One year

Y

On the Selector Class System (1)

A while ago, I wrote to Dan Green to ask him some follow up questions to an article he wrote entitled "The Standard of Literature" at his website. In that piece, Green argued against Alison Walsh, who had previously published an article in the Irish Independent on the need for gate-keeping in literature.(Walsh is a semi-regular contributor to the Irish Independent, and generally writes on the publishing scene there.) The question at stake is a rather complicated one, since on the one hand it hinges on issues of taste and on the other rests upon very commonly held -- one might almost say axiomatic -- beliefs about the great proportions of amateurish junk that get produced in any society by people who dream of being professional artists but do not possess the requisite talent. For Walsh, it seems, this axiom is incontrovertible. Or to be more precise, for Walsh, the axiom justifies gate-keeping as it is commonly practiced by the publishing industry. For Green, this justification is questionable; the true determiner of a work of fiction's worth is the reader, and the conventional gate-keeping model -- driven by profit motives as well as personal aesthetic taste -- is not adequate to ensure the production of what the publishing industry claims it produces: the best novels, short stories, etc., that are being created by living writers.

I wrote to Green with some follow-up questions after he posted his article, and he was kind enough to answer. I'm going to post some of that discussion here. I'm also going to ask a few more questions on top of my original ones.

When I emailed Green, I asked...

more...

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