Frankfurt Book Fair 2014
This year's Frankfurt Book Fair was exciting and eventful as ever, but unfortunately I cought the dreaded Book Fair Flu. It happens nearly every year to those of us who stay the entire week in the small city of halls with thousands of people breathing the same air, but usually the symptoms wait for Monday. Not this year, where I'm running a fever and sniffling like a Dickensian orphan, so the report will be shorter than usual.
Finland, the guest of honor, went for minimalistic in its pavillion decorations, in stark contrast to some of the earlier guests - New Zealand comes to mind -, but it was effective.
Four white circles of different sizes, and within in them, places to read, a bench full of Finnish literary quotes which you could only see if you put a paper on them and rubbed with a pencil over it - this got everyone's playful attention -, and on the other end of the technological scale the possibility to compose and post instant poems on the computer in another of the circles.
I couldn't attend the opening ceremony this year, so I missed Sofie Oksanen, the most famous Finnish writer present. But I know next to nothing about Finland and Finnish literature, so I went to some lectures and discussions to learn. Roman Schatz did a panel on everyday life in Finland with such details like "Putin cheese" as a name for the current extremely cheap cheese on the market (which was destined to be exported to Russia, but Finland being an E.U. country, the boycott is on), the fact everyone has mobile phones and no one has a landline anymore, and the "True Fins", Finland's populist nationalistic party, not being a worry on the scale of UKIP or Le Pen's Front Nationale, but notable for making it into parliament nonetheless. On the lighter side of the scale, there was a panel discussing Finnish humor, and a poor guy of an author, Tuomas Kyriö, was one of the chosen people because his books were funny (but he himself, as he insisted, was not).
Incidentally, I think panels discussing humor are doomed in general - explaining kills a joke every time. He also had strong opinions on the film versions of Finland's most famous (dead) humorist, Arto Paasilina, who according to him with one exception suck. I felt more ignorant about my lack of Finnish literature knowledge than ever. Strolling through the various halls, I at last recalled ONE Finnish writer whose work I was familiar with, and whose books I have in fact read several tmes: Mika Waltari. The Egyptian was perhaps the earliest historical novel which made a deep, deep impression on me.
There are about 70 000 new publications present at the Frankfurt Book Fair each year, so however many you sample, it's bound to be only a small percentage. I did note down two for proper reading (instead of browsing): a novel about Johanna Bonger Van Gogh, by a Spanish author, called in German "Die Witwe der Brüder Van Gogh" ("The Widow of the Brothers Van Gogh"). Johanna married Theo, Vincent's brother, had a child by him, and then had to experience in short order Vincent's suicide and Theo's rapid decline and death (he survived his brother for I think only 18 months or so. The onnly fictional work I had seen paying previous attention to Johanna is Robert Altman's "Vincent and Theo", and even there she's an, albeit interesting, supporting character. I have never seen or read anything focusing on her and her pov, and if you think about it, losing your husband in such circumstances and being stuck with all these paintings which at that point it must have seemed nobody would ever want, and alone with a small child - Johanna must have been one tough woman. She was essential for getting tthe public finally interested in Vincent Van Goth. From what I could see via browsing, the novel seems to explore both her grief and anger during Theo's withdrawal and death, then her resolve to continue, and lastly - once Vincent's paintings are famous - her wish not to get consumed into the Keeper of the Grail role entirely.
This novel is a short one, but the other I really want to read thoroughly is an epic of 1200 or so pages, by Georgian writer Nino Haratischwili, who moved to Germany and writes in German, called "Die acht Leben". Nino - not Nina, though she's a woman. I saw her several times during the book fair, once during an interview, where she had onee of the best retorts I've heard to the interviewer asking her whether the fact that her novel has more pov female characters than male ones means she has a feminist agenda. Quoth Ms. Haratischwili: "I find it telling that I'm still asked this in 2014 in Germany. If the novel had mostly male characters, it wouldn't even occur to anyone to ask whether or not that implies an agenda. I can't help but think of the actress Sofie Reuss who said that Hamlet's tragedy is seen as that of humanity, while Ophelia's is seen as "a woman's". Until Ophelia's tragedy, too, is seen as humanity's, we won't be equal."
Clever replies aside, I also was impressed by the excerpts she read. Her novel describes several generations of a Georgian family. One of the excerpts did a lot with the metaphor of story/carpet weaving. The other was a raw and viscerating scene of one of the women, who had the misfortune of being fancied by Beria, Stalin's terminator sidekick, reuniting with her husband (who works for Beria but has only just found out about his wiife having had to become Beria's mistress). She doesn't know yet he knows, they make love, and then just, just when she has climaxed, he throws acid in her face and then comits suicide.
