Seasons to be jolly, and otherwise...

It's festival season in Manchester, yet we've too much else to do. I'm "on tour" with work in Bristol, Cambridge and London over the next couple of weeks, so my Manchester International Festival fun has been reduced to Kraftwerk and Steve Reich, and the Procession. Annoyed to have missed the opening of the exhibition tonight - I always bump into old friends at these things - but hope to get to see it later in the week. Whether I find time (or inclination) to catch the Banksy show in Bristol is another matter. There does seem to be an awful lot going on at the moment - and on the one hand I'm a little gutted that I didn't bag tickets for Halle/Elbow and It Felt Like A Kiss, on the other, realise I'd have probably needed to take a fortnight off. After all, last night was also Manchester's Social Media Cafe - relocated to the sauna-like conditions of the BBC bar. The presentations always seem to mould themselves, so there seemed to be good audiences for all three. I enjoyed hearing about social objects and how they are like the periodic table from local web developer @hereinthehive, and hilarity followed through the crowdsourced little movie put together by Maria Ruban, The Joy of Ceefax, and a game of Ceefax Bingo to match. All good, slightly off-kilter fun; and that's the thing, there's a need for some creative, imaginative spaces in the city...

...which possibly explains why I'm feeling a little gloomily seasonal myself. After a couple of fantastic weeks, I've either reached entertainment burn-out, or just a necessary correction - my biorhythms are clearly a little off, as the last couple of days just been feeling a bit gloomy, and tiny little things have annoyed me out of proportion to their importance. It may just be a natural clearing of the airways after all the stimulation, or perhaps I'm just feeling the distance between the mundane and the sublime, both of which are amply to be found in my life at the moment. I get paid for the former, and pay for the latter - which might be better than the other way round, but still leaves one feeling a little like Leonard Bast. Suffering a little bit of ennui, I think, and though there's good ennui and bad ennui, I'm thinking this is the latter, more "what's the point?" than "I don't know what to do next." Perhaps being in other cities may help me get over this, though I kind of think I could probably do with some solitude, rather than stimuli at the moment. There'll be no let up, though, as I'll be back professional Manchestering for the Fall on the 18th July.

Partly I think its again down to the way that there's so much excitement about "all this digital stuff" but the one area I care about, literature, is hardly thinking about it. Notwithstanding the last posting about flarf and conceptual writing, I think the art form stays as it is; books, stories, poems - these are what writers care about, and everything else is a distraction - no different for me, than for John Donne or George Orwell then. If the key element of the Manchester festival this year has seen art break from its normal environments, and alter somewhat the relationship between performer and audience, then its a truly difficult thing for literature to achieve whilst still remaining primarily literature. I've some ideas about how we could do things differently (more in presentation of work than in the work itself), but not even sure where this would fit...more food for thought.

Reflections on Creative Writing

I've been writing for another blog, this week, at New Writing Worlds 09 festival at the UEA in Norwich. There was a 3 day salon with over 40 writers from over the world, as well as a significant number of readings in the city and on campus, much informal discussion and connections made, and on Thursday night, the launch of Norwich's campaign to become the 4th UNESCO city of literature.

My reflections on the salon are linked to below :-

Day 1
Writers and the Labyrinth

Day 2
Writing for Failing Markets

Day 3
Not Just a Different Language

Ideas, we've had a few

On the one hand you could say we live in an age where the "big ideas" are no more, or, at best, are antediluvian (the rise of fundamentalist religion, for instance); but on the other, there's a culture of ideas being thrown around which can only be a good thing. This week alone there's been a number of conferences, in the North West, and elsewhere; and this afternoon, I was reminded of the ongoing intellectual freight of the country, when I was asked to be an observer at a PhD Viva at MMU. I was at a consultation for Manchester's Cornerhouse on Monday; and one of Cornerhouse's aspiration's is to build on its almost accidental role as a "creative hub." It's long been the unofficial capital of Manchester's literary community, as well as housing art gallery, bookshop and cinema. It's interest to surmise whether it is our art galleries and other cultural venues that are returning to a previous role as "salon". Perhaps the rise of the Universities since the 1960s has isolated cultural thought in the ivory towers - and now ideas are beginning to break out again.

