A very merry July to you, my blooming lovelies, and for this weekās little taste of poetic culture we kick off with a verse from my very own pen, inspired by a certain UK āpoliticianā and his shenanigans to distract from him being exposed as dirty-as-they-come. I hope you find it edifying in these trying times. (Warning ā vulgar language. Politics brings out the guttersnipe in meā¦)
A rancid and racialist runt
Pulls a typically cheap circus stunt
To obscure what heās done
Heāll resign and re-run
I hope no-one votes for the c*nt
Now, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, enjoy a photograph of Nigel Farage.1
Please do not use this photograph (official portrait, courtesy of Wiki2) to train AI on how to transform images of humans into frogs. That is not a future we want to live in. (Shudders. Imagine a world where all the frogs looked like Nigel ā ugh!)
But enough of wallowing in the swamp of English politics! It is July, after all! Follow me from the depths of sliminess and corruption to a bright and sunny meadow filled with flowers under blue skies with just enough fluffy white clouds to reassure you that climate change doesnāt already have us completely cooked (yes, thatās what itās like in Vancouver. I know. I am thanking every one of my lucky stars on a nightly basis). Breathe the fresh air in off the Howe Sound and empty your lungs and your mind of all ugly thoughts.
Technically Burrard Inlet, not Howe Sound, but you can still smell the sea air, no?
Ahh. Isnāt that better?
You see how marvellous the imagination is? It can transform even a swamp into a meadow, or a sunny beach, and banish frogs like Farage with a few swishes of a dismissive wrist across the keyboard. Which brings me (oh come on, surely by now you know me well enough to have been waiting for this part!) to this weekās topic of writerly interest ā the magic of creative transformation. Or, to take it in one of its less exalted guises, Revenge Through Writing 101.
Indulge me, if you will, by glancing for one moment back at the delightful limerick with which this missive began. Note its playfully embittered tone. Now ponder the truly wondrous health benefits of turning wrath into wordy creativity. Faced with news of the self-appointed Baron of Bigotryās latest cunning stunt3 I could have fumed and fulminated all day, worrying about the state of the world in general and UK politics in particular, and rumbling around the house like a patch of inclement weather. Sooner or later, I am told, that kind of behaviour will earn you an ulcer. Instead, one quick flurry of the keyboard and Iāve transformed all that ire into a snarky little ditty that has Frogface bang to rights, makes me giggle every time I look at it, and replaces my sense of impotent rage with a smug little glow. And that, my friends, is the true joy of writingā¦
Oh you can call it cheap. You can point out that since Noxious Nigel himself will never know what I did, itās all rather pointless. But I rebut your poison-pen party pooping with a quote from Umberto Ecoās novel about the power and poison of writing, The Name of the Rose: āLaughter kills fear.ā
A rose. Because Iām nothing if not literal. And also, who doesnāt like roses?
And there are certain people in the world right now who are having a heyday with our fear ā not just using it to silence us, oh no. Worse. Using it to turn us on each other. Fear right now (and the ability to wield it like a weapon) is a short cut directly to power, over whole groups of people, and us as individuals.
Think youāre immune? Then how come youāve developed that habit of doomscrolling when you should be asleep? Weāre all hypervigilant these days, waiting for the next war, the next pandemic, the other shoe to drop. Fearās mass-manufacture is intentional, but even knowing that doesnāt make it easy to shake.
Thatās because threat and fear tap in to one of our most primal bits of mental hardwiring ā they used to be crucial to keeping us alive. Looking over your shoulder for a sabretooth tiger is good evolutionary sense. Being constantly on the alert for the next looming catastrophe in our permanently flooded news-zone is a surefire way to anxiety and/or angina.
Another breath of fresh Vancouver air. Youāre welcome, especially if you happen to be sweltering in the Europe-wide or Eastern US heatwave right now.
So what to do? How can we rewire our neural networks to seize back control? My advice to us all is the same I gave to my kids when they were tantrumming toddlers raging at the injustice of being three years old: use your words.
Use them to hold all that manufactured fear up to the light and expose it to the ridicule it deserves.
It might not change the world. But it will make you feel better. And, almost as importantly, it will remind you that you have power of your own ā power to recast situations in your own terms. The power of your own viewpoint and voice.
Writing as revenge isnāt a new idea for me. Iāve been doing it my whole life. You know what they say ā writing is what you do when you canāt afford the therapy. And absolutely, it feels good to put down in words the stuff that happens to all of us that makes us feel small and sad. But thereās another stage beyond just trauma-dumping. Keep at it, and the relief of getting all that noxious stuff out of your system and onto paper turns to something much, much better: a magical alchemy where words hand us the reins, and allow us to reprogramme the route from powerlessness to gleeful, cackling, creative revenge.
