The Art of Fiction

Editing and the Zeitgeist

2012-01-29T04:12:00.000-08:00

On the back of reading the Spender biography, I was fascinated by this trawl through 100 years of Poetry Magazine where the writer has looked for forgotten gems amongst the voices of the day. It's a humbling experience - for how many of us writing poetry today would hope to get a poem in Poetry and haven't?, yet at the same time, history shows that the poetry of a time fades into a certain sameyness.

Sameyness comes to mind when reading this intrigueing article about the mystery of poetry editing. For those who have a sneaking suspicion that mainstream British poetry is a club, where any existing member can apply the black ball to a new entrant, it offers a sense of poetry style decided on high. The success of Rachel Boast's Picador debut is suddenly explained as not a bright new female poet bursting on the scene, but one held back as a male editor, Paterson "honed the book with her for a number of years." It's an impression that I doubt Paterson wanted to give. After all, Paterson, a poet I like a lot, is quoted as saying "there have been notorious instances in the last 50 years of poets forging whole lists in their own image, and failing to notice,” offers an only partial commitment that Picador, Cape and others aren't doing exactly this.

It's a fascinating article, however, for poetry is something that surely can benefit from another ear, but, as any regular reader of poetry magazines or anthologies will tell you - there's definitely (as implied in the Poetry article above) a contemporary style that can sometimes drift into an orthodoxy which can exclude. Having Robertson as an arbiter of British poetry might seem a good idea if you share his tastes - but if not? Well...

What concerns me is that there's a lot of luck in finding a poetic mentor, whether a friend, another poet or an editor/publisher. You need someone who is sympathetic to your ideas (which may well be very different than theirs), where there is mutual liking and respect, and ideally where they can provide a different instrumentation to your familiar tune. Is this mentor more like a record producer? A Martin Hannett to Joy Division shaping the sound, or an Eno to U2 and Coldplay adding a warmth and nuance that their bombastic shapes would otherwise deafen out? And, if poetry is so dependent on finding that (senior) figure then what about those poets who are yet to find one? What rings truer is Robertson's role in shaping a poet's disparate material into a book; for modern publishing expects first collections of twice the length or more than in the past, and good poets aren't necessarily prolific ones.

Worth a read, but it raises as many questions as it answers.

Performance Prose

2012-01-28T03:04:00.000-08:00

Enjoyed the launch of Socrates Adams' debut novel, "Everything's Fine", at Blackwells Manchester last night. They've now got a P.A. and are planning many more events during 2012; just like a bookshop ought! A surely unintentionally all-male line-up (amazing how quick this starts happening again, when you don't realise it) gave us Chris Killen, author of "The Bird Room", Joe Stretch author of "Friction" and a 3rd reader, whose name, I'm sorry, didn't catch. I never quite made it to the popular "No Point in Not Being Friends" events where this crowd cut their performing teeth, but there was a larger audience along at Blackwells than I've seen for Booker Prize winners. Great to see young Manchester-based writers getting their books out there, and winning an appreciative audience.

Its a while since I read prose live, but in the distant past (1999!) I set up a one-off night in a bar called "Wrote for Luck" where myself, Lee Rourke and his friend Doug read from our "works in progress." Performance prose needs to have some of the immediacy of performance poetry to really work - and last night's readers were primarily funny, first person and in the present tense; only Joe Stretch's work in progress moving from that template. I remember going to see Mark Powell read in the early 00s in Islington at a regular night that had DBC Pierre on the following week (this was just before "Vernon God Little" won the Booker) and it did seem that prose was the new rock 'n' roll.

What was pleasing about last night was that nascent performance pieces have led to the more elongated work that is a novel. There's an art to reading from a novel, and Howard Jacobsen once told an anecdote about reading at the Buxton literary festival and when being asked by Roy Hattersley whether he was going to read from his new book was told "don't, you'll sell more that way." Hopefully, Socrates sold a few books last night - its the 2nd book from Transmission Print, another elegant new Northern press to sit alongside Hidden Gem - and it was good to hear from the other works-in-progress. My only caveat was, that the first person, present tense, which works so well in performance, can become a bit samey after a while, however different the readers and stories are. And I was wondering at what point this became a favoured fictional mode, for writers, readers, and also publishers? Just a thought...

We don't still read Spender, do we?

2012-01-24T14:24:00.000-08:00

I have just read David Leeming's 1999 biography of Stephen Spender, "A Life in Modernism." Spender, forever associated with Auden and Isherwood in our image of the 1930s had a presence throughtout the 20th century, like a literary Zelig. Leeming's book is fast paced and gossipy and in parts reads like Fitzgerald's description of a Gatsby party, a litany of the rich, famnous, fashionable and infamous. Born as late as 1909 he knew so many, and outlived them all, so that when he passed away in his 80s, by then Sir Stephen Spender, he was the last man standing. Spender's always seemed to me one of those literary names you read about but don't read, and in many ways the book is the story of that. A poet who was more engaged with being a critic, a commentator and a literary acolyte. In Leeming's account, everyone was not just an acquaintance but a close friend, and one is left with the sense that he had a genius for friendship - and not just writers, he dines with Henry Moore and Lucien Freud, is close to Stravinsky, and meets politicians. Man of letters perhaps - but a very modern man of media too. Yet underpinning it all is his bisexuality, his close relationship with his Oxford peers, and the ever-present freedom of his trust fund.

"Money, sex and poetry" could have been the subtitle but to be honest, coming to Spender with some scepticism, I came away liking him alot. He was a heart on the sleeve poet; a leftwinger whose dabbling with communism was always aware of its darker side; and - it seems - a friend to most of the 20th century's notable writers. His best work was written in the 1930s by this account,and he was overlooked or outgrew various awards as life went on. In this sympathetic account he knows that he should have spent more time writing his poetry. that feathering his intellectual nest, and if theres a modern day equivalent would it be a publisher like
Micheal Schmidt or a media figure like Clive James? The poetry, it seems, has hardly lasted - yet the criticism, in essay after essay alluded to here, sounds like its worth rereading. He didn't just have one literary icon, Eliot, but two, with his contemporary Auden - and it is poetry that he kept returning to, even though he wrote copious prose, literary criticism, novels and a well received autobiography. As a literary activist he was involved with PEN and Index on Censorship, and as an editor with both Horizon and Encounter.

His life seems utterly full of incident - his homosexuality at Oxford and in Weimar Germany returned to throughout his life as a husband (twice) and father of 2 children. Much later in the USA he would be in love with a much younger man, whom we only find referred to as B. If modernism remains more than a literary movement but something of the mind, then Spender seems one of its key analyst - yet his own poetry neither found its way into the Oxford Book of English Verse or lists of the great modernist writers. Extracted here his poems seem interesting and emotive but without the intellectual purity of Pound, Auden or Eliot. He was too much the romantic, and that didn't fit with the times. Spender's solipsism is of the heart-on-sleeve kind, whereas a different kind, Auden's apparent indifference to the world that was collapsing around them in the 30s, 40s and 50s, was needed to truly chronicle the age. Spender instead is spinning off to Spain to help rescue his ex-lover; or taking another young writer under his wing.

We don't still read Spender it appears - and his poetry, that mattered most to him, became incidental throughout an active literary life. The books kept coming however, and his industry and wanderlust seem somehow connected to his bisexuality, and his constant need for young male companions, whether intimate or not. Yet the scenes with his children and wife seem generally touching. A bit like the younger Bruce Chatwin, an understanding wife seemed vital to this gregarious soul's ability to inhabit 20th century literary life so fully.

More poignantly, as the book ends, and Spender's last years seem to be made up partly of writing elegies for the departed, we see, perhaps more than we realise, what a specific time in literature was taken up by 20th century modernism. It - rather than fascism or communism - was the ideology that both consumed and finally destroyed these writers. The second world war and what came after killed the sense of the 'modern' even as a free-er less ideologically complex generation - of beats, confessionals and others - continued the project in some other way. Modernism as an elitist game played by the Bloomsbury set can sometimes seem appallingly redundant, but reading of Spender's part in it, and the artistic risks that were not only taken, but supported, one can only admire the extent of the project. The world that came after - angry young men, Mailers and Vidals, Heaneys and Larkins seems far less complex, and far less convincing in its artistic ideology.

Poems in Oxfam

2012-01-15T07:48:00.000-08:00

A late Sunday afternoon trip to Oxfam in Didsbury and the shop is obviously benefitting from a few New Year clearouts. Someone literary has obviously been clearing the shelves, as there was a whole shelf of new poetry books as well as literary biographies and criticism. Saddest of all, a row of self-published Lulu.com books "by the author." I wonder if they'll find a home?

Amongst the poetry there were plenty of vaguely familiar names from presses like Shearsman, Carcanet and Bloodaxe, and maybe there's a poet or two in there that I'd enjoy if I found the time to browse, yet even though most of these books were published in the last decade or so, they felt like books from the past somehow; as each year there seems - despite some of the anthologists' assertions to the contrary - more poets than ever. All these "life's works" ending up here; and though its probably the same for novels - it seemed sadder somehow. I didn't escape myself, as the anthology "Reactions 3" edited by Esther Morgan, was there as well, with a couple of my poems in. I'll be interested to see if it sells over the coming weeks!

Though poetry publication is nowhere near as prolific as fiction, all those books make you think. For £50 I could probably have cleared the shelf but I feel, rather than having a great collection of contemporary books, I'd have a pile of poetic flotsam and jetsom; with a few gems between the mundane or the mediocre. I did find one little gem even today, the late Andrew Waterhouse's Windhover press pamphlet from 1998. A 99p find that I'll cherish even though it's author is no longer with us.

New Music for 2012

2012-01-14T05:50:00.000-08:00

Part of my "creative bootcamp" saw me recording 3 new songs (plus a remix) for a first of a projected "single a month" for 2012, which just so happens to be 30 years from when I first started recording music!

You can listen to the first E.P. or download it for a £1 from here.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

2012-01-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

The old west should be a fertile ground for novelists, it is, after all a somewhat uncharted history - a pre-history in many ways before official history gets written. Hollywood inevitably realised this a long time ago. Yet though there's a healthy store of genre Westerns,its not often that you'll find a Western up for a literary prize.

Patrick DeWitt's Booker shortlisted "The Sisters Brothers" is a first person picaresque as two killer brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters (hence the somewhat awkward title), begin their latest job for their employer, the shadowy "Commodore." As they are killers there job is a simple one, to go to San Francisco to kill a man called Herman Kermit Warm. Along the way, in the tradition of the picaresque, they encounter odd characters, find themselves in various scrapes and incidents. A heady mix of "Candide" and "As I Lay Dying" would give you a good idea of what the trip is like. Our narrator, Eli, is no Pangloss though, rather he sees this as the worst of possible worlds, where good things are unlikely to happen, money comes and goes, and the killing goes on, as inevitable as any other job. That he and his brother are good at it - the cold-blooded Charlie being adept at whipping up the temper of the milder Eli to make them a formidable killing team. Only now and then, when they mention who they are, do we realisethat the Sisters Brothers are notorious across the land. It is this contrast between their bloody profession and Eli's underplayed narrating, which makes the novel such a comic gem. He may be a reluctant killer, but he doesn't doubt his calling. Instead, as they head to their destination, with the Commodore promoting his brother to lead man, and his new horse, Tub, a sorry specimen, Eli begins to come to a new consciousness about his life. Along the way he removes himself from his brother's drinking and whoring to speak to a woman or two, takes advice on dental hygiene from a dentist he meets along the way and begins to think of a better life.

Yet this is no moral tale. DeWitt's west is a scabrous one, with the Californian gold rush in the background as the symbol of man's greed and venality. There are no cowboys in this tale, and only a few sorry indians, yet we get a good sense of the febrile world of 1851, with the speed of change being accelerated as thousands head west. It is a story of stories, and so used are we to the modern novel's self-absorbed narrative, that it takes a while to appreciate these stop offs and digressions. Even in the last part of the novel, where they have found their prey, their is time for another campfire where Warm tells them his own sorry story. The beauty of the book though is Eli's telling of it. He's a winningly amoral narrator, and him and his brother's affection for each other is touching. Also, this is becoming their last job, as the reality of their life as hired assassins comes to bear,first on Eli, and later his brother.

In a review in the Guardian, Jane Smiley is utterly puzzled by the novel, and seems somewhat horrified by its casual violence. Perhaps that's not surprising as her bloodless books are almost the opposite of the carefree romp you find here. Yet its surprising, amongst the welter of good reviews for this year's Booker list to find this negative one for what, to me, is by far the best of the bunch I've read so far.

Eli's voice is pitch perfect throughout, a growling, lightly accented Boswell, chronicling with humour and a growing self-awareness their travels and travails. Of the four first person narratives I've read so far from the 2011 Booker shortlist this book is not only by far the funniest, but also the only one that I'd recommend to friends; for as hackneyed as the picaresque might be as a form, this hardly matters when DeWitt gives us a new double act worthy of Vladimir and Estragon or Pangloss and Candide. Though his characters and situations are all grotesques, the writing throughout is superb, and there's a moral tale underpinning the violence that would be worthy of Thornton Wilder. A book that has no designs on the reader other than to entertain, the book is nonetheless much more than just an entertainment.

10 Day Creative Bootcamp

2011-12-29T06:21:00.000-08:00

I'm off work following Christmas for a week and a half and though I've lots of mundane things to do, my mine reason is to put some serious time and effort into my creative work. How to do that? Concentrate on one particular project? Well, that would be fine, but I'm not sure I've got one at the moment. Instead, I'm treating it as a 10 day creative "bootcamp" - to get my creative work into some kind of shape. Whether I'm doing new or old work, music or writing, I've set myself a few ground rules that take into account that I've still got to eat, drink, live, socialise etc. etc. whilst making some serious inroads into a range of creative projects.

Not too many rules as that would be counter-productive but here's what I've come up with....

1. Do something creative every day (music or writing - either is fine, but it should be related directly to my creative work, not this blog for instance!)
2. Finish the thing I am working on before starting something new (though this could be a phase e.g. finishing a first draft of a story, rather than the whole project)
3. I can do other things, like reading, housework, shopping, Facebook as long as it doesn't replace the creative stuff - and I need to mix things up a bit anyway, don't I?
4. New stuff is good, but getting old or half-finished stuff into shape is also good - and may well be the driver for the first few days.

I'll let you know how I get on.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

2011-12-28T12:54:00.000-08:00

The modern novel is obsessed with secrets withheld. In an age when everything is potentially known, from the private messages left on a celebrity's hacked phone to the open threads and conversations on Facebook, it's as if the old novelistic trick of pulling a rabbit from a hat has to find new ways of cloaking its secrets. The first person narrator and their inevitably selective memory and retelling offers the novelist the equivalent of a personal twitter feed, with others' own conversations crowded out by the protagonist's self regard.

Accept the magic trick and the novel can win prizes, amaze the readership - but will you want to go back to it, once you know the revelation? In "The Gathering" Anne Enright's narrator keeps the key fact from us, though she could have told us on day one - and in Julian Barnes' "The Sense of an Ending" the narrator, Tony, gives us a partial account of a university love affair - only to find out the truth of his actions forty years later.

In a horse race, gamblers bet not just on the horse or jockey on the going, the course and the distance. Barnes' book is slightly more than a sprint, but less than a chase, with the winning post visible even from the start. It makes the first part of the race untidy, as his characters jostle for position. A novel needs to have veracity and in the first half of the book, Barnes struggles to achieve it. Beginning at a boys school in London, three friends add the new boy, Adrian Finn, to their number. In the first few pages you'd be forgiven for thinking this was a draft for a sixties episode of "The Inbetweeners" with less sex-talk and more philosophy. They split, as friends do, to go to university, where, almost absently, our narrator tells of his own first relationship, with a girl called Veronica, who, despite it being the sixties is reluctant to "put out." Both precise in its time (the late 60s) and sloppy in its detail, you feel that Barnes, or more truthfully his unreliable narrator, is just in a hurry to get round the bend. Is there such a difference between studying at Bristol as Tony does and Cambridge as Adrian does? Are the class differences between him and Veronica's family really as marked as he makes out? This is hardly Alan Sillitoe territory. Tony listens to Tchaikovsky and Dvorak whilst his girlfriend has more sophisticated (but unremarked tastes), and, oh, he's got "the Beatles, the Stones...etc." a generic list of 60s music if ever there was one. Though I can well believe that priggish middle class boys would have a bit of classical alongside their pop music, the details of this life are slapdash, reading like a first draft that should be fixed later.

For later is when the novel delves into the psychological ripples of events - and harsh words said and written - nearly half a century before. We meet the retired Tony, post-divorce, his marriage and daughter written off in a couple of paragraphs, as his past comes back to him via a letter from a solicitor regarding the estate of his ex-girlfriend's mother, a woman he only ever met the one weekend. On these thin pivots, Barnes weaves a meticulous plot of secrets withheld, misunderstood - and lives twisted out of what they might have been. Without the "sense of an ending" that this letter and the subsequent events provide, it would be hard to single out these lives as different than any others. Again, as so often in the work of Barnes and his contemporaries (Amis and Kureishi in particular), male friendship and the betrayals that can come from pursuit of the same woman are central to this short, poignant work. If Tony isn't particularly telling us the "whole truth" the holding back of information which is the thing that allows these novels to work comes here from Veronica who in a single email could have made the second half of the novel redundant. Without her voice we are left with Tony's gradual realisation - as he comes to the final furlong - of what the sequence of events both on and off stage, actually was.

It's impossible to say any more without "spoilers". However, despite its many structural and psychological qualities, it is not without major flaws. In "On Chesil Beach" Ian McEwan writes about a more innocent time - pre-sixties - as if to remind us that it once existed and here, writing about a similar middle class cohort, Barnes gives us the line that for many people the sixties only actually came about in the seventies. Very true for working class people in the Midlands and the North - but for the southern middle classes heading to university in the late 60s? Perhaps...but one wonders. The cultural references all seem wrong somehow - and its like Barnes doesn't really care. His narrator is prone to saying he lacks interest in things - whether music, football or cars - then will digress enough to list long-forgotten British sports car marques. Our own memories might be flawed, but we expect more from a narrator. It hardly seems enough to say "I'm not sure" or to dismiss memories as unimportant, when in the next breath he's reciting conversations verbatim.

There's something else though - Barnes is usually complimented on his elegant prose, but elegant or not, much of the first half of this book seems barely competent, stock scenes that are meant to take the place of more considered character building. In his rush to get to the denouement, with his carefully assembled architectural structure, I found myself despairing at the inauthenticity of much of the novel, the arbitrary nature of much of the writing, as if he was more interested in the scaffolding than the building. Whereas Stephen King's "11.22.63" which I read the previous week takes infinite care over the minutiae of his fictional late 50s, here we have a casualness that seems all too common in even our better writers. Detail, whether its pop cultural references or socioeconomic truth is somehow seen as unecessary. The psychological truth of the book is all that matters. Read Coetzee's "Summertime" and you'll find a preciseness to both the language and the subject matter that is lacking here. Adrian Finn is given to us in second-hand, through broad brush strokes of verbatim sparring with his schoolmasters, yet this all seems to be telling rather than showing. Veronica and her family are all described so disparagingly that the idea that she was ever any more to Tony than a casual university relationship would seem absurd. As always in these novels of male friendship, the crucial friendship is the other one - between Tony and Adrian - yet in reality it hardly exists - and when they are separated by a circumstance, you feel it is with mutually beneficial.

Barnes has always been at his best in the immediacy of the moment - whether its the satirical thrill of the ark in "A History of the World" or the psychological menage of "Talking it Over." And he's back there again, excelling at a small psychodrama that wants us to examine life, regret, memory and love. Yet it seems to me that however effectively he does this, the tools he uses elsewhere in the book are becoming blunt - the novel relies too much on our good grace. Contemporary British writers have a tendency to extol masters like James, Proust and Flaubert, yet seem to offer a mere echo of them, and think that is enough. The lives we are reading about in "The Sense of an Ending" seem inauthentic, the story schematic, and the detail uneven and prosaic even as, with his usual masterly application of narrative structure and psychological motive, he drags us breathlessly to the finishing line. It's an effective conjuring trick, but feels somehow old hat - a trick that the experienced reader has seen once too often.

Snowdrops by A.D. Miller

2011-12-27T07:52:00.000-08:00

"Snowdrops" is a first novel that was surprisingly shortlisted for this year's Booker. The "surprise" was because it is essentially a thriller, and they don't usually get mentioned in such circles.

Set in early 21st century Moscow, its a short, succinct novel about contemporary Russia, its contradictions, chaos and corruption. A "snowdrop" we are told from the off, is a body that is only found after the thaw when the snow recedes. Yet if this implies a post-Glasnost KGB tale - which I was perhaps expecting - its far from it. Like Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" its a tale told after the fact by a youngish male narrator who has somewhat absently ended up in a particular place and time. The narrator is in his mid-thirties, and is writing down the story of what happened to him in Russia so that his wife-to-be (who we never encounter) can know about this particular episode in his life.

In tight, short chapters Miller sketches out a Moscow that we probably imagined, but hadn't seen, of corrupt officials, manipulative oligarchs, cheap prostitutes and naive foreigners, stranded there, not on some Soviet-era diplomat mission but as emissaries of the new money pouring into Russia. Miller gives us two stories of corruption - the one, an oil deal that is taking up Nick Platt's day job, and a love story when he meets Masha on the train. Told in retrospect, we know from the off that the story is not of true love running smoothe and the device provides both an intimacy to the novel but also its weakness. When Ford Madox Ford or Graham Greene "looked back" it was a framing device which then left us with the story, told as it unfolded, but here our narrator frequently interjects as he knows the ending and offers his regret even before the deeds he is ashamed of take place. Nick is a "reliable" narrator, but it is Masha, the Russian lover he takes, who is "unreliable" though we never hear from her except through him. There are plenty of clues about her suspect nature - from her travelling everywhere with her "sister" Katya, to her introducing Nick to her "aunt" and getting him to help with the paperwork around a property deal. The plot is more like an episode of "Hustle" than a Le Carre, with Nick our unwitting mark. But you can see what Miller is trying to do. The back cover references both Greene and Robert Harris. He takes from the latter the near-screenplay slickness of storytelling, and from the former a classic foreigner abroad scenario. Yet a corporate lawyer seems curiously without jeopardy, even if he's as distanced from his home town (Luton of all places) as any number of Greene heroes.

In many ways, the novel seems a device to look around the new Russia with the eye of someone who is both an insider (he has been there 4 years, and speaks passable Russian) and a visitor. The small cast of characters that Nick interacts with, may appear to be stereotypes (and that he meets the same policeman twice or bumps into Katya accidentally in a bar seems to imply Moscow is little more than a village), but they are drawn with care, and you want to be there be his side as he begins to fall into the trap that is clearly being laid for him.

I enjoyed the book, its a decent first novel, clearly structured despite its single sitting length. Nick is a distant character in many ways, but never really comes to life. His mother visits and she makes the comment that Masha is "too cold" for him - yet he seems a curious innocent abroad - having fled to Russia in his mid-thirties when the work opportunity arose, but without much of a life behind. Indeed, had Greene wrote this, you'd feel there would be a love affair behind him, not in front. It has a certain "mock noir" feel to it that you find in quite a few contemporary novels - where the experience seems second hand, somehow. It's that lack of jeopardy again; with the experience in Moscow both a life-changing one but also unimportant. He will return to the life he always expected to have - with Moscow an interlude that could have either made or break him but in the end does neither.

"Snowdrops" is well worth a read, and the sense of Moscow at a time of momentous, constant change is well-drawn, yet I can't help thinking that compared to, say, Ian Rankin's Edinburgh, the description of the city seems partial. Even the love affair at the novel's heart doesn't seem to come alive. Compare to the dark forces that Ian McEwan writes about in his 50s cold war thriller "The Innocent" for instance. Perhaps its not its genre attributes that got it to the Booker shortlist, but more its desire to read something from the story - yet Nick is hardly a compelling character. With the other characters - including Steve, his drunken, priapic journalist friend - drawn straight from central casting, the relationship with Masha has too much work to do; but it feels as distant to the reader, as it does to the narrator telling it retrospectively. I think there's probably a desire, via the scenes with the "aunt", Tatiana Vladimirovna, to contrast the old and new Russia, but again Nick is too distant a figure, too much of an onlooker. As the plots around him unfold you find he's not even the key actor in his own story, merely an attendant figure. Like a "mark" in one of "Hustle's" long cons, he could be anyone - though that, perhaps, is the point. Even this "new" Russia is seen as a passing phase - a moment in time before some of the darker practices become frowned upon, the gold rush over. In this world love, property, even life, are seen as transitional - and Nick, looking back, misses feeling that alive.

National Short Story Day

2011-12-22T05:18:00.000-08:00

Today is National Short Story Day - as its the shortest day.

Stories and information here

And I've put one of my stories "My Life According to the Albums of David Bowie 1968-1983" on my author website.

11.22.63 by Stephen King

2011-12-22T02:23:00.000-08:00

"The past is obdurate" says Jake Epping (aka George Amberson) repeatedly in Stephen King's 750 page time travel novel. Its a phrase that could apply to writers, when faced with "watershed" moments in history, such as the JFK assassination. The big subject requires the big book, as Elroy's "American Tabloid", Mailer's "Oswald's Tale" and now this make clear. King takes a literal approach to this literary time travel, and Epping, following the prompts of a dying man who has been doing this for years as it is, pops down the "rabbit hole" into a particular space and time in the past. This simple device gives a structure to the otherwise torturous business that writers have when negotiating time travel. King, though always aware of the paradoxes about time travel, doesn't want to write a SF novel as such. He's also not that interested in highlighting those differences between then and now, though highlight them he does. For though Epping has stepped back before he was born, the smalltown America of 1950s America (1958 in fact) has always been a touchstone for King. You could argue that most of his early novels were sat in a pretty unchanging version of this landscape. There's not a single McDonalds or other chain restaurant, the cars are like those lined up like the Boston Aquarium in Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead" and people habitually leave their back doors open or trust a written reference from an unknown college. But there's also segregated toilets, and even the smalltown people of Jodie, near Dallas, where Epping makes his home, think a woman's place in the home even when she's being beaten up by her husband. There's almost as much violence against women in the novel as in a James Elroy, but in Epping/Amberson King has a defending angel who has come back to stop it happening. He has also come to stop that other wifebeater Lee Harvey Oswald from killing JFK, but that's another story.

Though we begin in the present, and there's an obligatory 9/11 reference or two, King's world is not the one we currently inhabit. The distance from here to the 1970s when he first was published is a longer one than between then and 1958 after all, albeit with the sixties revolution in the middle. Going back in the past Epping becomes Amberson, a name taken from a gravestone, and - importantly - given that he is going back to finish another mans task (the dying Al), he has his own quest, to right the wrong that happened to one of his students. The sense of dread, that he so often turned into a physical supernatural horror in his earlier novels, is here from the start, but the horror is a human one - albeit, because it is a past event that the narrator already knows about, one that can be changed. But what is the consequence?

Structurally the novel is superb, with the chance to repeat the past like a video game offering a second chance if things go wrong. You can stop, pause, start again. The paradox is that you are getting older. Also, as George Amberson begins to live a life in the past, he begins to see that it is not immune to his presence. How do you write about such a vast subject as the Kennedy assassination? King is not a political writer, and the journey to Dallas is a long one, punctuated by more typical King fare. Jake Epping was a good schoolteacher and George Amberson becomes one. That he can also face the dark challenge of murdering another man, even to save lives, is a sign of his own moral complexity. Even though he knows the big things that are going to happen, he doesn't know the things that will take place in his own new life, and he creates one with the lovely Sadie. As Amberson is our narrator we're able to take on board his uncertainties as he weighs up his own happiness against the reason he is there, to "stop Oswald." But before he does so he has to be sure the conspiracy theorists were wrong, and that Oswald was a lone shooter.

There are contrivances here, but in many ways, the book's strength is its willingness to address them. All King's storytelling skills are here, and the long preambles in earlier books before the horror shows itself, are reflected here. For the horror is here a very human one. That if we know what is going to happen then our attempts to change it will bring consequences. In this alternative past that Amberson is creating, things keep repeating or stopping his progress, as if it is a dream he is living through. King, the arch chronicler of smalltown dread, manages to turn the whole of 50s America into a series of smalltowns. He reimagines Oswald's tale as primarily a family saga. The political conspiracy you get in Elroy is hardly hinted at. In all of America Amberson can't use his foreknowledge to put a bet on without coming into contact with the same Mafia-connected group of bookmakers. But isn't this always the way? Even as we change our lives - our location - our name - we then recreate what we have before. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.

The weakest part of the book is when Amberson begins to reconaissance Oswald. After all he is not an all-seeing-narrator and he has with him only those tools that you can buy from an electronics shop in 1958. Though one applauds King's ingenuity, Oswald and his family seen from afar seem almost invisible, and, of course, there is no motive. But again, these scenes are to set-the-scene, rather than anything deeper. Amberson's motive for getting rid of Oswald is as much about him being a wifebeater as him killing the President.

As you'd expect from King, there is plenty of action, but the length of the novel provides many other pleasures. King's 1958 is meticulous, and his narrator is a winning, if sometimes emotionally distant, guide through those years. There is more than getting up close to history in the book, rather, King has used the device to talk to us about the fundamentals in our life - the chance moment that means you get caught by a stray bullet, or meet the woman you love. The novel could be called "chance and consequence" for the latter is never far away - every action, after all,creating another reaction.

Though there's nothing in the novel strikingly original - the time travel motif is well worn; the Kennedy assination more so - King has crafted a remarkably compelling novel about the 20th century, which as we begin to see the chance and consequence of the 21st, gives us pause for thought - as well as a superb read.

Books of the Year

2011-12-21T05:04:00.000-08:00

I find it hard to have a books of the year, given that I don't always get time to read that much. However, one or two gems have come across my path and it might be a late present prompt for somebody.

All Roads Lead to France by Matthew Hollis

Hollis's biography of Edward Thomas is justly acclaimed. Beautifully written and paced, despite one knowing the inevitable sadness of the ending; though for a poet, death is not the end, and being forgotten is perhaps the ultimate tragedy - yet Hollis brings us a sense of Thomas the man, an exhaustive and exhausted literary critic, who, at a relative late stage, finds his poetic voice fully formed. As "romantic" of the myth of the poet dying is, we get a feeling that this tragedy is a shared one: his friends (including Robert Frost) and family; for English letters. An exemplary work, and excellent read.

Salt Modern Voices Pamphlet series

I was published in this series myself late last year, but there's been a flurry of others since. It would be unfair, having read with some of the poets to single any one out in particular, and I'm not entirely sure which were this year and last. Thanks to Angela Topping, JT Welsch, Clare Trevien, Lee Smith, Emily Hasler and Shaun Belcher for reading with me this year, and I'm only sorry I haven't yet managed it with Robert Graham, Mark Burnhope and the new writers in the series. As they say on the BBC, "other pamphlet series are available," but this one has plenty to show for it.

Best British Short Stories 2011 ed. by Nicholas Royle

The first in a series, it attempts to bring together the best short stories from the last 12 months. Like all anthologies it has its ups and downs - but there's something to please everyone. Particularly liked stories by David Rose and Leone Ross. I'm still dipping into it so not read them all, and if some are decidedly pedestrian, most zip along with the brio you hope to find from the form. Felt the bigger names or staider magazines were the least interesting in many ways. It will be interesting next year to see if Royle's choice for the Manchester Fiction Prize make the cut when there's another editor - as he didn't find prize stories to particularly appeal this one.

11.22.63. by Stephen King

I'm half way through and thoroughly gripped - the first King novel I've read for about 20 years. He takes on the biggest story here - JFK's assassination and his contemporary hero goes "down the rabbit hole" to 1958 to prepare to change history. King's great skills, in talking about smalltown America, the country's mythos, and a sense of impending dread are all here in plentiful supply. Not finished it yet, but think it will be one of the books of the year, regardless.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Having not read much fiction recently, this prizewinning novel impressed me with its brilliance. In amongst all the spats about this years Booker, it seems to get forgotten how the best American novels seem light years ahead of most things the commonwealth is producing. Egan's is a contemporary masterpiece that even tries McSweeney's style trickery (a Powerpoint presentation in one chapter) and pulls it off admirably.

My Artistic Year

2011-12-17T05:58:00.000-08:00

Where did these 12 months go? After last year's interregnum - when I was out of action for several weeks after an operation - I spent much of the year catching up on the projects I was working on. My Salt pamphlet "Playing Solitaire for Money" came out in late 2010, and so I was spent some time working on the website for that launch, and have added content to that during the year.

I had the launch of the pamphlet as a joint reading with JT Welsch in January at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, and we'd read together several more times during the year. Although I was determined to take opportunities for reading and promoting the book, it sometimes takes time to develop this side of things. Thanks to the Salt Modern Voices tour, and the hard work of the other writers on it, I've read in different places to different audiences. Probably over 300 people have seen me read since I first read from the pamphlet in late 2010 at Didsbury Arts Festival, taking in the University of Manchester, St. Ann's Square and the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, Northwich, Market Drayton, London, Nottingham and the University of Warwick. Although I've been steadily writing new poems, these haven't really found their way out into the world as yet. I've also been writing various fiction pieces, but intermittently, as time allows, though I can't not mention, "The New Club" which appeared in the Quickies anthology of "very short adult fiction" premiered at an uproarious Didsbury Arts Festival event. Over Christmas I'll try and finish some of these pieces off.

My music was also in consolidation mode - as most of my 3rd album since 2007, "In Times of Troubled Lives" was recorded last year, but I finished the work and got it duplicated in the spring, followed by a side-project EP under the name "Monochrome Industrial Dystopia" in the summer.

A busy year work wise, with the threat of redundancy hanging over me for the first half of the year, and alot of travel around my job seeing me have ten trips abroad during the year, including first visits to Germany and Finland.

