Global Fevering II

In your hometown, the cicadas compete with the cats to be the summer's maximum.

50

Yesterday would have been Richard's fiftieth birthday. The tradition in Asia is that one gathers with the deceased's family and friends and has dinner, as if for a normal birthday. In this case, that wasn't possible, so Suki and I went to the Buddhist temple near Kyungbukkong.

So now he's gone. It's still sinking in.

Fievre Globale - 1

Fade in

Extérieur. Une plage en Corée du Sud. Jour.

VO: "Nous arrivons à Daejin en bus. Nous sommes seulement un ou deux kilomètre de la DMZ. En venant ici, nous sommes passés l'une base de l'armée après l'autre. Premierement, l'utilisation militaire semble le principal moteur de l'économie locale....

«Au Daejin, le terminal est si petite que dans un premier temps, il semble déserte. Mais après nous orienter, nous trouvons notre chemin vers la plage.

«C'est beau - en forme de croissant, et, contrairement à plusieurs des plages plus au sud le long de la côte, complètement rempli avec du sable brun clair. Il est également – dans cet coin - à peu près déserte. Loin de nous, un foule, proche des hotels cher.

Il ya une barrière entre la route et la plage. Près de la section où nous en sommes, il est enfilées avec du fil de fer barbelé, un vestige de l'époque où cette région était muré de l'utilisation civile...

"Maintenant, la plage est ouverte ... mais les affaires n'est pas très bon. Quand nous avons faim et voulons manger un morceau, nous constatons que de localiser quelque chose d'aussi fondamental qu'un « supa "(un dépanneur), nous avons besoin de marcher presque toute la distance de la plage jusqu'a la région avec toutes les personnes et leurs radeaux gonflables en multicolores, avec les têtes d'animaux et facilement perforés.

«Retour à notre place sur la plage, une sirène se déclenche alors. La voix d'un homme soufflant dans le microphone, comme pour effacer la poussière. Puis son avertissement brouillées: « Ne pas aller trop loin dans l'eau avec vos trucs flottants »- ou quelque chose ... je ne peux pas lui donner un sens, et tu dois faire de la traduction sur la base d'un texte ébréché et incomplète.

«Plus de temps à la plage. Première,un baignade dans l'eau salée froide. Le choc de l'océan - le résidus saine et claire de la frigidité de celui-ci. Dans l'été, sa étant tolérable. (Je pense à mon frère pendant ses jours au Cap-Breton.)

"Ensuite, la sirène de nouveau. Plus de soufflage dans le microphone et un autre avertissement, celui-ci encore plus confus.

"Une autre annoncement.

"Une autre sirène.

«Je m'adresse à toi. 이상한 아저씨," dis-je. Cet homme est du type bizarre.

"A l'époque de la quatrième annonce de sirène, je commence à faire mon propre.

«Fwee-wee-weeeeeeee. Foof! Foof! 여러분! 자 들 야지! Wife 를 빨리 아나 줘!

«Et, en suivant les instructions, je te donne un câlin."

Global Fevering is part of the Plastic Millennium project. It links to two screenplay module novels: a mega-novel (Plastic Millennium), and a conventional-length work (Paper Keys to Burning Kingdoms). Both these projects are complete and being shopped around to publishers and agents. 

Global Fevering is an experimental online work-in-progress; it links the two former projects and occasionally quotes from them, while taking the narrative in new directions. It, too, is intended for eventual print publication. For now, however, it is digital, it is here, and it is free to read.

Copyright © 2013 Finn Harvor. All rights reserved.

Global Fevering I

Fade in. 

Exterior. A beach in South Korea. Day.

VO: "We arrive at Daejin by bus. We're only a kilometer or two from the DMZ. On the way here, we passed army base after army base. Military usage sill seems the main engine of the local economy.

"At Daejin, the terminal is so small that at first it looks deserted. But after orienting ourselves, we find our way down to the beach.

