On Meeting Roger Ebert

Well, perhaps meeting is a slight exaggeration.  But I did sit down with a group including Roger Ebert one day back in the 90’s.  It was back when I taught English at the University, and used to drop in at the Faculty Club on Friday afternoons with a group of fellow English instructors.  On this day when I dropped in, I saw at one end of the group gathered in chairs around a coffee table the unmistakable form of the man who had helped to make “Two thumbs up” such a well-known catch phrase.

“That’s a famous person,” I said to a colleague, who nodded in agreement.  We were sitting at the other end of the group, and I never got introduced to the famous person, and didn’t say anything to the famous person, which is why I wouldn’t exactly call it “meeting.”  Still.

For however long we sat there the famous person regaled us with stories of Hollywood, film-making, and the like.  I don’t remember any of them, but what I do remember is the reverential air that descended on us.  Now, this was not a generally reverential group.  It was composed of smart-alecky, bright young PhD-types whose most common mode was satire or sarcasm.

Sarcasm, by the way, as I notice by perusing dating sites, has become a positive quality somehow.  Women promote themselves by saying things like, “I have a sarcastic sense of humour,” though they sometimes qualify this by adding that they are not mean-spirited or harsh.  I don’t know; it seems to me that the essence of sarcasm is mean-spiritedness or harshness.  When a woman announces that she’s sarcastic, it’s a red flag for me; I back away, slowly, keeping my back away from her.

Anyway, our group back then, twenty years ago or so, tended to sarcasm.  Perhaps it should have made me back away, but then what would I have done on Friday afternoons after a week of teaching or working on my PhD?  Perhaps I was even guilty of sarcasm myself; I tend to take on the coloration of the group I’m in … Or can that be true?  I often fancy myself as the outsider in any group I’m in.  Does everybody feel that?  Perhaps I became a sarcastic outsider.

Anyway, on this day with Roger Ebert, no one was sarcastic, certainly not towards Roger Ebert.  “Oh, Mr. Ebert,” someone would say, “tell us about so-and-so.”  Or, “How was it to work with so-and-so?”  Or “Is Hollywood really as nasty as people say?”

I was astonished.  What had happened to the sharp, cutting intellectuals who used to dominate the group?  Had they been replaced by a bunch of adoring fans?  Does fame have such power?  In the absence of other things to worship, do we turn to celebrities?  (Well, the answer to that last seems obvious now that I write it.)

But there must be some other path besides sarcasm and adoration, it seems to me.  Maybe treating people as equals, though I hasten to say I don’t mean to put myself on the same level as Roger Ebert.  Or is that just adoration sneaking in?  I did register that he was a famous person, and I was rather mute that afternoon, perhaps as a result.  Was that just silent adoration? 

And I wonder what the famous person felt about the adoration.  I’ve occasionally been on the receiving end of that sort of thing: when introduced to the friend of my girl-friend at the time, who was totally tongue-tied around me, in an admiring way, because I had just published a novel.  I remember thinking, Well, this is nice in a way, but I’d rather just be able to talk normally with someone rather than bask in this admiration.  But maybe that’s just me.

On Reading Thoreau

Those who know me may wonder why I would be reading Thoreau.  I am the furthest thing from a Nature-lover.   Better a good book indoors than a trek through the forest; that’s been my motto.

But Thoreau I think of as part of literary history, as much as natural history, so when a course was offered on him, and after getting totally frustrated with my course on Genji, I signed up.  I also signed up for a course on ancient Egypt, the pyramids, etc., which turned out to be serendipitously ironic, since Thoreau didn’t think much of the pyramids or any building of monuments.

Better to build yourself, your character, your spiritual side than build a big monument, he says in Walden.  And I found myself agreeing with him on this, if not on everything.  Or more than agreeing; it was like finding a little bit of validation.

Don’t own things, he says; possessions end up possessing you.  And I have  made a life out of not owning anything beyond books and some bare necessities, and of course a computer.  Oh, and a television.  But no house, no car, no boat.

Actually, Thoreau had a boat, or at least the use of one.  And for that matter he had a house, a little cabin in the woods.  This has no attraction for me, except perhaps as a holiday getaway, and I can remember visiting some cousins on their farm and thinking, This is nice, breathing in the fresh air on their back deck.

But roughing it like Thoreau, no.  Still, I like his approach of the simple life, not knocking yourself out to buy the latest consumer goods, not working long hours at a job you despise for the money it will bring you so you can travel or buy a fancy house or keep up with the fashions.  I was once offered money for a downpayment: Go buy yourself a house, I was told.  No, no, I said; that’s not for me.

