the blog quebecois

I was going through some papers a while ago and came across this, which I'd entirely forgotten.

I used to listen to Gzowski's popular national CBC radio program.

One feature of it was letters from listeners. Which would too very often be floridly poetic paeans to the Canadian wilderness, stark landscapes, yaddayaddayadda, that went on and on and on until even Pierre Berton's withered peepee would collapse with the metaphoric strain of it all.

So I wrote this. Gzowski liked it enough to read it on-air (I unfortunately didn't hear it) and some months later I got a phone call from one of my cousins down east.

"Did you write a letter to Peter Gzowski?"

"Uh . . . yeah? Yeah!"

"He's put it in the Morningside Papers! (A series of books featuring interviews, essays, etc. from the show.)

And so he had. My fifteen seconds of fame.

January 8, 1989

Mr. Peter Gzowski
Morningside
CBC Radio
Box 500, Terminal A
Toronto, Ontario

Dear Peter,

It is quiet, now, out here. Winter has arrived, and all the powerboats and summer guests have fled. Night, and a fat full moon rides balefully above. It has been a tiring, yet rewarding day. There was wood to chop; wood to stack; and finally, wood to restack, after it all fell over. I stir the stove's slumbering embers, and then I yawn, and stumble away to bed. But sleep eludes me, for I am troubled by our reluctance to learn to live with, to co-exist, with nature.

As in counterpoint to my thoughts, there filters from without a mournful cry, a lament. The voice echoes again, again: haunting, piercing. Roused, I toss aside the blankets and struggle into my clothes.

The crisp inky air is like a tonic; an icy crust crunches under my boots. Where is the sly caroller? Ah, there he is, roosting in that leaf-stripped poplar! His imperious golden eye studies me coolly; no words do we exchange, but still we seem to understand each other. Man and owl; owl and man. Again his lusty screech -- and suddenly the forest explodes into a fine snowy glitter as I attempt to knock the stupid branch-hopping pest into orbit with the 5-iron I keep for this purpose, long ago having realized I was just no damn good at golf.

Sincerely,

notalex
Edmonton (or thereabouts), Alberta

I've always found Christopher Caldwell one of the more perceptive American commentators on Europe. I'd sort of lost track of him since he doesn't seem to be in The Weekly Standard anymore, but here he is effortlessly riffing on Germany and Romania.

The more I read this guy, the more impressed I get.

He is hilarious but profoundly serious, as all great satirists are, and today he just brilliantly juxtaposes comedy and tragedy.

Warning: if you're at all squeamish don't click on the linked photo. I did and it's something I never want to see again.

The 'most dreaded literary prize' has been won by Wendy Perriam for a description of pin-striped sex in her novel Tread Softly.

The annual Literary Review Bad Sex prize is awarded to the worst description of sex in a contemporary novel. This year's winner includes the lines "Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin-stripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers. Even Mr Hughes's penis had a seductive pin-striped foreskin."

I'd get that checked out, if I were him.

The competition this year was apparently, uh, stiff, but my vote would go to:
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Wild Ginger by Anchee Min (The Women's Press)

He groaned, 'Oh! Chairman Mao!'

Hot Chinese nookie AND corny Marxist dialectics: is there anything more arousing?

Frankly, yes, but that's not what the contest's about.

In their continuing campaign to run the National Post into the ground, the Aspers are launching their "Electronic Edition," which is in a PDF-like format. It actually looks cute -- a miniaturized, full-color, complete copy of the Post. You can go to any page of it, click on an article and it comes up. (Assuming they get the bugs out of it, which they hadn't the last time I looked.)

The bad news? As of the 24th of this month, it'll be a pay site. Even for subscribers to the Post -- which I am.

But I'll be damned if I'll pay an extra 5 bucks a month for it. These people just don't understand newspapers (they're from the television side of the media) and they sure as hell don't understand the Internet.

As I suspect they'll figure out when this thing goes bust a couple of months from now.

In the meantime, I'll still direct links their way (it's called free advertising, guys). This is a funny piece by Andrew Marlatt, which got misfiled in the Letters section. Well, it is a "letter" of sorts . . .

To: Bud Selig, Commissioner of Major League Baseball

Dear Mr. Selig,

Forgive my aggressively ignorant stance on the subject, but as a fan of American base ball, and as the father of two young boys, I find it appalling not only that Pete Rose was banned from your sport for gamboling, but that, as I understand it, he also has now been forced to "admit" to gamboling in order to be reinstated to the game he loves. To gambol, sir, is not a crime. To "gambol," sir, is "to frolic or skip about, as in dancing or playing."

The Guardian:

"It's accurate to say she is not cheerful," Peter Ayrton, the English publisher for Elfriede Jelinek, said yesterday. "But reading her is a totally exhilarating experience."

He was rejoicing at the Frankfurt book fair as word spread that the severe, feminist and dissident Austrian writer had unexpectedly won the $1.3m (£750,000) Nobel prize for literature.

