BOOKS
by LORI WILLOCKS
This one’s gone Animal Crackers!
Michael Boyce’s Monkey an action-filled novel of beast-versus-beast
>>REVIEW
MONKEY
Michael Boyce
Pedlar Press, 265 pp.
Michael Boyce’s debut novel Monkey is like a kung-fu story for grown-ups.
In fact, the author acknowledges Dr. Seuss as an inspiration, along with a sundry of influences as varied as Gertrude Stein, Lao Tsu and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These influences have shaped this lyrically written novel, whose three characters are gifted with superhuman physical and intellectual powers. Similar to the lonely fate of comic book heroes and villains, these characters’ extraordinary powers isolate them from the rest of society.
When we first meet the monkey, the central character of the novel, he is a happy-go-lucky prankster who delights in being "tricky smart, Bugs Bunny smart" and outwitting those who do not have his mental abilities. Just to prove his cleverness, he sneaks into people’s homes while they’re out and proceeds to eat their food, dance around or steal a worthless curio that they might not notice is gone. But the monkey is vain enough to believe he will never be caught, and his overconfidence starts to make him careless. A man manages to catch a glimpse of the monkey just as he flees the scene of one of his many break-ins. What the monkey doesn’t know is that the man who saw him is the snake, a cunning and dangerous character who is not someone to be trifled with.
The snake associates with a nefarious group and never bothers to lock his door because, "When you know the people that he knows you never need to worry." Yet the snake "belongs to no one but himself" and in return for the dirty deeds he carries out he maintains an affluent lifestyle and is able to preserve his independence. The snake is intrigued by both the monkey’s audacity to enter his place and his special powers (which he instantly recognizes) and thinks the monkey may be a useful partner in crime. He tracks down the monkey but will not exact revenge for the intrusion (for now).
Unbeknownst to the monkey and the snake, they are being stalked by the tiger, who has the ability to make herself invisible. She is a member of a secret group who "think they know what’s right" and seek to destroy the "great evil in the hearts who live for bad." She too is aware of the monkey’s gifts and hopes he can be persuaded to join in her struggle to defeat evil.
It is never revealed how the characters acquired their powers and the reader learns only vague details of the monkey’s past. What is described in detail is the hand-to-hand combat between the characters when they encounter each other for the first time. They fight not to destroy the other, but to discover each other’s strengths and weaknesses and gain their respect. The vivid scenes are filled with spinning kicks, back flips, cartwheels, propulsions through the air and lethal punches, not to mention strong sexual tension between the bewitching tiger and her two male counterparts.
The narrative follows the tiger and the snake as they plot and manoeuvre to gain the monkey’s allegiance. The relationship between the three becomes increasingly complex as their entanglements begin to impact their emotions, self-identity and associations. Loyalties are tested and principles are questioned. At one point the tiger remembers that, "the final resting place in the progress of a discipline, of any discipline, including those for fighting, (is) the heart." The same could be said of the progress of life and all three ultimately have to decide if they will follow their hearts or stick to their current loyalties.
The unique rhythm and lyrical style of the writing, combined with the witty observations of how social interactions can transform us make for an enjoyable read. The novel is much more fun than the over-intellectualized synopsis on the back cover would suggest. As the ending is a beginning of sorts, perhaps this is not the last we will read of this extraordinary trio.
FAST FORWARD VOL 11 #36
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Friday, July 28, 2006
j.r. carpenter reviews monkey
Monkey is the debut novel of Michael Boyce, who lives in Calgary at the moment, not that that has anything to do with anything. As for Monkey. That Monkey.
Monkey's not like a lot of other novels that I read. At first that's kind of irritating. I like fewer words. So I'm overwhelmed with words words words and wondering when Monkey will get moving, get to the point. And then biff baff, a kung-fu fight on a rooftop. Because that's the fastest way to get to know someone. That makes perfect sense to me, because a) I'm aggressive, and b) I've seen at least a hundred and fifty kung-fu movies. And around then it just happened that I started thinking about Monkey in a different way. I started to see the kung-fu movie structure underneath all that monkey chatter, and then Monkey starts to see it too! To learn things. About himself. Now that's interesting. A young guy learning. About himself, his thoughts, his feelings, learning to be alone with himself. Learning that neither good nor evil is all that interesting. That's really interesting.
So what this Monkey makes me think is that most novels are only novels. They're made of novels, made to be the most novel they can be. Monkey's made of other things besides. Made of movies to be sure, much more like a movie than a novel really. But also made of real like things. People. How they do things, how they think. The words words words drives me a little crazy but that's really more how we think. Most of us. We're slow learners. I don't like slow, but it's true. Monkey thinks out loud and it takes as long as it takes and doesn't skip ahead or jump around or know things as yet unknown. Which is what a lot of novels do. I think it's good to know a lot about novels and a lot about other things besides. And mix them all up. Good good. Now what? Now what will that Monkey Michael Boyce do?
Monkey's not like a lot of other novels that I read. At first that's kind of irritating. I like fewer words. So I'm overwhelmed with words words words and wondering when Monkey will get moving, get to the point. And then biff baff, a kung-fu fight on a rooftop. Because that's the fastest way to get to know someone. That makes perfect sense to me, because a) I'm aggressive, and b) I've seen at least a hundred and fifty kung-fu movies. And around then it just happened that I started thinking about Monkey in a different way. I started to see the kung-fu movie structure underneath all that monkey chatter, and then Monkey starts to see it too! To learn things. About himself. Now that's interesting. A young guy learning. About himself, his thoughts, his feelings, learning to be alone with himself. Learning that neither good nor evil is all that interesting. That's really interesting.
So what this Monkey makes me think is that most novels are only novels. They're made of novels, made to be the most novel they can be. Monkey's made of other things besides. Made of movies to be sure, much more like a movie than a novel really. But also made of real like things. People. How they do things, how they think. The words words words drives me a little crazy but that's really more how we think. Most of us. We're slow learners. I don't like slow, but it's true. Monkey thinks out loud and it takes as long as it takes and doesn't skip ahead or jump around or know things as yet unknown. Which is what a lot of novels do. I think it's good to know a lot about novels and a lot about other things besides. And mix them all up. Good good. Now what? Now what will that Monkey Michael Boyce do?
