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

Maudit Anglais

 Maudit Anglais
     by Dr. Electolux 

sibling rivalry sucks
wycliff chicken’s clucks
pounding rain on ducks
fighter planes called fukes 
simpson shows have yucks
heroes men with plucks
ford 250 trucks
yours electrolux

Is it swearing when said, by myself, in a language I do not understand? This—this sentence—would be a profound start to any serious investigation by a pre modernist, modernist or postmodernist work of fiction or poetry. I do not care about the answer. I do not wish to answer the question. I do not wish to ask it either. But I wish to examine the asking of it, or of any question that is asked in order to be answered or in order to mock the question and the answer or the question or the answer. This exegesis of the question above, this interpretation, is what fledgling philosophers mean when they say (displaying their wisdom), “Today, after Auschwitz, philosophy’s purpose can only be to question the possibility of the question.” In strong contrast to my feelings on the matter, Philosophy’s spokeswomen mean, “If only there was an answer” when they state aloud that there can be no questions. They are saying in fact that there are no discoveries that matter. The world—science, philosophy, agriculture, history – says the opposite. The profound desires in the breasts of philosophers Tate in York University, Braddigan at Stanford, Williams of Connecticut College, Smith at Harvard, Wayland at Oxford, Morrissette in Calcutta, and Smudgedigit in Edinburg are that a world of meaning be restored, found, sought, plied, worked, willed, wanged, split open, forged, jerked into being, discovered, fine-tuned, lamented, praised, scrounged, fought for, converged upon, analyzed, credited, raised, magnified, transcended, looked at and so on. Thus, “there is no question “is greeted by the only emotion allowed, despair, but unspoken of as such. “Let us never say ‘I despair,’ but keep searching,” is the agreement between all of this latter group of philosophers. ‘Let us find meaning’ is their bureaucracy, their jobs depending on it. Meaning, and the search for it, are economic. Prevailing hierarchies depend on the pull and push of meaning. Ms. Jane Scott, PhD, assistant professor of continental philosophy, would never, despite her three decades of studying Derrida, and thus, of course, Heidegger, admit that she was in any way clodded into a spectacularity of meaning’s thrusts and that she would defend the presence of the absence of meaning with her very life, until she nearly lost it (life and job at the Univ. of British Columbia) and then give up on it as easily as she gave up on her kid when it became plain that he was actually going to be a serious alcoholic and she could not fix him at all. The questions’ presence or absence matters not a bit. It is inconsequential in the absolute. What matters to me is the fact that those who lament its absence want it to be the point of discussion. After this short and stupid piece, I will never again bother with “the question.”
      Who am I? I will tell you by telling you a story about myself. I am now 56. When I was 23 I got married to a very pretty 19-year-old. I asked her if she would be my bride. She agreed. We were married six months later on a very hot day when the suits of those attending the wedding were soaked with sweat, and perspiration ran down the inside of the bride’s dress, front and back, in rivulets. A male attendant fell fainting to the floor before the minister. He chipped a tooth. I was almost as shortsighted then as I am now.  My parents drove up from Abbotsford, 1500 miles away.   They were too poor to come to the affair but they did so anyway. My father is/was a proud man. My mother is a proud woman. What she said did not always go. I do not recall any of the music that was played at the event. Muchachoes. The minister droned on and on. After the ceremony, everyone ate and opened presents and shook hands many times and laughed and felt terrible in the heat, and then my bride and I left for Mexico in my Volkswagen bug. The first night we drank wine, loved once, and fell asleep. In the morning I noticed that the room was neat and had been vacuumed and purified by the order of some good management, even though it had cost us very little. The next day we drove all the way to the Grand Canyon and looked down into it through a pay telescope. Then we made the fateful decision to hike down into the canyon along one of its many trails. We did that and after 6 miles in the 110° conditions, we arrived at the bottom and were soon sitting and lyi g beside the Colorado as it flowed past. We went on our honeymoon into Mexico as far south as cChiquaqua and  visited Mennonite villages in the western hills before returning home to Winnipeg. We are still married some 35 years later. My wife will retire from teaching primary school in two years. I will continue to teach at the University of Manitoba for another six or seven years, and then we will see. What do you make of that?       

