my tragic right hip

Despite how funny this post is from Torontoist, still, under no circumstances, not even if Entertainment Weekly asked me to review it, would I go see Bon Cop, Bad Cop.

I am absolutely fascinated by the 100 Mile Diet. Especially with the stat that “when the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1500 miles from farm to plate.”

Imagine all that gas, all those trucks, all that industry, that’s just gone in to my eating a potato with my frozen (but now cooked, obviously) tuna burger. I wouldn’t even know where to start. In my pale “environmentalism,” I carefully check the labels so that I’m buying Canadian produce, but that doesn’t mean that it still hasn’t travelled hours and hours and kilometres and kilometres to get to the grocery store.

So, I slept until 1 PM this afternoon. Truly, I haven’t done that since my mid-twenties. Then, yesterday I shaved one of my legs in the shower and, well, not the other.

Today I spent much of it doing research for the Western. I am 171 pages in and trying to figure out where to do some workshopping. One friend suggested Humber College – but it’s $2500 – which is a heck of a lot.

But it might be totally worth it and I know the writer I want to work with would be excellent.

Anyway. I am reading too, but most of the books I can’t talk about for a few weeks.

Anyone out there taken a good writing seminar? Any suggestions?

I have a cold. Sniff. And I feel very sorry for Pluto (link via Idiosyncratic Mind). Is it wrong to apply totally random human emotions on a ball of floating gassy ice (if that’s even what it’s made out of)?

So the impending fall season, of course, sends me off into never-ending fits of glee, and it also makes it somewhat tolerable to watch whatever crap is being peddled this time of year. I, ahem, watched half an episode of Windfall (Ew. Very, very bad). I got totally hooked on Showtime’s Brotherhood, which is kind of like a combination of The Wire my all-time favourite television show, and The Sopranos, only they’re Irish and live in Rhode Island. So all in all, it’s been a passable summer, especially with Jeremy Piven to watch on Entourage.

But my new guilty pleasure? Kathy Griffin’s My Life on the D-List. It’s okay, you can be embarrassed for me. I know it’s not high-brow entertainment, but it’s just such a likeable show, mainly because Griffin is so up front about her fame (or lack thereof), her life (or lack thereof) and her comedy that I can’t stop watching it.

I’d have to admit that I don’t watch a lot of reality television, the odd episode of Jackass when it was still on, one or two episodes of the Nick and Jessica debacle, the first season of Survivor and the one season of The Amazing Race that Amber and Rob were on, and that’s about it. Oh, and my RRHB forces me to watch American Idol, but only the auditions, because he enjoys them so much. And yet, once I watched half an episode of MLOTDL, I was hooked. I have it programmed into the Faux-Vo permanently and scheduled the episodes not to erase in case I decide to go back and watch them again.

Part of my fancy-ass job is to take people out to lunch. Today I went to Wish, on Charles Street E., downtown. We ordered a basic lunch but the bill was giant. “Why?”, you ask? Because we paid $17.00 FOR WATER. Once we found out that the water cost $8.50 a bottle, WITHOUT TAX, we drank every last drop.

Sigh.

Well, I don’t think there’s two different movies I could have seen this past weekend. On Friday night, the RRHB and I went to see The Illusionist. He had heard Jesse Wente on Metro Morning raving about it and wanted to see it. I had read about it in EW (of course) and also heard the CBC report, so I went along with it.

Anyway. I quite liked it: it’s very stylized, has a good script, Paul Giamatti is excellent and I heart Ed Norton when he’s actually acting (unlike Down in the Valley where he simply channeled) in a project that I can respect.

However, I would have enjoyed it more if they didn’t digitally enhance the magic and/or illusions, but maybe represented them historically as they were, but again, I’m not sure if the tricks he did even existed or not when the film is set. And, I don’t mean to be all, “I saw the twist coming,” but honestly, I totally did—I mean the film is called The Illusionist so you sort of figure he’s going to do one giant, ahem, act by the end.

The RRHB didn’t like it as much but I think that had more to do with his movie going experience than anything else. The only theatre in town the film was playing at was the Cumberland where the seats are shitty, the air terrible (as it it doesn’t exist) and we sat way to one end, which means you feel totally claustrophobic. So when he’s grumpy in a movie he talks through it, moves around a lot and asks me repeatedly if we want to leave. Heh.

And then on Sunday afternoon I went to see Snakes on a Plane. Holy crap, it’s so funny, but so bad, but I guess that’s truly the point. And when Samuel L. Jackson does the whole “motherf*^king snakes on the motherf*^king plane” line that’s all over the interweb, the whole audience hooted and clapped. Hilarious and awesome at the same time. I haven’t had such a fun movie experience since Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. Cuba!

