My Top Ten Books

I love memes. They save me the trouble of having to come up with new blog ideas every week, because all this thinking sometimes leaves me with brain fever. What's more I've given up sarcasm and chicken for lent and you can only guess which has been harder. I mentioned in my "books that made me want to write books" blog that those books weren't even for the most part my favourites. But these are:

1. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. Song Of Solomon, Toni Morrison
3. The Obscene Bird of Night, Jose Donoso
4. Dubliners, James Joyce
5. Guerillas, V.S. Naipaul
6. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
7. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
8. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
9. My Name is Red, Orham Pamuk
10.Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Satan is Real, You Nigger Lovers

I could explain to you why the core of Jamaica Reggae is country music but that's another blog, which I promise I will write soon. If you want to see the roots of reggae and gospel forget Aretha Franklin and the Staple Singers and reach for the Waylon Jennings, Jim Reeves, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Marty Robbins' Gunfighter ballads and The Louvin Brothers. The Louvin Brothers especially managed to mesmerize and influence reggae and gospel artists, who still sing "Satan is Real" in church.

This must be one of those ironies that gives God a good chuckle because the Louvin Brothers were two of the virulent racists ever to strum a guitar and they would have been horrified to know that just near the equator hundreds of negroes were loving their music. Ira Louvin died in a car crash and Charlie has kept on going, becoming something of a mini-legend, to country artists and alternative artists who still struggle for authenticity because well, rock and roll is just a little too plastic. Mind you, Charlie is so authentic that up
to a few years ago he was still giving the coons, jigaboos and niggers lots of hate.

So Elvis Costello, Jeff Tweedy, Will Oldham, Tom T. Hall, Tift Merritt, Marty Stuart, David Kilgour, members of Bright Eyes, Lambchop, Clem Snide, Superchunk and more have all guested on Charlie's new album. No doubt they wetted themselves on being in the same room as a man who walked they way they talked. But I wonder. Would the sessions have gone so smoothly had Cowboy Troy showed up? What about Charlie Pride? Did any of these guests care that had they brought their black friends along that would have caused problems? Or maybe these artists don't have black friends. I could take a cheap shot at Elvis Costello, who should have known better given his past, but I'll leave that for somebody else. The irony about this is that there are Jamaicans who will sing along to "Satan is Real" and in the same breath call Elvis Presley racist.

But this I know. Elvis never said "The only thing Negroes can do for me is shine my shoes and buy my records." Some claim he said it in Boston but Elvis had never been to Boston. Some claim to have heard him say it behind the scenes of CBS's Person to Person. But Elvis never appeared on the show because CBS wouldn't pay a fee. Elvis has always given credit to black musicians, never deluded himself about where rock and roll came from and went to a black church for most of his life. Hell, the man wasn't even homophobic.

This I also know. Elvis worshipped the Louvin Brothers. Elvis worshiped them so much that he asked them to tour with him in the fifties. The Louvin Brothers with typical Louvin class turned him down. As they eloquently put it, they would never tour with a 'niggerlover.' But hey, if George Wallace can change, so can Charlie Louvin, right?

Right?

Five Note Mojo

Nicholas tagged me with this, where bloggers say five things about themselves to various degrees of revelation. So in the interest of perpetuating this stream of Revelations here goes.

1. I had an exorcism at age 33. I just felt that there were things I needed to get rid of and a spiritual make or break was the only way to do it. Deliverances as evangelicals call them are as frightening as you think but also not what you think at all. My head didn’t do a 360 but I did speak in voices not my own and vomit up two buckets of I-know-not-what since I made sure not to eat or drink anything that day. The thing is, since my deliverance I’ve been more apart from God than ever before. I still believe he exists, but I’ve just lost faith in his ability to do anything. Last year I drove past an accident where a woman was crushed by a truck. If God thinks that something good has come out of that because all things work together for good, then one of the two of us is nuts.

2. I buy black music because I don’t want to seem like the Oreo I’m frequently accused of being. Lil’ Wayne made my list of best albums this year and to tell the truth I have never listened to his mix tape. Race as a concept bewilders me and because of that I feel that other people feel I’m not black enough. I listen to less rap than white people. I don’t buy R&B records. If I’m near a reggae artist I’m probably producing his video and I’m the token black guy at a Dungen Concert. The band’s Swedish. I went to a Toshi Reagon concert because I was going with black friends but spent all night kicking myself for not catching Deerhoof. I bought Mary J’s last album but have never listened to it. Yet I can sing along to every Peter Bjorn and John song even though I’ve never seen a lyric sheet and my favourite records last year were Joanna Newsom's "YS," Boris' "Pink," Mastodon's "Blood Mountain," and Gnarls Barkley, which for some downright confirms Oreo status.

3. To quote somebody from History Boys, I’m not happy, but I’m not unhappy about it. I have a journal that I write in everyday. I’m terrified of anyone reading it, but I wish somebody would.

4. I throw away Patti Smith’s albums every year. Every time she scowls “Kid can’t you show me nothing but surrender,” I feel she’s talking to me, cussing me for failing to live up to my potential. It’s like she’s saying look at me, I’m at 10 and you’re still at 4 so step up or step off. So I step off. I throw her records away because I can’t imagine living my life with such honesty. Then I buy them back and go look, I’m doing this now, and I’ve thrown away that now. Maybe one day it will be enough.

5. I hate meeting famous writers. I met Derek Walcott last year and got the name of his dear departed friend’s wife wrong. He promptly corrected me and I felt like a fool. I never have anything to say when I meet these people. I like to think that maybe all that needs to be said is in their work but there may be more to it than that. I just feel like an awkward fan and not a writer and I hate feeling awkward. It's better when we immediately think of a neutral subject, or if somebody introduces me, but otherwise I feel like a leech taking up people’s time. I still sweat over what dumb shit I might have said when I met Russell Banks. Strangely enough him remembering me for saying something stupid stings less than him not remembering me at all.

On Privacy

Nearly a decade ago in Wired Magazine, the futurist Esther Dyson, proclaimed that privacy was dead. The concept died years ago she said, we just haven’t yet realized it. In privacy’s place would or should come mutual responsibility and accountability. Now that secrets were over we had no choice but to hold each other in check since we all knew what the other was up to. The striking thing about such a worldview is that like Marshall Macluhan or even Phillip K Dick, Dyson ended up being both right and wrong.

I’m thinking of Dyson because of a rather revealing issue of TIME OUT NY that focused on New Yorkers living with their neighbors; an issue I found both inspiring and depressing. If privacy is over, nobody told New York City where eight million nations of one all live together apart. What was striking about the neighbors being ‘introduced’ to each other was not that they needed to be introduced or that they live apart by design but rather how adamant there were about keeping it that way. At the end of two of the matchmaking interviews it was clear that even though the neighbors were happy to be more familiar they were also clearly not going to reach out to each other again. There is this effort to deny the natural human tendency to socialize, to relegate it to work and neutral areas in order to protect the sanctuary of home. Home as a refuge from people as opposed to a place to welcome and entertain.

Sitting in my apartment in New York I tried to calculate how long it would take for me to be found if I had a stroke. I would die of course but how near would I have to be to the door before my corpse stinks up the hallway and how stink would it have be before the neighbors raise an alarm? I think of Vincenzo Ricardo, the man who sat dead in his Hamptons Bay house for a full year because not one neighbours thought to check on this old, blind man who had not been seen in months and whose letters were falling out of his mailbox. It’s incredible to me how far we will go to protect our right to not have anyone be a part of our lives. I think that at this very moment somewhere in this oh so developed state another Kitty Genovese (pic 1) is learning the hard way that she is on her own. There is a price to be paid for this of course. Privacy comes with a curse. While it may shield the hard working yuppies from nosy neighbors it also shields a Jeffery Dahmer from being found out, even when the stench of his pile of bodies becomes unbearable.

Privacy allows secretive people to hide on plain sight. One reason why Michael Devlin could get away with kidnapping Shawn Hornbeck (pic 2) and holding him hostage for four years is that whether consciously or not he counted on his neighbors to not give a damn what he did. He counted on his neighbors to be as self centered and selfish as he was. My roommate in NYC is from California and I’m from Jamaica and both of us found the willful anonymity of New Yorkers bracing and disturbing. The idea that I could take the train every day and not tell a single person good morning is foreign to me. I remember last year when I was stranded at JFK and called every person I considered a friend to help out. The response I got from all was “well, let me know how it turns out.” Now it could have been that maybe I was overestimating my closeness to these people, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think people in big cities think privacy; the right to exclude any and everybody from their lives is the only measure of true power that they have left. Selfishness then becomes survival mechanism and personal expression at once.

