we can always tread lightly, with discretion. This one's just too juicy not to share. In my (almost) fifteen years of working the street it was a new one.
A longtime tenant of mine, a screenprinter and one of the nicest guys I've known in the game, comes to tell me he's selling his bizness and retiring. He will not be renewing his lease at termination and has someone to take the place over. Fine. I meet with the purchaser. (Technically, he's not actually buying my former tenant's bizness, only the factory, large screenprinting machines, dryers, compressors, ventilation equipment etc.) The purchaser seems like a nice enough guy. Young. Mild mannered. Makes no fuss. I'm told by my former tenant that the purchaser has already begun operating the bizness, has put the utilities (electricity and gas bills) under the new company name, and the only thing left for him is to get a new lease. I do my standard checks on the purchaser's company (supplier references, bank) and everything is clear. I draft the new lease. The purchaser comes to sign. He signs but at the meeting I'm told, "Oh, I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I left my chequebook in the office. I'll be back tomorrow to give the security deposit and pay the first month's rent." One day passes, two, five... I call the phone numbers he left me. Out of service. The home address he provided belongs to a relative. "He doesn't live here," I'm told. The guy's vanished, without leaving a trace. I dig some more, check the public record on registered loans. As I suspected. Using the factory equipment as collateral, the guy conned the bank into giving him a quarter million dollars and, without doing a single day of bizness, the fraudster put a key to the door and walked away leaving everything. The only part of his game I couldn't quite figure out was how he got the bank loan in the first place. A lease is normally a prerequisite. According to the record, he had secured the loan two months prior to signing the new lease (and anyway, I never gave him a copy of the new lease because I was waiting for the deposit cheques.) Turns out he got a copy of the former tenant's lease and forged new dates and names to make it look like he had arranged a ten year deal with the Landlord beforehand.
One for the next novel.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Trespassing
Since starting this blog I've written precious little about the comings and goings of the bizness on Chabanel. It's a tough call. My professional activities, my work, how I earn my living requires a certain respect. Plainly, it would be stupid of me to write or say anything that would threaten my job and I'm wary about trespassing onto that territory. Does that mean that I can't be completely honest with my writing? Of course not. We use discretion in every aspect of our lives on a daily basis, how we speak, how we behave, even how we make art. Discretion does not equal censorship. So now there's this hoopla going on in Toronto about the principal of a Jewish day school who's shown some poor judgement by posting sexually explicit poetry on his website. My position is simple. The guy made a stupid move. There's no issue of free speech. No one is stopping the principal from posting anything he wants. The only question is whether the bad judgement he’s shown warrants dismissal from his job and that will be determined by those who have something tangibly at stake, the parents, the board of directors of the school etc. If I were sending my kids to his school would I pull them out over this? No. You make your own judgement:
http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/339613
http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/339613
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Corner Borges and...wisdom
Because for an artist, and I try to be one, everything that happens is material for your work; sometimes it’s very difficult. Happiness doesn’t require anything more; it’s an end in itself. Unhappiness has to be transformed into something else; it has to be elevated to beauty. For an artist everything that happens to him has to be clay for his mold, and he must try to feel things this way, even if these gifts might be atrocities.
This recently re-discovered interview with the master was forwarded to me by my friend, the poet and scholar Seymour Mayne.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Erotic suffering and cultural change
The first ingredient is exotic, glamorous pain. We all suffer, but most suffering is not glamorous. Audiences don't want to hear about the kind of suffering they actually endure. So to a medieval peasant, sufferings like cold, vermin, beatings and plague would not have been exotic or saleable. Those people wanted stories about what they didn't have, like enough to eat or a warm palace to sleep in. They told tales of palaces that fell into the possession of plucky orphans and magic tables that always overflowed with food...
Fast-forward a few hundred years and you find us, the doughy descendants of those wretched peasants, so stuffed with food that we obsess on losing weight. Magic tables constantly filling with roasted goose are the last thing we want to hear about.
