Monday, September 26, 2016

"Turning tables"

Feb. 15, 2016 "Turning tables": I cut out this article by Susan Krashinsky in the Globe and Mail on Mar. 11, 2015.  This is the last restaurant article from me, at least for awhile.  I'm sure some of you guys are laughing at this part.  This is the 4th one:

It is not yet seven o’clock on a frigid Friday night, and there is already a lineup at Pizzeria Libretto. All the tables at the hip Neapolitan-style restaurant on Ossington Avenue in downtown Toronto are spoken for. Standing in small clusters, hopeful diners scan the room, eyeing other people’s plates.

“You’re kidding. Wow,” one woman responds when told her wait will be about 45 minutes.
Friendly hostess Meg Walters works the phone, explaining to two callers in a row that they cannot make reservations. I ask her whether people unfamiliar with the policy are ever annoyed with her. “All the time,” she says.

This is the tension that lies at the core of many restaurants: the desire to cater to customers while confronting the basic fact that filling seats through reservations is wildly inefficient. To cope, some restaurateurs have placed time limits on reserved tables, juggled walk-ins, and even overbooked to try to protect themselves against no-shows that sap revenue. The average rate of no-shows for a typical restaurant is around 15 per cent.
Now, many restaurants are scrapping reservations altogether and adopting novel practices to attract customers and keep their tables full. These measures include issuing tickets for tables, charging variable prices depending on the day of the week and using apps and other technology to manage seating. It’s something of a revolution in an industry that was worth $24.9-billion last year in Canada alone.

A short walk away from Libretto, its sister restaurant Enoteca Sociale does a mix of walk-ins and reservations. The average cheque at Libretto is roughly $25; at Enoteca, it’s almost double. But when owner Max Rimaldi evaluates which makes more money, there is no contest. No-reservations comes out on top.

“For us, Enoteca is a labour of love. It’s about wine, it’s about our trips to Rome, it’s about our love of homemade pasta,” Mr. Rimaldi says. “Libretto smokes that out of the water in terms of profitability.”

Libretto takes great care to make the no-reservations system as painless as possible. Hostesses are unfailingly polite to waiting diners, recommending nearby spots to have a drink while they wait, and alerting customers the moment their table is ready. And while the atmosphere is casual, waiters are meticulously trained for high-level service once people sit down.

Still, when one is waiting more than an hour just to be seated for dinner, it can be hard not to wonder: How much is my inconvenience worth to the restaurant?

A lot, actually. Restaurants that take reservations can “turn” their tables an average of 1.5 to two times per night, three if they’re hopping. A place that takes walk-ins only, on a good night, can see as many as four turns. Some restaurateurs estimate that’s a 20- to 25-per-cent difference in revenue, for those popular enough to pull it off.

At Espana in Vancouver, a small tapas restaurant with 39 seats, a busy Friday or Saturday night can yield up to 170 “covers” (industry lingo for customers served), according to owner Ed Perrow. Even if reservations were completely booked for three seatings, that number would still only reach 117. That’s because, with no lag time waiting for the next reservation to show up, the restaurant can fill a table the moment it’s free, and serve more people over all.
Even 117 is an optimistic number: nights when all reservations show up on time are exceedingly rare. No-shows are a drain: Tables that sit empty bleed revenue. That makes a big difference to those operating on thin profits in an industry where 10 per cent is typically considered a good margin.

“A restaurant says, ‘Yeah, we’ll have your table ready,’ and a customer says, ‘Yeah we’ll show up,’” said Nick Kokonas, co-owner of restaurants in Chicago, including the three-Michelin-star rated Alinea. “And there’s a really good chance one of the two people is lying.”

Mr. Kokonas began experimenting with selling tickets for meals in 2011, when he and his business partner, chef Grant Achatz, opened Next in Chicago. The system was so successful, they soon started using it at Alinea. Others in Chicago and L.A. began testing it as well.

Tickets can be the price of the full meal, paid in advance (that’s how it’s done at Alinea), or a deposit that goes toward the customer’s bill (as at the Aviary, a cocktail lounge and restaurant also owned by Mr. Kokonas and Mr. Achatz).
“Putting down a $20 [U.S.] deposit takes no-shows down to almost nothing,” Mr. Kokonas said.

The software he built to manage the tickets has now spun off into its own business, Tock, which launched late last year. It has 16 pilot restaurants, and the renowned Per Se in New York and the French Laundry in California have both signed on to use the full version when it launches soon. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is among Tock’s investors.
Other recently launched apps, such as Resy and Table8, also offer ticketing systems for restaurants.

Of course, Alinea has lines of customers angling to book tables months in advance – they once had so many phone calls, it took down the entire 312-867 telephone exchange in Chicago. Some doubt that ticketing will work for everyone.
“My only worry – and Nick, I’m sure, has 10 pages of spiel to counter this – is that it’s very hard to do at a lower end or moderate restaurant,” said Hugh Acheson, a Canadian-born and Athens, Ga.-based chef, author and restaurant owner. “[Diners] still have to plan that event as a spectacle. That’s not why, I think, people generally eat out.”

Mr. Kokonas disagrees. The Aviary is not an event the way a meal at Alinea is. But before it used tickets, the no-show rate on reservations was 11.8 per cent. Now, the seating is half tickets and half walk-ins.

The no-show rate has fallen to 1.4 per cent, and revenue is up 22 per cent. EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) has doubled. The ticket penalty is lower than at Alinea,which Mr. Kokonas believes could work at a variety of restaurants: The deposit is usually $20, and higher on in-demand nights such as Friday and Saturday.

