The Struggle

Different Missions
Seven years later, photo quality about the same. Dancers fill the floor following a chat with author Dan Charnas about his book on J Dilla, The Drake Underground, May 22, 2022

I’ve always had a personal glitch pertaining to to matters of identity.

After I moved to Toronto, I quickly became aware of the familial intimacy that exists between people with a shared culture and point of origin, and how absent that feeling had been in my own life. Being an only child, coming from a place where what passes for culture is Catholicism and classic rock radio, I’ve always felt somewhat…blank? So in a life devoid of shared touchpoints I tried to build my own, usually centered around art, typically art made by people who do have that familial intimacy. Even then, I typically feel like I’ve failed, operating on the outside of a lot of these spaces. Most people who know me personally would consider me someone knowledgeable about music and record collecting, or as an ambassador for a certain type of art and music from Japan, or as a writer, but to the people who inhabit these spaces, I remain unknown. Much of this has to do with my apprehension for inserting myself into these them, for the noble belief that if I keep my head down and do good work, it will have to be noticed. Social anxiety remains a motherfucker, friends.

Back in may there was an event in Toronto to celebrate the release of the book Dilla Time by professor and journalist Dan Charnas. The book is a thorough examination of the life and work of James DeWitt Yancey, known profesionally as J Dilla, specifically his innovations in the use of musical time. I’m not going to synopsize any further, if you have any interest in the subject, Dan’s work is as definitive as we may ever get. I loved the book, as much as I loved his previous work of hip-hop scholarship, but getting through it was fraught for me at times.

As some of you may recall, and can see along the sidebar, I also wrote a book about J Dilla, a textual reading of his final album. At the time it was the only work of that size devoted to him. It was a top seller, well reviewed, taught (by Dan) in college classes. I remain immensely proud of what I did in that book, and what it accomplished and still is accomplishing. But I can recognize its imperfections, flaws that reading Dan’s book highlighted, even as it answered and contextualized some questions that still lingered from my time working on it.

But I knew I had to drag my introvert ass to the function that night, if nothing else just to celebrate what is truly an exceptional piece of work deserving of every accolade. After the panel portion of the evening, the DJs started up, flooding the room with bass, making it near impossible to talk. Waiting in line to get my copy of the book signed, I quickly tapped out a few words on my Notes app, introducing myself, congratulating him on the book and thanking him for showing love from the stage, as he’d dropped my name and book during his discussion with local hip-hop fixture Arcee.

Predictably, once he’d read the screen, realized who I was and come from behind the table for the dap and hug, I started blathering on about all the things I mentioned above, how I always meant for my book to be the first of its kind, not the only, and how grateful I was that he was able to tell parts of the story I wasn’t.

“There are different missions,” he replied, slapping my shoulder.

After he finished signing for those attendance we each grabbed a beer and chatted in a corner of the Drake for nearly two hours. He’d treated me as a peer, because to him I am one, and I left that feeling for the first time in years, like a writer. Even when faced numerous times by the dreaded “What are you working on now?“, I welcomed it, because it had been so long since anyone cared to ask.

When I logged in today, WordPress informed me it had been 13 years, nearly to the day, of when I started this blog. It was initially designed to keep my chops up while I tried my hand at fiction writing again, until the lure of criticism and commentary pulled me back. One thing that never changed in all that time? I never liked calling myself a writer. Even when I was getting paid for it as my primary occupation, even when a book came out with my name on the spine. It always felt unearned to me. Considering that Homestar Runner has updated more in the last seven years than this website has, it feels even less earned now.

In the 1987 movie Throw Momma From the Train the character played by Billy Crystal, a community college writing teacher, has a mantra he frequently imparts to his students: A writer writes. Always. Yes, it’s trite, but I’ve thought of that line a lot in the month following my evening at the Drake. I thought of it when I repurchased the domain for this site. I thought of it when I loaded the WordPress app back on my iPad. The simple fact, a fact I’ve probably denied so many times in my life, is that there is value in doing the thing, no matter what it’s for. Even if it’s some lukewarm takes about Japanese Pop music or clumsily interrogating why certain things resonate with me more than others. Just do the damn thing. A writer w rites, always.

On New Year’s Day 2022, my first social media post was something I’d seen on Instagram, a piece of window dressing that simply read, I WANT TO MAKE BEAUTIFUL THINGS, EVEN IF NOBODY CARES. I found it so moving, and then promptly forg ot about it, obviously. But here’s the thing I am perpetually reminded of: This business? Tapping on a keyboard? It is the one of a handful of things that I love doing so wholeheartedly, even when I feel at my stupidest, that I never notice the time spent on it. I think if any activity makes you feel like that, it’s a good indicator that it’s an activity you should spend more time on. It would serve me to remember that an d prioritize it accordingly.

So, what have I been doing instead of writing? I actually did finish a draft of a second project, something I cowrote with a friend I met through this site, actually. We handed in the first draft in 2019, so obviously it already feels like we need to rewrite a significant portion of it. It remains to be seen if it will ever come out. I had a handful of articles come out here and there, usually about Dilla, including a recent essay about him as a posthumous entity on the heels of a podcast episode based around the Donuts book. And, speaking of podcasts, I cranked out over 280 episodes of Geekdown, the podcast on nerdery I’ve been producing and co-hosting with my longtime friend Caitlin MacKinnon since around…whenever this blog last updated. It’s never set the world on fire, but it’s drawn a small and loyal listenership. I think we’ve been successful at making topics a listener might be interested in sound compelling, and it’s a testament to the power of just doing the thing week in and week out. I think our COVID era was surprisingly moving, as the show morphed into the two of us processing all the ways the ground was shifting under our feet.

