The Classroom Conservative

The English Professor's Pet Peeve: Say What We Mean And Mean What We Say

I flew down to Guelph for a conference today, and I traveled part of the way with a couple of acquaintances. Discussing someone we all knew, the consensus was that this person is likely to answer very literally when asked "How are you?" It is not an original observation, of course, but in honor of the late, great George Carlin I spent the rest of the day paying as close attention as Mr. Carlin did to the paradoxes inherent to the way we use language.

Immediately upon my arrival, I sought out a bookstore for a coffee. Yes, there is irony in the fact that we come to rely on a place that sells books to get coffee, as there is in the fact that we sometimes mean "generic hot liquid" when we say coffee. I was actually looking for tea. In the parking lot of the shopping center where books and coffee and tea are peddled, there is a sign that reads: "Notice. Please help us keep our prices low and return your cart to the corral. We cannot be responsible for damage caused by stray carts." I can only conclude that the inflationary pressures are caused by replacing carts, not paying for damage that the mall will not pay! But the oddest exchange was with the clerk in the bookstore. Having found a remaindered Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno biography of e.e. cummings, I approached the cash. "Did you find this okay?" she asked. I suppose she meant to ask me if I had difficulty finding the book I wanted. This really does not apply to something you encounter when browsing, of course. But the clerk seemed to want me to confirm that I had found the book. I was pretty sure I had. Have you ever given honest feedback to such a question? I remember once telling a cashier at the supermarket that while I had secured nine of the ten items on my shopping list, all the milk on display was past the "best by" date. She did not seem to understand, used presumably to having people simply nod in response.

Language is a sharp weapon: one with which we hit each other over the head!

Jack The Ripper And Anti-Semitism

I have just completed a two-year project on Jack the Ripper. I was fascinated with the idea, popular in the late nineteenth century, that you could identify killers through photographs of their victim's eyes. It seems to me that this trust in a dodgy image is similar to the trust we place in autobiography, and so I used the methodology of reading photography to read the life narratives of three police officers who pursued the Ripper. It struck me that this might be a topic appropriate for a colloquium paper, and so I undertook a short google search to see if any related images were available in the public domain that I could use to sell such a paper to undergraduates who, increasingly, seem to desire illustrated lectures.

One of the first sites unearthed by my search was filled with anti-semitic bile!

Now, as someone who understands that the web is filled with questionable content, and as a hands-off libertarian sort, this is the kind of thing that I would just ignore. But I have to admit that it bothered me a lot. I actually responded as one might upon coming across illegal pornography: I cleaned out my cache and deleted my history. I was really repulsed. As the days have passed, however, it occurs to me that if I am going to be the libertarian defender of speech rights that I believe myself to be, I must challenge this sort of garbage when I encounter it. And that is what I will do.

I need not identify the site. It is easy to find, and I will not dignify it by pointing you to it. It makes outlandish claims about a zionist conspiracy and the Oklahoma City bombings, about the recent Aruban disappearance of American teenager Natalee Holloway. But it also speaks of the Ripper case with a certainty that would make Patricia Cornwell blush. She, you might remember, is the crime novelist who, after undertaking much research, is certain that painter Walter Sickert was the killer. This website claims no such new research; it simply repeats as fact a suspicion that can be traced back as far as 1894. That was the year in which Scotland Yard's Melville Macnaughten wrote an internal memo identifying a "Polish Jew" as one of three viable Ripper suspects. We are now almost certain that Macnaughten was talking about Aaron Kosminski, a mentally-ill hairdresser from London's East End. This site somehow takes Macnaughten's 114 year-old accusation and presents it as certainty. It does not mention that historian Philip Sugden has proven that Kosminski was held in a lunatic asylum from the early 1890s until his death in 1919, meaning that if we accept that the Ripper killed only five women in 1888, a homocidal maniac was able to hold his impulses in check for more than three years. It also does not account for the fact that Kosminski, a small, idle, and dirty young man, did not really look like any of the men seen with Ripper victims before they were killed. The site has many illustrations of hook-nosed Rippers of semitic stereotype, but it does not manage to acknowledge that to accept Kosminski would be to reject the popular conception of a Ripper in cape and top hat moving about in the fog with a doctor's bag.

