Well kids, it’s edited highlights only tonight cause this old body needs to rest up for #2 Big Volunteer Event tomorrow. Tonight’s The Hand that Feeds hosts appeared in proper bureaucratic outfits (are you allowed to use those two words in the same sentence? Is my computer going to blow up?) (despite 90 degree heat) to present a series of numbered professional artists who each had to answer the same canned questions before presenting their wares. The evening's sponsor, The Stoof Foundation (which may or not be real - I can't tell from the website) sent several letters of support for the Scream's events, one of which referred to Canada as '...our pliant northern concubine' (the letters were clearly art but the website? I dunno...)
But back to the stage - Karen Hines blew the lid off the Pilot with a reading from Drama, her play in progress about a ‘content provider’ writer grovelling before a TV buyer. Remind me to keep an eye out for this content when it gets off the page and onto the stage.
And Angela Szczepaniak’s history of a bureaucrat’s life as seen through the forms filled out about and by him (Memo to: self. From: self. Re: Note to Self) was hilarious food for thought as presented by a diminutive administrative assistant.
Oh yeah – and the Form Slam? The thing where you spend valuable time filling out a grant form and the sons a b’s pick somebody else’s over yours? Well, it happened again. I don’t even know why I bother.
Is it possible that it is even hotter in here tonight than it was TuesdayÈ By the way, the large E with the accent after Tuesday is my keyboardès way of saying question mark…
See you tomorrow for more Screamy fun at the book-length reading of Margaret Christakos' Excessive Love Prosthesis at 23 Prince Arthur.
Nighty night.

Church windows and a disco ball… where could we be but the Scream Premiere at the Arts and Letters Club. It’s just the sort of venerable historic landmark that tends to house this kind of affair, according to the venerable David Antin, whose philosophical wander tonight led through his adopted San Diego, a city with “no streets, only mountains and highways,” past Sigmund Freud and Hitler's uncle, pausing near a shopper who hitched two llamas to a post while picking up provisions at the local grocery store. It's a challenging feat at the best of times, to maintain one’s place in a complex improvisation, but ridiculously so when faced with an extempore erotic performance by a woman in the front row, centre. Mr. Antin pulled off his thought-provoking narrative with charm and apparent ease. I heard and enjoyed but watched the speaker only intermittently.
She preens, she beams, she whispers at the apparently oblivious object of her affection. She drives her shoulders back and holds, shakes her fluffy ponytail and runs a sinuous hand through it, widens then narrows her eyes, pokes him lightly but meaningfully with a jutting shoulder, and shines at him with such aggressive animation that I realize he must be deaf. Her man that is. She’s obviously trying to catch his attention with clever words of sign language. Occasionally, when his unresponsiveness seems too much, she feigns interest in the speaker for 30 seconds or so. Then back to business: she pokes him with her drink, brings it to his lips. Suddenly the woman next to me, previously tsk-ing and shaking her head, leans forward. “Hey!” She shouts, sotto voce, “Stop that!” But the three rows between us are too many and the vixen can’t hear. Some sixth sense has alerted her, though, and she quiets for about a minute. At intermission, she’s the talk of the town. After the break, she’s a changed woman – shoulders slumped, arms crossed and quiet, watching Steve McCaffery perform Carnival Panel III, the third installment of his series of concrete poems. I have to say I really liked Steve, but I’m missing the gene for this genre. It’s like being at a Yugoslavian wedding where you smile and nod at all the nice people who you know are charming and well-intentioned but you have no idea what they’re talking about and everyone else is laughing and after a while you just yearn for a word you can understand. Judging by the explosive reaction of the crowd when he’d finished, I was the only one who didn’t get it…
Tomorrow, The Agent Provocateur: Choose Your Own Poetic Adventure. According to the brilliant full-colour accompanying text, there are 18 possible readings to choose from over an evening’s pub crawl.
Man, it’s hot in here – it smells like wet dog and I don't have a dog. I don't think that's a good thing. I really need a drink. I hope I still feel that way tomorrow.

So, as we count down to another annual Scream, thoughts turn to previous years and the fun and book purchases therefrom. Well, book purchases and book winnings, of which there have been many. But more about that later.
I came to screamery three years ago as a volunteer, having been told by an otherwise useless career coach that it was always a good idea to get out and meet people. Casting about for the least abhorrent option, I asked a friend about that festival she’d mentioned. Showed up at the 2008 opener and fell in love, with a poet of course. Evie Christie, as read by Stuart Ross. Evie’s was my first Scream book, bought the way an alcoholic buys a drink, irresistibly and against one’s better judgment. Unemployment be damned; it was to be the thin edge of a fairly expensive wedge…

I've been proven wrong. It is apparent to me now that the book really is dead. Although a few hundred people spent a lovely evening in the park listening to readings, more T-shirts seem to have been sold than books. Surely this is a sign that all hope is gone.

