QWF Awards: 2012

The QWF does such excellent awards banquets: last night they proved the rule with their 2012 awards banquet, held at Lion d'Or on Ontario (which host Josh Freed had couldn't help noting as a sign of how far Anglophones are willing to extend into Francophone territory to exert our waning influence). A few highlights:

Rawi Hage won for Carnival which wasn't a surprise. His books balance urban grit with his idiosyncratic humor and quirkiness. No doubt his books will stand the test of time (his book DeNiro's Game from 2006 continues to loom large over our city as a literary capital). I am glad that Hage took home the prize (and his speech was charming and adorable) but I was also disappointed that I didn't get a chance to see Anita Rau Badami up on stage, an author I adore. Also, I haven't read Hage's Carnival yet so I didn't have a connection to the work in a way I should have.

Taras Grescoe won for Straphanger, a book that I found absolutely riveting. Full disclosure: I was on the jury for this prize, so I am hardly objective (and there will several excellent and worthy books on our long list)  but Grescoe's book has altered the way I look at cars and cities. When certain journalists or writers in Montreal gripe about this road construction project impeding traffic or that new freeway exit ramp, I can just shrug and be thrilled that they're problems I never have to deal with (and I pay absolutely no attention to the price of gas). More than that, the book traces the history of the car on various cities around the world and makes one SEE cities in a new light. I suspect that in 25 years we will look back and know that Grescoe's book was the beginning of the end for the dominant role that the car has played in city life (though that said: even Grescoe admits that cars are important in certain places and at certain times).

Alice Petersen won the Concordia First Book Prize for her short-story collection All the Voices Cry, an excellent collection which contains several lovely little gems. Oana Avasilichioaei won the AM Klein Poetry Prize for her collection We, Beasts.

But the most heart-warming moment all night was when Eric Fontaine won the Cole Translation Prize for his translation of Doug Harris's (excellent) You Comma Idiot (titled T'es con, point). Fontaine's eyes were teary as he got on stage and his list of thank yous was funny, moving and entertaining. He is an excellent storyteller himself, it seems...

And a great evening was had by all!

Space, Imagination, Memory, Mortality: Charles Simic in NYRB

Charles Simic rarely disappoints me. And I'm not talking about his poetry necessarily but the pieces he writes for the NYRB. Yes, he veers dangerously close to old man nostalgia at times but more often he presents a provocative starting point and then attempts to create a universal experience from a series of personal details.

In this piece, for example, he considers how memory and physical space are tied together, most specifically, how certain buildings in New York are associated with memories from his past: scenes from his early marriage or a disastrous first date. In the end, the piece is about Aristotle's pronouncement that memory is nothing objective or static but resides in the same place as imagination does. But I take it one step beyond perhaps.

I've never lived in a city long enough to have long-standing associations with buildings. When I return to the place where I grew up, too much time has passed and space doesn't have the emotional resonance since there is absolutely no connection to my life today. The two cities I know better than any others - Montreal and Shanghai - represent different times in my life, but one is a living breathing city for me (Montreal) since I live here and experience its changes on a daily basis, while the other (Shanghai) is frozen in my memory. Though I've been back there several times since leaving, I always end up comparing what I see with what I remember.

A familiar corner: I lived right behind this building for years. 

This all leads me to a particular fascination of mine: how physical space and literature intersect. I love knowing that in this building here, a novel was set, that the author spent time thinking about this particular spot or front door or window sill. The Binerie on Mont-Royal where much of Le Matou is set. The Bagel shop on Fairmount where Mordecai Richler characters have stood. Mavis Gallant's Sherbrooke Street. Perhaps this is my way of creating memory in a city where I didn't spend my youth (I had the same tendency to connect space and literature in Shanghai and wrote for a magazine there on a similar topic).

Simic ends his piece with a tiny impression, the lack of any noise, as he considers a building in which he once lived. Fire seems to have been fated to destroy it. But, no, all these years later, there it stands, still reeking of his past though he sees no trace of himself there. This is a sign of our modern condition: for it is in Nature that we like to feel our mortality. In a forest, looking up at a mountain range in order to feel the sense that once we are gone we will be completely forgotten. (For some this is a terrifying feeling; for some, it's oddly comforting). Yet for modern urbanites like Charles Simic, one can sense this same sensation by standing in the shadow of an old brick walkup with rusted out mailboxes and dilapidated fire escapes.

It's a much more humane route to revelling in our mortality and one that doesn't feel as bleak and lonely as considering the same idea in nature, away from the masses of people where we so rarely find ourselves these days. 

Urban Irony: yech

There is a very interesting piece over the weekend in the NYT blog about contemporary irony as a generational style and it aligns with so much that I've thought about in the past few years. I am struck particularly when I am in Mile End or parts of the Plateau: the girls with oversized 80s eyeglasses, the men with handlebar moustaches, odd posters on the wall (like the one below that I Tweeted about a couple of weekends ago: Lionel Richie on the wall at Flocon Espresso), high-waisted mom jeans on 18 year olds. Francophone young people seem less enamoured with this tendency than Anglophone young people do but the NYT writer captures perfectly an analysis of how it might have come about and why it's potentially damaging or if that's an overstatement, so pointless and banal.

Hello, is it me you're looking for?

