Graham Milne

Fun with words: Embiggened English

January 5th, 2012

Last year, when that cunning polyglot Sarah Palin was castigated for her invented word “refudiate,” she invoked Shakespeare and the perpetual evolution of the English language. While the Bard might execute the expected cemetery gymnastics in being compared to a person who never met a present-tense verb she couldn’t wrest of its “g,” the Barracuda was, to her credit, quite savvy in her assessment of our mother tongue. Admittedly my opinion is biased given that apart from some passable conversational French, it’s the only language with which I’m intimately familiar, but I find the almost infinite permutations of “the Queen’s” fascinating. Dialects, accents, patois, cant, slang, rhyming slang, textspeak (editor’s note: vomit), jargon, technobabble, profanity, and the notion that a person from back-street Glasgow and one from Texas would never be able to understand one another despite using all the same words. Particularly the profanity. The great Stephen Fry recently tweeted what has become my new favourite: “Bollocks arse wank and tittypoo.” Try it sometime when you’ve just bashed your thumb with a hammer. To quote The King’s Speech, it flows trippingly from the tongue.

It doesn’t have to be countries developing their own variations on English. New lexicons spring up amongst even individuals. As a relationship develops, partners formulate their own code and refine terms that are of use only to them. Married friends of mine say “Icarus” to alert each other when their child is verging on a tantrum – justified props for the classical reference to the guy who flew too close to the sun on wax wings. My own better half and I have conjured a host of phrases that are nonsensical to outsiders but capture with craftsman-like precision the very substance of the entity being described, in a relaxed, familiar manner that lets us know just what the other is thinking and feeling at that moment. I present for your entertainment then, a sampling of our forays into etymology, and trust that you will not come away thinking us insane. Pronunciation guide added where appropriate.

Bluhcky: BLUH-kee (adjective): Descriptive for inclement weather, particularly that which is a combination of cold, damp/raining, fog or gray. “It’s a really bluhcky day out today.”
Boogloo (noun): Our cat’s covered bed, which resembles a small igloo, and thus a portmanteau of that and boo-boo-kitty. “The cat is asleep in her boogloo.” An additional note here is that boo- can be used as a prefix for any number of objects that relate to the cat: Boo-bits (her food), boo-box (where her food goes when she’s done with it), boo-barf (the occasional unfortunate hairball).
Burnippy: BRR-nippy (adjective): Descriptive of a state of extreme cold. “It’s supposed to be really burnippy tomorrow.”
Dirters (noun): Portmanteau of dirty and unders, i.e. underwear, used to refer to any form of laundry that needs attention. “Don’t leave your dirters on the bedroom floor.”
Frabjabbits (noun): Exclamation to be used in situations deemed unfortunate, similar to “goshdarnit.” “That local sports team lost again. Oh, frabjabbits.”
Poobulasquaooh: POO-buh-lah-squah-ooh (???): Placeholder for any song lyric that defies comprehension. This is my father’s interpretation of a hastily delivered, slightly obscure line from Hall & Oates’ “Maneater” which actually goes “The woman is wild, ooh.”
Shmorgee-borgee (noun): A meal consisting of a random assemblage of whatever food happens to be available, usually leftovers. “We have lots of chicken and veggies and stuff so let’s just have a shmorgee-borgee tonight.” An obvious if Swedish Chef-ized variation on “smorgasbord.”
Showeriffic (adjective): Descriptive for how one feels after a warm, cleansing and satisfying shower, especially if one was particularly dirty and/or sweaty going in. “That shower with the sixteen jets is just showeriffic.”
Snorfly (adjective)/The Snorfles (noun): The state of feeling congested due to a cold or persistent allergies. “Cleaning up that cat hair gave me the snorfles” or “I feel all snorfly after being out in the rain.”

What can I say, they require less spitting and hacking than Klingon. Seriously though, just try slipping a few of these into your next conversation and let me know about the blank stares you get back. But don’t tell me you don’t have your own mini-dictionary of words and phrases just for you and yours. It’s how we personalize a flexible, slightly weathered old horse we’ve all been sharing since Beowulf – how to make a little piece of English, a very common good, our very own. Sounds pretty cromulent to me.

