The New Socialist Realism

2007-05-26T17:04:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-12T13:53:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-04-03T17:32:00.000-05:00

His Life Lay in the Path of the Wrecking Ball

Between ’Salem’s 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.

2007-03-29T22:42:00.000-05:00

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 changing—changing 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.

2007-02-10T15:44:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-02-07T18:07:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-12-28T14:31:00.000-05:00

Things I Learned While Reading Student Essays

Man has created the society in which we live in.

In Sunshine Sketches people are scared of changes, more people, having scared to take up less part in the society.

We have not yet evolved but evolving for the worst, which one day will be man’s demise.

In this books, issues such as social ineptitude, ignorance towards other races, family structure and even general hygiene are found.

The comedy has been showed on many different aspects in the English Literature, nor not too many writers use dark themes to establish a parody out of it.

The comedy is showed in the contradiction between the ironic events and the dark themes in order to let the reader considerate the facts of life.

I bring up the fact that humans do have a choice to either live on fear and hate to live or live on love and love to live.

Coming from a mathematical background, Lewis Carroll knew exactly how to attract fresh new admirers.

This brings me to ponder the following question: should we base ourselves on poetry to define one’s beliefs?

Shakespeare’s poems were often written to lovers, but it isn’t known if they were his lovers or others’.

A village—it’s more old fashion then new technologies.

Also religion, church, school, family dinner in small community it’s real values, not in big cities just wokring to make a living or get rich.

When someone thinks of a prison, people think of a place filled with bad people. There are reasons behind the actions and why these people are called or referred too as bad. But no one is entirely good or bad all of the time. Everyone has committed a sin, which isn’t a good thing, but others do it more often.

In Annabel Lee’s case we understand she was killed by perhaps a natural disaster and had more of a today’s Hollywood feel to her.

William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, and William Blake, three of the best poets that history has ever seen, strangely with their same names these three Williams have inspired many generations in a lot of there poems.

Love is a deep affection or fondness, it is a feeling of warm personal attachment to a person or to a living organism which occurs very slowly and softly.

2006-12-22T21:01:00.000-05:00

Notes on Teachers

I’ve always thought the key statement about the futility of book learning to be the one in Plato’s Phaedrus. Plato has Socrates say that the invention of writing is unfortunate because a) Writing, unlike a teacher, doesn’t know when to be silent in the face of ignorance, and b) Students depend on writing to remember and so enfeeble their own minds. This is schoolmarm crankiness, but it also suggests a truth about the sad lot of the teacher: no longer the admired illiterate charlatan of a pre-Socratic sect, he becomes the custodian of an impersonal system of information retrieval. Knowledge is no longer magic, transformative of the knower, but a dry text about which we must be careful not to show too much contempt when the teacher is around. After all, he’d fail us if he knew what we really think of him. The conceptual gap between oral culture and cuneiform tablets is vaster than between cuneiform and iPod. As literates, we’ll never understand the perspective of an oral culture. We may as well try to think like a dolphin—or like Socrates. The anthropological and linguistic studies of oral cultures were merely self-referential works. Reading Homer is the closest we can come. And yet, even if we’re strong enough to disregard all spurious “traditions,” what we glean must necessarily be translated into our Gutenberg galaxy. Even Bill and Tedding back in time to hear Homer (who must have considered himself more teacher than entertainer) could not be more than an act of illiterate-tourism. As a humanities teacher, if I ask myself what one thing I would most like to teach my students, it would be hard not to express it as a didactic statement—and so not a “thing” but a “should.” You, the student, “should” make every effort to understand your direct and immediate relationship to culture, language, society and history, because if you do not, you will be enslaved effortlessly by the prevailing false systems of meaning. Something like that. Of course it would be unfair and outrageously self-indulgent to speak that way in a classroom. Besides, the argument has always lain open to criticism. Its most eloquent defense is also its shakiest: that such a belief has sustained multiple generations of secular humanists through centuries of brutal and psychotic Western history. Well then, the precocious student sighs with David Hume, why should future histories be anything like past histories? After all, my education is much more important than any bullshit mawkish theory of Western Civ.—this is my job prospects we’re talking about, etc. At any rate, that “lesson” is one that students must accept or reject for themselves after a long series of courses taught by like-minded teachers. We must accept that most post-secondary students will never face such favourable conditions. The other standard objection is that the teacher, as a demystifier and shareholder in Enlightenment Inc., must teach facts—verifiable things, not normative shoulds. So we have the text. The text is the prop in the teacher’s Keatonesque performance, to be taught and fallen all over by whatever exegetical blarney infects him. The student senses immediately that the answers—or even a molecule of truth—are not in the text. The correct answers are in the miserable dialectic of the teacher’s laboured questions, gestures, inflecting eyebrows, grinding teeth, carefully set shoulders (this is one reason why women, as superior readers of body language, perform better in Socratic environments). Pythagoras taught his followers that by imitating his motions, music and gestures, his students would gain insight into his mathematical doctrines and grow into priests of power. Today’s teacher offers a much more sad-sack model—that of a schoolteacher. The crushing systems of writing and information storage loom and lurk between him and his students. Even memorizing the text wouldn’t satisfy the teacher; he would still claim that you cheated and had failed to satisfy the unwritten criterion of proving that you’re not lazy…so why try? Anyway, it’s obvious he must have failed at something else even to be here—no wonder he hates you.

2006-11-26T16:29:00.000-05:00

From the Poland Files: Industrial Espionage, Part 2

Between dodge ball and insect safaris, we used to tell Polish jokes, Newfie jokes—without context, without malice. We thought that newfie or polack must mean contemptible and nothing else…What a polack thing to do! Most of these jokes had interchangeable butts. There was a bizarre one about Italian cowardice, a holdover from more categorical times that had cocooned itself in the playground gravel to rise again for post-boomers to hear and make of what we could. The Italian tank with five gears—all of them reverse. Madame Beauchamp’s eyes ballooned as she confiscated my sketch of it. I’d seen a tv special on the war and drawn Mussolini sitting on the hatch, ass-backwards with a bottle of wine, watching his contadini get crushed under the tread.

