bilipo
Bilipo: The French Crime Writing Library in Paris
July 10, 2013
A Bit More Crime Writing… Ancient Interview With Maurice G. Dantec
June 2, 2013
813
At the same time as I was beginning my career as a writer about car racing, Formula One being the main emphasis, I was also establishing a career as a writer about the French crime novel. Because I myself had written several published crime stories and several unpublished, but agented, crime novels, I grew tired of this not-well-paid area of meta-writing that, while it was vastly interesting, was also vastly frustrating. I was a published crime fiction writer, and I had begun to establish myself as crime fiction writing journalist…but who was not considered by the writers themselves as a writer.
The auto racing writing was more attractive in that I could never, ever claim to be a car racer, but I had a subject to write about that involved amazing human endeavor, and therefore, made for interesting material. So it was that I stopped writing about crime fiction. But by the time I stopped, I had amassed a fair sized trove of journalism, especially about the French crime novel.
maurice G. dantec
This interview with Maurice G. Dantec that I conducted and that I am posting today in Blog Articles as Opposed to Posts, was done as part of my research for my big article about French crime writing that I posted in the first post of this series. Dantec later moved to Montreal – where I go in a couple of days – and he became a very much bigger writer in France, expanding massively away from the crime writing he did in his early years into something more akin to science fiction and philosophy. In fact, all those elements already existed in his early writing, but just kind of expanded in his later career.
PS, if a great deal of the writing of this post looks familiar to you, that is because I have chosen tonight in my state of sleep deprivation to do something that I can do on a personal blog that I cannot do in a professional environment: I have cut and pasted almost word-for-word the original post of this series of “A bit of crime writing” and simply filled in the blanks, changing the material to that of the Dantec interview…. Great fun! And, of course, if you missed the original post, you have read it now….
From the Little Temple to the Lizard Lounge – and a Musing on Changes
March 4, 2013
I had a feeling of beginnings and endings last night as I walked down the Rue Princess past the closed up shop of the Village Voice bookstore, which had been on that street for 30 years, and where I went regularly – if much less in recent years than in the early years – during most of that time. I had expected to see a sushi shop in its place, but I was surprised to see the eerie storefront of the bookstore still there, but with the windows whitewashed. In fact, before I arrived on the street, I had suddenly thought that, “Oh hell, maybe the bar I am heading to play at is in what used to be the Village Voice!”
As it turned out, the Little Temple bar was NOT in the place of the Voice, as I mentioned, but slightly up the street and on the same side of the road. I had been invited by Jake Weinsoff, my friendly violin player with whom I played a couple of times in recent weeks. Jake has been hosting a musical evening at the Little Temple bar for a few months (it seems), and while it is not an open mic, Jake opens the mic and invites friends to play occasionally.
So for me, it WAS an open mic. It was also something new! I have not been doing enough new things in Paris lately, so I was keen to try this. It was also “new” because Jake injects new life into the musical evening, and just about everything he plays. I came a little too late to see his singing set in the beginning, and by the time I left to go to an old open mic, he was about to go up again – but I had to move on.
The Little Temple, by the way, is a very cozy Irish pub kind of place, with typical wooden walls, and all sorts of cubby holes and table and tall chairs all over. Very comfortable, and a fun night.
But I had heard that the MC team is changing at the once-per-month Lizard Lounge open mic near the City Hall, and so I did not want to miss it yesterday just in case the thing no longer exists in another month. I was told I need not worry about that, as it turns out the bar owner really wants to keep the open mic running, and there may even be a chance it will run more often than just the first Sunday of the month.
The same team of MCs has been running this open mic for five years, and it actually existed even before that. So this is a real long-running Paris institution of an open mic. I love it too because it takes place in the same basement – cave – room where I did my first ever open mic in Paris, on the Monday night in 2008, when it was run by Earle Holmes. (That one ran simultaneous to the Sunday night event – ie, two open mics on certain weeks.)
I got there a bit late, of course, last night, and so I only saw two or three acts. And I did my own songs. But I thoroughly enjoyed the evening, and was glad I didn’t miss it, and glad to get the news of what the future may hold….
Having recently discovered that the Shakespeare and Company bookstore has recently moved to a new address around the corner from its old one facing Notre Dame Cathedral, I also began thinking about that, of course, on this theme of new and old and changing of the guard, and in the context of the Village Voice. Life changes.
