Style No. 96: Hardboiled

They called him Khan The Tailor and he was known in the neighbourhood for looking the other way.

Let’s just set one thing straight before we get started, which is that I ain’t no snitch. A dick’s got to have secrets or he ain’t no kind of dick, private or otherwise. That’s the law of this business if you give a damn about getting clients. Not that it matters whether you solve the case or not. In this town the victims’ll turn round and slit the throats of the criminals in a second. That’s if they ain’t done it already.

But stories. Well they got their own laws too don’t they. Stories got to be told, that’s why they call them stories. There’s a message stored up inside them.

So I was on the case for this broad named Jack. What the hell kind of name is that for a broad you’re thinking? Pal, don’t even. I been there. Anyway it’s a dime in my pocket so what do I care.

She says to me Rex have I got a job for you. That’s me, Rex Mosgley. Investigateur extraordinaire or whatever they say up in Montreal. Rex it’s a pinch caper, she says. My boys they lost two suits pricey as a mint.

– A pinch eh? What kind of suits we talking? (That’s my way of talking to broads.)

– Crushed velvet orange jumpsuits, it’s the latest fashion, oh you’ve got to get one you’ve just got to.

– Damn it Jack don’t talk to me about fashion. Don’t you know the world is all grey for a man like me?

– But can you get them back?

– Does the pope shit in the woods?

– I don’t imagine it’s my place to comment on religious matters.

– Oh come on, don’t get so nervous now. Makes you look older than you are, like you’re someone’s grandma, which just can’t be true for a broad as fine-looking as you. (Rule number one, always compliment the client.)

– Actually my daughter-in-law just had a baby. His name’s Melvin. Melvin Pennington Samsonite.

– That’s a lot of luggage for a little boy to carry. How about you just give me the skinny on this character you say made off with your boys’ funny suits. Let me guess, someone with a .44 Magnum and an attitude malfunction.

– Funny you should mention that. See, it’s Khan The Tailor. They call him the Khan Man because he’s always separating folks from their belongings. And he’s haughty too, like he knows something nobody else does.

– Whoa babe, let’s push the manifold crank back a few turns. Khan the tailor? Stand up guy he is. Sews my underwear every Christmas. (This is when I started thinking something’s fishy. This racialist type Jack broad? Fishier than a goddamn Newfie kitchen I’m thinking.)

– Are you implying I’m a liar, Mr. Mosgley? You do understand that this Khan is a… a Hindoostani, don’t you?

This is when I noticed that she’s got something hidden beneath the shawl on her head. Right from then I knew things weren’t going to end well. I’m telling you, clients are worse than marks in this damn town. It’s no life for a dick no more.

– Bend an ear this way Jack and bend it good. My mother’s from Chandigarh, you hear? Dad brought her back from the service, fell for the mangoes if you get my drift. So here’s what I’m going to do is I’m going to look the other way and let you leave my office. Let’s hope Khan’s willing to look the other way too.

Well wouldn’t you know it, one of those days. Turns out this broad’s name ain’t Jack at all. Frau Jach maybe. Soon as I’m done my spiel she whips off that head shawl of hers and slings a pistol my way. Then she starts spewing some cream-of-word soup, garbled German or  devil knows what. Arbeit macht frei.

But as it happened, I was the one to set her free long before her finger got to scratching that trigger. I have the shotgun bolted to the desk like any dick with his head screwed on right. Not sure what she expected, should’ve known better if you think on it. Hell, when you been working in this business as long as I have, that’s just what you call mandatory office supplies.

Style No. 95: Sci-Fi

The planet of the Balthonians looks much like this piece of Earth-fruit.

The planet Nebtok Blintz 6.1 is located just a short distance from the Zerbon nebula. It has a twin planet (6.2) and both float in a beautiful wraith of Zerbon’s orange gasses. While this was nice to look at as I drove in, visibility was terrible. Luckily I’d just had my wipers repaired, and after clicking them to intermittent I was able to see well enough to land.

I only had a tourist visa, which I’d picked up at the Nebtoki consulate on Pluto (all the Zerbon planets seem to have consulates there, who knows why). The bastards only gave me 30 days, but whatever. I’d have the last laugh as I was going to meet up with the Balthonians and help them smuggle four tonnes of diamonds from the planet’s carbon core. Then we’d roll in our billions and take  peyote and maybe go to Alpha Centauri for burgers. But first there was work to do.

