Olympic Reflections

March 11th, 2010

So we owned the podium, eh? But the naysayers, our Canadian alter-ego, had a lot to say about it before we got there. Our typical Canadian hang-up got in the way during the dog days of the Olympics, during that middle stretch after the great gold performance by young Bilodeau, when the medals seemed to dry up. The naysayers seized the advantage, and many of my fellow countrymen involuntarily followed suit, falling into their pet blame game: blame VANOC for their aggressive American-style slogan, blame Vancouver for technical malfunctions and chain mail fences, blame God for denying Whistler its bucketfuls of snow, blame Canada for being assertive; why couldn’t we just show up for the game like we normally did in the past and went away empty handed, why did we have to win, we hewers of wood and drawers of water, how dare we desire to come of age on the world stage and say that we are a proud nation? The naysayers started to give me a belly ache and made me want to immigrate again.

Then our Canadian Olympians started to turn the tables on the unbelievers in their quiet, unobtrusive way (well, perhaps the Canadian women hockey players got a bit carried away, but who cares, at least they could drink and drive a Zamboni, even if some of them were underage – let any naysayer who did not take a drink when they were underage throw the first stone!) And before we knew it we had more gold medals than anyone has ever had in history. “Stop! This is too much for our Canadian modesty!” shouted the naysayers. “Screw off,” I replied, “I am enjoying this—finally!” And then to crown it all, our glorious men’s hockey team turned around what looked like another classic US come-from-behind victory pulled recently at the World Juniors, with a “take this and suck it” goal that sunk our southern neighbours for good in overtime. We were done, we owned the podium—no doubt about it.

After 22 years of being in love with this country, I was finally also proud of it. We stood in front of the world and we did our country proud, showcasing it for all its variety and excellence in sport, entertainment, culture, diversity, tolerance, fun, and humour. And we showed the world that we were just not a bunch of good natured, apologetic, nice, quitters; that we also had balls. I bet our American cousins did not know that William Shatner was Canadian, eh? We even managed to get President Obama to go shopping for Molson beer – waddayaknow!

After watching these Olympics, I became a firm believer that despite the shit that is going on in the world right now, with earthquakes and tsunamis and wars and economic meltdowns, we need symbols like these games, and role models like these athletes, to give us a jolt of encouragement. These young Olympians train for years for a few seconds of performance, where a fragment of a second’s improvement can catapult a player from fifteenth to first place. And they never give up. Thank God we have them, and thank God we invest in them, naysayers notwithstanding, for when the tough times come, it will be these future leaders who will say, “Hang in there, we can ride this out. And we can win!”

Way to go, Canada! Let’s own the podium from here on…

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Looking Beyond

February 27th, 2010

The waters are calm when looking over the ocean from the battlements of the Fort that guards the entrance of the harbour at Santiago de Cuba. Off to the right over the horizon lies Jamaica in the sun, and to the left is Haiti in its destruction, while down below, in 1898, the Spanish galleons had come out in single file, like innocent sheep, only to be sunk by American warships lying in wait outside the mouth of the harbour. This fort is a vantage point of history, recent and past, representing the beauty and horrors of life. I could not see any of this at street level. “Look beyond,” my wise teachers and mentors had told me, “and you will find vistas never seen before.” I was reminded of their words while sitting up there in those battlements.

I wrote the paragraph above while touring Santiago de Cuba with a group of Canadian writers recently. There were many such set pieces that I captured on paper in this land that seems to be frozen in time, reminding me of what life was like when I was growing up in a tropical island somewhere else in the world, where scarcities had been a fact of life, where the developed world was out there somewhere, a place impossible for us forgotten ones to get to. I remember climbing the giant Jam tree in the front yard of our family home, perching myself in its highest branches and looking out over the paddy fields, watching the planes fly overhead and wondering when it would be my turn to fly away.

Over the years, by a combination of looking beyond, being dissatisfied with the status quo, striving, and luck (isn’t luck the product of hard work?) I seemed to have swapped places with those fat-cat tourists who used to come to my island home and dole out money as if there was no end to the flow. In Cuba, this time around, it was my turn to dish out the pesos, while the locals looked on in anticipation. I wanted to tell them not to be fooled, that there was a finite end to this supply of money; that even in rich countries like Canada, bounty came from hard work, and that jobs could end with a small downslide of the stock market ticker. But what did they know about stock market tickers? All they knew was that they worked hard too, but did not have the money to show for it, so according to them, we must have some other unknown secret. It’s because of freedom and private enterprise, I wanted to say, but being a man following the Middle Way, I did not want to be a poster boy for Capitalism.

