Photo: Ossington Alley #1

Photo: Euclid Alley #2

Language and Meaning

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

I was reading the New York Times Sunday Magazine last weekend and caught this article, written by Michael Pollan, about the rise of agricultural diseases. In it, he begins with bemoaning the decreasing power of the word "sustainability", seeing as it has been turned impotent; yet another zombiefied corporate catch-phrase designed to make what one does appear useful even when in practise the reality is much more ambiguous.

There is a biting summary of this phenomena in the second paragraph of Pollan's article:

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

I sat at the breakfast table, thinking about this paragraph. It stunned me, because my awareness of the philosophical questioning of language - its power to distort and clarify - didn't extend as far as back in time as Confucius. To read it made me understand that this conflict - the fight to keep language from becoming a meaningless putty in the hands of technocrats - has been going on probably since the dawn of communication. It wasn't until reading, of all people, Confucius - that old aphorism-spewing chestnut - speak about it that my understanding of the conflict was deepened.

The two writers who outlined this conflict most beautifully for me were Wittgenstein, quoted at the top (from his treatise, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and John Ralston Saul, who rallied against the rise of technocrats most effectively in his books Voltaire's Bastards, and The Unconscious Civilization. Each fulfilled a means of illuminating the power of language in a way that was neither impractically academic nor precious. Saul warns about how the images and words we share can be/have been actively distorted by those with corrupting self-interest. Wittgenstein's very philosophy is about the parsing of truth and falsity (or senselessness, as he would put it) in how we use language to construct a world view.

With the discovery of Confucius' addition to this subject, I now have more to research and reflect upon. I suppose I'm fascinated with this subject, and for reasons I don't think are trivial. We are beset by corrupted means of communication every day: images that lie as well as they seduce, thoughts withheld from publication/broadcast because of vested interests. And yet, most importantly, I believe it's also language that can save us - the very tools used to fool us can be used to liberate.

I suppose one of the first questions I have is whether there are more than a handful of people out there who give a shit, or whether this is a pursuit (non-Quixotic, I insist) only a begrudging elite will ever have interest in following. Sometimes I'm haunted by the words of writer William Sturgeon, who - when asked if it was true that he thought 90% of science fiction was crap - answered that, actually, 90% of everything is crap. What haunts me is how this somewhat off-the-cuff pronouncement translates into the percentage of everyday people who truly care enough about things like this. It's important to me that people understand that the corruption of language (visual, textual, audible) is not simply an academic concern, and that it's possible to put up an effective, civil defense against it.

Update: For more on Confucius and the "rectification of names", please see this link for some context.

Book Review: The Odyssey, by Homer

"As soon as Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more [...]"

Homer's Odyssey is one of the 500lb (or 226.796kg) gorillas I've been reading as of late. I came to it strangely. You see, eventually I want to read James Joyce's Ulysses (a gorilla estimated to weigh a half-tonne). I knew that it was going to be a slog, so I did some research in preparation. Lo, it was suggested I read The Odyssey, as Ulysses tends to make reference to it. And thus, the Fates, if not Athena herself, recommended my next book.

The Odyssey isn't a novel, but rather a song/poem much in the same way as the ancient epic, Gilgamesh (and if you don't know what that is - and no, it's not a reference to the evil magician from the Smurfs - don't worry about it. I'm just trying to find another example that isn't also another Greek work from the same period). It was never originally written down, but rather carried from person to person in the same way you would hand someone a CD of a song you'd like them to hear. Preserved through history as an oratorical epic, Homer's Odyssey is an account of Odysseus, the Achaean king/hero, and his Job-like 10 year quest to return to his homeland, Ithica, having fought a decade before in the Battle of Troy (recounted in Homer's earlier work, The Illiad).

What's immediately engaging about the telling of The Odyssey is its surprisingly non-linear construction. We don't start with the fall of Troy and Odysseus' return to Ithica. Rather, we begin with the immortal goddess, Athena, seeking to undo the curse laid upon Odysseus from the earthquake god, Poseidon. From there, she confronts Odysseus' son, Telemachus, living with his mother, Penelope, in Odysseus' Ithican palace, now taken over with young suitors angling to wed Odysseus' abandoned wife, laying waste to his kingdom in the process (note: the Greek gods tended not to come down and appear to mortals as themselves, but rather as fellow mortals - presumably shy folk that they are).

It is only after this substantial preamble that we - in filmic terms - cut to Odysseus, stranded on the isle of the immortal goddess, Calypso, where she has kept him for years as her...well...is "recalcitrant love-slave" applicable? Yes? Okay then. It is only through Athena's indirect intervention that Odysseus is allowed to leave and finish his journey. Along the way, he is eventually allowed to provide the details of his painful journey since the fall of Troy: the land of the Cyclops, the Sirens, the Lotus Eaters, the thunder of Zeus, the House of Death, the nature of Poseidon's curse. If you have any inkling or interest in swashbuckling adventure, heroic tragedy, monsters, mythology, or men transformed into sheep, there is no reason not to follow Odysseus' tale.

Even preserved in verse-form (read: there's half as much text on the page as in a typical novel), The Odyssey moves at a fast clip - though its thickness may intimidate you at first glance on the shelf. It's a legendary tale that's not like cough syrup to read - in fact, you may just find inspiration in its construction, evocativeness, and imagination.

The Odyssey, by Homer (ISBN: 978-0140268867) is available at a fine independent bookseller near you, or at any number of online sources. Please note: this review is based on the award-winning 1996 translation by Robert Fagles, who also produced a version of Homer's Illiad. For those on the fence, there is a very readable summary of the book and its history here.

Requiems Not Required: Jazz and Classical

Just today, I was sitting in the kitchen of a post production audio house - my current temporary office - and found myself inexplicably tuning in to what was playing on the radio: Schubert's Symphony No.5. It's a dreadfully beautiful piece of music. I say dreadfully, because it's so evocative as to remove my mind from the mountain of very important things I have to tend to.

Thing is, I'm pretty sure I'm the only one in the building who could either name what was being played, or who would allow themself to be affected (nay swoon). But it's not like I set out one day in my youth, predetermined to "learn" classical music. I don't think anyone does, regardless of what it is we end up liking. Often we come across these things circumstantially. If it hadn't been for my watching A Death in Venice on TV one night long ago, I probably wouldn't have sought Schubert's symphony, nor the original story by Thomas Mann. I should also thank the old Warner Brothers cartoons, in particular the Bugs Bunny classic The Rabbit of Seville (riffing brilliantly and faithfully on Rossini's Barber of Seville).

Jazz came to me later, introduced by my flipping around the radio, looking for something other than Top-40 pap. And like everything I love, once I get hooked I find myself wanting to know more, filling in the holes illuminated by the light of my curiosity. I'm prone to infatuation and, not entirely unlike the tragic protagonist of Mann's Venice, find myself obsessed to learn as much as possible about these things.

The problem is that both Classical and Jazz, while not dead, are held in a stasis by so-called Classical and Jazz "lovers" who seek, paternalistically, to coddle them like glass-boned children, halting their growth (intentionally or not) and - as a dire result - their acceptance to new generations.

