Cypress Planting with Barbara Klar

Barbara Klar is intimate with trees. The poet spent nearly a decade planting them, and it’s clear from Cypress, her latest poetry collection from Brick Books, that she communes with the sacred through them. While there are millions of symbols of the natural world, from the salamander to the star, it is the tree on which we are dependent for oxygen, for materials for our shelters, even for the cross- and especially, for the book itself. The absence of the tree also reveals something: our greed as a species, our blatant lack of concern for the future, for the earth and its inhabitants.

Documenting the natural world, carefully recording or imitating its gifts, is an ancient tradition that yielded the earliest arts and the earliest religions. Even Judeo-Christian mythology harks back to Eden, a paradise garden strangely devoid of storms and plagues. Our absolute dependency on nature for food and shelter and safety has put as at her mercy, a theme paralleled in pagan and monotheistic theology, where we are always at its mercy. There is little that could inspire such devotion and awe as an ocean or a glacier or a tree. This time-honoured tradition of using art and poetry to observe the landscape and its meaning is also a very Canadian practice. From the Group of Seven to Emily Carr to Duncan Campbell Scott, Canadian artistry has been dependent since the beginning- making sense of our vast and majestic landscapes.

The author’s vision quest takes place in her home province of Saskatchewan, in Cypress Hills. She notes that there are no cypress trees there- the Métis called pine varieties ‘cypres’. The cypress tree, nonetheless, by its ghostly absence, is a potent symbol, for cemeteries throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East are abundant with this tree, a symbol of death and the afterlife. The ritualistic burial of the dead in cypress coffins and the planting of cypress trees near graves may have simply been a matter of perfumery- the fragrant tree helped improve the scent of the cemetery. But it has taken on the powerful role of watching over the dead and representing new life.

Barbara Klar carves eternal images from her trees, divining from her forests history, life and death’s endless cycle, the blood and the breath these grounds have witnessed. Sometimes, the poet’s wordiness- or worship- is too dense, like underbrush, forcing the hiker to turn back instead of going in. While her images are often captivating, the reader feels left out of the poet’s love affair with the forest- in a sense, uninvited. At times, it’s even worse- tagging along, but bored.

Still, it is a beautiful irony, a sacred ritual in and of itself, that we consume the tree in the very act or reading her history and her epitaph.

Cypress
Barbara Klar
Brick Books, 2008

Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, from Handymaiden Editions. Her poetry has been widely published, in anthologies, and in journals including Quarry, Kairos, Rattle, Grain, The Fiddlehead, Geez, Spillway, White Wall Review, New Toronto Quarterly, and Modern Poetry. Visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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Katia Grubisic’s What if Red Ran Out

How beautiful our children would have been, though poor at pool, Katia Grubisic laments. Just why this catches me so, I cannot say, but her book of What if Red Ran Out is filled with such what ifs and were nevers. Forget about hopes of grandiosity or words tangled up to make themselves unreadable to all but the chosen few academes who must translate them for us: Katia’s world is here on earth, here with strawberry jam and moths and “cardboard eclipse thingies.”

Katia’s work has appeared in all the mandatory Canadian literati publications like Grain and The Fiddlehead and Taddle Creek. But all of this is just a disguise. Sure, she can wrestle the big themes with the best of them, or slip images into your mind that will never leave it. She can use words like ‘concupiscence’ and ‘montivagant’ and ‘convivial,’ and drop names like Seamus and Camus like she means it.

But, Katia assures us, not to worry about all of that. “Don’t worry, this is a poem/entirely without grace,” she writes. Words are important to her, but the real concerns are more along the lines of “what if red ran out?” and about the laundry. Life, however tragic or rare, is also silly. In the world Katia sees, “Eros and Thanatos have gone to the mall.” If red does not run out, she will ‘exist on raspberries” like “others who have successfully lost their minds.”

