When he’d first gotten involved with the newspaper, Alex had unwittingly walked into the middle of a backlash against a group of rabble-rousing activists—guys who’d routinely taken aim at local politicians and thumbed their socialist noses at the SFU administration whenever possible. They were one of the first groups on campus to really push the Darfur issue on the general student body; in fact they’d been so solemn and reverential about it that, looking back, there’d been nowhere for the conversation to go but down. And the incoming editors, Alex included, had been all too happy to take it there. Still, it was hard to feel proud of a legacy that included quite so many fart noises and Vin Diesel jokes.
It was strange to think of who he’d forever be associated with in these crusty pages. There was Tracy, obviously. And Steve and Suze he’d worked with for a few years apiece, so that was fine. Yet there were also people like Keith and Chip, pear-shaped oddities whom he never quite figured out, but for whom he felt a kind of accidental, secondhand warmth.
And now the tides were shifting once more. Alex was about to become a relic himself. The disdain for his era and all they stood (or didn’t stand) for was getting louder and louder; its rumblings were distant, but unmistakable. He took another swig of the cream soda and put the bottle back down on the desk next to the Barbara Pym paperback, which he’d taken to carrying around in his back pocket like a talisman.
Whenever Alex had talked to his newer contributors lately, he could all but hear them thinking, Sure, old man. Whatever you say. It’s not going to be like this much longer.
They’d stopped listening to his suggestions for story edits. They’d started pitching him the same feature idea over and over again, until he finally accepted it. And whenever they did come to his office hours, they all smiled like hyenas, looking around at the kingdom they were about to inherit.
Two days after the celebrity was spotted reading the election posters, a small headline appeared in the Metro’s entertainment section. From page 14, near the bottom of the page: “Holtz to run for SFU prez.” A Mack Holloway exclusive—the official list of candidates wasn’t set to be released for days. But his article quoted two sources, both anonymous, who claimed that the actor had handed in his nomination form and was now officially in contention for the SFSS’S highest and most visible position. Then, at the end of the piece, a cryptic statement from Holtz’s manager: “Duncan just wants to be the best, no matter what he does. Whether it’s movies or something like this—which I obviously can’t comment on, guys, be serious—you can expect him to give it his all.”
At which point Tracy threw the paper across the room. “If the answer was no, he’d have just said no,” she said, lighting a cigarette at her desk. “This is getting weirder and weirder.”
That day’s issue of the Metro sold out at SFU in less than an hour. The next day the daily ran a follow-up story, this time at the top of page twelve; the day after that, a half-page profile up front, next to the local news. By the end of the week another campus business had permanently suspended its ad account with The Peak.
The week after that, Mack Holloway was reassigned to Burnaby Mountain until further notice.
The Peak, meanwhile, scrambled to stay afloat. Rachel went aggressively after the local beat, sticking to the SFU-centric issues that a paper based off the mountain couldn’t compete with: the opening of an all-soup restaurant in Maggie Benston, ongoing concerns about SFU’S plagiarism code, and Gung Haggis Fat Choy, the university’s annual Robbie Burns Day/Chinese New Year celebration. Suze followed suit in the arts section. Whereas before she’d mostly relegated on-campus performances to the events listings, now she started writing about the SFU theatre and art gallery to a degree that even they found to be a little excessive. Every show, from the twenty-four-hour Aeschylus marathon to the guy who ironically painted a surfboard decal on the side of his car, got a preview and a review.
One thing the remaining staff agreed upon was that Duncan Holtz’s name would not appear in the paper’s pages. No gossipy letters to the editors, no easy jokes at his expense. He was just another student, and would be treated accordingly.
Let the Metro stoop to lowest-common-denominator tabloid journalism. For once in the Peak editors’ lives, they were going to take the high road.
Another advertiser disappeared.
Tyson looked over at Alex, who was studying with him in a rarely trafficked corner of the library, and said, “We’re going to Pub Night.”
Alex groaned but didn’t look up. “Like hell we are. I think I’ve had my fill of watching you hit on drunk teenagers.”
“You’re right.”
“Mmm,” he said, underlining a passage in his film textbook. “Am I now?”
“Indeed. We’re going to watch you hit on teenagers.”
Now Alex looked up. “We’ve been over this. Absolutely not.”
“Let me ask you this: have you had sex, even once, since the last time we talked about this?”
“I—”
“It was a rhetorical question, dick,” Tyson said, reaching across the table and slapping Alex clean across one cheek. Someone from a nearby cubicle shushed them. Tyson added in a whisper, “The answer is no and we both know it.”
Alex rubbed his face. “Ow. And how would you know this?”
“Simple. If you’d gotten even a fiddly little HJ by now, you’d have rubbed it in my face. You’re a prude, and self-loathing to boot, but I know you also want to prove me wrong. That’s what’s really killing you, isn’t it?”
