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.
A small request: I don’t have a Patreon, and I’m not interested in placing ads here, so ultimately whatever time I spend posting here I do on my own time and dime. I would be so thankful if you could visit my Goodreads page and, if you like my work, please consider rating it. You don’t have to write a review if that’s not your thing (although that’s mighty appreciated).
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.
I’m posting this as a service to the wider community, based on my recent experiences attempting to use Voice Control on Mac as a result of losing the use of my hand due to surgery. For reference, it’s in response to this acknowledged problem with Mac OS systems where, often after an upgrade a bug is introduced that renders Voice Control unusable owing to an error involving the downloading of language files. Having tried all of the prescribed fixes (which no one seems to have found entirely effective), I came across a solution, and one reason I’m posting it here is that the forum thread is closed to responses.
I came across the fix when someone, hearing I had hand surgery, inadvertently suggested I use Siri (which I’ve never used and frankly don’t have use for). However, under the impression that perhaps I could use Siri as a backdoor solution, I happened across a rather magic “fix” which isn’t a fix but rather pointed me in the direction of the Dictation feature in Mac, which I found on this page. Basically: Choose Apple menu () > System Preferences and click on the Keyboard icon and choose the Dictation option (as opposed to the Voice Control option in the Accessibility section)…and sure enough, I could finally activate the option of having voice-to-text successfully. The best part? You don’t even need Siri for this feature (thank god).
It took me many (many) hours to find this fix, so I thought I’d post this so that anyone else having a similar issue will be able to (hopefully) have a way to enable this.
On this note, I have to say that doing client notes with voice-to-text is rather a godsend; not only for my temporary one-handedness, but I actually found dictating my notes verbally was both easier and faster than typing from memory. It could just be a me-thing, but somehow typing my notes from memory requires more effort (mentally) than just openly talking about them via a microphone. I may very well switch to this in the future, semi-permanently, however I’m just happy that I managed to find a solution to this annoying bug.
As someone who has been part of the online tech community since the 90s (Microsoft, Linux, and now Mac), I believe in the value of giving back to the community and I hope that by posting this I can relieve someone of the burden of Apple’s inability to render a fix for this, especially given the circumstances under which someone might need to access this sort of tool.
P.S. The cast was removed from my hand and I’m in the process of doing some intense physiotherapy (literally every two hours I’m supposed to do this), which has allowed me to type two-handedly once more. I’m very thankful for the care I’ve received at St. Michael’s Hospital over the last week. It’s been a bit of an emotional roller-coaster, which I imagine I will write about here sometime soon.
Earlier this year, when I received a notification that the band Slift was playing at Lee’s Palace in October, I immediately bought tickets. I had happened upon their music on a random afternoon, sitting in The Embassy, a music-forward community bar in Kensington Market. It’s a place where the staff play whatever music they like, who are also–crucially–young and have good taste.* I asked the bartender what band he was playing, because it was this wall of psych-rock with virtuosic flourishes of metal and prog. He told me the name of the band, who were from Toulouse, and went to pains to focus on the album in question, the one we were listening to. The album, from 2021, was called Levitation Sessions. According to its Bandcamp page it was recorded “inside the ultra-high voltage electron microscope at the National Institute of Applied Sciences’ CEMES Laboratory in Toulouse.” It’s one 70 minute live-off-the-floor set, based on their studio album, Ummon.
So I bought the album and really adored it; how skilled the playing was and how their sound didn’t seem to veer into the sort of unintentional self-parody that can accompany metal and prog (let alone psych-rock). Every form of music has its tropes, the things that make it necessarily stereotypical, even if the “music” is chaos. And their tone! My god, this album bled tone. To be able to pull something like this off, and do it in such a serious and committed way, was something I admired. I didn’t want ironic detachment or self-knowing winks to the audience. That said, it’s a very specific type of music, and largely because of its bombastic intensity doesn’t exactly make for, um, ¿stable? music to play in the background or on my walks to work.
Here’s the thing: no matter that after a dedicated month I ended up only listening to them intermittently, I was desperate to know what they were like live. I wanted to see/hear/absorb them in-person and how they performed, curious how they could replicate their blistering recorded sound. Obvs, when I received the notification it was a no-brainer.
Months passed (aka the summer), and as the date of the concert approached, especially as I was coming off a hard week at the office, I found myself equivocating. The show was on a Sunday night after all. I was facing a brutal week ahead of me as I prepared–mentally and emotionally–not only for an upcoming four-hour Case Based Assessment I was randomly chosen to complete for the College of Registered Psychotherapists, but also for my upcoming hand surgery 😬 in just over a week. When the Sunday arrived, I received an update from the ticket vendor informing me that, due to issues at the border, the bands (the opener was Meatbodies) would be going on an hour later than scheduled. This meant that, optimistically, Slift weren’t going to take the stage until sometime after 10pm.
