Chorus of a Country Song I'll Never Finish

It's not always easy, babe
It's not always ease

It's not always easy, baby,
So we tip our hats when it is.


The second in the Country Song I'll Never Write Series here on PBIHT

Asian Cha

For all you literary cool cats, might I direct you to:

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

I was honoured to serve as the current issue's guest editor for prose (ie. fiction and creative non-fiction).

Justifying Desert Island Needs II - The Hamburger Defence

Continued from Part I

Really, I just want to give the big defense for why I have a desert island list in the first place.

Why re-read or re-view anything?

The hamburger will serve as a convenient and, if I do say so myself, rather mouth-watering analogy.

Out one evening, alone or otherwise, you saunter into some burger joint. That first time was luck, or maybe it was word-of-mouth, or was it advertising? I don't care! I'm not conducting market research here. The point is the burger. The burger is juicy; it's delicious - face it, it's fucking fantastic. (Kua 'Aina burger in Osaka (or Tokyo or Honolulu) comes to mind.) (Agree to disagree, Troy.)

The question then, on your next eat-outing is: why fight the urge to repeat the experience?

1. Anything that good once can be twice and thrice etc, ad infinitum, equally good, can it not? Like a classic chocolate bar, like a Wonderbar or a Snickers.

2. If you know said hamburger is THAT good, why try the Chinese place across the street when you know chances are you'll be disappointed. When was the last time you tried a new Chinese place across the street and weren't disappointed?

3. Some people are always looking for the new, the exciting, the different. They search for it wanting new friends, downloading - nay, stockpiling - new albums, trying out new and exotic vegetables with furry exteriors and smelly interiors. Others of us keep our social worlds smaller, our restaurant choices narrower, our movie selections tighter. This just a personality type. But I'm sorry, give me a plain cold cucumber any day and I'm happy. I don't need it to get much fancier than that. (Though truth told I do love arugula. Arugula is good in a salad.)

4. Comfort food. I'm having a crap day. I need a pick-me up. I don't want new. I don't want change. I want familiar. That burger I've had six million times before is good. It always is. I'm going back for that. Screw you guys.

5. In truth, other than taste and my ever expanding belly cravings, I keep going back for that burger to figure out how they made it that good in the first place. Cause one day, I wouldn't mind making a burger worth returning to, even if it's just a bite-size thing.

Justifying Desert Island Needs - I of II

My father (Aba to his children) doesn't re-read books. He doesn't watch favourite movies two and three times at the theatre, never mind renting a movie he has already seen. Like most normal people he wonders why anyone would? After all, you already know what's going to happen.



In a post last month I mentioned this. But I feel it bears elaborating, and a better bit of explaining too.

It's not just that I watched "Inglorious Basterds" thrice in theatres this summer. It's not just that I've read every book translated into English that Haruki Murakami has written, or that I've re-read (and a few times even re-re-read) no less than seven of of his books. No, it's when I read or watch something more than five times that the worrying should begin. (Right, Jon, cause re-reading a book four times is normal!)

As you read this my poor Aba is scratching his head, wondering aloud why his son needs to keep going back again and again and again and ...

I should have known it from the start. Because long before Jhumpa Lahiri and Haruki Murakami, before the John Hughes movies, before Christian Slater and Winona Ryder were together in "Heathers," before I even knew a boy named Holden Caufield there was "The Terminator." From the fluke first R-rated viewing when I was ten (at our cousins place; they had the movie channel; the adults were upstairs), and for the next near decade I must have watched that classic action flick upwards of twenty or thirty or even forty times. (I guess I just never could get over how cool I found it that the bad guy got to be the main guy. I had a thing for bad guys.)

Though as a nearly-teenager I vowed to never outgrow action movies of the 'Bruce Willis Is In Them' variety, and though as a full-blow adolescent "The Breakfast Club" was sure to remain my all-time favourite movie of all time, forever - forever! - some addictions, for better or worse, we get over. The trouble is we tend to just replace one with another.