A book I already knew in English but which got translated into German was May Pang'ss "Instamatic Karma", her photo collection with short text passages. May Pang was present to promote the book and was interviewed by Willi Winkler, one of our more famous journalists for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Winkler, took the job of translator rather liberally and added a lot of background for the audience whenever he translated her answers into German, but just when I thought "come on, this isn't necessary, people attending this presentation are bound to be Lennon fans anyway who know this stuff", a couple behind me had the following dialogue:
Wife: But wasn't the wife called.... Yoko something?
Husband: This is someone else.
Head. Desk. Anyway. If you're familiar with May Pang, none of her answers were surprising, given this was a half hour presentation, but then as this demonstration proved a lot of people weren't. Becoming John's and Yoko's assistant, check, Yoko telling her to sexually babysit John, check (that's not how she put it, I hasten to add - her quote of Yoko has always been "You should date John" -, but it's essentially what happened), Yoko calling up to 15 times a day while they were in Los Angeles, check, reconciliation with Paul and Julian, check, Phil Spector being crazy Phil Spector, check. Actually, one of the Phil Spector stories was new to me, or maybe I had just forgotten: the time he swallowed the key, and no one, not even visiting David Geffen, dared to resolve to drastic measures because they were afraid of crazy Phil and his gun. May in person has a lower voice than I had expected, a pleasant and cheerful demeanour, and managed to make her replies sound spontanous despite having said them a thousand times already.
The Book Fair always culminates with the awarding of the Peace Prize of the German Book Fair in the St. Paul's, the church where the first German parliament during our very short revolution of 1848 assembled.
This year's recipient of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade was Jaron Lanier, digital activist, who certainly was one of the most colourful appearances to get this award: an enormous figure with long bright brown Rasta dreadlock hair (he's white), who gesticulated with his hands like a boss and when his acceptance speech had ended played an instrument from Laos for the audience to boot.
The audience, who hadn't experienced something like this before, loved him. Lanier was a very topical choice: not for nothing did the Mayor of Frankfurt, one of the presenters, use the prases "Right to privacy", "I don't want to be spied on by the NSA" and "for me, Edward Snowden is a hero of our time" (thunderous applause by the audience except for the politicians from the governing coalition who have to live with the embarassment of not having granted sanctuary to Snowden). In his own speech, though, Lanier mentioned that much as the government spying got rightful attention courtesy of Snowden, what's far more worrying long term is the spying by the cooperations, of which them sharing data with the governments is just a minor offspring. "Outsourcing off democracy" was a striking term, too. He also emphasized talking as an insider, coming from the digital world himself, and wanting to deal with it as it exists, not pretendd one could just wish it away. One reason why he also writes books, he said, is that while the internet has from the beginning always commented on itself, it isn't really a good commenter. A book, as a form, gives you the chance to step away a bit and look from a larger distance.
"Pack mentality" as something which, while always present in humanity, harnessed by the internet - "including and expecially by those who fancy themselves rebels" was an observation which resonated with me that I've often found to be true. The very practicall Mr. Lanier had a tip how to counteract one's own tendencies for this, too. "I always find it easier to trust people who support more than one sports team. If you find it in yourself to define yourself as someone belonging not just to one pack, to one clan, but to several, who maybe hold conflicting povs, your loyalties get confused, and you step away alrady from pack mentality."
( His backstory had another type of resonance not just for me, but for the entire audience: his mother was from Vienna, which she had to flee, and she lost most of her family to the concentration camps. )
Something else: the old quest for immortality resurrected by Silicon Valley. Apparantly there's actually a project to "solve the death problem" going on. To which Jaron Lanier said he sees it as rubbish. Even if it were eventually possible, it would either be available only to a tiny, tiny elite, or else it would mean a geriatic dreary society as new children eventually couldn't allowed to be born anymore. But in terms of more present day situations: there's the way the digital world destroys old sources of income without offering new ones. A seemingly free automated translation in reality works by having scanned the works of thousands of human translators - who don't get paid. And so on.
