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Jonathan Franzen

At the sound of the bell, Franzen is out of his corner and makes a quick right jab to the ebook. Franzen delivers a talk at an author’s festival in Columbia and makes remarks at a press conference, and all these comments get conflated (and maybe taken out of context) in news articles posted in The Guardian the The Telegraph. He says that words in ebooks are ephemeral. People crave the permanence of ink on paper. It gives them comfort and a sense of continuity. He says that ebooks are damaging to democracy and freedom. They promote a culture of ephemera when what we need most right now are enduring values. Somehow, he ties this all to capitalism and says the world feels out of control.

The crowd goes wild. Some people throw popcorn from the stands and call him a pussy Luddite for failing to embrace new things. Some call him a hypocrite, since his novels have sold well as ebooks. The guy at the beer concession points out that Franzen is a “literary” writer whose concern for permanence—ascending to the pantheon of the classical canon—betrays either narcissism or a fear of death, or both. Joe, who’s driven down to the cage match from Timmins, says that in the winter, when he’s snowed in and can’t get to the nearest bookstore, he still has his internet connection and can download the latest from his favourite authors. “Fuck him,” he says. “I like my ebooks.”

Others rush to Franzen’s defence. Ewan Morrison says the epublishing business is just another bubble and soon will burst. More people have made money selling ebooks on how to make money selling ebooks than have actually made money selling ebooks. Because the ease of publishing an ebook has removed the barriers to entry, the ebook market is now glutted with piffle. It’s damaging to democracy, not so much because of its impermanence, as because it is the clanging of a noisy gong that drowns out meaningful conversation.

Ursula Franklin

As a pacifist, Franklin doesn’t come out of her corner at all. The referee stops the fight and explains to her that the notion of a cage match is metaphorical and there will be no real fighting. Once she’s satisfied that a fight with Franzen won’t actually hurt him, she enters the ring with fists of fury. She lands her first blow with the observation that Franzen’s is a gendered view of technology. You’re such a man! she says. Technology is not a thing you hold in your hand. It’s a practice. Technology is not a discrete object, like an ereader or an iPhone. It’s a system. Discrete objects are embedded in contexts. Objects and contexts influence the development of each other in ways that are unpredictable and such development may be blind to the human beings who are the “beneficiaries” of the technology.

Franklin lands a body blow with her distinction between holistic and prescriptive technologies. Holistic technologies are those in which a single person controls every stage of production. Artisans and crafts people often use holistic technologies to manufacture and sell objects, like the pottery and paintings one might see at a craft show. Prescriptive technologies restrict control through division of labour or by removing human labour from the process altogether. The assembly line at an auto plant is a paradigm of prescriptive technology. Individual workers have no view of the entire process and little autonomy within that segment of the process where they work. Franklin observes that “[i]n political terms, prescriptive technologies are designs for compliance.”

The way in which we deploy technology is determined by public policy and shared values. Although there is no outcome preordained in any of this, we have come overwhelmingly to favour prescriptive technologies. This is an understandable consequence of the fact that our policy and value choices arise from within the context of capitalism. Prescriptive technologies produce more efficient outcomes. Never mind that such outcomes may also be dehumanizing and unjust. Capitalism removes such considerations from our public debate. In fact, we have so internalized the dominance of prescriptive technologies (this is the way it ought to be done) that we tend to ridicule holistic technologies as backward or hokey.

Although Franklin was writing before the advent of social media and ebooks, her discussion of technology provides a useful framework for considering Franzen’s comments about ebooks. I have an impression of Franzen as a holistic technician railing against the incursion of prescriptive technologies into the domain of his craft. But ink and paper novel-writing has never been an entirely holistic technology. While novelists have traditionally asserted a huge measure of control over the production of their work, they still must relinquish some control to editors, designers, lawyers, marketers, booksellers, reviewers, etc. At the same time, the ebook is not entirely a prescriptive technology. In fact, it is easier now than ever before to engage book production in a holistic fashion. From the first scratches on a pad of paper to processing a credit card payment, I can do it all on my own web site. But such a practice is anomalous. Overwhelmingly, we have chosen to treat the ebook as a prescriptive technology.

We see the consequence of this choice—and it is a choice—in the way large organizations (with access to capital) have deployed the ebook as a design for compliance. Amazon has embedded the ebook in a vertically integrated organization that aims to freeze out every worker in the traditional publishing process except the writer. Even the writer is in jeopardy as titles appear for sale that may have been cobbled together by algorithms. Apple offers authors a take-it-or-leave-it EULA that makes it questionable whether the author owns their own work. Even small players like Smashwords have automated the production process. And DRM prevents people from sharing what they’re read, limits library lending, and provides a solution to that most subversive of anti-capitalist organizations—the used book store.

