Sweet Rejection

"Dear Cap, 

Thank you for submitting "Phone Call" to The Walrus. Unfortunately, at this time we do not see a place for it in the magazine.

Thank you for your interest in The Walrus, and best of luck publishing your work elsewhere.

Regards,

The Editorial Staff"

That, ladies and gentlemen, would be the contents of my very first rejection letter. From Walrus Fiction. The story in question is a brief window into an average evening for me while in Kandahar, focusing on an uncomfortable phone call made to a significant other. For those of you who've seen Jarhead (and if you haven't, take the time) you may make the parable to that god-awful scene where he attempts to talk to his High School sweetheart on the phone. I always turn my mind back to Taxi Driver, to how Scorsese pans the camera away from Travis Bickle as he talks to last night's date on a pay-phone. There is no agony like that disconnected from personal contact, and something about the disembodying nature of a telephone call can be, in my mind, the hardest ten-minutes of a lifetime with nothing but your voice and awkward silences to fill the void (not to mention incriminating ambient noises).

Anyways, I finally feel like a real writer! Oh, boy!

I remember more than anything thumbing through Stephen King's earlier novels, where his poor and downtrodden characters made ends meet however they could in the midsts of supernatural situations. Specifically the Torrance family in The Shining (my favourite parts of that book being the first 100 pages or so), and King's frequent forewords, after-words, arguments, 'letters from the author', or the body of On Writing, specifically those making reference to his early days as a writer - a long-haired hippie-punk determined to re-write Lord of the Rings and nailing his rejection notices to the wall above his bed. I think largely due to King I've romanticized the struggle of working-class, poor student, artistic types (allowing, perhaps, for my comfort level therein). It may shed light on why I'm almost overjoyed to received a rejection letter. Then again, I've never been comfortable with praise above constructive-criticism. 

"Phone Call" isn't particularly the kind of story that ends on a positive note. Even reading it again (and, alas, editing) makes me want to bare my teeth, smoking old angers out from behind my gums to strike sparks against the air. I'm very comfortable with hurt and angst, and anger - they broil out of that oven-hot period of my life and bring back those kinds of memories. I have happier things to write about now, but it's less simple to find the words. Dark moods, moral blacks, they can be comforting in that way darkness can both be comforting and terrible. Ideally, I would like to post the excerpts and short stories I drum up on a separate page. Hopefully I can figure out how to use Blogger effectively! Within the next few days I plan to write a review for A Place to Bury Strangers' album Exploding Head, and some more books - among them John Vaillant's The Tiger and perhaps some James Clavelle. 

"I will beg my way into your garden,

just to break my way out when it rains"

-John Mayer

Paperbacks

“Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled times when I have a fair idea of what was happening, in a general way, but cannot be sure of dates or places or even the exact order in which events took place.”
- George MacDonald Fraser


As promised, I'm going to trudge forth today with a couple of reviews.

Fiscal irresponsibility seems to stay a consistent factor in my erratic city-life, and my recent discovery of Amazon.ca has not helped any. Now, when I say 'discovery', don't be confused, I haven't been unaware of Amazon all these years, I just never bothered to shop online very often. Long story short - no shipping costs for used paperbacks with purchases over $35.00 delivered right to my door? I have a bit of a problem when it comes to owning books - I can't step into a library, for instance, because I'll never return a single copy. I just want that book to live on my fucking shelf, dammit - I want the sum total of my collection to be stacked in more elaborate ways until I have an Arche de Triomphe of books on my shelves, until I've stacked them in pagodas and temples palisaded with other books of different genres and sizes. It's a bizarre quirk. It's hard to say whether I'm better off thanks to the Internet, or worst. In the days when I would wander Chapters and walk out with more books than I could afford, my literary appetites seemed much less efficient... then again, my credit cards are now maxed out and I need to buy more furniture. More bang for my buck still doesn't leave me with any more bucks...

Whatever.

Quartered Safe Out Here
by George Macdonald Fraser

The above quote is from the memoir in question, an account of the author's experiences during the Burmese campaign in World War II. I chose it not only because it was one of the few I could find without a hard-copy of the book in my hand, but because it unashamedly represents something so lacking in most war memoirs - unabashed honesty. 


There are millions of books written about war, from a million perspectives, all of which are without second-guessing taken with a grain of salt (hopefully) by their legions of readers. But this is the only book written about a man's experience at war where he flagrantly takes into question his own reliability as narrator. Having served on combat operations in Afghanistan back in 2010, this hit home. I find myself remembering certain events differently than members of my own platoon (one must take into account those differing perspectives), or than journalistic accounts of them. Fraser is one of the few authors who has effectively sat down and stated "these events are true in the sense that I remember them happening this way" and shrugs as to their veracity in accordance with historical review. Reading these accounts, so comfortably honest, makes it easy to sit down behind that blank OpenOffice document and start typing. I kept slim notes, while I was deployed, but most of them I imagine my ex-girlfriend burned along with all the other correspondence I sent her during my rotation. So it goes.