2 Lit Visits, 1 Open Mic; 1 – 0 Open Mic over Lit Visits
December 15, 2012
delerium
I made a little film of someone playing piano at Shakespeare and Company, but aside from that, it was really just a question of wandering around and paying respects, and perhaps having a bit of tea or some other drink, which I did not do. Then I went off to the Abbey and there an author was reading out in front of the shop, standing a crate like a speaker at Speaker’s Corner in London, with a large crowd of people standing in the cold beneath him. I think his book’s title has the word “merde” in it, and so I decided to go into the store away from the crowd, where I was warmly greeted – as usual – by the genial Brian Spence, who was preparing goodies for the Christmas toast to follow.
I drank a deadly beverage offered by Brian who had received it from a client, and I read a few first pages of books to see if I wanted to buy any – the one I recall is Borges’ Labyrinths then an AJ Liebling book on boxing, but then the drink went to my head (it was from the Czech Republic or Poland or some equally strong, hardy nation) and I cannot remember the others – and decided I did not want to buy anything. I needed to eat something very quickly if I was to survive the rest of the night and a beer or two.
So I went to a restaurant around the corner, ate some fromage de tête (head cheese), which was as disgusting as it sounds – were it not for the fact that it was excellent quality – and then a terrine de volaille and then ris de veau (sweetbreads, i.e. thymus glands), and some wine, and I was all ready to go off and have some Delerium beer and use up all that delirium and even the tremens, on an open mic.
So I went to the open mic that I reported last week was a little like a literary salon, the one at the Arte Café. After all I had been through, I really did not expect the open mic to live up to my past experiences there, and I fully expected to stay a short time and leave. I thought I would stay long enough to drink the Delerium to digest the animal innards. But the open mic, once again, was really wonderful, and I enjoyed the music, enjoyed playing, and then enjoyed the jam session, and above all, meeting new and interesting people – as always at the Arte Cafe. Thanks again, Arte Cafe!
Shakespeare and Company Literary Gathering, 3 Open Mics and the Most Beautiful Woman in the World
December 11, 2012
It has been a very long time since I attended a literary event – if you exclude the literary events I partake of every time I read a work of literature, which is very often – and now that I am on vacation and staying at home in boring old Paris, I decided I would make an effort to attend as many literary events as possible. So it was that when I arrived at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore for the first of my planned literary events and I was being refused entrance by a young and somewhat helpless book worker, I was very upset. But the guy was kind of right to try: The bookstore was so full of people it was barely standing room only, with all corners of the shop being occupied by listeners for a panel of editors of literary reviews talking about the past, present and future of that genre.
I really insisted, though, and the guy could see as well as I could that there was just enough space on the inside of the door for me to stand – with my large Gibson J-200 in its bag, by my side. So I got in and nodded thanks to the guy. I was delighted to see also cramped in there in a little desk by the entrance the delightful Sylvia Whitman, who has in recent years taken over the store that belonged to her father, who recently died, nearing 100 years of age. Sylvia is doing amazing things at the shop, and this panel is an example, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, so much so that I bought three of the reviews discussed in the panel, and I will have to busk for a week in sub-zero Paris weather in order to pay for them at 16 euros each. Literature is not for the poor. (Oh, sorry, another of the reviews, Five Dials, is entirely free and downloadable on the Internet, supported by the Hamish Hamilton publishing company in the UK.)
But anyway… The panel was made up of … no, forget that. I will just paste in the full details from the Shakespeare and Company newsletter announcing the thing: “Please join us to celebrate the launch of The White Review No. 6, notably featuring interviews with China Mieville, Julia Kristeva and Edmund de Waal, fiction by Helen DeWitt, essays on J. H. Prynne and Bela Tarr, artwork by Matt Connors and poetry by Emily Berry. To mark the release of this new edition, editors Jacques Testard and Benjamin Eastham have put together a panel to discuss the past, present and future of literary magazines, including Christian Lorentzen (Senior Editor at the London Review of Books and editor of Say What You Mean: The n+1 Anthology), Craig Taylor (Five Dials, and the author of Londoners), Heather Hartley (Paris editor of Tin House) and Krista Halverson (former managing editor of Zoetrope).”
