de taal

This is not an actual blog, just a short description of something that happened to me the other day.

My Dad skyped (yes, a new verb) me on Sunday to catch up a bit.  Occasionally we'll switch over to Dutch to exercise my third language skills.  The conversation turned to members of our family; what they were doing, how they were doing, where they were doing it.  It turns out that my uncle — his brother-in-law — suffered a pretty bad stroke.  Well, all, strokes are pretty bad, and as far as strokes go this wasn’t a total power-grid failure.  It seems the fuse was only blown in a few bits, like the one’s responsible for communication.  My dad said, “Ben is really struggling to speak English.  As a matter of fact, he has great difficulty even with his vocabulary in Dutch.  You can hear him fighting  to find the words.”

I said, “It sounds like we’re on about the same level then, speaking Dutch.  I should practice with him.”

Dad said, “No, he’s still doing slightly better than you.”

So, if you're wondering how well I speak Dutch, I'm slightly below the level of a stroke victim.

My Dad: 36 years of useful criticism.   

"Literary!!!", he muttered.

The urge to write now comes at about 4am.  This is inconvenient,  but doable.

Nothing is more tragic than watching Czech people dance.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve been to clubs in the Czech Republic and been flummoxed by how random the limbs were moving in relation to the beat.  And, I know, it’s a hell of a thing to criticize if you yourself are no Baryshnikov; but seeing a beautiful Czech lady studiously trying to move sexily, while coming off like two penguins in a foot-race, can leave a man confused.

I blame it on the lack of black culture.  This came to me when I was watching a group of white people try to keep a simple rhythm with their hands.  The only thing funnier than the person clapping off the beat while trying desperately to be on the beat, is the look of unbridled joy when a bunch of white people actually pull off a few claps in unison.

The way I figure it, the ability  to informally dance (as opposed to ballroom dance, belly dance, or Riverdance) increases in direct proportion to a society’s historical exposure to black, or darkly complected people.  And yes, the stereotype is as glaring as white-people dancing is hilarious.

So what’s the excuse for bad literature?

Again, this is coming from a place where the critic is no literary genius himself.   I am by no means a masterful weaver of words like Julian Barnes, Elmore Leonard, P.J. O’Rourke, or even Dave Barry.  However, I read —if you’re familiar with the unit of measurement — “a fuckload”.  So without further ado, here’s a few of my pet peeves:

Recently I was watching the Disney CGI film Tangled — at least the first ten minutes before the characters burst into song.  When this happened I literally leaped across the room, brought the mouse to bear on the “stop” icon, and checked myself before throwing my computer against the wall in disgust.   Here’s the thing: I like music (I don’t, however, like whiny music), and I like animated features, but being badly surprised by song —in something I thought was songless— is worse than discovering that the chocolates are raisins in your chocolate-chip cookie.   When I hear singing, when I don’t expect to hear singing, I feel the urge to do horrible things to nice people.  This goes for sporting events, bars, and yes, films.

I feel the same way when I suddenly encounter poetry in a novel — or poetry cleverly disguised as a song, for that matter.  There are poets, and there are writers of pros.  There is very rarely both at the same time.  I've only actually seen it done successfully by one guy, Kevin Colgan.  Without getting too deep into the relative merit of each, I should make it clear that I pretty much don’t get poetry. I just know when it’s bad.  Leonard Cohen, for example; great poet, terrible novelist.  Beautiful Losers was one of the most banal, badly-written books I have ever read.  Tolkein, had a habit of lapsing into poetic verse without the slightest warning.  There you are, Frodo has perilously moved his Baggins to the crest of Mount Dimpletwat, you turn the page, and.  .  .  what?  A friggin’ three-page poem about the observable vista across the Valley of Quidditch.  Just tell me the story, man.  Don’t wax on to yourself about the mighty tower/ with eye that glowers.  Never once have I read a poem in a novel that added to the plot in any way.  At best, the author comes off as a fatuous jerk, at worst it’s like discovering a flattened, dried, bug carcass between the pages. 