I did not know what to tell these islanders, and returned from my trip somewhat frustrated. In retrospect, I should have told them to go to a Fort-like place and look beyond, look to the sunshine and destruction in lands beyond, look at the world with all its possibilities, good and bad, and pick a spot to play, beyond one’s comfort zone. Perhaps that was the only way out beyond scarcity and insularity, the path towards growth, and towards finding breakthrough solutions beyond the “tried and true” that provide only marginal returns and keeps one like the unenlightened frog, forever circling in the slow-boiling cauldron.

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Creative wells run dry – or do they?

February 12th, 2010

This week I completed the first draft of another novel. This one came out very slow, as if I were pulling out a premature baby, yet unwilling to be born. I have never suffered from writers block for too long to be bothered by it in the past. But this time, I wondered whether I was indeed heading for an overdue dose of that clap.

In the last nine years, I have written enough material for an equal number of books, three of which have been published to date and the others are lying in queue, biding their time to be born without cannibalizing their predecessors. I put this prolific surge down to the suppressed years when I pursued every other endeavour but writing, when I was gathering my material, my experiences, that I was to later fictionalize in the nine books. But now the well seems to have run dry. But has it?

I recently met a well known and respected author who blew me away when he told me that he had written over 180 books over the last 25 years. I clung to his every word during our meeting, trying to figure out how “he done it.” And his advice to me was that the fallow periods are also ones of creativity: when the mind is recording impressions, new experiences, and characters, and storing them away for later use. So, he concluded, never consider the writer’s block as the beginning of the end of the writer, but the beginning of a new beginning for the writer.

New experiences, eh? Does this mean that I have to take up bungee jumping, sky diving, wade through dissolute sexual escapades, experiment with drugs and fall dead drunk on the street more than a few times? I think not. I don’t have the energy or the tolerance for those antics. Should I get people to tell me their stories; put an ad in Facebook: “Tell me your story, and I’ll exaggerate it into a novel, confidentiality assured, fame not guaranteed, royalties—doubtful”? Or should I invent a genre character, like a detective, who I can bring back time and again, into the same milieu, with more or less the same number of dead bodies, with slight modifications to the character list and scene sequences, and assure myself of a string of novels long enough to last into my retirement and beyond? I could even create a plot wheel, like Edgar Wallace did, and spin it periodically when blocked, to see if it lands on “dead body # 3 found in library,” or “purloined letter discovered on suspect,” or “diamond tiara disappears at ball.”

Or should I just accept silence as a rite of passage and continue to observe the world more intently, stilling the mind from chatter, watching life that contains all the possible plots that have been hitherto concocted in literature, picking only the ones that make sense to me?

My prolific author acquaintance gave me some good advice that day. The Block is the start of a new beginning, when what has been written before is less significant and likened to apprenticeship school, a stepping stone towards what now can be written with more depth, texture and meaning.

I am not sure how long this dry spell will last, but I am content to ride it out with my eyes wide open and not miss the cues when novel # 10 begins to stare me in the face.

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Reading Books In Flight

January 27th, 2010

I was dismayed when I read the revised air travel baggage regulations soon after Christmas and realized that I could take a laptop on board but not a handbag containing my books. I love to read on flights, forsaking the movie, the chatting with my neighbour, or the drinking and eating, just to catch up on my reading. Flights give me overt permission to read, my favourite pastime. I am unable to work, socialize or sleep while flying – so I read.

But now, some incompetent wannabe terrorist, who could not even ignite the bomb he stored inside his pants, has started an unanticipated vendetta against bookworms. For a moment I thought that this was a conspiracy by the e-book publishers who were secretly trying to get us conditioned to reading books off our laptops. Or perhaps it was a plan by those airport bookstores (who were quickly exempted from the book ban within days of the failed Christmas Day bomb scare) wanting to peddle all the New York Times bestsellers to us (that’s all they seem to carry these days, except for perhaps magazines, newspapers and chewing gum).

Then I realized that this dumb-ass terrorist had succeeded after all, by scaring the pants off the rest of us while burning his own. Books, not bombs, lead to enlightenment and peace. Greg Mortenson, the man behind the “The Three Cups of Tea” project, promotes this theory through his singular mission to build schools for children in Pakistan and Afghanistan so that those countries’ future citizens will learn to extend the olive branch and not the Kalashnikov. Bombs only lead to more bombs, lobbed in both directions, until the warring factions are exhausted, their assets destroyed, and fear and suspicion has taken firm root, never to be dislodged for generations.

