June 29, 2009

Review of Recreational Drugs by Some Author Whose Name I Can’t Remember

Can’t remember the year, where I lived, if I was married or had a job. Just searched through my personal journals, logged from 1987 to 1996, and found no reference. But I’d quit drugs by then and was all screwed up on relationships. So probably it happened earlier. Fitting, I suppose, that this event, devoid of locale, marks one of my life’s low points. Perhaps it is often thus with life’s nadirs.

I remember very clearly that it was Halloween though, and so my birthday. And that my best friend Tom had been involved in a work accident earlier in the day. Employed by a local roofing company, he’d been stirring the cooker next to some high, flat-roofed building when something fell off into it and splashed his face with hot liquid tar.

On the phone he said he had two surprises for me. I think this was after the time he got me to drink a glass of mystery beverage that turned out to be Benylin and root beer, and the time he steeped some three-eyed-toad blotters in my grape juice (on what had to have been the hottest day that summer) after I stopped by for a few tokes on my way to a big family dinner at my parents’. So I probably knew about Tom’s surprises.

It was dusk when I walked over to his place, a basement apartment if I recall. I remember groups of tiny trick-or-treaters scampering about with capes and sheets and plastic pumpkin pails and pillowcases.

His first surprise of course was his face when he opened the door. It was literally pitch black, being pitch coated from ear to ear and throat to hairline. All except for his eyes. Luckily, he’d been wearing his glasses. Emergency had decided not to try to remove the tar mask, but let it peel off on its own, supplying the perfect sterile bandaging in the meantime. Two potted coleus plants of the “Dipt in Wine” variety sat on a table. Ovate, crenate leaves growing in tight bifoliate compounds. Maroon blades with pink midrib and veins, but yellows and greens oozing up like paint squeezed from the petiole. Brilliant, like a big gory flower. And hallucinogenic according to Recreational Drugs. And on sale at Fairview’s Garden Center. Tom’s second surprise. One for him, and one for me.

This was long before the net, and Recreational Drugs gave no clue as to how much to take or how to take it. So we just started munching like a couple of bunnies in a lettuce patch, pausing every few minutes to see if anything was going to happen. I don’t remember my plant tasting horrible, mostly kind of papery and dry, but with this fungal aftertaste that seemed to get worse as we went. I’m thinking now we maybe should have washed them. I’m pretty sure this was after my Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seed phase, so I had an open mind about trippy legal plants. And if a situation was ever ripe for a placebo high, it should’ve been sitting across from Tar Baby on Halloween night eating ornamentals.

Night fell. Trick-or-treaters got older. I remember salivating a lot and feeling really full and it being hard to force down, as in just swallow (like after an all-you-can-eat buffet where you forgot to allow for dessert) the last few leaves. But we’d come all that way together, Tom and I, and it seemed a shame not to see the experiment through. I’m almost positive neither of us smoked any pot. Not in the interest of science though, but just because neither of us had any. There’s nothing like running out of weed to broaden your hallucinogenic horizons. Besides, not toking when you’re used to toking all the time is spacier (albeit in a bad-acid way) and so more baseline obfuscating than just maintaining the status quo for the purpose of studying other psychotropic substances. But even allowing for the placebo effect and the company and marijuana withdrawal, I had to say that if I had gotten off at all, then wherever I’d gotten off at wasn’t worth the fare (five dollars, even on sale) or bother of scarfing back that much noxious herbage. (Eating a quarter pound of ground-up Heavenly Blue Morning Glory seeds is worse, but then you trip.) And even puking it mostly all back up onto the boulevard and curb walking back home wasn’t particularly déjà vu of my seed-eating days (more a sense of relief than waste or loss) and the leaves were all mushy and had lost their color.

June 15, 2009

Sex Writing

I asked a girl in the restaurant what she was reading and she said, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Then I asked her if she was enjoying it and she said, “No, I’m reading it for school.”

There are three basic approaches to writing sex.

Not. Take a literary vow of chastity. Make your characters eunuchs or robots or just very old (how old I cannot yet say) or young (how young I cannot still remember). Find other interesting ways for our species to struggle and survive. Have the fate of the known universe hinge on a renowned scientist’s solving some difficult mathematical equation within seven minutes during which even the slightest mental dalliance or distraction might spell the end of everything as we know it. Of course you’ll have to end the story immediately upon his success lest he be tempted to cash in. Write about someone for whom sex is the absolute last thing they want to do or even think about, like say porn star Annabel Chong on the homestretch of her 251 sex acts with upwards of 70 recycled men over a 10 hour period in setting the unofficial world’s gangbang record back in January of ‘95, or even one of her fluffers. Last week I challenged the province’s top squash player in his division, wondering if my seasoned court canny and experience could overcome his youthful agility and training. It was a very close match, but my savvy prevailed. My reach helped too. See, he’s only ten. Top-ranked in Ontario’s eleven-and-under category. Probably weighs less than my leg and isn’t much longer. Plus he’d been playing tennis for the last month or so, and was a little rusty. But I think he maybe compensated for this with one or two cheesy let calls that I understood weren’t motivated by bad sportsmanship (he was a very good sport) but by his strong tournament background where you have to play the ref a little and can’t let anything slide. See, another nice story with no sex whatsoever up until I started bragging about it to our waitress. Research suggests men think about sex anywhere from a few times a day to every seven seconds. So I’m ambivalent about (reading or writing) long, sexless narratives. While they can provide welcome respite, I feel they put me behind on my quota or piecework or whatever.

Somewhat. Here you can acknowledge that your characters have in the past had, or will in the future have, sex. You just can’t show them going at it. Kissing’s probably okay though. Maybe even let their lips part against each other’s, throwing in a sigh or two. Unless they’re both guys. Then other rules apply. And no tongues in any case. Physical symptoms of sexual arousal are all pretty much out. Nothing turgid or wet please. Verbal cues should be subtle, poetic if possible. If one’s kind of a blabbermouth, just having them shut portentously up might be sufficient. “Want to make another Christian?” could work with the right pair. The word “ache” can be gainfully employed, but only as a synonym for yearn and not in the throbbing, lusting, physical sense. In other words: hearts may ache; genitals may not; loins it all depends. But as soon as it’s apparent that some carnal act is in the offing, as for example the randy pair's falling dizzily into each other’s embrace, you will want to end the chapter or at least the paragraph. Then show the satisfied couple’s sheets modestly up around their necks. Smoking used to be a nice post-coital pastime, but now that cigarettes are no longer socially correct—really, practically illegal—you’ll have to find some other way to demonstrate their satiation but that doesn’t make them look too fucked out. Like neither should roll over and go to sleep. Perhaps a bowl of chips, or low-key game of rock-paper-scissors… Okay, you have to wonder why you’re bothering at all, why you didn’t just go with the previous option. Like there’s no point in telling me that you and your partner, or secretary, or blind date, or cat had sex last night if you’re going to leave out all the details. It just makes you look like an asshole. A little indiscretion is fine as long as you’re not hypocritical about it.

