Few writers can lay claim to the triple crown — the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize — of CanLit award nominations. M.G. Vassanji pulled it off two years ago with The Assassin’s Song, and Rawi Hage followed suit with last year’s Cockroach. This year, Vancouver writer Annabel Lyon joined their illustrious ranks with The Golden Mean, her first novel for adults. Depicting Aristotle’s tutelage of a young Alexander the Great, The Golden Mean is a gripping, thoughtful dramatization of one of the most intriguing relationships in ancient history. Tonight, Lyon joins the other four writers shortlisted for the Giller in Toronto for the award ceremony. I spoke with her over champagne during the International Festival of Authors.

Before we talk about The Golden Mean, can you tell me about the experience of being nominated for all these awards?

I feel like I’ve been hit by something large. It’s overwhelming, and the days have become very long. It’s a lot of media and it’s a lot of readings. I’m used to being at home in my room and my book being this little personal thing, and all of the sudden it’s just out there. Of course, I’m not complaining at all. It’s wonderful, but it is very overwhelming, and I’m a pretty shy person.

How did the experience of writing a novel compare to writing the shorter fiction you’ve published?

It was really hard. I feel like I’m a short story writer. I always compare it to running: it all depends on what you’ve got the body for, and what you’re wired for. You might be a short-distance runner, or you might be a long-distance runner. I think I’m a short-distance writer. I feel confident when I do that, in control. The novel was a long, hard slog, and it didn’t come naturally at all. There were many points where I thought, “Can I just make this back into a short story?” I wanted to give up. But the story was just too big; it needed the scope of a novel.

Do you plan to write more novels in the future?

I have an idea for a sequel to this one. It was always a two-book project in my mind. I would love to write more short stories and I plan to, but it’s not like I have all these great novel ideas racked up and waiting to go in a production line. It would have to be something pretty compelling to get me to dive back into that again. Did I mention it was hard?

Why write a novel about Aristotle today?

I was a philosophy major as an undergrad. I liked ancient philosophy and ethics, and he’s the towering figure when you put those two together. I always loved to read his work, which I realize is incredibly geeky, which I am. In times of stress I would read Nicomachean Ethics, because it calmed me down. It’s someone trying to think things through in a very steady, calm, orderly way. To give you a trivial example: I would come home from going on a date which was kind of miserable, and I’d feel gross and wasn’t ready for bed right away, and I would start reading Aristotle. No wonder I didn’t get more dates. The period after September 11, not quite so trivially, was a stressful time. I started thinking, as did many people in the arts, “What’s the relevance of what I’m doing? Who needs fiction right now? What am I doing after all?” I started reading Aristotle again, and I was struck by how relevant and how contemporary he is. He’s asking questions like, “What is it to live a good life? What is it to be a good citizen? How do you avoid extremism?” All of which is hugely relevant. I remember reading that tiny little bio that was in the front of [his books] and thinking how I would make that into a novel. I’m a fiction writer, and eventually the fiction brain comes back. It took a long time before I realized I was actually going to write the novel, because I was just doing it as an exercise to see how I would write the novel if I was going to do it. [Finally] I accepted that I was really working on it.

Are there particular lessons you think Aristotle has for us today?

That idea of the golden mean, the avoidance of extremes and trying to find a middle ground. I think that is relevant, for obvious reasons in the world today, and something that will remain relevant, at the personal level and the political level, as long as there are human beings. My bigger project was that I really wanted people to know who Aristotle was and remember what he gave to the culture, because he’s at the foundation of so many things. He was one of the first empirical scientists. He went out and got his hands dirty, where the Greek philosophers before him just sat in chairs and thought things through. He was the father of logic, which led all the way to computer science and gave us the world we have today. He was one of the first people to do dissection on animals, which gave us modern medicine. Then there’s his ethics. And not just western culture, he was a huge influence over medieval Islamic scholars, as well. He’s like a Leonardo DaVinci or a Shakespeare — one of those once-in-a-thousand-years brains. I have little kids and I realized they can go through twelve years of school, they can go to university, they can get PhDs, and never have to learn anything about Aristotle. That felt wrong to me. I just want people to realize that deep down under everything the world is today, he’s there. It’s all built on top of what he did.

How close is your portrayal of Aristotle to what we know about the actual person?

There are works of historical fiction that play a lot more with characters and invent scenes that never really happened. That can be wonderful and really fun to read, but since my goal was to kind of give Aristotle back, I didn’t want to give him back in a warped or twisted way. I wanted to keep it pretty straightforward. Obviously, there’s not a lot that’s known because he lived 2,300 years ago, so I had to extrapolate a lot from his writings. For instance, it’s known that his father was a physician, so I assumed that he would have learned some of his father’s trade. I don’t know that for sure, but it’s a pretty safe assumption.

