Trips to the dollar store or to Wal-Mart or really to any massive box store spook and unnerve me.  Such excess.  Such excess, multiplied over and over again in shop after shop across the developed world.  This isn’t conspicuous consumption; it’s gluttony.  It feels as though we are uninvited guests to a buffet, a land of take-what-you want, swilling greedily until someone catches us at it…

Some of the British slang is magnificent: simultaneously expressive and functional, delivering concepts nearly impossible to communicate in the North American vernacular.

1. Faff
This is my favourite. “Faffing” has no proper equivalent in N. American parlance. “Wasting time” and “goofing around” do not express the same thing. “Dilly-dally” sounds idiotic.
Faff: To muck about, wasting time doing something not necessary.

2. “Muck in”.
Means to help out, usually a friend. Neatly communicates the idea of a group effort. “Muck” is vaguely unpleasant, much like helping a friend.
“Pitch in” doesn’t have quite the same effect, and can even suggest the transfer of money rather than services.

3. Naff
British slang, today meaning uncool, tacky, unfashionable, worthless…
Can’t think of an equivalent N. American term that communicates so many things so precisely.

Originally published in the Toronto Star on August 5, 2003

Tagline:   The Iran that CNN doesn’t show us – the daily existence of a country in flux.  No booze, but Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman, dubbedin Farsi.

I am suspended in an airplane somewhere between Toronto and Tehran, and my ignorance covers me like a chador.  My Eastern complexion has in the past camouflaged me as a full-blooded native Iranian, but in this cramped and noisy box I am quickly betrayed by my flat Canadian vowels.

Last summer, at 20 years of age, I embarked on my first visit to Iran, the country of half my heritage.  Bereft of tongue and custom, I possess little of the rich inheritance that is my birthright.

The Iran of National Geographic is an exotic wonder, or it is a stifling desert with gracious peasants.  The Iran of CNN is a horde of turbaned men, often Islamic fundamentalists, sometimes terrorists, always hostile.

The Iran I am about to experience is a very narrow Iran.  It is the country of the affluent few percent.  My great-grandfather was one of the richest men in the Northern provinces, and the remnants of his astonishing wealth still tinkle faintly in the purses of the second and third generations.  I will see neither the poor carpet-weaving villagers, nor the bluish opium addicts, nor the blazing skies of the Southern deserts.  Not this time.

August 1
At 7:20 PM Tehran time, we hove over a city that glitters with the famous “lights of Tehran”.  The airplane rustles audibly with women donning hijabs – veils for the hair.  Hijab is more than a garment, it is a mentality.  These women must remember, if only for a time, that modesty is the only ornament permitted a woman – officially speaking.

The number of women in this airplane who have been boldly bareheaded for the past several hours hints at the true esteem in which some circles hold officialdom.  Iran is the only Islamic republic in the Middle East, and since 1979 (the Islamic Revolution), Iranian women have been required to cover all but their face and hands.

We step out into an astonishing heat.

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Originally published in the Toronto Star on January 31, 2006

Preface:  In 2006, my very cool editor at the Toronto Star suggested I try out some highly marketed supplement pills for enhancing my brain-power, and then write about it.  I complied, but I added an angle of my own:  I convinced my long-suffering sister to be the “control group”.  Instead of downing supplements, she ate pizza.  This article is the result.

“One pill makes you larger, and the other makes you small.  And the ones that mother gives you, don’t do anything at all.”
– Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit”

The health  store next door now contains, theoretically at least, all of the ingredients for Superman.  ”Natural” is the watchword, and the “alternative medicine” industry proffers a pill for any ill, yours for the swallowing.

What sets the “natural world” apart from the pharmaceutical one is the bent toward betterment rather than healing.  Newer products offer something original:  poppable brainpower.

There are now dozens, and Google can lead you to all of them.  ”Brainspeed” is one such dietary supplement, made by Natrol, and comprised primarily of vitamins.

A couple of things to keep in mind.  First, Natrol has already settled a $5 million lawsuit in New York with regards to its line of muscle-enhancing supplements.  The allegation?  False advertising.  Another settlement, this one worth $250,000, was reached in California, after Natrol was accused of “making false and misleading advertising claims for their chitosan-based weight-loss products, and with selling weight-loss products that contained too much lead.”

