Paul Vermeersch’s beautiful new book of poems, Self Defence for the Brave and Happy posits that the 21st century will be through acts of imagination, dreams and daydreams, creativity, and even dissociation. When you can’t trust anything, the poems argue, your imagination becomes the only valid interpreter of reality. To wit, in the poem “Don’t Wait for the Woodsman,” Vermeersch warns, “Only stories want us to live. The wolf will lie in wait/ to devour us. Do not blame it for doing what wolves do.” And in the titular poem, we are advised “Tell yourself that you are beautiful. Listen only/ to songs that insist it.”

Part inspirational tract (borne of a deliciously playful inspiration, not the usual kind), part prophetic revelation, and all crafted with Vermeersch’s signature elan, Self Defence for the Brave and Happy is a generous chocolate box stuffed with bon(-bon) mots, the perfect gift for your inner visionary. Shine on, you crazy zircon.

This editor-at-large RM Vaughan sat down with Vermeersch to talk about the new book.

RM Vaughan: The book moves effortlessly between prophetic pronouncements and intimate, personal observations. Is it a goal of the book to conflate the two in order to make the reader more keenly aware that we live in prophetic times?

Paul Vermeersch: I think all times are equally prophetic and intimate. The lives of individuals unfold along with the cosmos. But the prophets only seem to get at half the picture, only the grand events. Perhaps one of the jobs of a poet is to be a prophet of the small things, too—to prophesy the taste of lobster, the pang of guilt, the fear of darkness. We can’t put small things on hold when big things happen. I think my poems encompass that spectrum: both the landscape and the figure within the landscape, both the star system and the escape pod within the star system.

RMV: The world has not seemed as dangerous as it does now in generations. But at the same time we have never been able to share our thoughts, worries, and joys more easily. It occurs to me that your book attempts to sort out, or at least guide the reader through, this very strange era.

PV: I agree that the world seems dangerous now. I don’t know that it feels more dangerous today than it did in World War II, for example, with the Holocaust unfolding and the atom bomb about to drop on Hiroshima; but it feels like a different kind of dangerous. A hundred years ago, the world was on the brink of slipping into the Great Depression. Today, I think we’re beginning to experience something I call the Great Regression: a time characterized by fear and greed, a time when fascism is resurgent and the institutions of democracy are under constant attack by demagogues, when misinformation is widely disseminated to drown out the truth and to sew discord, when the impulse to compassion is met with derision and the impulse to acceptance is met with bigotry, and amid all this chaos the kelptocratic class is raiding the world economy to fill its coffers. The Great Regression might be the precursor to a neo-feudal dark age ruled by narcissistic robber-baron billionaires. The effort to bring this about is already well underway. And all this is in addition to the mounting environmental catastrophe. If the world seems dangerous today, it’s because we’ve already seen how all this will end.   

RMV: That leads to the next question. You employ classic sci-fi imagery and tropes in the book, but there is no Asimov-like remove on your part, no impartiality—which I love. How have the observational and speculative traditions of sci-fi influenced and/or been discarded in this book?

PV: It’s 2018. Asimov imagined our time, but we are living it. There is no remove because we are already the ghosts haunting someone else’s future. Our era is the dystopian failure of a once hopeful prophecy. We were supposed to inherit Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland or Gene Roddenberry’s post-capitalist utopia. Instead we have a world prophesied by J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick. How else can we discuss this? Science fiction has given us the vocabulary to talk about our present era because it has always been about our present era.

RMV: “The future will be old and used. It will leak” is my favourite line. I shouted “Testify!” when I read it. Because, pardon my gloom, but it does feel like we have used up the future. Simone Signoret wrote, “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.” Can the same be said of the future?

PV: The used future is an important concept in science fiction. In a lot of science fiction, everything is new and shiny. The idea of the used future is why George Lucas imagined the Millennium Falcon to be a grimy, run-down hunk of junk. Even in the future, there will be old things, broken things. It’s Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias in reverse, the prophecy of future ruins. I wanted to work with that idea for precisely the same reason people want to renovate their kitchen or buy a new car: because we didn’t inherit Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland, because we’re in a race against time, and we’re desperately trying to save whatever shiny parts of the future we possibly can.

RMV: The section titled “Nu Rhymes for Nuclear Children” is a selection of nursery rhymes imagined from a post-nuclear war childhood. They are blunt and scary, and almost read like placards or protest songs.

