Famous in Cincinnati

 
 Famous in Cincinnati
     by Infamous Dougles (the Dredger) Driedger 

After the merger, Paupanekis and Linklater and Sons should rightly have been renamed Paupanekis and Linklater and Sons and Daughters. Lawyers have a way of keeping things traditional, don’t you know. The first postmerger case the legal teams combined to execute concerned the mistreatment of a handicapped woman who, though perambulant, had no use of her arms and hands and wheeled about in a special bicycle with her legs and feet. She felt embarrassed that she had to sit in such a fashion with her feet and legs towering over her body, and that when, for instance, in a hurry to get across the street at a crosswalk because the bus was roaring toward her, or cars had sped up and were whining in her direction, circumstances  required her to add behaviours to her motions that she found beneath her. Under those circumstances, she had to pedal very quickly for all her life and she looked foolish. She was not above knowing that her knees, snickering so fast up and down about her own ears, her bare feet gripping the wheels and making the rubber hot from handling (the emergency so critical, with said vehicle threatening), looked more than comic. That they (the knees and so, her, in other words) appeared to onlookers absolutely, in the purest sense of the words, stupid and ludicrous. She took the city of Cincinnati to court (something about the city allowing the citizens of the metropolis to make a laughing stock of her) and won her case. Paupanekis and Linklater and Sons now had a win and no losses tucked under their belts, and she, of course, had improved her financial lot quite extraordinarily.
    The next two cases they lost. They had no choice. They plea-bargained with the prosecuted and gave in, excepting a large sum of money in exchange for sending a certain Bob Nighty and another, in the next case, a Mr. Barneswipe, both at the time federal prisoners awaiting parole hearings, back to their cells with years added onto their sentences for crimes they likely had at one time committed.  After that, however, with money recently earned, the mergered teams were able to orchestrate the next five or six cases in their favour and soon they became successful. Ten years into the new merger, this legal company began to think of itself as an old boy in the club of jurisprudence. 
    Paupanekis seldom went back to the home of his youth. He did not like to think of his parents. They still lived (if you can call it that) in the same rural place they had resided when he left there at the age of sixteen. He actually never wanted to see them again. The whole business of pruning and landscaping sat poorly with him. He would become somebody. And he did. He married into a poor family, he worked in a series of bars as a bouncer and later as a lap dancer, and then sped off with his last job’s boss’s old jalopy into fame and fortune. Caught and tried in court for stolen property, he blamed it, he told the judge, on an old acquaintance, Robert Linklater of Nelson house, whom he had not met since schooldays, but whom he recalled had stolen their principal’s car on a drunken Saturday night. Paupanekis, without a lawyer, was defending himself. The judge did not buy it. Paupanekis called Linklater as a witness, and discovered that he was, in fact, a lawyer already. Articling. The two liked each other immediately. Paupanekis lost this his first case but Robert smartly got him off with warnings and small fines. They met again when Paupanekis finished law school, and together planned one day to form a partnership. Now they were famous in Cincinnati, their companies merged.
    When the two grew old, they quit law and stopped taking cases. Their children, sons and daughters, took over the business and these two old timers spent much of their time fishing and reading. They read to each other whenever the opportunity presented itself. One year, they chartered a small yacht, a sailing ship really, and spent a few months flitting about the Pacific. They ended up stormbound on a little island, uninhabited, and very beautiful. Here, Paupanekis said, when they came ashore, they could live in peace forever, if only they had books. They had fishing equipment which they made, like Robinson Crusoe would have done, of local materials: willows, fine roots of certain plants such as the bigartoiliani, famous for its fine root system, which they used for line, hooks from the bones of previous fish catches, and bait from the crayfish that abounded. But they needed reading material to make this place ideal. 
     They hit on a fine solution, though, in time. They would write stories for each other. They did that. They wrote at first stories of their own lives, but soon grew utterly bored with reading what they already knew. They began to make up stories, new stories, stories they invented. These satisfied them. They wrote one hundred  each before they were rescued (and here it needs to be said that their boat had suffered so much damage in a huge storm that they had always known that they would not be able to sail it across the Pacific). They decided not to bring these stories with them to civilization, fearing somehow that merging fiction with fact would deprive them of their glory. They drowned their books, so to speak, in the ocean before they boarded the yacht sent for them. Paupanekis and Linklater and Sons and Daughters proudly scribed across the lovely white boat’s forecastle. 
Sent from my iPhone

Never, Never Again

Never, Never Again
     by Douglas One-Brick-Shy (second cousin to      

     Dougie One-Shot)