This blog has taken a bit of a backseat, and as the conversation moves to Twitter and Facebook, I have a sense that it may soon have run its course, but we shall see - there's occasionally things I want to say about literature and art, and this is a convenient place to say them.

So overall, its been a year when my thoughts have turned from the "making" of work to the performing and promoting of that work. It's been nice to be offered opportunities to read in different places and contexts - culminating in last night's appearance for the Whitworth Gallery "Dark Matters" exhibition and a large piece in the Manchester Evening News about the performance.

Too early for New Years Resolutions of course, and its strange to be in a position when I've been concentrating on work from the recent past, rather than the work I'm doing at the time. One thing about reading a lot is that you also listen a lot, such as the other Salt Modern Voices, and I've tried to get to see interesting writers when they've come to town, or regular nights such as The Other Room, which remain inspiring. Literature, like music and art, remains an inspiration to me, as well as something I continue to practice myself. In some ways 2011 was a year when I more fully integrated these interests, and began to exploit them a bit more. I hope 2012 offers further opportunities.

Shadows in the Snow Mirror

2011-12-17T04:12:00.000-08:00

Reading at the Whitworth Gallery last night as part of their "After Hours" event. I am reading in front of Daniel Rozin's "Snow Mirror" and my audience have materialised in the mirror beside me. I'm having to use my mobile phone flashlight to illuminate my poetry book.

Albums of the Year 2011

2011-12-13T03:17:00.000-08:00

I can't pretend its been a year when I've gone out of my way to listen to new music, and with a few exceptions, that which I have heard hasn't been that exceptional. There seems to be a lot of competent music in whichever genre you like, whether Americana, indie, electronica etc. but few records that crossover to a wider audience. Meanwhile, the biggest selling albums of the year hardly get a mention in the critics' polls. The days of a "Lexicon of Love" or a "Welcome to the Pleasuredome" or a "Different Class" gaining both sales and kudos seem a thing of the past. The music press divides between a love of UK indie bands such as the Horrors, Wild Beasts and Metronomy, on the one hand, and more Jools Holland type music on the other. As ever, I won't have heard all the good stuff's that out there, but listening to a few of the favourites in the various polls released to date, I'm not expecting to find a Caribou or a Warpaint; though I've finally got round to ordering Kurt Vile and White Hills sound interesting. So this is a very partial selection of albums that I've enjoyed, whatever their provenance. And with the year's best moments being singles like "Video Games" by Lana Del Rey, Drake and Rihanna's "Take Care" or even multi-million seller Adele's instant classic "Rolling in the Deep", I'm sure my year's best of would probably contain as many singles as album tracks.

James Blake - James Blake

Probably my favourite record of the year, a dubstep artist that has retained credibility whilst gaining critical acclaim. His debut album showcases strong songwriting and singing (on Feist's "Limit to Your Love") as well as a spirally, ghostly production that owed as much to old 4AD records as the late night dubstep of Burial. I was reminded of the late Arthur Russell's beguiling sub-disco productions as well. A short, beautifully sequenced and inventive album, it made the top 10, but was always going to be too beguiling to truly crossover - though it soundtracked more than a few hip wine bars.

Welcome Reality - Nero

A UK number one, packed with hit singles, and apparently not particularly favoured by critics or dubstep afficiandos alike. I really don't care; I picked it up on a whim, and I've been listening to it with great pleasure ever since. A great anthemic pop dance album, that reminds me of the debut by Utah Saints as much as more hip properties. I first heard Nero with the BBC Philharmonic recording a "Dubstep Symphony", and their signature anthemic breaks, which wouldn't be out of place in a Prodigy show, were in full effect. The number one "Promises" is a great place of retro pop-soul, but the album is full of such highlights, confirming my suspicion that rather than being a recognisable sound in its own right, dubstep is a smorgasbord of dance styles from house, to hip hop, to jungle to old skool funk. As a connoisseur of pre-house electronic dance music, Nero's nods in that direction are particular welcome, reminding me of forgotten classics such as Haywoode's "Roses" (and even covering two, with the Jets' "Crush on You" and a remake of Carmen's "Time to Move.")

Build a Rocket, Boys - Elbow

I was perhaps a rare dissenter in finding Elbow's last prize winning album, "The Seldom Seen Kid", a little on the dull side, albeit well written and recorded. It was more one paced than this band usually are, particularly given their tendency across the 3 previous records for sonic invention - the reissue of debut "Asleep at the Back" reminding me of how they could be thrilling as well as anthemic. I shouldn't have worried, for "Build a Rocket, Boys" was perhaps their most complete album since their debut - including another handful of Elbow classics for their ever growing live audiences, especially the title-quoting "Lippy Kids." Guy Garvey's singing, always emotional, is given an even cleaner canvas this time round, and there's echoes of John Cale at his most emotional. Single "Neat Little Rows" Sounded like a Simple Minds outtake from their Arista period, whilst "Jesus is a Rochdale Girl" continued Garvey's knack of adding a gritty edge to what might otherwise be sentimental material.

Let England Shake - PJ Harvey

Almost universally acclaimed as album of the year, Harvey's latest took a while to grow on me, and still I'm not as convinced as the critics that it stands out from her always fascinating discography. For me, its an album with a number of incredible tracks (most notably the stunning "All and Everyone") around which the other songs act as a welcome setting. The "concept" element of the album reminds me of artists like Robert Wyatt or Fairport Convention, and its very English sense of place and time - picking apart a century of conflict, is obviously ambitious. To me, a good, rather than great record, but with Harvey's own songwriting and singing at a high level of excellence. If I'm at all underwhelmed its probably because it lacks the harder edge of works like "To Bring Me Your Love."

Helplessness Blues - Fleet Foxes

Without the shock of the new that characterised their debut, this second outing could have been a disappointment - but its almost as beautiful, and certainly has a wider musical palate. There's echoes of Brian Wilson at his best to match the pastel shades of the Laurel Canyon sounds of their debut. If anything its an even prettier album, and though the harmonies are still in force, it seems a less lyrical album in some ways; experience replacing innocence. That said, its a genre that they've made their own, and when the template was such a beguiling one, a second imprint from it was a welcome one.

I'm With You - Red Hot Chilli Peppers

I'll always like the Chilli Peppers but albums such as the bloated "Stadium Arcadium" make our relationship a little trying. Now without Frusciante, the new album is as chock full of the kind of nagging pop-rock melodies as they've always excelled at - but with a slight return to the more sinewy funk of pre-Californication days. At the end of the day, its a well crafted album with more than its fair share of memorable tunes, with Anthony Keidis and Flea working together as ever to make a kind of always-adolescent punk-pop-metal-hip-hop that done by anyone else would soon pall. In their hands however, nonsense like "The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie" and Manics-style "Monarchy of Roses", still sound playful and refreshing. Not to everyone's taste of course, but in a year where big rock albums seemed perilously thin on the ground, "I'm With You", with its typically too-late-to-the-party Damian Hirst cover, was a welcome return.

Mofo - Liam Finn

I saw Liam Finn (son of Crowded House's Neil) a couple of years ago in the acoustic tent at a festival and loved his songwriting and his stage presence. This, his second album, expands on the more homespun charm of his debut, and should have got much more attention than it did. Like his father, he can write a good song, and sing it well. There's elements of Elliot Smith or even Bon Iver in his make up, but he's probably even more contrary than either of those and the instrumentation - less sparce than on his debut - is varied and inventive.

Passive Me, Aggressive You - The Naked and the Famous

This New Zealand band's debut is in some ways an old fashioned pop-rock album, aimed squarely at the mainstream (and a young audience) but with enough familiar tropes to ensnare older listeners such as myself. Its curiously avant garde in part - with the atmospherics of the XX or even later Cocteau Twins - though glorious single "Young Blood" could be Katy Perry riffing on MGMT's "Time to Pretend." Its basically an adolescent pop rush of an album, but feels homespun rather than created in the A&R laboratory of a major label.

David Comes to Life - Fucked Up

Here primarily as a soundtrack to my gig of the year, Fucked Up at Islington Mill at the FutureEverything festival, with the whole venue turned into a mosh pit, and one of the most incredible examples of audience/band bonding I've ever seen. This double concept album owes as much musically as American icons like Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen as it does to the hardcore scene - perhaps a welcome reminder of that great fusion that took place in the early 80s with Bob Mould's Husker Du. In a year where guitar bands hardly set the world alight (though I've high hopes for rated albums by White Denim and Iceage)it was a reminder what the format could do.

Psychic Life - Jah Wobble & Julie Campbell

Though I've been a friend of Julie (aka LoneLady) for years, she kept this project under wraps until it was almost finished. Sneaking out at the end of the year, this unexpected collaboration got a bit of press for reuniting PiL alumni Wobble and Keith Levene. The unexpectedness continues into the music, where each track is very different - and though there are some influences, in a year where most music could be easily categorised, it does feel something of a one-off. Lead single "Tightrope" is as sinewy as the title implies, "Feel" would be as big as "Rolling in the Deep" in any sane world (and reminds me, distantly, of much loved 80s popsters the Motels), whilst "Slavetown pt.1" is an unexpected jazz/soul track. Her vocals throughout are superb, and Wobble (and Levene) provide an inventive and crafted backing. Running in at under 40 minutes and beautifully packaged nothing feels left to chance; a late year gem.

So, ten albums that I've listened to a lot, regardless of their credentials. I've managed to make more gigs this year than for quite a while, though mostly older bands. Electralane's reformation led to a stunning gig at the Academy 3, whilst Todd Rundgren's "greatest hits" set was also phenomenal at the Manchester Ritz. I was surprised and touched by Paul Heaton's MIF show - a musical tableau that turned into a "round the campfire" jam, made even more poignant by the stage collapsing before the show! And as stated above, Fucked Up's Islington Mill show was a phenomenon. John Foxx and the Maths at the University was also a surprising highlight.

In Praise of Lists

2011-12-04T08:10:00.000-08:00

Its a list time of year: lists for Santa, lists of Christmas cards, lists of provisions required for the Christmas dinner, best of year CD and film lists. I was asked to do a reading and a workshop in Market Drayton library this week, and since there were going to be both poets and fiction writers present I wanted an exercise or two that could be appropriate for both.

The night before I remembered Jennifer Egan's short story "To Do" which was in one of the Guardian's short story supplements. "Written in 20 minutes" according to the Guardian's preamble, it reads like an intensely potted version of "Mrs. Dalloway."

I've long been a fan of "list" stories - having written stories that are a series of answer phone messages and made entirely out of classified adverts. The list is what we put together when we're planning something, yet in many ways it can be the essence of the thing itself. Its probably even more prevalent in poetry, famously, in this poem by Sylvia Plath. When do we make lists? When we're planning something, or need to catalogue things, or put in some sort of order. There are all kinds of lists, of course, from inventories and catalogues, "to do" lists and "instructions", electronic programme guides, and, at the front of any book of poetry or short stories, a table of contents.

The attendees at the workshop came up with quite a few nice little approaches - one played with the word itself, and wrote a piece called "The Listing Ship", whilst others told of a life through a house clearance or a little boys' Christmas list. The McSweeney's school of writers likes lists - in their endless footnotes, or epistolary pieces like David Eggars' "Letters from Steven, a Dog, to Captains of Industry." In the recent Guardian collection of stories, Helen Simpson takes an existing list - Tube stations leading to "Cockfosters" - to concoct a story of loss, friendship and memory.

And it wouldn't be good to leave creative lists alone, without mentioning list songs - which from REM's brilliant "Its the end of the world and we know it" to Billy Joel's portentous "We Didn't Start a Fire", to the Nails' self explanatory "88 Lines about 44 Women" to my own "Ammunition is a State of Mind" are a staple of the songwriters'toolkit.

We're all Postmodern These Days

2011-11-18T09:55:00.000-08:00

They always have good subtitles at the V&A, and "Postmodernism" is subtitled "Style and Subersion 1970-1990". In a series of rooms, it doesn't give us a historical perspective as much as a thematic one. In this sense, it follows on from its last end of century show, "The Cult of Beauty". In "Postmodernism" we have spaces devoted to buildings (including the ones that weren't built); to artefacts; to music; to fashion. There's no real contextualising, except through the artefacts, which, given the subject is probably for the best. How do you come up with something as amorphous as "postmodernism" and then nail it by definition? Yet, we all know (or refer knowingly) to things being "postmodern." Like its close cousin, irony, we don't always get it right.

This video - not in the exhibition - would seem to me a gleeful example of the postmodern. Here are the Beatles, judging (and defacing) artistic representations of themselves, and giving the prize to the winner Jeremy Ratter, who chose albums by Shostakovich and Mingus us as his prize. Ratter would later find fame as the driving force behind anarchist punk band CRASS. But what of it is postmodern? The mix of fan with the worshipped? The Beatles judging a prize and the winner choosing a music that (at the the time, not later) they would have been seen as a pole apart from? Or the historical juxtaposition - that in a historical quirk, the founder of one of least populist bands ever should be thrown together, before that time, with the most popular? It would have been nice to have seen something of this kind of absurdity alongside the more formal works. But this was the early 60s, and our story starts later.

At the start of the V&A's exhibition they talk very clearly about Postmodernism in terms of its reaction to modernist design specifically in architecture. Here there's an orthodoxy that is dying through its increased irrelevance, and postmodernism was a reaction against it. The subtitle of "style and subversion" is important though. Postmodern design could be brash, modernistic, retro, but was always magpie-like in its appropriation. Similarly, the willingness to coopt both ideas and physical pieces from the past to incorporate in the new, was, I think, about looking the world the way it was and could be, rather, as in modernism at its most utilitarian, what we should plan it to be.

Yet, style and subversion are in many ways contrasts. Just as the aestheticism of the arts and craft movement and the Pre-Raphaelites led to decadence, kitsch, and a mass produced decorativeness; the intellectual idea of postmodernism as subversive comment on the past would soon be picked off, as its most commercial exploitations emphasised the style. The contradiction of Malcolm Maclaren's partner, Vivienne Westwood; punk designer to leading British designer; is there throughout the exhibition. Whatever was once radical, would soon become the mainstream. The music room is a delight, showing the best of NYC performance art - Klaus Nomi, Grace Jones, Laurie Anderson, Talking Heads - as the brash quirkiness became mainstream. Yet, turn a corner and you have a 3D hologram of Boy George, the boy who perhaps wanted success (and everything else) just that bit too much. Look away from it, and nothing appears to be there, stand straight in front and the hologram comes to life, an eerie ghosting across the years.

And if music was one way in which the postmodern could go mainstream, design culture was another. British magazines like ID and the Face were aimed at the mainstream. Their "stars", were like Warhols' "superstars", famous in their context - yet some actually became stars - like Robert Elms or Steve Strange or Marilyn. A series of Peter Saville designs for Joy Division and New Order look less like the startling classics I used to consider them, and more a trick repeated time and again, in the hope that no-one notices. Saville's wholesale theft of imagery is postmodern to the core (as in a Koons "sculpture") but in the glare of the gallery, there's a whiff of cynicism about it - of an art school kid passing off found images as their own aesthetic. In Saville, as in Neville Brody's Face covers, there's no longer a sense of "bricolage" or "collage", more a sense of pure appropriation. It is the constant question with "sampling" culture - is something original created from the vulture picking? That the appropriation sometimes works so well that it supercedes the original, well that's postmodern as well.

By 1990 surely it was all over anyway? The digital age had begun (first CDs, then the internet), and the naive early digital artworks, with their limited memory leading to the blocky representation of type, seem innocently new. Technology made it possible for everyone to be postmodern - whether its a photoshop mashup, or Richard X remixing Gary Numan and the Sugababes. The point now would be that you wouldn't notice the subversion, and that the style itself had become ubiquitous.

As ever with the V&A one is impressed by the cavernous depths of their collections. The "postmodern" never really stood much chance in British homes and cities that were still wary of the "modern" - and, as when you stand on the strip in Las Vegas, the vision of modernity we now say, is so breathlessly large, and unsubtle, that its no longer even ironic. That's why you could only describe Lady Gaga as "postmodern" to water down the original movement. There are delights aplenty in the exhibition, from failed prototypes of consumer goods, to clothes and objects you'd not be surprised to see in either junk shop or museum.

Literature is the one art that's mostly missing, (a quote from Amis's "Money" rather than his very postmodern "London Fields"),perhaps unsurprisingly, but given a movement that can sometimes seem more an intellectual conceit than anything more real, then something - whether Ashbery, or Wolfe or Barthes or Foster Wallace - would have seemed a more appropriate contextualisation than the 80s New Romantic soundtrack that is released to coincide with the exhibition. Two key movies from the early 80s play overhead - "Blade Runner" and "Koyaanisquaatsi." What's great about both is that they are fully formed - they are the achieved vision of their visionary directors, rather than tentative stabs at the future. After both movies, the future city was a fixed idea, rather than the malleable one that might have appeared earlier. The shock of seeing the fast collages of "Koyaanisquaatsi" and hearing Philip Glass's music focused on depicting these visuals was highly radical at the time - but has been so endlessly repeated ever since that we can almost forget the radical questions it once asked. And that, probably is where postmodernism becomes a victim of its own ubiquity. The style is wonderfully apparent throughout this diverse exhibition, but the subversive gets lesser and lesser as time goes on.

Live in London - Monday 14th November

2011-11-12T00:24:00.000-08:00

I'm reading poetry at the Compass in Islington, London on Monday night with other Salt Modern Voices, Lee Smith, Clare Trevien and JT Welsch. Its free and all are welcome, hope to see some London friends there. We'll start from around 7.30pm and I'm in the first half.

Now All Roads Lead to France - the last years of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis

2011-11-09T15:48:00.000-08:00

Poets, I'm beginning to think, are the best biographers of other poets. There's Andrew Motion's Larkin and Keats; there's Ian Hamilton's Lowell; and now there's Matthew Hollis's Edward Thomas. What do we know of Edward Thomas? His poem "Adlestrop" is one of those rare moments of magic that seems embedded in the language; as one of that group of poets who fought, wrote about, and in Thomas's case, died during the Great War, his work has a wider currency than that of many other poets. Yet, beyond that I knew very little. English Literature has its highways and it byways; its main streets and country lanes; and in many ways the byways and country lanes are the more prosperous routes. Thomas is that strange beast, a minor poet in the good sense, in that his work is not extensive (less than 200 hundred poems), yet important to both readers and other poets. Hollis, is a book that is as subtle as its fascinating subject, is making a similar minor-key statement as Thomas did in his poetry: if there is propaganda here it is for a certain type of writing.

I'd often seen the febrile poetry scene of London before the war as the beginning of a battle for poetry's soul - the imagists to the left, the Georgians to the right. You could say, the future, versus the past. Yet poets tend to defy categorisation, however much they might congregate at the time. Thomas's closest poetic friends were Walter de la Mare and Robert Frost. If Thomas was breaking with the strictures of Victorian writing, its worth considering that he himself was a later Victorian, and that his poetry was written later in his too short life. As a biography Hollis grasps that mettle in the subtitle - the "last years" of Edward Thomas, for its the poetry, rather than the years as a jobbing hack, literary journalist and critic, that Thomas is read and remembered for. Critic turned poet; like poacher turned gamekeeper - or is the other way round?

In many ways Hollis gives us the "making of Edward Thomas". The facts of his death are stark; like all Great War stories the single death stalks the life, as an ending we cannot avoid or escape. But the "making" is more complex than that. Thomas was an honest - a too honest - critic, but as he wasn't writing poetry himself, the honesty was accepted, encouraged. His judgements, in Hollis's telling, seem pretty robust. Most critic-poets will develop an aesthetic that is shared between their critical and their artistic work - and Thomas is no exception. In meeting Robert Frost he finds a kindred spirit, who, similar to Thomas, was yet to find his place in history - who, like Eliot and Pound, had come to England to be published there, in order that he might then become published in America. Frost would win the Pulitzer, read at a President's inauguration and sell over a million books in his lifetime. That is all some way off. He has a family in tow, no real contacts in Britain, and has only just begun writing the poems that would make his reputation. The Gloucestershire poets that they are briefly part of, is a group of the great, the good and the mediocre - but aren't all groups the same? For all that Pound's "imagistes" were fascinating, the poetry, outside of Pound himself, and perhaps some of H.D., seems minor.

Hollis tells Thomas's story with great care, and no little style. His own prose is sharp, warm, and considerate, and the biography, though deeply researched from a vast array of original sources, almost reads like a novel - it last just over 300 pages, and I read it over a weekend. The "poems" are the key source, of course, and Hollis is meticulous in digging out their origins, in both events and - so often in Thomas - in previous prose accounts. At the background to all of this is a restless soul unhappy, but not quite regretting, in marriage, and fatherhood, in his hackery. Thomas's parents are distant figures - his father hated; and in turn, he finds himself unable to engage with his son. Torn between the countryside - the England that is his muse - and London, where literary life keeps drawing him in; there's something of the Leonard Bast about Thomas; caught in a young marriage that is a tie and a bind, even though (unlike Bast), it is solace. Neither rich, nor poor, a poor "middle class" worker, if you like, Thomas's plight seems emblematic of the times. Had he outlived the war, what would have become of him? He had hoped to join Frost in America; his wife would outlive him by half a century, but would they have lasted?

Thomas, a piscean, doesn't seem a tortured soul so much as a conflicted one. Frost's famous "The Road Not Taken", a poem that it is too easy to take too seriously (and a close reading highlights its playfulness) was taken too seriously by its subject, given to be Thomas. There is something fatalistic about his volunteering to become a soldier in his late 30s, something fatalistic in his marriage and the significant (but apparently not quite adulterous) relationships he would have with other women; perhaps something fatalistic in his poetry - that appears fully formed, a lifetime of reading the poets of his time, creating a clarity to his own writing. Such clarity, we feel is hard-won.

Reading this wonderful book as a general reader one is impressed by Hollis's portrayal of the pre-war world - whether its Harold Munro's poetry bookshop or the rural isolation of Gloucestershire. In both cases, Hollis's picture is a highly nuanced one, and the world of these educated men of letters is seen with more clarity than romance would usually allow.

But reading the book as a poet, one is struck forcefully by its timeliness. The poetry world of a century ago is not so dissimilar to that we live in today. It has its focal point(s), its anthologies, its plethora of publishers, its old guard and young Turks, its rivalries and competing schools, its literary funds, its critics and its gatekeepers. The most popular poets of the day have not necessarily lasted, whilst reputations, such as that of Thomas, are yet to be made. There is, then as now, a small public beyond the poets themselves. If Hollis has an agenda to make (and if so its on a very measured scale), it is that the poetry is what lasts. He makes the case for Thomas, (one echoed by Leavis, Larkin and others) that is fine as far as it goes - he's a major poet, albeit in a minor key. His aesthetic though, perhaps, that's more questionable. The short lyric poems, about England, about nature, war and, occasionally, love, are limited. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and H.D. were about to do more promising things. "The road not travelled" in English poetry is a wide one; and Edward Thomas, for all his essential qualities, appears to be the familiar route, that poets such as Larkin and Carol Ann Duffy (who graces the back cover) are keen to endorse. If we take anything from Frost's poem and his relationship with Thomas, it should be that such narrow routes are hard won, and, as importantly, aren't the only ones we should take.

Downton Poetry

2011-11-06T01:13:00.000-07:00

Tonight's the last episode of series 2 of "Downton Abbey" - though thankfully its going to be back for a third series. Yes, its become a bit of a guilty pleasure, though whether its for its sumptuous set dressing, its overwrought melodrama, or just because I'm in love with Lady Mary (see above), I couldn't say. Though its as historically accurate as, say, "Anonymous", it does at least try. We've had the Titanic; we've had the Great War; and tonight it looks like we're going to get Spanish Flu (a very useful cast winnowing device!) But I think they've missed a trick. I'm pretty obsessed with the literature of a century ago, and the years immediately before and after the first world war see a highly fertile literary and artistic scene - with London, and later Paris, at the heart. Reading biographies of this period is a bit like a costume drama, as characters have a walk on part in each other's story. Poets, in particular, drawn to London, sought out W.B. Yeats' regular weekly meetings at the Cheshire Cheese.

I've just started reading Matthew Hollis's beautifully written biography of Edward Thomas, and the main characters of Thomas and Robert Frost have already been joined by Yeats, Pound and Rupert Brooke. "The War Poets" are familiar to every school child, and its often too easy to separate them out from the literary culture they came from (as they died young, and as a writer like Wilfred Owen was unknown before the war) yet there was a literary culture that young men (in particular) aspired to be part of. Publishers then, as now, treated poetry as a bit of a side project, often the poets subsidising the books' production; and literary reputation was jealously guarded, and new poets usually depended on an older writer's reputational patronage to "get on".

Thomas is at this point in the narrative a literary hack, and yet to write a line of poetry - but he's just met Robert Frost so I've high hopes for him, and I'm sure I'll give the Hollis book a proper review later, though so far, its a lovely work (like Andrew Motion and Ian Hamilton, Hollis is proving that poets make excellent biographers of other poets). But, back to Downton Abbey, surely Mary - a romantic soul, but with both a wild temperament and an inner hardness to her, would be married off by now if only Matthew had written poetry? Then again, maybe her impressionable sister, Sybil, is the one - and the Irish chauffeur Branson will turn out to be a poet as much as a revolutionary. For though most poets these days would not get anywhere near the great and good, in those pre X-Factor days, even such philistines as the Queen Mother would find themselves in the company of poets such as T.S. Eliot ("Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank.") Poetry fans look forward to Series 3 of Downton with expectation....

Campus Poetry

2011-10-29T02:41:00.000-07:00

My first of 3 "gigs" on the Salt Modern Voices tour took place on Thursday night at the University of Warwick, with Clare Trevien and Emily Hasler. Claire and Emily are alumni of Warwick and were invited back by David Morley and George Ttoouli to give a workshop, and a reading, which is when I joined them. Warwick has a dedicated "writer's room" which gives a space for tutorials, readings, whatever - although the somewhat insular nature of universities means that it was a bit of a bugger to find for someone who'd not been there before! I'd made my way to Warwick from my parents in Staffordshire, taking two trains and a bus; and it all went smoothly until I found myself on the rainy campus searching for the building where the reading was taking place. Not finding an open entrance I saw some other people trying to get in, and asked them if they knew where the writer's room was... "You're Adrian..." said Emily, so I finally met my fellow SMV'ers.

We were joined in a reading by a current student, Ian Chung, which was a nice touch. Both Emily and Claire read "Leamington Spa" poems from their books - and it felt like I'd been invited into someone's home, rather than just a reading. I read a few poems from "Playing Solitaire for Money" and a couple of new ones. There were about a dozen of us, and I enjoyed meeting the students, as well as the other poets in the room. The Salt Modern Voices isn't necessarily a "school" or a "movement", just a series of books by promising poets who are quite varied in styles and influences, and it was good to add the two women's books to the selection I've already got.

The next reading I'm doing will be on 14th November at the Compass Pub, in Islington, 7 for 7.30pm.

Sent to Coventry and Other Tall Tales

2011-10-25T06:21:00.000-07:00

Just a quick roundup -:

This Thursday I'm reading with Robert Graham, Emily Hasler and Clare Trevien, all published in the Salt Modern Voices series as part of our mini-tour. The venue will be a new one to me; the Writers' Room at the University of Warwick. Home of the Warwick Review amongst other things, I'm looking forward to a change of scene.

I was away for much of Manchester Literature Festival but caught 3 things at the weekend. "The Mind Has Fuses" an intrigueing evening dedicated to B.S. Johnson (blogged about here), and Zhu Wen and his translator Julia Lovell in conversation with Ra Page (which I blog about for the festival here.) The 3rd event was a nice end of weekend literary quiz, where, despite leading at half way the team I was on got beaten to a pulp (fiction) by the juggernaut that was the librarians!

At the Zhu Wen event there was a Comma Press bookstall and I was pleased to pick up the long-awaited debut collection, "The War Tour" by Zoe Lambert, only sorry that I hadn't been to see her read from it. Luckily, I then bumped into her on the way to the quiz in the Cornerhouse so got it signed. The city's literary serendipity acting wonderfully!

Because I'm poetry-reading in the Midlands, I'm going to miss (again) tomorrow night's Bad Language, but for anyone not literatured-out its sure to be a good night, with a reading by Emma Jane Unsworth - from, she assured me, her next novel rather than current one.

The Readable Barnes

2011-10-21T03:41:00.000-07:00

I was away for this year's Booker and just managed to find BBC newsnight on the Tuesday night whilst in Eindhoven to hear that Julian Barnes, the thoroughbred in this year's race had won the prize. I've yet to read the short "Sense of an Ending" but intend to do so; and its definitely an overdue honour. Barnes is the most enigmatic of that generation of writers in some ways. Whereas Amis we know everything about, the arch-satirist, the political enfant terrible; and McEwan has built a solid and ever-expanding ouvre of middlebrow psychodramas; I'm not even sure most readers of my age and younger would even think of Barnes as a novelist these days. He's a man of letters; hardly ever out of the Guardian review, an obvious intellectual aesthete of the type we rarely get in Britain.

He was always preferred (or liked equally) in France to Britain, which is easy to forget now he's top of the literary tree - and, worth pointing out that his books have frequently been more experimental and playful than is usual amongst British novelists. I'd assumed he'd been writing ignored novels between his Booker shortlistings, but looking at his bibliography, we've barely had 2 novels a decade since his heyday of the 80s. From "Metroland" in 1980 to "Talking it Over" in 1991, he was one of our pre-eminent novelists. His range has always been impressive, no one book is much like another (except in the pairing of "Talking it Over" and its sequel "Love etc.") and I was introduced to his brilliant "A History of the World in 10 and a half chapters", one of the only books by his generation that seemed aware of the post-war European novel and its tricks and delights, by a very non-literary friend. For thoroughbred or not, Barnes has always been the most readable of literary novelists. His novels have always (in Chris Mullin's unfortunate phrase) "ripped along." For me "Talking it Over" is, along with "A History..." his best, a cleverly told relationship novel.

So, for all the discussions about readability and dumbing down that has accompanied this year's prize, its probably only right that the winner is a writer who is never high brow or low brow, an aesthete, a postmodern writer, who remains always a joy to read; and has criticised the Booker himself in the past for being "posh bingo."

The Literati

2011-10-16T05:54:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year when the press is full of literary intrigue and controversy, when writers are tense, and when too much wine is drunk as the world finds out who has won...this year's Manchester blog awards.(*) Sadly work commitments mean that I will be in Eindhoven rather than the Deaf Institute on the night, but I'm sure it will be a good evening for all who attend.

(*) yes, yes its also the Booker on Tuesday night, but that's boring. My money (having only read one of the shortlist) is on Carol Birch.

In other news I wasn't able to attend the Manchester Fiction Prize, but with the shortlist good enough to furnish both a winner and a runner-up I imagine there was much carousing amongst the "literati" on Friday night. (Though, in my experience half of the Manchester "literati", whoever that might be, don't drink, which has always been a bit of a disappointment!) You can find out about the winners and read the shortlisted entries from here. In a highly international shortlist (4 out of the 8 were American/Canadian)Krishan Coupland from Southamption won ahead of Preston's Richard Hirst.

Festival Time!

2011-10-10T08:57:00.000-07:00

The Manchester Literature Festival begins today, with latest news via the blog or their Twitter. Its a packed programme, so go to either of those places for recommendations and reminders. Its all very respectable the first few days with establishment figures Colm Toibin, Alan Hollinghurst, Andrew Motion and Micheal Frayn, but lets its hair down a bit from next weekend. This handy one page Calendar is probably the best way to plan your campaign.

The waves come in, the waves go out

2011-10-08T03:51:00.000-07:00

Literature sometimes feels like a tide. At one moment its lapping around your feet, another moment you're stuck in a thin sand, the water miles away. The waves come in, the waves come out. Literary reputation has something of that as well, and there's plenty of lapping at the shore at this time of year. This year's Booker is announced on the 18th October, so expect plenty of pieces in the papers trying to drum up interest in an other wise uninteresting year.

The Swedish Academy has given literary trainspotters another tick in the box, with the esteemed Swedish poet(the first for 40 years, so leave that controversy to rest), Tomas Tranströmer a respectfully applauded winner. Born in 1931, and still writing, despite being paralysed by a stroke, its not a name I'm familiar with. The poems sound interesting, if not what I usually read; Bloodaxe in the UK are the independent press that energetically publishes his work.

And Neil Astley from Bloodaxe gave an illuminating Q&A online at the Guardian for National Poetry Day (what do you mean, you missed it?). His answers are towards the end of the comments.

Its 20 years of the Forward Prize and there's a well-curated summary of that prize in the Guardian. It's consistent, at least, though reading the poems, and the commentaries one wouldn't think of British poetry as the broadest of churches. The natural world, the elegy, history...these are the pillars of contemporary British poetry (or at least its Forward winners.) Its a poetry of solidity, at its most solid in its immutable borderlands, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, to such an extent that you wonder what an English poet, without Celtic forbears or leanings, would actually sound like?

My own tide has been out for several weeks. Not written - or thought - a creative thing, and that makes me sad. But its a tide, remember, rather than a constant river. I perhaps need to remember what the sandbanks look like now and then.

The Book Barge in Manchester

2011-10-01T03:04:00.000-07:00

The Book Barge is in Manchester for a few days near the end of its summer tour, before returning to Staffordshire. It is what it says on the tin, a bookshop on a barge, and utterly lovely in every way. I went there after work with JT Welsch (he took the photos) and we bumped into Kate Feld there. Manchester's literary village at its very best! (Its moored until Tuesday over the bridge from what used to be Bar Ca in Castlefield, Paul Magrs is reading there on Sunday at 4pm.)

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

2011-09-29T23:52:00.000-07:00

This contains a few plot spoilers, as its a book that you can only talk about that way, but I've tried not to give too much of the detail away, so be warned.