At Alinea, among 20,050 diners served in 2013 using ticketing, there were just 302 no-shows, and the restaurant still got paid for those tickets. At Next, 23,288 people dined in 2013, with 364 no-shows. Like at Alinea, these were mostly parties who showed up with fewer people than they’d booked. Just five full tables in the entire year did not show up at all.

Mr. Kokonas has also been experimenting with variable pricing. After all, why should dinner at off-peak times, such as on a Tuesday night or 5:30 on a Friday, cost the same as 7:30 on a Saturday – any more than tickets in the nosebleeds at a concert selling for the same as front row centre?

“It’s not just for chef-driven, small places. I actually think it’s more interesting to say, here’s a restaurant that’s not always full: Will shifting their pricing at low-demand times actually drive business?” Mr. Kokonas said. “The experience we’ve seen is a resounding yes.”

Technology has already modernized the reservations process, most notably through the online service OpenTable, which for a $249 monthly subscription, manages reservations on behalf of restaurants on its website.

That’s much cheaper than Mr. Kokonas’s system, which charges participating restaurants $695 a month. However, that system does not charge per ticket sold. OpenTable charges an additional $1 for each reservation booked through its site, and 25 cents for each booking through a restaurant’s website that embeds the OpenTable system its online booking. (In Canada the rates are $1.25 and 30 cents, respectively).

There is an opportunity cost in accepting non-guaranteed reservations: OpenTable, like traditional phone-in bookings, is vulnerable to no-shows. Tickets insulate restaurants from that risk.
Keeping people waiting can also be good marketing.

“Being in a busy restaurant, there’s a feeling that they are in a hot spot, and they feel cool,” said Colin Bowers, co-owner of Foxley in Toronto. “It’s a huge marketing tool.”

Changing consumer attitudes have opened the door: for foodies, dining is seen as entertainment in itself, that some will wait for.

Partly, this depends on the type of diner. At his restaurants Patria and Weslodge, Amin Todai says the slightly more sophisticated crowd wants certainty that they will not have to wait. But at two other Toronto places he owns, which are walk-in based, Home of the Brave and taco restaurant La Carnita, the crowd is younger, and the vibe is more relaxed.
Some people enjoy the civilized languor of having a cocktail at one place before dining at another. And a lack of reservations does not necessarily equate with a lack of service.
No-reservations advocates argue the policy builds trust with customers.

“There’s this intrinsic classism involved in who’s got the wherewithal to make a reservation at the right time – or pull because of who they are or what their name is – and suddenly the 8 o’clock reservation nobody can get opens up because somebody knows so-and-so,” Mr. Acheson said. “Dispelling some of that is, to me, a nice thing.”
Mr. Kokonas believes tickets address this issue, because they are transparent about availability. He is upfront about holding back tables for last-minute requests from VIPs, press, regulars, and friends. If the spares aren’t filled, his restaurants offer the equivalent of rush tickets to the theatre, selling same-day tickets via social media.
For some, walk-ins eliminate the option for people to bump the line at all.

When it opened in Vancouver in 1994, Vij’s was one of the first critically acclaimed restaurants in Canada to take only walk-ins. At the time, owner and chef Vikram Vij thought the average wait time would be 15 to 20 minutes. Now, it can be as long as two hours.

He occasionally takes flak for it, but Mr. Vij argues that it’s a more egalitarian system. “I never made an exception. Never did I say to anybody: ‘Oh you’re a friend of mine, I’ll get you ahead of everyone else.’ People felt I was going to be honest,” he said. “When my father comes, he waits like everybody else.”

Technology has changed the efficiency of walk-ins, as well. At Libretto, Ms. Walters taps an iPad to check on her wait-list with the OpenTable-owned app Rezbook. The screen shows a floor map. Each table displays the time the diners sat down, and is colour coded by current status– blue for occupied, grey for open, and light green for those close to paying their bills.

The app also shows the waiting list, with the number of minutes each party has been waiting, beside the estimated wait they were quoted. The numbers turn red when a party is coming close to exceeding that estimated wait. A few taps and the app sends an automated text telling them the table is ready. Just a few years ago this was all done with pen and paper, and the hostesses had to take their attention away from the door to call each party.

Some restaurateurs are exploring how technology might provide a better way than asking people to wait.

“When you spend enough time in restaurants, you see how much misuse of demand happens,” said Kyle Nares, an owner of Le Bremner and Garde Manger in Montreal. “There is this negative feedback loop, where people are forced to book so far in advance because it’s the only way they can secure a table, and then by default, their plans are going to change way more often, because they had to book so far in advance.”

Mr. Nares’s solution is DINR, a mobile application that has 14 partner restaurants in Montreal, all well-regarded places with a good level of demand. They tend to be smaller places – between 40 and 90 seats – where there is little room for error because of their size. (A no-show on a table is a much bigger percentage of that night’s business than at a large restaurant.) The app offers only same-day reservations (that open up because of cancellations, for example, or because a restaurant has held back some inventory and finds day-of that it is not needed). Diners can use the app to snap up those tables, and agree that if they don’t show, it will charge their credit cards a $30 fee.
If plans change, users can cancel up to one hour before the reservation with no penalty at all. The table would then go back on the app.

This system circumvents some of the criticisms of ticketing – namely, that it makes booking a table too much of a production, by allowing for spontaneity and last-minute planning.
Launched late last year, with some further testing, DINR could expand to other cities.

“We didn’t have the technology to match-make before. Up until a few years ago, it was impossible, what we’re doing,” Mr. Nares said. “The lineup thing is great for the restaurant. I’m not convinced it’s great for the diner.”