Getting through customs was disgusting. I forgot how drippy the Nebtokis are, and to make matters worse the agent at my wicket had left his mucus cup at home. Ew. Maybe this helped me in the end though, because I was able to pass myself off as a tourist without being selected for reversible brain dissection. A more attentive agent might’ve seen I had things to hide.

I returned to my pod and headed for the rendez-vous point I’d set up with my contact among the Balthonians, Chad. “So you’re here, finally,” he said. As though it was my fault the whole road was socked in with orange gas and I couldn’t go more than 100,000. My foot wasn’t even on the pedal, I swear.

“Just give me the diamonds, cowboy,” I said. This is what people call Balthonians because they look like cows.

“And if I say no?” he said, smiling like a crazed fool. What the hell was he playing at? Jesus, I just crossed the galaxy for this guy.

“Hey, what’s the deal man? You’re the one who called me, unless you forgot.”

“Oh I didn’t forget. It’s her who isn’t so sure.”

“Her? The grandmother?”

“One and the same.”

“My god. I thought that was just a legend. You know, scare the Bogzarfs and all that. ‘Ooh, don’t mess with us or the grandmother will get you.’”

“Might scare you too.”

“Well I’m not nervous. If anyone should be nervous it’s her.”

“Oh she is, she always is. That’s her M.O.” He turned his head and yelled back into the darkness of the cave he’d come out of. “Grandmother! Our fence is here. Come size him up.”

Of course I’d lied to him, I was nervous as hell. The grandmother? She was feared from here to the goddamn vanguard of the universe.

After a minute she waddled out of the cave, and to my surprise she just looked like an other Balthonian woman. The only exception is that she had a cloaking device wrapped around her head like a shawl. “What do you want,” she asked.

“What is this?” I said. “You guys fucking called me, ok? You. Called. Me.”

“Alright alright, keep your hat on,” she said, looking me up and down like I was a slave she was inspecting for Krebian digi-lice.

“I’m not wearing any lice, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I said. “Trust me, no one is listening in.”

“Yeah haven’t I heard that a million times,” she said, continuing to size me up.

“What about you, eh? What you got under that cloak?”

At this Chad turned purple. I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his damn head. ”No one dares mention the cloak!” he roared.

“It’s fine, Chad, it’s fine. If he wants to see, let him see.”

Finally we’re getting somewhere, I thought. A little cooperation. I was chewed up with curiosity by that point, wonder just what the hell this famous old lady kept on her precious little head, so even though it was just a second before she unveiled, it felt like an eon.

In the end I wish it had been. For when she pulled the cloak off her head I was greeted not by typical Balthonian fur, but something wholly different. A strange little man growing straight out of her skull. “Good god,” I said. “What the fuck is that.” At this the little man turned his head — not at me, but the other way — and a knowing smile pinched across his face. And that’s when I felt it, the heat. The raging unbearable heat. “No,” I said. “It can’t be true.”

His little voice croaked out then like a toad jumping from its wee dank toad hole. “Oh but I’m afraid it is.”

Every second that passed made it harder for me to speak, as I was cooking from the inside out. “Not…not…a mind boiler?”

“Haha! Merry Christmas Earth douchebag!” he cackled. With that I collapsed under the force of the burning, flopping like a fish on rocks. I tried to ask why, but my tongue swelled and choked me out.

There was no explanation, no reason, no hope. I’d met my end among this band of diamond nabbers. Goddamn, I thought. Should’ve known better than to trust a cowboy. Should’ve known… And like that I was gone.

 

Style No. 94: Western

The well where we buried that donkey-riding bastard was just down the valley there, yes it was.

Just another one of them damn stories. Heard a hundred of ‘em in my day. Always the same. Some hooligan rides into town on a shit horse more donkey than stallion, looking to cause trouble. You know the type. The strange ones with that real arrogant type of cold in their eyes. Sort of man won’t meet your eye. Just looks the other way even when you talk at him. Just stares off, like he know something you don’t.

