HUMAN WRECKAGE

A Timely Story of a Book

Every book has a story. There’s a story to every book. Every author, every edition and every reader. Let’s consider City of Gold by British author Len Deighton.

Deighton died last spring, age 97. He was a prolific writer. His spy thrillers were infused with detective noir. His hardboiled protagonists were cynics because no operation ever went as planned and these grubby men, usually as anonymous as their jobs in the shadows, had neither public school nor regimental ties in their wardrobes. Despite similarly sparse prose styles, the Deighton hero is the antithesis of Ian Flemming’s 007 snobby cartoon character (albeit a delightful one). Deighton embraced London’s “Swinging Sixties” and even published illustrated cookbooks for sophisticated bachelors on the make. RAF veteran Deighton was also a respected military historian. Blood, Tears and Folly is the most insightful, almost breezy, overview of the Second World War I have ever read. Beyond the canned obituaries, Deighton’s death prompted The Guardian and The London Review of Books to print appreciative essays on elements of his oeuvre. Skipping his forays into French cookery, I’ve read everything he’s written, many titles twice. I’ve seen all the films based on his novels and others where his writing warranted a screen credit.

Ann and I are dedicated readers. We’re fortunate that we’ve an informal network of like-minded family and friends. Suggestions and books are exchanged. Bags. We’d live in a bedlam of books, tippy firetrap stacks if clutter didn’t agitate me so. We’re hoping to age in place. But we can’t forget about our survivors and the inevitable cleanup. Inventory control. And there could come a day when Ann and I decide to downsize further beyond the modest confines of the Crooked 9. Our lives could conceivably compress into a seniors’ residence cell. No space for a paper library – man, I can’t even bear to contemplate the volume of physical music in the house – so stock must be rotated through, not accumulated.

One charming aspect of our neighbourhood is the sprout of “little libraries.” Giant birdhouses on a pole up front in a yard. Ann and I enjoy walking around and stocking them with enough literature to smother Alex Patterson, V.C. Andrews, outdated text books and ersatz religious tracts. We donate boxes of books to charity shops which tend to lure fellow bibliophiles hunting for a cheap score in good condition. Places like that, we drop off, I don’t dare go in.

The sole contemporary novelist whose books are automatic purchases upon publication is Colson Whitehead. Everyone else I admire is dead. In the spirit of reduction I’ve taken to rereading works by my favourite authors. Fresh eyes following dusty decades and the uncomfortable knowledge that a particular volume will never be taken to bed a third or fourth time. Yet my reluctance to part with them is crippling. As I reread my father’s edition of John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy I’m aware I’m doing what he did. And Ann has read it since. That book’s not going anywhere over my dead body. I believe I’m prepared to part with other ones though. I think I can. I think I can.

City of Gold is late Deighton. The Cold War had defrosted and so he went backward. This novel is set in 1942, Cairo. The Abwehr has penetrated the British high command. General Rommel’s Afrika Korps is rolling toward Egypt as speedily as Germany’s blitzes through Poland or the Low Countries. (The Allies would eventually turn the tide of the Second World War in the Western Desert, but not until 1943.) I was all over this book when it was published. I bought the hardcover at Audreys Books on Jasper Avenue. I bought copies for my father and brother – full disclosure: those ones would’ve been scooped off a Chapters remainder table six or eight months later. Still …

I remember a long distance call with my father. I said I was reading Fleming’s James Bond novels on my morning and evening commutes. I assumed he wouldn’t be impressed; I felt like a kid again, as if I’d broken something in the living room. Dad said, “I’ve always got time for a good story.” City of Gold is a good story.

Friends dropped off a bag of books recently. One of those reusable bags you pay for and as indestructible as the cheap plastic bags they replaced. There were a couple of returns inside. Had they not come back it’s possible I wouldn’t have missed them. I think. A couple of other books were intended for Ann. Down the side of the stack against the gusset was an Arrow paperback of City of Gold. I thought, “This one’s little library bound. The hardcover’s on the shelf downstairs and, anyway, I read it recently.”