Much as I love making the show, it takes a fair bit of work and sucks up a lot of bandwidth during the week, between watching content, recording, editing and posting. July is traditionally when we take the month off to recharge (and avoid the heat in my third-floor apartment) so I’ll have some free time to try some other things. I don’t know how frequent the updates will be, and it is not lost on me that the last thing the world needs right now are the musings of a mediocre white man in his forties. But there are different missions, and there still some best suited to my skill set. I want need to make things even if no one cares.

I promise it won’t be six years between updates.

Graining on That Wood

Five years ago I sat in a Starbucks in Toronto’s Rosedale neighbourhood, pulled out my then-girlfriend’s burdensome six-pound Dell laptop and started a WordPress blog. I named it after something I’d had scrawled on a white board in my apartment, something I thought might have ended up the title of my first story collection.

Poetry for Gravediggers was my fifth blog, and my first after being downsized as the ‘Online Editor’ of The University of Windsor’s Lance newspaper. Freed from the demands of mandated content creation, I had a surplus of time on my hands and no receptacle in which to dump my ramblings. So I started this.

This is some of what I wrote on May 28, 2009:

“Maybe you got away from your city, eager for the opportunities for reinvention such a move would afford you.  Maybe most other aspects of your life are happy.  But that need to tell stories never really goes away, does it?  Whether retelling truth or crafting your lies, stories have strong roots, you can never fully pull that need out of you. So you start writing your little stories again.

And if you’re like me, you fail. A lot.  You don’t finish. You despise every word that goes on the page, you question the sanity of anyone who ever had faith in your “talents.”  You get irritable with family, coworkers, friends and lovers.

And if you’re like me, you probably get sick of feeling like that.  So maybe you decide to take some of the skills you picked up when you weren’t writing, and use them to keep  you motivated as you try to make something of yourself, because your thirtieth birthday is already fading behind you and you finally understand that no one is going to make it happen for you.

So maybe, you start a blog.

This site is for me, as I call the bluff of adolescent mentors and supporters; we’ll see if you were right.”

Yesterday morning Okayplayer, a site I’ve read off and on long before I started this site, posted a lengthy and complimentary review of my first book.

You could say it’s been an eventful five years. My then-girlfriend became my ex-girlfriend, I moved to a significantly less-fancy Toronto neighbourhood than Rosedale (as ice cream truck jingles and sires waft through my window) and somehow instead of getting any short stories out into the world I messed around and became a non-fiction writer.

And suddenly this blog  shifts from chronicling ‘How I Got Over’ to ‘How I Stay On.’ One of the best things I ever heard was from the songwriter Mike Doughty when someone asked him why he finally decided to write a book about his time in the 90’s alt-hop band Soul Coughing. He said the reason he did was because someone called his bluff: he’d been saying he should write a book for so long someone finally handed him a little money and said, ‘So go do it.’ And that’s terrifying, because, as Doughty said, if you actually try, if you put yourself out there, you lose the comfort of being an undiscovered genius. It’s a comfort I enjoyed a lot over the last five years. And now I don’t have it anymore, which is good, if unsettling.  I’ve heard it enough that the fear of failure is really just the fear of success, and I finally know what that means. Because now that I’ve achieved some infinitesimal measure of success (I’ve almost stopped shuddering when I refer to myself as a “writer,” which is huge if you know me), I have to do it again. Which I really have no idea how to do, judging from the wall of silence that greets me after I get introduced to editors by mutual friends.

Which is kind of….great?  I recently pointed out to a new acquaintance that I have zero connection to the literary community of this city, not out of any aversion to meeting them, I’m just socially awkward and keep weird hours to pay the bills, so don’t have much of an opportunity. But part of me likes being an unknown quantity who came out of nowhere. Part of me likes that whatever small ripple my book’s announcement made in the community was essentially, “Wait, who?!” Or, to quote that unsung poet, Miguel: “I’ll do it all without a co-sign.”

So what does that mean? Part of it means refocus on the next book (pitch being refined daily) double down on posting around here, make connections when I can but don’t relentlessly network to the detriment of the real work.

In 2009 I wrote a post reviewing two volumes of the 33 1/3 series. Five years later,I have my name on one. This blog may have fulfilled the promise it was created for, but its purpose never ends.

And we won’t stop.

Cause we can’t stop.

 

The Pitch

During my trip back to the Windsor area last Christmas, my father got a call from a childhood friend, someone I vaguely remembered having visited us once when I was younger, but not anyone I thought my father still communicated with. They didn’t talk long, but from where I was reading the paper at the kitchen table, I could hear him on the phone in the basement rattling off the state of the family: Cousin 1 just had a baby and has turned into quite the sailor; Cousin 2 took a job as a news reporter in a big city; Cousin 3 is graduating journalism school this year and thinks he might look for a government gig, since J-schools produce far more graduates than there are jobs. Then there was a pause.

“Oh, no, no he’s here. About a week. Uhh, well he lives in Toronto now, working for [redacted]. It’s not a particularly high paying job, but he likes living in Toronto, I guess. You know my brother [redacted] had some health issues there for a while…”

And that was it. My cousins all had lives worth talking about at length, but his only son works a low-paying job and lives in Toronto. No mention of crossing the one thing I never thought I would ever do off of my life’s list of ambitions. Remember this if you think having your name on a book spine will change your life in any meaningful way.

But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

(more…)

Step Right Up

If you were to guess that the flurry of activity around here lately had to do with me getting the itch again now that the draft has finally left my grubby hands and flown overseas to people like designers and copy editors, you would be correct.

You don’t need me to tell you that writing is like running, or weight lifting or whatever other questionable endurance sport you might partake in. Use it or lose it, and I took my damn sweet time recovering from the process of writing the book (Level 56 on Grand Theft Auto Online, email me for my Gamertag. Get at me, dog). But then ideas for things to write about start to percolate and the longer they stay in there the longer they fester until the process of expelling them from my brain is lacklustre and disappointing. Not unlike passing a bowel movement.

As for how I’m feeling now that it’s out of my hands, the wonderful Julieanne Smolinski summed up that feeling with more precision than I ever could.

Yup.

None of this is to say I’ve been completely slovenly the last couple of months. I continue musing about whatever nerdery comes to mind over at 22 Pages for the University of Toronto (latest are here and here) and I also branched out a tad by tossing some pieces to the folks over at The Same Page on, oddly enough, the 40th Birthday of Hip-Hop and the release of Grand Theft Auto V (do you think I’m developing a niche here?)

As well, my friends and colleagues at 22 Pages Khaiam Dar and Alex Correa have collected the first volume of the webcomic they started in 2011, Smells Like Maturity. If you’re in the Toronto area, swing by Red Nails II at Jane and Bloor for their release party on November 15. I wrote the introduction, so if you’re a Ferguson completist, you’ll want to pick that up. Writing it turned out to be a bigger deal than I was expecting it to be, but I’m really happy with the piece, and for the opportunity to toast those two jerks on the occasion of making their longtime dream come true. Of course they’d release their book six months before mine comes out.

So that’s what I’m staying up to, friends. It’s a moment of respite from book madness as it moves to the production phase, but I’m sure you’ll be inundated with Dilla-related content as the book nears release. For the moment, I’m just enjoying the relative peace and trying to figure out how to stumble my way into being a quote-unquote “writer” instead of someone who wrote a book once.

Kind of weird to think now about how that struggle is what this blog was meant to document in the first place. .

A Letter to Donald

‘Bino,

I woke up from a mid-morning nap following an overnight shift to a phone blown up with texts and tweets alerting me to the spontaneous listening party you’d announced for your upcoming album in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods park.  I was a little shocked, as far as I knew you were still filming your episodes of Community, but with enough time to throw some clothes on and head down, I didn’t want this to be another of those “Cool things that happen in Toronto that I take for granted and don’t go to.”

There were only about fifty people or so when I showed up, standing around a kid with a pair of amplifiers. I foolishly thought attendance might actually stay at those levels, and that maybe I could tell you some of these things in person, but within fifteen minutes the crowd had swollen to around 200. As the crowd grew and 5.00 came and went the kid with the amplifiers started to look nervous, and it occurred to me it was wholly possible we were about to be trolled by a local crew of kids taking the opportunity to promote their shitty mixtape.  But then you showed up, no fanfare, pushed through the crowd to the picnic table, sat down, plugged your phone into the speakers and started playing the album*.

Aw, dammit. I thought. He’s on his art school bullshit again. I can’t lie, Donald. I’d been concerned. You first hinted at restlessness on the ROYALTY mixtape, so news that you were leaving Community (where I first became a fan) was disappointing, but not surprising. But that short film you made last summer (which I admit I didn’t even watch) caused some eyebrow arching, and then there were your Instagram notes last month. So when you strolled up without a word, I started to wonder if I was willing to hang with where you were going.

By the time I left Bellwoods, though, I was back on board, not from anything you did, per se, but from what the crowd did.

Toronto is…we can be a weird town. Superior yet love-starved. Many in that park seemed to think they’d be getting a concert of some sort, despite your earlier tweet to the contrary. A few climbed nearby trees to catch a glimpse of you. When you’d played what you wanted to, you stood up and answered questions from the crowd for half an hour. When a second person asked you if you were going to do any stand-up, a few of us groaned and you chuckled and mentioned someone had already asked that and moved on to the next question.

“Uhh, okay?  Thank you? For not answering my question? Appreciate it!” the guy hollered. And all I could think was Wowww, you know what?  Fuck you, guy. He owes you nothing. And that was when it all sort of clicked in for me. You don’t owe me anything either. If I’m sad the antics of Troy and Abed will be shortened this year, tough shit for me. Would I really turn down the chance to run the ship at my own show if given your choice?  No, I wouldn’t. Neither would anyone else.

As for the ‘cry for help.’ Instagram notes, I watched your Breakfast Club interview where you explained that part of what inspired it was just feeling alone and lost, like damn near every other twentysomething butting their heads against the promises of history.

“Everybody stunts on Instagram. Nobody shows their buddy’s funeral, nobody wants to be vulnerable. People thought I was crazy because I was honest. That was it,” you said.

That honesty is what always drew me to your music, that willingness to admit fear that always causes “real heads” to get their backs up and start calling people “soft.”  Like Kanye said, “We’re all self-conscious, I’m just the first to admit it.” He was never supposed to be the last.

When I was in journalism school my second writing course was on various styles of column writing, personal essays, shit like that.  For my first workshop submission, I wrote about something extremely personal that was going on with my family. I was older than most of my classmates, who I’d only known for five months by then. You could feel the air getting sucked out of the room as they read it. But I just threw it all out there because I couldn’t stand the idea of restraint, felt like all of our work work would suffer if we weren’t willing to go all the way with it. I’ve grown somewhat more diplomatic in how I deploy the truth in the subsequent years, but I still believe what I did in that class: that any art that means anything has to leave it all on the table. Your willingness to do that, rawer than how Kanye or Drake or even Eminem do it, is unlike anything I’ve heard in hip-hop, and is still so exciting to me. It’s like being 12 years old and listening to De La Soul is Dead for the first time, just being enthralled and anxious and confused all at once.

So what I guess I’m trying to say is do your damn thing, Donald, whatever that thing might be. If you want to write, write. If you want to make music, make music. I might not love everything you do, but you’ll always make it worthwhile to check in.

Best,

Jordan

ps: That “rainbow, sunshine” song? The one that sounded like Jhené Aiko sung a hook?  It’s a goddamn monster.

*Because the Internet, out Dec. 10.

 

Coming Down

This will be a story about two things, poorly organized.

It’s been about two weeks since I gave my manuscript the final read through and sent it off to my editors. My eyes stung, my body reeked, my brain frayed on sugar and caffeine overdose. Almost bankrupt from the work shifts I’d given away to write it. Two weeks on my finances are still kind of dicey. It could be another six to eight months before I see a dime from the thing, if not more. It’s almost enough to make a man wonder why he bothers.

Almost.

People have constantly asked me throughout this process, But aren’t you excited?! I am but I’m not. The 18 months I proposed, researched and wrote this book were a time of intense personal loss, on a few different levels, not the least of which was the breakdown of my six-year relationship, compounded by the loss of the woman who saw me through that breakup and made sure I stayed above water. There are lessons of self-sufficiency to be found there, I’m sure, but I don’t care to excavate them today. Suffice to say, I learned the hard way what most writers already know: any project may turn into a collaborative process, but in the thick of it, it’s just you, the screen and the words. And in my case, a dead man.

That’s been the strangest part of all this, now that I’m “over the mountain,” as it were.  I spent large portions of every day with this guy in my head, listening to his music, researching his life, reading what people who knew him had to say. I don’t need to do that anymore. I need to let him go. And I’ve started to, but I kind of already miss him.

After I mailed the draft in, I got nine hours of sleep, went to work for a quick shift and tended to the business of cleaning my sty of an apartment after weeks of neglect. I had Songza on for accompaniment, I think it was an 80’s party playlist. Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out” came on. I was hungry, so I took a moment to eat some yogurt and take stock of what I’d done and what still needed cleaning. And I don’t know, something about the breeze coming in my window, realizing I’d gotten enough of my life back to actually clean the house, Joe Jackson reminding me we’re all young but getting old before our time… I felt something resembling pride in my accomplishment. It didn’t matter who was supposed to be there when I finished,the point was finishing.

Details have trickled in over the last couple of weeks. A cover design, a release date, a listing on the publisher site [you can find all these details on the recently redesigned page for the book, just click ’33 1/3 Donuts’ above]. Currently my editor’s looking at the manuscript, she’ll send it back to me hacked to shit with ideas on how to make it better, I will spend a month rewriting based on her suggestions and then my tiny little hype machine will kick into high gear, and I’ll really be in trouble, because eventually someone’s going to ask the [reasonable] question, “Who the fuck is this guy, and why does he get to write about Dilla?!” And I don’t have an answer. I’m told most creative types, especially writers, live with the anxiety that we’re all just frauds and one day someone will realize it and tell the world.

Neil Gaiman has lived with this anxiety. Despite winning multiple awards for his writing, building a career that’s endured over 30 years and proving he can write everything from films to children’s books to comics and radio plays, he still worries that one day someone will knock on his door, confiscate his notepads and force him to get a real job.  He discussed this fear in a speech he made to the 2012 graduating class at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts. He put everything he knew about trying to build a career in the arts into those 20 minutes, and of course it went viral online, eventually being collected in a slim volume designed by Chip Kidd called Fantastic Mistakes. Knowing Gaiman was stopping in Toronto as part of his “Last Signing Tour” a mere five days after my draft day, the speech, with its dedication to everyone wondering “Now what?” [which I most certainly was] it seemed like a suitable item for him to sign [since I’d forgotten to bring my copy of Sandman #1 back from my parents’ house].

The first time I met Gaiman, I told him about being 10 or 11 years old and stumbling across an interview of his on the old TVOntatio show Prisoners of Gravity, and how I thought he was the coolest guy I’d ever seen, and started reading Sandman shortly afterward. His stories changed my life; where books like Dark Knight Returns or Arkham Asylum left a marked impression on me, Sandman didn’t have any of the nihilism those books did, there was always a humanity and optimism in them, something that spoke to me then like it spoke to me in his latest book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane (no lie, my favourite thing of his in years. No shots, just personal taste). Four years ago, he’d seemed genuinely touched by the story, looked up and smiled, then shook my hand, something I hadn’t seen him do much with the other people in line.

When I saw him a couple weeks ago, he was personable, if a little weary, and I launched into an off the cuff monologue about why I was having him sign the speech, and my book coming out, and how I took the advice to ‘make good art” very seriously, considering the circumstances surrounding my book’s inception (great fun watching his publicist try to piece that one together, as the woman I used to date was standing next to me in line). And for the second consecutive time, he paused, looked up at me and offered his hand, pen still threaded in his fingers. I think this means we’re best friends now.

Last Holiday I was speaking with a friend who’d recently separated from her husband and told her that for the first time in my life, I really didn’t know what the next 12 months were going to hold, for any of us. Most of the time, we go through our lives with at least a small degree of certainty: X and Y will remain married, you will live in this certain city, work at this certain job, etc. At the end of 2012, I couldn’t speak to any of that. Relationships were ending, careers were changing, people were moving. I had no idea what the gameboard was going to look like a year from then. Almost 3/4 through this year, I have even less of an idea. The book’s in, it could be the start of the career I’ve always wanted, or it could be some footnote on my life, a cool thing I did once.I probably don’t need to know that right now, which is rare for me, and extremely liberating. All I need to know right now is that trying to make good art and trusting my instincts is what got me here, and continuing to do the same is what will see me through.

You can read or watch the “Make Good Art’ speech here.

Going Home

There’s a neat conceit Zack Snyder & Co. use in the movie Man of Steel to get around the issue of Kryptonite: instead of being weakened by the radiation from the fragments of his homeworld, the cause is more environmental: General Zod and his crew maintain Kryptonian atmospheric and gravitational settings on their ship, which Kal-El is unaccustomed to, so when he ends up a hostage on there, it diminishes the powers that make him exceptional on Earth. It’s also a two-way street: when Zod gets his “breather” knocked off during battle, the sensory onslaught he receives from his superior abilities leaves him harmless as a puppy.

I spent ten days back home last week in an attempt to try and bash out the draft for my book. While it wasn’t a totally fruitless exercise, it left me feeling like both Kal-El and Zod: at times sapped of strength, overwhelmed at others.

It’s always been strange to me, going home. So much of my ‘second period,’ was defined by my seeming unwillingness or inability to leave the nest that every time I go back, I feel like the same trapped 25-year-old whose contrarian nature only left him more isolated as the people around him accepted the rules of the environment. This isn’t to say one approach was superior to the other, I could just never see any other way for myself.

Having been gone for almost seven years, not just from the nest but from the only place I’d known up to that point, there’s a cognitive disconnect there between me and my friends who never left, or left and came back. Again, I’m not saying one way is better than the other, it’s just that I was more acutely aware this trip than ever before that theirs is a lifestyle I stopped being accustomed to some time ago. I’d been seriously considering moving back there in the next couple of years [for reasons fiduciary and personal], but left there unsure if I ever could go back. There are definitely reasons that could entice me to return, and I know I would make a good life for myself there; but somewhere in the local news reports about iguanas on the loose and stolen prosthetic limbs I got that old nagging feeling of being a man out-of-place.

This is probably wholly my issue, and is something people usually chalk up to OoooOOOooh, Mr. Toronto’s too fancy for us, now! Which I would hope is obviously not the case. Most of the time when I’m in a room full of my friends who are now married and parents, I feel totally inferior, because I have not lived my life “according to plan,” and regretful that I’m usually pretty okay with that. My parents would like grandchildren, and while I always retain hope they might get them, I wouldn’t advise playing the over/under on that. And while my stance on children has gotten somewhat more fluid in recent years, my stance on marriage likely never will, as in, if she wants to, I’ll go along with it. But I don’t need any of that. And this is still an alarmingly rare position in small town Ontario.

I’m certainly not alone among people of my demo who find they have to click ‘remove from feed’ on Facebook with growing frequency to soothe the barrage of photos to children they have no connection to, but the sad fact is that you’re left with nothing but Game of Thrones memes and Zoosk ads as a result.

What’s all this mean, then? I don’t know friends. Toronto can feel painfully lonely, so much so that I often spook like a feral cat when friends back home call to say ‘what’s up?’, that’s how fully I’ve thrown myself into anonymity. But still, as I dragged my suitcase along Bay St, up to King to catch a streetcar, weaving through tourists and folks headed to the Jays game and bankers on their way home, I immediately felt more relaxed than I did that morning. Seated at my chair in my shitty apartment that I spend too much of my money to live in, I already feel more accomplished today than I did at my parents’ kitchen table.

Still. I once heard it said that a great life in a mediocre place is superior to a mediocre life in a great place. It’s always stuck with me. I would still love to force my will onto the culture of the Rose City. I just want a reason to go back.

“So, how’s the book going?”

It’s a reasonable question. It’s about the halfway mark of this adventure I’ve been on. I’ve read a pile of books, a stack of articles, reached out to and spoken with amazing, brilliant people, I’ve listened to Donuts and the records used to create it at least 75 times front to back [and that’s likely a conservative estimate].  So I can certainly understand why people ask.

Doesn’t mean I have any fucking clue how to formulate an answer.

But I try. People are being polite, taking an interest, and I’d like them to pay for the thing when it comes out, even if they have no intention to read it and buy it out of courtesy. I’ll take it. The popular answer, as in the one I go back to again and again is the ‘oil tanker’ response.

See, oil tankers actually consist of eight to twelve smaller tanks within the ship. Keeps the cargo from slooshing around too much, which could compromise the ship’s balance; less movement = more stability. My brain currently feels like an oil tanker with a single tank: production techniques, Soren Kierkegaard, the Kubler-Ross scale, Albert Camus, different approaches and opinions on late style, Roland Barthes, the epidemiology of lupus; all these things are just rolling around clumsily from one end of my brain to the other. I’ve given numerous lengthy and sensible ideas to the showerhead as I prepare to face each day, but this hasn’t translated into as many words on paper as I would like.

Put it another way: late last year the webcomic Toothpaste for Dinner put up a single panel gag called ‘The Creative Process.’

tcp

That seems accurate. We’re well into the ‘Fuck off’ segment of the program, far enough from deadline that panic isn’t on my back yet, but it’s waving at me from just over the horizon, a box of tissues in its twitchy hands.

And that’s fine, because I know it’ll get done. The structure of the thing, what I wanted it to accomplish, has been loosely in place since I began, a requirement of the proposal. Scenes, fragments, caveats and addenda are floating to the surface with more regularity than they once were; you can’t have all that material swishing around in your brain without something coagulating into something usable eventually. It will get done. It might have more academic meandering than the heads will want, and not enough for the theory kids, and maybe it gets savaged on Goodreads and the Stones Throw Message Board, but it’ll get done. If you’ve been with me a while, friends, you know that’ll probably end up the most surprising victory of all.

So keep asking the question. It’s good, it keeps me focused. Just don’t expect me to have an easy answer for you.

Dear Summer

They say if you love it, you should let it out its cage
And fuck it, if it comes back you know it’s there to stay.

Thirty-five. That’s how long I was going to give it.  The great thing about writing is you can do it no matter how old you are, no matter where you are on the planet.  But after three years of futzing around with half-finished short stories, blog entries and excuses, I was starting to think that, if by the time I turned 35, I didn’t have anything to show for this dying dream I’d been dragging around like Django with his coffin, I’d just hang it up and embrace mediocrity.  Find some office data entry job with decent benefits and something resembling an RRSP.  Blog a bit on the side, but never doubt my place, or lack thereof in it.

Then, an acquaintance of mine [and author of the volume on Portishead’s Dummy], blogged about the open call for submissions to Continuum’s excellent series of music guides, 33 1/3.  I’d always romantically daydreamed on how cool it would be to write one of them, so I started musing on what album I would do if I could: Midnight Marauders. The Shape of Punk to Come. Albums I love, but nothing that could summon the sort of passion necessary to pump out a 50-80,000 monograph on it.  Like so many other things I think about doing, I put it to the side, tried to forget about it a couple of weeks before the deadline.

That weekend, I’m standing in line at the 7-11 on my way home from work at around 11.00 pm, grabbing a carton of milk for the morning. The girl in front of me is buying what looks to be her groceries for the week and fumbling in her purse for her wallet, dropping a vial of white on the floor in the process.  When I get over what I’m witnessing [country mouse ain’t never seen coke in person before], I pull my headphones out and scroll through something to listen to.

I want to listen to Donuts, I think to myself. I haven’t listened to that in a while. I pay for my milk as the accelerating churn of ‘Workinonit’ kicks in and step out into the cool Toronto night.

Man, someone should do a 33 1/3 on this album, I think. That could be amazing.

I stopped at the corner. Wait. I should write a book on this album. 

So, in a rare flurry of energy, I put a proposal together.  That was in April.  In June, I got word that my proposal for Donuts made it through the first round of cuts, from 471 to 94.  Enough of an achievement on its own, certainly something to be proud of.  I said at the time, I knew I’d had a good idea about the book, something no one had stumbled on before, I thought I deserved to make the second round. Which, if you know me, is not the sort of thing I’m prone to saying.  So, I got what I wanted.  But man, wouldn’t it be cool to actually get the go ahead to write it?

I was sitting at a cubicle at the company home office when my phone buzzed, alerting me to an email from the editors of the series.  I froze, and started prepping myself for the letdown.  It’s okay, I told myself, to make the shortlist your first time out, that’s an accomplishment in itself. You couldn’t reasonably expect them to take a chance on an unknown property like you. “It’s an honour just to be nominated,” right?

I tapped the email, and skimmed it.  All I saw was ‘accepted,’ and my stomach dropped.  Son of a bitch. I got it.

I couldn’t talk about it publicly right away, until the publishers had all their ducks in a row. I got the green light email on Aug 31.

Just under two months shy of my 35th Birthday.

So there it is. My name is Jordan Ferguson, I will be writing an edition of the 33 1/3 record guides on J. Dilla’s Donuts album.

People ask my if I’m excited.  I mean, of course I am, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot of work in the meantime, plus my personal life’s been simultaneously enduring no small amount of upheaval. Now that that’s settled, and contracts are on the way, interview subjects have started being reached out to, I can start to appreciate the fact that I’m actually going to do the one thing I’ve always wanted to do, that I’m moving from observer to participant.  And I realize that there are probably going to be more than a few people wondering, ‘Who the fuck is Jordan Ferguson?’

All I can say is I’m a guy who is well aware what the work of Dilla and this album in particular means to people, because it means the same to me. And I’m a guy who wants to write this book not to get myself over, but because I want to celebrate the man’s work, life, and music. Other than that, y’all will just have to trust me.  I promise I won’t make you regret it.

Feature image by Happy Sleepy. Found on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons.

Uhh…. Now What?

I haven’t shaved since Thursday. I don’t think I’ve eaten a proper vegetable in longer than that. My four-month-old Macbook blew a pixel somewhere during the process. My fluid consumption hasn’t been caffeine-free since last Saturday. But I pulled it off.

Yes, friends, I finished it. I submitted it. It’s fate rests in the good hands of the folks at the publisher.

If you squint at that photo you can suss out what it was for. I won’t openly acknowledge it since I’m superstitious like that. I should know either way within the next couple of months. Me and all the other cranks who took advantage of the open call, ha.

Whether or not it gets accepted or not is kind of irrelevant, though. It was a good idea, and it’ll still be a good idea if they decide it’s not a good fit for them right now. I’ll find somewhere else for it.

What’s more important is the education this whole whirlwind provided me. Chief among the lessons: This is what I love to do. Waking up at 6.00 a.m. some days was still a pain in the ass, but once I got the coffee maker working, sitting down to work on it was a joy. I’m sure this was partially due to the pressure of the oncoming deadline thanks to my brain’s inability to summon an idea until just over a week before the due date, but it was more to do with loving what I was doing. The hardest part now is waking up tomorrow and not have to immediately rush to the cafe or the kitchen table to get some work in before I went to my job.

I hope it will be habit forming. This last week was the only time in recent memory I wrote every day. On something I valued, not cranking out a blog entry to distract myself from short stories or anything else I had on the go. Working on the proposal only served to affirm how much I love to make things, whether that’s podcasts or stories or blogs. These are the things that bring meaning to my life. Some of you probably knew that all along. I’ve always been a bit of a dullard when it comes to these things.

Thankfully, I have two other writing projects to try and finish this week, along with the aforementioned Macbook display issue to try and remedy, so I’ll be able to keep busy. Turns out, I kinda like busy.

Before I collapse in slumber, I would be remiss if I did not thank some people for their love and support this past week. I can be….,, unpleasant to deal with when immersed in a project like this. It lives in my head and consumes my thoughts, which can lead me to expect people around me to read my mind by osmosis, or to understand what I mean with little explanation. This can…strain some relationships occasionally. My thanks to those who gritted their teeth and let me go crazy, or kicked my ass when I was needing it.

To Richelle Gratton, Tera Brasel, Jeff Meloche, Khaiam Dar, Caitlin MacKinnon, Sarah Jacobs and Nicole Bryant: you all get shouts in the acknowledgements. And I hate acknowledgement sections in books.

Now, I think I’ll go pass out.

BRB

So, things are going to go silent around here for the rest of the month.

‘You say that like it’s not a regular occurrence.’

Oh, so you all are some funny muhf**kas now, huh?

I agree, my fits and spurts are well documented.  But something happened, friends.

I recently learned a series of books I greatly enjoy was putting out an open call for submissions.  I mused over it a little bit, ultimately dismissed my ideas.  But something happened as I waited in line at the 7-11 to pay for a carton of milk, laughing at the woman in front of me who dropped a vial of cocaine from her purse as she fumbled for her wallet:  I had an idea I didn’t hate.  An idea that excited me. An idea that had me telling everyone I knew I was thinking of doing it.

So I am.  Deadline’s the end of the month, and I’ll need every second I can find between now and then to do it.

In what I’m hoping is a bit of personal growth, the likelihood of failure isn’t getting me down at all:  because whether I get selected or not, it’s a good idea. Getting approved or not won’t change that.  It costs me nothing to do it, and in the worst case scenario, I’m just another of the cranks who submitted an idea. I know I won’t be the only one.

So that’s the scoop, friends.  You can still find me on Twitter during the interim, and the odd photo or quickie may very well go up on Tumblr, but my attentions will be off PFG for a couple of weeks. 

If I’m willing to do that, it must be important.  See you in May. Wish me luck.

Thirty Days of Stories: Day Fourteen

Title: Girl in Dryer

Author: Julie McArthur

Appears in: Broken Pencil #54

Premise: A young girl living in a skeevy apartment complex makes her way among aspiring drug dealers, middle school mean girlness and pot-bellied pigs. Currently unavailable to read online, but the issue is still on shelves.

Thoughts: Recently I had the good fortune of having my good friend, the poet and artist Annie Wong, drag me out of my cave for an evening of used bookstore browsery, poutine and pints in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood.

I hold any time spent with Annie in high regard, as she sometimes feels like my one tenuous connection to anything resembling the Toronto literary scene, a phrase I admit leaves me with an upset stomach.  But when I talk to her about art, or what we’ve been reading, or what inspires our work, what we want it to be, I actually feel kind of good as a ‘writer’ *shudder*.

Anyhoo, Annie’s been doing some work with Toronto indie-arts institution Broken Pencil [a publication I’ve taken small issue with before] and sweet talked the clerk at the used bookstore into giving her a free copy, which she promptly gave me. I figured it would make for a good opportunity to check in on the state of underground fiction in the city, see what’s valued and if I could see a place for me there.

In short, no. But, Julie McArthur’s story, while not perfect by any means [and a bit of a comedown after the steady diet of Nelson, Moore and Hempel I’d been on up to this point] kept me from falling completely into despair.

The story has a compelling lead character in Alice, the girl who hides from the world in a defunct dryer in her building’s laundry room.  She has a mom who loves her but isn’t around much due to work, and a friend named Paul, an older guy in the neighbourhood who buys a potbellied pig for a pet and lets Alice hang out with it. She doesn’t expect a whole lot out of life and doesn’t seem to have mind.  She’s content to hang out with Wilbur the pig and snuggle up in her pink blanket reading her book in the dryer.

While I found the language kind of plain throughout [probably design, you can’t take these things for granted] McArthur actually managed to surprise me by subtly revealing a sinister underbelly to the narrative.  It’s in the way she deftly turns the character of Paul into something more dangerous.  When Alice informs him she witnessed some boys in her building stash a bag of drugs in an abandoned washroom, Paul suddenly becomes adamant about having her steal it and buying it from her. His motives are never revealed, nor are the repercussions when Alice finds the drugs are already gone, but he grows irritated in that way dangerous people do when a deal doesn’t go the way they’d hoped.  The way that danger slowly leaks into the story is admirable, and a welcome change from the other works in the issue, which go so desperately out of their way to be avant-garde. McArthur doesn’t want to play in that pool, and her story is all the better for it.

Lesson: You don’t need to throw zip! pow! cliffhangers at your reader. Sometimes it’s far more effective to let it seep into the story in drips.

Favourite line:  Didn’t have one. Like I said, the language is pretty workaday. Can’t have everything.

A Letter to Meg

Meg is a friend and former Canadian Tire co-worker from back in the Windsor/Amherstburg days. We hadn’t spoken in the better part of five years when I get a message from her via Facebook, asking me if I blogged.

I swear, people, I wonder why I even try.

Anyway, Meg was interested in writing regularly and wanted to start a blog to do it. Sounds familiar. She wanted to check out mine, if I had one, to see what it was like. 

“Blogging is so super strange,” she wrote. Yeah, it is.  But it can also be kind of fun and amazing. I thought I would reply to her in public, as a chance to wax poetics on everything I know about blogging, which ain’t much.

Meg,

I was pleased to get your message, if a little surprised, given how long it’s been since we last spoke. I’ll admit, somewhat shamefully, to having you and the rest of the former CTC crew on the Facebook chopping block not too long ago.  I’m glad I didn’t drop the axe.

So, you’re looking to start a blog to keep the chops up.  That’s actually the very reason I started this up in the first place.  In 2009 I’d long been downsized from my position as Chief Blogger/Onine Editor for the University of Windsor paper, cranking out a couple of entries a day eight months a year. Suddenly I had a surplus of free time on my hands. Working at the bookstore had put me in a more literary frame of mind, as did the friendships I formed with a number of my coworkers there.  By that point I’d been blogging since 1999 or so, writing mostly in the style of emo, though we didn’t have a name for it then.  Writing for The Lance had scrubbed most personal details from my writing in favor of news and opinion, with the occasional reference to the persona I’d constructed to stand in for me.

What became PFG’s been a bit of an amorphous beast since then, moving from the story of a guy who wanted to finish some fiction and try to get it published, to pop culture commentary, to something that’s now spun out into the occasional podcast or video and now sort of back to a fiction focus [though results in the recent poll suggest that’s not what people want from me].

