Completion
A quick note: I’ve just finished Tolstoy’s War & Peace. I’ve been reading it for just over a year – the gi-normous, anti-public-transit hardcover version of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation – and finally read the last of the last pages last night (if that sounds awkward, the thing has an Epilogue in two parts, each spanning several chapters, plus an Appendix by Tolstoy). I would’ve finished sooner had the second half of the Epilogue not consisted of an essay by the author on the philosophical/socio-historical implications of freedom vs. necessity in society.
So, yes, in the upcoming days, I will post a formal review. There shall be more book reviews in general in the coming months, seeing as those are the things which are responsible for 50% of this blog’s traffic. I’m assuming this percentage consists, in equal measure, of both curious readers-to-be and desperate students cramming for their essays/tests (Question 2a: “What are the themes in Hesse’s Siddhartha?”).
Photo: Mist #4
And The Nominees Aren’t…
I will do what most major news outlets won’t do and say upfront that there are an enormous amount of more important things going on in the world (or, conversely, not going on) than this…
That said, I’m a film hound and thus can justify this mirage of mostly-useless information
The 834th Academy Award (ie. The Oscars) nominations were announced this morning. I don’t think there has ever been an Oscars year where I’ve been satisfied that the right films were (or weren’t) nominated for the right category (or at all). And yet…
- WALL-E didn’t get nominated for Best Picture, but was instead victimized by the mostly-useless ghetto category of “Best Animated Film of the Year”, where it shares it’s chances with such a memorable classic as Bolt. I will admit, I loved WALL-E; it was one of the most subversively humane films made in years. The sooner the “Academy” can eliminate the Animated Film category the better.
- The Reader…I haven’t seen it. I don’t know anyone who’s seen it. Yet while it seemed to get slightly trashed when it came out (one of the Nazi-themed Christmas 2008 releases) – and by “trashed”, I mean it was called a weak, manipulative Oscar-baiting film – it was nominated for “Best Motion Picture of the Year”. Again, I don’t want to criticize things I haven’t seen…but…
- I haven’t seen any of the films nominated for “Best Motion Picture of the Year”. I do want to see Slumdog Millionaire (terribly), whereas Frost/Nixon and Milk – though I do not doubt their quality – will probably come into my life via DVD rentals. As for The Curious Case of Ben(*yawn*), I have no interest.
- Editing, that category no one seems to understand seems a mirror image of the Best Picture nominees, with The Reader swapped for The Dark Knight. I’m okay with that, yet – while I liked Dark Knight, I would not necessarily nominate it for best editing; the big chase scene in the Chicago (sorry, Gotham) tunnel was terribly disorienting (as in, this is all cutty and fast and good and stuff, but why does it make no sense to me?). I don’t have a problem, on the surface, with a cutty style of editing (it was well-served in the Oscar-winning Bourne Ultimatum, perhaps one of the best action films of the decade), but it needs to make sense, which I felt was missing in parts of DK.
- Happy that Waltz with Bashir and The Class were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film – I want to see both of them very much. Would have been nice if the Swedish film, Let The Right One In, had been nominated, but that’s me dreaming.
And now, on to more interesting things…
Photo: Balloon #1
An Unspoken Rule: It’s Never Simple
For the last few years, I’d get the odd inspiration to write something suitable for the Facts & Arguments section of the Globe and Mail. For those unacquainted, it is a daily feature of one of our national newspapers; a personal essay between 800 and 1,000 words, open to the public for submissions.
Easy, right?
Truth: no. Every time I’ve tried in the past, I can’t pull it off. Can’t even get past two paragraphs. It’s not a question of writing 800 words of personal essay, but rather pulling off 800 words of personal essay that actually is interesting to a wide array of people which isn’t intellectually disingenuous at the same time. I say this because it’s easy to make fun of the Facts & Arguments essay (or at least I find it easy). “In the end,” I’ve joked to my wife, “what I learnt from my cat is that it’s not the travails I endured, but the lessons contained therein which have enriched my life. Ha, ha“. They are all, clichés aside, about personal experiences which lead to larger realizations. You could compare this (somewhat) to the essay featured at the back of the New York Times Sunday magazine, only longer and not as consistently curated.
