Want the inside scoop on Iran?
Expat Iranian blogger Hoder, aka Hossein Derakhshan, appeared on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos.
He talks about Iran, bloggers, the influence of blogs on politics, and why Iran should have nukes. Watch the video.
Want more?
See www.raincoast.com/weareiran:
We Are Iran provides a portrait of contemporary Iran using that nation’s blogs as its primary source. Author Nasrin Alavi has translated the Farsi blogs to English and has provided a cohesive commentary to help readers better understand the politics and culture of this virtual community.
Lonely Planet is running a video competition. The prize is a $7500 USD ($10,000 AUS) journey around the world, plus the opportunity to check out Lonely Planet Television in action in Melbourne, Australia. There are monthly prizes too.
View videos and enter online at lonelyplanet.com/lessthanthree
Competition ends January 15, 2007.
Over the course of the 10 day International Festival of Authors (IFOA) in Toronto, Raincoast authors received some wonderful support from the online community.
First off, the festival themselves were running a blog. Early in the proceedings, the IFOA asked authors if they had read Joyce’s Ulysses. Patrick McCabe (Winterwood), Tom McCarthy (Remainder) and Jon Mcgregor (So Many Ways To Begin) all gave answers. The blog also presented a special feature on graphic novelists Jaime Hernandez, Phillip Dupuy and Charles Berberian. Also mentioned were Seth and Ralph Steadman. Photos of the graphic novel events featuring Jaime, Phillipe and Charles are posted here.
The Torontoist did a great job of covering the festival throughout and ran a excellent feature on self-described ‘cartoonist’ Jaime Hernandez (Ghost of Hoppers, Locas and the forthcoming Maggie the Mechanic) as part of their IFOA coverage. Toronto’s Eye Magazine also made the Love and Rockets author their cover story and the interview is availble online. Jaime was interviewed by filmmaker Jerry Ciccoritti on Saturday October 21 for the festival.
On Thursday October 26 Inkstuds posted on the irrepressible author and illustrator Ralph Steadman. Ralph ‘read’ (he actually showed slides of his work) at the festival on Friday October 27 and was interviewed by Ben McNally manager of Nicholas Hoare in Toronto on Saturday October 28. You can hear the Inkstuds podcast on CiTR.
Ralph was very generous with his time and memories during his stay in Toronto and he did a lot of long, expansive media interviews, so expect more updates soon.
It is perhaps no surprise that Ralph Steadman was included in The Torontoist’s list of the 5 Hot Tickets for the IFOA, but I was also really happy to see debut novelist Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and Tintin and The Secret of Literature, in their selection. Tom was part of a roundtable discussion with Caroline Adderson, Eden Robinson and Timothy Taylor on Thursday October 26 and read from Remainder on Friday October 27 in the company of Clifford Chase, author of Winkie, Ralph Steadman, and Patrick McCabe.
The Torontoist also interviewed Tom McCarthy during the festival and Monique posted about the online reviews for Remainder last week on the Raincoast blog.
You can also read my very long, slightly nerdy interview with the Tom here. Tom is smart as a whip by the way.
Katherine at BlogTO added to her excellent book coverage and produced some wonderful podcasts from the IFOA. Her interviews included Tom McCarthy and Jon McGregor. Both interviews really are terrific (you can also her talk to Clifford Chase, author of the excellent Winkie, and Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai as part of the same podcasts) and they definitely worth downloading.
The IFOA blog also mentioned (way back in August!), of course, that So Many Ways to begin was long-listed for the Booker Prize. It didn’t go on to win unfortunately, but don’t let that put you off what is a beautiful book by an exceptionally talented young author. August seems like such a long time ago ...
I’d like to point out the incredible news pieces and awards for a couple of books published or distributed by Raincoast.
The current issue of Reader’s Digest has the big (22 page) excerpt of WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT by Katy Hutchison. Also the premiere of the CBC TV Gill Deacon Show features Katy. The show starts today at 11:00 a.m. PST and repeats at 2:00 p.m. PST.
EMPRESS OF ASIA by Adam Lewis Schroeder was reviewed recently in Globe and Mail.
“This is a compelling, heartbreaking and witty book that will stay with you long after you’ve put it down.”
“Schroeder is skilled at leaving hints here and there, but never fully giving away the secret. So in the end, the reader is presented with a wonderful, ‘aha!’ moment.”
“Brilliantly written.”
“This book is just plain superb. I wish Adam Lewis Schroeder all the success he deserves."