Decision points

January 3rd, 2012

Yes, I’m aware of the irony of titling my first post of 2012 after George W. Bush’s autobiography. Decisiveness is one of those traits highly valued in leaders, that they are firm and resolute in their convictions. Strangely enough it seems immaterial what those convictions are, as long as they are unwavering – someone who takes the time to examine an issue thoroughly before committing to a course of action is dismissed as a ditherer. It’s assigning total vindication to the concept of leaping before you look, inasmuch as it matters less that the leap will actually kill you than it does that you were certain about leaping in the first place. I’ve chosen this topic for my 2012 leadoff slot because it relates to my sole New Year’s Resolution: to be more decisive. Which is not to imply that I’m advocating the abandonment of sound judgment; it is certainly not to suggest substituting recklessness for reason. Rather, it is the idea of committing fully to a course of action instead of hemming and hawing and gaming out all possible failing scenarios first. Acting the latter is the equivalent of standing on the side of a busy roadway watching cars race by, when you really should be in that race. You should have been in it eighty-three laps ago, but you’re waiting for an elusive “perfect moment” to jump in. Truthfully, you’re not waiting for a perfect moment. It’s a fable you’ve conjured to rationalize your unwillingness to shift into gear and step on the gas. It is the eternal lament of the coward who has resigned himself to never trying.

We can sit back on our couches and slam the politician with the redneck opinions, the auto-tuned singer of dubious talents but ample cleavage, the latest hack vampire novelist, the hopelessly wooden thespian, the football team that never wins. But every single one of those people chose to stand up and try. It doesn’t matter that they may have succeeded because of how they look or who they knew or just plain dumb luck. They could have stayed home and kept to themselves, settled for a less than ordinary life. Something compelled them to take that fateful step into traffic. Ambition is not a vice; indeed, it is the driving force at the heart of all human progress since the beginning of time. I’m writing this on a computer and sharing it with the world because someone long ago decided they wanted something other than pen and paper. And before that someone decided they wanted something other than chisels and stone tablets, or charcoal and cave walls upon which to record their thoughts and stories. Star Trek was never about going timidly where thousands had gone already, if, you know, it was perfectly safe to do so and no one else would be upset by it. Hard to imagine getting excited about a television series like that, isn’t it. As it is hard to imagine getting excited about a life of hesitation and half-heartedness. Those who make a mark on the world use their whole heart. One shudders, like Ebenezer Scrooge confronted by the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, at the prospect of looking back from the tail end of life at endless opportunities forsaken and dreams that never got off the ground. That beautiful girl you never had the courage to ask out. The trip you never took. The jobs you didn’t apply for, the promotions you didn’t chase after. The novel you never submitted to a publisher. The treasures locked inside your soul that you never chose to share with anyone else. What then are you taking with you as you shuffle off this mortal coil? What are you leaving behind? Someone, I think it was Mark Twain, had a great quote about being more disappointed twenty years from now by the things you didn’t do, than by the things you did – regardless of whether you succeeded at them or not. Regret is the most burdensome of Jacob Marley’s chains.

My promise to myself for this year, then, is to charge at life. If I am to fail, then I want to fail with a huge Graham-shaped hole left in the wall I just ploughed into at full speed. (Full credit to Aaron Sorkin for that delightful metaphor.) Moreover, I hope to never again answer the question, “What do you want to do?” with “I dunno, what do you wanna do?” That is giving up one of your most precious freedoms as a human being – the freedom to decide the course of your own life. Even in matters as seemingly nonchalant as what to have for dinner. 2012 for me, is to be a year with no regrets, and no chances passed up. That is the stuff of living itself.

Oh yes. And I also promise to blog more.

Holiday wishes for 2011

December 20th, 2011

I don’t want to believe that on the whole, people are stupid. As I get older and grumpier though I’m finding it more difficult to reconcile my liberalism and my faith in the eventual betterment of humanity with the evidence. We are a week and a half away from closing the book on a year that saw the merits of wealth and greed extolled over the virtues of altruism, self-sacrifice and the understanding that we are all in this together. We have seen science demonized, facts ignored and truthiness become the guiding principle of government – as Asimov feared, brazen ignorance treated at the same level as expertise. Being right is not enough. Loud, not love, conquers all. And the worst part is, we all know better, but we let the bad guys win anyway. Why? Are we just too lazy? Has humanity just collectively decided to not give a rat’s hind parts?