All this suggests that what’s ahead for Katia’s writing will be witty, realistic vignettes, with sweeping metaphors and astute observations, rendered with cleverness and distinction. For now, there’s still that sense of a poet trying too hard, pushing words together to make a cellist appear under a tree, for example, without any real reason why she should be there. Poetry would do well to avoid more volumes in the archives with phrases like “missing the filigreed metacarpals’ infinite division.” You can feel the earth, though, if you toss away this heavy-handed surrealism. You can feel the pulse of a very funny, very unusual, very vivid woman, and you want to get rid of those unnecessary layers, to see her naked.

What if red ran out
Katia Grubisic
Goose Lane Editions, New Brunswick, 2008.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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Reading the Ruins

It had been awhile since I read a good horror novel, and a girl can’t let too much heavy reading go to her head so I picked up a scary-looking paperback and fluffed up the pillows.

Scott Smith’s The Ruins is hailed by King King as the ‘best horror novel of the new century.’ Even without having read the other several thousand creepfests that hopeful novelists must have penned since that century started, I’ll go out on a limb to say I doubt that’s true. I don’t expect a page turner about flesh eating Mexican vines to be deep or anything, but 500 pages alone in the jungle with a small group of tequila swilling tourists gives ample time to really get to know the characters, and I still don’t. You’ve got to feel something for the cast if you want to remember the story later, and only the day after, I can’t recall all of their names.

Still, that said, not every writer manages the mix of gods and monsters with Stephen King’s formidable depth. Not every writer makes real people out of inkblots. And that’s fine when you’ve got too many people coming and going in your head and can’t keep track of them. What you want then is something totally engrossing and totally gross. The amateur amputation scene, for example, is just what the doctor ordered. The kids, stranded in the middle of Mayan nowhere, try to keep poor Pablo alive by sawing off his infected legs. Dude broke his back falling into the centre of the earth, where the killer vines whisper and laugh and gobble up your vomit, shit, and blood. They made a good drumstick dinner of the dude before his pals rigged up the above plan to save him.

It was also totally atmospheric to feel the isolation of this jaw of hell that the poor students were lured to during their Mexican vacation. They follow a German tourist to an archeological dig, searching for his missing brother. Turns out the haunted hill is a graveyard: a sort of Mayan Hotel California. They find the German’s brother, all right, in the same condition they are all fated for. A skeleton, with vines growing through his eye sockets.

Sure, all of this made for some tremendous tension and a few interesting dreams where National Geographic met Ten Little Indians. But a little bit more local colour would have been fitting. You’re already in the jungle, at a site of the ruins of a Mayan temple. Here’s where you could insert a bunch of interesting research on curses or human sacrifices or ancient cult customs. Throughout the whole book, I kept thinking that the answer was obvious: if the group would sacrifice one to the vines, the rest could go free. That would be a solution that could be creepy, save a few of the characters, and get some interesting folklore in. But I doubt the writer did much more to research his story than look at a map and plunk down a random destination. The killer vines could truly have been in Brazil, Germany, or Yemen.

The verdict? I bet Scott Smith develops into a real thriller- he’s got a soothing and eerie flow to his writing, and I’m certain with experience he’s going to freak the daylights right out of us while actually digging in the dirt for some background. But for now, it’s a shallow grave- take it or leave it.

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I Heard the Wind-Up Bird Call My Name: Following Murakami into Another World

“Usually it starts with an image. I have a particular image in mind and I suspect there’s something deeper in it, so I follow it,” said Haruki Murakami, author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, to Ariel Gore.

Last year, devising my list of must-reads for 2008, I wrote, “I love novels of unusual coincidences and quotidian strangeness, and apparently this one’s full of the extraordinary ordinary. Ariel Gore, author of Atlas of the Human Heart, and my future wife, said it’s her favourite book ever. That’s enough to get it on my list.”

Well, it’s been a long time since I was blown away during the reading of literature. On some rare occasions, you read a novel that just alters the course of your existence. Comparing this legendary Japanese book to anything is futile, but ghosts of Marquez and Allende and Bradbury hover near the pages.

Ariel Gore told me I would love the book, and she was right. Not knowing me from a hole in the wall, she could not have known how hung up I am on magical portals, “The Game,” tricks of fate and tricks of the light.

