WORTHY OF A SONNET

One of my Creative Writing teachers at university used to tell us that in fiction, as in life, a bum is never just a bum.

(By 'bum' I mean a homeless person -- not, you know, 'bum' as in 'buttocks'. Because if I were talking about a 'bum' as in 'buttocks', well, the truism would be different, because usually a butt really is just a butt.)

He was trying to get us young and eager scribes to understand that the characters in our stories, even the minor ones, especially the minor ones, had to reflect the complexity of real people, and the homeless who begged for change on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto, the ones we passed by on the way to our other, real lives, had histories and stories that would astound us, should we care to listen.

I've often found that the mark of a good fiction writer is how much attention he or she pays to the little guys, the characters who pop up for a page or two, then recede back into the margins of the story. Does the writer bother to describe these characters at all? Does he give them a little bit of life, or are they relegated to be non-performers in their own play?

And mystery writers, especially detective-series writers, often provide the most telling, evocative descriptions of these 'marginal characters'.

Consider this, from Ross McDonald's 1961 novel The Wycherly Woman, part of a series of books narrated his world-weary detective Lew Archer:

The offices of the Wycherly Land and Development Company were on the tenth floor of a ten-story stone-faced building south of Market Street. A girl who hadn't quite made airline hostess took me up in an express elevator and let me out in a reception room decorated with hunting scenes.

Aside from the now odd, anachronistic use of the term 'airline hostess', think of the way that he describes this elevator operator -- the wit, the shadings. 'A girl who hadn't quite made airline hostess' -- there's a whole life history right there. We don't know what she looks like or sounds like; we don't know if she's over-the-hill or still creeping up it. But we get a sense of her, a feel for her. It's a flippant, offhand remark, but it has the ring of authenticity. A woman who wasn't good enough to fly the friendly skies and had to settle for riding up, up, up and away in an elevator all day. A lady not quite good enough even to be a flight attendant. There's a sense of sadness and pathos in what is, ostensibly, a humorous aside. A life history has been hinted at. The detective noticed this, so we do, too.

Or check out this one, from later in the same novel, as private detective Lew Archer checks into a crummy motel:

...At ten minutes to five in the morning the place was like a catacomb. The night clerk looked at me the way night clerks were always looking at me, with dubiety tinged by the suspicion that the customer might be right and I might be a customer.

A perfect, succint summary of the cautious, guarded way by which employees often gauge their potential clients (and an offhand description of the narrator himself). Not wanting to work but wanting the money; understanding that everybody is a potential buck, so better to be hesitant than dismissive.

Crime writers, especially writers who specially in a series character spread out over a number of novels, often give the little guys their due, because the protagonists are inquisitive by nature and prone to examining people up-close and in-depth. They are trying to solve a mystery, these detectives are, and thus every person is a potential clue, and their appearance, their manner, who they are and where they are and why they are must be examined, if only briefly.

I've kind of found a lot of crime writers ass-backwards, starting with Robert B. Parker and his series of books featuring Boston P.I. Spenser, and then discovering John D.Macdonald and his Travis McGee stories, and then getting ahold of Ross MacDonald and his Lew Archer novels. (Eventually I'll make my way back to the beginning, where Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet hang out.) Robert B. Parker has learned from both Macdonalds -- Ross and John -- about wit, and brevity, and tone. Their narrators are tough guys who have been fucked around by life, but still retain a cautious, involuntary wit and charm. The dialogue is lean and spare. The narrative momentum carries us forward. There is a mystery that must be solved; they must solve it; end of story. Along the way they meet the dregs of life and the best of life, and they show us them all, in all their twisted, wounded glory. Detective stories such as these are essentially about people who have fucked-up, and are paying the price, and need help. To not describe each and every one of these characters is essentially to dismiss all of us. (Because who among has not fucked-up, or paid a price, or does not need help?

My Creative Writing teacher was right. The homeless guy outside of the coffee shop, the one with the dirty beard and the paper cup, is never just a bum, and the bleary-eyed clerk at the 7-11 has a pathos and dignity worthy of a Shakespearean sonnet. We just have to look close enough, and listen, and imagine.

