Bruce Crown's Blog: Fleeting Words

The full text of my comments on my 2020 American election.

As a Canadian, it is devastating to see that a senate majority looks improbable. The Republican Senate has disregarded the basic foundations of democracy and representational rule. They have broken norms they themselves have established and signalled to an unhinged and inexperienced president that he is free to be a king than the president of a democracy.

However, the more shocking result is the 69 million+ votes (as of 3 P.M. EST Friday) that the incumbent minority president received, the impeached incumbent who continues to call for a stop to the tabulations of legally cast votes and a long line of sycophants and bad-faith advisors who are fanning the flames of his increasing falsities and whining simply because he is not as popular as he believes himself to be. I am not an American, but her northern neighbour, and a large number of events in my neighbour’s house, their rules and policies, affect my beloved country. The incumbent minority president has lied tens of thousands of times, has committed numerous crimes while holding one of the most powerful offices in the world, and perhaps more tellingly, ignored a global pandemic by making xenophobic claims to its origin, and downplaying its threat despite knowing how dangerous it is to the population. The COVID19 pandemic has left 241,000 Americans dead. Projections show this number may reach 300,000. 241,000 largely unavoidable deaths seemed not to sway the “conservative” Latino in Florida, nor the white uneducated male from casting a vote for the outgoing minority president. A vote for the impeached 45th president demarcates to a world watching in horror that the avoidable death of your brethren is of no consequence to the GOP voter as long as some abstract or real motivation and aspiration is met, whatever it may be.

As of right now, Vice President Biden looks on track to become the 46th POTUS, but I would be remiss if I didn’t express my humble opinion, that armed Republican supporters in PA and AZ, who are gathering to intimidate counters and stop the tallying of votes, is the start of another dark chapter in America’s history. This anger will not fade with a Biden victory. This anger will not fade if Trump egresses the White House peacefully — which is unlikely. I can only hope that America can do her best to repair her reputation, left mangled by threats to the PM of Canada by the impeached 45th president’s adviser Larry Kudlow, or by labelling her oldest allies “threats to national security,” of undermining NATO and the EU, of his ties to a pedophile, and of his uncanny ability to cozy up to the world’s worst dictators many times over, even if it will be under another hostile and obstructive senate.

Nevertheless, this will undoubtedly be a new day in America, and there is reason to hope, but I ask all Americans to remain vigilant. The popular vote, the will of the people, has rejected this authoritarian figure twice now. The race to the White House is always close, but our desires for a better tomorrow can reach further towards the horizon to a brighter dawn, together.

The wonderful Angie of ReadWithAngie has reviewed my latest novel: The Romantic and The Vile. She is a fantastic Canadian bookstagrammer and I can definitely recommend following her to get the latest on hidden-gems and new releases.

You can find the review on her website.

With the election later today, I wrote a piece about the previous Conservative government of Canada. It was meant to be a limerick, rhyming and bouncing throughout the piece, but lost its appeal as the sentences wore on.

The CPC has been plagued by corruption, regulatory capture, and far-right Republican politics since before the 2016 presidential election. It is available on Medium.

This is some short prose about the previous Conservative Government(s) in Canada, a reign of terror that lasted from 2006–2015.

They drew their swords on all of us who were not oil barons or right-wing think-tank specialists or CEOs. Many of us became  second-class citizens , many of us  lost our loved ones due to their psychopathic policies , and many of us  suffered as our services were cut  by their pens, and our government failed us beyond reproach. This is by no means an exhaustive list, for that would be a Homeric epic of corrupt proportions.

Don’t forget to vote.

Oct/21/2019.
Toronto.

My newest novel: The Romantic and The Vile, will be released in bookstores and online retailers on August 21st.

I look forward to seeing you at the various readings and meet-and-greets in Toronto, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, and Paris.

“When a private Monégasque banker discovers a mysterious journal at a bookstore, he decides to ascend the spiralling staircase of the writer’s cavernous mind.

A philosophical journey of existential discovery, Neil Meyollner begins to reflect on his monotonous life and contemplates embracing the changes and theories that cued the journal’s provocative existence.

The Romantic and The Vile is an investigation of mortality, happiness, and love.”

Available in paperback and hardcover on Amazon, Indigo, Barnes & Noble, and select retailers. 

Digital preorders are available on Amazon Kindle, Kobo, and iBooks.

Available in both softcover and hardcover.

There is an engineered design in art; moments and experiences are calculated towards an aesthetic, logical, moral, and social end. The goal is to achieve temporal unity. He who is marked for death dies; she who is supposed to fall in love loves like never before; he who is heartbroken is pained; she who is cold is unmoved. Whether by elation or despair, things must go as far as the temporal units will permit, and always with surgical precision. Each methodical moment is bound by the last and the next; the waving tide of agony turns only when things have gotten as despairing as they can get. The artist then, must be a simultaneous fusion of a brilliant neurosurgeon and a surreal engineer who designs and forms a triad among the cornered square of love, agony, beauty, and death. There may be agony, love, and death without the beauty; and there may be love, agony, and beauty without any death. There may even be agony, death, and beauty without love. Sometimes there is not even a triad but the full square: love, death, beauty, and agony; all four simultaneously, instantly, or consecutively moving in the direction of the temporal units. But there may not be love, death, and beauty without agony. Agony is compulsory. … It’s all agony.

