Culture in a Petri Dish

Friday morning.  I rise at the unconscionable hour of nine a.m. for a return engagement at the Waterfront Theatre.  Running late as usual so decide to drive even though it’s just a ten minute walk to the island.  I think, oh yeah, bound to be pretty quiet down there this time of day, parking, which often is, won’t be a problem.  Maybe a few tumbleweeds of rain blowing down Cartwright Street but yeah, we got this whole thing under control.  Wrong.  The joint is crawling with traffic.  Now I’m thinking, a bit frantically, “What did you expect?  What did you expect?”  I circle round in a crush of cars and pedestrians and veer off to check out my secret parking place.  Luck is with me and it’s empty.  I snug in and get to the theatre.  Things are in fact running a bit late.  It’s not a sell-out, but close.

     The cultural clock is turned ahead this morning from last night’s realms of the historical and made-up old Wild West to four novelists who write in contemporary milieus, Lynn Coady, Angie Abdou, Timothy Taylor and David Gilmour.  I don’t know about the title of this event.  Petri dish implies some sort of experiment and near as I can tell these writers don’t practice the art of experimental fiction except perhaps in the sense that all fiction at least starts out as an experiment. 

     Timothy Taylor and David Gilmour I know and wasn’t surprised when they appeared and looked exactly as they’re supposed to.  I had no idea who Angie Abdou was and wasn’t surprised when I didn’t recognize her but for some reason, at least momentarily, I was wondering who the fourth writer was and had this strange frisson when this morning’s moderator, Shaena Lambert, introduced her.  Lynn Coady.  That’s Lynn Coady?  Are you sure?  For some reason Lynn Coady in the flesh struck me as utterly unlike any of the impressions I’d gained from seeing her image in the paper or on the dust jacket of the one book of hers I’ve read, “Saints of Big Harbour”.  She looked–different.  Maybe it was the glasses.  And she looked way too young.  Lynn Coady’s, like, forty, right?  And this person looks like she could still be in high school.  Are they sure that’s Lynn Coady?  It could be I needed another coffee.

     Lynn read a sequence from her new novel “The Antagonist”, man-boys hanging around an ice cream shop in a town they’ve grown too big for and in which there’s nothing else to do. 

     Angie Abdou followed with an excerpt from her new novel “The Canterbury Trail”. Yes, Chaucer had some input into this “ski-culture” tale of a last of the season backwoods B.C. jaunt by a not entirely copacetic group who eschew the natural high of the great outdoors for copious amounts of drugs and alcohol. 

     Timothy Taylor, a local writer with an enviable record of success, make that vivid green envy, followed with a section from “The Blue Light Project”.  I haven’t read the book yet but it sounds a fine mash-up of culture, fake culture, paranoia and the extraordinary madness of crowds. 

     David Gilmour concluded the reading portion of the event with a brief excerpt from “The Perfect Order of Things”, autobiographical fiction, I would say, at its finest, where the personas of the protagonists of his earlier novels collect into one omni-author who revisits scenes of crises in his past life.  Stumbling around the Toronto International Film Festival twenty years ago, for instance, when he was thirties-ish and felt resolutely that he was an abject alcoholic failure.  Funny stuff, but he managed to get on with his life.  As he said later:  “It’s not fun to write about happy stuff.  If you really dig, if you find it interesting, other people will.”

     Contemporary culture, whatever’s happening in the modern world?  There was agreement that nowadays generally there’s an “atmosphere of great distrust”.  Paranoia about what’s real, what’s genuine.  There’s what’s happening, and what’s depicted as happening.  What is really going on here?

     A final question from the audience asked the authors what the feeling was getting their first book published.

     Timothy Taylor:  Euphoria.

     Lynn Coady:  Good.

     Angie Abdou:  Validation.

     David Gilmour:  The Beatles.

     The idea of culture is an amorphous thing.  It’s many things to many people.  We’re talking a huge number of Petri dishes.  And I’m pretty sure that was Lynn Coady.