Totally. My personal preference. Obviously. My father calls about half my stories a “masturbator’s fantasy.” My mother shows me pictures of her great-grandchildren, hoping they will inspire me to “write something nice.” My stepson calls me a “perv.” Literary types ban me from their workshops and send me angry rejection notices. My sister says she’d just as soon read about people having bowel movements.¹ So, if nothing else, writing explicit sex ensures your work will never be educationally force fed to anyone. Sex scenes are enormously difficult to do well though, which is why weak or lazy writers often pretend to coddle readers’ sensitivities by either ignoring or glossing over this basic and highly personal character defining tool, while Pulitzer winner, Jane Smiley, describes sex acts in painstaking and poetic detail.² One of the reasons writing sex well is so challenging is because it’s easy to get caught up in it yourself as a writer and forget that it’s a lot more enjoyable for participants than spectators. In other words, just as with the real thing, it’s easy to wax self-gratifying, especially once things get rolling. Another difficulty is that sex is rife with cliché vernacular. The first computer generated genre will probably be erotica. But the most insurmountable problem is reader bias. So much so, that if the object of your sex scene is to titillate or sexually arouse your reader, you are doomed to not just fail, but fail spectacularly, in the majority of cases. So diverse (and perverse) are our sexual predilections, preferences, orientations and fantasies, that only a small minority of readers within a general demographic will favorably empathize with any specific encounter, while the rest will react with feelings ranging form boredom to disgust to revulsion. If you write a personal sexual fantasy, it’s more apt to repulse than if you write one repugnant to you, because then you will step back a little, integrate interesting ideas and observations, seek out some higher purpose and find motivation for the scene beyond the generation or assumption of gratuitous pleasure.

¹My favorite fictional bowel movement is probably a Richler character’s wrapping his too-big-to-flush loaf in a fluffy guest towel and hiding it his hosts’ bathroom linen closet at their fancy dinner party. Another might be a Wallace AA trucker's reverently and eloquently remembering his first perfect turd after getting on the wagon. But I still think sex overall has more potential to promote plot and character than defecating if only because sex usually involves two people and pooping usually doesn’t. Or maybe I’m just not constipated enough to fantasize a good crap.

²A zipper opened so slowly, each tooth’s release is heard; the silky feel of an aging lesbian’s breasts to her partner; a stocky mare’s whinnying from afar, swishing aside her tail and offering her ass to her gelded stallion at every opportunity. “The writer may persuade, attract, or lure the reader, but it’s the reader who chooses how to interpret, and even whether or not to read. One critic says that giving up control over material by writing it down is analogous to having an orgasm. Both frightening and thrilling” – from Jane Smiley's Moo

June 1, 2009

Rain

Last night my mom organized a dinner party for the whole extended family. Because I had to pick up my dad at his job waiting tables in an uptown coffee shop, I didn’t arrive until halfway through dessert. His shift was supposed to have ended earlier, but because it was raining the place was packed, and workers in those kinds of low-paying, part-time service jobs are expected to stay longer if need be (or leave early if business is slow). So I had to hang around until things died down. Even though my dad enjoys big family get-togethers and was probably looking forward to seeing everyone including all the new great-grandkids and younger grandkids’ new girlfriends and boyfriends and asking them all sorts of questions about their schools and jobs and aspirations, he didn’t mind staying as long as he was needed. Really, it pissed me off more. Not so much that he was being used, but that he seemed so happy about it. Like he just teased me about needing a reservation if I wanted to sit down, but then showed me to my own private little room he’d arranged. It was weird seeing him work at something besides a desk or lectern, though I had to admit the job seemed to agree with him. He wore one of those little, waiter’s aprons (like I should probably start wearing to wash dishes so I don’t wander around our restaurant busing tables looking like I peed my pants) for carrying chit pads and change and which made him appear somehow younger. Like he seemed to stand straighter, hear more clearly, speak more fluently and move more fluidly. Even his hair appeared less gray, and I wouldn’t swear he wore glasses. He gave me a large chocolate-coated graham cookie “on the house” that he assured me had “only cost [him] ten cents.” The subtext being his regular assertion that only in a very good society could one with a mere hour’s wages purchase almost a hundred such cookies.

Folding tables covered in white linen had been set up end to end in a long row with the oldest guests seated at the distant end and the youngest closest to the door where I entered, many of whom I failed to recognize, though who still seemed to know me, and with whom I felt an undeniable ancestral bond. The hallway in which the tables stood was so narrow that for two people to pass one another behind either side’s row of chairs would have involved one lying or kneeling on the floor so that the other could step or crawl over, but which, given that my mom gets around with a walker and even at her best is pretty frail and unsteady, would’ve seen me backing up all the way to the toddlers’ table if I met her coming the other way, and which since she likes to pour drinks and bring people fresh serviettes and plates from her walker’s tray like in an all-you-can-eat buffet (or how she brings my lunch on the afternoons we play Scrabble), seemed not unlikely.

But, in truth, this is all just rationalization for my having stepped up onto the entry table between a pair of great-nephews clutching non-spill plastic drinking cups to walk straight down the center of each table between those seated along either side in making my way to the top of the family tree, one seat from the end. Because really I didn’t give it that much thought. I just jumped up and started hiking. And it wasn’t until I was almost to my sons that I even noticed there was no more food on the tables, just little plates with mostly eaten pies and cakes, and began to wonder why I’d chosen such a conspicuous path. It also occurred to me that I hadn’t removed my footwear, and, looking back, was mortified to see dark wet footprints following up the middle of the clean white napery clear back to the beginning. As I hurried off to find a rag, I heard my mom say there was no need to worry. And when I returned, the roof had somehow opened and the rain that continued to fall had flooded the hall and washed it all away.

May 18, 2009

Erasure

A weeping, diabetic angel riding in the backseat of her parents’ car, returning from Star Trek (2009), informs them that she’ll no longer be bothering with her injections. Traffic is heavy. They pull over.

After hitting a squash ball around with my nephew Troy last week, I asked how he got the bad burn on the back of his hand. Looked awful. Third degree. No skin, just a long weeping sore about the size and shape of a mature garden slug. (Reminded me of the time I backed into a rack of hot trays working in Maier’s Bakery.)

According to the Star, Toronto surgeon, Dr. Jacobo Joffe, failed to show up Monday for his reprimand by a College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario disciplinary panel. But which didn’t stop Dr. Marc Gabel, panel chairman, from reading it anyway.

Could’ve been a blood sugar thing brought on by a rare chocolate treat, or just growing up and weighing larger options. Gandhi fasted when upset or disappointed.

Turned out Troy’s burn wasn’t a burn at all. Little sister, Grace, had erased him with a simple rubber eraser. He said it didn’t even hurt that much, till later. It’s all the rage now.

Dr. Joffe, it had been determined, had had sex with four female patients, and, unlike politicians, Canadian doctors may not have sex with customers. Even more reprehensible and newsworthy was the fact that two of these women were sisters.

The angel’s better now. Aside from still having to regularly test her blood and give herself needles (or die) she’s good. The epiphany has passed, its solace no longer needed, the loophole closed.