Well these stories all ride the same road, but there’ll be detours on occasion. In this particular circumstance the detour was me and my pal Jeb-Ticky (nobody knows why they call him Jeb-Ticky but that’s the way it is and you’ll have to reconcile yourself to the facts). We was the new sheriffs came in since Thanksgiving when old Dougie McChiggan lost his head up in Crab Gut, which is a real town yes sir. And it’s no lie about his head. It’s yet to be found even though the five-dollar reward’s been posted months. Me, I suspect it was that Morris fellow on the western slope there. Folks say he done unholy things with his animals up that way.

Anyhow, what the hell was I talking. Right. So Jeb-Ticky and I, we got ourselves these new brightly coloured uniforms, which was his idea, something he hoped would put the fear of god in the common criminal, or at least the fear of a half ounce of molten lead in his backside. Didn’t we look just like a couple of fruits.

It was a Tuesday when that joker trotted up on his donkey with that look real smug-like, and I spoke to him politely but with a shotgun slung over my shoulder, for I knew he was an ill-grown seed. “Morning to you, rider,” I said. “What brings you to this peaceful part of the West on a god-granted blue sky morning like this?”

This is right about when that no-good rider turned his head and spat a hefty drop of fluids in the dust not two inches from my boot tip. “Looking for someone,” he said. “An old bird.”

“Ain’t a lot of old folks round here. Most of the boys don’t see beyond their forties this side of the mountains,” I said.

“Nah,” he said, spitting again, this time on the other side of his beast. “It ain’t that. A woman.”

I just looked at him like what the hell this boy on about, like god damn why you got to come ruin a perfectly good morning in this perfectly respectable fine town of ours. “Well, I doubt we can help you with that,” I said. Right around then is when I seen Jeb-Ticky setting up his rifle top of Mel Boonchild’s tailor. I think the donkey boy must’ve seen him too in that damn orange shirt of his.

“Let’s not get excited now,” he said. “I ain’t even got to the description yet.”

“Ah, of course. How could I be so rude! It’s just we don’t have much occasion to welcome visitors in these parts, Mr….”

“Auslander. Herschel Auslander.”

“Well Mr. Oslander, this is a busy town and I’ve got loads to do. So spit it out or be on your way.”

“As you like it, fruit-man,” he said. That was the beginning of the end, this little comment of his. One word too far. I was steaming under the goddamn collar right then. “Old woman’s who I’m looking for. Wears a shawl over her head with something hidden underneath it.”

That just snapped me right out of everything. Jeb too, ’cause I know he heard it. “You better get the hell out of this town before you regret your visitation in this country, boy. Your demeanour displeases a man in these parts,” I said, calm but firm-like.

“Is she here or not, sheriff OJ? The woman.”

“Just what do you plan to do with her once you find her?”

“I’m going to shoot her dead and take her secret for my profit.”

“You’re sick in the brain, donkey child. You best clear this township ‘fore you find the wind blowing through your chest like a whistle.”

He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but he just looked down and chuckled, like there was some private joke I ain’t been privy to. Then he whipped out his gun.

At that point quite a crowd had formed in the distance, and little Jack Welch caught a bullet in the ear. But thank god it only grazed the tip. He looks like a tagged cow nowadays.

Well this donkey man must’ve had a death wish because he pulled his gun and aimed it straight on me, but I swear he seen Jeb-Ticky perched on Boonchild’s roof from way back. Maybe that’s just me griping about the shirts, maybe he hadn’t seen him at all. I guess they weren’t a bad idea these uniforms. Too bad I’ll need a new one.

Well it’s no way to spend an afternoon picking skull fragments out your beard, I can tell you. But who knows? If Jeb hadn’t taken care of that fool my cold body might’ve turned the streets red that day.

In the end we was all fine though, and we buried that bounty hunter in a dry well beyond the town. I know it ain’t right, but I took a piss on his body once we’d thrown him down for what he tried on me and mine. “That’s what you get boy,” I said. “That’s what happens when you try and mess with a man’s mother.”

“That’s the truth right there,” said Jeb-Ticky. “That’s the right truth it is.” Then we went home, and I told momma to stop wearing that damn shawl before someone shoots it clean off her wrinkled head.