PV: I started writing these nursery rhymes in 1995, and they never really fit in with anything I wrote until now. I think they were waiting for this book. They’re all about 20th-century tragedies like the Kennedy assassination or the election of Ronald Reagan. I wanted to update the concept of traditional nursery rhymes that were about horrible things like tyrants and plagues. When the rhymes were redacted with thick black lines to hide parts of the text, they were finally ready for the 21st century.

RMV: The poem “The Prophets Want to Know if They Were Close” is, for me, the cornerstone of the book. We all want to know the future, but it is arguable that only prophets want to actually live in that future. In an era when everything can, and often does, shift overnight, in a heartbeat, what is the role of the prophet? Can prophecy even operate in such times?

PV: The job of the runner is to run toward the finish line, but what is the runner’s job when she reaches the finish line? Just so, the job of the prophet is to tell the future, but what is the prophet’s job now that we are in the future? I imagine the prophets lying on the ground, exhausted, wrapped in thermal blankets. The blankets are cocoons—the prophets must metamorphose into something else. When they emerge, they will have become poets. Then, instead of predicting the future, we can create it.

RMV: The book is being positioned as both a warning and a tonic, as something marking where we are and at the same time offering a helping hand. And there is a lot of joyful noise in this book! How do you keep your own spirits up?

PV: When my last book came out, one reviewer called me “the prophetic, post-apocalyptic poet,” and as flattering as that might be, I have no desire to be a prophet of doom. The 24-hour news cycle has perfected that job, and I can’t compete with it. It was a conscious decision to inject a bit of hope into this book, not only as a tonic—an antidote to the 24-hour news cycle—but also as an admonishment. Our imaginations are the key to a new future. We can’t create a better world unless we first imagine it. I wanted that idea to come through. I wonder, are we now living in a dystopian world because we’ve spent the last half-century imagining one? Has it all been a self-fulfilling prophecy? What if we return to Tomorrowland, to Gene Roddenberry’s undiscovered country? What if we spend the next half-century imagining a better society, a better world? What prophecy will we fulfill then?

Meet and hear Paul Vermeersch at the following:

OCTOBER 28, 2018 
Ottawa
PLAN 99 READING SERIES/OTTAWA WRITERS FESTIVAL
5:00 pm at The Manx Pub

NOVEMBER 3, 2018
Waterloo, Ont.
WILD WRITERS FESTIVAL
Poetry Workshop Master Class
More details TBA.

JANUARY 19, 2019
TORONTO
SPEAKEASY READING SERIES
More details TBA.

Illustration by Emile Compion.

Dear Europeans,

Listen, we Canadians are fond of you. And sometimes you Europeans can even find our country on a map. We like the way you keep it post-colonial.

But we have to have a chat about Prime Minister Trudeau. The new one, Justin. Not Disco Trudeau—that was Trudeau 2.0’s dad. I’m talking about Yoga Trudeau, the guy with the tight pants. From Vogue. Yes, him, the underwear model. Gosh, you have not paid us this much attention since we blessed your airwaves with the “Safety Dance.” We’d be lying if we said we’re immune to flattery (Justin sure isn’t).

But, still… Oh, how to begin?

You know how China sends out adorable panda bears as love ambassadors? Justin Trudeau is our panda bear, if panda bears cared about their abs. We send him abroad and you take his picture and you, being well trained in monarchical reasoning, think that if the head of the country is that good looking, it must follow, à la Elizabethan Great Chain of Being, that Canada is also in fine shape. As above, so below.

Your questions about our Prime Beef Minister betray not only your adorably antique cogitating but also your own aspirations. How hard, you wonder, would it be to find a Trudeau for Europe? Not so hard. You have beer commercial casting agents in Europe, no? They sell men’s underwear on the continent, yes?

The thing is, he ain’t all that, politically speaking. I personally would not kick him out of bed for eating (likely gluten-free) crackers, but I might smother him with a pillow if he started talking policy—what little of it he has to brag about.

And since you will keep asking about him, here are the answers you don’t want.

