August 10, 2006

Some people talk total bollocks. I don't mean they were wrong, or silly or suffering from a recent head wound when they were driven to say the stupid things that they said. I mean they were axe-whackingly off their nut, they were short of cheese, they were … oh, various other phrases without resident meaning but I can't find the words to express how severely they must be reprimanded.

Some people spool out such nonsense that they should be exiled.

Take Pier Giorgio Di Ciccio, Toronto's Poet Laureate. Yes, we have one. Calgary, make sure you don't.

It was an ad in a local magazine for a cultural festival and he was paying tribute to Toronto writer Sheila Heti, whom I admire and who deserved better than this.

"How to be authentic in the urban mix?" began Di Ciccio. I bridled. How to be verbed in the question? I asked myself. Indeed, whither interrogative at all? (All-points bulletin: Di Ciccio, who once used the phrase "architecting the city," generally does violence to verbs.)

"How to identify others as beacons for sacrifice?" the poet went on. I cannot unfold the petals of this question, but it reads to me like a Sopranos-like query: Who should be whacked?

These are Heti's preoccupations, Di Ciccio claimed. "Heti convinces critics everywhere that an appetite for raw life is urgent." This hardly surprises me, given that he also says "Heti's worlds are real, meticulous, scripted to the urban, and always tracking the heartbeat of the city as home."

Appetite for raw life? If this means Heti seeks oysters, fine, but why "urgent"? Sirens are urgent; appetites are just big. Perhaps she is hungry. On the other hand, she is scripted to the urban and maybe those she hangs with talk this way when they want a downtown oyster bar, not one in the boonies. But "tracking the heartbeat of the city"? I've done that. It's another way of saying "I got beat up" or "I threw up on the Blue Night bus and they kicked me off."

One tires of the tedious wet heartbeat night after night. Perhaps Heti just bends with the domestic (stays home) to script to the urban. Who can say? I don't speak Di Ciccio, but he has "authored" (Toronto's website tells us) 17 books of poems in his lifetime, along with a huge selection of total bollocks since becoming Top T.O. Poet.

I leave you with one: "'The Year of Creativity' is a clock that for one year will commemorate the city as it is living itself, as it is writing itself, as a poem that will require the literacy of admiration, from both its people and the country."

Well, okay then.

Last night, in an excess of high spirits, I printed out a feature from Britain's The Observer headlined 50 Great Ideas for the 21st Century. I can't resist that sort of thing. The headline should have been 14 Pages of Bollocks, but I only found that out when I stapled it and took it to bed with me for a light, enraging read.

True, the intellectual descent of The Observer in the past year has been faster than that bit of the Swiss mountain the Eiger's will be when it falls off. True, Stephen Bayley (the enthusiastic guy behind the Millennium Dome, the billion-dollar boondoggle in London that was built as the centrepiece of Britain's millennial celebrations) always talks bollocks. He says the great ideas of the last century include corporate identity, fast food, television, the hit parade, bestsellers, Gestalt psychology, sales tax and linguistics. I rest my case.

The list from this century has contributions from various bollocky types offering us No. 6, pigeon spikes, and No. 15, tooth whitening. One madman takes the prize, though, with his tribute to the De Young Museum in San Francisco. "The De Young is kryptonite architecture; it disables cheaply ironic or slackerish responses; it is beyond cool; its overall form, and its tiniest details, are about rigour. The building is an essay in emotional and physical extremity."

The overwrought – and possibly baked – boy who wrote this says the building proves that architecture "can have a meaningful, rather than merely entertaining, future."

I agree. Ask anyone who wants to get out of the rain.

I find that architecture attracts as many gleaming statements of bollocks as the top field, politics. Politicians lie. But they don't generally go into rhapsodies about it; they just accept a meaningless phrase from their speechwriters and hammer it home. Call it Essence of Bollocks. Version No. 1 for the NASCAR crowd is "cut 'n' run." Version No. 2 for bumbling New York Times editorialists is "the lesser extraction of the nation-state" or "towards a paucity of needs." (Thanks, Laurie Colwin.)

The savaging of the language arouses a "measured response" in me, as Prime Minister "Steve" Harper would say. Thus I shall bomb, slaughter, as well as demolish, the homes of those who do it. But I am a civilized person. I wouldn't normally do such violence to the sensibilities of my readers as tossing that grenade about buildings being essays in emotional extremity. Forget the buildings, how emotional are you right now?

But we must realize that these people are striding through the public sphere without shame.

I do think that when people talk bollocks, it's too easy to wince and later to weep in privacy. Surely it is in all our interests if we shudder openly and with brio.