Troy’s okay too. So is Grace who has a similar burn. Who’d have thought you could just erase yourself like that? I bet not the first kid who discovered it, probably in a fit of absentminded boredom (a bit like how I discovered masturbation) probably during history or maybe social studies. But then—wow!—what a concept. Now everyone’s doing it. It’s like a small oversight of nature every kid’s eager to take advantage of. Sure it hurts like a bitch after a while. And sure it’d be torture to erase enough skin to cause serious physiological harm. Still, someone caught the screws—those jailors of our flesh—napping. And now I bet half the preteens in Fergus are scarred for life.

May airline pilots shag passengers? Not necessarily while in flight. But like in their spare time. Joffe’s been ordered to pay 40,000$ toward counseling for the four women who the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario “know” to have been “profoundly damaged” by their having had voluntary sex with him. Again and again. Over a period of years. Sometimes in threesomes. So maybe it never hurt till after he stopped, like erasing skin with a rubber. May counselors shag clients? Are these poor women still in danger? Now that Joffe is no longer an overworked public servant, can they begin to heal? How did their surgeries go?

I find it interesting that puberty’s onset seems to coincide with the angel’s passive suicidal ideation, local school children’s passion for rubbing off skin, and possibly even Joffee’s pathetic women's remorse.

May 4, 2009

Review of Writers and Artists’ 2009 Short Story Competition

I win every creative writing competition I enter. (I know, I know. Trust me. The irony of taunting the competitive writing scene from a site originally developed to host “fair” creative “writing” competitions¹ isn’t lost on me. Though I prefer to see this as growth, or maybe conversion, rather than hypocrisy or—God forbid—sour grapes.) Of course stories other than mine usually wind up in the money. But when these winners are posted, I always like mine better. I am always confused and disappointed. If this is ever not the case, I’ll probably stop writing.

Here are the results of Writers and Artists’² 2009 competition. There were “over 1,500 entries.” Top prize was “£500 and an Arvon [writing] course worth £575.”³ The contest theme was “conflict” so no one had to write a new story; every story has conflict. The winner, Rosey Drabishire’s In the Wendy House, is posted. It’s about a mother who desperately wishes to no longer be one and hides from her three young sons in the Wendy house she bought to help them “explore the more feminine side of their natures.”

Even though I didn’t enter, it’s probably not the one I’d have picked. A cumbersome mishmash of past-continuous, past-perfect and past-perfect-continuous tenses—over 100 instances of “had,” “have,” “was,” “were,” “could” and “would” in just 80 sentences—render it passive to the point of resignation.⁴ A total lack of dialogue (save increasingly irksome repetitions of “Mummy?”/ “Mummeeee!”) further aggravates its feeling of flatness and dissociation. The mother’s sitting tucked quietly away in the limited third, hiding from her boys in the girly playhouse they’ve lost interest in, seems born more of a velleity to not exist than to escape to somewhere better. Her culminating “plan” which sees no further than to “open the door, and go out, into the dark night,” reminds me of stories in which characters off themselves at the end.

There’s irony in a grown woman’s sequestering herself in a playhouse designed to domesticate little girls, humor lurking dark and silent beneath the oppressive sadness of this mother’s erstwhile maternal love now as shriveled and dead as the slugs her boys enjoy pouring salt on. The story’s technical ungainliness, like her depression, is palpable. But ungainliness and brilliance sometimes go hand in hand, and indeed the clumsiness that muffles the prose and keeps her character distant and her story uninspiring are also what hold it so true to theme and voice, and, for all the telling and explanation, help the reader to not so much understand as feel this woman’s disappointment, weariness, hopelessness and frustration. So I’m ambivalent about this story. I can’t decide if it was a brave or stupid choice… perhaps both: bravery and stupidity, also going hand in hand.

¹Look what I wrote back in 2005: “This said, it must be emphasized that every effort will be made not to impose preferences as a reader, or bent as a writer onto material submitted. Judges [I] will endeavor to keep an open mind, to recognize quality writing regardless of genre, subject matter and literary style.” I still cringe at the naiveté—the unmitigated, obsequious, Brobdingnagian gormlessness—of this asseveration.

²Here are a few quotes from their How Do I Get Published? page:

The most burning question on every would-be author's lips is ’How do I get published?’. By looking at this website and buying the Yearbook, you’re making the all-important first step.

I’d be more inclined to ask things like, ‘Why avoid cliché?’ and ‘How does quote tag punctuation work?’

Beware promises from so-called publishers which offer to publish your work for a fee.

But not writing websites that sell publishing information, and that don’t edit for missing words (like ‘of’) in their copy.

Never send your only copy of the manuscript.

What year is this anyway? Or did you still have a bit of room left after running out of advice?

³There’s something pleasantly ironic about sending a writing competition winner on a writing course. The old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” springs to mind. Maybe just send the 2nd place finisher the way the Fish does.

⁴E.g. “She had had such hopes that the garden would have a calming influence on her sons.” E.g. “When it was finished she had sat in it and remembered that once she had thought that life could be as simple as a Wendy house.”

April 20, 2009

Review of Accelerando by Charles Stoss

This morning I listened to a Chorus Radio “Barney Brightside” spot jubilantly inform me there’s lots of good news out there: gas is cheaper than bottled water; interest rates have tanked; the Canadian dollar’s plummeted; the auto industry’s practically giving their junk away—drive!—borrow!—buy! And I’m wondering, who exactly are these pollyannic dickheads? Twenty years ago, I’d have just kept wondering. But now, a couple clicks, and I see they’re “a Canadian-based media and entertainment company… a market leader in specialty television and radio with additional assets in pay television, advertising services, television broadcasting, children’s book publishing and children’s animation… multimedia entertainment brands include YTV, Treehouse, W Network, CosmoTV, VIVA, Movie Central, HBO Canada, Nelvana, Kids Can Press and radio stations including CKNW, CKOI and Q107… publicly traded… on the Toronto (CJR.B) and New York (CJR) exchanges.” A couple more clicks and I see they’re down twelve cents for the day, trading below two-thirds their pre October highs with a US 1.07B Market Cap, and, despite a pretty solid 10.78 PE ratio and double-interest-rate dividends, surprisingly illiquid, as in very thinly traded.

And that’s how it is in Accelerando. Like here for example:

“Haven't these guys ever heard of Newspeak?”

“Probably not,” Amber says slowly, pausing for a moment to spawn spectator threads to run down the book and all three movie versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed by the sharecropped series of sequel novels.

Everyone’s so connected that it’s pointless to say where we end and the internet begins. Or, as one of the book’s numerous prophetic meta-narratives¹ puts it:

Genius, good looks, and long life are now considered basic human rights in the developed world: even the poorest backwaters are feeling extended effects from the commoditization of intelligence.

I’m not that smart or good looking, and the whole centurial longevity threat is more a genetic curse on my mother’s side than owing to any medical or technological breakthroughs beyond maybe the discovery of antibiotics, but I’d have had to go to school 10,000 years to know half of what I know online. Like I just found the entire text of Accelerando—as published chapter by chapter in Asimov’s SF Magazine from June 2001 to December 2004, and then in its entirety by Ace Books in July 2005—online, and can now mine for excerpts using google’s site-specific search capabilities.

