Upcoming

I recently received answers from Dan Green to some questions on standards in publishing (that is, the set of values that agents and acquisition editors apply/claim to apply/de facto apply) when deciding which manuscripts to print). I'm planning to write an article based on Green's responses. In the meantime, however, Green has agreed to have an online dialogue about the issue ... a sort of ad hoc mini-article before the article proper.

More soon.

Frances Madeson

 

My interview with novelist and playwright Frances Madeson is now up at my new site.

Paper Sweat

Last week, put the finishing touches on the edits of my Hiroshima novel. That brings to four the number of interconnected screenplay module fictions I have finished (one mega-project and three conventionally-sized mss.)

To see a bit more about this project, go here, or here to see pictures specifically of the Hiroshima hybrid graphic novel that is the project's most recent module.

The screenplay novel is an idea that I've been experimenting with for some time. I'm still convinced that it -- both as a hybrid graphic fiction and as a method of writing text-only narratives -- is an idea whose time has come.

Read the rest here....

The Industry/ies

At my new site:

From a year-and-a-half back, Mark Medley on Marc Côté's move from Cormorant to Thomas Allen. That is a long time in a cultural industry (even publishing), and there have been changes since then; a recent visit to Thomas Allen's website describes the company as now being a distributor, not publisher, and its fiction selection is thin. More alarmingly on a general level is the sense of pessimism is gripping the industry, as well as the idea that these days "only a prize" is sufficient to win a novel -- especially one by a new writer -- the sort of audience it needs in order to succeed commercially. In Quebec, where the literary culture has evolved differently than in anglophone Canada and there is less of a blockbuster mentality, authors also feel under siege but more in terms of their royalties: they are fighting to standardize book prices.

cont'd

Reminder

 

art © finn harvor, 2013

Am continuing blogging at my new site. It's now retitled as BridgeText; this is an idea I first floated with Charles Yang, a Korean developer who's helped me with my sites (and who is a partner to this one). I'm hoping to eventually get a bit of an interchange going. There is a lot of interesting graphic novel work happening both in Korean and Japan, and of course there are great scenes taking place in Canada (anglo and franco equally), the US, and UK.

Speaking of the latter -- when I went to conference on the graphic novel that was held at Oxford in September, I met several interesting people (including some good artists). Leaving the conference, however, I was struck by how much there remains a division between text-only and text-and-art fictional narratives. Does it have to be this way? Does it have to remain this way?

New site, old site, new site

Am (once again) starting most of my posting here. Enough freebies for the corps.

Morimura Tadushi

This is an image of Morimura Tadushi, the codename of Yoshikawa Takeo, the Japanese naval ensign posted to Hawaii to spy on America's Pacific Fleet in the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. During that period, Yoshikawa rented small planes in which he flew over the harbor, went diving in waters close to the harbor, and observed activity generally from an apartment he had rented specifically because of its proximity to the area he wanted to see.
From the PLASTIC MILLENNIUM project.

Plastic Millennium - historical backgrounder

images F. Harvor, 2013

These two images are of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and Admiral Ernest King -- two lesser known but significant actors in the drama of World War Two. As both David Reynolds and Ian Kershaw have pointed out, the monumental war we remember began actually as two wars: one being fought between in Europe, and one fought in Asia. And while the European war broke out in September, 1939, the Asian war had been dragging of for some time, since it had its source in the meat-grinder of the imperial Japanese invasion of China, as well as ongoing guerrilla conflicts between Koreans and Japanese.

Furthermore, though the prime belligerents of Germany, France and Britain are well-known, several "lesser" actors were significant from the beginning; although Canadian troops were not active in the Battle of France (troops were sent overseas at that time, but only arrived in France as the French army was crumbling and the British Expeditionary Force was cut off at Dunkirk), supplies from Canada to the UK were an essential life-line across an Atlantic Ocean that was riddled with U-boats. Similarly, while conservative historians tend to make quick work of "Britain and her empire", the Treaty of Westminster had granted the ex-colonies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand sovereignty over foreign policy (something these nations did not possess during World War One). 

