Rare chance to take part in a Michel Hellman atelier in Montreal, Herta Müller interviewed by the Paris Review, Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, Terrance Hayes in Toronto: Cultural Digest September 2

• Comics artist Michel Hellman (Mile End, link in French) is doing a workshop at Drawn & Quarterly. Don't miss this. It's $150 but there are only 10 spots available and it's a rare opportunity to work with one of the masters of the genre but also to walk away with a beautiful notebook that you've created yourself. I'd do it myself but I'm out of town that day. For those who remember, Hellman did an event at the Festival this year, a discussion about Mile End in books with Sigal Samuel (The Mystics of Mile End) and Guillaum Morissette (New Tab). It was a packed event with excellent questions from the audience. Hellman's workshop will be bilingual.
• American poet Terrance Hayes will be in Toronto on September 17 to read his work and be interviewed onstage. Hayes is one of the rising stars of American poetry and represents one of the new voices of our era. With allusions to everyone from Gwendolyn Brooks to race riots to the quiet beauty of domestic life with his family, there's something in his work that melds the personal and the political in very accessible ways. He's really a great performer, too. It costs $60 but it includes a copy of his latest book and a "special gift" as well.
• Herta Müller, winner of the 2009 Nobel prize for literature, talks about her history, her past and her writing with the Paris Review. I've tried reading her work a few times and have yet to gain a foothold into it, but reading this interview makes me want to try again.
• Many hours of lectures by the amazing Joseph Campbell have made their way online. Campbell was a hugely influential teacher and scholar and one of my first youthful obsessions was his series on myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which was very prominent and read often by people coming of age when I did. Bill Moyers' series of interviews with Campbell and subsequent book, The Power of Myth, was also something that every smart person I know read and talked about when it came out.

Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell: highly influential series of interviews

New publishing house for Muslim books based in Ottawa, Murakami on stage, Brazilian brothers' new graphic novel, Luis Alberto Urrea, Storylines at the Guggenheim: Cultural Digest for August 11

• Three sisters in Ottawa have opened a small publishing house to feature works by and about Muslim women and about the Muslim world broadly.
• Luis Alberto Urrea (Blue Met 2014) talks about his latest book, a poetry collection entitled "The Tijuana Book of the Dead."
• Haruki Murakami's book Kafka on the Shore has been made into a stage production that was performed at Lincoln Center in New York in July.
• Anticipation is building for the brotherly duo, Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, two of the comics world's biggest names, and their latest book, Two Brothers, which comes out later this fall. Their 2011 book, Daytripper, was one of the best graphic novels/serials I've ever read.
• The Paris Review looks at the connection between writers and the visual arts after a Guggenheim exhibition on the same theme, called Storylines.

Murakami on-stage

Blue Met 2015: Gene Luen Yang in Montreal at Drawn & Quarterly

Comics artist Gene Luen Yang will be here in Montreal for Blue Met 2015 and on March 18 at 7pm, there's a great opportunity to read some of his work with other fans or newbies.

Librairie Drawn & Quarterly (211 Bernard Ouest in Mile End) will be doing a session of their very popular graphic novel book club with his work, Boxers & Saints. This is great news: whether you're a big fan of graphic novels/comics and want to be a part of one of the most revolutionary voices in the medium OR whether you're new to comics in its most contemporary iteration and want to become familiar with what kind of experience reading a comic/graphic novel is about, this book club is your chance.

The bookstore is offering a 20% discount on his work, Boxers & Saints, from now until March 18.

Boxers & Saints

This book, a two-volume piece which looks at the Boxer Rebellion from two very distinct (and competing) perspectives, and won a slew of awards for its blending of myth, history and character. Much has been written about the Boxer Rebellion in recent years and its entire place in Chinese and Western history is being rewritten in many key ways. But Yang's work is not a dry historical treatise: it's moving and funny and shows us how we are shaped by the history we are fed and raised with (the book tells the story of the Boxer Rebellion from two quite distinct perspectives).

