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?

The TTC union head whose actual head you would never actually want to pat if you somehow thought he did a good job, Bob Kinnear, has lambasted the petulance and stalking of TTC management and riders, to use his terms. He has also promised to hold “town-hall meetings” with riders.

Union members continually lie to the public by claiming that photography is banned on the TTC. (It isn’t. Only commercial photography without a permit is prohibited.) The union has to adjust to the fact that, in the 21st century, it borders on impossible to buy a phone that doesn’t also include a camera. Most people carry phones. Many carry actual cameras. People are going to use them; it’s allowed. The union must adapt to the 21st century.

All the other issues are dodges. This isn’t about washroom breaks or management interference. It’s all about getting filmed committing a misdeed. Rarely, it is also about being falsely accused of committing a misdeed. I stepped in and corrected such a claim over the weekend.

Let’s reuse an early-Aughties buzzword and call all these people with cameras citizen journalists. They – we – aren’t going away. We will continue to take pictures, sometimes for purposes unrelated to union members. (I have 3,000 TTC photographs. Barely any of them contain any employees whatsoever.)

I am offering to convene a group of what we will continue to call citizen journalists to meet Kinnear and anyone else from the union. We’d do this in advance of the town-hall meetings and in private. (Off the record, if they want.) Who would attend? Everyone I can find who has published what the union would call a stalking or harassing or gotcha! photograph or video, plus a few others. But no hacks from the mainstream media; they’re irrelevant.

We would have an honest discussion, quite possibly with raised voices and a great deal of swearing, about the reasons people take pictures. Only some of those reasons pertain to the union. Then the union could go into these town-hall meetings having been briefed by the actual people they’re really complaining about.

Ball’s in your court, Bob.

The would-be agent who seems to understand me better than I understand myself had, as you know, forwarded me a contract in the form of a PDF export from MS Word. I eventually quit beating around the bush, rewrote it to my liking, typeset the damned thing, and sent it back for comments.

And waited.

Eventually I got a 23 K top-posted message suggesting we talk on the phone. I eventually quit beating around the bush and wrote him back stating I hate talking on the phone but would do it; when would be a good time, I asked?

And waited.

I then sent another message with the full text of my revised contract pre-quoted in an E-mail, with remedial instructions on how to interleave comments. (I shouldn’t have to be doing this in the 21st century. Your E-mail sucks.) I also told him not to even attempt it on his iPhone. What did I do next? I waited.

I decided to print two copies of the contract, inscribe an original signature on both, and mail them, via poste escargot, to the office address listed on his original contract. Attached was a Post-It® asking him to sign both copies and return one. “Then we’re in business.”

That letter came back undeliverable.

In the interim, he’s complained about the number of messages in his inbox (I keep up) and has boasted to the press of selling a blog-to-book that manifestly is not akin to Look at This Fucking Hipster’s.

A writer can get by without an agent. The converse is not true.

Adam Giambrone told the Star that in fact he, as chair of the TTC, merely set “policy” and is not responsible for any and all screwups.

“The chair of the TTC is chair of the board of commissioners … The commission is ultimately responsible for the policy; it hires the chief general manager and the chief general manager and staff are responsible for operations.”

So you’re saying you’re not responsible?

“I didn’t say I wasn’t responsible, but operations are generally under the purview of the chief general manager…. The board sets the fare, but in terms of how you implement it, the chair of the TTC board and the commissioners are not experts in transit operations – and they’re not supposed to be.”

Policies are statements of principles; policies are ideas. But the Toronto Transit Commission does a lot more than state policies. It orders specific actions, dictates operations, and hands out a shitload of money. These are not “policies.”

Linda Diebel of the Star could have conducted the following research herself, but we don’t expect thoroughness from print publications anymore. (The Star endlessly repeated the TTC’s lies about “hoarders” costing the TTC “millions” because honest people wanted to buy tokens at the stated retail price.)

I looked at the last six months’ worth of TTC meeting minutes and easily found the following operational micromanagement.

• 2009.12.16:
  • Approved layout of new exits at Donlands and Greenwood
  • Approved building a streetcar yard at Leslie and Lake Shore; will pay extra to add to a park
  • Requested new ways to reduce subway suicides. (Suicides are not “policy”)
• 2009.11.17: Specified a fare increase down to the penny
• 2009.10.29:
  • Approved $13.7 million and $379.4 million contracts
  • Awarded three contracts, two of which had stated costs totalling $4.844 million
  • Approved design of Steeles West
• 2009.09.24:
  • Awarded contracts for $14.5 million and $14.34 million
  • Approved design for Sheppard West and York University stations
• 2009.:
  • Awarded $9.983 million, $10.982 million, and $19,704,314 contracts
  • Approved “finishes” for Union station. (The Commission specified and ordered what your shoes will touch)
  • Approved service-level increases for 2010, 2011, and 2014, including “[s]ervice every 10 minutes or better, during the daytime and evening, every day,” along with transit-signal priority, special lanes on streets, hiring 52 new supervisors, building 75 bus shelters, and “undertaking physical improvements to bus facilities at specified subway stations. ” Ordered TTC to hold “public-information and input meetings”
  • Approved rebuild of bus loop at Seneca
  • Mused about renaming Dupont station
• 2009.08.09:
  • Awarded $58,446,480.60 contract, plus $9 mil for “office supplies, toner and copier paper.” (The Commission oversees every sheet of paper and dot of toner printed on them.) Awarded $13.4 million contract to Quebec bank and $385,000 to consultants
  • Approved spending even more money ($345,000 more) on Cumberland entrance at Bay
  • Micromanaged 501 streetcar