As exhausted as I felt, I was determined to go. I took an inventory of the least number of things I needed to bring with me (phone, ID, keys, etc.), because I wanted to be able to shove it all in my pockets. If you’re thinking that this was a preventative step for potential pickpockets, you’d be wrong…
(Side story: around two-and-a-half years ago, when the neglect of human-to-human contact became felt in my bones, along with other necessary disappointments and indignities–among them feeling robbed I didn’t have the opportunity to have a blow-out with friends on my 50th–one of the things I told myself I would do when things Got Better would be to get into a mosh pit. Somewhere. Sometime. Was it a declaration? I don’t know, but wishing for a mosh pit certainly kept my focus afloat sometimes.)
In any case, I proceeded to plan my outfit: old jeans with holes, basic black T-shirt, and a hoodie which would keep me warm outside but could be tied around my waste when it got hot during the concert.
It’s easy to misremember the interior dimensions of Lee’s Palace. It’s a medium-sized venue that can seem cavernous if you’re at the back, leaning against the bar (this was me during Meatbodies) or conversely more intimate down in the pit near the stage. There isn’t a bad sightline at Lee’s. When the opener thanked the audience and started packing their gear, I went against traffic and secured a spot at the back of the pit, knowing that the turnover wouldn’t be that long. Even as the three members of Slift proceeded to set-up their equipment on stage I still wasn’t sure what I was expecting, whether it would be Worth It, and another part of me was reminding me that it was a work night .
From the start it was clear they were there to deliver the goods: a full-on sonic assault, beginning with Ummon, from the self-titled album. It was clear why Slift is a headliner; guitarist, drummer and bass player performing as an organic entity, whose intense focus on rendering each song as passionately as they could was balanced by the fact that they seemed to be plugged-in as a band. No formulaic crowd chatter, no shout-outs except for a single note of thanks to the audience. Gradually, in front of me like a brewing storm, between those pressed against the stage and those of us at the back, I could see a mosh pit forming. Kids bopping…then kids bopping into each other…then kids pushing…and then the bopping kids crowd starts growing. THERE ARE PEOPLE MY AGE IN THE PIT! I make my way to the perimeter, and take on the role of pushing moshers back into the mass of bodies to prevent them from colliding into those at the back who only want to watch the show (please see this handy page for mosh context). It was while they were playing Citadel on a Satellite that I got so close to the whorl of bodies in the centre that I ended up being thrust into the chaos. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve been in a mosh pit (I crowd surfed in my thirties, I remember that), but I wasn’t prepared for it…which I think is the whole point. It wasn’t like I was doing this because I felt immune to danger. Strange hands pushing me about from different angles, me crashing into other moshers; at one point I was pushed backwards, hard, and almost lost my balance but someone was there to push me back in. You can’t control this. You can’t prevent this. You can’t analyze this. You can’t think this. And as soon as I was part of it, I stepped back and returned to guarding the perimeter, soaking in the music and the adrenaline (and yes, the sweat).
Slift probably played for the better part of an hour-and-a-half, maintaining their concentration throughout. My fifty-something body felt like it had been transported to my twenties, only the irony was that my body was in better shape (hello, gym) to be able to keep going for the entire set. When the house lights went up and we began to mill out of Lee’s, I felt lighter. The heaviness I’d been feeling was abated. I felt less scared of adult things. I was also proud that I stuck to my resolution and let myself lose control and fall into the pit.
* If you ever wonder where I find music, this is a great tip (cafés are good, too)
I recently added a note to the welcome message at the top of this here blog:
A small request: I don’t have a Patreon, and I’m not interested in placing ads here, so ultimately whatever time I spend posting here I do on my own time and dime. I would be so thankful if you could visit my Goodreads page and, if you like my work, please consider rating it. You don’t have to write a review if that’s not your thing (although that’s mighty appreciated).
Allow me to show a slice of publishing’s sausage factory. I don’t like corporate behemoths for many reasons, but for the purpose of this argument it comes down to anti-competitiveness. And yet, unquestionably, Goodreads equals traffic and visibility for authors. That’s the reality. When people provide positive ratings and/or leave comments, that boosts the odds of more people discovering my work. Goodreads is a nice way to say hey thanks (or whatever your version of that is) if anything here interests you. I’m not going to stop you from trying it out, however I’m also not going to slam you over the head with this sort of request.
