Secondhand Book Shortage in Morecambe and Lancaster!

there may well be a secondhand book shortage in Morecambe and Lancaster after my visit yesterday. Here was my impressive haul...

Lovely afternoon in Morecambe though it's still quite rundown, as this picture of fondly-remembered Frontierland shows.

Enjoyed the Art Deco grandeur of the Midland Hotel, overlooking the bay from the bar area,

...and here's another picture taken a little earlier in the afternoon.

The Art has Left the Building

When Urbis was designed and built, following the 1996 IRA bomb which ripped the heart out of the city, it was as part of a new visioning of that part of the city. Public space was transformed, with that part of the city, ravaged by sixties town planners and soulless shopping centres, opened out again so that the great buildings of Chethams, the Corn Exchange and the Cathedral became integrated back into the heart of the city. Urbis, an ultra-modern design, became a key part of that transformation, refusing the easy lure of heritage, in favour of something that in shape and style could be an architectural icon for Manchester. Alongside the Hilton, the Lowry and Imperial War Museum North, it added a highly recognisable piece of architecture to the city.

The planners and the city leaders who led on this, were rightly lauded for their vision - after that 1996 disaster. Good architecture in a city context is not an easy thing to do, and their are plenty of examples around UK that prove that. Lottery and other funding made this easier, of course, but it is the "vision" that was important. Yet, inside Urbis, there was none of that same vision. A half-baked collection of unconsidered interactive exhibits; a pristine, and soulless corporate vision of a city, less ambitious and engaging than a 3D Ladybird book of the city would have been. Those same visionaries, had no vision for the space, or what it should be. I went round (paid a fiver, as it was in those days), with my friend from Liverpool, and said "this is stupid, it's not about urban life at all, it should be an art gallery..." I'd been to a wonderfully bustling exhibition about Hong Kong city life at the Hayward a year before, and seen how it could and should be done.

Amazingly, over the last few years, Urbis has looked outward, and through a series of temporary exhibitions that reflected and contributed to the urban experience that is everywhere around in Manchester, a vision emerged - one that was not so dissimilar to what I'd seen at the Hayward a bit earlier, the idea of an art gallery as a dynamic, fast-paced experience. The excitement of the iconic building, reflected in a throbbing, exciting interior.

There was no vision at the beginning for what Urbis was all about, other than a piece of a regneration jigsaw, a plastic square on a Mancunian Monopoly board. Job done, the planners moved on, and presumably, the city pretty much forgot about Urbis, and, clearly, let artists and curators get on with the job of making it a key component of Manchester's official city vision, original and modern.

The art has not quite left the building, but is about to. The decision to move the National Football Museum from Preston to Manchester makes sense only in the sense of "numbers" - yes, it will get more people through the door in Manchester than Preston, but see what has been lost? The art, and with it, any vision of Manchester as taking cultural seriously. For though we have our high culture citadels (the Bridgwater, the Lowry, the Royal Exchange, Manchester Art Gallery), and our low culture ones (M.E.N, Eastlands, Old Trafford), neither are really creations of our age. I didn't and don't expect our current bureaucracies to have the power and vision of the Victorians, but I do expect them to create a space where those who might have a vision could make it happen. In retrospect, Urbis's empty interior was something that nobody thought about until the cost of running it, year in, year out, became clear. A museum, worse, a museum of football, is nostalgia run riot. No more chances for Mancunians to laugh at Liverpool's Beatles obsession, when we choose the past ahead of the future. Buildings are often no more than Rachel Whiteread's concrete filled interior spaces imply they are, "holders" without particular meaning. Churches become pubs and old mills become apartment blocks.

For art, it won't make much difference, for the art can still happen outside of the agreed spaces, unofficially, like the now-venerated Tony Wilson once did with Factory Records and the Hacienda. But imagine what might have been. If the city had set up Urbis with a Charter or a vision, to be a new kind of "institute of contemporary arts" for the 21st century. Take your children to that, make it a place for vibrant thought, discussion, and creativity. Let the mediated experience become the unmediated future.

