Ruel Johnson's Fictions

After One Year

2012-01-26T10:36:00.000-08:00

High Fidelity

this is the prophecy

i claim for us, a

certain hollowness

decades from this now, an

uncertain hollowness

arriving unbidden

at a certain hour

the oblivious, entrail-bound,

iron chain dragging certain

moments through forever

this infinite and substantial death

tear-streaked meiosis

the very last atom of our love

eternally rending itself from itself

*********

in this dream, i am your husband

in this dream i am on

a long sea voyage back to you

circe, this svelte, brown, dark-haired

woman, sad and wild,

exiled, even now, amidst friends –

the laughing drunken

doe-eyed nereids – for one sin,

her miscegenistic sorcery

nights in dark thrall, bestial heat,

stigmatic sperm enchanted

from the depths of shadow

tan island afloat

in the centre of the pandays’

bel air park pool, she emerges

in her narrow nymph’s hips’

soft pendulum a hint

of the magic of yours, her lips,

feline eyes, primal glint

her intoxicated, questing tongue

********

within the savage territory of my body

there exists a place

unassailably yours

veins that throb only

to the cadence of your voice

ant-free, sleeping spaces dreaming you

sparkless synapses

that blaze remembering your

lips upon my skin

********

a memory that i now make forever

that day at the museum

the pastel-toned photograph of

the conjoined house of frida & diego

the intertwined fingers

of ruel and dominique

a love yearning its own legend

its own ampersand

*********

each night is an ethereal scab

over the ragged wound torn by dawn

and though the years – exfoliating – yield

in the wizened, withered core of some far tomorrow,

a green, germinating comatose dream

in that dream, i will be your husband

in that dream, i will

be on a long river voyage,

a long river voyage,

you eternally in my arms

My Other Blog

2012-01-24T20:19:00.000-08:00

I have a new blog by the way, for socio-political commentary...

http://rueljohnson.blogspot.com/

Behind the Words - Killing the Kitten

2012-01-24T19:42:00.000-08:00

The basic problem facing fledgling short fiction writers that I encounter is a fundamental one, that of finding the material and shaping it into the final thing. Most jump into a piece because they encounter a particular narrative, directly or indirectly, and want to retell it. Others have some dream or vision that they want to put down on a page and hence give some meaning to.

What I've come to is that while these approaches may not be wrong in the strictest sense, what you first need to do is to consciously access the basic thesis at the centre of this narrative or that dream. Once you latch on to that, this grand statement that is the cause d'être of a particular piece, you have now the option of choosing experience or imagination or - as is likelier - a particular combination of both as the raw material from which you're going to shape, mould, sculpt, carve that story. Then you can set to work constructing the story proper... character, setting, plot, style, perspective. As Nabokov put it in one story,

"We, Writers, alter the themes of Life to suit us in our drive towards some conventional harmony, some kind of artistic conciseness. We spice our savorless plagiarisms with our own devices. We think that Life's performance is too sweeping, too uneven, that her genius is too untidy. To indulge our readers, we cut out of Life's untrammeled novels our neat little tales for the use of school children."

As ironic as the above delivery may be, this essentially is what the short fiction writer does. Finding exactly where to start cutting, and how much is the trouble. For example, the inspiration for the story Killing the Kitten came from four 'narratives'. The first is recounted in part in the story, the titular act, the killing of the kitten, something I actually did. The second is a conversation I had with a former girlfriend in my late teens, an angst-ridden bit of dialogue concerning the possible consequence of one of our youthful amorous indiscretions. The third came from a short story I read, a year later, at the Cropper Foundation Workshop in Trinidad, Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants. The fourth is the novel by John Irving, The Ciderhouse Rules, which I read a year or so after the workshop - as has been a habit of mine, working a reference to a thematic source text within dialogue, I referenced that novel within the story itself.

Inspired initially by real life as it was, my thesis was a variation on that of Hemingway's piece, and after considering the options, not many at the time, I decided that his use of dialogue, modified by framing exposition, with minimal description was the most apt mode of telling the story, letting the serious of the story come out in the realistic tenseness of the dialogue, the compromises, the parrying, the assaults, the deflections; I did however end the story with a lyrical flourish since Hemingway's abrupt, non-commital cut wasn't applicable to what I wanted to communicate.

I should note here that David Forster Wallace tackles the same thesis - granted with a decidedly American political slant or sensibility - in a brilliant short story Good People, but choses instead his inimitable rambling but also lyrical stream of conscious, freight train style; why this was necessary in this case, as opposed to the minimalism I adopted in homage to or imitation of, or whatever, Hemingway.

I think the major innovation I brought to the story, the thesis, was my use of perspective. I felt with the Hemingway story that the lens was too far away, and even had I read the Wallace story - published in theNew Yorker some four years after Ariadne - the lens would have been too close. I needed something that was midway, that offered a perspective between the intimacy of the first person and the objective distance of the third. When I was young, about nine or ten, I had a brief but intense flirtation with those chose your own adventure books and when I started writing the story, it came to me that I could actually use the second person/reflective first person mechanism that they used to pull the reader into their narrative, to essentially inhabit the main character.

All that was left therefore was to create a fairly detailed backstory for the characters. I chose to make the couple Hindu for several reasons, foremost of which was that as a perceivably non-Hindu writer, I wanted to underscore that my thesis within the story was a universal one, in defiance of and challenge to both the presumption by dark-skinned, kinky haired persons that as a dark-skinned, kinky-haired person I was automatically writing for other dark-skinned kinky haired persons to the exclusion of everyone else, as well as the rising Hindutva sentiment that was at its peak at that time that saw this space as somehow, for all practical purposes, an extension of BJP's India.

For me, finding your thesis, seeing the essential message that you want to carve out of experience and imagination, is a crucial step in getting the story off of the ground. It may not be the skeleton of the piece, and hence finding it doesn't necessarily mean you're just going to have to apply the meat of your tale to it in order to get to complete your fiction - but, that said, your thesis is the soul of your story and your conscious perception of it defines how you end up going about putting everything else together.

Finally, it should be noted that nowhere above do I explicitly or even implicitly state what that thesis is. If you have the time and have read this far, the story is below and you can make your inferences from that.

Killing the Kitten

You sit on the bench, waiting. You run the fingers of a hand through your hair. In the damp air, it is springy and slick.

People pass by. All walking towards North Road, most bound for Regent. Lanky basketball players, T-squared boys from the Technical Institute, fat female clerks with that dour look that graces the faces of all public service clerical staff, petite girls in plaid skirts, white shirts and Nikes, the one muttering madman, some University Students with the slow, self-assured drag that only aspiring lawyers and Rotaract/Rotary members can achieve, thick-thighed, high-gut women in large t-shirts and tights. Some of the bolder women stare at you.

"Hey, Ravi," a voice says and you turn around. You try not to notice that she has deliberately worn her hair loose, or the lip gloss that you can't decide whether you like or dislike intensely. The shirt is white, long-sleeved and loose; the jeans are tight. You have waited too many seconds to reply. She sits and turns away briefly to avoid you seeing her smile.

"We know each other too long for you to give me the silent treatment," she says.

"Sorry," you stumble, "I was just kinda lost in thought just now. How everybody…Auntie Sukhie, Naresh, you father them?"

"Everybody ok. So…Mr. Bholanauth. What have I done to…ah…for you honour me with your request to speak to your honourable and hardly-seen-these-days person?" She waves her hands, juts her chin, in a mock grandiloquence.

"I miss you," you say, and this stuns her.

"Please," she says quietly, a slight quake in her voice, "…remember? No more words like that."

"I miss you, Bharti…" You try to touch her hand but she pulls it away.

"Talk bout something else or I gone, ok, Ravi? When last you see Nirmala."

"Which one?" you ask, stubbornly.

"You know more than one now? I'm talking about the one I know. Wha used to go to Bygevalt. Which other Nirmala you know?"

"They get a girl does English with me. Creighton course."

"Well I won't know that Nirmala, dear. I could only ask about the one I know about, from Bygevalt."

"I ain see Nirmala for a long long while, girl I think Sunil seh last time he see she was pun GTV…the Bhajan show they does get on early in the morning, round four, five o'clock time."

"Sunil don't work?"

"Yes. He on probation at Scotiabank."

"Then what he doing up at four, five o'clock in the morn…"

"Preparing for work," you offer, cueing her.

"Uhn-uhn, not Sunil. An-y-bod-y but Sunil. Remember? Sunil used to come to school ten past nine every morning. Oh God, Sir Bristol woulda ketch heart-attack if Sunil din spend one more year at Campbellville…."

"Bharti," you stop her, "we didn't come here to talk about Sunil. Both of we know duh, awright?"

"Then talk then"

You wonder where to begin. Before you came, there were a million things that you wished to say to her, accusations you would have confronted her with. You wonder which one you should begin with.

"I remember this time up Mahaica," you begin "I went walking by myself on the road past Boyo shop and I here this sound, 'miaow miaow' -"

"A kitten."

"Yes, a kitten and I look inside some bush by the roadside and I find but three or four dead kitten, like tom-cat kill them and one still alive but barely moving and I pick he up and carry it to the bridge near Boyo shop and throw he in the trench"

"Ooh," she says, "that's cruel, Ravi"

"Anyway, I think it woulda just sink like that, but the current din kinda strong and you know that thing float like in slow motion like if it swimming until it float for couple minutes straight the legs moving. The other day at Sanskrit class, I ask guruji, the one from India, whether what I did was wrong, you know, adharmic, but he didn't hear me properly and went off on some rant about how Indian people will rise up and overthrow the oppressors or something like that. You think I shoulda kill it?"

"I think you shoulda given it a chance to live," she says "You just calling bad Karma for yourself."

You pause, because what you are about to bring up is going to hurt. But you go ahead anyway.

"I was reading this book - they made a movie out of it the other day, with Michael Caine - The Ciderhouse Rules and I was reading about the whole procedures for "throwing away a belly" like Auntie Sukhie would say and I read that one of the required procedures was shaving…down there."

"Whaz you point, Ravi?"

"All the time we been together, I never see you shave there except that one time, you know after you went away suddenly fuh spend that weekend with your family at Parika"

"So, I probably changed my mind one time…"

"And I been thinking since, you know, my problem, you know, shooting blanks…"

She gets up and turns her face and starts crying. You try to hold her but she shrugs you off and people are beginning to watch. You leave her there, your heart in your throat and head towards the seawall.

And there are nights along Camp Street, yes there are nights along Camp Street, when the wind from the ocean blows a heart-breaking cold, so cold that it, the very air, sometimes seems as if it's been encased in a layer of thin ice, thin, fragile, crystalline ice, and you walk, afraid of your passage, afraid that one wrong step and the whole world might shatter, and there is nothing more to be said, there are no more words left to say, and you walk, and you hope and wish and pray for rain.

2011-09-20T19:56:00.000-07:00

Note. A good friend and fellow editorial consultant working at the Vatican Publishing House informed me earlier today that an e-mailed paper from Guyana has had the Holy See in uproar for the past week. He said that he has never seen Vatican City in such turmoil since the passing of Pope John Paul. He believes that the contents of the e-mail should be made known to the world and has enlisted my aid in doing so since I belong to the alleged country of origin of said e-mail. I have been told by my friend that the Pope believes that it contains a message crucial to the events of Guyana at this time and that it should be decoded as quickly as possible. Though I post it here, I cannot vouch for its authenticity.

Ruel Albert Johnson

*****

Three Versions of Jagdeo

By Bishop Juan Edghill

"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory...full of grace and truth."

John 1.14

Justifiably, we can easily imagine him – were he conceived perhaps during the Crusades –marching triumphantly into Jerusalem, the bodies of the heathen followers of the rabid and morally corrupt murderer Muhammad piled high, their blasphemous infidel tongues silenced forever under the sweet retribution of his bloody and glistening blade of infinite justice – had that occurred, modern political science would no doubt have been spared the tropes of “Islamic Fundamentalism” and “Jihadist Terrorism”.

Ulysses – were the one whose name I proclaim been born in the time of the Ancient Greeks – would have had his legend eclipsed by a mightier one, an odyssey more epic, through a thousands Scyllas and Charybdises, the conquest of a thousand Cyclopes, even without the fixed star of a Penelope for comfort and guidance.

Abelard – had the subject of my sermon entered this mortal coil in the latter part of the 11th century – would have abandoned his ill-fated pursuit of Héloïse and turned his devotion and affection towards the very personal and intimate love, discipleship and spiritual succour to which this humble author finds himself committed.

Nativity, however, is as precise a science as it is an area of theological enquiry. Comprehensible and accountable only unto themselves, History and Divinity reserved his temporal provenance for a small, rural village on the lush, green coast of a small South American nation, Guyana, some 48 years prior to the penning of this piece. Future historians and theologians will no doubt record the precise date as the true genesis of the glorious age of the world to come.

Two Versions of Jagdeo

“[10] And there was much murmuring among the people concerning him: for some said, He is a good man: others said, Nay; but he deceiveth the people... [43] So there was a division among the people because of him.”

John 7

Even at the time of the writing of this essay – nay, this epistle, this sermon, this testimony, this revelation – Bharat Jagdeo is preparing to leave office as President of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana.

Didorus Sycophus posits, as is repeated and expanded upon by Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli in Il Principe, that no great leader is without his critics and his detractors; and Swift observed that the surest sign of the appearance of a great genius is that “the dunces are all in confederacy against him”.

Graciously, I shall not detail, only list, the calumnious arrows of dissent that have been volleyed against the burnished brass image of Bharat Jagdeo: the association with and employment of liars, drunks, turncoats, thieves, whores, whoremongers, rapists, homosexuals, murderers and pederasts; a propensity for misdirection and deceit; maltreatment of a ‘wife’ that he was not even legally married to; the coddling of murderous drug-dealers; nepotism and the selling off of state assets to friends; corruption; excessive pride and surrounding himself with sycophants; the practice of a policy of ideological racism; the suppression of free speech.

However, no matter the adversity faced by them, great men have always let their deeds rise above the false infamy thrown – like so much miasmic fecal matter – by their bitterest enemies.

In objective worldly terms, his 12-year tenure in political office was both relatively and universally transformative. While I would not prejudice the content of the seminal monograph I am currently writing as relates to the central thesis of this essay, I can comfortably relate just two of the lesser achievements of His Excellency that the objective reader may judge, ex pide Herculem, the greatness of his works, the inestimable bounty of his labour.

Let us consider his One Laptop Per Family Initiative. In an age when access to technology is as crucial as access to grain or fish was back in the Biblical times, not only has the President, in essence, given the man the fish, he has taught him to fish as well. Of course, much ado has been made about that it is a company of the Orient, Haier, which was awarded the contract to supply these laptops – these veritable loaves and fishes, this manna of modern life – to the multitude. Yet it is but a sign of the President’s willingness to reach across borders, even to the heathen and godless Chinese so that they may see reconciliation and kindness in action.

Laudable as that initiative is, its splendour but pales to the luminescence of his Low Carbon Development Strategy. In an age when the world is falling apart at the seams, when we are faced with the apocalyptic phenomenology of climate change, the President has sacrificed a great part of the patrimony of his state and estate – the blood of his rivers, the flesh of his land – so that the world should not perish but have everlasting life. Yet we have still two versions of Jagdeo, apparently at variance with each other – the corrupt and the copacetic.

Dem hemlige Frälsaren

Inherent within these two versions of Bharat Jagdeo we can find a transcendent third – out of thesis and antithesis is born synthesis, a unification greater than the sum of its ostentatiously disparate parts. For those who speak of his open association with liars, drunks, thieves, turncoats, whores, whoremongers, rapists, homosexuals, murderers, pederasts, smugglers of exotic creatures [not unlike the dove-sellers in the temple], scribes, tax-collectors, and drug dealers, I can recount a man who sat near a temple and was brought a woman accused of adultery to be stoned – his response to those who brought her was simply, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” I can recount that man also showing kindness to and breaking bread with those even of his disciples – his spiritual cabinet as it were – who would betray him, even on to the final meal before he was brutally murdered. I can recount that same man sharing the fate of crucifixion with two robbers and condemning them not. The Divine identity and purpose is clear, even if the earthly manifestations seem at first incidental – we live in age beset by apparently mindless calamity, wars and rumours of wars, famine, a time prophesied in the Bible as the end times, heralding a great Redeemer; now there emerges from an unlikely place a man who is named as Hero of the Environment, a Champion of the Earth.

Salvation cometh whence and where we least expect it: while it can be reasoned that, possessed of an omnipotence and omniscience inscrutable to human comprehension, the Great I Am could have chosen any more obvious figure in the history of our times to embody his Second Coming, the prophesied Comforter, the final advent of His Word made flesh – He could have chosen Barack Obama, for example; He could have chosen Bono – He, whose ways and motives remain eternally strange to men, has chosen Bharat Jadgdeo. Dem hemlige Frälsaren – the Secret Saviour for this age – is thus hereby revealed to the world.

Already I can hear the Pharisaic clamours of “heretic” resounding around the hollow spaces the spiritually bereft churches of today – echoes of the murmurings that filled the temples of Jerusalem 2000 years ago. I hereby assure those who murmur and those who are more inclined to the Truth, that that divination – as the one experienced by the prophet Isaiah – was preceded by revelation, and has been buttressed by subsequent proofs. For who gives himself up to looking for proofs of something he does not believe in or the predication of which he does not care about? A summary of the event of the divination and of some of the ecumenical evidences which support it, are as follows.

Summa Dialectica Divinus

“He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not.”

John 1.10-11

Surely, it is said that “But of that day and that hour, no man knoweth, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son but the Father only.” This has been taken by many eschatologists, scholars of the Parousia in particular, to mean that the knowledge of Christ’s return is unknowable and that his advent is instantaneous, citing select verses from Matthew 24, and 1 Thessalonians 4. This literal interpretation of these verses is but poor hermeneutic analysis, and runs counter to the Messianic precedent of the organic development of the body of Christ as well as the propensity of God on High to conceal the Truth of his Word in the inadequate verbiage of gospel. Even opponents of Christianity know enough of this phenomenon, the Divine eschewing of literalism, to imitate or deride it. I can recall to the attention of the learned, the infamous Coda of the heresiarch, Satornibus Adamus, the central cosmology of which was based on the numerological and Symbolist significance of the number 42. I can also draw attention to the more puerile example of the obscure French writer, R. Albert Jean-fils whose essay, La Trahison Des Clerics brutally skewered Cardinal Mazzarin – architect of the critical clerical endorsement for the reign of Louis XIV – not simply by a tongue-in-cheek satirical ‘addendum’ (purportedly written by Mazzarin himself) of the Cardinal’s theological masterpiece, Le Monarchie de Droit Divin, but also by weaving an accusatory expletive into the essay via an acrostic, coded simply by the italicization and bolding of the first letter in each substantive paragraph. (R. Albert Jean-fils did not, as was just, long survive this blasphemy.)

K’ung Fu-Tzu – that wise but pagan Oriental from the country of Haier – once stated that “If I hear the Way of Truth in the morning, I am content to die in the evening.’ I hereby present to you the Way and the Truth and the Life not simply as it was revealed to me, but also – in summary – those independent proofs of his existence which Jehovah has made manifest in the life of His Second Son, Bharat Jagdeo. I will simply say that the first revelation came to me one afternoon as I was speaking with the President at State House – he was commending and rewarding me for my fairness and tolerance in the execution of my duties as Chairman of the Ethnic Relations Commission. I had just secured His Excellency’s generous personal donation to my carrying out the Lord’s work, when a shaft of golden light descended from what I believed to be the window; when I got up to close the windows I saw that all were closed already and that the shaft of light emanated from what seemed to be the wall itself although there was no hole in it. I looked back at His Excellency and he seemed all on fire and I heard a mighty voice from on high say, ‘Behold, Your Worship, my Spirit made Flesh and in Whom I am Well Pleased. I charge you, Juan, to proclaim His glory in all the public spaces of the World, even unto Providence, for the Stadium there pleaseth me as a venue for His praises to be sung, even unto the multitude.’ I recall only picking up my briefcase containing the President’s monthly gift of charity, and leaving with a greater sense of Enlightenment than I’ve ever felt before. The sage, George of Burgos writes of the mixed fortunes of those who have been privileged to witness directly the glory of God – “Saul who was blinded on the road to Damascus; the rabbi Simon ben Azai, who saw Paradise and died; the famous soothsayer John of Viterbo, who went mad when he was able to see the Trinity; the Midrashim, abominating the impious who pronounce the Shem Hamephorash, the secret name of God; Nils Runeberg who wandered through the streets of Malmö, praying and who died soon after of the rupture of an aneurysm”. I escaped my revelation sighted, sane, and sound of body, and set myself the task of seeking the proofs of this euangelion, some of which I share now with you:

Unity is the name of the village in which Bharat Jagdeo was born. This is not a simple fact, nor an accident of origin. The thread of oneness is one that runs through the President’s life, including his current status as a single man – one unbroken by his supposed marriage to Varshnie Jagdeo since it was sanctioned neither by the Church nor by the Laws of Guyana – as well as the fact he as emerged as the greatest leader of a country whose motto is “One People, One Nation, One Destiny.”

Numerical symbolism is also crucial in supporting my divination of the Divine Nature of Bharat Jagdeo. In no aspect of his worldly genesis is proof of Bharat Jagdeo’s divinity more apparent than in the date of his birth. The symbolism of his being born on the 23 of the first month is rooted not only in the hierarchical numeracy associated with the Trinity (1-2-3), but also in the sequentialism of the New Genesis 1,2,3. And numerologists and mystics throughout the ages have long written and observed the place of 23 in significant global events. (viii)

Temporal strife, and this is my final proof for now, is often the soil and loins from which divinity springs,humanitas the womb and loam of impeccabilitas. That Bharat Jagdeo was born in 1964, the year that marked the beginning of the Satanic regime under which Guyana was held for 28 years (vix) is significant that his 28th year brought freedom to this land – his ascension then to the position of greatness from that point onwards was as if foretold in scripture. And today, today, I – a simple man, a postman and priest – am charged with bringing you the news that while we may be losing a President, we are gaining a Redeemer, a Saviour… for he is Lord, he is Lord, he is Lord.

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.

Hosanna in excelsis.

Juan Edghill, Episcoparus*

Notes

* It should be stated that in light of the preceding epoch-defining Christological revelation, a special Vatican committee has been convened to initiate the mechanism necessary for the instant and precedent setting non-posthumous canonization of the author, as a first step towards his eventual automatic elevation to the Papacy, subsequent of course to the terrestrial departure of Pope Benedict the Sixteenth. On his ascension, His Worship – the Bishop formerly known as Juan Edghill – shall thereafter be officially referred to as Pope Juan the Turd. We strongly and enthusiastically believe that, judging from the Bishop's record of achievement, this is an honorific he richly deserves even now.

Knockin on Heaven’s Door…

2011-08-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

“Half my life is in books' written pages,
Lived and learned from fools and from sages
You know it’s true –
All the things come back to you…”
Aerosmith

So, this is it. The rundown. The race to some other artificial fucking finish line but truth be told this is really the real one, the homestretch before the foretold rapture or calamity that 2012 is supposed to be.

I’ll be thirty-one years old in one month and one week, and so I guess it’s still safe to say that there’re more stories inside me, more than the simple twenty or so that I’ve put out.

Around my bare new apartment are the perfect props for a scene such as this, for the character I’ve become: rum, the obligatory bottle of Coke, books, a pen, the camera, the computer, no other furniture but my workstation and the chair in which I’m sitting, half a dozen coffee cups but no coffee and no stove to make it on as yet.

They support this premise that at times seems more fictive than documentary, that there is this writer and he is involved in something deep and meaningful, not simply something more added to the world but something which holds up a mirror to the world’s face and by that reflection causes the world to change.

I’m listening to my ‘Contemplative Playlist’, an eclectic bunch of shit that features anything from Enya to Alicia Keys but the only music that’s touching my soul right is classic rock – Meatloaf, Aerosmith, The Eagles, and Lynyrd “Free Motherfuckin’ Bird” Skynyrd.

