Stay up late.

Stay up late and do good in the world. 

Flowers at dinner.

When you get invited to someone's house for dinner, or a party, a nice thing to do is bring flowers. An even nicer thing to do is bring a vase. Most florists carry vases, often clear glass and real simple.

A host is busy—hosting—and flowers in a wrapper require attention.

Pass the flowers to the host, kiss kiss, take them back and head to the kitchen faucet. Put the flowers in the vase and put the vase on the table with the booze.

Bonus: a surprisingly lovely gesture—housewarming, birthday, new job—is to bring an orchid. It turns out that basic orchids are widely available and cost something like $25, including small vase. No room goes unimproved by an orchid.

It also turns out that orchids are surprisingly low maintenance: one ice cube at the base of the stem, weekly. Isn't that delightful?

TMFAD at SummerWorks.

Title of work: Tackle Me For A Dollar (“Tackle Me”).

Presented[1] by: Christopher Ryan Graham (“CRG”) and Ann Margaret Oberst (“AMO”).

Website: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF60DVi8xZY. (This is a video of the first time we ran Tackle Me. We made $35.)

Project overview: Tackle Me is pretty much what it sounds like. CRG takes a big, homemade sign to an outdoor space, preferably a park, and gets people to pay a dollar for the chance to tackle him. The experience raises all sorts of interesting tensions, themes, issues, mores, social anxieties, and personal neuroses, some of which are easier to summarize than others. The former include:

Playfulness and violence as a continuum. Tackle Me is a clear instance of humans playing at hurting each other. Any sharp distinction between playfulness and violence—usually based on intention—is called into question[2] by, at least, the uncertainty involved in amateur tackling.[3]

Conceptual versus practical understanding. Everyone knows what a tackle is, but few people know how to do it. I’m not sure people appreciate this is a real difference; that these are different modes of understanding. Tackle Me forces people to reckon with this difference, usually at the moment they ready themselves to charge and think: Oh, shit…

Metaperception and interpersonal relations. Tackle Me is great at forcing people to think about how their actions in the world are mediated by what other people think.[4] The point’s so banal it’s actually profound: few people recognize their sense of self is radically integrated with various communities. (We always already are, type-thing.) Tackle Me brings this home in a few ways, the clearest being that we don’t give instructions about how to tackle. This forces tacklers to make (=recognize) all kinds of assumptions about how CRG’ll react to getting hit.

Length of work: Entirely dependent on the work’s content: the harder the tackles, the sooner CRG’ll get tired or sore and want to quit for the day. Although, it’s probably a good idea to set a maximum time, like two hours, with the proviso CRG may not last that long.

Interestingly, this feature of Tackle Me calls attention to the role of the audience as gatekeepers to artistic expression. This is one kind of audience participation that’s hard to see but very real; also, felt much more acutely during Tackle Me than, say, the audience having to show up at a stage production. This is all very If a tree falls in the woods... except that with Tackle Me it’s the audience that cuts down the tree.[5]

Stage of development: Ready, except that we’ll need to borrow someone’s video camera.

Artists involved: CRG and AMO. We’re debating whether AMO should offer to be tackled, whether anyone would go for that.

Intended audience: Everyone (in the park). Curiously, the last time we did this the participation rate for females was much higher than for males. (We have some theories about why this is the case.[6]) All ages and abilities are welcome. One limitation we imposed was that you have to tackle. Some people wanted to give me a hug, but we declined this as being a different sort of project altogether.

Venue: Outdoor space is best; we like parks. In addition to increasing the number of potential participants, the absence of any barriers to entry—like a theatre door, say—calls attention to the arbitrariness of distinctions between participant, audience, and passer-by. (Think of buskers and the onlookers that arc around at that ambiguous distance where spectation is both guilt- and contribution-free.)

Plans for further development: Video evidence.

---

[1] It’s unclear whether this matters, but we didn’t create Tackle Me. The idea came from a story that CRG heard at a storytelling show. What we’ll create is the instance of our performance, sort of like a musician performing a cover, I guess. 