Restaurant history

In her book The Invention of the Restaurant, historian Rebecca L. Spang traces the history of the business to the 1760s in France. The first restaurants were different than inns because their menus offered a variety of broths favoured by “the sophisticated urbanite” – as opposed to “the coarse worker capable of digesting whatever was placed before him.”

Reservations came into being largely in the 19th century, when tables or rooms could be reserved for diners, Prof. Spang said in an interview with The Atlantic in July.

A sort of “competitive consumption” arose after the Second World War, she further explained, with guidebooks and restaurant reviews helping to determine the hot spots – where, subsequently, a reservation became difficult to acquire.
For decades, most restaurants of any quality took reservations. Walk-ins were the realm of diners and fast food. Since the late nineties, however, many businesses have moved away from that system.

In the past 10 years in particular, the trend has accelerated. Now, a restaurant’s popularity can often be measured by the stories foodies tell their friends about enduring two-hour waits.

Former restaurant critic Joanne Kates pointed to this change in her farewell column in this newspaper: “The new restaurants mostly have unfriendly reservation policies (i.e., they don’t do it),” she noted.

By the numbers

$24.9-billion: Full-service restaurant sales in Canada in 2014.

15%: Rough proportion of no-shows – customers who either cancel a reservation on short notice or fail to show up entirely – estimated by the restaurant industry.

20% to 25%: Estimated revenue bump a busy restaurant receives from allowing walk-ins only, rather than reservations.

10%: The profit margin restaurants aim for. At 30 per cent margins, a place would be “killing it,” according to one restaurateur.

35%: Common proportion of revenue that goes toward the cost of goods.


My opinion: For all you people who make reservations, go and stick with the reservations.  Or the very least give a 1hr notice to cancel.

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Monday, September 19, 2016

"A somewhat florid Florida"/ "An Alaska of last resort"


Sept. 10, 2016 "A somewhat florid Florida": I cut out this article by Brett Josef Grubisic in the National Post on Feb. 5, 2011:

No one will mistake Karen Russell for a latter-day convert to Raymond Carver’s orthodoxy of laconic characters and spare prose. A young writer who gathered widespread acclaim (from Granta to Stephen King) with St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, her 2006 debut short story collection, Russell is a fevered Gothic maximalist at home with rococo descriptive curlicues, filigreed strands of phrasing and bedazzling embroidered passages.

With a volubility that, for better or worse, recalls Zadie Smith at her word-happiest, Russell’s first novel is a wild ride of a performance. With
explicit nods to The Inferno and Through the Looking Glass, Swamplandia! tells of the meteoric descent of a larger-than-life family residing in a rickety self-made wonderland off the coast of Florida.

The mechanics of the wayward plot are relatively simple: After the death by cancer of Hilola “Swamp Centaur” Bigtree, beloved family matriarch and star attraction of Swamplandia!, a money - pit alligator wrestling theme park that’s a 40 minute ferry ride from fictional Loomis Country, Fla., the bereaved survivors scatter.

The Chief, Hilola’s blustering Willy Loman of a husband, soon leaves the island to secure refinancing for Swamplandia!; alone and unmoored, his three teenage children are quickly exposed to losses of innocence from the oddest of sources. (Their grandfather, Ernest Schedrach, who fled his miserable life as an unemployed pulp mill worker in Ohio during the Depression and took the fanciful name Sawtooth Bigtree, is installed in a retirement home.)

A trainee alligator wrestler at the time of her mother’s death, Ava Bigtree supplies the bulk of the narration. Capable of effortless classical allusions as well as sophisticated parsings of pop culture, she is less a bereft, barely pubescent character to feel sympathy for than a showcase for Russell’s voiceless in their party chignons, they stand around the back of a ballroom having flashbacks for most of the movie, regretting older events in their minds, ladling cups of glowing punch from a big bowl, and only after the dying violin note of the final song do they at last step away from the wall”) or a flock of birds (“The buzzards continued to pour

Her homeschooled 13-year-old sounds like a clever MFA student techniques and musings.

Whether Ava is commenting on a TV broadcast (“As if on cue, that lame movie from the sixties started playing, Ladies in Waiting. A quintet of actresses haunt the punch bowl — they are supposed to be spinster sisters or spinster best friends, or maybe just ugly and needy acquaintances — anyhow, these pink chameleons, over Swamplandia! in clothy waves; on the radio, the university scientists speculated that the unusual migration had something to do with the late frosts in the Midwest. Disturbances in the raptors’ diurnal cues”), she registers as a clever MFA student, not a child. For a home-schooled 13-year-old whose mother read her TV Guide, such worldliness and wordplay, while always remarkable, strains credibility.

Throwing Ava into a quest to save Osceola, her missing older sister, allows Russell to indulge her more-is-more philosophy and up the pyrotechnics (and allusions: Homer through Twain). Unsurprisingly, the journey into “the underworld” deep within the swamp, accompanied by a guide with ulterior motives named the Bird Man, grows dark and perilous.

Russell reserves the remaining fifth of Swamplandia! for Ava’s brother Kiwi, a bookish dreamer who bolts from the island in hopes of finding an income that he can send home. Voltaire’s naive Candide in a Floridian cultural wasteland as painted by Bosch, Kiwi lands a job at Swamplandia!’s rival, a franchise theme park called the World of Darkness. A series of surreal blackly comic set pieces, Russell’s elaborate counter-world (simplified to “the World” by its employees) features a Leviathan ride, Lost Souls, the Lake of Fire, and even overpriced Dante’s Tamales from Beelzebub’s Snack Bar.

