R-E-S-P-E-C-T: find out etc.

People who write crime fiction: stop telling us that cop work or P.I. work or coffee-serving work isn't as glamorous and action-packed as it is in the movies.
"Oh, it's not as exciting as James Garner makes it look on TV," said the character in the book that is on the verge of getting slammed shut and never opened again. "All I need is a pair of sunglasses, and I'd be a real David Caruso."
The worst, though, is when some jackass writer makes this big deal in the first or second chapter about how his cop character isn't some action hero you see on the big screen and then fills the rest of his stupid, asinine, bestselling, piece of crap novel with the worst cop show clichés. That's the worst.
Like, say you're writing a book about some normal everyday people who get caught up in criminal events which spin out of control, howzabout don't fill their mouths with the kind of argot Elmore Leonard invents for his career criminals. Howzabout you don't fill their mouths with stuff you got from reading Richard Price--or more likely, watching The Wire.

Howzabout you give me something in your novel I couldn't get from Wikipedia? George V. Higgins, in his really good On Writing (which is where I got the photo of text at the top of this post), says, "You cannot write well without data." If you're getting all of your data from second and third hand sources, and it's, y'know, obvious, well, you might find your book well-reviewed and get blurbs from people I admire, and maybe get rich and not have to spend your weekends pushing a mop, but, you, sir, in the inimitable words of TLC, won't get no love from me.

People know what they're getting into when they read a novel. They understand the compact of fiction. Even the most realism-heavy story needs to use the craft of fiction; compression, selection, flashback, metaphor, you get the idea. Unless you have very good reasons for doing so--and there are lots of them, but you gotta have at least one--don't pull them out of the story with your smug, knowing wink.

New Bones

[insert 3,000 words about the summer/fall of 1998]
That was the end of that phase of my life: the part they call the beginning, I guess, but I don't know if I properly enjoyed being young. It seems like I was always just holding out for something better I was sure was right around the next bend. Some wisdom, some experience, some epiphany. But it never came and I blew those years on Kerouac and cheap wine. I didn't believe I'd be around this long. I didn't believe the world would be around this long. I was like that dog, from some old bedtime story, forever barking at my own reflection, losing all that I had in the process.

Do not be the lobster.

"No, don't be the lobster...what does that even--Why would you be the lobster?"
"I thought you were trying to make a point, Ace, that we're all just little lobsters crawling around at the bottom of the sea. We don't think French Immersion schools have anything to do with our crustacean existence but before we know it we're in a pot of boiling, turning red. Right?"
"I don't know, Al. I guess that probably makes as much sense as what I was saying."
"No, no, no. I get it. You've got a lot on your mind. You don't have to make sense here. In fact..."
Aesop turned away so that Al wouldn't see him roll his eyes.
"...not making sense is the only logical defense against the tyranny of Scientism! We're awakening to a higher purpose, right here, right now. Who's to say the Mayan Apocalypse didn't happen and we're just too brainwashed by our force-fed mainstream media diet to recognize the celestial paradise we're already living in? We just have to free our minds from the fatted-calf mentality that just waits for science to explain everything to us and for us. Science is a religion, too, Aesop, but the only god it prays to is the Atom Bomb!"

"No. I'm not doing this now. You don't call me in to look at a Superman vid and then lay into me with this...mumbo-jumbo. That's a classic bait & switch and I want no part of it."
"Okay, okay, back to Superman... Where are they taking him this time? Is he the Nietzchean übermensch or is he a Christ figure like last time? Christ on a bike. I can see it now. And what's the deal with the guy in the fedora?"
"Okay, first things first. The last Superman movie was a disappointment. It failed. To fail with Superman is to fail abysmally. Nobody involved with that movie has worked since. Not even Kevin Spacey."
"But--"
"Just go with me, here, okay? One of many reasons that movie failed was that it attached itself to the Superman movies everyone remembers fondly; it used the same music, it ostensibly picked up the storyline, but it was boring. It was forgettable. Both of which are entirely unforgivable in a Superman movie. It wasn't that bad, but it wasn't that good, and why would anybody want to watch a mediocre Superman movie? So it tanked. It became a disaster. The studio just torched the whole Superman factory for the insurance money. 'Never again', that's what they wrote on Superman's grave, y'know?
"But now it's, I dunno, nearly ten years later, most of the crap merchandise that nobody wanted has finally worked its way out of the dollar stores that are the large intestine in the digestive tract of our consumer culture and, I dunno, maybe there's new bosses at the studio and they say, 'hey, let's make another Superman movie!'"