Dennis Miller, with whom I agree on absolutely nothing, had a great line on one of his specials back in the 90’s, the last time I remember when optimism ruled the day. He asked, “Why have we become so quick to exalt the banal, and so begrudging of the truly consequential?” Who’d have thought that fifteen years later, it would only get worse? The most famous family in the world right now is so not for their charitable work or their noble contributions to their fellow citizens, but because they are vapid, shallow and fundamentally useless seekers of celebrity. It would benefit us all if we paid greater attention to the tribulations of our own families (which, ironically, has no financial cost) than forking out cash and felling acres of forest to keep up with the talent-bereft Kardashians. And ridding ourselves of this scourge can be as simple as tuning them out and asking a friend to do the same. If countless videos of adorable cats can go viral, why not also a campaign to raise our collective intellect? As a start, I promise that this is the last time you will see that name on this blog. They will no longer take up rent-free space on Graham’s Crackers.

What else can we do to step up our game in 2012? Why not make this the year that we cease endorsing bullies or the use of bullying tactics in any form, be it in the high school halls, the pursuit of elected office or government itself? If repeated viewings of The Karate Kid have taught me anything, it’s that nobody really likes the Cobra-Kai douchebags or wants to see them win. Similarly, we should stop rewarding the political equivalents of Johnny and Sensei Kreese with our vote and consequently the right to mooch off the tax dollars that we entrust to them to ensure we are healthy, safe and free of fear. Let’s demand maturity, tolerance and intelligent debate from all parties and stop electing or otherwise supporting hormone-juiced frat boys who honed their diplomatic skills playing Call of Duty while high on Red Bull and vodka coolers. Our governments, like our schools, really can Get Better.

Other things to do in 2012 to enrich yourself and stem the tide of dumbing-down:

Read books that do not have vampires in them, and at least one that is over 100 years old.
See more live theatre and local musicians.
Go for long walks amidst the trees.
Instead of just posting what you’re doing on Facebook, ask your friends what they’re doing. Make plans to see them more often.
Unfollow Charlie Sheen, Snooki and any other famous-for-being-train-wrecks on Twitter and encourage a friend to do the same.
Try more local restaurants.
Never use LOL or OMG again. Learn a few phrases in Latin to pepper your status updates with instead.
Support your local conservation authorities by exploring your neighbourhood parks.
Listen to music made by people who are not supermodel-attractive.
Write something – a blog, a book, a haiku, it doesn’t matter which.
Don’t vote for the guy who’s angry all the time. He has issues, and none of them involve making your life better.
Do something friendly for a neighbour you barely know.
Don’t buy Us Weekly, People or any other tabloid magazine devoted to celebrities. If you must, then plant one tree, bush or shrub for every issue you just can’t live without.
Hug a puppy, kitten, bunny, lamb, pony or any suitable baby animal.
Make your own list of suggestions like this and pass them on.
Keep reading Graham’s Crackers! (Sorry.)

Start with the little things. You’ll be surprised how much you like them and how much you don’t miss the other noise. Maybe together we can start, very slowly, turning this behemoth called civilization away from the shoals of ignorance and back toward the heights of what it is within our capability as human beings to achieve, absent only the decision to realize that potential. I promise it’ll be worth it.

Best wishes for a happy holiday season.

Graham

The evolution of Christmas

December 8th, 2011

It seems every year, about this time, a select few on the right-leaning side of the punditocracy get their collective knickers in a knot over a supposed “War on Christmas” being perpetrated by their ideological opponents. As wars go, this imagined assault has to be one of the least successful campaigns in history, ranking somewhere between Custer at Little Big Horn, and anytime anyone has ever tried to invade Russia in the winter. We’re not seeing the burned corpses of shopping mall Santa Clauses rotting in the streets. Bright lights and fake reindeer still color our streetscapes. Many mainstream FM radio stations still switch their playlists to all Christmas on December 1^st – including songs celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. And December 25^th itself is still a statutory holiday. This is hardly the time for so-called defenders of Christmas to circle the toy wagons and rend the linings of their Santa suits in desperation. Just knock back an egg nog and chill. Please.

