Adaptation fail

Something tells me that if a book is unfilmable, you should just, maybe, not try to make a movie out of it.

World War Z, by Max Brooks, is probably the best zombie book out there. (Although, I haven't read all of Walking Dead, to be fair.) The book is "an oral history of the Zombie War."

It's been some undisclosed number of years since the zombie threat was declared officially over, and our unnamed protagonist is a guy armed with a tape recorder, collecting the stories of people who were involved. Every story is told as a transcript from the tape: just a person speaking, starting with the doctor in China who discovers one of the early cases in a small village and is silenced by the government. Our journalist interviews human traffickers who make the problem worse, even though they suspect what's happening; intelligence officers who cover it up; the CEO of a company that knowingly sells a placebo "cure"; people who hole up in gated communities; soldiers who see action on the front lines against waves of undead; members of the world's governments who eventually have to implement the scariest, most draconian systems to ensure survival; an astronaut who spends the whole apocalypse watching helplessly from the International Space Station; and the people trying to put the world back together once the war has finally been won.

The thing I really like about World War Z is the scope of it. People from all over the world, in all levels of society, get a moment to have a voice. You watch single individuals and their choices make or break history, but you also watch what average people do (there's an autistic teenager who tells her entire story in sound effects and reenactments, which makes it worse when you realize she's reenacting the moment her mother tried to strangle her while they were hiding inside a church, rather than let her be turned.) And voices from India to Japan to South Africa to Canada get to speak.

It's a global book, and what scared me about it was that you could substitute pretty much any real threat - disease, global warming, food shortages - for the zombies and get a frighteningly plausible scenario for how the way we are as a species and society makes disaster possible.

Right. And then because the book was popular, someone made a movie. And this is the trailer. Yes, that's Brad Pitt.


1. This story is about one dude. Who is Brad Pitt.
2. This one dude seems to be pretty connected in the military. I'm guessing special ops or something. Woop,
3. This is only happening in America, and look at all the Americans! Something tells me General Raj-Singh, the Tiger of Delhi, will not be appearing. Something also tells me that the eventual Plan that saves humanity will not come from a South African white supremacist, you won't hear a character claim that Cuba's isolation helped it win the Zombie War, and we'll never hear from the Chinese nuclear sub crew or the South Asian 'snakehead.' And I will lay you money the Americans don't get their best tactical ideas from people in other countries.
4. Zombies don't run in Brooks' book (and a lot of zombie aficionados will tell you they should never run. I don't personally care, because zombies are a metaphor for every other disease and disaster, and if you want them to run, fine... but they don't run in Brooks' book.)
5. In the book, by the time the zombies are causing chaos in New York, people know what they are. They're already marketing a "vaccine."
6. Most of the book, in fact, is taken up with how things get to the point of no return when humanity almost gets wiped out. This movie appears to start pretty much at the point of no return.
7. Looks to me like things devolve pretty rapidly into "guy with gun and combat training saves world as byproduct of defending wife and children." Sure, I don't know that Brad Pitt saves the world in this movie, I've only seen the trailer, but that's the trope. And even if he doesn't literally save the world singlehandedly, when Our Hero gets Into The Fight, because he wants to protect His Family, the implication is that all that nobility makes it so the world can be saved.

Maybe World War Z is unfilmable (and why shouldn't it be? Must every good book be made into a movie?) Although I would love to have seen someone try to make it as a documentary, earnestly filmed, relying mostly on the verbal testimony of the witnesses (but you don't have to be totally low-budget: some footage from the combat cameras on the ground at Yonkers, views of the devastation, maybe cameraphone video clips of early patients or of stragglers outside the fences of the walled-off Plan compounds... even the scene where the woman is walking around in Northern Canada killing zombies as they start to thaw out of the permafrost could be really cool.) That would be a really innovative zombie movie. This... well, I'm wondering what arrangement they made with Max Brooks. About all I see that's similar is the title.

A non-slam poet goes to the slam

[insert usual stuff about how long it's been since I posted here]

Last fall I competed in the first round of the VERSe Ottawa Women's Slam Qualifiers, one of a set of three qualifying rounds to pick the twelve finalists for the 2013 Women's Slam Finals. Mostly, I competed because I support the idea of having a women's slam in Ottawa, for a lot of reasons, and because it was VERSe Ottawa and I want to support them (having worked for them in their second year), and because the coordinators are friends of mine.

