Chad Taylor

Cut short


This week I wrote a 27-line piece about Kurt Cobain for Mythiq 27, an anthology of art and stories about 27 musicians who died aged 27. The book will be published in France in 2013, and will be accompanied by an exhibition.

I was also asked to write 150 words about the Frankfurt Book Fair for the New Zealand Book Council.

This was almost short enough to post on Twitter although I have mixed feelings about that. In an article in the New York Times Twitter's Adam Bain described a tweet as an "envelope:" a way of enclosing content and mailing it. I like that metaphor, if only because I have inherited from my grandparents the habit of using old envelopes as notepaper.

(Pic: Frank Micelotta / Getty Images)

On the road, 2012


Some other authors have blogged about the Frankfurt Book Fair: Robert Sullivan on the opening ceremony and Catherine Robertson on the whole week. I didn't blog because I was travelling without a laptop, which felt like a holiday. I used my iPhone for email. I carried a PDF of my new novel on FileApp Pro, which allowed me to fret over it anywhere, anytime. Caught without an English language version of Pack of Lies at the Mana-Verlag opening, I downloaded a backup ms from Gmail, and read from the phone at the lecturn. Not an ideal experience, but doable.

The practice of hotels charging and arm and a leg for internet access is alive and well in Frankfurt. (In Berlin, like London there is free wifi in most bars and cafés.) In the hotel lobby where the connection was free New Zealanders gathered in the mornings and evenings like smokers on a windy corner, emailing, texting and tweeting. (I've taken Twitter off my phone. It shortens the battery life and my concentration.) Internet access in the rooms was two Euros a day and limited, but at a few dollars a day for up to 25mg on a prepaid SIM, why bother?

For navigation I relied on a paper map of Frankfurt that I bought in Berlin, and for everything else a reporter's notebook and a pencil. Writing things down is still the best way to work -- you remember something better if you write it out by hand, and a pencil will never explode in your pocket.

On the final weekend when I received my Lufthansa flight confirmation I downloaded the boarding pass onto Passport, the iOS6 app. Normally I print out a paper copy of every travel document, just in case, but this time I passed through luggage check in, customs and flight boarding by showing staff the Passport screen or waving the phone across gate scanners. Lufthansa are one of the first airlines to invest in Apple's system and Frankfurt is a modern airport so this went without a hitch. At least half the people in the queue were checking in using smartphones.

The only technology I really missed on the road was a kettle in the hotel room but I knew not to expect that, especially after travelling in France for Les Belles Etrangeres. If you want tea in a European hotel you have to ask for a glass or thermos of hot water at the bar and carry it up to your room in the elevator. Barbaric. But at least then, you have tea. And so on the Wednesday night I sat up on the end of the bed in my room, drinking black tea while reading an ms off an iPhone and scribbling revision notes on a 79 cent notepad.

When all the rainy pavements lead to you


On Friday at the Frankfurt Book Fair (I'm typing this up out of order) Alan Duff, Carl Nixon and I took part in a panel discussion about the urban landscape in New Zealand literature. The subject was in contrast to depictions of the landscape in the pavilion and in other sessions. Alan came right out with it and said we weren't talking about the tourist image of New Zealand, which is why he's good value at things like this. He talked about the violent streets of Once Were Warriors. The panel moderator, Carl's publisher Stefan Weilde, was interested that Alan had renamed Rotorua as Two Lakes; Carl had also renamed the locations in his very Christchurch novel. I suggested that writers need distance from their subject -- life's hot, art's cool -- and that giving a place a different label was a way of objectifying it further, giving the author license to fictionalise. The irony of my novel Lügenspiele (Pack of Lies) is that it's the only novel I've written in which the protagonists try and get away from the city. Although Stefan did say that the hotel reminded him of the Bates Motel in Psycho, "which will give you all some idea of what to expect."

The format was very brisk given the subject matter. Any one of us on the pavilion could have gone on for hours. The allotted time was being counted down on a TV screen in the corner of the stage and the microphones were hand held. By the time it came to other sessions people were better used to it.

PS: Catriona Ferguson at the NZ Book Council blogged about this and other sessions on Friday.

Pic: From a late night train, Berlin.

