Holy Victoria, What’s Wrong in the UK?
According to tonight’s procrastination scan of the BBC, two of the UK’s more pressing problems (suitable for international digestion) are that the advertisements are too loud and the booze in Wales is too cheap. What’s next? The ocean’s dangerously refreshing and the English language is too widespread?
Fitzgerald attempts autobiography
“Shame about the Benadryl. I love me the Benadryl, and Jason was also pretty cool.”
Fitzgerald attempts film criticism
“Or, as I like to call it, ‘The Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.'”
Fitzgerald attempts to cook
“…I wish there existed a word somewhere between ‘soured’ and ‘dead.'”
Autoroute St-Urbain
St. Michael’s Dome-crown
hill-top lip tower over
tene-domi- -ciles not
so jewish not so junk
chic 70s gentrile-fied
trafficked ghost deline-
-ation ghost bikes truck
black zoom noise sewn
light lines j-dash
unsystem tra- -‘triffic
Plat-centric vue Avevue
Rachel iglesia d’espagne
zoom-car park lot
festi-limo streamer stream
line lights lit-tred/rature
scrolled on brick page
ghost lit rue-signs
at stitches over doors
rich/er ppl. dwollicile
here ghost decades
deca-bles /dents historical
sud-vue Notre-Dame
iglesia Place d’aux Armes
Aldred fntn. lumed
byover fluve-water
What Sharp did next: A Survivor’s Story
If I open this with the words: “Quality Non-Proliferation” you become immediately engaged exactly as you (I’d hope) become immediately alienated from the idea. Bad word string shock.
The later 20th century writing ethos was that if you fancied yourself a writer by trade the only possible way that you could justify your claim was by writing. By the mere act of sitting at your computer and typing your fingers bloody, or by breaking your pencils against cheap notebooks folded in half for support, could you tap into your creativity. Some writers took this as far as they could: Charles Bukowski is my repeated example of a man that did very little but write. When he had nothing to write about, he often resorted to writing about writing, or writing about writers. While this philosophy produced at least one notable great, it–like many–produced many notable casualties. Jack Kerouac swings above the gallows alongside rows that naively expressed their support for the ideology, would kill for it, and were killed by it.
The largest block to such a writing philosophy is that while it may produce some innovative approaches to situations and ideas, it produces on average a great deal more simple inanity. Proponents of the idea, and most post-modern prosthetics, ask: “Inanity in who’s eyes? What historical precedent does the critic have to make judgments of the quality of work produced in this, or any, manner? How does anyone exist as both subject and object to study and examination?”
Some would crucify Bukowski and beatify Kerouac. Bukowski described Kerouac as: “a writer who couldn’t write but who got famous because he looked like a rodeo rider.” Some love them both as revolutionaries of a people’s art. Many quite justifiably hate them both as hacks, narcissists, or at best uninformed dilettantes. I use some very simple criteria to determine why Kerouac remains a failure in my eyes: he shows the emotional maturity of a sixteen year old girl without the awareness Bukowski has of it.
One thing is that they were both undeniably creative men. My criticism of them is based on the qualities that they have, some I determine favourable with my cognitive bias, others I consider quite ill. Neither of these say much in regard to their quality, as if that had some sort of ladder that the snakes of objectivity could coil up and down (Fitzgerald once commented on how amongst our friend group the term “objective” could cause us to groan or wince as though it were a grade 9 homework assignment or a graphic description of a rape).
Koan no. 43 of the Mumonkoan appears as: “Master Shuzan held up his staff, and showing it to the assembled disciples said, ‘You monks, if you call this a staff, you are committed to the name. If you call it not-a-staff, you negate the fact. Tell me, you monks, what do you call it?”
That staff could very well be the notion of quality as it would appear in any superlative model of literary criticism, or a superlative model of literary criticism that could render the idea of quality as anything beyond physical or intellectual qualities (properties) reasonable.
By now you are wondering what I am getting at. Am I suggesting the non-proliferation of the idea of quality? Perhaps, but not exactly. When I sat down to write this, I had full intention of addressing Quality and Quantity as we deal with the notions creatively, and on this blog.
