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.

IFOA 2011: Douglas Coupland

Talk: Douglas Coupland (McLuhan 100 YouTube Talk)

International Festival of Authors (Fleck Dance Theatre). Tuesday, October 25, 2011.

Unsurprisingly, Douglas Coupland can still draw a full house, filling up the Studio Theatre. And also unsurprisingly, the demographic skewed towards, um, Gen-X types — the sort who would appreciate the first Franz Ferdinand album playing in the background as the room filled.

Freshly returned from travelling in China and possibly a little jetlagged, Coupland brought a loose approach to the night as he took the stage and chatted a bit to set up the terms of engagement: "Tonight's theme is randomness... which gets me off the hook for having to over-prepare things."

He talked about his background with McLuhan ("I'll call him Marshall"), starting from when he was approached by John Ralston Saul to write a biography — which ultimately turned into his entry in Penguin's series on Extraordinary Canadians. Coupland admitted that at the outset he didn't know any more about McLuhan than most people do, and that when he was a young student in 1980 McLuhan had just died, with his academic star at basically its lowest point.

"The reason that a lot of people have a lot of trouble getting into him is that the style of writing is very opaque, it was self-referential... it referenced a lot of people that certainly I haven't read, and it was very slow going."

"One of the reasons that he was also opaque was that he was writing about something that did not yet exist — he was writing, of course, about the internet... he was doing so forty-five, fifty years ahead of its existence. He was trying to explain something very high-tech very poetically."

Promising a "celebration of Marshall, the things he said and how they actually played out in real life" as well as "a celebration of the medium that emerged", Coupland sat down at a chair with a laptop in front of him and basically started typing search terms into YouTube, the audience laughing with recognition as the autocomplete started to suggest possibilities as they watched along on the large projection screen behind him. Far from any sort of dusty lecture, the event took on the cast of hanging out at a friend's house as they randomly call up their favourite viral videos and adding their own cultural commentary. "What most people know about Mr. McLuhan is this scene right here," Coupland said as he ran the clip from Annie Hall:

Coupland was watching along with the audience, "immersed in the medium that actually ended up emerging thirty, forty years post-Gutenberg Galaxy. And I'm going to do two things here: I want to celebrate the medium, and we're going to do that by putting in these codewords..." And yes, he was tying baby beluga mariachi:

This was the spark for some discussion on how social media has created the "tribal villages" that McLuhan theorized, splitting people along fissures far more nuanced than along the old ethnic or cultural lines. This allows for "aggregation of people in new and interesting ways" bringing about, say, #ows.

"One of the ultimate questions about the tribalizing capacity of technology is... the new medium, is it ultimately a secularizing influence or is it one that fosters orthodoxy, political or religious?"

Coupland talked about the explosion of television in the 50's — "a very cathartic event" and something that McLuhan talked about a lot — as an analogue to the massively transformative nature of the internet in the past decade. That gave him cause to randomly skip ahead in his notes, picking up a slightly different thread from McLuhan, reading from from "What TV Does Best" (1976): "one of the effects of television is to remove people's private identity. They become corporate peer-group people just by watching it. They lose interest in being private individuals. And so this is one of the hidden and perhaps insidious effects of television." This is obviously something that the internet has accelerated rather exponentially:

It turned out that the random theme was also about canoeing through a McDonalds ("how would you ever see that otherwise?"):

Coupland talked about what it means to be global:

This lead to some discussion about his father, and how any holdout from the information age can be roped in once they're shown whatever thing that captivates them (say, airshow disaster videos) is instantly available on youtube. After a couple more stories about his dad, Coupland had to remind himself to rope it in, flipping through his notes and settling back on tribalism, and relating it to his own experience in perpetuating one particular tribalistic idea in the form of the "Gen X meme, whatever it was or is." He mused about how corporate forces would try to exploit it, just as powerful forces tried to cash in on and exploit McLuhan's ideas, though ultimately it was really only the advertisers who found some sort of application for it — finding something similar in his own experience:

That led to some thoughts about the new ways of creating identities beyond old categories like nationalism — and ultimately beyond privacy, leading to the explosion of microidentities in ways that seems astonishing compared to the options of even a generation ago. "When I went to high school, you were a jock or you were a nerd or you smoked. And that was pretty much it. I smoked. Nowadays you can be twenty-seven different things if you're in elementary school — I'm kind of jealous of these kids."

Coupland then took it to the source to give a taste of what McLuhan looked and sounded like:

He interacted with the medium by poking at McLuhan's eyes with the cursor as he listened, occasionally pausing to inject a thought. Watching McLuhan's manner of expression brought home Coupland's point that McLuhan's own mind worked randomly, so a drifting approach and "poetic" consideration can bring us closer to him. This seemed to put things solidly on track, perhaps necessitating a random left turn:

Perhaps to serve the argument that our universal distractability with these clips is a uniting factor, creating a sort of collapsed-flattened world, arousing a type of sympathy in us when we see things like this:

Or — and I think this was the point — more importantly, that it creates a feeling of sympathy when we see things like this¹:

The internet allows life and art to interact with each other in stranger, more immediate ways:

And in a world where "information follows information follows information", you can then skip tangentially to this:

And then, back again to reality:

Added up, these clips demonstrate how we live in a state of "information transparency, superfluence, all-pervasiveness, and it's not going to stop — it's only going to get weirder and weirder." Coupland related this to McLuhan's love of the poem "The Maelstrom" (by Cleanth Brooks, referencing Poe's story "A Descent Into the Maelstrom") and the notion that when in the chaos of the gyre, one can survive by finding something to cling to. In the case of informational whirlpools, that thing which can provide the key to survival is pattern recognition — or even just searching for patterns.