I used to believe that people that use more than one exclamation point are mentally retarded.  Somewhere along the line, in my crotchety, bitter state, I have come to believe that people that use any exclamation points are mentally retarded.  Am I going too far with my fascist punctuation ideas?  Especially for someone that’s terrible at using them?  I just feel that very few sentences are so exciting that they warrant an exclamation point.  I put exclamation point users in the same category as people that use emoticons ( 8==> ): they have sponge for brains, or they’re girls up to the age of eighteen — which nearly amounts to the same thing.  I suppose I don’t like being told I should be excited about something.  A good sentence (or a tame sentence, but in a good context) should be able to convey the necessary excitement on its own.  Even in dialogue it should be used sparingly in short statements, otherwise you get: “Marty, get down from the top shelf when you’re going to try to steal cookies, otherwise the fall from that height may cause you to break your head and make it necessary to mop up blood and brain matter before heading to the hospital, which I don’t want to do because hospitals smell of iodine, and I hate the smell of iodine!” I picture exclamation points as tiny little crutches used both by the reader and author to convince each other that something interesting just happened.

This is highly controversial, but I also feel the same about words other than “said” to indicate that someone is speaking.   This is a bit of a tricky one, but the same rule can apply; if you have to use a colourful expressions to describe how the person is saying something, either you haven’t contextualized the statement enough, or you’re trying to sell something that isn’t there.  Sure I’ll accept the odd “whispered” or “yelled”, but when we start getting into “complained”, and “snarled”, and “griped”, and even “enquired”, and, of course “sang” (when the person is clearly not singing, and if they are, you're annoying me with your poetry again) I start to doubt the author’s actual ability.  This tends to happen in cheap thrillers a lot:

“Hey.  Hey!  Did you shoot Jim?” Jeff growled.

“I had to, he had the master-code to the Omega System.” grimaced Mike.

“Well, you know, if he dies, you die.” seethed Jeff.

“You just try it.” Mike challenged

“Maybe, I will.” Jeff snarled.

“Oh, yeah?” enquired Mike.

“Oh.  Yeah.” whispered Jeff.

“Well, take one step closer—“ mewed Mike.

“I already have!” Jeff spat.

“Ugh, do you have a towel?” Mike wondered.

“Kiss me first.” muttered Jeff.

And so, on and so forth.

Okay, here’s the thing about stories within stories: The quality of that story is only as good as the skill of the author producing it.   Telling me, “And he regaled me with a tale of such stupendous mystery.  I was so awed by its magnificent profundity I quite shat myself.” does not automatically induce the same reaction in the reader.  Unless that reader is easily amused, or simple.  That means; don’t tell me that the story your character heard, or witnessed, is amazing, just tell me the damn story.  If you have to tell your audience that what they are about to hear, or have heard, requires scaffolding to put their jaw back in place, you are probably telling (or have told) a shitty story.  The same goes for the listener’s reactions within the story, unless that story wasn’t explicitly told: “Jeff told us a story that scared the crap out of us.” works.  “Jeff began to tell us this story: (insert long story about hats here).  Afterwards we all sat in stupefied silence, some of us moved to tears.” does not.

The same goes for supposedly humorous statements.   Saying, “Everyone around the table laughed”, or, “The room filled with laughter at his comment”, or, “What he was about to do made some people laugh so hard they vomited”, means you are obligated to write something that’s actually funny.  Cueing your readers for laughter in this way,  without producing amusing material, is the equivalent to laugh-tracks in bad sitcoms.  Unless you expect your audience to be sheared every spring to make warm sweaters, you are asking paper airplanes to land on runways designed for 747s.  I’m particularly sensitive to this because it’s hard to write funny material.  Trust me, I’ve been trying (with varying degrees of failure) for years.  It takes a special kind of verbal intuition, timing, and execution to get it right.  So if you come along and fake it by explaining that this is the point when the audience is expected to laugh, I will call you a hack and punch you in the throat if I ever meet you in person.  No joke.

Also, I am no longer sure of the viability of the word “that”. I see it a bit like my removed appendix: I probably didn’t need it anyway. This is more a personal taste thing, like: “He was sure that he left the keys on his desk”, as opposed to, “He was sure he left the keys on his desk” Hmmm, you can stare at these two sentences until your eyeballs rupture and not be convinced that (or not “that”) one is better than the other. What is totally unacceptable, however, is two or more “that”s together: “He indicated that that key was the one he left on the desk.” I mean seriously people, a quarter-million words in the English language and you start doubling up on the dodgy ones?

