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This is an audio file of Part One A of my screenplay module novel TRUTH MARATHON. More to follow.

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For those who are interested, I have a PDF file of the first fifty pages of TRUTH MARATHON, a screenplay module  novel that is part of PLASTIC MILLENNIUM.

[to get the PDF, please email me at fharvor at yahoo dot com.]

Below is the newest YT version of the opening to my screenplay-novel TRUTH MARATHON, a PLASTIC MILLENNIUM module.

I am rather new at producing this kind of work and am painfully aware that it’s not the sort of thing one would see, say, at a film festival. But it’s not meant to be amateurish or a kind of hobby: increasingly, I’m becoming convinced that one of the crises afflicting current literary publishing is a crisis of media. (In a very recent post, Dan Green points out that the artistic accomplishment of Zadie Smith’s published fiction is not on a par with the  reputation she’s generally been granted by mainstream critical “consensus”. The connection that I want to make here is that Smith — and she’s hardly the only one — is a writer whose reputation is a creation of media, including new media, as much as it one of critical zeitgeist; in short, even writers can be famous for being famous, and that becomes especially true when the media of fame, for example TV interviews, achieve a cultural influence greater than that of what the writer is supposedly being feted for: their fiction.)

I originally wrote TRUTH MARATHON as a moderately experimental novel (its first drafts mimicked screenplay format) with a vague idea that I’d insert photos (movie “stills”) into the project. Having an acutely limited budget, that soon proved impossible. Who would I get to pose? I didn’t know any friends who looked the part, and couldn’t afford to hire actors. I also had many scenes set in summertime Canada, but by this point was living in Korea (all my trips back home the past few years have been in the winter). I realized that if I wanted visuals in this project, I’d have to make them the old-fashioned way. And since I was good at drawing and had a background as a cartoonist, I’d turn the novel into a hybrid graphic novel.

Converting this project to video format came later, and was prompted partly by looking at some work that some of my students had produced (I was wowed by what I saw as their expertise) and buying a new laptop with MovieMaker installed and realizing the basics of the software were not that complicated … as long as one wasn’t fussy.

It was the latter point that has become something of a sticking point for me: I am getting fussy. I’d like my work to be more “pro”. But I also find myself becoming increasingly alienated by most of the movies and videos I see, including those on YouTube. This has become especially true of the ones about life in Asia. They are frequently montages of clips with beat-heavy music dubbed over them. The tendency of movies — an ostensibly visual medium that is actually so music-philic that removing music makes movies automatically feel barren and boring — is to not have faith in the script. It is to undermine importance of the script by pumping up the visuals through various manipulations, and using music as both a prompt and a crutch. When putting together my work, all this was something I wanted to overcome. And so I’ve been going back to basics, getting my soundtrack from found sources around the home or nearby in the hiking trails close to our apartment.

Where all this is going, I’m not sure. But one thing is certain in my mind: writing can exist in mediums other than print and still retain its literary integrity. This isn’t meant as a put-down of print media in favour of the “superiority” of digital/online work; it’s rather meant as an equalization. Many of the problems afflicting print publishing today are sourced in an underlying hysteria about the efficacy of print media to compete with image-and-music-augmented narratives. A new aesthetic ideology with literary aims but not traditional habits will need to be developed.

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A short audio file of the opening of my new novel about Korea, PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS. This work is in turn linked to my large screenplay module novel project PLASTIC MILLENNIUM. However, the ms. stands on its own. While my various works have  thematic connections, they work independently as discrete novels.

The audio below is a bit shorter than I’d like; I don’t get the opening phone conversation between Dae-woo and Kyoung-ja, just after Larry’s accident. Nevertheless, this gives a taste of the work, and I’ll put up more samples some time later.

Incidentally, the photo above is taken at the Dong Seoul Terminal; I made a rush trip there around a month ago, when the weather was cold. I hurried because I was apprehensive soon the weather would change and, if so, any subsequent pictures would look out of season. However, it’s stayed cold this year. And the Koreas have stayed Cold in other ways, too, as the war of words between the two nations (or rather, the war-like rhetoric emanating from one capital) have served as a timely reminder of how much this region of the world is still trapped by ghosts of its past.

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A short audio excerpt from my screenplay module novel, TRUTH MARATHON — a PLASTIC MILLENNIUM project

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PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS moves between time zones and between cultures. The protagonist, Bak Dae-woo (Dave Park), is Korean-born but also – after a long adolescence as a visa student in North York and environs – steeped in the Canadian sensibility. Yet at the same time, this is a very international novel: its other main characters – Dae-woo’s sister Kyoung-ja, her ex-husband Larry Kudowski, the troubled academic Yoon Jin-ha, and the troubled times two scion of an American military family, Fulton Fairchild III – all help capture some aspects of what might be termed the flavour of contemporaneity.

Finally, this is an innovative work: it is a screenplay-novel – it borrows some of the conventions of a screenplay. This helps speed up the narrative and keep it action- and dialogue-based. Yet at the same time, it retains the best of conventional fictional narrative, with sections of back-story and interior consciousness.

To find out more, contact me at fharvor [at] yahoo [dot] com.

News flash: Conrad Black, convicted felon, is suing Bruce Livesay and Random House for defamation/ridicule/hatred of character.

Incidentally, and by purest coincidence, Conrat Lindt, one of the main characters of the graphic novel which forms one of the modules of my mega-novel PLASTIC MILLENNIUM, also has a penchant for the courts. Of course, Lindt, being a Nietzsche aficionado, has, ah, interests, that partake of a higher plane. No wallowing in the muck of truth-raking journalism for Lindt. We have a world to save! And a superman to save it!