After nine o’clock you could hear the bad guys on tv use words like spick, kyke, polack, wop…monosyllables that held you in a mysterious, thrilling, gnostic power as the hero glowered back.

I never heard the Poles defamed again until I taught business English for Electrolux in Warsaw. Unlike FSO-Daewoo, their HQ were downtown. I could walk down my street, dodging citizens’ unneutered dogs, cross the hulking bridge spanning the intercity trains, and make it to their building by 8am. There was the usual security clearance charade in the lobby. English teachers were not important enough to be given passes, so every time I came I had to present myself and ask permission to be let in—which I always got. If you ever need to gain entrance to a building in a foreign capital, just tell them you’re an English teacher.

The fifteenth floor was pure 80’s power office, all sleek blues and greys, needlefelt carpeting, roaming coffee trolleys and everyone smoking ha-ha-ha round the cooler. On the walls were framed vintage Electrolux ads to provide them with metanarrative. The 50’s housewife in full skirt grinning at her two-tone appliances. Pumps, outboard motors, luxomatic push-button vacuums sweeping up decades of dust: Nothing Sucks Like Electrolux. A man’s professional phone-voice boomed out in decent American English: “They have bought 12,000 H45-K’s…they will sell six! They have no idea what is going on. I told them to stop the lying. I said ‘Stop lying and pretending you understand what your job is and then I can start telling you what you're here for. Once we know that, we'll get back to selling because this is a business for the sake of Jesus!”

The accent, definitely not Polish, was hard to place. His voice trailed off as I got further away. The boardroom had a beech oval table and flipboard. I sat in a leather executive chair and reviewed my lesson. Verbs of motion: come, go, leave, arrive. To, in, at, towards. To is a preposition, come is a verb. Repeat after me: "To! Come!" I waited but no one came. A woman poked her head in the door, saw me, inhaled sharply and retreated. I was glad about not having to go through with another miserable grammar lesson, but then again I didn’t know what to do. Petty thoughts passed through my mind. Should I call my school? How long did I have to stay before leaving? Was I going to get paid? At last I packed up and headed for the elevator. On the way, passing the same office, I looked in and our eyes met. He was a heavyset blond man in a slate grey suit. When he saw me in my jeans, oversized shirt and long hair, he didn’t know what to make of me.

“And you are…?” he asked, as if addressing an invasive species.

“I’m the new English teacher,” I said. “I…my class was supposed to be in room 1501.” He cocked his head. “But there must’ve been a mix-up because nobody...came.” He shot a black look at his desk. Lifting his finger to keep me waiting, he called up underlings to report later for a bollocking. Smiling, he invited me into his office.

“You are an American?”

“Canadian, actually.”

Wistfully: “Ah…Canada. Beautiful country.”

“Oh, you’ve been?”

“No. Cancelled several fishing trips, though. Cigarette?” He flipped open a cedar box full of those Pure Virginia brown-paper cigarettes you pass by at duty-free shops. I took one and so did he. It was so strong I smoked it like a cigar until I left it to burn out in his crystal ashtray.

“I must apologize for my employees not turning up,” he told me. “Perhaps you’ve been here long enough already to know how hard it is to motivate them.”

“Well, this is my first day here….”

He smiled benignly. “No, please, what need you to cover up for them? There are historical circumstances, I would not deny it. But as we say in Sweden, history cuts both ways. You’re free to complain about outsiders coming to partition your country over and over…but what does this say about you that you keep getting partitioned, eh?” I told him I didn’t know. He laughed, his cufflinks shaking.

“I admire you but I don’t envy you,” he said. “A teacher in this country. And the stage is set for success, and the Polack needs English to connect with the rest of the civilized world, and here you are, ready to give it to him for practically nothing.” I laughed nervously. He swivelled in his chair to look down on the city.

“Polacks. Lazy. Drunks. Idiots. Stalin was a thug but he said out loud what otherwise can only be said in children’s games.” He swivelled back to me and stood to see me to the door. His bad mood was gone. “Nice to have met you. Hmm…Canadian. Fish?”

“Sorry?”

“Do you fish?”

“Not really.”

“That’s too bad.” He looked me up and down. “Well, you won’t find it so bad here. The Polish girls are very Catholic—they’ll do whatever you want. Time goes by fast, enjoy yourself. Easier to teach English than the Protestant work ethic!”

2006-11-20T19:45:00.000-05:00

From the Poland Files: Industrial Espionage, English Style

Wup-wup-wup-wup-wup-wup-shhhh…wup-wup-wup-shhhhhhhh… wup-wup-wup-wup-wup-shhhhhhhhhhhh. Instead of accelerating, the trams in Warsaw shake and worble up the tracks until some negative feedback is tripped and shooshing hydraulic stabilizers kick in: shhhhhh. The no. 23 crossed the Vistula and lesser rivers on its way north. It was crowded, but I could get a seat somewhere between the Russian market and the shacktowns where they grew their own cabbages and beets. A Platonic female voice, a slavicized Star Trek computer, would call out the stops overcorrectly, emphasizing the nasal vowels as if there were a government white paper pronouncing them endangered. I formed the sounds of the stops with my lips, trying not to think about what I had to do.

The ex-pat asylum that gave me a bed and beer money made me pay my way teaching business English. This meant they billed out at 300 zloty per 50-minute hour for sending out, via subsidized public transportation, a snivelling, underqualified cipher whose task it was to impersonate a teacher. The cipher was paid 30 zloty and handed a photocopied map of how to reach the kiosk selling the cheapest tram tickets.