Rather, the umdrehung must be a transformation of the hierarchical structure itself. Eddie Nelson fumed over his coffee and said to himself that he would never, never again, work at a job he didn’t enjoy. He stuck to that decision and the result was the cause of the events of which I speak.
    He became the nanny to four young ladies from a respectable rural Kentish family, name of Spencer. These ladies loved nothing better than to picnic in the sun on the moors and Eddie obliged them. One day, as they sat down chattering, in their gayly coloured frocks and crisp, white pinafores, to open their basket of goodies, supplied by an obliging cook, something, as if right beneath them, surprised them all suddenly into speechlessness. A great splashing and scraping began, loud enough to see them clap hands over their ears.  And then, o horrors, a troll, green as seaweed, gnarly and bumpy of visage, fearsome of muscular limb and neck, the very picture of chaos animated, rose gargantuan out of the water under a nearby bridge. Immediately a stench of the most heinous, unbearable foulness, like putrid dog leavings and rotting, gelatinous pike, overwhelmed their senses. The ladies found themselves nearly unable to breathe, gagging and bringing up the bites of sandwich they had just consumed. Languid, unlabored, majestically, the beast peered about it as if taking in the prietty prospect, looked once at Eddie and, without undue haste, effortlessly grasping her with one gigantic hand about the  waist, lifted Eileen, the youngest of them, near Its eyes (for trolls, as you must know, suffer everyone from that vision impairment known as degenerative myopia) and then draped her casually about its neck, much as it would have the carcass of a new-killed stag. Glancing once more at Eddie with a look at once ferocious and triumphant it strode off with her into the forest, from whence to their astonishment they heard neither screams nor calls for help, nor any other signs of discomfiture but only the receding thuds of the Being’s footsteps that all too quickly faded in the distance. 
     Eileen, being 12, had just had initiated her first monthly evidence of entering into the world of women, and the four picnickers concluded that the scent of so powerful a sanguinity had likely attracted the miscreant. “Oh, our poor parents,” the friends wailed, only slowly beginning to feel in their breasts the full weight of the terrible loss!      And now what to do became the concern that forcefully bore on them and tore at their hearts, until Emma, 14, offered a solution, which they duly considered, and discussed, and shortly took action upon. They would all follow the kidnapper into the woods, aided in their tracking of it by its lingering stench. Then she, Emma, once they neared its lair, would present herself as attractively as possible, making of her person a bait to catch the troll. Or, troll to bait the catch, if you will. The rest would hie themselves to boulders and trees in the immediate vicinity and then from hiding leap out and wrestle the troll into submission almost as soon as it laid hands on her.
     To make a long story short, this they effected, this they attempted, and this they accomplished. When they had got the said troll in their sight, who was sneaking as warily as lumbersome trolls are able through the thickets toward the bait, they whispered to each other for silence. They kept one eye on Emma and one on the monster. They held themselves ready and tightly sprung to leap out and grapple with it. So when this loathsomeness bestrode her there on the ground helpless and alone, intending to lift her as well to its shoulders, they bounded up as one and, rushing as quickly as ever they could, surprised it and caught it in their communal grasp. Unacquainted with resistance or surrender, it was not easily deterred nor incapacitated and struggled mightily. Eventually, nearly exhausted, the valiant company conquered it. After helping Emma to her feet, which event took more time than it should have, they kept a wary vigil, each side distrusting the other still. But in time they induced the captive to tell them where their sister and charge was hidden. The way was difficult and took them three days. So dangerous was the track that the troll preceded them at the front of a long rope to which they all held tightly. They proceeded with many delays and dangers along a path that eventually led them to a sunny clearing in the woods. In this clearing, to their wonder and astonishment, lay a Naugahyde  chair and on it lounged the captive maiden, their darling sister.  She lay there quite regally, her arms lifted above her head in a gesture of indolence and leisure, and with her feet propped up high against the trunk of an apple tree laden with red fruit. 
    “Dress yourself at once!” roared Foulness to the young thing. She stretched, she yawned, then did as she was bid, but not with the avidity she might have been expected to show, the warming sun having rendered her somnambulant, and as well the quiet of that nook playing tricks on her sense of shame and forbearance. Eventually, her habiliment properly seen to, she asked that the quartet spare Hideousness its life. And they, not ones to resist such a plea for mercy, invited the scaly substance to join their picnic. It did that. At its suggestion they all soon removed their morning coats (since it had been cool when their journey began), and under a brilliant sky the colour of blooming clover they began the eating and drinking that had initiated their misadventures. Cross-legged and attentive, they told stories, tickling each other’s fancies, and generally regaling the uncultured troll with all the delicate history of the Spencer clan. When they had all eaten their fill, they dallied a little longer doing whatever their hearts decided, and then, after a difficult return journey to the bridge, wandered off home, each to her separate lodgings for the night. 
     The troll wept when it retired to its lair and throughout the long night, thinking of the new desires for knowledge and taste that these strangers had bestowed on it. How could it ever bridge the differences? How could it possibly live now that erudition had cast its net over it and carried it away for its own, unknowable purposes? How much just now it yearned for the clearing of its cloudy, brutal mind.





