Coach House

This is one of the two presses at Coach House, which I've visited a couple of times (most recently, during our sad trip to Canada last winter). CH is one of the few publishing houses in English Canada that prints in-house, the others being Gaspereau and Porcupine's Quill. I'd be interested in finding out more about presses elsewhere that do the same.

More to follow.

From January to June

Today is June 6th, five months after Suki and I heard the phone ringing just after 10 pm our time and knew what it was.

These are various photos cribbed from an album my dad put together. (He made separate ones for Richard and me; I don't have the second one but would like to get a copy since there are several solo photos of Richard (Dickie back then) in it.)

Bucks

Bloomberg explains the Canadian economy:

"Canada thrives off its neighbor to the south. It's the U.S.’s largest foreign supplier of energy, including oil, gas, uranium and electric power." 

Truth Marathon, Machine-Style - from Korean to English

Below are the opening pages of my screenplay novel TRUTH MARATHON. This text was initially translated by a Korean grad student. I have now fed his version (which is excellent) through Google Translate. Results below. More commentary to follow.

밖. 세계 2차대전 직전 동경의 거리. 오후

제목 : 동경, 1941년 1월 26일

차 한대가 뉴욕 내셔널 시티은행(National City Bank)의 일본 지점 앞에 멈춰선다. 잘 차려 입은 서양 남자 한 명이 등장한다. 그는 은행 안으로 들어간다.

안. 잠시후. 은행.

잘 차려입은 서양남자가 줄을 서고 있다. 잠시 후 그는 은행 창구에 다다른다.

일본인 은행 직원 : (일본 엑센트로) 안녕하세요. 무엇을 도와드릴까요?

잘 차려입은 서양남자 : (교육 수준이 높은 엑센트로, 친절하게) 곤니치와. 예. 엔화를 달러로 좀 바꾸고 싶은데요.

일본인 은행 직원 : 얼마나요?

잘 차려입은 서양남자 :(상의에 손을 넣어 큰 봉투를 끄집어내며) 음, 조금 액수가 큰데요...

점프컷. 잘 차려입은 서양남자 바로 뒤.

역시 잘 차려 입은 다른 서양남자가 그 사람의 어깨를 한 번 두드린다.

다른 서양 남자 : (라틴 엑센트로) 주교님.

주교(잘 차려입은 서양남자) : (깜짝 놀라며) 오, 슈라이버 박사. 깜짝 놀랐소.

슈라이버 박사 : (조금 걱정하는 투로) 죄송합니다. 잠시 말씀 좀 나눌 수 있겠습니까?

주교 : 그러시오.

슈라이버 박사 : 아니오. 개인적인 말씀입니다.

주교 : (친절하게)물론이오. 잠시만 기다리시오.

Out. Just before World War II, the streets of Tokyo. Pm

Title: Tokyo, January 26, 1941

National City Bank of New York, one car (National City Bank) will stop in front of the Japanese branch. One well-dressed Western man appeared. He goes into the bank.

Not. After a while. Bank.

Western well-dressed man is standing in line. After a while he dadareunda bank teller.



Japanese bank employee: (Japanese accent) Hello. May I help you?

Western well-dressed man (educated accent, kindly) Konnichiwa. Yes. I'd like the yen to the dollar.

Japanese bank staff: How many?

Western well-dressed man (on the envelope, put a hand to pull out the big naemyeo) Well, I'm a little bit larger amount of ...



Jump Cut. Immediately after the well-dressed Western men.

Also other Western well-dressed man on the shoulder once he knocks.



Other Western Man: (Latin accent) Bishop.

Bishop (well-dressed Western men): (surprise surprised) Oh, Dr. Schreiber. Small surprised.

Dr. Schreiber: (a little worried about Touro) Sorry Do you think you can talk to you for a moment?

Bishop: do you want.

Dr. Schreiber: No Personal word.


Bishop: (kindly) course. Wait a minute.

Noteworthy

Donald Kirk on the resurgent Japanese far right.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer/the future of online literary culture

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer reading from her novel PERFECTING. To read my interview with Kuitenbrouwer, go here.