I took a moment to examine it anyway. The title was rendered in metallic ink, embossed. The image was a “golden hour” rendering of a jerboa, a “desert rat” and certainly not your average Norwegian brown. The hardcover jacket features the pyramids at Giza, a pair of palm trees and a military ambulance in a similar light, sunrise or sunset. The shock came as I flipped through the Arrow edition. My “recent” read was in fact 34 years in the past, 1992. Because my mind is as potty as my mouth, I thought, “Fuck.”

Three and a half decades of life and death, marriages and divorces, modest successes and epic failures, elation and the blues, jobs and postal codes, flux and stasis, and comedy and tragedy all in; a sudden immersive tsunami, a blurry quick-cut montage. And that’s just the half of it.

Latter day American noir author John D. MacDonald (unjustly neglected from my standpoint) once published a collection of his early pulp fiction called The Good Old Stuff. Its title is the nature of literature and music. When you reread an old book or listen to a classic album again, you can go back and you can stay as long as the page count or the two or four sides allow. I remember when I got this. I remember the first time I read it and why. I remember the first time I heard it with whom and where we were.

I placed City of Gold atop my night table stack. Ann and I have booked a short trip later this month. A compact book is a handy distraction when you’re hanging around a departure lounge and later mildly discomfited inside a cramped cabin crammed with other people and their baggage. Ann and I will be sitting beside each other. But once I open City of Gold again I might as well be on a different plane.

    

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything meaningless. No AI and little intelligence of any sort since 2013! Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com to buy my last couple of books. You can also listen to songs I’ve co-written with The Muster Point Project before scooting over to its YouTube channel.

EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

“Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign”

Clutter is an undefined crime, it’s not in the books. The flaw of indifference manifested and alluded to in sleek, glossy lifestyle and civic bylaws, that grey area between “Alice’s Restaurant” dumping and hoarding. Clutter thrives in cyberspace, replicating like a virus. It rides the airwaves. It is the embarrassing and involuntary white noise of society assaulting you out on the street. It honks, it beeps, it pings, it blinks, it winks, it redirects traffic, it blocks traffic, it parks on the sidewalk. John Updike wrote “dirt is matter out of place.” Clutter is stuff out of place. Lots of it. It hurts my eyes and ears and tries my patience. Clutter is entropy.

“Zere vill be order! Und ze order vill be enforced!” Who knew I was a closet fascist except for Friday night cosplay. But seriously wokes …

Lawn signs are a particularly irksome bugbear of mine. They appear like dandelions in Edmonton. Everywhere. Coroplast is the commercial name of a fluted plastic product – imagine a piece of cardboard that may or may not breakdown in landfill until sometime late next century. Durable. Like quality plywood it ships in 4’x8’ sheets, two sides good. The most efficient trim size for a stand out lawn sign from an efficient mass production standpoint is 24”x18,” no bleed. A proper sign comes complete with a rugby goalpost wire stand: ram it up and jam it down.

Placing lawn signs is a classic party promotional procedure during an election campaign. Anecdotal evidence suggests they create word-of-mouth buzz or a form of it. Should there be enough of a particular partisan colour on a street or in a neighbourhood, an undecided voter may opt to join the herd. (God knows we’re all good at that.) The other good thing about election signs is that parties are obligated to get their clutter off people’s lawns in a timely manner once the polls have closed. Alas, those regulations don’t apply to causes.

Alberta is United Conservative in all her majesty. Danielle Smith, our glib and shrill premier, tends to float illiberal and ill-considered future policy initiatives with one of two preferred prefaces: “I have heard …” or “People tell me …” Each public musing fertilizes a new crop of plastic dandelions. For the sake of further provincial autonomy, should Alberta withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan? HANDS OFF OUR CPP! The latest blight reads FOREVER CANADIAN. That sentiment may remain true for weeks to come even though Smith’s inane, expensive and failed exercise in direct democracy wrapped over a week ago.

Messages of admonishment and dissent up and down my street are difficult to ignore and difficult to dispute. Neighbourhood redevelopment begs the application of the Universal Law of Wham!: “If you’re gonna do it, do it right, now!” Proper urban planning is not in the Canadian Criminal Code, but running over children at play at high speed is. Ones advocating literacy and proper funding for all levels, aspects and forms of education demand a definitive Animal House statement: KNOWLEDGE IS GOOD. Book banning bad. And maybe Alberta’s healthcare system requires a lot more funding and planning, and more diligent oversight than four health ministers and an active RCMP probe into procurement shenanigans including alleged bribery and money laundering can provide. Curiously, Smith, the Banshee of Invermectin, dislikes the presence of federal police in her province. She’s been told and she has heard that Albertans would prefer their own provincial police force. The deflective signs are not positive.

