The way we were: cast and crew of Sitting on Paradise, playRites ’96/ Photo by Trudi Lee (I think).
There’s word in Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe & Mail, that Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites Festival will end after this season’s installment.
The reputation I made for myself in the theatre and the body of work I’ve been able to create can largely be attributed to Alberta Theatre Projects and the playRites Festival.
Back in 1993 when I arrived on the scene, the Festival (which began in 1987) was really gathering momentum. The model at the time was to offer main stage productions, in rep, of four new plays, with full production values, which was and probably still is unheard of, even unthinkable. At the same time there were three or four plays in development that were workshopped and then given readings in the rehearsal hall, known as Platform Plays. This is where I, and my play “No Moving Parts,” could be found at playRites ’93.
Other ancillary events included Brief New Works, which consisted of readings of short plays throughout the community; Celebrity Hors d’Oeuvres; TheatreBlitz!, a mini festival for high school students; the announcement of the Harry and Martha Cohen Award; Blitz Weekend, for theatre artists and journalists from out of town to come and check out the work; the 24 hour playwriting competition; later, Plays on the Plaza in the Shackter Theatre (holding an audience of ten) on Olympic Plaza, etc. etc. etc. It really was a festival in the true sense of the word.
In 1993, before the advent of the Auburn Saloon (which closed its doors earlier this year, alas), there was even an after-show bar in the lobby of the theatre called Martha’s Bar. In 1993, I read a piece at a literary event there hosted by Brad Fraser, whose play Unidentified Human Remains had received its first production at playRites a few years earlier and gone on to tour the world.
They called it at the time “The hottest six weeks in winter,” and that was an apt description. Masterminded by then Artistic Director Michael Dobbin and run by the indefatigable and exacting Bob White, it was an event unlike any other we are likely to see in this lifetime. It was also tremendously expensive and to pay for it, Dobbin had the moxie to prize some big bucks out of the not-always-so-supportive-of-the-art-thing oil companies. In fact, early on in my tenure there, Michael told me, confidentially, even conspiringly, that if oil ever reached 20 bucks a barrel, we’d all be dancing in the streets.
It did; we’re not. End of story.
At the same time, Bob White had the respect of playwrights from across the country, bringing the best available new work to the stage – in Calgary, no less. This included not only original plays written in English, but works from Quebec and even Mexico in translation which seemed quite daring at the time. Bob was (and still is, now at the Stratford Festival) a very intelligent and sensitive, at times ruthless, dramaturg, and in my experience, one of the country’s best directors. With him running the show, artistically, you could rest assured that the quality of the work was as good as it could possibly be.
It’s hard to explain just what a magical event it was at that time. You almost had to have been there to know how exciting playRites was in its day.
That first year I was there for my platform play reading, one evening after our rehearsal I sat in the Martha Cohen Theatre and watched one of the main stage plays. Actually, it didn’t matter that the play wasn’t so great (notice I’m kind enough not to name it), because I was blown away by the beauty of the theatre, the physical space, and offered up one of those silent prayers we all offer up from time to time, bargaining to sell my soul to god or the devil or whomever if I could just have my work produced in that theatre once. Just once!
1993, following playRites, I went back to my home town of Regina. It was a tense year for me, waiting to hear whether my little play, which I had since renamed “Some Assembly Required,” would be produced on the main stage at playRites ’94, or if I would sink back into relative obscurity, the beautiful dream over before it had really begun.
As it turns out, they did have me back. My play did well enough for me to become playwright in residence for ATP (a one year contract that went on for ten years). I wrote five more plays for the company, all of them premiering at the playRites Festival. Three of them received second productions in subsequent seasons at ATP, and so I ended up having nine productions in total in the elegant Martha Cohen Theatre. (I think my soul is still intact, although that may be up for debate.)
Some of these plays have gone on to having many other productions in other cities and countries, but there was something about the playRites production that was, for lack of a better word, magical. And that didn’t just happen, magically, it was the result of a lot of hard work. I was fortunate enough to have Bob White directing my work. The plays were cast with some of the finest actors in the country, with great designers (including now Calgary City Councilor Brian Pincott) and with Diane Goodman and the big ATP machine steadily behind it all.
I was really very fortunate to have been there at that time, and obviously I have very fond memories of the Festival. Because of all that ancillary programming, there was so much work for the theatre staff during those hot six weeks that it almost killed us, though I guess we tend to remember the good more than the bad. But make no mistake, it was hard, and relentless. There was pressure to be not just good but amazing. It was a great place to open a play, but it was hard on the nerves, not for the faint of heart.
For playwrights, the Festival was important for a number of reasons. It offered sensible and intelligent dramaturgy (or play development, if you like), so the work produced would be as complete, as good, as the playwright et al could possibly make it. It offered the best production values a play, new or otherwise, is likely to see, anywhere. It provided an audience, a big one in fact, as the Martha Cohen Theatre holds around 400 people. Finally, it brought the work exposure in the media (remember the media?) and to artistic directors from all over, making second (and beyond) productions of playRites-premiered plays commonplace.
And now it’s gone. I find it hard even to try to put a good spin on that. I’m sure it’s been a very difficult decision for the current staff. It will certainly leave a gigantic hole in the Calgary theatre season, and in the Canadian theatre scene as well. It’s a tough loss not only for playwrights but for actors and others for whom it represented at one time one of the best and longest gigs in the country.