So, in a political climate where the money for both football museum and art gallery comes from a department that manages to mix "culture, media and sport" in a single acronym, I only wonder what's next for the city? We talk about echoing the Victorians, by wanting the Palace to become an Opera House. Well it's only an echo. This too is nostalgia, high brow thought it might be. Then again, Charlotte House opposite the Central Library is now empty, the Odeon remains closed; the BBC building will have to find a new usage. If we're willing to give Urbis away to the most prosaic idea that comes to town, then let's forget about vision. Turn all of these into shopping centres; northern Trocadero's; outposts of Arndales; or, let's make them into a museum is applicable to the age, welcome to the Oxford Road Museum of Reality Television, welcome to the Truman Show.

Decade Talk

The Times' list of best hundred books of the decade, is a journalists' list, a news list. There's quality in there; Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" is the number one choice, but there's also the books that defined the decade, hang the quality; Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code amongst them. When the Guardian does this sort of thing they tend to do a better presentation job of it (you'll have to crawl through 17 pages of the Times unhelpful website to get to the number one).What's most noticeable is the amount of non-fiction, from "No Logo" to the report on 9/11 that make the list. Books about globalisation, terror and financial meltdown seem to define the decade in some ways. We have problems with nomenclature during the first 20 years of the century. The "noughties" will do as a joke. In talking about the 20th century we use our Kings as markers, houses are Edwardian or Georgian; but with a long-lived monarch where do we go? Whereas the years up to 1914 can seem now as "prelude to war" we can't predict any futures, so this decade surely begins, really, psychologically, with the "twin towers", even if, as a number of documentaries, and writers like Robert Fisk have indicated, this may well have been the end-act of a certain kind of appeased terror. After 9/11 the west was not going to remain non-interventionist, at least where its interests were at stake - and as globalisation shows, those interests are intertwined, and everywhere. But back to that list; the Booker prize winners have already been winnowed away, only Martel, Hollinghurst and (bizarrely) Adiga, by my reckoning, making the cut, though a number of short and long list titles are included. A list that finds room for competent but unremarkable books like "The Powerbook", "The Accidental" and "Fingersmith", makes one wonder if Virago's champions are alive and well and writing for the Times; whilst the choice of non-fiction from Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood seems a little perverse. There's little left-field fiction in the the list; no Magnus Mills (2001's "Three to see the king"), no Will Self ("The Book of Dave"), and little American writing, (no "Netherland" and no "This Book Can Save Your Life"); and the poetry selection is safe and uninvolving. (I would have Bolano's "The Romantic Dogs", translated by Laura Healy). All lists are arbitrary of course, but what's interesting is that the previous week's list of the decades top 100 films, shows the "noughties", if not quite a golden decade, to be at far more worth celebrating than you might have imagined; the high number of non British-American films, being a sign of where the quality lay - though the top 10, with 8 out of 10 being British or American seems absurd. I imagine their top 100 albums of the decade will be an absolute hoot however.

Memories

I had a helluva week. Theatre in Oldham last Thursday, the youth play "Heaven Spot" developed by Oldham Coliseum; music at the academy on Saturday, a sold out Yo La Tengo; and literature on Monday, Elizabeth Baines reading in Chorlton at the Book Festival. Knuckling down since then, working hard, cold nights, a certain waiting-for-the-weekend angst. Now its here, and I need to slow down, and then speed up. Ideas flashed by me all week, are those stories? or concepts? or am I too unobservant to see? I spent a while working through the back catalogue on Monday, getting back as far as 2002, in my writing, (a year when I seemed to write primarily about the internet and paranoia), and listened to a cassette I'd recorded as long ago as 1985, putting it on a second time as I struggled to recognise who it was that I was then.

I seem swamped in memories at the moment, echoing in my dreams alongside more troublesome thoughts. I'm thinking of myself as a little boy again, the age of innocence, and it's hard to do that without a certain pain. You remember the awkwardness rather than the innocence, I Think. I don't think I could write about my childhood - isn't it too generic? Yet I can smell the classroom, and there's something ineffably modern about my life, even as far back as 1972, a five year old in a hospital being saved by "modern medicine." Images of the hospital ward as I convalesced are some of my earliest memories. I didn't want to get out of the dream anaesthesia state; I remember a white hotel room surrounded by cards, and as I recovered, the squirrels - my totems - on the hospital lawns coming up to the window.

