When I'm feeling dull and stupid...

When I'm feeling dull and stupid (hot weather, a busy week, hayfever) I'm prone to read something anything but. I've been reading some Borges - not just re-reading some of the great stories from "Fictions" but his earliest book, The Universal History of Iniquity, a series of pen-portraits of bad men (and women.) Its rich in everything you want, easy to read, playful, but also focussed, aware of its power. I've always been a bit of a "rationer" of Borges, because every story does have so much in it, you can gorge yourself on it a little bit. Its fascinating reading where he might sit, between Chesterton and gangster movies on the one hand, and Burroughs on the other. Its modern writing, even this far removed, and yet with its libraries, its learning, its great books and its Biblical references its also ancient. Not saying anything that anyone doesn't know - but its good to be reminded.

Mags Thru Doors

Good thing about subscribing to magazines is that its a nice surprise when they arrive. Lamport Court 9 came through the door this morning, and being a Saturday time to read it. When I was its co-editor I think I was always trying to expand both the contributors and the audience - a somewhat thankless task - but now its just got one editor it seems to have settled into having a few regular contributors, a few guests, a few strangers. For those who've not seen it, it's the most unpretentious magazine you can ever see, no letters, reviews or even an editorial (a Kenneth Rexroth poem suffices in this issue). It's a little on the "beat" side of things, now, with a few dips into the avant garde. But poets (and despite there being some fiction, its now mostly a poetry magazine)are given room to breathe. Given my previous posts about finding good poetry hard-to-find it does make you wonder when you read a well-edited magazine, why that is the case. Like a John Peel listener in the age of Wham! and Shakatak, you get the feeling that editors, publishers and the like aren't really doing their job well enough. The real find here is Simon Robson for his superbly realised "My Cleanliness Moron for a Union Rep." The contributor notes only state that Simon Robson "works for the post office." As did Bukowski of course.

And...

One reason given for the Orange Prize was that it would give an opportunity for the type of books that women wrote and read to be valued. Men, it seemed took on big subjects like war, and these were the kind of books that won prizes. Interesting that this year's Orange winner is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with her novel about the Biafran war. Already a bestseller, whatever one thinks of the Orange Prize, its undoubtedly a weighty prize these days, with a highly competitive shortlist.

Having a conversation with someone last night I started talking about a couple of interesting issues. Firstly, under the guises of "simplifying" our communication large corporations are increasingly looking at "controlling" how we contact each other in a work context - e.g. through all our phone/email numbers being centrally managed and being rung/sent simultaneously, and connecting us to whichever one we pick up first. I can see why corporates would want such a level of control, but I think we'll resist it. Increasingly our identity is becoming a precious commodity which we choose how we "distribute" - different emails/numbers for different purposes. Personalisation when it is mentioned by the corporates means selling to us personally - for us, I think its about choosing how our identity is communicated to. We can give permission - but also remove permission. But linked to this, I realised that for all the talk about "globalisation" and the speed at which the internet allows messages to be passed around, in an organisation or a community the knowledge is held, not at the centre but at the edges - and those of us on the edges are rich in knowledge BECAUSE we make connections with other communities. Therefore, in literature terms, probably the publishers (see post below on poetry) or critics or editors are actually a long, long way from the richest nodes of knowledge. I need to think about this more - and sure there's probably a "term" for it - but I think its true. True decentralisation is like during the Fall of Rome - the centre no longer holds.

What happened to poetry?

Baroque in Hackney's post about a new "poetry war" (between the young and the old) made me think that in the last few months, blinking, or not taking notice, or something like that, I've somehow lost sight of poetry. Not my own, (its mostly shy, but not extinct), but other peoples. Perhaps I've just disengaged again - but, on the other hand, what is there to engage me? Is it just that poetry only comes alive in the autumn - with festivals and prizes - or is that there's nothing particular interesting happening out there anyway? The magazines seem to be the same as they've always been. Local upstarts like Lamport Court and Parameter have new issues out but the poetry scene has a familiar look to it, The North, Poetry Review, PNR, Poetry London, Ambit et al, with, inevitably some (or alot) of familiar names. Poetry Review under Potts and Herd was an interesting beast, but under Fiona Sampson, I don't know, it seems to have reverted to its usual eclectic but non-polemical past, unthreatening to a dowager in Devon or a schoolteacher in Swindon. As Katy says in that Baroque in Hackney piece, she's not hearing anything particular interesting on (or under) the grapevine, and I doubt that she will in the near future. Too many poets perhaps, who'd become part of the education system over the last decade, probably frightened to death at across-the-board Arts Council cuts? (And nothing rhymes with "Olympics" anyway.) As she adds in the comments, those young firebrands of the past didn't just snap away at the heels of older poets, but compete, threaten, dominate, kill... The Faber-Carcanet-Bloodaxe axis is still there, but older, not necessarily wiser - and despite valiant work from Salt, and some others - Seren perhaps - it's not like there's anyone finding diamonds in the mine (and when they do, Daljit Nagra perhaps, he's on a transfer to ChelseaFaber FC before you can say broken pentameter.) I'm not sure that poetry MAs at universities have had quite the same impact as Oxbridge magazines and old boys' networks. Also, perhaps as female poets have rightly gained more of the audience (and become more of the audience), perhaps a whole different set of conventions have grown up. I'll be honest here, there's quite a few female poets, Carole Ann Duffy for instance, who I can admire, but don't really interest me with either their subject or language. This surprises me, I guess, in that I don't really believe in a feminised poetry as being gender-specific in any real way; yet there's clearly some connections between (some) female poets and some female audiences. (Yes, there might be the same man-to-man, but I don't think its necessarily so eyeball-to-eyeball.) More vitally, I think, where are the contemporary poets - male or female - who reject that easy audience? I stopped performing poetry live in no small part because I began writing poems that could get a laugh, could be easily read live. I still value the "voicing" experience that reading poetry live can give the poetry, but reading poetry live is different than a live poetry reading. All to say, in other words, is there someone there I'd get out of bed to see - who would be worth getting out of bed to see? (Or even buy the book...the pamphlet...) I had a feeling a few years ago that we were just in a bit of a dip, where we had decent poets, but of the more reflective variety, now I just wonder if our short attention spans, our performance culture, our litfests and prizes, our internet vagrancy, our regularly funded magazines, our reality TV shows (they're not allowed to take any books into Big Brother! Let them take poetry, I think...what harm would it do?), our veneration of the famous-seamuses and the like, our universal university education and probably a number of other cultural signifiers that I haven't enough E numbers in me to remember have all combined to turn a downturn into a permanent slide. In the future, all poetry will be mediocre. I do hope not.

100,000 words later

I've written over 100,000 words of this blog since August 2005, when I began writing it, which is rather frightening, considering that in that same period I've written perhaps half a dozen stories, and a novella, probably less than half that length. If only you could recycle words and make them into something more useful, like a candle holder from a wine bottle or something similar.

Control/Freedom

A recent (rejected) story came back with the pleasing comment that it showed "incredible control." Yes, I thought, that's what I'm aiming for. Yet, then I thought again, I write because I want some kind of freedom - not knowing where the narrative is going or what it might churn up. Which is it I want then? Control or Freedom? Is it even a choice or an either/or? I can see that Hemingway's stories or Joyce's "The Dead" or "The Great Gatsby" are remarkably controlled, but what of longer pieces? Its the glorious freedom of the language that makes me love "Tender is the Night" whilst I admire "The Great Gatsby." I remember a James Wood essay where he compared the control of (a better) Bellow with the flabby freedom of (a worse) Amis. Yet, his own novel, one would guess suffered from over-control, not enough freedom. Its freedom that I liked in "White Teeth" despite its faults - and yet "Life of Pi", essentially a fable, was baggy with freedom, to its detriment. What is it then? Control implies that the writer knows exactly what they are doing - freedom that they are doing anything they're capable of. Would I rather be someone who exceeds expectations - and talent - but risks falling on my face? or someone who controls every nuance, but fails to let the work breathe. I'd say control makes a good story, and freedom a good novel - but its not that simple - perhaps its that in a novel, a paragraph or a chapter can have as much freedom as you like, but without control, the novel can and will despair the reader. The same writer can do both - Amis is superbly controlled in "Night Train" or "Time's Arrow", yet his preferable writing is the freedom of "Money" and "London Fields." (If I recall, that Woods criticism was about his least successful novel, "The Information".) The best writing will do both - fitting the strategy to the flow of the race - which means control in the sprint of a short story, and periods of both in a marathon like large novel. I've been puzzling about this, and thinking that yes, maybe the answer to this question is important to me...