But it was strange, because I had never been in a poetry slam before. Despite attending a lot of them, talking about slam a lot in reviews and on my radio show, and knowing a whole lot of people in the Ottawa slam scene, I had never felt like I needed to actually compete. "My poetry's not 'slam,'" I said, and generally, it isn't. But I had memorized several of my poems, for the three-woman show Chasing Boudicca that I was in a couple of years ago, and as a challenge for a couple of Kymeras shows.  I have a bit more experience with the format now than when I first got into the scene, because I really got into story slam with Once Upon a Slam, and even came in second in the finals last year. But poetry's different somehow from storytelling, and slam in Ottawa is really established and the people who do it are really good. And I know how different my style is from the style of most people who slam.

I reworked a poem to make it 'slammier' that night: I performed a sort of mashup of two poems from the Chasing Boudicca series, knowing that the central poem (the angriest and most personal of the series, therefore the easiest to make into a slam piece) was too short. (A poem that comes in at less than about two minutes leaves the audience feeling cheated, in my experience: you're supposed to really push that three-minute limit. It's why so many slam poets talk so fast: they're cramming the poem into the maximum allowable time.)

So I added bits from another one, and while I thought the tone change in the middle was a little odd, it went over pretty well: not so much the second-round poem, my jokey, steampunky "The Scientifically Minded Young Lady's Letter to Her Suitor; or, A Gentleman's Warning." Note to self: Victorian-esque rhyme schemes don't go over well with a crowd used to hip-hop polysyllabic rhyme.

Anyway, I was surprised at the end of the night to find that I'd come in fifth. Not quite in the final four, who would go on to the finals. But nearly. I did a joking, comic-booky, "Whew!" forehead-wiping gesture. Dodged a bullet.

Except, Rusty (the coordinator) reminded me, someone could always drop out. And then I'd be back in. Depending on rankings.

And guess what.

Last Friday, I got a message from Rusty rather early in the morning, saying someone had had to pull out of the finals the next night, and he knew it was short notice, but would I be willing to slam?

I have a rule about scary things I might not otherwise have done, which I get challenged/asked/nudged to do: I tend to do them.  So I checked to see if I could repeat something I'd done before (knowing that the "Chasing Boudicca" piece had been my strongest last time) and then said yes. I was at work: I would have Saturday morning, and a bit of the afternoon, to memorize my second poem and rehearse them both.

So I did that. I'm glad I'm pretty good at memorizing things: I wasn't entertaining any delusions about winning, which was kind of liberating really. But I didn't want to embarrass myself. I knew the Chasing Boudicca one had gone over well, so I reworked it a little again and rememorized it, and then I picked a lyric, pastoral, quiet, evocative little poem I wrote about being home in New Brunswick for the summer and working in the garden. Rusty said that when I performed it, he thought, "Well, this is interesting... it's not a slam poem. Just don't hate on it, judges!"

I sort of knew that I was, as I often am, being the slightly strange, foot-in-both-worlds poet. In the poetry scene in Ottawa, I'm neither fish for fowl, really. And I knew almost no one in the audience would recognize me, the way they would the rest of the competitors. V? Sure. Dimorphic? Sure. D-Lightfull? yup. Kate Hunt? Who the hell? Where'd she come from? So I figured I might as well go with that, and do something that would be totally different.

In the end, it cost me a couple of points - one judge gave me the lowest individual score of the whole night on it. But then Brad Morden yelled "READ A BOOK!" at him/her, which made me smile. And at the end of the round, I wasn't the lowest score of the night so far.

Then in the second round I got lucky and was drawn late in the round (you want to be later, because no matter what, scores creep upwards throughout the night) and brought out the Boudicca poem, and the judges dug it. It's definitely slammier, whatever that means: something about it being faster and (in this case) angrier and direct and about personal emotions, and ending with a bit of a bang. The judges liked it - all in the 9.something range. Which boosted me a lot, and I wound up coming in eighth overall, out of twelve, when the final scores got tallied up.

Not having had any delusions about winning, I was actually really impressed with that. I don't slam. Everyone else performing were experienced, and had competed at regular slams through the year. I've had a lot of experience at storytelling over the last year or so, but still, I was amazed.

