Where is the literature?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Traps

I'm in a writing trap. Or rather I'm in a trap that affects my writing. But I'm not trapped. There's a difference between being trapped, and a trap, of course. Being trapped, implies something psychological, or something malicious that has happened to you. A "trap" though, is no such thing, its something that has a beauty to it, in some ways, a trap is set, it waits there, it has purpose, and, if it's sprung, then there's a sense - from the setter of the trap - of a job well done. And a trap might be beneficial to the victim, you set a trap for an animal that shouldn't be in your house, in order to re-house it, for instance. Anyone who has ever tried to set a physical trap, also knows that the trap mechanism isn't the key - no, it's the bait, it what leads you in. My trap is of that variety, I think. I'm being lead in, by a breadcrumb trail, and then snap, down comes the door, and I wonder how I got in there - and, whether there's a way out. That's how traps work of course, they're not inevitable, they are placed in the way of things, and if you fall into them, sometimes its because of a good reason, because you were too tired, or hadn't been looking where you were going.

I'm not sure I'm being clear, but I'm like a mouse exploring a house, much of my time is spent aimlessly, trying to find my way around - surviving if you like - but mice are curious. They know that others are in the house, and that, if they come into contact with them, then maybe it won't be so good for them. The mouse knows he's not meant to be here, but can't help himself. If you like, I'm looking for the breadcrumb trail, I'm looking for the trap. For a story can be a trap, as can a style. I'm in a trap, even if I'm not yet caught, because the traps are all around. I've sniffed out another breadcrumb trail today - the poetry one - and its as sure as any other going to trap me again. I never learn. Leave the poetry alone! I want to say. Leave the cheese alone! little mouse.

Snap goes the door. And I'm not sure how I get out this time either.

Originality

I've been thinking alot about originality - not just of the "voice" or the "style" of a writer, but of the subject matter. I'm seeing, it seems a tendency for literature to be 3rd or 4th generation. We kind of expect films to be made from books, whether good or bad, but when the books themselves aren't the original idea, but a fictionalising of something else, something that already exists, I'm wondering whether the writer has become a mere middleman (or woman) in our cultural supply chain.

What am I talking about? Well, if "Slumdog Millionaire" takes a novel as its source material, "Q&A", all well good, but "Q&A", of course, takes a TV quiz show, "Who wants to be a millionaire?" as ITS source material. Now, I guess that show is itself not a first-generation format. But its not the only one. Look at these other cultural supply chains... Charlie Brooker's "Dead Set", a recent C4 TV success had two archetypes, Big Brother and Romero's Zombie movies. "Big Brother" of course, takes its name if not its concept from "1984." Orwell's novel, a satire, I know, has, I believe the virtue of originality, one of the reasons it has remained so current, so useful. But Orwell created Room 101 (another TV show)and Big Brother, created and named them. I wonder what happens to a world where all our cultural artefacts are made up of existing ones. Its long been a problem in the art world, even when obviously ironic, like Jeff Koons "Michael Jackson and Bubbles" or Fiona Banner's "Hunt for Red October", and film takes its inspirations wherever it can find them, whether childrens toy ("Transformers") comic book ("The Dark Knight") or fairground ride ("Pirates of the Caribbean.")

Any round up of contemporary literature would find room for a few comic books, if only because in the work of Alan Moore and others, there's a startling originality, even if like all the best storytellers they nod in the direction of other works. What's more worrying is that between the fictionalisations of real life and history that still dominate the fiction lists, and easy-to-sell versions of contemporary life, literature, not pop, has begun to eat itself.

Why the Old Ones are the Best Ones

I am a great fan of Salt Publishing's lovely slim hardbacks, so I'm very tempted by their new range of pocket classics, starting with slim little collections from Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti and John Keats, three of my favourite poets. Although you can easily get a cheap selected or collected, a nice edition is, well...nice. Far better in many ways than those "thrift" editions that sit uncomfortably on my poetry shelves. There's also something to be said for a wise guide through a poet's work; Faber did a similar thing a few years back with memorably results, particularly when extracting from a difficult poet like Pound, or a prolific one like Auden. I get lost in my authoritative Whitman, overwhelmed by my complete Dickinson, and despair at ever finding a decent selected Tennyson or Wordsworth. Not that Bronte, Rossetti or Keats were ever the most prolific - but still, there's a lot to be said for a careful filleting of even their work. Chris Hamilton-Emery who chose the selections finds room for La Belle Dame Sans Merci in the Keats selection, as well as On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, so no complaints from this corner on the selection. It will be interesting to see how wide the selection grows. A lovely Donne, or a careful Herbert perhaps, a pointed Shelley or a brilliant Byron.

Manchester Again

I've been both busy and unwell so don't feel I've done much that's creative at all in the last few weeks. I kickstarted the year very positively, but a few little bad things since then, seem to have taken the wind out of my sails a bit, and a couple of creative rejections, nothing out of the ordinary, have made me question myself more than usual about writing, and literature. There's a surfeit of magazines around these days - the online ones such as the Manchester Review and print ones like Succour and new one Bewilderbliss. Both Succour and Bewilderbliss have a theme (respectively "Fantasies" and "The Guilty") whilst the Manchester Review gives no clues to what it wants. I kind of think that the best road is somewhere in the middle. New magazines, of course, work best when they find their theme - I remembered "Metropolitan" for instance for a certain grittiness, laced with a little of the fantastic, but I'm sure this developed over the issues. The best of my recent stories wouldn't count as a fantasy - though it could pass muster as "the guilty" I guess.

Two Skins for the Contemporary Novel

I have just read "Netherland" by Joseph O'Neill, and so I guess, having previously read Tom McCarthy's "Remainder" I'm now fully qualified to respond to Zadie Smith's New York Review of Books article that compares and contrasts the two. There is much of interest in Smith's article, though it requires quite a bit of unpicking, and I wonder to what extent it has to do with the two books in hand, or whether either of them really has the necessary "heft" to deserve this close analysis. To my mind, they are not so much two paths for the contemporary novel, but rather, different "skins" for the novelist looking to write about contemporary experience. For in both books, there's a sense of early 21st century ennui brought to an absolute pitch. It may well be that the main literary trope of this first decade will turn out to be this ennui, or, perhaps more correctly, a sense of powerlessness. Our characters - whether O'Neill's Dutch commodity analyst, or McCarthy's recipient of an accident payout, are the accidental rich, that could as easily be reality show winners, or winners of the Richard & Judy/Oprah Winfrey bookclub lotteries in other words. It seems that the main distinctions between the two novels aren't as polarised as Smith would have in mind, other than those of nationality and style. For "Netherland" is very much an American novel, in a style that, puffed full of decorative lived-in prose, is almost unfashionable; whilst "Remainder" has the unfussy style that has dominated English writing for half-a-century. Smith mentions Ballard, and there is the same unblinking, unemotional sentences in McCarthy as you'll find in the great dystopianists work.

I'm wondering if what she's identifying here is a clash of styles rather than substances - and one's reminded of her own aborted take on the flashier end of contemporary American fiction, in the first half of the unloved "The Autograph Man." I'd go as far to say that it is the setting that creates the prose; for, reading the first half of "Netherland", I couldn't understand how this masterful writing had been dropped from the Booker longlist - unless, it was just too American. Perhaps that was the case, for in London, O'Neill's prose turns prosaic, no longer elegiac-romantic. It's like, in "Netherland", he's taken a deep breath on New York, and inhaled all its flavours.

I've written a little about "Remainder" before, and though its been an interesting think-piece, Smith's yoking of the two novels, it does seem a little artificial; both in their different ways are novels that are a little attention-seeking, whilst remaining some way from being revolutionary. What I found interesting about "Netherland" was both its centre of influence - it would be a prime suspect in any "all New York novels are indebted to Gatsby" investigation - and its intent. At its heart, its not about Gatsby - here, the vital but vapid Chuck Ramkissoon, but about Carraway - the less interesting narrator, Dutch oil analyst Hans van den Broek; or rather its about both of them, but comes to life through Ramkissoon's exoticism - even if, at its heart, Ramkissoon is just a foil to play opposite Hans, and boy, Hans is a cold fish. His life decisions are baldly existential - or, worse, complacent. Left alone in the New York that he followed his wife Rachel to, after she decides to go home following 9/11, we're given a marriage from a distance - actually, and in time - that it's very hard to care much about. These two rich, but vacant characters deserve each other. There's a self-absorbtion in Hans that is almost Jamesian; and by the end of the novel, it is James, not Fitzgerald who keeps coming to mind, not just the distance of a Strether in "The Ambassadors", but the struggle to give such a character anything of a passion. Though the Twin Towers is touched on with a ferocious delicacy, the homelessness of our modern knowledge workers - the rich, as well as the poor - comes home strongly throughout the novel. Home counties Rachel, and Dutch Hans, at sea in New York, a telling example of the shock to the system that 9/11 presumably still means to inhabitants of that city. I remember being in Manchester during the 1996 bomb, and how close I'd been to be walking in town that morning - over the next six months I shrank away from a city that was half-closed down anyway, and shortly moved to London.