How to describe this? Words fail me. Alice in Wonderland. In Japanese. With ghosts and plot twists and mind games. Treading the slippery slope between science and fiction. And it was a total culture shock, but everything resonated deep inside as if the book were actually unlocking the clues to the meaning of life. It pointed at signs I’ve been seeing the all along.

So now it will be no big surprise when I start insisting you all read it so we can talk about it. And what was I possibly talking about before I read the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami? I honestly do not know.

I sometimes get depressed when I read a masterpiece like this one. Why bother writing, when someone out there writes like this? And then you pull up your socks and learn while your mind is doing everything it can to absorb and learn and grow.

We’re talking about a 600 page book that manages to pull off minimalism. (New York Magazine described it: “as sculpted and impacable as a bird by Brancusi.”)

We’re talking about a book that holds your attention span the entire time. It doesn’t take any effort. It mesmerizes from the first clues, and for all its hauntings and magical realist touches, it’s incredibly literary. Its depth is astounding and it’s characters are unlike any ever put on paper.

I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

“A labyrinth designed by a master, at once familiar and irresistibly strange,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle.

Newsday was unusually poetic, with bang-on astuteness. “Murakami aims to provoke not just a frisson of unsettlement, but a deeper, more consequential unease.”

The best part? Well, I’ve only just begun. This guy’s got a long library of books out. I’m sure after only one title: reading his work is one of the reasons for living, which means I’m blessed yet with quite a ways to go.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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In Which the Author Discovers Erin Knight’s The Sweet Fuels

I could spend blissful years stirring academic poetic discourse around a classroom, exchanging highlighted notes and chewing on turns of phrase, but I must keep a promise I once made. I vowed to never frighten a person away from poetry, which has few enough readers, and to let more readers discover its joy. And how could I possibly do so besides sharing my own work with ‘the people?’ Well, I refuse to get caught up in the delicious word-twisting discussions of poetry that render it squashed and meaningless to anyone born after 1857, in the end.

You know what I’m talking about. Pick up an expensive art magazine, for example. You’ll hear it in the way the writers talk about a giant painting of bubbles. “The lines of the painting vivisect at terminal vertical intervals suggesting the death and excavation of history’s muse. To grasp the brushstroke with this painterly torture in mind, one must submerge all faculties in the absence of the artist’s intention.” Then they cheerfully tell you the painting, which to you seems to be a joyous and colourful celebration of gardens or something or other spring, is about the holocaust or Central American hostage holding and it costs four point seven million dollars.

And while I wholeheartedly believe we would all do well to do a few literary gymnastics, to read some old poetry and a few classics, to brush up on what’s currently on the prize lists or new in Canadian verse, it’s best that we recover honest expressions of our impressions. Remember when Kramer embarrasses the whole group by telling the girl with the Cyrano nose that she’s as pretty as any New Yorker? She ‘just needs a nose job,’ he tells her plainly. In the end, who gets the girl?

The tightly knit academic circles will forever bustle in their wordy, toothy circles. Like a bunch of heart surgeons discussing various valve suturing techniques, they will never lend a hand to the lay public to give their passion a wider audience. I vowed to be more like Kramer, to read a book as a smart and lively girl, tell it if it needs a nose job, and praise the beauty it already possesses.

Now, any number of literature professors or old-school editors would ask what the decidedly un-poetic New York television show Seinfeld has to do with Canadian poet Erin Knight’s debut, The Sweet Fuels.

Nothing, if poetry is only a Donne and Milton and Coleridge and never about the sweet plums in the icebox or Bob Dylan or about how even the rain has such small hands.

If you listen carefully to Kramer’s script, he’s a poet in every episode. Like William Carlos Williams, the K-Man waxes especially poetic about fruits. There’s the cantaloupe, there’s the avocado, and there’s the Mackinaw peaches, only available for two weeks of the year.

“The Mackinaw peaches, Jerry… I waited all year for this. Oooh, this is fantastic. Makes your taste buds come alive. It’s like having a circus in your mouth…Jerry, this is a miracle of nature that exists for a brief period. It’s like the Aurora Borealis.”

Don’t always run away from poetry because you don’t know ‘how to read poetry’ or ‘don’t get it.’ Just pick up the peach and savour it.