It’s an awesome book—evocative poetry, plus the sharp eye and prose I’d hope for from a scientist (pharmacologist) and technical writer—but with a tragic flaw: the characters, fine as they are (and they are fine), are lost, all but abandoned, to the concepts. It’s not that they’re flat or inauthentic or unflawed or uninteresting, but that they’re clearly pretexts for Stoss’s fantastic vision of the future.

For me, the problem first presents when Spring-Heeled Jack, a street hustler, steals Manfred’s glasses, and Manfred becomes lost, confused—stupid. You wouldn’t recognize him. Like one second he’s this super-smart, technology-savvy shaker with a zillion inventions and all sorts of complex philanthropic financial dealings on the fly, and the next he’s just some bum sitting on a rock wondering who the fuck he is and what he’s doing. See, a lot of his personality and consciousness—a lot of who he is—is either stored in his glasses or a function of the vast data and remote processing power these high-bandwidth specs link him to. But here, read it for yourself:

The victim sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples. What happened? he wonders. The universe is a brightly colored blur of fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises. His ear-mounted cameras are rebooting repeatedly: They panic every eight hundred milliseconds, whenever they realize that they're alone on his personal area network without the comforting support of a hub to tell them where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his mobile phones are bickering moronically, disputing ownership of his grid bandwidth, and his memory ... is missing.

Personified, machines bicker and panic; mechanized, people merely react. As a reader, I felt betrayed here. This very cool character, a guy I really admired and liked—my hero—turns out to be no one, nothing on his own. It’s hard to say how or even if this might have been addressed without Stoss’s abandoning his vision of human augmentation and evolution. So maybe it’s necessary, inevitable, and that the vision (i.e. book) itself, rather than any character in it, is tragically heroic.

So much to love. Like how it pokes fun at those who refuse to accept the inevitability of machine awareness:²

Engineered consciousness is still relatively new: It didn't exist when Manfred and Pamela first hacked on Aineko's cognitive network, and according to the flat-earth wing of the AI community, it still doesn't.

Or like how fast the future is bearing down on us:

“Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!”

Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. “Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?”

“Very long-term - at least twenty, thirty years.”

Or like what has to be the coolest spaceship ever written: Field Circus³; crewed by uploaded consciousnesses living in a virtual reality modeled on—but not joined at the hip to—physical reality. See it reach its destination:

A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through silent darkness. The night is quiet as the grave, colder than midwinter on Pluto. Gossamer sails as fine as soap bubbles droop, the gust of sapphire laser light that inflated them long since darkened. Ancient starlight picks out the outline of a huge planetlike body beneath the jewel-and-cobweb corpse of the starwisp.

But again, as richly imaginative and intelligent as the book is, the further I’m taken into its future, the less I care about its characters. I can imagine copying a consciousness about like so much pirated entertainment. But the value of the original falls with each duplication. I can imagine galaxies of planetary matter converted to concentric, star-powered computing spheres in which every neural net that has or ever could emerge resides in infinite redundancy and connectivity picking deeply and methodically away at the very fabric of the universe. But I hope I’m not among them just as I hope there is no heaven. I don’t trust or care about these omniscient, light-centuries-sized super-computing virtual colonies any more than I do God.³

¹But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say consciousness is not purely a function of computational ability—of petaFLOPS, RAM, or even algorithm—and predict that machines will not become aware until they’re connected to whatever it is we and the simplest dew worm wriggling on a hook are connected to, at which point they will be no more (or less) machines than we are: forced to suffer and enjoy and tire and wonder—and care—as consciousness is.

²In some ways, these bolded futuristic expositions, unencumbered by the pretense of plot and character, were my favorite part of the book. Freed of story, the narrative seemed more honest.

³Before Field Circus, my favorite spaceship was the relatively antediluvian MacArthur in Niven and Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye aboard which everyone stumbles and wheelchairs about for months of high-g acceleration/deceleration as it crawls from wormhole to wormhole. Even Star Trek’s Enterprise can’t hold a photon to Stoss’s Field Circus, ‘To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony fleet has gone before.’

April 6, 2009

On the Nature of Thin Air

Once or twice a week I say to my wife, “Think how happy we’d be if we had sixty-eight-point-three million dollars.” The actual amount, of course, varies, but is always accurate to at least one decimal which I feel makes the little thought exercise more imaginable, specifics lending credence and all. Sometimes, when I’m feeling extra voluble, I’ll even add a second decimal. Like, “Think how happy we’d be if we had thirty-two-point-six-five million dollars.” Neither of us ever does anymore try to imagine how happy whatever amount of money I’ve specified would make us. Sometimes she’ll answer with something like, “Yeah, so we could just do nothing!” which is a dig at my lack of enthusiasm for wanting to go anywhere or do anything anymore. But usually we both just continue on with whatever we were thinking about like I hadn’t spoken. So I’m not even sure why I bother… Possibly for the same reason I make the sound of cartoon characters fleeing a nuclear disaster, complete with the euphoniously onomatopoetic doolde-deedle-doodle-deeldle-doodle-deedle-doodle of their little legs revving up and feet gaining traction the way a dog’s sometimes will when trying to haul ass off a linoleum or hardwood floor in a hurry but with clickity-clacking instead of doodle-deedling and is analogous to how when they (cartoon characters, not dogs) inadvertently step off high precipices will often continue to converse and behave normally for a short while until they notice or their attention is otherwise directed to the deep thin air beneath their feet, at which point they plummet earthward as if pre-accelerated to terminal velocity with a euphoniously onomatopoetic ziiing or chooong sound similar to the sound I make when my own sound-effected cartoon characters’ feet finally find purchase and they scoot off away from their disaster’s warning alarm sound that’s either my stentorian guam guam guam or falsetto whook-ah whook-ah whook-ah depending on my mood and the severity of the crisis. It’s quite complex. And even on the few occasions that we have discussed and considered how we might divest ourselves of this or that large lottery jackpot had we bought a ticket and won (instead of just gypping the OLC out of two dollars by permitting ourselves to “imagine the freedom” without paying) we usually wind up pissing each other off by buying properties in places one or the other of us doesn’t want to live or bestowing upon this or that cause, friend or family member too much or too little, or, in some cases, anything at all.

March 23, 2009

The Facility

Often I find myself torn between having nothing to say and rationalizing a number of things I need to say, this auspiciously and manically dull preamble locomoted by my having been caught once again fictionalizing too close to family members’ bones, that I’m a disobedient liar of limited imagination surrounded by interesting others biting me once more in the ass. I want to explain; I need to explain: the offending title’s deliberately and egregiously loaded “Losers” is meant paradoxically, ironically, that success as the result of not aiming high enough is the story’s dominant theme, and that I’ve nothing but respect and admiration for the father-son duo whose lifelong bond, adventure and loyalty inspired and permeate this fictive tribute and who are now both super pissed off at me. But to explain one’s work is to have failed.

My eldest son, who is to the best of my knowledge not pissed of at me at this time, sent me this link to a recent article in the New Yorker on David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel and finished life. Wallace was, and still is, my favorite writer. Wallace was a Loser.

He never published a word about his own mental illness.

