Monday, September 26, 2016

"The Weasel's World"/ "Bog Tender"

Sept. 10, 2016 "The Weasel's World": I cut out this article by Joe O'Connor in the National Post on Nov. 5, 2011.  It was in the A- section.

He says I can call him Marv, Marvin, or the Weasel, an affectionate nickname bestowed upon him by George Chuvalo, the great Canadian boxer who fought Muhammad Ali, busted up the champ’s ribs and lived to talk about it.

Ali gave the Weasel something, too, a gold bracelet that jangles from his right wrist. He wears a gold watch on his left, plus a gold necklace. Hoffa’s boys bought the necklace for him in 1952. That’s Hoffa, as in — Jimmy Hoffa — the Teamsters union boss who disappeared, mysteriously, in 1975.

“I have it on good authority that Mr. Jimmy Hoffa is resting at the Renaissance Center Hotel, in the concrete, in Detroit, Michigan,” says Marvin Elkind, aka The Weasel. “When I went to work for Mr. Hoffa, as a driver, he told me if I was ever late I would be hurt. For four years, I was never late. I still have a reputation for being prompt.”

And so it was that the Weasel arrived several minutes early for our lunch date at The Lakeview Restaurant, an oldstyle Toronto diner and former neighbourhood haunt of a former hoodlum.

“I got busted here,” says the portly, slope-shouldered septuagenarian with a brokentoothed smile.
Popped by the cops when he was 11, for breaking into stores and bragging about it by buying a round of ice cream cones for his buddies and then flipping the waiter a dollar and telling him to keep the change: ‘‘Bogart did it in a movie.”

Marvin Elkind’s life could be a blockbuster. But then, it is always best to start with a book, and The Weasel: A Double Life in the Mob, written by the National Post’s award-winning crime writer, Adrian Humphreys, and excerpted here today, is an exquisite tale: revelatory, deeply layered and, best of all, true, confirmed by the agencies that worked with him.

The Weasel, understand, had other names: rat, fink, snitch, turncoat or, to be polite — paid police informant. Names his mobster buddies never knew about. Had they, Marvin Elkind would be wearing concrete slippers and sleeping with the fishes at the bottom of Lake Ontario.
Instead, he is digging into a Lakeview cheeseburger, telling stories about his 25-year career as the Wayne Gretzky of Finks, a stint that spanned several continents and saw him working with the FBI, Scotland Yard, RCMP and Mexican Federales.

“I’ll tell you what makes a good informant, and I am giving it to you straight, kid,” says the Weasel. “You have to be a guy that isn’t high level in any one mob, and works in several; a guy that is dissatisfied, feels he never rose as high as he should have and doesn’t have strong loyalties and is embittered. And you have to have steel balls and no brains, and I got them both.”

Chutzpah, and the audacity to stroll into mobsters’ lairs wearing a wire with no backup.
The Weasel recalls a case involving Johnny Pops Papalia, the Ontario mob boss. Pops was running a mortgage scam, selling land that didn’t exist.
Mr. Elkind got in on the deal and met Pops wearing a wire rigged into his belt.

“The meeting was going terrific, and I am looking at a piece of paper, and John, sitting opposite me, reaches toward my belt,” says the Weasel.
The fink thought fast. If Pops touched the belt, he would slug him in the mouth, call him a “fag” — remember, this was a while ago — and pray the wise guy’s embarrassment would rescue him.

“It turned out he was reaching for the paper in my hand,” the Weasel says, cackling.
There were bigger jobs. Marvin’s connections gave him access to other bad people, like Muftah El-abbar, a suspected Libyan terrorist with a penthouse in Toronto and ties to Muammar Gaddafi. U.S. agents asked for an introduction, and soon enough, American missiles almost put the Libyan dictator out of business in 1986, long before his own people did, thanks, in Bogart did it in a movie part, to a phone number provided by the Canadian fink.
“That’s the one thing I am most proud of,” the Weasel says.

Today, his pride is wounded. He is old, and looks it. He has diabetes, high blood pressure, bad kidneys, trouble with stairs and trouble standing. And he is still working, a legit job, driving for a family with a mentally challenged daughter.
“I am going to be frank, kid: if I was in a situation where I had enough dough to retire and enjoy life I wouldn’t have done the book,” he says. “I am doing it because I see it as a last hurrah to see if I can make some money.”

Books, you see, get turned into movies, and the Weasel’s life is an epic.
“Danny Devito could play me,” he says, flashing his broken tooth. “Or else, maybe Joe Pesci.”



There was an excerpt called "Hello, FBI Detroit" by Adrian Humpphrey's printed on the same page.  It's not on the internet though.  It's part of the book The Weasel: A Double Life in the Mob.
"Where it feels natural": I cut out this article by Alix Ohlin who reviews Bog Tender: Coming Home to Nature and Memory.

BOOK REVIEW Bog Tender: Coming Home to Nature and Memory By George Szanto Brindle & Glass 272 pp; $24.95

Is home the place where we grow up, or one we grow into? For George Szanto, who has spent his life teaching and travelling in locations from Wyoming, California and Montreal to Germany, Mexico and Brazil, it took retiring to Gabriola Island, B.C., to feel rooted and at ease.

