Saturday, May 26, 2007

A New Beginning

Dear Readers:

The bad news is that this is the last post I’ll be writing at blogspot.com. The good news is that my personal site has gone live! I wanted to make this move to gain more creative and legal control over the content. With the help of my webmaster, this vision is now a reality. It’s an exciting event for me. The blog will continue, so check there for updates. Also you’ll find a story of mine in PDF, a thoroughly immodest autobiography, and a section of news and upcoming events. Right now there’s no way to leave comments, but feel free to use the contact button to e-mail me. See you at:

www.tavish.tv

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Dollar Store Chic

As a snob, I try to pay as much as possible. You get what you pay for, and it’s not worth the time to ferret out the exceptions. However, I shop at dollar stores for some everyday items: paper towels, containers, simple tools, rubber gloves, and the latest Power Rangers merch. Consumers in Quebec are highly price-conscious (read poor), and stores like Dollarama have done brisk business here. No surprise when you tally up what they have to offer: the single price concept, no frills, and a wide selection from the best sweatshops in Asia.

Dollar stores are ahead of their time in most respects, so I wouldn’t want to speculate too much on whether or not the staff are actually paid $1/hr. I’ve found the employees friendly and knowledgeable about the prices and what aisle the pens might be in. The security guard, the chubby one in the disposable shirt, always keeps his eyes on me, so I never feel ignored. On the whole, it’s hassle-free shopping for all our mundane needs.

But yesterday my understanding of the dollar store as an unostentatious oasis of five-and-dime functionality was shattered. I was humming along to the piped-in Corey Hart, waiting in line with my armload of sponges and flatware when I spotted the young couple at the register. He: 18, hair bechromed with product, shit-catcher jeans, swooshless sneakers. She: younger, possibly strung out, painted-on top. In their shopping cart they had socks, sunglasses, stockings, music CD’s in paper envelopes, and copious bling. The cashier counted it all—un dos tress kwatr sink syet och nuev. And then, just as she was about to ring them up, his hanging lips wobbled as his shopping list came back to him. He lifted his hand and pointed at the display behind her.

“Et une boîte de cologne.”

Just like that! The brand is Jean-Philippe. These boxes feature a model who looks disturbingly like Billy Ray Cyrus, arms crossed jauntily over a floppy red shirt. Behind flies the stars and stripes. The motto:

Jean-Philippe: Famous Scents for Fewer Cents!

So what we have here is a smell you buy and apply to your skin to the degree you wish to make yourself fragrant and endearing to others. It’s manufactured in China, boxed with a French name, an American flag and an image of Mr. Achy Breakie photoshopped just enough that they don’t need to pay him, sold everywhere in the civilized world and in Québec. All hail the marketing maven who spawned that scents/cents pun, but might it not have been more euphonious and true to the target market to say less cents?

But who am I to criticize these entrepreneurs? No matter how much it might smell like diesel, Jean-Philippe’s dollar store line of Sino-Franco-American odours is an outstanding value: it’s sixty times cheaper than regular cologne, but probably only twenty times worse. Economic advantage times three. I realized that this couple before me were the darlings of economists everywhere: they were behaving with perfect rationality, stimulating the economy and getting the maximum for their money. Any aesthetic item can be diluted and atomized until it’s worth someone’s while to package and sell it for a dollar, and at that price you can’t get ripped off. From there I opened my clairvoyant third eye on the future: more and more dollar stores swarming into cultural hegemony, selling one dollar clothes, one dollar shoes, one dollar prints, one dollar first editions.

Space Battle for the Radioactive Tombs of the Rigelian Bondagelords!

A Jean-Philippe Novelization based on the brain fart by TM.

Famous lines for less dimes!

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

His Life Lay in the Path of the Wrecking Ball

Between Salems Lot and The Shining, Stephen King wrote a novel called Roadwork. This book is about a regular guy, Barton Dawes, who can’t cope with misfortune and the changes life brings, and so he decides to take it out on the local highway authority. He barricades himself in his house, the one slated for demolition, with a cache of nasty weapons, alcohol and thermonuclear ’tude, shouting into his megaphone epithets like “Fucksticks!” Sorry, no Vogon constructor fleet. Back when I read a lot of King, this novel was the one I liked the least. I already knew from the cover and the blurb what was going to happen, but it took forever to get to the third act showdown, with only weird Maine swearing and a meagre crescendo of small-town violence to tide me over. Also Barton seemed like kind of a fuckstick himself, not getting over anything and hanging around until he went crazy enough to do something that could be a premise for a novel.