It all made for a captivating speech which brought everyone on their feet, and then, as mentioned, we got some music as a bonus, from an instrument which was, he said, the first to use 16... somethings. (Alas, he mumbled, and thus I did not understand.) Which apparantly makes it the distant ancestor of computers, hence him playing it in conclusion of his speech. It charmed the hell out of everyone, and sent us all home maybe with worries in our hearts, but also a smile on our face.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1019941.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Finland, the guest of honor, went for minimalistic in its pavillion decorations, in stark contrast to some of the earlier guests - New Zealand comes to mind -, but it was effective.
Four white circles of different sizes, and within in them, places to read, a bench full of Finnish literary quotes which you could only see if you put a paper on them and rubbed with a pencil over it - this got everyone's playful attention -, and on the other end of the technological scale the possibility to compose and post instant poems on the computer in another of the circles.
I couldn't attend the opening ceremony this year, so I missed Sofie Oksanen, the most famous Finnish writer present. But I know next to nothing about Finland and Finnish literature, so I went to some lectures and discussions to learn. Roman Schatz did a panel on everyday life in Finland with such details like "Putin cheese" as a name for the current extremely cheap cheese on the market (which was destined to be exported to Russia, but Finland being an E.U. country, the boycott is on), the fact everyone has mobile phones and no one has a landline anymore, and the "True Fins", Finland's populist nationalistic party, not being a worry on the scale of UKIP or Le Pen's Front Nationale, but notable for making it into parliament nonetheless. On the lighter side of the scale, there was a panel discussing Finnish humor, and a poor guy of an author, Tuomas Kyriö, was one of the chosen people because his books were funny (but he himself, as he insisted, was not).
Incidentally, I think panels discussing humor are doomed in general - explaining kills a joke every time. He also had strong opinions on the film versions of Finland's most famous (dead) humorist, Arto Paasilina, who according to him with one exception suck. I felt more ignorant about my lack of Finnish literature knowledge than ever. Strolling through the various halls, I at last recalled ONE Finnish writer whose work I was familiar with, and whose books I have in fact read several tmes: Mika Waltari. The Egyptian was perhaps the earliest historical novel which made a deep, deep impression on me.
There are about 70 000 new publications present at the Frankfurt Book Fair each year, so however many you sample, it's bound to be only a small percentage. I did note down two for proper reading (instead of browsing): a novel about Johanna Bonger Van Gogh, by a Spanish author, called in German "Die Witwe der Brüder Van Gogh" ("The Widow of the Brothers Van Gogh"). Johanna married Theo, Vincent's brother, had a child by him, and then had to experience in short order Vincent's suicide and Theo's rapid decline and death (he survived his brother for I think only 18 months or so. The onnly fictional work I had seen paying previous attention to Johanna is Robert Altman's "Vincent and Theo", and even there she's an, albeit interesting, supporting character. I have never seen or read anything focusing on her and her pov, and if you think about it, losing your husband in such circumstances and being stuck with all these paintings which at that point it must have seemed nobody would ever want, and alone with a small child - Johanna must have been one tough woman. She was essential for getting tthe public finally interested in Vincent Van Goth. From what I could see via browsing, the novel seems to explore both her grief and anger during Theo's withdrawal and death, then her resolve to continue, and lastly - once Vincent's paintings are famous - her wish not to get consumed into the Keeper of the Grail role entirely.
This novel is a short one, but the other I really want to read thoroughly is an epic of 1200 or so pages, by Georgian writer Nino Haratischwili, who moved to Germany and writes in German, called "Die acht Leben". Nino - not Nina, though she's a woman. I saw her several times during the book fair, once during an interview, where she had onee of the best retorts I've heard to the interviewer asking her whether the fact that her novel has more pov female characters than male ones means she has a feminist agenda. Quoth Ms. Haratischwili: "I find it telling that I'm still asked this in 2014 in Germany. If the novel had mostly male characters, it wouldn't even occur to anyone to ask whether or not that implies an agenda. I can't help but think of the actress Sofie Reuss who said that Hamlet's tragedy is seen as that of humanity, while Ophelia's is seen as "a woman's". Until Ophelia's tragedy, too, is seen as humanity's, we won't be equal."
Clever replies aside, I also was impressed by the excerpts she read. Her novel describes several generations of a Georgian family. One of the excerpts did a lot with the metaphor of story/carpet weaving. The other was a raw and viscerating scene of one of the women, who had the misfortune of being fancied by Beria, Stalin's terminator sidekick, reuniting with her husband (who works for Beria but has only just found out about his wiife having had to become Beria's mistress). She doesn't know yet he knows, they make love, and then just, just when she has climaxed, he throws acid in her face and then comits suicide.