To some, this statement is nothing short of heresy. In Reflections of a Siamese Twin, John Ralston Saul - writing about the aggressive protectionism of French language in Quebec - made two valuable insights which also reflect on the state of Classical and Jazz music. First, that culture is not something which society should attempt to create, control, or destroy to meet our fashionable needs - it's a living organism which follows its own path. Second, that the only languages which need protection are dead languages. That is to say, he was criticising those who strove to legally protect and manipulate something which didn't require it in the first place.

The problem isn't that most of us don't tune-in to Classical or Jazz radio. The problem is that most everything programmed on these stations (with varying degrees, depending upon where you're located) is safe, old, and terribly predictable. Say what you will about the soulless depths of corporate-run, computer-programmed Top 40 radio, but one thing you can't deny is that they play songs written during this century (already nearly 8 years old). Jazz and Classical radio suffers from a predilection: only play the standards. Their philosophy: who cares if you play three different interpretations of Lullaby of Birdland seven times a day - it's a standard. Who cares if the daily playlist is the same tired variation of Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven - they're popular.

They're partially correct: Lullaby of Birdland is a standard, and those three dead white German guys are popular. For both genres, deservedly so. But, in a contemporary sense, it's only to the extent of pleasing people who have no desire to see either Classical or Jazz develop in different directions. When was the last time you heard anything from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew on the radio? That album was released almost 40 years ago - when was the last time you heard a single Classical composition written within this time?

We can't rely on movie soundtracks and cartoons to bring notice to the brilliance of older forms of music - if we do, they will always remain "older forms of music" rather than the living, breathing spirits which they are. We do both Classical and Jazz a disservice by sneering at contemporary innovation - I contend that it's the snobs who have done the most damage. We can't rely solely on the likes of Wynton Marsalis as appointed sentinels to tell us what is or what is not jazz music. We can't forsake contemporary composers, like Alexina Louie, to keep programming the same tiresome Mozart/Brahms/Beethoven lineup for our orchestras.

People should be freely exposed to different forms of music. Often. However, it should be neither prescriptive nor mandated. Assuming we are only as developed as the environment we are exposed to, it makes critical sense to see, hear, and experience as many things as possible. It is for this reason that protectionism makes no sense.

[author's note: when using the terms "Classical" and "Jazz", I'm using popular terminology. Technically, within both (admittedly very broad) genres, there are countless sub-categories (Baroque, Be-Bop, Fusion, Romantic...).]

All those whose mind entitles themselves,

And whose main entitle is themselves,
Shall feel the wrath of my bombast!

- Mark E. Smith

State of the Nation

It would seem that the world is going through some disruption lately. Both the microscopic world that is my creative life and the world-at-large.

The novel is coming along, but I found I'd written as much as I could. It couldn't get any further in its current draft without a "state of the nation" - the necessary point at which the writer must ask tough questions before proceeding. So, I decided to distill each chapter into cue card format, with the thought of posting them on a corkboard - the main idea was to be able to glaze over the thing and look at it objectively; this is something that's impossible to do when you're building the thing chapter by chapter. After completing the summary of the last-written chapter of the current draft, I realised that the draft was anaemic.

This was no surprise - or rather , it shouldn't have been a surprise. The whole purpose of summarizing the novel into cue card form was for the fact I couldn't see the forest for the trees anymore (pardon the cliché). You find yourself telling a story filled with characters and ideas, yet at times it ends up being a bunch of ideas posing as a story - at worst, neither...just a bunch of semi-articulated characters talking in order to necessarily further the plot so that the fucking thing can keep moving forward the way you thought it would.

In any case, justified or not, I was disappointed.

The next day, I took a long walk - the saving grace for the creative mind. I rolled the book's problems and inefficiencies around my head like rocks in a laundry dryer. I then found myself sitting in a familiar coffee shop and proceeded to spend a couple of hours writing down the resulting thoughts from my medicative stroll. In the end, it wasn't as bad as I'd thought. While not every individual issue got solved, I found myself with a solution or two which addressed my doubts. However, the long road seems longer - there's still a lot of work to be done before I can consider the current draft complete.

And the rest of the world, you ask? What of that macroverse you've avoided telling us about? Well, one bastard got kicked out of office. Another promises to step down. One did everything possible to halt any significant movement on climate change. Another continued to arrest anyone who questioned his hand-picked successor's path to election.

The moral of the story lies in the immortal words of Charles Bukowski: perseverance is greater than strength.

Photo: Cloud Gate Self-Portrait

Thanks for the credit(s)

I got an awesome birthday gift from an anonymous admirer: 1,000 BlogExplosion surf credits to Imaginary Magnitude. Thanks very much for the traffic!

On Awareness: A Diatribe

I was cruising around the blogdom (blogoshpere, blogoverse, what have you) and visited Bookninja - a great, topical place for writer/publisher/reader types. George, the site's author, in his posting about the controversy surrounding book pricing in Canada [controversy summary: our dollar surpassed parity with the USD$ in August, and yet our sticker prices are still in line with our dollar being worth $0.85] began as follows...

The parity/book pricing issue is still making headlines, which probably means nothing else is wrong with the world. Glad to hear we cleared up that Darfur/rainforest/child sex trade mess. Just like acid rain and the impending nukular armageddon. Whew. Glad it’s over. Now, back to blindly consuming my way through life….

The point of his posting was about customers getting upset over the supposedly unfair pricing scheme, but I was caught off-guard at first by the bitter sarcasm of the opening paragraph. With no criticism directed towards George (because what I've excerpted above is just that - an excerpt - and is not his main point), there's something about people taking a passive "high road", even sarcastically, which drives me nuts.

How, pray tell, shall we "clear up" what's happening in Darfur? Anyone got a quick-and-easy child sex trade disinfectant? It inadvertently highlights a problem that I've noticed: everyone seems to be aware of the world's problems. Indeed, thanks to television, the internet, and various types of media, that whole AWARENESS thing has totally succeeded. It has succeeded in creating a society that is so self-satisfied to simply be aware of suffering - suffering-by-agency, if I may invent the next cycle of academic theses - that doing anything to help isn't necessary anymore. It seems as if it's enough nowadays to simply say: yeah, I know. And that's the end of our moral responsibility.

In fact, I would wager that it's probably harder to motivate people to get off their asses in support of a cause/belief now more than ever. Part of this has to do with the fact that people who are getting-by reasonably well - what used to be known as the middle class, but which is now becoming "the haves" (vs. the "have nots" who are working three part-time jobs and still flirt with the poverty line) - have absolutely no incentive to lift a finger to do anything. In the United States, as an example, the greatest thing George W. Bush did was to stay the hell away from drafting kids for Iraq - rather than seeing sons and daughters ripped away, like during Vietnam, we're all comfy in our well-paying jobs, in our warm homes, with our new TVs, arguing about the relative strengths of Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD.

Our economic comforts make us lazy. They allow us to philosophize idly, without consequence. Nothing, save the economy itself, makes us worried anymore. Our perspective of the world becomes increasingly virtual; the suffering of others becomes something we hope TV and film celebrities, like Don Cheadle, can solve for us. We're simply asked for money to donate - again, another passive gesture. Alms for the poor.