Therefore, I wondered whether I should write to all the airport security organizations around the world asking them to scrap their plans to buy those intrusive super X ray machines that they are planning to install in airports shortly. Let them give those machines to hospitals and medical clinics instead, so that they can be used to detect hidden tumours and other cancerous foreign bodies growing inside us, and help get us timely remediation. Instead, pass a law that requires every passenger in an aircraft seat to be reading a book while in flight! In fact, add “book tax” to the many taxes on airline tickets these days and give each passenger his pre-ordered book at the departure gate – after all, if advance seat selection is possible, why not advance book selection? It could be all part of your “booking.” Just think of it – the publishing industry would enter a new renaissance. Airplanes would become the universities of the future, forcibly educating the teeming masses hurtling through the skies.

And as for those terrorists – I’d like to see one of those guys, with his face glued to a book in a cramped aircraft seat, try to stuff a bomb up his ass and light the fuse!

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Why do the poor always get picked on?

January 19th, 2010

When Haiti was hit by the massive earthquake, I couldn’t help but feel that the poor always get picked on. Why choose an impoverished country that has been reeling from one political and economic disaster to another? Why take them out with an earthquake as well? This happens quite regularly in the developing world: never-ending famines in the Sahara, tsunamis in South Asia, terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq, floods in Bangladesh.

I tried to balance that scorecard with reported disasters in the developed world in the last decade: 9/11, drought in Australia, forest fires in California, Katrina in New Orleans, extreme winter in Europe in 2010, near-miss terrorist attacks on Christmas Day over the US. But somehow it does not balance out when the loss of human life is calculated. The “Third World,” as we once used to call these nations, is more fragile and exposed when disaster hits. And while the costs of infrastructure damage in the West may be greater (after all, the West had more infrastructure, that is why they are called “developed”) there are often more dead and homeless in the less affluent countries.

Is this the punishment for past or present sins? If that were so, doesn’t the rich commit as much sin as the poor, or do they get to position it better, or conceal it altogether, even from a divine deity?

I have tried to relate this to karma – the cycle of birth and death that leads to perfection. Are those in affluent countries further up the scale in this cycle and therefore insulated from the worst effects of these disasters, while their poorer cousins are less down in the hierarchy of suffering and death, and are therefore going through boot camp at the moment?

Or is the “big leveller”—the disaster to end all disasters, the end of the Mayan Calendar, 2012, the Rapture, call it what you will—still to come, when all these different levels of suffering will be of no consequence, when rich and poor will be left exposed for who we truly are before an impartial judge who will either reward or punish us for our deeds on earth?

I have no answers, except to say that as much as it hurts me to see tragedy hit our poor cousins, it also gives me a great high to stare at my TV screen, watching frantic rescue workers using their bare hands to move aside rubble to pull out a weak but smiling child from the earthquake’s carnage and then celebrating that puny victory. It tells me that as a species we still choose life, and that we will never be comfortable with and yield to the prospect of death without a fight, and that as long as we feel this way, mankind will continue to grow and live, irrespective of where on this planet we live. Survival is our great unifier.

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Celebrity Conundrum

January 11th, 2010

When the sad tale of the greatest golfer’s fall from grace, or more aptly, fall from the stereotype, broke recently, I was glad that I was not in his cleats.

Just the other day, I was lamenting the fact that my books weren’t best-sellers, yet (you see, I am ever hopeful, and vain). But with best-seller status comes celebrity and intrusion and conformance to publicly held standards that the public themselves have difficulty attaining. The celebrity becomes the de-facto symbol of all that we (Joe Blow Public) have been unable to accomplish in our lives – our dream, our mirage. And when that bubble pops, the fallen celebrity is attacked with venom that is unjustified. How dare he burst my bubble?

The public spotlight is a lonely one, especially when that spotlight is conferred by corporate sponsorship and brand imagery that the celebrity is supposed to enhance. One wonders if the emerging celebrity’s own brand is neutered to become a subset of the sponsor’s existing brand, and never really stands on its own.

And what about his competition: the ones who can now jump in and fill the void, and who have been waiting impatiently to grab at some of the spoils, albeit under visages of equally clean living gentlemen who have never transgressed?

And what about immediate family members? Do they circle the wagons and protect the fallen one, or do they also pounce and pick at what pieces are left, lining their own pockets and leaving the carcass to the next level of celebrity: the notorious tabloids that will make our former celebrity weekly faire for the next few months, linking him with scandals true and untrue, until they have milked him for every bit of news and turned him into the monster they have portrayed him to be?