There are other ways to get the word out, of course. I mean, while I’m here, there’s nothing more awesome than bumping into someone who’s read one of my books, so feel free to spread the word the ol’ fashioned way: word-of-mouth.
I also accept that, despite being a bit of an introvert, I could do more to get the word out, like advertising this blog a little more on social media. The irony is that I feel self-conscious driving people toward my blog, this place on the internet where I post things for the general public to see. Anyhoo, that’s me.
I have a genetic condition, called Dupuytren’s Contracture, or perhaps more cool, Viking Disease. Below, you see two photos. The first is my left hand, unaffected. The second is my right hand, very much affected.
A hallmark of the disease is a thickening of the tissue in the palm of one’s hand (though it also can affect the pads of your feet, which I also have, yet it’s not serious). Normally, as it gets more pronounced (it’s chronic), the thickening of the tissue ends up pulling the fourth and fifth fingers inward, making it eventually difficult to operate equipment (or shake hands!). What makes mine a little more odd is that it’s affecting my thumb, pulling it inward. In the above photo of my right hand, that’s literally as far as I can expand my hand, whereas my left can go much further (not exactly pictured).
And so, at the end of this month I have surgery booked. I trust the surgeon, who specializes in this type of procedure, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that I’m going to be without effective use of my hand for upwards of three months. I have no clue when I’ll be able to comfortably type using my right hand, which means that — you guessed it — when it comes to writing it’s going to be difficult. I might try voice-to-type software (which comes with most laptops and phones), but I’ll be honest: I’m not looking forward to any of it. I don’t like surgery, period, and I sure as hell don’t like invasive cut-open-your-hand-with-a-small-risk-of-nerve-damage surgery. However, my options are…bleak. The worse this gets, the higher the likelihood the skin around my thumb will contract given there’s less room for it to move, which means permanent contraction.
This all said, I’ve been lucky. The last time I had invasive surgery was the removal of all four of my wisdom teeth when I was at the tender age of eighteen. I’ve never broken any bones (but boy have I been close) and I haven’t had to have anything stitched in this time.
Anyhoo, I hope to keep posting here, but perhaps without the regularity…or perhaps more regularity if I find it keeps me sane. Wish me luck!
Last week I had the pleasure of seeing journalist and essayist Pankaj Mishra deliver a rousing speech at the Royal Ontario Museum, as part of his being awarded the 2024 Weston International Award. Mishra most recently wrote an excoriating piece for the London Review of Books on The Shoa After Gaza. In his writing and arguments I really appreciate his combination of intellectual principle, and clarity, two things that don’t often combine as elegantly as in Mishra’s prose.
His speech was wide-ranging, and I would do it injustice to attempt summarizing it. That said, broadly, it was about the problems with Western media and it’s inability to capture situations such as what’s happening in Gaza without appearing to sanitize the language used to talk about inhumanity, or to display a complete lack of curiosity about the welfare of brown and Black bodies. How difficult it seemed for mainstream American journalists to talk plainly about the militarized crackdowns on protests in their own country.
One of my takeaways is that there are a lot of mainstream journalists and institutions who are beholden to a liberalism that attempts to peddle a singular neutral truth and is completely unable to work with complexity (such as multiple perspectives).
Personally, there are two current journalistic trends that drive me crazy:
Talking about smartphones and their effect on youth, where “smartphone” for all intents and purposes is clumsily subbed in for what is largely “social media”. By using it as a catch-all I feel we’re shielding social media companies from social responsibility. There’s no compelling research that shows an adverse affect on youths with smartphones — they can distract, but they can also help people connect.
Columnists who trip over themselves to make sure that the left and right are equally to blame for what ails society, despite widespread right wing terrorism on the climb, a literal fascist running for re-election, and all the while the people who own our social media accounts — some of whom, like Facebook, prevent people in my country from distributing news articles to each other — are libertarian billionaires.
So, as I mentionedlast month two months ago, I had delivered Book Three to my agent. He has since added it to his fall catalogue, in time for his yearly trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair. So, in light of the fact that this is now real and legit, I thought I’d (finally) reveal what Book Three is.
The real title is The Stars Align for Disco Santa.