 

Other People’s Expenses

 Other People’s Expenses
     by Thieving Dougie Murgson    

Bergson, whom Swnivel had only skimmed, others considered an authority on communication. As a philosopher, Bergson throve, Swnivel discovered in his readings in the summer of 1983. But (and this “but” interested him more than any “and”) Bergson’s thyroid lacked in essential nutrients. Likely Bergson drove himself to regular study, Swnivel concluded, as a way of outwitting the utter exhaustion that threatened him each day. A daily regimen of physical work, or even some such hourly activity as answering telephones for a company, or sweeping hallways as a maintenance person, or even filming actresses in their parts on stage or in the movies, would have driven him to his bed long before day’s end. So, Bergson’s unique medical condition determined his stamina, and that determined his occupation. He, that is Bergson, likely lacked in general intelligence, living not at all above, say, Swnivel’s own level of it (this according to Swnivel) with which he fostered relations, dealt with misbehaving children, scolded late school children, and generally kept a lid on excessive behaviour in and around the place. Lacking abilities, Bergson resorted to persistence and so, thus, became a made man. 
     On the surface, Bergson loved food, smacking and slurping with lusty enjoyment in the busyness of public fêtes and feasts. Beneath it, in private, however, he despised it!  How frequently he cursed potatoes, carrots, beans (wax, mainly), rutabagas, lemons, fish, mackerel, chicken nuggets, egg noodles, whipped cream, pastry, pudding, blood sausage, edible underwear, beer, nougat chocolate, and an assortment of food once he had eaten them. As soon as any of these passed through his lips and down his gullet, he found himself gagging and without appetite. The reasons for his peculiar revulsion confound scholars, but lucky Swnivel discovered why, indeed. The source for his new knowledge about the philosopher’s private life remains to many but Swnivel a mystery, that being a series of letters to Bergson’s grandmother from an old acquaintance of the woman that scholars have obviously not had available to them but which found its way into Swnivel’s hands. Bergson loved his grandmother. She liked him immensely, too. Bergson doted on her, she tolerated him. She bought him candy at Christmas, and he wished for it year round. He politely asked her now and then if she would provide him with All-sorts but she only glared and shook her head. What about Liquorice Whips then, he asked, but she ignored that. He named one after the other; Caramel Coins, Chocolate Dollars, Sen Sen, Thrills, Cookie Puffs, Sugared Popcorn, edible clothing, Beer Nuts, Turkish Delights, Mini Donuts, and even once Sour Pups but she declined in dramatic ways and left him hungering. He continued to love her with inordinate fire of feeling, and this showed itself in a decline in his marks in grade five. Here in general the young Bergson began to falter under the tutelage of Ms. Beckunder, who weighed 14 stone and ate herring snacks during classes, which she hid in her drawer and reached in for when the children were painting or doing projects, thinking no one knew. But, Bergson knew. He dared tell no one. None must know besides himself. He kept her secret a secret because he wanted some of those whatever they were for himself, and one recess he struck. He snuck a snack, swallowed it in his hunger almost before he had tasted, and promptly threw up in her desk drawer, all over her dried, salted, herring strips. Horrified, he clandestinely watched her after recess while the children were working on their class group mural of a pastoral farm scene with cows, chickens, goats, and rows of cabbages. And then ... . Aha! He saw her sneak her hand into her drawer, take something, bring it hidden to her mouth, engulf it behind molars with ecstasy on her countenance, masticate, and then swallow. She seemed to think nothing amiss! Oh for goodness sakes!, he thought. 
    It was around that time in his life that Bergson began to hate food. He despised it. He wished he had no need of it. One day he devised a plan and brought it to fruition the next. He would never touch food again, neither with his fingers nor with his lips. And he did not. A chunky boy, he soon grew thin and pale, and then died shortly after his thirty-ninth birthday. His grandmother, always sickly and more recently an invalid, declined to come to the funeral, saying that she had no idea who people were talking about. She spent some time that funeral morning snacking and then baked a cake for her tea with her friend, Marjorie, next-door. They consumed it together and shared many a laugh at other people’s expense. 
     Whether I believe Swnivel or not, the words he spoke to me in private about Bergson have lingered in my mind all these years. Swnivel died some 30 years ago and I have kept his memory sacred. His ideas I have largely forgotten by now, but I do recall most of what he told me about the philosopher and I think most of it the product of a fevered brain. Bergson not caring for food? Rubbish! Bergson flatullating regularly in the presence of guests, including women? Absurd! The philosopher incontinent in his old age, especially after the consumption of cabbage? Ridiculous, and insulting! A revolt of the bowels at the smell of frying liver? Complete hogwash! I doubt Swnivel’s veracity and think I will spend some of my failing energies on public denials. I might even write a series of apologies intended to set the current record straight. We must not let weak minds rule our understanding of strong men and women. Speaking of which, I met Anne Veronne just yesterday and she gave me to understand that the saintly Vestibule, of the Italian papacy, had neglected to send her monthly stipend and she was suffering severely from malnutrition and hunger. What a fraud he is! Someone should have him defrocked. I will have to do something about that and see to it that she eats. Till then, goodbye my friends, and bon appétit.

Poems Are Stories, Too

I intend to tell easy stories

     by The Author

     (Everyone in my family knows about my         
      shortcomings, the stuff of hard stories.)