The panel was a probing and interesting look at what is on the minds of the editors AND the readers. IE, how it is so much more fun to create a review and publish your own stuff rather than looking for a “traditional” publisher or one of the top magazines; how doing that also allows for discovering much interesting stuff from foreign writers in translation; how difficult it is to go through a slush pile every day; where to get writers in translation the funding of which will come from foreign literary lobbying organizations; how to distribute such reviews in a time when book stores no longer exist – except in strange places like Paris, where there is a massive number of small non-chain stores that will carry such magazines; how, with “so many” such reviews a reader is to make a choice on which to buy (!! if you’re rich, I say, buy them all); how submission to the slush pile really, truly, DOES work for the good writing, etc. It was fresh, and I hope that I have not highlighted too many “negative” things. I recall having attended a similar panel at the Village Voice book shop in around 1984 at a time when there was quite a movement of local expat literary magazines in Paris like Frank, and other names I now forget(!), and last night’s panel seemed so much “larger.” Having started to read N+1 today, I think it is, in fact. (I thoroughly enjoyed the opening essay, an insouciant attack on other magazines: the Atlantic, Harper’s and…the Paris Review.)
I think I will quit that theme now. From Shakespeare and Company I headed off to the Coolin that has a new system for the open mic that will be the death of it for me. It is an 8:30 PM sign up before the music starts at 9:30. This brings it to the level of the Highlander, where I can never get early enough to get my name on the list in a comfortable position – my fault, and the fault of living in the suburbs and eating a meal at home and getting up at 4 PM. But anyway….
So I went and signed up for the Coolin, then went to a great Italian restaurant next door and sat beside one of those women that you want to say to them: “You are the most beautiful woman in the world that I have ever seen.” But you don’t, because they’ve heard the line 500 times and no matter what, they will think you are insincere. And since it has happened to you 500 times you probably are insincere – except it seems true at that moment. But there she was with a friend, and talking about being friends with Vanessa Paradis and having approached “M” over some proposition or other…and slowly you think, maybe she IS the most beautiful woman in the world. Anyway….
Left the restaurant after eating one of the most beautiful pizzas in the world, went to Coolin, played two songs – Steve Forbert’s “Romeo’s Tune” (fitting, no?) and No Expectations of the Rolling Stones. Then realized that having signed up early enough to be around the sixth performer, I had the time to drop in briefly to the Tennessee for its open mic and then go to the Galway for its open mic. So went to the Tennessee, recorded a couple of acts, but did not even think of signing up to play at that late moment of the night, and then went to the Galway and played four songs.
An amazing, amazing night, all things considered. Four rendezvous, three open mics and two sets. Oh, and a pizza beside the most beautiful woman in the world that I have ever seen. (At least at that moment.)
A Genuine Canadian Article, Eh
August 12, 2012
I am not proud to be a Canadian. I never was, in fact. Always hated the concept. I am just a Canadian. I was born in Toronto, and grew up there and in Ottawa. I have two passports, two citizenships, a British one and a Canadian one. I have spent most of my adult life living in France. But I will never tell anyone I am British. I am Canadian, that’s where I’m from, how I was raised, where my whole early essence of life comes from. Now, my life is all about the entire world, as readers of this blog will know, as I travel the world for my work and seek out music everywhere – the common language. All of this long introduction is just to say how “un-proud” I felt this morning as I picked up my copy of the May 2012 LRC, or Literary Review of Canada, and my eye was suddenly caught by a stamp, a logo of approval on the bottom right corner of the cover that read: Genuine Canadian Magazine.
bob and doug mckenzie
But having not read the Canadian Literary Review ever before in my life – it is more than 20 years old, but I have been in France longer than that – I suddenly felt as if a), my intelligence had been affronted in a place where I had gone to make use of it, and b), as if the quality of the magazine itself was most certainly going to be about as thick and impenetrable as Genuine Canadian Leather, or even worse, it would read like as if Bob & Doug McKenzie – sorry for the ancient reference from pop culture – had written it. How could any self-respecting literary review stamp itself as a “Genuine Canadian Magazine”? And why, above all, with a title such as “Literary Review of Canada,” would I in my wildest dreams have any doubts as to its origins or cultural background?
literary review of canada
And in recent days as I have not been attending open mics all over the world or even in my adopted home of Paris – thanks to it being August and most of the open mics being closed – I have been doing a lot more reading, particularly of this absolutely superb biography of one of my favourite authors, who also happens to be Canadian, Mordecai Richler. Interestingly, as someone who hates the concept of CanLit, two of my favourite authors are Richler and his fellow Canadian, Robertson Davies. But in reading the Richler biography, written by Charles Foran – whom I also learned in the LRC, is the president of PEN Canada – I have learned that Richler also hated the whole concept of trying to prop up and boast about and support Canadian culture. His point of view was that it should survive on merit, not government support. Even more interesting, Richler was left-wing.
