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December 2009 Why it took so long, 15: Blue moon Thursday December 31, 2009 I was waiting on the ~. The ~ is not literally blue, unfortunately. A New Year's Eve ~ only happens once every nineteen years, so the last time there was a ~ I was pre-orthodonture and pre-poetry. I could probably look it up in a journal and see exactly what I was doing December 31, 1990. The sky's overcast, but the ~ is up there somewhere tonight. There once was a [ding] who told me to think [ding] whenever I saw the moon.
The ending of Hari Kunzru's Transmission Wednesday December 30, 2009 No spoiler ahead. As I was sprinting to the end, I was trying to figure out how Kunzru was going to greet me, or, more correctly, I was trying to figure out how I would end the novel if I were Kunzru. It's the riskiest kind of open ending, but one that I now recognize the reader has been primed for from the beginning. The solution is not in the plot (i.e., I was looking for clues in the wrong place) but in the form and what a high school teacher would tap the board and call theme.
Favourite place for lunch in Toronto: BBQues across from Grad House Tuesday December 29, 2009
Stool on the right is the best spot. Through the garage-door panes is the best view. The guy on the left is often the best company.
Why it took so long, 14: What do you care to know? Monday December 28, 2009 Promise, promise I won't fixate indefinitely on the idea of blogging. I've got till January 1, then finito. Where's the difficulty? It's partly in understanding function, audience, and tone--Comp 101 stuff. The real difficulty's not in the writing, but in a truth beyond the writing. For a student, it might be hard to admit that maybe his essay got a D because his thinking's unclear, and that realization means reconfiguring notions of the self as smart, as deserving, as articulate. In this case, the difficult truth is almost embarrassingly rudimentary: what's important to me might not be important to you. Ah, what a fact. It's self-pitying from your vantage, right, because it sounds like I expected you to care. But reverse it: how does it feel that what's important to you doesn't matter to me? that I don't want to hear about your day? that I couldn't care less that you're not sleeping well lately? You see? We can't reduce each other to informational value, to usefulness. We do commensurate damage to ourselves because we end up reducing our capacity to care for anything tighter or more uncomfortable than our skins.
Graduate House (Spadina and Harbord, Toronto) as writing space Sunday December 27, 2009 Grad House has been my favourite building in Toronto since it's construction. I learned recently that the budget was $25 million, only $25 million (if you don't have a sense of building budgets) back in 1998, maybe 1999. The building looks unfinished. There's something like scaffolding up one side, and the visual punch line--because surely the architects had to have some fun on their tiny budget--is a long corridor on the top two floors that runs from one end of the building to the middle of an intersection and stops. If you kept walking you'd plunge to your death, then get run over by traffic below. Drole. Add to the joke that "UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO" is inscribed on the glass wall of the hallway to nowhere and that the final O is like a cipher, meaning that after your time at U of T, kasplat! Add to the joke that this building is a graduate residence and that the bridge o' death is not a wholly farfetched symbol of graduate studies.
Inside the residence is beautiful, though. There's still that shiftiness in parts, as if the construction workers were on break. If a building could be a book, I'd read Grad House. It seems a building with nearly verbal style, and not just because of the text in the design. The res is in process; it's slightly disorienting; (it could kill you;) it's constantly revised by perspective and light. One minute you're laughing at it; the next, it's laughing at you. One could get some serious writing done in an east facing room, overlooking the inner courtyard (well, a tree, but it works somehow as a courtyard). You know, bring out one's inner Beckett.
Why it took so long, 13: Parting Saturday December 26, 2009 The "it" has morphed from blogging to "the new website." It took so long because it was hard to part with the first site. Clean, minimalist, functional, that site was like a sanitized, white-tiled bathroom, the type you see in Mr. Clean commercials. I really admired the photograph on the homepage by Christian Montes. It's from a Spencer Tunick installation. He's the artist that advertises for naked people to descend on some public site then he transforms them from naked people into nudes. It's like like the end of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (strange novel, that; really episodic in structure and oddly Socratic in dialogue). The eyes get alarmed by all the normal pink flesh out in public. I had to desaturate the colour photo into black and white to make the image less about flesh. Here are some screenshots of the old site, to which I am waving adieu.