The only time that New Yorkers broke this rule was 9/11. Not surprisingly the only place now that bears little trace of 9/11 is New York. A question like “how much do you know about your neighbors?” immediately takes on an ominous tone. We are so obsessed with shielding ourselves from potential bogeymen that our very mode of self-protection breeds them by the truckload. Going as I do from one country to the next it has been interesting to see the concept of privacy versus community bend, shape and shift. In America, a new form of human contact has exploded with no need for actual human contact or at least person-to-person or flesh-to-flesh. My Space and You Tube are communities as large as any neighborhood. My best buddy Bill is somebody I see at the most twice a year and our friendship developed totally on MSN. In Jamaica we are coming apart and settling into mini-communities of one. The irony is that the American achievement of new community and the Jamaican devolution into isolation is fueled by the same source: the Internet.

Through the internet Americans have found a new way to interact while Jamaicans have found a new way to cut off from community, perhaps to build what they have always wanted instead of the what they have always been subjected to. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It means for example that gay Jamaicans won’t feel so alone again and teenage Jamaicans can mature without the crushing sense that they have already outgrown the country at 15. But is this a real community? We can interact with each other on the web but I’m not sure we can hold each other accountable. Unlike real life (for the most part) we control what of us people see and hear on the web. I’m sure the web me is more articulate that than the real me. He certainly is better looking, since I used a photoshopped pic from five years and 20 pounds ago (not the one on this blog, I promise, ladies). In a curious way we have managed to be online yet still out of sight and out of mind.

But while I not ready to call an online community a real one yet, that may be just me. I realize that maybe anonymity and community can co-exist. That’s the whole point behind blogs such as this one, for instance. The Internet as a forum for gut truth also blows me away. On postsecret.com, people confess things they would never reveal in church, or to loved ones. There’s rarely any interaction but the onslaught of honest expression results in a community of sorts. It’s the best of ironies, a website for secrets that proves that we are all dying to lose them. My friend knows of a preacher who has an online church and strangely enough because his congregation can be more honest online than in real life he scores more breakthroughs than real churches. But here is why it can never be as good or better than real contact, at least not for me. Even with so many online friends, colleagues and contacts I still spend a Saturday night alone and feeling loneliness so heavy that it’s almost a sickness. And there has to be more to a community than lonely souls being lonely together. Sometimes privacy is just another way of choosing loneliness and sometimes loneliness is as sad as the Beatles told us in Eleanor Rigby.

Still not convinced that privacy is loneliness by choice? Try this experiment. Think or make a list of all your friends. First subtract all that you have met through work. And yes if you’re an artist or musician your fellow artists and musicians count. Now subtract all who are actual family members. Subtract all you met in college. Subtract all who are not really friends, just drinking buddies. Subtract your significant other’s friends. Now subtract all friends you have known more than six years. Still have friends left? Good for you. At least that’s not one of the things you’re keeping private.

Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me

I have four friends in four countries. Our lives could not have been any more different save for one striking blast of synchronicity that still leaves us spellbound when we think about it. In the spring of 1987, almost 20 years before we became friends, we were a stoned mullethead in Chicago, an ex-punk picking up photography in London, a future lit major in Australia, a willfully mute artsy type in Kingston and a quasi bohemian in Paris. But for one magical summer in 1987 (magic being black of course) all five of us with no knowledge of each other’s existence, were doing the same thing at the same time: Marooning ourselves in our bedrooms to listen to The Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.

I don’t remember 1987 by any sequence of days and dates; I remember it by breaths I lost, gasping at “Just Like Heaven.” I can’t recall any major events but I do remember the sad drum clatter of “Like Cockatoos,” fighting against the thunder strings and the titanic, looping bass. I know at precisely which bar of “The Kiss” the vocals come in and I remember experiencing something between epiphany and euphoria when I screamed “Get that FUCKING voice out of my head” along with Robert Smith. I remember trying not to lose it in the middle of “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep,” because I thought right then that I would never experience love. I was in U.S. for the summer after the roughest school year of my life. To paraphrase what Oprah once said about books, great music, hearing great records was the first time I felt loved, ever. Records like Kiss me Kiss me Kiss me, and Sign O’ The Times, (another double album masterpiece released that year) were so loaded with riches that they felt like gifts I didn’t deserve.

All I know is that when I listened to The Cure everything that I hated about myself at the beginning became everything I loved about myself at the end. This was my mute season, the summer I stopped talking because I had grown tired of being one of the most hated kids in high school. I spent that Easter trying to devise painless ways to kill myself because I just did not belong. I wanted to be one of the normal, cool kids so badly that I decided that the only way to make my life better was to end it. People always mocked me when I spoke so I stopped speaking, leaving it up to others to decide whether I was sick or rude. Drowning seemed too violent and slashing my wrists meant, well, the slashing part. I heard that falling from a building was like diving into water. I was dead set on dying but instead I went to Chicago. I stayed with my uncle, aunt and cousins who were all wonderful people, but fundamentalist Christians who didn’t take too kindly to popular music. I remember waiting until everybody was asleep and tiptoeing downstairs to watch Friday night videos on Superstation TBS.

One day we were driving home from Wednesday church service when we stopped at a gas station. Somebody was switching stations on the radio. Out of nowhere the strangest, high-pitched voice burst through the little car stereo. “Everything you do is so ingeeeeeeeeeeeeeniousssssss! He-she-it said. Five seconds later that same voice was howling “Why, why why why why can’t I be yoooooouuuuuuu?” The radio was quickly switched off. “You like that?” somebody asked me. “No,” I said, the first but not the last time I lied about music. I didn’t know who the band was or the name of the song, but I bought Billboard the next day hoping that the name of the song was Why Can’t I Be You. There it was on both the college rock and dance charts. I bought the record in secret, and spent nights staring at the huge lip-sticked cover, dying to go back home so that I could play it loud with the headphones on.

As a writer what interests me most is the commonality of experience, how we co-exist even as we choose not to coexist. Or put another way, how all of us are living the same lives even as we choose not to share them. In 1987 my future friends and me spent summer being alone together. 1987 was a particularly lonely summer and back then Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and Sign on the times were the only friends I had. But Sign O’ the Times was drama on an international scale. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me was a private thing, an underground back when the word meant something. The Cure were a band whose exaggerated freakiness and geekiness underscored my own. A band that taught me to celebrate the very things about me that others disliked. I was a Jamaican kid in love with Love and Rockets and Echo and the Bunnymen and couldn’t understand why I was being crucified for not liking dancehall reggae. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me was one of the first true epics of the alternative nation, back when we were all swimming in our own innerspace, unaware that we had become a movement. That was something we would not realize until all of us; goths, nerds, punks, hardcore kids, straight edgers, artfags, grunge boys, Riot Grrrls, hip-hoppers, new wavers and no-wavers all showed up at Pixies Concerts.

I recently bought the re-mastered double CD and found myself doing what I always do: skipping to “Like Cockatoos,” then playing the rest in entirety. I think of Robert Smith’s puppy dog whelp and how everyone around me hated it. I remember that being the exact point when loving something everybody else hates became the greatest pleasure in the world. I extended this to loving other things, among them the Pixies, Shakespeare and myself. Maybe it’s a stretch to say that loving the Cure helped me to love myself but in my mind it makes perfect sense. Don’t get me wrong, Disintegration is their masterpiece. In fact my favourite song of the 1989 might be Love Song. Or Lullaby. Or Fascination Street. But Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me is MY record. The one where I got to know and love not only this great band, but myself as well.

Pat Boone, the penguin

Fine, if Jack Nicholson can go unbilled in Broadcast News or Edward Norton in Kingdom of Heaven, then there is nothing particularly bad about such a thing. It may even work for the movie, Jack's appearance give a great film a greater jolt, and Edward Norton perhaps knew that his sheer grace in such a graceless movie would have caused critics to focus only on him, which they did anyway.

So maybe I'm making too big a deal out of Savion Glover not receiving any credit for his dancing in Happy Feet. I've heard even Glover's wimp-ass explanation, resorting to the "it's all good for the artform" excuse. I've even heard the lamer excuse that billing would have taken some of the magic away from the illusion of character. Funny, nobody was worried about Tom Hanks voicing a cartoon cowboy and Robin Williams doing a genie. But that's just a voice and nobody recognises voices right? My apologies if I just killed the illusion for you.

Savion Glover is not just any tap dancer, he's the world acknowledged Genius of the form, even if he doesn't seem to know it. I'm not surprised that he would be Pat Booned, but I am surprised that he has been done so by a cartoon penguin and nobody, not even Glover thinks anything is wrong with it.