The problem with a novel that's also about a failing marriage is that you have to care about that marriage to make it work. Neither Rachel or Hans seems to, so it makes it difficult for us to. But these problematic sides to "Netherland" shouldn't obscure its power - which is sometimes more painterly, more abstract, even more existential, than a non-realist novel like "Remainder" or Magnus Mills' work. It's evocation of the strangest of subject matters - the immigrant New York cricket scene is not the choice of a writer playing to the gallery - but an immersion in something the writer deeply cares about. Hans, in his time in New York is no longer a Carraway, but that other most rational of Fitzgerald heroes, Dick Diver from "Tender is the Night". Living in the neverland of the Chelsea Hotel, and with nothing other than his work, cricket becomes a therapy, a chance to live without thinking too much about one's own problems. Like in A.M. Homes' "This Book Can Save Your Life" or McInerney's "The Good Life", (the latter, also set in New York after 9/11), "Netherland" is an attempt to give meaning to a character whose life is too comfortable to actually require it.

I'm struck by echoes of my own work, in that a man falling apart when left alone (by a wife who goes to New York for a week) was the theme of my recent novella, and that my 1999 novel "High Wire", ends, as does "Netherland" with a scene of reconciliation on London's South Bank. That novel's faults were surely also of language, of finding a language that could effect the lyricism that O'Neill pinches more easily from the New York Streets, and planting it in the humdrum of modern life.

More than ever, as I said earlier, I feel that a sense of powerlessness, or ennui, is the decades defining literary characteristic.

Last night at the Social Media Cafe

I gave a small presentation last night at the Manchester Social Media Cafe, and really enjoyed it. My talk was a little more philosophical than others so was always likely to be a minority interest, but I sat with half a dozen interesting people in the "boudoir."

I could put all my notes here, but think its better to articulate the positions I took, without, necessarily having a conclusion or solution.

Position 1.

The internet is essentially a text-based medium and therefore remains beholden to the book.

Position 2.

That given this text-based bias, the internet looked to books for inspiration. If I say an "unreliable but reassuring source of information" am I talking about Wikipedia or The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?

Position 3.

Our 18th century novelist wouldn't find the internet so strange. After all, what is Gulliver's Travels other than a platform game? Isn't Gulliver himself Jonathan Swift's avatar?

Position 4.

Modernism is the dominant literary form of the 20th century and is a form that denies the linearity of the Victorian novelist/poet - and therefore is a model for what writing should be on the internet.

Position 5.

Late 20th century fiction tried new forms because the writers were transgressive and felt that the existing forms were too patriarchal, heterocentric, class-based or empire-worshipping.

Position 6.

Writers need to be adaptive, and counter-intuitive, and not accept the norms of the day. In our use of Google or Youtube we are "peasant agriculturalists entering the cities of the future en masse looking for work/fulfilment/life/future and finding only the mass-factories of the industrialists."

All that in 40 minutes, and here is my reading list... vaguely touched on, but worth repeating, nonetheless.

F1. Fantastic Literature

Arabian Nights - trad.
Gullivers Travels - Jonathan Swift
News from Nowhere - William Morris
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Mark Twain
Alice Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
Rime of the Ancient Mariner - S. T. Coleridge
Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott
Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti
First Men in the Moon - H. G. Wells
The Time Machine - H. G. Wells

2. SF

Super-Toys Last All Summer Long - Brian Aldiss
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
How’s the nightlife on Cissalda? - Harlan Ellison
Other Days, Other Eyes - Bob Shaw
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
Minority Report - Philip K. Dick
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Count Zero - William Gibson
The Jerry Cornelius Books - Micheal Moorcock

3. Modernism

An Imagist Anthology - Ezra Pound et al
Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein
The Making of Americans - Gertrude Stein
Ulysses - James Joyce
6 characters in search of an author - Luigi Pirandello

4. Experimental & Transgressive Writing

Dream Songs - John Berryman
The Tennis Court Oath - John Ashbery
Dream of a Common Language - Adrienne Rich
Memoirs of a Survivor - Doris Lessing
The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
Locos - Felipe Alfau
Cities of the Red Night Trilogy - William Burroughs
The Penguin Book of the Beats - Kerouac et al
Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
OuLiPo Compendium - Harry Matthews et al
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
Boy Wonder - James Robert Baker

5. Contemporary Writing

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Specimen Days - Micheal Cunningham
The Age of Wire and String - Ben Marcus
Contraflow on the Superhighway - Richard Price et al
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Solibo Magnificent - Patrick Chamoiseau
Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald
Microserfs - Douglas Coupland
Red Riding Quartet - David Peace
A Crack Up at the Race Riots - Harmony Korine
Whatever - Michel Houellebecq
The Swank Bisexual Bar of Modernity - H.P. Tinker

6. Miscellaneous

The Arcades Project - Walter Benjamin
Pandora’s Handbag - Elizabeth Young
n+1 Symposium: For a Practical Avant Garde- Various
And the Band Played On - Randy Shilts

twitter: @adrianslatcher

From yahoos to Yahoo - from Ulysses to UGC

"From yahoos to Yahoo - from Ulysses to UGC - how experimental and innovative literature offers lessons and pointers to the social media future" is the title of the session I'm leading on Tuesday night at Manchester's latest Social media cafe. It's a think-piece rather than an essay, a lecture or a presentation - since I'm positing a number of ideas, and seeing whether they have any validity; ideas 2.0 in other words. Where has the web come from? Yes, we know the internet began as a futureproof military comms network, but the web, and the services that have been built upon it, have been developed by technologists, for use by all, but with the inspiration of a range of archetypes. Is the web based more in the visions of science fiction writers and other fabulists than we think? Our rich literary history provides us with plenty of archetypes that have been and could be applied to the information age. Yahoo! took its name from "Gulliver's Travels" and fantastical literatures such as this are surely archetypes for every type of platform game or virtual environment. Even more appropriately, the 20th century saw the linear narrative exploded in every direction - and can the word games of Borges, Joyce, Stein and the OuLiPo offer us a key to developing the new media of the next few years? In turn... in a richly complex non-linear digital world, will literature respond to the social media and networking aspects of the web? And how do writers change in an information age, writing direct to screen in a text box... creating the live and changeable multi-author narrative of a Twitter stream...

Rabbit at Rest

So sad to hear that John Updike, the wonderful American novelist and poet has died. Like many of his generation of American novelists, their sheer lifespan almost defies criticism - writers are supposed to write, be successful, be forgotten, and then be remembered again; not to be still writing, creating book after book. I can't pretend to have read more than half a dozen - the wonderful Rabbit novels (particularly the immortal "Rabbit Redux"), the seventies erotica du jour of "Couples", the scabrously funny "Witches of Eastwick", the obvious ones, in other words - but I also love his poetry, it was funny, slight, anecdotal, clever. I hope he's remembered for both. God likes his storytellers, and I think, tonight, he'll be staying up very late.

Sooncoming

Coming Soon :-
No Point in Not Being Friends 7 27th Jan
Edwin Morgan, a Celebration - 30th Jan
Philip Davenport Book Launch - 30th Jan
The Other Room - 4th Feb
Manchester Social Media Cafe - 3rd Feb

See you there...?

New Songs Are Better Than Old Songs

Popular Songs is a new 6-track EP by Bonbon Experiment (AKA Adrian Slatcher) recorded in 2008.