A pithy meditation on Christmas Friday December 25, 2009 Psych.
Thanks to a CD from
Matt Raymond before I left
The boys’ choir singing “Christmas Time is Here” is like glass falling.
Why it took so long, 12: I was choosing a font Thursday December 24, 2009
Apparently
sans-serif fonts are easier to read online but serif fonts
are easier to read in print. I prefer a well-dressed serif
font, and I’m using one for this blog, but that decision
took a long minute. Of the sans serifs, Verdana’s hot. Of
the serifs, I like
Then there were size issues. In print documents, 12 pt is standard, but online it looks ginormous. Then you have to factor in the various resolutions of people’s screens, which might make your 12 pt look a smidge different. [Gasp!] But 10 pt was too small in Century Schoolbook, so I had to go with 11 pt, which isn’t one of the gradient stops when I click the arrow next to the font-size button in SharePoint or FrontPage, so I have to type 11. You understand my horror? Plus, there’s the colour issue. I know I want a clean-looking site, white background for the most part. Black text on that white ground was too stark, too normal, and I wanted something cleaner than that, so I spent days cycling through the shades of gray, from hexadecimal colour code 808080 to CCCCCC to slate 778899 to 666666, which was really a nearly perfect colour for text, but worries that it might burn a hole through my screen with its Satanic excess caused me to shop for colours around that, hence 777777 (too light), and finally, what you’re seeing, 505050. This post is my resistance to Christmas Eve hype. Fonts! Of all things he writes about.
From Toni Morrison to Hari Kunzru
The last novel I read was Toni Morrison’s A Mercy back in early December. Structurally, it was interesting--the alternating third-person narration with Florens’s slightly autistic prose. This autistic quality, I find, is getting popular and seems to stand in for poetic prose. I don’t know that Florens needed that voice, but Morrison said she heard it first, that it felt right with her, so. Who questions Morrison’s choices? But after a semester of teaching Morrison’s major novels (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, A Mercy, and the essays in Playing in the Dark) I needed to read something different. I felt like I was at the gym, lifting the same weight for a long time and I needed to try a new piece of equipment. So I started Hari Kunzru’s Transmission recently. Robyn Read, the jjang at Freehand books, recommended it to me over the summer, and I bought it immediately after seeing her, but didn’t get a chance to start reading until recently.
Robyn knows exactly
what kind of book I’d like, apparently.
Transmission
is quick paced, nimbly plotted, smart,
has octaves of tone, from lighthearted to technical to
ribbing. Even plot-wise, it’s the novel I wanted to write,
but now I don’t need to, because Kunru has done it so well.
If this were a dissertation, and I discovered my idea on the
shelf under someone else’s name, I’d be broken, but in
fiction, this is liberating. I’ve got to morph like a virus
and find another element of the story worth attacking.
Nicknames Tuesday December 22, 2009 I enjoy a good name in my mouth. My friends know this. If you’re around long enough and I find your parents’ name for you too well-handled, I’ll find you a more appropriate name. I want to call you something that no one else in the world does. I mean this to be endearing, not some twisted evidence of power. I want to call you something that no one else in the world does. Just like a gift should say something about the giver, your name becomes a marker of me.
Why it took so long, 11: Names
Should I mention people's names here? I have already, and I will. But should I? I mean, they didn’t sign up to be mentioned. It’s a discretionary issue. I won’t write anything that compromises anyone’s privacy, just public-domain behavior stuff. I’m assuming, wrongly, that people feel the same way I do about being mentioned, when in fact, a good percentage don’t care, and a reasonable percentage (of people in my life, I’m talking) might actually want to see themselves here, if only because it gives them more mirror to see themselves. The name, of course, is a handle on identity, and some folks might want control over the use of their name/image/identity. Tell that to telemarketers and spammers and junk mail administrators. Your name is slipperier (slippery modulation there) than your self. While your body’s sleeping, your name's highsteppin' in the night.