And I swear to you, as I am typing this, Meatloaf is plaintively crooning “Some days it don’t come easy/Some days it don’t come hard/Some days it don’t come at all and these are the days that never end”. Those latter days, those days when nothing comes at all, I’ve had a few years of those, three to be exact, ever since I wrenched those words that comprised my premature last book out of myself.

These days however, the words may not be coming easy but the things which start them are, the ideas, the epiphanies which tap into a particular vein, veins which spout both blood and ore, the gilded gush of words that I know I can look back upon on any day in the eternity that exists from the moment they find their way on to the page and still see them as worthy of sharing.

But this is the thing – what’s the fucking point? I keep thinking about the inimitable Borges, and his particularly excruciating imprisonment, being trapped inextricably within Borges, and I begin to see some of that imprisonment myself. I personally know about six people, possibly seven, who I can put into a room and be able to listen to – from them – a cogent discussion of my work, my tiny oeuvre. There may be about ten times that fucking number who’ve actually read my work in the first place, and ten times that number who know I’m a writer and who might have read this blog, or an article or two, but when it comes to the literary work are woefully unaware.

Sometimes indeed it feels like the songs says, that I’m frozen here on the ladder of my life, that no fucking thing will give, that the veil may be thin but it’s elastic and the most each probing scribble of the pen can do is stretch it to a certain impenetrable tension.

This may be my personal mythologizing of myself, this identification not only with the metaphysical aesthetes whom I admire and emulate – Borges and Nabokov – but also those motherfuckers who lived and wrote in blood: Hemingway, Greene, London, Roth, Mailer.

I think that writing should be should come from life, a deep engagement with it, its vices and glories. After ten years at this, pour exemple, I believe that, to paraphrase Nietzsche, intoxication is a prerequisite for great art, the ticket and the train to this transcendental experience and while the shamans of the past had their peyote or whatnot, I have my little bottles of D’Aguiar’s Xtra Mature Rum (Premium Blend), the aptly colloquialised ‘grenade’ because halfway into one of those fuckers on a good night, Aerosmith blasting ‘Dream On’ in my ear, and the page explodes, beautifully, rapturously.

Yeah, and I love women. Not in the pejorative sense used of those misogynistic skuntholes who make a sport of the amount of vaginas they’ve entered which is usually just a compensatory mechanism for cock or esteem issues or to erase the memory and implication of that juvenile mutual masturbation with the buddy friend incident/phase or more ominously that hazy nightmare when Uncle or Daddy got really creative with the tickling… nah, I love women in the Hank Moody sense of the term, in that I want to inhale them, wrap myself in them, taste them on the tip of my tongue, like some panty fetishist let loose in a girl's dorm five minutes after the Rapture.

Misogyny, machismo, men’s clubs, anything that involves the elevation of status exclusively or primarily based on the possession of a cock is really, by implication, gay; and if you’re a man and subscribe to any of that shit, you might as well book yourself as a model for the pending global Mapplethorpe revival that the rising popularity of faux-hawks and Kanye West glasses, and Kanye West, seems augury of.

There is one great benefit to being a man, and that is – and I mean no disrespect to my friends of the fudge-packing persuasion – to interact, to converse, to connect with, to make sweet slow love to, to create life in conjunction with these heavenly fucking creatures that we happen to find ourselves stranded with on this remote island in this great ocean that is the universe.

And I love my son. For the past four years, I’ve been working on this story, the theme of which is fatherhood and I suppose the fulcrum on which the piece rests (and you there, in the back of the class, I hope you’re taking notes) is the paragraph which reads.

“Fatherhood is this strange gift, an ecstasy comingled with something subtly darker, this inextricable grief existing at the very core of it, the spectre of the sadness of Laocoön, a nebulous, miasmal fear seeping ever outward in some blind, unconscious quest to poison and corrupt the heart.”

Bleak I know but it is also sublime, this thing that comes over me in his presence, this quiet awe that I cannot recall ever encountering in literature, and I realise now that in all the books I’ve read, poetry or prose, there is nothing there about the quotidian bliss and dread of fatherhood – this thing so powerful that it can only really be communicated in extremes, the melodrama of movies like The Champ.

Tonight again, I’m going to get back to the writing. These days, like I said, the ideas are flowing – in the past week, I’ve sketched the outline for a movie script, a sci-fi story, and a short fiction retelling of a Greek legend. The jury may still be out on the great motherfucking why of it all, the vexing question of use or legacy, but when that moment comes you sing it, you sing the shit out of that song that comes through you, because without it, everything else, the women, fatherhood, manhood will not be done the justice they deserve.

Dream on, dream on, dream on…

Words/worth

2011-05-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

I see him every couple months maybe, although the interval can be years at times. He is tall and thin, the fluidity and rhythm of his motion retained from the era when bellbottom jeans and afros were in vogue, without irony, and the particular cadence of his speech is a sort of poetry in itself, a music, like jazz, that inspired or inflected, without words ever being really necessary.

He follows my progress keenly, sincerely, the various women he has seen me with, my letters in the papers which he reads at the National Library, my books of which I may have given him one.

It’s an uneven acquaintance. His story over the perhaps eight years I’ve known him has never really changed, and he himself seems ageless. I listen with rote but unaffected interest about his life in the seventies, when he was the “first boutique owner in Guyana”, the woman he had who broke his heart when she left him for his brother, his slow mastery over the production of ‘bush medicine’ – most importantly, however, is that he has written a book that will save Guyana.

He started and finished it sometime in the eighties, the product of years of untrained studying of the economic and political system, and its manifestations and permutations, but when he took it to the government, they sent him away, when he took it to them big businessmen they sent him away, and now the country still in problems and people still suffering but unless somebody willing to pay him for his works, his words, the book is staying right there at home.

The first time I heard his story, I listened with no small amount of bemusement, and with the image in my head of the itinerant poet/calypsonian, B. Wordsworth, of Naipaul’s Miguel Street. Sometimes, if we meet at Campsite, I buy him coffee.

This last time when I run into him at the bus park, after a couple of solitary drinks at a bar, I get to know more about him than I’ve ever been told in the previous countless encounters, although the boutique and the book still make an appearance. I learn about another woman from decades ago, a young and fierce and passionate Venezuelan with whom he lived for four months in Caracas, who would leap out of bed ready to rage against any perceived slight against the integrity of her people. I learn that at nineteen, he overcame his epilepsy by sheer willpower only to have it triggered again when his heart was broken at twenty six by the woman who betrayed him with his own blood. I learn that he is sixty years old.

In his hand, he has a small plastic bottle, the kind that they sell a quarter of rum or vodka in – it contains a concoction that is guaranteed to keep my ‘boy’ hard, and that since he missed a sale and since it’s me, he would give it to me for half the price. At this point, a bus comes up and I – declining his offer – get on and it pulls out of the park, him standing there, drawn and lost with the bottle still in his hand.

On the bus home, I am exhausted and melancholy and empty, and within that vacuum drifts an image, myself thirty years from now, in some public space at minutes to midnight, desperately poor and hungry and earnest, hawking God knows what, harbouring some great novel meant to save the world, the water-stained pages in an aging briefcase in the corner of a room infested with mice and roaches and a dozen other creeping, gnawing things that only a handful of people ever really know the names of. The sad fear that this inspires passes, but not completely, and with every step in which I falter, I know it will return.

I write alone, within the cavernous belly of the night, and I say truthfully to you – in full consciousness of my capacity for arrogance, even to point of hubris – that what drives it is never anything that aims for nobility or self-sacrifice or acclaim, but instead this thing within the core of me that says, fuck the personal consequences, these words are necessary, that without them this necrotic entropy will spread and consume us all.

We writers in this place are descendants of an ancient and tragic stock, the sons and daughters of the Sybil, and all our grandest work fated perhaps to be as nothing more than a handful of sand let slip through the fingers, than something written upon fallen leaves in the wind.

Here we go again...

2011-03-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

... me entering another long, dark teatime of the soul, the place I've always produced my best writing from. It's inevitably a sombre place, a lonely one, the enormous night to borrow a phrase from Neruda (in translation, "noche tan grande"); if good writing is enlightening it is perhaps necessarily so because it emerges out of obscurity, out of darkness.

We write to remove the mist and shadow from our own souls, the dark veils from our eyes and hope by so doing remove them also from the eyes and souls of others. Even dark literature has to be seen as ironic, The Wasteland not as a celebration of despair but a light shone on the spreading necrosis of the age.

During the past few weeks, the final words of that particularly bleak book, Gatsby have for some reason been floating back to me, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.” The thing is, I think maybe that the tide, that current has changed and we find ourselves being borne ceaselessly into the future.

Every time that new phone comes out that we have to have, every time Facebook updates its features, every new alleged improvement upon something that was itself an improvement upon something else, you find yourself struggling desperately and impossibly to hold on to a bit of anything that once was, anything that became for a nanosecond against eternity important to you and that this age says that you need to let go of, move on, upgrade.

There was an age when we necessarily created certain things to accommodate our incapacity to comprehend eternity, concepts like Heaven and Hell and Karma. And when those things we created became corrupted, when our disbelief outgrew them, we became to imagine ourselves supermen, entities that had no need to accommodate the infinite because we could out do it. Fifty years ago it was the atomic bomb with its practically infinite capacity for destruction, today it’s the Internet, this endless rabbit-hole that we enter and get lost in while we infinitely expand and contract ourselves, 140 characters or less echoing through the Universe.

There is a story by Borges, The Witness, in which he describes the final moments of a man dying during the Dark Ages in England. The crux of the story, the Borgesian epiphany, if I’m allowed to sound a little like the pseudo-academic douchebags I loathe, can be found in the lines which read:

“Events far-reaching enough to people all space, whose end is nonetheless tolled when one man dies, may cause us wonder. But something, or an infinite number of things, dies in every death, unless the universe is possessed of a memory, as the theosophists have supposed.”

With the advent of the Internet, we did in fact imbue our collective existence with a memory, millions of gigabytes of it in fact, and with that feat accomplished, our self-created persistence of memory, this space where nothing is really ever erased, this thing that trumps both mirrors and paternity in multiplying and perpetuating the universe, we then proceeded to create ways of forgetting.

And it’s not just about forgetting things, objects, miniscule events, that "bar of sulphur in a mahogany desk", but we forget fucking people as well. The thing is, if our concepts of Heaven and Hell or Karma, of eternal reward or punishment, have been casualties of our conquering of the Infinite, (or our fear of it which may in fact constitute our only real concept of it), another casualty has been Love.

Whether it’s speed-dating or random Internet hookups, we no longer linger long enough to love anyone really, perhaps not even ourselves. The world now contracted, turned into this giant social particle accelerator, we rush into, through and away from each other at a velocity that has been unprecedented in history, beating on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the future. Whether you’re in Georgetown or Port of Spain or New York, and you’re logged into this particular universe, you get this steady diet of shifting identities, wavering genders, celebrity hookups that last a month and while the self-righteous may be quick to diagnose this as the disease, it’s simply the symptom, these people themselves as much victims as you or the beautiful woman that you fucked last weekend and will never touch again, without remorse, without a pang of regret, without the faintest sense of loss.

And it’s no good acknowledging it, this illness, and hoping that you can go back to a time when shit was slower, when you could savour life, and it’s just going to revert, via that reminiscence, to the way things were. The problem is, that for my generation, this is our Platonic cave, man, our Matrix, our Maya – our consciousness has awakened in it, has been awakened by it, and the next generation will be or already has been born into it.

The only thing that can save us perhaps is Love, not the larger communal concept which has died, but a personal reengagement with it. And yeah, I can see you in the back row smirking and muttering, “J’accuse, you hopeless romantic cunt,” under your breath, and I raise my hand and say guilty as charged. But even so, it’s a relative romanticism, the sort of thing that may have been less than ideal, if not immoral in times gone by – it’s a pragmatic romanticism that recognizes that Love can be found along the long road to perdition that this life can sometimes be, not at the end of it nor making the journey easier.

For me it’s a personal romanticism that looks in the rear view mirror and sees a path strewn with grief and beauty, moments that should have lasted longer, the artificial sepia tone and sentiment of a digital picture taken just a week ago.

I recognize the potential for the appearance of hypocrisy in this. I am as much part of this machinery as anyone else, more than most in fact – I commune with friends online, I flirt with women, I create alliances, I conduct business, I sermonize as perhaps I’m sermonizing now. And like most people today, when I unplug myself from the Matrix, it often doesn’t matter because you are so essentially programmed to behave almost precisely as you were when actually plugged in; to act otherwise is to submit yourself to the most universal ailment we have at present, the cognitive dissonance of the disconnected.

But I give myself credit for recognizing my sickness. Fuck, the recognition itself may be the disease, recognition of the fact that there was a time when people were better at love than we are in this time when a love that does not change with time has become quaint, quixotic, exotic, an anomaly, an anachronism in the age of digital subscriber lines.

Love, an individual reconnection to it when it has been effectively removed from the Zeitgeist, is the only thing that can truly anchor us. Everything else that we know flows with the current towards the inevitable cacophonic ocean of oblivion that seems to be the future ahead.

Still, it is something we’ve become ashamed of, particularly when relationship, the vessel that holds its fluid, tenuous substance together, fractures. You delete the pictures of you together, you change your relationship status, you unfriend each other, remove your expressions of intimacy, and you imagine that the heart works the same way. And for a while it does, because that is your reality, except that inevitable hour comes when you’re unplugged, that fleeting moment where the dissonance stops, and that is when you are most in tune with your ancestral self, when you recognize this thing that was once more or less universally identifiable as love but which is absent in the world that you inhabit. And then you plug in again and the moment passes.

I have plunged headlong into this life at times, trying to race toward this future that I’d created for myself in some juvenile fantasy half a lifetime ago. And to achieve maximum velocity I’ve discarded things, people, values, often not intentionally, often despite my best efforts to hold on to them. I’ve used past pain as an excuse to jettison women from my life, but I’ve come to realize it as false.

Last year, I found my true anchor, and for a while the old rules no longer applied, try as I might to enforce them. In the end, I lost her still, but not before I’d been effectively deprogrammed. Plugged back in, the dissonance now comes from existing within the illusion that we all inhabit, the frenzied pointless pace of it. I’ve done the deletions, the retractions, all the formal actions for the most part, but I’ve seen it simply as manifestations of the cowardice of the age, when love has become something less than fucking epic. It’s nothing more than a preparation for another plunge, a streamlining and the truth is, as good as I can be at it, I’m not up for it. I’ve lost the best woman I could have hoped to be with on my own journey to where the fuck ever I am headed, and my cardinal since then has been to try to discard what has been left, to make it appear less than it is. The anchor may be gone but the chain remains.

There Will Be Blood...

2010-10-21T19:38:00.000-07:00

This is the thing about the writing life, the artistic writing life. The better you are at something other than the writing that you know you've wrung from your heart, the more that things pulls you in, the more it provides the means for the other things in life that matter to exist.

I like to tell myself that what I do professionally is at least related to my writing. But that's skunt, and deep inside me I know it. Of course it looks the same, , but 'editorial services' goes beyond even the 'hack's hired prose' that Walcott complained about. It's as much akin to my literary work as a whorehouse mattress is to a marital bed - but like any whoredom it pays, and if you're experienced and know a couple tricks more than the average whore, you get to charge premium fucking rates, pun of course intended. And I'm damn good at it.

Maybe this is a confessional, therapeutic writing of the sort that those anachronistic hippies recommend in the place of real work, real writing, the deep shit that they can never access because it involves the psychic equivalent of plunging your hands deep into hot blood and entrails that ultimately always belong to you, and that's the same fucking place that "therapeutic writing" is intended to get you away from.

Tonight I watched the woman that I am going to marry (the triumph of hope, but love as well, over experience) collect third prize in the annual National Drawing competition, just weeks before her first solo exhibition opens at the National Art Gallery, and I found myself thinking that it might not be so bad after all to just submit, to continue the whoredom and fade into the shadow of her light, and the shadow of the light of my son and whatever brilliance he seems destined for.

Not that she would let me, but there is a certain seductive comfort in that thought, and I suppose the only thing that saved me from it was rereading a note sent to me from a friend I've never met in person, another writer, sent a few days ago, months after I had posted an excerpt of a story - one that I am still working on - in my Notes on Facebook. It reads in its entirety:

"just needed to tell you i finally read the excerpts from the paternity test (i sometimes wait to read something until i in a better place 'cause i know i'll like it and doh want interference) and your words are so beautiful. i like the excerpts (dis)ordered and fragmented as they are and assuming tha's intentional; love how these paragraphs tell the story. i'd love to see the finished txt to see if i feel differently, especially if not arranged the way you did in february... found myself crying so suddenly and unexpectedly as i read...

thank you.
walk good."

I responded with heartfelt gratitude, but in light of everything perhaps not gratitude enough. It is these miniscule acts of appreciation which individually serve to tip the balance, to awaken you from the lotus-dream of success, to show you that the journey is far from over and it is one that you are bound to travel, even to an uncertain end.

So this isn't therapy. It's the steeping of cold hands in lukewarm water, acclimatising my fingers for the heat of my own gut, and when I'm done I know that somewhere inside some ulcerous bleeding will be touched off, but since when has any great writing been bloodless?

President's College

2010-07-05T07:14:00.001-07:00

“Thought of going back
But all I'd see are strangers’ faces
And all the scars that love erases,
But as my mind walks through those places
I’m wonderin’, what’s come of them.”
Neil Diamond

I am going on thirty years old. I am a writer. I have a six year old son whose smile is the lifeblood of the thing that will emerge and endure from the ashes of my marriage. I have found beyond expectation this beautiful woman who is also for me a symbol of rebirth, of the persistence of hope.

A few weeks ago, at a birthday party, I introduced her to the one close friend that I have consistently been in contact with for two thirds of my life, Littleton Scott, my batch mate from President’s College. As relatively little as we interact, Little and I, whenever we do, it is always with the ease of a conversation that has been interrupted by a brief telephone call, or the ordering of the next round of beers, not as if weeks or months or tumultuous and life-changing have passed.

There is this surreal compression of time, almost, as if one minute we are preparing to go down to a breakfast of watery tea and bread and jam in the dining hall; the next we are having a mini reunion at his house, his mother’s cooking wafting in the air; the minute after that, running into him on the street and introducing him to my family; and after that chatting about the fact that he’s long friends with the man my ex-wife is seeing. This state of things is unique to one particular group of people: my friends from PC.

It is hard for me not see that place, President College, as Edenic in some ways, a place of genesis, innocent even in its corruptions, its acts of violence, its trysts. I remember being invited to PC in 2003 for an event commemorating my winning of the Guyana Prize and Leanna Damond’s winning of Miss Guyana, and presenting this intellectualized lecture on President’s College as a microcosm of the diversity of larger society. Looking back on it now, I see that my intent was good, reflective of my concerns about the divisions in the society back then, but I imagine presenting that talk in front of my batch mates and coming back to sit among them and being told, good naturedly, that I was basically spouting a crock of shit.

That talk was sociological, and like most things sociological, it was incapable of capturing and reflecting the soul of the place, which was really what I wanted to communicate to those children, most of whom would have entered the school after I left or were too young when I was there to remember me.

I should have spoken about the concrete things that only the inscrutable alchemy of time would transmute into the sort of abstraction that speaks to all of us who lived there. For example, on certain nights during certain times of the year, under the white streetlights, the road would be covered with crawling black beetles, which in our innocent cruelty we would pick up and terrorise a stuttering Marlon Chichester with, Chich who is now a burly senior officer in the Coast Guard.

There were those absurd moments of intimacy and jealousy and pain that were ultimately ephemeral but which did not seem so in the immediacy and sense of eternity of youth. Like the time Tracy Smith and I sat in the swing for hours not saying anything the night after she danced close to Eon David in a party, Tracy who everybody had a crush on and who was notorious before that incident for her signature dance characterised by the swinging dangerous knees that repelled any grinding advance. Or the time that Samantha Stephens gave me a backball of all of ten seconds on the bridge but which caused a slight rift between Jody, now Ade, that was thankfully healed before he left the school.

Recalling PC is for me is to recall Walcott’s quoting of Vallejo as preface to one of the chapters in “Another Life”,

“All have left the house, actually, but truly all have remained. And it is not the memory of them that remains, but they themselves. .. The steps have gone, the kisses, the forgiveness, the crimes. What continues in the house is the foot, the lips, the eyes, the heart. The denials and the affirmations, the good and the evil, have dispersed. What remains in the house, is the subject of the act.”

PC as a subject has appeared a few times in my work, twice explicitly. In the story, “The Blacka” from Ariadne and Other Stories, it is ironically a counterpoint to the Edenic space of my childhood in Tucville Terrace, and that presentation is patently false, deliberately fictive. The PC that has appeared most truthfully in my writing is presented in a poem called “Eve and Moonlight” which I wrote a few years after leaving school.

In what is now recognisably a perhaps too self-consciously literary manner, I began the poem with the recreation of the landscape of the space as Paradise, granted a compromised version of it...

“Pishon, the straight, unwinding trench that stretched
its schoolgirl's brown, satin ribbon of water – its length
growing as tie-dyed as each season's green growth of weeds

would allow – across the school compound; watering barren mango trees,
and jamoon giants that grew wan with their want of purple
(the dead god's colour) fruit. Our linear, lesser Eden!”

To what I believe is my credit, the central part of the poem , deliberately reverts to less ‘poetic’ language, a reduction, even degradation, of the metaphor of the Edenic ideal...

“Once, this exile returned to Eden –
From the old bus the metal barrier seems,
in the hot glaze of day, a flaming sword

that, forgetting its duty, points to the sky.
In the guard hut, in a weathered old PGS uniform,
a half-senile, wrinkled, brown cherub sits and smiles.

The voices mingle, probing, sifting
through torn and perjured memories,
and the strange faces of familiar strangers.

The unshorn grass has grown, beard-like, around
the old Camp David canteen across the trench...
...on that night when we laid, upside-down to each other,
along that thin wooden length of bridge the star-filled trench
below us – above, the inky, liquid sky – and kissed

a kiss filled with all the warmth of the enormous
night, and laughter, and our own kept records of
how many times our teeth had clicked together.”

I want to think that what is essentially PC exists not in some lofty ideal, but in the end results of a material reductionism, objects, places, flesh, imbued with a spirit of sorts that is inextricably linked to that object and somehow particularly evocative of our experience there, the subjects of the innumerable acts. For example, no other thing about PC on Facebook has elicited as much discussion as the picture of a plate of those SIMAP cookies that were served to us for snacks.

It is the sum of those endowed objects – the cookies, the fibre mattresses, the drops of water from the overhead tank, the claybrick flooring of the basketball court – which define the PC experience for us, this thing that is at once both ephemeral and eternal. I believe that it is precisely because of the fact that the experience exists in these things that the bond shared by our alumni transcends generations. For example, the party at which I introduced Little to my girlfriend was the birthday party of a young woman, Lavonia Springer, neither of us was at PC the same time with.

Or, another example, seven years ago I participated in a writer’s conference in Toronto, and made contact with a friend of a friend, the former who happened to be married to a PC alumnus called Michael Hoosein. While I had met Stella, the wife, once in Georgetown, I had never met Michael – who left PC before I entered – but once he and I started interacting, Stella started to mockingly complain that it was much the same when Michael and his PC batch-mates got together, and that she felt excluded from the conversation.

I believe this is the sort of story that is enacted, in different variations, across the world perhaps on a daily basis. Of course there is the occasional alumni one would notice as devoid of this particular identification with PC, and I could name a couple, but said douches are more the exception than the rule.

I am writer. I’ve wrestled for a long time with trying to encapsulate PC in thought and thence into words upon a page. Beyond the inadequate references in my writing, as noted earlier in this also inadequate attempt, I have gone no further than hearing the magisterial voice of Richard Harris, as Marcus Aurelius, resounding in my head, raspingly delivering the words,

“There was once a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish...”

I believe that there was once a dream that was PC, something that transcended the socialist Utopian elitism for which it was intended, this incidental element that failed the quasi-eugenicist benchmark that was set for it, and in that failing emerged as something better.

A quarter century after it began, that fragile whisper that is the true dream of PC has been effectively stifled by the machinations of a political myopia that has spread like a necrotic mass across not only our alma mater but the very society within which it existed, which provided it with the most crucial of the diverse elements which constituted it – us.