Within this system, the newest ciphers got the in-company teaching gigs noone else wanted. So picture me on the no. 23 tram wup-wup-wupping northwards past the six-by-six beet gardens and potato vodka bottle glass and pasturage and lives too badly shitfucked by faux-Marxism to ever get anything out of the free market…rattling north on rusty rails to the low-rent moonscape where FSO-Daewoo swooped down, sank in its talons, saw that it was good, and said: “Here. Never mind the cow patties. Here we shall general our way into the Polish market."

Vital facts: FSO was the Polish government-controlled car-tel with the catchy, monopolist-smug social-realist name: Frabryka Samochodów Osobowych, or People’s Car Manufacturing Company. Daewoo was a Korean electronics and automotive zaibatsu that Enronned out of existence in 2000. But for a few brief years, these two companies—one with no hope of competing in the free market, the other living from audit to audit—refused to die the death and siamesed into a producer of cars whose size and quality were in the range between subcompacts and Hot Wheels.

One of the more manageable problems of the merger was communication. The Polish engineers and salespeople weren’t going to pick up Korean on their breaks, so I was going to come twice a week and teach them Anglo-Saxon. The tram shuddered to a stop to let me and only me off at a stop named Zakłady Mięsne. With my limited Polish, this seemed to—and still seems to—mean Meat Factories. Aside from the FSO-Daewoo plant, it was Childe Roland territory out there: stunted shrubs and tracts of gravelly mud about to freeze into protoplasmic lumps. I shuffled over the parking lot to security to present my letters of introduction. A guard with a ruined nose accepted them like a signed confession. His heavy fingers were slow to dial on what must have been his first touch-tone phone. He waved over his shoulder for me to sit down. Eventually, a grinning blond engineer called Mirek came to fetch me.

“You are English man?”

“Well…yes.”

“You come.”

He showed me a few open-concept detail units and desultory shop floors on the way to the classroom. It was like watching them on 16mm film. They reminded of the Flint, Michigan of Roger and Me.

For lack of anything else to say: “So what do you work on, Mirek?”

“I develop a car that run on butter.”

“Excuse me?”

“Is our goal to make this car by five years.”

A moustache wearing a tall man passed us in the hall, slapping its hard hat in recognition of Mirek, who said nothing.

“What kind of car?” I asked.

“Butter power. No more gasolines. In futurity, everything running on butters.”

“You mean batteries.”

“Yes, buttery. I very like buttery.” We walked some more. “You know, our cars are most quiet in the World.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“No, no, you ask why.”

“Why what?”

“Why are most quietest.”

“Why are your cars the quietest?”

“Because…your knees covering your ears!” He dissolved into a little fit of nitrous oxide.

We were approaching raised voices. In a drafting room a Pole and Korean were arguing in broken English over a schematic diagram of an engine. They beckoned me in.

“You are…English man?” one of them asked.

“Um…yes.”

The Pole smiled triumphantly as he placed one hand on my shoulder. With the other, he pointed expertly with his index fingernail to an infinitesimal gizmo in the deepest bowels of the engine. “Then you will please to tell my friend…what is that!” I bent over the diagram—drafting pencil on transparent paper. I could think of no way even to describe the shape of the part or how many sides it had or what it might do; it was no less complex than I imagined an entire engine to be. One of those little Maxwellian demons who lurks in the heart of the machine, enforcing the laws of physics.

When I looked up, the two engineers were watching me, hopefully, nervously, waiting for me to settle their argument. Mirek had disappeared without my noticing. I could hear the buzzing fluorescent lights. They didn’t know what I knew, so they couldn’t say what they did. I didn’t know what they knew, so I couldn’t do anything at all.

* TO BE CONTINUED *

2006-10-16T12:14:00.000-05:00

Movie Review: Mad Love (The Hands of Orlac) Karl Freund, 1935

With apologies to Russian literature, Peter Lorre is Dr. Gogol, a spooky sawbones obsessed with shock actress Yvonne’s nightly role of torturee in the Spanish Inquisition. Naturally, Yvonne is repulsed by the doctor’s baldness, affected mannerisms, sleepy eyes and Hungarian accent. But when her Chopin wannabe husband Orlac is mangled in a train wreck, she needs the master surgeon’s help to get Orlac tickling the ivories again. The purity of their love is established, since Yvonne thinks of no other reason to get her husband’s hands functional. The mad doctor comes through madly—by madly grafting a freshly-executed murderer’s mad hands onto Orlac. Madness. The hands take on a life of their own, Orlac stalks Yvonne, the sun doesn’t come up for three days, and the police race to solve the trail of murders.

This was Peter Lorre’s first Hollywood film. Playing a psychopath as only he can, there’s more than a trace of M in his performance. He plays perfectly the baby-faced boy-genius set adrift in a gnostically flawed cosmos of lust, deceit and rage. There’s “I, a poor peasant, have mastered science…why can’t I master love?!”, in the same tone as “Rick, they’re after me. You’ve got to help me!” from Casablanca. Like Anthony Hopkins and Alan Rickman, Lorre refrains from scenery-chewing, instead creeping us out by bringing class and excellent manners to crazies who can go off at any moment. Lorre’s reaction shots, especially, show a world-weary familiarity with all the sadism, masochism, voyeurism and blood-lust the Hayes Office smugly thought it had kept off the screen.

This movie can be hard to find, and even if you do, it may be on a scungy old VHS or in an expensive DVD box set. There are some cut-down and censored versions out there: the full runtime should be around 70 minutes. Look for it.

If you were going to take the story more seriously than you should, you could say it’s a dandy Frankenstein-inspired tale of mind-body dualism. So yeah, the body can be guilty of crimes, and the mind innocent, yet the two can't be punished separately. Dr. Frankenstein, the mind, creates a body whose actions cannot be controlled, fails to separate himself from it, and perishes. Outside of the Shelley-medical-industrial complex, this is the old demonic possession tale. I feel inspired to teach a class on horror literature and film: The Human Body Outta Control. Poe! Stephen King’s old short stories! H. P. Lovecraft! Pet Sematary! Scanners! Night of the Living Dead! The Exorcist! The Thing! The Fly! Further suggestions welcome.