As the war slowly dragged in the United States, it did not do so as an actual belligerent -- that is, as a military actor. This wasn't due to lack of concern; the U.S. started providing material support quite quickly, and, under the Roosevelt administration, was eager to do so. But political opinion in the U.S. was deeply divided between isolationists and internationalists. President Roosevelt -- who had spent his entire presidency fending off attacks from ultra-conservatives (including at least one coup attempt) -- needed to shore up public opinion if American was to enter what isolationist Charles Lindbergh labeled "Europe's war". Meanwhile, the Battle of the Atlantic was raging,with both Canadian and American convoys shipping food and materiel to Britain, and losing staggering numbers of vessels in the process. Admiral King was at the centre of this drama. Meanwhile, in Canada, Mackenzie King was fighting a political battle to garner support for the Canadian armed forces; Canada had almost been broken in two with the Conscription Crisis of World War One. Mackenzie King -- like Roosevelt, a cautious politician -- wanted to move with the flow of public opinion, and not in advance of it. The result was a war that unfolded by degrees, and not, as general perceptions have it, that exploded all at once.

Noteworthy

Business Insider journalist Michael Kelley on clandestine assassinations and Edward Snowden.

Democracy Evolutions - 6

Part six of my Democracy Evolutions series is up at my new site:

When the great powers of Europe entered World War One, they believed the war would be short, and, of course, decided in their favour. But as the conflict dragged on, its costs escalated, and a new form of fear took hold among the banking centres of the continent and Britain. That fear was that the war would be so ruinously expensive that it would dismantle the imperial system the major European nations were so proud of having constructed....

cont'd

Various

1. Brian Fawcett and Steven Beattie on the David Glimour flap.

2. The second interdisciplinary conference on the graphic novel at Oxford closes. Several interesting papers presented. I met several interesting people there, and learned quite a bit. More to follow.

3. Le Devoir reviews Jérôme Borromée, a title by first-time novelist Guillaume Borque. I haven't read the work, and am not likely to get access to it any time soon. (My favourite kind of book is printed ... and sold at a reasonable price at a second-hand shop (just for the record, I'm okay with e-books, but firmly within the ee-cheon won price range, with a slight preference for those priced unequivocally at "kong").) 

The review of the novel describes it as being about a fairly archetypal urban male in his early 30s whose life is comfortable but who's in the grip of various dissatisfactions, some explicit, some concealed: he is worried about his sexual identity, and apparently shamed by rumours of his father's gayness. It sounds like an interesting and honest treatment of sexual anxieties that, while they come in an entire spectrum of forms, tend to be universal in the sense that one can only scrape away at the layers of this sort of anxiety -- one can never fully comprehend it. It is interesting to contrast the themes of this title with the David Gilmour's apparent opinion that "guy's guy" authors are strictly heterosexual; a leap of psychoanalytic faith. 

Part of the problem is that while Gilmour is interested in the work of male writers who are fascinated with women (an interest that I share), he does very little to scrape away at the difficulties -- the possible projections, anxieties, wish fulfilments, and secret currents of self-loathing -- that are the flip-side of human sexuality's "directness". (Ironically, Gilmour the writer seems more in tune with this than Gilmour the interviewee.) In any event, it does seem to me that while Gilmour is currently being taken to task for alleged sexism, it might be more germane -- and more revealing -- to discuss his attitudes toward fellow Canadian writers ... a group he expresses obvious disdain for. 

Of course, Canadian writing has never perceived itself as especially tough. But what is toughness? And does it deserve a conflation with guy's guy masculinity? I'd like to hear somewhat more on this issue -- both in terms of the interesting fiction that is currently being produced in Quebec (and getting little attention in anglo Canada), and in terms of Gilmour's more considered thoughts on this matter (he is fluently bilingual). It seems to me the question of his estimation of Canadian literature is where the controversy should really be sourced ... not the present brouhaha over his supposed sexism -- a sexism he himself denies, and which no evidence of has yet been produced.

Global Fevering III

From my Hiroshima project.