Google
provides free Wi-Fi service at
Things in
Thank you, Google. Wouldn’t it be nice if human rights were at a place where every man, woman, and child were entitled to free internet access? Argument could be made that identity is no longer fixed in the body (brain included) but that the constructed identities mediated through the internet are also organs of the self, of being, presence, of Dasein.
Why it took so long, 10: Waste
The last paragraph of yesterday’s post should be in a poem and not stuck in the text-heavy traffic of a blog.
Cover Impact Friday December 18, 2009 Earlier this week, when Patrick (Cuff) was in my office, and Jared (designer) also happened to be there, I showed him (Patrick) his (Jared’s) cover design. Back up to a few evenings before when my writing group was having dinner. Patrick had said something about his computer wallpaper representing some element of his personality. Whatever he said, the fact of the wallpaper was important enough to mentally bookmark.
Back where I
started, Patrick was in my office. I showed him the book
cover. And he said something like, Are you serious?
Apparently, the book cover is the image that he, in a
mindscape and time far away from mine, chose as his
wallpaper. He knew the whole story about the
It happens sometimes—what is happening now with Patrick—that there’s a cosmic or spiritual energy passing between people. Our lives align, which means, as Emerson would have it, you are a kind of me or I am a kind of you.
Invigilation Thursday December 17, 2009 I love that word, its roots, and flowers, especially invigilate. Yesterday, I invigilated my last two exams of the semester. It sounds a bit like vigilante and a quick, cross-eyed look might activate vitiligo which activates vertigo which activates classy, poised Hitchcock in profile. A shame I can only break out invigilate a couple of times a year. The exams were for two sections of American Literature II. Good class, good room, good time (8:00 and 9:30), so good times, good light, good unfoldings of thought, good words, good students. Last meetings are tough. There seems to be no way to preserve a semester’s energy. We cross into each other’s lives for four months, then we cross out.
Toward the end of
the exam yesterday, Eleanor Gavazzi took out her digital camera, and what started off as
a photograph of the tree outside turned into a desperate
attempt (mine) to capture the semester, even as students
were filing out of the exam. The photographs end up being a
record of loss.
Why it took so long, 9: I was holding a cookie Wednesday December 16, 2009 Struck on something major in rereading these posts, and that is that (“that is that”--nice) blogging, the way I'm doing it, unlike journal writing, does not have a sense of the daily. The genre seems intrinsically self-satisfied to let ideas, politics, whatnot, float above the writer’s life. The writer plunges his day into a juicer, puts a lemon on the rim and presents the juice to the world while chucking the shirt-buttoning, multivitamin-taking rest of his day. I’m starting to feel (after two weeks) that I’m extracting my life out. In a way, that makes me feel unrepresented here—too cerebral maybe. Does that juicer muck belong here? I’d like a bit more pulp, yes. For example, I jammed the electric stapler in the photocopy room today because a colleague came in with cookies and I took two in one hand, had my manuscript in the other, was talking to Jared and Carrolee, had my bag awkwardly balanced on my shoulder, and being so occupied, put too much paper in the stapler interstice. And when it growled and jammed we all broke out laughing because I would not put the cookie down. I just stood helplessly encumbered instead of freeing myself. I feel like it’s important to say that, to represent all that in a blog somehow, because it seems pregnant with moral, because it seems somehow typical, and because it makes earth worthwhile. Each day there are so many unrecorded joys that evaporate.
Cover Tuesday December 15, 2009 The cover of You Know Who You Are is a photograph by Irina Souiki. She took it inside Terminal 1 of Pearson International airport, the new terminal 1 (that always seems underused; they were still busing passengers from new T1 to old T1 a while ago). There’s an aquarium in there filled with clear, black, and red cubes, and Irina took a photo with her cellphone and in the frame she got only one red cube. Irina has been generous throughout the whole process (waived her fee for a donation to the Picture the Cure charity [do check it out and donate something]), and her image is so moving and striking and appropriate to what I’m trying to do in the book that the meeting of two separate artistic visions seems preordained, the way a love story told by two interlocking partners, where each partner finishes the other’s sentences, seems preordained. The cover I wanted before I knew what I wanted was based on a Christian Montes photograph, but it just wasn’t working out with the text, even with Jared’s magic powers. Once we landed on Irina's image, an angelic, high pitched awwww sounded, and behold. The runner up was also an Irina Souiki photograph that in the end suggested that You Know Who You Are was more frightening than it is. Another day we’ll talk about Jared’s magic?