01 A Sad Affair
02 Wonderful Products
03 Big Pink Ship
04 Sympathy for a Drowned World
05 Mariachi of the Mersey
06 Sea Thing

Literary Jealousy

I caught the noir thriller DOA ("Dead on Arrival") last night. Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan star in a fast paced story about a university professor of literature who has been given a slow acting poison, and who spends his final hours unravelling who his own killer is. A remake of a 50s noir, its interesting that in this version it is a tale of literary jealousy that has been implanted in the plot. For Quaid was a hot shot writer who stopped at some point in his success, because of his fear of failure, and in doing so lets down his students, his wife and himself. His faculty colleagues and idolise despise and idolise him - the talent that he had which they haven't got or hope to discover, and his running away from it. Its rare to have a literary theme for a thriller (though Stephen King's "Misery" and "The Dead Zone" have covered it) but I thoroughly enjoyed the film, which is a very creditable noir, touched with now-kitsch 80s fashions (bad hair, "Timbuk 3" playing on stage in a bar). A recent piece by Adam Kirsch in Poetry posited that all writing is competitive, because there's not enough praise to go round; and Malcolm Gladwell's latest book talks at length about whether genius is instant or worked at. Outside of lyric poetry, I think "genius" in writing is a maturing art, despite the occasional young debut that seems to contradict this - after all, the "meat" of a novel is life itself, lived or imagined. We don't live in a time of great prose style, and I wonder if we ever will again?, but where "DOA" does totally get it right is in showing that however we get it, "literary talent" whether worked at, innate, or discovered by bitter chance (Anne Frank's diary for instance...) is something real, that can't be faked. Literary success, well, that's another matter.

The New Genre Writers

I've noticed a new-ish trend, whereby a number of fiction writers, who'd probably have been classed as "literary" writers, if they'd been classed as anything have become genre writers - with series of detective or historical novels, rather than the one-offs they'd previously written. It's interesting...since this particular street used to be one-way in the other direction, with, say, a detective fiction writer trying to drum up interest in a novel that was about something else. Kate Atkinson and Sophie Hannah both seem to have had a new lease of (commercial) life by writing detective fiction series, whilst Suzannah Dunn's latest historical fiction is everywhere at the moment. None of these writers, of course, were writing novels beforehand that were overly literary, but they weren't necessary writing work that was overtly commercial - Atkinson was shortlisted for prizes for her debut "Behind the Scenes at the Museum", Hannah remains an award-winning poet, and Dunn was a lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester for a number of years after I studied there. Of their new direction, I've only read one of Atkinson's (excellent) mystery stories, but I think I'd be more interested, in some way, in their genre novels, than the somewhat undefined novels of their past. There might well be some other examples (and some male examples perhaps? Iain M. Banks's sci-fi or John Banville's pseudonym-using Benjamin Black novels). Genre's never an easy thing to do, and reading Atkinson's "One Good Turn", what I found refreshing - its not so much a detective story, as a puzzle that unveils itself - might be frustrating to a genuine mystery fan, however much of the genre paraphernalia remains. Whether, once embarked on a series, with a well-loved character (or a particular time period in the case of Dunn), these writers will find is as easy to break out of it, remains to be seen - but for the moment, it seems a refreshing development, decent writers writing the kind of books that people want to read. Now what was so hard in that?

New Year, no Revolutions

I'm not a great one for New Year's Resolutions - but this year I'm going to try and do something creative (either making something, or consuming something creative) every day. I'm not exactly going to beat myself up if I miss a day. The main thing is to think creatively, create some creative space - yes, I'm busy, but I'm surely not that busy...

...not sure how I'm doing this week. On Wednesday was in the lovely city of Lancaster, but got back in time to meet up with a few Other Room types, who were out in town. The next Other Room is in February, in its usual place of the Old Abbey Inn. Looking forward to it, as ever. Before then theres the next lit night at the Deaf Institute, which I've kept missing as I always seem to be away. Nice to have a few things in the diary, however vaguely.

I'm not sure if yesterday was creative as such, yet I met up with a friend from my college days in the Cambridge Blue pub just off Mill Road, in Cambridge. We certainly covered plenty of topics throughout the evening - so let's cound that as a yes! And today I'm not only writing my blog, but spent the morning at a seminar about Motion capture for the arts - which was all very exciting, if only to meet a few interesting "hyphenates" (A hyphenate being someone with more than one role - writer-bloggers, musician-academics etc.)

I've got a bit of Work to do at the weekend polishing some writing that I need to send off; so I'm hoping for an early night tonight, and a clear head tomorrow. You never know, it might happen.

2 out of 10 is bad

I was pushed towards the Weblog Awards Lit category by Ready Steady Book, one of the shortlist - and, along with the ever estimable, (but hardly bloggy at all, its a DIGEST) Arts and Letters Daily, the only one on the list I'm a regular visitor to. Both do a really admirable job at pointing me to other stuff, and I'm always grateful, but aren't blogs supposed to be a little more... er... personal.

I looked at the others on the list - clearly put together by a person who never reads blogs, and probably works for a newspaper. The dullest selection of semi-corporate (or wanting to be semi-corporate) properties I've ever read. I'll leave Neil Gaiman and Samuel Pepys out as they're kind of niche rather than general, but the others are so dull, and dullest of the lot was the NY Times "Papercuts." Of the others, Maud Newton can at least write (and read) and I might come back, but otherwise, per-lease. Ready Steady Book as shoe-in, I'm afraid, (and I don't really think, with all due respect, that RSB is really a blog, it just has a blog kind of integrated with its other stuff.)

Yeah, I know I write a literary blog, but its not sour grapes, its just, well, is this the best there is? Of course not - its an old-school type of "prize culture" that's very old media itself. Actually, I'm bored with myself now, already. To quote David Eggars, here's a picture of a stapler.


And given that its the first one off the block in Google images, its probably the most staplingist of staplers ever.

The novel as a filter for history

The last two novels I've read, Philip Hensher's "The Northern Clemency" and Junot Diaz's "Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" both filter the history of our times through their characters. This is not to compare the two novels, which other than being published in 2008, are very different beasts, but to think about this technique. It's not new of course - the novel can always step away from the action of history, or insert an actor into that history. As long as the reader believes in the intervention, then the history can come alive. What interests me is what this does for the novel - in other words, what is the artistic pay off?

I knew very little about the Dominican Republic or the despotic regime of Trujillo, until reading Junot Diaz's novel. His use of footnotes deftly provides a backstory that would probably intrude too much if its in the narrative. Diaz's main technique in this, his debut novel, is to filter the past through a family history. The main character, Oscar, is a fat, unpopular, sci fi geek in America of Dominican Republican extraction. He's the least likely of filters for history, in many ways, and indeed, he's not the narrator, its his only friend, Yunior, who takes on that role, Carraway to his Gatsby! Yet, there's something entirely appropriate - albeit satirical - about seeing the horrors of Dominican life as being almost like an SF/Fantasy world. We see, in Oscar, the end of line, the end of a line of trouble - "Fuku" as Diaz calls the curse that haunts Oscar's family (and is it just "Fuck you" in another language, we are left to wonder...)- yet there's also a sense that despite everything bad that has happened, something can survive, can live, even if its transplanted to an alien soil. The "filter" works; the Trujillo regime, and what follows it, is laid bare as a travesty, an aberration; and the scars still remain - in people's lives, in the land, and - it seems - mostly in the Dominican male psyche. For Oscar is an unusual Dominican, he has no success with the ladies. Yet, the Dominican male in this book is always seen as not just a womaniser, but a brutal one. Oscar, like Coetzee's Michael K, is somewhat the result of decades of brutality, and yet he remains a humanity to the end. But if the book has a fault, its that the contrast between the Dominican and American passages is so distinct. Diaz made his name as a short story writer, and this book is full of stories - mostly of the family history - in all of this, Oscar, filtered through his friend's testimony, seems hardly there at all - a useful fool, if you like; little more than a filter. The hip hop and geek speak is fun for a while, but Oscar is no Holden Caulfield; and when his sister takes up the narrative, there's little of the linguistic invention elsewhere. Interestingly the novel was originally a short story in the New Yorker in 2000. When I get the chance I'll try and read the shorter version.

In Philip Hensher's sizable Booker-shortlisted "The Northern Clemency", the timescale of the novel is from 1974-1994, undoubtedly a period of massive change in British provincial life; yet his protagonists, two sets of neighbours in a lower middle class suburb of Sheffield are hardly actors in their drama - unlike Oscar's family in the Diaz novel. When the Sellers move to Sheffield opposite the Glovers the families begin a dance of connectivity that sees their children change throughout the next twenty years even as the parents stay defnitely put. The key political event of the novel is the1984 miner's strike, particularly the Battle of Orgreave. Here's a history I do know something about, having lived through part of it, however tangentially. Where Hensher excels is in the minutiae of middle class life, even if, as if he's read too much Proust, he gives us every bit of detail however trivial. But somehow that triviality is the stuff of these people's lives, and there's such a richly drawn cast between the two families (and a whole load of minor characters as well), that you skip the occasionally page of hubristic description, to return to their lives. What succeeds as a "family saga" seems to fail as a "social history." Part of the problem is that by concentrating on the one class that was almost untouched by the horrors of Thatcherism, (and were, in the Midlands and the North, partly the reason for her electoral success), the main events of the age happen offstage. On the one occasion that this isn't the case - the battle of Orgreave - Hensher hardly does justice to this great affront to British civil liberties, by having a walk-on part for one of the Glover children, who has turned into a cartoonish Marxist agitator, presumably, one thinks, to enable him to turn up in this page of history.

