David Foster Wallace- 1962-2008

Following the series of recent reflections on writers and depression, and on the tough time I’m having coping with the suicide of a dear friend last Thanksgiving, the news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide slapped me across the face. His father said he had battled depression for several decades. Wallace, author of Oblivion and Infinite Jest and much, much more, was that rare breed who has a genius for both math and words. He had a dark humour and a deep wisdom within his human confusion. I’m so very sorry that he couldn’t take it anymore.

When I was a little girl who decided I was going to be a writer, it might have been worthwhile for someone to tell me, “Writers end up killing themselves.” No way, no way, no way. It is true that Wallace joins an unbelievably long lineage of writers who committed suicide: Hunter S. Thompson, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Koestler, John Kennedy Toole, Gertrude Bell, Anne Sexton, and so on. I wish David Foster Wallace, and everyone else who suffers from depression, total peace. If you just couldn’t take it anymore, I understand and wish you rest. The lingering question, though, is what we’ve lost and cannot know. There are those who come back from the brink and go on to do the most important, world-changing work of their lives. Johnny Cash comes to mind- he crawled out of the cave he went into to die, and comforted the rest of the lost world until he was an old man. Rev. Troy Perry slit his wrists and crawled into the tub to float into oblivion, but failed at his quest. He went on to lead the world in establishing freedom and equal rights for gay and lesbian people, and created a progressive, love-based faith where people could learn to love themselves and others instead of practicing hate. Your contribution may not be so huge, but is no less important: your friends, your children, your work mates may need your kind of wit or sarcasm or kindness. You do not know.

Rest in peace, Mr. Wallace.

for David Foster Wallace

It’s hell to lose another teacher to despair,
and trite to say his memory will live on, though that it will.
Cliche to say that this cruel world just isn’t fair
but some of us won’t make it up and over yonder hill.
In my own tawdry gloomy struggles with God and man
with a knack, perhaps; no genius, but still a fan,
I wrestle, too, with the cosmic joke, Divine Comedy, the Infinite Jest
and I hope that you have found relief and rest.

Lorette C. Luzajic

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

I Survived the Three Day Novel Writing Contest

I have joined the ranks of the brave and the insane and entered my very first Three Day Novel Contest.

While you played volleyball and BBQ’d chicken legs or eggplant strips on the beach, I was holed up inside for the whole of the Labour Day Weekend.

This entire year for me has been an exercise in the theme ‘focus.’ Focusing is not my strong point. My strong point is generating a thousand ideas, starting a zillion new files, and then leaving the concepts undeveloped on the backburner. My strong point is working on a hundred things at one time, putting in a day or a minute here and there. Eventually, you get something. But imagine if I focused on ONE AT A TIME!

Partly because I needed some excitement in my less and less exciting life, partly because I wanted to practice my focusing techniques, and partly because I wanted to avoid the holiday weekend excesses for which I have a penchant, I entered the Three Day Novel Contest.

Surely the process itself was far more interesting than the actual results- in my case. But I’m hooked. Sadly, I’ll never be at that beach BBQ where the Barenaked Ladies play for free at Labour Day, ever, ever again.

The rules are very simple, so that entrants don’t get confused. You write a novel over three days. Saturday at 12.01 you can begin, and Monday at midnight you must stop. A skeleton outline is permitted, and you can mull over the thing in your head all you want beforehand.

Friday night I went out to paint the town red with the spectacular Maevey, whose featherweight pink summer camisole would be muse enough for anybody. Yes, dear, it IS a hot summer night- but those are also pajamas….needless to say, I didn’t make it home for the Cinderella mark, but nearly- it was ten after twelve.

Of course, if I’m still awake, Seinfeld is on from midnight until one, so I decided to relax a bit and perhaps ponder the storyline of my novel before getting down to the grind. I fell asleep before King of the Hill could interrupt the focused flow of my novel writing, ha ha ha.

Saturday morning, fresh with zeal and …well, really, I still hadn’t thought of anything. I had the character and the title in my head all summer, but nothing happened to him. For a man who spent most of his life in a lunatic asylum, he was really rather a bit of bore.

Sometime around mid-morning, I decided I really needed a place to put my clothes. I keep pulling them out of the closet to find what I need, then the cats use the pile as a bed before I push them back in, which means I have to launder them to get rid of the cat hair. I’ve been thinking about getting another dresser for awhile, because the shelf scenario is not working the way I hoped it would when I moved in.

