Nick: Hello Daniel, how are you today and what have you been up to?

Daniel: I declined all Friday night invitations so I could wake up at 7 a.m. this morning and catch up on my e-mails. Today I plan to reconnect with old friends and business partners, and start a new column. I’m looking through my office window, disappointed that the older woman who usually tends her weeds isn’t there. The snow has pushed her inside, I guess.

Nick: Snow! Yuck! I used to think it was pretty, but two winters up in the Alps and I'm starting to hate the stuff. My place has been surrounded since November and I have dug my car out at least ten times... At least it's melting now. Where are you living and how bad are the winters there?

Daniel: I live in Montreal, a city built around Mount Royal, an igneous intrusion (harmless volcano) . Right now it’s covered with snow, bare, rakish trees and an Eiffel Tower sort of crucifix, but the snow is quite nice. The winters have been getting pushed ahead by a few days for as long as I can remember. Now, Decembers are warm, and snow only really starts falling after the new year.

Nick: I have been living in Nice for years... so the move to the mountains has been quite brutal. The winters in Nice are like English summers - so I have gone from whizzing around on a motorbike to digging the car out of the snow. I'm not sure I prefer the new arrangement at all.

Daniel: You are painting a picture for me, from Ernest Hemingway’s "A Moveable Feast": "We burned boulets which were molded, egg-shaped lumps of coal dust, on the wood fire, and on the streets the winter light was beautiful." What hogwash! Surely there is an underworld in Nice. Where are the rent boys, and how much do they cost?urely there is an underworld in Nice. Where are the rent boys, and how much do they cost?

Nick: I've got no idea what you mean... I haven't painted any picture at all about Nice, except to say that the winters are mild, have I? Are you stoned or something?

Daniel: Stoned on good coffee! Yes, perhaps I was projecting.

Nick: As far as rent boys go, I’m afraid that I have never been near one in my life (well, except for maybe being stood next to one in a bar, but then how would I know?). So how much would you think a rent boy would cost in Nice?

Daniel: My sex-trade work was mainly in porn, and I'm no expert at dollar/euro currency conversion. I'll guess that a private dance would go for 12 euros, though I'd have to double-check on that.

Nick: And have you ever been a client? On the paying end of the equation?

Daniel: Absolutely. My first sexual experiences were with sex workers, and I had a wonderful time. I took the clinical view that I should turn to professionals to make my initiation to sex a positive one. I'll never forget the Motel St-Jacques, nor the older woman who spanked my nuts with a paint-stirring stick and chastised me for having holes in my shoes. Hey, I was experimental. I had one escort scream to her pimp "I told you I DON'T DO VIRGINS." My favourite professional sex visit was with an escort who eventually decided not to charge me. He said "I'm doing this for me."

Nick: Wow! I've led such a sheltered life. Do you think working in Porn changed you, I mean, can you identify the part of you which comes from those experiences? I mean, I guess you couldn't have written your novel Shuck, for a start?

Daniel: I love how you capitalize "Porn", as if it's a religious term. Actually, it has supplanted many gods for many people. Yes, porn is responsible for coaxing the exhibitionist out of me. Sex work also gives you incredible people insight: you learn to see through a person's desire and cut to the quick. This isn't strictly good business acumen; it's also part of achieving closer human intimacy. If I hadn't done porn--oops, I mean Porn--I would have turned to other life experiences for writing fodder.

Nick: Talking of religions, you were brought up as a Jehova's Witness weren't you? What did that experience bring to the matrix of where you are today?

Daniel: Funny, I just published a column claiming to have discovered a Bible passage that prophesies Madonna as the Antichrist! I'm terribly glad that I had the chance to grow up with a strict religious worldview. It has helped me develop a wonky perspective on things, and now I can telescope in and out of closed-mindedness whenever it's useful to the writing process. I've found community with other ex-JWs, and I'm lucky that they seem to have rallied behind my work. Their input and discussions bring such a richness to me. Nick, how do you find community? I can't imagine there being a huge English-language writing community in the French Alps.

