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September 03, 2010

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September 03, 2010

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When silk-tied fops speak of the publishing industry as if it were an oil field with wells sunk into the heads of writerly men and women, and when their soulless acolytes speak of consumers, I can’t help but think they’ve lost control of their metaphor.  There was a time, before idiots took hold of the word, when consumption was something we did at the kitchen table, and the economy it supported went no further than the front door of the house.  Now we speak of consumption the way priests speak of the Eucharist.  We take our holy products on the tongue and by a miraculous consubstantiation, we become the things we swallow:  I am Apple; I am Motorola; I am Nike; I am Coca-cola.

Or more to the point:  I am Harper Perennial; I am Harlequin; I am Chapters/Indigo; I am Barnes & Noble; I am Amazon.

While consumption begins in the kitchen, it ends in the toilet bowl.  This is a fact the priests of the new economy omit in their liturgies.  After 9/11, when his holiness, G.W. Bush, instructed the faithful to shop, he forgot to mention this would induce a case of the runs that would fill a cesspool far deeper than the pit left behind after the collapse of the twin towers.

We are a race of gastronomic prodigies who force goods down the gullet in spasms of parastaltic glee, loosening our sphincters all the way down then blasting the half-digested bits wherever we aim our rear ends.  How fortunate for those closest to me that I am, before all else, a consumer of words rather than a consumer of plastic and rubber.

Consumption is a neutral activity.  A deer consumes grass in a meadow, then bounds to the woods to shit.  Without some consumption, every living creature would die.

As with the consumption of food, so with the consumption of words:  there is a practical limit to the quantity consumed.  Like most people, I can’t eat much more than my hunger allows.  Even if I could, even if I had a medical condition that made me feel perpetual hunger, my eating would not be boundless (it would soon exhaust me and my death would put an end to my eating).  The same is true of words.  I can consume words for only twenty-four hours of every day.  That, of course, is a theoretical limit.  In practice, I don’t read while I sleep, nor while I floss my teeth.

The problem with consumption lies more in its quality.  If I eat too quickly, I might develop a case of diarrhea.  If my food is tainted, I might vomit.  If my food is thick and heavy, I might be constipated for days.  But set before me a well-prepared meal, one with a variety of servings, with a well-planned succession of courses accompanied by an excellent glass of wine, and I will reward you with a firm stool that passes comfortably, presents with a warm brown colouration, and emits a rich odour.

This is the end of consumption:  to offer up something fresh and pungent at the end of the day.

The same holds for the consumption of words.  Writing is the literary equivalent of a shit in the woods after a session of hearty grazing.

I aspire to offer my readers warm coffee-coloured turds that tingle in the nostrils and send up plumes of steam in the wintertime.  But I’ll never do that if all I consume are the words of hacks.  If I were to wolf down a pallet of schlock thrillers (strands of dialogue strung between three-word sentences) the best I could offer on my own account would be a case of amoebic dysentery.  You would read me as a runny gruel that seeps into the grout of the kitchen floor.  Or if I were to subsist on a diet of Victorian novels, they would run through my intestines as naturally as a daily Big Mac through an Inuit, and I would be stopped up until, after weeks of bloated agony, I would explode with a volley of rock-like pellets.

Instead, give me a rich and varied diet.  Cook from the recipes of both the living and the dead.  Give me leafy greens and pasta.  Give me bruschetta and marbled meats, wine and rutabagas, cheeses and coffees and desserts that fry in flaming rum.  On such a diet, I can squeeze out nuggets of such delicacy that mothers will bring their children to gawk, curators will beg samples to place under glass for posterity, and revolutionaries will use them as incendiary devices to lob at dictators and CEO’s.

If we are indeed consumers, we cannot help but shit, and the result cannot help but be a mashup of all we swallowed the day before.

Writers are consumers of the first rank, gobbling by the bucket the words of their peers and squeezing out a rich paste.  They can’t pull words from the air any more than they can sniff the farts of angels.  Instead, they chew on all the words they have gulped, ruminating like cows in the dirt, swallowing and regurgitating, burping and grunting, then every now and again producing a great platt in the pasture.

But now.  But now.  How things have changed!

The silk-tied fops have arrived with their corks and shoved them up our bums and have told us we aren’t allowed to shit as nature intended by mashing up all we’ve digested.  Now, if we want to shit, we must either squat like scatological gods and squeeze our shit ex nihilo or harvest it from a choir of raging aphasics.  Whatever we consume, we must hold it in our bowels to fester until we bloat and burst, spewing our poisoned stew on illiterate innocents.

At first, the cork slips, allowing a pale soup to dribble onto the page.  This gives writers a piffle to work with, a smear across a sheet of foolscap or a brown ass-shaped imprint for an ebook.  But the brown-nosed acolytes are busy sniffing our shit, sending it to the lab for analysis, afraid that traces of our meals may have found their way into our stools.  To be safe, they bend us over tables and take sledgehammers to our corks.  They weld shut our sphincters.  They seal our orifices with nuclear powered force fields.  And always, they sniff through the dirt for more shit.

July 23, 2010

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2. Bad religion makes for bad writing
3. Reading Tropic of Cancer for the first time

Poverty is anonymous because we allow it to be anonymous.  If you walk north up Bathurst St., and pass under the Gardiner Expressway, with Fort York to the left and the railway lands just ahead, you can find plenty of evidence that anonymous poverty persists more than 160 years after the potato famine.  There are steps from Bathurst St. beside Fort York Blvd. that go down to a path.  Cutting back at the bottom, you can duck under the Bathurst St. bridge.  There you’ll find firepits, cardboard spread on wooden pallets, old socks, a blanket slung over a fence, a skillet in the dirt, an open jar of peanut butter, a dirty maxipad.  And everywhere … graffiti!

When I entered this space with my companions, we stepped into it with hushed tones, as if we were entering a stranger’s house.  We felt like intruders.  The graffiti seemed like an effort to give warmth to an otherwise stark place, to make it human.  It reminded me of students in dorms who cover the cinder block walls with posters and photos.  I wondered what happens to the people who live here.  What are their stories?  What are their names?  Surely we don’t have to let them die and then exhume their identities to memorialize on cold stone walls, do we?  What good are names on a wall if they don’t spur us on to prevent more names from being etched on the walls?

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“a writer who doesn’t want her work to be read by everyone doesn’t deserve to be read by anyone”

While the question of cloud computing – is it a good thing? what are its benefits? how will it change the way we interact online? – sounds like it properly belongs in the province of geekdom, I’m of the view that it also deserves to be discussed as a social justice issue.  The consequences of cloud computing need to be considered by non-technical activists.  Why?  Because as cloud computing goes mainstream, it will drive a further wedge between the rich and the poor.

(Note that while my focus here is on text and publishing, the concerns I express apply more widely to the question of access to all digital culture.)

What is cloud computing?

The personal computer began as a stand-alone device.  It was like a calculator with a bigger keyboard, or a typewriter that could remember things and check spelling.  When I bought a Mac in 1984, I did everything locally.  There was nothing on my machine that I didn’t put there myself by copying it from a floppy disk.  I didn’t have an internet connection so there was nothing on my machine that came from anyone else’s machine via a remote server.  Besides, in 1984, that would have been impossible because there was no such thing as an ISP yet.