In Bog Tender: Coming Home to Nature and Memory, Szanto writes of Gabriola with as much sweetness as its title suggests. Structured as a year-long journal, Bog Tender records the shifting seasons and local landscape, as well as the minor events of retirement. He reads and writes, undergoes medical treatment for his ailing eyes, takes care of his house, sees friends and family.

At the same time, Szanto digresses into his personal history, as each month of the year gives rise to associations from the past. September reminds him of time spent in Mexico; May of meeting his wife on a boat trip to Europe. The memoir swings between travel and repose, the past and the present, with a quiet, steady rhythm.

Some recollections offer more substance than others. The strongest sections centre on his father, who instilled an appreciation of the natural world by teaching him to fish: “He gave me the woods, the ponds, the lakes and the bogs. Handed them to me, with a fishing rod.”

Later, when Szanto is forced by airline security to relinquish fishing lures that had belonged to his father, he gets terribly upset. It’s the only moment in this otherwise tranquil book when he admits to being angry. As an anecdote, it’s both perfectly ordinary — it could happen to anybody — and genuinely heartbreaking.

Not every ordinary moment is fascinating, though, and sometimes his attention to the daily record can grow minute. “Also new for us this spring,” he remarks, “an uncertainty about the septic tanks” — a detail with the ring of truth, but perhaps not one the reader needs to share.

As his anecdotes range from his parents’ lives to his own experiences as a graduate student, playwright, professor and parent, Szanto always
He gave me the woods, the ponds, the lakes and the bogs returns to the bog by his home. Waterlogged and still, it presents an extended metaphor for the rich, sometimes melancholy process of recollection: “I look down into the September bog, under the water — what’s down there in all the murkiness? And in my own shadowy storehouse of memories?”

The bog is a place to observe wildlife — especially birds, which are vividly described — but also to brood. The deaths of Szantos’ parents bring out what he calls “the satisfaction, and the sadness, of remembering.”

Counterposed to this sadness is an intense attachment to nature. Szanto is acutely, almost painfully, sensitive to the world outside his front door. When a heavy snowfall breaks the branches of some flowery plum trees, he feels crushed himself, and immediately seeks to repair the damage: “Staring at the mutilated trees gave me only a sense of devastation and loss. Now, with luck, healing and growth could begin.” He fixes the trees, carries the downed branches into the house, and enjoys the flowers’ sweet smell.

In this as in many of Szanto’s stories, a small misfortune gives way to deep gratitude. A sense of constant good luck hovers over the book. A great deal of space is devoted to the Szantos’ quest for the perfect piece of real estate. All tradespeople are honest and reliable, all meals are delicious, and all inconveniences are minor. The contemplative life is punctuated by festive dinner parties and trips to Hawaii and Alaska. It seems either a charmed life or an edited one. As one visiting friend remarks, “All I’ve seen is beautiful places. Isn’t there anything ugly on Gabriola?”

Maybe there isn’t. Certainly Szanto is conscious of his privileged existence, and Bog Tender’s pleasant tone is colored by his understanding of how easily things can go wrong. A fishing accident and hornet sting could prove fatal, but don’t; cataracts threaten his eyesight but are successfully treated. Szanto’s anxiety over his sight — the sense that most connects him to nature, and to his writing — is muted but palpable. After surgery, he feels both euphoric and insecure: “like somebody’s faking all this new clarity of vision for my momentary benefit and can take away the fakery with equal ease. As if I were flying across a frozen bog, unsure of the forces keeping me high in the air.”

To be tender is to be sensitive; to be a tender of a place is to take care of it. Tender also refers to currency. Bog Tender encompasses all these meanings. Szanto, in his mild, unhurried way, makes a strong case for the beauty of the bog, and for the value of choosing, at last, a home.


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Monday, September 19, 2016

A somewhat florid Florida

Sept. 10, 2016 "A somewhat florid Florida": I cut out this article by Brett Josef Grubisic in the National Post on Feb. 5, 2011:

No one will mistake Karen Russell for a latter-day convert to Raymond Carver’s orthodoxy of laconic characters and spare prose. A young writer who gathered widespread acclaim (from Granta to Stephen King) with St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, her 2006 debut short story collection, Russell is a fevered Gothic maximalist at home with rococo descriptive curlicues, filigreed strands of phrasing and bedazzling embroidered passages.

With a volubility that, for better or worse, recalls Zadie Smith at her word-happiest, Russell’s first novel is a wild ride of a performance. With
explicit nods to The Inferno and Through the Looking Glass, Swamplandia! tells of the meteoric descent of a larger-than-life family residing in a rickety self-made wonderland off the coast of Florida.

The mechanics of the wayward plot are relatively simple: After the death by cancer of Hilola “Swamp Centaur” Bigtree, beloved family matriarch and star attraction of Swamplandia!, a money - pit alligator wrestling theme park that’s a 40 minute ferry ride from fictional Loomis Country, Fla., the bereaved survivors scatter.