On Tolerance

The irony isn’t lost on me that New York was once called New Amsterdam. The evidence is everywhere that NY has more in common with a European city than the rest of America. That is why I could write months ago that even though I’m not an American citizen, nor do I live in the states permanently that I am a New Yorker. Even by European standards the New York Metropolis is quite striking for its tolerance. In fact I’ll go out on a shaky limb and say that New York is even more tolerant than European cities, where the absence of overt racism and disenfranchisement causes far more insidious and subtle versions to endure. My Brit friends raise unholy hell when I mention this (and there is the fact that I’ve never been to London), but they are always struck dumb when I mention that New York’s terrorists were at least imported, not born and raised natives of their own city. Instead New York flies all freak flags at full mast, glorifying her melting pot magnificence, patting herself on the back for tolerating all manner of kinds on the subway, including the less than sane. There is really no place on earth like it.

This is also a problem that New Yorkers in their sometime blindness don’t recognize. When tolerance is elevated to the highest moral value it creates as many problems as solutions. Lord knows tolerance is better than bigotry, but this is also the laziest of solutions, a beginning treated too often like an ending; a way of doing nothing that reassures us that we have done something. Diversity is of course a wonderful starting point but tolerant societies mistake this for a goal. This creates a whole slew of problems, nowhere better seen than in New York.

Enter gentrification. But not in the way you might think. Concerned citizens watching New York’s boroughs becoming split between only the very rich and the very poor have demanded housing that reflects greater economic diversity. But this move not only fails to solve the problem but also fools us into thinking that we have solved it. Housing may be set aside for the poor but where are the good, affordable schools to educate their children? Where is solid childcare, health and wealth benefits, and job security—anything that would usher the poor into the middle class? A maid may find an apartment near Central Park South but if she can never afford NYU then she and her daughter will remain maids. And let’s look at the plight of the incredible shrinking middle class for a second. Nothing proves the healthy mobility of a society more than a vibrant middle, the existence of which means the poor are getting richer and the teachers, civil servants, police and firemen are finding opportunities for economic and social stability. But the middle class is going the way of the mastodon in New York, a move that will have its backlash as soon as the state remembers that this is the class that pays all the taxes. In the absence of a vibrant middle there is the stagnant poor. Tolerance, far from a force of social change has become instead, a tool of human resource development departments, two or three lines at the bottom of a recruitment ad, nothing more. This is not progress.

The fact is liberals are to a commanding extent well educated, if not always well paid (and that’s relative, people). Liberals are also and have always been afflicted with a case of blind snobbery that would be offensive were it not well meaning. Take for example the film Borat. Liberals had more problems with it than conservatives. Critics, while lauding the dark humour also expressed concern that Borat’s flagrant anti-Semitism, homophobia and sexism may have been misinterpreted as endorsements by “Middle America”. Here again a well-meaning concern betrays the damning cultural snobbery that liberals are frequently (and correctly) accused of, the type of that led Chuck D to exclaim in 1988, “Better a Klansman than a liberal.” Where is this American who is so backward that he would not get this type of joke? I’m not saying that he does not exist, but what about the many Americans, millions who are not New York liberals, who consider themselves open-minded, but was just slotted into an unsavory geographical stereotype without their consent? Again, without realizing it, the liberal has declared himself more intelligent than so-called Middle America and offends the very populace he thinks he’s defending. The “I am smart enough to get it, but my backward brothers will not,” logic. The Dixie Chicks were so lionized as victims that nobody noticed when they turned into antagonists, alienating potentially supportive women such as Reba McIntire and dismissing many of their devout fans as backward rednecks that they never wanted in the first place.

And what is a Middle American anyway? I’ve met farmers if Ashland, Oregon and they are nothing at all like the farmers I met in Florida. Most people I’ve met have no problem with a man willing his property to another man even they don’t like the idea of gay marriage. Most of them believe in God but not religion and most have no problem with abortion. And even if some are conservative or even racist as we often believe, isn’t it a greater offence to simply write the whole territory off as one kind of creature? And yet the more tolerant breed of American does this all the time. Nobody in Middle America calls himself a Middle American, at least nobody I met.

Tolerance is a cop-out, a positive value with no emotional quality. It is hence quite easy, so easy that what most of us think is tolerance is not even that. Case in point. Go back to the beginning of this blog; replace tolerance with Apathy and you will notice that the tone of the article has not changed one bit. Tolerance is a quick way to reach for diversity without ever admitting that diversity is not equality. Racial equality is wonderful but when only 3 percent of that race can afford a good education, it means nothing more than a guaranteed seat on the subway. Because tolerance is a first move mistaken for a final step it reinforces far more serious problems than the ones it fixes.

The poor don’t need you to hold their hand and sing kumbaya. They need opportunities to become less poor and more rich. By the way society moves two things might happen: The poor become wealthier, a restored middle class that will need a new set of economic opportunities that the city has yet to provide. Or the poor are given nothing and the lack of opportunities despite social diversity will create societal fissures that explode, sometimes on a national scale. London’s terrorists were homegrown after all and the Rodney king beating, trial and riots happened in LA, not Alabama.

Reading, Writing and Absurdistan

I don’t quite get it. On a very basic level, I can’t figure out why people would want to write unless they like to read. I mean, what would be the point? For the incredibly glamorous fast track lifestyle? I don’t think so. —Francine Prose, Atlantic, July 18 2006


I don’t get it either. That writing programs are increasing by the ten-fold while actual reading is plummeting does not surprise me. Perplexes me yes, but surprise? No. What does surprise me is how many of these non-readers are writers themselves, or people who want to write. This is what I do not understand. Why in heaven’s name, if you do not like books would you want to write one? And if you really don't care much for books, why, why, why should anybody read yours? But this is more common than I thought. James Frey made no secret of his rather lean library which seemed apropos for his rather massive hubris. In her wretched book, The Right to Write, Julia Cameron speaks about everybody being a writer merely because they write. She got particularly defensive at what she thought was writerly elitism. I can’t remember her mentioning a single book, other than the ones she wrote.

My belief is this: Writers who do not read have no right to write. How do you get the right to write? You need to be given permission first. In a blog I posted on Amazon several months ago I wrote about being given permission to write. It went like this:

“Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks about being given permission to write by Kafka. He read the following: "When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a night of troubled sleep he found himself transformed into a monstrous insect,” and was stunned out of his mind. “I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that,” he said. “If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So immediately I started writing.”

I have always been a writer, but wasn't given permission to write until I read Salman Rushdie’s Shame, about the sisters Chunnee, Munnee and Bunny. Among its many preposterous bits was a narrator who kept inserting himself in the narrative, even telling beforehand which character he was going to kill off. Then there was Omar Khayyam (no relation to the poet) who may have been born from all three sisters at once. I was appalled. Who told him he could do this? Who told him he could ruin the element of surprise and wag it in front of my face? But in asking the question he freed my answer. I trashed my first book and wrote another, the one I published.

I’m not going to blow my own horn about what I accomplished with my first book, but none of this could have happened were I not a reader. It just makes sense. How can anyone hope to blow somebody away with prose if they have not been blown away by prose? One of the many remarkable things about Gary Shteyngart’s magnificent Absurdistan is how much of writer’s novel it is. Absurdistan celebrates the very idea of the larger than life literary hero, something we have not seen in at least a century. More than that the book dares to suppose that fictional heroes are the only true models for real humanity. Shteyngart takes an audacious line; supposing, as his main character Misha Vainberg does that fictional heroes are realer and more instructive than real heroes. He also takes for granted that the reader is as well read as the narrator. I wasn’t in fact. But I did end up with a brand new copy of Oblomov as a result.

Absurdistan is the type of book that makes me want to write books. This is the type of magic that can happen with a novel, when it frees your mind and your pen. The book opens up new ways of seeing things, reading things by putting words together that excite me like never before. Can I do something like that? Not to copy him but to write in a way that I grab words together, throw them against a wall and watch them bounce? Because, to tell the truth I was bored with skinny prose. Okay that’s a lie. I dislike skinny prose. I dislike it profoundly. I dislike when people wave Hemmingway in my face as if he wrote with a scalpel instead of a pen, claiming that he fixed literature, as if anything was wrong with it. Joyce, Fitzgerald, Anderson, Woolf, Lawrence, and Svevo were all doing quite fine, thank you very much. The reductionism school of literature has been lauded too long as some sort of panacea. The very idea that smaller prose must be better prose has been neutering too much fiction. The result is horribly efficient and meticulously unadorned writing with as much pulse as a gnat.

