Pop quiz:
I mention Baghdad -- what images pop into your head?
Or how about Moscow?
Hanoi?
Philadelphia?
Phnom Penh?
We all have mental images imprinted into our psyche from who-knows-where 0f places that we've never been to, cities that we've never stepped foot in, oceans that we've never crossed. A lifetime of t.v. and movies and even books have allowed us to create our own, personal storehouse of locations within our mind that probably bear little, if any, comparison to the actual locales that exist independent of our own perceptions of them.
Take Phnom Penh.
More specifically, Phnom Penh at five a.m. on a typical Monday morning. (Then again, is any morning really typical?)
If you had asked me two, three years ago to close my eyes and slow down my breathing and get all contemplative and stuff and imagine Phnom Penh at sunrise, I would have imagined, well, not much at all. Dark streets, probably. Mounds of garbage lining the roads, definitely. Run-down, decrepit buildings having their grimy exteriors illuminated even more by the gradually fading moonlight.
Certainly the streets would have been empty in my vision. Who would possibly be out at five a.m. in a city as a dangerous and notorious as Phnom Penh?
Ah, but I have learned certain lessons in the past few years, and most of them have to do with preconceptions. They have do with judging before experiencing. And if you have not experienced Phnom Penh at five a.m., especially down by the river, then you have missed something fascinating.
What's Phnom Penh like on the banks of the river at five a.m. on a Monday morning?
Crowded, is what it's like. Dozens, hundreds of people doing their exercises, walking in place, walking around, running around, dancing in groups to music pumping from ghetto blasters. You will see couples and families and damged people with twisted legs holding out scales for you to step on, calling out the price, five hundred riel only sir, sir, a good price, mister, a cheap price, just for you my, my friend. You will see the darkness give way to an orange and gentle sun that will soon, very soon, become merciless.
At five a.m., though, it is gentle, this sun, and the air is cool, and the streets, which are emptied out after midnight, which no one in their right mind would wander around after twelve a.m., are full. The streets have been reclaimed from the night and given over to the day. No more fear. No more locked doors. No more sideways glances to the motodopes over your shoulders.
At this time, you see, these streets pulse.
That's Phnom Penh, by the river, at five a.m.
Moscow at five a.m.?
Don't know.
Never been there.
************************************************************************************
There was a recent program by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (or the CBC, kind of like Japan's NHK or America's PBS, only without those annoying pledge breaks every twenty minutes) that sought to establish once and for all (or at least for this year) who the 'greatest Canadian' was. I thought it was kind of a silly idea, and still think it's kind of a silly idea, but the results are interesting. Scary, but interesting.
The winner was Tommy Douglas, the creater of universal health care in Canada. Which shows you how important this issue is for Canada. (He is also, incidentally, Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather, Kiefer being the daughter of actress Shirley Douglas, but I don't think that's why Tommy was voted number one. I mean, Canadians like Kiefer Sutherland, don't get me wrong, very cool in Young Guns II and Flatliners, especially, but we don't like him enough to vote his grandfather the greatest Canadian ever.) Given that David Suzuki, the environmentalist writer/t.v. host was also on the list, it's a telling sign of how much weight we give social, humanitarian issues, us Canadians. We do have standards, you know.
At least, I think we do.
But check out the rest of the list.
Because Don Cherry also placed in the top ten. Cherry is a hockey commentator who is always putting his foot in his mouth and insulting Quebeckers or Europeans and he is highly entertain-ing and watchable. A lot of people don't like him. I do. Apparently, a lot of other Canadians do, too.
Is he one of the greatest Canadians ever?
Hmmm...
Even more disturbing, he placed ahead of Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player ever, John A.Macdonald, our first prime minister, and Alexander Graham Bell, who only invented the, oh, what do you call it, um, oh yeah, the freakin' telephone.
I mean, come ooooonnnnnnn...
It's kind of like Rush Limbaugh placing ahead of Michael Jordan, George Washington and, I dunno, Benjamin Franklin. (Didn't he invent electricity? Or discover it or something?)
A hockey commentator placing ahead of a hockey player? Gretzky is god in Canada. And John A.Macdonald is on our money. (Then again, so are kids playing hockey, true, but they're playing it, at least -- not commenting on it. And they're not wearing outlandish ties. And this is on the back of the five dollar bill, the blue one, and I saw Mike Myers when Late Night with Conan O'Brien came to Toronto, and he called it a 'Spock five', and I didn't know what he meant, but then he took out a magic marker and drew some black hair and pointed ears on a giant blow-up version of John A.Macdonald on the five dollar bill, and, lo and behold, he was right -- he does look like Star Trek's Mr.Spock. But I digress...) And did I mention that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone? (Although Joe Mantegna as Joey Zaza in The Godfather III says that the Italian, Marconi, invented it before Bell -- but what do mafioso know anyways, right?)
I know I know; it's a silly poll to begin with. But I'm still surprised that Pierre Trudeau or Gretzky didn't win.
And I think Canadians need to raise their standards a bit.
After all, where the heck is Montreal and McGill University's own William Shatner?
Don't we know anything?
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Monday, November 29, 2004
TO FAIL IS DIVINE...
...failure is more typical of the human condition than heroism.
-- Ian Buruma,
Wages of Guilt
Long live failure!
