Jonathan Ball's Blog, page 62

Readings in Toronto (April 11) & St. Catherines (April 12)

Watch out, Toronto & St. Catherines! Knives will rain from the sky!

Toronto Will Fall

Watch out, Toronto! Knives will rain from the sky!

Two Graduate Students Sharing an Office: A Short Play

Guildenstern enters his new office, where he meets Rosencrantz. Who beams and launches into…



Rosencrantz: I’m doing my dissertation on the Kantian sublime in the works of Tennyson! What are you doing?

Guildenstern: Killing myself.

#87, yo!

This very site made a list of the Top 100 Book-related blogs recently, so I guess, um, you have made a good choice in reading this? I can’t decide if this should be a spur to post more or a sign that people like it when I post less.

The Politics of Knives shortlisted for a Manitoba Book Award

Thrilled to learn that The Politics of Knives has been shortlisted for a Manitoba Book Award! Congratulations to all of the shortlisted authors and publishers (click the quote below).

Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry/Prix Lansdowne de poésie
Marchand d’intensité by Laurent Poliquin, published by L’Harmattan
Monstrance by Sarah Klassen, published by Turnstone Press
The Politics of Knives by Jonathan Ball, published by Coach House Books

My review of Andrew Pyper’s The Demonologist

I reviewed Andrew Pyper’s newest novel in the Winnipeg Free Press.

Everyone Love a Winnipeg Winter

Are Winnipeggers cheap or thrifty?

I did a silly little interview thing for Global TV in Winnipeg. I don’t know if I am a “linguistic expert” — they asked me because I teach English literature — but in any case I am always ready to defend the honour of a thrifty Winnipegger.

The odd coincidence here is that the news anchor Eva Kovacs, when she was a child, starred in the film CRIME WAVE by John Paizs, which I just wrote a book about (forthcoming).

Help Fight Men with Beards

Fight sounds better than support, but support would be more accurate. My friend John Toone and his company are producing the fine documentary MEN WITH BEARDS and need your help for their IndieGoGo campaign. I just watched the film last night and supported it, and now you can support it too. Here’s the trailer for you:

Garry Thomas Morse on The Politics of Knives

In a lengthy digression concerning whether or not Canada might have a “new novel” or “anti-novel” genre at the current time, Garry Thomas Morse includes some kind words on The Politics of Knives:

None of this takes into account the “klethorka” (almost recognized by Google as “plethora”) of Kafka inspired texts, including part of The Politics of Knives (Coach House Books) – I want to say the best literary “hatchet job” since Clockfire, Jonathan Ball’s previous book of absurdist theatre premises. Technically not a novel, although in Canada everything seems to be a novel nowadays, the title collection of prose poems offers a series of political statements that are slashed with erasure poetics/official document blackouts. Ball also riffs on my favourite Kafka novel in the section “K. Enters the Castle”:

But … control agencies. There are only control agencies.

They sense this camera track silent, pan slow. Stand

back from the pages, their long looping Ks, power

dormant. Not a shadow moves, no paper flits free.

Even as poetry, Ball’s writing reminds me most of the OuLiPo works and revisions of novel form I have been talking about.

I’m not sure if I understand the point regarding OuLiPo, since I have never made use of constraints in my books (only in some uncollected work), although I do mimic the style of constraint-based writing and conceptual writing quite often. However, I’m glad to have the book considered an anti-novel: in the editing process I specifically worked to transform the book from a collection into something of an anti-novel, which resulted in throwing away about half of the book and rebuilding it from the ground up. The Kafka-inspired piece that Morse discusses was one of the new pieces written to transform the book in this way and directly concerns the idea of a novel/ist turning into something new and strange and terrible.

I see the book as having an anti-novel’s scope and a clear (well, maybe not clear!) progression, from the opening invocation of a perverse muse to ending literally in the jaws of (Cerebus at the gates of) Hades. Somewhere between a collection of poetry, a collection of short fiction, an an anti-novel. In fact, I see all of my books thus far to exist in that liminal space (from the science-fiction novel-with-no-characters-or-plot of Ex Machina to the horror-novel aspects of Clockfire, which makes the reader the victim and compels her/him to imagine and suffer nightmarish scenarios). Although it’s a short blurb of a mention, it does cut to the heart of something going on in The Politics of Knives, I think.