Jocko Benoit's Writing and Pop Culture Spot

New Website

2009-03-18T07:38:00.002-09:00

Well, the new website is finally up. Like this horse, I'm now master of my own domain. Hopefully, I'll soon be adding to my blog as well.

Your Roll Brings You To A Door That Seems To Lead To the Perimeter of the Game Itself: In Memory of Gary Gygax

2008-03-05T10:00:00.003-09:00

I’ve been away from this blog for a long time, and it’s sad that it takes a death to bring me back. Gary Gygax, the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons, godfather of the role-playing game, and stepfather of the computer game, died Tuesday at the age of 69.

What he meant to the gaming industry is all too well understood by gamers themselves. His work revitalized the imaginations of game designers and of players who now didn’t always have a board, although there was an explosion of dice dimensions and colors. And nothing was black and white in D&D. As any dungeon master knows, there could be twenty sides to every argument, although the DM’s side was the only winning one. But Gygax didn’t reduce gaming to mere math – there was a sense of theatre for the players and the DM, and a sense of flexibility - the DM was like a good DJ just trying to keep the game flowing along in a way that seemed fair.

To observers, D&D seemed like a group of people having an argument over an airy nothing at best, or a group of obsessed or even possessed children feverishly carrying out Satan’s bidding. But time has proven that the airy nothing could become quite profitable when numbers married Tolkien and gave birth to trillions of rampant pixels populating legions of video games. (As for Satan, well, word is he’s still leering over millions of feverishly obsessed video gamers.)

But for me the implications go beyond money. My dual interests for much of my life have been creative ventures such as poetry, theatre, movies, TV and playful ventures such as sports and games. Maybe that’s why I have these fantasies about my two worlds coming together more and more in the future. After all, Gygax, as I’ve said, brought theatre into gaming. The first step was to imagine the world one was gaming in. The next step has been to navigate it on a small or now increasingly big screen and to interact with the very movie-like stories. And filmmakers are paying attention to video games, going after licenses and converting famous games into albeit less famous movies. And game designers are conceiving of increasingly more cinematic games - the blockbuster Halo series being just one example of many.

No, I’m not going to say that the future belongs to games. But I will argue that there is a strong gaming element to all that has come before in terms of cultural activities. Consider the poet who has often used metre (numbers) and form (genre) to lead the reader through one or more emotional states and to consider a new way of looking at the world embodied in the construct of the poem. Is this anything less than a kind of game played with the reader? Oh sure, people will tell you that they hate it when a writer manipulates them (like a game designer giving you only a handful of simplistic options), but the truth is that every work of art is manipulative. The only time we see through the game is when it is a game we don’t like. The other games we are perfectly willing to play.

That’s why I can look at a movie like Super Size Me and yawn – at least partly because I’m an avid McDonald’s guest, and also because I’ve heard the same tired and ill-considered arguments about eating right for far too long. But many intellectuals found the movie compelling and insightful even though they would (almost) never set foot in a McDonald’s restaurant and are already well aware of the ‘facts’ the movie is simply reinforcing. They like this game and so they play it with enthusiasm, suspending their pre-beliefs, just like children being told stories again and again even though they know how they end.

All I’m saying is that the boundary between serious art and frivolous gaming is less rigid than many would like to think. But the stories we tell in our art and in our games have many similarities and Gygax tapped into elemental fears of enclosed places and monsters and evil bosses to give us stories that we could walk into as more or less ourselves or as a character we don’t like to admit is a part of who we are. I prefer to play rogues, for example, despite my gleaming veneer of innocence. And one sweet girl I knew opted to play D&D for the first time whispered to me that she really wanted to play an assassin. Gygax was, in a way, the Freud of gaming, leading us deeper into our imaginations and our psyches, all without our being aware the dungeon we were navigating was inside ourselves.

Cheating On Poetry

2006-11-09T23:46:00.000-09:00

It had to happen after all these years. I mean before poetry there had been short fiction. And even after I committed to poetry I would sometimes wander off to write an occasional story or maybe even lose a couple of weeks with a screenplay. Poetry wasn’t possessive. It would often show up unannounced and distract me from work. It would come to me in the shower or in those wispy waking moments.

I guess things started to slide a few years ago when I realized that no matter how hard or how often I tried, publishers would never accept my relationship with poetry. I was an interloper not good enough for their prized daughter. No matter that poetry still came to me and so often resurrected all those old feelings, I would put down the pen and the brief high from writing would pass more quickly than it used to. Were we just star-crossed?

Lately I’ve taken up with photography and I’ve been feeling those things that were once commonplace with poetry – the sense of time rushing by, the giddiness at doing something that seems irresponsible and even bad. The ideas for new pictures keep coming and there’s always a place like Flickr where I can post my latest work and get some feedback. Photography (especially digital) is so immediate, whereas with poetry I can’t really get a sense of a poem until I’ve introduced it to an audience at a reading.

Am I upset with poetry to be doing something like this? I don’t think so. I’m upset with a publishing industry that is too narrow-minded, too anxious that poetry be protected like some nature preserve or the silence at a memorial service. Like any other relationship, so much depends on the family.

Meanwhile, all I can think about these days is when I’ll have my next chance to take some pictures – to get at photography’s buttons and peel veils of light from the ever-so-shy day.

Benoit - the Web Contagion

2006-10-31T08:49:00.000-09:00

Just a quick note to let you know that my two poetry teasers and my first ever poetry video are now posted on YouTube.

And my photographs now have a spot on Flickr.

Why I’ve Hitched A Ride On A Trailer

2006-10-14T22:53:00.000-09:00

I was recently reading “The Words Are the Thing,” an article by Scott McDonald in Quill and Quire (October 2006) on the emerging entity known as the book trailer. A book trailer is a web-based short film designed to convey the essence of a book, and publishers are beginning to add these trailers to their websites as an additional means of promotion. McDonald’s objection to the book trailer is simple: movies and books are two entirely different mediums and film cannot capture the essence of the print. He goes on to argue that a good book trailer would rely on excerpts from the book rather than on images. Words, for him, have to come first.

He makes a good point. After surveying a handful of the book trailers available out there already, I have to say some of them are pretty distracting, while others are just plain cheesy. But this new trend is at least a little reminiscent of the emergence of the music video. Critics at the time noted that the videos often had very little to do with the songs and that the videos forced viewers to remember the songs in terms of their visual associations rather than the more personal associations from listeners’ everyday lives.

And while the music video as a form has, in my humble opinion, grown stale these days, there was a time when video was an art form all its own. So who knows what might become of the book trailer if it grows in popularity? Will it become an art onto itself? And will authors reject the extra publicity while they defend the purity of the literary form?

Me, I’ve decided to jump ahead a little bit and try to adapt the form for my own purposes. If a publisher can use a book trailer to promote their books, then why can’t a writer use a book trailer to promote their unpublished manuscripts? Given the difficulties of getting poetry published in this country, what could a little extra self-promotion hurt? I might offend purists’ sensibilities – that’s true. But maybe my highly un-stanzaic shorts (packaged on a slim DVD) might give an editor some idea about how a book of mine could be pitched to an ever-shrinking poetry audience and beyond that to an ever-growing non-poetry audience. It will also show said editor that I am willing to do what it takes to promote my work and won’t leave it all up to an understaffed and underpaid small Canadian publisher.

So I’ve posted my first very primitive book trailer - make that manuscript teaser - on my website and I plan to add more. (It’s only available in Quicktime so far, but I’ll be posting another version soon.) Maybe this move isn’t all that different from William Blake using his engravings in his books for his inspired multimedia of the divine. So my teasers will be like William Blake meets Martin Scorsese meets a McDonald’s ad.

I just hope my poems don’t start getting too Hollywood to recognize me on the street.

Cliffs Where I Have Been Abandoned

2006-09-21T10:11:00.000-09:00

So here I am again, risking heartbreak. They say you can’t fall in love if you don’t take a chance and that you can’t stay in love unless you are ready to commit. Despite the claims of friends, relatives, employers and ex-girlfriends that I am incapable of committing to anything, I’ve already decided to take another chance. Maybe it’s the first wave of autumn air waking me from my languid summer slumber. I start to come alive a little bit in the Fall.

I think it has a lot more to do with the return of my favorite TV shows – it is a time when cliffs will be unhung only to be replaced by more perilously hung cliffs with each episode. Some people get through long winters that offer little hope for life and love just by watching their favorite serial drama. I’m not quite at that stage myself, but my fear of commitment is tested every year at this time when new shows come out and I have to decide whether or not I’m going to watch them. It’s not that I’m afraid of being disappointed that a new show will suck - it’s that I’m afraid a new show will be great and will then be cancelled and I will be crushed. It is like finding the love of your life for twenty-two wonderful dates only to have her sucked up into an alien ship never to return.

I remember God, the Devil and Bob, with James Garner voicing the Almighty. A great concept for an animated adult series that just didn’t wasn’t allowed the time to catch on. And there was Earth 2 and Nowhere Man, both of which were strong serial thrillers along the lines of Lost, but they came a decade or so too soon to be appreciated. And worse, they finished with terrific cliffhangers. Of course, I’ve mentioned Firefly before. At least the film added what could almost be called an intermediate ending to the series. Shows like Tru Calling and Boomtown had potential. Boomtown was, in fact, one of the few cop shows I’ve ever been able to watch. The idea of having a story unfold gradually through multiple personal perspectives of all the characters involved allowed for complex and suspenseful storytelling and humanized all the characters in the process. And having Alicia Silverstone together with Ryan O’Neal on Miss Match was inspired casting. The premise of a lawyer who operates a matchmaking service on the side combined legal drama with romantic dramedy. And then pfft! Hiatus after a half season and its devoted fans were left feeling like they couldn’t find love even through TV. The biggest heartbreak of all was Max Headroom which was allowed to run for an extra half season before being pulled. I believe to this day that some executive somewhere finally woke up and said, “Hey! Maybe supporting a TV show that attacks television doesn’t make us look hip and edgy, but just stupid,” and quickly pulled it.

This year my candidates for wooing are Smith and Jericho – Smith mainly because it’s a crime show that isn’t isn’t isn’t about cops and instead focuses on a group of heist meisters. Let’s have some sympathy for the devil once a week in primetime. And Jericho is an obvious choice for me, with my love of disaster movies and my nostalgia for the good old days when a Republican nuclear war would end it all quickly rather than now when a Republican series of wars will end it all slowly. You could argue it’s simply the inverse of Lost – a small group of people with dark secrets are stranded when the rest of the world endures a nuclear catastrophe.

The pilot episodes have been promising and there’s been a lot of teasing going on. The best of it so far is that I don’t have to choose between them and can play the TV field for another season. For those first weeks of Fall my social life can afford to go on hiatus. I’ll leave major decisions hanging for a little while with a sign on my life saying, “To be continued…” And, who knows? If I can learn something about attachment and commitment to TV shows maybe I can move on to real relationships.

Honk If This Car Is Ascending Too Slowly During the Rapture

2006-09-11T22:58:00.000-09:00

When I first woke up on September 11, 2001, I turned on the news and the fire and smoke pluming from the towers had my lapsed Catholic mind, still half-asleep, just for a moment latching onto imagery from Revelations. And, judging by the response of the religious right to the event, I obviously wasn’t alone. Now terrorism and jihad have become prime movers of the Apocalypse in Western minds. And it’s that willingness to believe in pure evil and the possible end of all things has led to war, and to war again.

But the conservative mindset isn’t the only one filled with dancing visions of Armageddon. In the August issue of Harper’s, the cover story entitled “A World Without Oil: Scenes From A Liberal Apocalypse” looks at the mostly liberal-led Peak Oil movement and the concern that eventually oil is going to run out and we may well have to literally head for the hills and learn to live off the land again. (Christ will probably be riding down on a chariot, it appears, because there will be no oil and gas left for the divine Hummer.) Many people (as peace and conflict studies expert Metta Spencer points out in her blog) are giving up the leftist cause and simply abandoning civilization in fear of what is coming. All they see is long lines of unmoving cars and a crescendo of helpless beeping. And add to this the list of people who have just seen An Inconvenient Truth and are heading for higher ground.

Things couldn’t possibly be any worse, right? Well, I used to have frequent dreams of nuclear war and trying to survive in the aftermath. Thank you, Mr. Cold War. For decades, the tensions between the bipolar powers were further strained by movies like Fail-Safe and countless spy thrillers and Godzilla movies playing on our fears of nuclear disaster. On top of this, Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, had launched an environmentalist movement that insisted we were destroying the world right from under our own feet - not to mention numerous studies that plotted the booming population of the planet to equator-busting limits by the time the new century arrived. (See Soylent Green or even Logan’s Run if you want some indication of where those fears could lead people.)

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 I thought that at least some of the tension would dissipate, but all of a sudden violent crime surged everywhere – at least on the news. Even while the numbers for violent crime were falling, the fear of it was rising. Could it be that people so strongly needed something to fear, some death wish to hold close like a burning teddy bear, they had to manufacture something out there in the night waiting for them? (Oh, and fear of crime is only going to get worse for an increasingly physically vulnerable North American population. There will be fewer young people to commit actual crimes, but more senior citizens paranoid about young people committing crimes.)

When you read far enough back in history, the Apocalypse and its champions have come and gone far too many times to count. Fated dates have whistled by with nary a cleansing flame. Paths of bloody glory have gone unswathed. Maybe that’s why when I was working on my book of poems about the many possible ways the world would end the tone of those poems grew more satirical with each new piece. The book
I had begun in fear was turning into something that was increasingly funny. I had started to realize that the Apocalypse was just a genre – a genre of thought I could play with and deconstruct.

I realized that people often projected their own insecurities onto the world and the Apocalypse takes the shape of what we as individuals fear or, in some cases, desire. The open-minded and tolerant left, for example, really only fears death. That’s why the left have been so outspoken about eating right, exercising, getting all the toxins out of their systems. And so go their attitudes for the environment. “We mustn’t let the planet die,” they assert with a conviction equal to their own need to eat right and take care of their bodies. The right, judgmental as they often are, imagine a Judgment Day when accounts will be balanced, moral deficits made right and winners and losers chosen at last. It will be the capitalist God & Son come for the last stage of a long-planned hostile takeover.

Me, I mostly like shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel where the Apocalypse can happen in any given episode and represents personal moral choices that people make every day. In Buffy the choices are about establishing independence and still keeping your friends close. In Angel it’s about working well with others as an adult and not letting the corporate mentality overwhelm your sense of right and wrong. If you screw up as a person, you let your personal demons win. You are the grounds of Armageddon. You are where the battle is won and lost with every decision you make. This I can understand.

Of course the real end is coming, but it’s unlikely any human will be alive to see it. The planet will most likely die long after humans have passed on. Humans will most likely fade as a species when more tenacious species emerge. Or maybe it will be some very non-Terminator-like robots. Who knows? All I can do right now is be close to those I care about, write down a few things I’ve learned, and relax in spite of all the world-smashing worries people choose to indulge. For now, I live by Buffy’s words: “If the Apocalypse comes, beep me.”

Writing: The Fairy Dust Factory Turned Sweatshop

2006-09-04T09:05:00.000-09:00

The book I’ve been reading the last few days is How To Be Idle, by Tom Hodgkinson. Maybe it attracted me because I’ve been particularly busy lately and I wanted a reminder of what it’s like to not be. Don’t get me wrong – I, of all people, don’t need any lessons in being idle. Just ask my mother. Or any of my ex-girlfriends. In any case, the book has reinvigorated my outrage over the grand plot (according to Hodgkinson and many past literary greats) to make us all feel guilty when we’re not working. Mind you, I tend to be one of the exceptions. When I’m not working I tend not to feel guilty so much as, well, great.

In fact, one of the reasons I like to write is that I’m still an amateur at it – meaning I’m seldom paid for my writing. That means that any time I sit down to write I’m playing hooky from work. It’s an act of defiance – mooning at the pedestrian life of jobs and careers. And it’s no accident that so many writers have felt animosity towards work. Work takes us away from that which we find most rewarding. It is the enemy. That doesn’t mean that the discipline of writing is an enemy. Discipline and sometimes forcing oneself to write when one doesn’t want to can be a good thing. Sometimes we resist writing because the act of creating a poem or a character or even a passage of dialogue can draw out things in us we are trying to avoid. (A poetry sweatshop – an off-the-cuff writing session alone or in competition with other poets – can really open up the creative pores sometimes.) And on the practical side, there is a skill to writing and it does help to keep in practice.

But the problem is that work has been steady infiltrating the mindset of writers over the last century. Things began to go sour, in my opinion, when most people in western society learned how to read. Big disaster for writers. Soon anyone who could read and write felt they could be real writers. What had once been considered a craft of a very few has been democratized. What happened next is only my conjecture, but I think writers started feeling defensive. If anyone could write, then how do we separate the hoi polloi from the true geniuses? If one could be trained to write, then genius was presumably within the reach of anyone who was willing to put enough time into writing.

And that was the way out for writers. Time, effort, perseverance, work. Soon writers were talking less about the inspiration for a poem or novel and more about the many drafts it took and the many many submissions of their manuscripts before acceptance. Screenwriters regularly recommend doing a dozen or so drafts of a screenplay before you even think of showing it to an agent. Even though writing had been stripped of its importance as a result of widespread literacy, it could still earn respect if writers simply changed the way they and their audience saw the endeavor. Call it work and people will nod in understanding and respect.

So we saw the emergence of workshops and writing programs, writer’s retreats and sitting in front of a desk every day whether the words come or not. I assume this was meant to both earn writers some respect and to dissuade wannabes from even getting up in the morning. Now the writer is someone who has to tough it out like everyone else and put in so many hours a day. I wonder if Montaigne felt that way writing his incidental essays on philosophical and everyday issues?

Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that a smaller percentage of writers are from the once great leisure class. There are more working class writers out there – pugilistic Hemingways getting up every day with bloody minded determination to dominate the paper canvass. And many of them want to make their writing seem as natural as possible and therefore less impressive to the average reader. (But if you’re going to do that amount of work, I think you should make your writing seem like something unattainable by mere mortals. Something approaching magic.)

These developments make it hard for a lazy person like me to make it as a writer. I, like Hodgkinson, prefer to sleep in. I prefer the excitement of the first draft of a poem to the constant picayune rewrites that follow. I prefer to think of writing as meaningful play. A game where we all learn something by the time the last period falls. I think all forms of work should aspire to become what writing used to be.

But the paradigms have shifted and left me behind. All I can offer to other writers is that when you get up with first light to begin your work day, I’ll stay in bed a little longer and dedicate at least a few minutes of dream to you.

Between the Fringe and A Hard Place

2006-08-26T10:05:00.000-09:00

More Fringe recommendations in no particular order…

Cloning Mary Shelley: This is the kind of play the word ‘interesting’ was built for. It’s a one-woman show that opens up connections between cloning, Frankenstein and his monster, Mary Shelley, the narrator’s past and present and stem cell research. It’s a fascinating bit of thematic juggling and weaving that works quite well. But the play doesn’t tell me what I should think about it all – a kind of open-endedness I applaud and call cowardly at the same time.

Get Off the Cross, Mary: Sacrilicious to the max when a gay puppet decides to stage The Flaming Passion of the Christ with himself in the lead. It’s a kind of Meet the Feebles for the stage with three Muppet rejects and their ‘handlers’ arguing their way through a jinxed film production. I was revolted and greatly amused. Not for rosary bearers or prudes.

The Centering: A commanding one-man performance featuring a political prisoner who retreats into his imagination to his past and his own inner clown. Touching, hard-hitting and funny all rolled into one, with some deliberately jarring and unsettling moments.

Genericles: It’s tempting to call this the best high school play ever (even though the actors are older than that). It has that feeling, including a cast of guys that I’m sure I went to high school with… Modern ideas about work are thrown into the setting of ancient Greece and run through the wringers of the gods. My favorite line has to do with Pegasus being put down when he breaks a leg. Plenty of cheap laughs along with some very clever bits. My only beef is that the play reaffirms the importance of hard work. [shudder]

Fringed Again

2006-08-24T10:04:00.000-09:00

Another Fringe recommendation:

The Excursionists: If you’ve ever wondered what Monty Python would do with a Jules Verne story, wonder no more. This play gives us two intrepid underwater explorers determined to find a new England now that the old England has sunk. Cannibals, sea monsters, messages in bottles – this is steam punk meets steam ponce and it doesn’t hurt that one of the duo resembles Malcolm McDowell in his Time After Time H.G. Wells role. Inventive and goofy, this play has got to be seen to be disbelieved.

Random Recommendations From the Edmonton Fringe

2006-08-23T10:54:00.000-09:00

A few recommendations (somewhat in order) for fellow Fringe-goers in Edmonton this week.

Despite my personal inclination to believe that romantic love is nothing but an ad campaign promulgated by evolution, my favorite two plays thus far at the fringe have been romantic comedies.

The Raven and the Writing Desk: David Belke’s latest comedy has all the elements you’d expect from one of his plays – love in jeopardy, fast-paced humour, poignant realizations, and a top-notch cast with split-nanosecond timing. I laughed so much even my eyebrows hurt by the end. I guess my only complaint is I always leave a Belke comedy feeling a little sad, both that it’s over and that, despite all the real and honest touches that make his couples seem truly in love, love just doesn’t seem as well meaning or as hopeful in real life.

52 Pick-Up: watch a couple’s relationship go through all the familiar stages – except in random order. 52 scenes corresponding to playing cards – each performance plays out in as determined by a deck of cards scattered at the beginning. And it’s not just a gimmick. The play is so cleverly constructed that past and future connect in surprising and touching ways with scenes from late in the relationship actually ‘foreshadowing’ earlier scenes – depending on which cards the actors pick up and in which order. I haven’t seen this play performed before, but the cast in this case is unbeatable, as far as I can tell. This is exactly the kind of originality and authenticity that a romantic comedy needs.

If you’re looking for something a little different, the next two plays are for you.

Identity: The story plays out as a comic book or graphic novel outlining the origins of the superhero Dragonfly and her liaison with an ex-superhero sidekick. With roots in pop culture, serious theatre, and dance, this play is for theatergoers in the mood for something different. Heavily philosophical, the story looks at the division in humans between head and heart.

The Wonders of the World: Recite: Three people in an outlying coastal area are unaware that a large meteor is about to strike the earth. Sounds like an occasion for madcap humour, right? Not quite. The story and characters are utterly unique. The American troupe behind this play is young, but the performances are polished and charming. And the writing (from two of the performers) is original, offbeat and disarming. I’m used to near-nekkid staging at the Fringe and so this play seemed cluttered by props, but the cast uses this excess with ease and skill. There is some very minimal audience participation, but don’t be afraid. The ending of the play will leave you with a small sense of wonder.

And for those of you with a taste for something more Hollywood…

Stealing Venus: I’ve always said what the Fringe needs is more heist plays. Someone must have been listening. This brilliant one-man multi-character performance gives us the entire multinational heist crew. Our main character, though, is not so wrapped up in his work that he doesn’t take time to think about love. In fact, if I have a complaint about this play it’s that I’d like more heist. The set up for the heist is great, but the heist itself isn’t all that interesting – probably because the point of the play is elsewhere.

Living Shadows: If you want to see what a Hollywood legend truly is, then this play about Mary Pickford is for you. The story mixes the historical with the psychological and gives us a well-rounded portrait of an important actress and filmmaker who helped build the foundations of the movie industry – a reminder that woman have both had it tough in the industry and made major contributions long before our times. Both the performer and the story transcend their “I am woman” generic roots and give us a multidimensional portrait of the artist as a slave to her public.

I Would Like To Begin By Closing

2006-08-16T22:12:00.000-09:00

One of the things I did during my vacation was watch the series Firefly. Of creator Joss Whedon’s three series (including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel) it is probably – for me – the weakest. But that doesn’t mean I don’t find it interesting and even compelling. This sci-fi series is all tarted up as a western and it even has echoes of a civil war that the captain of the good ship Serenity is trying to find closure for – although he is far more likely in any given episode to challenge the powers that be as if for him the war hasn’t really ended.

For a series that hinged on the subject of closure, its abrupt cancellation (just when the characters were starting to fill out and the story was becoming more complex) was at least a little ironic. Sure, Whedon gave his fans some closure with the film Serenity, but to some extent the ultimate fates of many of the characters will hang in limbo – a reminder that even in Hollywood the expected happy ending might be neither. Meanwhile, the DVD release of the series has sold briskly and the ongoing web campaign to reinstate the series hasn’t died out yet.

This is because a cancelled series is a problem for fans who seek things like catharsis and closure in their entertainment. How much do they want closure? Think back to the 80’s comedy mystery series, Remington Steele. I just picked up seasons 4 and 5 on DVD and I had a sense of completion – the whole set… mine at last. But the six-episode season five is a reminder of the difficulty of closure in a TV series.

When Brosnan opted to leave the series to become the new James Bond, he was forced to come back for another season and lose his chance at the role of a lifetime (temporarily, as it turned out) because the studio held him to his contract, mainly because of a fan-based write-in campaign that got the show back on the air. But only for six episodes. Just enough time for Brosnan to lose his opportunity and not enough time for fans to enjoy a full season. Nobody was happy. But the writers did at least try to resolve the romantic relationship between the two main characters and also resolve the mystery of ‘Remington Steele’s’ true identity. Fans weren’t entirely happy, but I thought the series ended on a truly touching note while leaving Steele with many unanswered questions. Perfect for a man of mystery.

Another DVD set out this week yet again illustrates the slippery nature of closure. The new Apocalypse Now package includes both the original theatrical version of the film as well as Coppola’s director’s cut (fifty minutes longer), otherwise known as the Redux version. Director’s cuts are about opening up the vault and saying, “Now here is the film the studio wouldn’t let me show you.” It’s a concept that appeals to anyone who sees film as more art than entertainment. But Coppola, in trying to settle things with a definitive version, has only made things worse for me.

The first version has a mythic feel to it. Sure, it’s in Vietnam, but it could be about any war. And it is a world cut off from the feminine. There is something lopsided about the whole story and that is what makes it nightmarish and deeply psychological. The Redux adds Playmates and a love interest, as well as a lengthy sequence at a French plantation where the war is made more historical and political and specific. These are two different films. My perfect version would leave out the Playmates and the plantation, but preserve the lover character who briefly brings Willard back from the dead-to-life. The love scene gives Willard motivation for that later moment when he decides to not take Kurtz’ place at the end of the film. It’s a motivation the original film lacked. But this scene can’t exist without the plantation scene and so there can be no perfect version of this film for me. It’s appropriate that this film the studio was afraid would never get made by that director gone mad in the jungle can, in a sense, never achieve artistic closure – at least for me.

These few examples of how closure can be imposed and yet thwarted illustrate how even Hollywood can’t nail things shut in a way that pleases everyone. Stories resist perfect endings because the child always wants to hear more before going to sleep, or the audience want to hear the same old story with slight variations. The end of a story is a kind of death and our stories, like their creators, resist endings and, if they have to, go into a chrysalis state similar to what happened to Star Trek until the audience is ready for them again in a new form.

Maybe even little firefly-sized stories get a second chance…

Braveheart Burn

2006-08-13T11:12:00.000-09:00

I recently picked up a copy of the Mel Gibson film Conspiracy Theory. Oddly enough, his character doesn’t mention any Jewish conspiracies at all. It’s a shame he couldn’t be more like the borderline lunatic he played in the movie. But why did I buy any film of his at all? Aren’t we all supposed to now be anti-Mel? If I buy his films am I not supporting his anti-Semitic attitudes? (Oh, and in a neat sleight of mind, we mostly ignore his D.U.I., possibly because so many people have been in the same position - never mind that being a bigot and a drunk driver are two hobbies that equally reflect disregard for human life.)