As the New York Times puts it:

Both volumes show how everyday humiliations by foreigners bred fear and hatred in the Chinese. But Yang also portrays the missionaries' tireless efforts to spread Christian learning and help orphaned children. Though many Chinese found Christianity threatening (and with good cause - it stirred up social conflicts that killed millions), the faith liberated and strengthened others, like the heroine of "Saints," a fatherless, outcast girl whose nocturnal visits from the spirit of Joan of Arc help her imagine herself a Christian warrior.

Get the book (again, if you buy it at the Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, you'll receive 20% off!), then attend the session, then have your chance to meet Yang in person at Blue Met 2015: Yang will be in Montreal for events on Friday, April 24 and Saturday, April 25.

Drawn & Quarterly's book club session is scheduled for March 18 at 7pm in their shop at 211 Bernard Ouest in Mile End. Refreshments will be served.

Joe Sacco & Alfonso Zapico

People keep asking me if I`m "scouting" here in Cartagena and though that's not the reason I came, I have to admit, it's one of the things that draws me personally to literary Festivals.

Today I discovered a writer whose name I've heard but whose work I didn't know very well: Joe Sacco. Born in Malta, Sacco was raised in the US and originally trained as a journalist. His love of comics, though, eventually overrode all the journalism he was doing and I'd say now he's one of the few graphic journalists working today.

He insists on calling himself a cartoonist first but there's no denying that his work has important journalistic elements.

He has written about Russia's Chechnyan problem, Sarajevo, Palestine, and US poverty. His latest work is called The Great War and is at the top of my list next week...

I love how detailed his art is: you can look at a page and study it for the longest time, seeing something new with each scane of the panels. When you consider, for example, the work of Guy Delisle (another excellent cartoonist who flirts with non-fiction subjects), it's like comparing a pencil sketch to a painting.

At any rate, Sacco is an author I definitely envision at Blue Met at some point in the future.

Another graphic novelist whose work I do know is Alfonso Zapico, a high profile translation of his La ruta Joyce which traced James Joyce's Dubliners is excellent. I also found a copy of Cafe Budapest and leafed through it a few months back. I love his blend of true life stories with the highly fictionalized panels of characters. Zapico is an interesting figure and represents, I think, a burgeoning comics industry in the Spanish-speaking world. Unfortunately, not much gets translated into English (more into French). I guess that's a good reason to improve my Spanish...

I love this blending of genres with cartoons: journalism, history, biography, politics, war: it's a hopeful sign at this time when journalism is going through such major transition throughout the world. A new way of telling stories, true or otherwise, a new way of exposing, of praising, a new way of enlightening.

 

Daytrippers, Guadaloupe and the History of Greenwich Village

Been reading a lot this summer but trying to focus as much as possible on reading during this quiet time because, as past years suggest, I will have limited time once fall is here. So not writing here or doing much else this time of year.

Some books I've had on my summer reading list but haven't managed to get to yet include:

The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians. Since we made it to New York a couple of weeks ago, I've been intrigued by the idea of a book telling the history of one neighborhood, Greenwich Village.

Miguel Marmol:  simply because I've not read anything by a Salvadorean author before and this "Latin American classic" seems like it could be interesting.

The Bridge of Beyond: I love Guadaloupe. Maryse Conde was our grand prize winner a number of years back and since I've read a couple of her works, I've been waiting for another book from the island to fall into my lap. So I'm excited about this upcoming publication. Plus anything by NYRB is going to be cool...

So far the highlight of my summer reading has been Daytripper, a graphic novel by two Brazilian artists (brothers, no less), Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba. The book is a revelation: funny, serious, moving, beautifully drawn and terribly entertaining. It tells the life story of a Brazilian writer as he imagines different deaths for himself, considering his complex relationship with his father, his mother, and his best friend. It's really a lovely story and I can't recommend it highly enough...

Hope everyone's summer is moving along without incident!

Guy Delisle and his travels

Getting back into the swing of things after reading only sporadically the last month. Well, not sporadically, I read every day but no 2 hours lounging around in my favourite chair in the evenings or falling into a book all weekend.

The last week, been pretty much reading only Guy Delisle. Delisle is one of the stars of Graphic Fiction/Memoir and his style: straightforward, almost non-lyrical - belies the more flowery approach (in terms of language and drawing style) of graphic memoirists such as Alison Bechdel. But I have been loving his books. I came across this trove of his books a few weeks back: Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea, his two early works, Burma Chronicles. His new one, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City comes out in April.