What continues to elude the vision of the myopic however is that that dream, the voice propelling that whisper has been invested in all of us who have lived it, who now irrevocably embody it, and while we have departed the house of our genesis we all truly have remained. The anniversary approaches – I can think of no better time to let it be known that the dream still exists.

The Murder of Words, Part One: The Death of Literature

2010-04-22T15:17:00.000-07:00

“Stalin’s greatest crime was the murder of words”
Eric Hoffer

On the 22nd of February, one day before the fortieth anniversary of the Republic, I attended a public symposium on the role of culture in Mashramani. At the sparsely attended event, I listened to a presentation delivered by Al Creighton, part of which dealt with the development of the literary arts over the four decades since 1970.

Granted the summation necessarily dictated by the time constraints, it was somewhat surprising nevertheless when Mr. Creighton reached the end of his presentation with no mention made of the Guyana Prize for Literature; surprising particularly due to the presenter’s long tenure as Secretary to the Guyana Prize Management Committee.

My first criticisms of the Guyana Prize were made almost ten years ago. Those criticisms in summary were that the reality of the awarding of the prizes went against a significant aspect of the purpose of the prize, the development and reward of Guyanese writing at home and abroad since the majority of the winners were overseas based writers, due primarily to better resources for the development and publication of their work, resources denied local writers. I should also add freedom from fear of the consequences of free expression.

The same year in which I won the Prize was the same year in which I started working at the Guyana Chronicle, the same year in which I was invited to the first Caribbean-Canadian Literary Expo in Toronto. It was the same year I authored a document on behalf of the editorial department of the Chronicle outlining the objections of the staff to the interference by the Office of the President, including within that document the provisions of the Declaration of Chapultepec against which said interference constituted a contravention, Guyana being a signatory of that declaration. It was the same year that I was denied a place on Guyana’s delegation to CARIFESTA VIII in Suriname, despite there being a literary contingent.

In 2006, despite being an active part of the initial deliberations for the planning of Guyana’s participation, I was to learn shortly before the event itself that I was not part of the literary contingent of Guyana’s delegation to CARIFESTA IX in Trinidad and Tobago. Some consultancy work, nevertheless, facilitated my observation of, if not official participation in, that year’s CARIFESTA.

An interesting anecdote: on arrival at Piarco, I met the late Minister of Education, Desiree Fox. After learning that I was not, unlike her, part of Guyana’s contingent for the event, the Minister was perplexed for a moment before asking, “Well, are you still writing?”. In the interest of the continuation of the always cordial relationship I had enjoyed with the Minister, I refrained from asking if the “still writing” qualification was one met by the members of the official literary contingent. We subsequently took a taxi together down to the CARIFESTA Secretariat in Port-of-Spain, the organisers not having seen fit to provide an official escort for the foreign dignitary.

In retrospect I should be perhaps be grateful that the launching of my collection of short stories, Fictions, Volume One, was included on the official programme of the CARIFESTA X held in Guyana, although my name was notably absent from any other official literary event during the festival. I am not however holding my breath for inclusion on the literary delegation for CARIFESTA XI.

My point is that I don’t mind the personal exclusion per se – whatever slight delusional Messianic complex I possess thrives on that sort of individual disenfranchisement. Also it provides more than enough evidence of perennial sycophancy, incompetence and outright idiocy in the administration when I do make some sort of challenge to the powers that be.

For example, I can – as I am doing now – ask the Ministry of Culture to release the names and literary qualifications of the members of the literary contingent for CARIFESTA VIII and IX, as well as the criteria for selection, and not expect a straight answer from the newly appointed Director of Culture, Dr. James Rose, the person to whom the Minister will no doubt direct to give a public response, if any. I can say, as I am doing now, that the selection process for the entire CARIFESTA contingents under question bordered upon corruption, and no proof to effectively negate that charge would be forthcoming.

My problem is what I consider a concerted effort to completely extinguish the already weak flame of literary expression in Guyana as appears to be happening now, and which the local media seems to be blissfully insensitive to. The Guyana Prize for Literature has gone missing for an entire cycle – the last prizes were the 2006 awards, given in 2007, and the subsequent one should have been in 2008. If the Pulitzer Prizes skip a year in America, or the Giller in Canada, or the Booker in the UK, there would be grounds for a national scandal. So far, no public explanation has been given by the Prize Committee for the absence of the awards, not even a peep of interrogation by the Stabroek News which carries a weekly column by the Secretary of the Prize.

The Guyana Prize awards a maximum of US $21,000 in prize money, in addition to the expenses associated with the hosting of the ceremony, and transportation for the overseas based awardees and judges and perhaps miscellaneous administrative expenses which should amount to roughly an additional US $10,000 total.

In contrast, the President’s US $100,000 annual commitment to a regional publishing house seems to have been activated with the recent launch of the Guyana Classics series, by the unceremoniously named Caribbean Publishing House. The books were not edited or printed in the region, much less Guyana, nor are they currently available to local readers. There is no auditing of the print figures, and no transparency of process. If a contractor charges the government $10 million for a bridge that only costs $5 million, there’s going to be a picture of that bridge on the cover of Kaieteur News if a whiff of that gets out; the annual commitment to the publishing house which does not have any apparent verifiable existence is worth some $20 million.

And of course, there was not even an attempt at sourcing contemporary writing for publication or republication, particularly from local writers, with some vague commitment towards this end slated for when the current cycle of Guyana classics is through, some three years from now.

So instead of sending US $21,000 (often less) of taxpayer money biennially overseas, the administration has committed to send US $100,000 overseas annually, in the name of the further development of Guyanese literature. And somehow this makes sense to, or does not register any concern with, the independent media, civil society, cultural activists and the political opposition.

At the end of the presentations, I asked Mr. Creighton about the Guyana Prize and was told, along with the rest of the audience, that an announcement would be made “soon”. This was two months ago. To be fair to the academic, the Guyana Prize Committee does not control the purse strings, but a principled stand should be taken in light of what is tantamount to the erasure of the national prize for literature, particularly in light of the fact that every other area of the Arts receives significant attention while there is absolutely no mechanism to support the development of creative writing. But a mouth, to quote Martin Carter, is always muzzled by the soup* it eats to live.

Derek Walcott, in ‘Codicil” wrote of his experience in Trinidad, noting “the best minds root like dogs for scraps of favour.” It is a sad realisation for me to watch the same thing happen here. This sort of absurdity thrives on two things, ignorance and silence. Those who don’t know can’t do anything, and those who know are silenced by fear or self-interest or both. Unless something is said about it, unless we protest against the systematic murder of words, this necrotic silence is going to spread throughout the entire society until it stifles all of us.

(The above is a first draft of an essay, part of a series called “The Murder of Words” about issues of freedom of expression and writing in Guyana.)

*Sorry. I meant “food”.

An Update

2010-04-19T13:50:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago, I decided to do what I've never done before in my life. I opened up the short stories and novellas that I've been working on for the past two years - in some cases, longer - and showed them to someone.

For the first time, I didn't feel any sort of apprehension in showing my work in its rawest, most incomplete form; I wasn't concerned about having to offer any explanations, or apologies; I wasn't afraid of losing someone close because of the potential that they would be blind to what is essentially me at my most basic.

Writing is hard work. Literary writing is harder. But sustained literary writing in contemporary Guyana seems so impossible at times as to be foolhardy to even attempt. I can only imagine how Quixotic I appear to so many people, the pen I always hold in my hand, a lance, charging ahead on the increasingly frail Rocinante of my past achievements.

Around her however - this person I allowed into the virtual artist's studio that a few folders on my laptop constitute - this thing that I have set out to do achieves meaning again, even as ill-formed and transient as the ideas seem to me when I try to seem them from any perspective outside of my own head.

Not, perhaps, that I should have expected less. In the past two months I've come as close as one person can to another, I believe, in the sensing of thoughts, of a matching rhythm of emotion. My affairs, since the breakdown and eventual dissolution of my marriage, have been many. Take this fact as boast or confession if you will, my point is that I have spent the past two years seeking something I finally came to believe was irrevocably lost. Fortunately, I've been rescued from such bleakness of perspective.

What does this mean for my writing? Everything. When this daemon - cacoethes scribendi - grabs hold of you, all other ambitions and desires become, at least for a time, as nothing. But we are human - not the demiurges that this craft makes us imagine ourselves to be - and hence subject to the reality of our incompleteness, this gravity towards an other, and often the two states are incompatible.

It is a rare blessing, therefore, to find a companion who gets it, for whom there needs to be no other explanation other than the statement of creation in progress. There has been so much I've lost since the beginning of this endeavour, so much I've realised that I had never even possessed. You begin to build your life in the ignorance and arrogance of youth, on the foundation of faith in another, and when it crumbles to shit - if you are as self-assured and egotistical as I can be - you are faced ultimately with a reflection of your own personal failure, magnified, Ozymandias standing at the pedestal of his own statue in the wasteland.

Now, after a long time, writing again makes sense to me, this grand plan that I have conceived can now be put into operation again. I cannot promise to be less ambitious - artistic mediocrity and compromise are not within my nature. But after the ash has cleared, after another enormous night has past its darkest hour, I can see my path again.

I've set a tenuous deadline for the completion of Fictions, Volume 2 as August 1st, 2010, which is going to be some two years since the completion and launch of Volume 1. In about a month or so, I will be spending a considerable deal of time away from Georgetown, both teaching writing and finishing not only Volume 2, but a triptych of novellas as well.

For all those who've followed the literary adventures of this knight errant, thank you and I assure you that your attention will be rewarded. To, Dominique Hunter, thank you for the faith you've shown - I love you, and I'm working hard on my most ambitious artistic endeavour "Eric Cartman's Greatest Hits", although it may take a few decades or so to complete; I beg your continued patience until then.

Cropper Foundation Workshop 2010

2009-10-20T07:25:00.000-07:00

THE CROPPER FOUNDATION
&
The Departments of Creative & Festival Arts and Liberal Arts
The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine

Residential Workshop for Caribbean Creative Writers

Are you the next Walcott? Naipaul? Lamming? C.L.R. James? Olive Senior? The 6h Caribbean Creative Writers’ Residential Workshop sponsored by THE CROPPER FOUNDATION, and organised in partnership with the Department of Creative and Festival Arts, and the Department of Liberal Arts, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, will take place from July 5th to July 23rd 2010 in Trinidad and Tobago. Fifteen writers who have not published a novel or collection of short stories, poems or plays will be chosen from across the Caribbean to join this year’s residential workshops.

The 2010 Workshop will focus on fiction, playwriting and poetry and will be facilitated by Professor Funso Aiyejina and Dr. Merle Hodge at a secluded writing-inducing setting location somewhere in Trinidad. Support for Caribbean Writing is an ongoing programme of The Cropper Foundation that seeks to contribute to the development of the Caribbean on many levels and in different areas of interest. The writers' workshop is part of the Foundation's effort to encourage new Caribbean literary voices by providing practical advice on the craft of writing. The workshops this year will culminate with the Launch of the first Anthology of Cropper Foundation participants’ writings – ‘Moving Right Along...’ as well as a celebration of the 10th Anniversary of THE CROPPER FOUNDATION.

Over 80 writers from Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Commonwealth of Dominica, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Caribbean Diaspora (Canada, USA, France, and UK) have competed to take part in these workshops held so far in Grand Riviere and Balandra on the eastern end of Trinidad's north coast, on Gasparee Island off Trinidad’s northwest peninsula, and in Tobago. From the participants of this workshop series, Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming (Bahamas) and Lenworth Burke (Jamaica) went on to win the Commonwealth Short Story Competition and the Jamaica Observer's Annual Fiction Award respectively; Ruel Johnson (Guyana) has won the Guyana Literature Prize 2003, Krishna Ramsumair (T&T) has published a number of short stories in local and international journals; Robert Clarke (T&T) received a Trinidad Guardian Writer of the Month award, as well as an EMA 2003 Green Leaf Award for journalism; and Tiphanie Yanique is now an Editor with “Calabash” and “Story Quarterly.”

For this year's Workshop, a maximum of fifteen participants will be selected from entries only from the Caribbean. The moderators will be novelist Dr. Merle Hodge (Crick, Crack Monkey and For the Life of Laetitia) and poet and short story writer Professor Funso Aiyejina, winner of the 2000 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa) for The Legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories. They are both lecturers at UWI, St Augustine, in the Faculty of Humanities and Education. Participants will engage with published authors and professionals from the publishing industry, as well as speakers from a variety of other disciplines including history, culture and political science. Applicants, twenty years and above, who are Caribbean nationals residing in the Caribbean, are invited to submit application forms and samples of their writing (five pages only) no later than November 15th 2009 to the following address: Writers Workshop, Department of Creative & Festival Arts, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad. Works of prose fiction, playwriting or poetry, either published or unpublished, will be considered for this workshop.

For application forms and further information, please call Dr. Dani Lyndersay (868) 663-0442; Ms. Rhoda Bharath (868) 779-7457 or Ms. Marissa Brooks 662-2002 ext. 3040 at The University of the West Indies, or email: MarissaUWI@gmail.com.

Sex and the Single Writer

2009-10-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

So I’m home alone and about to go into the self-indulgent, self-pitying pre-cathartic isolation that I resort to from time to time and – having finished all my “House” and “Two and a Half Men” DVDs – I have decided to try a new series, “Californication”, because I read somewhere that it involves a writer.

It’s Season One and before the pilot episode is finished it feels like the Universe is playing some sick joke and someone thinly disguised my life and made a series out of it – I’m now officially hooked. The thing with being a writer is that you spend so much time summing people up, categorising them, essentially type-casting them for storage and future use that there is little time for any continuous self-assessment. You spend a career dedicated to creating characters and assessing people as character types, that you begin to think that you are as, one young woman (or several, in fact) put it to me, some sort of “god”, someone above definition or characterisation.

There are moments however, and they usually occur – as is perhaps poetically just – through some encounter with creative work undertaken by someone else, that you see yourself and how fucked up you are and these are infinitely humbling. I’ve come to realise that I like the three shows listed above because I see something of myself in Gregory House, Charlie Harper and Hank Moody, the latter in particular. Were I to undertake a comparative review of the three characters, I would title it something in the vein of “The Return of the Byronic Hero”, which means in a non-fancy way that all three are colossal fuck-ups, as I am wont to be from time to time.

Of course within that ‘recognition’ there is the tacit acceptance that I am increasingly subjecting myself to categorisation as a type, and it doesn’t matter that is it is this lofty, darkly, romantic type, it is still a damn type and as a creator you shudder at the thought of you being typecast in somebody else’s work. Check out the Wikipedia definition of Byronic Hero and you see stuff like “high level of intelligence and perception”, “criminal tendencies”, “sophisticated and educated”, “self-critical and introspective”, “struggling with integrity”, “power of seduction and sexual attraction”, “a distaste for social institutions and norms”, “cynicism”, “arrogance”, “self-destructive behaviour”...all of which describe me to some greater or lesser degree.

So I’m watching Season One of “Californication” and I realise that I am a type. The basic premise of the show is that this blocked up writer with the potential to be brilliant, having produced a brilliant book or two in the past, is going through a shitty phase in his life where he drinks a lot and has sex with far too many women and is alternatively broke or flush with cash, while trying to win back the love of his ex and be a good father at the same time – Moody even has a predilection for black shirts and t-shirts matched with blue jeans. The most heartbreakingly poignant and beautiful line in the show for me is when at the end of one episode, Hank says “My family goes on without me while I drown in a sea of pointless pussy”, because it resonates with me. Not that I’m any fucking Don Juan drowning in a sea of pussy, pointless or otherwise, but from the moment you find yourself sipping on a rum and coke watching two hot women making out on your couch, you’ve got to admit that you’re at least knee-deep in it.

Abstinence is of course out of the question. Writing and sex are intertwined; “creation” and “procreation” possess the same etymological root; the existential statement of the permanence, the reality of creative writing, “the pen is” (the pen exists, is real, is present, a force) is an anagram for “the penis”, and ink (or its latest avatar, pixels) is nothing but a sort of symbolic jism on the white womb of the blank page.

Not that I haven’t tried it, the abstinence thing, because I have and genuinely, but then it becomes a thing and I have to express it and this somehow becomes an appeal for punani, perhaps even on a subconscious level, and then I get some and it feels empty and soulless afterwards and the cycle begins again. And I know why. Sex, the instinct towards it, is a biological imperative, the animal within us but we are not animal, or at least not all animal, and there is a stronger imperative which exists, “a crazy little thing called love”, and while I appreciate and can identify with the enormous amount of amazing T&A that is presented in “Californication” the moment in the show I ‘inhabit’ most completely is Hank reminiscing about time spent with his family and “Rocket Man” comes on, and I realise that I do in fact miss my earth, my wife – despite the tremendous shit we’ve put each other through – and that as utterly bacchanalian as my sex life has been over the past two years I would trade it all for one night spent tracing with my finger the curve of her spine.

Well...

2009-09-26T10:07:00.000-07:00

... that seems to have ended that argument. Thankfully.

Look, Charmaine Valere...

2009-09-23T06:10:00.000-07:00

Dear Charmaine,

I could take on this debate on several levels but let me restrict it to the literary. I am disappointed that this was the only response you could come up with relation to my queries about your poll.

First of all, I believe you have liberally embellished the qualifications and numbers of the respondents to your poll, but that is irrelevant to the greater context. Secondly, citing anonymity due to the fear of my virtual wrath is a cop-out, and an extremely weak one at that; you could have easily published some of the comments from all of these highly informed and qualified people without placing their [real] names. I agree that these people have every right to give their opinion on my book[s], but the only opinion that is represented is yours, and it is one that increasingly appears to be highly under-informed.

There are certain basic elements of literary criticism, and they are not generally summed up by the words "good to head-scratching bad." That said, what I have commended you on is your zeal in attempting to establish a critical reputation, thus leaving space for the simian act of puzzlement, the afore-mentioned head scratching. The incapacity or incompetence of the critic however is not a reliable reflection on the literary quality of the text - something I have kept in mind in my decision not to respond to the two published reviews I have seen of Fictions thus far, one of which you wrote.

Contrary to what you have implied, I have never offered any "lengthy, arrogant, incoherent explanations from a writer about his or her hintellectual intent"; this is the sort of thing I've criticised in Wilson Harris, and refuse to indulge in myself, outside of a discussion of technique in a writing class, or when I receive a proper critical challenge. I believe that the text should be the only basis for a critical appreciation of a piece of work, hence my not mentioning a word as to the intellectual intent of my book in my introduction to Fictions.

Here is my challenge to you. Having reviewed the book for CRB, it should be no trouble for you to post a no-holds barred critique of Fictions on your blog, give me that good dose of reality that I'm just begging for. You can even buttress it with the anonymous comments by your legions of qualified and discerning readers. They don't even have to marry me and make a child with me for me to ridicule them online.

This is the thing - I don't treat idiocy and incompetence lightly, and I am going to take pleasure in ripping your review to shreds, particularly regarding your tendency to run with the most obvious clues (inclusive of red herrings) while being blind to the richer meaning of the text.

I am going to save you some embarrassment by pointing out some of the basic errors made in your CRB review, so you can avoid repeating them.

* Only one of the two "journal stories" you referred to in your review is an actual journal story, and it says so in the title, "CCLE: A Personal Journal". The other one, "The Aviary" is a traditional first person narrative, doesn't even pretend to be anything else.

* Heat metaphor in "The Aviary", not the major theme. Only used as an opening and closing technique. Clue to a proper analysis of the story might actually lie somewhere, I don't know, in the title.

* Slave plantation reference in "Cumae", not so much a red herring as it is a red shark, as is the association with Guyana's colonial, slave-era past. The primary allusion is shamelessly and deliberately overdone but you missed it.

* You make the following statement in your review: "And the depiction of Walter Rodney as a talking head who only [my emphasis] gains 'bits and pieces of brain' as Smith's death vision is potentially a great talking point for the collection." Not only is this a trite assessment but misleading when you consider the context of the line, or indeed the line itself, from which the quoted part is taken.

"The bits and pieces of brain, as detail, came a little later."

There are of course several other blunders which together form part of a fairly brief, if meandering, review, but your problem is that you possess little capacity in your assessment of literature overall. Caribbean literature is often an easy critical avenue because much of it is retarded by pseudo-modernist, post-colonial prescriptions, perpetuated by mediocrities much like yourself with "a healthy respect for the Caribbean literary tradition", which by the way really doesn't exist, but you wouldn't know that.

Post-modern concerns and expression within writing coming out of the Caribbean cause you to scratch your head, but you can offer no cogent analysis for what is bad about what you say is bad. While I am adamant about the Caribbean/Guyana being the central subject of what I write, my literary 'tradition' is Borges, Nabokov, Marquez, Wallace, Walcott, Naipaul, Wallace and any other writer who has any sort of demonstrated ability in their craft. Artistic excellence is the only real tradition any writer should be concerned with, whatever society he chooses to focus on.

Taking the purported high ground and saying that the reason why my book has not been reviewed in the local press is because my 'friends in the media' are doing me a favour is disingenuous to put it mildly. There have been no competent book reviews in the local press period because there are no competent critics. If there is any consideration for me in the non-publication of a critical review of my work, it is due to fear of the very thing I am going to do to you pending your taking up my challenge to publish a more 'honest' review than the one in CRB: exposure as an incompetent sham. You can check my track record of eight years ago on the Coolie Tom Puss issue to see why.

Regarding typos in my work: I am currently reading a second edition of An Area of Darkness, produced by an international publisher, and marking the typos.

Fictions, Volume One, in winning the GT&T publication award, received the endorsement of not one but several people who know more than you about good writing...and lots more. Indeed, I declined a heartfelt offer from Ian McDonald to pen an endorsement for the blurb due to my lateness in getting it to print. I also went against the advice of a good friend whose critical opinion I actually respect to submit Fictions, as published, for the Commonwealth Prize for Literature - I decided against it because I couldn't complete the larger collection in time. That said, I did go as far receiving permission from the Regional Prize Committee to submit it, although as a rule they do not accept self-published work from the Caribbean.

You are completely out of your depth on this, and the more you insist on challenging my literary credentials, the more you are going to fail, as I have warned you. I am not some little blogger that you are engaged in some childish back and forth with, when you should be taking the time to educate yourself in the field you seem to have chosen. Privately claiming that I was Stolid Charisma was clearly not enough for you, you had to go embarrass yourself on a completely different level.

Regards,

Ruel

Janus Creative Writing Clinic

2009-08-10T15:13:00.000-07:00

I will be hosting the Janus Creative Clinic beginning at the end of this month. The Clinic is aimed at providing participants with a strong foundation in the creative writing disciplines of Short Fiction, Poetry, Drama and Feature Journalism. Participants will be divided into two groups (afternoon and evening during the week) for the literary classes - short fiction, poetry and drama - while the feature journalism classes will be held on Saturdays.

Sessions for the literary disciplines are two hours each, two sessions per week, for a total of 16 hours; sessions for the feature journalism course will be three hours each, weekly, for a total of 12 hours. Basic info can be found below, and I can be contacted at:

592-696-1840
ruel.johnson@gmail.com

General Requirements: Name; Address; Telephone; E-mail; Sample of Writing

Duration: August 31 - September 26

Fee: $12,000 each for Drama, Poetry and Short Fiction
$10,000 for Feature Writing

Registration Deadline: August 21

Payment Deadline: August 28

Weekly Schedule
Monday
1-3 pm: Fiction Group A
5-7 pm: Fiction Group B

Tuesday
1-3 pm: Poetry Group A
5-7 pm: Poetry Group B

Wednesday
1-3 pm Fiction Group A
5-7 pm Fiction Group B

Thursday
1-3 pm Poetry Group A
5-7 pm Poetry Group B

Friday
1-3 pm Drama Group A
5-7 pm Drama Group B

Saturday
10am -12 pm Drama Group A
1 - 4 pm Feature Writing
5 - 7 pm Drama Group B

After One Year

2009-06-18T04:59:00.000-07:00

After today, how I shall I speak to you? It's been going on a year now since I launched Fictions, Volume One and unfortunately I haven't finished Volume Two as yet.