Well, back to the LRC, that Genuine Canadian Magazine. FYI, my dad was founder and editor of another genuine Canadian magazine in the 1960s and 1970s, that I know would not have survived without government support – it was called Science Forum – and so I could not, either, be against government support. The point is not “don’t help it survive with money,” the point is, “allow it to be trashed, criticized, discarded, publicly ostracized and allow it to die…if it is no good. Allow it to be praised, promoted and loved if it IS good – in fact, if it is so good, it WILL be loved and promoted.” Here, yes, we arrive back at the LRC.
mordecai richler
The point of this was that in reading the LRC, I felt a closeness to the English Canadian intellectual, creative and cultural world in a way that my life as an expat and my annual return trips only for my work as a Formula One journalist – which is how I bought the LRC in June – does not usually permit me to feel. Above all, the review seemed to me to be very much the equal to any of other such reviews I read or have read from any other country in the world.
There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I was reading a Genuine Canadian Magazine! And that made that little idiot’s insignia on the front all the bigger an insult. By the time I got to the last page of the review I found a full-page advertisement telling me the source of the Genuine Canadian Magazine seal of approval: “Canadian magazine are unique,” read the ad, which had the face all fuzzy in the background – in a collage of magazine covers – of the ubiquitous and now iconic Margaret Atwood. “And so are you,” the ad continued. “That’s why we publish hundreds of titles, so you know there’s one just for you. All you have to do is head to the newsstands, look for the Genuine Canadian Magazine icon marking truly Canadian publications and start reading. It’s that easy.”
I was then told to visit magazinescanada.ca/ns to find my favourite magazine. I did so, and to my great shock, I found there just about every magazine that I ever knew existed in Canada. And I thought, holy crap, there’s no way I could even protest the culture police if I wanted to – without dropping all association with all Canadian magazines, including what appeared to be the major small literary reviews. At least it is not just the LRC that should be taken to task for this – although they would do well to be intelligent enough to at least drop the logo from the front page…if they are allowed to.
So the point of today’s rant? (Yesterday’s rant was about unicycling and cops and traffic laws in France.) The point is that Canada should really drop its efforts to show and impose its culture as being the equal to any on earth – especially that of its great neighbour to the south – because its best culture IS up to the level of that of anyone else’s…except when the culture police pop up their heads and insult our intelligence by insisting that we hear that. Again, and again, and again. Inferiority complexes are not attractive.
PS, in going to the LRC web site just now, I see there is currently a feature called, “How Others See Us.” Hmm… it’s catchy….
PPS, to add a point about not being proud to be Canadian, that phrase I used to open this rant. I speak in the same terms as one of the daughters of King Lear, when he asked his daughters how much each of them loved him. One of those daughters said she loved him – no more, no less. He failed to understand.
The Robertson Davies, Henry Cockton Link
February 27, 2012
robertson davies
As I did not go to any open mics last night, I decided to see what else I might have to go up in the rejected stories trove. I found this 1995 “appreciation” of Robertson Davies, the Canadian novelist, that I wrote in December of that year after he died.
My story actually has little to do with Davies, although it clearly shows what it set out to show, what an extraordinary sense of intuition he had. It is mostly about the life of an obscure 19th century novelist named Henry Cockton, about whom Davies was one of the rare established writers of last century to write anything.
The story also contains a letter from Davies to me, which, of course, has never been published before anywhere.
Another Guy’s Open Mic Book and Adventure
January 15, 2012
Open Mic Travels
Yesterday I found this email in my Facebook messages from a man named Martin Christie: Hi Brad, your blog keeps popping up on google whenevr I search for open mics and I’ve just finished a book called ‘Open Mic Travels,’ so I thought you might be interested. It can be found here:” http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/open-mic-travels/18788958
What!?!? Well, it turns out, as he said in his closing sentence, we are not exactly covering the same terrain, as his adventure was all around the UK, and mine is all around the world. Still, you can imagine all the emotions I went through after working three years on this “original” idea! My immediate reaction was: “There is no way I will read this guy’s book until I finish writing mine.” Then I thought, no, take a glance, nevertheless. So I went and read the first few sentences of his introduction, and I said, “Crap! He is doing the same thing as I am.” I staggered away. Then later last night I pumped up my courage to take a look in a chapter, and there I found I could breathe again because there are huge differences between his book and mine. In fact, there is no comparison – my book also has this running theme of a personal effort to get over a family loss.