Don’t get me wrong.
I’m all for Hemingway.
I think Carver is an absolute genius.
But writing like this.
Because I want to.
Because the night is cold.
And I’m alone.
Is just bad.
No to mention lazy.
Really.

There is nothing lazy about Shetyngart’s prose. Like the main character, Absurdistan is a huge lumbering beast of a novel, rattling off literary Molotov cocktails with such abandon that it doesn’t care who gets hit. Maybe Shteyngart needed an Eastern European with spotty English to pull this off. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated certainly echoes this point. But whereas Foer’s “English” revealed the desperate heart of a wanna-be, Shetyngart’s English is the global village that language has been threatening to become; equal parts Bronx Jive, literary overheatedness, Russian Rhythm and gruff Hebrew all set to NYC hip-hop. I’ll go further to say that Absurdistan is the first true Hip-hop novel: Bold in its ambition to associate itself with the Gogols, Dostoeyskies and Goncharovs, but borrowing, sampling and stealing words, then slamming together to see what sticks. A trick to be sure but if this what we have to do to set fire to prose, then bring on the tricks. It’s such a thrill to read a novel that takes chances, consumes itself and downright gluts on a feast of words, without announcing that that is exactly what it is doing. And managing to do so while being a crazy and hilarious road movie disguised as a fiction. I’m so anxious to finish this blog just so I can write again.

And that dear reader is what reading can do for a writer. There are other reasons of course. Under-read writers also betray a certain narcissism evident not just in the preponderance of first person narrators who sound like the author but also in the assumption that one's prose is already so perfect that one cannot risk being “influenced” by someone else. Figures. Only an troglodyte would not want to be influenced by others. That's why there are no Mona Lisas on cave walls. If you have not read enough, you may be a writer, but you have not yet been given permission to write. And you will never write great fiction until you have been given permission. This comes from reading and reading widely. It comes from reading outside of your race, gender, age group, sexuality and era. It comes from reading the very book you wouldn’t touch in a million years, or maybe it simply means taking down Moby Dick and reading past page 2. If you are one of these non-readers, do me a favour. Grab a few books including Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer and don’t stop reading until you get that feeling—You’ll know it when you feel it. The feeling where you say, damn! this book makes me want to write. What comes next will be better than anything you ever written before. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.

God Save Prince Harry

Seems my favourite worthless royal isn't so worthless after all. Whatever you may think of the British Monarchy (and I think very little) or the Iraq war, surely it speaks to something that this is the first country where someone of privilege, a royal at that, has decided himself to be no better that the "ordinary" people who have been sent to die. It doesn't matter that his royal heinie may never see combat. It doesn't even matter that this may be a publicity stunt to redeem our favourite swastika wearer. The fact is here is a prince putting his considerable money where his mouth is and having the balls to bear arms in the war his country helped start. What would Audie Murphy think about a Brit of all people, showing Americans up? Last time I checked none of the following have signed up for duty:Jenna Bush, Barbara Bush JR, George P. Bush, Noelle Bush, John Ellis Bush Jr, Neil Bush, Lauren Bush, Pierce Bush, Marshall Bush, Samuel LeBlond, Ellie LeBlond.

Of course these worthless rich brats are merely following the example of uncle Dubya, uncle Dick (good show! knocking up the wife exactly two days AFTER the draft was expanded to include childless married men), Cousin Rummy, et al, who used their trust funds to dodge vietnam. How did the so called greatest generation (George Bush senior) produce such cowardly kids and grandkids? Fine, having been in a war, George senior would undoubtably know the truth about conflict. Certainly a good father would never subject his own children to such a thing. So he sent poorer children instead? I can't imagine the type of cynicism that breeds the mind set that believes that the only constuctive thing a poor kid can do for his country is die for the politcians that run it. Who'd ever guess that person coming looking the best in this civil war would have been Sadam?

New York Notes #1: The Cortez Principle

Sure he was a sadistic, opportunistic, money grubbing, glory hungry, genocide inciting murderer, but Cortez still had a winning attitude to succcess. I know what you are thinking. Do you mean the attitude where in order to get wealth one must slaughter all who stand in one's way even if they are millions of Indians standing on top of gold or millions of Africans setting up huts beside diamonds? No, not that one. I much prefer the lesson where Cortez guarantees success by eliminating failure as an option. Because failure is neither a situation nor an outcome but a choice. Or rather an attitude. Failure is its own forgone conclusion. Circumstances are what they are and sometimes they obey no one, but too often we have failed ten times before we even started.

As soon as Cortez landed in the Americas he burnt all his ships. Whatever would happen to the conqistadores, returning to Spain was no longer on the table. My best friend, Che and his wife eliminated divorce as an option in their marriage. As a result they have survived things that have destroyed couples around them. As soon as they realised that option E, the escape clause, the eject button, the net below was gone, not only did they have to go back into the murk they just left, but they also had to find what worked, discard what didn't and beat a problem into a new shape, because there could be no failure. There is always a way, but you'll never know if one of your ways is the way out. Okay if I keep this up I will look in the mirror and see Deepak Chopra.

Here is my point. After writing the big, well read blog 'On Mediocrity', I found myself, or rather three friends found me to be one of the very mediocre people I was writing about. So 2006, the year I should have spent getting deeper into the art and business of being a writer, I spent selling beer. Placed in a situation where I could either take stock or take risks, I ended up hedging my own bets, willfully sticking myself in a job that I did not despise, but did not love either. It was a life that was behind me but I held on to it because it was safer. My justification was that look, I had debts to pay. I wasn't being a coward, I was honoring my obligations. I said that so often that I convinced myself that I meant it. So I've been living with a net. Figures that people who love nets hate risk, I just had not figured on one of these people being me. But playing it safe still means that you lose. In my case I watched my writing career grind to a slow crawl even as I was making money as an advertiser in a small country, in a career of no real consequence.

Playing it safe is just a three worded term for a more brutal, two worded one: Tunnel Vision. My friend Bill asked me how much I charged for my last advertising campaign, because that was what I was telling the world that I am worth. Whatever I earned that year, that was what I was telling people that I could be had for. After dividing that Jamaican sum into American dollars it turns out that I was worth 66 times less than I thought. This wouldn't have hit so hard were it a new lesson, but I had been there before. I knew this rut. It me six years to get out of it the last time.

I'm not into making resolutions but I will say this. I'm 36. Way too old to be cool and way too young to be dead. And way too far gone to be playing it safe now. A turning point is a point of choice where you can either take stock or take risks. And sometimes decisions that initially look like risks turn out to be things that we simply have to do. Because even inaction has a reaction and I don't want to be one of those "If only" people. So I have become one of those millions in New York striving for a dream that I can't define, on a mission that makes no real sense. It's not that I'm giving up Jamaica or that I'm going to live in the States, but as I left the airport I could smell my ships burning.

Just Found This One As Well: His Royal Badness

Thank God for You Tube. Now I can delude myself that I'm living in the past for as long as I like! Except for Patti Smith circa 1975-6 nobody has ever been as fearless and outrageously original as Prince was in 1980, not even Prince.

Question of The Week

"What has our society come to when Prince is the guy you can trust not to sexually offend 120 million middle Americans?" —James Poniewozik, Time Magazine.

Amen, brother James, Amen.

Have you seen this guy? Does anybody know where he went. There were unconfirmed reports that he briefly surface in some thing called Black sweat then quickly went back to making pop for soccer moms whose children are gone for the weekend and they want to get freekay!

Could somebody find him please and shoot the twerp that has been taking his place?

How to Make a Jamaican Music Video

First there must be children. But take heed: all children are not the same. There are some who touch strange things like books and remain indoors. These children may be white, red, yellow, mulatto or black in a white kind of way. Please refrain from employing that sort of animal. Many other children are available, far more pleasing to the video camera. Dark like Marassa and Midnight, with big bellies, still growing teeth, blue school uniforms (with blue tie-the-pig ribbons!). If possible, please make sure they are barefooted and this is crucial people, they must always be smiling. This is essential for the behind the scenes special where the star can grab his chest and remark how with all these hardships surrounding them these children are always smiling, always happy. That way you can be like Anderson Cooper in Africa! Please rehearse this line, for if references to inexplicably happy Negro children are not made, said video will seem exploitative. Your audience will never believe that you have been transformed as a person until you break down at the sight of smiling blackies.

Your local crew must come from a smattering of variably coloured well-spoken semi-Negroes who are quick to point out their Italian, French, Scottish, or Cherokee blood. Not Irish for everybody knows Irish people are just Negroes turned inside out. They should have traveled widely, listen to groundbreaking acts like James Taylor and Creed and should be able to reassure you that they know every hoodlum in the ghetto and go there all the time. Please bear in mind that these men and women only go to the ghetto with a film crew and 1000 US dollars in hand, but don’t let that trouble you. Ghetto people are just people, except that they are from the ghetto.