Yes, I did know about the cat hair slash clothing situation for more than a full year. But I was not particularly inspired to do anything about it. Not until now, when I have a novel due in three days and haven’t even started yet.

But I surmise that a bit of fresh air and sunshine will be just what the doctor ordered, and I hit a few yard sales in the neighbourhood, idling around on my bike. Exercise is good, right? Right. I strike gold when I find a rickety dresser, made out of wood not Ikea, and clean, standing on the curb. It takes me a while to drag the thing to my place, and then go back for the drawers. All that dragging means I loosened the top piece- the one that holds the thing together- and so I have to hunt for a hammer and nails, in that same disaster closet.

Now that the living room is cluttered with a bunch of drawers and pieces of wood, which the cats think of as a new jungle gym, I have just the kind of peace of mind I need to sit down and get started on the novel. I’ve made goals for each day- fifty pages. So far I have – the title.

Surely a little bit of fuel is what a writer needs. I’m pretty wired from the dozen coffees I’ve had on an empty stomach. But I don’t feel like cooking. That would distract from the flow! Hmm, do I feel like sushi- the cats vote for sushi, but I don’t feel like forking over 20 bucks when I already have a fridge full of good food. I open it, with a mind to toss together a quick salad or something.

Hmm, well, I decide I better stock up on good options. It’s going to be a long haul, this contest! So I hop back on my bicycle and head to the supermarket. It’s late afternoon by now. Maybe they have cream of broccoli soup on tap. I put two dozen pieces of fruit and fresh vegetables and cold cuts into my cart, then head to the check out. I see the line ups- except the express lane- are miles long and the people have mountains in their carts. So I abandon my cart in the ice cream aisle and opt for Triple Chocolate- that’s right, three kinds of chocolate ice cream in one, kind of like Neapolitan but without the strawberry and vanilla, which no one ever wants. I always wondered why anyone orders Neapolitan instead of just getting chocolate. You can’t beat chocolate.

I zip home with my carton of the good stuff, and when I get there, realize I still have no food, and haven’t had anything but caffeine all day. There’s a mushy banana- so I slice it up on top of a bowl of chocolate ice cream. It’s time to put the pedal to the medal.

Well, I’m inspired. I’ve eaten three bowls of triple chocolate ice cream and my stomach is sore, but damn, my first paragraph is good. I get down half of the first chapter- four whole pages- before I decide that the title is all wrong. And I think I need a bit of time to think about the direction the project is going…I can’t just let the characters lead me blindly around. I have to steer this ship!

Thank God there are two hours of Criminal Intent in a row. Usually Saturdays suck for television, and usually that’s great, because folks, I am not the kind of girl you generally find home alone on a Saturday night. My heartthrob detective Goren is just about to go undercover on a death defying sting operation when I notice my phone light blinking. Now of course I’d turned my phone off for the weekend- no distractions! But it can’t hurt to see who called. And to just call them all back and let them know how the project is coming along.

So you get the picture. And your concluding wrong, my friends, wrong, wrong, wrong. You are concluding that I did not finish my novel, that I started something again that I wouldn’t finish, that I didn’t organize my ideas in time…yes, and these insights into my nature were part of the process, because next time I’ll be making use of the Saturday. As it turns out, I awoke at six on the Sunday and the Monday and wrote stealthily through. The novel has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and even a few surprises.

Now, it might be the shortest entry they receive- but I doubt it. There has got to be at least one that didn’t make it to the fifty page mark. And it might be the worst novel they receive, but I doubt that, too, because despite my honest assessment that about 55 of my 65 pages are sheer filler, I think the beginning and the ending and the heated dialogue between the ghost and the boyfriend who is jealous of the ghost are pretty good. I mean, I’m not expecting my long short story to win the Novel Writing Contest, but I completed my literary rite of passage! For 31 years, writers and martyrs have been participating in this crazy thing, and I’ll be doing it again.

Next year, I’ll know to have something a little more solid for a story idea than ‘a ghost who lives in Toronto.’ And I’ll have it flushed out in my head before the start on Saturday. Next year, I’ll have a fridge with some ready-made chili and soup, and I won’t be watching any Law and Order (or the Sunday afternoon two-hour Madonna special- or the Day Diana Died special- but at least that was on in the background while I was typing.)