Delisle's North Korea book traces a few months he spent there as an animator (and, in fact, his descriptions of the process of animating a TV show are just as compelling as the bizarre cultish world of Kim Jong Il's people), his relationships with his guides and translators as well as other animators and foreigners working in Pyongyang. What an amazing opportunity and what an amazing experience to capitalize on. Delisle keeps a certain distance from his reader, he doesn't go into enormous details of his past or his emotional reactions to certain things on an individual level (though he certainly reacts as a normal human would to the bizarre universe of modern North Korea).

His early works are interesting but contain very little language (even at his most verbose, Delisle is not a writer in the way Bechdel is but an artist, his language straightforward and not often loaded with subtext) but are amusing if a little bizarre at times. They are also quite funny though these are works that can be read (and re-read) in a single sitting. It's funny to see how his earlier works contain the germ that he would bring to his more complex travel chronicles.

I am just starting his Shenzhen book and I am looking forward to seeing what he does with it in China, a country I have a long association with. Maybe one of these days he'll make it to Japan and write about it though he'll need a lot longer than three months to really make any sense of it...

The Last Days of Stefan Zweig

Crazy busy week and no time to blog. In the meantime, been reading two very interesting books.

Les derniers jours de Stefan Zweig has some of the most beautiful illustrations that I've seen in a long time. The story, too, is one that hooks the reader almost immediately: on a ship leaving New York harbour as Stefan Zweig and his wife leave what will be their last voyage abroad, on their way to Rio de Janeiro. The graphic novel is based on the book by Laurent Setsik (an influential book, it also inspired a play being shown in Paris while I was there back in the fall).

Only read about a third of the graphic novel so far, trying to revel in it and not read it all in one sitting which is what I want to do...so far the tension between the Zweig character and his young and nervous wife is one of the book's pulls, but so is the fame that Zweig had at this point in his career. All the boat passengers keep approaching him and making conversation or ask him for an autograph. One forgets how incredibly famous Stefan Zweig was at the height of his career so nearly forgotten was he a number of years back (in the Anglophone and Francophone worlds at any rate).

Also been reading Aya de Yopougon by Marguerite Abouet and illustrated by Clement Oubrerie. This one tells the tale of a young girl growing up in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, of being a young girl and the tension which comes from this in a traditional family. It's a funny book and the illustrations are also funny and charming. It's a book geared at "young readers" but I still find a lot in here that's interesting, particularly the portrayal of contemporary urban African life.

I hear from a few sources that Marguerite Abouet's book is now being made into a film (such an old stories with French writers: a movie is made of their work and suddenly they are impossible to confirm for our Festival, case in point David Foenkinos, Delphine de Vigan, among others...) which is an exciting development for the author and illustrator of her book.

Lazy Bastardism, Fed up with Hans Fallada, 2013 Programming, Poetry & Graphic Novels

Since I constantly have to change my routines or I start to get a bit batty, I've been "off" getting up early and writing here in the mornings. Instead, I get up early and take a long walk with the dog. Which means I have no time during the day to write here.

Almost finished with Hans Fallada's book (Every Man Dies Alone) and last night for the first time, it started to get to me: so much death, so much violence and mayhem and terror. It is a very large book and I have been reading it for three weeks at least. Only 50 pages to go but I may just drop it and try to find something more uplifting or funny to read. It's all clear how it's going to turn out anyway. And violent WWII novel combined with the usual pre-winter blahs is not a good combination.

Been slowly reading Carmine Starnino's Lazy Bastardism which I am really enjoying. My relationship to poetry is odd (or maybe not) in that although there are certain poets I read often and I return to their work again and again (Czeslaw Milosz, Adam Zagajewski, Wiszlawa Symborska, Marie Howe, Mark Doty and many others), I don't feel like a poetry expert in any way shape or form (my poetry reading is very sporadic and highly personal) so as I read Starnino's book, I am struck with how well-articulated his thoughts are on the work of so many Canadian poets. It's a great introduction to poets whose work I don't know at all and, of course, his very fluid and intelligent writing makes it even more appealing.