I Love 1982

I'd not had any great rush to read David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green" since - him being two years younger than me - I had a feeling a book about being an adolescent boy in a small town in the early 80s wasn't exactly going to tell me anything I didn't already know. It's thankfully a little light on period detail - too many ra-ra skirts and rubik's cube and I'd have felt it was trying too hard - whilst far fuller with the remembered detail of everyday life, the what's it like to be a kid. The difference's with now are interesting - TV and video and video games are exotic possibilities only - whilst the kids in the novel are free to wander - only rarely been given a lift somewhere by their parents. School is a battleground, where you have to make sure you don't become one of the stricken, hated by everyone in the school. Mitchell's brilliant on the school hierarchies, and thankfully, and rare in English fiction, its actual a real school, a village comp, where this "fitting in" is all that really matters - not being clever, or good at football or getting on. The more rarified world of the middle classes is more seen in Jason's home life, where his elder sister dates boys with sports cars, and his parents, mired in a crumbling suburban marriage, are willing participants in their own facade. Honestly, I could have written most of the book, so uncannily similar are the school scenes - and in fact I think I did, in two novels I wrote for the Lichfield Prize. Mind, where Mitchell's backdrop is the Falklands War, I wrote about the Queen's Jubilee. With a lead character who is "triple invisible" because of his stammer, because he doesn't want to be bullied, and because his parents are falling apart, we have an observant narrator which is the book's real strength. Although it's about his life, he's neither important or unimportant enough to dominate. Like all of Mitchell's books, theres a sense that this is partially a collection of short stories - and I'm reminded of Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" for its interlinked stories of small town life. There's a fantastical element as well, seen through an adolescent's eyes, still not too grown up to make up stories, which serves the novel well. I'm reminded a little of Kate Atkinson, or even that master of adolescent fiction, Stephen King. What passes for plot is diversionary enough - very much a novel of the provinces - my old tutor Richard Francis would find much he recognises here. Though no tour de force like "Cloud Atlas" there is much to recommend it, yet in some ways it's likeability is perhaps its downfall. Jason so wants to be liked, to fit in, and so does the novel. The plot comes across as a little too pat, the middle England novel of early Kingsley Amis, with small details telegraphed across the pages to link the episodes, and though Mitchell sometimes able to be able to write beautifully and believably about everything, his gypsies are a particularly ripe charicature I could have done without. Its real strength is Jason himself, a sensitive boy on the verge of adolescence, toppling over into it, as the world around him gets increasingly confusing. The book often talks about "truth" and he is a true character; yet the world of Black Swan Green, so typically English, so neither one thing or another (in one telling detail: "Black Swan Green closes on a Saturday afternoon. England clsoes on a Saturday afternoon.), can never be the kind of canvas that might have made a better book. If the "I Love 1982" programmes are about nostalgia, it is this "safety" of the past that comes across as nostalgic in this book. Nobody (that matters) gets hurt. Like Zadie Smith, there seems an unwillingness in Mitchell - or perhaps in his readers - to delve into any real darkness. I recognise that cosiness, since I've used it in my own writing, but I guess what I'm looking for - as reader and writer - IS something darker, is something with a greater truth. There are some good jokes - his dad works for supermarket chain Greenland - and a few anachronisms, (was "a bit gay" really in use as a phrase then to describe things that are weak? Which Roxy Music album was he playing that included "Virginia Plain"? Must have been the TV advertised greatest hits...). I have a feeling this is a book that he had in his locker - even before success - two chapters appeared earlier in Granta and New Writing - so is more a byway than a follow up to "Cloud Atlas." Much to recommend it, but unlikely to blow you away. I love 1982 myself, but mine was a little darker than this. (Worth re-reading Lee Rourke's thoughtful review of it here.)

This book will make your evening

A. M. Homes' "This Book Will Save Your Life" has already made a bit of a splash, a surprise Richard and Judy choice, perhaps, for this established, but ironic American writer. I've always liked her short stories, full of splintered debris, yet with a kernel of real truth. The cover of this new novel is strewn with doughnuts, and it seems not an inappropriate - or inadvertent - symbol. Our "hero", Richard, is a man in his fifties with nothing in his life that is not paid for - his cleaner, his trainer, his nutritionist. The "hole" being his relationship with his apparently callous ex-wife and his son, Ben, who is just coming on a trip across America, to end up in L.A. In a Los Angeles that is both insane, and utterly plausible, a corruscating pain, whilst he's in his apartment is the signal for his life to start filling up again - with the detritus of people and events that he starts to find by simply going out and looking for them. He has been asleep, and opens his eyes to find that the world is raucous, overwhelming, and willing to engage with him. A whole cast of absurd but plausible characters come his way, each in their own way similarly yearning to fill the vast holes in their life. Richard recreates a new family, a new group of friends from nothing - his own wealth, and time on his hands, allowing for this fantastical reconnection. Yet he also needs to relocate, as his own house starts to fall into a hole, a precursor perhaps of L.A.'s inevitable dicing with the San Andreas Fault. Homes is both a true original, and sometimes irrevocably an echo of other writers. There is DeLillo's punchy New York dialogue, discussing everything with a quickfire wit, more Seinfeld in Homes, than Salinger; then there is an echo of Heller's grumpy satire of middle-age, the sardonic "Something Happened", and then again the pathos of Coupland's "Girlfriend in a Coma" - perhaps this books' closest twin - or Easton Ellis at his most flippant. Yet these precursors don't really do justice to her surface level joi de vivre - the "trip" is a vastly enjoyable one, as the insane minutiae of rich (of course) L.A. life is satirised and amplified. Richard - this non-involver - becomes the Good Samaritan, saving lives by chance in a post-Lost American interior. It's a long book though, and once the cast has been assembled, there's a sense of the book itself falling into a hole, as the middle section sags under its peculiarity. Yet as soon as his son arrives, the tone darkens, the plot thickens, and the modus operandi becomes focussed. The last third of the novel is astonishing, a tour de force of chance, serendipidity, hope and regret. Richard's own memory-free past - his own hole - is filled in, and the limp macrobiotic diet he's been existing on gives way to a more doughty doughnut filled existence. It feels like a book that is post-disaster - though the disaster's are personal, never spoken of, again, like Coupland's "Girlfiend in a Coma" - yet the novel also comes to a head. Not to give the game away, the tropes and tricks that have both entertained us, and at some point enraged us, fall by the way side as the bigness and insanity of this vast coastal city takes over. Its a powerful, rollercoaster of a novel, that even at its most infuriating, never fails to entertain - yet Homes is far more than a party trickster. If the "everyman" here is at times a little predictable in his past mistakes, and insecurities, it is his humanity, that in the end gives the novel its humanity and it's not inconsiderable power.

"The Distance Men Need in Their Love"

I'm finding each issue of the American "Poetry" magazine dropping through the letterbox an absolute joy. A reduced price subscription is still available via Ready Steady Book. I subscribed because of the lack of exposure to American poetry; and deciding that in the absence of any "guides" it was probably the easiest way to keep in touch. I was blown away by the opening poem, by a name new to me, Bob Hicok, "O My Pa Pa", a funny poignant poem about how "our fathers have formed a poetry workshop." "I don't know why it's so hard to write a simple and kind poem to my father..." he muses, before ending with that endless imponderable, about "the distance men need in their love." Incredible stuff.

Middle Aged Men (and Younger Women)

Is it just coincidence that the book I'm reading, and the book I've just read are both books about men having a mid-life crisis written by (younger) women? Fiona Campbell's "Death of a Salaryman" follows a "salaryman" who loses his job in contemporary Japan, through a series of episodes where he creates several new lives for himself. Lead character, Kenji, is entirely engaging, and you root for him throughout - even as the rug keeps being pulled from him - sometimes by the world, more often by those close to him, (his very unsympathetic wife, in particular). Like a modern day Candide, whatever befalls him makes him a little stronger, a little more optimistic despite the disasters. In A.M. Homes "This Book Will Save Your Life", the protagonist is older - in his fifties - financially rich beyond his needs, but emotionally poor to an equal degree, a literary equivalent of Bill Murray's unfinished character in "Broken Flowers." Here, the awful wife is (so far) out of picture. It's interesting that as the publishing industry becomes more feminised - predominantly female writers writing for a predominantly female audience - that this literary cross-dressing (and it doesn't go far - both books are 3rd person), is perhaps the more interesting option. Interesting to know what fascination the writers see in such fallible non-alpha males?

Ten Years On

With Tony Blair's expected departure being announced today, I thought I'd dig out the first chapter of my novel "High Wire", which begins on election night 1997 (and finishes 6 months later). This small extract sees the main character, Adam Challis, compelled to go to the Royal Festival Hall to see history in the making, as Blair arrives by helicopter from his constituency. It's a scene I pulled pretty much directly from memory - and wrote it hardly six months after the fact.

The radio was broadcasting from the Royal Festival Hall. Crowds waiting expectantly for the helicopter that was ferrying Tony Blair from Sedgefield to London, anointing Caesar.

'We've just had twenty cars from Millbank booked there,' the driver told him.

'Royal Festival Hall it is,' he told the driver. He stared out the window at London by night, taxis all heading to the river, everyone collecting there. He felt not so much alone as compelled by the mass, ant-driven.

He was on the Waterloo Bridge side, coming up towards the mass that was squeezed in at the front of the Royal Festival Hall. He thought momentarily: they weren't expecting many people, choosing here. He couldn't even see the podium. Around him people stood expectant, drunk, but mostly bored. Strange, at a time like this. He looked at the faces and saw students, tourists, many of them younger than himself, mostly the coming, and he already felt that he belonged to a missing generation. The beards and beer bellies that he remembered from Labour party meetings were curiously absent. He swigged on his blush wine as others shared bottles of champagne, or sipped Hooch slowly. It was like a Techno crowd after the electricity went, some still oblivious, most just stopped, obediently waiting the restart. This mob wasn't going to scream for anything. But that was where he was wrong - there had been the distant whirr of Police choppers inching in and out of the capital, but now the whirring was more insistent, our own Air Force One, and the whoop went up and off. He tried to make his way further into the crowd but he was pushed back, almost angrily, you won't get through mate, there's no room. Now it was a Live Aid crowd, a Billy Graham crowd, fierce, self-protective. He couldn't just stand there rammed in between jostling lines of people, seeing nothing, hearing only the echo. He turned and forced his way angrily out, pushing back the crowd to part them, moving with some force, oblivious to their complaints. He headed out towards Waterloo Bridge trying to find the way back down, past the Hayward and over by M.O.M.I. The numbers here were fewer, everyone who was coming was already here. Why had he even come?