Salinger remains a more than occasional jones I need to hit. But Murakami, a relatively new fix, I can barely make it through a conversation that even hints at writing, never mind a blog post, without bringing up the poor guy*. I've probably read "Norwegian Wood," the first book I chose to take to my desert island that is Murakami's least surreal and only out and out elegiac love story, at least five or six times since I was introduced to Japan's most famous living writer seven years ago.

In other words, Aba, if the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, it does risk bumping its head a few times after, or rather during, the fall.

To explain my lunacy, then, I offer, The Hamburger Defence.


I offer it here.

*In her ever gentle way, Ai has recommended that I take a break from Mr. Murakami for a while. I've surprisingly rather agreeably consented to take a short sabbatical. Even arty addictions, it turns out, can be rather unhealthy. (And ok, it was kind of my idea in the first place to take the break, but Ai's mentioning it kind of hammered the point home in my wee head).

If It Were Easy ...

"Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues—which takes years."
-Alex Haley

"I'm sorry. How many years, exactly?"
-Jonathan Mendelsohn

Night Swimming

What to Read, What to Read - Here: A Few Current Page Turners

3 books I've read in the last year, recommended in the last year, and still recommend now.


1. Lloyd Jones' "Mr. Pip" - probably the most satisfying fiction read of the year.

2. Amelie Nothomb's "Tokyo Fiancee" - funny novel about unusual love, that is just as much if not more also a remarkable insight into the heart of the enigma wrapped in the mystery that is Japan.

3. Dave Eggers' "Zeitoun" - true harrowing story of living through Katrina, as a Muslim-American.

[And, way past due, if you haven't already read Malcom Gladwell's "Outliers" - fascinating book, that in typical Gladwellian fashion uses thoroughly engaging readable anecdotes to illustrate academic research, in this case, about key ingredients to success.]

Where the Underdogs Are, We Know, It's What We Don't Know That Scares Me [Part II of II]

Continued From Part I

Me?!

But I was the lamb. I was the sweet herbivorial prey. Sweet innocent me, he says, craning his neck to daintily tooth-pull leaf from tree, I wouldn't hurt a fly, not unless it really annoyed me or, apparently, if it didn't seem in my righteous mind deserved enough to be part of my circle.

(For more on this, read Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye; to my mind it is her masterpiece. I don't believe in girl books and guy hooks, in chick flicks and dick flicks. It's all nonsense. A good movie is a good movie is a good movie. Same with book and painting and person. There. I've said it. So get over it. Yes, of course Margaret Atwood writes about women. In Cat's Eye, it's about girls, and how cruel they can be to each other. And for all who believe it's only girls who spread cruelty, see the major events of the 20th century, or, more immediately, any school playground.)

You ever have a drawn-out fight with someone? (If yes, proceed. If no, stop reading. You're either a liar or an angel. I say liar. Angels don't read blogs.) But really, you ever notice how the real tricky element of a long fight is that you both feel right, both feel wronged, both feel victim, both the poor fat kid. Ever notice how much that fuels your right to believe you can breath fire?

If everyone is a victim, how to ever end the war?

Because this does of course relate perfectly to the way countries interact, just like junior high school kids. And I'm not even just referring to the obvious, to Israel and Palestine. But that's not a blog post, that's a blog lifetime. I prefer to try my hand at understanding one small part of the world through the way it was in our youth.

This is one reason why I recommend Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. Because of how human Max is, how good and bad, how glee glad and terribly sad.

A few other reasons to see Spike Jonze's film include:
+Heart;
+Integrity;
+Authenticity;
+Acting performances, both human and puppet;
+The puppets;
+The vision;
+The humanity (that should come earlier, if this list is supposed to be in order of importance; it isn't);
+Catherine Keener;
+For five seconds of Marc Ruffalo (which is never enough and yet manages always to be so so much);
+For the character named Carol, to name but one of the many I fell for (and for how very far he is from the Tony Soprano voice behind him); and
+For a movie for kids that might not be entirely for kids, fine, but I took my seven year-old nephew and he wasn't bored, he endured, he enjoyed, sitting through a movie without pyrotechnics or clever sidekicks or Disney tied in Big Mac toy treats, for a movie for kids that is actually about something, many things that include death and love and loss and sorrow not to mention what I addressed before, and that deals with them in a way that seems so real, so resonating right.