My primary ambitions as a writer have been, perhaps in this order, to write 'about' Guyana, to do it the best, and to do it as early as I can within this finite and unknown span of years I've been alloted. I says "ambitions as a writer" because I have myself on this sort of loosely conceived schedule which has me venturing into the world of moving images in the not so distant future - movies, television, videogames.

I have come to realise that my internal 'Clock of Ambition' is out of sync with whatever Mean Time that is seemingly dictating the 'CoA's of most of my peers and contemporaries. Many people have their sights set on a car and a house at thirty; my goal is an international award for my writing, and the beginning of my career in film production, house and car being of secondary, maybe even tertiary, importance. Every now and then, I synchronise my CoA, and when I do I am a rabid conceptualiser and planner, granted with a C in the implementation department.

This is currently the phase in which I find myself, and I've had this sort of anti-climactic epiphany about the paucity of editorial services in Guyana and the capacity for growth in this area. This is where the entrepreneurial side of me kicks in and what I've been finding recently is that there has been a middle path between the two drives - the creative and the 'accumulative' - and that they don't have to be mutually exclusive. The problem is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy and focus, editing papers some of which give you a headache after the first paragraph and then writing a paragraph or two for a short story.

In my next post, I'm going to write a little about how Guyana-blog culture has changed in the past year, particularly with the demise of the formidable Livinguyana.com, and the rise and reactivation of some other blogs.

Borges on the Development of Writing

2009-05-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

I found the following article by Borges here:

The Writer's Apprenticeship

The poet's trade, the writer's trade, is a strange one. Chesterton said: “Only one thing is needful - everything.” To a writer this everything is more than an encompassing word; it is literal. It stands for the chief, for the essential, human experiences. For example, a writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

I published my first book, Fervor de Buenos Aires, way back in 1923. This book was not in praise of Buenos Aires; rather, I tried to express the way I felt about my city. I know that I then stood in need of many things, for though at home I lived in a literary atmosphere - my father was a man of letters - still, that was not enough. I needed something more, which I eventually found in friendships and in literary conversation.

What a great university should give a young writer is precisely that: conversation, discussion, the art of agreeing, and, what is perhaps most important, the art of disagreeing. Out of all this, the moment may come when the young writer feels he can make his emotions into poetry. He should begin, of course, by imitating the writers he likes. This is the way the writer becomes himself through losing himself - that strange way of double living, of living in reality as much as one can and at the same time of living in that other reality, the one he has to create, the reality of his dreams.

This is the essential aim of the writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. I am speaking in behalf of the many young men and women at Columbia who are striving to be writers, who have not yet discovered the sound of their own voices. I have recently spent two weeks here, lecturing before eager student writers. I can see what these workshops mean to them; I can see how important they are for the advancement of literature. In my own land, no such opportunities are given young people.

Let us think of the still nameless poets, still nameless writers, who should be brought together and kept together. I am sure it is our duty to help these future benefactors to attain that final discovery of themselves which makes for great literature. Literature is not a mere juggling of words; what matters is what is left unsaid, or what may be read between the lines. Were it not for this deep inner feeling, literature would be no more than a game, and we all know that it can be much more than that.

We all have the pleasures of the reader, but the writer has also the pleasure and the task of writing. This is not only a strange but a rewarding experience. We owe all young writers the opportunity of getting together, of agreeing or disagreeing, and finally of achieving the craft of writing.

(First appeared, under the title “Who Needs Poets?”, in The New York Times, 8 May 1971, and reprinted, in 1973, as an appendix to Borges on Writing.)

On The Process of It

2009-02-13T03:13:00.000-08:00

It is 4.30 in the morning and my self-appointed deadline (the real one having expired two weeks ago) for a project looms some two and a half hours away. At this exact moment, I am listening to “Einer Wird Kommen” from the operetta, Der Zarewitsch – considering my circumstances, growing up in the poor neighbourhood of Tucville Terrace, and my present ‘snug’ apartment on Durban Street, I can understand somewhat why the girl that was on my couch three days ago would laugh when I played some of my beloved opera for her.

I added a total of about two hundred words to two stories intended for Fictions, Volume 2 over the past half hour, which may be considered progress in a time when I have not had the breathing space to put down a sentence. This ephemeral, nameless time of night, sometime between when the karaoke club across the street closes and when the sun announces that the serious business of the day is about to begin, that is the time that I write the most or the best, when I birth whatever it is that has been gestating in my mind for so long.

Sometime within the past half hour, I wrote, among others, the following words:

“Fatherhood is this strange gift, something that is happiness and more with an inextricable grief at the very core of it, the spectre of the sadness of Laocoon…”

I like them – I fought hard for them and while I may delete them altogether some time in the future, I believe that I have the right to enjoy them now. The files for the project I am working on are all open in front of me and it is the simplest of things to analyse the information and edit and rewrite, yet this simplicity does not find its way to my fingertips pounding away upon the keyboard. What comes out instead, are these words I am writing now and those that I added to my stories before I started this.

The process behind the production of art is often an inconvenient one – this ideal coalesces slowly in that unnamable place between your heart and your brain, or which perhaps coexists simultaneous in both of them, and often when you should be doing something more profitable or ostensibly useful it forces its way out, strangling everything else.

I recall a conversation I had with the girl on my couch, about expression or execution being the only real existence of art, and that the ideals or ideas which exist within the artist do no matter if they are not communicated via whatever medium the artist works in, something with which she disagreed. At this point in time, I see the seductiveness of the idea of the superiority of the conjectural work, or the pure unexpressed idea – you can walk around with the perfect novel or poem or painting in your head and still function efficiently within the strict economy of everyday life because you are not bound by the irresistible drive to express and craft and redefine.

This drive is something which is common to all true artists. One of my favourite songs is “Breathe” by Anna Nalick, which captures the process and its implications in these words:

“2 am and I’m still awake writing this song;
if I get it out all on paper it’s no longer inside me,
threatening the life it belongs to…”

As I wrap this up it’s now almost an hour since I started writing it, and after the last full-stop is typed and the file is saved, I will go make myself some coffee and try to put in as much work as I can in the final hour that remains for my project to be done. Sometime during the day I will publish this via the push-button publishing that is the Internet and the girl on my couch will read it but not comment because she is shy and is afraid that she may be seen as the girl on my couch, or that she may be several of a long line of girls on my couch which may have been true sometime last year but not now. We will speak about it on the phone or in person, or maybe just on the phone because in person I find myself possessed of this irresistible urge to kiss her as if that kiss were a poem and her lips the living pages on which it yearns to be written.

And with this project hopefully finished, or this phase of it, maybe in 24 hours I will be up, with the bills paid, and so much pressure gone, and my son asleep under the net on the bed, and I will add hopefully a few thousand words to my stories while listening to la habanera from Carmen, “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”, even though she finds it funny that I actually really do love opera.

Bullshit versus authenticity

2009-01-08T13:47:00.000-08:00

The earliest identifiable influence I recognise on my becoming a short fiction writer is, Bharati Mukherjee's, The Middleman and Other Stories. I came across a recent article on Mukherjee . What I like is her honesty in defining herself as an American writer, despite having spent her formative years in India. I am tired of trying to expose the bullshit that is the basis of Guyana-born writers calling themselves Guyanese writers and what they are writing "Guyanese literature" simply be virtue of being born here. Mukherjee writes:

"I maintain that I am an American writer of Indian origin, not because I'm ashamed of my past, not because I'm betraying or distorting my past, but because my whole adult life has been lived here, and I write about the people who are immigrants going through the process of making a home here... I write in the tradition of immigrant experience rather than nostalgia and expatriation. That is very important. I am saying that the luxury of being a U.S. citizen for me is that can define myself in terms of things like my politics, my sexual orientation or my education. My affiliation with readers should be on the basis of what they want to read, not in terms of my ethnicity or my race."

Happy New Year

2008-12-27T09:38:00.000-08:00

My Grouchy Goodnight to 2008
By Ruel Johnson (With apologies to Pauker and Praed)

Good night to the year Y2K8
It has finally come to an end.
I could probably quite safely state
Mine has followed the general trend –
Some bad shit, some good shit, but over
All not irredeemably mucked up;
Mostly me trying my ass to stay sober,
Between drinking to forget I’m fucked up.

Not by everything, just mostly the marriage,
And all my relationships since.
Miscarriage after goddamn miscarriage;
Each time I think about my sex life, I wince.
Oh, I have had my moments of beauty,
And those of sheer ecstasy too –
It’s just that they didn’t involve any cutie,
Just my hand and “Dirty Debutantes 2”.

Goodnight to all my dear friends on Facebook,
All six hundred and ninety seven of you;
I would be as lying as any lawyer or crook,
To say you’re all people I knew.
Like who the fuck would Imran Khan be?
Or Kamal Ramkarran or Gino Persaud?
Does Kwesi Anthony Isles know me?
Do I know Lisa Ahmad?

“Justin Helton’ sounds like part of a lame pun
“ Knock Knock.” “Who’s there?” “Justin Helton.”
“Just say it, I swear this’ll be a good one.”
“’K, Justin Who? " "Just in Hell, tonight, craving some sun.”
I know, of course, Maria and Nazima –
Always on my damn status updates.
For two horny young women, it would seem a
A bit better to have more on their plates.

Goodnight, dear Guyana, the water
Keeps rising to cover us all
More ably than a certain man’s daughter,
Would cover…it-rhymes-with-“my wall”.
Dear Minister of Agriculture,
My good friend Robert Persaud,
Douchfour’s forced aquaculture,
Is making your constituency mad.

Good night, the Café Oasis,
And (on South Road) Oasis Too.
The coffee from so many places:
Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Peru.
Good night to Windies, ‘my table’,
Where I imbibe my good coke and rum,
And drink and write till I’m unable
To drown out the ambient hum.

Goodnight to my ex (yes I “went there”),
My own former bright shining star –
It seems that you were specially sent here,
To – okay, that would be going too far.
I’ll save my damning to tarnation,
To avoid any more strife.
Just that in my next incarnation,
I won’t be having a wife.

Good night to this craft of writing,
It’s lovely but at times such a louse,
And moody, and bitchy, and spiting –
In fact, not too far from a spouse.
Goodnight, for now, to my Fictions,
Filled with “truth”, I am told, to mock you;
May it become one of your future addictions –
And if not then, honestly, fuck you.

Good night to the year Y2K8,
I wish all my friends all the best,
May I manage to remain sedate,
May I get far more women undressed.
May I grow richer and stronger,
And may my life be filled with reward,
And while “it” doesn’t need to be longer,
Dear God, may it always stay hard.
May I eventually find a true love,
With a pleasure place tasty and tight,
Or, if not, then a convenient screw, love –
Goodnight to this sweet year, good night.

Benjamin Percy

2008-12-22T17:29:00.000-08:00

I usually spend my time seeking out other writers, particularly fiction writers, who I can class as my contemporaries and whose career I am interested in following. I recently discovered a story called "Refresh Refresh" published in the Paris Review, and written by someone called Benjamin Percy.

Now there are two reasons I love this story. Firstly, it is some powerful writing. Plain, spare, and still elegant. Secondly, it's manly. One of my pet peeves has been the fucking pussification of the literary, with the post-modern concerns of feminism and homosexuality, as if real men - bare-knuckled, flawed, testosterone-driven - were somehow banished from writing.

I was even more impressed with Percy when I read this online interview, part of which I quote below:

"Aside from your interests in nature, your writing has been associated with the concept of the “new masculinity.” I have heard a range of definitions for this concept from an emphasis on more sensitive men to a more hyper-masculine model of “uber” men like those in 300. How do you define this idea? Is the concept of the masculine in need of a revision?

Percy. We no longer live in a society that sends its sons into the wilderness to slaughter large beasts to prove they are men. Instead, parents buy their boys a Nintendo and ten, 20, 30 years later they’re still not sure if they’re all grown up. And when they are all grown up and weighed down with responsibility, they aren’t sure where they stand anymore as gender lines continue to blur like wet fingers drawn across newsprint.

You can talk about Mars and Venus ad infinitum, but these days, more often than not, the sole thing that distinguishes a man from a woman is what dangles between your legs. For proof of this, look no further than the Bravo network or GQ magazine or Banana Republic, where men go for their style tips and face creams and hair gels and silken underwear.

Look no further than your local multiplex, where women are taking on roles traditionally reserved for men: Demi Moore as G.I. Jane, Angelina Jolie as Laura Croft, Jennifer Garner as Elektra. With the rise of the metrosexual and the fall of our formerly patriarchal society, you’ve got a lot of men who are lost in a kind of gray zone, trying to find ways to compensate—by joining Gold’s Gym, where we pick up large pieces of metal and put them back down—by screaming a little too loud when the Packers, our modern-day gladiators, score a touchdown—by driving a Hummer that burns 20 gallons a minute.

I could go on, but that’s a healthy enough dose of man talk.

"This does bring me back to one of my earlier questions as well, though. Many of your specifically male characters seem driven to violent impulse. How do you view the relationship between masculinity and violence?

Percy. Men internalize much of what they feel, much of what they think. And I’m interested in the non-verbal communication that occurs between me—a heavy clap on the back translating to love, a tightened fist and narrowed eyes translating to hate. Many of my stories concern men in pain, and because they don’t know how to talk their way through it, they swing it out of their system. It’s the equivalent of lancing a boil to release the poison building up inside you. "

Writing Workshop Update

2008-12-18T12:03:00.001-08:00

At a date to be announced, in early February I will be hosting a Short Fiction Writer's Workshop for persons seriously interested in developing the craft of writing short stories. My qualification to facilitate/teach this course does not come out any particular stellar record of academic achievement so my meagre literary prizes, poor publication record, and scant critical acclaim will have to suffice. In this two-bit "ascendancy of mediocrity" society in which we live, those should be more than enough, plus my heart is in the right place.

It should last about five days, inclusive of a weekend and will most likely include a holiday to cater for the work schedule of those interested since I would prefer it to be residential. Depending on the funding I can raise, there should only be a nominal fee for participation.

The workshop has a tenuous link to the Writing Competition hosted by my friend Charmaine Valere of the Signifyin' Guyana blog in that I have a slight point to make about the benefits of writers' workshops - Charmaine has put up a lot of money to foster the reward/recognition aspect of local writing while the workshop is focused on the developmental. Hopefully someone who would have passed through my workshop will take the top prize of US $500 Charmaine has put up. You can find out more about the writing competition at signifyinguyana.typepad.com.

Regarding the workshop, the selected participants, a rough maximum of ten, again dependent on funding, will be required to spend a number of days in an intense residential workshop environment developing the short stories they would have submitted to be considered for selection.

Selection of the short list at the very least will be based solely upon my estimation of literary value in the submissions and the potential for development the writer has; there is no restriction on submission except it must be your own work and submitted in English, while eligibility is dependent on residency in Guyana, at least for two years prior to Februart 2009 - you can be from Turkmenistan for all I care. I am fairly well read enough to recognise plagiarism when I see it, even from some supposedly obscure sources so please don't try that shit.

There is no financial incentive for participation except for prizes for the best short story produced during the workshop and the most improved writer, since this is a developmental effort.

You will be expected, if selected, to familiarise yourself with a number of workshop texts which will be sent to you beforehand. This will include basic material on the elements of the short story which you can research yourself, as well as work from a number of writers of short fiction. These include Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, David Foster Wallace, Stephen Crane, Anton Chekov, Guy de Maupassant, Robert Antoni, Kei Miller, Kate Chopin, V.S. Naipaul, Vladimir Nabokov and Ruel Johnson.

Recommended reading includes Penguin and other anthologies of short fiction; Ficciones/The Garden of Forking Paths/The Maker by Jorge Luis Borges; David Foster Wallace stories, several of which can be found online; the New Yorker magazine short fiction section; the Paris Review online short fiction section; Fictions - Volume 1, and Ariadne & Other Stories, both written by yours truly.

Don't expect me to teach you to write but because I am not qualified to do so. My role will be to:

1) Provide the space in which the participants will work on their writing
2) Provide rough guidelines to creating a good short story
3) Moderate discussion sessions, both educational and critical

By the end of the workshop, you will be expected to have improved the short story you would have submitted and at least begun a new one during the workshop; you would also have had developed some sense of the context out of which you're writing, geographically, socially, culturally and otherwise. You would have had a crash exploration of themes and terms like post-modernism, post-colonialism, traditionalism, realism, mythopeia, fabulation et cetera.

I will be using Facebook, my blog, and other avenues to promote this effort and if you are selected, I look forward to working with you.

A Poem in Progress

2008-12-10T12:48:00.000-08:00

Untitled

Your touch, prophecy
whispering one day our love
shall renew itself

be strong enough to
bridge or fill these dark, silent
chasms between us.

Some dawn’s frantic call,
each heart precarious on
the cusp of return,

flashed forward to
the oblivion of noon;
tongues amnesiac

as if memories
of tenderness were better
preserved forgotten.

An emptiness that
is aligned to your absence
encircles my heart

and I’d give all I
have for one night spent tracing
the curve of your spine.

Writing Competition and Workshop

2008-12-04T05:00:00.000-08:00

I have been so fucking delinquent in updating this blog it isn't funny. Today is the 4th of December and this deadline which is weeks away might as well be fucking seconds away because I am going nowhere fast with this work. Fictions, as a piece of art, seems to have inherited my combination of talent and indiscipline.

The stories, and their alignment, keep writhing and changing shape just as I am about to corral them into what is supposed to be a holistic, fully conceived artistic endeavour - and a completed one. I've pulled off tight shit before but this is going to be tighter than anything I've ever done before.

More important than my personal literary woes is this announcement by Signifying Guyana that she (C.D. Valere) is hosting a Short Story Competition with a significant amount of money being put up for prizes. There is going to be a workshop component of the Prize organised by yours truly, though the details are yet to be worked out. Before the end of the week, Charmaine and I will come to some agreement on the role of the workshop but that sort of minutiae aside, I honestly believe that this is going to be a significant step in the development of local writing.

I am currently working on the 'curriculum' for the workshop, which should take participants through the fundamentals of the short story and how they have changed (or evolved) from Maupassant through Borges to David Foster Wallace. The main point of the workshop however is not going to be teaching but the provision of a space conducive to the production of good literary writing.

More updates on how it goes soon.

Not far from the tree

2008-11-20T00:52:00.001-08:00

My son turned five years on Sunday and it seems just months ago when he was this tiny thing on my belly, squealing in delight as I rolled him off and caught him. I was usually the one to put him to sleep, rocking him while his mother - exhausted - slept.

Earlier tonight, or last evening rather, I was trying to explain to him that I couldn't pick him up from school so I asked his grandfather to do it for me when, after patiently listening to me, just calmly and emphatically said "But that doesn't make any sense."

I have been told time and time again by people, the women who happen to get close to me in particular, that I have this arrogance when it comes to my rigid application of logic in human behaviour. If something does not make sense in my head, I viciously interrogate it and very often the other person at the end of the dissection usually ends up feeling like shit. Last night, my son gave me a small dose of my own medicine - for the second time in about a month.

I usually take people at their word and my credulity usually stretches in a self-conscious way until I can take no more and that is when I become vicious, cruel. It is not one of my better qualities, in fact it has all the hallmarks of a tragic flaw. My incisiveness is valuable in that it helps me to cut through the layers of bullshit that is such an intrinsic part of human nature, but the problem is that when I cut, I cut without discretion and regard for who is under the knife, despite my emotional connection to them.

There are certain situations in which being right is a hollow victory, and I have had many hollow victories over the past year. I feel a certain sadness that this penchant for incision, for intellectual haughtiness, is the first notable characteristic of my own that I see in Aidan, he who reminds me so much of his mother in so many ways, from his good looks, to his adoption of her mumbling of "Pardonme" during conversation.

Lying low and raising hell

2008-11-18T03:35:00.000-08:00

You haven't heard from me in a couple of weeks and reading this is a pleasant surprise. He's back you say, staring loving at my words on your computer screen, but there is a flicker of sadness behind your eyes, a transient flash of despair at the possibility of coming online tomorrow to find that I've returned to whatever solitude I've emerged from.

It is not that that sadness, that apprehension is without justification. After this meeting, I truly do not know when I shall post again. I spend much of my time in this room with white walls and a white door and white fluorescent lighting and a big window with a view of a community with the kind of houses that I would like to own one of next year but which is virtually impossible.

I spend much of my day listening to heart-rending songs like Sarah McLachlan's Arms of the Angel because I do feel sometimes as if I do spend all me time waiting for that second chance, for a break that would make it okay. And of course I work, I work towards that break that would make it okay and it means that my plans for my literary writing is deferred but I know how I am, how much of how I operate is genuine procrastination and how much is the tensing of the muscles so that I can move one particular mountain or the other out of the way.

I have taken time to do an online interview with Nicholas Laughlin which you can find online here. In the upcoming weeks, stemming out of this, there is going to be a heated debate on literature in Guyana and I intend to strike down with great vengeance and furious anger on those who seek to shovel shit in my ear and tell me it's Mozart. If the enfant has gotten older, the terrible has become plus terrible.

Real Trini talent for alyuh

2008-11-12T05:25:00.000-08:00

Two years ago I was in Trinidad for CARIFIASCO 9 and ended up at this Fringe event called Writers' Block where I was treated to some of the best entertainment I have experienced in my life.

One of the people I met was a young man called Muhammad Muwakil. Many Guyanese might recognise him from this spoken word HIV/AIDS ad with the slogan "Live Up", featuring a group of young people dominated by this fucking annoying girl with an Afro-American accent.

Anyway, one of the items at the event was a poem by Muwakil backgrounded by music from his group the name of which I have forgotten. You can find a simple recital of the poem, "4 am in Belmont" here on Youtube...moving even without the music.

Muhammad recently posted this poem on Facebook and I read it and just had to share it. There is usually a schism between "poetry poetry" and spoken word poetry but in Muwakil's work you find that the two are not mutually exclusive. Enough intro from me:

"ah want dis. allll ah dis an more
Muhammad Muwakil

My sanity howls at the moon, is lonely, seeks the pack, is disgusted, rejects the lot, is lonely. I do not know why I hate school so much, is it the rigidity of curriculum that I shun. I am so tired of being told when and how to do my thing. Shit! I walk among men as a man but I know that I am something else, what? I want to express it lord, I want to write, I want to speak I want to paint and play the guitar and draw and have children and make mistakes and fall down and get up and fall again, and pay and fight and cuddle and go to d grocery and harass meh grandmother and set a vision for Trinidad and be the best writer out of the Caribbean ever and speak d word and swim in macquripe and laugh out loud and kayak til meh body hurt and have friends who ah could trust and play drums an chant down Babylon wit collis and sight up wit modupe and baba and naeem and marlon and chike and skeeto and mark dread mark whas d vibes mark! Oh god broddah das life! an all meh bredren who feel like dis too and to sit dong on meh back step in ah sliders eatin july mango wit d juice runnin down meh elbows and chin and to wake up ah morning and hear dat nobody dead las nite and to turn on d radio and hear ah david rudder on 96.1 or 96.7 or 94.1 a real rudder like banana death song or bahia girl, not one where he singin wit bunji or machel, and to have artist who I could identify wit not people who live and hide behind chains and shades in d vip, and to play jouvert yes jouvert because it have sometin bout it that even though I am a muslim it says something to me, not the winin an jamming but d something d something, and to eat putigal til ah get sick and get sick and drink ah corn soup and feel better and lie dong on maracas beach and fall asleep to the sound of all dem children runnin from d surf and d lollie man and the waves beatin d shore like water envy earth, and d man beatin d pan like we need liks still, and ah want to be proud to say I am a trinbagonian, America have a black president I want a black leader too, and ah doh want no more gangsta politics, you cannot persuade me through fear I have a God and is not you Patrick. And ah want meh children to fly kite and play hop scotch and play in d rain an d drain and catch guabine and get ring worm and fall dong off dey bike and buss dey head and cry fuh dey mudda who is still d most beautiful woman I ever see in meh whole life I want to live and not worry bout food and clothes and economies I want to grow long white locks and not have to worry if the muslim community go extradite meh because of tradition, ah want every man to see man as man and no disrespect, I want to be able to tie up pieces of cloth on meh hand dependin on d mood ah in and not have anybody ask me if I alright I like to tie shit on meh wrist arite das jess me. An ah could go on and on but wha ah really want is to live in a world where the contribution of every single human being is valued for what it is, whether it be ceo or housewife, neither is diminished, farmer or stock broker, carpenter or real estate agent. I want love to spread d four corner and a light to shine outta everybody eye, like d sun always risin in we head, like it always have hope. I only postin dis because ah know dat somebody go read it an get d release I get from writin it and ah want dat too. Ah want to be free. Wha alyuh want?"