I don't mean to critique anyone who's got money, nor to cast aspersion on the efforts of anyone who's trying to make a difference; I'm not trying to be a prole with a chip on his shoulder. I just turned 37 yesterday and this is the first year of my adult life where I haven't had to worry about paying rent - and I like not having to worry about that. I'm just concerned about the lull of consumerism and the lack of ways for people to truly, as in dirt-under-your-fingernails truly, get involved and feel as if they're making a difference in an immediate, non-virtual way.

In Memorium: Thomas Drayton

The city I moved into in the summer of '95 is changing. Indeed, all things change and the best of us learn neither to fear it nor be heedless of what it is ushering. If there was an icon of Queen Street West, a spiritual totem that all in the city was not so bad, it was Thomas Drayton (shown pictured, left, with Andre Benjamin of Outkast).

He was often seen outside his marvellous vintage clothing store, Cabaret, or taking walks with his behemoth of a Rottweiler. It seems odd to say this, because in a sense you'd expect it to be commonplace, but Thomas was such a decent, grounded, and inherently benevolent person - indeed, I come back to the word totem to describe such a person. He always smiled warmly and greeted you on the street, regardless if neither of you had ever been formally introduced.

I can say that everyone I know who met him, whether it were fellow dog-walkers in the park or infrequent patrons of his store, were heart-broken to hear of his passing. He died peacefully after the onset of a sudden illness, on October 24th.

Songs are not legion for those who are neither particularly heroic nor lamentable; we prefer to base our odes, it seems, on those who straddle one of two extremes. Lost in the middle, where the majority of us dwell, are pillars such as Drayton. He was one of us and yet still managed to set an example of what could be attained.

My heart broke when I saw the placard in the window display of his store, explaining his passing. There is a copy of the memorium here. It's one thing to keep memories of the dead alive in our hearts - I think, in the case of Thomas Drayton, we can go further and emulate the example he set for us, in his day-to-day style.

Advertising

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UPDATE: Thanks to everyone for their feedback on this. It's a contentious issue and I'll probably shelve it until further notice. I appreciate your points of view.

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When I first envisioned this blog, I had it in my mind that it would be a potpourri of thoughts and feelings, curated with an eye to people of reasonable intelligence and cultural curiosity - with photographs too.

While it hasn't veered off-course too much, I've found that 'imaginary magnitude' has become popular for the book reviews, which, owing to evolution, it seems have been the most prodigious type of posting. (As for the photographs, I'm still trying to get some quality scanning time - my scanner broke a while ago, leaving only my wife's, and it's hooked up to her computer, and I tripped over first base after my dog ate my shoelaces, blah blah blah).

So, lately, I've been wondering whether I should - with all aesthetic considerations taken into account - consider ads on the blog. Those Amazon-y things you see on other sites whenever they mention a book. Yes? No? Ambivalence? Do you find them invasive? Would you be offended by an ad in the margins or click-throughs that would enable people to purchase the books I'm reviewing directly?

I'm torn. I'm torn because I generally prefer to buy books locally at independent booksellers. That said, not everyone visiting my site lives in a major metropolitan area that allows for the cultivation of said booksellers. And hey, I can make a couple of bucks on the side for my time.

Let me know what you think - I'll start a poll in the margin as well, in case you're unable to type.

Book Review: Introducing Quantum Theory, by J.P. McEvoy

Never let it be said that I'm only a fiction-reader...

I've been fascinated with the concepts (and the idea) of quantum theory since I was but a boy in high school. There were several problems, however, that stood in my way:

1) I sucked in both math, physics, and chemistry (though I attained a rather impressive "B" in biology).

2) Quantum theory is notoriously difficult to visualize, and if you're an artsy-type person who sucks in mathematics, it will perennially seem somehow "just around the corner" from one's understanding.

However, as Bukowski said, "perseverance is greater than strength". I've never given up my interest in quantum theory, even though I long ago realized that I would probably never truly understand it within the language it was conceived (ie. math). For a writer, not being able to visualize with language is a form of impotence.

One day, during a "second wind" of faith - that I could find a book which could magically explain quantum theory comprehensively - I posted my question to a message board. It would be a year later before someone responded. After adjudicating my level of "maths", a kind person suggested Introducing Quantum Theory by J.P. McEvoy.

Having previously read (surprise, surprise) Introducing Wittgenstein, I was familiar with the format of the Introducing series; essentially, they are well-written and concisely distilled comic books. I know of no better way to describe them and I can think of no better series of books that manage to grapple subjects as diverse as Keynesian Economics and Kafka for the curious mind. They also make great streetcar reads.

It took some hunting - let's face it, this isn't exactly a top-seller - but eventually I found a copy (with thanks to Toronto's World's Biggest Bookstore).

And now that you've read my heart-warming prelude, the review...

The most important paragraph in this book, as I discovered about a quarter of the way through, is on the second last page, in the Further Reading section:

Quantum theory cannot be explained. Physicists and mathematicians from Niels Bohr to Roger Penrose have admitted that it doesn't make sense. What one can do is discover how the ideas developed and how the theory is applied. Our book has concentrated on the former.

I wish I'd known this when I was a kid.

That said, Introducing Quantum Theory is an excellent primer. It focuses on the historical impetus which led to the stumbling-upon of the theories which now formulate our current (if not fixed) understanding of quantum phenomena. It starts with establishing the era of Classical (Newtonian) Physics - so assured were scientists of the day with the prevailing theories that it was referred to as the Age of Certainty...and, rather deliciously, it began to unravel via the route science often is forged: experimentation. Thanks, primarily, to Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and Niels Bohr, foundational rules of Classical Physics were brought into question and a new, quantum, world was revealed.

The book is full of formulae - it has to be - however, it's not necessary for the casual reader to use the formulae or to necessarily understand what any given formula does (although the latter would be nice). The concepts are outlined well by J.P. McEvoy - the conflicts, the dead-ends, and the frustrations of the worlds greatest minds as each took turns refining the prevailing speculation. He has done a great job outlining, linearly and non-linearly, the essential questions: how did this happen, when did this happen, who was involved, and - most importantly - why we should care.

It is a book that deserves (requires, perhaps) that the reader approach it from the beginning straight to the end, on several occasions in order to fully grasp the evolution of quantum theory. I fear that, in one read, it may all be too much for most - personally, I look forward to approaching this book again, as I feel it of great value which, over the course of several reads, will keep inspiring me in different ways. It's important to realize that this isn't necessarily about science, but about the refinement of how mankind perceives the world around us.

Introducing Quantum Theory, by J.P. McEvoy (ISBN: 1-84046-577-8) is available at an independently owned bookstore near you, or available at various online vendors. I should add, since this book incorporates original illustrations on every page, the graphic artist: Oscar Zarate.

Movements and Gestures

One of the greatest realisations that occurred to me during film school was during the otherwise innocuous screening of a student's assignment. It was contrasty, black-and-white, shot on 16mm, with no dialogue or sound, save for a temporary score via Carl Orff's overture from Carmina Burana.

He had assembled a sequence of shots taken around an old country barn which had fallen apart due to age. There were shots of his pre-school niece playing in the field. Fairly pastoral, well-shot, stuff. However, just before the thunderous beat of the chorus, he did what is technically called a "swish-pan" (essentially swivelling the camera so that the movement from point A to point B in the frame passes by in a quick blur). It wasn't huge - he couldn't have turned the camera more than ten degrees to the right. But the impact was massive on me: I sat there and solidly understood, with the overture's choir belting out the chorus, the acetic importance of a simple gesture.