And now I feel less a failure over that.  I’m a Thoreauvian.  At least in part.

I don’t share his notions on solitude.  He found being with people, even the best people, wearisome: a true introvert, clearly.  I’m a bit of an introvert myself; you won’t catch me at a big party, or at least you won’t catch me enjoying myself, but I do like company, interaction, conversation.  Thoreau seemed content with the sun, the lake, the fish, and the birds – though he did sometimes wander into town to hear the gossip and one time he seemed almost to be complaining, saying he would meet more men if they weren’t so busy hoeing their beans.  People should take a break from their hoeing and do some socializing, that’s what I think.

And I don’t share Thoreau’s Old Testament prophet approach: he hectors his readers, a bit in the manner of Thomas Carlyle (about whom he wrote an article).  It’s not just that he chose to live a simple life in the woods; he seems to think everyone else should do the same.  But I have no objection to other people leading different sorts of lives.  If other people want to own houses and cars, that’s fine with me.  But it’s still nice to know that there’s a respectable philosophical tradition to which I can attach my life choices.  I feel reassured somehow, though also still a bit lonely.

Argo and Historical Truth

What is truth, said Pilate, and would not wait for an answer.  Or so says Francis Bacon, recycling a Biblical story that is probably not true itself.  It’s a good story, though, or a good line.  It reminds me of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and the line in it about printing the legend, not the fact: it makes a better story to say that the meek Eastern lawyer (Jimmy Stewart) somehow got the better of the evil Valance in a duel (the underdog triumphing and doing justice) than that another gunman (John Wayne) shot him from behind.

Which brings me to Argo and the fuss over whether it’s true or not, or an insult to Canadians, or another sign of the evils of Hollywood or of Americans.

I saw Argo a few months ago.  It was a gripping, suspenseful film.  I quite enjoyed it, even though I was troubled by the depiction of what I had always regarded as an act of Canadian heroism. 

I’m old enough to remember 1979-80, the capture of the American embassy, the escape of six Americans, the praise heaped on Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor.  I felt proud back then.  It was at the same time that Terry Fox did his marathon, but that didn’t move me.  Ken Taylor, a Canadian ambassador, a Canadian ambassador, a Canadian, the quintessential meek underdog type, had somehow shot Liberty Valance, and won a small battle against evil.  That moved me.  I remember a cartoon, I believe an American cartoon, of the time depicting a hulking American in a bar saying to a tiny Canadian on the barstool beside him, “Guess I owe you one.”

It was a wonderful story – and true!

Except then Argo came along and made it sound not so true, made it sound like all the praise from the Americans for the Canadian rescue was just a cover story so as not to further inflame Iranian revolutionaries against the United States.  I felt deflated.  It’s like the scene in Liberty Valance where the real story is revealed.  But in the movie the crusty old newspaper editor refuses to print the real story.  Ben Affleck, in contrast, did.

Unless Ben Affleck’s version is itself not true.  And there have been all sorts of commentaries, especially here in Canada, to say that Argo is inaccurate; it’s those nasty Americans taking credit for a Canadian caper; it’s Hollywood distorting the facts again.

And I think, well, yes, Hollywood distorts the facts; all artists distort the facts.  I wouldn’t read War and Peace to get an accurate depiction of Napoleon in Russia, or listen to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture for that either.  Art is art, and history is history, though often the lines are blurred, and there are post-post-whatever type critics who I’m sure will tell us that history is all just subjective nonsense written by the winners etc. etc.

Maybe in the end we all just like a good story.  The Americans have their good story now, which I, as a Canadian, can enjoy even if part of me feels diminished by the undermining of the old Canadian story that I lived through and took pride in.

I don’t think we really want the facts, though, not in a piece of art, and even outside art.  We like our legends; some things are so good they ought to be true, as the saying goes.  The trouble here is that we have competing legends.  I’m not sure what to do about that.

(Thanks to Cindy Heinrichs, Joan Stuchner, and Lesley Johnson for inspiring me to muse on this.)

On Humility

Lately, the forces attacking religion – the Hitchens-Dawkins new atheists – have been gathering force and making themselves known even on my Facebook page, by people who delight in mocking various forms of belief while at the same time promoting their own form of belief, Science.  They f***ing love science, and all that.

