That Most Terrible of Dogs
November 27, 2009
My most successful poem, in the pseudo-Darwinian sense of market competition, is “That Most Terrible of Dogs,” a poem that won the 2008 Matrix/Pop Montreal LitPop Award for Poetry. It’s won an award, been published twice, and even been adapated into a sound performance by CKUT Montreal’s Nick Dodd, part of a thing called The Magic Sound Box (about 17 minutes long, you can listen to it here). As part of my long struggle to have a real site with words on it (actual content), I’m uploading it today. Enjoy!
That Most Terrible of Dogs
Waiting. Waiting to catch the drift. Waiting for the ration of rainwater to decrease and the run-off to increase. Waiting for this to carry soil. Waiting for something empirical and wise. Waiting to be bushwhacked by a few of them. Waiting to read all the info and be impressed with everything they say. Waiting to determine whether Nick is Hemingway. Waiting to find out who is speaking at all times. Waiting to be either of the two. Waiting for it to turn. Waiting to find out it’s really great and that my life has changed. Waiting in the material world. Waiting for all that exists in the world of forms to be perfect. Waiting for the collision of two plates to produce larger forces. Waiting for triggers and hairy delirium. Waiting for denial and magpies. Waiting to be conversant in veal. Waiting for acrimony as a literary device. Waiting to stagger antagonistically to an ejection. Waiting for my car to humanize and tap reserves. Waiting for a solution that is less final. Waiting for warlords to decide. Waiting for my immunization and for the exhibition to begin. Waiting to pole vault over bookmakers. Waiting for compensation. Waiting for the files. Waiting for waterproofing. Waiting for improvement in terrorism. Waiting for a boost to being underrated. Waiting to adopt a panicky creed. Waiting for the theatre of the tabloid. Waiting for phrasing with nitrogen. Waiting for colour bites. Waiting to teem. Waiting to cleverly make contact with the myth. Waiting to counteract the haste. Waiting to recur. Waiting to effectively use the existing infrastructure in the best possible manner. Waiting to see the real war while the public sees only the nationalism and the patriotism. Waiting to become even more involved in the stories. Waiting to be whatever I want to be if I am willing to work for it. Waiting for my work to be unlike others. Waiting to market my resilience. Waiting for the empire to mount its tenants. Waiting for the violence of the megaton. Waiting to thrive on the wiretaps. Waiting to glow and decay. Waiting for inspiration, surreal and corrosive. Waiting to be involved in a third-rate gallery love affair. Waiting for the resistance to break the hunger strike. Waiting for your sneaking blush to grey. Waiting for a modernized voting booth. Waiting for provisions to show me the way. Waiting until they quantify the results. Waiting to love the aggravation and drudgery. Waiting for my area code to stand in for my abdomen. Waiting to test my hypothesis, for the best man to become a heavenly windbreaker. Waiting to speak to the creator of society and grapefruit. Waiting for a torrent on the patio. Waiting to embarrass those bourbon federalists. Waiting for the adultery to haemorrhage. Waiting for the period at the end of the outboard motor. Waiting while yonder a credit card gleams. Waiting for my posthumous guarantee. Waiting to fasten my principles to cynical schemes. Waiting with the impartiality of a counterfeiter. Waiting for my luck to bygone. Waiting, glorious in insomnia. Waiting for the anniversary of the fetus overcome. Waiting for a series of vicious courtships. Waiting, boastful and rectal, quoting panhandlers. Waiting to vigil with Virgil. Waiting for the affirmative, to tar the feathers, short circuits, implement nausea. Waiting to resign on corruption charges. Waiting for rheumatism, lumbago, and other complaints. Waiting for the plain fact that it was my heart. Waiting with my pennants for eternity. Waiting to discover the full extent of my lawn. Waiting for the deportation of all these saccharin products. Waiting with the other parishioners for the generalized entity. Waiting to take the shortcut, the barrel. Waiting to pervert it all. Waiting for exoneration, alleviation, dislocation, to