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.

PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS

A brief description of my new novel ms. is up at my new site.

The Korean Wars

From "The Cry of the Magpies" by Kim Dong-ni:

Ok-nan said that her coughing fits had occurred even before the half year had elapsed. When months passed by without a word from me and the magpies continued to cry in the mornings, my mother's eyes began to glare in a strange way. Then the strange glaring of her eyes seemed to shift over to a long spell of coughs. At first her condition was not so very bad, but beginning about one year after I left home, she got to coughing almost wihtout fail whenever the magpies cried in the morning....

I remember my mother was in the habit of mouthing such words as "O, God!" or "Help me!" after her occasional coughing fits even before I left home for the battlefield. And now she was replacing those words with "Bong-su!" and "Kill me!" 

In my view, there was not much inconsistency in this development. Rather, these seemingly contradictory expressions were no more mutually exclusive than the two sides of one coin. The way I looked at it, "Help me" could very naturally become "Kill me", a suffering deepened into bottomless despair.

[From ""The Cry of the Magpies", Kim Dong-ni, The Portable Library of Korean Literature, Jimoondang Publishing, Seoul, 1961, 2002.]

Drawings IV

This is one of my favourite photos of Richard and me (our mom's in the background). It's at the opening for my first solo show of art -- a group of life drawings of people at work. It was held at Partisan Gallery ... I can't remember the date -- sometime in the 80s. Richard came down from Montreal. My mom was living in Toronto at that time, and I think my dad had moved there as well. The crowd was good even though the sort of work I was doing -- highly representational drawings without the aid of photos -- wasn't considered hip at the time, and still isn't considered so. The drawings themselves were of people at work ... again, an unhip subject-matter.

Richard was more affected by the modernist aesthetic I was. Actually, I was affected by it, too, but not as purely; I was heavily into cartoons as well (an interest starting in childhood), particularly political cartoons and what back then we called "underground comics" (that's graphic fiction to you, 21st Century kultur-kampfer). He'd had a show at Concordia, where he studied. His works were giant paintings: neo-expressionist self-portraits and animals. Come to think of it, I was strongly interested in neo-expressionism as well. But his work was very uniform in its aesthetic -- he'd put down lines in large bold strokes. I don't remember that he experimented much with different media when painting -- he stuck to acrylics, and a similar style. (Later, he became interested in sculpture and ended up doing a lot of line drawings -- I think by this point he just didn't want to buy paint.) He also during this university period did drawings in india ink, which were, looping back again, similar to his paintings. In effect, he was drawing rather than painting -- the paintings were drawing-like. Many painters have this tendency, and it's simply one way of solving one's visual subject-matter: one uses lines of colour rather than blocks of them. Lines always materialize in representational work, no matter how abstracted. But some artists use them as a primary visual element, and Richard and I both fell in that category. We were both -- as we had been when kids -- drawers.

Norway II

During our first trip to Norway we took a car trip with my paternal grandmother (Farmor in Norwegian) through the mountains north of Oslo. It was the summer, but in the highlands the temperature dropped quickly.

It had been a hot summer in Oslo, and neither Richard nor I were prepared for the coldness. It wasn't all that bad, really, but our windbreakers didn't quite do the trick. Most of the time we were at lower elevations -- driving along a thin, apparently endless highway. It was when we drove up to the top of a mountain that the ice fields would appear.

The beauty of the fjords is something to see. Geographically, they are quite plain -- old mountains with soft edges and a lot of wild grass growing on them. (I'm not even sure if I remember them from an individual memory or whether my recollection of this detail has simply been filtered through one travel brochure pic too many.) It's too bad we didn't come better equipped, clothing-wise, to do a day's worth of hiking. I didn't fully appreciate the beauty of a geographic formation like a fjord until I did some hiking with my uncle Henrik in Newfoundland many years later and saw formations that were very similar in Gros Morne. This is the only trip to the Norwegian fjords that I've made. Hopefully Suki and I will be able to make the trip together some time -- we're not hardcore about outdoors activity (i.e., no tents), but we definitely like being outside for hours of walking.