What would Franklin say to Franzen’s concerns about freedom and democracy? I’m inclined to think that identifying the ebook as the source of the problem is a bit like taking a symptom for the disease. In fact, one could argue the opposite: it is ink and paper books that threaten freedom and democracy, for, as Franklin notes, there is a strong relationship between written text and orthodoxy and fundamentalism. If ebooks are a problem, it is only because they can be manipulated in ways that deliberately curtail freedoms and enforce compliance with capitalist structures. So, for example, while there is nothing necessarily ephemeral about the text of ebooks, it becomes ephemeral if our ability to access it is restricted. What happens when planned obsolescence makes an ereader useless by deprecating its operating system? In this scenario, technology is manipulated to force compliance with the demands of an endless consumption on which our capitalist structures depend.

That is not an ebook problem. That is a problem with unregulated economic systems. Perhaps that is the proper target of Franzen’s criticisms.

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While I’m leery of making too much of the all-powerful governing metaphor, there is a correspondence between the idea of blueshifting and the feel of these poems. Blueshifting (the phenomenon) involves a passivity – it assumes an observer who sits and does nothing while stars approach or drift away. Blueshifting (the poetry chapbook) also involves a kind of passivity: “The world / wheels toward the inevitable.” The sun rises and sets. Time advances. Meanwhile we sit and watch it happen.

With poem titles like Making Time, Devolution, Entropy, Relativity, Dark Matter, and with an epigraph from Carl Sagan, and references to Mastodons, petroglyphs and quantum states, one might expect to find a collection of science-nerd poems. But science itself has changed (and maybe rescued poetry in the process). We don’t live in a deterministic universe of Newtonian mechanics. Yes, “The world / wheels toward the inevitable”. But we live in a universe of unobservable observations and strange attractions. The path to the inevitable is not fixed.

One twist in the path, which maybe defies scientific analysis even more than love, is humour. Kamins keeps the all-powerful governing metaphor at bay with a gentle sense of humour and genuine wit. Eggcorns, for example, is a funny poem of malapropisms. And Devolution inverts our expectations by sentimentalizing garbage and smog and expressing indignation at the threat of an encroaching nature. And my favourite of the collection – Headspace – lulls us into a saccharine state of mind, sitting next to grandmother, perhaps on a farm, learning how to make jams or preserves the old-fashioned way, until we discover that this is a case of “borrowed nostalgia” and our narrator is, in fact, in a classroom making it all up.

Could this be a comment on the way poetry gets made? In the sometimes vitriolic debate about the merit of MFA programs, maybe one side of the debate rests on a case of “borrowed nostalgia”, projecting the good old days when poetry was a rustic pleasure passed on to us by our grandparents. Maybe this is Kamins poking gentle fun at the whole debate. And with beautifully crafted poems in a tight, cohesive collection like this, we’ll grant her that indulgence.

Heather Kamins’ web site

Upper Rubber Boot Books

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h/t to @akirakuba

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You seen the toothpaste? she asked.

Harlan shrugged. Maybe we left it in the last motel.

That’d be the third tube this trip.

Harlan didn’t understand how Lisa could get so worked up about a tube of toothpaste. It was astonishing how she could be so philosophical when they hit a deer in some prairie backwater and were stuck there for three nights waiting for the body shop to fix the van. But lose a tube of toothpaste and the world might end. Probably it had to do with control. A tube of toothpaste is something we can control. A deer leaping onto the road is more like an act of God. Even Lisa could see that Harlan didn’t have time to brake, so after the initial shock, she got out of the car and, staring at the bloody carcass and the mashed-in grill, said: C’est la vie. But the first time Harlan forgot to pack the toothpaste, she made it sound like a sign of the coming apocalypse.

You seen the vacuum bags?

What for?

I wanna do some gardening.

Don’t be an ass.

Why do you think I’m asking for the vacuum bags?

What I meant was: I put in a fresh bag when we left on the trip.

Well it’s full.

You mean the kids actually used the thing while we were gone?

Looks like.

Should be a box of them. Linen closet. Top shelf.

