In vague honour of the recent release of The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book JokesIn vague honour of the recent release of The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes (featuring a riff on Borgès by occasional Walrus contributor David Ng),^{*I shouldn’t be honouring them, given that they turned down my hilarious submission, “Gary Shteyngart Is a Shtupidface,” but that’s just the kind of generous spirit I am.} an unwittingly funny quote I had the misfortune to come across yesterday. It’s the response of Sweden’s foremost contribution to world literature, August Strindberg,^{*Sorry about your luck, Göran Sonnevi.} to Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil :
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My friend the Baronist recently loaned me the Simon Schama’s Power of Art DVDs. The BBC series, which first aired in 2006, crafts episodes around eight seminal works, combining biography, social history, and criticism to give a sense of what made each one significant during its time and what keeps it so today. I’ve thus far seen the ones dedicated to Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (1601), Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa (1652), Rembrandt’s The Conspiracy of the Batavians Under Claudius Civilis (ca. 1666), David’s The Death of Marat (1793), and Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840).^{*Update for all you completists: I’ve since seen the rest. Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows (1890), Picasso’s Guernica (1937), and Rothko’s Black on Maroon (1958), for scorekeeper-completists.} All have been riveting, with the exception of the one on David, who, as a painter, makes for a great revolutionary.^{*The violent kind, not the artistic genius kind, in case that wasn’t clear.}

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A few last thoughts on the subject of mixed martial arts^{*Before I get back to my true passion: Bennett Buggy repair.} in the wake of UFC 83, which went off last Saturday in Montreal, and of an interview Robin Brown conducted with me for The Inside Track, which will air on CBC Radio One at 1:30 on Sunday, May 3, in most parts of the country (4:30 Pacific and 2 in Newfoundland, also on Sirius channel 137 at 6:30 Eastern).
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So I’m going to piggyback on the recent blogosphere success of The Walrus’s resident Man, Ed Keenan, by responding to his latest post, “The Manly Art, Minus the Artifice,” as well as to Frank Deford’s recent article on Sports Illustrated’s website, “Has boxing been quashed for blood sport?”^{*Subtitle: “Why we’re getting our butts kicked by ESPN.com.”} Both offer critiques of mixed martial arts, which, as mentioned a few times on the site the past few days, Jan Dutkiewicz and I have an article on in the current issue of The Walrus.

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I went to see the New Pornographers and Okkervil River play at the Phoenix in Toronto on Wednesday night. The concert was surprisingly good. I say surprisingly first of all because the New Pornographers were excellent, though they don’t have much of a reputation as a live act. Carl Newman can churn out cheery distortion pop like nobody’s business, and he comes across as one of the nicest musicians you’d ever want to meet. But as my good friend the Baronist pointed out, when the music’s on, he comes across as one of the nicest musicians you’d ever want to meet. Dude rocks out with his **** in. Still, since Neko Case^{*Who I remain willing to marry despite her steadfast refusal to send me a mason jar with one of her high notes trapped inside.} was singing and twitching the best tambourine this side of Betty,^* I was impressed.

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The May issue of The Walrus features a story I wrote with Jan Dutkiewicz on mixed martial arts. I promised when we went to press that I would write a blog post on the subject of Barthes and MMA, which will hopefully not prove as obnoxious as it sounds. I’m also not sure I can top Chuck Liddell (pounding Randy Couture in photo) on the subject, but I’ll give it a shot.

Like^{*As part of my and Ed Keenan’s ongoing efforts to reclaim the footnote from D1a2v3i4d5 F6o7s8t9e*r& W!a†lπl∑a√c≈e©, we’re taking things up a notch. Henceforth, sidenotes.} most people with a Bachelor of Arts degree, I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to forget about Barthes. I’d largely succeeded at this task, until a former intern here, much better read than me,^{*Except for the works of Richard Scarry, which I am the world’s foremost expert on. It was I, you probably know, who first explicated the subtext of his masterwork, What Do People Do All Day? Turns out they mostly sit around thinking about sex. For shame, Mr. Scarry, for shame.} handed me a copy of Barthes’ Mythologies in conjunction with my research for the story. She’d flagged the essay “The World of Wrestling” for me, which I soon realized I’d read and subsequently repressed as an undergrad. (more…)

As part of my ongoing efforts to make this blog as random as possible, I recently subscribed to zip.ca, a site that allows you to rent DVDs by mail. Notwithstanding Zip’s impossible-to-browse catalogue and persistent inability to send me any movie ranked above #9 on my “Ziplist,” it’s a fun way to pretend I enjoy artsy movies. Much easier to click a Rossellini film onto your watchlist, given that with Zip you never know when you’ll actually see the film, than it is to commit to it at the video store on a Friday night when you’re bagged and just want to go home and fantasize that you’re Sigourney Weaver taking care of some pestilential co-work… er, aliens.^{1The following co-workers are exempt from this Freudian slip:} (more…)