Only now do stories about cold and hunger without happy magical endings become popular, because that form of suffering is, for most of us, a nice distraction from the actual sufferings we undergo...
It's important to realize here that the "suffering" of these stories is erotic to the reader, just as the vision of a magic table always full of food was erotic to a medieval audience. And by looking at what forgers feed their gullible readers, we can see how cultures change.
I've kept my mind pretty well out of the controversy regarding books sold as memoirs that are actually pure fiction. I think part of the reason is that I see the relationship between memoir and fiction as a continuum, a sliding scale. Memoir, like memory itself is partly fictional, and fiction, contains ingredients of memory. So the question becomes where and how should the line be justifiably drawn between the two. There are no hard and fast rules. And in recent years the line has become hazier. Why else has something emerged called "creative non-fiction."
Okay, the cases in the news lately have been particularly egregious examples of falsehood, outright fraud. And I guess what I find most interesting are not questions related to safeguarding the integrity of literature or even the book industry. But rather what the trend (and it does now seem to be a trend) tells us about the path of society, cultural change. Tyee Books has an interesting perspective as quoted in the above paragraphs: http://thetyee.ca/Books/2008/03/10/LitFrauds/
No doubt the publishers were duped by the authors. But they share part of the blame. In the rush to publish and compete in an increasingly competitive economy publishers have become lax on the editorial side to the point of negligence. It's particularly intriguing to think that writers, of all people, have become such charlatans. I don't mean to place writers on any kind of pedestal, but there has always been a certain cache and nobility to writing. What makes it so surprising is that the rewards which await the fraudster tend to be relatively negligeable. With very few exceptions, writing has never been a lucrative activity. What a writer might expect from his/her toil is a certain amount of respect. Nonetheless nowadays, with the proliferation of writing in general and a great many paper and electronic outlets available more people are writing and some are even managing to scrape together a meagre living. The point being that in today's environment, it's inevitable that with more writers and publishers and product out there, there are bound to be more charlatans, people who will push the boundaries to get an edge.
And I suspect that pushing the boundary has become easier for young people who are growing up in a culture where everything is relative, a matter of spin. The points made in the Tyee piece seem to come down to one main point: what sells. Stories of violence and "glamorous suffering" are nothing new. They've worked since the bible. What has shifted is the context; a wired society that pushes the boundaries between fact and fantasy in a thousand different ways. Young people spend a great deal of their time in a headspace that is virtual, assume multiple made-up identities and dispense with them as easily as candy wrappers.
Book publishers are going to have to be more vigilant, no doubt about that, for the sake of their own financial interest. And the silver-lining here is how quickly these frauds have been exposed, which is also endemic of the wired world, the libertarian ideal of a system that can police itself. But even more important, it shows that as a society we still care. Not so much about the integrity of literature or the nobility of the writing profession, but about what goes in to the products we are consuming, from Chinese-made toys to books.
Fast-forward a few hundred years and you find us, the doughy descendants of those wretched peasants, so stuffed with food that we obsess on losing weight. Magic tables constantly filling with roasted goose are the last thing we want to hear about.
Only now do stories about cold and hunger without happy magical endings become popular, because that form of suffering is, for most of us, a nice distraction from the actual sufferings we undergo...
It's important to realize here that the "suffering" of these stories is erotic to the reader, just as the vision of a magic table always full of food was erotic to a medieval audience. And by looking at what forgers feed their gullible readers, we can see how cultures change.
I've kept my mind pretty well out of the controversy regarding books sold as memoirs that are actually pure fiction. I think part of the reason is that I see the relationship between memoir and fiction as a continuum, a sliding scale. Memoir, like memory itself is partly fictional, and fiction, contains ingredients of memory. So the question becomes where and how should the line be justifiably drawn between the two. There are no hard and fast rules. And in recent years the line has become hazier. Why else has something emerged called "creative non-fiction."