I think a lot of these complaints I have can be boiled down to one very simple thing: Don’t treat your audience like sycophantic morons.  Unless that's your target demographic (which is growing in inverse proportion to the polar ice-caps melting) treat them like they at least have a couple brain-cells which communicate with each other to create a thought.  This means ease off on the use of description — and if you insist on copiously smearing your wondrous and varied thesaurus-based vocabulary like rich golden butter across the tableau of your morning darkened toast, try not to emit a constant stream of clichés.  Don’t perpetuate the dumb, like so many other mediums are trying to do.

In conclusion:

Something funny.

the challenged

Recently, when I was in class I was overcome with laughter when I realized that one of my classmates didn’t have the whispering gene. A really nice guy in general, he just never learned how to speak in any volume lower than “talk”. Inevitably there is going to be some whispering going on in class, it can’t be avoided, like fat people in Walmart. With this classmate, however, when he gets into a discussion with someone, everyone around him can hear his side of the conversation. The effect is as if there were nobody talking to him at all, and that he, in fact, is sitting at the back of class holding a conversation with himself. One would think that the teacher would then ask him to be quiet, but I think that his “quiet voice” is so over the top they just assume he’s addressing the class —and it must be important because nobody would not whisper in the middle of a lecture.

I emitted another burst of laughter when we were trying to put together the questions we would ask a war veteran in a face-to-face interview. This gem came from a very tall Dane who started rattling off suggestions including, “How has your adjustment been returning home?”, “Did you kill anybody?”, and, “Have you had an amputation?”

This last one, I couldn’t let go:

“Why not ask a blind vet how many fingers you’re holding up?”

“It’s a nice day, how about if we conduct the interview while jogging?”

“I know you’re mute, but could you speak up?”

“So when did you realize your face was missing?”

Under this barrage of elite witticism he plaintively asked, “What if they were amputated before they went to war?”

Really, is that Denmark’s drafting policy? “Welcome to the army son, you’ll be in the King’s 38^th Division. They are primarily responsible for radio communication and being steady targets.”

To his credit, this Dane once noted that a particularly flamboyant plaid one of our classmates was wearing was from the clan McQueer.

(Generally I jot down little notes to remind myself to pick up on a topic. The notes for these last two anecdotes were “Whispering Wilson” and “Anders and the Amputee”, respectively. This makes me think that Whispering Wilson and Anders’ Amputees would be a good name for a bluegrass band.)

Directly outside of my front door there is a home for the mentally challenged. Well, not really a home, more a place where their parents store them for the day to free themselves up for work and regular day-type activities. From what I can tell it is a nice facility. The outside facade is the usual yellow brick (of which Aarhus is the number one producer, and consumer of, in Europe) with large windows which feature rooms filled with colourful things that the mentally challenged may enjoy; large balls, stuffed animals, plastic spoons. The outside of the one story complex has a large grass yard with a sandbox and swing-set. This is where I believe most of the howling is going on.

When I first moved here I couldn’t quite figure out what the sound was that was waking me up every weekday morning. It sounded vaguely human, but could it be some obscure Danish wildlife I’ve never heard of like the European polecat (which would probably be a great name for an Winnipeg strip club), or an elk? It only took one day off for me to glance out my kitchen window and say to myself, “Huh. Those are retards howling out there.”

No, the language I use to speak to myself is not always politically correct. Is yours? If so, why?

It’s not that they were being beaten, or abused, or anything. As a matter of fact, judging by some of the staff at the facility, one might seriously considered blagging their way in to get a bit of the club-med treatment. It’s clearly an above the board operation. Granted, evil lurks in unlikely places, and they may have a damp, ugly, basement where they tease the mentally disabled with name-calling or Sudoku, but I doubt it. This is, after all, Denmark; a place that has really only been successful in being nasty to Muslims. And in that case they were pretty (though naively) shocked by the screaming vitriol created by a single cartoon.

It seems the clientele of this particular establishment —mere feet from my front door— are howling just for the hell of it. Sort of heralding in the new day like reveille, or a rooster.

The evenings pose a different problem. On the other side of my house is another row of houses. These houses contain the business students going to my University. Being a post-grad student of Journalism I am not privy to their exact class schedule but it seems like their course load is made up of a single 15 minute lecture a week that occurs sometime in the late evening. This frees them up for other activities, like drinking heavily and yelling at each other across the courtyard. When the weather is too cold to yell at each other across the courtyard they go to each other’s houses and yell at each other indoors. Just to set the record straight, these are ALL very nice people, so the yelling that occurs is of the friendly variety. Also, the yelling is somewhat of a necessity, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to hear each other over the dance music.