And yet, the playRites Festival as I have described it here, the way it was 20 years ago or so, has been gone for some time and for the last few years, there just didn’t seem to be the same buzz, the same excitement about it. It felt like the magic was gone, like a little of the air had seeped out of the balloon. I wondered if maybe this was just my own personal perception, as I’m not involved anymore, with nothing at stake. But it would seem, clearly, that wasn’t just my own perception. And now, the great idea, the noble initiative, has run its course, and it’s time for the company to move on.
Move on to what? That’s not for me to answer. I’m sad to see playRites end, it will be sorely missed in Calgary by many. (By people like Joyce Doolittle, for example, who has seen each and every main stage play at the Festival, well over 100.) But I hope something new and wonderful will emerge from this resilient and important theatre company.
Thanks for reading.
Here’s the curtain call music Bob White chose for the playRites production of my play Sitting on Paradise in 1996.
A few days of steady snow and it doesn’t take long to switch from summer mode to winter. You hear things out here like “Well, at least we made it through October.” It’s true, we mostly did. But now only three days into November, October seems like a long time ago, and the world suddenly looks different, the colors have been drained from the landscape and the world now appears in black and white.
Just last week, I heard the old refrain, the old wishful thinking: “Maybe this year it won’t snow. Maybe this will be a warm winter. Maybe this year it won’t happen. Maybe global warming isn’t such a bad thing after all . . .”
But of course, it did snow. It needs to snow. Have a look at some of the photos of the depression from out here and you’ll see for yourself what happens when it doesn’t snow. My mother used to say that the thing that near drove her mad in the ‘30’s was the dust. Dust and fine dirt everywhere, no avoiding it, impossible to keep anything clean, it would even get in your mouth. No water and everyone thirsty all the time, a mouthful of dirt, well, sorry to inconvenience you but we need the snow.
As for the cold, I don’t know that we need it but we’ll get it. It’s only adults who mind the cold. Kids don’t notice it. When I was a kid my mom’s biggest worry was getting us to do up our coats and put on our mittens, even on the coldest days. In high school we shunned boots and wore Converse, the only concession to winter that we would put on an extra pair of socks. This at 40 below, where the Fahrenheit and Celsius concur that it’s fucking freezing.
In Saskatchewan when I was a kid it would go on for weeks like that. Cars developed square tires, if cars would start at all. Remember the sound of someone trying to start their car on a cold dark morning. The hacking sound of the ignition, the whine, the silence. Again and again and again, until the thing turned over, and then you’d have to listen to the person rev the shit out of their motor for ten minutes before the car could crawl away, spewing huge flumes of white steam out the tale pipe. Either that or the sound of the car door slamming when the person finally gave up and went back in to call someone for a boost.
The sound of your footfalls squeaking into the thin dark air. The cold made audible but the air too thin and brittle to hold the sound for long. It’s a sickly sound, the sound of ice, the sound of the deep cold. You might want to do up your coat if it gets that cold and you have to walk a ways, but by and large you don’t think too much of it, it’s just how it is.
And so many ways to express it. It’s cold. It’s chilly. Breezy. Or the interrogative form: Cold enough for you out there? Sure, it’s a tad frosty out there. Colder than a hooker’s heart. Colder than a well digger’s ass. It’ll freeze the balls off a brass monkey. Exposed human flesh will freeze in less than 60 seconds. And it did, and it still does, but apparently human flesh thaws out again.
And everything now rendered in black and white. The white snow and the dark endless night of winter. White breath pluming out against the black sky, remote white stars above twinkling cold and eternal as if you have been caught and fixed in space along with the constellations. And even the sun when it bothers to shine, and shine coldly, radiating cold, shines almost as white as the moon and about as warm.
Every year it comes as a bit of surprise, no matter how many years you’ve had in the cold, you manage to forget, the summer effectively erases all memory of the long hard winter so that every winter becomes the first winter.
More than the cold and the snow, though, it’s the darkness that pervades everything. If summer is one long endless day, winter is an even longer more interminable night. It presses in from without. It works its way inside, seeping in, leaching all color leaving only the black and white outline of things: trees, fences, brown-black grasses poking up through a blanket of white snow, shadows of things under stark street lights, outlines of buildings, white swirling snow passing through the feeble white cone of a street light.
And yet for all that, life carries on. We lash wooden boards to our feet and head once again to the mountains, even more beautiful in winter than in summer. And there is beauty to it too, but not the lush, plentiful and easy beauty of the tropics. It’s austere and even barren. We have no choice to fill it up with something, and so we create art. Into the void, we feel we must offer something, from Shakespeare and his Hamlet to Beethoven and his 9th Symphony to the Group of Seven and their sublime and timeless images of the land and the climate. To this little effort of mine. We do try to fill the void.
In this way we carry on, and maybe even prevail.
And if nothing else, it only lasts for six months.
Thanks for reading.
Here’s a wonderful Gordon Lightfoot song from Sarah McLachlan.
I have mentioned elsewhere on this illustrious blog of mine that for the past few years, on and off, I have been teaching about “cultural vocabulary” at a place called ABES in North East Calgary. (Please see Cultural Vocabulary at ABES and Work, Work, Work.)
On thing I believe it’s important for my students to know is who’s on our money, from the Loonie on up. I guess I might well ask at this point, to my Canadian readers, if you know, exactly, for all the times you’d handled, say, a ten dollar bill, whose picture appears on it.
I ask this because one day last week, I came upon a conversation between one of my students, a doctor from Pakistan, and a Canadian–born student from another of the programs. She was asking my student just what, exactly, we focus on in my class. (Another way saying, “What the hell do you do in there all day?”)
