There’s nothing more comfortable than a warm summer afternoon on Bloor Street. If you have a free minute close your eyes and spend it with the city. You have to drink it in with your other senses to really taste it. The crowds. The shopping bags. Sunglasses. Patios. Hot sun. Cold beers. Comfort. Comfort. Comfort.
But nothing jolts you out of lazy bliss like a funeral procession of 28 people in black trudging sombrely down the block. Especially when they’re reading passionate eulogies, dropping love notes and setting up spontaneous shrines for clothing stores, to the obvious bewilderment of the owners.
From July 2nd to 13th thousands of faithful readers in Toronto are paying tribute to the life and death of a dog-eared icon.
The Book.
The Scream Literary Festival brings together some of the best Canadian authors, poets and artists. Hymns, readings, performances, and workshops explore the imminent demise of books and book culture.
Because it’s not just the books themselves that suffer.
Beneath Toronto’s storefronts is a graveyard. From the recently demised David Mirvish Books to Yorkville mainstays the Book Cellar and Britnell’s, Bloor Street is a virtual cemetery of loved and lost bookstores.
“When people hear dead bookstores, they think we’re poking fun,” said Carey Toane, who organised the July 4 Bankruptcy Walking Tour – a memorial trek for the lost.
“But it was a serious walk. We left flowers. People talked about their memories. When you ask writers and fans of literature they all have a favourite independent bookstore. It’s the only place you can find small press books, so when they disappear so does a huge chunk of Canadian culture.”
Chapters. Indigo. Amazon. Fourteen years ago they dropped a megaplex sized brick on independent bookstores. At least a dozen have disappeared in the Annex alone in the past fifty years.
These are stores with personality. Where famous authors got their start and readers stoked their passions. Where you could spend an hour basking in the smell of old paper.
Essayist and founder of Pages Bookstore (which is closing soon) Marc Glassman summed it up best. At the Yorkville Public Library, the oldest in Toronto, in the fiction section (A-J), bald-headed Glassman adjusted his spectacles before an audience of 60 that had gathered for the Scream Fest’s Book of the Dead Incidence Reports.
“When the Internet and computers hit, it seemed at best a mixed blessing to many writers and other cultural practitioners,” said Glassman. “The question du jour for lovers of literature became, ‘would you take a computer to bed with you?’ There was warmth in the physicality of the book-the paper, binding, typography and, in older volumes, the aroma. How could a screen and pieces of hardware replace it?”
But is the written word really dead? Or is all this mourning premature.
Consider this. Over half of Canadians read books for pleasure everyday or almost every day. About 27,000 books are published in Canada every year with annual revenues over $1.5 billion. That’s three new books every hour. In the United States, the annual number is a staggering 170,000.
Maybe it’s not the form itself that’s changing, but how it reaches readers. While US book production declined 3% in 2008, “On Demand” publishing that caters to indie and niche writers more than doubled. Meanwhile, Project Gutenberg is using technology to hook new readers. The Fourth World eBook Fair is providing free downloads of 2 million books for a month from July4th -August4th. Fuelled by donations from libraries around the world, there were over 1 million downloads from the website (worldebookfair.org) on the first day of the festival alone.
Speaking of the ‘net, my internet’s out and leaching wifi off your neighbours is a lot easier when you live in an apartment and not a shitty Parkdale basement next to a halfway house.
So I’m in Starbucks. Again. Researching this story with seven minutes until my internet password runs out. I hate Starbucks, those cheap bastards. But it’s the only place close to home I can surf and suck up the caffeine. Six minutes now. After that it’s off to a library down the street.
“It’s like a bad arcade game,” says my friend. “Running from one coffee shop to another. If only it were more post apocalyptic with guns, cannibals, strippers and mutant animals.”
Mutant animals. That reminds me of that new zombie novel I’ve been meaning to pick up. Pride and Prejudice retold, blood and gore style.
Maybe it’s the garbage or the economy, but something’s rotten in Toronto. Tough times are inspiring a new brand of creepy Canadian literature.
Kicking off the Scream festival were two Canadian horror-lit luminaries (who knew?): Tony Burgess is the author of Pontypool, the Canadian zombie tale that was recently made into a movie. Derek McCormick is the critically acclaimed and fiercely fringe fight-writer of the Haunted Hills, which was named the best book of the year by the Globe and Mail and the Village Voice.
His latest work, the absurdist historical fiction novel the Show that Smells tackles, gay vampire country and western singers.
It doesn’t stop there. Evan Munday’s new comic book Quarter Life Crisis takes place in a post-apocalyptic Toronto where everyone but twenty-five year olds have died. He joins Mariko Tamaki for the Comics to the Rescue portion of the festival Thursday, 7p.m. at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.
“The absurdity of being here in Canada,” laughs poet, novelist and fiction and poetry editor of This Magazine Stuart Ross, when asked what Canadian Horror is inspired by. “The absurdity of attempting to be a writer in Canada. It’s a great existential horror. Not to mention the disappearance of the book. We’re screaming blood curdling murder. And there’s a lot of horror in the minds of readers because the book is such a beautiful thing.”
Back to Glassman. He may have started his speech like an old Roman General addressing his troops before an inevitable defeat, but he ends it with a spurt of hope.
“Will print survive? Yes, just as video didn’t kill the radio star, nor TV destroy cinema. All forms are possible. And the book, like the vampire, will live on-even if it does die!”
Events continue all week. Join leading Canadian poets and novelists like Margaret Christakos and Andrew Pyper for the kick off Scream in High Park Monday, July 13 at 7p.m.
[rssbreak]
