Haters gonna hate.

Somebody asked me once, when I was still writing for the newspaper, how it felt to write down to a fifth-grade reading level.
I didn't punch the guy for two reasons. One, he was a friend of a friend. Two, do you know me at all?
Now, I've got nothing against academics, post-modernists and other assorted eggheads, but, likewise, I've got nothing against readers. Writing in plain, everyday, accessible language isn't the cakewalk some might think. Especially when, as many newspaper reporters do, you deal with such enemies of clear language as politicians and public relations officers.
Roy Peter Clark tells us to use shorter words, sentences and paragraphs at the points of greatest complexity. We write because we have a desire to communicate. We've got something to say, and we hope somebody's gonna get it when we do.
That's why I can get behind the sentiment of Steven W. Beattie's essay from last year, "Fuck Books", if not the method of delivery. Beattie, along with Alex Good, got people talking about Canadian books this week with a pair of posts at the National Post's The Afterword blog. The overrated list filed similar complaints against the abuse of poetics in CanLit as Beattie's "Fuck Books" and, I don't know, is it open season on poets again?
I don't read enough CanLit to enter too deeply into the debate on this one, but I do worry all the fucking time that this novel I'm writing isn't CanLit enough, doesn't meditate lushly enough on a tableau of tapestries, either ironically or earnestly, doesn't distill through a fractured lens the frissons of post-colonial metaphors. And then sometimes I worry that it does all of these things just a little too much. Mostly, though, I remind myself how inadequately I've fared whenever I've tried to fit in. I remind myself of Herbie Popnecker, and what he told JFK. And I wage on.
mp3: "Liv Tyler" by Roadside Graves
mp3: "Everything" by Roadside Graves

Boring people

"Only boring people can be bored," my Eighth Grade teacher used to say. About four years ago, I saw those words postered on a wall just outside Blood Alley every night during a string of graveyard shifts in one of Canada's most notorious slums*.
It wasn't the first time since 1991 I had reason to think of Mr. C, and it wasn't the most recent. How do you not constantly go back to the lessons you learned when you were 13? Inside and out of the classroom, that's when we shrugged off the final crumbs of our childhood and learned how to walk in adult bodies. It's when we got our first glimmers of having to take some responsibility for ourselves and when we were lucky, we got a hint of the power that lay in that responsibility.
And we were lucky.
Mr. C told us that he became a teacher because Education was the last thing you could get into at the University of Saskatchewan after you'd flunked out of everything else. He'd briefly been a punk rocker in his youth, he said, until he realized that you couldn't be a punk rocker if you were riding around Moose Jaw in your parents' stationwagon.
Mr. C ran a music appreciation class where we would bring in our own music, play a song and then the class would talk about it, with Mr. C usually schooling us on why the music we liked wasn't as cool as we thought it was, but not in a condescending way. During one class someone (it might have been me, but I don't think it was) played "Kiss Off" by the Violent Femmes. Mr. C asked for a show of hands if we liked it. All hands up. He asked for a show of hands if we identified with the lyrics of the song. Again, all hands up. I still don't know what to make of that moment, when I realized that all of my classmates, to some degree, felt the same as I did: alienated, shunned, hopeless--even the ones who made me feel that way.
Our school canceled the Valentine's Day dance that year because it fell during Lent. Our class try to reason with Mr. C. "Isn't Christian sacrifice meaningless," our class posed, "when the one making the sacrifice doesn't have a choice?"
"Yeah," I agreed. "If we have to give up dancing, you should have to give up something you enjoy...like music!"
"I'm way past enjoying music. I do it because I have to," Mr. C answered, and we were reminded that the forces that ruled us were often ambivalent.
Mr. C later confided in me that he was just being tough, he still enjoyed music. And, y'know, I was young and naive, but not that naive.
At the beginning of the school year, Mr. C told us that despite what we may have heard about him, we shouldn't get our hopes up. He'd turned 30 over the summer and his good years were over, he said.
I'm older now than Mr. C was when he taught me so much. I wonder how much of his Weltschmerz was a put-on and I wonder how thick he lays it on now.
Mr. C turns 50 today. Happy birthday to one of the coolest people I've ever met. If you're entering his class this fall, I hope he promises the same to you that he did to us, and I hope he keeps that promise in the same way.



mp3: "Summer Nights Lakeside" by Gospel Claws
mp3: "Visions of You" by Modern Superstitions

*in case the face that I was working in a place called "Blood Alley" didn't make that clear enough

The record-buying public shouldn't be voting.

Kathryn Calder's debut album shares a name with my second favourite P.D. Eastman book. You can read my review of Are You My Mother? here.
And because I know that most of you reading this blog are completists when it comes to record reviews written by yours truly, here's one I did a few issues back on the Mohawk Lodge's new album Crimes.

mp3: "Arrow" by Kathryn Calder
mp3: "Bad News" by the Mohawk Lodge

Awwww crap!, part two in a series

I heard the news today, oh boy (yesterday actually).
Regina's Polymaths are calling it quits for quite legitimate, life-goes-on reasons. I haven't even heard their only album, Home Again, so I'm not, y'know, heartbroken. That doesn't mean it's not a loss for music fans and for a Regina pop scene that has surely matured in my absence.
Their 2008 EP, So Long, Castle Road, pleased me in so many ways: It's smart, catchy pop full of local references.
I'm pretty sure I first learned of their existence by reading Pat's Sound Salvation Army blog, so props to him, and props to Polymaths. If you're in Regina on Thursday night, go pay your respects at O'Hanlon's.

mp3: "Wrecking Ball's Kiss" by Polymaths
mp3: "Strike" by Polymaths

Awwww, crap!