This seems to me to be the overlooked driver of much of the worldās greatest literature. Did you know, for example, that Buck Mulligan, the blaspheming bullock-headed bully-boy who opens Joyceās Ulysses was based on one of old Jamesieās real-life nemeses, Oliver St John Gogarty? Joyce came to loathe rich, aristocratically-connected Gogarty for his pampered ease, his arrogance and his callous comment on the death of May Joyce, Jamesā mother. Our boy got his eternal revenge with the excoriating caricature that opens one of the worldās most celebrated works of literature.
Proof that revenge writing can produce great literature. Not always, but you gotta start somewhere, no?
Turns out those t-shirts that declare ādonāt piss me off. Iām a writer ā Iāll put you in a book and kill youā arenāt far wrong. They just need a little tweak. āIāll immortalise you for all the world to see the crashing cockwomble you areā is more on brand.
From Dante imaginatively casting his political enemies into hell in The Divine Comedy, to RenĆ©e Schafranskyās alleged skewering of her faithless ex in Tips For Living, the Muse just loves sharpening her claws for some well-deserved vengeance. Apparently, itās not so much a dish best served cold, as a slow-cooked story world spiced to pungent, bitter-sweet perfection. And served with a smirk.
I think I first appreciated the full joy of this particular magical art when I fell afoul of a power dynamic that commonly pertains in the world of academia ā that of the handsy professor and the lowly student backed into a corner, metaphorically and, on occasion, in the flesh. Donāt worry, I took appropriate steps in the real world. But for genuine closure, nothing beats a good revenge-write.
So, without further ado, I offer you a snippet of my early transformed ire. I never finished the novella, which was to be a delicious flight of fancy where a certain sleazy academic gets framed and scammed in a satisfying gotcha by his erstwhile victims. Maybe todayās instalment is just a beginning. Maybe itās enough in itself. At any rate, rest assured I am smirking as I copy-paste it here for your delectation.
tsunami.com4
Such an innocent looking little envelope. It arrived with a tiny jangling sound like Tinkerbell, and sat patiently in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. It had to take its place in the queue, with 120 other items, all unread. Prof Jones was a busy man. It didnāt seem to mind. It could wait.
It bided its time while he responded to conference invitations and editorial quibbles. It remained uncomplaining while he cross-checked dry, scholarly references and rewarded himself by re-reading the naughty bits of Lolita. It kept silent vigil during his MA class on modernist fiction, and never said a peep throughout his one-on-one supervision with the toothsome Miss Thomas, who had enlivened her very dull and shoddily researched theory of womenās clothing in The Waste Land by not wearing very much of it herself. At six oāclock it was still waiting for him without a hint of reproach. For want of a better excuse to put off going home, he opened it.
Welcome to tsunami.com.
Lorena invited you to play chess. Itās your move.
Click on the url below to play:
http://www.tsunami.com/rd/ec.cgi?id+2021/11/2/17082_1036506091&player+b
Chess? Who would bother trying to engage him in a game? He hadnāt played for years. But Lorena sounded exotic. A bit too much so. Probably one of his students trying to get one over on him, cocky little sods. Instead of opening the link, he clicked Reply and typed:
Who are you, Lorena?
The mail bounced. Alright then, letās play it your way. At home, he would never click something unsolicited, but this was a university account, and the IT department would have his back. Complacently, he opened the link.
Before him was a chessboard showing a very uninspired opening: Pawn E2-E4. There was a message box to the right of the simulated chess board. He made the standard opening response, Pawn E7 to E5, without consideration, retyped his question in the message box, and clicked āsendā.
Almost immediately, a little yellow envelope appeared. He opened it. Bishop F1 to C4. In the message box, a single line:
āWouldnāt you like to know?ā
A genuine viking strategy board game, because a) frankly itās much cooler than our travel chess set and b) I canāt be arsed to walk all the way downstairs and find the actual chess board to photograph.
Thereās double satisfaction here ā the juvenile glee of drawing a rude sketch of the teacher, and the more mature enjoyment of experimenting with what it might be like to see inside their head. But the real delight comes from having the person whoās rubbed you up the wrong way trapped in a world of your own making, where you (re)write the rules. Try it yourself and youāll see what fun it is taking over the steering wheel.
In an unlikely conjunction of the planets, Iām also scheduled to write a newsletter next week as well. (No, I donāt know what youāve done to deserve that, either. Take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror and resolve to behave yourself better in future.) Perhaps Iāll have dug up the next part of Prof Jonesās chess game by then, or mayhap the world will have spun in a different direction and need another sort of rewrite.
Either way, I leave you with Ecoās wise maxim that laughter cures fear, and my own less philosophically exalted proverb: if they p*ss you off, write about āem5.
Until next time, may your beach-cafe be breezy and your lollipop sweet!
I apologise if you happen to be eating.
Whatās the difference between Nigel Farage and his resign/re-stand strategy?
Oneās a cunning stunt, and the otherā¦
Do. Not. Click. Itās a title, not a link.
Note to Capān ā do we have that on a t-shirt in the Shipās Store?
Answer: Give me a weekā¦ š