Knob Jokes with Germaine Greer and Sam Mendes

A friend went to Stratford to see King Lear, last week, and mentioned that Germaine Greer was in the front row. She was on her own (Greer, that is), and was apparently looking around all the time, nervously, presumably to make sure that everyone realised that she was Germaine Greer. I said to my friend something I've noticed before, that people who are forever the centre of attention (whether on TV,the guys who stand up and make presentations, or ASBO kids) are almost incapable of just sitting there, being quiet and watching something. So, it probably wasn't a surprise, given her famous person's-ADD, that she gives Lear such a scathing review. It reads like she was always intending to - and, inevitably, to concentrate on one thing, the naked Ian Mckellen. (Which, of course, is probably why the Guardian sent HER to review it in the first place.) My friend thought it was a er...pointless and gratuitous display, and thought that McKellen clearly just gets off on this. Like a reversal of those old Hollywood "no nudity" clauses, it would be, "I'm only doing this if I can get naked," "can't we go for underwear Sir Ian?, or subdued lighting." "Stark bollock, or the deal's off." Thanks to Extras I think we can now believe the worst of every actor and actress and actually be not too far from the truth. However, I also just watched "Jarhead", Sam Mendes film about the first Gulf war (the one after the invasion of Kuwait - we've since renamed the other first Gulf war as the Iran-Iraqui war). Obviously taking a single soldier's view of the conflict - it's from a memoir - is limiting; but how limiting! I tend to like watching war films (and boxing movies and gangster flicks), clearly in some sort of macho over-compensation for my bookishness, (and yes, there's a guy with glasses, who kind of messes up, and writes porno letters for the Major back to his wife back home), but "Jarhead" was very weak. Mendes' direction is his usual mix of competent fluidity, and episodic predictability - Hollywood clearly sees him as a safe pair of hands, he's certainly no auteur - but, in a film with hardly a woman to be seen, being in the US Marines around 1990 clearly involved mainly around making and responding to knob jokes. (In the showers. "Hey, it's like a penis, but smaller.") As my recent novella begins with a man waking up with an erection, perhaps I shouldn't criticise, but it seems the spirit of Donald McGill is alive and well and in a theatre or cinema near you.

Who needs Tromatic Reflexxions?

Of course, there's avant garde and avant garde, and it always seems so much simpler in music. You just order it from Amazon and give it a listen. "Tromatic Reflexxions" by Von Sudenfed may sound like something from a Keston Sutherland poem, but in fact its a collaboration between Mark E. Smith and Mouse on Mars. Mouse on Mark, perhaps. Not heard any of it yet, but it adds to his rich, albeit occasional, series of electronic forays, that has existed both within and outside of the Fall. Interestingly, in the same way that having Harry Potter helped Bloomsbury widen their list, Mark E. Smith is now on the same label, Domino, as the Arctic Monkeys. Perhaps the Fall might end up on this growing mini-major?

So Much Everything

I bumped into the poet Steven Waling last week in the Cornerhouse and he had with him a new book which he's reviewed since on his blog. A handsome affair, "50 Heads" by Tony Trehy is a collection of pieces by the curator of Bury's Text Festival a couple of years ago. At the time he got some considerable press for complaining about how the poetry that is most recognised abroad is ignored at home. What always amuses me about the self-conscious avant garde is how they behave in EXACTLY the same way as they complain about, say, the more mainstream poetry scene. Despite the occasional fights over whether JH Prynne is more important than Carole Ann Duffy, what you see is a ghettoisation on both sides, with not a moment of crossover. Two Bald men fighting over a comb in other words, to nick Borges formulation on the Falklands War. Steven made the valid point that he liked going to avant garde events since it was rate for him not to be the most avant garde person in the room. It mirrors John Burnside's recent horror in Poetry Review at the disdain for American poetry he'd recently come across. For the common reader, and I consider myself one, (for God help someone who hasn't spent their whole life immersed in sub-genre of a particular clique), its clear there's no single anthology of either contemporary British or contemporary American poetry that tries to cover the waterfront. You might be able to dig out something like "Vanishing Points" on the experimental side of things, but we're well overdue a collection, say, of "English Poets born after 1965." Since that would include forty something's like myself in its age range, its likely a whole generation has been missed, or sidelined. Going back to Tony Trehy, I believe that you can only begin to give a value or otherwise to poetry like this, when you put it side by side with both its predecessors, and its opposites. Personally, an avant garde that doesn't engage, enrich or even fight with the mainstream is a self-intended failure, since its only acting within in its own "mainstream." A true avant garde would be rejected by those who have considered themselves avant garde for 30 years or more, as threatening to their little piece of land. That they guard it so carefully, and make it so hard for visitors, means it will eventually face the fate of the Shakers, compromised by the very purity of their beliefs. Just to add, that this isn't an attack on any particular writers, that I felt Trehy did a wonderful job with the Text festival, and that what I'm really asking for is that the diversity of poetry in this country - mainstream, experimental, performance, personal - needs to develop a common respect rather than being always either/or. A couple of nights later, I bumped into John Hall from Citizen 32, laden with the latest issue, complete with Lawrence Ferlinghetti poems in it. Having to get up at the crack of dawn for a 3 hour train journey on the Friday, meant that I couldn't come along to what sounded like a great line-up at the Briton's Protection on Thursday night, with George Wallace and Derry's the Poetry Chicks amongst others.

Skinheads & S***heads

I've read a few of the interviews about the new 80s film "This is England" and I'm not sure whether I'll go and see it. A good review here and elsewhere but I'm a bit alarmed by some of the things Shane Meadows has been saying in interviews. He's talked alot about the original skinheads being anti-racist and into reggae; all true enough; but Meadows was 11 in 1983, and I don't remember any reggae-loving nice skinheads in my part of Staffordshire (he was born up the road in Uttoxeter) by that time. I was 15 at the time, and the skinheads were, without exception, the troublemakers and the terrorisers in school. Seeing Suggs in a Madness video might have seemed harmless enough, but translating his leery cheekiness into playground thuggery, the skins were our schools brooding encapsulation of terror; so I'm always a little uneasy when I hear of anyone glamourising this particular cult. Perhaps if you were in it, it made sense, but outside of it? You had to watch yourself. Last year, I was horrified to find that the BNP polled second - over 700 votes - in the village where I grew up, and with local elections today, I just checked and yet again, the only ward with a BNP candidate in Cannock Chase is my old village, Norton Canes, and sure enough, on the list of "nominees" I recognise one name from my class of '83. Whether or not he was a skinhead then, there was always something wicked in our local woodpile, and I associate the skins with that - not with reggae music and helping old ladies across the road.

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Election update: the BNP fell back into 3rd place in Norton Canes, behind the Conservatives, and the winning Labour party, albeit still with 405 votes. Somewhat less than last year.

Vote Early, Vote Often

Just a reminder that there's a load of election's on Thursday. I've only a vague recollection of where my polling station is, but I'm sure I'll dig out the necessary information at some point tomorrow.

Ambient Electronica for Dummies

A 2nd EP of my new music, "The Secondhand Value of a Download" is now available to download. The result of 3 sessions over the last month or so, it contains 7 predominantly instrumental electronic tracks, which you might like, if you like that kind of thing.

Not recognising Gwendoline

I'd skimmed through yesterday's G2 in the Guardian about 3 times before I realised there was a 2 page interview with Gwendoline Riley about her new novel "Joshua Spassky." Not recognising someone from a picture, may mean its been a while since you've seen them (true), but her hair is darker, and that fools me every time. Though the web article includes the old, old picture. The interview's interesting, as ever, since she's a sparky conversationalist, even if the headline's concentration on graves and Morrissey seems a little out of place. Talking about "Joshua Spassky" she says "it's pretty obvious that the two characters are in love. What is in doubt is: so what?" which in itself makes me want to read it. Given the notoriously short, but never short-changing, nature of her work I was amused to read that she is one of our more "prolific" novelists, her youthful achievements, like Keats, Fitzgerald (or Wayne Rooney), giving her a relatively advanced c.v. Her next book, she says, is exploring misogyny, a subject I've often touched on myself in stories, (I was going to call a novel "The Misogynist" at one point), so I remain intrigued by one of Manchester's (by adoption) most interesting writers, though I'm not sure that next time I see her on the steps of Central Library I'd recognise her.

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Lured here by the Gwendoline Riley piece, you can no doubt find a minute to sign the online petition to support the long-closed "Band on the Wall", in Manchester's regenerated northern quarter, in its quest to reopen.

