Preface

I was playing with the idea of using Michael Turner’s own devices to write about his new novel American Whiskey Bar. The Vancouver poet, musician, and now novelist, uses a Preface (written by a character named Michael Turner, who’s a poet, musician, and now screenwriter); an Introduction (by Hungarian filmmaker Monika Herendy); a screenplay, American Whiskey Bar (originally titled A Bunch of Americans Talking); and an Afterword (by Serbian film critic Milena Jagoda). With these elements, Turner constructs an intense, intelligent, and darkly humorous satire about the writing and making of a film that takes on cult status though only a handful of people will ever see it and that is set in one bar over one night somewhere in the U.S.A. American Whiskey Bar (the film) deals with race, sex, gender roles, and violence in America at the verge of the millennium. American Whiskey Bar (the book) is about all of the latter as seen through different characters’ versions of the “truth.” A postmodern Rashomon. I thought of emulating Turner’s form as a sort of mini-homage to a book I admire, but also just because the idea of doing it amused me. I was getting tired of writing book reviews and afraid I was becoming stuck in the morass of reviewspeak despite my best intentions. And, like Turner, I believe that form is a major part of content.

Then something happened that pretty much clinched it. In a Commercial Drive coffee shop (the one with the dreadlocked dogs sprawled across the doorway), I heard some people discussing American Whiskey Bar (the book, not the movie). This was really weird, because the book hadn’t been published yet. I had one of only a handful of galleys, yet here were all these people offering their two bits on American Whiskey Bar. I didn’t have my tape recorder with me, but I scribbled some notes to capture the main elements of the conversation, which I reconstruct for you below.

My one worry was that no one would believe me. It seemed bizarre that people would be talking about a book they couldn’t have read yet. And add to that the fact that this book about a film is by a guy who wrote a book (Hard Core Logo) that was made into a film about the making of a documentary (Hard Core Logo), which was followed by a book about the making of the film about the book (Hard Core Roadshow). But then I ran into someone at Word on the Street who said, “Go for it.” And so I am.

But first, I’m delighted to present an introduction by the late Donald Barthelme, taken from the new posthumous collection of the American postmodernist’s essays (Not-Knowing, $38.50, Random House). Barthelme, ever one to chafe against genre constraints, takes on novelist and critic Mary McCarthy and two essays she published bemoaning the end of the road for the novel.

Introduction

“What is curious is the way Miss McCarthy would limit her medium. She begins by defining the novel in such a way as to include all the great works of the past and render the future doubtful, by defining the novel as a structure of fact and going on to declare the erection of such structures no longer possible because the facts have turned into ‘irreality.’ She is not much concerned with how these doomed towers are stuck together, only with the aggregate that forms their substance. In the second essay, ‘Characters in Fiction,’ she explicitly condemns monkeying around with new designs: ‘An impasse has been reached within the art of fiction as a result of progress and experiment.’ Formal innovation, she finds, has crowded out an interest in people, plot, character, the social. Throughout both essays she argues persuasively for a return to fiction’s traditional virtues, to recipes for jam and recipes for Mrs. Micawber.

“This sounds like a declaration of bankruptcy spiced with a denunciation of that guilty partner who has made off with the cash.” – Donald Barthelme (from On Writing, 1964)

Conversation Vérité @ The
Continental

Characters:
WOMAN
MAN
BARISTA (young, bald, sexually ambiguous)
GENRE COP (resembles Allan Bloom)
BRIAN FAWCETT (in a cameo)

INT. COFFEE SHOP – DAY

A WOMAN and a MAN are engaged in intense conversation. They could be lovers. But then again, maybe not. One is Caucasian, one is not. It doesn’t matter, for the purposes of this conversation, which one is which.

MAN
Who would you get to play Klaus 9, the guy who practically destroys that poor director Monika Herendy just to get the bloody film made his way? I see Klaus Maria Brandauer. But that’s probably because his name is also Klaus. I guess he’s too small. Klaus 9 is huge, right? Or did he just seem huge?

WOMAN
I think Herendy is the most fascinating character in the book. I mean, I don’t believe everything she says in her “Introduction,” but she’s very convincing. I see Babz Chula, but I guess you’d probably need a name.