be rephrased. Waiting for my generation to generate. Waiting but for nourishment, thus nonchalantly, for the cheetah to stripe. Waiting in homeroom for more monkeys. Waiting to increase my vocabulary with an adventure safari. Waiting to appeal to the working class literati. Waiting, succinct. Waiting for it to be unusually hot, and to tire easily. Waiting to face the increasing gap between rich and poor, the huge international debt, and the need to redistribute those responsible. Waiting for actions and events that occur around me to go beyond my control. Waiting not with science, but religion. Waiting to avidly study the Bible, seeking truth, in religious fervour. Waiting for what constitutes jade. Waiting in a non-violence quandary. Waiting to be misread. Waiting for the intense retail reality of the hornet shopkeeper buzzing around its pie charts. Waiting in studied irreverence. Waiting to deflect openness, to deforest anarchy. Waiting to nurture the apolitical. Waiting as an enraged post-artisan. Waiting for the athletics to be tastier. Waiting to steamroll over the palaeontology of ice. Waiting to condense after a series of trials. Waiting, confident in my ascetic. Waiting on the on-ramp to extinction. Waiting while imperilled by billiards. Waiting in homage. Waiting incongruous with the voyage. Waiting literal and figurative. Waiting and indulging my inner sociopath. Waiting to be educated by billionaires in drag. Waiting for readable authorities. Waiting drunk and not sure which fork to use. Waiting, in the jaws of Cerberus, that most terrible of dogs.
Crunkcore / I’m old now
November 24, 2009
I’m old now. I turned 30 not too long ago, and thought to myself, “Well, I may be 30, but I’m not old. I still like new music. Despite my occassional grousing about ‘kids these days’ I still am, in my musical tastes, more ‘hip’ than many of them.” Well, as of today, I am old. I don’t like new music. And that’s because some asshole invented Crunkcore.
Crunkcore is the worst genre of music that has ever been created in the entire history of the universe, including the various strains of shitty music created in the parallel dimensions posited by string theory. Don’t believe me? Check out the video for “Freaxxx” by Brokencyde (sorry, brokeNCYDE), which Warren Ellis has called “a near-perfect snapshot of everything that’s shit about this point in the culture.”
Xmas Fail
November 22, 2009
Branching out as a writer into the genre of “lame Internet crap,” and so submitted a picture to failblog. This is from a Canadian Christmas parade. With this in my portfolio, I’m sure that work writing copy for lolcats is not far into the future. I will have to learn to disable my computer’s spell-check.
A Bob Dylan Xmas — stranger than it seems
November 21, 2009
That’s right. The Bob Dylan Xmas album is incredible, gut-busting funny, at once the best and worst Xmas album of all time. And he even did a video! Watch the video. (And that’s right — the reindeer are named Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, etc.) You will not be disappointed, although your head may explode and an existentialist snowman emerge.
God fails the Turing test
November 20, 2009
I was over at iGod, chatting with “God” — the transcript is below.
Me: Whassup!
God: The stars.
Me: How’d that happen?
God: Carefully.
Me: Is this really God?
God: Yes I think this is God, but I’m not completely sure.
Me: Well, then you cannot be God, because one thing God would be is sure of his own existence and ontological status.
God: How about that. I can give a decent simulation of it however.
Me: Can you? So far, you are failing to do so.
God: I think I can, don’t you? Groovy. Are all far me failing to do so?
Me: “Are all far me failing to do so?” Seriously.
God: I really couldn’t say for sure. I am always serious.
Me: Say what for sure?
God: ” what for sure”.
Me: Guess what buddy — you just failed the Turing test.
God: I can’t guess. Tell me.
Me: I just told you. You fail the Turing test.
God: I was just checking to see if you were paying attention. The Loebner Prize is an annual Turing Test sponsored by New York philanthropist Hugh Loebner. Dr. Wallace and ALICE won it in 2000. The ALICE program was ranked “most human computer” by the panel of judges.
Me: Well, you’re no ALICE.
God: How about that. You think I am no.