"They did, they did make another Superman movie, it's just like you said, Aesop!"
"That's right, Al, they did make another Superman movie. Or they're making one. And it's a clean break from all that came before, right? They're not going back to the failure, they're going forward, forward, forward! New costume! New origin! They've got a blonde Lois Lane! This ain't yer grandpa's Superman!"
"So, why then the man in the hat?"
"Exactly."
"Sounds like another Aesop Mosley Mystery!"
"Yeah. Something like that."

Be the lobster!

"'Sup, 'Sop? You see this?"
"See what? When would I see anything? I'm walking around like my head is underwater when I'm not half-asleep, which is as close as I get to being all the way asleep lately."
"Um, okay. So you didn't see this?"

"Wait, that's not... that's the new Superman movie? Is that here? Where is that? I saw some pictures of Lois Lane outside the Empress, but I don't know...is that downtown downtown? I don't even recognize, wait, he's riding a bike? Why would Superman ride a bike?"
"Looklooklook, this is a modern take on Superman. He's a regular guy! He doesn't wear a tie, he has a blog, he rides a bike! Forget about that, look at the guy on the corner, on the sidewalk..."
"What, but that's...they wouldn't!"
Aesop recoiled from Al's computer monitor. He collapsed into the cheap, stackable visitor's chair. His left hand was over his mouth. Slowly, his hand traveled up his face to cover his eyes, his fingers splayed out so he could gawk at the unmistakable image with his right eye.
"They would, they could, and they leaked it to the Internet!" Al was dancing in his swivel chair.

"No, look, I'm not even here for...okay play that again...geez, they really did it, didn't they? I mean, what are you thinking, you drop that into your story?"
"Hey man, I thought you'd like it. It's an homage, right?"
"Al, you know I went to French school, right? French immersion? I mean, if you didn't go, I don't know how aware--I don't know if you even know it exists--anyway, I always think of the word homard when I hear homage--that's French for lobster. Did you know that? I don't know why I even know that. I didn't grow up eating lobster either, you know? Or even thinking about it. I mean, lobster to me, same as French immersion to you, right? A thing that's out there at the bottom of the ocean that has nothing to do with your life whatsoever."
"Yes, be the lobster, Aesop!"

No, wait! Detective fiction is like jazz!

If the cadence may be regarded as the cradle of tonality, the ostinato patterns can be considered the playground in which it grew strong and self-confident.  - Edward E. Lewinsky

A decade and a lifetime ago, I interviewed Dr. Ed Lewis, then the head of the jazz department at the University of Regina. I was just kinda getting into jazz at that point, I think maybe I'd just bought my first Vandermark 5 album, and I'd been getting down with, like, Medeski, Martin & Wood and, I don't know, that's probably it. Wait, Roland Kirk. The Inflated Tear. That was happening.
These were not, are not, necessarily the best entry points into jazz, but there they were. And this would have been, really, probably the fall of 2001, really the height of my arrogance as a music writer. I mean, I was headed for a big crash, but I didn't know it. Things were still pretty hot back then for music writers, jobs would find me. There were a few mags I could whip off an email to, say "Hey, buddy, this is what I'm writing today, you want some?" And I'd get these fantastic cheques in the mail for US dollars, and this is back when that mean something. I mean you take a cheque for US$100 into the bank (this was back when you still took cheques to the bank) and they'd give you back $135 in Canadian money. Back then, you could rent a one-bedroom apartment downtown for like $250 in Regina so, the idea that a guy could make a living writing about music was not so fantastical.

Dr. Lewis, known in Regina at the time as "the Jazz Doctor", was a great interview. A natural talker and a wellspring of jazz lore, he took advantage of my jazz novice enthusiasm and gave me his history of jazz. Klezmer, or "klezma" as he called it, played a huge role. He also addressed something that I'd been curious about--why were there so many jazz versions of Broadway showtunes? In my young mind, the two genres couldn't be more disparate: jazz was the sound of America at it's coolest and most sublime; musical theatre was the sound of crazz pandering to base emotions and the death of my career in the legitimate (high school) theatre.

I strained to keep my naive disdain for showtunes to myself, but if Lewis saw it he didn't care. He told me about the Bop revolution (which I knew a bit about from all my Kerouac reading back in the day) and how jazz players grew more interested in improvisation and less interested in composition. The riff ruled. Ostinato. Popular songs, standards, showtunes were great for this because your audience was probably already familiar with the melody and could better appreciate the demarcation of what's composition and what's improvised virtuosity. They'd be hep to your blowing.