Lots going on with awards too. All the following books are nominated in their respective categories:
Red Cedar Award (best book as selected by B.C. students in grades 4 to 7)
STILL THERE, CLARE by Yvonne Prinz
FRANCESCA AND THE MAGIC BIKE by Cynthia Nugent
Silver Birch Award (best book as selected by Ontario students in grades 4, 5 and 6)
STRANGE NEW SPECIES by Elin Kelsey
THEY DID WHAT by Jeff Szpirglas
Red Maple Award (best book as selected by Ontario students in grades 7 and 8),
MONEY, MONEY MONEY by Eve Drobot
Golden Oak Award (best book as selected by new readers in adult literacy programs)
PAUL MOVES OUT by Michel Rabagliati
National Parenting Publications Awards Gold selection
I FOUND A DEAD BIRD by Jan Thornhill
Children’s Literature Roundtables of Canada 2006 Information Book Award Finalist
ARE YOU PSYCHIC? by Helaine Becker
Oh No, Not Ghosts! by Richard Michelson and illustrated by Adam McCauley.
Shhhhh! Dad said not to make a peep so that he could get some sleep. But what if something is wriggling and slithering in the shadows? And did that floorboard just creak? Zinging rhymes and moonlit illustrations will transport readers beyond the bedroom walls to a magical world. Ages 3-7.
Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich by Adam Rex
Frankenstein, Dracula, Bigfoot, The Wolfman ... that’s a pretty scary crew. But it turns out these monsters have the same problems as everyone else. Dracula has a huge piece of spinach stuck in his teeth. The Wolfman is leaving clumps of hair in the shower. And wait until you see what Godzilla’s done on some poor guy’s Honda.
New York Times bestselling author Adam Rex has combined disgusting, laugh-out-loud humour with spectacular artwork. Any kid (or adult) who’s ever feared a monster will never see him in quite the same way again. Ages 5-10, but as I say , adults will love it too.
The Spooky Book by Steve Patschke and illustrated by Matthew McElligott
The Spooky Book is perfect for reading aloud for Halloween. The story unfolds on a dark and stormy night, as Andrew reads a book about a girl named Zo Zo, and Zo Zo reads a book about a boy named Andrew. Their stories come together in a surprise ending.
Author Steve Patschke (pronounced Patch-key) is an elementary school librarian who was so spooked when he wrote this book that he had to sleep for a week with his bicycle helmet on and a broom by his bed. Ages 3-7.
UPDATE: Congratulations to the winner, Suanne of Richmond.
....................
Win two tickets to the Lyonesse Theatre’s production of Gonzo and a copy of Adam Lewis Schroeder’s novel Empress of Asia.
Gonzo runs from Nov 1 to 12 in Vancouver at Norman Rothstein Theatre (950 West 41st Ave, at Oak St.).
How to enter:
In the comments field tell me a story, preferably about why you’d like to attend the play Gonzo or read the book Empress of Asia. Perhaps you have a story about WWII?
Share your story for a chance to win two tickets and a book.
A winner will be drawn at random on October 31.
Gonzo is written by and directed by Gordon Pascoe and is based on his experience in a Japanese prison camp in Shanghai. (Find out more ...)
Empress of Asia by Adam Lewis Schroeder is about Harry who met his wife Lily during WWII, and the secret she’s kept from him for 50 years. (Find out more ...)
Ron Nurwisah of Torontoist.com says, “A man is put into a coma by a falling object. He goes on to receive an 8 million pound settlement and with his newfound wealth obsessively tries to recreate a scene that he may have once witnessed. This is the premise for Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, possibly one of the most imaginative novels to come out of the UK in the last few years.” Read his full interview.
Chris at Spikemagazine.com says, “It’s not often I read an entire novel in one sitting, but I did with Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Whether that’s a testament to the gravity of my insomnia last night or Tom McCarthy’s novel, I’m not sure, but Remainder certainly didn’t put me to sleep.” Read more.
Keir at KeirWilmut.com says,
“The nice people at Raincoast Books sent me a copy of Remainder, and asked if I’d review it. What remains of a person after a near-fatal trauma? What does it mean to be authentic? These are two of the questions posed by Tom McCarthy’s first novel, Remainder.” Read Keir’s review.
Janelle at Eclectic Closet says,
“Tom McCarthy’s artistic eye is apparent in Remainder, translating into vividly described settings. The setting is as much a character as our nameless narrator. Readers are immersed in the setting which is invoked at such a visceral level that one feels the sunbeam warming one’s skin as the narrator lays in a sunbeam and smell the liver wafting through the ventilation system.” Read Janelle’s review.
