Two Gut Punches

Two gut punches this week: the passing of two cultural icons, Dolly Parton and Tim Curry. Both died at the age of 80, and that's about all they had in common on paper.

Dolly was the daughter of a sharecropper, born in a small cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, the fourth child of twelve.

Tim was born in Grappenhall, Cheshire, UK, the second child of a naval chaplain and a school secretary. He was boarding-school educated.

I wasn't going to post about Dolly. I mean, everybody—literally everybody—is mourning her passing publicly. I didn't think I had much to add until the news of Tim Curry's passing came the same week.

What's the connection? The trans community loved them both.

And so did most everybody else. The phrase I've been hearing about Dolly this week is that she was beloved from NASCAR to drag queens.

Of course, Tim Curry rocketed to stardom in the mid-1970s playing the "Sweet Transvestite," Dr. Frank-N-Furter, in the cult-classic film The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

When I was growing up, Dolly confounded me. The big dumb blonde hair, the big curves, the enormous chest, and the outlandish costumes, which always accentuated her chest. And that was contrasted by a sweet singing voice and an "aw shucks" innocence. She was sort of country music's version of Marilyn Monroe (or Jayne Mansfield), but with a glam-rock taste for fashion, minus the drugs and pretension. I didn't know what to make of it.

She always seemed like a bit of a joke during an era when pretty much every performer took themselves way too seriously. She was the butt of untold numbers of comedy routines. But here's the thing that made her different: she seemed to be in on the joke. She didn't seem to take herself seriously at all.

And yet she was very serious about her craft, her career and her business acumen. Look up Dollywood—one of the most profitable and high-yielding regional theme park resorts in the United States—if you want to get a sense of what I mean. It turned out the joke was actually on us.

She successfully made the transition from country star to the mainstream with her appearance in the comedy film 9 to 5, for which she also wrote and sang the smash-hit theme song. Now everyone was taking Dolly seriously.

Dolly was always a tireless worker. She cemented her status as a cultural icon with her philanthropic work. She's donated and raised hundreds of millions of dollars for various causes, from literacy programs to disaster relief to medical research.

And what everyone saw in Dolly—beyond the crazy appearance, the makeup, the glitter and rhinestones, the plastic surgery—was a huge heart. Dolly clearly loved people. All people. Republican and Democrat. Urban and rural. Gay, trans and straight. She made no distinctions. That was no performance. And they all knew it and loved her back.

Admittedly, Dolly was not my cup of tea growing up. But The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a cultural touchstone in my upbringing. I might argue that Dolly's appeal across gender, socioeconomic and cultural boundaries was made possible, at least in part, by Tim Curry playing a bustier-wearing, sex-obsessed alien.

Rocky Horror is a lot of things. It's a spoof of the science-fiction and schlocky B horror movies of the 1950s, the gothic novels of the 19th century, and it also draws on Broadway musicals, rock-and-roll youth culture, and even the theatrical revues of the Ziegfeld Follies and the so-called aqua-musicals of Esther Williams.

And people from all walks of life responded to it. So much so that they came back over and over again, and didn't just want to sit in the movie theatre passively watching. They wanted to be it. They learned all the lines and lyrics, dressed up as the characters, brought props, and interacted with what was happening onscreen.

They took literally the title of the final musical number: "Don't Dream It, Be It."

Rocky Horror is a wonderful cultural hodge-podge of outlandishness and joy. But at its core, the message is one of love and acceptance.

Exactly like Dolly.

The Sea Glass Collectors

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Sea Glass 

The sea glass collectors of Inverness,

Pace the sandy shoreline of Cape Breton,

Like musing philosophers hoping to express,

A sentiment in words they chance upon.

Their aim is to glean some shining moment,

From the detritus coughed up by the Atlantic tide,

The mounds of smooth pebbles and seashell fragments,

Washed-up seaweed and kelp, slimy or dry.

To find a sun-caught shard, clear or creamy white,

Lantern green, cola brown, or rare azure blue,

They scrutinize the beach with granular sight,

And bend as if gathering drops of crystallized dew.

They are women absorbed in walking meditation—

A practice known to Buddhists for centuries;

Measured breath, measured step and contemplation,

Unacknowledged members of an ancient sorority.

They walk to leave behind, for a time, chores,

Their men, children, the world; and return to themselves,

The treasure they comb from the ocean shore,

Lies beyond jars of colour displayed on kitchen shelves.

Sea glass is as much imagined as it is real,

A product of the spirit and nature’s artful way,

To beautify used bottles from the town’s old landfill,

Polished and palmed like beads for praying.