When you're full of inspiration and energy, your first instinct is to paint on as large a canvas as possible, in block letters, in red. And yet these grandiose movements, glorious though they may be in some works, are not the only - or necessarily the best - means of communication. I discovered how magically integral one simple gesture could be - through a simple adjustment of the camera, the student had intentionally or unintentionally done something that I felt was on-par with even the most flamboyant cinematic spectacles.

Today, on the streetcar, I'm reading Culture and Value, a collection of manuscript notes by Wittgenstein - and again, he makes the same point: the importance of the simplest gesture. You can hear this in music, you can see this in dance; it's even evident in sport. The greatest performances are those which blend masterful movement with graceful gesture.

A call for local writers

Hello all. For the last two years, I've been an organizer and participant of a Toronto-based writers group, called "Carpe DM". We are poets and prose writers: we come from different backgrounds and disciplines. As of late, due to various natural circumstances (school, life, work), our membership has dwindled down from 12 to 6 active participants.

We're looking for new Toronto-based writers to join our group.

If you're interested, here are some take-a-look-in-the-mirror recommendations:

1) We are only interested in people who are serious about writing (in that writing is an ongoing process, which involves labour and dedication).

2) We are not interested in writers who are looking solely for congratulations on their work, but who instead desire honest, constructive feedback. On this note, you will be expected to provide the same for the other members.

3) We are looking for people who can attend monthly meetings (it's in a bar, so it's not like we're stuffy or anything).

4) You are over the age of 25.

5) We are not a star chamber; we do not encourage preciousness, though to be brutally honest we also believe in meritocracy. We are good writers who want to become better writers. Adding poor writers is not something we are interested in.

Still there? Good. If this sounds like something you're interested in, please leave a comment or drop me a line (by removing the word "NOSPAM" from this address): apostata@NOSPAMrogers.com.

You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are. That is the difference between writing about yourself and writing about external objects. You write about yourself from your own height. You don't stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein (manuscript note, 1937)

Book Review: Cathedral, by Raymond Carver

I recently made the acquaintance of someone who works as a literary agent for TV and films. I didn't know this when we'd been first introduced, just as she was unaware that I wrote fiction. In these sorts of situations I tend to play it cool, because the last thing I want to do is come across as a "desperate unpublished writer" (insert images from Dawn of the Dead) and thus endanger the non-professional relationship. Still, she nonetheless asked if I'd be interested in sending her some work to read. I obliged and, happily, she liked it very much.

We got to talking about writers and influences, and she asked whether I'd ever read Raymond Carver. I hadn't (insert sound of audience hissing), though I'd heard of him. [It occurred to me later that I'd seen Robert Altman's Short Cuts - which (very loosely) strung together several of Carver's short stories into one long, dark ensemble piece.] It was when she mentioned that one of my stories reminded her of Carver that I figured I might as well find out for myself.

So, I picked up Cathedral, a collection of short stories at Babel Books & Music, a local second-hand bookstore and immediately proceeded to satisfy my curiosity.

Firstly, I was thankful. Yes, there was a similarity, but I found that the "world" Carver inhabited as a writer (I use the past tense because he passed away in 1988) differs from mine. This may sound selfish, but I still sometimes suffer from an irrational fear that everything I'm writing has been done by someone else, and that it's only a question of time before I find out, like some sick Twilight Zone episode. But I digress...

And what, pray tell, is Carver's world? It's a sparsely urban, godless place, inhabited with people who find ways to ignore the mounting problems facing them. This doesn't speak for all the stories, but it certainly summarizes the atmosphere. He paints as a writer what Edward Hopper writes as a painter (though I would argue that Carver's characters probably aren't as well-dressed, and if you're wondering why I've switched from past-tense to present-tense, it's that I'm trying to wittily suggest that the product of an artist can survive its creator's demise). And yet, this world isn't one that has gone to hell. There is love, though it is often tempered by the cool water of circumstance. There is even a sense of magic lurking in the shadows, albeit a neutral magic; one that can spell enlightenment or tragedy at the slightest moment.

Since this is a collection of short stories, providing a synopsis for each (or any) would probably spoil the pleasure of reading them - and despite the picture I paint of Carver's literary universe (or at least that contained in Cathedral), it is a unique pleasure to read them. Carver is a model of tight writing - he takes the "why say in 30 words what you can say in 10?" mantra and says it in five. Most recently, an article in the New York Times highlights an ongoing controversy about the editorial authority of some of Carver's published work, with speculation that some of this tightness may have been the work of an over-zealous editor.

In short, I clearly understand why Raymond Carver is praised as one of the great American writers: his vision is clear, even when the lives of his characters are muddied, and his writing style is immediate and bracing.

Cathedral, by Raymond Carver (ISBN: 978-0679723691) is available at an independent bookstore near you, new or second-hand. You can also purchase it at any number of online vendors.

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

- Ivan Turgenev

Book Review: Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse

This is the second book I've read (and reviewed) from Hesse. Admittedly, after first reading Steppenwolf early this year, I was in no rush to go further just yet - that book was enough for my mind to deal with and left an indelible impression. However, hey, Siddhartha is only 122 pages...how much of a hassle could that be?

Thankfully, this svelte novella bares little resemblance to Steppenwolf's hallucinogenic soul-churning. It's a simple, spiritual tale, reminiscent in style of works I read in my late-teens and early twenties (in particular: Khalil Gibran and Jiddu Krishnamurti).

The book begins with Siddhartha, the handsome and talented son of a Brahmin family, bidding farewell to his people and homeland. Driven to plumb the depths of spiritual knowledge, he and his best friend, Govinda, decide to join a group of Samanas - ascetic nomads who drift through towns and desert alike, denouncing all possessions. At first, Siddhartha takes to the group and spends a long time mastering their philosophy until he eventually finds himself dissatisfied and conflicted by the limits of their teaching.

Breaking away with Govinda in tow, Siddhartha journeys to find a group of monks attending an open lecture by the Gotama Buddha, their spiritual leader. Hearing Gotama speak, Siddhartha begins to finally understand his path. Given an opportunity to speak privately with him, Siddhartha extols the virtue of what Gotama has stated, but tells him that the path he sees for himself cannot be found following Gotama. The Buddha is surprised and asks him to explain, to which Siddhartha reveals his revelation: that the Gotama learned everything not by following others, but by making his own path, and if need be his own mistakes.

It is at this point that he and his friend break from one another - Siddhartha decides to go into a nearby town to find his way, and Govinda, equally taken by the words of Gotama, decides to follow him as one of his faithful monks. When he reaches the town, Siddhartha finds himself indulging in the flesh and physical manifestations of the world: he falls in love with a beautiful courtesan and finds a job with a wealthy trader. Years pass, and while Siddhartha accumulates fortunes and lavish tastes, his soul begins to buckle, his demeanour sours, as he longs for the path he thought he'd found. He eventually breaks away from the town and finds himself at the doorstep of a poor ferryman - it is there that he forms his understanding of the spirit, nourished with the help of the ferryman and the voice of the river.