Raincoast publicist Dan also had a chance to talk to Tom McCarthy. Here’s his 3-part interview.
ADDITION:
Scotchneat.ca says,
“What I liked most: the little moments of description where the author captures precisely the kind of internal loops that we’ve all experienced, such as when he’s on the way to the airport to pick up a friend and realizes he forgot the flight information.” A quote from the book is included then, “It seems like a quotidien passage to pick, but I think McCarthy has an ear (eye?) for the jetsam of the human mind that reminds me a bit of Don DeLillo. That austere and somehow darkly funny insight of how the mind goes, that we can all recognize in ourselves. All the more alarming when it plays out the way it does. The passages where he describes what rehab is like become the internal workings of his pet projects: break everything down to its constituent parts and then execute them (well, maybe literally, even).” Read Scotchneat.ca’s review.
Win two tickets to the Lyonesse Theatre’s production of Gonzo and a copy of Adam Lewis Schroeder’s novel Empress of Asia.
How to enter:
In the comments field tell me a story, preferably about why you’d like to attend the play Gonzo or read the book Empress of Asia. Perhaps you have a story about WWII?
Share your story for a chance to win two tickets and a book.
A winner will be drawn at random on October 31.
Other stipulations and hoo-hah:
The play is in Vancouver so you need to be here or get here on your own.
Word of mouth really helps local plays and books so if you attend Gonzo or read Empress of Asia, please post your review in the comments field.
About GONZO
Lyonesse Theatre presents the Vancouver Premiere of Gonzo, written by and directed by Gordon Pascoe. Gonzo is a heart-warming story of humour, compassion, and humanity in a Japanese prison camp in Shanghai, 1942-45. (Find out more ...)
Venue:
Norman Rothstein Theatre
950 West 41st Ave (at Oak St.)
Preview: Oct 31
Show runs: Nov 1 to 12
Tickets: Box Office at (604) 257-5111 or Lyonesse Theatre at (778) 230-7671, or book online at
www.bryher.ca.
About Empress of Asia by Adam Lewis Schroeder
Empress of Asia is a sweeping story that spans the years between the end of World War II and 1995. Harry, coping with the looming death of his wife, Lily, is shocked to discover that she has kept a secret from him for years. Before her death, Lily asks Harry to contact Michel Ney, the man who saved Harry’s life in World War II before being killed by the Japanese—or so Harry had always believed. Harry journeys to Thailand, piecing together details of past years.
One of Raincoast’s newsletter readers sent me the link to a literary festival:
http://www.lakefieldliteraryfestival.com/
Lakefield Literary Festival celebrated its 12 season July 14th to 16th , 2006. The date was chosen as the weekend closest to Margaret Laurence’s birthday, and the festival showcases many current Canadian authors.
Have you participated or attended this festival? Let me know what it’s like.
The images in the about section look lovely. The festival is located in the village parks and churches, and on the grounds of Lakefield College School.
Thank you James for the link.
Famously referred to as part of the “Axis of Evil,” North Korea is one of the most secretive and mysterious nations in the world today. A series of manmade and natural catastrophes have also left it one of the poorest. When this fortress-like country recently opened the door a crack to foreign investment, cartoonist Guy Delisle found himself in its capital of Pyongyang on a work visa for a French film animation company, becoming one of the few Westerners to witness current conditions in the surreal showcase city.
North Korea’s recent nuclear tests have forced open the door a little further on the country, its people and its leader Kim Jong II. But unlike the recent documentaries and news reports on North Korea, Guy Delisle was able to observe more than was intended of the culture and lives of the few North Koreans he encountered. His astute and wry musings on life in the regime form the basis of his travelogue and graphic novel Pyongyang. (Guy’s latest book is Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China.)
Images from Pyongyang:
-- as shown on Time.com
In the final part of the interview, author Tom McCarthy (Remainder and Tintin and the Secret of Literature) talks about the publication of his debut novel Remainder and the International Necronautical Society.
(Read Part 1 and Part 2)
Raincoast Blog: Remainder has had an interesting route to publication. How did you end up at Metronome Press and how did Alma Books come into the picture?