Adam Giambrone is wrong when he claims somebody else carries out operations. Somebody else also does, but the body he heads issues specific orders. This isn’t “policy,” and anyway, policy is a relevant thing to talk about when you’re running for mayor.

Isn’t it disappointing how the little people who will (or won’t) vote for him just can’t bring themselves to overlook all those pesky operational details?

• If you’re the driver of eastbound 501 streetcar 4225 at 1100 hours on a Saturday, it’s better if you don’t wear two visible black earbud headphones. Smart drivers wear only one, on the left side, though that will still be visible to the keen passenger. (Black drivers often make the mistake of wearing icing-sugar-white iPod headphones. Dodged that bullet!)

• It also helps if, when challenged with “You’re not seriously listening to an iPod or using a cellphone, are you?,” one does not insult the passenger’s intelligence.

• When the passenger continues to insist that you verify you are not listening to anything or using a phone in contravention of regulations, resist the hair-trigger impulse to call CIS and ask for the “police” to attend. Also, don’t lie and bellow into the TRUMP phone that the situation “may get out of hand.”

• If the story you’re trying to sell us that of course you weren’t using a cellphone, do not then pull it out and start videotaping the passenger with it. (A BlackBerry on the Rogers network.)

  

• Finally, do not lie to the passenger and claim photography is not allowed on the TTC. This is an especially unwise option when:

  • you are yourself taking photographs on the TTC, and

  • the passenger leans over and reads ¶3.17 of TTC Bylaw Nº 1 out loud. (“No person shall operate any camera, video-recording device, movie camera or any similar device for commercial purposes upon the transit system without authorization” [emphasis added].)

  Also do not demand the passenger delete the photographs from his camera, both of which are of course his own private property.

Special bonus career coaching for middle management

• If you’re a TTC supervisor with 23 years’ experience, as Ms E. Stubbs (Route Supervisor, Eglinton Division), claimed to be, also do not lie to the passenger by insisting, over and over again, often by interrupting the passenger, that photography is prohibited. (It isn’t.) Another tip? Do not drop buzzwords like “9/11” and “terrorism” to justify the lie.

• If you’re trying to de-escalate a situation and recommend a more amicable course of action the next time a passenger sees a driver using a cellphone, do not also offer the opinion that citizen documentation of TTC wrongdoing is “getting out of hand.” Do not also implicitly confirm the suggestion that drivers are now just immediately calling CIS whenever any dispute of any kind happens.

But I do want to offer a word of praise: The driver admitted to the supervisor that he was using a phone. He had no real choice – everybody could see the foot-long length of headphone cord dangling under his coat.

Average people now feel quite empowered to document everything the TTC does wrong. Things get trickier when the guy you’re arguing with is a journalist with insider knowledge.

Eye 74 (Winter 2009), its “Berlin special,” reveals another weakness of the design-magazine form. It turns out you actually can, in a Tetrisian manner, pack a feature well with one squib after another. When those squibs are accompanied by one or maybe a couple of photographs each, what you’ve actually written is a blog post. Eye must, at a subconscious level, know this, since its own blog actually ran postings that were functionally equivalent to and interchangeable with its “Berlin special.”

Fontana Modern Masters

Having exhausted Penguin, Puffin, and Pelican, anglobibliophilia takes a new turn this issue with James Pardey’s retrospective on Fontana Modern Masters, a book series that began in 1970 and used a shocking palette of yellow/orange/green/blue. Buy enough of the books, assemble them together like tiles, and the cover patterns interlocked to become a kind of op-art painting.

Eye’s online version of the article of course fails to show you a single picture; good thing Pardey has his own site. [continue with: ‘Eye’ visits Berlin, unnoticed →]

I took Mr. QUENTIN CRISP to luncheon circa 1994. He had knowingly arranged his life-style so that such treats were possible; one merely rang him up. “Mr. Crisp? I am a writer from Canada. I’d like to take you to luncheon.” “Let me get out the holy book,” he drawled, audibly hauling over a daybook that quite possibly bespoke a busy lunch schedule or was completely blank. We met at his favourite greasy spoon on the Lower East Side. I gave him the shish kebab from my Greek “salad.”

In How to Have a Life<hyphen>Style, Mr. Crisp presaged phenomena that are now commonplace.

• Above all it is necessary to inculcate one’s own individualities, Mr. Crisp argues, for that is the genesis of style.

  Most people are at present content to cherish their mere identity. This is not enough…. You have to polish up your raw identity into a life-style so that you can barter with the outside world for what you want.