Right now, critics around the world are trouncing Oliver Stone's ALEXANDER, a film I'm dying to see, with their linguistic weapons of war. (Well, not all critics -- Harry Knowles of www.aintitcoolnews.com and Armond White of www.nypress.com have championed the film, but they're in the minority.) Overlong, garish, ludicrous, filled with bad acting and an implausible tale -- in other words, a typical Oliver Stone flick.
That's what they say. I've long been an Oliver Stone fanatic; that particular obsession will have to wait for another, epic-length blog. Let's just say that the rampant, galactic-wide dismissal of the film saddens me.
Not because of the film itself. Hell, maybe it is a mess. Who knows? I'll decide when I see it, whether it's on DVD here or in a theatre somewhere else in the world. The moment you start allowing critics to dictate your entertainment options is the moment you have, officially, given up all vestige of independent thinking. Epic or epic-yawn, I'll watch the flick.
Why?
Ah, because to fail in a noble quest is better than succeeding at a mediocre one. There is great, worthy respect due to someone who has bitten off more than they can chew. And what a sight to behold, to pay homage to! How ennobling to see effort spent -- misplaced, perhaps, misguided, to be sure, but spent, nonetheless. Exerted and unleashed effort, regardless of the outcome, is always inspiring.
George Lucas once said that he spent two years thinking about a movie while a critic spent twenty minutes writing and thinking about it. (And all of you jesters out there up in the balcony who are thinking that twenty minutes is too long to spend thinking about a George Lucas flick can exit now. Watch your step on the way out.)
Think about it. Think about what it takes to write a script about Alexander the Great. Think about what it would take to cast it, shoot it, edit it. You know what it takes? Passion and balls.
What does it take to write a review? A piece of paper and a pen. A computer and a keyboard. (Or an, um, blog...) This does not mean that a review cannot also be a noble piece of work. But too many critics take a perverse glee in cutting others down to size. To use your art for those principal aims is small, petty, demeaning.
We are here on this planet to do grand things or fail miserably trying. That's what I believe.
Clive Barker, the horror writer, was asked how he would like to be remembered. "As a failure," he said. Why? Because that means that he had not reached his ultimate goal. Because that means he sought to do something beyond his grasp and did not quite attain it. Because that meant he was striving.
Ah, to strive. To strive, friends and neighbours, Romans and countrymen.
You don't learn from success. You learn from striving, failing, falling short. In the last few years I've failed quite a bit. I trained for a marathon in Japan, only to blow out my knee in the week before the race. Couldn't run it. I took Level Three of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Didn't pass it.
But as every true warrior knows, even the losses are battles. To fail while attempting something above and beyond yourself is proof of your appetite for life. If every attempt is to be met by ridicule from the weak, the cowardly, the meek, than what does say of us, the human race? What does it say to the young? It says that we make ourselves bigger by putting down and ridiculing those who try and achieve something, that's what it says, and that doesn't say much about us at all, in the end.
So let's make a toast to Oliver Stone, shall we? Maybe the film is riveting, or maybe the film will make you want to eat rivets, but let's salute the foolish, the mad, the bold quest of a man who dared to bring Alexander's impossible life to the silver screen. Let's raise a glass to the last-place runner of the race, the goalie pulled after five goals in ten minutes, the employee sacked after a week on the job.
And I can say, with all honesty, that, should success elude you, I wish you a long life full of failure. I wish you scorn from critics, be they family or friends or, well, critics. I wish you a horse to fall off of in battle. And another to hop back on.
-- Ian Buruma,
Wages of Guilt
Long live failure!
Right now, critics around the world are trouncing Oliver Stone's ALEXANDER, a film I'm dying to see, with their linguistic weapons of war. (Well, not all critics -- Harry Knowles of www.aintitcoolnews.com and Armond White of www.nypress.com have championed the film, but they're in the minority.) Overlong, garish, ludicrous, filled with bad acting and an implausible tale -- in other words, a typical Oliver Stone flick.
That's what they say. I've long been an Oliver Stone fanatic; that particular obsession will have to wait for another, epic-length blog. Let's just say that the rampant, galactic-wide dismissal of the film saddens me.
Not because of the film itself. Hell, maybe it is a mess. Who knows? I'll decide when I see it, whether it's on DVD here or in a theatre somewhere else in the world. The moment you start allowing critics to dictate your entertainment options is the moment you have, officially, given up all vestige of independent thinking. Epic or epic-yawn, I'll watch the flick.
Why?
Ah, because to fail in a noble quest is better than succeeding at a mediocre one. There is great, worthy respect due to someone who has bitten off more than they can chew. And what a sight to behold, to pay homage to! How ennobling to see effort spent -- misplaced, perhaps, misguided, to be sure, but spent, nonetheless. Exerted and unleashed effort, regardless of the outcome, is always inspiring.
George Lucas once said that he spent two years thinking about a movie while a critic spent twenty minutes writing and thinking about it. (And all of you jesters out there up in the balcony who are thinking that twenty minutes is too long to spend thinking about a George Lucas flick can exit now. Watch your step on the way out.)
Think about it. Think about what it takes to write a script about Alexander the Great. Think about what it would take to cast it, shoot it, edit it. You know what it takes? Passion and balls.
What does it take to write a review? A piece of paper and a pen. A computer and a keyboard. (Or an, um, blog...) This does not mean that a review cannot also be a noble piece of work. But too many critics take a perverse glee in cutting others down to size. To use your art for those principal aims is small, petty, demeaning.