Here's how things were supposed to go:
I show up with my moderately wonderful second draft tucked under my arm. Perhaps I am wearing a tweed coat with suede patches, perhaps I am not. It is mid-October, the weather could go either way.
I am cordial with Joseph Boyden, perhaps even a bit shy, as I often am with people I admire. But I make an quiet mention of how his Moosenee characters in Through Black Spruce have similar speech patterns to some of the characters (especially Antoine Batiste) in Treme, which is set in the place where Boyden mostly lives now, New Orleans. He realizes I am a perceptive reader, and he begins to form a genuine interest in reading my manuscript. He tells me stories about the people he knows who inspired characters on Treme, and I dazzle him with my arcane knowledge of Clark Johnson, who hasn't been on Treme, but was on the final season of The Wire, which Boyden still hasn't watched at this point, and his interest in my novel grows as my eyes widen when I talk about the scene in Homicide: Life On The Street where Johnson's character, Detective Meldrick Lewis, allows his strained marriage to finally collapse under the weight of a black-velvet painting of Teddy Pendergrass.
"So what's your novel about, anyway?" he asks.
I explain to him that it started out as your typical vaguely-autobiographical, grudge-settling first novel, but grew into something else. Inspired in equal parts by Jonathan Ames's first novel I Pass Like Night (as well its direct influence, The Catcher in the Rye), Walter Mosley's first Socrates Fortlow book Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned and Jack Kirby's 18 issues of Mister Miracle comics.
Boyden doesn't quite get all the references, but his wife, Amanda, who is co-presenting the retreat, says, "You watch a lot of HBO, don't you, Emmet?"
So they read the damn thing, the beast I've been working on not-quite-as-steadily-as-I'd-like since January, when I registered for the retreat. They like, it shows promise. "There are some really great ideas in here," Joseph Boyden says.
"I agree," Amanda agrees. "But we have some notes."
The next four days are an ecstatic blur, as we workshop through the novel's problems--and there are problems. After the day's writing and rewriting is done, we go for a long walks in the cool night and I tell them all about my wonderful, supportive wife and my ridiculous daughter, who is, by October, speaking in sentences and, oh, the things she says!
At last, the retreat has run its course, and Nicole and Lill have come over to meet me in Campbell River for a little family holiday before the drag of everyday life resumes. Joseph and Amanda, my new best friends, invite the three of us to New Orleans "sometime after Mardi Gras" and Joseph tells me he wants to show my next draft to some important people.
The next spring, in Louisiana, a chance encounter in Louis Armstrong Park leads to a meeting with David Simon, who immediately buys the rights to my novel and offers me a job, forever changing my fortunes.
Here's how things went:
"Hello, Mr. Matherson? I'm sorry to inform you that the Art of Fiction writing intensive with Joseph and Amanda Boyden has been cancelled."
Awwww, crap!
###
Here's Big Tree, a New York band who play what I call Hippie Jazz, performing a terrif version of "Little Brother" live. The song is also on their self-titled 2008 album, but this live version just kills it. If you're in the Canadian Maritimes, they'll be playing Julie Doiron's Sappyfest on July 31.



MP3: "The Concurrence of All Things" by Big Tree from their brand new EP, Home (Here)

Google Me

So, um, the number one search term leading to this blog over the last week was "Bon Jovi Emmet Matheson". Also, a lot of visits have been coming in from Iran. I don't want to jump to any, I mean, I don't think the two are, well, that's one heck of a coincidence.
I wrote some words about Bon Jovi for the prairie dog, and also about Das Racist. The Bon Jovi thing is a follow-up to something I wrote last fall. I don't know why I've written more about Bon Jovi in the last year than any other band, and I don't know why they care so much in Iran. But I'm glad they do.
Meanwhile, remember Bigg Jigg? I featured him here a few months ago. Just like the Rural Alberta Advantage, the Deep Dark Woods, Women and the Parkas, great things have happened for Bigg Jigg aka The Breadwinner since appearing on ABWAWBA. He's just signed to Universal Music Group, who will release his debut longplayer I Am The Go 2 Man on August 20.

mp3: "Google Me (Dirty Version)" by Bigg Jigg

now is better than before

Wednesday on the swings, a girl, maybe 4 or 5 years old, yells to be pushed higher, harder, faster.

"You're boring, Dad," she says to the man behind her.

He looks at me and smiles with pride, "She has no idea how hard I work at being boring."

mp3: "My Daughter" by Lucky Fonz III

mp3: "We Are Still Young" by Lucky Fonz III