'Cause I got some weird ideas in my head


Pictured: coming onstage for Sunday's crime panel at the Frankfurt Book Fair with Paul Cleave, Alix Bosco (AKA Greg McGee) and Paddy Richardson, hosted by Wolf Dorn. Paul talked about his Christchurch serial killer novels and writing unsuitable stories at school. Greg talked about how writing a female protagonist gave him the idea of creating a female pseudonym to go with it, as a way of protecting his creation. He thought the critics went much easier on unknown Alix than they would ever would have done on the author of Foreskin's Lament. Paddy talked about writing non-gory crime, and the importance of narrative. She hadn't considered herself a crime writer initially, but came to it later -- something I had a chance to talk to her about when we caught up the next day. Wolf asked me about the influence of film and music on Shirker, which was published in Germany by DTV. All of us (novelist Dorn included) write differently from one another. I said I thought crime-writing was to literature what the blues were to music: a form that has spawned countless variations.

The pavilion was packed, as you can kind of see. That big light in the corner was a lot brighter on stage, but the audience certainly sounded as if they enjoyed what we had to say. Big ups to Wolf for hosting the event.

Bedside reading


Before



This place was good....

A fine Messe

Travelling without a lap top is great but blogging on an iPhone is hard. There are iPads and smart phones aplenty at Frankfurt -- the free wifi grinds to a halt at lunchtime -- but mostly there are books, in huge quantity. If this is what the death of publishing looks like then death is nothing to be afraid of. Things were very different in 2003-2006, people tell me, in the "boom years" but again things seem pretty good. The floors of the main halls are crammed with stalls and reps taking meetings. One publisher told me the point of the Fair is to be seen, "so people know you're still alive."

New Zealand is in two places: in the sales stand in Hall 8, which is as busy as the others, and in the main forum, where stands the pavilion, the events stage and the green room, where the mood is unfailingly upbeat. The locals and publishers I've spoken to like the Pavilion and think we've done well. (Disclosure: I crashed a party that wasn't really for authors. "You must feel like you are in the tank with the sharks," someone said, in a German accent.) There is a lot of talk about hiking; I've had to bluff my way through that. My sessions are today and Sunday. I've had meetings, been interviewed for radio and the Arte tv channel and am taking part in an online event on Saturday. And it's raining, so as an Aucklander I feel right at home. Although my head does hurt this morning for some reason.

Late night


Jazz at the A-Trane, Bleibtreustraße 1. Raphael Beiter on trombone. Amazing vocal performances by Fama M'Boup, Friederline Merz, Zola Mennenech and Anna Marlene. Your host: Andreas C. Schmidt. 

Is this thing on?

From the Mana Verlag press reception at the Patio-Restaurantschiff Helgoländer Ufer/ Kirchstraße, Berlin, with Peter Walker, Robert Sullivan and Philip Temple.







Signs

Arts and culture

Ich bin ein Whatever


Christchurch photographer Maja Moritz took portraits of me for the press kit for the Frankfurt Book Fair. This is my favourite.

Directions


In preparation for the Frankfurt Book Fair I downloaded the German + Travel app, which supplies and speaks useful phrases. The sound files are preloaded so there is no wait to play them, and no network traffic charge. And you can play phrases at random to make up robo-conversations: it's the app Kurt Schwitters would have liked.

Since upgrading to iOS6 I've been using the Apple maps app too -- I thought it was fine. Consumer Report rates the app as not that bad. 'Apple’s problem is that is replaced best-in-class with pretty-good.'

There is a new and best Amazon Kindle out. Gizmodo says the Paperwhite is for 'anyone who wants an ereader with a great screen. Which is basically anyone who wants an ereader.'