We are here on this planet to do grand things or fail miserably trying. That's what I believe.
Clive Barker, the horror writer, was asked how he would like to be remembered. "As a failure," he said. Why? Because that means that he had not reached his ultimate goal. Because that means he sought to do something beyond his grasp and did not quite attain it. Because that meant he was striving.
Ah, to strive. To strive, friends and neighbours, Romans and countrymen.
You don't learn from success. You learn from striving, failing, falling short. In the last few years I've failed quite a bit. I trained for a marathon in Japan, only to blow out my knee in the week before the race. Couldn't run it. I took Level Three of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Didn't pass it.
But as every true warrior knows, even the losses are battles. To fail while attempting something above and beyond yourself is proof of your appetite for life. If every attempt is to be met by ridicule from the weak, the cowardly, the meek, than what does say of us, the human race? What does it say to the young? It says that we make ourselves bigger by putting down and ridiculing those who try and achieve something, that's what it says, and that doesn't say much about us at all, in the end.
So let's make a toast to Oliver Stone, shall we? Maybe the film is riveting, or maybe the film will make you want to eat rivets, but let's salute the foolish, the mad, the bold quest of a man who dared to bring Alexander's impossible life to the silver screen. Let's raise a glass to the last-place runner of the race, the goalie pulled after five goals in ten minutes, the employee sacked after a week on the job.
And I can say, with all honesty, that, should success elude you, I wish you a long life full of failure. I wish you scorn from critics, be they family or friends or, well, critics. I wish you a horse to fall off of in battle. And another to hop back on.
Sunday, November 28, 2004
THE SOROS DOCTRINE
George Soros is the billionaire Hunagrian-Jewish-American who spent millions of dollars in trying to defeat Bush, but he's also quite a remarkable philanthropist, a man who didn't start giving away his money into he was well into his sixties. For many years he had been interested in philosphy, even writing his own books on the subject, but after a certain point in time he came to realize that the real self, his true self, was, indeed, a philosophical, contemplative one -- but it wasn't enough. All of that thinking and pondering had created a vacuum, he said, and by doing he escaped from the vacuum and into the realm of the actual. (Or something along those lines.)
Right now there's a boom, an explosion of universities in Phnom Penh, and all of the schools are trying to figure out, hmm, what exactly do we, um, teach, so that these kids can move beyond the thinking realm and into the actual realm? And so there's lots of business classes and computer classes and English classes because this is what the kids will need, goes the common currency of thought. And they're right. But these are the future leaders of Cambodia, these people, and this is a new age in this country, and so we have to be careful, even cautious, about what is taught to them and how it is presented. How it is framed.
I thought of this recently while reading this book THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND that caused an academic sensation (if that's not an oxymoron) in the mid-eightites, mostly because it took to task the rather dismal state of education in the elite universities in the States -- your Harvards, Yales and Stanfords, all of which had begun to slowly drop of all the old-dead-white-guy stuff and replace it with it multicultural, possibly revisionist approaches to learning and education.
I'm not going to get into that that here. That's been argued to death a thousand, million, trillion times, by people much smarter and much dumber than me. (There's a lot of the former, a few of the latter.)
But what a university is for is a good question, an obvious question, and one that isn't necessarily asked a lot anymore. Higher education simply is; universities simply are. Next?
And yet...
At the risk of sounding like someone who doesn't have any original ideas of his own (which is pretty much close to the truth), I read a book a few years back (or most of the book; it was pretty tough going, it being a 1950's-British-Marxis-feminist tract and all, so cut me some slack, okay?) called THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, by Doris Lessing. There was an introduction at the start of the book, a long one, a good one, actually a great one, in which Lessing basically ripped into the state of modern university systems the world over. She is one of the world's most erudite, respected novelists -- and she never went to university. High school dropout, like Einstein and Quentin Tarantino and Robert DeNiro and Peter Jennings. No-name schmucks.
A few points she made that I remember.
1) Universities, especially liberal arts programs, are set up in a very either/or, competitive fashion. Meaning, if you like author X, then you shouldn't respond to author Y. If you like both, something's wrong with you. At a very young age, students learn that there is the Canon (cue the sound of thunder and ominous music), and these are the books contained therewithin, and this is the kind of literature that should be read about and written about.
Got a problem with that? I did, and I still do.
What's lacking is any kind of personal, authentic response to the books in question; the self is left out of the equation. Meaning, we are taught, to a certain extent, to think of books as having this almost mystical 'validity', or 'value', or even 'worth', that exists above and beyond are own perceptions of the text itself.
Hogwash, Lessing says, and I agree. There are books and your responses to them. Period. You may hate a book at age eighteen and love it at twenty-eight and find it decidedly mediocre at thirty-eight. The book has changed nada. You have changed much. The book and you have crossed paths a few times, and you have emerged, altered. The book just sits there, waiting for your response. (I read John Irving's THE CIDER-HOUSE RULES every few years and am always amazed at how different it is.( Waiting for your emotions.
But what's happened? We have a world now where books, and certainly films, are judged as if they are part of a sporting competition. People write movie reviews, especially, that rarely have any authentic representation of the author's feelings.
No, no, no, you say, the author has to be objective. This ain't Oprah. This is literature. He has to view the work for what it is. Personal feelings have nothing to do with true, authentic criticism.
