Welcome to my blog, where I write about writing, with excessive swooning over music and dashes of media marginalia. You can read more about me, etc., here.
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I’ve been thinking about the issue of contrivance in fiction, how it works as the everyday fabric but can be used as a point of criticism. This is to say, for beginners, what does it mean for a piece of work (book, TV show, play etc) to be critiqued as contrived (as in “Oh that was such a contrived scene…”).
It’s hard because it’s in the very nature of something fictional to be, on a very basic level, inherently contrived. Fiction is fiction. Whether it’s happening between two robots on a faraway planet, or under our nose, it’s not real, though it might feel so, even if it is accurately based on the truth (not going to get into autofiction here).
To use a good concrete example, I’m thinking of the three seasons of the popular streaming show The Bear. In particular, their respective finalés. It goes without saying that if you haven’t seen The Bear and have been meaning to, you might want to skip this (and if you haven’t seen The Bear, I heartily recommend it). Also worth noting that I’m only focusing on the finalés. Season Two, for example, might have (for me) the weaker ending, but I found it generally more interesting than Season Three.
At the end of Season One, our chef protagonist discovers, amidst the chaos of running a busy sandwich shop and facing imminent bankruptcy (and someone nearly going to jail for manslaughter), not to mention his own bouts of post-traumatic anxiety, that the chef’s dead brother (and former owner) had hidden around $300,000 in tomato sauce cans, communicated to the chef in a cryptic suicide letter. The restaurant is not only saved, but plans are laid for a high-end version. Was it a stretch? Sure, but I didn’t really care because somehow it seemed deserved. Perhaps it’s because it reveals a very tender emotional thread, consistent with the other episodes, as the chef contends with the mystery that his brother was to him, and the hole of grief he feels around losing him.
Season Two ends with the launch of the renovated incarnation of the restaurant, as the chef contends with small margins and high expectations while balancing a budding romantic relationship with a family friend. Everything is riding on opening night and the chef, in mid-service, winds up locked in the walk-in freezer when the handle breaks off on the other side. Alas, he cannot carefully control the chaos happening outside and has a meltdown with his cousin on the other side of the door, who’s comparing the chef’s neuroticisms to his mother, who had literally driven her car into their family home the other night. It’s funny, because on paper there’s clearly less outward contrivance in this finalé than Season One…and yet it didn’t work as well.
So what does this mean? I suppose it’s when something goes from the natural contrivance of fiction into an area that doesn’t feel deserved, either by flaws of logic, lack of genuineness or consistency with the whole. When it doesn’t work it doesn’t give me reason (or enough reasons) to “believe” that it’s a natural part of the landscape, no matter how far it may reach. It respects the limits of the world it resides within. Or another way of putting it: if I feel a bump in the road, convince me that it’s part of the ride. The more bumps, the more convincing I might require.
One of the things with the finalé of the Season Two that doesn’t work is the unbelievability of the chef getting locked in the freezer in the first place. Anyone who has worked in a restaurant (hello) knows that walk-in freezers have a release button on the inside that opens the door precisely because of such situations. It also lacks the comparatively symphonic threading together of Season One. Despite spreading the spotlight throughout the season to other characters, it comes back to the chef and his obsessive (likely traumatized) behaviour, his relationship with himself, his split responsibilities to his restaurant and to his girlfriend who is sitting at a table while all this is happening, waiting for him to acknowledge her. What bugged me mostly consisted of the chef squaring off with his cousin. What was this trying to achieve, I wonder? It felt like a too-convenient device to force a confrontation, where the cousin literally calls-out the chef’s unresolved inner challenges. Maybe because it was kinda lazy, given the confidence of the show overall? It’s a little too on-the-nose, even didactic, compared to the show-don’t-tell way in which Season One handled things. Am I saying it was bad? No, it just uses a plot-device that feels stolen from the 80s.
