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 22, 2008
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!
August 11, 2008
A CASUALTY OF WAR, edited by Peter Burton (Arcadia 2008)
A CASUALTY OF WAR is the delightful new collection of gay short fiction by renowned English editor Peter Burton. Despite its title, the book’s themes are multifarious and range from hardcore wartime tales to infectious comedy. It opens with a Kafkaesque piece, WHEN THE TIME COMES, by writer-director Neil Bartlett, and continues with a heart-warming tale, TROUBLED, about nascent love in the punk era, by novelist/critic Sebastian Beaumont. It includes work by three Canadians, including me, Patrick Roscoe and Ian Young. Roscoe’s MARIPOSA, BUTTERFLY reads like a Spanish fairy tale while Young’s THE BUGGERY CLUB is a real nostalgia piece for anyone out and living in London in the ’80s. Thankfully, the collection also contains works by distinguished writers from an earlier era, including ATTI INNOMINABILI by Michael Davidson, a bittersweet look at adolescent sexuality, previously published to a limited readership in the ’60s. Among my favourites (they’re all favourites, really) are Stephen Saylor’s KINDER, GENTLER, with its emotionally-charged ending, Cliff James’s THE VIOLENCE OF THE GARDENER, with its superb noire twists, Richard Zimler’s perceptive take on gay/racial tensions, A DRY PAST, and the truly wonderful comic piece, AWKWARD RELATIONS by Richard Haylock, the English novelist who died recently at 87. This latter, a sort of CAGE AUX FOLLES set in ’80s Morocco, alone is worth the price of the volume.
August 6, 2008
Yesterday I woke with a germ of an idea for a short story. It seemed so slim that I was about to toss it off and ignore the impulse. Something made me sit down and write it. A few hours later I’d completed a 3400-word short story entitled Mouse, about two brothers, one of whom is a drug addict and the other of whom knows the secret that turned his brother into an addict. I don’t recall ever finishing an entire story in one sitting, so that’s a first. It still needs refinishing, but so far it seems to be a solid effort.
July 29, 2008
What I've been reading:
NO BEAUTIFUL SHORE by Beverley Stone (Cormorant Books)
God, I love a woman who can swear! And Beverley Stone is right up there with the best of them. This beautiful, disturbing book is one of the most honest tales of contemporary Newfoundland I’ve come across. Part-TRAILER PARK BOYS and part-THELMA AND LOUISE, it’s an account of teenagers Bride Marsh and Wanda Stuckless’s attempt to leave out-port Newfoundland for life in Toronto, a challenge much bigger than it sounds. Bride is the sexy one who gets hit on by men, while Wanda is the entrepreneurial tomboy who sells dope to make her passage ‘away.’ Both prove hindrances to their goal. A sharp blend of the comic and tragic, Stone’s story is filled with wisdom, insight and some very deft writing.
