The chronologically relative tense

Michael Hayward

Globe and Mail columnist Ron Mickleburgh opens his article in the Saturday edition of that paper with the following lead:

In mere days, Vancouver’s turn in the Olympic spotlight will be just six months away.

a curious circumlocution which provides us with an excellent example of the chronologically relative tense – also known as the Slaughterhouse-Five tense, after the Kurt Vonnegut novel which features a character who has become “unstuck in time.”

I suppose we should be grateful to the Globe’s editors: things could have been even more opaque; a Geist mole inside the Globe’s Vancouver bureau has provided us with an early draft of Mickleburgh’s piece, which, in its initial state, began

Two years, seven months and a few days from a week ago next Wednesday, we will be able to cast back our minds six years, four months, three weeks and two days to a point in time when the opening of the 2010 Winter Olympics was still four years and six months or so away.

Inauguration statements of a different sort

Michael Hayward

The publishing industry is in a period of transition, with the dominant delivery mechanism for the written word (ink printed upon sheets of processed tree) gradually making way for a clean, green, all-digital delivery path. Almost every newspaper and magazine is twinned with its web-based echo which offers "online only" bonuses (audio, video, a searchable archive that stretches back to the stone age) to subscribers. As for books: who is not delighted to know that we can now read 41 different versions of Persuasion on a Kindle? (unless you live in one of those "other" countries -- like Canada -- where Amazon has yet to establish a Kindle beachhead...)

With that as backdrop let me direct you to premiereissues.com, a website which describes itself as an online "archive of magazine firsts"; the new media serving as a (virtual) museum to preserve and display examples of the old.

At premiereissues.com you can read the dreams and yearnings -- the hyperbole and the bafflegab -- those nuggets of deathless prose offered up by editors-in-chief as their official Statements in the first (and in some cases: only) issue of their brand new magazines. Think of it: you're up there on your freshly-printed podium, you tap your champagne glass with your escargot fork to get the reader's attention. You're speaking for posterity.

So what on earth might he have meant, and what subscriber demographic was editor-in-chief Jefferson Hack hoping to reach, when he wrote (in the inaugual issue of Another Magazine):

We wish our lives to be less complicated and more spiritually rewarding yet we are creatures of extremes. Taken to habit and spurred by random acts of chaos. We laugh when we should cry and make others cry when we should make them happy. We are silly and smart, selfish and caring, the modern metaphysical children of Adam and Eve. This is our Original Sin. Our humanity, our right to fuck up and pick up the pieces. To learn as we go along and make the same mistakes again. To lose ourselves in the moment and put things off for another day.

And was Michael McCullough attempting to carve out a niche for gastropodaphiles when he asked readers of the first issue of bleach magazine

Be honest. Which would you rather read? Me welcoming you to this brand new magazine called bleach and telling you that it is going to be so unique, so different, and so new? Or me telling you about the exciting features, photo essays, fabulous personalities, and up-and-coming artists that lie in store for you when you turn the pages? Or me telling you about a friend of mine who likes to make art out of crushed snails on canvas?

Geist is not yet listed in the archives of premiereissues.com; we will be. And in the meantime you can read right here, the closest I could find to an official Statement, from the inside back cover of Volume 1 Number 1 of Geist magazine, October 1990

Welcome to the last page of the first issue of Geist, the national magazine of ideas and culture. Our statistical experts tell us that you probably got here in a quite unstatistical way, by flipping around, pausing here and skimming there; and furthermore that you've probably made several mental notes to pick Geist up again -- and may even have left this copy in the bathroom, anticipating future encounters. Who can know these things? In any event, you are here, and now that you've come this far, you should consider joining us for more of the same and more of that. Hence the open invitation: if we sound like you (so far), join us now. And bring your friends. We need to know who all of us are. A subscription to Geist is a commitment to -- in a word -- etceterage -- which is to say: language, art, photography, life.

Geist; still the best source of etceterage around...

The Big Books Bailout

Michael Hayward

A typical poet's mansion, after the bailout.