Where do they go from here? Well, Season Three manages to be the least capital-D dramatic of the three, but that might have to do with the reality of the overall arc of the series. They’re establishing themselves now. To grab terminology from group dynamics, The Bear went from storming (Season One), to norming (Season Two), and then performing (Season Three). In Season Two they launched the new restaurant without it burning down. In Season Three the pressure seems to be more existential, namely figuring out how to chase a Michelin star without skimping on the chef’s exacting quality, while needing to maximize table turnover in order to break even. The chef’s story is less centred overall, but the finalé features him–already experiencing anxiety attacks as he anticipates the first critical reviews of the restaurant to be filed–having a post-traumatic episode as he comes face-to-face with the chef he trained under, who cruelly undermined his self-worth–all while attending the closing of another mentor’s establishment.
I don’t have any big issues with the direction of Season Three; creating an emergency for the sake of having, say, Season One’s manic energy would seem somehow disingenuous here. I think it’s a sign of confidence if a show can shift gears without resorting to tricks. If anything felt off, it was the repeated depiction of the chef’s meltdown, his manic inner thoughts projecting themselves onto his world. After a while they didn’t serve to deepen or develop our understanding of what the chef was experiencing. Okay, meltdown, got it. Where does this wind up on the contrivance scale? Contrived? Stylistically perhaps, but not in terms of plot or story.
Anyhow, thank you for joining me on this thought exercise!
I was listening to BBC6 Music, a mainstay of mine, and found myself nodding along to the playlist by DJ/performer John Cooper Clarke (who was standing-in for Iggy Pop on his Iggy Confidential program) when this came on. An obscurity, even for Link Wray fans, from a 1989 album recorded in Germany, this track immediately grabbed my interest and I was surprised to see that it was by him because it felt so much more like a post-modern Rockabilly track the likes of which you’d more likely hear from Alan Vega (and/or his wonderful collaboration with Alex Chilton). The slimmed down instrumentation, consisting of just Wray crooning, along with balladeering guitar accompaniment (complete with a clip-clopping effect — also done on guitar? — creating a sense of someone on horseback, which wonderfully fits with the atmosphere of the piece), reminded me of the latter works of more recent bands, in particular The Walkmen’s laterworks. I just love this, even though the album itself ain’t much of a keeper.
Lou Reed is like a magic uncle to me. His voice was there in my teens when I was very alone, feeling vulnerable and misunderstood. My real entry point was a best-of cassette, Rock and Roll Diary: 1967-1980 . It was there that I not only discovered his solo material (uneven a collection though this release was), but discovered his seminal early band, The Velvet Underground (with John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker). His voice managed to cut through the bullshit and yet was supernaturally intimate. It was through this intimacy–the inherent heartbreak in his poetically-charged lyrics and his speak-sing voice, the lurid provocation of (what we would now call) his queerness–that I fell under Lou Reed’s spell, and I count myself among many. Another best-of (I was a teenager, forgive me) was Walk on the Wild Side: The Best of Lou Reed, which was a more even introduction to his 70s solo material. I told myself, there was no way you could listen to his live version of Coney Island Baby and not feel an elemental longing combined with a stubborn conviction in the idea of salvation by love.
Lou’s work was uneven, perhaps not by his stated standards, but with each album (and each decade) you just didn’t know what you were going to get. And yet, even that was cool. He was the coolest person on this earth. Go ahead, Lou, release the Bob Ezrin-produced Berlin, and album of fantastically depressing yet inspired songwriting. Put out Metal Machine Music, the sonic equivalent of a root canal. If you were looking for iterations on his most well-known album, Transformer, he was already onto something else, and often something polarizingly different. Perhaps solipsistic, perhaps self-intoxicated, perhaps self-annihilating. Perhaps lost in the mid-80s, writing MTV pop songs with production standards that don’t age well.
The height of my appreciation for Lou Reed came as he released New York in ’89, when the quality of his output (and production standards) levelled up while I was turning nineteen. It combined his assured poetic chops with acidic social critique and a fuck-tonne of guitar. This was followed by Songs forDrella, to this day one of my standalone favourite albums. Brimming with empathy but with a Velvet-y stripped-down sonic aesthetic (that I wished the acoustic-driven “Unplugged” trend at the time embraced), it was a collaboration with his former collaborator, John Cale; an ode to their mentor (and one-time producer) Andy Warhol, who had recently passed.
I should probably talk about Will Hermes biography of Reed. And, in a way, I am. It’s a weird feeling, reading the intimate (and finely rendered) details about someone who was a spiritual role model in so many years of my life, especially under so many situations that seemed beyond my control.