I think it's fascinating that after a long period where novelists either hid in the distant past, or in a present unbothered by the political, there does seem to be a taste for something that is more relevant. I wonder how many readers of "The Northern Clemency" will Wikipedia the miners strike afterwards? Fewer, I imagine than readers of Diaz's novel will want to find out more about the history of the Dominican Republic. With the seventies and eighties now slipping into history themselves, for the first time I'm seeing my own memories crop up in fictionalised histories. It's probably a trite observation, but "The Northern Clemency" wouldn't have suffered much from ignoring the bigger picture, and concentrating on the domestic dramas; whilst although "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" continues to enthrall across all its timezones, Oscar, his sister, and our friendly narrator, remain unknown, unknowable, tied to their past.

My Year

And following on from the posts below about my favourite books and records of 2008 - what about my year? It's gone quickly, that's for sure, and I'm sure I've fitted a lot in.

According to my horoscope, Saturn in opposition since 2003 "has made any successes hard won" and 2008 "has doubtless been no joyride," both of which I can nod along with. But, let's be honest, hard won, is still a victory, and I've never been of the joyriding persuasion anyway.

Creatively, I think I've spent my time equally between music, writing, and digital stuff, with sometimes the three coming together. My first full length album in years, "Vertical Integration" was completed in the spring, and I'm still really pleased with it. Inevitably, after that, I didn't quite record so intensively for a while, but have found time to write/record songs every now and then (including this week). Having ummed and aahed about making music for a number of years, let's just say its a very positive hobby to have, in that I enjoy both the process and the result.

Its not that writing took a backseat, because of the music, but that I've been so busy at work etc. that I've not had the extended time that's really necessary to write long fiction. I've been writing a few stories, now and then, and I'm pleased with them. Interesting that my stories are increasingly that - narrative led - though the only story I had published this year (in Parameter Magazine) was anything but. I've been trying to write some science fiction as well, which has been fun.

I am working on a longer thing, but I do find it difficult to just pick up and drop - and I think I'm going to need to have an extended time at it next year if its going to be finished, we'll have to see.

The one thing that has fallen off a little, is my poetry writing. Perhaps songwriting has taken its place - I'm not sure. I'll always write poetry, but not all the time.

More recently I've been thinking about all this "social media"/web 2.0/blogging stuff that I do. It falls in a bit of a middle ground between work and play, I guess.

I've got a few projects that I'm looking to move on with/finish over the next few weeks - one musical one, a couple of written ones - a year end is a "taking stock", rather than a "finishing off"; last year I recorded a song on New Years Day.

The number of blog posts I've made this year, year on year, is down on the last couple of years, but its still over a couple a week, so I guess it remains a viable forum. We'll have to see.

2009 then... what might you have in store for me?

Books of the Year

Its always difficult to sum up a year's literature, after all, much of what one reads will have been first published last year, or years before, particularly if its a new writer that one comes across.

If one book bestrode the year it has to be Cormac MacCarthy's 2006 novel "The Road". It got mentioned by Martin Amis in his debate on literature and religion in Manchester, and before then, by C.K. Williams at the New Writing Worlds symposia in Norwich. That debate, a 3rd panel discussion, which I had the pleasure to blog away at, looked at how writers were responding to nature, and, in particular the threat of global warming. "The Road", a writers' response to after-the-catastrophe is so clearcut in its disaster, so biblical in both its language and its themes, that it seems the clear book du jour. If the apocalyptic has been there in recent semi sci-fi novels from Michael Cunningham, David Mitchell and Kazuo Ishiguro, its also there in the mutually excellent "This Book can Save Your Life" by A.M. Homes and "The Book of Dave" by Will Self. A further hangover from the previous year, and the most enjoyable book I read all year, was David Peace's "The Damned United", without a doubt the best football novel ever - and, next year, hopefully the best football film ever as well.
I read last years prizewinner "What Was Lost" by Catherine O'Flynn, and enjoyed it immensely - more than Anne Enright's intrigueingly complex "The Gathering." Those books by new authors that do get published - a little like first albums these days - are highly competent works, well structured, well written, but not necessarily that exciting. Its a long time since we saw the shock of the new. This year's Booker list looked very readable, without being particularly exciting. I'm a fifth through Philip Hensher's "The Northern Clemency" - an immense state-of-the-nation novel, and so far its excellent. One novel I failed to finish this year, and had bought after glowing pre-release reviews, was Hanif Kureishi's latest, "Something to Tell You". With quite a number of good books to read, I can't quite see me finding the time to go back to a novel I was finding to be poorly written, linguistically baggy and emotionally overblown. In this Christmas period I am back to reading, and a real find has to be Roberto Bolano's "The Savage Detectives" which I'm enjoying immensely. Many people's book of the year, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz, was one of the year's most readable, seeing the horror of the Dominican Republic's history during the Trujillo dictatorship through the most unlikely of filters, that of a transplanted Dominican sci-fi geek. If it had a fault, it was that these contemporary characters felt two-dimensional compared with the richness of the rest of the novel.

Bolano I discovered through his poetry, and the late poets' recently translated collected "The Romantic Dogs" is a pleasure throughout. Its been an interesting year for poetry in the sense that the mainstream has lost any interest to me. I think the rise in small presses such as Eggbox and ifpthenq, let alone the juggernaut that is Salt, means that good looking, readily accessible books are being made available outside of the majors - often concentrating on their existing list of poets. Seren, of all the small presses, has had major showings in the prizes, but there's a feeling that the prizes/majors have quite a bit of a symbiotic relationship if only because there's a need for the "big names" to continue getting a mention. What seems to be the case is that the vibrancy previously seen only in the "performance poetry" scene is spilling over into more interesting and experimental poetic arenas. With no major retrospectives/anthologies since the millennium, it will be interested to see what the scope of Roddy Lumsden's forthcoming anthology encompasses. My best poetry of the year has been particular poems, either in collections or in magazines, and I'll see if I get a chance to look at these in the new year.

I've read very little non-fiction - 'cept on blogs and in papers - but Alex Ross's "The Rest is Noise" I discovered about halfway through its year or success - and it remains a wonder, even if, after about 3 months of devouring 20th century classical music I reverted to type (e.g. hip hop, electronica and indie.) I also read Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" so there we have it - the most relevant critical essay of the year, and it was written in 1936! On the back of a remarkable essay in "Poetry" I bought Adam Kirsch's collection of essays on contemporary poetry, "The Modern Element" which I fully expect to be one of the best reads of 2009.

First, music of the year....

...I will get on to books of the year in a day or two, I hope, but music's a little easier. I've listened to so much this year, and I do feel its been a bit of a good one, with a wide range of new talent, mostly American, coming into the open. My singles/tracks of the year are mirrored in my favourite albums, but would probably finish off as 1. Time to Pretend - MGMT 2. Love Lockdown - Kanye West and 3. Paper Planes - M.I.A. 4. Ready for the Floor - Hot Chip 5. Piece of Me - Britney Spears