Second, Natrol also landed itself in trouble when it undertook to sponsor the United States Chess Federation last year.  It’s the nerd equivalent of a steroid company sponsoring the Olympics.

Natrol claims that Brainspeed can make one think faster.  It comes in three flavours:  ”Perform”, “Attention” and “Memory”.  ”Think Faster, Maintain Your Memory and Empower Your Mind”, proclaims Natrol.  It costs around $60 (U.S.) for 60 pills, and can be bought at several sites online – although it hasn’t been approved by Health Canada and thus isn’t legal in this country.

But do pills like  Brainspeed actually work? (more…)

Originally published in the Toronto Star on September 6, 2005

Fourth year, and the storied “real world”, of which I have heard much, looms dismally large. Now the chill winds of September, and a young undergraduate’s thoughts at last turn lightly to thoughts of school. School…and beyond.

“You won’t be able to leave everything to the last minute in the REAL WORLD,” warn parents, employers, career counsellor types, gloomily. Sometimes they are angry, as you will glean from my strategically placed exclamation marks. “Fire and brimstone! That wouldn’t go down very well in the REAL WORLD!”

Indeed. But if this isn’t the real world, then it must be a fake world. I’ve no objection. Deep in the dappled and drowsy fake world, sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears. Here in the fake world, the air is sweet, the sleeps are long and, theoretically speaking, I can fly. I am by no means desirous of being drafted into the exacting canker sore that is the “REAL WORLD”. All hail Neverland.

Historically, the best place to avoid the draft is graduate school. What follows is a brief bit of propaganda – the seven wonders of graduate school.

1. Time

Waking up at 8 A.M. is for nerds. Rise at 10, mon confreres. Or, if that please you not, rise at 11. And if your dreams were especially luxurious, rise not at all. The world is your oyster, if you could afford oysters, which you almost certainly cannot on your graduate student salary. But seriously, folks, to pen one’s own schedule is an excellent thing – work proceeds at a pace and arrangement more suited to the whims of erratic Chappelle’s Show reruns. When it proceeds at all, that is.

(more…)

Originally published in the Toronto Star on June 14, 2005

Have you ever been moved to violence, even blood carnage, by the sheer grammatical audacity of radio fare? I know I have.  Below follows the most comprehensive grammatical assessment ever performed on a Snoop Dogg composition, and that’s just the opening act.

“Late night, come home /

Work sucks, I know /

She left me roses by the stairs /

Surprises let me know she cares /

Say it ain’t so, I will not go, turn the lights off, carry me home /

Nanananananananananana…..”

– Blink 182, “All the Small Things”

Picking on Blink 182 is like shouting at one’s dog. You hate it for excreting all over the airwaves, and yet in your heart you know the poor beggars just don’t know any better. Thoroughly inept at all instruments, unquestionably illiterate and probably quite smelly, Blink 182 has appeared on the cover of the appalling rag CosmoGirl and won an irrelevant Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Award.

Spelling and Grammar:

1. “Late night, come home /Work sucks, I know”…

Demons from hell, can you say SENTENCE FRAGMENTS?? F.

2. “Nanananananananananana” is spelled with a silent ‘e’. F.

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Originally published in the Toronto Star on February 8, 2005

Good morning, and what do you want, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings?

Laxatives are in Aisle Five, bon apetit, you mossy-bowelled bleeder…have a runny day. Ahoy there, you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous pervert …and welcome to Wal-Mart. Please watch your step…your warts are leaking. Cart or basket? What was that? Stop the presses, Shakespeare has spoken, ingenious pairing of the “f” word with “you”, bravo, you cancerous lump of nose-pick. Painkillers are in Aisle Eight, have a superb overdose.

Abuse is dead. Instead we have boorish, boring vulgarity – two or three one-size-fits-all sewer swear words. The same old ho-hum cussing, what’s sauce for the broken fingernail is sauce for the thirty-car train wreck. Where’s the panache? Why not exhume the verbal treasures of the English muck mines? From the playful to the truly vile, let’s doff the swears and curse with style. I’m I.D.’s pretentious, long-winded international correspondent and THIS IS CNN! Brought to you by the letter “I”: for your belligerent pleasure – right now! – a whirlwind tour of Planet Insult. You smelly bag of mongrel corn plop. You sock-sniffing guttersnipe. You reek of sauerkraut and leprosy.  (more…)

These are the tales of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, a world-famous detective who lives on Baker Street.  Sherlock cares for nothing but solving crimes, so the task of lionizing him falls to Mr. Watson, a doctor whose awe for his friend is boundless.  All of the Holmes adventures are catalogued in what is essentially Watson’s diary.