That I’m impatient, disinterested in money and so lacking in a certain kind of ambition comforting to a family, possessive of the females in my family, easily moved to jealousy, quick to apologize, much too quick to apologize, verbally hating lies but myself living with a great deal of secrecy, being temperamental, somehow unable to be a good father, especially in the sense of attending sports games the children play in school, not steadily eyeing the kids’ learning in school, and not attending to their every physical and mental need because I am always focussed on my achievements, my intellectual achievements. More. Many more. Many more lamentables.
     For that reason, because my children know all this about me, and know my sins so well, I intend not any longer to write about them but to focus on good memories, memories without sad recollection in them of bad qualities. Memories such as finding Chester, calling cows “pussy cows” that say “mooeow,” stories about my dad shaking in a canoe with me, my dad fishing on Horseshoe Lake with us young ones, my dad taking us to Highway Inn for ice cream on Saturdays, my mom with the green thumb and her greenhouse, my mom and the story of Jack Toews forgetting Low German after two weeks in the city, my mom making excellent fried potatoes and fried smoked ham, my mom being scared out of her wits when I came home all bloody, my white T-shirt soaked red from neck to bellybutton, and so on. Jim winning a roll of quarters in Las Vegas, Jim successfully helping me to get rid of stuttering by reading the Bible, by having me read the Bible to him, Jim leading the church choir, Gwen and her athletic abilities, Gwen and her great kindness to me, Lois and her astonishing acceptance of me always, especially these last years when I’ve had my most aching troubles, the preciousness of Sofia and her clear desire to keep me from losing faith in myself, the blessing of Russell and his quiet, uncomplicated way of relating to Marty and myself and everyone, Jonathan and Matthew and their continuing friendship and oneness with each other, memories of Jessica and me in a bluegrass band and making music and me on her porch on Alloway at 9 in the evening most weekdays to sing and talk and help her get over her sadness at being a single mom. Such I intend to be the focus of my memoir, for the sake of pleasantness of experience for the reader, and for the sake of newness of style because my style has always been so satirical and inclusive of the blackness of life. Let my stories shine with light. 

Fledgling

Fledgling 

     By Douglas Reimer

Young Rudi was very fond of money. He was the second youngest child and outsold us older two siblings. The oldest sibling, Jim, did not participate in things like selling in order to buy Christmas presents or birthday presents or whatever. By selling I mean selling Christmas cards. The three of us, Gwen, Rudi and me, in 1958, let’s say. That seems about the correct date since I am not sure of it, but we were a young and fledgeling group. Every day after school we would take, on our little sled, boxes of cards provided by my dad who got them at a salesman‘s discount from the Raleigh’s Co. for which he worked. We split the houses on a street between us. If I took 102 on the south side of Centre Avenue Rudi would take 104. We’d emerge about the same time and take another box of cards if we’d sold one, or if not then move right on to 106 and 108. The temperature in December commonly hovered around -25 and sometimes -30, with wind inevitably, and us wearing not nearly enough layers, inadequate clothing because my parents did not spend money on clothes unnecessarily, and there was no parent in the family who spent more than two minutes a year thinking about what clothes the children might or might not require. So, for instance, a black nylony/cottony pair of slacks that looked to me by the end of two years like they’d been trampled by pigs for half that time and washed altogether four times, sort of, was what covered my bottom half for six hundred schooldays in grades nine to twelve. Little Rudi, born in October, 1950 had nothing warmer to wear. Nor Gwen. Cold, hungry, hungry, hungry, we tramped through town knocking on doors. At the end of two hours the three of us had each heard “I don’t think so. Not this year. We don’t really use cards” thirty-five times and  two of us had sold one box each, making gross sales of $1:00 all told, before walking the mile back to the village for supper, for cabbage soup and buttered bread. None of the other children in Altona—and I mean zero—did that. None of them got cold to the bone for any reason. None got hungry three times over. Roy Abrams, Margaret Loewen, Rick Janzen, Jim Wolfe, Marry Anne Streamer, Barry Braun, Rick Friesen, John Zacharias, Gladys Loewen, Norman Schmidt, Stealer Dyck’s, Sally Dueck, Grace Braun, Grant Thiessen, Libby Friesen, Terry Sawatsky, none of them spent weeks every year pulling a sleigh, begging people to buy something, freezing their jewels off, wearing too little to be even a little warm. We three did. For better or worse. The reason, generally? The same one that had us up in summer at 6:00 AM in a beet field hoeing beets till 4:00 PM six days a week if there was a clear sky. In often 100 shadeless degrees. And, calculated finally to have earned  25 cents an hour net when all was counted in late August. Which we then didn’t need reminding to give back to the parents because they provided for us. On paper a solid enough expectation. And the Christmas card money? The 17 dollars and 37 cents we had saved in Gwen’s piggy bank?  Well, that 1958 Christmas morning mom and dad had a handsome (us kids thought), new, blonde, two-tiered, lightweight  coffee table under the tree, a present from three proud children.  Rudy had earned most of that 17 dollars by himself. I think he felt a great sense of pride in the extra hours he put into the selling. He should have been proud. I don’t recall any feelings in myself except cold and hunger. Well, and shame.