Kiwi’s misadventures there and in the strip mall territory around it — including run-ins with punishing bosses, unfathomable girls, crude workmates and, best of all, a stripper beauty pageant at a lowrent casino at which his father is the MC — are recounted exuberantly. The extravagant writing, at times risking proximity to ham-fisted symbolism, is characteristically engrossing, yet it’s pleasurable because the scenes are significantly shorter than those of Ava.

There’s no doubting the sheer talent of Swamplandia!’s 29-year-old author. Words and ideas seemingly pour from her inventive mind in a torrent. It’s Russell’s inner editor, however, that could benefit from assertiveness training.

Brett Josef Grubisic is the author of The Age of Cities. He teaches at the University of British Columbia.



"An Alaska of last resort": I cut out this article by Philip Marchand in the National Post on Feb. 5, 2011:


Fans of the television series Northern Exposure will recall the quirky, free-spirited, mostly engaging characters who inhabited a small community in Alaska. The very remoteness of the locale, its isolation, the feeling that anything could happen, the more fanciful the better, contributed to an atmosphere of magic. The series was what literary critics of another era would call a “romance” — that is to say, not realistic.

Realism is what David Vann does. His novel Caribou Island (HarperCollins, $28.99) is set in and around a small Alaskan community called Soldotna, which contains no amusing characters. It’s the kind of town where rusted-out cars litter backyards, and strip malls alternate with abandoned lots full of more rusted-out cars. The economy is marginal and seasonal, relying on tourism and fishing. Desperate locals work at the cannery, a grinding, tedious employer of last resort. Visitors, far from being charmed by the site, and the state as a whole, call Alaska a “dump” and a “toilet.” Even Jim, a reasonably prosperous local dentist, views Alaska as “the end of the world, a place of exile. Those who couldn’t fit anywhere else came here, and if they couldn’t cling to anything here, they just fell off the edge.”

One resident who still dreams of Alaska as a magical frontier is Gary, who came here 30 years ago, after realizing he was “outclassed” as a graduate student in medieval literature. Gary and his wife, Irene, acquired all the “Alaskan accoutrements” such as moose antlers on their small house, but their daughter, Rhoda, a veterinarian’s assistant, views the results as a “junkyard.” Some might admire the lifestyle of Gary and Irene, as described by Vann. “No TV. No Internet. No phone. Just the lake, the woods, their home, their kids, going into town to work and buy supplies.” But it’s a sad life all the same — Gary scrapes by, somehow, with his failed business enterprises.

Now he has a recurrence of the dream. He and Irene will live even closer to the elements by building a cabin on nearby Caribou Island and moving there for the oncoming winter. It’s an insane vision but Irene is helpless to prevent it.

The reader naturally wonders why she sticks with this loser. Vann explains. As a 10year-old, Irene came home from school one day to see the body of her mother, a suicide, hanging from the rafters. Irene subsequently was passed around, for the rest of her childhood, by relatives who did not want her. The result is Irene’s lifelong determination never to be abandoned again. She will stick to this marriage even though both partners bitterly blame the other for the ruined lives they have lived.

Their two adult children face prospects little better than a cabin on Caribou Island. Mark, a part-time fisherman, is a pothead. Rhoda lives with Jim, whose feelings for her are tepid at best. Rhoda nonetheless dreams of an elaborate wedding ceremony in Hawaii.

This novel gave me the willies. It is nothing new in American literature, of course, to dwell on people with rusted out cars littering the backyard, families beset with booze, divorce, terrible jobs, unreliable dads, children raising themselves. In this novel, however, trailer park mores are combined with a fearful climate and a primordial wilderness, which makes falling off the edge feel even scarier. Irene, whose dilemma is underlined by searing pains in her head that no doctor can diagnose or treat, views the forest as “malevolent.” Gary, despite his bravado, deep down experiences even the “inanimate world” as full of “intent.” It is an intent, needless to say, unfriendly to humans. The dark, brooding, end-of-the-world feeling to the landscape and the seascape makes human follies loom larger than usual, and seem more devastating in their consequences.

Gary’s cabin is a case in point. From the very first day of construction, Gary does nothing but blunder — his carpentry labours are more like a Laurel and Hardy skit than a serious attempt to build a shelter. “To grapple effectually with even purely material problems requires more serenity of mind and more lofty courage than people generally imagine,” Joseph Conrad once wrote. Such serenity of mind and lofty courage is well beyond Gary’s reach. “I’m an incompetent ass, and that’s what I’ve always been,” he confesses to Irene at one point. The cabin itself, lopsided and full of gaps, becomes a symbol of his disordered soul.

In one sense, Caribou Island is a paean to bourgeois values. Material poverty and shabbiness is a reflection not so much of bad luck as defect- ive character, which is why Vann pauses even to note that his characters drive “battered” old cars, “crappy” Datsuns and so on. “No one in the family drove anything worth looking at,” Rhoda reflects at one point — a fact, again, of symbolic import.

Give Rhoda credit. At least she tries to help her parents — the only character in the novel, it seems, concerned about someone other than herself. (A visiting couple, Carl and Monique, two other major characters in the novel, wreak havoc with their blazing selfcentredness.) But Rhoda has barely enough resources to help herself. If she had any gumption she would have left town for Seattle or Portland long ago.

So the gloom deepens and the momentum towards disaster becomes unstoppable. Readers may sense what is coming but it’s hard to look away — partly because Vann knows how to heighten attention with sharply focused prose and use of alternating points of view.