In the end, Siddhartha's path is one of profound simplicity - a result of his spiritual maturity aided by the fateful intervention of those in his past. In circumstances both tragic and sublime, he attains the peacefulness he was searching for, though in ways he was unable to perceive beyond his youthful revolt.

This book is oft-described as one of the more compelling European perspectives on Indian spirituality. I found myself, for the first quarter of the book, feeling as if I was going over familiar territory - concisely written, but hardly ground-breaking stuff. It was only at the point of Siddhartha's revelation in the face of Gotama, that the Buddha himself never followed the teachings of others save for the lessons of personal experience - thus, why should Siddhartha be a follower? - that the book grabbed me. There is something Nietzschian in this; superimposing the perceptive defiance of an individual onto a "meeting by the river" of two minds, one old and wise, the other young and daring. To see what happens to Siddhartha, in many ways symbolic of those precious few who attempt to live by their learned convictions, is what drives the reader to finish the book. I don't think anyone will be disappointed in Siddhartha, though to what extent they are inspired is another question - one which truly depends on the mind and soul of the reader.

Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse (ISBN: 978-0811200684) is available at a friendly independent bookstore near you. Or online at any number of vendors.

I'm alive

I'm alive and well, ladies and gentlemen. After finishing the theatrical release of a major motion picture, I'm slowly finding time to blog - I hope you understand that, faced with a choice between having a life and blogging (because, these days I cannot do both and be happy), I will pick the former every time.

That said, I have two book reviews coming down the pipe: the first is Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, and the second is Cathedral, a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver.

I also have a nice batch of photos I've taken, so feel comfortable that the future of this blog is not solely text-based.

Regards,

mc

Cops and Actors

So far this year, I've worked on two productions (one TV series and one feature film) which involve people playing cops (detectives, in particular). One thing I've noticed on both projects (and in general) is that when actors plays cops they usually take one of two approaches:

1) 60-70% of actors will, well, act. They will play the part, for better or worse.

2) The remaining 40-30% of actors will dredge up some ridiculous "cop" pantomime, based loosely upon what they've seen (or remembered) from such seminal TV shows as Streets of San Francisco and films like Serpico. You can identify these actors by their insistence on swaggering up and down hallways, chewing up the scenery, and making any weaknesses in the dialogue that much worse with their ham-fisted delivery, as if they were channelling some sort of Bad Cop Actor deity.

It's hilarious.

Quite often, there are two cops in any given TV show or film - partners, of course - and chances are, each of them will don one of the two examples listed above. Predictably, as follows the format of scripts these days, the "good cop" will be an actor trying to play a cop. The "bad cop" will be the person constantly slamming binders closed, and yelling things like: "Look, pal - we're running out of time! There's a killer still out there!".

Okay, at least I find it amusing...

Is It Not Ironic

i·ro·ny
n.

1. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.

2. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning.

3. A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect.

4. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain).

5. An occurrence, result, or circumstance notable for such incongruity.

I'm not a language fascist, however if there is one word which has been cataclysmically abused to the point where the government should step in with tasers, it is the misuse of the word "irony".

In case your eyes glazed over the definition posted above, allow me to further define the word by demonstrating what irony is not. First, let's start with the most common misperception. Irony is not coincidence - no, not even a sad coincidence, as boldly defined by Alanis Morissette in her song, "Ironic":

An old man turned ninety-eight
He won the lottery and died the next day
It's a black fly in your Chardonnay
It's a death row pardon two minutes too late
And isn't it ironic... don't you think

Actually, I don't think that's ironic. Because it isn't. What she's describing is a series of unfortunate circumstances. Mind you, renaming the song "Unfortunate Circumstances" wouldn't work - doesn't have much of a ring to it.

The thing is, I can excuse Alanis for this. I can do this because she's a musician and not someone whom I should, by her profession, necessarily hold in high regard as regards the use of English language (lest I use the same linguistic measuring stick against Led Zeppelin and Muddy Waters).

Not, say, like a nationally broadcast television journalist. Say, like the anchor of CBS Evening News, Katie Couric:

[September 13th, 2007]
COURIC: And now this sad footnote from Iraq. Two Army paratroopers who recently wrote an article that was critical of the war effort were killed this week. Staff Sergeant Yance Gray and Sergeant Omar Mora were part of a group of seven who authored a piece entitled "The War as We Saw It," published in The New York Times last month. The group wrote that for Iraqis, quote, "engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act." Now, ironically, Gray and Mora were killed along with five other soldiers not in combat, but when their cargo truck overturned during a routine trip in western Baghdad.

It goes without saying that this is tragic, but it's not irony, unless Ms. Couric believes being stationed for combat in Iraq was not foreseen as being dangerous in the first place. I'll let the folks at Media Matters question this last point.

Speaking of Iraq and bad communication, after 9/11/01, we were told - and I don't know who was the first to coin this, not that it matters, because like so much that has happened since then, everyone just bent over and agreed to it like submissive pets - that it was "the end of irony". And while I hope this daft phrase will be preserved as an example of world-class naivety, it seems we've never gotten a handle on this word, which is sad. It's sad because I feel that this proclamation, made just over seven years ago is yet another example of the phrase, "the first casualty of war is truth". To pronounce that any word or behaviour is no longer valid abdicates a necessary freedom of communication.

Conspiratorially, I wonder sometimes if irony, a formidable weapon when used knowledgeably, hasn't had it's meaning and usage watered down intentionally. Why? Well, we seem to be very prolific at being ironic and affecting irony in our popular discourse without ever troubling ourselves to actually identify it (or for that matter question our dependence upon it when it comes to things we care about). Indeed, sometimes it seems we are incapable of showing reverence for anything without irony poisoning the well. Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of irreverence when it is used to desaturate those things in life we take too seriously - but if everything portrayed on television, in films, in our books, becomes increasingly ironic (without the audience bothering to know what irony is, or worse still, without an opinion - reverent or not - to begin with) then does that not somehow conjure the image of a society that is becoming more wilfully deluded?

I hate ending things with a question, so I'll just say that I try to hope for the best, knowing that - in the long run - when it comes to understanding the great frustrations of humanity, you are often left on your own to figure out the truth. And even then, sometimes there's nothing that can be done for anyone other than yourself.

Photo: Chicago #2

Quotes and Science

Work. It is the great blog-killer.

Sorry for the lack of updates. In lieu of something original and scintillating, I bring you two quotes from Max Born, Nobel Prize-winning atomic physicist:

“There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by 'the scientific method'.”

"The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world."

I've spent a lot of time lately reading Introducing Quantum Theory by J.P. McEvoy. I find it fascinating in many ways (least of which being the mathematical formulae). I'm finally beginning to understand not only what "quantum theory" truly refers to, but how it was discovered/unearthed, and how it relates/differs to classical physics.

Art & Science, I'm convinced, are the same - to avoid one is to live a life of wilful ignorance.

Book Review: Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, by Peter De Vries

There's nothing sadder than to have contributed your soul to the world, and as a writer this contribution is more like a communion of flesh, only to find that, at the end of your life, everyone has forgotten about you.

