Aline Irwin, who is way overdo for her own post, would approve of this petition on behalf of the athlete Caster Semenya.
So for Aline's sake I urge you all to take a look at it and to consider signing it. 
(This bookplate was designed for Aline Irwin, somewhat androgynous member of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club.)
"Gender is not a science, and biology does not make -- or unmake -- a woman."
War, Peace & the Kid Book
photo from here.
Here's a speech I gave last night at The Winter Drey book launch, posted at the request of some of the visitors.
I’ve never given a speech at a book launch before, but upon reflection I discovered that, at this one, I actually had something to say.
It always seemed to me that that the overall theme of these books would be clear from the launching-off point of the first one, a true historical battle between a pair of Viking kings from the 10th Century in which the weaker-seeming king won without a single sword being hacked into flesh.
But since, in the highest profile review I received for that book, the reviewer chose to admonish me for not being bloody enough to satisfy her ten-year-old son, I feel compelled to spell things out a bit.
I love bloody stories, don’t get me wrong. So many children’s books are about the battle between good and evil. Harry Potter, Eragon, The Lord of the Rings. Even the Silverwing saga, by our own Kenneth Oppel, has a few good battles, if I’m not mistaken.
It’s what makes these books exciting. 
Still, I wondered if it was possible to write a series of books, in the grand epic tradition, about characters who choose not to fight, without being accused by a grown-up of being too boring for children. Is it possible to depict courage without hacking off an arm with your sword?
That was my question.
The Feathered Cloak had, at its centre, the battle, or non-battle, that I described above. It portrays the events that lead up to it, some mythical and others everyday, and tries to imagine a reason why the cards fell the way they did. It had a lot to do with a bloodthirsty warrior getting his symbol of battle transformed before his eyes into a symbol of peace.
The book was also about the wishes and dreams and feelings of a young girl.
The Winter Drey explores a different path towards and away from war, one that might strike you as a little darker and more contemporary: That is, what kind of person (or creature) would seek to control a much larger person (or creature) than himself by manipulating the love that person feels for something, be it country, or family, or world-tree? What sort of person (or creature) would asset that control by invoking a powerful but entirely invisible enemy?
And what kind of event would give the other person (or creature) an inkling that maybe he was being manipulated?
The book is also about the wishes and dreams and feelings of a little boy.
He’s the brother of the girl in the first book. She’s not in this second book, but these two children, beloved to me, will meet again.
photo from here, posted in honour of The Winter Drey's own Rat-A-Task.
In this book too I’ve created the weakest character you could possibly imagine. Think of the weakest creature you can imagine and then make it weaker. And then I gave gave this creature more influence over the outcome than anything else.
(Hint: it's not a squirrel.)
So yeah, basically, what I wanted to write about is heroic Vikings who choose, in the end, based on hard experience, not to fight. It may not be bloody enough for some, and I may not be doing the world any favours by filling the heads of children with naive notions like how peace is better than war and can be just as exciting, but it’s what I set out to do, and I intend to finish it, with ever escalating stakes.
-Sean Dixon
A Funny Vindication for the Switch to Prose
So it seems after all these years of being a playwright, I've gotten some of my best Toronto theatre reviews ever for a bunch of text that I wrote as prose.
It's weird though. Plunk Henry, whose name is all over these reviews, is one of the central characters of my next book, which I've just completed. It's strange to see his name all over the press, floating freely from my own.
Theatre is so weird.
Wild Gilgameshian Things
There seems to be a little hint of Gilgamesh in this exciting thing. Something about the way they deal with the trees, and the impressive place they build. Are they destroying their world? Is that what it is to be a monster?
Enquiring minds want to know. But have to wait till October.
Curated Videos
I'm a bit of a Facebook maniac. Originally I was using it as a storage place for research and for videos I liked. But I've posted so many things there now that I've come to realize it sucks as a closet. You can't find anything there after a week or two. Or maybe you can, but it will take hours. Days. Occasionally I'll read someone say how they're putting something up on Facebook for posterity. But Facebook never involved itself with posterity, not even before it adopted the twitter-style feed. It's always now, and now and... now! and NOW and now.
But I still like to post things there. Music videos that I've just discovered. Medieval church music on Sundays. The occasional jaw-dropping thing. Some politics, some humour. I'm rarely judicious, barely discerning.
Going to have to be now though. 
One of my FB (and city) associates, a feller named Erik Rutherford, has come up with the bright, gorgeous idea of creating a website for curated videos. It's called Ryeberg and the idea is described (by him) as follows:
Watching and sharing video clips has become part of our lives, and it’s time we had a website dedicated to making sense of what all this video content means to us.
This is how it works: Ryeberg Curators select video clips from any video hosting site (YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo, DailyMotion), and present these selections with written commentary. These become Curated Videos. Curated Video = Video Clip + Written Text.
By inviting smart, talented, distinguished people to offer their thoughts on the videos they find interesting, Ryeberg aims to bring intelligent, convivial discourse to the great surfeit of video pouring through cyberspace.
Erik challenged me (essentially) to rein in my mad FB video postings, think about the ones I actually like, write about why I like them, and post them in the larger Ryeberg format.
The site went up last week. Here's my latest and here's the main page. Sign up. Check it out.
An Open Letter to Scholastic Book Services
I am writing to you to serve notice about an incident that took place in 1972 which I have never forgotten and which, as is perhaps obvious, I still regard with bitterness and regret -- an incident in which you took advantage of my distance, my shyness, my politeness and, most egregiously of all, my tender age.
The scenario is as follows.
I was in Grade Two. Early that year, I managed to scrape together my meagre allowance and fill out an order for a book featuring the inimitable Pippi Longstockings. I don’t remember which book it was, but it had presumably been featured in your 71-72 catalogue, so perhaps you could look it up for me.
I was already a fan of Pippi, her stockings, her freckles and the actress who played her in the dubbed Swedish film adaptations that had recently been unleashed onto North American TV. Pippi was probably the first crush I ever had, which might go some way towards explaining the world of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club. Just saying.
Waiting for the Scholastic shipment to come in was the first thing that taught me about patience. I had to allow for time to pass, and though it was true that some things took a long time, it was also true that when that time was past, it suddenly seemed to have been light and easily borne.
What’s more, when those boxes were carried into the classroom, the excitement was almost overwhelming. How was it possible that this nearly unimaginable block of time had actually gone by? How far I had traveled, and now I was mere steps away from my goal: holding a shiny, slim new BOOK in my seven-year old hands.
Waiting for the Scholastic shipment to come in was the first thing that taught me about patience. I had to allow for time to pass, and though it was true that some things took a long time, it was also true that when that time was past, it suddenly seemed to have been light and easily borne.
What’s more, when those boxes were carried into the classroom, the excitement was almost overwhelming. How was it possible that this nearly unimaginable block of time had actually gone by? How far I had traveled, and now I was mere steps away from my goal: holding a shiny, slim new BOOK in my seven-year old hands.
And then I’d have it forever, free to peruse it for the rest of my life. It was my own searchable thing.
When my shipment was handed to me, though, there turned out to be some mistake -- I thought (at first) easily remedied. My book turned out not to be Pippi at all. Much to my horror, I was handed a changeling called Ramona the Pest.
When my shipment was handed to me, though, there turned out to be some mistake -- I thought (at first) easily remedied. My book turned out not to be Pippi at all. Much to my horror, I was handed a changeling called Ramona the Pest.
-But Mrs McMahon, I didn't order this.
-Says here you did, dear.
I remember going to the front of the classroom to dig through the detritus of the box to see if there was some mistake, if my Pippi book was down among the paper shavings somewhere. But alas, no. Pippi was out of stock, I would not get my stockings, and SCHOLASTIC had assumed I would be content with some other girl. Your company assumed that I, an innocent seven-year-old boy, would take one girl over another, just like that.
Though I don't remember which Pippi I was after, I do recall the exact edition of the book that was placed in my sorry little hands.
The last thing in the world I wanted that day, if I was not going to get a Pippi book, was this. There had been several other books in the catalogue that had fought for primacy with Pippi. Pippi was a fighter though, and had won the day. Ramona? I don't know if she was even in there.
I've listed some questions for you:
It has recently occurred to me, however, that I am now an author. A published author! published by a fellow venerable New York institution no less!
Don’t get me wrong. I think you guys are great. In those days, you also published a book of poetry, Grab Me A Bus, that had actually been written by children and for children. I loved that book.I was able to imagine, through the auspices of that book, what it would be like to write and be published. There were photos too.
I held on to my copy of Grab Me A Bus for 20 years, until I finally gave it to the young son of a friend who was moving away from the small town where he lived to the big city. The kid was anxious about it. My friend asked me to write him a letter about my experience of that same kind of journey, undertaken at about the same age as he was.
Why did you do that to me?
Why did you think I would want Ramona?
How could you do that to me?
What did you take me for?
A girl?
That's what I thought at the time.
Still, that's no excuse either.
These days I can't help thinking you took me for some kind of slut.
Shame on you, anyway, whatever you thought.
I still think about it, after all these years. All my life since then I have often avoided popular things, in the event that I will be as disappointed as I was on that day -- a disappointment which, by the way, could have been avoided by the simple act of sending me my money back instead of Ramona the Pest.