 Truth and Consequences
            by Leigh Douglas Reimer

Marty and I were planning our honeymoon. Terry Sawatsky got involved in planning it in an odd way; as a matter of fact, he was actually going to be be part of it! As in going to accompany us on it!  What!? you ask. Yes, it was true. (I think John Cleese would have approved!) You must remember that long ago people had double weddings, as my parents did with my Aunt Tina and Uncle Ben Hiebert, and here we were now in a quite old-fashioned way about to share our honeymoon with this red-haired (and might I add, fearfully intelligent guy, a smartness that came in handy as events later indicated).
     I was totally blindsided. I don’t recall how it happened, but suddenly the plan included us travelling together for part of the holiday. It’s not that I regretted adding Terry’s (and his new wife, Millie’s) company. We fully loved the two of them, and had often spent excellent times together on adventures of one sort or another. Actually, I am remembering that slightly wrongly because I should have said that we wouldeventuallyhave those adventures. We really only started them after the wedding when the four of us began to go camping, visit at their house on Dorchester, play Romoli together and skip Adult Sunday School at Charleswood Mennonite Church to have coffee at the MacDonals west of the church along Grant Avenue. But here we were planning a double honeymoon. And yet I knew that if we were to share our honeymoon with anyone it would have been Terry and Milly because Terry was my best friend from adolescence and Millie had become a precious one ever since Terry introduced me to her as his girlfriend. 
     The second phase of the honeymoon was a trip into Mexico. We had intended, as we planned, to meet the Sawatsky’s in the city of El Paso, sister city of Juarez, Mexico. When we were still a few hundred miles from the border, we stopped for gasoline in a town called Truth and Consequences. Almost a city, really, of some 5,000 people and half a dozen fuel stations, it was a lovely place and my lovely wife and I were generally having a lovely little time. We had a  new, souped-up 1970, tangerine-coloured Volkswagen Beetle (with smart-looking, inverted Siberling tires), the New Mexico desert bathed us with fragrant, hot sun, the sky covered all our travels in a blanket blue as could possibly be, and the desert birds and insects astonished us with their amazing variety. Our senses showed us a world so different from Winnipeg’s, a good thing when you’re honeymooning. Tomorrow we would arrive in El Paso and connect with our friends. Excitement about traveling  together had been growing ever since we left the Grand Canyon with its strange and unwelcome calamity (a calamity that we wished to forget but never would!).
     So, nearing Truth and Consequences we decided to fuel up.We had a doubt that there would be gas available before we arrived at the border. As we pulled into a service station—and I think it was an Exxon—I looked across the street at another service station and, low and behold, there shimmering in the heat was the mirage of Terry’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Well, I said to myself, maybe it looks just like his, but it can’t be! Can it?      
     No sooner had I noticed the yellow bug than Marty pointed and called out that it was them, that, Yay! we had found our friends! And sure enough, about then Terry shouted, “What’s wrong with you! What are you doing here? Don’t you know we’re not supposed to meet yet?” We laughed, we patted ourselves on our backs, we hugged, and then we started to fuss about the fact that this extraordinary meeting, this extraordinary coincidence, had happened in, of all places, Truth and Consequences! How wonderfully odd that moment. Could the world get any smaller than that? Could anything better happen on a honeymoon?

Successful Motions

Successful Motions 

     by Simply Beautiful, My Dear

Have you ever noticed,” Eduard Barnswipe said to the class, “that failures abound in this country, and that failure, in fact, is rewarded?” His students did not respond immediately, and then they violently cheered and surged up to attention giving him their unrestrained approbation. Since his question came a minute after the official end of classes for that day, Eduard began packing his leather bag as a sign that they were dismissed. A minute later the room was empty but for a young lad in a wheelchair who now moved towards him from the back of the room, and to whom Barnswipe barked out a “What do you want, Sir?” The student stuttered something indecipherable but kept moving closer until he came to a halt at Barnswipe’s feet. 

     Unexpectedly and without answering him, that worthy, physically-challenged one grabbed the professor by the lapels and hoisted himself therewith upward before him, looking him squarely in the eyes and then, swiftly turning him about with a shift of his weight and leaning away, bent him precipitously backwards over his wheelchair handles so that the older gentleman soon felt all feeling going out of his arms and legs. A minute more, and with a final violent exertion of his muscular upper body, that worthy snapped Barnswipe in two and finished him off. 

     Eduard lay from that day for many a month in a bed, unable even to move his head, or to speak a single word. “Failure is rewarded” constituted the second last words he ever spoke aloud. He did think to himself, though, of the profound import of these words. He had been rewarded, despite his grand efforts as a teacher, with failure, and not with any treasure other than failure. He had been rewarded, in other words, with vengeance in his soul. He vowed, within himself eventually to get even with his attacker. That day came sooner than he had expected. One day, into the very hospital room where he lay, lumbered the worthy who had finished him off. The man before Eduard was now no longer in a wheelchair, but walked standing tall, if not firmly, on his own two feet. He was an orderly and he’d come to empty Eduard’s piss pot. For good reason less perceptive now than he used to be when life had been a disaster for him, he knew not that the man before him was none other than the former teacher he had so viciously misused. 