A lot of people ask me how I can live in such opulence, given that I make my living writing award-winning literary fiction that nobody actually reads.

-- Julian Gough gives a writer's view of a proposed bailout of the US publishing industry

Geist's cadre of crack writers were delighted to read an article in the New York Times which detailed a bailout package for the US publishing industry. "Heck," we thought, allowing an uncharacteristic coarseness to creep into our language. "If American poets can once again expect to dine regularly on truffled partridge and champagne, is it not reasonable for Canadian poets and publishers to demand a similar bailout from their government?"

The text of the proposal analyzes the "irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading" practices which got us all into this mess, practices which "simply put too many families into books they could not finish":

We are seeing the impact on readers and neighborhoods, with 5 million readers now behind on their reading. Some are just walking away from novels they should never have been reading in the first place. What began as a sub-prime reading problem has spread to other, less-risky readers, and contributed to excess inventories. These troubled novels are now parked, or frozen, on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, and other reading institutions, preventing them from financing readable novels.

All we can say is "Write on!" If Mr Harper wishes his minority government to survive the next few weeks he should bear in mind that writers are voters too...

All I want for Christmas...

Michael Hayward

Yesterday George Bush played Santa, pardoning 19 and commuting the life sentence of a convicted methamphetamine dealer in Iowa -- but it looks like time is running out for Lord Black of Crossharbour, who is probably banging a tin cup against the bars of his Florida jail cell demanding his own Christmas miracle. Or hunched over the keyboard of his Sony Vaio (Windows XP rather than Vista; Conrad may be a convicted felon but he's certainly no fool) clicking his browser's Refresh button as he scans and rescans the list of people pardoned by George W. Bush -- from which his own name is still conspicuously absent.

This particular item from Lord Black's Christmas wish list hit the newspapers in late November, a bleak time of year when even the most pragmatic of us are tempted to indulge in unwarranted optimism. I first read of Conrad's yearnings in The Globe and Mail, having watched the latest episode of Indiana Jones on DVD the night before (in which a paunchy Harrison Ford puffs and labours to foil a fiendish Russki plot and sends his pacemaker into overdrive). It was an odd convergence of entertainments, Lord Black's Machiavellian scheming acting as an awkward counterpoint to Indiana's corn-fed American gung-ho; surely the cinematic potential of this mashup cannot have escaped the eye of Spielberg et al?

The final act almost writes itself: the incompetent (Josh Brolin fresh from his starring role in W.) breaks out the venal (Lord Black as himself) from the slammer -- while the world's financial system collapses in a mega-trillion-dollar special effect. Cue the 96-piece orchestra, John "Star Wars" Williams's score reaching a bombastic conclusion as a bank of first- and second-violinists reprise the hero's theme to an accompaniment of tympani and brass. Our Conrad sets his Charolais-like head in profile and cocks an ear at the sound of a Sikorsky Black Hawk rotor approaching overhead. "C'mon Your Worship!" -- a desperate George W. leans dangerously from the cockpit window, "C'mon!" Casting his ermine-trimmed cloak aside, Conrad lunges up and outward from his cell-block window and just manages to catch the rope ladder's final rung. The helicopter banks abruptly from the camera towards a carnelian sunset; credits roll.

Why, I was talking about this with Nelson only yesterday!

Michael Hayward

-- as reported by the BBC:

Nearly half of all men and one-third of women have lied about what they have read to try to impress friends or potential partners, a survey suggests. Men were most likely to do this to appear intellectual or romantic, found the poll of 1,500 people by Populus for the National Year of Reading campaign. The men polled said they would be most impressed by women who read news websites, Shakespeare or song lyrics. Women said men should have read Nelson Mandela's biography or Shakespeare.

So it turns out we were lying about the wrong books all along. Susan Sontag; Wittgenstein; Nietzsche; John Cleland; Kant -- babe magnets, one and all (or so we'd believed, with little in the way of first hand confirmation). "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" as Puck puts it so succinctly in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act III, scene 2, line 115; one of my favorites of his plays, by the way (I've read them all).