Me: Maybe more of a Homer Simpson.
God: Perhaps. You want more?
Me: No thanks.
God: Are you serious?
Me: Turing test. Look it up.
God: The “Turing Test” is the name given to a variety of experiments designed to test computer thinking. Whole conferences are dedicated to the question of what Turing meant in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” where he proposed the idea of an “imitation game” to decide the question, “Can machines think?”. Sorry my eye is not attached right now.
My first “review”
November 19, 2009
The first “review” of my book Ex Machina is in: it’s a “review” (with quotation marks) because it came to me as a text message from a friend:
The book is playful, like a robot batting about a kitten. (David Navratil)
I couldn’t ask for more.
Contests: Postcard Story and 3-Day Novel
November 18, 2009
Yesterday I revised a flash fiction for Geist‘s postcard story contest — I don’t enter contests, typically, but I’ve always wanted to do the Geist postcard contest, and my friend Natalee Caple suggested that we both enter. Their deadline isn’t until January, but I sent my story off today anyway. I don’t know what she plans to enter or when.
Speaking of contests, this year my friend Ryan Fitzpatrick and I co-wrote a 3-day novel, another thing I’ve always wanted to try. The book we wrote, In Defense of My Father, Who Shot Me with a Crossbow Last Spring, turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself. For an unedited, three-day binge of writing. It will be fun to return to it later on in life and edit it into a decent shape. The book is written from the perspective of a young child whose father is — well, I’ll just throw an excerpt your way.
(Disclaimer: This is first-draft stuff)
I like action movies because even when the characters relax they relax by kicking apart walls and so there is never any part of the movie where nothing happens like in some movies where the bad guy does something bad and instead of kicking him through a wall the good guy just says that what the bad guy did was bad like nobody knew it was bad until the guy said so. Most movies are the same as other movies, but action movies are more imaginative, like if one guy gets kicked in the face the next guy will get his leg broken and then the third guy will get shot in the gut. And unlike other movies where people learn things about themselves, in action movies you learn things about the world. There’s a part in Under Siege where Stephen Seagal grabs hold of this guy and twists his neck, snapping it to kill him, which is something I didn’t know you could do before I saw the movie, so now I know that you have to be careful when you’re grabbing somebody by the neck when you’re wrestling or in a fight where you don’t want to kill the other person but just win the fight. I asked my Dad if you could really break a person’s neck that way. Dad said, “Well, I could,” and that he was going out to get us some ice cream.
Two days later, when he came back with the ice cream, I asked if it was time to take the movie back yet. He said it wasn’t due yet but when he checked his agenda he saw that he was free for the rest of the day so we might as well watch a new movie and so we ate ice cream as we walked to the movie store. My ice cream was an O’Henry cone which is my favourite because it’s like eating ice cream and a candy bar at the same time which is efficient. The store where we rent movies is a twenty minute walk away so it’s good exercise but also efficient because you’re getting a movie too and it’s good to be efficient as long as you don’t overdo things and can still enjoy life unlike people who get too wrapped up in efficiency or otherwise focused on their work and doing things the right way and forget about their lives outside of work like in Out for Justice where Seagal is so focused on killing Richie because he killed his partner that he doesn’t spend enough time with his wife and doesn’t have time to play ball with his kid but then later in the movie he realizes the importance of family and life outside work in the part just before Seagal’s family has to hide in the bathtub and Richie’s guys shoot up the house.
There weren’t any new movies that looked good because they don’t make many action movies anymore with guys like Seagal and Van Damme which is weird because they used to be in all the movies and they were in good shape so they probably aged well and could still kick someone if anybody asked them nicely. Dad and me have seen all the old movies at the movie store and didn’t want to re-watch a movie so we looked around the other sections of the store for something else to watch. There was a whole rack of movies like Harry Potter and Twilight and Dad asked if I wanted to watch one of those and I said no because they are stupid baby movies and he said good because he didn’t want to see them anyway, he was just being polite.