Cornerhouse's "The Art of With" debate the week after next, has another contribution, this time from Tom Fleming, called "Embracing the Desire Lines." Things still aren't "open source", of course, but curated, invited, but I'm imagining that the new Cornerhouse - as a hub for ideas as well as art and film - may well need to think on how it might expand on this. Something like n+1's event/pamphlet series would come to mind. Their pamphlet on "A practical avant garde" is one of the most stimulating things I've read over the last few years - and, key to this, I think, brings the "ideas" culture beyond the big think pieces of Charles Leadbetter, Richard Florida, Malcolm Gladwell and others, and into more specific frameworks. It's why the Social Media Cafe in Manchester exists, as well, of course, to not be too prescriptive or "top down." Open source ideas have to come from the left field; from the audience; and - key to that - the participants need to be able to "curate" the ideas, not merely respond.

And I'm always keen to see art find its own place - I should get to Lancaster next week to see my first Litfest event, the launch of their exciting new Flax edition, "The Crowd Without."

Where is the literature?

I was at the Clicks or Mortar? conference at Tyneside Cinema yesterday. The symposium was about the role of venues in the digital age - a dichotomy of "clicks" or "mortar". As often happens at events these days, there's ample representation of the visual and performing arts, and a small, but noticeable gap for literature. Literature, of course, exists, offline, is non venue-based, despite the plethora of festivals and readings these days. That even these can exist in a variety of places - theatres, cafes, bars, bookshops, fields, market places - should offer some lessons about "venue" - but literature remains quiet. More worryingly, as Dick Penny, from Bristol's Watershed (and Dshed digital venue)said "we are living in an audio-visual culture these days." This has some very large implications for literature - because its saying that, since the age of the printing press, since mass education began - the arbiters of our culture have been writers: whether poets, legislators, priests or journalists. If the inevitable consequence of the digital age (and the generation that have grown up only knowing a world with the internet and digital images/sounds) is an ending of that age-of-text then surely we should be worried. At the moment, as I've made the point before, the web remains a text-based medium. Yet a culture of video games, short messages, flashing images, 3D films etc. is sensory - external, all around us. Reading, and writing, require a certain calm, a certain isolation. In this new world, even with our own "bubbles" (ipods, tomtoms etc), where is this calm?

Peter Greenaway was one of the highlights of the day, giving an extensive polemic about the "death of cinema". He made many points, both valid and contentious, but two keys ones sat in my mind. Firstly, that the crowd gathered in the dark in the evening to have a one way experience with the optical illusion of the two hour film on a project screen, is surely now an absurdity - that all those things about the experience are no longer sustainable. Secondly, that if we are now in this audio-visual age, that we have a problem, because we are so visually illiterate. Painting, he contrasted with film, as having thousands of years of history, film has 115 years and it is "over."

There's an irony about all of this of course - in that the disruptive technology of the internet is being adopted by the very things that it is most likely to replace: the BBC, for instance, and, yes, cinemas like the Tyneside and the Cornerhouse. The beautifully restored Tyneside is also highly connected, with good internet access throughout the building that allows things to happen - artistic and otherwise - throughout its diverse physical space. Like the Cornerhouse, it acts as both cinema and art venue - and as Greenaway's presentation makes clear, there is little distinction - amongst artists, at least - between both mediums. However, I'd add that the great wonder of 20th century cinema, like the Victorian novel is both an accidental anomaly that has become its own high-watermark - and something that has, inevitably to change. Theres a confluence took place: of talent, audience,technology and for want of a better word, "timing", that means the motion picture has held us in its thrall for best part of a century. I watch "The Last Picture Show" of "Cinema Paradiso" and I don't recognise that cinema going experience, any more than I would the Saturday matinees or the Drive-ins. My cinema going experience - a flat suburban one, dull Odeons, limited choice - was changed not by the multiplexes, but by the art house cinemas, and, yes, by the choice that the video player and multi-channel viewing (starting with the "option" of Channel 4) gave me. If those "new markets" were themselves made allowable by the success of, "Star Wars" and "Jaws", then so be it.

