Meta-Fictional Crossover of an Unpublished Text, Composing, 02/07/2015

What I’m about to explain is going to be a bit weird. Weird in that sense where someone who's been hanging around too many literary theorists (both in real life and over the internet, both recently and over several years) sits you down and starts talking to you about . . . ideas.

I won’t start going through Blakean allusions here, or anything like that. Not really my style.

Yes, Alice's last name comes from this Marvin.

The main difference between my two Alice film scripts is perspective. The storyline of the film has always revolved around the relationship between Herman Klein and his android life partner Alice Marvin.* The original short story where this narrative began was told entirely from Herman's perspective: he tells you how lonely he was, how Alice made him feel happy and loved (because she was designed for that purpose), and how he decided to live openly with her once he realized that android intelligence was superior to humanity’s. Alice decided to respond to her liberation from literal slavery by slowly pushing humanity, one person at a time, beyond our current, wretched condition.

* Easter eggs for the projects. I've thrown little references to androids in popular science-fiction and the history of cybernetics all over the project. One character’s last name is Spiner, a coffeeshop where one scene takes place is called Café Capek, for example. I still haven’t come up with a title for the film itself, though. Maybe a good phrase will appear somewhere in the dialogue as I write it.

Last Fall, I was developing a storyline whose perspective was Herman’s. And right now, it hit a limit of my skills as a writer: Herman’s story was so interior that I had a lot of trouble dramatizing it. I could depict it as memory and thought in a literary form, but I couldn’t bring it across in dramatic, dialogical form. 

I don't like to describe the difference between the media as between the interior and the exterior; that's a little too dualist for me, ignores the integration of self and world. Narrative prose is about building a complex, intricate perspective on the world. Drama, whether on stage but especially in cinema, is about building a world. 

Not every android is depressed.

Andrei Tarkovsky could make strange films that depicted interiority and twisted emotional states with imagery alone. I'm not Andrei Tarkovsky. I don't think I can say I'm anything near his level without seeming like a twat.

So I changed the storyline to push the Herman-Alice story into the background. Discovering the truth of this relationship, after they’ve established themselves as equal partners and not owner and property, is now the endpoint of the film. It instead concentrates on Alice’s first act of helping push humanity to a better ethical stance beyond Herman.

Elias is a colleague of Herman who dates women the same age as his adult daughter, treats both his girlfriends and his daughter with either possessiveness or condescension, and his response to meeting Alice is to become obsessed with her and try to break her off from her relationship with Herman.

The weird, meta-fictional thing is, Elias already existed in my fiction. He exists in my old novel (which at some point, I'll turn into a short story collection) A Small Man’s Town. There, he’s a sex-obsessed professor, just like in the new Alice script. But he's a very marginal character in that novel. He appears only once, to talk the girlfriend of the book's protagonist, both university undergrads, to join himself and his wife for a threesome. He eventually convinces another student after she turns him down.

Well, Laurie doesn’t turn him down as much as she tells Elias to go fuck himself while running away.

Across both the media that I’ve used him in, Elias expresses a very pure and important aspect of humanity: our inherent sleaze. When I need to express this in the best way for a narrative, I'll come to him. The climax of the film will be when this embodiment of human greasiness sees himself for the wretch that he is.

I just have to get his fall right.

Hunting for an Autobiography, A History Boy, 07/08/2014

Most of my friends, especially those I got to know when I lived in Newfoundland, know that I have a complicated relationship with the island where I was born and raised. Even when I lived there, I had a complicated relationship with it. I’ve long felt alienated from the nationalist sentiments that dominated my school years there as the oil boom jump-started its economy for, really, the first time in its history. That was a product of my distaste for the oil industry and the fast-money damn-the-consequences culture it creates. The cultural identity of the island was very much cobbled from its rural lifestyle, which, having lived in the capital St. John’s for all of my time there, alienated me from that identity.

Yet one of my longest-gestating projects is A Small Man’s Town, which is currently transforming into my book of short stories about young people’s life in St. John’s as it becomes a confident, quite possibly arrogant, boom town. It has an autobiographical tinge to it that anyone with even a slight ability for critical reading will detect. Some characters are assemblages of people I knew on the island, some incidents recall activities I took part in. 

There are scattered cameos from a reggae band called Lazypants and a communist-themed surf-rock band called Red Square. Anyone who partied in downtown St. John’s in the early 2000s will have danced their faces off at shows by the reggae band called The Idlers and the communist-themed surf-rock band called The Kremlin. One story focusses on a protest against the war in Iraq at the main Memorial University campus that fizzles out after one speaker gets stage fright and another praises Al Qaeda and the Mehdi Army for opposing the imperialism of the United States. 