Imagine that they are the main characters in their own lives, and we are looking for answers, like a detective.

And then just wait and see what they will reveal to us, if we look hard enough and ask the right questions.

HAPPINESS IS A HOT SHOWER (OR IS IT?)

"You never know what you have until it's gone, and I wanted to know what I had, so I got rid of everything."

-- Steven Wright


One of the seemingly contradictory realizations many travellers come to after spending time in desperately impoverished countries revolves around the fact that poor people quite often seem like happier people.

Happier than us, I mean. And by 'us' I mean people raised in places where there are hot showers, helpful police, paved roads. Places that are designed for our own comfort and convenience. Designed by 'who', exactly, we never really ask, because such comforts are an expected and required part of daily living, and troublesome questions like that need not be spoken aloud. You get in trouble, you call the police. Your sink stops working, you call the plumber. There is a person designed to take of our needs. This person requires money, of course, to fulfill his task, but if you have the coin, he'll do the deed.

In Cambodia, not only is such a person probably not around, but you probably couldn't afford him anyway. If you get sick, there is medicine, yes, but it is expensive, and guess what? It's probably defective. The good stuff is given to the relatives of government workers; the bad stuff makes its way into onto the drug store shelves, buyer beware. If you are driving too fast, or merely driving at all, the police will stop you for imaginary infractions and ask for some cash. If you lose your passport (as I did), you will have to go to the back room of the police station and bribe the official. If, God forbid, you are hurt, and need a hospital, watch out. There will be blood on the floors.

We recoil at such a place.

And yet, look around.

At the people's faces.

At their smiles.

At their kindness.

They look, well, happy.

Back in Canada, most people I see don't look happy. They look stressed, and worried, and frazzled.

But not happy.

I'm not a Pollyanna. I know the savage wound that is festering inside the hearts of most Cambodians, victims of terrible atrocities less than a generation old. I realize that their life expectancy peaks around fifty. Life is harsh and hot and completely unfair.

And yet, still.

They look happy.

They don't have much, but they don't need much.

The Philippines is similar. Desperately poor, people find faith in their God and their families. The government won't help them, so they do what they can, with what they have, and keep on going.

I saw a British chap on Filipino television awhile back. He was rich, a millionaire. Back in Britain he had a handful of expensive cars and a big house, and he always bought the latest gadget as soon as it hit the shops. Then a curious understanding came to him. The more he bought, the more unhappy he became. He was always chasing the next thing. He was always getting bored with the latest car, and thus required a new one. He steadily came to the conclusion that happiness derived from attainment fades. So he chucked the house and sold his Porsche and used the money from the sale of his car to build three schools in a rural part of the Philippines. Happiness is temporary, he realized, but fulfillment, more difficult, but a deeper enrichment, endures.

There is something to be said for living with less.

The quote from Steven Wright at the top of this post is meant to be comedic, and it is funny, sure, but it has a kind of zen, koan-like truth at its core. If what you have defines what you are, then what are you if you don't have you have?

We all strive to reach higher, and that striving is an integral part of our condition, a remnant of evolution perhaps, this desire to be better than we are. But if the striving itself is not connected to something deeper than material comfort, a hollowness will remain.

Here in the Philippines, where I live, there's no shower. Water comes from the tap, and it's cold, and you wash in it, and you know what? You get used to it. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy my hot showers during my recent stint in Japan, of course, as a hot shower is one of life's true common pleasures.

Now I know that, though. I didn't realize it before. I thought hot water from a showerhead was a given. It's not. It's a privilege. There are people, children, living in the same house as me who have never known what it's like to stand under a hot shower and feel the water fall.

Knowing that, I try to temper my desires. To control my want.

To want more, yes, but more of the right stuff, the good stuff, the stuff that keeps the smiles on the faces of poor children -- goodwill, community, a willingness to stretch and expand our own sense of possibility towards ourselves and others.