In his highly acclaimed 2010 novel "Freedom", Jonathan Franzen gives us the Berglunds, a middle class American family whose life is tracked over a thirty year period. There are no subplots that don't involve the family, no major characters that aren't somehow in their working or emotional orbit. Despite its 600 pages, there's a tight claustrophobia to this small cast; an intimacy, rather than a vastness to the novel's ambitions. Yet, the novel is ambitious. Why else should we spend so long with Patty and Walter Berglund, unless they are emblematic of their age or so fascinating a pair of creations that we can only revel in their lives?

Rarely, I think, has America seemed such a different country than Britain. For the world that the Berglund's inhabit through their rise, their fall, (their rise again?), is only echoed here in the same way that the foreclosures of subprime mortgage market were. For this is the American middle class, where Walter Berglund can give up his corporate job with 3M and still earn $170,000 a year with a thinktank/charity; where his 21 year old son, useless, hardly educated, but cockier than his father ever was, can be pursuing arms deals worth $700,000 in South America. From this side of the ocean American life seems stranger, further away than ever before.

Franzen begins with censure. Despite much talk of him rescuing the realist novel, here he is the most manipulative of omniscient narrators. "There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds" he says, on behalf of their St. Paul neighbours on page one. And we're off. With an obvious tell, rather than a show. What does he mean? Over the next 600 pages we kind of find out, but kind of don't. The Berglunds are as typical a family as you might imagine. Patty, a stay-at-home mother, being a lead gentrifier of their city suburb; Walter, a good family man and corporate drone; their regulation 2 kids, a boy, a girl, as invisible as such kids ever are, at least till the boy moves in with his childhood sweetheart and her down-at-heel mother. In the breakneck 30 pages at the start of the novel we're given a whizz through what the neighbourhood, acting as Franzen's Greek chorus, think of the Berglund's and its ripe with neighbourly sarcasm. We don't realise it here, but we are halfway through the story, a very odd place to start.

The second section takes us back; via the narration of a memoir that Patty has written for therapy (we never quite find out why or when she has therapy, but then again, she has reason enough). Patty was a star athlete, going to a specialist athletics college, partly to get away from her arty, Democratic secular Jewish family. Partly, it seems, in one of Franzen's frequent manipulations, to meet Walter, essentially the good son of a rich, but ragged family. In the late 70s, early 80s (Franzen is rarely specific about the cultural times, though he's very specific about the politics and economics of each era), he's given us not an everywoman, but a somewhat unique one. She's taller than her classmates, until she goes to Basketball college, where she's amongst other giants, but one of the few non-lesbians in her team. If team sports is one of the American obsessions, it clearly doesn't run as far as the women's teams. It seems Patty has developed her own outsider status - but also found her own crowd. An early rape by a typical jock, puts her off men, and throws her into a dysfunctional friendship relationship with the gothic, depressive, pathological rich girl, Eliza. It is through Eliza she meets Walter and his musican room mate Richard Katz.

It is the relationship between Walter, Richard and Patty which is the heart, the strength and the centre of the novel. Walter and Richard could not be less alike, yet, like often happens, the randomness of their room sharing creates a lifelong bond, and a lifelong resentment. Both love and need the other for what the other isn't. Walter always feels second best to Richard, whose easy way with life and women he admires and resents in equal parts. Richard goes back to Walter time and again, for a stability and an intellectual consistency that his own life lacks. In "Freedom", it is their love, their rivalry, their hate, which is Franzen's strongest suit. Like Amis's "The Information," Barnes' "Talking it Over" or Pinter's "Betrayal", male friendship-rivalry is explored across the decades; and as ever, there's a woman at the centre. Patty is sexually attracted to Richard, but is pursued (and likes being pursued) by Walter. His diffidence constantly opens up the chance that she might choose Richard, but in the end, Richard's own waywardness drives the sensible Patty into his arms. This unscratched itch comes back to them later in lives, when an unhappy Patty, and a down-on-his-luck Richard become lovers at long last, at the "Nameless Lake" that becomes the title of his breakthrough alt.country album. We go back and forth through time; Richard Katz an occasional rather than constant presence in their lives - perhaps more important to Walter than Patty at the end of the day. Yet marriages are mysterious things, and Walter and Patty's remains so. Its as if, over 600 pages and 30 years, Franzen hopes we will have enough evidence to understand them, and understand why they love each other.

But things aren't quite that straightforward. We have to take Walter and Patty as read. For Franzen is nothing if not the omniscient narrator, and he has his favourites. Rather than being, as I initially thought, a modern everywoman, or exemplar (her basketball playing an equivalent to Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's football proficiency), Patty - who can gain the attention of two such different men - is prodded and poked by Franzen's narration throughout. The most interesting creations in the novel are the women; Patty; Eliza; her son's girlfriend Connie; yet Franzen or his narrator hates them all. Patty is raped, and her father doesn't quite say its her fault, but he comes close. She falls for Walter not as an athlete, but after she breaks her leg, and he dotes on her. As a wife and mother we see not the good years, but see her being despised almost as a stay-at-home mother and homemaker. She dotes on her son Joey and he runs away from the claustrophobia of her love; whilst her daughter is the one uninteresting woman in the tableau, a walk on role, who Franzen assigns particular tasks to, but remains uninterested in throughout. We've been told so often about Patty's failings that when Richard - to all intents and purposes a bona fide rock star - becomes her lover, its almost hard to know why. For their is no awakening of character, she is portrayed always as a victim. A fascinating character, but Franzen's patent dislike of her verges on the misogynistic.

As the novel bobs and weaves through the years, we are given potted histories of other family members - an attempt at the Victorian tableau novel - which seem a little distracting (particularly when he throws in details of Patty's family during the last hundred or so pages of the book), but also, and this seems to be Franzen's key, a long plot jump into the year 2004, post 9/11, and into the heart of the madness that was Bush and Cheney's NeoCon America. To all intents and purposes Franzen's characters are mostly Clinton (Bartlett!) era liberals; and here they are in 2004, having discussions about the terrorist threat, and making money out of arm's deals. In a plot swerve that lack's credibility, Joey, the Berglund's 21 year old son moves to New York and becomes a go-fer for an arms subcontractor; whilst Walter joins a not-for-profit that is saving hectares of land from development in return for mining contracts (whilst inevitably falling for his beautiful Asian assistant.) We are given pages and pages of exposition; characters talking with environmental pamphlets as scripts, as these parallel escapades, though occasionally funny and grotesque, grind us through the early years of the 21st century. Joey, like Walter, remains an uninspiring character. Whilst the women in the novel have a certain zest, however much they are despised, the men seem really in need of our dislike, both for how they treat their women, and their opinions and career choices.

Don't get me wrong, "Freedom" is a vastly enjoyable read. Its an intellectual's page turner, a worthy beach book, and kept me running back to its many pleasures whilst on two weeks away round Europe, but it seems to be striving to be more than that - a "state of the nation" novel. There's a glowing review from Philip Hensher on my copy, and I can understand why, as his "The Northern Clemency" is the closest British equivalent of recent years. That book similarly tried to give us a vast political story through a single family, and, like "Freedom", gives us an enjoyable overview of that family, without really articulating the sweep of the age. I felt that Hensher's love of Proust meant that he over-emphasised every detail in the hope that something Proustian would result; and with Franzen, whether its Updike or Bellow or even Roth who he wants to emulate in their vast sweeps over the age, the novel comes across more like a less wacky version of John Irving's "Hotel New Hampshire." Despite the long gestation since "The Corrections", some of the novel seems to have been written in an over-fast flurry, to capture the zeitgeist of the day, yet this is hardly Franzen's strength. Walter's obsession with "over population" is quirky to the point of stupidity, (its not primarily a comic novel, and yet this is surely a comic conceit?), and the unexpected sudden death at a key point late in the novel is cynical writing of the worst type, killing of a character at an appropriate point in the soap opera.

And perhaps, at the end of the day, that is the point. This is a soap opera. Its claustrophic cast give us much pleasure along the way, and there's enough variety of style, tone and location to keep us going. Any outrage with Jennifer Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad" beating it to the Pulitzer should be tempered by the knowledge that in every way Egan's novel - which in many ways treads the same ground, the same class of people, the same timescales, even dips into the music industry - is the superior one. Perhaps these two books offer a genuine example of Zadie Smith's surmises about the contemporary novel (where she suggested that Tom McCarthy's "Remainder" and Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" were opposite in approaches.) Like every other American novel of the last few years, set near or by New York, the twin towers is given ample leg room, yet despite its contemporary concerns Franzen seems remarkably old fashioned in many ways. Like Micheal Chabon's "The Wonder Boys" he touches on the lost Jewishness of his characters, but more as another "set piece" among many, and he has none of that writers' deliciously comic touch.

In "Freedom" I got the sense that whatever his original plan was, it somehow got diluted or altered, by the trajectories of both his writing, and the times. The worst pages by far are the expositional ones, about multinational corporations, environmental policies and land-grabbing. In trying to expose the cynical manipulations of Bush-era capitalism he is neither comic nor serious enough to really add something new; whilst the Berglunds, though endless intrigueing, are neither typical or atypical. The omniscient narrator is often censorious, yet the characters themselves are inconsistent. In such a long narrative arc, it should be possible to perceive change, but it tends to happen with a jolt. Richard Katz is a non-drinking rocker (straight edge? no, of course not, or at least Franzen never tells us that), then he drinks. Joey Berglund eschews masturbation, then turns into one of the Inbetweeners in the frequency with which he pops one out. There's plenty of sex, or at least sexual imagery, in the novel, yet in showing us two generations of teenage life (Patty and Walter in the early 80s, Joey in the mid 2000s), we just see an opportunity for different jokes to play out. Joey, more conservative than both his parents (but like them, marrying young, and to a childhood sweetheart - Connie, who is in calm devotion to Joey, everything his manic mother's love wasn't) is described in detail when he has phone sex with Connie. Holden Caulfield this is not.

And I could go on. Richard Katz's arrival in any scene livens things up a bit, if only because of the unresolved tensions with Walter and Patty. He goes from unpopular punk rocker to cult alt.country singer (yet makes a living putting up wooden decks for middle class New Yorkers.) If you are interested, you'll get family trees of both Patty and Walter's families. There's even a nice little sidetrack with Joey to South America where he finds out he really loves his wife whilst trying to get off with his best friend's beautiful sister.

If you've a book group, and a spare month (it is long), give it a read - you'll enjoy. But long and hard as I looked, there was little here that comes close to the "Great American novel."

Dirty in Didsbury

2011-09-29T04:45:00.000-07:00

Athletes are not adverse to a bit of rumpy-pumpy if the condom consumption of the Olympics is anything to go by. However, it was writers who brought the tone down at the Northern Tennis Club in West Didsbury last night at the launch of the #flashtag Quickies anthology, subtitled "short stories for adults." The flashtag writers formed their tag team last year and as well as crashing other readings and hosting popup literary salons they have organised a couple of their own events.

So, for Didsbury Arts Festival, they, along with both the invited and the submitted writers, decided to put together an event and an anthology with a theme, basically, ahem, talking dirty in 400 words. The rest of this review will no doubt plunge into double entendre, as I, along with a dozen or so others rose to the challenge.

With tables laid out cabaret style, a glitzy backdrop, the promise of impermanent tattoos with the word "Smut", and compere Fat Roland, holding the said anthology in a pair of oilily applied marigolds, I doubt West Didsbury has seen such a debauched evening since the last Lacrosse club social. Ranging from the funny to the elegant, the sexy to the stalker, the stories delved deep in the darkest sexual fantasy recesses of the south Manchester (and further afield) literary communities. Doyen of the short-short, David Gaffney, also in the anthology, regaled us with a couple of star-turn sweary shorts, and in a well-oiled programme that would put even the best arranged swingers club to shame, we came on in groups, and explored our own little fantasies. The only orgy though, was of words.

Buy the Anthology (in the flesh, or virtual, depending on your prediliction)... details are here.

Talking Dirty

2011-09-27T11:55:00.000-07:00

In what is probably a first for Didsbury tomorrow night sees the launch of "Quickies", an anthology of adult shorts, ranging from the naughty to the funny, the erotic to the perverted; all, as Kenny Everett would have said, in the best possible taste. I'm pleased to be amongst writers such as Chris Killen, Emma Jane Unsworth, David Gaffney and Clare Massey, as well as the Flashtag organisers who've done all the hard work and put together both this anthology and the evening. Copies can be purchased on the night.

I'll be demurely reading my piece, alongside a host of others - so come along to the Northern Tennis Club in Didsbury from 8 o'clock.

Literary Lumps

2011-09-24T02:25:00.000-07:00

I've been away in Brussels, Ghent and Amsterdam, so apart from the company of Jonathan Frantzen's "Freedom", haven't been doing much that is literary. Well, it's all to the good, as there's going to be lots coming up with the Didsbury Arts Festival and Manchester Literature Festival hot on the heels. The former starts today, and lots on around the village for the opening day, though its a typical alabaster sky at the moment.

I'm one of many readers next Wednesday 28th September at Northern Tennis Club for the launch of the erotic "Quickies" anthology of flash fiction, and an evening, no doubt, of double entendres. All welcome. Just remember the safety word.

From 10th October the new literature festival is full of treats and the festival blog has writers picking out their own festival highlights.

Before then, and I'd almost forgotten, a change of night and venue for The Other Room, and their next event is at the Anthony Burgess Foundation this coming Monday.

And tomorrow you should head over to Chorlton where the Bad Language/Shoestring Press collaboration (aptly entitled the Bad Shoes Festival) takes over Elektric and Dulcimer bars.

If the weather is keeping you inside, the Bad Language next issue submission deadline is 30th September, theme:Bad Language, so go F- yourselves.

Is that enough?

A visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

2011-09-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

Does the novel exist as a cultural imperative in the 21st century? I would have said "no" - that it is purely a commodity and/or an artefact.

Imagine: reading "Ulysses", "1984", "Catcher in the Rye", "American Psycho" for the first time - with or without context.

It is late to the party to be giving the same kind of imperative to a novel which has already won the Pullitzer, but having read Jennifer Egan's "A visit from the goon squad", I could just scratch my chin and say "another novel" or could actually say that this is something more than special.

Anyone who is aware of American literature over the last 25 years should be aware that the Roth/Updike/Bellow/DeLillo great American Novel is not only a chimera but increasingly futile. American Pastoral, Rabbit Redux, Augie Marsh, White Noise happened at hapzard points in their careers - there is no peak, no trough, just an "is", they could, they did; and they are all men.

We can analyse that all we like but its an irrelevancy, because every generation creates its own macabre, its own serendipity, its own orthodoxy.

What is so amazing about Egan's "A visit from the Goon Squad" is that it cuts through all that, whilst being highly aware of where it's coming from. There seem, to be at least, two clear antecedents, Brett Easton Ellis's imperiously brilliant "The Informers" and David Mitchell's wonderful debut "Ghostwritten." Whether or not Egan has read these books, she takes from the first its fragmented stories, and from the second its sense of connection.

Fragments and connection weave through "A Visit from the Goon Squad." Its ostensibly a story about music industry types in the 80s, but weaves back and forward (again like David Mitchell) from the 60s to the 2020s(the future!) Whereas Micheal Cunnigham's excellent "Specimen Days" signals this, Egan's brilliant novel refuses to signal. This is a road trip without signs, and that is far harder than it should be. Yet, remarkably, she takes us with her, even as characters and perspecitves change. It would be so awful to call this a portmanteau novel, even though it is, because the weave is so fantastically achieved. Rather, I would say that Egan has "balance", because this, more than pretty much any contemporary novel I could mention, is a beautifully balanced novel. Conceits have a tendency to topple over; Egan's only topple to somersault again.

Does any of that make any sense? Here's the proper review: a group of 80s wannabes/casualties work out their life/come good/fuck up.

I can't write a proper review of this. The brilliant Sarah Churchwell has done that already - read that.

OK - you've done that. "We're the survivors" the central character Sasha says. I don't think I've read another contemporary novel that has been so aware of our frailty, our fragility.

"A Visit from the Goon Squad" is the novel that we should all be reading, all be writing, and it puts into the shade every other British or American novel over the last few years. It goes beyond the casualness of Eggars, whilst willing to embrace the whole McSweeney's footnote culture (but it does it better: it has a whole chapter that is a POWERPOINT PRESENTATION.)

I finished this novel and wanted to start it again - but I had to go and make a bonfire of this year's Booker prize shortlist first. It's that good. It transforms. It makes. It reduces.

Better than that it "questions." Whereas you can read most American novels and go "Who are these people?" after the usual consummate ironicness, something kicks in with "A visit from the Goon Squad" that stripped this reader of his cynicism. I've never met the people here, but I care about them alot more than the characters in A.M. Home's brilliant "This book can change your life." The not-caring was part of the action there.

The novel isn't perfect, (after all, which novel is?), there are a couple of emotional loose ends that don't quite add up. These are mine, maybe not yours, I want to read this novel again - immediately - from the start - and that's unhead of. There's a great Tom Petty song, Even the Losers, or there's the film "Dazed and Confused", or there's friends of mine who are not here any more....

And there's chapter 10, the second person (my favourite person, if it comes down to ranking them) "Out of Body" where a character lives and dies in Sasha's peripherary for purely a chapter, but may well be the best piece of American (or anywhere) fiction written in the first 11 years of this compromised century.

This is not a review, this is a homage.

The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

2011-09-11T04:04:00.000-07:00

"The Witches of Eastwick" may well be Updike's most well-known novel, as he remains a cult writer to many. (The brilliant Rabbit novels, which are his best and most famous work, don't seem to have had the wider cultural prominence of, say, "Portnoy's Complain" or "Gravity's Rainbow.") The reason for this, of course, is the 80s film that was made with Jack Nicholson as Darryl Van Horne and Susan Sarandon, Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer as the witches. I must have read it not long after it came out (it was published in 1984)and enjoyed it immensely. Reading it again 20 years later, the enjoyment remained, but if anything, it's improved with age.

The 80s film has done it a number of disservices, not least by associating it with that time, when the book is firmly place in a particular time, the early 70s. The Vietnam war remains a crucial backdrop to the novel. The story, simple enough, is of a stranger, Darryl van Horne, coming to town, buying the "old Lennox mansion", and drawing in three divorcees in the town, Alexandra, Sukie and Jane. What draws Horne is their abilities, known to each of them, used sparingly, and for frivolous means. For these three women are witches, meet regularly in a suburban "coven" to share gin and reminisces about men. Female friends of a similar age call their own meeting a "coven", and Updike's novel offers a potent mix of female empowerment on the one hand, and a paeon to the mysticism of women on the other.

The 3 witches are already aware of their powers when van Horne comes to town; having not only deposited their respective husbands, but also using them for various domestic reasons. But this is a much darker witchcraft than Samantha in Bewitched, or even the Desperate Housewives-style of the recent for TV "Eastwick." In many ways, I think the novel is set firmly in the same world that his earlier sex comedy "Couples" takes place. It is a small town America that is no longer tied so much to its twin pillars of church and family. This is the messy America of the early 70s, with Vietnam firmly in the background, and the shock of economic downturn (and ruin) on every doorstep. Into this reality of the American dream Updike plants one of its most shameful episodes, the Salem witches, but in, what I think is a highly original conceit, witchcraft here is real, and part of being a woman. Their powers are acknowledged, even accepted by their community - as if in the madness of the times, a little witchcraft is the least of the problems.

What makes "The Witches of Eastwick" retain its power is both the richness of Updike's writing, for which this subject matter is perfect, and the originality of the story. Its frequent adaptions have shown how clean a concept it is - that of the small town contemporary witches and, as importantly, the arrival of van Horne into their lives. For van Horne has materialised, (and will dematerialise, just as quickly), without explanation. Have the witches conjured him up? Or, having detected their power has this "devil" turned up on their doorstep to harness it? Part of the book's brilliance is that Updike never gives us more than a few clues about van Horne's provenance, the strongest being the name. van Horne is in many ways as hapless in the affairs of man as he is magnetic to the women. His only power over the world is what he gets people to do for themselves. This is Crowley's "free will." He is a very modern devil as well; collecting pop art (he had no time for the abstract expressionists), installing hot tub, tennis court and stereo system; and he draws the three women into a web that they don't even understand for themselves. He provides each of them with the foil they need for their own talents - whether its admiring their music, their sculpture or their beauty. Yet, it is when the witches are together with him, mutually pleasuring each other in the hot tub, that their "cone of power" seems at its height. This is late 60s/early 70s sexual utopianism given a magic air. Under van Horne's prompting the women begin to take what they want from the town of Eastwick - not content with having affairs, the dreadful wives of their men have to suffer as well. All, you know, will not end well.

It is the friendship between the three women which is one of the book's triumphs. For Updike paints three very different women who share mutual respect, but have different characteristics and want different things. The beauty of Updike's prose to me has always been that he writes with his mouth full, there's abundance on every page, and in every sentence. By the end of his writing life, this abundance could sometimes slip over into parody, the books themselves unable to carry the weight, but in "The Witches of Eastwick", he has a subject that demands this omnivorousness. Written in three distinct acts, the "cost" of witchcraft begins to show in the collateral damage that affects their lives. The ordinary wives who they accidentally widow become a religious-charged coven of their own, the local priest being replaced at the head of his congregation by his previously subjugated wife; and the young son and daughter of the couple who have died as the result of the witches, return to town and become part of van Horne's coven - eventually driving apart van Horne's influence on the witches, when the young woman marries van Horne (and, we later find, the young man becomes his lover.)

In "witches" I think Updike found a grand subject that also offers endless opportunity to satirise small town life. van Horne is a most peculiar kind of devil, actually impotent (in both ways) without the powers of the women. He is drawn to them and to Eastwick like a parasite. When he gives a sermon to the local congregation at the end of the novel he talks about nature's parasites. The implication is that the witches too are this; but in reality he is talking about himself - and by implication, if this world of parasites is God's world, then shit, they might as well have given the other guy (him, the devil) a chance. This playful irreverance has mostly stood the test of time. Programmes like "Desperate Housewives" and "True Blood" seem to echo the ideas of Eastwick in different ways. Of course, Updike's fecund women (their many children are virtually running feral, uncomfortably out of earshot), are a very different kind than you find in Angela Carter's fairy tales, but that's because they are existing in a real world. The ultimate fantasy, of course, is that they are looking for the perfect man, and that they find him in the devil himself, shared between them, and a creature they cannot ever possibly be ruler over. Women are given a forceful sexuality in the novel, with men just dupes controlled by their wandering penis, but the novel ends with them all conjuring up the next male, and leaving Eastwick. Is there a conservative moralism here, that female sexuality uncontrolled by marriage is dangerous? It's one reading I suppose, but Updike is delightfully ambiguous.

I'm not sure whether Updike is studied extensively in Universities these days; if so I wonder if "Witches" is one of those studied? It deserves to be. It seems to offer a nice satirical counterpoint to the sixties and seventies suburbia of "Couples" and the Rabbit books, and remains both a delightful read, and a highly accomplished metaphor. Updike woudld revisit the Witches in his last published novel, "The Widows of Eastwick". Their enchantment is hard to resist.

Found this contemporary review by Margaret Atwood which intrigueingly compares it to the Wizard of Oz.

The Long Booker

2011-09-07T03:27:00.000-07:00

With yesterday's announcement of the Booker shortlist, along with Dame Stella Rimington's remarks about the judges looking for "readability", we have another strange metaphorphosis in the long history of our premiere literary prize. This is a prize that has been won by such "unreadable" novels as "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha", "The God of Small Things" and "Life of Pi". "Literary fiction", for want of a better word, is inevitably a very large church. It's one of the myths of the Booker that there's a certain kind of "Booker book." There are these books, and they occasionally make the shortlist, but they very rarely come within a sniff of winning.

I think its more interesting to look at Booker lists not in isolation but in a historical context. 12 years into the century can we make some assertions about "twenty first century" fiction or, indeed, the Booker itself? It remains, under Man's sponsorship, our leading literary prize, and though the Orange is still with us (and was developed in response to an all-male Booker shortlist) there's been no real attempt to usurp it (the Guardian's "Not the Booker" notwithstanding.) Its quirks remain. Commonwealth writers allows Booker to select from "everyone writing in English other than the Americans", and as a result likes to slip in some pseudo American books - for instance, on this years short list, two of the books are American novels in all but passport, from the Canadian authors Edugyan and DeWitt.

I'd say, rather than there being a "Booker book", there's several memes that the prize returns to. High class historical fiction has long been a mainstay, and remains both a triumph of the English language literary scene ("Sacred Hunger", "Wolf Hall", "Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet") and an annoying arm of the British nostalgia industry. On every shortlist, they've won less often than you'd imagine (only Mantel and Carey really fit this category this century.) Ever since Rushdie (and perhaps since Naipaul), the Indian subcontinent and its writers have enthralled Booker judges. Adiga and Desai (the younger) have won this century, yet the last 3 years is the longest period without a subcontinent writer since the mid-80s by my quick reckoning. Is this meaningful, or just a blip? Time will tell.

The 3rd meme is the midlist writer - beloved of Booker lists in the 70s and early 80s - we've recently seen Banville, Enright and Jacobsen take the bauble for mid- or late- career novels. I'd guess that in a year without a standout-standalone book its a safe choice. Hollinghurst, Mantel and Atwood could also be placed in that company, but each of their winners has been much acclaimed.

What I've noticed is that those word of mouth phenomenons "Life of Pi" or "The God of Small Things" phenomenon (a step-up in class or debut novel that goes viral) rarely wins the Booker - though those books sometimes get nominated ("Brick Lane" or "White Teeth"). More often those viral books happen outside of the Booker firmament - think "One Day" or "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" - but hardly need its imprimatur. Only one real "outlier" - DBC Pierre's "Vernon God Little" - won this century, and like John Berger's "G" or Keri Hume's "The Bone People", its one of those oddities that most competitions spew up now and then.

The first decade of the 21st century has not been the best of decades for the Booker. The absurdity of establishment rather than cultural establishment figures such as Dame Stella Rimington chairing the judges isn't likely to push the prize in a more radical direction - whatever the Blogosphere would hope for. More damagingly, I wonder what happens to those third and fourth books from ex-contenders. Magnus Mills was last shortlisted in 1998, Jon McGregor in 2002, Sarah Hall and David Mitchell in 2004, Costa winner A.L. Kennedy has never made a shortlist, Impac winner Nicola Barker has just one listing (albeit as recently as 2007 for "Darkmans"), Will Self follows Martin Amis in the "apparently too clever for the Booker" pile. I would think that these seven writers (and there are others) would feature heavily in any discussion of the British novel of the last 15 years. The Booker remains unassailably our top book prize, but this years list, despite its good points - heavy on debuts, independent novels, and both the historical and the contemporary - confirms that the prize offers a poor guide to what's really happening with the English-language novel, whilst being undoubtedly very Booker.

My other blog's a Porsche

2011-09-04T02:19:00.000-07:00

Maybe not, but having two websites does require a bit of cross-promotion now and then.

I've just updated my author website www.adrianslatcher.com

- video of me reading "A Colossal Machine" at the Manchester book market
- a new page collating the book reviews that have appeared on this site over the last 3 years or so
- new addition to the Writers section of the site: Simon Armitage

What's a poem about?

2011-09-03T00:38:00.000-07:00

I've been spending the last week organising and rearranging the poems I've written since "Playing for Solitaire for Money" was finalised in Spring 2010; so close to 18 months of writing.

Do we have particular obsessions at particular times? I guess so - though the subject matter reappears. I think that some of the topics of that collection I've wanted to explore more; contemporary paranoia, nostalgic memory, engaging with the world, love, the absence of love. Additionally, there's something I've always been edging towards, a certain "metaphysicality" where situation and emotion are layers rather than explicit. Can you be a metaphysical poet in the contemporary age? If so, its not so much the connecting with the real world with the mystical, as extracting the debris of a spiritual sensibility from the consumerist nature of modern life, and finding some meaning in that life, however hard.

But without analysing my new work too closely (and its not yet available anywhere, anyway), I've noticed a certain pulling away from trusting words on their own, to trusting the poem. Form has become more important, at least in the shape of these lyrics. I've begun to distrust the glittering power of individual words, at least where they don't offer us a genuine sense. When we talk about "meaning" in a poem, I don't think its always about the literal sense, but for me, at the moment, the poem has to have meaning, even if its obscured (or layered). I've a jaundiced view of words for their own sake, or images that are beautiful but static. No great change here, anyhow, as I've never been much of an "imagist", never followed Stevens (or even Ashbery). Conversely I've dumped the more literal poems, however neatly they've stacked up.

What I want, I think, is a poem to stand up by itself, to have meaning without being explicit about that. The metaphysical poets were clear, direct, demotic, yet highly open to interpretation within that framework. Its why they're still read, I think, as approaching something of the contradictions of human consciousness, and utilising words with an awareness of how inadequate they are as tools.

The Long Hand of the Writer

2011-08-30T14:08:00.000-07:00

A nice little Twitter discussion last few days around "writing longhand." Alex Preston was thinking of doing it, and being encouraged by Jon McGregor and Lee Rourke. I put my twopen'th in, but it got me thinking.

I've deliberately written poems longhand these last few years - though during late nineties/early noughties I was equally as likely to write poems to screen. There seems no reason why that should be a bad thing; and I found it interesting in terms of form and content; but in reality, I've nearly always written poems longhand, the scribbling out, the flash of inspiration, all seems to encourage it. But I've written good poems direct to screen as well.

Fiction's different though. I've been a type-writer since 1990 at least - helped along by access to word processors (typewriters were another matter) and a reasonably fast typing speed. When in full flow on fiction my handwriting had difficulty keeping up with the thought processes of getting the writing down and I still think that's true to a large extent; but that said, I've been struggling to get prose down in any way shape or form of late, and wondering whether something of this might be the ubiquity of the screen - the ever present internet in the corner of my vision.

When I participated in the multiple writer residency "the Reading" recently I found myself able/forced to write to the screen for a good 3 hours. At home, the distractions become too easy. Yet I've never given up longhand entirely - the issue has always been the extra work involved in typing it up (with the caveat that you get to 2nd draft it - but I'm a pretty good copy typist, so to be honest, I don't do much revising when doing that.) (And besides, my handwriting is sometimes illegible.)I was surprised a while back to find that the novel I'd begun on my M.A. was started longhand - though only the first few pages. In those days it was easier to be without a computer, now they seem a little too ubiquitous and maybe that's the problem. It almost takes a leap of faith to believe that you can go back to writing longhand - even though you know that Martin Amis and William Gibson still do (I think), and that the majority of writing that you revere was written in that way. Who used to type up these manuscripts? Obedient spouses? Hard-pressed publishing assistants? The writer...? In other words, you can romanticise the "longhand", when it can sometimes be cutting off one of the better tools the modern writer has.

I carry a pad with me these days, and every now and then start something longhand - either because I'm away from the computer, or, as importantly, because I'm wondering if that might be a more efficient way of channelling the imagination. Yet I've sat on trains with a laptop and written 3-4000 words - highly productively - so its not just that.

But anyway, the Twitter conversation got me thinking, and I was away from a computer for a few days up in the North East, and I had a pad with me, and a bit of spare time, and I started writing a story. I'm going to try and finish it in that form, even knowing that I've the job I've entering it on to the screen at some point; the writing doesn't necessarily seem that different, but I do think there's something in seeing the words immediately on the page - for if the computer can be a match for the notebook for writing, I'm still sure it's not what I need for reading my work.

The strangest thing was how it did tie my imagination a little behind my back. For I'd no computer on which to check a word, or a spelling, or to look up a particular technical term or other such detail. Those gaps are starting to appear in the narrative as I write, and I find it the least appealing part of the process. Just as Hemingway's newsman's Remington seemed to be echoed in his taut writing style, I think the longhand writer is potentially handicapping the imagination, by taking away the extended tools by which it now functions so seamlessly. My longhand story suddenly feels less modern than ones I write straight to the screen. Yet, for me, at this point in time, the suggestion seemed a good one. Short fiction in particular - but longer stuff as well - doesn't seem particularly interested in the modern at present; and by going back, I wonder if I might unlock at least something of the difference.

(Adrian uses Muji exercise pads. They are cheap, comfortable to hold, and the pages are wide).

Albert Angelo by B.S. Johnson

2011-08-23T07:48:00.000-07:00

English fiction of the post-war period is a series of roads not so much less-travelled as roadblocked off. Quite a few of those roads exist in the ever inventive work of B.S. Johnson. Periodically, we are encouraged to read Johnson, but I wonder if more than a few people actually do? Yet, if you pick up Jonathan Coe's biography, "Like a Fiery Elephant" (a description given to the Albert character by one of the schoolchildren in "Albert Angelo"), you need also to read the work.

"Albert Angelo" was his second novel and deconstructs the very form. Published in 1964, Johnson uses the (many) tools in his arsenal to tell a simple story in a multi-dimensional way. For Johnson all fiction is a version of a lie, but rather than leave it at that, he both gives us a conventional narrative (albeit seen from a number of different angles) and then exposes the lie. Yet, this is no mere gimmick. We've surely got over the idea that novelty in fiction "doesn't last", after all, Tristram Shandy is still with us, and the contemporary novel can sometimes seem to deserve every adjective other than "novel." Albert is an architect manque struggling with his designs for buildings that never get built, whilst affording a cheap lifestyle through the horrors of being a supply teacher. Recovering (or not recovering) from rejection by a girlfriend who Johnson has punningly called Jenny Taylor, (get it?), Albert (Mr. Albert, or Albert Albert, we are never entirely sure), resents visiting his parents, resents the education system that sends him from one underwhelming Secondary Modern to another, and most of all resents his own misery.

