Ewokphobia

The cruellest thing you can do to a man with a pathological fear of teddybears:

mailbox

I hope this is real graffiti, not something staged by the photographer. Either way, it inexplicably made me piss myself laughing.

(No offence to anyone in Chinatown, of course. I'm sure it's not true.)

If you don't like what I'm saying, Good!

All entertainment, be it poetry, dance, cinema, novels, pop music, storytelling or stand-up comedy, has a duty to challenge the audience. Even the escapist genres of "sci-fi" and "fantasy" should not take the easy route and pander to the reader's flabby prejudices and bigotries, but should assault their consumers by shoving these repugnant bigotries back in their faces like a regurgitated meal. They should hold up a distorting fairground mirror and show the audience a grossly exaggerated version of themselves that will make them shudder, even as it makes them laugh, and that will impede their enjoyment of the show by making them think.

And some viewers will come out of the show laughing and say, "I don't really look like that, so it means nothing. I have to change nothing in my life."

But others will walk out having been made to think. They will say to themselves, "I know that was a hideous exaggeration, and I'm not really like that, but it was only when I saw myself looking grotesquely distorted in that mirror that I noticed I am a bit flabby at the edges, so maybe I need to get myself in shape."

And still others will come out of the fairground shaking their heads and saying, "You know, even that outrageously stretched and unbelievable exaggeration of myself, which broke my suspension of disbelief because it was so shocking—well there are fat fucks out there who are even more morbidly obese than that. Maybe there is social problem that we must stop ignoring."

Let's not take this metaphor any further because fat is not a moral phenomenon and in extreme cases may be a disability (and the very concept is often an opportunity for misogyny and discrimination). No, the phenomena I'm really proposing we distort and exaggerate to the point of discomfort in our art are political and moral grotesquenesses like racism, religious fundamentalism, homophobia, discrimination, ableism and normative triumphalism, social imperialism, moral inflexibility, prejudice and sexual repression.

Because however much we may laugh at the exaggerated representations of these evils in satirical art, we must recognise that there are trace elements of all of them in ourselves. We have all judged people because of the colour of their skin or the shape of their eyes. We have all seen news from a third-world country and thought, "If only they were more like us." We have all told (or been tempted to tell) a sick person to "pull themself together". We have all grumbled at the inconvenience of having to negotiate an access ramp when stairs would be easier. We have all seen somebody who acts or dresses outrageously being victimised and thought, "They're really bringing it on themselves."

And we have all made statements like those in the preceding paragraph, and thought ourselves clever and good and liberal for doing so, while ignoring the fact that some people have not done all of these things, because they are the victims in these cases. Shove your smug inclusiveness back in your face.

So, artists, when you present the archetypal villains of your piece as vicious Nazis, why not remind your audience that they picked on the Jehovah's Witness kid in high school? When your evil horde are bearded, be-turbaned devils enslaving their own women, don't forgive your readers who campaigned against women's right to choose their own reproductive destinies and control their own bodies. If your fantasy includes monsters who traumatize or devour children, don't let people dissociate that from the monster who sits on his privileged arse in Rome covering up and protecting those who despicably abuse children, to protect the good name of his organization. If your bad guys or the subjects of your lampoon hold ridiculous and moronic views about race or gender or science, make sure your viewers know that it's their and their neighbours' opinions on poverty and social education, healthcare and glass ceilings, natural evolution and anthropogenic climate change that you are mocking.

There is no excuse for laziness, for prejudice, for retrograde and reactionary thinking, for smugness. We're all guilty of these flaws sometimes, but as an artist it is your fucking job to overcome the weak and the obvious in your public work. If you can't rise to this, go shoot yourself in the shit-eating face and leave the stage to those of us who are not afraid to alienate our audience.

(For someone else's thoughts that helped inspire this rant, read British comic Stuart Lee's autobiography, How I Escaped my Certain Fate.)