Albums of the year then... (to be rearranged no doubt!)
1. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes; like Midlake a couple of years ago, it almost defines what Americana is, an instant classic, based on the past, but also very now. Beautiful songs, beautifully sung and arranged. For me, its the combination of the album and their "Sun Giant" EP rather than the album on its own, as I downloaded both from Emusic to make a debut album +.
2. Third - Portishead; reviews and the album passed me by, but a couple of recommendations from friends made me pick it up. I was never a big fan, too ubiquitous, too sedate; but this new album reinvents their sound marvellously, taking in all sorts of new-retro devices yet remaining their mystique and magic.
3. What Does it all mean? - Steinski; a long overdue compilation of the original mashup expert - utterly wonderful, and remarkably contemporary.
4. Stay Positive - the Hold Steady; remarkably their 3rd great album in a row, and with songs as good as on their previous two, but with a fuller, more rock sound. In a year when landfill indie and tired old metallers were the best that rock music could give us, the Hold Steady went from being the best band that should have been around in 1978 to the best rock band of the day.
5. Supreme Balloon - Matmos; synthy Californian experimentalists surpassed themselves on this album, all recorded on golden age synths, the elongated title track in particular is a masterpiece
6. Seventh Tree - Goldfrapp; a real grower, and yet again Goldfrapp seemed to understand the zeitgeist better than anyone; perhaps all the songs weren't as good as on previous outings, but the overall feel, subdued and pastoral was a wonderufl listen and singles "A&E" and "Happiness" were standouts.
7. Oracular Spectacular - MGMT; best single of the year in the ubiquitous "Time to Pretend" but the album almost lived up to it. Like much of the best music from Bowie to Prince it thrived in its inauthenticity - you felt that they were having fun, but there's none of the cynicism of the Killers.
8. Beat Box - Glass Candy; best of a new wave of electronic acts - a short poppy album full of unexpected gems including a great version of Kraftwerk's "Computer Love"
9. Feed the Animals - Girltalk; not an awful lot different or better than their earlier "Night Ripper" but the year's ultimate party album. A stars on 45 for the iPod generation and probably the last word in sampling.
10. For Emma, Forever Ago - Bon Iver; more Americana, and a universally acclaimed record; but it deserves it; a thing of unexpected beauty and poignancy
11. Arena - Todd Rundgren; a surprising mix of all that's good about Rundgren - great guitars, wonderful tunes, and fascinating arrangements. Live, the subtlety was lost a little, but otherwise, a real surprise in a year when the big names and old favourites weren't that much around.
12. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles; an exciting adventurous all-over-the-place debut that didn't always reach the heights of their astonishing singles and live performances but was always interesting.
13. In Ghost Colours - Cut Copy; more electronica, but this time with an unmistakable pop edge to it - a bright shiny, pop album that just nicks a place ahead of Ladyhawke and Nick Cave as antipodean album of the year.
14. Dig Lazarus Dig - Nick Cave; not a bad track on it, not a bad album - yet so familiar are we with Nick that if it doesn't reach the heights of say, Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus it almost seems like an also ran of an album.
15. Pacific Ocean Blue - Dennis Wilson; reissue of the year and a top 20 hit as a result; a wonderful late seventies piece of Beach Boys magic
16. Made in the Dark - Hot Chip; more electronic-pop, but with lead track "Ready for the floor" one of the year's finest, and surely showing them to be fans of OMD, the album, a mixed bag, remains highly listenable.
17. Imperial Wax Solvent - the Fall; not their best even after a recent run of form, but with enough high points to remain highly relevant.
18. Fourth - Verve; surprisingly excellent return album that ditches the more introspective moments from their past and goes straight for the jugular with powerful guitar
19. One of the Boys - Kate Perry; unashamed pop record guilty pleasure of the year was her "I kissed a girl" but the anthem heavy album has its gems as well.
20= Jukebox - Cat Power; not as great a record as "The Greatest" but her total reworking of diverse songs such as "New York, New York", let alone her self-written Dylan tribute make this a good, if not stunning album.
20= We Started Nothing - The Ting Tings; (I knew I'd forget one...)... pop as anything but it should have been infuriating, and was actually great fun for longer than it should have been. I hear "Great DJ" is on the soundtrack of the new Danny Boyle as well...

In Praise of Pauses

Christmas often gives us time to pause, so its sadly fitting that Harold Pinter, the laureate of the pause, died over the season. There are, of course, many, many obituaries of the man, and reminisces of him, and reminders of his work. The ever estimable Arts and Letters Daily collects them in one place. His Nobel speech was reprinted in part in the Independent and summed up that key contradiction: between a literary life that was deliberate in not nailing things down, and a political life that insisted it was necessary. We can leave the nailing to others, particularly at this time of year, but its the work of course, rather than the political views or the contradictions, that will last. In the land of Shakespeare its perhaps not that surprising that our latest Nobel laureate should be a playwright, yet its instructive to think how much his work hangs over our time - in perhaps a way that no playwright ever will again. I saw a fringe production of the "The Dumb Waiter" a few years ago at Edinburgh, and it was in every way brilliant; it also felt endlessly relevant - and, contradictorily, of its time. There's something about the setting of those early plays that only just remains in England, the echo of the fifties austerity, the provincial towns, the grimey bedsits and b&bs. Whereas post-war America (say, like you'd see in Miller's "All My Sons") has material wealth, in which it sets a sometime spiritual poverty, Britain even up to the seventies and eighties remains drab. Pinter, in his willingness to shine a light on that drabness, will always seem of his time, even if his themes, and his writing transcends it. An early play like "The Dumb Waiter" is set in a single room, always recognisable, I guess, in any age, but its prop - the dumb waiter of the title is something that had gone into memory thirty years ago. I came to Pinter more through those two fascinating works: his screenplay of "the French Lieutenant's Woman" and, particularly, "Betrayal", an adult drama in every way. I'm not a particularly regular theatre goer, and there are only a few writers for theatre whose words seem particularly vital, but Pinter was one of those. The pauses of legend, are, I think, the spaces that he left where we could hear the words echo. To understand, to reflect.

Poetry Prizes

My uncharacteristic silence the last week or two has its usual reasons...alcohol and Christmas. After managing around half a dozen parties since my last post, its amazing I've still got any of the braincells required for writing this occasional blog. Poetry prizes come in all shapes and sizes and I'm generally no fan of them, after all its hardly a competitive sport is it?

Yet I have to say I can only applaud the innovation of the online poetry slam that Poetry Republic have set up in support of the Mines Advisory Group charity. Judging is by the entrants - and the winner will be announced as part of the "not part of" Manchester International Festival fringe next summer.

And although, as an unsuccessful entrant, I should be a little down today after not making the shortlist for Salt Publishing's inaugural Crashaw Prize, I'm far more intrigued by the six shortlisted writers, who'll have their books published internationally, and knowing Salt, very handsomely, in the next few months. A quick Google search shows that these are all poets with a little bit of a track record; a sign perhaps that the "slush pile" is not made up the mad and hopeless, but the hardworking, the worthy, the progressive, the comming. From my own perspective, even the discipline to enter the competition - i.e. putting together a 70 page collection - was a valuable one.

Staying In v. Going Out

The pre-xmas events season kicks in big time this week. Everything from regular nights, to one offs, from Xmas parties to informal catch ups with friends. The 2nd Social Media Cafe in Manchester is this evening at the Northern, with Heather Corcoran, curator of FACT in Liverpool as the speaker. I'm hoping to be there, let's see how the day goes!

Frustratingly I'll miss Nicholas Royle reading very locally at Didsbury Library on Wednesday, from 7.00, as I'm in London, and pondering whether I'll have time to get along to Openned reading at the Foundry, Old Street - Openned are good friends with Manchester's The Other Room, so it would be good to take advantage of being there at that time. Then back to Manchester for a choice of two Christmas parties!

The Spirit of the Age

With 2009 just around the corner it seems about the right time to think about this decade, and see if any themes have emerged in literature, or elsewhere, to define the spirit of the age. Post 9/11, and a week after Mumbai, you can say that "terror" could be seen as that spirit, but as no doubt someone else has said, terror is the spirit of all our ages, not just this one. If there is one literary work that seems to be evoked more often than any other at the moment its Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", which must say something about our view of the times - the last time post-apocalyptic nightmares took hold of our imagination were in the decade after the 2nd world war, as the threat of the cold war began to grip where the terror of Nazi Germany was only just subsiding ("Lord of the Flies" - 1954, "1984" - 1949).

Yet, I think its some other works of that late 40s/early 50s period we need to look to. "Waiting for Godot" (1953) has been revived a couple of times lately, and there's something about its ennui, its resignation, its passivity that seems particularly key to the current world. Look around the world, and what you see, whether thuggery, barbarism, militarism or imperialism, is at a state or semi-official level. We live in repressive times, where the sheer force of the state, or the immense reach of globalisation seems to quell anything other than feelings of resignation. This is no 1968, with a youth rebellion reeling round the world with contempt at their elders, nor 77, with punk rock, working class rebellion and race riots beginning to form a heady brew of discontent. This is the age when a shop assistant gets killed on the first day of the Walmart Sale, as the angry consumers trample over him; or when the decision on whether a cricket tour should continue in India is more about what's in the contract, than what is morally right or sensible.