For the most part, internet connectivity hasn’t changed things.  Even though you may view content that resides on a remote server, that content is delivered to you by copying it to your local machine.  When you view a web page, you are viewing content that has been copied from a server to your local machine’s cache.  Ditto for YouTube videos.  Ditto for emails.  And so on.

Cloud computing refers to the situation where your content resides not on your local machine but on a remote server; you use your local machine simply as a point of access to that content.  You probably have already encountered limited purpose examples of cloud computing.  Online banking is the most obvious example.  You access the bank’s servers to obtain your account information and to perform financial transactions.  None of this happens on your local machine; all you see on your local machine is the result of your transactions.  Another obvious example is pay-per-view TV where your media provider delivers digital content from its servers to your local computer (a PVR box) for temporary storage.  After viewing, the program is automatically deleted from your PVR and the only way you can view it again is to access the media provider’s servers.

Kobo introduced cloud computing to online book selling.  It learned from the complaints leveled against its competitor, Amazon,  that when you lose or break a Kindle, you lose all the books stored on it.  Kobo answered this problem by designing a different kind of service.  When you buy a book from Kobo, you are buying a particular kind of license.  You access your books through the Kobo site.  If you lose or break your Kobo eReader, you haven’t lost any of your purchases.  Simply access the Kobo site and download your purchases to a replacement device.  When you buy an ebook from Kobo, what you buy isn’t a file, but the right to access a file.

Kobo is not a “pure” instance of cloud computing.  It still downloads a file to your local eReader.  You can’t do anything with the file (apart from read the text) because it’s protected by DRM, but the file resides on your device.

It looks like Google editions is about to change all that by introducing “pure” cloud computing to the publishing industry.  While Google has been tight-lipped about its plans, it appears that it will be rolling out a service that feeds content to local devices for consumption without copying files to the local devices.

Why a justice issue?

As literacy goes digital, the barriers to the tools of literacy will increase.

There is a danger that cloud computing will produce a divide in the quality of experience that people have when they engage text.  We already encounter this divide in traditional computing.  NGO’s have viewed access to hardware and internet connections as a vital part of any effort to promote development.  The rise of computer literacy in India, for example, has figured large in the country’s economic boom.  Last year I wrote of my son’s trip to Kenya, where a group of students installed thirty PC’s on a LAN in a high school in Nyeri.  It was important enough that the Minister of Education flew there by helicopter from Nairobi.

But what good is some hardware and a fast internet connection if you need a credit card to access content?  We don’t have to go half way around the world to pose this question.  We could ask the same question on behalf of a homeless man in Toronto who keeps himself informed by sitting at a computer terminal at the Toronto Reference Library.

Barrier #1:  Access to Credit

Cloud computing makes its money through micro-transactions.  People purchase information as a consumable and the purchase is financed by debt i.e. paid by credit card.  (Even downloading a free ebook from Apple’s iBook service requires a credit card.)

Marginalized people don’t have access to debt.  Or they have so much of it they can’t get any more.

As the meltdown of ‘08 demonstrated, many lower-middle income earners were marketed access to debt in the guise of financial “products”.  This was an exercise in exploitation that was allowed to happen because of an absence of market regulation.  Yet the marketing reach of Google far exceeds that of financial institutions, and there is no reason to suppose that people who cannot afford a subprime mortgage are better equipped to resist the enticements Google offers in the purely unregulated marketplace it occupies.

In traditional transactions, the delivery of goods on credit has often given rise to an exploitative relationship.  Why do we think this will change as more of our activities shift to the cloud?

There is enormous cultural pressure to engage media delivered from the cloud.  Those who cannot afford it will be left out, or more likely, will participate beyond the reach of mainstream media.

Barrier #2:  Inability to Lend

The lifeblood of cloud computing, at least as practised by Kobo and perhaps also by Google, is DRM.  Locked files are temporarily copied to local devices.  But a locked file can’t be loaned.

There are many circumstances when it seems natural to lend text:

• sharing a newspaper at breakfast or picking up a discarded newspaper on the subway

• buying a used book

• borrowing a book from a friend

• donating old books for a fundraiser

• libraries

And yet even producers of DRM-free ebooks discourage lending.  Smashwords includes this notice with each ebook sold on its site:

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Like recycling, lending is naturally antagonistic to the cloud economy.  Lending can be viewed as an act of resistance.  But a system that makes lending impossible narrows the avenues for resistance.

Resistance

For the first time in human history, the written word may be deployed as an instrument of enslavement.

This won’t happen because of anything intrinsic to the words, but because of the system by which words are delivered to their readers.  As book retailing (and all digital culture) becomes a creature of the cloud, this will foster a dependency based on debt.  Those who can afford debt will be unaffected.  Those who can’t will pay dearly to participate.  And those with no access to debt will be shut out.  There won’t be any blurring of the lines as there is now when a man can pull a discarded newspaper from the recycling bin or pass an hour in a library’s reading room.

Although the scenario I present seems alarmist because it presupposes the extinction of print text, nevertheless such an extinction is precisely what large media providers like Google aim to achieve.  And while some scoff at the idea that physical books will cease to exist, it is fair to suppose that as more resources drift to the clouds, this will impoverish the catalogs of print providers.  While I don’t think we need to resist this trend  (after all, a cultural change is, of itself, a neutral event), I do think we need to resist the way this cultural change may be exploited to exclude the marginalized.  So here are a couple thoughts about how we might resist these marginalizing tendencies:

1. Writers have power.

There is a venerable tradition that sees the writer as allied with the underclass.  Unfortunately, most writers are ignoramuses when it comes to the brave new world of text-in-the-clouds.  If authors knew how much they were giving away to publishers and retailers at the expense of their readers, they might negotiate terms differently, or simply circumvent the usual players in the book industry.

I am of the belief that a writer who doesn’t want her work to be read by everyone doesn’t deserve to be read by anyone.  Or, to be more blunt:  it’s about the reader, stupid.

A writer can better serve the reader by making sure cloud-free copies of her work are available e.g. via personal web space or alternative portals.

2. Libraries matter.

Ideologically, cloud computing fits nicely with libertarianism.  There is no such thing as a publicly funded and publicly accessible cloud.  A real threat exists that within a short time all literary output will be surrendered to private interests.  Conservative interests in the U.S. see no need for public libraries.  See for example the on-again-off-again relationship Florida’s libraries have enjoyed with the State legislature.  But Americans can’t hold a candle to Alberta, where Ralph Klein’s conservatives instituted library user fees in the 1980’s, the only jurisdiction in North America ever to have done so.  The cloud, entirely a creature of private interests, will only work to further erode the position of libraries.

And yet a publicly funded cloud for access to all forms of media seems a natural extension of the public library – an institution dedicated to fostering learning and preserving culture for the benefit of everyone.  Imagine what that would look like.  Imagine what it would mean for average families trying to make ends meet.

Such an institution might serve as an important counterweight to the overwhelming power of monopolistic global media providers like Google.

Afterword:  I note that libraries currently lend ebooks which, thanks to DRM controls, expire after a limited period.  However, these assume ownership of an eReader, and so this form of lending can hardly be viewed as egalitarian in the sense of traditional library lending.

July 21, 2010

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2. Graduating into the New Economy
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“Community” is a spectacular bronze sculpture consisting of 21 life-size figures, standing proudly on the grounds of Manulife Financial’s Head Office in Toronto.