Can you talk a bit about your decision to portray him as essentially bipolar?

Again, that’s extrapolation from his work. He wrote in a book called Problems about the link between what he called melancholy — but we would call depression — and the creative temperament. It sounds like something he knew intimately and wrote about from experience. Then you look at the sheer amount of work that he produced. It’s a manic mind that could never switch off. He was just insanely curious about everything. Metaphysics, law, politics, theatre, marine biology, astronomy, astrology, the Olympics — you name it and he wrote a book about it. So at the other end there was this kind of frenetic mind that just never seemed to stop. You take those two things and then look in the Ethics where he writes about the golden mean being his ideal. I thought, that doesn’t sound like somebody who’s arrived at that, it sounds like someone who desperately wants that.

What is it about this particular period in Aristotle’s life — when he began tutoring Alexander the Great — that attracted you to write about it?

Those seven years were the most tumultuous of his life. He spent the first twenty years of his adult life in Plato’s Academy as basically a student and then as a teacher. And then he had this period of travels where, after Plato died, he went to Asia Minor, he went to Turkey, and then he lived on the island of Lesbos before being summoned back to his birthplace, Macedonia. He spent seven years there, and during that period Macedonia conquered the rest of the southern city-states. He was away from Athens, which is the center of the world for an intellect like him. Then he tutored the young Alexander, who must have been a force to be reckoned with. After Philip, the king of Macedonia, died, Alexander took the throne and went off on his big campaigns. Aristotle went back to Athens and stayed there for pretty much the rest of his life. Once again he was in a university writing books. Externally and internally, I thought that seven-year period really had the most going on, and it’s also a nice, discreet period for a novelist. It has a beginning, and a middle, and an end. For me, coming to it from short stories, I needed that framework to hang it on.

What was the research process like?

I wrote a very embryonic, complete first draft of about forty pages before I did much research at all, and then went out and did a lot of reading. I came back and realized I’d gotten all this stuff wrong, so I went back and fixed it. It got longer: it was eighty pages, then a hundred pages. I went out and did more research, and then I came back to writing again. The neat thing about something set in ancient times is that there’s a limit to how many primary sources you can read. You can get to the end of it, whereas if you’re writing about Shakespeare you can go on researching forever. So in a way, [The Golden Mean] being set so long ago made the research a little easier. But I didn’t go to Greece. I was having babies at the time that I was writing this and I couldn’t get away from them. More to the point, you can’t go to ancient Greece. Things that I would have wanted to see just weren’t there anymore.

Did working on the novel so long change your relationship to Aristotle’s work?

The more I worked on him, the more he became a frail figure in my mind. He starts out seeming like this monolithic, huge brain. Such a reputation, such influence down the ages; you think he must have been this solid, confident figure. Yet the more I read his work and the more I thought about the character, the less true that seemed. He increasingly became someone who I felt worried for.

Throughout the novel, characters use contemporary vernacular, including profanity. What went into your decision to take that route?

When I started working on it, I found that I was using a very British diction, which was really annoying, because that’s not my diction. My dad’s English, so I sort of have that voice in my head. A lot of historical fiction, especially about the ancient world, is written by Brits. It’s become a convention to have characters speak British diction. I started questioning why I was doing this, and why I couldn’t just use a North American diction. I ended up having the Athenians speak like Brits, because the Athenians are from of an older, more refined culture; they certainly looked down on the Macedonians for being a very young, very wealthy, barbarous society that had to import all its culture. I gave the Macedonians my vernacular, the North American ways of speech. I’ve had reviewers trip on that sometimes and say, “Well, why do they speak this, it sounds anachronistic, it sounds too contemporary, would they really swear like that?” Well, why would they say “bloody hell” like a British person? That doesn’t make any more sense. [Using contemporary vernacular] also seemed a way of saying this isn’t British history that I’m writing, this is Canadian history. We’re a democracy, and where does that come from? We watch Hollywood movies that are in three acts, and who wrote about that first? This is Canadian history, it’s North American history, it’s world history — so why can’t I use my own voice?

Since this is your first novel for adults, I wonder what differences you noticed between writing for adults and children, both in the composition and the reception.

I’ve found children’s writing easier. It’s a more joyous thing to do. I look forward to sitting down at the desk, and it comes very easily. Obviously there are certain things you wouldn’t write about in a children’s book, and the level of language has to be different. I had to learn to do that, and I had a great editor who helped me through it. The Golden Mean was definitely harder, darker. As far as reception goes, I think the real contrast is with publishing short fiction. People often think The Golden Mean is my first book, when I’ve written prior collections. Short fiction really doesn’t count. I’ve spoken to poets about this, and they’re also often asked, “Are you just a poet?” In the same way: “Are you just a short story writer?” It still amazes me that people are buying this book. As a short story writer, I’m used to selling my 400 copies. You sit at the tables waiting to sign, and you watch everybody line up for the novelists. Now people are lining up for me, and I still have that kind of feeling: “Really, you bought that? You bought my book?” I have no experience with this. This is crazy.