Honestly, I’m not even sure what it is they’re protesting. It’s not a return to tradition, as it’s plain that Christmas as we celebrate it and have celebrated it for well over a century has little to do with Jesus. Customs like the tree, Santa Claus, eating turkey, none of those come from the Bible. Indeed, what we think of as a proper Christmas owes more to the writings of Charles Dickens and his Cratchit family than it does to Church doctrine. The date itself was picked by Pope Julius I in the 4^th Century, borrowed (or stolen) from the pagan Saturnalia festival. Even the Bible doesn’t claim that Christ was born in December – Bethlehem around this time of year hits sub-zero temperatures during the night, and shepherds would not be out watching their flocks in the fields, as it says in Luke 2. And amazingly, Jeremiah 10:2-4 prohibits Christmas trees entirely:

²Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.

³For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.

⁴They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

As oppressed as those who lash out against this supposed shock and awe being perpetrated against the twenty-fifth of December by the evil liberal literati may feel nowadays, it used to be a lot worse. In colonial America, celebrating Christmas would cost you a five-shilling fine – you could thank the humourless Puritans for that one. The Founding Fathers didn’t think much of Christmas either, holding their first session of Congress on Christmas Day, 1789. It wasn’t until 1870 that the U.S. government finally declared it a national holiday.

What probably sticks in their craw the most is that Christmas, like life itself, evolves. Long gone, at least among the majority of those who observe the Yuletide holiday, is the absolute requirement to fast and attend a morose mass, replaced by the sound of little footsteps running down the stairs as soon as dawn breaks to see what Santa and the reindeer have brought. From year to year, from generation to generation, Christmas is in motion as old traditions are modified, expounded upon, abandoned, as new carols are added to the canon, tastes in decoration (and food) change, new Christmas movies find their way into theaters. But more importantly, Christmas changes as families themselves combine, separate, expand or contract. Like a cosmic cornucopia of paint colors ebbing and flowing, blending together to produce new ways of celebrating the one day a year it remains a virtue to be nice to someone else just for the sake of being nice – in a world increasingly given to assigning a perplexing nobility to selfishness.

Santa Claus as we know him – the jolly fat guy in the red suit – was essentially a creation of the Coca-Cola company’s advertising department back at the turn of the 20th Century. But we have applied that image to the legendary figure of St. Nicholas and crafted something entirely new, a character who now fires the imaginations of millions of children as they await his yearly arrival. It evolved in our collective consciousness. Much as Christmas itself will continue to evolve with the coming years and decades. That isn’t a war on Christmas – it’s a perfectly natural next step. Like the strongest in nature, Christmas will survive. And to those trying to hold back the progress of nature, there’s truly only one reply: Bah humbug.

Going home again (or not)

November 29th, 2011

Catching up on my James Bond gossip today, as I am wont, I came across a snippet of an article about how Pierce Brosnan doesn’t like to watch his Bond movies. This is not an uncommon stance among actors. In fact I can’t think of a single actor I’ve ever heard of claiming that he or she enjoys checking out their old stuff. Maybe it’s a stock reply because they think that otherwise they’ll come off as immodest. But it’s probably genuine. I can recall attending sci-fi conventions and being surprised, at least at the early ones, that the actors knew far less about the work they’d appeared in than the fans in the audience. How could they not know? They were in it, for Pete’s sake, they must have watched it a thousand times too! Of course they should be aware that you can’t fire the phasers by pushing the seventh button on the display panel, it’s the eighth button. Sheesh. (Cue the Simpsons nerd saying “I hope someone got fired for that blunder.”) So I read this article about Brosnan and I’m reminded of the post I wrote defending George Lucas’ right to tinker with his creation. It’s an interesting contrast between the artist who abandons his work without a second thought and the one who obsesses over getting it right for years on end. The spectrum of writers must be of the same diverse breadth. Look back, or move ever forward without the mirror?

George Harrison wrote in the liner notes of the 2000 CD reissue of his 1971 triple album All Things Must Pass that he had to resist the temptation to remix every song. As I’ve admitted previously, I’m a tinkerer when it comes to my words. I edit and re-edit, deleting and shifting words around in pursuit of the perfect sentence. It’s probably not the best way to flex one’s writing muscles – not nearly as productive as simply letting go and watching the words pour out. That is the notion behind NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, what those of us who can’t grow mustaches well do in lieu of Movember), in that you are not permitted to go back and edit until you have completed the month’s worth of writing (and finished a first draft to boot). But frankly, there are days where I just don’t have it in me to create much new stuff, and editing is a stopgap way to keep the juices trickling, if not flowing. I’m aware of the school of thought that says that on days like that you should force yourself to write anyway. Perhaps that’s true. That is one of the reasons I find blogging refreshing. Something can be written spontaneously about the events of the day, completed and sent off into the void with little thought to looking back and changing things around. It is another step towards pure creation.