There is another element at work here, not often discussed in critical forums or book club chat, and that is the perverse pleasure readers often take in the misfortunes of characters — a pleasure given boundless scope in fiction. The principle applies here. No matter how badly things are going in the life of a reader, that reader can contemplate the dismal fate of Gary and Irene and feel almost jolly in comparison.




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"It's not about the writing"

Sept. 10, 2016 "It's not about the writing": I cut out this article by Craig Davidson in the National Post on Feb. 5, 2011:

Before Christmas, I was at a literary gathering, which I don’t generally attend for the simple reason that they frequently lead me into the types of exchanges I will shortly document.

There was this … person. She was emblematic of a certain personality you run into at literary gatherings. A sessional instructor of English composition at a Quebec university with an expression of perpetual distaste etched on to her face that made her mouth look like a cat’s clenched-up fanny. She seemed unsure how she’d even gotten to this party, as if someone had slipped a gunny sack over her head and dumped her here, much to her dismay. She gave off a nearmasochistic vibe: This party and its denizens were several echelons beneath her.

This woman insinuated herself into a pleasant talk I was having with another woman, a screenwriter and freelance writer — a lifestyle we hold in common, as a freelancer-slash myself (slash-novelist, slash-news-paperman, slash-magazine editor, slash-bus driver, slash-librarian, slash-unemployed). The screenwriter and I were having a candid discussion about the realities of writing for a living, and the compromises you make. This other woman eyed us slantwise down her nose, giving me the impression we were trapped in rifle sights. If I could have leapt, unobtrusively, out the window in a hail of shattering glass I would have happily done so, severed veins be damned. A snippet of our conversation: Screenwriter “It’s not like I always get to write what I love. Have to make the bills.” Me “The way it goes. You work on what you have to so you can devote time to what you love.” Horrible person “You should never work on what you don’t love. Why waste your time? It should always be about the writing.”

Oh, you tiresome, nettlesome, burdensome, irksome shrew. Just disappear, why don’t you? Atomize and vanish, go back to haunting the Special Collections section at some drafty university, you wraith-like non-entity, you. You aren’t even a hot bag of gas — you are cool, vaporous, and you slide down my neck like rock slime.

Of course, she was dull. Of course, she was stuffed to the tops of her clichéd tortoiseshell glasses with unearned elitism. She was a fraud because she had no real clue what we were talking about, having not had our experiences. Most of all, she was boring in the way all types are ultimately boring: Their colossal sameness makes them so. You may think such people couldn’t possibly exist outside the pages of Richard Russo’s Straight Man. Yet, sadly, they do, in the (pale, sun-starved) flesh, in dizzying profusion in certain social settings. Their existence inspires in me a wearying depression.

Why? For all the reasons outlined above, but most of all because such buffoons make me feel poorly about the choices I’ve made with my own writing lately. Odious as that person was, one thing she said was patently true:

It should be about the writing. Mostly, anyway.
Which, it pains me to say, is something I’d gotten away from in recent years. Somehow I fell into this mindset where the primary consideration became: Will this sell? Which was looking at things from the wrong side of the desk — as an agent/editor/publisher, rather than a writer. I got strung up wondering if an editor would

Anything you approach from an impure angle tends to flee be thinking: Is there a feasible demo for this? Rather than: Is this a decent piece of writing that readers will enjoy and connect with?

(When I say “somehow I fell into this mindset,” I am being disingenuous, in that I know exactly how it happened: I wanted to keep writing, and to do so I had to maintain favour with editors and publishers. It inspired a certain sick desperation, heightened by the fact I was trying to make a go of it as a freelancer — a rough gig at any time, not to mention at a point when print journalism, in its many forms, was in perpetual collapse. The spectre of living under an overpass eating Alpo from a tin can was very real for a couple years there.)

Anyway, this internal debate — Will it sell? — was by then occurring on a scene-byscene, sentence-by-sentence basis. I found myself clinically dissecting bestsellers. The Da Vinci Code had short, poppy chapters. So I’d have short, poppy chapters. Eat, Pray, Love had a loopy narrative voice. So I’d have a loopy narrative voice.

I approached writing a book as a complex equation: The Guaranteed Canadian Bestseller Formula™. Take one spunky heroine (preferably Mennonite), add one northern canoe trip, a dash of illicit buggery (a priest or close family member, either works) and set it in a harrowing post-apocalyptic world where the spunky heroine, OfNomi, has lost the right to her own body … blammo! Instant chart-topper.

What I resisted seeing was that the writers whose success I wished to ape hadn’t set out to achieve it with the mixture of dire desperation and cold-eyed cynicism I’d developed. They were writing at least partially from their own experiences about topics that inspired them. They were — as the sourpuss at the party kept harping on — just writing. That they happened to write something that compelled a great many people was a product of their passion and understanding rather than any kind of self-conscious targeting of potential readership.

So what did I end up with by following my silly formula? Just about what you’d expect. One godawful stitched-up Frankenstein of a book that will never see the light of day. Such flawed creative conception worms into the book itself, tangling in with the words and robbing it of that critical, unmistakable joy of creation. The writing creaks with the freight of a writer’s own worries and fears, and of his attempts to shoehorn it into something that might be all things for all readers. I ended up with a book that was still me, yes, in that the ideas were mine and the narrative drew, at least in part, from my own experiences, except everything was freighted with baggage that wasn’t part of my earlier work — books that were flawed in many ways, but at least didn’t suffer from a sense of authorial secondguessing in hopes of currying favour with an audience.