An Update

2008-11-10T05:54:00.000-08:00

This is just a brief update to inform the occasional reader of this blog that I have not died. Am trying to achieve escape velocity from the cycle of brokeness so the writing has been put on hold for now. I have roughly a month to finish Fictions II in time for the next crucial stage in my Grand Plan.

A Brief Note on Death

2008-11-04T08:53:00.000-08:00

A book I read I read once and still have in my library, John Bowker's The Meaning of Death mentioned the story of Ulysses and his return voyage home during which many of his company's were lost during storms at sea, victims of Poseidon's rage.

In the past few months, I have seen so many deaths that I deem significant to me in some way or the other, some not wholly unexpected, others tragic in how abruptly the life of the person ended. I suppose it has to do with the concept that every life has a purpose, something I subscribe to only from a perspective of free will as opposed to determinism. John Irving's position, cum Wilbur Larch in The Cider House Rules, that the most we should aspire to be is "of use" is the one I find personally most comfortable.

Yet, reading up on Barack Obama's life story, for example, you seem to get the idea that his parents existed simply to bring him into the world, or that he was the central purpose of their union. The recent death of his grandmother sort of confirms this.

The deaths that have affected me personally however in recent times are those of Alicia Foster (whom I only met once), David Foster Wallace and David DeCaires. It is easy for someone with an imaginative bent such as I have to see the obvious linkages between the names but I attribute this only to coincidence.

I am agnostic which basically means that I am not stupid enough to believe that any one misconstrued illusion (we call them religions) is of any more or any less validity than the next one, nor I am arrogant enough to say that this life, with its basic mystery of existence, is the summation of everything. I do not obsess too much therefore with what lies after death; my concern is with the quality of life one leads here.

It is ironic that, in the midst of all this death or my heightened sense of it, my son - just five years old in two weeks - asked a few days ago whether I wanted to be "buried or burned." And a week before that he made the brief decision that he was going to stop eating meat after seeing a television programme showing animals being slaughtered for food.

That he should grasp such a concept at so tender an age is astonishing to me but also sad. A sense of mortality should not be for the young because, unless tragedy strikes, they are invincible and immortal.

David DeCaires

2008-11-02T14:23:00.000-08:00

David DeCaires is dead. Long live David DeCaires.

Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck

2008-10-31T06:38:00.001-07:00

In addition to dealing with the death of David Foster Wallace, which has dampened my fucking spirits more than you can imagine, I am beset by all sorts of shit:

1) I am falling behind in some of my consultancy work, which means less money to add to my already meagre income.

2) I am falling behind in shaping out in my real writing (Fictions II and a screenplay I have been working on for the past four fucking years).

3) Realising how much of a philistine fucking place I am trying to live in as a writer - all sort of artistic and literary shit is going on in Trinidad on a weekly basis and nothing is happening here.

4) The sense, spurred no doubt by DFW's passing, that this writing skunt is essentially pointless at the end of the day.

There are a couple of things that are saving me from virtually suicidal depression as well, so I guess the universe balances itself out a bit. My son, for example, is a constant source of delight although work has me so tied up I hardly get to spend quality time with him these days. And I'm trying this monogamy thing and she's proving to me that it has its rewards.* And even with Wallace's passing, it's given me an opportunity to find out more about his work, which in turn has provided with the information I need to define the abstractions which serve as the theoretical basis for my writing.

I have a long weekend ahead of me and I have to prioritise from a list of activities which include, drinking and trading insults with Kram, catching up with Bakannal, spending time with my son, making sure that I don't railroad my budding relationship, working, writing and jerking off.

*Subtle allusion to the fact that yes, I am seeing someone fairly steadily and despite my inclinations to follow the 'advice' 0f my morally-numb friend Kram, I am going to curb my propensity to be a complete fucking whore at times.

Senseless Tragedy

2008-10-29T13:05:00.000-07:00

It's amazing that a friend's Gmail chat signature highlighted me to the passing of David Foster Wallace. I have blogged about Wallace's work before and spoken about its influence on mine. Writing this, this cold feeling has come over me and I have this thing in the pit of my stomach.

From reading his work, it's easy to tell that every honour bestowed on Wallace was well-deserved and the world had much more to expect from this literary giant. That he died was tragic enough, but the fact that he hung himself makes it even more heartbreaking.

This is a genuinely sad moment for me, the worst in an generally unfavourable day.

A Note

2008-10-29T05:49:00.000-07:00

I passed by the house of an old friend last night, and sat on her veranda drinking some rum and coke. As I am writing this in Oasis, a Norah Jones album is playing, which was the soundtrack sort for the affair we almost had, this woman 12 years older than I am, and "possessed still of a girlish laughter" and a sadness that she masks with various passions of which I was briefly one.

Watching her last night, I couldn't help but notice how her beauty increased with age, as if nurtured by the melancholy which takes her over increasingly from time. There is a section of Derek Walcott's Another Life, which you can find here, a reminiscence of his long lost love affair with, a part of which reads:

a man lives half of life,
the second half is memory,

the first half, hesitation
for what should have happened
but could not, or

what happened with others
when it should not.

In retrospect, fidelity can appear, under certain circumstances, as a moral blunder.

Cynicism

2008-10-27T05:55:00.000-07:00

You see how it goes? You show people that cynicism is not what you're all about and the next thing you know you get accused of being a philanderer. Says an anonymous commenter on this post:

"Ruel is comparing Raptus to Borges...wow..how far would you go for a little pussy. You want to fuck the girl so flattery is the first step. Ruel Johnson is too arrogant to praise anyone without sinister motives. This post is nothing but a low down cheap shot to extract a little bit of smelly cyat. Good luck...look our Raptus...ruel is going to make the moves on your little punanni."

Come on man, how sleazy do you think I am? Before I even knew who raptus was, I said that the young lady could write. I think my friend, Bakannal is brilliant as well, but that doesn't mean I want fuck him. I've also praised the Guyana Media Critic, but that doesn't mean I want to fuck him.

Why are you people so cynical? Yes, I might be arrogant but I believe that I am also fair. And I seriously can't flatter a woman about her writing just for a little punani...well maybe if it was Kerry Washington, but nobody else. Like I've said before, I may be a bastard, but I am not a fucking bastard.

When it comes to sex, I believe that as consenting adults, there doesn't have to be any such deception involved. And, here is a confession, I have absolutely zero game. Zilch. None. Nada. I either get straight to the point or I start tumbling over my words like I do in public speaking. Maybe with enough rum and coke I achieve a certain flow with speaking to women as I do inmy writing but to walk around perpetually semi-inebriated just so you can get some would be pathetic.

And who knows? Maybe I'm content with whatever, if any, I am getting. So, dear Anon, please get your mind out of the gutter. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...

Dear Stolid....

2008-10-23T08:37:00.000-07:00

Try not to be a fucking skunthole. I haven't cursed properly in a couple of blogs and you make me go sin my fucking soul. Take off that blog and you have my official mangina badge.

Enraptured by Raptus

2008-10-20T09:58:00.000-07:00

I actually met up with Raptus8 over the weekend and as it turns out, we've met before. The sad thing about her is that she doesn't believe in what I said about her natural talent, she can't see what the fuss is all about.

Admittedly, she is relatively young and hence we behind the ears but she has the foundation of the making of a superb writer. Let me give you an example of the basis I have for my assessment. In her last post, on the death of Akila Jacobs, she writes:

"You showed me how to write my first story and then my editor perfected it. You gossiped about me in fact you said that I am a lesbian..lol, we had arguments, whenever you did not have any story ideas for the day (before I could) you used to do follow-ups on my goddamn stories, you were very inquisitive yet I found myself sharing a few lunches with you at 8pm and we spoke about the trials of life. I never told you that I admire your strength and courage.

I left the profession because I was overworked and underpaid; you stayed because you loved it and more importantly because of keriah.

The last time I saw you it was on hi5…

RIP …Akila Jacobs."

Now compare it to the following:

"Delia Elena San Marco

Jorge Luis Borges

We said our good-bye on one of the corners of the Plaza del Once. From the sidewalk on the other side of the street I turned and looked back; you had turned, and you waved good-bye.

A river of vehicles and people ran between us; it was five o’clock on no particular afternoon. How was I to know that that river was the sad Acheron, which no one may cross twice?

Then we lost sight of each other, and a year later you were dead. And now I search out that memory and gaze at it and think that it was false, that under the trivial farewell there lay an infinite separation.

Last night I did not go out after dinner. To try to understand these things, I reread the last lesson that Plato put in his teacher’s mouth. I read that the soul can flee when the flesh dies.
And now I am not sure whether the truth lies in the ominous later interpretation or in the innocent farewell.

Because if the soul doesn’t die, we are right to lay no stress on our good-byes. To say goodbye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we’ll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves as contingent and ephemeral.

One day we will pick up this uncertain conversation again, Delia—on the bank of what river?—and we will ask ourselves whether we were once, in a city that vanished into the plains, Borges and Delia."

I've confirmed that Raptus has never read Borges, yet here you have echoes of the Argentine master in this young, country girl barely into her twenties. With a little polishing, who knows that could happen.

The Weekend

2008-10-20T08:25:00.000-07:00

For the past few months, I've led a more or less complex life. When I was younger, in my teens, I used to dream of the writer's life where I would live from book to book, filling my spare time with sensuality pursuits, dinners, a different woman each week.

After the failure of my marriage, the avenue for that fantasy life opened up itself again and I lived it for a while and while there have been genuine moments of beauty, there is a hollowness that overcomes you, independent of the elements of a less tender reality - bills, responsibility, health, vestigial pain.

This weekend started out with a certain decadence in which anything was possible but ended almost effortlessly at a place of peace that I had been virtually struggling to find for the past few months. I try not to worry about whether this peace is too ephemeral and whether that mechanism that dictates a conflict between her and I will kick into action again.

And if it lasts, there will no doubt be casualties, and no matter how many ground rules were established, how many pre-existing conditions were explained, the heart does not work like that and disclaimers, no matter how explicit, do not make the hurt you cause any less legitimate.

I spent the entire weekend without seeing or talking to my son, not my fault, but when I pick him up from school this afternoon, there will be an accusatory element in his questions which will shame me; coming back from an out of town trip, nestled against her, a voice behind us in the bus shouted "Daddy" and my heart leapt and although I knew it wasn't I turned around to see if it was indeed him.

This weekend has been a sort of quiet watershed of things which have impacted upon me greatly as both a person and a writer, not the least of which was the tragic passing of Akilah Jacobs. I am reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty and have found a writer whose work I genuinely admire, which shows me that yes I am still very much in my apprenticeship.

What is the sum of all this? Am I happy? Have I been made a better person? The one change I can come up with is that I feel less hollow, even if sadder for the damage I have done, one woman blameless, both undeserving.

Anon again

2008-10-17T06:04:00.000-07:00

Comment from my friend, Anon.

"There is no need for further discussion is there? You want to be right more than you want to be great. I'm up for a pissing match but I can't take on both you and your ego at the same time. Particularly when the stakes are so low.

Any author, every author, possessed of a temperate disposition and dogged personality can ably defend their work, if they so choose. Those with a more didactic bent to their personality can respond to every critique of their work with a treatise on how the work should read; a zealous few take this tendency to its ignoble end and try to counsel readers on the interpretations they should make and the meanings they should in an attempt to hold hostage the discourse of narrative and nuance--a control they relinquish in the very act of publishing.

The greats balance their compulsion to creation with bouts of manic optimism, chronic insecurity and are able to alchemize their condition into the actualizing truths for which we revere them. Apparently, you are not so burdened, except by your own complacency.

Why strive when the accolades come so easily to the big fish in the tiny pond? Why engage in honest intertextual analysis when you could adorn yourself with garlands of pretty words? Why bother when you've already convinced yourself that any reward could be yours if you'd only get off the pot and use your fingers instead of your sphincter? Why grow when you can rest on your laurels, and point to penny-ante prizes dispensed in what you've previously acknowledged as a vacuum of talent, in a calcified state of supposed genius? Why seek out worthy opponents when you can condescend to peons? Why be an artist when you can be an author? Why indeed."

Dear Anon, a couple of points. Like I said, you've given me the best interrogation of my work I've ever received and I value that. My defence isn't as spirited as it might appear because I am my harshest critic - I can point out more errors and more things I am comfortable with in my work than you can ever hope to.

However, when I do find a critical review like yours which asks most of the right questions, it is in my interest to make sure that the interrogation itself is sound, something yours was not, as prettily written as it was. It would of immense value to me if you were to undertake a review of Fictions, whenever I complete the collection. What I am saying is that some of your key prescriptive criticisms were inherently flawed although the path of your probing was legitimate. I posted the three examples of my work to show that your personal dislike of one passage in one story which itself is a "pastiche" (lol) of styles does not warrant a dismissal of the work as a whole.

Regarding my big fish in a small pond status, anyone who knows me knows that is an inherently unfair accusation. I stay and write in Guyana not for any easy laurels since the relative few that I have I have had to sacrifice much for - it is because I have a strong belief that we need to develop a literature of place that, writing that reclaims our particular humanity. The Guyanese parallels of Danticat and Diaz are the big fish against whom writers like me have to struggle against because they present a picture of our people, our society that is inauthentic, dehumanising and painted for the edification and entertainment of people worlds away from us.

In Molly and the Muslim Stick for example, the sole Guyanese character is a primitive idiot whose identity shifts from African to Amerindian, and who gives off scents according to his mood. And of course the Guyana is not the Guyana of recent, something continuously absent in the work of an author whose personal connections to the present government have been unwavering. Read any review of the book and try to see Guyana inside it. It's easy to see this stance as patriotism being the last resort of the scoundrel or the mediocre, but I have had work published in reputable magazines and journals and the Guyana Prize, whatever its shortcomings, does have high standards for adjudication.

I am here because I believe that not only myself, but other writers living here, drawing on our own particular experience can produce work that can compete (and it is a competition, if an incidental one) with the work which purports to represent us but doesn't. Walcott's Hic Jacet has been my personal credo for the "where" I am writing from, and it will be until I feel there is no more I can personally do to give back this place its humanity in literature.

If there is any condescension in my writing, it is to the people who live elsewhere and usurp their origins here for literary gain. I have sought out emerging writers in Guyana and offered my encouragement and support, I have written ad nauseam about the need for writing workshops particularly one supported by the Guyana Prize for Literature, I have helped numerous writers here edit and try to reshape their work, and I am in the process of organising not only a writers' workshop but a writers' retreat on my own initiative. At present I've volunteered to be a student in a drama workshop that I was asked to be a resource person for.

Finally, I don't believe that Guyana is a vacuum of talent - I know some brilliant writers here who, given enough time and opportunities, could stand as the foundation of a true national literary renaissance. I do believe however that this country is an artificially created desert of opportunity for the literary artist, a wasteland created primarily by malign neglect. CARIFESTA was a perfect example of how the powers that be elevated the mediocre and the politically connected, and sidelined people with true talent because their political allegiance was suspect or the color of their skin was not the preferred hue.

I have been insane enough to sacrifice a great deal in order to acquire whatever literary 'stature' I possess today and while I am ready to attempt to ascend beyond this, I believe I do have to make one last ditch attempt to seek out and find the true talent which exists here and aid in creating an environment in which it can be nurtured.

Feel free to e-mail me at ruel.johnson@gmail.com and I would be glad to send you a PDF copy of Fictions which you can rip into at will.

A Mes Amants

2008-10-16T16:34:00.000-07:00

Dear ladies...lovely ladies...to put it bluntly, not because we fuck means I am going to write a story about it or you. And it is not dependent on how good you were in bed or how much you mean or meant to me. Some of the women that have meant the most to me and with whom I've had some of the best sex in my life will never see themselves in my erotic writing.

Why is this post even necessary? Because, several women have either hinted to or outright told me in the past few months that they would willing pass up the punani but they were afraid that they would have to read about it later on in some book of mine. As an adjunct, some of those very same women have also wondered aloud about how I would capture the moment if we ever did the deed.

Here is the deal, if we flow and it's special and our connection moves me sufficiently and I see literary usefulness in paying homage to that moment, then I am going to want to write about it but I am going to seek your permission first, if the circumstances can in anyway identify you.

I believe sex is an intrinsic part of what makes us human and I have no reservation about capturing that aspect of our humanity in art. And while I may be a bastard at times, I am not a fucking bastard. In the words of J. Holiday, "Baby, I won't tell, if you don't want me to, 'cause I got thing for you, and I'd do anything for you..."

In essence, what I am trying to say is if you want to Ride the Ruel Rodeo, and the interest is mutual, please don't let your reservation be for literary reasons. In closing, let me leave you the following excerpt from one of the stories in Fictions:

"When she finally allows him to touch her, from the way he touches her, it is clear that he is in amazement at certain things – the way his hands almost completely encircle her small, supple thighs…the taste and texture of her, eternally fresh, eternally pliant…how her elegant doe-like legs open to accommodate the taurine bulk of his shoulders."
From "Eden Revisited"

Another Gem

2008-10-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

Was doing some ego surfing to find out what the world wide web was saying about big bad Ruel Johnson and came across this simple post. Okay, I tell myself this young lady has taste in literature, why not check out the rest of your blog.

This has been a good week for me. First I got the sort of scathing critique of my work that I've been begging for like some leather-clad crazy with a ball gag in my mouth shouting, "Spank me, Mistress. Spank me!"; I got a stupendously simple, yet well-paying contract; I've been doing things I would be too fucking stupid to even mention here; I am seeing my son grow into a person, as opposed to simply "my son"; and then I found Raptus8.

Where do these people exist? Whether it is simple, raw emotion like in this post, or in just plain ranting like in this one, what we have in Raptus is pure, raw talent - a gift for writing that the truth is, I wish I had. I know my talents, I know my ability with shaping words and I am the first to point that it is prodigious - I have the laurels to prove it.

What I don't have is the gift to essentially write for primarily myself, as Raptus basically does and, let it be good. If there is any sense of writing for myself, it is merely an audience that I believe has a lot in common with me. I am obsessed with crafting, I hate making mistakes, and I rarely am content with the finished product.

It is writing like that which I found on this young lady's blog which makes me at times feel like a literary fraud. The sad fucking thing, in fact the tragic thing, is that she is most likely stuck in some clerical job somewhere while her true talent finds its only outlet on her blog.

Whoever you are, keep it up and while you may be looking out for Volume II of my book, I'll be browsing your blog daily from now on.

Three samples

2008-10-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Anon,

Please find below samples of three stories from Fictions, each equally representative of the story they are from:

Sample One

"Before he draws his last breath, Cyril Johnson does not seek nor does he find the precise redemption that is expected of him. He has stumbled upon a greater revelation, one in which not only vindication for himself, or Smith, was possible but also a quiet, unheralded heroism.

The old man dies at home at 5 o’clock on an ordinary Thursday afternoon in November. After he expires, the wraith which haunted him remains. It remains because it believes that, according to its understanding of balance in the universe, its counterpart should return so that their debate could continue, maybe even to a resolution.

It does not see that when Smith, as an agent of the Machine, destroyed its former body, he also initiated his own gradual annihilation, a mortification of the soul which preceded by almost 22 years the final mortification of the flesh. It does not see that Cyril Johnson was already essentially as spectral as it was, that Johnson existed within the body of Smith simply because he was trapped within that vessel.

From, “The Last Assassin”

Sample Two

“Will I become one of your stories in – what’s it called?”

“Fictions.”

“So, will I become one of your stories in Fictions?”

“Yes.”

“Make sure you make it a steamy one then.”

“I’ll make it as clinical and un-erotic as possible.”

“Why?”

“For spite.”

“You’re not spiteful, you’re sweet. Why?”

“Because the recreation of the sex would dwarf everything else. The story should be a monument to this moment in my life.”

“The moment included sex.”

“Yes, and it was great but this, what we’re doing now, talking, that’s what’s important in the long run for me.”

“There is no long run. Don’t do this. Don’t make this more important than the new and the sex.”

“I’m not trying to make anything more than what it is to me. But I won’t make it less.”

“Then make the sex steamy.”

“I don’t want to. I won’t. It’s my story.”

“No. It’s our story.”

“Listen. The last story I wrote that had a lot of sex in it, people either hated it for the sex or loved it just for the sex. Anything else I wanted to say was hardly noticed.”

“Is it more research material that you need? Is that it?”

“Research material…”

“Research…material.”

“Oh…hmmm…Persuasive…but it’s no good.”

“How about now?”

“My mind’s set. I’m not going change it. There’s nothing you can possibly do to make me change it.”
From, “Eden Revisited”

Sample Three

The clearest memory I have of Peter in his youth, before the bitterness, was from those blackout nights with our mother quizzing us from that handed down Student’s Companion. I hear my mother’s voice, thin and echoing, ghostlike, fading away into its own ellipsis. “A place where birds are kept…”

And Peter’s image stands out in dramatic candle-lit relief, surrounded by the haze of the rest of my siblings, as he asserts without fail, “An aviary!” So it would go, through apiary, aquarium, hutch, warren, sty, insectarium…

It is not that the rest of us did not learn all the answers over time – we did. But long before we did, and long after, our original ignorance and relative ineloquence had become incorporated into that familial ritual. In the end, Petamber became the spokesman for all of us.

The single correspondence between Peter and I in the nine years since I left for Canada was a short cryptic letter he sent me just as HAWK had entered its infancy. I have it in my Toronto apartment still; indeed I know it from memory by now:

“What is an aviary, Prakash? An aviary is a place where birds are kept, where birds are kept together despite plumage and temperament and origin. All that is important is that they can mutually tolerate their capture, for no greater purpose than that of some perverse and unnatural exhibition.”
From, “The Aviary”

Another "bashing" from Anon

2008-10-16T07:01:00.000-07:00

I received the following re-rebuttal comment from Anon, who tore into me as I highlighted in this post.

"Your club-bopping and bed-hopping are irrelevant. Red herring dispensed with, now on to the work.

• I missed the part where you said it was unrepresentative. Perhaps I should refresh my cache. I did, however, notice the portion where you shared “an example passage in Fictions which is the sort of thing I believe the discerning reader should enjoy”. I also read one of your earlier posts where you discussed your ideal reader, who, based on your characterization, is a member of a thin subset in an already slender sample. The other portion where you advise that “any reading of Fictions, not to offer a Cliffs Notes on my own book, should be done the way you drink a particularly fine Merlot, rinsing it around in your brain a little before digesting it” also made a dent on my consciousness. So, if you are to be believed, this unrepresentative excerpt is an example of work that can be mined for deeper meaning, and yet you would recommend that your discerning readers, primed to decipher such meaning no doubt, read Fictions in a manner that would support those sorts of minute excavations. Sisyphus will want a copy. If the excerpt is unrepresentative, as you now claim, I have a few questions. Is Fictions littered with passages that your discerning readers would not enjoy? If I don’t enjoy it, am I undiscerning?

• Hyperbole without humor is a bit too acrid for my taste. Omeros is not, by any interpretation of the words, as popular or widely read as the Bible/Tolkien (ha!) I believe originality, and not opacity, was the metric I used to determine success. In case my previous comment did not bring the point home, your allusions are unoriginal because they were both drawn from a banal source and simply sit on the page, unremarkable and unchanged. Using a well-known source raises the bar on the output (if I sing a song to which you know every note, you will be much more sensitive to problems of pitch on my part); obscurity might have piqued the interest even when artistry failed. Also, through no fault of yours, I’ve seen those same allusions employed to much better effect by numerous authors. I will concede that your allusions are just as obvious as Walcott’s, but that’s where the similarity between this (I’ll force myself to stay on topic, but your insinuation that the mere mention of an elven woman and a dark man warrants an association to the great master is unforgivable, particularly when it was as clumsily executed as this was) and Omeros ends. A pastiche of choppy metaphors does not equal ironic mimesis utilized as a tool of repudiation and reclamation.