Why it took
so long, 8: Thinking about thinking about blogging
Monday December 14, 2009 It’s going to take a month for me to work through my blogging issues. No joke. Just give me to the end of December then I’ll stop these fixated, quasi-theoretical meta-blogs. Understand that this is how I approach anything I find interesting. Think ahead, think through: like a huge backswing followed by a Nadalesque helicopter topspin follow through. That’s why I don’t commit casually and possibly why I don’t heal easily. There’s so much pleasure in the thinking, even if the decision that results has to be squeezed into an anticlimactic one-word statement of position: yes or no.
It's hard to
explain the pleasure of lists and planning and assessing.
But there are people out there who understand this drive,
people who may not show every piece of HTML code that goes
into producing the visible, people who enjoy manipulating an
idea round and round in their heads like a 3D computer
model.
Why it took so long, 7: Two more benefits
of blogging Sunday December 13, 2009
I feel
another acid-reflux post about blogging working its way up
my esophagus.
Benefit 3:
Blogging keeps one writing. Keeps one at the barre, even if
one’s not dancing; sketching, if not painting; running
scales, if not playing Chopin. Benefit 4: It keeps one honest. I mean
that nearly literally. It forces reflection and examination
of the self, work, and world, in a way that a more
transformative genre does not. It is an option to
sublimation that does not transcend or escape the real.
Why it took so long, 6: A couple of
potential benefits of blogging Saturday December 12, 2009 It’s time to stop pooh-poohing blogging
and instead examine its benefits and possibilities. Benefit 1 is a technological pro: because
blogging offers the possibility of linking to other online
content, blogging is a discursive form, or the web is. I’m
sure there’s already heady theory written about distance and
space on the web: how everything is exactly the same
distance apart (that distance being a click); how one click
connects a searcher to high and low content; how popularity
has become a non-evaluative way of organizing material. Benefit 2: A blog lets one control one’s
public face. For that reason, it’s kind of like Facebook,
which I resisted for a couple of years before joining and of
which I’m still not a huge fan. The cons are obvious. One’s
public image tends to be shallow, even if one tries to flood
the public with minutiae. Also, there’s the burden of being
interesting or different, which is exhausting, and smacks of
the strained contrivance of high-school, pink-hair
rebellion.
Facebook group update Friday December 11, 2009 The Facebook You Know Who You Are
group has grown from five to thirty-eight fans. Joseph has
sold nine books in four days. The last one was to someone
whose computer crashed and for whom Joseph recovered all the
lost data. And you know how people get when they’re
grateful, so for payment, I imagine Joseph going mafia on
this person, fingertips clumped under his chin,
Brando-voiced: I give you choice. I help you cause I help
you. We friends, right? Friends help friends. Here’s wha I
do for you. You give me either your first child or you buy
book. What kind of book? Is poetry. Sss. My first born, huh? Um, this is
tough, but I’m gonna go with—gimme a minute—okay, the
poetry.
Why it took so long, 5: Leaving something
behind Thursday December 10, 2009 Still trying to come to terms with
blogging, and I've forged in the smithy of my soul
a pro-blog piece of wisdom: It’s important to leave some
record of yourself on the planet. Some people have children and pour
themselves into their children’s throats: my mother used
to say, when I was young, that kind of thing. I’ve kept
dia-- journals (man up the term a bit) since 199x, off and
on. So I'm not sure why blogging feels like a major
adjustment to some high-minded principle of writing. Maybe I
was turned off by the publicity of the genre, the surer
sense of writing for an audience, when journal writing has
usually been downtime for me. There are other turn-offs too. But, look, in under ten seconds I can
think of a handful of people in my immediate life who blog
happily: Jim, Ben (well, he used to), Patrick Cuff, Joseph
(who seems to be four years ahead of me technologically,
always already swimming in the newest thing while I have my
toes curled around the diving board).