Considered one of the greatest American humourists of his day, on par with the likes of James Thurber and Mark Twain, Peter De Vries was a prolific novelist who wrote over 20 books over the span of his life, most notably Tunnel of Love, The Blood of the Lamb, and Slouching Towards Kalamazoo. There is a fascinating, heartbreaking story about American society's collective memory loss as it regards De Vries' work here.

Humourist. The word feels like an anachronism. It conjures the image of an old man in suspenders, sitting on some honeysuckle scented Midwestern porch spinning tales of the County Fair of '36 when Old Man Smucker's pig got loose and... but this is all presumption. In other words, we've equated "humourist" with "rustic". It's wrong. We need humourists, whether they be satirists, parodists, or even the most groan-inducing vaudevillian showmen. We need to laugh - not just with grotesque cruelty, which is our current fixation, but thoughtfully.

Slouching Towards Kalamazoo is classic American humour: an extremely well written (De Vries was an accomplished linguist as well as an editor) portrait of a boy's disoriented steps toward adulthood and independence in small-town society. It's also terribly funny in places. His narrative style is never creaky or mannered; he tells the story, adds some window dressing, but always gets back to the point. The point: Anthony Thrasher, an intelligent yet under-achieving Grade 8 student falls for his teacher and winds up getting her pregnant. Compounding this is the fact that, due to his age and immaturity in the realm of the hands-on world, he doesn't even fully understand the implications of what's happened, having only the mythology of a boy's speculation to cope with the problem. Meanwhile, his father, a devout church minister with a passion for reading literary classics aloud at the dinner table, is driving Anthony's mother toward infidelity...with an equally devout atheist.

Combining a witty parallel retort to The Scarlet Letter - required reading in Anthony's Grade 8 class - with a prescient view of the theist/atheist debates currently raging around us, De Vries manages to portray vivid characters that, aside from being given satirical names such as Bubbles Breedlove (a friend whom Anthony becomes smitten with later in the book), are touchingly real.

Profundity...? Perhaps. I'm not sure that would be the chief reason for reading Slouching Towards Kalamazoo. It's delightful, character-driven storytelling with some killer dialogue. What more do you need?

Of all De Vries books, only two are currently in print - out-of-print editions are available via eBay and AbeBooks. Other than Slouching, there is his "dark book" as it's been referred to, The Blood of the Lamb. I encourage people to give preference to independently-owned bookstores, but in this regard, given the scarcity of De Vries work, I'll simply say that you owe it to yourself to check him out.

But don't forget him.

Update on Michael Cahill

Allow me to turn to a more personal, less literary/artsy subject today...

I was in Chicago on the weekend with friends. I came back on Sunday night, got home, and out of habit checked the stats on this blog - a habit borne of curiosity generally, and my occasional question of whether this is a worthy pursuit specifically. I was stunned to see more than triple the average number of visitors to the site on the weekend.

After more searching through the stats, I discovered that the majority of visitors were coming from search engines like Google, and all were searching the name of my late uncle, Michael Cahill, whom I'd written about here and here.

Noting that this couldn't have been a random surge, I searched for a while and noticed that America's Most Wanted had re-broadcast their story on his murder (which I originally wrote about here). Furthermore, a news blog in Virginia recently focused on the crime also.

It's several days later and I'm still getting a lot of traffic from people, from all over N. America and even Europe for that matter, looking up Michael's murder. Strange. The whole thing is strange - the incident itself, tragic obviously as it was, and now this surge of interest which more than eclipses all of the previous Michael-related traffic I've received since AMW first broadcast the story. I don't quite understand the invigorated interest, but I'm happy that more people are curious; it means that there are that many more people who may be able to help out in solving the case.

Helps that Berkeley Breathed is involved I guess, which is one of the more hard-to-believe aspects of the story.

A sign

I've been unable to parlay this into a larger essay - this is not to say there isn't an essay in it, but rather the time and thought necessary to write it has been elusive. In Toronto, there is a gentleman by the name of Reg Hartt. He runs a program called Cineforum, where he screens classic silent films, censored cartoons, and obscure treats like the ever-reliable "Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon" mash-ups. His advertising is ubiquitous in the city; black and white ads stapled and taped to hydro posts and litterboxes, with large sans serif block letters: "SIDDHARTHA by HESSE", "SEX AND VIOLENCE CARTOON FILM FESTIVAL".

Nobody comes close to Reg when it comes to promoting on the street. He is tireless.

In any case, one day I saw the following ad for a lecture at Reg's. It is a phrase which has stuck in my mind like a thorn:

SO LONG AS MAN
WANTS GOD ON EARTH
THERE WILL ALWAYS
BE A HITLER

Book Review: The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

Readers of this blog (both of you!) may have caught my previous mention of the strange road I took in finding Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita - not only the book itself but also this particular translation (self-published by Michael Karpelson - more on this later). Without exaggerating, it was well-worth the effort.
How does one describe this book? Well, considering all the fuss over Harry Potter as of late (or perennially, as it would seem), The Master and Margarita would seem a perfect literary tonic for anyone looking for speculative adult fiction. Hailed as one of the best pieces of Russian literature (not just speculative) of the 20th century, such praises can also be intimidating; visions of a depressing, Dostoevskian St. Petersburg, and the obligatory poverty and mental illness which filter to a bleak (if well-rendered) conclusion. This is not that kind of book.

One day, two members of the reigning literary elite meet in a park to discuss problems with the subject matter of one of their poems - it's not atheistic enough, says the elder, and thus not worthy of publishing (this being Soviet Russia, under Stalin's rule). No sooner is the question (and denial) of the devil raised, than the two are greeting by a tall, dark stranger who appears out of the blue and proceeds to describe how one of them will die. And, albeit under fantastic circumstances, it comes true.

Pretty soon, the stranger and his motley troupe - a clownish bloke with a broken pince-nez, a fang-toothed redheaded goul, and a large, talking black cat who walks on his hind legs - occupy a townhouse in the centre of Moscow from which they direct a chaotic spell over the city. Anyone it seems who gets in their way - usually members of the cultural privileged classes - either vanishes, winds up in the sanatorium, or is vanquished to another part of the country.

Who are they? What are they doing? All of this is unravelled (and exploded) the further into the book one reads. We meet the eponymous Master, a discouraged writer whose seminal work on Pontius Pilate is lain to waste by the bureaucratic tendrils of the sycophantic literary scene, and his faithful lover, Margarita - a married woman who would do anything to be free of her chains and reunited with him.

The Master and Margarita is a wild, throw-the-rulebook-out-the-door tale which manages to weave outrageous satire with eloquent speculation on morality. Bulgakov's novel confidently navigates between deft, fantastic comedy and touching, emotional drama - without one disregarding the power of the other. Written under the tyrannical reign of Stalin from 1929 until Bulgakov's death in 1940, it is both a response to the madness of that period and a triumphant individual statement.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to anyone who is looking for something fantastic and unpredictable to consume them. It is truly a book that can be read and re-read numerous times, with each pass being as fulfilling as the next.

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov (ISBN: 978-1411683051) is available at a friendly independent bookstore near you. Or online at any number of vendors.