By way of example, he mentioned that he now knows who appears on our ten dollar bill. I asked her if she knew, to which she said she had no idea. The good doctor then informed her “It’s Sir John A. MacDonald.” To which she asked, “Who?” To which my student, who has been in Canada for all of six months, replied, “Our first Prime Minister, and The Father of Confederation.”
I guess we still must teach Canadian history in our schools. But I was really surprised, one might even say shocked and appalled, that a young, intelligent woman who received her education in Calgary wouldn’t know the answer to this.
While we might believe that all American students learn about George Washington (as we do in Canada as well), there are clearly gaps in the American system, as the following story illustrates.
A number of years ago, I found myself (not that I was lost, but you know what I mean) in New York City, specifically in Spanish Harlem. I was there with a program developed at Calgary’s Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts called the Playwrights’ Web. We had partnered (I hate using nouns as verbs, but sometimes it seems inevitable) a Calgary junior high school with one in Harlem, the idea being that we would learn about each others’ cultures through the vehicle of playwriting.
The class in Calgary had been quite into the spirit of the project, but when I walked into that classroom in Harlem, it almost seemed to be the first they had heard of it. One young, diminutive fellow in the class walked up to me, in the midst of utter pandemonium, stood there looking at me, arms akimbo (as we used to say) and said, “Yo! You’re the man! You’re the big tall white man! Do something! Teach us something!” And then he returned to his seat, getting high fives and low fives from his classmates as if he played for the Yankees and was returning to the dugout after hitting a home run.
I remember at that moment looking at the door thinking to myself, “New York City is just beyond that door. I could just leave. Why don’t I just leave?” It was very tempting.
As I stood there contemplating the closed door to the classroom, three girls in the front row who were all in their best attire, and unlike anyone else in the room actually seemed interested in the program, engaged me in conversation. One of them asked, “Do you all got your own money up there in Canada?”
I said yes, indeed we do. I happened to have a Canadian 20 in my wallet and so I fished it out and held it up for their consideration. At the moment I held it up, the whole room went quiet. No more pandemonium.
The young dude came back up the centre aisle looking at the bill with great confusion and suspicion. At length he asked,
“Whut da fuck’s that?”
“That’s a 20 dollar bill, I said.
“No it ain’t,” he said.
“Yes it is,” I said.
“Where da fuck’s that from?” he asked.
“Canada,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “Where da fuck is dat, anyway?”
“North,” I said, “North of the Bronx.”
“And it’s like its own country?” he asked.
“We like to think so,” I replied.
“And you all got your own money up dare?” he asked.
“Yes we do.”
He leaned in and looked more carefully and then asked, “Who’s the fuckin’ chick?”
“That’s the Queen of England,” I told him.
He worked that around in his brain for a moment before asking, “What da fuck’s she doing on your money?”
To which I said, “That’s a very good question.”
And after that little interchange, we managed to have a very good week together. I taught them a bit about the theatre, a bit about playwriting, a bit about Calgary, and a whole lot about the American Revolution, which oddly enough, they seemed to know very little about.
And so it begs the question, “Who’s on your money, and why are they there?”
Last night I saw John Cleese at the Jack Singer Concert Hall in Calgary with my friend Zenon West. This was one stop on his Last Time To See Me Before I Die tour. For those interested in the phenomenon of Monty Python and really, the history of comedy in England from the 1960’s till now (which I am), this was a very entertaining and informative show. Mr. Cleese uses clips from the Monty Python TV series, as well as his films such as “A Fish Named Wanda” and the amazing Fawlty Towers to illustrate his points and to break up a very generous lecture of sorts – half lecture, half stand up comedy – which is always charming and informative.
The two hours go by so fast. It really is a brilliant evening. The audience is so appreciative to be in the presence of someone who has made us laugh for so many years. What a gift he has given us, the gift of laughter. I can think of none greater.
As I sat there, listening to one of my favourite people on the planet, I was taken back to an evening some forty years ago in my home town of Regina. It actually goes back maybe a year or so before then . . .
Some of you will have no frame of reference for this, but back in the 1970’s, not just in Regina but most anywhere, there were only a few channels on TV which were mostly black and white, and if you wanted to change the channel you had to physically do that on the set with a dial, there were no remote controls.
In Regina, there were two channels, CTV from Regina and CBC from Moose Jaw. (2 and 9, as I recall.) On Thursday nights at 9 on Channel 2 there was an hour long detective show on called Mannix, which I loved to watch. My friend Rick (aka Richard Campbell) told me about a new show that came on at 9:30 on Channel 9 called Monty Pythons Flying Circus which I wanted no part of.
On Friday mornings Rick would ask me if I’d watched Monty Python but I stood fast and remained true to Mannix. (Hey, if nothing else, I’m loyal.) Finally, one Thursday evening a little after 9, Rick walked over to my house and turned the channel on our old Zenith TV and made me watch Monty Python and from then till now I was hooked.
That summer, Rick and I learned that the Monty Python troupe was actually coming to the Saskatchewan Centre of the Arts. We could hardly believe it. (No one came to Regina back then other than Valdy and Supertramp.) We were able to get front row tickets for the simple reason that not many people had heard of them by this time.
We were treated to an amazing show, all their TV sketches done live, and done word for word, as well. For a couple of aspiring theatre artists, this show must have had a more profound impact on us at the time than we could have known. I doubt that I’ve been more enthralled with a performance since.
After it was all over – after the flying edible missiles and dead parrots and cross-dressing lumberjacks and all the rest of it – Rick and I went back to stage door and waiting for them to come out. (The only time I’ve ever done such a thing.)
