Friday, October 30, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Pagan party
If you’re feeling witchy this Halloween weekend, check out the Montreal Witches Masquerade Ball, happening Friday in NDG’s Rosedale-Queen Mary United Church (6870 Terrebonne). The ball is organized by the Montreal Pagan Resource Centre, which connects members of Montreal’s pagan community.
The event kicks off at 6 p.m. with a Samhain (pronounced “saw-wan”) ritual that will honour loved ones who have passed away in the last year. The ritual is free and for adults only. The ball starts at 8 p.m., featuring a DJ and an outdoor Celtic labyrinth and is open to all.
Hobbes, the president of the Pagan Resource Centre who only goes by one name, promises plenty of “rug-cutting and shin-digging,” and says organizers anticipate a heavy turnout from local pagans and the general public.
“A lot of peoples put on costumes, but fail to realize they are in a costume year-round, and Halloween is when they actually take their costume off and get to be themselves,” says Kevin-John Chaplin, a volunteer at the centre.
Profits will go to the Centre, a volunteer-based drop-in located inside Mélange Magique, a pagan bookstore.
The ball is alcohol-free and open to all ages. Tickets are $12 at the door. For more info visit paganuniverse.com/mprc/.
ELISABETH FAURE
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Sexy schoolteacher seduces scribes
Hour Vixen Laura Roberts serves up erotic fiction lessons
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GRAPHIC STEPHANIE VRIEND
A new workshop promises to help would-be writers improve their erotic writing skills.
In her upcoming intro workshop to erotic writing, Hour’s “V for Vixen” columnist Laura Roberts will share her saucy talents in sexy smut-writing.
“I think people frequently leave out sex scenes more because they’re scared of doing them wrong than because they don’t think they should include them,” said Roberts, who is also founder and publisher of Black Heart Magazine, an online source for smut.
“And there are tons of ways to screw up sex scenes, so it’s intimidating.”
The workshop, titled “Saucy Smut: An Introduction to Erotic Writing,” offers ways to avoid the pitfalls of bad eroticism.
“Most people come at them from either a kind of Harlequin romance or a porn video angle,” explained Roberts. “They don’t think there are many options. There are actually lots and that’s what I plan to teach.”
“Saucy Smut” benefits not only the serious writer of erotica, but any fiction writer who is trying to write a sexy scene into their novel.
A bad sex scene can ruin an otherwise perfectly good book and no author is immune. A list of famed authors who have been pilloried for horrible sex scenes includes Canada’s own Michael Ignatieff (in Asya) and Tom Wolfe (in I Am Charlotte Simmons).
Wolfe won The Literary Review’s Bad Sex award in 2004 for his efforts and did not accept the honour graciously, which touched off a minor scandal in the literary world. Roberts not only wishes to help writers avoid a similar fate, but said she thinks the genre of erotic writing can be raised to a new level of quality.
“I think [the Bad Sex awards] are interesting and sort of funny, but I also wish there were an accompanying ‘Good Sex award,’” said Roberts. “That, to me, is more of a challenge than writing bad sex scenes.”
In her opinion, Montreal needs to be doing more to encourage erotic writing.
“I find it kind of disappointing that in a city like Montreal, which comes off as so sexually liberated, there’s no sex writing community,” she said. Roberts pointed to writers such as Susie Bright, Violet Blue and Audacia Ray as authors who have raised the profile of erotica and wants to see Montrealers get the same exposure.
“It would be awesome to read a Canadian anthology of sex writing, the way Cleis Press publishes yearly anthologies of Best Sex Writing,” said Roberts. Cleis is a queer publishing house and their Best Sex Writing issue includes such categories as Best Gay Sex, Best Lesbian Romance and Best Women’s Erotica.
Roberts wants to teach workshop participants that good sex writing extends beyond dirty language, emphasizing that character and plot development are the key to writing any good story.
“It’s like being seduced by a new lover every time you read a good story,” said Roberts. “Even if you know the endpoint is going to be sex, it’s exciting to get there in a different way.”
“Saucy Smut: An Introduction to Erotic Writing” will be taught at Joy Toyz (4200 St-Laurent Blvd.) on Oct. 9 at 6:30 p.m. Price is $35, $30 for students.
