Untethered: What A.M. Klein Tells Us About Anne Carson

I've been dipping back into Anne Carson’s work. Since my compatriot has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I thought I should revisit her writing.

As I mentioned before, when she first began to attract attention in the mid-1990s, I tried reading some of her poems that appeared here and there in literary journals and magazines. I was left unmoved and, frankly, puzzled.

A few thoughts.

One of the first things you notice about her writing is how disconnected it is from traditional literary structures.

Much has been said about the way her writing crosses boundaries. Her essays have the narrative qualities of short stories and the short lines of poetry. A novella is written in free verse, while another book comes in a box and unfolds like a brochure. She's also written opera libretti. She's liberal in her use of form and has said that she thinks more like a visual artist than a writer.

Her playfulness with form has made her writing difficult to categorize, which appeals to people who are uncomfortable with categories, and there seem to be plenty of those these days. Most people call her a poet, perhaps because she writes so often in sentence fragments, and fragments reflect our fragmented contemporary sense of ourselves.

To me, however, her lines don't sing memorably in the way I expect poetry to. They have the flavour of narrative, or at best lyrical prose.

I'm not sure why she called her best-known novella, Autobiography of Red, a "novel in verse." It's clearly not written in any conventional verse form. The lines are chopped up, but the story itself is relatively straightforward fiction, complete with an essayistic introduction and appendices. Calling it a novel in verse may initially have turned some readers away. Since its publication in 1998, however, readers have come to accept it as avant-garde literature, or simply as a work of fiction that happens to be arranged in an unconventional way.

The question is whether this kind of postmodern approach adds anything to the work. Plenty of people seem to think it does. The approach has certainly captured the dislocated zeitgeist.

But it's not as though this kind of experimentation hasn't been done before.

One of my favourite novels is The Second Scroll by A.M. Klein, published in 1951. Like Carson's novella, it's relatively short. At its centre is a fairly conventional story about a young man following in the footsteps of his revered missing uncle, who has lost his faith in God and is travelling through postwar Europe. The novel also has a series of appendices, called Glosses, designed to comment on the main story. Each Gloss is written in a different literary form, from poem to a letter to a theatrical play, culminating in a prayer.

The point of Klein's novel was to mirror the structure of the Hebrew Torah in a modern retelling of the Jewish exodus into the diaspora and the return to the Promised Land. The Glosses echoed centuries of rabbinic commentary on the Torah. Here, the structure reinforces the meaning. The formal experimentation isn't simply a matter of literary play; it is integral to the meaning Klein is trying to convey on multiple levels. 

With Carson, I don't always get the same sense of necessity. I sense a writer experimenting with forms, but I don't always see why a particular form is needed to convey what she wants to say. There's an element of indulgence about it, as though the possibilities of literary invention are sometimes more important than the destination.

Take Autobiography of Red. Carson begins with the story of Geryon, a red, winged monster from Greek mythology who was killed by Herakles. In Carson's version, Geryon becomes a contemporary boy who grows into a young man, falls in love with Herakles, suffers the consequences, and eventually encounters him again. The ancient myth becomes a story about sexuality, vulnerability, desire and the difficulty of being different. That's not actually anything particularly new.

But for Carson it's the idea and ramifications of being different that seems to preoccupy her. Geryon's wings, rather than being merely a fantastic feature of a mythological creature, become an outward sign of his difference. His redness is both a physical attribute and a recurring image around which his identity is constructed. Carson takes a figure who was little more than an obstacle in someone else's legendary heroic story and gives him an interior life. Which is also, not particularly new.

And yet I remain unconvinced by the claim that this is a novel in verse. And in spite of the title it’s not an autobiography. (In  another parallel with Klein, the first gloss of The Second Scroll is a poem called Autobiographical). The story can be followed perfectly well as fiction, while the broken lines often seem to me more a matter of presentation than an essential feature of the narrative. The formal choices produce interesting effects, but I'm not sure they transform my understanding of the story to the degree that the designation "novel in verse" suggests.

That may be a matter of taste. But it brings me back to the question of whether experimentation is serving the work or whether the work is serving the experimentation.

Now consider Nox, Carson's book about the death of her estranged brother, Michael. Here, the form is even more conspicuous. The book comes in a box and unfolds into a long accordion-like strip of pages. It contains photographs, fragments of letters, recollections, and entries that resemble dictionary definitions. It is less a conventional book than an object to be physically unfolded and examined.

At its centre is a poem by the Roman poet Catullus, written on the death of his own brother. Carson translates the Latin poem word by word, surrounding each word with definitions and shades of meaning. Alongside this linguistic excavation, she assembles what she can recover of her own brother's life.

The parallels are obvious. Catullus lost a brother; Carson has lost one too. Both are trying to find language for an experience that resists expression. The ancient poem becomes a vehicle through which Carson approaches her own loss.

The form also reflects the nature of memory. A person's life cannot be reconstructed as a seamless narrative from a few surviving letters, photographs and recollections. We are left with fragments, and the gaps between them can be as significant as what remains. The accordion-folded pages embody that fragmentation, while the accumulation of definitions and documents becomes an attempt to recover a person who is no longer there.

This is a more persuasive justification for Carson's formal experimentation than I sometimes find in Autobiography of Red. The structure of Nox is intimately connected to its subject. The difficulty of translating Catullus becomes a metaphor for the difficulty of recovering her brother, while the physical act of unfolding the book suggests the work of uncovering a life.

But does it work emotionally?

The accumulation of material sometimes seems to substitute for emotional immediacy. We are presented with the evidence of a life and the difficulties of reconstructing it, but the elaborate literary apparatus can also become a barrier between the reader and the person being mourned. In fact the construction often distracts from the impact rather than serving it. 

Carson's point may be that a life cannot be fully recovered, that language cannot bridge the distance between the living and the dead. Is this a revelation? 

The book's final, almost unreadable translation seems to acknowledge the limits of the entire enterprise. It's an affecting idea, and I don't dismiss it. But the fact that I can understand what the book is trying to accomplish doesn't mean that I experience its emotional effects as deeply as some other readers evidently do. The self-consciousness of the work becomes its central purpose.

And this is where the comparison with A.M. Klein becomes interesting.

You know who Anne Carson is now, and you have likely never heard of A.M. Klein. I think that has something to do with the moment we're living in.

Klein's work was firmly grounded in a sense of national and cultural purpose. His experiments with language and form drew on traditions that gave them meaning. And the comparison with Carson is apt on another level: both were classicists, deeply interested in the ancient world. Carson made teaching Latin and ancient Greek her living, while Klein was a Latinist as well, but made his living as a lawyer, as well as essayist and newspaper editor. He was deeply devoted to his Jewish identity and to the well-being of his community and felt it was part of his practice as a poet and novelist.

This, to me, points to a fundamental distinction between a modernist writer (Klein) anticipating postmodernism and a postmodern writer (Carson) working in postmodern times. 

Klein remained grounded in the literary traditions and historical experiences of the twentieth century, even as he experimented with forms that would later become associated with postmodernism. Carson, by contrast, seems far less bound by those traditions and treats literary form as something to be taken apart and rearranged. This is red meat for academics and literati, and less interesting for the general reading public. 

Reading Carson, academic terms such as deconstruction, metatext and intersectionality come to mind, concepts that would have been foreign to Klein's literary world. His experiments had a clear purpose: to give the biblical story of the Jewish people contemporary relevance at a pivotal moment in their history.

Carson's purpose seems less clearly defined, but a lot of it seems to be about defining 'difference'. Her work reflects the fragmentation of our age, a time when categories of identity, including gender, are being questioned and public battles are regularly waged over grammar, language and pronouns. What is often called "woke" culture is, among other things, suspicious of inherited categories and the assumptions that sustain them. It isn't difficult to see why Carson's willingness to cross boundaries and unsettle conventions has found an audience, particularly in academic and literary circles.

The world Carson inhabits is primarily one of myth, language and meaning. It is esoteric in a way that Klein's work stubbornly refuses to be. For Klein, the lived historical experience of the Jewish people remains central. The literary form serves that experience, rather than becoming the experience in itself.

Of course, this isn't to say that Carson is indifferent to the world, or that her writing lacks emotional content. Autobiography of Red explores desire, vulnerability and alienation through the reworking of an ancient myth. Nox attempts to grapple with a real death through fragments of memory, language and scholarship. 

But I wonder whether Carson's work sometimes becomes so absorbed in the process of constructing meaning that it loses sight of the world beyond it. The reader is invited to follow associations, make connections and discover resonances, but the journey can feel endless. One meaning leads to another, one literary reference opens onto another, and the work's ingenuity becomes its own justification.

This is not a knock on Carson's skills as a writer. She writes well. She is a master of literary accretion: her lines and meanings accumulate, one on top of another, to provide fresh insights. For that reason, she feels more like a literary archaeologist than a poet. She digs and uncovers fragments of meaning, often literally from ancient sources, drawing on myth and history to create a contemporary narrative.