I still think about it, after all these years. All my life since then I have often avoided popular things, in the event that I will be as disappointed as I was on that day -- a disappointment which, by the way, could have been avoided by the simple act of sending me my money back instead of Ramona the Pest.
It has recently occurred to me, however, that I am now an author. A published author! published by a fellow venerable New York institution no less!
The Other Press!
I am therefore in a good position to seek redress!
(I'm serious, you know. That was not an intentional rhyme.)
Furthermore, it occurs to me that the sin you committed against my mute and innocent age may have been repeated over the years against countless other scholarly but diffident children. I mean why not? If I didn’t protest at the time, then what was to stop you from taking advantage of other children, just like me? How many other kids have got the wrong book simply so you could clear off the order desk and go home?
Furthermore, it occurs to me that the sin you committed against my mute and innocent age may have been repeated over the years against countless other scholarly but diffident children. I mean why not? If I didn’t protest at the time, then what was to stop you from taking advantage of other children, just like me? How many other kids have got the wrong book simply so you could clear off the order desk and go home?
See, if an adult had ordered a history of the American Revolution, would any self respecting publishing house have sent them a book of essays on the influence of the French Revolution instead?
(perhaps with a note explaining how the French Revolution is considered historically more important than the American one, despite the fact that it happened afterwards. Nothing special about a colony revolting against the motherland. But the people rising up and overthrowing their own government? That's huge! Take this book instead. It has a nice introduction written by Carla Bruni and a free CD and DVD! Take this book instead!)
No?
Then why did you send me Ramona the Pest?
Oh it feels good to finally get that off my chest.
(It occurs to me that perhaps it wasn’t as popular as Pippi Longstockings, and so it never went out of stock. Otherwise I might have gotten a copy of the collected poetry of Beverly Cleary instead.)
I held on to my copy of Grab Me A Bus for 20 years, until I finally gave it to the young son of a friend who was moving away from the small town where he lived to the big city. The kid was anxious about it. My friend asked me to write him a letter about my experience of that same kind of journey, undertaken at about the same age as he was.
So I gave the kid my copy along with the letter, and then later I found I missed my copy and tried to find another one on the Internet. But not everything is available on the Internet. I couldn't find one.
Though I did discover there that some kid somewhere (Australia, I think) had plagiarized the title poem from that collection (If You Grab Me A Bus) and used it to win an online poetry competition in, like, 1999. The poem was up on their site, proudly printed. I wrote and told them to take it down.
But not before reading it and being reminded how much I missed by copy of Grab Me A Bus.
In conclusion, I would like to say that you don't need to send me my copy of Pippi Longstockings.
And you don't need to send me my money back.
In conclusion, I would like to say that you don't need to send me my copy of Pippi Longstockings.
And you don't need to send me my money back.
What I would like, though, is for someone to head down into the dusty basement of Scholastic and dig out at old 1974 copy of Grab Me A Bus and drop it into the mail to my good friends at the Other Press. I can pick it up later.
That would certainly clear the air between us.
Yours Most Sincerely,
Sean Dixon
(Adult & Published Author)
Toronto, Canada
Romy's Bingotown
Image from here.
I pretended that Romy was from someplace other than Brantford, Ontario (I think I may have settled on Windsor in order to make it conceivable that she had travelled on the Nindawayma when it had served as a ferry between Tobermory and Manitoulin Island.)
But in truth, Romy is from where I’m from. She’s from Brantford. Wayne Gretsky is from there too. So is Alexander Graham Bell, no matter what you Americans say. In fact it used to be called The Telephone City on the city signs. Now it's called the home of Monsieur Gretsky. (I'm not even sure I'm spelling his name right.)
Image from here.
Things are looking up these days, apparently, but a few years ago, downtown Brantford was being used as a perfect location for horror movies. It all started in the 80s when someone had the bright idea of building an Eaton Centre on the downtown Market Square, thus blocking the view of every corner of downtown from every other corner of downtown. Ruinous? Yes. I love the commentary by the graffiti artist who peopled the walls of abandoned buildings with shadows, as in the photo at the top of this post.
They put that Eaton Centre up because they were worried the downtown was deteriorating (cf. the 'doughnut effect') and they wanted to revive it. Instead, it eradicated whatever charm the place had left.
I had always heard there was an old Six Nations curse on that Market Square, declaring that any institution that built on it was destined to fail. All that land was supposed to belong to the Iroquois, promised to Joseph Brant for assisting the Brits against the Americans and their revolution.
Where the Eaton Centre was concerned, it took a few years, but the corp went down.
And when the corp went down, there was even less colour there than there had been before. For Romy, who gets depressed by drabness, that meant a move to Montreal, the most colourful city in Canada.
At least sometimes. Other times it's not.And when the corp went down, there was even less colour there than there had been before. For Romy, who gets depressed by drabness, that meant a move to Montreal, the most colourful city in Canada.
Eustace Tilley, Honorary Montrealer
The New Yorker is basking in the reflected glory of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club (scroll to bottom of link to see if you're fit for membership). As, really, why should they not?
(Oh wait... that link wasn't about a magazine... It was about a train.)
(And apologies to all those who believed the LC was actually being somehow represented in the New Yorker.)
(And speaking of Eustace Tilley, I just found this beautiful compilation.)
I'm up on Large Hearted Boy...
... a unique & indespensible books and music site, with the official Lacuna Cabal playlist.
Including, among many others, Aline's taste for publicizing outrageous contemporary political events, like the tasering of a frightened, confused and definitively innocent man by the RCMP in the Vancouver airport...
... song courtesy of Bob Wiseman.
A Striking Young Beauty
I found this about six years ago on a bulletin board in a coffee shop downtown. I thought I should block out the name and address -- which is a suite in a fancy condo building at the heart of the city -- for the sake of a clearly wealthy and insane man's privacy, while at the same time indicating its positioning as the base of this impressive textual perfume bottle (or cremation urn, however you choose to see it.)
My question though: All questions of mental illness and sexual fantasy aside, if an obsession to reverse the aging process with vitamins isn't a mind-numbing and meaningless concern, really, what is?
Nindawayma
Photo : Julien Roumagnac (www.j-roumagnac.net)
I was watching a terrible Quebecois movie last year with my wife (its awfulness doesn’t stop it from being the highest grossing Canadian film of all time) -- Bon Cop Bad Cop. The premise was clever -- a cop from Toronto and another from Montreal are obliged to work together -- so it wasn't so hard to watch, but there was a big surprise for me at the end. The climax takes place at the Montreal port on board an old crumbling boat where the bad guy’s hiding out.
These scenes are poorly edited and fail to give the watcher any sense of place. But I suddenly recognized the setting. ‘Hey!’ I proclaimed, incredulous. ‘That’s my boat!’
I meant the Nindawayma.
It was the Nindawayma. Which is not, technically, my boat.
Photo : Julien Roumagnac (www.j-roumagnac.net)
At the end of the play version of The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal, Neil Coghill stowed away on a barge that was heading down the St Lawrence River to a port in St. Pierre & Miquelon.
By the time I came to write the novel, I realized I was dealing with a more international setting and my characters were going to have to head further afield.
I realized, in other words, that I was going to need a bigger boat.
I took a trip to Montreal and walked down to the waterfront. There was a spectacular old paint-peeling boat in the old port there.
In this image the boat appears to be in the same location but it’s pointing in the opposite direction from how I (and Neil and Romy) found it. I wrote down the faded names on its side, assuming I would not find anything but intending to conduct some research all the same.
Much to my surprise, there was a lot of information about this particular boat on the internet.
At the time, it was for sale by its owners, so there was even a website, up no longer, that included detailed specs and photos of the interior decks. These proved to be very helpful, though there was certainly not the wealth of information and imagery that there is now.
At the time, it was for sale by its owners, so there was even a website, up no longer, that included detailed specs and photos of the interior decks. These proved to be very helpful, though there was certainly not the wealth of information and imagery that there is now.
(This site was up at the time, but there certainly was not a Wikipedia entry. Nor were there Flickr collections.The most spectacular photos up now are all by Julien Roumagnac, who has kindly allowed me to illustrate this entry with a few of them. In his photos, the Nindawayma has been moved from where I found it to a more picturesque location closer to downtown.
(And there's another beauty at the bottom of this post, by Julien's brother, Marc.)
Photo : Marc Roumagnac (www.roumagnac.net/blog)
The reason why we actually know all this is because there are a lot of people who pay attention to the fate of ships. They make it their hobby, or perhaps even their duty, to spend their days writing logs and shipping journals and posting photographs and asking after the whereabouts of the ships that might have carried them once across Georgian Bay or into a port at Barcelona or the Isle of Man. They track their progress and mourn their passing. They lie snug in their beds at night and think about the hull that once protected them from the deep. We’ve even found a testimonial by a Nindawayma-fan in Montreal who bewailed the state of her paint-job but affirmed that she was still “a part of the family.” Thousands of ships are adrift across the Internet due to the intercession of such people. The Nindawayma is one of them. So is the Manx Viking, which turns out to be the same ship. So is the Monte Cruceta and the Monte Castillo and the Monte Corona and the Monte Contes. That’s how we know. We’re amazed, really, at how much we know. Far more than Neil and Romy knew, that’s for sure. Though we’ve never even stepped aboard.