But dear readers, today I can honestly say that I just didn’t get this book until now. I was bone-ignorant of how months and months of constant roadwork on your street can send you off the deep end—the one you were scared to swim in. I failed to appreciate how endless filling, jackhammering, paving, grading, grinding, backhoeing, compacting and gravelling would jeopardize my sanity. They started in October. It’s now April. Take a second and count the months between. Check out that picture taken from my window. Their approach is to dig up a hole, then fill it up, then dig it up, then leave it unfilled for as long as possible, then repeat. I asked the workers how much longer, but they’re all from rural Quebec and I couldn’t understand shit. But let’s hand it to them, they’ve done it. They’ve changed my tastes enough to make me admire Stephen King’s Roadwork, a novel no one who isn’t a bored 12 year-old boy should ever attempt to read.

Open parenthesis. Roadwork was, like The Running Man, one of King’s pseudonymous Bachman books. Kingophiles have various explanations for why he did it, that the Bachman books were too commercial, or too experimental, or too short, or just plain too crappy. The man himself says it had nothing to do with the content of the books; it was just a publisher’s suggestion that the public wouldn’t cope with such prolificness under a single name. Coming from most writers that would sound like self-serving horseshit. But when he’s talking about himself, King’s probably guileless enough to be speaking his mind when he suggests that creating a secret identity was a good alternative to writing fewer books and spending more time with his family.

Recently, I read King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. This is the first book he wrote after his much-publicized brush with mechanized death in 1999. It’s part autobiography and part treatise on the art of fiction. The parts about his young life reveal his very humble origins, and his obsession from the beginning with genre movies and the pulps. He seems to have spent the first 18 years of his life absorbing all things horror, sci-fi and fantasy, from Poe to sixties exploitation movies. It’s amusing to read about King getting brow-beaten by his pompous high school English teacher, a cultural interrogator who asks with mock calmness why anyone would read “trash like that” (when, presumably, there’s a shelf of linen-bound Melville and Dickens in the school library). King’s deft characterization of a familiar type is good fun, and a slam dunk for us underdogs who can enjoy a story for its own sake without spasticating over cultural seriousness. But King must know that, like his own lower-middle class shoulder-chip to hit the big time, that English teacher never really went away. He was a minor sucker on the tiniest tentacle of the octopus of consensus. Now it’s Stephen King who unashamedly writes “trash like that,” and younger generations get to play the shame game with his—and Danielle Steele’s and James Patterson’s and Dan Brown’s—books.

Personally, I can remember the exact day when I was first so shamed. At the age of fourteen or so I gave my father a Stephen King novel—The Dark Half, I think—for his birthday. He looked at me as if I’d delivered Freud’s gift of shit. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he mentioned James Joyce and made it clear that I’d erred royally by thinking he would give over a few hours to such drivel. I felt really awful, like there was something wrong with me for liking those books, and that if I kept it up I’d never be smart like dad.

But this was no rogue father! He was articulating the undying prejudice that stocks literature and genre on different shelves. The other day I came across noted critic and lunatic Harold Bloom’s comments on King winning the O. Henry short story prize: “He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That they [the selection committee] could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.” Notice how Bloom revives the binomial penny dreadful, hearkening back to a time when writers knew both how much one of their lines was worth and what its value was. The ham-fisted use of the word idiocy to round it all off recalls Pacino’s speech to the fingers-up-their-asses school board in Scent of a Woman: “If I was half the critic I used to be, I’d take a flame thrower to King’s house!”

