June update, Blue Ruin, Taco Bell art heist, etc

Sorry I didn't have a catchy title for this one. Adam's Notes for June 14, 2024

Jun 14, 2024

Guntram Boso and his Daughters, 572 AD by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Gregory of Tours: “Boso was a good enough man, but he was much too given to breaking his word.”

Hello again. It’s been a surprisingly rainy month, and now that one wild fire scare I wrote about a while back really feels like a distant anomaly. It’s the first summer in years where there’s less than two dozen wild fires across the province, and they’re all under control. It’s fortunate, because Calgary is running out of water.

I’m getting some writing done. I’m working on a new short story and I’m having a lot of fun with it, and I’m pushing the novel project uphill, a little bit at a time, everyday. I also finished a couple of short stories last month and I’m in the process of submitting them to various places. And I’m still looking for a home for my CBC Short Story Prize longlisted story, but I’m confident that one will find a place eventually. Of the new stories, one’s a big fun genre story, sort of on the outskirts of sword and sorcery, and the other is set in the contemporary world, another attempt at doing ‘literary fiction’—an annoying term, I know, but I don’t really know how else to say ‘not genre fiction.’ Literary realism, maybe, but that feels wrong, too.

I told myself that this summer I would learn to write a proper book review. I’m still working on it, still have a ways to go, but I’ve also had some success, got some acceptances, and hopefully you’ll see my byline later this summer, including my first for a Canadian literary magazine. I've been thinking a lot about the book review as a genre unto itself, and when I do, I start to think that I might like book reviews as much as I like, say, science fiction or crime novels. I read a lot of them, I would say at least one every other day. So it’s good to finally figure out how to write them.

Two new books that I've read recently, just for fun, are Hari Kunzru’s Blue Ruin and Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France. Blue Ruin is about an artist past his prime who runs into his ex while delivering groceries for an app during that early part of the pandemic when people were wiping down their groceries. She takes him into the compound she’s staying at with her successful artist husband and their rich friends. It’s not about art so much as the art world, which is juxtaposed against contemporary poverty. There are some sharp observations, but it’s really more about Kunzru’s tight plotting and how these characters bounce off of one another. I really enjoyed it. House of Lilies is about the Capetian dynasty of France, sort of a blank spot for me. I’m good with the Merovingians and Carolingians, then it’s sort of a blur until the stuff covered by Maurice Druon’s Accursed Kings series, then it’s a blur until Cardinal Richelieu, then it’s a blur again until the French Revolution and 1848 and the 20th century. So it was nice to have that filled in, if only a little. Her quotes from Jean de Joinville made me realize I need to read that guy’s work in full.

Oh, and a reminder: I’ve got a short story out at Indie Bites in their “Wishes and Wizards” anthology, free to download at their site. It’s called “The Ysidra” (after a kind of parrot-like bird I found mentioned in a medieval bestiary), and it’s about a pair of weary soldiers who find a relic belonging to a dead wizard in the chaotic aftermath of a battle.

Venantius Fortunatus reading his poems to Radegund, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Radegund was, “forced to marry the Merovingian king who slaughtered her family; she managed to wriggle out of that marriage by founding a prestigious convent and becoming a nun. Radegund stayed involved in politics, though, performing top-level diplomatic negotiations, running literary salons, but also performing these really extreme and gruesome mortifications of the flesh.”

Some stuff I’ve read online lately

I never really gave Jonathan Lethem a chance, but his survey of the works of Charles Portis was good. If you haven’t, you need to read Portis’s Masters of Atlantis and Dog of the South. Trust me.

The Dial has a great profile of César Aira and a wild piece about Swedish author Elisabeth Åsbrink's literary breakup with her longtime friend, the controversial playwright Lars Nóren. How controversial? Well, he once staged a play starring Neo-Nazi prison inmates on day parole that mostly consisted of racist diatribes. The day after the last show, one of the the actors took part in a bank robbery in which two police officers were shot dead in the aftermath. Anyway, it’s Nóren who broke up with Åsbrink, because he thought occasionally freelancing for a newspaper that supports NATO was beyond the pale. The Scandinavian literary scene is wild. I’m reminded of a great bit in a Jens Lapidus novel where a prisoner escapes thanks to the prison blueprints he’s given as part of a thesis he’s writing on the history of the prison.

The LRB on Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover Valentine Ackman. I’ve been reading through Warner’s short stories and hope to write a little about them here next month.

Lyta Gold on Bridgerton/genre romance as the romance of money was quite good, and informed my reading of Blue Ruin.

Everyday I wake up and I go online and I see dead Palestinian babies. I go online and I see people here in Canada and around the world putting their freedom on the line trying to oppose this, and I see them being smeared. Sorry, I know it’s a bummer but there’s a genocide happening and it’s being streamed to us live and I don’t know what to do or say about it. I want to write more about it here, but I don’t know what to say that wouldn’t lead me further into despair, let alone be effective. I want to do something about it, but I’m not in a place to act. Briarpatch has a good piece about the campaign to smear pro-Palestine protests. And The Walrus has a piece about last year's Giller Awards, Canada’s largest literary award, which was interrupted by protestors demanding the sponsor, Scotiabank, divest from Elbit systems.

A long read about a hacker from Finland who stole a nation’s worth of psychotherapy records. Originally the hacker tried to sell the data back to the nationwide chain of psychotherapy clinics. When they wouldn’t pay the ransom demand he started looking into the records for salacious details to blackmail individual patients with, but by that point the cops were onto him. I dunno, perhaps it’s just me, but maybe not everything needs to be a nationwide chain on a retail franchise model.

#Heistwatch: Kinder Buenos worth £134,000 stolen from estate. Thieves cut through roof of strip club, net $250k. Taco Bell art heist (some of the stolen paintings are going for $10k). Updates on the Pearson Airport heist here and here.