Oh, and I've just found a couple of questions I wrote to some boatnerders, the first of which was answered by a feller named Kent Malo, who discussed stowaways on barges with me and advised me to change my plot (which was the other impetus for me to head down to the Old Port, where I found the Nindawayma.) George Wharton gave me some answers on the second question, I think.
Information that I accumulated in all these places was the following, composed in the (later edited) narrative voice of Jennifer and Danielle:
When the Nindawayma was born, in 1976, she was one of three sister ships all named for Spanish Mountains: Monte Contes, Monte Corona and Monte Castilla.
The Corona was named for a Volcano that has not erupted in three thousand years. We don’t know where the Monte Contes is, but the word means ‘You count’ in Spanish, so you can figure it out. And the Castillo – closest to our hearts – was named for a mountain with beautiful caves containing painted art from ten thousand years before the Gilgamesh Epic was written.
They were all sold and renamed a number of times – the ships we mean, not the mountains – with the Corona finally running aground under the name Isla de Tagomago, at home in her birth-country in 1999, after which she had to be destroyed. The Contes was ignobly laid up in 2001, under the name Ciudad de Ceuta.
As for the Castillo, her story went like this: she stayed in Spain for only two years, where she was sometimes called the Monte Cruceta, but don’t expect us to figure that out. In 1978 she was renamed Manx Viking and worked for the Isle of Man. On her stacks she sported a triskelion for a logo – one of those triads of running feet meant to represent the sun moving across the sky, like this:
Only somewhat less denuded. Nine years later she was sold again to a Norwegian Company and renamed Skudenes. Some say she wasn’t renamed Manx Viking until just before she made the trip to Norway, but we just can’t keep up with the complexity of that sort of information. Then she got sold to a Canadian Company that called her ‘Ontario #1’ just until they’d gotten her over the Atlantic, at which point somebody sponsored a contest to name her properly, possibly for the first time. Nindawayma sprang from that, and the triskelion on her stacks was painted over with a logo of three N’s.
The Nindawayma served as a car ferry between Tobermory and Manitoulin Island for three years, assisting a bigger ferry called the Chi-Cheemaun, until they retired her and let her sit in the Own Sound harbour for almost a decade. Then she got towed up to Les Mechins, Quebec. Then she got towed back down to Montreal, where she’s been sitting ever since, at least until the night she was boarded by Romy and Neil.
The Corona was named for a Volcano that has not erupted in three thousand years. We don’t know where the Monte Contes is, but the word means ‘You count’ in Spanish, so you can figure it out. And the Castillo – closest to our hearts – was named for a mountain with beautiful caves containing painted art from ten thousand years before the Gilgamesh Epic was written.
They were all sold and renamed a number of times – the ships we mean, not the mountains – with the Corona finally running aground under the name Isla de Tagomago, at home in her birth-country in 1999, after which she had to be destroyed. The Contes was ignobly laid up in 2001, under the name Ciudad de Ceuta.
As for the Castillo, her story went like this: she stayed in Spain for only two years, where she was sometimes called the Monte Cruceta, but don’t expect us to figure that out. In 1978 she was renamed Manx Viking and worked for the Isle of Man. On her stacks she sported a triskelion for a logo – one of those triads of running feet meant to represent the sun moving across the sky, like this:
Only somewhat less denuded. Nine years later she was sold again to a Norwegian Company and renamed Skudenes. Some say she wasn’t renamed Manx Viking until just before she made the trip to Norway, but we just can’t keep up with the complexity of that sort of information. Then she got sold to a Canadian Company that called her ‘Ontario #1’ just until they’d gotten her over the Atlantic, at which point somebody sponsored a contest to name her properly, possibly for the first time. Nindawayma sprang from that, and the triskelion on her stacks was painted over with a logo of three N’s.
The Nindawayma served as a car ferry between Tobermory and Manitoulin Island for three years, assisting a bigger ferry called the Chi-Cheemaun, until they retired her and let her sit in the Own Sound harbour for almost a decade. Then she got towed up to Les Mechins, Quebec. Then she got towed back down to Montreal, where she’s been sitting ever since, at least until the night she was boarded by Romy and Neil.
Photo : Marc Roumagnac (www.roumagnac.net/blog)
The reason why we actually know all this is because there are a lot of people who pay attention to the fate of ships. They make it their hobby, or perhaps even their duty, to spend their days writing logs and shipping journals and posting photographs and asking after the whereabouts of the ships that might have carried them once across Georgian Bay or into a port at Barcelona or the Isle of Man. They track their progress and mourn their passing. They lie snug in their beds at night and think about the hull that once protected them from the deep. We’ve even found a testimonial by a Nindawayma-fan in Montreal who bewailed the state of her paint-job but affirmed that she was still “a part of the family.” Thousands of ships are adrift across the Internet due to the intercession of such people. The Nindawayma is one of them. So is the Manx Viking, which turns out to be the same ship. So is the Monte Cruceta and the Monte Castillo and the Monte Corona and the Monte Contes. That’s how we know. We’re amazed, really, at how much we know. Far more than Neil and Romy knew, that’s for sure. Though we’ve never even stepped aboard.
Since I wrote those words, the Nindawayma seems to have been taken over by the government and used as a setting for a couple of movies -- Bon Cop Bad Cop and something called Saved by the Belles -- and has been moved to a dry dock scrap yard, presumably nearing the end of its existence.
Seems to me, I didn't entirely make up my alternate history though. There had been a plan at one time to turn it into a cable ship, but that didn't happen in the end.
We Interrupt This Program
Just to say 'Wow'.
Funny irony that Lesley Gore would be so much more well known for It's My Party (and I'll cry if I want to), along with its sequel, It's Judy's Turn to Cry, two songs that must be so much more reassuring to hear in a man's world than this one.
Happy belated birthday, Lesley.
Real People
self portrait by Goya
I don’t imagine I’ll do it again anytime soon. It’s been a source of some embarrassment to me. Not so bad, really, but when you’re a fundamentally shy person, when it doesn’t take much to trigger old reserves of guilt, fruits of a Catholic upbringing, well…
Still, I was depicting a book club. Book clubs pay attention to the institution of literary celebrity. So I, perforce, paid attention as well.
For example, the subject matter of the book dictated that I contend with the popularity of Canada’s Michael Ondaatje, since his groundbreaking Toronto novel In the Skin of a Lion famously took its title from one of the great passages of the Epic of Gilgamesh as translated by N.K. Sandars:
And when you have gone to the earth
I will let my hair grow long for your sake,
I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion.
This fact would never escape the notice of the members of the Lacuna Cabal. Not in a million years. In fact, Runner Coghill actively tries to obfuscate the title of the book so she can hold the rest of them off from making the connection for as long as possible. She calls it He Who Saw the Deep and He who Saw Everything. She says the title is ‘a matter of opinion.’ She doesn’t want the awe of literary celebrity to colour her fellows’ first impressions of the epic.
But she also knows she can’t hold off the real title forever. When it finally comes out, the LC members get very, very excited.
And, as a result, I get a little embarrassed now when I run into the man in Toronto literary circles.
And then there’s Ann-Marie MacDonald, whose Fall On Your Knees was, for awhile, the quintessential book club book. It’s the one the LC has just finished when Runner introduces her ten cuneiform stones.
It was a fitting book, though I had a hidden agenda as well, since its author was, like me, trained as an actor at the National Theatre School of Canada, has written several plays and was, truth be told, the first person who encouraged me to make the leap to prose.
In both cases it was fun to lightly satirize criticisms the authors had received, especially Ondaatje, who didn’t get any grief for depicting an alleged World War II traitor in The English Patient until it had been transformed into a blockbuster film.
There are several other name-droppings from the Canadian literary world, as well as a few luminaries of British children’s fiction -- Romy Childerhose’s admiration for same being a poorly kept secret in the club -- like Richard Adams, Philip Pullman and, of course, Ms. Rowling.
And Margaret Atwood’s last name is used as the root of an adjective evoking, in general, weak, cowardly, conformist pumped-up males defined by their adams apples. It’s actually neither accurate nor fair, but it’s not my job to make Jennifer and Danielle either accurate or fair.
On another level, there are the generous, irreplaceable contributions of Professor Bruce Kuklick of University of Pennsylvania and Professor Jan Walls (retired) of Simon Fraser University. These learned men both wrote so beautifully in answer to my queries that I quoted them verbatim, altering only the party to which they were speaking.
And Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne makes a cameo appearance, stepping into the role of Shiduri the barmaid (inadvertently undercutting the wishes of Priya who wanted to play the part.)
But the most important cameo in the book is of course that of Salam Pax, the famous Baghdad Blogger.
(Potential spoilers follow.)
I was introduced to Where Is Raed, not by surfing the net, but rather in the object of a birthday present given to me by my friend Carl Wilson. So I read The Baghdad Blog, at first, as a book, not a blog.
I won’t get into my reasons for choosing Salam Pax to encounter Aline, Neil and Seyed Samir other than to say I wanted the appreciations of the LC’s membership to move gradually from the arcane to the concrete, from an imaginative world into the real world.
And so it followed that I wanted them to make the lateral move from the printed page to the active recording of personal experience that a blog -- especially a great blog like Where is Raed -- provides.
But I realized I could not bring myself to just up and do it. I felt I had to ask permission. I'm aware it's not the act of a fearless novelist. But I never said I was a fearless novelist. I'm more of a tremulous novelist.
