3-Day Novel 2010 (Part 1)
So, I've decided to serialize the novella/long story I wrote over Labour Day weekend back in September. The problem with it was that I needed about 6000 words to end the story, so I'm hoping I can write an ending worthy of the setup before we reach the point where I have to post the shitty band-aid ending. Anyway, installment one:
1. The Greek Chorus Speaks
It is the winter after the fall...
...when the bottom fell out. The charts they showed us on TV that September were hurriedly put together, squished vertically to make the downward line look less preposterous, less like the serene, intense face of Kali, the destroyer. All the same, sometimes the blue line dipped below the lower margin of the chart--the DOW dipping below 6000, then 5000, before we changed the channel.
The bottom had fallen out of the stock market--the metaphor doesn’t matter, for whatever we heard was ultimately the product of self-interested voodoo of whoever benefits--but for once, nobody seemed to benefit. The bottom had fallen out, which had gummed up the banks, and now their bottoms were falling out, and those who survived had clamped up and were treading water, hoarding jam for the winter, with one hand pushing away the needy while intoning standardized pieties. The TV told us it was always darkest before the dawn. It told us of market self-adjustments. It told us of grand opportunities for investment, for those in the know. It trotted out economist after economist, and after the outcry became too intense, they tried self-help gurus, inspirational speakers, even calm professorial types who amended the standard pieties with neologisms like “catagenesis”--the creation made possible only through destruction--but it did not stick. For even the stations’ bottoms were falling out. Our demigods--Wolf, Billo--were themselves sick, starved of the ambrosial effects of ratings, advertising dollars. Advertising for what? To whom? Ten news cycles later, the grimness of October showed, and the economy was in full tilt. So much so that our southern neighbours elected a (kind of ) black man to be president--catagenesis indeed!
That was the lay of the land globally. And as for locally, as for home: Hogtown, Toronto, Muddy York, Toronto the Good, the Centre of the World, We Who Classify Canada as either Toronto or not-Toronto (with apologies), that little blue line that went off the graph ramified out of abstraction into ten thousand things. Marble had begun to crumble from the tallest of our offices. The potholes multiplied. Traffic was lighter, then heavier, than lighter, like water swishing in a pan, tectonically rocked, blindly striving. We walked much more that fall, except when we drove like mad, drove anywhere out of the Big Smoke to grasp what serenity there was left in the fallow landscapes. For here among the towers, that insular human ecology that we stupidly called “the economy” was generating all manner of endangered species. And those were not about to lay down and die. No, they competed. We competed. We pushed each other off overcrowded buses. We found men with flashy shirts stabbed in alleys for their clubbing money. We roamed the inner suburbs in ever-growing bands, like some intellectual version of a zombie apocalypse. And we brooded; oh, we despaired. We drank coffee and tea and booze and we pounded tables as we pounded pavements. We spoke with the passion of Argentinean leftists before they were “disappeared”. We got together in basements for clothes swaps, for peasant stews, for games of chance and bull sessions. We produced several kinds of catastrophe chic.
But ultimately, we grew tired, and alone. We sank into our isolation even though those of us who still had rooms usually housed one or two hidden homeless, our unofficial roommates, our friends who were always there. But we Torontonians did not take to this newfound forced intimacy. So we walked around more. Walked the teeming streets. Walked the well-trafficked vibrant, diverse neighbourhoods Jane Jacobs was proud of, neighbourhood strips shuttered despite the teeming. Neighbourhood merchants eyeing the listless crowds anxiously instead of welcomingly.
That was the fall. When winter hit, the crowds cleared the streets and a whole new kind of crowding began.
Consider: "Economics just is voodoo."
1. The Greek Chorus Speaks
It is the winter after the fall...
...when the bottom fell out. The charts they showed us on TV that September were hurriedly put together, squished vertically to make the downward line look less preposterous, less like the serene, intense face of Kali, the destroyer. All the same, sometimes the blue line dipped below the lower margin of the chart--the DOW dipping below 6000, then 5000, before we changed the channel.
The bottom had fallen out of the stock market--the metaphor doesn’t matter, for whatever we heard was ultimately the product of self-interested voodoo of whoever benefits--but for once, nobody seemed to benefit. The bottom had fallen out, which had gummed up the banks, and now their bottoms were falling out, and those who survived had clamped up and were treading water, hoarding jam for the winter, with one hand pushing away the needy while intoning standardized pieties. The TV told us it was always darkest before the dawn. It told us of market self-adjustments. It told us of grand opportunities for investment, for those in the know. It trotted out economist after economist, and after the outcry became too intense, they tried self-help gurus, inspirational speakers, even calm professorial types who amended the standard pieties with neologisms like “catagenesis”--the creation made possible only through destruction--but it did not stick. For even the stations’ bottoms were falling out. Our demigods--Wolf, Billo--were themselves sick, starved of the ambrosial effects of ratings, advertising dollars. Advertising for what? To whom? Ten news cycles later, the grimness of October showed, and the economy was in full tilt. So much so that our southern neighbours elected a (kind of ) black man to be president--catagenesis indeed!
That was the lay of the land globally. And as for locally, as for home: Hogtown, Toronto, Muddy York, Toronto the Good, the Centre of the World, We Who Classify Canada as either Toronto or not-Toronto (with apologies), that little blue line that went off the graph ramified out of abstraction into ten thousand things. Marble had begun to crumble from the tallest of our offices. The potholes multiplied. Traffic was lighter, then heavier, than lighter, like water swishing in a pan, tectonically rocked, blindly striving. We walked much more that fall, except when we drove like mad, drove anywhere out of the Big Smoke to grasp what serenity there was left in the fallow landscapes. For here among the towers, that insular human ecology that we stupidly called “the economy” was generating all manner of endangered species. And those were not about to lay down and die. No, they competed. We competed. We pushed each other off overcrowded buses. We found men with flashy shirts stabbed in alleys for their clubbing money. We roamed the inner suburbs in ever-growing bands, like some intellectual version of a zombie apocalypse. And we brooded; oh, we despaired. We drank coffee and tea and booze and we pounded tables as we pounded pavements. We spoke with the passion of Argentinean leftists before they were “disappeared”. We got together in basements for clothes swaps, for peasant stews, for games of chance and bull sessions. We produced several kinds of catastrophe chic.
But ultimately, we grew tired, and alone. We sank into our isolation even though those of us who still had rooms usually housed one or two hidden homeless, our unofficial roommates, our friends who were always there. But we Torontonians did not take to this newfound forced intimacy. So we walked around more. Walked the teeming streets. Walked the well-trafficked vibrant, diverse neighbourhoods Jane Jacobs was proud of, neighbourhood strips shuttered despite the teeming. Neighbourhood merchants eyeing the listless crowds anxiously instead of welcomingly.
That was the fall. When winter hit, the crowds cleared the streets and a whole new kind of crowding began.
Consider: "Economics just is voodoo."
posted by A. D. at 6:17 PM
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