But for me, reading Carson feels oddly untethered. It's as if I'm wandering through the rooms of a house in a dream, a house constructed out of meanings, myths and language. You inhabit yourself in her writing, but the outside world feels ethereal and unreal. Each room contains details that give you a sense of being somewhere, without ever quite pinpointing an address.

They say that every language is its own country. Yet for Carson, language is less a country, something that grounds you in a physical place, than a means of travel. It carries you between points in time, making stops along the way between antiquity and the present. Those stops may be named Herakles, Sappho, Catullus, Emily Brontë or Virginia Woolf.

The point of it all, sometimes, seems to be that there is no point beyond the journey itself.

To read Carson, you have to be prepared to travel on her terms. I'm sure that for some readers the experience is exhilarating. For me, it's less reorienting than disorienting: travel for the sake of travel, without any particular destination.

Perhaps that's the fundamental difference between Carson and Klein. Klein's formal experimentation brings us back to a shared history, a community and a world outside the book. Carson's takes us into the mechanics of the book itself, into the play of language and the associations it generates. One grounds us; the other sets us adrift. 

Neither approach is inherently superior, but they offer very different experiences of what literature may be. You might say that in Carson's case it seems to be about what storytelling might look like in a post-literate world - where traditional forms, authors and characters are symbols to be leveraged - which I think is ironically part of her allure these days. In that sense, her Nobel is like Dylan's, more about artistry than actually about writing.  

It's never easy to predict an author's legacy. So far, Carson has been a writer who is more admired than beloved. I suspect the Nobel Prize won't change that.

If I could have one wish granted that comes from Carson's Nobel win, it would be that more people discover A.M Klein's The Second Scroll, although in today's political climate, that's unlikely. 

Cartoonish

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

I remember as a kid

asking my father 

if he was a millionaire.

That seemed to be important.

More than the fact 

that he made ladies dresses 

for a living,

which puzzled me

since he’d never worn one himself.

Today, we talk in terms

of billionaires,

and even trillionaires.

How many zeroes in a trillion?

An egg carton full?

How many omelettes 

does that make for the poor?

The world is Simpsons-scripted,

but without the irony

and whiplash dialogue, 

every episode guests

a washed-up rock star

with a heroin addict’s dental plan,

and an orange-tinted politician 

with painted on hair.

I remember when derangement 

wasn’t a qualification

for public office.

So we wait for delivery

of a cardboard box 

marked ACME

with the latest fantasy gadget,

complete with illustrated how-to instructions 

for our scrambled brains:

a rocket powered car,

a Batman flying suit,

a medieval catapult or,

a black two-dimensional hole

a trap 

to outsmart the bird

but inevitably we 

fall through it

to our temporary deaths.

The Greatest Defeat

The greatest defeat is moral defeat.

Or, to put it another way: you know the war has been lost when you become like your enemy.

Or, to put it yet another way: the best revenge is not to become like your enemy.

The last quote is a thought expressed by the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius in Meditations.

These were my thoughts when I heard that the U.S. Secretary of Defense had announced plans to livestream a public execution.

My mind immediately went to the public beheadings carried out by militant jihadist terrorists, including that of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whose murder was filmed and whose execution video was released in February 2002.

The American spectacle will not be a beheading. It will be the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist. On November 5, 2009, Hasan killed 13 people — 12 soldiers and one civilian — and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas, where he was stationed at a Soldier Readiness Processing Center in preparation for deployment to Afghanistan. According to eyewitness accounts, Hasan bowed his head for several seconds before suddenly standing up, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” and opening fire. He was shot himself and left paralyzed from the waist down.

It's horrific stuff, and undeniably an act of radical Islamist terrorism.

Let's put aside for a moment the political stupidity of livestreaming an execution, which would spread like wildfire across anti-American and pro-terrorist social media. The footage would undoubtedly become an international recruiting tool. Hasan would be transformed into a martyr, an inspiration to those who already hate America and the West.

Never give your enemy ammunition for his guns or fuel for his rockets. That's my paraphrase of Napoleon Bonaparte's famous observation: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

What Hegseth is proposing is politically stupid in a thousand other ways. But I'm more concerned with what it says about America in 2026, and what it will take to turn the country around.

We already knew there was a fascination with violence, a fetish for military might, and a vengeful, sadistic streak in trump and his minions. In all likelihood, trump will be bragging about the ratings the day after the execution is broadcast.

What bothers me most is the moral defeat this represents for America: a country founded, at least in principle, on universal values, and on the proposition that political legitimacy rests on something higher than tribal allegiance and ancestral hatreds. It is a defeat of wisdom, idealism and character, as much as of moral progress.

When a country abandons its core values, it surrenders to the very instincts it once claimed to have overcome.

When Daniel Pearl's execution was filmed and released to the world, I thought about the moral chasm between those who committed such an act and those who regarded human life as something more than an instrument of terror. What horrified me was not simply the brutality of the murder, but the perpetrators' pride in their own savagery — their desire to publicize it.

You might argue that in Hasan's case, justice is being administered. And I would agree.

But don't you think Pearl's killers also believed they were administering a form of justice?

The point is that a public execution, like a public beheading, is intended to terrorize. Its purpose is to strike fear into the hearts of those deemed political enemies.

America abandoned public executions generations ago, in part because it sought to represent something different: something more humane, more civilized, more evolved. The manner in which a society administers justice says something about the society itself.

Every war is, to some extent, a war against yourself. America is clearly losing hers.

A Case of Two Nobel Prizes

I'm very happy for Anne Carson, and even happier for Canadian literature. A Nobel Prize certainly helps. It's an accolade that generates attention and confers legitimacy.

But I have to admit I'm scratching my head. It's the second time I've scratched my head about the Nobel Prize in Literature in recent years. The first time was when it was given to Bob Dylan.

I can't think of two more different laureates than Dylan and Carson.

Dylan is inarguably the most influential American songwriter of the last sixty years. Whether he qualifies as a "poet," or however else they tried to squeeze him into a definition that would make him eligible for a literature prize, is a matter of conjecture. I argued at the time that he didn't qualify and shouldn't have received it. A Grammy, sure. But not a Nobel Prize in Literature.

Anne Carson, on the other hand, indisputably qualifies. She has devoted her entire career, as a writer, teacher and translator of Classics, to perhaps the most arcane area of literature. Fortunate for her, then, that Classics appear to be having a moment in popular culture these days. Think of Christopher Nolan's recent smash hit film The Odyssey. It even inspired me to read Homer, which is quite a feat.

One might suppose that this cultural moment factored into the Nobel Committee's decision. In the same way that Dylan's award appeared, at least in part, to be an effort by the Committee to keep the prize culturally relevant, Carson's award might be seen as an effort to bring a highly respected but relatively obscure writer to a much wider audience.

And that raises a larger question: What exactly is the Nobel Prize in Literature trying to accomplish? What does the committee represent, and what does it believe literature ought to be?

When Dylan got the prize, I argued that if the committee wanted to give it to a beloved and respected singer, Leonard Cohen would have been more appropriate. At least Cohen was also a respected poet and novelist before he wrote songs and started singing them.

The Carson choice makes me think of Margaret Atwood. I'm not suggesting that Atwood is necessarily a "better" writer than Carson, or that Carson is undeserving. 

But if part of the Nobel Committee's mandate is to recognize writers who have had an enormous cultural impact, Atwood would seem like the most worthy Canadian recipient. She has been nominated multiple times in the past, has been internationally influential for decades, her work has reached an enormous readership, and she has become one of the defining literary figures, not just in Canada but around the world.

Which makes the Carson choice even more of a head scratcher. The committee didn't choose the Canadian writer with the greatest cultural reach. It chose a writer whose reputation is much more concentrated within literary and academic circles.

So, again, is the Nobel trying to recognize writers of great importance and influence, or is it trying to tell us which writers we ought to be paying more attention to?

In Dylan's case, they seemed to want to leverage his enormous popularity and reputation to make the prize more culturally relevant. With Carson, they appear to be doing almost the opposite: leveraging the reputation of the prize to raise a writer out of relative obscurity.

And they've done that many times before. In fact, that may be the more typical MO of the Nobel. Can you name the writer who won it last year? It was László Krasznahorkai, from Hungary.

Dylan didn't need the Nobel to make him culturally important, and that was part of why I thought it was an unnecessary choice. It seemed a bit too much like a marketing move to me.

Carson is the reverse. Her work was already highly regarded, and she had been winning major prizes in Canada for decades. But the Nobel suddenly gives her a vastly larger audience. I like that idea. According to one critic, Carson has more fans than readers, so she can use the boost.

Oddly, one might argue that choosing Carson, because she is so unknown, risks being a step backwards in terms of the Nobel's cultural relevance. Could it be that giving the Nobel to Carson, exactly 10 years after Dylan got it, is a way of atoning for his?