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Monkey Reviewed by Ravi Rajakumar
(Thank you Ravi Rajakumar)
Different readers will get into Monkey in very different ways, but to me Monkey is first and foremost a Kung fu comic book about style and philosophy and how they are put into practice. The story is internal in the sense that the characters' practice is often either hypothetical or witheld altogether - there's a nice tension between the monkey, tiger and snake's tendency to make mental preparations and their desire to do some actual fighting. When the fighting does happen, it's like a powerful chemical reaction that finally has enough input energy to get rolling on its own.
Monkey is written in a poetic, flowing style, that subtly varies with changes in character and scene, following its own grammatical rules. It's smooth writing, but with frequent changes in tempo and pitch, to keep you on your toes.
Monkey is a great book for anyone into martial arts, philosophy, politics and social interactions as they relate to one another.
Different readers will get into Monkey in very different ways, but to me Monkey is first and foremost a Kung fu comic book about style and philosophy and how they are put into practice. The story is internal in the sense that the characters' practice is often either hypothetical or witheld altogether - there's a nice tension between the monkey, tiger and snake's tendency to make mental preparations and their desire to do some actual fighting. When the fighting does happen, it's like a powerful chemical reaction that finally has enough input energy to get rolling on its own.
Monkey is written in a poetic, flowing style, that subtly varies with changes in character and scene, following its own grammatical rules. It's smooth writing, but with frequent changes in tempo and pitch, to keep you on your toes.
Monkey is a great book for anyone into martial arts, philosophy, politics and social interactions as they relate to one another.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
A Monkey piece by Goldberry Long
(My response is at the end of this)
From University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 75, Number 1, Winter 2006
IN:
INSIDER, OUTSIDER: READER'S CHOICE
Letters in Canada 2004, pg 6
by Goldberry Long
(Thank you Goldberry Long)
Billed as a 'post-cubist deconstructionist kung fu story told in a lyrical Gertrude-Stein-like style,' Michael Boyce's Monkey certainly signals from the flap copy onward that a reader will be either an insider or an outsider to this text. Brush up on your modernism, dust off your art history book, and you may get the joke. With a Tender Buttons sensibility, this book does deliver the promised kung fu scenes. Clearly allegorical, at time frustratingly self-conscious, it's also weirdly compelling and entertaining.
The story is about 'the monkey' who 'goes into homes that aren't his own, and that is bad.' The monkey is an outsider to the extreme:
"He likes his secret life, his no-one-knows-him life. He is anonymous. ... The whole of him is secret but plain enough to see. He does not hide behind a mask like heroes have to do, pretending that they're normal when they're really something else. It's just that no one gets close enough to really know him."
He enters the snake's house and takes a 'thing' that belongs to the snake. He is glimpsed by the snake, and the snake begins to follow him. The snake, it seems, is a sort of 'secret agent' who works for a group 'that is more a force of bad,' and the snake wants to recruit the monkey. The snake, Boyce writes,
"Could be so charming and make you want to know him and make you want to be with him and want to hang around with him and do with him the things he does and that could be a thing that's bad unless you're strong inside and know yourself inside and can be yourself inside and stay yourself inside and keep him from inside you and keep him there outside you."
The monkey is also being followed by the tiger, who 'is very charming. It can be quite alarming just how charming she can be. Of course she can be sexy. She can be very sexy. She is also alluring. She's very much alluring. ... it's a good thing that she's good and that she fights for good.'
In the triangle that emerges, the tiger and the snake take turns attempting to recruit the monkey, and all three of them discover that they share an outsider status. Though affiliated with groups, both the tiger and the snake insist on independence, and are more like the monkey in that they are 'a rare, endangered species and they must somehow resolve the differences between them and come together somehow, and be as though they were a tribe, a clan and a family.'
Through the allegorical narrative, then, Boyce explores what it means to be an insider and an outsider. Ho are groups important, the narrative asks, and when is membership valuable? Herein lies the paradox: when the tiger, the monkey, and the snake become a small group of outsiders, they render themselves insiders, if only of a group of three. This transformation of their identity is strangely circular, and is oddly suited to the prose style of the book. Boyce writes, 'Meeting up with people can be very interesting. Sometimes it is a thing, which is a thing that's interesting. When membership does matter, it often is a thing that is an interesting thing.'
Clearly, Boyce is seeking to comment on narrative and form as he is telling a story, and the form demands the primary attention of the reader. Told in a deliberately flat and abstract prose, the sentences circle around meaning with chant-like repetition. The form, of course, must do more than pay homage to Gertrude Stein; it must yield meaning. In this case, deliberately withholding detail (as in the 'thing' that the monkey steals) makes the reader grapple with its absence.
In one passage, the reader is told to think of a detective in film noir movies: 'if you could imagine that, then you could also then imagine the way the monkey moved and how he might appear to be if you saw the monkey moving as he headed for the snake's place, see?' In other words, in acknowledging the need for description (the need to 'see') and motioning towards description in another medium, the narrative asks the reader to supply description. The narrative creates a place-holder and provides a prompt: Insert film noir image here. This is interesting in its way, as a discussion of the conventional fictional expectation of particularity; this narrative refuses the reader, and in doing so, creates a dialogue with the text.
What's compelling is how this intertwines with the theme of the outsider. Depending on the reader, the narrative abstraction results in two possibilities. First, the reader may participate in filling in the blanks - so that the identity of the stolen 'thing' is reader-defined. Thus, the 'thing' becomes known only to the reader, and he or she becomes the sole insider to the text created by that particular reading. Alternatively, the reader may disengage, experiencing the text only on the abstract level. Thus, the reader becomes a complete outsider, unable to access the information available both to Boyce and to the characters (who all know the identity of the 'thing').
Whether these aspirations are successful depends entirely on whether the reader is engaged in the questions. A reader seeking a novel in the conventional sense will be particularly challenged by passages like the following:
"He certainly is only like himself, and such a man who is only like himself would certainly be known to be someone who's only like himself. He would be known for it. He would be known, he could be known, because he is most certainly only like himself. He is only like himself and not just like another man and not like just any man. He is not like any other man. He would be known for that. He would be known, he could be known, and anyone could know him as the man they saw as certainly a man only like himself. They might have seen him."
Whether readers emerge from this passage feeling they know something about what he is like is entirely up to them - which is, I think, what Boyce intended.
Michael Boyce's Comments about this piece
This is very interesting. And it was very interesting to read, for me. It has a certain way of being writing for a journal in a university, and I have done that too, so it is for me a thing that's interesting because it is a way that I'm familiar with, and because it's being used to talk about my book.