What irks me about the whole urban irony thing is the sense that sincerity is almost subversive. Everything is one step removed from intention. Do the people who run Flocon really like 1980s Lionel Richie? Or is this a pose, an affectation? What would a poster of some funky cool new band on the wall communicate? Sincerity, so it's something you'd never see.

I think about when I was in my 20s, the kind of music and style I abhorred was anything that parents would have liked (now, of course, I appreciate Carole King and Neil Young and early 70s film) but now it's like certain allusions to the past allow young people to communicate that they are somehow capable of knowing everything that is cool now (which was how we measured how cool someone older was when I was in my 20s: if he knew Depeche Mode and the Violent Femmes and Erasure, then he was OK; if not, then he was old), not only are they aware of contemporary music and film and style, they know about everything that came prior particularly my generation's icons though it's always people who were terribly "uncool" in the 1980s: Lionel Richie (when I was young, this was middle-aged people's music), Barry Manilow (ditto: my grandmother adored Barry Manilow), etc.

This kind of ironic style isn't that new but the ubiquity of it is: in Montreal, in New York, in Portland, many cities where I have spent time recently, all have young people who look identical. I suppose that's been true for a while but I have to say that going to a new city where there is a unique kind of style is so refreshing. And it happens so infrequently...

It's odd that irony only relates to pop culture or fashion. This demonstrates the shallowness of the tendency: never do you see young people clutching paperback copies of Danielle Steele ironically.  Why aren't hipsters ever ironic about Billie Holliday or Coltrane or Henry James or Thomas Hardy? I guess that's too far away...? It's the contemporary link that contains all the resonance...? And it would require too much thought and analysis? I don't know but the piece linked above is certainly thought-provoking...

Weekend by Andrew Haigh

Saw a great movie yesterday afternoon on Netflix, Weekend by Andrew Haigh. It's not a new movie, maybe a year old or so, but it was lovely, about two young men who meet in a bar in Notthingham and have a weekend together. It reminded me of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise in some ways, that 1995 film (and its subsequent sequels) where two young people explore what it means to be themselves, to be looking for someone else, to be young (or in the case of Weekend, gay) in the world today. Andrew Haigh's film is better, though, and lacks the self-consciousness that Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy need to make their characters convincing. (That said, Before Sunset, the second of Linklater's movies has one of the most amazing final scenes of just about any movie I've ever seen.)

As is my habit, I then read several reviews of the Haigh film which confirmed to me all the lovely complexities that the film explores. But mainly it's that final scene which stays with me and the light-handed touch of the director who never lets it drift into melancholy or cliche (though he does play with cinematic cliche in interesting ways). The emotional core of the film, which all comes together at the end, is terribly honest and moving.

What struck me, too, is how life is shown in such a realistic way: life as a series of conversations, some pleasant, some emotional, some tense, some banal, some irritating. And isn't that how we all get through life, drifting from one conversation to another? There are no "lessons" here, nothing didactic about playing witness to these two men falling in love and the limitations that are imposed on their relationship.

At any rate, it's a beautiful little movie with solid acting and writing, one of those movies that stays with you for days afterwards.

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).

Innovative Interview with Gary Shteyngart

Here's an interesting interview between Rabbi Harvey at Jewish Books and writer Gary Shteyngart

In graphic novel form by Steve Sheinkin.

Interesting approach and you can check it out here.

t's all about Shteyngart's 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story.

The book is excellent and the interview with the writer though it's text-heavy (hard to avoid in an interview!) contains some interesting information about Shteyngart's approach and research on "the future".

I wish I could draw because I'd love to make my interviews this interesting.

Thoughts on Governor General Award winners for 2012

Linda Spalding: her GG fiction prize wasn't a shock because she is a great writer (though mainly for non-fiction), but I haven't read her novel, The Purchase. Her speech was lovely and she talked about coming to Canada in 1982 with an unpublished novel in her suitcase and feeling valued as a writer and artist, tapping into a vibrant and amazing community of artists and writers in the Toronto area.

I also haven't read Ross King's book Leonardo and the Last Supper though I've heard it buzzed about here and there. Definitely going to check that one out.

I was really happy that Nigel Spencer won for his translation of Marie-Claire Blais's book Mai at the Predator's Ball. Blais continues to do amazing, innovative and hard-to-categorize work though she's in her mid 70s at this point. I had forgotten that he'd translated this work. He's won twice before for translation for translating Marie-Claire Blais. For anyone who's not read Blais or who wants to start with an excellent Quebecois francophone writer, she's where it's at. Blais and Dany Laferrière are the two best-known names (after Michel Tremblay, of course) on the international scene from Quebec.

I was surprised that France Daigle won for Pour sûr. It's a great book (and she was in attendance at Blue Met 2012 for this book) but Catherine Mavrikakis got a great deal of buzz for her book Les derniers jours de Smokey Nelson and was short-listed for a couple of prizes for it. So it surprised me. Then again, it is nice to see a non-Quebecker win for a francophone novel (Daigle is from New Brunswick).

At any rate, when I got back to the office, two publishers had already emailed or faxed me proposals for the next festival with their just-crowned GG 2012 winners.

So many books! I feel like I am reading constantly but even so, I can't possibly keep up with everything I should read. Now off: I should spend an hour reading (Eric Dupont's La Fiancée américaine) and I should get myself to the office at some point today, too!