24 as Cautionary Tale

Out for coffee with a friend, I admitted my current obsession with the tv show 24 (Fox 2001-14) and asked if he watched it. He replied, with uncharacteristic vehemence, “No! And I’m not going to. That show made rights violations seem an okay response to terrorism. It helped normalize Guantanamo.”

            Well, yes. And no.

            Yes, it’s about a Counter Terrorism Unit agent named Jack Bauer charged with the task of keeping the US of A safe. As the seasons progress, Bauer takes on more and more attributes of a mythic hero, seemingly impervious to bullets and able to take out ordinary adversaries by the half dozen. He does break a sweat -- he does in fact bleed – but it doesn’t slow him down much. By the end of the series, his torso is a map of scars which chart his violent course, a man with an unfailing moral compass that leads to conflict not just with foes and purported allies but also with the very human rights enshrined in the US Constitution

            But, no. The riptide that counters his jingoistic support of the Office of the President is Jack Bauer’s misery. Every season, with an ever-increasing propensity for violence, he negotiates multiple internal and external threats, and each time the personal cost increases:

My wife was murdered because I was responsible for protecting [President] David Palmer during an assassination attempt. My daughter can't even look at me. Every day I regret looking into the eyes of men, women and children knowing that any moment their lives might be deemed expendable in an effort to protect the greater good. I regret every decision or mistake that I might have made which resulted in the loss of a single innocent life. (Season 7, 9:00pm-10:00pm) *

Death of, or total alienation from, family; betrayal by, or madness and death of, lovers; mistrust from allies; personal isolation, alienation, exile, imprisonment. A passionate and intelligent man, Bauer can enumerate each choice that leads to personal disaster. Dedicated to protecting national security, he cannot protect or secure the very people who matter most to him.

            It’s all very Anglo Saxon – like Beowulf,  Bauer’s great virtues as a warrior cannot help him negotiate success.  Bauer's fatal virtue is patriotism, expressed as hate for those who seek to destroy his country by violent attacks from the outside or more subtle corruptions from within. Bauer ends the speech above by asking“…do you know what I regret the most? That this world needs people like me.”

            It’s as if all the misery that Jack Bauer averted in saving hundreds of thousands of “innocent lives” rebounded upon him and then spilled over onto those he loves most. And that’s why 24 is not a model, but a cautionary tale.

*The 24 drinking game: pound a shot every time someone says a variation on the phrase “innocent lives.” Make it a double if there’s a quantity preceding it: “hundreds of innocent lives.”

Review: The Physics of Allowable Sway, by Marilyn Lerch

Sackville, NB: Devon Ave. Poetry Books, 2013.

Review by Kathy Mac and Ben Lord

“Allowable sway” usually refers to the amount of movement designed into the structure of a building or bridge. However, Marilyn Lerch uses the phrase to describe how “treetops, like keening women, bend and lift” (“Once I Dreamed” 32). This boundary-confounding slippage between natural and artificial marks many of the best moments in The Physics of Allowable Sway.

        The book includes a number of poems that grapple -- intellectually, emotionally and spiritually -- with problems of identity and mortality in our contemporary world. In “Paul,” Lerch explores what it means to know someone you never met; in this case a young man who killed himself, whose words she read years later. She became connected to Paul precisely because he removed himself from the web of connections: “When all was sick flux of love turning / you were fixed and pure, your act decisive” (28). Over and over in the poem she asks “How does one decide?”  -- to end your life, to remove yourself from knowability, to hasten the dissolution of your corporeal and memory identity and become fathomable only through your writing. To move from “one” to none, or all.

        Not everything in The Physics of Allowable Sway is so dire. Some of the most diverting poems treat serious subjects lightly. “Child, Child” exhorts someone “eye-level with no-nonsense knees” to “stay down there / as long as you can” only “occasionally tilting your head / up the long length of your future”  (58). Other poems here are pastoral, and pleasures to read in part because of Lerch’s articulate yet accessible diction. “Sunset at Cheticamp” ends with a description of the way

the molten globe slowly sinks

into its own lava sea while

birds skim the closing crease

and the small green light

on the point winces

on and off. (24)

        In “Leaving the Human Behind” Lerch takes up again to her quest to understand the limits and strengths of human interactions with nature, by returning to the cave walls at Pech-Merle,

to come upon that hand

splayed in red ochre on the rock,

like to like

across millennia.

She ends the poem, and the book, imagining a time when:

whoever finds this,

if you still can,

feel the feeling of

how much we loved

life.                                            

In this beautiful. self-published book -- produced using nineteenth-century letterpress technologies at Gaspereau Press -- Lerch clearly aspires to produce an artifact as compelling to her future readers as that ochre hand is to her. Like the images on the wall at Pech-Merle, The Physics of Allowable Sway is a palm-print not just of Lerch’s life, but of the cultures, experiences and histories which culminate in this book.