And then they came out. It would be hard to put into words the generosity they showed Rick and me that night. They not only signed our programs (which I have since lost, alas) but had Rick and me sign the various books and magazines they were reading, anything on hand really. As their cabs (and one limo) waiting to take them to their downtown hotel, they stood and engaged two young high school kids in conversation for what seemed like a good half hour. Amazing! It seemed so then and it seems so now, so many years later.
So, all that was going through my head last night as my friend Zenon and I watched Mr. Cleese’s very charming performance. After a well deserved standing ovation, it was over. Back in the day, back in Regina some 40 years ago, when the show was over they projected PISS OFF onto the curtains. The beauty of Monty Python was that we laughed at that. Of course we did. It’s funny.
No such thing last night, and when it was over, Zenon remarked that John Cleese genuinely seems to be a nice man, and I couldn’t agree more.
To end, here’s one we all know, that they did in Regina a million years ago and that Mr. Cleese shared with the audience last night.
Some of you may know that after defining myself artistically as a playwright for the last 20 years or so, for the last year I have been writing a novel. I have written over 20 plays in my lifetime, 18 of them have been produced at least once, some of them many times. The writing process by and large ends with the first performance, although we might sometimes go back and tinker with a few scenes here and there. This usually happens in the unlikely event that the play is being published.
And so I know my way around the process of writing a play, I think. This is not to say I know, absolutely, how to write a play, just that I understand the process of how one might go about doing it. The question I have been asked over the last few months is how I am finding the process of writing a novel, and how it differs from writing a play. So this post is an exploration of those questions.
One thing that both processes have in common for me is that I typically hand write a first draft, and then transcribe it into the computer which becomes in effect draft 2. The plays I have written have almost always been written in fountain pen on graph paper. I wrote the first draft of the novel in pencil on graph paper in three small notebooks. The novel in fact magically ends within a page of the end of the third notebook.
When one is writing a play, one of the most important things to monitor is the voice of the characters, making sure they are clear and distinct. My novel is written in the form of a daily journal and so the voice of my protagonist is of the utmost importance. It’s close to my own voice, but it’s not my voice, it’s his. So in a way, it has rather been like writing an extended monologue, and in this regard it wasn’t too much of a departure for me, if I thought of it that way.
This perhaps begs the question, could this novel then be adapted for the stage? The simple answer to that is yes, it might possibly work as a one-man show. Another question might then be, why didn’t I just write it as a one-man show? The simple answer is, I don’t know. The surprising thing about it is that if this were to happen, it wouldn’t interest me to do it myself. Again, I don’t really know why.
When I write a play, I am very tuned into the page and word counts at the bottom of the screen of any Word document. These counts tell you, roughly, how productive you’ve been on any given day. In a play, because of the nature of dialogue, it is possible to leap ahead in pages without drastically altering your word count; writing a few hundred words might swell the script by 5 pages, and you can feel that you have put in a pretty good day’s work in doing so. For some reason, I can remember that my play A Guide to Mourning is about 18,000 words long. It is, by today’s standards, a full length play, and so that has always been an unofficial benchmark for me.
Also, if the play is in two acts, you can reasonably tell by the word count if the two acts are of roughly the same length and therefore duration. This is important because you don’t want to end up with a first act that is 90 minutes long and second act that is only 15 minutes, say. You get the idea.
This is obviously not a concern in a novel. But what I have noticed is that while the words pile up, the pages numbers tick by very, very slowly. Like a glacier, receding. A few weeks ago, I seemed to get stuck on page 87, no matter how long I worked or how much I typed, I just seemed to be stuck there. (I noticed this because I don’t like the number 87, it being 13 less than 100. Another strange example of living with tridecaphobia!)
I have now typed just over 45,000 words, transcribing the written version of the novel from my journals into the computer. I am just starting the third and final volume. Some people ask why I don’t get someone to do this for me, but this is the most critical and creative part of the process. Hardly a sentence gets typed that isn’t changed, somehow. More often than not, the handwritten version is quite compressed and needs expansion, illumination. And of course at other times it just has to be thrown out. Sometimes, it actually has to be changed because I can’t read my own damned handwriting.
Overall, the main difference I suppose is the sheer volume of the novel. It really does take discipline and even courage to go on. You also have to manufacture your own enthusiasm for the project. Some days that can be difficult as you find yourself convinced that they guy who wrote the first draft is a babbling idiot. How James Joyce lasted 17 years in writing Finnegans Wake is beyond me. And he didn’t have Facebook to distract him!
Courage, discipline, optimism are what I need now. So far, so good. I am looking forward to sharing this tome with the world when the time comes. When it does come, I am looking at an innovative way of going about publishing it.
Juicing can lead to a much healthier lifestyle giving the juicee more energy, vigour, strength, stamina, joy and money, and sometimes turning him or her orange, depending on the juice. It also contributes to less weight, less anxiety, fewer bad thoughts at 4 AM and, overall, a lessening of the sense of futility one (ie, a non-juicee) may experience when confronting, on a daily basis, the gaping existential void.
Reminiscent of the situation in Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, this Eugene sat by for some time as more and more of my friends became juicees and sang the praises of juicing and the many, many benefits thereof (see paragraph one). And so nudged into it by peer pressure and a typical North American sense of entitlement that I should look younger and feel better at 56 than I did at 16, not to mention the certain right to immorality, I took the plunge the other day and came away from London Drugs with a Nutri-Bullet, which happily was on sale for $96.00, although what it costs when it’s not on sale is not clear to me as I am not a wise consumer. I am impulsive and reckless. According to my juiced-up friends, one I start juicing myself (so to speak) I will become a better consumer and will begin to make more prudent choices when I engage in retail therapy.