Could Kosminski really have been the Ripper? Sure. But I do not think the case against him is any better than that against any of the dozens of other suspects Ripperologists discuss today. While the Ripper could have been a Jew, he could also have been from any of the many other groups living at the time in and around Whitechapel. What is most galling, however, is how this site recycles anti-semitic conspiracies that were debunked as red herrings at the time of the murders.

It just goes to show that while many people, including Cornwell and Sugden, have done and are doing credible research on Jack the Ripper, research that is subject to scrutiny, other people -- like the author or authors of the site I am describing -- are presenting rumours as fact for their own narrow benefit. They, too, should endure some scrutiny, should they not?

Do Not Turn Your Back On Glenn Anderson

News has broken tonight that former Edmonton Oiler Glenn Anderson has finally been elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame. Because of a lost year during a work stoppage, this year's class is made up of players who were passed over in prior years. As a central figure during a much more entertaining time in the National Hockey League, Anderson surely deserves the honor.

But my favorite Anderson memory actually has to do with broadcasting. In the early years of cable television in Canada, it had the reputation as a place for "adult" content. When The Sports Network debuted, I think some of its commentators still held this view. For its hockey coverage, it hired a number of big name sportscasters who had a great deal of experience in Canadian media circles. The product was well-produced and very professional. The Edmonton Oilers were playing in the marquee game. Glenn Anderson hit the ice, and the color commentator, with his thirty years experience in media, said: "That Glenn Anderson is a great player. But do not turn your back on him. He will f&%k you!"

Dead air.

I can only imagine that producers were frantic behind the scenes, telling this living legend that just because Canadians had to pay to see this coverage did not mean that he was free to use the salty language of the locker room!

Needless to say, conventional coverage ensued.

Congratulations, Mr. Anderson. No one will turn his back on you on the dais at the Hockey Hall of Fame.

The CFL Does Not Warrant Special Protection

Did you know, as the National Post attests in its editorial, that the Canadian Football League is superior to the National Football League? It must be because the size of the ball used is slightly wider, because the size of each squad is larger, because the playing surface is different. It cannot be because the skill of its players is comparable. CFL salaries have been unable to compete with NFL salaries since the 1980s, and every CFL player who gets a shot south of the border takes it. I do not know any CFL player personally, and even the moldiest benchwarmer is ten times the athlete I ever was, but let us not confuse the issue with this chest-pounding boosterism. You see, CFL advocates want it both ways: the CFL is both the superior product and the minority enterprise that requires protection. If it was truly better, it would need no protection. The interest of fans would carry the day.

There are many reasons to follow sports played below the level of top-tier, elite professional enterprises. You can spend an exhilarating Friday night watching the Lethbridge Hurricanes play the Calgary Hitmen, but that does not mean that we need to require the Calgary Flames to pull out of the Saddledome for the good of "Southern Albertan culture." Lower division soccer teams in England have their loyal fans, but all these teams aspire to promotion to the Premiership, and no one sees a match between Reading and Swansea as anything other than an undercard. As a child, I was a big fan of "semi-pro" senior hockey in Newfoundland.

So what is it about the Canadian Football League that requires its supporters to disparage another, more entertaining enterprise based south of the border? If, as the CFL commissioner claims, the Grey Cup is a symbol of national unity, what have they to fear? We cannot change the title music of a hockey broadcast in this country without huge cries raised across the land, so is the very possibility of a NFL team in Canada much of a threat in the face of genuinely, spontaneously nationalistic loyalty? Do we really need a politician like Larry Campbell threatening a law to keep the NFL out of Canada? Need I fear a fine or imprisonment simply because I would rather watch the most dreadful game between Oakland and Cleveland than a pitched battle between Toronto and Hamilton?

I am so tired of being a pariah because I follow the National Football League. I have to listen to insults about my game from people who are terrified by the thought that the Buffalo Bills, a franchise that struggles perpetually, might play a game or two in Toronto over the next few years. Our Senate, with all the crises facing us, feels the need to occupy itself with Canadian football on the off-chance that Toronto will outpace Los Angeles in attracting a NFL franchise. If, as CFL Commissioner Mark Cohon suggests, a threat to his game is the beginning of the end of Canadian culture, I suggest we power down and hand the keys over now. All hail our new overlords, all spikes and four downs!