Coupland wrapped up the presentation by giving a quick primer on approaching McLuhan: start with Gutenberg Galaxy ("read it before you read Understanding Media"), and "look through it, be generous, think of him as a poet... If you can't figure it out, figure out what it might be applying to coming down the road next."²

With that, there was an appendix, with Coupland bringing up illustrator Graham Roumieu (author of Bigfoot tale Me Write Book), with whom he collaborated on the just-released Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People. This was a bit of a 180 on the evening ("sorry for the bait and switch," said Coupland), with it suddenly feeling like Coupland was hosting a talk show. There was some chat about the book, and some of the art projected on the screen, and although this was befittingly random, it sorta derailed the night's earlier ramshackle momentum as things more or less ambled to an end.³

Photo credit: readings.org.

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¹ I couldn't find the exact same news clip that Coupland used of the Banda Ache tsunami, but this seems to incorporate the same footage.

² Said Coupland, "if he's right about 2011, he's probably right about ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now as well." But this seems like a bit of an ex post facto confirmation bias fallacy to me: if someone said of the predictions in Nostradamus or the Book of Revelation that they were obviously true, but some of the predictions just hadn't happened yet, we wouldn't take that to be a strong argument for their accuracy.

³ Those with a hankering for more McLuhan should check out the Dew Line Festival with a series of art events taking place this weekend (November 5-10, 2011).

IFOA 2011: Barclay, Ghosh, Huston, Jessup

Reading: Linwood Barclay, Amitav Ghosh, Nancy Huston, Heather Jessup

International Festival of Authors (Fleck Dance Theatre). Tuesday, October 25, 2011.

It's funny that I consider it a matter of course that I'd go to a show to check out bands that I knew next to nothing about — hell, even go in with a deliberate lack of foreknowledge just to be able to evaluate with a sort of beginner's mind — but it seems rather strange to me to do the same at the Authors' Festival. But still, I had a free night and reckoned to check something out, and settled on this reading at the Fleck Theatre. Of the four listed authors, David Bezmozgis, who I'd seen a couple days previously, was the only one I'd heard of.

At IFOA events, there's usually a few hints as to what sort of audience is anticipated. I'm always paying attention to the music that gets played before things get going, and here, there was a worryingly dull mix of adult contemporary soft rock that looked to fit what was a slightly older crowd. At least there was a Belle & Sebastian song in there.

More encouragingly, the night was hosted by Zoe Whittall, whose work, in books like Holding Still for as Long as Possible, takes place in a slightly cooler version of Toronto that remains pretty culturally recognizable to me — anyone who sees the romance in using the sidewalk in front of Soundscapes' window display as a makeout spot would understand where I'm coming from.

But when Whittall stated that Linwood Barclay would be reading first, I did a double take, and was quickly digging out my programme. No one else around me seemed to be taken by surprise by this.¹ I was never a particular fan of Barclay's brand of joshin' satire when he was a columnist at The Star, and except for a stray mention here or there, hadn't been following his literary career, where he has apparently made good as an author of suburban anxiety crime fiction. He alluded to his Star days his extended intro, managing to fit in a few topical jokes, and taking care to slip in a mention how well his previous book had done.

He was reading here from his recently-released The Accident, presenting the book's prologue, a snippet — disconnected from the main narrative — telling the story of a pair of small-town friends on vacation in New York City. The whole thing felt like a slightly-too-calculated skewering of middlebrow naïveté pitched squarely at middlebrow readers to give them a sense of cultural superiority — there was even a character named Edna. It was goes-down-smooth stuff, and there was nothing wrong with it, but my general impression was that this was not for me.

He was followed up by Amitav Ghosh. Born in Calcutta (though writing in English), Ghosh has written several novels as well as a variety of non-fiction works. He was reading from River of Smoke, the middle book of an in-progress trilogy following upon the Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. The book is mostly set in Canton just before the first Opium War, though the passage he read came from a slightly earlier timeframe, set against the backdrop of a sea voyage passing by Saint Helena while Napolean was there in exile.

With even a short snippet giving a nice sense of place and the feeling of the gears of several cultures turning against each other, this was interesting stuff. As well, Ghosh was undoubtedly the most compelling reader of the night, the lilt of his voice enfolding the story's faraway exoticism. This was good stuff and served the purpose of putting me on the lookout for more by Ghosh.

Nancy Huston's reading was also, broadly speaking, a travelogue. Giving an account of a vacation going badly, Infrared is a "slice of life" of its main character, sexomaniac Rena Greenblatt. Telling the crowd that she had recenly read at a 'books and breakfasts' event, she commented, "it's actually not a breakfast kind of book... it should be more like 'novels and nightcaps'."