• Mutual adoration is not implicit in the excerpt. It may be so in the preceding paragraphs. In this snippet, the adoration is ascribed solely to the female character; the male in the very next line reveals that his capacity for adoration has been spent elsewhere. The rest, religious undertones aside, is just sex. The act of eating and drinking alone do not connote adoration. Judas (and Peter after a fashion) ate, drank and betrayed. That may well be your subtle, though rich, meaning.

• If the juxtaposition of high and low art is your thing, then Junot Diaz might be of interest to you. It took him ten years to write BWLOW and with good reason. He is so nimble at his craft that you never see the sleight of hand or suffer a ponderous fumble as he shifts flawlessly from the lowbrow to the sublime.

(http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/12/24/071224fi_fiction_diaz?currentPage=1)

• The canon is littered with wispy elves you can reference simply for their trusting innocence. If you must have this imagery, pick any of them. Tolkien’s elves are far more complex. Furthermore, you’d be hard-pressed to tie your hero and heroine’s (based on their actions in the snippet) morality to that of Tolkien’s elves, especially in reference to sex and marriage."

First of all, I'm insulted that you should refer me to the performing monkey that is Junot Diaz for an example of proper writing. I have no literary respect for Diaz, Dabydeen, Danticat or any of those who mine their exoticism, tap into the communal guilt and fascination of societies in which they are minorities, in order to reap compromised literary rewards. What we are seeing is not true literary merit but affirmative action, not prize-winning but reparations. Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Oondatje however are the type of [minority/immigrant] writer that I respect.

Readers may look to this excerpt of Diaz' work Pulitzer Prize winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao for what his publishers constitute either a representative or exemplary sample, something you should buy the book on the strength of. It is ironic that you would cite Diaz as an example of sublimeness: there is nothing either sublime or literarily lowbrow about either the New Yorker story or the excerpt from Oscar Wao, with its pandering Spanglish and other self-conscious exoticisms (Laxmi, curry, fuku, Trujillo) which are only there so insulated (mostly Caucasian) Americans can kowtow to him and say how quaint and ethnic and literate is the "Dominican" who incidentally left Dominica at fucking five. By the way, is the allusion/homage to Hemingway in the title of Diaz' book "trite" or clever?

You can't accuse me of gimmickry and try to show me the error of my ways by citing even worse gimmickry. My ideal reader is at their particularly zenith because they exist in the society in which I am writing from, and can potentially see themselves and their society in what I represent. The average, intelligent, young non-Guyanese is not too far below my ideal reader, by the way, as neither is the average literary egghead in tweeds and glasses tucked away in some comfortable bastion of Western academia. The irony is, were I to find a US publisher (no Pulitzer since I don't happen to be a US citizen), with the right compromises I'd have a fairly good shot of enjoying roughly the same sort of critical acclaim as a Diaz or a Danticat.

And a note on the fine wine thing, don't take all of my cockiness too literally. It's mostly tongue-in-cheek, so ostentatious as to appear absurd, which is the point. All I require of my reader is to read my book and hopefully enjoy it for what they get out of it, my personal disappointments at how many people get how much of what notwithstanding.

Your comment on mutual adoration et cetera: I've already explained that implicit in the "she drank of my body, I tasted her flesh" is a perversion of the Blessed Sacrament wherein both lovers are adorer and adoree, hence both are sacred and capable of committing sacrilege. The juxtaposition of his observation of her adoration and his confession of his sacrilegious transference are necessary precisely because of the need to show the definitive act of sacrilege - she's adoring him, he should be looking at her and adoring her back because that is their thing, but instead of worshiping her he "sometimes" wishes that she was his wife. This should be apparent to any discerning reader.

I am too tired to defend the "dark bulk, elven paleness" thing again - I feel like Barack Obama explaining Ayers to the McCain campaign. And let me concede you the "representative/unrepresentative" point since reading what I said about not littering a passage with allusion and metaphor just for the sake of it does not necessarily translate to "this is not what I do in all my work." To express my mea culpas, I'm going to give excerpts of various stories in Fictions in my next or a subsequent post.

The "eating, drinking" reference/allusion is not to the Last Supper but to its subsequent incorporation into sacred ritual, The Blessed Sacrament, wherein it is implicit that anyone who takes part is a devotee and therefore capable of betrayal - in much the same way that it isn't really infidelity if you screw someone else after a one-night stand but if you do it during a prolonged affair then it has a greater chance of being classifiable as such. As regards unoriginality of metaphor, please cite three literary works in which the Blessed Sacrament and/or Resurrection and/or Parousia have been used as sexual parallels. I see the subversion inherent within the metaphor/allusion as original, and you have yet to cite a single of these numerous works to prove me otherwise.

"Pastiche of choppy metaphors...". Lol. You have got to be kidding me. It's a short story, the brief excerpted passage of which uses one central reference, with the only "digression" being the dark bulk/elven paleness which itself ties into an overarching theme of taboo/forbidden intimacy inherent within the story, hence your "pastiche" label doesn't quite work here.

My "club-bopping and bed-hopping", by the way, would not be "irrelevant" if you are who I think you are. If it isn't the person I think it is, then it shows a certain zealotry that is unbecoming of any proper literary critic; I hated the excremental first pages of Dabydeen's Molly and the Muslim Stick but, to be fair, I waded through the entire sewer of the novel to say definitively that the book is utter shit - I haven't pronounced on Wao in its entirety because it would be dishonest. Yet you are offering a flawed supposedly literary judgment of a book based on a small excerpt.

If it is however the person I am referring to, you are human and I hurt you and I am sorry, but it would explain the sort of rabid need for deconstruction in what is possibly the most intelligent criticism of my work I have received to date.

This the Shit I am Talking About

2008-10-14T06:31:00.000-07:00

Woke up this morning feeling hale and hearty, like when I was eighteen and solid everywhere. Did some excuse for exercises, some pseudo-martial arts wushu type shit that I do to meditate, headed down to the Oasis, checked my comments and found a fucking gem.

Now before I post the comment, as I have done below, let me say that there is only one person who has ever given me the sort of downright whup-ass critique of one of my stories and who writes with the same incisive wit and intelligence with which the following comment was written. If it is you, then thank you and I hope The Boy is a bit more secure in who calls you, me in particular. If it isn't, then that particular allusion, while it may have some gossipy value as it stands, is one you wouldn't get.

Now for the comment:

"Are you being serious? I have not read your book but if this is representative I don't think I want to. Allusions are the literary equivalent of hip-hop samples--they are only as good as their provenance and they have to be strikingly original yet fit so seamlessly there could be no thought of an alternative version.

"We feasted lustily off each other for over two months,

is there another way to feast? Implicit in the verb is the connotation of excessive consumption. Also, "lustily" as an adverb when making an allusion to sex? Might as well say we had sex sexily for the amount of nuance that word added.

she drank of my body, I tasted her flesh,

This is tritest allusion available in the largest source for potentially trite allusions. It's like the national anthem, so overdone that unless you're Whitney you're going to find that your hackneyed caterwauling elicits only polite applause

and sometimes, sated, and drifting off to sleep, my dark bulk cradling her elven paleness,

You can only get away with this phrasing in three cases:
a) the female in question is actually an elf and you're a grizzly bear in which case it's a neutral statement of fact.
b) you're making a pitch for Mills and Boons market share.
c) you actually wanted to underline an obvious dark-light contrast and what better way to do than to utilize the most obvious language possible. Cigars (obviously) for everyone.

I committed the sacrilege of imagining that those eyes staring at me in adoration,

Sacrileges don't usually work in this direction. The adored necessarily is sacred and the metaphor does not work if the adoree is not the source of defilement/betrayal in this case.

willing a resurrection, a second or third coming, before the four short hours she had paid for ran out,

At best this is juvenile humor which conflicts with the tone of the rest of the passage. At worst it's an unfortunate slip in a bad passage and confirms that the author is tone-deaf in regard to his own writing.

were those of the vapid woman who inhabited my apartment and whose love, even in those hours, my own heart yearned for."

Vapidity, by definition, does not inspire great emotion. Later, a narrator may come to realize that a woman is vapid, but he could not yearn for the love of a woman he recognizes as vapid and still be in any way a reliable narrator. Should you argue that this a willful shift of perspective from recitation of events to reflection in a few lines, to what effect?

Good writing holds up (thrives actually, and reveals textures and subtleties upon further inspection) under close reading. This struggles and ultimately fails to survive."

I am now heading across to this writing workshop but let me leave a bulleted critique of the critique:

First of all, the passage is not representative of the book and I did say as much in the very post you commented on. The thing with extremely intelligent people, and I am guilty of this, is that they believe that everything can be judged ex pide. The problem of course is when you ignore the obvious. Samples of my work are littered around this blog, and I can always send you the complete book(s).
"Allusions are only as good as their provenance..." et cetera sounds like a wonderful prescription but you've failed to (a) say that the particular mechanics of the allusion is unoriginal and (b) if so, how? It is like saying Walcott's obvious homage to and subversion of Homer in Omeros is intrinsically trite because of the availability/popularity of the source material.
Brilliant point about the source of sacrilege, and you can be excused since you were not privy to the beginning of the opening of the paragraph from which this is excerpted; never mind that it is implicit within the excerpt that the adoration/devotion is mutual via the very corruption of the Blessed Sacrament which you commented on. It is not, "she drank of my body, she tasted my flesh...", theirs is a mutual devotion, and thus his transference to his wife is sacrilegious.
I give you the point about juvenile humour, but again it is only because you have not been privy to the overall tone of that section of the story, or indeed the story itself. The tone is ironic, oscillating between the voice of a man growing into his manhood and the teenager (juvenile) that he still remembers and sees the ghost of within himself. It is deliberately juvenile, as is the term "good ganja weed."
Your comment on "my dark bulk..." is prescriptive and not really a true critical point...I could have easily been more straight forward in this but the visual contrast is not the only thing I intended. "Elven" to qualify the "paleness" cannot be deemed unnecessary simply because of the critic's personal preference for WYSIWYG, since it not only gives a specific hue but also an implicit moral quality, with reference to Tolkien, to the description. I also had in mind the Othello/Desdemona allusion in mind as a sub-text but it was not "seamless" in my mind so I 'discarded' it, as much as you can discard something that you never intended to specifically allude to anyway.
Finally, if it is you, that latent viciousness has always been your one weak point, the flaw in the diamond that you are. And if it isn't, brilliant critique nonetheless and I hope to God you're a hot woman and we meet up some day.

Explico algunas cosas, Dos

2008-10-13T08:07:00.000-07:00

Coming from the comments made on part one of "Explico algunas cosas" - that is, none - and a discussion I had with a friend on Fictions, I have decided to forego writing the second installment as I had originally planned.

Now I've had some people tell me they think my book is shit, I've had people thumb through it and decline to buy it, I've had people just . On the other hand, I've also had people come up to me and say how much they plain out loved it and can't wait to get their hands on Volume II - there was one girl in particular that came up to me in Palm Court and praised both books, and sheep that I was, I couldn't get up the courage to make further contact, despite the searching eye contact for the rest of the night.

Okay, so far, I've had one discussion with someone who really "got" some of the more difficult stuff in Fictions and appreciated what I was doing. This is a very bright person, young professional, well read and living and working in Guyana. She is representative, I believe, of the ideal reader. The sad thing is that other "ideal readers" don't seem to get what I am writing as much as she does.

So, indeed, Neena, who am I really writing for particularly if only a fraction of the readership I expect the book to resonate most clearly with don't/can't get it? At the centre of literature is communication, messages from one person to another. If the medium, the literary work, fails to communicate those messages, then that work has necessarily failed in its purpose. And, as we all know, it is purpose that created us, purpose that connects us, purpose that pulls us, that guides us, that drives us, it us purpose that defines us, purpose that binds us...

Okay seriously. I love writing which offers rewards that are hidden and out in the open at the same time, which offer multiple layers of meaning which strengthen and implement each other. I can give you an example in Borges' short story "The Aleph" at which he talks about a publishing house called Procrustes & Co, a subtle reference to the tendency of publishers to butcher a writer's work to fit some preset mould or standard. Procrustes in Greek mythology was a giant who waylaid travellers, offering them a rest in his bed: if they were too long for the bed, he would lop off limbs or their head, and if they were too short, he would stretch them until they fit. One doesn't really lose anything if the allusion is not caught but there is a invaluable richness to be gained if it is.

Let me give you an example passage in Fictions which is the sort of thing I believe the discerning reader should enjoy, and which reinforces one of overall themes in the story, the sacred nature of of love, even within a failed relationship.

"We feasted lustily off each other for over two months, she drank of my body, I tasted her flesh, and sometimes, sated, and drifting off to sleep, my dark bulk cradling her elven paleness, I committed the sacrilege of imagining that those eyes staring at me in adoration, willing a resurrection, a second or third coming, before the four short hours she had paid for ran out, were those of the vapid woman who inhabited my apartment and whose love, even in those hours, my own heart yearned for."

Lit 101. Earlier in the story, the main narrator in the story speaks about a first kiss [with his wife] in the rain on the avenue on Main Street in front of the "the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart before it burned down and everything turned to so much ash."

The above passage is meant to do several things. First of all, as the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart is meant to symbolise the relationship of the married couple and its going up in flames, or ending up as ash, the affair referred to is meant as a phoenix resurrection, or an attempt at it, on one level.

The greater allusion in the paragraph is sacrilegious - the word "sacrilege" being deliberately included - with its carnal corruption of the Blessed Sacrament, ("she drank of my body, I tasted her flesh") as well as that of the Resurrection and the Parousia ("willing a resurrection, a second or third coming"). Even the word "adoration" is meant both in its literal as well as Christian connotations.

For me, the excerpted paragraph could be read in a purely literal sense and still be appreciated for the rhythm and balance I have (hopefully) imbued it with - but the true richness exists in the "what else" that is present. It would of course be tedious to litter a short story with metaphor and allusion just for the sake of putting as much in as you can. Any reading of Fictions, not to offer a Cliffs Notes on my own book, should be done the way you drink a particularly fine Merlot, rinsing it around in your brain a little before digesting it.

I am so fucking full of myself, it is scary.

Explico algunas cosas

2008-10-10T13:16:00.000-07:00

I recently received an e-mail from friend of mine, herself a writer living here but who is afraid to self-publish her own work. The e-mail was more of an interrogation than a critique of Fictions, as she took the time out to explain. In this post, I want to address a couple of the very valid questions she poses because I believe that this sort of interrogation is not crucial only to a reader's understanding of a writer but also the writer's understanding of himself or herself:

Neena
"Every story has a beginning, middle and an end…these are the rules of storytelling. Obviously, this is not happening in Fictions. Why? The rules are being broken here…why? What is writing? Why do we write? What is this writer trying to say by toying with the rules? What does this mean to the reader who doesn’t give a hoot about ‘writerly’ preoccupations?"

Ironically enough, the best reference point to address the issue of plot is a writer whose work I cannot stand and which I will be parodying in one of the stories in Fictions, Wilson Harris. I can hold up Harris novels, with their plot structure of "a beginning, a muddle and an end", at one extreme as a break from the traditional requirement of narrative to have an ascending plot which culminates in a climax (perhaps followed by a denouement) which is what I believe Neena is trying to identify and fails to in my work.

For me, trying to ascertain plot in the modern short story is like trying to ascertain plot in the modern poem. While I can certainly write stories which adhere, at least on the surface, to the traditional formula for short fiction, I believe that these are more prescriptive than statutory. While I don't subscribe to the bullshit perspective that there is something inherently valuable in the sort of unreadable gibberish that is typical of a Harris novel, I am anything but a traditionalist when it comes to story structure.

Why? Because if you read enough books, plots begin to become extremely predictable, even the ones whose predictability comes out of their unpredictability - like, pour exemple, you just know that there is going to be a third twin serial killer who was castrating the hermaphrodite belly dancers in novel 112 of the James Patterson's 200 Marketable Plots Series. Every time I see a book that has the some review proclaiming the storyline to be a cliffhanger, I want to hang the reviewer and the author from a cliff. And then drop them.

Let me give an artistic parallel to why I write the way I do. Pablo Picasso was schooled in traditional drawing and painting techniques and excelled at them but after a while they were not enough. One of my favourite Picasso pieces is Guernica pictured above which is his representation of the bombing of a Spanish town by Nazis during the Spanish Civil War - no traditional/realist representation of the bombing could capture the terror and the tragedy as well as Picasso's abstract mural did.

Similarly, there are certain things that I want to capture in some of my work which a traditional plot structure is inadequate to contain. In some stories for example, and this is the sort of thing which I started, if a bit subtly in Ariadne & Other Stories is the disintegration of narrative as both method and message. The main character in "Ariadne" for example is attempting to write a story which he fails to do because the place and the woman did not truly exist for him at the time because of his status as outsider, interloper. The first half of the story is the unfinished narrative ("I tried my hand at fiction, you know, started a story called 'The Beach'..."), while the archetypal myth that is the skeleton of the story, that of Theseus and Ariadne, is in itself an abandoned narrative.

The main character in Ariadne makes an allusion to the myth and the unfinished narrative of the affair with when he says "That afternoon, our last, that kiss, our Naxos; I don't know how I shall conclude it. Maybe I can invent some European, or American, or Canadian, some tourist who shall descend, god-like in all his economic splendour, and carry you off, actuate that voyage half-traveled by the heart."

We live in the era of not only literary works which subvert the traditional concept of narrative, like David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, but we see this subversion in other media as well, from as innocuous an example as Beyonce's "Me, Myself and I" video which is shown in reverse, to the much more highly accomplished and enhanced execution of the idea in the brilliant if controversial film Irreversible to other movies like Memento and Vantage Point which all shake up the basic elements of the traditional narrative or plot.

In Fictions, my most 'audacious' subversion of narrative is in the story "Apres Le Deluge" - every other story falls a more or less linear developmental path - linear and cumulative. "The Last Affair" has some temporal leaps and digressions but all in all it's pretty sound narrative, plot and all, particularly post-"Spring in Fialta" as it is.

In summary, for me writing short fiction is an art. I am not going to do anything so ridiculous, in parallel, as splashing paint on a canvas and saying "Et voila! C'est l'arte." But after about a century and a half of existence (and we are of course not including its antecedents the myth and the fable), the art of the short story is evolving and any writer worth his/her salt is going to be at the vanguard of that process.

Finally, the question of writerly preoccupations. All the above is and is not classifiable as such. It is writerly preoccupation but this does not mean it excludes the reader. In fact, my preoccupation with the above concerns originated in my identity as a reader...it is, for me, only coincidental that as a writer I have the means to try to do something about it.

P.S. In case, judging from the above, this blog may come across to some as elitist or intellectual, I would just like to keep true to my infamous reputation and say anyone he thinks that can kiss my ass like the skunthole that he is.

A Good Day, Part I

2008-10-09T07:36:00.000-07:00

After an infuriating blackout last night, I took to bed a bit early. After, miraculously, the electricity came back on, I went downtown to buy a Red Bull and, there is no way to put a fine edge on this, porn.

Went back home, started writing, and decided to take a break to watch (for the dozenth time) The Thomas Crown Affair, the remake starring Pierce Brosnan and featuring Raquel Welch - who starred in the original with Steve McQueen. My favourite line in the movie and my new fucking credo, "A woman could trust me....if her interests didn't run too contrary to my own."

So maybe I'm a bit jaded but this isn't about that. This is about my writing. After watching the movie and (way too much information warning) making use of my purple-headed yogurt slinger, I settled down to write. When I finally took a break it was because, in between tracks on my "Love Songs" playlist, I heard one my phones ringing. Missed it but called back Bakannal, the skunt, who was up after midnight not writing but downloading porn.

After agonising over several stories, trying to 'get' Atonement which I began watching halfway through on CNS 6, and replaying this real hot scene of Black Sistas, White Guy Creampie Fiesta 6 or some shit (the Trouser Cyclops cries again), I finally decided to take a nap at five. Not a very productive night in terms of typed work but beautiful in terms of conceptualisation.

I leave my house at around 6.55 for a 7 o'clock meeting and then it's to Oasis for breakfast and to settle in. After spending too long on Facebook, I decide to go the National Library and it was great. In case none of you people were aware of this, I am a fucking nerd...a geek. I may appear a cool, suave, hip, sophisticated Lothario on the outside but I am goddamn Urkel on the inside.

I float whenever I enter the National Library with all its oodles and oodles of books, oh my! My first quest was doubly pleasing - a search for an article in a back issue of Chronicle, and one that I had written. Browsing through the old papers, one of the first things to catchy my eye was this cleverly titled article called , "Adieu, Foolhardy". Why it was clever and all that skunt I don't have the time to explain, and I was thinking who is this fucking genius who was writing this shit in the Chronicle while I was in Tortola, until of course I read the byline which read "Ruel Johnson"...which made sense.

Bakannal Cuss Out

2008-10-06T08:50:00.000-07:00

I actually missed this post on the GMC website about my good friend Bakanna l. I couldn't have said it better so I will say it worse. Bakannal is a skunt. A fucking skunt. I would invite him on the retreat but he would say he has to work. I know he will read this, so Bakannal you are a chicken shit skunthole.

In fact, I will go for a record number of mentions of the word "skunt" in this post to show how much of an infuriating skunt you are. You have the means, you have talent, you can make the time, to write something proper.

Here is a boast - I am getting lonely being the only young big-swinging dick writer here in Guyana - it is time to whip it out and show us what you got. Otherwise, you are saying that you don't have a big-swinging cock but a cute little mangina...a cute little hairless mangina of the type you might see on a Ken Doll. You skunt.

An Idea

2008-10-06T06:04:00.000-07:00

One of the benefits of being in the public eye as a writer in a society that is for the most part ambivalent about its literary people is that you become a lodestone for other writers. Granted that most of the people who come to you and say "Please take a look at this for me" actually have shit to show you, you still have the odd moment where you discover some genuine talent or some pedestrian writer who with prodding and encouragement could produce some decent work.

People surprise you. There is always some hot young thing who you look at think I would love to fuck her passionately all night and have breakfast and a discussion about whether she thought Lolita was merely high artistic indulgence from a master at his craft, a critique on American innocence and splendor in contradistinction to European debauchery and decline, or an audacious outlet for Nabokov's own nympholepsy/pedophilia. And then she hands you a poem that she is inordinately proud of and you have a Stupid Migraine, i.e., an intense headache brought on by someone, or something done by someone, so incredibly stupid as to short-circuit the logic centres of your brain.

Then there was one case where I kept running into this guy who looked like Akon on steroids. About my height which is about 5' 11" (no, no I'm 6 feet all) with arms almost as big as both of mine put together. After an introduction one night in a club to a luscious looking cousin of his (and a migraine inducer with her speech alone, but...) we became sort of friends and one day he casually mentioned to me that he wrote poetry. Now I'm thinking, he's a cool person but no way on earth is this muscle-bound deportee a poet: I was fucking wrong. He might have been a diamond in the rough but this guy was a diamond nonetheless - all the pain of an abusive childhood at the hands of his mother, their reconciliation, his foray into criminality, all the frustration at being away from his wife.

Now with the increased visibility coming from the launch of Fictions, I have been meeting all sorts of interesting people who write, or at least try to, and what I've come up with is that we have the talent here. I have the idea, which I've already floated, get some of these people together to do an overnight retreat at The Guyana Heritage Museum at Kastev on the West Coast of Demerara.

The idea basically is to get as many people together, which for all practical reasons might be no more than ten, who are willing to commit about two nights, Friday and Saturday, and two days, Saturday and Sunday towards meeting with other writers, sharing work, critiquing and receiving criticism. It would be something very informal, a very loose format. Gary Serrao is a good friend of mine and I am sure would be willing to give a small discount on regular rates for rooms and food.