I do like it. I always did enjoy writing things in university, and I really do enjoy that someone in an academic context is writing about me, and is writing about Monkey. I do like that it is thinking in the way that it is thinking about Monkey. It stimulates my thinking about Monkey and about what it is that I was doing.
Some of it is not what I would say, but I like that she is saying it, and saying it the way that she is saying it. It is most agreeable that anyone is thinking about what is going on with it, and I think that there are things she thinks are going on with it that are really going on with it, and it is for me a pleasure to be seeing that any one is seeing that, seeing the things that may be going on with it.
There is a lot of quoting, and I am thinking that I will record myself and link it to the quotes so that any one can listen to me reading it, and that can be an interesting way to insinuate myself into this piece.
Think about this piece.
What is this piece? It is not what you normally would say was a review. I like that fact about it. That you have to think a bit about just what it is itself, even as it goes along thinking about something, which happens in this case to be my book.
Who knows if Goldberry Long will ever read my response to this. But if she were ever to be doing that, then I would say to her, that what's important about anything that can be anything the reader cares to make it be, is that the relationship to any thing becomes much more apparent, and the way that any thing is something that any one is making into something that has meaning is becoming more apparent, when the description of the thing is done in how it's done in Monkey.
There are many things, and a lot of them are things that anybody has some sort of a relationship towards or with or both and more, and what is that all about? I am often thinking about that. In my new book, I am thinking about that in a different kind of way, where the relationship itself is more the focus of a thinking about things, as relationships are things and things also are relationships. But that is something else for sometime in the future.
There is some thinking about membership in Monkey, and there is some thinking there about what the inside is and what the outside is. So it is interesting to read somebody pay attention to those things, and think about the way that Monkey thinks about those things.
Thank you once again, Goldberry Long.
From University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 75, Number 1, Winter 2006
IN:
INSIDER, OUTSIDER: READER'S CHOICE
Letters in Canada 2004, pg 6
by Goldberry Long
(Thank you Goldberry Long)
Billed as a 'post-cubist deconstructionist kung fu story told in a lyrical Gertrude-Stein-like style,' Michael Boyce's Monkey certainly signals from the flap copy onward that a reader will be either an insider or an outsider to this text. Brush up on your modernism, dust off your art history book, and you may get the joke. With a Tender Buttons sensibility, this book does deliver the promised kung fu scenes. Clearly allegorical, at time frustratingly self-conscious, it's also weirdly compelling and entertaining.
The story is about 'the monkey' who 'goes into homes that aren't his own, and that is bad.' The monkey is an outsider to the extreme:
"He likes his secret life, his no-one-knows-him life. He is anonymous. ... The whole of him is secret but plain enough to see. He does not hide behind a mask like heroes have to do, pretending that they're normal when they're really something else. It's just that no one gets close enough to really know him."
He enters the snake's house and takes a 'thing' that belongs to the snake. He is glimpsed by the snake, and the snake begins to follow him. The snake, it seems, is a sort of 'secret agent' who works for a group 'that is more a force of bad,' and the snake wants to recruit the monkey. The snake, Boyce writes,
"Could be so charming and make you want to know him and make you want to be with him and want to hang around with him and do with him the things he does and that could be a thing that's bad unless you're strong inside and know yourself inside and can be yourself inside and stay yourself inside and keep him from inside you and keep him there outside you."
The monkey is also being followed by the tiger, who 'is very charming. It can be quite alarming just how charming she can be. Of course she can be sexy. She can be very sexy. She is also alluring. She's very much alluring. ... it's a good thing that she's good and that she fights for good.'
In the triangle that emerges, the tiger and the snake take turns attempting to recruit the monkey, and all three of them discover that they share an outsider status. Though affiliated with groups, both the tiger and the snake insist on independence, and are more like the monkey in that they are 'a rare, endangered species and they must somehow resolve the differences between them and come together somehow, and be as though they were a tribe, a clan and a family.'
Through the allegorical narrative, then, Boyce explores what it means to be an insider and an outsider. Ho are groups important, the narrative asks, and when is membership valuable? Herein lies the paradox: when the tiger, the monkey, and the snake become a small group of outsiders, they render themselves insiders, if only of a group of three. This transformation of their identity is strangely circular, and is oddly suited to the prose style of the book. Boyce writes, 'Meeting up with people can be very interesting. Sometimes it is a thing, which is a thing that's interesting. When membership does matter, it often is a thing that is an interesting thing.'
Clearly, Boyce is seeking to comment on narrative and form as he is telling a story, and the form demands the primary attention of the reader. Told in a deliberately flat and abstract prose, the sentences circle around meaning with chant-like repetition. The form, of course, must do more than pay homage to Gertrude Stein; it must yield meaning. In this case, deliberately withholding detail (as in the 'thing' that the monkey steals) makes the reader grapple with its absence.
In one passage, the reader is told to think of a detective in film noir movies: 'if you could imagine that, then you could also then imagine the way the monkey moved and how he might appear to be if you saw the monkey moving as he headed for the snake's place, see?' In other words, in acknowledging the need for description (the need to 'see') and motioning towards description in another medium, the narrative asks the reader to supply description. The narrative creates a place-holder and provides a prompt: Insert film noir image here. This is interesting in its way, as a discussion of the conventional fictional expectation of particularity; this narrative refuses the reader, and in doing so, creates a dialogue with the text.
What's compelling is how this intertwines with the theme of the outsider. Depending on the reader, the narrative abstraction results in two possibilities. First, the reader may participate in filling in the blanks - so that the identity of the stolen 'thing' is reader-defined. Thus, the 'thing' becomes known only to the reader, and he or she becomes the sole insider to the text created by that particular reading. Alternatively, the reader may disengage, experiencing the text only on the abstract level. Thus, the reader becomes a complete outsider, unable to access the information available both to Boyce and to the characters (who all know the identity of the 'thing').
Whether these aspirations are successful depends entirely on whether the reader is engaged in the questions. A reader seeking a novel in the conventional sense will be particularly challenged by passages like the following:
"He certainly is only like himself, and such a man who is only like himself would certainly be known to be someone who's only like himself. He would be known for it. He would be known, he could be known, because he is most certainly only like himself. He is only like himself and not just like another man and not like just any man. He is not like any other man. He would be known for that. He would be known, he could be known, and anyone could know him as the man they saw as certainly a man only like himself. They might have seen him."