In Diamond, Knight writes: “Why write only if? Why not write if sunlight/strikes the dust motes in the room, if a splinter/wedges beneath your nail, if you fall/in love, if you fall? Write the nub of graphite/in your palm, pure carbon, memory/of a long-ago word- so many of us have it/lodged beneath the skin…”

Listen:

“Take the small maps on your knees. Grasses
traced routes there as you took back your wind,
while backstory spin in the bicycle tires.
When you stand, can you still read the legend
creased in the skin, is this your quietest scar?”

Listen:

“There’s a gnosis in the undersides of leaves,
silver edges turned up before a storm.”

I have no doubt that Knight’s work will stand up to the scrutiny of the higher hallways. Imagery, metaphor, “continuous engagement with our points of reference.” Check, check, check. But more importantly, this is the kind of book that talks about making tea, about making bread, about leaving the prairies, about searching maps for clues of our past. It is the kind of book that can earn the trust of the pedestrian audience, let us giggle, let us cry, move our ordinary experiences into the divinity of that diamond dust mote.

It can keep a person going through the endless and trivial travails. It is delicious, tender, redolent, and fleeting- like those fabled Mackinaw peaches, sweet fuel.

The Sweet Fuels, by Erin Knight.Goose Lane Editions, 2007.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. She is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, a Handymaiden Edition, 2006. Look for it on Indigo or Amazon. Her poetry has also been published widely in journals like Spillway, Rattle, Modern Poetry, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Quarry, White Wall Review, and more.

Please help me by purchasing the books I talk about, my book, or any other books at chapters.indigo.ca

He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands: Tony Robinson-Smith’s Back in Six Years

For a person who prides herself on a sense of adventure, it’s always been a thorn in my side that I’ve never left North America. While abject poverty didn’t keep me from covering every other inch of the States and Canada, I just couldn’t see panhandling for plane fare home in Japanese or Cambodian. I suppose for all my hoopla about fearlessness and independence, I can be rather timid and don’t want to be too far from my mother.

I’m not holding out for the homogeneous hell of chain hotels, no matter how swank. But one of these days I hope a fine purveyor of my rapier wit and irreverent observation sees fit to send me to a local bed and breakfast in Belgrade or Hanga Roa. Believe me, if I had just a few bills above my rent each month I’d be off to West Africa faster than you can say voodoo.

Now, Tony Robinson-Smith is one of those people who lets no obstacle stand in the way of his dreams, including money or, well, air and sky. No one could accuse him of having his head in the clouds. He had both feet on the ground, and that is how he intended to keep it.

And so he did- Tony traveled most of the globe without flying. How is a person who has visited 55 countries changed? How do you live in the world when you’ve seen the whole dang thing? How do you relate to people when you’ve seen how the other half lives- all of it? What is left to find when you’ve risked everything to stand on a peninsula called Pangandaran and watched flying foxes, silver monkeys, white hornbills and cat-sized fruit bats?

It’s all fine and good that anybody who has ever listened to rock music or worked in a bank has spent at least one party with a $20 bill shoved up his nose. But would we be so disconnected from history and mystery if we experienced South America without our North American gluttony? When Tony experiences altitude sickness in La Paz, the natives give him a wad of coca leaves. Coca is traditionally prescribed for everything, and the humble plant is chock full of vitamins, too. It seems tawdry to think about the bad babes of Hollywood brigade, stuffing themselves into bathroom cubicles to line up lines on the back of the john. What if we experienced history the way healers and shamans would show us?

Of course, not every native tradition will be as appetizing as a good wake up buzz for the long walk to Machu Piccu. I for one would have a hard time being polite when I found a chicken foot in my soup, though in theory I believe we should make use of all parts of an animal. And for those of you who have even heard of Limassa in the Central African Republic, hope you’re up for some monkey meat. “This was dinner: a black monkey with a bullet hole in its head, congealed blood streaking the fur, pink wrinkled face, eyes glazed. We’d need to be a bit hungrier.” Yeah- delish. After braving culinary culture shock like this, you can see why Tony writes with poetry when he finds a shop on St. Helena Island. “Oh, joy of joy, Bourbon Chocolate Creams and refrigerated Granny Smith apples. My hands trembled.”