I've tried to read Carson's work a couple of times over the years and found it heady and dry. That's not a criticism of its literary merit, just an expression of taste. Maybe the Nobel will make me give it another go.

The more interesting question to me is why this writer, this year.

As I say, one theory is the renewed popularity of Classics. Another is that the Nobel Committee, like every cultural institution, is conscious of its own relevance. 

And then there's one more theory about this year's prize which always seems to play a role: Politics.

Canada is having a moment on the global stage, thanks to the leadership of Prime Minister Mark Carney. Our defiance of trump has suddenly given Canada an unusual amount of international attention and enhanced prestige. Could the Nobel committee also be acknowledging this new political leadership? There's even talk of Carney being nominated for the Peace Prize.

Wouldn't that make a nice set of Canadian Nobel bookends?

_________________________

PS. Carney didn't win the Peace Prize. I'm actually relieved. Carney winning would have made trump even harder to deal with for Canada. Maybe the Swedes (or is it the Norwegians) understood.  

My Aim Is True

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

his first record,

christened by his manager

'Elvis'

which he thought was a joke,

made worse later that year

when Presley died.

He’d never liked

Presley’s music

all that much,

had Buddy Holly’s square 

spectacled looks,

and preferred the rockabilly

of Jerry Lee Lewis

and R&B of Little Richard

a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop.

That’s when he grasped

inertia:

once things were rolling

there was no real steering

like the arrow aimed

bow stretched to chin

gut touching lip

held tight with all the muscle

you could muster—

at the instant of release

nature takes over

no telling

where it will strike

how deep

and who gets hurt.

He’d have to learn

to live with it.

[From an interview with Elvis Costello on the 50th anniversary of his debut album My Aim Is True. The title is taken from the song Alison, which describes seeing an old girlfriend and the disappointment he feels about the direction her life has taken. He says that in a larger sense it's about how 'your nature may kill the love you cherish most'.]   

the song ends

the song ends:

that's the beauty.

Brother Theodore

Blessed are those who do not know and cannot think. I envy you folks, I honestly do. I would rather be a contented pinworm, than a tormented Brother Theodore.

- Brother Theodore

Lately Brother Theodore has become a bit of a fascination for me. I think it has something to do with this moment we are living through.

I first came to know Brother Theodore from his guest appearances on the David Letterman Show in the mid-1980s. He was an oddity, a darkly mad comic, maybe the darkest ever. An absurdist tragedian.

An energetic older man, seemingly in his mid-80s, who spoke in scholastic English with a heavy accent. I had the impression that he might have been Greek. He had a compact body with an oblong head full of grey hair combed at odd angles. His head sat on a thick, square body—you had the impression that he was constructed out of blocks. He had beady eyes, a wide mouth and pointy nose, and was dressed in black. He looked like a cartoon villain or a ghoul.

In those days Brother Theodore called himself “a philosopher, metaphysician and podiatrist.” People would go to hear his rambling stream-of-consciousness monologues at his weekly appearances at the 13th Street Repertory Theatre in Greenwich Village.

What I hadn't realized in the 1980s was that Theodore had been performing since the late 1940s and had made television appearances for decades on many of the major talk shows—Jack Paar, Dick Cavett and Merv Griffin, to name a few. He'd actually reluctantly come out of retirement when he appeared on Letterman, which revived his performing career and brought him to the attention of a new, young hipster audience.

Brother Theodore was not “God's gift,” as his name suggests, but rather quite the opposite. He called himself the devil's spawn. His famous refrain was, “As long as there is death, there is hope.” And he was not Greek.

He was Jewish. Born Theodore Gottlieb in 1906, he was the scion of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish textile and fashion-publishing family. He said he was born with “a golden spoon” in his mouth. He was also a chess prodigy and played with Albert Einstein, a family friend and frequent house guest after the family moved to Düsseldorf. He lived the high life in Weimar Germany, a dandy and a playboy.

And then it all came crashing down with the rise of Hitler. At the age of 32, Theodore found himself at Dachau concentration camp. Few of his family members survived, and he was forced to sign away his family's fortune to the Nazis for one Reichsmark. Having personally witnessed horrors, some of which he later recounted, his quick wit and abilities as a performer played an important part in his survival. Eventually, family friend Einstein helped him emigrate to America to restart his life after the war.

What made Theodore so compelling as a performer was his unpredictability. When asked a question, he would respond ambiguously—as though even he didn't know what would come out of his mouth next—and soon branch off into some wordy oration, pseudo-intellectual tangential nonsense, which would in turn send him into a fit of rage, on the cusp of violence.

Given his experience in life, it's not a mystery why unpredictability was his modus operandi, the essence of his performance art. Once you started watching him, you couldn't look away. It was like watching a natural phenomenon: the tranquil sea suddenly frothing and rising into storm-tossed waves crashing against the rocks.

A reflection of his lived experience. And he turned it into art. Tragic comedy. Few knew what was behind it.

“We are puppets in the hands of an insane puppeteer,” Brother Theodore said. 

He wanted his audience, sitting on the edge of their seats in the vice grip of his mad performance, to experience the same helplessness that he had decades earlier.

Blaming Us

The old adage is that you can't have great art without great audiences. Great audiences are ones that appreciate depth and sophistication in art.

I thought about this after re-watching the NFB documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. It follows the 30-year-old poet and debut novelist—it was 1964, the year I was born—shortly after his emergence as a wunderkind of Canadian letters. He was not yet a professional musician or songwriter.

In the film, Cohen is seen reading his poetry to large, attentive, receptive audiences. In one scene, the camera moves from face to face in the audience, and they are positively rapt, especially the thickly mascara'd young ladies.

The size and enthusiasm of the audience was one thing. For a poetry reading! But the age was another. They were mostly young people.

By the time I was working at the Jewish Public Library in the early 90s, where I organized dozens of poetry readings and book launches, the average age of the miniscule audience was in its mid-60s. They were probably the same people, now retired, who'd gone to hear Cohen back in the early 60s.

Leonard saw the writing on the wall, pun intended, and turned to songwriting as his ticket to fame and fortune. He understood that poetry had peaked in popular culture back in the mid-50s.

Poetry requires attention to be appreciated and enjoyed. The poet creates a certain kind of space and then invites the listener into that space as a type of communion. In the visual arts, the successful painter does a similar thing with his creation.

But the audience must be willing and able to go there to partake in that communion. It's not a passive engagement, like watching a television screen. It's more like a ritual—the priest presents the Eucharist, the bread and body of Christ, and the audience is an active participant, bringing to the process their understanding and belief in order for it to have spiritual resonance and meaning. Otherwise, it's just eating a wafer and sipping wine.

It's the audience that makes the difference, and that's why, for the last 60 years or so, in terms of art, we've been eating wafers and sipping wine.

The unsophisticated, shallow audience mistakes utility for quality, and superficiality for importance. If great art is being made, and it might be, it's unlikely anyone knows, because there's virtually no audience for it. Without an audience up to the task, greatness becomes indistinguishable from mediocrity, Leonard Cohen from Taylor Swift.

Screen culture is the very definition of 2-dimensionality. That's why every concert these days has a giant one, or rather a bank of giant screens. The audience needs to have the performance technologically shoved down its throat. And performers like Taylor Swift, in her bright shiny costumes and hair extensions, are tailor-made—pun intended—for the screen. Try to picture a crooning Leonard Cohen on a giant screen.

You get the picture.

But I'm not here to trash Swifties. I want to eulogize our culture, and point a finger not at the artists, but rather at the audiences, at us, for killing it. We're the ones who demanded and accepted drek for decades. We're the ones who've been burying our heads in devices and becoming trained out of our desire or ability to distinguish a real-life singer from AI-generated slop. We're the ones paying thousands of dollars to fly to Paris to watch Celine Dion bombastically lip-sync her way to a career comeback.

Well, not me anyway.

But maybe there's some hope. Maybe culture works like agriculture. After commercial farming saps all the nutrients out of the field with its pesticides and poisons, it will lay fallow for a time, the natural elements will take over, and eventually restore the land so that it can produce a rich harvest once again.

At least, I hope that's what happens, and not desertification.

Heaven

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

Heaven

is a small room

in some forgotten, dilapidated

part of town,

where the buildings

are ramshackle,

and there's an old movie theatre

like out of 

The Last Picture Show,

a sprawling marquee

with a cryptic message 

of missing letters,

canopy necklaced 

in luminous pearls,

and next to that 

a folksy general store,

with brooms for sale 

in the window,

and hats

(everyone wears a hat in heaven)

and next to that a strip bar,

next to a wooden church

with bell tower 

and vaulted stained glass.

Main Street is dusty

because it never rains

in heaven,

and everyone is unemployed,

of course,

they sit around all day

collecting heavenly welfare

and spend it on

booze and smokes

or whatever they want,

which isn't much,

and they smile

all the time 

because they relish

having

nowhere to be

and nothing to do

except to remember

and talk;

And they talk

endlessly

about everything,

share memories

and opinions,

and nobody minds,

they just listen

and laugh,

and laugh and listen,

at all the silly

things being said, 

no one gets angry

or offended,

because after all

they're in heaven

and slowly getting high

and know 

they’re never

coming down.

