May 26, 2008 On Fiction

As a place becomes more familiar, it becomes less random.

Familiarity creates shape.

Families exclude: the more familiar, the more exclusive.

Shaping the real creates fiction.

Fiction creates new expectations by violating others.

Fiction informs the family.

Family manifests fiction.

For setting to work it needs to be felt along the blood.

Place forms families.

False formality

False Formality and (ironically) fear of grammar have caused the four most ridiculous nonsensical misuses of the English language: using "due to" instead of "because of"; the use of the reflexive pronoun "myself" as if it were a more formal version of "me" or "I"; using "speak to" instead of "speak about"; and using nouns like "impact" as verbs.

Language changes; language evolves. Evolution, however, selects for simplification, for clarity and elegance. All the above cases are born from a fear of making a mistake and a fear of being too simple to understand. Rather than having and expressing complex ideas, the artifice of false formality is being used to make ideas seem complicated: "purchase" instead of "buy"; "beverage" instead of "drink."

Something is due to some other thing. Her lateness was due to her lack of care for others (not "She was late due to [sic] her lack of care for others"). Is this a small thing? Of course it is, and it would not matter so much but for the reason: a false sense of formality and/or self aggrandizement.

The nonsense of saying "Michelle and myself perused the aisles for chocolate baked goods" is most clear if you drop the "Michelle and" and read it out loud. Equally "You should submit the report to Hanna or myself by 4:59 Friday afternoon" just makes no sense under even the weakest lens. If it said "I should submit the report to Hanna or myself by 4:59 Friday afternoon" the usage would be proper, but does not make any sense, because I myself would probably give myself until 5:00 (or maybe Monday morning).

I would love to watch somebody speak to an issue—I cannot even imagine what that would look like. I prefer to speak to people (actually plants, but that's beside the point) about things, and why an "issue" cannot be a problem or a difficulty or a current problem I do not know.

Good English verbs are frowned upon (more formality), so instead of changing something, the business world says it "impacts" it. This is the least offensive of the above problems, and is probably quite Shakespearean in its inventiveness (new words excite unless they become trite expressions of one's "business acumen").

There are, of course, others. Do not use the word "comprise" unless you know how, because it does not sound formal it just sounds uppity, and never try and do anything.

As Francophone mothers wring their hands over their language becoming more informal, English in Canada has all but lost its informal lustre: thou, thee, thy, thine, and thyself all having been relegated to the basement of unused archaisms.

Do not be afraid of prepositions or any other good old English words. Start sentences with "but" and "because"—just do it properly. And, for god's sake, do not be afraid of "me"; it never hurt anybody, and you were only corrected when you were a kid because you were using it incorrectly, not because it was not possible to use correctly at all.

(Nothing I have written here has not been noticed by Orwell himself; it has all just irritated me afresh)

Oh Canada

When I was in high school, we (teachers included) would laugh at the arrogance of southern Ontarians calling where they lived "Central Canada." These are words that would never pass the lips of someone from BC, and my time in Nova Scotia also suggests that the place people there refer to as "Upper Canada" would never be called "central" anything.

Nobody is asking anybody to be politically correct. Political correctness is a term for what used to be called lip service. The words themselves are only the sentiment made manifest, and it is the sentiment that offends people. Southern Ontario is many things, but is not central Canada in any way of imagining the term. Why not call the region "Southern Ontario?" That still shows all the privilege of having a region named after part of a province, without implying that the rest of the country revolves around this self-perceived fulcrum.

Should we not be calling the regions of Canada "the North", "BC" (or "the West," aka the Pacific Cordillera), "the Prairies," "the Canadian Shield," "Southern Ontario" ("the Industrial Heartland," or "Upper Canada"), "Québec," "the Maritimes," and "Newfoundland Labrador" (or, the latter two combined into "Atlantic Canada")? Though the Upper Canadians of the Southern Ontario industrial heartland bear no malice when they say "Central Canada," how could they not know it would be taken that way?

The term should disappear, along with its implications. We in BC welcome people from all over the country to live here, but please leave the eastern centrism behind.

Hardhats and...