I think what is intriguing about the "venues" and their management, is that they have an impossible tightrope. Ideally their model should be beginning to fade, with any space becoming a possible replacement for the Cornerhouse or the Watershed. But these venues, holding houses for art, if you like, are culture-shops in many ways. They are in ideal locations, at the heart of a city's young urban cultural life. They are not, noticeably, growing... but neither would you close them down. Their success is of appealing to the young urban consumer. Where they are in the wrong place or have the wrong or even worse, an unclear function (Sheffield's centre for popular music, the first incarnation of Urbis, the Place in West Bromwich) they will fail, and fail again. A conversation was had about turning old Woolworths into cultural venues, but as someone pointed out, the reason that Woolworths failed was because not enough people came through the door.

I've noticed recently - with exhibitions at FACT and the Cornerhouse - that the venue is becoming a constraint on the art in many ways. There's an absurdity about going to a cultural venue, not to look at a painting or see a performance, but to watch a video (particularly when, in that same building there are high quality cinema screens being used to show an Oscar nomination rather than video art), or to hear some sound art. I think new forms of art are exploding from the venue, whether on the internet in the public space, and arts venues and festivals need to see this and replicate it.

Literature, I worry about. It remains mute at these events. Yet, as Peter Greenaway made the point, so much film is just animated stories, books with pictures. The irony is - I've mentioned recently - that writers are sometimes becoming "middlemen" in the cultural value chain, not originators or initiators. Greenaway recently illuminated Rembrandt's The Night Watch, and has turned it into a movie - seeing it as a source material, a visual journalist's account of a murder that has taken place.
Because literature has no venue, because, as well, it is everywhere (or at least, because writing is everywhere), because we no longer venerate the word (the Holy Books, the American constitution) - and may even abuse them instead (Jade Goody, Ashley Cole, because there's a "commercial" literature that dominates and doesn't receive public funding; because writers themselves baulk too much at the idea of art or of originality - all of these make it vulnerable. It has already gone from the centre of the university experience, I think; and there are few writers under 50, here or abroad, that seem to have the cultural heft of their predecessors, still writing deep into the night. We were not always a written culture, not even always an oral one. Did the crowds attending the mummers play or mystery play catch all the words, or simply revel in the physical action, the costumes, the spectacle? Yet there was a story - a telling - and a structure - an ordering - to even those representations. In many ways, a conference like yesterdays highlighted which art forms are most vulnerable in the modern age - and it may well be the representative ones (film or recorded music) rather than the experiential (theatre, dance). Greenaway mentioned that he had been commissioned to make a film by Nokia for its mobile phones - and his work is more likely to be presented, not in a cinema, but as public art, or in a gallery, or for a festival now, than as a conventional film. He is, of course, not the most conventional of film makers. Yet with the Hollywood blockbuster costing so much to make - the odd Slumdog apart - then the representative arts run a great risk. The Guardian yesterday pointed out that the game Guitar Hero has sold nearly as many copies as the best selling album of all time, and in much quicker time.

This recession that gathers around us may not be so bad for art, but it may be disastrous for the commercialising of that art. The refurbished Tyneside is a beauty, a gem, but it is also a living venue, a high church of culture. The audience at the conference was predominantly white and middle-class, the panel's predominantly male. Literature, as always on these occasions appeared absent. I'm hopeful that this absence might simply because literature have sorted it out already (though I know that's not entirely the case), but I also fear that the written word, which underpins so much of our great culture, may be chopped up, mixed up and made incomprehensible or easy to ignore by this newly pervasive multi-sensory audio-visual cultural world. The gatekeepers, whether arts bureaucrats, educators, politicians or Apple and Sony, won't notice till the damage is too far gone. It is the writer, and only the writer, who can continue to insist on his or her relevance.