Whether readers emerge from this passage feeling they know something about what he is like is entirely up to them - which is, I think, what Boyce intended.
Michael Boyce's Comments about this piece
This is very interesting. And it was very interesting to read, for me. It has a certain way of being writing for a journal in a university, and I have done that too, so it is for me a thing that's interesting because it is a way that I'm familiar with, and because it's being used to talk about my book.
I do like it. I always did enjoy writing things in university, and I really do enjoy that someone in an academic context is writing about me, and is writing about Monkey. I do like that it is thinking in the way that it is thinking about Monkey. It stimulates my thinking about Monkey and about what it is that I was doing.
Some of it is not what I would say, but I like that she is saying it, and saying it the way that she is saying it. It is most agreeable that anyone is thinking about what is going on with it, and I think that there are things she thinks are going on with it that are really going on with it, and it is for me a pleasure to be seeing that any one is seeing that, seeing the things that may be going on with it.
There is a lot of quoting, and I am thinking that I will record myself and link it to the quotes so that any one can listen to me reading it, and that can be an interesting way to insinuate myself into this piece.
Think about this piece.
What is this piece? It is not what you normally would say was a review. I like that fact about it. That you have to think a bit about just what it is itself, even as it goes along thinking about something, which happens in this case to be my book.
Who knows if Goldberry Long will ever read my response to this. But if she were ever to be doing that, then I would say to her, that what's important about anything that can be anything the reader cares to make it be, is that the relationship to any thing becomes much more apparent, and the way that any thing is something that any one is making into something that has meaning is becoming more apparent, when the description of the thing is done in how it's done in Monkey.
There are many things, and a lot of them are things that anybody has some sort of a relationship towards or with or both and more, and what is that all about? I am often thinking about that. In my new book, I am thinking about that in a different kind of way, where the relationship itself is more the focus of a thinking about things, as relationships are things and things also are relationships. But that is something else for sometime in the future.
There is some thinking about membership in Monkey, and there is some thinking there about what the inside is and what the outside is. So it is interesting to read somebody pay attention to those things, and think about the way that Monkey thinks about those things.
Thank you once again, Goldberry Long.
Saturday, July 08, 2006
The first launch
Launching Monkey the first time.
The first time I launched Monkey, Beth Follet, who is the publisher of Pedlar Press, and who also is a writer, arranged to have the launch be at the Rivoli, a club that's in Toronto, as part of something that is called This Is Not A Reading Series, (TINARS) which is done by Pages bookstore, which is located on Queen St West. The launch was shared with Shary Boyle, for whom Conundrum Press was launching her book called Witness My Shame.
I do like Pages bookstore quite a lot, I like the Rivoli a lot, and also do like Shary Boyle a lot, and my family lives there in Toronto, and it was a joy to share the evening with them, and to meet with Beth, who is so absolutely great, and whom I do think the world of, and I was surprised by Stuart Ross being there, who published my first book called Hit By A Rock, which was not a novel, but rather a collection of short pieces, and who I hadn't seen in a very long, too long a time, in fact, and so it all was quite agreeable.
It was a big production, which was a joy and was a bother, and it did involve my friends, which was exciting for me, because they really are quite talented, and they really are quite lovely all around. It would take a lot to just describe what happened and what it was we did, because of course I didn't read, so I had to do some other sort of thing that would present and/or represent the book.
And what I did was quite involved. And it all was, sort of was, totally chaotic, and was a lot of fun, and was typically a sort of Lipsink thing - but was it really anything that was a Monkey thing?
This is what I always have been wondering.
Lipsink is a thing that I really can't describe. You must experience it in order that you really come to understand it in some way or know it in some way. There are some archived remnants of some previous occasions of doing Lipsynk that you can see and hear on my site mboyce.com - and you can get an understanding of the work of oculart, and other people who participated, at their various websites, which you can link to off my side bar over there.
But unless you were tuned in, or were at the launching at the Rivoli, you cannot really get it what it is, and I cannot explain it or describe it because it would be too boring and uninteresting to try and do that for anybody anyway, at least in writing anyway. I could maybe do it over drinks, but I couldn't bother doing it in writing.
But I could deliberate a little bit on the question I have asked, which is, was the first launch really anything that was conveying the way that Monkey had been made?
I would say no before I would say yes, but then once I had said no, I think that I would think again, and then maybe I'd say yes.
It might not be that obvious why I would say yes, why the answer would be yes, why and how it was conveying in some way the way that I made Monkey, but that is why it's interesting to me. It's interesting for me to think about the way the answer could be yes.
This is what the press release had said on the pagesbook.ca site advertising for the TINARS (This is not a reading series):
Using video, new media and telephone Michael Boyce aims to extend to the performance space-and perhaps even beyond!-the experimentation he engaged in to write Monkey, a novel which combines the dynamics of "superhero comics, kung fu movies, Taoism and Gertrude Stein." Come celebrate the launch of this exciting first novel and who knows, you may end up celebrating with the rest of the wide wonderful world. (That's a hint.)
The hint of course relates to the Lipsink broadcast, using lipsink.oculart.com to broadcast on the internet everything we were presenting from Toronto, Montreal, Banff and New York City.
I wouldn't argue with the way the novel is described, but I wonder now about the comment about experimentation that I engaged in to write Monkey.
First of all did I engage in any sort of an experiment in writing Monkey?
I might think that I should say that kind of thing to some foundation for arts that might support my writing by giving me some money to help support me while I write. But they never give me any money, so I don't know why I bother asking anybody, to start with, and more to the point, I don't know why I bother saying things like that when it's much more interesting to say the sort of things I'm interested in saying in the ways I like to say them, which at least does let me have the satisfaction then of having said something to someone that I think has been worthwhile to say, and that I care about enough so as to mitigate the injury from the rejection that's inevitably coming.
Arts foundations may like artists to say that they are going to experiment with something, like as if it is a science, because that could make it closer to a thing that makes some sort of business sense, if they like to think that business is like science, and if they like to think that anything like science is better for them to give their money and support towards.
But I think making art is more about some other kind of thing, that really isn't like something like business or like science. And that is why it can be interesting to mix them up sometimes, through their practitioners, because they all are something different, and why should they be made to be something that's the same?