Giving a warning that the reading was not suited for those under eighteen, she read a series of loosely-connected episodes, and was even brave enough to include a passage with a panted sex scene — although one gets the impression that any section of the book would have something like that. Several bodily fluids made an appearance, but also some more lofty "philosophical fencing". With the narrative crosscutting into flashback and memories, there was an air of sophistication here, and a slightly dislocating feeling — one that served the vibe well — that might arise from the fact that Huston writes and publishes in French (her second language), and then subsequently translates herself into her native English. I could see the craft at play here, but I didn't really get the impression that this would be something I'd pick up.

Huston's sophisticated self-assurance was a contrast to Heather Jessup, reading from her first novel The Lightning Field with a paced deliberation that might have been a cover for some nervousness. Set in Cold War-era Toronto with its engineer protagonist working on the Avro Arrow, the extract played on the historical synchronicity that the Arrow's 1957 grand unveiling to the public was upstaged in the news by the launch of Sputnik. In the novel, this is the backdrop to the more personal story of what happens to a family when someone is quite literally struck by lightning.

Some of the aerodynamic jargon felt a little shoehorned in — perhaps the goal was to capture the clipped dryness of the grey flannel suit era, but it left the whole thing feeling a little lacklustre. Jessup is also a published poet, and there was a sense here of carefully-chinked-in words, each considered just so, but sometimes the paragraphs seemed to cohere less. Which means that while there's several potentially-captivating layers here, I wasn't particularly pulled in to the story's world.

And so — four unfamiliar authors, one potential spark. Not a bad ratio, I suppose. Still, as the MOR tunes faded back in as the audience filtered out, I was feeling mostly ambivalent about the night. The format of the straight-ahead reading is, frankly, probably my least-favourite sort of presentation on offer at the festival. The real benefit of seeing authors in the flesh is to get a measure of their personality and a sense of how that's shaped their work, and while that's always going to creep around the edges of their comportment, I'm probably more interested in any sort of dialogue than just a reading.

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¹ It turned out that IFOA's website reflected this actual lineup, but the printed programme — and the electronic version of it that I'd been using to make my picks — were left in error.

IFOA 2011: Bezmozgis & Shteyngart

Interview: Koffler at the IFOA (Bezmozgis & Shteyngart)

International Festival of Authors (Lakeside Terrace). Sunday, October 23, 2011.

A full house in the Lakeside Terrace, with rollicking borsht-flavoured folk tunes filling the air as the crowd filed in for this co-presentation with the Koffler Centre. The session was hosted by Gal Beckerman, author of When They Come For Us, We'll Be Gone, a seminal work on the Soviet Jewry movement, making him an apt interlocutor for two authors with similar backgrounds.

Though both came to North America during the Jewish exodus from the Soviet Union at the end of the 70's, David Bezmozgis and Gary Shteyngart came across as an odd couple so perfectly crafted that it might have suggested the hand of a literary author. Bezmozgis, the polite Canadian, was in a light, casual suit, reserved but with flashes of a sly smile. Shteyngart came across as more brashly American, a mile-a-minute Noo Yawk talker in a plaid shirt, his countenance providing no concealment for his emotions. There was a cool/warm dichotomy on display — if not quite Kennedy/Nixon than perhaps more like the possibilities suggested by a few day's facial growth: the subtle difference between a carefully-groomed beard and scraggly unshaven jaw. Just looking at their body language and hearing them speak, one could almost imagine Shteyngart throwing a plate of linguine against a wall to tweak Bezmozgis.

The session began with a brief reading from each author to give a taste of their work, and those glimpses of personality in their appearance were drawn even more sharply, with Bezmozgis giving a straightforward, slightly dry recitation of his material, letting the words themselves carry the task of bringing to life an excerpt from his recent novel The Free World. The book is set in the inbetweenrealm of Italy, 1978, where recently-departed Soviet Jews wait (and wait) for their fate as refugees in various Western nations to be decided. In the selection read to the audience, paterfamilias Samuel, a true-believer in the Soviet cause despite being denounced and forced to flee with his family, feels displaced from both his past and future.

Shteyngart then read from his Super Sad True Love Story, which is "set slightly in the future, when a completely illiterate America is about to fall apart. [beat] So, next Tuesday." From the get-go, he was a gregarious ham, reading with gusto, throwing in gestures and voices and accents for his characters. His book is a distopian vision marking him as "the Nostradamus of three months from now", including such of-the-moment events as tent cities in NYC.

Beckerman began the conversation with a look at the authors' common origins, both departing to the West in the massive '79 wave of immigration. Despite landing in different countries, both felt similar lingering effects of being at the vanguard of Russian Jews moving into unfamiliar communities, dealing with culture shock and class snobbery — both at Hebrew School and in wider society. This might explain how their origins could hold an outsized place in their work and imagination.