The Bookerisation of American Fiction

We've long protected our own Booker Prize from America, believing, perhaps rightly, that American novelists would then dominate it. Yet, there's been a strange side effect. America, despite its Pullitzers etc., looks longingly at our Booker. The "type" of novel that has become a "Booker novel" has a certain respectability and seriousness about it, that America seems to respect in the same way it likes our Royal Family. That's my impression, anyhow, given the range of writers who have been picked by Granta for its latest Best Young American Novelists issue. Out in May, according to the Guardian (but already on 3 for 2 in Waterstones, according to me), the short biographies of half a dozen writers that the Guardian mentions seems to indicate that new American writers are increasingly like Booker writers - serious types picking exotic subjects, or other lands or peoples - for their novels. The affluent, educated traveller is a commonplace in Booker lists, (though America so far seems to have resisted that other Booker "lure", "the historical novel")and that's what comes to mind reading about the latest crop. "What leaps out of the new list, as the Granta judges have commented, is a heavy emphasis on things foreign." I would add, that this is not necessarily a good thing. Yes, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and even Bellow wrote about a world outside of America, but it was from an American perspective. In a globalised world, this kind of cultural tourism, though often commercially successful, has yet, in my opinion, to produce a literature as good as the indigenous. And though American writers have always embraced university posts, another British trait seems evident, when you read that "Gabe Hudson shares an office with Edmund White at Princeton, where he teaches creative writing. Joyce Carol Oates has an office over the corridor." Hudson sounds an interesting writer, but Edmund White was one of the judges, and like in Britain, it seems that the established literary tent likes letting a few writers in, in case its tent is blown down by a new wind down the street. I remain highly suspicious of writers who actually feel they fit in with the prevailing winds, rather than railing against them. Though, perhaps, given the iconoclastic urban writing of McInerney and Easton Ellis, the new generation feel more at home with such urbane writers as White and Oates. And its worth repeating, that with its cut off point at under 35, generations aren't what they used to be, from Updike, to McInerney to Foer 9/11 has been an alluring subject.

It's Monday morning and I don't want to go to work...

Perhaps its the early sunshine, but I've been waking earlier and earlier, and even getting some things done before I go to work. Today I'm delaying the Monday start, after all, I'm doing a presentation on webby things at Dukinfield Town Hall later on, so may not make it back to South Manchester tonight (or at all.) I went to see "Sunshine" at the weekend, and enjoyed it. Everything's post-modern these days even when it doesn't want to be, so its easy to criticise its sci-fi by numbers. If you've ever seen "Alien", "Appollo 13" and "Silent Running" and that episode of Dr. Who called "The Satan Pit" you've probably got most of the numbers. Yet, it would be churlish to complain, since it looked beautiful, had a certain can't take the eyes from the screen quality, was undeniably cinematic (perhaps a first for a film supported by the UK Film Council), and did touch on a few larger issues. It was head and shoulders above Boyle and Garland's "The Beach" as well. Next time you look up at the sun, it might send a chill through you, seeing how much we depend on that distant orb. Film, in this sense, is a poor substitute for the other arts, when it comes to wondering about our existence and that sublime body. Worth thinking about next time you start to write a poem - that maybe you've all the budget you need! I was in Waterstones at the weekend and came out without buying a book. Everything was so much more expensive than the internet, unless it was in a 3-for-2. Yet again, I was struck by the poor quality of most mass-produced paperbacks. You might as well buy them as an e-Book if that's the way things are going. Though I did pick up a remaindered biography of Muhammad Ali, which I'm looking forward to.

An artist friend came round, as I said I'd help him with a website for a forthcoming exhibition of his. I was impressed by Wordpress - which I used properly for the first time - but can see that for someone who just wants to "blog", blogger remains the less confusing option.

Going back to the bookshelves at Waterstones, its interesting how many novellas seem around these days. They don't call them that of course, but Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach" and Philip Roth's "Everyman" are not the only short books out there. For such alpha male authors, size, it seems, doesn't really matter.

Death of a Salaryman, Live in London

"Death of a Salaryman" is the first novel by Fiona Campbell, another alumni of the MMU creative writing course. She's doing her first reading from the novel at Vox N Roll, at the Boogaloo Bar in London on Monday 23rd at 8.30.

The Pursuit of Happiness

An old friend comes to stay and reminds me of one or two truly obscure but great records from the past!

Its always the BBC

Its always the BBC that gets the mood wrong, errs on the side of caution, makes the wrong decision. It's hard to find myself on the side of the ill-conceived National Short Story Prize, a beauty contest with predictable contestants, but the news that one of the shortlisted stories, Hanif Kureishi's "Weddings and Beheadings" is not being broadcast because of sensitivity over the kidnapping of the journalist Alan Johnston in Gaza, seems to show, yet again, our national broadcaster is as parochial as a village fete. There is certainly time for some sensitivity, and one can only feel for Johnston's family and friends at this time. Yet, a short story, from a respected writer, written well before this event, and, moreso, in a context that Johnston was well aware of - was perhaps his reason for being where he was - seems a strange lamb to sacrifice. Do you remember before Gulf War I when Massive Attack became Massive and Bomb the Bass were removed from the playlist. The Kureishi story sounds hardly that original (consider the brilliant film "Fifteen Minutes" with its media-obsessed ultraviolence, on television only last week, never mind the photographer in "City of God") but given that every week there are atrocities and kidnappings in Iraq, the "sensitivity" seems misplaced. If the story is good enough to be in contention for winning this prize, then surely it can't be any kind of crass exploitation?

The great thing about Myspace...

...and perhaps the real reason for "social networking" is that you come across things serendipitously that you otherwise wouldn't have done. Therefore, friends round for dinner tonight, Tim's in a band that can be found here, which led me to here, the Manchester Mixtape and CD festival. Wonderful! And it happens without anyone's permission. I'm already itching over the pause button (which would, in itself, be a great name for a song).

PS "Life on Mars" was good as a self-contained episode but bad in its inexcusable playing of fast-and-loose that had come before. It used "The Others" technique at one point, and then turned back on that. It's not the trick endings that bothered me; but you always felt there was a reason that Sam Tyler had been spirited back (indeed, some episodes were particularly focused on this), and yet, unless I missed something, there was no reason. McGuffins all round, in other words.

Avoiding

All day I've been avoiding finding out what happened in "Life on Mars" in the hope that I can watch it a day late on Virgin on demand (not always certain - the last episode of Spooks NEVER appeared on NTL, spooky) and it seems the whole country was talking and writing about it. Let's say John Simms has always been a favourite, who deserves a successful series, and the idea was brilliant - but some of the episodes (particularly the Chorlton sex party one) have been the creakiest of recycled police procedurals. Whatever, as soon as I've finished here, I'll watch the last episode. I've also been avoiding reviews of McEwan's "On Chesil Beach" having read the first few paragraphs in the Observer, I was sure there was something dreadful and frightening about to happen despite the langurous prose. Suddenly read a review, Peter Wild's on Bookmunch and I'm none the wiser, hurrah! though I'm not sure I want to read the book. Wild is right that "Enduring Love" was his breakthrough - if only because it was his first truly successful novel (though I'm rather a fan of the earlier "The Innocent") - McEwan, before then, seemed a writer who was stuck: both in his forensic style, and his buttoned-up subject matter. "Enduring Love" seemed to unbutton him; and he's stayed that way. Yet, I'm not even sure I'm interested anymore. There was hubris in "Enduring Love" (the thriller element, the crutch his novels had previously leant on); but nothing compared with the slight "Amsterdam", the brilliant, but contrived "Atonement" and "Saturday", which was more enduring, than love. We're now in "late" McEwan I think, early being the tense short stories - the terribly stretched novels like "Child in Time" - middle being everything before "Atonement" (his "Birdsong"), and now we're late. He's an audience, and he's a novelist, and now he realises he should bring the two together. I find it hard to agree with Wild's conclusions - though I've not read "On Chesil Beach" yet - that this is a writer peaking; yet his caveat I can't disagree with, that McEwan is part of an old guard.

The web, music and Bonbon Experiment

Though there's a million Myspaces, a million blogs, it's fair to say that the web hasn't yet really delivered as a "content distribution" platform - or rather, it is too intimately wedded to the old ways. The difficulty is, of course, that we're used to getting things for "free" on the web, and yet the old business models remain. We also value what we pay for etc. etc. and the "value" of, say the new Arctic Monkeys song, is far more than anything most of us could dream up for our Myspace. That said, I've been spending much of my time making music recently. From the mid-eighties I would diligently mix my songs down on to cassettes, and maybe make the odd copy here and there (2nd generation, muddy sounding as hell). It was only in 1998 - by which time my music making had reduced to a trickle - that CD-R's meant you could "burn" a CD (at twice normal speed!!!!) and use one of those awful sticky labels to turn into a "proper" CD. Alot of time since has been spent turning my old cassette tapes into slightly less-hissy CDs. Yet, even this has been a slightly messy medium. I guess I've always wanted to make my music available on the web, for anyone who wants it. In the past, this has been "old music" repackaged, but I'm happy to say, the first EP of new material - oh, for years! - is now available to download, including the cover (with lyrics on the back), and, if you so wish you can burn it to a CD or add it to your iPod. "Fall of the Rebel Angels" consists of 4 songs, with 4 demos & alternative versions. The songs are entitled "Narcissus", "Sad Lovers of Twilight", "Fall of the Rebel Angels" and "No". Bonbon Experiment was the name I recorded under years ago, and I've resurrected it for my new tracks. There will be a 2nd EP - this time of instrumental music - available shortly, and I'll occasionally upload test tracks on Myspace. I'd love to see more artists make there work available in this way, but of course I don't get paid - but on the other hand, I doubt it would add up to a hill of beans anyway - and, in case you're wanting to get Girls Aloud to "cover" one of my songs, it is released under a Creative Commons licence.