Harlan found the box, but it was empty. That was so like the kids, especially the twins: use something up then put back the empty box without telling anybody it needs replacing. They did this all the time with the breakfast cereal and the Kleenex, and the milk. The milk was the worst. At least once a week, Harlan poured himself a bowl of cereal only to find that one of the kids had put an empty carton of milk back in the fridge. Harlan returned to the garage and tossed the empty box of vacuum bags into the recycling bin.

Harlan didn’t feel like driving to the store. He’d had enough of driving these past weeks. Instead, he drew a stool to the garbage can, put on the mask he used for sanding drywall and finishing the floors and all the other DIY home reno projects that raised a cloud of dust, and he emptied the vacuum bag into the can. The bag’s opening was the width of two fingers. Harlan stuck in his left index finger and his middle finger—the finger Lisa was always after him not to flip as he drove—and used them like tweezers to pull out tufts of dog hair and dirt and bits of food, all of it a dull grey. He wondered if this wasn’t some kind of parable: how all the wild colours of our modern life mix together to produce something bland and colourless. He pulled out pennies, a cork, the tabs from beer cans, a triple-A battery, half a dog biscuit, pine needles, a frayed shoelace, a couple of Jenn’s makeup remover wipes. Digging deeper into the bag, Harlan felt something big and hard, something too big to pull through the opening.

Withdrawing his fingers, he shook the bag over the garbage can until the object fell out. He squinted into the cloud of dust rising from the garbage can. From where he sat, he couldn’t say what it was. It looked the size and shape of a stubby carrot, only not the colour of a carrot. It was mostly black and grimy. Harlan drew the object from the bottom of the can and took it around to the other side of the van where he kept a light above his work bench. Taking off his mask, he turned the object over and over in the light.

It was a human finger. The black was the black of dried blood. The finger couldn’t have been in the bag long because it wasn’t rotten yet. Maybe a day. The whorls of the fingerprint were still intact. It had been severed almost at the knuckle, and by a sharp tool. There was nothing ragged about it like you’d expect if it had been yanked off or bitten by a dog. Harlan got a plastic baggie from the kitchen, and sealing the finger, he stowed it in the freezer compartment of his beer fridge. Then, opening the fridge, he got a can of beer and sat himself behind the garage for a think.

No need to panic. No need to call to the police. It might have been an accident. There might be an easy explanation why someone in his household had vacuumed up a human finger. Maybe he shouldn’t tell Lisa, at least not yet. She had a tendency to overreact. What if one of the kids had done it. Harlan didn’t know much about the law but he was certain that chopping off someone’s finger was a serious business. None of his kids had ever been in trouble with the law and he wasn’t sure Lisa could stand it if any of them went to jail. The twins were sixteen and so they would be treated as young offenders. No serious consequences. But Jenn was nineteen, an adult, at least in the eyes of the law. Then again, Harlan had a hard time believing Jenn could have chopped off someone’s finger. That was more the sort of thing you’d expect from the twins.

Harlan left his can of beer half empty on the patio and went inside. He poked his head into Jenn’s room and found her cross-legged on her bed and yakking on the phone with her boyfriend. Harlan waved. Jenn waved back, all the fingers of her left hand present and accounted for. He squinted at the right hand, noting how comfortably she held the phone with all five digits. Jenn pressed her palm to the phone and asked what he wanted.

Nothing. Just checking in.

Okay, and Jenn rolled her eyes.

Harlan found the boys in the basement playing video games. He watched how they held the controllers and he counted twenty digits in all.

I need to talk to you boys.

When Chas asked what, Wes took advantage of the momentary lapse in attention to blow up Chas’s jeep.

Boys, just pause it for a minute. Harlan and Lisa had been back not even half a day and, already, the kids were behaving as if their parents had never been gone. I want you to tell me straight up: did you two have a party here last night?

The boys looked at each other, then relaxed their shoulders and admitted that, yeah, they’d had a bit of a party, but only a few friends, nothing wild.

And Jenn? Was she in on it?

It was her, you know,

idea.

Boys, anything happen at this party of yours? An accident, say? Or a fight? Anybody get hurt?

The boys looked at each other and shook their heads.

And if I asked Jenn, she wouldn’t know anything either?

I guess not,

seeing as we were all together.

Boys, I’d like you to come out to the garage with me.

The three men crept through the house like commandos, looking left and right down each hallway to be sure Lisa didn’t see them. Harlan led the boys to the beer fridge in the garage, and as they stood like worshippers before a shrine, he took the baggie out of the freezer compartment. They gathered beneath the light of the work bench. The dog curled onto the concrete floor by the beer fridge and licked herself in indelicate places. Harlan opened the baggie and, using a pair of barbeque tongs, removed the finger and held it up for inspection. He looked like a surgeon with oversized instruments.