I'm trying to remember that within every shiny red Porsche lies a school waiting to be built.

Perhaps when everybody can have both -- the car and the school, the frivolous stuff and the deeper, more human stuff -- another level of understanding will be breached.

After all, it's hard to remember a time when I've been more happy, more pleasurably content, then when I had a hot shower after more than a year of cold-water washing.

Imagine that.

Happiness from a hot shower.

A ROOM WITH A VIEW

Everyone needs a room of their own.

The twelve-year old in the house has his own room, finally, after a few years spent shacking up with his cousin, and a few months sprawled out on the couch in the living room, across from his uncle on the other sofa, and adjacent to the TV.

Now, solitude.

Toys are arranged carefully on the dresser; comics are neatly stacked; citations from school for work well done are stickered to the ceiling above the bed.

I think back to the two bedrooms of my youth, in houses long left but continually thought of. It's funny. I moved out of our first house when I was seven, the second when I was nineteen, but I still dream about them. Literally. I dream about going back, finding my old bedroom, dining in the kitchen, crashing out on the couch downstairs. In my dreams, though, the houses don't look anything, at all, like I remember them. Completely different. Entirely altered. I've had these dreams for many years, off and on. I go back, and what I remember is not what I see. My old room is no longer my room, yes, but it looks so different, feels so different, that I wonder if it ever was.

Then I wake up, and the pictures of my old bedrooms in my head are clear and pristine and kodak fresh.

For a child, your room is your world. It's the one place you can call your own, infinitely. The place where your dreams are collected and nurtured, day by day. Elsewhere, outside the door, drab rules the day: there are bathrooms, living rooms, kitchens to be cleaned and yards to be cut, adult places, parent places, but there, in that room, everything is the opposite of mundane. You can make of it what you will.

I would look out my window at the distant sight of the CN Tower and the skyscrapers of Toronto, across the lake, an hour's drive and a lifetime away, and I plotted how I would get there. I could stare at the sky and watch the waves of Lake Ontario and listen to the winter wind and lie on my bed and read my comics and believe that such a distance could be breached, given time.

Children need a space to breathe, stretch and imagine. It seems so simple, almost redundant, to talk about the importance of a room of one's own, but in many countries, many cities, in Canada and Cambodia, the Philippines and the Niagara Penisula, space is shared. Dreams are not horded; space is. Even here, where I live, just across from the house, five steps away, another ramshackle shed of brick and tin houses three or four people, together. Each sharing a room with another. Children and adults, too, not given a chance to look at the world in solitaire, for themselves.

A room, for yourself, with a view.

It may not be bliss, but it's a place, private and secure, individually molded, and sometimes, in this world, that's enough.

LET THAT PERFECT BLUE SUPERBALL INSIDE OF YOUR SKULL BOUNCE, BABY

I will run ninety miles per week. I will scale Mount Everest, twice, naked. I will quit smoking. I will start smoking. I will lose thirty pounds. I will gain thirty pounds. I will go vegan, all-out. I will assassinate all vegans. I will give to the poor. I will try to prevent myself from becoming poor. I will be a better person, periodically. I will be a worse person, probably. I will accept Jesus. (Only to have Jesus reject me -- a first for him, and I can see it coming.) I will renounce all worldly possessions. I will buy a Ferrari. A red one. (Actually, aren't all Ferraris red?) I will do this all over again next December, near the end.

Making New Year's Resolution is a fool's game, I suppose, but we do it, some of us, and it's easy to understand why.

It's rare in life that we get a clean break, a fresh start, a way and a means to start all over again. (You could argue that we do have such opportunities, every day, at each moment, as Penelope Cruz said in Vanilla Sky, but acknowledging those exceptions is a blunt and tireless burden.)

The start of a new year, page one on the calendar, is a marker. A turning point. Traditional and banal. With us from the first day of the first new year of our lives. A chance to begin.

Most of us make resolutions; most of us break them. Or smash them, repeatedly, within the first week or so.

This year I once again have some resolutions, as I'm sure you do, too, but I've decided to keep them secret.