No Purchase of Beer

 No purchase of beer
     by Screwcap the Second

Busy as usual with his horse, general Sajagen sent little Akra with his calculation to the chief. Besides the animals bearing military supplies and armament he would require 27 mules duly assigned to him to carry his beer. The beer came in kegs of 20 kg each. Roughly 200 of these would be accompanying him on his mission into Northern China. The journey would take up to a year. The reply came back from the Mogul that 25 were too many and he would allow only 10. Irate, Sajagen overloaded 11 mules with 15 kegs each and departed, dispirited. He decided early on to begin to purchase his beer en route, to save the supply he was carrying for a time when traveling in enemy territory would make supply-buying difficult. Each keg hung in a bag of goat skin, amply designed to except mule dung.. The dung, named Dhdn in Mongolese,, imparted a fresh and wholesome flavour to the beer after being in it’s vicinity for a few weeks. The rest of the soldiers had to supply themselves by stealing, or buying if they had the coin to do so. It was Akra’s job to pick up each fresh mule turd as they journeyed and to pack it carefully with the others around the leather bags. If the young lad missed a dropping, Sajagen quickly reprimanded him.
     “Here, you useless little horse turd! you are purposely leaving behind pieces of mule excrement to irritate me! Now, get on with you. Go pick that up or I’ll have your gizzard served alongsider my beer at tomorrow’s breakfast!” The boy always obeyed quickly when his general noticed relapse in him.
     When they returned to their home city on the steps a year and a month later, Sajagen had forsworn beer altogether. Not a month into his journey, the entire mule train fell into a ravine and not a keg survived. He sent men down in a great hurry to scoop up all the beer they could in containers of whatever sort they happened to have to hand, but sadly it had all mixed with the mule feces and become almost unpalatable. Sajagen did try valiantly for a few weeks to imbibe the mixture but, despite almost heroic efforts, he eventually found the foulness of taste and the general muddiness f colour (now no longer amber and not bright) discouraging and he decided to give up drink entirely for the rest of his life.                                    

Me and my Faults
      by Douglasin Reimer

And the following incidents acquaint you with me. With what was devious and dangerous about me and what was not. I may have sounded critical and self-righteous in my description of Harvey and Jake but I include myself in their group, in their attitudes. My faults may not be identical with theirs but they are and they are real. We’re all human, in other words, even adolescent males. A great statement about human nature that startled me with its accuracy the moment I read it goes as follows: “Treat every man as he deserves and who shall escape whipping.” I deserve whipping. Okay, I didn’t pull the wings off of flies, far as I can recall (though I remember burning a fly/flies with a magnifying glass). Nor did I blow frogs into balloons (I saw it happen, but never blew into the straw). I failed to plot apple-stealing scenarios for anyone, including Harv and Jake. I simply couldn’t hit a bird with a slingshot no matter how hard I tried. Bicycle spokes survived my plans and presence, and my female peers were in no danger ever of my hands invading their personal space (whether encouraged to or not) because as I remember it they seldom allowed themselves to be found near enough to me to find out (though I would never have harmed what I loved most, more by far than I loved myself). I was timid and self-reproachful in all of my dealings with people except close friends. I always felt sick with guilt whenever I thought the word “should.” So, when it  came to people-hurting, I posed no great danger except accidentally. So, to all intents and purposes, I wore a sort of halo. Not. My greatest “sins” were all fathered by deception. In case you are beginning to think that this smacks of confession—“O geez, here he goes, whimpering about himself, scared of everything and hoping for easy absolution and God’s forgiveness!”—you are bound for a minor disappointment. We boys were all biologically human with all the appetites and mischief that is in boys and has been since time began. It is always said with such certainty by most backward-looking non adolescents that adolescent males’ brains reside way too low down in their persons to be of any use whatsoever. I say, however, that we young fellows did have brains, only they were unafraid things, not easily convinced of the divide between what we did and what we were taught we should do. We saw, we looked, we wanted, we did. At least wanted to do. Now, however, older, in our early seventies, having fully succeeded in leaving the feelings of human biology behind, we are each one of us instead fully the products merely of culture and teaching, of Western fear. We no longer understand the impetuous, spontaneous joys of Eden.
      No, I list my early weaknesses happily and willingly stand shoulder to shoulder with Harv and Jake as an equal. Some of my weaknesses: I secretly loathed my parents’ version of Christianity; though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, I took no pride in my sister’s accomplishments as a star athlete, and was in fact hardly aware of it or her existence (all my time and thinking devoted almost exclusively to Dougie, “Big Doug,” Big special Dougie; I pinned my brother Rudy down whenever I felt like it and let my spit stretch down toward his face, though he hated it and tried desperately to turn his face away because half the time I couldn’t pull the spit back up (he begged me and I’d care less, it being so much fun); I would play ping pong with Rudy and win every game, five or ten games in a row, and laugh at him until he’d be so frustrated he’d fling the heavy plywood paddle whizzing across the table as hard as he could, me ducking just in time, and then he’d chase me to try to catch me and hurt me; I’d be laughing the entire time; I stole quarters from my older brother who had won a roll of them in Vegas, and he found out eventually, even though I tried to disguise the theft by taking only one quarter a week; at fifteen I stole jars of cherry, crabapple and raspberry preserves to brew wine, being careful to arrange the jars in the pantry to make it look like they were all still there; i stole a carton or three of cigarettes from a local store, I stole LPs and suede jackets in Winnipeg, I made jokes to my friend about two unfortunate girls in my grade who it was popular to ridicule for their plainness and poor clothes (poverty); and so much more. Treat me as I deserve and, yes, I wouldn’t escape whipping, not by a long shot.