"It's beautiful -- crescent-shaped and, unlike several of the beaches farther south along the coast, filled completely with light brown sand. It's also -- apart from a pocket of people crowded at the foot of the town's pricier, slicker 'pensions' -- pretty much deserted. There is a fence between the road and the beach. Near the section where we are, it's strung with barbed wire; a vestige from the days when this region was walled off from civilian use. 

"Now the beach is open for business ... but business isn't very good. When we get hungry and want a bite to eat, we find that to locate something as basic as a "supa" (convenience store), we have to trek almost the entire distance of the beach, to the area with all the people and their inflatable rafts and multi-coloured, easily-punctured, animal-headed inner tubes.

"Back at our spot on the beach, a siren goes off. Then, the voice of an ajusshi blowing into the mike, as if to clear it of dust. Then his garbled warning: 'don't go too far into the water in your floaty thingies' -- or something ... I can't make sense of it, and you have to do translation on the basis of a chipped and incomplete text.

"More time at the beach. First swim in the salt-cool water. The shock of ocean. The clear, healthy residue of frigidity of it. Its being summer tolerable. (I think of my brother during his days at Cape Breton.)

"Then, the siren again. More mike blowing and another warning, this one even more garbled.

"Another swim.

"Another siren.

"I turn to you. '이상한 아저씨," I say. Strange guy.

"By the time of the fourth siren/announcement, I start making my own. 

"'Fwee-wee-WEEEEEEEE. Foof! Foof! 여러분! 자 들야지! Wife를 빨리 아나줘!'

"And, following the instructions, I give you a hug."

Global Fevering is part of the Plastic Millennium project. It links to two screenplay module novels: a mega-novel (Plastic Millennium), and a conventional-length work (Paper Keys to Burning Kingdoms). Both these projects are complete and being shopped around to publishers and agents. 

Global Fevering is an experimental online work-in-progress; it links the two former projects and occasionally quotes from them, while taking the narrative in new directions. It, too, is intended for eventual print publication. For now, however, it is digital, it is here, and it is free to read.

Copyright © 2013 Finn Harvor. All rights reserved.

Global Fevering

Upcoming....

Sean Dixon - playwright, novelist

Sean Dixon - actor, playwright, novelist (The Girls Who Saw Everything, The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn)

CBT: V. S. Naipaul has declared there are not any important writers anymore, Philip Roth has predicted the novel will become a cult activity, Peter Stothard has asked if fiction writing simply used to be better, Cullen Murphy, David Shields, Lee Seigel, and Geoff Dyer have all stated that non-fiction is superior to fiction. The list of people of letters who apparently have lost faith in literary fiction goes on an on; it is clear that an elementary questioning of the novel is not a passing cultural phase. Furthermore, the short story seems to be under siege as well: many agents and multinational publishers do not handle/publish story collections, small magazines seem perpetually underfunded, and a YouTube-ification of text and image seems to be taking short narrative in new directions.

What is your opinion? Do the novel and short story have a future? If so, what kind? And will e-technology alter the very forms of them? If so, how?

SD: I rarely read short stories, to be honest, unless they’re parables of just a few paragraphs, which I love. But when I look at a book, I like to imagine it as having a rarified, singular world entirely bound within it pages. If I see that the book is short stories, it loses its magic for me. Except when it doesn’t. I’ve tried to love them. I just don’t.

Re non-fiction vs. literary fiction, though: if things keep going the way they’re going, someone is going to come out with a wholly artificial novel, with overblown characters and an improbable plot line, and everyone’s going to get their minds blown, rediscovering this notion of imagination. ‘How did she do this amazing thing?’ they’ll ask, mouths agape over the pages. And then no one will read another non-fiction book for a hundred years.

CBT: Are the very significant structural changes taking place in the publishing industry having an effect on novel or short story writing? If so, how?

A few years ago there was some talk about the death of TV viewing, due to the internet. Then, earlier this year, Netflix released its first fully-funded endeavour, ‘House of Cards’. When I watched it, my computer was plugged into my television. This was considered revolutionary, but it was only revolutionary for the middlemen. There was no difference in how the series was written by its screenwriter, shot by its director or interpreted by its audience.