This movie, as an old creative writing classmate/poet friend of mine (Jason Guriel) so perfectly put it, will be considered a great movie ten years from now.

Where the Underdogs Are, We Know, It's What We Don't Know That Scares Me [Part I of II]

Discussed in these posts: Beautiful Girls, Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are.

In Beautiful Girls (1996), a movie about a guy in his late twenties who returns to his snowy hometown for a high school reunion, there is a minor moment near the film's end (this spoils absolutely nothing), when at the reunion, a short, fat man, who you know looks just exactly how he looked when he was fifteen, approaches Darian Smalls, the now bitchy blond (a pitch-perfectly cast Lauren Holly) who was of course the princess of the high school back in the day. He says to her, and I'm paraphrasing, but pretty movie nerdily closely, "Darian Smalls!" He is clearly excited. "You were beautiful in high school!" She thanks him, shy. He is, however, not finished. He continues, "But, if I may say, mean as a snake. You were mean as a snake."

This is not a defining moment in the movie; it is a great moment nonetheless. It always is. When the popular bitch or the prick prince of the frat boys gets his/her comeuppance from the lowly fat loser. And which of us , really, hasn't felt like a lowly fat loser at some point(s!) in our lives.

I wasn't the fat kid (though I managed a good bit of pudge in grade seven - not a winning year for ole Mendelsohn Jon) but I wasn't a cool kid either.

I like to think I was a fairly nice kid, a pretty good kid. I always aimed for kindness. I hated meanness. But then I was an underdog, underdogs don't really get to choose. They almost have to be nice. Meanness, it seems to me, was a privilege of the popular. If pretty enough, or cool enough, you need not develop a personality.

I was lucky enough to have a sufficient social adeptness to stay out of the centre when the centre wouldn't have me. I learned quick how to not be the one to get dumped on, most of the time. If I did get too close, though, I was the victim, of course. The softer. The fucked over.

I wasn't bullied in school, I wouldn't say that exactly, but I certainly felt pushed pretty far outside the circle, and sometimes, just plain being left out and not included is its own kind of bullying.

Woe is me.

The thing is, though, memory is a tricky devil. Because I, like all, can recall with pinpoint precision every single moment that some kid was a jerk to me, every catcall and hated nickname, every tease and rolled eye, every kid that made me feel low, blue, dumb, nerd, etc. What I've not been quite as good at remembering are the kids that I pushed out of the circles that I managed to get into.

No one thinks they were Darian Smalls. No one thinks they were they were the bitchy one, the asshole one, the jerk, the bully. Me? Never!

It does, however, become hard to ignore, when one of the kids you pushed out calls you up one day, more than a decade since you last saw him (your last sighting being when you were in grade eight - that's eighth grade in American) and after a greeting and a little small talk abruptly cuts in to ask, 'How come you were such an asshole to me back then?' Or perhaps it was, 'Why did you do that to me?'

Me?!

Part II

Autumn Leaves

The Loner's Drug of Choice

What I miss most about smoking, other than the suck-inhaling act itself, and the paraphenelia, and the security blanket of carrying the paraphernalia - patting down that same pant pocket to make sure lighter and smokes were where they needed to be before leaving the house - was the getting away from the crowd. It's one of the great smoker secrets. That much as smoking is a social act, an act of quick and easy bonding, it is as much and more the most acceptable of anti-social activities. Just gonna step out in the middle of some family dinner for a smoke or five. Gonna break away from the work space a moment. No, no, it's not you. Just a craving, you know. Just gotta have a butt outside; I'll be right back.

I miss sitting and smoking out on the concrete steps in front of my parents house, or smoking in their backyard that was once mine. Getting away from the crowd, seven minutes of peace and quiet. That and the act itself, and all the chemical altering relax inducing rest of it.

Sugar's sweet, but smoking was the loner's real treat.