     The orderly came from the Abruzzi district of Italy and had arrived to this country some 20 years earlier with his ageing parents. His father (from a fine old Italian family with the last name of Spread), a ship’s Carpenter who had received a head injury in the hold of one of his own ships, banging it with great velocity on a beam too low off the floor and so deranging himself in an instant, lived here on social assistance. His mother, a fine woman of tolerable education and disposition, toiled each day at breadmaking to support the family, now that Spread senior was no longer in a condition to do so. She toiled daily at baking and then saved her evenings for television. She especially loved the Westerns, namely The Rifleman, and Have Gun Will Travel. And she fancied herself princessy enough of countenance  and figure to deserve to have one of those maverick heroes come to her and lift her on his horse and ride her away from her difficulties. Once, when she did ride a horse, on a farm some miles out of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, she immediately on mounting fell forward over its mane to such an extent that the guide had to rein in his steed and reach his hand to her to aid her back upright. She felt ever afterward a kinship with this gentleman, and often wrote him letters which he did not answer, out of safety concerns, fearful as he was that the husband would have something to say about the matter should a secrecy between them be discovered. Spread junior’s mother kept him in clothes and food while he was a youngster, but when one day he visited the ship where his father had been injured, and he banged his own head also by accident on the same beam that had done his father in, he fell prorate to the floor and others had to assist him out of there to a hospital where doctors announced him to be in a state of grave dislocation of movement. He received from the hospital a wheelchair for the modest sum of eight dollars monthly, and this machine gave him the movement and dexterity over distance that he longed for. 

     Until the events in the classroom with his brusque teacher. Now, some years after the classroom debacle, he had almost recovered from the emotions of that day, when another group of emotions, as mentioned earlier, accumulated, which further upset his balance and decentered him. 

     It began thusly. The former invalid bent over Edward, spoke some kind words to him, because he felt unusual sympathy for non ambulant persons, and reached under the sheets to extract the bedpan. As he bent close to him Edward suddenly lifted his head, the only part of him that initially retained any movement, except his anus, (which he could flex and move about, and which by now he had taught to talk and to perform all kinds of secret little fine motor movements), and in a flash had that tall man by the nose with his teeth. He bit him so hard that blood filled his mouth in an instant. Barnswipe hung on, even though the tall man roared. In a moment, this Eduard grabbed the miscreant by the legs (since his upper body had gained a great deal of strength through two years of relentless callisthenics), lifted him bodily off the floor, and smashed his head into the wall, repeatedly, with more vigor and momentum each time, until the room rang with the impacts. Then, instantly he took Spread by his head and, looping his feet and legs over the high back of the bed, struck him numerous blows to the side of his face. After which he lifted him by both arms and legs and rammed him repeatedly onto a pointy bedpost of brass till the unfortunate orderly, impaled sitting up, stuck on the end of it and wobbled there. The attacker fell back to his bed exhausted but mollified. He left Spread junior to get down from his perch as best he could and to recover as best he might. 

     Despite Spread’s marginal brain damage and the broken and ruined joints of his arms and legs (remembering with what ferocity the teacher had flung Spread about),  the teacher sustained a still worse  condition (having been too vigorous, too unwisely exuberant,  in the beating of his former student, and thus incurring numerous and various injuries upon his own person as a result) that seemed to his now feeble thoughts the most terrible of his new injuries. He could no longer use his anus for anything. He discharged into a colostomy bag and found himself, despite his best efforts, unable to make his rectum either to speak or to move in the heretofore way. He felt so lonely and bereft, that he wished to commit suicide, but he lacked the means to achieve that happiness. And he felt unable to ask anyone to aid him. He taught himself by hook or by crook to do this or that with his tongue, but that artefact never gave him, in its ambulation, the same satisfaction that he had gleaned from all his earlier successful motions.