In all seriousness the event was a complete success, one which I watched between my volunteering duties. I got to watch a bit of each set, enjoying a poem about tampons, a tale of a french woman with a perfect complexion being married into a Hindu family, an airplane flight and a conversation between a girl and each of her dead parents. I didn't get to hear the explanation as to why one reading duo included a stripping Ryan Kamstra and a police man in short shorts providing shade from the moonlight with an umbrella. I must have been selling T-shirts at the beginning of that act and watching the barren book table.

I myself picked up a copy of the Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper and The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark as Remembered by Fourteen People in a Basement. For anyone else who picked up the chapbook, my single addition to the work was the line about the "undiscovered country". For me, the rest of the story went down the memory hole.

What else can I say? There must be some real literature lovers still surviving to have braved the mosquitoes to listen to some good poetry and prose. Another year of the Scream Literature Fest has come and gone, and a little bit of life has been pumped back into the book.

We did do a good job of throwing off our mourning-wear for the Joy-athon! I myself was clad in a light green Scream Fest T-shirt and manning the merchandise table. While the view wasn't the best from there, I did get to hear the readings and observe the goings on.

All of the readers did an excellent job with engaging and often amusing performances. Most of them were assigned readings with little choice in the matter, but all did an excellent job. My personal favourite was the reading of a new Bruce LaBruce script by Maggie Macdonald. An amazing performance of a script included stage directions and descriptions, as well as dialogue delivered to the best of her vocal range ability, from naïve and high pitched Steve to the predatory porn agent.

A few highlights of the event include the raffle, where winners got to spend 60 seconds grabbing as many books as they could from the book table, and an impromptu auction of the Dennis Lee Book length Dinner tickets that occurred after two winners in a row already had tickets. In the end, the lot owner bid $40 on her own item in donation to the Joyland’s story-sharing tour. Brian Joseph Davis and Emily Schultz might just be able to make it home now.

The readings themselves varied from the heart-wrenching to the gut-splitting, but it seems we will all survive to scream another day. And to get back to our mourning for a weekend packed with funerary events.

I must say, if the future of the book relied on the participants of Scream in TYPE's bookstore basement there would be quite a problem.

Do you remember grade 12 English class? Sitting at the back of the class twiddling your thumbs hearing nothing but the mumble jumble flowing out of your teacher's mouth? I'm sure you do. That was probably during the unit of Shakespeare's play Hamlet . Well if you attended Scream Festival's "The Book in the Head" event then you were pretty much doomed.

In a small tight-nit space a dozen readers attempted to put together the famous works of Hamlet. Prompt book (actor in the role of dead text who aided participants when stuck on a line) was their only source of help in putting Hamlet together in modern day. Sadly, only a few out of the dozen actually had some knowledge of the lines, where many others knew the general story line. Though some lines were remembered, quite a few were spoken out of order or included filler words like, "something, something." Others were able to paraphrase lines with versions of what we would call modern day lingo such as hoe and dude.

Putting together Hamlet became a game of broken telephone and you know what that means. Scenes would change, or appear earlier in the text. Main characters would die slightly differently. Not to mention movies which have added and subtracted stage directions, character roles and actions while emphasizing and opting out particular scenes. Movies have already changed our recollections of the book making it easier for the book to get lost in time or changed drastically.

After a few beers and a ton of laughs we managed to put together most of Hamlet. Hamlet might have lost his life in the book, but he continues to survive into our future... or what's left of him.

However, what would happen to the future of books if they actually relied on world of mouth or the movie version? The story would be forever changing. When you are reading a book really appreciate how authentic it is. Realize that you have that ability to grasp the whole book in full and in your own way and not have to rely on someone's broken versions.

Last night the Book in the Head Salon was held in the basement of Type Books. In this event, a dozen booklovers were asked to reconstruct a literary text from memory, the goal being to see how much of the story would survive without the book. The participants were not given any hints prior to the event as to the tale they would have to tell, but they did so with astonishing detail.

Inspiring of a much loved episode of the Simpsons and from which The Lion King is loosely based, it is probably the most referenced of literary tales, the most quoted, most satirized, most familiar of stories. You guessed it: The Tragedy of Hamlet.

Although the Prince of Denmark could not survive his own play, his story will survive the death of the book. Many of us could only form a general story arc and recall a few iconic phrases, but some of the participants provided ample entertainment as they pieced together line after line. They took away the show by reciting entire scenes, and could easily have gone the whole night without much paraphrasing.

The game started out with surprising accuracy, but as time grew short the scenes were summed up by “the poison fight” and “when they started stabbing each other.” The players worked co-operatively to remember particular lines. However, after a few beverages this process became a little bit silly. Hamlet’s innuendos were paraphrased as “the dirty parts”, and my own personal favourite, the suggestion of “How now brown cow,” instead of “How now Ofelia.”

An interesting addition to the game was the Prompt Book: the actor playing the dead text. When the players needed a point in the right direction, the melancholy book would give them a line. Some of Shakespeare’s most melodramatic lines were read with a completely inert tone. The role was well played and provided many laughs for the participants.

There may be a reprise of this experience at the Main Stage so that all might see what we came up with in recollecting a classic. A good time was had by all.