Hendrix Opened For The Monkees

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG

I’ve dumpster dived and made love

On the same day

I’ve dumpster dived and made love

On the same day

Sometimes you get nothing 

Sometimes you get grace.

You can see continents

From thirty thousand feet

You can see continents

From thirty thousand feet

And never think about the people

Living on the street.

You might imagine the future

You might remember the past

You might imagine the future

You might remember the past

But one thing I know for sure 

The present doesn't last.  

The most valuable thing you have

Is always your attention

The most valuable thing you have

Is always your attention

Someone else is wanting it  

With their own intention.

The machine is not answering

And nobody's home

The machine is not answering

And nobody's home 

The house is furnished, the lawn is mowed, 

And everyone's gone.

Notification

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

There are so many poems

and so few readers,

so many songs

and so few singers,

so many dances

and so few dancers,

so many dreams

and so few dreamers,

so much love

and so few lovers.

Dinner from the freezer

on the assembled table,

knife, fork, napkin—

IKEA instructions,

an unused screw;

phone,

waiting for notification.

Bibi the ‘no other choice’ candidate

Whatever you might say about Benjamin Netanyahu, and there’s plenty, he’s a brilliant political speaker. And his UN speech was one of his best. A masterclass.

It was constructed in such a way as to appear to be addressed to the gathered diplomats and dignitaries of the 81st UN General Assembly. The ones who hadn’t walked out in protest anyway. When in reality he couldn’t care less about them. He even said so, inviting more of them to leave at the outset of the speech. 

In reality, and effect, it was aimed at a domestic Israeli audience in the middle of an election campaign that will decide his immediate political fate and, for all intents and purposes, his lasting legacy.

The refrain that he repeated over and over, carried by media internationally, was “We have no other choice.” When I mentioned the speech to my wife, she said she hadn’t heard it, but then remarked that she’d heard something about, “no other choice.” I asked her what she thought it meant. She said, as Jews, we have no other choice but to fight to stay alive. 

She had only heard some reports about the speech. She did not even hear the context.

That’s how brilliant the speech was. From a simple, remembered phrase she gleaned a memorable, resonant message. One that was perfectly understood by, and appealed to, a diaspora Jew.

And she wasn’t even the main audience.

The main audience of “We have no other choice” was to voters in Israel. It was that he, Netanyahu, was their only choice in the coming election.

He told the story of his heroic older brother Yoni (Jonathan). Upon hearing that they were preparing for an imminent attack, Bibi went to see Yoni at his military base and asked him what was going to happen. Yoni answered: “We’re going to win. We have no other choice.”

If there was any doubt that the intended audience was actually domestic—a sales job to demonstrate his strength, defiance and competence as a leader who cares only for the security of his tiny country that is in constant mortal peril—it was put to rest when he said:

“Devastating Iran’s nuclear facilities was hard, but for me, it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make as Prime Minister. Because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead.”

But would we?

And speaking of peril, what about the peril created by the failures of his government that preceded the catastrophe of October 7? And what about the peril generated by the Gaza military quagmire that has resulted in a humanitarian crisis and left Israel facing unprecedented international condemnation? And what about the consequences of policies that critics argue have contributed to an increasingly dangerous environment for Jewish communities around the world, including the attacks in Australia and, just this week, in Ontario?

Netanyahu had an answer for all that: Lies. Jews have always been hated and will always be hated, through no fault of their own.

So, whatever we’ve been doing in Gaza, in Lebanon, against Iran, we had no other choice.

So vote Bibi, again. The “no other choice” candidate.

Ingenious.

To me, ‘no other choice’ is the motto of an autocrat.

From The Margins

Art has always come from the margins, at least the art that mattered.

The last time Jews had a major artistic impact was about the middle of the twentieth century. In the US, in literature, there were fiction writers like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and Grace Paley. Poets like Emma Lazarus, Allen Ginsberg, Delmore Schwartz, Adrienne Rich and Marge Piercy. In music, composers like the Gershwin brothers, Irving Berlin, Aaron Copland, Jerome Kern and Leonard Bernstein. In jazz, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Stan Getz. In popular music, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Carole King and Neil Diamond. In the visual arts, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Jacques Lipchitz, Philip Guston and Louise Nevelson.

In Canada, the most influential Jewish mid-century cultural figures included A. M. Klein, Mordecai Richler, Irving Layton, Miriam Waddington, Adele Wiseman and Leonard Cohen.

It was the last time Jews weren't mainstream.

They were either immigrants themselves, usually born in another country and brought over as infants, or, more often, children of first-generation immigrants. They straddled a cultural divide between the New World and the Old World, between a new language and cultural tradition and the languages and traditions of their ancestors. In effect they were equi-distant from both.

It was that friction, that tension, that afforded them the perspective they needed to develop a new perspective on their adopted culture.

It was from that position, as outsiders, that they were able, to fight their way in, culturally speaking. To demand their place at the table, against a certain amount of resistance, and ultimately to gain acceptance by reinvigorating their adopted culture with what they could offer artistically.

That process of revitalization has played out over and over again. The outsider brings a fresh voice and perspective to a mainstream culture in need of re-invigoration. In Canada, in literature, we've seen it in recent years with African and South Asian voices, and then Asian voices, coming to the cultural fore.

But once they arrive, then what?

Their art becomes part of the mainstream. Part of the existing cultural soup. And like any ingredient in a recipe, blended-in and barely distinguishable from the entire dish.

It's why no one talks about 'the Jewish writers' anymore. They are just writers. 

I began to wonder: if it's art from the margins that re-invigorates the culture, where is the margin of the future? Where will we find the outsider-artists who are positioned to provide the perspective that helps us better understand who we are?

Perhaps, as culture in all forms becomes increasingly dominated by digitization, the margin will be found outside that realm. I don't mean people who simply don't use computers, or artists who insist on painting with oils on canvas rather than working digitally. I mean something more fundamental.

Digitization isn't simply changing the way we communicate. It is changing the way we understand the world.

More and more of human experience is being translated into something that can be recorded, measured, stored, searched, transmitted and reproduced. A photograph becomes an image file. A book becomes a collection of searchable words. A song becomes a stream. It's all data.

The digital world is extraordinarily good at representing things. But art is more than just representation. It's a record of human experience: love, grief, memory, physical presence, silence, loneliness, aging, death, desire, intuition, mystery. 

They can be represented digitally, of course. We can photograph a face, record a voice, write down a memory. But the representation is not the thing itself.

Perhaps this is where the next cultural margin will emerge.

For the immigrant artist, the distance came from living between two cultures. He could see his adopted culture from the inside and the outside at the same time. The future outsider may occupy a similar position between two worlds: the digital world and the world that exists beyond digital representation.

And this outsider need not reject technology. In fact, he may be completely fluent in it. He may use it more effectively than anyone else. But he will retain an awareness of what it cannot contain.

That awareness could become a new source of artistic perspective. Because, by definition, the artist's modus operandi was to see and express what everyone else has stopped seeing and expressing.

The Jewish immigrant saw the absurdities and assumptions of American culture because he hadn't grown up inside them. The immigrant writer could hear the language differently because it wasn't quite his first language. The child of immigrants could look at his parents' world and his adopted world simultaneously and see things that belonged to neither.

Perhaps the artist of the future will do something similar with the digital world. She will live inside it, but also outside it. She will understand the language of algorithms, platforms, screens and networks, but she will also be conscious of the things that cannot be expressed in that language.

She might discover that the unexplored territory isn't somewhere else. It's right here, found in everything that remains stubbornly human after we have translated almost everything else into information.

Perhaps that is where the next great art will come from. Not from a new ethnic group or a new immigrant culture necessarily, but from people who occupy the margin between what can be represented and what can only be experienced.

Every successful outsider eventually becomes part of the mainstream. That is how culture renews itself. The outsider enters, changes the culture, and eventually becomes indistinguishable from it.

Which means that the margins never disappear. They simply shift. For a long time, they were found at the borders between countries, languages, religions and ethnicities.

Perhaps the next border is between the digital and the undigitized.

And I don't mean that traditional art forms like poetry, stories, music and visual arts will be abandoned. In fact the opposite may happen. Digitization may be deemed an assault on the forms of art experience that we have cherished and enjoyed for millennia and that could spur an embrace of those forms with even more relish and vigor, in a protective way, as a mother protects its beloved child. 

But one thing is for sure. Somewhere along the border between the digital and the non-digital, or should I say the human, someone is already looking at the world in a way the rest of us haven't yet learned how to see.

Me And My Harmonica (reprise)

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG 

for Adam Gussow

I learn to play harmonica,

To my wife's eternal dismay.

But play the harmonica I will,

Whatever she may say.