The point isn’t that King has won. He hasn’t—this is more a background tension than a war. Academia and publishing must judge books, and this leads to canon formation and snobbery. Most who set out to write penny dreadfuls will fail and give up, but for every 10,000 who try, we’ll have a Stephen King who can laugh it all away. For example, Michael Chabon, a more talented and more ambitious writer than King, has said that he sees his mission as “the destruction of literary categories.” Fair enough, but his clever pastiches depend on the reader’s knowledge of those categories. Kavalier and Clay wouldn’t be as good of a novel without the existence and genuine attractions of comics, graphic novels and pulp fiction as alternatives to assigned reading.

The other day I was mulling over the idea of going forth into Carrie or The Shining, with a good Sun hat and a compass and plenty of water, in the hopes of mapping out new oases. But I decided that for me this would be an act of radical nostalgia and nothing more. I still think fondly of the King books I read when I could enjoy them. Even Roadwork, now. Close parenthesis. “Now they would listen to him—now he had the guns.” Aw yeah.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Dear Readers,

Sober music, please. The time has come for an update. After enjoying a trip to North Carolina earlier this month (see photo), I’m back in Montréal writing full time. My book project continues, and meanwhile I’ve also gone back to writing short stories.

To those of you who’ve been checking up on me here on Blogger recently (and I’ve been slowly finding out that there are more than I thought), I’m sorry there hasn’t been a lot to read here. For a while there this blog was my main creative outlet, but things are changingchanging as in up, up, up, lickety-split. For those who don’t speak jive, the exciting news is that, with help, I’m creating a personal website. The main purpose will be to promote my writing career, but there will also be news, updates and pasquinades. A new story will be posted soon too. It's about an anomie-plagued teen's coming of age. Don't worry, I haven't shipped my oars to drift with the tide of CanLit: there's werewolves, a cool interrogation scene, and I promise, no epiphanies. The URL for the new site will be:

www.tavish.tv

To steal a line from Brando, I’ve always considered myself spiritually Tuvaluvan. Check back here and at the new address if you want to see things fall into place. And tell your friends. Or if you're fed up, tell your enemies. I'm gonna go get me some converation. Take it away, Manny.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

English is a Non-inflected Indo-European Language (from a work in progress on English teachers abroad)

They come from all over. Besides the recent graduates, there are elementary school teachers, beancounters, zookeepers, customs workers, divorcees, cinephiles, readers of the daily press, and writers of letters to the editor. Few were compelled to leave, none were compelled to stay in their home countries. You recognize them as those who speak a little too clearly, forming the words as if everything hung on a preposition. Telling a culture-shock story about life over there, their chins retreat into a tightening jaw: they’ve told it too often, it’s become fixed, repertoire. This time they won’t change enough to make it reverse compatible with you. They’ll be forced to say you had to be there, laughing for both of you at the undefined irony of misunderstandings. Their sophistication is a universal relativism that accepts all things. Life is what happened to them, not what they did.

They speak English. It is something they know without knowing what they know or how they know. The language is a mitochondrion mixed in with their being. To become teachers, they must have the precious commodity excavated and read back to them. In teacher training, they learn to see the air they breathe, and to show others less fortunate how to gulp it down. Now I understand.

The lesson must be about something. Break it down to courses, modules, tasks, reincorporations, semi-controlled practices, and at each moment you are doing one thing to the exclusion of others. This shows purpose and control. And while you explain the present perfect continuous or a tricky phrasal verb, they listen, understanding between 40 and 70 percent of your words, and taking from them whatever they need: the non-syllabic rhythms, the formation of a fricative. Why that word, made of those sounds and not others? It’s arbitrary—but also fully determined because you must use that one word. The signal separates from the noise, the acceptable sentences build themselves into the membranes of the ear. In order to speak it, the teacher must speak about it as if it were geography.

None of this may be said. In order to make the process less terrifying and to give us some agency over language, they have pedagogy and pedagogical talk, made up of these specialized terms:

Communicative, i.e. the communicative approach. Like dynamic, a meaningless adjective conferring instant credibility on its user. The implication is that the last twenty years have witnessed a renaissance following on dark ages during which teachers and students were too stupid to communicate. After an interviewee or teacher tells you about an idea, you can always nod seriously and say: “Hmm…but how would you make that more communicative?” There is no known face-saving response, no matter how dynamic you are.