2006-10-10T13:32:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving in Toronto

For the second year running, I spent the Thanksgiving weekend in Toronto with my good friends. They have what Kim Jong-Il really wants: the World’s greatest turkey recipe. To wit, Napa Valley turkey (no, this is not bad red wine). They’ve been roasting and basting and invasively taking the temperature of this bubblyjock every year for twelve years now. How good was it? Let me count the ways: tender, briny, juicy, salty, gamy. This year I realized that even the night of the dinner is part of the recipe, leading up to the morning-after delicacy of perfect turkey sandwichvana. The key is to stuff as many peas as you can into the sandwich. Really, it’s the peas.

Otherwise, just good times in the T-Dot. The right mix of sentimentality and shuddering over undergrad days. Everyone in Montréal talks smack about Toronto whether they’ve lived there or not. This is starting to get my goat. Toronto's a great town. There’s a lot to be said for:

1) drivers who look out for signs so at least they know what laws they’re breaking.

2) vestigial courtesy.

3) superior public transportation.

4) this West Germanic way people have of expressing themselves. It reminded me of Frisian.

5) fine outposts of the coming Revolution like the Communist Daughter on Dundas St. They understand that party members need refreshment.

So lay off Toronto. Face it, if your career were going anywhere, you’d be there too. What? You won’t be a sell-out? I don’t see anyone making you an offer. I didn’t know you had anything besides self-deceptive principles to sell. You procrasturbating loser. As if you could make Toronto rent. This is the big city. Even the bums are big-city bums. They have more pride than mangy Montréal sans-abris...more pride than you. You’ve always nurtured a secret love for the Leafs. You know where your deposits go. The symbolism of the CN Tower can’t be homophobically snorted away. Even now, as you read, your eyelids are getting heavier…and heavier…you have a hankering for a double-double and Boston Cream and edible oil product…they’ll help you work that 60-hour week…that’s right…you’re soaring over the hick towns…shedding upon them your Milquetoast days and ways...you’re already in Toronto...now your sense of inferiority can be less geographical and more purely personal.

2006-09-30T18:43:00.000-05:00

Confessions of a Boho Cinemaniac: Nothin’ Beats My Local Art Moviehouse (Take That, Becardiganed Bourgeois Idolaters of Box Office!)

When I’ve had my fill of pixilated airborne snakes and pirate sideburns, I make my way to the humble little picture house in my neighbourhood. I duck in, buy popcorn from the Tammy Faye look-alike who’s always smoking, and sit back to enjoy a good flick. I find I don’t even need to bring a date to enjoy myself.

With only one screen, the Cinéma de L’Amour will never have the greenbacks to serve up Box Office dynamite. Instead, their programmers scour the independent and foreign circuits (especially, it would seem, France and the Czech Republic) to bring me reels you’ll never see at your suburban, quiet-desperation, Starbucks-sipping Cineplex.

As a regular, I’m welcomed by name. The other kinoscenti are local eminentoes: landlords, professional chess kibitzers, and Portuguese men in their fifties who tend to keep their bulky coats and dark sunglasses on until the film starts. These guys are so into it that they won’t even sit next to you while watching. You can see them nodding furiously in recognition of the director’s auteurial savvy. And they’re not about to be distracted by their bladders—hence the frequent bathroom breaks. Afterwards, I’ve tried to get the odd filmlovers’ discussion going in the lobby, but I guess they feel I’m a little wet behind the ears yet to have anything worthwhile to add. Nevertheless! Amid the intense, anticipatory silence, it’s clear what the “L’Amour” is all about: the love of good cinéma.

I’m aware that independent film is more “hard-hitting” than the usual Hollywood fare. In fact, if you watch attentively, you’ll start to notice that through subtle editing and lighting effects, the love scenes tend to be more liberal. Hey, I’m sorry, but the beamer-driving, median-income-earning stout burghers are just going to have to deal with it. There will always be snivelling Babbitts to take offense at this kind of direct, no-nonsense art. These guys just don’t get irony. Take last week’s third of a quadruple-bill: Sgt. Pecker’s Lonely Hearts Club Gangbang, an uncompromising, scathing, satirical, hyphenated-adjective look back at 1960’s popular culture. But for the prude-shtapo, it was just a clichéd love story of the old boy-meets-girl-and-girl-and-girl variety. Well, all I can do is quote promoter Bobby the Brain Heenan, when he said of the sport of professional wrestling (no link to L’Amour should be inferred), “For those who get it, no explanation necessary; for those who don’t, no explanation will do.”

But I’m troubled by all the empty seats I always see around me at the Cinéma de L’Amour. I’d like them to be filled with local families instead of butter stains. Sad to say, a time may come when the playbill reads “Fermé” instead of “I Can’t Believe I Did the Whole Team.” I don’t want to see the theatre go out of business or be prostituted into an acting school or frenchie community centre. Come on so-called Canada Council for the Arts, we need these outposts of independent culture. I’m calling on my readers to make a difference here. Hey, it’s only $4 to get in, and they have a new feature every week. So grab a ticket and I’ll see you there. Just don’t sit next to me.

2006-09-25T18:54:00.000-05:00

An Open Letter to Wal-Mart:

Mailed to:

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Bentonville, Arkansas, USA 72716-8611

September 25, 2006

Dear Wal-Mart:

I have taken up space in these pages defending you against the demented charges of the liberal cancer. Whether you were aware of my efforts, I don’t know. I saw that it was beneath you to reply to those lumpen, as it would have been to thank me for horsewhipping them. You have real work to do. As for them, they may carry on their witch hunts against the successful. I shall stand by you on principle.

Or so I thought. Today I took a trip to the South Shore of Montréal to exchange my Ontario driver’s license for a Québec one. Next to what you would call the DMV, shone the aluminum siding of one of your outlets. In the parking lot, associates in Québecois true blue vests tapped their cigarettes into the ashtrays provided. They were so focused on their next challenge that their faces looked almost blank. Just like you, they have work to do. I hadn’t planned to, but I decided to go in, elbows out, and hunt for bargains. You see, I’d never actually visited one of your stores.