(Photo by Phillip Chin)

Lisa Moore is picking at old wounds. Her latest novel, February, is about the Ocean Ranger — an oil rig whose sinking off the coast of Newfoundland in February 1982 remains a painful blight on the province’s collective memory. February follows the lives of the fictional Helen O’Mara — whose husband is among the eighty-four men killed in a disaster that yielded no survivors — and her four children. Moore explores how loss is played out over nearly thirty years of slip-and-slide between past and present. With February, the author delivers what readers of her two previous collections of short stories and one novel have come to expect of her work: prose that is at once challenging and facile, richly poetic but eminently consumable.

When February came out, one critic accused it of being too Canadian. We’re at a point where “Canadian” is sometimes used as shorthand for literature that is too aesthetic or intellectual.  What are your thoughts on where such “Canadian-ness” fits into our national literature?

I’m from Newfoundland, and that probably comes before being Canadian, or at least gets mixed up in it: they’re two separate identities mixing together. Since becoming a writer, I’ve travelled through Canada a lot to do readings, and that has really informed my idea of what it means to be Canadian — just travelling in the landscape and seeing how different it is and meeting the people. I really don’t believe there is such a thing as a Canadian kind of writing. I think that Canadian literature is as diverse as the country is big, and it gets more and more diverse every day. I read last night with three other writers, and each of the books that we read from was completely different. Of the three books written by Canadians, one is set in Beirut, one is love poetry, and mine is about the sinking of the Ocean Ranger. That’s a literary experience in Canada: if you go to a reading, you hear all of that.

Do Canadian authors tend more toward regionalism, then? Does writing from Newfoundland have a distinct voice?

Newfoundland is difficult to get to, and it has in the past been difficult to make a living there. Mostly people were dependent on fish. Now, of course, the fishery is gone, and we’re reaping the benefits of oil.  Michael Crummey’s [recent book Galore] is about outport living, and my book is about an oil rig that sank. Both involve isolation. An oil rig is an island, too, in a way. So that’s something that we share in common: the literature is informed by geography.

You and Michael Crummey are both belong to the writer’s group The Burning Rock Collective. It seems that in Newfoundland, and St. John’s in particular, the artistic community is tightly knit.  How much does the conversation taking place in that community influence your work?

Michael Winter is a very good friend of mine, and Ramona Dearing, Larry Mathews, Claire Wilkshire, Beth Ryan: these are all people whose work I’ve read and commented on while it was in progress, and they’ve read mine and offered me criticism. That experience makes literature a really living thing. It gives it another layer; it lifts it off the page. St. John’s is also a diverse place artistically. The music scene is very rich, there’s a great visual arts scene, and film is taking off. Everybody knows each other, and everyone is often collaborating.

In February, we get a strong sense of community. The Ocean Ranger sinks, and there’s this experience of communal grief that happens afterward.

When the Ocean Ranger sank in Newfoundland, it was a tremendous shock that just reverberated through the whole province. That disaster is still a raw wound there.

Why do you think that is?

It’s because it never should have happened. Corners were cut, and safety procedures weren’t followed. The men weren’t trained properly; they didn’t have enough survival suits. The lifeboats were not durable; many of them broke apart when they got in the water. Loss of the sort that occurred on the Ocean Ranger is always shocking and difficult to take, but even more so when it’s unnecessary.

It broke my heart to read the Royal Commission on the Ocean Ranger disaster.  I just found it unbearably sad. It outlines the details of all the things that went wrong, many of which could have been avoided. It made me realize that people risk their lives just to make a living on a regular basis.

Do you have any personal connection to the Ocean Ranger disaster?

No, but my own father died very suddenly of natural causes around the same time. My mother and father were madly in love, and I watched my mother go through that grief. My sister and I went thought it as well.

I thought a lot about the idea of trauma when I read February and the idea — I think Hannah Arendt said this, among other people — that it can be worked through with narrative. Was writing February a kind of catharsis?

When I went to research the book there was very little material information available. There was almost nothing written: just the Royal Commission and a few books and documentaries. It was astonishing how little material there was about an event that had left such a mark on Newfoundland.  Then this year another book came out at the same time as my own — a piece of non-fiction by Mike Heffernan called Rig — and a sociologist named Susan Dodd is writing a book about the Ocean Ranger as well. It feels to me like people have come to a point in the process of grieving or working through trauma where it’s becoming possible to tell the story. And also absolutely necessary to tell the story.