And I say no, no, no, that's b.s. Because if you are a boxer, then you are going to have a different view of ROCKY than if you are an accountant. If your parents divorced at age eight and you remember every little bit of it, then you will respond differently to KRAMER VS.KRAMER than I will. If you were a high school basketball player, not great, no, not giving Jordan a run for his money, uh-uh, but not bad with the ball, then you will respond differently to the Gene Hackman classic HOOSIERS than a non-sports fan will. If you have a particularly keen interest in history and ancient civilizations, then you will view ALEXANDER one way, and the McDonald's manager working the late shift, the one with the receding hairline and whacked stubble dotting his cheeks, will view it another way. (Not that those two people couldn't be the same guy, come to think of it.)
This is not to say that there are not books and films that are better produced, more diligently stitched together than others. Of course. That's what quality and craftsmanship are about.
But art is not produced in an aesthetic vacuum, or emotionless vacuum. It is created by strange, loner-like people with weird, wild impulses that are hungering to express the sentiments inside themselves. And hey -- guess what, kids? To deny that you are a similar person with identical longings when judging such work robs art of its true purpose. It makes you a liar and a cheat, too.
2) The other point Lessing makes, and this is a good one, has to do with people who leave. People who exit. The teachers who stop teaching after a year. The cop who gives up the beat six months in. The student who stops attending classes after a year and a half.
We do not pay enough attention in society, she argues, to people who stop. These are the people who cannot fit into the system. These are the people who do not respond to the system. And these are the people who usually have the most constructive, instinctive things to say.
Instead, what happens is we have thousands and thousands of people who are trained in a particular way of thinking and reacting -- and so is it any wonder that most book reviews and film reviews sound so similar, as if they were all written by the same computer programme? Of course not. This is how the system trains people. This is how the system operates. The people who couldn't fit into the system, who for some reason or another couldn't adapt, have moved on. The world has lost their voice. The neighbourhood has lost that cop. The classroom that needs that kind of teacher has been replaced by the formulaic, institutionalized one.
Point is, as Soros points out, there is great wonder and satisfaction in contemplation -- ess -
entially, that's what university does for you. It gives you four, five, eight years to sit around and think about stuff and write about stuff.
And then at a certain point you have to get out into the world and do stuff, and so what we think about during those years, and how we think about it, does not remain in a vacuum. It is released, to intoxicate or poision the masses. How we think, and how we train others to think, needs to be addressed.
So next time you're teaching a Cambodian, the slow, shy one at the back of the class in the ripped, dirty slacks, or talking to the late-shift manager at Mcdonald's, the heavy guy with the raggedy stubble who doesn't look that bright, truth be told, ask them about what they're reading. Find out if they've seen any good movies lately. Ask for their opinion. Listen for their emotions. The tremor and excitement in their voices.
These are the ones that don't fit into the system, see.
These are the ones to ask.
These are the ones you listen to, carefully.
Before they go.
*************************************************************************************
I am pleased to bring to your attention the writing of Brian Gibson, a fellow survivor of the York University Creative Writing program and fellow cross-country teammate of mine on the York Yeomen team that placed third at the Ontario championships in '96. (Brian was the strong, lean, fast guy who placed in the top ten, if I recall; I was the, um, weak, not-so-lean slow guy who placed, uh, nowhere-near-the-top-ten.)
You should go to www.bleedingdaylight.ca and check out the latest novel from one of Canada's brightest young writers, a murder-mystery set at our old alma mater, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
(Oh, and last time I saw him he looked a little different from the author's photo -- but I'm betting he still wears Darth Vader t-shirts.)
Right now there's a boom, an explosion of universities in Phnom Penh, and all of the schools are trying to figure out, hmm, what exactly do we, um, teach, so that these kids can move beyond the thinking realm and into the actual realm? And so there's lots of business classes and computer classes and English classes because this is what the kids will need, goes the common currency of thought. And they're right. But these are the future leaders of Cambodia, these people, and this is a new age in this country, and so we have to be careful, even cautious, about what is taught to them and how it is presented. How it is framed.
I thought of this recently while reading this book THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND that caused an academic sensation (if that's not an oxymoron) in the mid-eightites, mostly because it took to task the rather dismal state of education in the elite universities in the States -- your Harvards, Yales and Stanfords, all of which had begun to slowly drop of all the old-dead-white-guy stuff and replace it with it multicultural, possibly revisionist approaches to learning and education.
I'm not going to get into that that here. That's been argued to death a thousand, million, trillion times, by people much smarter and much dumber than me. (There's a lot of the former, a few of the latter.)
But what a university is for is a good question, an obvious question, and one that isn't necessarily asked a lot anymore. Higher education simply is; universities simply are. Next?
And yet...
At the risk of sounding like someone who doesn't have any original ideas of his own (which is pretty much close to the truth), I read a book a few years back (or most of the book; it was pretty tough going, it being a 1950's-British-Marxis-feminist tract and all, so cut me some slack, okay?) called THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, by Doris Lessing. There was an introduction at the start of the book, a long one, a good one, actually a great one, in which Lessing basically ripped into the state of modern university systems the world over. She is one of the world's most erudite, respected novelists -- and she never went to university. High school dropout, like Einstein and Quentin Tarantino and Robert DeNiro and Peter Jennings. No-name schmucks.
A few points she made that I remember.
1) Universities, especially liberal arts programs, are set up in a very either/or, competitive fashion. Meaning, if you like author X, then you shouldn't respond to author Y. If you like both, something's wrong with you. At a very young age, students learn that there is the Canon (cue the sound of thunder and ominous music), and these are the books contained therewithin, and this is the kind of literature that should be read about and written about.