I expected a wide selection of lowish to moderate quality goods at unbeatable prices. Even your rabid detractors grant you that much. So I set out in search of toothpaste, cleaning products, breakfast cereal, pens, etc. OK, so you don’t carry Allenbury’s soap, or the Pentel pens I like, or my brand of garbage bags, or a few other things. I guess it wasn’t my day. You’d get that stuff in for me next month. But what really got me was that among the stuff you did have, your prices were higher than my neighbourhood markets (Segal’s and Sakaris).

Now, the fame of Segal’s may not have spread quite as far as Bentonville. Those who know Segal’s Grocery know that it’s a special place—the prices are phenomenal and it’s deservedly famous. But these guys have to pay St. Laurent rent, and they have one zillionth the floor space of a Wal-Mart, and they have a skeleton staff, and they’re killing you. Sakaris prices are more normal, but I found comparisons not in your favour. Thirty cents more for a box of Cheerios means something to a coupon-clipping Scot. Everywhere I turned in Wal-Mart, everything was comically shoddy or overpriced. There was almost noone else there. The muzak was awful. I stopped humming. The muzak stopped. There was no muzak. I had to get out.

Asphyxiating, I grabbed a family-sized bottle of Pine-Sol and checked out. Back in the lot, I read the label: Poison, Do Not Swallow. Why had I bought this product I’d never bought before? I had floor cleaner at home. I sweated freely. The grizzled Wal-Mart associates, puffing away, looked me over. They seemed to say, Well bub, are you gonna do it? We all used to teach like you. But none of us had the guts to do it.

Curses and derision on you Wal-Mart, and bad luck to you. Your prices aren’t the lowest. You’re a sham and a shame. You suck. You have no reason to exist. You’re the thing that should not be. You're a fleck of sand in God's eye. You’re a symptom of the post-modern whatchamacallit. You’re stealing my oxygen. You killed Socrates. You make my students play violent video games. You make people like me into incoherent, ranting liberals.

Sirs: I don’t intend to take my business to Wal-Mart any longer.

Yours very truly,

2006-09-25T00:05:00.000-05:00

From the Poland Files: He Did It for La Patrie

After work one day, we went to Mózg, the town art bar. Mózg means Brain, or A Brain, or even The Brain. It was spacious and comfortably pretentious: black velvet curtains hung on the walls, grotty sofas, beer-stained canvases for sale. The clientele were mainly young men with ponytails and glasses who wanted to discuss politics, and lovely girls who didn’t. At Mózg you could buy 40 kinds of vodka, and two kinds of beer—both of which went down like razors. Behind a mesh of chickenwire, there was a girl drilling the anti-theft devices out of cassettes and selling them.

Steve got in the first round of beers. We English teachers shuffled to our corner sofa and got down to another night of ETT (English Teacher Talk, or shop talk. The acronym was based on the pedagogical concept of TTT—Teacher Talking Time. Both TTT and ETT were supposed to be minimized to create nurturing space for the emergence of a real conversation.)

Kieran complained about his students. Sarah complained about her students. Steve, fiddling with his earring, complained about his students. I started to tell them about a great book I was reading, interrupting myself to complain about my students. Everyone drank furiously—this was going to be a long night.

Thankfully, Will arrived, plunked himself down and told us about the time he used to be a parking valet in London and had had to drive an arch-criminal’s Harley the wrong way through the Dartford Tunnel to get it to an armored parking garage on time. He bobbed, he weaved, he ducked mirrors. Later he got a phial of poppers as a tip. We nodded appreciatively as he drained his glass. Will and his shoulder-length red hair were twenty years older than the rest of us. None of us had any real idea where they’d come from. One of the new teachers, too clever by half, began asking questions trying to pick holes in the story, but we shut him up quick. It was a great story, and we were glad to hear it. Will’s pasts were replete with sex, drugs, violence and John Bull outdrinking and overcoming all feeble gestures towards modernity. Like cartoons, there was no problem of guilt or neurosis. The dead were reassembled off-screen to turn up again with such energy that there was no time to ask questions. All there was to do in this town was drink or go to one of the two one-screen theatres to soak yourself in Hollywood’s more bankable reels. You took diversion where you could get it.

It was shaping up to be an unremarkable night, when a very large Polish man in jeans and a sweatshirt approached us. He had the #2 shaved head, jutting chin and heavy build that you only see on Polish men or professional boxers. He asked whether he might be permitted to sit down. We said sure. He sat down. He looked at us in turn. I tried to guess whether I came up to his shoulder. In a steady voice he said something in Polish that we didn’t understand. We swallowed hard. Then he said in good French:

“I overheard you speaking. Forgive my rudeness. I always enjoy speaking with foreigners because it’s the only real talk you get around here.” I got over my surprise to translate this for my friends. We were all surprised: English, German, Russian, maybe, but you just didn’t meet locals here who spoke French. His name was Grzegorz. He was indeed a local. Before Solidarity and the fall of communism he’d vamoosed to join up with the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. Those were his brothers, his real family. Those were men who acted like men. Once you’ve lived in the desert with men and drunk under the desert moon and fried and eaten snakes together and practiced garroting each other, you’re brothers.

Following our approach with Will, we egged him on and asked him all kinds of fool questions about secret missions and death and glory. He clammed up and half turned away, telling us that he knew we thought he was a dog. No, we told him, you’re no dog. Tell us more about Tunisia. No, he said, it’s no use, to you I’ll always be a dog, a dirty dog. Not at all, we said, winking to each other, how can we show you you could never be a low-down dirty dog to us?