Completed in June 2001. “Community” is a comptemporary [sic] representation that uniquely reflects Manulife’s diversity and international operations.

On his work and methods, we find this statement:

Newman began his exploration of the figure by creating small sculptures of anonymous businessmen. While their suits identified them as figures of power and authority, their crouching, falling, and grasping postures revealed vulnerability. Cast in bronze, the figures took on an unexpected timelessness.

As Newman’s focus shifted toward the whimsical and satirical, the figures suggested the inflated egos and social pretensions of their subjects. By the 1980s the businessmen, now distorted, flattened and shadow-like, conveyed the fast pace of contemporary life.

Let me see if I understand.  Are we to suppose that Manulife Financial commissioned this sculpture so Kirk Newman could poke fun at its executives?  Is that what’s going on here?  Let’s take a look at the sculpture, and then consider its context:

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Of the 21 figures, six are children, five are women, and nine are men.  One man is a labourer and wears a hard hat.  Eight of the men wear suits, although one appears younger and wears a baseball cap and carries a knapsack.  Eighteen of the figures are Caucasian.  One man is Asian and talks on a cell phone.  One woman is Afro-Canadian and carries a child (presumably her own) on her back.  The four Caucasian women appear to be professionals.

This was commissioned in 2001.

In Toronto!

Executed by a man raised in Texas.

Who has founded a school in Kalamazoo whose lead sponsor is a car manufacturer.

Is this what diversity looks like?  Is this what an international corporate concern looks like?

Where is Kirk Newman’s satire?  This looks more like horror to me.

In understanding ourselves, perhaps the greatest challenge we confront today is the reconciliation of our global reach to the fact that each of us exists in a local context.  I view Newman’s sculpture as a symptomatic of our struggle to answer this challenge.  A financial company with global interests flies in an American artist who has little or no connection to the city.  Although the artist is no longer here, his work remains.  Like a real person, the sculpture abides in a local context.

Does the sculpture integrate well with the local context?  Does the context contribute meanings to the work quite apart from those one might infer by its placement on the gracious lawns of Manulife’s corporate headquarters?

Here are some of my own observations about the sculpture’s context.  Take another look at the photo which appears on Newman’s website.  If the photographer had stepped back two metres, he would have taken the shot through iron bars.  Manulife’s grounds are gated by high wrought iron fences and padlocks.  To the north is the community of Rosedale, one of the wealthiest communities in the country.  If we walk east along Bloor Street, looking south, we find Cabbagetown, celebrated for its working-class roots in Hugh Garner’s novel of the same name.  Now, Cabbagetown has become gentrified so that writers like Barbara Gowdy and partner, poet Christopher Dewdney, can work in relative peace while two streets over, women hook and the homeless sleep on park benches.

Moving further east along Bloor Street, past Sherbourne subway station, there is a sign that says “Nature Trail”.  It is supposed to take you down into Rosedale Valley which feeds into the Don Valley River system.  Don’t follow the trail — certainly not alone.  As the valley descends, the subway emerges from the hillside in a big concrete tube that meets with the Prince Edward Viaduct.  The supports for the subway provide shelter for many homeless people, and the concrete surface is covered in graffiti.  For a nice white middle-class boy like me, this is a scary place to venture because it’s hidden from city streets, densely wooded, and inhabited by people who fall outside any conventional understanding of what it means to live in community.

Walking east from the “Nature Trail”, we arrive at the western footings of the Prince Edward Viaduct, which looms large in Michael Ondaatje’s In The Skin of A Lion.  The first thing we encounter is a Bell pay phone and a sign for a distress centre and the number:  (416) 408-HELP.  The Prince Edward Viaduct was the once the world’s second most deadly structure (after the Golden Gate Bridge).  In 2003, the “luminous veil” anti-suicide barrier was completed.  Even so, the distress phones remain.

Mine is a cursory sampling of the context in which Manulife Financial has situated its “Community.”  The work is caricatured.  The work is sanitized.  But most of all, the work is as divorced from local realities as the company which commissioned it.  In a world dominated by financial institutions with global interests, it’s increasingly easy to ignore local context.  It is increasingly easy to pretend there is no causal relationship between global policy-making and local quality of life.  Community is a fine value, but it’s not a static thing to sit in bronze on a manicured lawn; it’s a living network of relationships that requires constant nurture.  Otherwise people go missing, as they have from this sculpture.  The missing figures are the homeless, the mentally ill, the sexually exploited, the hungry, all within a few hundred metres of Kirk Newman’s “Community”.

July 12, 2010

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July 05, 2010

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Later, while wandering around, private security guards asked me to move along and told me I couldn’t photograph the building they were guarding.  And later still, when I returned to meet my wife at the end of her work day, I was again asked for ID and questioned about both my reason for being there and the contents of my bag.  After being vetted by the police officer, I sat on the steps to the building where my wife works and was again accosted by private security guards.

On Saturday June 26, 2010, my wife and I attended a peaceful rally at Queen’s Park.  Meanwhile, a couple kilometers to the south, the leaders of the G20 nations were meeting to engage in economic planning that will affect virtually every living creature on the planet.  Later in the afternoon, we found ourselves at the intersection of Queen St. W. and Bay St. when young people dressed in black erupted in a window-smashing frenzy.

All that is done now, but I am still bewildered, wondering what has happened to this city.  Typically, I would describe myself as an issues person, but I have had little time to consider the issues that were formally addressed at the Summit because of all that has happened on the ground.  For me, what is vital now is the local; the global will have to wait.

Protesting the G20 Summit is a worthy enterprise.  People who wish to engage their constitutionally protected rights of assembly and free speech can find all kinds of reasons to speak out.  Some of those reasons are substantive; they relate to issues being addressed by the G20 leaders:

• Banking.  Tax banks?  The Tobin tax?
• Monetary Policy.  Austerity or Stimulus?
• Trade.  Liberalization?  Barriers?
• Environment.  Sustainability?  Greenhouse Emission caps?  Cap ‘n Trade?
• Military.  Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Gaza, Darfur, Kyrgystan, Tibet, North Korea?
• Human Rights. Well, okay, maybe they didn’t talk about human rights.

But other reasons to protest are best described as procedural.  These are local and particular to the way in which the G20 Summit was implemented in this place.

• The disruption of a major urban centre.
• Extraordinary security costs and concerns about pork barrel policing.
• Temporary suspension of civil liberties through secret regulations.
• Enforcement of non-existent laws.
• Use of agent provocateurs.
• Police brutality.
• The abandonment of ordinary citizens for the sake of a select few.

The two strands of protest set up a dissonance that typifies the growing proliferation of international gatherings that consider global agendas.  It is the dissonance between the macro and the micro, the global and the local, wealth and poverty, power and vulnerability.  The most important question of those who protest global events is:  how can we most effectively resist their agendas?

A question on the ground in Toronto is:  do Black Bloc tactics further the aims of resistance?

Having been caught in the midst of their actions and having witnessed firsthand the damage that they did, I’m taken aback by the reportage in mainstream media.  For example, we have this article in the Globe & Mail from Christie Blatchford (who was never there) which accepts at face value the claims of the police chief Bill Blair that protesters interrupted a soldier’s funeral cortège when there is independent evidence to suggest that he is lying – or at least to warrant the kind of independent investigation that is supposed to be the hallmark of good journalism.  Frankly, Blatchford is talking out her ass.  More generally, our mainstream media have vilified a little bit of window-smashing at the expense of more important issues.  These people are characterized as “thugs” and “hooligans” and “anarchists” who are using the event as an excuse to go wild.

