Game, narrative, art

Montreal's Blue Metropolis Literary Festival is on, and a few events have caught my attention.

Earlier this week I attended a lecture on "New Aesthetics in Game Narratives." Under discussion were Jason Rohrer's Passage, Davey Wreden's The Stanley Parable, and Anna Anthropy's Dys4ia.

Somewhat ironically, while these games are considered classics among game designers and academics, they are not widely known among mainstream gamers. (And I don't fall into any of these categories. What the hell am I doing here?)

I'm not convinced that any of the aesthetics under discussion were exactly new, but the point was made that these games were not merely stories being told in a different format. The act of them being gamified imbued the narrative with a whole 'nother level of meaning. Truly, you could not transfer these games to text and retain the intended effect. Being in the game, playing the game, and being subject to game tropes is essential to the narrative.

[This is in sharp contrast to, say, games in the Assassin's Creed franchise, which have high production value and excel at storytelling, but in a very traditional way (even when it gets meta).]

Of the games on deck, I can claim familiarity only with The Stanley Parable. Kind of Kafka meets Douglas Adams. Kind of beautiful.



Also, I had trouble finding the damn lecture space at the university. I walked endless corridors and checked an infinite number of empty rooms (it seems I came up an unexpected elevator), always circling back on myself, waiting for a voice inside my head to set me on the right path. It dawned on me that this must be part of the planned lecture experience (it wasn't).

I have nothing to hide

I've played with personas, I've tried to compartmentalize my various selves, but it's too hard. It's contrary to my experience of reality; everything bleeds into everything else. (Even this blog, Magnificent Octopus, was conceived as a magnum opus, an everything, a unifier.)

In the end, it's all me. I've always used my real name. Why wouldn't I? I have nothing to hide.

Last weekend, though, I came to the stark realization that "I have nothing to hide" is a vulnerability in the armour of freedom I wear so brazenly. It can be used to undermine my right to privacy.

Everybody has something to hide. And I'm prompted, what if you're applying for a certain job, what if there's a regime change in 5 or 10 years' time, what if.

So let me say instead: I stand by all I say and do. I have nothing I should ever have to hide.

From Anonymous to Edward Snowden: Hackers as Activists, was a fascinating discussion, part of this year's Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, moderated by Will Straw and featuring anthropologist Gabriella Coleman (@BiellaColeman)and Ubisoft content director Thomas Geffroyd (@Orph30), who worked on Watch Dogs, a game about a hacker.

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On my way out to the event, I continued reading Satin Island, by Tom McCarthy, and I was just at the part where Petr was telling about people hacking down the Berlin wall. I was jarred by the use of the word hack — here it was starkly physical, people chiseling and chipping away at this massive physical structure, which itself was a mere symbol of something much stronger and vaster, something social and political, some great divide. And this word was buried in this tiny account which was surrounded by talk of U's company's Project, his growing fantasies of vandalizing the Project and its associated structures, of sabotaging it by feeding faulty data into the Project.

That word, "hack," is a loaded word. To cut, to cough. To cope, to loaf. To work as a mercenary, to work in the service of mediocrity, to sell out. As regards the technological connotations, see Ben Yagoda's A Short History of Hack.

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Hacking has a long and proud history that depends on craft and craftiness, with the intent of repurposing machines to do things they weren't designed for. It has its own tradition and folklore; this is evident in naming practices, and Coleman gave the example of UNIX, which was based on the overly complex Multics, in effect castrating it, and thus its name memorializes the condition of its birth.

Hackers tend to combine tech savviness with a touch of compulsive disorder. They have a highly developed sense of humour, hence Easter eggs. They take pleasure in breaking (into) things, just to see if they can. Which gives them the knowhow to build better things. They work as system administrators and security researchers.

Hacking embodies a counter-cultural, antiestablishment spirit. The idea of hacktivism then takes up the cause of freedom, free speech, free access, and freedom of information. And that's a good thing. How could it not be a good thing?

Geffroyd made the point that we're very quick to give up our freedoms in North America. For a continent founded on the principles of liberty, it's easy to convince us that the greater good outweighs our individual rights. This is not so true in Europe (Germany is one of the biggest defenders of personal privacy), and he surmises that this is the legacy of World War II, which Europeans still live with in a relatively immediate way. Take for example the Gestapo, who used government files to identify Jews; the Stasi, who used surveillance and other techniques to identify dissidents. Europeans know firsthand the terror and danger of the surveillance state.

Whether or not I have anything to hide, I should never have to hide.

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How does a modern anthropologist go live among the natives when the natives are an underground subculture? (Tom McCarthy asks the same question in Satin Island, which is about a corporate anthropologist.)

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It was a provocative hour; there was no time for an in-depth analysis of today's privacy issues, or WikiLeaks, or the infiltration of communication networks. But it definitely opened my eyes to the interconnectedness of many of these issues, and confirmed for me that I need to take responsibility for being better informed so I can be a better citizen.

Some of the subjects that were touched on...

People:
Jacob Appelbaum
Aaron Swartz
Anonymous: The Masked Avengers in The New Yorker.

Issues:
Journalists' email being vacuumed by security organizations: GCHQ captured emails of journalists from top international media
The need to ensure free speech and privacy for lawyers, activists, and journalists.
Internet crime laws
The Five Eyes, an alliance that shares intelligence, in circumvention of domestic privacy laws: About.
Televisions collecting data via camera and microphone: Your Samsung SmartTV Is Spying on You, Basically

Tools:
Copyleft, copyright that guarantees free distribution terms.
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) data encryption: About.
Tor, for preserving anonymity online: Download.

See also
Hacking Watch Dogs – An Interview With Thomas Geffroyd
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman – review

"It's not real German, it's more like the nightmare of German."

Wolf Haas is the author of a series of comic crime novels featuring private investigator Simon Brenner, a former cop. Three of them are now available in English, and a fourth is on its way. (The English publications are not in the order of their original release.) I saw Haas yesterday evening at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival.