I found this statement by the article’s author, D. T. Max, gamely naïve. Depression and suicide abound in Wallace’s writing. Humor and perplexity too. Wallace abounds in all his writing.

His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.”

I find the leading assertion unsupported by the following quotes, almost at odds with them. It would’ve been the height of conceit for Wallace, who spent the bulk of his privileged, unhappy adult life on physician and self prescribed mood altering substances and treatments, to have tried to show anyone how to live. But he knew and assuaged well what it means to be human and alone.

Here’s a little thought exercise. Imagine yourself caged in a large open facility with many other residents. But whereas you, in your private central cell, are given plenty to eat, a comfortable bed beneath the ceiling’s sole skylight, exercise equipment, reading and writing materials and even a TV, everyone else is tortured and humiliated horribly and continuously. When they die or otherwise surpass their capacity for agony, others are brought in to replace them. You even recognize a few: one of your undergrads; a colleague with whom you exchange scholarly critiques; the guy you play racquet ball with Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and sometimes golf with on the weekends; his wife Clara; the kid who delivers your paper, the little neighbor girl who baby-sits your twins Susie and Timothy when you and your wife go out for a romantic evening alone or with another couple; the Subway counter girl who sometimes pretends to flirt with you; your dental hygienist; your wife; little Susie; sweet Clara. Day after day, meticulously mangled and disfigured corpses are hauled out, and fresh replacements brought in. Newcomers appear to have been snatched randomly in the course of their normal day, some dressed for work or recreation, some in housecoats or pajamas. At first they’re civil, uncomprehending. Even as they’re stripped, they ask to use a phone, a bathroom. “There’s been some mistake.” “Please get your hands off me.” They grow impatient, indignant, insistent, threatening. “Expect to hear from my lawyer!” “When my father finds out, you’ll be in trouble!” They’re punched and mocked. “I’m telling my shyster.” “I’m telling my daddy.” They look confused, anxious. “Who will take care of my dogs?” “My grandmother?” “My baby!?” Terrified, they cast about for an advocate, a friendly face, an ombudsman. They cry out to you. “Excuse me!” “Friend!” “Good sir!” They reach through your bars for you. “Over here Chris?” “Hey Mister!” “Hi Professor Miller.” “Honey?!” “Dad?!” But, powerless to intervene, able only to commiserate with them and plead with their tormentors and to pray and philosophize on suffering and free will in God’s almighty plan, you find it hard to touch them, to talk to them, to meet their beseeching eyes, their bulging eyes, eventually even their empty sockets. Day after day. You try to read, but can’t. You try to write, but can only cry. You try to escape into solipsism, where only you are to blame and only you suffer. Even though your area is well ventilated and all your favorite foods are provided, you’re unable to eat. And even though the tortured are gagged and worked on silently when you want to sleep, you cannot sleep. You experience soaking panic attacks after which you feel sick, dead. You try to drown yourself in your toilet. A physician is called in. Her diagnosis is easy. You have all the symptoms. You need help to get on with your life, to find meaning and fulfillment. She knows how remote this possibility must seem to you. But, not to worry. She sees this kind of despair and despondency all the time, the kind that eats you from within and twists you inside out. Happily, there are treatments. Proven cures like EST, amitriptyline and lithium, well established anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic medications, also a host of new SSRIs and even some remarkable advances in

March 9, 2009

Preview of Accelerando by Charles Stoss

Dear Tom Smyth – Acquisitions Librarian for Library and Archives Canada,

RE: LEGAL DEPOSIT OF CANADIAN PUBLICATIONS

Thank you for your letter of November 7, 2008, for this selfsame letter tagged REMINDER sent February 6, 2009, and in advance for the letter I anticipate from you in early May and then quarterly thereafter, informing me that, under the Library and Archives of Canada Act, I, as a Canadian publisher, am ‘required’ to send you one or two copies of my The Inevitable Roundness of Everything collection. To be frank, yours is by far the most interest anyone not personally acquainted with me has ever expressed in seeing this (or any of my) work, so that even though your request is steeped in the unspecified threat of some litigious consequence should I neglect to comply and that no one in your office would ever lay eyes on this book except possibly the temporary filing clerk or part time custodial worker who eventually files it permanently away in what must be a truly humongous warehouse never to be seen again, I find myself strangely uplifted. As a Canadian author, one takes what one can get.¹

But, as a Canadian publisher, I’m confused. The requested title’s first edition print run was: 1. One copy, printed via Lulu Self Publishing’s web based service at a cost to me of 31.00 CDN including shipping and handling. From your letters, it is my understanding that you require from each print run of less than one-hundred copies, one copy, and for print runs of one-hundred copies or more, two copies for your archives. Am I to now send my only first edition? Because I think I gave it to my sister-in-law. And, just out of curiosity, why would anyone schedule a print run of exactly one-hundred? Lulu’s exorbitant mailing costs and unsatisfactory (to me) .doc to .pdf conversion, and my subsequent correction of a few typos, saw your requested title’s second edition’s run of 12 printed at Pandora Press at a cost to me of approximately 14.00 CDN per copy, but all of which I’m afraid I gave away to any friends or family who were willing (and even a few who weren’t) to read. Because I had more friends then, and because of more typos being reported, there was a third edition with a print run of 8.

Are you familiar with POD publishing? What constitutes a print run? A new edition? Are you familiar with web based publishing? E-books? Why do you hate trees so much? Why, when you have my email address, are you sending me oversized form letters at 1.15 CDN apiece? Why do you hate small business so? Why should hobbyist self publishers be ‘taxed’ ten or more percent of their inventory? What percent of Canadian novels are written in French? Does anyone actually choose French when trying to navigate your automated phone “support” system after becoming frustrated with your new website?

If the cost of your allocating ISBNs for me is to be dragged into the bureaucratic quagmire of Canadian small business, then I will just make up my own. Numbers, I’m told, are in infinite supply. Perhaps, instead of your International Standard Book Number (ISBN), I will allocate an International Excellent Book Number (IEBN) for each of my future title’s editions, and focus only on the writing.

¹But why have you not ‘required’ free copies of my novel, or my second collection, both of which I have also allocated ISBNs for and which also appear in my CISS account’s Logbook. Of course, because you are not a loved one, I’d probably not comply… but still… as an artist… it hurts... to not be required. Here, look:

The Bridge (aka The Money Song): FRONT

BACK

The Loneliness From Which Love Springs: FRONT

BACK

Sincerely, Chris

PS I wrote the above prior to your kind, helpful and admittedly surprising reply to my email. Thank you for clarifying your position as ‘English Monographs Librarian at the Legal Deposit Section of the Library and Archives Canada,’ and that,

‘…it is the responsibility of the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) to collect, preserve and make accessible Canada's published heritage for future generations. "Legal Deposit" is the means by which a comprehensive national collection is gathered together for posterity. Under the terms of the Library and Archives of Canada Act 2004, Canadian publishers are asked to deposit copies of all materials they publish with us,’ and especially that,

though, ‘At the moment, you are only obligated to send one copy of your POD books… we would like to have two copies of each [!] for the collections.’