I spent the last few days of writing Fictions, Volume I, there and I can tell you it was fucking inspirational. Kastev is a windy village close to the seawall, about half an hour's drive from Georgetown, and the Museum and Toucan Inn (check pictures here) is a nice little cul de sac in the middle of it. Anybody interested in participating can feel free to make contact with me on ruel.johnson[a]gmail.com or 696-1840. This is something that I am extremely excited about, albeit with its inherent capacity for deflation. I am going for the weekend retreat anyway - but if it could be a writers' retreat, it would be fucking awesome.

A Sad Day

2008-10-02T15:45:00.000-07:00

This is a sad day in the history of blogging...this Silver Dragon is no more.

Some Responses

2008-10-02T15:29:00.000-07:00

With regards to the comments made on this post:

Sig...I write for several audiences but admittedly I have a sort of elitist bent when it comes to whom I perceive as receiving the richest meaning from my work...it is the literary pretension at work I suppose.

Guyana Gyal...you have to read David Foster Wallace to get what I am talking about, but yes, your comments were generally on the ball.

Regarding the publication thing, I don't sweat it for several reasons:

1) I have been offered publication by one of those British-based publishers before but I rejected even the initial terms of changing my stories or producing one to fit the demographic they were exploiting.

2) I had two manuscripts shortlisted for the Guyana Prize. One of them won over books published by legitimate publishing houses. How's that for a cock-measuring contest?

3) At this point in my life, I have no fucking interest in being published by a major press. My books are meant primarily for Guyanese, and granted if the average Guyanese cannot get some of the allusion within my work, neither can the average American on British or Canadian citizen. I have sent one e-mail to a small independent press in the US which was receptive to my sending sample stories from Fictions - I have not.

I have an ambitious point to make when it comes to what can be produced here, and part of the grand plan has been made easier regarding one contact I recently made regard eligibility of self-published work.

I have had work published in magazines and journals in the region and further afield. My writing is the only real resume I have and it has earned me a shitload of money at times, and it has taken me places - and this was with just one self-published book out.

I have no hangups about self-publishing and the commenter on Livinguyana was ignorant, ill-informed and not worthy of a response.

Bluntly...

2008-10-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

MY BOOKS ARE ON SALE AT OASIS CAFE ON CARMICHAEL STREET, OASIS TOO ON SOUTH ROAD AND IN AUSTIN'S BOOK STORE. BUY THEM PLEASE. IT'S HOW I MAKE MONEY.

A Simple Pleasure

2008-10-02T05:35:00.000-07:00

I am a sensualist. I like feeling things, engaging them. The bad part about sensualism is that often you become inured to the things that please you the most and you need more and more stimulation to double your pleasure, double your fun. But sometimes you are reminded that you do not need to strive as hard to get pleasure out of life. There is this Derek Walcott poem which sort of epitomises that rediscovery of contentment in the simple, the quotidian:

Alba

Dawn breaking as I woke,
with the white sweat of the dew
on the green, new grass.
I walked in the cold, quiet as
if it were the world beginning;
Peeling and eating a chilled tangerine.
I have many sorrows,
dawn is not one of them.

This morning I prepared my son for the day, stopped by a stand in front of his school to get some snacks for him, and prepared to take him up to the door to his class on the first floor of the school building. It's become a ritual, me taking him up the steps and saying goodbye to him as he enters the door. This morning however, as soon as he hits the gate, he high fives the security guard and then turns to me and tells me that he is going to walk in himself. There is nothing I can say that can begin to describe the mixture of feelings which hit me in that instant.

Suffice it to say, I have many sorrows, fatherhood is not one of them.

How it's coming

2008-10-01T09:01:00.000-07:00

Okay...here doing absolutely fucking nothing except updating Facebook. I worked a bit late last night and slept in. There's the Meatloaf song I'm sure I referred to already on this blog, which says "Some days it don't come easy, and some days it don't come hard...some days it don't come at all and these are the days that never end."

This is one of those days that never end. I have some great ideas for editing and writing but my mind just freezes every time I get up to go on the computer. It's more of a writer's speed bump than an actual block but it's frustrating just the same. Now is not the right time to get inspired but suddenly I am.

Just a note on my view of short fiction writing. We are no longer in the days of Chekov or Maupassant where there was this expectation of of linear, progressive development of plot with a clearly identifiable resolution. For me there is a certain amount of wastage in constructing a story simply for the sake of some preordained climax like you would find in stories, albeit classic ones, like "The Necklace."

Poetry and short fiction are, in my head, closely aligned in that the writer should imbue the relatively small amount of words that he has to work with as much meaning and richness as is possible. I think pure fiction belongs to a less skeptical age, where the prerequisite suspension of belief was made easy due to an unquestioning communal gullibility that does not exist, at least in the West, today.

We live in the age of the metafictional, what is sometimes referred to as post-modern fiction - it is natural that in age which our reality has been questioned and prodded and examined and disputed (stretching from Camus' L'Etranger to the Wachowski brothers' Matrix movies), that [short] fiction itself should be interrogated from its form to the basic presumptions. This is not new - Hemingway's fabled six word short story, "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn." was written decades ago.

I intend, sometime in the upcoming months, to facilitate a young writers' workshop and heading my booklist are of course Borges, Nabokov, and one ace-in-the-hole, David Foster Wallace, who is a fucking genius innovator. If you haven't read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men you are missing out on work by someone who has shifted the genre off its centre and at the same time given it a new lease on life. Enough of this ranting for now.

Just for the Heck of It

2008-09-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

Okay....just wrapped up lunch about two hours ago with Silver Dragon and Bakannal. All I have to say to Mr. GRam who did that long ass comment on this post is maybe I can get a job but you still can't get breakfast in bed. And no comment on the est of the shit, since I will not be baited into revealing anything that you don't know already.

Started back this consultancy with this international organisation and I have been placed in this office with this sweet goddamn view. Very peaceful, very relaxing and I could chill out and write whatever the fuck I want to write...including this stupid entry, just for the heck of it. I got two clients ringing off my goddamn phones and I am putting in a bid for a short and hopefully sweet editorial contract so the money situation will improve.

I've figured out something about me. I am afraid of too much success in my non-literary work. I like the finer things in life but where is the angst and the hunger when you get what you want? I treated myself to a bottle of red wine the other day, which I used to drink in the middle of the night while writing. It is not the same as a bottle of Coke and some cheap ass XM rum. Also, I work a lot out of Oasis Cafe where I get treated to some of the finest food and coffee in Guyana - I mean an Oasis salt-fish and bake along with a hot cup of organic Peruvian is almost orgasmic.

Yet, I am at my most productive with a shitty tasting cup of instant coffee and a bone-filled saltfish and bake from Camp Site complex. Spinoza held, as I have learned via Borges, that all things learn to preserve their nature. Maybe, whatever considerable talents I possess, I am essentially a bum at heart, a slacker resistant to the development of his potential. I try to think of it in terms of my dedication to my art but the truth is, I am the least prolific person in literary terms - with the exception of course of Bakannal who I am the point of giving up on because he has no fucking excuse.

I mean, and permit me to digress a little, I think five years ago I autographed a copy of Ariadne to Bakannal with something to the effect that it was his turn next. I have another book out and the man has not put out shit, which is tragic because if I am sure anybody can, it's him. I complain about mediocrity a great deal but the mediocre are going to continue to triumph in this fucking place if the people with real talent continue to be so fucking non-committal in their creative output.

which pop up from time to time. Am I providing adequately for my son, do I take care of him enough?Anyway, back to the main, if rambling, thread of what I was saying. I think the only thing I feel I am really good at is being a writer and being a father, and there are serious moments of doubt? Have I reached my zenith as a writer and, if yes, what sad existence will I fall into afterwards?

Timeka Marshall et cetera

2008-09-25T12:25:00.000-07:00

After some unclear concession on the steamy hotness of Timeka Marshall, Stolid goes on to say how the girl must be photogenic or something. I was in Palm Court the very same night and she looked damned luscious to me. The picture I've stolen off her Facebook profile and pasted here is really how she looks in person.

Moving along to the literary side of this blog, I spent much of today in a frigging daze, finally deciding to leave my apartment a little after lunch. I feel it coming on again, the slackness, the desire to do absolutely nothing except write, drink and fuck...though not necessarily in that order.

In about half an hour I am going to the house of an old friend, and enjoy a couple of glasses of her precious rum and coke and catch up. Then I am going to go home and try my best to write although I've somehow managed to lose both my notebooks. If anything, over the few months I've learned not to bitch and just go with the flow of the Universe, dude.

Instead of dressing up like I did yesterday, I have on my torn leg pair of jeans, plain white t-shirt and a pair of sneakers - and I postponed the haircut and shave. Tonight it's rum and coke, reminiscence and the pondering on how some shit never changes.

I Address Certain Things

2008-09-24T08:38:00.000-07:00

First of all Stolid, I don't trust your sense of judgment anymore. Timeka Marshall is fucking hot and anybody who says otherwise is either hating or gay - which one are you?

As for what I've been up to during the past couple days...I've been trying to focus myself back on my consultancy work, so far disastrously. What I have been far more successful at is getting back to the roots of my writing via visits to the National Library and it has been a sublime experience. Also, I recently discovered a sweet passage in some notes on a story that I have decided to include in Fictions, Volume II and that has made me very happy indeed.

Now, with regards to Fictions, Volume I, please don't bother asking me whether what I am writing is all fictional or not. I'd like to quote you Philip Roth beforehand so you can save yourself the trouble.

“I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dumb and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.”

Philip Roth, Deception

My point in naming the book what it is was to provoke the inevitable question to which the only answer is, "It really doesn't fucking matter all that much." The questions I've been bombarded with so far, and the downright assertions and accusations:

"'The Last Affair' is about you and your wife isn't it?"
"So your cock is six inches, no measure from the base, seven inches?"
"So you fuck the coolie girl, eh?"

So far, what I have failed to see, and this is an indictment of the state of culture in Guyana, that there has so far been no review of Fictions or any other CARIFESTA publication in any of the local papers. You have a critically acclaimed young writer releasing a book after five years and there is no review of it? And then when I go on television and say that the cultural environment in Guyana is fucking decrepit, the Brown-Nose posse all huddle and whisper how fucking unpatriotic I am.

Give me a couple of days, and I am going to start releasing some righteous fucking anger up in this place, so all who might have thought that I've gone soft and complacent in my old age, lost the fire in my belly as it were, wait till you get a load of this lil upstart reloaded.

First of all

2008-09-17T06:49:00.000-07:00

...hmmmm.

Secondly, I'm now officially 28. Yeah.

To all my friends whom I did not get to drink with last night, my absence was for a good cause and being my friends, I know you understand. And yes Gavin, I did give myself a "special present", minus of course the trick handcuffs.

In about two hours, I'm due to give a presentation at a Rotary lunch on Literature and Literacy and this is something I have been thinking long and hard about. In fact, if my pondering on this topic were made substance, it would be a book like Finnegans Wake or a cock like Mandingo's.

Right now I am in Oasis but I can't think because there about sixteen members of the School of the Nations brat pack in here at the moment, including one that looks annoyingly like an ex-girlfriend of mine, which is very disconcerting because she has to be eleven years my junior which interestingly enough is around the age my ex was when we were together ten years ago.

Note to self...as liberal as a parent as you tend to be Mr. Johnson, courtesy of Gibran's "On Children", try hard to make sure that your son never ever develops that skull-drilling nasal whine that comes with an American accent, particularly a fake one.

And now, as I am wrapping up this post, the most annoying of them are leaving. There is a God after all...

Other Notable September 16 Events

2008-09-16T06:20:00.000-07:00

Sep 16 1498
Tomas de Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, dies in Avila, Spain. More than 2,000 heretics were burned to death and 9,654 otherwise tortured under his aegis before all the Jews were expelled in 1492. In 1836, vandals break into Torquemada's tomb, cremate the bones, and scatter his ashes upon the winds.

Sep 16 1920
A horse-drawn carriage parked at the corner of Wall and Broad streets suddenly explodes just past mid-day. 100 pounds of dynamite hurls 500 pounds of steel shrapnel into a crowd of New Yorkers, killing 40 and wounding almost 300 others. No one is ever charged in the world's first car bombing.

Sep 16 1968
Presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon appears on the NBC comedy show Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and asks "'Sock it to me'?"

Sep 16 1985
Art Scholl, Hollywood's greatest aerobatics pilot, loses control of his Pitts S-2A biplane over the Pacific Ocean during the filming of Top Gun. Before heading off to the Danger Zone in the sky, Scholl's last words were "I have a problem -- I have a real problem."

Sep 16 1999
Disney Infoseek executive Patrick Naughton travels to the Santa Monica pier to meet a 13-year-old girl he was attempting to seduce via an Internet chatroom called "dad&daughtersex." The girl was actually an undercover cop. Disney fires Naughton almost immediately after the news breaks; the executive later pleads guilty to the charge of crossing state lines to have sex with a minor.

Sep 16 2005
John Ellis Bush, son of Florida Governor Jeb Bush, is arrested for being drunk in public and resisting arrest outside a bar in Austin, TX.

(Courtesy DailyRotten.com)

Nearing thirty

2008-09-15T10:25:00.000-07:00

In a couple of hours I am going to be 28 years old. It's not like 28 is a true landmark age, not like 30. Still, I try to think of what I have done with my life and I'm not sure of how much I score on my own self-assessment.

I have my son, Aidan, the person I hold dearest in the world, above anyone or anything and who has given me enough to be proud of before his fifth birthday. If I am ever truly concerned with anything as grandiose-sounding as a legacy, whatever genetic gifts I have passed on, or have been a conduit for, to him would be legacy enough.

I have some excellent friends, fine upstanding young men all, except for the ones that aren't...which means you and you and you, you skunts. You know yourselves and will most likely be the ones commenting on this post, so fuck off in advance.

Regarding female companionship, it is enough to say that I've been rescued from the mire for now and it is what it is and although the kinks still need to be worked out, we good for now.

All in all, it's not a bad life. I get to do my professional projects, work on my writing from Oasis Cafe, break bread with some good people, get inebriated on occasion, play video games with my son which makes me a cool fucking father in my book, and have some occasional quiet time with a good woman...life isn't bad at all.

Me and DW...Part II

2008-09-12T14:04:00.000-07:00

I met Derek Walcott at the symposium he headlined at the Ocean View International Convention Centre. First however, a little bit about me: I am not the star-struck, celebrity worshiping type. If I have a strong desire to meet anyone, it is because I believe we have a certain affinity with each other.

And the people I'd like to meet because of this are few: I'd like to meet Quentin Tarantino most definitely; Eminem; Busy Signal to a certain degree; David Cronenberg and Anthony Minghella. Meeting Walcott was therefore not anti-climactic to me, when he sort of looked at me after a glowing introduction from Ian McDonald and I was summarily dismissed. Derek Walcott is a self-centred, egotistical prick who believes that because he is an excellent writer people need to kow-tow to him; I understand the man perfectly.

Because I am such a big prick myself, I didn't do the "Please can I take a picture with you, sir" sort of thing. I love this man's work, but not even for Derek Walcott - Kerry Washington, maybe, but not Derek Walcott.

The next time I encountered Derek Walcott was at Castellani House at what was supposed to be a master writing workshop but which turned out to be a complete fucking fiasco. Expecting a workshop, I duly printed some of my poems and took copies of my books and was delighted when the Nobel Laureate asked if anyone brought any work. Because no one else did, my poems were left untouched on the table, although during the rest of the class I was a fairly good student.

Wrong, I was the annoying know-it-all student, the type of fucker that everyone else in the class in high school hates including the teacher because there isn't a question that he isn't ready to answer - in short I was a smart-ass. Thankfully, I recognised that I was being a smart-ass and pretended to write down everything Walcott ordered us to write down. The only uncontrollable upsurge of smart-assism occurred when the great man gave the wrong spelling for Finnegans Wake, adding an apostrophe that wasn't there - it was too much for me so I corrected him.

I won't comment on the rest of the workshop because the post would be too fucking long and two-thirds of it, literally, would be expletives. Just to say that I heard so much skunt that I wanted to puke. Long story short, a friend of mine gave me an enthusiastic introduction to Walcott again but I wasn't that bothered - I knew his game by then. The person who received more questions per capita from Walcott was the same woman, a journalist, I could not keep my eyes off of during the workshop because she had the most flawless skin and the most over-exposed breasts in the room.

There was a point in time during the elbow-rubbing afterwards where I politely stood by while Walcott was talking to Sir Shridath Ramphal - when there was a break in conversation, I politely addressed Sir Shridath, whom I had met before, and who came over to me immediately after the workshop to chat with me, asking him about the date of his book launch.

A little later, the beautiful breasted journalist and I were in conversation when Walcott comes up to her and invites her to lunch with himself and Sigrid (she thought he said cigarette) who I've read is notoriously tolerant of his flirtations. He invited her to a movie screening as well, and she invited me along since it turns out she was a friend of one of my friends. I ended up not going.

The long and short of it is that Derek Walcott is a grumpy, arrogant, lecherous old prick: my respect for the man has grown tremendously since meeting him.

Me and DW - Part I

2008-09-09T11:56:00.000-07:00

It is not often that one gets to meet one's idol. During CARIFESTA, I finally got to meet Derek Walcott, the man whose book, Another Life, made me first want to become a serious writer. In fact, Walcott's use of a quotation from Andre Malraux' Psychology of Art:

"An old story goes that Cimabue was struck with admiration when he saw the shepherd boy, Giotto, sketching sheep. But according to the true biographies, it is never the sheep that inspire a Giotto with the love of painting: but, rather, his first sight of the paintings of such a man as Cimabue. What makes the artist is the circumstance that in his youth he was more deeply moved by the sight of works of art than by that of the things which they portray."

My Giotto moment was opening Another Life and reading the first lines:

"Verandahs, where the pages of sea
are a book left open by an absent master
in the middle of another life -
I begin here again,
begin until the ocean's
a shut book, and, like a bulb
the white moon's filaments wane

Begin with twilight, when a glare
which held the cry of bugles lowered
the coconut lances of the inlet,
as a sun, tired of empire, declined..."

I knew then, not only that I was sure that I wanted to write, but also what I wanted to write about, this place, this place that I could not recognise in the best books, or indeed any book, that I read. After a while, Walcott's "Hic jacet" became my credo and it still is to this day.

My [first] book of poetry, The Enormous Night, had two major influences: Pablo Neruda and Derek Walcott. In fact, the collection is actually named for a phrase from Neruda, just as Fictions is named after Borges' Ficciones.

Walcott is the only living writer I have idolised, and the only writer whose work I see my own as an extension of, even though my current major genre of creative writing is short fiction and his is poetry. Meeting Walcott was therefore important to me and CARIFESTA provided the opportunity of just that. I suppose I was awaiting my own Cimabue-Giotto moment, but it never happened. In the next post, I'll give a summary of what did happen. In the meanwhile, anyone interest in e-mail me, please do so on ruel.johnson@gmail.com.

Next post, Me and DW - Part II...

The Future

2008-09-06T15:25:00.000-07:00

...or I suppose this can be called, "It's been a while: Part II". Okay, here's the skinny on what is going on with this ongoing project called Fictions. So far, Volume 1 has received a fairly good critical reception by people whose literary credentials I respect.

Of course my friend, K-ram, outright told me it was crap but then confessed that he didn't actually read the book...so he can go suck on a cartload of gangrenous, syphilitic donkey-balls until he does. There is one great fear that is taking hold of me as I get feedback on the book or fail to, something K-ram alluded to as the Emperor's New Clothes syndrome. Maybe I've hyped this book up so much on this blog, hype ably aided by the local media, that people may be afraid to point out that I'm writing shit after all.

Which I am not...but I need the harshest criticisms of Fictions as possible so that I can see the areas in which I can improve. I am confident and cocky when it comes to my writing but I reserve a great deal of room for humility, even if only because it may be indicative of the fact that as good as I am, I have the capacity to be so much damn better.

What I am undertaking in the overall productions of this book has evolved over the following months to be a wonderful experiment and the more I [re-]enter the literary life I rejected for the past six years, the more I experience one pleasurable surprise after another.

For those of who haven't read Fictions, it is available at both locations of the Oasis Cafe, Austin's Book Store and the Michael Forde Book shop (don't fucking ask how) so please pick up a copy so (a) you can read a good book and (b) I don't have to resort to cooking curry curry ever again...until my next book.

Coming up next, my [non]-encounters with Derek Walcott and how I need to keep my fucking ego from outright exploding after correcting the man whose work first inspired me to take this writing shit seriously.

PS. Just to celebrate my return...fuck, skunt, pokeyhole, shit, ass and tits. There.

An Oldie but a Goodie

2008-09-03T04:44:00.000-07:00

No, Stolid...this not the end of this blog. But I have been so busy with the business side of being a writer in Guyana that I haven't had the time to do much updating. Fictions is only half-published by the way and I still have to do some polishing of the stories (I'm anal (in the [Tony Shaloub] Monk as opposed to [Catholic] monk sense) when it comes to my writing) as well some more fund-raising to get that volume out by late October. And then I have to do a limited edition complete volume of the book.

In the meanwhile, let me leave you with something I wrote three years ago while I was living in the British Virgin Islands, and no I did not find any virgins there, British or otherwise:

"On Killing My Third Rat

People often disagree with me when I try to convince them of the inherent evil within certain seemingly innocent things. Like, for example, when I try to convince them that Barney, Teletubbies, and Mr. Rogers are all agents of the Beast. The only ally I've found in my case against the Teletubbies is Jerry Falwell and, let's face the nauseous, belligerent, swindling truth here, that brings me very little comfort indeed. Even before modern children's television, Lucifer has been winning souls through many apparently innocuous devices. Like what is up with Georgey Porgy (which rhymes with orgy) and the whole sexual molestation thing? And little Jack Horner - the pun here would not be lost on the Trinidadian reader - putting his thumb and what? And that old woman in the shoe who couldn't keep her legs closed. And where were the RSPCA and those rabid cows at PETA when that little gem about the farmer's wife mutilating three disabled rodents was written, eh? This was the foremost thought on my mind the other night as I brought my broom down on the head of one of those friendly rats that have so graciously decided to choose me as their flatmate. Actually they don't live with me, they live somewhere in the acre or so of bush that surrounds my apartment but they drop in often enough through the holes they've bitten in my anti-mosquito mesh. Anyway, as I was viciously beating this rat to death - smashing his head in with my broomstick, and stomping him with my size-ten Timberlands - I took some time to reflect on my upbringing. I wondered, if I had not listened to those silly nursery rhymes - like that one glorifying gratuitous cruelty to one of God's creatures - whether I would have turned out a better person; whether instead of murdering this poor rat, and immensely enjoying it I might add, I would have been selflessly leaving pieces of cheese and bread out for him and his no doubt starving legion of progeny. I mean, was that nursery rhyme or one of its predecessors the cause, for example, of a teenaged Ivan the Terrible throwing live animals off of towers just for the sheer heck of it? I vowed, as I was mopping that rat's blood off of my floor - his body already thrown back into the bushes so his family could give him a proper burial or eat him or whatever - I made a silent, sacred vow. I have, regrettably, killed three rats so far. I will be far gentler with the next one that comes into my apartment. Instead of using the hard edge of the broom, I'll use the mop to beat him to death."

Official CARIFESTA Launch Tomorrow

2008-08-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

Dear All,
The Official Launch of Fictions, Volume 1 is slated for 12.30 pm at Book Fair at the National Park. I will be however at National Park from today, hustling my ass.

The price per copy is $2000 so please walk with your damn money. Ariadne & Other Stories will also be available at $1500 per copy. But, wait for it, you can buy both books for just $3000.

Best Wishes,
Ruel

Challenger

2008-08-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

This is a bit too painful to recall in detail...event catered for...guest invited...my book does not arrive from the printers...Houston, we have a motherfucking problem...good news, the pony in the pile of horseshit, is that my banner looks brilliant...

Launch Lift Off

2008-08-23T07:27:00.000-07:00

Boooom...bitches.

Launch Lift Off

2008-08-22T08:52:00.000-07:00

One...(Meh nah test two...what about you?)

Check it out, Stolid!

2008-08-22T08:19:00.000-07:00

Launch Lift Off

2008-08-20T20:42:00.000-07:00

Three...

