26776. (Crown Lands) Fearless
26777. (Leon Bridges) Coming Home
26778. (Sam Evian) You, Forever
26779. (Lana Del Rey) NFR! Norman Fucking Rockwell
26780. (Lillian Nawrot) Premier Concert de Lillian Nawrot au 112 de Terville, 2024
First-time listening for SEPTEMBER 2024
READING — SEPTEMBER 2024
25406. (Kewin Pèche-Quilichini & Joseph Cesari) L’Habitat fortifié de l’âge du Bronze en
. . . . . Corse: formes, rythmes, fonctions [article]r
25408. (Carlo M. Cippola) The Basic Laws of Human
25409. (Jack Dunnington, Carol Ember & Erik Ringen) Altered States of Consciousness ― Two-
. . . . . Culture Comparison [article]
25410. (Daniel F. Lieberman) The Story of the Human Body ― Evolution, Health, and Disease
25411. (Amy Langstaff) A Twenty-Year Survey of Canadian Attitudes towards Homosexuality
. . . . . and Human Rights [article]
Read more »
FILMS — AUGUST 2024
(Pratt 1973) Dr. Seuss on the Loose
(Nishitani 2022) The Orbital Children [地球外少年少女]: Ep.1 ― Extraterrestrial Emissaries
(Hitchcock 1940) Foreign Correspondent
(Nishitani 2022) The Orbital Children [地球外少年少女]: Ep.2 ― Mist and Darkness
(Kaufman 1978) Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(Brooks 1967) The Producers
(Aldrich 1962) Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
(Wilder 1944) Double Indemnity
(Jones 1989) Erik the Viking
(Mulligan 1962) To Kill a Mockingbird
First-time listening for AUGUST 2024
26770. (Saint Vitus) Lillie: F‑65
26771. (Tim Presley) White Fence Is Growing Faith
26772. (Noahfinnce) Growing Up On the Internet
26773. (Hot Snakes) Jericho Sirens
26774. (Birthright) Let Me Down Easy
26775. (Crown Lands) Fearless
READING — AUGUST 2024
25384. (Bradley W. Hart) Hitler’s American Friends ― The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States
(Walter M. Miller, Jr.) The Best of Walter M. Miller, Jr.:
. . . . 25385. (Walter M. Miller, Jr.) You Triflin’ Skunk!
. . . . 25386. (Walter M. Miller, Jr.) The Will
. . . . 25387. (Walter M. Miller, Jr.) Anybody Else Like Me?
. . . . 25388. (Walter M. Miller, Jr.) Crucifixus Etiam
. . . . 25389. (Walter M. Miller, Jr.) I, Dreamer Read more »
Aug 1, 2024 — The Cat with Six Legs
It was 2 AM. I was too troubled to sleep. It had been a disheartening day.
The phone rang. I picked it up.
Before I could even say “hello,” a voice made a slow, menacing chant:
“Meeeeeeowwww. Meeeeeeeowwww. Meeeeoooowwwww.”
My blood ran cold.
I have no intention of manufacturing melodrama. What I intend to recount will not be exaggerated, nor will it be unduly minimized. I will, of course, describe how I felt about the events. I will leave the reader to judge events by their own lights.
Regular readers and correspondents will have noticed that I have published nothing in more than seven months, and that even my meticulously kept reading, listening and viewing logs have been either late or entirely absent. I will be the first to admit that the last few years have been a rough time for me, that my energy has been depleted, my spirit strained, and my perennial optimism challenged. But, fear not. The Rook and Bishop still protect the King.
It began with a cancer diagnosis, which of course was frightening. But I soon found myself in competent hands. The cancer was a common one, it had been caught early enough, and the necessary daily radiation treatment and medication were applied promptly. I did not find this any strain on my fundamentally positive attitude. As it stands today, my oncologist considers the cancer effectively defeated. Unfortunately, I developed another ailment either triggered by, or at least coincident with the radiation treatment. It has two very distinct characteristics, namely, that it is no threat to my life, but it is extremely painful. And so, for the last two years, my life has been dominated by pain, and my mobility has been severely limited. There is no need to go into medical details. Suffice it to say that much of my time has been dominated by physical pain, ranging from being irritating to being agonizing ― and sometimes the sort of sensation you would get if you put your hand on a hot stove element. It’s coming and going is unpredictable, but it is rarely absent. Pain has become so normal to me, that I actually have trouble remembering what it was like to live without it.