In real life, I covered a successful and impressive protest against the Iraq War that marched from Bannerman Park to City Hall, where I took some of the better photos of my youthful career in journalism. It was impressive precisely because it only brought out close to a thousand people, but that was enough to block Duckworth Street for nearly 20 minutes of marching.

So with this in mind, I am greatly impressed by the work my old friend, and my co-worker in that phase of youthful journalism, Michael Collins, has done so far on his blog about the literature of Newfoundland, entitled The Page “Newfoundland Literature” Does Not Exist. Michael is completing his doctorate in literature studies at University of Toronto, and has become a brilliant advocate for the art of an island about which I remain ruefully ambivalent. He comes from Placentia, one of the larger rural communities of Newfoundland, with a population of a few thousand. He knows more folk songs by heart than most Newfoundlanders his age know the titles of folk songs. Anyone else who cares about Newfoundland culture should be glad that he and his work exist.

I mean, I’m naturally glad he exists. He’s one of my oldest friends. I’d be terribly upset were he to stop existing.

Random Passage was also adapted into a television
miniseries that reached international audiences, which I
thought fetishized and uncritically worshipped the images
that Morgan critiqued and the lifestyle that she describes
correctly as unbelievably harsh and difficult.

But aside from all these memories cascading through me like a bad reference to Proust, I write to praise Michael’s blog, which is not only a celebration of Newfoundland as a source of literature, but a place for critical reflection on the greatest works about the island, its culture, history, and people. Michael calls Newfoundland's a minor literature, a concept Gilles Deleuze developed to describe creative voices that are pushed outside their mainstream, and find their most original expression from the margins of their world. Such literatures are remarkable precisely for twisting the ordinary and the popular into strange new shapes. This may be through linguistic invention, a destabilized narrative, a casual relationship with the fantastic, or a thousand other injections of ordinary weirdness. His recent post on Bernice Morgan’s Random Passage is particularly enlightening, and helps to make the case, which I would uphold, that Morgan’s novel, combined with its sequel/completion Waiting for Time is the greatest work of Newfoundland literature ever written.

The book tells the stories of a small community called Cape Random, an assemblage from the communities that form Morgan’s own heritage. It depicts the culture of Newfoundland as arising from economic rejects and outcasts of the British and Irish cultures who first colonized the island, whose hardscrabble and barely survivable rural coastline effectively became a dumping ground for the forgotten and undesirable people of a colonial culture. 

At the same time, the precise history of the place and the nature of the story itself remains in flux between multiple narrators, blurring the division we too frequently take for granted between history and memory. What Newfoundland truly was, even in its actual existence, becomes a function of what it is now: a place about which we tell stories to weave into the echoes of those who once lived so that we can have a past, a history, and a cultural memory.

Michael’s account of Random Passage in its cultural and literary power gives much more detail and depth than I could right now, but I hope I’ve at least encouraged you to check it out. Lately, I seem to have attracted a few more politically-minded readers. But this blog isn’t solely about politics. It’s about me, my work, and my own history. And today’s post is about what my friend is creating, an account of Newfoundland literature that represents its true depth. 

As for me, I hope that I can eventually get A Small Man’s Town fully revised and published, so that it can contribute to the tradition of Newfoundland literature. Its stories carry their own ambiguous relationship with the island and the city in which they take place. Some characters are proud Newfoundland patriots. Some are desperate to escape. Some are afraid to leave. In all cases, the effects of that island and their life on it stay with them, because I wrote the book about the island, so of course they do.

A Post-Pride Post: My Gay Interest Content, Composing, 30/06/2014

I spent this weekend at World Pride with my girlfriend and her best friend Dreamy. It was an absolutely mad weekend, and despite my new sunburn, I had a wonderful time in the most ludicrously deranged bacchanal that I’ve ever experienced. I think Toronto now knows its physical limits in terms of how much of a party it could sustain without breaking. Let’s just say that after this weekend, I’m extremely glad to get back to work.

As my overstuffed workweek begins again, I thought I’d share some ideas at the heart of one of my fiction projects, A Small Man’s Town. This is the sprawling novel about life in St. John’s in the 2000s that I’m turning into a book of linked short stories so that I can sell it to a publisher more easily. 

The stories all revolve around subtle, slow-dawning epiphanies. My favourite short stories are by James Joyce, though my too-late discovery of Alice Munro’s work has brought a new element to my influences. You could say the modern stereotype of the short story involves a moment where the protagonist comes to understand some fundamental aspect of his life differently, or more truly, than he had before. My short stories in this collection all have this moment of realization, but we see how it doesn’t really change the characters at all.