Alex wound up to respond, but Tyson was right. It was, he realized, with no small whiff of depression, just like his writing career: Alex wanted the bragging rights that came with being sexually active more than he wanted to actually have sex. Even if just for his own private reassurance. The identities of his sexual partners, like the contents of his unwritten novel, were placeholders, their details TBD. This can’t be healthy, he thought.
“No fucking way I’m going to Pub Night,” Alex whispered back, and waved his hand in dismissal. But his head was already alight with the dozens of covert trysts that no doubt took place there every Thursday night, when drinks other than the rancid mountain ale were on special, and where the social code for sexual attraction was relaxed even further than usual. The truth was, he might not get many more chances like this.
Another.
And another.
Rick went on stress leave.
The enormity of their mistake only gradually dawned on them. But once it did, the editors bailed, and bailed hard.
It was Tracy who first figured out the flaw in their new Holtz-free strategy. She was walking up the AQ’S main steps when she was cut off by members of one of the film crews, pushing wheelbarrows of props and equipment across in both directions. As she waited for them to pass, she overheard a group of students breathlessly gossiping next to her about Holtz’s run for president. All of them were going to vote for the celebrity, “because wouldn’t that be hilarious?”
“Suddenly it all clicked,” she told the collective that week. “We’ve never really been suppressing the story—everyone knew about it already. And now it’s a legitimate public event.”
Alex dropped his head into his hands. Tracy was right. Somewhere along the line, the Peak editors had become reactionaries on a whole new scale. And snobs, too: the one thing SFU readers were genuinely interested in was the one thing their newspaper refused to tell them about. Because it was—what? Too obvious? Oh no, Alex thought, his imaginary ulcer about to pop. Our coverage itself has become ironic.
The rest of the room seemed to be thinking the same thing. Rachel stood up and announced, “I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t want my section defined by the things I’m not writing about.”
“You know,” Alex added aloud, “the Metro is claiming that they broke this whole Holtz story. And that’s technically true—we didn’t report it. But we could have. We knew about it before anyone else did. It happened down the hall from the room we�
��re sitting in.” He was getting excited. It was the kind of riled-up energy he imagined was present all the time during The Peak’s political eras, and it felt thrilling to tap into, even just for a few seconds. “Rachel’s right, guys. I bet we could still pull it off.”
“You mean—” Claude said, perched on the edge of his seat.
“I think it’s time to drop the embargo.”
Thanks to the Metro’s coverage, a wave of other, more respectable media had already started nosing around SFU. First Vancouver’s paid dailies and free weeklies, then local TV news and the CBC. By the time The Peak decided to dip its toes in the water, the story was getting traction on the national newswires.
But Mack Holloway remained the first reporter on the job. He was also the most visible around campus, chasing students for quotes and scribbling in beat-up, dollar-store notebooks. His was the face you’d recognize: creased but stoic, with a career newspaperman’s easy air of exhaustion. He commandeered a table next to the big-budget sci-fi production near the lecture halls; the crew assumed he was some suit from the studio, or more likely the haggard screenwriter. Whatever this shaggy dog was turning into—be it comedy or tragedy—Holloway seemed bent on bearing witness to it.
Another. The Peak was a sinking ship, more water than boat.
Alanis Morissette was right, you know.
The truth about irony appeared in the summer of 1996, but nobody recognized it—even though it spent weeks on top of the charts. And nobody talks about it now. They all say, “Isn’t it ironic that ‘Ironic’ isn’t actually ironic?”
They’re all wrong, the bastards.
A black fly in your chardonnay is ironic. It is. You expect fancy wine to be fancy, and your expectations get thwarted. Boom. A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break is really ironic—we’re talking hearty, old-fashioned, character-building irony here. And ten thousand spoons when all you really need is a knife? Don’t get me started.
You hear the same argument trotted out a million times. In rez hallways late at night, or while lying on the hood of your buddy’s car, stoned out of your mind and waiting for airplanes that will never appear. It goes like this: the examples Morissette gives aren’t ironic—they’re just unhappy coincidences. Sure, I don’t want rain on my wedding day, but that doesn’t make me the victim of a fuggin’ poetic device over here.
Alex took a sip of what he called swamp mud—all of West Mall’s six drip coffee flavours mixed together. He was clicking around Duncan Holtz’s IMDb page, absent-mindedly investigating everything the man had ever appeared in.
Nope. Triple nope. The only reason people accept this kind of asinine logic is because they think different rules apply to irony in real life versus in fiction. If any of this shit happened to Hamlet, they’d have no problem whatsoever. They’d write a term paper about it.
But for some reason, these people are unwilling to treat their lives like a story, and themselves as the writer/director/hero.
Why?
Why do the same people who maintain multiple blogs, soundtrack their every walk to the store (thereby shutting out all competing narratives), cultivate a public list of their top friends, and frame their daily existence as a string of status updates—why can’t they recognize the one basic force in their lives that feeds all the others? Why don’t they know the name of the most-used tool in their toolbox?