I knew he could be, to put it lightly, difficult. He didn’t suffer fools. And yet as someone now in their 50s, with a lot of life experience and self-reflection, I’m inherently prone to interrogate phrases like this. Basically: isn’t that another way of saying “asshole?” They weren’t always “fools,” but people he knew, people he had a history with. Hermes’ accounts of Reed severing ties indirectly, through third parties, with figures no less important to his life (save career) than Warhol and Cale–even his wife, Sylvia Morales–are difficult to read. Difficult because, and perhaps I’m doing him too much a service in saying this, but in many ways he represents the sort of insecure artist that many have inside of us. The part of us that is more comfortable sending a witty indirect riposte than having the balls to actually sit down and speak with someone face-to-face, consequences be what they may.
He was artistically uncompromising and yet simultaneously his best enemy, hindered in no small way by spending the better part of a decade-and-a-half deeply entwined with chronic substance use (heroin, yes, but mostly alcohol with amphetamines). His songs came from deep injury and his MO was deeply insecure, lashing out, burning bridges, yet consistently championing the works of those around him he admired with the fire of a thousand teenagers (The Ramones, Talking Heads and most recently, Anohni).
This isn’t a book for a casual fan (if that’s possible to be). And yet, for those of us who are–in whatever way–beholden to Lou Reed’s music, no matter how inconsistent (note, my favourite solo album is StreetHassle, which is a deeply fucked fin de 70s meltdown, capped by the brilliant title track), no matter how maddening yet believable a depiction, what Hermes is able to show of Reed’s character is consistently inconsistent. A collection of contradictions almost built to self-destruct. A middle-class Jewish kid from Long Island who became known for the seedy NYC underground, a queer role model uncomfortable with his self-promoted ownership of that attribute. Someone who wanted it both ways: to be a provocateur, but without an instinct to reflect on the consequences.
Despite his self-destructive instincts, despite his sometimes terrible treatment of the people closest to him–including allegations of occasional physical assault of partners–I wept while reading Hermes’ deeply tender account of Reed’s passing by liver failure, accompanied by his longtime partner and soulmate Laurie Anderson, alongside local Toronto musician Kevin Hearn. It served as a sort of closure for me, a decade after the fact, helped by the unparalleled intimacy of the source material and the author’s judiciously light touch with prose when others would have opted for the sort of ham-fisted poetry Reed himself would’ve sneered at.
I’d like to mention that Lou Reed: The King of New York is not only a thorough document of a vital force in 20th century popular and alternative music, but an intimate glimpse of the 60s and 70s New York zeitgeist, as well as a compelling portrayal of the inherently dangerous world that those who belonged to the LGBTQ+ community faced (such as shock therapy for those young men institutionalized for being gay).
A brief note to Hermes, should he come across this: in the future please refrain from making the all-too-common mistake–particularly among American writers–of name-checking cities like Prague and New York City, only to refer to a concert in the same paragraph as happening “in Canada.” Um, we have cities, too.
[Update: I’ve been meaning to write this review for a while, and of course it turns out the day I pressed “publish” just happened to be Lou Reed’s birthday. Go figure.]
Hate it. Hate. I hate it. *spits poison from wound*
Promoting myself sometimes/always feels like putting on a clown suit and yodelling “Hey everybody, something I wrote that I think is good was published,” while squeezing a bulb horn and yuk-yuking my way until falling through a manhole.
I think it — this notion that self-promotion is a kind of fool’s errand — can come down to two things: a socially internalized idea of “selfishness,” and social anxiety.
A big part of it is the visibility. I have social anxiety, though some people who know me may not clue into this, and while it’s way better than when I was younger (thank you, therapy and age) it’s not non-existent, especially on days when I’m feeling conflicted about whatever personal or work-related conflict is afoot. But this is just part of it, a facet of a more complex whole.
