IFOA 2011: Babstock, Beaton, Glass, Knelman

Reading: Ken Babstock, Kate Beaton, Rodge Glass, Joshua Knelman

International Festival of Authors (Studio Theatre). Sunday, October 30, 2011.

Back out to the Studio Theatre (still with that Franz Ferdinand album playing) for the last day of the Festival to check out something of a grab-bag of a session, without much of a throughline or connective thread between the four authors. The afternoon led off with much-lauded poet Ken Babstock, who read from his collection Methodist Hatchet.

I'd seen Babstock read before and found then that it all kinda slid past me and here, starting with "Carolinian (Crosscut with Sound)" I was getting about the same vibe, mostly thinking a sort of confused "whaaaa?" as the rush of words started to zip by me. With "Sovereign" ("about one of my many mild concussions," Babstock dryly informed the crowd) I was trying to go with the flow, figuring that this is stuff that you have to float in, instead of trying too hard to cling to shoals of meaningfulness as you rush by.

One poem came with a bit of meta-level audience participation: "you don't have to do anything or say anything: I need you to imagine yourself in a darkened theatre — you're a kind of a floating sentience — there's somebody nattering away on stage about poetry and you're floating around and then you find yourself in the audience, you can see the back of your head. Just float a little bit closer — when was the last time you could look at the back of your head? Put your hand on your shoulder, like that scene, like those angels in that Wim Wenders film. And now, just do a little puff of air on the back of your neck... puff."

After that, either I was adjusting into the right headspace or Babstock was moving into less-complex poems. A more prose-y one based on amateur poet Coney Burns' prison letters to W.H. Auden hit the spot and felt reasonably grounded, as did the closing "catastrophic ballad" entitled "Hunter Dearie and the Hospital Wing".

Interestingly, that would be the only straight-up "reading" of the afternoon, with the remaining authors all doing something more like presentations on their work. This made sense for cartoonist Kate Beaton, given that it's harder to do a reading of more visually-based works. Her recently-published Hark! A Vagrant is a compilation of works from her ongoing web comic, and in lieu of just reading, she talked more about her creative process. Her comics frequently re-present history and literature with a snappy popcult sensibility, and she led off by discussing how she came to write about Juarez and Maximilian. Needing to find the right comedic hooks to be able to re-tell their story, she played on the personality differences between the refined, aristocratic Maximilian ("who has an amazing beard") and the humourless, up-from-poverty Benito Juarez to give an account of something more muddled than just the usual colonialist villain/noble local entanglement.

She also unpacked her approach to Robinson Crusoe, here with the story told from Friday's perspective, confused by the babbling, stinky egotistical would-be slave-owner who washed up on his island.

There can be element of nerd-snobbishness in some of Beaton's work, where you can feel smug if you get all the references and tell people who aren't amused that they just don't get how sophisticated it all is. But there are some genuine laughs to be found in her stripped-down works: I rather dig her "Mystery Solving Teens", anti-Hardy Boys sullenly hanging out by the smoking door, for instance.

After a break, there were some broad similarities in how Rodge Glass presented graphic novel Dougie's War, although it was in the service of a much more sober work. "I'm not usually a graphic novelist," the Scot said, explaining how the project evolved through a commission from a Veterans' organization to explore issues of PTSD. Glass took that as an opportunity to go deeper into the voiceless war-after-the-war that veterans face — the story isn't about combat so much as how soldiers adapt afterwards, dealing with civilian life while still living in the battlefields in their mind. Those two worlds were conveyed in the book through the use of flashback-vivid colour offsetting the black-and-white mundanity of the day-to-day. There were some textural segments in the book, including a biographical sketch of Dougie that Glass read.

Looking at the inspiration for the book, Glass discussed Charley's War, a comic series created by Pat Mills (known for his work on Judge Dredd), which was an unglorious account of soldiering in WWI, and its aftermath for the soldiers — well beyond the gung-ho Sgt Rock heroics typical of war comics. And he closed by moving further back in time to read Rudyard Kipling's evocative "Tommy" showing the enduring nature of these issues where society trains men to be killers, and then expects them to slip back into civilization:

I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play.

The day wrapped up with Joshua Knelman, who, instead of reading from his recently-released Hot Art instead elected to tell the story leading to its conception. Working as a young researcher for the nascent Walrus magazine ("at that time, I was twenty-six, I was actually living in my parents' basement — because that's where you live when you work at a Canadian magazine.") he was trying to put together a story about a theft at a local art gallery — something which apparently happens far more often than we hear about.

That led to an interesting personal account, where he got pulled in far deeper than he first suspected, ultimately meeting face-to-face with the thief. That began his own education on the international market in stolen art and, ultimately, to some of the paintings being returned.

"It's all just one big shell game," the thief told him, with stolen art circulating from criminals to dealers to auction houses. Through that and meeting a cultural lawyer specializing in art theft he was slowly drawn into the broader story, ultimately taking the bait to ramp up his investigation into something larger about the international art theft industry, culminating in his book.

Photo credit: readings.org.