Climate change, conservation and ecology: inarguably short- and long-term concerns. Possibly crises. Alarms printed on industrial plastic. What is irony if you mean well? Anyway, there must be a landfill nearby.

Before too long the mass-produced outrage, that deeply personal statement upon installation, fades like sun-bleached ink. The messages no longer register; illegible clutter as meaningless eyesores. Lawns as Coroplast sties. Elected ineptitude and the 24-hour news cycle always ensure there’s room for at least one or two more weeds of complaint.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything meaningless. No AI and little intelligence of any sort since 2013! Visit my companion site  www.megeoff.com to buy my last couple of books. You can also listen to songs I’ve co-written with The Muster Point Project before scooting over to its YouTube channel.

SAINTS PRESERVE US

That Time of the Month

A calendar year is incomplete without its dates of celebration and awareness. National Coffee Day recently passed like a diuretic. There are special days for doughnuts, hot dogs and pizza. Activists, advocates and crusaders usually designate a week to their causes. Disease-prone organs like lungs, hearts and kidneys warrant a month – provided they can hold out that long. There’s always something there to remind you of your diet, your desires and your death. Happens all the time.

What to make of 19 October, referendum day here in Alberta? A cynic might presume the United Conservative government is promoting an infection in the province’s body politic. Could be a one-off or the start of something sickly cyclical? There are ten questions in the pop quiz. Almost all of them are moot as they concern federal powers which are above and beyond the constitutional jurisdictions of Canada’s provinces and territories. A few of them are alarmingly xenophobic. The tenth is something of a canary in a coalmine conundrum, sort of a backed-off barroom argument. Should Alberta stage another, separate referendum on secession? The tenth question’s potential follow-up question, the formal, finicky fine print, is whether or not Canada’s wealthiest province should begin the begin, formally unmoor itself (landlocked as it is) from the Canadian federation.

The questions read in conjunction with the government’s 12-page self-cover guide are designed to elicit the UCP’s desired responses. I’m reminded of an idiotic customer satisfaction survey: “Would you prefer to fly WestJet to your Los Cabos vacation getaway or walk?” Not a single one of the questions constituted a plank in the UCP’s successful 2023 re-election campaign. Its platform focused on tax cuts which never came to pass. I view this immanent exercise in direct democracy as Premier Danielle Smith’s Pontius Pilate play. The secession question in particular allows her to wash her hands of her own oscillating ineptitude and pin the blame on the people. Cracked leadership as parrot.

Smith, a glib erstwhile pundit who acquires party membership cards like collectibles, is a political opportunist of the crassest sort. She will suck up to der Trumpenfuhrer or cock an earnest ear to an outlandish conspiracy theory. Whatever it takes; needs must. The prize of power took some machinations and keeping it means doubling down with pandering plausible denial.

In those halcyon days when kids could find summer jobs that paid competitive wages, two friends of mine drove forklifts. JB 007, no pinball wizard, tilted a pallet of Kraft salad dressing. The clean up took days. Pat the Bowie Freak impaled a chesterfield on behalf of Sears. I picture UCP leader Smith driving a forklift designed by multiple committees through a vast ideological warehouse: UCP as UPCs, barcodes ranging from pink Tories to the illiberal right with a long dark aisle of hacksaw-wielding separatists. A lot of inventory, some of it not shelf-stable.

Alberta’s separatists are a fascinating breed. The fifth column embedded in the UCP is not sectarian. It could be race-based, but not in the sense of a distinct nation of people seeking sovereignty. No, they’re a bit too white bread for that. No, imagine a nasty break up. And just for fun, imagine a same sex break up, non-binary could very well apply down the road. An aggrieved party in a snit, bilious with festering resentments of perceived slights and grimly determined to depart with every tangible asset and then some. And by God, the severing will be like Amazon Prime! Speedy delivery at no charge! This breed of Albertan should not be mistaken for a single SKU. Some dream of an awkwardly situated independent country while others fantasize of annexation by the United States provided the Grand Old Party remains in power forever south of 49; Woke 2.0 won’t fly off the shelves.