Okay, okay. That is drastic. I will instead try to ignore the stupidity and the waste of this annual debate. God bless the CFL, but I await the beginning of NFL training camps. And I long for the day that the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who watch NFL football on Sundays warrant the kind of respect that would bestow on them a team of their own – if the marketplace, open and fair, will bear its weight.

Sex And The City

I ran from the theatre. 

   

On a few occasions over the years, I have walked out of a film before it finished, but this time I stayed until the end.  Then I ran.

   

I hated Sex and the City.

   

Now, I know what you are going to say: this was never a film meant for me, and I had no right to be there in the first place.  Maybe you are right.  There were four women sitting behind me, kvetching about their husbands, and the half dozen to my right had cellphones, pagers, and screaming children.  I was outnumbered, but I came to the theatre interested.  I was not a fanatical follower of the HBO series, but I respected what the program tried to do in upsetting the tedious pabulum of network television.  I like Sarah Jessica Parker, and I think her Carrie Bradshaw character is complex and watchable.

   

This film is neither.

  

The conflict is created by her fiancee’s cold feet.  Goaded into goading Mr. Big into marriage by her increasingly shrill and unsympathetic friend Miranda Hobbes, Carrie is left at the altar.  The problem is that this development takes forty-five minutes to present itself, a tedious period taken up with the veneration of fashion labels so central to the success of the series.  Unfortunately, it has never been so blatant, never such a distraction from the plot.  The remaining hour-and-a-half churns its way towards an inevitable happy ending by introducing us to a new character, Carrie’s assistant Louise, played without charm by Jennifer Hudson.  No one behind the paper-thin script sees fit to integrate Louise with Carrie’s circle of friends, and her scenes are thus oddly disjointed.  As for Miranda, Charlotte, and even Samantha, their storylines could not hold your attention for even a segment of an episode of the old series.

   

But worst done by of all are the men, of course.  Chris Noth (as Mr. Big) and Evan Handler (as Charlotte's husband Harry Rosenblatt) play to type, and we get only a hint of the complexity of the former, even as his life is shaken and shaken again.  David Eigenberg (as Miranda’s Steve Brady) gets to revisit something like an old storyline, and Jason Lewis (as Samantha’s Smith Jerrod) is eye candy without the opportunity to put his wares on display.  Gilles Marini (as Samantha’s neighbor Dante) gets the only exposure one will remember.

   

The only justification for making this film, beyond the big windfall for all involved, would be if Parker and her peers had one more story they were dying to tell.  There is no such story here.  I cannot imagine that people who felt betrayed by the “conventional” ending of the series will feel vindicated here, though I could hear sad reprisals of 90s “grlllpower” echoing behind me as I made it to the door.

Vancouver’s Environmental Mixed Message

I am just back from British Columbia’s largest city, and I had a great time. Improbably, we had no rain at all.

During my first morning at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, I was in a long queue in front of two women who had themselves a real dilemma: one of them was holding a disposable coffee cup, and she was fretting to the other that there was no recycling container near enough so that she could discard her cup and still hold her place in line. They searched high and low before the second woman gave the first a special dispensation to throw her cup in the garbage can.

The inability of many people to reconcile their environmental impulses with their need for convenience is a problem for people who describe themselves as “green.” This often leads to mixed messages, and the city of Vancouver sends quite a few. With a light rail service and a robust series of bus routes, you would be surprised perhaps to discover that downtown automobile traffic there rivals only Toronto amongst Canadian cities, in my experience. While gasoline prices are prohibitive in British Columbia, you could not argue that parking rates discourage people from bringing their cars into Vancouver’s core. Moreover, Granville Island, the city’s little gem, is overrun with cars. Little streets intended for pedestrian traffic are clogged with all manner of automobiles racing between crosswalks, seeking a rare parking spot.

The University of British Columbia is best reached by bus, and these behemoths of public transportation were, on the occasions I took them, at least, packed with people. Do people still use their cars because the buses and trains are full? Or does the city not put ample equipment on the streets because people choose to spend hours commuting in their automobiles? Most critically, if Vancouver, a city with critical density in design, cannot make this work, what hope is there for urban centers even more far flung?