Bernard Anton Live

A nice music and poetry (slam) piece by Bernard Anton who I interviewed a while back at my new site.

Truth Marathon - One: Vogme 13 Certified!

Above are some drawings and below is the newest YT version of the opening to my screenplay-novel TRUTH MARATHON, a PLASTIC MILLENNIUM module.

I am rather new at producing this kind of work and am painfully aware that it's not the sort of thing one would see, say, at a film festival. But it's not meant to be amateurish or a kind of hobby: increasingly, I'm becoming convinced that one of the crises afflicting current literary publishing is a crisis of media. (In a very recent post, Dan Green points out that the artistic accomplishment of Zadie Smith's published fiction is not on a par with the  reputation she's generally been granted by mainstream critical "consensus". The connection that I want to make here is that Smith -- and she's hardly the only one -- is a writer whose reputation is a creation of media, including new media, as much as it one of critical zeitgeist; in short, even writers can be famous for being famous, and that becomes especially true when the media of fame, for example TV interviews, achieve a cultural influence greater than that of what the writer is supposedly being feted for: their fiction.)

I originally wrote TRUTH MARATHON as a moderately experimental novel (its first drafts mimicked screenplay format) with a vague idea that I'd insert photos (movie "stills") into the project. Having an acutely limited budget, that soon proved impossible. Who would I get to pose? I didn't know any friends who looked the part, and couldn't afford to hire actors. I also had many scenes set in summertime Canada, but by this point was living in Korea (all my trips back home the past few years have been in the winter). I realized that if I wanted visuals in this project, I'd have to make them the old-fashioned way. And since I was good at drawing and had a background as a cartoonist, I'd turn the novel into a hybrid graphic novel.

Converting this project to video format came later, and was prompted partly by looking at some work that some of my students had produced (I was wowed by what I saw as their expertise) and buying a new laptop with MovieMaker installed and realizing the basics of the software were not that complicated ... as long as one wasn't fussy.

It was the latter point that has become something of a sticking point for me: I am getting fussy. I'd like my work to be more "pro". But I also find myself becoming increasingly alienated by most of the movies and videos I see, including those on YouTube. This has become especially true of the ones about life in Asia. They are frequently montages of clips with beat-heavy music dubbed over them. The tendency of movies -- an ostensibly visual medium that is actually so music-philic that removing music makes movies automatically feel barren and boring -- is to not have faith in the script. It is to undermine importance of the script by pumping up the visuals through various manipulations, and using music as both a prompt and a crutch. When putting together my work, all this was something I wanted to overcome. And so I've been going back to basics, getting my soundtrack from found sources around the home or nearby in the hiking trails close to our apartment.

Where all this is going, I'm not sure. But one thing is certain in my mind: writing can exist in mediums other than print and still retain its literary integrity. This isn't meant as a put-down of print media in favour of the "superiority" of digital/online work; it's rather meant as an equalization. Many of the problems afflicting print publishing today are sourced in an underlying hysteria about the efficacy of print media to compete with image-and-music-augmented narratives. A new aesthetic ideology with literary aims but not traditional habits will need to be developed.

박인희

Here's a video of 박인희 (Bak In-hee), a Korean folk singer Suki turned me on to. She was famous during the 1970s and 80s and is still popular, though I suppose that to younger people she seems rather dated. Personally, I find a lot of depth of feeling to her music. Of course, growing up in Canada during that period, I didn't know about her then. But for some reason she triggers feelings of nostalgia in me, and I'm not sure why. (With Suki, of course, the nostalgia is front and centre.) Because she's female and a folk singer, I suppose the automatic comparison would be with Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell, though I find her voice places her in a slightly different league. Strongly recommended.

PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS - SECOND VIDEO

PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS - FIRST VIDEO

PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS

Here are a couple of photos of the Dong Seoul Bus Terminal in eastern (dong) Seoul. It is the setting of the opening of my new novel of the same name as the title of this post. It's also a very busy neighborhood, and also a good representative of some of the different dynamics between Gangbuk (Seoul north of the Han River) and Gangnam (Seoul south of it). It's more working class, more hurly burly than the vicinity of the Express Bus Terminal close to the Shinsegae shopping complex. But in the vicinity of Dong Seoul one also finds the same masses of apartment buildings that Gangnam is famous for; they spread away from the Dong Seoul terminal likes clones. 

Last Lake

From Toronto, roughly a year and a half ago. It was a painful trip -- one of the last times I saw Richard. Recalling it all hurts more now for some reason than it did a few months ago when he passed away. Maybe this picture is kind of corny but, well ... screw corny.

RIP. bro.

Noteworthy

Dan Green on Richard Ford.

Jean Baird on book prizes and genre fiction's place in CanLit.

PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS - 3b

Here is a new YT vid with a further excerpt from my novel PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS.

I'm still trying to work with the technical limitations of MovieMaker. Speaking of tech limitations, I had a much longer post on making this almost ready to put up when ... the text cyber evaporated. Am doing deep breathing at the moment.

Hiroshima Reverb

From a screenplay story on Hiroshima I've been working on for some time now. According to CNN, it's back in the news....

PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS - INTRO

This is the intro to my novel ms., PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS.

Keep posted for more.

PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS - YT vid

This is a recent vid from my new novel ms. PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS. It's part of The PM Project, an overarching collection of three novels (including one mega-novel) and some linked short stories, monologues and graphic fiction. All these projects are connected: either characters or thematic concerns move back and forth between them. But all also work as discrete, independent modules. They stand alone.

PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS is set in Seoul and Toronto. It is a family drama, but, with its depictions of underemployment, workplace stress, and geopolitical secrecy, it is a social novel as well. Its main protagonist, Bak Dae-woo, makes a brief appearance in my mega-novel PLASTIC MILLENNIUM. This is his story in full.