I'll be posting again soon on the topic of authors posting their work online. For some time now, Dan Green has been posting on the virtues (and necessities) of online criticism; that is, a body of criticism which is not under the same material pressures of production as print criticism is. It seems to me that one could make the same argument for online publishing of fiction; however, there is a problem with this latter approach, and it is a major one -- people, for whatever set of reasons, do not seem inclined to read online literary fiction with enough passion to create an alternative cultural ecosystem which could exist parallel to but independently from print.

It seems to me that the kind of online critical ecosystem that Green calls for already exists, and is relatively thriving ... though obviously one could debate (as Green does) the criteria it should meet to really compete with print criticism. Yet -- and this is a gargantuan irony -- online criticism seems almost exclusively concerned with print literary production. Online literary production could, I suppose, campaign against this trend on the grounds of ethics ("it's not friggin' fair!"). But it seems to me that online literature is much more likely to succeed if it recognizes that online publishing is an animal quite different from what print used to be. (A note here: print publishing itself is changing quite drastically, as the Korean industry shows (more on this later)). Online literature, in other words, cannot mimic print forms and succeed in creating its own cultural ecosystem.

Karakara by Claude Gagnon

This is the trailer of a movie that I saw around half a year ago when I was travelling to Montreal to see my brother for the last time. It resonated on several levels.

Noteworthy

Steven Beattie on Clark Blaise

Dan Wagstaff on Sarah McNally

Zach Wells on Ian McEwan

The "Marvelous Bodies" conference at Saint Louis University, Madrid, continues (if curious, a YT video based on my paper here).

Screenplay-novel Manifestos Redux - 1

I put the following up several years ago when I was still treating the progenitor of this site as a kind of manifesto. I still get hits for the following -- though the idea of the screenplay-novel still hasn't gained mainstream acceptance, it has its adherents; I guess it's one of those ideas that's so natural that people tend to get it as a form of collective eureka.

I've changed my thinking considerably on the topic of screenplay-novels since I started experimenting with this. My original idea was a script with a series of accompanying visuals ("stills" and "story board roughs"). I still like that idea, but, FWIW, my thinking has evolved as I've thought more about popular narrative culture, high culture and the relationship between the two.

More to follow.



What is a screenplay-novel?

It's a novel. But it's written in the form of a screenplay.

How did you get the idea of writing a screenplay-novel?

Over time, it dawned on me that I treated movies the way I treated novels: I would appreciate their stories in a similar way, and talk about them afterwards the way a person might talk about a novel. In fact, I do this more often with movies ... mainly, I think, because nowadays movie-watchers vastly outnumber novel readers and so there are many people you can have a conversation with about a particular movie -- even a very serious movie. It's a lot harder to do that about a particular book.

The epiphany occurred when I was reading the published screenplay of the film version of Out of Africa (I'd read the Karen Blixen original many years before). My wife had a copy of it, and it was lying around the house.

I live in South Korea, and these kinds of scripts are enormously popular here. They're marketed as an English learning tool (English script on one page, with Korean-language "key points" on the other). But as I read the script I found I really enjoyed it in and of itself. And then I thought, if this works as a book form of an existing movie, why wouldn't it work as a book form of a movie that's never been made? In other words, why not use the same combination of stills and script?

[N.B. It's worth noting that some time after reading this book for the first time, I noticed it didn't in fact contain stills plural, but the same photo from the movie over and over. However, the point still stands -- an artistic experience similar to that of a movie can be created in book form.]

And then there's the creative process involved: Unless writing autobiographically, I like imagining scenes as if they were in a movie. My imagination seems to naturally work that way.

Has this idea been done before?

There's a long tradition of writing satire in the form of a screenplay -- you know, some comic scene, for example, an inane conversation in the White House. And there is a tradition of teleromans in some countries. These are basically comics made of photographs, not drawings.

But there are no examples of a literary novel written in screenplay form that I've seen. At least, this was true when the idea first came to me. Since then, people have given me examples. One was a script by Michael Turner entitled "American Whisky Bar". I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on it. But some time after it was published, it was produced by CITY-TV and Bruce McDonald as a live television drama. I saw that broadcast. The broadcast was really more like a 1950s-style televised play than anything else. So I don't know if it qualifies.

