Escapist

I am pleased to say (if belatedly) that I managed to complete last weekend's goal of writing a new wedding scene for my novel. I estimate that the revision of the novel, as a whole, is at close to 80% finished. It took having a fairly miserable head cold and getting snowed in at a deserted hotel, listening to the new Girl Talk album on repeat to get the new chapter done, but boy does it feel good (or maybe it's the meds). Once the weather cleared, leaving behind only the -30 conditions outside, spending most of the day staring out of the window at this particular view also helped.

Of course, being holed up in a lonely hotel working on a novel as I was, made me think of this heartwarming little movie.

Song of the Day: Titus Andronicus, Richard II

"But there's only one dream that I keep close

and it's the one of my hand at your throat."

Deathly Hallows, Unreviewable

David Harris, the editor over at Spectrum Culture, has written a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One. In his introduction, he suggests that there will be countless reviews of the movie, and questions the need to review it at all. I would like to take this a step further and state that the movie is probably unreviewable.

Let's think about this for a second. Yes, it is still possible to issue a technical review of the movie, commenting on things like camera angles and sound editing, but my understanding is that this is still largely the same technical team that has been responsible for several of the other movies. Similarly, the director and writing team have already had a chance to express their views on a variety of themes and motifs in the Harry Potter universe. I think it would be a reasonable to assume that their work here will continue what they have already established elsewhere. Thus, every viewer of the past movies has the necessary experience to determine whether, based on the earlier movies, they want to see the new one.

Further, it is common practice for some to comment on the degree of faithfulness of the movie to books, or the creativity in the adapting or the sequencing of different parts for a movie audience, but the whole film-in-two-parts aspect of The Deathly Hallows suggest that we can only really evaluate Part One in the context of how well it works in conjunction with Part Two.

Finally, while there is a legitimate review to be written for the small segment of population who have not read the books nor viewed any of the movies but (for some strange reason) decided that Episode 7 of 8 is where they want to be introduced to the world of JK Rowling, those few people are in need of a review written expressly from the viewpoint, for that purpose. I would suggest that few of the writers reviewing The Deathly Hallows are capable of such a feat.

For most of us, if we have watched the previous movies, or read the books, then we have already either made a heavy emotional investment in the movies, or else dismissed them long ago. No rewiewer can adequately express the degree to which The Deathly Hallows will live up to our own expectations.

Goal For The Weekend

Revisions have sent my novel on a slight detour and I need to re-write the wedding scene. Luckily, I have plenty of good memories to draw upon, plus this nifty little image for my influence map.

Happy Birthday To You

When my wife and I first started dating, I was afraid that we didn't really have much in common. Sure, we grew up on the same side of town, had parents that came from almost identical cultural backgrounds, knew a lot of the same people, went to the same kinds of schools, etc. But really, we didn't like the same kind of music and I worried that this masked deeper aesthetic and political divisions.

It was a great relief then when we discovered that we both liked this song. She, being a fan of Sinatra and musicals, I being a fan of early punk. It turns out she also has a soft spot for Debbie Harry.

The track is from one of the earliest Red Hot & Blue releases and supposedly the video is directed by Alex Cox of Sid & Nancy, Repo Man, and Straight to Hell fame.

Fun trivia: I wanted to include the line "Next July We Collide With Mars" on our wedding invites.

Dan Vacon, All-Alberta Winner

Hey, big congratulations to my former school mate and Dudes frontman, Dan Vacon for winning the All-Alberta Songwriting Competition. Lots of my friends entered, so a round of applause for them too.

You can listen to "Gold and Green" (as well as the other top six finalists) by clicking here.

In the words of my wife, "Suck on that, Four Strong Winds!"

A Room Of One's Own

We're in the process of trying to move, so everything is packed up. It's not particularly ideal for trying to find time to do some writing, but I manage. Theoretically, any new house we're moving to will have an "office" space for me to work in. In the interest of researching layouts and room ideas, I stumbled across this series of photographs from The Guardian exploring the rooms of famous writers. I thought I'd add my own:

Yes, that's a table in the kitchen. I work there early in the mornings before everyone else gets up, and the typically sometime in then mid-afternoon after an espresso or two. Today I was working the sequence of the novel's middle part and needed the space to spread out chapters 6-8.

Song of the Day: I'll Be Seeing You

(The second revision is maybe 60% done and I'm starting to find it hard to remain true to the original vision I had for the novel. As things become more "streamlined," alternative plot points make themselves available -but are they better?)