And now, suddenly, my attitude to Martin’s book and adventure has completely changed – except that I STILL will not read it until I finish my own book. It turns out, however, that Martin ALSO has a blog on which he writes about his open mic adventures. And I checked out some of his music as well, and found that we also differ completely in our approaches to music. So again I could breathe. And then, finally, my ultimate feeling of summation was, “Well, part of the reason I was writing my own book was also to inspire other people to do similar things with their lives. So seeing that someone already IS doing something similar can only be praised and promoted. It’s wonderful, in fact. And who knows, maybe we can start a whole new musical, open mic, travel movement or genre?
Anyway, check out Martin Christie’s music samples – most are done with music machines, but he said he uses the guitar sometimes too – and drop by to lulu.com to buy his book, Open Mic Travels, if the sample you read interests you. I’ll do that once I finish mine! (Which I hope will be the case within a matter of weeks – all the writing is done, I’m still compressing and editing.) Oh, and by the way, some readers of the blog may discover eventually that I have now removed from this blog the introduction to my book that I had posted, and the sample from the Brazil chapter. It turns out that I think that introduction was bad, and the sample from the Brazil chapter was almost wholly unedited and not up to the level of the rest, either. One of the advantages of an Internet blog is that you can put up whatever you want whenever you want – but that is also its disadavantage, because there is no screening process even with oneself.
Anyway, what a cool story to put up today when I spent yet another night trying to get over my cold – which is almost gone…. Oh, I almost forgot, Martin also has a facebook page for his open mic adventure that you can “like.”
PS, all of this reminded me of another friend’s project. Paddy Mulcahy is an Irish musician I met at befriended at the Highlander open mic in Paris last year or the year before, and he has just come out with a short documentary film about a South American song he has translated into English and turned into an interesting, almost Irish, folk song. I’m reminded of that because last year I took around cameras with me to the open mics around the world and am currently working on making a documentary of the open mic journey. I’m posting Paddy’s video here.
Brad’s Rejected Stories
December 26, 2011
I have decided to create a new section on this blog, one for an archive of my rejected stories. That may sound like a really weird idea, and not the sort of thing one should really show off. But in the end, I feel able to do this because I don’t feel insecure about my writing, yet I also feel as if a lot of the suffering I had to go through with rejections was pointless! Of course, in many cases I may not have tried hard enough to sell a story – ie, I had to submit my biggest break-through article to at least 11 publications before it got accepted over the transome as the front page essay on the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review in 1991!
I am also doing this in order to use the rejection stories area to fill up the blog with a nice little juvenalia archive, and also because I feel in most of the cases the stories will have some kind of cool historical value to read – like take today’s story, for instance, which is a review that I wrote of Paul McCartney’s show at the Bercy Stadium in 1989 and which was part of his world tour. It was pretty historic as a world tour, and when we look back now at a time when this concert was further away than the actual Beatles breakup and he is STILL performing!! Very cool.
A Remembrance of George Whitman of Shakespeare and Company
December 17, 2011
Shakespeare and Company Book Shop
The book store actually had played an important role in my life, but I have always had a hard time summing up how. I had met many writers there, including Christopher Cook Gilmore, a novelist who died of a brain tumor in 2004, and who introduced me to his literary agent, who would become my own first literary agent. He actually at one point commissioned from me a murder mystery that takes place in Shakespeare and Company, and I actually wrote the whole novel. Taking a look at it now for the first time in the 20 or more years since I wrote it, I laugh out loud at how bad it is and I am not surprised it was immediately rejected not even by publishers, but by the agent! (He tried to sell one or two of my good novels, but never succeeded.)
But I suddenly realized today a fact I had completely forgotten, which was the I had also had another thing commissioned linked to Shakespeare and Company, and that was a newspaper article about the bookstore, that an editor at the Globe and Mail in Toronto had asked me for on spec – and he too rejected that. I wrote the story in 1989 and it was just one of a long string of articles that I had written over the previous decade that had been rejected as all my efforts to write journalism came to nothing but rejections. I suppose now that I was so used to rejections and thinking that anything I wrote would never get published, that I immediately gave up on the idea of publishing the story. But now that I look at it for the first time in 22 years, I think it was a shame it never got published. It paints a wonderful and very true picture of the Shakespeare and Company of the time, and no doubt, George Whitman’s store of any time going back to its founding in the early 1950s.
So I am very pleased to be able to post that never-before-published article about Shakespeare and Company – including quotes from my interview with George (and with Gilmore) – here in the articles section of this blog. It was a visit to the store right squat in the middle of its Shakespeare and Company period, and a nice museum piece and memory of how things were. I have posted the article with no changes made to the manuscript, as I found it in my computer archives, as written.