The Chief, Hilola’s blustering Willy Loman of a husband, soon leaves the island to secure refinancing for Swamplandia!; alone and unmoored, his three teenage children are quickly exposed to losses of innocence from the oddest of sources. (Their grandfather, Ernest Schedrach, who fled his miserable life as an unemployed pulp mill worker in Ohio during the Depression and took the fanciful name Sawtooth Bigtree, is installed in a retirement home.)

A trainee alligator wrestler at the time of her mother’s death, Ava Bigtree supplies the bulk of the narration. Capable of effortless classical allusions as well as sophisticated parsings of pop culture, she is less a bereft, barely pubescent character to feel sympathy for than a showcase for Russell’s voiceless in their party chignons, they stand around the back of a ballroom having flashbacks for most of the movie, regretting older events in their minds, ladling cups of glowing punch from a big bowl, and only after the dying violin note of the final song do they at last step away from the wall”) or a flock of birds (“The buzzards continued to pour

Her homeschooled 13-year-old sounds like a clever MFA student techniques and musings.

Whether Ava is commenting on a TV broadcast (“As if on cue, that lame movie from the sixties started playing, Ladies in Waiting. A quintet of actresses haunt the punch bowl — they are supposed to be spinster sisters or spinster best friends, or maybe just ugly and needy acquaintances — anyhow, these pink chameleons, over Swamplandia! in clothy waves; on the radio, the university scientists speculated that the unusual migration had something to do with the late frosts in the Midwest. Disturbances in the raptors’ diurnal cues”), she registers as a clever MFA student, not a child. For a home-schooled 13-year-old whose mother read her TV Guide, such worldliness and wordplay, while always remarkable, strains credibility.

Throwing Ava into a quest to save Osceola, her missing older sister, allows Russell to indulge her more-is-more philosophy and up the pyrotechnics (and allusions: Homer through Twain). Unsurprisingly, the journey into “the underworld” deep within the swamp, accompanied by a guide with ulterior motives named the Bird Man, grows dark and perilous.

Russell reserves the remaining fifth of Swamplandia! for Ava’s brother Kiwi, a bookish dreamer who bolts from the island in hopes of finding an income that he can send home. Voltaire’s naive Candide in a Floridian cultural wasteland as painted by Bosch, Kiwi lands a job at Swamplandia!’s rival, a franchise theme park called the World of Darkness. A series of surreal blackly comic set pieces, Russell’s elaborate counter-world (simplified to “the World” by its employees) features a Leviathan ride, Lost Souls, the Lake of Fire, and even overpriced Dante’s Tamales from Beelzebub’s Snack Bar.

Kiwi’s misadventures there and in the strip mall territory around it — including run-ins with punishing bosses, unfathomable girls, crude workmates and, best of all, a stripper beauty pageant at a lowrent casino at which his father is the MC — are recounted exuberantly. The extravagant writing, at times risking proximity to ham-fisted symbolism, is characteristically engrossing, yet it’s pleasurable because the scenes are significantly shorter than those of Ava.

There’s no doubting the sheer talent of Swamplandia!’s 29-year-old author. Words and ideas seemingly pour from her inventive mind in a torrent. It’s Russell’s inner editor, however, that could benefit from assertiveness training.

Brett Josef Grubisic is the author of The Age of Cities. He teaches at the University of British Columbia.



"An Alaska of last resort": I cut out this article by Philip Marchand in the National Post on Feb. 5, 2011:


Fans of the television series Northern Exposure will recall the quirky, free-spirited, mostly engaging characters who inhabited a small community in Alaska. The very remoteness of the locale, its isolation, the feeling that anything could happen, the more fanciful the better, contributed to an atmosphere of magic. The series was what literary critics of another era would call a “romance” — that is to say, not realistic.

Realism is what David Vann does. His novel Caribou Island (HarperCollins, $28.99) is set in and around a small Alaskan community called Soldotna, which contains no amusing characters. It’s the kind of town where rusted-out cars litter backyards, and strip malls alternate with abandoned lots full of more rusted-out cars. The economy is marginal and seasonal, relying on tourism and fishing. Desperate locals work at the cannery, a grinding, tedious employer of last resort. Visitors, far from being charmed by the site, and the state as a whole, call Alaska a “dump” and a “toilet.” Even Jim, a reasonably prosperous local dentist, views Alaska as “the end of the world, a place of exile. Those who couldn’t fit anywhere else came here, and if they couldn’t cling to anything here, they just fell off the edge.”

One resident who still dreams of Alaska as a magical frontier is Gary, who came here 30 years ago, after realizing he was “outclassed” as a graduate student in medieval literature. Gary and his wife, Irene, acquired all the “Alaskan accoutrements” such as moose antlers on their small house, but their daughter, Rhoda, a veterinarian’s assistant, views the results as a “junkyard.” Some might admire the lifestyle of Gary and Irene, as described by Vann. “No TV. No Internet. No phone. Just the lake, the woods, their home, their kids, going into town to work and buy supplies.” But it’s a sad life all the same — Gary scrapes by, somehow, with his failed business enterprises.