But is there value in going back? I’m of the opinion that there is, despite some seeing it as narcissistic navel-gazing. For one thing, given that all writers are tremendously insecure and at our core, believe that we suck and no one will ever read us (admit it!), it’s healthy to revisit something that you wrote that really shone. Somewhere amidst the hundreds and thousands of words of triteness and crap that will never voyage beyond your hard drive, the gems are lurking. You can probably imagine such a passage off the top of your head. A few dozen words scribbled or typed late one night in the midst of a short story or unfinished, Proustian behemoth of a postmodernist novel that just for one moment, scraped against the door of greatness. And then you remind yourself, on your worst, most doubting day, that yeah, you can do this. You’ve done it before, you’ll do it again. Or, you look back to remind yourself of how much better you’ve become. How you’ve abandoned your overreliance on adverbs and polysyllabic words and found your clarion voice. It’s the evolution of you, the honing of the mark you are going to make on the literary canon, a blade sharpened and polished one paragraph at a time.

Pierce Brosnan may not want to watch his old movies anymore. But I’m happy to take a stroll through the memories of old works whenever it suits me. Because at the risk of hauling out one of those trite expressions that as a maturing writer I should never, ever use, you can’t know where you’re going until you understand where you’ve been. And every so often, you have to glance at the map again.

Zen and the art of snowman construction

November 18th, 2011

After an unseasonably warm and extended fall, the first snow of the season tumbled to earth yesterday. It didn’t last long, but for half an hour at least November looked like it’s supposed to. With the mercury plunging below freezing last night I’ll go out on a limb and say we even stand a better than average chance of a white Christmas – call me old-fashioned, but it doesn’t seem right exchanging gifts and eating turkey when outside is a sea of dead leaves and asphalt. If global warming reaches its zenith that’s one Bing Crosby song future generations will find inexplicable. “What are you talking about, there’s never been snow on Christmas.” (The duet with David Bowie on “Little Drummer Boy” is the other – still don’t know what was up with that pairing.)

Something else we’ll miss too is building snowmen. Even when it does snow nowadays it’s difficult to find that perfect, temperature-teetering balance that proves ideal for snowman construction. Too warm and your raw materials are slippery slush; too cold and the snow won’t pack together. Ironic too, that the temperature best suited to build a snowman is also least suited to keep it around for long. In a few short hours your masterpiece becomes a lump on the lawn with only the corncob pipe and button nose to remind anyone of the gentleman who once stood there greeting the passersby. As illustrated in the lyrics to Frosty, the snowman by his nature is a transitory creature. He is emblematic of the need to seize the moment, and to appreciate that moment to the fullest while it lasts.

The best snowman I have ever built, bar none, was an ambitious creation assembled on a snowy December day in 2007. A healthy blanket had fallen during the night and the temperature was hovering around zero – prime conditions to start rolling. It started out with the usual approach – roll a big ball for the body and a smaller one for the head. Luckily there was plenty of snow in the driveway to use without having to spoil too much of the area around where the snowman was to stand. We had the basic structure in place and were pondering how to finish it off when my better half suggested a twist – why not make a snow bunny?

That set the imagination afire. We remolded his head, adding a snout and carefully shaping it to ensure it didn’t look too much like a pig. Ears were next, followed by shoes, some stubby arms and a puffball of a tail. A bow from an old Christmas decoration was repurposed as a necktie. Unfolded paper clips became whiskers. The master stroke, however, was cutting up pieces of a charcoal air pre-filter to use as buttons, nose, mouth and the all-important eyes, taking a little design inspiration from Looney Tunes along the way. Now all he needed was a name. The proximity of the holidays provided le mot juste, and Hoppy the Snow Rabbit was born.