I wrote him a letter and sent it in the body of an email.
From: Sean Dixon
To: salam pax
Subject: funny query
Dear Salam,
I have a question for you.
I'm currently writing a novel, the last part of which involves two young people stowing away on an old ferry ship, that starts out docked in the Old Port of Montreal and gets towed across the ocean to Portsmouth in England where it's meant to be transformed into a Cable Ship. They get caught part way.
One is a ten year old boy who has run away after the death of his whole family in Montreal. Well, actually it's just the death of his sister, but she's the last in a line of unexpected deaths, The other traveler is a 21 year old female student who's trying to take care of the boy.
When they arrive in England the boy is transferred to the Canadian High Commission in London. The girl, since she's an adult, is jailed and later bailed out by the fellow members of an Exclusive Montreal Young Women's Book Club who have been chasing them in a high-powered parental yacht. They all have their passports and arrive in England legally.
One of the yacht-riding club-members is a fan of Salam Pax -- that's you of course -- and learns while in England that Salam Pax is actually there as a guest of the Guardian.
I would like to use you as a character because a major theme of my story is the intersection between the lives of these character and the books they're reading. But one of them doesn't read books: He reads blogs.
Also, the novel takes place in 2003.
He finds out where you are and tries to meet you and in fact wants the ten-year-old boy to meet you too. The ten-year-old-boy has been acting out the story of The Epic of Gilgamesh as away of coping with the deaths in his family. The reason why he is acting out the Epic of Gilgamesh is that it was the book that was being read by the book club when his sister died. It was his sister's favourite book.
He becomes interested in Salam Pax when he discovers that you are also from the place where the Epic of Gilgamesh is from.
Salam Pax meets the boy and tells him about the war in Iraq. in theory at least.
But I wanted to write to you first and check to see if it would be okay to have you make a brief fictional appearance in the latter part of my book.
The only other real person who makes an appearance is the woman who at one time in her life had been the subject of the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne. She is apparently a real person. Friends of mine in Montreal have met her. An ex-teacher of mine taught her in an acting class once. In my novel she lives near the Old Port of Montreal and helps out some of my characters.
So you would not be alone.
I also refer to the works of several Canadian authors, whose books are being read by the Club. However, they do not make appearances.
That's all, I guess. I thought it would be fun to write to you. I love this project, and have been working on it as a novel for the better part of a year. It started out a few years ago as a play, but the number of cast members just kept growing, until I eventually made the leap. It's called 'The Girls who saw Everything'. I'm fast approaching my ocean journey section and thought I would write.
If you consent to appear as a fictional character, then I have three questions. They are somewhat tongue-in-cheek:
Would you, in theory, have consented to such a meeting, with a 10-year-old Canadian boy, while you were in England, or does this not strike you as a realistic scenario?
What would you have told him?
Have you ever read the Epic of Gilgamesh? If so, what do you think of it?
Hope to hear from you.
Yours,
Sean Dixon
CANADA
ps, if you google me, you'll find I'm not the British soccer player or the inmate of an Arizona Penitentiary. Nor am I the Sean Dixon who writes his name all in lowercase letters and is, I believe, also from Arizona. I'm the Canadian Playwright. I live in Toronto. I'm wondering whether your film will come here.
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 01:58:13 -0800I think I caught him on a high.
From: salam pax
To: Sean Dixon
Subject: Re: funny query
hey me a character in a novel?..woohoo...will get back to you on the questions
There was a period, after the optimism that seemed to be prevailing in Iraq at the time when I wrote to him, when things got really bad in Baghdad. I believe Salam's whole family had to get out. They left the country just around the time when I was publishing in Canada. I only know this because I saw somewhere that he was supposed to make an appearance in Toronto at around that time, but he canceled it because of these troubles.
And then eventually he popped up as a student in London. Now he’s blogging again. Twittering too, in fact. It's great to see.
But I do wonder if, over the months and years since that exchange, the man hasn’t had second thoughts about loaning his character to a fictional scenario by an author who happened to catch him in a good mood very early in 2005.
I counter these feelings of guilt with the thought that I can offer my book as a sort of advertisement for his book -- The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal as a bit of ephemera to serve as publicity for The Baghdad Blog.
In truth, my most paranoid fear is the thought that my project may have prevented Salam Pax from being depicted in a piece of fiction by one of his literary heroes, William Gibson. I heard at one point that Gibson, who is also a fan of Pax’s, was considering putting him into his novel Spook Country. I don’t know what prevented him in the end. Surely he wouldn’t have cared if a small time fellow Canadian had done the same thing. Surely not.
Surely not.
If that was the case, and I really don’t believe that was the case, but if that was the case, then I’m very, very sorry.
Postscript: The plot described in the letter to Pax is no longer entirely accurate. I chose to send my characters much farther afield than Portsmouth, England...
(although I had an interesting conversation with the Port of London Authority’s Martin Garside on the subject of how he would handle an underage stowaway on one of his ships. He gave me his phone number and was helpful and witty. The first thing he said to me was “Well this is one of the stranger requests I’ve received in awhile.” Without his intervention, my own stowaways would never have had the courage to leave Canada. In the play, they only get as far as the island of St-Pierre et Miquelon, off the coast of Newfoundland.)
… and I also decided that I could not depict the character of Salam Pax in any corporeal way, but rather only in the way he'd been revealed to me. That is, not face to face but rather as an internet scribe.
Thus endeth the shriving.
Desk, Ball, Boxing
I'm on Desk Space this week.
The book-cave with the window overlooking domestic quarrels was the desk at which I wrote The Last Days...
But I did not sit on a yoga ball while writing that book. Although I did have a serious back incident just around the time when Romy and Neil were stowing away on the Nindawayma (the boat which, someday soon, will be the subject of its own post.)
The injury was a serious lumbar twist that had the effect of making me feel like I was being broken on the rack. I had to get frog-marched by paramedics down our narrow apartment stairs, since their stretcher wouldn't fit. and then, at emergency, I was provided with some pretty serious drugs so I could eventually limp out of there at a funny angle and they could have their bed back.
So yes, now I sit on a yoga ball. I've written two novels perched on this thing. And I go to boxing classes Tuesdays and Saturdays. And, so far, I have not had a repeat incident. Or I suppose I have, but not quite like that one.
Montrealers on the Starship Enterprise
In celebration of the release of the new Star Trek film this week, I will risk the ire of Lacuna Cabal members everywhere by simply acknowledging it.
And, further, explaining that the character of Coby, inventor of the fitzbot, was initially described as sounding just like James T. Kirk by virtue of the fact that he hailed from the same neighbourhood in Montreal as William Shatner. Yes, it's true.
Coby's bookplate
But I scuttled the idea in the end because I didn't want people to think that the entire Montreal English speaking community -- its poets and musicians and poets and musicians -- spoke like Captain Kirk. Because it just isn't true.
Coby does though, a little bit, sometimes.
Bye Bye Wiki
I used to have a Wikipedia entry. It was fairly brief and modest, mentioned only The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal in its various incarnations, no plays, no short stories, no YA books. I have no idea who put it up. But it seems this guy has taken it down, just in time for my US release, because I'm not notable according to the guidelines.
Not notable? I've never been so insulted in all my life.
Then again, I suppose I've played fast and loose with the free encyclopedia now and again in the past. I once rewrote the end of The Fountainhead's synposis. It stayed up for three whole days before someone finally commented, 'That doesn't sound quite right,' and changed it back.
Maybe they pay attention to that sort of thing?
Ah well, it was worth it to have three precious days of some people swallowing the idea that Ayn Rand blew up Roark's building a second time.
Assyriological Theory
There was a bit in the original manuscript of The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal in which I riffed a bit on the lesser known older version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Enkidu, rather than catching a disease and dying, offered to retrieve G’s mallet, which had fallen into the Underworld. Once down there, Enkidu discovered he would not be allowed to return.
This version struck me as a slightly less harsh gloss of the Gilgamesh story, intended perhaps, I thought, for children. My editor wanted me to cut it though, because it came directly on the heels of the death of a major character, and she didn’t think I should be dicking around in the realm of clever Assyriological theories.
Here, for the blog, is the restored fragment of Jennifer and Danielle’s depiction of Gilgamesh’s fallen mallet. 
Claire Calnan about to read the excised passage at the first launch of The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal. She's making fun of me because I've accidentally called her up at the wrong time, thinking it was her mistake and not mine. Photo by Ashley Winnington-Ball.The other thing we wanted to tell you was about how, back in the old days of Mesopotamia, there was a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh prepared and carved into stone especially for children.
It was decided somehow, considering the Epic was widely used in school exercise books for the study of proper Cuneiform, that the death of Enkidu was needlessly harsh and confrontational for the child mind. So, in the altered version, instead of losing Enkidu, Gilgamesh actually loses a sort of croquet ball, and the Underworld is depicted as the deep ditch underneath a sewer grate. So we see the disconsolate Gilgamesh tossing aside his mallet, rending his garments and chopping his hair all because he’s lost his ball. No matter how hard he stretches and reaches through the grate – just like that man in Strangers On a Train – he cannot reach his ball. He can see it, but he cannot reach it. He thought he was strong as a reacher and instead learns the terrible lesson that, as a reacher, he is weak.
And so Gilgamesh grieves in Cuneiform:
I’ve lost my ball!
