Saturday, November 18, 2017

The Neglectful Poet

I am a neglectful poet. At the end of a busy week, after a busy month, I've collapsed this weekend, and staying in. I'm missing a poetry reading at the Whitworth this afternoon, and I realise I need to find some time to write up my own poetry. I've not stopped writing - far from it - snatched poems have been all the creativity I've managed in the last few weeks of travelling around the UK and Europe, but they're scribbled in my notebook - or in a few occasions direct to the computer. I'm not the sort of poet who write sequences so every poem is its own world, every blank page could turn into any kind of poem. Its only when I put them together, start looking at a number, that I maybe have an idea where I'm up to as a poet, what my concerns are, or how my style is developing. Every now and then over the last month or so Facebook has popped up to remind me of a few lines of poetry I wrote a few years ago, in most cases I don't remember the poem. It must be there on a computer file somewhere, I guess. A little poetry admin is required. Partly its because despite still going to a number of readings I don't think I've read poetry live this year - or wait, I read a single poem at a friends event impromptu - but certainly not a full set or group of poems. Neither have I been sending much off or having much published, so its easier to forget I'm sometimes a poet than not. Most poets I know have their neglectful periods, times when they stop writing or life gts in the way. I'm luckier than most in that I usually write poetry in an ad hoc way, and its rare that sees a full break. But I am a neglectful poet, and need to stop being, else the year will just fade out.

Monday, November 06, 2017

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

Over the years, "The Man in the High Castle" has gone from being an obscure novel, to the book that people mention when discussing Dick's greatness. More recently, it has been the inspiration for an Amazon TV series of the same name - now on its third series.

Clearly, one small book needs to be changed a little to become a repeating series - but TV and film adaptions of Dick have long been known to dip into his ideas and his invented worlds and transpose their own casts and characters.

Written in 1962, barely a generation after the end of the second world war, and noticeably, at the time of the cold war's highest tensions, "The Man in the High Castle" reimagines a world where the Axis powers won the war - and as a result, Germany rules the world, but Japan is now in control of the Western United States even as the Reich has spread to New York and the Eastern seaboard. We learn that the terrible price that the Jews had to pay, continued, but spread further as the Germans exterminated most of Africa. At the same time, the old joke (probably a new joke in 1962), that the Americans won the space race because "our German scientists were better than their German scientists" is inverted in that the Nazis are colonising Mars, and that rocket propulsion allows privileged Germans to cross the Atlantic in less than an hour. These fantastical trappings are talked about matter-of-factedly, as Americans have gotten used to this new world. In California, where most of the novel takes place, the Japanese are reasonably benevolent conquerors, bringing with them a decorum and a sense of proper behaviour that even the brash Americans are beginning to take on board. The gradations of "favour" that an inscrutable Japanese businessman is aware of would take a lifetime for an American to learn, so of course, some follow the Japanese and become regular users of the i-Ching as a way of organising their life - the gnomic utterances of the oracle providing the wisdom of history rather than the rashness of individual decision.

Against this backdrop a more mundane tale is taking place. Bob Childan makes a living selling Americana to rich Japanese who are fascinated by the Old West. Frank Frink is a Jew who fled the East coast Reich and now works in a factory where they partially make fake Colt 45s made to look like genuine antiques. His ex-wife Juliana has disappeared into the unconquerable middle America which acts as a buffer zone between Japanese and German conquests, and he regrets losing her. In the Japanese areas there is a surprising new bestseller, an alternate history where the Germans lost the war.  The author of "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy", Hawthorne Abendsen lives in Wyoming in "the high castle" protected from potential marauders by its isolation. Amongst the Japanese, Tagomi is a high ranking trade official waiting for a visit from a "Swede" Baynes who is due in from Europe to talk business.