Haas is Austrian, and so is his German. "If it sounds weird, sounds wrong, it's a good translation." He apologizes for his English, but explains that when he reads in German, he also has to apologize for his German: "It's not real German, it's more like the nightmare of German." There is not only one kind of German.

His writing style is unique. It's very much like spoken language, lively, verbal tics and all. He writes the way he does because he likes the sound of it. (And it makes for very compelling reading.)

He likes reading in English because it's as if he's reading a book someone else wrote. He is distanced from the words; the words come as a surprise and he's not as judgemental of them as if he were reading them in his own language.

On top of which, in English they sound more like a real whodunit. He seems to romanticize the American crime thriller. As I riffle through scads of Scandinavian bestsellers in my head, I realize he means the hard-boiled, noir tradition.

In his view (and mine) it's the narrator of these books who's the main character, not the detective.

There's an attempt to explain the detective Simon Brenner to those who have not read any of the books. The interviewer likes the Columbo analogy; I don't. Brenner may have a common-man appeal about him, but he's not that clever. A bit oafish; not exactly clumsy, but intellectually sloppy. He never controls a situation; things happen to him.

Haas describes Brenner as a dinosaur of a man, an old-fashioned stereotype, only he tried to make him more likeable. Like his uncles. The kind of man who has to appear strong, tough; says little, but drinks a lot. Remember, Brenner's an ex-cop, and all-round fuck-up. "He tries to think, but he's too tired."

So how does he solve anything then (or does he)? "I don't want to be rude in a foreign language, but that's when the narrator kicks his ass."

While some of his writing has a basis in reality, Haas admits that much of it is pure fantasy; for example, Brenner's hometown is a real village, but Haas has never been there. Haas travels to promote his books, of course, and he discusses how those experiences are creeping into his books. But he's wary of opening his mind too far; his books are, after all, about small villages with narrow-minded people.

When did Wolf Haas realize he needed to write? He sets the interviewer straight: "I do not need to write. I want to write." Being a writer was a more attractive alternative to having a proper job, though not so viable in the beginning. What he learned from his days writing advertising copy: when you have an idea, you have to stick with it, run with it past the point of no return. He confesses that it's somewhat embarrassing to write crime stories — it's ridiculous.

I picked up a copy of Resurrection and he signed it for me. We even managed some (very) small talk. I asked him whether he reads a lot of crime novels, does he have a favourite crime writer, but it turns out, no, he reads maybe 2 or 3 a year, he likes reading all kind of things, "even poetry" (and it sounded to me a little like a line). Lovely man, shy, a bit nervous and awkward — real, with things to say.

Read Wolf Haas.

Lullabies for white trash

I'm reading Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals, in anticipation of seeing the author next week. I'm only halfway, but I highly recommend it. It is absolutely heartbreaking.

The worst is, she names streets that I know, and I picture myself walking along them with my daughter, who's just about the age of the novel's narrator, and, well, I well up, and I think how lucky I am.

A selection of Heather O'Neill's writing is available online:

Fiction
The End of Pinky

Johnny really was a gorgeous thief. Tonight he was wearing a black fedora over his dirty blond hair, and his blue eyes peeked out from underneath. He had a tattoo of a swan on his fist. He had survived his father trying to kill him three times. Once he had held him under the water in his bubble bath for a whole minute. Another time he had thrown Johnny off the balcony, and he landed in a pile of snow in just his underwear. Once his father sent him to talk to a stranger wearing a trench coat with nothing on underneath. As a result, Johnny didn’t fear death at all and he had no morals, which gave him the wickedest smile on the strip. It was as though each homicide attempt had only made him more beautiful.

And They Danced by the Light of the Moon (a prequel to the events of Lullabies)

Manon liked how the word "fuck" sounded when it came out of Jules’s mouth. It was like something shiny and wondrous that lit up her whole being. It was like a little piece of dirt in the oyster’s mouth that would turn into a pearl.

Riff-raff

Because I was from Canada, they seemed to think that I had never been exposed to riff-raff. I was like the dodo birds that lacked natural predators and so stood meekly as Europeans clubbed them to death. Listening to too much Anne Murray had made me soft.

Nonfiction
On Deadbeat Dads

Deadbeat Dad typically wears sunglasses and leather jackets. He has long hair, even though he’s balding on top. He rides a skateboard at age thirty-five. He’s fit, and is often spotted in the playground doing chin-ups on the monkey bars. When children are with Deadbeat Dad, they always feel in the flush of a new relationship. Everything Deadbeat Dad says is a riot. He does the most exciting things. He wrestles snakes! He eats shark! He runs into Ozzy Osbourne in bars!

On Growing Up White Trash

I wrote about how the basement walls of my building were covered in licence plates and hubcaps. I thought it was beautiful, like Aladdin's cave. I wrote about eating pork chops while sitting on the sidewalk and watching a television plugged into an extension cord that ran through a window.

Poetic License: A letter from Heather O'Neill, on liberating the sixth grade.

One had compared feeling good to disco balls, one had written about a raving stepbrother who drank all the orange juice in the house, one had written about his dad letting him sleep out on the balcony in the summer.

Radio
Various stories on This American Life.

"The Little Wolfboy of Northern Quebec" on Wiretap. (There are several other stories on Wiretap, but they are not easily searchable, or findable; this one's a favourite of mine.)

Blue Met
Heather O'Neill is at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, interviewed by Shelagh Rogers, on May 2. Heather O'Neill's new book is The Girl Who Was Saturday Night.

Looking forward to Blue Met

The launch of the festival program is like Christmas for me. I look forward to it every year. Then I sit with my various coloured pens, marking the must-sees and the maybe-interestings, mapping and scheduling.

The 16th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, themed "The Power of Words," runs April 28 to May 4, with some pre- and post-festival events.

This year's recipient of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix is Richard Ford. (But I'm not yet convinced I need to read him.)