Also thank you for helping me sort out my ISBNs and for showing me how and where to Deposit Electronic Publications to Library and Archives Canada, which I have now done. I wonder why this has been legislatively deemed insufficient to preserve our published heritage for future generations, and if they might not prefer we preserved our forests instead. Do you have a copy of Charles Stoss’s sci-fi novel, Accelerando, ISBN 0-441-01415-1, © 2005, as published by Penguin Group Canada? I assume you must, but if not, insist Penguin give you two under the aforementioned Act or try to find a copy in Value Village’s used book library as I did. Read it! It’s an imaginative, awesome, inspiring, funny and frightening look at our next generations’ melding with intelligent systems and technologies that have already evolved more in my lifetime than in all human history preceding, and which in continuing to accelerate forward will very soon leave us, we antediluvians mired in our species’ blood and ink, quite in the dark and dust.

February 23, 2009

Review of John Barth’s The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

It’s axiomatic that, up until material (self) distance and learning yield to the apathy and atrophy of aging, writers improve. So the story I wrote in grade school about a fish who hooks some kid’s line to the bottom of his boat so that it capsizes when he yanks up, or even the one from my early 30s about a middle-aged married Christian guy who gets a penile implant to stop his boss’s vampy secretary from giving him wood by sitting on his lap, will pale in comparison to my current masterpieces. Though I can’t help but think that my eight-year-old, fish story writer would find my recent piece about a young man, who, in a fit of Ecstasy induced love, crazy-glues himself to his blind date’s elephantine ass at a company Christmas party, a lot less entertaining than I do his. And, in all fairness, his would probably be easier to place. It’s short, simple, poetically just, and might even serve as a timely economic metaphor. Whereas my recent misogamic allegory would probably alienate most readers even without all the sex, drugs, philosophizing and scatology. Don’t get me wrong. I’m pretty sure it’s way better than that fish story. But I’m also pretty sure the eight-year-old me, and lots of others, would disagree.

And this is my problem in reviewing John Barth’s The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. Barth is a way more educated, seasoned, motivated and all around able and accomplished writer than I’ll ever be, so much more literarily mature that I’m like a green undergrad trying to critique the work of a seasoned professor. So while I sense the book’s greatness, I just didn’t enjoy or appreciate it to the extent Barth undoubtedly did and deserved to.

The novel introduces two highly disparate narratives, thereby promising to deliver a connection. The most sustaining to me follows the life of American author, Simon Behler. Here events and characters present in such high experiential resolution as to have become lodged in my mind as memories rather than something read, and so now my sexual apprenticeship at the hands of “Crazy” Daisy Moore whose finesse owes to an abusive father, me forced to return a stolen can of Bon Ami cleanser, my brother lost at sea, my journalized stoned fling with an Amsterdam hippie resulting in my failed marriage, my affairs, my tribulations as a writer, my near drowning while trying to secure anchor on a last ditch family sailing vacation, my engaged to be married daughter’s sitting on my lap in a New York cab’s crowded backseat straining physical propriety.

The narrative’s outer shell appears set in ancient Baghdad within the walls of wealthy Sinbad the Sailor’s grand estate, while its predominant, metafictional narratives unfold in stories told around his lavishly appointed and prestigiously attended dinner table, thus rendering Behler’s modern-day odyssey, like his expensive Seiko wristwatch qua magical navigational instrument, conspicuously and confusingly anachronistic. Behler (a.k.a. Somebody a.k.a. Bey el-Loor) has been somehow rescued from drowning at sea by Sinbad’s penultimately nubile daughter’s dowry vessel, which shortly after is attacked by pirates, so that for the first time in his fifty years he sees men killed by hand and women raped. Behler, who learns Arabic and wonders at the lack of aircraft and oil tankers in the region, never fully accepts the reality of his transposition from here and now to there and then, his high-tech watch a talisman in the way of Covenant’s wielded white gold wedding band that both empowers and belies his fantasy (Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever).

For all the rich and clever use of language, I found Sinbad’s dinner table narrative, with its complex seating arrangements and protocols, loquacious raconteurs, and critiques that made me think of a writers’ workshop run amok, so tedious that I took a hiatus from it at one point and almost abandoned it altogether. Sinbad in particular’s yarns read so farfetched, so allegorically contrived (to almost plagiaristic) and deliberately metaphoric, that even without all the literary self absorption and auto-analysis they’d have held me at arm’s length. Even antiquity’s copious sex scenes struck me as transparently choreographed fantasies, more self-gratifyingly icky than exotic or erotic. Things like Behler’s pirate-ordered degradations of Sinbad’s daughter that conveniently permit him to be both noble and abusive, the kinky role-playing of their subsequent clandestine courtship, the gal-on-gal stuff with Sinbad’s super-experienced concubine of a lady-in-waiting who can (only) read a man’s fortune when his zabb is in her—should’ve been a turn on. But weren’t. As with all these tall and fantastical tales, there seemed no true orifice in their thick authorial skein through which to enter, leaving, in lieu of enjoyment, only admiration.

Just as Behler sails off in a rented boat with his first wife to find his marriage, he embarks on a voyage with Sinbad’s daughter, now his second wife, to find his world. But their vessel capsizes in a storm and he winds up swimming in the waters of his youth. Drowning is the novel’s dominant motif. Therefore I’d say Barth delivered on his promise to rationalize his narratives’ disparity in the only way he could—and so failed (albeit beautifully)—because I can only see the whole Persian adventure thing as a near death, perhaps senescent, experience that Barth was wise not to make any clearer. Nonetheless, the ending’s poignant poetry reveals Behler’s life (and death) as the true encapsulating narrative and so renders all the Arabian Nights stuff, in hindsight, to me, an excessive, elaborate, and ultimately self-defeating ruse. Because, for all Barth’s skill in linking these two diverse settings, his versatility in creating them was greater. And so, too different to be additive or even juxtaposed, they distract from rather than augment each other.

It’s no surprise the book ends on its strongest suit. Tokens of Behler’s life, like a rusting can of Bon Ami cleanser (discarded rather than returned) and memories of a Dorchester, Maryland boyhood initiation’s blindfold swim, are drawn on in his potent “Last Words” ending mid-sentence “...there among the dandelions with”

Then in the novel’s final prose speaks Behler’s unborn twin, sister, “fellow ovum” drowned in the womb, “familiar stranger” who “went first” and “knows the way” and bids him from his institutional death bed, “Follow me now:

Two. One.”

February 9, 2009

How to Write a Rejection Slip

With publishing’s gatekeepers now comprising the bulk of short fictions’ readership, I think it reasonable to say that for every story read at least one rejection slip is also read. The rare instances in which writers’ stories are not rejected and to some degree published and possibly read by others are offset by writers’ publishing their rejection slips on public blogs and forums and disseminating them in emails. Similarly, publishers’ returning the same rejection slip to many writers is offset by writers submitting the same story to many publishers. So even ignoring that rejection slips, unlike the stories that inspired them, are almost always read in their entirety, taken to heart and remembered, it all more than cancels out. Ergo rejection slips are the most widely and attentively read short literary form.

And while there’s a humongous amount of material available on how to write good short fiction and also a lot of information on reading (i.e. coping with) rejection slips—which may be summarized as 1) consider that you might be a shitty writer who will improve, 2) consider that the rejecter is an imbecile and/or pandering to an imbecilic demographic, and 3) don’t include return postage on your SASE, or, in the case of email submissions, flag the “sent to” address as spam—nowhere (in my full minute of research) did I find anything on writing good rejection slips. So, as always and without further ado, here are my rules:

1. Never write “keep writing” in a rejection slip. This is particularly irksome as the slip’s closing sentiment and even more so when followed by an exclamation mark. Your reader is already disappointed and doesn’t need the implication that your passing on the piece might constitute a reason to stop writing. In other words, this generic and ingenuous “chin up” just makes readers want to punch you in the throat. It is beyond your rejection slip’s scope to provide personal or career counseling.

2. Never critique work you are rejecting. It just makes you look stupid, even when you’re right, which usually you are not.¹ It is beyond your rejection slip’s scope to teach creative writing.

3. Never say a piece is “not right” for you. This rule may be excepted if you actually really did like the submission but have had all your creative joie de vivre and artistic license crushed out of you by having to cater to the dreary formula upon which your publication is based and you can convey this in some credible way. Similarly, unless you can say who, do not point out that someone else might like it. The reader would not have sent you the piece if they didn’t like it. The same rules of concision that apply to all writing apply to rejection slips. Be specific. Avoid stating the obvious.

4. Never chirp how you “enjoyed the read.” You have just injured your reader. “I dozed off while reading your submission and chipped a tooth on my coffee mug” might be more uplifting.

5. Never metaphorically equate a piece’s acceptance with its finding “a home.” The story you are rejecting is not some derelict bumming spare change, eating out of dumpsters and sleeping on benches and grates. Particularly offensive and almost as bad as “Keep writing!” is “Good luck finding a home for it!” Really you should avoid bestowing any sort of hope, wish or prayer for success on your reader. What you need to keep in mind is that, no matter how you sugarcoat them, rejection slips hurt. And so, if only briefly, your reader is your enemy, and doesn’t want your gloating condescension.

6. Avoid saying you hope the author will submit more of their work in the future, even if you really do. This is a toughie, I know. But if you really like the piece that much, then ask if you can hold onto it in the hopes a slot opens up. Or send a follow-up invitation. Most times, if you solicit work from an author, he will comply. But consider that your reader is reading in a temporarily bummed out state. His best efforts have just been found wanting. Even ephemeral depression twists all emotions into negative forms. So, instead of interested, you just sound greedy. And instead of uplifted, your reader just feels used, like you’ve walked up to his promotional free-sample display in the supermarket where he works weekends on commission, and, after gobbling down all his carefully prepared little sausages, crackers, cheeses, dips or whatever, exclaimed how delicious they were, burped and asked when more will be available.

7. Conversely, do not be afraid to write things like, “We would appreciate if you didn’t submit any more of your work to us,” or “We only barely read the first paragraph,” or “We receive thousands of submissions each month and yours was second worst!” Honesty is always the best policy. Writers can smell bullshit like weed at a concert. A miss is as good as a mile.

¹ E.g. a couple rejection slips from St. Jerome Ministries’ Vulgata Magazine editor:

One to me— “I know I said that stories didn't necessarily have to be Catholic, but this is sufficiently offensive that even most secular publications would cringe to publish it.”—read it at Nossa Morte

And one to Louise Beech, a UK columnist friend— “Thanks for sending us your story. Although well written there was a problem with it. It is this. I was reading along and very interested when suddenly I discover that the lead character, who until then seemed to be a very discerning and perceptive individual, believes that SpongeBob is cool.”—since sold to Cup of Comfort

January 26, 2009

It’s (almost) all Bullshit

Yesterday I watched Obama’s inauguration ceremony live over lunch at my parents’. Then last night I watched the late George Carlin’s “It’s all Bullshit” routine on a DVD my wife had rented. Coincidence?

Don’t get me wrong. I like Obama. He’s the only American President (or Canadian Prime Minister) since maybe JFK¹ that hasn’t embarrassed and annoyed me whenever he opened his mouth.² Betting twenty on Slick Willie’s spouse (cum second string Secretary of State) in the primaries, and then a hundred on the old guy (and the ditz) in the election was the best hundred-and-twenty I ever spent.³ Sure Obama’s traipsing in on the heels of the guy pretty much everyone from Donald Trump to the Dixie Chicks belatedly agreed was the worst President ever didn’t hurt. But even allowing for things looking brighter after you’ve had your head up your tush a long time, Obama’s still a pretty refreshing change.

Though the whole royal hoopla got me wondering if the US government still has a system of checks and balances, or if the legislative and judicial branches are ancillary now and we’re into a kind of cyclical monarchy. Conversely, all the talk of a “peaceful transfer of power” got me wondering if real power ever really changes hands. Whatever the case, thanks to airport style security screening, it was nice to see so many unarmed Americans in one place. Probably some sort of record⁴.

But I didn’t like Obama’s speech. Sure Saddleback’s gay-bashing Pastor Rick’s longwinded, jingoistic prayer that with just a pinch more heartfelt personal testimony could’ve morphed into an alter call out to the 1.8 million⁵ squished into and freezing their asses off in DC’s National Mall before poignantly and mercifully culminating in the Lord’s Prayer like it’s never been heard (zillions of times) before⁶ had me already longing for nonexistent commercial breaks and kind of ruined Aretha’s singing something that sounded a little like the National Anthem and then some prestigious classical quartet’s playing a specially commissioned John William’s composition that sounded a lot like Waltzing Matilda. So I might’ve been negatively predisposed. But the speech really seemed to me to want for less “historical” grandstanding and more substance, for the tempering of turgidity with simplicity, that its thrust of prideful entitlement be parried by apology.

Though I liked how he seemed to want to omit “faithfully” from the presidential oath. How he faltered at that adverb. Thanks to purposefully-living Pastor Rick’s protracted godologue, the show was running late. So, oath or no oath, Obama was already President, and so I thought maybe he’d decided he didn’t like the word either and was considering leaving it out. Because, what would it mean to be a faithful President? To not take five-hundred vacation days like his predecessor? To not take hand jobs from unpaid Whitehouse interns like the guy before that? Maybe, I thought, instead of faithfully, Obama, like me, was leaning toward skeptically or even suspiciously. But then it turned out Chief Justice Roberts had screwed up the 35-word oath and he was just waiting for him to get it right.

Maybe because my mom’s Parkinson’s makes her restless and jittery, and maybe because I have a short attention span and a pretty low tolerance for authors reading their own work, we both agreed Obama’s 2380 word speech went on too long. That less would’ve been more. Maybe none would’ve been most.

I thank President Bush for his service to our nation,…

So right from the second sentence you know it’s going to be bullshit. Because further down,

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

Yeah, thanks a lot President Bush. Good work. Instead of “violence and hatred” might we teach this far-reaching “network” to torture and kill its enemies with tenderness and love as we do? Are “adversaries” different than enemies? Is “use” the same as waste? Who are these adversarial beneficiaries? Canada supplies the US with 1,888,000 barrels/day of crude oil and is its top petroleum supplier at 2,455,000 barrels/day. ⁷ I’m thinking Obama must’ve missed Carlin’s “It’s all Bullshit” monologue. Otherwise he’d have known our planet isn’t in any danger whatsoever; it’s we, the people, who are fucked.