Working on a project with a local cultural institute which is kind of exciting. It's about graphic novels and I've been discussing with several publishing houses the feasibility of getting some "stills" in order to project images onto some public screens to promote this art form. This part of my job is really fun. So many graphic novels to explore, too!

Programming update: just about finished with our international programming for 2013. Been working for a week or two on Canadian and Quebec programming (and watching my budget drain away waah) which is a lot of fun and can see the overall programming plan really starting to take shape and have a personality. Still a lot more work to do but it is definitely coming along...for anyone who has submitted a proposal, I am moving high gear into these this week and next.

The Walking Dead

So I was kind of obsessed with the graphic novel series, The Walking Dead for a few years and avoided the TV show until relatively recently. Now coming up on the end of the 2nd season on Netflix (I know the 3rd season is running on AMC now but I never watch TV on TV and am always behind!) and though they changed the plot in many key ways, the producers have somehow managed to capture the angst and themes from the books (not to mention the terror and creepiness).

Basic premise for those unfamiliar: guy wakes up in a hospital bed after being shot and the entire world has changed as he has been in a coma. Some strange disease has taken over the world and now the "dead" are no longer dead but zombie-like, hungry for flesh, terrorizing the few humans who have managed to avoid getting the disease (which seems to be caused by bites or scratches from the walking dead). Society, needless to say, has broken down, and the cities are uninhabitable as the zombies crowd every street and residence. Small bands of humans escape and live in hiding, ready to move at any minute.

OK on the surface kind of hokey. True enough. But what the series does is explore what our society means by showing us a society with extreme violence and where the sense of right and wrong is completely up-ended. In a sense, it operates like Mad Men (which, again, is much more about our society than the world of 1960s misogynistic advertising executives) but turns it over: what does it mean to be a "man" to be brave or a protector when the world is turned upside down? Why do we automatically revert back to these old paradigms of man as protector, woman as sweeper of the hearth and nurturer when things become drastic? Also themes of being a leader, being "the odd man out," conforming, and, of course, what it means to be human.

It's not a perfect show: sometimes the dialogue is god-awful. The southern accents are appalling (the story is set in Atlanta and rural Georgia). It gets a bit soap-opera-y at times. And there is almost no point in the show when you feel like laughing. It's heavy, deadly serious.  But it's worth watching. And as The Tyee suggests: perhaps it fulfills some kind of primordial need to explore our worst fears (which used to be filled by stories of Armageddon, the end times, hell, etc.)

Sidebar: Netflix Canada: only $8 a month and yes if you want something that's just been released or something very specific, forget about it. But there is plenty there worth watching...I haven't rented a movie in years (and now only download a movie occasionally from iTunes when it's something new or very very specific).

Reading and Concentration

A few weeks ago I heard two authors on-stage, lamenting the fact that readers today expect more than just words on a page. That images help, that readers' attention spans are shorter and can't sit for too long without some kind of distraction or alternative interaction to help manage so many words.

This may or may not be true but I found it a fascinating assertion. I have to admit that long books are slightly intimidating (though they didn't used to be). I still read them but I have to break them up so that they are read like different books (Murakami's 1Q84 too me about six months to read, not because it was a particularly difficult book but because I read about 2-3 books in between each major part of the novel).

Biography: easier with pictures

I am not sure if this is just a natural extension of having a lot to read or if my brain has been rewired because of so much online reading. I do read a lot more graphic novels than I used to (a teacher of graphic novels told me once that he loved teaching this genre because he never had to convince his students to do the reading, that he never had to suggest reading was "good for you"). And I have to admit that I can certainly appreciate the interaction between image and text that this form allows. I never feel that I have to read a graphic novel (and sometimes I do feel that X book is a chore I wouldn't read if I didn't need to for work).

boooooooring

But reading with links on the page or pop-up windows with factoids is annoying. It's not that I am not tempted to follow the chain from these additional bits of information, but I don't want to be tempted. And it breaks my concentration in a way that is hard to recover from. Yet I do it. I do it when I watch movies, too (keep a device handy, read about the director, the main actors, the reviews of a movie: WHILE I'M WATCHING IT!).

I also find that authors who write 50 page chapters with no breaks annoy me. Sometimes I can sit for an hour straight without getting up but it's rare. Generally, I read in 10-20 minute spurts because I often read on the metro or with a phone next to me, etc. Shorter chapter breaks or natural dividing points keeps me moving but I find I read these books faster, too.

