Just in the last week I have received three different invitations from Karen Walton to events sponsored by Ink Canada, the loose group of Canadian screenplay and teleplay writers. You may remember Walton from such Canadian feature films as Ginger Snaps, and as a prominent writer on the series that told more lies about gay men than anything in 20th-century television, Amerikanski Queer as Folk.

I note the foregoing because everybody’s favourite teleplay writer Denis McGrath recently wrote me an electronic-mail message that, when not calling me names, claimed that various wymmynz at the Ink Canada boozeup I attended complained I was “leering” at them. I talked to 15 people that night, of whom five were women, and of that number, three of them were Karen Walton and her girlfriends. (The others were a struggling writer and a Film Centre grad.)

Just on a mathematical basis alone, I must have packed a lot of leering into those chitchats. The objection I raise is that I don’t even notice women in the ordinary course of events, and, as an homosexualist, not only do I not look at them closely but would find that somewhat displeasing. I don’t even like watching documentaries about mammograms.

And after all this, they bombard me with invites to their friendly soirées. (Karen, get me a Diet Coke, will you? Twist of lime?)

Meanwhile, I guess it was no problem at all that I said the following to the fellow it applied to: “What’s it like being the only writer who works out?” And I guess nobody but me and Callaghan overheard that atrocious off-colour joke by a writer about his wife’s propensity for oral sex. McGrath also alleged that Walton or somebody had told the Paddock to bar me from the premises, something the Paddock wouldn’t confirm when I followed up on it, as I of course did.

All I remember is having a great time talking to all sorts of interesting writers, and being sneered at by Walton and her princessy girlfriend, who mocked my name.

People are always trying to nail down the difference between American TV and Canadian TV. The difference is: With the Americans, smart people write dumb shows.

The Internets, like other young men, hold grudges. The issue is not your own desire or need to change. It is enemies’ and opponents’ desire and need to stop you from doing that.

For longtime Internet users

The burden of past work makes you feel like you can never change your mind. Those with long memories and good search skills – few in number but armed to the teeth – can accuse you of hypocrisy and back it up with your own words. They conduct a gotcha campaign like an operative from a rival political party, with equal bloodlust.

Everything you did yesterday and last year is viewed as a guarantee of what you will do tomorrow and next year. But what if you are facing an upheaval? What if you’re getting divorced, or you left the Mormon church? What if you’re ashamed of a major upheaval? What if you lost your job and can’t find another one?

What if you’ve just been keeping things quiet all these years, like being a devout Mormon? Or keeping your spouse’s name quiet but not a secret, just out of probity? What if you decide to talk more about something you never particularly hid?

Can you make important changes like these imaginary examples? Once you do, at that point whatever you write is at odds with what you wrote before. Won’t people insist that proves you’re a hypocrite?

What if you have matured or simply changed and you want to do things differently? Will people let you? Will you hold back because you think people will criticize you for having changed your mind?

What makes you afraid to change your mind? Isn’t it other people?

For new Internet users

Every new platform attracts stupider and stupider people and induces them to act nastier and nastier. From E-mail software that defaults to top-posting (yes, it really is as bad as I have been telling you) to Twits to Tumblrs, the latter of which are at root cyberbullying media, the simpler it is to go online the trashier the results. LiveJournal and MySpace should have been a warning: The smartest people got online early. Then there’s everybody else.

I disagree with paternalistic predictions that young people today will come to regret all the personal details they publish. Eventually we will greet the first elected head of state with a portfolio of “embarrassing” party pics indistinguishable from the voters’.

But by then all those people will have become experienced Internet users, albeit of a different and worse Internet, and they too will find it is nearly impossible to articulate a significant change to anything important in their lives.

Comments

Anonymous online comments have caused tremendous harm to modern society. Comments sections in general are an insidious danger unless proven otherwise and ruthlessly patrolled. Even then, it is the patrolmen who suffer from the comments, not completely unlike police officers who must watch child pornography so they can testify in court that it really was that.

Wolves lurk in the forest. In my 20th year online, I know that trying to start over or doing something different or just changing your mind carries so much risk of attack and vituperation as to become a deterrent.

I have completely changed my mind about one thing: The permanence of records. I no longer believe you should never rewrite or delete something you once wrote, assuming you have no intent to deceive. In many cases you can specify what you changed or at least say why. Rewriting the past is not always Orwellian.

But will everybody else let you do it? Aren’t you afraid to try? Hasn’t your own experience proven to you how quickly the mob bares its fangs?

I wish to register my objection to the Stockholm syndrome afflicting users of (“if”) iPhone OS, a system on which it is phenomenally difficult to type. We must emerge from our state of denial: This kind of virtual keyboard may be able to do more than a hardware keyboard but it works worse.