Style No. 93: Kung-Fu

The valley of the Yak Cheese Masters.

“Ha! You will never master my style. For when I finish demonstrating my yak cheese kung-fu, you will be dead.”

“So it is the yak cheese style  you practice. You must have sought the teachings of Khenpo Tukpa Shinpo.”

“Yes, that is how I earned this orange tunic. I traveled to Lhasa, where the Tibetan kung-fu masters have their stronghold in a lofty cave beyond the city. There we ate roasted barley and practiced the way of the yak cheese in snowdrifts on windy evenings.”

“You fool, you think the Lhasa style can protect you? Your arrogance will see you destroyed. The yak cheese style is nothing compared to my chipotle turkey sausage kung-fu. I learned it from the fabled secret grandmother who carries its ancient scrolls beneath a shawl on her head. Now you will die.”

“Poor friend, it is not arrogance but knowledge. And I will never die because I am hard as stone like the cheese of the mountain beast. I break the teeth of the foolish. And if you boil me in water I am not destroyed, but instead become even better. Your style, on the other hand, has ground meat as its essence. So I will return you to your natural state!”

So it was that Master Yak-Fu returned to the Land of Snow after a lean meal of diced poultry and continued his quest to find the strange man ascertain the nature of his knowingness.

Style No. 92: Nature Show

The species is known to consume these stimulating berries like their life depended on it.

These two are a spectacular pair. Rare to see orange ones in the wild, and two males at that. Friendly aren’t they. Brothers perhaps. Marvellous song. The shrill whistle that is their trademark. Only a few billion of these left in the wild now.

Oh how incredible — a Shawl-Crested Hideygran! Many safari-goers dream of seeing one, but chances remain low even here with this nervous species. When you consider the crowd of nature-lovers gathering in the distance, it’s a miracle she’s here at all.

And I’m not sure if you can see it, but behind them through the trees stands one of the more common animals found in this vast wilderness — the Know-Eyed Strangeman. Certain biologists have raised concerns about their growing numbers, and there has been recent talk in government circles about a cull. Better snap your photos while he’s looking the other way before this one’s dispatched by animal control.

 

Review: ‘Love and the Mess We’re In’ by Stephen Marche

Thanks to Gaspereau Press for a review copy of Stephen Marche’s experimental work of concrete fiction.

Love and the Mess We’re In is like nothing you’ve ever read. I don’t mean that as the usual figurative praise on how good a book it is, but as simple fact. This is different.

What makes this work unusual– and I don’t know what to call it if not a ‘work’ –is its application of concrete poetic techniques in fiction. The result is something quite remarkable.

We’re all familiar with concrete poetry, whether it’s early 20th-century works like Apollinaire’s Calligrams or the more recent poems we all had to read in high school English class. The idea of manipulating how words fall on the page to enhance or alter meaning is an old one.

What’s new is applying this in fiction. It’s a clever idea that produces some startlingly powerful effects.

But let’s step back and look at exactly what we’re discussing:

In case you were wondering, that’s the Buenos Aires rain running down the page as Viv, the protagonist, waits to get into Clive’s apartment so she can cheat on her crazy husband with him. And this is not an exceptional sight in Love and the Mess We’re In. The right-hand page is actually pretty tame compared to the rest of the stuff you’ll come across. The book is a wild and intriguing ride.

These creative structures generate interesting possibilities that Marche explores to great effect. (And it’s not just Marche that deserves the credit — the book was designed and typeset by Gaspereau’s own Andrew Steeves, whose blood, sweat, and tears must be in here nearly as much as Stephen’s.) Particularly in the extended sex scene, “Life of Flesh,” that makes up chapter 3 of 5. When you’re used to book pages carrying 300 words and then you’re hit with a tiny 12-point “No” and a vast sheet of white space followed by a massive “Yes” that claims the entire next page, it’s striking. There’s really something there, something that gets at the feeling Marche tries to put across (in this case an orgasm) in a manner rarely achieved by conventional means.

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Marche is a damn good sex writer. He’s also adept at probing emotional undercurrents rarely voiced in our daily lives — things like the guilty, shame, and need that surge up when a best friend and a wife fall in love when the friend/husband goes insane.