Above: Centre Block Fire, Parliament, 1916, hours after being started by the Bironist
JB Reid, Library and Archives Canada, C-010079

I have a confession to make. Several confessions, really. And I want to get them out of the way before some muckety-muck justice department lawyer spills the beans to Amnesty International, the BC Civil Liberties Association, my sainted mother, and above all you, Ottawa. It’s not just prisoner-of-war detention practices anymore.
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Hello one and all. The Bironist is back, and will hopefully become more frequent soon. My extended absences are not, as with other bloggers, a matter of laziness or indifference—simply an extension of my bironic mystique. Have I been galavanting about the world, romancing lasses and enjoying fine scotch? You can’t know, unless you click on the footnote.¹
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As noted in my previous post, I met Norman Mailer at a conference at Harvard three years ago. At the time, I’d read almost none of his work and was completely nonplussed by the experience. Being of a generation for whom practically everything is held up as larger than life, and thus for whom almost no one is larger than life, I had no appreciation for why, e.g., Ken Finkleman would go off his rocker when he learned I’d met the man.¹ However, when I picked up King of the World, David Remnick’s extended snapshot of Muhammad Ali, in the course of researching a story on fighting, the force and utter strangeness of Mailer’s personality at the height of his fame became impossible to overlook.

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In a room at the Cambridge Hiatt, shortly after I arrived to accompany Mr. Mailer to his keynote address for a Harvard conference.

Mailer (pulling on a shoe with some difficulty): It’s no fun getting old.
Me: No kidding.

(With apologies to David Ng’s “True Encounters in My Research Career,” in our September 2007 issue.)

A post on Mailer’s boxing writing to follow tomorrow.

Alberta let your hair hang low
Alberta let your hair hang low
I’ll give you more gold than your apron can hold
If you’ll only let your hair hang low
—Doc Watson, “Alberta”

Good chat on oil royalties with Dr. Keith Brownsey of Mount Royal College over at the Globe’s website today, debating whether or not Ed Stelmach is going to wave his freak flag high, high¹ and stick it to the Oil Man. This is the part I found most interesting:

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In anticipation of tomorrow night’s Throne Speech Throwdown, I bring you this, from the days when civil discourse wasn’t always so civil:

“You damned pup! I’ll slap your chops!”

Donald Creighton’s John A. Macdonald: The Young Politician, sets the scene beautifully:

There must have been some provocation in [Mowat’s] remarks—some charge that Macdonald had wilfully falsified his views. Macdonald gasped. These impertinences were actually coming from the fat boy who had been his inky junior at school and his respectful apprentice at law! Suddenly, as the plump, bespectacled, rather self-important little man finished his statement, Macdonald’s brittle temper was shattered into splinters as at a blow. In a minute—as soon as the Speaker had left the chair—he walked quickly across the gangway. Blind rage in his heart, he confronted Mowat.

“You damned pup,” he roared. “I’ll slap your chops!”

John Sandfield Macdonald quickly stepped between the antagonists. Others helped to pull them apart.”

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Although the publisher sits in the office next to mine, I’m rarely aware of specifics on the fundraising side of things. Turns out some major Walrus events have been taking place over the past few weeks, in Vancouver and Ottawa, with two more, in Calgary and Toronto, still to come.

One idea we’ve come up with for Calgary that’s worth the price of admission is an auction to become a character in an upcoming work by a well-known author. The roster is an impressive one: Margaret Atwood, Karen Connelly, Charles Foran, Wayne Johnston, Jake MacDonald, and Guy Vanderhaeghe.

I’ve often pondered how authors generate their character names,¹ but the idea of a bazaar is a new one on me. I could see it having been the case for Duddy Kravitz, at least.

Calgarians with names like Zbigniew DeLeon and Martyr Lovehandles are encouraged to come out, bid early and often, and put Margaret Atwood’s legendary cleverness to the test. Jane Smiths are welcome, too.

Footnotes
¹Save for Jack Kerouac, for whom they somehow always seem obvious.

This blog was supposed to have launched months ago. Not at all in keeping with the off-the-cuff spirit of the thing, however, I’ve been paralyzed coming up with answers to two questions common to would-be bloggers who have nothing in particular to say.

Question 1. What’s the point?

