Apart from being in Paris, two moments stand out from my recent trip to France. By chance we stumbled on the highway along the Normandy coast where the D-Day invasions took place. Omaha Beach, at Saint-Laurent-Sur-Mer, was one of the prime locations for the Allied landings under Churchill and Eisenhower. If it had been in North America, Disney and McDonalds would have set in, Yuppies would have gentrified and over-built the area. Here, a single monument and a statue suffice to commemorate the scarcely imaginable battle that took place there on June 6, 1944. Apart from sand and sea, there is little else than silence stretching along the shore.
Heading back through the Loire Valley we stopped at Illiers-Combray, famous for having served as the setting for parts of Proust’s monumental À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU. It’s a small, unimposing village, whose church, memorialized in the same book, is much smaller and far less spectacular than Proust’s rendering—not a surprise. Still, the village has an otherworldly charm, especially by twilight, despite its total lack of pretension or even any seeming interest in the tourist trade.
October 15, 2008
October 10, 2008
As always, Paris is a whirlwind of sights and sounds, grandeur and beauty.
While Prague and Budapest can compete with it for majesty, no other city can compare for the richness of its cultural history. Paris was where the 20th century was, that eccentric raconteur of concision Gertrude Stein declared. As usual, she got it right.
Where else can you say Proust and Joyce shared a cab at that corner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway drank in that bar, while over there Charles De Gaulle gave his historic speech on the liberation of Paris from the Nazis?
Where else can you spend an afternoon visiting the graves of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison, and then pop over to visit 19th century near-neighbours Frederic Chopin and the unjustly neglected Luigi Cherubini (whom Beethoven declared the greatest living composer)?
That’s my Paris. And so much more.
October 2, 2008
In between filling out those all-important grant applications (Writers' Reserve, etc.) and getting ready to leave for Paris, I've been working on my latest novel, In The Place of Joy and Laughter, a fairly serious literary work about life, death and dancing. (One of the characters is a choreographer.) It seems I've been spoiled by thriller writing, because suddenly I've been reduced from averaging 2500 words a day to something more like 250, if that. I forgot how slow going writing can be at times, though the trade-off is finding this book is producing some of the best prose I've ever written.
September 22, 2008
As many people who know my writing can attest, I have a strong interest in Buddhist teachings. On the other hand, my dislike of anything dogmatic or doctrinal stops me from declaring myself to be of any one faith. This authorized biography of the 14th Dalai Lama is the latest in a series of books exploring the man behind the legend of Tibet's reincarnating spiritual leader.
DALAI LAMA--MAN, MONK, MYSTIC by Mayank Chhaya (Doubleday 2007)
Although this is an ‘authorized biography,’ it reads more like a political treatise on the state of occupied Tibet. No doubt this was part of the Dalai Lama’s reasoning behind authorizing the book as he heads into his later years after nearly 50 years of exile from his homeland—more fuel for a fire threatened with extinction on his death. The few solid glimpses of Tibet’s spiritual head are welcome here, but they’re no more revealing than much of the other material by and about him. If His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama comes across as god-like, it’s more through his lack of everyday human foibles than anything else. There’s little that’s magic here, as one might hope, but that’s to be expected from a writer whose introduction all but apologizes for having an interest in a religion whose main credo centres around reincarnation. It’s typical of a leftist humanist outlook that looks to the human intellect as the highest creative force in the universe—a vast mistake, as our current world state shows. If more people cared about the Dalai Lama’s teaching and less about China-occupied Tibet, we might solve many more of our problems.