Anyway - although I have, for the sake of saying something that could be taken in some kind of way, said that Monkey was experimental writing, it is not experimental writing and it was not any sort of an experiment.
My friend Kath Cowie said that she thought that it was avant garde, which pleases me, but that is not the same as saying that it is experimental writing.
I think that anyone who says "experimental writing" instead of saying "avant garde," might be saying so because they're tired of saying "avant garde," - perhaps because it was a thing that people said more often long ago. But I do not think that they're the same, "experimental writing" and "avant garde."
I do like it if someone, especially someone like Kathy Cowie, who is an awesome artist, says it's avant garde.
But I wouldn't say that it was avant garde, because who am I to say a thing like that? How could it ever be a thing like that for me? I wrote it, after all, so naturally it is a thing for me that when I was writing it was now, and which now of course is then, so how could it ever be a thing for me that is avant garde?
It may have been interesting for me to say that Monkey is experimental writing so that a community of writers, who are tired of saying work is avant garde, might embrace me as a part of their community, if I thought that it was interesting to be a part of that. And I think I may have thought that it might be, but not I do not know that it would be, and I do not care to purchase any membership on the basis of my saying that my writing is experimental.
Or I may have said it was experimental writing as a way of giving warning to anyone I might believe might have trouble reading it, or be disappointed when they found out that it was not the sort of writing that Alice Monroe or someone like her might be doing, and which they might prefer, I might think - and if they did prefer that then I might think that they might be disappointed and try to warn them about that.
But who really is to say?
Who really is to say what anybody's going to like or find it interesting to read? I can like a lot of different things. Alice Monroe is someone I can like to read as much as Getrude Stein, Samual Beckett and James Joyce, and also Michael Bendis and Jack Kerouac and William Gibson and Neil Stephenson, and Margaret Atwood too. So why should I assume that mostly anybody else isn't just as varied in their tastes as I?
And I am disappointed to be thinking that I ever should be saying something like that sort of thing, that Monkey is experimental writing, when it does not describe what Monkey is at all.
Monkey is not experimental writing. I don't think it is, in any case.
I do think that there are many ways that are more interesting for me to be describing what it is or what its interest is, or what I was doing with it while I wrote it and how I was thinking about what it was as literature.
It is different, that seems to be the case for anyone who's read it, that they do believe it's different, and that is gratifying that they do think that it is different, because I do care for it to be something that is different.
So then that is a success.
I was not experimenting when I wrote it, but I was doing something, when I wrote it, with the way that it was being writing, and with what it I though that it was doing as it was being literature.
It's interesting to me that it is literature.
It can be anything of course at any time that is related to it being something that is written, and one of those things, then, that it can be, is something that is literature.
That means that there are customs and conventions, and maybe explorations, and experiments as well, and challenges, and departures and returns, and all those sorts of things that can be any sort of a relationship to what has been, and what there is, and what, of course, there might be coming up.
Think about jazz music.
There was a time when anyone who was someone who was seriously playing jazz, was listening to someone who played it before they did, and to anyone who was playing it right now, and were thinking about how they might do it differently, and be someone who would add a little something to whatever was evolving, and so they would make their stamp.
They often did this with a great deal of respect, even though they also were a little challenging, and a little bit competing, but they were very keen about doing something that was adding to the pioneering and the evolution of the playing of their instrument, and the playing of the music, which they were all together playing.
Some did also later call some things that some of them were doing, experimental music or experimental jazz, and any of them might have been offended, or been pleased, to have been said to be someone who was doing something of that sort, but a lot of them would also say that they were only playing music, and developing their music, and taking it into the direction of their thinking and their feeling, and trying to take it further to develop it, and make it, and allow it to be evolving in themselves and through their playing, through their instruments, and through the music they were playing.
It was also like this in painting for awhile. And it was like this in other sorts of music too, even in rock music for a while. And it also was like this in plays and in film and in acting and in dancing, and lately it has been like this sometimes in television too. And of course it has been like this in literature as well - in prose and poetry.
Anyone who is a writer can be thinking about what they're doing, and about the way that what they're doing is a way of doing something, and that this way of doing something can be trying to do something before it actually is doing it, that it can be exploring something to see if it will work, and that this could be what you might call experimenting - or you could also call it practice.
You could say that experimental writing is writing that is practicing.
This sort of writing that is practicing could be interesting to read, or not.
This sort of writing that is practicing could be interesting to always do, or do a lot, and then allow yourself to be called, and to call yourself, an experimental writer.
But this is not what I am doing or am intending to be doing.
I do not care to show hardly anyone my practicing. But I do care to show anyone my writing.
My writing could, of course, always be construed by anyone who really cared to do so, likely, as really being anything of whatever I might say it's not.
That can be always done with almost anything - show how it is really what it says it's not. And that is interesting.
But what is also interesting is what anybody says their writing is and why they say it is that way, and not seek to find the contradiction and destabilize the saying, and not be too concerned with proving they are wrong.
Anybody can be wrong, and anybody can be right, and so what is really interesting to me, is what anybody cares to say, because it shows the sort of thing they care about, and thus the sort of person that they are, and the way they see the world, and how they care to be with other people living in the world.
It could be called the heart of them, and it could be called their spirit. And if you have an interest in such things, then you might not care so much to prove them wrong or make them seem to be fundamentally always in a contradiction, because anybody can be said to be at any time always in a contradiction.
And even anyone who points it out can be subject also to such a pointing out as well.
So anyway, Monkey isn't what I'd call experimental writing, because it's not experimenting, because it isn't practicing to do something; it actually is doing it.
It could be said that it has done it well or not, but it certainly is doing it.
Well, but did I practice it before I did it? Well, maybe in a way I have, I did, but I wouldn't really say I have or did.
Practicing my writing has not been ever much of anything like practicing to play an instrument.
In some ways it has been like practicing kung fu - a certain sort of kung fu that's to say.
Not all kung fu is the same or looks the same or is taught the same with the same idea. And that just all makes sense, because there is no kung fu really, not any one kung fu that is the prime kung fu, because kung fu is a discipline, it is discipline itself, and so that means that it is sorted out by schools and individuals, which is to say by groups and individuals, whether they be students, or be masters, or be teachers, or whatever, in many different ways that often are contentious in the way that they are different, but can also be complementary to each other too.
My writing, like anybody's writing, could be said to be in this way, actually a practicing, insofar as it is like the way a certain sort of kung fu could be said to always be a sort of practicing, and always is becoming what it is, even though it also always is unfolding as it is, and not becoming anything, but rather is expressing what it is.