A note about this translation: The translation I refer to above is the latest, by Michael Karpelson. While listed on Amazon, he is currently making small revisions to this edition which, combined with other projects in the works (another book by Bulgakov as well!), means it will not be available for the next while. If you like, I've received permission from Michael to post his email address - if you contact him, he can arrange for a copy of the existing edition to be shipped to you, as he did with me. His email address is: mkarpelson (at) gmail (dot) com. {psst - support independent publications}

Another note (June 24, 2010): I recently read another translation of M&M, by the prodigious team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I'm a little surprised, because it seems as if it's longer than the Karpelson version (ie. it has slightly more content in places). Maybe that's just me. It's certainly the easier of the two to purchase, so I put this out there for you to contemplate.

Preface This

If there's one trend in film that I cannot understand (or sometimes tolerate) it is the rise of the Director's Introduction.

Today, someone asked if I'd watched the DVD of Bon Cop Bad Cop, a Canadian feature film which had been a box-office smash when it was released last year. He then told me that there was a Director's Intro where Eric Canuel talks about - wait for it - how successful the film was at the box-office. And if that weren't bad enough, you couldn't skip through it to the film that you had just paid money to either rent or buy. Why anyone would think it a good idea to hold the paying audience ransom so that they could congratulate themselves on making a profit is the sort of provincial-minded Canadian bullshit that I've unfortunately come to expect from a country pathologically unable to take its head out of its ass. But why does any film need an introduction in the first place?

I remember renting Spielberg's Munich last year. Not only did he have an intro (optional though it was), but in it he more or less apologized for his film - politically. Could you imagine Bertolucci apologizing for The Conformist or Orson Welles apologizing for Citizen Kane? Spielberg: the man who has brought more money into the box-office than nearly anyone in history, who in his prime innovatively defined, through works like ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind "the film for everyone", now prefaces his work as if there had been a manufacturing error of epic proportions which caused hardcore pornography where there used to be sunsets.

What the hell is going on? Do we not trust ourselves? Are we becoming so fearful of litigation or clouds of doubt on the horizon of our career's posterity that we must now preface our work, selling its merits as if applying for a loan, as if spending the millions of dollars to make the film was, in retrospect, an uncertain mistake?

Guillermo del Toro, in his introduction to the Pan's Labyrinth DVD talks briefly about how much weight he lost during production. Terry Gilliam, who filmed an introduction for the theatrical run of his much-maligned feature, Tideland, stood there reminding us that his film was about the world through the eyes of a child. Indeed, it's as if the general public were being treated like infants.

In my writer's group, during our monthly meetings, we will read new work aloud. We have a firm rule: you do not preface your work. You do not say "I was trying to write about...", or "This is based on a story...". No. Stop it. If it's good, it will stand up on its own accord. If it's good - even if I have questions - I'm comfortable that I will be able to find this out on my own after the fact. If you need to explain your work before you present it to an audience then chances are you have not produced a work that an audience should be seeing (as opposed to, say, yourself).

When I see a film, I want to see the film. I do not want or require a preface where somebody "explains" things for me or, worse still, some risk-averse apologia. I'm a big boy, I can handle it.

Photo: Rebecca Street #1

A Conan For a Different Age...

It's a start...

[yes, the artsy, philosophizing, photo blog has been getting political lately. I will try to balance this out with unnecessary essays on Camus -ed.]

The news just broke that the UN has approved (up to) 26,000 peace keepers to be sent to Darfur. From the Globe and Mail:

July 31, 2007 at 3:59 PM EDT

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to authorize up to 26,000 troops and police in an effort to stop attacks on millions of displaced civilians in Sudan's Darfur region.

Expected to cost more than $2-billion in the first year, the combined United Nations-African Union operation aims to quell violence in Darfur, where more than 2.1 million people have been driven into camps and an estimated 200,000 have died over the last four years.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the resolution as "historic" and urged member states to offer "capable" troops quickly.

The resolution, number 1769, invokes Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, under which the United Nations can authorize force. The measure allows the use of force to be used for self defence, to ensure the free movement of humanitarian workers and to protect civilians under attack.

But the resolution, which has been watered down several times, no longer allows the new force to seize and dispose of illegal arms. Now they can only monitor such weapons.

Gone also is a threat of future sanctions, but British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned on Tuesday that "if any party blocks progress and the killings continue, I and others will redouble our efforts to impose further sanctions."

"The plan for Darfur from now on is to achieve a cease-fire, including an end to aerial bombings of civilians; drive forward peace talks ... and, as peace is established, offer to begin to invest in recovery and reconstruction," he said on a visit to the United Nations.

Some (perhaps rightly) are comparing this to Rwanda - not the existing massacre, mind you (that's been done quite well already), but the handcuffing of UN peace keepers. As the article says, UN soldiers can only fight back in self-defence. I can only hope, and call me a blind idealist, that the lessons of Rwanda will have been learnt.

Like the title says, it's a start. Two hundred thousand civilians have already been killed in Darfur. At this point, anything more than a diplomatic gesture is a sign of hope.

Intolerant Alternatives

For those who don't live in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), there are two papers which demonstrate the zero-sum game of "providing an alternative voice" in mass-market traditional media.

The first, which I submit as The Intolerant Right, is The Toronto Sun, a daily newspaper distributed through most of Southern Ontario. In short, pro-conservative, pro-law-and-order, pro-military, anti-liberal, anti-big-government, anti-humanist. They regularly publish op-ed pieces which make numerous references to City Council as being infested with socialists. They once published an editorial "cartoon" which allowed you to paint-by-numbers a portrait of Toronto's mayor, David Miller, which ended up portraying him as Adolph Hitler.

The second, which I submit as The Intolerant Left, is NOW Magazine, a weekly news/community paper with wide distribution including outside the GTA. As opposed to the Sun, NOW is pro-socialist, pro-community, pro-union, anti-police, anti-military, anti-corporate. NOW operates under the impression that the world's problems can be solved with townhall meetings. The recent clash between the Chilean U-20 soccer team and the police was, without bothering to investigate, blamed squarely on the police who were identified as racists.

Don't get me wrong, NOW has a good arts section. The Toronto Sun, for that matter, excels in sports coverage. However, as regards editorial thrust, both papers are heinously biased and often responsible for stoking the coals of hatred.

And thus we come to that auspicious moniker: the "outsider" or "alternative" media voice. People who devour the Sun feel that everyone else is too liberally biased and that their paper "tells it like it is". Those who fawn over NOW feel as if every page uncovers the organic truth, conspiratorially cloaked by the interests of Big Business. Yet, despite the obvious differences between the two, faithful readers of both feel as if they are getting the inside track on enlightenment.

This is one of the pernicious problems with being the "outsider" or the "alternative" in the traditional media market - it's bullshit. You know it. I know it. Yet - and kudos for consistency to both the Toronto Sun and NOW - one can predictably ascertain the editorial reaction of both papers without as much as a few seconds of applied imagination.

Me? Generally, I'm left-of-centre, I do think there is a clear history of corporate greed which has threatened to extinguish individual rights (let alone entrepreneurship), and I don't want our laws to be dictated by the tenets of any organized religion. However, pure socialism is a Romantic Dream - it assumes everyone is the same, which is the summit of naivety if we must include the criminally violent or the unfortunately stupid. Yet, I believe that culture needs federal funding and should not be treated like an elitist nice-to-have. Also, I would rather have another 4 years of David Miller's ineffectiveness than yet another malicious, vindictive clown like Mel (The Black Cauldron) Lastman or a ruinous corporate-minded manipulator like Mike Harris at the provincial helm.