The other day I had the chance to read a Paris Review Interview with French author Michel Houellebeq, whose novel Elementary Particles was seemingly on every bookstand in Paris when I was there in the summer of 1998. I regretted not buying it at the time because I fell in love with quantum mechanics in junior high and must admit that it has been very influential in my thinking. It even skewed my reading of philosophers like Nietzsche and allusions to it crop up in the character develop parts of Games of Chance. I was surprised when Houellebeq mentioned a similiar connection. You can read the interview here:

However, Houellebeq and I most recently crossed paths in interviews with Iggy Pop over his new album Preliminaires, something that reminded me of his previous collaboration with a French artist:

Classic genre tropes

Brief thoughts this afternoon about some classic plot devices and what they meant at one time or another:

Individual v. vampires: fear of the unknown, death, or foreigners

v. werewolves and mutants: fear of one's self, typically brought on by adolescence

v. mummies: fear of past burdens

v. Frankenstein's monster: fear of science

v. computers, robots: fear of the future and our own inhumanity to each other

v. zombies: fear of each other, plague

Forgotten Pieces

[Deep in the process of revising Games of Chance, amalgamating secondary characters and streamlining subplots, I stumbled across this stub of an article in the early pages of the journal I'm using to write this particular novel. It's unfinished, and I believe it's from August 2004, since I remember writing it at a cafe over breakfast in Montreal, a city I visited in 2001 and 2004. I still believe the problems addressed here are among the major problems facing Calgary, but I was struck by the recognition that I felt "aloof" in Calgary, as that feeling of "aloofness" is a major theme of Games of Chance.]

Another City, Not My Own

My wife and I had been planning a trip to Montreal for quite some time. It was the only place in Canada that we could agree on as interesting. We had been to Montreal once before and enjoyed it's streets and shops. It was the antithesis of my home town Calgary, in the West of Canada.

Please note that I have used the awkward phrase "West of Canada." I have picked my words deliberately here, avoiding the semi-republican separatist connotations of "Western Canada" and the historically colonialist implications of "Canadian West." I like "the West of Canada" as it alludes to the sprawling nature of our country while turning Western Canadian alienation into an amusing Elmer Fuddism.

I must admit, growing up in Calgary, I never felt alienated. Quite often aloof though, as if Canada was something that happened over there, somewhere else, but not around here in Calgary, with its new suburbs and wide open spaces. There was never anything that tied me to this thing called Canada and I often longed to be a part of something more than vast empty prairie.

To me, Montreal was where Canada happened. Maybe I'd viewed too many Expo posters in the childhood bedrooms of my aunts and uncles; but everything about Montreal whispered "Canada" to me. Quebecois separatistes might disagree and say that Montreal is an integral component of their "distinct society"apart from Canada. Historians too,might point to Montreal and say that is unique to all of Canada, with its blend of French and English, Europe and North America, but to me that's what the rest of Canada should have aspired to become - neither old world nor new, a phrase too often taken to imply our cousins below the 49th Parallel and their state of perpetual "now-ness."

This has been my problem with Calgary. Both Calgary and Montreal experienced tremendous periods of growth after the Second World War. Montreal, already sitting at close to a half million citizens, exploded with suburbs and then reinvented the inner city neighbourhoods, superimposing modernist structures, like office buildings and expressways on pre-modern urban landscapes. Calgary, on the other hand, had very little to build upon and so just built out with reckless abandon. there was nothing to preserve and so my hometown has preserved nothing. Forget trying to find a building that dates from Calgary's incorporation barely over a hundred years ago, it's hard to find something from before the Second World War. The downtown core has been completely worked over, save for two or three blocks and every year hundreds of pre-war homes are run into the ground to make way for in-fills and condominium complexes.

I am not against modernism, or the march of progress, and I know that some Montrealer's feel that the same processes of historical erasement is underway in their city too. Leonard Cohen complained that the construction of bland square box offices over top the Victorian houses on St. Laurent were destroying the soul of the street - over fifty years ago. I am sure there are those who say the same about the many condominium conversions going up all over the place now. What bothers me is that despite all of its modernization, Montreal as managed to maintain its identity and character whereas Calgary's identity and character is becoming synonymous with its sprawling soulless suburbs. The sprawl creates problems, many of which Calgarians want to ignore, such as the environmental resource mismanagement that results from having the lowest housing density in Canada with one of the lowest occupancy rates at 2.1 people per dwelling and 1.2 automobiles. This sparseness prevents small residential businesses from succeeding, keeps public transportation from having the necessary critical mass to become cheap, efficient, and allow for anything but rush hour delivery of workers to and from the city's core. The net result is the direct inhibiting of the type of great city character that Calgarians so desperately want.