John Barber of The Globe and Mail

CBT: V. S. Naipaul has declared there are not any important writers any more, Philip Roth has predicted the novel will become a cult activity, Peter Stothard has asked if fiction writing simply used to be better, Cullen Murphy, David Shields, Lee Seigel, and Geoff Dyer have all stated that non-fiction is superior to fiction. The list of people of letters who apparently have lost faith in literary fiction goes on and on; it is clear that an elementary questioning of the novel is not a passing cultural phase. Furthermore, the short story seems to be under siege as well: many agents and multinational publishers do not handle/publish story collections, small magazines seem perpetually underfunded, and a YouTube-ification of text and image seems to be taking short narrative in new directions.

What is your opinion? Do the novel and short story have a future? If so, what kind? And will e-technology alter the very forms of them? If so, how?

JB: There was a piece in the NYT Book Review this weekend about a secret plan in 1958 to recruit John Steinbeck to write an anti-Nixon “attack novel” in support of potential Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stephenson — the point being that such a strategy would be unimaginable today, with novels having little of the “social power” they once did. The author of Portnoy’s Complaint, which had such a huge impact in the sixties, speaks from experience. My own experience led me far away from the novels I studied more than 30 years ago as an English major, and I took up my current beat with considerable skepticism about their value and future. But since then I have been struck by how durable the form seems. There are more novels being written than ever before, and a small number are very much worth reading. Perhaps their postwar prominence was anomalous and now we are returning to the “old normal.” I think novels will survive because they permit writers to achieve maximum, uncompromised expression completely on their own, without having to collaborate as in film tv etc.

As for stories, they will survive as long as magazines do.

CBT: Are the very significant structural changes taking place in the publishing industry having an effect on novel or short story writing? If so, how?

‘If magazines disappear, short stories will too. But I don;t see that happening. There might be fewer readers but not necessarily any less activity. I think literary fiction in general is becoming more streamlined and “readable” than it maybe was at the height of the novel’s prestige, more because of changes in popular tastes (and improvements in competing media) than the structure of the publishing industry. There is so much speculation on this matter and very few facts. One of the few facts that impresses me in this regard is that all the “Big Six” publishers remain profitable, with e-book sales adding to rather than diminishing their market share.

CBT: Is the cutting back of mid-lists and a general cautiousness about taking risks on new or relatively unknown writers affecting the caliber of writing that does manage to get into print?

JB: For sure some of the big publishers are pruning their lists, but many of those writers are going to smaller publishers. The number of fiction titles published in Canada each year keeps growing, even as unit sales decline. That’s an interesting puzzle that I can’t pretend to understand. My gut feeling is that many novels are written these days to function as calling cards or credentials rather than to be widely read. Virtually all writers now have day jobs in which resumes matter as much or more than book sales. I suppose you could say that reduces the quality of the overall output, but I wouldn’t blame publishers, and it doesnt diminish the efforts of more serious writers.

CBT: Is the selection system for novel and short story manuscripts fair? Should it be made blind?

JB: Unfair, arbitrary, inefficient, purblind, cravenly commercial — choose your adjective. All apply. But nobody has discovered a better way. Also, suggesting it be “made blind” assumes that individual editors and companies will readily agree to surrender their autonomy to conduct business as they see fit, accountable to whom they choose. I can’t imagine anything like that ever happening.

CBT: According to media reports, e-book sales now represent a significant percentage of overall sales. But small bookstores see them as more a threat to their survival than anything else, and a lot of book people remain print people. Are you enthusiastic about e-books? Do they hold the potential for a renaissance in literary publishing? Or are they over-rated and too susceptible to piracy?

JB: Ebooks are at about 15% of the market now, according to Booknet Canada, and their success has come at the expense of mass-market paperbacks rather than hardcovers or paperback originals. Ebook originals are still rare and confined mainly to the genre categories — literary fast food. Non fiction doesn’t register in the ebook market — all the best-sellers are fiction. I dont for a minute believe, as many others do, that the new format inspires creative expression allowing authors to bypass the “traditional gatekeepers.” Virtually every author who has succeeded with ebooks goes on to sign a conventional contract with a commercial publisher. And it is those publishers who are making ebooks pay.

CBT: What do you think of literary prizes? As Jason Cowley has commented, they reduce our culture’s ability to think in a critically complex fashion? Do they suggest, “this book is worth reading and all these others aren’t?”

JB: I think they are useful but problematic, especially in a small market like ours. Having three major award programs lined up in the fall does mean that only nominees get noticed. But prize programs are useful as a substitute for the reviews that are no longer being published in the press. And even if they fail to generate sales, they help to validate the efforts of nominees at least. It’s easy to be snarky but literary fiction would likely disappear from widespread public consciousness without them. .

CBT: In a piece you wrote last year during book prize season, you commented on how there was a drift away from Canadian writers writing about Canada — a task, you dryly commented, very few outside the country would take up. The “internationalization” of CanLit seems now to be an established trend, however one thinks of it; furthermore, no one feels threatened by novels by Canadians about, say, Vietnam (of which there are now at least three).

What rule of thumb would you suggest here? Avoiding writing about America? Or is something more nuanced at work? If Canadians are sometimes to write about other nations, including the US, should work about the US in particular seek to deconstruct its myths rather than reinforce them?

JB: It’s ironic that government/public support for Canadian literature originating in nationalistic sentiment should have helped produce such a cornucopia of post-nationalist/global/immigrant fiction. But that’s the big trend, and we’re in the thick of it. I certainly don’t think it’s a problem, nor would I ever propose any restrictions on what people should write about and how they should do it. The practical fact is that Canadian writers will always be tempted to embrace a wider audience because our own market is so small. They can’t afford too much of the often excessive navel gazing of US and British fiction. I read somewhere that UNESCO figured you needed 20 million potential readers to support a national literature, and English Canada is right on the cusp of that. So it makes sense to embrace the world.