***

P.S. The EP (Extended Play) is one of my favourite musical storage devices. In the 60s there was even an EP chart pulling together 4 or 5 songs on a 33rpm 7" by bands as popular as the Beatles or Elvis Presley. "Magical Mystery Tour" wonder of wonders was a double EP. I guess the format died about the same time that albums became pillars of wisdom around Sgt. Pepper. It was probably not till punk that you got a real renaissance of the form - something of the DIY ethos, and giving value for money to fans - again, on 7" - what was that one that Motorhead/Girls School did? Or do you remember that "Too Much Too Young" by the Specials was one track on an EP. At the same time, the "maxi single" - 12" singles - was being pioneered in disco, and EPs got a bit of short shrift after that - multiple formats began piling up (see Frankie Goes to Hollywood etc.) - yet the 12" single could sometimes be an EP - bands like Cocteau Twins didn't have a lead track and 3 b-sides, but 4 tracks of equal value. Some of my most prised possessions are early 80s 12" EPs. For new bands without enough songs for an album (and needing a regular income!) the EP offered value for money for fans and a good marker of the band's progress. And the EP sometimes got so long it had to be called a mini album. What was Sisters of Mercy's awesome "The Reptile House" - a long EP or a short album? Multi-formats ruined things of course, but in some ways, the CD single brought back the EP - sometimes in its old format. A band would release a new single and give you 3 of their hits as "presents". I used to scour the b-sides for these little "greatest hits" collections. But the real EP should be something that has a coherence or form to it - several live tracks for instance, or a number of remixes to accompany an album. (Think of A Certain Ratio's "4 from the Floor".) By giving it another title than the lead track, an EP had its own identity. I was pleased when the Arctic Monkeys released there "Who the Fuck are the Arctic Monkeys?" single last year - too many tracks to be a single, too cheap to be an album. An EP then! It seems that in the new download age an EP is the way to go. 79p or so for a single - you're not really going to shell that out again for a b-side or two? But 4 tracks or so for a few pound - now you're talking. My EP is rather long to be a true EP - in fact its probably 2 EPs, the 4 songs, then the 4 remixes, in old money. Yes, those aiming for the charts will surely continue to release singles with a dodgy b-side, a dubious dance mix, and a DVD promo for company, but for the rest of the world - surely the EP's day has come again. I'm beginning to think the Myspace limitation of 4 tracks is actually perfect. Here's the EP for the 21st century, not just a song, not quite an album. Find out if you like us, and, there will be another one along in a few months.

Plays on Words

I was reading in Poetry magazine about a competition for a verse drama, to help revitalise this particular art. I've been quietly interested in this form for a while, perhaps inevitably, as someone who writes poetry and drama, and is consistently interested in narrative. I've been reading Christopher Logue's Homer, Goethe's Faust (in English, Jarrell's version) and keep returning to Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes. It's always the great anomaly of English literature that our preeminent writer, Shakespeare, was a poetic dramatist. Every now and then someone has a go at something - I've been impressed by Simon Armitage's multimedia attempts - and it seems a worthy thing to attempt. I've had a drama idea for several years, which I'll keep for myself for now, which I long ago realised would be best done as a verse drama. I've gone back to my notes, and found that the structure I'd begun in 2004, has a lot going for it. The writing is another thing - but I'm finding it a fascinating challenge, albeit a big one. I think I'll complete the first act and see what comes from that. I do have form here; I wrote one a few years ago, a Mummers style rewriting of a story I'd written, but got somewhat perplexed responses from the playwriting competitions/services I sent it to. Maybe I have to approach this from the poetry end?

Mine's a 99p download

News that EMI are going to ditch DRM (Digital Rights Management) and encode their tracks at a higher bit-rate, but for a cost, reminds me of the old joke about whether you'd have "sex for a million pounds." Ok, if you say yes, we know what you are, now let's negotiate on the price. For the joke is that the music industry does already sell DRM-free digital tracks - they are called CDs. Given that they tend to translate 99p in the UK to 99 cents in the US (twice the price, thank you very much), I'm not sure this is exactly the revolution that will save EMI from the ditch in which its been driving. Let's now talk about price... a £5 back catalogue CD to download with 12 tracks will now cost you £12 from iTunes without a cover or any of that other nice stuff; and that its still in bed with the abysmal Apple doesn't make it any better. I prefer the 20p a track I'm paying with emusic, with no downloads, and a lovely excursion through the backwaters of independently released music. If EMI had any balls it would have made its entire back catalogue available DRM-free either through iTunes or someone else and had differentiated the price as it does in record shops - but totalitarian Apple wouldn't want that either, would it? It's clear that this "model" - higher quality, higher price - is to enable them to sell the Beatles catalogue in a little while, even if this wasn't their announcement today. This is, remember, a last throw of the dice for beleaguered EMI, that they've thrown it so tentatively shows how little faith they have in either their product or consumer. This one will run and run....

That Library Thing

You may notice a little dialogue box to the left with the words "See my books" on it. I've just been having a look at Librarything again, and it seems better than when I first came across it. A chance to catalogue your collection online. I've not done that, not all of it, not yet! But who knows, over time...type Kathy Acker or William Burroughs in the box, for now, and get a sense of what it can do. Neat. I think. Amazing how many books I've got that nobody else has (type in: Icelandic.)

Now Listening

No relation

I've said below that I've lost a bit of faith in Amazon, but I'm beginning to think it's now going slightly insane. (Yes, I know its not a real person, but even websites have personalities). Just look at its latest recommendation...

We've noticed that customers who have expressed interest in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell have also ordered Black Swan Green by D. Mitchell.

How strange, two authors with such a similar name! And so ubiquitous had "Black Swan Green" seemed (though I've not yet read it), that I assumed it had already been released in cheap paperback. £3.99 though; that's ridiculous - they have gone insane.

Reading bad novels

Orange judge Kathryn Hughes makes the point that to get to the good longlist for this year's prize, they first had to wade through too many bad novels. "The rural teacher syndrome" of scarcely concealed autobiography being a particular problem. (Which does make you ask, why do the publishers publish them then?) However, although I can well see that a prize judge might never want to read another bad novel again, I wonder about her point that even bad non-fiction teaches you something; whilst a bad novel feels just like time wasted. Obviously there's different layers of bad; I don't think I would willingly suffer a Reader Digest' condensed version of a Dick Francis novel again; (I was miles from anywhere - there were no other books in the house...), but, and maybe this is my own contrariness, I've often learned more from bad novels than good ones. For a start, as a writer, it makes you want to react against them; and second, there's something about a bad novel that clearly gets the blood running. Successful novels that I've disliked are a particular favourite - nothing would ever get me to read Ondaatje's "Anil's Ghost" or Jane Smiley's "Moo" again, yet I remember hating Carol Shield's "The Stone Diaries" so much that I had to read her equally ghastly "Larry's Party" just to see if I'd got it wrong. Perhaps I've been lucky - and avoiding novels about rural teachers might be where I've got lucky - or, more likely, any fiction has something going for it: the long, hard process of creating it in the first place.

And I was going to abolish them...

They may be unelected twerps, but every now and then the House of Lords comes up with the goods, rejecting the Manchester supercasino (and throwing out the other new casinos to boot.) Its highly likely that this little piece of contentious legislation, having now caused the government such problems, good disappear for good. The spurious arguments about "regeneration" (also, if you remember, Tessa Jowell's justification for any and every overspend on the Olympics) have clearly not worked in this case; since anyone with half a brain would at least question the logic of creating a gambling maelstrom in one of the most socially disadvantaged boroughs in the country.

Under submission

I'm never quite sure what to say about "rejected submissions." It's one of those things I guess. When we were running Lamport Court, because it was mostly poetry, fiction came in but rarely. Most of the things we rejected were obviously wrong for the magazine. What we didn't find was a wealth of good writers out there waiting to be published. Our range wasn't particularly wide, it's true, but the fiction we did publish was generally good, although it took about 5 issues before this was as good as the poetry. There aren't many outlets for fiction, its true, and I've a lot of respect for those literary magazines that trawl through that particular slushpile. Personally, though, it's really hard. I think most of my best writing is in my short stories, but, over the last few years, I'd have found it easier to get into the England team (hey, I'm left-footed), than to get a story published. I've sent a few stories to a particular magazine, and got rejected; but the latest thing I sent, I genuinely class as amongst the finest things I've written. I was giddy with excitement when I got the idea; giddier still when I finished executing it. In this particular case, I've somewhere else lined up to send it, but I think its true that a good story does lose a bit of its lustre when, like a kid at school, its had its confidence undermined a bit. As the writer of it, its very hard to see it for what it is. Publication gives a story justification: proves that "yes, it's a good story."

You Should be Ashamed - in praise of Toyin Agbetu

Is there anything more symbolic, in an event to recognise 200 years of slavery, attended by the main beneficiaries of that, the Queen and her ministers, to see a black man being manhandled away from the event by security guards. Toyin Agbetu, you are my new hero. A brave man in a cowardly world. (Nide handbag by the way.)