Of course, an architect should find work, but there's a clever humour in the chosen profession that he cannot quite follow, for Albert is a poet of architectural design. He tours a begotten post-war London looking for gems of Georgian, Victorian or later architecture, whilst despairing at the awfulness of the new Sadlers' Wells. In his classes he struggles with a worsening disorder amongst unruly pupils that could almost have been written today in the aftermath of the riots - students who can't write, and don't care that they can't; teachers who have given up; and an education system that seems to deliberately want it that way. The late 50s/early 60s of Johnson's imagination is carefully wrought, and puts into perspective contemporary writers who write about the period through a tinge of nostalgia.

Like Burgess, he takes after Joyce in wanting to show all of life, and only wishes he could not just describe but let you experience life. It is the paradox of "Ulysses", that by showing us our "reality", we look away, not recognising the methods that are needed to tell it. Yet, Johnson's world is nothing if not plainly wrought. A visit to see Chelsea (then as now, a mix of the tawdry and the talented) is described as minutely as the tortures of his school life. It's perhaps worth saying that we're further away now from my school days, than they were from the world Johnson depicts. The failed relationship with Jenny is the pain that keeps hurting for Albert, and stops him from moving on, even as he romanticises the relationship. Faced with an unruly class, he's daydreaming of an idyllic camping trip where they were at their best together. As he pulls himself together the pupils notice his erection under his trousers. But Johnson wants to not only write about sex, but about semen, about menstruation. Why, he seems to be asking, can't these experiences make the page, as well as others? Aren't they what makes us human?

Trawling round London late at night, sex seems infinitely possible, and love impossibly so; this is the world of Dennis Potter's "Lipstick on Your Collar". Like Burgess;s Droogs in "A Clockwork Orange" his teenage scoundrels are both demons and potent symbols of what the writer can no longer be; yet the pupils are drawn with some warmth. Johnson, one feels, was a good teacher, even if the litany of descriptions that Albert's pupils give his fictional surrogate say otherwise. School then was a mixture of sadism and crowd control, leavened on occasion by the passions of the odd teacher, or the attentiveness of a rare pupil.

This part of the novel (called "Development" - another part of Johnson's deconstruction) is a carnival of different styles and perspectives trying - and in many way succeeding - in giving a genuine picture of the somewhat tawdry world he's describing. There are some parts which haven't travelled; a joke about a tramp being asked by a prostitute if he has a (French) "letter" for protection uses a phrase that's now forty years out of common currency; black characters have "negroid features". Yet, there's a strange modernity to it all. Johnson is of our age, after all, the Beatles were already moving on from "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." His pupil's most frequent criticism of Albert is that he should "cut his hair." Here is the small town FE lecturer of "Lucky Jim", but in world that is far from as comic as Kingsley Amis made out. The techniques that are most radically realised, are probably not the infamous hole cut through a page, but in the new openness that "art" could embrace at that period. The sixties may have been good for Johnson, if he'd been a decade younger. Like Potter, or Burgess, there's the regret of sexual opportunities not readily available. The book is explicit, sweary, ribald; it's after all, after the Chatterley ban, even if the Lord Chamberlain is still censoring the theatre.

For Johnson, for Albert, we have a world that has no room for dreamers, no room for romantics, and the answer seems to be to just "accept." If the format of the contemporary English novel was complicit in that acceptance, then Johnson's stylistic experiments make so much sense. Telling us what his lies actually are("she wasn't called Jenny", "that story was my fathers",) seems not so much another layer of artifice as technique to make us question all stories, even the ones we make up ourselves. How rosey are our spectacles? Reading "Albert Angelo" seems to take us back to a recognisable world, not too different than our own. It's owning up to its poetic licence, gives it a veracity. Like Lee Rourke's recent "The Canal", the distinct place names of a village-y London transplant us firmly to a place and time. To be read in our time, a novel doesn't need to have been read in its time, and Johnson had a tiny audience, a tiny influence; yet it reads - not so much as a period piece - but as an important document. Without being explicitly a "youth" novel like "The Outsider", Johnson is an angry enough young man, and, from this distance, seems far less compromised than Kingsley Amis, for instance. We don't revere our cult books in the same way as we do American writers, yet Johnson's mundane supply teacher is not so far removed from Bukowski's post office worker, after all.

Why read B.S. Johnson? Well, I was looking for a palliative after some of the recent contemporary-historical novels I've read, and it proved an efficacious one.
Also, there's a must-attend Johnson retrospective as part of this year's Manchester literature festival. Though his life and character are interesting, it is what he does in his books, and that's the writing as much as the parlour tricks, that makes him so vital, the best part of three decades after his death.

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

2011-08-22T08:20:00.000-07:00

Half Blood Blues was kindly sent to me by Serpent's Tail after it was longlisted for this years Booker. A 2nd novel by a Canadian writer, you can see why it appealed to publisher, and, to a lesser extent, Booker judges: telling a somewhat unusual story, that of an American Jazz band caught up in first Berlin, and then Paris at the outbreak of World War II. The twist in the tail is that their trumpeter, Hieronymous Falk, is a young black German, and, as the one surviving record of the group - "Half Blood Blues" - shows, was a unique talent.

Edugyan begins, not with the band in Berlin, but in Paris, as they make their final flee from the Nazis, following that auspicious recording. Flash forward half a century and Sid and Chip, the two survivors of the band, are called to Germany for a documentary about this legendary session. All is not as it seems, and our narrator, bassist, Sidney, is both uncomfortable about the return and drawn - as he always has been - by the insistent Chip. He was dragged into a brothel aged 13, by his more talented rhythm mate, and here he is, an old man, being dragged across the Atlantic, to face, as only Sid knows, the truth about the past. For "Half Blood Blues" is a book about secrets and betrayal. But like "The Kite Runner," "The Gathering" or "Atonement," the reader is kept waiting for the truth. A common enough contemporary trope, in some ways, this gives "Half Blood Blues" the air of a shaggy dog story. That Heironymous has somehow survived the Holocaust, creates a second quest story - as, following the revelations in Berlin - Chip and Sidney hunt him down in Poland. Given the momentous times they lived through, three old pals burying the hatchet seems a slight return.

The Booker, in not allowing American novels, has had a bit of a penchant for American-style novels the last few years, and this, like "Vernon God Little" or "Keepers of the Truth" is American to the core. Despite plenty of research, the story seems to lack veracity - partly because the act of ventroquilism that Edugyan gives us with Sidney is that of an old man telling stories on the stoop, never quite getting to the point; and partly because we are seeing this through time and memory. Music is notoriously hard to write about, and Edugyan does a good job of it, but what she gains in matching Sidney's jive with the spirit of her musicians, she loses through the somewhat playful way that the jazz band makes its way from the heart of the nightmare to safety. Its not just that Sidney is an unreliable narrator, he comes across as an unreliable witness. Not that all books about that period have to be morality tales - yet there seems something a little casual about this particular story of betrayal, given the events happening all about them. Also, Sidney's obfuscations make it a somewhat frustrating read. I'm remembered of Allan Gurganus's similarly obfuscatory "The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All". Alone, Sidney's narrative isn't quite entertaining enough to make up for its shagginess. There's a love story at the heart of this as well, but Sidney's love for singer Delilah, and the latter's protectiveness of the young, vulnerable Hieronymous doesn't quite do it for me. Is it just sex? Or is it something more? With Hiero's voice being silenced throughout most of the narrative (though he gets given voice when it suits the author), he seems a mute character, brought alive by a music that, of course, we never get to hear.

Yet as I was about to give up on the book's longeurs, it begins to come alive. The rush from Berlin to Hamburg to Paris, and then the panic as they then have to arrange an escape to America (a near impossibility for the German-African Hieronymous) is truly gripping, Sidney's digressions notwithstanding. Here the backwards looking structure makes sense, for we know that they survived, and that the meeting with Hieronymous will be the climax of the book. The love and rivalry between these three men has sustained them all in different ways through the years.

I'd be surprised if it makes it beyond the Booker longlist, as its a somewhat frustrating read, and much too long in its early part, yet if we take it for what it is, both an old man's picaresque back into his regrettable past, and a not inauthentic paeon for a lost music, it works well enough on those terms.

For another point of view Bernadine Evaristo reviews it in the Guardian here.

90s

2011-08-20T01:23:00.000-07:00

I've been putting a tape (yes, a tape!) together for a friend, and most of the tracks on it are from the 90s. What do we even think of this decade? Britpop and Nirvana, Friends and Alan Partridge, leaving the ERM and New Labour? Whereas the 80s seems to have an identity now, a polarised one, with the glam of the New Romantics alongside the strife of the Miners Strike, the 90s could well be characterised as the boring decade, at least in the UK.

Prosperity didn't come till late - the mediocre John Major government dominated the decade, but has left no legacy memories (but a privatised rail service), whilst New Labour's late century ascendancy has its awkward moments: Cool Britannia and Millennium Dome. Blair is remembered now for his Iraq misadventure not the slightly uneasy triumph of his 1997 landslide.

Musically, as books like Seven Years of Plenty have tried to show, it was a vivid time, but in retrospect surely "grunge" and "Britpop" were weak constructs that merely saw alternative and indie music making a final surge into the mainstream, with a few great bands at the heart of each. The 90s was a catholic period, with illegal raves having turned into lucrative festivals and franchises. Going back through old 7" and 12" vinyl I was struck not by how dated the music was - much of it stands up - but how, outside of the Blurs and Oasis's, we hardly hear any of the second division acts today, and how late 80s records (such as "The Stone Roses")seem to speak for the decade in the way that the Clash's "London Calling" seemed to herald the 80s.

Personally it felt like a failed decade - certainly my generation bore the scars of Thatcher, and we seemed to work hard for little gain. Friends married later or not at all, opportunities seemed scarce, and hard-earned. There was none of the insouciance of a generation that came after, with Easyjet and Ryanair flights taken as granted, a booming job market (at least until the last couple of years), and the wonders of the iPod and internet. In the 90s, I felt we all tread water, waiting for the future we'd been promised the decade before. Our favourite shows were Friends, This Life and Cold Feet, comfortable fantasies about people like us who were prettier and richer, but with all the same problems. Its easy to forget there was a house price boom in 1986-8, before things went sour again; the house I struggled to buy in 1989 in York would have been half the cost eighteen months earlier.

Yet, coinciding with my twenties, the 90s felt like a period when I was in a rush. I wrote 5 novels, none of which got published, but 2 got shortlisted for prizes, and I dedicated myself to studying full time, had 5 jobs in three different cities, changed career, bought and sold a house (at a loss!), rented nearly a dozen rooms and flats; recorded at least 7 "albums" (on cassette naturally - CD-R's were another bit of that delayed future!); bought my first (and 2nd) PC; went onClub 18-30 and Amsterdam trips. Looking back I bought CDs and vinyl - the latter were usually half the price of the former (and nowadays its the opposite, go figure!) - and lost a bit of my interest in literature only for it to come back towards the end of the decade. I was in a hurry to become an adult, at the same time, the world was welcoming the extended adolescence. Prosperity is part of it, of course - without it, you do live for the day.

Alternative comedy and music had stopped being political - the entertainment age was beginning; repackage, repackage as Morrissey prophecied on "Strangeways, Here We Come"... CDs were joined by (just about) affordable PCs and the internet felt like a private club with its own rules and etiquettes, rather than for everyone, and for everything. That said, I was on email by the middle of the decade (several years before Tony Blair ever sent one), and you knew you would never go back.

The 90s - not easy to love, but even harder to hate - a bedding in of 80s modernity, a last gasp for the Baby Boomer generation (Clinton, Blair), a consumer age, but without the money (and cheap credit) to do much about it.

Salt Modern Voices Interview 2: Lee Smith

2011-08-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

Salt Modern Voices are a series of poetry and fiction pamphlets published by Salt Publishing. This Autumn, several of its authors will be touring the UK and reading in various venues. More info on this can be found on the website. In the lead up to the tour, SMV authors will be interviewing each other and posting the results on their personal websites. In the first of these, Lee Smith and Claire Trévien interview JT Welsch on form, masculinity, and his American heritage.

Interview with Lee Smith

In the second interview, made available here for the first time, questions from Claire Trévien, Mark Burnhope and Adrian Slatcher have been asked of Lee Smith, whose collection "Away from the City" was No.1 in the Salt Modern Voices series. Growing out of an exhibition of photography and poetry, the collection explores not just connections between written and visual arts, and also the two cities, Melbourne and Cambridge, where he has lived, and where the poems were written.

A lot of your poems seem rather minimal. When they're not 'short', they often consist of taut, clipped lines, or short numbered sections. One of them is a haibun. There are photographs included in the collection too, which add to a kind of 'travel journal' feel, where these elements might be collected together to chart a journey. Do you see visuals as an inherent part of your practice? Could you tell us something about your composition and organising principles?

Away from the City is indeed a travel journal, an account of a year spent in two cities. I wanted the poems to form a series of images, short instances of emotion, movement, or even nothingness, that transport the reader through these urban environments. This journey is very much a visual experience. The photographs create an atmosphere within which the poems emerge. This process reflects how many of the poems were written - observing and capturing visual exchanges, and then interpreting these elements in poetic form. I can't write long poems. The images get lost in the writing. I don't have a huge attention span, so the more immediate these observations are, the more they are allowed to resonate.

The title seems deliberately misleading considering the predominance of urbanity in these poems, but then as one realizes that it's a tale of two cities, it seems perhaps as if the title captures that sense one has when 'belonging' to two places: of always missing one when with the other. Did you write your Cambridge poems in Melbourne and vice versa, or where they done in situ?

The title does hint at that sense of belonging in two places. Indeed I did write some Cambridge poems in Melbourne, and vice versa — which led to a number of interesting links between different poems. I think the title also tries to convey the feeling of movement in the series as a whole. I felt sometimes that by merely walking and observing the people who inhabit the city, I was moving further away from it.

We're used to a "transatlantic" language writing between Europe and America, I wonder to what extent you felt you had to choose or develop a "trans-pacific" language to write about two such distant, and distinct cities as Cambridge and Melbourne. There seems a consistency in your writing between the two places, but its quite impressionistic - as if you're seeing both the new and familiar for the first time. To what extent was this deliberate?

When I first began writing these poems in Melbourne, I had been there a number of times previously. I was familiar with most of the city, but I still felt like a tourist every time I returned. I tried to harness these feelings of alienation, but apply them to local, everyday situations. Perhaps it's this element of alienation that ties the language of the two cities together. Or it may be that influences on my own dialect had seeped through when writing this series — I felt very strongly connected to Melbourne after I returned to Cambridge.

I like art/text collaborations - for you was this always an important element what you wanted to do? I'm interested in how the exhibition, and then the pamphlet emerged, and whether you had to write within those constraints, or found this enabling?

The collaboration with photography was an essential element in the germination of this book. I felt inspired by the way that these two cities had very clear visual identities (architecture, fashion, business etc.) and the power that photography has to capture poetic visual images. The original exhibition of Away from the City contained 24 photographs, and only eight poems. I wanted to experiment with the way that people navigated around the images and text, and what parallels they would draw between them.

With the pamphlet, I constrained myself to including only twelve poems from each city. Here I wanted the images created by the poetry to be in the foreground. The choice of using only eight photographs was a difficult one, and perhaps I would choose eight different ones for a new edition.

I'm just interested in what other poetry you like/read - particularly given that you must have come across a lot working for Salt. I published some of Chris McCabe's early poems for instance in Lamport Court, and his approach to how the poems look on the page, as well as the kind of short poems he does, seems to have something in common with your work. Did the Salt list/or particularly other poets feed into your work is it something in parallel?

Working for Salt obviously exposed me to a huge array of contemporary styles. And to an extent, I guess editing and typesetting the Salt list allowed me a broader knowledge of the range of poetry being published. I remember, not long after joining, reading Luke Kennard's The Solex Brothers and thinking how completely different it was from anything I had studied at university. It encouraged me to experiment with style, and I remember writing many more prose poems after reading that book.

I've tried hard not to emulate poets that I enjoy reading. It spoils my experience of their poetry. However, looking back on the poems now, I can see elements of Matthew Sweeney, Tobias Hill, Bashō. I believe I first read McCabe's work after writing Away from the City.

On the whole, I'd rather remove myself from style comparisons and influences. My fear is for a reader who stops mid-way through one of my poems (or anyone else's) to consider who the poet has been influenced by.

I believe you're returning to Melbourne. Where next for your artistic practice then?

I've just invested in a new camera, so more photography/poetry collaborations. I want to experiment more with exhibitions and digital. There may be room for a 'spin-off' pamphlet, but I certainly couldn't manage a full collection.

Melbourne's a perfect place to develop the visual aspect of my writing. Also, I'm looking forward to having a huge range of creative artists (music, art, design) to collaborate with. The poetry community in Melbourne is very different to the UK. I like the idea of not having to conform to a particular school/publisher, developing new audiences, and generally not being outcast by an antiquated poetry establishment.

What to Read When You're Not on the Beach

2011-08-13T01:12:00.000-07:00

Summer reads dominate the newspapers. Usually at this time of year they're short of news, not this year of course. But there's something a little annoying about the sense of entitlement that sees August as a month to pack bags for two to three weeks and find a beach to read on, or whatever. Not all of us are following the political classes to Tuscany. Sunshine's in shorter supply than news this August.

But even in the summer, there's still a residual amount of literary activity. It could take most of the summer to read through the massive programme of this year's Manchester Literature Festival. There will be a few gems, I'm sure, and having the Anthony Burgess Foundation as this year's hub will cement its role as Manchester's new literary centre. Very much looking forward to a celebration of B.S. Johnson for instance. The Anthony Burgess Foundation has a brand new website just in time, not just for the festival, but for next year's anniversary of "A Clockwork Orange." This weeks Manchester riots give a contemporary and sociological subtext to the work. As a few commentators have pointed out, Alex and the Droogs are younger in the book than we see in Kubrik's film version.

If poverty and lack of opportunity create riots, they don't necessarily lead to criminality. An admirable art project from Arthur + Martha, with some text help from various writers, wonders what the equivalent of Engels' 19th century poor would be - and focusses on the cities homeless. Tweet From Engels (@tweetfromengels) gives voice to the homeless, funnelling their words through Twitter and is well worth following.

Admirably, at a time of year when most literary events shut up shop, The Other Room stays open for business. The week after next, the 27th event in this always fascinating series, takes place at the Old Abbey Inn on Wednesday 24th August.

I've been trying to organise myself a bit more in order to enter a few of the plethora of competitions that seem to exist these days. There's been an extension to the Didsbury Arts Festival short story and poetry competitions (Theme: Maps, Deadline: 26th August) and there's also an intrigueing new opportunity from Art group Blank Media Collective. Slightly more in the distance - the chance to have a poetry collection published should never be ignored, if only because it forces you to organise and arrange your work. The Anthony Hecht prize offers not just publication but money. What more could a poet ask for?

Coming up soon, as well, I'm one of a series of writers giving workshops at part of the Calderdale Writers Roadshow. I'm running a workshop on Creative Non Fiction on September 10th - but there's plenty of other opportunities, and a good enough reason to pop out of Manchester to nearby Calderdale.

Now is the Time for Your Tears

2011-08-09T14:34:00.000-07:00

I'd like to spout some half-baked theories of disaffected youth; link the marauding teens with MPs expenses and banker greed; pontificate on our X-Factor meets Grand Theft Auto culture...

...but I can't because I'm too sad. Tonight's riots in Manchester, murmured throughout the day, but so flagged up that I thought they couldn't possibly happen - that the troublemakers would be stopped as soon as they crossed into the city centre - ended (if they have yet ended) far worse than I could have imagined. Marauding through the city - slipping from the main streets to the Northern Quarter - it looks like independent businesses as well as flash stores will have borne the brunt of the carnage. London braced itself for more violence with a show of police strength, but the meme had moved, to Salford, Manchester and the West Midlands. I feel that the riots are following me around, hitting every place I've ever lived (Croydon was last night's shocker), though I trust the well-behaved youths of York will spare me another night of personal sadness.

I've spent the last decade wanting to make things better within the limits of what the public sector can do, decrying the materialism and consumerism of our culture - but they're one and the same thing aren't they? Young people want "something to do" up to a certain point of self-gratification; hanging with their friends, messaging each other; getting the latest trainers or mobile phone, whatever the cost; and...finally, today, arranging a riot with a sense of Machiavellian planning that puts most Flash Mobs to shame.

Too early to see the damage; too early to see if it will flare up again. In Looters v. Police, the former are winning at the moment. What's at the end of it? An unlucky lottery of court cases? Juvenile detention? We've long admired America; its capitalism, its brands; are we now admiring its broken youth? Its extremes of wealth?

Another day for such thoughts. Bob Dylan once wrote the song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" in which he held off your sympathy, "now is not the time for your tears." I've felt that for a day or two, the awful happenings in London, the tardiness of our political classes, the media circus of 24-hour television. Each fire, I thought, would bring death with it - not just flames. But somehow the city burns, the windows of the supermarkets and the fashion shops crack; and the horror goes on - live entertainment on a warm night for an incomprehensible generation. Now, with Manchester, fair Manchester, vibrant Manchester, the people's Manchester in the path of these misguided lotusts, now, as Dylan sang, now is the time for my tears.

Debates not contributed to

2011-07-27T04:30:00.000-07:00

Forget about roads not travelled, there's an increasing number of debates I've not been contributing to. The travails at the Poetry Society (details are all over the web but here's one of the more reliable summaries) seem sad, because small organisations can have an impact far beyond their size, and good corporate governance is as important here, as it is at News International. The devil makes work for idle boards to do it seems. As neither subscriber to Poetry Review or member of the Poetry Society, its the kind of club that brings out the Groucho in me, but I'd hoped at some point in the future, as a poet at least, to have some nodding acquaintance with either.

As for the Booker longlist, announced yesterday, its the old and the new, as ever, and it increasingly seems the novel's top contest is as open as a Golf major in the post-Tiger Woods days. (Tigers do well in the Booker by the way, so its not a totally spurious analogy!) Great to see small publishers on there, again. I've not read any of the books, so I can't really comment. I have a sneaking suspicion that the "big names" might not make it to the final six, if only because quite a few of the new books seem quite interesting and original in subject matter (if not in style.) A judging panel including the ex-head of MI5 and the writer of "The Woman in Black" is likely to be going for a good story or two, I'd think.

What's clear - or has been for a few years - is that there's no new broom to the Booker, no new generation of writers taking all before them, and proclaiming the irrelevancy of those that have gone before. History features strongly, as ever, the Indian subcontinent seems to have fallen a little out of favour (or maybe it's just this year), and there's a welcome return to the list with Jane Rogers indepedently published pseudo SF novel.

I like the Booker, its quirks, its annoyances, and spits and spats - and also its occasional ability at picking out some of the better books of the year. I've read 7 of the last 9 winners, but only one ("Wolf Hall") genuinely seemed the best of the bunch.

In Residence

2011-07-24T02:10:00.000-07:00

I'm at a "writing residency" today, for 2 and a half hours at least. This is part of a project called The Reading, and takes place in the Untitled Gallery, which is a tiny room underneath the Friends' Meeting House in Manchester. 72 writers are contributing and I'm following on from Kay Boardman, who I don't know, who may well be (one Google search later, so may not be!) an editor of a book on "Popular Victorian Writers".

So, all being well, from 12pm I'll be avoiding the sunshine and the jazz festival and sitting at a screen waiting for inspiration - my words being simultaneously broadcast to the Cornerhouse and other venues about town. Best keep it clean then.

Tweet me at @adrianslatcher if you've any words you'd like me to inculcate into the text and reception willing, I'll see what I can do!

Performing Seals It!

2011-07-17T02:49:00.000-07:00

The Manchester International Festival finishes today, and although its a bit difficult to be objective, given that few people will have been to more than a couple of shows, because of the cost and the variety, it seems to have been another success. There were tickets still on sale as late as yesterday afternoon for the remaining shows - which, though surely not ideal, at least let people make choices after the reviews came in.

I popped into "11 Rooms" at Manchester Art Gallery yesterday - I simply hadn't found time and opportunity before - and the place was packed, and indeed closed its doors early. Performance art, that mainstay of TV comedy skits on art, has clearly come of age. Maybe it was already there... David Blaine in a box, or the hourly stints on the 4th plinth at "One and Other." I don't think I'm being elitist when I felt that I didn't want to be crammed into a small space watching this or that performer. The performers I have seen this last couple of weeks - Rickie Lee Jones, Paul Heaton, Lonelady - have been of the musical variety. In each case, although seeing them live seems a privilege it is the work that got me there. Classic albums from Rickie Lee (she took us through her first two albums in the order they were recorded), familiar songs from Lonelady, a brand new ensemble piece by the Beautiful South frontman.

I could (and perhaps should) have gone to something every day and night this week, but I've had to limit myself. In all of this "performance" you wonder where anyone gets the time to do any work nowadays. Bjork apparently doesn't speak for a day after the performance; yet everyone's been hoping to "star spot" round town, as if seeing someone outside of their show, drinking beer in Albert Square or coffee in the Cornerhouse, is somehow a more authentic experience. After all, its no surprise that you might bump into Damon Albarn out and about, as he's garrisoned in Manchester for a few weeks. The more authentic experience, of course, is the performance; but even more than that - it's the creation of the art, and that, so often happens outside the performance space.

I'm thinking of this because next Sunday I'm going to be in a "performance" space, one of a relay of writers in "residency" for a couple of hours at Untitled Gallery, a subterranean space under the Friends' Meeting House (run by Metallica fans if the typeface is anything to go by!) Jane Chavez-Dawson's "The Reading" is being broadcast onto screens across the city, including the lobby of the Cornerhouse. A full list of writers is here....

This piece appealed to me on a number of levels. Firstly because it is about writers doing what they do, usually in silence and isolation. Secondly because of its democratic nature - which has appealed to a wide range of Manchester's writing community. And thirdly because the chance to sit down and write something in "residency" even for just a couple of hours, feels a real privilege. In other words, it amazes me that any work at all gets done these days, so inculcated are we in the primacy of performance.

As a poet, as a well as a fiction writer, I know how long it can take for a poem to make it from first draft, to being ready for the world, to being published. For our art, I think this has implication, in that its only when a book or record or film is completed that the world sits up and takes notice. Our instantaneous culture is one of over-production, yet for an individual artist or writer this is so difficult. No wonder there's a trend in the art world towards minimalism, it's all people have time for.

Yet if you make art in isolation, it can be hard sometimes to know where it might fit in. There are writers who are fixtures in certain magazines, or who are an obvious fit for this or that project. Yet if you follow your own path - wondering where it might lead - it can sometimes seem out of synchronisation with the times. A disinclination to be a "celebrity" is anathemic to modern culture. Bookselling demands not only your presence, but your performance. In our cultural zoo it is the creatives who are best at being performing seals who often are most successful, at least in the short term. But all this activity is often counterproductive. I've read more about the Poetry Society in the last month than in the previous ten years, and all of it is to do with their administration and nothing to do with poetry (though there are poets involved.)

Anyone who is interested in contemporary art can find themselves invited to previews every week of the year - yet it is the silent contemplation on a wet Wednesday afternoon that offers the real communion with an artist, just like the real communion with a writer is in private, with the work. Anyone who has sat there uncomfortably as a friend asks to read your latest poem knows how irrelevant your presence is to the reading - after all the "presence" is all in the work. All art is performance, but when everything is performance, I fear a little for the art.

Vault by David Rose

2011-07-15T01:28:00.000-07:00

Reading David Rose's debut novel "Vault" I didn't quite know what to expect. After all, Rose has been a writer of unusual, terse short stories for decades, and this - his first longer work - is novella length, and described as an "anti-novel." I shouldn't have worried.

At its heart, "Vault" is a noirish thriller, and Rose provides both the tension and the detail that such a description deserves. It strikes me that if you play with genre fiction of any kind - the war novel, the spy novel - then the best way is to play the genre bits as straight as you can. In the hands of a careful stylist, and Rose is certainly that, details are both spare and appropriate. Our lead character is a cyclist, a World War II sniper, a Cold War accidental spy, and defiantly the "hero" of his own life. McKuen is himself a character in a novel, which dramatises the life of this fascinating maverick, yet in "Vault" the "real" McKuen is also commenting on that life, correcting the errors, puncturing the mythical. What might seem a gimmick is far from one. In fact, the dual perspective provides a powerful way to tell a life from two different perspectives. We are given the action scenes through the novelist - who plays up the heroism, creates an atmosphere, and creates an anti-hero. Then, through the narrator, the myth is punctured, the man seeps through.

If not a unique way of telling a story, "Vault" is cetainly more explicit about its dual narrative. Usually it would be the narrator who inflates his own importance, and up to the reader to do the puncturing. A fictional life told through the key moments seems a rich model - it's not so far from Anthony Burgess's "Earthly Powers" or Jim Crace's "Aracadia" after all - but given the subject matter, I think Rose gives his subject a depth and perspective that a less postmodern treatment would hardly do justice to.

After all, this is, ostensibly, a historical novel. Our main character is a minor player in large events. We get a very personal story. His two main skills, as sniper and cyclist seem wonderfully complementary, and in both the war scenes and the racing scenes we get the sense of a talented loner having to learn how to be part of a team effort for the greater good. That's as far as Rose goes in spelling out any deeper meaning, and the novel is the better for it. I've written before about a certain kind of contemporary "mock noir" which takes the conventions of genre fiction and adapts them to other scenarios, and there is an element of this double-take in "Vault", yet at the same time, Rose stays true to his character's life. There is no retrospective analysis; no attempt to contemporarise the past. I'm no cyclist but the descriptions of racing seem lived, real. Isn't sport so often praised for being a metaphor for war? Here the link is made explicit. The myth busting real McKuen never stops mentioning his busted knee and what it prevents him doing.

There's much pleasure to be had in this short novel, and though its easily read in one sitting it seems more substantial than many longer works. What it takes from the short story is a purity of vision. There are no subplots, no side issues. the dual narratives (with chapters named 1a, 1b etc.) is used for a reason, rather than strictly adhered to. Only when reality and fiction are far apart do we get two different accounts of the same story, elsewhere, Rose uses the method to drive forward the story. I wondered about a few of the details in the war scenes, with references to "no mans land" and "trench warfare" being associated with the First, rather than the Second world war; though I imagine they are accurate enough, they cause a jolt with a reader accustomed to certain conventions, and perhaps should have been removed. Generally the war scenes are very powerful. The sniper is such a tiny cog in the big wheel of battle, that his decisions are both "life and death" and hardly relevant to the bigger picture. Chasing through Europe after the German retreat, he comes across latent horrors, and it brings out his own dark side in a way that the tumult of war doesn't. This haunts him in civilian life, and cycling, one feels, is both escape - and in what it takes out of the competitive rider - penance.

There's something of Calvino's appropriation of genre writing in "Vault", and inevitable echoes of Graham Greene; whilst the bleak south east of post-war Britain reminds me of the same landscape in McEwan's noir novel "The Innocent", yet these are echoes rather than signature themes. McKuen listens to Mahler, and there is something musical about this book. The clank of the bike chain, the silence after a sniper's kill; Rose seems acutely aware of the auditory possibilities of the worlds he is documenting. It's a wonderful little book, that is a pleasure to read.

The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin

2011-07-14T04:35:00.000-07:00

Colm Toibin's acclaimed late 90s novel "The Blackwater Lightship" is a story about three generations of an estranged Irish family brought back together by the news that Declan, brother to Helen, is dying. In an arresting opening scene, Helen is acting as a party host for her husband, whilst preparing for him to take their two sons away for a week. As soon as she has seen them off, she has a visitor. Her brother Declan has asked for her to go and see him in the hospital. Declan has AIDS. This elegant opening is used by Toibin to set up a contrived setting, where Declan is taken to his grandmother's where 3 generations of the women in his family are brought under the same roof, alongside 2 of his friends. We discover that Helen doesn't speak to her mother, and that her mother and grandmother also don't get on. The silences of broken families are filled in by them all being brought under one roof for the first time. Of Declan we learn little, other than what he was like as a child, he is defined almost entirely by his illness - the friends who have tended to him, and now, reluctantly, at his request have let his family back into his life. We find out more about their lives than Declans. Toibin's adept at describing the replacement family a gay man builds around him when his real family exclude, or are excluded.

The setting, on a crumbling coastline, where the Blackwater Lightship is a metaphor for what has been lost (there were once two lighthouses, looking at each other, like lovers across a room). Over the course of the novel, which follows the trajectory of Declan's illness, the three women are asked to confront their hostilities to each other. Whether or not you are taken by this novel depends, I think, on how easy you are with Toibin's manipulations. The only straight men in the novel are dead (Helen's father) or absent (her husband), and the story - an unwrapping of past hurt, missed opportunities - is played out through the women in the family, with their shared love for Declan, being the glue that starts to bring them together again. Helen is a successful head teacher, her mother is a thriving business woman, yet they cannot see their similarities. Rural Ireland is played out as a place that has to be got away from, else it will draw you in and strangle you - yet there are no great events in this family's life, the betrayals are unspoken, perceived. Helen's husband tiptoes around her past, and decides not to delve too deeply when she doesn't invite her family to her wedding. Yet, Helen has estranged Declan as well. Here is hurt left to grow over the years.

The other Toibin I've read, "Brooklyn", takes a similar theme, but the millieu is different, an oppressive Ireland of the 1950s dominated by poverty and priests, with power maintained through silence. In 1990s Ireland, Toibin seems to be saying that the silence is what remains.

It's undoubtedly an elegant novel, and Toibin's prose is much praised, yet he writes in a transatlantic style that though it travels easily (to Booker shortlists and to American universities) isn't really strong enough to carry what is, in many ways, a long short story. If the Jamesian languidness of "Brooklyn" (and presumably "The Master") aren't quite formed in his prose at this point, there's still a pointing towards it. Like Ishiguro you feel that there has been a deliberate excising of a more emotional style. Yet, transatlantic as it might be, its also a very middle-class novel. These characters would easily fit into the mainstream of British literary fiction. Like in Mike Leigh's film "Secrets and Lies" you only really feel they exist within the parameters in which we see them. The backstory is just that, in the background, to illuminate points of difference between the claustrophobic cast of characters.