Maybe the media are talking about other people.  I witnessed something different.  What I witnessed were well-organized people who were focused and had a clear message to deliver.  They were not random.  They were not crazed hooligans.  Contrary to claims by mainstream media, they did not hurt Toronto’s small business operators (unless you include the Zanzibar strip club in that description).  What I witnessed was a group of people striking out at symbols of power and oppression — banks, international brands, garment retailers engaged in questionable labour practices, big media concerns, and (of course) law enforcement.

As a citizen of this rather staid city, I am offended by smashed windows.  But when I step back and think for a minute, I wonder if maybe there’s something wrong with my own attitude.  The fact is:  I agree with the protesters in black.  I don’t like the banks either.  They are what Ed Broadbent used to call “corporate welfare bums.”  And with the G20, Stephen Harper has ensured that not only our domestic banks, but banks throughout the world, continue to get a free ride.  I don’t like garment retailers that don’t give a shit about labour practices in Bangladesh, or claim to give a shit but engage in questionable practices at home.  I don’t like fast food vendors who rely on meat raised in deplorable conditions which is purchased like any other commodity in an international market.  And as for the allegations about interrupting the repatriation cortège.  If it had really happened, then, yeah, it would have been rude and insensitive.  But dammit!  I’m opposed to troops in Afghanistan.  And no, I won’t feel compelled to show respect in death for someone I would not have respected in life.  After all, we’re talking about trained killers here.

On substantive points, I find myself sympathizing with the people we’ve come to identify as the Black Bloc.  My disagreement is more with the procedural points.  Again, stepping back, I’m not so sure a few smashed windows is as distressing as people make it out to be.  Their methods are rational.  They can be understood and analysed.  The same cannot be said for the police who, on many occasions, threw reason out the window.  When they implemented “kettling” procedures, they told people they would be arrested if they didn’t leave, yet denied them a way to leave.  This was documented by no less than Steve Paikin of TVO.  Police Chief Bill Blair deliberately withheld the fact that he had misinterpreted regulations expanding police powers because he “was trying to keep the criminals out.”  This is lying by omission.  These breaches of public trust represent a far deeper betrayal than a few strategically smashed windows.

But what disturbs me more than Black Bloc tactics or duplicitous and incoherent law enforcement is the utter complacency of Toronto’s citizens.  It appalls me that people would express more outrage at a few broken windows than at the suspension of constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms.  The problem with Toronto is that the very thing which makes it great — its tolerance — looks a lot like the very thing which makes it weak — its complacency.  Toronto is a flaccid city bloated with middle class denizens who are disengaged from the issues that affect them because they’re too goddammed comfortable.  I include myself in that description.  We’d rather switch off our minds with entertainment than trouble them with issues.

Traditionally, Toronto has described itself as Toronto the Good.  Sometimes, people behave as if being good is the same as being nice or insipid.  But being good is something altogether different.  Being good can mean being filled with righteous anger.  Bruce Cockburn’s “If I had a rocket launcher” captures this attitude.  And the tolerance we celebrate during Pride week represents the culmination of a thousand small acts of righteous anger.  This aggressive goodness has its roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Moses committed homicide.  Jesus lost his temper in Jerusalem’s temple.  Both acts were grounded in righteous anger at the abuse of power.

Despite my ability to rationalize just about anything — including window-smashing rampages through the streets of Toronto — I don’t see myself putting on black clothes and covering my face any time soon.  Here’s why:

One of the cautionary questions any activist should ask is this:  how am I being used?  Whether the action is as innocuous as retweeting, or as serious as torching a police car, it is important to anticipate how media, police, politicians — even other activists — will interpret what you do.  Power, especially the power inherent in media, includes the power to manipulate perception.  Look at the way Christie Blatchford has helped to characterize protesters in black as insensitive uncaring pricks.  And media interviews with sweet elderly vets who have lived all their lives in Toronto and have served overseas to defend the freedoms we enjoy … anybody who questions such treacly spin must be a thick-skinned asshole.  Never mind that the streets he cries out for are almost universally owned by companies listed on major stock exchanges.  His tears are years too late.  The battle for his city was lost when he was a younger man.  Apple won.  So did Scotiabank and Cara Operations Limited and NRDC Equity Partners (U.S. owner of The Bay).

We have heard the obvious ways in which Black Bloc protesters may have been used.  It has been suggested that police allowed them to rampage through downtown Toronto.  There is speculation that this was a strategic move which garnered sufficient public support that police could then exceed their authority without question.  In addition, it would deflect criticism from the PMO regarding the enormous security costs.   While activists like Craig Kielberger have said that the Black Bloc draw attention away from legitimate groups, that may be precisely the outcome authorities were hoping to achieve by withdrawing the police presence from Yonge St.

But there may be other ways the Black Bloc protesters have allowed themselves to be used, more subtle than those discussed by mainstream media.  It may be that these protesters have unwittingly internalized modes of expression that mirror the very behaviours they lash out against.  I raise a few examples here.  Perhaps these will be the seeds for a more developed discussion at a later date.

Has Black Bloc become a brand?

Were the Toronto participants a franchise of a globally recognizable method?  Are they marketing a product? — a particular brand of civil disobedience?  Think of the clothes.  The look.  The code words.  Is there anything to distinguish them from kids at the Gap or West 49?

Are Black Bloc methods acontextual?

They parachute into a scene and implement their tactics without regard for local culture or the nuance of place.  Isn’t that what global brands do?  Isn’t that what the G20 group has done to the City of Toronto?  Citizens have complained that the heightened police presence and barricades are inappropriate to this place; this is not how we do things here.  And yet we’ve been compelled to fall in step with orders from somewhere else.  This global event has imposed on Toronto a decontextualized model of how a Summit ought to be run.  But the same is true of the Black Bloc people.  They are committing the very evils of those they protest.  They come here with their violence and their confrontation and run roughshod over a long tradition of peaceful assembly and conciliatory public discussion that is particular to this place.

Black Bloc methods end up being nothing more than McProtest.  Next year they’ll go to France and pull the same ready-made methods from the same plastic box.

Does Black Bloc mimic big media?

It’s almost as if the Black Bloc people were making a ratings grab, trying to steal attention from other, more staid, protests.  How does Black Bloc distinguish itself from big-media trash-talkers who prefer spectacle to reason.  Shock media is a one-off stunt, but it takes you nowhere if you can’t follow up with substance.  Otherwise, it becomes as trivial as the 11 o’clock news which we’ve already forgotten by 11:35.

What about anonymity?

Avoidance of responsibility is a hallmark of power.  From the highest echelon to the police officer wearing riot gear, the chant is the same:  “We were just doing our job.”  People demand police badge numbers and the officers respond with the phone number for Pizza Pizza.  This business of blending with the everyone else. Isn’t that a page ripped from the police handbook, with agent provocateurs who wear pictures of Che Guevara on their knapsacks?  In discussing new media, Jaron Lanier has noted that anonymity with social media contributes to the degradation and trivialization of public discourse; it undermines healthy democracy.  The same is true of anonymity in public protest.  Black Bloc is to city streets what trolls are to comment pages.

