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Photo by Gail Harvey, no reproduction without permission
Changes Gourmet went under. The Cameron House on Queen Street West in Toronto is for sale. Boatloads of interesting people died, people who made history. But then, people who make history are always dying: sort of the point, isn’t it?
Institutions have been closing and packing up left, right and centre for this past year. I said it myself the other day: The New Yorker folds, I am investing in a bunker and or moving to Neptune.
Battle fatigue, in some cases, and just plain out-of-cash cries of the heart in others. Papers we love, singers we idolized: I’m willing to bet that to each generation hitting 40 or 50, or 80, it always feels like the world is a cultural funeral. The life cycle requires it. It just depends what you were sentimental about when the last call came.
My very first book was launched at the Cameron House on Queen West. On account of circumstances [can you tell I been writing in voice this week?] I had to throw the launch myself, and cater it, and basically, run it. That was back when an 87 page fiction book could have an ISBN and get a blurb from a big-name Canadian writer and sell some copies without being “picked” which let’s all face it, means being placed on a very expensive display that a publisher buys like a pimp buys a corner. And while the Cameron House, which housed a lot of exciting indie artists I know as well as a lot of personal memories of my own from age 17 [sorry, Mom] to my later adult years [now], is going for around 3 million smackers, my first book in hand-numbered first edition is worth about 50 bucks. Which isn’t too shabby since we priced it at $8.95 thinking no one would want the stupid thing when it landed and apparently some did, want it, and bought it all up.
I am seriously thinking that one of the reasons it is hard to keep writing fiction in this world, never mind this country, which is a pretty awesome country aside from the war crimes that get exposed lately, is not about the money. If it were ever really about the money, we’d all write horror, romance and westerns. And even then: story matters huge. It’s hard to sit all day long and have faith: harder still to wash dishes all night for even less money and drive cab all day: think about your whine.
But even as I read Lewis Hyde’s gorgeous book “The Gift” and his trickster book, too, I am mindful of that sensation of writing in a burning building, and it sort of makes it harder to not just run out the door with everyone else and buy a sno-cone and twitter on about the titillation of wreckage.
And I’m not kidding: if the New Yorker goes under, I may have to wave the white flag and move over to actuarial science. Even though I suspect that’s a field that right now, is actually one of the more exciting and scary fields to be in, between rampant childhood obesity, mass medication and so on. What will it take to kill off a large number of middle-aged writers? The death of something like the New Yorker, I’m guessing. Because for many writers I know, that’s the one remaining lifeline to the good old golden days of Cheever and his pals. It’s been over for ages, but it’s what keeps some of us typing, that urge to be, not just to blog.
Big love to the grieving family of Mr. Jacksoul tonight. 39 is way too young to die of lung cancer, or of anything. Quit smoking, folks. Start living your dreams, asap.
Listening to: Lonesome Highway, Jacksoul
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