My ball has fallen through the sewer grate!
I have lost it!
My ball is gone forever! I will never roll that ball again!
And so on. The Mesopotamians, it should be noted, are highly regarded for their uncompromising culture of death. Their view of the world is considered to have been among the harshest that has ever stood in the history of culture. Still, they really shielded their children, didn’t they? We shudder to contemplate what their initiation rituals must have been like.
Neil, on the other hand...
Influence
Jackson Pollock's Moby Dick
Another nice review with an acceptable caveat from Mr. Cutter, a beautiful moniker for a literary critic (though I must add that his criticisms of my book are gently rendered. And they're far outweighed by praise:
There’s a whole other thing ... that this book emphatically deserves praise for: the thing’s trying, in total good faith, to engage with the present world. Meaning, in this case, Iraq and blogging and wars, meaning nationalism and antiquities, meaning how all good stories not only overlap but are literally, at a genetically-coded level, made of the same stuff. For the sake of the book and it’s really great narrative riches, I won’t go further into it than that, but know that, reading Lacuna is not akin to reading some slow-burning navel-gazer about middle-classers coming of age, nor is it some hijinxy send-up of mores and morals and manners. The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal’s a fierce and challenging and spunky book, and it’s fun as hell...)
Where he finds fault, it seems to be with the narrative voice, the first person plural negotiations of Jennifer H and Danielle D.
J&D's bookplate
And he lays the blame for my choices squarely at the feet of David Foster Wallace.
Now I’m honoured to be considered part of the genius run-off from DFW, given that he should be still here and he should be still writing, he was clearly a writer for the ages and a great teacher, and I also admire his heroic struggles to contend with the bullshit of some contemporary philosophers, using language that these same philosophers would understand...
I also pride myself on giving credit where credit is due. Although in this particular instance it suddenly occurs to me that Mr. Cutter is talking about blame rather than credit, so I must suddenly assume for the purposes of an essay on the subject of influence that he would cite DFW for influence over more positive aspects of my book as well...
Image from here
But I’m afraid I’ve never read Infinite Jest.
I’m aware that it’s possible to be influenced by a work through the zeitgeist, through all the chatter that accumulates around it and through the work that it influences, and so I could most definitely be wrong about the following theory, but…
I would say rather that DFW benefited from the same primary influence as I did -- the great stories of J.D. Salinger. Not Catcher in the Rye -- though that novel has always been Salinger’s calling card among scholars and critics -- but rather Franny & Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, considered far less important by these same critics (with some notable exceptions), but whose moment-to-moment narratives are the precious touchstones for me, and, I suspect, for writers everywhere.
Actually no. They’re not touchstones. I don’t go back and reread these stories. I haven’t read them in twenty years. They’ve rather become woven into the mechanics of my synapses, their images occasionally popping up in association with moments in my own experience, carried from firing to firing (and no I'm not talking about my undistinguished employment record) (although on the other hand I could be) throughout my life.
In a part of my mind, I will always be in the back seat of the limousine with Buddy Glass, stuck in a traffic jam with several strong characters travelling away from Seymour’s cancelled wedding. I will always be executing a perfect shave with Zooey, talking with his mother on the other side of the bathroom door; lingering on the phone with Franny who sits downstairs in a darkened living room; even swatting flies with a fat lady, sitting on her porch and listening to It’s A Wise Child, along with Christ himself, buddy, Christ himself.
I loved these stories and I carry them with me, not because of their themes and apparent allusions to eastern philosophies, but rather because of the inherent warmth in the relationships and the reader’s capacity to get right inside the dialogue.
That said, I also consider it reasonable to regard DFW as the primary Salingerian heir, since Infinite Jest seems to have pushed Salinger's very personal brand of narrative as far as it can go. One of these days I intend to read it and find out for sure.
Priya
My first impulse when writing the novel — aside from the notion that it was a book club reading the Epic of Gilgamesh — was how I wanted to explore the love of things that are very old by people who are very young. 
One of the members of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club was a self-conscious songwriter named Priya. Since I thought at the time I was writing a play, I set out to write songs for Priya that could be performed. I wrote two. The first was meant to be a whimsical failure and the second a half-decent song that would be sung by the whole company (i.e. the book club) as they made their journey across the sea in search of a lost young boy who was himself searching for a wise old man.
Throughout the story, she contemplated dichotomies such as young/old, present/past, living/dead, and human/god.
It was meant to be a proud moment for Priya.
She was the only character who had awareness of the members of the audience. It took a scene or two for her to noticed them, but when she did, it wasn’t long before she came up with an explanation:
I had no idea I'd dreamed you up.
God, you must think I'm the most self-centered creature.
Then again how does an aspiring songwriter get by unless she imagines an audience hanging on to her every word?
Oh I'm sorry; you're probably thinking: "But we're really here!"
[That's so cute...]
I mean, sure, okay, yeah, sure, it's vain, okay, sure, but think of it this way: I'll always try to impress you. I'll always try to put my best face forward, be a hero in my own movie. It's almost like you've replaced God, don't you think? Or the gods.
The Pantheon.
Thus was born the idea that ended up in the song she wrote and performed at the end of the play, We’re in the Movies. She took the old argument that belief in a god turns us into ethical creatures and replaced the idea of god in that equation with the audience. 
It's a funny switch from the standard. When we're sitting in an audience, isn't it the performer who seems to be larger than life? At least if all goes well? Isn't it the performer who equates with the gods?
In fact, it becomes, if all goes well, a back and forth. Each seeks the gift from the other, of something special, something timeless, something, maybe, godlike. 
Funny too though that Priya imagines herself not on stage but in a movie:
At the end of the film
there's so much to discuss
As we try to figure out
just what happened to us
Did we win? Stay together? Did we cry? Did we pray?
Did we find we worked hard by the end of the day
Were we good? were we ill? In the movie, did we kill
A conviction, an appeal, was it fake, was it real...
Take one more step in the argument and the audience (a collection of people) gets replaced by community - a group of people that hold individuals in their midst. Perhaps it's our community that turns us into ethical creatures. God = Audience = Community.
The human community is an ageless thing. It has always been with us, whether in a tribe or a polis or (under certain circumstances) a young women's book club. Their polis can bridge the gap between present and past. Their founding goddess can also be a girl from Westmount.
And the movies themselves make us godlike as well, hammering a nail in the wall and hanging us up like Inanna in the realm of Erishkigal. A pinup for the ages, _01.jpg)
a performance imprinted upon the ages. Buster Keaton is long gone, but his spirit still flickers though the projector onto the wall or through the zeros and ones to our digital laptop screens. It’s how someone can be both young and old at the same time: Gilgamesh glories in his youthful kingship. Priya acts out the adventures of the Lacuna Cabal and imagines her own movie. She can be old and young at the same time as she performs her song.
But I'm starting to get very complicated with what is really a very simple idea: the fact that we all imagine ourselves as heroes in our own narratives.
+++
I tried to make this ‘imaginary audience’ conceit work in the novel, but I couldn’t do it. Priya therefore became more or less the silent character that she mostly seems to be to the other characters. She still wrote songs that are present in the novel, and the dichotomies are still there too. But it’s not the same. Poetry is not performance.
+++
Chris Abraham and I workshopped the play with students at the National Theatre School of Canada in 2002 and then again in late winter of 2003, during the lead-up to the Iraq War (also, not coincidentally, time period in which the novel is set.) The part of Priya was played by Michelle Girouard.
Here’s Michelle playing the song The Oil Men performed as a distraction for Cabal members while Romy is up on the roof pretending to be the monster Humbaba battling boys:
And here’s Michelle playing We’re In the Movies:
(At one point in rehearsal, Michelle got a nosebleed and I ended up taking her over to the Royal Vic, where I could swear we saw Neil making his getaway with Runner in a wheelchair.)
And here's the youtube site for our contest, deadline May 31st. We're looking for performed covers of Priya's song.
The Club vs. The Club
I have a guest blog post up on The Reading Group Guides Website, about the experience of bringing my book about a book club to an actual book club, in LA, comprised of actresses.
In other news, there's a new submission on the Lacuna Cabal song cover contest site. Lucas Myers, seemingly dressed up as LC member Aline Irwin. Check it out.
Hidden Pleasures
Can you get a colour like that except from an old copy of a book that long ago lost its dust jacket?
The photo above and the one below were taken moments apart, one a little closer to the window.
It's one of the precious qualities of old books like this. They change with the seasons, or over the course of a day. 
This is Du's favourite book. A hidden pleasure. A secret stashed away in his socks and underwear drawer. He doesn't really want anyone to know he reads poetry from 9th Century China. Not so much because he's ashamed of it as he just prefers the secret. He's had the book so long, it's like carrying around an old stuffed bear.
+++
My friend Carl Wilson had his life turned upside down recently when actor James Franco was stopped on the red carpet at the academy awards and asked if he had any guilty pleasures.
The last thing the interviewer expected was that Franco would mention a book. The cues he offered were The Hills & American Idol (I know I know, that last link doesn't really go to American Idol, but how could I resist?)
And he prefaced the question by holding forth on the highbrow nature of the Oscars, begging for a little lowbrow with his highbrow. 
(Saying the Oscars are highbrow — no matter how much they might want to be — is like saying that US political discourse covers the spectrum from left to right. They aren't. It doesn't.