How is our forward-thinking PM protecting Canada’s fragile environment from the ravages of global warming? By negotiating bad trade deals with the EU (that would be you lot, who are still buying coal from Russia) and by reviving cooperation on the Keystone XL pipeline with President Trump, which is a bit like driving a truck full of beer up to the gangway of an off-duty frigate and tossing the captain a bottle opener. It’s going to get messy very, very fast.

To be fair, the prime minister has become a true friend to the poor, the marginalized, and to Canada’s growing underclass. Whenever he meets with the disenfranchised, he wears denim. Denim and novelty socks.

And, yes, Trudeau’s dedication to democratic reform is indeed admirable—if you live in Belarus. To date, he has said the words “democratic” and “reform” out loud, in public, and highlighted each utterance with a look of athletic (by which I mean less-than-mindful) determination. But when you are building a film franchise… erm, rather, a political legacy, you don’t put all the good stuff in the first movie term. Justin Trudeau 2: Back to the Senate is being pre-marketed as a cross between A Few Good Men and one of those French movies with almost no dialogue. Because words, words are so, so empty.

That’s our sexy PM: snug trousers, same old ill-fitting policies. Canadians call this situation the “Canadian Compromise.” It’s how we comfort ourselves when we realize we’ve once again settled for the status quo in better tailoring.

Remember the weird “clear” trend in the 1990s, when everything from Coca Cola to Palmolive dish soap was manufactured without colouring? The marketers thought they could draw in buyers with the promise of literal transparency. Except the Coke still tasted like Coke and, to our wonder, so did the Palmolive. We got the bottles mixed up.

Justin Trudeau is clear cola: He looks as fresh and healthy as river water, and he’s full of crap.

Straight, white, men still dominate the technology industry. In our May/June issue, This Magazine contributing editor RM Vaughan introduces us to LGBTQ activists around the world who are fighting for change. Also in this issue: Sam Juric tells us why we should stop painting foreign adoption as a Brangelina fairytale, and instead focus on the  not-so-happily-ever-after of trauma, mental health crises, and isolation that many adoptees and their families face; Nashwa Khan asks “Why is CanLit so white?” and challenges the default narrative in our current education system and literary communities; plus new fiction from Jowita Bydlowska, an essay in defence of Kanye West, and much more!

If you’re having trouble finding This Magazine at your local newsstand or bookstore (so many copies of US Weekly! So very many!) email our publisher Lisa at publisher@thismagazine.ca and she’ll help you find a store near you. Or better yet visit this.org/subscribe and get the magazine delivered right to your door.

“Total Eclipse” (2005) by Will Munro. Photo by Sean Weaver, courtesy Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

It is impossible to speak of Will Munro. It is easy to talk about Will Munro(s).

Will Munro, the artist/activist/social wizard/impresario and all around wunderkind, passed away one lovely, clear-as-a-bell summer morning in 2010. He was 36.

In that too-short time, Will produced an enormous amount of highly influential, DIY-infused art, reinvigorated the Toronto, and by extension the Canadian, and some argue international queer club scenes—and I support that argument, having seen Will’s influence up close in countless cities far and wide. He empowered an entire generation of artists, who felt the ossified Canadian art scene was not for them, to simply make/display/distribute their art on their own terms.

You’ll note I’m using the “/” rather a lot—I have no choice. Will was so many things, Will made so many things.

I generally distrust the concept of “legacy,” but not in the case of Will Munro. His simplest and most inspired conceit was that queers of all stripes (homo-normative, hetero-normative, just plain fucking crazy, what have you) have far more in common than not, and can share a big sandbox with joy. And we did. For a decade, Will ran the legendary Vazaleen parties— mad, dressed-to-thrill events that spawned many, many subsequent cultural products and collaborations. And that’s putting it mildly.

The parties and the underlying concept—shared space for a diverse population—were both quickly copied, largely because a generation of queers had grown up under the segregationist, essentialist politics of the ’80s–’90s (dykes only go to dyke spaces, fags only go to fag spaces…oh, it was all so tiresome, so numbing), politics that no longer made sense, no longer reflected the day-today reality of the third wave of queer liberation. Suddenly, we all had a meeting place, and we used it.

Now it’s time for a more rigorous examination of Will’s beautiful, sexy art. Will’s social contribution is well-documented (and I’m doing it again), but his highly original art practice, one fuelled by punk-rock aesthetics, righteous rage, and delicious impertinence, rough homemade fashion, sex-worker rights, and queer youth advocacy, club and DJ culture, anti-corporatism, and, less remarked on, his long fascination with, and promotion of, queer cultural history (an interest that made him, again, unique in his generation) has been, to date, not as well-considered.

