Pensive Prowler #30 by Dmetri Kakmi

Manger Montreal

When my friend Cam Rogers invited me to stay with him in his girlfriend’s flat in Montreal I could hardly say no. After all it was his birthday and this most French of all Canadian cities has fascinated me since I saw Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal in the early 1990s.

Montreal is also the home of the legend that is Leonard Cohen; and, thanks to Instagram, I knew that queer enfant terrible Bruce La Bruce was shooting his new salvo, Saint-Narcisse, there at the time.

How exciting. I might bump into the great man himself or actually be in a Bruce La Bruce provocation. I’m ready for my humiliating, yet oddly erotic sex scene with skinheads, Mr La Bruce!

As further enticement, the Musee des Beaux Arts boasted an exhibition of fashion designer Thierry Mugler.

So off I went, only to arrive in the Ille de Montreal feeling like I’d bathed in the other passengers’ excrescences for almost twenty hours in the air. Never the less, after a quick shower and a change of clothes, Cam and I hit the streets in search of fortifying ramen.

It was a chilly night. Despite it being May, spring was yet to arrived. The dismal Canadian winter swept boulevards in which cars glistened like evil spirits as they swished by in the persistent drizzle.

The discomfort of being out on the cold was forgotten when Cam pointed out Leonard Cohen’s house across the bare trees of Parc du Portugal, and the very next morning treated me to breakfast at Bagels Etc, a regular Cohen hangout. Over the next week, I discovered that giant murals of the crooner’s face loom over many parts of the city, like the all-seeing eye of a benevolent despot, lending Montreal the air of a hip dictatorship.

Montreal is built around Mount Royal, an extinct volcano on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River, the slopes of which were once occupied by the Iroquois. Perched atop the mount, like a supplanting god, is a giant crucifix that lights up at night to remind you not to enjoy yourself too much because the wrath of god is around the corner.

Maybe that’s why the populace of under two million pursues hedonistic pleasures like a wolf after a moose. The minute the sun came out Sunday morning everyone stripped down to shorts and T-shirts and rushed to the park that slides off the mountainside to enjoy the free drum and dance event known as the Tam Tams, the smell of weed thick in the air. By mid afternoon, when Cam and I descended from the mountain, the park was jammed with families, hippies, Rastaferians, brazen flirts and eccentric fashionastas, enjoying the music in a hazy carnivalesque atmosphere reminiscent of a medieval fair.

It must be said the denizens of Montreal did not strike me as a particularly fashion conscious lot. I saw little above the standard blue jeans and voluminous grey jackets the whole time I was there.

The success of the Thierry Mugler exhibition at the Musee des Beaux Arts tells me they are desperate for fantasy.

I mean what suburban Mum doesn’t aspire to wear a bustier inspired by Detroit car styles from the 1950s? Or which business woman doesn’t want to climb into a suit composed entirely of rubber tyres before driving the kids to school? Want to look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon before sitting down to peel potatoes? Thierry Mugler has the dress for you, madame.

Of course you’d have to subsist on a lettuce leaf and a glass of water for a year to fit into those tiny creations, but what price fashion, darling?

Cam and his girlfriend (who was in Spain at the time) live in a borough known as Le Plateau. It’s a lively, up-and-coming area, full of cafes, bars, and restaurants, catering to an ethically diverse clientele: Portuguese, Jews, Greeks and of course the French. English is very much a secondary language and it was delightful to hear people switch from Quebecois to English in the blink of an eye when I mumbled with some alarm, ‘Je ne comprends pas. Parlez vou Anglais?’ Though I understand there is a degree of resentment.

Several times during my stay, I walked to Mile End, the next borough along, to buy chewy sesame bagels straight from the oven at Fairmount Bagel. Heedless of my waist line, I devoured one on the way home and shared the rest with Cam over breakfast. If there’s anything I miss now that I’m in Melbourne it’s those bagels, so full of give and bite— amazing with Swiss cheese and a ring of piquant salami.

Were the bagels better than the poutine we had one rainy day at Maam Bolduc?

The large white enamel bowl placed on the table between us overflowed with french fries covered in gravy, topped with caramelised onion, curds and roast duck.

Poutine means ‘mess’, and that’s exactly what it looked like. A great big mess. But the burst of umami when the lot was conveyed to the mouth via a fork was utter heaven. Even though I was full, I kept shovelling in the carbs until it felt as if I carried a food baby. The walk home hardly touched the sides and I passed out for several hours on the bed, unable to move and providing a perfect resting place for Cam’s two Siberian cats.