“Et tu, Brute?” Smith has been emphatic: There will not be an eleventh question on her watch. The next provincial election is a hard date: 18 October 2027. She may wish to table any plans for celebrating another term. The UCP, young as it may be, is already notorious for its backroom daggers; Smith herself is no novice. The referendum is an inadvertent reckoning for the party too. The UCP must come clean about its true mission and that implies one faction or another is delisted in the warehouse. The party won’t disintegrate, but it will fracture, there will be shards. Alberta’s next government will be a minority. The vote will lay bare the province’s urban-rural dynamic.

Elections Alberta is the independent body that oversees our rituals of democracy. The Smith government has slashed its budget while dictating any and all electoral ballots be counted by hand. Nobody expected a ten-question referendum comprised of ten separate ballots. Maybe there was a more efficient way to waste money and time? A single sheet? Electronic tabulation? A short-staffed Elections Alberta will be under scrutiny on referendum day. Social media is rife with disinformation from immediate interested fringe parties and foreign bad actors. There will be complaints and disputes. All unintended and unforeseen consequences are on Premier Smith and her fifth column cabinet members.  

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything meaningless. No AI and little intelligence of any sort since 2013! Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com to buy my last couple of books. You can also listen to songs I’ve co-written with The Muster Point Project before scooting over to its YouTube channel.

THE HUMAN RACE

An Evolving Narrative

When it’s all too much/You turn the TV set on/And light a cigarette/Then a public service announcement/Comes creeping on/You see a lung corroding/Or a fatal heart attack/Turn to me …

Some forty years ago I read an essay on stereo equipment (I’m still a whiz at that 70s stuff) in The New Yorker. A witty, incidental aside described any Lou Reed album as a “suicide note.” Lou’s streetwise image was perhaps a genuine contrivance, but the entire New Sensations album (1984) suggested he was in a borderline emotional state teetering precariously over a shallow pond of good moodiness. “Turn to Me” will never be mistaken for Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” even though their messages are the same. To put it somewhat less succinctly in the excruciatingly evangelical boardroom stenography of modern times, you’ve got to “reach out in order to move forward with ongoing clarity.”

When the revolutions per minute shellac you beyond 78, you’ve got to know who to call. Unlike Dylan’s “Mister Jones,” I’m acutely aware of my broken handle on things, a rusted crank that’s no key to the mystery of what the hell is going on. But I know some people. And I’ve reached a stage in my life when I’m not prepared to brazen it out any more. I’ve learned a lot but I still know an iota less than fuck all. There may never be a right answer, there may never be a wrong one, but you better understand the question.

The first time my friend Jim Gibson instructed me to “ping” him, I assumed he’d become fluent in Esperanto or at least an elite player in a beer bottle cap league. He’s a hi-tech digitized guy. Back in high school he foresaw what was coming and it wasn’t computer science students printing out perforated portraits of Snoopy. When I need blockchain explained or fret about the state of the metaverse beyond its existence in a Spider-Man cartoon, I get in touch with Jim. Because I don’t ping him, I sometimes wait weeks for him to call me back.

Tip of the Spear (2017) was Jim’s first book. A rumination on a potential slow-motion trainwreck involving the organic and digital worlds. Four minutes to midnight at the crossing. Its thesis was positively Hemingwayesque: Progress is good. Increasingly sophisticated technology is simply a mere tool; perhaps even the Platonic ideal of an accelerant or efficiency. Civilizations have been disrupted so many times before throughout history and so why not right here right now?

A decade on, Tip of the Spear is now as irrelevant as those Wired magazines stacked for resale at a kiosk in your local antiques mall. When Artificial Intelligence only existed on printed pages, in the speculative works of Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison. I believe the tech bro mantra is something like “Move fast and break things and sweat the legalities and ethics later". Nobody thought to x-ray the contents of the AI Pandora’s Box before blowing its lid off. As for me, I picture a Large Language Model as a big sweaty fat guy with an extensive vocabulary of malapropisms; maybe he just perseveres.