MAN
What about the screenplay part? One guy I was talking to said it sort of reminded him of Sam Shepard. I can see that. Sort of. Anyway, the script doesn’t need to stand alone. Maybe it could, I don’t know. You have to read it in the context of the novel. Also, having these four different tables of characters talking, and their stories sort of overlapping with the stories of people at other tables is kind of Altmanesque.

WOMAN
I loved the part in the script where the one woman tells the younger one about this wild sexual ride with the African exchange student that plays on all those racial stereotypes. And then when you realize that nothing really happened …

MAN
Didn’t you find it sexist?

WOMAN
(makes air raid siren sound)
PC Alert! PC Alert!

MAN
(ignores her)
I did really like the three garbage men sitting around talking about casting their next screenplay. I mean, that was as funny, funnier really, than the pitches in The Player. And then mentioning Warren Oates! Warren Oates was great, man, and I didn’t even realize he was dead. I’m still bummed out.

WOMAN
He may not be dead. This is a novel we’re talking about.

(GENRE COP appears next to their table)

GENRE COP
It’s not really a novel.

WOMAN
What is it then? An egg?

GENRE COP
(writes something on a pad and slaps it on the table)
Here, give this citation to your pal Turner when you see him next. Maximum penalty for impersonating a novelist.

WOMAN
Who are you, the literary Gestapo?

GENRE COP
Just following orders, ma’am. Although, I do admit that postmodernists give me the willies.

BRIAN FAWCETT gets up from the next table where he’s been quietly drinking an Americano. He pops GENRE COP one [KAPOW!] right in the kisser. GENRE COP falls, knocking some coffees to the floor. He stumbles outside. FAWCETT sits back down, his back to the rest of them. The BARISTA comes over to wipe up the spill.

BARISTA
That guy is such an asshole. He’s in here every day and it’s always, “That’s not really a poem, that’s not really a story, that’s not really non-fiction, that’s not really a coffee.” He’s probably got some Norton Anthology circa-1956 up his butt.

WOMAN
Who’s that other guy?

BARISTA
Oh, that’s Fawcett. He’s written some cool, genre-busting books using dual text – Gender Wars, Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow, and Public Eye. He thinks too many Canadian writers write precious, hermetically sealed little fictions. He used to be Vancouver’s foremost postmodernist, but he lives in Toronto now. Visits, though.

WOMAN
I’d hate to piss him off. Hey, have you heard about that Lynn Crosbie book? The one about Homolka and Bernardo. It’s really ballsy, so angry but controlled. She just fires this powerful arsenal of language at the killers and looks at how we – the public, the media, everybody – have made these icons of them in some twisted way.

MAN
(with his hands over her ears)
I don’t want to hear about it. I think she’s sick.

WOMAN
Have you even read it?

MAN
(makes a low vacuum cleaner-like hum and keeps his hands over his ears)
I can’t hear you.

WOMAN
(to Barista)
Now, there’s a book for Mr. Norton Anthology. Fictional letters to real people from fictional people. Fictional dreams and mindscapes of actual people. Media reports, real people’s fictional diary excerpts, found poems constructed from trial testimony. Crosbie calls it “critifiction.” I guess she had to call it something.

BARISTA
I just heard that in Britain it’s illegal not to name your children. If you don’t name your baby by a certain time, they’ll name it for you.

WOMAN
Really?

BARISTA
Really.

MAN
I still can’t hear you.

Afterword

Note to editor: Well, yes, there is a plot: Turner is commissioned to write a screenplay by Herendy, a Hungarian pornographic filmmaker who’s trying to go legit. The evil Klaus 9 hijacks the entire enterprise. Jagoda, a respected film critic, is forced to write a review of the film. Turner is disgusted and embarrassed by the experience and publishes the screenplay of American Whiskey Bar to put the whole thing to rest. He invites Herendy and Jagoda to provide the intro and afterword.
Note to ed. re: Crosbie book: The point is that the form and content cannot be separated, even with a kneejerk crowbar. Like Turner’s book, the form is content and vice versa.
Note to ed: In an essay two years ago in The Georgia Straight, Brian Fawcett wrote, “Turner is probably the most original writer B.C. has produced in a generation.” I tried to just have him get up in the coffee shop and say this and sit down, but somehow it didn’t work. So I resorted to metaphorical violence. I hope that’s okay. Everything else is a version of the truth.