It’s that old story, same in books as it is in love: Anything you approach from an impure angle, from a state of desperation rather than joy, tends to flee rather than come to you. If you press too hard, wanting it so much that you’ll do anything to get it, so much so that it twists your original outlook and intentions, chances are you’re not going to get what you seek.

My opinion: I'm going to put that in my inspirational quotes.

I was stalking success rather than wooing it. I was rifling success’s trash cans and peeping through its window with a telephoto lens — where, before, I’d simply marched up to success’s front door, said: “This is me, take it or leave it,” and success was smitten enough with my boldness to let me in for awhile.

What I’ve finally come back to is that purer state of happiness that I used to enter when writing. From the moment I first started writing, right up until my first book came out, I never really cared about an audience; sure, I wanted readers and knew at some level I needed them if I was to forge a career, but I wasn’t weighed down under self-summoned expectations. That all changed, and I needed to get it back.

I thought back to my days in Miss Jeffries’ Grade 10 creative writing class, where my thoughts went along the lines of: How can I entertain myself ? (and as a secondary notion, How can I totally gross out anyone who reads this, particularly Courtney Smith, with her neon green scrunchie, whom I sort of like? — what can I say: I was 15, and not the suave Lothario I am today). I had to rekindle the joy I’d felt when the page just opened up, I fell in, and there were no limitations or worries about target demos, what editors will think, the booksellers, the whole apparatus I’d no knowledge of when I’d first said to myself: Hey, it would be pretty cool to write all day long.

I’ve likely wasted a few years, unless you wish to count it as part of a treacherous learning curve. Mea culpa. I don’t know what to say, other than I’d never really contextualized myself as anything other than a writer — it is what brings me the greatest joy, career-wise — and I was willing to do anything to be one. Which, ironically, held me back more than if I’d just gone back to that unfettered sense of fun that writing once held for me.

And I’m grateful to be able to say that it still does hold that fun. It’s nice to know that I may be many things, but a total masochist is not one of them.
But still, those are the realities. I need to hold a day job. I need to satisfy my publishers — and I want to, wherever possible. Books need to be publicized. Books need to sell. These are the rules at a certain level, and to play the game at those levels means accepting the rules.

The uncomfortable paradox that I’ve settled into is that it both is and isn’t just about the writing. But it should start being about the writing. The basic joy and love of it.

What comes after, once a book makes it into the hands of an agent/editor/publisher/publicist, can get a little thorny. They have a job to do and you need to understand that. And then there’s buzz and critical reception and just plain bulls--t luck. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, you shouldn’t kill yourself over it — and I say so despite the fact I do kill myself over it, often several times over.

These are the waves you’ll have to ride. But that’s a lot of being a writer, anyway: riding those waves. Hopefully, you catch a big one someday and ride it like hell. Then you may get caught in dead calm and have to paddle awhile. But if it’s something that makes you happy, as it makes me happy — even when it’s driving me mad — you put up with it. Writers aren’t the most realistic people out there, but after you’ve been at it awhile, that sense of realism usually settles upon you.

And it’s that sense of reality that sets me in such antagonism against people like that person at the party.

It’s not just about the writing, you idle dingbat. It’s about sacrifice and compromise and good fortune and dedication and clear-headed rationalism and holding your head together and learning to live with who you are and existing within your own limitations while still harbouring the sense that someday you might shatter them.

It’s about riding the waves. Once you’ve been through it, come talk to me. Until then, shut your yapper and enjoy the mulled wine.

Craig Davidson is the senior editor at Maximum Fitness magazine. His most recent book is Sarah Court, published by ChiZine books.




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"Huckleberry Finn as a sex offender"/ Justin Berry (Part 1)






May 23, 2016 "Huckleberry Finn as a sex offender": I cut out this article by Donna Bailey Nurse in the National Post on Oct. 22, 2011:

Lost Memory of Skin By Russell Banks
Knopf Canada
416 pp; $32
Reviewed by Donna Bailey Nurse

Most of Russell Banks’s best-loved novels are set in the small, economically floundering towns of New Hampshire and upstate New York, or in hardscrabble South Florida neighbourhoods. His mostly male, financially strapped protagonists find themselves pushed to the fringes of their communities by their own frustration, by the rejection of their neighbours, or by some sordid combination of both. Banks does not espouse nostalgia for an earlier era:

His is a fallen world. Characters such as Bob Dubois of Continental Drift, Wade Whitehouse of Affliction and young delinquent Chappie from Rule of the Bone recall only fleeting fragments of happiness and stability. He warns of an approaching world in which families are an anachronism, community no longer exists, and human relations — even sensations — are irrevocably altered.

Banks is part novelist, part cultural anthropologist, and never more so than in his latest novel, the strange and riveting Lost Memory of Skin. It’s the story of a young sex offender who ekes out an existence under a causeway in South Florida. The Kid, as he is known, is befriended by a professor interested in homelessness. He is not one of Banks’ run-of-the-mill outsiders. Convicted of attempting to have sex with a minor, he is cast out by society in a way that is vaguely uncomfortable for us to acknowledge. Indeed, the Kid, we soon realize, is more victim than victimizer — the product of an era in which family breakdown has dovetailed most unfortunately with the age of information.

The novel is set in Calusa, Fla., where the Kid grows up as the only child of a single mother. Working as a hairstylist and prowling for men leaves her with little time for her son. The Kid fills the gaping void by playing with his pet iguana and watching Internet porn. When his school makes laptops compulsory, he becomes a bona fide addict, consuming up to eight hours of skin flicks a day. At 22, the only women he knows are writhing images and the only skin he has stroked is his own. What are the psychological repercussions, Banks asks, of defiling our most basic instinct?