Family and death - perhaps "The Dead" retains a hold over Irish fiction even now - yet this novel seems almost pathological in its self-imposed misery. Unlike Anne Enright's similarly themed (but differently structured) "The Gathering", there is not much fun to be had. I can't remember another novel that so dwells on the illness of one of its characters, another pathology - perhaps the end of the 20th century allowed the "taboo" to be not just lifted but explored? There is resolution of a sort, after all there has to be, given the novelist's contrivance, though its of a tentative sort. Helen's mother would very much like to come and see her and her children, but she promises not to stay "overnight." Certain proprietaries are necessary it seems, not to mend the past, but to retain the truce. Toibin seems to be saying that in a very modern Ireland, nothing much has really changed, underneath it all - but perhaps the reader, or at least this reader, requires a bit more convincing. "Get over yourself" you feel like saying, but in this novel, nobody would have the language for it; and, unusually for an Irish writer, neither does the novelist.

Business as Usual

2011-07-14T02:19:00.000-07:00

Dragging myself away from the News International scandals (and trying to wonder why since everyone I know has been suspicious of the "Digger" and his nasty little newspapers for as long as I remember, the political class are only just realising it. Reminds me (as many things do) of the tale of the frog and the scorpion).... as I say, dragging myself away.

In Birmingham on Monday I had a long-overdue visit to the magnificent city Art Gallery. As well as sitting there enthralled by Epstein's "Lucifer" I spent some time with their pre-raphaelites, read about the progress of the Staffordshire hoard (which was dug up a couple of miles from where I grew up), and had lunch in the wonderful Edwardian Tea Rooms. The real reason for going was to see the "Home of Metal" exhibition in the basement. Something strange hearing Black Sabbath, Diamond Head and Napalm Death in an art gallery. Birmingham's attitude to culture always seems a little ambiguous. I looked in vain in Waterstones for any Roy Fisher. Still writing at 80, he seems a nearly invisible figure, even in the city where he came from.

I'm writing about the West Midlands - partly about my own past, but partly the landscape, partly trying to uncover the somewhat hidden literature of the city - and it strikes me that there remains a literary hole of sorts, despite the usual preponderance of literary festivals etc. The Lichfield festival this week has brought in Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke as the main poetry event. The recovery of the Staffordshire Hoard reminds us that Mercia was once a powerful kingdom. I wonder what its "national" literature would look like?

There's a sense of overstimulation elsewhere as the Manchester Festival continues in the city. I've hardly had a chance to see the main events, never mind the fringe, though was so glad I went to see one of my musical heroines, Rickie Lee Jones, on Sunday night.

There's quite a lot of static on the poetry airwaves at the moment. Like buzzing fly at the window I can't quite ignore the furore over the Poetry Society/Poetry Review whilst realising that it has little relevance/resonance for me, either as a poetry reader or writer. Poets, despite the popular perception, do seem to like a scrap - a shame that this one appears to be about the administration rather than the art. The Forward Prize shortlist is the usual mix of the well-known and the new, and you get the sense that "prizes" are now the poetry equivalent of patronage, great if you get them, furiously derided if you don't.

Little pleasures continue: there's an Oxfam "book jam" on Sunday night in the Northern Quarter at Apotheca ; there's a competition to write "quickies" (adult flash fiction - that's what happens when you let the Chorltonites into the Didsbury festival!); the Other Room returns with its packed summer programme, next Wednesday; and Kate Feld is running a workshop on creative non-fiction leading to a competition for this year's literature festival.

The Cult of Beauty

2011-07-07T00:44:00.000-07:00

Our relationship to the Victorians is always an intricate one. We still live in and love many of their houses; we are sniffy about "Victorian values"; we have a Commonwealth when once we had an Empire. Victoria was on the throne for so long, however, that it is the later part of her reign that we are seeing in our minds-eye when something is described as "Victorian." Yet Albert died in 1861, and the museum that bears her and his name, the Victoria and Albert (or "V&A") only took that name at the end of the 19th century.

It's an appropriate place for an exhibition on late Victorian art and design. "The Cult of Beauty" is billed as the first comprehensive exhibition of "the aesthetic movement 1860-1900." The V&A may well be my favourite British exhibition space, and as ever with their major shows its a curatorial triumph. At its best, the V&A augments its remarkable exhibits with a vast sweep of historiogaphy, and the Cult of Beauty is no exception. From paintings, to artefacts, to a whole range of late Victorian social and cultural histories, the show is in some ways breathtaking.

What was the "aesthetic movement" then? This is an exhibition that takes in the Pre Raphaelites, Whistler, Leighton and other late Victorian painters; finds room for designers such as Morris and Liberty (whose shop still exists in Central London), and still find time for the fin de seicle decadence of Wilde and Beardsley.

If "The Cult of Beauty" has an agenda it is to revitalise our interest in this familiar, yet increasingly distant time. In parts it succeeds. Our 20th century middle classes are stubbornly enamoured of the late Victorian aesthetic, whether its willow pattern China, or Morris's wallpaper. The examples given throughout the show are luscious, pristine, but at the same time trite. This "aesthetic" was one of a very particular, and peculiar design. New materials and techniques provided artists with the means to produce things of beauty, to their own design; yet this was also a precursor for the "mass produced". The arts and craft movement, as idealised in William Morris's utopia "News from Nowhere", would end up influencing the mass-produced.

The four spaces given over to the exhibition take a chronological and thematic approach. The Pre-Raphaelites, though towering over the exhibition in terms of their influence and quality, are seen in the context of their times, their influence extending beyond their own work. But though the exhibition shows their influence, it is not theirs alone. The vivid colours and even more vivid life that we saw in the recent "Desperate Romantics" TV show comes to mind; the set designers of that show had clearly done their homework. I loved Millais's "Esther", where General Gordon's coat was turned inside out producing the vivid patterns you see in the Biblical character's beautiful gown, and the red-haired heroines of PRB legend return again and again in the art that follows. I was fascinated as well by the story of the Grosvenor Gallery, which was opened as a rival to the Royal Academy and became something of a home from home for the Aesthetic movement. It was here that Ruskin famously slammed Whistler's painting for "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."

This exhibition was full of such historical gems as this - and you realise how febrile the capital's artistic scene must have been during the late Victorian period, even as Victoria herself stayed in secluded mourning following Albert's death. The riches of the Empire were finding their way directly into the homes and tastes of London's middle classes. Whereas the Pre-Raphaelites had worked with carpenters to design furniture to their taste, or had scoured London for 17th century eastern pottery, by the 1880s and 1890s, the wealthy middle classes were keen on showing their own ostentation. Pottery from Stoke-on-Trent emulated Chinese willow patterns; whilst furniture makers and metal workers created elegantly designs. The exhibition even imports a pair of iron gates, which were built to show off the skills of the craftsmen who made them.

A reader of Quiller-Couch's first edition of the "Oxford Book of English Poetry" (1900) is struck by how well-formed is the English canon, up to the age which has just finished. Yet the last 50 or so pages of the book are full of tedious versifiers, reminiscent of Tennyson, but without the great man's brilliance. Few survive in our memory. Modernism was not just the period that followed, but a necessary reformation, and the same is true elsewhere in the arts.

The British painters that came after the PRB seem minor. After all, in Europe a revolution in painting was being undertaken. Whistler seems a bridging figure, both between old world and new, but also between the tastes of late Victorian England and the revolutions on the continent. Other painters we look at now for their decorative powers. Leighton's Flaming June for instance (not featured in the exhibition - but there are other examples of his work), or Albert Moore's luminous "Azaleas." (My favourite painting in the show.)

The natural world is popular with the Aesthetic Movement, but its the peacock that dominates, the exotic beauty of its feathers, becoming a leitmotif, particularly in Whistler's the Peacock Room, which is recreated via audio visual display. One can only admire such attempts at bringing art to the centre of life, but we also see how increasingly these attempts are part of "fashionable society" rather than an art for all. Art for Arts Sake, as Whistler's regular pamphlets would have it, becomes a stick which Punch cartoonists can beat the asethetic movement. In Oscar Wilde, we have both an exemplar of the aesthete and the period's most lasting criticism. Few dramatists are revived as frequently. If Wilde was very aware of the absurdities of the movement, as is clear from "The Importance of Being Earnest", he was mocking his own friends and circle, for the benefit of a wider, more conservative audience. Today, we share the laughter, mocking the pretension, whilst still admiring the decoration. It is the pre-Victorian imagination - the romantic poets, J.M.W. Turner - that still dominates British aesthetics, yet Victorian kitsch casts a long shadow.

The "decadent" 1890s end the show. We see revolutions in book design, exemplified by the Beardsley illustrated "The Yellow Book." Here we have a vibrant literary journal, and an enthusiastic educated audience for its writers and illustrators. Yet if, from the distance of a century or more, we are looking for "decadence", its not in the "shocking" illustrations of Beardsley, or stories of the trial of Oscar Wilde, but in the bourgeois sensibility of the times. Wonderful as this show is, I think it falls short of rehabiliting its art. There is something a little too mesmerising about this "cult of beauty", that seems to reflect the technological advances and great wealth of the late Victorian British Empire. You will look long and hard for the real Victorian England, particularly the non-Metropolitan world. Aestheticism brought a certain European sophistication to the galleries and drawing rooms of London, but quickly became commoditised by the class who embraced it - who, in turn, felt morally outraged by the artists (such as Wilde) who had provided their guilty pleasures. For all that Rosetti, Millais, Morris and others were dedicated to illustrating truth through beauty, at some point their innovations became little more than bourgeois fashion. In the end, it is in the history of design and home furnishings that the Aesthetic movememt influenced, rather than the history of art. At its best, the paintings of Hunt and Millais, "Goblin Market", or "The Portrait of Dorian Gray", late Victorian art and literature has a fragile magic to it. It is no surprise that we still admire their buildings, and their interiors. In this exemplary show at the V&A, we see an earlier age of commerce than our own, and the echoes are very clear. Yet we have forsaken beauty for expediency, satire for prurience, Whistler for Emin. The exhibition's title is a clever one for a "cult" can mean two things; an obsessiveness about something which others don't share, and something that appeals to a small group of people. In calling the aesthetic movement "the cult of beauty" the curators of this show are noting only how strange we would now think it to want to design our lives along aesthetic purposes. Modernism, a far more European movement, never really took hold in Britain, as a previous show at the V&A amply demonstrated; and the strong hold that the aesthetic movement still has on our visual imagination is perhaps one part of the reason why.

American Account

2011-07-04T16:07:00.000-07:00

The last of Martin Amis's Public Lectures tonight at the Martin Harris Centre at the University of Manchester was an independence day special, with him being joined by Erica Wagner and Will Self to talk about America. As Ian Mcguire, from the Centre for New Writing, made clear in the introduction, its a big subject. Too big in the end.

All three speakers were a little bit American. I didn't know that Self had an American mother (but British passport, which delayed him somewhat in one post-9/11 visit, "Are you an apple or a pear?" the customs guy asked him, repeatedly.) Wagner, an American by upbringing and accent has lived here since her late teens. Amis, of course, writes American, however English he speaks, specifically in the accented "Night Train", but also in his attempts to bring the full American hubbub of U.S. prose to his British writing. (He also emigrates on Wednesday, with his American wife and American children, becoming a - very - Englishman in New York.)

The big subject was a problem. Amis talked of the discovery of America across the frozen Baring Straits; Self, accidentally given the anti-American role (not really necessary, I thought), preferred personal anecdote to historical relativism, though smirking at the space mission naming of its Atlantis after a mythical, sunken continent, whilst Wagner seemed almost apologetic of her accent; whilst conceding that being an American in England had given her immediate authority on its literature, even if she didn't quite know it. One of her first book reviews was of a Western... so, hell, she'd better know a bit more about Westerns.

It seemed a given that we should talk about America in the context of anti-Americanism, the post-9/11 dislike and misadventures across the world. I'd have preferred a debating point on "why America matters" rather than another going over the decline of Empire. Certainly, on July 4th, it was interesting to hear an overview of America that crossed time and nation. There were some interesting points. "America is a world", said Amis, "India is a world, Brazil is a world," disagreed Self, "not America." It could have made an interesting debate in itself, but wasn't followed through. It was, Wagner, I think , who talked about American literature being better for embracing a multiculturalism it had found in British literature. I'd have liked more on that. Is it true that the British + authors like Rushdie and Ondaatje have made America think more about cosmopolitanism? I'd dispute that, but I think she was hitting at a larger truth, that in a globalised market place, authors are now hybrids. Books like "The Kite Runner" or authors like Junot Diaz are American +. But as Amis pointed out, Bellow (as a Jew) and others were always American + anyway.

The beauty of tonight's talk, looking back on it, was that there was a certain joie de vivre about it, despite the concentration on America's myopic world view. There were a few open goals missed, I felt. That there's been a Reagan statue unveiled in London today, for instance. The post-Iraq, post-Blair worldview seemed a little too easy. Everyone's a little disappointed in Obama it seems; but Britain, and its own neo-con coalition was not mentioned. Talking about Blair seems easier somehow. Misadventures abroad have longer consequence.

Yet, when we did touch on novel writing, the three speakers were mostly acute. The instance response to 9/11 of writers hasn't been that great. As Amis said, DeLillo got terrorism much better in "Mao II" and "White Noise" than "Falling Man." Self's dismissal of Jay Mcinerney's "The Good Life" (though he didn't mention it by name) seemed the wrong choice. Mcinerney tries to incorporate 9/11 into the early 21st century contemporary sequel to "Brightness Falls" and though it does feel contrived in parts, I actually think he is doing the very difficult task of being too contemporary, which meant that 9/11 had to be incorporated. The incorporation seems trite, but I don't think he ever exploits the subject.

But that conversation, like a lot tonight, didn't go much further. After all, Amis is one of those who has written extensively post-9/11, and readers of "The Second Plane" are quite rare. The audience questions were, in that uniquely Manchester way, as random as you might expect. I've often felt a "Question Time" format with submission before the event might work well at this kind of event, but, for these public lectures the University of Manchester have stuck with a slightly dull format that could probably benefit, as gracious as Mcguire was, from a more pro-active chair, or a more mediated public response.

As ever it was good to pull out the best thoughts from our esteemed speakers. I'd have liked to hear more from Wagner on literature, as I've always been impressed by her editing of the Times book section, but she was relatively quiet on the subject. It was Amis who mentioned most books by name. Self was funny, particularly when asked to respond to the maddest of the audience's questions (something about drugs and religion that none of us really understood), and made a good case for reading Kafka's "America" if you really want to understand the country. Amis got his best response when he quoted Larkin; Manchester audiences always enjoying the erudition (I think it was Milton last time I saw him here.)

If tonight felt a bit like a missed opportunity, I don't think the audience were too minded. I didn't recognise a single person from the Manchester literary scene, yet the Martin Harris centre was virtually full. Here, it seems, is a very different audience than you see elsewhere at literary events in the city. The slightly null feeling I had at the end of the evening probably came from this juxtaposition. Finishing his four years in Manchester, Amis has proven there is an audience for this kind of event, and it will be interesting if he's left some kind of legacy on the city, with the students he's taught, the conversations he's had. Perhaps even in what he writes next.

With Colm Toibin replacing him in the Autumn there's clearly more than a change of "manager", like when Derby County replaced Brian Clough with Dave Mackay: the styles were very different, but they got a similar result.

Festival Season

2011-07-04T01:13:00.000-07:00

Manchester International Festival began on Thursday. Counterintuitively I went down to London Friday, as I'd long planned to, to see "The Cult of Beauty" at the V&A (more of which later.) MIF (or #MIF11 on Twitter) isn't a festival that you can take the full two weeks off for, as it would probably bankrupt you. Most people I know have booked for one or two events and will see what else they might catch. Yet there's also a festival pavilion in Albert Square, many of which events are free. So, over the next week or two I'll be catching a few things I'm sure. Its also spurred its own fringe, this time with quite a large, coherent programme. The "Not Part of" festival takes its name from the somewhat dismal community offerings of the first MIF, but has thankfully grown into a welcomed little brother of the main festival. As ever in Manchester, the city is a diverse beast, and events not associated with either festival of fringe are going on at just the same time. So tonight I'll be going to the last of Martin Amis's public lectures as Professor of Creative Writing at University of Manchester.

The Administration of Poetry

2011-06-27T07:16:00.000-07:00

The worst thing about my job is the endless administration and bureaucracy it entails. You come to learn that it will never all be done, that all bureaucratic systems have their own inbuilt tendency to multiply. All you can ever do is mitigate it, say enough is enough.

Having a day off after an overload of necessary administration over the last two weeks, I feel I've earned a bit of time to get back to being creative. So, here I am, looking through the fifty or so poems I've written in the last year and a half, wondering which work, which don't, which need more work, which don't. And you know what? I've spent several hours this morning on the administration of poetry. I've been a bit slack on some things recently, but have mostly typed up my handwritten poems as I've gone along; thank God for that. But you can't revise poetry on the screen, so my printer's been spewing out pages for most of the morning, and then I had a pleasant hour, reading through, and putting them into 3 piles: almost there; those worth returning to; and those probably not. Its the first time I've done this ordering since last year putting "Playing Solitaire for Money" together, and the experience of doing that has helped here. Poems need to find friends, rather than stand alone - whether that's form or subject.

Then, what am I going to do with these poems? I kind of stopped sending out randomly to magazines quite a while ago; though there are certain magazines I'd love to get published in. So, I've done what Kirsty Maccoll apperently did in choosing the tracklisting for "The Joshua Tree", put them in order of my favourites. I needed a dozen or so - there's a couple of poetry competitions with deadlines next week (Bridport Prize and Lightship poetry competition) and though I've never even got shortlisted for a poetry competition I thought it worth choosing a poem for each - then there's two of my favourite magazines, one online, one offline, and I've sent a batch to each of those.

It's not that the other poems in the pile aren't worth sending off, but they're perhaps requiring a bit more TLC. Noticeably, a lot of the poems I've been happiest with are 2010's batch, rather than 2011's. Takes a while you see. So, it's mid-afternoon and apart from a brief coffee with an old colleague in Didsbury's ever pleasant Art of Tea, and a brief scavenge through the charity shops, all I've done today is the Administration of Poetry. Stamps. SAEs. Online payment systems. Hole punching. Printing. Ring binding. A satisfying day off, but in some ways, something of a Busman's holiday.

U2: They May be Wankers, but they're OUR Wankers

2011-06-25T05:18:00.000-07:00

U2 played Glastonbury last night, to two different controversies. The first being that because U2's tax affairs are now in the Netherlands, Bono is a "debt denier", not paying his fair whack. Given that he's not a British citizen, I'm not sure that its any of our business anyway (Irish Uncut rather than UK Uncut, if such a thing exists might have a view.) Bono, who lectures the world on debt, is being lectured himself. Fair enough. The second controversy is that they shouldn't be at Glastonbury - that they are an out-of-date rock behemoth.

Its mostly the second of these that has me writing a blog post. Its always seemed to be musically the most conservative of festivals (the main reason that I've only been the once.) The "ironic" Sunday night act (Tom Jones when I went in the mid-90s), a selection of big name headliners, hip indie bands relegated to 2nd, 3rd or 4th stage; and black music almost invisible (except when they make a big fuss that isn't - i.e. Jay Z), its amazing it still has any reputation for music at all. That is has, is because of that collective experience of 50,000 people in a field celebrated in Pulp's "Sorted for E's and Whizz", and, nowadays, supplemented by a healthy BBC audience. Glastonbury's headliners are big news. Yet whereas Coldplay, Radiohead and Primal Scream appear to be Glastonbury regulars, U2, like the Cure, (and Morrissey, who also appeared last night) come from an earlier era. The Glastonbury of the 80s was still a hippy leftover as much as a cultural icon. U2 are, as well, the "biggest rock band in the world" TM. The one thing that Glastonbury has never really done much of is basic, all out rock music. I'm wondering whether, in a world where the rock band has become an actual rather than metaphorical dinosaur, it was this as much as anything that caused my twitter stream to be full of anti-U2 ranting last night (even as they kept watching!)

I don't mind that at all, but culturally its fascinating. The anodyne reformed boyband Take That can wow millions with a spectacular show, below average songs, and an enormous sense of good will, despite never having, as far as I can recall, ever expressing an opinion about anything other than partying, having a good time and er... making shed loads of money, whilst U2 get pilloried. Somehow we still care about U2, and when we see and hear the unrepentant Bono in trademark shades and World of Leather 2-piece, his still taut band hanging behind him looking more like his roadies than his bandmates, we're angry about something inarticulate about ourselves. For if U2 are wankers, they are most definitely OUR wankers; that's those of us in our forties and early fifties.

I first heard U2 in the 5th year at school. I knew the name and had heard "I will follow" (that soulful/soulless early single) on Peel, whilst preferring the more adventurous music of the Cure, Teardrop Explodes, Echo and the Bunnymen and New Order. I don't think anyone had these overly serious, tune-light young men from Dublin as inheritors of the term "biggest band in the world." So whereas better frontmen died (Ian Curtis) or lost it (Ian McCullough) and better bands split (The Smiths, Bauhaus) or became irrelevant (The Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs). U2, in 1983, were about to raise the bar. Their third album "War" impressed the knuckleheaded at my school. Anthems were probably going to go down well with a generation heading for the dole or the infantry (as happened in my school.) Amongst these guys, (and it was always guys at that point) U2 were second only to the mighty Alarm... "New Years Day" and "Sunday, Bloody, Sunday" though songs that I was tired of from the very first time I heard them, I now listen to with a certain wry nostalgia. "How long will we sing this song?" they asked rhetorically, perhaps knowing the answer was going to be "for a very long time." And, in the dire years of sixth form discos, towny nightclubs and even ironic student nights that followed over the next 3-4 years, the only rock records you'd often hear in the "student" section of a club night were "Pride (in the name of love)" and Simple Minds' "Don't you forget about me."

U2 spent a lot of time in the US, and the "Under a Bloody Sky" mini-album was a gateway drug to the band. I've never seen them, partly because they've always been massive. If The Smiths can rightly be called "our Beatles" then U2 are surely "our Rolling Stones". Yet if they never had that band's late 60s originality, and were always more in the pay of Christ than the Devil, they have tried to remain relevant in a way that Jagger and co. long gave up on. "The Joshua Tree", their 5th album, catapulted them to true greatness and it still seems a remarkable record, channelling their love of America and creating not just a spiritual record, but an enormous bestseller. It was the first album where U2 actually wrote songs, rather than sang statements. There are few covers of U2 songs from their previous 4 albums, their are endless versions of the songs like "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking for" and "One" that followed.

U2, never my favourite band at school, were never my favourite band at college, and I only even heard "The Joshua Tree" because Richard from the hockey club used to play it incessantly. Over the long summer, I realised I was missing it, and bought the CD. And its been like that ever since, I'm an accidental U2 fan. Hearing a great track out of context ("Even Better than the Real Thing", "One", "The Fly", "Vertigo") and finding myself with another of their CDs, or, more recently picking up "The Unforgettable Fire" cheaply and wondering why I never bought it at the time? U2 are the rock band for people who don't much like rock bands. They've occasionally tried to be cerebral - the brilliant Eno/Berlin-inspired triple of "Achtung Baby", "Zooropa" and "Passengers: Original Soundtracks" - in a way that clearly inspired both Radiohead (in their leap sideways from "Ok Computer" to "Kid A") and Coldplay (in hiring Eno to revamp a tired brand after "X & Y") and even Oasis (the next rock band to make it big with non-rock fans, though only in Europe.)

I'm not sure that even rabid U2 fans (and I've never actually met one, though they probably exist)are full of joy at the news of a new album coming out; though there's always a track or two worth saving. When U2 are good, they are often very good. There's hardly a modern rock track this century as potent as "Vertigo" or a modern ballad as genuinely poignant as Bono's song to his dying father, "Sometimes You Can't Make it on Your Own." The heart-on-sleeve passion that can seem embarassing occasionally gets smiled on by the rock and roll Gods.

In an age of spectacle performances - whether the bloated and tune-free Muse, the empty Lady Gaga, or the all-inclusive Take That - U2 have remained the spectacle-band to see, with their endless touring being frequently seen as the biggest, and biggest grossing tour on the planet. Yet, at Glastonbury last night, despite a phone call in to the International Space Station, the set was pared down. At the heart of it was a pretty simplistic rock and roll band. They were never the best, the most sophisticated, or the most original, but they often had the best songs, they've stayed together - the four of them - in a way that we'd all wished the Smiths or the Roses had done, and at the heart of it is the visceral simplicity that makes the best rock and roll the soundtrack to our lives. All those people watching on TV last night, and slagging off Bono and the band on Twitter, are actually doing so because U2 have always been there for us - a somewhat awkward soundtrack to our lives; coming to the fore in drunken dancefloor moments ("New Years Day") or at times of emotion in our life ("One"). I tend to play them at Christmas, something about their mix of melancholy and spirituality, or the snow in their videos.

When you have the mediocre sound du jour of Mumford and Sons (aka Brian and Micheal) "triumphing" earlier in the evening, Bono and band have something of the uncle at a wedding about them. Neither Lauren Laverne or Zane Lowe, usually so full of froth, knew what to say, this wasn't Tinchy Stryder after all. The Edge still plays guitar like he's just learnt his first riff, and thinks "this will do"; Bono still hasn't learnt to laugh at himself - at least not on stage - in the way that Morrissey, on earlier in the evening has done, but in 1985 Morrissey had a much better band - the last dozen years he's put up with a group of pub musicians. I found myself watching, but mostly listening last night. And lapping up the U2ness of it all, from the leather trousers, to the snippets of "Yellow" (surely U2 have never wrote a song as bad as that?) and "Jerusalem", to the phonecall (stolen from the band's iconic Zoo TV tours of the late 80s) to an astronaut on the International Space Station. There were plenty of things for non-U2 fans to turn over for, but the "oh my God" nature of the tweets increased as time went on. They've always been there in our lives, and they've never been hip, never been a cult band. They are U2. And so are we. They may be wankers, but they're OUR wankers.

Manchester Book Market

2011-06-17T15:34:00.000-07:00

FRI 17 & SAT 18 JUNE
Literature Northwest: THE MANCHESTER BOOK MARKET
St Ann's Square. 10am-5.30pm. Both Days.

The popular Manchester Independent Book Market returns to St Ann’s Square for its fourth outing, offering book lovers the chance to sample new titles by the UK’s most exciting independent presses.
In a climate where major corporate publishing is becoming all the more conservative – banking on celebrity memoirs and novelty titles - the UK's independent publishing sector is leading the way in producing intelligent, original and challenging books and magazines.
The North of England in particular boasts some of the UK’s most innovative publishers of novels, poetry, short stories, and non-fiction, and the Manchester Independent Book Market brings them all to your doorstep. This year's market will feature over 30 publishers including Peepal Tree, Route, Comma, Crocus/Commonword, Dreamcatcher, Flapjack, Nightjar, Satchel/Suitcase, Thanatos Books, Hidden Gem, and many others.
Situated in the bustling St Ann’s Square, just off Deansgate, the market’s a great place to browse, grab a coffee, listen to live readings from a selection of talented performance poets and authors, and find the perfect gift for the book lover in your life.
It’s also a great opportunity for aspiring writers to network, and make face-to-face contact with representatives from the North’s independent publishers.
There’ll be live readings on Friday 17th and Saturday 18th June, from 12pm-5pm.
More information to follow.

FRIDAY READINGS

12-1.30pm
Dominic Berry
Steven Garside
Tony Walsh aka Longfella
Gordon Zola
Mike Duff
Copland Smith
John Darwin
Maria Roberts
Peter Wild
Eleanor Rees

2 - 3.30pm
Peepal Tree showcase compere by Adam Lowe
Seni Seneviratne
Nii Parkes
Desiree Reynolds
Simon Murray
Angela Barry
Sabeen Hussein
Baba Israel
Tim Lees
Conor Alwood
John McAuliffe

4 - 5pm
Marvin Cheeseman
Max Seymour
Claire Massey
Zahid Hussain
Alison Littlewood
Bill Rogers
Steph Pike
Ade Jackson

SATURDAY READINGS

12 - 1.30pm
Penultimate feat. Martin Stannage, Ben Mellor, Ali Gadima and others
Anna Tuck
Mark Mace Smith
Anna Percy
Chris Jam
Helen Clare
Conrad Williams
Chris Woods
Adrian Slatcher

2 - 3.30pm Flap Jack showcase
Jackie Hagan
Dave Viney
Tony Curry
Fergus Evans
Dermot Glennon
Gerry Potter
Annie Clarkson
Rod Tame
Rosie Lugosi

4 - 5pm
Michelle Green
Anne Caldwell
Emma Jane Unsworth
Nabila Jameel
Zoe Lambert
Amanda Milligan

Lets Not Talk About Sex

2011-06-11T02:06:00.000-07:00

Something's been niggling me over the last couple of weeks regarding "gender and writing." Firstly, why am I even interested in this "old chestnut" again? It's come around again, though. Silly old Naipaul thinks no women are worth reading, easily offended Bidisha gets her calculator out and adds up the X and Y chromosomes of recent literary prizes; the Guardian runs a "guess which gender" game and in the midst of it all, there's another Orange Prize winner.

Nothing sees opinions solidify so quickly into camps as this one, it seems. It was the same a few weeks ago when Philip Roth won the "international" Booker to much chagrin from Virago founder Carmen Callil. Yet, what have we learnt over the last week or so? That we only discuss the issue when the Orange Prize is on the horizon? That Bidisha's got a point (as always) but its so predictable as to be ignorable? That V.S. Naipaul hates everything?

The original Orange came about for a very valid reason; the all-male shortlist for the 1991 Booker list. Its notable that Bidisha no longer includes the Booker in her list of Prizes that doesn't recognise women, after all 3 of the last 5 winners were female, even if only one of those years had a majority of women on the shortlist. I'm not sure what one can say about prizes - other than that the "Orange" is a good thing. Its not as if it takes all the air out of the literary system, allowing no men a look in. It seems to me that the Orange, by virtue of its internationalism (it admits American women, which Booker doesn't), has done a good job. Its the only British prize that a writer of Barbara Kingsolver's calibre, for instance, will be mentioned in - surely a service to the British reading public?

What has concerned me about these various discussions of women writers, male winners, is that the arguments seem to no longer hold water. I haven't the stats to hand, but aren't more books bought by women? Aren't more novels now published by women writers? Weren't there more women than male poets in "Identity Parade?" Don't girls do better at school? To criticise Roth or Heaney or even, god forbid, Naipaul for being male seems to be attacking the wrong targets. None of those formidable figures have slipped from their perch yet; but though I only like the first of these, its their writing not their gender that has kept them there. Are there are any female poets of Heaney's generation that we equally revere? Perhaps not, but then he was always the "famous" one; but go on a generation - we have a very popular poet laureate, who probably sells more tickets to more readings than any of her male peers. We have a female editor at Poetry Review. And, if we are looking for a list of British contemporary writers who might appear to have staying power, its surely as likely to include Nicola Barker, A.L. Kennedy, Ali Smith and Sarah Waters as David Mitchell, Tom McCarthy and Hani Kunzru.

In other words, are we choosing our arguments selectively? I certainly don't envisage - or want - an "all male" prize to rival the Booker, but if a random male finds himself at a random railway station looking for a book, he may look in vain, unless he's got a particularly liking for Wilbur Smith or Chris Ryan. The rest of the book jackets are aimed at the female traveller, even if the books themselves aren't. For a variety of reasons, the book trade has increased, rather than decreased, the likelihood that a man will only read male authors. Us literary types, particularly those of us brought up in the egalitarian 80s, are as likely to be picking up the new Atwood as the new Amis. A "good male read" award might be a better idea - but if it does, then like a Labour party safe seat, a female quota might be advisable.

Is it true that women writers only write about certain "female" subjects? There's a bias, certainly, towards inward narratives and domestic dramas, but then again there isn't - depends where you look. I think its just that men rarely write about these things; or if they do, its freighted with intellectual concerns or billed as a Bildungsroman, or, as in the hospital scenes in McEwan's "Atonement", as much concerned with the mechanical as the human. And women also write about conflict and wars, whether its the Congo in Kingsolver's "The Poisonwood Bible" or Leningrad in Helen Dunmore's "The Seige."

The book - whether novel or poetry - is always in "crisis", but there plenty of new writers. Last night I went to a talk by the American artist Judy Chicago, who has just written a book about Frida Kahlo, entitled "Face to Face", where she looks at the whole of Kahlo's life and work, but with the emphasis on the latter. It was a fascinating talk, and the book is lavish. Despite only having an oeuvre of around 140 paintings, many of the ones shown were new to the audience. For Chicago, this unwillingness to look at the "whole work" of a female artist is detrimental. She herself suffers from having one work, "The Dinner Party", revered above all others. An interesting problem for any artist; but she makes the point that with artists from the past, if we know so little of their work, then chances are that little of the work will have been preserved, or collected. Many of the pieces that were exhibited in Manchester Art Gallery's "Angels of Anarchy" surrealist women artists, were from private collections. Chicago also pointed out that for women artists to move on, and to not keep repeating the same ideas or images, they need to know the lineage of women artists that may not be part of the canon.

It was this last idea that stuck with me. "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it," we say, knowingly, about politics, but surely it is also true of art? The drug novels of the late 20th century that came in the wake of "Trainspotting" seemed to be unaware of a rich history, and added little to it. (Welsh's book, in contrast, was well aware of a lineage of Scottish writers, using Scottish idiom and dialect.) There's a very real sense, that because the overriding narrative remains patriarchal, that even those "gains" that have been made in entering women writers into the canon may again be lost. We are lucky, in other words, that Lessing and Atwood and Drabble and others are still writing.Chicago's audience was a mix of those who knew her work well, and those who didn't. The audience was, predominantly female; perhaps the audience was predominantly male when Amis was discussing Larkin? The rediscovered women writers of Virago's green-spined list now seem to be in every charity shop. The appetite for those books, those writers, which was clearly there thirty years ago, now seems on the wane. The many women writers who have been published over the last 30 years or more, some, I'm sure, have long gone out of print, or have stopped writing.