When it comes to the gay characters in my St. John’s stories, you see this best with the two stories featuring Nadia, my 21 year old Palestinian lesbian. She’s a central character in the collection’s first story, which was also the first scene that I thought of when I first conceived of A Small Man’s Town in 2007. The campus protest scene was originally much more ludicrous, and was played for cartoonish laughs. Its current form is more subtle and cynical.

It’s a protest against the Iraq War, a scene that takes place in early Fall of 2003. The first speaker is a local leftist activist, who almost brings the rally to a halt with her ridiculous defence of the Ba’ath Party as brave resisters to American imperialism. Newfoundlanders will probably know which local politician I’m skewering there. Her friend Laurie, who organized the protest, throws Nadia on stage too early to try to save the rally (instead of doing any public speaker herself), and ends up sputtering through her speech in a moment of stagefright. The next day at a party intended to celebrate a successful protest, Nadia and Laurie reconcile over a block of hash. 

Their friendship is central to a later Nadia-focussed story, which describes how Laurie and her boyfriend became Nadia’s first friend when she moved to St. John’s. This story focusses on the fallout of Nadia’s only real relationship during her university years, with an egocentric girl named Jen. They only date for six months, and it’s implied that Jen was cheating on Nadia with men — she was more interested in amassing sexual experiences now that she was living independently in the city. 

Nadia, however, fell stupidly in love with a woman who was only ever using her, like a lot of people do in their 20s. One New Years’ Eve, when Jen rubs her promiscuity in Nadia’s face one night until she’s reduced to tears, Laurie comes to her defence, kicking Jen out of the party* and helping her feel better about herself. 

* A lot of the major events in the university-centric stories of this collection happen at parties and rock shows where people are drinking heavily. This is when people’s most honest natures tend to emerge.

What was most important to me for these characters was establishing the complexity of their friendship. Too often, I’ve seen relationships between straight women and lesbians depicted according to stereotypes, and within the swirling network of these stories, I wanted to have one set of friends who would just relate to each other as people instead of The Gay Best Friend™ or close friends who are Awakening Their Latent Sexualities™. 

Laurie and Nadia are a decent person who’s sometimes too full of herself and a sweetheart who can become terrifying when she loses her temper and despondent when her heart is broken. I wanted to offer people a story that offered that kind of complexity in such a simple friendship.

Redux, Composing, 28/04/2014

I was revisiting my old manuscript for A Small Man’s Town this weekend, thinking about turning this sprawling, plot-light, disjointed narrative about life in St. John’s in the 2000s into a series of short stories. As I got to know the conventions of the publishing industry, I’ve realized that I could have more success with the manuscript if I were to edit the loosely connected scenes of the narrative into linked short stories. It would have helped if I had bothered to research the conventions of the publishing industry before I started writing the thing in 2007, but we all have our regrets in life. 

I grew up in this strange, beautiful town.

So here’s roughly how the novel would look as a group of short stories. I’m not sure what order they would go in for the final version of A Small Man’s Town: The Collection, but here, they roughly follow how each storyline starts in the novel version. All of these are very provisional titles, of course.

Stop The War, Please. In Fall of 2003, student activist Laurie is the lead organizer of a protest at the university campus against the American invasion of Iraq. The rally is a disaster because their first speaker is a local left-wing activist-for-hire who uses her speech to praise Islamist militants, suicide bombers, and al-Qaeda for bravely resisting the growth of Western imperialism. I actually wrote this draft in 2007, long before my recent fights over the politics of today’s Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts. Nadia, a child of Palestinian immigrants, tries to save the rally with her own speech, but she gets stagefright and runs away. Laurie and Nadia reconcile at a party that night over hash.

When Joseph Met Laurie. Joseph was the original protagonist of the novel, a quiet guy who seems basically kind, but mostly observes the world around him. By the end of the novel, you realize that he’s actually sort of a jerk as well. But this would basically be the story of his awkward meet-cute with Laurie, as they become friends through the campus newspaper and activist organizations, and he gets over just enough of his late-teenage anxiety to ask her out. She kisses him first.