Review: Blood on the Ground

Jakob Cayne, Blood on the Ground. Autoautopsy Press, 2009. Pp. 488. CAN$28.99.

"This is gritty and disturbing crime novel with obvious hints of Calder, a bouquet of Welsh and some Palahniuk in the swallow. The hapless protagonist, unhappy in a life of crime, flees from the clutches of the gangster cartel to which he is indentured, only to find that beneath the streets of the unnamed Canadian city is a bizarre underground world of urban fantasy monsters darker than he had imagined, and possibly more dangerous than the one he has left behind. Both the crime and the dark fantasy pats of this novel are well-written and entertaining, with faced-paced fight and chase scenes, an engaging protagonist, terrifying but believable villains, and an inevitable but thrilling dénouement in the tunnels beneath a sewage treatment works. The mechanics of the underworld perhaps stretch credibility in places, and to be honest the story is a bit too long, but there is no denying this is an excellent read.

"But.

"Billed as a début novel by 'acclaimed critic, poet and anthologist' Cayne, this work must be read within the context of the author's oeuvre. Cayne's poetry (as any web-search through the review sites will confirm) is derivative and turgid, borrowing a romantic style and Eighteenth Century diction and yet labelling itself avant garde because of the controversial and political subject matters he likes to address. With this in mind, the ostensibly readable crime novel, mixing genres and literary influences to disguise the lack of deep content, is guilty of the same sins. However entertaining this single volume might be, this is no Stieg Larsson in the making, but rather a derivative and degenerate writer with little to recommend him."

(reproduced by permission of the author)

The music of pyuuuuuke

Yesterday on Radio Lethbridge's Literature Hour show, imaginatively themed around "luuurve poetry" (I"m sorry, they really did say it that way), five minutes of airtime were dedicated to each of four Canadian writers, among them a certain plucky, amateur, deservedly obscure hack, Sylvia Barschatz, plugging her second book, The Music of Love.

Barschatz herself was blandly inoffensive and placid as always (the only amusing moment being her use of the expression "my editor" to describe what is in fact her husband), and unmemorably gave us a good indication of the quality of her book. The rather gushing junior DJ, however, spouted what must have been publisher's copy, and described the scribbler's latest efforts as "a bold and unconventional tour de force into the glorious heights and gut-wrenching lows of our favorite emotion", and the "startlingly original language-use" of a "darling of the poetic establishment."

Reviews of The Music of Love from more reputable sources tell a different story—this is neither a novel nor a book of poetry, but the worst of both genres: 600 pages (still only 2/3 the length of her previous outing) of turgid, ill-constructed, unattractively typeset prose that may borrow from blank-verse and stream-of-consciousness traditions but never approaches the poetic in style or quality. A protagonist as depressingly gray as the ghost girl of her début novel, a love story as convincing as a leprous horse in schoolgirl uniform, and a dénouement as staggeringly unoriginal as the title of the book itself.

The only thing bold or startling about this sordid little five minutes of fame was the audacity to claim Barschatz is a "writer".

Keep it up, Independent Radio. This is why we love you.

Emu Boy?

So I met an Emo boy in the surgery this morning,
Skinny jeans like black tights
with skeletal hands on the hips
Anarchic Angel teeshirt, new, too clean,
Bottle-black sneakers with tongues hanging out thirstily,
and a crimped fringe down to his throat.

Who knows what was wrong with the Emo boy this morning.
Apart from the obvious, I mean.

Deciphering Reynolds

I recently picked up an envelope of mixed ephemera and personal notes at the Bamff rare book fayre, which included a page in the hand of the legendary mid-20th Century poet Georges Reynolds. This is clearly his revision notes on a longer poem, obscured by his notoriously abbreviated style and some fire and water damage down the right hand margin. Can anybody help identify which poem is being revised here?

An interesting take on graffiti

Some of us have always argued that graffiti is art not crime, but this exhibition in London, What is Crime? has an interesting take on graffiti in the context of political violence, among many other images suggesting that neglect and infringement of civil freedoms are the real obscenity in our world, not acts committed by petty criminals. (Anyone over that side of the water able to go see it and write us a review?)

