WHY READ?

The problem with a love of reading is that it can disconnect you from the real world around you, making you think thoughts and imagine images that don't have any relation to what's right there in front of your face. You read a book about Taiwan, and suddenly your brain is immersed in facts and figures that are interesting, compelling, potentially moving, but the cars that pass by your house, the birds that chirp overhead, the clouds that do their cloud-like things, remain unnoticed. The reality you inhabit becomes an appendage to the more vibrant world that your intellectual pursuits provide.

So what do we read for then? To connect to something bigger than us. To gain insights into who we are and why we do the things that we do. To know that we are not alone.

But we know that already, don't we? We can walk outside, turn right, knock on our neighbour's door, and our loneliness becomes an illusion. There's a person there, asking who we are and what we want. The deeper insights that books allow, the knowledge that we gain, pales in comparison to the flesh that we now face, flesh attached to a face, and a chest, and a torso, flesh that forces us to confront another living creature, and share our loneliness, our confusions and questions.

Books are an escape. Books are a journey. Books are the means by which we makes sense of a senseless world. These are the reasons that readers give for living and loving books. They're the reasons that I give, too.

But is it all bull? If you want an escape, step out your door. Go on a journey to a new place, a new street, a new shopping mall. If you want to make sense of a senseless world, ask your local priest, rabbi or grocery-store clerk. Those are real people, stuck in the same world you are, dealing with the same daily aggravations that drive us all slowly, unavoidably insane.

I think our love for books is simpler than that, and it comes down to words. Words, words, words. We like words. We like what words do. We like the way they interact with themselves and our own psyche.

Everything else -- escape, knowledge, entertainment -- is a byproduct of what those words do to our nervous systems. We read because are bodies are wired to get off on the electric, kinetic effect that good words grouped together can create. We like the sounds that are formed in our head as our eyes scan the page. We like the buzz and the pulse. All the other good stuff is a not-so-accidental offshoot of the language; the letters are our entrypoint into those other worlds and our lifecraft when we're lost. They give us what the real world withholds -- all of the emotion, all of the knowledge, encapsulated in twenty-six member states, with none of the attachment that life demands.


If you don't get off on the language, you don't get off on reading. And if you do, it's good to remember that life, too, has its own occasional rewards, as transitory as they sometimes seem.

FIFTEEN YEARS FROM NOW

A cool and almost wet Saturday morning. Rare lately. Appreciated now. A respite from the sun and sweat. A rotating fan blows on my neck. An empty Pink Lemonade Snapple bottle sits beside the computer. It has been awhile since I've tasted a Snapple, and it tastes good, tastes real, even with all its artificial, sweetened glory. I can see and feel all of these things, and for some strange reason this makes me feel good, as if I'm appreciating that which is usually neglected, as if the little things have somehow become big things in my mind, achieved a weight that they deserve but aren't usually allowed. I think of all the things that have been crammed into my head, useless things, irrelevant things, facts and dates and names and scents from my past, my high school, my classroom in Japan, thousands of raw, inert facts, learned and glimpsed once, then stuffed away, forgotten. It can be overwhelming, if dwelled upon, but then I remember to focus on this fan right here and right now, and the wind from the fan, and the lack of heat, and the taste of Snapple still on my lips, and for some reason I can't quite explain I hope that I won't forget this moment, that it will come back to me on a cold winter night fifteen years from now, when I am forty-four, in Canada, awake, listening to a winter storm, that it will give me a strange sort of comfort, a remembrance of youth, if nothing else, before I sink back into sleep.

WHAT NOW?

I read an old interview with playwriter/screenwriter/filmmaker David Mamet recently, which got me thinking about the kind of stuff I like to think about, which is the future, the past, fate, destiny -- you know, all of those esoteric concepts that are always overlooked in school, in favor of such important, crucial ideas like imaginary numbers and the International Date Line. (I still don't get 'imaginary numbers'. And try explaining what the International Date Line is to a group of slightly confused Cambodian university students. I've been there. It wasn't pretty.)

Mamet was making kind of an offhand remark, which is where all the great wisdom is inevitably found. He was saying that there really is no 'future' -- that the very concept of the 'future' is simply a means by which those in power maintain power. "Do what we say, and do it now, or else W, X and Y will take place. Oh, and maybe even Z, if you're not careful."

Makes sense to me, especially in light of multiple 'terror warnings' and threats of attack on American soil. We sacrifice our daily lives for what might be, could be, probably won't be.

I like to think of it like this: The future is now, just extended, like a twirly straw, and we never, ever get there, because it is always now, this moment, and not then, or the next moment. It's forever now.