I can tell you that my carpal tunnel pains are raging, and that I bawled like a baby when I hit the epilogue. And in my possession was a hugely imperfect 65 page mess, with a clever title and a good opening paragraph. “What will YOU think up under pressure?” the contest advert asked. Now, at the other end of it, I had something, something I dreamed up, radically different from any project I’d ever worked on, a completely alien invention. Part Margaret Atwood, part Twilight Zone….It doesn’t matter that the book- or booklet, as it were- is kind of cheesy and lame. No one’s expecting perfection in three days except me. What mattered is the 72-hour kick in the pants the contest promised, and it was. “A trial by deadline” they warned.

My book may not win, and it may not become fodder for an after school special, and it may not even end up a short play in the Fringe Festival next year. But I’m damn well sure my focus has improved a million-fold. And that it’s going to be a breeze to whip up stuff that I don’t necessarily think is worth writing but have to anyhow. All the assignments on my desk top do not seem daunting after forcing my way through writer’s block like that. It was grueling torture and after that sugar crash I thought I was dying. And I’m going to do it again and again and again. Which means, yes, that you all get stuck with my annual novella.

You’ll get to read it in the new year, after the winners are announced. I know- you secretly can’t wait to see what my twisted mind dreamed up on chocolate and espresso…

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

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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The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series is Number One!

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Rushdie and Me

There are few I would consider marrying, but I’ve long been certain that Kramer could be the next one. We would be giant, over the top, demi-intellectual goofballs together. The sheer amount of merriment that would ensue sure beats the melancholy underworld I’ve been living in most of my life. Kramer could meet me halfway. Little Miss Chatterbox and Cosmo. Kramer’s oddball beauty just might be everything I’m looking for in a man. He could make New York fun. And I suspect that his depth is considerable, despite a surface veneer. He hides his true genius and creativity, and yet, what you get is what you see. The key to Kramer is in not trying to figure him out. The joy of him is that you look back and realize that everything he says is true, no matter how crazy it seemed at the time you first heard it.

Yes, yes, I’m fully aware that Seinfeld’s kooky neighbour does not actually exist, and that’s a big relief because I’m in no hurry to get married again. And much as I’d hoped for it in adolescence, I want nothing less in life than to move to Manhattan. Fictional or not, Kramer and I spend a lot of time together through these newfangled, magical wonder boxes- turn on; dispense laughter. And Kramer never loses the ability to surprise me. One day he comes home from the sauna and tells Jerr- Bear he saw Salmond Rushdie, of all people, taking a steam.

Now, a conversation with Kramer might be exactly what Rushdie needs in life. The man, though wryly funny, could use more belly laughs. It can’t have been easy, becoming the poster child for offending Allah, just by writing a book. I sure hope that if any of my blustery words weren’t always as reverent as they ought to be, God could handle my outburst. I’m pretty sure we are supposed to study and learn and question our world, not just reach for what we’ve been told, and I’m pretty sure God doesn’t need armies on earth to censor our explorations if they veer from the truth- then every single one of us must be taken down. The cosmic world is a little more flexible than some adherents of faith think.

But that bit of fuzzy logic didn’t occur to the Ayatollah of Iran, who certainly drew attention to a newly successful author, an ordinary looking guy named Rushdie. He put a fatwa on Rushdie’s head for blasphemy. It’s ludicrously arrogant to think that no one should ‘insult or malign Muslims’ and that anyone has the right to kill for doing so. How can we seek truth if we cannot discuss it, and in discussing it, may offend some players? The book that caused this furor was, of course, The Satanic Verses, and the poor writer, now a popular award winner, went into hiding, fearing for his life. I guess by this principle I will also be executed, then, for portraying a pic of Georgie Bush with a lump of white paint by his nose and the caption, “I inhaled.”

I had a hard time myself, having read hundreds of books that defamed my childhood faith of Christianity, seeing what was so offensive here. I’ll give anyone’s faith its due, but true faith means having ethics, and the beginning and ending of ethics is always ‘thou shalt not kill.’ But here’s what caused the world of terrorism to erupt- the title, for starters. It allegedly implied that the Holy Koran’s verses were the work of the devil. (What was so devilish was that these verses, which in historical allegory were withdrawn after their first transcription, encouraged intercessory prayer to three pagan goddesses of the Middle East. The crescent moon, strangely, may still evoke the namesake of Allah, in Allat, the moon goddess….) Additionally, the prophet Mohammed’s wives appeared here in a brothel and the name of a Mecca-like place translated to something like ‘ignorance,’ which was deep sacrilege to the faithful. The list goes on, but surely by these standards, Christopher Moore, who wrote Lamb, about Christ’s adventures with Bif and Maggie and a zealous evangelist, had better head indoors.