Also, apologies if this kind of subtextual pedantry is redundant to the Live Art Series panel: neither CRG nor AMO has any real experience with this sort of thing—indeed, we’re keen to join what we imagine to be an interesting community of folks—so we don’t know what’s going to be obvious to you guys making the decision. (Although, we do think this kind of point is interesting as an instance of the ‘thinking about thinking’ we’re hoping that Tackle Me cultivates, as you’ll see if you keep reading beyond this FN.*)

*…which further reading AMO thinks is unlikely, while CRG—whom you’ve probably guessed is the one doing the typing—is hopeful the Live Art Series panel will see the FNs as a neat, textual representation of this very ‘thinking about thinking’, how humans actually makes sense of and in the world.

[2] The uptown term here is “problematized”, I think.

[3] A literal undercurrent here is the issue of trust: nothing prevents a person from trying to get their money’s worth, as it were—basically, tackling me really hard. The last time we ran Tackle Me there were two people with pro tackling experience (male and female rugby players), both of whom let that be known and intentionally curbed their enthusiasm. 

[4] More formally, it seems clear to us that, all else equal, what A thinks B is thinking about A in respect of X is at least as important to A’s conduct in respect of X as what A’s thinking about X directly. It’s maybe simpler to do a formula: [illegible].

[5] (er… sort of.)

[6] There are about six pages of discussion here that CRG wanted to append but AMO vetoed as, variously, sententious, prolix, otiose, lame, obvious, and “We’re not having any more fucking formulas”. This FN’s a kind of editorial compromise, then, wherein I’m allowed to say the difference in male/female participation rates suggests a kind of paradox, at least for the guys: the result of conflicting social norms of masculinity, on the one hand, and civility (as like a subset of masculinity—like chivalry), on the other: basically, that guys don’t participate for fear of, and of not, hurting me.

Men who straighten their hair.

See, the thing is, I'm not sure it's in your interest to give me a hard time about straightening my hair. You know what I'm talking about: to just assume that a person who straightens their hair is feminine, like that's some hallmark of femininity, hair-straightening.

...

I'm not saying you're saying that only girls who straighten their hair are girls. Why would you think I was saying that?

...

What I'm saying is that you're saying that the only people who straighten their hair are people who think they're female, so if I do it I must be less of a man than some other guy who doesn't straighten his hair.

...

Why would you think I would think you thought I thought that's what you were saying?

...

No, the first thing.

...

See, that's not helping either. I'm serious, you don't want to have all these people in the bar here thinking that a guy who straightens his hair is some sort of nancy.

...

It's a British term for "effete man".

...

It means I'm putting that bit in quotations.

...

I'm not saying that because you called me a nancy that you're also a nancy, like only a nancy would use the word "nancy".

...

It's not in your interest because now all these guys in the bar here are going to know you stepped outside with some hair-straightening nancy and had your life separated from your body. That's why. [End.]

Bangkok and other places.

Truer words were never spoken, in a Bangkok bathroom, at least.

Little bit of handmade yarn.

Little bit more.

Geez, I really liked this yarn.

Angkor Wat in the background, CRG in the foreground.

This is like an average temple.

Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious building, is covered with bas-reliefs. Covered.

Like all the Angkor temples, this is built by hand.

This temple is covered with the bas-relief detailed below.

This is over 1,000 years old.

I lived here for a week.

There are lot of dragon statues guarding temples in Thailand.

In Bangkok, this is the street that sells used engines.

In Laos, there are good places like this to read.

Also in Laos, sometimes you have to wait while construction crews finish the road you're driving along.

Once again, CRG in the foreground. (Back at Angkor, by Tha Prohm.)

Have that, 1,000-year-old Khmer temple. UN-believable.

In a Laos village.

A reasonable worldview.

Annals of curious legislation.

The Use of Animals to Shield Unlawful Activities Act (Manitoba).

No person who is committing an unlawful act on a property shall use an animal to protect that property.

Tanning Beds Act (Nova Scotia)

The purpose of this Act is to protect the health of Nova Scotians, and in particular young persons, by restricting their access to tanning equipment in tanning facilities in light of the risks associated with the use of tanning equipment.

Clothesline Act (Nova Scotia)

WHEREAS the use of clotheslines to dry clothes reduces energy consumption, greenhouse gas and mercury emissions; AND WHEREAS Nova Scotians should have the ability to utilize clotheslines outdoors.