The boys gawked at the finger, saying things like whoa and is that what I think it is?

I found it in the vacuum cleaner.

The boys shrugged.

The bag was empty before your mom and I went away. Which means the finger got sucked up while we were gone.

No change in their expression.

So you two have no idea how it got there?

They shook their heads.

Harlan remembered the beer he’d left behind the garage. It was warmer than he liked, but still drinkable. Beer in one hand, tongs in the other, Harlan contemplated the finger where he’d lain it on the old wooden miter box. He had no idea how to read the boys. Sometimes they looked at one another and he knew they were up to their eyeballs in some kind of conspiracy. But he saw none of that now. He wanted to believe their ignorance was genuine. After another gulp of beer, he sent the boys back to their video games with a promise never to tell their mother what they had seen. When they were back to blowing each other up in hi-def Dolby 7.1 surround sound, Harlan went inside to fetch their sister. Give Jenn a chance to examine the finger. See if it stirred any recollections from the party the night before. As they stepped into the garage, Harlan told her he was about to show her something nasty and she was not to tell anybody.

Whatever, Dad.

Harlan stepped to the work bench, but the finger was gone. Underneath the bench, the dog lay chomping at something. Queenie! Harlan grabbed the dog at the back of the jaw and forced open its mouth, but it was too dark underneath the bench. By the time he had dragged the dog into the light, whatever she’d been chomping on had disappeared.

Damn. She just ate the evidence.

Evidence?

A finger. A human finger. It was in the vacuum cleaner.

Jenn gave no indication she knew what her father was talking about. He sent her back to her telephone with the same promise he’d extracted from the boys: don’t tell your mother.

Tossing the empty baggie into the garbage bin, Harlan took a second beer from the fridge and returned to his chair behind the garage. He needed to think about things. Thank God for beer. What is it they say? In vino veritas? In wine, truth? Harlan wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but he found a kind of truth in beer. If he drank enough beer, it smoothed over the ragged edges. It solved life’s mysteries, not by giving answers, but by making them cease to matter. Harlan had no idea how a human finger had ended up in his vacuum cleaner. Harlan swallowed another mouthful of beer. To be truthful, it didn’t seem all that important.

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The Global Soul makes for unsettling reading not so much for what is in the book as for what might have been in the book had its publication been delayed for five years. Published in 2000, it provides us with a snapshot of an emerging global culture just before 9/11. I read it with an archaeologist’s relish for a simpler age when people were more trusting and less anxious, when people could pass through airports without having to submit to body scans and pat downs. In 2000, there were cell phones and email and internet technology, but no hint yet of the inaptly named social media. There was no flaming, no comment trolls, none of that ceaseless and polarizing chitter-chatter that has turned much of our public interactions into a barrage of ad hominem attacks.

As that rare creature, the native Torontonian, I find The Global Soul particularly poignant because Iyer’s longest, and perhaps warmest, chapter is an extended meditation on multiculturalism and the way it plays out in Toronto. I think it’s a universal response that when a non-native non-resident tries to understand life in your home town, you prick up your ears. You want to know how you are perceived elsewhere in the world. Iyer’s concern here is to ask whether multiculturalism is real or just some made-up anti-myth which we apply to ourselves to keep the newcomers happy while we natives surreptitiously impose our culture upon them. Iyer wants desperately to believe in the “city as anthology”. He observes: “Toronto … seemed to me a much more hopeful and witty vision of a world not conforming to the old categories without dwindling into a universal Nowhereland …”

Iyer may be viewing the city through rose-coloured glasses or reading his own needs into the landscape, except that he demonstrates no qualms about writing scathing criticism when he feels so inclined. In the next chapter, he savages Atlanta. It is “a small town’s idea of what a big city should be.” It is global “by virtue of being featureless.” Its buildings are “all the interchangeable props of an International Style that could, in its latest incarnation, be called Silicon Neo-Colonial.” Its deepest division is not racial but “between those who were willing to buy into the belief that profit curves could be the answer to suffering and those who were not.” Given his assessment of Atlanta, one assumes that if Iyer had not liked Toronto, he would have said so.

