No Bloodshed in Literary Death Match

ShanghaiExpat is pleased to report that there were no deaths at Friday night's Literary Death Match, part of both the Shanghai International Literary Festival and the JUE Festival, despite the aggressive atmosphere of menace that surrounded the writers as they sized one another up before and during their readings. A shot was fired at writer Jenn Chan Lyman as she read her short story Ophiuchus aka 2012 but Chan Lyman is in a stable condition. She suffered mostly from shock, just like the audience did after hearing her tale of geeks struggling to get laid by using the ploy of their newly discovered star sign, Ophiuchus, “a dude wrestling a snake” who represents the “monster masturbators of the universe” according to one of the characters. Fellow participant Nancy Conyers, who told the tale of a honey-blonde Texan, sashaying her clueless way through Shanghai, was not harmed but her main character was cheated in the marketplace and cheated on in the bedroom.

In the second round, crime novelist SJ Rozan commenced battle with the disturbing, bloody, and voyeuristic tale of the murder of a young woman, the kind of woman who was “rich...but flashed her headlights at every tattooed freak”, who 'flipped off the whole neighbourhood' when the cops told her that a neighbour had called them in to save her from an assault that was actually just rough consensual sex. Irish poet Martina Evans, who had participated in a decidedly more sober evening of poetry the night before on St Patrick's Day, responded with three poems: Can Dentists be Trusted?, The Day My Cat Spoke to Me, and Facing the Public, a caricature of her mother, who “didn't just have an operation; she died in the Mercy Hospital / and came back to life only when Father Twohig beckoned / from the foot of her blood-drenched bed.”

There were tough decisions to make for the judges, Vikram Chandra, author of Love and Longing in Bombay and Sacred Games, Michelle Garnaut, founder of the festival and M on the Bund, and John Leary, ridiculously funny short story writer, who presided over the categories 'literary merit', 'performance', and 'intangibles' respectively. Their harsh (but fair) sentencing scored Conyers a 127 on intangibles, a good score for one based a counting system without numbers and her vivid characterisation had Chandra wondering if he new Honey's sister; Chan Lyman was admired for her courage in addressing the bodily functions as a theme as well as “prosaic bussy things like buses”, but her intangibles score was reduced from an “'R' like the pirates” to an 'N' as it was found that she had ridiculed John Cusack's disaster movies, a bad tactical move on her part; SJ Rozan impressed on the performance side for surprising all with her sweet demeanor preceeding all that talk of rape and murder as well as scoring extra points on intangibles for bringing in the important topic of 'sex and buildings'; Martina Evans' talking cat seduced Chandra but put Leary in mind of his dog's regular 'second breakfast' of cat faeces, earning her the score of a stick figure in the latter category.

With the preliminary rounds over and the losers dragged away bleeding, volunteers were chosen from the audience to make up two teams, captained by Jenn Chan Lyman and SJ Rozan. The deciding round was called 'Poets and Madmen'. Pictures of the famously inspired and the famously brutal were shown on a screen and it was up to the teams to decide 'poet or madman?', a particularly tough question considering the wild eyes, psychotic demeanors, and crazy hair of the audience members...it must have been very distracting for the teams. However, SJ Rozan's team were up to the challenge. As Ann Heatherington, the night's MC and the event's executive producer (who, by the way, was clad in a dress of a particularly bloody shade), stooped to place the medal about Rozan's neck, she asked what the writer would take away with her from the experience? Rozan proudly replied to the exceptionally tall Heathington: “It makes me feel 10 feet tall”.

Literary Death Matches are becoming more and more common all over the world. Authorities advise members of the public to be on the alert and, if they must participate, to bring along a friend (just to be on the safe side).