I wanted to show that this is not the kind of disaster that just hits the headlines and then goes away. This is the kind of thing that continues to affect people who are left behind for generations. It wasn’t just the loss of those men, as awful as that was, it was also that their families were scarred. In fact, the whole province was. It was important to me to say that with the book.

Despite that, the ending of February is very hopeful.

When someone dies, in order to honour that life you have to live joyfully. Even though the book is about grief in some ways, I wanted there to be joy in it as well. I wanted that to come through in the language, in the way that Helen experiences through her senses. I hope that it’s a sensual book, that the senses of the reader are engaged and come alive. And I wanted Helen to fall in love again. Because I think that is not, in fact, a romantic notion but a realistic notion.

(Photo by Barbara Stoneham)

With such successes as The World According to Garp, A Prayer For Owen Meany, and The Cider House Rules to his name, John Irving is one of the most beloved novelists of our time. Last week he appeared at IFOA XXX to promote his twelfth novel, Last Night in Twisted River. (You can listen to the early part of the event via The Globe and Mail’s podcast.)

At first, Irving spoke about his writing process, which always begins with him figuring out the final sentence of his intended novel. Only then, he explained, can he know where to start. For two decades, Irving struggled to find the closing words of Twisted River. When he had them at last, he was able to craft the book with unprecedented speed. Irving started writing in 2005, and delivered the manuscript to his publisher just over a year ago — a furious pace by his standards.

Irving read the novel’s opening passages, then sat down with CTV host Seamus O’Regan for a fascinating discussion. O’Regan quoted a passage from Twisted River wherein the protagonist, a renowned writer named Daniel Baciagalupo, laments the propensity of readers to search his novels for evidence of autobiography. O’Regan likewise lamented that this put him in the awkward position of recognizing autobiographical elements in Twisted River, but feeling reluctant to explore them. Irving jokingly threw his interviewer a lifeline when he admitted that Kurt Vonnegut, in scenes from the book, repeats the same advice to Danny at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop that he once gave Irving, in reality, at the same institution.

During the audience Q&A session that followed, a high school English teacher asked Irving how he feels about his work being taught in schools. The author confessed to mixed feelings. Many of his favourite books are those that he first read in school, he said, and so he likes that students will be exposed to his work. But there were other books (e.g. Faulkner canon), he continued, that he was made to read when he wasn’t ready for them, and so he hates the idea of students being forced to slog through his novels if they don’t enjoy them. “Teach the books,” Irving instructed his questioner, “but make sure your students know I’m not the one forcing them to read them.”

Later, Irving related an amusing anecdote about Charlton Heston’s arrival at a Planned Parenthood benefit screening of The Cider House Rules, the 1999 film based on his abortion-themed novel. No one would sit with Heston, fearing he was a right-wing zealot, but the writer knew better. “The Planned Parenthood people assumed that because he was a big gun-rights guy, he must be pro-life — when actually, and I’ll bet you didn’t know this, he was as staunchly pro-choice as he was pro-gun. His entire political philosophy was, ‘Don’t you tell me what to do!’”

All in all, a very enjoyable evening with one of America’s most celebrated storytellers.

It may be the most overworked expression of existential crisis in the language, a phrase quoted so often it has become little more than a flippant cliché, and yet, to be or not to be: that really is the question at the heart of A Serious Man. The latest Coen brothers film opened recently to predominantly good reviews, and it certainly went over well with the crowd I was in the other night. But, in spite of all the laughs it got, it’s hard to say just how much irony is implied in the title. A lot of the laughter I heard rippling around me had a bemused, nervous undercurrent, the kind of chuckle you give when you aren’t sure if laughter is the expected response but still wish to signal you’re in on any joke that may have been intended.

Like much of Joel and Ethan Coen’s best work, A Serious Man mingles pathos and levity, not in order that the one should undercut or relieve the other, but to reveal just how fine is the razor’s edge between the two. Incongruous humour is one of the brothers’ favourite devices for keeping an audience off balance, and when the pretense of straight comedy is suddenly dropped, the viewer is bracingly made to see how brutal outrages and genuine pathos are sometimes born of unlikely beginnings. You might call this the reductio ad absurdum school of black comedy, where the dangerous potential of an amusing premise doesn’t fully reveal itself until after you’ve taken the hook. Such abrupt shifts in tone can register like a sucker punch to the solar plexus. If they don’t morally implicate you for finding humour in what may turn out to be no laughing matter, then they at least make you wonder what you found so damn funny in the first place.