Discussing what set their experience apart from the previous waves of Jewish immigration to North America, Beckerman asked about the projections of the hosts, who had banded together to "save" the Russian Jewry, creating a particular power dynamic with the new immigrants. Coming into communities where there was less of a continuity with the pre-existing Jewish culture — as well as the fact that they were coming from a country that had the stigma of being "the enemy" — gave an outsider's edge to both men as youngsters, branding them with feelings of pride and shame in their backgrounds.¹ As for how that contributed to their work as authors, immigrants have more of an ability to compare societies — which is a pretty explicit theme in The Free World.

Turning to influences — Richler, Roth, Malamud, Elkin, Leonard Michaels and Bellow were listed off — Bezmozgis said, "I was reading excellent books about people who, like me... had come of age, growing up in a Jewish immigrant community. And I looked around and I thought... I have some aspirations to write, and I found myself in the midst of yet another wave of Jewish immigration that is no less interesting than what has come before." Bezmozgis is comfortable in situating himself in that tradition, and enlarging it with the richness of material, both comedic and tragic, in his own experience.

In addition to those North American authors, Shteyngart also talked about drawing from the Russian literature — moved by Chekhov as a child, he was also influenced by the satirical tradition, including works like Voinovich's The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. he also talked about his sarcastic edge emerging when "everything you've believed with all your heart, you're told is bullshit. After that it's hard to latch on to any[thing] political. It's always taken with a grain of salt." And regarding not writing "seriously", he added: "my fear is that I want to entertain a little too much sometimes," having to learn to modulate the humour to serve the literary purpose.

Amongst the topics in the Q & A period, Bezmozgis was asked who his "envisioned reader" was, and he talked about being aware that he's writing for a general North American audience — goyim like myself — having to find the right balance in explaining specific cultural references without being pedantic. There was also some back and forth on the current vogue for Russian Jewish stories (viewed as rather inevitable, given the demographics) and the role of arts funding (Bezmozgis passionately defended the need for support for authors travelling and taking their stories abroad).

And as the setting sun slanted into the windows, filling up the room and causing the participants on the stage to have to squint to look out over the crowd, Bezmozgis closed by musing on the sadness of the lost dreams of the Soviet true believers (embodied by Samuel in his novel) and the loss of cultural continuity with the disappearance of the Yiddish traditions of Ashkenazi Jewish life — leaving it unspoken that it's through literature that we can maintain something of these connections, creating empathy and understanding as our own identities shift and meld.

Photo credit: readings.org.

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¹ There was also an intriguing discussion of cultural differences in the sense of victors and victimhood in the generation of Jews that grew up in the Soviet Union (Bezmozgis: "we won that fucking war!") compared to those who had fled the Holocaust.

IFOA 2011: Daniel Clowes & Seth

Conversation: Daniel Clowes

International Festival of Authors (Brigantine Room). Friday, October 21, 2011.

Down to Harbourfront to lead off another year at the International Festival of Authors.¹ One shouldn't try to stereotype the comic book crowd too narrowly, but this looked beguilingly like a comic book crowd — smart and equal parts slouchy and well-turned-out.²

Which would be a good match for the pair taking their seats on stage, who both were dressed about exactly as you would have expected them to — even if you only knew them from their work. Seth was natty as ever in a vintage-styled suit and plaid tie, while Daniel Clowes was dressed down in black jeans and shirt. One suspects that though they would blanch at the very idea of it, they know the value of their personal brands. They also played with the basement-dwelling/social outcast stereotype: "Cartoonists are not performers," cautioned Seth at the outset.

"It's basically like lifting up a log and expecting the worms to entertain you," Clowes confirmed, in his wryly deadpan manner.

That said, this was an engaging conversation, generally even-handed though it was officially billed as interview of Clowes by Seth. The latter, of course, is well-known as an illustrator and writer of Palookaville and such titles as Clyde Fans and It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, and is celebrating at IFOA both the recent release of a new "sketchbook" graphic novel The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists and the receipt of the $10,000 Harbourfront Prize. Clowes, meanwhile, is the author of the seminal Eightball comic, from which the the recently released The Death-Ray was drawn — as well as Ghost World, which, in its film adaptation might be his most prominent foray into the mass consciousness.

Seth led off with some basic questions like what led Clowes to become a cartoonist. After a youthful obsession with comic books, "I just never had any other ambitions," he commented.

An aspiring visual artist, "I became a writer of my comics completely by default." he turned out to have a natural ability as a storyteller: "the drawing was always a terrible struggle, but the writing... I didn't even have to think about that." Asked, if the writing was the easy part, why he persisted with the drawing, he replied, "to me writing is just the utility – there's no fun in it at all... you write to get to the stage where you can draw."

That led to some interesting back-and-forth with both agreeing that the more physically mechanical parts of the long process of cartooning give a space to let the brain be unoccupied, where the mind can wander and new ideas can be birthed. Seth asked about Clowes' artistic guideposts along the way, invoking Robert Crumb. Both agreed he was, in their youthful view, just "filth" — but ultimately, in the longer run, an inspirational figure. Clowes, however, was more immediately inspired by others like R. O. Blechman, whose minimalist, doodle-like cartoons appeared in book form in the 50's — "proto graphic novels", aimed at adults, and not sold in comic book stores. This was his lofty goal, but after frustrations in trying to break into the orthodox world of commercial illustration, he ended up in the comic book world, publishing Lloyd Llewellyn.