September 16, 2008
Wow. If there’s anything I detest more than grant applications, I can’t think of it. I’ve spent the last week and a half applying for the National Screen Institute’s Features First program, which as its title suggests, is about the making of a first feature film. Mine is called Guilty Pleasures, a black comedy about non-identical twin brothers, Jean and Fausto, who produce Quebec’s favourite cooking show, Guilty Pleasures. When both men fall in love with their new Anglo assistant, a long-buried sibling rivalry comes to life. Like Erik Canuel’s Bon Cop, Bad Cop (which I watched this weekend for the first time), it’s a hybrid French-English script pitting the cultural differences of Canada’s two solitudes at each other’s throats. If I get into the program, it may get made. If I live through the application process.
September 7, 2008
Explain Please…
On Friday I traveled with my friend, painter Omel Masalunga, to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo NY. The Albright has one of the best collections of impressionist and modern art in North America. You’ll find almost every influential name between 1850 and 1950 represented there, with a number of well-known works to accompany them. Deservedly, it’s considered a treasure.
So what was that gathering outside the gallery on its back steps this Friday afternoon? There were a number of musicians, many of them drummers, as well as a bassist and a bagpiper. The music was a funky fusion of new and old world sounds that rose to an almost deafening roar while an upright piano was hoisted by crane over a baby grand. The crowd grew agitated as the upright was suspended for several suspenseful minutes.
Since this is America, I told myself, people will clap and cheer at the destruction. Sure enough, when the upright crashed onto the grand, the crowd roared with something like approval. Had it occurred in Canada, we would have laughed nervously to make sure we were seen getting the joke and then turned away with a sense of guilt at participating in something obscene and possibly even anti-art.
What made it all the more obscene, and personal—at least to me—is that the upright was a Kimbal spinet—my piano. Looking around, I spotted one other person who seemed to be experiencing the same moral conundrum I felt on being there. A three-year-old boy, perched on his father’s shoulders, had his fingers resolutely plugged into his ears for the entire event, removing them only after the destruction was largely over (apart from two demolitions experts further taking apart the pianos with sledgehammer and axe.)
I grew up in the ’60s, and understood—or at least felt I understood—the urge behind such anti-corporate, pro-environment acts as the destruction of cars by groups like The Who. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but attacking that specific aesthetic made sense to me, while this failed to register as a statement of anything worthwhile or even comprehensible. Explain?
August 25, 2008
I was privileged to open the weekend’s WRITING OUTSIDE THE MARGINS festivities along with Brooklyn-based writer/performer Hadassah Hill. She had the south stage and I had the north. I spent the entire half-hour reading from THE P-TOWN MURDERS.
Foot traffic was slow to pick up (despite some fairly renowned names in the early hours of the readings), though things were rolling passably well by early afternoon. Still, it seems a sad statement on Toronto’s sublime artistic indifference. On the other hand, the talent was sparkling and the hosts (Ryan G. Hinds and Kristyn Dunnion) were engaging.
One of the best things about participating in a writers festival is the opportunity to meet new writers and reconnect with others you haven’t seen for a while. One of the newbies was Geneva St James, a BC author with an infectious reading style whose MADE FOR YOU is a fun ride. It was also good to hear Anand Mahadevan read from his wickedly funny THE STRIKE, though ironically a nearby lightning strike cut short his reading. RM Vaughan read from his new memoir-in-verse, TROUBLED, reminding us what it’s like to hear poetry read by a talented reader, and the sensational Nina Arsenault thrilled and trilled with her personal take on beauty and mortality.
The festival also helped answer a question I’ve had hanging over my head for 40-plus years. What do I want to be when I grow up? Now I know: I want to be John Cameron Mitchell. I want to be someone so talented, genuine and insightful that he can drop all facades and just stand in front of a crowd and talk about his personal life, joke about his intimate sexual explorations, discuss his artistic successes and his conservative family upbringing without a hint of ego, or better yet, complaint.
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt myself in the presence of someone so inspired and inspiring. I tried to meet John several times during the festival, unsuccessfully, but just as I was leaving I spotted him sitting on the patio at Zelda’s, introduced myself and gave him a copy of my book. I was a fan of SHORTBUS when I saw it and now I’m a fan of its creator too!