She hates the crying racket,

The piercing whiny whine.

But that's not how I hear it,

To me it sounds just fine.

She says she can't be near it,

Yells take it somewhere far.

Where nobody can hear it,

'Play it in your car'.

Me and my harmonica,

We're both made to roam.

The one place I can't play it,

Is when I'm in my home.

Me and my harmonica,

We both sing the blues.

Anything that you can have,

Is something you can lose.

I blow a tune in four-time,

Pressed up against my lips.

And when my tune is done,

Back in my pocket it slips.

I move on down the road,

A wanderer alone.

With nothing but a song to sing,

Far away from home.

Out and in, in and out,

My body and my breath. 

Shapes a sound into a song, 

From silence and from death.

  

Me and my harmonica, 

Go out for a long walk.

Try the door on my return,

But she done changed the lock.

Me and my harmonica,

We both sing the blues.

With every tune I learn to play,

I also pay my dues.

Droppings From Heaven

I read this slowly in between other books. This one was odd; Layton used a lot of political and historical references I barely understood. Cool title though.

This is quoted from a two-star review on Goodreads of the 1979 poetry collection Droppings From Heaven by Irving Layton.

I'll say one thing about this brief ‘review’. He's right about the title.

At least he's honest about the reasons for his cluelessness: an unfamiliarity with ‘political and historical references.’

I'm re-reading the book myself. It's true Layton does make a lot of political and historical references in his poems, some of them obscure, like Stalin, Mussolini and the German National Socialists. The book is, in part, a fiery indictment of man's inhumanity to man.

Layton takes on the admonishing voice of the biblical prophet Jeremiah. But he's not ranting about the downfall of Jerusalem. He's warning about the moral degradation that allowed the atrocities of the 20th century. And not even God is spared his outrage.

Cool title indeed.

Layton writes: “The battle for the free, independent individual, for his dignity and waywardness, against the hordes of robots and frightened massmen that a soulless technology is creating in ever-increasing numbers, has already been joined. The stakes are high: they have never been higher and the future of poetry rests on its outcome.”

When he says ‘the future of poetry’ he actually means humanity. They are one and the same to Layton. He knew nothing of social media influencers or AI agents. Much less a malignant narcissist like Donald trump or a diabolical megalomaniac like Elon Musk.

And what of these poetry-reading dullards and amnesiacs who have limited knowledge of politics and even less of history? Well, they are ripe for the picking. They are susceptible to believing in any absurd conspiracy theory, but will be especially enamoured by ones that finger the Jews for all their woes and have a special affinity for those that offer an apocalyptic ending.

As for the state of poetry, when it's actually read, Layton wrote: “Its old enemies are still with us—humbug, mediocrity, gentility. And, striding with ever-increasing confidence, a couple of newcomers—machine-tooled professionalism and a bloodless scholasticism lugging a supply of cosmetics to rouge it into the appearance of life.”

It's unsurprising that so little of the stuff gets read anymore.

Layton might have added to his list of newcomer ‘enemies’ the elevation of marginalized identities. The job of the arts since his death in 2006 (the year Facebook was launched)—particularly the kind on public life support like poetry publishing—is, too often, political. Look at the submission guidelines of most poetry publishers these days and you will find a line that says something like ‘BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors are especially encouraged to submit.’

I first came across the acronym BIPOC about twenty years ago in a rejection letter from a publisher to whom I had submitted a novel manuscript. The editor wrote something along the lines of—don't take this personally, but we would have been more open to considering your novel if your protagonist had been a woman instead of a middle-aged man, or if you were BIPOC.

Personally, when I read a book—or meet a stranger face to face—I couldn't care less if the author is BIPOC or LGBTQ+. Nor do I care how they identify religiously, ethnically or politically, or what hockey team they root for.

All I care about is truth-telling and being moved by their humanity. And not your truth or my truth. THE truth. And yes, the truth really is still out there. 

Somewhere.

The Era of Moral Relativism

I've said this before: I was educated as a moral relativist. I'm guessing most of my generation was.

Moral relativism is the belief that right and wrong are culturally dependent. In other words, they differ from society to society, and even from person to person. According to this view, no single moral code is necessarily better than any other. I believe in the Ten Commandments, you believe in honour killing — it's all the same. We should not judge the behaviour or values of other cultures because, if no objective moral standard exists, there is no basis for claiming that our culture is more right than theirs.

Moral relativism became ascendant in academia through the intersection of several intellectual and cultural developments.

First was the decline of religion in education and public life. Second was the influence of Marxist and post-colonial thought, which increasingly interpreted history through the prism of oppressor and victim. Third was the emergence of postmodernism, with its argument that culture, knowledge and even truth itself are shaped by underlying structures of power.

The western elite, particularly the academic elite, having imbibed these ideas, grew ashamed of their privilege and power, and they taught their privileged students to feel likewise.

I thought about this recently as I watched a press conference with filmmaker Alex Gibney, discussing his new Elon Musk biopic, along with two participants in the film. I haven't seen it, but by all accounts it sounds pretty devastating.

I listened to the way they described Musk, and it sounded familiar.

A megalomaniac and a technocrat. Someone who believes every human problem can be solved through scientific thinking, engineering and efficiency. A person who believes in the "great man" theory of history — a Howard Roark-type character, if you've read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead — who equates empathy with weakness, lives by the principle that the ends justify the means, and believes power should be wielded by strong-willed visionaries.

Musk is six and a half years younger than me, so he belongs to my generation and wasn't educated that far behind me. The description of him sounds a lot like some of the people I met in graduate school.

I graduated from McGill University in 1986 and then went to a school called IUHEI in Geneva, Switzerland, now called the Geneva Graduate Institute. It was a postgraduate institute of study and research founded with the mission of promoting international relations as a means of resolving global problems.

You'd think a place like this would attract a lot of very smart people, and it did — present company excepted. The seminar classes were very small, usually 10 to 20 people, and most of the students came from elite universities around the world. In truth, I felt like a fish out of water sitting around the table with graduates of Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and the like.

You'd also think these ambitious young people would be idealists: people who believed in the school's mission of solving global problems through international relations — problems like Cold War tensions, civil war, mass poverty and economic underdevelopment, global health and so on.

I certainly was. I arrived in Geneva thinking I might eventually find work at the UN or for an NGO. I was bent on doing my part to save the world.

There were some people like me there. But, to my surprise, there were many more who seemed to have other ambitions. Particularly the American students.

They seemed to want to become hedge fund managers, Wall Street derivatives traders, or perhaps get jobs with one of the big commodities trading companies based in Geneva.

In other words, they were less interested in promoting values than in acquiring personal wealth. They were in Geneva because it looked good on a résumé.

The leaders of tomorrow.

I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised. After all, these were the 1980s — the heady days of "Greed is Good," when Wall Street traders were making their first million before they turned 25. It was the era that produced what we now think of as the Epstein class: people for whom wealth, status and power became ends in themselves.

Money had become a huge driving force, particularly in education. A generation was beginning to pivot away from an arts-and-humanities-based curriculum toward STEM and business education. That was where the money was.

Universities built brand-new, multi-story business-school buildings and scientific research campuses while their arts faculties languished in old, neglected classrooms.

Philosopher Allan Bloom wrote about this in 1987 in his surprise bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. He documented what he believed would be the cultural, moral and political price of raising a generation of relativists.

Not even Bloom could have imagined a President trump or an Elon Musk.

Both represent, the idea that there is no higher moral authority beyond the individual and his own conception of what works. Wealth and power are their own justification, rule of law an obstacle to be overcome. 

Musk and trump may not have the same pedigree as the misguided student protesters who cheered for Hamas after the terrorist attacks of October 7. But they share the same moral obtuseness, and play the same special interest, identity politics game.

The irony is that moral relativism was supposed to make us more tolerant. Instead, it left us without the intellectual tools to explain why some things are simply wrong — regardless of who does them.

I want to be understood

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

I want to be understood,

like every fool.

Like the wind.

Like the honeybee.

I'm dumb as a meteorologist,

or apiologist, 

not content 

to act the vane, 

or spin with 

the momentum of the planet.

Or to get buzzed 

by the petal to petal,

pollen dance 

tickling my nostrils,

hachoooo!

I want to be understood;

translate it all

into a gibberish of symbols,

a code to breach

the defences of another mind 

like an exploding drone.

Why can’t I just

sit back and jaw-drop

ooh! and ahh!

under the canvas Big Top

along with the other yokels;

watch the lion that doesn’t decapitate 

his trainer, and

the trapeze-idiots doing flips,

catcher swinging 

like a clock

open arms

waiting and

waiting and

waiting

and

to be saved.

The New Rock Stars

Trumpapalooza.

That’s what many called the unprecedented—and unusual—midterm Republican convention held over the past two days in Dallas.

And trump, who, if you believe the polling, is the most unpopular president ever at this point in his term, proclaimed that he should be on the ballot in November. To make sure he was the star of the show, he spoke on both days of the convention.