Even if we assume that the protests of those using Black Bloc techniques were real, and their violence was not precipitated by agent provocateurs, it’s difficult to see how they have distinguished themselves from the entities they claim to critique.  Maybe that in itself is evidence that this kind of protest is not real.  It is manufactured.  It is manipulative (and therefore easily manipulated).  It is these things because it lacks the imagination to distinguish itself.  You’ve probably seen the banner:  “Another world is possible.”  Yes.  Another world is possible.  But such a claim requires sufficient imagination to point the way.  Smashing things — whether committed by protesters or by agents of the state — is a craven act that offers us nothing.

July 02, 2010

Related posts:

1. Eternal Flame of Hope extinguished for Toronto G20
2. G20 Summit Protests in Toronto
3. Rally to Demand Inquiry into Actions Concerning G20

I left before any serious protesting started, not because I’m chicken-shit, but because a) I have a short attention span; b) I ended up meeting my wife at a watering hole on College St. & c) I then got a migraine headache and had to high-tail it home.  The only protester I saw — and I’ve included a couple of photos of him here — was Kevin Clarke who, a few years ago, ran for mayor of Toronto on the “masturbation” ticket.  You can download a quicktime video of him campaigning back in 2003.  His style hasn’t changed much.

A couple other things to note:

1) I called my last post on the G20 a bullshit report.  That’s inaccurate.  All I saw was horseshit.  There are mounted police riding around the downtown core and they must have fed the horses laxatives beforehand.

2) My favourite (and most ironic) photo is of the Eternal Flame of Hope in the park by Metro Hall.  It has been extinguished and covered in plywood.

[View with PicLens]

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June 25, 2010

Related posts:

1. G20 Protester Chased at Toronto Pride Parade
2. G20 Summit Protests in Toronto
3. Rally to Demand Inquiry into Actions Concerning G20

[View with PicLens]

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June 24, 2010

Related posts:

1. Ireland Park & Toronto Railway Lands
2. Graffiti
3. Eternal Flame of Hope extinguished for Toronto G20

One of those daring voices belongs to Darcey Steinke whose best-known novel is Suicide Blonde.  While it is arguable that Suicide Blonde is not a post-AIDS novel (AIDS gets a single mention), nevertheless it is set in the heart of San Francisco in the late 80’s and takes us to gay clubs, whorehouses, parties and tells a story of sexual self-destruction.

Jesse is a 29 year old woman in a relationship with a man named Bell, but Bell has come unhinged by a wedding invitation; a lover from his teens, a man named Kevin, has decided to marry straight.  Jesse’s attempts to pull Bell back into their relationship (e.g. dying her hair blonde, having sex with him while someone else watches) are complicated by her own sexual ambiguity.  Drawn to the more dominant Madison, Jesse takes a job bartending at the strip club/whorehouse which Madison manages.  Inevitably, Jesse starts turning tricks.  The whole movement of the novel is an inexorable drift to Kevin’s wedding.  Jesse drives down to L.A. and, in a drunken haze, confronts Kevin with the fact that Bell still loves him.  And … well … if you like pleasant romps with happy endings, there’s always Danielle Steele.

Steinke writes with a terse prose that has a tough, noirish feel.  So we get paragraphs like this:

“Bell turned up Jones and I realized he was walking toward the theater for his audition.  I followed.  He didn’t seem particularly nervous or troubled, though on Sutter and Jones he stopped for a moment, sunk his hands into his pockets, leaned back against a brick wall and looked up into the sky.  His leisurely motions reminded me of dreams … watching your lover speak in hushed tones with someone else.  Bell put his flattened hand against his chest.  Could he be thinking of the morning his father died?”

Like Miller, Steinke is sexually frank (watching as Madison fists a man until she’s in up to the elbow) and just a little bit blasphemous (taking the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus to its logical conclusion).

More importantly, Steinke shares what I have called Miller’s gnosticism which rejects the orthodoxy of dualism (with its preference for the mind) in favour of an integrated mind/body whole.  Ideas and sexuality belong together.  So do religion and violence.  At the very least, sexuality and violence need to be reintroduced into our understanding of what it means to be fully human.  We see Jesse struggling with this:

“I wondered if the function of my body might be different from the function of my mind.  I sensed the peace one found if they subverted either mind over body like a monk, or body over mind like a whore.  You could hold both only if they were separated and severely so, like the right and left brain when the fissure is broken in surgery.  I was trying by trusting my animal instincts over my intellectual ones.”

This gnosticism leads inevitably to an aesthetic of shit because it has to incorporate the unpleasant and the vulgar.  People vomit, get beaten up, bleed, shoot up, smell, piss themselves.  Jesse begins the story of her first time with:  “I rode the bus down to Georgia.  It smelled horrible, because an old lady in the back had shit in her pants …”  Like Miller, Steinke’s characters scorn that “true-love bullshit.”  Madison’s ex-lover, the fat matronly woman named Pig, tells Jesse “that horror is everywhere, it’s the rule, not the exception.  Life is a disease.”

And finally, as with Miller, the particular messes of this particular story ripple outward with universal consequences — or at least consequences for the idea of America (which, according to some Americans, amounts to the same thing as universal):

“I am the worst kind of person, attractive, overeducated, raised with middle-class delusions of grandeur.  But it’s not just me; family life in America sucks, because if you’re even a bit smart, the pressure from your family to jump classes is excruciating.  There’s this insane idea that materialism creates status.  Even if you make some headway, it’s an internal jump.  You’re always middle-class, talking on your cellular phone with your color TV muted.”

The nicest guys she meets are on TV (although, as she acknowledges, being nice is just a cover for weakness).  And Madison accuses Jesse of wanting her life to be like the movies.  Driving into Monterey on the way to the wedding, Jesse notes all the fast food chains and observes that “like everywhere else in America that was special, it had been spoiled by gentrification.”

America is founded on a dualism — or at least an aesthetic dualism — that is so preoccupied with its head that it’s incapable of acknowledging its body, along with all the messiness that having a body entails.

June 17, 2010

Related posts:

1. Reading Tropic of Cancer for the first time
2. The Film Club, by David Gilmour
3. Clear Heart Open Mind, by Catherine Rathbun

The expat Yank living in Paris in the late 20’s and early 30’s.  The oblique references to an American wife named Mona who has sent him off to Paris without a care for his sexual proclivities.  The plotless meandering.  The indiscriminate drinking and fucking.  The largely useless attempts to write a novel.  The regular (and disappointing) visits to the American Express office hoping for money from America.  The panhandling and mooching.  More drinking and fucking.

Is there any sense to it?

And can we make anything more of it 75 years after its publication?

The Gnostic Henry Miller

My first thought is that Henry Miller is a member of a gnostic literary sect.  He pits himself against a literary orthodoxy that regards the text as the product of an educated mind.  A work of art will support an exegesis the same way a passage of scripture will encourage the good Christian theologian to utter hyper-intellectualized mumbo jumbo.  These are the products of mental abstraction.  They belong in the brain.  But the brain is the least and the last of our organs likely to be engaged on the front lines of human experience.