Today the chilling cold was accompanied on the rain and would not cease. The day wasted in a River View Suite, lethargy in the Borgo San Jacopo Restaurant, drowning in the light-tasting wines of the Fusion Bar rather than the southern bank of the magnificent Arno. The pattering followed and persisted every window passed or looked upon. I saw the sparrow outside at the bar, and only that one time. She was perched on the windowsill outside the bar, where the slogging raindrops tried to beat her down. But she was a distant arrow, rebellious, monstrous, flickering her wings outside and becoming a blur in the downpour as she crossed the Ponte Vecchio and flew towards the Uffizi. All day both of our thirsts were unquenchable, and I wanted to let her in like I had done before, but she as gone and I had not opened the window of opportunity in time. When one of the porters tired to make small-talk by asking if I’m all alone in the suite I gave him a scornful look that made him slouch his shoulders. The Family Suite; that’s what it was called. That’s what he’d said with that killer, two-faced Italian smile.

Then on the Ponte Vecchio the raindrops spiralled and looped around my hair. I was lost going across to find out if it had been the same sparrow from back in those oddly accented streets with impossible pronunciation. The rain filled the blue but greening water of the Arno… the aroma of petrichor, along with its soothing sound made me forget the rain and enter a desolate land of deep sinking silence. To be lost, however briefly, was a liberation from the chains of recognizable roads and the instagrammable walls and sights of old, ancient towns trying desperately to reinvent themselves. Outside the Uffizi I saw, or thought I saw her again. With her little, wet wings outstretched and immediately rising from one of the garden statues — Venus — after seeing me, and moving into a fluid trance of flight away. She pushed the rain away like a tired and departing God. Watching her rise towards the thick, thundering sky, I attempted to capture the capture of her fixed ascension. Just the day before the sun had been out, shining on the Arno as it does on wonderful women and men who in vain chase them, but now, once checked into the Family Suite, the sun is gone and there is only the rain. Always the rain.

— An excerpt from a forthcoming novel.

Rough draft of the manuscript.

Florence.

Our first experiences as a person are unhinged and free from words and desires. Words create desires, linked to the nexus of fusing sentences that start out as thoughts. Experiences are monastic and solitary; no two people have the same experience despite living in the exact same moment. Example: pain. The first experience of pain is ‘owwwwww.’ That is pain. When does the word translate into and from raw experience? … Our parents take us to the doctor and say, this new word, “She is in pain,” or “He is experiencing discomfort.” We are prescribed a painkiller, sometimes even in the form of a placebo: a lollipop or a chocolate bar, and are sent back into the pool of experience. However, now we are armed with a word that expresses and balances one particular experience: owwwwww.

But what describes the unhinged, onomatopoeic experience of love, and who is the doctor of existence we must see? What would he or she prescribe counter-act it and kill it? If only there were some pill to take to balance the deafening silence of love’s onomatopoeic sermons; I would swallow that tablet in a heartbeat. Question: Is it for the same reason that adults do not explain romantic love to children? To safeguard themselves from these enigmatic and undefinable experiences? Answer unknown.

[…]

How absurd would it be to appear at the doctor’s office and say, “I'm in love.” Why you would be laughed at! But would it really be that absurd to consider such a trip? That absurdity, of showing up at the doctor’s office, would only coax truth. Truth that had obnubilated itself until the moment of that very absurdity. Love must be like suffering then, with only the one way to overcome and balance it.

— Unused excerpt from the forthcoming "The Romantic and The Vile"

Først Ord notes.

Question: where is home? Is it tied to an external location or does it include an internal expanse that contracts in the proximity of that physical location? Example, if I am Torontonian and I am in Toronto, am I home? Answer unknown.

Words trickle down our lips one by one. Twirling through the air like shameful or blissful raindrops from our souls. They fester and elevate like wounds or cures. Squalid streams of blood and fire they can be; Translucent streams of water and serenity they must be. Sometimes the last of our words appear sluggish and filthy, and sometimes they appear transcendent and ethereal… until there is no more to tell.

Wassily Kandinsky; Picture with a Black Arch; 1912

Words; how loathsome they are and how cruel. How much we can twist them to our benefit or use them to be hated in honest deliberation with ourselves and others. How abhorrently contorted and dishonest they can be and yet how magical. How precise and clear and vivid. Hearts dance when words waltz through the air but they shatter when in our cruelty we use them to break souls. Why can’t we flee from them? From these magical letters that form something out of nothing as if there was a music to them as despairing as a cello or as divine as a lyre. Simple and clear words, is there anything more real than simple words? Is the soul made of magical words or do words make the soul magical?

Melrose Edition of Walter Scott.