Money for Nothing

In my college class on humour, we begin our unit on comedy and censorship with a discussion of Lenny Bruce’s 1961 arrest for the use of the word cocksucker. My students find this quite shocking -- the arrest, not the word.

In comedy, the line of acceptability is there to be crossed. Once the line is crossed, of course, it moves.  What was once unacceptable becomes merely risqué, and eventually, with repeated crossing, mainstream and safe.

In its recent decision declaring the song “Money for Nothing” unsuitable for broadcast because the lyrics contain the word faggot, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council argues the reverse -- what was formerly safe (a 25-year-old song) is now unacceptable.

 The CBSC argues that the acceptability of the word has changed:

...like other racially driven words in the English language, ‘faggot’ is one that, even if entirely or marginally acceptable in earlier days, is no longer so.  The Panel finds that it has fallen into the category of unacceptable designations on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status or physical or mental disability.

And if the lyrics disparaged sexual orientation, I would agree. But they do not. They disparage the bigotry of the oafish character spouting the words. He scoffs at the bands he sees on television, calling them yo-yos and yes, faggots: “That ain’t working,” he proclaims. “That’s the way you do it: you play the guitar on the MTV. “

In its decision, the Panel did acknowledge the legitimate artistic usage of an offensive word:  “Individuals who are themselves bigoted or intolerant may be part of a fictional or non-fictional program, provided that the program is not itself abusive or unduly discriminatory.”

The Panel goes on to say that while the song may fall under this category, legitimate artistic use is apparently not enough to make it acceptable for broadcast.

WTF, CBSC?

The Money for Nothing Guy is the Archie Bunker of 1985. We are meant to laugh at him, not with him. (In fact, you can hear Mark Knopfler cracking up as he sings “banging on the bongo like a chimpanzee.”)  The lyrics satirize a discriminatory attitude, and as in all satire, we align ourselves not with the speaker and the literal or surface message, but with the implicit moral code underneath.

In my humour class, we discuss instances of satire being misread, that is, where readers or listeners mistake literal words for implied message. So sorry, CBSC, that you missed the message, and are now on my list of Examples of People Who Just Don’t Get Satire.

It's a good thing no one in Canada is broadcasting "A Modest Proposal."

Banished Words

I look forward to the list of overused words published by Lake Superior State University every New Year's Day. This year's list includes Facebook and Google as verbs.

Jordan from Waterloo, Ontario nominated these words, saying,"Facebook is a great, addicting website. Google is a great search engine. However, their use as verbs causes some deep problems." 

What are these deep problems? Yes, I could say, "Please contact me through Facebook," or "Search online using Google," but honestly, why would I when "Facebook me" and "Google it" are so much more concise? Would I also have to stop using email as a verb?  How about phone? ("Please send me a message through electronic mail if you are not able to contact me via the telephone.")

People! Language changes! Nouns get turned into verbs! Verbs get truncated! Some words die and slip from living memory. Others are born and take their place. This is what language does. Diss is now a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary! (Disses, dissing, dissed!) This is what language is.

My grandparents, who were born during World War I, sometimes prefaced a particularly dire warning with "I'll tell you something, and that's not too." Or maybe they were saying, "And that's not two."  Either way, the phrase makes no sense. They're dead now, so I can't ask them what they meant. I've tried reconstructing the sentence ("I'll tell you one thing, if not two"?). I've tried asking other family members, and while they remember the expression, they cannot explain it. I've even tried googling it, to no avail. The phrase remains incomprehensible. That's a deep problem in communication.

A History of Reading

You may perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very well worthwhile to be tormented for two or three years of one's life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. – Jane Austen

1. I come home from kindergarten in a quivery state of awe. "Michael Pearce can read!" I announce. "He read a whole book for Show and Tell!" My eyes fill with tears of bitterest envy: all I can do is look at pictures while I wait to be read to. Like a baby.

My grandfather says he will teach me to read. After dinner, he sits with me at the kitchen counter and begins sounding out words. “C-A-T, cat,” he says, writing it out. “R-A-T, rat.”  Now it is my turn: B-A-T, he writes. "What does that say?"

I have no idea. Cat, rat.... “Catches,” I guess.  No. Chases? No. Hits on head with giant rubber mallet?

Thirty minutes later, I am thoroughly sick of learning to read. Also, I have not learned to read. Also, my grandfather is not a patient teacher. I am in tears.

But he persists, night after night at the kitchen counter, and eventually, I can read.  The best day of the week is library day. The best days of the school year are when Mrs. Smith, the district librarian, comes to our class to tell us about the new books in our library. Sometimes she has to bore us to death with the Dewey Decimal System first, but she never leaves without reading. She is the best reader I have ever heard, changing her voice and accent and pitch as she shifts from character to character.

2.

I read all the time.  I read when I am supposed to be cleaning my room. I read when my grandparents say I should be outside playing (in the four days of summer that befall Northern Ontario).  I read before school, after school, and during school, especially during math class. Thus, to this day, I can read like a wizard but can barely add.

3.

In my early adolescence, I read indiscriminately. I finish The Shining and pick up Jane Eyre. I read all the Bourne books and then Heart of Darkness.  Wuthering Heights is sandwiched between two Harlequin romances.  