Which puts even the very concept of the 'future' in a tricky place. Where will I be in that mythical, non-existent point in time? Will I still be in Cambodia five years hence? Unlikely, very unlikely, but not impossible. And when (or if) that five year span comes to a head, will I then proclaim: "Aha! I'm now in the future!" No. I'll simply be here, at this moment, doing this thing. Plain and simple. The year 2000 didn't feel like the year 2000 because it wasn't the year 2000, not the one we'd grown up with, that futuristic realm of flying cars and skyway escalators. It was simply now.

And now it's then, and the year 2000 actually seems rather quaint, pre 9/11 and all.

So then: where do we position ourselves, if there's never a next, and only a now? We have to plan for the future, but since it never comes, how do we know if our plans have been fulfilled? One day you wake up and say "Damn, I'm almost thirty," and of course you don't feel thirty, because it was always up-ahead and down-the-line. The plans you made were for that thirty-year old self transplanted from whatever your twelve or fifteen or twenty-one year old self was thinking and feeling and hoping for.

All I know is, the future doesn't exist, but I'd still like to go there, just to chill out, hang out, like Marty McFly in Back to the Future II. When I was younger the future was, indeed, the undiscovered country, this strange and foreign land, waiting to be discovered, if not conquered, but now I see it more as a way-stop, the fast-food place at the side of the highway that you take a break at before getting back on the road again. It's not a place you dwell in. You prepare for it, and you have 'future preference', as Bill Clinton's old prof used to say, but it's merely the repository for this present moment. Everything we're doing is preparing ourselves for the next now. And the next. And the next.

So you better make sure that your now has some weight, purpose and dignity to it, because it's a linked chain, this collection of present moments is, like the Buddhist concept of a reincarnated soul: one candle lights the next, then the next, then the next, so that there is no clear differentiation between the various lives; they are all part of the same, fluid line. Moment leads to moment to moment, each of them building and shaping the next, influencing the next. Each lending gravity or grace to what follows.

So, take care now, is what I'm saying.

It's all you've got.

ONLY CONNECT

What makes good writing good?

I ask because I'm reading this novel right now called Mailman, by J.Robert Lennon, and it's about -- you guessed it -- a mailman, one who inhabits modern-day American suburbia, and it's very well-written, clever, filled with these long and looping sentences that are designed to draw you into the story but also designed, in part, to show off the linguistic dexterity of the writer, drawing attention to the quality and elasticity of the writing, kind of like what I'm trying to do now, writing a long sentence that still somehow has some semblance of control, so you can flip the pages and say: "Damn, this guy's good."

See what I mean?

The novelist Elmore Leonard on his rewriting process: "If it sounds like writing, I cut it."

Meaning, if the language in the story draws attention to itself as language, the author is, basically, showing off. Letting the reader know that he or she is a talented wordsmith, a gifted craftsman; if you're spending all of your time admiring the pretty way that the piece is put together and not concentrating (or caring) about the story, something's out of whack.

I tend to agree.

Take Michael Ondaatje, the Canadian poet/novelist who wrote The English Patient. Fabulous poet, but I can't really get off on his novels, because they're, I don't know, too poetic. Every sentence is this crisp and sharpened jewel. You're meant to pause and ooh and ahh after every phrase.

Poetry, in my humble opinion, is the place for showing off your verbal skills, your ways with words, your capacity to turn English on its head. Poetry is the dazzling little sparkles of sunshine that drift through the summer afternoon; prose is the beam of light itself, pointed and purposeful.

This is not to say that language isn't important when reading a story, or writing a story. It's everything. But the style of the writer should serve the path of the story. You should be sucked in by the writer's prose, yes, but not astonished. Some of my favorite writers, muscular
wordsmiths like John Irving and Norman Mailer, are always insightful, graceful writers, working wonders with our puny language, but it always has a point, their prose; it always has a direction. It's subordinate to the characters and the plot and the theme. It's functional, this use of language, which makes its occasional leap into profundity that much more, well, profound.

I say all of this because writing a blog, even as casual as one as this, is still an exercise in language, in tone, in voice. I'm not writing this the same way that I would write a term paper, or short story, or a letter to the editor. I'm trying to emulate the kind of breezy, conversational tone that most blogs and e-mails have tended to adapt over the last five years or so, because it's easy to read and fun to write. (Who wants to go through life writing term papers every day? Or reading them, God forbid...)