An Online Reputational Lynching

As we increasingly substitute virtual lives for real lives, we have to reassess and reevaluate how we are being changed—not just our sense of what is real and what isn’t, but also the way it exploits the dark recesses of our hearts.

As we know by now, online activity tends to bring out the worst in us. Algorithms are designed to encourage outrageous behaviour and pander to all our biases and prejudices. We can respond unthinkingly to our worst impulses, with minimal consequences.

And sometimes we find out how others pay the price for that.

I think that’s something we can learn from the tragic death of Jason Arday.

If you don’t know who he is by now, I’d be surprised. I didn’t until two days ago. Now it seems everyone wants to have a go at him, at Cambridge University, at diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and to promote their own political agenda and demonstrate their own moral superiority.

What I see is a tragic story of an online reputational lynching, in which the media and a million random commentators are only too willing to join in. Villagers with torches and pitchforks, banging on Dr. Frankenstein’s door.

If you don’t know the story, Jason Arday was a professor at Cambridge University, the youngest ever appointed in the prestigious university’s history. He was also Black. He was also severely neurodivergent and apparently didn’t speak until he was 11 years old and didn’t read or write until he was 18. His story is pretty incredible.

And it has come to light that quite a bit of it was untrue, or at least exaggerated. Not the neurodivergent stuff. But, starting a couple of years ago, the work that earned him his academic position and reputation came under scrutiny for plagiarism.

I don’t want to get into the details. You can look it up for yourself, because there’s plenty about it online. What there isn’t plenty of is compassion.

The accusations and online kerfuffle resulted in Arday resigning his Cambridge position and, a week later, apparently taking his own life.

First I felt deeply sad. Then I took some time to process the sadness. It is not the time to react, especially not to prove a point.

Upon some reflection, I came to realize that I couldn’t care less that Cambridge hired him, for whatever reason. That’s their business. If they screwed up, that’s their problem to deal with. If they fail, too bad for them. They will lose out. Let’s not exaggerate the ramifications for the rest of us.

Let’s presume Cambridge hired him because they wanted to virtue signal. They wanted to make him the poster boy for their enlightened policies.

How is the irony lost on people that the online piling-on is motivated by precisely the same virtue signalling they are accusing Cambridge of engaging in? Diminish Arday and Cambridge to elevate themselves.

I don’t want to say anything more about Arday at this juncture. Probably not ever, actually. I can imagine how devastated his wife and loved ones are and how brutalized they must feel by all the exploitation of their tragedy and vitriol.

It feels appropriate simply to say that this is a moment for reflection on how social media has scrambled our collective moral compass. 

I Went Looking For An Audience

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I went looking for an audience for my poems,

Found one nearby at the old folks home.

The bars bustled with games on large screens, and the cafés 

Were packed with patrons glued to laptops sipping lattés.

But at the old folks home they appreciate true entertainment,

Especially the kind that doesn't ask for payment.

They put me on the events calendar, top of the bill,

Reserved me a mic, a pitcher of water, and a room to fill.

I appeared the day after a guitarist who sang Yiddish tunes,

Slotted-in before bingo, and a man who made animal balloons.

And on the appointed day, at the appointed hour,

My audience shuffled in, mostly under their own power.

Some were wheeled in chairs, a few still in their beds,

Most with sleepy eyes and others with foggy heads.

They parked their metal walkers next to Filipina attendants,

It was as quiet as a courtroom and I was the Defendant.

I'd guess they ranged in age from eighty to one-o-five,

They all seemed more or less happy to still be alive -

Alive they were, they’d seen the Great Depression,

And had made to life's demands every possible concession.

Some I could tell had even known Auschwitz One and Two,

The evidence marked indelibly on a forearm tattoo. 

This was my audience, experts of the most tragic kind,

Forgetful and forgotten, mostly deaf and semi-blind.

Now fixed to this place, they waited obediently,

For a pisher like me to recite his precious poetry.

And there I stood before them offering my paltry rhymes, 

Lacking in perspective but possessing abundant time.

What came over me was an indescribable shame,

As if my mere presence had insulted the Holy Name.

Still, I read, as they sat there, cold as rows of stone, 

Utterly unmoved, and utterly alone. 

When done, I gathered my scraps and thanked them profusely,  

Knowing that not one of them would have changed their place with me.

Have The Philistines Won

I've been on a bit of an Irving Layton kick lately—reading his poetry, watching films and interviews. Whenever that happens, a mood and a hankering overtake me, and I find myself reflecting on it. Why Layton, and why now?