I bought the film because I like it. I’m selfish that way. But I’ll admit I’m less excited about Mel these days. And his indiscretions have forced me to examine my movie star preferences, and I’ve had to face a fact I don’t advertise too much – many of my favorite male movie stars are fairly conservative politically. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner – Republicans all. But the films! The Terminator, Blade Runner, The Man Who Would Be King, Pulp Fiction, Bull Durham – I’d be much poorer in spirit without these films, among many others. But does my fondness for these actors mean that I’m actually much more conservative than I see myself as? (Certainly their action films are about the one man who stands against the many – hell, I live that conflict at least five times before breakfast, so of course I identify with it, even though as a left-leaning person I’m supposed to be all about the collective.)

I can still draw on favorite actors who are noticeably liberal (Robert Redford, George Clooney, Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Nick Nolte… oops, there’s that D.U.I. demon again). So I must be okay, right?

It’s not new territory for those in the arts. For example, many poets had to wrestle with Ezra Pound’s mind-boggling decision to do radio broadcasts in support of Mussolini during World War II. Add to this his unsettling tendency to slander Jews and your impression of The Cantos is bound to be affected. I find it hard to read Pound as a result. (Okay, I find The Cantos hard to understand period, much less read.) On the other hand, my impression of e.e. cummings’ poetry is the same as it was before I found out about his anti-Semitism.

Meanwhile, on the music front, I fully support The Dixie Chicks in their politics, but I’ll probably never buy one of their albums because they’re still just too country for me. Political affinity alone can’t make me like someone’s art. And then there’s Frank Sinatra – a man whose thuggish soul just grunts out in his songs. Why don’t more people hear it like I do? I can never appreciate his singing because the life of the man walks all over the songs as if they were cigarette butts or ex-wives. (Ooops! I just thought of that Frank Sinatra hat scene in Mel’s What Women Want. Things are really not looking good for our boy.)

In his book What Good Are the Arts? (just recently in paperback), John Carey talks about how defenders of the arts want to believe that lives are improved by a person’s proximity to art. Carey goes on to show that not only are noted appreciators of art (Hitler) not changed for the better, but artists themselves – those people up to their necks in the stuff – are not consistently better people than those who stay away from the arts. This point should be obvious to anyone who has ever known an artist. Or who has even stood near an artist.

And the artists whose work we like despite their huge personal flaws are no different than the friends we like despite their continuing refusal to be more like us.

Those of us who work in the arts harbour dreams of making it big, but we don’t realize what that might mean to our ‘legacy.’ Decades from now, readers of my poetry will shudder at the thought of all the dead animal flesh I consumed (just in one evening) and at the number of critics I buried in my backyard because they just couldn’t leave my private life out of their reviews. All I can say is that, at the time, these things seemed more acceptable. Blame it on current socio-cultural paradigms, is what I would tell them. I am/was a man of my times. And God help a future where writers can’t arbitrarily kill their critics. I wouldn’t want to live there. Just as I’m sure many people dread a future where drinking and driving was no longer culturally acceptable. “That bastard Mel,” we intone, even though we’ve had bigoted thoughts and driven drunk at least five times before breakfast. All of us have a sudden ego crash waiting for us out there, never mind if you’re signaling left or right.

Me and Cohen

2006-08-10T23:15:00.000-09:00

Just thought I'd mention that I'll be one of the performers at this year's Leonard Cohen Night. Details are below:

5th Annual Leonard Cohen Night (in Edmonton, September 23, 2006)

Leonard Cohen Night returns to Edmonton, Saturday, September 23rd with an evening of poetry and song. This event, presented by the Cohenights Arts Society in conjunction with the first Edmonton Poetry Festival, will celebrate the 72nd birthday of Canada’s favorite poet by featuring local singers Colleen Brown, John Gorham, Jared Sewan and Ann Vriend as well as wordsmiths Jacques Jocko Benoît and Myrna Garanis. The 5th Annual Leonard Cohen Night is the culmination of a two-week celebration that includes Spice Box, an exhibition of women's portraits inspired by Cohen's poetry, at Edmonton City Hall, September 7 - 20. This exhibition will feature works by Tessa Nunn, Glenys Switzer and Raymond Thériault curated by Danielle LaBrie. Join friends, fans and others who dig music and poetry - and ‘Leonard’ - for these unique festivities. Leonard Cohen Night will be held at La Cité, 8627 - 91 St., Edmonton. Show starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $22 and are available at TIX on the Square (780.420.1757 or toll free 877.888.1757, tix@tixonthesquare.ca.

For more information contact Artistic Coordinator Ronald Tremblay at 780.461.9028 - ed.bisk@telus.net or Cohenights Arts Society President Dr. Kim Solez at 780.710.1644 - kim.solez@ualberta.ca

Vacation!

2006-07-24T00:10:00.000-09:00

My apologies to my visitors for the last few weeks of bupkis on this site. Incredibly busy in the lead up to my vacation. I'll be away until August 8th, but I'll have new material soon after that. I can feel ideas hatching already. Either that or I've sat on the carton of eggs I just bought...

A Modest Proposal To Offset the Great Harm That Comes From Plagiarism

2006-07-04T23:31:00.000-09:00

My night has come to a standstill. I’m trying to decide exactly how to handle a student who has obviously plagiarized his final essay. More precisely, he’s paid someone else to write it for him. The thing that baffles me is why anyone would do this. I know it has something to do with wanting the result (more money, more prestigious, or merely to finish off that last nagging credit for the degree) more than the experience and the knowledge.

My favorite plagiarist of all time had to be a guy I vaguely knew in my Moral Theology class at St. Francis Xavier University. What a pre-Dentistry student was doing in Moral Theology I’ll never know. My guess is he thought it would be a bird course (orni-theology?) and then found out that the priest teaching it expected us to know the Bible (not ‘know’ in the biblical sense) and to read theologians in our spare time. (A great lecturer, even though he had the toughest academic standards I’ve ever encountered. Our three-hour final consisted of ten essay questions – DO ALL, and write three pages on each. I like to say that I nearly flunked morality…) So this pre-dental guy decides to pay a philosophy student to write all six book reviews of theological works. Those essays received grades of 80 and above. Don’t know how he did on the exam. All I know is God didn’t strike him dead in the gym.

My big question is why would anyone want to steal someone else’s writing? My puzzlement over this has to do with my basic faith in my own writing and my inability to be overawed by the writing of others. Meanwhile, there are the supposed ‘accidental’ plagiarisms various writers have been accused of – lines, chapters, scenes, characters resembling those in other books. And, of course, there are the deliberate ‘borrowings’ and ‘homages’ to previous works that you find in a poem like “The Wasteland,” for example. Probably the neatest example of writers plagiarizing writers came from a fiction writer in Toronto (sorry, I’ve forgotten his name) who once entered a writing contest by using stories by Hemingway, Faulkner and Kafka to prove a point. No one caught the plagiarisms, but, more importantly for this writer, none of the stories won any prizes. He felt this proved the lack of legitimacy of the contests and the judges because they couldn’t recognize obvious quality. But all the episode really proved is that the three famous writers would have a rough time today because their writing isn’t spiced with the contemporary idiom.

But why should true plagiarists be concerned at all? They live in a culture in which out and out stealing (of songs, films, photographs) is common practice. The written and performing arts are not ‘real’ somehow. Stealing from them is just about the free exchange of data. I’ve proposed that this should spread to things like money – which is, after all, a piece of paper which informs the bearer and the receiver that the bearer has the financial clout to support the number on the bill – but no one has taken me up on this.

And while laws have been passed to protect copyright and you can face fines and even jail time for serious offences, the same isn’t true of student plagiarists. People have proven time and again that something is only wrong if you are caught and you are punished. Since plagiarism is increasingly widespread, it follows that it is perceived to be less and less wrong. The need to discover one’s own thoughts and attitudes and to look more closely at the ideas of others in the course of a research essay is a luxury for the elites – and even they seem to be foregoing the need for discovery, if the statistics on plagiarism are any indication. The drive to achieve something of value is far more powerful and relevant than the drive to embody something of value.

My main problem with plagiarists isn’t that they are cowards who are afraid of finding out more about who they are – it is that they are cowards for not truly, whole-heartedly going after what they want. You see, plagiarism is a painfully slow way to achieve success. One essay at a time, the student works towards the big job and big payday at the end of it all where the rewards of cheating can be greater and more far reaching. But why delay the gratification? I would propose that if you see someone who has money and status and power, kill them and take it all. Or, if you like to hire people to do your dirty essay work, then hire other people to kill the people who have what you want.

I’ll admit this might sound extreme to some, but I just want to assure you I have no personal gain in this proposal – except that I might have to spend less time trying to catch plagiarists and could offload that population to the police and the courts. And if you are horrified by my suggestion, you have to remember I nearly flunked morality once.

The Importance of Artistic Disasters

2006-06-26T23:13:00.000-09:00

Lately I’ve been infatuated with disaster and end of the world movies. Mainstream, direct-to-video, TV miniseries – anything will do. So I’ve watched The Triangle, Revelations, War of the Worlds, Category 7 and, most recently, Absolute Zero. Now, most movie reviewers will tell you to never put a title on your film that can come back and be used against you. First strike against Absolute Zero. This movie is essentially a low-budget attempt to repeat the moderate success of The Day After Tomorrow. But there’s only so much you can do to make globally destructive weather effects for the price of a bad coffee. So the film, despite an interesting premise (scientifically speaking), just never had a chance from a financial point of view.

So don’t get me wrong – this isn’t a movie that fails because of utter incompetence. When it fails, it fails by inches (which might as well be miles). We’re talking about dialogue that is reasonable, but not memorable. The plot is serviceable, but not compelling. The effects are mostly okay, but few and far between. The acting is not flawed. But add up all of these things and you have a real disaster artistically.

But - and I direct this to all would-be screenwriters and filmmakers out there – this is great news for you. It means you can sit and watch a film and constantly think about what you would have done differently. Even I, who’ve never made a film, noticed things like establishing shots that were a beat too long. And there were emotionally unsatisfying moments such as when a key character dies (impaled by a palm tree in the least effective effect of the movie) and his loved ones look a wee bit teary eyed for a few seconds and then promptly forget about him.

Going through a movie like this is much more educational in some ways than watching a truly great film. A great film can both fill you with wonder that such things are possible in the world and fill you with insecurity about you ever being able to equal or surpass what you’ve seen. You learn from great films and are influenced by them. But bad films can show you that you already have learned more than you thought. When you see something that doesn’t work and can say why, this helps build your sense of confidence and accomplishment (at least as someone who has some knowledge in the field). And sometimes a bad film will have one or two good ideas or techniques that you can redesign and adapt for your own work.

The same goes for poetry. When I’m feeling insecure about my own poems, I’ll sometimes take out a recent literary magazine that has never used any of my work and read some of the stuff they have published. This often makes me quite happy because I look at the poems so unlike mine that are, from my perspective, bad poems and this frees me up to write something new – gives me a false sense of superiority so essential to the artistic process (and so soon undermined by having to go back and do the rewrite and see the inspired poem in all its bare-assed awkwardness and glory).

There’s nothing to protect your work or mine from being treated exactly the same way by some other creative type, of course. Just so long as I never find out, I’m happy in my ignorance. What’s important is that we learn, just like the characters in disaster movies, how to pay attention to all the right signs of possible doom and we will not make the same mistakes that led to catastrophe.

The Biological Dictionary For Dummies

2006-06-22T09:24:00.002-09:00

I have a theory that our culture is nothing more than a series of misunderstandings of everyone and everything that came before us. What I mean is that we misunderstand the civilization we are born into and as we grow older we help create something that is different than what we were born into.

Take, for example, the concept of theme. In most literary forms, a theme is the main idea or opinion a work embodies. A work may have more than one theme, of course, but usually one idea predominates. But according to my students’ essays, ‘theme’ is interchangeable with ‘subject,’ ‘motif,’ ‘mood,’ ‘topic,’ ‘style,’ ‘setting,’ and even, I suspect, ‘peanut butter and jam’ or ‘Kraft dinner’ if they’ve been at work too long without eating. In reality, “Love” is not a theme. “Love sucks” is. (Ok – not a very interesting or thought provoking theme for sure.) And a movie can’t have a fish out of water theme – but it can have a fish out of water motif.

The confusion comes at my students from all sides. I hear and read the same mistakes every day from countless shows, newspapers, magazines, and even from teachers. At a certain point I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m remembering things correctly myself.

Imprecision is the kind of thing that George Orwell railed about in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” and I guess I’m railing a bit now too. It doesn’t matter – change overtakes all of us. I look at how he criticized people who used to say “to have an impact on” when all they needed to say was “affect.” I wonder what he would think if he heard people simply replacing “affect” with “impact” as in, “He impacted the situation”? – which, by the way, is like nails on a chalkboard for me.

Terms simply change and maybe it’s useless to fight. But I can’t help it. Watching Attack of the Show the other day on G4 Tech TV, I heard a panel of people talking about cult films and whether or not Snakes on a Plane would qualify as one. One guy argued that you couldn’t know unless the film flopped because a cult film has to fail initially. Another guy argued, though, that Star Wars never flopped and was an instant cult classic. Imagine kicking a row of ten cars to set off at least five different types of car alarm. That’s what went through my head when I heard that.

One of the guys on the show started for me by arguing that a cult film has a small fanatical following, so Star Wars, due to the size of its fan base, could never be a cult film. But the other guy shot back saying the fans for the film were like religious devotees, therefore it was a cult film. But, no, I shot back to the screen, that would make Star Wars a religion, not a cult. And it probably just about is, as far as I can tell.

But I could feel the term ‘cult’ slipping from my grasp as younger film fans can hear in the word something religious, but not something small. Meanings change. Mistakes turn into orthodoxy.

That’s why the word classic, as misused above, has changed as well. It’s a case of partial understanding of the word. People think of classic and they think “great”. Once upon a time, classic embodied “old” as well. The notion of an instant classic implies that something is instantly great, but it also implies, to my ear, that something is instantly centuries or at least decades old.

The most important thing I’ve learned about this, though, is not that civilization is going to hell. It’s that I can’t stop myself from feeling irritated by the changes. Someday I imagine myself unable to communicate with others around me. A fish not so much out of water, but in an old folks aquarium, an object of curiosity. Even now I’m looking at an old dictionary I keep around to remind me of how language leaves us all behind. It dates back to Orwell’s favorite year, 1984. There is no “internet,” “DVD,” “cyberspace” (in fact, “cyber” prefixes words dealing with robotics here), and words like “virus,” “crash,” and “virtual” have taken on new meanings. So am I just a biological dictionary that can’t keep up?

My only consolation is that I, in my stubbornness, will continue facing the students who represent the new ways of speaking, and they will continue to be martyred for the right to speak the language as they think it should be spoken because, for now, I’m the one with the marking pen. (The theme of this piece, by the way, is that we all cope with change as best we can, though most often by taking revenge on its proponents in print.)

The Curse of Humour

2006-06-19T22:47:00.000-09:00

Yesterday I picked up the latest Selected Poems by Roger McGough, one of my favorite poets from years ago. Reading through his poems just reminds me of how much I’ve borrowed from him in my own writing, at least in terms of over-the-top bravado:

Or when I’m 104
&banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
& fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
& throw away every piece but one

(from “Let me Die a Young Man’s Death”)

There’s a poignancy at the end of many of his poems that makes you realize the stakes have been higher than the light tone led you to believe. I like that – the poem that catches the reader up short so they realize even the apparently trivial has depth.

I like other poets who are similar to McGough in some ways. I think of poets like e.e. cummings (so many good lines, but I always think of the opening, “(ponder, darling, these busted statues”) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for example. cummings, not Frost, Lowell, Pound, Williams or Stevens, would be my choice for best modernist poet and Ferlinghetti would out-Beat Ginsberg in my book any day. But critics have tended to treat these poets in the past as ‘minor.’ Even Robert Browning, who I count as a strong influence on my work, has been considered a durable but minor poet.

But, then, we live in postmodern times or postpostmodern times where the hierarchies of the literary patriarchy have been toppled and we no longer think in terms of ‘best’ or ‘great’ or ‘minor.’ Those days are done. We have learned to see writers as conduits for multiple ideologies and variant readings and we have simultaneously unmasked the power politics that lay behind literary coronations of mostly white males.

Even so, I find the writers I most admire don’t get much attention from the literary establishment. It can’t be because they’re no good because ‘no good’ doesn’t exist anymore. It could be that they’re just not interesting or relevant to critics these days. But I think the truth is much simpler. These poets are often funny.

It’s the last literary bulwark – the one between serious meaningful literature and humorous writing. It’s a barrier that goes all the way back to classical times and has been maintained and dusted by its Christian overseers for centuries (just ask Chaucer). And it survives, oddly enough, in post-Christian postmodern criticism and its almost humorless humour, despite the widespread evidence that postmodern writers themselves are often self-referentially funny – though it’s a sense of humour that most readers have no access to.

Even in pop cultural circles it’s the dramas that tend to win the Academy Awards for Best Picture while quality comedies are often noted but not rewarded (except by the Golden Globes – a comedy act all on its own). Even most viewers think of comedy as something they can turn their minds off for and just relax (they’re wrong, of course, but that’s an argument for another time).

With my own work, I notice that in poetry events I’ve been involved with, for the first long while I was often slated as the opener because I had become known as a humorous poet. I was someone who could get the crowd going. Over the years, my position in the order has moved toward the end of these evenings, possibly because hosts have noticed a darker side to some of my work and a.) they wanted to avoid disturbing listeners too early on or b.) I was being recognized as a more serious poet. On the other hand, it could just be a coincidence.

If you want proof of the hegemony of the serious, just grab any poetry anthology and browse. Let me know how many funny poems you find. Or even how many poems you find with a funny line. There are of course exceptions, such as the book Stand Up Poetry, edited by Charles Harper Webb. This is an anthology designed to highlight poets that are currently using humour effectively in American poetry, featuring poets as diverse as: Billy Collins, Lucille Clifton, Charles Bukowski, Jeffrey McDaniel, Russell Edson and Stephen Dobyns.. Read poets like these and you’ll feel like someone opened a window or sprayed you with a hose on an oppressive summer’s day. And I’m willing to bet that somewhere in mid-laughter you will have an epiphany about life – even if it’s only about what you’ve been missing in terms of poetry.

Why I Will Never Make the World A Better Place

2006-06-15T00:06:00.001-09:00

I’ve been reading Tim Bowling’s latest book, Fathom, and have been struck yet again by the power his poetry often has. My favorite image so far has to be one from the poem “I Didn’t Go In At the Recess Bell.” The narrator comes across a cat raiding a bird’s nest and eating the “almost-foetal blind” young. The cat’s meal becomes a horrific image:

the crack-eared cat looked once
at me through jaundice-yellow eyes
but did not cease to chew
and quickly swung back,
drool-strings rendering it
an awful puppet.

It’s Tim’s dark take on things that I find appealing, despite the considerable focus on nature in his work.

Years ago we had an opportunity to exchange ideas on poetics and, on the surface of things, we certainly have little in common in terms of our poetic interests. His world is the natural, mine is the artificial. He writes lyrics poetry, I prefer satire. But it’s only lately occurred to me why I’m drawn to his work: he is a fatalist. His world view is not too distant from that of Thomas Hardy who himself inherited fatalism from an ancient English tradition and before that the Greeks. My fatalism is more of the prophetic variety, inherited from the likes of Cassandra, William Blake and Irving Layton. Tim’s poetry reflects the belief that we cannot overcome life’s deepest most essential difficulties because they are built into the nature of existence. I can get on board with that, and I also subscribe to the belief that everything good is bad for somebody and vice versa. Dead bird, fed cat. And you’ll note the drool as puppet strings takes on new meaning in the larger context of Tim’s poetry as a whole.

This doesn’t mean that either of us are grim people and natural born party-killers. In fact, the most fatalistic of writers have often been quite good at parties. Think of Mark Twain and his lively if occasionally vicious sense of humour. Or even O. Henry who was one of the most widely read American writers during his lifetime and whose stories were considered quite funny even though they were often about people’s utter inability to change. (See, for example, “The Cop and the Anthem” and “The Roads We Take.”) The same could be said of Chekhov. Funnily enough, O. Henry’s work was popular for many decades in Russia where they know a good fatalist when they read one.

And being fatalistic doesn’t mean I can’t be moved by heroic struggles and attempts to change the world. Just tonight I watched part of the American Film Institute’s tribute to inspirational films, 100 Years… 100 Cheers. Many of the scenes from these films can get me a little bit teared up. And some of my favorite films made the list, but then so did the absolutely satanic film, Forrest Gump. Oh well, sympathy for the devil and all that.

What I do take issue with, though, is all those people who say they want to make the world a better place. It sounds good, but before I let anyone go ahead with their plans I’d like to take a look at a mock-up of the better place they have in mind. Do they mean the better place that groups like Greenpeace and Doctors Without Borders are working toward? Maybe, then, that’s a good thing. Or do they mean a better place like Hitler was striving for? A contemporary example would be someone like George Bush who I truly believe is trying to make the world a better place. I wish he would stop. I do not want to live in his better place.

Fatalists know there can be no better places. Fatalists do not necessarily resign themselves to the gloom of the past, but they do try to look carefully at what is right in front of them and study what has happened before. They know that deep meaningful change may never happen and that when it does it’s over millennial stretches of time.

As for all of you who want to make the world a better place in your lifetime, I wish you all the best. But I hope I’m gone by the time you succeed.

The Art of Dating In the Arts

2006-06-13T22:46:00.000-09:00

Okay, so I’ll admit it. I’ve been peeking at the dating books at the bookstore. The first thing that occurs to me is I’m too old for this #%@&. The second thing is that one-third of the books are about how a woman can get a man and another third is split evenly between how a woman can dump a man and why a woman doesn’t need a man. Fair enough.

I’m of course browsing furtively through the final third of the books, careful to regularly shake my head with a wry smile and let out an occasional faint mocking chortle whenever someone else comes down the aisle.

In one book from the eHarmony dating people I come across a startling revelation. The book outlines several key points of potential compatibility and one of these points is about, of all things, art and artistic sensibilities. The chapter is even more specific in that it says if you are an artist of any type you might want to consider dating another artist. This all has to do with the care and feeding of your artist lover. According to the eHarmony folks, the artist has unique sensibilities and lifestyle preferences. I can right away list my own idiosyncrasies: I’m a junk food loving, night owling, work-phobic, lifetime non-drinker who’s never owned a car. Kind of a snappy description maybe, but not the type of thing you send in as a personal ad.

The important thing, according to this book, is that the artist has to have someone who understands the need for bouts of privacy and for a more individualistic approach to life – not to mention a tolerance for bizarre utterances (a more benign but nonetheless disturbing version of Tourette’s whereby, say, the poet might suddenly cry out “The fish dreamed of being a monkey!”). And the obvious candidate for such understanding is another artist. You can certainly see how this works among actors who, spending so much time on the set and having not much privacy or mobility, turn to each other with, if the tabloids are any indication, much success – no matter how often they have to keep succeeding, one divorce after another.

My own dating habits have gone completely counter to this. My girlfriends have been far more practical and level-headed than I am. And they’ve still been fairly open-minded about my poetic predilections, averting their eyes whenever they have caught me in mid-ink-spilling on a page. When we broke up it was usually over things that had nothing to do with artistic sensibilities.

I have had fantasies about dating other artists, though. When I was younger, the fantasy was about dating the female lead singer of a band. But I know with my own button-down lifestyle that would never have worked for someone like that. Painters have always had a certain appeal to me, but I have never found myself in those particular artistic circles. A dancer – now there’s someone I could have understood. Me with my soul of a dancer but body of a bowler. Of course, there was always the possibility of another writer. Why not? I can take the subtle but never completely out of mind competition.

But none of these vague fantasies have ever come to pass. I’m not sure why. I suspect it is because for all my interest in the arts there is something anti-artistic about me – something that doesn’t donate to Greenpeace or ignores recycling bins – not out of malice but simply out of too little concern. I prefer McDonald’s to the (formerly) smoke-filled cafes and I preferred Coke to coffee or espresso. Given my late night junk food-fueled marathon computer gaming sessions, I might have been more compatible with a computer geek with a soft spot for weirdness, even if it was expressed in poetry that didn’t rhyme.

The lesson here is unclear to me. Maybe it’s that art can emerge from the most unlikely of sources. Or that we can’t get the heart to read dating books before it starts beating. Or that some lives are simply misspent on art when they should be getting on with the business of getting laid. Or – more likely – just because one knows their way around the contours of art they may not be able to navigate their own heart – at least not without a trained instructor.

Messrs. Locke and Hobbes Arrive in Deadwood

2006-06-08T23:10:00.000-09:00

I’ve been spending my time lately indulging in long ‘DVD weekends’ with my favorite TV shows. Who would have thought that DVD’s would do even more for TV than for film? But that’s the way things have gone with lower quality films lately and incredible TV shows, many of which are serial in nature. And if a serial show gets things right, that means you’re not going to sit down and watch just one episode.

And look at the lineup: The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Desperate Housewives, Lost and on and on and on. If you were too late to catch a series in first run you can catch it on DVD. That’s what happened with me and Buffy. In fact, Buffy’s popularity continues to grow even though the series ended in 2003.

So I’ve just recently caught up on what I missed in Boston Legal’s first season. Then I dove into Battlestar Galactica and got really upset when I made it to the last episode on the last disc. If the disc had been an orange I would have been squeezing it in a press for just a few more seconds of the action. Finally, I turned to Deadwood because I had been hearing a lot about it.

I suspect the main reason acquaintances recommended it to me was because of the swearing. I, ladies and gentlemen, am from Cape Breton where there are swear words you non-islanders have not yet heard tell of. We watch over these words as if they were nuclear plant runoff and we are careful not to expose them to an unprepared public. But when I watched my first episode of Deadwood, I’ll admit I blinked. I looked down the one-hour barrel of profanities and I blinked hard. Repeatedly.

I was home.

But the gold mining camp (later town) of Deadwood felt like home in more than that one way. What I like about the show is that you get to watch creator David Milch’s vision of civilization and community emerge. Yes, the town is full of murderous no-accounts and people who are running from pasts they would just as soon leave under the rock they crawled out from under. But gradually, as the series progresses, you can see the relationships forming, almost against the characters’ wills. His vision of people is that we are hard nosed individualists and yet we can’t help forming communities.

And with that world view he manages to capture the ongoing contradiction in American literary art – the tension between individualism and community. Especially compelling is the slow transformation of Al Swearengen in our eyes. Part of this is character growth, but part of it is also us being allowed to look closer over the time that a TV series allows and see that as much as he wants to be king of this small outpost, he also understands how the world works, how people want order after a while and they also want to be close to other people. Even Swearengen, despite his protestations and occasionally violence, has a soft spot for Mr. Woo, the head of the contingent from China. So even the worst of the worst can have a conscience and a need for being a part of things. Take that Locke and Hobbes!

Milch’s world is a very dark and very optimistic one. He shows us that the brutal period of no government that the philosophers Locke and Hobbes leveraged to bully us into being glad we signed the social contract (even though we must have been drunk when that happened because we had no recollection of it) can be short and productive. At the same time, as these no-account characters gradually take up positions of authority, we might want to turn back a few pages or so in our history books and see founding fathers everywhere as a little less noble and a little more human. Deadwood takes the piss out of the civilizing project and at the same time shows how necessary it is. You’d have to call that a draw.

The series also illustrates how TV can lead a return to the long-form story of the epic poem and the eight-hundred page novel. You can take the time to say the big things and still entertain with one cliffhanger after another. Sure, my anarchist soul might prefer that the citizens of Deadwood refuse to be drawn into power politics and instead form a separate communitarian culture, but as far as television goes this show is still one of the finest examinations of social development I’ve ever come across.