The high priest of this orthodoxy — the literary world’s first bishop of Rome — is none other than Réné Descartes who said the mind’s operations should exist in a chaste sphere, never to be tainted by the operations of the body.  I suspect Miller was deeply opposed to such a view.  Had he been a religious man instead of a writer (not that the two are mutually exclusive), he would have advocated that priests fuck regularly and often.  In fact, he would have said that priests have nothing useful to contribute to the human condition if they don’t fuck regularly and often — not the secretive pathological fucking of the pederast — but the full-on fucking that engages all the senses and all the being.

In the same way, work that bears the label “art” or “literature” ought to be challenged as false if it claims for itself an intellectual tradition divorced from its gritty context and restricts its access to those people with the correct analytical tools — what Miller calls “a fog of book learning.”  If Miller were to see today how literary fiction has become professionalized, he would piss on MFA programs and the universities that sponsor them and would mock agents who are mesmerized by institutional qualifications.  Maybe this is the “bright awning” he speaks of when he notes “what a discrepancy there is between ideas and living.  A permanent dislocation though we try to cover the two with a bright awning.”

Miller might say that the simple act of delving into a text in search of its deeper meanings is an act of violence no different than the example Descartes provided when he ripped the mind from the body.  Nevertheless, with all that fucking, it’s tempting to scrutinize Miller’s writing through the lens of a Freudian analysis.  Maybe Tropic of Cancer is Miller’s Id at play without a Censor.  Miller might answer:  so what?  Freud’s hierarchy of consciousness — Id, Ego, Superego — is all about what happens inside the brain and so bears no relation to the practical experience of real people — an experience which includes the body.

Whether it’s priests or academics or psychiatrists, they do their interpreting in the realm of ideas and Miller stands as a passionate corrective to this lopsided view of human experience:

“All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water.  And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of relief.  Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.”

This also accounts for Miller’s affinity for Walt Whitman, whom he mentions on several occasions.  Like Miller, Whitman was a great gnostic, celebrating the primacy of the body in human experience.  In fact, George Orwell calls Miller a “Whitman among the corpses.”

Henry Miller and the Aesthetic of Shit

My second thought is that Henry Miller beat Milan Kundera to the punch by 55 years.  In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera argued that without the acknowledgment of shit, what we pass off as art is in fact nothing more than kitsch.  Miller doesn’t say as much, but Kundera’s words serve as a useful explanation of Miller’s methods.

Miller writes:

“It’s good to have a fresh warm body beside you when you wake up in the morning.  It gives you a clean feeling. You get spiritual like … until they start pulling that mushy crap about love et cetera.  Why do all these cunts talk about love so much, can you tell me that?  A good lay isn’t enough for them apparently … they want your soul too….”

Love, or at least romantic love, or at least the love we hear about on top 40 radio play, is all feeling with no shit.  It is kitsch.  In Tropic of Cancer, all the fucking happens against a backdrop of fear.  Behind everything is a fear of disease.  There’s the dose, the clap, syphilis and gonorrhea, references to the Black Death, a religious pun on the flaming bush, chancerous cocks, pus, a shapely whore who turns around to reveal a pox-eaten face.  Even the title speaks of disease.  It isn’t a line on a map, but a meridian of terminal illness that runs through all our lives.

“Wherever there are walls, there are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer.  No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis.  It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent.  It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.”

Alongside disease are references to excrement.  Miller does Kundera one better when it writes:  “… the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.”  This is one slice of bread for a sandwich with the “dirty fat cockroach of a priest” (cited above) for the filling.  For the other slice we have an incident involving two turds in a bidet.  Miller speculates that the miracle to which the cockroach of a priest attends will turn out to be no more than these two turds.  There is a recurring image of the universe as something that has been “pooped out.”  And “the greater part of what happens is just muck and filth.”  It’s important to note that Miller’s rant about “muck and filth” isn’t a rant about moral filth.  He enjoys himself too much for that.  It’s more that he’s engaged in the challenge of exposing muck and filth as somehow necessary.

Paris and America

“Paris is like a whore.  From a distance she seems ravishing, you can’t wait until you have her in your arms.  And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself.  You feel tricked.

I returned to Paris …”

That is how it goes for Miller.  He holds a certain contempt for his adopted home, but he can’t tear himself away.

America holds something altogether different for Miller, and it is more intense for being an ocean away.  Perhaps the difference lies in aesthetic sensibility.  The America of Walt Whitman has disappeared in the kind of efficiencies that delivered the Gatling gun and indoor plumbing.  Writing in the 30’s Miller was of the view that such a world was unsustainable — not unsustainable in the environmental sense we’ve grown accustomed to, but unsustainable perhaps as a philosophy or as an aesthetic.

“The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters.  The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential only that the drains function adequately.  Beauty, that feline beauty which has us by the balls in America, is finished.  To fathom the new reality it is first necessary to dismantle the drains, to lay open the gangrened ducts which compose the genito-urinary system that supplies the excreta of art.”

While I agree with Miller that the American sensibility is unsustainable, I think Miller underestimated the extent to which the tattered wallpaper could be pasted over with additional layers and so refurbished year after year.

He writes of a Hindu man he meets, an emissary from Gandhi who is working to garner support for the anti-Colonial movement.  Writing more than a decade before India’s independence, Miller’s words sound prophetic, but they speak not to an India of 1947, but to an India of 2010:

“The young Hindu, of course, is optimistic. He has been to America and he has been contaminated by the cheap idealism of the Americans, contaminated by the ubiquitous bathtub, the five-and-ten-cent store bric-a-brac, the bustle, the efficiency, the machinery, the high wages, the free libraries, etc., etc.  His ideal would be to Americanize India.  He is not at all pleased with Gandhi’s retrogressive mania.  Forward, he says, just like a YMCA man.  As I listen to his tales of America I see how absurd it is to expect of Gandhi that miracle which will deroute the trend of destiny.  India’s enemy is not England, but America.  India’s enemy is the time spirit, the hand which cannot be turned back.  Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world.  America is the very incarnation of doom.  She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.”

I wonder what Miller would think if he could see now the consumable growth of kitsch that is America, spreading like a cancer over the world.

On Miller’s own account of the American aesthetic, it is understandable why he would have to wait thirty years for the American ban to be lifted on his works, and why it would require a court (rather than ordinary people exercising common sense) to declare that his works are art and not pornography.

Related posts:

1. Suicide Blonde by Darcey Steinke
2. Summer Reading – Book Reviews
3. If Reading is Consumption, then Writing is Excretion

Many people have an urge to write.  Who knows what motivates that urge.  Maybe they want to satisfy a deep-seated psychological need.  Maybe they hope to become famous.  Maybe they’re driven by the lottery mentality:  take a crap shoot at the big money.  But here’s the hard reality:  most people who entertain such an urge end up cranking out horrid pieces of shit, enriching vanity presses, and amusing cruel reviewers like me who pass a couple hours of an afternoon licking our lips as we tear into their work.

I prefer writing websites that concern something else.  I’m stirred by writers who demonstrate to me their commitments — not simply their commitments to good writing (which is important), but their commitments to wider concerns.  Take, as an example, Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing and his involvement in the Electronic Freedom Frontier.  I think, too, of some of my favourite authors in the pre-digital age.  Anthony Burgess didn’t start writing until he was nearly forty and, then, mostly because he was diagnosed with terminal cancer (which proved to be not so terminal).  He was already an established composer and a polyglot.  In other words, he had a lot more to bring to his writing that the simple fact of an urge.  Or closer to home, think of Margaret Atwood with her love of birding, and commitments to feminist and environmental issues.