Promoting oneself shares some Venn with “networking,” a word which can cause some people to feel the urge to vomit, largely owing to prolonged exposure to those who are just a little too slick and creepy — and sometimes strangely successful — in social situations. How can one be oneself-with-others in a way that is flexible — reasonably invested and and curious — which also makes room for our strangeness; our quirks and idiosyncrasies? I’m not convinced it needs to be the exclusive domain of the neurodivergent or the anxiety-having, who are more attuned to this idea owing to their need to otherwise “blend” in social environments. I think, for many people in the general population, being ourselves-with-others can sometimes feel like a series of situational disguises. Just how coherent are our identities? Is “identity” just an ever-shifting amalgam of self-adjustments to our social environment?
Anyhoo, self-promotion is a similar sort of pain. I don’t want to be that guy (insert image of shameless author plugging their wares to an annoying, kinda desperate degree and taking little interest in, you know, community). And yet it’s kinda naive to think that people will just find your work through a random series of adventures (though that can happen in real life, albeit often on an infinitesimal level).
Look, I will admit I’m luckier than 99% of writers out there: I’ve had the opportunity to visit several cities across the country promoting my books*. I was interviewed by Gil Deacon on CBC Radio*. However, not unlike crowd-surfing (IYKYK), in no time the glow fades out, your ass is on the floor and before you know it you’re abruptly just another chicken scratching at the same yard. (* thanks in large part to my publisher’s travel and publicity grants)
So, I suppose, a thesis: I promote my work because I think it’s good and I would like to encourage people to seek it out if it appeals to them. That sounds pretty straight-forward, right? This isn’t a particularly revolutionary or provocative statement.
This is where “selfishness” comes in, at least for those prone to this idea. I’m not talking about healthily putting one’s interests to the front burner, but rather the idea of self-promotion as an egotistical pursuit, an unchecked desire to put ourselves first in a gross, narcissistic, oxygen-depleting way. There are many reasons for having this play in our thoughts, particularly if you’ve been raised in environments that use guilt and shame as a means of “correcting” behaviour that strides to stand out (let alone celebrate personal accomplishment).
So, yes, doing something perfectly acceptable such as promoting the short story or essay or novel we wrote, the beast that took untold (unpaid) hours of our time to craft, can come across as craven and attention-seeking if we’re feeling less than confident, or struggling with self-worth issues…which, while acceptable within the purview of human complexity, is also kind of silly.
Writers, put your work out there. Shout about it from the rooftops. I might also suggest that, working in the same principle, you put forward the works of your peers along the way. We all deserve to have our works appreciated, and there’s no way of doing this without sticking our necks out in public — it is, I think, part of being an artist, whether or not we are comfortable with it.
After about five years off the pitch I finally decided to take my 50-something ass out to play rec soccer last summer. Needless to say I was the elder on the field, by about 20 years (at least).
I played in two matches. The first was magnificent, although I stayed back in defence for most of the match. It was great to run around and I have distance running to thank for the stamina. My teammates were cool enough and a good time was had by all (I don’t even remember the score).
The second match…was different. As soon as the match started a burly dude in a Benfica jersey began pointing at me and telling me that I was out of position (or something to that effect). I immediately shut that shit down, telling him a) he ain’t the captain, b) there is no captain, and c) if he had ideas about my position he could come back to my position and shut the fuck up. My adrenaline was immediately spiked but I was happy that I wasn’t thrown off by this guy’s mouth, and happier that he kept to himself and his friends for the remainder of the match. Then, halfway through the game while I had my turn in goal, a player from the other team, attempting a goal, slid into me and in the process sprained my big toe. Needless to say the rest of the match was a little touch-and-go (yes, I kept playing, don’t ask why). So, not a great outing and it took a couple of weeks for my toe to heal so I didn’t make it out for the rest of the season.
This all said, I’d like to make this a little more of a habit. However, it made me remember just how “normal” injuries were in rec league sports, and, given my age and the fact that I like to live an active life off the pitch, gives me a little bit of pause.
It’s been an eventful year, insofar as there seemed to be a lot going on and yet seems to have passed by quite quickly.
I’m happy to have completed revisions to my next novel, The Stars Align for Disco Santa, and passed it on to my agent (who I hope reads it soon, but he’s a busy man). Fingers crossed that in 2025 it does the rounds of publishers and finds a suitable home. Otherwise, as writing goes, it’s been liberating. As well as the novel, I’ve been seriously working on an essay about my uncle’s guitar and the sordid personal story surrounding that. As I might’ve mentioned previously, it’s the sort of personal essay that requires much more contemplation (not to mention exploring my own blind spots) than even a novel. There’s nowhere to hide with something like this, not when you’re writing about yourself. I’ve had essays published before — one of them made 2017 Best Canadian Essays — but it wasn’t nearly as vulnerable as this piece; there’s so much woodshedding (to use a guitar term) involved, and yet I’m happy with how it’s coming, even if it hurts to reach into the places it needs to go.