Apology Act (most provinces)

An apology made by or on behalf of a person in connection with any matter, (a) does not constitute an express or implied admission of fault or liability by the person in connection with that matter [...] and (d) must not be taken into account in any determination of fault or liability in connection with that matter.

"A Gatsby among municipalities."

Edward Keenan's "Some Great Idea" (Coach House, 2012) is a highly readable, engaging and lucid primer to Toronto's post-amalgamation politics. Assembled from a decade of Keenan's writing about Toronto culture and politics, S.G.I. argues that the city's greatest political strength is its diversity, and the best way to exercise this strength is for all the city's voices to engage, engage, engage.

Keenan's currently a senior editor at The Grid and also writes/has written for Eye Weekly (what The Grid used to be called), Spacing, Yonge Street, and other city-based publications. If you follow Keenan then a lot of this book will be familiar; parts are lifted verbatim from stuff he's previously published, a corpus stitched together into four long-ish essays. The book offers a potted history of Toronto's self-identity and then maps this (loosely) onto the city's three post-amalgamation mayors: Mel Lastman, David Miller and Rob Ford. The map reads as follows:

Lastman blustered through the chaos of the post-amalgamation identity crisis; Miller began projecting a self-confident identity onto the new city; and Ford declined to accept that identity in favour of something scrappier and less ambitious.

The book's best line is clipped for this review's title, and fairly summarizes the problem - circumstances - Keenan's trying to decoct; viz, how Toronto manages to have any kind of civic identity given its history, especially recently, of extreme municipal narratives. Keenan's argument is that the city favours - and suffers - perpetual re-imagination, and that this is the only sensible way for so many different kinds of people to get along and prosper.

Keenan wears his politics on his sleeve: he's a Jane Jacobs disciple, loves David Miller and loathes Mike Harris (whom Keenan calls "a villain in the modern story of Toronto"). This matters, the obtrusiveness of his bias, because S.G.I.'s nowhere near long enough to be editorially balanced. (I read its 171 pages in an afternoon.) It also underlies the book's most and least compelling arguments.

The most interesting part of S.G.I. investigates the difference between Ford Nation and everyone else (the latter, basically, people who live downtown and struggle to understand Ford's popularity). Keenan's claim is that the relevant binary here isn't urban vs sub-, middle class vs upper, folks vs elites - or, more uncomfortably, immigrants vs nationals, minorities vs whites - even though each of these has some explanatory force. Rather, the critical opposition is taxpayer vs citizen, a shorthand for two very different stories of civic engagement. 

Whereas "citizens" view themselves as active participants in government, interacting with neighbors and local businesses, having a stake in their local community, "taxpayers" view themselves as isolated from the larger city. A taxpayer's major form of civic interaction is their property tax cheque, which they send far away, literally, then wait to see visible improvements back where they live. 

Keenan's primary example is Woburn, the community where he grew up, around the intersection of Markham Road and Lawrence Avenue. Woburn is one of Toronto's "inner suburbs", where roughly 70% of the city's residents live, and is best characterized as a non-community: Keenan notes, "if you ask people who live near Markham and Lawrence what life in Woburn is like, they will not recognize that you are talking about their home." Wide roadways, heavy traffic, strip malls with copious parking, bungalows and high-rise apartment towers. Keenan says his parents still live near Markham and Lawrence, but "near in the sense that people in Scarborough mean it", meaning 2km away. And so:

[I]f the city services in your area are thin on the ground, parks far away, transit inconvenient and unreliable, you might reasonably think the government is not working for you. If you live in a place like Woburn, where residents say a lack of any sense of 'community' or 'neighborhood' is one of its defining characteristics, talk of empowering residents... might just seem wacky and out of touch.

It's no coincidence that "wacky and out of touch" is also what a lot of people living downtown - outside Ford Nation - think about Rob Ford. Keenan's argument is that the best way to understand Ford's popularity, at least initially, is to understand his appeal to "taxpayers" as directly oppositely David Miller's appeal to "citizens"; a sort of retrenching of the city's entire identity, a very loud shout from the upper decks that We're still here. The challenge for Toronto's next mayor will be, as it's always been, to reconcile the extremes of post-amalgamation Toronto living.