Obviously the form is changing, and the internet is influencing the way that form is changing. But the prose medium of fiction is several centuries younger than, say, the the medium of painting. And rumours of the latter’s demise has been, in the past, greatly exaggerated. It’s probably not over. The 19th Century was the Century of the novel only from a 21st Century point of view, ie. a limited point of view.

The invention of the camera was supposed to destroy painting. It certainly sent it into its most experimental phase but it didn’t destroy it. We’re even back now into a time of figurative painting and we have painters these days who are as technically proficient as any of the great masters of the Renaissance. No one ever thought that would happen in the 1950s. The future of these disciplines is just not clear.

CBT: Is the cutting back of mid-lists and a general cautiousness about taking risks on new or relatively unknown writers affecting the caliber of writing that does manage to get into print?

SD: I don’t know. Aren’t more things getting into print than 50 years ago?

CBT: Do you have an author's website? Does it help you sell books?

seandixon.org. I put it together recently when I was laid up with back troubles. I haven’t looked at it in weeks. I expect I’ll tend to it in the fall though. I have a play being mounted at the Tarragon next spring and, as it happens, I have a lot to say about it.

CBT: How do you feel about running an author's website? Do you feel its a labour of love – or an annoying imposition? Or something else altogether?

SD: I loved setting up and maintaining the blog for my first book — lacunacabal.blogspot.com — and would maintain it still if I thought there was any point. I consider it to be unfinished. I set out to do the same for Kip Flynn but I realized I had nothing to say about that book beyond its own confines. Which is one of the reasons why I took so long to get back to you re this interview.

CBT: Is the selection system for novel and short story manuscripts fair? Should it be made blind?

SD: Probably not. Probably not.

But I don’t like the fact that, if I understand correctly (and I’m by no means an expert on this subject) it seems to have become very easy for a publisher to look up a writer’s ‘numbers’ and make decisions accordingly. It could mean a writer has less of a chance to develop through her lifetime if she is not fortunate enough to be successful right from the start.

CBT: According to media reports, e-book sales now represent a significant percentage of overall sales. But small bookstores see them as more a threat to their survival than anything else, and a lot of book people remain print people. Are you enthusiastic about e-books? Do they hold the potential for a renaissance in literary publishing? Or are they over-rated and too susceptible to piracy?

SD: I’m not sure that stat is as true as it was when you first sent that question. Is it? But I also think, if we don’t get back to reading print books, everyone is going to develop new, insidious forms of open-angle glaucoma.

CBT: What do you think of literary prizes? As Jason Cowley has commented, they reduce our culture's ability to think in a critically complex fashion? Do they suggest, “this book is worth reading and all these others aren't?”

SD: I would pay a lot more attention to literary prizes if they were run the way jury duty is done within the legal system, virtually pulling names out of a hat and then going through a voir dire process with a number of publishers (whose involvement could also be decided by lottery!) It could be a sort of Hunger Games scenario for critics and publishers. The chosen jurors would then be paid very well, coming from all walks of life. And we would be privy to their lifestyle changes and menu choices during the period when their task would be to read these one hundred books.

Then we’d both be more fascinated by the process and also understand better how arbitrary and ridiculous it is.

CBT: One thing that struck me about THE MANY REVENGES OF KIP FLYNN was the degree to which is was self-consciously a Toronto novel; it wasn't just a novel set in a place, but it was about having specific concerns about that place (fighting over-development -- a quintessential Canadian concern that one finds in Asia, too, but not to the same extent). Is part of what defines a literature its regional character? And if so, is there not a "CanLit" but a series of RegionLits, including, say, VanLit, HaliLit, TOLit, QueLit, MonLit, and so forth?

SD: Yeah, maybe. Like that Akashic series of city noir books.

The sad thing about Kip Flynn, though, is: I was setting out to create a myth of Toronto for a projected reader from elsewhere. It was (originally) a commission for the UK market. So I was imagining an idealized British reader sitting down with my book, which is something that never happened and, really, a stupid idea on my part. Especially since I knew Torontonians would mostly feel bored by my effrontery in daring to present a myth of their city to them. Like some small-time Michael Ondaatje. That turned out to be pretty much the case, in Toronto, at least with the print reviewers, who didn’t even bother to pick it up. I did get some appreciative bloggers. Kip Flynn’s biggest adherents have turned out to mostly live in Kensington Market itself. So, then, it’s more from the genre of KensingtonLit. Which is its own kind of accomplishment.

