The blog of Ron Schafrick
I'm pleased to report that my story "Conjecture" was accepted by The Danforth Review. It's an online journal out of Toronto, and I'll post again when the story goes live. In the meantime you can find out more about The Danforth Review here.
So after a hiatus of a couple of months, during which I read other novels and story collections, I finally got back to the business of reading Proust, this time tackling the third volume, The Guermantes Way. And what a happy homecoming it was to meet all those familiar faces again! How nice it was to become reacquainted with our unnamed narrator (I understand that in Volume VI his name is finally revealed to be, not surprisingly, Marcel); the family servant, Francoise, who simultaneously dispenses equal (and hilarious) measures of both compassion and cruelty; and Marcel’s (let’s just call him that) charming and aristocratic friend, Robert St-Loup. Also back are Marcel's calculating and unctuous friend, Bloch; the aristocrats we first met at Balbec in Volume II, Mme. Villeparisis and that arrogant and irritating Baron de Charlus (the kind of character you love to hate!); and of course the narrator’s grandmother, mother and father (although the latter makes little more than a cameo appearance in this volume—more on that later).
Just to follow up on my earlier post, I'll be reading next Monday, October 5th at Wise Bar (1007 Bloor St. West) along with Tara Gereaux and Andrew J. Simpson, the organizer of the Words at the Wise reading series. The event starts at 8 pm. For more information about Tara and her novel Size of a Fist, check out her website here. Also, check out the Facebook page for the event, and of course Andrew's website too. Very excited! See you then!
I've known about it for a few months now, but I've been asked to keep it under my hat until the announcement was officially made by the good people at McClelland & Stewart and the Writers' Trust of Canada. And now here it is. I'm thrilled to report that my story "Lovely Company" is included in The Journey Prize Stories 27. Check out their Facebook page here. The book will be available in stores on October 6th, and you can find out more here. I have to say that it was a real pleasure working with Anita Chong during the editing process of the story. Thanks so much!
On Monday, October 5th, I'll be reading once again at the Words at the Wise reading series. The event will be held at Wise Bar (1007 Bloor St. West) and starts at 8 pm. At this point, I'm not sure who the other readers will be, but I'll post more information as details become available. Andrew Simpson is the host of the reading series (and also the author of the newly released collection of stories, Heaven's Gone to Hell) and you can learn more about him here.
Hope to see you there!
On Tuesday, September 15th, I'll be the opening reader--the opening act, as it were--at the book launch for Marnie Woodrow's new novel, Heyday, published by Tightrope Books. The event is at The Gladstone Hotel and starts at 7:30. And the novel, by the way, has a very intriguing premise; I'm very much looking forward to reading it. You can find the details here. And you can find more about her novel here. Hope to see you there!
A number of years ago, in a column in The Globe and Mail’s books section dedicated to great but forgotten books there was an article on Thomas McGuane’s The Bushwhacked Piano. Although I no longer remember specifically what the article had to say about it (apart from praising it), I do recall running out to a nearby second-hand bookshop and picking up a copy. But when I started reading it, I felt it wasn’t quite my cup of tea, as it were, and promptly set it aside. I also felt it was more artifice than art, plus a little too “Southern” for my taste, and went back to reading the kind of realism that I generally prefer.
Don DeLillo is one of those names you often hear bandied about but—unfortunately for me—someone I’ve never read. That is, not until now when I recently finished Mao II.
The story centers around a reclusive writer named Bill Gray who has penned two influential novels and has been working on a third for the better part of twenty-three years, a novel that is more or less finished but one he hesitates to submit to his publisher because it doesn’t live up to the quality of his earlier works. Gray lives in Salinger-like reclusiveness and, because he hasn’t been published or even seen in years, a powerful “cult of personality” surrounds the author and his works. According to Scott, Gray’s live-in personal assistant, publishing this new and flawed work would severely damage whatever influence—even power—Gray may yield over the public imagination.
But coming out of the shadows is exactly what Gray does, or attempts to do. His friend and editor, Charlie Everson, convinces Gray to speak publicly at a press conference in London urging the release of a Swiss poet who has been taken hostage in Beirut by a band of Maoist terrorists, a press conference that never materializes because the building is bombed moments after the attendees are evacuated. And herein lies the central theme of the novel: terrorism vs. art, especially as it relates to the masses.