Lexis. Vocabulary. By squinting slightly and calling it “lexis,” the inevitable tedium of memorizing long lists of words is transformed into a sleek methodology with a ring of Japanese engineering excellence. Vocabulary is not communicative, but lexis most certainly is—so students will pay cash money for it.

Idiomatic. Teacher talk for “Haven’t the foggiest.” A catchall response to tough student questions. Example: Student: “You told us always to use contractions, so why can’t I say ‘Yes, I’m’?” Teacher, chewing on his collar: “Ah…that’s idiomatic, I’m afraid.”

TTT. Teacher talking time. The disturbing echo of KKK is not accidental. To be avoided since it smacks of the scholastic dungeons of the past when teachers used to explain things. Making your students prattle about hypotheticals and their personal lives is just more communicative. The hidden wisdom of the ban on TTT is that it permits fools to be silent.

Elicitation. A communicative way of reducing TTT by making everything into a guessing game. Instead of saying “post office,” the teacher elicits by drawing a post office, or miming one, or interpretively dancing one until one student cries uncle and says: “Post office!” This technique helps get rid of unruly students who do their homework and ask tough questions.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Montreal Rant in G Minor

To the sexagenarian who keeps coming into my local supermarket and asking if they’ve found your debit card yet: It’s gone. You’re senescing. Welcome to the losing-stuff years. If there’s any money in your account, your bank will issue you a new card. If not, stay home. In any case, stop wasting everybody’s time.

To the guys who’ve been jackhammering and tearing up the road outside my apartment for the last 6 months, to no effect: I don’t hate you, I hate what you represent. A time in the future when my taxes will be paying for your deafening ineptitude.

To the student who texted me a militantly illiterate message demanding that I raise your grade: Fuck you. Your implication that a teacher of yours would have to be in any way spiteful to give you a shitty grade is comical. We all hit the wall sooner or later; for you, it’s junior college. Your essays are objective evidence that you are significantly dumber than those around you. Despite the monstrous stupidity running rampant at the average university, you will not even get in. Unless your parents are wealthy, you’re screwed.

To the glum Portuguese photographer who sits in the window of your little studio balefully watching the St. Laurent foot traffic pass your business by: I noticed you and, since I like to support the little guy, I made a mental note to get my passport photos done at your place. Imagine my shock when I found out you charge $13, while the big, nasty chain drugstore ½ block away charges $7. No matter how in focus and centered your passport photos are, I’m not going to frame them for posterity. I don’t know if you’re a thieving moron or a moronic thief, but I do know that you should be out of business. Bad luck to you and may you stub your toe in the darkroom.

To the e-Bay store that sold me Nike running shoes that turned out to be cheap fakes shipped to me in a cardboard box from China: Taste a black bear’s ass. Your site guaranteed authentic shoes, and included helpful tips for spotting fake Nikes. I see now that your positive feedback was typed exclusively by the right hands of 14 year-old boys who spend too much time in their rooms and have no need of arch support or a non-marking sole. I hope Phil Knight’s pocket calculator tells him that he can make more money by cracking down on you fraudsters and having the Chinese courts condemn you to suffer every prison movie cliché, except the escape.

To the retro and hipster shops on St. Laurent Boulevard: Stop amassing old junk from rummage sales and dumpsters and rebranding it retro chic by virtue of the fact that it’s in your store. Every time I look in I see the same badly scuffed vinyl records, dirty clothes and worn out kitchenware, watched over by the same tired hoydens with piercings. I’d have more respect for you if you just went ahead and sold vintage piles of dry and crumbling feces. If you’re not ready to lower your hypocrisy threshold to that level, at least take those melting records out of the window and invest in a mop and pail. Better yet, take out student loans, get an education and do something worthwhile.

To the Arabic market where I bought a bag of spices that turned out to be four years old: Inhale deeply from my cat’s litter box. I opened the bag just to confirm that the mixture would have the full aroma of North African desert sand. When you’re running a business, you have to take inventory periodically. When a product gets long in the tooth, mark it down, multiple times if necessary, but if nobody buys it you must accept the cruel logic of the free market and throw it away. Or I might know a few shops on St. Laurent who would take it off your hands, cheap.