Sherlock Holmes is a drug addict with Asperger’s.  He is mawkishly attached to his old roommate Watson, and calls him over for tea and opium at any hour of day.

Sherlock does all of his best work when he is blitzed out of his skull.  According to Watson, one hit of opium sends Sherlock into a state of intellectual frenzy, his brain clocking operations at breakneck speed. Indeed,  one might even say that it kicks into high gear.  Ha ha.

Sherlock solves all of his crimes by means of improbable clues, most of which could be interpreted in a dozen different ways, or should not be interpreted at all .  Consider the following scene, from “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”, in which Holmes interprets the size of a hat:

[Watson] “I have no doubt that I am very stupid, but I must confess that I am unable to follow you. For example, how did you deduce that this man was intellectual?”

For answer Holmes clapped the hat upon his head. It came right over the forehead and settled upon the bridge of his nose. “It is a question of cubic capacity,” said he; “a man with so large a brain must have something in it.”

Or he may have simply had a huge head.  Or he may have suffered from some horrible disease.  Or his hat may have been too big for him.

Sherlock’s astonishing ability to solve crimes is presented as a gift of his intellect, his infinite propensity for logic and deduction.  In fact he is simply the luckiest man alive:  his fantastic hunches are always correct.  His real gift is ESP.

Sherlock’s substance abuse and supernatural intuition are irresistible but well-worn jokes, and I’ll stop making them right now.   Candidly speaking, the stories are incredibly entertaining.  Most of them are first-rate – taut, well-written, and genuinely suspenseful.  Holmes is a great character – or caricature – and Dr. Watson is the quintessential sidekick.  I particularly enjoyed “A Scandal in Bohemia” (which features the very compelling character Irene Adler) and “The Red-Headed League”.

If you are in the mood for some nineteenth-century adventure, quirks and quips from the original eccentric Englishman and a bit of heroin, I absolutely recommend Sherlock Holmes.

Have you seen the movie Barney’s Version (starring Paul Giamatti, Dustin Hoffman, Minnie Driver, Rachel Lefevre and the beautiful Rosamund Pike)?  If so, were you baffled that an entire trio of lovely and accomplished women managed to fall for Barney, a tubby slob? (more…)

The title of my book Life is Perhaps was snatched from “Another Birth”,  a poem by the most famous female poet Iran has ever produced – the tragic and sublimely talented Ms. Forough Farrokhzad.

From a biographical sketch by Melissa Barnhardt in Rozaneh Magazine:

“The modern Iranian Poetess Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967) virtually “opened the windows” of Iranian poetry to real relationships and the real world. While Persian poetry had already been somewhat liberated by the free verse of the 1920s, her frank presentation of feelings about loving, sexual relationships was revolutionary. She did the unthinkable, not only writing about intimacy in a predominantly Shiite Moslem society, but writing about it from an utterly honest, utterly feminine point of view. Without fear, she said what had always been forbidden, inwards that had never before appeared in a literary work. Incredibly, her impressive ability caused initial shock to give way to the overwhelming admiration of the educated and the young. Secure in her voice, she broadened her concern to include natural, honest relationships within the Iranian social order. Finally, she began to emphasize a dialogue with the rest of the earth, and an openness to the entire natural universe, as her once specifically Persian images of fundamental relationship (the wall, the window, the mirror, the streets, and the garden and the sun, etc.) were suddenly galvanized with universal force.