My father gives me a box of books for Christmas: Dickens, Orwell, Austen, but also, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. I open it up to find that language as I know it has been dismantled and reconstructed on every page. Are people allowed to write like this? It is the most wondrous thing I have ever read.

4.

I no longer want to read the Bourne books. I can’t fully explain it. Something is missing in the language.  

5.

I tell my grandparents I want to study English in university. My grandfather wants to know what kind of job this will lead to. Oh lots of jobs, I say and recite a list (journalist, editor, copywriter, teacher) but the truth is, I’m not going to university in order to get a job. I’m going so that I can leave home, first of all, but also, to read. For the next four years, my primary responsibility, my job, will be to read.

Best. Job. Ever.

Titles That Stick and Titles That Suck

In the fall, when Knopf Canada sent me two possible cover designs for my book, I began asking friends which factor was more likely to make them pick up a novel by a writer they'd never heard of: the title or the cover.

More than three months have passed since these conversations, so I can’t remember a thing anyone said, but the question came to me again today as I looked through the list of books I've read this year.

Books I Read Simply Because of Their Titles:

·         This Cake Is for the Party by Sarah Selecky

·         Londonstani by Gautam Malkani

·         How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely (brilliantly funny, highly recommended)

Books I Read Despite Their Titles: 

·         Snowflower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

·         Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman

·         The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Books That Fit into Both Categories:

·         The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and his Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O’Hagan

Of course the title is extremely important, but it seems to be one of the hardest things to get to. Apparently (i.e. according to Wikipedia), it took F. Scott Fitzgerald some time to settle on The Great Gatsby. Earlier titles included Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires (just awful), Trimalchio in West Egg (even worse), and The High-Bouncing Lover (!?).  And although he was finally persuaded to accept The Great Gatsby, he wasn’t crazy about it.

My first title for Beyond the Sky and the Earth was Bhutan Mist, which is also the name of a “Scotch” produced in Bhutan (by the Army Welfare Project, which tells you why “Scotch” is in quotation marks).  My editor dismissed my working title on the grounds of "it doesn't work" and "sounds like a perfume."

“Your title is probably in the book," she said, so I went back to the manuscript to look for it. I then proposed the literal translation of the Dzongkha phrase for “thank you very much”: No Sky, No Earth, Thank You. That, too, was rejected with breathtaking alacrity, but it did lead to the title that stuck.

The original title for my novel was Who You Are to Us. Very Alice Munro-ish, I thought, but my agent gave me a look that said, “You are not Alice Munro.” For several months, as I struggled with revisions, I referred to it as That Motherf***ing Motherhood Novel.

And then my friend Dan suggested I turn to music for inspiration. He gave me a stack of CDs that matched the era I was writing about and specifically suggested Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Good-bye.” Hurray! I had a title!

Luckily, titles cannot be copyrighted. Even more luckily, the agency representing the Cole Porter Trust gave me permission to quote the lyrics in the book.

A Hieroglyph of Fear

In her Dec. 14 column in Salon, "Why We Love Bad Writing," book critic Laura Miller quotes C.S. Lewis's "An Experiment in Criticism" to explain why so many readers might actually prefer the cliches that run through the work of genre writers like Steig Larsson and Dan Brown. "'My blood ran cold' is a hieroglyph of fear," Lewis explained, a kind of hieroglyph that does not require the reader to pay words the "kind and degree of attention" that a more literary turn of phrase would.

I stayed up half the night to finish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but I had to work to NOT pay attention to Larsson`s language, which caused much eye-rolling in the opening chapters (at things like the list of computer specs, which in a few years time, will be the equivalent of reading that Lisbeth plugged in her Commodore 64 and turned on her dot-matrix printer). I have no interest in reading the rest of the trilogy: in the end, the flaws in Larsson`s style detracted too much from my enjoyment of his excellent ability to unspool a plot -- in much the same way that the millefeuille-style of a beautifully poetic writer like Anne Michaels detracts from my abiliy to enjoy her storyline.

The problem, as Miller shows, is when critics try to turn these personal preferences into literary laws and then sneer at the hapless law-breakers enjoying their Larsson or their Michaels.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality

Writing: The Fantasy

The house is not just clean, but digitially altered (rooms are elongated, windows enlarged, piles of paper replaced by vases of gardenias). There's a pot of hot coffee, two cheese straws on a white linen napkin, a Mason jar of sharp pencils. My hair is straight and I am wearing lip gloss. I sit at the table and turn on my laptop and I write all day. When I look up, it is dark. Time for a glass of wine and some Ella Fitzgerald.

Writing: The Reality

The sink is full of dishes and my Ontario Health Card just expired. The mesh in my French press is warped so my coffee is murky. My hair is uncombed and I can't find my Chapstick. I sit on the sofa surrounded by piles of unmarked exams. I can't find my character's voice. I know that 95% of what I have written today will be deleted, but I polish it anyway. When I look up, it is dark, but this is no great accomplishment because it was dark when I sat down. Time for a glass of wine and some Ella Fitzgerald.

Tomorrow is another day.

Top Ten of Twenty Ten

Books I loved this year:

1. Room by Emma Donoghue
2. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
3. Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant
4. Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor
5. Cherry Electra by Matt Duggan
6. Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
7. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
8. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
9. Supersad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
10. By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham