Kyle Fitzsimmons

(We join the crew of the USS Enterprise at Table Four. Waiter CAMERON approaches the table to take everybody’s order.)

CAMERON

Coffee everybody? (Everybody nods.) Did everybody have a good time last night? (More assent) I couldn’t make it out last night. I was too tired. I just went to bed. (Stunned silence) Okay…well…I’ll be back with your coffee. (He leaves the table.)

EMILY/KIRK

Something’s wrong. Cameron has never slept in his life. He doesn’t even own a bed. He serves at the Cornerstone all day and drinks all night with the Cornerstone staff. Everybody knows that. In fact, sleeping is a direct violation of Article 567, section 2, subsection ii of the City of Guelph Food Service Charter. How deep does this go?

MCCOY

Jim, you’re being paranoid. You need rest. You should listen to the ship’s doctor once in a while. I could have you removed from duty.

SPOCK

Captain, I took the liberty of making some scans and it would appear that the Doctor’s emotional outburst is once again completely unfounded. That was not the real Cameron. That was a robot--albeit a well-liked and popular robot. Furthermore, I have reason to believe that robots have infiltrated the entire staff.

EMILY/KIRK

How…how could they? Amelia…Jeremy…Chloe… Dara…Dana… All the others… All of them…gone. I served with them against the Shiny People. And now they’re…no more… We’ve got to do something…but what?

SPOCK

We’re up against a formidable enemy, Captain.

MCCOY

It sounds like you admire them, Spock, with your cold Vulcan Logic.

SPOCK
I do not admire them, Doctor, I merely acknowledge their superior abilities.

MCCOY

How can you say that, Spock! They were your friends!

EMILY/KIRK

Gentlemen, now is not the time. They must have a weakness, and I think I know what it is. If they are logical beings as Mr. Spock says, then that is how we will bring them down. (Robot CAMERON approaches the table again.)

CAMERON

Ready to order gang?

MCCOY

Migas.

SPOCK

Migas.

EMILY/KIRK

I see today’s omelette is a western.

CAMERON

Yes…

EMILY/KIRK

What does that consist of?

CAMERON

Mushrooms and peppers.

EMILY/KIRK

Does it have…cheese?

CAMERON

Yes it does.

EMILY/KIRK

Then I would like the western omelette…but without cheese.

CAMERON

(Somewhat surprised) Oh…well…okay… I guess we can do that, if that’s what you want…

EMILY/KIRK

It is. (Cameron leaves the table.)

MCCOY

If this is going where I think it is Jim, then it just might work.

SPOCK

Indeed, the captain’s plan shows a great deal of potential.

MCKOY

Spock, you’re a pointy-eared ass-kisser.

EMILY/KIRK

Gentlemen, be quiet. (Cameron returns with the order and distributes the plates to the shocked officers and departs.)

MCKOY

That cuts it, Jim. Something is definitely wrong here.

SPOCK

I’m sure you’re aware, Captain, that we can’t afford to see this plan fail. Otherwise the entire downtown core will deteriorate into confusion when people suddenly realize they have no idea how to spend their mornings.

MCKOY

(Screaming) That can’t be allowed to happen Jim!!

EMILY

Be calm, men. You’re my two best officers, and I need you to keep control. Quiet. (Cameron approaches the table again)

CAMERON

How’s your food, people?

MCKOY

Oh…good.

SPOCK

Indeed, it is more than satisfactory.

CAMERON

(To Emily/Kirk) Do you like your omelette?

EMILY/KIRK

I do. It’s delicious.

CAMERON

Good!

EMILY/KIRK

There’s just one thing…

CAMERON

And what’s that?

EMILY/KIRK

(Music swells with tension.) What this omelette could really use is…cheese.

CAMERON

Cheese? But you said you—I mean, you didn’t want—I mean it already—you shouldn’t have said you—(A red light flashes on Cameron’s necklace.) Error! Error! Awaiting instructions! Awaiting instructions!

SPOCK

If I may be so bold as to point out, the only logical course of the waitstaff is to report the customer’s complaint to the kitchen staff.

CAMERON

Must comply! Must comply! (He marches stiffly back to the kitchen. The crew watches as he interfaces with the rest of the staff who have gathered around to listen.)

SPOCK

I believe they are interfacing with the primary control right now.

MARK

Does not compute! Does not compute! (Picks up chit holder and shoves it in his eye. Chloebot’s head begins to smoke, and not for the usual reason. Dara starts taking clean dishes off the shelf and loading them into the dishwasher. Eric starts babbling nonsensical scientific data to anybody who will listen. General chaos. Ragged customers stand around surveying the destruction in horror)

CUSTOMERS

What will we do? How will we ever survive?

EMILY/KIRK

(Standing on the table.) It will be hard at first. But you’ll make it. You’ll persevere. You’ll pull yourself up and learn to live without the tyranny of robotic hospitality professionals. You’ll build a new world. And we’ll be back to see you again.

(Back on the ship. SPOCK and MCKOY are standing around EMILY/KIRK in the captain’s chair. Their conversation is accompanied by a whimsical oboe.)

MCKOY

Well Spock, it turns out you were wrong about everything once again. You’re such an asshole.

SPOCK

On the contrary, Doctor, your obvious mental infirmities are an embarrassment to sentient beings everywhere.

EMILY/KIRK

(Smiling and shaking her head.) You two. Why don’t you just fuck and get it over with.

(SPOCK cocks an eyebrow inquiringly. MCKOY averts his eyes.)

END.

     Jack McGreary, narrater of Will Ferguson’s new novel, Spanish Fly, would probably identify in con-man’s parlance what happened to me as “The Switch”; when the responsibility of the con moves from the con artist to the mark. When Dan at the bookshelf laid out three books on the counter in front of me, and indicated Spanish Fly as being the book that it would be in my best interest to review, I was deeply skeptical. I didn’t see what was in it for me to read a book about the education of a depression-era grifter and the love triangle in which he finds himself with his two compatriots and teachers. It seemed a little “Greatest Generation” for my tastes, all that idealized “hardnose” and “moxie” crap put together with the soft-focus mentored coming-of-age clichés that strike me as being complicit in all of our current follies. Of course I probably would have snapped up the book right away if I’d remembered that I already have a couple of Ferguson’s books on my shelf, Beauty Tips From Moosejaw and The Penguin Anthology of Canadian Humour. I traditionally present the latter title to newlyweds for those times when they’re desperate for laughter and can’t stand to watch Seinfeld reruns because it reminds them too painfully of how easy and simple it was to simply dump people when some disgusting or morally reprehensible personal habit manifested itself.

     I was hooked, however, by the fact that Spanish Fly also had a (sold separately) soundtrack of original music written by Ferguson himself along with Tom Philips and the Men of Constant Sorrow which I’m going to tell you right now isn’t very good. It’s a completely gratuitous marketing experiment with nothing one would be lead to believe has anything in the way of musicological authenticity to recommend it. Save your money.

     With that little unpleasantness over, I can now tell you how much I liked this book by telling you about “The Switch”, that moment when my lips curled up at the corners of their own accord, when I was completely taken in by the web this book was weaving. Ferguson’s depiction of dustbowl America would have made Steinbeck proud. You could imagine if the used car salesmen that prey on the Okies in chapter 7 of The Grapes of Wrath got their own book, along with perhaps a great deal more likability to keep you interested . “The Switch” came for me early, before McGreary meets his mentors, when he is still young man subsisting on boiled weeds, aghast at his fathers credulity, and developing a steel trap mind at the library between shifts at the salt-mine. Somewhere in those passages when McGreary is grappling with and wrestling to the ground the great philosophical debates of the ages, I experienced that moment of giddiness; a light in my eyes that I could actually feel, when my deepest complacency was shocked with the realization that I was about to be the recipient of a very big literary pay-off. That this writer had sussed out the joint, seen all the angles, and hadn’t missed a trick; that I was on the ground floor of something very big. When McGreary subsequently embarks on his shady career under the tutelage of a couple passing through who recognise his gift with numbers, the book takes on real historical weight with the cornucopia of scams calculated to play on the weaknesses of everyday people like you and me—some of which, a little research has shown, are still in play today.

     And there is a dark side to Ferguson’s inventiveness, lurking underneath the narrative from the beginning that builds to an excruciating suspenseful final few pages; making you wonder in the end how Ferguson pulled it off while you were watching the whole time. Being a somewhat skilled writer myself, I can tell you exactly how he did it if you just log onto my website at www.kylefitzsimmons.com--which is a real website powered by a fully functioning ultra-modern computer with vast databanks and capable of lightening speed calculations. Leave your credit card number and I will be pleased to avail you of the powers of the imagination which you can parlay into limitless prosperity.
Mention this review and your first idea is free…

     I first became aware of Roger Zelazny through my obsessive reading of Philip K. Dick, and specifically through their collaboration on the post-apocolyptic novel Deus Irae. In that novel, the two award winning science fiction writers transformed the traditionally cautionary tale of nuclear horror into a trying ground for their expansive and quirky imaginations. It was almost as almost as if they had resigned themselves to total destruction as a historical inevitability and got on with the work of speculating on the starting over—a kind of refreshing impertinence to bring to the subject of the end of the world, fatalism, oddly enough. And one in which people eke out an existnce unmolested by the politicians that started those wars which results in a kind of a de facto idyll. Deus Irae abounded with tropes familiar to devotees of “PKD”; madness, mutations, and a signature caprice with regard to the realities inhabited by his characters to test the well-earned credulity of his posthumous and growing legion of fans. Zelazny’s hand in this was not as clear to me, however, not having so totally steeped myself in his work, or even read anything at all by him I can remember(he might have shown up in some anthology I powered down as a kid...or an adult)until finding a hard-cover book-club(and thus worthless) edition of Lord of Light, published in 1967, with its original paper cover intact and displaying abstract artwork typical of the era that was more likely some square’s idea of psychedelia on the cheap (unlike the cover pictured above).

      Zelazny acquits himself with more credibility, however, as one of those squares who could teach the hippies a few things about possible realities, proving once and for all that it isn’t the length the hair but the mind under it that matters. In Lord of Light, we see fantasy combined with science fiction in such a way that we initially don’t really know which we’re reading. Or if we’re reading an allegory, for that matter. It takes place on a planet—ours?—in which the Hindu Gods reign supreme. Zelazny thereby ducks the censors with typical sf acuity by using this religion as a means to explore the idea of religion as opiate of the masses and sanctuary for profiteers, scoundrels, and hypocrites. A “theocracy” of Gods stands in the way of progress in order to maintain their hold on power, allowing just enough mechanization to the people for such things as coin-op prayer machines, and withholding the advanced technologies by which they weild their terrible godlike powers and satisfy their carnal desires. Meanwhile, the people are kept in line with the promise of immortality providing their Karma is determined to be sufficiently up to snuff. However the people are drawn away from their religion by “Mahasamatman”, AKA Siddhartha, AKA the Devine Buddha, or just Sam to his close friends. He defies the gods with his teachings on self-mastery and perception, the means by which to attain Nirvana without kowtowing to the Gods.

     Zelazny tells the history of Buddha’s war with the Gods in high Space Opera style that takes its inspiration from the ghidas, which are also quoted at the beginning of each chapter that describes the Buddha’s different incarnations. And it’s heartfelt stuff as well, driven by, as is the best of the genre, by conscience. In this way, Zelazney pulls off a neat trick with history. Where sf was originally about what would be until the LeGuinian innovation that suggested the best stuff was in fact about what is, Zelazny takes this trend a step further by creating a work that makes us ponder what was,by way of what will be, by way of what is. It leaves a with a soulful resolution reminiscent of the ending those if us in the theatre who were in the know stayed sitting for at the ending of Lord of the Rings, a kind of denument. As well we are left wondering at the human potential that remains to be seen when we conquer our baser natures. As the Buddha would remind us, in ourselves as well as in others.

     Early one evening recently a drunk came stumbling out of a downtown bar alone, and, even though I was going the other way, I followed him back downtown, catching up with him in the square and asking him if he was driving or taking a cab. It was just that time of night when drunks feel obliged to rush home; when their personal obligations become misplaced against the greater good. I was appalled by a recent tragedy and other similar losses of innocent lives to drunk driving that I accosted a total stranger on the street because I didn’t want to read about the end of that potential chain of events the next day in the paper. I may also have been inspired by the motto of “the organization” in Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys: “We all make the world.” It is a response to the fatalist apology, “I didn’t make the world, I just live in it.”

      Ruff’s protagonist Jane Charlotte finds these words engraved on a coin under her pillow after independently rousting a serial killer in Nancy Drew fashion. This makes her a candidate for membership in a secret organization that fights not crime, but evil itself. When we first meet her, however, she is being assessed by a doctor in a mental institution; later in life, and after she has killed someone she “wasn’t supposed to”. Naturally, everything she says is called into question, and the attentive reader is engaged by the interplay between madness, reality, and morality. Crazy people say the darnedest things, after all.

      Which begs the question, is she really crazy? The description she gives of the organization is highly inventive, but so is madness itself, in a fashion that is often greater than the sum of it’s…parts, for lack of a better word. Equally inventive are Jane’s eyebrow-raising methods of maximizing her potential in the assignments she is given to the point that her true allegiances are called into question by her handlers. It is the archetype of the rogue cop given much needed new life with the sensibilities and tenacity of womanhood. Meanwhile, attempts on the part of “internal affairs” to establish her true allegiances in light certain unintended consequences-- as well as the skepticism of Jane’s psychiatrist—create a sensation in the reader’s mind of dangling at the end of a fire truck ladder as it goes around a corner in a silent film. And this book in a very real way has the flavour of the Keystone Kops imagined as a secret organization, with all the attendant comic potential. Or are all of Jane’s stories a vindication of an early episode relating to a mysterious younger brother?

     Those like myself who have been afflicted both with madness and big sisters will know that sometimes madness is preferable, and those who have often speculated on, or more accurately, forced to doubt, the true motivations of those creatures will appreciate the confusion evinced by Ruff’s clever narrative. Bad Monkeys has the ambition and vision of the best graphic novels and comic books, not to mention the same unapologetic stridence. The queries of Jane’s psychiatrist gives one the feel of story panels and narrative boxes. The design of the book itself also evokes what could either be a copy of the DSM, complete with decorative ink-blot, or a training manual for a secret society, complete with sinister logo. Ruff’s story-telling is a vindication of the imagination in the same way as radio—lower budget for special effects that gives rise to greater possibilities in the theatre of the mind; hence casting a brighter light on every day human questions. We are all of us fighting evil in our own way, succumbing to the occasional madness and the occasional defeat at the hands of evil real and imagined.

     And you’d think it would kill us to take a cab.

     Back in the eighties they made a movie based on Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. While it was a pretty good movie in it’s own right that you couldn’t fault for it’s copious historical and academic omissions that made the book so interesting, it was nonetheless relative to the book in the same way the movie version of The Grapes of Wrath was to Steinbeck’s masterpiece. Much of the background was missing for certain, but so was the earth-shattering finale that brought those books to such a satisfying ending. The Name of the Rose was a book which, as a young intellectual neophyte, I was obligated to read so that I could tell people gravely that I had done so whenever the movie was mentioned. I then proceeded to put off doing so for another twenty years, owing to the regard with which I comfortably held myself. However I apparently jabbered on enough about my good literary intentions that a friend gave me Baudolino as a Christmas gift one year. It was on of the best books I had ever read.

     It is a book that has as it’s foundation a divine premise. In the year 1204, during the sacking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, we are introduced to Baudolino, who in turn tells us his story from his childhood as an Italian peasant with a gift for languages. He has only to hear a few words spoken of a language he has never heard before to become fluent in it. The the kicker is that he’s a pathological liar; an epic obfuscator who has the ear of emperors; altering history while remaining almost totally anonymous. Eco’s innovation to this archetype has been to give it flesh and bones and heart and mind; a curious kind of conscience, and a respectable idealism.

      Baudolino becomes the adopted son of Emperor Frederick after manifesting his talents at a crucial time. He is sent away to matriculate in Paris where he falls in with a reliably bohemian clique from all corners of the known world, including a former Hashish assassin who has absconded from the legendary despot with a pot of hash oil he shares with his friends in Paris. They then proceed to invent the legend of Prester John, a “mythological” Christian Ruler of a distant, vast, and wealthy kingdom. Having justified their invention on the basis that if it comes from the human imagination, it must be true, they entreat the emperor to finance the search for this chimerical land.

     It is a timely story fitting Eco’s rather credible theory that it is the liars who make history. In reading this book I find I was very aware of the ease with which I took up the tale each time I picked up the book, as thought the characters were waiting for me to join them in their historical romp.

     The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is another book to make a writer cry and moan and beat their chests with sorrow that they didn’t think of it themselves. It is also as enigmatic as it’s title, and unexpectedly rewarding over the time that has passed since I read it. I know a few people around town who are fans of Eco, one of whom just commenting a few minutes ago on these books as she passed my table, and I am waiting patiently for any one of them to read The Mysterious Flame so that I can discuss it with them. Certainly I would implore them to read Baudolino, and my instructions to the person I gave my copy to was to enter it into the world library as it is too good a book; too important and relevant to current affairs to have it sitting on my bookshelf unread by anyone else. Queen Loana, however, is a different matter. I want somebody else to read it in order to figure out if my theory about what happens in the story holds any water.

     Without giving anything away, this typically divine idea concerns a book seller who succumbs to a loss of personal memory, in which, as a result of a cranial trauma, he cannot recall any aspects of his life, such as his marriage, his children, and his own childhood, but somehow still seems able to recall all the books he’s read. He retreats to his family estate in Italy, and combs through his grandfather’s collection of early twentieth century Italian pop culture in an effort to pull together a recollection of his life. Henceforeth, the book is adorned with beautiful images from this pulp literature. Americanisms are culturally appropriated to Italy, including Mickey Mouse, Terry and the Pirates, and the Yellow Kid—images which I hope will never be forgotten, lest we forget how we came to be what we are today. Furthermore, we see the rise of Italian Fascism through these ostensibly innocent images, the history of pop culture being also a history of the darker tendencies of propaganda.

      Midway though the book, the book seller Yambo makes an incredible discovery and everything…changes. Suddenly he recalls his childhood, and we are taken back to Italy in the closing days of the war when he is called upon to perform an act of courage on behalf of the Italian resistance. What follows, a child enacted against fascism, is reminiscent of the more recent Pan’s Labyrinth, and just as gripping in it’s depiction of ordinary people resisting fascism in their own country. It is always a haunting subject. The ending of the book, however, is a mystery again it’s title which, while initially somewhat abrupt, has accrued a kind of logical sense that has changed the book in my mind from being a good idea somewhat mishandled to a very good idea handled in a very original and courageous way that has stayed with me more than any of his works. It is an oddly transformative story, aging in my mind like wine, producing new meanings over time. The last time I had this rather frustrated “Aha!” feeling was after watching Hal Hartley’s film No Such Thing, when I felt like I was the only person in the world who got the joke.

     In any case, I don’t hear too many Ecophiles bandying about these titles in polite conversation, and that’s a shame. They are at turns interesting, and at others great. How different works by a single writer gain broad acceptance while others are sidelined is beyond me. I would argue that these two books are the ones Eco was working towards when his reputation was already made.

     An old friend of mine’s favourite quotation from the cannon of Bob Dylan was, “If you ain’t busy bein’ born, you’re busy dyin’.” It is a theme that arises repeatedly in Dylan’s lyrics, and it is appropriate that it should be the driving theme of the first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles, a book of beginnings in the plural as opposed to the singular. But I feel the need to be careful in writing about Dylan, as it seems as though Dylan himself hangs over the shoulder of the critic like a vulture circling over the dying body of a cliché. In this respect, he anticipated punk and grunge by reserving a special skepticism for those who praise his work. Of course, this in itself is a cliche that has been applied to him repeatedly by those of us who think we get what his work is all about—as though by critiquing him, we could be like him; as though understanding was emulation, when in fact all we are seeing is ourselves or what we wish to be, and still getting it wrong time and time again. Suffice it to say, his music has always been close to me, in those basement stoner parties when he revealed parts of the world upstairs.

     There is a contrast between Dylan’s hard-nosed pragmatism, and the eloquence of his words, as though the imagination was only accessible to those who’ve earned it or sacrificed for it, which is another cliche, but not one he indulges in. When the book opens, we find him where we expect to, early days in New York City, signing his first recording contract, mind like a steel trap, undaunted by anything despite his youth or the unknowability of the cosmos. He inveigles himself into the Greenwich Village folk culture and tirelessly educates himself in all manner of baroque and esoteric knowledge, and most of it through the lens of folk music and the considerable history inspired by it, and that it inspires in turn. Unexpectedly, we fast forward to 1968, after the fabled episode of going electric that has entered into the annals of music history as a watershed moment. At this point, he is recording Nashville Skyline, and dealing with the unwanted aspects of fame in a creative fashion that the reader begins to recognize as Dylan’s fundamentally creative way of tackling life. And this becomes apparent when we jump ahead again to 1987, during the recording of Oh Mercy with Daniel Lanois. The language takes on a mystical tone, deftly abstracted and searching, the words of an artist still striving to be born, in response to the questions that arise of themselves, crises that would be taken seriously by no-one other than an artist, and by no other artist than that artist—a living refutation of the claim that artists view themselves as morally unaccountable, or that they are so idealistic as to be blind to the world outside their minds.

     And then we return where we never expected to see, that period in the Midwest before he came to New York, as well as some of those figures in that period previously obscured specifically to infuriate the media. What comes clear through all of this is the central fact of folk music, initially, and music in general as the fulcrum on which turns his entire relationship with the world, a point of singularity that achieves limitless variety while ejecting into his life and the world constantly evolving and re-enervating wisdom. But while there is this centrality, there is also a total and unselfish partnering of the reader with the writer as he learns and understands the world in a creative and organic way that also succeeds in being completely unsentimental and pedantic. An invigorating work, one that not only describes the love an artists will have with their work, but also how any of us loves anything.

     It is a musical genre that balances chaos and order by pushing the limits of both; a medium born in an adopted land by an oppressed people who are both celebrated and scorned. They are sophisticated, eclectic, and esoteric while also tortured by drug addiction and victimized by opportunists. Their fortunes are irrevocably tied to the vagaries of fashion, fame on one hand and the cold hand of academics on the other. All the while they are driven by a tremendous and relentless force of artistic conscience to keep the music moving ahead, beyond proficiency, beyond brilliance, never resting, never complacent. It is fitting Blue Note Records, The Biography by Richard Cook should be so well balanced, eloquent, and tasteful; essential to lovers, collectors, students, and teachers of jazz music and its history, ably fulfilling the demands of chronology, discography, and trivia. There really is something in this book for every interest but the prurient.

     As many aficionados know, Bluenote was incorporated in New York by German immigrants Alfred Lyon and Max Margulis, Margulis filled the shoes of copy writer and advertiser, leaving room for another German immigrant Francis Wolff to direct the business. Dentist Rudy Van Gelder rounded out this very small company as recording technician, some of the early recordings being taken in Gelder’s parent’s home. The Biography charts Bluenote’s history in such a thorough but succinct fashion as to surely hold lessons for those interested in starting their own recording companies today. From the beginning they are torn between being documenters of the music, and innovators forging new sounds and setting trends. They also face familiar issues relating to changes in media and technology and the expenses incured flipping the catalogue from 10” 78 to 12” and from that to 33 1/3 micro-groove. While detailing the earlier and somewhat retrograde recordings of such pioneers as Sydney Bechet, the book hits its stride with the first Be-Bop recordings, as artists such as Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, and Dexter Gordon strive to pick up where Charlie Parker left off. As I was able to do at this point, one could read along with a session by session critique of the recordings while actually listening to the music itself. You can feel the history, and practically taste the vinyl in that slightly insane way of avid collectors.

      In reading about the advent of Hardbop and Free Jazz, one feels like a fly on the wall of the studio as these musicians act and react to changes in the music, succeeding and failing, learning and teaching. Richard Cook is also respectful of the musicians themselves, shedding light on what true Renaissance figures they were, with interests outside Jazz that find their way in and out of the music. They are humanized more by way of their capabilities and their diversity rather than by their failings and indulgences, as such they may have been defined if they were pop or rock stars. There are no clichés here regarding the price of inspiration or terrible sacrifices made for one’s art. What comes through is a formality on the part of the proprietors of Bluenote and the musicians it represented that serves to demystify the process to the point that it re-mystifies it all over again. We are left with a greater respect for these musicians than we started with, and that is quite an accomplishment.

Click on Garrry and the band to go to the Hellmouths website!