(Not that, um, there were a lot of people clamoring for my intentions for the next twelve months, knocking on my door, harassing me on my, well, non-existent cell phone, but still.)

Somebody once said -- it might have been Pat Sajak, or possibly Twain -- that the minute you reveal your plans, your goals, your innermost dreams, poof, up they go in smoke. There is something sacred about an idea, in your head, illuminated in bright neon for you and you alone. It has weight; it has possibility. You can twist it back and forth, up and down, stretch it from side to side, wondering if it will break.

The thing is, in your mind, it never does.

Break that is.

Or, if it does shatter, you can put the pieces back together again. Crazy-glue the mother whole and complete. Shining, even. Glistening, maybe. There is no one to knock it down again, stamp on it, kick the pieces through the sewer grate then laugh as they fall.

When your goals are revealed, however, when the light of day sunburns the hell out of everything you hold proper and true and holy, something happens. To you, and to them -- your dreams, that is.

They melt.

They come face to face with the blinding sun, and they retreat into the shade, then the darkness, until they become difficult to find, if not impossible. And then you wake up, and it's February, and the snow is deep, and the air is frigid, and you remember, faintly, that you meant to do something and be something larger than you were at the end of December. If only you could locate it, that stem. If only you could bury it in the soil once again, and let the water flow, and wait for the buds to bloom. Ah, well, you say. Next year. As you smack the pillow for a better, plumper comfort.

So best to keep your dreams to yourself, I think. At least for now. At least here, at the dawning of the coming year, when hope springs, if not eternal, at least bi-weekly. Best to believe, for this moment, that all those crazy scenarios inside of your head can and will and must come to fruition.

It's winter, you see, and if you let your dreams out, into the cold, something might happen to them.

And I want your dreams to endure.

So this New Year's, as the clock counts down to twelve, as Dick Clark (or, God help us, Ryan Seacrest), shuffles out to do the inevitable glowing-bouncing-ball thingamajig, I wish for you the endurance of your intentions. I wish that your dreams remain trapped inside of your skull, where they have room to bounce around, where the ceiling has no limit, where all of your hopes can keep on rising, like one of those blue superballs we used to wield like weapons of war when we were kids. The ones you could bounce and have no idea where they would end up, so fierce and spastic were their trajectories.

When the numbers on the clock reach 12:00, I want you to take those dreams, those goals, those wishes, and unleash them, superball-style, inside of your head, the arc of their rocket-like ascent visible for you and you alone.

I want you to wait and watch and see how far that perfect blue orb of a dream will go.

And I hope, for you, in the coming year, that you never even the see the beginning of its descent.

"I GO TODAY TO MY BORDERS"

Sometimes, in Cambodia and the Philippines, the power will go out for no reason. A brownout, it's called. You're typing away, tapping the keys, then boom -- out goes the light, in comes the dark. Sometimes it lasts for a minute; others times, an hour. At all times, annoying.

But what can you do? Call the power company? Complain to the cops?

You simply have to wait.

People living in third-world countries get used to disasters big and small, natural and manmade. Life happens, essentially. Get over it.

Arriving back in the Philippines from Japan, it's not only the heat that's a shock to the system. It's the kids, dozens, hundreds of them, popping in and out of homes, ramshackle and ragged. It's the sense of life being lived, if not on the edge, at least precariously close. Day to day. Week to week. Leaving things up to God for all the rest. Poor and rich living next to each other, sharing the roads, perhaps, but little else.

Recently I finished reading The Fabric Of The Cosmos by Brian Greene, a user-friendly physics book that can totally upend your conception of the universe, if you think about it too much. (And I mean, shit, I didn't even understand most of it, but it still screwed with my head.)

One of the more interesting parts of the book has to do with the notion of parallel universes that may -- or may -- not exist side-by-side with our own, undetected, as their light cannot reach ours, and ours cannot reach theirs. Other versions of ourselves, possibly, playing out different versions of our lives.

Tantalizing to think about it.