Now he has a recurrence of the dream. He and Irene will live even closer to the elements by building a cabin on nearby Caribou Island and moving there for the oncoming winter. It’s an insane vision but Irene is helpless to prevent it.

The reader naturally wonders why she sticks with this loser. Vann explains. As a 10year-old, Irene came home from school one day to see the body of her mother, a suicide, hanging from the rafters. Irene subsequently was passed around, for the rest of her childhood, by relatives who did not want her. The result is Irene’s lifelong determination never to be abandoned again. She will stick to this marriage even though both partners bitterly blame the other for the ruined lives they have lived.

Their two adult children face prospects little better than a cabin on Caribou Island. Mark, a part-time fisherman, is a pothead. Rhoda lives with Jim, whose feelings for her are tepid at best. Rhoda nonetheless dreams of an elaborate wedding ceremony in Hawaii.

This novel gave me the willies. It is nothing new in American literature, of course, to dwell on people with rusted out cars littering the backyard, families beset with booze, divorce, terrible jobs, unreliable dads, children raising themselves. In this novel, however, trailer park mores are combined with a fearful climate and a primordial wilderness, which makes falling off the edge feel even scarier. Irene, whose dilemma is underlined by searing pains in her head that no doctor can diagnose or treat, views the forest as “malevolent.” Gary, despite his bravado, deep down experiences even the “inanimate world” as full of “intent.” It is an intent, needless to say, unfriendly to humans. The dark, brooding, end-of-the-world feeling to the landscape and the seascape makes human follies loom larger than usual, and seem more devastating in their consequences.

Gary’s cabin is a case in point. From the very first day of construction, Gary does nothing but blunder — his carpentry labours are more like a Laurel and Hardy skit than a serious attempt to build a shelter. “To grapple effectually with even purely material problems requires more serenity of mind and more lofty courage than people generally imagine,” Joseph Conrad once wrote. Such serenity of mind and lofty courage is well beyond Gary’s reach. “I’m an incompetent ass, and that’s what I’ve always been,” he confesses to Irene at one point. The cabin itself, lopsided and full of gaps, becomes a symbol of his disordered soul.

In one sense, Caribou Island is a paean to bourgeois values. Material poverty and shabbiness is a reflection not so much of bad luck as defect- ive character, which is why Vann pauses even to note that his characters drive “battered” old cars, “crappy” Datsuns and so on. “No one in the family drove anything worth looking at,” Rhoda reflects at one point — a fact, again, of symbolic import.

Give Rhoda credit. At least she tries to help her parents — the only character in the novel, it seems, concerned about someone other than herself. (A visiting couple, Carl and Monique, two other major characters in the novel, wreak havoc with their blazing selfcentredness.) But Rhoda has barely enough resources to help herself. If she had any gumption she would have left town for Seattle or Portland long ago.

So the gloom deepens and the momentum towards disaster becomes unstoppable. Readers may sense what is coming but it’s hard to look away — partly because Vann knows how to heighten attention with sharply focused prose and use of alternating points of view.

There is another element at work here, not often discussed in critical forums or book club chat, and that is the perverse pleasure readers often take in the misfortunes of characters — a pleasure given boundless scope in fiction. The principle applies here. No matter how badly things are going in the life of a reader, that reader can contemplate the dismal fate of Gary and Irene and feel almost jolly in comparison.




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"It's not about the writing"

Sept. 10, 2016 "It's not about the writing": I cut out this article by Craig Davidson in the National Post on Feb. 5, 2011:

Before Christmas, I was at a literary gathering, which I don’t generally attend for the simple reason that they frequently lead me into the types of exchanges I will shortly document.

There was this … person. She was emblematic of a certain personality you run into at literary gatherings. A sessional instructor of English composition at a Quebec university with an expression of perpetual distaste etched on to her face that made her mouth look like a cat’s clenched-up fanny. She seemed unsure how she’d even gotten to this party, as if someone had slipped a gunny sack over her head and dumped her here, much to her dismay. She gave off a nearmasochistic vibe: This party and its denizens were several echelons beneath her.

This woman insinuated herself into a pleasant talk I was having with another woman, a screenwriter and freelance writer — a lifestyle we hold in common, as a freelancer-slash myself (slash-novelist, slash-news-paperman, slash-magazine editor, slash-bus driver, slash-librarian, slash-unemployed). The screenwriter and I were having a candid discussion about the realities of writing for a living, and the compromises you make. This other woman eyed us slantwise down her nose, giving me the impression we were trapped in rifle sights. If I could have leapt, unobtrusively, out the window in a hail of shattering glass I would have happily done so, severed veins be damned. A snippet of our conversation: Screenwriter “It’s not like I always get to write what I love. Have to make the bills.” Me “The way it goes. You work on what you have to so you can devote time to what you love.” Horrible person “You should never work on what you don’t love. Why waste your time? It should always be about the writing.”