Obscurantist Raging

A combination of things. I seem to have quite a kaliedoscope of things flashing by me at the moment and I can only see the flash, not make out the shapes or the colours. People and places, first of all. Went to Lancaster, the city, on Saturday; the university was my alma mater; and though I've been back a couple of times in the last 5 years, this was the first time I've really walked around the city for over a decade. Everything was familiar, but nothing was exact. I walked up the Ashton Memorial, a glorious folly, overlooking the city, and was shocked by how few times - a couple? - I'd done that in my 3 years there. Then today, bumped into 2 people I've not seen for a while, in incongruous but utterly predictable places; a meeting, a bus stop. Yet, whereas I approached Lancaster like an old friend I'd not seen for so long, and could take it all in again, I realise how fragmented my friendships are these days; strangers who briefly become less than that, before, perhaps becoming it again. Yet, I sense other things - sometimes a massive empathy with someone I've only really seen in the street. In our fragmentary life, that's what passes for intimacy, I guess. It seems I'm having a heightened sense of emotions about things, people, places at the moment, in a world that is pragmatically opposed to this. It collapses in on itself. I got home tonight after a tiresome set of work-related annoyances, and the friend at the bus stop; a much-needed Cote du Rhone on getting back home; and the recently downloaded awesomely thrilling visceral punk of Nation of Ulysses' "13 point program to destroy America" seem to have done the bit for me. Anger is an energy, as John Lydon once sung. I was thinking about contemporary writing, and it struck me, as it has before, that we shouldn't limit our "writers" to poets, playwrights and novelists. Any review of British letters since 1980 has to include Richey Edwards, Mark E. Smith, Morrissey and Ian Curtis amongst its poets; screenplays for "Trainspotting", "GBH" and "This Life" amongst its drama; and Steven Bell's "If...", Alan Moore's "Watchman" and "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" amongst its fiction; perhaps Fiona Banner, Damian Hirst and Tracey Emin amongst our avant garde writers. Take the literary artefacts of the last 25 years and its richer if you reach wider. A phenomenal task to think through all that (to watch, and hear all that...) but perhaps the only way to wander beyond the sterility found elsewhere. I'm at that point. Staring down the sterility. I once wrote this lyric whose chorus went "I don't want to be missed by inches," and it took me years to realise what I meant was that I didn't want the measure of my life to be so short, so easily measured. What now then? I see a need for a hyper-realism, a less-than-mundane, a dream of the absurd, and a willingness to burn...

The New McEwan

In a tradition that goes back at least as far as "Enduring Love", Ian McEwan's new novel, "On Chesil Beach" is trailed in the Guardian. How to review the extract? - so just a couple of points. I've felt for a while that McEwan is turning into Iris Murdoch, writing about the lovelives and other detritus of rich folk, and this seems even more in that territory, set on a wedding night in 1962 - pure Murdoch territory (though she was writing it as contemporary fiction then.) Yet, its a worrying model, since at her worst she can seem little more than Mills & Boon with a first class degree, and as we accompany Florence on her wedding night, McEwan duly gives us her "husband's enchanted gaze" - and later he's "nauseous with desire and indecision." You already feel that, pastiche or not, this isn't going to be a typical first night, or a typical marriage, with the husband's violent tendencies already telegraphed. This hidden dread is of course McEwan's primary skill, and the flat, methodical build up of prose detail is how he keeps hiding it; yet the writing in this first piece seems anachronistic, the detail's complacent. I'm only mentioning this because Ellis Sharp has expanded on his piece about the recent Josipovici talk, to speak of how the modern novel doesn't try hard enough. To illustrate this he uses a piece that James Woods did several years ago about "Enduring Love" as being an "efficient fictional engine" not a "true novel." McEwan, I think, has since perfected that engine, yet what I thought was exceptional about "Enduring Love" was that it did take some risks, in its structure, form and content (even its title with its dual meaning, of lasting and suffering.) We will have to wait and see if "On Chesil Beach" is another "efficient fictional engine" - I suspect it will be - but I feel that the more complex structures that McEwan attempted, partially successfully in "Enduring Love" are ones he has since shied away from. Notably, "Enduring Love" missed out the prizes, his work since, safer, less risky, has done far better.

Have I fallen out of love with Amazon?

Given that the online booksellers are seen to "blame" for the fall in High Street book sales, its strange how nobody really talks about the problems they are having. I have to say I've been happy with Amazon as long as I've been using it - and I've stuck with books and CDs rather than buying other things from there - yet, there have been signs over the last year or so that we're not as compatible as we used to be. Some time ago they changed their database and search - I think to be in line with their American site - but something went a bit wrong, and you'd search for, say New Order, and get a list of Bruce Springsteen albums; or, looking down a long list what you wanted was there, but if you typed it in by name it was. Then, there's Supersaver delivery. Over a certain amount, if you go for this option, you can get free delivery. Great. Although it takes longer to arrive, that's not a problem - I've just used it for back catalogue - but of course Amazon has to pay for this somehow, and that's by using a wider range of couriers. So, despite the fact that my address has not changed, and I've had literally hundreds of Amazon parcels make it to my door, the Home Delivery Network, which they were using, returned my order to base with a note that "incorrect address." This is the equivalent of a paper boy going round the corner and dumping his papers, rather than delivering them. And I know what's happened - some address software gets confused because although I live in a flat, the block itself has got a number, not that I know it or its part of my address, but it means that when they ask for your postcode and number their software doesn't register. But, although they got back to my query really quickly, being an automated system, there's not a lot I can do other than reorder the items. Yet, guess what? two of the items have gone up in price since then - one considerably. I noticed this before Xmas, when everything in my "save for later" box went up one week, then after Xmas, went down again. I could reorder but it does seem hard work. Whereas Parcelforce would always leave it at my door or allow easy collection, these new "cheaper" services have so far left me in the lurch, arranging a Saturday morning delivery, or collecting it from the delivery person's house! Its not that it's bad, its just not that convenient. No such thing as a free (lunch) delivery I'm afraid. I'm sanguine about it. I used to love Waterstones before it started treating me like all its other lovers, and though Amazon was a distant relationship I thought we'd never fall out. Never mind, I'm already flirting with download services for music; having occasional triestes with Fopp when I want to get physical; and can't see much wrong with buying direct from publishers for books that I really can't get elsewhere. I'll pay Amazon the proper postage from now on, since like any separation, I like to keep things civilised between us; after all, they used to give me something I couldn't easily get elsewhere. (And, don't tell, but I've been whispering in the ear of Amazon.com for some while yet, something about that American accent, that makes you fall for the transatlantic cousin...)

Thanks Jim Jarmusch

I found the film "Broken Flowers" a little too languid for its own good, but the seventies Ethiopian funk music used on the soundtrack stayed with me , long after the film was forgotten. Amongst the various things on my emusic wants list, waiting for my downloads to refresh, the series of Ethiopiques albums has been a real priority - and having listened to the volume that contains the "Broken Flowers" tracks, I feel like I've just discovered a new obsession. Volume 4, which is full of the music of Mulatu Astatke is destined to dominate my stereo for weeks I think. Utterly remarkable music, exotic, funky, stylish, fervent, freeform, composed; thanks Jim Jarmusch.

Good Things

Its been a goodweek. I enjoyed the Matchbox launch in the darkness of the upstairs room of The Thirsty Scholar, with the trains pelting by overhead as accompaniment to the rhythms of the 2 poets. (See Steven Waling's blog for a fuller review.) There was a good crowd, and the literati were well in evidence, at least the more discerning end of that crowd. Last time I saw something in Thirsty Scholar it was some disturbingly loud post-rock band. The hush of poetry was, I think, better all round. The new Parameter Magazine was hot off the presses - and a good range of material in it on a first sampling. Next literary session is at the Central Library this coming Friday at 1.00, where new Salt authors Neil Campbell and David Gaffney read from their respective new short story collections.

Boxin' Match: Allen Fisher v Scott Thurston

A reminder: this Wednesday, the estimable Matchbox hosts its first "event", not in a matchbox, but in somewhere (slightly) bigger. Allen Fisher and Scott Thurston will be reading at the Thirsty Scholar on Oxford Road in Manchester on Wednesday 21st March at 6.30. And its free. I will get over my allergy to literary events to attend this one, I promise. Elsewhere, Scarecrow has returned from hibernation with an offbeat generation/brutalist online anthology. Here be monsters, methinks. And the equally offbeat, Unquiet Desperation, is expanding into cities in America and elsewhere - distributed free in locations around the world since 2005 - its editor tells me that new editions are sprouting up in various US cities, and wonders why the Americans seem to get it, but the British don't. (See earlier posts about Waterstones etc. for a duh, yeah about that.)