There was a lot of news coming out of the event. But the biggest announcement, delivered by the star of the show himself from the stage, was that if Republicans win both the House and the Senate in November, every American adult would receive a cheque for $5,000.

Don’t think of it as bribery to get your vote, which would be illegal. It’s a dividend, trump said, on an economy doing gangbusters.

Except the economy is not doing gangbusters. Far from it. But put that aside for a moment. And put aside the fact that paying every American adult $5,000 would add somewhere between $1.15 and $1.35 trillion directly to the national deficit. And put aside the fact that it’s essentially trump using Americans’ own money to pay them back for his political benefit.

Trump has made BS promises like this before. Remember the DOGE dividend? You know trump is lying, especially when he starts with, “I promise.” The more grandiose the promise, the bigger the lie.

Still, I’m sure some Americans are dumb enough to fall for this ruse. Like they've fallen for so many others.

But what caught my attention wasn’t the obviously corrupt scheme of a blatantly corrupt politician. It was the show, the spotlight on the main-stage headliner.

Trumpapalooza.

When I was growing up, we looked up to musicians and actors as idols. Rock stars and movie stars occupied the spotlight of our young imaginations. Usually there was the same movie that everyone was going to see and talk about. There was the same rock concert that everyone wanted a ticket for.

As rock stars became more popular, rock concerts got bigger and bigger. First they filled clubs. Then theaters. Then hockey arenas. By the end of the 1970s, they were filling football stadiums. By the 1980s, rock concerts had grown into multi-stage, multi-day extravaganzas.

Yes, there was Woodstock and the Monterey Pop Festival in the late 1960s. But Woodstock was a massive money loser, and Monterey was a nonprofit event; most of the artists weren’t even paid to perform. 

The first Lollapalooza came along in 1991 and helped establish the template for the next generation of this kind of event.

But something else happened along the way. As the concert became bigger, the event itself became the attraction. People weren’t necessarily going simply to see their favorite performer. They were going to be part of something. The focus shifted from the performer to the spectacle.

You weren’t just attending a Pearl Jam concert. You were participating in an event. And that distinction matters more than many realize.

In subsequent years, the dilution of attention away from individual performers only accelerated with new technology. Streaming services for movies and music put another nail in the coffin of the old star-making machinery as Joni Mitchell famously sang about it in Free Man in Paris.

Or has it? Maybe it just changed. Maybe the new star-making machinery is social-media-driven politics.

Trumpapalooza got me asking myself a question: Are politicians the new rock stars? Is this what trump understood before anyone else did? Is this why he seemed able to seize the moment with his shtick in a way that no one else could?

Think about his political rallies. The arena. The giant screens. The music. The merch. The chants. The performance. And finally, the headliner takes the stage and feeds the dreams of thousands of fans with what essentially amounts to a fantasy world.

Trump understood the model. The political party is becoming the record label. The campaign is becoming the tour. The rally is becoming the concert. And the politician is becoming the rock star.

The Democrats are beginning to recognize the new culture. They are looking for their own rock star. Is it Gavin Newsom? He’s got the looks and the charisma. AOC? She’s got the following and the chops, but is she singing the right song? This new kid in Texas, James Talarico, seems to have the right image?

But Democrats still don’t fully understand the model. They are looking for a the rock star. But trump understood something else.

The rock star isn’t successful because he is the best musician in the world. He is successful because he can create a connection with an audience. He can make people feel something. He can make them believe that they are part of something bigger than themselves.

And rock stars don’t deal in truth. They deal in dreams. They deal in fantasies, something to believe in. That’s why they are called fans.

And perhaps that is the most important thing trump understood about the new political culture. A politician used to be judged by his policies, his accomplishments and whether he kept his promises.

A politician-rock star is judged differently. A citizen asks, did you do what you promised? A fan asks, do you still represent the fantasy I put my faith in?

A citizen changes his mind when the facts change. A fan changes the facts to preserve his faith in their idol.

That is the danger of turning politics into entertainment. Entertainment requires fans. Democracy requires citizens. Citizens evaluate. Fans cheer.

And trump may have understood before everyone else that, in the age of social media, the politician who can become the biggest star can also become the most powerful politician.

Trumpapalooza, this bizarre mid-term event with fantasy promises wasn’t just a political convention. It was an example of what American politics has become.

China

My big brother has become a big fan of China. He lives in the U.S.

It started after a business trip. He imports a product from China that is made for his company, like so many American companies. He visited to meet with his manufacturer and talk about a new product they were developing.

He was impressed by what he saw. Huge modern cities. Well-run transportation. Clean public spaces. Automation everywhere. Courteous, disciplined, hard-working people providing efficient service. No apparent crime.

He came home to see dirty cities with people living on the street. Infrastructure in disrepair. Rude people, seemingly angry and complaining about everything.

Last week he texted me that the SWAT team had surrounded the residential building next to his. It was on the local news. A man had apparently murdered his girlfriend and was now armed and holed up in his apartment. The police managed to extract him with tear gas.

China, he said, is at least twenty years ahead of the West right now. It's the future.

If that's the case, then why are so many people leaving the country? And why are they still clambering to come to the West?

He said that's a lie. Most people who leave China go back. They are flooding back in the hundreds of thousands.

I doubted it, so to verify, I asked Chat. According to the most recent statistics, China is experiencing negative net migration—that is, outflow vastly outpaces inflow. Recent UN-based estimates put net migration at roughly minus 319,000 in 2024. 2025 statistics seem to indicate that the trend is slowing, but it's still negative in the hundreds of thousands.

Anecdotally, my brother's contention sounded plausible to me because one of my Chinese work colleagues recently moved back after working with our company for eight years. She was being groomed to take over as the Controller, so her decision came as a surprise. But her circumstances seemed unique. Her family owned a successful manufacturing company in China, and her father had recently struggled with serious illness. There was no one else in the family who could help run the business, thanks to China's one-child policy from two decades ago.

Over the years, this colleague and I had many conversations about China, and she was a staunch defender. I always understood her attitude as more an expression of pride in her heritage and culture than an argument about the relative merits of Chinese society and politics.

I have worked with many Chinese colleagues for a long time. They are typically young women who came to Canada to get an education, found work, usually in the accounting department, and stayed. I enjoy talking to them about why they came to Canada and chose to stay, especially considering the weather here.

It always starts with education. That doesn't mean China doesn't have great schools. It's through an education visa that these migrants gain access to potential residency. So they are coming for the quality of life, not just the education.

I've heard several reasons for coming: to get away from an overbearing, demanding family; to get away from congested cities; because Canada has lots of space, lots of clean water, and lots of clean air; for the adventure and sense of personal liberty.

I rarely hear economic reasons, because most of these migrants come from relatively well-off families. If they can afford to come here for an education, it signifies that they already have means.

I never hear about politics. And from that I conclude that either it doesn't play a part in their decision or, more likely to my mind, they are simply conditioned not to talk about politics.

One time, my colleague and I were talking about her use of WeChat, which is China's main social media platform, sometimes likened to their version of Facebook. But WeChat is much more than Facebook. It's not just a way for people to stay in contact with their old high-school chums. It's also a banking system, a mobile payment app, and even provides access to government programs.

I argued that WeChat was more like a government surveillance system and a mechanism for social control than a communications platform. I asked her, "Can you criticize Xi on WeChat?"

She answered, "Why would I want to criticize Xi?"

When I told this story to my pro-China brother, he defended her answer. He said that I had a blind spot because I was indoctrinated to believe that criticizing the government represented an important value. "You don't understand," he said, "because of your conditioning."

I suppose he's right about that. I can't help but think that criticizing the powerful, holding them to account for the power we give them, is important.

"If you understood her point of view, you'd see that she trusts the government to have the public good in mind, because that's the basis of their system. And it's working well. She sees no reason to criticize the government."

"Is it that she sees no reason to criticize because it's working, or because it's futile, and potentially dangerous, to criticize?"

My take-away from my conversation with my brother is concern for the future of democracy.

I'm having more and more conversations with people who have lost confidence in what democracy represents—in terms of freedom, values, prosperity and security. The collapse is primarily happening in the United States, which drags the rest of the world down with it.

And China is the winner. With every American failure, it looks better and better. Even to a person like my brother, who is educated, has a BA in political science, and understands what's at stake.

To me that's the scariest part.

You’re Gettin Old

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG

You’re gettin old and you don't even notice (x 3)

Then one day you're old.

You’re gettin poor and you don’t even notice (x 3)

Then one day you’re poor.

You’re gettin dumb and you don’t even notice (x 3) 

Then one day you’re dumb.

You’re gettin bald and you don’t even notice (x 3)

Then one day you’re bald.

You’re gettin fat and you don’t even notice (x 3)

Then one day you’re fat.

You're gettin ugly and you don't even notice (x 3)

Then one day you’re fat.

You’re gettin old and you don't even notice (x 3)

Then one day you're old.