(But that's a tangent.)
After struggling for a few seconds, and further encouraged by the questioner (who assured Franco that he would 'wait all night') the actor finally gave up searching for the sort of answer that was expected of him and mentioned a book. He mentioned Carl's book. Not so much because Carl's book was a hidden pleasure for Franco as the question itself brought to mind the themes of Carl's journey to the end of taste.
Epigraph for Sunflower Splendor.
I was going to embed the video here, but I feel that a youtube screenshot will clash with all the digital photos of an old book. So I'll let you go find it here. Or here, where you'll also find Carl's own impressions of the experience.
Franco's choice of a book instead of a TV addiction did not so much reveal a guilty pleasure as a hidden pleasure: a hidden love of learnin' was unexpectedly displayed on the red carpet for the Academy Awards, shocking the questioner and spurring perhaps the first book review that has ever happened there.
Beyond the red carpet though, I suspect Franco isn't the only person who would choose a book for his hidden pleasure.
+++ 
The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal is partly a book about the love of books. A few of the characters have precious favourites that have been with them so long, they would never even think to share them with anyone, much the same way as you wouldn't share a favourite pair of shoes, say. They're secrets.
In one case, the secret is actually a blog, but in all the others, it's a book. Even the ten stone cuneiform tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh were once a secret — the longtime favourite of twins Runner and Ruby Coghill. But then Ruby died and so Runner revealed them to the book club, demanding that they read them for the next book, despite the small problem that none of the members knew how to read the ancient language.
But other characters have their secrets too.
Du's is a book called Sunflower Splendor - Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry. His particular favourite section of this eight hundred page book is the small collection of poems by Yu Xuanji, translated by Jan Walls and Geoffrey R. Waters.
There's a reason for his obsession with this particular poet, but you'll have to read the book to find out what it is. 
Here's her biography though, from the old book, written by one of the translators, Jan Walls, (who is himself briefly interviewed by Jennifer and Danielle in their writing of the Lacuna Cabal's last days):
Sidewalk Friendship Test
Looks like something Missy Bean might have dreamed up in soliciting membership to the Lacuna Cabal. Except funny might have been just as much trouble for her as too smart.
[Cough, cough...]
Tweet
I have a Tweetdeck rigged to find references to Gilgamesh. Some of these are really sweet, like a recent tweet from Kaypee who first wrote, 'is Gilgamesh, mostly god but still human,' and later amended it to, 'is akin to Gilgamesh, mostly a goddess but still human.' Or, regarding the colour of his hair, sokaiokyoon wrote, 'this purp so epic I might have to call it the ... !'
Others complain about what dreck the story is, tweeting sentiments like, 'who even cares about Gilgamesh anyway?' Once, when I tried to engage with someone who hated the story, they ignored me, choosing instead to write, 'All because I mentioned Gilgamesh? Awkward.'
Then there's SuperSanko, who is adventuring on line under the name Gilgamesh the Great.
Gilgamesh Trailer - Celebrity bloopers here
But the vast majority of Gilgamesh references allude to a TV animé that takes place in the future, features a sky like a mirror and centres around a pair of twins making their way in a noirish world. I have no doubt Runner and Ruby would be delighted.
Postscript to musicians: don't forget to enter the contest.
Song Song Song
There's a song in The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal.
It's called We're In the Movies, and it's about the common experience of feeling like we're the stars of our own movies, ipod buds blasting the soundtrack while walking to the corner for a soda.
I have a version of the song here. My friend Michelle Girouard has another here. I'll be discussing in a later post what the connection is to the novel of The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal, including what possessed me to write a song for a novel in the first place.
But for now, the important thing to report is this: There's a contest for the song, being sponsored by the Other Press. Aspiring performers are being asked to record their own take on it, for a prize of 500 dollars and a copy of the book. I'm really looking forward to this, especially since I like the song but I'm not particularly fond of my own singing voice.
Enter by May 1, 2009, by joining the Lacuna Cabal group on YouTube and uploading your video. The top star-rated videos will be judged by a panel, apparently including me, to determine the semifinalists. Semifinalists will be announced on May 9, and the Grand Prize Winner will be announced the week of May 19. Official contest rules are here. There's an age restriction: 13 and above with parental consent. Otherwise 18 and above.
Sheet music here if you like, a bit anally rendered perhaps (by me) and with maybe a few errors. It will probably be easier to learn it by ear. And feel free to change the key. 
Caveat: This song was never meant to be performed by me with a long-neck banjo and a stripy toque in a youtube video on the internet. Aside from it being mildly embarrassing, the point was for the singer to be young, not old.
But I'll get ot that in a later post. And anyway, it works either way. Still, I hope you can do better.
The video above was filmed and edited by my wife, filmmaker Katerina Cizek. James Thomson appears on bass.
To Those Who Would Follow the Leads Provided by Torture...
... which is a subject that is always relevant, but particularly these days to Canada's CSIS...
I would point to a quotation I heard recently in this documentary:
Why do you search so diligently for sorcerers?
Take the Jesuits - all the religious orders - and torture them. They will confess.
If some deny, repeat it a few times. They will confess.
Should a few still be obstinate exorcize them, shave them, only keep on torturing. They will give in.
Take the canons, the doctors, the bishops of the church.
They will all confess.
-Friedrich von Spee, Jesuit priest of the early 17th Century, with regards to the Inquisition.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE FOLDING OF A THYROID BUTTERFLY
by Neil Coghill
(N.B. Instructions in italics are not absolutely necessary for the completion of the origami (thyroid) butterfly. They will however assist with certain other matters.)
1. Clear off a work surface as near as possible to an oriel window. Don’t pick the window with my campsite though. I’d rather you chose another. But preferably a south-facing one, with a view of rue St-Gabriel. Still, if you must choose my window, since it’s view is the best, try not to step on my sleeping bag.
2. Place a square of paper, colored side down, on your work surface so that its point are facing up and down, left and right. Look out at the cobbled stones of rue St-Gabriel. Take a few deep, calming breaths.
3. Bring the left point of the square over to meet the right point. Crease and unfold. Think of your little brother, your responsibilities toward same.
4. Bring the top point down to meet the bottom point. Crease and unfold. Imagine how with this sheet of paper, you are caring for your own embattled thyroid.
5. Locate the center of the square by determining where the crease lines made in 2 and 3 intersect. Ask yourself, ‘Have I taken all my medicines today? In their correct dosages?’
6. Bring the top point down to the center of the square. Crease and leave folded. Ask yourself, ‘Have I eaten properly today? More than just a bit of Ichiban here and there?’
7. Repeat Step 5 for the remaining points of the square. Turn the model over. Imagine a separate course for each fold. Soup course; entrée; salad course; dessert. Make sure to imagine foods that you like. Otherwise you might as well not bother. Eating is a pleasure to many people, you know.
8. Bring the top point down to the center of the model (use the intersection of crease lines as your guide again). Crease and unfold. Repeat with the remaining points. Or just do whatever you like.
9. Turn the model over and open out all the flaps. See if I care.
10. Position the square so that its edges are facing up and down, left and right. Bring the top edge to the center of the model. Crease and leave folded. Repeat with the bottom edge. You will now have a rectangular shape in front of you. Really, imagine it’s just an origami, if you like. Just don’t make that joke about the pipe. It’s a stupid joke. Of course sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.
11. Push the top left point of the rectangle towards the center of the model, in between the two layers of paper—the corner should collapse along crease lines made in previous steps. Repeat for the remaining points of the rectangle. The resulting shape (seen in the crease lines) should resemble a square with triangular shapes extending from the left and right edges. Turn the model over. But consider that you were the ones—both of you—who taught me how to use this imagination you so impugn as a tool of persuasion.
12. Bring the top edge of the model down to meet the bottom edge. Crease and leave folded. Your model should now resemble a boat. The top left corner and the top right corner should now have three layers of folds. Unless your problem is just that these instructions are too hard…
13. Pull the top layer of the top left point down so that the model collapses along the left side of the upside-down "v"-shaped crease extending out from the top center of the model. In the process of bringing the left point down, the top left point of the model's second layer should automatically be brought over to the center. Repeat with the right side of the model, which should now be shaped like a triangle, long edge facing away from you. Turn the model over. That these instructions might be having the opposite of their intended effect.
14. Bring the left point over to meet the right point. Crease and unfold. Turn the model over. If that’s the case then I’m very sorry. If that’s the case and you still want the butterfly, just take a few more deep, cleansing breaths and wait for me to get home. I should be home soon, I tend to get home at a quarter to four, as you probably know. And then you’ll have your butterfly and a hundred more where that came from.
15. Place a thumb and forefinger at either side of the model's center, vertical crease line, at the top edge of the model. Bring the right half of the model over the center crease line just enough so that the bottom point of the model separates into two wing-like shapes. Crease and leave folded. But, on the other, hand, I really bet you can do it.
16. Turn under the loose corner that was brought over the center crease line. Re-crease the center portion of the butterfly to secure the folds. Imagine you are the great goddess Inanna. You can do anything! For example, here you will have recreated your own thyroid in the image of a butterfly, healthy, powerful and resolute, but delicate. Well worth the effort. Well worth it. 
Gilgamesh & US Hegemony
Speaking of how a leader can be taught how to be good to his people...