Personally, I think people will come up with other examples and this will turn into a long-running debate over who was first. And I doubt it will ever be satisfactorily resolved. Instead, what I'd like to emphasize is I'm calling for the screenplay-novel to exist as a distinct form of novel. In other words, I'm hoping that many serious writers will adopt this way of writing novels -- at least, for some of their work.

So it's a good idea because it's new?

Ideas aren't good simply because they're new. I might be the first person to invent chocolate-flavoured cheddar cheese. That doesn't mean it's worthwhile. Instead, I think this idea is good because it has the potential to be artistically effective. It solves problems for the writer, and solves problems for the audience. Although it should be written with care and craft , because its word count tends to be lower than in a traditional novel, it's quicker to produce and quicker to read. Yet at the same time, it keys into people's imaginations. It is a very effective way of creating the vividness necessary for certain types of narrative, especially those emphasizing dialogue.

Of course, some people don't feel the same way. For them, the screenplay-novel is not a particularly evocative way of writing. They need more in the way of description -- both of the environment and of interior consciousness. I understand this. Because the screenplay-novel is stripped-down, it seems to have certain inherent shortcomings, one of which is less physical description and the other which is the apparent disappearance of interior consciousness.

So it's important to underline the first quality can still exist in a screenplay novel. As in a regular screenplay, there is no necessary restriction on the number of descriptive passages that exist. There are simply conventions about this, just as there are conventions in what might be called traditional screenplay writing; screenplays tend to be very minimalist. However, a screenplay-novelist doesn't have to follow this convention. He or she can include as many descriptive passages as he or she wants.

Evoking interior consciousness is more of a problem. Interior states of mind don't "disappear" in a screenplay-novel. Instead, they have to be evoked mainly by the characters' dialogue. (This is one reason why I tend to use more description of gestures, facial expressions and tone of voice in my dialogue than you'd find in a regular screenplay.)

The screenplay-novel form is not perfect. It has strengths and weaknesses. But let's be honest: the traditional novel has short-comings, too, not the least of which is its increasing tendency these days toward self-consciousness and overripe writing (or over-write writing; a lot of books suffer simply from being longer than they need to be). It is a sad irony of contemporary fiction that just as the novel is facing so much competition from other narrative forms -- from movies to video games -- so many novels that are published are either strait-jacketed by convention or so self-indulgent and flabby that they fall into the category of books that can be opened but not finished. This is one of the real strengths of the screenplay-novel: it is designed to be finished. It is designed to succeed in keeping its audience's attention. There is something shameful and affected in insisting this is an irrelevant goal for the serious writer to keep in mind.

(And I cannot keep repeating often enough: the screenplay-novel does not have to eschew fine writing; belles lettres can exist within its pages -- it is just that belletristic description is kept to small proportions, unless those belles lettres arise naturally in a character's speech.)

You mentioned interior consciousness. This is exactly what I like about novels. How can a screenplay ever compete with that?

This is probably the most complex aesthetic question that one can ask of the screenplay-novel as a form. As I suggest above, interior consciousness does not "disappear" because putative descriptions of it disappear. In other words, interior consciousness -- or rather, consciousness generally -- when evoked in art can be revealed many different ways. A good stage play tells us a lot about characters' interior consciousness; it does this through dialogue that takes place in more-dramatic-than-one-finds-in-regular-life situations. In other words, even though a stage play generally does not attempt to "show" interior consciousness, it can quite effectively evoke enough of the characters of various dramatis personae that we, the audience, develop a sense of both the outer and inner life of the people on stage. (Furthermore, just as staged theatre can, to a degree, and through the artistry of well-written dialogue, tell us something about the interior consciousness of characters, so traditional novels can fail at successfully evoking it. It's also worth noting that a fair percentage of "interior consciousness" that one finds in works of conventional fiction is simply not very convincing. More on this in a moment.)

When we talk about interior consciousness in art, we are not talking about something that reflects with absolute accuracy an already existent state(s) of mind. Instead, we are talking about a mimetic process; an attempt on the part of art to capture something that is "real" -- if consciousness can be said to be real in the way we normally understand that word. Quite often, this mimetic process falls short.