It's my little theory that a whole new form of writing has developed since the dawn of the Internet, and blogs are just an example of it, this kind of casual, lackadaisical prose, trying to simulate the way we speak. It used to be that you did your rigid, serious, writing type writing for your teacher or your boss or your editor (if you were a writer); any casual tone was saved for the recipient of your letters, but realistically, not too many people are writing letters anymore.


So writing in more or less the same way that we speak was not really what people did, until the
Internet exploded and blogs were invented and suddenly everyone around the world was able to read pretty much whatever they wanted. And then you throw in cell phones and text
messaging and who knows what else, and suddenly language is shifting, mutating, morphing into something almost unrecognizable.

As long as it's rooted in communication, it's fine with me. Language started out as merely that, right? Purely functional. And then people got good at it, developed a flair for it, and, bingo bammo, art was formed. Prose was formed. Poetry was formed. And sometimes the artistic flaunting of one's own gifts got in the way of the entire purpose of art which was, well, communication.

The Internet brings us full circle, back to communication, back to me having something to say and you waiting to hear it. (Okay, maybe you're not waiting to here what I have to say...) It's the newest addition to what Gutenberg started awhile back. (No, not Steve; I'm talking about the printing press dude, although he might be distantly related to the Short Circuit star).

So here's to blogs and prose and poetry and every other way that we try to link ourselves with another's thoughts, minds and hearts. Here's hoping that, despite all our recent technological advancements, we never lose sight of language's original intent, nor the wonderfully artistic and malleable ways we can put it to use.

LIL KIM, MODELS FEAR FACTOR AND ALL THOSE CLOSED, IMPENETRABLE DOORS

Across from my apartment, across the street, across the park, just to the left, lies the North Korean embassy in Phnom Penh. It's about a minute walk from my place. A huge house behind a huge gate with not-so-huge guards guarding it. (Cambodians are pretty short.) Outside, on the Clearasil coloured walls, there are a collection of pictures of that kind, sweet, lovable dictator known as Kim Jong Ill. (Oh, and I spelled 'coloured' with a 'u' in it because that's the way that Canadians spell it, and I felt very patriotic for a second there. Flaunting my heritage and all.)

The former Cambodian king, Sihanouk, is good buddies with Kim Jong, graduate of the Don King School of Hair Design. Literally hangs out with him in North Korea three, four months out of the year. The current king, Sihamoni, actually studied filmmaking in North Korea in the 1970's. (How bizarre is that? NYU film school, maybe. USC film school, sure. North Korea?)

Yes, bizarre is the word for that hermetic kingdown.

Sometimes, when I'm walking or running by the North Korean embassy, I glance at those framed photos of the dictator and notice the lackadaisical attitude of the Khmer guards, and the gate to the place that is sometimes swinging open, and I wonder what would happen if I just ran inside.

Not that I would do it. I'm crazy enough to live in Cambodia, true, but not crazy enough to force my way into the North Korean embassy.

But still. I genuinely want to know: What goes on in there? Is there a need for a North Korean embassy here, and a rather big one to boot? I know that there are two North Korean restaurants in Cambodia; I wrote about my visit to the one in Phnom Penh in an earlier blog, as it's owned by the father of an old North Korean student of mine. (I think he's gone back to North Korea, that student, to join the army. Good grief.) So maybe the employees of the restaurant need the facilities of the embassy, 'cause they sure as hell aren't allowed out much on their own, if at all, to wander around the 'democracy' that is Cambodia. Maybe they're training spies -- for who or where or what, I couldn't tell you.

But I want to know.

What do they do in there? Are the North Koreans that are living here sending back secret information to Pyongyang? Hell, I have cable here, and last night I watched an episode of 'Models Fear Factor'. The North Korean embassy has a satellite dish, so maybe everyone inside there was chillin' and watching that, too. Do they go back home and say to their sheltered brethren: "Look yo, you would not believe what's going down in the outside world."

There are so many closed doors in the world. I don't want all of them opened, no, but I do want some of them pried ajar. Just for a moment. Just so I can take a peek.

We pass by them every day, these buildings that guide and shape our world, and there's one right across the street from me, a strange, forbidding one, a North Korean one, and I want to climb that fence, drop to the ground, rush the doors, see what happens. I want one less mystery in the world, just for a day, a moment.

I want all those closed doors to open.

HEAVEN AND EARTH

The other day I watched Oliver Stone's Heaven and Earth, probably his least known film, and, in my mind, one of his best. I first saw it during those slowly dying days of high school, Christmas '93, when Schindler's List had taken the cinematic world by storm. There was little room left for yet another Stone flick about Vietnam. It came, went, disappeared. (Much like Alexander has done.)