The market for novels is increasingly a female market, and its no surprise that writers such as Kate Atkinson or Suzannah Dunn have moved from general fiction to more marketable genres, such as crime or historical novels. Male writers have always done this, even if sometimes under different names. A writer of my age, of either sex, could not, I think, ignore female writing. Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood are more acute influences on me than David Lodge or William Boyd. But I think what Chicago said, and what Bidisha hints at, is that it is not just the gender of our contemporary writers or readers that we need to consider, but the gender-bias of the culture. It was, as I say, impossible to ignore female writing in the 80s, just as it was impossible to ignore gender politics. It formed me, it formed my peers. Whether it had the same trickle down effect on people who had not been to university is harder to say. The majority of the city's women were enjoying the spectacle of the 5-man Take That last night, not a talk by one woman artist about another. The men may well have been at home looking after the children last night, which in itself would be some kind of triumph.

It seems to me that the "dog whistle" gender politics makes headlines but it not helpful. Wise feminists realised that their struggle was part and parcel with the class struggle, whilst more than aware of feminism being an achilles heal for an often male-dominated labour movement. Contemporary thinkers need to be wary of playing to a gender bias which will always find an audience, whilst ignoring the larger power games that are defining our contemporary world.

I write, therefore...

2011-06-04T00:45:00.000-07:00

My friend, the novelist Fiona Campbell, invited me over to Liverpool in the week to speak to the creative writing group she's running. They were half way through a ten week course, and she'd asked me along to talk about getting published, and in particular, how social media can be useful for writers. Its easy to forget that although many writers have taken to the web like a duck to water, its not always an obvious fit. Everyone was on email, but few had read many blogs, or thought about using the many literary resources of the web. Our open system can sometimes still seem like a closed shop.

Its always nice to talk to people who are just starting out on their writing journey, if only because it also brings back echoes of your own experience. But a couple of the questions were particularly acute. "When did you know you were a writer?" asked one, and "how do you keep going, with a day job?" The first question made me stop for a second. "Very early on," I said. I'd always written, but looking back I probably felt I was serious about it whilst I was university. I remember writing a story that I was particular proud of, the subject was serious, and so was the execution, and I liked it enough to painstakingly write out a good copy of it, which I gave a friend to read. It made me think about what "validates" you as a writer. It's not as simple as "I write, therefore I am a writer." There have been several stages of validation. Yes, the first time I had a poem published, yes, when my unpublished novel was shortlisted for the Lichfield Prize, yes, when I got on the MA at Manchester, and yes, when my Salt book came out. But actually, those external validations are far less important than the internal ones.

And this led me on to the second question - keeping going, when I've got a busy day job. For me, its always been the work, and the validation is the validation you get from a piece of work well achieved, or completed. I look back on old work and don't regret that it wasn't better; rather I'm often amazed by the amount of energy that went into it. I might know more about what I'm doing now, and things might seem "easier" in some ways, but in reality, it was always hard, and I was always willing to put the work in to finish the work. The sparseness of my published CV, makes me keener than ever that the work that is published is stuff I'm proud of. And, though keeping going when you have a demanding job is quite hard, I've always worked, I've always written, so it doesn't seem unusual. In the list of enemies of promise, it's not the worst.

***

That demanding job has been driving out everything else this last week, so I only vaguely noticed the furore about V.S. Naipaul's views on women writers. He's the one "great" writer who has always puzzled me. I can hardly remember, and certainly didn't much enjoy, the one book I read by him, "A House for Mr. Biswas", and all I really know about him is his apparently disagreeable personality. Is he really worth the fuss? Saying that Jane Austen has a "sentimental sense of the world" is such a misreading of that arch social satirist that its almost worth a blog post of its own.

***

This week ahead has even more cultural delights: Social Media Cafe Manchester on Tuesday; The Other Room on Wednesday; new artists responding to Anthony Burgess on Thursday; a new exhibition by Hilary Jack, an artist we published in Lamport Court, also on Thursday and a lecture/book reading by Judy Chicago on that brilliant artist Frida Kahlo on Friday.

Self Publishing for the Famous?

2011-05-31T00:40:00.000-07:00

Marillion fans are a unique bunch. The 80s progressive band briefly hit the mainstream with the "Misplaced Childhood" album, but after singer Fish left, so did their presence in the mainstream. Yet, year on year, Marillion continued, with a new singer and - I gather - much less of the progressive stylings. The only people looking forward to a new Marillion album are, I'd guess, other Marillion fans and since 2001 they've been getting pre-orders for their albums in, in order to finance their new records.

It's an old story then - ten years old at least - and online sites such as Kickstarter have acted as similar "angel" sites for new ideas. Whereas in the past you may have gone round your friends to find the money to finance a "start up", in this age of "online friends" why not go to the web.

Anyway, the idea has now reached publishing. This week at the Hay Festival, a new startup, "Unbound", was launched with much fanfare. The idea is simple: bringing authors and books together. For £10 for pre-ordering of an e-book to £250 for lunch with the author, there are a range of sponsorship levels - each of which gives you access to the author's workings in progress. A book of short stories by legendary Monty Python member Terry Jones? A new novel from missing-in-action This Life creator Amy Jenkins? These are just two of the initial projects being offered. With some kind of audience, and some kind of presence, these are exactly the sort of people that you would imagine traditional publishing was always giving advances to for their next project - but just as freelancers in the digital industries have decided they'd rather go it alone, these writers have decided to give "Unbound" a go.

"If you’re a novelist, historian, philosopher, economist, biographer, scientist, journalist, comedian, filmmaker, gardener, cook, academic, traveller or have lived an interesting life or done extraordinary things, we’d love to hear from you.Each proposal has the potential to become the book you really want to write, pitched to the people who really matter: your potential readers", says the website.

It will be fascinating to see if this is a success - or where it works and where it doesn't. There have been quite a few publishers recently who have released expensive deluxe editions knowing there will be a "subscriber" market for these - but here we have the equivalent of the famous person's self publishing venture. It will be interesting to see how it compares with the music industry's similar ventures. Author loyalty is there for big names, but does it extend beyond genre? Did Grisham fans buy his non-crime novel with gritted teeth? Did he accept a lesser royalty? Did Mark Haddon's "Curious Incident" audience mop up his following book, a book of poetry?

One wonders about the levels of incentive, of course, given that the modern writer is expected to sign everything, be on tour constantly, and probably go out for dinner with his or her fans (its the only way they'll get a square meal on those royalties!) It would be interesting to see some more interesting incentives - perhaps, Terry Jones' personalised ringtones or Tibor Fischer sharing his unprintable reminiscences about Martin Amis for instance. One boggles a bit about the math - Tibor Fischer's already written stories require 1,477 subscribers (which at £10 a pop, gives a not unreasonable budget of £14,770)- but one appreciates the idea.

I guess I'll keep an eye on Unbound, and hope that it signs up, say, Jeff Noon to write a new novel or for the Cocteau Twin's Liz Fraser to write an autobiography.

***

Not unrelatedly, I'm giving a workshop this week to a writing course, and quickly put together a document of "social media" resources, hints and tips for writers. As it might have wider use I've put it online here.

The Last Poet

2011-05-28T02:36:00.000-07:00

To call Gil Scott-Heron a poet, just as to call him anything else, was to overvalue one part of this unique artist above and beyond another. Gil, who passed away overnight, aged 62, is unequivocally deserving of the term "legend" but I'd also say he's one of those few unique artists who is "sui generis", and his passing means we will not see his like again.

His first writings and music were published and released at the start of the 1970s - he was a young man, 21 as the decade opened - and in the fervent of that decade, the rare talents he showed, as a writer (he was a novelist before he was a musician), singer, poet and performer were eminently necessary. Scott-Heron's place in American culture is hard to quantify from this distance, but what is fascinating is how his stock has always been so high in Britain. I must have first encountered him via his funk classic "The Bottle", but also, in the carcrash of the Reagan administration political rap-funk tracks like "Re-Ron" got played on UK radio. His music was hard to find, yet when he came over to play a tour with his jazz-inflected Amnesia Express, around 1990, myself and a friend headed to Leeds Irish centre to hear a fantastic two and a half hour set, with lengthy improvisations of "Angel Dust", "Winter in July" and others. I saw him several other times, in small venues in Manchester, and each time the set was staggering. In those days, where smoking was allowed indoors, what people was smoking was partly herbal, and you saw the great man through a cloud of it; his languid, but always wonderfully courteous onstage persona, providing a contrast with the tight band and fantastic wordplay.

His return to the recording studio and critical acclaim with last year's "I'm New Here", was again prompted by his British fan-base, and he was always welcomed ecstatically in the UK, particularly those times when he'd had issues with immigration in getting into the country. Its hard to offer a critical summary of an artist who, at times, seemed to be the only radical voice in American music, but whose message was equally inclusive and universal, and whose songs will only grow in stature in the years to come. Everything's he's ever recorded is worth seeking out, even if his back catalogue has only been patchily available over the years; pick up the individual albums if you can, as the compilations available have often downplayed his more political work.

The sign of an artist who has gone beyond his fanbase is when their words get spoken out of context. "The revolution will not be televised," he sang early on, and the phrase has been used and misused ever since, as this most remarkable of writers found the words to describe our contemporary condition even as we looked on it with ignorance and indifference. He will be missed.

Every Day is Literary

2011-05-25T00:31:00.000-07:00

Literature fans are spoilt for choice this week. You could have gone and seen Carol Ann Duffy and Friends at the Royal Exchange on Monday; or last night gone to an Ambit magazine launch at the Anthony Burgess Foundation. Tonight, there's Bad Language at the Castle, and tomorrow a choice - or a double header - August Kleinzhaler at Burgess, and as part fo the Chorlton Arts Festival, a Flash fiction event at Dulcimer. I missed the exciting sounding Station Stories last weekend, as had other things on, but heard Nick Royle's story, "The Royal Fusilier", a pitch perfect piece of gritty northern sentiment, at the Ambit launch.

The Noble Roth

2011-05-20T23:56:00.000-07:00

News that Philip Roth had been awarded the Man Booker International Prize should have been the moment when the prize came of age. After all, the Nobel Prize has been continually and consistently reluctant in awarding its laureate to Americans. Rather than being a nice counterpoint to the Americanisation of the world, this has sometimes seems absurd: particularly when it comes to rewarding the novel, rather than other literary forms. The American novel is one of the wonders of the 20th century, and Philip Roth has been one of its finest proponents. Its rare to find, on reading his 90s masterpiece "American Pastoral", that you are reading an instant classic, a defining piece of work at the moment it comes out and, moreover, recognising it as such.

This new Booker prize, by rewarding Roth, was, one would have thought, being as uncontroversial as one could be - that was until one of the judges, Carmen Callil, disassociated herself from the award. That would have been fine - though surely an achievement award like this could have found one of its 13 writers that all the judges could agree on - but she went on to say "I don't rate him as a writer at all. I made it clear that I wouldn't have put him on the longlist, so I was amazed when he stayed there."

Callil's opinions are her own, and all judging panels are going to have differences of them, but as Jonathan Jones pointed out, you can dislike his work, but you can't discount it, and by doing so, Callil comes across as silly. Stuart Evers has written an excellent blogpost on why Roth matters.

Defending herself, Callil writes that "to give this prize to yet another North American writer, when we had such great writers to choose from (the previous winner was the truly great Canadian writer, Alice Munro) suggests a limited vision, to say the least." Its an absurd argument, made the more so by her next line "this is not a matter of nationality." The rest of her argument, about the judging process, is perfectly valid, but her issue has been with Roth as a writer, and that is where any damage is done.

The domestic Booker has loved its spats, but the international award was surely trying to be Golden Globe to the Nobel's Oscars. Roth's chances of winning that are probably neither impaired or improved by this result, so mysterious are the workings of the Nobel committee - but as quixotic as the Nobel's choice has occasionally been, the Omerta of the judging committee might be something that Man Booker could learn from.

My brief thoughts on Roth and other links are here.

The Shadow Line

2011-05-18T01:00:00.000-07:00

Its been a while since there's been a real "event television" outside of the live shenanigans of the X-Factor and the like. But having caught the first two episodes of "The Shadow Line" I'm pleased that I've come to a new series as it goes out for the first time, rather than later down the line. Our much-loved HBO imports come second-hand (at least for the first series), so its great to see the BBC not only commissioning a serious multipart drama, but promoting it with some fanfare.

Christopher Ecclestone and Stephen Rea would be hooks to watch any new show of course, but "The Shadow Line" does seem a genuinely risky proposition. Its clearly not a show developed by committee, but with a vision from the writer (Hugo Blick) that has, in the first 2 episodes found its way onto the screen. Like "Internal Affairs" or "The Wire" the simple expedient of putting us in both camps - the good guys and the bad guys - works well; we are more than just voyeurs, we have a multi-dimensional view of a story that two episodes in is muddy as hell. More than that, the bad guy (Ecclestone) cares for his wife who has early onset Alzheimers, whilst the police are leaking information for money and the lead cop, (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor)has his own series-full of secrets.

The wonderfully haunting theme tune, Pause by Emily Barker & the Red Clay Halo, has been following me round from the last episode but I'm also impressed by some of the staging in the show. The brilliant scenes at the end of episode 2 which saw bad guys, good guys, and a 3rd person who could be either, all trying to get hold of a witness to the murder, was psychologically thrilling. Whether or not the show is one great big shaggy dog chase, I hardly care at the moment - and look forward to the next five weeks as the story unravels in unexpected ways.

Everything Future

2011-05-15T07:33:00.000-07:00

We live in an age of competing realities. Our individual "villages" are colliding, in a way that SF has long prefigured. The dual cities in China Mieville's noir future detective "The City and The City", the video game un/reality of David Cronenberg's ExistenZ, even the melting walls of psychological space and memory in Lessing's "Memoirs of a Survivor" are in some way our recognisable realities.

At this year's FutureEverything conference, a yearly collision of art, digital ideas and music, the 2-days of debate is a shifting dialogue. Strangely enough, the conference eschews the unconference format for more formal keynotes, panels, and presentations. Yet one of the defining mediums of our current age is the keynote talk, exemplified by the online archive of TED videos. There's something nicely ironic about FutureEverything's format, where people who spend most of their lives online, go offline for a couple of days, share coffee and pastries, and put up their powerpoint presentations just like the regional sales rep conference that you see satirised in TV comedy. Knowledge transfer - one person speaking to a roomful of people - is a hard thing to reinvent.

The debate then, this year, was one that didn't start, lead or end in a linear place. Across three rooms, there were different cross-currents, as ever. Taking place in a central Manchester venue, this year's conference brought the art onsite, was near Piccadilly station, and made it alot easier for serendipitous jump cuts through the city. Not that many people will have had the stamina for four days AND four nights. By Friday afternoon's coda, given by an ebullient caffeine fuelled Bill Thompson, the debate was beginning to take form; and Thompson captured it, then, with his own inimitable magic made it fly. Thompson theorised that we are no longer offline beings, but the online is part of us. That switching it down is a deliberate act of mental sabotage, as our brain synapses are being made to rewire to include these new external limbs. Like Neo in the Matrix we are part of the machine. For Thompson, this is not just a liberation, but a victory in a war. The geeks (or, at the very least, the information workers) have won the war, and the losers, though they should not be ignored or treated unfairly, are as disenfranchised as the Anglo-Saxon farmers who were stripped of their lands by the Norman Earls.

We, "the digital", are no longer the future; this is no longer a bet that could have gone either way (like Betamax v. VHS), but are inheritors of the present. What we do with it is the wider subtext. There's a moment for pleasure, of course, as all victories taste better than defeat, but also a sense that now is the time to accept this reality, and make sure it works better for us.

The day before, a provocative presentation from James Bridle, spoke of our new urban space, that is being designed, not for people, but for machines. Machine-logic, whether in the placing of goods in Amazon's mega warehouses, or the windowless bunkers of server farms, is increasingly the design principle, just as the 19th century pithead was less designed for its human workers, than the buckets and trollies that brought the coal to the surface.

Where are we in all this? Thompson is older than me, from an analogue generation that dreamed of (and dreamed up) this digital future. For those who are younger, it is no longer negotiable, or even a question - social networks, always-on devices, dual-screen activities (watching, tweeting) are embedded in them every bit as much as those cyber-pioneers who are experimenting with chips under their skin. The 20th century organisational structures that Bill, and many of us, work in (or work with) are potentially in collapse, yet as the furore over public sector cuts has made clear, the human cost of this (for workers, for users of services) is what makes us angry. The robots that control our lives are currently primarily data modellers - the decision making software behind online loan applications; the sensors that order new stock for the shelves as soon as they detect an absence as our supply chains become ever more "just in time" (and, it has to be said, ever more vulnerable to disruptions such as the winter snowfall).

In his Lancelot Andrewes' quoting poem "Journey of the Magi", the Anglican-convert, T.S. Eliot, characterises the Magi as exhausted followers of an debunked religion, "no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,with an alien people clutching their gods", able to see the future world that they had long hoped for, but too old to be part of it; the ties of family and homeland too great. It is interesting that Eliot used the word "alien", for its otherworldly meaning (not the one he'd have meant) seems entirely appropriate.

Perhaps those of us who are able to turn a trick through our engagement with this "digital culture" can leap ahead by bridging the analogue and digital cultures; though surely the logic of this is that the bridge won't be there for long? Thompson told us that we were now all playing "the game" which only ends when we've forgotten that we're playing the game. In other words, how can we remember or recall what we've forgotten? The statue of Ozymandias in the desert; the great pyramids of Egypt with their secrets as immortally entombed as their pharoahs; the language of Jesus himself, spoken today in only a few small Syrian hill villages; even the key to "reading" redudant computer languages and technologies. The speed at which technology is changing may only be matched by the speed at which we are forgetting.

At a conference like this their are few naysayers, few Andrew Keen's wondering whether this makes us more stupid, few fearmongers seeing technology as the enemy. Instead we are asked to embrace the "robot", make him our friend. A nice coincidence that this week's Dr. Who should see one of our favourite cultural machines, the TARDIS, "humanised" in the Neil Gaiman-penned episode "The Doctor's Wife".

All revolutions have consequences though: I began to see again not the "virtual" but the "physical" representation of the internet. An earlier speaker had played the scene from the IT Crowd where the geeks hand a small box to their boss, and tell her "This, Jen, is the internet." We want the virtual to have a physical presence, just as much as those deep in faith built their churches, prized their relics, and made sure that Knock in Ireland has its own airport. The physicality of all those virtual financial transmissions is now played out in the worthless housing estates in Ireland and Spain; the "just in time" network that feeds the Western world is mapped through millions of containers, each one individually tagged, its contents unknown and unknowable until someone opens it up, like the "can of dead girls" that opens Series Two of the Wire.

In our digital victory, we have to take care not to be like the bourgeoisie who handed over the revolution of 1789 to the very bloody terror of the Robespierrists... I begin to wonder if as we speed forward, our very frailties, and our loss of understandings, and our beginning to forget the analogue world to the extent that our "bridges" to it fall away, leaves us vulnerable to the machinations of the technocracy that can (and does) make money from this new world.

The "digiterati"'s love of the new needs to be used for revelation, rather than revolution, and it was reassuring that the conference ended with the award of the FutureEverything prize, not to a technology, but to an "idea", the "Macon money" bonds that created a new "social currency" that could only be redeemed through collaboration, networking and human interaction.

In the whirlpools of ideas that FutureEverything brings to Manchester every year it is these still lilies in the centre or at the side of the pool that provide sufficient contrast; articulates a human side to what can often seem to be disconnected and specialised concerns. It was there in the Macon Money prize, it was there in Bill Thompson's "victory" speech, it was there in Kimchi and chips LITTree artwork, and there in bearhugs that US hardcore band Fucked Up gave their audience at Islngton Mill on Thursday night.

Find out more:
FutureEverything Festival Portal (social media links etc.)

The Ebony Tower by John Fowles

2011-05-07T01:54:00.000-07:00

"Is this your first book?" Tom Maschler recalls asking John Fowles on reading "The Collector." "Good God, no," Fowles replied, telling Maschler he'd written 9 full novels before his "debut", two of which, Maschler disovered later, were "totally rewritten as The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman." I'd been coming back to Fowles for a while, following a couple of conversations with writer friends, and reading this anecdote in Maschler's gossipy autobiography, "Publisher". Fowles has always struck me as a polarising writer, but what is it that polarises? One of the few English writers of the sixties and seventies whose work stands up to renewed scrutiny, the polarisation appears to be betwen those earlier books, and those later less successful ones. Though there might be things to admire in his odd piece of Victoriana "A Maggot" or the misanthropic "Daniel Martin", it is those earlier books on which his reputation depends.

The novella "The Ebony Tower", thankfully belongs in the earlier camp. A young abstract painter, who also writes art criticism, has an opportunity to visit an older master in isolation in the Brittany countryside. Arriving, fortuitously, without his wife; David Williams finds that Henry Breasley is not quite alone - but attended to by 2 young nymphs, "the mouse" and "the freak," frequently found naked, and with an ambiguous relationship with Breasley, his art and his bed. The scene is set for an elegantly staged psychodrama, but the subtext is "what is art?" Breasley never forgets a painting, but is in articulate, and rude and boorish when drunk. Williams is exactly the sort of painter that Breasley has no time for. Yet Breasley represents for Williams the losing side of an argument - however great his work might have been.

In this strange menage, Williams is stripped of his pretensions, the young girl - "the mouse" - who had brought him here, (though he hardly knew that at first), leaving him with an indelible impression. Here, it seems, is life, whereas his work has abstracted itself from it. Is this the ebony tower? The contrast with the "ivory tower" ruminations of critics and intellectuals is clear. Breasley, in life, is inarticulate, but watching him paint - and Fowles provides brilliant depictions of the artist at work - all pretense falls away. Its as if the old man has escaped from the irrelevance of being "judged" according to the contemporary mores of the day and has become part of his own history - and of the history of art itself. Williams, in contrast, is as uncomplex as his everyman name, with limited talent, not just in his work, but in his life. The story is both short enough to maintain the intensity of this brief encounter, and long enough to be a psychological character study. The older Breton couple who are Breasley's housekeeper and gardener hover in the background; whilst Williams absent wife, and his life back in London becomes increasingly dreamlike as the story progresses.

Here in a small nugget of his fiction, are all Fowles strengths - his layering of meaning; his beautifully descriptive prose; his characterisation of larger-than-life, but highly believable gargoyles; and his psychological probing. Published in 1974, it was made into a film in the 80s with Lawrence Olivier, inevitably, in the Breasley role.

Royal Fiction

2011-04-30T11:31:00.000-07:00

The current Royal Family have often been portrayed in fiction, though they hardly need it, given how soap operaish its been over the years. I particularly liked Sue Townsend's "The Queen and I", and the gin-drinking Queen Mother in Spitting Image. But nobody actually does fiction like the British aristocracy. For those of us who've never seen a Debrett's or think the "season" relates to football or racing, there's probably a vague sense that this country is run according to ancient precedent, fixed forever and unchangeable like something predestined from Lord of the Rings. What yesterday proved yet again, is how risible this view of history is. The Royal Family are arch writers and re-writers of the so-called "traditions" that are then utilised for retaining the family firm.

Two items from the wedding yesterday struck me as the kind of loose ends we're getting used to in Stephen Moffat's version of Dr. Who, but if you delve a little too deep unravel. I'm sure that soldiers and sailors and airmen frequently get married in their dress uniform, however inappropriate that might seem to the rest of us who don't want our work gear in our wedding photos - what's wrong with Moss Bros? - but they announced with all gravitas that William was going to wear an Irish Guards' Colonel outfit rather than his own outfit. It turns out he's an honorary colonel in the guards since February. What happened? Did he look through a set of uniforms with Kate and go "that one looks good, I'll ring granny and see if she can sort me out a commission?" I have no idea; but if the dressing up box of military uniforms can be used so arbitrarily then maybe the rest of us should look for a nice uniform next time we get married. We wouldn't, of course, because it would be seen as crass in the extreme; but given that his brother was wearing his own appropriate uniform, where on earth does this fiction come from?

Secondly, this Duke and Duchess of Cambridge nonsense. I'm sure there's some logic to the titles that the Royal Family dish out - its one of the perks of their job, of course - but the Dukedom (if that's the word) has a patchy heritage as it is, and has been in disuse for years. So, our King in waiting gets married in someone else's uniform and now, with his new wife, sports an imaginary title - both things having been conferred since the start of the year. The 19th century business men who would buy a stately pile to get hold of a title had nothing on the family who run this ridiculous pyramid scheme. One of the many pleasures of reading Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" was her shining a light on the pork barrel politics of the day; a time when royal patronage and political power were so clearly linked - in 2011, we have Labour Prime Ministers missed off the guest list because they are not "privy councillors" (whatever that is), and new titles for the 2nd in line to the throne and his wife which may as well been ordered up mail order from the United States.

Of course, if the Queen cannot create such trinkets and baubles, then who in the country can? But it highlights the absurdity of the British class system (which I referred to in a recent poem as "a repeating lie") in a way that would make the most florid of romantic novelists blush. Simon Schama, on the BBC yesterday, made the interesting point that the troubles in the Middle East are all about getting rid of family dynasties. The fascinating history of the British Monarchy is that the family has remained potent, even as its been rightly stripped of more and more of its power. Without belittling yesterday's marriage in any way, these "grace and favour" powers - whether creating a new Dukedom, or turning a small Wiltshire town "Royal", seem to me to have little place in a modern country. I'm not sure whether I felt sad for him, or vaguely proud of his chutzpah, that David Beckham proudly wore his OBE on his dress suit; not everyone can be a soldier, and the gongs they get are one symbol of a nation's gratefulness that one should never disparage, but surely our most famous footballer missed a trick by not dressing himself up in all his winning medals from his illustrious playing career - he'd have looked more like a pearly Queen than Elton John in his heyday.

Bad books, bad writing

2011-04-29T03:03:00.000-07:00

Are bad books and bad writing necessarily the same thing? And does context matter? There are plenty of poorly written books in the world that have become bestsellers; and plenty of well written ones that are torrid; yet are we even talking about the same thing? Sometimes a writers' style doesn't gell with the reader. I remember recommending Anne Micheals' "Fugitive Pieces" years ago, and someone being disappointed, finding the poet's style too intrusive for its subject. There are "marmite" writers that you can love or hate; but there are books which given space and time I'd happily give a rationalised trashing too. (One example from way back: the much lauded late Carol Shields. I hated "The Stone Diaries" but was intrigued by its success and critical acclaim, and read her later novel "Larry's Diary." If anything it was worse, but whereas with "The Stone Diaries" I could perhaps say it was a "marmite" book - and probably not written for a male audience at all - "Larry's Party" protagonist was male, but Shields' didn't get anywhere close to the male psyche, and the book was both boring and unbelievable.)

Usually, if you can't say something good, you possibly shouldn't say anything at all - it might just be "marmite" after all, but I wrote a negative review of Sean O'Brien's debut novel "The Afterlife" last year, because the reviews I'd read seemed to be skirting around how poorly written it was; and I half feel that I should do the same for Adam Roberts' "Swiftly" which is one of the poorest books I've read in a long time. A piece of "steampunk" (rather than SF) where Gulliver's discoveries are now protagonists in 19th century European history, the idea is a grand one, but Roberts' soon loses interest in it - preferring an extrapolation of the idea (what if the Lilliputians were giants compared to some other organism? etc.) which is frankly unecessary. Worse, the wild goose chase of an unlikely set of protagonists is punctuated by the worst kind of historical novel purple prose, and for reasons that - having not read Roberts before - I'm assuming are meant to be humorous, an obsession with the scatalogical. The blurbs on the cover, the interesting premise, the homage to the great Swift, would indicate that you are in the company of a modern master; but the end result is over-long, poorly structured, and written in an indigestible prose style that may be an effective mid-19th century parody, or may simply be rubbish. Not a full review, I'm afraid, but I did struggle to the end, hating the book more and more as I skipped through its unengaging picaresque, with characters I neither liked nor had any sympathy for. Having read a few SF or related novels over the last year or two, I've become used to a sort of clagginess of contemporary SF prose that aims, I think, to be almost "literary", but its usually been redeemed by both the scope of the imagination, or the sympathy with the characters. "Swiftly" provided neither of these comforts.

So is there a connection between bad books and bad writing? A well written book will let you excuse a lot, a badly written one - one's patience quickly wears thin. I know that Carol Shields being a good writer couldn't rescue "Larry's Party" - in many ways, her "good" writing, mitigated against it. I know that Sean O'Brien is a deft critic and capable poet; but "The Afterlife" despite being an original idea, is scuppered by the writing. Adam Roberts is no hack, but "Swiftly" is no honour to Swift.

Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer

2011-04-27T08:25:00.000-07:00

Despite Britain being home to a bewildering range of working class subcultures, the British novel only occasionally dips its toe into these. Whether its Colin Macinnes "Absolute Beginners", Sillitoe's "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning", Richard Allen's bovver boy novels, or John King's "The Football Factory" the visceral nature of young, violent working class Britain has rarely been a mainstream strand of contemporary literature. To that list we can now add Max Schaefer's debut novel "Children of the Sun", which mines a powerful vein of material through exploring four decades of British Nationalist movements. Whereas viewers of Shane Meadows' "This is England" might come away with the sense that the skinhead is essentially harmless, a self-realising club of working class inclusion, in Schaefer's novel, the skinhead is placed firmly in his historical reality, as the symbolic look of the far right.

"Children of the Sun" runs two stories in parallel. In contemporary London, middle class, homosexual James is looking for material for a screenplay, whilst living with his black skinhead boyfriend Adam. Discovering that one of the most violent sociopaths of the 70s and 80s far right movement, Nicky Crane, was also gay, he gets drawn to researching this story. In parallel, we meet Tony, a working class east end boy, who has his first gay experience at 14, and continues his experimentation in parallel with an increasing identification with skinhead culture and the far right millieu in which it thrives. We follow Tony from the late 70s right through to the early 90s, through punk NF band Skrewdriver concerts, Rock Against Communism festivals and race riots in Brixton. Tony's story sees him becoming close to the major fascist names of the period, and is a potted history of the far right's multiple reinventions, from the National Front, through the British Movement, the paramilitary Combat 18 and the early days of the BNP, including walk on parts for a young Nick Griffin. Schaefer assiduously weaves Tony into the narrative of the far right, finding room for Nazi occultism, gay skinheads, and even the AIDS epidemic.

In the contemporary story, James' own fascinations start to go beyond his research, and he becomes obsessed with the obscure material he's researching, logging on late at night to a gay dating site to have risky conversations with an anonymous gay nazi. If at times Schaefer's own research lies too heavy on the page - its leavened by set pieces such as the elderly Nazi who invites the young skinheads round his house to toast the Fuhrer. Never afraid to delve deep into the violence, the sex, and the violent sex of the world about which he's writing, the overwhelming sordidness of this world is handled deftly, and with some humour. James own attempts to dress as a skinhead are playacting, and when he finds the "skinhead" night that he and Adam goes to, is just a pose, rather than some unchanging subcultural scene, his own fantasies crash into the reality of his life. One of the few women in the novel, his sister, is a key character, as though she is only there in brief moments, she provides a counterbalance to his increasingly dysfunctional quest for the truth about the eighties gay nazis he's frantically searching for.

If some of this sounds like a manufactured structure, it is, but it never gets in the way of a story that runs in two directions - switching between the past and the present. Tony's episodic life gets less interesting as it reaches the late 80s and early 90s, when there is no longer the mainstream acceptance of violent racism that still pervaded the late 70s and early 80s. The confused gender-race politics of the period is summed up by the using of Nicky Crane on the "Strength Through Oi!" album cover. I remember reading Sounds, and Oi scene propagandist Gary Bushell, in the early 80s, and finding it difficult to separate the violent, monodimensional music of those bands from the violent, racist skinheads who lurked round the subways of every provincial town. Schaefer, who was born in 1974, does a remarkable job in painting a world that he can only ever have known second hand.

If the book has a failing, its that its reliance on historical sources, rather than being purely a story set in the period, means that the characters, even Tony, remain distant. It has something of David Peace's veracity, or even echoes of Jake Arnott's sixties true crime novels, without the characterisation that a more fictionalised version might have given it. There's little chance of sympathy for characters who are addicted to warped ideology, mindless violence and ever riskier sexual behaviour, yet there remains a pathos at the end, when the two stories finally come together. The book's structure serves it well, and the powerful use of contemporary cuttings from a wide range of far-right publications, which intersperse the chapters, gives a genuine context which Schaefer successfully matches in his own text.

I haven't seen much about "Children of the Sun", and picked it up on spec from WH Smiths a couple of months ago; like those earlier "subculture" novels, and with fellow travellers China Mieville and Stewart Home namechecked in the credits, its certainly likely to garner its own cult. The material that he has unearthed is remarkable, even if the story doesn't quite match the research, and in getting under the psychology of the "skinhead" - its a novel that will probably have more resonance than any number of sociological "white studies" texts.

There's an illuminating interview with Max Schaefer in 3AM Magazine, which is also well worth reading.

Lets Talk About Text

2011-04-24T02:22:00.000-07:00

Next weekend is the Bury Text Festival. Although more compressed than previous BTFs it is still a weekend full of delights, from the opening at Bury Art Gallery on Saturday morning, to readings/events at a local church and Bury Met during the day. Sunday continues with the NW's current obsession with all things Schwitters, with a full day seminar, before another reading/performance in the evening. Worth a trip out on the tram for some or all of this. Given how many contemporary artists use text in their work, its good to see an exhibition that gives equal voice to writers who use visuals in theirs. From Fluxus, through to the Concrete Poets, through to the YBAs, through to flarf, writing and art fuse together from both different directions, and Greater Manchester is there at the intersection.