Now comes your cast. School girls in dark blue uniforms are a must but so too are children who do not seem to go to school, especially if you are shooting on what is clearly a school day. Their purpose is the run behind your vehicle screaming and laughing. Nobody scowls in the ghetto. The sidewalk must be taken up with five to ten men, preferable old and playing dominoes. You must get the action right. Make sure you zoom in to a medium shot just as the winning Negro rises and slams the winning domino on the table, breaking the table in two. Next pan upwards to the cute ghetto girls looking out their window, pan back down to catch more ghetto kids running and smiling then scoot the dolly over to catch the Granny, whose toothy grin belies a lack of actual teeth. Make sure she smiles for two teeth are better than too many. Her hair should be in two pigtails like a Native American and she must be selling something, preferably fruits, vegetables and cigarettes. Under no circumstances should an adult man be shot beside a child. That would imply that he is the father and everybody knows that ghetto kids ain’t got no daddy.

Come to think of it, forget, the ghetto; you must shoot in the uberghetto. Remember that poor Jamaica is the real Jamaica. Forget high-rise buildings, Taino tribal grounds, the second oldest railroad track in the world, and the most fascinating network of underground caves in the Caribbean. You need bad roads, shit running down the side walks, zinc fences, tenements and gunmen, because this is the real Jamaica. Please have the locals stack 12 speakers together, 3 in a row and have the natives come out to wind their waists and slam dominoes on the table or your viewers will think that it’s Haiti. You must shoot in district of Waterhouse. This will be in your contract for Waterhouse is the music video ghetto of choice, probably because the quick to be violent blackies aren’t so violent there. But be sure to buy the men in mesh merinos a hot Guinness or you might not make it out of there alive. Remind yourself that if Alicia Keys can shoot there, you can too.

Should you meet a gunman make sure to genuflect in the usual fashion. But feel free to pass off an offensive comment so that the Jamaican crew can never shoot in that place again. The nature of that comment is up to you but forgo the racial for Jamaican Negroes are not black. Make sure you have extra film left for the midnight dance so you can remark how bestial and sexual the natives can be while dancing. Listen as the Jamaican producer remarks that this is in keeping with our African culture, even though he or she will not do such things until after the wrap when they take you to Quad Nightclub where uptown people grind each other. Try a dance yourself but restrict it to hands, you don’t need to remind us that white people cannot dance for us to remember that we’re still safe. Because once you take our dances we’ll have nothing left! Don’t forget the smiling children.

Make sure there is at least one Rasta, Rastafarian to you. Please try your hardest to find one that is old and almost toothless as the young ones might make a play for your women folk. The Rastaman capacity for seduction is legendary, just ask a certain vogue editor about her Bob Marley lost weekend. One must have at least one Rasta to show the world that yes; Bob Marley’s spirit approves this video. Try to get somebody to wear a Bob Marley T-Shirt while at it. While you cast for Rastas makes sure that wardrobe drapes the video in red, green and gold as these are the only colours that Jamaicans wear. Except the dark blue uniforms of the school children. Extra points if the Rasta is a coconut vendor for you can include a shot of him decapitating said nut and drinking the juice to reassure your women that a big black man with a machete is not a creature of violence but quaint beauty.

All women must be fat. Your video babe will be imported so there is no need to search for Jamaican women that American men find attractive. Your women must have big, big, big breasts. Mount Everbreasts. She must sport two wheelbarrows to carry each tit. And with big breasts must come wide hips and monstrous thighs that could squash a penis into a flounder. She must always have a basket of fruits on her head, even though this is the ghetto. She must blush when called for, wind her waist on cue and disappear as soon as a white woman enters the shot.

When you have wrapped up the ghetto scenes, then it’s time for the other real Jamaica. The deep blue seas, the wide expansive sunrises and the Rastas on the beach. Under no circumstances should you shoot a building that is more than two stories high or was built in the 20th century. In fact, make sure your structure or edifice is not taller than 12 speakers placed together in rows of three. This is to remind American viewers that Jamaicans party all the time and have no need for houses or workplaces. Never ever let on that any Jamaican works for a living in any other profession but selling fruit and cigarettes on the street corner. Have you gotten the sun rising over the mountains shot? The sun rising over the sea? The sun rising over the ghetto? Good. Now shoot your sunsets. When that’s done go to a market and shoot some more market women selling fruit. And running children.

Make sure all of this is done before you shoot your star or he or she may have to wait among poor people. This your star may find extremely unpleasant because then he or she will have to take pictures with babies who have never heard of her. And while no criminal lives in the ghetto you might still want to spring for extra security because it’s not their fault that they may want to take stuff that is not theirs. Private property? Bah!

Please also remember not to pay the extras. You will only create monsters that will then expect to be paid for actually working on your production. Believe the Jamaican producer when he tells you that the locals will be so happy to be in your video that they won’t even take your money, after all, what use is money to poor people? Make sure you thank the Jamaica Tourist Board for allowing you to film Jamaica in the way they like Jamaica to be filmed. Granted, nobody at the tourist board had ever seen or will ever see the ghetto (except in music videos), but they trust that you had found lots of smiling black children and a red green and gold color scheme to play with. And even if you did not, throw in two or three sunsets and they will call it even. And when you finally wrap up your shoot and fly back to where you came from, please come back again soon. Without you, there’s no work for the country to do.

PS: If you think I'm joking, google "Jamaican children," click images and see what comes up.

My Blues Aren’t Blue Enough

Poor Darby Crash. If the late Germs singer thought that his life was so insignificant that death was the only way to improve it, he might have changed his mind had he seen how less significant his death turned out to be. Darby Crash had the extreme misfortune of taking his life the day before Mark Chapman took John Lennon’s. And as poetically catastrophic and sickly epic suicide can be (see: Kurt Cobain) it’s nowhere near the ticket to instant martyrdom that murder is. Or a noble fight with a terminal disease. Crash didn’t even OD in the rock & roll way. Drug overdoses are supposed to be accidental, not deliberate. Gun deaths are far more glorious. For instance, you get Dave Grohl to immortalize you in perhaps the best lyric of his career: “One shot...nothing.” Crash was doubly cursed when months before, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, took his life by a far more poetic hanging, inadvertently spawning the best dance band of all time and creating about five or six genres at last count. Crash was just a loser punk who offed himself before he could record a decent version of Sex Bomb.

I mentioned Darby because it’s a hell of a thing when your own misfortune pales beside others. Not that I’m proud of misfortune or think it’s something to boast about, but in this new culture that celebrates victimhood and uses it to justify any behaviour, you can be declared irrelevant if your blues just aren’t blue enough. This must be why I sympathise with the straight white American male so much. Ever since political correctness declared him the villain of the story he has had no choice to but rush to the sidelines because all the people he kept down must now have their moment. Sure you’re an A student, but are you an A student from the ghetto? Sure you’re the top in your class but did you have to sell meth today just to buy a decent shirt to come to school? Your mom may be dean of studies but is she a crack-ho? Yeah you’re cool, but are you a poor black lesbian feminist who has been given a hard time by people just like you? Of course not. White boy, your blues just aren’t blue enough. I feel your pain. You’d be surprised how many black people do.

I could have traded on third world guilt if I wanted to, but that becomes less and less convincing when I type stories on a Mac Book pro or dine at Asia de Cuba. But that’s not even the point. Earlier this year I applied for a fellowship to a writer’s conference that shall remain nameless. I wasn’t expecting to win, because well, I’m a pessimist but thought I stood a chance, coming from a third world country still shaking off colonialism, political tribalism, globalism and every other ism I could think of. Of course I didn’t win but when I read the biography of who did I had this weird mix of guilt and envy. “My leaders are corrupt,” is just not as engrossing as “when the warlord torched our village, we could not find food to eat,” not even to me. I found myself asking how can I compete with that? I found myself asking myself why am I asking myself these questions? This was beyond politically incorrect. I was envying somebody his or her catastrophic misfortune because it made her resume look so much better.