He said we could look at his tattoos, that would help. A couple of us demurred. But by now we were high on our own hilarity and really kinda curious so we said, OK, show us. He lifted his sweatshirt, turned away to reveal the kidney area of one side of his back. The swastika was black, turned 45º, about six inches across, scored into him with a blunt needle unlikely to have been held by any very sober hand. Kieran groaned. Sarah clapped a hand to her mouth. Grzegorz rolled up his sleeve to show us more. He had some cryptograms jotted across his bicep.

“I know you think I’m a racist dog,” he said. “But this says death to Jews and Muslims. We all got this one when we were initiated.” Well of course he did. Will tried to change the subject by asking about the fate of a bar he used to bounce at in Tunisia. The rest of us tried out cowardly excuses to ready ourselves for a cowardly back door sneak-out. When Grzegorz saw how antsy we were, he told us he hadn’t meant to offend us, and he was taking us all out for a steak dinner. We pointed out that it was past midnight and Polish restaurants close at eight. Besides, even though we were English teachers trained to live on beer, some of us had actually had dinner.

“You will come with me,” he said, in the same toneless French. “Taxis for everyone. I’m buying you all steak dinners.”

“Nowhere to go. Next time.”

“I know a woman in the country who’ll cook us all steak dinners.”

Yes, his plan was to tumble his poor aunt or sister-in-law out of bed, tie on her apron and make her cook for ten. Jesus. Did he really think she had a decade of fresh steaks and trimmings in the fridge? What did he really want with us? Just what bad habits had he picked up during those long Tunisian nights, staring up into the mad face of Orion? Was I going to be just another statistic—the latest English teacher turned gimp? Would we be pressed into his local chapter of the Legion and marched across the desert to garrote Semites indiscriminately? We were cowards. We knew this had ceased to be a time for politeness, but we went on declining as politely as we could. He would have none of it, we were leaving in five minutes for steak dinners. He got up to piss. We scrambled for the door and clattered down the stairs and through the alley to the silent street. The icy air burnt our lungs. Not far away we poured ourselves into taxis whose moustachioed, Sobieski-smoking drivers whisked us home.

The next day we could not agree whether from the street a voice had been heard booming out “I am not a dog! I am not a dog!” But sometimes since, bored with those who pass for lunatics these days, I like to think that I did hear it.

2006-09-18T01:04:00.000-05:00

Papal Infallibility Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

What is this garbage news making the rounds about the pope “apologizing”? The New York Times, Washington Post and others have reported with straight faces that the pope is “sorry”—that the reaction to his anti-Islamic remarks has not been the one he wanted. Wha’ Happen’? Any six year-old knows that “I’m sorry you reacted the way you did” ain’t no apology. What a sheer waste of column inches. You know the copy editors must have had second thoughts about running this kind of Catholic-pandering pabulum since they dragged a bona fide Vatican scholar out of mothballs to tell us this is all “extremely unusual.”

The maunderings of the popes and ayatollahs and mullahs are not news. These guys believe in angels and devils and the inferiority of women and an impending purification through apocalypse. The Catholic Church officially accepted the Copernican model of the solar system in 1999. They stand firm against gay rights, birth control, and penicillin. Well, he’ll probably come out against penicillin next week. It’s not 1106, it’s 2006, and if it’s not quite science fiction, if we haven't achieved all we should have, at least we can be serious. Agenda-setting media, please stop reporting this stuff so we can get on with the real world.

Poem of the day: T. S. Eliot's "The Hippopotamus"

2006-09-17T14:13:00.000-05:00

Learning Teaching/ Teaching Learning,

and Other Irritating Antimetabole (Quiz Thursday)

I’m teaching four college English courses this fall, mostly night school. Two introductions to college English, one class on the American satirical novel, one survey of genres through humour.

And literary humour is serious business. I make sure they know that as long as I'm in charge, there'll be nothing funny about it. I'm well aware of the multinational publishing and entertainment synergies waiting to gobble up my top students with six-figure starting contracts. All their lives, these kids have had it drilled into them by parents and tv that the only way to get ahead in an interconnected global economy is to study English literature. A tear welling up, one of my students told me how his parents back in their Chinese village used to dream of him going to a Canadian school in order to master writing essays comparing the satirical techniques of Leacock and Nabokov. Now he is on the verge of achieving their dream, and he already has a five-book deal inked with an academic publisher. I smiled broadly to keep my chin from wobbling.

For once, my lesson is clear: now that we've abandoned the horse-and-buggy Copernican system for the hypercaffeinated hack and slash of the Thomasfriedmanian Flatworld, only students who have been trained in the latest rhetorical and compositional skills will be able to compete. More and more, college English essays and even specialized articles are being outsourced to literary sweatshops staffed by young and ambitious Indian and Honduran belletrists—some as young as 12. In North America, those students who can’t keep up with the latest Chaucer theory are shunted into “softer” fields like law, computer science and engineering. And all most of these graduates have to show for their stint in higher education is a bitter look as they hand you your grande frappuccino.

This is a great shame. We should respect the value of a degree whether it’s in liberal arts or not. There are other ways to value people than whether they can tell you the difference between a Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet. What about those who rebel at the thought of giving in to social pressure, taking a quick-and-dirty degree in English or philosophy, and getting that easy job, car, and house that come with it (if you translate the Latin fine print on their BA’s)? Are they not men? Why punish someone who followed his boyhood idealism into inorganic chemistry or marketing?

We need to bring these disillusioned folks back into the fold. To start with, English departments could be more generous in sharing their massive research endowments with their weak sisters. As for my small role, I remind my students not to lord it over anyone that their financial security is guaranteed. A college education should be about more than just broadening your horizons and imagination by exploring the greatest ideas and writings in human history. Learning to use WordPerfect, to make smells in a laboratory, to do tequila body shots, to find your true identity—be it jock, nerd, preppie, slut or freak—all this will make you a more complete person and better able to make conversation with those less fortunate than you.

2006-09-09T16:16:00.000-05:00

Notes on Inequality

Of all our motivations, greed is the most quantifiable. This fact explains why statistics on economic inequality are more compelling than “data” on gender, cultural or age difference.