At my first go over the program, I've identified two standout events:

• Thursday, May 1, an interview with Austrian crime writer Wolf Haas, author of the darkly humorous Simon Brenner books and for whom I've developed a fondness. I'm giddy with anticipation.
• Friday, May 2, Shelagh Rogers interviews Heather O'Neill, author of the amazing Lullabies for Little Criminals. No, I haven't actually read it, but I own a copy and I know all sorts of things about it and I expect it to be thoroughly amazing. She has a new book out.

I'll be poring over the event listings in more detail in the coming days — I'll let you know what else I find. The full program is available on the Blue Metropolis website.

Sylvia — lifting a bell jar

It's been nigh on a month that I hosted a breakfast salon at the 15th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, in which we discussed Sylvia Plath and her work, and The Bell Jar in particular.

It was an intimate group of people with very different relationships to Plath — from the gentleman with a mental illness who had a broad interest in how authors addressed depression et cetera in their writing, to the woman who'd been a fan of Plath throughout the 1950s and onwards, collecting a file folder of newspaper clippings about her and corresponding with Sylvia's mother after her death.

I'd spent a couple months refamiliarizing myself with The Bell Jar and sifting my way through her published Journals and other related work. (I've quoted this bit before, but:)

Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing — singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, noone, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time — which it is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere — poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That's what it feels like: getting shed of a routine. Even though one had rebelled terribly against it, even then, one feels uncomfortable when jounced out of the repetitive rut. And so with me.

— from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. July 11, Wellesley & Cape Cod, Massachusetts (summer 1952);
Journal July 1950 – July 1953.

Unsurprisingly, on closer inspection The Bell Jar turns out to be much more complicated than the easy, breezy voice of Esther Greenwood might lead you to believe. I mean, even the symbol of the bell jar — stifling, yet protective. Esther/Sylvia reveals mixed feelings toward almost every situation she finds herself in.

Why are mopey teenage girls drawn to Sylvia Plath?
I came to Sylvia Plath relatively late in life. And I'm glad that I did. I can't imagine myself as a teenage properly appreciating something like this:

Once when I visited Buddy I found Mrs Willard braiding a rug out of strips of wool from Mr Willards's old suits. She's spent weeks on that rug, and I had admired the tweedy browns and greens and blues patterning the braid, but after Mrs Willard was through, instead of hanging the rug on the wall the way I would have done, she put it down in place of her kitchen mat, and in a few days it was soiled and dull and indistinguishable from and mat you could buy for under a dollar in the Five and Ten.

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard's kitchen mat.

So what do teenage girls get out of this? A warning? A prophecy? Sylvia was near 30 when she wrote this — with two small children and a troubled marriage (and I put forward that the maturity or experience level of a 30-year-old woman circa 1960 is near that of today's 40-year-old).

It's been said there's essentially no such thing as an innocent reading of The Bell Jar. Everyone knows it to be quasi-autobiographical, and everyone knows the tragic end Sylvia came to. She killed herself mere weeks after the novel was published.

The romance of the doom and gloom is the attraction to younger readers, I think; the material takes on significance secondarily.

Prose that transports
One salon attendee was particularly taken with one excerpt I'd selected:

I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat — on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok — I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

"In one sentence she takes you around the world," she said. Unleashed and recaptured, brought still under that bell jar.

Let us not forget that, despite the grim subject matter, The Bell Jar is poetic and funny.

I'm struck by the Sylvia's expressed desire, and it recurs in her Journals, to write fiction, that she found writing fiction harder than writing poetry, because poetry at least had rigid structure to fall back on. Poetry is its own kind of bell jar, I think.

Further reading
A few of the articles et cetera I've been perusing these last few months...

On Sylvia Plath, by Elizabeth Hardwick. New York Review of Books, May 23, 2013.

For all the drama of her biography, there is a peculiar remoteness about Sylvia Plath. A destiny of such violent self-definition does not always bring the real person nearer; it tends, rather, to invite iconography, to freeze our assumptions and responses.

Sylvia Plath's Joy, by Dan Chiasson. The New Yorker, Feb 12, 2013.

The feeling that "Ariel" is a discovery, a revelation, has never really faded.

There Are Almost No Obituaries for Sylvia Plath, The Atlantic, Feb 11, 2013.

"Daddy" Is Mommy, by Katie Roiphe. Slate, Feb 11, 2013.

Feminist critics have always had a soft spot for women driven to madness or suicidal despair by the patriarchy, but the story of Plath’s mental illness resists the simplicity of that or any explanation.

Sylvia Plath: reflections on her legacy. The Guardian, Feb 8, 2013.
"The Bell Jar was a call to action because it is a diary of despair." — Jeanette Winterson.

Sylvia Plath’s secrets are hidden in plain sight, by Jane Shilling. The Telegraph, Feb 2, 2013.

Of course, Plath is not unique in having acquired a dense carapace of romantic myth after her death. The history of literature is littered with wayward geniuses whose talent was prematurely cut off. Yet something sets Plath apart from the melancholy roll-call of Keats, Shelley, Byron, Brooke, Rimbaud, Radiguet, Woolf, Sexton, and latterly the young playwright Sarah Kane. However powerful the myths of their deaths, these writers are still known mainly by their works. In Plath’s case, her writing began, soon after her death, to be relegated to a supporting role in a seductive, but intensely misleading, narrative of victimhood.

Don't judge The Bell Jar by its cover, by Sam Jordison. The Guardian, Feb 1, 2013.

I even quite like the idea of someone mistaking the book for a sexy summer beach read and falling headlong into Esther Greenwood's cruel world.

Out of the ash, Sylvia Plath's legend rises anew, by Emma Garman. Salon, Jan 27, 2013.

What no one can dispute, though, is that Plath would be thrilled to witness the intricacies of her life still drawing fascination 50 years on: More than anything else, she longed to be famous, immortal, celebrated.

Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar still haunts me, by Kirsty Grocott. The Guardian, Jan 11, 2013.

The Bell Jar is so carefully constructed and considered. Despite the messy tangle of subject matter, Plath never rambles; and for all it's flowery and poetic language there is not an unconsidered word in the entire book.

Sylvia, a movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig, 2003.

Lady Lazarus, a film by Sandra Lahire, 1991.

This seemed reassuring

I had the pleasure of seeing Gianrico Carofiglio in interview yesterday evening, as part of the 15th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. He is a former anti-Mafia judge (in Italy) turned crime writer. I have not read his books, but I fully intend to (in fact, I bought a book after the show, and I'm already seven chapters in).

He's charming — modest and self-deprecating, yet exuding a calm confidence. He embodies very much the same qualities as his protagonist, defence lawyer Guido Guerrieri. When asked if he (Gianrico) and Guido are one and the same, he explains that, while he used to maintain a firm distinction between himself as author and Guido as an entirely fictional creation, upon seeing how popular Guido is with his women readers he's become much more flexible in the matter.

(He's so charming, in fact, that when he was signing my book for me, gosh, I don't know what came over me, my senses left me entirely, I think I flirted with him, and the opportunity to ask him a serious question about non-Scandinavian European crime fiction slipped past.)

Carofiglio came to writing relatively late in life, though he'd wanted to be a writer since he was eight. The question is not why a lawyer should decide to turn to writing, but why a young child who wanted to be a writer decided to become a lawyer instead.

He has mixed feelings about the port city Bari, the setting for this series of novels and from which he hails. He clarifies, it's good to have mixed feelings toward people and things you love. When things are too clear, it's not very interesting.

He echoes the sentiment in explaining why Guido is flawed: Weaknesses are more interesting than strengths. (And this is, I'm sure, why we love our poet detectives, our broken heroes, our tragic men — men readers find them easier to relate to, women readers come to care for them, want to fix them.)

Carofiglio tries to define a good lawyer. You must above all else have respect for people, all people. You must not be a moralist — there is no room for moral judgement in law. You must practice doubt.

In Italian, there's a saying: La verita, relativa. The truth is relative. One is an anagram of the other. There are always different versions of a crime, different versions of the truth. If you don't know this being a lawyer, then you're not a good lawyer, Carofiglio remarks. But he is not a relativist. Rather, acknowledging different perspectives and examining the multiple points of view is the best way to arrive at the truth.

I've started reading Involuntary Witness.

The psychiatrist was tall, massive and imposing, bearded and with hands like shovels. I could just see him immobilizing a raving lunatic and forcing him into a straitjacket.

He was kindly enough, considering his beard and bulk. He got me to tell him everything and kept nodding his head. This seemed reassuring. Then it occurred to me that I too used to nod my head while clients were talking and I felt somewhat less reassured.

It has a tone that reminds me a little of the one book I read by Wolf Haas. Self-involved, self-reflective, chatty, playful. It feels different from the Scandinavian crime novels. Though, Carofiglio wasn't about to make any generalizations of this sort. (He has read the first of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, and admits he found the stuff about computer hacking quite boring — he would've cut 150 pages.)

At any rate, Carofiglio has a brand new fan in me.

Here's a link to a review of Temporary Perfections, one of the later books in the series, but it in turn has links to reviews of several of his other books.

15th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival

The 15th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival runs April 22–28. The full program is now available on the festival website.

The recipient of this year's Grand Prix is Colm Tóibín (whom I have not read, but you can be sure I'll be reading up on him now).

And if you're in Montreal that weekend, join me Sunday, April 28, for a breakfast salon to discuss the work of Sylvia Plath, and The Bell Jar in particular.

See you there.

Books as art

True to form, I've been meaning to see a particular art exhibit for weeks, but I've been putting it off or forgetting, until now, just days before it closes.

Judging Books by Their Covers, is on at the SBC Galerie D'Art Contemporain, April 14 – June 9, 2012, and was presented as part of this year's Blue Metropolis Literary Festival.

I convinced a coworker to make the trek with me on our lunch hour yesterday — a 20-minute walk each way, and about 20 minutes to explore art in the 2-room gallery.

(We peeked into another gallery on our way out. Frankly, I find this building amazing — the lobby board listed at least a dozen galleries, all housed in this old building with the slowest elevator in the world. Seriously sssoooo slow, you'd have time for a quickie between floors. Did I just say that out loud? From top to bottom, or vice versa, you could perform a whole wardrobe change plus, and emerge an entirely different person. But I'm glad to have discovered this place, for the art I mean.)

I expected a show of actual book covers, à la Chip Kidd, or whoever, but that's not what this is. The concept of this exhibition relates more to the ability of a book cover to draw you in, through words, images, colour, texture. These are recontextualized books as objects.

The works by the five artists represented in this show could be described as bold, intricate, feminist, objectifying, irreverent, or political. The review in the Belgo Report has more details. I found them curious and interesting.

Whatever I do or don't get about art, this exhibition is a great conversation starter — about what books you have or haven't read, how you arrange them, whether these books are real or made up, how touchable these books look, and in particular with Hans-Peter Feldman's five-panel work of black and white photographs how much you want to pull those books off their shelves, turn them over, flip them open.

As much as I love my e-reader (for its portability, searchability, etc) and the e-communities that talk about books, I don't buy all this crap about technology making reading social. An e-reader lying on a coffee table is little more than a gadget, compelling no one to ask about or explore what's inside (except at a most factual or technical level). But print books, stacked on desk corners, splayed open on armchairs, scattered around a house — these are social catalysts into the minds of the flesh-and-blood people you live with. Even though this exhibit features mere pictures of books, it drives home the point that nothing quite compares with actual, physical, printed books.

The woman with three names

Joyce Carol Oates was awarded this year's Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix.

I read one of her novels for the first time the other week, and I didn't like it much.