I am tired of all the solid wonders who get churned out of the MFA programs.  I am tired of literary agents who say they give serious weight to an author’s professional training.  The “product” is slick.  It’s marketable.  It’s a good “property.”  But for all that, nine times out of ten, it gives me no reason to care.  There has to be something lurking in the background — a powerful experience, a deeply held philosophy, a prophetic voice — something — anything to persuade me that the author is motivated by more than a bare urge to write that’s been stewed in some training.

So what to make of Graham Swift’s Making An Elephant which, at first glance, looks like yet another book marketed to all those aspiring writers with their private urges?  There’s the tagline:  “Writing From Within” set above an image of a typewriter.  Then there are the review snippets on the back cover.  At the top is a quote from The Oprah Magazine — not a good sign.  From the Toronto Star, we get:  “Especially good when challenging the common misconception that fiction is merely cleverly disguised autobiography.” Oh, so this must be a book about the craft of writing.  And maybe it includes some reflections on more theoretical concerns.

It turns out that’s not at all what the book is about.  The quote from the Toronto Star is true, but it refers to 15 pages in a book that’s nearly 400 pages long.  Swift makes an elegant plea to readers of fiction to resist the temptation to ground the story in the facts of its author’s life, for “the whole challenge and reward of fiction lies in its liberation from personal fact.”  He goes on to play with the tension between geographical details that fix a story to a particular patch of ground on the one hand, and a long tradition of seeking a story’s meaning in the universal values which raise it out of its particularity on the other hand.  He notes that “we live in an increasingly dislocated world, a world in which cultural as well as geographical boundaries become ever more volatile and confused.  Of course, writers should respond to this, but it might be thought that writers, who have to write from some personal fixed point … would be at a disadvantage.”  He disagrees, suggesting that “mental dislocation” is bound up in what it is that writers do.  This is all good stuff, but not really what the book is about.

After reading Making An Elephant, I’m of the opinion that Graham Swift isn’t really interested in writing; he’s interested in people and writing is the pretense he uses to satisfy that interest.  In that respect, he has more in common with authors like Burgess and Atwood.  Apart from a couple short essays and some poetry he wrote to break a drought between novels (and which really ought to have been omitted), Swift offers us a series of portraits.  Some, like the title piece, are personal in nature (“Making An Elephant” memorializes his father).  But most are portraits of authors.  These aren’t portraits of the authors as writers, but as full-blooded people with other concerns.

He writes about his desire to learn how to play the guitar and how he co-opted Kazuo Ishiguro (an accomplished guitarist) to help him buy a guitar.  There’s an account of his friendship with Caryl Phillips and how the two of them skipped out on some boring event at Toronto’s Harbourfront International Festival of Authors and went drinking instead at the now defunct Bamboo Club on Queen Street West.  (That in itself offers a revealing take on Swift’s priorities.)  He tells of his 1989 trip to Prague just days after the Velvet Revolution in search of the dissident author, Jiri Wolf, who was rumoured to have been released from prison.  Wolf proved elusive, but Swift finally caught up to him in a hotel restaurant where they spoke briefly.  In a way, Swift failed in his assignment because, when the meeting was done, he had no more notion who Wolf was than beforehand.  As readers, we come away with a sense of Swift’s overarching desire to encounter Jiri Wolf, the man, and his indifference to Jiri Wolf, the collection of facts in a dossier.  In this regard, Swift presents as fundamentally compassionate.  In another piece, Swift tells how he and his family entertained Salman Rushdie (and security guards) on Christmas Day, likening Rushdie to an Islamic Father Christmas.  There are memories of fly fishing with Ted Hughes who seemed, at times, more interested in fly fishing than in writing poetry.  Swift rounds out the collection with an encounter with an author now dead more than 400 years — Michel de Montaigne.  As with his flesh-and-blood encounters, Swift is concerned to pierce the writing to get at the man.

Maybe it’s best to describe Making An Elephant as a book about how to enjoy people where they are rather than where you wish they were.  That may not be an accurate description, but it’s certainly closer to the mark than anything indicated by the book’s cover.

June 11, 2010

Related posts:

1. Review: The Light of Day, by Graham Swift
2. Review: The Certainty Dream, by Kate Hall
3. Review: You Are Not A Gadget, by Jaron Lanier

You can read the text of this poem in the June, 2010 issue of my Poem-a-month newsletter.

June 01, 2010

Related posts:

1. Poem: Watermelon
2. Poem: O Captain! My Captain
3. Poem: Magic

The view looks like this:  our world is organized as a hierarchy.  At the top of the hierarchy is a full-on transcendental reality.  This is the heightened apprehension of “things as they really are” that we would be able to see if, with Plato, we could crawl out of our caves, or if, with St. Paul, we could let the scales fall from our eyes, or if, with William Blake, we could cleanse the doors of our perception and see the world as it really is — infinite.

But because we live in caves and our eyes are covered in scales and the doors of our perception are murky, the world we inhabit looks ordinary and dull.  The table we eat at has a solidity to it, but it’s plain, and the people we jostle on city streets are solid enough, but they aren’t terribly interesting.  Ours is the tangible world of everyday life.  It is a diminished world.  Only on rare occasions does this diminished world crack open and let in some of Leonard Cohen’s light.

And then there is the poem.  It is our heroic effort to cope with the diminished circumstances of our real-world living.  I say ‘heroic’ because our poems inevitably fail but we write them anyways.  They come from the struggles of finite beings who occupy the real world of solid bodies.  They are necessarily less than their authors, and so, like their authors, they are a diminishment.

The poem’s value, like that of any art, comes not from anything that inheres in the poem, but from its role as placeholder in a cosmic syllogism:  a poem is to the world as the world is to transcendental reality.  In its role as placeholder, the poem directs our attention to higher things.  The chart below illustrates this relationship.  It looks like an inverted pyramid.  It shows the conative process in which the wide open reality of “life, the universe, and everything” is reduced to our feeble poetic expressions.

You don’t have to believe this, of course.

There are competing accounts of a poem’s place in the grand scheme of things.  One such account is implied by Descartes’ view that the only thing we can know for certain is that we are thinking things.  The only verifiable reality is the interior reality of mental processes.  That allows us to redraft the chart above.  We could say that the transcendental, the solid world, and the poem, are all mental processes called perceptions and therefore all have the same value.  Rather than displaying them hierarchically, we can display them as occupying separate unrelated spheres or as occupying a single jumbled sphere called the mind.  However we choose to represent them, it’s fair to say that, on this view, the poem is no longer  a diminishment of anything.  It is the traces of a mental reality, and while not real in itself, a poem is no less real than a rock, say, or a soul, because they aren’t real either.

Another account of a poem’s place in the world comes from science.  When I speak of science, I speak of a materialistic discipline that tries to describe phenomena.  If I were to place science on the diagram above, I would place it in the middle among the “Solid Objects in the Real World.”  It would treat the “Transcendental Realm of Dreamy Stuff” as phenomena that have simply been misdescribed and properly belong among the “Solid Objects.”   And a poem is simply a misguided attempt at explaining phenomena — like a bad theory or speculation over a pitcher of beer.