Nick: Huh! You're right, there isn't. To be honest, up until now I've pretty much avoided any grouping of writers. I grew up in a family filled with artists and their friends who spent all their time talking about painting... I think I developed an allergy against intellectualizing the creative process in any way. It tends to make me cringe in fact. I always think that it sounds pretentious. So writing has always been a very solitary thing for me. But recently, I have been going to some writerly events in London, and I have discovered that I actually quite enjoy being surrounded by like-minded souls.
I think in a way, a lot of my life choices up to this point have tended towards independance from community, isolation perhaps... moving to a foreign country, living in a town with very little gay community... Lately, moving to the top of a mountain has pushed that one to the limit, and maybe because of that, or perhaps as writing becomes a more defining element of who I am, the desire for people who share the same culture as me, whether that be a community of English speakers, or of arty people, or gay people - that desire has been getting stronger and stronger. For now I have been going back to London more and more. But I'm thinking about reorganising my life long term to maybe make that easier.

Daniel: I can relate! For many years, I avoided writers like housework. I would be terrified to walk into a reading series for fear of having to acknowledge the name of my desired profession out loud. It seems that for me, book writing and publishing has been a coming-out exercise, a purging of shame. I have yet to discover the source of that shame, however. I'll let you know when I do. Back to painting. Do you find any painterly aspects to be lurking in your writing?

Nick: No, I wouldn't say so really. I have always been more interested in what people think and why they do what they do than what they look like. I describe very little of the surroundings, or of peoples' attributes. I tend to go for a couple of telling details and leave the reader to fill in the blanks, which always seems to work well for me. People always say that they imagined exactly how this or that place looked - I think I just give enough leeway for their own mind's eye to come up with a picture. And I always hated those bits in novels where someone walks into a room and you get this three page description you have to skip about what colour the drapes are... Because there's always the worry that amidst the pages of descriptive fluff you might skip something essential to the plot-line. I guess if I was a painter I would be a minimalist - a simple splash here and there and let the viewer imagine the rest. I think you're similar too - I don't remember much unnecessary detail in Shuck. The main thing that has stayed with me is the lists... very OCD - and very poignant. It's a stunningly beautiful novel.

Daniel: That's nice of you. Yeah, I hate drapes, too, enough to never use the word in fiction. From a writing point of view, the physical world interests me. Last night I was reading passages of Shuck for the first time since it was published, and those lists you refer to--found objects that the main character obsesses over--reminded me of the things I've lost over the years. I'm thinking of a white plastic Right Said Fred LP that went missing after an international relocation, sheet music for pieces I'd written for a string quartet and then given to street buskers. Objects are my only link to rapidly fading memories. I have taken very few pictures. Any lost objects you'd like to track down?

Nick: Not many, most things seem to eventually always reappear. A friend of my father used to insist that "things disappear." I never really knew what he meant, but these days I can only agree that keys, socks, glasses, pens, cameras and mobile phones do indeed disappear. They also often reappear exactly where you knew they were to start with. I think one day we will find a scientific explanation for this... perhaps it's to do with worm-holes in space, perhaps cheeky pixies with a twisted sense of humour. Of course some stuff is always lost with each break-up, and it can take years to realise what has been lost... in more than one sense!
You said that you write a column. What's that about? And which do you prefer - writing columns or novels?

Daniel: Actually, I've been thinking a lot about the differences between writing a column and writing a novel, though I have no real preference--it's just different. First off, writing for a tri-weekly newspaper is a very rapid cycle from start to finish, taking roughly a month: getting an idea while listening to a great album through shower curtains, writing the piece, publishing it, responding to feedback, and getting paid. It’s great to move onto an entirely new train of thought every few weeks, and to have creativity driven by deadlines. A column gives me a greater level of interaction with readers because it’s an online dialogue, a way of becoming part of each other’s routines. It also gives me a chance to experiment with content and writing styles that are new for me.

Nick: I have written regular columns myself, so I know what you mean. All the same, I think I prefer the free-flow freedom of the novel... start when the inspiration comes, write until it is finished, or more, even, watch as it writes itself. I never quite feel like it's me that's in control if you know what I mean.

Daniel: Oh yes, you mean when the character takes you hostage, ties you to the railroad tracks (remember those?) and throws in a mean plot twist?
On columns, have you ever noticed that English doesn’t have a word to describe "an installment of a column?" How come "television" has the word "episode", but writers have to go around yammering "I just wrote a new column for my column?" Maybe it's a grand plot to discredit us. What about calling individual installments "shards?"
A shard is less substantial than a column, and might collectively compose a column. Can you think of any potential new words?