This past weekend I saw her interviewed by Jack Kirchhoff, Deputy Books Editer of The Globe and Mail, on the subject of her crime novels.

I find Oates to be very creepy. Her physical persona, gaunt, pale, crazy hair that's being restrained, a bit Emily Dickinson, very gothic. Her subject matter too, uncomfortable. Even the book I didn't like, I loved hating it. Felt like rubbernecking.

Oates gave us a brief overview of crime writing as an exploration of the human dilemma, starting with Ovid, through Dickens and Dostoevsky, to the Americans Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner, and she puts herself in the same lineage.

To write a crime novel seemed more ambitious to her than straight fiction, at which she was already practiced. When she started writing under the pen name Rosamond Smith, the idea was to produce something that was swift-moving and cinematic. She was very witty in describing the experiment of shopping the first pseudoymous novel with a new agent to a new publisher, like she was cheating on her established editorial relationships.

It was an interesting session, but I had a hard time keeping straight when she was talking about her crime novels and when she was speaking more generally about her entire body of work. Kirchhoff did little to keep her on topic, and Oates — you could tell she's done this before — just talked and talked about whatever the last sentence led her to. (The general nature of the discussion meant I decided to forego attending another interview with Oates later in the day.) So this report is a bit scattered, but such was the nature of the hour.

Her writing has a ballad-like structuring, and she refers to Dickens and Hardy quite a bit, with characters that are blind and heedless, but well intentioned.

She quips at one point that one tends to think of psychopaths as male, but then has to clarify to the nervous audience, "That was a joke actually."

She's interested in darkness. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

One of the differences in writing crime is that the tradition demands tying things up; serious fiction allows for irresolute, mysterious endings.

Kirchhoff brought up the point that Oates has been accused of melodrama (but I'm not sure if this was leveled at the crime novels or her fiction in general). She counters that there's little difference between drama and melodrams — Shakespeare was the king of melodrama!

In her early work, Oates felt herself telling a story. Now, she mediates her voice; there's more dialogue.

She likes reading Michael Connelly, and James Ellroy.

Then there are her postmodernist gothic novels (I'm not sure which ones fall into this category). She loves gothic, surreal. She described the spectrum from domestic realism — John Updike, which is beautiful and contained — to the gothicism of Cormac McCarthy, with its rich language and story that is primitive, elemental, and deeply scary.

I think it was in discussing Blonde that Oates went off on a tangent about the United States being "such a tragic, farcical country" and the "demonic forces" among the Republican candidates with their warped nationalism and sense of American exceptionalism, that America is special, and therefore everything about it is good and right. She got pretty worked up. That was something to see.

Of her own novels, Oates' favourites are Blonde (and she spoke at great length about her fascination with Marilyn Monroe, and how public figures can have such vast loneliness), My Sister, My Love (which was suggested by a real-life unsolved case, because we all have the right to speculate, to look at the evidence), and as a straight-up crime novel Take Me, Take Me with You (written as Lauren Kelly).

Definitely I will pick up one of these and give Oates another shot.

Simenon and the man who didn't stay to lunch

Circumstances conspired against it. The damp cold on its own might've kept me home with a book and a blanket, but Earth Day manifestations meant roads were blocked and kept other people away from the downtown core and the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival.

Despite a handful of people having expressed interest in Lunch and Literature: A Georges Simenon Salon, only one gentleman actually showed up. He was there with a genuine enthusiasm for Simenon, but he's also on the festival board of directors, and he absolved me of the responsibility of lunching with him. I admit I was a little disappointed, as he claimed to have read all 400 Simenon books, and I'm sure he could've told me a thing or two.

Evidently Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote an introduction to Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, did not feel obligated to attend.

It does make wonder who are all these people reading Simenon and responsible for the renaissance Simenon is reportedly enjoying. Is it you? (Drop me a line. I'm seriously interested in the demographics of the Simenon appeal.)

I have not yet finished all the homework I'd assigned myself. I'm still reading a biography of Simenon. There are a lot of facts in it. And I know for a fact that Simenon was a very interesting man. But ohmygawd-it-is-sssoooo-boring-shoot-me-now. I will skim through what's left of it in hopes of finding some meaningful insight, but I doubt I will find anything worth sharing with you. Simply, I would so much rather be reading a Simenon than reading about Simenon.

I have posted a version of my discussion notes, along with some supplemental material, to their own page. (These notes are subject to further editing for clarity and flow.)

These notes are deliberately very general in nature — even had the event attracted a full room, given Simenon's output there's no guarantee there'd be any overlap in the books everyone had read. The idea was to talk about Simenon in a general way and examine the attraction to his works via some common themes, with a focus on the romans durs (as opposed to the Maigret mysteries). You may find these notes useful in your own discussions on Simenon.

I will consider fleshing out this page with other Simenon resource material. For example, I'd like to add short (50-word) synopses of Simenon titles, something I'd started doing for my own easy reference.

Anyway. I'll keep reading Simenon, and maybe we can try to meet up for lunch again next year.

On translating DFW

This afternoon at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival, a dozen or so people (of which I was one) sat in on a discussion panel with author and translator Edoardo Nesi (winner of this year's Strega Prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award) and literary critic Scott Esposito (Conversational Reading), moderated by Juliet Waters, on the difficulties involved in translating the works of David Foster Wallace. Nothing particularly revelatory here to anyone familiar with DFW's work or who's given the problems of translation the slightest bit of thought, but interesting nonetheless.

Nesi very neatly summarized Infinite Jest as a book of weakness, where everyone is incapable of doing the right thing, everyone is recovering from something.

It's agreed that Infinite Jest is a very American novel. When Nesi first urged Italian publishers to take it on, they saw it as a too expensive proposition. It is long, its use of language is intricate, and there's a lot of tennis in it. Nesi, who played tennis as a youth, was well poised to complete the Italian translation that was started by somebody else.

A translation constraint: Since IJ already has copious footnotes, a layer of translation notes wasn't practical, so the translated text really did need to speak for itself, without further explanation.