Oh, you tiresome, nettlesome, burdensome, irksome shrew. Just disappear, why don’t you? Atomize and vanish, go back to haunting the Special Collections section at some drafty university, you wraith-like non-entity, you. You aren’t even a hot bag of gas — you are cool, vaporous, and you slide down my neck like rock slime.

Of course, she was dull. Of course, she was stuffed to the tops of her clichéd tortoiseshell glasses with unearned elitism. She was a fraud because she had no real clue what we were talking about, having not had our experiences. Most of all, she was boring in the way all types are ultimately boring: Their colossal sameness makes them so. You may think such people couldn’t possibly exist outside the pages of Richard Russo’s Straight Man. Yet, sadly, they do, in the (pale, sun-starved) flesh, in dizzying profusion in certain social settings. Their existence inspires in me a wearying depression.

Why? For all the reasons outlined above, but most of all because such buffoons make me feel poorly about the choices I’ve made with my own writing lately. Odious as that person was, one thing she said was patently true:

It should be about the writing. Mostly, anyway.
Which, it pains me to say, is something I’d gotten away from in recent years. Somehow I fell into this mindset where the primary consideration became: Will this sell? Which was looking at things from the wrong side of the desk — as an agent/editor/publisher, rather than a writer. I got strung up wondering if an editor would

Anything you approach from an impure angle tends to flee be thinking: Is there a feasible demo for this? Rather than: Is this a decent piece of writing that readers will enjoy and connect with?

(When I say “somehow I fell into this mindset,” I am being disingenuous, in that I know exactly how it happened: I wanted to keep writing, and to do so I had to maintain favour with editors and publishers. It inspired a certain sick desperation, heightened by the fact I was trying to make a go of it as a freelancer — a rough gig at any time, not to mention at a point when print journalism, in its many forms, was in perpetual collapse. The spectre of living under an overpass eating Alpo from a tin can was very real for a couple years there.)

Anyway, this internal debate — Will it sell? — was by then occurring on a scene-byscene, sentence-by-sentence basis. I found myself clinically dissecting bestsellers. The Da Vinci Code had short, poppy chapters. So I’d have short, poppy chapters. Eat, Pray, Love had a loopy narrative voice. So I’d have a loopy narrative voice.

I approached writing a book as a complex equation: The Guaranteed Canadian Bestseller Formula™. Take one spunky heroine (preferably Mennonite), add one northern canoe trip, a dash of illicit buggery (a priest or close family member, either works) and set it in a harrowing post-apocalyptic world where the spunky heroine, OfNomi, has lost the right to her own body … blammo! Instant chart-topper.

What I resisted seeing was that the writers whose success I wished to ape hadn’t set out to achieve it with the mixture of dire desperation and cold-eyed cynicism I’d developed. They were writing at least partially from their own experiences about topics that inspired them. They were — as the sourpuss at the party kept harping on — just writing. That they happened to write something that compelled a great many people was a product of their passion and understanding rather than any kind of self-conscious targeting of potential readership.

So what did I end up with by following my silly formula? Just about what you’d expect. One godawful stitched-up Frankenstein of a book that will never see the light of day. Such flawed creative conception worms into the book itself, tangling in with the words and robbing it of that critical, unmistakable joy of creation. The writing creaks with the freight of a writer’s own worries and fears, and of his attempts to shoehorn it into something that might be all things for all readers. I ended up with a book that was still me, yes, in that the ideas were mine and the narrative drew, at least in part, from my own experiences, except everything was freighted with baggage that wasn’t part of my earlier work — books that were flawed in many ways, but at least didn’t suffer from a sense of authorial secondguessing in hopes of currying favour with an audience.

It’s that old story, same in books as it is in love: Anything you approach from an impure angle, from a state of desperation rather than joy, tends to flee rather than come to you. If you press too hard, wanting it so much that you’ll do anything to get it, so much so that it twists your original outlook and intentions, chances are you’re not going to get what you seek.

My opinion: I'm going to put that in my inspirational quotes.

I was stalking success rather than wooing it. I was rifling success’s trash cans and peeping through its window with a telephoto lens — where, before, I’d simply marched up to success’s front door, said: “This is me, take it or leave it,” and success was smitten enough with my boldness to let me in for awhile.

What I’ve finally come back to is that purer state of happiness that I used to enter when writing. From the moment I first started writing, right up until my first book came out, I never really cared about an audience; sure, I wanted readers and knew at some level I needed them if I was to forge a career, but I wasn’t weighed down under self-summoned expectations. That all changed, and I needed to get it back.

I thought back to my days in Miss Jeffries’ Grade 10 creative writing class, where my thoughts went along the lines of: How can I entertain myself ? (and as a secondary notion, How can I totally gross out anyone who reads this, particularly Courtney Smith, with her neon green scrunchie, whom I sort of like? — what can I say: I was 15, and not the suave Lothario I am today). I had to rekindle the joy I’d felt when the page just opened up, I fell in, and there were no limitations or worries about target demos, what editors will think, the booksellers, the whole apparatus I’d no knowledge of when I’d first said to myself: Hey, it would be pretty cool to write all day long.