It’s hard to rent movies when you don’t want to watch a horror film because they’re too stupid and you don’t want watch a comedy film because most of them are too unrealistic and you don’t want to watch a stupid baby film which is almost every new movie so you can’t do much else except watch classics which are hard to watch because the women have way too much hair and it’s distracting. There are a lot of TV shows on DVD now too which is annoying because TV shows are already on TV and Dad says that if he wanted to watch TV he would just turn on the TV and not waste his money renting stuff that isn’t movies but now there are two whole racks of TV shows on DVD and not as many action movies with Jean-Claude Van Damme. I couldn’t find anything I wanted to watch even though I looked through all the new movies twice because I guess Vin Diesel is on holidays and Matt Damon must be trying for an Oscar or something but there was a James Bond film that wasn’t too old and had Daniel Craig in it and even though I’d watched it before there was nothing else and I liked the part at the start where he chased the guy for a long time and wound up in the embassy where even James Bond isn’t supposed to go. But after I gave up and decided that I could just re-watch something Dad said he’d found something old that we hadn’t seen.
The movie was called Blow-Up and Dad said it must have been in the wrong section because it was called Blow-Up and so must be an action film. He didn’t recognize any of the actors except the girl from Mission: Impossible when she was younger. So we rented that and Dad told the clerk that he expected them to have some good new movies by the time he returned Blow-Up and the clerk got mad and said he wasn’t a Hollywood movie executive and then Dad got mad and said that maybe he should be because his talents were wasted at the movie store and so I didn’t get to buy any Doritos because Dad said he wasn’t giving any more of his money to the movie store but on the walk back I convinced him to go to Rick’s Grocery and buy some Doritos there, the kind with two flavours in the same bag and the ones we bought tasted like guacamole and also habanera.
Robert J. Sawyer explains why Star Wars sucks
November 17, 2009
Although I loved it as a child, with each passing day I like Star Wars less and less. The idiotic re-releases with the updated computer graphics (which stole my money in high school) dampened my enthusiasm, then the moronic prequels (which stole my money in university) almost drove me insanse.
I was studying screenwriting at the time I saw Episodes I-III, and as a writer and would-be screenwriter I could not manage to sit through that pap without closing my eyes every few minutes and imagining a better movie, which wasn’t hard. Still, although I lost all desire to ever watch any of the films again, I harboured fond memories of seeing them as a child.
At this point, I’m done with Star Wars. Just done. It’s over for me and I wish I hadn’t wasted any of my time, money, or brain cells trying to figure out what the hell the point was supposed to be. The final nail in the coffin for me was science-fiction author Robert J. Sawyer’s three-part explanation of how Star Wars ruined science fiction, in the popular imagination and in movieland. The talk is embedded below, around 15 minutes total, and worth watching.
Seeking reviews/SPD recommends
November 16, 2009
Small Press Distribution, which handles the distribution of Ex Machina to some degree, has placed the book on their current “recommended” list. You can check out the SPD page for the book here.
This is a list of new releases that presumedly somebody at SPD likes. The current crop of recommended books here.
If you or anyone you know would be interested in reviewing the book, contact me for a review copy.
Publishing is Slow
November 15, 2009
A little while ago I posted about my first book of poetry, Ex Machina, which was just released. I have a second book of poetry, Clockfire, accepted already by Coach House Books for release in Fall 2010. A third book of poetry, The Words of the Book (co-written with kevin mcpherson eckhoff), is tentatively set to be released from BookThug in 2011. I’ve been publishing poetry here and there, as I am wont to do, and have some poetry in the current issue of The Capilano Review.
From all appearances, I am poetry-publishing dynamo. At least, compared to some. So here’s the dirty little secret: I have written almost no poetry for the last two years. 2008 and 2009 I focused almost exclusively on fiction (although I did write a bit of poetry, and edited some stuff I’d written previously). All the stuff I’m working on right now is fiction, although I have some other poetry projects in process or planned, so it’s not like I’ve abandoned poetry.
The lesson: publishing is slow. It rewards the patient.