It isn’t just that it can take four tries to type a seven-letter word accurately (12 seconds for one word). Or that you can leave a word behind five words back with the wrong initial letter, requiring complex fingerpoint cursor repositioning and backspacing to fix it. (Today’s example: “Onternet.”) Nor am I talking about the near-impossibility of typing extended non-alphabetic strings that aren’t just numbers. The fact that a quadriplegic using a mouthstick and word prediction under Windows XP can type faster and more accurately isn’t the issue, either. It is the systemic failure of the exception and correction dictionary that queers the system.

Apple has linguists on staff. Don’t they use their own phones? I don’t understand how they could possibly have shipped a product that legitimately acts as though people wish to write fir for for. People just do not want to talk about Douglas firs that often. The same applies to us for is and of for if, both of which are distinguishable by context. A further systemic error causes capitalized words mid-sentence to be lower-cased and begin with z. (Why? You undershot and pressed z instead of the adjacent Shift.)

The prevalence of these errors is calculable. Just Google the name of an iPhone Twitter application plus a misspelling or a phrase that uses it. (Twitter will usually publish the name of the authoring application on the Web version of a Twit; you can isolate Twitter usage that way.) From what I can tell, Tweetie users have mistyped for as fir over 12,000 times, even controlling for legitimate uses (as in phrases also using cedar, pine, or Douglas and, to separate other senses of Tweetie, anything relating to Looney Tunes). That’s just one source of iPhone text.

In which other area of Apple’s business would Steve tolerate a system that triggers thousands of provable errors for a single word? Why hasn’t it been fixed?

When will Apple raze this forest of 12,000 firs?

Now imagine how much worse it must be for Finnish, German, and Thai. (I trust you understand why it would be worse.)

What’s not to like about Republic of Doyle? (Except of course for those two things that aren’t very important to most people but couldn’t be more important to some people.) This brainchild of a fella who’s too tall to be called a scamp, Mr. ALLEN HAWCO, has fallen prey to Canadian snobbery. The same kind of TV critics who dismissed Corner Gas and especially Trailer Park Boys have found a new whipping boy, one with bright blue eyes, a bit of a high forehead, and no chest hair whatsoever.

Let’s demolish a few objections.

1. Setting

   Myles McNutt:

   [W]hat kind of cultural statement does a show make when it proves that St. John’s is just as capable as Toronto of housing a generic procedural private-investigation series?

   My argument is that it isn’t a cultural statement at all. I’ve written thesis chapters on how

   I’m just going to stop there. Anybody writing theses on Canadian TV is obviously gonna hate Republic of Doyle.

   C. Archer:

   The biggest problem with Republic of Doyle is that Newfoundland is ancillary to the show’s plot. RoD is a generic mismatched-partners detective drama…. With a rewrite or two, Republic of Doyle can be set anywhere in Canada…. Maybe I’m missing out on RoD’s subtleties. I don’t know.

   No, C., all you and Myles did was jump the gun. On Episode (10)3, there was Mary Walsh as a kind of doyenne of George St., complaining bitterly of the citadel to alcohol from which she could not extricate herself. Episode 5? We’re going off-island – but we’re not going down the road to Toronto. We took the ferry to St. Pierre, with apparently real exterior shots captured by second unit.

   If car chases made The Streets of San Francisco special because a car chase in flatland Omaha or Fargo would be boring as shite, car chases in St. John’s make Republic of Doyle special. It’s a city where every second street is a hill and half of them cross at Escherian angles.

   Unmentioned also is the depiction of St. John’s as part of the 21st century. I expect my dicks to carry an iPhone. I may not expect my dicks’ dads’ missuses to hack into suspects’ VoIP voicemail via MacBook, but I will be pleasantly surpised when I see it.

   Republic of Doyle is a genial detective series set in St. John’s, where sometimes things happen that could happen only there. “Setting” can hardly exclude universal human activities.

2. Girls! Girls! Girls!

   Now, this one I don’t get at all. Peter Jackson: “The problem is, Jake Doyle usually succeeds. The women are all horny and indiscriminate; all but a couple of them exist for little other purpose than to throw themselves at Jake at least once every show…. In a nutshell, the show is sexist.”

   Actually, Nikki is at best ambivalent about divorcing Jake. We see her ambivalence in a true-to-life way: Nobody fucked her better, not even that big black guy they obviously airlifted in from Toronto and The Border, so she comes back for more. Other lasses are former Jake squeezes.

   Meanwhile, Jake is baffled to the point of disgust by Rose’s desire for his dad. Malachi has been around the bend a few times and always looks like he just woke up after ten years’ slumber, but if anything, Malachi is Rose’s boytoy. (Des is another of those, this time not metaphorically.)

