Tightrope Books holiday hoedown

I forgot to mention, check out Tightrope Books website for their holiday show at Charlie's Gallery on Harbord. There's gonna be reading and boozing, always a good combo. $5 martinis, a great idea during the festive season. I'll be dropping by to have a few Golden Cadillacs or maybe even a Pink Lady, doncha know...
Anyway, it's important to support Tightrope cuz I want them to become huge and prosperous, particularly when they're publishing my stuff...

Writing and re-writing / Sex on the page

A friend of mine is working on a story and sent me an early draft, asking for some feedback. I'm probably a lousy person to ask since my analytical skills are all over the place but here's what I wrote back:

You've talked about that apartment and those neighbors for a long time now so it's good you're finally getting it all down. Sure, it's rough but all things begin rough, nobody ever just pours forth with perfect stuff in the first few drafts. Christ, if only. It'd save a lot of time and grief but you go with it and you learn. It's like playing an instrument, you get better by practicing. Well, you do need a song to play to and that's where your experiences come in.

I'd say the core is there. Now it's a matter of deciding what is important and working on that. Maybe get to the point more quickly or give the opening more depth. Beginnings are always hard because it sets the tone for things.

The main issue is to get the whole story down and not worry about the details at the moment, that will come with re-writing. I don't know how other people do it but I usually write stuff by hand in various notebooks, on bits of paper, bags, whatever's around, then put it all together on the computer, print it out and read it over and over, look for the rhythm of the language, the music in it. A lot of stuff can seem good on paper but then you read it out loud off the printed page and it goes ta da ta da... CLUNK.  They say a big part of writing is finding your voice, the voice that readers will hear in their heads when they read it.

Well, it's all re-writing. Mount Royal is 411 print pages but I've got about 30 times that in actual print outs. I wish I knew how to make the process easier and faster but I don't so I just do what I can. It's a weird balancing act - exposing yourself but doing it without getting maudlin or corny, saying something worth reading, I wish I knew how it all worked in terms of a 'technique' or a 'method'. Some editors insist on a plot but my favorite books usually don't have a larger, earth shattering plot where the reader finishes, looks up and says: "Ah... I see..."
I like Bukowski, Burroughs, Henry Miller, Kathy Acker, none of whom have a larger "plot" in their books. It's more or less stuff going on in their lives and in their heads. I guess I just feel like plots are for soap operas and I don't find them believable. I mean, whose life has a plot?

Too often lately I read stuff written by people with Masters degrees in Creative Writing and it's all "craft" and clever turns of phrase but no blood and guts. A lot of cool, dryly ironic witticisms, which I find to be a real snore.

Anyway, you've got your story - and that's the critical thing - you actually have something you want to get out and that is the hardest part of the whole thing so just keep going with it, don't fret about technique or grammar or style, all that can be re-written, it's the actual story that counts.

Sorry if I'm not being more detailed but that would just throw you off, nitpicking now is pointless, with ideas still forming. Just get it get out.

talk to ya soon,

baz

Speaking of writing about experiences, another friend sent me an article in British paper The Independent about some award given annually to the book that has the most overwrought purple prose about sex. It's funny the Brits giving out this type of award since, as a culture, they're not exactly the paramours of the world.

It seems the biggest enemy of writing about sex is the use of metaphors, her 'Venusian mound', the 'erupting volcano', 'fiery lava-like tempest' rather than what it FEELS like, not just bodily, but emotionally, where your head is at while caught up that way with another person. In this day and age, any interaction, but especially physical interaction is pretty weird, with so many individuals disconnected from their physical self, using their bodies to communicate less and less, the basic urge behind sexual contact becoming more and more pointless. Well, if you don't want to have kids, then... It's something I try to address in Mount Royal - the irony of so much being devoted to sex despite the fact that pregnancy is almost always considered an unhappy result. So what are the substitute motives? Physical pleasure, closeness with another, boosting your own and someone else's ego? Endorphins? Maybe it's just the need to find some depth, some meaning within human contact and in an increasingly un-physical world, it's almost a kind of nostalgia, pining for a time and place when it was still known as 'making love'. That's an odd term. Making love. To make love. To make - to create. Then love, the desire for another, emotionally, intimately, to want to be in their presence, to share something not shared with others perhaps? So... to create physical love.