Tom McCarthy: I finished Remainder in 2001, but the conglomerates wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole. To be fair, some editors pushed quite hard, but couldn’t get it past their marketing departments, acquisition boards, whatever they call the ones who actually call the shots. So I involved myself more with art projects for a while - art projects which were actually literary projects in disguise. The art world is very literate. Virtually no one I met in publishing in the UK had actually read much literature beyond contemporary middle-market stuff, but artists, curators, critics and so on are super-literate. Some of them were even doing work based on the writings of Beckett, Huysmans, Robbe-Grillet and so on. So I found a kind of refuge in that arena. And it was in that arena that I met Clementine Deliss, who set up Metronome Press with Thomas Boutoux. They’re both curators and critics, and they wanted to do a project around the legendary Olympia Press, which operated out of Paris in the 50s and 60s and published (in English) people who the conglomerates also wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole: Beckett, Burroughs, Trocchi, Nabokov, people like that. Olympia was very tied in with visual art, and with soft porn, and Metronome Press wanted to emulate that - re-enact it, you could say. So in late 2005 they published my book and three others, plus ‘Teasers’ that had erotic imagery from contemporary artists alongside excerpts from the books. They were determined that this was an art project, not a publishing one. So when Remainder was getting big press reviews and the UK chain stores were asking for it, they still only distributed it in art galleries and institutions. Then Alma came into the picture and produced a mass-market edition in 2006.
RB: Are you glad Remainder wasn’t taken up by a large publisher in the UK, or do you just think about the millions that you could’ve made?
TM: Funnily enough, as I was signing up to Alma after the good reviews and the general buzz, one of the biggest of the bigs, who’d rejected it on two separate occasions before, came running in trying to gazump them, offering my agent I don’t know how much. We were like: ‘It’s the same book now as it was then. F*** you.’ You’ve got to work with people who actually support what you want to do, or it’ll all go wrong a year or two down the line. I’ve signed with Vintage in the US, but that was because they came across it, tracked down Metronome (which wasn’t easy) and took it on their own initiative. The Editor-in-Chief, Marty Asher, said to me: ‘I don’t know if one hundred or one hundred thousand people will like it as much as I do, and I don’t care. It’s what I want to publish.’ And he can: he’s got the power. He’s like a fairy godmother. So’s Clementine Deliss. And Alma. I wonder how many other serious novels there are out there that haven’t found fairy godmothers yet. I’m lucky. Three years is nothing.
RB: What are you working on now?
TM: I’m editing the manuscript I wrote before Remainder, Men in Space, which Alma will bring out next spring. It’s a novel about disintegration set in Prague during the break-up of the former Eastern Bloc. And I’m working on a new novel called C, about technology and mourning.
RB: I came to your artwork relatively late. Could you explain the International Necronautical Society to me?
TM: The INS is a construct, a cultural fiction that gets played out in both virtual and real spaces. It’s got the bureaucracy of a Kafka novel (committees, sub-committees, sub-sub-committees), the political austerity of Stalinist governmental bodies (denouncing enemies and former members, issuing proclamations and so on), the cultural bombast of early twentieth century avant-gardes (it was launched with a manifesto very much modeled on the Futurist one of 1909), and the subversive viral energies of Burroughs and Debord (we infiltrated the BBC website a few years ago, inserting INS propaganda in its source code which only a network of a few hundred people could access). The INS is most visible when we hold Hearings, interrogating other artists and writers in front of press and public, publish reports or let public spaces such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in London host our FM broadcasting units; but it’s operative all the time, everywhere. We are all necronauts - always, already.
RB: I get asked this all the time by people in the book industry, so I am going to ask you - were you tempting fate by calling the book ’Remainder‘?
TM: Remainder is the right title. It’s about aftermaths, residues, what’s left when everything else has been said, shown, repeated, taken away. In terms of the book industry it’s the right title too: it was left behind, but it’s still there.
Reviews of Remainder:
Ready Steady Book
The Midnight Bell
Other interviews with Tom McCarthy:
3AM Magazine
Tom McCarthy will be appearing at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on October 27th and 28th, 2006.
In the second part of the interview, author Tom McCarthy (Remainder and Tintin and the Secret of Literature) discusses ideas of authenticity, technology and the work of J G Ballard.
(Read the first part of the interview)
Raincoast Blog: Authenticity is a recurrent theme in Remainder and yet a lot of contemporary culture strives to be arch, or ironic. As an artist/author, is authenticity something important to you in your own work? What makes something authentic? Is authenticity possible through repetition? Are irony and authenticity mutually exclusive?
