Campbell - Eaten back to life: (essays)

I have known Jonah Campbell for a handful of years by nowa decade and change, by my count. Which I suppose constitutes two handfuls. And change. In that time I have seen him howl mad at a Morrissey concert; watched him stab open a can of garbage National Bohemian Beer with a knife produced seemingly from nowhere; I have attempted to radiate annoyance while he talked in depth with an obliging Parisian sommelier about the provenance of certain grapes and the repute of this-or-that vintner and god-only-knows-what-else, but nevertheless given myself over to his (allegedly) better judgment; I have heroically held my tongue while he dozed hungover in the back seat of an acquaintances grandmothers car with his face almost totally obscured by one of those quilted sleeping masks worn in old movies by the kinds of characters who also own monogrammed robes; laughed when he left me a rambling phone message after failing to keep our appointment at his old Saint-Henri apartment (christened Snake Hollow) that involved the presumably explanatory/excusatory declaration, shit got baffled; and watched with perverse amusement, as he registered seemingly unaffected indifference to the sight of the Mona Lisa , widely considered one of the better paintings ever painted.

But the best and most telling story, the one that winds to the heart of the particular quality of Jonah-ness that defines his character and, so too, this collection, came to me secondhand. It runs as follows: in an effort to get the better of the suffocating summertime heat, he and some mutual friends went swimming somewherea lake or a quarry or one of those ol swimmin holes you hear about, it doesnt really matter. But, like, not a pool. Anyway. When a friend commented on how great the water was and what a capital idea going swimming on a hot day turned out to be, Jonah replied, in an archly Jonah-ish turn (voice lilting upward in my mind, if not in reality): Its almosttoo refreshing? At which point our mutual friend, consumed by exasperated disgust, attempted to angrily, impotently paddle away in an inner tube.

The author (of this collection; not your present author, i.e., me) has debated the finer points of this story, but that it lives as such in legend is just as well. And also sort of the point. The idea of a heat-beating dip proving, somehow, too refreshing seems categorically contradictory. How, after all, can something be in excess of refreshment? Isnt there refreshment, and thats it? Presumably, if something is either a) exceedingly refreshing, or b) insufficiently refreshing, it thus ceases to be at all refreshing, and so the modifier essentially slaughters the thing its modifying. Simply: it doesnt make sense.

And yet, I think this anecdote reveals a certain quality in Jonahs writing, and in his thinking (if it is not too pretentious or haughty to call it that). Throughout this collection, which spans everything from the serious consideration of emerging chip flavours to a defence of dilettantism to canny observations on the films of Jean Renoir, Jonahs work is structured around a sustained discontent. He holds in his mindor even, Ill dare to venture, sappily, his heartideas of things that just exceed (or far exceed) the cold, boring reality of things themselves. Its too easy to get locked the clich of Platonic ideals and whatnot, but suffice it to say that for Jonah there always seems to be this imagined essence of an experience or thing toward which his work inevitably narrows: the geographic and historic particularity of the profile of a particularly funky (in the gross, noxious sense, not the slinky bass-solo sense) glass of wine, or of his encounter with that wine, the concentrations of flavours found in bitters and digestifs, even the essential character of what a place, or holiday, or piece of candy, or potato chip means. This preoccupation, perhaps in its very nature, creates conditions that can never be fully realized. It can only be perceived in flashes, like the face of a hot babe glimpsed speeding by on a train.

Theres an overriding disappointment in this. If theres one thing that draws me to Jonahs writing on food, boozing, and whatever else, its the mood of melancholy that governs the proceedings (Im also undeniably suckered in by his acute eye for detail and capacity to turn a phrase, and his penchant for crapulence, which I share, albeit in a way thats less refined and more just run-of-the-mill-fat-guy). Jonahs writing is shot through with a sense of dissatisfaction, yet it is, I think, a productive dissatisfaction.

This is not because such feelings of always being let down carry with them some cheesy hope of one day, somehow, somewhere, finding that perfect sandwich, like: Lo, that one day we may be able to eat kebab unburdened by the guilt of colonialism! God, no. Garish! What I respond to in Jonahs disappointment is the intensity with which it complicates pleasure. In his best pieces, he approaches the fineries of lifeand the not-so-fineries, like getting shitcanned in Niagara Falls, Ontario, a place where I too have spent many bleary nights shambling recklessly under the ambivalent glare of a three-story sculpture of Frankenstein holding a Whopperwith caution, even disdain. Pleasure is supposed to be the thing we escape into, to relieve ourselves from the weary realities of the world. And yet its in this escape itself that Jonah seems to find (or create) the weariest problem: the vexing contradictions at the heart of being alive and eating and drinking and losing ourselves to the delusive succour ofto yoink a favourite Kramerismfeeling good all the time. He leaves the problem of squaring the accoutrements of the good life with actually living a good, morally unsuspect life unsolved, as it should be.