Assorted Nonsense

The inimitable (I mean that in a nice way) Colleen Anderson has an amusing post on her blog about the time she met me at a World Horror convention.

Or did she?

Please watch this profound video from Karl Johanson about the proposed new SOPA Bill. Don’t know what that is? Don’t worry… the video will explain all:

Amen.

Yesterday I read an article in the Toronto Star by Heather Mallick about Robert Fulford of the National Post writing a critical review of Margaret Atwood’s latest story in the New Yorker, called Stone Mattress. The Atwood story is about a woman who was raped as a teenager by an older boy who gets away with it. This act sends the woman down a bad road in which she gets pregnant, becomes a prostitute, and then marries older men of ill health so that she can help them die prematurely and get their money. Ultimately she meets the man who raped her and exacts her revenge.

Fulford doesn’t like the story because he thinks it “comes across as a classic man-hating story.” Mallick doesn’t like Fulford’s review because she thinks Atwood is “entitled to fill her fiction with hateful men.” She also didn’t like that Fulford didn’t own up to once having been skewered in an Atwood piece, suggesting that his review of Stone Mattress was simply revenge, as if it’s not possible to dislike a story solely on its own merits, or lack thereof.

Mallick professes to have once adored Bob Fulford, “wisest and cleverest of older male journalists.” Now, she claims that Fulford has stopped regarding life with endless interest and even joy, and turned sour. This seems a harsh assessment based on a single review of Atwood’s story. When I read that line in her article it seemed so disproportionately harsh that I wondered what else must be informing Mallick’s revised opinion of Fulford.

As a reasonably decent man this whole episode struck a nerve. I’m aware that certain women don’t like men, or distrust them, and that because of the actions of some jerks they have good reason to feel this way. I have always tried to conduct myself in a way to give women reason to like men. I have three sisters, a mother, a wife and two daughters and many female friends and colleagues. I like women. I’m good to them. I treat them with respect. So it annoys me when I am confronted with women who think that, as Fulford writes, men are villains except when they are clowns. That’s just a different kind of hatred, and it’s no better than men disrespecting women. Understanding that there are men out there deserving of scorn, just as there are woman deserving of scorn because of hateful attitudes and actions.

So I am sympathetic to Fulford’s take on Atwood’s story, although Atwood is equally hard on women in Stone Mattress. The female protagonist, essentially a serial killer, is certainly no more sympathetic than the male schmuck she murders. But I’m more sympathetic to Fulford himself than I am to his take on the story because I’d like to know why Mallick has come to dislike him so much. Just disliking Atwood’s story, and not owning up to having been a victim of an earlier Atwood story, just doesn’t seem to justify it.

I once spent four days at Atwood’s house recording a series of interviews for CBC Radio. Surreally for me, the entire four days were spent conversing with Atwood and the rest of the crew in French, which I was in the process of learning at the time, having recently returned from several months of living in Aix-en-Provence, France. Apart from Atwood’s assistant at the time, Sarah Cooper, Atwood and I were the only anglophones. On the third night we all went to a restaurant together where circumstances contrived to place Atwood and myself alone together for about twenty minutes, and we conversed in English for the first time. The whole experience generated a certain camaraderie between us, or at least that was how it felt to me – I’ve met her several times since and she has never indicated that she remembers me. Although I consider this last point worthy of mention, I don’t hold it against her. I’m not sure that I would remember her much either if she were not one of Canada’s most famous authors, mentioned time and again on the CBC and in the rest of our national media. Impossible to forget, in other words.

However, I’ve never forgotten her friendliness at the time. She did not come off to me as the least bit man hating. Her characters and stories are fiction, after all, not necessarily representative of the author’s own mind set. The truth is I haven’t actually read much Atwood, apart from some short stories in a book she gave me on our last day together (Good Bones) and the aforementioned Stone Mattress. And a handful of radio drama adaptations of her work such as The Handmaid’s Tale.

No, if I had one bone to pick with Margaret Atwood it wouldn’t be her stance against men, it would be her stance against science fiction, which she seems to regard as less than worthy. Yes, she writes it from time to time, but when she writes it is isn’t science fiction, it’s something else, something better, “speculative fiction” maybe. I find this attitude inexplicable and insulting, and no I don’t feel that way because she has previously skewered me in her work, at least that I’m aware, not that I would be aware not having read much of her work.

So neither Robert Fulford nor Heather Mallick have done anything to alter my opinion of Margaret Atwood. I’ve never given Robert Fulford much thought but I feel rather sympathetic toward the man now. As for Heather Mallick, who’s work I have read from time to time in the Star, and to whom I haven’t given much thought either, I am now unduly curious about.

Just what the heck does she really have against Robert Fulford?

For thousands of years hardly anything changed.

Spears used by humans tens, even hundreds of thousands of years ago stayed the same for millennia. You could learn how to use it as a kid and the skills you learned would last a lifetime. Hundreds of lifetimes. Even in the last thousand or so years you could learn a trade from your father, or a particular skill, and trust that it would still be applicable years later to teach your own kid.