And what it did was to remind me of a couple of things. One: I don't write enough lately. Or, really, at all. And two - maybe I should try this slam thing, just to see if I can do it. Apparently I don't make a half bad showing with a day's notice. . . so maybe I should give it a try?

Going on the journey

I know some of the other people involved - and more involved than me - have already written about last weekend's epic telling of The Odyssey: Marie Bilodeau and Tom Lips, in particular. I was there, as usual for storytelling events, as a cheerleader and booster (and, for my sins, offerer of handmade cross stitched Dalek T-shirts in exchange for donations to the Indiegogo fundraiser . . . I now have a dozen Daleks to stitch . . .)

They have nothing to do with The Odyssey, no. Except in that the Doctor is a lot like Odysseus in many ways. Traveling from one adventure to the next, defeating monsters, putting everyone traveling with him in mortal danger, and having very clever plans which he makes up as he goes along. Poseidon's kinda like the Black Guardian, come to think of it. . . and the rest of the gods could be the High Council of the Time Lords, exiling him, then randomly deciding to send him home. . .  someone stop me.

But to be totally honest, I think we all had our doubts. Would people really want to come to the NAC at 10:00 in the morning and commit themselves to a story until 10:00 at night? Is The Odyssey that timeless? Are people that curious?

As it turned out, they did, and it is, and they were.

My niece came up for the weekend from Montréal to see the show, intrigued by the idea. We got ourselves up and caffeinated in time to run some supplies over to the green room before the show at 8:30 a.m. - fruits, veggies, bread, dips, coffee, tea, chips, brownies, etc. - and I set them up while she went out and staked out a table. I'd been to a long telling before, a couple of years ago, when a group of storytellers took three days to tell the whole Norse myth cycle. This was different, though. This was more public, in a way. It was at the NAC, not under a tent in Jan Andrews and Jennifer Cayley's front lawn. It was more formal.

But the magic still happened - and people did come. At 10:00 the room was comfortably full of people who grabbed a coffee, found their seats, settled in, and got ready to go the distance with Odysseus, and we started out with the gods deciding what to do with him, as he was trapped on Calypso's island.

The time flew. There's no way I could reflect on every storyteller's performance (there were eighteen of them) but there were moments that stood out, and pairings that made perfect sense to me. Gail Anglin does the conversations of gods so well. Jacques Falquet's Calypso was, to be honest, dead sexy. Daniel Kletke's Cyclops was a wonderful juxtaposition of careful herdsman and vicious brute. Kim Kilpatrick's voice and humor were perfect for the scene with Nausicaa by the stream. Top Lips, in the protracted, viciously funny scene in the hall before Odysseus shows himself, was wonderful. When Marie Bilodeau's set was over, my niece leaned over to me and said that she guessed Marie got that bit so she could tell the part where Telemachus kicks Peisistratus awake at three in the morning because he's so impatient to get back to Ithaca, and I believe it: she made the two of them, in a couple of lines of dialogue, seem like college roommates, which is essentially what they are. Marta Singh made the scene where Odysseus first speaks with Penelope, and she thinks he's just a beggar, seem like a seduction, and when the nurse discovers who he is, she made me feel the vital importance of keeping her from spilling the secret. Katherine Grier's ending to her story, and the set, with Odysseus and Telemachus, finally revealed, armed, and side by side in the hall facing the suitors, "resplendent in bronze," rang for a few shocked seconds before the applause began. Jan Andrews' reflective style perfectly matched the final scenes, where Penelope and Odysseus are finally back together. . . and have no idea what to say to each other.

It's also a story about people, with so much humanity in it. There were things I'd never known about the story, like the way you get to watch Telemachus grow up, the way you get a sense of why those who stay loyal to Odysseus love him so much, the way Penelope is revealed to be far more complex than you'd think. And the way the ocean, and all those small rocky islands with their harbours and their seafaring people, are so prominently a part of the story.

There's something about committing to hearing a story the long way, sound by sound and word by word, that connects you to it. It takes time for things to happen. It takes nearly twenty minutes for Odysseus' great bow, which Penelope brings into the hall, to finally make it way inevitably into Odysseus' hands. Telemachus sails off, and a party of suitors follow to ambush and kill him on his way home, and hours and hours later you finally find out what happened. And I don't think I could have listened to a reading that was that long: but when it's storytellers, it's a different experience entirely.