I’ve likely wasted a few years, unless you wish to count it as part of a treacherous learning curve. Mea culpa. I don’t know what to say, other than I’d never really contextualized myself as anything other than a writer — it is what brings me the greatest joy, career-wise — and I was willing to do anything to be one. Which, ironically, held me back more than if I’d just gone back to that unfettered sense of fun that writing once held for me.

And I’m grateful to be able to say that it still does hold that fun. It’s nice to know that I may be many things, but a total masochist is not one of them.
But still, those are the realities. I need to hold a day job. I need to satisfy my publishers — and I want to, wherever possible. Books need to be publicized. Books need to sell. These are the rules at a certain level, and to play the game at those levels means accepting the rules.

The uncomfortable paradox that I’ve settled into is that it both is and isn’t just about the writing. But it should start being about the writing. The basic joy and love of it.

What comes after, once a book makes it into the hands of an agent/editor/publisher/publicist, can get a little thorny. They have a job to do and you need to understand that. And then there’s buzz and critical reception and just plain bulls--t luck. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, you shouldn’t kill yourself over it — and I say so despite the fact I do kill myself over it, often several times over.

These are the waves you’ll have to ride. But that’s a lot of being a writer, anyway: riding those waves. Hopefully, you catch a big one someday and ride it like hell. Then you may get caught in dead calm and have to paddle awhile. But if it’s something that makes you happy, as it makes me happy — even when it’s driving me mad — you put up with it. Writers aren’t the most realistic people out there, but after you’ve been at it awhile, that sense of realism usually settles upon you.

And it’s that sense of reality that sets me in such antagonism against people like that person at the party.

It’s not just about the writing, you idle dingbat. It’s about sacrifice and compromise and good fortune and dedication and clear-headed rationalism and holding your head together and learning to live with who you are and existing within your own limitations while still harbouring the sense that someday you might shatter them.

It’s about riding the waves. Once you’ve been through it, come talk to me. Until then, shut your yapper and enjoy the mulled wine.

Craig Davidson is the senior editor at Maximum Fitness magazine. His most recent book is Sarah Court, published by ChiZine books.




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"Huckleberry Finn as a sex offender"/ Justin Berry

May 23, 2016 "Huckleberry Finn as a sex offender": I cut out this article by Donna Bailey Nurse in the National Post on Oct. 22, 2011:

Lost Memory of Skin By Russell Banks
Knopf Canada
416 pp; $32
Reviewed by Donna Bailey Nurse

Most of Russell Banks’s best-loved novels are set in the small, economically floundering towns of New Hampshire and upstate New York, or in hardscrabble South Florida neighbourhoods. His mostly male, financially strapped protagonists find themselves pushed to the fringes of their communities by their own frustration, by the rejection of their neighbours, or by some sordid combination of both. Banks does not espouse nostalgia for an earlier era:

His is a fallen world. Characters such as Bob Dubois of Continental Drift, Wade Whitehouse of Affliction and young delinquent Chappie from Rule of the Bone recall only fleeting fragments of happiness and stability. He warns of an approaching world in which families are an anachronism, community no longer exists, and human relations — even sensations — are irrevocably altered.

Banks is part novelist, part cultural anthropologist, and never more so than in his latest novel, the strange and riveting Lost Memory of Skin. It’s the story of a young sex offender who ekes out an existence under a causeway in South Florida. The Kid, as he is known, is befriended by a professor interested in homelessness. He is not one of Banks’ run-of-the-mill outsiders. Convicted of attempting to have sex with a minor, he is cast out by society in a way that is vaguely uncomfortable for us to acknowledge. Indeed, the Kid, we soon realize, is more victim than victimizer — the product of an era in which family breakdown has dovetailed most unfortunately with the age of information.

The novel is set in Calusa, Fla., where the Kid grows up as the only child of a single mother. Working as a hairstylist and prowling for men leaves her with little time for her son. The Kid fills the gaping void by playing with his pet iguana and watching Internet porn. When his school makes laptops compulsory, he becomes a bona fide addict, consuming up to eight hours of skin flicks a day. At 22, the only women he knows are writhing images and the only skin he has stroked is his own. What are the psychological repercussions, Banks asks, of defiling our most basic instinct?

The Kid winds up in trouble after meeting a young woman online and arranging to visit her home. She is just 14, but he tells himself that she is probably more sexually experienced than he is. He never finds out, of course. He is gleefully ambushed by her father in the kitchen before a SWAT team takes him down. It is a pathetic and ludicrous scene familiar from reality TV. You have to feel sorry for the Kid who is so naive, so confused, so much younger than his 22 years. Yet he is also scrappy and determined to hold his own.

The Kid serves a few months in prison and is sentenced to nine years’ probation, the conditions of which demand he live at least 2,500 feet from any children. There are three possible locations: Calusa Airport, the Panzacola Swamp, and under the Claybourne Causeway. The Kid chooses the causeway.  He and his pet iguana live in a tent by the shore, away from a collection of huts and lean-tos. He is the newest member of a colony of sex offenders that includes a seventysomething ex-boxer and a slick bodybuilder. Like the others, the Kid must wear a GPS device to keep authorities apprised of his whereabouts. A quick Google search reveals his criminal status to all.