Of course I had no right to such thoughts, but I know enough to realize that these setbacks also work in persuading who they need to persuade. Of course she could have won because she was simply better than me. After all, I’m not so stuck up my own butt to think I’m the be-all and end-all of fiction, but I kept finding myself asking questions that only my white male friends could understand. Is my suffering, suffering enough? I think my childhood was as crappy as the next misunderstood geek, but how can it compare to “last year they took our children, now our boys have come back to kill us”? My parents may have died from cancer but how does that compare to when they are massacred in their sleep? In a world that celebrates the victim, scars become stars. It’s even worse when the victim has genuine intellectual merit because you simply know that it then boils down to who suffered the most. And if you’re a white male it means that people think you’ve had things too easy. If you’re from the Caribbean middle class it means that you were one of the luckier blacks even if you don’t feel lucky at all.

This doesn’t mean that I think affirmative action or refugee programs are not necessary. It’s a myth to think the we will always do the right thing and measures such as these step in when we inevitably fail to be the nobler creatures we claim to be. But sometimes it does seem as if the playing field isn’t so much level as re-skewed, and if yours is the sinking side then you have no right to say as such. It means that I might never win an award if I go up against a Haitian or African and I should be damn ashamed for writing such a sentence. But I know better. At the end of the day we love storytellers and some people’s stories are simply better...especially if they are worse.

The Only Good Dictator is a Dead Dictator

God must have a really messed up sense of humour to continue allowing the worst killers to die of old Age. Mobutu, Papa Doc, Milosevic and now Latin America's favourite CIA creation, and good friend of Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet. Whatever happened to the Good old days when Mussolini got his just desserts? It takes some skill to wash the blood of some 3000 people off one's hands, so perhaps he was already at peace before he finally croaked. So rest in peace Augusto, you corrupt, murdering, klepto son of a sniveling mongrel bitch. If I ever find your stinking ass in heaven when I get there, God's going to have to answer to me.

Get Thee To A Creative Writing Class!

The first time I came to New York with aspirations (ok pretensions) of being a writer I immediately went to Brooklyn. I had read (ok bought) tons of books and without fail the blurb at the back would say that _____________ resides in Brooklyn. Paula Fox...Brooklyn. Colson Whitehead...Brooklyn. Colin Channer...Brooklyn. Chris Claremont (OMG!!!) ...Brooklyn. That was enough to make a postcolonial writer go batshit. I flew into a delusion close to psychosis. I jumped off the G train and thought, this is my Paris 1927! I would swoop down on Clinton Hill and run into Jonathans Lethem, Franzen and Safran Foer, arguing about whether prose is really just the freest of free verse. I would stop for coffee and Paula Fox would run up and warn me to stop distracting readers with smut. Jhumpa Lahiri would explain that the reason her agent didn’t like my book was him not me. I would spend lunches drinking coffee and smoking Craven A’s, nights poisoning myself with absinthe and the rest of the time banging out the great Caribbean novel while my life fell apart. Spectacularly of course. Instead I couldn’t even get myself mugged, and realized that the last person to ask for directions in Brooklyn was a Brookliner.

Because New York is 8 million nations of one and in Brooklyn the nations are islands. Maybe there is a community of writers there, but as I’m not yet the type of writer that the New Yorker needs to talk about, I probably won’t see it. But there was a reason I was searching. Simply put, a writer needs community. There has to be something to offset the essential loneliness of being a writer. Something had to balance out the truth that we are at our most productive alone.

Maybe this is why so many writers spend a great amount of time knocking Creative Writing programs. “Can writing by taught?” goes the question, as if anybody in a creative writing program has ever been so stupid as to mistake it for composition class. For a genre so confident in its intellectual certitude, literature can be downright bonehead in its theories of how one becomes better at it. Julia Cameron, in the Right to sums it up as this: I have pen, I have paper, I write so I’m a writer. Like Ginsburg rhapsodizing about Bebop, the point was that if you were inspired enough anybody could do it.

Funnily enough nobody spins on their toes twice and gets called a ballerina. Now that I can strum a guitar a little bit, it’s been 6 months and yet Bob Dylan hasn’t gotten the memo that I’m his next band member. And Scorsese, what’s up with you not casting me in the Departed? Don’t you know that I was the star of my high school nativity play? You’d think of all the people who would know that inspired amateurishness is a myth it would be writers, but they are the ones shoveling this stuff. Make no mistake several writing programs are awful. There are also far too many of them and sooner or later they will have to ask why writing programs attendance is up while actual reading is down. But back to the point. I’ve heard and read too many writers, many of them graduates speak nothing but ill of programs, patting themselves on the back with the knowledge that writing can’t be taught and none of the real greats went to writing class anyway.

This is of course mythmaking of the highest order or rather, bullshit. I joined a creative writing program (Wilkes! Big up you'self!) after I published my first novel. And yet I was not the person in the class bitching about how unnecessary the classes were. This man thought everybody had a right to his opinion; boasting that his good buddies Mailer, Wolfe, Hemmingway, Baldwin and Jones never went to Creative writing class. Alas, pity the poor fool who takes a class with Kaylie Jones, who called Baldwin uncle Jimmy and James Jones, Papa. The fact is the boys did go to creative writing class. The class of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor from a bygone, awfully missed era. When Jones first submitted From Here to Eternity, Perkins told him to keep 100 pages, ditch the other four hundred and write the book over. He also gave Jones 100 bucks so that he wouldn’t starve to death doing so. Mailer, Thomas Wolfe both entered the Perkins classroom and all literature is the better for it. Hemmingway went to the class Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson. Edith Wharton was pretty much schooled by Henry James. Even Flannery O’Connor went to an actual writing program, Iowa. Even Brooklyn was a school for writers once.

But that Brooklyn doesn’t exist anymore. Nor that Paris or London or Berlin though there was a Prague for a while. A writer searching for community is not going to find it at some smoky café in Park Slope or Rue St. Honoré. And maybe editors like Perkins still exist but I have my doubts after a junior editor at one of the three most powerful publishers in the world told me that his boss is not a “book person.” If you want the atmosphere of creativity and critique that can make a difference in a manuscript the only place you’re going to find that is a Creative Writing program. It took me 4 years to write my first book, largely because I did not know what I was doing. I could have used a trained ear, somebody who knew when storylines weren’t tied up, when words like ‘it’ were being overused, when characters were flat when they should be round and when using ignominy in a sentence impresses no one. I’m sure Zadie Smith can get Ian McEwan to read her next manuscript but the rest of us have to go to school. Sometimes if you’re lucky you get to build your own community. More than that, you come to realise that it does take more than one person to write a good book. If you have Jonathan Franzen on speed dial to do this for you then congratulations, but the rest of us have to go to school.

Creative Writing programs aren’t perfect. I’m still not sold on the idea of beginners giving pointers to beginners since nine out of ten don’t read nor have a clue about reading like a writer. There is also the tendency to confuse critique with simply telling what you would have done had YOU written the story. Workshop fiction can be devoid of real feeling (sentiment is the enemy!) and bad workshop fiction obeys rules so close that the end result is more of a thesis than a story. That said chances are that editor will not be able to tell you that your tone slipped on page 150, busy as he is, signing the next plagiarizer of chick lit. And neither Joyce Carol Oates nor Andrew Wiley can read your nine pager so you’ll have to take a number for a very long wait. But maybe Peter Carey or Colum McCann over at Hunter can help you turn your care bears story into Watership Down. Or maybe Francine Prose would pick up where others haven’t that your masterpiece in one less character away. And maybe you will realize that the best writers are students and Creative Writing programs serve to teach us that the essence of good writing is learning itself.

Spacebreak Sex

For something that we do all the time, obsess about when we’re not doing it, think about, worry over, take pills to enhance, and even define one’s identity by, sex seems curiously absent from literary fiction. Oh sure we have bad sex, unrewarding sex, adulterous sex, paid for sex, deviant sex, even interspecies sex (Ok, guilty) but no real sex. We’re particularly good at exploring the implications of post-sex but never in medias res, in the thick of it so to speak. The human body goes through all sorts of wonderful and scary stuff during sex yet nobody writes about it. What gives?

Instead what we have what Barbara Kingsolver called spacebreak sex. You know what I’m talking about. It goes like this:

He touched her hair, she looked in his eyes, they both headed for the bedroom.

[SPACE BREAK]

The next morning the woke up in each other’s arms...

So what the hell happened? Were they lost in pleasure? Did one of them in the act of sex realize that they were making a horrible mistake? Did somebody fake it and why? Did they think sex was a blanket panacea for everything else and realize that it wasn’t (or it was)? What happened? Who was dominant and why? If a writer loses nothing by describing how a bullet enters a person why does he lose point for describing the entry of genitalia?