It's a book a lot of people talk about it Italy, but not so many people have actually read it, daunted by its size (and I'd venture to say that's true among English speakers as as well).

Esposito characterized IJ as positively Dickensian, in how it plays with language (may I add — even revels in it), and the scope of the story — hundreds of pages go by before the strands come together and the connections become clear.

DFW is a unique voice; no one compares to him. Nesi gives the example of Pynchon (with whom DFW is often thrown into the group of American postmodernists), whose Vineland was translated as if it had been written by an "old master." The language of DFW, on the other hand, demands that it be treated fresh.

Waters asked if there was anyone writing in Italian today who might compare. She suggested Umberto Eco — (apart from the footnotes in Foucault's Pendulum, I don't really see it, but) she contends there's something monastic and arcane (and therefore Eco-like?) about The Pale King (which I have not yet read).

To write like DFW, with the "foolish idea" of explaining youth, says Nesi, is too high an ambition for Italians, who have lost the ability to explain their own country.

There is no French translation of Infinite Jest. The conversation touched briefly on whether and how to preserve the grammatical errors and misspellings in DFW's French (given his meticulousness, it's hard to imagine these weren't deliberate, no matter his rationale for them). Also, how it might be politically touchy.

I had assumed a French translation would be rendered in Quebec French. I think the language allows for an Americanness of spirit, and with more registers, than France French. But I didn't think to ask about this. Also, I missed the chance to ask if someone could enlighten me on Gilles Duceppe's role in endnote 304.

On a side note, I know what this summer's big read is. I'm in, and I'm psyched.

Reeling from the rot

Esi Edugyan is the author of Half Blood Blues. Her second novel, it won the 2011 Giller Prize and was a finalist for several other awards, including the Governor General's Award and the Booker. I have not read this novel yet, but it's been on my list owing to the endorsement given it in Kim's review at Reading Matters.

This afternoon she was interviewed on stage by Shelagh Rogers, and Shelagh asked the question that I'm sure is on everybody's mind: "Did The Wire have anything to do with this book?" The answer is No.

Shelagh asked because some of the characters hail from Baltimore, and there's something in the clip of the language in that television program and in this novel that's similar. Esi later came back to The Wire actually, in talking about the time she lived in Baltimore, that it's a city of stories, if you get into a cab you're going to hear a story, and that it's weird, and well, very much like it's depicted in The Wire (a show I've never seen, but which comes highly recommended — maybe I'll start watching it tomorrow).

The novel is about a group of jazz musicians in Nazi Germany. Today's conversation discussed some of its themes: whether talent is "god-given" and how it differs from genius; the black experience in the Weimar Republic and the seeming randomness and sometime contradiction in its laws with regard to... what's the correct term here? non-Aryans? (for example, a Jewish teacher was fired and replaced by an African-German teacher); the nature of friendship, how people slip into patterns in any relationship, and whether friendship can withstand betrayal (of which there's some in the story); how creativity thrives (or not) under an oppressive regime; how we define and establish identity, whether by blood or geography (which reminds me of some of what Vasily Grossman had to say in Life and Fate).

It's clear that Esi did a lot of research in writing this novel, on the dialect and slang, on Berlin, on jazz, the politics and the day-to-day circumstances of the time, on Louis Armstrong. She admits that several elements (what Louis said, or some of the slang terms) may not be true to life, but she feels no qualms about this because she believes them to be true to the spirit. (When she was taking journalism classes she shied away from doing interviews for her assignments to the point of making up quotes — a sign, I think, that fiction was a better career choice.)

I picked up a copy of the book and had it signed afterward, and felt like an idiot for having nothing to say, just "I hear it's really good," which may be the dumbest thing I've ever said to an author. But truly, I'm more eager to read this now after having heard her — she's thoughtful in her responses, seems very sweet and honest if shy, and really does have a lot to say about all sorts of things.

Excerpt from Half Blood Blues:

Chip told us not to go out. Said, don’t you boys tempt the devil. But it been one brawl of a night, I tell you, all of us still reeling from the rot – rot was cheap, see, the drink of French peasants, but it stayed like nails in you gut. Didn’t even look right, all mossy and black in the bottle. Like drinking swamp water.

The sound of things

I'd planned to see Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez this evening at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival, but the event has been cancelled.

Vásquez's 2007 novel The Secret History of Costaguana (published in English translation in 2010) riffs off of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, a book I've been trying to read for the last 26 years, and it occurred to me that Vásquez might be my way into that story.

His first novel, The Informers, is about Colombia's Jewish and German Immigrant populations, and The Sound of Things Falling (I love this title!), due out in English later this year, tackles the subject of the drug trade.

I'm disappointed that I won't have the chance to hear Vásquez speak (but this means I can spend the evening going over my notes in preparation for talking about Simenon on Sunday).

I'll be back at Blue Met tomorrow, and I'll be checking out the onsite bookstore for Vásquez's novels too.

Further reading

• Profile: The Guardian
• Interview: BOMB Magazine
• Review of The Informers: The Quarterly Conversation
• Review of The Secret History of Costaguana: New York Times

Hot art

This evening I attended Blue Metropolis Literary Festival event Crime Writing: Hot Art and Montreal.

Joshua Knelman, author of Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives through the Secret World of Stolen Art, spoke about the state of international art theft. The book came about from an award-winning article he wrote for The Walrus, of which he is a founding member.

I have not read his book, but I am fascinated by the subject. Here's what he said in a Q&A on the Indigo non-fiction blog:

The minute a Picasso is stolen from a museum there are pictures of it in every paper across the world, with the value of the painting, every auction house and art gallery knows this piece has been stolen, every collector knows its been stolen. It's a headache for the thieves because suddenly everyone is looking for this painting. It's a headache for the police because if it's a really famous painting stolen from a cultural institution the police get pressure from the political side.