I brought the big box home and sat it on my kitchen counter. It made me feel so healthy! I love the photo of all the leafy greens and fresh fruit and nuts and all the rest of it. I must say, I began to feel much healthier and could feel a renewed vigour creeping into my loins (as they say) just from looking at that picture.
Time (or lack of), fatigue and alcohol prevented me from actually opening the big box for several days, which was unfortunate because immediately after purchasing the Nutri-Bullet I went across the street to Safeway and bought all kinds of leafy greens and fresh fruits and nuts – they can be found in a section of the store I had never been in before, that specializes in non-meat, non-dairy, gluten-free, unfrozen and unpackaged edible substances commonly known as fruits and vegetables.
These I also left on my kitchen counter. I don’t know what I was thinking – that the box might unpack itself and my leafy greens (spinach) and carrots and nuts might just hop into the big jar, ready for me to transform them into a nourishing and sustaining mulch one morning?
That obviously never happened. And it’s too bad it didn’t, because let me tell you, spinach left in a plastic bag on a counter top soon turns into a green slimy goo, rendering the juicer somewhat redundant. (At the same time, it should be noted, my genetically modified carrots will probably survive beyond Armageddon, where they will no doubt nourish and sustain the various cockroaches and rats and politicians who will be the only survivors , but I digress.)
Undeterred, and by now an ardent devotee of the Nutri-Bullet (I have found myself endorsing it to several friends now, both on Facebook and the part of my existence that is other than Facebook, which I believe they used to call “real life”), I found myself lugging home a huge bag of “fresh farm produce” procured from a friend who sells this stuff out of the back of his car behind Caffe Beano. This is the serious stuff that only the real devoted friends of the juice render down into nourishing drinks, let me tell you. Actually, come to think of it, I can’t tell you what any of it is – was – because I don’t know the names and couldn’t spell them if I did. (I think one of them rhymes with “ridiculous,” but I’m not really sure.)
Well, the long skinny things with the big green leaves soon went the way of the spinach, only this time in my sink, and the bag of green stuff that I at least put in the fridge began stinking up my entire apartment – from the fridge, yet! Clearly, in the interest of public health, it all had to go. I have a small cucumber left which is shriveling down to the size of a big peanut even as I type these words, as well as a zucchini and all I have to say about that is I don’t care for zucchini even when it magically and mysteriously makes its way into a chocolate cake.
And so, to recap: two weeks in and not a drop of juice has been juiced – or in the parlance of juicing, extruded – let alone ingested by this wannabe juicee. $140.00 into my juicing regime, the juicer is still in the box and I don’t expect it to come out of there any time soon. I ended up eating the nuts and opened up a can of cream corn a few days ago but I don’t suppose that really counts.
Still, through it all, I have become an ardent fan of juicing. I think it’s very good for you and I hope this post has encouraged you to become a juicee yourself.
This photo has nothing to do with anything, but in it, I am wearing a Hugo Boss jacket which I bought for $6.00 ay a thrift store recently. Yep. 6 bucks. And don’t I look good in it?
I was one who was early onto Facebook which I believe was about 8 years ago or so. (Modest research on my Facebook page tells me that I in fact joined in 2007. That’s a lot of wasted time!) (No excuse for shoddy research when we have the internet at our fingertips, eh what?)
At the time of its inception, or maybe more to the point, of my joining of it, Facebook really seemed liked the greatest thing since, as they who have no gluten issues would say, which I do but I’ll say it anyway – since sliced bread.
When I signed up, I was a columnist for the Calgary Herald which used to be a decent newspaper but is now hardly more voluminous than the various flyers it lovingly enfolds (Revenue! Revenue!), as it trickles down from the Herald building to an ever diminishing readership. Well, that’s another story. The point I am trying to make here and would make if I’d just get on with it (and so here I go, getting on with it – cut to the chase they will tell you at the journalism schools that mysteriously continue to pump out graduates year after year, even though there are no jobs for any of them, a situation where you have essentially entire faculties of failed journalists teaching eager and bright young people the tricks of the trade for a trade that exists less and less each and every day. “Get on with it!” they will say, reading from notes drunkenly scrawled on yellow foolscap thirty years ago in a fit of gin-inspired inspiration, “Get on with it, and tell your story! Cut to the chase!” they will say, as if they know anything. OK, so, fuck them, I’m not going to get on with it, I’m going to tell my little story about NOT writing for the Calgary Herald anymore and it goes like this . . .
I was wandering aimlessly (Like a cloud! Like a Calgary Flame back checker!) through the aisles and channels of my local Co-op grocery store when I was accosted by a sweet little old lady, she pushing her cart full of grim healthy things and me pushing my own cart piled high with the usual rubbish, red meat and chocolate and pretzels and the usual bachelor fare) when she stopped me, short of ramming my cart with hers, and pulled up her 5’2 inches to my 6’6 inches, saying, “You’re that fellow who writes in the Herald.”
This kind of shit happens all the time. I hadn’t written for the Herald for two years when this incident went down, but what can you do, she’s like a grandmother, who’s going to be rude (not me) and so I looked her in the eye and said, “Yeah.”
She looked me in the eye, and lying through her dentures said, “I read you every week.”
“Oh yeah?” I rejoined.
“Absolutely,” she re-rejoined.
“Welllllllll,” I countered, “Did you read me last week?!”
“Sure,” she said. Lying. “I read you every week.”