I think literary fiction writers are scared of sex. It was so weird in creative writing class when I would submit something explicit and I would be counseled by well meaning adults how to write with more subtlety so that I could get the feeling across, you know, so that I wouldn’t HAVE TO go into the act. Why not? And why use the phrase HAVE TO? Maybe we fear that we would suck at it. Maybe that demon of sentimentality that hovers over all writers would run amok and ruin our stories with lines unfit for even Cinemax After Dark. Maybe we would just end up writing porn. That’s not an unreasonable fear, The Bad Sex in Fiction Award is usually given to otherwise fine novels that stumbled spectacularly in this area. How about this one from literary luminary and 2005 bad sex nominee John Updike:

“..his prick stared back at him with its one eye clouded by a single drop of pure seminal yearning. He felt suspended at the top of an arc. Faye leaned back on the blanket, arranging her legs in an M of receptivity, and he knelt between them like the most abject and craven supplicant who ever exposed his bare ass to the eagle eyes of a bunch of crows.

Faye took him in hand. He slipped in. He became an adulterer. He went for the last inch. She grunted, at her own revelation. His was that her cunt did not feel like Phyllis's. Smoother, somehow simpler, its wetness less thick, less of a sauce, more of a glaze. It was soon over. He could not help himself, he was so excited, proud, and nervous. When he was done, he opened his eyes, and saw this stranger's face an inch from his, seemingly asleep, the closed eyelids showing a thin pulse, her long lips curved self-lullingly.”

Notwithstanding that no good sex scene could start with the word prick (Is this a white male writer thing?) it’s no surprise then that most times we resort to the good old space break.

Maybe great writers, unlike great poets are simply not having good sex. Or maybe it’s only the straight ones. When it comes to good explicit action the gays guys seem to have it locked even if the straight audiences may not want to read it. Alan Hollinghurst can get into literary raptures when writing about man-man action. His Booker Prize winning novel, The Line of Beauty is filled with them, but they work for the novel precisely because the main character was trying for this rapture, with a certain erotic desperation to lock into a 70’s style hedonism in the AIDS encroaching 80’s and failing miserably, especially when class, no respecter of persons or sexualities got in the way. Next to the gay guys are the dirty old men of the Latin boom, such as the late Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who’s Infante’s Inferno would probably never have been attempted by an American or a Brit. Whenever I mention that only the gay guys and Latin Americans got it, Henry Miller is frequently trotted out. But Henry Miller died way back in 1980 and his last books were the words of somebody trading in his own detritus and not even aware that he had become just another Henry Miller imitator.

Maybe we are just aware that other art forms, pardon the pun, do it better. A particular accomplishment is the new movie Short Bus, which opens with a man satisfying himself in a way that few men can and then goes on to a sex therapist who’s never had an orgasm and a couple playing way out of their league by bringing a third person to the party. That this film is buoyed by explicit sex scenes (we have a go for penetration, folks!) underscores rather than undercuts it. I was incredibly pissed off and envious that I hadn’t written a novel like this first. In music Prince nailed the knife-edge between pleasure and perversion way back 1980 with Dirty Mind and Patti Smith rode through with Horses even further back in 1975. Even photography boasts of Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Nan Goldin and Andres Serrano.

I think we literary fiction writers need to take our pencils, or laptops back into the bedroom. Something pretty fascinating is happening in there. Everybody seems to know this but us.

Where I'm Coming From

I’ll never forget my first day of Primary School and second day of High School. Primary is probably what Americans call Elementary but I’m not sure. Primary school was the first time I realized I was different from everybody else. High school was the first time I was reminded of that difference. Neither was a happy experience, in fact both fucked me up royally in wildly different ways. The first time I was ridiculed for being different was in spelling class when I said “Yes Miss”(we call all female teachers Miss, even the married ones) and the whole class shouted Yesssshhhh Misssssh. I don’t know, maybe I spent my earliest years in some parent made cocoon but I hadn’t the slightest idea that I spoke funny. But they turned funny into a double whammy—the best of puns, where how I spoke was both funny-ha-ha and funny-strange. It was something to ridicule in the innocently merciless way that children always ridicule. Like Jason Taylor in David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green I also studied words, dictionaries and my own way of speaking, anything to avoid a word with S in it. I guess that increased my vocabulary a thousand fold but it also made me sound like an idiot, an eight year old stumbling over words so as not to roll the dreaded S off my tongue. I even tried pronouncing it as a Z.

They called me Sissy and other names as well that my subconscious has mercifully kept to himself, but here is the great thing about kids. I was a sissy, but I was their sissy. Once something happened, I can’t remember what, but my school uniform was ruined (might have been a fight, man did I love to fight) and the entire class marched to my home to explain to my mom that it wasn’t my fault. In some way, being the resident strange kid made me a weird kind of popular. I had no reason to believe that this would not continue. But then came High School. And all boys’ High School. Wolmers Boys School.

If Primary school made me different, High School made me so sorry I was ever born that I spent five years thinking of ways to fix that mistake. September 1981. It seemed that I couldn’t open my mouth for two seconds without somebody calling a girl’s name or an animal’s name or just simply battyman or faggot. All because my S sounded like SH (I did not get over this complex until I heard Sean Connery speak the same way). My second day of school I was going home with my brother, the coolest kid in Second Form (Grade 8) and his just as cool friends. They were only 11 and 12 but I thought I was in the company of men, the coolest men I’ve ever seen, and they were even talking about girls and sex already! Christopher M________ saw me leaving and shouted “Angela!” Like an idiot I said, “I wonder who he’s talking to?” to which my brother said “It’s you he’s talking to,” in a tone I heard from my father once talking to my mother because I said I liked disco (that was back in 1977, people) and she seemed to think I was headed for ballet class.

In less than three days I was rejected by my own class and had embarrassed my brother. But I was a good student and needed to learn my lesson only once. I stopped acknowledging my brother as such and never did it again for the rest of our school lives. To this day most of the boys who know us or of us have no idea that we are related. I volunteered to step out of his cool life. I decided, perhaps without knowing that the only way to stop fucking up my brother’s reputation was to disappear, so that’s what I did. I left for school at a different time. I went to a different bus stop. I took a bus that went in a different direction. We had no interests in common, no sports, no school clubs, no arts, no friends. We maintained our distance so well that even when my brother had to repeat a year and we ended up in the same class, people still had no idea that we were related. Some of his own friends made it their duty to humiliate me on a daily basis. I just figured that since leaving high school was not an option that maybe enduring this shit was just something I was supposed to do.

I love my high school and I still support it, but with the exception of two remarkable years in 1982 and 83, it was the most colossally dismal experience of my life. I think the only reason I’m still here was my cowardice about suicide. Back when the first wave of misinformation came out about Columbine, I remember hearing that these two boys were picked on mercilessly in high school because they were not cool or liked (This is totally untrue by the way, they were not nerds or geeks), there was a part of me that felt the way Eminem felt in the verse he cut from the Marshall Mathers LP. I too have been that angry and that hurt. There were days when I don’t know what would have happened if I had a gun. And my mom was a cop. I know there are people who think, “So you had it rough in high school and nobody liked you, nyah-nyah-nya-nyah-nyah,” (I think that’s what my friend, Bill said). I know there are people who think that people like me should just grow up and put the past in the past. But if you have never been through what we’ve been through, rejected at the exact age when you crave acceptance then you really don’t know what being a boy or a girl interrupted feels like. Ten years later you will channel that void into restless ambition and you will do well, just as I did. And it will mean nothing because you’re using success as revenge. I sometimes wonder if I were to walk up to Bill Gates and whisper, “those kids in school STILL hate you,” what would happen. All I know is that to be rejected by your peers at that point when affirmation means everything leaves a void in you that is replaced by something, maybe a chip on one’s shoulder, maybe the emotional life of a 12 year old, maybe a lifelong obsession with Science Fiction, comics and porn. Who knows.

Kurt H__________, one of my brother’s friends started coming to this church I joined a few years ago. He was clearly going through some very heavy shit and as a church brother, moreover a church brother who knew him maybe it was my duty to encourage the man. But here is something funny about nerdhood. To be tormented by people is not half as bad as to be forgotten by them. Because there really is a link between abuser and abused, a relationship in its own weird way that leaves you thinking that considering all the shit this son of a bitch put me through he could have at least the common decency to remember my name. Because I will never forget his. It weird being a nerd because you find so few reasons to feel special that you’ll settle for being special in torment and when you find out that you were a mere run-on sentence in your tormentor’s life it feels worse than the abuse. Anyway, this guy was clearly going through some heavy stuff or he wouldn’t have been in church. I’m not going to speculate what the heavy stuff was, but maybe he needed somebody to talk to. That was not my thought but the friend beside me, who also went to the same school. He kept prodding me to talk to him, to remind him who I was as if that were an icebreaker. All I could think of was him humiliating me again and it would hurt like I was fourteen. You have to understand Kurt H_________. Loads of boys humiliated me during high school but Kurt H________ went one step further, by befriending me enough to help him cheat on his art exam then publicly humiliating me right afterwards. I looked at this guy in church and felt such a monstrous hatred for him that I was pissed off at Jesus for letting him in here. I thought that if this was the kind of asshole who was going to make it to heaven then I wanted nothing to do with that goddamned place.