So some shrewish scold takes the trophy, eh? Quelle surprise!

I'm not qualified to judge Ms. Jelinek's literary merits, as "severe, feminist" books for me rate in reading enjoyment somewhere between subpoenas and Korean VCR manuals. The Swedish Academy, too, has a long and ignoble (pun intended, haha) history of promoting hacks who nonetheless fit the politics of the age.

Behold, then, from Ms. Jelinek's crappy* website, her impeccable credentials:

Do you know him from before? Have you heard the name Halliburton and the name of Cheney, the holy lord, offspring of I don't know what or who, but certainly of a mother, and since then he has wrestled with the numerous soft feelings. Dick Cheney. But his feelings won't win. Halliburton will win, the company, they can build cages in Cuba, well, even I could build a cage if I had to, but it would only be strong enough for rabbits, if anything, they also built Corpus Christi in Texass, they managed that. And it earned its name. He will rebuild everything, the lord of the energy industry, Mr. Chairman of the Board, lord of the fiddled books , lord of jobs for the boys. But such boys are only found in Arabia. You can bet on it that this company will win irrespective of whoever else wins. Hang on, and what about the British with all these brave guys who so diligently butchered foreign flesh, and of course also the other way round, because nobody wants to owe the other a favour, but sometimes it has to be. They have dragged themselves to the foreign land, illusion of the avenger incarnate, and now several of them are six feet under, in the sand, and now they should get nothing?

Oho! Texass, did'ja catch that? Not exactly a Joycean level of wit -- but then, James Joyce never did win the Nobel, so maybe she's on to something.

That was from one of the few pieces on the site not in German, so maybe it lost something in the translation; but it doesn't strike me as anything a moderately clever poli-sci student couldn't have done, albeit with fewer comma splices.

* (All the links on her website seem to be broken, no doubt due to increased traffic. It's worth taking a look at, though, if only to wonder at its ceramic Bambi centerpiece.)

One of the things that writers aim for is a strong opening sentence or paragraph that immediately engages the reader. Fiction writers refer to it as the "hook"; newspaper or magazine writers as the "lede."

Here's a good example of the latter:

It has been revealed a Hamilton woman was so angry about police taking her three preserved snakes that she stormed into the station and threw a jar of pickled kittens at the counter.

This instantly provokes the reader's curiosity:

What? Pickled kittens? In a jar?

I don't mean to cast aspersions, but this woman is obviously low-rent trailer trash.

Pickled kittens are properly stored only in aged oaken barrels; and if you must transport them to hurl at police officers, then Louis Vuitton sells a quite attractive Suhali leather and canvas ammo belt specifically for that purpose.

But you of course already knew that. Sheesh.

Via Dave Barry

From April of Dave Barry's Year In Review: [registration required]

Meanwhile, in another blow to the U.S.-led coalition effort in Iraq, Spain withdraws its troop, Sgt. Juan Hernandez. As violence in Iraq escalates, critics of the Bush administration charge that there are not enough U.S. soldiers over there. Administration officials heatedly deny this, arguing that the real problem is that there are too many Iraqis over there. In the words of one high-level official (who is not identified in press reports because of the difficulties involved in spelling "Condoleezza") the administration "may have to relocate the Iraqis to a safer area, such as Ecuador." John Kerry calls this "a ridiculous idea," adding, "I wholeheartedly endorse it."

For my money, the best humorist in the Anglosphere. Alas, he's packing it in, at least temporarily:

So this is a great job. And yet I'm quitting it, at least for now. I want to stop before I join the horde of people who think I used to be funnier. And I want to work on some other stuff.

So for the next year, I won't be writing regular columns, though I hope to weigh in from time to time if something really important happens, such as a cow exploding in a boat toilet.

At some point in the next year, I hope to figure out whether I want to resume the column. Right now, I truly don't know.

So in case I don't get to say this later: Thanks to all you editors for printing my column, and thanks especially to all you readers for reading it. You've given me the most wonderful career an English major could hope to have. I am very grateful.

there goes my baby
there goes my heart
they’re gone forever
so far apart

roy orbison

I've heard of literary niches, but this is a bit ridiculous. It's by someone named Ulrich Haarbürste, who writes short-short stories about wrapping the late singer-songwriter Roy Orbison in Saran Wrap (or cling-film, as they call it in Europe):

I start at the ankles and work up. I am like a spider binding him in my gossamer web. I do it tight with several layers. Soon Roy Orbison stands before me, completely wrapped in cling-film. The pleasure is unexampled.

I guess it's like Hemingway and bullfights, or James Joyce and Dublin.

He (I'm assuming that Ulrich is a male name) is actually a pretty good (I'm assuming, too, that English isn't his first language) writer, with a sparse, economical style that rather suits the bizarre subject-matter.

In case this genre is more popular than I suspected, Ulrich is your go-to guy:

If you have written any stories about Roy being completely wrapped in clingfilm please send them to me and I may put them up on the site. If you have a site with stories about other pop stars being wrapped in cling-film mail me and we can exchange links.