I've watched it a few times over the years. It keeps drawing me back. And then I watched it, here, in Phnom Penh, eleven years on, and I picked up so many things I'd never noticed before -- in its story of a young, traditional Vietnamese peasant woman and her life as it's torn asunder by the Vietnam war, both in Asia and America, it achieves a kind of still, Buddhist grace. I'm older, the movie is the same, but it's a new experience now, a richer experience.

So much to love about this movie -- its images, its heart, its blatant, overt romanticism. It is not cynical and hip; it replicates a more innocent, Asian view of the world, where ghosts and fate and karma are all linked with bombs and bullets and helicopters flying overhead.

The main character was criticized as being too passive at the time of its release, too much of a pawn in the story, tossed around from incident to incident -- which, to me, pretty much misses the whole point. Anybody who's spent anytime in Southeast Asia will recognize the raw deal that most young girls have on a continual, daily basis -- the lack of any viable options. The lack of control they have over their own lives. We have so many ingrained notions about narrative, so many expectations. This movie does not necesarily fulfill those, or even try to, which is its strength.

If you've travelled over here, you'll recognize the subtle acts of corruption depicted in the film, the innocent smiles, the wide sky and bright sun. This is a movie about tone and texture and images, which is why the plot gets a little stalled in the end, a little overcrowded, a little rushed.

But so what? Who goes to movies for plot, anyways? We go to experience another life, another view of the world. The narrator of this movie is a Vietnamese peasant woman. Think about that. When was the last time you ever had a female narrator for an entire film? I can't think of one. Let alone a village girl who sees her life as a working out of her own karma. Stone may have a reputation as a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, but this film proves the range of his interest, the depth of his feeling.

Why would anyone back home get it? It approaches life at an angle that most people have never been priviliged to see from. I loved it back in high school, but I didn't get it; I was intrigued and haunted by its image, its tone, and, most importantly, its fantastically sumptuous music by the Japanese composer Kitaro. As Stone notes in a rambling-but-oh-so-fascinating director's commentary, the score is popular the world over, streaming forth from elevators and taxicabs. It has a heart, this music does.

So does the film. I recommend it. Don't go in expecting a well-plotted, well integrated storyline. Don't go in with your own point of view of the world (although I guess it's impossible not to, right?) Just watch it, and imagine the story from the heroine's perspective, Le Ly Hayslip, and allow yourself to be sucked in. Allow the grace to take over.

OUR CYNICAL, SARCASTIC CULTURE, JAPANESE HIRING PRACTICES, AND WHY ANTHONY ROBBINS (DESPITE HIS SLIGHTLY CRO-MAGNON APPEARANCE) TRULY IS THE MAN

We have to choose what to believe:

1) Life is either an endless slog through a neverending series of browbeating, soul-destroying humiliations, or

2) it is a battleground through which we can seize our ultimate potential, help others grasp theirs, and live each day as a spiritual, enlightening progress towards our ultimate purpose.

Guess which theory Anthony Robbins would choose?

For those not in the know, Anthony Robbins is America's premier motivational speaker, star of countless late-night infomercials, personal coach to hundreds of elite athletes, businessmen, politicians and statesmen, guru to anyone and everyone seeking to become better than they are at the present moment.

He is, depending on how you look at it, an inspirational role model or a complete and total crock.

(Or maybe a bit of both.)

Upon hearing even the name 'Anthony Robbins', a lot of you are either rolling your eyes. I want you to think about why.

A few years back there was an Esquire profile of the man titled 'Wouldn't YOU like to be Anthony Robbins?' It followed him around for a day or two, detailing how slightly larger than life, is-this-guy-for-real his existence seemed to be, requiring an energy level, a positivity level, that was not only inhuman, but somehow subhuman, too. (I'm not sure what that means, either, but it sounds good, so I'm going with it.)

A lot of people consider Robbins to be nothing more than a scam-artist out to con vulnerable, desperate people who need a little pick-me-up in their lives.

That's always a possibility. I happen to think there's a lot to what he says, what he represents, what he advocates.

Most of what Robbins preaches is not new; it's the packaging that sets him apart, the packaging of himself, and what he' s selling, which is positivity, planning ahead, modelling yourself after others who have succeeded in the same fields that you want to succeed in, and then going after what you want.

Take the firewalk.

At his seminars, Robbins has people walk on burning coals.

Why?

Because once you do something you did not think you would be able to do, it leads you to question what other limitations you have imposed upon yourself. And once you do that, you start to see that a lot of what society imposes on us seeks to limit ourselves and our place in the world. Robbins wants to cut through the cultural conditioning and allow the individual to emerge in all his or her proper glory.

