Benjibopper

Labels: 2002, non-fiction, Travel, west coast

How's this for my novel jacket blurb?

Woolly Visions

This forceful novel explores the ambiguous fears of bleeding hearts abroad, illuminating the scandalous distance between the ideas of academics and how the world is run.

The star of the story is 27-year-old Koko Valentine, a roving student on the run from love and comfort. He is jerked from his blind routine during a mass protest against high gas prices in Indonesia, when he meets Pram and Budi, two quick-learning bus drivers whose astute yet simple observations set in motion a botched plan to end a new kind of terrorism.

As a perpetual voice of neutrality, Koko is torn between the arguments of powerful men and women who can’t agree on how to make the world and humanity flourish. One the one side are the Death Consultants who argue that by mass marketing implements of destruction like motor vehicles and weaponry, the worst elements of humanity can be eliminated, allowing the rest to flourish. On the other side, plain language consultants argue for behaviour-shaping education of the masses. In the middle Koko is falling in love with a Danish children’s novelist and being seduced by a radical Indonesian eco-activist.

Prodding more intensely into his new lover’s ideas and character, Koko unveils the authenticity of his own mind. This is a novel that abolishes the pretense that knowledge leads to action, pulls back the curtain covering our power structures, and ultimately exposes the reedy streak separating progressives and war-hawks.

Finally, Koko is distorted by the trap he chooses to enter. Readers too may fail to recover from the power of Benjamin’s words.

Labels: 2002, Fiction, Toronto, Woolly Visions

This is my friend Leah. This is a funny picture of her from her undergrad days, soon after she won a bigass award and tonnes of recognition for taking on some bigass factory that was going to pave over a beloved wetland near her home. Sometimes M and I drive by that factory, right through its gargantuan shadow, and we always comment on the 17-year-old girl who took it on, who became our good friend, and introduced the two of us.

Here's a poem I wrote about her a few years back, because she's so freakinwickit:


Parallel lives lived entwined entrenchedly
listlessly lying in sprinklers playfully
Eating like meeting a tattooed gourmet
wheeling and stealing into the chalet
Kissing in circles over hummus discussions
of barefooted boxers & blackbooted Russians
Not a thought about purpose or porpoise oppressions
just active in costume protests against our own obsessions

Squeals of closeness and objected assumptions
audible anger over the other's no gumption
Advisories precede rationalizations of the stupid mistakes we made
right before our boldest hearts suffered a barber's fade

The fall that follows falls short under the swallows
There's also beauty in a homeless man's wallow
With the ties of bondage broken too
the lonely freedom descends upon you
And me with the fear of the fate to come
resisting the ever-present urge to run

But fate is just whatever happens to us it's never wrong
Our nature's take us where we belong



Leah recently started her master's degree at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (part of U Toronto), and is leaving an amazing job where she works with kids to bring out the best of them in their art - it's even better than it sounds. We saw their show a few weeks ago - a combination of original artwork, art from found objects, and performance art, that was absolutely stupendous and I wish I had pictures of that for you.

Leah should have been considered for that 'greatest Canadian' CBC schtick. Instead I nominated Tooker Gomber, who is also really great, and who I also wrote a poem about. But, today's blog is for Leah.

--Bopper

Labels: 2002, friends, Poetry, Toronto