And those bastards Locke and Hobbes wouldn’t have lasted two rings of a spittoon in that place.

High Concept Poetry

2006-06-04T11:41:00.000-09:00

Sometimes I wish poetry were more like the movies.

For one thing, the movies have comedies, thrillers, science fiction, western
s, and a whole posse of other genres. Most times these days it feels like poetry has two: experimental and lyric. Now of course you can write about nature with free verse, prose poetry, villanelle, and several other forms, along with a slew of rhythmic schemes. Same goes for writing about love, family and death. And the experimental poets have an ever expanding arsenal of forms in lieu of having anything to say. Despite this, it often feels like poetry has a paucity of subgenres.

At the same time, people criticize the genres of film because they are shoddy replicas of real life. Film genres embody formula and repetition and are antithetical to originality and art. And yet they still manage to get us excited on a regular basis. Is this because film appeals to our baser selves – the selves so many poets try to escape in graduate creative writing programs?

Does my interest in poetry and film create a conflict between the subtle and nuanced vs. the hit-you-over-the-head simplicity? Can a person who has studied poetry still want to see a movie like Snakes On A Plane?

That movie in many ways sums up the differences between some films and most contemporary poetry. Ask any poet what his latest poem is about and you will likely get a fairly lengthy answer that doesn’t let you know what the poem is about. In fact, if you ask again what the poem is about, the poet might even get testy and say something like, “A poem doesn’t have to be about anything. It’s an experience, a journey with no destination.” Meanwhile, ask the guy who first pitched the concept of Snakes On A Plane what the film is about and he’ll just excitedly repeat the title at you.

This type of film is what’s known as high concept. High concept means many things, but it’s the kind of film you can sum up in one or two sentences. For example, an archeologist must stop the Nazis from obtaining an ancient artifact (Raiders of the Lost Ark). Man disguises himself as an actress and becomes a better person (Tootsie). And my very favorite for its succinctness, Jaws – underground (Tremors). You can actually hear the guys in the studio exec’s office blurting out their ideas this way and then fleshing them out. And you know the story right off. You know the stakes. You know what train you’re on for the two-hour celluloid trip.

Your first reaction might be that poetry just isn’t about that kind of oversimplification. Let’s see. Pilgrims of all walks of life tell their stories on the way to a shrine (The Canterbury Tales). Fallen from grace, Satan seeks revenge against God (Paradise Lost). A man discusses the former wife he may have murdered (“My Last Duchess”) If you want more evidence of this kind of useful reductionism, just refer to Shakespeare’s plays: Man and woman from rival families fall in love. Man hesitates in avenging his father’s death. Man suspects his wife of an affair and murders her. Man plots with wife to kill the king and assume power. People stranded on an island encounter strange forces and must atone for their pasts (okay, this one could also be the pitch for the TV series Lost). You see, Shakespeare was high concept from the start. That makes me think if he were alive today he’d be in the Biz.

I have a few high concept poems myself. Rival female Mafia groups shoot it out in modern day Italy (based on a true story). Man falls in love with a Valentine’s Day card. Man gives a lift to a mysteriously silent young female passenger. Mother unknowingly takes underage son to see topless dancers at the Moulin Rouge. Man discovers there are ancient books for each of the seven deadly sins. Man seeks operation to change him into a cartoon. And, finally, I have an entire manuscript that can be summed up with: tribal queen of Briton stuns and defeats the Romans in bloody struggle.

So what I’m proposing for any poets out there is that you not be afraid of what I’d like to call high concept poetry. Keep some poems like that in your personal repertoire so that when someone asks you what you write about you can toss out a few one-liners to get your interrogator interested. You want some poems that can hook people before you even read a line. Sometimes we can get lost in the craftsmanship of making every single line of a poem mean volumes. This type of poetry is rewarding for the careful reader. But sometimes it’s fun to try and bring an entire poem down to one line. A single unified effect that conveys the gist of it all.

My next poem? On the paper’s broad white space, no one can hear you scream.

The Vogon Poetry Society

2006-05-30T22:44:00.000-09:00

According to the Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, the Vogons are responsible for the third worst poetry in the universe. A bureaucratic species, Vogons enjoy reading their poetry to other creatures who promptly try to kill or at least deafen themselves so the torture will end. But today I was involved in an event that was nothing like that. It was a media thing for an upcoming poetry festival in Edmonton. A sunny day, a casual outdoor crowd and some good poetry.

I wanted to make the most of my allotted two minutes, so I chose to read a poem I had written on Valentine’s Day. The poem was inspired by a Hallmark card that had outsol
d all other Hallmark Valentine’s Day cards by a ratio of five to one. (The story was a news item. How slow was that news day? Or, more accurately, it’s just another example of corporate publicity increasingly substituting for news.) When I looked up the card on the internet, I was in awe of its banality: “Each time I see you, hold you, think of you, here's what I do/I fall deeply, madly, happily in love with you. Happy Valentine’s Day” (card V330-5, Hallmark). The card has been the leader in sales over the last two Valentine’s Days. And it’s awful, vacant poetry.

But right away I want to apologize to whoever wrote that card and to all the people who bought it. The card serves its purpose and serves it clearly and succinctly. Many people will look at the greeting itself maybe once or twice. The front of the card is what they often remember most. And even more importantly, we remember the person who gave the card. How can what I consider legitimate poetry compete with something that intimate?

It can’t. The poetry I like to read consistently questions the words and borders we use to define our lives. The greeting card above helps reinforce ossified beliefs and assumptions about love and romance. So for me it’s bad poetry. But what I think of as bad poetry is what people most often prefer.

Just this weekend I ran into two examples of bad poetry. (They were the reason I chose the greeting card poem to read today.) The first example is in the miniseries made of Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers. Now, I’m a big fan of any story that has a poet as the hero, and this miniseries has some good moments and a nice slow build, but the most blood curdling part of the horror for me is when Jimmy Smits has to read one of our hero’s ‘great’ poems. It is in some ways a knockoff of Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” with the poet, Gard, saying again and again he has “one last mile to go”. You don’t get to hear ‘the poem’ in its entirety. You get a bunch of crossfades from one sequence of the poem to another as if the poem might have lasted a few hours. And yet the audience looks on, moved and both tearing up and smiling. The tearing up I can understand. The smiling must have been a misperceived group death grimace.

The second instance of bad poetry came from an American model now living in Italy. She’s very lucky I’ve forgotten her name. Hysterical amnesia can be a godsend. She read a few poems from her tome of a few hundred pages that a legitimate publisher had approved, possibly after reading the Necronomicon and eating a few people. Again, the publisher’s absent name is a victim of my inwardly turned, mind-blotting rage. I would recite the poems for you, but they are fairly typical: lots of adverbs, abstract nouns like ‘love’ and ‘courage,’ along with heapings of passive verbs that are hardly verbing at all. This is what makes it on TV. This and occasional celebrities peddling that book of poetry they’ve always wanted to write. (I can take all of the excesses of celebrity except their excursions into poetry. I’ll make an exception, though, for Viggo Mortensen.) Then, of course, there are some of the less artful rap lyrics, the twangiest of cowboy poets, the smarmy and ham-handed imitations of Beat poetry in the early “I Am Canadian” ads.

I don’t want to say that it’s all Vogon poetry and there is no place for it. In fact, years ago we had a Vogon poetry night where people read the worst poems they could find. Some of them were poems that other readers were fond of. Even now, there is no real consensus about what ‘good’ poetry is. How can we criticize that which is terrible if we don’t agree on its opposite? And how can we call greeting card poetry worthless when one successful greeting card will pull in more money than all of one poet’s poetry combined will earn in a lifetime?

And how objective can those of us who consider themselves ‘serious’ poets be when we are judging these so-called Vogons? We challenge audiences and hope that they can clear the imaginative hurdles we put in front of them, but most readers prefer to listen to poets clear iambic rhyming hurdles – up and down up and down. The ideal would be to have poets and readers stretching a bit to hand off the baton that is the poem. But that’s unlikely to happen in the current environment which is increasingly hospitable to the ‘Vogons among us.

Oh, and the worst poetry in the universe came from, according to Douglas Adams, a human.

If Life Is A Movie, Then Where the Hell Is My Agent?

2006-05-29T20:58:00.000-09:00

Over the years of working with film genres, I’ve often run into the comment that “the best movies transcend the concept of genre.” In other words, the best films are better than all that formulaic nonsense. The comments usually come from people in the arts who place great importance or originality and therefore dress like nobody else. Mind you, in dressing like nobody else, they distinguish themselves from people in uniforms and office attire. You could argue that their love of originality helps them identify with each other and bond – that is, until they have to work together on a local production of Les Miserables and can’t agree on anything. That tempestuousness is another of their common traits.

One of my favorite films that plays with its genre is Scream. The film milks the audience’s knowledge of horror conventions and openly refers to those conventions even while it both breaks and reinforces them in the story. But the film also has one of my all time favorite lines. It’s the main character’s boyfriend’s response when she says that sometimes her life feels like a horror movie. He says, “Life is like a movie. You just can't pick your genre." First of all, dump any guy whose best attempt at reassurance is a perverse kind of fatalism. Second of all, the idea that life is a movie should offend many people, and that your life in particular is only one genre is preposterous.

But look closely at your life. Do we truly transcend the expectations that people have of us? Do we see ourselves as fully individual and unique? We certainly don’t see others that way. Despite movies like The Breakfast Club, don’t we all still tend to put the people around us into categories? Life goes on after high school for each of us and yet we can sum up people around us with one line (“Doesn’t anybody teach you people how to drive?”) or even one word (“Asshole!).

The truth is that most of us are proficient at putting people into categories, including ourselves. It’s the kind of thing Walter Truett Anderson discusses in his book, The Future of the Self: “We love anything that reduces the burden of complexity. We love labels of race, gender, and nationality; movies of good guys bashing bad guys; songs of undying love; stories in which people are propelled through life by a single motive.” (p.164) I mean, since he’s mentioned people propelled through life by a single motive, let’s consider someone like George W. Bush, and possibly even Alberta Premier, Ralph Klein. These are politicians whose success rests on their persona as ‘gold ol’ boys.’ We know the type right away. They emanate common sense (remember Klein’s Common Sense Revolution?) and do-it-yourself stick-to-itiveness. The Democrats keep losing because they’ve been cast as dull elitist eggheads. It’s not a policy problem – take it up with central casting.

We can be stereotyped based on gender or even subgenres within our gender (the jock, the dumb blonde, the geek, the corporate slut). Or it could be our professions (what’s the first animal that comes to mind when you think of lawyers?), our lifestyles, our class, what part of the country we’re from, whether we’re married or single, etc.

And it’s not easy crossing genres. It’s not easy, for example, working in the fields of education and media simultaneously. The priorities, expectations and values of university professors and television producers and executives are very different. By working in television, I’ve lost some academic credibility and by working in academia I am a separate animal from my media colleagues.

But there are certainly examples where people have ‘crossed genres’ successfully – people who marry outside of their faith or cultural milieu, people who move to other countries, people who have multiple careers over their lifetimes, and even people who root for teams that aren’t from their city. It’s all about becoming more fully human – not rejecting the things about us that are ‘generic.’ We have very little control over what genre we belong to because the next person we meet will just put us in a category after a few minutes (or less) of conversation. But we can keep stretching ourselves – or maybe it’s more accurate to say that we can continue being more honest about the many selves inside us, “to look at wider vision of our humanity,” as Anderson argues later on.

At least I hope that kind of adaptive behaviour is possible because I’m getting tired being this serial dystopic dramedy with an increasingly smaller cast and so-so ratings. I’d like to be more of a philosophical action hero blowing up people’s expectations. I hope I get the part.

The Other More Scrutable Code

2006-05-24T14:14:00.000-09:00

There’s been a lot of furor about the historical accuracy of The DaVinci Code, but people are missing the real point – in this case, as with so much in popular culture, history is not the final aim.

The notion of history even intruded on the court case where the authors of a 1982 book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, sued author Dan Brown over using their take on the living descendants of Jesus. The court ruled that when it comes to historical information, copyright does not apply. The law itself is a good one and allows writers and other artists to use and adapt history to create new perspectives and ask fresh questions. Never mind that some people make a mockery of history in their subsequent works – the benefits of this freedom far outweigh the potential for idiocy and ignorance. But the funny part of the ruling is that it grants the ideas of Dan Brown and the Holy Blood authors the credibility of history and historians. I’m sure this would trouble most historians right away.

After all, what these writers have done is create a ludicrous or compelling (depending on who you are) narrative out of mostly circumstantial and tangential evidence. You could even argue that rather than adding to historical knowledge, these books are adding to our mythological base. Of course, devout Catholics, among others, object to this rearranging not just of history but of mythology. Seeing Mary Magdalene as more important than traditionally allowed changes the symbolic structure of the church and perhaps of belief itself. Meanwhile, others see the story as confirming what they have suspected all along – that the church has always been ready to subjugate or at least disregard women.

But I would just chime in here and say that it really doesn’t matter if these stories have any basis in truth. The fact that they are found compelling by contemporary readers and moviegoers tells me that the stories are important here and now. These stories have emerged and become popular because of a current struggle within the church as many women both working for the church and believing in the church are expressing doubts about the nature of its hierarchy and their position in it. The DaVinci Code is a gangbuster story because people are ready for it. It has done much to break the code of silence so many women have been bound to as members of the Catholic church.

And, of course, the affirmation of the feminine is of a kind with everything going on today in Western culture. It doesn’t matter if Mary was hustled out of the Holy Land to start an invisible family line in France. What these modern stories tap into is current desires and wishes. I’d even argue that these stories are only becoming hot topics now because 1982 (when Holy Blood first came out) was too early. The timing is better now. As with many ideas in popular culture, they are almost never ahead of their times – they are running side by side with them. The DaVinci Code implies that there is hope for change in the near future, but the change it hopes for has in many ways already happened, with women increasingly refusing to be dictated to by ancient and deliberately inscrutable authorities.

Stalking the Audience

2006-05-22T22:49:00.000-09:00

One of the main knocks against pop culture from the point of view of intellectuals is that it doesn’t respect the audience – giving them sentimental and/or predictable fare at every turn. And by ‘the audience’ intellectuals mean themselves. On another tack, intellectuals accuse pop culture of brainwashing the audience (and this time they mean everyone but themselves) – of being a dangerous force of oppression. It’s hard to square those two criticisms most times – that pop culture is both inept and deviously skillful.

Many intellectuals don’t have a good handle on what will be popular and why. Just witness this past weekend’s resounding box office for The DaVinci Code - a film many critics had panned, along with the highly successful book. Fans don’t care. There is something appealing about the book, or, more accurately, the book has numerous appeals to a vast cross-section of different audiences. I saw it, for example, because I love a good conspiracy theory. The fact that I first heard this theory in the very early 90’s doesn’t change that appeal. Sometimes these theories take some time to filter down to a broader audience. In this case, Dan Brown and his book were the last stage of the process.

Critics in many cases just simply missed the possible appeal of the film. But this doesn’t mean the film industry is filled with cultural geniuses. Just look at the number of bombs and disappointments from earlier this year and all of last year. They really can’t predict for sure what will work. That is exactly why, as we all know, they resort to sequels to successful films and to film versions of semi-successful TV shows. And it’s why studios hedge their bets and occasionally make an oddball film with an independent feel because they know that sometimes one of these can take off.

The unpredictability of the audience has to make you wonder. After all these decades of research by sociologists and psychologists, entertainers of all types are still unsure just how to attract a good-sized audience. Of course, you’re guaranteed to do it if you have a winning hockey team currently battling in the Stanley Cup semi-finals. The screaming and the car horns outside my window every now and again these last couple of weeks is very loud proof that you can get people out if you can make them feel 1.) Like they’re included and 2.) That they’re winners.

An audience like this is often a reminder to me of why I write poetry. Hardly anyone gets stabbed in a riot at my poetry readings. I nonetheless envy the purity of the response that a sports event or a concert can get from people… and of course the incredible numbers involved. I suspect that the closer an event comes to being pure ritual, the broader the interest in it. People call it the lowest common denominator, but I think it’s more accurate to call it the widest possible net.

I’m not so different from those critics and corporate types I mention above. I’d like to write things that attract large numbers of enthusiasts. But I’m not the type of poet that can do that because I’m usually trying to criticize or undermine my culture’s rituals in my work. In this, I’m not so different from many other poets who have too many questions and doubts about normal everyday cultural assumptions. That doesn’t mean I’m not in awe of any work that can move so many people at one time. What we have to recognize is that the work that can do that might be anything from a conspiracy-laden cotemporary thriller to DaVinci’s Mona Lisa. We can’t predict what will strike a chord any more than we can determine just what was making Mona Lisa smile.

The Two-Faces of Conspiracy

2006-05-17T18:30:00.000-09:00

Despite some protests from my Illuminati Local #757, I’ve decided to share a few thoughts with you paranoid freakheads in regard to whether or not there is a world conspiracy to keep you down. The short answer is: no. We don’t even know who you are or care where you live. The longer answer is: yes. We only serve those who we know and who we care about and so when things get done they probably get done to you because we’re not looking where we’re going.

What fascinates me is the inordinate amount of time people spend thinking about who is out to get them. Must make bottom feeders like yourselves feel more important. Either that or Robert Anton Wilson was right when he argued that the conspiratorial mind is simply one in which creativity has taken a bad detour.

A great example is the film The DaVinci Code. What a fuss over this by people who say the whole thing is a fiction. We love that. It’s even better when some of it is true and some of it ain’t. More importantly, it’s about time you guys did something about those Opus Dei prigs. They’re really hard to take at parties. They’re just like insurance salesmen – always recruiting when all the rest of us just want to relax and have a nice evening plotting the overthrow of a few strategically selected governments. Go get ‘em, is what I say. It might make up for how you all made the Masons look like great American heroes in National Treasure. Puh-leez. I’m willing to bet there was some Skull and Bones money in that screenplay.

The thing I love most about conspiracy films is those fine lines between truth and fiction. Sure you get movies like The Matrix, Minority Report, Fahrenheit 411, The Truman Show – hell, any dystopic science fiction film is about a conspiracy. But then there are the other ones like Capricorn One about a faked Mars landing (a movie that gave birth to those charming black helicopters), JFK and all those films about the Holocaust (6 million deaths no one wanted to know about). These films tease us with what we think we already suspect about the powers that be. And then there are films like All the President’s Men about a real life conspiracy that led to the end of a presidency, and Good Night and Good Luck about a newsman who takes on a government conspiracy to undermine American freedom while under the guise of fighting a communist conspiracy. (The conspiracy based on combating a conspiracy is my favorite ploy, personally. It’s the Hail Mary of the Conspiracy Superbowl.)

And of course there are the more domestic conspiracies, usually of silence, whereby family members are victimized for years, either physically or psychologically. These have to often compete with the larger conspiracies but are often more real and more immediately damaging. But films and countless TV movies have brought these stories into the unforgiving light.

What I’m saying is that the beauty of conspiracy theories is that, despite the academics who poo poo them and then turn around and claim the media are out to brainwash all of us, there are times when people work together for a common goal that they would prefer no one discovered. Maybe Marilyn Monroe wasn’t killed by the Kennedys or the mob, but there definitely was collusion in baseball. The people who keep digging for the scoop are both lunatics and serious journalists. Personally, I’m rooting for the lunatics. The stuff they turn up is so much fun.

For instance, the whole George Bush knowing about 9/11 and even planning it. I love that one. It helps hide in plain sight the much more obvious deliberate lies about Saddam Hussein and WMD’s. I have to hand it to the Bush team. The old “hide the real conspiracy behind one that people will find flaws in and won’t believe.” Bravo.

Sadly, I have far too much experience with this and know the history of conspiracies all too well. No group can keep a secret forever and no group is smart enough to pull off the complete invisibility a good conspiracy requires. Not long after The DaVinci Code hits theatres, people will be looking for a new target for their anxieties and fears. I assume Dan Brown is already hard at work on that. And Mr. Brown, no more Illuminati books. Once was funny, and twice made us sit up and notice, but a third time and we might think you’re out to get us.

In the Crosshairs

2006-05-15T08:36:00.000-09:00

If you were going to kill someone, who would you rather have giving you your orders?

I found myself thinking this recently when I was trying to choose between a couple of my favorite video games. What I like, for example, about the Splinter Cell series is that it’s a nice break from the endless shooting and carnage in your typical video game. You have to pace yourself… and the killing. It involves subtlety and patience and intelligence. So do the games in the Hitman series. Yet, even though the Splinter Cell series is a bit more popular than the Hitman series, I often prefer the latter’s Agent 47 to the former’s Sam Fisher.

What, you may ask, is the difference? Well, Fisher does have those cool goggles with multi-purpose visual modes, but he is a patriot working for the government. Meanwhile, Agent 47 (with the bar code tattooed on the back of his bald head) seems like a man forced into circumstances and given orders by a nebulous international organization of some sort. In the upcoming Hitman: Blood Money, the organization Agent 47 works for is knocked out of the picture and our man is on his own. Even better.

Video game reviewers will talk about graphics and sound and gameplay, but in the end we like characters we can identify with. I can enjoy playing Agent 47 more than Sam Fisher. It’s not a matter of game elements, but of story elements. And it’s a matter of ideology. Being a government operative is not an option in my imagination. Being a hitman of mysterious origins is.

There are ideological reasons why I prefer TV private detectives over TV cops – I’m not a team player in some respects and the idea of the police ‘brotherhood’ disturbs me. I like detectives who are well meaning and will occasionally break minor laws and pull cons to get to the truth. That’s why this past decade of TV has been a disappointment for me – all those cop shows. The 70’s and 80’s had The Rockford Files, Magnum P.I., Remington Steele, Moonlighting and Simon and Simon – any one of which I’d prefer to all the NYPD Blue’s, C.S.I.’s and Law and Order’s. The C.S.I. rabble are particularly repulsive to me with their unimaginative vision of crime and evil. It’s a deeply conservative world view filled with clearly identified bad guys and it shows the forces of law as ultimately infallible and self-righteous. Many of the main characters are nothing more than bullies. Yuck.

Sometimes it’s not a matter of ideology guiding my choices, but simply subject matter. Reviewers will often talk about how directors or actors or writers determine their picks, but I think many of us choose because we’re interested in what the story is about. You could have the best movie ever about drugs, for example, and I would not be interested. I’ve seen Traffic and I’ve seen Requiem For A Dream. They are both hard-hitting, insightful, thoughtful and compelling – and I couldn’t give a damn. On the other hand, I will watch the most painfully perpetrated film about baseball just because it’s about baseball.

And of course there are fans who will pick films by genre – the gross-out teenage comedy, the slasher picture, the war movie, the character-driven relationship drama. These have both subject matter and ideology working together. The horror film, for example, is often about guilt and punishment. Very Catholic, ironically. The gross-out comedy can be a way for filmgoers to vicariously rebel. But ideology is a tricky thing. Gross-out pictures can also be very regressive in that we are laughing at characters in an aggressive and superior way. To be a politically incorrect comedy is to be both radical and bigoted, often at the same time.

All this is just to say that how we watch or play things is more complex than we might ordinarily think. We are often dealing with Neo in The Matrix as a Christ figure and as the very un-Christian Nietszchian Superman. This doubling of ideologies attracts a wider audience – even if that audience is not fully conscious of the ideas underneath the surface. Inside our heads there is the little hitman taking notice of the seemingly innocuous ideas passing before us on the screen and he always has something in his crosshairs – those moments when what we see on the screen is just… dead on.

Philosophical Tennis With Woody Allen

2006-05-11T23:01:00.000-09:00

It’s hard to forget some writers because of how I was introduced to them. I was initiated into the world of Woody Allen by a girl I met in undergrad. We started going out a few weeks before graduation even though she had a boyfriend back home. She loaned me her copies of Woody Allen’s three books of essays and stories and it was love at first read for me. (Funnily enough, someone took a picture of me that year where my hair is flying out and I am bug-eyed behind my glasses, looking a little bit like Woody.) Then, of course, she left me when her boyfriend came to watch her graduate. But we had been keeping very late hours and so the night the boyfriend arrived to consummate their four months apart, she fell asleep. Then she told him about me and sent him packing, finally showing up at my door. Just like in the movies.

Except that when I went a year later to visit her in Connecticut, things had changed. As luck would have it, there was a Woody Allen festival playing that week and we took in a couple of his films. But let’s just sum things up by saying that those films were all I got to see. And pretty soon she sent me packing. Just like in a movie. A Woody Allen movie.

Even decades later, watching Match Point (recently out on DVD), I can see that Woody keeps on getting the vicissitudes of love just right. The story centres on a former tennis star who meets a girl and moves up in the world with the help of her family even as he is falling for the girl his future brother-in-law is engaged to. Sounds like another Woody Allen comedy - just like my life - right? Except it’s not a comedy. No, no – not at all.

It reflects an ongoing concern in his work with the nature of the universe: that is, that it has no meaning. This comes up in films as diverse as Sleeper, Annie Hall, Hannah and her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors and, well, just about all his films. And even in a one act play called “God” in the book Without Feathers. His characters, especially the ones played by him, keep bringing up the meaninglessness in life. In Crimes and Misdemeanors a rabbi renowned for his positive attitude ends up killing himself. As Mark T. Conrad points out in his essay, “God, Suicide and the Meaning of Life” (in the book Woody Allen and Philosophy), Allen is consistently atheistic and fatalistic in his point of view, believing that since there is no God there can never be any meaning to life.

Because of Allen’s obsession with meaninglessness, there may be no better writer to illustrate the fine line between drama and comedy (other than Shakespeare). After all, luck and fate play major roles in both tragedies and comedies. If things had gone just a little differently in Romeo and Juliet, for example, that whacky couple just might have made it and Shakespeare might have thought about calling his play My Big Fat Italian Wedding. Then think about the description for Match Point – man falls for future brother-in-law’s fiancé; he marries the sister, then brother-in-law breaks off engagement, etc. That could easily be a comedy as both couples trade back and forth with hilarious results. In fact, Woody’s done that type of story as a comedy before.

But Match Point is never close to being a comedy in tone. While we laugh at the nature of the absurd in his comedies, we are in this movie horrified by the direction that fate seems to drive our main character. A tennis player he once competed against asks him if he ever wonders how his life might have gone if one or more tennis balls that hit the net had gone over rather than falling back on his side. The movie proposes that it doesn’t matter – that looking for meaning, or patterns, or justice in the world is pointless. The ideas that make us laugh when they are in Allen’s comedies shake us to the core in a film like this.

Now, while I’m a big believer in fate (I think we do things because we can’t help but be who we are), I think we can learn to see the patterns that we create in our own lives. For example, it might be a bad idea to go on a long trip to visit a long distance girlfriend who broke up with the last guy she had a long distance relationship with and who made a long trip to see her. That’s not fate – that’s just common sense. And it is a pattern – not a pleasant pattern to be on the receiving end of, but a pattern nonetheless. Unlike the modern optimists, I don’t waste time trying to change other people’s patterns. I hardly waste much time trying to change my own. But I recognize them. I learn from them in some small ways. I don’t rely on the existence of God to give me meaning. I rely often on the same thing Woody himself does - writing patterns into existence, even if his patterns are about the lack of meaning in life.

Watch What’s Good For You

2006-05-09T22:29:00.000-09:00

Now and then I’ll read a book that both wins me over and loses me every few paragraphs. It’s an odd experience and it doesn’t happen often. The Rebel Sell, by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, was one such experience. And a book I’m currently reading is the same sort of thing. The book is Two Aspirins and A Comedy: How Television Can Enhance Health and Society, by Metta Spencer. The great thing about the book, from my perspective, is that Spencer argues that television, among other popular entertainments, is not pure escapism and that it can even have healing benefits. What she means by this is that when we watch TV shows and films we learn from the characters. Stories have lessons. You only think you’re watching ‘mindless’ entertainment.

