Vampire Beavers.

(Towards rethinking Coyote, Trickster Fox, Raven, Nanabijou, Loki ...)

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Paul Gaugin, Where do we come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 1897: [The choice of this image is not accidental - it figures centrally in ‘The Social Conquest of Earth’ by Edward O. Wilson mentioned below. He calls it Gauguin's 'master work' and maybe it is.] ... is anyone out there seeing the least bit of light at the end of the tunnel??? I guess people are figguring out that I'm crazy - at least it's not a violent craziness. This would explain completely the total lack of response - the years of dropping pennies into this Internet well and hearing no splash. My son tells me I am an incontinent asshole but he says it without the smile that came along when the sweet girls used to call me 'safado'. Self-fulfilling prophecy this shunning business - bound to make you crazy. In the stories, some of Trickster's tricks are on the serious side - Loki does real damage - but he/she is nonetheless a necessary antidote (to, say, Wallace Stevens' 'primary noon, the ABC' & 'arrogant, fatal, dominant X'). I am not pretending to any such status, no identity going on here; I'm just supposing, wondering, if voices like Edmund Wilson's & Amory Lovins', in their very positive clarity are not part of that liminal energy (along with Joe Hall and the Continental Drift - and their tune 'Vampire Beavers', Peid Pumpkin, The Fugs ...) which in my mad fugue seems to be showing light in the darkness. Granted it's a long shot, a flash in the pan &c.. "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." (Archilochus, ~7 BC) Anyway ... two recommendations: 'The Social Conquest of Earth' by Edward O. Wilson, April 2012 from W. W. Norton & Company, and a review in the NYT (which pans it); and, Amory Lovins' outlook: Three Major Energy Trends to Watch (discovered at Climate Denial Crock of the Week).   Carlos worked out until he became a rhinoceros.Solange did gymnastics until she became a horse. Carlos and Solange married in 2004. Two years later they had their first unicorn.   Donkeys, dinosaurs ... whatever: Mentally computing doubling time from growth rate - a simple calculation: 70 divided by the growth rate in percent - can be accomplished, relatively easily by most. Then remembering related-rates problems and such from high-school algebra ... so, how to compute when renewables will reduce nuclear & fossil fuels to nil? Or even if the trends are headed that way? Nevermind the data are mostly questionable, cherry picked, whatever, it's not so easy. Evaluating Paul Bloom's criticisms of eusocial evolution (above), also ... difficult, problematic. And yet I find Edward Wilson trustworthy where I do not find Jared Diamond so. [Oops! Said this before I had finished reading the book. Wilson & Diamond 're a proper pair of flim-flam snake-oil promoters. And Amory Lovins conspires (to a degree) with Gwynne Dyer on the geo-engineering beat (Georgia Straight article). So, a flash in the pan it is, will o' the wisp, all fucked up. HOWEVER - there is an interesting comparison to be made between Edward Wilson and Pascal Bruckner which I will try to get around to soon.] Rainraven: In about 1996 or so, springtime, in the rain, I was sitting on a side-hill of the transmission line cut from Ocean Falls to Bella Bella wondering whether or not to build a kayak and disappear into the coastal edges of the Great Bear rainforest. I was uncertain. The ravens were out, making odd gurgling calls as they do sometimes in the rain, and I looked up to see one of them seem to tumble in the air, quite close, and speak to me, "Do it." I sat there till I was soaked, took the long hike back to Ocean Falls ... and did it, built the kayak at least, but I chickened out of disappearing. Oh well. I got distracted - the people in the town made me Fire Chief and then a while later, Mayor - and I forgot to paddle away. A few years after that they turned on me and I fled back into the cities.

 
Maybe you thought I would show the way to some simple formula for energizing Trickster? I wish I could, gentle reader. 

Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong. Hark! Now I hear them: Ding-dong, bell. (The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2)

 
Murray Gollin

Funeral services will be held tomorrow in Israel for Murray Gollin, 21-year-old Montreal broadcaster-writer who was killed Saturday in a highway accident near Tel Aviv.

The three-car collision at As Kelon also claimed the lives of four Israelis and injured nine others. Recent letters to friends and relatives in Montreal indicated Mr. Gollin was due to return home almost immediately from an eight-week writing tour of Israel.

His wife Andrea, originally of Boston, is expecting their first child in six months' time. His parents, Mr. and Mrs. H.K. Gollin, of 5422 Brodeur avenue, left yesterday for the funeral and burial services in Israel.

A public remembrance service will be held at 3 p.m. Saturday in the chapel of St. Patrick's Church, 460 Dorchester Boulevard west.

Mr. Gollin graduated from West Hill High School. While attending school he was associated with theatre drama and later did assignments for McGill University Radio.

He was one of two English-language program co-ordinators at the Youth Pavilion of Expo 67, and when the international Exhibition ended he went into freelance broadcasting and writing to a full-time degree.

Mr. Gollin was involved particularly with CBC Radio and prepared a number of documentaries concerning pop music and the so-called hippie community in Montreal for local and network broadcast.

He wrote several feature articles for the Entertainments supplement of The Montreal Star during the past year.

A week of mourning in Israel will follow the funeral and burial services tomorrow. His wife and parents are the sole immediate survivors.

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Remembering Murray recently (because Murray & Vincent & I were good friends and because Vincent died just before New Year's, a gravitational meditation as it were) ... considering the changes since then it was most surprising to reach out my hand tonight and immediately find the obituary I had saved more than forty years ago - tucked into the back page of a passport - the only surviving bits of paper from those days.

Andrea Haskins invited me to stand as godfather when the baby was born and I went down to White Plains NY for the christening.

She was a dancer, a beautiful and graceful woman, tiny. Those were the 60's and our lives were mostly chaos; that was the style, the type. We did not 'keep in touch'. I never saw her again. I cannot even remember if the baby was a boy or a girl - a girl I think. I must have known her name but it's gone. ... Marie?

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