This is part of what’s going on in A Serious Man. It doesn’t make sense to describe the movie in terms of plot, since that would imply a cause-and-effect chain of events set in motion by characters acting deliberately. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a middle-aged suburban Jew who teaches physics at a local college in the ’60s, is the quasi protagonist of the film, if not of his own destiny. Gopnik is an emasculated, ineffectual milquetoast, a spear-carrier in the ugly melodrama of his own life, and yet a man more to be pitied than scorned. His failure to intervene in the events of his life — a crumbling marriage, a household off its axis, a controversy that threatens his job — is not merely the result of a deficit of will, for of what use is free will in a universe ruled by chance? How can our actions be meaningful if we have limited or no control over their consequences — if they have no consequences at all? (Early in the film, a student attempts to bribe Gopnik for a passing grade. “Actions have consequences” is the professor’s rebuke. “Yes. Often,” says the student in clipped monotone. “Always! Actions always have consequences!” Gopnik insists, pounding his desk as if to persuade himself as much as the student seated opposite.) And what if — to echo one of the movie’s repeated refrains — we’ve done nothing at all and yet find ourselves squarely in the path of the tornado? What if action and inaction lead to precisely the same outcome: who’s to say this or that is the better course?

In many ways this is familiar terrain for the Coens. Time and again in their films, blind chance intrudes into the lives of characters and capsizes the notion of a world in which everything happens for a reason. As Anton Chigurh, the coin-flipping mercenary of No Country for Old Men, observes from behind the barrels of his shotgun: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” Of what use is any rule, for that matter, when we are just a coin toss away from a confrontation with the forces of random chance that a character like Chigurh represents?

Larry Gopnik is very much the plaything of such dark powers, and the Coens surely mean for us to see our own smallness in him. Gopnik is so preoccupied with the “uncertainty principle” that he dreams of chalking up an acre of blackboard with a complex proof of the theorem. (“It proves we can’t ever really know what’s going on. So it shouldn’t bother you. Not being able to figure anything out.”) And yet, the obscure mathematical notation closely resembles his simpleton brother’s nonsense scribblings in the so-called “Mentaculus,” a small journal which the latter describes as a “probability map — of the universe.” It’s not altogether clear how seriously we should take Gopnik’s embrace of (or capitulation to) the principle of uncertainty: it seems equally a craven refusal of responsibility and a philosophic acceptance of the absurd. Gopnik has allowed himself to be written to the margins of his own life, but though he has done nothing either to deserve or avoid what he gets, what should one do if the consequences are unpredictable? What does the universe owe us apart from whatever luck happens to be our portion? As one of the rabbis who Gopnik consults points out, “Hashem doesn’t owe us anything. The obligation runs the other way.”

With his life unravelling in his hands, Gopnik seeks stability in his Jewish heritage, but its rituals and traditions are presented as arid, cryptic, or mindlessly rote. Yet his search for meaning is never completely ironized, and often quite poignant. In the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There, the protagonist attempts to take control of his destiny with disastrous consequences; Gopnik submits to circumstances and ultimately recovers some semblance of his old life — for what it’s worth. But, as the last shot of the film makes clear, there’s still no getting out of the path of the tornado. It would seem the Coens have answered Hamlet’s question as sensibly as possible. To be or not to be? More like damned if you do, damned if you don’t. So what are you laughing at?

(Photo courtesy of Wilson Webb/Focus Features)

Happy Halloween, once again, one and all! This year I ask that we consider some choice old horror anthologies, in whose pages lurk all sorts of scares and shocks. The horror tradition in comics has long been dominated by a model developed by the EC comics company in the 1950s, whose titles like Tales from the Crypt featured cornball “hosts” (the Cryptkeeper and his ilk), pun-filled narration, surprise twist endings (the werewolf was his brother!), wide-eyed bigfoot cartooning, and endless! exclamation! points! I admire EC and its murderer’s row of artists as much as the next comics reader, but our attentions now turn to those collections that worry the boundaries of the EC-style anthology, or pounce outside of them altogether.

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In 1962, late in his career, kiddie comics master John Stanley briefly turned his hand to the horror genre. The indispensable Stanley Stories blog has lately been posting his strips from Ghost Stories and Tales from the Tomb in their entirety. The typically incisive commentary over there covers much of what I would want to say about these, frankly, kind-of-insane comics, so I urge you to click through.

I’d like to emphasize, though, just how much Stanley got away with, thanks to working under the aegis of Dell Comics, the innocuous, kids-only publisher of titles like Donald Duck, Little Lulu, and Fairy Tale Parade — atypical fare for the gore-and-guts set. Dell’s spotless G-rated record allowed it to publish beyond the censorial eye of the Comics Code Authority, who in the mid-’50s had neutered or foreclosed upon bloodthirsty troublemakers like EC and its imitators. Stanley’s first stabs at horror were allowed to revel in threats of dismemberment, ghastly suicide, child-killing monsters, parents devoured by malevolent forces, and a scissors-wielding grandma who wants to knit you.