I was also happy to see that although there were half-day tickets, starting at 4:30 (just after Odysseus lands in Ithaca, I believe) most people opted to come for the whole day, and take the whole journey. And very few, once they'd come in and started to listen, could bring themselves to leave. At the lunch and supper breaks, we wandered out into the bright daylight and found patios to sit on with other people from the audience, talked, ate, drank, and then headed back quickly, not wanting to miss a word.

The applause was resounding and long at the end, and then there was even more applause, and then Top Lips led everyone in a resounding chorus of "What Do You Do With A Drunken Suitor" ("Hey, hey, rosy fingers, earlie in the morning....") and there was more applause, and then people began, tired and with what my niece and I called "story-brain," to trickle away. But slowly: some of them not quite wanting to part company just yet. Not after having been on such a long journey together.

Talking to Bernie

This week on Literary Landscape I got to talk to Bernie Finkelstein - a life-long insider in the Canadian music scene and the founder of True North Records. He was Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLauchlan's manager; he produced records by Rough Trade, Kensington Market and Dan Hill. Basically, his life has followed the track of the Canadian music business from "Business? What business?" through the 60s Yorkville boom and the slow but sure building of the profile of Canadian artists. He's been influential in the creation of a lot of the support systems that have allowed new Canadian musicians to flourish, like FACTOR, MuchFACT, and a bunch of other initiatives that help new Canadian artists hold their own against the tidal wave of the American industry. I loved what he had to say about how being Canadian doesn't necessarily make you 'indie' in any trendy, hipster way, but it does in that it makes you think, a lot of the time, about the giant you're lying cheek by jowl with.

I read the book in a matter of about two days - partly because it was sent to me on Tuesday, and I had to interview Bernie on Thursday. But it wasn't a trial to read it in that time. It felt like a chat, in part because of his writing style, which was very conversational, but also because all he was doing with the book was talking about what happened to him. And without laying it on thick about the points he was making, he let incidents illustrate the point. Like the moment with the CNE, when he ran into a director who refused to have Murray McLauchlan perform, saying he wouldn't put "that kind of stuff" on the stage at a family show.

Murray McLauchlan. This guy:



Apparently the problem was the director didn't know the difference between Murray McLauchlan and Maclean and Maclean. These guys.



Clearly, people didn't know anything about their own music scene, the incident seemed to say. Clearly, Canadian talent had a long fight ahead of it to be recognized by its own national institutions... Anyway, I read the book and felt like I had an idea of the guy I was going to be talking to, but I was still a little nervous talking to someone who's talked to everyone else. What am I going to be able to say that's remotely intelligent about the music industry? I thought.

Turned out, as it usually does, that I didn't have to. Bernie was a great interview: of course, he's had decades of experience. But he also managed to lead me nicely from one of the questions I'd meant to ask to the next.  The whole thing went smoothly: I had time to get to the major points I wanted to nudge him into talking about, like the uneasy relationship with the American industry, his reasons for staying in Canada, not moving to New York like everyone else did in the early 60s, and talking about the 'bleep' that sold Rough Trade's single 'High School Confidential.' What I didn't get to, and wish I had, was his take on the disappearance of the 'single.' Wish I knew what he had to say about that. Maybe I'll ask him if I can make it to his reading at the Elmdale on Sunday (7:00: check it out at writersfestival.org.)

The interview is posted here! Click to listen: about 30 minutes.

Some songs we talked about during the interview, for your infotainment:

Don't send this sentence to an editor

I'm in the middle of sifting through community announcements for the Centretown Buzz. You would not believe - or perhaps you would - how fast my eyeballs went skidding off this opening sentence:

The Sunday afternoon concert, CARMINA BURANA by Carl Orff, under the energetic direction of Music Director Kurt Ala-Kantti with participation of happy choristers of three choirs: Harmonia Choir of Ottawa, Ottawa Brahms Choir, and Cross Town Youth Choir and guests drawn from Nepean Choir and Tone Cluster , and with the tremendous support from most accomplished, professional fine musicians and soloists from the Ottawa scene, was a great success.