Nick: I just used to say a "text" - I'm working on a text for my column. But I think a shard sounds nicer. If we had the Institute Francais, they could just invent a new word for it – a committee could sit around and decide that it shall be henceforth known as a ‘pallager’ and let anyone who doesn't use the word talk to the police about it. You know they invented a word for Email - they called it a Mèl. But no one used it. They sued a few public bodies to force them to say Mel instead of Email, but it never caught on. The government are now using courriel - which I believe came from over your way, but it's still not catching on. Everyone just says Email. Language is such a strange thing... it really is a living entity, and as soon as you try and train it you end up with something ridiculous, like those bushes they clip to the shape of a Penis. Something absurd and useless.

Daniel: Yesterday I read in Canada's Globe and Mail that the word "smell" will live on as a noun, but will eventually die out as a verb! "Dirty" will apparently be scrubbed out in 750 years, which is a real relief, because that gives me time to write a few more novels full of street trash. Researchers have been studying word replacement techniques in Indo-European languages through computer modeling. Nick, I'm pretty sure we could jam the system if we tried...

Nick: That's a weird idea - that something as seemingly random and evolving as language should be model-able on a computer. Of course you would have to wait 750 years to see if they're right, and, barring some major scientific advances, I don't suppose the author will care that much by then. I read a great essay by the Australian author, Robert Dessaix about words that are missing in different languages, and what that reveals about different cultures, because of course, if you don't have a word for something, you can't think it, which is really quite a mind-blower. For instance, there is no such word as assertive in French. The closest you can get is demanding, aggressive or stubborn. There is no word for "care" either. You can worry about someone, think about them, be preoccupied, but you can't care about them. Interestingly enough, you can "not care" (s'en foutre) which produces the bizarre situation of having to say that you "don't not-care". An entire language having a word for "not caring", but not for "caring" is kind of scary, don't you think?

Daniel: What's there to care about? Just kidding, I think that language has interior logic that allows people to work around "missing" words. I've always found it curious that English doesn't have an equivalent for "je te boude". The definition is caught somewhere between "I'm sulking" and "I'm boycotting you", but English speakers have developed many other ways of expressing that thought (see: "I'm not talking to that asshole", or the perennial "talk to the hand"). What upsets me, however, is that according to the popular urban--or arctic--myth, Inuit languages have dozens of words to describe different types of snow, but anglophone Montrealers only have one way of asking "when is the fucking plow going to clear the street?"

Nick: You can work around the missing words, but in the end you aren't ever thinking the exact same thought, because you can't - which is scary because you realise that your own thought processes are entirely constrained by your vocabulary and culture, which, I guess, is why learning other languages is such a good idea.

Daniel: So true, so true. And we must create the words we need, or someone will do it for us.

Nick: My first novel 50 Reasons is currently being translated into French and it's stunning just how different the result is - it truly is becoming an entirely different story. Are there any plans for translating Shuck or Tattoo This Madness In?

Daniel: There was once interest in translating Tattoo This Madness In into Italian as part of a research project. I'd be curious to see the impact on queer Italian punks among former Jehovah’s Witnesses. Does the language of activism and rebellion translate better than other strains of language, just because it has to? I have yet to discover the answer.

Nick: What else are you working on? I expect you have been pretty busy with promotion? How's that going?

Daniel: Publicity for Shuck is going just swimmingly. We've put the US PR machine into gear, which includes a lot of big news I can't discuss just yet. It's safe to say, though, that I'm hearing rumours of a buzz.
It's amazing how promoting Shuck in the United States is merging my readership with my porn fan base, which is still thriving. I think it's healthy for everyone involved to have access to the new, integrated "me". It gives me a sense of wholeness, and it's a pleasure to continue threads I broke off a long time ago. Of course, that begs the question if I'll go back into porn. The only answer I have at this point is "why wouldn't I?"

Nick: Gosh you could organise integrated events for the new integrated you combining live porn performance and book signings! Now there's an event I'd cross the Atlantic for. I have some comparatively traditional reading/signing events coming up in London in March and April but to be honest, just standing up (clothed) in front of people terrifies me. Any tips?

Daniel: Well, you could start your schtick by asking the audience a question. Not only does this diffuse the pressure of that killer, opening minute, but it also brings the audience into the proceedings. Here's a good question: "What's the French equivalent of 'to care'? First correct answer gets a free book." Get it?

Nick: It's a good idea, I might try it!

© BIGfib 2009.