Lucky number Seven
Famed landscape painter’s origins traced back to Concordia campus
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Concordia journalism professor Wayne Larsen did exhaustive research on the most famed of Canada’s Group of Seven landscape painters PHOTO ALAN MACQUARRIE
One of Concordia’s own faculty is climbing the bestseller list with a new biography about the life of A.Y. Jackson, a member of Canada’s famed 19th-century Group of Seven landscape painters.
A.Y Jackson: The Life of a Landscape Painter offers readers a vibrant portrait of one of Canada’s most famous artists.
“Jackson was always the most interesting member of the Group,” said Wayne Larsen, a journalism professor and editor of The Westmount Examiner, who is himself a landscape artist. “He never owned a car, never married and lived a frugal lifestyle that was designed to serve one purpose: his painting.”
At the Oct. 8 book launch, held at Nicholas Hoare bookstore on Greene Avenue, the Concordia community rubbed elbows with Westmount’s finest—both the outgoing and incoming mayor were in attendance—to celebrate Larsen’s latest book.
“I could never understand why there was never a full biography of Jackson, but now I know,” said Larsen. “It was a huge undertaking and no one else ever wanted to tackle it.”
To write the complete story of Jackson’s life, Larsen went over a large amount of previously unpublished material with the help of his wife, art historian Darlene Cousins. They pored through many of Jackson’s personal letters and family photos, along with interviews with people who were close to him and colour photography of his art from private collections.
The resulting book is a feast for the eyes and an intimate look at Jackson’s life, detailing how the maverick outdoorsman rose from an impoverished childhood to become the de facto leader of the Group of Seven. The art contained in the book is a portrait of Canada, from rural Quebec communities to Newfoundland, British Columbia and the Arctic.
In the course of his research, Larsen tracked down Jackson’s birthplace on Mackay Street, a stone’s throw from Concordia’s Sir George Williams campus. Larsen said that most of Jackson’s early life had never been documented prior to his book.
One of the best parts about writing the book was doing hands-on research, said Larsen, which resulted in humorous findings.
“I remember laughing out loud when I saw [Jackson’s] old army enlistment papers from World War One,” said Larsen. “Most kids lied to make themselves older in order to enlist, he lied to make himself younger.”
Jackson’s forceful personality informs each of the canvases reproduced in the book, giving them new meaning.
As of Oct. 10, the book was already at number two on The Globe and Mail’s bestseller list in the art section, second only to Kat Von D’s High Voltage Tattoo.
A.Y. Jackson: The Life of a Landscape Painter
Wayne Larsen
Dundurn Press
280 pp
$60.00
Word to the Wise
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Armenian scientist George Ter-stepanian predicted such things as avian flu and super hurricanes back in 1982. GRAPHIC VIVIEN LEUNG
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Wiser Than Humans George Ter-Stepanian Éditions Antaeus 324 pp $24.99
Wiser Than Humans, the work of the late author and scientist George Ter-Stepanian, was a book truly ahead of its time. Written in the early 1980s and available now for the first time in English, the fictional work foretells many of the environmental crises currently affecting humanity.
Available in time for CON*CEPT, Montreal’s annual science fiction convention, the book is set in the year 2015 and opens at a global environmental summit. The world is on the brink of destruction because of the troubled state of the environment. Ter-Stepanian accurately predicted many events that have already come to pass such as avian flu and disastrous changes in the world’s climate.
A group of scientists leave the conference and fly home over the Bermuda triangle where they are promptly kidnapped by a UFO. What happens next involves an interspecies effort to save the planet.
The life of the book’s author, who passed away in 2006, was no less interesting than those of his fictional creations. Born at the beginning of the 20th century in Armenia, Ter-Stepanian lived to be 99 years old and witnessed world-changing events.
“He lived through two world wars, two revolutions, Lenin/Stalin and the KGB terror regime, famine, and the ‘dark’ years in Armenia,” recalled his daughter, Karina Ter-Stepanian, who co-published the book with her sister, Anahit—both of whom now reside in Montreal.
Ter-Stepanian was an internationally recognized scientist, specializing in soil mechanics and engineering geology and publishing over 300 scientific papers in journals around the globe. He was also passionate about art and literature and spoke seven languages fluently. The book was originally written in Russian and then translated into English by Christine Mitchell.