CBT:  The first time I was exposed to your work was when I saw you at a reading at a kind of ad hoc art space on Queen. You were reading from a work in process about being harassed by a stubborn and wrong-headed tax auditor. The reading still is quite vivid in my memory. Furthermore, I note your experience across genres (music, theatre) and your play-writing. In effect, you are writing literature on "many platforms", but writing in forms that tend to be pushed out the standard category of literary prose production -- the short story collection and novel.

In your opinion, should artists do more work across disciplines? After all, it seems to be something of an accepted norm in a crypto-version anyway: artist are now expected to maintain websites, be energetic and theatrical at readings (that, at least, is the ideal), and so forth. Is there such as thing as literature off the page? And if so, should it be recognized as an equal partner to literature on the page?

SD: I like your idea of literature off the page, but working across disciplines is not something I would advise, no. I would advise against it: A writer needs to develop an audience. Passionate adherents of theatre don’t tend to be studious followers of literary culture, and vice versa. If you’re working in both media, you’re more likely to pass right under the radar than to be seen as a double-threat. I’ve been a playwright in Toronto since 1990 and most of the current crop of theatre critics aren’t the least bit familiar with my work. Ditto for the theatre community. That came from novel writing.

That’s not to say I regret doing it. I’ve spent most of the last couple of years trying to claw my way back into a certain visibility in the Toronto theatre, during which time I vowed I would never write prose again. Today, though, I have two or three things in development in a couple of theatres, and I’ve found myself being pulled into an impractical prose project.

The way I came to novel-writing from playwriting is something that could not have happened any other way than the way it did. Really, I’m an actor whose training involved to picking up skills, as needed: that’s why I started the banjo and that’s why I started writing text to be spoken aloud.

CBT: What are you working on now that you're excited about?

CBT: Play: A God In Need of Help, to be produced April 2014 at the Tarragon Theatre.

Play: A Painter in the Dark, in development at the Tarragon Theatre.

Play: The Orange Dot , commissioned by Vikki Anderson for DVxT, Toronto, as a companion piece for Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, and featuring (at least at the moment) several songs composed on the banjo, for the 2014-15 season.

Play: White Boy from Gyntford, a free adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, unapologetically Ontarian. Currently homeless.

Play: Adaptation of Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, currently being shopped around.

A new novel.

Sadly though, I’m running out of money. This seems to be the time when I’m most inspired. I don’t know what/why that is.

Bio:Sean Dixon is a playwright and novelist. Recent plays include Lost Heir, The Gift of the Coat (ATP PlayRites 2008), Right Robert & His Robber Bride (Caravan Farm 2012), andFRANCE—or, ‘The Niqab’ (Summerworks 2012).

Two upcoming plays: A God In Need of Help (Tarragon Theatre, Toronto, April 2014, Richard Rose, dir.), is based on a true story from 1606 about four strong men who are compelled to carry a large painting on foot over the Alps from Venice to Prague; The Orange Dot (DVxT Theatre, Toronto, 2014-15, Vikki Anderson, dir.), is a play with music about two city workers who are beginning the process of taking down an old tree when it starts manifesting otherworldly behaviour. 

Sean’s first novel, The Girls Who Saw Everything (2007) aka The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal (UK, US, Australia), is about a young women’s book club in Montreal that sets out to read the world’s oldest book. His second novel, The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn (2011), is about a young, low-level entrepreneur who takes on one of Toronto’s most powerful building developers. 

 He’s also written two YA novels, The Feathered Cloak and The Winter Drey, both set during the time of the Vikings. 

He lives in Toronto with his wife, documentary filmmaker Katerina Cizek. 