Bill Bentley Buck and Bob

Bill Bentley Buck and Bob
     by You-Can-Call-Me Ray Jay

Bill Bentley quickly buggered off
As soon as he was able

He leapt forthwith upon a steed

Acquired from the stable

He’d spent most of his father’s cash

On presents for his Rose

She’s hightailed it when that was gone 

Or so the story goes

We weep we pine we wring our hands

But all to no avail

The grace that’s i’the entire world

Won’t fill a leaky pail

So keep your pecker (courage—Med. Eng.) up my son

Don’t hasty into town

The one who gets up earliest

The sooner he’ll go down

So when the three mice felt the shame 

Unaided to their homes

They all lopsided went back to

And tried to hide their lame

The moral of the history of Bill  Bentley Buck and Bob

Is never give them anything

And never take a coin

Don’t namely give a shite

Addendum 

Bill Bentley Buck and Willy Bob

Agreed Will was a silly slob

“Swift the Winged Whippet” and the Vivaldi Concert

“Swift the Winged Whippet” and the Vivaldi Concert
       by Douglas Reimer

Bob Nighty walked up the sidewalk. Next door, Rover barked at his wire gate, and when the dog stopped doing that he stood looking intently out, irritated at Bob’s failure to stick his head around the corner of brick by the front door as he used to do when the golden retriever had first trained him to acknowledge him. Rover turned and walked to his own house door, and soon hurried back to look some more for Bob Nighty. 
     Life in Rover’s backyard on Niagara Street sucked. It went without saying that he’d seen all of it a million times and was sick of the whole thing. And then to top it off, Bob had built a 6 foot high fence around his whole backyard and now he, the dog, couldn’t see the neighbours come home or walk out of their back door into the rear yard, and he had no one to bark at or make conversation toward. He used to enjoy forcing Bob or his wife, Miranda, to come to the fence and make small talk while he roared at them as if they were intruders. Once they had given him doggy biscuits, he usually shut up for five minutes, as long as they made no sudden movements. Because if they did, such as banging something, or sliding a metal ladder down from the eaves, or coming to dig a bit in the flower bed next to their border with the Smooltots, he had an excuse again to jump and reverberate and threaten.
     He knew, while barking insanely at Nighty one day, that something was going to change when Bob grabbed the first thing he could layi his hands on and smashed time amd again at the wire fence close to his (Rover’s) face, screaming and calling him down. A baseball bat! Rover had barked very loudly at that, snarling and showing his lips, turned up and black, and his great, white fangs. The babysitter who happened to be in his (Rover’s) back yard at the time, had taken the two boys and the two dogs (Rover and his quiet retriever friend, Matthias), inside for an hour while she fussed at the window to see if Bob could be trusted. Bob seemed unperturbed by his outburst and continued some sort of digging at the fence, putting in fence posts as it turned out later, and she (the babysitter) eventually let everyone back into the compound. She was worried and cautious. She sat in the kid’s swing with her hands in her lap and waited a little to see if Bob would continue in a trustworthy way what he was doing. He glanced up at her and she knew then by his relaxed face that he would be okay for the moment  
     Rover found that Bob had built the fence all the way to the corner and even past it so that he (Rover) couldn’t see the family members when they got out of the car. Even in front of the vehicles Bob had continued the fence, too. So, now the Nightys’ parked out of his (Rover’s) sight and walked invisible through a gate to get into the backyard. He (Rover) could hear them arrive, but it was no fun barking if he couldn’t stare into their eyes from between the wire fence squares. When the old grandfather (Mr. Smooltot senior) came out of Rover’s house for a smoke, he now sat looking through the fence not at Bob, or Miranda, or their married daughter with the little kid, but at a fence. Just like Rover, Smooltot used to also like to notice all these people next door and quietly observe their comings and going’s and so on. Before the new fence, Smooltot sometimes rebelliously lifted the kid over the wire fence and placed her among the boys on the swing, even though the mother often said no, she should just stay in the yard because she (the mother) was not staying long. Smooltot Senior lifted her over anyway and made her play there. And Grandma Smooltot would invite the little girl into the yard, give her and the boys each a sandwich at the little table, and act very nice until the little girl took one of the boy’s  sandwiches and bit into it and then she (Smooltot) would yell HEY!! at the little girl. But now that the fence was up, Rover’s family didn’t have the chance anymore to see and so invite or interact with any of the Nightys. For Rover it was now so boring here. Nothing to see but a stupid fence. No one to train. No people to make do things. No one to be quietly observant of who pretended you weren’t there once they said hi how are you and immediately go on about the business they had come into the backyard to do. This was actually completely true for all of them, Rover and the Smooltots.  Well, there was always the concert coming up. Smooltot Senior and the Mrs we’re going to hear Vivaldi tonight and fence or no fence they would have had a break from the boredom and some real, as well as some fine cultural cuisine to feed them, to provide them much needed mental stimulation. Yes, this at least was good.

Sent from my iPad

Dramatic Characterization in Oedipus Rex

   

Dramatic Characterization in Oedipus Rex

       by Douglas Grimier

Well, class, this likely will be the last time I see you before the pleasures that stretch before you of leaving study and the anxiety of grades behind for a week and a half or so. During this time I expect that you will all take good care of yourselves so that when you return here there are no stories of tragedy to unfold to me because .... well, I care for every one of you as if you were my own offspring. Now, on to the subject at hand. Are we not so very lucky, to be blessed with minds that can read in new ways the stories of the old, old, old literature.

      And it is Sophocles’ most famous play that will entertain us today. The subjects of Oedipus Rex are love and pride. Pride is the conventional subject of Greek tragedy. This discussion that follows shows how pride, as a quality of Oedipus’s character, develops in his telling of the story. Sophocles characterizes Oedipus (that is, makes him a believable character) by motivating him. Oedipus’s motivation is his angry pride, his feeling that he should not have been targeted by the gods in the first place, not have been loaded with such a horrible burden as the Oracle places on him. This excessive pride, which motivates all of Oedipus’s behaviour, becomes increasingly clear to us, to his audience, in the course of the episodia(a term specific to Greek tragedy, loosely meaning “events”). Among the episodiaare these: 

-oedipus madly fights a whole group of soldiers he meets along the road to Thebes, angered by rough treatment from the king, who is disguised as a citizen.

