Roger Ebert on going gently

The memoir which came out at the end of last year from Roger Ebert, the American film critic who was half of the classic Siskel-Ebert "Two thumbs up!" TV duo, and which I've just recently read, is full of humourous (but never simplistic) and intelligent (but always just discursive enough) stories about his life and, you know, about Life itself. I wouldn't have expected less; no one could not be fond of Roger Ebert, either back when he was "the fat one" of the famous duo, or now, when he pours his gift for communication into his blog, having lost his ability to speak after a series of operations for cancer of the thyroid, and then of the salivary glands.

If you're not interested in movies, or American life of the last half-century or so, or don't like memoirs, it might not be the book you want to pick up. But there are a number of passages which would speak to any human heart, and none more directly or wondrously than the one I am about to let you read.

It comes in a chapter at the end of the book called "Going gently". Ebert is sixty-nine and has had cancer; as he says, he doesn't expect to die anytime soon, but knowing that he could, and in fact is more likely to than most of the readers of his book, has led him to the contemplation of death, "the distinguished thing", as he quotes Henry James calling it on his deathbed.

What follows is one of the most affecting takes on death, and early death in particular, I've ever encountered. I've read it several times now, including once out loud to someone close to me who was recently brought by illness to a contemplation of death, as Ebert was, and the mix of feelings is as electrifying every time.

Ebert writes:

***

... I correspond with a dear friend, the wise and gentle Australian director Paul Cox. Our subject sometimes turns to death. in 2010 he came very close to dying before receiving a liver transplant. In 1988 he made a documentary named "Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh". Paul wrote me that in his Arles days, van Gogh called himself "a simple worshiper of the external Buddha." Paul told me that in those days, Vincent wrote:

     Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.     To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.

That is a lovely thing to read, and a relief to find I will probably take the celestial locomotive. Or, as his little dog, Milou, says whenever Tintin proposes a journey, "Not by foot, I hope!"

***
Life itself: a memoir by Roger Ebert

Christmas nonsense

Not "Christmas, nonsense!" in the Scroogian sense of "Bah, humbug!" ie "If I could work my will, nephew, every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart", but pure, simple, funny Christmas nonsense. Along with the family Christmas, the consumer Christmas, the religious Christmas, I'd like to take a moment to celebrate the funny Christmas. If you'd like to join in, the first thing to do is to sing these lines to the tune of "Good King Wenceslas":

Good King Sauerkraut look out
On your feets uneven...

This is just one of a series of splendidly mangled Christmas carols which appeared in the classic (we're talking back in the Kennedy era, the Cold War era, the Race to the Moon era) American comic strip Pogo, written by a genius named Walt Kelly. Pogo is a chipper little possum who lives in the Okefenokee Swamp in America's Deep South, along with his best friend Albert the Alligator (big and a bit stupid, in that classic best friends tradition where one has the brains and one has the brawn) and a slew of other swamp creatures incarnating various human personality types, such as the morose and prickly Porky Pine and Mam'zelle Hepzibah, a sexy French skunk.

In the house where I grew up there were three paperback Pogo collections on a low shelf in the dining room and we kids found them and read them, over and over, without knowing or caring that the animals were actually satires on various political figures of the era, but just because they were so funny. I remember my mother explaining about a bobcat with thick eyebrows who represented Joe McCarthy, the man who led the witchhunt against communists in Hollywood, the Army etc (you know, all those likely places), and how we just didn't really care.

I still don't really care about the political jibes, but I have enjoyed over the years catching on to various clever literary allusions with which Pogo was also sprinkled, my favourite being the mud turtle named Churchill La Femme, nicknamed "Churchy".

It turns out Roger Ebert, the American film critic famous for the entertaining "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" reviews he used to do on TV with Gene Siskel, vestiges of which can still be spotted on DVD cases as "Two thumbs up! -- Siskel and Ebert", and for his clear and intelligent writing style which made him the only film reviewer to have won a Pulitzer Prize, and then more recently for his clear and intelligent writing about life after thyroid cancer, which left him unable to speak or eat, and now for a memoir called Life itself, is a Pogo fan as well, and he has posted Walt Kelly's Moon Race version of everyone's favourite Christmas poem, "Twas the night before Christmas" as I call it, but which is actually titled "A visit from St. Nicholas", on his blog. If you are a comics reader or writer who would like to sample a fine, aged comic, I recommend taking a look.

There is also an official Walt Kelly site and the vintage newspaper comics site ilovecomixarchive.com has got some good Pogo strips on it. Walt Kelly, I found out, also worked for Walt Disney for a time, and is responsible for animating Geppetto inside the whale in Pinocchio -- is this my favourite Walt Disney animated film, or is it Dumbo? -- hey, look at that, Walt Kelly worked on Dumbo too!

Supposedly a complete Collected Pogo is in the works. I will definitely be requesting a purchase for the library.
Addendum, a year later: it's here! From our friends at Fantagraphics: Pogo, the complete syndicated comic strips. Volume 1, through the wild blue yonder.

"...Due to run 12 volumes, this collection completes the holy trifecta, along with Charles Schulz' Peanuts and George Herriman's Krazy Kat, of comic strips whose influence cannot be overstated." -- Booklist

Merry Christmas to all from Books in the City. And to wrap up, may I offer a Pogo chorus of:

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!