Enduring Modernists

I'm envious of my fellow Brit Lit bloggers who made what sounded like an excellent event in London, with Gabriel Josipovici, entitled "Whatever Happened to Modernism?" Good precis of the event from the Sharp Side and This Space. I went to the V&A's "Modernism" exhibition last year and was interested how modernism has many facets - the V&A, naturally, concentrating on architecture and design, rather than literature, music and painting. This is where the problems lie of course. For on the one hand modernism is a distinct movement at a distinct time, and the modernist impulse, could, one thinks, be seen as being almost entirely related to that time; and that if we are now in a period where none of that impulse or influence is still there - or, if its so dissipated by assimilation - then with time passing that's hardly a surprise. I've written before that I consider "Finnegan's Wake" or "The Making of the Americans" a cul-de-sac from which there is no return; for unlike the visual arts, abstraction in the written arts is almost always a negative. In fact, the best modernist writing would be against abstraction - would be about a determined clarity. That clarity in the visual is about releasing paint from it being a representative art, and making it explicit for its own sake. But just as modernism never really took hold in English architecture, design or painting, it didn't really take hold in English literature either; sometimes for very good political reasons. (In architecture and design the conflation of modernism with a certain type of systemic oppression is where the English, for all our faults, find a distinction - is the modernist impulse illiberal? might be the question that is implicit in an English rejection of it.) But from what I can gather from this lecture - and the comments on it - what is in play now is the issue of artistic complacency, where a form is appropriated without consideration of the birth pains of that form. I suppose the "breaking of the pentameter" of free verse would be a good example; Pound certainly never meant it to mean free, as in without responsibility. Like a Stuckist painter, unable to comprehend that the failure of their argument is not Painting vs. other artforms, a contemporary novelist/short story writer/poet who is simply filling a particularly shaped box (named: novel, poem, story) without considering why that box is in any way appropriate (or not), IS essentially complacent. Importantly, modernist writing is not necessarily better than a non-modernist one; (a minor imagist vs. Tennyson for instance), but the intent will have an effect over time. I wouldn't disagree if it is that Josipovici still thinks that English literature is "narrow, provincial and smug" - though I'd be interested to know how the word "Provincial" is used. It is a long time since British writing has had the confidence of authority (perhaps the sense of a "great" country passing on to its literature), yet I would doubt whether it has ever had a sense of radicalism. Those of us who appreciate its wider merits realise, regrettably, that we're working in an inherently conservative artform. Yet English writing is peculiar as well in that it is not tentative - how can it be? with such a long lineage - and this is where the smugness can come from I think. I was talking with a friend about "On Beauty" by Zadie Smith, and we can neither of us understand the level of acclaim given the book. Whereas its source material, "Howard's End", has a particular historical moment behind its structure, Smith's reworking is merely a convenient trope, no more than "Bridget Jones' Diary" reworking "Pride and Prejudice." Yet, Smith is a writer who certainly appreciates modernism, even if she doesn't aspire to more than its range of ideas. Confidence without responsibility is the often hollow centre of the English novel or poem.

Bookslops

I don't think anyone who reads/buys books regularly will be surprised at the news that Waterstones (aka HMV) has got caught napping by the nation's book/CD buying habits and is having to look at its business again. I used to go to Waterstones all the time, but what would be the point nowadays? An example. Although I'd already bought it from Amazon, when I was in the slick new Arndale Waterstones a week or two ago, I looked through their poetry shelf to see if they had the new Faber collected Louis Macniece. Bear in mind this is a well-reviewed book, by a respected publisher, in the anniversary year of the poet. Nowhere to be seen. But of course, I wasn't surprised, and it hardly mattered, because I'd already got it from Amazon at a discount. This was a book I'd heard about through the usual ways - the books pages of the Times and Guardian (in articles on Macneice rather than a review per se), and which Amazon had kindly pointed me to. Imagine that scenario happening with every other book lover - no wonder Waterstones etc. finds its sales down. HMV would be the same. Whereas I will still make a date with Fopp, because you simply never know what you'll find there (and you always find something), HMV and Waterstones are as dull and predictable as the Tesco vegetable counter. Apparently, Robert Topping, who used to run Waterstones in Manchester in his glory days, is opening a new bookshop in Bath. That will no doubt be worth going to next time you're in that town; whilst I read with interest (albeit with a little amazement, given how complex it used to be to actually buy a book there!) that Foyles is opening a branch at the new St. Pancras. We are, perhaps, developing "Intellectual markets" to join our "Farmers Markets", and the venerable corporates are left to become bookslops, where only the endless mediocre detritus of the mainstream publishing industries will find a ready market.

Outsiders

I'm thoroughly enjoying Colin Wilson's autobiography "Dreaming to Some Purpose." I've never read anything he's written before but he's a very engaging host through England of the 50s and 60s. The 50s London of scarey landladies and clandestine affairs, against a backdrop of little money, and snobbishness against anyone from the provinces is wonderfully evoked. Yet, if in the first few chapters he's living a British "On the Road", sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath, hitchhiking round Paris, the litany of mundane jobs - dishwashing, factory work etc - and the need for a provincial morality and security gives it an entirely different cut. Like other upwardly mobile provincial writers of the 50s, like Burgess and Amis, he's more at home in the British Library than in the literary parties. His candidness is refreshing, and there's a general puzzlement that so many of the people he liked and thought he got on with, so disliked him in return. An incredibly prolific author - there was a bit of a flurry of interest last year on the 50th anniversary of the Outsider - his interests in a certain type of philosophy as well as any sort of ephemara - mean that I'm probably getting the best of him in this book; but so what? It's gripping, gossipy, (meetings with John Braine and Albert Camus are particularly good) self-mythologising, anecdotal, all-over-the-place and good fun. I rarely read of "men of letters" who you'd actually like to meet in the flesh, but you get the feeling that Wilson would be good company.

Five Short Stories

I've read 5 short stories in the last few days. "The Misogamist" by Andre Dubus (from "Finding a Girl in America") was an unsettling story about a soldier at the end of the second world war, and his fiancee waiting for him back home. Unsettling, as always with Dubus, in that you're put straight there in front of the emotions, without more than the vaguest hint of a back story. I then read "Under the Dam" by David Constantine (from the collection of the same name), and was frustrated by its deliberate avoidance of telling. It's a slippery story that I never quite got hold of, though maybe I'll go back to it. Then, China Mieville's "Familiar" and Jonathan Lethem's "The Dystopianist" (both from Conjunctions 39: the New Fabulists.) Both were bravado pieces that left me a little disappointed at the end. Mieville really grabs you from the start, in the nastiest possible way, and like watching something terrible happen, you can't pull your eyes away; but there's perhaps too much "difference" in the story - a witch, an old woman, a familiar - that means you can never rediscover the ground on which the story began. Lethem's is much more humorous - its like something out of "Heroes", the new Sci-Fi Channel series I've been watching, crossed with a bit of Terry Pratchett - but a sloppy ending. Then, from the last Transmission magazine, Rozalinda Buyong's "The Fragrant Farewell". It was strongly written with good characters, but felt it wasn't so much a short story as part of a longer piece. I've loads of short story books/collections/magazines around here, and I think this is the way to approach them; story at a time, dipping in and out.

Beautiful McSweeneys

Unswayed as I have been by recent Mcsweeneys, the latest - issue 22 - is a beautiful gem. In a lovely hardback cover, 3 "mini" books are collected together and held there by magnets. Of course! A selection by the wonderful OuLiPo; stories inspired by a list of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unused story ideas; and most intrigueing of all for McSweeneys, a poetry collection - which, admirably (and somewhat OuLiPo-like) creates "poetry chains" by choosing 10 poems by 10 poets, getting them to choose one of their own poems and then to choose another poet, creating an anthology (keep with me) of 100 poems by 50 poets linked in 10 chains. The sheer beauty of it all is breathtaking, and makes me wonder again, how come the Americans can do this sort of stuff, and we can't? Go on, I'll start...

***

P.S. Appropriate to mention here, Granta's new edition, Best Young American Novelists. I've felt for a while that just as we no longer read fiction in translation, we don't really take much interest in American fiction, and McSweeney's has at least created a reason to. Whether this new list of under 35-year-old writers will do so, is another question. There seem so many interchangeable writers nowadays. There are only 2 of these writers who featured in "The Burned Children of America" anthology a couple of years ago, perhaps on age alone. According to the Guardian lots of these writers haven't written a novel yet, so the whole premise is a bit flakey for a start. (Though I've always loved how Helen Simpson gets on every British list, deservedly, yet still refuses to write a novel!) More flakey, is that "class" is the great unspoken in American literature (and society), yet, at the same time a majority of these writers are "ivy league." Ho hum. I'm concerned now. It's a truth universally acknowledged by parents of a certain financial standing that paying for your kids to get into a posh school/college will give them a bit of a leg up. So, perhaps that's why we've got all these precocious under-35 year olds. That said, as always, I look forward to reading it. Every anthology has its moments.

"This century's biggest art movement: Careerism"

Thanks to the always useful Arts & Letters Daily for highlighting this wonderful article from Dushko Petrovich calling for a practical avant garde. There's little point in me paraphrasing an essay that is so well written, and more importantly, addresses an important point - that whether you use the words "avant garde" or "reactionary", the aim of the game needs to be the same, to identify good work and then find a way of doing it. He takes the simple (but complex) artistic need for a "rectangle" and sketches (he's writing about visual art) its relationship to both past and contemporary art. The avant garde needs to be able to get beyond the word "interesting" and embrace "good", whilst the reactionaries won't get anywhere calling everything they don't understand "bad." For painting, perhaps also for literature, as we see ReadySteadyBook and This Space come out fighting in favour of quality. From National Poetry Day to the national curriculum, through the BBC's "great read" to your average Waterstone's, its not so much a dumbing down that we see, but an anti-intellectualism; a reluctance to envisage that anything that isn't instantly accessible is worth the effort. Its like the whole guilty pleasures thing seems to be a figleaf for those people who are often being paid to be intellectual (e.g. academics, reviewers, columnists) to elevate the mundane, rather than ignore it. I'm a lover of pop culture, whether its music, film or TV, but though I might proclaim greatness for Blondie, Goodfellas and "24", I wouldn't say the same, for, say, Take That, The Phantom Menace and Big Brother. It doesn't make them necessarily bad (though I'll argue with you about that), but it doesn't make them interesting. If all this pop-culture-as-high-art began with the Modern Review, we can probably see now, how ironic we must have been allowing Julie Burchill and Toby Young as our creative czars.