Recently, I was reminded of a great thought experiment in economics: imagine witnessing an hour-long parade of society’s earners in which each man’s height corresponds to his income. Call the average man 5’10’’, then someone earning an average income will appear that tall, if less then shorter, if more then taller. What you would actually see, in any modern economy, is forty-five minutes of insects and midgets and dwarfs jogging past, then ten minutes of six and seven footers. In the last few minutes, giants ten to thirty feet and more. In the waning seconds of the parade, things get weird, as the paraders—rock stars and athletes—get so huge you can’t see their heads from the ground. Finally, at the very end, Bill Gates’s sensible shoes descend like the trademark Monty Python foot and squish everything.

As economic pornography, this vision allows different forms of voyeurism. First off, it seems hard to reject the idea that the giants are unjust and have somehow appropriated their stature from the vertically challenged. The whole thing reminds me of an Industrial Worker poster of the nineteen-teens: Pyramid of the Capitalist System (click to enlarge).

This image makes the same height = riches parallel, with a good dose of medieval Wat Tylerism (note the 3 estates of the realm on top). The nefarious Capitalists are just above the oppressed masses, living it up, and surely, as Marx noted, taking the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

But getting back to the parade of inequality, some problems come up. How can you prove that the riches of the wealthy belong to the poor? When I pull his string, my talking Nietzsche doll says that this statement makes no sense—that it’s just a symptom of our Christian slave morality. As all my aristopals who were kicking back poolside in St. Petersburg 1917 keep telling me, had they known all along that the poor in fact own everything, they would have had no incentive to earn or at least preserve their ill-gotten fortunes. The point got them nowhere. And Russian backwardness is as topical today as it was in 1750.

Vast economic inequality is one of those dreary facts of life that gets along just fine without philosophical justification. Scottish Enlightenment Economics, objectivism and supply-side economics make virtues of self-interest and even avarice, but the truly rich have never wasted their time with such salon-conversation stuff. Why should they? It’s always been the task of cheap job-seekers to write the government and academic documents cloaking laissez-faire in the spirit of the times.

The Bush administration’s tax cuts for the wealthy are a lightning rod for what passes for debate on this issue. To hear many commentators tell it, the cuts are not only unjust but insane, bankrupting Washington in an anti-New-Deal Skull and Bones ritual suicide. This last charge is scurrilous. The administration knows what it and the Democrats will never say out loud: the wealthy create wealth for investment, the poor, by definition, do not. You can question the social justice of tax cuts but not their viability as a strategy for propping up the economy in a difficult time (whether it's the optimal strategy is another question). The treasure of the wealthy does not just go into stuffing their mattresses and wife-swapping: it must be spent outside the black market or invested. But seeing the cuts as an effect rather than a cause of inequality doesn’t make for exciting, politically-polarized editorial copy.

Aside from the American government, Wal-Mart takes the most flak for unpatriotically “creating” inequality. The Matterhorn of this brand of blarney is the shoestring documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. Ex-employees complaining of racism on the job (something minorities with no education or skills never find outside Wal-Mart), mom and pop’s hardware store forced to shut down (no interviews with customers—they have none), enabling thieves and rapists to operate in their parking lots, the Bentonville cabal’s inexplicable reluctance to don Santa suits and give its millions of Bob Cratchits generous benefits packages, and other crimes against humanity.

Pull the other one. No doubt upper management are cynical plutes floating fag jokes at the golf club, but they work for an American public corporation designed to turn a profit for its shareholders. The worst that can befall them is termination. To hang onto the Marxist fantasy and The Capitalist Pyramid, you have to equate Karl’s English midlander, cigar-chomping, wife-swapping venture capitalists with today’s salary-leeching, health- and self-conscious, psychoanalyzed, interchangeable MBA’s. As such, they’re at least entitled to pass the buck.

I’ve never been to a Wal-Mart outlet and I don’t particularly regret it. I see Wal-Mart as a successful exploiter of inequality, not the cause or even the catalyst of inequality. Like McDonald's or the corporation in abstracto, ad nauseam, Wal-Mart presents a brand-name soft target for the weekend culture jammer. A free market means agents are free to act as Wal-Mart acts. And consumers are free to buy their tv dinner trays there. Revel in your superior taste if you like, but leave them alone. Freedom means inequality and suffering for most: your freedom is naught when you’re at the mercy of everyone else’s freedom. In a perfectly egalitarian world, no one has to get hysterical because we’re all 5’10’’ and we all work and shop at the same place for the same pay. I can hear the greeters now: "Welcome to Gulag-Mart! Welcome to Gulag-Mart!"