A book I already knew in English but which got translated into German was May Pang'ss "Instamatic Karma", her photo collection with short text passages. May Pang was present to promote the book and was interviewed by Willi Winkler, one of our more famous journalists for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Winkler, took the job of translator rather liberally and added a lot of background for the audience whenever he translated her answers into German, but just when I thought "come on, this isn't necessary, people attending this presentation are bound to be Lennon fans anyway who know this stuff", a couple behind me had the following dialogue:
Wife: But wasn't the wife called.... Yoko something?
Husband: This is someone else.
Head. Desk. Anyway. If you're familiar with May Pang, none of her answers were surprising, given this was a half hour presentation, but then as this demonstration proved a lot of people weren't. Becoming John's and Yoko's assistant, check, Yoko telling her to sexually babysit John, check (that's not how she put it, I hasten to add - her quote of Yoko has always been "You should date John" -, but it's essentially what happened), Yoko calling up to 15 times a day while they were in Los Angeles, check, reconciliation with Paul and Julian, check, Phil Spector being crazy Phil Spector, check. Actually, one of the Phil Spector stories was new to me, or maybe I had just forgotten: the time he swallowed the key, and no one, not even visiting David Geffen, dared to resolve to drastic measures because they were afraid of crazy Phil and his gun. May in person has a lower voice than I had expected, a pleasant and cheerful demeanour, and managed to make her replies sound spontanous despite having said them a thousand times already.
The Book Fair always culminates with the awarding of the Peace Prize of the German Book Fair in the St. Paul's, the church where the first German parliament during our very short revolution of 1848 assembled.
This year's recipient of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade was Jaron Lanier, digital activist, who certainly was one of the most colourful appearances to get this award: an enormous figure with long bright brown Rasta dreadlock hair (he's white), who gesticulated with his hands like a boss and when his acceptance speech had ended played an instrument from Laos for the audience to boot.
The audience, who hadn't experienced something like this before, loved him. Lanier was a very topical choice: not for nothing did the Mayor of Frankfurt, one of the presenters, use the prases "Right to privacy", "I don't want to be spied on by the NSA" and "for me, Edward Snowden is a hero of our time" (thunderous applause by the audience except for the politicians from the governing coalition who have to live with the embarassment of not having granted sanctuary to Snowden). In his own speech, though, Lanier mentioned that much as the government spying got rightful attention courtesy of Snowden, what's far more worrying long term is the spying by the cooperations, of which them sharing data with the governments is just a minor offspring. "Outsourcing off democracy" was a striking term, too. He also emphasized talking as an insider, coming from the digital world himself, and wanting to deal with it as it exists, not pretendd one could just wish it away. One reason why he also writes books, he said, is that while the internet has from the beginning always commented on itself, it isn't really a good commenter. A book, as a form, gives you the chance to step away a bit and look from a larger distance.
"Pack mentality" as something which, while always present in humanity, harnessed by the internet - "including and expecially by those who fancy themselves rebels" was an observation which resonated with me that I've often found to be true. The very practicall Mr. Lanier had a tip how to counteract one's own tendencies for this, too. "I always find it easier to trust people who support more than one sports team. If you find it in yourself to define yourself as someone belonging not just to one pack, to one clan, but to several, who maybe hold conflicting povs, your loyalties get confused, and you step away alrady from pack mentality."
( His backstory had another type of resonance not just for me, but for the entire audience: his mother was from Vienna, which she had to flee, and she lost most of her family to the concentration camps. )
Something else: the old quest for immortality resurrected by Silicon Valley. Apparantly there's actually a project to "solve the death problem" going on. To which Jaron Lanier said he sees it as rubbish. Even if it were eventually possible, it would either be available only to a tiny, tiny elite, or else it would mean a geriatic dreary society as new children eventually couldn't allowed to be born anymore. But in terms of more present day situations: there's the way the digital world destroys old sources of income without offering new ones. A seemingly free automated translation in reality works by having scanned the works of thousands of human translators - who don't get paid. And so on.
It all made for a captivating speech which brought everyone on their feet, and then, as mentioned, we got some music as a bonus, from an instrument which was, he said, the first to use 16... somethings. (Alas, he mumbled, and thus I did not understand.) Which apparantly makes it the distant ancestor of computers, hence him playing it in conclusion of his speech. It charmed the hell out of everyone, and sent us all home maybe with worries in our hearts, but also a smile on our face.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1019941.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.