Our entire existence may be but one of billions. A billion mes; a billion yous. Side by side, unnoticed.

Space and time are linked, is what Greene is getting at. And these spacetime allotments could hint at another, deeper realm of understand that we have yet to discover, which could possibly render our own conceptions of space, and time, moot. Or limited, at the very least.

So many intriguing notions scattered throughout this book, especially regarding how we intrinsically view time as moving forward-- but, according to physicists, this is not necessarily the case. Time and space are two peas in the same pod, and time doesn't necessarily move anywhere. It just is. Future, past and present -- all slices on the same spacetime loaf of bread that come into existence, yes, but not progressively.

Or something like that.

Which makes sense to me.

We've all had that feeling. You meet somebody you haven't seen in ten, fifteen years, and there you are, finishing each other's sentences, picking up where you left off. As if not time has passed.

Well, it hasn't.

It hasn't moved anywhere.

It's simply there, somewhere within that loaf of spacetime. One slice near the front, one slice near the back, but all a part of a whole. We've moved through space, from here to there, there and back again, but time itself is wrapped up in itself. Which is why we can so easily sink back into our prior selves, our past relationships. They never left us. Nor we them. We were always there, together, further down the line, perhaps, still embedded in the same small space.

My childhood and adolescence, my adulthood in Japan, Cambodia and the Philippines, my observations of the rich and the poor, the high-tech of Nippon and the dirt of Phnom Penh: encapsulated.

And beside me, another me, in another world, asking similar questions, different questions. Taking alternate paths and identical ones.

Recently I read a book called Lance Armstrong's War, a fantastic chronicle of the Tour De France, and in it Armstrong's main competitor, Jan Ullrich, preparing to commence a particularly demanding stage of a race, states: "I go today to my borders."

What a phrase.

Pushing oneself to one's limits. Seeing what one is capable of.

And yet, to do that, to go to one's borders, we must, inevitably, intersect other's borders as well. Physically, psychically, spiritually, emotionally.

The genius of modern science persists in insisting that perhaps those borders are translucent and arbitrary. The rich and the poor, the clean and the dirty, the hot and the cold, me and you: we can find our borders, and cross them, and see what lies beyond.

When the brownouts come (as they will), and the darkness falls (as it must), it's nice to know, or to believe, that there is another place, another space, where the light still shines bright. A place where you (another you) and me (another me) may meet.

All of this, simultaneous.

Where space and time, light and dark, will compose the same essential state, and where we will find ourselves at each other's borders, eager to enter.

I will wait for you there.

EAST IS EAST AND WEST IS WEST

I went and watched two movies in the theatre on Saturday, both in Japanese, one film an American film, directed by Clint Eastwood, the other film a Japanese film, directed by Yoji Yamada, and the American film felt American, and the Japanese film felt Japanese.

Letters From Iwo Jima (which I watched in Japanese, which meant that I didn't exactly understand everything that was being said, true, but hey, war is war, fear is fear, acting is acting, so I got the drift) is a good film, possibly a great one, because it is, like all of Eastwood's films, low-key and understated and suitably laconic. (Much like life, come to think of it, or the best parts of it, anyway, the truest parts, the parts that matter.)

War is bad; nationalism is confusing; suffering is universal. The movie doesn't reinvent the wheel, and there are times when its sole purpose seems to be to inform us that 'hey, the Japanese are people, too', but, the more I think about it, the more I think that people do need to be reminded that, yes, the scared shitless kids on the opposing end of the artillery fire are just like you and me, mortal. Perhaps it's sad that I feel that way, or that one should be thinking thoughts like this in our multicultural world of the 21st century, but thoughts are thoughts and those are mine. And the film itself is a moving, decent and humane story, simply told, filled with Japanese actors speaking Japanese and acting in Japanese ways. Watching it in Japan, surrounded by seniors who may, who knows, have been there, in the movie, on that island, for real, added impact.

But it felt American.

The style, I mean.

The texture.

The compositions.

The framing.

All of that stuff.