Indeed, there were endless death threats and multiple bombings of bookstores, assassination attempts on publishers, and more. I thought the prophet Jesus warned us that we would be persecuted in his name and would have to stand up to all kinds of offense, including Moore’s very funny novel. We were instructed to turn the other cheek, however, not to bomb and murder wherever we didn’t like something.

Rushdie’s prolific career started in 1981, pretty much after he threw in the towel. Born in Bombay to a Muslim family, his first work was a sci-fi experiment. He says he wrote three other novels that “mercifully weren’t published.” He was also working in advertising and questioned whether he should just move on from writing. “Maybe I’m just pretending to be a novelist,” he told a mesmerized audience last night (June 9, 2008) at the Danforth Music Hall. He said this following a reading from his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence. Sitting there, all I could think was, wow, must be nice to be out! Indeed, Rushdie got tired of staying in, and eventually the fatwa was lifted, but fresh upheaval and new threats haven’t driven him back in.

Thankfully, after tossing up understandable concerns about becoming a writer, Rushdie promised himself that he would never give up. Midnight’s Children came out 6 years after Grimus, and it blew everyone away. Rushdie won the first lot of more than 25 of the most prestigious literary awards in history. A few years later, the uproar over Satanic Verses meant a career of death threats and chaos. But Rushdie doesn’t talk about all that, even when an audience member asks him about Islamic terrorism today. Instead he tells fledglings like me frankly “there are enough books.” If we are wondering why we want to be writers, then don’t be writers. The only excuse, he says, for becoming a writer, “is that you can’t avoid it.”

Now you’d have to be pretty imaginative to come up with any possible commonalities between an unknown pop culture and vitamin writer like myself, and the recently knighted Mr. Rushdie. I’m not even a fan, really, though I intend no disrespect in saying so. The lavish plots and painstaking historical details, the majestic span of human endeavours and dilemmas, the depth of the characters are all astounding things, and so, Rushdie is my teacher. But I confess to finding the going difficult and convoluted, and I find that his ‘magical realism’ lacks the kind of resonance and natural flow I find in Allende or Marquez. I suspect two things here: one, I’m just not smart enough to really absorb the reading and its contexts, by one who is generally regarded as a genius. And two, just plain old personal taste.

Still, I was pleasantly surprised to find that we nonetheless had a few things in common. Sal’s dry humour, which I think underlies a great deal more of his writings than is perceived, reigned clear. While there is certainly an inflated aspect and also something of a defeated one showing in Rushdie’s persona, there is absolutely an earthier charm, a faint silliness, and a sure grip on how comical the absurdities of the world are. There’s even something vividly gracious about a man who doesn’t scoff for what must be the 2144th time he is asked “how did you become a writer?” and “what are your favourite books?” I appreciate humour, more and more, as one of the most important ways of bearing life’s bullshit. I think Rushdie would agree.

Second, I’ve always thought Rushdie’s work a little wordy, and to be frank, most of those who know me find me rather wordy as well. I admit I go on and on. I edit quite a bit out, trust me, and I’m still left with an extraordinarily verbose verbiage. I cannot say in ten words what I might say in four thousand.

I decided to embrace my wordy weakness and named my other blog Little Miss Chatterbox. Minimalism may be the trend for distracted modern audiences, but a quick overview of literature assured me I’m not alone. Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Alexander Pope, now these are not exactly the most terse writers I’ve ever read. James Joyce, Shakespeare, Rushdie, me- well, we all tend to digress a lot.

“Stories are what define us,” Rushdie says, in defense of humans prone to loquacity. “We are the only creatures in the world who have developed the curious habit of telling each other stories.” This, he says, is an amazing way we have of making sense of ourselves. Certainly, it’s a technique he uses. “I go forward by going sideways.”

The real question here is what the million-dollar man was doing with Kramer in the sauna when there was a price like that on his head. When Kramer asked his name, the writer in the towel said “Sal Bass.” Jerry wasn’t so sure it could have been Rushdie, but Kramer knew that the ‘sal’ part was too much to be a coincidence, and that the ‘bass’ part alluded to fish- you know, to Salmond! Foolish hilarity ensued.

See, the uber-elite literati pooh-pooh television, but I think we take great joy in TV shows and in movies for the same reason we give importance to literature. Rushdie himself enjoys the occasional acting foray (though it was actually Sal Bass and not Rushdie who played Sal Bass/not Rushdie in the Seinfeld episode.) These are our stories. I’m not the only one who views life as Seinfeldian. The meaning of life is, quite literally, the reason of the show. It’s a show about nothing, and so, it is about everything.