I may never get to Benin to the village built on stilts that I have dreamed about for decades. Once I do get there, I may screech and complain about the mosquitoes and probably spill the pirogue crew with my bellyaching. I’m definitely becoming more high maintenance as I grasp at the false securities of middle age that I purchased at Winners. But Tony’s a courageous man who trusts fate to carry him through his fears. He gets into the pirogue. He motions in hopes of universal signs, finding ways to communicate with people from endless different languages and ways of living. He goes everywhere, from West Africa in the river pirogues to the 78-metre tall Buddha to Alberta’s Lake Louise, where I got stuck once while hitchhiking when I was young and hep.

And the guy’s an indomitable daredevil. Call me a wimp, but I’d be popping the Phenobarbital I keep with me at all times two days into any kind of storm ‘close to the equator.’ Listen to this rich visual: “The sky was grey, glazed lighter where the sun was. We looked to windward for dark smudges drifting towards us signaling the next squall. We lived in safety harnesses and oilskins. “It’s like being in a goddamn washing machine,” Josh said.”

And it’s likely they’d also lose me when I hear Tony say, “…bulbous oval heads, clipping the air aggressively with their mandibles. I had watched enough wildlife programs on TV to know that these were African driver ants.”

In this hilarious yet poetic account, there’s deep warmth, and a truly egalitarian spirit. Not many people have been to 55 countries, but if you had, it would be hard to be too self-absorbed or xenocentric. This book is special because it shares that exact gift with us. I doubt it was Tony’s intention at all, given the stunning descriptive landscapes he shows us at every turn. But above all the scenery, it’s a people story more than anything else. The snippets of dialogue, the cadence of unusual voices, the inherent humour and the quirks in style and custom: in all of these details, Tony shows us the creative ways that people work with and against the tyrannies of nature.

So the story is riveting. The dude is fascinating and brave. And the writing is simply astonishing. I can’t tell why Goose Lane Editions let a thrown-together cover like this one fly. While serviceable, perhaps- yo, someone’s looking at a map! – we’d be more apt to pick it up on impulse with illustration of any of the riveting scenes inside. Or fewer garish fonts. What gives? Who knows- just don’t judge this one by the cover. It will quickly become one of your favourites.

Back in Six Years: a Journey Around the Planet Without Leaving the Surface
Tony Robinson-Smith
Goose Lane Editions, 2008.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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Bored by Henry Miller

Like Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza, I read Henry Miller in high school, when I was Baptist and virginal and also a voracious reader. I didn’t get it then. I remember the scenes of ‘the writer’ going from café to café and hooking up with women in between writings in his notebook. Nothing ever happened in the book, I thought, and there’s no way this jerk could possibly get all these girls, whores or not.

Henry Miller by artist Norbert Haupt.

I assumed I must have missed something, as inexperienced in both the physical and the intellectual joys and sorrows as I was back then.

When my good friend Crad Kilodney’s book Putrid Scum lamented how no new writers have heard of Henry Miller, I decided to give it a go with my added 20 year experiential tapestry. While I see Miller’s influence on Kilodney, I also see clearly that Crad’s a far better writer, and Miller’s even worse now that I can actually read and write.

I mean, come on, who praises this kind of drivel? Believe me, I’m not offended by the word ‘cunt’ -though there’s no real need to use it more than ‘the’ in any context. But I venture out on a limb to criticize the ‘great writer’ who went before me. After all, if anyone sent out a manuscript today as self-involved as this one, they’d soon be living at the Salvation Army or working at Tim Hortons. You need a plot, you need some prose, you need paragraph breaks, sentences, and an occasional glimmer of wit.

Worse- any book about this much sex, about writers and lesbians and hookers and drinking and sleazy cafes in Paris- any book, no matter how horribly written, couldn’t possibly be boring. Lurid, crazy, raw, intriguing, perhaps, but not boring. Miller manages to make a perfectly slippery erotic-noir underworld of artists into a complete and utter bore. Now that’s an accomplishment.