I’ve thought a lot over the years about what blogging means to me.  I still, despite the bile most Internet-famous writers push into my throat, believe blogging and the ease of access to content creation for most people is one of the most important developments in recent memory.  Yes, a good number of blogs, including some of the more famous ones, are little more than vanity projects or single-topic stunts trying to spin into a book deal, it’s still an amazing tool with an infinite number of uses [something I had the amazing fortune to speak about to a group of students at the Queen’s Fac of Ed years ago. It was a simpler time].

Anyway, advice.

(more…)

Thirty Days of Stories: Day Thirteen

Title: Charades

Author: Lorrie Moore

Appears in: Birds of America [1998]

Premise: The cracks in sibling relationships become evident during a holiday game of charades. Read it here.

Thoughts: Earlier in these proceedings I made mention that a lot of your favourite writers want to be Amy Hempel. True Story: whoever doesn’t want to be Amy Hempel wants to be Lorrie Moore.

Moore exploded on the literary stage [and into my heart] with her first short story collection Self-Help, which used the second-person voice so well amateurs have been ripping it off ever since [How to Become a Writer,  with its opening suggestion of “First, try to be something, anything, else” is probably one of the most passed around short stories in recent memory].  She hasn’t been terribly prolific since then, three short story collections and a pair of novels, but every word she’s put to page is incredible.

The two things I took from this story, which uses a sort of third person free-indirect narration told through the point of view of Therese, the oldest sibling in the family, had to do with word choice, shitty first drafts and surprising your reader.

There’s a moment where Therese, a circuit court judge, is thinking about her younger sister’s decision to go to law school: “…she had assumed Ann’s decision to be a lawyer is a kind of sororal affirmation…”  Look at that word: sororal. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used before, anywhere.  I doubt Moore used it in an early draft of the work [pure conjecture].  She probably had ‘sisterly,’ and in the act of rewriting, decided that ‘sororal’ sounded better, set the tone of the sentence on a different level, suggested something about Therese and her level of education, how she views the world. Because who uses sororal?!  Every word is a choice, and when you’re blasting your idea down onto the paper, maybe the wording isn’t as flowery as you might like.  That’s fine, you can go back to the draft with a fine toothed comb in a week or so.  That’s how you change ‘sisterly’ to ‘sororal.’

I was talking yesterday about letting your characters surprise you, and how I wasn’t sure I knew how to do that.  Lo and behold, I read this story later that afternoon and Moore’s Therese manages to surprise me from out of nowhere with an offhanded comment about a public defender she’s been having a perfunctory affair with, despite loving her husband dearly.  It’s mentioned so nonchalantly in the narration, yet makes perfect sense for the character [I’ll include it as my favourite line from this story].

This all feeds into the idea of the value of rewriting, which is also something I’m either too good at or not good enough; when I’m not ignoring a half-finished story I can’t bear to look at again, I’m performing what Evan Connell called, ‘going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places.’  But you never get to ‘sororal,’ you never get to be surprised by your characters, if you can’t focus on what you’re doing when you go back to the draft.

Lesson: Write shitty first drafts. Don’t be scared of them. For more on this, read Anne Lamont’s brilliant essay of the same name.

Favourite Line: “He is ardent and capable and claims almost every night in his husbandly way to find Therese the sexiest woman he’s ever known. Therese likes that. She is also having an affair with a young assistant DA in the prosecutor’s office, but it is a limited thing — like taking her gloves off, clapping her hands and putting the gloves back on again. It is quiet and undiscoverable. It is nothing, except that is sex with a man who is not dyslexic, and once in a while, Jesus Christ, she needs that.”

Thirty Days of Stories: Day Twelve

Title: We and They

Author: Antonya Nelson

Appears in: Nothing Right [2009]

Premise: A progressive family in the early 90’s struggles to understand their adopted mix-race daughter.

Thoughts:  While my paperback copy of this collection is missing them, I’m fairly certain the hardcover enticed me with a murderer’s row of cover blurbs by everyone from Raymond Carver to Michael Chabon to David Foster Wallace.  Quite the endorsements.  The depressing thing is, Nelson deserves every one of them.

There’s a lot more going on in this story than that one line synopsis I provided would suggest, primarily the relationship between the adoptive family [The Landerses] and their relationship with the Catholic family across the street [The Pierces], the clash of values between them, and the reasoning for the Landerses adoption of the mixed-race toddlers Otis and Angel.

What I found the most striking about this story [and most stories in this collection, I’ve picked it apart pretty thoroughly as the margin scribbles throughout will attest; We and They was one of two stories I had yet to read in it] is how natural Nelson’s prose is.  Compare it to something like the Grace Paley story we looked at last time, where the writing is fantastic but moves at a slower pace, demands more concentration, Nelson’s writing just zips along, reading it is like cruising in a vintage roadster with the top down.  That isn’t to say the writing isn’t good, far from it. It just means, even at its most descriptive,  at its funniest, the prose is so relaxed and natural it never feels like any work went into it at all, which is of course the first sign that something is genius-level good.

I suspect, purely conjecture, that Nelson reads her work aloud a lot. In my experience it’s the only way to get prose that sounds that natural.  One of the few things I can admit that I do well is write dialogue, and a lot of that comes from reading out what I’ve written after a day of writing.  If it don’t sound right in your ear, it won’t sound right in a reader’s head.  Of course, you do run the danger there of tying your characters too tightly to the vision you have of them in your head, robbing them of the chance to live and breathe on their own [I admit, this is something I still have never had happened to me, they’ve never surprised me because they’re never alive to me, they’re just end up me in costume].  But if you’re going to find your ‘voice’, something I’m still not sure I have, then that’s the way to do it.

Lesson: Read out loud. Relinquish control of your characters. Really think of them as people, and not players you’re directing.

Favourite Line: “Our large family was not the result of Catholic faith and we didn’t attend Blessed Sacrament church or school, despite the fact that it was a stone’s throw away from our house. We threw stones, so we knew.”