It all depends on how you measure it and if you care to measure it.
I sometimes care to measure it to see if it is being what I care that it be doing.
So I would rather say my writing is kung fu than say that it's experimental writing.
I know that it can easily confuse anyone I say that to, and that I would have to qualify it usually, but I think that is a good thing that I need to do that if I care to not be glib.
I did do things with Monkey that were like getting out there on the stage and playing something more than what you might have played before, that was like getting out there on the track or field and doing something more than what you did before, that was like making moves that you had never done that well before, and giving more than you done before, but which you had been building up to do.
I had been building up to do it.
I had been thinking all along about the different ways of doing it. I had been pondering and wondering and growing my conviction to be doing it some way. And then eventually I did it.
In this way the blurb was right to say that the launching at the Rivoli was consistent with the way that I made Monkey. Because before I did launch Monkey I thought about the launch in the way that was consistent also with how I had been building up to making Monkey, by thinking and preparing and considering and practicing and deliberating about how I would be doing it, and what could be interesting about doing it that way, and what other ways there might be that also could be interesting, and maybe I would do that too, or do that at some other time - and so like that.
In that way, the blurb is right. If experimentation means those things, and I do suppose that it can mean those things, I do dare to think that it could mean those things, then yes, my presentation was an indication of another thing where I did do something similar in order that I could then do what I did do.
This then made the presentation be a little bit in this way similar to doing Monkey, when I was doing it. But I was, of course I was, doing something rather different, and it wasn't much like Monkey really, not in much of any other way besides in how it was a thing that I did do, like anything that I would do, and which always is, in this way, showing some of my kung fu.
And it was different from Monkey especially, because I did this thing, this launch, with a lot of other people, whereas I did Monkey on my own.
I had some feedback doing Monkey that influenced me in some ways, especially from Ravi Rajakumar, but this is not the same as what anyone was doing on that night that Monkey launched the first time at the Rivoli.
I'm tired of talking about this right now. Some other time I'll talk about the second launch of Monkey.
The first time I launched Monkey, Beth Follet, who is the publisher of Pedlar Press, and who also is a writer, arranged to have the launch be at the Rivoli, a club that's in Toronto, as part of something that is called This Is Not A Reading Series, (TINARS) which is done by Pages bookstore, which is located on Queen St West. The launch was shared with Shary Boyle, for whom Conundrum Press was launching her book called Witness My Shame.
I do like Pages bookstore quite a lot, I like the Rivoli a lot, and also do like Shary Boyle a lot, and my family lives there in Toronto, and it was a joy to share the evening with them, and to meet with Beth, who is so absolutely great, and whom I do think the world of, and I was surprised by Stuart Ross being there, who published my first book called Hit By A Rock, which was not a novel, but rather a collection of short pieces, and who I hadn't seen in a very long, too long a time, in fact, and so it all was quite agreeable.
It was a big production, which was a joy and was a bother, and it did involve my friends, which was exciting for me, because they really are quite talented, and they really are quite lovely all around. It would take a lot to just describe what happened and what it was we did, because of course I didn't read, so I had to do some other sort of thing that would present and/or represent the book.
And what I did was quite involved. And it all was, sort of was, totally chaotic, and was a lot of fun, and was typically a sort of Lipsink thing - but was it really anything that was a Monkey thing?
This is what I always have been wondering.
Lipsink is a thing that I really can't describe. You must experience it in order that you really come to understand it in some way or know it in some way. There are some archived remnants of some previous occasions of doing Lipsynk that you can see and hear on my site mboyce.com - and you can get an understanding of the work of oculart, and other people who participated, at their various websites, which you can link to off my side bar over there.
But unless you were tuned in, or were at the launching at the Rivoli, you cannot really get it what it is, and I cannot explain it or describe it because it would be too boring and uninteresting to try and do that for anybody anyway, at least in writing anyway. I could maybe do it over drinks, but I couldn't bother doing it in writing.
But I could deliberate a little bit on the question I have asked, which is, was the first launch really anything that was conveying the way that Monkey had been made?
I would say no before I would say yes, but then once I had said no, I think that I would think again, and then maybe I'd say yes.
It might not be that obvious why I would say yes, why the answer would be yes, why and how it was conveying in some way the way that I made Monkey, but that is why it's interesting to me. It's interesting for me to think about the way the answer could be yes.
This is what the press release had said on the pagesbook.ca site advertising for the TINARS (This is not a reading series):
Using video, new media and telephone Michael Boyce aims to extend to the performance space-and perhaps even beyond!-the experimentation he engaged in to write Monkey, a novel which combines the dynamics of "superhero comics, kung fu movies, Taoism and Gertrude Stein." Come celebrate the launch of this exciting first novel and who knows, you may end up celebrating with the rest of the wide wonderful world. (That's a hint.)
The hint of course relates to the Lipsink broadcast, using lipsink.oculart.com to broadcast on the internet everything we were presenting from Toronto, Montreal, Banff and New York City.
I wouldn't argue with the way the novel is described, but I wonder now about the comment about experimentation that I engaged in to write Monkey.
First of all did I engage in any sort of an experiment in writing Monkey?
I might think that I should say that kind of thing to some foundation for arts that might support my writing by giving me some money to help support me while I write. But they never give me any money, so I don't know why I bother asking anybody, to start with, and more to the point, I don't know why I bother saying things like that when it's much more interesting to say the sort of things I'm interested in saying in the ways I like to say them, which at least does let me have the satisfaction then of having said something to someone that I think has been worthwhile to say, and that I care about enough so as to mitigate the injury from the rejection that's inevitably coming.
Arts foundations may like artists to say that they are going to experiment with something, like as if it is a science, because that could make it closer to a thing that makes some sort of business sense, if they like to think that business is like science, and if they like to think that anything like science is better for them to give their money and support towards.
But I think making art is more about some other kind of thing, that really isn't like something like business or like science. And that is why it can be interesting to mix them up sometimes, through their practitioners, because they all are something different, and why should they be made to be something that's the same?
Anyway - although I have, for the sake of saying something that could be taken in some kind of way, said that Monkey was experimental writing, it is not experimental writing and it was not any sort of an experiment.
My friend Kath Cowie said that she thought that it was avant garde, which pleases me, but that is not the same as saying that it is experimental writing.