I am someone who has built his life around walking. Most of my greatest times of pleasure have been hikes in wild country, exploring places on foot, scrambling over ancient archaeological sites or just amiably strolling in pleasant landscapes. Yet for the last two years, I’ve been more or less trapped in my apartment and denied such pleasures. Sometimes I’ve been able to walk around normally for a few hours, but more often just ten or fifteen minutes of walking has triggered extreme pain, and I have been forced to sit still in a fixed pose until it dies down enough for my brain to function normally. Walking, when it’s been possible, has been loaded with new dangers. My sense of balance has been affected, and I have had six sudden and painful falls, where sensation suddenly vanished from my legs and I was thrown onto concrete pavement instantaneously. On two occasions, this resulted in some bleeding cuts and alarming bruises, and on one occasion it resulted in a shattered right elbow, requiring immediate surgery. The surgery was, as I expected, top notch, and I currently have about 90% use of my right arm. One humorous sidebar: When I was being driven by ambulance to the emergency room, the paramedics asked me why I appeared so cheerful and wasn’t weeping or screaming. In truth, I had become so used to extreme pain that a shattered elbow didn’t feel particularly alarming. I had suffered more intensely the previous evening just sitting at home. The ambulance journey was more or less a lark, and I enjoyed their company. Paramedics are my kind of people.
Now, the last two years have not been uniformly miserable. Much of the time, the pain has been tolerable, and occasionally entirely absent. On the very street where my elbow would later be pulverized, I was sipping coffee and reading Gogol in one of my favourite cafes. There, I received a phone call informing me that I had won the Dalton Camp Award. This is a quite prestigious national award for journalistic belles-lettres. It was accompanied by a sculpted medallion by a globally renowned artist, as well as some media interviews. Congratulatory letters arrived from a nationally celebrated columnist, some historians, and a federal government minister. My writing is normally confined to a small, specialized community of scholars, and such recognition was previously unknown to me. It was very gratifying. Moreover, my life has exposed me to enough of the suffering of others to put my own into perspective. While the last two years have been challenging, I’ve known many people who have endured much worse. I’ve witnessed, during my various adventures, suffering inflicted on innocent people that would reduce any of my complaints to triviality. It’s those very experiences that impose upon me the responsibility of rejecting depression and self-pity. But, these circumstances, especially when I’ve spent most of my life in good health, did require some buttressing of morale.
Such buttressing was plentiful. I have a small, but superb coterie of friends. They have all been splendid. I have not lacked for help when needed. But considerable emotional support came from an additional quarter: my two cats, Thompson and Mackenzie. If the disgusting little creep known as J. D. Vance showed up in my presence, you can only imagine the tongue lashing I would subject him to, let alone his party colleague who boasted of executing her puppy in a gravel pit. It is Mackenzie, the ginger cat, who plays the lead role in the drama I am here recounting.
Mackenzie was always the less adventurous of the two cats, who are from the same litter. A bit chubbier, more timid, but warmly affectionate and equipped with a lawn mower purr. I learned in the beginning that he disliked being touched in the belly, so I avoided doing that. There was a reason for that, which I did not yet understand. Thompson, by contrast, could soak up an infinite amount of petting, rough-housing and belly tickles. Both cats were good company as I sat forlornly trying to wish away lightning-like jolts of pain, or struggled to fall asleep. Last summer, tragedy struck Mackenzie. He went totally blind, began to have difficulty walking, and lost weight and bulk. At first, he responded to this sudden calamity with panic and terror, lashing out with his paw at anything that approached him and creeping around after sounds to fight the demons he imagined to be tormenting him. He was suffering from a rare affliction called polymelia, which apparently occurs to one cat in a million, and can also occur in humans in rare instances. Mackenzie had six legs. At first the extra pair of legs were tiny and buried invisibly in his belly fur, but by the time he became blind they had begun to grow, and one of them grew big enough to sport sharp claws. The blindness, the difficulty walking, the shattering effect on his mind, and the dramatic loss of weight were all part of an attack on the structure of his body, as these unwanted limbs grew out of him. There was nothing that could be done for him directly, other than to hope that his condition would stabilize and that he would be able to adjust psychologically to his condition. He and Thompson were close pals, rarely separate. But in his fear and fury, Mackenzie attacked Thompson, and their brotherly bond was broken.
My nurturing instincts kicked in. Though I had to suffer some nasty scratches, I lavished affection on Mackenzie. As time passed, he calmed down. Eventually, he responded positively to my ministrations. The fear and anger abated, and he became extremely affectionate, snuggling up to me to sleep, and following me around. Slowly, the two cats regained trust in each other. But Mackenzie had clearly suffered brain damage. He was often confused, and sometimes would walk for minutes in tight circles. He would obsessively try to push himself into tight corners. He no longer purred. He was a half of his former self.