Her ideas nicely balance those of Steven Johnson in his book, Everything Bad Is Good For You. Spencer notes that Johnson focuses by choice on the structural elements of the popular media and their increasing complexity and correlative effects on our intelligence as viewers and gamers. While she doesn’t dispute Johnson’s claims (she even lists his book as one of her favorites on her blog), she notes that he completely ignores the possible beneficial effects of the content of popular media. What do popular stories have to say to us? And how do they affect how we feel?

But then she makes an interesting decision – and by interesting I mean a decision that upsets me. She decides that the best, most beneficial stories are those that aren’t overly complex or intellectual but instead the ones that put a premium on empathy. So she looks in depth at a show like Northern Exposure. On the surface, this is a great choice. It’s a well written show that was one of my must-sees during its original run. And the series’ emphasis on spiritual growth is important – something that I don’t think has truly been replicated since (at least not with the show’s utterly non-denominational approach).

The problem is that I myself couldn’t watch only that type of show. I also get spiritual enlightenment of a … different kind. For example, I think that one of the best films about redemption is Pulp Fiction. Looked at from the spiritual perspective, it’s the story of how three badasses (a weak man, a righteous man, and a shepherd) find different degrees of redemption. Then there are the other types of stories about people who go the other way. Take Memento, for example. It’s about a memory-impaired ethically challenged character who is banished to his own personal hell. And he is damned for good reason. I like the occasional story that gives us a perfect model of what not to do.

Spencer, though, finds these types of stories considerably less healthy. She admits that she empathizes with Tony Soprano, but that she feels somewhat unwell after watching an episode of The Sopranos. These shows, she contends, make us feel unhealthy because of the questionable nature of the main characters and their environments.

This is, she readily admits, subjective. And that leads to what I see as the main problem with her thesis: it rests on a narrow ledge of what is healthy and what is morally rejuvenating. She believes that the best stories draw us into an empathetic relationship with the heroes – but not just any heroes. There is little room in her schema for the true antihero. Nor is there room, as it turns out, for gratuitous or vicious violence. By these standards she eliminates films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Pulp Fiction. But I would argue that the violence in Pulp Fiction is neither gratuitous or vicious. After all, it’s a black comedy and when a kid is asked what he thinks about miracles and he says he has no opinion, that is simply not the right answer. The universe of the black comedy demands his head be blown off.

I suspect something else is going on here with Spencer’s specifications. The shows she consistently champions are predominantly feminine in nature. The not so secret ingredient is the empathy. And she earlier in the book admits to her disinterest in entertainment that demands a lot of mathematical and spatial intelligence and with complicated structures. It turns out that the secret to spiritual enlightenment is to be less masculine and more feminine.

Me, I’d argue for a more balanced approach between the masculine and the feminine. And if that proposition doesn’t work, then I would point out that, traditionally, many of the great religions have recognized that there are at least three ways to achieve a more spiritually enlightened position: the path of love, the path of good works and the path of knowledge. Spencer is clearly on the path of love. And I, meanwhile, have consistently chosen the path of knowledge. In fact, reading her book so far has given me a good deal to think about and that has made me feel more enlightened already. And I feel energized reading her work, precisely because she is telling me something I do want to hear and something I don’t want to hear. That’s the way I am.

Spencer makes the understandable mistake that modern medicine makes – she assumes that the same medicine will make everyone feel better. But some of us are allergic to heartfelt dramas, as many a girlfriend and wife has come to understand.

The Mindless Viewer and Philosophy

2006-05-07T16:42:00.000-09:00

One thing that can tick me off is when someone mentions in passing that they killed an evening by watching or playing some mindless entertainment. ‘Entertainment,’ in fact, is usually perceived as the opposite of educational by many parents and educational experts when they decide what shows children should watch on TV (usually educational shows as opposed to the kinds that the parents themselves watched when they were growing up). What I would contend is that the only reason any entertainment can be mindless is when the person engaging in it has left their mind at the door.

One consolation for me these days is a series of books from Open Court dealing with pop culture and its philosophical roots. The series began in 1999 with Seinfeld and Philosophy and has gone on to deal with TV series such as The Simpsons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos, films such as The Matrix and Star Wars, the pastimes of baseball and Harleys, and influential figures such as Woody Allen, Monty Python and Bob Dylan. With twenty titles released and five more on the way (see complete list here), the series seems ready to tackle just about any aspect of popular culture.

From a personal perspective, I can tell you that when I picked up the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy book, Buffy was simply a show I kept meaning to look at but hadn’t gotten around to. A few essays into the book and I had to go out and rent a season of the series. Within a week I was a full-fledged convert to the Buffyverse. Who’d ‘a thunk a philosophy book could turn me on to a TV series?

The purpose of the …And Philosophy series is two-fold: to ground philosophy in imagery and stories that most people are familiar with, and to show that the everyday culture we take for granted can tell us some truly profound things. And while I’m sure there are many people out there who would see this enterprise as a waste of time (academics who think pop culture is a wasteland, and pop culture fans who are sick of people reading too much into things), I think the series is one of the best things going right now.

For one thing, philosophy has been on the ropes for a while. I can remember when I was an undergrad and the university I attended was small enough that they could have every department represented by a desk in the main gym. This was pre-computer registration (by a year or two – larger universities had already switched to the now standard method) and so each student had to sign up for courses by visiting each department desk they wanted courses from. It was a fairly intuitive and for the most part friendly process, giving students a chance to chat up a professor or two while signing up. The funny and sad bit was when I saw the two philosophy profs walking around the desk they manned, calling out that philosophy courses were still available, almost like fish mongers hawking the fresh intellectual catch of the day (even though you knew their wares were millennia old). St. Francis Xavier University was still a very Catholic place, but theology and philosophy were increasingly marginal disciplines even there. The …And Philosophy series, then, can be seen as a survival strategy.

Meanwhile, many of us would sit in the TV lounge on our floor in residence and watch a steaming hot pot of Monty Python’s Flying Circus come to a boil, never contemplating that when we watched a skit with two people having a debate about whether they were arguing or merely engaging in a series of contradictions we were learning just a tetch of philosophy and logic. Other times we were catching our Saturday afternoon dose of Star Trek where characters debated the nature of being truly human in every single episode.

Would knowing that we were learning have spoiled the fun? Maybe. But there’s no reason why we can’t be entertained and then, on second viewing, be educated. The …And Philosophy series gives us an opportunity to clarify what we’ve seen through the lens of philosophy. If we resist looking closely at our entertainment, it could be because we want so much to escape from all meaning. And that in itself says something about our lives. If we had to examine our favorite movies and TV shows, then we would have to ask why we’ve chosen them and not other movies and shows. Then we would have to examine ourselves. And that is harder than any philosophy course and there is no book coming out called [insert your name here] and Philosophy to help you understand yourself.

United 93’s Unfinished Flight

2006-05-02T09:46:00.000-09:00

Despite media-fanned trepidation about United 93, the film is getting a smooth ride from critics. They generally like that the film has stayed as true as possible to the events of that day and the overall documentary feel of the piece. And with documentaries being so popular among critics in a weak couple of years for Hollywood, United 93 is the right film in the right style for right now. And I’m not even talking about the obvious political parallels of a group of ordinary Americans trying to take back control of a plane that’s been hijacked by a small band of religious fanatics that have been holding the passengers at bay with a fake threat and relying on fear to govern long enough to drive the whole country plane into the side of a building.

One thing people often talk about when they analyze books and TV shows and movies is identifying with the characters. So United 93 has us right from the start because we know the story and for everyone who watched the news for three straight days in September of 2001 like I did, we already identify with the people involved. So the film doesn’t have to do anything and we’re already on board.

The good thing for non-American viewers is that the film never becomes a patriotic screed. Neither the terrorists nor the passengers ever make a big deal about America. The story is about life and death and loss – period. That sort of jingoism that you might find in something like Air Force One is what can sometimes take non-Americans out of a film. I can still hear the pilot of one of the scrambled jets as he veers in front of the President’s plane to intercept an incoming missile and he says something like, “I’ve got this one, Mr. President,” and then his fighter is hit and explodes. I’m gagging at that even after all these years. But there's nothing like that in United 93.

At the same time, if we weren’t already emotionally primed for this story, we would have very little to identify with in the characters. The truly amazing thing about this film is what it does with almost no character back story. We hear the phone conversations to loved ones, but all we really know about the characters is that they have someone they care about. We don’t get full glimpses into their lives. We see slightly nuanced reactions to the events – no two characters appear to have exactly the same reaction at any time – but we don’t really ever know these people. And yet we identify with them.

In fact, the direction and the performances and the story are so even-handed, that there are moments when you have to actually sympathize with the terrorists. Before everything begins unfolding, we catch a glimpse of one of the terrorists repeating “I love you” three times to someone on the phone. We watch one terrorist trying to stand up to the crowd of charging passengers and being overwhelmed and just for a flicker of an instant we might feel his bravery and his terror, mixed with the satisfaction of seeing him taken down. And even while the passengers pray, so do the terrorists.

Now, there are practical and political reasons for this strategy of identification. By making the real people as thinly sketched as possible, you don’t risk alienating surviving family members by mischaracterizing someone. And the sprinkling of humanizing characteristics among the terrorists shows Arab Americans that at least you’re not resorting to easy stereotypes.

But that still leaves the question of just why this lack of detailed character backgrounds and stories works for the audience and for critics who so often demand character-driven plots.

There are three possibilities. The first is that when we are given nearly blank characters (especially those who don’t in some way offend us) we simply tend to identify or empathize. It’s a reflex. When all we have are a character’s fears we can relate to those. The second reason we can relate so easily is that the back story extends outside the film. It’s still relatively recent history to us and so we supply much of the emotion we felt on the day all of this happened. We’re both feeling what’s happening on the screen and recalling what we felt back then. The final reason this film works despite giving us so little background is that we don’t always need background and detailed character development. Sometimes we just want to know what happens – or, in this case, get a better understanding of how something happened.

We won’t know for some time if this film will still works long after the initial impact of 9/11 has faded. Maybe by then someone will have done a film more in line with Titanic, with a more conventionally themed story superimposed on a real-life disaster. There would be nothing wrong with that either. That’s how real events are eventually translated to cultural memory. First we try to understand and then we mythologize on the long unfinished flight into history.

Satire and the Importance of Being Mean

2006-04-27T22:34:00.000-09:00

With movies like Thank You For Smoking and American Dreamz in theatres at the moment, I feel a little bit of relief that satire as a form is not dead. It bristles and crackles even on late night TV with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report where politicians, pundits and pop culture icons are caught in a crossfire of precisely aimed barbs and zingers and much broader flatulence that is the mustard gas of humour. Satire reminds us that it’s war out there and we are the targets. No one is safe in the camouflage of their innocuousness. Satire is the anthology of all the thoughts that have crossed your mind that you hope no one will ever hear.

It’s always been one of my favorite forms, despite the fact that people in literary circles tend to think of it as a ‘lower’ genre. Why this is, I’m not sure. I think it has something to do with its apparent lack of seriousness and its abundant mean spiritedness. After all, if you’re going to attack a social ill, you have to do it with the air of grave concern and at least a little good will. And if you’re going to look deeply into the human psyche, you have to show the full depths of feelings and memories of your characters. Satire, meanwhile, starts with the premises that nothing is not funny, being mean is a human right, and that humans are not all that deep.

But the satirist is not an idiot. He tries to come as close to reality as possible – like a kid staying inside the lines in a coloring book. Every now and again, the satirist has to cross the line – like Jonathan Swift suggesting that perhaps eating Irish babies is a solution to Irish poverty in his essay “A Modest Proposal.” But up to that point, his line of reasoning is quite reasonable. In fact, many satirical stories are based on perfectly reasonable lines of reasoning – that’s why they’re so funny and so frightening.

The short of it is, though, that satire is a victim of our times. In the age of irony (the 90’s) satire didn’t quite fit because sarcasm is not satire. Satire is tragedy with a vicious smile on its face. Sarcasm doesn’t require the same amount of effort. And with the increasingly earnest new millennium, satire has little room to grow – unless in the form of rebellion against the earnest attitude it is most antithetical to.

An absence of satire is always a bad sign for me. At the moment, though, TV is safe with the likes of Jon Stewart and The Simpsons. Film, while not wholly embracing the form, does bow to it regularly. Think of 1999 and three partial satires such as American Beauty, Fight Club and Being John Malkovich.

The form that is suffering most from satire’s absence at the moment is poetry. Remember poetry? The earnestness levels are high. And there are plenty of angry performance poets. But there are no real satirists out there – people who can combine anger with restraint, realism with the absurd, tragedy with comedy, hatred of humanity with moral concern for the species. A ‘lower’ genre. Right.

When the poets (even just a handful of them) can take their contempt for the form of satire and re-direct that hatred at their fellow man, the world will be a better, funnier place.

Jane Jacobs: Seeing the Trees and the Forest

2006-04-25T22:04:00.000-09:00

I was recently involved in an online discussion among poets about the relevance of landscape poetry. Some poets involved just didn’t get much from reading poetry about landscape. I would have to lump myself in with those poets. But there is often the shared assumption among many artistic types these days that nature is more important than human beings and their creations and that humankind is merely imposing its will on the natural world. A friend of mine argues that, to the contrary, man is part of nature and everything man makes is a part of nature. It’s when we forget that when we get into trouble.

I think Jane Jacobs, who died today, understood that. From The Death and Life of Great American Cities up to Dark Age Ahead, her books show that she persisted in believing that it is our ideologies about what human nature should fit into that causes many of our problems. Her approach to city planning was to not have an overall grand design but to let the city grow according to what the people who actually lived there wanted. A city developed by its use. It’s the kind of thinking that can alienate those on the left who think no good can come out of cities and those on the right who feel that people must be more strictly controlled or else chaos will break loose. Her plan was to let natural chaos happen and see if it was such a bad thing.

There are so many things about her attitude that I like. Primary among them is that she didn’t immediately write off cities as the embodiment of humanity’s worst impulses. My own work is about cities and about the places where cities meet ‘nature,’ so I liked knowing that Jacobs was around to step into the fight for better cities. And she was pragmatic and Taoist in her approach. Yes, cities should be better, but there was no ‘should’ as to how that could be accomplished.

In fact, her approach allowed for cities to grow naturally, as if humans were a part of nature and the cities were simply taking shape the way a beehive or a seashell takes shape. We have cities because we can’t help but have them. It’s part of what we are and nature itself made us that way.

Yesterday, I was cycling through one of the many green areas in Edmonton and I heard a loud rending snap and crash. I kept going and only on my return trip did I see what had happened. A tree had fallen. And I had heard it. (I almost felt like it had waited for someone to pass before it fell so that it wouldn’t become the tree in that stale philosopher’s paradox about sound and the unheard falling.) This is one of the things I value about this city – the feeling that non-human nature is a part of everything here. I can look from my balcony (I have an apartment precisely because I don’t want my own piece of land that I have to groom and maintain according to arbitrary standards of grass height) and it’s only from a height like this that you can appreciate just how many trees there are in this city. During the summer, all the houses for miles around are blocked or partially blocked by green. I don’t see the war against nature from this vantage point.

Today when I cycled past the fallen tree again, I couldn’t help but think of Jacobs, giant that she was in her own neck of the urban woods. And I hope not unheard.

Scrawl In Favor of Good Penmanship

2006-04-24T22:44:00.000-09:00

A while back I had an exchange with a student of mine who had just handed in an essay on why students should no longer be taught writing – how to write by hand, that is. Her argument (and she herself was definitely a strong writer) was that since kids are using text messaging, IM, the internet and various word processing programs, handwriting was redundant. It is, according to her, an outdated technology. And the capper for me was that she is a teacher.

My mind scrambled to refute her. All the handwriting I’d never been able to read in my life flashed before my eye. There were all the margin notes I received from teachers on my assignments. I eventually decoded the blurred pencil jottings that explained how my handwriting was not the best. There have been countless prescriptions that but for a doctor and dentist decoder ring every pharmacist wears I would be dead from some misprescribed medication. There was the note from my dorm roommate telling me I had an appointment with my advisor on Thdesmday the 19th or 17th at 2:00 or 5:00. And, most painful of all, was the scrap of paper I got from that hot girl at the university graduation party. She told me that since we were about to head off to different parts of the country, it was time to have one last fun but meaningless magic moment. But the number her drunken hand scrawled on the slip of paper I’d stolen from somebody’s thesis bibliography was almost illegible. I kept getting a service for pet neutering.

So is getting rid of handwriting such a terrible thing? After all, kids have embraced technology and most of them will never turn out to be masters of penmanship anyway.

I wish I had had Joel Best’s book, Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall For Fads, at the time this student made her case. His argument is that many people often mistake fads for genuine innovation because when either of these things begin, they look pretty much the same. One section early on strikes at the heart of the educational fads involving technology. At various times in American education, the radio, films, and TV were all theoretically poised to eliminate the need for textbooks. And, of course, the computer is the latest candidate to take a run at traditional teaching methods. Best argues that it is the very idealism about progress that has so many intelligent people leaping forward every time they think they hear a starting gun only to find soon after it was just something backfiring.

I guess my overriding thought on computers in the classroom is not a new idea – it’s that the computer is only as full of resources as the student is resourceful. I’m not saying that computers in the classroom are a fad – I’m saying that the belief that computers will create super students is a fad.

Besides, I’d miss handwriting. I start all of my poems with pen and paper. And I can anecdotally support the contention of scientists who study the brain that you use different brain muscles writing by hand than you do by typing. The hand written poem and the one than ends up in typed form are different both from the process of rewriting and from the change of medium.

Finally, I come to associate those who are close to me with the way they write. Writing reflect personality. So what does it mean that when Rainer Maria Rilke met one of the many loves of his love, her maturing effect on him actually changed his handwriting? Talk about a relationship setting a guy straight.

This is a sentimental attachment I have to handwriting, then. All I know is I would rather watch a drunk woman try to scrawl her number on my hand than watch her try to tap a note into my Palm. I can take her handwriting to graphologists and decide whether or not her personality is a good match for mine. If she’s cute enough, her handwriting will start to resemble her in my mind. Leans a lot to the right and is a little loopier than most. But this is the carbon graph of her mind and I’ll keep it close to me.

The Good Customer

2006-04-21T15:57:00.000-09:00

She wants to know if there’s a problem – if there’s anything she can do to make things right.

I tell her, no – I just need a change. I need more freedom.

She wants to know exactly why I’ve decided to end things.

I tell her it’s just what I said. No other reason.

But why, she asks, do I want to end my relationship with Shaw Cable? She says they wouldn’t want to lose me because I’ve been such a good customer.

By that I assume she means I’ve paid my bills on time for many years. It’s not like I’ve brought the company flowers or took it out for dinner.

In the end, I tell her that my mind is made up for now and I’m going to test out the new digital service I’ve had installed and then maybe I’ll re-think things later once I’ve had a chance to try out Telus TV and its freshly tarted up deal.

The eerie thing about all this is that it really does feel like the end of a relationship. And the comment that I’ve been a good customer gives me a brief, subtle feeling of satisfaction. Given all the blown romantic and platonic relationships I’ve had over the years, it’s nice to know that at least I’m a good person to relate to, corporation to consumer.

And I do feel, fleetingly, like I’m betraying a person, not a company. And it’s not as if I’m changing companies out of necessity, but simply because I want more options in terms of bundles and channel choices. But, then, how many times have I – have any of us – dumped or been dumped by someone because a better choice came along? And don’t we all bargain, try to be better, offer incentives for our lover to stay?

But what does being ‘better’ mean as a lover, or even as a friend or family member? Where’s the fine print defining the boundaries of the relationship? How many times can we forget to repay our loved ones before they send our hearts to an emotional collection agency?

Also, do we in fact have any real choices in our relationships? Don’t we simply like or love who we have no choice but to like or love? Some things can’t be bargained for.

So you see what I’m saying. Being a good customer is infinitely preferable to being a good lover, or friend, or son, or father. The rules are straightforward. And it is so easy to be a good customer. Pay your bills on time. Don’t make trouble. This is why capitalism will triumph over all our other piddly beliefs. It demands so very little of us – of who we are – and the payoffs may be small, but they are a sure thing, unlike the stubborn odds of finding reward from others in the Las Vegas of the heart. And there’s no fighting with anyone over the remote control on those long weekends when you find comfort in front of the flickering TV and in those faces that are always glowing when you walk into a room.

Lessons In TV Ecology

2006-04-20T16:44:00.000-09:00

I’ve finally done it. I’ve joined the digital TV age. Of course, I slept through the installation guy’s arrival and had to phone Telus and have him turn around and stop by again. We might live in the digital age, but my animal brain still sleeps and dreams like it was 50,000 B.C.

I decided to get digital TV because Telus, in trying to compete with Shaw Cable (which has branched into Telus’ telephone territory), had developed TV service which offered more choices in terms of bundles of channels. Given the unnatural selections we are so often forced to take just to get the channels we want, I jumped at this chance.

The sad fact is that in a couple of years when the Canadian Radio and Television Commission’s ruling to open up cable choices completely comes into effect there will be a lot fewer channels to choose from. For example, I very much wanted Book TV (a channel name which for many both inside and outside the industry sounds like an oxymoron). But how many people who are avid TV watchers are also big book fans? Some, obviously – but enough to build a sufficient subscription base upon?

For all the talk of niche markets, most TV viewers want the same sorts of things. We want good regular TV series’, movies, news and some occasional controversy. Yes, we each want other kinds of TV viewing, but not the same type of viewing. I can’t even remotely imagine what type of person would think a golf channel was interesting. Many people would agree with me, even golfers who prefer playing to watching other people play. There just might be enough fans of this, though, to support a channel. Then what about something like W, the Woman’s Channel? Presumably they’ve got the potential viewership, but what was originally intended to be a liberating force for women has become a channel much like any other with reruns of women-friendly TV series and liberal sprinklings of chick flicks.

What often happens is that these channels begin to look more and more like every other channel, because that’s where the mass of the viewershiip is. TV series and films are the kinds of entertainment we have in common, for the most part. The TV ecology is still robust, but the balance is maintained at the cost of many unsuccessful ‘species.’

Looming over all of this, though, is the specter of the financial losses. The big networks are increasingly resembling the cable networks in their pay structure just to make ends meet. TV is constantly under siege by things like video games, the internet, films, DVD’s, radio and countless other entertainments. And all of these media (except for video games) complain that the money is tight – a harsh lack of sentiment you will find echoed by most major North American industries.

Could it be that we have so many choices and our interests are so thinly spread that few businesses can make enough money to survive anymore? Have we become victims of our own economic diversity? In his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph A. Tainter argues that ancient Rome had become so economically diverse and so far-flung that its economy was unsustainable no matter how high taxes were raised. Our consumeristic freedom of choice may well lead to the failure of our civilization.

Hmmm… When it comes to collapse my money is actually on a mass brain spasm brought on by a confusion of multiple remote controls. I’ve had three such spasms in the last hour. No one ever said choices didn’t come at a cost. But I’ve got what I asked for and you’ll get my remotes from me when you can pry them from my cold dead hands.

Democracy ‘R’ Us

2006-04-19T09:42:00.000-09:00

The cover story the April 18 issue of Dose (find the issue here) deals with the rise of the blogger and tosses out a few interesting statistics. For one thing, on average, a new blog goes online every second. And the blogosphere is sixty times bigger than it was in 2003. And the number of posts that contain the word “blogosphere” is 231,570… uh… 231, 571. Blogs are occasionally even on the news when they break a story that the mainstream media has missed. Most importantly, anyone who has access to a computer and the internet can start a blog. Hell, it took me three minutes to get one up, minus the content, of course. And I’m not exactly a technological wizard.

The improved economics of technology is bringing the average consumer greater and greater potential creative power. Just look at the iLife suite for the Mac. You can use the new iWeb to start up a blog or you can plunk down a few music loops in GarageBand and create the semblance of a song in less than an hour. And iPhoto allows you to futz with your pictures and fix them up quickly. Not to mention the power of iTunes that can turn you into a DJ in no time. (Compare lining up thousands of songs now vs. stacking maybe seven vinyl singles or albums on a turntable.) Finally there’s iMovie and iDVD that together allow you to edit your own digital movies and then burn them to disc.

Meanwhile, just look at what digital cameras have done to the cost of making a first-time film. Now you don’t have the enormous expense of film stock. And a decent home computer loaded with expensive software can do the post-production. So a movie like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow can be made mostly on a desktop. Meanwhile, seasoned but rebellious directors like Richard Linklater can go out and shoot a film with a hand-held digital camera and then add animation in post-production to give us the film Waking Life as well as the upcoming A Scanner Darkly. Sure, there’s some initial investment, but it’s nothing compared to the tens of thousands just to get film stock for a short feature.

But if TV’s your thing, there’s hope for you yet. Get thee to reality TV. There anyone can be a star – providing they have personality, or, if they’re unfortunate enough to be interviewed by The Daily Show staff, they don’t even need much of that. In fact, natural is good because American Idol would be nothing without the initial episodes filled with people who believe they can actually sing. Believe me, in the end they’ll take anyone on TV – even someone like me. After all, the cable niche industry just keeps on growing and they need on-air staff to fill those time slots. Mind you, the pay in cable isn’t what it once was if you had worked for the big networks.

What might occur to you, though, is that if you and everyone else is making movies, starring on TV shows, creating digital heavy metal, blogging their asses off, then who’s paying to hear see or read what you’re creating? Who’s the audience if everyone is suddenly an artist? (And – ahem – who’s going to pay me to write this?)

A more subtle point is why should we pay to have something someone else made when they’ve done it with a technology we feel we’ve mastered (or might someday master when we get around to it)? Why should we pay for the artistic creation when we are artists ourselves? You see where I’ve led you to now, right? It’s interesting that our reluctance to pay for digital artistic products is coinciding so neatly with our own access to that technology.

And where all this leads us is to the art form that I’ve practiced for decades now – poetry. Not only do poets have very small audiences, usually consisting only of other poets, but many poets (or people who call themselves poets) don’t actually read any poetry by other poets. They’re perfectly within their rights to do that. There’s no binding contract to know the history or current state of the art. But I’d like to suggest that this is the future of all the other arts. When writing was an elitist technology capable of dazzling a crowd, it was a vital part of culture. But with general literacy came the decline of poetry as a cultural force. When a technology becomes democratized, it loses its power to amaze. So I’m not suggesting that we are facing a dystopic future as posed in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” We aren’t going to suddenly find our great artists hobbled by restraints for the sake of equality. But they could well be lost in the glut of creative production as everyone gets into the artistic game.

Now, there is some small window of hope. Dose notes that only 55% of bloggers are still posting three months after they’ve started their sites. Meanwhile, the theatres aren’t exactly flooded with local neighborhood film productions. It could well be that people soon realize that creating things isn’t easy, and after the initial rush of appreciation, there isn’t much to drive you unless it’s the thrill of creation itself. Most people, on the other hand, just want the attention. Whether it’s a blank page or canvass or screen the artist has to face, the technology is there, but it should come with a label reminding you, “Content not included.”

The Novel’s Extended Death Scene

2006-04-18T10:44:00.000-09:00

Hollywood films and novels used to be best of friends - so much so that screenwriting awards are regularly divided into two categories - original and adapted - with the latter category being for the most part owned by novels. But there are ripples… rumours of a falling out between films and novels.