All this would be fine if literary people could reach some kind of genuine consensus about when writers succeed and when they fail at depicting interior consciousness. But they can't. What this means for defenders of traditional literature as a repository of "something that movies can't do" because, so their argument goes, only literary fiction can evoke interior consciousness, is a need to re-think just what it is that allows a work of literary fiction to tell us about various characters' inner lives. Showing inner life is not as simple as claiming one shows it; a work of art has to do more. And this is something screenplay-novels can succeed at doing as well, if they are written well enough.

I've read other screenplays, and they're a lot different from yours. Why?

Those aren't screenplay-novels, they're screenplays. They are meant to be produced into movies. What I'm doing here is a novel meant to be imagined as a movie.

But it's just words. What I like about movies are the pictures.

Books can contain pictures, too.

Why don't you just write a regular novel?

I do. I have. But recently I have become interested in this approach to -- this form of -- writing. It's a method of writing that works for me; that re-inspires me after years of increasing frustration with traditional literary techniques.

So you hate traditional fiction?

No. When it is well done I admire it just as much as I ever did. Traditional fiction (which could be called conventional fiction, but here I really mean to say literary fiction in the form in which we usually find it) has been what formed me: this is true from 19th Century geniuses like John Keats, Charlotte Bronte, Oscar Wilde, Edmund Gosse, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, to the extraordinary richness of 20th Century literature -- including giants such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Theodore Dreiser, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, J. D. Salinger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Leonard Cohen to lesser knowns such as Bruno Schulz, Tadeusz Borowski, Knut Hamsen, Ole Edvart Rolvaag, Sigrid Undset, Violette Leduc, Elizabeth Jane Howard, David Plante, Daniel Jones, Harry Sonny Ladoo, and Britt Hagarty, to artist/writers such as R. Crumb, Peter Bagge, Julie Doucette, Chester Brown and David Collier, to recent discoveries among Korean writers such as Chai Man-shik, Oh Jung-hee, Chae Yun, and Yun Heung-gil ... the list goes on and on.

In the period described above, there's such an enormous quantity of good writing that at times one might be forgiven for thinking that "good writing" is for the recent historical period like "progress" was in the late 19th Century: something we can take for granted. The early days of the 21st Century, however, indicate an opposite trend. Much fiction that is getting published and praised these days has a tired, predictable quality.

If I were the only person who felt this way, I'd blame myself. But many people who are serious about reading feel the same way. When best-of-year reading lists are drawn up, one often hears the comment that a particular book which won major prizes or was promoted by establishment taste-makers was a disappointment. There is a malaise affecting contemporary fiction, and this malaise is corroding the faith that people at all levels of the literary enterprise have in the process of producing literature. Agents are taking on less literary fiction than they used to, publishers are publishing less of it, and writers are finding their careers stymied when the sales of one book just don't materialize and they find it difficult to sell their next manuscript. (Or else, their careers are stymied by not being published at all -- and yes, this happens to good writers.)

But being a writer has always been difficult. Why complain about that?

It's not so much a complaint as an observation that the cultural landscape is in the process of changing rather drastically. This isn't news. The readership of fiction, especially literary fiction in its traditional form, has been declining for years. Recently, this decline has become alarming. By all means, read traditional novels, and, if they move you, venerate them. But we have to face the larger cultural reality. We have to think in new ways.

So why don't you just watch movies and TV?

I like movies ... TV I'm not so sure about, although there are good programs out there.

The problem with movies and TV is this: they cost a lot to produce. No, let me rephrase that -- they cost an astronomical amount. Apart from the indie movie scene, which tends to be perpetually marginalized, no one individual can make them. They are group efforts, and while this gives them some strengths, they suffer from the near-inevitable tendency of group creations to lose any singular voice. And it's the singular voice that has to survive. It's the individual consciousness, not the group, that maintains contact with life.

And this is one of the great strengths of books: because they're relatively cheap to produce, they can still be made by individuals. (The contemporary trend toward "packaging" a book is pernicious on so many levels, as the Kaavya Viswanathan incident showed. Whether this scandal will be enough to stop the general trend to package books and turn even them into bland, committee-made products remains to be seen.)

Mass culture, with its converging technologies such as TV-receiving cell phones and ubiquitous WiBro reception, keeps moving more and more toward post-literacy. We are in desperate need of narrative forms that both can reach an audience but also allow the artist to retain his or her individuality. The screenplay-novel is a way of "writing a movie".

So you're suggesting we just give up? That because mass culture is so pervasive we are obligated to mimic it?