The revolution will not be televised/There will be no re-run, brothers/The revolution is live!

Great writing transcends its primary inspiration, its initial context. Living words evolve into cosmic stencils. A sage observation however misapplied or misinterpreted down the road can never be stripped of its universal truth. This is why the lyrics of Gil Scott-Heron, an American jazz poet and musician writing about Black Power in 1971 America, suit my state of mind as I try to grasp for some understanding amid the advent of AI with its promising myriads of blessed miracles and dreadful threats of unforeseen consequences. All I know is that something’s happening very fast and faster than the speed of enlightenment.

The Human Race, in its Schrodinger’s cat forms, is a collaborative effort. Jim and co-author and colleague Laura Haynes are grappling with our immediate science fiction future on Substack in real time. We have been seduced by Aristotle’s prime principle of proper drama – we have suspended our collective disbelief of AI. It’s here, there and maybe everywhere. We need critics, thinkers, not glib social media meme fodder; these are not the times for ill-considered off the cuff remarks. Together Jim and Laura as writers, as informed, objective observers, have courageously rolled a set of quantum dice.

The penultimate draft of The Human Race is now available for download on Substack. The audio and tactile books, scheduled for the end of this year. They could all be very different. Mumbling as a writer, I can tell you this much: it takes me years to write a novel; it takes me a week or so to write a blog post; it takes me a week or a month to write song lyrics for The Muster Point Project. Sympathy cards for funerals don’t come easy. The process of putting anything, anything of mine out there petrifies me. I admire Jim and Laura because in my darker moments I could “refudiate” (God bless you, Sarah Palin! Idiotic neologisms are so seductive. Talk suggestive acronyms to me; I’m begging. How was I to know you’d morph into a US Republican Einstein? A Tea Party? How quaint!) everything I’ve ever done, rewrite it all and then start the cycle over again. There’s an app for that now.

Had I even an iota of inclination to do so, I’d parachute myself into a minefield of dilemmas. Am I being edited or erased? Is the resulting work my own? Credit where credit is due, but who or what gets it? Am I obligated to inform my readers and my songwriting partner? Can sweat equity ever be quantified? What is the value of one person’s original thought and hard labour? This written ragged voice of mine has taken a lifetime of refining. Writer’s block has value too, penalty box time to gather some of the thoughts and ideas out and up there under heaven. I require tools to get them down: pens, notebooks, pads of paper; a stripped-down "kandy-koloured" laptop laps beige electric typewriters at the starting gun – revisions are so much easier to implement as eternally imperfect as they will always be but they are mine.

AI is amoral. Nothing personal despite our human tendency to anthropomorphize everything else in our world. The urgency surrounding a rapidly evolving technology which has lately displayed an alarming propensity to perpetuate enhanced versions of itself, is as Jim and Laura see it, one of governance hindered by a yawning knowledge gap. Times are increasingly weird and we’ve got to turn pro. But how can a business leader or legislator implement or regulate an infinite abstraction of ones and zeros they’re incapable of wrapping their heads around? “Honest to God, it was here last time I looked!”

I never dreamed of encountering Isaac Asimov’s fictional Three Laws of Robotics straight-faced and verbatim in a Globe and Mail business story. Perhaps robot psychology will soon be a viable career option. Why not? Social media influencers can actually make a living now. (Oh man, I would’ve loved to have dropped that pathetic aspiration on my father during one of our chats about my future just to watch his face; alas, said job did not exist in the late 70s. There was always advertising of course.)

I’ve touched on just a few of the many aspects of modern technology that Jim and Laura delve into and decipher in The Human Race for the benefit of others who like me fear what they can’t understand; my automatic reflex is to dismiss and mock, ignore and carry on. I’ve since been reliably informed there’s little or no time for indifferent and snippy jest now because the ever-fluid finish line isn’t preordained to demarcate a brave new toxic dystopia. Anyway, we’ve enough islands of that ilk around already.      

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything meaningless. No AI and little intelligence of any sort since 2013! Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com to buy my last couple of books. You can also listen to songs I’ve co-written with The Muster Point Project before scooting over to its YouTube channel.