Anyway, as always, you just do what you can, try to be honest somehow, try to avoid being clever or too cute. It's not a serious thing but it's a human thing and so, does require some weight...

Getting banned

I got banned from some guy's blog, which I never visit. I commented on it kind of second hand through a weirdo website. Jesus, there's a lot of these miserable jerk-offs around. This guy I got banned by, he's one of these wackos who claims Marc Lepine wasn't killing women, he was killing feminists. This idiot's name is Robert Lindsay and he says he's some kinda something or other. He's just another bitter creep that the popular girls in high school never noticed so now he's gonna take it out on the whole wide world, just like his hero. Marc Lepine didn't kill women or feminists. He murdered children. 18, 19, 20 year old girls, young kids.
This Lindsay guy is like a symptom of psychic dysentry, spewing forth, convinced he's right about everything. And we all write: Dear Diary, this is what I think today... about this. And aside from a tiny handful of blogs, we're all talking to ourselves. So why write a blog? I wonder that myself sometimes and I'm not sure if I'll bother continuing with this. Maybe it's simply a way of keeping random notes to check back on for ideas mentioned, perhaps accidentally. Hell, maybe I'll ban myself from my own blog.
Reminds of a joke about the really stupid hitman: The boss offers him a vast sum to kill some enemy, a huge amount of money the hitman's never even dared to dream of.
"Fuck, boss, for that kinda money, I'll kill myself!" Then the perfect comic timing pause and: "Uh... wait a second..."
Okay, it's not that funny.
All right then, how about this. I've had an idea I'm trying to work into a story. It's about this artist, some really pretentious performance artist type guy. His own body is his canvas. He works out only one arm, say, or, one leg, or his neck maybe. I mean really goes gym crazy on just that single body part or muscle so he's a flabby, out of shape average geek, except for a huge right arm or a huge muscular neck, or maybe just one calf.
I dunno, maybe I can work it in some where. It's one of those millions of little scraps of paper I've got with some idea or line scrawled on it that I've never known what to do with. Maybe write a book of just that kind of crap, random semi-formed ideas. Shit, sounds like some books I've read lately... Gad, if people are gonna write, they really should figure out something to write about, at least amuse readers. The pseudo-irony floating around lately, posing as story writing, it's a real snore. But when you grew up in some no name semi-rural Ontario town and have lived in just one big city, Toronto, and hang out in a tiny and obscure CanLit scene with friends from university, well, how much are you really gonna have to say, especially if you rarely get laid - or even get involved with anyone on an emotional level - or take any kinds of risks at all, other than boring yourself to death at your pointless little day job. Anyway, as some poet said recently: It's happened, according to the UN stats office, there are now officially more writers in the world than readers...

What's with the Whitey?

Somebody asked me what's with all the 'Whitey' stuff? Here's the thing. It's not so much about skin color - although that is a major element - when something is "White", it's really about an attitude, a mindset, a way of being and seeing and thinking. It's not just about racism. It's about consumerism posing as self-righteous social responsibility, something only "White" people do. Well, they do have to somehow justify spending all that cash so conspicuously - the pricey Volvo hybrid, paying $700,000 for a $280,000 house, the $2,000 stroller, the million dollar toddler, spending $10 on a $1 coffee. Starbucks is "White" as hell, so is the CBC, despite their efforts. It can't be helped, it's a kind of psychic DNA, very difficult to remove. Being "White" is the unhealthy lack of even the tiniest amount of self-loathing, the sociopathic belief in being RIGHT.
Yes, I'm bitter and I'm repeating myself but it doesn't matter because hardly anyone reads this blog - and no one's going back 10 or 12 entries - but it is nauseating to see this neighborhood I live in gentrified, to have it shoved down my throat, to be surrounded by fucking cliches. Like the yup down the street who dresses up in his $10,000 worth of racing bicycle and Lance Armstrong suit to go riding with his equally White friends. Yeah, go climb an Alp, ya fuckin' parasites... Christ, I'm getting old.
But music is a balm sometimes and today I'm listening to those gals from the Western lands, my beautiful devourers... Therese Lanz and the Mares of Thrace....
and equally soothing, Alice Glass and the Crystal Castles...

to Die for...