I’m fond of science myself, and am no great believer in orthodox religion, but the onslaught on religion bothers me precisely because I am no great believer, and this veneration of Science, often by people who are not scientists themselves, strikes me as just a rival religion trying to oust its competitors.

I suppose I could shrug and say, well, let the various religions (including Science, Marxism, neo-Marxism, or whatever) compete, but something still bothers me.  I like Science as Religion less than orthodox religion, and I was reminded why by a review in the latest London Review of Books of a new book by Francis Spufford, who it seems defends religion, in particular Christianity, by acknowledging its flaws but then saying it has an emotional truth to it.

This truth seems to amount to being able forgive oneself for one’s failings by going back to the doctrine of Original Sin. 

Now, my heritage doesn’t include belief in Original Sin, but I could empathize with the thought behind this.  You don’t have to believe in a Patriarch in the Sky or a Son on a Cross to feel that there are forces in the universe beyond the understanding of human beings, and more powerful than human beings.  You don’t have to believe in any orthodox religion to feel that people are flawed and fallible – but perhaps it helps.

Stripping away all the fairy tales, what remains of the orthodox Western religions (the religions of the East may be different) is a notion that we human beings should be humble.  There are forces out there that we cannot control, that in fact may control us, or at least affect us.

I saw the movie 56-Up yesterday; it’s part of a wonderful series tracing the lives of a wide variety of people, and I took away a couple of things from it.  One is that most of them have succeeded in doing certain things that I have not succeeded at.  I felt bad about that, and still do.  But the article in the London Review encouraged me not to be too hard on myself, to accept that, well, I am a fallible human being.

The other thing that I took away from the movie was that human theories are paltry, ineffective things.  The series that 56-Up is part of began with a television show meant to illustrate the rigidity of the class system in Britain, following the old Jesuit principle that if you can control a child for their first seven years, their life after that will be set.  But the set of films that followed exploded that theory.  Here we see someone from a non-academic background who never went to university ending up with a high-up administrative position at a university.  We see poor people becoming well off and someone from a well-off background stumbling through life, homeless for a while, though righting himself to a certain extent later. 

The people in the 56-Up series have gone in a variety of directions, illustrating not some theory but the vagaries and variety of life.  Which brings me back to the limitations of mankind.  We can propose theories – some people come up with the most elaborate theories, purporting to explain everything.  Some people speak, or used to speak, of the perfectibility of man; those sorts of theories led to the Gulag.

But an approach to life that says we are fallible, we are limited, we cannot explain everything or control everything – that seems truer to me, and less dangerous.  We need more humility and less hubris, and that is why I am more sympathetic to traditional religious belief, even though I am a non-believer myself, than I am to an attitude that says through Science or some human ideology we can change the course of the world.

On rewatching The Rockford Files

So I’ve been at home suffering from a bad cold and feeling up to doing little except watching daytime television, including episodes of one my favourite shows from years past, The Rockford Files.  All about Jim Rockford (James Garner), the somewhat smart-alecky private detective and his sleazy friend Angel (who everyone loves even though he’s, well, sleazy) and his father and the attorney he sometimes works for.  Oh, and Dennis, the grudgingly helpful cop.

Mostly the cops aren’t helpful in this show; very few people are helpful in the show as Rockford tries to get to the bottom of crimes.  There’s corruption and incompetence and just a sense that the whole universe is against him.  I think there’s an appeal in that, which comes across better in the earlier years of the series.

In some of the later episodes (and I was surprised to see they kept making them till 1980) the focus seems to drift away from the crime solving to the lives of Rockford and his friends.  This seems to be an occupational hazard of crime series: they begin by focusing on the people who commit the crimes but eventually switch to telling us about the crime fighters (in CSI, Law and Order, or whatever).  Boring, and anyway you learn more by the indirection of the early episodes.

So in the early episodes it’s easier to identify with the tough (but kind underneath) Rockford who has to go it alone with no one to help him.  Or almost no one.  In the episode I saw today his father comes up with a useful insight which in a way puts Rockford in his place.  It’s a memorable scene, at least to me, in which when Rockford says a guy in a semi tried to kill him, his father quizzes him about the type of semi and then declares that they weren’t trying to kill him, just scare him to death.

Who knows if Rocky (the father) is right?  But Jim doesn’t argue with him, and it’s almost comforting in a way.  Here is someone (Rocky) who knows and who is providing the knowledge to help.  Maybe that’s why I remembered the scene: because it’s nice to think that there’s someone out there in the indifferent, sometimes confusing universe who both knows and cares.