Why We're Considering Changing the Name of the Atlantic Canadian Poets Archive (ACPA)

Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts 

Advisory Committee for Public Art

Aero-Club Picardie Amiens

Aid, Conflict and Peace Building in Afghanistan

Air Canada Pilots Association 

Alabama Cemetery Preservation Alliance

Alberta Cowboy Poetry Association

Allegheny County Port Authority 

American Cleft Palate - Craniofacial Association 

American College of Psychoanalysts

American College Personnel Association

American Concrete Pavement Association

American Concrete Pipe Association

Anti-Citrullinated Protein Autoantibodies

Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act

Aperture-Coupled Patch Antenna

Arizona Crime Prevention Association

Asia Canine Protection Alliance 

Assistant Chief Patrol Agent

Associate of Chinese Photographic Association

Association Canadienne de Patinage Artistique

Association of Canadian Port Authorities 

Association of Celebrity Personal Assistants 

Association of Certified Public Accountants 

Association of Chinese Philosophers in North America  

Association of Christians in Planning and Architecture

Association of Concrete Pumpers of America 

Audio Capture and Playback Adapter

Auditing in the Caribbean: A Practical Approach

Australian Centre for Precision Agriculture

 
Australian Commercial Parachute Association

 

Representation in Your Writing

This is the way the media depicts the world as being:

Straight

White

Male

Cisgender

Middle-Class

And that is not only wrong, it is also freaking incorrect.

The world is diverse, and our writing needs to show that accurately and respectfully. This isn’t about being ‘politically correct’ or anything, it’s about necessity.

We’ve come a long way from our thirteen year old weaboo selves writing Mary Sue OCs in poorly done fanfiction. There is no longer a reason for we as writers to have such homogenized visions. The easy way is to write characters from just our own cultural circle. That’s bland. People exist outside of stereotypes, and so should your depictions of them.

We justify this by saying things like: “I’m afraid of misrepresenting ___” or as ‘coming off offensive.”

Those are indeed real fears writers face, but we need to overcome them. What’s worse than having a poorly fleshed out character? Having zero diversity. (That is not to say that a stereotype is excusable either. If they exist as a punchline or trope, reconsider how you’ve depicted them, not whether or not you should even depict them.)

Research (more than just) a little, represent a lot. Learn what it can be like to live on a Reservation, find out more about hiring practices for people who aren’t white, or what bathroom experiences are like for people who identify as neither male nor female.

They don’t have to be sob stories and their differences shouldn’t make up their characters, but ‘they’ need to be in our TV shows, movies, books… it’s not a matter of choice as much as it is a necessity for today’s writers. Make them more than ‘they.’

 It’s going to mean something when your audience can identify and find themselves in your writing.  

Lesley Choyce, All Alone at the End of the World: Poetry Review

 Lesley Choyce’s latest collection of poetry includes pieces both anecdotal and philosophical. All Alone at the End of the World gives readers the sense that they are not alone at all, but sitting with an experienced storyteller who leverages his unique voice to make the poetry fly off of the page. Using wit and sharp diction, the speaker spins tales of the mundane into larger-than-life adventures that ensnare the attention of the readership.

Choyce has the capacity to create tangible imagery, vividly translating his lived experiences onto the page. Readers feel their hearts race while reading “Black and White Cat on Oxford Street,” a poem that is not profound in the subject that it treats, but which powerfully creates fear and then relief:

The cat is, I swear

in flight,

its trajectory taking it

straight into the grill of my car

when suddenly

it understands the density of its disaster,

angels grabbing at its claws midflight,

flipping it backwards

onto the safe hard comfort of the curb (19) 
With technical prowess, Choyce uses line breaks and enjambment to generate suspense, while alliteration highlights the main events of his colloquial story. The poet’s retelling makes an extraordinary poem out of an ordinary event.

All Alone at the End of the World transports readers to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then takes them around the world. Building on themes of the universal, Choyce’s book is infused with philosophical poems that pull his readership out of their current surroundings, and invite them to join him on his journey of self-reflection. For example, he recognizes the complexity of identity in “Contradictions”:

This poem is not helping

To solve the threadbare mystery

of me, however,

and my desire to be here and now

but also scattered everywhere

and anywhere at once.

This is an ambitious poem

going nowhere. (21)

Building on a common issue, the speaker’s inability to solve the “mystery / of me” conjures a sense of empathy from readers. Mirroring the role of a mentor speaking to an acolyte, Choyce’s narrative relays a message reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:  “. . . be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue” (34-35). The playful tone creates the sense that the speaker accepts that his desire is unsolvable, even before stating that the poem is going nowhere; Choyce embraces his contradictions, and inspires others to do the same.

          Choyce’s All Alone at the End of the World finds beauty in seemingly monotonous aspects of life and encourages readers to look for splendors often taken for granted.

Works Cited

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. MD Herter Norton. New York: WW Norton & Co., 1993. Print.

by Benjamin Lord, with input from Monica Grasse, Sharisse LeBrun and Molly Strickland