One of the things Iyer gets about Toronto is the deep sense of irony that pervades local culture. Perhaps this is a defence against being (mis)taken for an American city. This gives rise to an unease “expressed with a good humor I wouldn’t expect to find in England”. The reference to England is curious since ironic humor strikes me as more of a Scottish habit and for precisely the same reason. Like the Scottish, we must steel ourselves any way we can against an overbearing cultural presence south of our borders.

I learned early on that many Americans are deaf to our tone of irony. In high school, I remember music exchanges with American high schools. We would feel inferior when faced with marching bands that performed with military precision. When it came our turn to play, at least a couple of our students would be stoned. We’d play horribly. We’d laugh afterwards and the teacher would accuse us of being apathetic. Maybe we were apathetic. Mostly, the experience made us cringe. We’d rather share half-assed jokes than perform anything with military precision—music, football, or war for that matter. Or consider the Canadian reputation for politeness. It is astonishing how many times I hear my fellow citizens say “I’m sorry.” However, outsiders (or at least those without an ear for irony) may miss that our apologies are often delivered like a knife in the back.

Although Iyer doesn’t make the point, at least not explicitly, he suggests a connection between irony and multiculturalism. His characterization of irony as “a chastened sense of history” anticipates his observation “that if the essential question that America asks of every newcomer is, “What will you do with your future?” Canada adds to it the more difficult one: “What will you do with your past?” Irony gives us the detachment to entertain a twofold vision. While we can appreciate the optimism of America’s forward-looking gaze, irony gives us imaginative space where we can maintain that part of our identity which lies behind.

Oddly (for someone born here), I share that twofold vision. Recently, I’ve reconnected with friends from high school, many of the same ones who went with me on those music exchanges to American high schools. Now, we share with one another in ways that were impossible as teenagers. In this sharing, I have discovered how I was perceived as one of the few Toronto-born WASPs in my circle of friends: I belonged in a way that none of them did. What is curious (ironic even) is that I perceived myself as an outsider too. I perceived my normal as Iyer’s multiculturalism, a linguistic and cultural soup and me floating in the broth like one more ingredient.

Twelve years after The Global Soul first appeared, do Iyer’s claims for multiculturalism in Toronto bear up under scrutiny? Undoubtedly things have changed. 2010 was a benchmark year for us in several ways. In 2010, Toronto ceased to have a dominant ethnicity. We are all minorities now, although I suspect the locus of political and economic power remains with WASPs. Also in 2010, Toronto hosted the G20 summit. Twenty world leaders were whisked into the downtown core for thirty-six hours, then whisked out again at a cost of more than $1bn. Nineteen thousand police and paramilitary personnel secured the event and effected the largest mass arrests in Canada’s history. At the time, something felt different, but I couldn’t characterize it. On reading Iyer, I wonder if the difference lay in an absence of irony. None of this belonged to Toronto. Even the protests seemed out of place. In the grand tradition of colonialism, the protesters came here mostly from elsewhere to do our protesting for us, deploying their globalized Black Bloc brand of tactics without regard for local nuance, which is, well, ironic, given that they described themselves as anti-colonial anarchists.

Finally, in 2010, Toronto elected mayor Rob Ford, a conservative in every sense of the word. Although Ford claims to be motivated solely by economic considerations, his “derail the gravy train” brand of fiscal restraint has harsh consequences for new arrivals and ethnic minorities. For example, Ford has slashed the public library budget and wants to eliminate city-run daycare spaces, two services which are invaluable for people trying to get a foothold in this city. Again, drawing on Iyer, I note that one of the things which distinguishes Ford from his predecessors is tone deafness. He does not hear irony. Or, to switch metaphors, he lacks the twofold vision that would allow him to respect our past even as we move forward. His inability (or is it his refusal?) to hear irony also denies him the capacity to empathize with those who inhabit hybrid identities.

Although Iyer’s perceptions of Toronto still apply, I think it’s fair to say that recent changes indicate an erosion of multiculturalism even as the city becomes more multi-ethnic.

If you find my assessment harsh, I’m sorry.

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Here is what Julian Barnes writes about the General Purposes Computer (GPC), a project begun in 1998 and released for public consumption in 2003:

The General Purposes Computer was begun in 1998 after a series of government enquiries. Previously, in the late eighties, there had been various pilot scheme which had sought to put the whole of human knowledge onto an easily accessible record. The Funlearn Project of 1991-92, with officially sponsored prizes and scholarships, had been the best known of these schemes; but its purity of principle had been impugned when it was linked to a government campaign to decrease the child-user percentage in state videogame parlours. Some had even accused Funlearn of didacticism.