Armenia’s troubled national history is another recurring theme in Wiser Than Humans.
Several of the leading characters make reference to the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Turks, an event which remains unacknowledged by Turkey to this day.
“My father was an eight-year-old boy in 1915 when he first became aware of our [national] tragedy,” said Karina Ter-Stepanian. “He believed the recognition of the Armenian Genocide was important not only for Armenians but for humanity, to ensure that the same crime will not happen elsewhere again.
“The book was inspired by his strong belief that the general public needs to be aware of our devastating ecological conditions. That is why he decided to write a science fiction novel, [which he thought] would serve as a powerful and metaphorical vehicle through which to share his concerns and make a plea to his fellow citizens to take decisive and necessary measures,” she continued.
But has the late Ter-Stepanian’s dire forecast for humanity’s fate come too late to the ears of the western world? So long as science fiction writers continue to make bold new predictions about the direction we as a species are heading, it’ll never be too late.
Wiser Than Humans can be purchased online at editionsantaeus.com.
Montreal’s science fiction and fantasy convention, CON*CEPT, runs from Oct. 2 to 4 at the Days Hotel (1005 Guy St.). For more info about CON*CEPT, visit conceptsff.ca.
October 6, 2009 NEWS Lonely Liberals wipe the slate clean
Buses needed to fill Quebec convention with delegates
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Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff with a bundle of the thunder-sticks that urged him on. GRAPHIC VIVIEN LEUNG AND GINGER COONS
On Oct. 4, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff shook hands with delegates and attempted to repair the damage caused by the resignation of his Quebec lieutenant, Denis Coderre, on Sept. 28.
A week before the Quebec City convention, Coderre resigned after Ignatieff gave long-time rival Martin Cauchon the contested nomination for the riding of Outremont.
During his very public resignation, Coderre took a swipe at Ignatieff saying that decisions for Quebec were being made by a circle of advisors in Toronto.
Coderre’s resignation created a ripple effect that extended to the convention. Several senior members of the party’s Quebec executive resigned in solidarity. Hundreds of attendees also dropped out, leaving the party scrambling to rescue the convention and put up a united front for the media.
Closer scrutiny in the packed convention hall showed that appearances were deceptive; a majority of those on the floor sported yellow IDs, not white ones, meaning they were invited guests and not actual voting delegates.
The Liberal Party had feverishly offered free passes, meals and bus transportation to hundreds of people in the final days before the convention.
This complicated matters when delegates were asked to vote on policy matters and constitutional amendments. Many people without voting rights were allowed to speak at the microphone and, although officials claimed that quorum was achieved, the number of voting delegates in the room might have dropped off throughout the day.
In an effort to mitigate the effect of Coderre’s accusation that Ignatieff’s Liberals are Toronto-centric, party officials banned Ontario MPs from attending the event, forcing several high-profile guests to cancel at the last minute.
The audience members had a lukewarm response when Ignatieff delivered his speech, although supporters banged their thunder-sticks aggressively to give the impression of thunderous applause.
Ignatieff used his speech to try to save face from the Coderre fallout and expressed his love for Quebec and its people.
“You are the grassroots,” Ignatieff told the crowd in his French-only address, “but I am the leader.”
The Liberal leader hugged and praised his predecessor, Stéphane Dion, in a moment that received a standing ovation.
There were no hard feelings on Dion’s part as he urged party unity behind Ignatieff to which the crowd responded with applause.
Another newsmaker at the convention was speculation about whether or not Ignatieff will replace Coderre—a hot topic The Canadian Press has been following closely. According to the news service, Ignatieff will confirm this in a matter of days.
During a time when Liberals have vowed to oppose the government at every turn—which could possibly triggering an election at any time—and have faced bad publicity for the Coderre fallout, the party is turning to recreating their image.
In a sign of party renewal, delegates voted in an almost entirely new executive headed by incoming President Marc Lavigne. In his acceptance speech, Lavigne vowed to better organize the party in every region of Quebec and to make use of modern fundraising techniques to fill the party’s bare coffers.
Elisabeth Faure attended the convention as a delegate.