I have no problems with good dance music, but here’s the thing about it; you can hear dance music long before it actually arrives. This can be illustrated by people that blast dance music in their cars. Standing near a road (or several kilometres away from it) the steady sub-audio thump of the bass can be heard for quite a while before you see the Honda Civic playing it — which is inevitably souped-up with tinted windows, black lights, a whale fin, and a tool in the driver’s seat. You know the scene, and it promotes all kinds of hatred towards it. Assuming you ignore the fact that it works as a fairly good indicator that a jack-ass is approaching. Sort of a cowbell for douchebags.

The effect is somewhat more authentic when the dance music is coming from your neighbour’s house, and the walls between you are made of rice paper. The steadily pounding electronic bass drum is a visceral sensation you more feel than hear. The feeling is like having your head inside of a steadily pounding bass drum, or having your rib-cage regularly tazed. This is a slightly tricky situation for me for a number of reasons. The first is that my neighbour is a super guy. In fact he has an edge on most other French people because he plays, and enjoys, ice hockey. For somebody who has never left North America to understand the incongruity of this; it’s like a new parent not posting several terabytes worth of baby pictures on facebook, or a ‘Women of M.A.D.D. Erotic Calendar’. The second is that I partied too. In fact, they are me about 10 years ago (no truer thing can be said, considering they are the age I was ten years ago) so I understand the general excitement: new place, new people, all with different accents and backgrounds, no parents dragging you down with boring rules, like “Don’t pass out in the street” and, “Overall volume below the decibel level of canon fire”. I had fun, and they’re having fun, and good for all of us. In light of that, their carousing doesn’t inspire the kind of hatred that would have me on the lawn in a bathrobe with a shotgun. Besides, when I ask them to keep it down, they do, and there are no hard feelings. And it’s not as if I haven’t been complained to for the very same thing due to guitar-playing with a few of them early in the morning.

In the end, all it really means is that retards wake me in the morning, and then put me to bed at night.

Prague re-visited

Prague is still there, though a little smaller and a bit meeker. Or maybe it’s just me; I got bigger and stronger.

A little back-story:

Last week I returned to Prague after 5 years of living in very polished environments. I left the place looking like a stick insect and weighing about 167 pounds, I rolled in mid-January with 40 more pounds, a knapsack, and two additional chins. My severely emaciated condition can be accounted to shoddy eating habits, no exercise, and hangovers so tremendous I didn’t bother getting out of bed to eat for days at a time. The weight gain is a result of doing the opposite of that.

The places that I lived after Prague were Ottawa; the town that fun rolls down the window to laugh at as it drives from Toronto to Montreal, Powell River; a place where they lynch you if you don’t think it’s fun, Vancouver; which everybody tells you is fun, and probably is if you weren’t on the verge of committing suicide; Delft, Holland, which is fun because your health lies in the hands of 15-year-old with the fists the size of ping-pong paddles, and Aarhus, Denmark; where fun may exist underneath the layer of fog produced by their foul-smelling cheese.

Despite the vast geographic distances between these places they have certain things in common, the most evident being loads of white people and fairly sterile atmospheres. Sterility is a word which brings to mind doctor’s offices and spermicidal jelly. You stretch the definition to cover cities or towns and you’re still not far off from the original definition. The places I’ve lived since Prague are not only clean and wholesome, like Delft —or like Ottawa, which works as a fairly effective anti-conception system — but their governments and authority figures have a much closer relationship to their citizens ranging from “meddling” to “rape”.

An Israeli friend of mine in Prague, for example, has been making and selling lovely tasting snacks to drunk bar patrons. Here’s is how it works: He makes them at home, puts them on the counter of the bar, people buy them, he profits. There’s no contract, no city, merchant, or union approval, and no taxation. People in Western Europe may dimly recognize this system as a half-remembered memory, like nation-state borders or Otto Von Bismarck. People in North America are aghast and reach for their phones to call lawyers and see if they can crush him for not being FDA approved — which still wouldn’t stop them from stuffing their faces with his delicious snacklings.

Another couple friends own bars which they keep open as long as they want, so long as they don’t piss off the neighbours. Those same places are hosts to the kinds of shady activity that would have entire police forces dedicated to their surveillance if the bar were in any other country.

