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Stop callin' me an icehole, you fargin' bastages!

Some amusing slang etymology, courtesy of the online Urban Dictionary:



bastage -- n.: bastard



"Originally used in the 1984 movie Johnny Dangerously. This PG flick introduced bastage, fargin', and icehole as PG terms for similar sounding words."

Mr. Sandman

Today's iTunes purchase: "Mr. Sandman" (1954), written by Pat Ballard and performed by The Chordettes. The song is a toe-tapping melange of scat, pop, big band, jazz, and barbershop quartette (and a guaranteed two-minute cure for melancholy). Contains the immortal rhyme:

Give him a lonely heart like Pagliacci
And lots of wavy hair like Liberace

Some light reading

Two lists of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. Some strange ones in the "reader's list." Ron L. Hubbard at # 3, # 9, and # 10? WTF?

Australians curse the coming darkness

People of the north, the sun will soon be ours. At precisely, 00:07 UTC (6:07 p.m., Regina time), that fickle orb will cross the equator, bringing "spring" (and a related drop in cases of seasonal affective disorder) to our beloved hemisphere.

Up before 5 a.m. today, the coldest day of the new year (-43 windchill), battling the forces of entropy.

The Rocky of Canlit?

I'm thinking of starting a new writing regimen to try and get my novel finished. Getting up at 4 a.m. every day and writing for 3.5 hours before leaving for work. The glass of raw eggs will be optional.

Winter solstice

... today at 6.20 pm local.

You

Victoria Day, 2006. I should be doing yardwork or taxes (dandelions are going to seed and I'm way past Revenue Canada's deadline), but spent most of the day completing the first draft of my first ever story in the "second person." If first person is ideal for confession, then second person ("you you you") seems best suited to accusation. Which is perfect because the story is about political and celebrity assassins (Oswald, Chapman, Hinckley etc.).

Got a case of the strangles?

While researching the etymology of "distemper" (don't ask), I came across a related ailment -- "the strangles" (also known as "colt distemper") -- an "infectious febrile disease of horses" marked by inflammation and congestion of mucous membranes and swelling and suppuration of the lymph nodes of the jaw and neck. Next time I'm too flu-ridden to go into work, I'll now be tempted to wheeze into the phone, "can't come in, got a case of the strangles." Not to be confused with "bastard strangles" (I'm not making this up), defined as "atypical strangles in which abscess formation occurs elsewhere than in the lymph glands of the neck." Now that's gotta hurt.

A list of the 100 "most important" Canadian books ever ...

... has just been published by the Literary Review of Canada. The LRC emphasizes that this is NOT a list of "favourite" books, but rather, a list of works that have had lasting significance in Canada's evolution as a nation. "We wanted books that have changed our country's psychic landscape," explains LRC editor Bronwyn Drainie in a media release.

The books are listed in chronological order, starting with Jacques Cartier's optimistic Account of the Second Voyage of the Navigation of 1535 and 1536 (1545) and ending with Jane Jacobs' pessimistic Dark Age Ahead (2004).

Notable fiction titles on the list include Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1947) and Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), Timothy Findley's The Wars (1977), William Gibson's sci-fi classic Neuromancer (1984), Margaret Atwood's distopian The Handmaid's Tale (1985), and Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries (1993). The most recent fiction title on the list is Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998).

Notable fiction omissions include Yann Martel's The Life of Pi and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (both were Booker winners). The most notable non-fiction omission is possibly Margaret Trudeau's autobiographical Beyond Reason. I mean, really, if smoking hash with the Rolling Stones and writing about it doesn't get you on a list, what will? Maggie may fare better in the LRC's upcoming "Cheesiest 100 books in Canadian history."

Another celebrity children's book? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul McCartney has become the latest washed-up celebrity to pen a children’s book, joining the likes of Madonna, Sarah Ferguson (the Duchess of York), Jamie Lee Curtis, and former supermodel Paulina Porizkova— all of whom used name recognition rather than literary talent to get published.

McCartney co-wrote High in the Clouds (surely not an ode to cannibis?) with author Philip Ardagh "who was brought in after a first draft to ‘finesse’ the book," reports the Associated Press. Translation: the first draft sucked and McCartney needed a hired gun to make him look good.

And how’s this for a downer of a premise: the alleged kiddie book is reportedly about a squirrel named Wirral whose mother is splatted by a tree knocked down by evil developers.

McCartney advises parents of "very little kids" to skip over the opening death scene, adding: "My little one (two-year-old daughter Beatrice) is too little. She likes the pictures though." And what's not to like about pictures of squirrel guts, we ask?

No word on whether the book includes a recipe for squirrel soup.

Who’s the shit disturber that put Cheezies in my poutine?

The latest edition of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary has more than 2,000 uniquely Canadian words and phrases, editor Katherine Barber tells CanWest News in an article published today.

The Canadianisms include: all dressed, bachelor apartment, butter tart, Cheezies, chesterfield, deke, dick all, double-double, eavestrough, girl guides, gravol, housecoat, parkade, pogey, poutine, seat sale, serviette, shit disturber, toboggan, toonie, tuque, and washroom.