I can think of several pop stars that I wouldn't mind wrapping in cling-film. Very tightly.

He does have standards, though:

I have also had to refuse a number of very good stories on the grounds that they may have libelled Roy or exceeded the bounds of propriety. On the same subject, may I say that I received a couple of stories dealing with tinfoil-wrapping, which were deleted promptly. Tinfoil wrappers are degenerates and should be ashamed.

Via The Presurfer

Not this year, Norman Mailer. I don't think so, Margaret Drabble. Fugeddabout it, Gore Vidal.

I've yet again scooped the blogosphere by finding out the identity of this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. OK, I don't know her name, unless it really is "The Woman I Was," but I recognize Nobel Laureate material when I see it:

Bloody Bush is celebrating his 60th birthday.. he invited his tails “followers” to celebrate with him.. How many children and women will die all over the world to make him happy and make a wish?
Bush, the terrorist, we wish if your mum did not born you. You are the bloodies liar not only on the earth but through the history.. I do not know how your silly wife and stupid daughters are proud of you? The answer is they silly and stupid!! But what about the tails who are celebrating with him? How do they agree with him on killing more than 100 Iraqi civilians every day? The whole world should know that the ongoing blood baths in Iraq pushing toward a civil war made by the Americans. Stop staying silence, say with me to Bush:

MAY YOUR WISHES DO NOT COME TRUE ANY MORE.
Saying is not enough, let us work; let us have an action; not only to stop bloody Bush, the terrorist, wishes, but to save Iraq and the world from the White (Dark) House..

I, for one, am in awe.

Flawless politics? Check!

Victim of colonialism? Check!

An authentic style? Check! (It will be described as "experimentially primitive" in the citation.)

You scoff? Need I remind you of the illustrious Harold Pinter and this shooting star from the year before?

The lady is a lock.

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

Allegedly compiled by high school English teachers, a number of wildly-inappropriate similes taken from student writing. I say allegedly because they're almost too good to be true. Some commenters also expressed doubts. There were claims that they came from the Washington Post, which runs contests soliciting bad writing from its readers; others thought it was the work of Jack Handey.

I had no idea who Handey was, so I googled around to learn that he was is/was a writer/performer for Saturday Night Live. No wonder I didn't know about him. I haven't watched the show since the glory days of John Belushi, et. al. (And having seen some of the same skits since, I realized why they were so hilarious -- because I was stoned out of my mind at the time. Let this be a warning of the dangers of drugs.)

Like Steven Wright, Handey makes genuinely funny absurdist observations:

Even though I was their captive, the Indians allowed me quite a bit of freedom. I could walk freely, make my own meals, and even hurl large rocks at their heads. It was only later that I discovered that they were not Indians at all but only dirty-clothes hampers.

More here.

Via The Presurfer

Well, last month, to be exact:

"Yes, we work out all our enmities and neuroses on the printed page, so we can afford to be nice to each other," Ruth tells me. "It's exactly the opposite at the Romantic Writers' convention. They're all a lot of backstabbing bitches."

The Bulwer-Lytton bad writing award has been announced.

The winning entry:

"Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped 'Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."'

I prefer the postmodern flavor of this entry by Alex Hall of Colorado, in which the suspension of disbelief is stripped away, revealing not only an author manipulating his story, but an "author" who is himself imaginary. A fiction within a fiction, if you will.

"'Toads of glory, slugs of joy,' sang Groin the dwarf as he trotted jovially down the path before a great dragon ate him because the author knew that this story was a train wreck after he typed the first few words."

Chuck (Fight Club) Palahniuk wrote "Top 10 Things That Would Make the Writing World a Better Place." I couldn't help but agree with point #4. 'Cause it's true!

I discovered (purely by accident, I assure you) that nearly all her books at my local library had been autographed, presumably by Maggie herself (or someone with a very strange hobby). Not sure if the librarians knew what the crazy lady with the Sharpie was up to in the stacks but they had to have been unamused. Horrified, even.

P.J. O'Rourke:

I think Obama is losing a lot of people in the US because he’s got a know it all, lecturing sort of attitude. He’s a capable public speaker but he talks down to his audience constantly, and that’s irksome. I haven’t been a fan of the tone of any recent president. Bush could not get [his] foot out of his mouth. My wife works to get corporate execs to express themselves in public. She said you can train a chimpanzee, but Bush won’t take advice. I always felt all gooey after Clinton got done speaking, and Bush Senior was incomprehensible in his own way, a mumbly WASP.

If you're not familiar with O'Rourke's other writings, here's part of one of my favorite pieces from his Give War A Chance (1993). As Google Books won't allow me to cut and paste (for reasons of copyright, I assume ironically), here's the link to the complete essay.

Amanda Hess:

This blog post originally stated that one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive. In fact, the statistic applies to black men who have sex with men. Also, the photo caption incorrectly attributed Bayard Rustin's photo to "Wikipedia Commons." The correct title is "Wikimedia Commons."