Part of that intersection, of course, is The Other Room, and Knives Forks and Spoons Press. The latter had a poetry garden party of sorts yesterday afternoon in Newton-Le-Willows, where along with over a dozen other KFS poets I read a short piece of work to the invited audience. I've missed the Other Room's last couple of events, but with Tom Jenks, James Davies and Scott Thurston amongst the readers yesterday, was able to pick up their latest lovely looking yearly anthology, amongst a few other books and pamphlets. Zoe*, our hosts' Jack Russell ran around the garden making judicious interventions on the reading, turning Matt Dalby's sound art into virtually a duet (he coped admirably, as he describes here), and suddenly disappearing at the point when Robert Sheppard read about a "dog running around in circles." Dogs were present in a few of the works, as was Cornelius Cardew, which probably sums up the experimental poets' juxtaposition of the everyday with the esoteric.

Knives Forks and Spoons have just been justly shortlisted for the Michael Marks Pamphlet Publisher of the year award, a sign of how far they've come in just 18 months or so.

* I originally wrote Zod, rather than Zoe, our hosts' Jack Russell. What a great name for a dog that would be!

Not Cruel April

2011-04-22T01:37:00.000-07:00

For once the end of April is benign. The weather is lovely, and in the slightly mysterious way that Britain is run these days, the Royal Wedding coincides with three other bank holidays to make this a genuine break, like Christmas, only warmer. On the one hand - its put a break on things at a time of year when, schools aside, things usually go at breakneck speed. Europe goes on as normal, probably a little confused by the slightly arbitrary way we British arrange things (after all, they have a month closedown in the summer), and the football season and other sporting things are in full effect. God knows (and I'm sure he doesn't care) what this does to the faltering economy; but, like when the snow slowed us down, I'm a believer that we're the better for these breaks. Modern life is far too manic at the best of times and this slightly enforced break (which not everyone's making a week of, the fools!)also comes at just the right time. Forget about that date in January that is "blue monday", the endless British winter can sometimes seem everpresent. A bit of sunshine, bluebells and crocuses, and we're suddenly full speed ahead with the effervescance of nature overflowing. Hell, the BBC even give us "Lambing Live."

Avoiding the R**** W******* will be the hard part, though nice to see that even non-royalists have taken it as an opportunity to have a party. It's not just that I don't care about whatsit and thingummybob getting married, I'm utterly perplexed as to why I even should care. The Queen's got plenty of life in her; Charles is forever in waiting; and in the modern world, we're know longer quite in awe of this particular family. In any other context William and Kate would seem like a typical middle class couple, bright enough, but a little dull, whose nuptials were of interest to their family and peer group from university. One imagines the surreality of the royal procession will seem even weirder by being foisted on a couple who, to outside eyes at least, seem hardly able to support the apparatus. Avoiding the whole shenanigans will involve banning the BBC from our house, as its events like this which don't confirm the broadcaster as the best in the world, but as the worst, with all sense of proportion out of the window. I suffered through a half hour discussion on whether David Cameron will wear a lounge suit or tails, the other day.

For me, this week is a rare time without any particular plans. After being away quite a bit, and then not being too well, I'm suddenly looking at an 11-day sojourn without any particular plans, and that alone, feels marvellous.

Literary Allergies

2011-04-17T02:51:00.000-07:00

Admist all the media kerfuffle surrounding the posthumous David Foster Wallace book, Geoff Dyer has come out in hives: or rather he's admitted upfront his allergy to Wallace's writing. Its a nicely different take on the literary parlour game of what great books you have and haven't read; but it also struck a chord with this reader. There are some writers we know are good, some we know are bad, but there are some where it doesn't make a difference, as they bring us out in a rash.

As Dyer says, he even "likes" Wallace's writing, he just can't get on with it. Its interesting that Dyer says this, as I think he's a similarly rare food group. I've heard him read on a couple of occasions, and I've loved it, but trying to read his books, I start by enjoying his light, breezy style, his digressions, his authorial interruption, and then, I get annoyed by it. There's just too much Geoff Dyer in it, and my palate's not up to it.

But I think there are a couple of types of literary allergy. Dyer (as with Wallace for him) is in the "I like it, but can't stomach it" category - writing that's a little too rich, or too plain, or simply too "too", for our taste. And perhaps, like David Foster Wallace, Geoff Dyer is a writer who writes books which are almost guaranteed to bring out that reaction from some readers - they are books that are not easily pigeonholed. I might start reading expecting one thing, and then get another. One of these days I'll finish a Dyer book and can throw away my anti-histamines. On the other hand, other allergies are more severe. I get annoyed when I see the cover of the book; when I hear the writer's name; when I hear how brilliant they are. It's not just that I don't get it, it's that every time I try to get it (i.e. by reading them) I can feel the old panic attacks coming back. It's like they are written in a language that induces migraines. Beryl Bainbridge is one of these. She's a national treasure; she was the "best writer never to win the Booker"; she's loved by all and sundry; she wrote books on a range of subjects. Yes, yes, yes. But two pages in to "Master Georgie" or whatever, I'm in knots inside, my eyes are glassed over. Ali Smith's another one. I skipped pages of "Hotel World" in an attempt to get through it; I've even read a couple of her acclaimed short stories, and I've felt physical unwell at the end.

I noticed that when people started sharing their #literaryallergies on Twitter (thanks to the writer @sarahchurchwell) it was old dead writers like Trollope and Hardy; or bad experiences at school. There aren't, I think, allergies - some writers just aren't for you or there's a non-literary reason for liking them - but an allergic reaction is a personal one; books that you otherwise perhaps ought to like, and for one reason or another don't. Just accept it, and move on to the next author, there are plenty out there.

Unfinished Works

2011-04-10T00:28:00.000-07:00

Any scholar of unfinished works is advised to read the article on David Foster Wallace's last novel in yesterday's Guardian. "The Pale King", which is being published with agreement from his widow, Karen Green.

The first question about unfinished works she answers in her Observer interview:

"The notes that he took for the book and chapters that were complete, were left in a neat pile on his desk in the garage where he worked. And his lamps were on it, illuminating it. So I have no doubt in my mind this is what he wanted. It was in as organised a state as David ever left anything."

David Foster Wallace died in 2008, so in some ways, without the death, this would just be a normal publication process for a novel that an author had let go, sent to his publisher. As his editor Michael Pietsch makes clear in the Guardian piece, it is impossible to know how finished the novel was. Certainly some parts were complete, and even though the ending appears incomplete, this could also be part of his plan. Pietsch's job was to put together the novel in the best way that he could. Structure, in such a digressive writer as Wallace, proved one of the hardest things - and, also, the unknowable: what the writer would have changed as it went through the stages to publication.

The reason we have this novel, of course, is because Wallace matters. It is only his 3rd novel, but he wrote much more - essays and short stories that are amongst the best writing of the late 20th and early 21st century. Reading a Wallace essay or story can change your thoughts, even your thought processes. Suicide is always a tragedy, and Wallace's death is a reminder that it is not something that we have suddenly cured with all our modern pills and strategies.

That - and commercial imperative - are why "The Pale King" is being published. I think it should be. Yet, we are left, as ever with unfinished works, with more questions than answers. His was a thin, but substantial bibliography - and if anything, the logic of this publication must surely be because, of all contemporary writers, Wallace's work always feels - at the same time as its exemplary and measured - to some extent unfinished, a question, or series of questions rather than an answer.

We live in a world of "completion", where first albums appear fully formed, where debut novels are brimming with confidence, yet writing, as with all art, is a construction. Coincidentally, this week also saw a feature on the "director's cut" - and asks whether it is the holy grail of an auteurs vision or a marketing indulgence? As an individual, coming across a work of art for the first time, you accept it on those terms. I first heard "Diamond Dogs" on cassette, and the track listing was in a different order than the LP, even though it was a concept cassette! I will always have a softspot for the original "Blade Runner" with the voiceover, however many other versions Ridley Scott releases. I first bought the Pixies "Surfer Rosa" on CD where it was coupled with their previous mini album, "Come On Pilgrim", so for me, "Surfer Rosa" includes those tracks. Joy Division's posthumous "Still" is my favourite of their albums, as it was the first I heard and bought.

For writers, there is always some editing, but its rare, I think, that a "directors cut" has been published. (My friend Elizabeth Baines has done so with "The Birth Machine", and the reasons for it are fascinating. Partly I think this is because we encounter the work in its published form, and this gives it permanence, whatever the writer's intentions; but partly, its still the writers' words, the writers' version. The first time I saw "Hamlet" it was in a version based on the first published version of the play; which had been toured, then published without Shakespeare's permission. The play is shorter, simpler, less of Shakespeare's words, but still Shakespeare's words.

Wallace's death gives us an endpoint. He moves from being read, to being studied. There are these books and no more. Better, I think, that "The Pale King" is published as a book, so it can be enjoyed as that, rather than as an epitaph.

***

The Manchester poetry scene had sad news this week. Carcanet poet Linda Chase died on Friday after a short illness. She had run the dynamic "poets and players" series or readings, amongst other things, and never had any doubt that poetry could command a substantial audience. A new book of poems from Carcanet was completed before she passed away, and will be published later in the year.

Brief Notes

2011-04-03T12:35:00.000-07:00

Its the "end of year" for anyone in the public sector, but starting a new year of any kind in April always seems a little silly, lambing season or not. The "cuts" begin to bite from now, and last week saw the Arts Council act as judge and jury on its flock. Its worth noting that the arts isn't all about "regularly funded" organisations, and literature, which receives much less than, say, theatre or orchestras, from this particular pot, also exists far more outside of the funding streams. That said, the small money that goes into literature can hardly be said to be wasted. A little seed money to fund a poetry press, magazine or festival seems the least that the state can do. A year ago, government was happily spending public money on "cash for bangers" remember... amongst the losers last week were some that I know well, and I was particularly sad to hear that Litfest in Lancaster didn't receive funding, given the wide range of activities they do to help writing and writers. We don't have a writing development agency or anything similar in the NW, and Litfest, in small ways act to help writers get published, and get better. I wish them well.

Next week, I'm away with work, notwithstanding a head cold that came on yesterday, so I'm unfortunately going to miss the 3rd anniversary of the exemplary "The Other Room" which takes place on Wednesday at the Old Abbey Inn, with readings from Ken Edwards, Alec Finlay, Carrie Etter & Derek Henderson. Its partner in avant garde crimes, Counting Backwards, is on at Fuel on Thursday as well. First weeks in months are not turning out to be that convenient for me, unfortunately.

I said I'd give a mention to Emma Newman's book launch which takes place at the Cornerhouse next Friday. The writer and blogger is launching her collection of spooky stories "Dark Places."

So, a week of literary opportunities, if you want something to take your mind off the "cuts."

Political Poetry

2011-03-27T08:43:00.001-07:00

I've written a short essay with my thoughts on "political poetry" and a few examples from my own work on my writing website here.

Literary Dedication

2011-03-26T03:45:00.000-07:00

Writing is both a privilege and a pressure. Yet any genuine writer will tell you how hard it is to stop, to give up. Writers block is much misunderstood - its more often writing too much, rather than not enough; watch or read Michaeal Chabon's "Wonder Boys" for a glorious example. Poets dry up, but they still write. I remember Larkin summing up his own writing career, and including, alongside his poems, the many reams of library minutes he'd overseen.

But as Cyril Connolly noted all those years ago, there are many "enemies of promise." Success can be one of these, oddly enough. I've known a couple of published novelists who've withdrawn from the fray after their next novel has been questioned by their agent or publisher. There are also plenty of published writers who carry on regardless, sustained by an audience, a publisher, or even just the compulsion.

In the music business, which is in many ways more brutal than the books business, we've seen classic artists like Bob Dylan and Neil Young coming out of a decade of poor work to produce great albums again. Whether a writer could publish, say, half a dozen clunkers, before returning to form, is doubtful. Readers aren't that loyal, and, after all, a novel is rarely like an album, able to be filleted later for its rare highlights.

I've been off all week, and its taken that long to get my perspective back after a busy three months, including quite a lot of displacement. Fun as the trips have been, I always need some time for reflection, but also time for some of the things that hang around the edges of creativity. A scribbled book full of half-written poems is no different than a multitracker full of unmixed songs. Work has to be done to finish them off.

All my life I've been keen on finishing things off, or at least parcelling things up, providing some curatorial design to my own music and writings - and this week has been partly about that. A new CD has just gone off to the duplicators, and it will be finished next week, (more of that then). The first track recorded for this new release was recorded in January 2010, so its 15 months in the making, which is about my average these days.

Funnily enough, the latest poems in "Playing Solitaire for Money" were written in January 2010 as well, so whatever I've written since then - perhaps thirty or forty poems, of which maybe a third or a quarter are worth persevering with - is beginning to find its own shape. If I was off for another week, then that would be the next project, as it is, I'll print them off, and carry them with me as I go here and there again.

I've no pram in the hallway, but Connolly's enemies of promise were many. And, as you get older, its less about promise, than purpose. Twenty five years of writing seriously may not have taken me to Gladwell's "10000 hours" but I'd like to think I've learnt something over the years. Much of that is about not writing; I'm just working on a story that I had the idea for at least five years ago, perhaps longer, but only started a couple of weeks ago. The actual writing (of a story that will end up less than 2000 words) could probably be fit into a single working day; it was the not writing it that took the time.

When I do manage to find a week to be creative, like this one, my frustration is how little I actually do. In the past I've been known to spend half of it writing or making music, but these days, the more critical issue is about "head space." So I've finished reading two novels that I began months ago, visited the fascinating Anish Kapoor exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery, heard Paul Farley and Micheal Symmons Roberts read from their new book "Edgelands", and a few other things. It's the main reason I didn't arrange to join the march in London today against the cuts. For once, its a march that I think can have some impact, if only as a mobilisation of a large number of ordinary people; which no government can be entirely happy at being on the wrong side of. But joining them would have probably took a big chunk out of my week (I'd probably have gone down yesterday, come back tomorrow)and I'm trying to eke out this space for creative work.

I watched the first part of the new BBC adaption of "Women in Love" and it reminded me that its been a while since I read Lawrence, but also, that he seems to have fallen off the literary radar a little over the last decade or so. If ever there was a writer who had literary dedication, it's Lawrence. From the wrong side of the tracks, he arrived both fully formed and formless; a new voice in a time of new voices, a powerful figure, an immense talent. Who else was such an influential critic, iconic novelist, brilliant short story writer and highly original poet? There sometimes seems an abundance of Lawrence, but his world view crossed genres and forms in a way that we now know to be incredibly rare. Like Hemingway and Joyce its hard to separate out the life in exile from the writer; but whereas Hemingway's late work was a shadow of his early writing, and Joyce got lost in his blindness (actual, and the creative blindness of "Finnegan's Wake")Lawrence last two longer works were "The Virgn and the Gipsy" and "The Escaped Cock" (aka "The Man Who Died"), both amongst his best.

A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee

2011-03-22T01:22:00.000-07:00

Neel Mukherjee's debut novel "A Life Apart" (first published in India in 2008) is a young man's picaresque. Beginning with the funerals of his parents in Calcutta it tells the story of Ritwik, a young Hindu, who then moves to England in the 1990s, but can't shake his past from him. Told in the localised third person, it has the feel of a first person narrative, for except in a couple of places, the novel takes place in the moment, with the future closed. Arriving at Oxford on a scholarship, Ritwik thinks his fellow students are conversing in German (its a Liverpool accent he hears). The English title "A Life Apart" describes the novel well, but so does its original title "Past Continuous", for the novel includes extracts from a parallel story, a novel that Ritwik is writing about an English woman in India at the start of the 20th century.

The various strands of the novel create the book's forward movement - and the sense of the picaresque. Everything is connected in Ritwik's life, even though he does not easily see the connections. In Oxford, his confusion in the seminar room is interspersed with his incessant cottaging, having sex with strangers in toilets and elsewhere. This too is a life apart, but when a friend at university talks to him about child abuse, he realises that he too was abused, and just about picks up the courage to ring a help line. Yet Oxford is a staging post, not a destination, and the heart of the book is in another parallel story, when he comes to London to work as a carer for an old lady in Brixton, Anne Cameron. In the dusty twilight gloom of her large house he finds secrets to match his own, and another connection with India, where her and her family once lived. As the door opens on Ritwik's own life - and, like an unreliable narrator, he's curious about the world, whilst in denial about much of his own life - reality closes in on him. After his Student visa runs out, he becomes one of the invisible, and is drawn to an underworld of prostitution and rent boys.

In a long book, we are constantly engaged in the minutiae of Ritwik's world, often shockingly - with Mukherjee being as forensic about the cottaging rituals in Oxford, as he is about sponging down Anne Cameron in Ritwik's role as carer. In the end it is the novel's sheer abundance which is its real strength. Ignoring the tropes of magic realism that post-Rushdie writers have often used, it feels like a different approach to writing about the "innocent abroad" - literary in parts, (both in the story Ritwik is writing, and the way he sees the world through his learning) - yet earthy, deliberate and detailed, particularly in the sex scenes. Some first novels seem to be a brisk run-through of life at the time of writing, breathless but transitory; "A Life Apart" crams everything in - perhaps too much at times - yet is also somewhat sedate in its pacing. I read the book fast, but over a period of several weeks, and the novel's various episodes seemed to allow me this luxury; for the style of the writing breaks up the narrative, so that it sometimes feels like a series of connected vignettes - closer to Henry Fielding than to Henry James in other words (or at least in terms of the sexual content!) In the end it isMukherjee's delight in every aspect of Ritwik's life and world that comes through. I'm reminded a little of one of the book's blurb writers, Rose Tremain, for isn't Ritwik as conflicted in contemporary life as Robert Merivel is by 17th Century England in "Restoration"? Yet, Ritwik seems another of those contemporary characters who could only be written about today - for life happens to him, rather than by him. If the young hero of the twenties and thirties influenced the world he was part of, and the hero of the fifties and sixties ran way from that world "on the road" or wherever, the contemporary hero seems hardly able to exist in the world, without being crushed by it. By the end of the novel the echoes that Mukherjee sees with the early 20th century Swadeshi movement have faded away into nothing. Its a downbeat novel in many ways, but far from sombre. I'd heard Mukherjee read from the latter part of the book in Norwich last year, and was surprised, on reading it, how that section - looking after the ageing Anne Cameron - came so late in the book; yet its clearly the key that brings the various episodes together.

At the end of an art experiment?

2011-03-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

Next week the "regularly funded organisations" that the Arts Council has been funding for years find out if they are still regularly funded. The last few years has seen unprecedented arts spending, particularly in building new or extending and renovating old theatres, galleries and museums. Art as a driver for urban and civic renewal probably began with the Bilbao Guggenheim, but arts funding and a benign, supportive government (and councils) has seen a flourishing over the last fifteen years that we are unlikely to see again in our lifetime. It has been both success and failure - with the Tate Modern at the one end and the ill-fated Public in West Bromwich at the other. If in Manchester we still have our own glass elephant, in Urbis, at least its an imposing one, even if its about to enter a 3rd stage of its short, ill-defined life, this time as the National Football Museum.

Yet, if there was is one civic art project that I personally look on with both pride and admiration it has to be the New Art Gallery in Walsall. The regeneration it promised to bring to its end of town may be yet to come (Urban Splash have been advertising their unbuilt flats next to it, almost as long as I can remember), but as building in itself, as a gallery, and as home to the Garman-Ryan collection it is immaculately conceived. The building, first of all, four storeys, two upturned oblong, might seem less impressive on first glance, than the odd shapes of the Imperial War Museum North or Urbis, but it is elegant nonetheless, like giant fence posts at the end of a drab Midlands town centre.

Inside it is even more so, with traditional materials, wooden floors, stairs and wall coverings, giving it a quiet timelessness that glass and steel can never quite achieve. The gallery spaces are even better - extensive, connected, and perfect for both a busy tour and quiet contemplation - the latter being something that you rarely get at Tate Modern for instance. Best of all, the Gallery, ten years old last year, has an artistic purpose that Urbis or the Public could only dream of it. It was built to permanently house the Garman-Ryan collection. Kathleen Garman was mistress, and eventually wife, to the brilliant American sculptor Jacob Epstein. A middle class girl from Wednesbury, near Walsall, she ended up, with her siblings, at the heart of 20th century modernism. The collection bequeathed by her and her friend, the sculptor Sally Ryan, to Walsall art gallery, includes a rich selection of Epstein's work (including many head sculptings of Kathleen, her children, and other luminaries of the day), as well as contemporary artists, and impressive works from antiquity. Spread over two floors, the collection deserves repeated visits.

But the gallery also has a large exhibition space, usually given over to contemporary and/or community exhibitions. Over the last year the artist Bob and Roberta Smith has taken over the space, has been the gallery's artist in residence, and now curates an exhibition that takes its cues from the lives of the Garman's (particularly Epstein's tragic -and unacknowledged son, Theo). What to make of Bob and Roberta Smith? His (for the name is in itself a distraction) art seems to be rooted in the formlessness of the YBA generation, poking fun at the contemporary world, but also raising the political temperature of a sometimes apolitical generation. The bric-a-brac sculptures and bright painted signs and statements that dominate his work in the Gallery, seem out of place far from the shallow day-glo glare of Hoxton or wherever. This is an overly knowing art, that perhaps works best when it works in conjunction. "The Life of the Mind" takes on the lives of the Garmans and Epsteins sculptures of his daughter Esther, and tries to make connections between artistic and everyday lives, between facile objects and gallery exhibits.

On Saturday, there were a series of accompanying sound and performances taking place in the gallery. With Epstein's sculpture of his daughter Esther looking on, and Bob and Roberta Smith's signpost statements bright and amateurish behind, two young orators tried to outshout each other with monologues, responding to a painting of Valerie Solano's shooting of Andy Warhol, the woman with a SCUM (Society for the Cutting up of Men) and the man with a SCUW (Society for the Cutting up of Women, presumably) t-shirt. In another room a man unwraps chocolates, whilst twisting a Rubik's cube. Walsall, not known for pretension, looked on amused.

There's some good work in the exhibition, and I was particularly pleased to see some photographs by Helen Chadwick as well as her famous "Piss Flowers." Excellent autobiographical pieces by Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin are also there, as the cream of the YBA contribution, and as well as transplanting Epstein's Esther, a Van Gogh sketch is also removed from the permanent collection into this part of the gallery.
It's all good fun, even if it left me feel a little annoyed at the continued jokiness of post-YBA British art. Ostensibly an exhibition about art and life, and how the two collide, Bob and Roberta Smith's seems a particularly inappropriate artist to be able to delve into this subtle relationship. Everything is potentially a joke, or potentially not; and the diversity of the curated pieces seems as child-like as the curator's own kindergarten writings. Not alone amongst contemporary artists in resting heavily on the written word, Bob and Roberta Smith's own words seem more appropriate to the carnival, which his work in the exhibition seems to mirror. Carol Ann Duffy's recent selection at the Tate in Liverpool, in contrast, seems much more considered. Go see, but for the individual pieces, rather than the zany connections.

The bigger picture, I guess, is that Epstein is an artist who already connects in many different ways - through his contemporaries; through his historical antecedents; and through his influence. The Garman-Ryan archive offers much in the way of fascination, but I felt that it was the US art scene of the 80s and 90s, with its frivolity, its chaos, and its crassness, that Bob and Roberta Smith was bringing up here: and there seems little obvious echo of 20th century modernism. I'm not an art historian, but the misunderstanding seems an important, perhaps even a serious one.

Yet, we should revel in this, for where will its like come again? The Bilbao experiment - of art for regeneration has been rolled out substantially throug lottery largesse, so that there are far more impressive gallery spaces in the UK than I can ever remember. Whether its the Baltic, the Tate Modern or the New Art Gallery, these spaces bring out the best in contemporary, historical and touring art. Yet they are part of a powerfully symbiotic creative infrastructure that involves community artists, creative partnerships in schools, visiting shows, artists in residence, and the post-YBA flowering of British art. Yet for all the money on show at Frieze or wherever, for all the graduates pouring out of art schools, for all the artists studios, and expensive art publications, has the last 15 years or so really been a golden age? It feels that the time has passed on again - that there's an internationalism, a globalised art elite now that trots from festival to festival, country to country. The work itself hardly has time to settle, to find roots. Some of these new buildings - and certainly some of the projects that fill them - will no doubt be hit next week by arts council cuts; yet the visual arts has made a brash, loud case for itself, bouyed by free entry, its role in regeneration, and the media interest in everything from the Turner Prize to Banksy.

We have gone beyond the fusty permanent collections of municipal galleries, and indeed, some of these are now being sold off to pay for children's centres and whatever else, to a need for art spaces to be as dynamic as new media, as fast moving as film, as contemporary as the latest Apple advertisement. The need for a permanently revolving series of exhibitions (all free at point of use) is not only an artistically challenging one, but an expensive one. Urbis had no permanent exhibits during its most successful phase, but that creates its own challenges. Contemporary art is verbose, has many voices, and yet one wonders how much of it will survive time's filter? At every auction house there are 19th century landscapes and portrait paintings, only memorable if they accidentally have some connection with a still pivotal figure.

The New Art Gallery, Walsall, exemplary in every way, will no doubt remain a key civic rallying point - on Saturday it was busier than the ICA last time I visited (and with better exhibitions) - but elsewhere, you wonder whether this particular experiment - art as civic enterprise - is nearing its end.

New Formats

2011-03-21T07:06:00.000-07:00

I was fascinated by the news in today's Guardian about "flipbacks" a new book format that you flip from top to bottom rather than side to side, like a shorthand notepad. With thin paper, small pages, its refreshing to find there are some new ideas coming from publishers rather than handwringing about e-books etc. Responding to the recieved wisdom that books are just to big to carry with you (has anyone felt the heft of an iPad?) I had to glance twice at the date to make sure it wasn't a Guardian April fools. (Of course, being the Guardian, it might still be, and their news editor has just "scooped" one of his colleagues.)

Great to get a Guardian story on a slow news day (er...maybe not, there's Japan, there's Libya....) but a Google search tells you that Flipback is a BHS Boys Clothing Brand (something to do with skateboards I imagine), so be interesting to see if they are more than a passing fad.

To ensure a dubious future, Hodder and Stoughton are launching in dead June with a dozen "holiday reads" including the large (but already well-read) "Cloud Atlas" and the short (and slightly holiday-unfriendly) "Misery." I personally love all these kind of things. I still regret not buying some Factory records DATs back in the day years before I got a DAT player (for my own music) - and have recently picked up a few cheap price "film and book" packs, as well as all those little Penguin 60s and the like. We've had colour your own covers of classics, and reissues in hardback of modern classics - so I'm game for a few flipbacks on my shelf.

Surprised that the book industry hasn't followed the record industry in realising that collectibles are the other end of the equation to downloads. The poor quality of contemporary paperbacks - bad binding, cheap covers, and poor paper stock - makes them disposable; and its why I've loved recent hardbacks such as Julian Barnes' Arthur and George or David Mitchell's Thousand Autumns... individual authors like Iain Banks have books reissued in nicely designed "sets" - yet my bookshelves crave a publisher like Penguin or New Directions or Picador where there's such an overwhelming sense of aesthetic, only poetry publishers like Salt and Carcanet, and a few reissue specialists like Hesperus, seem to take this kind of thing seriously.

I reckon I'll buy a Flipback or two out of curiousity, or if not wait till the whole set are on discount at The Works, sometime before Christmas.

Some Things

2011-03-15T12:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a step back in time, as along with JT Welsch I had an opportunity to talk to creative writing students at the University of Manchester, courtesy of John McAuliffe and Vona Groarke. A step back in time, as I was one of the earliest students on the MA in Novel Writing (as it was then) - third or fourth year - with Richard Francis and Michael Schmidt at tutors. The University continued with a creative writing course after they'd gone (respectively to Bath Spa and MMU) but it was a good few years before it reinvented its creative writing provision as the Centre for New Writing. All to the good, and it was nice to be asked back, as with all the glitz of "the Martin Amis years" there sometimes seems a bit of amnesia about the courses that preceded it. We read a couple of poems and talked a bit about our different journeys to being published by Salt.

On Sunday I'd popped to Vintage Village in Stockport, and was pleased to find, amongst the bric a brac and classic clothing, a nice little book stall. I picked up quite a few literary tomes, including a nice catalogue for a sixties exhibition of literary memorabilia. Made me think that we should have a museum of literature somewhere in the country! In these straitened times its unlikely.

Its the start of the competition season, I realised, when I got an email for this year's Manchester Fiction Prize. So popular was the 2009 prize that you'd probably be better off doing the lottery, I guess, but at least prizes concentrate the mind, and there's plenty of time to get your entry in. Disappointingly, for a prize that costs £15 to enter, there's a 3000 word limit. Hey ho, it is what it is.
Anyway, there appear to be a few more homes for short stories than there used to be, if this invaluable list from fellow Salt-y Tania Hershman is anything to go by.

Next week there's a couple of interesting literary events at Anthony Burgess Foundation. Don Bogen and Ian Pople are reading on Monday, and Paul Farley and Micheal Symmons Roberts are reading on Wednesday. More details of each on the Burgess website.

***

When I left Helsinki on Friday morning the news from Japan had not yet come through, and so it was a double shock when I switched on the television back in the UK. Since then, of course, the absolute horror that the country has been facing has grown almost hourly. At times like this, everything else seems to fade into the background, rightly so. You can donate to the Red Cross appeal here.

Message from the Frozen Sea

2011-03-11T09:49:00.000-08:00

A month ago it was minus 20 degrees and even the Finns were complaining. I landed on a misty Tuesday afternoon at Helsinki airport, with snow all around, but the runways and roads clear and the cold no more than a winter day in Manchester. Arriving at Helsinki bus station, there's something subdued and utilitarian about the city around you, near Soviet-style grey blocks, enlivened with a mix of American, German and Finnish brand names. Everywhere in Helsinki is in on itself, a reflection on the long dark winters, with the entrances to buildings hidden away, or anonymous. The city has been built against the weather it seems, double doors everywhere, and even the grand facade of the central railway station only to be entered through wooden doors more appropriate to a Lutheran chapel than a major transport hub.

The second thing I notice about the city, after these cloisters, is the care taken with design. If the buildings from the outside are austere, everything inside is modern, designed, intricate. Finland seems to work like a single organism, that mixes that northern collectivism with an independence of spirit. A couple of times during my visit, for a meeting about "digital clusters", I encountered disagreements between Finns, or someone going the wrong way; there seemed a certain irritation about these things, as if a perfect system had got a minor flaw. Design, I began to see, was the Finnish way of improving the systemic. Imagine, I thought, if England worked well, rather than hardly at all. I think that's why we admire Finland.

For would you live here? At the top end of Europe, nearer St. Petersburg than Paris, with a history that mixes isolation and invasion, and with a language that is by all accounts one of the hardest to learn. On Wednesday I walked through the city, taking the couple of hours of spare time I'd got to orientate myself. The night before the streets had all seemed similar, the maps had been incomprehensible to a pedestrian, and the street names blurred into one; but, with daylight, and a sense of which direction I was going in, the city seemed perfectly well organised. No-one jaywalks, cars stop as soon as you are anywhere near to a zebra crossing, and there's a constant stream of buses, trams and even pedestrians.

Usually you can tell which direction the sea is in, from the colour of the sky, the sound of gulls and the smell of salt air, but here the sky is either a breathtaking blue or a stubborn grey, and the sea offers no clues. Turning a corner the port area is laid out before me, the boats tethered not just to the dock, but to the water itself, a frozen sea, with, in the distance, a brief glimpse of blue open water of slowly encroaching spring.

Finland has a remarkably quiet modernity about it, whilst the city itself looks locked into 20th century austerity. In the hotel, in the city hall, in the airport there is free fast wi-fi, and though the Finnish language remains a hieroglyphic to outsiders, most people speak (and seem happy to speak) English, even their websites being in dual language.

At the old Ford factory on Wednesday night, we are given a presentation on "Helsinki Cruise to the Future" where the city is encouraging the large leisure cruise ships that are a growing part of the city's economy, to disembark more of their passengers. Compared with other destinations Helsinki looks uninviting. Art, culture, shopping, restaurants, leisure activities, and, of course, saunas, are going to be the carrots to encourage the world's wealthy leisure passengers to sample Helsinki. They should do. Beyond its slightly soviet style architecture, and the drabness of the endless winter, is a vibrant hidden town of style, shopping and sophistication. Look closely, and beyond the hats, gloves and overcoats, and the Finns are immaculately dressed; and though I'm sure there are pockets of poverty here as elsewhere, the sense was of a well-behaved, cultured city. Finland's population are growing older, yet unlike some cities, you notice babies being pushed around in prams or on the trams.

The cold means that the public areas aren't the outdoors, the public squares - at least not at this time of year, but in the academic bookstore, a large crowd are stood listening to an in-conversation between a Finnish author and his interviewer. The English language poetry shelves (heavily devoted to American authors, and American editions of European authors like Cafavy or Lorca) are twice the size of those in the Arndale in Manchester. Every restaurant we go into is full; and the food belies the city's isolation, fresh and inventive. Next year Helsinki is European capital of design, and the range of boutiques and shops selling high quality clothes, homewares and furniture is impressive. At a presentation about the programme, there are a few technical teething problems. In the land of Nokia, whoever decided to use an Apple to give the presentations faced that company's universal non-compatibility, and we struggled with videos that didn't start or a slideshow that didn't fit the screen. It was kind of reassuring to know that the Finns can be a little amateurish on occasion. I imagine they're already working out how to fix it, however. A strange, abrupt, and not entirely successful piece of performance art by three young women, going under the name Nutty Tarts, brought that evening's presentations to a slightly perplexing close.