For one thing, graphic novels are becoming more prominent as sources for films. Think here of films like V For Vendetta, Sin City, A History of Violence and Road To Perdition. Add to this the usual adaptations from comic books that once were sporadic but are now legion: the Batman, Superman, X-Men and Spider-Man franchises, as well as notable one-offs like Ghost World. Then add the movies based on video games (which, admittedly, haven’t fared all that well): Tomb Raider, Doom, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, among others. Finally, with the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, there is the prospect of having more movies inspired by theme park rides. And, of course, the novel has its usual competition in the form of stage plays, non-fiction books, articles, and its old nemesis, the short story.

Meanwhile, the sales of fiction are slightly down overall in Canada. But this may be completely unrelated to film’s spurning of the form. It might have more to do with the concentration on literary fiction by Canadian publishers. While this has worked for a few decades and given Canadian fiction a deep and broad literary reputation both home and abroad, it has been disastrous in terms of attracting new audiences. The passion for literary nationalism is dying somewhat in the country. And the novels that have so often dealt with the perils of growing up, the anguish of the inability to communicate, the repression of characters’ feelings and the explication of that repression which leaves no room for an actual plot, the average reader might be forgiven for cutting back on their fiction consumption. And, as some critics have noted, the retreat from Canadian fiction has been led by men.

I’d have to count myself as one of those cowards. I’ve read probably four novels over the last ten years. And before that, for many years the only novels that interested me after finishing grad school were science fiction novels. Maybe it’s as simple as arguing that studying English killed my interest in novels. But, interestingly, it fueled my desire to read poetry. Another argument I might make (and I’m not the first person to propose this) is that the novels I studied and the novels dominating the Canadian scene today are simply too feminine. They deal with character development over plot. Not nearly enough stabbings, shooting, fistfights, etc.

But there are still other developments putting the novel in jeopardy. American classrooms include fewer and fewer whole novels, and educational administrators are promoting the use of novel excerpts to make life easier for schoolkids. TV series and videogames are developing stories over longer and longer periods of time. Whether it’s the Halo series or shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Desperate Housewives, The Sopranos, Lost and many many others, the long-form story is being picked up by other media. Where once the novel had scooped up the guts of poetry – heroic narratives and epic storytelling – and left it with little crumbs of lyric forms, now the novel is being gutted in return by other media for its narrative essence which it has often abandoned in any case for more microscopic examinations of the human psyche.

These examinations are vital, but just as vital are the big stories that carry us many an imaginative mile. These are stories with larger than life flawed heroes, the likes of which you might find in The Iliad or The Odyssey. For a few centuries, the novel managed to provide these stories all by itself, even though you could see from the very beginning in a book like Don Quixote that the novel was not comfortable (if a genre can be personified) with the old epic heroes. And now most novelists have abandoned this ancient type of storytelling and are being upstaged by Lara Croft and Batman, and a guy just named V.

I’m not really predicting the death of the novel. But I think it is going to be gradually subsumed by these other forms and limited in its role, just like poetry has been limited to dealing with the domestic in its ghetto of the everyday. The new media know the hero is what puts bums in seats. The novel, for a time, as the leading book technology since the 1700’s, used to know that too. But the novelists that have come since, to their credit and their peril, have resisted those restraints. And the price of their freedom is an increasing irrelevance.

The Fatal Flaw In Metacritic.com

2006-04-17T10:57:00.000-09:00

When I first discovered Metacritic.com it was like finding a statistical El Dorado. The idea that all movies, books, CD’s, games, and now TV shows could be assigned a mark out of a hundred was an elegant concept. The site assigns a number out of a hundred to each review it has collected and then averages them out to give you one overall number based on sometimes dozens of reviews. No more hit or miss review reading – such as when you happen to go to a movie based on the one good review of what other critics thought was a terrible film. (Unless you don’t listen to critics anyway and tend to go to whatever movies you feel like.)

But the system has a huge flaw that can’t be fixed. Well, it could be fixed if we were to change the nature of society. But that might be more than the people of Metacritic.com signed on for.

Let’s say I was planning on seeing a movie like Inside Man. I would check the Metacritic site and find out the movie had scored a 76 based on 39 reviews ranging in score from 58 to 100. I can also check and see that the film has received an overall score of 7.3 out of 10 based on 62 votes from visitors to the site. Fair enough. I go to the movie and find that as a heist genre film it has a lot of good twists, but no real character arcs and no ultimate payoff ending. No heart. Well, you can’t win ‘em all.

But the interesting thing is that Inside Man is one of the few so-called ‘genre’ films to have done well recently on Metacritic. The films that tend to get the top scores are dramas, documentaries, tiny indie flicks and foreign films. Does this mean that genre films have all taken a dive? (Given the last 18 months of film releases, I wouldn’t discount this possibility.) Or is the system revealing something about the divide between critical and popular tastes? Even the voter’s choices tend to reflect a readership that is mostly steeped in film culture, although non-film geeks sometimes get in the mix as well and this accounts, I suspect, for some of the differences between the critics’ picks and the voters’ picks.

But critics I have watched and read seem to also have their genre favorites. Roger Ebert, for example, has a thing for well-made science fiction. But when you lump all the critics’ votes together, their favorite genre films are being mashed down scorewise because of other critics who don’t share those same genre interests. So the films that come out on top reflect only the critics’ more ‘arty’ tastes.

Which brings us to why those tastes are so arty in the first place. Many people over the decades have complained about the films that critics tend to prefer. Let’s face it, though, if we were in the position of these critics having to watch hundreds and thousands of films over the years, we might have somewhat different tastes too. We would start to prefer films that were as far away from the formulas as possible. The sad result of this natural tendency, though, is to create a dichotomy between the people who know films and the people who want to see a film to be entertained. And what entertains a film critic is going to be different from what entertains the average moviegoer.

Am I saying that there are two different standards of quality when it comes to judging films (and, for that matter, literature and the arts)? There are at least two different standards. How we sort out the good from the bad is something that literary theorists, politicians, religious leaders and everybody else have been arguing about for centuries. Most recently, some people have proposed that tastes are so relative, anything could be called good by somebody and maybe that’s enough for, let’s say, Showgirls to be called a great movie. If that’s the world you want to live in, you can have it.

I still think it’s worthwhile debating the relative merit of works of art, but we have to be aware of various cultural contexts that are affecting everybody’s judgments. And if you decide to throw up your hands, like I often have, and say let Time sort it out, then I’d almost agree with you. But the cultures of the future will have their own agendas when it comes to deciding what was the best that ever was. The only thing I believe is possible and worthwhile is to experience art, come to some sort of judgment about it, and then be ready to argue argue argue. That is how art finally shapes us – not while we are the audience, but when we become the work of art’s champion and are forced to think about why it is important to us.

Writing and Work: I Pass On the Hammer

2006-04-14T16:12:00.000-09:00

“Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”

- Henry David Throeau

A long weekend like this is for relaxing, right? So why do I look forward instead to the opportunity to do some writing? I mean, you’ve done writing before – it’s not easy. It’s hard work. And yet, compared to the other things I do during the week, spending time writing, while occasionally difficult, is rewarding. The truth is I feel guilty if I haven’t done any writing in a week. When I start to get edgy and fidgety and short-tempered, the first thing I do is check to see when I last wrote. It’s almost always seven days on the nose.

I’ve tried to explain this need to guidance and job counselors in the past when they’ve asked me what I wanted to do. “Write,” I tell them. “Yes, that’s something you can do on the side, but what would you like to do to make a living?” “Nothing,” is the only answer – and I’m sure anyone reading this who has some artistic impulse knows what I mean. Asking me what I would like to do besides writing is like asking me exactly to choose between being tortured by pincers, blades, surgical instruments, dental drill or hammer. Or, to put it less graphically, in exactly what way would I most like to waste my time until the next moment I’m free to do some writing?

I have had good jobs over the years and have been very fortunate for the most part in terms of having a friendly working environment as well as good people to work beside. I’ve had the kind of work situations most people would kill for: taking kids on guided tours of the Fortress of Louisbourg, teaching university-level courses, designing and writing courses on popular culture, and writing and hosting several educational television series. Not hard labour in any sense. Difficult work at times, but often intellectually challenging. And yet I would trade all those hours working for hours to sit and walk and think and then finally write.

It’s so bad sometimes that when an acquaintance, upon hearing how much work I’m doing at any given time says to me, “At least you’re keeping busy,” I want to strangle them, or at least scream, “Keeping busy is what people do to avoid their lives!” In fact, my resentment toward work has never really abated. When I discovered Bob Black’s great essay, “The Abolition of Work,” fifteen years ago I began to believe that the answer was to get rid of work. I mean, how could anybody want to work? It was such an unrewarding way to exist. The only hope was revolution and a dramatic paradigm shift.

But I’m not so blind that I haven’t noticed how some people actually seem to enjoy their jobs the way I enjoy writing. They often even feel fulfilled. So maybe the only revolution that’s needed is for people to understand that what writers and other artists feel doing their ‘unpaid work’ is exactly what they themselves feel doing their jobs. I mean, writing is work, just as much as carpentry is work. And anyone who’s read my poetry can tell you, I write like I was using a hammer, not a pen. If I could just make non-writers feel how empty and cheap I feel after a week of hard work at my job, they might empathize. If I could make them feel just how much writing (as opposed to what I do for a living), gives me a sense of actually contributing something useful to the world, they might encourage me to do more.

Who am I kidding? Given how seldom imagination, sitting still and long periods of staring out the window are valued in our society, it’ll never happen. Screw patience and empathy. A revolution is easier. Pass the hammer.

Raiders of the Real

2006-04-13T15:44:00.000-09:00

The great thing about Reality TV is that we all think we’re in on the scam. We know there are cameras and a crew of TV types following every reality contestant. We know the people chosen for Survivor are chosen both for their strong personalities and for their looks, at least to some extent. We know that the various Idol shows put a premium on a very narrow range of pop music – the kind that is palatable to many people and incredibly safe. And we know when Donald Trump fires a failed apprentice it will be in the closing moments of a show that is edited and shaped to constrain to the format of stories we have heard since we are born.

And yet many people still watch these shows because there is some semblance of reality – the contestants are not playing characters – or at lest not playing them in a way that seems contrived. At the same time, after all, many viewers are attracted to the various C.S.I. shows which, despite a number of experts who have pointed out the factual errors in these series, are seen as being gritty and real, even though the bad guys are always recognizably bad and are always clearly caught – a stretch for any reality I’m aware of.

What these two types of shows appeal to is our need to recreate reality. And what’s happening in pop culture is not unlike what has been going on in literary culture for decades. Most award winning and critically recognized novels are strongly realistic, as is most mainstream poetry. It’s as if the human species has been moving towards this plateau across the arts and, if you believe many critics, realism is the pinnacle of human aesthetics.

There are, of course, numerous exceptions. Dime novels and comic books may make occasional nods to realism, but the emphasis is on stories of myth and legend. The highest grossing films of all time are hardly monuments of realism and instead most often rely on action, magic, future technology and superpowers to pull in the money. These films – from E.T. to Raiders of the Lost Ark to The Sixth Sense offer not simply escapes but alternate routes of perception for those people interested in human nature.

Besides, this dividing line between the real and the fantastic is somewhat arbitrary. After all, how many people believe that Michael Moore hasn’t shaped the facts to fit an ideological template? Not that he shouldn’t either. He is involved in the act of creation, as is every filmmaker or artist who has to make choices about what to include or exclude. It would be pretty tedious reading about every single trip to the bathroom made by the characters of The English Patient, for example. So let’s leave those bits out. And nix the long picking of the nose scene. And do we really need those Hemingwayesque musings on who in the bullfight arena just let go of a fart that will become legendary in retellings of that day? No. Realism is not an exact mirror held up to life. There is always someone moving the camera to frame one part of reality and not another part.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. It’s just the way art works. It’s when we hold these works up as models of reason and telling it like it is that I worry. A realistic work is someone’s opinion about what’s real. If you like it, it’s because it is probably reasonably well made and it reflects your opinion about what’s real. Nothing more.

As for realism being the pinnacle of artistic achievement, time will tell. But if realism were a person, I would find it sanctimonious and without a sense of fun. (Here again, you can see how Reality TV is one step further removed from realism.) And until this gritty cop/crime/legal drama thing has passed, you can find me watching my Buffy DVDs.

Playing In The Electronic Woods

2006-04-12T16:07:00.000-09:00

In the world of fairytales, kids only ever had to be worried about witches, wolves, and evil stepmothers. They might be thrown into an oven, or be poisoned or killed by having their head lopped off by the edge of a trunk (“The Juniper Tree”). Life for children who heard those fairy tales was easy. Now they have to worry about being ‘over-wired,’ at least according to Time magazine in the March 27 article, “The Multitasking Generation,” by Claudia Wallis. The big concern is that kids are not able to absorb knowledge effectively when they are instant messaging, listening to music and typing a few lines at a time of an assignment for school. Ooooh scary to see kids lost and entangled in the forest of wires.

Of course, there are all the other usual suspect fears of kids getting stalked by online predators, of them getting into drugs, becoming addicted to games, being desensitized to violence by the media, being sexually promiscuous, joining a cult, staying up too late, smoking… Remind me – why do people have kids in the first place? Add to this the fears of having your child killed at school by another student. (Mind you, a study on school violence in the U.S. in 1999 showed that a child was three times more likely to be killed by a parent than by a fellow student.)

There’s no question these are all potential problems. But if we just focus on the media problems for a moment, let’s do a little cost-benefit analysis. Most parents consider TV time as dead brain time. Kids could be playing sports (if there was sufficient space set aside for them to do this, and if parents weren’t worried about bullies and predators and traffic). Or they could be involved in clubs or other activities (because we don’t want them being over tasked electronically when we could be filling up their kid-sized daytimers with appointments and meetings and tutorials). But I’m not always clear on what the main fear about TV actually is. Is it that kids sit there, seeming stoned and unmovable for hours on end? Or is that kids will be influenced by inappropriate role models and lessons they pick up from TV? Which is the danger: inattention or too much attention? It can’t be both because one would seem to preclude the other.

But why aren’t parents more excited now that kids have so many things to take them away from TV? Don’t computers and the internet offer them greater avenues for creativity and knowledge gathering? Ah, but the computer is just a TV with a mouse. Same problem of inactivity. Well, then, video games offer more brain activity at least, right? Kids can get pretty intense playing these. But it’s still a relatively passive pastime and there’s the risk of overexposure to violence and even sexual content. Add to this the long-standing bias against games in a work-obsessed culture and that’s it for the Xbox.

But then there’s instant messaging and cell phones which help create a community of close or distant friends and keep the child from becoming too isolated. But this is the wrong kind of connection. What they need is closer physical ties with children in their neighborhood, but maybe not closer ties to the kids that are too rough or are a bad influence or whose parents are unpleasant or allow their own kids to do things that you won’t let your kids do. Or who read their kids those scary fairy tales that you can’t imagine why anyone would ever write for children in the first place and thank God for the Disney versions.

My solution to all of this – and keep in mind, I’m not a parent – is the same as my solution to keeping kids relatively germ free. Go roll them in the dirt now and again. My technique is inspired by recent studies showing that kids may in fact be more susceptible to disease and allergies as they grow older if they were kept in a mainly antiseptic environment. So, if media is dirt to you, then roll your kids in it and let’s see what happens. Then send them to bed with a good old fashioned fairy tale. Let them have nightmares wherein they gradually learn to problem solve and work things through in their dreams, just as they work things through in the stories they see on TV and navigate the world all by their lonesome on the electronic waves.

Sure, you’ll be there looking occasionally over their shoulder, but you can’t protect them from everything. And you have lives that need living too, remember? And there are dangers aplenty that perhaps crowd into your mind every time the child in you has to learn something new or meet someone a little frightening. Maybe in adulthood you finally feel strong enough to face those things you put off confronting as a child. And sometimes it’s easier to face the dangers your child has to confront than the ones that howl on your own doorstep right now.

I Set Up Camp in the Offside

2006-04-11T09:29:00.000-09:00

You would have hated playing street hockey with me when I was a kid. Especially if you were on my team. I was the guy the other team always asked about a close play. Did the ball cross the invisible but mutually agreed upon line? Did it go over one of the rocks we pretended were immutable goalposts? And I would give my honest opinion, even if it cost my team a goal. The only thing that saved me from being mobbed by my team was that yesterday some of them had been on the other team and had benefited from a call I’d made.

Sure, I’ve learned to hold my tongue a bit – otherwise I never would have been able to play team sports for so many years. But after years of watching fighting and chippy play in hockey get worse and worse, I stopped watching it about twenty years ago. Except for that playoff season when Bill Ranford was the MVP. His sister lived in my residence and I watched the Oilers to watch Ranford to be loyal to her. Living in residence was my only way of being in a tribe back then.

But when I was a kid I watched hockey because I liked the sport and probably out of some sense of tribal loyalty. So the 1972 Canada-Soviet series was a big time for me. In fact, one afternoon, my teacher let me bring my portable black and white TV into the class so we could watch one of the games. (I lived across the street from the school and ran home to get the TV.) But watching bits of the reenactment of the series on CBC I see that moment in time through different eyes. Canada-Russia ’72 doesn’t sugar coat things, to its credit. We see the ugliness on the Canadian side of the benches. But the series still has a ‘Hollywood’ ending with a last-minute victory for the Canadians who somehow manage to snatch victory from an indominatable empire and, more surreptitiously, from a 2006 Olympic drubbing. What timing!

And yet many Canadians respond to these victories and losses as if they themselves are doing the winning and losing. I think Canadians give themselves too much credit, but they do respond much as David Berreby might predict in his book Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind – a book which attempts to put some science into the study of our tribal behaviour.

One thing that emerges from his discussion, though, is that the tribe we identify with depends on our circumstances. For example, most Canadians will respond positively about Canada until you, say, ask an Albertan how the province has been treated by Canada, or go a little deeper and ask a Calgarian about their place in the global economy. Loyalty nests within loyalty. And sometime loyalties compete. Do you stay in Canada where you can’t find a job in your field, or do you move to the nemesis U.S. where you can? Most people who even ask this question already know the answer.

I’m sure there are others who are like me – who define themselves more by what tribes they don’t belong to than by those they do belong to. Henry David Throreau was, in that respect, my kind of guy. In a recent Harper’s article (“The Spirit of Resistence”), Curtis White celebrates that spirit of opposition and independence Thoreau embodies. But I’m not so resentful of the lives others lead as to want to live by myself in a cabin by a pond for a few years.

What I would like, though, is for people to notice their contradictory loyalties. Or to recognize that when the news anchor for either national news broadcast begins a story by saying, “This story may have far reaching effects for Canadians…” he might not be talking to you. I don’t expect anyone to come live with me in a place that is always offside, but I would like it if someone somewhere once in a while said the ball didn’t go where his team wants to believe it did.

Insert Love Scene Here

2006-04-10T00:13:00.000-09:00

One of the first things a screenwriter will tell you about writing a movie with romance in it is that the brief time when you show a couple falling in love (just before you throw all sorts of obstacles at them) should last no longer than five minutes – just enough time for a quick montage, a few lines of dialogue and – if it’s one of those types of love stories – a quick slow motion tumble and a few ‘landscape’ shots of the naked bodies. In typical cinematic short-hand, the couple is now considered ‘in love.’ And we accept this because to show the long process of the early part of a relationship would just take too long. Much worse than trying to adapt a five-hundred page novel into a one-hundred and twenty-page screenplay.

We accept a lot of other conventions about the romantic movie as well – the greatest of which is that the couple will come together in the end (as in When Harry Met Sally) or will be tragically separated despite being destined for each other (as in Shakespeare In Love). But the convention we don’t quite think through is the convention of opposites. This is where the zany madcap dilettante and the button-down, orderly professor type (Bringing Up Baby) come together in the end. This isn’t about real life opposites attracting – it’s about mutually opposed archetypes reconciling. It’s about dueling forces of nature, not real people. It has more to do with Taoism and the balancing act of the universe than it does with romantic love.

But no one will have any of that. In a way, many people are perverse Taoists when it comes to love – there is the ‘one’ (a crude bastardization of the Taoist ‘Way’), and you can’t plan for it, you have to simply go with the flow and love will find you. But, just like generations of Chinese believers, we hedge our bets with our Confucian side – the side that tells us we have to understand love in terms of calculation and politics and rivalries and power. Just look at the bookstore self-help sections. There’s all sorts of advice about the how and when to date, how and when to marry, how and when (and where) to have sex, how and when to break up – even picture books for modern Kama Sutras that I swear I just read for the articles and religious significance.

Add to this Helen Fisher’s book Why We Love where science enters the game and she explains to us how connections are formed chemically – chemistry not being as mysterious as we like to pretend it is. And then there are all the TV shows that give us the ‘we are animals’ version of love and sex, with plenty of heat-sensing camera shots of couples going at it and plenty of mini-cameras going through openings and seeing things that perhaps we shouldn’t picture just when we’re trying to seduce someone. Are we purely physical beings with no mystical connections at all?

Or you might have noticed Laura Kipnis’ book from a few years back, Against Love. In it she describes romantic and married love as a kind of tyranny and infidelity as a radical kind of sexual politics that is overthrowing the social order. She states at the outset that she’s being polemical, but some of her arguments still ring true: “Scratch the romantic veneer, and we’re hard-nosed realists armed with pocket calculators, calipers, and magnifying glasses.” We love with an eye for appearances and advantage, judging what our appearance and social standing can attain for us. And in our consumer society, love “conforms to the role of a cheap commodity, spit out at the end of the assembly line in cookie-cutter forms, marketed to bored and alienated producer-consumers as an all-purpose salve to emptiness.” Hence, the romantic movies.

As a culture, we have divided feelings and ideas about the nature of love. Is it destiny, divine intervention, animal attraction, practicality, or happenstance? Right now I’m sure some of you are saying it’s all of these.

But one thing I do believe is that it love definitely isn’t romance. I don’t think you can even talk about love until a couple has been together for at least ten or maybe even twenty years and has a store of shared experiences. And to all those people out there who argue that violent movies pervert our sense of how justice is served in a civil society, I would argue that romantic movies – with their narrow, simplistic version of love – do far more harm to us as a culture. There are far fewer people dying from movie-induced gunshot wounds than there are people dying from what they only believe is love.

The Main Types of Canadian Poetry and What's Wrong With Them

2006-04-07T12:16:00.000-09:00

No, I’m not having a snit. I’m just pointing out the obvious. Every thing has something wrong with it, so why should the genres of poetry be any different? But I wanted to save people the trouble of having to go through the reviews and counter-reviews of poets like Carmine Starnino and Christian Bök as they harp on the deficiencies of each others’ literary camps. What I would like to do is sum up everyone’s weaknesses with a short piece here for your poetic one-stop sniping. I will not name names, though, because there are too many poets who excel at what they do to mention individually, and far too many who, well… suck.

Let’s start with the largest current genre – what many poets simply refer to as the mainstream. This includes by far the most poets, outnumbering probably all the other poets in all the other camps. Broadly speaking, this poetry descends from the lyric tradition where the focus is more on feelings than on abstract concepts. And since the Romantics, the emphasis has often, though not always, been on the importance of the common man and on using everyday language (even though Wordsworth’s own poetry seldom sounded like it could trip off the tongue of a leech gatherer). This type of poetry often focuses on the commonly shared moments in life, on childhood, love, nature, sickness and death. I’m generalizing wildly, of course, but if the poem you read is very personal and emphasizes emotional expression and the universality of common experiences, then you’re reading a mainstream poem.

The problem with these poems is they may succumb to unremarkability, both of subject matter and of language. The attempt to connect with the audience by recounting a moment by the bedside of a relative who is hooked up to machines in a hospital or to tell the story of a lost love is going to give the sense to the reader that anyone could have written the poem – which is both a good thing and a bad thing. The best mainstream poets make these moments new and interesting, while the worst make them banal. The other main flaw with this type of poetry is its tendency to play totally for the heart and give little sustenance for the head. Sincerity of emotion is seen as a virtue in the mainstream, although that is seldom enough to make a good poem. And don’t even get me started on the preponderance of nature poems. That’s worth another piece all on its own…

Other poets that carry on the Romantic tradition in many ways are the formalists who, at the time of this writing, are most vocal in the English Montreal community. They point out the laziness in the language and formal structure of the mainstream, and rightly so. But the problem with formalism is that, while it brings back a certain masculine air to poetry that has been absent for too long, it can’t seem to accommodate the notion that form doesn’t have to mean old form. There is an inability among formalists to recognize that forms haven’t existed as they are since the moment the Almighty flicked on the bathroom light. Forms come into existence and they fade and they return. Meanwhile, new forms emerge as language changes. Seems simple enough to me. As for the laxity of language, good consonant-clustered words mixed with the milk of vowels can make for a hearty breakfast, but it ain’t the whole ballgame. In fact, the traditionalists are the most likely among poets to forget that sometimes words get in the way of communication, that readers can get lost in those trees and lose the sense of the poem.

No one could accuse avant-garde and postmodern poets of taking words too seriously. They break them up into silly-bles, hard-bitten sounds and sometimes arrange them in humorous etymological crucifixions on the page. Their main advantage over the mainstream and the traditionalists is their sense of play and their acknowledgement of the constant flux of meaning. Of course, there’s a difference between flux of meaning and total absence of meaning – a distinction these poets don’t often care to make. And sometimes play can be a very aggressive and hostile activity – especially for the average audience member trying to make sense of these more experimental poems. In the cliquish world of poets, the indifferent avant-garde are the cliquiest – which is saying something. Finally, can we stop calling it the avant-garde if the attitude and approach hasn’t really changed all that much in the last twenty-five years?

Performance poets have it right in one sense – the audience comes first. They shape their poems for maximum audience effect. They hone the ancient craft of the bard and the scop, and I am embarrassed in their presence when I watch them recite poems from memory. Mind you, I’m also embarrassed in their presence when I hear what they’re reciting – often poems that don’t seem worth committing to memory. The incantatory power in some poems becomes mere repetition in others. And sometimes only the sheer force of personality can power a bad poem to a round of enthusiastic applause.

Perhaps the poets I most empathize with are the ones that pop up in lonesome self-published chapbooks in various big city bookstores across the country. They are the underground poets, writing among a few friends or working in isolation. Their poetry is too raw for the mainstream and too political for everyone. They may tend to overuse profanity and their poems don’t have a chiseled structure, but their tendency to direct strong emotions outward and to recognize social ills makes them unique among the types of poets we have. At the same time, the alienation from literary history and from the very public they are addressing weakens their poetry. They are not part of a clear or purposeful community.

And in this notion of community there might be a lesson. What strikes me is how hopelessly inept all these types of poetry are when left to their own devices. They each harbour strengths the others should (and secretly do) envy. And they certainly cross over into each other’s territory frequently. But not often enough. If I were the king of poetry I would decree that each of these groups trade places with each other long enough to learn valuable lessons about possibilities. On the other hand, maybe poets are like the civilizations they so often pretend to scorn and all our best inventions come out of the constant wars we fight between ourselves. Me, I’m for riding everybody’s catapults and flying over the brittle fortifications to pillage from everyone what I know of poetry.

The Wikipedia Dilemma

2006-04-06T00:00:00.000-09:00

Sometimes, usually after marking my umpteenth ‘Wikipedia essay’ in a row, I want to give up on Western civilization. But then I remember I’ve already done that. Kind of leaves me with a dilemma.

What is a Wikipedia essay, you ask? It’s an essay that assembles facts and binds them together with quotes from other people. Sometimes there are pictures. (If I allowed it there would be short mpegs of the student and perhaps even an mp3 or two providing a soundtrack to the assigned topic, “Describe the relationship between the values presented in television content and those found in television advertising.” The main source is usually Wikipedia along with some web sites. The theme is either not there or takes the form of “That is why ___________ is a good thing.”