Inevitably the early schemes had been book-oriented; they were attempts to create the ultimate, perfect library where “readers” (as they were still archaically known) could obtain access to the world’s accumulation of knowledge.

Although Barnes envisions this knowledge archive as a government initiative instead of a private endeavor, he captures something of Google’s aspirations, including a debate which he frames as a dispute between proponents of “Total Knowledge” and “Correct Knowledge”. It presages a concept that Jeron Lanier identifies in You Are Not a Gadget as “cybernetic totalism”, an ideological stance adopted by Google and many technologists: machine intelligence will arise as a natural consequence of an accumulation of knowledge.

In Staring at the Sun, Gregory pays frequent visits to the GPC and consults it almost in the same way Athenians used to consult the Oracle of Delphi. But the process proves frustrating:

Gregory didn’t want examples. That was one of the troubles with GPC: it was so full of information it always tried to give you as much of it as possible; like some party bore, it wanted to drag you away from your own interests and boast of its knowledge instead.

That sounds like Amazon with its useless book recommendations, or the 200,000 different links returned by a Google search. And Google promises to become an even bigger “party bore” now that it will be incorporating “information” from Google+ in its Search Plus Your World. What I find most curious about reading these passages is that Barnes reflects upon these developments with a note of irony while we, who now live it, have, for the most part, lost our ironic detachment. It is what it is and we accept it in all its absurdity.

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Here are the book titles:

Still to be Born, by Schwiebert & Kirk

Empty Cradle, Broken Heart: Surviving the Death of your Baby, by Deborah L. Davis

The Other Side of Sadness:  What the New Science Of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss, by George A. Bonanno

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I get the stigma of epilepsy: how
people can be cruel, even smart ones,
with puppy words that never bite,
at least not until they grow teeth.

“No Karen,” she agreed, adding …
“Hospitals are not for intelligent people.”
Woof. I must be super stupid, thinking
illness was the cause for my admissions.

I wish you could have met my friend
who was so smart he hanged himself.
If only he could have been stupid
and gotten the help he needed.

I get the freedom of diagnosis: how
it drops the scales from your eyes
and lets you see you are not mad,
your mind, not “irretrievably flawed”:

the world has been given back to you.
Has it been taken away from me?
Don’t make me the baby you toss
out with your tepid bath water.

This is a poetic response to some passages I read in The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness, a memoir by Karen Armstrong. I read it as research for a novel I’m writing in which one of the characters is an ex-nun. As I had hoped, the memoir gave me insight into the experience of transitioning from convent to the secular world. I admire Armstrong’s writing and her work to promote understanding amongst the world’s major religions. However, I tripped over something that I couldn’t ignore. Armstrong recounts mysterious episodes of fainting, forgetfulness, finding herself in strange places, experiences of anxiety and panic. The sisters of her order believed she was hysterical and engaging in attention-seeking behaviour. Later, as an academic outside the convent, she was referred to a psychiatrist and even hospitalized for psychiatric treatment. Eventually, she received a correct diagnosis: epilepsy. However, her relief was accompanied by an “it could have been worse; I could have been mentally ill” sentiment. To which I respond: so what if you were? In the long run, would it have made any difference? Should it make any difference?

I suppose what bothers me is that, although she is sensitive to the problem of stigma, at least in relation to epilepsy, she nevertheless writes in a way that contributes to stigma in relation to mental illness.

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I’ve always been resistant to the idea of cellphones. I blogged about my first cellphone and my disappointment at its failure to live up to the hype. Talk of convergence was premature. Now, with people reading War & Peace on their iPhones and taking photos with their iPads, I wonder if the idea of convergence is just wrong-headed; single-purpose devices have a place after all. I also wrote about what has come to be known as the “digital divide.” Cellular technology draws clear lines around those who are marginalized from the mainstream. And many of those who do use cellphones struggle to maintain their accounts, yet feel they have no choice if they want to stay connected.

Nevertheless, I relented. Like all conscientious middle-class parents, we got a family plan and tied up our children with digital leashes. Call, text, tweet, post to Facebook. Let us know where you are. If we can’t reach you on a Saturday night, know that we cower in the dark, growing more anxious by the minute, certain that you’ve been mugged, or worse. I know you think this is annoying, but we worry because we love you.