I also began in earnest on a fourth novel, which is coming along well. It takes place just a little bit in the future and seems to be drawing out a lot of my more philosophical thoughts about society and the erosion of democracy. The main character is a psychotherapist who finds herself immersed in an unspooling drama while attending a professional conference. It has a title, though I’m too superstitious to reveal that before it’s been vetted by my agent.
I had hand surgery in October, which was an emotional experience for me (speaking of unspooling), combined with the pressures of my work. The good news is that I’ve given myself a couple of weeks away from the office to let things coalesce. The trick, as I’ve touched on over at my professional blog, is not to overwork myself. In short, there’s no winner if I’m dead at the finish line.
For the new year, I see myself being a little more public-facing as a writer. I’ve been toying with the idea of facilitating a seminar for authors, focused on how to read for an audience. This is a long-brewing idea that I’ve kicking around for a few years now, inspired (if that’s the right word) by the fact that so few authors seem to know what to do when they’re reading their work for an audience, which ends up doing themselves and their work a disservice. If I can swing it I’d like to aim for the spring. It’s a way for me to give back to the community (I plan to make it pay-what-you-can just to cover costs, with whatever proceeds remaining going to a local charity).
Of course, politically and socially, there appears a storm approaching, and I don’t know what to do about that except to direct my powers as an artist toward addressing it in whatever way I can that might (if I can make a wish) allow people to understand how we got here, or at least put the spotlight on those who have done a better job of describing this better than I can.
I wish you, dear reader, the best for the new year. You have more power than you think you have, and I hope you find a way to channel it in such a way as to cut through the divisiveness of our time. I think community is important, and ultimately this concept is more powerful the more local and intimate its location.
I honestly don’t know how it came to be that I was following Carl Didur, or rather, signed up for his Bandcamp page, but one day I received a notification that he had a new album out. I don’t even regularly check out new releases from accounts I knowingly follow, but nonetheless I found myself giving his new album, Carl’s Dream, a listen and was enraptured by it.
I don’t know anything about him and there’s little to find out there on the Internet, other than that he hails from Toronto…and someone I know also knows one of the guest guitarists on the album (?!). That’s it. However, Carl’s Dream is a lush, warm and textured, largely wordless album that has an elemental simplicity to it, not unlike early Brian Eno. Fans of Atlas Sound/Bradford Cox will also like this, along with those who might be looking for a more grounded Boards of Canada sound.
(apologies for the spelling mistake on Carl Didur’s name when this was first published!)
Hand update: I’ve got a pretty gnarly scar, but there’s progress. Two weeks ago they removed the stitches from my palm, and I would not wish that pain and discomfort on anyone (note: they can’t anaesthetize your hand for this).
Psychologically I’ve been up and down. I’ve had to work through a feeling of being violated, of having to re-familiarize myself with what my hand can do (via physio) while fighting the fear that I’m going to pull or tear something in the process of rehabbing it back to where it should be.
While this has all been going on the political world south of the border has erupted into a swirl of chaos and condemnation. It’s a type of deja vu, considering we went through four years of this already. In the end, one of the people running for the presidency represented change and the other chose stability; the problem of course is that stability is hard to defend (let alone promote) when the candidate in question is trying to be a celebrity-endorsed centrist while there are so many voices in the mainstream media complaining about a left-wing cabal sacrificing the sanctity of American values. Frankly, it’s only a matter of time before the same debate amps up on this side of the border (it’s basically already here), what with a thoroughly mediocre Prime Minister playing out his third term similar to a sitting duck Biden, with little regard for the public malaise around his party. Cooler heads prevail when there are reasons to stay the course and our current PM struggles to even sell his wins let alone address his weaknesses.