According to Barber, shit disturbers are called “shit stirrers” in Britain and the United States. Personally, I prefer the broader Canadian term (there are more ways to disturb the shit than just stirring it, after all).

Link: Canadian Glossary, eh?

Word of the day: heresy

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.

—Graham Greene, novelist/journalist, 1904-1991

Quote

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

—Logan Pearsall Smith, essayist (1865-1946)

Fiction freebie

The O. Henry prizewinner of 2000 is readable online (not an excerpt, the whole piece!). The story is called "Weight" and was written by John Edgar Wideman. I rarely read a story twice, but I've read this one several times now. For more award-winning fiction freebies, visit the "freebies" section of my website.

Word of the day: puritanism

The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.

—H.L.Mencken, writer/editor/critic, 1880-1956

Insight = eloquence

Here's one of the best writing quotes I've yet stumbled across:

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

—Cato the Elder, statesman/soldier/writer (234-149 BCE)

Quote

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

—Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity's Rainbow

Quote

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

—Mark Twain

Deep Throat fingers self

Former FBI deputy director W. Mark Felt (now 91 years old and living in Santa Rosa, California) has apparently told Vanity Fair magazine that he was Deep Throat, the secret source who guided Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Washington Post investigation of Watergate that culminated in Richard Nixon's resignation as American president. Woodward and Bernstein gotta be choked that Felt decided to self-identify to another reporter, rather than letting them pull off the mask and relive their Watergate glories. Felt's confession would have been no revelation to the man who lost the most, Nixon, who had the G-man pegged as the snitch while he was still president. Which brings us to our quote of the day, courtesy of Tricky Dick:

"The informer is not wanted in our society. That's the one thing people do sort of line up against.... They say, 'Well, that son-of-a-bitch informed. I don't want him around.' We wouldn't want him around, would we?"

—President Richard Nixon, in a recorded White House conversation with Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman

Finally revealed: what "BD" stands for

Someone from Janesville Wisconsin visited my website yesterday via Google, using the search terms "free BD stories." Perplexed, I replicated the search. Turns out, "BD" is an abbreviation for "bondage." Now, I've never written a bondage story (much less a free one), although someone does get roped into a chair in my play The Scarborough Four ;-).

CanLit's missing foundation?

"A great literature needs, and in some sense depends upon, the co-presence of deep and passionate critical thought."

—Michael Keefer, paraphrasing Matthew Arnold (in a review of Barry Callaghan's Raise You Five), Globe & Mail, May 20, 2005

Dumb and dumber?

They don't make politicians like John Diefenbaker anymore. Last of the great Canadian orators, his one-liners were usually better than Carson's. One of my first "political" memories is watching The Chief scold Pierre Trudeau for using the F-word ('fuddle duddle') in the House of Commons. Here's another of my favourite Diefenbaker anecdotes, as revisited in a recent newspaper column on the history of "Tory turncoats":

Back in 1976, the ultra-rightwing Jack Horner couldn't persuade Tory delegates that he should succeed Robert Stanfield as leader (Horner came fourth in a field of 11 candidates). What did he do? Why, he switched to the Liberals and became Pierre Trudeau's minister of industry. When Horner crossed the floor, that marvellous, vitriolic renegade John Diefenbaker quipped that the IQ in both parties had suddenly risen.

—Peter Worthington, Toronto Sun, May 20, 2005

Marathon of Hope

Twenty-five years ago today, one-legged runner Terry Fox dipped his artificial leg in St. John's harbour and started his Marathon of Hope to raise money for cancer research.

"If you've given a dollar, you are part of the Marathon of Hope."

—Terry Fox

Website of the Terry Fox Foundation

Smashmouth fiction

I'm coining a new term: "smashmouth fiction." A Google search of this phrase yielded no hits among the world's eight billion or so web pages, so I'm staking a claim as the nomenclator and progenitor of this exciting new literary movement.

Merriam-Webster Unabridged defines smashmouth as "characterized by brute force and an absence of finesse or trickery : HARD-NOSED [e.g., smashmouth football]." So smashmouth fiction would be writing that grabs the reader by the throat in the opening sentence and continues to stimulate and/or provoke all the way to the final period of the closing chapter.

Etymology of "buckshee"

Whenever my dad gets ripped off by a company on goods or services, he's been known to grumble that the perpetrator is a "buckshee outfit." I used this phrase in casual conversation recently and elicited a few wrinkled foreheads, so thought I should check the dictionary meaning of "buckshee." I'd always thought it meant "fly-by-night" or "jackleg."

Merriam-Webster defines the word only as a noun and indicates it's the lesser-used variant of baksheesh, which in turn derives from the Persian word for "gratuity." Meanwhile, American Heritage defines the adjective "buckshee" as meaning "free of charge" or "unsolicited or gratuitous." Neither sense is pejorative (unlike the phrase "buckshee outfit!"); but American Heritage does offer the following sentence from the Financial Times as an example usage: "The title was a bit of buckshee deceit, and had little to do with the plot."

This usage of buckshee suggests the use of something gratuitous to cheat or deceive. So, by extension, a "buckshee outfit" could be a company that regularly uses cheap gratuities or other means to rip off its customers. Then again, it could just be a malapropism, which would explain the wrinkled foreheads.