Hoppy Holidays — Not the kind of snow bunny you'd see on the slopes…

Much like his famous brethren, Hoppy was not long for this world. The air got progressively warmer and snow became rain. The first to go was an ear, and by the time the sun fell, after providing smiles to pedestrians and the drivers of many passing cars, Hoppy was no more, living on only in scores of photographs taken of our accomplishment. Perhaps we knew we wouldn’t top ourselves, because we haven’t tried to build a single snowman since. Life – or, more to the point, the desire to stay warm on snowy days – has gotten in the way. But that December day we brought Hoppy to life is one we remember with clarion detail, unlike so many others that have ebbed away into the stream of lost thoughts. Was it the sheer joy of working together to build something special, or the surprise at the wonderful creation that resulted? I suppose it’s a bit like the day I wrote about a few posts ago; the one thing they share is the act of creation itself. Making something, even if it isn’t lasting. Building becomes building memories. Good ones.

If you have the chance, if the temperature is just right, get off your computer, bundle up, step outside and build a snowman. It doesn’t have to be a work of art. It just has to be. Then step back and let yourself smile. I think you’ll be glad you did.

Two more reasons why MLP:FIM is awesome

November 15th, 2011

Presented for your enjoyment. All content of course the property of The Hub and the creators of the show. In my previous post on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (and don’t worry, this blog is not going to degenerate into a weekly update on all things pony) I pointed out the show’s embrace of remix culture and its extended “brony” fanbase. Below are a couple of screengrabs from the most recent episode, taking place in a bowling alley. Ask yourself how many tween girls would notice this – and understand the reference:

It's "The Jesus" himself! With a hairnet covering his mane and tail. But who else is lurking in the background off to the right… look a little closer now…

Dude Donny and Walter — It is! The Dude, Donny and Walter! Man, that really ties the episode together!

Yes indeed – The Big Lebowski has invaded My Little Pony. A cult movie that sits in the top ten list of the most uses of the F-word has snuck into a kid’s cartoon. Young girls won’t get it. Bronies will love it. And much rejoicing and many celebratory White Russians will ensue.

It’s just like, my opinion, man, but I really dig this show.

Ex astris, somnia

November 10th, 2011

The centre of our galaxy, as imaged by NASA.

They are pinpricks in the dark mantle of heaven, tiny oases of light in the desert of the night. We stare at them when the clouds have parted and the artificial lights of the cityscape have gone, looking out into the universe, into the past. Their shape has found its way into the iconography of every culture on earth. They are a deep well of mystery to be unraveled, a trove of endless knowledge waiting to be decoded by scientific observation and analysis. We entrust them with our wishes, and they are the vault of our dreams.

It is impossible to look up at the “heaventree of stars,” as James Joyce called it in Ulysses, and not experience a moment of transcendence. Even astronomers, whose lives are spent cataloguing the universe and translating it into numbers, are still humbled by the beauty of stars. Historical stargazers like Galileo, facing the wrath of the Church for casting doubt upon God’s divine order, could not stop peering up into the night sky. Some, like Giordano Bruno, went to their deaths transfixed by the possibilities of worlds beyond the confines of Earth. Stars may be, scientifically speaking, massive balls of burning hydrogen, but more than that, they are the very fires of imagination, reaching out to us from so far away.

Dreamers often trip over the sidewalk because they’re busy looking up. I remember visiting my grandfather’s cottage as a boy and sitting on the dock long past sunset, armed with a pair of binoculars, and feeling overwhelmed by the sight above my head – where metropolitan light pollution back home kept the players restricted to familiar constellations like the two Dippers, out here in the north was an entire galaxy revealed; the Milky Way in all its splendor and sublimity. The plethora of mosquito bites that revealed themselves the following morning was testament to how long I spent out there that night, lost in the possibilities of the grand everything. Not appreciating it at the time, but understanding now that on that evening I was connected to the entirety of human history, to everyone who had ever stopped in the night, cast their eyes to the sky and if even for a moment, wondered.

From a purely scientific viewpoint, stars are fascinating. The cosmic cornucopia of star types, from blue supergiant to brown dwarf. The cycle of their birth and death, the clever universe recycling the debris left by a supernova into new stars and planets, and in our case, new life. Black holes, pulsars, quasars, nebulae. Beyond every turn in the cosmos lies a perplexing new construct to enthrall the curious and the seekers of truth. Yet stars have an indelible spiritual quality also, something that cannot be reduced to an equation, a chemical reaction.