But I Thought She Loved Me. This is a longer story, told in several scenes. Nadia, whose father works for an engineering firm in rural Newfoundland, comes to Memorial for university, living in St. John’s for the first time. Joseph and Laurie are her first, and best, friends in the city, and also the first people to whom she comes out as a lesbian. She then engages in a tumultuous relationship with Jen, a beautiful white woman who essentially uses Nadia for an experimental six-month fling, during which she continually cheats on her with men. Laurie, Joseph, and their friend Sanjay spread a humiliating story about one of Jen’s sexual encounters out of revenge for her treatment of Nadia. After they break up, Jen continues to display her promiscuity specifically in front of Nadia to upset her. 

Gone. A minor, but loveable, character in several of the university-centric stories is suddenly killed in a car crash shortly after graduation. Joseph has two awkward conversations at the funeral. First, a brief exchange with his gruff, Bayman father that reveals how ashamed Joseph is of his own rural Newfoundland heritage. Second, a walk with his ex-girlfriend Laurie.

Now Hit Me! Several years after the university stories, Joseph is picked up in a bar by a headstrong woman who, during sex, demands to be beaten and choked. Lucy later calls Joseph to apologize for making him uncomfortable, and they end up in a long-term relationship.

Come Near at Your Peril, Canadian Wolf. By force of personal charisma, Lucy becomes the provincial Conservative Party nominee in her Western Newfoundland district during Danny Williams’ 2007 electoral sweep. She adopts several propaganda techniques from Triumph of the Will to organize cross-province rallies to maintain popular support for Williams. She later picks a public fight with the CBC over their national network running a television news story about a stroke victim whose slurred speech vaguely resembles a stereotypical Newfoundland accent. Lucy's popularity comes to rival Williams, and he views her with suspicion.

Literary Ambition. Joseph works as a submissions editor at a St. John’s publishing company run by the eccentric Mr. Bradley. Bradley hires a new employee, a Newfoundlander returning from a decade in Argentina, to run international submissions, part of a plan to turn his small company into a globally famous publishing house. Arlena Gutierrez (born Arlene Parsons) is incredibly pretentious, and waxes on about the beauty of Argentina and her deep feelings for her former lover, Juan Garcia Rubenstein. Joseph better connects with her easygoing, English-deficient husband Hector. 

Unreadable. Another longer story. Joseph and Lucy keep trying to help his old university friend Bernie get his life together. He’s held down a series of mediocre, go-nowhere office jobs while trying to start a career as a novelist. But the manuscript he sends Joseph is terrible, an awful collision of James Dean clichés and mawkish romance set in the 1970 FLQ crisis. Bernie joins Joseph and Lucy on a night out with their old friend Sanjay, who has returned to St. John’s from his home in Toronto to marry his happily pregnant girlfriend Sarah. After Bernie lands a job answering phones for the city’s Arts Council, he meets Deidre, the sister of a local celebrity actor, with whom he becomes infatuated. Because Bernie is neurotic as hell and can’t just ask a girl out to coffee, he talks Joseph and Lucy into being his wingmen at a dinner party with several folks from the Arts Council. Smoking a joint with his host in the upstairs library, Joseph learns that his boss Mr. Bradley has been the kept man of one of Newfoundland’s richest men, and that his company was formed as a vanity project and sinkhole for the accounting of losses in other parts of the corporate empire. While he’s away, Bernie reveals his feelings for Deidre in a way that creeps her out and ultimately costs him his job.

My Secret Life. Joseph gets a manuscript from a local author on his desk: it’s about a young female adjunct literature professor who discovers her sexuality and self-confidence through an affair with one of her students, who is suddenly killed in a car crash shortly after graduation. Joseph is shocked to realize that this is actually a thinly veiled story of his own friend’s actual affair with their first-year literature professor. Joseph remembers a party they attended at another professor’s house where they showed up, seemingly on a date. At the time, he was preoccupied by accidentally seeing his friend Nadia’s ex Jen having a gymnastic threesome with the slimy professor Elias Farkas and his wife, while on his way to an upstairs bathroom. Lucy calls the manuscript creepy and obsessive, and on her advice, Joseph rejects it. Two years later, he finds the book in a local store, heavily revised and published by Random House.

Was It All About Me? Joseph visits Toronto for the first time at age 29, replacing an ill Mr. Bradley at a publishers’ conference. While there, he meets his old girlfriend Laurie, who moved to Toronto six years earlier and now works for PEN International. They have dinner that night at the hotel and talk about their past and current lives: Laurie has had no serious relationships, having dived into her political activism, while Joseph and Lucy are engaged and planning a family. Laurie realizes that Joseph never held any very strong political or even ethical beliefs of his own. He changes his politics and morals to suit those of his romantic partner. He briefly visits Sanjay, Sarah, and their toddler before happily returning to the comfort of home.