In a TED.com talk by Tim Brown, CEO of the “information and design” firm IDEO, about Creativity and Play, an activity in a 1960’s study on creativity produced a great deal of “Sorries” from the participants, showing exactly how we fear the judgment of our peers. The activity was to, I assume in university classroom originally, draw the person immediately beside you in 30 seconds. This was repeated during the TED Talk, and produced a large number of apologies from the audience to one another. The drawings were likely poor quality, and perhaps did little justice of their subject – or much worse, they did tremendous justice to their subject. Brown tells you that if a child were to draw even a much poorer quality picture, they would be proud enough to show it off as a masterpiece. One thing that changes as we age is the fear of how our creative pursuits will be accepted and judged by our peers, and this is an enormous inhibiting factor on our desire and ability to create.
One brainstorming rule that Tim Brown promotes in his own design firm is that quantity should be the goal over quality. Quality, as we can see, is intrinsically linked to judgment and criticism. To do some of our most creative thinking this is what has to be overcome. This sentiment echoes Tony Pierce’s words about how if you think you’re a good writer, write twice a day, for the public (Ezra Pound even says something similar in his ABC’s of Reading).
What has killed this blog a number of times is “having nothing to say” or being uncomfortable about writing “on the spot” (while sober). When I speak of Quality Non-Proliferation, then, I am saying that we should write here as though we are brainstorming, aiming to produce content with quantity in mind. It won’t be long before one of us produces a turd. Alternatively, it won’t be long before we collectively produce a paper-chain of genius. Many chances to be creative produces more genuine moments of creativity than very few or severely limited chances.
Stop trying to produce quality work. Draw more dicks with moustaches.
Don’t take your date to the graveyard, man, don’t take your date where the dead folk are
“Graveyard ain’t no place for dancin’,
and it ain’t no place for sweet romance,
try and make a tombstone for your bed
& that sweet little lady might wind up dead”
– Graveyard, by Bad Uncle. See: Bad Uncle on MySpace
A couple of the Unsettlers get drunker and dirtier with a couple of other musicians — I saw them for the first time playing the Grumpy’s stage on St. Patrick’s. O the whiskey, did the whiskey ever flow so low in so many bottles?
Now if you’ll excuse me I’m taking ma blonde to the Cimitiere-des-Neiges for a dance with the deceased.
Poisoning yr. whiskey bottles since the fall of the Berlin Wall,
– strych9
The smoking issue.
I won’t be surprised when lung cancer claims me at 23. I went for a jog last night. Almost died. Three blocks in I brought up gum thick and vinyl, stained brown like the juices that accumulate in my pipe filter.
Fitzgerald and I devise dangerous games to play with cigarettes, sitting in his room with the Bande-a-part dance scene dvd intro cycling for hours cuz we’re too damned to find the remote. The search consisted of me sitting there, moving something – a book beside me on the couch, a pile of ash, the crushed cushion I was half sitting on – while Fitzgerald stood in one place in the middle of his room being stressed out about it. “Now I really just want to watch this movie. Where’s the remote? No where!”
-Sit down. I’m content to
“watch the intro. Me too. Who does this? Seriously.”
-People at my mother’s work, being upper to upper-upper class as they are have real trouble understanding the fullness of impoverished lives. She’s like a broke prophet or a snake oil salesman.
“Man?”
-Woman. Person.
I strike a match and light a smoke, pull in a long, rich drag, and then toss the lit cigarette at him. Fitzgerald catches it, ember to palm, and pops it in his mouth without making any fuss about the blister.
-She says: the starving diabetic daughter of the drug-addict upstairs comes knocking on the door at 1AM to use the phone so she can go to the hospital, and how she says her mom’s fighting someone upstairs, and the folk at work are all “Yeah, Marina’s telling her stories again” like they’re pulled from the pages of a cheap novel. You see this kinda thing at low-dollar ground zero, alive and ripe with the people we know.
“Nah best call back ina halfhour there’s a Jesus-tonne of cruisers outfront…”
Thick with rust and salt from the Newfoundland breeze.