Miller doesn’t disguise the autobiographical fantasy here. He wants to be/is a writer in France. The time frames jump all over, but don’t worry about getting mixed up: nothing happens. He meets some other jerks who treat women like shit. While this is not earth shattering or unusual, usually there should be a context, a literary device, a character development behind the scene. Here Miller imagines that all women are gaping wounds throwing themselves at his unwashed body, helpless against the charms of his balding head and the prick he’s always taking out in alleyways.

How is this different than the average masculine fantasy? Well, for one thing, most men recognize that it’s a fantasy, and most don’t think their tripe should go down in the annals of great literature.

The funny thing is, 70 plus years after the book, how clear it is from here: Miller fancied himself a worldly man with a deep understanding of women, how they worked physically and psychologically. But he did not have an iota of understanding. He was not even able to interpret the possible scenarios that transpired. While it was maybe vogue to talk about whores spreading their hoohas and picking bed bugs from their hair in a world that was yet to go mainstream with porn, it’s clear the poor guy’s virility was a complete sham. And with a teacher like Anais Nin, the most sensual and kinky writer a man could hope to bed, he still had no idea about women. And worse, no idea about writing.

Karl Shapiro called Henry Miller the greatest living author (when he was living). “I do not call him a poet because he has never written a poem; he even dislikes poetry, I think,” Shapiro wrote. No kidding. The man had absolutely zero ear for language. I agree with Camille Paglia that Miller should be taught in school- if only to rid ourselves of any sentimentality and to contrast the good writers with the bottom feeding posers of Paris.

My apologies to Normal Mailer, who wasted a great deal of his time reading Henry Miller. His critical examination, Genius and Lust, heralded The Tropic of Cancer as one of the top 10 novels of all time. Ummm, excuse me?

Club International has better literature- and at least there are pictures.

I’m sure an unknown, unimportant writer like myself will get in plenty of trouble from fans and academia for blasting this ‘erotic masterpiece.’ For I couldn’t possibly understand the intricacies of the sexual imagination and the finer points of literary pacing. Here are some of masterful quotables so you can judge for yourself without wasting too much time reading the damn book.

“Of them all the loveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake I too would become a Jew. Why Not? I already speak like a Jew. And I am as ugly as a Jew.”

“There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed…I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent.”

Hmm, what are ‘incandescent ovaries?’ And does any lady, no matter how inflamed, want them?

Moving along:

“And the more I looked at it, the less interesting it became. It only goes to show you there’s nothing to it after all, especially when it’s shaved. It’s the hair that makes it mysterious. That’s why a statue leaves you cold. Only once I saw a real cunt on a statue- that was by Rodin. …It’s an illusion! You get all burned up about nothing…about a crack with hair on it, or without hair.” (This particular gem goes on in a paragraph that is two pages long.)

“Even as the world falls apart the Paris that belongs to Matisse shudders with bright, gasping orgasms, the air itself is steady with a stagnant sperm, the trees tangled like her hair.”

“Why do I suddenly recollect the Passage des Thermopyles? Because that day a woman addressed her puppy in the apocalyptic language of the slaughterhouse, and the little bitch, she understood what this greasy slut of a midwife was saying. How that depressed me!” (Wow- deep thoughts, deep thoughts.)

It’s hard to take these ‘out of context’ when there is no context. There is no plot, there is no insight. I mean, stream of consciousness is one thing, when there is actually a stream or some consciousness.

Oh, and Henry? I’m sorry to break it to you…but six inches, while serviceable enough, is not something to write home about…

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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Beautiful Posers

I’ve broken up with Adbusters.

Now, I love Adbusters deeply. I revere the years of risks and courage, the pursuit of truth, the visionary hope, the way it furiously demanded meaning from existence. I respected Adbusters for teaching kids to analyze the media and verify sources of information. I applauded the experiment, the faith, the design, and the do-it-yourself grass roots. Those who poo-poo Adbuster’s glossiness are too young to recall its humble inception, and it’s still a self-supporting organism as it grows into a mammoth cultural force. I won’t take away from any of these formidable strengths when Adbusters has done so much to ask world forces to be accountable for their actions.

too old to indie rock'n'roll, too young to die.