These somewhat unpromising plot points provide the "action" whilst a wider tableau takes place off screen. Hitler is alive, syphilitic and mad, with various factions of the Nazi high command still jostling for position - and part of that factionalism is at the heart of the story - with a plan being considered to wipe the Japanese off the planet, as also non-Aryans. When Juliana meets Joe, a truck driver, he suggest an adventure - to meet Abendsen. Nothing is quite as it seems. Joe is not the Italian he purports to be, but a German spy, and Baynes is also a German, passing on information about the planned destruction of Japan by certain Nazi factions. The antiquity market is a slightly strained metaphor for what is happening in America - for the "real" America that we know hasn't happened: the post-war boom, the American dream, are stunted, never happened. There's some similarities with Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", with Abendsen the equivalent of the mysterious John Gaunt, and the concentration on the American production line - Frink is manufacturing jewellery, but the Japanese suggest it could be better being mass-produced as trinkets for the poor.

In some ways its a clunky novel. The characters never seem much more than ciphers, and though there is some description of this alternate world, Dick doesn't go into many details - he talks briefly about the world as it now is, but this is no great feat of imagining a particular world; rather, both this world and the world depicted in "The Grasshopper...." are both fictions. The i-Ching is used throughout the book as being a guiding force - but for what? For chance and misfortune seem to be the actors in this new world. The characters own lives seem "small beer", hardly worthy of our attention. Yet the reason the book has endured, and won an award in 1963, are because, as ever with Dick, it is the potency as well as the elasticity of his ideas that inspires. On one level this could be seen as a pulp fiction, about the good and the bad, with the world situation as backdrop, but there's something much stranger - like in Ballard, for instance - in the way he sees the world - with the i-Ching as a central character. Abendsen is not the "man in the high castle" after all, but has moved to a suburban house with his wife; whilst we are left in all sorts of doubts as to which version of Nazism will triumph. In many ways the book has a circularity to it - so by the end we could just as easily believe this is the fake world, and that the world shown in Abendsen's book - a resurgence Britain, a new empire, is the real. And both have aspects of our own. What if all of them are true?

Wednesday, November 01, 2017

City of Literature, Get in!

Yesterday, during UNESCO's annual conference, Manchester was named as an UNESCO City of Literature. Get in! The hard work for this started best part of a year ago as far as I remember, with Manchester Literature Festival, University of Manchester, ManMet (aka MMU), and the city council agreeing a bid. Lots of legwork from Kate Feld, who went to pretty much every live literature night in Manchester (rather her, than me!) as well as speaking to writers, publishers and others with an interest in Manchester as a literary scene. Jewels in our crown are old buildings - namely our four great libraries, Chethams, John Rylands, Portico and Central (our local libraries, like Didsbury, are gems as well) - and places for dead writers, namely the very undead Anthony Burgess Foundation, and the lovingly restored Elizabeth Gaskell house; as well as publishers such as Carcanet and Comma press.

It's an honour rather than a pot of money, but its great that this not only sees our two universities working together (a shame we still can't mention the S-word to make it 3!) but puts literature at the heart of the Mancunian regeneration story, when its often been well behind sport, music, architecture and the like. Anyway, not any more. The considerable assets of the city are of course its writers, who are many and plentiful. Last night I was at The Other Room, where James Davies and Scott Thurston, made rare appearances at their own night. Other Manc-based writers of note in the room included Neil Campbell, John G. Hall, Tom Jenks, Matt Dalby, Amy McCauley, and my good self; not a bad subset for a cold Tuesday night competing with Man Utd v Benfica, Jeanette Winterson and Rebecca Solnit elsewhere in the city, and of course Halloween.

Manchester's writing scene has been very grass roots and thrived outside of much civic interest or involvement - that will hopefully now follow. We are definitely needing some kind of writers' development programme, as well as more opportunities for writers to work, perform and publish in the city. All of which myself and others fed into the submission to the City of Literature application.

The official press release is here and my previous thoughts on Manchester as a writing city are here.http://artoffiction.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/manchester-city-of-literature.html

As a civic bauble its a nice one to have, and I've long been an advocate of us joining the UNESCO creative cities network, as I'd seen what a brilliant thing City of Literature had been for Norwich, and also how music cities like Ghent and Bologna have benefited, but of course, the hard work starts here: taking Manchester's many literary assets and promoting them as something other than history, but as a key part of our radical, working class, multicultural, intellectually stimulating past, present and future.