Art reflects, doesn't lead - and yet I don't think the spirit of the age is an angry one, or even a collective one. Even in parts of the world where there is much more reason for rebellion and protest than in the west, the differential between the might of the state and the organising power of the people is too great; collectively there is ennui, resignation, even acceptance. (The destruction of value that the banks have given us over the last year or more, and the willingness of the population to almost reward the architects of this failure.) Much is talked about the internet and "social media" but a Facebook group seems a poor replacement for a union meeting. That other book of the age, A.M. Homes' "This Book Can Save Your Life" seems every bit as appropriate as "The Road"; they both deal in dread, but whereas the dread in "The Road" is very real, in the Homes book its almost existential.

I've been reading a few poems recently that seem to have something of this quality as well - a quietitude, a non-expectation of solving things. So back to Beckett, "I can't go on, I'll go on."

Elizabeth Gaskell news...

Following on from the news that Gaskell's house in Plymouth Grove is going to be renovated, this story on the BBC's website piqued my attention...

Apparently Mrs. Gaskell is "is best known for Cranford", well, only since the BBC's version of it is she. More quality reporting from our national broadcaster.

Lessons in Poetry

Its worth watching this week's Culture Show, on iPlayer or the net to see the piece on Mick Imlah who's 2nd collection, "The Lost Leader" won the Forward Prize and is being gerrymandered into winning the T.S. Eliot. Observers of poetry prizes know that with the odd exception of a "Birthday Letters", there's hardly any consensus between the awards, so it was interesting to see a full piece on one of the contenders, with reading from figures as estimable as Andrew Motion and James Fenton reading Imlah's poems. I was alerted to an article by a bookseller friend who said he'd been inundated with requests for the book after the piece went out. I've nothing for or against Imlah's poetry; I've not read them; and there's obviously a human interest story there - in that he was recently diagnosed with Motor Neurone disease - but I'm interested that a prize where the judging is led by Motion (a Faber author) has two Faber authors (Motion and Fenton) on the Culture Show giving such a powerful plug for another Faber author (Imlah) for that same major prize. Because, however worthy a winner the book is, this is, of course, how its done in poetry. I wonder if the other contender publishers on the list have been badgering the BBC for airtime? Perhaps anything that draws a new name into the public sphere is a good thing, though with the major poetry houses having so little to do with any newer, more vibrant poets out there (as the success of Salt, Seren and others has testified over the last couple of years), the poetry establishment remains as rigid in its ways as ever.

I guess, I'm interested in this, more - in a media studies sense - of how work gets out there, than any other way. It may well be that the other Eliot judges, Lavinia Greenlaw and Tobias Hill amongst them, have other things to say about the winning collection; it may well be that The Lost Leader is a very good book.

Poets, in particular, seem to relish scarcity, so a quick search of the web shows that Imlah is himself a bit of a "lost leader", his 2nd book rumoured but never delivered till now. I loved this page from the LRB, where it announces that "Mick Imlah's The Lost Leader will be published in 2002." Thinking of him not as a poet cum literary editor with friends in high places, and more as the Axl Rose of the Scottish literary scene, appeals to me. And it goes without saying, one wishes him well fighting his disease.

Freelance Writers, a Moment....

Whether its a Moleskine in the Cornerhouse, a laptop in Cafe Nero, or an exercise pad in Central Library, the freelance writer isn't always stuck at home in their garrett. In fact, the writer is as likely to be a nomad as any other freelancer; have battery power (and wifi) will travel. There's a move in the city towards providing cheap, available appropriate spaces for freelancers across the creative industries - and though the focus has been on digital and new media types to date - its clear that artists, writers, freelance journalists, bloggers, film makers and musicians are all part of that community. So if you think you fit into any of those, would like a bit more elbow room than Starbucks gives you, or find the lure of the Krombacher a big disincentive to setting up base in a bar, please have a look at this article and fill in the accompanying survey.

Credit Crunch Christmas

I can mention the C-word nows its December. May need to pick up an advent calendar this afternoon. I'm going to try and avoid going to town this week, it was so manic on Saturday, so local shops for local people, and - perhaps more importantly t'internet. I'm not usually one to "plug" books, but I'm pleased that small publishers and magazines are trying to entice you all to buy some unusual xmas presents. Short fiction magazine Transmission has a competition and a Christmas bundle, perfect for the short story writer amongst your relations; Salt publishing has both a poetry and short story book club and Facebook members of its group can get a third off all Salt books, which should be enough to give your postman a hernia. Interesting post from Chris Hamilton-Emery at his Facebook page last week, giving a great overview of the perils and pleasures of running a small press - and also indicating that Salt's going to move to London shortly. I saw Nathan Hamilton from Norwich based Eggbox last week, and this small press's books are lovely hardbacks - whilst if I do manage to force myself out of the house, there will no doubt be tables laden with goodies at this week's The Other Room, in Manchester and at the launch of the latest Comma title on Friday in Liverpool. I'm also thinking Tim Wright's "Oldton" "pack of cards" is too beautiful an artefact not to buy after meeting him and seeing it last week.

Blind Leading the Blind

The news that there is criticism of the film "Blindness" because of its portrayal of blind people beggars belief. The film hasn't opened yet, so I'm talking in the general sense. "Blindness", the novel by Saramago, a major factor in his winning the Nobel Prize for literature, is, to my mind, one of the great novels of the last 20 years. It is, of course, an allegory. Here blindness is a contagion that passes from one to another, and creates a new, disastrous society. It references the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, but also speaks clearly of our contemporary world, where community is often so disconnected. I don't think, reading the book, I even once thought of it referring to the naturally blind. After all, its a regular trope of dystopian sci-fi - "Day of the Triffids" from 1951 using it - and, more than that, its one of the most moral novels you could ever read. I'm sure the film - which has received very mixed reviews - may have its problems, after all its a highly philosophical novel, yet it can only depress one that the rare occasion of a European art novel being made into a film with a reasonable wide distribution, receives criticism. As someone with an eye problem myself, I'm very sensitive to the needs of the blind and partially sighted, but I'm puzzled where this has come from. In his Guardian piece, it appears that its David Cox who is making the criticism, not the RNIB or anyone else, yet it doesn't say anywhere if Cox is a journalist, an activist or just plain stupid. Apparently the criticism began in America, that country of such universal tolerance, but again it seems like it was opportunistic. If it makes a few more people read the book then perhaps it is just a storm in a teacup, but, I just feel a little wearier having to even respond to this drivel.

The Future of Literature is Debatable...

I'm in Norwich for an event that I've been arranging for a while with New Writing Partnership. When we talk about how "digital technology" is effecting literature it's too often couched in terms of the industry - eReaders and Amazon; downloads and podcasts - and not enough is said about the writing. It seems a legitimate conversation for writing development agencies and projects to think not just about the industry but how the "digital world" impacts on writers and readers as well as publishers. Using Chris Meade's Future of the book report Read:Write as a starting point - today's debate has a real opportunity to tease out some of the issues. It may seem hard to believe, with so many bloggers-with-book-deals and writers-who-blog, but literature remains, on the whole, with its head in the sand about all of this. Not, I'd hasten to add, necessarily a bad thing. There's a distinction between using digital tools to market yourself, and changing a way of working that is already successful for you...

Except I'm not convinced that everything's fine and dandy in the world of literature. Whereas the turnover of authors remains high, and possibly disastrous, the industry itself moves at a glacial speed. Only last week I was hearing about another young author, this time Cecilia Aherne, who proudly writes using a pen; a boast that I still find hard to believe in this day and age where people put their shopping lists on their iPhone. Yet Aherne is a massmarket writer as well; one of the things I hope we get out of today is a sense of how the writing itself needs to develop with the medium. If the recent Bond movie Quantum of Solace showed not only the influence of video game narrative, but also of HBO style series such as "24", then its a wonder that fiction and poetry can remain stubbornly linear in an age of the digital. The challenges are there as well of course... a novel written entirely as a Twitter stream is almost certain to come out in the next six months, but will Twitter, or microblogging in general, survive the restlessness of the digital audience?

There's different definitions about "progress" in writing - the 20 book strong longlist for the £50,000 Warwick Prize is a case in point. Throwing up philosophy, fiction and reportage in one big stew, it aims to reward how writing "evolves" - though with Naomi Klein, Alex Ross, John Burnside and "Netherland" by Joseph O'Neill, alongside more wayward names, it may take a few years to get into its stride.

I'm going to be blogging today's event - I hope, internet connection willing - so come back from 1.30 if you're interested.