When we feel smallest, when we are walled in by the borders of our lives, the stars remind us that there is so much more – more than anyone can conceive in the longest lifetime, more than our species will ever be able to experience in its entire existence. It is no surprise then, that many wonderful narratives have been written that take place out there, and that the ongoing narrative of humankind’s fledgling exploration of the stars continues to compel. I’ve been a fan of both science fiction and science fact my entire life: books about the U.S.S. Enterprise and the Apollo missions have rested side by side on my nighttable. A most treasured possession was a plastic model of the space shuttle Discovery, acquired on a visit to Cape Canaveral and painstakingly assembled and painted by me and my father, with a place of honor among my collection of classic Lego Space. The stars call to our very souls, inviting us to follow like beacons of inspiration. Lighthouses of friendship and warmth amidst endless, oppressive darkness. And we are more than willing to answer.

As we craft our tales of imagined far-off worlds, or calculate the gravitational pull of a red giant, the question remains: what exactly are we looking for when we look at the stars? The simplest answer may be that in kindling our dreams, the stars are ultimately like distant, tantalizing mirrors. We look into them, squinting, peering long and hard, hoping to discover the missing elements of our own equation staring back at us. Out in the farthest reaches of the universe, we are looking for ourselves. That connection to the purest spiritual truth that has eluded us since our dawn and remains for now at least, like the stars, just out of reach – what it means to be human.

Mr. Bond, Dr. Freud will see you now

November 6th, 2011

“Oh please, James, spare me your Freud. One might as well ask if all the vodka martinis ever silence the screams of all the men you’ve killed. Or if you’ve found forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women… for all the dead ones you failed to protect.” – Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean) to James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) in GoldenEye

After four years of speculation, rumor, tabloid nonsense and the customary story about the Bollywood flavor-of-the-month who is “perfect” for the female lead and the “desperate” choice of the producers, the truth is out. The 23rd James Bond movie, SkyFall, started shooting on November 3rd. Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes reteams with Daniel Craig after their collaboration on Road to Perdition, and brings along for the ride the most incredible cast ever assembled for a James Bond movie: Javier Bardem (Oscar winner for No Country For Old Men), Ralph Fiennes (Oscar nominee for Schindler’s List among other things), Albert Finney (four-time Oscar nominee and star of the Best Picture winner Tom Jones) along with Judi Dench and the two new ladies – French actress Berenice Marlohe and Pirates of the Caribbean star Naomie Harris. Longtime Coen Brothers collaborator Roger Deakins is the cinematographer and Stuart Baird handles editing. The script is by Bond veterans Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Gladiator writer John Logan, based on a premise by The Queen screenwriter Peter Morgan. With all that talent it would take an act of Satan himself to forge an A View to a Kill-style misfire. Then again we haven’t heard who’s doing the theme song yet. Is Shirley Bassey still available?

About the plot, little is known beyond the postage stamp synopsis released by the production team – basically, that Bond finds himself fighting to save MI6 after a dark chapter of M’s past comes back to haunt them both. When Judi Dench was first cast as M for Pierce Brosnan’s Bond debut GoldenEye, much was made in the entertainment press of the idea that a woman was taking over as the boss of the most chauvinistic of all cinema spies (sorry, Austin Powers.) However, throughout the four-film Brosnan era, apart from a few sparse touches the relationship between Bond and M was not played that different than it had been with Bernard Lee (or to a lesser extent, Robert Brown) in the past. Beginning with Daniel Craig’s tenure, the producers have opted to treat the relationship differently. Obviously with an actress of Judi Dench’s caliber you don’t want to limit her to sitting behind the office desk and disappearing after the first act. In expanding the character of M, the producers have created a more maternal bond (pardon the pun) between her and her star agent. Indeed, their relationship is unique in the 007 universe, as M is the only woman who does not see Bond sexually (the reverse being true as well.) When Bond was broken in Casino Royale by his betrayal by Vesper Lynd, and set out to bury his demons in Quantum of Solace, his loyalty to M remained. Indeed, when one thinks of Bond as doing his duty for queen and country, it is not necessarily Her Majesty Lilibet Mountbatten-Windsor he is thinking of first.