Although written more than two decades ago, DeLillo’s book was not only stunningly prescient but also just as valid today as it was then. While in conversation with George Haddad, a man who can introduce Gray to the hostage’s kidnappers, Gray says, “‘What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which [terrorists] influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous’” (157). A few lines later, he adds, “‘Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative’” (157).
What adds to the eerie farsightedness of this passage are the several references DeLillo makes to the twin towers in New York, what Brita, a New York photographer, describes as “the million-storey towers” (87), buildings that in themselves contain masses of people and seem to carry such haunting weight and power in the novel.
Crowds, not surprisingly, figure heavily in the novel, particularly in terms of the prominence they play during that historically pivotal year 1989. The Prologue to Mao II begins with one of those mass weddings held in Yankee Stadium led by the Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. Among the thousands to tie the knot that day is Karen, a young woman who is subsequently abducted by her family but is never fully deprogrammed of her cult-like beliefs. After running away, she is eventually “rescued” by Scott and becomes his usual bed partner, and sometimes Gray’s as well. It’s through Karen’s eyes that we see the frightening and chaotic mix of both the power and powerlessness of crowds, particularly as she sees them on television: the human stampede of soccer fans in which nearly 100 people were crushed to death in Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England (a photo of the crushed faces up against a fence introduces Part I of the book) and that utterly maniacal gathering of an estimated two million mourners after the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Teheran. Along with Karen we watch on television the masses of people surging upon Khomeini’s body on its way to the gravesite. Unwilling to relinquish their dead leader, the crowd tears apart his shroud, leaving his defenseless corpse exposed and even trampled on. Along with Karen we also watch the failed Tiananmen Square Uprising, the crowds of people gathered under the iconic Mao portrait, the troops coming in, and the piles of corpses on the street, some of whom are "still seated on their bikes" (177). (Although not mentioned, 1989 was also the year the Berlin Wall came down, bringing to mind images of the crowds of people streaming through the now-useless wall.) In her search for the missing Bill Gray, who was last seen stepping onto a crowded New York sidewalk, Karen’s roaming through New York takes her to Tompkins Square Park and the encampment of thousands of the city’s homeless living in plastic bags, cardboard boxes and makeshift lean-to's. Karen's awe at the sight of all this "human refuse" harkens back to an earlier comment made by Brita in which she claims only a handful of nameless men own everything in New York and “‘[p]eople are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sweep away the boxes’” (88), a reference it would seem to the 1988 riots when, according to Wikipedia, police attempted to clear the park of its squatters.
And looming above it all is the image of Mao—or Mao II, a series of prints Andy Warhol produced (like his famous Marilyn Munroe series) which represents not so much an actual historical personage as a represenation, a mix of lines and shadows that denote something or someone iconic—a fiction, in other words—that the crowds can believe in, blindly follow, claim as their own, and invest their faith in; images that become increasingly meaningless as the anonymous narrative of terror takes hold.
I was delighted yesterday when I got my contributor's copy of Southern Humanities Review in the mail in which my story "Refugees" is included. Although the story was accepted two years ago and is included in my collection Interpreters, it's still nice to see it come out in print form again. In a nutshell, the story is about a family of North Korean refugees who come to Canada and the veracity of the story they tell to the narrator. What was a surprise to me when I was going over the proofs a few months ago was that the opening scene is quite a bit different from the one in the book. I forgot all about that earlier version, and now I'm not sure why I ever changed it in the first place. Anyway, I'm excited to see it out there in the bigger world. To order your copy, click here. And below is a cute promotional video for the newest issue.
I was pleasantly surprised this morning when I got my contributor's copy of Best Gay Stories 2015 in the mail. My story "Lovely Company," which was first published in the Fall 2014 issue of Plenitude Magazine (#5), is included among the stories. So it goes without saying that I was thrilled back in January when Steve Berman, editor of the series, contacted me asking to include the story in the annual anthology. Naturally, I said yes. So now it's here, it's in print, and I'm totally looking forward to cozying up with this book and getting to know the stories inside. To order your own copy, which is put out by Lethe Press in the US, click here.