Got a problem with that? I did, and I still do.
What's lacking is any kind of personal, authentic response to the books in question; the self is left out of the equation. Meaning, we are taught, to a certain extent, to think of books as having this almost mystical 'validity', or 'value', or even 'worth', that exists above and beyond are own perceptions of the text itself.
Hogwash, Lessing says, and I agree. There are books and your responses to them. Period. You may hate a book at age eighteen and love it at twenty-eight and find it decidedly mediocre at thirty-eight. The book has changed nada. You have changed much. The book and you have crossed paths a few times, and you have emerged, altered. The book just sits there, waiting for your response. (I read John Irving's THE CIDER-HOUSE RULES every few years and am always amazed at how different it is.( Waiting for your emotions.
But what's happened? We have a world now where books, and certainly films, are judged as if they are part of a sporting competition. People write movie reviews, especially, that rarely have any authentic representation of the author's feelings.
No, no, no, you say, the author has to be objective. This ain't Oprah. This is literature. He has to view the work for what it is. Personal feelings have nothing to do with true, authentic criticism.
And I say no, no, no, that's b.s. Because if you are a boxer, then you are going to have a different view of ROCKY than if you are an accountant. If your parents divorced at age eight and you remember every little bit of it, then you will respond differently to KRAMER VS.KRAMER than I will. If you were a high school basketball player, not great, no, not giving Jordan a run for his money, uh-uh, but not bad with the ball, then you will respond differently to the Gene Hackman classic HOOSIERS than a non-sports fan will. If you have a particularly keen interest in history and ancient civilizations, then you will view ALEXANDER one way, and the McDonald's manager working the late shift, the one with the receding hairline and whacked stubble dotting his cheeks, will view it another way. (Not that those two people couldn't be the same guy, come to think of it.)
This is not to say that there are not books and films that are better produced, more diligently stitched together than others. Of course. That's what quality and craftsmanship are about.
But art is not produced in an aesthetic vacuum, or emotionless vacuum. It is created by strange, loner-like people with weird, wild impulses that are hungering to express the sentiments inside themselves. And hey -- guess what, kids? To deny that you are a similar person with identical longings when judging such work robs art of its true purpose. It makes you a liar and a cheat, too.
2) The other point Lessing makes, and this is a good one, has to do with people who leave. People who exit. The teachers who stop teaching after a year. The cop who gives up the beat six months in. The student who stops attending classes after a year and a half.
We do not pay enough attention in society, she argues, to people who stop. These are the people who cannot fit into the system. These are the people who do not respond to the system. And these are the people who usually have the most constructive, instinctive things to say.
Instead, what happens is we have thousands and thousands of people who are trained in a particular way of thinking and reacting -- and so is it any wonder that most book reviews and film reviews sound so similar, as if they were all written by the same computer programme? Of course not. This is how the system trains people. This is how the system operates. The people who couldn't fit into the system, who for some reason or another couldn't adapt, have moved on. The world has lost their voice. The neighbourhood has lost that cop. The classroom that needs that kind of teacher has been replaced by the formulaic, institutionalized one.
Point is, as Soros points out, there is great wonder and satisfaction in contemplation -- ess -
entially, that's what university does for you. It gives you four, five, eight years to sit around and think about stuff and write about stuff.
And then at a certain point you have to get out into the world and do stuff, and so what we think about during those years, and how we think about it, does not remain in a vacuum. It is released, to intoxicate or poision the masses. How we think, and how we train others to think, needs to be addressed.
So next time you're teaching a Cambodian, the slow, shy one at the back of the class in the ripped, dirty slacks, or talking to the late-shift manager at Mcdonald's, the heavy guy with the raggedy stubble who doesn't look that bright, truth be told, ask them about what they're reading. Find out if they've seen any good movies lately. Ask for their opinion. Listen for their emotions. The tremor and excitement in their voices.
These are the ones that don't fit into the system, see.
These are the ones to ask.
These are the ones you listen to, carefully.
Before they go.
*************************************************************************************
I am pleased to bring to your attention the writing of Brian Gibson, a fellow survivor of the York University Creative Writing program and fellow cross-country teammate of mine on the York Yeomen team that placed third at the Ontario championships in '96. (Brian was the strong, lean, fast guy who placed in the top ten, if I recall; I was the, um, weak, not-so-lean slow guy who placed, uh, nowhere-near-the-top-ten.)
You should go to www.bleedingdaylight.ca and check out the latest novel from one of Canada's brightest young writers, a murder-mystery set at our old alma mater, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
(Oh, and last time I saw him he looked a little different from the author's photo -- but I'm betting he still wears Darth Vader t-shirts.)
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
WHY I LIKE COMMAS
There's this one scene in the Richard Price novel FREEDOMLAND where there's a mob or a protest or something in an apartment somewhere in Jersey, and the person in charge is either trying to control the crowd or scare the crowd, cupping his hands in front of his mouth to amplify the sound, and he starts saying something like: "The police, are on, the way. You have, to stay, calm." And that replicated so perfectly the way that people talk in those situations when you have a lot of loud people saying a lot of things and you want to be heard, have to be heard: the staggered, staccato monotone, the jagged breakdown of a sentence into easily heard and identifable parts, and I'd never seen it put in print like that, and I thought cool, which is why I've remembered the style, if not the exact wording, of it even five years after reading the book (which you should read, by the way.)