   And when tubby ginger Walter finally gets rogered, he’s the bottom. (Just like in real life.)

   The sexual politics of Doyle? The sexual politics are the show is just sexual. These critics – all of them guys – may be inwardly unnerved by Hawco’s manly suavity. Jake Doyle is tons of fun to be around, and to get done by.

   My esteemed colleague and I do wonder how, if ever, they’re going to handle the homosexualist question. With dykes, we assume. Like in the territories, Newfoundland is crawling with ’em.

What about those two pesky issues?

Producer Rob Blackie admits that postproduction is a continuous process. They’re pretty much still posting episodes for March right now.

All right, Blackie. When the hell are you gonna fix your captioning and description? Friends don’t let friends hire amateurs for a show as good as this.

And I’m not the only one who noticed that pretty much every other CBC star has appeared on the show.

Question for the conveneress of Ink Canada: Do you and your girlfriends seriously think this correspondent was “leering” at you at the last boozeup?

Such powers of observation! I’m sorry I made such a mess with that cheeseburger. Buy me a shrimp cocktail next time?

Denis McGrath (heavily copy-edited):

I said, “I kind of look at it as – it’s my job to fail until I don’t. You try something, fail, fail, fail, keep failing, and hopefully eventually you look at something and say ‘That’s not a total failure,’ and then you nurture that little ember and follow it and hopefully you get somewhere.”

And the producer nodded and said, “That’s what separates real, effective writers from those who just have ‘ideas.’ Regular folk hit that first fail and either refuse to see it, or freak out about it.” […] So to all my peeps in rooms or pounding out pages today, wherever you are, here’s to today’s #fails.

My esteemed colleague is not being honest with himself. Let’s accept his suggestion that, in his teleplay writing, he fails and fails until he succeeds. He does not do the same on his personal Weblog, which has remained unimproved since it came into being.

I don’t like his tone; maybe that’s the sort of thing that really doesn’t change and isn’t up for discussion. But every single aspect of the appearance, code, and copy of his blog is atrocious, and to reach that level of ugly you have to work at it. With 133 inline font changes on the homepage, it’s least unreadable only in no-CSS view, which few can manage. Printing won’t help: There isn’t a print stylesheet.

Also, in cold light of day and after years of experience, it’s clear he hews to what I now call the Ouimet-McGrath school of Weblog comments, where only the nastiest survive. (They are the ones fed regurgitated vermin by their mothers.)

I can hold these objections if I wish. They pale in comparison to another objection: I don’t get any credit for my own improvements. I’ve gone to a great deal of effort in recent years to live up to high standards, and I don’t mean valid HTML. I mean, in essence, hypocrisy reduction.

As an example, McGrath assailed me for daring to delete blog posts. That’s happened three times since 1998, and anyway, these are not stone tablets we’re dealing with. Nonetheless, I thought about it and published a policy that offers researchers the chance to view any deleted item.

I view this as an ethically creditable policy. It is not made up of whole cloth. It merely explains what I already do. Additionally, when I get something hugely wrong, I publish a correction and leave the original up for posterity (first example; second). The stone-tablets analogy is not actually as imperfect as one might think, given the work I put into ensuring my sites function in future equipment.

(McGrath failed to mention the many blog comments I deleted or edited on the Tea Makers, including every unsalutary reference to him that could be deleted or edited. I also banned one epithet outright. This is an odd thing to overlook for a man who believes comment fields are meant for vituperation and character attack. Someone he himself attacks had tried – unprompted – to help him out. It takes a lot to ignore this sort of thing, since I mailed him directly to explain what I was doing.)

In this case, then, even when a particularly vicious and hateful third party levelled an accusation, I assessed and addressed its core. I tried to improve. I have seen no improvement of any kind in the years I have read Denis McGrath. Meanwhile, what I do to improve goes unacknowledged. (Some decided long ago they hate me and that’s that. For them, Robert Downey Jr. never got out of jail.)

Now, through an emergent or power-law effect, McGrath has become a kind of de facto blog spokesperson for teleplay writers in Canada. This has trickled up the ladder: True to Canadian form, if you do enough media you get to do more media, as McGrath displays on his guest segments on Q. I like his segments on that show. He’s also fine delivering presentations, from what I’ve watched. I see little he should be proud of online.

I think the small coterie of teleplay writers, supporters of Canadian television, and related fans should start a new emergent process. They should make somebody else the beneficiary of the power law. At the last Ink Canada boozeup, I talked to 15 people, but all I saw McGrath doing was backing up to the bar staring at the room or talking to one friend, or sitting alone thumbing his iPhone.

There’s a leadership void staring us in the face. There is a great deal of room for a writer for the screen who blogs ethically, well, and under continuous improvement.

That isn’t Denis McGrath. Who will it be?