Conversations in the Book Trade: Books, art, art-books, and ... authorial movies.
Literary communities largely view AI as a malignant threat to literature through plagiarism and cultural pollution. While I generally agree, AI will not disappear and social media outrage is ineffective. Only government legislation can impose limits. Writers should lobby for legal protections, develop alternatives, and focus on personal experience and artistically powerful linguistic experimentation that AI cannot replicate.
YouTube link: https://youtu.be/zBasdUX_KZI?si=4Zj6acaptO1M5Ff-
The movie has become the preeminent long narrative form of our time. From James Baldwin to recent Booker Award winner H. John Harrison, writers have spoken directly on the ways in which the medium of movies affects their sense of the novel form. Can novels learn from this?
YouTube link: https://youtu.be/2H_C2PjDW6U?si=eimnFoajpOsiSIS4
Selected work & projects
Artist · Writer · Academic · Filmmaker
Independent practice · South Korea
Finn Harvor is an artist, writer, academic and filmmaker based in South Korea. His work moves between moving images, writing, visual art and research, often exploring the intersections of human experience, technology, conflict and the natural world.
Across these forms, he is interested in the structures that shape ordinary life: the systems we inhabit, the environments we alter, and the private histories carried within public events.
Film · Writing · Visual art · Research
An ambient moviepoem built from winter field recordings and observations of the everyday labour that keeps urban life in motion.
Film / Soundscape / Moviepoem
A speculative literary project examining possible futures, ecological disruption, political conflict and the choices that shape collective life.
Fiction / Interactive narrative
A historical novel exploring the 1930s political crisis surrounding the alleged plot to form a business-backed force against the Roosevelt administration.
Historical fiction / Research
An ongoing record of environmental change, landscape, everyday observation and the human consequences of the Anthropocene.
Writing / Environment / Observation
Authorial films, moviepoems, sound works and moving-image experiments.
Fiction, essays, poetry and projects attentive to history and contemporary life.
Visual work, drawing, photography and interdisciplinary projects.
Research, conference presentations and critical inquiry across cultural forms.
Art-making is a way of attending to the world: its visible structures, its overlooked energies, and the possibilities that remain unfinished.
Baram Writer is a hybrid videopoem/ screenplay fiction that I wrote around twenty years ago. It was originally published in the (now defunct but excellent) online literary journal Dark Sky.
The idea I had was to write a poem with accompaniment “stills”, as if the poem had already been produced as a movie (I’ve done the same with short stories and novel manuscripts). Because Dark Sky evaporated from its original site, in 2008 I archived the project as it originally appeared: https://baramwriter.blogspot.com/2008/11/baram-writer.html?m=1
And I’ve made a few videopoem versions of it since.
For example:
Baram Writer
https://youtu.be/oPHzuqDuAec
And here: https://youtu.be/Oc9PS6vXd40?si=YaoC7k87-iQyy3hB
Cities are fundamental to human society. They bring people together, make cultural and economic life possible, and create opportunities that would be difficult to sustain in isolation.
But cities can also damage the environments on which they depend. Traffic contributes to air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions. Roads and buildings absorb heat and replace living ground with impermeable surfaces. Urban development can fragment habitats, intensify flooding, generate waste and leave too little room for trees, birds and other forms of life.
These problems are not inevitable. Well-designed cities can use less energy, make walking and cycling safer, improve public transport, restore streams and green spaces, protect biodiversity and become healthier places to live. A densely populated city can even have a smaller environmental footprint per person than a more sprawling settlement, provided its infrastructure and policies support that outcome.
There is no single blueprint. The best ideas often begin with people who know a particular street, neighbourhood or city through everyday experience.
Think of a city you know well. It might be the place where you live now, somewhere you grew up, or a city you visit regularly. What practical change would make it more ecologically friendly?
A public discussion about sustainable cities, urban ecology and the future of our communities.
Canada and the United States emerged from the First World War with enlarged factories, heavy debts, restless workers and farms built for a wartime market that was disappearing.
The peace of 1918 did not restore the economy of 1913. War had changed what North America could produce, how governments raised money, and what farmers and workers expected from prosperity. The central postwar problem was conversion: how could economies organized for extraordinary military demand return to civilian life?
population around the end of the war
Canada had mobilized on a remarkable scale for a small country. Munitions production enlarged manufacturing, Victory Loans deepened domestic finance, and federal income taxation appeared in 1917. More than 600,000 Canadians served and roughly 61,000 died. Veterans' pensions, war debt and demobilization followed the troops home.
1920 census population
The United States entered the war much later, in April 1917. Its industrial base and internal market were vastly larger. Wartime mobilization accelerated shipbuilding, steel, chemicals and finance, while the country emerged as a major international creditor. Its postwar adjustment therefore occurred from a position of greater scale and financial power.
The cities eventually recovered during the 1920s, but agriculture did not share the prosperity evenly. Wartime Europe had needed North American food. Farmers responded by expanding acreage, purchasing machinery and often borrowing. When European agriculture recovered, world supplies increased and prices fell. The mortgage did not fall with the price of wheat.
For many farm families, especially in export-dependent regions, economic insecurity did not suddenly arrive with Wall Street in October 1929. Its foundations had been laid during the postwar adjustment.
These bars visualize the demographic difference that shaped the two industrial systems. Population alone is not a measure of industrial power.
A vast domestic market, deeper capital markets and the ability to sustain mass-production industries primarily through internal demand.
A smaller population spread across great distances, high infrastructure costs and strong dependence on exports, British finance and increasingly American capital and technology.
The sequence shows how apparently separate sectors were becoming parts of one economic system.
Industrial economies become powerful by connecting sectors. The same connections can transmit weakness.
Why is it misleading to begin the Great Depression story only with the stock-market crash of 1929?
Did Canada's First World War deaths create the mass unemployment of the 1930s?
Join the conversation
Share the city or neighbourhood, describe the environmental problem, and suggest a realistic improvement. You can also reply to another reader's suggestion and build on it.
Read comments and add your idea ↓Comments and replies appear in Blogger's comment thread beneath this post. They are shared with other visitors, subject to the blog's comment settings and moderation.