You can put the language and the people in the movie, but there's something else. (That's what Thomas Magnum said, 'there's something else', hauntingly so, a line I remember, God knows why, as he, Magnum, was convinced that there was a reason he should stay alive, be alive, as he walked through limbo and the almost-afterlife after an almost fatal gunshot in what was supposed to the final episode of his eponymous TV series, directed by Jackie Cooper, Superman's Perry White, and who am I to disagree with Tom Selleck, as the episode itself, after all, though not the last, ultimately, was still fucking great, and so was the episode the following season that brought him back from the brink of death, Infinity and Jelly Donuts, the name of that episode, that is, and it was clever and honest and true, and consistent with the spirit of the supposed finale -- it brought Magnum back, and it didn't cheat, and it all, made, sense. Life doesn't, of course, but that episode did. We take wisdom where we can find it, and I find it, still in Magnum P.I. Sue me.)

And yet the other movie I watched, Bushi no Ichibun (which is translated here into English as something like Love and Honor, inexplicably, but which actually means something like 'One Part of the Samurai'), feels Japanese through and through. Front to back.

Which means, essentially, that there is an economy of movement, gesture and framing to each and every scene. The takes are long; the movement swift. Small details are evident in each and every moment, and these small things, like the best small things, accumulate, then resonate.

Leaves fall, gently.

Swords slice, swiftly.

Looks are exchanged.

All very precise, and measured.

All very Japanese.

Both films are good films. Indeed, Letters From Iwo Jima has already picked up a couple of critics' awards back home, and it isn't even out yet back there. Bushi no Ichibun, meanwhile, continues to pack the cinemas here in Japan.

But it's interesting to me.

How one can feel a culture's approach to art, through the lens. How some things remain rooted in a time and a place, a tone and a posture.

How culture transcends language and actors. How one can sense its presence in a film, in the choices made by the invisible director, in the style, in the shape and manner of people and objects. In who goes where, and why, and how. Delicately, or with force. Alone, or in groups. Towards, or away from us. All of this, cultural.

The glorious thing, of course, is that cinema, regardless of our origins, can bridge that gap, link those threads, finding a way, sometimes, at the best of times, to make us feel connected. Despite our differences, and, quite possibly, through those same differences, thus unearthing our common, indivisible dimensions of humanity which too often remain buried beneath rumbling rhetoric and colourful, fluttering flags.

CASINO ROYALE: EFFING GREAT

Seeing pictures of Daniel Craig in a tux on the web, I thought, "This guy is James Bond?", but after watching Casino Royale, all I can say is that this Bond, the Craig bond, is, quite possibly, the best Bond, ever -- better than Connery, better than Moore.

And this is coming from someone who saw Octopussy and Never Say Never Again at roughly the same time, at the impossibly impressionable age of eight, and thus permanently had both actors cinematically implanted in his brain as dual, twin, mirror-image brothers of Britain's most savage secret agent, and thus was never able to view Lazenby or Dalton or Brosnan as anything but feeble imposters to the majestic Moore and the king-like Connery.

But I'm telling you.

This Bond, well.

Craig is lethal and charming, deadly and witty, and proof positive that it's never too late to inject adrenaline into what may merely appear to be a dying, gasping lifeform.

Watch the steady but relentless way he chases down the bad buys.

Look at the erotically intent but simultaneously nonchalant, almost diffident manner in which he casually thanks drop-dead gorgeous check-in-girls.

From the first frames, I forgot that Craig was anybody but Bond -- and I instantaneouslyforgot about all the other Bonds, too.

I wondered, like a freshman: Who is this Bond? What is he holding within? What is he waiting to release?

I'd seen Craig, years ago, in Tom Hanks's Road to Perdition, where he was suitably sly and wimpy, and recently, in Spielberg's Munich, where he was approriately tough and thuggish, but here, in this flick, well.

He's something else.

He's made Bond human and agile, remote and in-your-face. Together, all at once, somehow.

He's an actor, in other words.

Not many men in the movies are, but this guy is.

I'm telling you.

He's that good.

And so is the movie.