When I wrote my third novel, The Stars Align for Disco Santa, it was during the worst year of Trump (2020), and was certainly influenced by many of the things that have now come to fruition: authoritarian politicians abetted by corporatist tech companies running roughshod over and unveiling the frailty of democracy, exposing how much of the West is protected by evidently feeble gentlemen’s agreements and empty platitudes of decency. In other words, if Harris had won, my book–soon to be doing the rounds of publishers via my agent–would’ve still been relevant, but reflective of a dark time in society now past. Now? It seems more pertinent than ever, which is terribly sad (an understatement), but here I am.
You write the book you have to write. By the time it hits the market you have no say on how trends will have changed in the interim, how the landscape and zeitgeist will have shifted. When my first book was picked up by Wolsak & Wynn, I had to wait nearly three years before it was published; in that time the media landscape seemed inundated with time travel narratives, so that when The Society of Experience finally came out the conceit felt certainly less unique than during the years I’d spent writing and polishing the manuscript. In short, you really have no choice but to deal with it, and I can only hope that, by the time Disco Santa does the rounds, publishers will see it as rising to the occasion.
So, as you may have noticed from last week’s post, I’m able to write again, and much sooner than I’d anticipated. My assumption was that I was going to be in a splint after my hand surgery, perhaps for upwards of months (thus my interest in voice dictation software). However, literally the day after surgery, I got a call from the hospital attempting to book me for physio two days later. Because I was in a cast I didn’t know what “physio” was to be done (see photo below).
When I arrived, the physiotherapist looked at my cast and then took a pair of scissors and said “So, let’s take a look at your hand…” which caught me by surprise. This is where I should probably go into the surgery itself, three days before. I was asked to show up for 8am that morning. It was cool and dark out (hello, late October) and I was dressed appropriately for the occasion, which basically was track pants, a loose pullover, a hoodie and wearing glasses. Normally I wear contact lenses but I knew this probably wouldn’t be a good idea given that I was going to be put under for the procedure. They’re an older pair of glasses and I don’t wear them out very often…and sure enough, just steps from the hospital, as I removed the hood from my hoodie, my glasses slipped down my nose and fell onto the sidewalk, breaking into two hinged monocles. And it might as well have been my spirit that broke. My prescription is strong, which suddenly rendered the world a smeared blur of strange shapes moving around me as I picked the pieces of my glasses up and entered the hospital in a state of despair. I held one half of them against my face, feeling terribly awkward…and terribly vulnerable being in this strange environment, on the verge of having major surgery.
Once the staff directed me to a pre-op area where I was required to change into a gown, to my frustration I realized–despite the nurses kindly providing me with tape–that the frame had broken at an awkward place on the bridge, which made re-attaching them nearly impossible without their collapsing soon after. I’m not too proud to say that I nearly had a fucking breakdown as I futilely tried to restore some semblance of my vision. And all of the pent-up anxiety I’d been holding around the surgery for months, around the potential outcome, around what my life was going to look like while in recovery came to the surface. I should say that the pre-op nurse who noticed my freak-out was very helpful and empathetic (she shared that her prescription was much worse than mine; she’d had laser surgery).
I can do pain. I’ve done pain. But the intimidation of the procedure–the not-knowing–was overwhelming as they wheeled me into surgery. When I woke up and saw the cast, and realized my arm was completely limp as a result of the anaesthetic, it was a lot to work with.
So, just days later, when the physiotherapist began cutting it off, revealing my stitched up palm and thumb, the blood that soaked the bandage she was removing, I was overcome with emotion. “Are you going to be sick?” she asked in a practised way as I stared at the absolutely gory Frankenstein result. I shook my head, instead looking at the box of facial tissue on the counter, holding back tears of a strange mix of shock and grief. Showing great care she proceeded to go through the exercises I was supposed to do, which involved stretching my fingers inward (which would also put stress on the ligaments and muscles, my palm held together with sutures), and told me that I had to do these every two hours. She encouraged me to use the hand regularly (or as regularly as I could manage), including things such as shampooing my hair, brushing my teeth, etc.
So, typing that last post was basically part of my physio. My hand is getting better and the stitches will be coming out in the next week, however I still struggle to look at my palm, the loose skin, and yes, I struggle to stretch and bend my hand for fear that I’m going to rupture something. It’s a body horror thing, basically.