“Well, isn’t that a miracle, because I wasn’t in the Herald last week!” I said, triumphantly.
And then she grasped my arm with her bony little hand and laughed gaily (as they once said) and said, “Oh, my, you say the funniest things! Keep it up, boy! Don’t stop!” And then she walked away.
And really, who was I to argue? In a very bizarre way, she made my day.
OK, and now I am ready to get on with it, so I will now close this endless parenthesis and do just that.)
Feel better?
(She actually called me “boy.”)
So, when I joined Facebook, I did in fact still write for the Herald, in the Entertainment Section, on Saturdays, yet, and so I immediately got (attracted?) a thousand friends. Some I knew, some I didn’t know. Good friends friended me. (My hobby is making verbs of nouns!) Casual acquaintances friended me. Total strangers friended me. Hot babes friended me! It was all good. I was like a junkie! Bring ‘em on! Bring on more friends! I couldn’t get enough. (Now I have almost 2,000! I need more! I need more friends! The beast must be fed!!!!)
(In fact, in that very same Co-op store, on another occasion, I was fondling the juicy plump olives one day when a man hoved in beside me and said, conspiringly, “We’ve never met . . . but we’re friends on Facebook.” Brave new world, indeed.)
And, as God would have said, when God was still speaking, “It was good.” That kitty cat picture that someone I don’t know posted was so cute, and so I hit “like.” That scholarly article from Oxford or Germany about the obscure playwright Brghwraighght, I read, and then hit “like.” The photos of dilapidated cinemas? Like, with a pithy comment such as “Wow!” or even pithier, “OMG!”. The pithy Oscar Wilde quotes? Like, and even share. I was only too happy to engage.
Honestly, other than masturbation, I can’t think of anything that has held my interest for so long.
But lately, I don’t know. I think I’m feeling a bit of Facebook fatigue. It was bound to happen. I mean, I used to like so many things that I don’t like anymore, why would this surprise me? Initially, I was happy to be able to stay in touch with friends, and I still am, although I am growing a tad impatient with “friends” (for there are friends, and there are “friends”) who only use the thing to advance their own greatness and never ever ever ever hit like on something you’ve posted, let alone share it.
But beyond that, I’m wondering if it’s possible that there is a finite number of Oscar Wilde quotations (there has to be) and if there is a finite number of cute videos showing insane blood thirty carnivores (ie, dogs) playing with other sweet innocent mammals (cats and humans, say), and not ripping them limb from limb and then devouring them. (There’s probably no limit to these.)
For my part, I am reduced to sharing photos of owls (50 likes) as opposed to sharing scholarly articles (1 like, from an insane friend whom I have never met from rural Kansas, who likes everything I post) because no one will read anything longer than ten words anymore. These, and the photos of myself trying to convince my 2,000 friends that I am if not still “dramatic,” at least interesting.
I am old enough to have lived through a few trends. No one thought vinyl would end. (As it turns out, it hasn’t, it can’t be killed, it’s back.) Or cassettes. Or VCR’s. (Go to any garage sale. VCR’s! Toy Story! Does anyone even have a player anymore? How many billions of VCR’s are out there polluting our planet now??) (Sorry)
As much as we can’t see it, or won’t see it, it’s obviously inevitable that Facebook will prove to be another passing fad, and I am confident enough with my take on the zeitgeist that if I am feeling fatigue, others are as well.
So what?
Wait for the next great thing?
In the meanwhile, on Facebook or off, how about this: How about rediscovering what “friends” really are. What it means to be a friend. Or how about going to an event instead of just hitting “like” or “join” because you think that would be a good thing to do, if only you weren’t at home experiencing life through Facebook. I’m as guilty in this as anyone. Hell, you’re probably reading this because I shared it on Facebook. But I am going to make this little credo my mantra this winter so I don’t get stuck inside alone all the time: Set it aside. Shut it off. Go out. Make human contact. See live performances. Start living again.
And don’t mourn Facebook. It’s not dead by far, but I sense that it’s purpose is shifting. When all is said and done a hundred years from now, if there is still a planet called earth, in my mind it will be shown to have done more harm than good.
But for now, it is what it is.
If you’re old enough, this video might make sense. If nothing else, it’s a good song.
It’s beautiful weather here in the Bovine City. The flood waters have receded for another year at least and the spirit of cooperation and, well, let’s just say it, LOVE, that washed over the city (so to speak) earlier this summer still prevails. Yes, it really was the summer of love here, and if anyone is feeling a bit of Nenshi-fatigue, no one is admitting to it. (We have the best mayor; Toronto has the worst mayor. It doesn’t get any better than that. Surely.)
You’d have to wonder how anyone could find anything to be grumpy about in this Shangri-La but true to form, here he is again, Mr. Grumpypants, reminding us once again that no matter where you go, there will always be someone who is unhappy about something. Take it away, your grumpiness . . . .
Yeah. OK. Exhibit A. Take a look at this photo:
Hardly an award-winning photo but it will give you an idea.
It looks like a war zone, right? It looks like it was taken in some kind of post-industrial wasteland in a third world country. In fact, it was taken in the Connaught neighbourhood of Calgary.
A year ago, this was a happy, friendly little park. It was a well-populated park. There are many people in this neighbourhood who live in apartments with no balconies, or perhaps north-facing balconies bereft of sunshine, who need and utilize this park. It was a busy place.