So this poor celebrity is shouldering quite a few weights already: the need to keep winning in his chosen field of endeavour, the need to behave in a manner that supports and enhances corporate sponsors, the need to portray an image of success that his public following can never emulate, the need to suppress his own desires and aspirations should they ever digress from all of the above. And while doing all of that, he can never totally rely on family support as he desperately tries to stay out of the hands of the tabloids. By Jove, that’s a heavy load! No wonder the Risk-Reward diagram is like a see-saw and not a circle, as I had once though it to be. What goes around does not necessarily come around in equal measure for celebrities; it comes around accompanied by either a sack full of dough or a millstone.

So, as the New Year is upon us, I am secretly glad that I am not a celebrity – yet (I told you I was vain!) And I wonder, if that day ever comes, whether I would have the energy to withstand a PR faux pas, however innocuous it may be? Or whether I would long for these days when even if I had jumped off the CN Tower, I may not have warranted more than a footnote in the local rag— “Fruitcake Tries to Fly Off Tall Building.”

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Winding down the year

December 27th, 2009

“So this is Christmas, and what have you done?” The refrain hangs heavy on my mind. Like a stock-taking superimposed by some divine deity who is counting down the hours in my life left on this earth.

I learned a few home truths this year. I learned that I could write books and stories in my sleep, but without a strong sponsor or benefactor, they were going nowhere, unless I gave them away for free on the Internet (still an option that I am actively considering). I learned that the commercial world had burrowed deep into its foxhole in 2009 and wasn’t taking any chances on “new and enhanced” but sticking merely to “tried and true.” I learned that Social Networking is great to become famous (sure, Google me and see the number of places you can find Shane Joseph, Writer) but not necessarily rich. It takes more than blog articles, tweets, and online postings before customers will buy into your brand. I learned that the tried and true media outlets are still the most influential.

I learned that people, even those closest to me, were fallible, just as I am, and that I cannot always hold them to the high standard I hold for myself. I learned to pursue dreams and accept when they came up short in reality. I have learned that money is only given to us for safekeeping and for deploying wisely; if we fail in that task, it will be taken away. I learned about the circular nature of time – events will take place only when they are meant to; all we can do is prepare for their occurrence. And so, even though I continue to record appointments in my calendar and plan for achieving defined goals within certain time frames, I am fatalistic about their actual outcomes. I have learned that the expression “Shit happens,” really happens!

Therefore I would respond to that old John Lennon song and say that I grew wise, marginally. I grew patient. I became poorer in the pocketbook but richer in my soul. I grew older by a year. I planted a lot of seedlings in this rather fallow year, which I am hoping will bud in 2010. And I have bided my time, waiting for the next chapter to unfold.

To all of you who have been reading my blog posts, I wish you Season’s Greetings and all the very best in 2010!

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Man, do I need to win one of them literary awards?

December 18th, 2009

Now that the launches are over, and the book stores (the ones I know of) have been supplied with my books and all my friends and relatives have been cajoled, teased and threatened to buy a copy of my latest creation in time for Christmas, how does one get to the next level of book sales?

Why not win an award?

I have seen writers’ works (spurred by their agents) being slavishly flogged at every literary award in the land and beyond. Fail one? Go for the next, and keep on the trail until someone feels sorry for you and gives you an award. Then sit back and watch book sales take off into the stratosphere.

Why does that happen? The power of endorsement, in a media-stricken society where the making of choice has been abdicated to “Oprah Recommended” or “Heather’s Pick”— that’s why.

Reader’s are wary of picking up a book unless it has some label: “long listed for X Award”, short listed for Y Award”, “Winner of Z Award” Who gives a damn about the award and the integrity of its selection process? “Hey, this book won an award – it must be good!”

Can any writer win an award? I am not sure about that these days given that awards are the tickets to best-seller status; they must be closely guarded like the Crown Jewels. I guess any publisher could forward their favourite author’s book to the dreaded long list: just mail in an application and advertize it on the book’s dust jacket – that’s a start! But getting beyond that to the short list? Now that is another story, because here is where you encounter the gatekeepers, those guardians entrusted with protecting the livelihood of the industry, to ensure that a few major labels are still around as the landscape gets littered with more self-publishing, blogs, wikis and other “noise” that take away from the public’s reading time.

I thought of inventing my own award once— after all, who would really tell the difference? I even wrote a blog article about it some time ago and it got more hits than the number of sold copies of my books. Eventually, I abandoned that idea because I am a writer, not a gatekeeper. And I figured that if there is a good story out there it will be told, eventually— even posthumously. Writers are gifted with the ability to tell stories and their stories will be heard.