Not anymore.

Now everything changes. Constantly and quickly.

My parents grew up with no running water or electricity. Now that’s practically unthinkable, in this country at least.

I learned analog broadcast production skills in school. Now it’s all digital. I grew up with three channels to choose from on television. In black and white. Now there’s hundreds, all in colour. When I was a kid I had a real dog. Now I have a robot dog. No wait, sorry, that’s my future grandkid I’m thinking of. You think I’m joking? Just wait. (Imagine a dog smart enough to pick up his own poop… worth inventing! You’d make a mint.)

Much of this change is positive. Me, I’m all for hot showers and coffee at the flick of a button. But the sheer pace of all this change is starting to irritate me. Should it not be possible to purchase a computer with a particular operating system and trust that you won’t have to mess with it for ten or so years?

Apparently not.

I’m writing this on a MacBook I purchased in August 2006. It seems like yesterday to me. It’s running OS X 10.4.11. And all the new software I want won’t run on anything less than 10.5.x. So I have to go through the rigamarole of upgrading to Snow Leopard. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Do you have any idea how hard it is to catch a Snow Leopard? (There’s a great episode on Snow Leopards on the series Earth… took them weeks if not months to find one.)

Anyway, I guess you have to take the good with the bad. Hot showers and instant coffee = constantly having to upgrade your computer.

Okay, I know that once every five years isn’t exactly “constantly”. But if they could make a spear (or at least, a type of spear) that didn’t need to be upgraded for one hundred thousand years, why not a computer? And here’s a good question: might the day not come when we’ve gone as far as we can with computers? When they’re as good as they can be, and there’s no point in upgrading them further? And they stay that way for one hundred thousand years? Just doing what you need them to do without having to fuss over them constantly. Imagine! Bliss? Or boring?

Doesn’t really matter. Cause one thing’s for sure.

It ain’t gonna happen in our lifetimes.

I just finished watching the series Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays.

First a disclaimer. I used to work with the two stars of this series, Bob Martin and Matt Watts, back when I worked in Radio Drama for the CBC. Bob Martin was usually a voice down the line on Steve the First and Steve the Second (we would record him from a remote location) so I never got to know him. But I worked very closely with Matt Watts on Steve the First, Steve the Second, and then later on a show called Canadia.

A few words about Matt. We got to be pretty good friends working on these shows. In fact working with Matt on these shows was a dream. I have never felt so creatively in synch with anyone as I did with Matt. We almost always agreed on creative approaches and we both worked extremely hard to make the shows as good as we could possibly make them. We dreamed of a return to the golden age of radio drama, of content so entertaining and well produced that it could not be ignored.

Our dream never quite came true, but we did make some damn good stuff together in the time we had.

So now I’ve moved onto management at the CBC and Matt has moved onto TV. I regret that we may never be able to work together again creatively and that I may never again experience the creative synch that I experienced with Matt with anyone else. But I remain a huge fan of Matt’s work, and am delighted to discover that the move to television has in no way diminished that work. On the contrary, it has simply allowed a wider audience to experience the fruits of his labors.

So I’m obviously biased. But I think that any discerning critic watching Michael: Tuesdays and Thursday would agree that it is one finely honed show. The writing is superb. The direction is polished. The acting is note perfect. Even the music is appealing.

I wrote Matt at one point early in the season that I didn’t find the series exactly to my taste after watching the pilot episode. This feeling went away fairly quickly. The feeling was engendered by the prudish part of me, which responded somewhat negatively to the (initially) frequent sex between a couple of the main characters. I have some kind of a weird double standard thing going on there too, I have to admit, as I don’t have a problem with HBO fare like Rome or Game of Thrones. It was just seeing it on CBC, and the fact that it meant that I couldn’t watch the show with my eleven year old daughters, which would have made it infinitely easier to watch as the episodes aired.

Anyway once I got past that little peccadillo and was able to focus on the other elements I began to thoroughly appreciate the craft that went into this show. My rather egotistical appraisal can be summed up thusly: it didn’t require my involvement.

I should explain that a bit. I frequently watch shows and think, my God, why did they do THAT? Could they not see that the story required THIS? If only I had been allowed to participate in the creation of this show!

In fact, this is how Matt and I originally became acquainted. I recorded the pilot of his first ever radio show, episode one of Steve the First. My involvement was limited to recording the episode. Then someone else took it away and butchered the mix. When I heard it I was appalled, and I wrote Matt to tell him so. I told him exactly how it needed to be fixed (in my not so humble opinion). Matt complained to the producer, and I got to remix it to my satisfaction. I remained as opinionated throughout our working partnership, and as I’ve mentioned earlier Matt, to his enormous credit in my view, always took my opinions seriously.

Matt, Bob, Don McKellar and everyone else associated with the show got Michael: Tuesdays and Thursday right all on their own.

Well done guys.