THE COSBY DOCTRINE
I read a transcript of LARRY KING LIVE the other day (because, uh, that's what guys like me do in their spare time, when they can never figure out when the suspender- guy's show is on over here), the one where he was interviewing the author of the second most bestselling non-fiction book in NEW YORK TIMES history, a self-help book called THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE. (And if you don't know what that book is, then you don't exist in the same universe as all of those folks that voted for Bush do.) He's a pastor named Rick Warren, I think, and he said some things that reminded me of a Buddhist expression I heard somewhere:
Your life is not yours. It can be taken from you at any time.
This particular Christian author made a similar point: Look, this is not a self-help book, because self-help books all say: It's all about you, and I'm saying, right from the start, this isn't about you at all. Your life is not yours and yours alone.
That's the gist. (Cool word, gist. Not used often enough.)
We think of our lives as ours, to have and to hold 'till death to us part -- wedding vows of one. We make the rules, baby. We decide the course of our fate. We captain the ship.
I look at it this way. A few years back a homeless lunatic whacked me with the equivalent of a hockey stick across the gut in Tokyo, leaving a nasty bruise that was a gift, if only because had the man thwapped me in the face, I could be missing an eye right now. My life would have been altered in ways I really don't care to think about. He's already taken something from me -- my naive sense of security that only a Canadian can have. (Or maybe a Nebraskan.) He could have taken my pupils, my jugular, you name it.
Whether you look at it in Buddhist terms or Christian terms or no terms at all, your life is hanging by a fragile thread, baby. All of your dreams, aspirations, fears and fragilities are one whisker away from being sliced and diced, late-night style. (I'm not sure what that last part means, either, but I'll go with it.) We all have our personal space and our personal rights and our own personal integrity, yes, true, acknowledged, but there is a truck, see, just down the street, travelling quickly, and you are listening to your walkman, head bobbing, lips mouthing, thinking about that latch on your fridge that just, won't, shut, and you are slowing down, wading to the rhythm of beat and the pulse, while that truck, the one you don't know even exists, is getting ready to mow you down, no questions asked, skid-marks on pavement with brains, blood and skull-bits being mandatory, not optional.
Remember Heathcliff Huxtable talking to Theo on THE COSBY SHOW? "I am your father," he said. "I brought you in this world, and I can take you out." There's the Powell doctrine; this is the Cosby doctrine. Now, I don't know if there's a Father up there bringing us in and taking us out. (If there is, I think he just might look like Cosby -- stern but goofy.) But I know now, more than I did before, that we can all be taken out, whether anybody's in charge up there or not.
This can all be taken from you, this life, and it's helpful to remember that we are taking away other's lives, all the time, constantly. Everyday we take something away from someone else by a warm wave of the hand, a snide comment, or a friendly nod of the head, whether we realize it or not. Not their life, of course, we don't take that, we give them that, we allow them that, but there's a myriad of insignificant acts that shape our interactions that don't conceive or disintegrate our lives, no, but they add to them. They subtract.
There's more to life than life itself.
(Unless you're a serial killer or a soldier or a sniper. Then you do take lives, literally. I met a dude my first week in Japan at a bar: Me: What do you do? Dude: I'm a sniper with the marines: Me: Oh. Thinking -- You kill people; I, um, teach ESL...)
We give and we take. And given that Cosby was always handing out morals like candy to little Rudy, here's one of my own: Try not to take too much of other's lives, and be on guard for those that are taking yours, little by little. (And be forgiving, too. They may not know it.)
Your life is not yours. It can be taken from you at any time.
This particular Christian author made a similar point: Look, this is not a self-help book, because self-help books all say: It's all about you, and I'm saying, right from the start, this isn't about you at all. Your life is not yours and yours alone.
That's the gist. (Cool word, gist. Not used often enough.)
We think of our lives as ours, to have and to hold 'till death to us part -- wedding vows of one. We make the rules, baby. We decide the course of our fate. We captain the ship.
I look at it this way. A few years back a homeless lunatic whacked me with the equivalent of a hockey stick across the gut in Tokyo, leaving a nasty bruise that was a gift, if only because had the man thwapped me in the face, I could be missing an eye right now. My life would have been altered in ways I really don't care to think about. He's already taken something from me -- my naive sense of security that only a Canadian can have. (Or maybe a Nebraskan.) He could have taken my pupils, my jugular, you name it.
Whether you look at it in Buddhist terms or Christian terms or no terms at all, your life is hanging by a fragile thread, baby. All of your dreams, aspirations, fears and fragilities are one whisker away from being sliced and diced, late-night style. (I'm not sure what that last part means, either, but I'll go with it.) We all have our personal space and our personal rights and our own personal integrity, yes, true, acknowledged, but there is a truck, see, just down the street, travelling quickly, and you are listening to your walkman, head bobbing, lips mouthing, thinking about that latch on your fridge that just, won't, shut, and you are slowing down, wading to the rhythm of beat and the pulse, while that truck, the one you don't know even exists, is getting ready to mow you down, no questions asked, skid-marks on pavement with brains, blood and skull-bits being mandatory, not optional.