Tom McCarthy: These are complex questions, and to even begin grappling with them we’d have to go back to Plato, the notion of the simulacrum, and so on. Art’s whole currency and mode is inauthenticity, and yet it strives to be ‘truer’ than, say, propaganda, science, journalism - in fact, than all other mediums. Paul de Man wrote a brilliant essay on irony and inauthenticity called ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’. I hadn’t read it when I wrote Remainder but it could be describing the book. He says that to recognise your own inauthenticity doesn’t mean you become authentic: you just repeat inauthenticity at more and more self-conscious levels, and that double, triple, quadruple language is called irony. Having said that, there’s ‘sincere’ irony and pat, smug irony, like you get in the worst one-liner, get-it-got-it kind of art. In Remainder I wanted to deal with the whole question of inauthenticity authentically, if that makes any sense.
RB: Remainder starts with the narrator describing being knocked unconscious by an unexplained lump of technological hardware, and in his subsequent quest for authenticity he has an aversion to using technology during his re-enactments. Do you have reservations about technology? (I appreciate it’s kind of ridiculous to be asking you this on email!)
TM: I’m not sure he’s averse to technology. He doesn’t want any cameras present during his re-enactments, but that’s largely because that would collapse the whole book into a Baudrillard-style meditation on media and the image, which I really didn’t want. He invests the huge sum of money which he gets as compensation for the accident in technology stocks. I’m fascinated by technology, or by the theme, at least. Techne means showing, revealing, and technology is the gauze through which the world reveals itself to us - and behind which it retreats. It’s the veil.
RB: Do you own a mobile phone?
TM: My god, yes. I’d rather leave home naked than without my phone.
RB: What will the future look like?
TM: Who on earth knows? I don’t even know what the present looks like! [J G]Ballard says we’ve collapsed the future into the present and we’re surrounded by fictions and fantasies from which we can pick at will. He says that the writer’s job is to invent the reality. I like that, that’s very good.
RB: It’s interesting that Remainder has been compared to J G Ballard, the author of Crash. Ballard seems to have this fascination with technology, and both Crash and Remainder have this clinical air of unease.
TM: Crash was a big influence. It’s more the repetition side of things than the technology. Ballard’s hero Vaughan re-enacts car crashes of the rich and famous. He’s also obsessed with becoming authentic, as is Ballard-the-character-in-the-book. He keeps saying things like ‘the car crash was the first real thing that had happened to me’. The heroes of both Crash and Remainder use re-enactment and stylised violence as a portal towards the real - and fail spectacularly, excessively, luxuriously.
RB: Are you a fan of Ballard?
TM: Ballard is fascinating because he’s a great writer without even being a good one. I don’t mean this negatively: I’m a huge fan. But he doesn’t care about polished prose (compare his sentences to Nabokov or Updike and they look like pulp) or depth of character. Having said that, Crash has an intense lyricism that comes from its almost incantatory, modulated repetition of technological and sociological terms, and Vaughan is a much truer presence for me than, say, some boring ‘rounded’ figure out of Jane Austen. That’s the great thing about Ballard: he’s got a vision, he’s a visionary, that makes him great, and the niceties he doesn’t bother with. He knows exactly where he stands in this respect. I talked to him once and told him my theory that Crash was a re-write of Don Quixote, whose hero also re-enacts stylised violent moments on the public highways in a bid for ‘authenticity’, and also fails fabulously - and he answered: ‘Your theory is great, but I’ve never read Don Quixote. I don’t really read proper books, I’m very low-brow.’ Genius.
RB: Who are your literary inspirations?
TM: I’m very un-Ballard in this respect. I went through a phase of worshipping Joyce, and read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake inside out. And before that, Conrad: I’d copy out whole passages from Heart of Darkness. Burroughs, Pynchon, Melville, Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury is the best book ever written in my opinion. I read lots, and try to work out how they do it. If you wanted to be really good at football you’d watch videos of Pele and Zidane and try to emulate their moves, then take them somewhere else. I like the French a lot: Genet, Blanchot, Bataille, Ponge. I like Shakespeare, and the Greeks. I’m really traditional I’m afraid. But then I’ve just published a book about how brilliant the Tintin books are from a literary viewpoint, so maybe I’m not all canonical...
The final part of the interview will appear tomorrow
Tom McCarthy will be appearing at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on October 27th and 28th, 2006.