In the 80's there was a struggle against the mainstream comic world (which was much smaller back then than the multimedia corporate monolith it is now), with Clowes identifying as "a barnacle on the side of these big companies... thrown in the back of the store in that little cardboard box marked 'adult'".

"We were the 'alternative' guys who hate superheroes," was the self-perception of the time, which is rather unlike the situation today where there's more of a continuum, where people can comfortably like both realms. Commented Seth: "the superheroes won... everybody knows who the X-Men are now." But at the same time, the "serious" cartoonists managed to gain some cultural respectability, moving from comic book stores to book stores, and from being comic book writers to being authors.

All of that past struggle — being outsiders to literature for not being serious enough and outsiders to mainstream comics for being too serious — meant it was mildly ironic that Clowes was at a literary festival celebrating The Death-Ray, a superhero comic. He suggested that came about because the medium is now mature enough that the "alternative" guys don't need to define themselves against the superhero comics. And as for why, there was the challenge of doing a non-ironic superhero comic, one that doesn't wink at its own absurdity: "the worst idea," and therefore a perversely compelling one "you could ever have would be to do an earnest superhero story."

Moving from there, Seth poked into the darker corners of Clowes' misanthropic worldview: "you seem like a nice, well-adjusted guy. But in your work you clearly really hate people. What the hell is that all about?"

"I'm really the last person to discuss... I've always felt that deep down that I was actually a very optimistic person at a certain level, and that I've always been continually disappointed." That lead into a discussion of his character Wilson, who for him embodies that underlying optimism, as he constantly puts himself into the orbit of other people, even though it never works out.³

That led, at the close of the first part of the programme, to more discussion on the evolution of the comics medium: was it better to work in obscurity on one's own vision instead of swinging for the fences of mainstream commercial success? A couple decades ago, "there was no money in it, why could anybody tell you what to do?" The balancing act between creative freedom and the pitfalls of obscurity and insecurity is a conundrum that any kind of artist can probably appreciate.

There was a variety of topics in the Q & A, such as the tale of Clowes' youthful encounter with Steve Ditko and the intellectualization of cartooning and analyzing it as high art — in that regard, both were in favour of Ivan Brunetti over Scott McCloud. And interestingly, someone asked about how the transition from book to movie was different between Ghost World and Art School Confidential, politely leaving unspoken the large gulf between how excellent the former was and the latter was not.

"When we made Ghost World, everything worked out well, and when we made Art School nothing worked out well," was Clowes' honest response, describing how with so much going on in the film-making process, there's just a lot of luck in how things work out, and it's hard to get an overview of what it's going to be like until it's done.

And perhaps best of all was this exchange, which summarizes the whole thing rather well:

Audience member: Do either of you feel like you've contributed something negatively to this society?

Clowes: I actually think about that a lot.

Seth: Do you know what you would consider negative?

Clowes: I think there's some bad vibes I'm putting out there.

Seth: Well, I'm certainly not giving any positive vibes about the future, that's for sure. I know I couldn't be less encouraging of the culture around me.

Clowes: I'd like to think we amuse a few people —

Seth: — on their way to the grave.

Photo credit: readings.org.

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¹ As I shuffled into the Brigantine Room with the crowd, it felt like things hadn't changed too much from last year — in fact the PA was still playing, as it was a year ago, Emily Haines' solo album.

² And in women's fashions, anyone with an affection for those 50's style upturned librarian glasses would have enjoyed themselves in this crowd.

³ "Why not create worlds you'd want to be in?" asked Seth, acknowledging that he can't do that either in his own work. He's no stranger to artistic depictions of self-hatred (as revealed at the close of his Palookaville comic) and the pitfalls of relating one's insecurities.

IFOA 2010: Lynda Barry

Reading/interview: Lynda Barry

International Festival of Authors (Studio Theatre). Saturday, October 30, 2010.

Dag.

I saw Lynda Barry a couple years ago at IFOA, and it rocked so hard — calling it the "DIY gig of the year" captured my feelings well — that there was no way that I was going to skip a chance for a repeat visit. Barry, a mile-a-minute speaker, is an artist, novelist and teacher, but probably remains best-known for her long-running alt-comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek. She was here discussing and reading from her new book Picture This — a collage-based work that serves as a practical education on how to draw while acting as a meditation on why creating art is so fundamental, and something we all do as kids, but something that we almost all tend to stop doing.

The book is a companion to, and extension of, her previous work in What It Is, which asked the same questions about writing stories. "The things we call the arts have an absolute biological function," is her constant assertion — creating or reliving artistic experiences makes you feel better. All of this is tightly wound up with Barry's central preoccupation with "image" and the "image-world". In her conception, in everything we call the arts, the image is fundamental.

To get closer to the heart of this perhaps it's worth quoting at length something that Barry, who is fascinated with the brain, returns to time and again in her talks, describing the value of the image-world with this metaphor about phantom limb pain.