Perhaps she dared fate by her extremely public living of a life that defied stultifying restriction. The daughter of a military colonel, she married at sixteen, published her first volume of poems at seventeen, gave birth to a son at eighteen, and was divorced before her twentieth birthday. Not long after the divorce she was prevented from seeing her son ever again. Her increasingly mature volumes of poetry included The Captive, The Wall, Rebellion, the important Another Birth, and the posthumously published Let Us Have Faith in the Beginning of the Cold Season. She studied film production as result of her liaison with the Iranian intellectual and film maker Ibrahim Golestan, and won the prize for documentaries at the 1963 Uberhausen, Germany Film Festival, with her film about a leper colony in Tabriz, Iran. In 1965, UNESCO produced a 30 minute film on her life, and Bernardo Bertolucci, a 15 minute film. In 1967, she was planning to play the lead role in a Tehran stage production of her Persian translation of Shaw’s St. Joan, when she met her untimely death in an automobile crash.”

The world awaits a seminal translation of Farrokhzad’s poems into English, but until that day here is a translation of an excerpt of “Another Birth” by Karim Emami:

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Originally published in Eye Magazine Weekly on February 16, 1998

Note:  this was the first time I ever saw my name in print, and I was very excited about it. Sky-high tuition fees in Ontario are the norm now, but in 1998 fees were a seriously contentious issue.  Like much of my early work (and come to think of it, my present work and probably my future work), I now find it more than a little embarrassing.  The quality of writing is patchy and the sarcasm is clumsy.  The usual disclaimer:  I was a teenager when I wrote it!

Students are bleeding Ontario into the pits of financial death.  They are a fussy, spoiled lot, poking deeper and deeper into the public change-purse in their ruthless pursuit of free education, free jobs and free beer.  Too pampered to search for one of the trillions of youth jobs available in Ontario’s booming economy, too drunk to lift their very rich noses from their heaped plates of caviar and shrimp, students whine and protest incessantly, potentially ruining the sky-high morale of all other Ontarians.

Take heed, my friends, students will be the downfall of this fine province!

Recently, University of Toronto students have discovered three new molehills to inflate into mountains:  a mere 20 per cent hike in tuition fees (this year, it has increased 60 per cent in the past five years); a forecasted graduating student debt of $25,000; and the “commercialization” of university facilities.  I am certain that you are as tired as I am of these little brats constantly wreaking political havoc on poor Mr. Harris and social havoc on our peaceful streets.  Thus behold a foolproof plan guaranteed to solve all students’ financial “problems”.

First, tuition fees aren’t the fortune that the self-righteous little leeches would have one believe.  If 55,000 students attend U of T and each graduates with a debt of $25,000, this amounts to a cumulative U of T debt of $1,315,000,000 Canadian.  Big deal, about a buck fifty U.S.   Solution #1:  Panhandle for a day or two in Detroit.  (Edit:  It’s true (more or less)!  The Canadian dollar was about 60 cents USD not so very long ago!) (more…)

Originally published in The Manchester Evening News in summer 1998

Note:  I’ve visited Manchester several times, and on this particular visit I was struck by the colourful dialect of the city and penned a little article describing the differences I observed between Canada and the UK.   To my immense surprise, it was accepted and published in the Manchester Evening News under the odd headline “You do say some funny things”.  They even popped by to take my photograph.  :)  In retrospect I find the article extremely silly and rather embarrassing, and I would hasten to remind you that I was 17 when I wrote it!

To Canadians, England is emblemised by cricket, cups of tea and John Cleese.  Our view of Manchester is even narrower – football and Frasier’s Daphne Moon.  Many Mancunians seem to have mentally reduced all of Canada’s vast 12 regions to one symbol – snow.  The truth is that many parts of Canada, including most of Ontario, where I am from, are warm and green for six months a year.  Your weather, however, is identical each day.

Here are a few entries from my Manchester meteorological journal…Monday:  Grey with a touch of rain.  Generally rotten.  Tuesday:  Grey with a touch of rain.  Generally rotten.  Thursday:  Grey with a 46-second patch of sunshine.  Still rotten.

A more common and disturbing myth is that Canada is a glorified extension of the United States.  This may be true in terms of foreign policy, but we are not Americans.

The most noticeable difference I have perceived between Canadians and the English is speech.  So, you Mancunians, never go into a Canadian restaurant and request a “buttie”.  You will be the recipient of at best a stifled giggle and at worst a slap in the face.  We eat sandwiches, but they do not contain some poor chap’s bottom.