Remember Heathcliff Huxtable talking to Theo on THE COSBY SHOW? "I am your father," he said. "I brought you in this world, and I can take you out." There's the Powell doctrine; this is the Cosby doctrine. Now, I don't know if there's a Father up there bringing us in and taking us out. (If there is, I think he just might look like Cosby -- stern but goofy.) But I know now, more than I did before, that we can all be taken out, whether anybody's in charge up there or not.
This can all be taken from you, this life, and it's helpful to remember that we are taking away other's lives, all the time, constantly. Everyday we take something away from someone else by a warm wave of the hand, a snide comment, or a friendly nod of the head, whether we realize it or not. Not their life, of course, we don't take that, we give them that, we allow them that, but there's a myriad of insignificant acts that shape our interactions that don't conceive or disintegrate our lives, no, but they add to them. They subtract.
There's more to life than life itself.
(Unless you're a serial killer or a soldier or a sniper. Then you do take lives, literally. I met a dude my first week in Japan at a bar: Me: What do you do? Dude: I'm a sniper with the marines: Me: Oh. Thinking -- You kill people; I, um, teach ESL...)
We give and we take. And given that Cosby was always handing out morals like candy to little Rudy, here's one of my own: Try not to take too much of other's lives, and be on guard for those that are taking yours, little by little. (And be forgiving, too. They may not know it.)
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
WEATHER, CARDS, ALEXANDER...
Hot. Dusty. Blue sky -- all day, every day. Rain, not a chance. Wind, if you're lucky. Cool on your cheek, a reprieve, however brief, from the sun.
Cambodia in November. Late November.
Back home, an Ontario fall, close to winter.
Seasons here don't change. They shift. One moment it's raining each and every day in the late afternoon for forty minutes on end, hard rain, driving rain, and then, click, the channel's changed, the rain's gone, the sun is back, minus the wet, and the long lazy day can begin once more.
**********************************************************************************
Reading fiction from home takes on a different weight in a foreign land. One minute you're immersed in a Canadian short story, a familiar story, a domestic story, complete with frigid weather and frigid people, and then you hear a sound, a laugh, up you look, and there you see: casually pedalling cyclos and slowly shuffling women with food balanced on their head and groups of motodops sitting on the side of the road, enveloped in a game of cards, the only game in town, kneeling beside their bikes, all of them leaning against one another, leaning forward, the men and the bikes, and down go the cards! SWAP! When Cambodians play cards, they play, each hand thrust down as if they are sure that this is the one, and then you tilt your head down, to the page, and you're back, back home.
************************************************************************************
An ode to courage, daring, ambition, stealth: Alexander the Great, quoted:
My friend, if by deserting from the war before us
You and I would be destined to live for ever, knowing no old age,
We would do it; I would not fight among the first,
I would not send you to the battle which brings glory to men.
But now as things are, when the ministers of death stand by us
In their thousands, which no man born to die can escape or even evade,
Let us go.
Which I take to mean: Unfortunate, yes, but Death is here, there, above, beyond us, around us. So live, now. Fight. Revel in glory. Commence.
Cambodia in November. Late November.
Back home, an Ontario fall, close to winter.
Seasons here don't change. They shift. One moment it's raining each and every day in the late afternoon for forty minutes on end, hard rain, driving rain, and then, click, the channel's changed, the rain's gone, the sun is back, minus the wet, and the long lazy day can begin once more.
**********************************************************************************
Reading fiction from home takes on a different weight in a foreign land. One minute you're immersed in a Canadian short story, a familiar story, a domestic story, complete with frigid weather and frigid people, and then you hear a sound, a laugh, up you look, and there you see: casually pedalling cyclos and slowly shuffling women with food balanced on their head and groups of motodops sitting on the side of the road, enveloped in a game of cards, the only game in town, kneeling beside their bikes, all of them leaning against one another, leaning forward, the men and the bikes, and down go the cards! SWAP! When Cambodians play cards, they play, each hand thrust down as if they are sure that this is the one, and then you tilt your head down, to the page, and you're back, back home.
************************************************************************************
An ode to courage, daring, ambition, stealth: Alexander the Great, quoted:
My friend, if by deserting from the war before us
You and I would be destined to live for ever, knowing no old age,
We would do it; I would not fight among the first,
I would not send you to the battle which brings glory to men.
But now as things are, when the ministers of death stand by us
In their thousands, which no man born to die can escape or even evade,
Let us go.
Which I take to mean: Unfortunate, yes, but Death is here, there, above, beyond us, around us. So live, now. Fight. Revel in glory. Commence.
Monday, November 22, 2004
THIS IS A LONG TIME AGO
I've always loved this quote from comedian Gilbert Gottfried: Did people in ancient Greece walk around saying: 'Gee, this is a long time ago...'
It cracked me up at fourteen. It cracks me up now. (Which says something about how much I've matured, but...)
I can't even figure out why it makes me laugh so much, but I remembered it recently when I was reading one author's take on Alexander the Great, and his explanation of how we can't judge yesterday's standards by today's morals.
I was reading a biography of Alexander and his conquest of most of the freakin' world, and I wondered: Why did most of these people, these conquered people, give themselves so freely to this young punk after their land was invaded, their fields razed, their citizens slaughtered?
The explanation was, well, in those times, that was what people did. Plain and simple. If your land was invaded, and your side lost, sorry, pal, but you gave up any authority you had to the rightful victor, like it or not.