A note

2008-08-15T09:21:00.000-07:00

An uncritical patriotism benefits only the few in power, and absolves them of their responsibility to ensure the wellbeing of the people. There is no ideal authority, no government of heaven...

Made the news...

2008-08-14T11:56:00.001-07:00

What do you know, I made the news...

In Praise of Bump Club

2008-08-14T10:49:00.000-07:00

Today is the final full day before Fictions goes to the printers and I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that I have consumed far too much alcohol in the past week and my brain feels as if it's been pickled - while inebriation may be conducive to creative work, it surely must be in moderation.

The good news is that I just saved a bunch of money by switching my car insurance to Geico. Or something similar. Just when you thought corporate Guyana was irredeemable in their philistinism, I've just been made recipient of the [hopefully inaugural] GT&T publication grant. It makes me feel almost conflicted that the dominant colour on the cover of my book is a bright red.

Now to return again to alcohol consumption. The persons largely responsible belong to a motley crew of young men referring to their Saturday drinking sessions rather uncreatively as "The Bump". Now I've mentioned this group in passing in one post and got a thorough busing out because I happened to casually refer to the consumption of unpalatable animal parts.

Now that cussing out notwithstanding, over the past few months, I've been more or less inducted into Bump membership and the mixture of camaraderie and imbibing has served to help me through some trying times. The only dirty little secret I discovered recently about members of the Bump, the only potentially stigmatic thing, is that the bulk of them are from Queen's College.

As a President's College person, we generally tend to take QC to task for their uppitiness and their penchant for bullshit institutional formalities. This sort of thing is readily apparent at the Bump but they've somehow managed to infuse it with a PC-like coolness, rubbed off no doubt from former PC student Kieron Meredith who made the only major mistake of his life when he
left PC to go to Queens.

That said, I've come to develop a healthy respect for the Bump membership. It feels good to be adopted to a group of young professionals who all seem to be excelling in whatever profession they happen to be in, but are still grounded to enough to get together every Saturday to talk skunt. For me, that is a sign of true pedigree, not the pretentious airs that most QC people have about them.

I am actually looking forward to this weekend's Bump meeting, after the (ahem) reunion last weekend. I can actually hear the stupid singing of that Latin school song now.

Post Scriptum

2008-08-08T14:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, I give up. The celibacy thing was stupid. Silver Dragon, esteemed members of the Bump, others in general, you were right. You were right. I've flushed the Zen out my system and have gotten rid of my mangina. I tried...I really tried.

My Happy Place...

2008-08-08T11:53:00.000-07:00

...which is also sort of my sad place. Got some great additions to my contemplative music selection and have been listening them all afternoon. Eric Clapton's tragic but beautiful song, "Tears in heaven", most of my Neil Diamond classics, and Staind's two big hits, "It's been a while" and "Outside". Also got the best of my boy 50 Cent for when I am feeling all hyped up and gangsta...

Additionally, a friend was thoughtful enough to bring me an optical mouse so my layout blitz this weekend is going to be made so much easier. I am going to spend the weekend at a place that has special memories for me, and if you are reading this, you know where I am talking about...I haven't been back there since.

It's going to be me, my music, my solitude, my stories. The final crafting of Fictions tomorrow and while there is a sort of relief coming in, I also feel a distinct sadness. As the creator of a work of art, you develop a paternal sort of feeling over the work you put out. And publication is like sending your child our children out into the world and hoping that they do well.

The finishing of Fictions also marks the end of an era for me. After this, I will no longer by the angry young man - I will have to grow up, shoulder the sort of responsibility commensurate with my capacity. Essentially, the events in sum of the upcoming month are going to constitute a significant rite of passage for me.

Here is part of the plot of the larger tale, ladies and gentlemen. The prodigy - after five years in the cocoon of a strangling, mundane but at times beautiful domesticity - has planned his emergence to coincide with the most opportune convergence of the stars in heaven. With the upcoming CARIFESTA, he will be both at home and within his element. Old friendships will be renewed and strengthened, new alliances will be made.

This is the time that is most ripe for the strange alchemy that turns the curse of the Muse into the gift it was originally meant to be. And is not that it cannot fail, but if it does, there can be no more apt an epigraph to his literary career than Ovid's homage to another young man who decided to take the reins of destiny into his own hands:

"Hic situs est Phaeton, currus auriga paterni,
Quem si non tenuit, magnis tamen excidit ausis."

Except of course that the chariot is his own, any paternity being the self who years ago fathered the self he is today.

This is the last post on Cumae for what will be some time, the next most likely being my announcement of the date the CARIFESTA Secretariat would have given me for the launch. Out for now. I'm off to my happy place tomorrow.

Modesty...

2008-08-07T16:18:00.001-07:00

Just a completely random "Eureka" moment, no doubt induced by alcohol. I am a genius. And no, I don't mean it in the cliched, random moment of clarity enlightenment way. I mean it in the same way that Silver Dragon speaks of his wealth...it's just there.

Now, because of my arrogance, my bluntness, and my disdain for mediocrity, I am sure that there is the odd person out there who doesn't like me. Even some of my friends might find my occasional haughtiness off-putting, which to them I can apologise for.

Anybody else however, please remember that whatever of my many personal flaws you can point out at any given moment, you are likely not a genius so you can fuck off. That means you, and you, and you. I can fall into some mysterious abyss appearing in the center of Georgetown but a genius will be falling into that abyss.

I love ordinary people, but I realise that I don't like them. Because I am a genius, this is not contradictory. Now the would-be cynic might scoff and say that a true genius would not be so immodest to dedicate an entire blog post to the fact of his genius, but the would-be cynic can fuck off.

I am going to close off this post now because I have to go continue my genius work. And to all those who disagree with my self-assessment as a genius, it's okay because you are all stupid and incapable of understanding my ingenious thoughts. There.

2008-08-05T05:18:00.000-07:00

You saw the cover, here are the contents:

_______________________________________________
Introduction

FICTIONS I
CCLE, A Personal Journal

FICTIONS II
The Last Affair
The Hawk
The Aviary
Thief
Jambo, Si Jambo
True Believer
Eden Revisited
Otter Lodge
The Hardest Thing
Cumae

FICTIONS III
Words and Lyrics
Legends, Takatu
The Death of Ravan
A History of Phlegm
Sul da Frontiera
The Great Junkie Carwash
The Last Plantation
The Paternity Test
The Last Assassin

Homestretch

2008-08-05T05:10:00.000-07:00

I have exactly one week left to submit my stories to the printers. I am way short of my fundraising target but I have hope. The greatest task ahead of me is the hardest part of writing – rewriting, crafting the stories.

Like the Meatloaf classic says, “Some days it don’t come easy, and some days it don’t come hard. Some days it don’t come at all and these are the days that never end”. Except these days are the days that end too quickly for me.

My contemplative playlist is almost finished and I still have roughly six hours of writing facing me tonight. I have moved my work desk into my bedroom so that I can rest my back every hour or so - I gots to keep it strong for...well.

I have modified the design of the cover according to suggestions made by a reader of this blog, and who apparently saw my semi-corpulent ass on television on Sunday night since he saw fit to comment on it. As much as I really do treasure being quiet in my corner for the most part, all this publicity shit comes with the territory.

You can expect to see more of me on television, in the press, and on radio, being all arrogant and self-important, and according to one friend, looking a bit like LFS Burnham. For the next month or two, its emergence time for me, public limelight and all that, and as much as I loathe it mostly, I have to admit that part of me likes it just an incey wincey teeny little bit.

I get to be the fucking bad-boy, the enfant terrible, of Guyanese writing all over again. Six, eight years on and I am rediscovering that I still have that fucking fire in my belly, that I have a belief and a dream that I am still willing to fight for and piss people off at my pronouncements.

Ladies and gentlemen, Ariadne received some periphery attacks from the lunatic fringe but there was nothing that they seemed to be able to sink their teeth into. Fictions is much more meaty and I have some other projects in train to raise fucking hell. My blood is up, testosterone is coursing through my nuts, and I am getting ready to kick ass in the morning and take names in the evening.

This is going to be fucking sweet.

House

2008-07-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

By the way, let me register that I am not a fan of House because I in any way personally identify with a cranky, mean, self-centred, sarcastic, narcissistic, foul-mouthed perverted genius who hates mediocrity and has a thing for hot, intelligent women. Really. I just like the show.

Quick Post

2008-07-30T12:03:00.000-07:00

Alone in house…writing and watching House…drinking Maxwell House…

2.16 am and fucking blackout comes on. GT, the land of no fucking guarantees. There is something utterly paradoxically romantic about writing on a laptop by candlelight. And yes, Sherlock Holmes, my wonderful insomnia is on the rise again.

P.S. And the electricity came on just after I typed “again”. GPL is fucking with me.

Mood music

2008-07-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, 29 July. It’s 6.30 pm and I am home alone. Drinking some leftover beers from Bakannal’s visit to my apartment last night and settling down to my writing. The karaoke bar across the street has decided thankfully to not blast their speakers at full volume.

I actually finally have “Free Bird” on my laptop but I can wait for its turn on the playlist since some of the songs which precede it are classics in themselves. There is Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited”, Billy Joel’s “An Innocent Man”, Richard Marx’s “Hazard”, and of course “Hotel California” by the Eagles, the fucking 7-minute version with the guitar solo.

“Free Bird” itself is also the 8-minute version, with guitar solo. For those of you who don’t know this song, I can direct you to another classic piece of art, Rob Zombie’s masterpiece of a film, The Devil’s Rejects – while I am sure “Free Bird” has been used in movies before, this has got to be the best use of the Lynyrd Skynrd signature ever.

[I should probably note here that I started this post as a follow up to this one but the sudden blackout which inspired it has ended.]

All these songs are part of my “Contemplative Playlist”, the roughly two hours of music that I listen while I write. Also notable on the list: “Desert Rose”, Sting and Cheb Mami; “Iris”, Goo Goo Dolls; “Angel”, Sarah McLachlan; “Untold Stories”, by Buju Banton; and “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty.

What I need to make my list a bit more complete include: “Soolaimon”, “Brooklyn Roads”, “I am I said”, “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show”, “Shiloh”, “Turn on your heartlights”, “Hurricane”, “Crackling Rose”, and “Playing” all by the greatest fucking songwriter in history, Mr. Neil Diamond. Also, I have to get “Two of three ain’t bad”, and the full 11-minute version of “Anything for love” by Meatloaf. Then of course there is “Una Palabra” by Carlos Valera.

When I tell people the music I like, I often get accused of “selling out” as it were. One friend asked me if I was a middle aged white man from Manhattan. And having a drink with Bakannal and Silver Dragon the other night, the latter expressed shock that I would know the words to some old school dancehall.

The fact is, I have an eclectic taste in music, although I tend to be attracted more to words than the beat. I would rank Busy Signal’s “These are fucking days” right up there with some of the best of Neil Diamond.

“Every day the same shit,
Different gal, same dick
Different flow, same spit
Different drugs, same ship
Same Busy, different hits
With different messages
Reaching out to everyone
In all different communities.”

And another brilliant fucking song coming out of the new breed of dancehall artistes is Bugle’s “Exercise every day”.

“Life for me, this ain’t no fun
De only thing I can depend pun is my gun
I don’t really want to rob Mista Chung, but
Survival a de key in a de slum.”

I’ve forgotten, by now what the original point of this post was but it feels, going on six hundred words, as if it’s threatening to turn into a dissertation.

The Cover

2008-07-30T08:59:00.001-07:00

Thank you everyone who posted on the cover design, particularly those who expressed some concern for the copyright on the image. The image is taken from Wikipedia Commons, and can be found here.

As a photographic representation of the Michelangelo's Cumaean Sybil, a work of art for which the copyright has expired, the photograph is also in the public domain. It's use on the cover is therefore not illegal.

As to whether it is aesthetically pleasing or not, that is up for argument. When I designed the cover for Ariadne, I decided to use an image of the clay-brick Avenue on Camp Street because it was related to the one of the stories in the book, "Killing the Kitten".

Why I used a portrait of the Sybil of Cumae is because Cumae and the Cumaean Sybil serve as the underlying allegorical and metaphorical bases for one of the central stories in Fictions, the one this blog is named for, and by extension the entire collection itself.

A friend and I had a discussion recently concerning. While I am a rabid proponent for the need for a provincial aesthetic in Caribbean, I subscribe to a great degree to Bacon's assertion that "All novelty is but oblivion." My homage to the Greek structural and thematic antecedents to my work is ever present - my last book was named Ariadne & Other Stories.

Why I chose that particular painting is that I did not like the other two available on Wikimedia Commons. Castagno's Sybil is representative of the Sybil of Cumae in her youth, while Raphael's painting is much too crowded - the Sybil represented in my short story, 'Cumae", is not quite, but close to, the Sybil of Petronius, referenced in Eliot's "The Waste Land", the old washed up prophetess whose pitiful existence way past her prime has been caused by her vanity. Michelangelo's Sybil is closer to the Sybil I wanted to represent: aged, grotesque, yet still very powerful.

Stolid Charisma, I take your point about the size and font of the title but perhaps you should allow for actual scale when it comes to your assertion that the "Fictions" is too small. Regarding the font, what I was aiming for was a contrast with the fairly elegant "Palatino Linotype" which is the primary font for the stories. What I am going to do is experiment a bit and see if anything else works.

You can't judge a book et cetera

2008-07-28T14:32:00.000-07:00

Sitting here in Oasis Cafe, having had a particularly exhilarating online reminiscence about a particularly fine bottle of Moet & Chandon (1980 vintage) I enjoyed about a month and a half ago, with the promise of more to come, I am preparing to head home to really start working.

The reminiscence and the promise was good because, another particularly fine bottle (also 1980 vintage) keeps presenting itself and disappearing, to the point that I am seriously considering going completely back to teetotalling.

Tonight I will go and undertake some laying out of my completed stories. I am a one-man production outfit when it comes to the writing, layout and graphic design of Fictions and I can tell you it's hard work. This afternoon it is hard work I can go home to with a damn smile on my face.

You've gotten snippets of the content of Fictions, some more of which I will be posting closer to the launch dates, and a mockup of the cover. I enhanced the cover design a bit and would like your opinion on it. Bitchy opinions are welcome, just as long as they are informed bitchy opinions.

Guinness is Good for You

2008-07-26T14:51:00.001-07:00

Aidan having rediscovered his mother for the weekend, I spent last night drinking with Bakannal and our amorous army pardna, meeting up briefly with the mighty Silver Dragon as well. Started off at Latino and ended up in Palm Court. Roughly eight Guinnesses later and four hours after having started, I am sprawled off on my couch, promising myself that I am going to get up and do some writing at around 4 am.

I wake up at 10 am and my fucking head is killing me. I don't feel like cooking and I can't eat bread the way my mouth is feeling so it's time to head out to my landlady's shop for a peanut punch to settle my stomach and some channa to fill it. A hangover makes you realise that sunlight actually emits a fucking noise.

Six hours later and I have chalked up about five hours of this game, Narc, and my stomach is still queasy. I come down to Oasis, put on my "contemplative" playlist and suddenly it comes. It fucking comes. And not in the drizzle it's been coming in in the past two months. I am on a damn high. I am in the fucking zone.

The moral of the story: Guinness is good for you.

P.S. Dear Bakannal. You are a skunt. If I had a bow and arrow I would shoot you, straight in your mangina.

This fucking place

2008-07-24T06:13:00.000-07:00

It’s 3.20 am, my most productive time of the day. I am in that period of transition – a matters of hours really, but welcome nonetheless – between wrapping up one job and going full bore into another.

I am now settling into doing some writing and then the fucking power goes. Yes, I do have a laptop but with an average battery life of one hour, I can’t go into any intense writing with any sort of assurance. It’s an old, ugly IBM which has a battery life of about an hour; that’s the equivalent of suffering from premature ejaculation in these times of metrosexual studs like the Vaio which can boast a lasting power of about eight hours.

Anybody who tells me that Guyana is about to turn the corner and shoot into the realm of even decent development is going to get an invitation to, in the immortal words of Eric Cartman, Suck My Balls. And, no, you fucking fags reading this, I didn’t mean that literally. You hot chicks on the other hand, maybe I do, maybe I do…I’m just saying.

But back to my rant. I have to be in the fucking zone to write properly. When it comes to doing the voodoo that I do so well, I am a goddamn primo donno (which I suppose is the male equivalent).

Thankfully, due to my working late, Aidan has opted to spend the night with my parents or else I would have to be up fumbling for matches and a candle before he wakes up to darkness and begins to scream so loud that the neighbours think that I am murdering my child.

And there, before I could wrap this fucking post up, the lights come on again. As a child of the swinging eighties, all this frequent blackout shit and no water coming shit and prices being out of range of the ordinary man shit, it’s like I am living in a fucking flashback.

My friend, with the outrageously luxurious mansion (as opposed to the other run-of-the-mill reasonably luxurious mansions out there) I don’t suppose you have to suffer this shit. It would be interesting to see what a blackout night goes like in your neck of the woods.

A poem

2008-07-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

Fantasy

In this room –
this Universe of Eternal Morning –
with the sun sliding on to the rumpled sheets,
let me awaken

and find you;

consumed by the cotton of my shirt,
wearing nothing else.

Come show me the calm, cool
country of your neck
and let me conquer,
claim it with kisses

Name it for mine own

Let there be no sound
but your laughter.
Let there be no touch
but your body's.
No taste
but your breath.
No scent
but comes from you.

And let there be only us

In this room –
this Universe of Eternal Morning…

Moving along now

2008-07-22T05:13:00.000-07:00

This is my final word on the whole deadbeat mother issue. I had an epiphany last night, or a re-epiphany as it were, since I had written more or less the same thing about eight years ago. It is that there are many deaths in this life.

Sometimes the essential spark - what we may call the soul - which exists in some people dies: sometimes it is extinguished by external forces, sometimes it commits what is tantamount to suicide. It is like the excision of daemons in the Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy.

You try to communicate with someone and at times you may get through, but ultimately what occurs is more a seance than an actual conversation.

Dirty Laundry

2008-07-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

Regarding my this post, which was somehow construed by some of my friends to be my airing my dirty laundry in public instead of being genuine advice to deadbeat mothers, all I have to say is that I have been at best mild and highly allusive.

During my research on the phenomenon of deadbeat mothers in general, I found this page of links for example, with the individual posts going into a fair amount of detail including adding names, phone numbers et cetera.

While this battle of the sexes thing is more my friend, The Silver Dragon's, during some of my research into the general area of what transforms a woman into a complete skunt when it comes to motherhood, I have found some interesting tidbits like the fact that in the US, men are far more reliable at paying child support than women.

Dirty laundry is one thing. But in an environment which presupposes that women are endowed with some inherent, unassailable parenting gene that men are incapable of possessing, it needs to be illustrated that the opposite is as often true . Quiet frustration when dealing with a deadbeat bitch is not a virtue, it is not a sign of manliness, nor of maturity - it is condemning yourself to pressure cooker stress, particular when every accommodating plea you've made for civility, reason and good faith is repeatedly met with spite, illogic and outright deception.

My logic is simple. You are not saddled with the greater financial burden of raising the child, you have a good job, you get any assistance from the child's father: you have no fucking reason not to make time to spend with your one child. None.

Borges on writers

2008-07-18T18:55:00.000-07:00

Reading Borges for inspiration and found this gem of a quote in a story called "The Secret Miracle".

"Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned."

How true, even of this writer. There is a treasure trove of Borges' wisdom over at Wikiquote, but there is no substitute to exploring the rich and virtually infinite labyrinth of his work as a whole.

Now back to the lit

2008-07-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

So the other night I am heading up the East Coast and working on Fictions in my head when I get this breakthrough for the resolution of one of my stories. Somewhere around Atlantic Gardens, a genuine fucking Eureka moment, and I don't have a pen nor paper to record it.

Half an hour later, we are in Ann's Grove and I have procured a pen and a relative's telephone bill for last month and my world finds balance again. "The Last Assassin" is one of the stories I consider of higher importance in my book. Whereas, like most of my short fiction, the focus is intimately personal, this particular story has a wide resonance because it is deals with part of Guyana's political history.

I have this penchant for iconoclasm, and I hate taking given history without a pinch of salt - and Guyanese history needs entire spoons. "The Last Assassin" is partially an interrogation of one major event in Guyanese history, and is ironically set outside of Guyana. I cannot say more without denying the reader a considerable part of the ironic thrill which runs through the story. I will instead leave you with the following Borgesian paragraph, edited slightly from the version that will be published:

"Before he draws his last breath, he does not seek nor find the precise redemption that is expected of him. He has stumbled upon a greater revelation, one in which not only vindication for himself was possible but also a quiet, unheralded heroism."

Excerpt, "The Last Assassin"

"Eppur si muove" et cetera

2008-07-18T17:03:00.000-07:00

On the advice of friends, I've decided to remove a post which I published last night. That said, ma'am, judging from the fact that your phone is as expected turned off when you promised to see your son, you're still a skunt...

On idealism

2008-07-17T15:53:00.000-07:00

Nobody don't say anything when I ranting and raving and being all foul-mouthed and shit. But as soon as a man decides to stand for something, to set some sort of benchmark in his life, the one conclusion that everybody coming up with, including his friends, is that he lacking sex and it is somehow affecting him.

To Guyana Gyal, thanks for the self-publication information but publishing locally is far more feasible. Ultimately I would like for the the book to be affordable enough for the average local literary enthusiast.

Okay. So this post can be construed by some cynical people, as a bit on the corny side, coming as it does from an oft-times belligerent bad-ass such as yours truly. But I have done the whoring around after heartbreak thing and the fact is it leaves you empty and you don't really get to fill that space inside you.

It's not that I am against getting some, but the Predatory Man thing is so fucking cliched. Here is another corny fucking thing I am going to say: Some men "consume" women like they do Polar beers - and not the legally (?) imported ones; I mean the kind that we used to buy at that Chinese restaurant on UG road where you had to dump the empty cans in a tall white bucket.

And while I am still amazed at the ability of certain friends of mine, one whose name and rank in the GDF I will not mention, to handle more pussy per month than the entire staff of the GSPCA combined, I prefer my experiences with women from now own to be more like indulging myself in a particularly fine bottle of Moet et Chandon for about a week or so before moving on, in about a month or two, perhaps three, to another.

The fact is however, I cannot afford fucking (double entendre intended) Moet et Chandon at present, although I've had the occasional sip in the past couple months. So, while I might need "some" as it were, I don't need any. In any case, I got 99 problems and a bitch already happens to be one.

Phoenix

2008-07-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

I am nearing thirty, but at twenty-seven still not quite there, about a week away from being officially divorced, and I feel sometimes as if I am living my own version of The Pursuit of Happyness.

And no, I do not succumb to the temptation to paint myself as the flawless hero of my own life's narrative, because God knows I have played the part of villain, of monster, often enough. Yet, looking back I can see that I have been mostly good, and that I still am and I do not have to do things for some inherent vindication within certain actions.

I, for example, take care of my son, not to appear as a good father but because it is just simply something within me to do, and no rift, indeed no chasm, between his mother and I can sever that bond. And what I get by way of reward is simple and powerful, like the five minutes we spent together last night looking into a mirror, he with a cup of tea and me with my mug of coffee, and the two of us staring at each other through our reflections and simply knowing.

I am single and celibate now, not to appear to have some moral high ground but because I have had something like an epiphany that true pleasure or the true sating of desire is not to be found in the chase and the conquest, nor in the submission. True pleasure exists, and necessarily so, outside of the illusion, the fantasy of pursuit and capitulation.

We should be like planets, bodies in space, floating; and love, or simple attraction, should be something inherent and unseen, a gravitational force which emanates from the core. The next woman I will be with, we must have that, a union without the burden of detritus, or in spite of it.

In the past few months, I have been through the fire. It is not an easy thing, the realisation that the emotional edifice that you spent the past six years constructing was not an altar but a pyre; yet as the ashes cool I have found that those parts of me that have not been annihilated, have indeed been strengthened.

Three weeks to finish Fictions and to raise enough money to publish in time for CARIFESTA. No fucking sweat.