It is under the causeway that the professor finds the Kid late one night. He invites him to participate in a series of interviews on homelessness in exchange for some social and financial assistance. A tentative friendship evolves. In appearance, the Professor is the mirror opposite of the Kid: he is tall and morbidly obese. And like many of Banks’s characters, he also suffers from addiction. The obsession for food dominates his life. The Professor grew up an outsider in his own family. He has never connected himself to any group and instead has inhabited a number of conflicting, secret lives. He claims to have been a spy and a double agent; an anti-war activist and a Vietnam vet. Yet none of these facts reveal anything genuine about his life, just as the information on the Internet in no way explains the true nature of the Kid’s experience. However, when the professor’s past begins to catch up with him, he asks the Kid for help.

With Lost Memory of Skin Banks crosses a cautionary tale about human sexuality with an adventurous account of coming of age, an idiosyncratic union to say the least. It succeeds through an infallible execution of voice that conveys and contextualizes the Kid’s bemused and searching perspective. In time the Kid is revealed to be as much of a descendent of Huckleberry Finn as Chappie from Rule of the Bone. He is one of Banks’s poor, white boys whose imaginations furnish them with hope for the future. They are a far cry from the tragic grown men — like  this novel’s Professor — who never manage to outrun their pasts.

Banks is an avid outdoorsman and the backdrop of this story is animated by his intimate knowledge of the moods and inhabitants of land and sea. Rather than merely imagining the world of the novel, Banks seems to have constructed it with his bare hands. His sentences are so muscular they are practically three dimensional, yet they propel us forward with aerodynamic grace. His style is unmatched, inimitable, inseparable, as it should be, from the moral integrity of the man.


This is intense and disturbing for some readers.  I am forewarning you:

Aug. 25, 2016 Justin Berry: Here is a really old flashback of 2006.  He is this teenage guy who was on Oprah and how he got a webcam.  Then he was sexually abused by people on the internet.  If you knew me back then, you may remember the story and how I went on televisionwithoutpity.com forum and how there were pages of comments on it.  This is from 10 yrs ago, but I do remember it well.  There was a Law and Order: SVU ep based on it, and he later went on Larry King.  I watched those too.

Berry was 13 yrs old and then he got a webcam to meet people on the internet and mainly girls.  As soon as he got on the internet, he got all these people IMing him.  Later someone on the internet said "I'll pay you $50 if you do a webcam with your shirt off."  He thought nothing of it because he has been to the pool with his shirt off.  Then it got to take your pants off.  Then masturbate with the webcam on.  He thought nothing much of it because masturbation is a natural thing to do.  He was getting paid for it.

Then later there was something about meeting someone on the internet.  He told his mom he's going to Las Vegas for a tech conference.  He had a can of beer then he had sex with a guy.

His parents are divorced and he lives with his mom.  Later a kid at school found out about his webcam and posted pictures around at school.  Berry left school to move with his dad.  Later his dad found out about all this money he was making.  His dad helped him with the webcam show and didn't stop him.

Berry was having sex with prostitutes on his webcam. 

It was a very intense and serious episode.  I thought he was 100% victim.

Twop.com: Afterwards, I went to this website and I was shocked and surprised how there were so many comments saying he wasn't 100% victim.  I can't remember all the comments, but here are a few I do remember:

Some comments were like this:

"That's why you don't put a computer in the kid's room.  You put it in the living room so you know what your kid is doing on the internet."

"What kind of parent lets their kid go to Las Vegas by themselves, even if it's for a conference?"

Here is one that's kind of offensive:

"I'm sorry, but the whole time I was watching this, I was thinking about South Park.  You know where Cartman goes on the computer and he writes "I'm a 10 yr old boy" and everybody starts IMing him.

You guys are probably like:

A. That is offensive.

B. That is funny.

C. Both.

I was offended by that.  Then again, the person did give a forewarning.

After all those comments, I was undecided.

Friends opinions: I was 20 yrs old back then and here are some of my 20 yr old friends opinions.  Back then they said this, but they could change their opinion.

Who thought was 100% victim: Leslie.

Who thought he was not 100% victim:

Angela: I remember she came to my house and I asked her about it.  Her opinion was like how he was like a teenager, but he would have kind of known if he was right or wrong in this.

Sonia: No one was putting a gun at him and forcing him to do it in the room.

Seventeen magazine: In 2007, a story about a girl who was forced to take a naked picture of herself or something like that, because the person on the internet threatened to kill her and her family.

Human Trafficking: I saw this back in 2005.  The women are 100% victims.