Songs playing right now... Die Mannequin's Bad Medicine.
and live, where you really get to see Care Failure. She's pretty fuckin' great. Bad Medicine Live.
And another song... Like A G6 by the Far East Movement, featuring Dev and the Cataracs. But the whole thing's really about Dev's song Booty Bounce, where the "Like A G6" chorus comes from. Still, it's good FeM was smart enough to pick it up and get her the exposure. She's a whip.
Yeah, I'm into girl singers. Okay, so? I sort of have always believed that women are more sympathetic with music than guys, at least singing. It's funny how no matter how many tats and hair and rips'n'shit, the guys playing guitars behind CF (CK) look like total cliches.
Also, it's weird how unhip CanLit is about music, shut up in their own little hermetically sealed world, no clue about new bands, etc, I mean other than folky, Paul Q banjos and whatever the fuck like that, straight white kinda thing. Oh, Whitey, where's your head at?

Dear Diary...

Since we are all our own audience... 18,980,494,658,001 blogs and counting. The Canadian publishing scene is all afire about the industry's biggest hand-out, the $50,000 Giller Prize. Big controversy among the 11 or 12 people that've actually heard of the Giller and give a shit.
The money's great and all but I heard the shortlisted authors and the winner read their stuff on CBC radio and jeeeezus, it was the same old whiny monotone from Whitey about Whitey's small town hang-ups, up-tight Anglo families that can't speak to one another, banal familial secrets that make everyone feel awkward and speechless. What a fucking snore.
That's always the problem. How incredibly WHITE and POLITE and CANADIAN the whole publishing scene is. Well, it does belong to them, their culture. English is their language. The dominant culture among the founding peoples.
But, man, it's hard to take the same old socially progressive, oh-so-concerned CBC mindset where everything must be drained of its blood before being judged as acceptable for publish consumption. No bawdy humor, no inside jokes among whores. Actually, no whores at all - at least not the honest kind.

The Girl Who Kicked Herself In The Ass...

Shut-in nerds unite. She's young, she's guh-guh-gorgeous, she kicks ass, busts heads, she's tri-sexual, multi-contextual, she wears a black leather jacket, she's a globetrotting hacker, a bad guy whacker, a sleuth, a one-woman phone-booth, a chiz, a whiz, a brainiac, a maniac, a muse, a muzician, a poet, a priestess and she LUVS to suck'n'fuck bagged out middle aged white journalists...
This garbage series of alleged books remind me of that half-assed Toronto singer Drake, the Vanilla Ice of his generation. Ten years from now aging Nerdicans will be sorely embarrassed to have "The Girl That..." books on their shelves and you will see them on lawns and driveways at yard sales, each one going for 25 cents. I guess it's a good thing Drake downloads are virtual and leave behind virtually no evidence of ownership.

Thanks, Whitey...

I keep seeing on various arts websites the slogan at the bottom about the Canada Council for the Arts providing "generous" support - and that the Canada Council provided a whole $20.1 million dollars in funding to the arts last year. Wow, line up for your well-deserved blow jobs, CC apparatchiks.
Jeezus, what a piece of condescending bullshit. A lousy 20 million bucks when any half-wit known the arts in this country create a half billion dollars in revenues. The really sickening part is how the Council and gov't break their arms patting themselves on the back over their largess. As with all public spending, the spenders conveniently forget that the money belongs to the people they're giving it back to.
The funding should be 10 times what it is or more because it is artists that move a society forward. It is the artists who take the initial risks, usually to their own detriment.

The day after...

Last night's reading at The Central turned out to be a lot of fun. Nathaniel G. Moore and Myna Wallin put good shows and I had a laugh, even though it felt like I was speed reading. Thanks to everyone for coming out. It ended up being kind of packed in that small room but what the hell, we'll get a bigger place next time...
Christ, I'm beat and hung over but a good hung over...

Tonight...