Already, people are rolling their eyes. That's your right.

But I think that's also what western culture conditions us to do.

We're a very cynical, sarcastic culture. We celebrate David Letterman and Jon Stewart and Conan O'Brien and Saturday Night Live and the cult of insincerity. (All very, very funny guys, by the way.) It's hip and cool to be glib. It's almost expected that you view the world with a cynical air by the age of, oh, fourteen. The world is a terrible place, and we are merely pawns, and the government is corrupt, and pass the remote because The Sopranos starts in five.

And as much as I like Michael Moore, the man and his movies, I still believe that there's a fundamental flaw in what he's preaching, which is this: it's not constructive. It's all about using humor and wit to point out flaws with the people in power, without ever, ever proposing another alternative. (Unless that alternative is the mere act of voting, getting the guys in power out, and oh then the world will be fine and dandy, and you will be satisfied, and your life will better.) Which is fine, in limited doses. But when that becomes your worldview, when your whole attention is focused on taking apart the people who are actually doing things without simultaneously focusing on what should be done by you and you alone, we're regressing as a people.

What does this have to do with Anthony Robbins? Good question. Give me a minute...

Okay.

It comes down to this: the education we receive throughout the first twenty-one years of our lives barely prepares us for any kind of job whatsoever, let alone for the emotional, physical, psychic toll that living itself does to our nervous systems. In our school systems, we don't get any, I mean any, advice on how to tackle the problems of life head-on, without fear; we don't get (or at least I didn't) any educational, I don't know, invigoration or preparation, are not indoctrinated with the sense that destiny is within our hands, with the belief that we can go out and do things in the world, invigorate the world, even change the world.

Anthony Robbins preaches change, and self-mastery, and even that latter term is something that many people right away would scoff at.

Why? Because, as Robbins himself has often pointed out, we celebrate the victim in our culture. If we're not feeling well, we get lots of attention around the water cooler. If we have emotional problems that are dragging us down, we can go on Oprah or Dr.Phil or Jerry Springer and become celebrities because of our misfortunes. We medicate ourselves with countless drugs to boost our self-esteem.

What Robbins talks about isn't necessarily enticing. He's talking about putting back in your own hands. He's speaking on the need to believing that you have to be a victim of yourself and whatever 'system' you're currently railing against. He simply highlights what all of our teachers should talk about -- the necessity of making goals, of believing in yourself, of seeking out those who have done fantastic things and finding out exactly how they did them, and how those rules could possibly apply to ourselves.

Did you get any of that kind of advice in high school or university? I sure as hell didn't.

In Japan, the year before you graduate, you go to countless job fairs and check out myriad companies and decide, a year in advance, which company you want to work for. When you do graduate, you know what you're doing and where you're going.

I used to tell my students in Japan that back home in Canada, when you graduate, you...graduate. You get a piece of paper. You get a handshake and a smile and a kick out the door into the real world. ("Good luck! Have fun! The Prozac's in the medicine cabinet, second shelf, next to the cough syrup!") There's rarely any systematic (or even haphazard) approach to life talked about.

(I'm not saying the Japanese way of doing things is necessarily better, or worse, because there's a lot of disadvantages to their hiring structures as well, but boy, at least they have something in place.)

I think it's sad, in a way, that even the name Anthony Robbins usually conjures up snickers and chuckles and rolls-of-the-eyes.

That says something about who we are, I think. It says that any open display of passion, of energy, of excitement, becomes a source of disdain. It says that we've given up on our true potential before we've begun.

We are what we think about all day long, somebody once said.

Can you imagine if we had somebody like Anthony Robbins teaching our kids, each day, every day? Can you imagine the amount of self-confidence they'd have?

This all comes spewing out simply because, as I approach thirty, I see a lot of sapped lives and cynical people. I see wallowing and self-pity (often from myself) and unnecessary misery.

I want to believe in the good stuff. I choose to believe in the good stuff, the Robbins stuff, the 'Just Do It' stuff, because the alternative, quite frankly, blows. I decide to believe that we are the masters of our own destiny, that we can be and dream and do great things, heroic things, however we define 'heroism' to ourselves. I want to believe that what Anthony Robbins says is the truth, because that's a better way to live, a more heightened way to live. I want to believe in the power of our individual selves. I want to believe.

Don't you?



(For a really long and interesting interview with Anthony Robbins from What is Enlightenment magazine, in which he talks about the relation between self-mastery and spirituality, click here:)

www.wie.org/j15/robbins.asp