These ghost stories are another order of spooky altogether, the kind that confounds expectation, logic, and often comprehension. Stanley’s uncredited collaborators stiffly delineate these dreamlike tales, and though the results are sometimes crude, they are always very far from inept. Underlying every panel and every page is Stanley’s visual sophistication, which grants even the most wooden or unpracticed renditions the stark and primal quality of nightmare.

When we break through the muddle of the story to those final, gigantic panels, the effect is authentically startling, if absurd. We come forcibly out of the tale as though we’re waking up in a cold sweat, breathless, puzzled as to what our fevered brains have conjured up. Like, the psychiatrist’s head is a quilt?

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Six issues of Skull appeared between 1970 and 1972. Gary Arlington, proprietor of the renowned San Francisco Comic Book Company, came up with the bare bones idea for a horror anthology in the EC tradition; artist Greg Irons fleshed it out, and underground comics had another addition to its onslaught of horror books. Most of Skull featured the grim crosshatching grotesquerie of Irons and Jack Jackson, as well as the first UG work from the smooth and heavy metal-friendly pen of Richard Corben, among others. Some less out-and-out examples of the genre formed part of the scene, too, though I’m less familiar with them, having only caught the barest glimpses of Slow Death, or Insect Fear or, most tantalisingly, the gruesome cute brut of Rory Hayes’s Bogeyman (send in your unwanted copies c/o The Walrus).

Skull is worth singling out if only because it distinguished itself, late in the series, by taking EC’s literary aspirations and turning them inside out. So where EC’s go-to pulp auteur was the square and kind of respectable Ray Bradbury, the Skull crew gave over two entire issues to groovy, eldritch H.P. Lovecraft adaptations. True, the influence of Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos in literary horror has been as pervasive and maybe pernicious as EC’s in comics. At the time of the undergrounds, though, horror comics had as yet been been unmolested by the man’s tentacles, so an infusion of the Old Ones into the genre could at least boast the virtue of novelty. And at best, transposing Lovecraft to this setting helped connect with the UG’s flair for depicting goings-on in extremis (hence Michael Smith’s flesh-melting psychedelic freak-out in “Cool Air”). The gleeful, de trop stylings of many of the artists match well with Lovecraft’s squelching purple prose (“a nightmare caked and clotted with bloody shreds of alien flesh and hair, embraced by a malignant retinue of sleeping bats”).

In Skull’s final issue, the full-length “A Gothic Tale,” Irons and Corben — the twin poles of slick and dirty UG professionalism — took turns illustrating writer Tom Veitch’s centuries-spanning Lovecraftian story of mad science, gross monstrosity, and weird old religion. It’s a fine capstone to an interesting series, one of those fully conceived, self-contained little packages of which the underground was sometimes impressively capable.

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In the 1980s, having helped redefine monster comics as part of the all-star Swamp Thing team (who, if you’re wondering, had nothing to do with the film), artist Steve Bissette had yet further services to perform in his favoured genre. Determined to continue setting an example for seriousness in horror comics, rather than uphold the cheesy old punch-pulling norm, Bissette cofounded and edited a series called Taboo. The books were thick tomes rather than floppy pamphlets, whose bold conception was on occasion actually matched by the capabilities of their contributors. Taboo’s publication history is fascinating and convoluted and depressing, tied as it is to the various industry implosions of the time. The result of this tortuous past is that the series is a record of projects interrupted, delayed, or left unfinished. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s Jack the Ripper saga From Hell concluded elsewhere, for instance, as did both the Moore-written porno epic Lost Girls and Jeff Nicholson’s Through the Habitrails, a sort of anti-Dilbert.

But the real one that got away was Throat Sprockets, an amalgam of not-quite-vampires and not-quite-snuff-films from Video Watchdog mastermind Tim Lucas. He completed the tale in prose novel form, but it’s forever to be regretted that his working relationship with initial artist Mike Hoffman fell through. Hoffman’s angular photorealism evinced a real feel for the sharpness and seediness of well-worn film prints, and Lucas proved remarkably adept at splicing and manipulating the language of comics.