I have no idea what this means in terms of future readers, but the two authors I alluded to earlier on both suggested that the tendency to have images or illustrations in books will continue because people expect this now and readers need this now. I don't know if that's true but an illustration every once in a while certainly doesn't hurt!

Random Sunday Thoughts

*It's snowing. I guess winter really is going to happen again this year. Every year, I hope that winter just forgets to show up. It'll be fine once it starts but the transition is a challenge.

*There is little distinction between "work" and "life" in some professions. I notice this, for example, when I am reading a book for work on a Saturday afternoon or blogging for work on a Sunday morning. But more than this, I have many events to attend for work which almost always figure into my weekend at some point: readings, launches, performances, openings, cocktails. Not complaining, but a good reason why I need so much time off during the summer.

*Reading Nancy Richler's The Imposter Bride. Only just 30-40 pages into it but it's highly readable at this point (beyond that initial confusion when one has to sort out all the different characters' names). Nominated for the Giller, it's a book that landed on my desk almost a year ago (before it was published) but, as is often the case, it got a bit lost in the sea of books. When I read about the nomination, I recalled having it and rounded it up.

*It's odd how few novels there are about elections when we are all so gripped by them a regular intervals. I know about a few, of course: The Manchurian Candidate (which I read a long time ago, great movie, too, though I mean the old one with Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury), Primary Colors (which I've never read), and a few others. When I search for "novels about elections" a list pops up of 10 or so. I've almost no interest in reading any of them, particularly at this time of year when I am so sick of election noise. I've absolutely given up watching the US news at this point but it's even a big part of the Canadian news cycle now.

*Still working my way through Jason Lutes' Berlin, on the second book, City of Smoke. Reading it slowly because I try hard to only read one chapter every few days so I can revel in it. That's the problem with most good graphic novels: I race through them in 45 minutes, but I'm trying to train my brain to enjoy this one slowly, pay close attention to the illustrations and, more importantly, the interaction between the illustrations and the text. Book three has not been anthologized yet (the author is still writing the series) so now the question is do I wait or do I start buying single issues/chapters once I am done with Book 2?

* The last few days I have been doing lots of research: on German novelists, on Chinese poets, on Italian journalists, on African cartoonists. This is one part of my job that I like a lot.

*My first day of winter tradition (which means the first day it feels like winter): make a big pot of chilli and watch an old movie on DVD.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Read this memoir last night and this morning on the plane flying back from NYC (though it's only a short flight, I managed to get through almost all of it).

It's lovely: moving, funny, and containing all kinds of fascinating literary allusions and references to Fitzgerald, Proust, Hemingway, and Wallace Stevens, to name just a few.

What emerges is a highly complex man (Bruce Bechdel, Alison's father) who is loving, stern, distant, manipulative, and conflicted. I have rarely felt that I understood a long-dead character from a book as I do now about him. His death at 44 seems doubly tragic in the consequences it has on a young girl, a traumatized family, and a man who never had the chance to live his life the way he needed to.

And as Bechdel herself noted at her performance Saturday at The New Yorker Festival, the book is as much a book about gender non-conformity as it is about twin tales a man who never has the chance to come out of the closet and a young girl's acceptance of her own lesbianism.

I highly recommend this book: even for those who don't think you enjoy graphic novels, there is a real insight here that the form allows Bechdel to delve into in a very unique way. Not only is her internal life presented here but "archival" evidence from her past, recreated here in graphic novel form: diaries, letters, police reports, telegrams, old photos. It's highly readable and immensely moving.

OK off to Thanksgiving dinner now. Happy holidays, everyone.

Alison Bechdel and Judith Thurman

As I noted a few posts ago, I am a big fan of comics (or graphic novels; I have such a hard time with which term to use). This afternoon I had the great opportunity to see two personalities I admire in conversation.

I came to Dykes to Watch Out For late in life: far after it had been syndicated across the country and just before its run ended in the late 2000s. I never read it regularly but I did end up finding an anthology a few years after its run that I quite enjoyed. It`s got a soap opera quality to it: like Will & Grace and Queer as Folk and R Crumb all rolled into one. It`s got a normalcy that easy to relate to yet for me it contains a distance that makes it compelling and exotic.