Honesty is really what drives the story home here, and Fraser's knack for authentic dialogue that practically runs off the pages in rivulets. The narrative in itself is interspersed with personal reflections from the author himself, centering around political and humanitarian issues like the dropping of the Atomic bomb, British Colonialism in India, and the question of "emotional pornography" in the Modern Age. All of these are unapologetically shaped by the author's experiences and as a soldier I can sympathize and even agree in some places. The latter issue, for instance, hit home - I remember being aggressively questioned as to the state of my mental well-being after rotating home, to the point where it was offensive. And with forty-or-so other Camerons having just rotated home, I wasn't alone. The fact is, whatever issues came up from our individual experiences were soothed away by collective therapy. And when I say 'therapy', I mean the kind that takes place in the Junior-Ranks Mess after-hours and during the excursions to the Byward Market. The sad reality is we're fine, and most people can't seem to accept that because they consider their mediocre, sheltered lives to be normative in the grand scheme of things.They labels us (affected by war as we are) as deviants, when in reality we are just fine and probably better off less ignorant and self-entitled.

The central theme to the story is the dysfunctional camaraderies between the members of Nine-Section, who mostly speak in a Northumbrian accent so thick you could spread it on rye. There is that imperishable sense of brotherhood from living together in austere, depraved conditions, with others that has translated over from so many war narratives before and after I won't waste time dwelling on it here. But Fraser's prose is very visceral, and a quarter into the novel I could feel the humidity sucking against my clothes and the rain dripping off the tip of my nose, smell gun-oil and the cheesy waft of old boots. It concerns itself with the infanteer's experience, that is to say slogging through the muck from engagement-to-engagement (which are few and far between, as were mine, in varying degrees of intensity) and more interested in the little stories between road-movements (like the author's promotion and attempt at distilling a well, without success and with ensuing hilarity).

This is what it was like being a British soldier in Burma during the war, and this is what it is like being a soldier at war in general. I burned through this book like wildfire and have since passed it off Cameron-to-Cameron with positive reception all-round. If anybody who reads is reading this, pick it up, you'll be surprised.

No Direction Home

'At the crossroads of my life
I came upon a dark wood,'

I'm sitting in a third-floor mod in Meaford, ON, full of bland mess-hall food and listening to an arrangement of music ticking back and forth between The Black Angels and P. W. Long, with Francoise Hardis thrown in every now and then just to add a few new dimensions to the ambiance. I'm rooted to my chair and so weighed down by the lack of things to do I'm beginning to feel the cafadre I remember feeling on the hotter days in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Land Force Central Area Training-Center Meaford (LFCA TC) isn't the kind of place you can easily find on a map - a small pimple of dormitories, classrooms, and office buildings orbiting the Georgian Bay and the unlucky recipient of all its crazy weather patterns. It isn't unlike most Canadian Forces Bases, to be honest, only that it is located in that region of Ontario dominated principally by small townships, antique stores, and church picnics where the tallest buildings are WAL*MARTs and most of the kids seem to think they are either gangsters or MMA fighters from Huntington Beach, all of whom look and act like fucking clowns.

I'm employed currently in an instructor position for the Basic Military courses running here throughout the summer, teaching infantry fundamentals and trying not to notice how much hotter the female candidates are than I remember from my training years back. In past instances, sequestered in this armpit over a weekend, I would start drinking at noon and wind up going bananas at Bananas Beach Bar in Wasaga, but as I am trying to cut down on that particular vice (amongst others) I am coming to full appreciate just how fucking boring these little towns can be. Petawawa, at the very least, is paradise for the outdoors-man (and Ottawa is so close-by). I think my brain is cooking out of my skull from boredom, and here I am.

I span up another blog because I kind of wanted to focus on literary aspirations, away from the direction my sister blog had taken (which haphazardly cataloged my more debauched escapades and darker moods). The last school year has been tumultuous and unpleasant (romantic upsides notwithstanding), in that terrifying way I'm sure life seems to most people my age. I failed or withdrew from most of my classes at Carleton (which left a sucked-dry feeling in my gut) due principally from lack-of or waning interest, doing nothing for my post-secondary education but sinking me further in debt. I've come to realize that I've come to realize nothing, really - I'm still suspended in a confusing maelstrom without direction in regards to my future aspirations. I clocked As in both my Creative Writing courses, in a rock-star kind of way. I dropped most classes to soldier with the Camerons (and earn enough bank to pay for rent, and groceries). I just can't seem to come to terms with what I want to do with my life. Write? Police? Paramedic? Soldier? Teach? It'll come to me I suppose, and I'm not the first underachiever to spend nights in the dark pulling out his hair. I can't decide whether I want to enroll in Fall classes this September. In terms of military careerism, you can only get so far as a Reservist - and I'll just chew the insides of my mouth on that one, for now.

I'm considering going through with a Commonwealth Transfer to the Royal Parachute Regiment in the UK, for a 4-year contract. So I can travel and see the English military at its finest. Just waiting for my sweetheart to finish her last few years of University (being far more organized than I am). I'm also more recently considering some Private Military work, having met a fellow Corporal who spent some time in Africa doing the same. I miss the adrenaline high and the sleepless numb of the operational tempo, and I'm getting a taste of it working long days here as an instructor, although it has substantially less bite.

I'll keep threading water, I guess. In the meantime, I'll use this blog to review books and music I find particularly spellbinding, tell stories, write excerpts, and just plug World-Wide into the Web.

"Oh, be joyful
'cause that shit spreads"
- Matthew Good