This message came home powerfully to me when my novel After the Flood, which I wrote in 2002 and which languished for years afterwards in my “abandoned projects” file because no-one was interested in its subject matter, suddenly found interest when climate change became a hot topic last year.

Perhaps, I will not go for that award after all. Perhaps my reward is that the story got told, eventually, and during my lifetime—what a bonus!

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Deja-vu (After the Flood, the novel vs. 2012, the movie)

December 8th, 2009

I watched the movie 2012 and had a sense of déjà-vu as I left the theatre. Had the movie’s script writers and I met in some dream space and used each other’s plot lines? The destruction of the earth, which takes place in the first fifty pages of my book, is in this movie! Now of course, there are some of the Hollywoodisms in the film—like fantastic special effects and the drama of the cliff-hanger—that I dispensed with for my novel. But the rest is kind of—there! They even have a little-known writer, who had published a book about this calamity, as one of the principle heroes—go figure! The only difference is that my disaster happens in a Canadian locale, whereas 2012 takes place mainly in the USA.

Is it easy to project the what-if’s that can happen to the planet if we carry on regardless? But if these trend-lines are so easy to forecast, why is no one doing anything about it? Will Copenhagen really embody Hopenhagen? Or have all the best seats in the ark been sold already to the worlds billionaires so that they are safe when the flood comes? Is that why there are Forbes’ lists and other rankings of the richest people in the world, so that they can lay claim to being at the front of the line of the box-office for this show to end all shows?

Is it also co-incidental that this type of literature and movies is coming out at this point in time? When I sat down to write my novel, I had no intention of scaremongering. I don’t even know what compelled me to write on this futuristic theme. And I was writing this book back in 2002, when the world was a safer place, other than for a couple of tall towers that had fallen in Manhattan a few months earlier. Perhaps the falling of those towers was the first inkling of a world about to go drastically wrong? Maybe that was the catalyst that started many of us writers writing in different parts of the world, unconnected to any conspiracy to scare the pants off the world but compelled to project a vision of hope should a disaster like this occur?

Despite the long years I waited to see this novel in print, I was pleased by the reception I got when it finally came out last month. Readers flocked to the book’s launch events; readers nodded and understood why I wrote this stuff—now. They would have been out having fun in the park instead had I launched this book in 2002.

And for those who thought that I had planned this novel with the Hollywood script-writers, I have to remind them that the balance 250 pages of my novel deals with what happens after the flood, a situation that the movie does not address. Maybe I should send Hollywood my book. Or maybe, just like all car models that are planned years in advance, they have already scripted the movie versions of 2025, 2035 and 2045, all to be released closer to those dates? Oh, darn…

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Experience & Setting

November 24th, 2009

When you live in different places, and later try to write about the experiences you had in them, how much do you paint from the external and how much do you bring from within? Which is the better way? Which conveys a better sense of place?

When I commenced writing my latest novel, Milltown, someone lectured me that I hadn’t lived in a small town in Ontario long enough to write about one. After all, I hadn’t gone to school in one, never worked in one, hadn’t played hockey and gone drinking with the guys on Friday nights, never had sex in the back seats of cars at drive-ins when I was a randy young adolescent – how dare I write about life in a small town? I pleaded “guilty” to all those experiences, guilty for having committed them all somewhere else (except perhaps the hockey – would cricket count?), and “not guilty” for having perpetrated them in a small town in Canada. That said, they were no less thrilling wherever I had experienced them – be it in a big city, on a tropical island or in a desert oasis.

When writing about settings from within, the danger is that you also bring back the experiences which occurred in those places. Therefore the experience and the setting become inter-twined, and inseparable, and the experience is non transferable to a new locale. The writing may be more authentic, but the writer is stuck in his time and place warp.

Therefore, for this novel, my settings are written from the outside in, just as “method” actors do, just like landscape painters turn out masterpieces by sitting in a location and absorbing the scene in all its permutations and in all weathers and at all times of day. I am writing setting by observation, while transposing experiences from within, wherever they occurred, because human experience is universal.
That is why I like writing setting from the outside in, because I can transplant the experience, whether it was drinking with the boys or having sex in the back seats of cars, and place it wherever I want it – either in a big city or in a small town. I just have to change the props, but the experience and the emotions behind them, are still the same.

Setting is important, for without it, characters have no context, history has no colour and the stage has no backdrop. But setting can be separated from experience because the latter is transportable, the former is not. I bet you an orphan boy under threat for his life feels the same fear (i.e. experience) today that Oliver Twist did in his day; the present-day orphan probably has more solutions (i.e. props) at his disposal to alleviate that fear than poor Oliver had, because his setting is different.

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