Now, Rushdie’s a remarkable man, and while I was honoured to learn from his passion and experience during this terrific reading and interview, it still holds true that I wouldn’t care to run into him in a steam room. He may be smarter and have a better job than Kramer, but he’s a bit formidable, blustering, just through with his fourth wife, and well, not all that good looking. Kramer, on the other hand, has an offbeat quirkiness that makes him look hot with a cigar in an old-fashioned jalopy, despite the pompadour and trademark leggy clumsiness. I’m also pretty sure that Rushdie would find my work and my life too breezy, too girly, too soap operatic, with too many talismanic trinkets lying about. Despite his penchant for writing magic, he doesn’t believe in it, and I do.

But I digress.

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

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Home Alone: thoughts on the writing life

February has just slipped out from under me, and I know sooner or later I will have to leave the house.

Sure, I’m anticipating long and curious city walks in spring’s fuzzy glow. I’m dying for midnight coffees near Bloor and Brunswick, where the conversations of the assorted revelers nearby fill my notebooks. I want to be a lady who lunches, to go someplace with Elle and our girls, to pound them back and show off our vintage clutches. Oh, yes. I can feel the thaw. I will even go dancing, I’ll wear red lipstick and a smudged mole. I could definitely enjoy something with the banjo tonight, or something with gin.

But it’s still freezing, and so it didn’t take much persuasion for me to commit to another evening home alone. The truth be told, this all by myself stuff is spectacular. This past winter has been paradise. Like most people, urban home solitude is an expensive commodity, and I’ve always had roommates. I’ve lived with the fabulous and the fey, I’ve lived with thieves and vampires, I’ve lived with people whose name or face I might not recall upon passing. I’ve lived with lovers, with squatters, with addicts and mental patients and freaks of every assortment, with senior citizens and junkies and crazy Indians. I’ve lived with the elfin, the initiated, the converted evangels, the con men. With hippies, and the pierced and the prodded and the brilliant and the travelers. I lived with prison types and with festive fags of every stripe.

And I tell you, from the banker to the monk, human beings, each in their own way, are stunningly insane.

Those who know me know I love nothing more than a crazy person, and that I use the word so liberally it’s annoying. I love people. I love crazy people. I love being a crazy brilliant writer in the big city. But in my ascent to nearly middle age, that proverbial hill that shortly I’ll be over, I’ve finally found living arrangements on my own. It’s pretty nuts, I’m telling you, because all I do is write. It’s like I’ve been waiting for this winter my whole life and didn’t know it. I’m downloading, and it’s coming through my fingertips into the keyboard.

It doesn’t matter tonight that all week long except for Thursday when I had a root canal I did nothing but write furiously and endlessly- that’s still exactly what I feel like doing tonight. Dinah Washington’s elixir diction and bell-clear blues swerve sensually through my brainwaves. I just popped open some French Cross, the cheapest pink wine I could find. There’s salami and oranges. This is luxury. My girl Maeve described it best: she said that you can’t always be spilling open and over but you have to be there if the muse appears. You had to coax it, provide it with a portal. If you were out in the middle of a crowded subway or a nightclub, you might not hear her.

Seems it works. Close the door, pour a glass, the floods rush through me. I ride the crest of that surge of confidence, that thrill in life that can only come from a sense of your work, of your contribution. It’s still tempered with its see-sawing worldview, the one that forgets potentiality and experiences fear instead. Of what possible self-indulgent use could a bunch of poetry about my weird moments possibly be to anyone else on this planet?

That’s why famous writer Ariel Gore reminded me about William Carlos Williams said: “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

visit the writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net
order her poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife, through indigo or amazon online

The Secret in the Old Attic: Anne Szumigalski’s Ghost

When Earth Leaps Up
Anne Szumigalski
Brick Books, 2006

Browsing through When Earth Leaps Up feels like one of those afternoons spent rifling through mementoes in a dusty attic, sun streaming through cracked windows. But it’s not my attic and I feel like I’m ferreting someone else’s secrets, prying open private papers. They are so compelling that I’m unable to put these mesmerizing discoveries down even as I hear footprints coming up the old stairs.

Alas, it’s just Anne Szumigalski’s ghost creeping into the shadows as I snoop through her things. She may be a little restless about When Earth Leaps Up- the posthumous volume is something of a scrapbook put together from loose papers and thoughts left behind in her personal effects. She did not order them, select them, polish them or finish them, and indeed they have an uncensored, unfinished, private feel. Without the poet’s hands-on control, I suspect I’m eavesdropping on revelations and sentiments unintended for me, and this makes this volume extraordinary.