I think that anyone who says "experimental writing" instead of saying "avant garde," might be saying so because they're tired of saying "avant garde," - perhaps because it was a thing that people said more often long ago. But I do not think that they're the same, "experimental writing" and "avant garde."
I do like it if someone, especially someone like Kathy Cowie, who is an awesome artist, says it's avant garde.
But I wouldn't say that it was avant garde, because who am I to say a thing like that? How could it ever be a thing like that for me? I wrote it, after all, so naturally it is a thing for me that when I was writing it was now, and which now of course is then, so how could it ever be a thing for me that is avant garde?
It may have been interesting for me to say that Monkey is experimental writing so that a community of writers, who are tired of saying work is avant garde, might embrace me as a part of their community, if I thought that it was interesting to be a part of that. And I think I may have thought that it might be, but not I do not know that it would be, and I do not care to purchase any membership on the basis of my saying that my writing is experimental.
Or I may have said it was experimental writing as a way of giving warning to anyone I might believe might have trouble reading it, or be disappointed when they found out that it was not the sort of writing that Alice Monroe or someone like her might be doing, and which they might prefer, I might think - and if they did prefer that then I might think that they might be disappointed and try to warn them about that.
But who really is to say?
Who really is to say what anybody's going to like or find it interesting to read? I can like a lot of different things. Alice Monroe is someone I can like to read as much as Getrude Stein, Samual Beckett and James Joyce, and also Michael Bendis and Jack Kerouac and William Gibson and Neil Stephenson, and Margaret Atwood too. So why should I assume that mostly anybody else isn't just as varied in their tastes as I?
And I am disappointed to be thinking that I ever should be saying something like that sort of thing, that Monkey is experimental writing, when it does not describe what Monkey is at all.
Monkey is not experimental writing. I don't think it is, in any case.
I do think that there are many ways that are more interesting for me to be describing what it is or what its interest is, or what I was doing with it while I wrote it and how I was thinking about what it was as literature.
It is different, that seems to be the case for anyone who's read it, that they do believe it's different, and that is gratifying that they do think that it is different, because I do care for it to be something that is different.
So then that is a success.
I was not experimenting when I wrote it, but I was doing something, when I wrote it, with the way that it was being writing, and with what it I though that it was doing as it was being literature.
It's interesting to me that it is literature.
It can be anything of course at any time that is related to it being something that is written, and one of those things, then, that it can be, is something that is literature.
That means that there are customs and conventions, and maybe explorations, and experiments as well, and challenges, and departures and returns, and all those sorts of things that can be any sort of a relationship to what has been, and what there is, and what, of course, there might be coming up.
Think about jazz music.
There was a time when anyone who was someone who was seriously playing jazz, was listening to someone who played it before they did, and to anyone who was playing it right now, and were thinking about how they might do it differently, and be someone who would add a little something to whatever was evolving, and so they would make their stamp.
They often did this with a great deal of respect, even though they also were a little challenging, and a little bit competing, but they were very keen about doing something that was adding to the pioneering and the evolution of the playing of their instrument, and the playing of the music, which they were all together playing.
Some did also later call some things that some of them were doing, experimental music or experimental jazz, and any of them might have been offended, or been pleased, to have been said to be someone who was doing something of that sort, but a lot of them would also say that they were only playing music, and developing their music, and taking it into the direction of their thinking and their feeling, and trying to take it further to develop it, and make it, and allow it to be evolving in themselves and through their playing, through their instruments, and through the music they were playing.
It was also like this in painting for awhile. And it was like this in other sorts of music too, even in rock music for a while. And it also was like this in plays and in film and in acting and in dancing, and lately it has been like this sometimes in television too. And of course it has been like this in literature as well - in prose and poetry.
Anyone who is a writer can be thinking about what they're doing, and about the way that what they're doing is a way of doing something, and that this way of doing something can be trying to do something before it actually is doing it, that it can be exploring something to see if it will work, and that this could be what you might call experimenting - or you could also call it practice.
You could say that experimental writing is writing that is practicing.
This sort of writing that is practicing could be interesting to read, or not.
This sort of writing that is practicing could be interesting to always do, or do a lot, and then allow yourself to be called, and to call yourself, an experimental writer.
But this is not what I am doing or am intending to be doing.
I do not care to show hardly anyone my practicing. But I do care to show anyone my writing.
My writing could, of course, always be construed by anyone who really cared to do so, likely, as really being anything of whatever I might say it's not.
That can be always done with almost anything - show how it is really what it says it's not. And that is interesting.
But what is also interesting is what anybody says their writing is and why they say it is that way, and not seek to find the contradiction and destabilize the saying, and not be too concerned with proving they are wrong.
Anybody can be wrong, and anybody can be right, and so what is really interesting to me, is what anybody cares to say, because it shows the sort of thing they care about, and thus the sort of person that they are, and the way they see the world, and how they care to be with other people living in the world.
It could be called the heart of them, and it could be called their spirit. And if you have an interest in such things, then you might not care so much to prove them wrong or make them seem to be fundamentally always in a contradiction, because anybody can be said to be at any time always in a contradiction.
And even anyone who points it out can be subject also to such a pointing out as well.
So anyway, Monkey isn't what I'd call experimental writing, because it's not experimenting, because it isn't practicing to do something; it actually is doing it.
It could be said that it has done it well or not, but it certainly is doing it.
Well, but did I practice it before I did it? Well, maybe in a way I have, I did, but I wouldn't really say I have or did.
Practicing my writing has not been ever much of anything like practicing to play an instrument.
In some ways it has been like practicing kung fu - a certain sort of kung fu that's to say.
Not all kung fu is the same or looks the same or is taught the same with the same idea. And that just all makes sense, because there is no kung fu really, not any one kung fu that is the prime kung fu, because kung fu is a discipline, it is discipline itself, and so that means that it is sorted out by schools and individuals, which is to say by groups and individuals, whether they be students, or be masters, or be teachers, or whatever, in many different ways that often are contentious in the way that they are different, but can also be complementary to each other too.
My writing, like anybody's writing, could be said to be in this way, actually a practicing, insofar as it is like the way a certain sort of kung fu could be said to always be a sort of practicing, and always is becoming what it is, even though it also always is unfolding as it is, and not becoming anything, but rather is expressing what it is.
It all depends on how you measure it and if you care to measure it.