A league of our own

Photos just arrived by mail of the 2004 Sage Hill Writing Experience, where I participated in Lynn Coady's fiction workshop. My favourite is a pic of this year's Sage Hill softball team (below). That's 2004 Order of Canada appointee Robert Kroetsch in the back row, second from the left, wearing the grey golf shirt. I'm the sunburnt one at the far right, wearing the banana-yellow volleyball shorts.

Crappy Hemingway story discovered

A lost Hemingway story about bullfighting has been discovered in the papers of the late American screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart. Hemingway wrote the story when he was just 25, before he had fully mastered the craft. The five-page story has been appraised as “not great literature” by Hemingway expert J. Gerald Kennedy. Kudos to the Hemingway family, who have refused permission for the story to be published. If you want to buy (and read) it, you’ll need a fat wallet: the carbon-copy manuscript and accompanying handwritten letter signed by Hemingway will be auctioned in December by Christie's, which expects the bidding to top $22,500 Cdn. Fortunately, most of my early, crappy work is trapped on the hard-drive of a non-Y2K-compliant computer, where it poses no threat to humanity.

• BBC item on the discovered Hemingway story
• Guardian story on the discovered Hemingway

KFC shareholder alert

Inspired by Alice Walker’s anti-KFC poem “Mother’s Day,” PETA is waging a poetry contest on its “Kentucky Fried Cruelty” website. Submitted poems will be sent to KFC honcho David Novak “as a literary message to KFC that animal welfare must be taken seriously.” The best entries will receive an autographed copy of Walker’s “Mother’s Day” and “all serious entries” will receive an anti-KFC poster “featuring quotes from celebrities ranging from actor [emphasis added] Pamela Anderson to scholar Dr. Cornel West.” Certain media blatherers think PETA goes over the top with many of its stunts, but I appreciate their passion and creativity (even though I’m an unrepentant carnivore and longtime circus aficionado). They certainly know how to push the envelope on behalf of their various causes, and in this instance who could object to their desire that KFC “treat the more than 750 million chickens raised and killed each year for [its] restaurants less cruelly.” But I do object to PETA referring to professional jiggler Pamela Anderson as an “actor.” I mean, please. And in the interests of equal time on the whole vegetarian-carnivore debate, I’ll close with a counterpoint from that other world-famous, socially-conscious poet, Homer Simpson:

“If God didn’t want us to eat animals, he wouldn’t have made them out of meat.”

It's all in the word count

China's Xinhua News Agency reported yesterday that author Qian Fuchang has written a "novel" meant to be read on mobile phones via text messages. The "steamy tale of illicit love" consists of seventy chapters totalling about 4,000 words. I hate to break it to the author (not to mention the BBC and The Globe & Mail which carried the news item), but 4,000 words is not a novel, or even a novella — it's a freaking short story. For the record, novels start at about 50,000 words and most reputable publishers won't even look at manuscripts less than 70,000 words. So I guess it's back to the typewriter, Fuchang!

_______________

According to the "fiction factor" website, works of fiction can be categorized by length as follows:

• Micro fiction: up to 100 words
• Flash fiction: 100-1,000 words
• Short story: 1,000-7,500 words
• Novelette: 7,500-20,000 words
• Novella: 20,000-50,000 words
• Novel: 50,000-110,000 words
• Epic: 110,000 words and up

Attention grammarians

Oxford University Press (OUP), publishers of a slew of dictionaries, recently identified the most common error in the English language. It's not the grocer's apostrophe and it's not confusing "its" with "it's" (an error now only committed by about eight percent of English speakers). No, the most common error in the English language is confusion or misuse of the words "diffuse" (meaning "not concentrated") and "defuse" ("to remove the fuse from or otherwise make less potent or harmful"). My guess would have been confusing "your" and "you're", but that didn't even make the shortlist. Other common confusions listed by OUP include rein/reign, pedal/peddle, tow/toe, pouring/poring, draw/drawer and their/there/they're.

Joyce, you randy devil

A bawdy three-page letter written in 1909 by literary icon, James Joyce, to his main squeeze, Nora Barnacle, just fetched a whopping £240,800 ($590,000 Canadian) at auction. If I'd known writing dirty paid so much money, I would have taken a course or something. Joyce's "Araby" is one of my all-time favourite short stories, but I've still got his daunting Ulysses (considered by many to be the best novel of the 20th century) on my "to read" list.

• Read the Sotheby's press release about the Joyce letter, which Sotheby's describes as "the missing link from the most famous erotic correspondence in modern literature."
• BBC News: "Joyce letter smashes sales record"
• Official "Bloomsday" centenary website (commemorating the 100th anniversary of the day of action in James Joyce's Ulysses: June 16, 1904).

As if there's not enough drivel on the Internet ...

So begins my literary "blog" — an online journal of crazed musings about books, writers, movies, form-letter rejection slips, barking canines from Hell, the exhorbitant price of cranberry juice, whatever comes to mind. (And yes, Hell has its own web page — check it out.)