Speaking of which, maybe the least compelling argument in S.G.I. is Keenan's take on Rob Ford's conflict of interest trial. Keenan's description of the proceedings is close to riveting: I was physically uncomfortable reading excerpts from Ford's testimony where he (=Ford) claims to have made  statements without understanding what he was saying at the time. While it's no surprise Keenan's pleased with Ford's subsequent removal from office (currently pending appeal), what is surprising is Keenan's view of this result as being a victory for citizenship: 

The court case began when a private citizen named Paul Magder found a pro-bono lawyer and filed a complaint about Ford's behaviour with the courts. A citizen was inspired to activism by the actions of a mayor. And that citizen changed the course of the city. If I were imagining the story, I could not have written a better ending.

At the level of first principles, Ford's removal from office via court process is terrible for democracy. Both the Mayor and his brother, Councillor Doug Ford, have been relentless in pointing-up the court case as undemocratic, and they're right: everyone can vote, but not everyone can understand, let alone afford access to judicial process. (Keenan elides any real description of Madger's lawyer, Clayton Ruby, one of the city's wealthiest criminal attorneys, and elsewhere in S.G.I. states that both Madger and Ruby were recruited to the case by another complainant, Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler.) On a practical level, though, what's really strange is that Keenan totally fails to appreciate how conflict of interest lawsuits - and other kinds of legal action - are now an established tool in Toronto politics. Rest assured, the residents of Ford Nation are taking notes on this new approach to evicting the next incarnation of David Miller. Madger's victory, if upheld on appeal, is almost certainly and entirely Pyrrhic.

The reason many elected officials are immune from prosecution is that having to defend allegations is a major distraction for everyone: the official, other officeholders, the press, voters. And, again, it's a mode of civic engagement only available to a very small group of savvy, well-funded citizens, which is why most processes for removing elected officials are handled by other elected officials. (Like impeachment.) For someone exceptionally keen on the power of civic engagement, on bringing all of Toronto's diverse voices to the table, Keenan's view on the Ford trial is kind of incoherent.

Still, there's no doubt S.G.I. is useful and stimulating. It's also worth reiterating the book's readability, because that's not the first thing I think of when I hear "primer on Toronto's post-amalgamation politics". Keenan writes like the good journalist that he is, and if you disagree with him, at least you'll never wonder why.

The Next Big Thing

Thank you to the lovely and talented Amy Stuart for linking me into this chain. It’s always fun to answer questions on stuff you’re writing… a good way to pretend it exists outside of your own head/computer.

1. What is the working title of your book?

How to grow your heart.

2. Where did the idea for the book come from?

It's a weird sort of fictional memoir, I guess. Trying to capture how memory and understanding work through imagination, projection. How this is both magical and terribly lonely. The work involved in knowing anyone ends up being mostly trust and faith, exactly as hard as maintaining certain kinds of religious beliefs - like transubstantiation, the existence of GOD - that are, these beliefs, impossibly real.

All of that's a long way of saying the idea for the book grew out of my experience living with someone who turned out to have a serious eating disorder. Trying to figure out how to empathize, help, understand, cope, deal, maintain basic sanity while watching someone trying to kill themselves, slowly, still.

3. What genre does it fall under?

Fictional memoir? Is there such a thing?

4. Which actors would you choose to play the characters in a movie version?

Amanda - Keira Knightly from the film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (about orphans raised to have their organs harvested)

Brother - Tom Waits, when he was younger.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of the book?

A young girl lives with anorexia through the eyes of her bewildered, floundering brother.

6. Will the book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Out of my hands.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Still in progress. Parts of an earlier, long-ish thing were salvaged, all that was fruitful from a year of work. Taking a break at the moment, gathering strength, resolve, purpose, motivational calories.

8. What other books would you compare yours to?

No idea. I just borrowed Rick Moody's memoir, from the library, thinking it may be a good template. I'm hoping to do something incredibly sad that doesn't read like a funeral dirge. Suggestions welcome.

 

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My life.

10. What else about your book might pique a reader’s interest?

I've never read anything about what anorexia looks like, what it's like to live with someone who's self-denying. Only what it's like to be the person s.-d.-ing, which first-person accounts seem to have legitimacy that other-person accounts lack. That's my gut reaction, anyway, like who am I to write about this other person's suffering. This raises anxiety about experience appropriation, how pain and suffering are objective and subjective - respectively - and what that means for having any kind of meaningful relationship with anyone, ever.