Purpose 1: Self-love, the ur-motive of bloggery and columnization

The Bironist will eventually be known as the most self-indulgent blog in the history of blogs (in case the composition of a 900-word introduction doesn’t mark it as that already). Should I forget to mention it later, I enjoy fruit smoothies for breakfast. My middle name is Lin, after my father. I dream of owning a Fender Jaguar guitar. Of the places I’ve lived, I like Montreal better than Toronto better than Edmonton better than Vancouver.

Go on, try and turn away.

Purpose 2: Promotion of media host

Publishing a magazine in Canada is a cash-intensive prospect. It’s stunning how much money it costs to print and distribute a treeware journal, even given such a vast and relatively underpopulated country. Fill it with 5,000-word articles such as “The Nature of Chocolate Bars: A Heideggerian Analysis” and go light on the T&A¹, and it gets still harder.

Self-indulgent columns are a proven economic driver for media enterprises. I know, fans of Sports Illustrated’s Peter King thought his unending updates on his daughters’ softball and field hockey teams were designed to sate America’s huge appetite for girls’ softball and field hockey news. Not so! In fact, they’re part of the brand that is Peter King, everyman reporter of NFL football, friend to the American soldier and barista, and vaguely dissatisfied critic of the Bush administration.

My goals are humbler: if all eight of the lit-mag fans in Canada, plus my parents, read this blog at least once next year, that will raise $0.04 in ad revenue for The Walrus Foundation’s coffers, leaving only a few million dollars, less four cents, to raise from other sources.

Purpose 3: Imparting of expertise

Imparting expertise is especially important here, given The Walrus’s educational mandate. In accordance with our deal with the Canadian Revenue Agency, our content is supposed to be entirely edumacational.²

The most successful blogs, for instance andrewsullivan.com, tend to focus on one particular area (in Sullivan’s case, politics). Sadly, I’m a generalist. That’s why I work at a general-interest magazine. I’m not qualified to do anything but read Saul Bellow novels while playing tennis with my left hand and harmonica with my right.³

This limits me, essentially, to imparting what little expertise I have on general-interest magazines.⁴ As this isn’t likely to be of note to anyone outside of the nation’s handful of journalism schools, I’ll rely instead on distracted analyses of Bellow, tennis, and harmonica—or, more accurately, interests such as sports, international affairs, and the lives of past prime ministers.

Question 2. What’s the name?

I’ll spare you the list of rejected appellations for this blog, most of them involving horrible puns on my last name.

In keeping with Purpose 1, The Bironist’s origin story is peppered with references to cool people I know and fabulous trips I’ve taken. The short version: the term was inspired by former Walrus intern and current Stéphane Dion speechwriter Gillian Savigny, codified by former Walrus editor and current Globe and Mail writer Joshua Knelman, and coined by yours truly. This happened following the consumption of several Baltika syems⁵ at a beer garden in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Birony, defined: a literary device wherein a statement is designed to seem ironic, but is in fact sincerely meant.⁶

For an example of birony, please see my on-its-face-absurd reference to the possibility of running a 5,000-word analysis of chocolate bars through the lens of Heidegger, the most impenetrable European philosopher this side of Slavoz Žižek.

Guess what: I wasn’t kidding. I’d assign that piece in a heartbeat if I thought I could get away with it. I’d call it “The Noumena of Nougat,”⁷ and you’d drool over every Dasein⁸-infused word.

So there you have it, the mission statement of The Bironist. Consider our lives mutually enriched.

Next, on The Bironist: I break the story that Adolph Cameron, president of Jamaica, has secretly been acting as leader of another country.

Footnotes
¹Not to mention the P&A, S&M, and A&W.
²Hence my decision to use spurious footnotes, which confer all of the sheen of education but require none of the noxious learning.
³Fortunately, I’m ambidextrous. Also, I’m not especially good at tennis, harmonica, or reading.
⁴Fun fact: in the early years of the New Yorker, managing editors were referred to as “the new Jesus” (or “new Jesi,” in plural), an allusion to both the saviour status conferred upon them by Harold Ross and to the ongoing cycle of death and resurrection the position saw until eternal life arrived in the form of the true Messiah, William Shawn.
 Here at The Walrus, I’m referred to as “the new Bachman Turner Overdrive.” It’s complicated.
⁵syem=seven in Russian.
⁶Birony accrues an additional layer of meaning when it refers to matters of the heart, thus alluding to Lord Byron. However, as the concept then becomes, technically, trirony, the bonus layer is immediately deducted, restoring bironic balance.
⁷Noumena are, roughly, the aspects of an object that we may inquire into and comprehend. Visit Wikipedia to learn more. Tell them I sent you.
⁸Dasein is the main concept in Heidegger’s Being and Time. It’s a long book, and I only have the first half memorized (in English, anyway), so I’ll reduce it to an individual’s, um, being in time.