As the above link to the exhibition includes the filepath "currentexhibition.htm" it probably won't remain true beyond the August end of this show, at which point you'll find it in the archive. A brief discourse on the graffiti image can be found at the King's news site (as students at the Center for Crime and Justice at that college co-organized the exhibition).

So what is the crime?

Wiscon panel titles

Some lovely sounding panel titles according to the Twitter stream:

• "bisexuality in sci fi"
• Disability + BSG
• subversive kids' books
• "Resolving Time Travel Paradoxes"
• Warrior women
• What's In The Air
• kick-ass moms
• Verb Noir launch party
• "Gadgets: Then, Now and When"
• unspunky teen protags
• NOT ANOTHER F*CKING RACE PANEL
• portrayal of working class in SF
• Dr Horrible Party
• robots revolutionized by love

(I may have misinterpreted some of these... but it's more fun to crowd-source this stuff than look at the actual programme...)

Found on the inside wall of a locked cemetery this morning

Animated Graffiti

This has been doing the rounds for a while, but I just saw it again today and it has just the right combination of inventiveness, irreverence, grotesqueness, repugnance, and sheer Lovecraftian alienness to tickle my boxes. Enjoy!



Go give the artist some love: this shit is more poetic than a thousand jolly rhymers will ever achieve.

Wasteland

This stinking cesspit of human filth
sucking the wealth of the country
into the Opulent Wasteland

Even rats living in their own shit
don't crowd together in so many millions
eating their young and puking blood

If you planted a giant white mushroom
in this garbage heap the Opulent Wasteland
it would be no loss to the world

No enslaved masses would mourn

I flee civilization heading west
leaving behind the Opulent Wasteland
the taste of ash in my mouth
the burning fuel the melting asphalt
unnoticed by the Cyborg the reactionary
I head into the fire

First published in Croydon Times, December 1994.

Crush you into the steps

The message behind this red tank moving inexorably up the steps of a train station in Italy seems to be one of warning, a show of strength, a cry of rage, of anger, of fear, a blood-curdling yell of, "We shall crush you! Crush you into the steps! Crush your head! Splinter your bones across the public transit system."

Stand against the red tank at your peril. Never mistake this military machine for a benign force, or think it's on your side or under your control. Never leap into the road to welcome your new crimson overlords. Run. Run for your lives. We cannot be stopped.

Real and imagined disgust

The New Scientist news service this week posted a story, 'Why real and imagined disgust have the same effect'. This story is based on an interesting article by Jabbi, Bastiaansen, & Keysers ('A Common Anterior Insula Representation of Disgust Observation, Experience and Imagination Shows Divergent Functional Connectivity Pathways', in PLoS ONE), which may have implications for the diagnosis and treatment of autism as well as behavioural studies of empathy. As you may recall, disgust and repugnance are topics that fascinate me (as they do most writers of disturbing literature). It disappoints me, therefore, that the authors of this study, looking for a passage of "disgusting" literature to test out on their experimental subjects, were unable to come up with anything better than this:

You turn around because someone is leaning on your shoulder, suddenly looking into the open mouth of a drunken beggar... you see his rotten teeth, surrounded by pustulant sores, while he suddenly releases the reeking content of his stomach all over you... You feel your stomach turn over as you suddenly feel the acidic taste of a clump of his vomit on your lips.

Next time call in a professional, gentlemen.

Spot the fallacies in this moronic review

Taken from the Bamff Poesie Revue, May/June 2008. The reviewer: does not deign to give his name; gets the title of my book wrong; confesses ignorance twice in this text, and yet still presumes to judge; clearly has never read nor written good poetry in his life; unwittingly admits to peculiar perversion in his choice of erotic titillation.

Precisely the sort of review no self-respecting author would pay any attention to.