Are you my mother

Bechdel`s two post-Dykes memoirs are tales of her family: Fun Home about her father and the latest, Are You My Mother, about her relationship with her mother. Bechdel really pushes the limits of what graphic novels can and should do. As she noted in her discussion this afternoon, she is interested in how comics can represent the internal lives of characters (as they have so long been focused on action or external lives). And her works do what good movies do: tell stories in a way that you forget the form or the attractiveness of the medium and just let the story overtake you.

Thurman is an amazing writer though I wonder how well-suited she was to Alison Bechdel`s on stage personality. Bechdel leans toward being an introvert, it seems to me, and Thurman likes the cerebral idiom frequently: lots of questions that seemed to be to esoteric and far too psychological for the subject herself to address (questions of `the other`etc etc don`t seem to be very instructive when discussing comics with the artist. That`s not to suggest that Bechdel isn`t amazingly charming and bright but there is a highly pragmatic aspect to her approach as an interview subject).

Excellent questions from the audience: about color choices, about comics a form geared at a society becoming less (traditionally) literate, about the presence of Dykes in today`s queer culture.

Great show overall and I definitely have Bechdel`s two memoirs at the top of my reading list for the fall.

from Dykes to Watch Out For

Graphic Novels: some of my favorite titles

I developed a taste for comics (or graphic novels) later in life. As a young person, I didn't really read comics. Not sure why: no one that I can recall did as a matter of fact, not my brothers or cousins or classmates. It just wasn't part of our lives growing up.

But in my early 30s I started reading books by writers like Alan Moore, Frank Miller and others. I started reading the classics but soon branched out into personal favorites. I still read comics frequently though I try to just read for 30 minutes or an hour each day because 1) they go so fast and 2) I am too interested in too many other kinds of writing.

Jason Lutes' Berlin

Lately, coming back from Berlin, I've been reading non-stop about the city and that has led to other kinds of connections: Christopher Isherwood, Joseph Roth, Käthe Kollwitz, Robert Walser, and others. I was up at Drawn and Quarterly recently and discovered Jason Lutes' Berlin which is fascinating. Set in the years between the end of WWI and the start of WWII, his book explores the political turmoil in the city through the eyes of a cast of characters from all walks of life.

The work is beautifully drawn, compelling, tragic and funny. Apparently Lutes is only halfway through his story though he hasn't published a new one in a number of years. For some reason, this makes it even more appealing to me (nothing's worse than starting a series that's already over).

The End of Men?

A couple of years back, I was really into the work of Brian K. Vaughan. His series Y: The Last Man took inspiration from a nearly forgotten Mary Shelley novel, The Last Man. In Vaughan's version, a deadly virus hits in the Earth and every male mammal on the planet dies suddenly. All except one man, Yorick, and his pet monkey. The series traces the end of the world as we know it as Yorick crosses the US in search of the cause or a cure for the disease in order to start life again. Along the way, he encounters lesbian terrorists, Israeli spies, Russian agents, and every woman wants him for various reasons. Unfortunately, as they are want to do, Hollywood is now adapting this for film which I'm sure will make the series popular but also ruin it slightly.

Brian K Vaughan's other work (later than Y: The Last Man) is a more traditional super-hero tale: Ex-Machina, about a NYC politician who is a retired superhero but has been called back into active duty reluctantly. This series is an interesting exploration of the media, what it means to be "good" or moral, and what power actually means.

I tend to prefer graphic novels that are set in the "real" world. I don't like science fiction series or alternative universes (that's true of fiction, too, for the most part). The only exception to this is The Walking Dead which is great though I haven't seen any new issues in a long time.

Some other series I like include Matz's The Killer, and Jay Faerber's Near Death (set in the noirish streets of modern Seattle).

As I write this, I have to say that though I never liked comics growing up, I did love graphic illustrators and early graphic novelists like Frans Masereel were some of my favorite artists. I had (and still have) several of his "novels in woodcuts" that tell a story with only images. Frans Masereel himself was a fascinating figure and deserves an entire post himself.

Frans Masereel