A scientist named V.S. Ramachandran has done some astonishing work with neurological problems he's actually solved with a mirror. He had a patient who had lost his hand, but the patient's experience was that the hand was still there, and not only there, but it was in a really tight fist — you know, painfully tight. This guy was miserable; he couldn't get away from that feeling. Ramachandran made a box, tilted the mirror in there, and then he put a hole in the other side. He asked the guy to stick his hand in the hole, the fist that was still there, and look down. So what the guy saw was his fist and then the reflection of it, which was like his other hand. Then, he told him to open his hand, and what he saw was the reflection of his other hand opening, and it solved the problem.

That's a perfect example of what images do. My feeling is that in the course of life there are certain things for us that are like phantom limb pain, like a horrible, horrible parent who dies before you ever work things out with them. And I think the only way that those things can be worked out is through something that's akin to that mirror box — except it may be a fairy tale, or it may be a painting, or it may be a song you can remember from when you were 14 and you had to play the same song over and over and over again, like 400 times in a row. Yeah, what are you doing there? You're opening your fist. You're looking at a reflection.

The image-world is "an immune system and a transit system". Barry proceeds from the notion that everyone is interested in images and interested in making images — or just wordlessly interested in making images but blocked somehow. Once you understand what the image is, the form that it can take is up to the artist — there's no difference between making a piece of music, or writing a story, or creating a dance, or having a very good conversation.

With regard to drawing, this is what she is offering in her book — which she read from in a lively start to the session, asking questions both in the guise of the near-sighted monkey (her stand-in in the book) as well as beloved long-running characters Arna and Marlys.

Just as with What It Is, the book starts from looking back to childhood — "there was a time when drawing came easily" — before something happened to make us stop. So she proposes simple exercises like scribbling or doodling — physically creating at even the simplest level and finding the links between the mental activity of creation and the physical acts that correspond. The physical act of drawing provides the rhythm and creates the inspiration. Beyond drawing, Barry's art-making is supremely approachable to all: a bottle of school glue, toothpicks and paper scraps are all that's needed to get started.

That reading, plus an interview with Peter Birkemoe (owner of local comic-book heaven The Beguiling), were the formal pillars of the event, but the real magic came from the tangents and notions that Barry veered off into. An unpretentious and supremely engaging personality, Barry has the gift of imbuing her ideas with a spark of enchantment, a sense that even in a world full of cruddiness — especially in a world full of cruddiness — we all have the gifts to share in the fundamentally human and biologically indispensable worlds of images and stories.

Along the way, she talked about the beautiful art that could bring a person to tears — and that the artist that happened to bring her to tears was Jeff Keane, of the Family Circus. And about the mysteries of doodling and how even the simplest drawing connects us to the part of the brain that less aware of time — essential for getting through dull classes or meetings.

Birkemoe left more room than usual for questions for the audience, leading to a wide-ranging series of digressions, including hula ("hula saved my life," Barry said, completely seriously), the joy of ruining paper and what it was like to write a play. She even ended with her favourite party trick, which I shan't ruin for you if you haven't seen it, but was guaranteed by Barry to take a year off the life of everyone in the crowd.

In short, a totally delightful time, and I left feeling unusually buoyant. I headed out from the York Quay centre and walked down to the water's edge, the evening sky in its last moments of a brilliant orangeness turning to a stirring fuchsia melting into darkness. As I watched the surface of the water reflecting the sky back in jangling shards, I thought about how much I feel disengaged from the image-world, and I thought about that clenched fist, and I wondered to myself, given all the frustration and self-imposed limitations that I feel about [deleted], what is that mirror that would allow me to unclench?

And I walked past the wave deck, and I walked past the park with the muskoka chairs and I walked past the Music Garden. I watched the water under a now-dark sky and listened to the streetcars behind me. And I felt pretty happy about things, regardless.

IFOA 2010: William Gibson & David Mitchell

Bridges Over Time: William Gibson & David Mitchell in Conversation

International Festival of Authors (Fleck Dance Theatre). Wednesday, October 27, 2010.

A big crowd for this one, with the lower seats filled up and some people even sitting in the balcony. I was here to see William Gibson, author of many novels of speculative fiction, and a canny observer of technology and the way that people interact with it. He read a chapter from his new Zero History, set in the same universe as his previous Pattern Recognition and Spook Country — a universe not too different from what next week might be like in our own. Choosing a passage that was mostly conversation-based and expository, his prose was filled with the vividly specific textures and bits of stuff that fill his work. Standing slightly stoop-shouldered, the gangly Gibson had a folksy sort of quality, speaking unhurriedly and with a hint of twang revealing his Virginia upbringing. As he read, he was clearly enjoying himself, almost laughing along with the audience, as if he were letting us in on a code-cracking conspiracy. Very enjoyable.