I often think George W. Bush would have been a perfect Gilgamesh if only he could have met his Enkidu somewhere along the line. Don’t you think? He had the perfect lack of self-awareness.
As it stands, he only gave us the first half of the story though, submitted his people to an Ius Primae Noctis of sorts, throughout his presidency.
And then the middle part of the story seems to have handed the role of Gilgamesh to Saddam Hussein, who spent months wandering in the wilderness. I know he was an awful tyrant, but a face like that does make me wonder whether his style of leadership might have changed after such an experience. Like Gilgamesh. During his reign he suffered from terrible hubris. I wonder if life in a hole in the ground can wash any of that away, the way it does in the movies.
So Bush tag-teamed Saddam in playing the part. But nobody bothered to give us the ending, where we find the leader older and wiser and more compassionate. No ending. Everyone plundering and blundering through history, forgetting to give the people an ending. Unless Obama is the ending...
He sure looks tired here though.
But this is all very rude of me, perhaps. I am, after all, only a Canadian. Shouting from the wings, as it were.
Today of all days, though, I have the right to look south of the border with a critical eye. Because I see someone has been talking about me behind my back.
Runner & Ruby Coghill
There’s a book by Hillel Schwartz called The Culture of the Copy. It’s a beautifully written, seemingly influential, phenomenological approach to the idea of facsimile over many centuries of human culture (one example: he attempts to locate the origin of the phrase The Real McCoy and learns that origins themselves are legion.)
In the last century, we have been unable to escape the age of mechanical reproduction. It fills my own days more than I usually realize, from the moment I might see an image of the Mona Lisa in the newspaper to a comic routine on youtube or a real-time conversation with my brother on Skype.
Shwartz’s book makes the case for the copy being itself a symbol of post-post-modern-modernism etcetera ad infinitum… It’s the world that the members of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club are living in when they encounter one of the oldest stories in the world. Their retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh is a modern mirror image, a copy of a copy of a story someone once told. Carved cuneiform in clay at play in the modern world.
It also brings the modern world to a stop. 
It’s possible to be both a copy and an original. Runner and Ruby Coghill, the twins that preside over The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal, are by no means copies of each other. One of them isn’t even alive anymore.
When I read The Culture of the Copy, I had already decided that the book was only going to tell the story of The Epic of Gilgamesh on the surface. Its undertoad might actually, (I thought), croak out the tale of two Sumerian goddess sisters, Inanna and Erishkigal. One was the goddess of fecundity, the other the queen of death. They never saw each other. Theirs was, in Runner’s words, ‘the best and oldest story of twins.’
Runner tells the story better than I do.
It’s about Inanna, goddess of life, descending to the realm of her sister Erishkigal, because it was the only place in the universe that she had never been, and she was curious. So she went. To get there, she had to pass through seven gates. As she went through each, the guards would make her remove a piece of her garment, until when she came before her sister Erishkigal, Queen of the Dead, she was … naked and ashamed, and then her sister struck her dead and hung her body on a nail. That’s how they tell it: hung her body on a nail. Erishkigal was jealous of her sister’s primacy in the upper world, and wanted her to stay down there. These two women, though. They were so close as to be almost the same person. When Inanna’s servants came down to claim the body, they found Erishkigal moaning and doubled over, as if she herself were experiencing the physical pain of her sister’s death. And she wouldn’t let her go. It was like they had to be together, the two sisters, but also they couldn’t be together, and the only way Inanna could be returned to her place in heaven was if someone she loved would come and take her place.
Gilgamesh himself is a character who is caught in the universe of these two sisters — a universe some of us are familiar with, in which death follows life and is itself eternal. One wonders why it can’t be the other way around? As it is, for example, in the Christian universe, wherein we might as well just up and bleed the world, drop a few bombs and hasten our way to the afterparty?
The Sumerians, in short, were saner with their religion than we are. And they had a saner way of demonstrating to a leader how he should be good to his people.
And Runner and Ruby Coghill preside over the universe of the Lacuna Cabal just as Inanna and Erishkigal do with the Sumerians.
Which is not to say I like the idea of this book being presented in the genre of metafiction. No way. All these characters — Missy, Emmy, Coby, Du, Romy, Aline, Priya, Neil (though their names have been changed to protect the innocent) — are masters of their own destinies. The narrative does not govern them (despite what the Coach House book jacket might say). Rather, it is their love for the narrative that governs them. This distinction makes all the difference in the world. It’s something that can happen to real people, Don Quixote being a perfect example. 
Not that Don Quixote is a real person, but you know what I mean.
To paraphrase the narrators, Jennifer & Danielle (whose names have not been changed to protect the innocent): Anyone who think we’re making metafiction can just fuck off. Maybe later we’ll let our convictions in this matter get a bit sketchy, but for now…
I will however confess to the presence of a little bit of the supernatural though. I recently read an interview with a Canadian playwright whom I admire, who said she just can’t help believing that ghosts belong in serious fiction. It's because she’s Irish, she said.
I'm Irish too. At least partly.
Which is how I can bring my twin sisters back together in the realm of serious fiction, even though one of them is dead.
And then there are the narrators—the so-called anti-twins—Jennifer and Danielle, who feel they are not worthy of telling this story yet are the only ones who can.
The reader might be surprised to read all these highborn claims connected to what is after all a story of shallow little book club being told by a pair of unscholarly girls.
But it’s my hope that the reader won’t make the mistake of confusing the narrative voice (humble, self-abasing, attempting to prove at every turn that they are neither worthy or bright, like the copiers of the Gilgamesh Epic for the library of the great king of Nineveh, Ashurbanipal, who conducted their work in chains)
... for the authorial voice (which asserts that, yes, J&D are worthy. and yes, J&D are bright; and yes, J&D can achieve the grace that comes from steeping oneself in great literature.)
These storytellers aren’t like the tweeter whose post I read on Twitter the other day, a teenage girl who wrote that she would rather claw her eyes out than ever be subjected to the Epic of Gilgamesh again. J&D’s approach is somewhat more adventurous. And they take their task so seriously that they seek to track their own growing awareness in the telling.
Gilgamesh is a longtime obsession for me
I adapted the epic of Gilgamesh once before, in a very long spoken ballad with musical accompaniment, as part of my play Aerwacol, written over a decade ago. Why Gilgamesh is a subject for another post, but the song grew to be so long that I felt compelled to present it in three parts over the course of the play. I have long suspected this to have been a cop-out on my part, and that perhaps I should have edited instead...
Recently though I had the pleasure of seeing a new production of the play, in St. Louis, Missouri, and I found that the journey of the song (and the songwriter) through the play turned out to be one of its strongest components. Along with the fact that they answered the script's call for a manual railroad cart with the real thing.
An added bonus of the St. Louis production was this review, by Richard Green, on a regional news site called Talkin' Broadway.
... a band of slightly gob-smacked Canadians, broken by recent tragedies, sets out across the plain. They roll along on a railroad push-cart (a "jigger"), only to meet with unwelcomed success. Gradually, they disband until we reach an ending that still defies explanation, in my mind ... Aerwacol is a masterpiece of the commonplace, the desperate, and the impossible.
The whole cast is remarkable, natural and polished. We are led into the wilderness without a map, just as Christopher Harris (as a pig farmer) is led through the woods and ditches in the opening minutes by his delirious wife (Donna Parrone). And in that flight, she says the absolutely unspeakable, instantly rising to mythic stature...
It would probably be boring to read about every little unexpected bit of naturalistic humor or stagecraft that makes Aerwacol so transcendent, but you'd be surprised at what magic can arise from small things: a fine mist from stage left catching the cool white rays of dawn; a country cottage that snaps open like the end of a long fever-dream; and an odd chicken-wire shell surrounding the top of a mine, creating echoes of mysterious depths whenever its platform is struck with a shovel or plank. Taken all together, it makes you think there may still be a couple of centuries of good theater still ahead of us.
I'm old enough now to know that a notice like this doesn't mean I'm en route to Broadway, but it's a nice thing to see, fer sher.
Here's the ballad from the play. It focuses in on a detail in the Gilamesh story — his encounter with the barmaid, Shiduri.
Sources close to the Mayor conceded last night,
Callyhoo is not up to the task.
He lost his brother last month in a skiing accident
And he’s no longer up to the task.
This was clear yesterday when, found by the river,
Still swollen from last week’s flood,
He’d lost his shoes and his socks and his hat and his Pride;
His renown is unfortunately now stuck in the mud.
The distraught Callyhoo stumbled into a bar
For to try and catch his breath,
The barmaid looked at him straight in the eye
Said don’t waste time with your challenging Death.
Don’t waste time with your challenging Death my man
Let your days be untroubled and free
Pay heed to the little ones that hold you by the hand
And the touch of a woman like me.
Of each day make a feast of rejoicing my love,
Let your people be a comfort to you,
So when you pass on they’ll remember, they’ll say
That man new life. That Mayor Callyhoo.
But the Mayor said “No!” “No!”
He had to learn on his own.
He had to wander the roads of the earth
To fill the hole that was there in his heart with a home.
For awhile Callyhoo went with Wild Bill's Fair
On display for the leering crowd
For awhile he worked on a high scaffold
Where he shouted his questions at God out loud
In his travels he found hearts ravaged as his
Were numbered as stars in the sky
So he founded a town where they could all lie down
Where all were welcome to come lie down and die
Now people came to this town from miles around,
By the hundreds or more, to be dead.