Again: easy, right? After all, it’s just 800 words of personal stuff. You’re a writer, eh Cahill?
Truth: no, not easy. No, not at all. One misty Sunday morning over the Christmas break, I got the inspiration and decided that I was going to finally hunker down and do it. Me, the fiction-writing blogging sorta guy was going to sit his ass down and write an honest to goodness Facts & Arguments-style essay if it killed me. And it had to be good. And it had to be honest. No bullshit. No cynical kiss-ass formula-copying. It would, after all, have my name on it, published or not.
I realized several things immediately:
- Even though I write for this blog, which could be construed as “personal non-fiction” (or whatever the latest strain of non-fiction terminology is), it’s still pretty free-form stuff. It’s not like I have an editor, aside from my own middling expectations. In other words, it was not a load of help.
- Unlike fiction, I couldn’t write it all down as a semi-coherent story and then revise-by-whim from there. I don’t write enough non-fiction to have those strengths. My first “draft” (and trust me, that word deserves those odious quotation-marks) was a stinky grab-bag of overly-literary ideas which made no sense to the world outside my head, which for the most part seemed up my ass at the time that I wrote it.
- Being honest in a blog and being honest in a personal essay intended for mass (as in nationwide) publication are two totally (totally) separate things. I had to pay attention to a lot more than I had bargained for. And no swearing.
It has been torture. I’ve spent more time on this than I care to mention (at last count, thirteen revisions in two weeks). And yet, I didn’t want to give up. The format was a challenge and as a writer/artist/whatever it’s important to be challenged, especially if one wants to be versatile. In the end (ha ha), I’ve finally got something worth submitting. Whether it actually gets published (and, God knows, I’ve done my best on this sucker) is no longer a chief concern. The goal was to submit my best effort and that is what I’ve done (though of course I’ve cursed my chances of this ever happening, having written about it beforehand and all).
Many lessons learnt, indeed.
quote
“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”
– Steven Pinker, from My Genome, My Self
You
Inevitably, you will go somewhere, some informal gathering of friends, perhaps a party of some sort. You will discover that you are surrounded by people your age who all seem to be doing pretty well in life: active, successful, progressing in their art (whatever that word may be construed to mean), and content in a non-complacent way. And it will slowly make you feel like crap. Particularly the morning after.
You look squarely at your day ahead, at your day-job-slash-career (the thing you do for money), your achievements (or things you hope to achieve within a certain time period) and you have realizations of which many are negative, self-critical, sometimes despairing.
You know the colder months do not treat you well. You know that you suffer silently from something which begins with a “d” and rhymes with “repression”, and that there’s sweet-dick you can do about it short of spinning the midway crown-and-anchor wheel of pharmaceuticals. You also know that there is no cure, that winter has only begun, and that your public transit reading material is a collection of essays written by someone who suffered similarly and recently committed suicide.
It is one of those moments when the warmest of jazz songs on the radio does not warm you, that despite the windows in your apartment the January daylight is too cold. It is one of those moments where you look outward for signs of optimism, but in doing so you also make yourself susceptible, where both good and bad pass freely through your unarmed perimeter. That, given your disposition, you see more bad than good (or even worse, emptiness; after all, even “bad” is a symptom of humanity). You know the good is there, but for some reason it is not as visible or vibrant as “good” should be.
You find solace in writing about it in second-person (a format you’ve been wanting to try) and by an unfinished roll of film in your camera and the possibility that there are things outside that could be captured as means to portray these unanswered questions. And that a long walk will do you good.
A quick note
I just wanted to point out that Ingrid’s photo/horoscope art project, Unbought Stuffed Dogs, has drawn to a close. She has a wonderful summary of the “point” and the experience of the process. Such things should not go unnoticed.