-I tell her that and she tells me that her dad was the captain of a bowling team, and every week, same night, same time, he’d go out. So one day a group of thugs that must not of liked his business come crashing in with long, sharp knives and hold my mom, aunt and uncle – all between the ages of 5 and 12 – hostage until he comes home. The big black heroin addict that lived in the bottom floor of the rooming house my grandfather ran gets wind of this and grabs his shotgun, comes running in shouting, chases them all out of the apartment. Of course, they left – rock beats scissors – and all riled up he spends half the night shooting out the street lights down Rene Lavesque, back then Dorchester Street.
“Jesus fuck.”
Fitzgerald rolls about his bed in a fit of laughter. Blowing smoke out through his nose, and choking on his own carbon dioxide. These moments happen so often, and they can’t be dulled out and have to burn to completion. He giggles down, and the room falls silent hanging with white webs of smoke, the still smell of his lungs.
-There was another guy, Loftis Love, that lived in the same rooming house for a while. When my mother recalls him she laughs, but pauses to interject “He really wasn’t a nice man on any level.” Apparently he looked just like Hitler, and in the early 1960’s was about the same age as Hitler would be. All throughout his room he had framed pictures of himself taken as the Fuhrer. For the longest time, my mom was convinced that Hitler had been boarding in the same house as them. Every so often he’d burst into the room and shout a deep, German “SEIG HEIL” and scare the living shit outta my mother and her siblings. Mr. Love rode a big Harley Davidson, big fat hot, which he kept tied up to a signal contraption consisting of pots and pans that’d warn him if anyone ever touched his bike. Naturally, every day my mother would find a way to trigger the system, and Hitler’d come out on his balcony in a bathrobe throwing empty beer bottles down in the general direction of the bike.
Either way, he was involved in child pornography and propositioned my aunt. My grandfather overheard her telling one of her school friends about the scenario, and no sooner had he heard it than he was up there, beating the shit out of his Fuhrer. Broke a couple of his ribs and threw him down a flight of stairs, shouting that he’d never step foot in the building again.
“Joe, switch!”
Fitzgerald and I toss our lit cigarettes simultaneously like circuis acrobats doing a dangerous trapeze stunt, catching them with our bare hands and continuing the inhalations (though by this point Fitzgerald’s room atmosphere has been declared a certified carcinogen.)
“How long do you think it’ll be before we burn this place down? We’re going to keep doing this until it kills us. You know that, right? We are going to die from fire. We have to keep doing this.”
-Don’t worry. I’ve got firefighting experience.
Fitzgerald snorts.
“You’ve got firefighting experience? You know one day, I’m going to just interrupt one of your tirades by putting out a cigarette in my eyeball. I promise.”
-I’m going to hold you to that.
“Oh, I know.”
-Good. So you know that I’ll be waiting, and I fully expect this to happen.
“I’ll keep edging the ash closer until the day comes. You’ll see.”
-You won’t.
“Not with any depth perception.”
-I was staying with Evan and Meg down south, just shortly after they got married, and we were roaring drunk. Evan, in his stupor, picks up a bottle of perfume and a torch and lights half of the room on fire. Here I am freaking out, and he’s laughing too hard to do anything about it. On the floor in hysterics, and I’ll stomp on burning books and beating shit down with my shirt.
“He wasn’t laughing. He was just practicing stop, drop, and roll.”
-After that mess, he curls up on the bed and starts crying. “Why did you marry me? I’m such an awful person!” and he goes drunkenly to sleep with Meg stroking his precious hair. She sat up after he was out cold, grabbed another six-pack from the fridge and we stayed up until 5AM listening to Leonard Cohen and talking about how much of a dirty hipster I am.
While drowning the cigarette in the ashtray, precariously perched on the edge of Fitzgerald’s bed, I knocked it to a side where it fell victim to the vindictive forces of gravity. Ashes covered his floor like Constantine’s vision of the apocalypse.
“What am I going to do about that?”
-Broom?
“GAY.”
-Weave a throw-rug?
“And beneath that lies the great spill of 2009, in which Royal Joe Sharp sent 300 to their deaths.”
-God bless them all.
I light two cigarettes and toss one at Fitzgerald.