That subject is so far from the verb it needs a calling card to avoid roaming charges. 'Nuff said.

Stuart Ross and Bruce Kaufmann on open mikes

There's a lot to think about in this recent post on Bloggamooga. Stuart Ross, firmly on the 'open mikes are painful necessary evils' camp, respectfully and engagingly disagreeing with Bruce Kaufmann, open-mike organizer at the Artel in Kingston.

I think I pretty firmly stand in Bruce's camp on this one: but I like the question Stuart poses, which is, "How does one create a supportive testing ground for new writers and at the same time also encourage quality work?"

I think the answer is, you create a supportive testing ground for new writers. And you don't expect that everyone will bring quality work. How I see the e- and self-publishing world evolving is very similar to how I've seen open mikes work: eventually, over time, you see a natural filtering, a survival of the fittest, taking place. People learn where to go for the sort of thing they like. The challenge for the people running open mikes, or any other test-flight area of the arts, is to remember that change, evolution, and selection are out of their immediate control in these cases. So is 'quality.' If your open mike becomes known as the sort of place where a particular kind of poetry is appreciated, then it will trend toward that kind of poetry, in much the same way as a poetry slam, where you see rankings and winners among the poets, will often trend toward a style of poetry that holds popularity at the moment. But these things might change. It's a very fluid process. And also - not everything that one audience thinks is good will go over so well with another.

Stuart says: "What I see happen at open mics is that everyone gets wild applause. In fact, sometimes the most inexperienced writer gets the most applause. Is it possible that open mics reward bad writing much of the time?"

I think I disagree that applause necessarily encourages bad poetry. I think most of the encouraging or discouraging that happens in an open mike happens in the conversations afterward. Also, where one open mike might be a safer ground for new writers - applauding wildly for the person who's had the guts to get up and read their work - not all are, in my experience. It's up to the individual poet whether they want to go to another open mike, with the same poem, and maybe get a lukewarm reception because of the kind of audience that's there. And, if that happens, it's up to that poet to decide whether they give a flying crap what the audience at Poetry Series Y thinks, and whether they want to go back and keep reading for Poetry Series X, or want to examine their poetry and see if maybe Poetry Series Y's audience has a point. At that point, ability to grow and a thick skin come in handy.

But... it's still not the responsibility of the people running the open mike to decide. It's up to that poet, who either says, "sure, I'll go find out what Poetry Series Y has to teach me and see if I want to incorporate it into my practice" or says, "Hell with Series Y, they love my stuff at Series X and I'm okay with that, that's all I really want."

Nor is it the responsibility of the audience at any of the series, really, to encourage or discourage the poet. The audience's job is to listen with respect, have an opinion, and react however they would like to. Again, if they don't like the poem they don't have to clap: if they don't like a majority of the stuff at a series they don't have to keep going. If they're willing to listen to a lot of possibly rough or raw poetry, because of the potential in it, they'll stay and clap for the brave poet who gets on stage shaking. If they're not, they'll go to another series and encourage the poets whose work they respect and look up to.

You can't dictate the quality of the work or the ear of the audience. All you can do is provide the space. Maybe, by inviting people whose work you like to read in the open mike, and as featured readers, you can demonstrate what sort of stuff you think is interesting and valuable in poetry. But you can't dictate what your audience will take away from it. All you can do is provide the microphone. Things will shape up as they may, and in accordance with your personality and hosting style, with the people you draw in to listen and the people you draw in to perform.

The main thing is, without the audience who listens to the first time poets, and the raw, and the rough poets, where will the audience and the poets in all the other, higher 'quality' series come from? This is a self-taught art, in which you have to find your own way, meet your own mentors, and teach yourself all the new tricks, and everyone has to start somewhere. Everyone, at some point, has got up and shared a bad poem. And if they had not done that, they would not keep doing it, and there would be far, far, fewer poets in the world.

Change comes: Jan Andrews' "Who Wants the Dress?"