I’m tempted to say the internet and its cacophonous array of sources of highly varying quality is to blame. But then I just have to think back to undergrad and I can remember most of the students I knew were this lazy then as well. There was one guy in my Moral Theology class that managed to get an 80+ in the course after hiring someone in his residence (an economics major with a strong predilection for toking up before every exam) to write all six of his theological book reports for him. The priest who taught the class never caught him. Moral Theology! Some people really have no fear, do they?

Students can become accredited, as Jane Jacobs notes in her book Dark Age Ahead, without truly learning. And I can’t put all the blame on Wikipedia. In fact, the Wikipedia project has to be admired for its oddly workable collaborative structure as people in the know have the opportunity to write or add to existing entries on subjects that are their specialty. (And, no, I’ve never contributed to the site myself, being a poet and occasional TV show host and therefore possessing no native knowledge of my own.) Sure, there are bugs in the system. Knowledge may be altered as it is filtered through so many minds. I guess then it becomes no-ledge.

But the internet isn’t the first time in history humans have had to wrestle with the quality and diversity of available knowledge. There have been catastrophic moments such as when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed by fire (possibly after some librarian tried to ‘shush’ the nearest invader). Countless manuscripts were lost all at once, leaving us with a less than comprehensive view of things such as ancient history and ancient drama.

The collapse of Rome led to what many term the ‘Dark Ages’ before the consolidation of medieval European cultures. In that interim, many monasteries became the temporary homes for Greek and Roman manuscripts which were copied and recopied over the decades and centuries. What was also happening was that the Arabic world had managed to retain some of the knowledge of Greece and Rome and add to it during a magnificent flowering of scientific and philosophical investigation.

But nothing remains the same over long periods such as those. Bart Ehrman, in his book Misquoting Jesus, documents the changes – intentional and unintentional – in Bible manuscripts over the centuries. Just as disturbing is that there are many manuscripts from that period that lie still unread and untranslated in locations throughout Europe – painstakingly copied manuscripts that are bound in volumes containing completely unlike manuscripts and then marked along the binding with the name of only one of the manuscripts, or perhaps labeled with the name of a manuscript that isn’t even contained in that particular bound volume. Who knows what’s been lost in there, just as no one knows what knowledge we are losing in the plethora of internet sources that overwhelm some of the more substantive websites.

But I’m not going to tell you that this could lead to the fall of civilization. It might, and it might not. The point here is that knowledge is a fragile thing. It is conditional and fleeting. Languages change and we lose the sense of the past. We are not building a pyramid of ideas climbing ever higher to the sky. We are jumping from one ice floe to the next, hoping it will last long enough to carry us to another patch of ice in what we’re starting to think is a global warming of the cool intellect.

The point is not whether or not our civilization will end. It will. It might not have anything to do with our inability to transmit what we know to future generations. It might have everything to do with a surplus of pandas or a shortage of margarita umbrellas. I just think you should start thinking about what books you would like to preserve and take with you when it all goes. Meanwhile, I’ll jump to another student essay floating in the light at my desk and hope the argument isn’t too thin to support my heavy thoughts.

Poetic and Political Purity

2006-04-05T00:03:00.000-09:00

For many years I've been considered a political poet by the poets I know. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the word “anarchist” is in the title of my only book. Just a hunch. But I don’t look like an anarchist. I wear golf shirts and jeans and prefer rock music to bebop. Hell, I probably don’t even look like a poet. And I’ve never gone in for causes. My comeback to that is I’ve always been more into effects. Ba-boom, tsshhh. I am a lazy writer who is more apt to criticize than to do anything constructive.

And yet I still believe that politics has an important place in poetry and that George Orwell was right when he said that “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” But where that place is has never been fully clear to me.

It’s an article by George Eliot Clarke (“Poetic Rule”) in The Walrus (April 2006) that got me thinking about this old issue yet again. I used to be much more passionate about the connection, but now I can only read and respect the passion of other writers like Clarke. He’s a Trudeauphile, so right away I can get on board with that. And the quote he borrows from Trudeau is spot on for the pragmatist in me: “We are going to be governed whether we like it or not; it is up to us to see to it that we are governed no worse than is absolutely necessary.” This is the Trudeau I can absolutely respect. In these words you can feel that under the guise of government is force and power. Authority in society rarely exists without the potential for and tendency towards violence.

But Clarke is more attracted to the Trudeau of the Just Society and he goes on to say it is “a beautiful society because of a harmony among its constituents, one that seeks to equalize imbalances in income, representation, and power, but also one that respects and supports the arts.” That would be fine, except for the fact that it’s often my fellow citizens who are voting for the tax cuts and get tough on crime bills while opposing the kinds of things that I think are only just, such as gay marriage and higher minimum wages. After all, if you live in Alberta and you are a sensitive artist, 90% of the province’s population is likely to oppose your vision of the Just Society. Let’s face it, if we didn’t have politicians to take all the heat for us, we’d be at each other’s throats. The Just Society can’t exist because we all have a different idea of what ‘just’ means.

Another point where Clarke and I depart comes when he comments on Shelley’s assertion that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World”. Shelley’s world view, according to Clarke, makes the poet “a kind of supreme investigative journalist, finding beauty and enlightenment in the most unlikely places or revealing crime and decay where they are hidden.” I like the analogy. It gives the poet some guts and some integrity as well as an ongoing mission – although maybe these days, with journalism being not the shining knight it once seemed, the association less valid.

Or is it? Clarke assumes that the politics of writers are going to be more just or superior to those of the politicians themselves. But throughout literary history writers and artists have made questionable decisions based on staunch principles and cowardly politicking. Seneca was a good bud of Nero, for example (although that didn’t protect him in the end), Chaucer apologized publicly for the blasphemy of his Canterbury Tales, and Donne sold out his Catholic roots so he could become Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Shakespeare wrote works of genius and also the nakedly jingoistic and narrow-minded Henry V. Wordsworth and other writers of his time were enthusiastic about the French Revolution until… well, you know. Kipling was the best paid literary pundit for imperialism an empire could have. Eliot and Pound and many other writers were covertly or overtly anti-Semitic, and there is, of course Pound’s support of Mussolini - on radio no less. Big on equal opportunity, writers have been there to support Nazis and Stalin.

And among the idealistic writers there is the allure of beauty – the kind of artful beauty Clarke sees in a just society. But I think if you took all the writers in this country and put them in one room, you wouldn’t get agreement about what is beautiful, what is just, or even what is art, or what food should be served at the buffet. Clarke finds beauty and form in justice and politics – the very things he believes should be found in poetry, while I find disunity and ambiguity – the very things I believe should be found in poetry. We are each trying to impose different aesthetic visions on what it means to be human. He has purity of intent in his poetry and politics, and I have learned over the years to distrust the purifiers.

My politics are closer to those of James Joll, who Clarke quotes as saying the “tragedy of all political action is that some problems have no solution, none of the alternatives are intellectually consistent or morally uncompromising; and whatever decision is taken will harm somebody.” Add to this the proposition that writers must first look inside themselves to find the evil they want to criticize, and you have my world view. But with all this conflict, this lack of solutions, this lack of clear vision for the future, you would probably argue that it’s no wonder I don’t even bother getting involved in causes. But it’s just the opposite. It’s only when writers understand the impossibility of final victories and can accept the permanence of bittersweet coating their tongue – that is when they are ready to start writing politically.

Of course, the honesty that comes from this might get you killed. Maybe joining a march or running for the board of a non-profit organization is a safer bet. Better to be in a cause than to lie murdered like an effect some found too powerful.

What Not To Wear If You're An Invader From Mars

2006-04-04T10:00:00.000-09:00

I run into a lot of parents who are worried about the effects media will have on their children. Me, I’m more often worried about the adults. After all, it wasn’t children who led the panic during the 1938 radio performance of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. People believed that invaders from Mars were advancing on American cities and that it was the end of the world for humankind. Joseph Goebbels took that same message about invasion and the end of the known world and turned Teutonic frowns upside down for Hitler and the Nazis when millions listened to radio broadcasts and believed things were as they sounded. McLuhan called radio a hot medium as opposed to TV the cool medium.

At least, all of this is what I watched this weekend on TV, along with a Saturday afternoon catching back-to-back episodes of What Not To Wear. I have gone on the record many times – although no one has ever been listening – saying that fashion is a waste of time, that what’s in today will be gone tomorrow, and yet I find this show occasionally compelling. The premise, if you don’t know the show, is that two fashion mavens, with the help of the ‘victim’s’ friends and colleagues take one person aside for the episode, toss out their old hideous clothes and attempt to remake them in terms of their overall look. Each victim is horrified at the thought of losing the ‘natural’ person they have always been – whether it’s the woman in her mid-thirties wearing clothes that are too small and too tight, or the woman in her mid-thirties wearing clothes that are too baggy and non-descript, or the woman in her mid-thirties wearing T-shirts that are hand-me-ups from her daughter. There’s a lot of untouched psychological territory in this show, don’t ya think?

The point is that the victim has to endure being told they dress like an alien, that their friends and family all agree, that they have been followed and filmed for a week before this and that the home audience gets to see everything. And then they have to endure letting the mavens chuck the old cherished wardrobe away, each tossed piece accompanied by a diatribe about how awful it looks. And then there’s the hair and face makeover. Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. Just like any other reality show, how much of this is real and how much staged? It doesn’t matter. It’s still a form of storytelling.

And most engrossing stories have one or more morals to them. On this show, for example, we learn that one has to look one’s age. And one has to dress appropriately for work. And one has to look tidy or people will think less of you. That you can become the person your image projects. These are the messages we have drummed into us in one episode after another. Oh, and that people who make style their profession are going to know better how to dress you than you do yourself. So you have to give up a fair bit of autonomy to get along in the world and be accepted. And you have to be willing to be talked down to like a kid who refuses to grow up.

It’s as if the co-hosts take a person who they see as an alien and try to make them look like everyone else and therefore attractive. But the most frightening part of this whole process for me is that they’re right. When I see the before and after shots, I have to agree with many of the decisions the hosts have made. But I don’t know anything about style. I spit on fashion and those who worship weekly at its alteration. Yet I can’t deny the results. It’s as if I’ve already absorbed all of this somehow – me, who feels alienated from this so-called culture I live in. How did this happen? It’s not as if TV is brainwashing me - it’s merely re-illustrating that which I already know.

But the last thing I remember was our ship landing softly on the planet and when we emerged with our giant human-rending machines, a few people waving frilly clothes stood in our way and said that we would catch our deaths if we didn’t dress properly. Then they took us each aside, one by one, and said that it was only a matter of time before we would have to blend in, and wasn’t that better for the invasion in the long run anyway? Blend in, make people forget they had been conquered, and then just be able to sit back after a long week of slave driving and relax.

I know what should be next. There must be a game show on I know all the answers to. Nothing is more satisfying that fitting in by proving my intellectual superiority to those I want to dominate… or impress… or was it imitate? “Why not all of them?” I’ve decided.

Heisted On My Own Petard

2006-04-03T00:15:00.000-09:00

The jig is up for heist film fans. In the April 1 Globe and Mail, Lynn Crosbie (“Ocean’s Thirteen? Just Shoot Me”) argues that heist films and the glorification of the outlaw is in bad taste and she makes the case for comparing real life villains (or “Thieving Scum,” in her words) to their more glib, slick and nihilistic counterparts in films like Ocean’s Eleven (the remake) and a TV series like Heist. She does understand that there is a certain Robin Hood air to some of these stories and that we often identify with the thieves. And yet she tries to talk us out of this identification with both real life and fictional thieves in favour of common decency and the acknowledgment of the suffering real thieves have caused. A very sober and serious point. (And yet she somehow manages to slide in a compliment for Frank Sinatra in the original Ocean’s Eleven. How does he come up when the subject is human decency?)

I happened to read her article the day after I had re-watched the film Snatch – a movie that has heists and attempted and failed heists galore. So I felt duly chastened. But I would watch the film again. It makes me laugh. And it’s a prime example of some confusion she inadvertently introduces into the subject of crime and film. First of all, it’s a mistake to lump the serious films about crime (like Natural Born Killers which I agree is a fine film and straddles the line between comedy and brutality) with the funny films about crime. In the serious films like The Grifters we see that con men and women have nothing in their souls and nothing to look forward to. But a film like Snatch gives us the satisfaction of the catchy nicknames of some of the characters (for example, Boris the Blade, who we mainly see using guns), an 84-karat gem, and a continuous stream of bad-to-worse scenarios that are funny even when people are being killed. We see a wide range of criminals here – the brutal and the devious, the unkillable (both of whom are killed) and the hapless. If you took this film as a model of the criminal world, you would come away thinking that most criminals are just not that bright. And the statistics might back you up on that. Meanwhile, it’s a comedy and comedy is all about overthrowing the natural order of things, with those on the bottom (thieves, let’s say) coming out on top. Surely she’s not arguing that all films about crime be relentlessly dramatic and earnest?

Then there are the films like Pulp Fiction where the forces of the law are nowhere to be found and it is the supposed ‘bad guys’ who come to represent our entire range of human possibilities with some of the characters being redeemable and some not. Slick yes, but it’s hardly an amoral film when the final meaningful action is the laying down of a gun.

Meanwhile, the one aspect of the heist film in particular that Crosbie doesn’t really cover is what I will call the puzzle element. How are they going to steal the jewel, break into the vault, get around the security system, etc.? It’s a purely intellectual joy – a puzzle that we try to figure out or we watch for all the pieces to fall into place. And there are still thematic puzzles to be sorted out as well.

A 1999 remake (another bane to Crosbie) of The Thomas Crowne Affair isn’t about a violent bad guy, nor is it only about an art thief. It’s about the affair between the thief and the insurance investigator, and it’s about their mutual mistrust not just as prey and hunter but as man and woman. And it’s funny and a little sexy, with Pierce Brosnan giving us a little look at what his Remington Steele character might have been like before he settled down. That same year, 1999, Entrapment gave us a remarkably similar film about master thieves and the difficulty of trust between men and women.

What’s going on to some extent here is a confusion of genres (serious films showing us bad people) and comedies (films giving us fun characters). If she wants to argue that criminals can only appear in films that make them look realistic and, of course, bad, then her aesthetics are not much further advanced than those of the Hayes Code that first sought to ensure that all criminals were shown punished for their crimes on the screen. (And how realistic is that, given what we know about crime statistics?) What about those times when the thieves are actually doing something that will benefit people – say, like in Sneakers where the devious but basically decent characters are trying to stop a plot for world domination? This has the tone of a heist film, but the protagonists are simply closer to the right side of the law. Even in the remake of The Italian Job there are questions of loyalty and proper vengeance. The good thieves have to steal from the bad thief.

If Crosbie’s main complaint is about bad remakes (Fun with Dick and Jane and the recently announced Ocean’s Thirteen), then I can understand and probably agree. But if it’s that we should go to films expecting movies both to ‘get things right’ and to make things right, then I say no.

What I’m arguing is that most of us try to be law abiding, although many have to fake it on occasion. We watch films about Robin Hood types with a little bit of envy and we don’t want to think about consequences. That’s what many films are at least partly about. The best heist films are also about other things – love, trust, the willingness to take chances, doing the right thing. In other contexts, these are valuable lessons. The heist is a metaphor for who we would like to be in relation to our own lives. People with imagination and cunning taking the chances we never dare and going for the gem or maybe even Aladdin’s genii. We watch these characters hoist the anal guards of the secret hordes and hoist us on the petards of our decent self-righteousness. We watch a wide range of often seedy characters we are compelled to identify with while many people insist we must see the villain as outside of us and beneath us. Crosbie seems to prefer that we keep people like this at arm’s length, but we are secretly people like this in some ways. So much of who we want to be perceived as is a series of alarms and codes and a thick wall separating us from people we see as our inferiors.

And these films are the sudden explosion at the thick vault door of our imagination, or maybe some tumbler in the heart just clicks into place.

Invasion of the Genre Snatchers

2006-03-31T00:59:00.000-09:00

The last science fiction writer that truly influenced me as a writer is gone. Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006) died earlier this week. Lem was a genre bender who managed to write science fiction and philosophy and comedy – often on the same page. His Ijon Tichy stories were throwbacks to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and satirized politics and culture and science. His Pirx the Pilot stories were hard SF puzzlers that made you work at remembering what was in the last unread chapter of your Grade 12 physics textbook. And The Cyberiad was a work of fiction, satire and philosophy that was to our current sentient robots what Aesop’s Fables was to the Greeks. Ask any robot and they’ll tell you that the only two writers who got it right were Asimov and Lem. Then add to this Solaris, the novel that was made into both Russian and American films. And then there are the works of non-fiction as well as his book reviews of books that haven’t been written yet. Lem like to mess with his genres. Postmodernists called him one of their own, but he insisted he was there before they were and he didn’t like being lumped in with them.

When prodded about his favorite non-European science fiction author, Lem chose another genre-bender, Philip K. Dick. In an essay on Dick, Lem expresses his distaste for the sameness of American science fiction. No one ever accused Lem of being the same as anyone, that’s for sure. But his point about American SF should not be dismissed. Is he right? I don’t want to do a survey of the genre, but let’s just consider a few touchstones.

First of all, science fiction is not the genre of the moment in the U.S. Fantasy is. Whether in books or video games or in films, fantasy has slowly climbed over SF in terms of popularity during the last thirty years and especially with the emergence of The Lord of the Rings on film and the Harry Potter franchise in general. Now, when it comes to genre fiction, I fully support the genres that are the furthest stretch from ho-hum realism. But of horror, SF and fantasy, my least favorite genre is easily fantasy. Too much ‘restoring the order of the cosmos’ for my taste. Much better to have the horrors or the dystopia still in control at the end of the story – just like in real life. (What’s truly scary is that my spell check doesn’t or won’t recognize dystopia as a real word – frightening red lines under the word denying the possibility of its existence.) I mean I cut my teeth on the Alien and Road Warrior series along with Blade Runner and The Terminator – with Deckard unsure of his true identity, Max left alone after his heroic sacrifice, Sarah Connor driving into the storm she knows is coming, and Ripley waking up in film after film in a recurring nightmare she can’t escape from. None of this ring nonsense, or using the force and beating the bad guys. The hobbits of my kind of SF don’t win and the little kid with the wand gets put in a gulag.

What really bugs me, though, is that there’s a lot of unintentional genre-bending going on in North America. And I blame the bookstores. For years, they’ve put SF and fantasy books under the heading Science Fiction and Fantasy or, if they couldn’t afford the extra letters, just under Science Fiction. So a couple of generations of speculative fiction readers have grown up thinking the two genres are one and the same. I was once interested in a woman who leaned forward at that crucial moment when you are deciding upon first meeting someone whether you are going to sleep with them or even marry them (or so I’ve heard), and she said, “Oh, I love Science Fiction too. The Lord of the Rings is one of the best Science Fiction books ever.” Good night and good luck.

In this kind of environment, does SF stand a chance? The Matrix, of course, bailed the genre out for a time. But though I liked it very much, it was always too hip, stylish and smug a story for me. And the hero wins in the end. Dark City showed more promise with a main character who might just be a serial killer, but he can’t remember. Much less Charles Dickens and more Philip K. Dickens. But the vast majority of SF films these days rely on action rather than ideas to drive the plot. V For Vendetta stands as a recent partial exception. There is some style to it and some sidelong commentary at current events, and what young and future anarchist out there could resist the possibility of the British Parliament building being blown up? But the enemy is an unsubtle one – a standard Orwellian dictator backed up by a religious talk show host. Not very challenging targets.

The relative success of V For Vendetta points to the potential eclipsing of regular science fiction books by science fiction graphic novels, one of which spawned this film. And with their emergence (which, as a former comic book reader, I certainly don’t oppose) film has found a natural ally. Both media deal with visuals and this might well mean that the SF movies of the future will be dominated by visuals – even more so than SF films of the past - with the noticeable lack of compelling and challenging ideas. Comic books also have a tendency to create heroes. Notice all the superhero films these days. Will those heroes be of the perpetually triumphant variety, or will they be more like the antihero of The Planet of the Apes pounding his fist in the sand with the crushing realization that mankind has destroyed itself?

The short of it is there are too many optimists out there making the genre of films I used to most enjoy. There are too few truly and deeply negative voices. That is one of the reasons I will miss Lem. His work can’t be summed up by saying, “It’ll all work out in the end if we just put our faith in one man.” He was too skeptical for that. He was too much of a satirist. Perhaps that is why he never received the recognition he felt he deserved from the American SF writing community. Perhaps that’s why there won’t be that many movies based on his work. I think he would be fine with that. And he would understand it too because the dystopia of smiles always wins.

Quarantines, Morgues and Where Poets Are Born

2006-03-30T09:15:00.000-09:00

This month’s issue of Poetry was a surprise for me. First of all, I read a lot of literary magazines – mainly to find out what a particular mag is looking for in terms of style and content so that I can submit some material. I don’t read literary magazines to find new talent. That’s why I browse through bookstore shelves and eavesdrop on other poets talking about a new writer they’ve found. I’ve discovered three American poets by browsing – Jeffrey McDaniel, Sarah Lindsay and Stephen Dobyns. These finds are what can keep me going for months. But in literary magazines the odds are much slimmer. In them you find poets who have been lucky enough to be published in their first journal and may never be seen again. Many others are the type of writer who consistently publishes over the decades and you even come to recognize their names, even if they don’t ever seem to achieve any acclaim. Then there are the established poets. Once in a great while, you find a new poet that you think is going to go the distance.

That’s what happened to me this month when I read Katherine Larson’s five poems in the March Poetry. I won’t ruin the experience for you and will let you decide for yourself if you like her work, but all I know is it was a pleasure for me to read poems that actually have thematic integrity and a muted power that is all the more powerful for it being muted. And these poems finish well, unlike so many poems I read. (Remember people, sometimes open-endedness and the claim that you want readers to find their own meanings in a poem is just an excuse for having nothing to say.)

The real choker for me is that these are Ms. Larson’s first published poems. She did win a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship in 2003, but still… It amazes me where poets come from and how some can get so good so fast. If she were a stock, I would be in on the ground floor right now and I would buy, buy, buy.

At the other end of things, and in fact in the same issue of Poetry, are those other writers. A number of writers take some time to look at poets who, though they had variable reputations while they were alive, have already faded into the dust that covers their books. The look at these poets is loving, focusing on their strengths and their best lines – a courtesy probably less frequently given them while they were alive. It is a poignant thing to look at any poet’s work, seeing as how even the best known poets are hardly recognized in our culture (unless they are as savvy as Leonard Cohen and can play a guitar). But to look at those who seem to be on their way out of human memory, that hits a little to close to where I live.

It seems I’m still reading poets and commentaries on poets just to take stock of my own poetic fortune. I go to local readings and open stages both to be surprised by a poem or even just a line that will stay with me for a while, and to see where I fit in the local poetry scheme. I like to think it isn’t just about ego, though. I’m drawn to crowds of poems and poets because of some larger force. We poets are merely the vehicles by which poems meet other poems, much like some scientists hypothesize human bodies are merely methods of conveyance for viruses and bacteria who are the true architects of the world. The main snag in that analogy, of course, is that poems can only dream of being as sophisticated as viruses and bacteria. Poems are the much slower disease we are all dying for (not from) as they commingle and create new possibilities. They are the disease I hope might someday change us.

Still, it would be nice to be the author of the mutant poem that set everything in motion – the poem that got out of the literary quarantine of magazines and coffee houses and got the sirens wailing.

How the Ugly Truth Breaks Art's Mirror

2006-03-29T00:59:00.000-09:00

Talking to some high school teachers recently, I’ve discovered why all pop culture and all art is doomed to obscurity. What these teachers told me was that they had a hard time getting students interested in old movies not only because of the stagy acting and the inferior or absent sound, and so on, but because the actors just weren’t very attractive. Standards of beauty have changed so drastically over the decades that the stars of old come up short every time.

So that means the stars of today, no matter how realistic the acting or exceptional the set designs and special effects, still won’t appeal to the students of tomorrow. Brad Pitt will be the late 21st century equivalent of Harold Lloyd, or maybe James Dean. (I never can quite place Pitt.). Tom Hanks will be nothing more than a revamped Jimmy Stewart while the attractiveness of Julia Roberts becomes as much a mystery as that of Katherine Hepburn. (And even I can’t imagine a time when Humphrey Bogart could ever have been attractive.)

Maybe this thought makes you smile. What a shallow point of view, you’re thinking. People look at films as works of art, not as beauty pageants. But in art, looks and style are everything, dah-ling.

I mean, many fans would argue that films now are better than films of olde simply because the special effects are far superior. After all, what we see in Metropolis is clearly transcended in a film like The Matrix, right? What did Fritz Lang try to recreate? Electricity and a robot. Ooooh. Funky. But The Matrix gives us those great slow motion, multiple-angle shots of combatants in mid-air. It recreates whole worlds. There’s no comparison. For some viewers, that is the only way to measure a science fiction film’s success – the beauty of its effects.

Meanwhile, sometimes an entire technology comes along and changes the nature of the performer. That’s what happened with music videos and the types of singers and musicians that could be successfully marketed to the video audience. You have to look good to be a video star – although that doesn’t explain Rick Ocasek of The Cars. It’s just the way things are. But one look at the video stars of the early 80’s vs. the stars of today and you can already see the shifts in aesthetics. Cindy Lauper couldn’t make it in pop music today, but then maybe we’ll say the same thing about Pink tomorrow.

And every other art must often become fashion’s bitch. In poetry, for example, one of the most common forms for the last few decades has been the slim, anorexic shape, with one or three words per line. In another time, this form would have seemed hideous, but now it is the Kate Moss of the poetry world. (I mean the poems are unnaturally skinny, by the way, and not that they are smuggling drugs.) And if you teach poetry in the classroom you will soon understand that one of the things your students will most remember about you is not what you said about what William Carlos Williams meant by that red wheelbarrow, but how you often would wear one shirt cuff rolled up higher than the other and that one hair on one of your eyebrows tended to curl up toward your forehead. (That’s how I console teachers who worry about what their students are learning. I just tell them to be respectful and to make sure they are well groomed with as few boogers as possible hanging from their nose per term.)

I know from my experience working in television that the things I say may be deemed important by my producer, but of equal and, I suspect greater importance is that I have a very good complexion and hardly need any makeup at all. My choice of clothes, though, is another thing. Golf shirts bad, suit jackets good. I apparently often fail to project a sufficient degree of authority based on my wardrobe alone. This is a lesson I hope to have learned when I go back to the rough and tumble world of speed dating where researchers, I’ve heard, have determined that the most accurate predictor of whether or not one participant is attracted to another is not their sense of humour or the ease with which they speak or the excitement they have for their work, but the way they look and the timbre of their voice. We dream of deep emotional attachment, but we hunt according to surfaces. The person wearing clothes and a hairstyle that are twenty years out of date can have all the love and tenderness in the world, but they’re going home alone.

Could it be that Oscar Wilde was right all along – that “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing” with the corollary that “Fashion is merely a form of ugliness so unbearable we are compelled to alter it every six months”? These were observations of a truth he sometimes despaired of and which his own work often contradicts. There we can find love and compassion as well as forms of truth other than fashion. Perhaps the best art transcends fashion. Or it might be in fashion but not of the fashion. There are some positive signs here and there. I mean, young stars like Scarlett Johansson almost seem to have an Old Hollywood air about them, as if she could have been in films alongside Irene Dunn, while other stars of the past still seem beautiful today. For instance, if you teach film and you have students who say that Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn are not beautiful, you send them on over to me. I’ll be the guy with one sleeve rolled up higher than the other, just ready to go to work on these young minds waiting to be refashioned.

It’s Alive! It’s Alive! (Pop Cultural Icons For the Ages)

2006-03-28T00:58:00.000-09:00

Here’s a test that will rekindle those nightmares you used to have about high school English. Name a character from nineteenth century literature that you could guarantee most people you know would be familiar with. Got one? Okay, now name more than one. How many can you come up with?

