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).