Coming up: Jan Andrews at Voices of Venus, March 14th at 7:30 pm. Venus Envy: 320 Lisgar

Astrid Lindgren, who most people know as the author of the Pippi Longstocking books, also wrote a book that I enjoyed as a child even as it creeped me out. It was called The Brothers Lionheart. A quick run through the plot: Karl is the narrator, a young boy who is sick with some kind of fatal illness. His older brother Jonatan, who is just about perfect, tells him about a place that you go when you die, called Nangiyala, where "all the stories are still happening." He promises that he will follow Karl there, and that even if it's a very long time before he dies, it won't seem that long to Karl. But, as it turns out, Jonatan dies first, saving Karl from a fire. When Karl dies not long after, they're reunited in Nangiyala, where Karl is no longer afflicted by his illness and is finally as strong and healthy as his brother. They settle down there in an idyllic, boys'-adventure life, but have only been there a short time when they get embroiled in a struggle between good and evil (evil in the form of a nasty warlord from the next valley over.) In the course of the battle, Jonatan is mortally wounded. But, he tells Karl, it's okay, because when you die in Nangiyala, you go to another place called Nangilima, which is even better, because there's no evil there. So Karl picks his brother up, carries him to the edge of a cliff, and jumps off. End of book.

I was disturbed by the book as a kid - and not really because the main characters die (twice.) All the usual reasons the book might be thought to disturb a child (suicide as the answer to being crippled, for example) didn't have as much effect on me as the way the book seemed to say that as soon as you think you've got the world figured out - as soon as you think you know what's going to happen, in this world or in the next - you'll discover that there's another layer beyond that, and another, and another. You solve the puzzle of this world (or it's resolved for you - in Karl's case, by death and being reborn in Nangiyala) and there will be more and different conflicts to survive, and yet another mystery of what comes after, waiting for you. Or, as the lady in Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time says: "You're very clever, young man, very clever ... But it's turtles all the way down!"

The Brothers Lionheart popped into my mind after I saw storyteller Jan Andrews performing her show "Who Wants the Dress?" It's a very powerful show, and in part, I think it's about finding out that once you figure out Nangiyala, sometimes you discover there's a Nangilima no one told you about.

Jan's show starts with a telling of a story by the English writer Sara Maitland. The story is a strange and mesmerizing one, about a young man who is compelled by tradition to dress as a woman in order to hunt his first seal. (According to Jan, Maitland claims this is a real folk tradition in some parts of the UK.) Killing the seal is the way to prove his manhood - but when he does dress as a woman he undergoes a transformation, and becomes the woman, and his/her shifting identity feels like a dreamlike discovery and a collapsing of his/her way of seeing the world all at once.

Jan's story picks up from the end of the first, and explores growing up in a time and place where the possibility that she might be a lesbian wasn't even considered. (Jan is nearly 70: it was a different time.) She tells the story of growing up, learning to fit in, learning the conventions (don't kick your leg over your bike, getting on "the boys' way"), wearing the dresses and the pretty clothes, playing the role that she and everyone around her assumed was hers to play. She tells about getting married, having children, all as things should progress. She thought she had life figured out. And then she met the woman that she would fall in love with, and everything changed. Of course things never change so drastically without turmoil, and without looking back at who you thought you were and rewriting it, like laying a layer of vellum over the past and retracing the lines. But eventually the storms cleared and the dust settled and she went forward into the rest of her life, with her partner, having made what most people would consider the greatest discovery and transformation of her life.

But then - at least this is what I felt, hearing the story - after years of settling into who she "really was," an encounter at a storytelling conference got her thinking that perhaps there was a Nangilima that she hadn't known about before, that there was another layer of vellum that could be laid down over the past and retraced on, that you don't ever know, even at 70, that you have everything figured out, that it's turtles all the way down.

What moved me about her story - aside from the obvious courage it has taken for her to put this show together and perform it - was that it rocks the ground under everyone's feet. Not just those who are confronting questions of gender identity and sexuality, as the world's views of those subjects shift and change around all of us, but everyone. The Brothers Lionheart gave me the creeps as a kid because it suggested that nothing is ever finally resolved. It's the disturbing truth at the centre of a lot of philosophies: you don't know that you don't know, and nothing you think you know can be relied on utterly. In the face of the world, you're best not to develop attachments to what you think is true. Change comes. It will shake you.

(If you want to see Jan perform this sit-still, barely-breathe, beautiful story, get yourself to Venus Envy this Wednesday at 7:30 for Voices of Venus.)