Now, go read:

Kathryn Mockler

Vows to my prostate.

My doctor says you’re shaped like a walnut but I think you’re shaped like a heart.

I’ve loved you since we first met, eighth grade, I was straddling a fence in the schoolyard, balanced on my perineum and the pressure suddenly exquisite. You made my whole body sigh, including the muscles in my pelvic floor that control bladder release. I wore proudly your love’s yellow stain.

My beloved prostate, from the Greek prostates, literally “one who stands before”, “protector”, “guardian”. Divine exocrine gland, male G-spot, the second-most sensitive part of my body.

In our teenage years we were precocious. Too excited for our own good, the girls who called us “Quick draw”. Ours was the shotgun approach to intercourse, one pump and it’s ready to fire but lo how we’ve grown together. Practiced patience, resolve, thousands of Kegel exercises. Now we can run coital marathons, 90 euphoric seconds.

I love you because you’re the gateway to my urethra.

I love you because your secretions account for 50-70 percent of my seminal volume; also 100 percent of its colour, that lustrous Mother of Pearl or sometimes Corn Silk, like white with a tinge of summer.

I love you because your secretions help make my sperm more alkaline, to neutralize acidity in the vaginal tract.

I love you because you’ve never once complained there’s no acidity in a fucking condom.

I love you because when it gets cold you stay the same size, and because no one cares how big or small you are, especially how small.

My dearest prostate, no amount of facial hair could ever express my love for you, my deep and abiding affection. For you alone I would consider the “other” kind of threesome.

As for these unworthy vows: amare et sapere vix deo conceditur. (“Even a god struggles to love and be wise at the same time.”)

Project day-maker: My dear friend.

Send someone a hand-written note, just to say 'hello'.

Project day-maker: I just called...

Call someone you love just to tell them.

Final exam.

This story takes the form of a law school examination question. First I will read you the fact scenario, followed by a series of questions designed to test your understanding of the legal issues at play.

Please listen carefully. There will be no repetition.

Here we go:

There is a doctor. One day this huge woman comes into his surgery. A spewing volcano of skin, stomach and ass, and she’s got this problem with… you guessed it her ass. Which is just catastrophically big. So she bends over the table and the doctor takes a look and she’s got this sort of fungus or pus going on down there. Like around her anus. Which apparently is pretty common because the doctor right away knows what it is, it’s ass gonorrhoea. So the doctor gets out this little gardening tool thing used for specimens (the technical term for which is speculum - it’s sort of a pair of blunted flattened scissors that you hold like a gun and it separates things and takes a sample at the same time) and he pushes apart her ass cheeks and uses the speculum to take a sample of the ass gonorrhoea. Standard procedure. 

So now he’s got this gardening tool implement with about an inch of pale yellow pustular… well not shit but you know, discharge, the ass gonorrhoea, and he’s turning around to put the specimen in the little plastic bag they send to the lab when his hand slips off the woman’s tectonic ass and he pitches forward and braces his hand against the examination table, which causes his other arm to hit the nearby instrument table, with his elbow, which knocks the hand that’s holding the speculum backwards towards his face, and because he’s simultaneously pitching forward the sample end of the speculum goes right into his mouth.

Now the doctor plays it cool and just takes it out of his mouth and throws it away and goes to brush his teeth and take another sample. Remember the patient’s facing the wall and so has no idea what’s happened. But the nurse helping the doctor is so disgusted that she starts to vomit into the garbage can by the examination room’s door. Braces her hands on either side of the can’s rim and heaves up the Big Spit. And because the can is pretty low to the ground the nurse doesn’t have her head all the way in the can but rather a foot or so above and you can see everything she’s bringing up like untreated sewage - which basically that’s what it is, when you think about it - and the patient of course sees and not to mention smells this and freaks out and unfortunately happens to have chronic stomach problems, on account of being so hideously obese, plus she’s bent awkwardly over the examination table in a kind of snowman jack-knife thing that’s putting all kinds of pressure on her intestines large and small, and her ass is there giving a whole new meaning to the phrase moon shot, and she lets out a belch that makes the fillings in the doctor’s teeth rattle. Then she herself starts vomiting all over the wall and the examination table and all of this just makes the doctor even more desirous of being able to go brush his teeth. His wife refuses to kiss him for like a month afterwards.