Susan Moss z'l 1968-2026

Susan Moss was a stubborn woman. She was also cranky, sardonic, uncompromising, funny and totally lovable in her Susan Moss sort of way. Pretty much everyone who knew Susan loved Susan, and that's a lot of people. But most of all Susan was very very talented and committed to her art. She was the preeminent photographer of the Montreal music scene for the past three decades.

Susan passed away yesterday at the age of 58. She'd been diagnosed about a month ago with metastatic pancreatic cancer, and decided she was going out on her own terms - exactly how she did everything in her life - with MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying).

The Gazette's obituary calls Susan a "Montreal music scene legend." She was certainly that. To me she was my closest friend David's little sister, who I knew probably since she was about 10 years old. When we were growing up I can remember her older brother complaining about how Susan drove the family crazy with her stubbornness. 

As far as I can tell she never changed. And I mean that in the best way possible. 

The last time I saw Susan was at David's 60th birthday party, almost two years ago. The whole family was there and the warmth and love in the room was overwhelming. Before that it was at a Joe Jackson concert a few years earlier. It had been a long time since I saw Susan and I was almost as excited to spot her next to the stage with her camera, as I was to see Joe and his band on stage. By that time Susan's legendary status was firmly established. 

I haven't been a big concertgoer since getting married and having kids. And it was at concerts you were guaranteed to bump into Susan. I went mainstream. Susan never did, and never could. It just wasn't her.

It was that single-minded, uncompromising nature that drove Susan to perfect her craft. She loved what she did and loved being around the ragtag community that grew around the music scene, along the Main (Saint-Laurent Boulevard). I'm not sure 'ragtag' is the right word. But there's no doubt Susan was attracted to the edgier side, the artists and barflies who challenged convention. Musician Patrick Watson is quoted in the Gazette as saying "She’s very rock ‘n’ roll... She’s gritty, very punk rock but elegant. She’s part of everything that embodies this city, part of the city history.” 

I'm not sure 'elegant' is the right word, it's not what comes to my mind when I think of Susan. The words that do come to mind that go with 'punk rock' are 'honesty' and 'integrity'. Susan embodied that. 

I might speculate about her interest in musicians. I would have loved to ask her about it, as you would any artist about their subject matter. What fascinated her about it. Whether it was the spectacle of the show, or the persona of the performer. The fact that, like her, musicians have individual visions and refuse to conform.

It can't be overstated how much she loved what she did, and there was no compromising that. As it should be. 

Her untimely death comes as a devastating blow to family and friends. She told the Gazette in her final interview, “Other people are like, ‘I want to live to 100.’ Why? That sounds awful. Retirement didn’t seem that fun to me.”

Susan had fun. A lot of it. A 'ridiculous amount', she said. She considered herself incredibly lucky to have lived her dream. We can find some solace in that.

Canada On The Same Side As Iran?

It’s not a nuclear Iran. It’s not a nuclear North Korea. It’s not a globally dominant China.

The thing we have to worry about most in the world today is that not enough people take the United States seriously anymore.

And I don’t mean its military or economic power. I mean its word.

The ultimate source of power and authority is your word. And trump has debased and squandered that power for the United States. When your words carry weight, you don’t have to rely on missiles and sanctions to get people to listen.

And when your word is strong, you can rely on something even more powerful: silence.

When the world respects what you represent, your reputation precedes you. Your mere presence embodies power and authority.

It’s why the United States never needed a military parade on the Fourth of July. It didn’t have to show what it had. Everyone already knew.

Until trump ordered one that is—a clear sign that he did not understand this basic principle of international affairs, or the power of the office he had inherited.

Think about it. Since World War II, the United States has never faced a sustained conventional military challenge from another major power. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and now Iran were all wars of choice.

The times the United States has been directly attacked have involved terrorists, as on 9/11, or proxies, where responsibility could be obscured or plausibly denied. No major country would openly challenge the United States. That was the power of American reputation.

Now that reputation is in shambles. And that creates a slippery slope.

First, America’s presence is no longer taken seriously. Then its word. Then its sanctions. Then, eventually, its military.

When you are no longer taken seriously, you have to use more military power, impose more sanctions, and issue more threats and demands just to accomplish what once could have been accomplished by a phone call.

That’s a very dangerous place to be. And there is another consequence that may be even more important.

Countries begin preparing for a world in which the United States can no longer be trusted.

Iran and Canada are, in very different ways, responding to the same fundamental problem: what do you do when your relationship with the United States becomes uncertain and unpredictable?

Both have become highly motivated in their conflicts with the United States because trump has made those conflicts existential. And when a conflict becomes existential, victory is no longer necessarily about defeating the other side. It's about surviving. A question of will.

Iran will outlast the United States. 

Canada will outlast the United States. 

Because both countries understand the basic calculation. They simply have to survive long enough for the political circumstances to change.

Iran is already maneuvering to take advantage of a changing balance of power, consolidating its influence around the Persian Gulf and positioning itself for a future in which American power is less decisive.

Canada is doing something similar in its own way: distancing itself from dependence on the United States and strengthening its relationships with Europe and Asia.

Trump is bankrupting the United States in its most valuable asset: its credibility.

Something that took decades for the United States to build can take only a few years to destroy.

Once countries stop believing that American power is permanent, they begin making decisions based on the assumption that it isn’t.

Alliances change. Trade changes. Military relationships change.

And the world changes with them.

And unfortunately, if history is any indication, those periods of global transition come with tremendous costs.

Costs that we will all have to pay.

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The American poet Wendell Berry passed away yesterday at the age of 92. I always liked his work for its gentle wisdom, plain lyrical language, and common touch that, I think, derives from working on the land. Berry was a farmer in Kentucky. I would say that he was in the mold of Robert Frost, except that unlike Frost, who was born and grew up in San Francisco, Berry was the real deal. 

He was also a bit of a throwback to an earlier time. The vast majority of the poetry that was published and became popular in the post-war era was largely urban-based and cosmopolitan in sensibility. Berry's poetry stayed stubbornly close to his agrarian roots. 

This is not to say that he didn't write about pressing issues over his many many volumes. He did. In a poem called Against The War In Vietnam he wrote: Believe the automatic righteousness of whoever holds an office. Believe the officials who see without doubt that peace is assured by war, freedom by oppression. The truth preserved by lying becomes a lie. Believe or die. 

Berry's poetry often carried a strong political edge and social critique. With the social, political and economic upheaval of modern technology, and environmental degradation brought on by climate change - these "despair for the world" provoking times -  his poetry feels more necessary today than ever. 

I love this one too. Especially the lines:

make a poem that does not disturb / the silence from which it came.

How to Be a Poet

By Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i   

Make a place to sit down.   

Sit down. Be quiet.   

You must depend upon   

affection, reading, knowledge,   

skill—more of each   

than you have—inspiration,   

work, growing older, patience,   

for patience joins time   

to eternity. Any readers   

who like your poems,   

doubt their judgment.   

ii   

Breathe with unconditional breath   

the unconditioned air.   

Shun electric wire.   

Communicate slowly. Live   

a three-dimensioned life;   

stay away from screens.   

Stay away from anything   

that obscures the place it is in.   

There are no unsacred places;   

there are only sacred places   

and desecrated places.   

iii   

Accept what comes from silence.   

Make the best you can of it.   

Of the little words that come   

out of the silence, like prayers   

prayed back to the one who prays,   

make a poem that does not disturb   

the silence from which it came.

Who Are We, Really?

I think a lot of people are scared to be who they really are.

That simple statement raises some complex questions. For one thing, is anybody really anything?

I think there is a 'real' person inside each of us. Another way of saying it is the 'authentic' person. In the nature-versus-nurture debate, the 'authentic' person is the one closest to our unique individual nature and character. It is primarily determined by the particular mixture of genetics and biochemistry we are born with. These express themselves in our physical and emotional traits: our dispositions, capacities and abilities.

We are complex life forms. But if you think of it in plant terms — at the risk of oversimplifying — it's essentially everything that is already in the seed. A package of potential that will grow into the flower it is capable of becoming. And every flower is a little different.

Obviously, the environment plays an enormous role in determining how close the plant comes to realizing the potential contained in its seed. For plants, that environment is relatively easy to manipulate to achieve good results: water, light, nutrient-rich soil and so on. But there are environmental factors that are harder to control: climate, weather, disease, predatory insects.

And plants have virtually no means of effecting their environment to optimize their potentiality. No agency. Whereas we do. We have the ability to extensively shape our environment.

That, essentially, seems to be one of the purposes of consciousness. We don't merely respond to our environment; we can reflect upon it, alter it, and create new environments in which we can live.

And this is where education comes in.

I once had a teacher explain to our classroom that the reason it was important for us to learn the skills we were being taught was so that we could make a living. It was possibly the most jaded and reductive explanation for education I had ever heard. I remember him saying something like, "I am teaching you how to spell like the bankers spell."