Still, sometime around Buy Nothing Day last year, I decided it was time for a respite. I was taking an inventory of my mental environment, backing away from influences in my life that weren’t as positive as I wanted them to be. Much to my surprise, the negativity of Adbusters was on that list. While I think it’s foolish to have your head in the sand and know nothing about the evils of this world, it’s equally as futile to think of nothing but. And cool design and quotable quips notwithstanding, Adbusters got the axe. Just for 2008- nothing’s permanent. But I wanted a year without Big Brother breathing down my neck. I don’t shop at the Gap, okay? And I LIKE watching TV. And I have nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine question and likely never will. My church donates money to refugees and AIDS and I volunteer there. I do enjoy coffee but sometimes buy fair trade and try to support local farms and local artists….but I don’t want my mother to stop taking her little pills, and believe me, neither do you.

AAAARRGGHHH. I love you, but.

It was actually a conscious choice to back off of reading the only magazine I’ve bought and saved every month pretty much since it launched. I wanted to watch Seinfeld in peace. Was it not enough for you that I mute the commercials and read Kafka in those intervals?

Well, I’ve been really good about not answering his calls…it was particularly hard when Heiress Paris was cover girl and the whole darn issue was about celebrity emptiness. There would have been cool photos with snippy phrases pasted underneath, and arrows pointing to monetary waste: expensive, ugly dresses. There would have been some doctoral student’s yammering about anorexia or how Madonna spoke for poor countries but had never been a starving African child herself- oh, yeah, or how she adopted a kid who didn’t have AIDS, how could she have! Some of this I would have devoured, nodding, building up a deeper hatred for people I don’t even know. But the part of me that thinks Hollywood is a pagan incarnation of a modern pantheon would have been saddened. Besides, there are more and better clothing pics in Life and Style.

Well, I got a message from my ex through Facebook- see, Adbuster’s had warned me of Facebook’s evil! And I followed the message- who can resist the lure of a juicy story about the death of western civilization? Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization by er, hipster Douglas Haddow cinched it for me. The deal is sealed. We’re split. Until you give me some optimism and stop analyzing every little move I make, I can only see you casually, without commitment.

To quote an old friend from one of the more ‘real’ and less dead-endly subcultures, a junkie who liked to pee his pony skin pants because it was ‘natural’ and we are ‘animals,’ Mr. Mo Jo Risin’ (if that’s not hep, I don’t know what is…): “This is the end, my friend, the end.”

Now Haddow’s a decent writer, with occasion astuteness and a clever turn of phrase. But he’s clogged with the kind of vacuous self-importance that he attributes to the shallow hipster losers he’s writing about. It’s a bit of a stretch to blame Death Cab for Cutie fans for the end of the world just because they bought a vee-neck T at American Apparel. Sure, sure, I know AA ads show toothpick porn but its more upsetting to me that their crap is so flimsy. But what if some stylish followers of a subculture aren’t perfect visionaries? I mean, my parents would vote for Bush if they were American, but I still love them, for crying out loud! I think it’s been clear that each and every youth subculture that ever existed had some airy-fairy notions and some really good ideas, too. You take the good, you take the bad. Come on, the kids are all right.

But Haddow’s too full of his own words to let a few kids live through a few bad fashions and a bit of escapist privilege before life hits them with the back of its hand.

“An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society,” he writes. Yawn.

If you look around on the net you’ll see that Haddow and his Asian-eatery and Appleton’s Rum slash writer lifestyle is so hips it drips. I’m not sure what subgroups came and went that solved all the world’s problems without making any new ones. Hmm, how about the happy hardcores? How much peace, love, and funnery can a kid cram into a teletubby backpack? Now the candy kids are all dentists or six feet under because bliss gave way to methamphetamine. So, reaching back further, to my embarrassing high school mornings- black eyeliner, jean jackets, cigarettes, Morrissey. Sure, I was a vegetarian for five whole years but I went back to normal and quit smoking, too. I even go to church now. Then there was the ‘60s- yay, freedom. That’s when that pony-pants pisser hissed out some pained poetry and refused to see thirty like a good handful of his pissed-off peacenik friends. RIP Jimi, Janis, Mojo.