Beyond this impressive array of halting serials, an above-average number of Taboo’s highlights arrived in isolated contributions. There were some very pretty stand-alone stories from neo-pre-Raphaelite Michael Zulli, including a jaw-dropper written by Neil Gaiman’s then-five-year-old daughter (Gaiman and Zulli’s take on Sweeney Todd is another Taboo-fostered project that screeched to a skidding stop). Chester Brown wrung an unsettling amount of pathos out of funny animals falling prey to the food chain. Al Columbia, standard-bearer of modern-day horror comics, contributed some vivid, frenzied outpourings. What continues to haunt me, though, are a handful of candidates for career-best work from underground legend S. Clay Wilson: his graphic and sweaty and desperate “This is Dynamite” in particular strikes me as truly taboo,  so relentlessly did his penlines scratch away at deep human ugliness.

We could’ve used another couple dozen volumes of horror comics under Bissette’s stewardship, especially as the years have worn on and the talent pool has gotten deeper and darker, allowing for an easier skimming off of the dross. Imagine a thick regular instalment of something like Taboo, where Renee French’s soft-penciled parables of death and deformity, or Josh Simmons’s claustrophobic wrongness, or Columbia’s cartoon apocalypses, all rub scabby shoulders. Ah well, such dreams are for Halloweens yet to come.

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Finally, in subject matter worlds away from this post: Saturday’s spate of IFOA XXX events includes my interview with Seth, whom I’ve gone on about before, and R.O. Blechman, whose far-reaching career making perfect little drawings should provide much to talk about. Details are here. Toronto readers, I’ll see you at noon in Harbourfront’s Brigantine Room.

Over the past few decades, Paul Quarrington has forged an unparalleled career as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, and musician. Earlier this year, he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Saturday afternoon a sell-out crowd came to the Brigantine Room at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre — with some, including yours truly, relegated to the adjacent tent — in order to celebrate the life and work of this remarkable artist.

Dave Bidini hosted the event, which saw an assortment of Quarrington’s friends and colleagues take to the stage in order to celebrate his work. Up first was Irish writer Roddy Doyle, who explained that he’d met Quarrington and grown to like him before ever reading his work. “Which is just as well — it’s shite!” From then on, despite Bidini’s claim to the contrary, the event took on the occasional air of a roast. Margaret Atwood related an anecdote about performing country western songs with Quarrington and Timothy Findley at a PEN benefit in the early ’90s. David Bezmozgis talked about attending a Quarrington reading years ago: “It was the first time I saw in the flesh a writer whose books I’d actually read. I’d like to thank Paul for dispelling my romantic image of writers.” Later, Nino Ricci described his regular poker games with Quarrington. Particularly noteworthy was Bidini’s reunion with his Rheostatics band mates, who performed a short and very sweet set midway through the event.

During the intermission, video greetings from those who couldn’t attend played on screen. Among these speakers were Jim Cuddy, Michael Ondaatje, and Ron Mann. Afterward, The Quarrington Brothers, a band comprised of Paul’s musician brothers Joel and Tony, performed. Next, his sister Christine spoke, followed by Paul joining his brothers to perform as The Quarrington Trio. Other speakers included Alistair MacLeod, who delivered a poem he’d written about Quarrington, and Patsy Aldana, who presented Quarrington with the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Matt Cohen Award.

Finally, Quarrington himself took to the mike. In talking about his diagnosis and upcoming chemotherapy, he became the first speaker to directly address his illness. He spoke movingly about his belief that he’d been given a second chance in life, and that the illness struck him as a message from his creator that, “If you don’t like it here, you don’t have to stick around.” After leading the crowd in an apposite reenactment of Lou Gehrig’s famous words at Yankee Stadium, he closed the proceedings with a performance by his band, Porkbelly Futures. All in all, a quite fitting tribute — celebratory, not funereal — to a writer we all hope will be delighting us with his work for many years to come.

Windows Vista was a disaster from the word start. Anybody who has used Microsoft’s generally maligned operating system, which debuted in 2007, knows the headaches involved with convincing it perform even the most basic tasks. Diehard PCers fear no more: last Thursday, Microsoft released Windows 7, a brand new OS designed primarily to exorcise the demons of the Vista nightmare.

Vista’s greatest flaw, at least in my experience, is the draconian security scheme that Microsoft developed to seal holes in its creaky, yet dominant Windows XP. (As of August 2009, XP, which is almost ten years old, was installed on 69 percent of the world’s personal computers.) With Vista, any attempt to access the internet generates a warning that interrupts all system activities, and must be dismissed before the user can continue. Windows 7 resolves that nuisance by sending warnings and authentication requests to the newly created Action Center, where they can be ignored or acted upon at the user’s discretion.