Okay, the cases in the news lately have been particularly egregious examples of falsehood, outright fraud. And I guess what I find most interesting are not questions related to safeguarding the integrity of literature or even the book industry. But rather what the trend (and it does now seem to be a trend) tells us about the path of society, cultural change. Tyee Books has an interesting perspective as quoted in the above paragraphs: http://thetyee.ca/Books/2008/03/10/LitFrauds/
No doubt the publishers were duped by the authors. But they share part of the blame. In the rush to publish and compete in an increasingly competitive economy publishers have become lax on the editorial side to the point of negligence. It's particularly intriguing to think that writers, of all people, have become such charlatans. I don't mean to place writers on any kind of pedestal, but there has always been a certain cache and nobility to writing. What makes it so surprising is that the rewards which await the fraudster tend to be relatively negligeable. With very few exceptions, writing has never been a lucrative activity. What a writer might expect from his/her toil is a certain amount of respect. Nonetheless nowadays, with the proliferation of writing in general and a great many paper and electronic outlets available more people are writing and some are even managing to scrape together a meagre living. The point being that in today's environment, it's inevitable that with more writers and publishers and product out there, there are bound to be more charlatans, people who will push the boundaries to get an edge.
And I suspect that pushing the boundary has become easier for young people who are growing up in a culture where everything is relative, a matter of spin. The points made in the Tyee piece seem to come down to one main point: what sells. Stories of violence and "glamorous suffering" are nothing new. They've worked since the bible. What has shifted is the context; a wired society that pushes the boundaries between fact and fantasy in a thousand different ways. Young people spend a great deal of their time in a headspace that is virtual, assume multiple made-up identities and dispense with them as easily as candy wrappers.
Book publishers are going to have to be more vigilant, no doubt about that, for the sake of their own financial interest. And the silver-lining here is how quickly these frauds have been exposed, which is also endemic of the wired world, the libertarian ideal of a system that can police itself. But even more important, it shows that as a society we still care. Not so much about the integrity of literature or the nobility of the writing profession, but about what goes in to the products we are consuming, from Chinese-made toys to books.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee
My first Coetzee, unbelievably. I'll be reading many more. This is a delightful, multi-leveled, multi-layered novel that reminds me of a three tiered chess game, and gamesmanship is the operative term here.
The setting is an apartment building and actually each page is divided into three sections. The top section is occupied by the writings of Senor C, a South African born 72 year old author of some renown living in Australia, an obvious stand-in for Coetzee himself. The contents of this uppermost section is a manuscript of his "opinions" being prepared for publication in Germany, lofty thoughts on a myriad of subjects including, Harold Pinter, Australian politics, apology, probability, Zeno, the afterlife, the body, paedophilia, terrorism, the slaughter of animals, the nature of the state, compassion, avian flu, competition, Guantanamo Bay, Al Qaida, Dostoevsky, boredom, ageing, JS Bach and the list goes on.
The middle section is comprised of Senor C's more informal, intimate thoughts about a young Fillipina he meets in the apartment building's basement laundry room. More than forty years his junior, he is nevertheless smitten with Anya and decides that he will make her his "secretaria" (secret aria) by offering her the job of typing his manuscript.
The bottom section is written in Anya's voice. She is a street saavy survivor who immediately sees through the old man's ploy, and uses her sexual assets to draw him in. Her crass, oversexed, money-hungry boyfriend Alan isn't terribly pleased with the arrangement. He concocts his own plan to use Anya (who is using Senor C, who is using her in turn) to steal the dormant wealth amassed by the old man from his writing.
The narrative is a multidimensional house of mirrors. Suspicions give way to trust and vice versa. Perceptions and realities alter as positions shift. Anya's down-to-earth, heartfelt beliefs begin to 'soften' Senor C's writings as the two draw closer in a relationship of genuine mutual affection.
