Apostrophe | Joyland
Presented by Pages Books & Magazines, ECW Press & NOW
Emily Schultz, author of Joyland, a novel about teens, video games and the Cold War, will talk about the influence of video games on her new book, and then, along with commentator Misha Glouberman, will lead audience members in a movie-screen-sized version of the Atari game Combat, a post-Pong, primitive tank game circa 1977.
Joyland: Welcome to 1984 and the town of South Wakefield. Chris Lane is 14 and he's sure that he can see the future, or at least guess what's inside of Christie Brinkley's mind. But he can't foresee the closing of Joyland, the town's only video arcade. With the arcade's passing comes a summer of teenage lust, violence, and a search for new entertainment. Never far away is Chris's younger sister, Tammy, who plays spy to the events that will change the lives of her family and town forever. Bringing the Cold War home in a novel set to the digital pulse of video games and the echoes of hair metal, Joyland is about the impossibility of knowing the future. Joyland is illustrated by graphic novelist Nate Powell, whose work has been praised by Sin City creator Frank Miller as "observant, intimate cartooning [that] surgically cuts to the bone."
Emily Schultz is an award-winning writer living in Toronto. Her first book, Black Coffee Night, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award for Best First Fiction. A story from that collection was adapted by Lynne Stopkewich, director of Kissed. Schultz is the former editor of Broken Pencil magazine, and of This Magazine, and has been called "one of the best Canadian writers under 30" by the Globe & Mail.
Darren Wershler-Henry & Bill Kennedy, authors of Apostrophe, will debut apostropheengine.ca, the Internet home of the computer program that gave birth to the poetry in their new book. Projecting their web site to movie screen proportions, Wershler-Henry and Kennedy will interact with audience members to show how the apostrophe program hijacks search engines to generate live poetry. They will be joined on stage by poet Ken Babstock for a discussion on the role of the poet in the creation of such work.
Apostrophe is: a) a figure of speech in which a person, an abstract quality, or a nonexistent entity is addressed as though present; b) a poem written in 1993 in which every sentence is an apostrophe; c) a program - apostropheengine.ca - based on the 1993 poem that hijacks search engines in order to extend the poem infinitely; d) a book of poetry written using the Web site. The answer: e) all of the above. Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry's Apostrophe contains all of these things, except the search engine (but you can visit that any time you like). Each line from the original poem has become the title of a new poem generated by the program's metonymic romp through the World Wide Web. Phrases rub against each other promiscuously; poems and readers alike come to their own conclusions. The results are by turns poignant, banal, offensive, and hilarious, but always surprising and always unaffected. In other words, everything a book of contemporary poetry should be, and then some. Poet and scholar Charles Bernstein has suggested that Apostrophe may be related to Freud's notion of the uncanny, a somnambulistic drift that appears aimless yet somehow always returns to "you." Apostrophe is an entirely new kind of poetry: neither stable nor unstable, sections come and go, but the overall shape of the poem remains vaguely familiar, like a trick of memory.
Bill Kennedy is the Artistic Director of The Scream Literary Festival, a poetry editor for Coach House Books, and organizes the Toronto-based Lexiconjury Reading Series. He also runs Stop14, a new media development company.
Darren Wershler-Henry teaches Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is the author of two other books of poetry, NICHOLODEON and the tapeworm foundry, and author or co-author of seven nonfiction works. His most recent book is The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting.