I didn’t meet Bruce La Bruce, which was just as well. After all the food I’d consumed, I looked like Jubba the Hut. Unless Mr La Bruce was making a film about fatty fetishists, I wouldn’t make it past the front door. So Cam and I shuffled to L’Express one last time and toasted this fun city with a Montreal Martini.

This is the final Pensive Prowler column.

Dmetri Kakmi (Episode 158) is a writer and editor based in Melbourne, Australia. The memoir Mother Land was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in Australia; and is published in England and Turkey. His essays and short stories appear in anthologies and journals. You can find out more about him here.

Pensive Prowler #29 by DMETRI KAKMI

Lazy is as Lazy Does

Hello. We didn’t speak last month. I know you missed me. Strange as it may sound I didn’t miss you. Well, not much anyway. I wasn’t myself, you see, and I needed time out. Mine host John King kindly gave me leave and here we are again, back where we started, and I still feel pretty much the same. Shithouse, as we say in Australia.

Here’s the low-down. When the time came around for last month’s Pensive Prowler, I had so much on, I couldn’t find the time to sit down and write. Even if I had made the time to put finger to keyboard, my brain was so overloaded I couldn’t have found a topic on which to ruminate.

I had too much on my plate. Subsequently, my brain put down its foot and refused to go further with the constant hurly-burly I imposed on it since the start of the year. Instead of working with me, it sent me on a holiday.

Even though I felt guilty about letting you down, and then feeling like a lazy good for nothing for not enlivening your drab, uneventful lives with my extraordinary wit and eloquence, I threw my hands up in the air and went along with it.

No column? One less thing to do. What a relief!

I am by nature lazy. If I can get out of work, I will. But I’m not telling you anything new, right? You’re like that too. I can see it from here. Your indolence is visible to my all-seeing eye. That sluggish slothfulness, the listless torpor, that takes over the minute you’re alone and no one is looking.

Yes, I know, you’re annoyed because you’ve been exposed as a fainéant,for all the world to see. (Look it up you lazy bugger.) That’s okay, you needn’t feel bad. Like I say, I’m one too.

As dear Emily Dickinson so wisely wrote:

I’m Lazy! Who are you?
Are you – Lazy – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Industrious!
How public – like a Fart –
To tell one’s name – the livelong April –
To an admiring Blog!

My natural mode is reclining on a comfy couch with a dozen buttery croissant and a row of Hanky Panky cocktails (look them up) arrayed before me, dozing, eating, drinking, and watching horror movies.

I’d even have a servant who looks like Dirk Bogarde (look him up), fanning me with a palm frond and giving me inappropriate massages if I could.

Hey, calm down. There’s no need to get offended and all #mootoo on me. I’m being honest and open with you for the sake of furthering the human condition.

But really what is this thing called lazy? An unwillingness to work or use energy. That’s the definition on the online dictionary because I’m too lazy to reach across and open my excellent but really heavy Oxford English Dictionary.

Far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as a lazy person. There are only people who lack the motivation for specific tasks. Laziness is relative. Just as there is no person who works hard at everything, there is no person who is lazy at everything.

There is only a lack of drive, an absence of motivation. If we could motivate people by giving them tasks they love to perform, there would be an end to laziness.

That sounds like I’m saying I lacked the motivation to write last month’s Pensive Prowler. That’s not true at all.

It’s just that I had to finish the third draft of my novel (done), finalise the program for the second Greek Writers’ Festival (almost done), check the proofs for a forthcoming essay in Archermagazine (done), finish reading seventy-four shortlisted entries for the Ada Cambridge Writing Prize on which I’m a judge (done), check my students’ writing (ongoing) and pack my bags for Montreal (look it up), which by the way is where I will be speaking to you from next month.

If someone could start a Crowdfunding thing to get me to Canada business class I’d really appreciate it. Thanks. Bye.

Dmetri Kakmi (Episode 158) is a writer and editor based in Melbourne, Australia. The memoir Mother Land was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in Australia; and is published in England and Turkey. His essays and short stories appear in anthologies and journals. You can find out more about him here.

