An image from the gallery where I read last night.

The people behind the Real Vancouver Writers’ and Culture Series have posted video of the reading I was at last night. My bit starts around the 38 minute mark, right after Kevin Chong killed the crowd with his horse sex bit.

Just a reminder I’m reading tonight at the Real Vancouver Writers’ and Culture Series at the W2 Culture and Media House. My first reading in five years! I’ll be doing a little bit from my new book, The Warhol Gang. The location is 112 West Hastings Street — just look for the burning building:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9X3VXgq7QI]

Over at the Raincoast blog, Dan Wagstaff is running the 5 Things Vancouver travel series — a sort of miniguide to Vancouver for Olympic tourists and visiting terrorists. It kicks off with an entry from me, in which I politely don’t express my feelings about the Olympics.

(Image from cfarivar’s Flickr stream.)

A recent online thread about the existential angst of grad school reminded me of a conversation I once had during my PhD years about how grad school is like a monastery. That is, when it’s not like a Kafka text. Consider the similarities. You spend a good portion of your life resisting the earthly delights of the physical world, turning your back on fortune, physical possessions and the carnal pleasures of dining out in nice restaurants. Instead, you dedicate your existence to discovering and deciphering the symbology of the world. You find hidden meaning and coded messages where others only see inanimate objects or mere words on a page. You become a vessel of purity, both in body and mind. Like monks, as a grad student you will labour for years over texts that few people, if any, will read. And, of course, you are subject to the capricious whims of a strange and unpredictable god (your thesis adviser) who may at any moment end your miserable existence (kick you out of the program). I don’t know that it’s a cult, although sometimes its adherents share the same private language and display coded symbols of adherence to its doctrines — a sure example of confirmation bias if there ever was one. Perhaps there is an argument to be made it’s a religion. Perhaps the argument already exists in some sealed thesis in a forgotten part of a university library somewhere, like Aristotle’s lost book of comedy.

For me, the siren song paycheque of the damned was too difficult to resist. I fell from grace the moment my first book review was published and I realized I could make a living writing texts that people actually read. I revelled in the material, in the orgy of popular discourse. I abandoned the monastery and threw myself into the world of the fallen and the symbolically dead. And I was slowly excommunicated as I forgot the divine language of theory.

Of course I miss it. I miss the kinship that only poverty can forge, as well as the righteousness of the ignored cause. I even miss the ideological warfare, although I’ve managed to mostly replace that with online games (Horde>Alliance). The literary classics are turning into video games anyway, becoming a new ground for scholarship now that the veins of Shakespeare and Faulkner have finally been exhausted. And I miss it because for all the physical pleasures the real world has to offer, it also has it distractions, its 9-5 schedules, its countless meetings, its deadlines reminding you that you are running out if time, reminding you, always, of your mortality. Anyone who tells you they don’t miss grad school is lying, because at some point we all long to escape into abstraction.