2006-09-03T15:19:00.000-05:00

On Turning Thirty: The Heyday of the Blood

30 today! One of my favourite Preston Sturges lines is “I’ve got this terrible milestone hanging around my neck.” If you’re getting your RDA of magnesium and zinc, you can expect, six or eight times, to close out a decade. The odometer of life turns over, winks, and rolls on. At these times it’s hard not to steal a moment to check the carnage in the rear view mirror, and peer ahead to the murky horizon, before settling back to dodging all the potholes and shit and roadkill that keep popping up right in front of you. There wasn’t much continuity to my twenties. All I can say is that wherever I went, there I was. I took advantage of my opportunities to make mistakes that would be forgiven such a greenhorn. I travelled and acquainted myself with the full richness of the gong show of life. My friends know that I love to begin tall tales with “I remember one time when I was in Poland….” For those who need references, that was a period at the close of the last millennium, 1996-1999 (e-mail was just a hazy dream; we communicated by dropping messages into pneumatic tubes). It was the rest of times, it was the worst of times. It was a magical time when any young Canadian ne’er-do-well could appear to have work teaching English to Slavs. And it was a lot like work, except for the getting paid part. Highlights of what I learned: 1) Household management. During my stint, I was bunked consecutively with an Englishman, a Scotsman, an American, and a Peruvian. Domestic bliss. One week, I’d buy all the groceries and do all the cleaning, and then the next week, I’d buy all the groceries and do all the cleaning. 2) The power of shrewd negotiation. My employers told me to enter the country on a tourist visa and then they’d arrange a work visa once I arrived. When I got there I found out that they’d had their fingers crossed and I’d be held hostage as a dirty scab and persona non grata. 3) Personal hygiene. Krakow, 1997. Unemployed and slowly imprinting myself into a friend’s sofa, I had to get back my self-respect. A waiter caught me shaving in his restaurant. Only one twist made it awkward: because of my villainous Polish, I’d accidentally bought toothpaste instead of shaving cream, along with a plastic Bic single-blade razor. I’ll always remember the stunned look on the poor man’s face as I peered at him with a face of minty green lather. 4) The sanctity of love. My girlfriend of five months, Edyta, announced that she was ready to middle-aisle it, and we’d best sit down with a calendar. I hesitated, she dropped me like Kryptonite, and last I heard she was happily wed to the guy she’d dropped to go out with me. Since he was her first love, it was only right for her to step up and make an honest man of him. I spent the rest of my twenties getting edumacated at the University of Toronto and McGill. This was the compromise I worked out when I discovered that no way has yet been found to attend the University of Toronto while living in Montreal. I cherish all the clichés and quotes about edumacation, especially the inner strength you get from having a reasonable idea of how ignorant you are. Let’s not forget the Christian humility to be gained from squandering public funds to study neither science, business, medicine nor law. I look ahead to my thirties without resolutions or disillusionment. As for my menagerie of bad habits, I’m counting on my laziness to keep them in check. I don’t have much left to learn about money, having already earned my first million—Polish zloty. With my edumacation, I’ve filled my noggin to the brim, and never have to worry about digesting any new ideas. I look forward to struggling and striving and proving myself all over again. Look at this pic of me, aged 21. Whenever I feel that I may not have accomplished all I can, I remember that I used to hang around bars with a cigarette megaphone. How far I've come. I feel better already.

2006-08-31T09:06:00.000-05:00

Movie Review: Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947) I heard about a famous scene in a movie called Possessed with Joan Crawford. I watched it but the scene wasn't there. Strangely, it turns out that there are two films by this title, both starring Crawford, telling different stories. The one I watched is a melodrama/film noir. Crawford plays Louise Howell, a steady nurse in charge of a rich matron whose mind is failing. She croaks under mysterious circumstances and eventually the husband pops the question to the nurse. But her marriage is just a ruse to make an ex-lover jealous. When he doesn't respond as she thought, she starts losing her mind. As the stakes keep getting higher and her step-daughter is drawn into the maelstrom of lust and deceit, Howell spirals down into hallucination and clinical psychosis. This well-crafted film is worth watching for several reasons. The emphasis on Freudian mental health and the panacea of psychiatry is a nifty little time capsule recalling Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). There's a brilliantly campy scene in which Howell, now a semi-catatonic mental patient in a bare cell, narrates her sordid past to two male shrinks who've injected her with sodium pentathol. Then they withdraw to confer, clicking their tongues as they deplore her "classic schizoid symptoms." Thus female desire is pathologized. But make no mistake: Possessed is a dark film that goes beyond revenge and murder to question the integrity of work and even the family in post-war America. In the final act, especially, it becomes clear that Howell is in a race to understand herself and her proper female role before she goes mad. There's an amazing sequence where Howell, claws out, has a blazing row with her step-daughter. The accusations and jealousy keep ramping up, until we seem to see a murder (reminiscent of the death of detective Arbogast in Psycho). The image dissolves and we understand that it was all one of her hallucinations. This device became common enough in films 30 years later, but here it's way ahead of its time. The fact that so much of the descent into madness is set in a beautiful Los Angeles home made me think of David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997). As another example, Bernhardt uses hand-held subjective shots to take us through the dark house. Hand-held shots in a 1940's studio picture! As in Lynch, nothing happens, but it's somehow terrifying to be confronted with the ground zero of domestic life. As a self-conscious "woman's picture" of Hollywood's golden age, this film recalls others such as Mildred Pierce (1945). Again, the Crawford character is headstrong and engagingly bitchy as she overcomes menial work and sexism to marry up—only to face a string of betrayals. In the world of these films, material success seems a little too easy to achieve, but then again the threats of downward mobility, madness and the heroine fooling herself into believing her own female performance are intensified. So the moral calculus works itself out. Highly recommended.

2006-08-30T10:41:00.000-05:00

I let a friend of mine talk me into starting my own blog. So far I don't seem to be Luddite-stupid enough to plead that I can't figure out the technology, but I won't rule it out for the future. So here we are. I'm going to start out, on the principle of so-far-out-it's-in, skylarking as a Stalinist apparatchik. But is this anything more than an irrelevant joke, in my trademark dubious taste? What is it that attracts me so much to the propaganda of the past, the more blatant, the better (e.g. my collection of vintage guidance counsellor films)? I suppose it lets us imagine that there were times of greater certainty. Also, pat as it sounds, there are parallels between the intellectual culture of Stalinism and today: elected officials seem more and more interchangeable, castrati with their arias of impotence. The debate is not between ideologies as such but rather a debate about whether ideology should matter at all, since we know all the answers, we've reached the end of history, there's just a little tinkering left to do, etc. However, like any kidnapping carried out as a practical joke, one could take this comparison too far. By "New Socialist Realism," I mean two things: 1) to evoke nostalgia for the officially sanctioned, carefully censored, utilitarian and universally comprehensible culture of post-revolutionary Russia and China. There anyone could get a decent job writing about how production was booming. And 2) to denounce all plagues of formalism, vanity, ass-kissing, obscenity, decadence and elitism. I've recently started a new teaching job: introducing young college students to literature. I tell them to read (doctrinally sound) stories and then I ask them what they think and they giggle. For this they pay me. In the field of indoctrinating our youth, production is booming.

Until next time, comrades.