The synopsis I wrote for the catalogue is as follows:
“Marcus is living the dream. Quite literally, it turns out. One fateful day at his tech startup, he finds a sticky note on his desk containing a cryptic message about his ex-girlfriend that draws him into a labyrinthine quest through chaotic film sets, sailing the violent waves of Lake Ontario on a virus-infected author cruise, destined to land on Monster Island . . . only to discover he’s been working in a stupor as a bookstore employee all this time, under the effects of a powerful medical prototype that has created a life-like inner world for him to experience, a world drawn from his and others’ memories, including his ex-girlfriend, Marta, and his mysterious half-sister, Jocelyn, who happens to be the architect of the experiment.
Evoking the hit Apple TV+ series Severance and reminiscent of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Stars Align for Disco Santa is a heartfelt satire of misplaced desire and the limits of our control, a fast-paced novel that is as much about family and grief as it is an offbeat joyride through the not-so-funhouse of the psyche, asking the question: What matters?”
The cat is out of the bag now, and I no longer have to use “Book Three” to describe this! I am released!
I honestly don’t know much about this band, but I heard this track playing in a local bar and I was really taken with it. I’m an aficionado of guitar instrumentals, and I looooove what the lead guitarist does with his fills. It’s very delicate and quite beautiful, even if the track carries the markers of its era (60s).
As I’ve done previously, I thought I’d post a list of things I’ve seen in the last while. All of these can be found on major streaming services.
Plan B
Produced for CBC, (streaming locally on Gem) Plan B is a well-made drama with a sci-fi twist. The premise in each season (note: the seasons’ storylines aren’t linked so you don’t need to watch them in order) is the discovery of a phone-in service called Plan B, which — after you submit your payment information — can take you back to an earlier sequence of your life, allowing you to re-live (and re-adjust) your timeline.
The show does a lot without a big budget. It helps that the writing is solid and the premise, rather than being dreamy, often ends up only creating more domestic ethical and moral conundrums for its characters than it solves. This is gritty, grown-up speculative drama (see: Black Mirror, Twilight Zone) that will invite a lot of questions from the viewer about the ways “control” can be addictive to those who are insecure, or indulge our need for justice in ways that goes beyond the grasp of our intent. I found the just-released second season more compelling, but I would recommend the series as a whole.
Time Bandits
I was not particularly interested in watching this, despite multiple critics giving it praises. I’m skeptical of producers taking my childhood memories and rehashing them for the next generation. Discovering that Taika Waititi was behind the series budged the needle a bit. Then there was finding out from my partner, just as I was sitting down to watch it, the controversy over one actor’s on-set experiences during the production of the show. So yes, mixed feelings going in.
While the first episode contains a lot of promise and is definitely the comedically sharpest of what I watched, it’s a case of diminishing returns afterwards. There are some genuine moments of whimsy and satire, and Easter eggs for Python fetishists, but it ends up overly plot-driven with surprisingly little-to-no interest in character development or relationship building. Less surprisingly, Waititi himself is cast but feels inserted just to fill the running time by chewing the scenery. I’ll note that this was made to include a younger viewership, so it’s possible some jokes I thought were basic might land better with children. We stopped after four episodes.
The Lady in the Lake
Based on a novel by Laura Lippman, The Lady in the Lake features Natalie Portman in her first major TV role. The series revolves around two murders in Baltimore in the 60s, the first being a young girl found by the river. This draws-in two narratives from two very different parts of the city. The first is through Portman’s character, a smothered Jewish housewife who is frustrated by the oppressiveness of her social circle and coming to terms with the sacrifices she’s made. The second is by Moses Ingram (who you may recognize from The Queen’s Gambit), a Black single mother who works as a window display model when she’s not making money on the side at the local gambling house.
The lives of the two leads intertwine (albeit in different timelines) as Porter leaves her husband and resentful son, and moves into an apartment in a Black inner-city neighbourhood as she begins a journalistic pursuit of the girl’s murderer. Ingram’s thread is certainly the more propulsive of the two, as she tries to balance municipal political disappointments with supporting her stand-up comedian husband, with everything centred on a nightclub run by a powerful racketeer. There’s a writerly attempt here to draw a parallel between the shared experience of two women oppressed by their circumstances, both of whom must ultimately rely on their persistence and resourcefulness. However, this shared experience can sometimes feel a little like wishful thinking given the fact that there are significant socioeconomic differences between both characters, despite both in their own way paddling up-river in a male-dominated society. Ingram’s stakes are also much higher: she may be the Lady of the title.
There’s a lot going on in this show and certainly maintains a novel-y feel to it. I don’t know what it is about jazz clubs and films / shows that want to be a lot more than they are, because while The Lady in the Lake captures the politics and culture of its era and sports a good cast, the overall telling of the story can feel uneven, despite being a twisty and intimate glimpse of a different time.