Similarly, those who judge Alexander's seemingly endless desire for more and more lands to dominate as essentially barbaric may have a point, but they're also missing the point, because he lived in a 'pre' time --pre-Ally McBeal, pre-Freud, pre-Victorian, pre-Christian, pre-everything. The way we've been conditioned to view the world cannot possibly mesh with how he saw the world. Was it right? Was it wrong? Irrelevant. It was, period. You can't project backwards. You don't have to agree with the way things were. But you have to acknowledge the way things were, acknowledge the framework through which people saw the world. Alexander believed himself to be a descendant of Zeus. Oracles were consulted regularly for advice (oracles being the primitive version of Dr.Phil.) War and conquest were the standard by which success was measured. Aristotle was a soldier and a scholar, and saw no contradiction between the two. The world was an unknown entity, there to be fought over, divided, and contemplated upon, preferably in white loincloths, I'm guessing.
Think of it this way. Three thousand years from now, scholars, future Aristotles, may look back at our time, at 2004, and marvel at a world so divided by culture and religion, by linguistic differences and theological clashes that led to the deaths of thousands of innocents. Three thousand years from now, there could be one race of yellowish/brownish/blackish/whiteish type people, and the teenagers of that future era will read their history texts (or have them implanted in their heads, I guess) and laugh at how primitive, unsophisticated and basic we were.
From our horizons, Alexander and his ilk were basic, yes, ignorant of human psychology, sure, and overly dependent on oracles and sophistry, uh-huh, but their legends endured. Their exploits inspired. Alexander was so well known he was written about in the Bible and the Koran. Not bad. Which of today's leaders (or conquerers) are mythic enough to make the cut three thousand years from now in some as-yet-to-be-written gospel?
Just think: As you butter your bagel and watch Katie Couric on the Today show and settle into your comfortable cubicle at work and bop around town looking for a Dairy Queen so you can nab a Blizzard for lunch, diet be damned, you are also living and breathing right here and right now in that land known as 'a long time ago.' People thousands of years from now (assuming the world will still be around, and I think it will), college kids whizzing around the skies in vehicles too abstract and surreal to contemplate, are studying your life and your values, your diet and your weapons, your judgements and choices, and they're snickering, these kids are. Sighing. Wondering how you could be so ignorant. Wondering how you could be so skeptical. So naive. They're relieved, these futuristic sophomores, that humanity has somehow managed to advance past that barbaric and primitive Dark Age known as the 21st century.
It cracked me up at fourteen. It cracks me up now. (Which says something about how much I've matured, but...)
I can't even figure out why it makes me laugh so much, but I remembered it recently when I was reading one author's take on Alexander the Great, and his explanation of how we can't judge yesterday's standards by today's morals.
I was reading a biography of Alexander and his conquest of most of the freakin' world, and I wondered: Why did most of these people, these conquered people, give themselves so freely to this young punk after their land was invaded, their fields razed, their citizens slaughtered?
The explanation was, well, in those times, that was what people did. Plain and simple. If your land was invaded, and your side lost, sorry, pal, but you gave up any authority you had to the rightful victor, like it or not.
Similarly, those who judge Alexander's seemingly endless desire for more and more lands to dominate as essentially barbaric may have a point, but they're also missing the point, because he lived in a 'pre' time --pre-Ally McBeal, pre-Freud, pre-Victorian, pre-Christian, pre-everything. The way we've been conditioned to view the world cannot possibly mesh with how he saw the world. Was it right? Was it wrong? Irrelevant. It was, period. You can't project backwards. You don't have to agree with the way things were. But you have to acknowledge the way things were, acknowledge the framework through which people saw the world. Alexander believed himself to be a descendant of Zeus. Oracles were consulted regularly for advice (oracles being the primitive version of Dr.Phil.) War and conquest were the standard by which success was measured. Aristotle was a soldier and a scholar, and saw no contradiction between the two. The world was an unknown entity, there to be fought over, divided, and contemplated upon, preferably in white loincloths, I'm guessing.
Think of it this way. Three thousand years from now, scholars, future Aristotles, may look back at our time, at 2004, and marvel at a world so divided by culture and religion, by linguistic differences and theological clashes that led to the deaths of thousands of innocents. Three thousand years from now, there could be one race of yellowish/brownish/blackish/whiteish type people, and the teenagers of that future era will read their history texts (or have them implanted in their heads, I guess) and laugh at how primitive, unsophisticated and basic we were.
From our horizons, Alexander and his ilk were basic, yes, ignorant of human psychology, sure, and overly dependent on oracles and sophistry, uh-huh, but their legends endured. Their exploits inspired. Alexander was so well known he was written about in the Bible and the Koran. Not bad. Which of today's leaders (or conquerers) are mythic enough to make the cut three thousand years from now in some as-yet-to-be-written gospel?
Just think: As you butter your bagel and watch Katie Couric on the Today show and settle into your comfortable cubicle at work and bop around town looking for a Dairy Queen so you can nab a Blizzard for lunch, diet be damned, you are also living and breathing right here and right now in that land known as 'a long time ago.' People thousands of years from now (assuming the world will still be around, and I think it will), college kids whizzing around the skies in vehicles too abstract and surreal to contemplate, are studying your life and your values, your diet and your weapons, your judgements and choices, and they're snickering, these kids are. Sighing. Wondering how you could be so ignorant. Wondering how you could be so skeptical. So naive. They're relieved, these futuristic sophomores, that humanity has somehow managed to advance past that barbaric and primitive Dark Age known as the 21st century.
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