On getting one’s wishes enforced

Today on the bus a young, apparently healthy student got on at the university bus loop, waited for the bus to fill, then as soon as it took off, rang the bell and promptly got off at the next stop, a mere five minutes walk away.

I sat there shaking my head (well, not literally), thinking why couldn’t he just walk?  I was ready to grumble and mutter about the laziness of today’s youth  --why, in my day we didn’t have any universal bus passes and we walked two blocks when we had to.

I was ready to grumble, but I held back.  And why after all was I grumbling?  The young man’s departure didn’t hurt me; we were stopping anyway to pick up more people before the bus began the express part of its route.  Is there an urge to grumble and criticize others?  I know Confucius would disapprove: When someone does something you think is wrong, he says, think, Do I ever do something like that?  And then work to improve yourself.

So Confucius wouldn’t hold with this grumbling, and I did stop myself mid-grumble, but not because of him.  I was remembering a similar incident from a week before.

That time a whole pile of young students did the same thing, and not only that, pushed their way out the front door, disrupting passengers who were trying to get on.  The bus driver seemed annoyed, but said nothing … then.  However, right after that a girl got off, still at one of the preliminary stops before the express route started, and he lit into her.

“Next time don’t use an express bus as local drop-off,” he said.  The girl said nothing, just meekly departed.

That time I’d also been grumbling internally about the pack of guys who found it necessary to ride for one stop and then got off at the wrong door.  I was ready to grumble about the girl too; this time there was no one getting on at her stop; we wouldn’t have stopped, except for her.  We could have been getting going into express mode.

I was perhaps thinking that sort of thing, and that’s what the bus driver basically said aloud.  But as soon as he did, I recoiled.  I thought, There’s no rule saying how long you have to stay on an express bus.  She rang the bell for an actual stop.  Where did the bus driver get off telling her that?

And yet I felt like telling her myself – except I wouldn’t have.  Not out loud.  I might have thought it, grumbled to myself, but never have spoken up.  And if someone else had spoken up, not just the driver but any passenger, I would have cringed.  I’m not entirely sure why.  Perhaps it would seem like bullying.  From the bus driver it seemed like abuse of authority.  I suppose my dislike of those two things outweighs my displeasure over laziness or misuse of the express service.  Perhaps there are things I want to grumble about but not have anything done about.  People are strange.

On having one’s past leap up in one’s face

On the weekend I had a bizarre experience.  Imagine a world where all your experiences, and everyone else’s, can be broadcast worldwide for all to see, where things that happened decades ago can be brought back to life as if they were happening all over again.

Oh, wait, we live in that world.  There’s video and the Internet and …

As I’ve mentioned, I’m studying The Tale of Genji this term, partly because of a developing interest in Asian studies and perhaps because years ago I once attended a public lecture on it.  A Vancouver Institute lecture, offered by that very interesting Vancouver institution which offers free public lectures, sometimes by quite eminent authorities.

It occurred to me to look up that lecture now that I’m taking the Genji course, by which I meant checking to see if the Vancouver Institute had listed it in its history of past lectures – and it certainly had.  There it was, in November 1987.  But more than that, much more than that.  This was a list with links.

I clicked on the link, and suddenly I was back attending the very lecture on the Genji that I’d been at so many years ago.  It turned out that the guest lecturer was a leading figure in the field, someone mentioned on our course syllabus.  I gaped at my computer screen.

And more than that even, there were shots of the crowd, the audience who had come to hear.  I was in that audience.  Never mind the guest lecturer, I thought: show me me.  Where am I in the crowd?

But I didn’t see me.  If only I’d asked a question or something.  Caused a disturbance.   Perhaps that’s what we need to do to be noticed.  But I hadn’t.  Not that I can recall.

And if I had seen myself, what then?  Could I have reached out and spoken to that younger me and said, This is what will happen to you …

How odd.  Who knew that there was a recording that would be made available in another century, a recording that would almost show me myself?  I see a science fiction film in this somehow, but perhaps that’s just because I’ve seen too many movies.

That expert lecturer is dead now.  Perhaps a lot of the audience members too.  And it’s not exactly the same experience, watching it on video.  I wasn’t sitting where the camera was.  I couldn’t zoom in and see the speaker’s face so clearly.  And most of all I am not now what I was then.  You cannot step twice in the same river.

But you can watch the video.