You may have Sherlock Holmes' on your e-reader, but you will not find his address on any map. The suspiciously well-named Jimmy Stamp deconstructs and reconstructs the mystery of 221B Baker Street:
As a real manifestation of a fiction, the many 221Bs attest to the power of Arthur Conan Doyle's writing. So strongly do the Holmes stories resonate with our culture that we have manifested his home in our own reality, creating shrines and sites of pilgrimage across the world. But these "replicas" also attest to the power of architecture and interior design, which by their very nature make things real.
Gavin Polone at New York Magazine talks about why TV is better than movies. If you're interested in popular culture you should print out this article and nail it to the wall. Almost a coda to Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, it does well to explain the most significant shift in mainstream entertainment since the rise of the movie blockbuster in the 1970s.
I would bet that you have noticed that your friends are more excited for new episodes of a favorite show than they are for the release of a super-hyped studio tentpole movie...  [A] malaise has taken hold of the movie audience, which is illustrated by the oft-heard phrase, "There is nothing out worth seeing.".
But why? Polone:
There are too many networks now competing for attention and they don't have the luxury of spending the huge sums movie studios can to cut through the marketing clutter and get the consideration of the potential viewer. So, they have no choice but to make shows that stand out from everything else based on their quality and distinctiveness. That is why, in recent years, you've gotten to watch not only Breaking Bad, but also The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and Homeland. None had pricey CGI, huge stars, or a flashy, unavoidable ad campaign; all they had was terrific writing, acting, and originality that made people want to recommend these shows to their friends.
On the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Graeme McMillan at Time discusses how the series changed pop culture forever:
These days, of course, we're used to the idea of rebooting series and franchises and getting new takes on what had come before, keeping the best bits and discarding what doesn't fit for something that everyone hopes is better. That wasn't the case back in 1987. Back then, translations between media tried their best to faithfully replicate previous iterations, and even oddities like the Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks Dragnet movie that predated The Next Generation by a matter of months tried their hardest to offer affectionate homage to their predecessors, even as they pretended to parody them. Star Trek: The Next Generation may not be a reboot in the common usage of the term today: It takes place in the same continuity as the earlier series, and doesn't seek to replace it or undo anything that came before, but for all intents and purposes it was a reboot for the concept and a chance for Roddenberry and staff to correct whatever mistakes or bad decisions had been forced on the original.
In Hollywood, pitching is everything. TV writer Bill Barol remembers being with Al Franken for the worst meeting in the history of show business:
After a few moments the telephone rang at the host's station, Franken picked up the phone. Here's what I heard him say:

"Hi, honey... No, still having meetings. What? CNN? No, why?" He listened for a long moment, and then I saw all the color drain from his face. And I heard him say: "He's DEAD?"
However a study published in the Journal of Aging and Health has found that creativity predicts a longer life:
A large body of research links neuroticism with poorer health and conscientiousness with superior health. Now openness, which measures cognitive flexibility and the willingness to entertain novel ideas, has emerged as a lifelong protective factor. The linchpin seems to be the creativity associated with the personality trait—creative thinking reduces stress and keeps the brain healthy.

World on a wire


My confirmed schedule for the Frankfurt Book Fair, to date. There are a few more things hovering around, TBC. It's going to be productive and fun to be talking about New Zealand writing to international audiences. So if you're in Frankfurt (or Berlin, earlier), do come. If you're not then there's an app for that.

SUNDAY 7 OCTOBER / 17.00 – 18.00
Presentation of four New Zealand writers from MANA-Verlag: Philip Temple, Peter Walker, Chad Taylor, Robert Sullivan.
Patio-Restaurantschiff Helgoländer Ufer / Kirchstrasse 10557 Berlin.

THURSDAY 11 OCTOBER / 17.00
"Meet the Author"
Frankfurt Book Fair / The MANA stand Venue Halle 3.1 K674

FRIDAY 12 OCTOBER / 13:00 – 13:30
Urban Sprawl (Panel discussion)
The gritty city revealed through contemporary New Zealand fiction writers Alan Duff, Chad Taylor and Carl Nixon in discussion with Stefan Weilde.
Frankfurt Book Fair / Pavilion.

FRIDAY 12 OCTOBER / 14.00
"Meet the Author"
Frankfurt Book Fair / The MANA stand Venue Halle 3.1 K674

SUNDAY 14 OCTOBER / 13.00 – 14.00
A Grisly Lunch ( Panel discussion)
New Zealand Crime Writers Paul Cleave, Alix Bosco (Greg McGee), Chad Taylor and Paddy Richardson in conversation with Wulf Dorn.
Frankfurt Book Fair / Pavilion.

SUNDAY 14 OCTOBER / 14:30
"Meet the Author"
Frankfurt Book Fair / The MANA stand Venue Halle 3.1 K674

Appetiser


Doing an interview for the German Arte channel with Barbara Dickenberger in the Mezze Bar, Queen Street. We talked about cities, New Zealand, the lying narrator and Lügenspiele (Mana Verlag 2012) in preparation for the Frankfurt Book Fair. I'll post my schedule of events soon. DOP Jon Bowden who I worked with on Frontseat. He would have taken a better photo than that.

Ein literarisches Roadmovie


In October I will travel to Berlin and Frankfurt where New Zealand is the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2012. There I will be taking part at several events to talk about, among other things, the new German edition of my 1993 novel Lügenspiele (Pack of Lies). The first event will be a reception welcoming New Zealand writers to Germany. More dates TBC.

My German publishers Mana Verlag have subtitled the new edition of Lügenspiele "Ein literarisches Roadmovie" -- I like the sound of that. I like the cover photograph, too, which is by Edinburgh-based artist Jeannie Laub.