My favourite line comes from a section titled Insh'Allah. "Behind every paragraph the reader ought to be able to hear the music of the present joy and future grief." This masterfully crafted story resonated with me symphonically long after the last page was turned.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
It's a lovely cover. As I mentioned this book has been waiting for me for some time on the bookshelf, quietly, patiently like the cover's empty boat. I'd read so much about it since it was released in 2005, bucket fulls of praise. In the end I was disappointed. Frustrated is probably a better word.
Ishiguro gives us something that might be called SH (speculative history) a variation or subgenre of SF (speculative fiction.) Phillip Roth's "The Plot Against America" also comes to mind as recent SH in which history is re-imagined, tweaked, the facts slightly altered, and the logic then fictionally played out.
SF is generally not on my reading list, but I can see the attraction of speculating on a farflung future, stretching the tendons of reality, creating imaginary worlds with all sorts of dystopic or utopic possibilities, in order to learn something about our present. But there is also something distastefully presumptive and problematic about the conceit of toying with the past for this purpose. With history, whether or not it actually happened, matters. The fact that what takes place in "England, 1999" of this novel doesn't reflect conditions of the time and place, gives the entire exercise an air of illegitimacy. I kept scratching my head, wondering why the author simply didn't just use "England 2199." But this was not my main frustration with the book.
The conditions described in the book are of a dystopic past in which a race of clones is raised for the sole purpose of having their organs harvested (called "donating.") The narrator is Kathy who is a "carer," someone who cares for donors during their convalescence before they themselves become donors. She is caring for her close friend Tommy who has made multiple donations, reminiscing about the time they spent together at Hailsham and The Cottages where they spent their childhood and adolescence with their other close friend Ruth.
Somehow, these clones can donate three and sometimes even four times before coming to "completion" (euphemism for dying,) which begs the question, are they bred with multiple organs? It's hard to imagine how the organs are harvested, and in what order, to ensure mutliple donations. In general, the system of organ harvesting, how exactly it works, how it came into being, who was behind it and how it evolved etc. is never detailed. This omission left me questioning from beginning to end, distracting me from the main story which is about the love and friendship of the trio of clones.
The fact that the main characters are questioning too is transparently part of the author's storytelling strategy. He wants us to be part of the secrecy that surrounds the young lives of the protagonists. I frankly had a hard time buying into it. The story, which goes from memory to memory, (a lot of sections start, "I should explain here...") is a drawn out affair in which the author strings the reader along, dropping hints about the background. The reader is kept more or less in the dark until the last 50 pages of the book, when one of the "guardians" clarifies the true nature of the clones' existence and the battle waged behind the scenes to save their "souls." By then, the question of whether clones have souls, which is supposed to be a crux of the book, seemed almost moot because they are portrayed as such sensitive, intelligent and articulate young people with emotionally rich lives. Quite simply I didn't believe (or, for that matter, care) that Kathy and her cohort, who by the way are well-read and creative (all part of their upbringing), would be so dim as to not realize what was actually going on, so dumb as to not understand how they are different from the general public, so blind as to accept their tragic fate, and so lame as not to try to escape, rebel, or something.
On the other hand, maybe that is precisely why they should be considered a subhuman species, because they don't seem to have any genuine and burning desire to fight for their own survival. Each of their lives is a slow excruciating smoulder which utlimately extinguishes once a letter (from some unseen, faceless institutional master) arrives telling them that it is their turn to donate until they 'complete'.
Cuba and the three Rs: Reconnecting, Reading, Relaxing.
Back from seven days in Cuba with the family. Many pleasures were enjoyed not the least of which were much-needed megadoses of Vitamin D, much-needed time reconnecting with the wife and kids (boy, it's easy to forget how enjoyable their company can be) and almost complete disconnection from the wired world. Also, managed to read two novels. I'd had Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" on the backburner for a long time, and I'd never read anything by J.M. Coetzee so I took along his latest "Diary of a Bad Year." One was disappointing, the other a delightful surprise. In the coming days, when time allows, I'll let you know which book falls into which category. By the way, that's a shot of the actual hotel.
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