And that’s the basic plot. Tim and Clive are best buds. Tim meets Viv and they get married, but within a couple years he loses his mind. Viv sticks with him a long time even though he’s been institutionalized and stands little chance of recovering. Finally she relents in her devotion to a man who’s arguably no longer there, and flies to Argentina for a night of love with said best friend.

It’s a simple story, which is all Marche or any writer could manage in this format. While the book is 260 pages long, it’s really a mid-length novella because there are so few words on each page. This is a plus if you don’t feel like reading 100,000 words of concrete poetry.

Which you’d be justified in, because although this is a fascinating book it does have lulls. The dinner conversation between Viv and Clive from pp. 62-139 is a case in point. Here Marche employs an ingenious structure of columns so readers can simultaneously take in what each character is both saying and thinking (often completely different things). But while this is interesting and amusing, much of what Clive and Viv think is banal (e.g. “Out the window, brothers squabbling with Italianate hand gestures about their mother’s habits”).

It’s already jarring to have to jump between columns to navigate thought and speech (many of the pages in Love and the Mess We’re In have multiple elements with no clear reading pattern). But when the reward for struggling to decode Marche’s message is something as pedestrian as, well, a pedestrian, you just feel like hugging Jonathan Franzen for believing good literature doesn’t have to mean arduous reading.

Of course, it may not be fair to evaluate Love and the Mess We’re In on fiction’s terms. (Although it is marketed as such both by Gaspereau and the bookstores. Head to Chapters and you’ll likely find it on the New Fiction table.) But really, that’s Marche’s innovation with this book — stealing concrete poetry from the verse-writers who’ve been hogging it for centuries and smuggling it over to the fiction folks.

Considering this innovation, it would’ve been grand if he’d made more of a splash storywise. Instead, the book is more about expressing the feelings brought up by a challenging scenario (in this case adultery perpetrated against a madman whom both culprits love deeply). It’s a slice-of-life work. In that regard this fictive apple hasn’t fallen far from the poetic tree.

All the same, Marche’s latest effort is a bold exploration of fictions formal frontier. It’s quite simply a marvel that the book was produced at all, given recent trends toward conservatism in publishing. And while it’s not a perfect book — sometimes Marche’s wordiness goes too far — it’s certainly an inventive piece of art that goes a long way in showing the potential scope for typography to impact the reading experience.

If you like concrete poetry, this is for you. This is the bees knees, this is your mandatory assignment due at the end of class tomorrow in a blue duotang. If you like gorgeously fabricated books printed on paper so good you could eat it, this is also for you. And if you’re gunning for some nuanced explorations of love, loss, and guilt, you might also want to pick this up before you hit your next counseling session. On the other hand, if you recoil at phrases like “Sounding and astounding / Resounding and running and rousing / Slivering and silvering and spilling and slippering / Raining and running and rushing / slumping and slouching,” then consider yourself forewarned.

Review: “Ninja: 1,000 Years of the Shadow Warrior” by John Man

As a person with deep convictions in democracy, I think it’s important we, as a people, take the time every once in a while to step back and reflect on ninjas.

Seriously though, these days ninjas are important, and I admire John Man for writing this. A product of the ninja-turtle age and a long-time consumer of other shrouded assassin fare, I had to stop when I saw Ninja in the bookshop. “A history of ninjas,” I thought. “Damn, why didn’t I think of that?” It’s a great subject, both because ninjas are so popular — from Connery-era Bond films to YouTube phenomenon Ask A Ninja — and because everything people know about them is fluff. Just who were these shuriken-flinging bad-ass spy dudes, anyway? I certainly wanted to know; I expect many others will too.

But there’s a catch. It turns out there’s a good reason why all we know of ninjas, or shinobi as they’re known in colloquial Japanese, is myth. I hope you’re hungry for slow-baked legend in wild embellishment sauce, because that’s about the only thing on the menu when it comes to shadow warriors. ‘Shadow’ is the operative word in this whole ninja business.

The result is a book more on what ninjas aren’t. So we discover most popular thinking on them is bullshit. Black suits? Nah, dark blue, sometimes other colours. Ninja stars? Nope, according to Man there couldn’t be a dumber weapon. How do you carry something that’s got blades on all sides? How do you get it out quickly in a fight? And how do you avoid cutting yourself? Instead, you were more likely to find ninjas wielding knives and swords (or blowdarts — not everything we imagine about them is false).