In Prague, Czech Republic, the single mother Helena is seduced by a successful handsome man and travels with him to spend a weekend in Vienna, Austria; in Kiev, Ukraine, the sixteen-year-old Nadia is selected by a model agency and travels to the United States with the other selected candidates; in Manila, Philippines, the twelve-year-old American tourist Annie Gray is abducted in front of her parents. In common, the girls become victims of a powerful international network of sex traffickers leaded by the powerful Sergei Karpovich. In New York, after the third death of young Eastern European prostitutes, the obstinate Russian-American NYPD agent Kate Morozov convinces the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Chief Bill Meehan to hire her, promising him that she would fight against this type of crime and that he would not regret. - Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil


My experience: When I was watching Oprah, Berry did not say anything about being pressured into it.  In 2006, I would say in a way I was kind of pressuring and overwhelming this one person with all my emails.  I was sending like 3 little emails a day, which is a lot.  In 2016, I did apologize to him and all my friends in this email:


He accepted my apology.

In 2016, I did kind of made a mistake with this other friend of mine.  I bumped into him at the mall after work and he offered me a ride.  It was fun talking to him.  I then started emailing him on Facebook to go to all these Meetups that I go to.  He told me that I was being kind of pushy.  I did not mean to be pushy at all.

Aug. 26, 2017 Renegadepress.com: This is a Canadian teen TV show, kind of like Degrassi.  There was this episode where Patti was interviewing this girl with a webcam show.  Later Patti and the girl was offered that if you show your belly button on the webcam, you will get a camera.  The girls do it and they get the camera.

Later, they were offered $100 each if they are topless.  Patti felt the pressure, but I don't think she did it.


My opinion: In 2006 I was undecided if Berry was 100% victim.  Now that I gathered all this information and looked at a real magazine story and fictional shows, I have made a decision.

He is 50% victim.  No one threatened him through the internet or physically in person. He went to Vegas on his own.  He wasn't kidnapped like in Human Trafficking.  There is no sexism involved because he is a guy and he can't be a victim.  If a guy was kidnapped and forced to do things, then I would say 100% victim.

My main reason is that he was getting paid.  In Human Trafficking, the women became prostitutes and they weren't getting paid.
 
On Wikipedia, it says this:

Eichenwald requested demonstrations of the workings of Berry's online business which Berry provided, including live conversations with subscribers. After Berry revealed the identities of children who were being exploited by adults, Eichenwald persuaded him to discontinue the business and turn his information about those minors over to the authorities.[1]


If you want to know more about him, here it is: 


Sept. 11, 2016: I decided to look up about how far it is from California to Las Vegas.  It's like a 6hr drive.  I'm not sure if he flown or take a bus there.  I would say that is expensive to get there.


Sept. 13, 2016: Berry went on his own to Vegas.  He got money, time, and effort.  The money could have come from someone else he was meeting there.  If the predator came to Berry, that's another thing.

Counter argument: This is to the counter argument of Angela saying that as a teenager, you know what's wrong and what's right.  It varies on person to person and what kind of situation.

Teen pregnancy epidemic: I wrote about this before on Tyra Banks.  This girl Jessica wants to have a baby with her ex- boyfriend and feels like when the baby comes, he's going to want to be with her and raise the baby together.  There is also Sue- Ann who wants to have a baby too with her boyfriend because she knows how to take care of babies.

As a kid in elementary school, I know getting pregnant as a teenager is not a smart or good thing to do.  There are some teens who are really dumb.  Fortunately, Sue- Ann's mom was there and cried, that made Sue- Ann not get pregnant.  Also 6 months later, Jessica did come on the show to say she didn't get pregnant after she saw herself on TV.

I tried to find the Oprah episode on YouTube, but I can't.  The thing is, you don't know Berry at 13.  I do remember there was a video of Berry with his shirt off and talking to his webcam.  It was a clip on Oprah.


Bad behaviour: Also as a teenager, I'm sure a lot of us have smoke cigarettes, drank alcohol, done drugs.  We all know it's wrong, but a lot of teens do it.

Creep catchers: My friend Sherry sent this to me, but I already know about it from reading the Edmonton Journal.  She did send me one thing about Teen Mom.


I also wrote a blog post in Jun. 2016 about it:



Kyle Mac on Twitter: This also reminds me of the time I tweeted to Mac about seeing his demo reel on a private site.  I told him that he can email me in a new email of his, instead of his personal email address.  He created a new email and I got to see the demo.

I was imagining what he's thinking like: "I don't know Tracy.  I have never met her.  What if she emails me a lot?  What if she spams me?  What if she gives my email address to other people?  Then I would have to transfer my contacts to another account."
So that's why I told him to create a new one. 

I just want to say this: I don't want anyone to email me about sexual predators or teen pregnancy.  I am so done with it.  I have written so much about Dateline: To Catch a Predator in 2011-2012 and teen pregnancy in 2009-2010.  They are important topics, but I had written enough about it.

Sept. 14, 2016 Try Alpha: I like twop.com and how it can have deep and meaningful conversations about important topics.  I wish I did have my blog back in 2006 and I had copy and pasted all those Twop comments onto it as a reference.  However, I do have this blog for years and it's a good reference.

I have told you about this before.  I had went to a friend of a friend's house to have deep and meaningful conversations.



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