IFOA 2010: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall and DBC Pierre

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall and DBC Pierre

International Festival of Authors (Brigantine Room). Saturday, October 23, 2010.

A double-header interview, I was keen for this one to check out local writer Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, whose 2004 memoir Down to This, telling of the year he spent living in Toronto's Tent City, has now been followed up with his debut novel Ghosted. I haven't read the new one yet, but I was intrigued by what I'd heard about the hyper-local nature of the story, which is largely set in the College and Spadina neighbourhood. I'm always a sucker for fiction set in places I recognize, where one's own familiarity feeds into the vividness of the prose while at the same time adding new layers of resonance to the places themselves. He was joined by DBC Pierre, a Booker Prize winner in 2003 for his first novel Vernon God Little, and here at the festival presenting his new Lights Out in Wonderland. Pierre, with a mildly scruffy appearance, presented as the hard-living author type from whom any literary accounts of debauchery or hangovers might not be wholly invented.¹

The session was hosted by Brent Bambury², who showed great keenness for both books and structured his interview around teasing out some of the similarities in the two works. He began with examining the iconic structures that play a part in each of the books — the Bloor Viaduct in Ghosted and Berlin's Templehof Airport. Regarding the metaphor-value of Templehof, Pierre was articulate in discussing how the location underpinned his allegory on decadence and the collapse of ideologies (fascism, communism and now capitalism) that Berlin has witnessed in the past century.

While Pierre portrayed Lights Out in Wonderland as a contemporary Satyricon — an illustration of a decadent society — Bambury pried into some of the deeper layers as well. Both books have a dark heart, concerned with the enigma of suicide and other forms of self-destruction — Bishop-Stall said his book was about "the line between people who are truly suicidal and people who will just end up probably killing themselves." Along the way there, there were also some amusing coincidences in the books, such as a large amount of cocaine consumption³ and memorable scenes involving aquariums.

Enjoying that imagery, Bambury pressed Bishop-Stall into an impromptu brief reading of one his his aquarium scenes, while a little later also prompting a short selection from Pierre, in a passage illustrating his thesis that capitalism is an escape-proof trap — in this case illustrated with a hungover protagonist lost in an Ikea.⁴

Closer to home, on the very local nature of his work, Bishop-Stall talked about how although Toronto is a vivid character in his books, it the city he knows the least, especially in its usual literary incarnation. His Toronto is one that most people don't know, the hidden underworld of after-hours clubs and the desperate efforts of the dispossessed. After talking a bit about Down to This and its echoes in his new book, Bishop-Stall talked about the "one equals seven" rule — the notion that it takes seven years of settled life to recover from one year on the streets, a period that he has now passed out of. In an echo of that, talking about his Booker prize Pierre noted it has been seven years since he won that ("good for getting published, but bad for writing") and those after-effects might be out of his system as well.

After the Q & A, as the audience began filing out, I actually saw something that I don't think I've ever seen before. Before heading out to sign books for the audience, Bambury held up the two authors got both to sign his copies — a further sign that the enthusiasm that he brought to the interview wasn't a front. Illuminating stuff, and if the goal of something like this is to whip up interest in these books, it certainly worked on me.

Listen to Bishop-Stall's reading here, and Pierre's here.

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¹ When asked, "How was your Friday night?" Pierre dryly responded, "I"m still having it."

² Who is well-known — if not revered — by Canadians of a certain age as the former host of Brave New Waves, the pioneering late-night radio show that disseminated non-mainstream music of all sorts in a pre-internet age. For those so inclined, apparently Bambury is now hosting the new Day 6 on Radio 2.

³ Bishop-Stall: "from a narrative point of view, if you like books where a lot of exciting things happen, a good way to get that done is to have your character as a cokehead — a lot of shit will then happen."

⁴ There were some other parallels, too, like Ghosted's lists of some Nuit Blanche-esque monumental public art echoing Wonderland's decadent recipes made from endangered species.