The final part of our interview with Tom McCarthy will appear tomorrow. Meanwhile, the Torontoist blog has posted a feature on Tom as part of their coverage of the International Festival of Authors (IFOA) in Toronto this week. Tom is part of a roundtable discussion at 7pm on Thursday, October 26, 2006, in Studio Theatre at the Harbourfront Centre and is reading from his novel Remainder at on Friday, October 27, 2006, in the Brigantine Room (also in the Harbourfront Centre) along side Clifford Chase and Raincoast authors Patrick McCabe and Ralph Steadman.
In Remainder, the extraordinary debut novel by author Tom McCarthy, the nameless victim of an unexplained accident uses compensation money to painstakingly reconstruct and re-enact his memories of a London apartment building. A darkly comic and unpredictable exploration of memory and identity, it was originally published by underground French publisher Metronome Press, and is now available to a wider readership courtesy of Alma Books.
Tom McCarthy’s non-fiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature is published by Granta Books (also available from Raincoast), and Remainder will be published in North America by Vintage in 2007. Tom is also the General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network. He was born in 1969, and lives in London, England.
Raincoast Blog: Remainder has several incidental moments that appear significant but are ultimately unexplained. Do you know exactly what happens?
Tom McCarthy: If you mean do I know what exactly the ‘accident’ consisted of, no. It’s not Memento: it’s not important what the accident is, simply that it happened, that we’re in its aftermath. If you want to be literal about it, some bits of a satellite or plane falling on the hero’s head wouldn’t be a bad guess; if you want to be allegorical, you might think more along the lines that the ‘accident’ is history, time, being thrown into the world in the first place. All the other loose ends have their place and function at one level or another - short councillors, extra cups of coffee, even cordite…
RB: Is ambiguity a virtue?
TM: For sure. If you were simply communicating a message you were certain about it wouldn’t be any good as literature.
RB: So did you work out the precise details of the characters and plot first or did you just see where the initial idea would take you?
TM: The whole thing came in a flash, in half-an-hour of mad scribbling at a party after I’d seen a crack in the bathroom wall and had a moment of deja-vu, just like the hero. The rest was carpentry. Of course, details and whole sub-sequences came while I was developing and executing it, but essentially it was pretty much all there in the crack-moment.
RB: Is the apartment building in Remainder based on a real location?
TM: I went walking around Brixton (in South London) looking for a building corresponding to the one I had as a picture in my mind, just like the hero does. I found one that wasn’t exactly the same, but close enough to provide a base to work from, just like he does. It even had little roof-access cabins which I realised could be used for putting out the cats his vision requires to be slinking around (and which plummet to their deaths one after the other). The real building’s not called ‘Madlyn Mansions’ either: that’s a nod to Proust’s madeleine moment - and, of course, to madness.
RB: Do you think there is a unique London sensibility about the book? Will a North American audience read it differently to a British audience?
TM: It’s very integrated into the landscape of London, but I think that’s more incidental than fundamental. It’s by no means certain that the forthcoming movie will be set in London. Any big city that has dilapidated areas undergoing gentrification, coffee-shop chains and social hierarchies that break down along racial lines (and which big Western city doesn’t have all these?) could host its action. The only place it couldn’t be is LA, because then all its unreality and re-enactment scenes would play out as an allegory about the movies, which they’re not.
RB: I read in your fantastic Ready Steady Book interview with Mark Thwaite that you researched trauma and post-traumatic stress disorders for Remainder. Did you find that research interesting?
TM: It was absolutely fascinating. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy, but PTSD is an extremely creative condition. It instils a propensity for repetition alongside a need to disguise the scene being repeated, i.e. to generate other scenes and contexts for the primal event to morph through. It also leaves you with a sense that everything is somehow artificial, secondary, fake. Andy Warhol said that from the moment he was shot for the rest of his life onwards he felt he was just watching TV. The only ‘real’ thing for PTSD sufferers is the traumatic moment itself, which remains outside of proper memory, hence outside of all narrative, all representation. Again, that’s why the ‘accident’ must remain unnamed.
Part Two of this interview will appear tomorrow.
Tom McCarthy will be appearing at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on October 27th and 28th, 2006.
Jaime Hernandez, author of Ghost of Hoppers, appeared at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto this Saturday.
There are some interviews coming up that I’ll post when they appear, but in the meantime, have a look at the posting on Torontoist.com.
Quote: “Bottom line? Hernandez has the stunning ability to write complex stories entirely populated by minorities - women, bisexuals, punks and hispanics - and make them universally appealing. This is comic book snob canon.”
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Check out our NEWEST Podcast for Clancy with the Puck, a hilarious tale of hockey hubris.