A Quiet Little Madness

The last time I was in Toronto - and it's been awhile - I abused the Queen Street West hospitality of my cool CBC-TV host, was publicly humiliated on college radio for not knowing the particulars of Yo Yo Ma, trashed the stage at the Bathurst Street Theatre and - if memory serves - was summarily dismissed for my "New York attitude" by The Globe & Mail.

It was that kind of weekend. Add the six months of Miami-Dade County Stockade time I did in '98 for winning a fight against a couple of kooky, coked-out Ottawans and one might consider excusing my extreme indifference to Canada's de facto capital. In fact, so complete has been my bias that other than that cat Cronenberg, the rag named Now, and a shop called Flair - never mind the usual polyglot public information spiels - I know next to nothing of the town.

So what, right? My subject, much more astute with such matters, would now tell me to stay the hell out of it. That this is not about me; it's about a book. And he'd be right. But I come not to harangue but to herald a work sinuous enough to smash to bits my cultivated prejudice of our northerly neighbors. So bear with me, please; it's been a long time coming.

Sparrow NightsIn Sparrow Nights (Counterpoint Press, $24), David Gilmour, one of Canada's brightest minds, reveals in full the psychosis I've always suspected lurked beneath the prim facade of Toronto's gleaming streets. Call it, the cacophony of order, the rustlings of shadows of propriety, the crack in a carefully cultivated veneer.

But as Leonard Cohen says: "There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."

And so what if the light's a little shady? We're talkin' about a specific kind of deep, dark beauty here, the beautiful calamity of a learned, cultured soul losing it's grip.

And oh what a wonderful slip it is.

Professor Darius Hollaway digs a particular nubile young woman with a particularly dirty young mind - no surprise there. Neither are we surprised to learn the dear Professor doesn't know what he's got until it's gone. What is surprising, however, is the way he handles - no, revels in - his love's leaving. I mean it's not as if there aren't any other prospects on campus. Maybe it's all that Chekov, or perhaps the somber Symbolist poetry that is his bag, but it's almost as if the relationship didn't really begin until it ended.

Bang. Absence creates a vacuum, a hole in his world that needs filling, and what better way to fill in the blanks than with obsession? Sure there's the requisite period of mopery and mourning, and the dry dull encounters with strange women who dig sad sacks, but that's a mere phase. It's the obsession he's after and obsession he'll have.

But how obsessive can one get? Well, if you're one of Gilmour's creations, quite obsessive indeed (think Nicholson Baker's Vox, without the chit chat). Still even the mind of the most accomplished obsessive sometimes wanders off topic, and if he's any good and mad at all that's where things really become interesting. This ratchet-minded Professor is no different. Push comes to shoves comes to very unprofessional behavior, until snap and the crackle finally pops. Imagine acting out your most devilish thoughts; it is that good.

It is said that if you can survive love you can survive anything, and Gilmour finds great joy in the truth of that notion. In Sparrow Nights love is gloriously wicked and suitably cruel, but it's the anything part that comes hot on the head-over-heels that really pushes the envelope pushes it 'round the bend and all the way back to love. What a trip.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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