So far, I’ve thought of four. They aren’t characters from the often-touted literary works that many departments of literature are assigned to keeping alive for the present and future generations. But if you went up to anyone who has grown up in Western culture – even the stereotypical guy sitting in front of a TV watching a football game through a boozy haze – you would get a glint of recognition by saying any of these names: Frankenstein, Dracula, Scrooge, or Sherlock Holmes. Of course, your unwilling test-taker might get Dr. Victor Frankenstein mixed up with the monster he created. And he might not even be aware that there was a novel by Bram Stoker. He might wonder if that guy Dickens ever wrote much else besides A Christmas Carol. And he might be puzzled when you mention the guy from Baker Street. “I thought you said the character had to be fictional.” I would even throw in another ‘character,’ despite the fact that he was real. Jack the Ripper was in fact fictionalized in any number of the so-called penny dreadfuls of his day – fan literature, if you will. And his name in the popular imagination precedes his history by a fair bit.

Why do I bring this up? Because it’s the post-Oscar, post-Golden Globe, etc. season when many people have tried to determine just what it is that is the best our culture has to offer in terms of the arts. We’ve watched and we’ve nodded. But do we believe that Brokeback Mountain has the gas to live on, or is it rooted in a current cultural crisis that will date it? I’ve had that feeling before, watching many films that were hard-hitting in their time and then…pfft! I didn’t see the film Philadelphia until about ten years after its release. And the A.I.D.S. story had moved on beyond the events of the film. Think back to the serious dramas you’ve seen in the past – which ones leap to your mind? Okay, try this instead – are you more familiar with 1981’s Best Picture Oscar winner, Chariots of Fire, or with another of the nominees that year, Raiders of the Lost Ark? Which one has the most steam at this point in time?

Many of us who have taught English at one point or another like to imagine that the truly great and profound writers will last, even if we weren’t there to promote them to the sleepy and those who are actually asleep. But even Shakespeare’s most familiar characters – say, Hamlet and Macbeth – don’t have the staying power in the popular imagination that someone like Don Quixote has – a character created by Miguel de Cervantes who, as fate would have it, died in 1616, the same year as Shakespeare ditched the mortal coil. And if you look again at the nineteenth century novel, who remembers the classics from that period without having a Wikipedia chronology open in front of them? And yet if you mention The Three Musketeers, people tend to respond, even though Alexandre Dumas wouldn’t be considered a literary giant by today’s standards.

All I’m saying is that the popular culture of the past has given us some of our most iconic and enduring figures and too often the literary world fails to recognize the power these figures have in our cultural consciousness. Why these figures? Why for so long? And that’s to not even mention King Arthur and Robin Hood who have outlasted their often nebulous authors and gone on to Hollywood fame and fortune. Call it the revenge of the populace.

Doesn’t this make you wonder, then, what cultural icons we are creating even now that might last beyond our time? Maybe there aren’t any right now. One look at the serious lineup of Oscar nominees for the past year, and you have to wonder if those stories will outlast the times they are commenting on. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t wish them ill. But will any of the characters in those films rise again to fight another cultural day, following in the footsteps of Batman and King Kong?

Gorging On Mea Culpas

2006-03-27T01:22:00.000-09:00

The cover story of the March 13, 2006 issue of Newsweek is about the confusion that results when the media try to sum up the latest research in diets. Things, it seems, are over-simplified and often misreported. So this is another example of the media eating crow by exposing how the media has a bad influence on us. But even if you’re tired of the media’s navel gazing, the article does reveal what we value in our society – better and longer life through proper observance of nutritional intake.

The article points out that there has been a steady increase in TV news pieces on food and nutrition and health in general. And that only happens because there is a demand for this focus. How healthy our foods are presumably affects everyone. And many people are frustrated when cult diets come and nutrients like calcium, bran, milk, eggs, coffee, and wine rise and fall in the popular estimation like gods in a modern pantheon.

The question is: to what extent is the media to blame for our confusion? Yes, a TV piece is bound to shorten things, being a visual diet of brief scenes and sounds bytes that are the aural equivalent of two-bite brownies. Things are going to get lost as the story ingredients are cooked into a five-minute soufflé. But the Newsweek article gives too much credit to the medical and scientific community. This is the same community that brought you leeches as a treatment for various illnesses. Uh… bad example, actually, as some practitioners are currently reviving the use of leeches in certain kinds of post-operative scenarios. Someday we may look back at the brief period when we didn’t resort to leeches as a time of medical ignorance. My point is that our store of medical knowledge is constantly being remaindered and restocked. And you can see this flux in the ever-changing news about what foods are good for you and are not good for you.

It’s the kind of contentious debate that a book like The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession With Weight Is Hazardous To Your Health indulges in. Author Paul Campos takes things beyond the mere eccentricities of diet and hits us with the big question: why are we so obsessed with whether or not we or others are fat? He launches into studies that show that moderately obese people are actually healthier overall than moderately underweight people. (Okay, so I’m maybe oversimplifying. Woo hoo! I guess that makes me a member of the media.) But in the process he points out that how we define obesity has changed over the years. And let’s face it, when some studies argue that 70% of Americans are overweight and that only 10% of people who manage to lose weight actually keep it off, we’re facing a long uphill struggle against impossible odds. Why are so many people so obsessed?

Of course, this focus on food isn’t new to humankind. Various religions have had and continue to have dietary proscriptions based on beliefs about good and evil. What’s interesting to me is how the language of ‘being bad’ and ‘being weak’ once used to define the ‘sinner’ in religious society where now, in a secular society, these descriptions characterize the person who has fallen off their diet or who can’t even bring themselves to get on one. The sinners are the overweight, and, lo, we can see their sins hang upon them and drag them down. So have we really changed all that much as a species? People used to count their rosaries, atone for their sins, and buy relics of the saints to help them on their way to heaven while now they count their calories, atone for their snacks and buy wristbands and exercise machines from late-night celebrity-hosted infomercials. When someone says their body is their temple, I’m sure they really mean it because they don’t have a sense of other dimensions to their existence.

Never mind that our picayune dietary concerns are almost obscene given that, and I’ll be maudlin for a moment, so many people on the planet don’t have enough to eat. Never mind that all the energy we put into being careful about milligrams and organic might be better spent redistributing food to where it is truly needed. But I don’t need to tell you to never mind, I know you will. But what the religious model of the new body as the stand-in for the soul reveals is that we are obsessed because we are attempting the impossible. Just as religious devotees come to be frustrated by the inability of the individual to consistently and gladly conform to the dogma of the divine, so too do our individual bodies resist broad one-trick schemes to make us all look more like some predetermined ideal. The soul and the body are in complete agreement here: you can’t make them do what they won’t do. They frustrate our doctrine of free will and self-determination and the ancient fascist ideal of the perfectibility of humankind. They tell us that the self is not in control.

The contradictory reports that we see on the media and from the medical community, then, are glaring reminders of what many people can’t accept. And so we try to blame someone because that’s how superstition works. The medical community blames the media, the media mea culpa’s itself and then blames the consumers, the consumers blame the professionals and, finally, everyone blames the overweight because their fat doesn’t act in a predictable way and because they have an ungodly obsession with food.

Hang Gliding With Emily Dickinson

2006-03-24T00:55:00.000-09:00

Surveys have shown that one of the most popular dream occupations for Canadians has been that of writer. According to still other surveys things might be changing, what with reading on a slow, steady decline these days - although, if you hang out in poetry circles, you’ll soon realize that a disinterest in reading poetry does not prevent plenty of people from writing it. Why do so many people feel attracted to writing? (And what kind of mind games are these survey people playing with us?)

Well, obviously, writing is the cheapest ego trip you’ll ever take. You can self-express yourself silly and stand in front of a group of people who will actually listen (or pretend to listen) to what you have to say. How many can claim that kind of attention from their family, peers, or colleagues? Add to this the incredible ease of writing. Add pen to paper, or throw fingers at keyboard repeatedly and bring to a boil. Let cool and serve it up. That perception of ease is captured nicely in the apocryphal story of the writer at a cocktail party (how the writer got in there, I’ll never know) who is having a discussion with a brain surgeon. “Oh, you’re a writer,” the brain surgeon says. “I keep telling my wife that at some point I’m going to take a year off from my job and do the writing I’ve always wanted to do.” To which the writer responds, “What a coincidence. I’ve always wanted to take a year off from writing and do some brain surgery.”

But there’s more to the attraction to writing. For many people there is something classy, romantic and exciting about being a writer. It is about the independent spirit. There is the sense of adventure. The vast majority of people who do not dream of being a writer understand exactly how silly this fantasy is. “You actually sit at a desk and call that work! Get out and into the world for Pete’s sake! Get out among the living.” Never mind the fantasy of globetrotting and immersing yourself in foreign cultures. If you want to be a writer, you have to sit at a desk, shut the world out and do the writing.

When I’m the road for any reason, I find the rush of sights and sounds too much to easily absorb. In order to write, I need the comforts of home. I need some semblance of routine – not necessarily a writing routine, but some kind of a framework I can hang my day on. It can be as little as knowing which way to turn as I walk out of my bedroom. There are people who can do the globetrotting and the writing, but I’m not one of them. Nor was Emily Dickinson, who stayed close to home (mostly in her home) for the better part of her life. And though I’m extroverted among a friendly crowd, when I write I tap into my inner Emily. And I don’t trust the passion that some writers have for gobbling up all sorts of experiences. Just a little will do, thanks.

Gustave Flaubert once said, “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I’m not a big fan of Flaubert’s work. Maybe I identified a little too strongly with the bored housewife Madame Bovary. But I do fully endorse what he has said about the regular and orderly life. In fact, when I read poetry that seems flat and unoriginal I often imagine that the person who wrote it must lead a much more exciting life than I do. Nevertheless, out of my boredom and the rut I have paced into the center of my life some surprising ideas and lines and poems jump out of the shadows of my gray days and startle my pen into motion – a needle turning the page into an EKG reading.

The good news, then, is that there is still great and innovative writing to be done out there. The kind of writing that can shatter you – the kind of writing that is the hang-glider for the soul as you (and somewhere to the left of you, Emily herself) drop over the edge of your own expectations and hope your steering and the wind can bring you safely to the ground again. The bad news is that, based on my experience, you’re going to have to go sit in a corner and shut up long enough to write while the rest of the world plays outside your window. Still interested?

Violence In the Media IV: This Time, It’s Personal

2006-03-23T08:36:00.000-09:00

The odd thing about the people interested in the effects of media violence is that the discussion always descends into statistics and whose are bigger… I mean better than the rest. Sure, there are news stories about just how many violent video games and movies the Columbine duo enjoyed, or to what extent racing games might induce kids to drive recklessly. (When I was young, we didn’t need video games to teach us reckless driving - we taught ourselves to be indifferent to our own lives and those of others. But I guess kids these days need help with every little thing.) Why is it that the effects of media violence always seem to happen to someone on the news? It’s always somebody else’s kid. What about the effects on you? Or on me? How can I write about this unless I know my own history with the beast?

When I was a kid I used to get in fights. Luckily, I didn’t stay in any fight long enough to rack up a lot of cuts and bruises. I was a one-shot-to-the head kinda guy. I usually got more cuts from falling limply to the ground than from someone hitting me. There were no video games, I couldn’t get into truly violent movies, and the violence on TV went no further than Mannix and Cannon, and later on, The NBC Mystery Movie. Despite the appalling lack of media violence in my life, I was an uppity kid and my face was a knuckle magnet. If I wasn’t insulting a guy who was bigger than me and getting beaten up, I was insulting a guy and then running like hell. Luckily, this was in elementary school and most of the school’s bullies by then had a two-pack-a-day habit and I could easily outrun them if I didn’t make a wrong turn down a dead-end alley.

My bullies – funny how possessive and sentimental I’ve become about them after all these years. I’m not sure about their TV habits, but I can tell you that you have to put in long hours waiting by the corner store to fill your quota as a bully each night. They would fish for geeks with insults and reel them in with threats, occasionally tossing one back if he was too small. There was little time for TV and they often couldn’t afford movies – cigarettes weren’t cheap even back then, especially for a bully who had to keep his hangers-on happy.

How did this constant threat and occasional violence affect me? Well, it was often terrifying. But the avoiding getting beaten up was the most frightening part. When a bully would catch me I would feel something like a sense of relief. The running was over. A few quick hits – the location of which depended on the style of the bully (these guys weren’t craftsmen yet and were still learning their trade) – and it was done. The beating was never as bad as the fear of being beaten. But don’t get me wrong, it hurt. And then the tension over until my turn in the bully queue came up again.

There is no comparison at all between the comic book violence so many people complain about and the actual thing itself. Watching Arnie outmuscle or out-shoot a bad guy is not traumatizing at all compared to what it was like just having to go to school some days. The over-the-top violent stories are often of mythic proportions, and the violence is symbolic of the conflict between good and evil. The hero often faces an opponent who he or she shares characteristics with and must defeat them. This, according to Joseph Campbell in his many works, including The Hero With A Thousand Faces, is about the hero subduing the darker part of himself. and when we watch a story like this, we are the hero. The stories are an impersonal way of recreating our everyday personal struggles.

That kind of stuff doesn’t phase me. If you want to make me uneasy, force me to watch boxing or hockey on TV. Or some graphic news stories. It amazes me that when people discuss violence in the media they almost never mention these things. The imaginary violence frightens them much more. Maybe it’s because they simply see the real violence as happening to ‘other people.’ Geysers of blood spurting from a teenaged slasher victim in a movie on the TV bother them more than a story about real Iraqi civilian casualties (with close-ups of the bodies).

It’s not everybody’s fault. As we grow older, we all become desensitized to everything, whether it’s street people looking for money, the ever fainter tug of love on the heartstrings, and the fate of the dying. We lose touch with ourselves and with others. (And we wouldn’t want to not be desensitized because a life where everything is just as intense as the last time would be very difficult to bear.)

So it occurs to me that it’s time to reconnect with my old bullies. I’ve got a big job for them if they’re up for it. Maybe I’ll tell them it’s a kind of redemption. I’m going to assign them each a long list of names and they are going to have to find the people on their lists and pound the daylights into them. They will be using that old evil power of theirs for a greater good. Because violence can’t be understood until you make it personal.

Violence In the Media III: How I Became Desensitized To Essays On Media Violence

2006-03-21T23:56:00.000-09:00

Right now, even as you read this, communications professors are being exposed to an average of 5.7 essays per hour on the effects of media violence. Think about this. By the time you’ve finished this article another professor will be one essay closer to poking his marking pencil through the next student that walks into his office. Imagine the barrage of the same statistics over and over every day. After a while, this kind of inane parroting of numbers from very old texts and journals (quoted and recopied more times than the Bible was by medieval scholars) has to numb even the sharpest mind. It’s only a matter of time before these professors become desensitized to the senseless and utterly predictable arguments that people fall into because they lack the imagination to solve society’s problems in any other way. Always resorting to essays against media violence – that can’t be the answer, can it?

Inevitably in these essays, the concept of desensitization comes up. You’ve heard the idea before – usually through the very media that supposedly endanger our moral sensibilities in the first place. Desensitization to violence happens when you are exposed to so much violence on TV and in films and video games that you hardly react at all to real violence in your surroundings. Granted, I do get an uneasy feeling in my stomach after four or more hours straight of Halo, but I think that’s more due to the pizza I swallowed without chewing and then washed down with some gummie bears and a ginger ale.

At the same time, though, we do learn to copy the actions of our heroes or those actions we learn in video games. When I used to play street hockey as a kid, the kids whose heroes were the enforcers tended to check me into snowbanks. And I can remember many a time coming out of an arcade after playing Galaga and having the urge to shoot all the cars that cut across my path. There was also the Tetris effect of having the urge to fit shapes into variously shaped empty spaces. And I never ever went into a crowded department store parking lot after playing Pac-Man. I would wander around the aisles for hours, gobbling up garbage and running from the blue parking enforcement guys.

But these were eidetic responses to the visual imagery and would soon pass. What media critics more often focus on are the tendencies for children to behave more aggressively after watching aggressive shows. But as Gerald Jones points out in his book Killing Monsters, one study (Coates-Pusser-Goodman) “found that preschoolers were three times more aggressive after watching a video than before – even though the video was Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” He goes on to say that this led some to conclude that watching TV itself led to violence, but Jones sees it differently: “I love Fred Rogers, but I suspect if I were forced to sit in a hard plastic chair in a strange room and stare at him when I’d rather be out playing, I’d act aggressively too.” Still, there are enough studies out there that show an immediate although short-lived imitative response to violent shows for us to conclude that –

Ah ha! Gotcha! That’s what I want to write in the margins of these students’ essays. How can the same violent stimulus (say, Mister Rogers) desensitize us – in other words, lull us into passivity – and at the same time prod us to commit violent acts? The fiendish television must be pulling us in two directions and we are much like James T. Kirk in the episode where he becomes the calm Kirk and the angry Kirk. Who will ever put us back together again? Oh, who? Who?

Of course, the writers of these essays are not concerned for themselves, but for the children. (Won’t somebody please think of the children!) Children, they contend, are much more impressionable than adults. They see the Road Runner knifing and gutting the coyote, thrusting his beak repeatedly into the coyote’s eyes – ooops, that’s the underground version I’m thinking of. Anyway, children are more apt than adults to be traumatized by violence and deadened to it (again, you can see the contradiction). Children are more apt to imitate something they have seen on TV or read about in the wrong books. Children are more apt to mindlessly imitate words they hear and read and then repeat them without doing the proper research or trying to come at an essay topic from a new and exiting angle.

Hmmm… maybe there’s something to this desensitization after all.

Violence in the Media II: Girls On the Lam

2006-03-20T23:29:00.000-09:00

With more and more young girls committing violent acts, it’s time to consider what exactly is driving them to such extremes. By this I mean, just how are television and films and songs and video games doing it? Don’t these media spend all their time spurring young boys on to violence? Is it a wise marketing move to branch out and tackle the young female demographic as well? I’m worried that the media will spread themselves and the violence too thin.

Of course, there’s the old fallback – simply show the news stories and clips of girls bullying girls and fighting girls. That usually helps. The media know that they have to emphasize exactly how powerful they are by showing what a terrible influence they can be. S.O.P.

But then they have to come up with the culprits – name names. Xena, Buffy, Sydney Bristow, Lara Croft, Max Guevara – these are the usual suspects. Never mind that they are fighting for good causes or beating up bad guys – they provide bad role models. After all, how can the young girls who watch these shows know who the bad guys are in their real lives? In the end, critics argue, it’s just about the aggression (and the form-fitting or revealing outfits) and girls are learning to solve their problems with violence.

Some say this trend goes back to the character of Ripley on Alien. In terms of appearance, Sigourney Weaver pulls off the he-woman look and fits in well with the guys on her ship. And when the fur and hatchlings and acid blood start to fly, does she try consensus building with the alien? No. Does she try to empathize with the alien’s pain? No. She does things like a man and blows the thing out the doors of her shuttle. Yes, she has power, but she chooses to use it in a very unfeminine way. And from her cinematic loins have dropped the other female power heroes mentioned above, up to and including the central characters Kill Bill and Ultraviolet, although when I saw those movies I recall mostly male audiences. They must have gone home and told their women-folk about the films. Sometimes that’s enough to get the fem-rage on.

And Lord knows The Spice Girls didn’t help. The more prescient cultural mavens must have realized even back then that these five tough grrrls heralded a shift in the cultural winds. All I knew was I was sure that they could kick ‘NSYNC’s ass and give the ‘battle of the bands’ new meaning. Forgive me for those long ago and still recurring violent thoughts.

But I worry sometimes that the media can’t be everywhere – that sometimes it may let some young women slip through the cracks. For example, where was the media when a group of mostly girls punched and kicked to death the young British Columbia girl, Reena Virk? I worry that the media might not get sufficient credit for something like this because these girls were not TV addicts, for example. It’s possible that, in a case like this, family problems, drugs, alcohol and a whole host of social issues might have had more to do with the violence than the media did.

And what can you say about the incident in 2002 in Lauro, Italy when a few days after an argument in a beauty parlour three women were dead and five wounded after a shootout between rival factions of the Cosa Nostra? It turns out that many women who rise to power in the organization after their male relatives are killed or imprisoned have some nasty non-media-related habits. Not many TV shows, for example, deal with the finer points of carrying around bottles of acid in purses to throw in rivals’ faces. There is a certain cultural acceptance of aggression among women there, perhaps. And maybe there is the increasing recognition among the women of the west that while there are still inequities in the system, power is gradually seeping into the feminine realms and with power almost inevitably comes violence.

Unfortunately, that means that if the media were as powerful as some of us like to believe, they wouldn’t waste time encouraging us to participate in violent acts – they would be out putting the hit on their competition. When they are powerful enough to do that, then we can take them seriously.

Violence In the Media I: Babies Kicking Talcum-Powdered Butt

2006-03-20T00:42:00.000-09:00

I’ve finally realized that the real threat embodied in a show like The Family Guy is how it might affect the preschoolers. After all, their main model on the show is Stewie, a toddler who has grand plans to kill his mother. And, of course, Freud would probably have something to say about the murderous impulses of all those compulsive rubber-nubbin-suckers with the oh-so-wide eyes. Pacifier aggressives, he called them… I’m almost sure of it. But the short of it is that we can’t let our toddlers watch a show like this because they might become desensitized and come to accept the ‘mommie-killing’ model.

Even if you don’t see the threat, some of the writers that weaned me could see this diaper rash of murders coming for decades. Just look at a couple of stories from Ray Bradbury, for instance. “The Small Assassin” deals with a mother who begins to fear that her baby is trying to kill her. By the end of the story the baby has put the hit on both parents and as the family doctor brandishes a scalpel and advances on the baby, even Las Vegas bookmakers wouldn’t want to put money on the outcome.

Another of his stories, “The Playground,” centres on a father who fears for his son in a world of bullies. Are these bullies urged to violence by too many late nights watching violent 1950’s TV? Doesn’t come up. All the father can think about is his own tormented childhood and how the time of bullies for him was the most traumatic of his life. But his love for his son is so great that he finds a way to take his place and throw himself into that world as he becomes a child again.

Even in an adult-centered futuristic film like Logan’s Run the adults fear the place called Cathedral where all the young kids and teens hang out and wait to jump the next lost passerby who comes too close… It seems some writers just assume that kids will be violent from the get-go.

So Stewie starts to seem like not so much of an anomaly, despite his post-grad vocabulary. With just a little close observation, you can see the Stewie effect in action. Watch a child play with a toy or a pet (even grown up pets fear the pudgy junior Frankenstein lurching toward them) or reach for your finger. Sure, you don’t even feel much of a tug, but imagine if that child were adult-sized. If we all behaved like babies (I can hear you already saying it, but park it for now), the jails would not be big enough. Come on – do you think the design of the playpen is an accident?

Studies (I’m foggy on the names – sorry) have shown that babies commit more aggressive acts in an hour than a teen might commit in a week. And teens, of course, commit more aggressive acts than adults, etc. What this seems to indicate is that we’re born with a little bit of violence in us and most of us grow out of it. Unless we have kids who play hockey or we read too many Danish cartoons.

Music Envy

2006-03-18T19:04:00.000-09:00

Little did I know when I went to a recent poetry reading/lecture by poet, playwright, literary critic and librettist George Elliot Clarke that I would end up thinking about my relationship with rock and roll. The discussion was supposed to be about poetry and political engagement, not music. But it turns out that he and I have a lot in common, including being born in the same year and being from Nova Scotia. And, like me, Clarke has never gotten over an early desire to be a musician. In fact, he has never really left that desire behind, working as he has on operas involving both classical music and jazz.

Back in high school I tried guitar, but my instructor didn’t have any guitars for the left-handed and said I could just adapt, which I did - for two lessons. My mother, like many parents, tried to encourage my interest in music and bought me a harmonica and a bongo. But after a few tentative stabs at these objects, I soon realized that they weren’t going to play themselves. Music did not come naturally to me. And my private in-car singing performances on the way to my grandparents’ place were soon postponed indefinitely while my mother took pills to stop the ringing.

And so began a long life of music envy. I, like Clarke, wrote lyrics before I wrote poems. His output was prodigious during his junior high years. I managed two hundred lyrics in one year and then, after a failed attempt to form a band with some equally unskilled friends, I went back to writing short stories. Let’s face it – growing up in those days or even now, music was/is God. You are judged by the bands you listen to. You follow (sometimes literally) the local bands that are struggling to get noticed and if one of those groups get a record deal you can proudly say you were there before they sold out.

But more importantly, the guy with the guitar gets the chicks. It’s a cliché, but I’ve watched it happen. A few people gathered together in a university residence lounge - one guy picks up his guitar and you notice that the cute girl who never shuts up has gone all quiet and the guitar man’s roommate later returns to the room to find a bra hanging on the doorknob. (No one said musicians were subtle.) Meanwhile, a former friend of mine once introduced a tableful of us to a couple of aerobics instructors who had approached us at a bar. There was a lawyer, a medical technician, a teacher and, of course, my friend saved me for last – “And this is Jacques. He’s a poet.” The girls went back to watching the band. If things had gone differently that night I might be the healthiest guy my age, although I might have a compulsion to count to four all the time.

I was attracted to poetry only gradually. Sure, I was aware many of the best poems had an element of musicality, but at least I didn’t have to spend a fortune trying out pens or types of paper – unlike the world of music where you have to make a bit more of an investment. I might end up being a bad poet, but I could be bad with very little overhead.

Another thing that Clarke pointed out during his talk, though, was that the intense interest in music starts to fade after one’s early 20’s. True enough. My knowledge of current music is more than spotty. The experience of listening has changed somewhat as well, although listening to an iPod-shuffled mix isn’t all that different from throwing a stack of seven 45’s (you know – vinyl) on my turntable and playing a string of very different artists. Sure, bands like No Doubt, Evanescence, Good Charlotte, White Stripes, The Hives, and Jet come along to get me interested in what’s happening now – or, more like a few years ago. And I can still hear a song like “Fallin’” by Alicia Keys and recognize that it is in the ranks of the all-time best torch songs. But I envy the passion that younger listeners have for their music. And I’m sorry I missed out on raves and got stuck with disco.

But, then, age gives me some historical musical perspective. I now know that one of the few disco songs I liked – Amii Stewart’s “Knock On Wood” – was a cover of an Eddie Floyd song. Not unlike the minstrels of medieval Europe, modern songsters cover and re-mix and re-vamp. So Janet Jackson uses a snatch of America’s “Ventura Highway” and Madonna grabs a snippet of Abba’s “Gimmee! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” – some of us know where those pieces have come from and it’s a little something to make us feel smug, and to remind us that there’s nothing new under the sun.

I’ve learned to accept my place as an amateur music historian and my contribution is my personal knowledge of the period from the c.1970-c.1986. I’ve also learned to accept that words have always come more easily to me than notes. Poetry has been there all this time for me – the Betty to music’s Veronica. Not too shabby. And words will still be in my head long after I’ve blasted my ears to hanging shreds of protoplasm listening to Led Zep’s “Rock and Roll” on the headphones. Genres of music have already changed a dozen or more times since my taste was relevant and will continue to change, leaving the songs I hum very much out of style. But some the best of the poems I knew back then are still zip-lock fresh (same with some of the songs, as it turns out). Poems, for whatever reason, seem to age more slowly. Maybe the muse is some kind of cosmic aerobics instructor who still has me counting, “One, two, three, four…”

Spoiler Alert: Ten Best Movie Endings

2006-03-16T15:51:00.000-09:00

One thing that Hollywood is often criticized for is the ‘Hollywood ending.’ You know – the heroic triumph, the guy kissing the girl, violins swelling, broad horizons opening up in front of our protagonists. But all Hollywood movies are not, thank God, made the same. With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of some of my favorite film endings – many of which will illustrate my point.