Oh, but one tiny criticism: instead of “fancy snake doctor” someone, somewhere working on the damn film, especially the FBI guy, whose job it is to, oh, I don’t know, be smart or something, should have called him a herpetologist, because that’s what they ARE. Has no one watched National Geographic?

In a desperate bid for comments, any comments, any one out there? I’m giving you a new poem, “Deer Lake, 2006,” and I swear to God that the inspiration for this poem came from a very “infamous” person they played on the radio up north. And then turned ugly when it obviously became about something else—wanna guess what’s the inspiration behind the poem? And then feel free to trash it or not, but likely yah…I know it kind of sucks, but I can feel Ken Babstock saying to me, “Just put a little pressure on it.”

Deer Lake, Summer 2006

The odd contrast of barge on a small body of water,
his sound carries, like helicopters in the night.
Noise of beer and pine needles, stripped now of the
intensity of the 1970s, it sounds oddly theatrical.
Soundstages and Broadway, all things misplaced on this lake,
here where loons call deep into the night
and the water always seems warmer when you’re in it.

And you want him like you want another beer,
knowing that it’s better not to imbibe too much too soon,
or your secrets come bawling out in the spider-infested outhouse,
where the sound is undeniably the best.

First kisses and lost nights to poker, pinochle and Moscow mules,
nothing changes except you, you who tells nothing of us to them,
taking the words right out of my mouth, just as I inch towards singing them:
out loud, not forgotten, this place, our place, your choice,
you took the words out, which meant you took me out, leaving me, there
beside the dock, watching for the sound to carry.

Ever since Bridget Jones tottered in on her spiky shoes ten years ago, the merits of chick lit have been argued and debated among women writers on this here interweb. Oddly, I’ve never seen a debate over “serious” writers like Cormac McCarthy and, just for the hell of it, John Grisham, regarding the “merits” of law fluff and all its implications on contemporary literature. I mean that doesn’t get people all in a flurry. Where are the blogosphere debates about why one sells so much less than the other and who out there is complaining about the lack of literary merit in “male”-centric popular fiction?

And yet, we (the royal we, the “women” we) seem to be unable, as a group to just let each other write whatever the hell we feel needs to be written. It’s like taking the school yard chatter of the popular girls (the non-chick lit writers) and consistently forcing the less-than-popular girls (the chick lit writers) to eat at the table next to the cafeteria while pointing and laughing at them. Is a chick lit author any less of a writer because her cover is pink and maybe features shoes in a stunningly sexy way? I don’t think so…oh, and isn’t that baby pink lettering I spy on the cover of This Is Not Chick Lit? To me, it all just sounds like people are upset more about how popular chick lit has become more than anything: the whole idea that if everyone in middle Canada or America is reading The Devil Wears Prada that must mean the book is crap, because the masses are always wrong with a capital “W” when it comes to culture.

Yet, I think that championing women writers, of all kinds, is important, especially in the day and age where less books are being read by less people, and it becomes harder and harder to find good fiction no matter what side of the debate you end up on. I’ll read Jennifer Weiner in an afternoon and cry my eyes out, and then pick up something heftier the next day and have an equally enjoyable experience. There’s room in my cafeteria for all kinds of writing and I don’t see why one has to make the very important point of crying in all caps that you are, by definition, not a chick lit anthology helps matters any. Seems to me that the editor is simply trying to draw attention to herself by abusing the very thing she purports not to be, and that’s the worst kind of attention. How to make yourself feel better by putting other people down, now, isn’t that first sign of not having enough self-confidence? How very Mean Girls of her.

In short, me thinks the pink doth protest too much. Proclaiming to be the “best” of anything makes me cringe, I mean, not even Google lets you use that word in an ad because nowadays it means absolutely nothing.

Again, The Last Juror by John Grisham isn’t really the book I’d read anywhere other than maybe, and let’s just say maybe, on a beach in Mexico because I’d finished all of my other books and it’s the only thing left lying around the room. That said, it makes a truly engaging audio book, and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it.

All tolled, it took most of my time in the car for the last week to get through it, but as it finally ended, I sat in the car for about five minutes listening to the end before going in to the office.

The sprawling story of Willie Traynor, a small-town newspaper owner who befriends Miss Callie, the matron of a large black family in Mississippi, The Last Juror opens with a violent murder, one that has the entire community of Clanton up in arms. As the next ten years unfold, the story of the paper, and of its owner, Traynor, comes to life beside the story of Miss Callie and her incredible family. The trial of the murderer, Danny Padgitt, becomes the focal point for the meat and potatoes of the book. The story sprawls like an old plantation porch, filling in the lively details of country, small-town life, and I suppose it’ll be made into a movie at some point (isn’t that a Grisham pre-requisite?).

And I’d give it one and a half solid thumbs up in terms of keeping you awake on a long drive. One thing’s for certain, you’ll be drawling in your sleep and longing for a cup of sweet tea before the book’s finished.