Bond movies can be a curious entity. In many of the more forgettable entries there was little attention paid to character development or emotional engagement. It was just a fun ride. And that’s fine if that’s all you’re looking for. Clearly it worked or we wouldn’t still be talking about it 50 years on and 23 films later. As the second generation of Bond producers has gotten older and responded to the changing audience, and in particular seen Bond struggling to stay afloat in a field swarming with imitators of the genre it essentially spawned, they have come to realize that the character of James Bond has considerable depth worth exploring. Who is he? What drives the core of this man whom men want to be and women want to be with? Consequently the producers have tried to craft plots that are emotional journeys inasmuch as they are excuses for implausible action scenes. Sometimes with mixed results. The World is Not Enough was the first real attempt in the modern era to make a character-driven Bond movie and the elements did not blend together well – rather like a martini where the proportions of vodka and vermouth were just slightly off.

Some Bond fans balk at the character-driven approach, suggesting, and not unreasonably, that not every mission needs to be personal. But I’ve maintained that that resonance is the crucial meat and potatoes alongside the chocolate and the whipped cream. We need to begin to care about the people on screen, about Bond, as opposed to just watching him do cool stuff. That cool stuff will always be essential to Bond – one would not necessarily care to see him simply talking about his problems on a psychiatrist’s couch for two hours – but probing into his soul takes it from the realm of popcorn movie into that of real cinema and makes it a truly memorable experience. I suspect that with the above-the-line talent who have been brought on to shape SkyFall, the producers are aiming for just that. Of course they want to make a great entertainment, but let’s have a little something for the grownups too. I think Ian Fleming would be ok with that (actually, he would have flipped out at the suggestion of a female M, but I won’t tell him if you don’t).

Fun with words: What’s missing?

November 1st, 2011

A dollop of fun today, a touch dissimilar to rants past. Your mission, and I think you’ll find it amusing, is to scan my paragraphs and unmask what’s missing from my words that you would normally find abundant. It is my task also, to suss out if I can do it whilst maintaining a gripping account for visitors to my blog. Why do I do this? Curiosity, mainly; to find if it is at all within my writing skills. Do I fancy my output as wordplay on par with that of a craftsman such as, say, Nabokov? Hardly. Most vigorously not, in point of fact. Triumph in this pursuit, or falling short, will signify nothing important, or lasting. It is, truly, just for kicks.

Pray, what to talk about today? Our world is a cornucopia, rampant with judicious topics: a sampling might contain a follow-up to All Hallows’, political turmoil abroad and on our own soil, institutional ramifications of Kim Kardashian’s imploding nuptials, or sonic vistas from Coldplay’s album Mylo Xyloto. Or my familiar go-to if nothing can catch my imagination on that day, Aaron Sorkin’s vast portfolio of writings. Anyway, I’ll go for a story I find particularly irritating.

Much was said about Ms. Kardashian’s 72-day sham, mainly and rightly, that it is folly to proclaim in this day of our ongoing commoditization of stardom that any should look upon gay unions as a singular hazard to that most holy (said with sarcasm) institution of matrimony. Is it not individuals such as Kim who turn such important rituals into ridiculous “shows” for cash who should catch our communal scorn? Why do loyalists to a particular political inclination go on fighting to bar gay unions if straight Kim and company can flaunt what is so important to so many loving pairs with such disdain? A high point of hypocrisy, I would think. Not that it’s a shock coming from such sorts. It’s always about “saving our morality,” a worn-out justification to attack things out of favour with a diminishing group of old right-wing layabouts.

A propos of our villain in this saga, you cannot totally fault Kim. Truly, all of us must swallow our own wrongdoing in popularizing Kim’s antics and crafting a mass craving for additional clowning around; purchasing stacks of flimsy publications thanks simply to Kim’s mug only adds to this “famous-for-nothing” lady’s kingdom of public domination. It will not stop until common man opts to turn his focus away and to topics of vital import. Until that day, Kim Kardashian and ilk will maintain an unnatural hold on our discussion and grow rich, with a continuing sum contribution of nothing to civilization’s gradual growth (or stagnation).

I shall stop my rant at this point and ask you again to look back at this post and say what is missing. For my part, it was good fun to craft. You may submit your thoughts in our usual way. Alas, naught but bragging rights to our victor. Good luck though, and happy hunting!

Author: Graham Milne

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