Former People, Current Work

Former People: A Journal of Bangs and Whimpers, is looking for submissions. Edited by C. Derick Varn and Steven A. Michalkow, this looks like a good project. Will be following it with interest.

John Harris - author, critic

This is part one of an interview with John Harris, author and columnist for Dooney's Cafe:

CBT: Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of increasingly narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? The Crash of 2008? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?

JH: It’s not likely that literature is in trouble. It’s just that the ways in which we use written language, to make and present stories and song, change. This makes us literary writers uncomfortable. When we’re uncomfortable we tend to conflate ourselves with our art. If our royalties are going down, literature is in trouble. If we can’t get published as easily as before, literature is in trouble. If we can’t get jobs in the English Department because enrolments are collapsing, literature is in trouble. If repressive regimes enforce censorship, literature is in trouble. If the economy tanks, literature is in trouble. If multinational publishing houses flood the market with crap novels, literature is in trouble.

Thinking like this is pretentious, and it confuses us. One thing we need to remember is that there’s a fairly convincing theory of art that holds that the more uncomfortable writers are, the better they write. Maybe literature would be better off if writers were in more trouble. Sharon Thesen put it this way at the 1984 Winnipeg Writing and Performance conference:

Poetry’s identity with social crisis and crises of meaning will always guarantee both its vitality and its general unpopularity . . . . In future, poetry may become less a “discharge of psychological evil-being” and more a homeopathic infusion into a healthy body politic, but his may mean the disappearance of (lyric) poetry as we know it — an occurrence I can’t say I look forward to. But that is the unsettled and questionable subject of poetic language speaking, that would rather have Artaud than Utopia.

Literary writers in Canada and other relatively free, prosperous and peaceful countries actually are in trouble, but in ways that are good. They are facing technical challenges connected to the platforms on which they deliver stories and songs. The Elizabethans faced similar challenges, in having to convert from manuscript to print circulation, from patronage to profit, from the church or schoolroom venue to the playhouse and a mass audience.

This goes back a long ways. With literature, writing as compared to speaking or singing increased in importance with the invention of paper. There was now a way of communicating across large spaces and over time, which was important to business, law and government. Society facilitated written communication by teaching reading and writing. All of this provided extra opportunities to people who invented stories and song lyrics and wrote them down. They could appeal to a larger audience. They could get jobs doing what they liked to do — at least the talking-about-literature part. They had stimulating new technologies to play with. Writers in one country could read what writers in another country were doing — the English, for example, in the fifteenth century, reading the Italians.

When the printing press was invented, writers could have books of poems and stories mass-produced and sold in the market. This enabled them to dominate other artists. Musicians and singers had to get audiences to come to listen. Painters and sculptors had to get people into galleries. Playwrights had to get audiences to the theatre.

Now there are marketable platforms for plays, music and sculpture, making things fairer for other artists and providing even more stimulating challenges and technology to story-tellers and song-writers. To talk of these platforms as being “narcotic,” as compared to the printed page, smacks of sour grapes. It implies that audiences are not to be enticed into reading or listening to poems and stories but forced because they are, essentially, stupid. They don’t know when something’s bad for them. Writers with this attitude may be conflating writing and teaching, taking a classroom of students to be a real audience. They are not. Audiences have to be entertained.

Certainly scientists should look at what various media of communications do to the mind, just as they might study certain narcotics, and certainly if problems are suspected governments should act. But writers don’t know enough about CAT or MRI scans to provide any direction in this, and some (Yeats, Frost) believe that it’s part of their job to put readers into a trance. Some evidently believe it’s part of their job to be in a trance.

Shakespeare wrote extremely sophisticated plays in extremely sophisticated English that appealed to both the educated and the uneducated. Likely he spent more time understanding that audience and writing for it than he did complaining about it. Money was an important motivator.

So, no “death of literature.” “Death of the book?” So what? Homer did okay without it. Shakespeare didn’t pay too much attention to it, though he made sure that his lyric and narrative poetry got published. For lyric and narrative, that’s where the money was. Now, maybe the computer screen is better. The audience decides these matters, not the writer, and it decides it through its purchases. 

[cont'd]