To this park, that was really nothing more than a grassy glade in the midst of the concrete jungle, the people would happily flock. Here you would find a person leaning against a tree, perhaps reading a book. You would see people playing a game of catch with a Frisbee. Or a football. You had the lovers sharing a blanket, arguing about fixed mortgage rates, and cheeses, etc. Yet others with dogs, happily, willingly bagging the shit of these senseless violent creatures. Go figure!
There was one guy who had one of those remote control helicopters and I took a certain delight in watching him, over the course of the summer (last year), learn to fly the thing. (Rumours that he was planning on affixing a video cam to the helicopter in order to spy on his ex-girlfriend who lived on the third floor of a nearby apartment are to date unsubstantiated.)
My point is that a year ago, on any given day, that park was a thriving oasis in the middle of a very urban neighbourhood.
And then a year ago, last August, the green fence that you can see in this photo was placed around the park, in effect locking out anyone who wanted to use it. I remember thinking at the time, why do that in August? Why not wait till after Labour Day? The days we can actually sit out in a park in this city are numbered. Why now? Why August?
Putting a fence around the park and locking everyone out of it might have been excused had anything happened, but nothing did. The empty, fenced park sat there for at least the next four or five or six weeks with nothing being done to it. And soon enough, winter came and we switched to survival mode so then who was even thinking about parks and such?
Over the course of the winter and early spring, the only thing that became clear was that the newly envisioned, improved park would feature a running track. The outline of the thing has been visible through the fence for some time now. Along with some holes that look like they might have to do with lighting. And there’s a huge pile of dirt in the middle of the thing that’s been there so long, untouched, that by early summer it sprouted grass, resembling an iron age burial ground.
All work, all progress, meager as it was, stopped at the time of the flood, and so I guess we all thought fair enough, the park renovating people are probably doing emergency flood relief.
But now, months after that, over a year in, all told, this once happy and well-utilized park looks like it does in my sad little photo.
To put it in some kind of perspective, that high rise apartment in the background has been totally constructed in less time than it has taken to render this park into its current state. A whole fucking entire building has been erected and they can’t do a half a block of grass and a running track.
I don’t suppose any of the users of that park have had a chance to voice their displeasure, but I certainly am, here and now. WTF?! What kind of morons would put a fence around a perfectly fine park for over a year only to have it look like this? What is wrong with people? Whose idea was this? Why aren’t heads rolling? Who is responsible? And who was the genius who decided that a park largely populated by readers and slackers and lovers and dope smokers needed a fucking running track in the middle of it in the first place?!?!?!?! (To voice my feelings on joggers is well beyond the scope of the current post.)
And finally, because they obviously won’t make it this year, when might we expect this unwanted improvement finally to be completed? How many years will slide by?
Huh?
They should have just left well enough alone, fucking assholes, if you can’t do any better than that. It’s as I always say, change is never good. Nothing good ever comes of it.
Hard at work, signing and numbering the books. I’m actually much better looking than this in real life.
If you should happen to meet someone who claims they know what’s going on these days with publishing, run the other way. No one knows. If anyone might know, it might be me, but I’m telling you I don’t know. Therefore, no one really knows. And there certainly is no secret.
When first there were computers and clumsy dot-matrix printers back in the early 80’s, it didn’t seem to change much, and so it was business as usual for writers for a few more decades. We carried on the same as we did when we were typing.
It seems to me (another way of saying I have no idea what I’m talking about but I’m going to say it anyway) that not a lot of attention was paid to printers in the early days of computers because the theory was that we would soon become a “paperless society.” That’s what they told us and we believed them.
I don’t know how many trees I’m personally responsible for slaughtering since then, but probably a small forest.
And yet, at the same time, they weren’t entirely wrong, these experts. The fact that you are reading this post electronically, as we say, is proof of that.
The one area of printing that befuddled the experts from the beginning was the book industry. Rather than roll over and die, it seemed to flourish in the electronic and later digital age. It seems to me (again, no idea, just saying) there were two (at least) reasons for this. For one, those of us in the literary community supported the industry as well as we could in the best way we could, by buying books. I know so many people like myself who own a Kobo or Kindle and an iPad or other tablet who still (and always will) prefer the “real thing” as it were. And the book industry responded by creating nicer books. It’s true. Books, as physical entities, as artifacts, are much nicer now than when I was a student of literature in the 70’s and 80’s.
Being in the publishing business myself, I know that it is possible to create beautiful books. Especially with a small press like B House, where we do very small runs of our books, it’s possible to create books that are beautiful inside and out, as it were. (We like to think that not only do they look nice, but that what’s inside them is worth reading as well.)
While I’ve been hard at work (not really, but you get my drift) publishing the work of others, I was recently rewarded with a publication of my own by an even smaller press than B House called 100 têtes Press, run by Calgary poet Paul Zits. 100 têtes is somewhat oxymoronically (I love that word) a chapbook press. All the books are created by Paul himself. The care he takes with typesetting and selection of papers results in very beautiful and unique books. He even sews them together on a sewing machine on his dining room table.
Here’s what Paul has to say about it:
Written, the name 100 têtes translates into English as “one hundred heads.” Spoken, the name takes on a second possible translation, namely “without a head.” The name, appropriated from Max Ernst’s 1929 graphic novel, La femme 100 têtes, reflects Zits’ own personal interest in collage-work and literary montage. From their materials, design and binding, reflected in each book’s unique presentation, is 100 têtes belief in the book as art object. But the name is also meant to emphasize the Press’ community-driven focus, made up of, simultaneously, one hundred heads and no heads.
It is the mandate of 100 têtes Press to publish local writers, both new and established, of any genre, with an emphasis on experimental and conceptually resonant poetry, prose and visual art.