So we're
over our blogging anxiety? No one's ever died from blogging.
An audience isn't the same as a militia. What's our line? It's
important to leave some evidence of yourself behind. It's also important to leave something out. Aaaand we're back.
Myronn Hardy's
The Headless Saints
Wednesday December 9, 2009 Learned today that Myronn Hardy’s book,
The Headless Saints, won the 2009 Hurston/Wright
Legacy Award for Poetry. Eee. That I’m calling him Myronn
Hardy is strained, is for public record. He’s not a
first-name-last-name kind of person to me. He’s My
(the suggestion of empty possession in the nickname [My? my
what?] is our running joke), which is to say I know him, and
I'm so name-dropping right now, but it's just 'cause I'm
proud of him and his winning the prize means more to me than
Poet X winning. It’s good, but not totally surprising,
news. His first book, Approaching the Center, won the
PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. So he’s two for two: two
books, two prizes.
A
conventional summary of his poetry won’t get at its texture.
I'd describe it as exotic, tropical, slightly feathery as if
coming from a large bird. He includes snatches of other
languages (Portuguese usually). The poems are longer than
the usual lyric; they read like hearty meals. Hearing him
read is like being in a Chagall painting. Instead of using
commas, he uses horizontal white space, what I call breath spaces, which gives him a visual brand like a
Why it took so long, 4: A more honest
attempt at an answer Tuesday December 8, 2009 The fact of the rejection before the
rejection: that no one will read this, that I am, as feared,
irrelevant.
The first and possibly best review I will
ever have Monday December 7, 2009
comes from
Joseph--remember the book doesn't come out until April--on
Amazon.ca:
5.0 out of 5
stars Should be an excellent read.
Dec 5 2009
Simply frothing at the mouth for April 15
to come around so that I can dig my teeth into what should
be a delightful literary feast. That's a perfectly constructed sentence
if I ever saw one. Shakespeare himself ne'er produced a
finer line. Such an energetic metaphor of consumption! Such
care in handling its arrangement! Thrice Yau gives voice to
a man's starvation for poetry and we can only clutch our
hearts and wait alongside our hero for the "delightful"
repast.
Why it took
so long, 3: Access Sunday December 6, 2009 Up top, I don’t mean
access in the
positive sense, as in “Professor X lives in his office and
is therefore always accessible to his students,” but more
the way snooty folks use the word when they dismiss poet X’s
poetry as being “easily accessible.” Who wants to be [def’n
2] accessible? so ubiquitous you might as well be a
top-40 pop song playing overhead in the mall? Everybody
knows exactly how you go. You’re easy on the ears. To the point, doesn’t blogging, or having
a web presence in general, imply that people want to have
access to you? that you are important to someone who owns a
computer? that your physical presence is not enough to
satisfy others? that you have a public? The very hubris of
that kind of thinking makes me wince because all of those
assumptions about one’s importance and relation to the world
are, for most bloggers, self-driven: I believe my opinion is
worth recording; I believe I must expand my force on the
planet; I believe I have a public. For a writer, access means that
the public, your public, can read your book then go online
to find out as much about you as it wants while you write or
nap or whatnot. You can write and write at your public
without ever occupying the uncomfortable, even boring,
position of reader. Your public. Who is your public? How does
the possessive case work here? Brain says your public is a
group devoted to following you, your own personal Greek
chorus strophing and antistrophing wherever your action
takes it. Gut says your public actually owns you, like we
think we own celebrities. Your indicates relation
rather than possession—it’s some weird genitive case. One
can’t tell anything about the distribution of power from
looking. If this whole situation were a GRE
question, the answer would be blogger : your public :: parent :
your child when that child is throwing a tantrum in
the mall