Memories are almost like the impressions left over from the stamp of life, they are inert, and unchangeable, but you can, like an archivist, find something more, go deeper into the canvas, go "oh, yes, that was why." Watching a drama of Margaret Thatcher's last days in power on the television it treats it - perhaps as it should - as a Shakespearean political drama - yet the life outside the commons, led by that disastrous administration, is absent. We only see the Conservative party as a comic creation, more Dickensian than Shakespearean. 1990 I was unhappy in my first job, or was I, at that stage, at least happy in it? I'd just bought a house, moved in, set up home, cut the lawn, filled the fridge. The unhappiness grew over the next couple of years; no political responsibility for that, I guess. There's a photograph somewhere of me at the Labour party winning party during that year's local elections. Thatcherism had no answers to the questions that it raised. Scorch earth policy, and the north has not yet quite recovered; yet they talk of this recession as the "longest" or the "deepest" - it doesn't feel anywhere near as disastrous? The social contract has held; but for how long? Next year we will see.

I half feel I should start another blog for my thoughts on politics, technology and the like; yet I distrust the truthfulness of commentary; of think tanks. I still have the higher respect for the truth that fiction can articulate. I need to have a read through the Times' "Best hundred books" of this underwhelming decade, to see if we are still managing it.

"We are a corrupt people involved in a collective lie"

I take the title from a recent blog post by the Guardian arts critic Jonathan Jones. What he actually says is "We are a corrupt people, apparently, involved in a collective lie." I'm interested in that "apparently" surrounded on each side by a comma. It's a brilliant line, and I'll come back to it's meaning in a little while, but first that "apparently." Does he mean "we are a corrupt people apparently" or that we are "apparently involved in a collective lie" or both? It's important. The sentence, I feel should read, "Apparently, we are a corrupt people involved in a collective lie", since he's using the phrase with some irony. It would not work otherwise - for he is not talking about our politics, or our ethics, but about our art.

There's comedy in the phrase, and it's asking the unaskable question. If, (to remember Pangloss in "Candide") we are living in the best of all possible times (for art) then how come the art isn't greater than it is? And though Jones is talking about the UK contemporary art scene he could, one extrapolates, be talking of art in this country (or this English-speaking culture, to be more accurate) in its entirety. It was a question I began to ask at the recent AND Festival in Liverpool: I was intrigued by this idea of a new art that sits between cinema-digital technology-games and visual art; but does it actually exist? More importantly, is it any good? I can well believe that we are living in a golden age for technology, but does this translate to art?

To go back to Jones, it's clear that contemporary art, in the echoing chamber of the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, and in the slipstream of the YBA's, Sensation, and the Frieze fare, does exist as a phenomenal commercial success, but as an artistic success? Those agent provocateurs, Hirst and Emin, seem increasingly likely to be remembered for their historical rather than artistic role; whilst the artists that I rated highest, Gillian Wearing, Rachel Whiteread, and Anthony Gormley, are at interesting points in their careers, their best works already iconic, and part of the language, and a question remaining over whether what they do next can extend their reputations, or risk cliche.

Yet, outside of the gallery, there are few art forms that have had a renaisance over the last 20 years. Theatre's new trick, first showcased in David Hare's "The Permanent Way", - the documentary drama - seems to show that television has taken over the theatre in more ways than one; whilst it would be a brave critic who argued that the latt decade in pop music or film was up there with the highlights of the past. A cliche it maybe to laud its achievement, but the American TV drama of the The Wire, The West Wing, 24 and the Sopranos, may well be the leading cultural achievement of the last dozen years - that and reality TV, which at least has the benefit of not aspiring to high art.

For literature a close reading of the prize shortlists, whether for poetry or the novel, indicates that there has been no presiding spirit or leading group of writers; that Martin Amis and Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes remain the big hitters of fiction, and poetry hasn't had a new "star" for 20 years or more, yet literature like art, remains in a constant state of cheerleading. There have been some good books over the last decade or so, even if by long-established authors, yet it's clear that the new century, a decade in has not seen a narrative or lyrical surge to match our technological advancement. You won't read this anywhere in the critical infrastructure, which speaks of each Booker shortlist as "a very good one", or our annual poetry crop as "a very good year for poetry". The hundreds, now thousands, like myself, who've been through the creative writing courses; the every-town-has-one literary festivals; none of this seems to have created, as yet, a new golden age for literature. In fact, what seems most apparent, is the intolerance shown to voices that are not firmly in the mainstream, or writing with the values and aims of the commercial fiction writer. Here as elsewhere one can only ask. Are we a corrupt people involved in a collective lie? Apparently.