The screenplay-novel is not a selling out. Think of it this way: there are good movies. There is good TV -- especially outside a North American context. In other words, both mediums are capable of producing genuine works of art, despite their group-made natures. If you write a screenplay-novel, you should try to make something that also has artistic merit. Obviously, it won't possess descriptive passages to the same degree that great traditional fiction does. But this does not mean the screenplay-novel must diminish a good writer's requirement to produce (or good reader's requirement to be sensitive to) linguistic originality. The screenplay-novel is intended, above all, to re-invigorate the relationship that exists between writer and audience.

When reading a screenplay-novel, people can read it as a director might. This is one of the broad-based effects that movies have had on the modern mind: it is possible -- even natural, it sometimes seems -- to think "cinematically". In other words, our minds have already been conditioned to imagine narratives as if they were movies. Maybe everyone doesn't do this. But many people do, and they do it effortlessly. In this sense, we are all directors now.

The trick is to be a good director -- an auteur, if you will. The need for this is especially pressing these days as the role of the auteur has been severely diminished within the movie industry generally. And that's an irony that stands in favour of the screenplay-novel: movies are becoming too expensive and formulaic for auteurship to genuinely thrive within movie-making itself. Therefore, a creative individual with the sensibility of an auteur needs the book. He or she needs the artistic freedom that the book still can provide.

It's worth noting that the best movies and TV that squeeze through the system are often made in opposition to mass culture. The screenplay-novel is another way of doing that.

But what about reading? If everyone is "being a director", won't reading suffer even more?

People are still reading lots these days. The trend among readers, however, is to buy more non-fiction than fiction.

What's wrong with that?

Nothing in the sense that non-fiction has always been popular, and now simply is more so. However, we still need fiction. It's not a luxury. It's a necessity, as well. It's something of a cliche to observe that cultures rise and fall based partly on the stories they tell themselves. It might be more accurate in a 21st Century context to point out that cultures wage wars -- or passively witness them -- according to the stories they tell. (This, incidentally, is one theme of TRUTH MARATHON.)

I still think screenplays suck. Traditional novels are more interesting to read.

Then read traditional novels. I do. But consider the possibility that the screenplay-novel idea is a relatively new one, and part of your antagonism to them may be the result of being conditioned to read fictional narrative one way and not another. Remember that: the screenplay novel is just another form of narrative. One of the main reasons it exists is to re-connect author with audience. If you want an extremely short summary of why the screenplay-novel is worth taking seriously, that's it: it is a form of literary fiction many people will read.

Truth Marathon - Two - upcoming

Noteworthy

Just came across the following interesting website, Korean Modern Literature in Translation, via a comment by Charles Montgomery. We are about to catch a bus to Suki's hometown so this post is a rush job. But will be checking out this site in more detail later. Looks good.

Democracy Evolutions -- The May 16th, 1961 Park Jung-hee coup [re-post]

I originally posted this in 2011:

Today is the 50th anniversary of the Park Jung-hee coup d'etat. Although the story received a long editorial in the English-language paper I usually buy (The Korea Herald), it's received little attention in the English-language expat blogs, at least that I've been able to find so far. In Korean, the top news site by net ranking is this Ohmynews piece. 

At the school where I work, there was no mention of the coup. Yesterday was Teachers' Day, and today is "Adult Day" (this is an awkward translation -- it really means Age of Majority Day, though it refers to anyone who reached 21 within the past twelve months. Lots of flowers are being sold.) In fact, I would have missed the anniversary altogether if I hadn't bought a paper this evening. In two days will be another anniversary that is a milestone in the development of  South Korean democracy: the May 18th Gwangju Uprising. This warranted a screening at my school of 화려한 휴가 [The Splendid Holiday], a very affecting 2007 film directed by Kim Ji-hoon. But I'm not sure there will be much in the way of references to it on campus beyond this.


The May 16, 1961 coup was a regression; an usurpation of a student-led, non-violent revolution that took place some months before, and overthrew the dictatorial Syngman Rhee. But the 5.16 coup still has its apologists, who in turn call it a revolution in an attempt to win the lexical-political game of transforming reaction into something labelled progress. Some of these tensions are covered in the following article, from Korean, at the Daum website.