Set up a LIVE BLOG for the event: http://digitalliteraturereconnected.blogspot.com/

The Essay and the Book

I remember reading Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" essay and thinking it was brilliant - but then reading the book of the same name realised that he was stretching a good idea, a little too far, and even, that his examples weren't actually that good at proving his thesis. The sense that however readable, and however original his ideas, he's better in small doses than large ones remains. His recent essay about "genius" seemed particularly curious. As interesting as ever, he was making the case that the idea of genius being something that doesn't need working at may well be a lie - that there are two types of artist, the apparent prodigy and the grafter, and that its the latter who is the experimentalist (trying to find out what works by incremental means) seemed curiously wrong-headed. I'm on a train so can't quite find the links without some difficulty - but he's everywhere at the moment with his new book "Outliers". Literary genius is a particularly difficult subject - as literary "success" seems a totally different thing. I guess we can all accept Shakespeare as a genius, but below that level, where do we rate our writers? Being published and winning prizes in this culture doesn't seem to equate to genius, whether its taken ten years to write a novel or ten days. Genius if it has any meaning has to be applied sparingly, and, I would think, to the unique, the unrepeatable, the uncloneable. A Coetzee, or a Carey, or a Rushdie for instance would seem to fall far short, and I'm not sure they'd like the label anyway. And where to put a Pound, when faced with an Eliot? A Lowell and a Bishop? An Amis K. and Amis M.? Yet if we only allow our innovators to be geniuses we have only room for a flawed Joyce, and less room for a (differently) flawed Fitzgerald.

The Slow Reveal

I'm sure there's a typology of short stories - the surprise ending etc. - but I'm not sure if the one that I particular specialise in is there. I guess what I write tends to be "the slow reveal". The story has always been there, or the point of the story, and what I've done in writing it is to put a cloak around it, but then I slowly reveal it all. The slow reveal seems to have three distinct parts - the first is scene describing, the set up, nothing particular to do with the story itself, but you meet a character or a place, or several characters and they're doing something that may or may not be relevant to the story. So thats not what the story's about. Then, half way through, two thirds through something happens, a jolt, an event, a chance meeting. But thats not what the story's about either. And then, in the end, it could be a page, a word, a paragraph, a sentence, but the story that's been there all along. I don't think its a twist. I think a twist is sometimes from another story completely, whilst the slow reveal shows something that's always been there, the thing that the story's about. I guess you find it alot in Sherwood Anderson, quite a bit in Fitzgerald, in Cheever, even in Salinger. For me it has both "truth" and "artifice" - truth because everything in the story has to be a fitting cloak, and artifice because, clearly you could have said, in a line, "this man abuses children", or "this person's fortune is based on a lie." In a novel I think the "slow reveal" feels like a cheat - you find it in "The Gathering" or "Atonement" - but in the short story, I think it has all the elements of tension I'm asking for, mainly because its not about our secrets, but about what we'd rather hide, which is a different thing entirely. (Clearest example from my stories online: "A Cold Night For Drowning")

Object of Desire

On the front desk at Fopp records earlier in the week was the ultimate Christmas gift object of desire for these jaded times: a stylophone with MP3 connectivity. Its always interesting with such things to wonder how many were sold, and how few were actually used on records. Retro wise we had "Style" by Orbital, but that's about the best I can think of. I had a Casio VL-Tone, which was, to my knowledge, only ever used on "Da da da" by Trio and "The Man Whose Head Expanded" by the Fall, (even I never used it on my own songs!)

Makes one think: these iconic instruments are "iconic" not for their use, but for their uselessness. I'm wondering what is the most ubiquitous of electronic instruments (it would be too hard to do the same thing for guitars!) - the DX7? Roland Jupiter? Mini Moog? Or something unheralded, an every day workhorse drum machine that appears on 1 out of 2 records you'll hear in a particular year?

Faith Restored

A few weeks ago, the Daily Mail had this promotion giving a free CD from the eighties every day. I like the Daily Mail, because it gives you a really clear sense of who your enemy is... but its free CD promotions are quite good, and clearly aimed at the people I knew at university who weren't me! I couldn't be arsed to go to WH Smiths every day, so I sent off for the whole set - which means I'm now listening to "pelican west" by Haircut 100, and wondering how much more growing my hair needs to become a mullet. So for - I think about seven quid - I've got 10 albums from the glorious dayglo decade that was the 80s. So fuck credibility - I've got Terence Trent D'arby.

Earlier I was at Manchester's earlier social media cafe listening and discussing this whole new world etc. The whole new world etc. The whole new world etc. It's the old world that's the problem, let's sort it.

Milestones & Millstones

I've spent the morning tarting up stories. It's harder than writing them in many ways. Whereas to write a story you open everything up, and let the thing pour out; to rewrite and revise, you have to concentrate on the detail, on the language, on the things that you're sometimes blind to in your own style. What always astonishes me at this re-write phase is how often I go to put something additional in - either a phrase or a verb - only to find it's there already a few lines down. Astonishing, because I'm terrible at remembering the detail of my stories, particularly when I've just written them.

So, for someone who always felt he was more at home in longer fiction - occasionally in poetry - I reached a milestone of sorts with my latest story. It's my 100th. Or rather since I started handing out stories in a little photocopied zine back in 1996 - it's the 100th I've "published" in this format. Less than a 10th of those have been published elsewhere, more's the pity, but it's quite a collection one way or another. I realise that over the last couple of years I've gone back to writing stories with a little more consistency and regularity than I had done for a while - and the last seven or eight would hang relatively well together. Such productivity over the years can seem equally a "millstone" in that how can I ever expect anyone to read them all? I'd like to think I've got better...but I'm not sure that art always works in the direction of obvious improvement - sometimes it's about doing things differently, or writing about different things, as much as honing a regular style.

By the way, I sorted out the problem I had with my latest story, detailed earlier, I decided the paragraph looking back on events was unecessary - partly because it turned out to be a bit medically suspect. Even in the small universe of the short story, there's a determination to not get things deliberately or factually wrong.

Artists Only

I was in Bristol earlier in the week, with work; quickly following a few days in Whitley Bay with family, so felt a little disorientated by the time I went to see Todd Rundgren at the Academy 2 last night. He was fine, a little on the rocky side, but I'm glad I'd got his new album so some of those songs were familiar. You've got to go see the legends when they come to town. Travel is sometimes something I don't do well, but at least this week I somehow managed to fit in writing a short story. I rarely write about my childhood, and sometimes wonder if my reluctance to mine some of the more personal aspects of memory is one of the things that inhibits it's acceptance. I'm not overly interested in "me", I guess, but we live in a sentimental, autobiographically-obsessed age, so perhaps I should let out a bit more. I'm Scorpio rising, of course, so if my writing appears cold or stern, its also putting a brave face on the tumult underneath. And of course, the story I've just written isn't any more "true" or any less "false" just because I've garnished it with memories of my old school!

I sometimes think visual artists have it easier, in that their work can defy the autobiographical far easier than writers. In Bristol, I was introduced to the German artist Mariele Neudecker, and it was fascinating to see some of what she's working on in her studio - a reinvention of landscape in many ways, she sculpts intricate lifesize forests out of fibreglass, and in her making sculptures of both natural and made objects, I guess I recognised something of my own preference for surfaces.

Back to my story: and there's an interesting technical challenge I've got - which is that there's a section of the story that takes place much later and offers an "explanation" of sorts, of the rest of the story. I'm minded to take it out, but wondering if its "echo" will still be there? I might see about giving out two versions of the story and see whether there's a different reaction depending on whether its included or not.

America and other contemporary mysteries

I am a great believer in the contemporary novel, the contemporary setting - but I wonder what it actually means. Speaking about this the other night, I don't think the blow-by-blow accounts you get on blogs are really what I'm talking about - and god help the blogger who turns real-time rant into a novel. What's left there? It's why, despite his hope and protestations, Tom Wolfe's New Journalism never became the literature he'd envisaged. "In Cold Blood" aside - was there a classic that came out of it? Wolfe's own masterpiece, "Bonfire of the Vanities", as acute a tale of the 80s as you could wish for, was, like "Wall Street", a product of 1987, and, of course, a fiction. There's a piece in today's Times wondering how an Obama presidency will affect the arts. The arts, in my mind, it seems, is most affected by 3 things: money (some kind of patronage), opposition (something to rail against), and, the zeitgeist (which can just as easily be described demographically.)