See, the reason no youth group has solved all the world’s problems and adopted the noblest fashions, the most meaningful spirituality, and the most righteous habits is the same reason why nobody in the world ever has. We can’t agree on what those things are! We are not perfect people! No one in the history of this planet has ever solved the problems and hit on the exact right combo of beliefs and outer markers of those beliefs. And people change. You can be dead certain that just as I no longer don a black wig and a red tube of lipstick, the hip trip will fade until it all comes around again. And who bloody well cares if dude is posing as vegan until a Real Girls Eat Meat hookup comes around? Who cares if he only uses his bicycle sometimes but his parents actually support the troops? Fuck off. People change. They explore. They belong one place one day, and somewhere else the next. There’s only One Guy who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and if anybody knew what he really wanted, the world would have been a better place to begin with.

Leigh Christie commented on the Adbusters site: “Sure, some of these Urban Outfitters and Vice-magazine zombies are a bit lost, but they all come around eventually. Think of these things as the gateway drugs to an incremental path to social and environmental responsibility. Baby steps… something Adbusters does not really understand. The funny part is, Adbusters helped to create ‘the hipster movement’. You ask people to ‘curb their consumption’. Here’s what happened- they all start riding bikes and stop buying new stuff. The kids started using craigslist and thrift shops sales go through the roof. And Adbusters response to their young offspring: You tell them they are shallow and unsustainable. “

Ron also made a great comment. “Oh Adbusters, haven’t read the magazine in like 6 years but this is just so ironic it hurts my head.The most self-loathing focus-deprived counterculture magazine lambasting the current self-loathing focus-deprived counterculture of the day. Didn’t this type of cynicism die out back in like 1999?”

I couldn’t say it any better than this spot-on Anonymous: “OMFG, Hipsters! What supercilious nonsense. As if every self-professed (or self-denying) ‘counter-culture’ was not chockablock full of vapid, self-interested pseudo-individuals. This article positively reeks of second-hand nostalgia for an unjustly idealized utopian past. I find it tremendously ironic that these same hackneyed yearnings for the prelapsarian counter-cultural Golden Age were undoubtedly filtered down to the author through the very mass media on which he heaps such scorn. Please: grow up.”

forever in blue jeans, but with a taste for fine art.

APW mirrors my sentiments, too. “Thank you, so-called Hipsterdom, for providing venues where a 120 lb male weakling can experience some colour and noise without having to worry about being called a homo by popped-collar bros with frosted tips, reeling from Red Bull and vodkas and testosterone. Guess how many times I’ve seen a fight break out at one of these dive bars that Haddow visited? I can’t even recall! …Sure, we may be snide, elitist, self-styled intellectuals. We were drama nerds in high school! Now we’re fine arts majors! …Hey hipsters, thanks for showing up to art shows and coming to see bands that are just starting out, have barely practiced, and might very well suck, even if you’re only there to hang out and get drunk. You can pretty much be counted on to at least be supportive.”

My favourite comment of all? This Anonymous: “I blame Sonic Youth.”

This brief reunion with Adbusters reminded me of the negativity and inflated self-righteousness and the unrealistic expectations that my supposed intellectual equal has. I hope Adbusters can turn around and see what he’s missing in me- humour, imperfect beauty, values acquired and tossed, a poet, a dreamer, a girl who can agree to disagree. But how can you go out with a mag who hates everyone? I’m not supposed to do what my parents would have liked- get a good job or at least a good husband- because that would make me part of the sleeping corporate world or the first wive’s club- or is that Stepford Wives? I’m not allowed to listen to bisexual, anti-war indie bands because they might stay in the shallow end if I’m not careful!

So what am I, in my thirtysomething still secondhand rose post vegetarian gluten free church going arts supporting fruit fly flitting grateful recovering addict still on gin bike riding Camille Paglia and Haruki Murakami reading writer’s life?

So hep it hurts, apparently.

And I’m on my way to a warehouse party to view some sculptures and smoke weed , sans skinny jeans- fat girls don’t do skinny jeans- with my roster of queens and a few boys who won’t beat them up.

What’s wrong with this picture? Absolutely nothing.

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