Headache art cases make up about 5% of what is actually stolen every year. So you're talking about a very small piece of the art theft pie but it gets probably 95% of the media attention. So again it's the complete inverse.

He's out to dispel the glamour I (and many others) tend to associate with this type of crime.

Most stolen art is worth a fraction of a Picasso, but theft from private collections is apparently going on all the time — it adds up to ahuge black market art industry.

It's complicated by the difficulty of establishing a work of art's provenance, and the fact that the business of art is completely unregulated. Further, very few people are equipped with the knowledge of art and understanding of how the art world operates required to investigate crimes of this nature. The people who do have specialized knowledge are usually dealers and collectors, who with their interests at heart very often turn a blind eye. Art cops are few and far between.

For about an hour Knelman talked about his research, with anecdotes about the art thiefs and the detectives he's met who devote themsleves to this niche — and how remarkably similar their skillsets are.

I still think it's glamorous, and I'm thinking about a career change.

Read Joshua Knelman's article "Artful Crimes" for a taste.

Art theft fiction
Since I tend to turn to fiction, here are some titles I dug up — novels that involves art theft, though generally of the more sensational kind. I'm somewhat surprised there aren't more, but it occurs to me that art crime doesn't need fictionalizing to be a good story.

• The Raphael Affair, by Iain Pears — Featuring detective art historian Jonathan Argyll investigating the destruction of a newly discovered painting thought to be by Raphael.
• Doors Open, by Ian Rankin — A bored, self-made man decides to commit the perfect crime: rip off the National Gallery of Scotland.
• Artists and Thieves, by Linda Schroeder — By day Mai Ling recoveres stolen art for Interpol. But she is also duty-bound by her family to steal a priceless object, and return it to China.
• The Rembrandt Affair, by Daniel Silva — Retired spy Gabriel Allon is pulled into a race across the globe when an art restorer is murdered and a portrait by Rembrandt stolen.

Art appreciation?
Complex as it is to pull off a theft of this nature, and as beautiful as the objects of these crimes are, what intrigues me most is the question of who is actually in the market for stolen art. I imagine the filthy rich eccentric who goes down to his cellar occasionally to admire the genuine Mona Lisa that hangs there. (See also The Eiger Sanction, by Trevanian, whose protagonist is an assassin and an art collector.)

But the idea of such a connoisseur isn't very realistic either. Stolen art tends to move to dealer to dealer to collector to auction house to dealer, etc. It's not about the art — it's the money.

The man who wasn't Maigret

Come discuss Simenon over lunch.

Sunday, April 22, 2012, at noon
Koko Restuarant, OPUS Hotel
10 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal

Email Irène Raparison to reserve a spot.

Not a fair maiden at all

"You do mean it, Katya? You're not just saying this humor me?"

Humor? Katya wasn't sure what this meant. Unless Mr. Kidder was asking if she was lying to placate him. As girls and women do, to placate men.

Really? Am I missing something? I don't question that girls and women do this, and they learn to do this at a very early age, but for a 16-year-old to use the word "placate" in her head while not understanding the expression "to humor someone"?!

A Fair Maiden is the first book I've ever picked up written by Joyce Carol Oates, and I really didn't like it much at all. Thank gawd it was short.

I'll be seeing Joyce Carol Oates next week at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival — she's the recipient of this year's Grand Prix. I thought it only appropriate that I should read something of hers before then.

Oates succeeds in making A Fair Maiden an uncomfortable read — what does a wealthy old man want with a teenage nanny? — but the characterization is poor, the langauge is off (the narration switches from Katya's perspective to if not exactly Mr. Kidder's, then Katya's approximation of what Mr. Kidder's perspective might be; all the adverbs are in awkward places; and "mansion-sized houses" just sounds dumb), and the fairy tale element thrown in toward the end is laughable (or make the whole thing fairytalesque and throw out the first 100 pages).

Every other page is he's funny, no he's creepy, is he sincere in his quaint way, or is he mocking me, he wants me, pervert, no he really loves me, I want everyone to look at me, everyone wants me, no don't look at me I'm ugly, and this gets very tiresome. Yes, 16-year-old girls are confused, and often naive, but some of the contradictions Oates builds into Katya's character make her stupid, and I don't buy it.

There's simply no subtlety in it.

There are a few points in the Paris Review interview (1976) that lead me to suspect that in writing A Fair Maiden, published in 2010, Oates actually identifies with the old man.

Excerpt.

Some reviews
(Despite their reservations, they're still much warmer than my feelings toward this novella.)
– The Guardian
– The Independent states that Katya is "only vaguely aware of his more sinister intentions" but this is false — she perceives (rightly or not) perverted sexual intentions by page 8!
– Popmatters ranks this "as one of Oates' stronger works," but then quantifies it as a 7 out of 10 (the rest of her work rates lower?).
– Washington Post

Is Oates possibly still riding on the success of 1969's Them? Is there a particular novel of hers you would recommend? (I'm not much for short stories, of which I know she's written quite a few, but I'm game to try one of her crime novels before next week's event.)

Simenon in Montreal

If you're in Montreal next weekend, join me in discussing the work of Simenon over lunch, part of the 2012 Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. You don't even have to know that much about Simenon. He's dead, so he won't be there to say you're wrong.

Whether Maigret is your all-time favourite detective, or you've fallen hard (as I have) for Simenon's romans durs, if you've only ever seen Monsieur Hire, or if you think Simenon was a misogynist pig, or even if you've never read a word by Simenon and just want to see what the fuss is about...

Lunch is at noon on Sunday, April 22, 2012, in the Koko Restuarant of the OPUS Hotel on Sherbrooke. The event is free, but you're expected to buy a lunch. Email Irène Raparison to reserve a spot.

Blue Metropolis 2012

The Blue Metropolis Literary Foundation this morning held a press conference to announce its line-up for the 2012 Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. The Festival once again changes venue this year. It will be held at the Opus Hotel on Sherbrooke, April 18-23.