The Kid winds up in trouble after meeting a young woman online and arranging to visit her home. She is just 14, but he tells himself that she is probably more sexually experienced than he is. He never finds out, of course. He is gleefully ambushed by her father in the kitchen before a SWAT team takes him down. It is a pathetic and ludicrous scene familiar from reality TV. You have to feel sorry for the Kid who is so naive, so confused, so much younger than his 22 years. Yet he is also scrappy and determined to hold his own.

The Kid serves a few months in prison and is sentenced to nine years’ probation, the conditions of which demand he live at least 2,500 feet from any children. There are three possible locations: Calusa Airport, the Panzacola Swamp, and under the Claybourne Causeway. The Kid chooses the causeway.  He and his pet iguana live in a tent by the shore, away from a collection of huts and lean-tos. He is the newest member of a colony of sex offenders that includes a seventysomething ex-boxer and a slick bodybuilder. Like the others, the Kid must wear a GPS device to keep authorities apprised of his whereabouts. A quick Google search reveals his criminal status to all.

It is under the causeway that the professor finds the Kid late one night. He invites him to participate in a series of interviews on homelessness in exchange for some social and financial assistance. A tentative friendship evolves. In appearance, the Professor is the mirror opposite of the Kid: he is tall and morbidly obese. And like many of Banks’s characters, he also suffers from addiction. The obsession for food dominates his life. The Professor grew up an outsider in his own family. He has never connected himself to any group and instead has inhabited a number of conflicting, secret lives. He claims to have been a spy and a double agent; an anti-war activist and a Vietnam vet. Yet none of these facts reveal anything genuine about his life, just as the information on the Internet in no way explains the true nature of the Kid’s experience. However, when the professor’s past begins to catch up with him, he asks the Kid for help.

With Lost Memory of Skin Banks crosses a cautionary tale about human sexuality with an adventurous account of coming of age, an idiosyncratic union to say the least. It succeeds through an infallible execution of voice that conveys and contextualizes the Kid’s bemused and searching perspective. In time the Kid is revealed to be as much of a descendent of Huckleberry Finn as Chappie from Rule of the Bone. He is one of Banks’s poor, white boys whose imaginations furnish them with hope for the future. They are a far cry from the tragic grown men — like  this novel’s Professor — who never manage to outrun their pasts.

Banks is an avid outdoorsman and the backdrop of this story is animated by his intimate knowledge of the moods and inhabitants of land and sea. Rather than merely imagining the world of the novel, Banks seems to have constructed it with his bare hands. His sentences are so muscular they are practically three dimensional, yet they propel us forward with aerodynamic grace. His style is unmatched, inimitable, inseparable, as it should be, from the moral integrity of the man.


This is intense and disturbing for some readers.  I am forewarning you:

Aug. 25, 2016 Justin Berry: Here is a really old flashback of 2006.  He is this teenage guy who was on Oprah and how he got a webcam.  Then he was sexually abused by people on the internet.  If you knew me back then, you may remember the story and how I went on televisionwithoutpity.com forum and how there were pages of comments on it.  This is from 10 yrs ago, but I do remember it well.  There was a Law and Order: SVU ep based on it, and he later went on Larry King.  I watched those too.

Berry was 13 yrs old and then he got a webcam to meet people on the internet and mainly girls.  As soon as he got on the internet, he got all these people IMing him.  Later someone on the internet said "I'll pay you $50 if you do a webcam with your shirt off."  He thought nothing of it because he has been to the pool with his shirt off.  Then it got to take your pants off.  Then masturbate with the webcam on.  He thought nothing much of it because masturbation is a natural thing to do.  He was getting paid for it.

Then later there was something about meeting someone on the internet.  He told his mom he's going to Las Vegas for a tech conference.  He had a can of beer then he had sex with a guy.

His parents are divorced and he lives with his mom.  Later a kid at school found out about his webcam and posted pictures around at school.  Berry left school to move with his dad.  Later his dad found out about all this money he was making.  His dad helped him with the webcam show and didn't stop him.

Berry was having sex with prostitutes on his webcam. 

It was a very intense and serious episode.  I thought he was 100% victim.

Twop.com: Afterwards, I went to this website and I was shocked and surprised how there were so many comments saying he wasn't 100% victim.  I can't remember all the comments, but here are a few I do remember:

Some comments were like this:

"That's why you don't put a computer in the kid's room.  You put it in the living room so you know what your kid is doing on the internet."

"What kind of parent lets their kid go to Las Vegas by themselves, even if it's for a conference?"

Here is one that's kind of offensive:

"I'm sorry, but the whole time I was watching this, I was thinking about South Park.  You know where Cartman goes on the computer and he writes "I'm a 10 yr old boy" and everybody starts IMing him.

You guys are probably like:

A. That is offensive.

B. That is funny.

C. Both.

I was offended by that.  Then again, the person did give a forewarning.

After all those comments, I was undecided.

Friends opinions: I was 20 yrs old back then and here are some of my 20 yr old friends opinions.  Back then they said this, but they could change their opinion.

Who thought was 100% victim: Leslie.

Who thought he was not 100% victim:

Angela: I remember she came to my house and I asked her about it.

Angela: Are people really this dumb?  By the time, you get to that age (13), don't you kind of know what's right and wrong by then?  I think he knew what he was doing was kind of wrong, so I don't see him as 100% victim.