This happened during the worst of my own struggles with pain, when it was more intense and more devastating to me than it is now. Under such circumstances, the therapeutic effect of caring for another creature, allowing me to step outside myself, was crucial to my own ability to accept ongoing pain. I think I would have been much more cowardly, and much more miserable and self-pitying if it weren’t for the example of this brave little blind cat struggling with an incomprehensible assault on his body and mind.
Once Mackenzie had overcome the worst of his challenges, he became able to join Thompson in what had previously been their principle source of fun. They both loved to hang out in the corridor, just outside my apartment door. I live in a hundred-year-old apartment building. I know all the tenants on my floor, and all of them are familiar with both cats. Most of these neighbours not only tolerated the two cats, but enjoyed feeding them treats and petting them. The four dogs on the floor were all friends with them, even including the big clumsy dog belonging to the artist next door. As Mackenzie gained some weight and lost his terror, he found something of his old self by sitting by my door, and was fine with being petted by anyone. He would not, however, venture far from the door.
Such was the situation on the evening of June 29. Toronto Pride was in full swing, and I live on the edge of Toronto’s Gay Village. I was swamped with work, however, since I could only do serious work when I was within brief windows of minimal pain. I let Thompson and Mackenzie hang out in the corridor while I attended to some correspondence with an archaeologist in Europe. Usually, I would check on them every few minutes, but in this case, I remained at the computer for more time than usual. There was no conceivable danger to either cat, both being well known to every tenant on the floor, and protected from the world beyond the building by three consecutive heavy spring-driven doors and a staircase. So when I did check up on them, and I saw only Thompson in the corridor, I assumed that Mackenzie had come back into the apartment and settled down in one of his many hiding spots. I had not had a chance to see the huge Pride festivities on Church Street yet, and I was not in pain, so I figured I could venture out to enjoy the fun, and if the pain started up, I would only have two blocks to walk home. Dealing with such calculations had become routine. So I called Thompson in, locked the apartment door behind me, and ventured out for a stroll. I was gone an hour before the pain started to build, as it usually does, and slinked home with the plan of taking a marijuana gummy and minimizing movement. When I got home, Thompson was right at the door, behaving oddly. He greeted me with a strange sounding meow even before I could open the door, and when I did, he dashed out, looking anxious and perplexed. I looked around for Mackenzie. Sometimes he would hide in very obscure places, regularly finding new ones to challenge me. But as I searched more and more thoroughly, it became obvious that something was very wrong.
That evening, I more or less disassembled the apartment. I searched every corner of the three story building, and outside it. Mackenzie was nowhere to be found. Eventually, I had to conclude that the impossible had happened: he had somehow gotten outside. That this could have happened accidentally was inconceivable. He could not have gotten through even the first door, no matter how distracted some passing tenant might have been. Mackenzie could only move at a slow pace, was totally blind, and he was physically weak. That he could get unseen through three doors, including the locked outer door, was patently impossible. It would have been physically impossible for him to go down a staircase. There was no way of escaping the conclusion that somebody had purposely snatched him, gone through all three doors and chucked him outside on the street! If someone had attempted to do that with Thompson, there would have been a ruckus, and Thompson would have made mincemeat of any stranger trying to grab him. But little, harmless, blind Mackenzie would have been easy to grab and would have been incapable of struggling.
By the next morning, I was plastering the neighbourhood with posters. They described Mackenzie, explaining his blindness and fragility, and gave my phone number for anyone to call. I made enquiries everywhere I could think of. Every pet food store and veterinary office was alerted. The animal shelters were closed for the holiday weekend, but I kept an eye on every new entry on their website until they were scheduled to reopen their phone lines.
Eventually, information came. The street in front of my building had been busy with party-goers heading to and from the festivities in the village. Mackenzie had been seen, apparently injured, and collected by strangers. He somehow wound up in an animal shelter in faraway Etobicoke. When their phone line finally opened, I was given the news I dreaded. I was not told the extent of Mackenzie’s injuries, so I’m not sure how much that played a role in his fate. What I did quickly learn was that the shelter had misinterpreted his scrawniness and blindness for extreme dehydration. In truth, he was well fed and content when he was snatched away. They assumed from his appearance that he had been abandoned for a great deal of time. They decided to put him to sleep. This was done shortly before I was able to call them.
As you can imagine, Mackenzie’s cruel death was disturbing to me. But it was not nearly as disturbing as what happened at 2 AM, the following night.
The phone rang. I picked it up.
A voice made a slow, menacing chant:
“Meeeeeeowwww. Meeeeeeeowwww. Meeeeoooowwwww.”