This year's theme: Le pouvoir des mots [The power of words]. This comes through strongly in the emphasis on the children's portion of the festival, promoting literacy and the culture of reading in youngsters. (I'll see if I can get my daughter to attend an event and report on it.)

The 2012 programming for the main festival has a couple main areas of focus. One is Cuban literature, and the other is crime writing.

The 2012 Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix winner is Joyce Carol Oates, who, coincidentally, has a large body of crime-related novels. She will be awarded the prize at a special event on Saturday, April 21. (I have not read any Joyce Carol Oates. Where do you recommend I start?)

(Past winners include some of my favourite writers: A.S. Byatt, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster.)

Noteworthy:

• Read Dating (literary speed-dating)
• Collaboration with Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (several events will be held at the Grande Bibliothèque)
• Shoe Stories, a fundraising event (books! and shoes! — two of my favourite things!)
• Read & Ride, a cross-promotion with the Société de transport de Montréal, encouraging the use of public transportation, so you can read on your commute

For those of you who are unable to attend, I will be blogging the festival, so you can live it vicariously through me. I'll have access to several events and festival participants. So let me know if you have an interest in a particular event and I'll see about attending it for you. (For those of you who are able to attend, well, maybe we can compare notes.)

Finally, I'm excited to announce that I'll be hosting a Lunch and Literature event: A Georges Simenon Salon, at noon on Sunday, April 22. Held in the Koko Restaurant, the event itself is free but the purchase of lunch is required.

If you've ever read Simenon — whether his romans durs or his Maigret novels — please come out for lunch and contribute to the conversation. I've nurtured a mild obsession with Simenon since I first discovered his romans durs about a year and a half ago, and I'm curious to know what other readers see in him.

Sadly, I cannot attend the panel discussion on translating David Foster Wallace (Scott Esposito is on the panel), as it conflicts with my Simenon lunch.

You can find full program details on the festival's website (which has been given a long overdue facelift).

Also check out Programming Director Gregory McCormick's blog, Azure Scratchings, for more festival-related news and commentary.

The future of the book

Some three weeks ago (more! what day is this, anyway?) I headed out to the 12th Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival to attend a panel discussion: "The Future of the Book."

(It's the only event I attended this year; there was no author in particular that I was clammering to see, but I feel obliged to experience the benefits of great cultural events taking place near me, no matter how much I'd rather nap.)

On the panel: Yvonne Hunter, director of publicity and marketing at Penguin (Canada); Kim McArthur, publisher and president of McArthur & Company; and Andrew Piper, prof at McGill, author of Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age, and blogger.

The discussion was moderated by Paul Kennedy, wearing a Habs jersey.

I was going to report on this panel discussion immediately after the fact, and then I wasn't going to bother, and now I am, because of an overwhelming sense of confusion. That is, I came out of that talk a bit confused, the discussion had a vague and shifting focus, and the panelists themselves didn't seem very certain about anything. Now that it's sat with me for a few weeks, I see that this muddleheadedness is really the point, evidencing the confusion of the industry as a whole.

I'm sure that's not news to a lot of people. Me neither. But it's one thing to read about the industry here and there, the uncertain financial futures of independent booksellers and publishers, that reading is on the decline, the problems associated with digital rights management, etc; quite another to be in a room with industry professionals and see them shrugging their shoulders and shaking their heads.

So, this is me, not really reporting on anything at all, just saying, "Aurgh."

The state of things today is that boundaries are being knocked down, between writers and readers, between publishers and distributors. There's consensus among the publishers that they're losing the middle — you're left with big-money authors and weird little niche markets; the rest is dross.

Briefly they discuss the potential for technology to change the reading experience, particularly for children, where it can be an enhanced learning experience, and also for encyclopedia-type reference books. (Great! But then they're not books anymore.)

Of course, no one believes that books will ever be driven to extinction; although in some ways, they are being transformed into something like fetish objects. (I think the word "fetish" is taken by some people in the audience (as evidenced by their comments) to be something stronger, weirder, and more offensive than it ought to be. Everybody seems kind of scared by this.

Here's something I hadn't thought of: Ebooks can't be remaindered (the whole concept of which, I learn, was introduced during the Great Depression). Too bad for me and my bargain-bin hunting ways, but I'd've thought the industry would love that. Did you know it's normal to expect 50% returns on Maeve Binchy titles?

(None of the publishers who send me review copies is equipped to send review copies as ebooks.)

The "plan" then is to feed all those profits from your bestsellers back into the editorial process; if you don't need printing and warehousing and distribution, the savings will better serve the author–editor relationship. The role of the publisher can now morph into that of nurturing young talent. (Which is what I always thought it was supposed to be, that that's what the bestsellers afforded them to do; I'm not sure how digital changes this.)

(But this is kind of contrary to the kind of anecdote I regularly read, that editorial input is below expectation, and copyediting often nonexistent. I really don't think they know what they're talking about.)

I sat in a room of well over 100 people, most of them older than me, most of them gasping at the revelations of the Orwellian-like capabilities of Amazon to get inside your Kindle and track your every movement. Clearly they all like books, panel included; in fact, the panel were quite nostalgic about the physical book, about how you take them to bed and to the beach, and I was really surprised at all their trepidation.

My sense of it is this: They are too easily confusing content with form. They are feeding into each other's romantic nostalgia for physical books. In their defense of physical books, they are fetishizing them, and trying to preserve a market while resisting a brave new one. (I must say, the Penguin rep seems genuinely concerned with ensuring authors get a fair shake out of the deal). There's a weird emotional blockage at work that's preventing everyone from seeing clearly and getting on with business.

I'm not really sure what I want to say here. Sorry for not being coherent, but neither is the future.

Vaguely related matters
Five different reading devices, championed by five different readers.
Some answers to some common complaints.
The future of reading at the PEN World Voices Festival.
Amazon tracks Kindle habits.
Kobo also tracks how you read.