Sonia: No one was putting a gun at him and forcing him to do it in the room.

Seventeen magazine: In 2007, a story about a girl who was forced to take a naked picture of herself or something like that, because the person on the internet threatened to kill her and her family.

Human Trafficking: I saw this back in 2005.  The women are 100% victims.

In Prague, Czech Republic, the single mother Helena is seduced by a successful handsome man and travels with him to spend a weekend in Vienna, Austria; in Kiev, Ukraine, the sixteen-year-old Nadia is selected by a model agency and travels to the United States with the other selected candidates; in Manila, Philippines, the twelve-year-old American tourist Annie Gray is abducted in front of her parents. In common, the girls become victims of a powerful international network of sex traffickers leaded by the powerful Sergei Karpovich. In New York, after the third death of young Eastern European prostitutes, the obstinate Russian-American NYPD agent Kate Morozov convinces the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Chief Bill Meehan to hire her, promising him that she would fight against this type of crime and that he would not regret. - Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil


My experience: When I was watching Oprah, Berry did not say anything about being pressured into it.  In 2006, I would say in a way I was kind of pressuring and overwhelming this one person with all my emails.  I was sending like 3 little emails a day, which is a lot.  In 2016, I did apologize to him and all my friends in this email:


He accepted my apology.

In 2016, I did kind of made a mistake with this other friend of mine.  I bumped into him at the mall after work and he offered me a ride.  It was fun talking to him.  I then started emailing him on Facebook to go to all these Meetups that I go to.  He told me that I was being kind of pushy.  I did not mean to be pushy at all.

Aug. 26, 2017 Renegadepress.com: This is a Canadian teen TV show, kind of like Degrassi.  There was this episode where Patti was interviewing this girl with a webcam show.  Later Patti and the girl was offered that if you show your belly button on the webcam, you will get a camera.  The girls do it and they get the camera.

Later, they were offered $100 each if they are topless.  Patti felt the pressure, but I don't think she did it.


My opinion: In 2006 I was undecided if Berry was 100% victim.  Now that I gathered all this information and looked at a real magazine story and fictional shows, I have made a decision.

He is 50% victim.  No one threatened him through the internet or physically in person. He went to Vegas on his own.  He wasn't kidnapped like in Human Trafficking.  There is no sexism involved because he is a guy and he can't be a victim.  If a guy was kidnapped and forced to do things, then I would say 100% victim.

My main reason is that he was getting paid.  In Human Trafficking, the women became prostitutes and they weren't getting paid.
On Wikipedia, it says this:

Eichenwald requested demonstrations of the workings of Berry's online business which Berry provided, including live conversations with subscribers. After Berry revealed the identities of children who were being exploited by adults, Eichenwald persuaded him to discontinue the business and turn his information about those minors over to the authorities.[1]


If you want to know more about him, here it is: 


Sept. 11, 2016: I decided to look up about how far it is from California to Las Vegas.  It's like a 6hr drive.  I'm not sure if he flown or take a bus there.  I would say that is expensive to get there.


Sept. 13, 2016: Berry went on his own to Vegas.  He got money, time, and effort.  The money could have come from someone else he was meeting there.  If the predator came to Berry, that's another thing.

Counter argument: This is to the counter argument of Angela saying that as a teenager, you know what's wrong and what's right.  It varies on person to person and what kind of situation.

Teen pregnancy epidemic: I wrote about this before on Tyra Banks.  This girl Jessica wants to have a baby with her ex- boyfriend and feels like when the baby comes, he's going to want to be with her and raise the baby together.  There is also Sue- Ann who wants to have a baby too with her boyfriend because she knows how to take care of babies.

As a kid in elementary school, I know getting pregnant as a teenager is not a smart or good thing to do.  There are some teens who are really dumb.  Fortunately, Sue- Ann's mom was there and cried, that made Sue- Ann not get pregnant.  Also 6 months later, Jessica did come on the show to say she didn't get pregnant after she saw herself on TV.

I tried to find the Oprah episode on YouTube, but I can't.  The thing is, you don't know Berry at 13.  I do remember there was a video of Berry with his shirt off and talking to his
webcam.  It was a clip on Oprah.




Bad behaviour: Also as a teenager, I'm sure a lot of us have smoke cigarettes, drank alcohol, done drugs.  We all know it's wrong, but a lot of teens do it.

Creep catchers: My friend Sherry sent this to me, but I already know about it from reading the Edmonton Journal.  She did send me one thing about Teen Mom.


I also wrote a blog post in Jun. 2016 about it:



Kyle Mac on Twitter: This also reminds me of the time I tweeted to Mac about seeing his demo reel on a private site.  I told him that he can email me in a new email of his, instead of his personal email address.  He created a new email and I got to see the demo.

I was imagining what he's thinking like: "I don't know Tracy.  I have never met her.  What if she emails me a lot?  What if she spams me?  What if she gives my email address to other people?  Then I would have to transfer my contacts to another account."

So that's why I told him to create a new one. 

I just want to say this: I don't want anyone to email me about sexual predators or teen pregnancy.  I am so done with it.  I have written so much about Dateline: To Catch a Predator in 2011-2012 and teen pregnancy in 2009-2010.  They are important topics, but I had written enough about it.

Sept. 14, 2016 Try Alpha: I like twop.com and how it can have deep and meaningful conversations about important topics.  I wish I did have my blog back in 2006 and I had copy and pasted all those Twop comments onto it as a reference.  However, I do have this blog for years and it's a good reference.

I have told you about this before.  I had went to a friend of a friend's house to have deep and meaningful conversations.




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