Why Joseph Yau should be an action figure Saturday December 5, 2009 I was talking to Joseph tonight, and I mention that the book cover was done and I send him a link to the Wolsak site. When he sees it, I can tell he’s smiling from how his voice changes. He says, I wonder if it’s on Amazon(.com), and lo it is. Then we check Amazon.ca and it’s there too. Discounted. And it’s on Chapters/Indigo as well. Joseph says, I’ve got to be the first to buy it. I say, It’s not available until April. April 15, he says. He’s reading off Amazon. Yeah, I know. I’m slackjawed with disbelief, understand, because this is the first time I’m seeing my book on Amazon, and the grin is still in his voice. He buys enough copies—that’s plural—to get free shipping. Then he spontaneously starts a publicity campaign by emailing some people. Then he takes the action to Facebook. He changes his profile photo from Bauhaus to the You Know Who You Are cover. Then he creates a group, invites people, and within seconds, Jim joins. Within ten minutes, we have five members. So if Mattel’s reading this, and it wants a new line of ethnic superheroes, then Yau’s your man. Make him jacked. His prop could be a laptop that transforms into a souped up bike. And for a costume— Oh, perfect, a few summers ago we were painting an apartment and for some Korean-language-institute-immigration-related reason he needed very specific photos of himself wearing a suit and surrounded by children, so he was dressed up that day in a black suit, all debonair, and I was walking around Toronto behind him, like some servile assistant, in paint-splattered jeans and a tee shirt, snapping photos. When we got back to the apartment, he photoshopped one of those photos, one where he’s standing heroically with his fists on his hips and his chest out, to give himself a red cape and red laser beams from his eyes. So this is what I propose for his costume: black suit and tie, a red cape, and his eyes should have tiny red LED lights in them. Or possibly just fire. His eyes could be like little blowtorches. There could also be a pocket-sized version that hooks on to a keychain and people could use to light cigarettes or perform random acts of pyro destruction.
Why it took so long, 2: Priorities Friday December 4, 2009 I thought blogging would steal time and
energy that would be better spent on other writing. Sure, I
suppose, there’s a hierarchy embedded there: in steal,
in better, in other writing. Blogging's in
the discount-book bin while poetry and fiction occupy the
new-releases shelves. Maybe it's better to flip the idea from
the y-axis to the x-axis and not think of the
blogging/other-writing relationship as hierarchical but as
sequential. That way we don't have to deal with the
political and oppressive innuendo of hierarchy. Blogging is
simply what I do after I write other things. I remember in a
grad class at
Ho-ho! That line of
thinking almost pulled a fast one on me. In fact, blogging
has co-opted the spot of “real” writing by its desirable,
terminal position--climax, dessert, reward, rainbow. Okay, here's how they can both win.
Poe/fiction will get the first-child benefits—best
attention, never-worn clothes. Blogging can be the
doted-upon last child. It's pretty clear how I want to structure
my writing priorities. If I have a finite amount of words to
use every day before I’m sprawled out and spent, then I’d
prefer to put those words toward generating work in another
genre and not chronicling myself.
Blogging rules Thursday December 3, 2009
Rule 1:
Thou shalt not blog before writing/editing something in
another genre: poetry, fiction, flash; whatever the project
be.
Rule 2:
Thy primary blog focus shall be pastures literary (i.e.,
writing, reading, thinking).
Rule 3:
Thou shalt not, as Pound prohibits, print thy sins, neither
shalt thou rant; for in the day that thou rantest or
publisheth thy sins, thou wilt have forgotten thyself and
thine heart shall not be thine on thy pillow.
The word "blog" Wednesday December 2, 2009 The word blog entered my
vocabulary like a
BUH
LOG BUH
LOG BUH LOG BUHLOG BLOG!
Why it took so long Tuesday December 1, 2009 I’ve avoided blogging because I thought
it would steal my best energy from other writing. Sven
Birkerts had my back:
I never even
think of keeping a diary now, because I believe that -- for
me -- the process of tracking the daily internal flow
leaches off the transformational energy I require in order
to refract myself into essays and reviews. Hard as it is, I
believe that one should come to the page just a little bit
hungry, full of personality and the desire to extinguish it
for a time in the act of writing. ("Abandoning
Diaries")
Change
"essays and reviews" to "poetry and fiction," and nix the
first clause since I've kept diaries since middle school,
and you'd have a dead-on description of how I felt. And I'm
still planted in that position--most of me is--but I'm just
turning my face to see the blog thing more clearly. All this
is experiment. |
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