Man also does his best to humanize the ninjas and ground them in the social world of medieval Japan. Since there’s basically no info available on individuals, he turns to the fiercely independent communities in the Iga and Koga regions south of Kyoto where the shinobi originated. Man recounts how ninjas emerged there in an effort to avoid rule by the central government. As he lays out this background, we find that lots of these ninja guys were farmers (gotta have something to do when you’re not sneaking into castles and poisoning feudal lords). Indeed, many ninja tools were adapted from farm implements, and their gear actually seems more like a carpenter’s toolbox than an assassin’s arsenal — folding ladders, rope, saws, etc.

In this vein, he notes ninjas were often fixtures of their local communities, and devoted themselves to the common good. They weren’t all rootless killers-for-hire and unscrupulous mercenaries. There’s something truly interesting in this. There’s fascinating tension in a life where you creep around at night scaling manor walls with grappling hooks and poisoning aristocrats, only to spend the days sowing rice with your wife and kids.

Unfortunately, however, most of what Man writes on ninjas — even this stuff about their social roles — is weakly substantiated. While the author no doubt made the best of a difficult topic, Ninja has the feel of a book improvised in the absence of sources. All he really has to go on are a few anecdotes from people he interviewed in Japan who claim to descend from ninja families — but oral evidence that dates back so far (the 15th and 16th centuries) is notoriously problematic. Aside from that, he mentions one or two treatises on ninjitsu (ninja ways) penned following the decline of the ninjas as a professional group. (This was after the shogun united Japan and the feudal lords stopped hiring ninjas to assassinate each other.) In other words, the book is a bit superficial, reading more like an extended journalism piece than the work of someone who’s a true expert in the field. Then again, for certain readers that might be just the level of detail desired.

The highlight of the book is the final two chapters, which aren’t actually about ninjas per se. Man makes the case that Japanese spies in WWII were modern ninjas, and charts the incredible stories of these men. His argument for modern ninjas doesn’t hold much water. (A good definition of “ninja” doesn’t appear in the book at all. He even claims James Bond is essentially a Western ninja, thus conflating shinobi and spies in general. And throughout the book he refers to any deceptive behaviour as “ninja-like,” which really waters down the term.) But making this link does allow him to delve into fascinating material, particularly on the life of Second Lieutenant Onoda Hiroo, who survived for 30 years in a Philippine jungle refusing to believe the war was over.

This guy’s story is insane. Thirty years? Alone? In a jungle? Not only that, but the Japanese government — and even his own siblings — contacted him on multiple occasions and begged him to come out. But he refused to believe them. Clearly these were wily attempts by the Americans to lure him into the open and sabotage his mission. (“Amazing that they found someone who looks and sounds just like my brother! How clever these Yankees are…”)

His determination to stick to his orders until his commanding officer appeared to rescind them is staggering. And indeed there’s something quintessentially Japanese about it, although that sense of conviction doesn’t belong solely to ninjas (think of all those samurai slicing their guts out to show loyalty to their masters).

When Man gets ahold of this rich seam — for once a subject that actually has source material! — he shines. The writing is engaging, emotionally charged, and addictive. Here the pages turn easily. The rest of the book, however, is a hybrid of the worst features of academic and popular writing — dry like many scholarly works, and lacking intellectual rigour like many popular titles.

But this, again, is likely due to the material, or the lack thereof. Facing such an impossible assignment where most of the history is just scraps of legend, Man has to pick up the pieces as best he can. The result is a book that’s actually more about wars between proto-shoguns vying for control of Japan than about “shadow warriors.”

That being said, Ninjas is an interesting read and essential homework for ninjaphiles. And if you like to deconstruct pre-modern beliefs as “mumbo-jumbo,” you’ll probably enjoy John Man’s personality, as he delves into myth-busting quite heavily. If you’re after some light reading on the warring-state era of Japanese history, Ninja is absolutely worth checking out in this regard too. But if you want an authoritative history of the shinobi that’s readable yet scholarly, you’ll have to wait.

———-

Thanks to Harper Collins  for a review copy of this work.