On the Wednesday after Christmas day, my wife and I went for a morning coffee at Balzac’s in the Distillery District. We sat in the loft, iPhones propped beside our mugs and catching up on our Facebook and Twitter feeds, sharing with one another whatever we learned. From there, we drove to the St. Lawrence Market, parking (perhaps portentously) in front of the Rogers store on Front Street. While my wife waited for an order at the butcher’s, I called my son to make sure he was awake. We left and, on the way home, stopped at a local grocery store. Once home, I reached to my right hip where I keep my iPhone clipped to my belt and felt nothing. Damn, where was my phone? I checked my coat pocket and, again, nothing. Returning my hand to my hip, I felt a plastic tab slide from under the belt—it was the clip from the holster I used to hold the phone. It had snapped from the case.

I’ve lost it, I said.

I ran back to the grocery store to ask if they’d found anything while my wife called the security office at St. Lawrence Market.

I was astonished at my own reaction. This stuff belongs in a psychology journal. First came paranoia: all my personal info is on that phone; somebody will hack my phone, then steal all my passwords—email accounts, bank accounts, social media sites, Paypal, blog. I spent the next hour and a half changing all my passwords, making sure they were unique and strong, uppercase, lowercase, numbers, punctuation. Next came anger, most of it directed at myself. How could I have been so stupid not to have noticed that I lost my phone? Mostly I was angry at myself for being so hard on my daughter about her lost phone. How could I have been so insensitive? The third and most surprising reaction was anxiety, not a generalized anxiety, but an acute feeling that I imagine would be closely associated with the experience of addiction. Words like withdrawal and cold turkey come to mind. In a single moment of carelessness, I had cut myself off from my social networks, my email, messaging, phone calls, photos, music, ebooks. What was I going to do with myself? I needed a fix.

After lunch, I went to Rogers with my old Motorola flip phone and got a new sim card. At least I would have phone service, and even texting, but when I tried to text, it didn’t feel the same. Although I’ve never been to a methadone clinic, my visit to the Rogers store was probably like to visit a methadone clinic. It gave me enough of a fix to get me over the initial symptoms of withdrawal, but it just wasn’t the same. I told the guy at the counter what had happened and he shook his head. He said: Losing an iPhone is like losing cash; you’re never gonna see it again.

That night, I lay in bed and tried to imagine life without an iPhone. I tried to persuade myself that I could get along just fine with an old Motorola flip phone. I told myself it was an act of resistance. Losing the iPhone was really my subconscious brain forcing me to do what I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’ll opt out of the mainstream. Social media trivializes communication. It’s just a smokescreen for media conglomerates to monetize social space. Next thing you know, they’ll be putting up billboards between my synapses. I fell asleep with visions of myself as a new media hermit skulking off to my virtual cave.

The next morning I was a wreck. I ate breakfast without knowing what was going on in the world. I tried to walk the dog, but didn’t know what to wear outside because I had no weather app. I threw up my trembling hands and ran to the Rogers store. The guy smiled; he knew I’d be back; he’d seen this sort of thing before. He said it was horrible to see what can happen, even to a grown man.

My name is Dave and I’m an iPhone-a-holic. It’s true. I didn’t last even one day without an iPhone. It would be easy to grow discouraged, to conclude that all my ideals have been lost to a hunk of addictive socio-techno-candy. But not quite; there is an upside to this story.

Exactly one week after I lost my iPhone, I got a call from the Rogers store on Front Street. A passer-by had found an iPhone on the sidewalk and handed it in to the store. Although the phone wouldn’t start or recharge, they used the sim card to trace my account. An honest person. Who would’ve thought?

When I picked up the phone, it was clear that there had been some corrosion on the USB contacts. It had probably seen a bit of weather. I took it to the Apple store, hoping they could clean the contacts. Instead, because the phone was under warranty, they simply replaced it. When I got home, I gave it to my daughter. Isn’t that the way it goes with addiction?

_______________

Thanks to my brother-in-law, Paul Acheson, for posing with his iPhone in the photo above.

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Being an empiricist, I’m interested to know if Leonard follows his own rules. Digital text now makes it easy to answer such questions. Using his novel, Get Shorty, as my sample, I found there that he uses 342 adverbs including 4 instances of the adverb “suddenly”. Maybe The Guardian should publish a new piece called “The Exceptions to the Rules”.

If writing were easy enough that it could be reduced to a series of 10 or even 100 rules, then we could all follow Bo Catlett, one of the thugs in Get Shorty:

Chili opened the script again, flipped through a few pages looking at the format. “You know how to write one of these?”