-Oedipus announces, too proudly for the fates, that he suffers as much as or more than the citizens of the city of Thebes, who have undergone such terrible suffering at the hands of the voracious Sphinx.

-Oedipus impetuously and falsely condemns both Creon and Tiresias, calling them traitors who have plotted to destroy Oedipus so Creon can take over the kingship.

-Oedipus sends for the Oracle a second time to find out what is causing Thebes such suffering. This may seem understandable, but it shows us that Oedipus is not content to let events take their own course. He goads the fates all along in every way to hurry up and bring (his) destiny to pass.

-Oedipus publicly overdramatizes all of his feelings in order to push the fates to end the whole affair: his single-handed attack and killing of the large group of soldiers on the road to Thebes, his preposterous decision to answer the Sphinx’s riddle; his vaulting at the innocent Creon and Teresias to drive them into telling him more; his intense lamenting before Jocasta to see whether she can provide him with more information than she already has (she wishes, of course, to keep silent about it all); his unnecessary threats to kill the Old Shepherd who wishes to keep quiet about what he knows; and his final rapturous responses to Creon when that kind man lets him see his children once more.

-Oedipus’s excessive actions (driving into his eyes a hairpin from his mother/wife’s hair, which blinds and maims him but does not kill him) when he recognizes the truth of his marriage to his own mother.

     In summary, Oedipus eventually knows (though he has already long suspected, I believe) that he is doomed to kill his father and marry his mother, but with great hubris he pits his wits and emotions against the gods. He rages against them for their unfairness. This raging against the gods and against his own fate is his tragic flaw. “He should have taken his medicine like a Man,” the old saying goes. But, more even than the children he hugs in all his gore at the end, he appears to be an adolescent (a show off) in all his actions. He is petulant and angry that he is bound to do what he does not wish to do. His petulance, his childish anger, that is, his noble, regal pride are his downfall. These actions may actually not be noble but ignoble. Unless there is another explanation. And there is! He is, in fact, and has been for the entire time since he has learned of his future from the old, unwelcome party guest back in his home city, in unbearable pain with his knowledge. Against all odds he has not been able to find release in death, since he has twice tested his ability to die (fighting the soldiers single-handedly; facing the Sphinx’s impossible challenge). He wishes for his pain to end now, not later, and so he pokes and pinches at the fates in order to hurry them up.

     There is, however, another subject besides pride in this play, and that is love. Oedipus has been deprived of the love of his parents from an early age. This deprivation of affection, of attention from loving parents, of the normal love of a wife, and of the love of a real good father, are the real motivation for his astonishing anger, sadness, vaunting, overreacting, busy pushing for answers and so on. He does not wish to live if the gods do not love him. He does not wish to live if he has parents who are not really his. He does not wish to live if he has married his mother who consequently cannot love him for obvious reasons. He does not wish to live if he cannot ever receive the true love and affection of the children he has spawned because they will not be able to love a father who is really their brother! They will never themselves ever be able to be married because of the stigma of their father!

     Oedipus, sensing long ago that he cannot ever find love or be loved, rages all along against the gods for their unfairness and he longs now finally not for death but for revenge on the heavens. He wants, he wishes, the world to see for a long time to come when they hear the story of his loath able blindness  how unfair the gods are who rob us arbitrarily of love.

     Students, this is a novel analysis of the play and of Sophocles’ purposes unimagined by any previous intellectual. I am specifically and particularly capably fit to bring for you a reading of the play’s purposes that is incredibly exciting. It is exciting, class, because it has never before been read this way.  before, and it is an exceptionally insightful reading. Keep that in mind when you remember over the next many decades this moment, this class with its astonishing insights and lessons to learn about how to read old texts and how to live in this awkward world. I wish you a very good holiday and expect to see you back here again after the midterm break during which I assume many of you will be heading to Florida to celebrate the week and a half that you have of liberty before the return to the harness and stepping into the work load again.

Long-Lost Relatives

 Long lost relatives.    
     by Jammin’ Uncle Benjamin

They came from Walhalla in a rented minivan
They came from Wisconsin back in 1991
Delorane, Biscaine, Tallahassee, Chickasee
And a station waggon got here all the way from Tennessee

     Chorus
     I got married to a gal from Tennessee
     She still insists that it was she who married me
     We had children quickly darlings one two three
     Now her relatives are steadily arriving here to see

A sister came from Tallahassee with her brothers two
They stayed for twenty days with precious little here to do
We laundered all their clothing gave them food and money too
And when they finally left we bid them all a fond adieu

A family from Wisconsin came we gave them room and board
They prayed before and after meals and loudly praised the Lord
At restaurants and shopping malls and in the grocery store
They closed their eyes they raised their hands and then they asked for more

     Chorus

A lanky man arrived here from the banks of Cumberland 
This Tennessean spoke so slow I couldn’t understand
I asked him what his name was and he told me right away
But blamed if I will ever get it to my dying day

     Chorus