Monday, November 10, 2008
Sunday 10.09 at Wordstock 08
I had plans to the only catch some of the afternoon and evening readings at the second day of Wordstock, but had a change of plans when I saw that film writer David Thomson was on the schedule. So I found a street parking despite the attendance of local churches and the holiday food and gift show that was also at the Convention Center. I'm kind of glad that I didn't go with late afternoon plan because masses of folks came in to the Rose Quarter for the annual holiday Trans Siberian Orchestra extravaganza.
I worried at first when I saw the large screen of the Powell's stage when my ticket was taken. The rough hewn cartoon artwork that appeared on the screen looked very much like Lynda Barry wasn't scheduled to come on til 5pm that evening. So what gives? Did she have to come on early? Is she doing two talks? Well as it turned out, it wasn't Lynda Barry at all, but lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechtel giving a talk about the anthology of her strip Dykes to Watch Out For. I checked it out for a few minutes, but found that if you weren't a fan already, you were probably going to be lost. There were lots of folks there at the 11am hour on Sunday to see her. Well, as Allison said on her website "Portland is such a hotbed of comics and also of queerness, it was quite overwhelming."
David Thomson came on at noon. His New Biographical Dictionary of Film is one of my favorite books. It contains hundreds of essays about the works and lives of hundreds of actors, actresses and directors. All of the entries are quite distinct from each other and offer his own unique personal evaluation of their work. He opened his presentation on Sunday by talking about how he tends to be personal and on the importance of having an opinion.
Have You Seen...? is the title of his latest book and it is already probably the most significant film book of the holiday season. It offers roughly a thousand one page essays on films both obvious to be in such a volume and many not as clearly a candidate for such a collection. Sure, Roger Ebert has done this a couple of times already with his Great Movies books, but the one page/1000 essay format of Thomson's makes for maybe more of an infectious browse when you flip through it.
Thomson is a sixty seven year old Englishman living in San Francisco. I may be a bit of a simplification but I have found public talks by Brits not to be as interesting as their work itself for the most part. In the late eighties and early nineties I saw James Burke speak a couple of times and the best part of his talks were when he would wind up and do Connections bits, much like the scripts of his BBC documentaries. Here the best part of the talk is when he read his essays on Chinatown, Duck Soup, Seven Samurai and Brief Encounter.. Although he did say some things that a true believer in the power of film (like your buffetmaster here) would agree with but others would find a bit overstated such as the declining interest in foreign films having "such an hostility especially with young people and it is one of the most devastating things to happen in this country." Or how British people didn't embrace cinema's capability to be both so real and so fantastic.
Thomson later signed my copy of "Have You Seen... ." in this weird writer's corral arrangement they had for the signing sessions. I told him I hoped to enjoy his new book as much as I had the New Biographical Dictionary of Film. He said he hoped I would too. I told him I very much appreciated the economy he had in his writing. He then said something that seemed like a Non sequitur, "If you write a lot, you have to be tight"
Nothing at the 1pm hour seemed to work for me, so I decided to walk over to the exhibit halls at the Memorial Coliseum to the Portland Comic Book Show I had no idea that there were so many different kinds of Star Wars toys. It was a strange subcultural experience, but after about three times around the track and scoring a copy of Scorsese's Mean Streets DVD for practically a give away price, I kind of had enough and returned to Wordstock.
William Least-Heat Moon and Andre Dubus III, probably the two most successful and generally recognized literary names at Wordstock this year were both scheduled for 2pm. I spent the first half of my time at Least Heat-Moon's appearance because Dubus was in the midst of reading from his latest novel when I arrived. Least Heat Moon's latest book is entitled Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey, it is a return to a book of travel on the road, the subject and setting that gave him is greatest success in his first book Blue Highways
This time he is not traveling alone, but with his wife, who he refers to as Q, and the travels are finite and planned. Quoz is a funny word. The urban dictionary says it is slang for something good. My Webster's Unabridged says it is something odd or queer. Least Heat-Moon claims it means a persistent and silent energy, like a book, which is ready to give you energy when you engage with it. Sometimes this engagement means there is "some assembly required" such as with his second book PrairyErth which I remember trying to get into many years ago. He said that book had a vertical structure vs. the horizontal structure of Blue Highways. He admitted that many people found it off-putting, that folks either loved it or hated it.
As soon as one of the most well known of travel writers received the question "What is your routine for writing" I knew it was time to move on over to Dubus, whose Q and A session I found immediately engaging. He talked about some of the moral ambiguity of his characters such as Colonel Behrani in House of Sand and Fog. His philosophy is that there is no darkness, just lightness twisted. He first apologized for quoting Tom Waits because he knew it would offend someone but then said "There is no devil. There is just god when he is drunk."
Dubus impressed me as someone who learns about his characters as he writes. He quoted Grace Paley: "We write about what we don't know about what we know." His intelligence and dedication to his work impressed me. I bet attending workshop session on Writing for Discovery would have been a great experience.
Sandra Tsing Loh gives new meaning to the term activist parent. Her high energy and passion for involvement in the schools was quite a striking perspective. She doesn't understand why a mothers involvement in PTA could not be considered an act of feminism. When I arrived I saw her talking about how Hispanic kids had to learn that bubble multiple choice tests were not like the games of chance and lottery they saw their parents teach. She also talked about how Democrats need to support public schools by letting their children attend them, Obama included. I recall the incident where Tsing Loh was fired for saying the f--- on KCRW public radio, but didn't know anything about her. I don't know if I'll pick up her book, but I found a few essays online I'd like to read now that I am familiar with her energy and her voice.
Mike Mignolaspent his time in art school wanting to draw monsters. After ten years in the comic biz at DC and Marvel, the Portland area's own Dark Horse comics gave him his chance to do that. It turned out to be the wildly successful Hellboy series. Mignola had a vibrant, Quentin Tarantino-like energy about him as he was interviewed by one of Dark Horse's founders in the next to last event of the day. If you were one of the comic nerds over at the Coliseum Expo Hall you would have been in hog heaven. But I always try to do right to acknowledge and appreciate one's passion, especially of an artistic ilk.
God bless Lynda Barry. We have heard her tell a lot of the same jokes and stories maybe four or five times now, but they are always delighful. And the message of her talk, the need to find what she and her former Evergreen professor called the image as a focus for creative work, is something that everyone should reacquaint themselves with from time to time, in my humble opinion. I think Dubus would have agreed with her that she feels that we write in order to have an experience. She also believes we all become a little bit crazy when art becomes an elective and there is no longer any recess.
There is always a lot of joy in a Lynda Barry appearance. But this one was maybe more joyous still because of last week's election. She said she would temper her langauge this evening bus would be likely to say balls. And she said its nice that lesbian and evolution are no longer cus words. She received a standing ovation at the end of her talk. It seemed like a fine enough way to end a very full weekend of ideas and creative folk. Full as i was, I was certainly ready to drive home and put away a volume of tacos.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:54 PM
Comments:
Bob,
Great stuff. I was tickled by the comments on Lynda Barry. I can always tell if someone is a good person or not by asking if they liked Cruddy.
-Roderic
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Great stuff. I was tickled by the comments on Lynda Barry. I can always tell if someone is a good person or not by asking if they liked Cruddy.
-Roderic
