Rust Is A Form of Fire

By Joe Fiorito

Joe Fiorito spent 18 hours in total, over the course of three days, on the corner of Victoria and Queen in downtown Toronto watching the city go by and recording what he saw. The rhythms of the city ebb and flow according to the time of day. The declarative sentence is the best brush to paint an objective portrait of the city we live in. It is an example of what happens when you stay in one place and observe a single place or thing for a very long time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica Editions Inc
• Release date: May 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781550719284

Joe Fiorito

Joe Fiorito was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario. As a young man in Northern Ontario, he worked in a paper mill, surveyed roads, and laboured in bush camps prior to becoming involved in community development and arts consulting. Fiorito spent five years working with a staff of Inuit journalists at CBC Radio in Iqaluit, NWT before transferring to Regina, where he wrote, produced and directed CBC Radio's highly acclaimed "The Food Show," a weekly program about food and agriculture. Fiorito lived for many years in Montreal, where he first wrote a weekly food column for HOUR, and later signed on as a city columnist for the Montreal Gazette. His first collection, Comfort Me With Apples: Considering the Pleasures of the Table, a series of essays about food and memory drawn from Fiorito's HOUR columns, was published by Nuage Editions (now Signature Editions) in 1994. In 2000, it was reissued by McLelland & Stewart. Tango on the Main, Fiorito's second collection with Signature, was selected from his Gazette columns. Fiorito relocated to Toronto, writing first for the National Post and then for the Toronto Star. In 1999, he published his family memoir, The Closer We Are to Dying, which became a national best-seller and received widespread critical acclaim. This was followed by the award-winning novel The Song Beneath the Ice and Union Station: Love, Madness, Sex and Survival on the Streets of the New Toronto.

Book preview

RUST IS

A FORM

OF FIRE

JOE FIORITO

GUERNICA • ESSENTIAL PROSE SERIES 107

TORONTO • BUFFALO • LANCASTER (U.K.)

2015

For Carmin Priolo, flaneur

Contents

Introduction

Day One

5:40 a.m.

6:10 am

6:40 a.m.

7:05 a.m.

7:55 a.m.

8:15 a.m.

9:10 a.m.

10 a.m.

Noon, Day One

Day two

Thursday, 11:35

Noon.

12:50 p.m.

2:30 p.m.

3:15 p.m.

4:05 p.m.

Day three

5:30 p.m.

Friday night.

8:10 p.m.

9:50 p.m.

Midnight.

About The Author

Introduction

The slim grey volume had as its somewhat unappetizing title: An Attempt At Exhausting A Place in Paris. The author, George Perec. I love a slim volume, and a high concept, and I knew what this book contained before I picked it up.

Over the course of three consecutive days in October of 1974, Perec parked himself in cafés in the neighbourhood of Saint-Sulpice, so that he might observe and record whatever passed in front of him.

What was he after? His phrase: what happens when nothing happens. He did not act or intercede; he behaved as if he were both at the movies and in the movies, writing the screenplay and sitting in the audience at the same time.

The concept, a flash of light.

This is, in a way, the essence of what I do as a city columnist for The Toronto Star, the largest newspaper in Canada: observe, record, report.

The only problem with the kind of column I write is that I have to move on, without the luxury of lingering in one place for three days.

Perec, of course, was not a journalist. He was a novelist, an essayist, a palindromist and a filmmaker.

His day job — a guy’s got to make a living — was as an archivist of hospital records, which may explain his love for — or fascination with — the quotidian.

He was also one of the founders of OuLiPo, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle; the workshop of potential literature.

I think of journalism as potential literature, with this single stylistic exception: you can’t make stuff up. Anyway, there is no need to do so when the events of the day are filled with so many marvels.

Perhaps OuLiPo was not so much a movement as it was a bunch of smart people experimenting with ways to refresh and renew literature: a lipogram, for example, in the form of a novel without the letter e; the snowball, a poetical exercise in which each word is one letter longer than the word which precedes it; and my favourite, N+7, a dictionary experiment in which you alter a text by replacing a noun with whatever noun follows seven entries later in the dictionary.

In other words, serious fun.

I knew I had to do what Perec did.

My methods differed, slightly. He sat in cafés. Toronto does not have a café culture in the European sense, and so the only time I went indoors was twice, both times to get a bite to eat.

The result: I heard more conversations, or bits and pieces of conversation, on the street than I heard indoors.

I suspect that, in Paris, the café is a private space. But here, on the streets of Toronto, the public space is private: we are unguarded, unaware of each other, and isolated in public with our cell phones.

Why did I choose the corner of Queen and Victoria, as opposed to some iconic Toronto intersection? I chose it precisely because it is not iconic. It is not Queen and Yonge, with its shiny window displays and its tourists; nor is it Queen and Sherbourne, with its pawn shops and men’s shelters.

It is not Bloor and Yonge.

Thank goodness.

It is simply a corner between corners, an island in a stream of people; it is where we rest for a moment before moving on. It is also where some of us stop when there is nowhere else to go, and then we move on without distraction, with no thought of seeing or being seen.

I deviated in other ways from Perec. I interceded, directly in one instance; and in a couple of other cases, I engaged people; or, rather, they engaged me.

Why? Because we are, all of us, human. Because we are never better, nor