The hardhat symbolizes work and honesty, so when we see a politician wearing one our nerves should bristle. The image of a polished shovel gleaming as it rips into the soil, its happy wielder joyfully looking at the cameras and ignoring the earth itself, says all we need to hear. But it doesn't: instead people are filled with the hope that the sight of a job getting done brings with it. If the government builds homeless shelters, why not have homeless people themselves breaking the earth and earning a living (and a place to live) with their own labour? Politicians earn their living finding money and a place for projects, but taking credit for the actual labour of creation often appears to be their real job—ensuring the continuation of their own species—as if they were new fathers wearing their hospital gowns and having their pictures taken in the delivery chair, feet in the stirrups, gleaming forceps about to penetrate their nether regions.

Soulcarving 2000

Potential: road swelling through the cambered cradle below, through limbs into downhill feet resting, heels against asphalt; electric dust of dusk alive, anticipation suspending action; the hill is itself steep enough to impel its own completion, its base a disappointment even before pushoff, is itself an enactment of gravity--an expression of descent. The last line always strings out the same, always leads, rain running down a dry window; the last turn alive in the first and containing, remembering, the pressure of the first at its end. The reclining western sky removes detail and adds intensity, smoothing while brightening surface; the memory of last night's rain remains alive in both cedars and rolled concrete curbs redirecting the lime green serpents rocking below, still breathing the heat of the days sun in the blacktop. Some momentous compulsion incites the stone beast from its ageless sleep, uprooted feet grounded against silica crystal, as the force that had held it static itself frees it forward and down. Feet still, waiting,, gravity blooming manifest in pitch and friction voicing its approval in the plastic metallic tones particular to the occasion, the hill alive and rotating, downward force vectored into acceleration. The drop, the unmakeable made, the complicated simplified. Then the quiet walk home. Potential realized.

Reginald Postman becomes Regular Mailman

"And it would be like saying that to anyone. Some words carry the same import wherever they are sent—regular mail or special delivery—yet other words are so generic that the way they're sent defines their meaning. Which are which? Is it really possible to tell?

"People are just complex words: layers of meaning, and the routes and paths they travel, accumulate and gather in the corners of dance halls, growing into contorted brain-like dust bunnies, shifting nervously toward their purpose. Of course, that purpose is only discovered when it is reached, no sentence ever complete 'til it is punctuated, and then only as punctuation ever is, a marking of rhythm and really a pause in the infinite. Do people really know where the period goes until there is one to be marked?" he wondered out loud.

A Song for Hiroshima, 2004

I didn't want to leave you,
But we knew it had to be;
That the time had come for me to go
To make my life complete.

We write on the wall to show we've been
Down here all the while,
Then the morning comes
And we put it all away.

Let's raise a glass
To all the plastic
People who come and go;
Let's shine our shoes
And walk away,
For miles until we're home.

I ran my hand along the rail,
Weathered, cracked, and smooth;
I chose my words carefully,
Knowing that I would
Not be here the next night,
Or hundreds after that,
That I had to leave
That one last time
Into the blinding light.

Let's all choke back
Those last good-byes,
And head off on our way,
Let's close our eyes
And stagger out
Into the final day.

I find myself sitting here on the other side
Of the big ball we call home
There’s not a day that goes by
Without dreaming of what is gone.
There’ll come a time, when I’ll be back,
Singing the same old song;
'Til that day arrives,
I sit here all alone

Breath

The music of song has eroded with the years;
the music of the spheres deafening now.
Language of the world showing itself from beneath
the film of artifice, spread
lightly,
blanketing
the sound life makes
as her perspective scrapes leaves
cleans away days,
plays at renewal,
coughs up past reliances,
whets teeth with words—
sheer wish, steep face drop—
ends puddling intransitive verbs
in the corners of well-trained thoughts.

Tokyo—May 22, 2008

Tokyo remains. The weight of it sustains and settles the city deeper into history. The randomness of it all, the anonymity, allows us never to learn anything about it. Standards are high, and evenly spread; relative terms like good, fine, fast, and clean, bear little weight when describing things to do or to eat, for example, because what those conditions mean to us depends on what we need now—right now. Planning becomes self-defeating when everything we need remains ubiquitous and plentiful.

Life shatters entropically, though. Transportation develops into a life giving and affirming force, because it is something to learn. Survival remains simple; and the city's inertia defies failure.

The laziness of the recumbent goddess lies spread arrogant on the plains and swampland. Quietly asserting her authority she breeds prolifically and consumes voraciously. She maintains a blue blanket of smoke that insulates her, and lives immune to its smothering. Ungrateful and unwelcome supplicants suffocate.