Mackenzie’s murderer was calling me to gloat. I knew instinctively that I must not react. Whoever this psychopath was, he would clearly want me to react. I knew better. I know a thing or two about psychopaths. I would not give him the pleasure. The meeowing continued for a bit, stopped, and the phone went dead. So far, the number I was called with defies tracing.
I’ve lived in my building for a couple of decades. I’m a familiar figure, and the two cats were familiar figures. I know everyone on the floor, and remain on good terms with everybody. The only personal conflict I had experienced in the building was three years before, with a man who had briefly been the building manager. Shortly after being hired, this man had started aggressively berating tenants, and even threatening several of them. I was one of the tenants that he crudely threatened. He was pretty obviously unstable. Shortly after threatening me (“If you cross me, you’ll see what happens to you!”) he was fired by the management. When I mentioned what had happened to the new building manager, he asked me to provide a written statement about being threatened. I presume the owners wanted documentation so that the thug could not contest his firing. This incident didn’t even come to my mind until more than a week after Mackenzie’s death. After all, it had taken place years before, and I didn’t even remember the man’s name, nor would I even recognize him by sight. My interaction with him had been brief. Yet, he is the only suspect that I can think of. He could easily have kept building keys, and anyone familiar with the buildings could easily enough get in without them. However, he is long gone. This presumes holding a grudge for years, and acting on an opportunity to grab Mackenzie. The hypothetical case against him is not strong. The only positive side of this theory is that it would eliminate the possibility that there is an unknown psychopath in the building now who has something against me.
My particular historical studies have made me familiar with all sorts of manifestations of human evil. I know far more about wars, purges, riots, lynchings, pogroms, slavery, secret police, concentration camps, genocides and general nastiness than most people would be able to absorb without great distress. It’s the subject matter of my academic inquiries and my expertise. But it has been many years since I’ve witnessed anything along these lines as personal experience. For many years, my existence has been overwhelmingly peaceful and without fear or danger — the base state of the comfortable Canadian. Even the nastiest of our politicians don’t shoot puppies in gravel pits, or urge lunatic followers to storm the Parliament Buildings. Our lunatics, when we have them, are usually not equipped with AR-15s. I live in what is considered the “inner city” of the country’s biggest metropolis, surrounded by night clubs, bars, and marijuana shops, in a multicultural hive of immigrants, in the cheapest old building in the country’s most crowded district. Yet I live in one of the safest places in the world, and while I occasionally run across someone sketchy, I normally expect every passing stranger to be sensible and kind. But I know that this is an exceptional place and an exceptional time.
Perhaps it’s of value to me to confront again the visceral reality of evil. It’s been a long time for me, only memories of younger and more foolish, risk-taking days. Now I was again forced to experience it directly instead of in the books and documents I normally swim among. It was not hard for me to picture the helpless terror that Mackenzie experienced in his last hours. Mackenzie was not anyone’s idea of a cute and appealing pet. He was lots of work to care for. He was capable of little that would entertain me, like his happy and rambunctious brother. He was at best only half of what he had been before, diminished in mind and body. He clung to me for comfort. In his vulnerability, he gave me strength, and despite his fear and confusion, he had courage that put me to shame. I owe him. He was the most innocent, blameless little creature conceivable. He was full of love. And, objectively, he was worth a million times more than the sadistic cretin who murdered him. I will waste no sympathy on that sort. Nor will I be despondent.
Because. Because.
Because the cretins win if you let them crush your happiness. You may sometimes find me in pain, but as long as I can muster the strength of little Mackenzie, I will resolutely refuse to be unhappy.
FILMS — JULY 2024
(Pelissier 1949) The History of Mr. Polly
(Ishihira 2022) Sasaki and Miyano [佐々木と宮野] Ep.7 ― Chocolate
(Koster 1951) No Highway in the Sky
(Young 1967) Wait Until Dark
(Allen 1975) Love and Death
(Zinnemann 1952) High Noon
(Gordon 1959) Pillow Talk
(Cox 2021) Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas
(Hall 1962) Eegah
(Cooper 2020) The Bronze Age Collapse: Mediterranean Apocalypse
First-time listening for JULY 2024
26762. (New Young Pony Club) Fantastic Playroom
26763. (Tallies) Tallies
26764. (Bad Bunny) Un Verano Sin Ti
26765. (Philip Glass) Violin Concerto
26766. (Ned Rorem) Violin Concerto
26767. (Bombino) Agadez
26768, (Lost Under Heaven) Love Hates What You Become
26769. (Ronnie Scott) At the Royal Festival Hall with the Ronnie Scott Orchestra and Tony Crombie