Well, the night's finally here. The Me & My Big Mouth reading, with Myna Wallin, Nathaniel G. Moore and me - reading in front of what I'm hoping will be more than a couple of noisy drunks...
To get up and read - is it stand-up? Should it be serious? Among the non lit-scene public, meaning 99.9999999% of the population, the term "literary reading" usually results in a shrug or a yawn or a rolling of the eyes, muttering, "Christ, not that can lit crap again..."
Going to a few readings, the thing that really strikes me is how goddamn SERIOUS the atmosphere is, like going to a funeral or a dentist appointment. There seems to be this attitude that writers are not entertainers, they should not be expected to get up there and 'entertain', that it's crass somehow. Instead, the audience ought to willingly endure the grim monotone.
So no wonder very few non-writers, non lit-scene type people go to readings.
My personal goal is to try to turn readings into an event people want to attend, where they can have a laugh, a few drinks, yell shit at the reader if they feel like it.
The question is: Should you get up there and read serious and grim stuff or something that's more conducive to eliciting a few laughs? Me, I'll go for the cheap laffs every time. It's easier and more memorable for those on hand. Who doesn't like to laugh and if the drinks are cheap enough, they might come back on another night when they find out you're reading, thinking: "Hey, fuck, let's go have a cheap pitcher and a few laughs."
So tonight is Me & My Big Mouth, the second time event in this reading series.
It should be fun, foul and filthy - let's hope, anyway. Maybe we'll see you there...

Canadians are pure evil

On CBC radio, I heard a few of the nominees for the 2010 Giller Prize. I had some vague idea that this is Canada's richest literary prize. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's the country's 2nd or 3rd richest literary prize. Whatever, it's serious money but the people reading, these nominees, I don't remember their names - One was from Thomas Allen Books, I think. The stuff they read was all the dot dot dot crap on the back covers of novels. "Supremely crafted... beautifully wrought... a powerful new voice... someone to certainly watch for..." etc etc etc but to hear this stuff, it just sounded so genteel, so polite, so fucking CANADIAN. Nice, middle class white people or whiteified people writing and then reading, in the appropriate monotone, their nice, middle class stories, full of amusing and poignant anecdotes. I guess that's the thing I find so annoying - this stuff they write and read, the CBC, the Giller, Scotia Bank as sponsor, it all comes off as so incredibly white and SQUARE. Not a drop of blood or viscera between the bunch them, nothing I felt like I could sink my teeth into - they all came off as hobbyists, people who wouldn't be any worse for wear for NOT writing - not writing wouldn't kill them, wouldn't ruin their lives.
And after all, is there really any other motive, in this age of raging ironies, for doing something like writing stories? If writing isn't the single thing that makes you feel like you're actually doing something valid, if it isn't a physical compulsion, then should you really bother?
There's a smugness to it all I find offensive, the supposedly innate goodness of Canadians, this myth that Canadians are honest and decent people. They work very hard to maintain this mythology, this ridiculous propaganda when any moron can see it's the opposite. Canadians are shallow and vain and psychotic, they are greedy and atavistic, the vast majority have never read much beyond their text messages and hockey stats and garbage like Toronto Life mag. And what of all our famous Canadians? Robert Picton, DC Scott (Confederation poet/genocide perp), Paul Bernardo and Karla H., ex-Col. Russell Williams, Marc Lepine, Clifford Olson, Graham James - and they're just the headline grabbers. Deep within the nice, polite Canada is an army of vicious, cowardly vampires, lashing out from the darkness with razor whips and leg traps, waylaying the unsuspecting and the very young. Lots of sappy horseshit about veterans and "Let's do it for the kids", bland-faced, hockey playing millionaires posing in hospitals with dying children while their forefathers butchered an entire race of people through pillage, rape, genocidal 'educations' and the bio-warfare of disease. Let's face it - these comfy, white middle class "Canadians" trying to pass themselves off as kind and caring and so awfully reasonably, they are nothing but pure evil.

Grammarian beefs

"Your not going to believe this."
I noticed a blogger getting shit from some anon poster about this "abuse" of language.
Many of these self-appointed blog polizei refer to themselves as "Grammar Nazis" and go around pointing out these errors.
I have mostly agreed with there efforts. Their. So there.
Yes, there are plenty of shrill cries about the death of grammar, of written language itself, that English needs a prophylactic body like the L'Académie française. Perhaps English needs its own version of Quebec's language charter.
But maybe not.
Maybe it's just language evolving - dumbing down sometimes, dumbing up others, turning into who the hell knows what. It's not as if you'd have trouble understanding what someone means. But does this inability to use correct grammar - or more to the point, not caring about using correct grammar all the time - give the writer fewer tools with which to express themselves?