14
IRREGULARITIES ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
In total there were four candidates for the presidency. One was Samantha Gilmartin, a fiery, pathologically focused sociology major who was also the current SFSS university relations officer and, until a few months ago, a shoo-in years in the making. One was Piotr Ivanov, a 3rd-year transfer student who was running on a platform exclusively devoted to getting calamari added to the Pub’s menu. One was a mysterious woman known only as Kennedy, who’d filed all of her paperwork through the mail. And one was Duncan Holtz.
These were the faces and statistics running laps through Rachel’s head as she swapped tapes in her recorder, last-minute prep before her interview with the head of the Independent Electoral Commission. This was going to be a teaser story, part of her lead-up to the big debate spread later on. The IEC was the official election watchdog, its members charged with the thankless task of refereeing the proceedings and keeping all mud-slinging down to a tolerable level. Inevitably, they were given shit from all directions, and roundly criticized for failures both real and imaginary—even though voter turnout always stalled somewhere around 10 percent.
Rachel took the stairwell two steps at a time. Over the weekend the walls had been stripped of their election notices and replaced with a fresh coat of individual campaign posters. Each candidate was assigned an official colour, meaning that every bare surface on campus was now a pixelated rainbow of lofty promises and almost-catchy slogans. Amidst the chaos, Rachel’s eye was drawn to the purple posters of Duncan Holtz, which seemed to outnumber everyone else’s 2:1. The guy was clearly making a serious go of it. And you couldn’t help but be drawn to the pure Hollywood-ness of his face. Walking across Convo Mall, she passed other candidates shaking hands and handing out even more flyers.
Rachel repeated the names, slogans, and campaign promises until they were committed to memory. Usually she’d have had this stuff mapped out weeks in advance, but this year’s temporary Holtz embargo had thrown her off. She cursed herself for walking into an interview so unprepared.
Wanting to appear as neutral and unbiased as possible, the IEC had set up its office this year in the Rotunda, far from the prying eyes of SFSS headquarters. A circular study area that sat directly above the lower bus loop, this was once the epicentre of the entire campus—The Peak’s original office had been in there, little more than a typewriter and bucket in a windowless room, way back in ‘65. Now it housed the women’s and LGBTQ centres, CJSF 90.1 FM, and a bunch of other advocacy and research groups. A table on one side of the common area was piled high with old clothes and ragged books, free for the swapping.
The defining feature of the Rotunda, though, was the glass column in the middle, around which all of the desks and tables were organized. That’s where Rachel spotted Lana Murphy, this year’s IEC head watchdog, standing on a chair and applying a strip of scotch tape to the cardboard walls of her makeshift office. She nodded at Rachel over her shoulder and wearily invited her to take a seat.
Right away Rachel could tell she was a kindred spirit, and an ally in the war against idiocy that was being fought on campus every day. SFU: A Sphincter Says What? Since 1965. The giveaway was Lana’s fingernails (polished to within an inch of their lives) as well as the skin around them (ravaged to same). Rachel thought of her own mangled split ends with pride.
“Rachel,” Lana said. “Nice to see you. Sorry about this.” She stepped off the chair, which wobbled as her weight shifted. Back on the floor, she regained her poise. “It’s embarrassing, I know.”
“What, specifically, is the embarrassing part?” Rachel put her recorder down on one thigh and got out her notebook.
“Look at me,” Lana said. “I’m surrounded by pieces of a refrigerator box. My staff has been wiped out. Our budget this year is less than zero—the SFSS is claiming we owe them money.” She pointed at Rachel’s recorder, whose dusty tape made a faint whirring as it spun. “I guess you guys know a thing or two about cutbacks, too, huh?”
“Actually, that’s the same one we’ve always had,” Rachel said. “But yes. Things are rough in our office as well. We just pawned our printer. We’re getting lectures about leaving too many lights on.
“You know,” she added, the idea just coming to her, “we could put a fiscal spin on this story, if you wanted to. Budget cuts, personnel being stretched thin, that kind of thing. Recession stuff plays really well right now.”
Lana shook her head, her smile veering toward the condescending. “No. Thanks, but no. The last thing I need right now is to come off as whiny, or that I came to you guys to vent about my problems.”
>
“Fine by me.” Rachel felt a little slighted. Maybe they weren’t going to be pals after all. “Let’s get started, then. What do you think of this year’s crop of candidates?”
“As I’m sure you know, Rachel,” she said, slipping into her on-the-record persona, “it’s not up to me to say. Obviously it’s encouraging to see so many names on the ticket, but I can’t speak to the individuals’ relative merits. I’m a disinterested third party. The IEC will remain fair and impartial throughout.”
“And what do you see as your group’s main duties leading up to the election?”
“The IEC’S mandate is simple: to ensure that all of the protocols, as laid out in the student society’s bylaws, are followed to the word and to the letter. Candidates have strict limits on how much they are allowed to spend and how they are to conduct themselves during campaigning. We’ve already conducted a thorough inspection of the posters that have been put up, verifying that they fall within set parameters.”
The Dilettantes Page 16