The problem with these alternate accounts is that poems have a nasty habit of leaping outside their own words and becoming objects in their own right.  Poems are like trick balloons that want to rise outside themselves and float through “Solid Objects in the Real World” and on up to the “Transcendental Realm of Dreamy Stuff.”  Poems don’t know their proper place.

This is rather a long introduction to a review of poetry but, what the hell, it’s my blog and I’ll do as I please.  What I hope my introduction has done is to map out some of the terrain that Kate Hall explores in her first collection, The Certainty Dream.  It is a terrain shared by philosophers, especially epistemologists, people who investigate what it is we can claim to know for a certainty.  As the title to Hall’s collection suggests, she is playing with classic questions about perception, consciousness and knowing.  She doesn’t behave like a philosopher because she doesn’t stake any ground.  She doesn’t claim to be a Cartesian or an advocate of science.  She’s a poet and so can leave claims unstaked.

When most poets gather up their poems from scattered publications to produce a single volume, the result often looks like a scattered gathering of poems.  Hall’s collection is remarkable for appearing to proceed in the opposite direction, as if all the poems were written first for a single coherent work, then bits were carved off and sent away to appear in journals.  As a result, there are some clear threads that run through nearly every poem to give the collection a tautness.  Dominant images include:

• containers
• vehicles
• miniatures
• birds (especially mynah birds but also blackbirds and crows)
• recursion and paradox (e.g. people swallowing themselves)

Containers

There are bathtubs, ponds and dinghies, a basin and a submarine, body bags and sarcophagi, skin, a petri dish, houses, moving boxes, a “bomb-proof concrete room/with twelve locks on the door”, a pear grown inside a bottle, “the old blue steamer trunk”, suitcases, the belly, a “giant domed ceiling”, cups, a vat, a jewellery box, a glass box, and a “shapely hole.”   In a poem titled “The Shipping Container” Hall notes that “It’s true, the container / has great aesthetic value but I was really hoping / for a free watch with a rechargeable battery or / at least a better kind of nothingness.”  This raises a question about poems.  Are they containers for meaning?  Do they have an aesthetic consequence apart from their contents?  Or, to put these questions in terms of the diagram I created above, do poems rise up from their diminished status to a position of substance in their own right?  Can words jumbled together, become something greater than the sum of their parts, like Ezekial’s dry bones waiting for breath?

Vehicles

Containers can be vehicles too.  A container can hold information, but a container that moves can also transmit information.  And so we encounter living bodies and bathtub races and trains, model boats and elephants, the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, toy dump trucks, a blue minivan and ships burning in the harbour.  We see a clear correlation between vehicles and the transmission of information.  For example, in “The Sun Library”:  “The 11:40 train departs, / arrives 16:17.  All the time / I’m travelling, I’m at a loss / for information.”  And in “Remind me what the light is for” we have a brilliant encapsulation of the state of poetry in 2010:

Dear occupants of the moving boxes,
there are days when I forget
you have to live here too, in cardboard
cubes, tossed inside with lamps
that do not work. Everything is labelled but
because we’ve reused the boxes, the objects listed
are not what’s inside. So, occupants, I am losing
faith.

People have lost their faith in poetry too. Although we sometimes use poems like containers to convey information, the information that they convey is about as useful as lamps that don’t work.  And the forms we learned in school are like mislabelled boxes.  If “[t]he mysteries are in need of / continual rephrasing” but we allow the mysteries to ossify in a tired curriculum and worn-out scripture, then of course people will lose their faith.

In another “container” image, Hall draws on Richard Dawkins:  “Evolution is about the genes / manipulating the bodies they ride in.”  Is that what a poem is?  A body that carries coded information?  Or, in the end, is a decoding simply impossible?  As her book comes to a close, Hall writes:  “I imagine myself / at an art gallery looking at installations / and not pretending there can be / any sort of understanding.”

Miniatures

Many of the poems feature small things.  The world is shrinking.  “You must have gotten smaller to fit yourself / into that space.”  There are birds “whom I forced into a small fragmented area”.  “It’s scary to loom this large in / the world of tiny experiences.”  She writes of “shrinking the sarcophagus / until it’s the size of a small jewellery box.”

Is poetry an act of diminishment? If you use poetry to convey decipherable meanings, do you sacrifice something as you squish those meanings into their tiny containers?  Or can we break poetry out of that old hierarchical model that treats it as an inferior kind of knowing?

Birds

I’m not sure what to make of the birds.  Crows are traditionally seen as symbols of death or desolation or loneliness.  But here, the primary bird is the mynah bird.  Maybe the birds here are like mislabelled boxes.  Whatever they might be will only reveal itself by watching them in their own habitat.  Or maybe it’s a pointless exercise.  As Hall says in the poem which gives the book its title:  “Certainty could be folded / into a featherless bird.”  This echoes Hall’s “Dream in which I apologize to the birds” “those whom I made / strings of words / featherless”.  If we try too hard to nail down a meaning that we can affix to the bird, we’ll end up stripping the bird of the very thing it needs to be a bird.

Or maybe the bird is a shape-shifter.  In “Dressed-up Dream”:

mynah morphs into crow
stands for nightingale
don’t assume abandonment
he needs a new name
not being himself anymore

and builds a nest from anything that’s available.  At other times, the mynah has its tongue clipped. And at the end “this became the dream his dream in which I did not allow him to speak / and the dream in which I imagined him speechless before me”.

A bird capable of speech that is rendered speechless?  Maybe that’s like a poem capable of being a container that transmits information.  Maybe there’s nothing to understand in a poem any more than there’s something to understand in the speech of a mynah bird.  A bird simply is.  In the same way, maybe a poem must be left to be whatever a poem may be.

Recursion and paradox

The poems are riddled with recursive images that drag us into paradoxical games.  Given Hall’s preoccupation with consciousness, I don’t think this is such an arcane thing.  After all, consciousness is a recursive and paradoxical phenomenon.  We are all beings who are aware of ourselves as beings who are aware of ourselves.  In “Dream in which the dream is scaled to size”, “you are about to swallow / the whole world with you / in it”.  This is an image which appears several times.

In “Overnight a horse appeared” she presents an interesting variation by imagining herself crawling back inside herself.  The “she” doing this imagining is probably the poem itself as a kind of reified character:  the poem is the character who is the subject matter of the poem.  The poem warns us of itself.  It’s a trojan horse.  If we fall prey to its ruse, who knows what damage it will do.  “For my horse and me, / it hardly matters.  Though it will matter for you: / how you decide to read me or / whether you do.”  The ruse is to trick me into believing the poem is meaningful.  The paradox is that if I discover that the poem is a ruse, then it will have becoming meaningful and will have succeeded in tricking me despite the fact that it failed to trick me.

Then there are the mynah birds who “pluck / themselves out of existence.”  Maybe this engages us in a similar paradox:  the poem succeeds when it disappears.

Kate Hall’s The Certainty Dream is fun and interesting and challenging.  I sense in it — and this is an entirely personal sense — a quiet yearning to create more poetry in which the self-conscious poet grows still.  The “mynah dreams himself into a statue”.  When that happens:  “who will call out / and calling out who will answer”.

Perhaps these are questions which should remain unanswered, or simply answered by the fact of more poetry.

June 01, 2010

Related posts:

1. The Mirror and the Lamp, by M. H. Abrams
2. Review: You Are Not A Gadget, by Jaron Lanier
3. Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida, by Roo Borson