“You asking me,” Catlett said, “do I know how to write down words on a piece of paper? That’s what you do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your head. It isn’t like having to learn how to play the piano, like you have to learn notes. You already learned in school how to write, didn’t you? I hope so. You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas and shit where they belong, if you aren’t positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words. There people do that for you. Some, I’ve even seen scripts where I know words weren’t spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it. So I don’t think it’s too important. You come to the last page you write in ‘Fade out’ and that’s the end, you’re done.”

Chili said, “That’s all there is to it?”

“That’s all.”

Chili said, “Then what do I need you for?”

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1. The titles. Many of McGimpsey’s “chubby sonnets” should not be read without first pausing to savour the title. For example: “Song for Cardigans and Assholes.” Or “Death be not proud but, really, who could blame you? I mean, c’mon, you’re Death!” Or “Jesus loves you, but doesn’t love-love you; I mean He thinks you’re okay but He’s going through some things now and is not interested in something more meaningful.”

2. Canadians with gluten allergies (who have mourned their inability to drink beer during hockey games) can find solace in McGimpsey’s tender verse:

Certain despairs, like gluten allergies,
Should only (suspiciously) affect white
Middle class women or Canadians.

3. McGimpsey understands the cultural importance of Barnaby Jones like few poets speaking for our generation.

4. Novel titles. McGimpsey could have written a novel called “The English Patient Vs. Predator.” Sadly, he didn’t, but it would have made a great movie.

5. Cellphones and Facebook figure importantly in McGimpsey’s poems (although not as importantly as Barnaby Jones). “I paw my cellphone like a rosary” and “Before the iPhone arrived, we lived like pigs” or the confessional: “All those times I was ‘Maybe Attending,’ / I admit I wasn’t going to attend.” After I read those lines, I was seized by a fit of guilt and had to stop reading until I poured myself a drink.

6. His poems can be mined for writing advice. And why not? After all, David McGimpsey has a Ph.D. in English Literature and teaches at Concordia University. So, for example, in “Putting the ‘ah’ in ‘adjunct.’”, he offers us some shtick from Wayne C. Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction:

I wasn’t a full-time professor
But I still worked for the university.
I was a departmental mascot —
‘Skewy’ the Creative Writing Bee!

In that warm, itchy outfit for Skewy
I buzzed about the halls at big events.
I’d wave my arms and say, ‘Show, don’t tell,’
And, ‘Your craft will set the world abuzzzzzzzzzz!’

7. His poems can also be mined for aphorisms, although not the sort of aphorisms Zarathustra would cite from his cave on the mountain, more the sort of aphorisms that qualify as ‘gas-station wisdom’.  “Like all fine cuisine, airport celery soup / achieves balance.” “Hell is other people’s taste in music.” “Those who think you can’t run / away from your problems just haven’t tried.” “You can’t buy Wrangler jeans at Versailles.”

8. McGimpsey shows you what it’s like to be a middle-aged man on the run from the things middle-aged men are usually on the run from. Except that running has become acutely disappointing since every place looks like the place before. They all have box stores and cheap motels and tacos and Pepsi.

9. The cover, designed by Evan Munday, features what appears to be the rare and exotic Jackalope.

10. If you are ever wondering what McGimpsey is up to in this book, a hint is only a click away. See, for example, this interview from Maisonneuve which includes the following statement:

My affection for American pop culture is, I think, unambiguous and, I assume, has been enjoyable for my best readers. A few times I’ve seen how this accounts for a misreading of my poetry which I’m sure will trail me to the grave: that is, when a critic takes contemptuous displeasure in an American culture reference and imagines I must hate what they have been conditioned to hate and therefore assume my goal is satire (I couldn’t possibly be saying I watch Family Matters, could I?  I couldn’t really prefer Celine Dion to The Tragically Hip, could I?) and then wonder why my satires don’t seem to go far enough. I have no interest in apologizing for that or defending that as governing poetic conceit in the face of the myriad weepy grievances Canadian intellectuals have against the United States. After all, I do not write about American popular culture: I write about my life and American popular culture is the metaphoric vehicle through which the tenor of my life is moderated.

I admit, sometimes I get a burr stuck up my ass and rant about how the American elephant is going to roll over and smush my cultural mouse. Reading Li’l Bastard is like taking a laxative, unsticking my burr, reminding me to loosen up a little bit. Have some fun.

Follow @DaveMcGimpsey on twitter.

Buy the book from @coachhousebooks.

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