Of course, learning the skills necessary to earn a living is important. But that isn't the reason for education.

The Latin root of the word education is educare, meaning to rear, nurture, nourish or bring up. Nowhere in its meaning is the idea of earning money.

The reason for education, in my view, is to nourish the sense of self: to learn how we think, how we learn, what interests us, what we are capable of, and ultimately what we might become.

In that sense, education is really an expansion of consciousness.

Early education should certainly focus on thinking skills and the basic abilities needed to function within society. But during those formative years, children should also be learning something equally important: that what comes naturally to them has value, and that part of growing up is learning how to recognize, develop and trust what they already possess inside themselves.

Instead, we often teach them to distrust it.

We teach them to look outward for the standards by which they should measure themselves. We teach them to adapt to the demands of an external, constructed world, even when those demands conflict with their own inclinations and capacities.

This is isn't accidental.

The modern education system developed alongside the Industrial Revolution, and it inherited an industrial conception of human value. It established a hierarchy of abilities based largely on their economic usefulness. Mathematics and science were highly valued because they produced measurable, practical results. Technical competence was rewarded. Standardization, efficiency and conformity became virtues.

The arts and humanities, meanwhile, were increasingly treated as secondary — worthwhile, perhaps, as a sideline, but not essential or critical.

There is a great irony in what is happening now.

The very abilities our society has spent generations telling us are the most valuable — calculation, pattern recognition, information processing, technical analysis — are precisely the abilities that machines excel at.

And so, strangely enough, the AI revolution may be forcing us to reconsider the very hierarchy of human abilities that helped produce it.

We aren't particularly alarmed when AI is used to perform scientific calculations or analyze enormous quantities of data. But when it begins writing poetry, composing music, creating images or producing human-like conversation, something feels wrong, even threatening. Because those activities were never merely useful to us.

They were how we recognized ourselves.

The AI debate is therefore ultimately a debate about how we define ourselves — about who we really are.

For many decades, we have increasingly thought of human beings as wealth-generating factors of production. We have measured ourselves by what we can produce, how efficiently we can produce it, and how much economic value we can generate.

Perhaps AI will finally force us to confront the poverty of that definition.

Because if a machine can perform more and more of the things we once considered evidence of human intelligence, then what remains uniquely human cannot simply be our ability to calculate, process information or even produce things.

Maybe the answer lies somewhere closer to the seed. Our individual nature. Our particular sensitivities and dispositions. Our capacity for experience, meaning, love, imagination, curiosity and creation. The strange and unpredictable combination of qualities that makes one person different from another.

We spent centuries reshaping our environment in order to make life better, only to begin reshaping ourselves to fit the technological environment we created. We were on track to do more than reshape nature. We were beginning to replace it altogether with a technological alternative.

And now we're starting to freak out about a full-scale takeover.

But perhaps what we're really afraid of isn't that machines will become too much like us. Perhaps we're afraid that, after generations of teaching ourselves to become more useful, more efficient and more productive, we may finally have to confront the possibility that those were never the things that made us human in the first place.

AI isn't just challenging what humans can do. It's challenging us to remember who we really are.

Choosing the Right Frame

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

A painting bought cheap at the thrift store,

The cloth matting soiled with oil and grime,

Stains of another place, from another time,

By others who beheld and loved it before. 

A Montreal winterscape when life was hard,

Painted in ‘38 by an artist long-ignored,

The gathering sorrow of Europe is fore- 

Shadowed, our city rendered in graveyard

Tones; rust, muted blues, greens and greys,

Rooftops swathed in thick chimney smoke,

Ramshackle wooden balconies bent and broke,

Tenements of sacrifice and malaise. 

Today our preoccupation is decor,

Choosing from an assortment of frames,

Columns of hung parentheses, many the same,

Initial thoughts of matching walls and floor. 

Then a word surfaces about what the artist meant,

His travails, a certain responsibility moves us

To deeper levels, we begin to discuss

Other dimensions—take of ourselves a measurement.

The framer waits impatiently as we mull our choice.

I lean in, share with my wife our sweet secret,

She smiles, the framer fails to interpret.

She tells him to make us an invoice.

The Monetization of Life

There used to be something we did called work.

Work was how you made money to pay for life’s expenses.

These days, work is increasingly being replaced by the concept of monetization. The reason is simple: almost anything can be monetized. The things we used to call work, but also the things we used to call leisure, entertainment, friendship, attention, personal expression—and increasingly, even our bodies.

In fact, monetization is gradually taking over more and more aspects of our lives. It is encroaching on everything.

I started thinking about this because my brother sent me an Instagram link that disturbed me to my core. It was a man talking about the blood-products industry, particularly plasma.

The United States is the global powerhouse in the supply of blood plasma and plasma-derived products. It supplies a huge proportion of the world’s plasma, up to 70%, in large part because people in the United States are permitted to sell their plasma, unlike in most other countries. Blood plasma is a commodity in the United States.

There are more than a thousand commercial plasma-collection centres across the country, many of them operated by for-profit companies. Studies have found that these centres are disproportionately located in economically disadvantaged communities, where the financial incentive to sell plasma is presumably greatest.

The point of the Instagram poster was that capitalism is an exploitative and inhumane economic system. When it is done with your labour, it takes your time (and your soul). When it can’t suck anything more out of you, it comes for your blood. And it relentlessly seeks out those who are most economically vulnerable.

It is an important perspective. And it raises many more complicated moral and ethical questions.

How can we condemn the commercialization of blood products when the need for them is so great and the demand is not being met by voluntary donations? If people need plasma to survive, and there isn’t enough of it, then paying people to provide it does solve a real problem. But it also means that one person’s economic desperation can become another person’s medical supply.

As a Canadian, currently feeling angry about the economic pressure being brought to bear on our sovereignty by the Trump administration, I was particularly shocked to learn just how dependent Canada is on the United States for plasma-derived products. We important 83% of our blood product from the US. 

Canadian law does not permit the commercial sale of human blood and plasma in the same way that it is permitted in the United States. The underlying concern is that once we begin treating parts of the human body as commodities, where do we draw the line?

And yet we import American plasma products to meet our needs.

Isn’t that hypocritical? More importantly, isn’t it a national-security vulnerability?

A country should probably think carefully about depending on another country for something as fundamental as the biological material required for its own health-care system—particularly when relations between the two countries have become as unpredictable as they are today.

But the larger point is more instructive.

The story of modern life is, to a considerable extent, the story of the monetization of everything.

Our labour was monetized long ago. Now our attention is monetized. Our preferences are monetized. Our personal data are monetized. Our identities are monetized. Our relationships increasingly become content. Our private lives become brands.

The monetization of our bodies and blood seems to be a logical extension. The separation between the personal and the marketable has gradually disappeared.

There used to be boundaries around what we considered appropriate to buy and sell. Some things were simply not supposed to be commodities. Human organs, for example. Intimacy. Friendship. Personal identity. Perhaps even leisure.

But those boundaries have been under relentless pressure.

Remember leisure time?

Since the Industrial Revolution, it has gradually been squeezed out of our lives. One of the great labour debates of the past century has been about reducing the working week—from six days to five, and now, increasingly, from five to four.

How quaint.

What if I told you that medieval Europeans had something like 140 religious feast days and holidays every year, according to the nineteenth-century historian Pierre Émile Levasseur? That is an astonishing proportion of the calendar devoted, at least officially, to celebration, worship and communal life.

The picture gets even stranger when we go further back.

This comes from an interesting essay by Ted Gioia, who cites the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’s argument that some hunter-gatherer societies spent only around 15 to 20 hours a week obtaining food and meeting their basic material needs.

There are obvious qualifications to this comparison. Life expectancy was brutally low, infant mortality was extraordinarily high, and “work” is not necessarily an easy thing to define across radically different societies.

Still, the broader point is worth considering.

For most of human history, the objective of economic activity was not necessarily to maximize economic activity.

The Industrial Revolution changed that.

We made extraordinary gains in sanitation, medicine, food production and life expectancy. We became wealthier and, on average, lived much longer.

But somewhere along the way, we developed the strange idea that the additional time we had been given should be spent producing more wealth, consuming more, and growing the economy.

In the age of tech, that has transformed into the invasive and ubiquitous concept of monetization.

The new technologies ensure that virtually everything can be monetized, even leisure.

We go on vacation and take photographs for Instagram. We exercise and post the results. We have hobbies that become side hustles. We turn our opinions into content. We monetize our attention by watching advertisements and monetize our creativity by building personal brands.

The Industrial Revolution gave us more time alive. The modern market has spent much of the intervening period figuring out how to put a price on that time.

And perhaps that is the real paradox of modern life.

We conquered scarcity, increased our life expectancy and acquired more leisure than almost any generation before us. And then we built an economic system that taught us to regard all of it as an opportunity cost.

The question is no longer simply whether we work too much. It is whether there is anything left in our lives that we are allowed to do for no economic reason at all.