The problem with any form of media claiming to the be an "alternative" is that "being alternative" (as opposed to say, trying to approach the complexity of the average person's viewpoint) becomes a ball-and-chain by which they have to editorially tow the line, whether or not it devolves into predictability (or self-parody).

Photo: Café Bernate #2

"The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe."

- Peter De Vries

How To Measure Progress When Not Much Is Really Changing

I'm a fiction writer.

This is what I tell people, which is often followed by digging my fingernails into my palms, hoping they don't ask me if-

"Have you been published?"

No. The answer is no. And no, you can't tell them that a poem you wrote in high school was published in the local paper - you're over 30 and nearly twice the age of that (wonderfully talented) kid.

"Um...not yet."

This is about as affirmative as it gets. It's like telling someone you're a bus driver, and when they ask a perfectly normal question like "Oh, where? For what company?", you reply: "Actually, I'm not driving a bus right now...I'm hoping that someone will allow me to drive a bus soon.".

I'm a bus driver without a bus, albeit with a route of sorts and sufficient credentials to do the work without injuring passengers (save for their sensibilities at times). I'll let that analogy fizzle like a wet campfire. Needless to say, telling people you're a fiction writer without having anything to show in terms of published work, one feels like an impostor after a while. Gladly, writers naturally feel like impostors so it's not that bad.

The reality is not quite as depressing as it appears ^tm. I've only been at this seriously for a few years, having spent a few years before that working on a novel which I ultimately decided to shelve, lest I spend years more perfecting something I'd outgrown and was really tired of staring at. Since then, I've crafted several solid short stories and have started a new novel. The more I work on short stories, the more improvements I see in my writing overall which then reflects in the novel. It's a nice arrangement, save for the fact that the time/energy I devote to the short stories are subtracted from what's going toward the book.

My strategy is that the short stories - the good ones, not the ones I hand people and preface with "It's an experiement!" - are "easier" to get published, if only because they require less time to write/revise than a novel. Thus, with some sort of publishing precedent, it would be easier to attract a publisher for the novel.

Of course, I've yet to have anything of note published. I'm trying to keep at least two submissions outbound at all times, but even that's tricky because you want to gear the right type of story (stylistically, etc.) to a publisher who will be most receptive to what you're offering. Add to this that waiting for acceptance or rejection (the latter being all the rage these days) can take anywhere from 3 weeks to 6 months with ethical penalties if you submit the same piece to more than one publisher at a time. So, let's say you spend two months on a short story - from ink on the page (I still do my rough drafts by hand) to "rev. #12f" on my laptop. If the publisher you submit to (assuming, like what happened to me and the magazine Maisonneuve, the post office doesn't return it claiming they can't find the address) takes 3 months to get back to you, that's almost half a year spent with no dividends to show (aside from the aforementioned improvements in your writing, which, when you receive a rejection letter, isn't very compelling at all).

Fun.

Yet, if I didn't think my work was good, I wouldn't bother. If I didn't see improvements in my skill, I wouldn't bother. I have to remind myself that, although I don't have anything to show for my efforts as regards to getting published, I do have the work itself, which is no small accomplishment by anyone's measurement. In any case, it's all I have at the moment - that and will.

And the moniker, "fiction writer".

Translation, Traducción, and перевод

I used to hang-out in cafés when I was in my early twenties. It was a means to get out of the house without going to bars. Chances were, the conversations were better in cafés, and - depending upon the type of café - the people were usually a little more sophisticated [why writing that word feels like an elitist thing, I'm not sure - is there something wrong with sophistication?]. Most of all, cafés are cheaper than bars, and when you're in college and starving, it made sense to choose the former if you wanted to avoid the bottleneck of debt.

There was a place in Burlington (Ontario, sorry Vermont) which lasted perhaps only a year (as all good things die early in Burlington, including the dreams of its youth...but I digress). I can't even remember the name - French, I think. The owner was a very interesting fellow, an accomplished academic who'd lived and studied in Paris previously. I'm not sure how he managed to afford a café in the middle of a very chi chi shopping square, but he made the best of it: poetry readings, live music, parties. It was all very fin de siècle; nothing like that can live for very long in a town as complacent and suburban as Burlington was at the time.

I remember one afternoon, sitting with him (his name escapes me...so much of the years from 1990 -> 1995 escape me), and chatting. The topic arose of translation. He revealed that he wrote about the aesthetics and potential controversies of translation. Can you imagine having a book published about translation? I couldn't then - it was something I simply took for granted and sometimes still do. The more we talked, the more I realised how much blind trust we put in the hands of the person whose job it is to convert the prose of the world's great non-English-speaking writers. It never crosses our minds that a translator could be culturally prejudiced, or simply unimaginative for that matter.

Let's face it: when I recently read Crime and Punishment I didn't hesitate to think that I was reading anything but the prose of Fyodor Dostoevsky. But, of course, it was a translation. I can only assume it was accurate, not that I would have any way to tell as I only have an elementary understanding of Cyrillic (let alone Russian). What is astounding to me, is to think of how effortless and transparent the best translations are - when I consider the acrobatics some of them must go through in order to preserve the magic of the original text (the rhythm, the flow, the style, the weight, the economy) I always conclude that it must be such a rewarding and paradoxically unheralded role to play. Who translated the copy of Crime and Punishment that I just finished reading? Couldn't tell you. I didn't look.

This was brought to my attention most recently, and most magically, with the appearance of the book The Master and Margarita in my life. I was speaking with a Russian composer one day, relating how much I enjoyed speculative fiction from former-Soviet countries (Stanislaw Lem, the Strugatsky brothers...) when he mentioned, "Have you read Master and Margarita, by Bulgakov?". "Who??" was my response. Let's face it, Bulgakov is not a name etched in the collective memory of popular literature. "You must read Master and Margarita." was all he said, with that particularly curt Slavic insistence which intones the inherent universal importance of whatever it is that's being recommended, without question. So, I went on my laptop and did some searching - what I found was that there were, at last count, five English translations of the book.

Five.

As it turned-out, one was based on the censored Soviet text, another was marked as simply not in-depth enough, with three more ranging in response from capable to great. So - aware of the inherent importance of translation and having my curiosity piqued by the book itself - I did more research and found that the most recent translation had been done in 2006 by a fellow Canadian, Michael Karpelson (highlighted in this article from an otherwise obscure right-wing news site). To make a long story short, this translation was self-published through LuLu.com and was off-line due to small revisions Karpelson wanted to make. I ended up getting his email address from LuLu and contacted him directly - he was very nice and offered to sell me a copy from the existing print run. By the time I received it, I had no less than five other people, without prompting, ask whether I'd read the book. Talk about destiny.

So, for the Michael Karpelson's of the literary world, without whom authors as diverse as Camus, Marquez, Borges, and the Dalai Lama would have no means to speak to English-speaking readers, I raise a toast of appreciation.

[note: I will have a proper review of The Master and Margarita within the next week or so]