I sense a sudden boom in Munro studies coming. Retrospectives and monographs galore. More gifts from a relentless giver. It’s the least we can do.

But this is not the place for academic pursuits. Let other people get post-grad degrees off Will’s back.

Right here, right now, I just want to say thank you. I miss you, Will.

Solidarity forever. Or until the litterbox is full. Illustration by David Donald.

It’s hard enough to be a socially progressive, left-leaning, anti-globalization, conscientious sort in this world, but to be a socially progressive, left-leaning, anti-globalization, conscientious sort and be mildly inconvenienced? It’s too much to bear.

As I write this, Toronto is several weeks’ deep into a civic workers’ strike. The issues on both sides are complex, and neither side, the city nor the union, have behaved with grace or consideration. Swimming pools are closed, city-run daycares are closed, you can’t get a permit of any sort, and nobody is picking up the trash. As someone who hates to swim, has no children, and would need to own a home before I could consider renovating it, the strike means only one thing to me—how long can I get away with not cleaning my cat Poutine’s litterbox? How many little mountains of clumped clay does Poutine have to stumble over before I officially become an animal abuser?

Like most apathetic Torontonians, I figure ignoring the garbage problem is the best solution (actually, sneaking out in the middle of the night and cramming the cat crap into an overflowing street bin is the best solution — illegal, yes, but what are they going to do, get Poutine’s DNA from a turd?). And, like most no-way-would-I-do-that-job Torontonians, I am not unsympathetic toward the “garbage guys” union—at least not until their needs collide with mine.

Like most events in our publicity-mad era, the stalemate between the city and outside workers is really a battle over good versus less-good PR. The clever people signing the cheques at Toronto City Hall well know that the public employees’ union can’t muster the same sentimental attachment to waste management as their brother unions can to policing or firefighting. Firefighters have cute dogs, for god’s sake! And cops are sexy. Garbage guys have no adorable mascots and wear baggy uniforms that are about as sexy as wet tarps.

Nobody grows up wanting to be a garbage collector. No heroic texts sing of triumphs in trash removal, and there are no long-running television dramas examining the soul-destruction endured by people who empty recycling bins. No one has ever run into a burning building to save bundles of old newspapers. Thus, the city can hold out as long as it likes, because there is no glamour in rubbish.

I will admit to having impure thoughts about my local litter wranglers of late, and I am not talking about wondering what’s under their oilcloths. The first week into the strike, I caught myself thinking such unprogressive, uncharitable thoughts as, “I have never been in a union of any kind, so I wouldn’t know a banked sick day from a snow day,” or, “I went to school for six years, and I still make less than my local scullery lout, the guy who always chucks my empty green bin in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking pedestrians, seniors in walkers, large dogs, and children on trikes.” Shame, you dapple my rainbow.

In week two, I began to question my previously automatic support of unionized labour. Specifically, why do people behave like it’s 1932 whenever they go on strike? As if the diverse world of work today — wherein few people share the same mix of labour, pay, and benefits agreements — can be reduced, when it’s metaphorically convenient for both parties, to “bosses versus workers.” I’ve been my own boss my entire adult life. Who do I get to sing antiquated folk chants to? Where do I file a grievance when my house smells like the dumpster behind the Humane Society?

Now in week three, I don’t care anymore who’s right or who’s a greedy, overprivileged layabout (although I would dearly love to see my local councillor, a do-nothing in the sunniest of times, heaving bags of fetid refuse into the maw of a maggot-encrusted truck, preferably while being pecked by seagulls). I just want to breathe deeply again.

I’m tired of taping aloe-scented antiseptic wipes across the bridge of my nose when I run past the cat’s “go (and go, and go) zone,” through the increasingly dense, bluish mist surrounding the feline rest stop. I’m fed up with feeling surrounded by my own bad habits, by pizza boxes and sour wine bottles, fly-specked candy wrappers and spore-spawning coffee grounds. I’m sick of the dust, the entombing dust, and the raw, sweaty, eye-watering acidity in the air, the farty tang of it all.

If I wanted to wallow in filth, I’d pick up trash for a living.