Question one: Can the patient sue the doctor for physical and emotional distress? In the course of your answer pay particular attention to the issue of causation; specifically, can the doctor argue that it was not his own malpractice that caused the patient’s distress - i.e., his accidentally taking a mouthful of ass gonorrhoea - but rather the nurse’s reaction to his malpractice, and that but for the nurse’s vomiting the patient would not have suffered any harm? Alternatively, can the doctor argue that the patient’s pre-existing conditions - her morbid obesity and chronic stomach problems - were the real cause of her adverse reaction, and he can’t be responsible for illnesses he doesn’t cause?

Question two: Can the nurse sue the doctor for physical and emotional distress? In the course of your answer please specifically consider whether the nurse’s status qua nurse requires her to be especially desensitized to medical grotesquery, which would make her reaction to the doctor’s venereal mishap unreasonable and so prevent her winning any lawsuit.

Question three: Can the doctor sue the nurse and patient for the damage done to his surgery by their respective vomiting? In the course of your answer be sure to address your analysis of multiparty causation in question one - e.g., if you argued that the patient could not sue the doctor because the nurse’s vomiting supervened the doctor’s eating ass gonorrhoea as the cause of the patient’s injury, does that mean the doctor is similarly prevented from suing the patient? - as well as your analysis of the nurse’s professional capacity in question two - e.g., if the nurse can sue the doctor for emotional and physical distress, can the doctor nevertheless sue the nurse for the property damage caused thereby?

Question four: Assuming the doctor can sue the nurse and patient for the damage to his surgery, can he also sue for loss of consortium? [NB. Loss of consortium derives from the Latin phrase per quod servitium et consortium amisit, which translates as “in consequence of which he lost her society and services.” In this case, the doctor’s loss of consortium is the monetary value of his wife refusing romantic attention for a month after he ate his patient’s clap.] In your answer be sure to discuss any defenses available to the nurse and patient, including whether they should be responsible if the doctor goes home and blabs every detail of his day to his wife, or for his wife’s hypersensitivity to the few particles of Neisseria gonorrhoeae that plausibly remained in the doctor’s mouth after multiple tooth brushings.

You have 60 minutes to complete your answer. Good luck.

Project day-maker: beautiful.

Today, when you see someone you think is beautiful, tell them.

Project day-maker: flowers.

Buy a corner store bouquet and give away the flowers to people you pass on the way to school or work.

Craft fair.

Arts and crafts and money.

When “small batch” equals big dollars and one-person companies are supported by corporate-size websites, is “hand-made” what we think it is? A report from North America’s largest consumer craft fair, where the competition for puppet dollars is intense.

The Morning News, 10 May 2012.

Here.

Volcano boarding.

Diary of a post-adrenaline junky.

Some decisions are best made heedlessly, based on the chance for an epic story—and some people think like that all the time. A report on what it’s like to slide down a volcano on a piece of sheet metal at 55 mph.

The Morning News, 16 February 2012.

Here.

Orchestra conducting.

When the crescendo is the least of your problems.

After practicing with his iPod—and feeling pretty good, actually—a novice discovers the extreme fear of conducting a professional orchestra.

The Morning News, 8 February, 2011.

Here.

Lewis H. Lapham

Nothing is off the record, because I'm not coming back.

After 26 years writing Harper’s Notebook, Lewis Lapham talks about history, essays, and modern journalists.

The Morning News, 30 November, 2010.

Click here.

Image: Jason Polan.

Letter to the Editor

-->

Letters,

The Walrus,

19 Duncan Street, Suite 101,

Toronto, Ontario, M5H 3H1.

17 August 2012

RE: John MacFarlane’s Editor’s Note, September 2012 Issue.

