I had a rough time at a recent Scrabble tournament in Gatineau (1-5, -414, last in my division, 31 rating points lost), which bruised my already-fragile confidence in my playing abilities. Josh says that six games of Scrabble in one day is not an accurate metric in assessing one’s current skill level. Easy for a national champion to say, difficult to internalize when the only tournaments you play in are one-days. He might have a point; I’m over .500 in multiday play in the last 12 months. I’m choosing not to include the March tournament at a fancy cabin in rural Ontario in that count because I played and lost four games against a different national champion, though they were way closer than anyone would have predicted. For whatever reason, I feel like the game is something that’s happening to me and not something I have an impact on. I feel like words I used to know are dribbling out from my ears to make room for new words I’m trying to learn 50 at a time. I don’t play enough. When I do, wins never feel mine the way losses do. But I keep taking lessons from Josh, because I have deluded myself into thinking that being good at this game is within my grasp. We’ll see how Belleville goes in a couple of weeks. It’s a multiday.
I would never in a quadrillion years describe myself as part of the “lit scene,” but even a cursory glance at my comings and goings would make a liar out of me. The open mic I co-host is old enough to be in grade school, which is geriatric in poetry reading event years. I still think of myself as adjacent to the event even though, again, patently not true. There’s a significant part of me that still thinks of my hosting duties as “just helping out.” I’m a supporting player in the scene; it’s something that’s happening to me rather than something I’m helping to make happen. Such falsehoods! My oldest poetry friends in this city, like it or not, are not just poets themselves, but editors, curators, publishers. Hell, I’ve been in their publications. I’m knee-deep in it. If you stick around long enough, people will figure you’ve always been there.
Book #2 is definitely happening. Real heads know. It’s a greatest hits of the last four years of farting around and trying to make art happen. Honestly, that might be the only way art happens, by farting around. “Playing” might be a less juvenile way of phrasing it. Points of reference for the new book: old tech doing new things, climate anxiety, Makato Shinkai, Interstellar, sci-fi to rip bong hits to, and a little band from Champaign, Illinois called Hum. I mean, all space-y, post-y rock bands, really, but Hum in particular. When I was putting my first chapbook together, I joked that the poems were a way to map out my own imagination, and that’s still true. Right now, I’m trying to evoke a feeling, and it’s the feeling I get when I watch 5 Centimetres Per Second or listen to Slowdive’s Souvlaki or plug “compilation of last pitches from perfect games” into YouTube. It’s slow and cinematic and winsome and romantic and wells up inside you. It’s fuzzy and diffuse but, because it’s poetry, is rendered in precise language. It’s a corner worth painting myself into.
Everything cool happens on Saturday nights, which sucks for me, because that’s when I’m wrapping up my work week in the shadows of Downtown Montréal’s stumpy high-rises. It’s by far the worst thing about my job, which is pretty painless as far as soft-handed email jobs go. I’ve been at it for nearly two years and I still can’t explain what I do; the best I’ve come up with is “digital typesetter.” I take the Word document your PR team has drafted up to announce your shiny new widget or widget cleaner or Chief Widget Officer and I apply a little liquid HTML to it to make sure the internet can read it. I don’t think I needed an MA in Film Studies to do this, but hey, I don’t wake up every morning thinking my body could use a few more bullet holes, so I’ll take that as a win. Remember: the winning lottery ticket isn’t the job you love, but the job you don’t hate, and I don’t hate my job.
Remember when I used to be a film critic? Back when I was younger and hipper and hungrier? I mean, you never stop being a film critic, you only stop being published. The forms, the formats, even the clichés, they’re stored in my muscle memory like riding a bike or doing a deadlift. What’s gone is the volume; I watched a lot of movies when I was in grad school, not so much anymore. I still have takes but don’t worry about their temperature. I thought One Battle After Another was a fantastic piece of work; I keep thinking about Benicio del Toro’s character, whose secret superpower is his community network. My allergy to the work of Yorgos Lanthimos persists, though it is not strong enough to deter me from seeing his movies. There’s stuff there, but the presentation still keeps me at arm’s length. There continues to be no bad Wes Anderson movies.
Sometimes I’ll be brushing my teeth or feeding the cats and a stray though will burrow itself into my brain like a weevil, and invariably, that though is something like “is K-Pop Demon Hunters going to be in the field for the 2025 Movie Bowl? I mean, the top four seeds are probably going to be some combination of Sinners, Weapons, One Battle After Another, and A Minecraft Movie, and it’s a lock for a Best Animated Feature nomination, if not a win, but the year has had tons of great movies… should I watch K-Pop Demon Hunters? Is there ever going to be a 4K Blu-ray of K-Pop Demon Hunters? Am I the type of guy who would own a 4K Blu-ray of K-Pop Demon Hunters? How would I explain K-Pop Demon Hunters to my mom? Not that she’d listen to me, she hasn’t seen something I’ve recommended since she gave a thumbs-down to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
It took me long long enough considering I have every predisposition to have been a fan of this band since high school, but I’ve finally become a Wilco guy. Here is the progression of my Wilco fandom: catching I Am Trying to Break Your Heart on cable in high school, passing familiarity with the well-known cuts from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born through college, seeing them open for Neil Young in 2008 and not recognizing most of the songs in the set (though I remember popping for “Jesus, etc.” and “Heavy Metal Drummer”), long gap, lmao they called their album Star Wars, long gap, devouring Jeff Tweedy’s How to Write One Song during deepest, darkest pandemic because I will devour any book about writing, devouring Tweedy’s memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), getting my ass kicked by the perfect record that is Summerteeth, listening to the “canonical” run between Being There and A Ghost Is Born, reading Tweedy’s third book, watching live shows on YouTube, getting familiar with album cuts from albums I hadn’t listened to yet, starting again with A.M., plugging “what is the best live version of impossible germany” into a search engine, watching Nels Cline guitar rig rundown videos.
I’ve been torturing myself with something I’ve dubbed the Future Shelf Project. It’s a combination of best-of-the-year lists, a shopping guide, and a wishlist for music and movies. They are aspirational shelves, movies and albums I own and would like to own, with a hard cap of 25 releases per calendar year. Obviously, there are exceptions. I’ve decided that live albums, compilations, soundtracks, and EPs don’t count against the 25 albums for a given year; documentaries, assorted non-fiction, and shorts don’t count against the 25 movies. It’s the best way I’ve found to counteract the weight of history and the allure of various canons and I’m not entirely sure it works. Every list is aspirational, but these lists might be aspirational in a way that is a deterrent to discovery and novelty. As with most things, a little flexibility in the rules is called for (e.g. releases by the same artist in one year can be condensed into one slot, aka the Steven Soderbergh rule, aka the King Gizzard rule; entries from a box set can be exempt from counting against a year’s total, aka the Mission: Impossible 2 rule). I can’t disregard how meditative it is to make these lists, but that time making lists is time I could better spend watching Yi Yi rather than speculating about it as one of the 25 movies from 2000 on my shelf in potentia.
A mostly-complete list of the books I’m currently cycling through: Ubik by Philip K. Dick, The Game by Ken Dryden, Neuromancer by William Gibson, Selected Poems by Kenneth Koch, The Dog of the South by Charles Portis, Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, and The Tower by W. B. Yeats.