The name of my book is Silent Suite and it exists in a limited edition of 40 copies, signed and numbered by the author himself. (That would be me.) It contains three short, sparse poems which I wrote really in reaction to the oh so busy wordy poems I’m used to hearing at poetry readings these days. (Remember the famous line in Amadeus – “Too many notes, Mozart.” I feel like saying that to young poets nowadays – “Too many words!” Hmmmm. Maybe I did just say it. That feels better!)
So, here we see at least a trend in publishing – smaller runs of uniquely produced books which can quickly become collectors items given the small numbers involved. The problem, as you can probably tell, is that no one makes any money from this. That’s the problem as I see it when it comes to publishing in the modern era. As bad as it was for writers in the past, it only seems to be getting worse. The resume expands even as the bank account shrinks. What else is new?
Because Paul is not in it for the money, as they say, his suggested price for the book was $4.00. The day I signed them at Shelf Life Books (there’s a link to Shelf Life to the left – that’s where you can buy a copy, or through me directly), manager Will Lawrence (always the sharp businessman) countered by suggesting a price of $8.00 per book.
After much strenuous negotiation between publisher and book-seller, finally a compromise was reached — $6.00 a book!
As I say, none of us is getting rich, but we at least have the satisfaction of bringing a funky new book into the world.
I managed to sneak one of my classes on stage at the Jack Singer after a tour of the downtown library.
In 2009 I began a very interesting adventure in teaching at a school in north east Calgary called Alberta Business and Educational Services, or ABES, as it is known. They had just come up with an idea for a program aimed at helping internationally educated professionals, primarily in the health care field, find meaningful employment in the health care system here in Alberta. (I have written about ABES before: please see Work, Work, Work from August, 2011.)
I know we have all had a cab driver who comes from somewhere else and who has a PhD in some exotic field or other. I know it doesn’t seem right to most of us that we accept such talented people into Canada and then give them little or no opportunity to practice in their particular area of expertise.
Well, this program at ABES allowed me the opportunity to do something about that. The idea was that they would study for 12 weeks with me, and then study the very practical program in sterile processing that would allow them to become medical device reprocessing technicians. In other words, they would be cleaning up the instruments from the operating rooms and other areas of the hospital.
One might argue the merits of training former surgeons how to clean up the instruments they had used in their home countries as a matter of routine, but it was at least a door into health care services here. Compared to what a lot of them had been doing, such as cleaning floors at Tim Horton’s (as a pharmacist from Afghanistan was doing) or stacking apples at Superstore (as a surgeon from India was doing) or delivering pizza (which a veterinarian from Iran was doing), etc. etc. etc., this new gig we were offering in the hospitals was very prestigious and the pay wasn’t bad either.
For my part, it hasn’t been ESL, exactly. My boss at ABES, Mitchell McCormick, refers to it as “teaching a cultural vocabulary,” which is an apt description. Let me give an example of how I can build a whole week of lessons from something that emerges organically from the class.
During the last federal election, one of my students, a doctor from Cairo, asked me one morning, “What eez ziz I am seeing on all of zeez signs everywhere, Fote, Fote, Fote?”
“Fote? Oh, you mean vote.”
“Zeez eez exactly vot I am saying: Fote.”
Well, I explained, we were in the midst of a federal election and we were being encouraged to vote. And as I said this, it dawned on me that the entire concept of a free election, which we take so much for granted in Canada, to the point that most of us don’t even bother to vote, was an entirely new concept to many of my students, depending on their country of origin.
This allowed me to tell them about our political parties (maybe one in ten would typically know who our Prime Minister is, for example) and the history of politics and Canada going all the way back to Sir John A. (And despite the fact all of my students had handled many ten dollar bills in their time here, none of them knew the name or significance of the old boy on the ten, let alone the guy on the five, but of course we would get to Laurier eventually.)
So, a reasonable exercise was then to find out what ridings they all lived in, who their MP was, who was running in the election, the nature of their platform, etc. etc. etc. In a subsequent provincial election we did the same thing.
You get the idea. What I teach is very practical, meaningful and inclusive. All of my instruction is aimed at helping my students get a job, and instilling the feeling that they are informed and valued members of our community.
This program has been a remarkable success by anyone’s standards, with a completion rate of 97% and an employment rate of nearly 90%. For me, personally, it has been a good fit into my lifestyle, providing some structure and steady income for roughly half of the year, and then affording me the freedom for my other pursuits the other half. This summer, for example, has been taken up with the writing of a novel. But even as I have taken the time to write my novel, there is now a growing concern that the program may not be renewed.
I have seen firsthand just how effective this program is, not just in terms of job training, but perhaps more importantly restoring a sense of hope in our students, and the attendant dignity that goes along with having a meaningful job that allows them to provide for their families.
Unfortunately, the funding for the program has always been tenuous and now we are worried that despite its unparalleled success, it could be cancelled altogether. Honestly, there are so few good opportunities out there for the community we are serving with this program that it would be extremely unfortunate if the funding were not renewed.
You know, it’s not easy immigrating to a new country. I know the alienation and even despair my students feel when they first walk into my class. Yet, I have seen so many of them grow and take their place in our community thanks in no small part to a cool little program in a cool little school just a little east of Deerfoot.
We put together a short video, narrated by yours truly, which I am including below for your further edification. If you agree with me and can see for yourself the importance of this program, please feel free to share this post or just the video itself with others, including MLA’s and other people who could influence a decision on the future of this program.
In the words of the poet, “Don’t it always seem to go, seems you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone . . .”
eugene stickland 