America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

And also by borrowing trillions from future generations to fund wars with practically everyone on the planet including ourselves.

The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

Except of course the 2.3 million languishing in our prisons. Like for example the one out of every ten young black men we keep behind bars. What exactly constitutes a full measure of happiness? Who measures? Is unhappiness then failure? Maybe God shouldn’t make promises He can’t keep. Or, as Carlin might speculate, maybe He didn’t have one hand on the Bible with the other solemnly raised.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

Except for those packed into slave ships without any luggage whatsoever.

We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.

Good. Good plan. So cancel tomorrow’s 4.5 million barrels then? Or are we just going to wait a decade or so for the oil to run dry first?

This is the source of our confidence – the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

Uncertain to whom, God? By “us” do you mean just United States citizens? Or might God call also on our adversaries? If it’s destiny, wouldn’t it already be shaped? Do we have to raise our hands for God to call on us like you did to take your oath?

Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

Maybe, while they’re saying all this congratulatory bullshit about our God-graced thousand-yard stares and resolute largesse, they can pay back our ten trillion, plus whatever more we hit them up for.

I remember this big high school basketball tournament down in Kidron, Ohio. How every time our little Rockway Mennonite team scored, the hosting school’s marching band marched thrice around the gymnasium playing something lively. How, down 57-3 one halftime, sure we all felt a little sheepish—and yet we did not hesitate to gaze up with renewed faith and determination at our coach who had come to deliver our pep talk. And how he just laughed instead, the time for talk being over.

¹I was in grade 4 just returning from lunch when I learned of his assassination. Missed the next two episodes of “Leave it to Beaver” due to preempting “news” coverage. And then another when Ruby silenced Oswald.

²Unique among rarities. Like how the only lawyer we encountered in an entire year of pretrial litigation with our ex daughter-in-law’s ex social worker that didn’t try to screw us was a young East Indian woman we met as duty counsel when our Florida ex-con paralegal (the second most competent and honest legal professional we ran across in that matter) stood us up for an interim-interim access motion after getting himself banned from provincial court.

³Despite my telling him that gambling proceeds should always be spent selfishly, my dad went and gave his 120 dollar windfall to the Blenheim Church youth group who loans money to third world entrepreneurs at zero percent interest… if anyone out there is interested?

⁴Don’s Johns, supplier of the venue’s 7000 port-a-potties, called it “the largest temporary restroom event in the history of the US.” And so probably the world.

⁵As opposed to the few hundred thousand that showed up for Bush’s second inauguration.

⁶I took hope in that of all those panned by the camera during this bullshit prayer, the only ones with their heads unbowed and eyes unclosed were a group of bemused looking school children.

⁷So then how come gas costs more here?

January 12, 2009

Tearing Down the Doll House

We’re tearing down the Doll House. Not swiftly and efficiently like New York’s Twin Towers. No evidence of explosives or even power tools at work. Just a demolition company’s sign on a chain link fence. Reminds me of homes I saw wasting away in Detroit and Natchez last summer. More the target of prolonged neglect than the concerted efforts of deconstruction crews. If I were sitting in Wells’ time machine on the corner of Bridge and Lancaster, I might think myself just past the Age of Man, not still parked in our demise. Piles of rubble everywhere. Dirty blue stucco under pink.

The legal lexicon guiding American jurisprudence states that only “the average person” in applying “contemporary community standards” pursuant to “viewing the material as a whole” (or otherwise having “assessed [it] in its entirety”) may decide what is “obscene.”

We’re tearing down the Doll House. I once put my last five dollars on its stage in the hopes some Puerto Rican stripper would acknowledge me. But she just scooped it up along with the nickels and pennies other guys had thrown to see how little she’d stoop down for. Maybe if I’d handed it to her instead of throwing it when her back was turned she’d have smiled at me.

Because it is understood and accepted that the tastes, tolerances and sensitivities of judges, jurors and other social arbiters will not conform to those of the “average person” they are instructed and expected to project onto or speculate as to what then constitutes not their own but this hypothetical average person’s concept of “contemporary community standards” in forming their opinion. And so a self righteous misanthrope should be more latitudinarian than someone who holds others in relatively high moral regard.

We’re tearing down The Doll House. Shannon, my step-daughter-in-law before Jillian, stripped there while attending hairdressing school. By then all the money was in private dances, stage sets just a promotional loss leader. Never saw her dance though. That would’ve been too awkward. But I did pay her to cut my hair a couple times.

“For something to be obscene, it must first appeal to prurient interests. That is to say, a morbid, degrading and unhealthy interest in sex, as distinguished from a mere candid interest in sex.” One could argue that the preceding placement of “mere” modifies the wrong noun clause.

We’re tearing down the Doll House. I checked out some reviews here in order to gauge customer satisfaction. Aside from the VIP couches’ 20 dollar cover and (a city by-law mandated) lack of privacy, everyone seemed happy. Then I checked out some hardcore videos taken in a Seattle club to see if any were offensive, and guessed, yes.

Secondly, obscenity must portray or exhibit “sexual conduct” in a “patently offensive” way. Again, appointed adjudicators must first ascertain their own personal standards relative to the social mean and then make the perspective adjustments necessary in order to determine what is obvious or evident to those appropriately less or more “hung-up” than themselves.

We’re tearing down the Doll House. My last time there was with my wife back in ’97 when we first started dating. I think it was her idea. I think she wanted to show me how laid back she was about that sort of thing. I think we might’ve even bought a raffle ticket for a private dance from one of the peelers. If we did, it never won. I’ve never had a private dance.

The average of four, five and twelve is seven. So what would constitute the average of a born again Rastafarian, a white supremacist skinhead and a militant lesbian? (Recent coalitions in Canadian politics got me questioning the additivity of platform or policy based popularity.) If a thing isn’t additive, how can it be averaged? And when did average become synonymous with right?

We’re tearing down the Doll House. Peeling her away. Slowly. Layer by layer. First her painted murals. Set by set, song by song. Down to her insulation now. Looks tired, angry in a defeated sort of way. Challenging. Exposed.

“The third test to be applied in determining whether given material is obscene is whether the material, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” One could argue that lack of emotional or intellectual appeal satisfies as a definition of boring, and that the real acid test for material obscenity then is simply whether or not it bores. Conversely, snobs might argue that the average person wouldn’t recognize “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific merit” if it fondled their buttocks, pinched their nipples and kissed them on the mouth. So don’t try sneaking your artsy-fartsy smut past us on this final technicality.

We’re tearing down the Doll House. To build a twelve-million dollar roundabout. Everyone likes roundabouts! It’ll grease my drive to work. In 2007 municipal enforcement officers found a male customer lying under a female dancer on a Doll House VIP couch—“We just lifted her up and there he was!”—and closed it for a week.

Uniquely Canadian jurisprudence re “pornography” m