Dear Editors,

Buried deep in the back of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, endnote 269, is a character sketch of pro football punter Orin Incandenza by his former roommate, the reclusive hypochondriac Marlon Bain. Bain describes Orin as a near-pathological liar, a serial seducer of mothers with young children that he (=O.) contrives to fall madly in love with him, to the point where they (=the mothers w/ children) forget all about their brood; much the same way that O. feels his own mother serially philanders and apportions her attention. Orin goes so far as to deploy a series of numbered seduction strategies, selling each married woman a different version of himself, which Bain says demonstrates how “there can be such a thing as sincerity with a motive.” Then there’s a long and kind of funny anecdote before Bain recapitulates as follows: “It is not that Orin Incandenza is a liar, but that I think he has come to regard the truth as constructed instead of reported.”

This same distinction underwrites John MacFarlane’s Editor’s Note in the September issue of The Walrus magazine. Mr MacFarlane writes about the difference between advertisers and journalists, which cohabit a magazine’s pages but for very different reasons: advertisers have something to sell, while journalists have something to say. Mr MacFarlane puts it thusly:

“Journalists, including me, often feel conflicted about advertising: grateful because it helps pay the bills (including salaries), and because financial sustainability is an editor’s best friend; when a magazine is solvent, its owners tend to leave its editors alone. Grateful, then, but wary, because advertising is always self-interested, which is what distinguishes it from journalism. [Emphasis added.] This is also why journalists sometimes dismiss it as irrelevant or, worse, dishonest. Yet what could be more honest than the shoemaker’s desire to have people buy his or her shoes? Seen in this way, the marketing of products is a natural consequence of the making of them, and in a consumer society it’s hardly irrelevant, and only dishonest when it’s, well, dishonest — that is, when it makes false claims.”

I submit to you that the prenominate gloss is not only wrong but insidious and bad, and just plain hard to believe given Mr MacFarlane’s editorial mantle. The fact is that journalists sell stories: writers ‘pitch’ stories to editors, editors pick the most interesting of these, and then work with the writer to get the story into print. Along the way there are hundreds of ‘editorial decisions’, arguments over usage and pitch and tone and angle and what to quote and what to cut. The overriding aim is to tell the story in a way that interests readers. To get more readers to turn more pages, some of which pages, of course, carry advertising.

For Mr MacFarlane to suggest that journalists are not self-interested, and that this is what distinguishes them from advertisers - people who sell things - is literally ridiculous: silly to the point of being surreal, reckless, cavalier, wilfully blind, and then almost unbelievable when he ends his Editor’s Note with The Walrus’s own sales pitch:

“Like the shoemaker, we at The Walrus want to sell what we make to as many people as possible, and so we advertise the magazine’s virtues wherever and whenever we can. Is this self-interested? Yes. Irrelevant? Not if it puts the magazine into the hands of more readers. Dishonest? Our ads claim The Walrus is fearless, witty, thoughtful, and Canadian. You tell me.”

Mr MacFarlane’s argument is the same as Marlon Bain’s: that some people regard the truth as something to construct, while others regard the truth as something to report. Mr MacFarlane puts advertisers in the constructed camp and journalists - at least journalists at The Walrus - in the reported camp. (This is what makes advertisements for The Walrus different from advertisements in The Walrus.) The problem is that the distinction is completely false; it’s a non-distinction, mistaking a difference in degree for a difference in kind. So-called ‘reported’ truth is every bit as constructed as plain old advertising: a journalist can only talk to so many people, put the camera in so many places, run down so many leads, ask so many questions. The process is even more constrained by word counts and page limits: subtle distinctions that require lots of space to develop and explain rarely win out over points that are more straightforward, pithy, exciting, salacious, surprising.  

A more intuitive way to make the foregoing points is maybe this: the reason there are many different magazines and newspapers is that there are many, many different ways to tell the same story. In fact, there are as many ways as there are storytellers, and each journalist can be only one of these. To suggest that even some journalists tell better stories than others - do more reporting than constructing - is to mistake journalists for prophets.

There will always be more to say than pages on which to print; the map is not the territory, and my world, at least, does not unfold in neat, clear, narrative arcs. The most obvious things are often the easiest to overlook but also, in many cases, the most important: in this case, that without readers there would be no writers, even at The Walrus. For Mr MacFarlane to suggest otherwise is, with great respect, simply false advertising.

Yours,

As ever,

Tonight, Raconteurs, 7.30pm.

Hyacinth will be there! And yours truly, and others, telling stories. 

No One Writes To The Colonel, 7.30pm.

Boom.