The other major problem that plagues Vista is its sloth-like speed. Last year, when Popular Mechanics conducted a head-to-head comparison of various PCs running Vista against various Macs running OS X Leopard, Vista lost in almost every category.  Microsoft has been playing catch-up ever since, and now promises that Windows 7 will offer “faster, more responsive performance.” Given that doing anything in Vista is like watching paint dry or grass grow, improvement should be relatively easy to accomplish. Of course to get this faster performance your computer will have to meet (and most likely exceed) the minimum system requirements. Windows 7 demands at least one gigabyte of RAM and a one-gigahertz processor. That’s nothing outlandish by today’s standards, but if your PC is more than a couple of years old, you’ll likely need to upgrade to take full advantage of Windows 7’s capabilities.

Microsoft wouldn’t be Microsoft, though, without at least one Byzantine decision. Like Vista, Windows 7 is available in a multitude of versions. There are six different editions of the new operating system — all with different features and price points — although only Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate are widely available at retail. (The Starter edition does not support 64–bit processor architecture, the standard for new PCs; it won’t even let you change your desktop wallpaper.) Absolutely the strangest thing about the newest Windows, however, is that it comes without many of the standard programs that you expect to find when spending several hundred dollars on an operating system (the Ultimate edition costs $349.95). Windows 7 lacks pre-installed programs for even the most basic tasks, like writing email, chatting online, or managing photos, calendars, and contacts. Instead users are asked to download these programs for free from a Microsoft website. That seems like a poor use of time and bandwidth — or, to put it more politely, a pain in the ass — especially considering that competing systems like Apple’s OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, come preloaded with an array of superbly designed and easy-to-use programs.

But how much does that really matter? Apple has been steadily gaining market share since the initial release of OS X in 2002, and Snow Leopard is sleeker and more reliable than anything Microsoft has produced in years. (It hardly needs mentioning that Apple makes better commercials than Microsoft too.) Mac OSs, though, only recently surpassed 5 percent of global usage — whereas Windows, in one form or another, is currently hovering near 93 percent. So what if Vista was a step in the wrong direction? With that kind of lead, Microsoft could walk in circles and not lose for years to come. With Windows 7, however, Goliath is back on the forward march.

By any measure, Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk is one of the most celebrated and respected writers alive. The author of six novels, a memoir, and a recent essay collection, Pamuk was the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. Three years earlier he won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award — the world’s most lucrative prize for an individual work of fiction — for his novel My Name Is Red. On the second night of IFOA XXX, Pamuk took to Toronto’s Fleck Dance Theatre to read from his new novel, The Museum of Innocence. Set in 1970s Istanbul, the novel (an excerpt from which recently appeared in The New Yorker) is the story of Kemal, a wealthy man who becomes enthralled with a young shopgirl and spends nearly a decade trying to woo her.

Pamuk delivered a few well-received passages before sitting down for a wide-ranging talk with CBC Radio host Carol Off. For the first part of the interview, they discussed the novel’s thematic concerns. Like most of Pamuk’s work, The Museum of Innocence focuses on the fault lines in a society dealing with the competing strains and allures of tradition and progress, of Islam and the West. An obviously cosmopolitan man, Pamuk expressed his sympathies for the progressive side, though he criticized those who congratulate themselves on their outward modernism (which, he said, largely amounts to the frivolity of European shopping sprees) while harbouring deep conservatism within. At that, the conversation turned to political matters.

It’s a long-standing PEN Canada tradition to place an empty chair on stage at its events to symbolize the many writers around the world who cannot freely participate in such proceedings. For the past fifteen years, IFOA has observed this tradition in the name of a specific author. This year’s selection is of intimate relevance to Pamuk. In January 2007, Turkish-Armenian magazine editor Hrant Dink was shot to death outside his office in Istanbul. Prior to the assassination, Dink had become one of the few people convicted under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code for “insulting Turkishness” in his writings on the Armenian genocide. Pamuk was charged under the same article for his own comments on the topic in 2005.

When Off broached the subject of his relationship with Dink, Pamuk demurred, explaining that he has strong private feelings, but does not share them in interviews. He seemed somewhat reticent to discuss politics at all, preferring to speak about his literary work. This sparked an interesting exchange about interviewers’ tendency to question writers about politics, as well as a minor audience revolt.

After the interview, Pamuk took questions from the crowd. Of particular interest was his response to a question about the experience of having his novels translated into English. He explained that English is the only non-native language he’s comfortable with, and that he collaborates with his translator to ensure that the reworked text maintains the subtle artistry of his Turkish original. Regardless of the translation’s quality, he went on, the first reading always leaves him depressed, as it’s difficult to see his Turkish voice replaced with an English one. In part, he settles on an acceptable translation by simply growing used to it.

Those who’ve never read any of Pamuk’s work would do well to peruse his extraordinary Nobel lecture; anyone who regrets missing last night’s event may want to give his 2008 appearance at the University of California a look. Both serve as fitting, yet succinct introductions to one of the world’s most important writers.