Pensive Prowler #21 by Dmetri Kakmi

Death Sentence

One long sentence is what it felt like, and I don’t mean a sentence as in ‘a set of words that is complete in itself, containing a subject and predicate, conveying a statement, question or command, and consisting of a main clause and one or more subordinate clauses’; no, this felt like a death sentence, ‘a punishment assigned to a defendant found guilty by a court of law’ kind of sentence, because after all I’m talking about being hanged, drawn and quartered, in short punished, for failing to deliver this column on time, when all along I had forgotten it was due on the twentieth of the month because, you see, I’ve been travelling abroad, back home for two weeks, heavily jet lagged, overworked, sleepless in Melbourne; and I had completely forgotten a column was immanent, let alone thought about what to write, and it segued right into my guilt complex, or rather my desire to please, not let people down, disappointing the master of ceremonies at Drunken Odyssey, as I call John King, and I thought ‘By the camel’s lumpy hump, O might Jann, what shall I do?’; maybe I can pilfer something I wrote ages ago and send it to John—he needn’t know, but I’d know and then I’d only add to my misery by deceiving not only the MC but also the blameless reader by handing over soiled goods, so to speak, and there’s be disappointment all around; and then it came to me—be honest, tell the truth; I mean that’s what you normally do when in a tight spot or don’t know something—tell the truth and people will, hopefully, understand; they will be more accepting of a truthful admission, a cri de coeur, so to speak, than a lie, an attempt to draw the wool over their eyes—I’m talking about you, my dear members of the congregation—by pretending I knew what I was doing all along, which of course I didn’t, and couldn’t hope to, since the process of knowing implies conscious effort, knowledge and understanding of choosing a subject and putting one word in front of another to make a whole, which is pretty much what I’m doing now, I guess, as I kneel like a supplicant before you, begging for forgiveness, except of course in this case I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m headed or how this little misadventure in the confessional is going to end, whether with me absolved or damned, who can say?; all along I’m thinking of the long sentences I’ve enjoyed in books—Orhan Pamuk’s long sentence, buried somewhere in his Istanbul book(there’s another in My Name is Red, but it’s not as long as this one), immediately comes to mind—there are many others—the thing is you don’t realise you’re reading a long sentence until you turn the page and see Pamuk has been running (riffing?) on the same thought for almost a page and a half without a full stop, or a period, as you Americans say (isn’t a period the flow of blood and other materials from the lining of the uterus?), but hey why not punctuate a sentence with monthly lunar expulsions?; it’s better than masturbating on the page, which is what many authors do; but to get back to Pamuk, when you realise you’ve been reading one long sentence without pause, or drawing breath, you turn back the page, glance at what you’ve read and, in sudden wonderment, as if you’ve seen a splendid fireworks, you leap to your feet and clap with the sheer joy of it; it’s a virtuoso moment, a marathon run, and you can hardly believe he’s pulled it off, like those amazing cinematic long takes Brian De Palma is known for, the expertly choreographed, complicated set-ups that seem effortless to you and me, sitting comfortably in our cinema seat, observing, when really they require a lot of careful planning, are technically very challenging and difficult to pull of, flowing and weaving, drifting and swooping—think of the museum sequence in Dressed to Kill or the frenzied opening minutes of Snake Eyes—not a great film, the latter, but still exhilarating for however long it lasts before collapsing under its own misjudgements, with Nicholas Cage running amok, yammering and gesticulating wildly on his cell phone, as you Americans call it, which doesn’t make sense because it is not a ‘cell’ (okay it’s in the dictionary but it’s the last possible meaning); it’s a mobile phone you carry in your pocket and whip out to welcome the interruptions you anticipate in the course of a day; but that’s what I want to say about Pamuk’s sentence in the Istanbul book: it does not collapse; it sustains itself, floatingly sublime, on the spine of letters that turn to words, words that form sentences, units of meaning, on the vertebrae of carefully judged punctuation marks, unlike my piece, which admittedly is starting to wobble, show signs of fatigue, where I’ve clumsily patched things up, made near-invisible cuts and spliced two predicates together, hoping you haven’t noticed, like Hitchcock in Rope, to deceive you into thinking I’m clever using the hyphen instead of the semi colon to link sentences and tie my drowning not waving together so that I can tell myself, I wrote the column, damn it, and John King will be pleased; he won’t send his assassins to silence me before I put down a full stop, or a period, as you Americans infuriatingly call it.*

*Kind thanks and grateful acknowledgement to ‘One Long Sentence’ by Sven Birkerts. You saved my arse. Or ass, as you Americans call it.

Dmetri Kakmi (Episode 158) is a writer and editor based in Melbourne, Australia. The memoir Mother Land was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in Australia; and is published in England and Turkey. His essays and short stories appear in anthologies and journals. You can find out more about him here.