Mark Abley, a dear friend of the poet, and a Canadian literary staple, is responsible for compiling from her files and notebooks what fills When Earth Leaps Up. He confesses to his “trepidation” at some selections in the afterword, wondering whether he’s giving up the equivalent of a journal to the public, or if he is allowing beloved scribbles to be immortalized. He acknowledges the trickiness of the whole process, not just out of privacy concerns, but also whether the poet would have felt a piece was ready, or intended at all for the public. After all, not every note a person makes is destined for completion- we scribble random ideas and poetic thoughts that later hit the paper shredder.

“I need to come clean, and state that the book you are holding is not the book that Anne would have sent out for publication, had she lived another year or two,” Abley admits. “Apart from correcting a few obvious typos, I did not alter any of her words or play with her line breaks.” Most of the pieces weren’t first drafts, he says, but then, they weren’t edited either, and Anne liked to revise her work until it felt perfect.

The resulting collection feels like a bundle of letters with a ribbon slipping out of place. It couldn’t be any more beautiful- perhaps poets need a trusted friend to keep them from overworking or hiding, another poet to coax delicate secrets from the shadows. It’s not that Anne would ever shrink from self-revelation- she rather basked in the nakedness of poetry. It’s just that here the nakedness feels more chanced, less planned. The work is as stunning, exquisite, gorgeous as always, maybe more so. The usual themes of death and change and human longing are all present, and still infused with a ribald, humourous undertone.

The title poem opens:

when earth leaps up
and heaven descends
and the two meet like lovers
then the question is
could these flowers be stars

and is dust nothing
more than the handful
I sprinkled on your face
as you went down into the dirt
(47)

Graves and skulls and bones and the anthropologies of the human condition have long been staples of Anne’s work- what greater themes could poets ponder than love or death? An early memory of my childhood centres around one of Anne’s stunning, eerie passions. I was perhaps far too young to be voraciously reading through each Canadian poet on those musty beanbag chairs at the little library, but precociously I already identified myself as a poet and knew instinctively that to write poetry, I must read it. And I came upon Sitting Under Death’s Rich Shade, where Anne ponders the skeletal remains of a man she called Frans. I couldn’t have been more than eight years old, and knew nothing of either love or death. But when Anne wrote, “ a bit/ of me is broken/because of your memory” I knew with spooky certainty that one day it would be clear. Anne closed her poem with “damn you, I cry out/you would not take me/when I was fifteen and dangerous.” (from On Glassy Wings, 117)

How I wanted to be fifteen and dangerous: to love so freely and lose so tragically. What Anne’s poems have always shown is how time waits for no one, and now it’s poignant and painful, almost a personal loss, to shuffle through Anne’s private papers as her spectre roams, eager to divulge but censored by the gods from what the living cannot know. It seems a terrible irony that the same ‘fifteen and dangerous’ for which I waited so impatiently has come and gone two decades plus ago, as have a sadly lengthy line-up of my own Frans-ian tragedies.

Still, as somber as death may be, there is buoyancy in these poems that transcends the morbid subject matter. Perhaps Anne glimpsed prophetically a comfort that she reveals from before she went beyond: penning her thoughts, which included the admission that “for the living/ there is nothing worse than death”, she writes: “When I think of him I say/’He is lost to me.’/I should say perhaps/’He is found to himself.’”(Untitled, 48)

The poems here are so stirring because Anne is no longer metaphorically Sitting Under Death’s Rich Shade, but actually buried in it. The ghostly feeling is nothing more than the fulfillment of Anne’s poetry. For all her life, she wrote carefully the questions that haunt the human heart, poetic longings for the dead, for those left here, for what we may encounter after. Now that she has slid into forever, she would have to revise this and every other volume with the answers she has found. But the human plight remains that we must wait out our own curiosities and see for ourselves this mystery. No one states this more beautifully than Anne herself in To a Friend Dying:

“this is only the beginning
of change” I shall say
as I bury your pupa
into its mound of dirt

“on the day of wings
something shall certainly emerge
perhaps not flesh
perhaps not what you expect.”
(54)

Visit the writer Lorette C. Luzajic at her web site, www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
Her poetry collection The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos is available on her site, or through Indigo or Amazon online. You should order it: it’s a damn good read!
xo Lorette