He died on January 4, 2006 at the age of 93. The last years of his life were spent at the Maimonides Geriatric Center in the Montreal suburb of Côte Saint-Luc, where the pugnacious, sharp-witted, rapier-tongued, self-described genius slowly succumbed to Alzheimer's disease.

Layton was undeniably a genius. He was also, in my opinion, the greatest poet Canada has ever produced. 

It took a while. He only published his first important poem, The Swimmer, in 1945 when he was 33 years old. After that he was off to the races.

During the postwar period, Layton dragged Canadian poetry kicking and screaming into the 20th century. His greatest poems belong in anthologies of the English language's most important poetry, alongside Yeats, Wordsworth, Eliot, Frost and e.e. cummings.

He said he had two missions with his life's work as a poet and educator: to fight Puritanism and to fight Philistinism.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s largely took care of Puritanism. It seems to be making something of a comeback in the United States these days, with the conservative push to reinstate patriarchy, restrict abortion and return women to traditional roles. My guess is that it won't last. That horse has left the barn and isn't coming back.

Philistinism, on the other hand, is positively flourishing, aided by new technologies that are designed to make us less knowledgeable and less curious about the world. We appear to be outsourcing wisdom and experience.

I suspect Layton knew he was already riding an anti-Puritan wave in the 1960s as his popularity grew nationally and internationally. He was also a savvy and charismatic self-promoter who understood how to use the media to amplify his persona.

I also suspect Layton knew he was fighting an uphill battle against Philistinism. In Donald Winkler's wonderful 2003 film, A Red Carpet For The Sun, poet and teacher Seymour Mayne—who is also my friend and co-editor—recalls having Layton as his high-school teacher in the mid-'50s. On the first day of class, Layton wrote a series of enormous numbers across the blackboard: 99.999999. He asked the class if they knew what it meant. He then explained that it was the percentage of people who were ignorant Philistines. He was determined that his students would not be part of that number.

By the mid-1980s, Layton already saw the writing on the wall, even though he could never have imagined the impact technology would eventually have on the debasement of culture. He understood that poetry was on its way out.

In a TVO interview to promote a volume of published letters, Layton said: "I believe that poetry no longer has a future. There will be poems written, but there will be no poets... Because the language has been debased, commercialized and so on. And the whole sensibility that once produced these outrageous and wonderful mad men has gone smash. It's dead."

By "there will be no poets," Layton meant in the sense of figures possessing stature and cultural authority. He was really talking about the audience for poetry—the culture that once made such figures possible.

Layton was always concerned with cultivating his public persona, in the mold of the Jewish biblical prophets. Audiences were hungry for his fresh, iconoclastic, irreverent opinions. That hunger reached its peak in the early 1960s. A decade later, it was waning.

When I first went to hear Layton give a reading at McGill University Hillel in the mid-'80s, he could still draw a crowd. Layton's presence was an event, and the affection and esteem of young, interested audiences were still there. His poems were on the syllabus of virtually every Canadian literature survey course at major universities across the country.

But the culture was moving on, and Layton was no longer the mainstream figure he had once been.

In 2026, what Layton said 40 years earlier about poems continuing to be written while language was being debased and commercialized sounds prophetic to my ears. There is no doubt that more poems are being written now than ever before. And 99.999999 percent of it is self-centered, whiny dreck.

When you read Layton's poetry, you are struck not only by the precision of his craft but by the universality of his concerns: the dignity and magnificence of the human being; the daily injustices and inhumanities of politics; the beauty and truth of art; the physical ecstasy of experience; the necessity of freedom to exalt the human spirit.

Philistines, who are concerned with life's banalities, appearances, wealth, social status and conformity, have no appreciation for any of it. 

Maybe that's why Layton is hardly mentioned anymore, except of course, in university classrooms. And even then with some trepidation. The 5-times married Layton was also known as a womanizer, which these days makes him a target for cancel culture. 

Have the Philistines won?

Notably Layton himself didn't think so. He thought the poets would be replaced, by filmmakers or another type of artist. 

But then Layton didn't know about social media and AI.

Compliments

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I trusted only my mother

to offer them:

Not the screen-shot

responses ordained

by my preferences

to make me feel good

about what I think

and feel.

I hate feeling suspicious

about feeling good,

hate wanting

to feel bad,

but these days

it’s the only answer.

Housefly

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Insignificance buzzes 

Like housefly wings;

Beating its body

Against the tempered pane

As if another world beckons.