Illustration by Alexei Vella

Baby boomers: drop the watercolours, back away slowly

In last spring’s flimsy caper comedy Mad Money, an uneasy truth lingered beneath the slapstick thievery and rolling-in-greenbacks hijinks: the fabled baby boomers, now hitting their early 60s, have no idea how to deal with the diminishing returns of their impending senior citizenship. Pardon me if I gloat.

The film opens with Diane Keaton and Ted Danson, a greying upper-class couple with grown children, flitting around their vast, over-decorated home like panicked pelicans, wattles and all. Ted’s character has lost his job, and Diane’s has never worked. They contemplate getting jobs for which they are overqualified (or simply too self-important) to perform, but are so horrified by this prospect that when Diane finally does get a crappy job, her desperation and complete disbelief in her change of fortune leads her to go on a gluttonous crime spree.

Watching Mad Money, it occurred to me that, as a post-boomer, generation X-er, echo baby — choose your own term — I have performed many jobs “beneath” my education or class standing. And so has everybody I know.

In fact, I can’t think of one person from my generation who has not spent at least half of his or her adult life gainfully underemployed — typically by boomers with a third, or less, of our education and credentials. For clarification, I am, according to most demographic standards, a near-boomer. I prefer the term “post-boomer,” thank you, if the B-word must be used.

I was born in 1965, the year traditionally cited as the end of the post-WWII baby boom. But I have always considered this calendar system woefully imprecise. Boomers are a cultural phenomenon — as they like to tell us every single day — and not a demographic one.

A boomer is someone whose first “English Invasion” pop music crush was the Beatles. Mine was the Sex Pistols (and that’s one hell of a telling gulf). A boomer fondly remembers his or her first colour television. A post-boomer remembers the day the cable was hooked up. Boomers were taken to Expo ’67 to get their first taste of culture on a grand scale. Post-boomers were taken to … well, nothing.

One of the first bitter lessons we postboomers learned about the adult world is that once a boomer has all the cake he or she wants (practically free university tuition, full universal health care, bountiful entry-level jobs with minimal qualifications, CUSO), they don’t put the rest of the cake in the freezer for a future sweet tooth — they take a hammer to it and shove the mush down the garberator.

But now boomers are edging toward their golden years and you can see the fear steaming out of day spas and rumbling across golf courses like a charged purple haze.

Naturally, they’ve turned a timeless reality into a fresh business opportunity. Bookstores are packed with how-to-age books for boomers. The ever-resourceful Moses Znaimer has dubbed his own pre-walker days his “zoomer” years and created a magazine to sell the brand. Radio stations are converting to Age of Aquarius nap-time programming, and televisions are flooded with gardening and travel shows.

Sherry Cooper’s bestselling The New Retirement: How It Will Change Our Future (the hubris of the boomers demands that everything they do be declared “new” — what next, The New Death?) attempts to counter boomer mortality anxiety with recipes for “wellness” management and, most important, investment profit maximization (one suspects the two goals are mutually inclusive).

According to sherrycooper.com, “boomers will redefine retirement with great energy and creativity, working well beyond age 65 and mostly by choice…healthy goal-driven boomers will seek purposeful leisure…” Am I the only person who finds that paragraph terrifying?

Working “well beyond age 65”? Swell. That’s great news for the economy, transnational trade, all levels of government, the civil service, the CBC, academia, the arts (I could go on here, but it’s too depressing). Seasons 30 to 40 of The Vinyl Café ought to be a riot.

And what exactly is this futuristic-sounding “purposeful leisure”? I read that quote to a fellow post-boomer artist, and he stopped cold, gulped, and said, “Oh God, now they’re all going to be artists … watercolours are back.”

While I don’t condone violence, I can condone a reasonable, humane culling of the aging herd. They don’t have to actually die, just virtually pass away. And here’s how: if you are a boomer, stop. Just stop. Stop working, stop acquiring, stop micro-managing your (and my) universe, stop sucking the life out of popular culture, stop going outdoors in those ghastly Crocs and Tilley Endurable hats, and, please, stop talking about how you’re eventually going to stop and, instead, stop. Now.

You’ve had a good run, flower children, longer than anybody else’s, but the bloom’s off, it’s last call at Alice’s Café, time to relocate. I hear P.E.I. is nice, and it has a convenient bridge. The kind that locks at night.