I have known Jonah Campbell for a handful of years by now—a 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 acquaintance’s grandmother’s 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 somewhere—a lake or a quarry or one of those ol’ swimmin’ holes you hear about, it doesn’t 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): “It’s almost…too 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? Isn’t there refreshment, and that’s 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 it’s modifying. Simply: it doesn’t make sense.
And yet, I think this anecdote reveals a certain quality in Jonah’s 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, Jonah’s work is structured around a sustained discontent. He holds in his mind—or even, I’ll dare to venture, sappily, his heart—ideas of things that just exceed (or far exceed) the cold, boring reality of things themselves. It’s too easy to get locked the cliché 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.
There’s an overriding disappointment in this. If there’s one thing that draws me to Jonah’s writing on food, boozing, and whatever else, it’s the mood of melancholy that governs the proceedings (I’m 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 that’s less refined and more just run-of-the-mill-fat-guy). Jonah’s 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 Jonah’s disappointment is the intensity with which it complicates pleasure. In his best pieces, he approaches the fineries of life—and 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 Whopper—with 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 it’s 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 of—to yoink a favourite Kramerism—feeling 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.
It comes back to that idea of excess, itself a governing force in the modern Western world. Perhaps we can only mull over the conditions of such gross excess after subjecting ourselves to the full gauntlet of its abuses. It’s not about drinking so much and then being punished with a hangover. It’s about drinking so much to get hungover, suffering the punishment like a wretch and then, slowly, eating ourselves back to life. It’s about the bracing reality that to be refreshed at all is to feel too refreshed.
And so: here’s to feeling bad all the time.
—John Semley
1 Though Mr. Campbell assures me that it was not a proper sleeping mask but rather a T-shirt wrapped around his face, to achieve the general effect of a sleeping mask.