I sometimes care to measure it to see if it is being what I care that it be doing.
So I would rather say my writing is kung fu than say that it's experimental writing.
I know that it can easily confuse anyone I say that to, and that I would have to qualify it usually, but I think that is a good thing that I need to do that if I care to not be glib.
I did do things with Monkey that were like getting out there on the stage and playing something more than what you might have played before, that was like getting out there on the track or field and doing something more than what you did before, that was like making moves that you had never done that well before, and giving more than you done before, but which you had been building up to do.
I had been building up to do it.
I had been thinking all along about the different ways of doing it. I had been pondering and wondering and growing my conviction to be doing it some way. And then eventually I did it.
In this way the blurb was right to say that the launching at the Rivoli was consistent with the way that I made Monkey. Because before I did launch Monkey I thought about the launch in the way that was consistent also with how I had been building up to making Monkey, by thinking and preparing and considering and practicing and deliberating about how I would be doing it, and what could be interesting about doing it that way, and what other ways there might be that also could be interesting, and maybe I would do that too, or do that at some other time - and so like that.
In that way, the blurb is right. If experimentation means those things, and I do suppose that it can mean those things, I do dare to think that it could mean those things, then yes, my presentation was an indication of another thing where I did do something similar in order that I could then do what I did do.
This then made the presentation be a little bit in this way similar to doing Monkey, when I was doing it. But I was, of course I was, doing something rather different, and it wasn't much like Monkey really, not in much of any other way besides in how it was a thing that I did do, like anything that I would do, and which always is, in this way, showing some of my kung fu.
And it was different from Monkey especially, because I did this thing, this launch, with a lot of other people, whereas I did Monkey on my own.
I had some feedback doing Monkey that influenced me in some ways, especially from Ravi Rajakumar, but this is not the same as what anyone was doing on that night that Monkey launched the first time at the Rivoli.
I'm tired of talking about this right now. Some other time I'll talk about the second launch of Monkey.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Monkey reviewed by Laurie Dawson
Laurie Dawson from the Writing & Publishing at the Banff Centre said this about Monkey:
(Thank you Laurie Dawson very much)
Monkey Rocks!
Monkey is a john cage song playing with three characters: the monkey, the snake and the tiger. Through the course of this wildly ambient and gently explorative narrative, the three characters transform each other; transform their respective environments and ultimately uncover the potential in their threesome to transform the world. In the endless beginnings of this engrossing debut novel, we follow the characters following each other, figuring out who they are each step backwards they take.
The book is a turntable of intelligentsia mixed with humanity and fun. So much fun. The main protagonist, the monkey, jumps in from your peripheral on the first page and doesn't stop tickling your ribs until a week after you've put the book down. The other two characters become central too. Each one wearing a few traits on their kung fu sleeves: cold, cool, controlling and calculated on the silk arm of the snake and the tiger wears a constant need to always be planning then worrying about what others may think of the plan or what sort of plan she will have to make to counteract their reaction to her plan, and, oh, she kicks ass as well.
Monkey is the best of being a kid, being an adult, everything in between and beyond. It subtly says hope, right now, not later but right this instant. If Jet Lee symbolizes grace, power and dignity and Theodore Seuss Geisel is the master of multiple-meaning(full) rhymes and Gertrude Stein structured a sentence like no other, well, micheal boyce has integrated all three and more; building his own place amongst the brilliant workings of those who can at once authenticate paradox and live in their own skin.
(Thank you Laurie Dawson very much)
Monkey Rocks!
Monkey is a john cage song playing with three characters: the monkey, the snake and the tiger. Through the course of this wildly ambient and gently explorative narrative, the three characters transform each other; transform their respective environments and ultimately uncover the potential in their threesome to transform the world. In the endless beginnings of this engrossing debut novel, we follow the characters following each other, figuring out who they are each step backwards they take.
The book is a turntable of intelligentsia mixed with humanity and fun. So much fun. The main protagonist, the monkey, jumps in from your peripheral on the first page and doesn't stop tickling your ribs until a week after you've put the book down. The other two characters become central too. Each one wearing a few traits on their kung fu sleeves: cold, cool, controlling and calculated on the silk arm of the snake and the tiger wears a constant need to always be planning then worrying about what others may think of the plan or what sort of plan she will have to make to counteract their reaction to her plan, and, oh, she kicks ass as well.
Monkey is the best of being a kid, being an adult, everything in between and beyond. It subtly says hope, right now, not later but right this instant. If Jet Lee symbolizes grace, power and dignity and Theodore Seuss Geisel is the master of multiple-meaning(full) rhymes and Gertrude Stein structured a sentence like no other, well, micheal boyce has integrated all three and more; building his own place amongst the brilliant workings of those who can at once authenticate paradox and live in their own skin.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Monkey reviewed by Pete Huggon
This is from the September 2005 issue of Word.
Thank you, Pete Huggon and Word, very much.
You can find Word here:
Word
A great book to ease into this snake-eating-its-tail kind of writing, Michael Boyce's Monkey is one I've recommended to quite a few of my friends-the literary set, the read-just-for-fun set and even the unabashed-geekery set-which isn't to say it's lightweight at all, although it is light-hearted, charming, and at the same time hypnotic and subtle.
The story is told in a floating point of view that evoked for me a bombastic narrative in a pub-all intimate confidence and over-the-top ejaculation, weird asides and strangely astute observation.
It revolves around three characters who aren't so much simple as pure - they have singular motivations that consistently inform all their actions, yet are richly drawn. Through them, Boyce renders a multi-faceted rumination on morality, but with the tropes of kung-fu movies as his palette. Gloriously original.
Thank you, Pete Huggon and Word, very much.
You can find Word here:
Word
A great book to ease into this snake-eating-its-tail kind of writing, Michael Boyce's Monkey is one I've recommended to quite a few of my friends-the literary set, the read-just-for-fun set and even the unabashed-geekery set-which isn't to say it's lightweight at all, although it is light-hearted, charming, and at the same time hypnotic and subtle.
The story is told in a floating point of view that evoked for me a bombastic narrative in a pub-all intimate confidence and over-the-top ejaculation, weird asides and strangely astute observation.
It revolves around three characters who aren't so much simple as pure - they have singular motivations that consistently inform all their actions, yet are richly drawn. Through them, Boyce renders a multi-faceted rumination on morality, but with the tropes of kung-fu movies as his palette. Gloriously original.
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