David Mitchell, the evening's other author was unfamiliar to me, although being twice-shortlisted for the Booker, he obviously has some cachet. Although here promoting his newest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (set in 18th century Japan) he instead read a new short story — very new, in fact. "I'm still working on it, so I need you to be friendly, Torontonian guinea pigs tonight," he told the crowd. The story had a science-fiction basis, but with a streak of folk tale and social realism, Mitchell relating it to "Gordon Lightfoot, guesting with Rush, singing a song by The Smiths". The tale cross-cut between two stories, each hinging in a different way on the value of the elderly in a society defined by scarcity. Mitchell was even editing the story in real time. On hitting the sentence, "there was a fierce glint in his look." he stopped. "That's a rubbish sentence, isn't it — 'fierce glint in his look'?", crossing it out before moving on.

And then the authors were interviewed by Mark Askwith. Gibson was placid and unruffled on the stage, cool in the McLuhanesque sense. Mitchell, meanwhile, gave the impression of a clever seminar student trying to impress a professor, taking notes and visibly thinking on stage. The interview revolved around, as Gibson characterized it, how "everyone's present is always some else's future and someone else's past" — the means by which fiction can give us the gift of atemporality, "of not being too now-centric." This would serve as the link between the two books, Mitchell's set in the past and Gibson's in the near-future, both agreeing that ultimately imagining the future and past are equally speculative — although the ways that the author could get each of them wrong is different.

There was some talk about writing strategies, and of the narrative value of outsiders — and in both of these books, translators — as protagonists. Askwith, fascinated with both authors' neologisms (Williams' story memorably featured a character being issued tic-tac-like "mercy beans" as a last option) enquired about the drift of language and the need to have new words to describe things in the future.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation came around the topic of what we might call ubiquitous intertextuality. Gibson discussed how he now takes it for granted that readers will automatically google unfamiliar names or phrases, and how "every published text today is surrounded by an invisible virtual cloud of hyperlinks" — a radical game-changer for how authors handle exposition. He further proposed that in a couple years, every e-reader will be connected to Google, and the reader could click through on every word to wikipedia — meaning that an author could slip in relatively obscure references and assume that the reader will get some pleasure out of googling it, working their way through the same websites that the author found.

Some questions from the audience were answered with thoughtful paragraph-length answers, and not just quick sentences. On literary influences, Gibson observed that although he always mentioned William S. Burroughs at the top of his list, he realized with age that that was partially because he thought he'd be seen to be cool to name Burroughs, where, in reality, the spy novels of Len Deighton might have been just as formative. Thought-provoking stuff throughout.

Recording: DBC Pierre

Artist: DBC Pierre

Song: Date with Ikea [excerpt from Lights Out In Wonderland]

Recorded at the International Festival of Authors (Brigantine Room), October 23, 2010.

DBC Pierre - Date With Ikea

In the spirit of my music-augmented reading by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, I thought I'd do the same with this brief reading from DBC Pierre. I didn't have anything specifically Ikea-related, but this looped-guitar improvisation by Svarte Greiner has a suitably icy Scandinavian edge, I think. (You can read more about that show here.)

My discussion of this reading/interview can be found here.

Recording: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall

Artist: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall

Reading: A Shining Flood, A Wall of Water [excerpt from Ghosted]

Recorded at the International Festival of Authors (Brigantine Room), October 23, 2010.

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall - A Shining Flood, A Wall of Water

Something a little different here. The interview included this brief impromptu reading by Bishop-Stall from his novel Ghosted. Now, I haven't read the book yet, but I hear a lot of it takes place in the College/Spadina neighbourhood. I don't know if the characters drop into Comfort Zone, but I sort of get the impression they might be at home there. So I decided to augment the reading with a recording from that venue, in this case by Ostrich Tuning — a show that you can read about here if you are so inclined.

My discussion of this reading/interview can be found here.

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.

IFOA 2010: "In Graphic Detail"

Round Table: "In Graphic Detail" (feat. Charles Burns, Dylan Horrocks and Seth)

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

Rather than just rows of chairs as I remember in the past, the Brigantine Room was set up salon-style, with small round candle-lit tables filling most of the room. That created a nice atmosphere (though the setup also might get a bit awkward in a packed room, where people would be struggling to position themselves so their backs aren't facing the stage). As it turned out, there was a decent crowd, but not a full house for this one. The event was a round table discussion featuring three noteworthy graphic novelists: local artist Seth (as nattily meticulous-looking as one of his creations, slightly dandyish in a suit and argyle socks); American Charles Burns (looking more like a high school teacher or someone similar that you'd run into at Costco); and Dylan Horrocks from New Zealand (sitting in the middle, he also split the difference sartorially, looking perhaps like a young professor in a sweater and sneakers combo).¹

The discussion was hosted by CBC's Bob Mackowycz, who did a good job of not over-injecting himself into the discussion — he pushed things along as necessary, but as often as not the three artists prodded each other with questions, keeping the whole thing flowing like an actual conversation. The discussion started by talking about the creative process — all three agreed that the meticulous nature of their craft required scheduled regularity more than bursts of inspired passion (cartooning is "more plodding" than painting, as Seth commented).

The conversation turned to the differences between commercial work and their own art, and Burns and Seth agreed on the usefulness of "busywork" to fill the time and keep the work routine going in creatively fallow periods, while Horrocks' experiences were coloured by a spell of commercial work he did (writing for Batgirl, of all things) that eliminated any lingering romantic notions he held about working in "the industry".