• To become famous, talent is an asset. But nothing more.

  It used to be thought that only the rich and famous needed style. Television has changed all that. We can now see that there are people in our society who can earn vast sums of money, become the world’s sweetheart, be photographed at airports, and be known by name to hotel proprietors without displaying talent of any kind.

• Mr. Crisp anticipated Fran Lebowitz in a number of ways, though they share a core message – “I don’t like writing. I like having written.” As did another wit.

  As [Mr.] Noël Coward has said, television is not a thing to watch. It is a thing to be on.

• Speaking of which: As Mr. Crisp has elsewhere noted, in New York you are on the minute you walk out the door. Now it is true everywhere.

  Any one of us, be he ever so humble, may find himself “on,” and woe to him if he is not prepared with his own style. […]

  [W]e must do more than think of [television] as an enemy against whose intermittent stares we must brace ourselves. We must welcome its interest and rise joyfully to its challenge by taking our life-style with us wherever we go…. Soon there will be very few professions that are not also the profession of acting.

• Of course reality makes for good television. But how real is it?

  Once upon a time the dross of everyday existence was considered quite unsuitable material for drama. Life was accidental, repetitious, unedifying. Tragedies were the opposite – formal, articulate and shot through with moral purpose. In spite of the apparent distance between these two planets, they were secretly set on a collision course from the beginning of time….Now the situation is so bad that we can plot the point where the drama and the documentary will crash. It will happen on television….

  Mr. Kenneth Loach, the television and film director, is… on record as having said that he wants television plays to look like the news. What a poor wingless creature he must be! Why does he not want the news to be as well acted as a play?

• On “that classless, stateless, all-purpose human unit that now wanders up and down King’s Road or any similar street in any of the big cities of the world,” the connected teenager:

  This being has been deprived of all the smaller group styles on which he could have begun to build an individual style. To start from the ground up, without help, seems too arduous a task. He finds it easier to identify merely with the fact of being young and has more in common with the teenagers of Tokyo than with an elder brother…. The young have become like those primitive tribes whose oneness is such that their members can communicate with one another without speech and, if necessary, across hundreds of miles of desert.

• The electronic book will take the form of an eternal river. It will also come with cover art that is a skiamorph of another era.

  If the spoken word is not quickly restored to health, we shall soon be in a very bad way indeed, for the written word is on the way out altogether….

  [A] book will be in a little vulcanite box (in a Penguin paperback colour to show to which category of literate it belongs). Proceeding from one corner of this contraption there will be a flexible tube with a mechanical device at the end of it which the “reader” will fit into his ear like a hearing aid. Once in a while he will go to the library and say to the girl behind the counter, “I’ve come to get my Ian Flemings recharged.” Then, on the way home on the bus – I mean the municipal helicopter – as he sits plugged in to whatever book is in his breast pocket, a fatuity born of murmuring sound will pass into his face.

  When that day comes, literary style as we know it will be obsolete.

(Via.)

(UPDATED) Or, as he would be more likely to write his name so Google can never find it, D e n i s M c G r a t h. And it isn’t pronounced “denee.”

• See, TV is a software business. Period.
• I feel like the industry is just like the usual suspects chatting to the usual suspects.
• I wrote Charlie Jade really fast and still maintained good quality.
• My favourite thing I wrote – ever – didn’t get picked up.
• Not many people can write thoughtfully about Television, which is different from being a TV critic. But critics must have the space to judge as they see fit.
• Just forget about talking a Canadian TV gatekeeper out of hitting viewers over the head with repetition.
• Writers are much too attached to the precise execution of their ideas.
• Canadian TV might actually get somewhere if we had writers’ rooms like the Americans.
• The room is sacred.
• Canadian TV executives are snobs and a lot of TV writers are frustrated film auteurs. They won’t even talk about the only successful Canadian TV shows, Trailer Park Boys and Corner Gas, because those shows are beneath them.
• See, I’m a TV writer. I love the medium. It means I have a TV sensibility. And I will not apologize for that.

Update

(2010.02.01) How many times has Denis begun a sentence with “See” followed by a comma?

1. “See, we kind of ping-pong back and forth between having to hear a lot of hateful stuff – some of it understandable, some of it not.”
2. “See, the series is the carrot.”
3. “See, that Web site, the entire ethos behind it, is a ripple off the impact of Evel Knievel.”
4. “See, so though snow may be falling from the sky, it’s just possible that the sky might not be falling with it.”
5. “See, I’m really not doing it justice.”
6. “See, up in the Territories it turns out that the population – a robust 75,000 or so – is quite interested in and involved with their legislative process (we’re talking like 80% turnouts at elections).”
7. “See, our trusty broadcasters and BDUs have come together to complain (once again) to the CRTC about how broke they are.”
8. “See, even in the age where everyone’s potentially a publisher & a content creator, the relationship between wheat & chaff exists.”

(Originally published 2006.12.14 18:37.)

Because even lycanthropes can suddenly need a replacement jackhammer bit.