While you visit “loos” and “toilets”, we visit “washrooms” and “ladies’ or men’s rooms”.  Chippies do not exist in Canada, and if you happen to mistake a McDonald’s for one, a request for “mushy peas” will be met with raised eyebrows and only minimal tolerance.  Peas only become “mushy” if they are rotten (“gone off”), in which case they are speedily discarded.  We don’t have “petrol” – only “gas,” which costs 22p per litre.  (Edit:  NOT ANY  MORE!!) (more…)

The Circus
by Showey Yazdanian

Abbas Farmanfarma, forty-five and hefty, hated Toronto in the summer. He was perspiring prodigiously into a huge American car on his way home from work, burning with anger at the traffic that dragged along the highway in slow motion.

“What a country,” mumbled Abbas, fat face glistening under its mighty Iranian five o’clock shadow as a bus blurted a smelly black cloud into his windshield. “You either freeze or boil.”

“Thank God it’s Friday, Toronto, and it is hot hot hot!” said a WOLD radio cretin. “Is it hot enough for you?”

“Shut up,” mumbled Abbas. Even the highway shimmered with sweat.

“I said is it hot enough for you Toronto?”

Something in Abbas’s brain exploded. He floored the gas pedal. Five seconds later he screeched to a halt behind a red minivan, obviously air-conditioned, which sat with pointed obedience at a yellow light.

“Beshoor hammal, move!” screamed Abbas. [No-brained dirty labour worker, move!]

And the howled reply: “Hey fat man! Learn to drive!”

“Kooft! Ridam be ghabre pedaret!” [Syphilis! I'm going to take a shit on your father's grave!]

“Learn English, you fat Al Qaeda bastard!”

Abbas blasted his horn. That was all it took in Toronto at rush hour. Within seconds the offending minivan was at the epicentre of a cacophony of beeping.

His rage quenched, Abbas rolled up the window. When he finally pulled into his trim suburban driveway, it was seven o’clock and there were twin swatches of yellow sweat under his sickly-smelling arms. He stepped out of his car, swayed upright for a few seconds, and finally fainted onto the lawn. (more…)

A personal story originally published in “Footprints for Mothers and Daughters” (HarperCollins), May 2011

Night school. The drone of a lecture in the darkness; students a little surly, a little soiled with the day’s dust and sweat; teachers a little grey, a little grim as they too hurriedly gulped at tuna sandwiches and warmed-over pasta at break-time. There was little pleasure in it for any of us, but that was night school. We all needed something. The teachers needed a little extra money; I needed one last high school credit to graduate on schedule.

It was Dad who usually picked us up from night school. Outside it was dark and cold, and we would huddle in the narrow corridor and watch like owls for the yellow headlights of the old ’86 station wagon. There it is! The car! The car! we would yell, and madly clamber into it. Free for another week.

At home there was a warm kitchen, a hot dinner, and a bone-crushing hug from the cuddliest, most devoted mother in the world. There was dinner until homework and homework until bed-time, and that was life twice a week until the night that Mr. Heald, our night school teacher, made an announcement. “Guys, I know that this could be hard on some of you, but I think it’s fair to tell you that we might have to cancel physics this year,” he said.

My heart sank. I absolutely couldn’t lose this credit. (more…)

Unpublished; written in fall 2009

This article is nominally about Venice, but it’s mostly about money, because money is truly the currency of Venice. I’ve never seen a place with so little heart to it.

There is a good reason for this. Venice is less a city than it is an ornament: pretty to look at, but not very functional. The same magnificent history that gave rise to the splendid patchwork of narrow footpaths and canals has also damned Venice to uselessness. Venice, with its 117 islands, hundreds of bridges and zero motorways, isn’t especially well suited for anything but tourism, and the locals know it. It’s the biggest tourist trap in Europe, and possibly the entire world. Tourist ‘trap’ probably doesn’t do it justice, actually. It’s a full scale ambush.

I entered Venice on the bus from Mestre, Venice’s ugly sister city on the mainland. Mestre isn’t glamorous, but the hotels are a lot cheaper and believe it or not, it’s where most Venetians actually live. Smitten foreigners have driven the Venetian property market into the stratosphere, and the most sodden 1-bedroom apartment in town starts at well over a million dollars. Unlike New York or Berlin or London, where the rich hide in darkened cars and sprawling estates, in Venice there aren’t any of either, and the Beautiful People are very much on display, sweeping through the Rialto in stoles and diamonds. (more…)