Manchester's Literary Renaissance

I couldn't help smiling at this posting in the Guardian about Manchester's Literary Renaissance, if only because of its somewhat haphazard nature. The Manchester literary scene ebbs and flows over the years, with magazines, readings, writers falling in and out of the city as life and literature changes for all of them. At this point in time, there's certainly a critical mass of writers based in Manchester, with courses at all 4 Greater Manchester Universities (Manchester, MMU, Salford and Bolton), and rarely a week goes by without a reading night.

Yet the city remains a little stubbornly unliterary in some ways. Though the critical mass of writers will no doubt look locally on occasion for their subject matter, it is usually its underbelly that makes it into fictions such as those by Joe Stretch and Chris Killen. Though for every Cracker, there's always a Cold Feet, and Didsbury suburbs feature in the work of a number of Manchester writers.

The Manchester Fiction Prize was won by an established writer with few connections with the city, Toby Litt, whilst Carole Ann Duffy's poetry, though it sometimes references the city, is anything but Mancunian, if that means anything. Even our most famous literary son, Anthony Burgess, only really wrote about the city in his memoirs, though he had enough of a chip on his shoulder to state that "the novelist is Mancunian."

Many of those writers linked with the city, involved in the city, myself included, are emigres, and I still rarely see the city that I know, usually love, and occasionally despair of, depicted realistically - or even with the definition that you find in the songs of Mark E. Smith and Morrissey, or in great TV like Cracker and Queer as Folk. The great Mancunian novel remains stubbornly unwritten - and it is Gwendoline Riley's slim vignettes (not mentioned in the article), "Cold Water" and "Sick Notes" that would be key texts in any "writing about Manchester."

Jerome De Groot, who writes the article, is based at the University, and on the board of the festival, so its nice that he balances the institutions with the literary underground, and good to see Jeff Noon's Manc classic "Vurt" remembered in despatches. For me, writing in the city since 1995, its only recently that I feel that I have enough perspective to write substantially about the city.

My own favourite story is of Borges, visiting England with his mother, having won the inaugural International Publishers Prize in 1961 visiting Manchester to pay homage to De Quincey. I like to think Borges sprinkled a bit of his magic in the waters of the Irwell, and we occasionally catch a glimpse in the Mancunian rain.

Four Different Styles

A week ago I was on my way to Lancaster for the launch of the "Mostly Truthful" anthology. I've been so busy since that I find it hard to remember it's just been 7 days - and I've not had time to blog about it.

The four readers appeared in the same order as in the anthology, and we read most of our contributions in the hour session. It was fascinating hearing Kate Feld's take on Manchester, her being an American transplant to the North West gave her a different view of the city. Her second piece, which talks about how she now has an "imagined" English childhood overlaying the reality of her own was a reminder of how our memories of growing up are both unique, but also generic. I read from both of my pieces in the anthology, before giving way to Katherine Woodfine whose "journey" (the nebulous theme of all our work) was a cross London one. Finally Jane Routh read about different kinds of "journey", the passage of the rural year, in two pieces from a monthly diary she's been keeping.

What interested me, and interests me always, about an unexpected grouping of writers such as this, is how there were four very different styles, and more than that, four very different sensibilities. I've sometimes read anthologies or collections where there seems little to distinguish the styles of a particular group of poets or writers, and I guess commercial fiction works on that premise - yet it's the one thing that a writer can bring to the table that is entirely their own. I don't think that any of the four of us had much in common in terms of either our style, sensibility or even life experience, but what we did have was points of intersection - across all of these - which is, at the end of the day, what connects us. Literature, language, speech - these common understandings, for both us and the audience, are intersection enough.

We arrived at the same time, and left separately; Lancaster overcast and wet. I came away thinking of a realm of possibilities, and pleased for the opportunity.