Another friend arrived in Prague as a back-packer, climbed up the corporate ladder to a powerful position with a massive international conglomerate before getting too cocky, going independent, and landing on the wrong side of the real-estate crash. Massive doses of pervitin probably did not help. It made him loopy and stripped his teeth of enamel, which made his teeth slightly transparent and rendered his open mouth a good place to keep goldfish.

This last story I’ve heard a lot. In fact. this tends to happen more than the people that find success and fulfilment.

Another heavily frequented bar in my old neighbourhood still has the exact same people telling each other the exact same sad stories about ice-skating up a hill, but having a plan to change all that.

This sort of thing can go on because the country, like much of Eastern-Europe operates in a distinctly grey area. It’s not necessarily a good thing; one bar-owner friend was significantly screwed by his management and forced to shut down with no legal recourse. With no fixed identifiable system in place, bureaucracy —building off former Soviet ineptitude and malfeasance— behaves like a spoiled rich fat child that repeatedly changes the rules of the playground games in order to give themselves the advantage.

It’s hard to tell if the grey area is a good thing or a bad thing; whether it’s okay for 12-year-olds to be served alcohol by topless bar staff, or that the place is rife with people stitching each other up for a quick buck due to loose laws, it just is. And to be honest the place, within its own dodgy framework, functions just fine. Very little violent crime, no particular profusion of destitution, and a fairly healthy, though moderately weird-looking, populace.

That grey area, also, allows for some pretty peculiar behaviour. When eating with a friend in a local eatery (Czech eateries on their menus, by the way, tell you how much food you’ll get by weight; 150g, 200g, 250g, etc. However, the scales are fairly arbitrary from restaurant to restaurant. 200g in the particular place we were in was a mound of fried cheese and french-fries, in another restaurant, for the same price, 200g is a bean on a leaf of lettuce. Grey.) a man walked in dressed like how a drunk Czech man imagines what a guru looks like. He was wearing an orange sarong/toga/robe, elf boots, and an orange turban like the 50s cinema portrayal of the Maharaja by people that have never been to India. He was also a drunk Czech man.

What was particularly interesting about him though was the people he was with — not a circus troupe, group of cheap palm-readers, or hari-krishas— but normal people. Even when he suddenly got up and started gesturing in a pseudo mystical manner; flighty hand gestures indicating his knees and the turd-like object attached to the front of his turban, they nodded appreciatively and continued their amiable banter.

For someone like me that thrives on weirdness, it’s things like this that make Prague so attractive to me.

And how was it for me returning?

Originally I wanted to re-visit the city, but in the end it was about seeing friends. There is a special comfort in being with people that are on the same wave-length. I spent many formative years with these people; not sitting around television screens, not texting each other, not using social-media as a guise for a real relationship, but actually talking, and more importantly laughing, and often sober. Having the conversation pick up where it left off, shed of the bullshit second-guessing which beleaguers most new relationships, makes you realize how tiring it is the rest of the time.

Prague itself has actually changed very little, at least on the surface. Maybe they’ve cleaned up their bureaucracy somewhat, but from what I’ve heard you still need 13 stamps from eight different locations in opposite ends of the city to renew your driver’s license. The metro is still packed with dour people and smells like an NBA locker-room after game-time. A man will still wears socks in sandals without any sense of irony. You can also still blag your way into the pricey seats of a Strauss Concerto, be unselfconsciously approached by beautiful women, and dance till 5 in the morning. I did notice a fine effort to institute recycling, complete with bins for paper, glass, and metal, but it was once, and in the national airport.

This is horribly clichéd, but I find it hard to avoid the analogy. Visiting Prague was like seeing a past girlfriend with whom I shared an emotionally charged and passionate relationship for a long time. The amount of terrible explosions of blind anger in the place was only equalled to the amount of times I laughed so hard my diaphragm seized up. The sex —still with the analogy here— was unimaginably good, as only two people who have a lot of time to practice together can make it. It was a slightly sad though cleansing re-union where we both appreciated who and where we are in our lives. And without a doubt, after my sudden break-up with Prague, I fantasized often and heavily about her. Facebook didn’t help, it put the city in my face (appropriately) constantly. Returning to Prague has made me realize that we can be friends. This is a nice feeling. It’s soothing because I may understand her better now than I did when I was there... at least my relationship with her anyway. I also know that as long as the right people stay there, she will always be there for me when I need her. Which I will.

Because I still find her sexy as hell.