I'd arranged to leave in the early morning, as though flights to and from Manchester are regular, they fall differently on different days. Waking at 5.30pm this morning, I was half regretting not having another day or two here, and thinking that the snowfall from the previous night might have impeded the road to the airport as it surely would have done in the UK. At that time of day, Helsinki shouldn't be up and working, but it already was, and catching the fast shuttle bus directly to a busy airport, and a full plane back to Manchester, I left the city certain I'll be coming back some time.

Generation Gap

2011-03-06T12:07:00.000-08:00

I turned 44 on Friday, which seems, suddenly, to mean something. My forties is speeding by. Whatever it is I need to do, then I'd better start doing it now, or soon. I've not really much a sense of what the "mid forties" should look like anyway. Too old to be a footballer or a rock star; beginning to go grey or bald or whatever else; its a "dad" age; yet I've not got kids. So how do you reinvent this?

Also, the last year or so I'm willing to admit to a generation gap. I'm lucky in that as well as having friends the same age and older than me, I also know people a lot younger. Ten, fifteen, even twenty years hasn't seemed to make that much difference to be honest, I've felt a shared sensibility, however loosely. The ubiquity of the music and other cultural references that I've always liked, has meant that you expect the Cure or Joy Division or Radiohead or whoever to be as familiar (or more familiar) to the average culturally-inclined 20-something as to my own generation.

Because I still listen to chart music, pop music, its here you see a real difference. Listen to contemporary pop (R&B seems so not the right phrase) such as Jessie J, or Far East Movement or Tinchy Strider and it's an entirely different aesthetic; almost totally divorced from the cliches of sixties pop and rock (whether Motown or the Beatles), it seems both technologically futuristic (in its musical soundscapes) and pre-modern at the same time. The songs themselves are simple jingles, reminding me more of Brill Building pop from before the Beatles than the more complex pop of the sixties onwards. We're back to a time of uber-producers and the vocalists being as manufactured as the anodyne pop of the late 50s. It's not necessarily a bad thing; after all the MP3 player and the ringtone are the AM radios of the present - but it does throw away the sixties hegemony, in a way that is something new. I guess the generation of record company executives and producers are now younger than me, growing up in a purely digital age. At the same time, the safety first approach of programmes like "Glee" and the "X-Factor" sees the classic song in the same way as the 50s music store might have done, the version less important than the sheet music (or the Midi file).

But if there's a cultural generation gap then its a complex one; as without having the demographic breakdown to hand, its hard to know who is reading the Stieg Larsson books or watching "The King's Speech" or buying the Adele album or whatever cultural signifier is currently hottest. I guess it's that an ageing population, with two generations of baby boomers now getting older, is also a conformist culture. The success of Adele, whose second album has just sold a million in no time at all, and is top of the UK and US charts is a case in point. On her debut she covered a late Dylan song ("Make you feel my love") and on her new album she does a bossa nova version of the Cure ("Love Song.") What 19 (or 21) year olds are into Dylan and the Cure? Probably the stage school type. And when she sings her instant classic "Someone Like You", its a 21-year old writing a life experience song that seems to belie her young years; except, of course, heartache's particularly acute as a teenager. That it's arrangement and her performance of it are, to these ears, closer to karaoke than to Roberta Flack, is more a criticism of the kind of emotive culture that we have these days, than Adele per se.

Last night I saw "The King's Speech" and like the director's previous film, "The Damned United", it had inch-perfect performances, a solid historical backdrop, and, I have to say, nothing much more profound than that. There's a staginess to "The King's Speech" which is probably appropriate to the thin material, whilst "The Damned United" saw the darkness of David Peace's book replaced by a mix of comedy and pathos. The inimitable Timothy Spall replaces his curmudgeonly Peter Taylor with a jovial Winston Churchill. I found "The King's Speech" slow, sometimes boring, and betraying the director's TV origins. None of this is a surprise of course, but there's also something worryingly revisionist in this story of King George VI. There are few families of whom we know so little, yet have read so much, as the Windsors of course, and like "The Queen" before it, a story is fashioned out of the thinnest of details. Scorsese it is not.

So I'm sat here in the middle of an age that on the one hand seems to have a new cultural language (Jessie J, Tinchy Strider, video games)and feel fascinated, but generationally a world apart; and on the other finds room for such well-made, but highly conservative products as Adele's "Someone Like You" or "The King's Speech." The former are American products filtered through a manic British street mentality; the latter are British staples exported to the U.S. (and the world) with as much success as single malts and Burberry. Thinking of the literary world in this context, World Book Day yesterday was, to those of us who care about literature, as relevant as the Grand National is to racing buffs, a nice idea but for those who ignore it the rest of the year. "One Day", or "The Time Traveller's Wife" or whatever other free books were handed out, are already ubiquitous, and making them available free is all about getting to those people who don't read at all, I guess. Laudable, but hardly going to lead many to a wider appreciation - any more than a visit to see "The King's Speech" will open up a larger audience for British film.

As the world tips on its axis in the Middle East, and our P.R. led coalition government throws our few remaining contemporary civilities in the air in the hope they break into pieces, I'm not sure if the gap I'm feeling is generational, cultural, or emotional. I can, and will (I guess), ignore it, and concentrate on the marginal stuff, that still has more interest to me - but I've always hoped for some reconciliation between my own tastes and interests and that of the wider world; as well as having a horror of the kind of cultural nostalgia that its so easy to fall back on.

Get Shorty

2011-03-04T04:28:00.000-08:00

The Booktrust has provided a well-chosen list of contemporary British short story collections, which shows a healthy appetite for the best books, rather than necessarily the biggest names, with smaller presses Salt, Peepal, Social Disease and Comma all represented. Not much to add to a list that I can heartily recommend - I've several of the books on it, and have earlier excellent collections by Lasdun and Kennedy.

Tomorrow is World Book Day, which is all well and good, and there will be lots of literary events around. Oxfam in Didsbury is handing out a C.J. Sansom medieval mystery and Carol Ann Duffy's "The World's Wife", from about 5pm, but arrive earlier and you'll be able to browse their extensive secondhand collection.

Literary folks should no more be peeved by the mainstream focus of tomorrow's bookfest than racing types should be sniffy about the Grand National. It's not really aimed at us, after all round these parts, every day is World Book Day.

Generation Fill?

2011-02-27T03:24:00.000-08:00

These things come unannounced. An idea in a TV planning meeting perhaps. The BBC seems to have gone overboard on books at the start of 2011, something to "fill" the gaping book-shaped hole in the BBC's cultural coverage. Having missed out on Richard and Judy Book Club, they're clearly trying to make up for last time. The disappointment of clip show Faulks on Fiction now behind us, the next initiative (and that feels like the right word) is for World Book Day, when the Culture Show profiles 12 first time novelists. The Guardian's John Mullan chaired the panel, but is obviously allowed no obvious spoilers, as his piece in the Guardian is more ponderous than that - looking somewhat unevenly at the idea of "literary fiction."

I've no real opinions on the writers on the list, as I've read only one of the books on there (Jen Ashworth's promising and dark-funny debut "A Kind of Intimacy") though I heard Evie Wyld read in Norwich last year. Lee Rourke, Neel Mukherjee, James Scudamore and Catherine O'Flynn are recent new novelists I've read and enjoyed that are not included*, but that will always be the case with lists. The Twitterer who was aghast at the lack of cultural diversity on the list surely has a point, but maybe its just an anomaly of the selection criteria. Hard to know if any of these twelve would feel comfortable with the term "literary fiction" or not.

The Guardian, I seem to remember, did a similar thing a few years ago, and just chose half a dozen "first time" novelists. I can only remember that Gwendoline Riley was one of them, and if the question is "where are they now?" all I can say is that in Gwendoline's case she was sitting having a coffee with a friend in Manchester on Friday lunch time. A 4th novel, one hopes, is on its way.

In other words, its a little TV-led idea that will probably make an interestingly bookish episode of the Culture Show. "People have been talking of "literary fiction" since the 1960s, but it was in the early 80s that it became established" - writes Mullan, and its an absurd assertion, people have been talking about literary fiction for ever (see the Henry James essay that this blog is named after) even if it was not always called that. What he means, I think, is that it was in the 80s that it was necessary to distinguish between literary fiction and "popular fiction." (Its also a very British view, for where are the great late 20th century American novelists in this?). My own view is that distinction is now a little unecessary; there is little taste it seems (from readers or publishers) for books that are deliberately "difficult" or "experimental", or even "serious." Books he mentions, like Ishiguro, Mitchell and Mantell, can of course, be all of these things - yet Mitchell's gloriously readable and elegantly plotted "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" was deemed inaccessible by the Booker judges and others.

Mullan, a good enough literary educator, seems a little out of his depth in casting an eye over the development of literary fiction. His conclusion - that contemporary writers have assimilated literary experiment into their work - I find especially suspect. Contemporary tropes of first person narratives, false endings, and literary pastiche may be du jour, but they also seem far from being only literary ones. That bestseller "Shadow of the Wind" plunders Borges wholesale, after all. And, then again, Mullan also says some of this "crop" of books don't use any literary trickery at all.

There does seem a preponderance of first-person narratives or single character perspectives from the thumbnail sketches of the 12 novels given in the piece, and this might dovetail somewhat with the rise of creative writing courses (and their role in writer's development.) Its not just that first-time writers given themselves a single voice to play with (something I've always found incredibly hard to sustain), but they often put them in impossible situations (they are a child, or imprisoned, or there is an early death); the getting over these formidable obstacles - which most published novels will have to have done (with or without the help of a workshop peer group)- is a kind of literary rite of passage. Next time, you hope the hole you've dug yourself in, is not so deep, not so hard to escape.

I hope the exposure on the culture show helps rather than hinders the dozen novelists on the list; luckily, most writers I meet these days are under no illusions about the marketing requirements of the profession; they will just be happy to be there, its a crowded market after all, and (again an issue), you are only a "new voice" once.

There are, I think a genuine trend or two in contemporary British fiction; I'd describe a kind of neurotic realism, where ordinary people are no longer the protagonists of their own life in the complexities of the modern world, but victims. You see it in Tom McCarthy's "Remainder", Magnus Mill's "Restraint of Beasts", Nicola Barker's "Clear" or David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green", small characters inadvertently swept up in something life changing. The world's depicted are realistic, but somehow turned inside-out, their responses to it neurotic or paranoid. Think of Dave Rudman in Will Self's "The Book of Dave", the young boy in James Scudamore's fabular "The Amnesia Clinic", or the lonely characters of Catherine O'Flynn's "What Was Lost". All contemporary morality tales of a sort. This trend - of personal jeopardy - clearly takes from the psychodramas of early McEwan, but also, I think, from the "personal story" literatures and memoirs that has so frequently been on the bestseller list over the last decade or more, whether misery memoir, or survivor story. Faced with an uncertain world, young (or new) novelists look inwards for their stories, their gaze is on the miniature, rather than the external and all-encompassing.

Back to next week's Culture Show, and I'm sure it will be a well-made and interesting feature. The writers themselves are probably exactly the sort of people you want in the limelight, the couple I've met (and the one's missing from the list that I mention) are articulate, thoughtful and generous, good readers, good writers. Those of us who feared the next literary show would be a kind of Celebrity Lit Idol in Big Brother's Library, can rest a little calmer in our beds. One can't ignore the influence of things like Richard & Judy and book clubs in general on the format of these shows after all; and, with e-readers coming of age, the "click 'n' buy" model of books may require a new form of browsing, different than the few minutes we spend in the bookshop. Writers and publishers will have to find different ways of raising awareness than the pretty cover, or the cover blurb. I enjoy reading first novels for many reasons, not least being invited to meet a new sensibility for the first time, but we shouldn't overestimate their role. A literary culture that only mentions first time novelists on the one hand, and the Rushdie-Amis-McEwan generation on the other, lacks balance.

*I realise a couple of these already have second books out, but still, that just highlights the daftness of this list's criteria.

On Writing

2011-02-23T06:08:00.000-08:00

Robert McCrum's column at the weekend was an interesting one. "Can you teach writing?" he asks. Note he doesn't say "creative writing", and I think it's an interesting distinction. He does mention style guides, and books such as Fowler's English Usage and a new guide from Stanley Fish.

But the main thrust of the piece is how reading the greats can help you with your writing. I'm not sure if he's ever sat in on a creative writing course but certainly at Masters level, I don't think the aim is that you are being "taught writing", though the proliferation of courses these days may mean that there's an element of that. Certainly when I studied on one, there was an expectation that you could already write; the course - workshop led - was more about enabling you to write. I suppose I was quite surprised that there weren't some formal lessons on style and structure, and I'm sure a poetry course would include more of this kind of instruction than a fiction one. However, based within the Academy, creative writing courses are also creative reading courses, and this I found invaluable. We read classic novels, interesting novels, and novels that had recently been successful. Even from bad novels you can learn good lessons.

McCrum's list of good exemplars is a fascinating one, though every writer will have their own. Struggling with a particular issue on my novel, my tutor Richard Francis suggested I read Don DeLillo's "White Noise", and it was a fantastic suggestion. It wouldn't have been appropriate for most of the writers on my course, but that's the beauty of such examples. I'm always a little suspicious of the "extract" school of reading, where an extract from a well-known novel is given as an example of how to do something; writing isn't like quadratic equations where you can remodel based on a particular example - you need to read the whole work, and from that you can take what resonates.

For me, what I learn most from studying novels are more to do with structure and style than particular formal approaches. Fitzgerald remains supreme for me in setting a scene and visualising a world, yet he's not the writer to go to for structure (in a novel), or rather his novels are pieces of experimental architecture, that are not entirely satisfactory - writers who followed his example completed the building. I'm fascinated by more unusual approaches to telling a story. I love how Philip Roth tells the story of Levov the Swede in "American Pastoral" through his regular narrator Zuckerman; reminds me of the Russian doll structure of "Wuthering Heights" with a story within a story. And what about Thornton Wilder's wonderful "Bridges of San Luis Rey" where a series of character stories use a framing device? More recently, Michael Cunningham and David Mitchell have layered their stories deliberately. For short stories, I love the connected collections of Brett Easton Ellis's "The Informers" or Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg Ohio." These are all deliberately structured books, but its fascinating reading more traditional narratives and seeing how the narrative drive takes place. I remember (and would recommend) John Grisham's "The Firm" for not missing a beat. Its interesting reading his earlier "A Time to Kill", how his structure is messier, and hasn't quite got the narrative pace of his breakthrough book. Other books are deliberately slower, sometimes frustratingly so. Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" or Colm Toibin's "Brooklyn" are sometimes glacial in their pace, and rely on the accumulation of detail; the pay-off coming much later in the books. With so many books being published every year, its rare that you come across something entirely new, but the best books, the ones that last, rarely seem to follow a simple template.

Out of Town

2011-02-19T02:42:00.000-08:00

I did my first "out of town" reading on Wednesday with Angela Topping, who organised the night, Blaze, and JT Welsch, in a pub in Northwich. It was a long night as the last train is after 11, and so wasn't home to nearly one. Good to see a cultural evening so well attended. Sometimes in the big city you can get blase about the opportunities. The night after I was at CUBE Gallery for Merzman, and exhibition (also on at Castlefield Gallery, to which I moved later), in response to Kurt Schwitters' concept of the "Merz" (itself a "found" word). Saw a few old friends, and impressed by the turnout at both galleries. There was also a fantastic performance of Schwitters' sound art, by accomplished performer Florian Kaplik. However, the art opening crowd wouldn't shut up for long enough to let the performance continue. That aside, a fascinating evening and good to speak with Ian Hunter, of Littoral arts, who are doing all they can to restore Schwitters' Merzbarn in Cumbria. More details of their projects are here. Over the next 18 months they hope for artists, musicians and writers to be able to visit the Merzbarn.

What do we read about when we read about love?

2011-02-13T01:49:00.000-08:00

A nice quote I picked up yesterday from somewhere (the Guardian?), Kurt Vonnegut said he didn't write about love because it takes over; as in fiction, in real life. Do men even read love stories?

The best love songs are often either the hope of love ("I'm Still Waiting") or its aftermath ("Band of Gold") and its the same in fiction. Feminist critics long ago identified that in the Victorian novel the girl only got the guy at some cost. George Eliot, her own life experience giving her a particular perspective on how low love was valued as a reason for marriage, peoples her books with couples in various degrees of disarray; marriage only ever becoming truly happy when its beyond the pressures and pleasures of youth. Come to think of it, Middlemarch, which is a book about politics and society, is also very much a book about love and marriage. But if they go together like a horse and carriage, the carriage is often rotten and the horse is lame.

The great "love stories" are anything but. Daisy and Gatsby, as told by Fitzgerald, is a story remembered. The re-kindling of the relationship briefly in West Egg is no replacement for the crass riches of the class to which Daisy belongs. Tom and Daisy Buchanan is the "love" that endures...not the other varieties. If men are drawn to love stories its probably those that are heroic in some way. A love that lasts through the years. Yet rarely is there a satisfactory ending. Someone usually has to die, or worse, lacks the courage to come back. No wonder films have been made of "The English Patient", "The Age of Innocence", "Brideshead Revisited" and "The End of the Affair." If movies usually prefer happy endings, in movies the happy ending can be a brief reconciliation. Love has survived, its protagonists will not.

Despite its somewhat purple prose I always liked "The Bridges of Madison County", which again fits into this pattern of love denied. In this case, they part for the sanctity of each other's families. That is the generation that stayed together for the good of the family. Tragedy haunts most fictional love stories, and its there on nearly every page of "Revolutionary Road", a portrait of a marriage that makes "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" look like an advert for Match.com.

You could see this as part of fiction's innate conservatism. In real life people meet, marry, divorce, deal with the multiple families that have resulted, with more decorum than you'll find in any number of Iris Murdoch's. Love, in books, is rarely allowed to fade; in life it can and does. Reality gets in the way. Although novels reflect our world, they also exist in their own world, and this is a compact with the reader which usually requires some sort of resolution. Novels were once all called "romances" after all, and some of that lingers. Impressionable English students are likely to remain a fondness for Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being", for love seems more important under repressive regimes, (and isn't "1984" more of a love story than anything else Orwell ever wrote?)

Women tend to write better about love, and more realistically. I'd recommend Louise Erdrich's "Tales of Burning Love", where four ex-wives accidentally get stuck in a blizzard on the way back from his funeral and tell their stories; or Nicola Barker's "Five Miles from Outer Hope", where an unlikely love blossoms despite the awkwardness of their personalities.

Heroes and Villains

2011-02-12T03:12:00.000-08:00

There is a new BBC show called Faulks on Fiction which looks at the British novel through its characters, heroes, villains etc. Don't let me put you off watching it, but the first episode (Heroes) was one of the laziest pieces of television I've ever seen. Faulks is obviously a bright guy, (with an even brighter shirt), and has sold mountains of books, but really, this was the Ladybird book of the novel made into a film (and I'm being unfair to Ladybird there.) An odd line or two of Defoe or whoever aside it was Faulks in an exotic (or not so exotic) location, with some old film clips. Read the books.

Not that there's anything wrong in concentrating on certain characters - however great novels overturn archetypes not repeat them into cliche. The second episode is on villains, and I imagine Heathcliff* will get a run out. He's a great case in point, because he remains one of the most ambiguous characters in fiction. Loved by teenage girls pining for a dark stranger, whilst being one of the great psychopaths in English fiction. Whereas some dark characters are misunderstood, Heathcliff is rarely viewed with ambiguity. The two halves of the book give us the two Heathcliffs, the abused child, beloved of Cathy, and the pathological adult wreaking revenge on everyone. If the Brontes saw their brother Branwell in Heathcliff and Rochester they are somewhat frightening portraits. Yet, in Heathcliff there is motive, however extreme his revenge; whilst in Rochester we have a weak, broken man, who has made disastrous choices in his life, and hardly deserves the love of Jane Eyre to look after him after he has become blind. The other great man in the Bronte sisters life, their father, outlived all his family, and is a remarkable figure, rising from abject poverty in Ireland, to a position of importance in the Northern English church. As ever, thinking of their great creations, only sends one back to the books, the morality of the Bronte's characters never to be entirely quantified.

* apparently Heathcliff finds it into the "lovers" episode of Faulks on Fiction. My mistake.

Writers and Jobs

2011-02-11T03:04:00.000-08:00

A friend said to me the other night that I was the only published poet he knew who didn't work in academia - and by that, he probably meant in literature/creative writing departments. It made me think: how come so many poets are lecturers and academics? There's clearly a monetary impulse, poetry not exactly being a "give up the day job" type of dream, but there's clearly something else as well. The academy seems to take contemporary poetry (or at least, contemporary poets) more seriously than it does fiction writers. There are plenty of novelists running creative writing courses, but they don't seem to dwell in Academia to the same extent. Perhaps its because writing a novel is as similarly overwhelming as writing a dissertation. (My novel WAS my dissertation.) But beyond that, there seems a disconnect in some ways. The majority of poets I've met aren't particularly interested in fiction (except when they turn to it themselves), and simply don't have an opinion on novels. Novelists read poetry but tend to be bewildered by the scene, sticking to a few poems or poets that they've encountered along the way. Generalisations of course. Perhaps the analytical tools that are used in poetry's construction have something of the same qualities as those used in literary criticism? For my part, I'm very comfortable about writing about fiction - its qualities, its structures, its history, its method - but I'm far more circumspect about poetry. I have opinions, likes and dislikes, rather than certainties - whilst with fiction I feel on solid ground.

Thinking back to when I finished my M.A. in novel writing at Manchester, nobody was in a hurry to offer me a university job (I got one, but in a different department); it was almost as if writing a novel was somehow déclassé. Perhaps if I walked into a university now brandishing "Playing Solitaire for Money" and "Extracts from Levona" I'd be expected to give a weekly course on Milton. It seems unlikely. Thinking about it, I've hardly ever attended anything that could be called a poetry "class", either studying poetry or writing it. That legacy of dull school afternoons takes along time to shake off. Talking about novels, however, I seem to come alive, English literature as social science incorporating politics, history, sociology, economics, philosophy.

Writing can co-exist with other jobs, I've proven that over the years. There's conflicts of time, of course, and as I said in a recent posting, the worry that your imagination is being squeezed into ever tighter corners of your day (and night); but as long as both jobs aren't spent entirely in front of a screen, they can co-exist. Given a choice, I'd probably prefer to teach literature, than creative writing, though to be honest, I don't see that there is that much difference - in my approach at least. You can learn by example; and the best critics I've read have tended to be writers - either in their non-fiction work, or their letters. I was at Anthony Burgess last night For Nicholas Royle meets Nicholas Royle, the first the Manchester-based fiction writer turned academic, the second the Sussex-based academic turned novelist. It was a full, fun evening, but I had to leave early. A less academic discourse I don't think you could have imagined; which again makes me wonder about writers in the academy. And, refuting what I'd earlier said, neither of them is a poet.

Memorable Poetry?

2011-02-05T06:48:00.000-08:00

I've come a little late to Philip Hensher's piece in the Telegraph about the current state of poetry. It's worth reading, for its more nuanced than a summary of it might make out.

In response to the Costa being won again by a poet, (Jo Shapcott's "Of Mutability" following on from Christopher Reid's "A Scattering") he wonders why, when poetry receives praise and profile, it still garners little interest, few sales. He makes the point that whilst Sean O'Brien's "The Drowned Book" won many prizes, (and earned much from those awards), it sold "sod all." Moreover, he makes the point that when poetry is elevated in our discourse, it is for its backstory rather than the words itself. Shapcott's book was written following her cancer treatment, Reid's was an elegy. Its a valid point, but whenever people talk about what poetry is for, then weddings and funerals are often given as an answer. Although he's right that the Booker doesn't tend to be awarded based on a writer's sufferings; perhaps that's the wrong tree he's barking up. The "misery memoir" and its fictional equivalent (and I'd include Anne Enright's dyspeptic "The Gathering" in that list) have been a phenomenon in recent years - with books like "The Lovely Bones" outselling many others. "Poetry as a highly wrought expression of a complex emotion, or as an exquisite opportunity for verbal play and wit, seems to struggle for a readership," and I don't think anyone involced in contemporary poetry would think any different. I'm relaxed about this. We live in a world of films, games, television and the internet, and poetry has to compete with those as well as others. It seems that poetry is addressing issues relating to the environment with vigour; though may find it more difficult to respond to the deficit - after all, poetry has always been more comfortable describing nature than money.

Hensher seems to be struggling with the problem, and I'd say its at least partly because he doesn't seem to be aware (or certainly doesn't mention) many poets other than those, such as Duffy, Armitage and Paterson, who are as famous for their poetic presence as their poetry. You may well find all human life in poetry, but possibly not in any particular poet. Every week it seems that a different poet wins a prize, here or in America, and half the time, they are a name new to me, never mind to the general public. But I'd say the same is true for contemporary art, or theatre.

Although Hensher doesn't seem to be wanting to open a debate on that old chestnut of whether poetry should rhyme or not, the Telegraph readership takes up the cudgel for him. Strangest of all is Sophie Hannah's comment (I'm reliably informed it is the Carcanet poet writing) "Contemporary poetry does not sell because it doesn't offer enough pleasure/enjoyment to the reader. Rhyme and metre - the things that make poetry musical and memorable* are hardly ever used these days in the way that they were by Housman, Larkin, Tennyson, etc, and so much of contemporary poetry does not stick in the mind in the way that pieces of music we love do." *(MY EMPHASIS)

Should poetry stick in the mind? When I think of poetry I love, it is not the simple lyric poem, but the more complex ideas of "The Wasteland" or Ezra Pound's "Cantos". There is nothing wrong with memorising verse, but clearly that though a regular rhyme and metre makes that easier, it doesn't make it better. There are memorable poems by contemporary writers - Ian Duhig's "Fundamentals" or Edwin Morgan's "The Coals", or Luke Kennard's "The Murderer" would be in my list - and probably no less than in previous ages. The dreadful Victoriana that Pound wanted rid of, (which inevitably rhymed, and followed meter) is as unmemorable as a random shard of the least memorable L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet.

To my mind, a poet should be less convinced about their formalism, and more concerned with having something to say. "The Wasteland" remains the most convincing piece of English language art from the devastated world immediately following the First World War, even though it remains notoriously difficult art. Clearly, there was an audience for this great work, at the moment the "audience" for poetry may well be at those times when we need it most, when in love, when we suffer, when we lose someone we care about; the world we live in is unlikey to be so kind as to leave us with only these fundamentals for long. Poetry, will, I have no doubt, respond. And it probably won't be in pentameters.

The Dreaming Imagination

2011-01-28T00:36:00.000-08:00

I've always dreamt, and often remembered the dreams, but recently its been different somehow. My dreams have been more vivid, more detailed, and I've often remembered them - through waking early - in immense detail. Rather than the detritus of the day, or a representation of my worries or anxieties, I'm beginning to think that my creative imagination is increasingly taking place whilst I'm asleep - pushed into that space by the prosaic pressures of every day. As I get older, I get less time, rather than more; things get harder, energy reduces.

Also, recently I've been away quite alot, and being in a different place seems to accentuate the dreaming imagination. The stimuli of new places, but also the attendant pressure on negotiating an unfamiliar space - and sometimes language - seems to make the waking day imagination-free zones, where all my mental abilities are concentrated on the every day. I know I'm not saying anything that many people haven't always faced; particularly parents of young children; but I guess I've always lived my life attempting some kind of psychic balance. I've enjoyed having the day-to-day stability of working, as well as having to; but I've also found at various points that the bit that gets squeezed out is your creativity, your art.

I was speaking to an artist friend in the week and he's recently gone back to working 4 days a week, after managing to get down to 3. And the economic necessity is one thing, but the art is what suffers, falls away. I sometimes think artists should be encouraged to have sabbaticals - three months here, a week there - rather than try and balance the necessary mundaneities of life with a regular "making." Yet our somewhat brutal economic world doesn't often allow that.

So I'm finding myself exhausted. Last week rushing off to Amsterdam with work, next week to Brussels. Such trips are enjoyable, and productive, but they also eat into one's everyday routines, take a chunk out of the week. Life you try and fit in and around things. There's a pay off - there's stimuli in travel, but you need time to reflect, to process. After my reading the week before last, I was mentally and physically exhausted.

My hotel in Amsterdam, Hotel Aalders, was on a street next to the Rijkksmuseum, and made out of two 1904 townhouses, merged into one. There I was on the top floor, and it was only on the second day that I realised there were two staircases in the building, rather than just one with two branches, like some real-life Escher. Amsterdam was wet and grey but grand nonetheless. The elegance of the city's streets always noticeable. Waking in the middle of the night, with rain pouring down outside, I'm not sure if I was a dream I began writing down, or simply an idea that had crystallised. In longhand I must have written between two and three thousand coherent words of a fully formed story before I fell back asleep. In my waking hours, I don't necessarily need to find the imagination to complete it, just the time...

After the Reading

2011-01-22T13:41:00.000-08:00

Reading from our Salt chapbooks on Wednesday at the Anthony Burgess foundation in Manchester, both myself and JT Welsch were overwhelmed by the size of the audience, and their kind appreciation. Poetry works well when it is well presented, and when there's an interest in what's being read - and I hope the evening managed to accomplish those apparently simple, but often difficult to achieve, aims. For every friend who couldn't make it, someone else seemed to turn up in their place, and because our own individual audiences don't crossover that much I hope both of us widened the interest in our poetry. Clare Conlon has kindly written a review of the night on her blog.

In today's Guardian, having awarded the new Picador prize last week to the unknown (to these ears at least), Richard Meier, Don Paterson makes the point that "so well-connected is the community of poets that you're never more than two or three degrees of separation from Seamus Heaney."

The column's important, I think, as one take on the "state of the poetry scene" at the moment - and its interesting that Paterson, both prize winning poet, and one of the gatekeepers, makes the point that middle aged editors are "in danger of publishing only young poets who sound like the now-middle-aged ones they grew up with." Its good that he mentions efforts by Salt and others to "tap into" the grassroots network, and the Picador prize sounds a good attempt to do something similar. It might even be a perfect next step for someone looking to follow up a debut pamphlet!

Reading Reminder

2011-01-17T10:06:00.000-08:00

Just a reminder that I am reading from "Playing Solitaire for Money" along with JT Welsch reading from "Orchids" on Wednesday 19th at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on Cambridge Street in Manchester. Arrive for 6.30pm for a glass of wine and a chance to look at our books - and we'll start reading about quarter to all being well. Not sure of the order yet - we'll decide that on the night! Look forward to seeing old friends and new. More details if you need them here or download the flyer.

The State of the Short Story...

2011-01-09T12:14:00.000-08:00

Reading the 5 stories shortlisted for last year's National Short Story Award, (they can be downloaded here, but you need to buy the book to read them, I have to thank shortlisted author Jon McGregor for the elegant Comma Press book which he gave away in a Twitter competition) it is tempting to read them with an eye on the "state of the short story." I think this would be wrong for two reasons. First, the BBC's involvement must have an impact on the type of stories that make the final shortlist. "Most of us, I think, recognize that a good story is, in part, one that you can hear in your head" says James Naughtie in his introduction. To which one might reply "really?" Certainly all 5 of this year's winners you can imagine making good radio, which is not true of all stories. Secondly, in winnowing down what was probably quite a large shortlist, I imagine that the winning selection are those which are most obviously achieved, and if there's not exactly conformity on the list, neither are they particularly diverse.

Three of these stories, by David Constantine, Aminatta Forna and Sarah Hall are highly specific on their location (the first two even in their respective titles, "Tea at the Midland" and "Haywards Heath") whilst Jon McGregor's and Helen Oyeyemi may not name their locations, but are very firmly placed. Only one of the stories, McGregor's is anything but realist, and his, along with the winner by David Constantine are the only two that are obviously stand-alone pieces - the others could easily be extracts from a longer work. All apart from McGregor's are anecdotal; I don't mean that in a bad way, rather that they are recognisable episodes, in recognisable situations. I thought all but one of the stories would probably have made any longlist that I'd have put together, simply because of the quality of their writing, the fifth was more prosaically written. I can understand why David Constantine's won, as its probably the most contained, possibly the most accomplished of the five, though I found it was also the one story that had definite designs on the reader. In "Tea at the Midland" a couple are having tea at the Midland hotel in Morecambe overlooking surfers in the bay. We are overhearing their conversation. They are having an affair, or rather, this may be the end of the affair. The scenario is a familiar one, there's more than an echo of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", yet I'm not sure I believe in the characters. My favourite of the 5 is probably Sarah Hall's "Butcher's Perfume", a perfectly formed coming-of-age story that embeds its revelation naturally. I should listen to the BBC version, to see if they had to censor its robust language. Aminatta Forna's story, "Haywards Heath" is more a radio play than a story, and indeed was broadcast. She's the one writer I'd not previously heard of from the list. Jon McGregor's "If it keeps on raining" is in a style that would be familiar if you've read his novels, as in those, he carefully unwraps a mystery, never quite giving it all away. It's a delicate high wire act, and perhaps is the only one of the five that hints at the short story as a non-realistic as well as a realistic form, whilst its "block" paragraphs increase the awareness of the story's poetry. Lastly, Helen Oyeyemi's "My Daughter the Racist" is a serious story, set in an unnamed third world country, which nonetheless makes you laugh.

Thinking of recent short stories I've heard or read, there's nothing here as amusing as David Gaffney's Powerpoint stories, or as mystical as Clare Massey's wonderful fairytale, "Feather Girls" , or as pungently raw as Toby Litt's recent Manchester Prize Winner "John and John". Certainly worthy of our attention, and always identifying a well-tuned shortlist, the BBC's national prize isn't - and probably doesn't want to be - the place to go to check the pulse of the British short; but it's a decent enough benchmark for quality, which all writers of short stories would be well advised to read, or at least listen to.