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In Hamilton, Ontario I play double bass and co-create music with our ensemble Ghost Variables: Gary Barwin and Connor Bennett reeds, Chris Palmer guitar, David Lee double bass and Mike Hansen percussion. We’re assembling an album: here’s a sample track: Agree/Disagree.

We’re also collaborating with Earth Wind & Choir, the Hamilton ensemble led by Sarah Good and Annie Shaw. Until the end of September 2024 I’m posting this track we did together, Spectralities:

August 15-18 Maureen and I drove down to NecronomiCon Providence, a horror literature and film convention convened in Providence, Rhode Island, where now-famous (in some circles, infamous) author H.P. Lovecraft was born and lived most of his life (1890-1937). Lovecraft’s work is behind my Wolsak & Wynn “Midnight Games” trilogy – he’s even a character in the books.

I was able to sit on the panels It Came from the Frozen North! (see below) and Seething Nuclear Chaos, met some people and even (since I’m working on a project about British television writer Nigel Kneale, a fan of Arthur Machen) was invited to submit to the journal of the Arthur Machen Society.

These photos are merest details of my visit: I should also mention the screening of the gonzo Cthulhu epic Minore, with flying tentacled sea monsters versus male models wielding swords and assault rifle / bouzoukis (the film is Greek), by Konstantinos Koutsoliotas, who lives in Toronto and works on Guillermo del Toro films.

On the It Came from the Frozen North! The Canadian Weird panel, David Lee (left) seems to be making a point, with David Nickel, Simon Strantzas, Tiffany Morris, and Scott Jones.

There was a lot of positive response to my 2015 Lovecraftian sci-fi novel The Midnight Games, so I told the publisher I would make it the cornerstone of a trilogy. Easier said than done: I wasn’t able to get the next book, The Medusa Deep, out until 2021. Soon however, the trilogy will be complete. One of the treats of doing the trilogy is that each book has an ominous cover artwork by Toronto’s Rachel Rosen. Here is the latest.

The New York Times recently did an article on the African American cellist Abdul Wadud (1947-2022) and I’m glad to say, linked it to an interview I did with Wadud for Coda Magazine in 1980. Thanks for the USA website Point of Departure for having the foresight, and insight, to reprint the article last year in a new format, introduced and edited by Pierre Crépon, under the title “Knocking Down Barriers: An Interview with Abdul Wadud, 1980.”
NINETEEN EIGHTY! Working for Coda in those years gave me so many opportunities to become immersed in a music that relatively few people knew much about. A career in the arts is not easy, and it’s encouraging to think that one’s work accumulates incrementally, and that what can seem to have been ephemeral can sometimes bounce back into the spotlight, years after it’s done and – you think – gone.

Excited to see an early book of mine, Stopping Time: Paul Bley and the Transformation of Jazz (Véhicule 1999) in a new incarnation published by Quodlibet Chorus in Italy. “Liberare il tempo: Paul Bley e la trasformazione del jazz.” Thanks to Gabriele Zobele for getting his hands on a copy of the long out-of-print Véhicule edition, and making this happen!

At this writing (March 2022), I’m having a great time (that’s me on the left) playing double bass with Chris Palmer on guitar, at Hamilton’s Theatre Aquarius in Sky Gilbert’s Pat and Skee. This new play has great performances by Suzanne Bennett as Pat, Ralph Small as Skee, and Sky himself, as himself. Chris and I play onstage, both before the show and during it, as the jazz band in the club where Pat tries to spend as much of her time as she can, and where she encounters both Sky now, and the younger Sky. Audiences have loved it so far! We’re playing until March 12.

Pat and Skee
Theatre Aquarius, 190 King William Street, Hamilton
https://theatreaquarius.org/upcoming-shows/
Thursday, Mar  3            7:30 pm
Friday, Mar        4            7:30 pm
Saturday, Mar   5            1:30 pm
Sunday, Mar      6            1:30 pm
Thursday, Mar 10          7:30 pm
Friday, Mar        11          7:30 pm
Saturday, Mar 12            1:30 pm

Is the pandemic state of suspended animation starting to thaw? I have accepted Scott Thomson’s kind offer to put the recording we made with Germaine Liu and John Oswald on Scott’s Bandcamp page. A Hyphen in Reverse. I originally thought of it as a CD but I couldn’t figure out what I’d do with a CD – sell it at “gigs”? There is space on Bandcamp for a “cover artwork,” however, and thanks to Maureen Cochrane for her help with this, and everything else.

https://sowehear.bandcamp.com/album/a-hyphen-in-reverse

Wishing all the best to our friends in the U.S.A. on this pivotal day! If you need a bit of levity, Hamilton Public Library asked me to do a reading for their Virtual Storyteller series. I agreed immediately – like a lot of writers these days, I’m more desperate for attention than ever – and read them “A Rope Ladder to the Moon,” which they edited into a very short (2:11) video.

The thing about writing books is, it takes a long time. My Midnight Games sequel, The Medusa Deep is now scheduled for spring 2021 so I am working on a third book to make a trilogy.

There have been opportunities to do shorter pieces: The Hamilton Arts Council commissioned me to write an online essay on the Dundas-based painter Catherine Gibbon. 

Early this year the FB page Cha: An Asian Literary Journal announced the existence of a new book, The Flock of Ba-Hui, based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, by the Chinese writer “Oobmab” (spell it backwards). I ordered a copy and wrote a review of the book for Black Gate Magazine. 

There are occasionally chances to play double bass. Whenever we get the chance, I get together with Hamilton musicians, guitarist Chris Palmer and saxophonist Connor Bennett. We have been getting together via Zoom, and given the chance to play in IICSI’s (the International Institution for Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph) online IF Festival in August, we did our best to offset the technical handcuffs of online collaboration by recording ourselves separately; Connor Bennett mixed the tracks together and with visuals added in real time by Andrew O’Connor, we offered Pandemic Assemblage #1.

My novel The Medusa Deep, sequel to The Midnight Games, is still scheduled for this fall – I’ve got my fingers crossed that Wolsak & Wynn will be able to issue it then! Like everything else, publishing has been slowed to a crawl by COVID-19 / aka the coronavirus. Since books seem to be all about text (they aren’t really), you might think publishing would be relatively immune, but books are really about bookstores, readings and launches, browsing shelves and listening to word-of-mouth, about holding an object in your hand that came to you from other persons that you talked to and interacted with, so the book trade has been hit hard.

The Medusa Deep, in continuing the story, transports the imaginative world of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos” to present-day Hamilton, Ontario (this time, Nate also goes to the BC coast, and points beyond). It is also about an individual confronting not only the alien and strange, but the terrible power of crowds and misplaced faith, and the ways in which the need to survive becomes the need for power, and then somehow that need changes character, changes shape, and becomes something terribly evil. With this in mind, writing in this particular place and time, it is hard to create fiction that keeps pace with actual events.

Chainsaws: A History just came out in paperback, and Harbour was able to get me on the Hamilton TV station CHCH on March 11, just before everything really started to lock down (in the video I announce a signing at Epic Books, for example, that didn’t happen and may never happen). For my own reading, I am ordering a few books from my local indie booksellers, but as long as social movement is stopped, publishing is stopped too!

I’ve got to thank Harbour Publishing for the new edition, and for taking on Chainsaws in the first place. Harbour is also now distributing my novel Commander Zero, since its original publisher has ceased operations. For technical reasons they can’t include it in their catalogue, but if you contact them, they can provide the book!