Isn't creativity great?

It's sometimes too easy to forget why you create what you do, why you spend so many hours doing it, trying to get things right. It would be no lie to say that over the last couple of years, I've felt a real tension between having always been creative, and, on the other hand, a reluctance to commit to doing anything. Partly its been time and energy (though I always found it in the past), and partly a genuine sense that I didn't know what I was doing it for anymore (dreams of fame and fortune, if I ever had them had long gone, and the "peer group" that had probably sustained me for a good few years, was looking a little thin on the ground). But also, its partly about what I've been creating. I've always enjoyed writing fiction, and endured writing poetry - the first requiring a different mindset than the latter - even if I take a lot of satisfaction from having continued to do both. I also think I'm a better fiction writer, though, it has to be said, without much evidence either way of late. So last year I finished the first draft of a novella, and wrote a couple of very strong stories, all of which I'm proud of; and collected another group of poems that I'm still wrestling with - uncertain about. But I don't think any of this could be classed as "fun." From when I was about 16 - for at least a decade - my main creative outlet was musical, and recently after a couple of years of doing nothing at all in this area, I decided to have another go. So the last month, any chance I've had, I've set up the new 8-track and started writing/recording a song. The 4 songs I've recorded are all very different, (though not necessarily that different from what I always used to record!), and more than that, I've really enjoyed writing them, singing them, listening to them, and now, putting them on a CD. It's so much fun! Versions of all 4 songs are now on my Myspace, if you're at all interested in this other persona. And it is a persona - since I think what I bring to songwriting is a sense of character, a sense of drama. I'm not trying to write generic songs for James Blunt, but create a little self-contained world in music, similar to what I would do in a story. Got to go, I've got some more recording to do!

A New Centre for New Writing

I was prescient that the University of Manchester would have to up its game a little with the appointment of Martin Amis as a "professor." Here's the meat - they've just advertised a 0.65 post as a Lecturer in Creative Writing to help develop the University's "Centre for New Writing," though at little more than 15k for the privilege, it probably rules out such literary heavyweights as, oh, me! The new centre has 2 other writers alongside Amis, Patricia Duncker, who was at UEA, and Vona Groarke, a poet. I'd not heard of the latter, though she appears to have come through the "irish studies" route, and not read either of them; but Amis apart it seems a quite typical department, probably 3 parts pragmatism to 1 part bohemian. The university will, I'm sure, make money. What interest me more is that use, again, of the term, "New Writing." This follows on from East Anglia's "New Writing Partnership", and, if you go back a bit, the British Council's "New Writing" anthology. When we started "Lamport Court" it was deliberately given a longer title, "Lamport Court New Writing." I felt then, as now, that "new" had 2 meanings -: new as in new voices, and new as in innovative. It's not something you can necessarily create as an editor, but you can foster it. The "new writing" phrase in Academia seems a lot less "new" than that. It's not merely age - Amis and Duncker were born a year either side of 1950 - but a sense that any cultural movement needs a changing-of-the-guard, a kicking over statues, where the previous generation simply don't understand. There's been quite a lot on the blogs recently about the meaning of "literary" - I've always felt the term is self evident - but even in the 20 years since I left university, the counter-cultural novel of the 50s and 60s, whether "Last Exit to Brooklyn", B.S. Johnson, or "The Dharma Bums" has risen in significance, from being seen as maybe something worthy of thematic study ("the beats", "modernism") - and certainly not literary - to being the only literary writing that has lasted. So, here's to new writing! (But not too much of it.)

The Secondhand Value of a Download

A very measured post from Scott Pack on digital downloads, and why he thinks whereas the music industry has seen "revolution" the publishing industry will see "evolution." A couple of points: although I can see that books might come with an "unlock key" so you buy the physical book and perhaps that gives you access to the e-version as well, this sort of hybrid, though good in principal never seems to work in practice, mainly because it tends to be marketing driven - and, actually too costly to maintain beyond the short term. I agree that books, by their very nature, will remain a little immune to being replaced by the download version. I keep asking friends "what's the second hand value of a download?" and the answer, of course, is nothing. The music industry seems a little oblivious to this (but then, it still insists on Digital Rights Management to restrict what you can do with what you've legitimately paid for.) I think - with the whole history of 1st editions, hardbacks, trade paperbacks etc. - this is a genuine loss - and would actually mean there wasn't, in reality, much of a publishing industry left. What intrigues me is whether the Print-on-demand option will create a market for bespoke books. I think the difficulties of doing this at the moment probably mean the answer is "no", but I could easily imagine a Faber or someone else with a good backlist, letting you choose your favourite poems to create your own personalised anthology and letting you pay a premium for it. I could imagine it, but don't think, as yet, there's anything like that level of inventiveness in the industry.

***

I am writing this at the same time as digitising some records - I'm not entirely sure why, but it is oddly satisfying, as one of the comments on Scott's blog makes clear. I use a little piece of software called Polderbits, a Dutch company, which is by far the best and easiest thing I've found for chopping up albums into tracks. I use a little pre-amp that cost me about £50, but I think you can get them from Maplin and places for about half that these days. At the time of writing: I've been listening to New Age Steppers, Royal Trux and the Dream Syndicate.

Ownership of your art

Interesting post from Elizabeth Baines, post-Milan Kundera, about the artist's right to be in control of their work. It should go without saying that this is the case, but I know Elizabeth isn't the only writer I've met who has been advised/forced/encouraged by their intermediaries to change the book. What's astonishing is the extent of that change on some occasions, with editors (or increasingly agents) taking on an "executive producer" role on the novel. I often quote Martin Amis's literary fable "Career Move", since it hits so many of these things straight on. Here, poets are as Hollywood scriptwriters, and the "poem" is the property of a whole army of consultants, specialists, producers and actors. From this, of course, we don't necessarily get great art. Yet, in cinema, the "auteur"-led project has, I'd think, been no better or worse than the studio approach. I was amazed when I found out that Coppola was just a hired hand on the first "Godfather" movie, after many others had been touted - he, of course, with Puzo, made this story, particularly his own - but the film would have been made without him. (Something you couldn't say about Woody Allen's recent "Match Point" for instance.) I don't actually think there's much interest in the artist nowadays - at least not in literature. Writers seem to be increasingly malleable, or, to be more charitable, happy to go along with the realpolitik of their industry. Yet, unlike most other artforms, writers don't actually NEED the other people that might be necessary in music, theatre, cinema etc. In my own occasional jousts with the "real publishing industry" what has always shocked me has been the contrast between their view of the professionalism required in their part of the process, with that of me, as the writer. A writer, I always got the sense, was almost the disposable part. The idea of a personal vision, or an articulation of that, unheard of. In short, I don't think agents, publishers or these other intermediaries trust writers to do their part of the job. Yet ironically it seems the other way round - and that the marketing end of the business often fails to do the very few things that are asked of them. A friend who had an academic book published was perplexed to find that her publisher was asking her where it should be sent. One of the frustrating thing about any job of work is not your own part of the enterprise (which you're usually quite good at) but a sense that you end up doing everyone else's job for them. I can well imagine that a publisher would say that a book didn't sell because it wasn't available in enough shops/or because the cover didn't appeal/or because some piece of marketing didn't come up, and somehow blaming all these things on the author. "Oh, your book didn't sell." Yet look at it the other way - the author has fulfilled their part of the bargain, writing the damn thing. But I do sympathise with the compromises that everyone has to occasionally go through. I was annoyed a few years ago when an editor changed the last couple of lines of a story I'd written, and only told me when they were on the way into print. Annoyed, but not overly bothered - yet had the story been reprinted somewhere I'd have insisted on the original. I tend to write fiction that responds to the "idea" and does that with integrity. Sometimes, this means my short story is actually too long, or my novel is actually too long. If I was Zadie Smith I guess I'd probably be allowed to get away with this (at least the first time!), but as I'm not I'm somehow supposed to write something of a prescribed marketable length. The irony is, that having no publisher to please, I'm surely going to just write what I consider integral to the piece. Decoupled from the publishing world, as I am, the only pressure is the one that comes from inside: to own the piece of work. In this, I'm beginning to think, is where I really am an avant garde writer! Yet I can't help thinking that in a culture where productivity (and over-productivity) comes cheap, this distinction, about what a writer really wants to write, having some moral value, is one that the publishing industry has little interest in, and even less understanding of.

Strange Signs

I took the afternoon off, and found time to go to Paramount books, the secondhand shop on Shude Hill. Like other 2nd hand bookshops I've visited lately, the prices seem to have risen and the range gone down - the unintended consequences of internet selling, I guess. I bought two books, science fiction writer Bob Shaw's "A Wreath of Stars" and Stuart Home's "Tainted Love." Here's from the first page of "A Wreath of Stars" -: "Snook was determined to do much the same thing on his linear course from birth towards death, and - at the age of forty - was well on the way to achieving his aim." And here's the first line of Stuart Home's novel, "when I was 40 I decided I wanted to meet my (m)other." I didn't read either first pages in the shop, just they were books I was interested in having, I checked the price and condition, but that was all. Now what is the likelihood that I could pick up two books, of the many in the shop, which mentioned being "40/forty" on the first page? Never mind that I'm going to be 40 on Sunday. Strange signs indeed - but I always knew that Shude Hill and its bookshops exuded magic, and wrote about it in "The Four Hills of Manchester." That 4 again, as well...