Callyhoo lay there living for 99 years
Then he stood up again and scratched the top of his head.
He thought he recalled something that he had once heard
That seemed in a flash to make sense
And a damn sight wiser than all this lying around,
So he addressed all the supine ladies and gents
He said let's not waste time with this pretense of death,
Let's make our days untroubled and free
pay heed to the little ones that hold us by the hand
And build up a town for you and for me
A town with fresh water and plenty of wine
And land all around for to make
A garden of Tears that would reap Happiness
In our Village of Early Awake.
"Each day must be full of rejoicing and love
For the people are a comfort to you.”
He proclaimed all this and said "When I pass on
Tell them that man knew life – The Mayor Callyhoo!"
Keep Calm and Carry On
There's a poster shop in my neighbourhood that sells one in several different near-primary colours. It looked like a vintage design, so I looked it up and found that it appeared all over London in 1939, courtesy of the Ministry of Information.
I recall reading how this was also the manner in which Londoners responded to the Underground bombings in 2005. They kept calm. They carried on.
Missy Bean
This is the bookplate for Missy Bean, founder and president of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club. When we workshopped the play at the National Theatre School in the winter and early spring of 2003, the part of Missy was played by Kate Hewlett, who complained to me at one point that she thought the character was too much of a bitch.
I felt really bad about the notion that I had created a character that was so unsympathetic that it caused trouble for the actor (esp given my priorities), and tried to counter in rehearsal that Missy was just a frustrated leader, and that if everyone in the book club was more inclined to listen to her advice and follow her directives, like, to the letter, then no one would consider her to be a bitch at all.
As advice goes, it didn't really help, esp since the play didn't offer Missy any opportunity to show anything other than these alleged thwarted leadership abilities. 
In preparation for transforming Missy into a character for the novel, I recall purchasing Wonder Woman, the Complete History, by Les Daniels. I grew up with the TV series, thinking she was a less-than inspired character. But, as with other such American cultural icons, I had my mind changed by the range of admirers Wonder Woman had. And experience has taught me that keeping up appearances while saving the world is not such a dissable notion. Not for Wonder Woman nor for Missy Bean, nor for me.
Since writing The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal, the name 'Missy Bean' has come to represent a default moniker for me indicating a mask or a false personality covering something up. Currently I'm creating a character who tries to create a disguise for herself so she can seek revenge on someone. She's trying to become Missy Bean but not doing a very good job.
My Own Attempts at Cover Art
My UK publisher partnered up with the Saatchi Online Gallery to sponsor a contest for the book cover. More than a thousand submissions were made, including a few that inspired debates as passionate as anything that had ever been tabled by a member of the Lacuna Cabal. My own mini-essay on the whole experience is here.
I prepared a cover of my own to be used just in case people were reticent about submitting. That did not turn out to be a problem, so my submission was never viewed. I'm still proud of it though. It makes use of one of Alison Rossiter's beautiful book images (recorded by placing a book on its end directly on top of the light-sensitive paper and underneath the enlarger), along with the UK edition's butterfly paragraph-divider, and makes me think of Romy's hair, Runner's vulnerable thyroid and the full-on intensity of the LC as a whole.
The other two are from way back, when we were trying to come up with a cover image up here (over here? down here?) in Canada. The ghostly building in the top image is from the background of a digital photo I took of the Royal Vic at night.
And the last one is a hexapod (swiped from the Internet) being chased down by one of the members of the Lacuna Cabal, as depicted by Leonardo da Vinci. Of course. 
I made many, many more, before my Canadian editor finally shouted Stop!. But these are my favourites.
The Play (I)
Antoine-Jean Gros, "Sappho at Leucadia"
I began this book as a play. In the summer of 2000, my friend Chris Abraham (unrecognizable in the dark) told me to think fast and come up with an idea to pitch to the Montreal Young Company. He expressed the preference that the setting of the play be their own city.
Like many companies devoted to mounting works from the classical rep, the Montreal Young Co. was crowded with larger-than life actresses who had very little to do, most of the great parts in such plays (Shakespeare excepted) having been written for men.
So I decided I would write a show that would restore the balance of work in this particular rep, eat up their hours and provide a full evening of hoofing it on stage. My goal was for the girls to feel, by the end of the night, that they'd dug their ditches as deep as the boys.
The ways and means of the girls who saw everything in the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club arose from that necessity.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I will reveal that my first pitch had actually been an adaptation of Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, but that's more or less another story. 'More than anything else, I dislike muchness' was the essence of the author's response to my treatment. And it was true. I had definitely offered her muchness, my top priority having always been fun for the performers. I could not help myself in that regard. Everything else was secondary. Perhaps that doesn't ultimately make for powerful playwriting. The collaboration described in the link appears to have served Ms. Carson much better than I would have.)
I'd always wanted to write an oratorio of The Epic of Gilgamesh for a Toronto choral ensemble called the Boys Choir of Lesbos. Why Gilgamesh is a subject for another post. Why the Boys Choir was because I had seen them put on a wonderfully terrible over-the-top performance adaptation (sans singing) of The Lord of the Flies — a glorious celebration of women playing the roles of violent innocent boys. I loved every minute of it. I wanted to harness that energy and bring it to the telling of Gilgamesh — with singing too — in a full blown oratorio. 
The inherent contradiction (oratorios are essentially stand-and-deliver singing performances) did not seem to have occurred to me. I don't know what I was thinking.
And of course the Montreal Young Company was not the Boys Choir of Lesbos. They wanted a play, not a static opera, no recitatives allowed. So I set out to create a scenario wherein the actresses of the MYC would have reason to be as passionate and devil-may-care committed/crazy — as godlike — as the Boys Choir in their dirt-smeared, topless, war-paint wail of a William Golding reenactment. That was really how the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club was born.
The Monkey's Paw
Toronto has a newish bookstore on Dundas Street that caught my eye recently while I was on my way to meet some friends on Ossington. I looked in the window and this is what I saw.
Alleged Author
The girls of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club have tried very hard to make their author look fake — applying black and white, doing away with depth of field, adding cartoon colours, overlapping a very poor image of nose & glasses, and, finally, giving him a Greek fisherman's cap that he wouldn't be caught dead wearing in real life.
Perhaps they believe an author must wear such a cap in order to be taken seriously as a Canadian producer of what they believe to be literary nonfiction. Or perhaps the Greek cap means they harbour the hope that their alleged will one day become a bona fide Nobel laureate.
But maybe they only wish he were from what was considered to be the birthplace of Western civilization before Gilgamesh came along (rather than from a city in Canada that isn't even their favourite), where it's a lot warmer than it is here right now.
Bonus. Here's a picture of the author with his brother.
Official Bookplate
This is the official bookplate for the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club.
It was designed by Evan Munday, based on my own tinkerings with a 1930s bookplate made for Alpha Delta Phi at Cornell University.
'Manus Multae Cor Unum' means 'Many Hands One Heart'.
I don't live in Montreal anymore. I was there as a student, and I still miss the city and visit it as often as possible.
I'm not sure I really understand the term psychogeography, but I believe I hold the geography of Montreal in my psyche. I wrote The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal so I could turn over and examine all the detritus of my memories of the city.
Like many students I was cash poor, and one of the few things I could do for entertainment was walk through the streets and look at the people and their fashions and the architecture and the statuary. The parks and the churches. The mountain. The city is full of icons. St. Joseph's Oratory. Farine Five Roses. The old city by the river. This city is possessed by both a mountain and a river. In fact, it's an island on the St. Lawrence River.
Island, mountain, river. Is there any other city in the world like that?
Some of these icons are literal. Montreal is populated by winged statues. One of them was swiftly sketched by Evan from a photograph for this bookplate.
-not this beauty (my favourite) which overlooks the old port of the city and graced my computer desktop all through the writing of the book,
-nor this one, which graces a gravestone in the Côte-des-Neiges Cemetery, where the Lacuna Cabal once convened,
-but rather this one, which stands on a high pillar at the foot of the Montreal Mountain, near where the tam-tams have their jams on weekends.
You may ask, what do Montreal angels have to do with The Epic of Gilgamesh?
As a starting point for this novel, I wanted to devise a pantheon for the world of the book. I needed a way to believe that the gods of ancient Mesopotamia could be present and walking the streets in Montreal, the way a Sumerian might imagine them.
I took inspiration from these stone angels that peek up into or gaze down over the urban landscape of the city. They represent the closest thing to a quotidian version of such gods.
So I decided to imagine the girls of the Lacuna Cabal as a group of minor deities in a world that would give them a certain amount of control over one another (depending on who was in charge in a given instant) and complete control over the men in their midst.
I also felt, given the boys' overall powerlessness, it was only fair for them to exert a modicum of control as well. So Coby, one of the unfortunate male characters, got to build a hexapod for the Haptics Lab at the Centre for Intelligent Machines at McGill University, which was designed to scuttle away from the light and into the shadows.
Coby gets a bookplate as well, as does everyone who joins the (now defunct) Lacuna Cabal, even if, as is the case with boys, they're only half-members. 
Unfortunately, over the course of the novel, Coby loses control of his hexapod. 
Ahem...
The author of The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal is not alleged. At least for the purposes of this blog. He's not an automaton. He's real, and he's going to start posting.
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