Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Canadian-ize This!
[Carmelita Vertuccio], a newbie at [Pages] bookstore scribbled down this web address for me during a session of spitting words at each other. It was a link to places for writers, a site listing off a bunch of gigs for budding writers. Most are little tasks; flash fiction, short story contests, poetry. But it should be nice for exercising the writing muscle. Something I sure need to do since lately it's been beginning to atrophy. Hopefully I can get something out of it. Hopefully anyone who's a writer, and can tolerate the Canadian publishing industry can get something out of it.
A lot of the gigs on there seem worthwhile, but some of them, I see the usual problem I have with the Canadian publishing industry. Like the "Canadian-ized Star Wars Poetry" contest. How the fuck do you Canadian-ize a space opera? I confess I haven't seen any of the Star Wars movies, I have a weird resistance to watching multi-sequeled epics. But I had the idea that what made it so popular was that the worlds were so far out and different from what we're used to. If they're saying that most works of science fiction normally feature aliens that look like humans with prosthetics and speak with American accents, and have cultural rituals similar to American ones, just backwards then they may have a point. But then what? Changing character names to things like Luke Snowwalker and Darth Eh-Der? Fuelling the ships with maple syrup, changing Chewbacca into a giant beaver, Luke Snowwalker and his sister Princess Alberta go out to the prairies and commit incest, and... Oh Christ, I just answered the question myself, and could probably enter and win the fucking thing.
Canada's a great and safe place to live, and while Americans act like the idea of free health care is a foot in the door for socialism, it works fine. But boy do I hate Canadian... things. I hold no bigoted views toward people of any group... other than religious whackos. However, I am very prejudiced towards what I read. When it comes to reference and theoretical texts, I don't discriminate. I can take things from what I learn, disagree with them, or just catalogue the info in my mental roladex. But as for fiction, I can't stand work that deliberately sets out to be exclusive to an ethnic, cultural, or social group. I refuse to read Canadian fiction, and I don't like books primarily about a person of a social demographic struggling to prove their worth as a person of a social demographic.
It doesn't mean that I read books exclusively written by and about middle class heterosexual male WASPs, that couldn't be further from the truth. I have an affinity for books about the oddest characters, and quite a few of my favourite novels are by authors from other countries. But the thing is, while they can give you a taste of their foreign cultures, they don't force feed it into you, and rub your nose in guilt for not being of the culture or not understanding it. The cultures are background to the story.
Am I saying culture or cultural identity are insignificant? No, they shape things whether people like it or not. And your race, gender, class, and nationality will always be major factors of how people perceive you and what people expect or don't expect from you. This last presidential campaign was such a perfect example of that. I'll give America's electorate the benefit of the doubt and say that they were listening to the issues, but it can't be denied that they were also caught up with perceptions and misconceptions, and abuses of perceptions and misconceptions of race, gender, class, and age when it came to who they'd prefer to have as the POTUS.
While I'm getting political, I might as well start pointing fingers at a figure behind this Canadian media mess. The beast which has a lot to do with the problem is the Canadian government. It has a major say in letting things come out based on a litmus test of how Canadian a work may or may not be. Such meddling has a lot to do with why Canadian media is so bland, and why American media, while mostly asinine and trite, is more exciting, and why in America more diamonds can be found in the rough with the focus being on economic viability most of the time. It's easier to argue to corporate clunkheads why something can make money rather than it is to argue to corporate and governmental clunkheads on how something is Canadian.
At the end of it all, I think that people, and things do the best when they go out and do their own thing from their own individual perspective. I'd never say that nothing good comes out of Canada. The Kids In The Hall is one of my favourite shows. It was funny and bizarre, and only once in a while would you even be reminded that it was Canadian. Most of those reminders were the environment. Things such as money, police uniforms, buildings, and flags. And when they did get to heavily talking about Canada, it was normally satirical. David Cronenberg in the earlier days was one of the best and most subversive directors, and even though he's lost his spark now, he still isn't just Joe Canada. John Kricfalusi is one of the most talented and warped cartoonists and had to leave the country to find work, or he'd at this day be working as head animator on some Canadian shit like 6Teen.
And when you look at this philosophy being applied in other cases, we can see ti work too. The Presidential race was a shining example, where the black candidate didn't run reminding everybody of his race, but just ran as himself and ran with his views, and won by a landslide.
Whether Canada figures that out or not is another story. But until then...
See everyone in hell!