-Sartre argues that all things become their pre-determined essence. I think I like cigarettes so much because they embody this so eloquently, a thing unravelling of its initial form into pure essence. When talking about it, Sartre means that a kitten will become a cat and do whatever it is that cats do in their essence, but since humans are continually bound by their awful chains of freedom what it is that they do is not as deterministic as that of a cat or a cigarette. Thus, man has no essence. Heidegger disagrees with Sartre, arguing that humanity’s essence pre-supposes its freedom, and that its essence is to contemplate its relationship to Being.
-There’s notably this drive in the mass intellect to reclaim archaic ideas of Animism and spirituality, ideas that place importance on the movement of spirit through all things, and the absolute sacredness and interconnected of things on Earth. We, dashing young radicals, yearn to embrace this sort of romantic revival of the spirit, yet we do this. On our heroic quest to save the world, we spend our nights choking on cigarettes in a small room.
“Relating to that I heard on someone’s TV today a man who was talking about the global eco-crisis. He said that we’re victims of a kind of momentum – rape of the earth etc. – that the most detrimental words uttered or written on Earth were that Men are the Masters of Nature, rather than part of the harmonious whole. But because we’re at the top of this abstract heirarchy, there’s no immovable object to stem the tide of our unstoppable force.”
-This is the spirit of our age, which is all very strange. The Zeitgeist. I think it was Heidegger that was largely responsible for the popularization of this term.
“Well, it’s German. Ghost… Time.”
-He argued that all people, no matter what their social status or awareness of it, were doing the bidding of the spirit of their age.
“Well, it’s an absolute. The zeitgeist isn’t absolute – it’s not a closed system, which we can just step away from and say that that it’s a thing over there and that we’re not a part of it. It’s an absolute in the sense that it is what is, the ever-changing, maliable social, political, economic, and spiritual atmosphere which we exist in and label the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.”
-Some may be able to recognize and manipulate it, but so far as what it is…
“Well, it’s our essence. While it’s maliable and changes, no matter what we do with our essence, however we move our essence throughout the world, we cannot escape it, even with absolute freedom as Sartre argues. It’s inextricably connected to us. It flows and conforms to the collection of our will, of our individual essences. In that sense, it conforms to us, although we conform to it. While the Czech Communist Party may have been able to remove Clementis from the history books, they can airbrush him from photographs, they could not – as Kundera points out – remove the hat which he placed on his leaders’ head before the photograph was taken as a gesture of good will. That’s just a poetic appropriation of the hat symbol, but the point isn’t the hat, but the point is Clementis’ impact on the Communist Party, whether they attempt to hide it or not.”
-In essence, two men smoking in a room, expecting to die of cancer at age 23.
“Draw!”
Fitzgerald shouted as the embers crawled toward their end, flicking the smouldering husks toward each other. My own careened past his face, and his found home below my chin. A tiny burn, and quick movements to stamp out the butts before we lit his room on fire.
New poem, in need of title
Freshly inked, my latest. In need of title.
Also, today’s reading recommendations: Heather O’Neill and Max Blagg (Autobio A Gogo, googlable, can you spot the influence?)
————-
Hopped off the bus at Central Station
where the junkies winked thru the winters etched on their faces
where I lifted the empty tin of a Berri Square beggar to my ear
& heard the sounds of suicides in the Saint Lawrence river
Red-light Archambault drew me up the street
and the unhatted hustlers sheep-herded me in with Peeping Toms
We clung to our seats & our whiskies & our favourite girls
knowing it was concrete and cold outside
but here the lights shed red roses on our eyes & the dancers’ skin
Lights off. Doors shut. Kicked to the curb like unwanted kids
blowing over the streets discarded burger wrappers lined with grease
I drifted with the taxi cabs upwards St-Denis after they’d dropped the bomb
everyone’s a liar their guts & hearts empty as their coffee cups
eyes desperate as their cocks & cunts & wallets
like Lucy, with whom I traded an eye for a tongue
& we danced til dawn when up the sun sprung
On I went chanting with my new tongue to the foot of the mountain
where the cross was up-hung over me
& Pan played his pan-flute to the laurel tree
Onward and onward til the bars let us in again
danced I & the satyrs past the unfucked and dreary
their jeers and their laughter drove us downstairs
& when they ask me @ home “What do you remember of Montreal?”
The hip of a UdeM girl like the ’90s, on the blue line.
( IN ) 