Many others before me have noted that an ending can make or break a movie. Both cases are certainly true. A movie-ruining bad ending can leave you feeling cheated. Such is the case with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. Meanwhile, a so-so movie, let’s say Pitch Black, can almost be redeemed by a great ending. And a good movie with a good ending is often award-winning material. But there are also many movies that are quite good and fizzle in the final seconds – like Wall Street. The final scene where our young inside trader gets out of the car and heads up into court feels unsatisfying. But the movie is still good enough that we can forgive a lapse of intensity in the dying moments. So a film’s ending isn’t absolutely everything.

What endings are about is giving the viewer a sense of satisfaction – both of the aesthetic and the moral variety. I say moral because I remember when The Talented Mr. Ripley came out I spoke to many people (mostly women, as it turned out) who absolutely hated the movie and really really hated the ending where the young Mr. Ripley gets away with murder on more than one occasion and caps everything off by killing his only true love. Interestingly, this ending almost makes my top ten movie endings list. I loved the fact that precisely because he has to kill his only true love to conceal his true identity and then go on to pretend to be in love with a woman while he is gay is one of the most bitter and harsh forms of justice I can imagine. In order to remain free, he has to be someone else. But not everyone agrees. And a film that fails to fulfill our need for artistic and moral symmetry will have a rough time.

But before you go any further, you should know that I’m going to be talking in detail about the endings of ten films, some of which you may not have seen. This will ruin some of these films for you. I don’t want to be the type of person who asks you if you’ve seen a movie and before you can answer tells you how shocking the ending was when the old woman turns out to be a werewolf. Or like the guy who came out of the movie Jagged Edge and told everyone in our lineup going in, “It’s his typewriter.” Or the guy who drove by a lineup for Armageddon and screamed out to us, “Bruce Willis dies!” But, then, if you haven’t seen those movies, I’ve already done the damage. Sorry.

A final point: in picking my top ten endings, I cheated. I’ve chosen the very final moments of some films – the dénouement – and from others I’ve chosen the climactic moment, the turning point where something is revealed. If you’d like your money back, talk to the cashier. Anyway, here they are:

10. The Sixth Sense
I hesitate to put this film in here at all because I don’t want to encourage Mr. Shyamalan to keep making movies that try for shocking revelations in the final reel. But when the technique works, it can change your entire sense of what has come before. When Malcolm Crowe realizes that he is actually dead and that he, not only the kid who’s afraid of the dead people that come to him, has also been rescued as the kid has helped him work through his fear of giving therapy, it’s a revelation. The film shows us in its ending that the healing in a therapeutic relationship flows both ways. Besides, the ending forces you to watch the movie again and see where you were misled at every possible turn. That’s only good Hollywood money-making sense.

9. The Thing (1982)
Okay, this film will never crack my top 100. Sure, John Carpenter’s music is always nifty, and Kurt Russell is in fine post-Snake Plissken form. But the effects veer between startling and creepy-funny (remember the head on tiny bug legs?). And the story itself isn’t all that interesting, although there are some legitimate scares here and there. But the last line of the film is probably my favorite last line ever. Picture the utterly destroyed Antarctic science station, flames rising high into the sub -60 night. Our protagonist McReady and another last survivor, Childs, sit across from each other with a bottle of booze, both of them knowing that there is no hope of rescue and that even if there was hope maybe they shouldn’t be rescued just in case, because one or the other or neither or both of them might be infected by The Thing and ready to spread to the rest of the human population. Childs asks, “What do we do?” and McReady answers, “Why don’t we just wait here for a little while – see what happens?” And then they each take a swig from the bottle. It’s the ultimate ‘guy’ ending. Bring it on, alien.

8. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
…Also known as one of the hardest films I can possibly watch to the end. After Chief realizes that the rebel McMurphy has been given a lobotomy for his disruptive behaviour (just when McMurphy was so agonizingly close to leaving the place and never coming back), he smothers his friend with a pillow and then busts out of the asylum. This ending is the ultimate statement about what the system will do to the free spirit, reflecting the essence of Beat writer Ken Kesey’s book and, simultaneously, the post-70’s disappointment in the Boomer generation’s failure to change the system. I would argue that the film and its ending transcend the period in which they were made and have become iconic for the both the defeat and the survival of the free spirit ever since. And I must be right because they parody the moment on The Simpsons.

7. Falling Down
This film is on the list because of one moment during the climactic confrontation where a police detective with no will to resist his wife or his colleagues has to face a man who has finally found his guts and has been spending the day standing up for himself while gathering a small cache of guns and occasionally exploding in violence. D-FENS, his license plate number – the name we come to know him by – has confronted a surly Korean store owner, gang members, an Aryan supremacist and others in his odyssey through the city as he finally expresses himself and descends into… is it insanity or near-insanity? It’s an open question because when the film was originally released, viewers were split on whether or not this character was sympathetic. But for those who found D-FENS’ situation compelling, we are finally reminded, as he is at the end of the film, that he has become somebody quite different from who he started out as. Det. Pendergrast tells him that he was going to kill his wife and little girl and then himself. And D-FENS pauses and almost soulfully asks:

D-FENS: I’m the bad guy?
Det. Pendergrast: Yeah.
D-FENS: How did that happen?

As we have been watching him throughout his day and he has acted out our own frustrations and aggressions, this near-to-final moment is a reminder to us of how slippery the slope of ‘self-expression’ can be. Meanwhile, Pendergrast, forced to kill D-FENS, absorbs some of the man’s uppitiness and stands up for himself against his wife and his commanding officer with a much more reasonable amount of forcefulness. The proper balance is restored. Almost a Taoist observation about the proper use of force.

6. Dead Poets Society
For many an English teacher, this film has been either inspiring or controversial and potentially dangerous. As a former English teacher myself, I’ve heard both sides often. And the ending of the film really brings both ways of looking at the film into sharp contrast. After inspiring his students to live life to the fullest in the midst of a repressive boys’ school environment in late 50’s America, John Keating is forced to resign when one of his students commits suicide after following Keating’s advice to pursue his passion for acting -a decision which provokes the boy’s father to send him to a military academy. Many teachers feel that Keating’s advice crosses the line of what a teacher can do – especially in the environment of the modern school system where teachers’ actions and words are sharply circumscribed. At the very end of the film, the future poet among Keating’s ‘disciples’ stands up and calls out “O captain, my captain” (quoting the Whitman poem Keating had earlier quoted to the boys), leading many of the boys to stand on their desks. Some people (ok, me too) might be brought to tears by the moment while others see this scene as a contradiction to the earlier scenes where Keating advises the boys to be individuals. Here, instead, they have become loyal ‘troops.’ I can see that, and I don’t care. The fact is, those who feel uneasy about the film react in a remarkably similar manner to the administration of the fictional school. The idea of a teacher not following curriculum and instead giving life advice to students is completely irresponsible to many. But for anyone who pays close attention in school, education isn’t about learning things, it’s about learning to emulate people you admire while you construct your own identity. John Keating, then, is as good a model as any. And even though I’ve never warmed to Whitman, I’m usually standing on my couch by the end of the film.

5. High Noon
Marshal Will Kane has a problem. At noon, the train carrying men who have promised to kill him is arriving. His wife, his deputies and the town have all abandoned him and it looks like he will have to face the bad guys on his own. He manages to defeat them, with the help of his Quaker wife, and then faces the town at the end. He takes off his badge and throws it at their feet in the dirt before riding off with his new bride. It is a scene that warms my sometimes anarchist heart. The town order is restored, as in so many Westerns, but we don’t care. The hero rides off, but he gets the girl. A couple of common conventions are defied here. And screenwriter Carl Foreman gets to take a sidelong swipe at the House Un-American Activities Commission and his friends who abandoned him during the time when he was subpoenaed to testify about Communist members of Hollywood. He refused and, like many of the time, had little support. The image of a Marshal tossing his badge to the ground in contempt, though, resonates beyond that moment in American history. And it’s the kind of thing you don’t expect to see in a Hollywood Western.

4. Fight Club
The important thing in Fight Club is that the guy gets the girl – the Hollywood ending, right? Only if you like wearing nothing but black (face mask included) and show up frequently at anti-W.T.O. rallies. The beauty of the final moment is that our hero rids himself of his Tyler Durden doppelganger by shooting himself. But will he make it to the credit card company hi-rises that have been wired to blow? Maybe in another movie he might. But here he just has enough time to console Marla, his on-again off-again girlfriend (depending on whether he is himself or Tyler) by saying, “Everything’s going to be fine.” And that’s when the explosions rip through the buildings across the way. The buildings begin to fall in a fireworks of destruction as the two lovers reach for each other’s hands and our narrator says, “You met me at a very strange time in my life.” And they go back to watching the pyrotechnics in what would have to be described as the most romantic moment ever for anarchists. Sorry – I’m trying not to cry as I write this.

3. The Terminator
Again with the violence and destruction, right? Not quite. Actually another tender moment, of sorts. Sarah Connor, the pregnant mother of the future rebel leader who will save mankind from destruction by the machines, has survived the final battle with the terminator and pulls up to a gas station. Just when she thinks about Kyle (the man who dies trying to help her), a boy takes her picture – the same picture Kyle used to look at, wondering what she was thinking of at the time. But then the boy points to the darkening skies and the old man nearby says that a storm is coming in – a symbolic parallel to the real storm that is coming in the future when the robots take over. Sarah knows everything that is ahead – that she will have to struggle and die and watch the slaughter of countless humans. The happy ending has already happened in a sense, but now she has to endure the horrific part of the story. So she drives into the heart of the storm. Thank you time paradoxes and loops for an ending that is both happy and ominous.

2. Memento
The first time I saw this movie, I kept asking myself, “What would be the worst possible thing that could happen in a story like this? What would be the least optimistic conclusion possible?” And the possibilities I went through in my head fell a little bit shy of the actual ending’s truly dark implications. We only learn at the end of the film (but actually the beginning of this inversely told story) that Leonard Shelby himself is just doing what everyone else has been doing – taking advantage of his lack of long term memories. He sets himself up to kill the closest thing to a friend he has. And if Teddy is telling anything near the truth, the odds are that it was Leonard himself who killed his own wife, and not the mysterious John G. he has been looking for. The story turns out to be about the impossibility of certainty, but even more so about the power of denial and the inability to accept what one has been and done. The implications stretch far beyond the film, of course, to all of us who are, in less obvious ways, memory-impaired and unknowingly altering our pasts to create an acceptable version of ourselves. Are there enough Post-its to help us ever know ourselves and our relationship to those around us?

1. Pulp Fiction
What many critics like to talk about in regard to this film is the joy of its aimless romp through the articulate and yet seedy underworld. They love its nihilism. They are watching the wrong film. The ending in the restaurant brings the whole film together through Jules quoted passage, Ezekial 25:17 – a passage which he has altered somewhat from the original. The bits about the weak man, the righteous man and the shepherd, while reflecting the tone of Ezekial, are not part of that passage as written in the Bible. But it does nicely delineate the film for us as a series of redemption stories about a weak man (Vincent), a righteous man (Butch) and a man who is “trying real hard to be the shepherd” (Jules). Jules’ speech to Honey bunny while he holds a gun on him (and on us – that gun is huge on the big screen) still makes me shiver. We think we know how this is going to end, but the moment turns into one of spiritual change once Jules realizes that he himself is “the tyranny of evil men.” It isn’t a highly emotional transformation. But when this Buddha with a Star Model B 9mm. sets that gun down we know everything that is going to happen afterwards and we know it’s the wise decision. So, even though this ending takes place chronologically before the other two stories, Jules’ revelation becomes a vision of not only his future but that of the other characters in the film.

Clearly, these are very personal and idiosyncratic choices. Far from definitive. But you can learn something about a person by closely observing their favorite movie finales. For example, most of these endings have a defiant tone. Also, while I was composing the discussion of the above films I discovered that my top three picks all question the concept of endings itself. In these three films I find satisfaction both in the structural design and in the points the films make about the possibilities for and obstacles to redemption. And even though I get a feeling of completion from these endings, there is also the sense that things simply don’t come to an end – the road goes on past the film itself, in both directions.

This is certainly something I live by and so my favorite film endings simply reinforce what I already believe. Nothing new there. We go to films not to lose ourselves but to find ourselves. In some ways, we try to embody those values – we become the ends of those films as we step back into the light, spoiling for another chance.

Scanning For Names

2006-03-14T16:26:00.000-09:00

There is a cluster of questions writers often face. The primary one, I would guess, is some version or another of “Did that really happen?” usually accompanied by, “I know someone just like that.” Then there are the other questions about where the ideas come from, the frequency of writing, how one might make a living as a writer. And of course there’s, “Would you be able to take a look at a few short pieces of mine for me?”

In my case, there has often been another question that I’ll admit I’ve brought on myself through a single decision I made a long time ago to not go by my given name, but by the name I grew up being called. The question is, “So why do you go by ‘Jocko’ instead of ‘Jacques’?” I wouldn’t bother anyone with my thoughts on this, but that question has been the most pressing one for people asking about my work and I’ve had to think about the reasons for this a good deal and so have decided to inflict those thoughts now on others.

So I’ll answer the question. In several stages.

My name began in the midst of a political struggle between my French grandmother and my English mother. When the baptismal bloodbath had cleared, the name of my baptismal certificate was: Joseph Pierre Alexandre Jacques Benoit. Joseph was a traditional name given to all Quebec-born boys, and the other tradition was to list the names in reverse. But for years my driver’s license said “Joseph Pierre Benoit”, my S.I.N. card said “Jacques Pierre Benoit” and all my other I.D. said “Jacques Peter Benoit.” This last complication was because my mother was under the impression I had received “Peter” after my grandfather rather than “Pierre” after my uncle. So for years I filled in forms as Jacques Peter Benoit. When we found out the truth, I kept the name Peter as a way of balancing out all the other French names. The French-English war over my name was hopefully, by then, over.

Shortly after I decided as a teenager that writing gave me more bang for very few bucks than any other activity I’d tried, my mother threw her support behind me (all the while emphasizing that I would have to have a real job as well – a rule she reminds me of probably only once a week now). She was pleased on returning from a convention one year to present me with a novel she had found. On the cover I could see the big, broad lettering: “Jacques Benoit.” A well known French writer of science fiction and fantasy. Since I was thinking about going into science fiction, this bothered me a little, but I consoled myself with the fact that he was solidly a French writer while my name only sounded like that of a French writer.

It was not long after this that I discovered “Jacques Benoit” was one of the most common names you could find in Quebec at the time. For that matter, my father’s name was Jacques Benoit. Technically I was a Jr., although no one has ever called me that. My father was someone I hadn’t seen since I was five and I began to wonder if I really wanted to write under that name.

There are, in Canada, other complications as well. For one thing, my name is French and I don’t speak French. And in the early 80’s with one referendum down and any number left to come, I wondered if it was a wise thing to be a French-named English speaker. For one thing, I was a French-born ex-Quebecois who had lost his grasp of the mother tongue. I was exactly the kind of child the French were afraid would proliferate. Let’s face it - I was the reason the province wanted to separate from Canada, although I tried not to take it personally.

With all these things in my mind when I first attended the poetry sweatshop at The Rivoli in Toronto, I was all set to write a poem that night in late 1987. I had watched a few of these events before and laughed now and then at the names people chose to go under. I wasn’t quite so adventurous and decided to write my first poem for the sweatshop as Jocko. It was the name my mother called me. It was what my father was called during his rowdy boarding school days. It was a name that sounded like a little bit of trouble. Exactly the kind of image I wanted for my poems, and it wasn’t even a name change at all. Besides, so many poets went by three names, I figured that going by just one name was my way of contributing to name conservation and maintaining the etymological balance. Over the next several months, I was a finalist in the competitions a few times, and even one of the winners once. My new writing name was off to a good start.

I began sending poems out under that name and after a few acceptances, the troubles started. Because I self-addressed my poems to “Jacques” (I didn’t want the mail getting lost) many editors began to ask to publish my poems under my ‘real’ name. And some editors simply insisted they couldn’t publish a one-name poet. Other editors simply published my work under my given name without even asking me about it. Two poets I approached after readings were very friendly until they asked me my name and then they gruffly insisted I use my given name. If I had used a pen name from the start, none of this would have happened. But there was something about my nickname that was getting me into trouble. Eventually, I started compromising by writing under “Jocko Benoit” and the publications in more ‘serious’ magazines picked up.

One of the most common things I heard was that I should use “Jacques Benoit” because “it’s such a nice French name.” No one ever said it was a nice name – always a nice French name. And I wondered if there were different standards for nice English names and nice French ones. And of course, these were all Anglos saying this to me. I began to pick up on the subtlest of prejudices underneath it all. Or it could have simply been that, as the restaurateur in the film Addicted To Love argues that his foreign name and accent in a country like America make him like Superman, maybe I was throwing away an obvious advantage.

At one point I looked up the two first names on a web name database and found that “Jacques” is often perceived as a stable, conscientious and accountant-like individual while “Jocko” is often more of a jester, a rambunctious ne’r-do-well. In many ways, the two names together probably aptly sum me up. But in my poetry I wanted to be the latter with just a hint of the former. My poetic voice works best when it is telling people all the wrong things to do, and when it is being petty and jabbering at the idiots (which would include everyone, I suspect). The tone of my poems has to be unpoetic wherever possible.

And that is probably the main sin of my name. It doesn’t sound like a poet’s name. It doesn’t convey the right tone or air. Never mind that it suits the image I want for my work. It doesn’t have the proper seriousness for the job. It’s the name of shipyard workers who open bottles (and possibly cans) with their teeth, or Aussies who sell batteries on the telly (well, actually, his name is Jacko), or the guy who shoulders you heavily as he walks out of the bar you’re going into and is obviously looking for a fight, the slick-looking guy in the suit who’s always coming onto your wife at work and the only way she can get him to move on is to let him surreptitiously cop a feel or two so he can know he got some. Meanwhile, my last name has the same root as “benediction” and “beneficence,” providing a neat balance that I hope my poems represent as often as possible.

Still, for many the image my nickname conveys is wrong. And we all know that when you’re trying to sleep with close relatives or cheat on your spouse (yes, I’m talking to you Byron-Coleridge-Poe-etc.), it really helps to have a Lord in front of your name or perhaps a good sturdy middle moniker or dignified initials that make everything scan nicely for the reviewers.

Why There Can Be No Guilty Pleasures

2006-03-14T00:06:00.000-09:00

There is probably no other term that makes my neck hairs burn. Guilty pleasures. Everyone seems to have them. The English professor who likes to watch Three’s Company reruns. The sound engineer for a national arts radio network who likes to read comic books on the sly. The basketball phenom who, when no one is looking, sneaks out to go bowling. The monster truck driver who puts Abba on his iPod. The hobo who sometimes eats his campfire stew with a fork instead of a spoon. The social misfits who can’t quite close off avenues of enjoyment that would cost them their social status if anyone were to find out.

As a poet who is immersed in pop culture, I suppose I’m expected to have more than my share of guilty pleasures. But I don’t. Here’s why.

First of all, the term is overused. I hate being a cliché, so I wouldn’t say I had a guilty pleasure even if I did. I would at least find another more interesting term. Mind you, that need to stand out makes me a bit of a snob.

Second of all, the term ‘guilty pleasure’ makes the person who uses it sound like a snob. Probably because when they use the term they are being a snob. To say you have a guilty pleasure is to say that you have a form of enjoyment that you feel is beneath you.

Third of all, you’re not feeling guilt, you’re feeling shame. Guilt has to do with committing an immoral or unethical act. Shame is all about losing face and social standing. So if someone said they had a shameful pleasure I would have to nod in agreement at their precision, if not their opinion about themselves. That is, unless they told me they had happened to kill someone with an axe to the head and discovered they had enjoyed it. That would be a guilty pleasure and I would defer to their linguistic acumen. But until I find myself smilingly washing my hands of blood in the bathroom sink, I refuse to have any guilty pleasures.

Maybe it’s because I’m a poet (which is at least three pay grades below hobo) that I can’t have guilty pleasures. After all, you can’t look down on anything if it’s all above you. But I unfortunately know too many poets who have scads of guilty pleasures. This proves that you can have a guilty pleasure no matter how low you are on the social scale. Many poets, while making no money, often see themselves as culturally superior to those who waft money and power around. The culture of ostentatious consumption is full of totems and icons that poets, artists and others see as culturally deficient. And to be a poet whose eyes have begun to linger over passing SUV’s is to be a person with a dark secret in the middle of an environmentally conscious, anti-capitalist crowd.

Of course, the cultural lapses may happen in any number of ways and directions. You can see this in a film like Educating Rita, recently released on DVD. In this film, Dr. Frank Bryant has reached the end with his pampered snobbish students. He’s become lost in his own subculture and no longer wants any part of it. He gradually drinks himself out of a job by acting like a lower class lout. Meanwhile, he’s developed an interest in one of his Open University students, Rita – who eventually wants to be called Susan because that sounds like the type of name a more cultured person might have. She has to hide the shame of going to university classes from her working class husband and kin because they wouldn’t look too kindly on her new found interests. In this case, education is her guilty pleasure. And through the course of their interactions, Rita/Susan actually becomes Frank’s guilty pleasure. He wants her to stay rough and unspoiled with a creative energy and brutal directness that hasn’t been sapped by intellectual life.

It’s that energy that many people find in their guilty pleasures – that thing they had to leave behind in order to assume the social role they have worked hard to attain. But in every role, something is missing. No individual can perfectly fill their role, even if they’ve chosen it for themselves. A song we can’t admit to liking trickles into our ears and babbles like a musical brook in our thoughts all day. A B-movie full of stop-action animated monsters that thrilled us as a child comes on late night TV and we sit bathed in the warm familiar flickers we remember from a long ago matinee.

You can tell what aspects of the self a person has had to sacrifice by what they label as their guilty pleasures. It’s a sad but, many would say, necessary cultural rite of passage to leave things that used to please us behind. But why do we do it? In fact, as I’ve pointed out, the very existence of ‘guilty pleasures’ proves that we don’t leave things behind. We only claim we have. The only way we can fill a role we’ve chosen for ourselves is to lie to everyone and lie to ourselves. Luckily, we are good at both of those things.

The unthinkable alternative would be to embrace everything we like and make no apologies. This is something I am trying on a lifelong basis. Mind you, I hate many things and I’m indifferent to many others. But I think it’s worth trying to be truthful about what we do like and what we don’t. (Maybe at another time I’ll say something about how we pretend to accept many parts of our assigned roles that make us acutely uncomfortable.) Why not simply say we (okay, I) still listen to Abba and The Partridge Family? Why not make a point of championing Ishtar (as one of my friends often does)?

You see, the real danger is that you might convince yourself that you don’t like something you actually do like. You will have achieved the next possible stage of evolution – the reprogrammable robot. Of course, the other possibility is to transcend roles altogether, but I can tell by the way you’re quietly shoving your Archie comic books under your bed with your foot that you aren’t ready for that yet.

The Problem of Place

2006-03-13T20:47:00.000-09:00

Normally I don’t agree whole-heartedly with the literary declarations of Carmine Starnino. But I have to make an exception for his recent comments in the March 2006 issue of Quill & Quire where he sums up the career of Irving Layton. And I especially support what he says about Layton's relationship with this country:

"I was amused to learn from the CBC that Layton fought for a 'Canadian' voice in our poetry. Layton didn’t have a Canadian bone in his body…He was the first poet from this country to disown his assigned historical self, that boondock checklist of 'Canadian' behaviours."

Admittedly, maybe because Layton wasn’t Canadian-born the roots were just never there. Maybe it takes a certain amount of time for a person to become Canadian or a child has to breathe Canadian air and swim in Canadian water before a certain age or else it’s all for nothing.

But Starnino has nevertheless hit on one of the main things that attracted me as a beginning poet to Layton – that dismissiveness towards the place where he lived. Granted, Layton wasn’t just dismissive, he was contemptuous, as in his poem, “Centennial Ode”:

Like an old, nervous and eager cow
my country
is being led up to the bull
of history

The bull has something else
on his mind
and ignores her

The truth is that the cow did the best it could to enlist the poets at the time of the centennial, including the likes of Leonard Cohen and Margaret Atwood, whose body of work hasn’t exactly been one long ode to their country of origin. Cow-nada in this is like every other country in assuming that the artist is a citizen first – someone Adrian Clarkson (even before she was Governor General) can parade around like national literary trophies.

Layton’s work puts the lie to this, though; partly because his poems mostly ignored the country he lived in even while embracing Greece and Italy, and partly because most of the poets of this place never welcomed him as one of their own. Sure, there’s the sexism, the strident pro-Israeli statements, and the occasional annoying gnat of poem that many poets saw as a lower art form. But how many poets and publishers who have survived only because of a beneficent state can say they weren’t at least a little bothered by his contempt for this place? Why make such a fuss, especially when there is apparently so much here to be celebrated?

My collision with Layton’s poetry came not long after I had been reading Hermann Hesse, a German writer who abandoned his country between the World Wars because he didn’t like the direction it was heading in – a finely tuned apprehension as it turned out. One of the books I read was a collection of letters entitled If The War Goes On… In it, Hesse and Romain Rolland exchange thoughts on the nature of war and doubts about the validity of the whole national enterprise. Great stuff for a kid in Grade 11 whose English teacher has just said that even though he doesn’t want to teach poetry, he will put the class through two weeks of Canadian poetry “because it’s Canadian.” So the tinder was there and Layton was just the right spark.

But Layton did write about Montreal. He did write about places where he travelled. And there he and I part company. And while the blurbs on the backs of most poetry books published in this country usually end with the writer’s bio and a final sentence saying, “She lives in...” (possibly because where you are from as a poet is more important to most readers than what you actually have to say), I blithely ignore the places I have lived. And they’ve all been decent places – Montreal; Red Islands, Sydney and Antigonish in Nova Scotia; Windsor, Kingston and Toronto in Ontario; and Edmonton. These places stubbornly refuse to inspire me even as they have been good homes for me. It is mainly in my dreams that they appear in any creative way. A high school hallway leads to a university classroom whose door opens onto Alexandra Road in Sydney which intersects Santa Monica Boulevard (must have something to do with the similarities I saw between part of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and George Street in Sydney – a lot of empty retail buildings on a wide, desolate street), which brings me to a poetry reading on Whyte Ave. in Edmonton. If dreams reveal anything about the innermost desires and intentions, then I must not see much difference between the places I’ve been. Or I see them as essentially interconnected, if only by my having been to each of them.

Let’s face it, though – how many of us in North America are born, grow up and live in the same place all our lives? Does place mean the same thing to us as it once did when we couldn’t easily pick and move our lives? Are we as a species gradually moving towards a revelation about the nature of our places – something akin to what the 12th century monk, Hugo of St. Victor wrote? "The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land."

I’d like to believe we are moving in that direction – not because it’s some pseudo-religious rejection of the world we live in, but because it’s a more realistic assessment of what land and sea mean to us as a changing species. Yes, species. Most poets like a more folksy approach – a more locally rooted way of being in the world. Who, after all, would dare speak for ‘the species’? But if modern man can reject the possibility of God as a superstition, then why cling to the near mystical belief that a place has a special hold on us? Why choose to reject one superstition and then live inside another one?

The truth is, maybe I just suffer from ‘place envy’ – a baffled fascination with people who write in such loving detail of the places that are close to them. I don’t begrudge anyone their attachments – so long as they don’t look askance at my poems. My poems with no sense of home that wander the page like descendants of Cain, knowing they’ve done something wrong to become so unmoored from the earth, but determined to see what’s out here beyond the ‘Here Be Dragons’ signs.