Maybe it was the thought of never hearing Purple Rain again or reading another issue of X-men that kept me from killing myself. Maybe it was that we had a rather loud car and somebody would have heard the engine before the carbon monoxide got to me. Or maybe I was just too chickenshit to do anything. The truth is something else. Something Todd Solondz nailed in that movie, Welcome to the Dollhouse. Like the brutalized heroine in that movie I think what kept me alive was the stubborn determination that some way, somehow, somewhere, sometime things just had to get better than this. It just had to.

In 1986 I decided that I had to do something. By the end of 1985 I was so unpopular that I even earned a sort of respect because nobody could understand how I could stomach so much relentless abuse, to even laugh along with it. It seemed that I was one of the top four targets of ridicule in my year; something had reached critical mass. There was just no way I could continue like this, hated because I like art and lit and history, didn’t like football (soccer) and walked and talked funny. I realized that more than everything, it must have been my screwed up way of speaking that made people hate me.

So in the summer of 1987 I stopped speaking.

Losing My Religion

It’s far easier to be a dogmatic Christian than you may think. You don’t need the ability to read, or a secondary education, or a sense of reason or even reality. You need believe only two things, Creationism and Armageddon. Once you have alpha and omega nailed then everything in the middle is just gravy. Doesn’t even matter if your dogma is slightly different than mine. It’s a disturbing Irony that Jesus never wrote down a single sermon, perhaps because he knew exactly what was going to happen, that by writing something down his words would have become exactly what it is today: Dogma, especially for those who prefer to be read to.

Because reading, as the always-brilliant Jeanette Winterson said recently, is an act of free will, and it is a private act. This is why when the oppressors come, whether they are culture warriors or Armageddon-horny church sisters, they destroy the books first. An educated mind is a liberated one and a liberated mind is a dangerous thing, especially when it becomes sensitive to injustice. This is why Religion is still the opiate of the masses and for it to remain so; the masses cannot be too intelligent. Who’d ever guess that an ignorant, uneducated populace would serve both a religious and political agenda in one shot? An uneducated believer can be told that hardship is his lot and accepts such as God’s will without even once realizing that his slave ancestor was told the same thing. Or he is told the opposite, that MONEY SHALL COMETH TO HIM NOW, and he will believe that instant, unearned money is God’s will as opposed to the whole “by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread" business. A friend of mine bought this hook line and sinker several years ago and thought it was the Lord speaking to him when an old, childless woman willed him the contents of her safety deposit box in England. He had only to pay the overdue bank charges and the contents of several boxes would be his. He flew to England, paid the charges to her attorney at his six storey, busy office and was handed the keys. He soon found out that while the bank certainly existed the account did not. By the time he got back to the attorney’s office, less than two hours later the people, the furniture and the phones on all six floors were gone.

I’m not convinced the faith is supposed to trump reason. Ever. I’m not sure God thought so either. For every “Faith can move mountains” one can also find in the bible a “test me in this.” There is something essentially backward and pagan about blind faith, something unintelligent in such thinking that runs contrary to a God who seemed intent on establishing a kingdom of reason and justice on Earth. Yeah you read me right, don’t let all this faith mumbo-jumbo fool you. God also said faith without works is dead.

Because if religion without question becomes dogma, then faith without reason become mysticism, a holy witchcraft. We’ve seen this before. Not just in Jim Jones’s Guyana or Waco or the Moonies or Mormon polygamists. We see it also in Jamaican churches that insist on their pastors being a final authority. That nutcase preacher who condemned her congregation for exposing the filmed gang rape of a young girl wasn’t pissed that the rape occurred, but that by taking the case to the authorities, the congregation members challenged her God given authority. I wrote a novel about this, set in the past because I refused to believe that I was telling a contemporary story. Boy was I wrong.

I still consider myself a believer, but I’m not sure if I’m a Christian anymore. One reason for this is that to this day I have never been able to take my mind to church. It always seemed unwelcome in a place that lionized the once illiterate Smith Wigglesworth while ignoring that the man did eventually learn to read and write. The church has the archetype of the holy idiot who takes things on faith, sings choruses for two thirds of the service and pays attention to the sermon only if it condemns everybody else for being sinful and praises him for being saved, sanctified and spirit filled while promising him that while bullshit happens in the night, joy cometh in the morning.

I cannot think of a more satanic existence. As long as religion never engages the mind it never engages reason. The by-products of reason, ethics for instance then become fluid to the point of meaningless. A case in point, some of the kids I counseled could speak in tongues at the drop of a hat. They could also sleep around with no remorse whatsoever. They would drag praise and worship for hours so that the “spirit” is given free reign but tune out once a pastor starts to challenge them. They would condemn everything and every one outside their window but never look at the monster in the mirror. Because open-mindedness, fairness even is an act of reason as well.

A lack of this creates moral hypocrisy. More porn in consumed in Utah than in New York. Adult friend finder.com has 21,000 Jamaican members, even though, as we will sooner or later tell you, we have more churches per square mile than anywhere else in the world. You can always tell when a Christian convention is staying at a hotel, for the adult cable viewership quadruples. A woman I know who sold adult toys and videos when asked said she hadn’t sold a sex video to Jamaicans in years, instead they preferred scat, amputees, S&M and all manner of kink.

Christianity began as a renewing of the mind. That is what made it so liberating and so dangerous. Maybe it is the curse of all movements that they become the very thing that they were supposed to be a reaction against. The crux of the New Testament are letters from Paul that impressed people through reasoning, not dogma, condemnation or cheap spirituality. The first manifestation of Jesus’ uniqueness was him dazzling the Sanhedrin with his intelligence and wit at such a young age. This Jesus and the adult he became flipped the script on dogma with intellect, not by creating new absolutes of his own. And if you don't think the sermon on the mount is a profoundly intellectual discussion then you're reading the wrong bible. I rarely find this intelligence in church and even when I do, I still feel as if I have to set my mind on dim.

What so great about being proud that the Bible is the only big book you’ve ever read? Jesus never even read it. Why do people rejoice when they hear that sister so and so doesn’t have a PhD but a G O D? How come all these evangelical anti-Catholics all praised that orgy of gore and violence called The Passion of the Christ? Why did they use the film to recruit new Christians? I told some church people that I felt like I had seen a snuff film or some really kinky porn with children in the audience. I thought the film was nothing more than the director’s bloodlust passing off as art and it played into the belief that people should still be scared into faith—something that Jesus couldn’t have been more opposed to. I also said that Jesus would have been appalled that anybody would stoop so low as to show his suffering in order to get people to follow him. I think he would have been appalled in the utter refusal to engage the mind as opposed to the heart or in this case, the stomach.

Two of my favourite writers are Jack Miles and Gary Wills. Both are Catholics and both are part of the few who believe that Faith and Reason are by no means mutually exclusive. I read their books like how others take drugs. Both agree that by not trying to explain God, by resorting to “he works in mysterious ways” you reduce his supernatural power to magic and Jesus becomes hocus-pocus. I love the Jesus of the bible. He was actually quite scandalous, fraternizing with whores and tax collectors, cursing trees, praising lowlifes, hanging out with women, staying homeless, remaining single, calling himself the fulfillment of prophecy, educating leaders in the dark, giving over to rash emotions like fury and mirth, sometimes at the drop of a hat. There is simply no way to understand a mind such as his without using your own . That is what I plan to do. I just don’t know if I can do this in the church.

Live TV and Dead Children, Take 2

I LOVE this. So right after I post my blog about what I think about today's children, along comes a kid to set me straight with this:

I agree that children can be like this, but not all. Some children have the right mind not to do any of those things. You may think this is foolish, since this is coming from a kid, but it's true.

I agree that children want to be a singer or an actor so they don't have to learn anything, because I used to. Now that I am growing up, I want to be a writer, but being a singer or an actor is still in mind. I say this because children can imagine to be what they want to be. After all, we are just kids.

The real world will come to kids soon, just don't judge all kids and say that all kids want to be super stars and that they would do anything to be famous because, like I said before, not all kids are like that.

"The Real world will come to kids soon." It sounds like both a promise and a warning. Perhaps it's both. I have only one question. If kids are reading my blog do I now have to behave myself?