There was an interesting discussion on the necessity and limits of plot, Horrocks calling it, "the least interesting part of the story".² Seth added that while plot is conflict-based, the stories with little conflict are most interesting. While our culture has a limited notion of storytelling, obsessed with incidents and conflicts instead of situations or places, all three of these artists' works are strongly situation-based, with strong sense of place.

Meanwhile, there was talk on the possibilities of working in other media (all three would find it awkward, although Burns has done some work in animation) and the possibilities of adaptations — Horrocks, for one, would welcome an adaptation of Hicksville that wouldn't be beholden to the exactness of his book's plot. Burns talked a bit about the possible adaptation of Black Hole and his realization that for him it would have to be a hands-off process — the book is his work, a movie would be something else.

There was also a fascinating discussion on the value of scarcity for imagination — like reading comics in foreign languages as a child and coming up with one's own dialogue to fit the visual language. Burns recalled reading Tintin as a kid and seeing the listing of other books on the back cover, ones you couldn't always find in your local store and that in some way existed only in your own imagination. This resonated strongly with me, reminding me of my own childhood. It's something that is increasingly disappearing in our online age, and one wonders if easy access to seemingly everything will have an adverse impact of the generation who are growing up now.

There was a lot of other ground covered in the hour of discussion and short Q&A session. Being familiar with these artists' works, it was easy to see how their personalities are woven into their art. An engaging time.

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¹ For those unfamiliar with these artists and perhaps looking for somewhere to start, I'd recommend Seth's Clyde Fans, Horrocks' Hicksville and Burns' Black Hole, all of which are available through the Toronto Public Library.

² Horrocks would later comments that he was looking for novels with a similar unconcernedness with plot, preferring a less-structured daydream-drift — something like "Moomins with sex," he said, half-jokingly.

Recording: John Waters

Artist: John Waters

Talk: Advice on Fashion

Recorded at International Festival of Authors (Fleck Dance Theatre, Harbourfront Centre), October 22, 2010.

John Waters - On Fashion

My notes for this event can be found here.

IFOA 2010: John Waters

John Waters

International Festival of Authors (Fleck Dance Theatre). Friday, October 22, 2010.

A reliable (if pricey) annual autumn celebration of all things literary, the International Festival of Authors gives cause to head down to Harbourfront after outdoor concert season ends. I figured it would be a good start to a Friday night to spend some time with John Waters. Heading down to the Fleck Dance Theatre — which I've been to for a concert and a couple IFOA things, but never for dance — there were a decent number of keeners out waiting in line before the doors opened. Looking over the crowd, there were a handful who clearly looked like superfans but otherwise a pretty mixed bunch, 30's to 60's, that didn't fall into any overt niche. Some punk hairdos were apparent, and looking around it appeared this was widely thought to be a good place for guys to take their beaus out on a date.¹

For a crowd that was, presumably, united in some sort of affinity for things outside the mainstream, the bland smooth jazz playing over the PA before the show wasn't a good fit. The theatre is a pretty big space, seating about 450. There was a good crowd for this one, though I don't think there was anyone seated in the balcony.

For the first part of the night, Waters — dressed in a dapper black-flowered suit — read from his book Role Models. The book is a memoir, albeit one constructed in an unconventional way. Not directly an account of Waters' life, it's instead a collection of character sketches of people who have been important to him. The notion of how our characters are shaped by the people who influenced us was a central thread throughout the evening, as was hinted at in the first reading from the chapter on Tennessee Williams — in subtle ways, it's just as much about Waters as the playwright he never met. After stealing a "forbidden" Williams book from the Baltimore library, Waters learned, "I didn't have to listen to the lies the teachers told us about society's rules." And that one can be an individual even in an outsider subculture: "Tennessee Williams wasn't a gay cliché, so I had the confidence to try to not be one myself."

Waters also read from the satirical "Cult Leader", where he outlined his plans to build an "army of filth" before being interviewed by Richard Crouse. The conversation began with the usuals about the process of creating the book and the pair talked about some of the people in it, like "outsider pornographers" David Hurles and Bobby Garcia. The discussion ranged from fashion to politics and religion to hippies and punks, all served with Waters' wit. Less flippant was the discussion of Leslie Van Houten, the former member of Manson family fighting for parole — a cause that Waters has publicly celebrated, engaging in an real investigation of redemption and how people can change. He also talked about some of the changes in his own thinking, such as feeling regret now for, say, having used the Manson murders as comedic fodder as "boogieman against straight people" — something he now sees as youthfully irresponsible and insensitive to the victims' families.

There were a few questions from the audience before the night ended with the traditional retirement to the author signing — that part isn't really my thing. Overall, a fun time.

A key part of John Waters' career has become the selling the brand of being himself — his presence is perhaps most marketable "work". Given that his main vehicle for this has been his one-man show This Filthy World, it was interesting to see the differences in approach in this more highbrow sort of event. I think the tone of the conversation was a bit more introspective and probing than when I saw This Filthy World, but without losing Waters' irrepressible verve.

Listen to Waters speak here.

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¹ A good way to give the impression, "I'm literate, but still a little freaky".