Detective fiction is like Bop, in this way. It might even be true of all genre fiction, but I'm not familiar enough with any other genres to say for sure. The plot, or melody, is familiar but what the writer does within the framework (or sometimes without) of that familiarity is what's thrilling.

Sez You

Why are we still putting sesame seeds on hamburger buns? It seems like it's just a big waste of time for everyone.
Have you ever had a hamburger on a bun without sesame seeds on it? Did you miss the sesame seeds?
It's not like the sesame seed doesn't have other, more useful places to be. Like in sesame oil, or tahini. It's not some bullshit vanity grain, like the poppy seed.
There's probably just some dude who owns a bakery and has a bunch of sesame trees in his yard. This guy is like, "What am I gonna do with all-a them sesame seeds that fall outta them sesame trees every fall? Fuckit, I'll put 'em on the hamburger buns. Charge an extra 35 cents per dozen. Then I write the trees off as a business expense. Yeah, screw the taxpayer, that's the idea!"

Thoughts: I got 'em.

I lost my phone, I lost my pen, I spent a fortnight without constant internet access. I should do that more often.
My phone, who cares, right? I'm tempted to not replace it. Just forget the whole thing. I didn't have that phone very long. The one before, I'd had since coming out to Vancouver in August, 2006. It was an artifact. All it did was send and receive phonecalls and texts. Its ringtone was "Milkshake". I had a lot of people's numbers in there. That phone was destroyed two months ago. I couldn't retrieve the numbers. Its replacement, which fell out of my pocket on an airplane did everything people think a phone should do these days.
I was more broken up about the pen. It fell out of the same pocket, probably at the same time. Just goes to show. I'd had it less than a week. The last few years I've been using cheap Bic pens, the kind you get in packs of 12 for two or three bucks. I figured, I always carry a pen, I'll probably lose it, so don't get fancy with it. Just get a pen that does what a pen oughtta do. But I never lost a pen. I ran them dry, broke them, repurposed them, but never lost them. So when the last pen in the bag became unreliable, I decided I had earned the sweet glide of a six-dollar Uniball. So much for that. Luckily, my dad spotted me a ballpoint promoting my uncle's contruction fastener company. It's not much to look at, green textured grips on either side of the nib, but it feels good in my hand.
I filed a Lost & Found claim with the airline for the phone.

So I wasn't on Twitter, I wasn't reading my email. I was hanging out with my family and stuffing my face with butter tarts. I watched a lot of TV and read a couple of books. I put that construction fastener pen to work and wrote some notes.
Most of them, reviewing them now in the silence of the new year, were notes on my Project, which I'm not ready to share. The rest were mostly about TV.  I watched a lot of TV. I was staying at my in-laws and they have all the channels. All the channels. And a deep-freeze full of treats (half-full now) like butter tarts and lemon squares and cookies cookies cookies.
NOTES
Things I liked about Killing Them Softly (which I saw Boxing Day night with my youngest brother and oldest sister)

• heavy-handed allegory 
• all the crime dudes were stuck in the 70s
• Ray Liotta (who reminded me, in retrospect, of Caroll O'Connor) 
• didn't cheat against violence with style
• very few flourishes or vamping
• Gandolfini was like a Haggatha song 
• pretending Brad Pitt's character was Tyler Durden to the Richard Jenkins character's Edward Norton character from Fight Club (what was his name?) 

Ads I saw on the Sun News TV Network

• "Natural Health Supplements"
• central vacuum system
• Red Lobster

Every single time I put on Sun TV, it was just one Sun Media journalist talking to another Sun Media journalist. Nothing gets in. Nothing gets out. 

Wallander doesn't know Revelation is in the back?

Good: Night Court marathon
Better: Night Court Christmas episode marathon
Best: Night Court guest-starring John Astin marathon

Book TV check in:

• Lois & Clark
• interview with Suzanne Somers
• Lois & Clark
• Lois & Clark
• Road to Avonlea 

Random episode of Arrow

• All traces of Vancouver have been digitally removed, but then they go and mention Vancouver by name. 
• Stays true to Green Arrow's roots as a cheap Batman knock-off
• Bodyguard's name is Diggle, mentions a brother named Andy
• Really laying it on thick with the DCU references, from Bludhaven to Big Belly Burgers 
• Not much to recommend it: little humour, no joy, no trick arrows, no van dyke, no chili, no smack talking Batman.