A contemporary novel about 2008? I'm lost as to what the subject might be. America looks large, but in a way, as someone who only visited once, in 1995, I can't begin to contemplate. If the evangelical Christian America seemed mysterious, I'm not sure that an America of "change" will provide any less so to this outsider. The use of the word "socialism" by both McCain and Obama seems to come from an entirely different lexicon than my own. Yet, the America of "The Wire" or "Sopranos" is - if not recognisable, is certainly not mysterious. In some ways, the pseudo-religious aspects of "Battlestar Galactica" are the more mysterious.

Yet, what would an English novel cover? It's a strange year, isn't it? Sport, long an obsession, yet so often one that we're so bad at, sees us now, with Lewis Hamilton, Andy Murray and our Olympians in a "golden age" - but its interesting that its a golden age of individuals or at least of the individualistic. What Hamilton and Murray have avoided is the dead hand of the establishment, of institutitions. And even the cycling success of Team GB - though pubblicly funded - has come from isolation of the successful from the institutional. We are the land of innovators, explorers, individuals... and with a dollop of outside influence (Hamilton's Grenadan antecedents, Murray's Caledonian bullishness)... success becomes something that we shouldn't be afraid of. The contrast with the institutionalised bumbling of the ill-advised 20/20 disaster couldn't be the more so.

Perhaps we are moving beyond the age of "apology" - the Englishman (or rather, British citizen), as David Brent or Frank Spencer. Our new heroes are winners, ruthless, internationalised, and... not universally loved. So be it. Perhaps the new Bond is a sign of this. Yet, the boorishness of the age - (Mssrs. Ross and Brand, stand up) - has never seemed so out of step as a result. Which is real? Perhaps its the renewed respect for our soldiers returning from what still seem like endless conflicts...and a reminder that, like America, the military dead and injured, aren't necessarily the products of the British public school system, but the ordinary man and woman, accepting the odds, taking the chance.

A week - a month - a year in which all our contradictions have been thrown about (and continue to be thrown about: look at how many of the powers-that-be responsible for the banking disaster want us to return, as soon as possible, to some business as usual), I'm concerned less about "what place art" as the revolving morals of the age. Where the BBC becomes a victim of the Mail on Sunday; where we dislike our winning sportsmen and women for having a character that is so unlike our own. America, one hopes, will have a new start on Wednesday morning - even if in many ways Obama is a conservative candidate for a conservative country - for us, our egalitarianism is celebrated by Anthony Gormley's parade of ordinary Britains on the 4th plinth, yet our sense of what's next is entirely uncertain.

Hymns Ancient and Modern

Its rare for me to be in a church, and so I've always got a mixture of vague familiarity and slightly quizzical novelty about me when I do find myself in one - as today, for a christening. I enjoyed the hymns - Sing Hosanna and All Creatures Great and Small - both ones I know, and (in the first case at least) love. Theres a lovely amount of literary history embedded in church hymns, ceremonies and readings. I lost concentration a bit during the reading but thought as the priest gave his interpretation that vicars and priests would probably make good bloggers in some ways. Isn't the weekly sermon an extemporised commentary in just the same way?

The cost of tuition

Its eleven years since I started on my MA in novel writing at University of Manchester. I can't remember what it cost - between £2-3000 I guess. There's been a proliferation of courses since, long and short, BA and MA, even the odd PhD. Theres alot of writers I know who teach as well as write, so what goes around comes around. And if you do a week's Arvon course or something similar like Faber's recent writers weekend that Elizabeth Baines recounts, having attended it in Paris (Paris!), or even a weekend course with the Poetry School, or others, it costs less but is over in a blink of an eye. As someone who organises events I know how difficult it is to ever reclaim the "real costs" - yet writers are rarely wealthy, and an "investment", whether for a weekend or a year, is probably much, much more than the ££££s themselves. I gave up a £25k a year job (in 97!) to do the course, so it probably cost me much, much more in some ways than the headline cost (and the biggest cost was that when I came back into work house prices had gone through the roof and I've been paying that price ever since.) But this is just stupid - accountancy masquerading as opportunity. Someone once said to me that they saw running their poetry magazine at a cost of a few hundred pounds a year, nothing more or less than their equivalent to "the golf club membership."

I've always said, when people have asked about going on a course, what they want to get out of it. In 1997 I didn't know any writers, had no time to write, and was unhappy in my job and living in Croydon. Moving back to Manchester for my masters was the best thing I ever did. I was buying time, a peer group, friendship... and if I'd hoped to get a few contacts that would help me get published as well, that was perhaps my naivety. I bumped into Elizabeth Baines last night in Didsbury and was fascinated by the Paris trip - a long way to go I thought for a couple of days tutoring, I wondered when she got time to write, never mind blog... She lifted her eyes to the ceiling, "late into the night", she said.

So here's a thought...I gained a lot from my masters, but even more from having the time to create, the time to think - and the time to read. If it could cost you up to a £1000 for a week away somewhere on a "working holiday" or thousands of pounds to do a masters, what about for £25... the best tutors I've found are other writers - not the ones you might on a course, but the ones you actually like. F. Scott Fitzgerald's letters, Henry James Selected Essays, The Paris Review Interviews, Jeanette Winterson's "Art Objects", Kafka's diary... these are half of the tuition I needed - the other half, that should be obvious: the books themselves, "Franny and Zooey", "Men Without Women", "Women in Love", "Middlemarch" - make your own list

Four Story Day

I've felt particularly uncreative of late. Sat down at the weekend looking at a blank screen, writing a few words. Nothing seemed to come. I've been so busy this week, as well, having organised an event introducing the arts to the best in digital stuff on Monday - and think that maybe having no headspace for anything else has just let the ideas line up in there. Anyway this morning I woke up with a great little idea for a short story, and I'd hardly come up with more than a skeleton in my head (well it is nearly Halloween!) when three more story ideas scrunched up behind it. A four story day, then. All I have to do now is write them...

The Blog Life

Last night, was at the Manchester Blog Awards, which I've written about here, in a piece called "when bloggers become writers" so won't repeat that here. Had a great time, though it was one of those nights when I got tired from saying "hiya" to too many people. Lovely as all those people are!

Retreated to Common and had a wonderful chat with the alluring Coco Laverne. All this blog stuff is great, but I'm painfully aware how crowded a space it's getting!

When Worlds Collide

Everything seems very frenetic in Manchester at present. There's the literature festival for a start - which I'm going to finally make acquaintance with tomorrow at the Manchester Blog Awards at Matt and Phreds. I would have gone to more but have found myself with a range of other commitments - work and otherwise - as well as having a bad cold which knocked me out for most of last week. Thinking ahead, I'm key organiser of a range of events for the arts over the next few weeks, starting with an event around "Digital Content" in Manchester next week, and culminating, in Norwich with an event with New Writing Partnership looking at how the art of writing is changed by technologies. All exciting stuff, of course, but feel the various strands of my life are hurtling around like something thrown together by the Large Hadron Collider! And again, sitting squarely between my different worlds - as blogger, literati, and technology advisor to the arts - I'm quite excited that a group is forming that it would make some sense to be part of - namely a "social media cafe" for Manchester. I'm pretty sure that even my avatar is exhausted by all of this.

Worth Every Penny of the License Fee

Congratulations to Aravind Adiga winner of the Booker Prize; not read it, not particularly interested in reading it, but same for the rest of this year's shortlist, so who knows? They may have found a gem. There's been plenty of meaningless discussion on the Guardian's book blogs, and various tit-for-tats. But my favourite comment was the one that said "of course it won, he's Indian, and it's got a tiger in it, one or the other improves your chance - but both..." (I paraphrase, but I thought it funny.)

I've been down and out with a cold these last few days, and so had the attention span of a ribena addict, so had forced myself to stay up at least till the Booker winner was announced. I've always enjoyed the pantomime of the Booker however hoary the plots and characterisation, yet the BBC long ago gave up on it. And last night they were worse than ever. Turning to the live performance on the 10.00 news, they stayed with it for 3 minutes, had an embarrassing cock-up when they got no sound from their reporter in the Guild Hall, ran the VT tape of the 6 books, and only just caught the announcement of the winner, before telling us to "catch more of the ceremony on BBC4"... they meant BBC News 24. And we pay the license fee for this?

Life, as they say goes on, though doubt I'll now make the opening of the literature festival tomorrow, even if I make it back on my feet. It's took me about two days to write this blog entry as it is - the soporific power of lemsip!

A Booker for our times?

Just a quick one. We know that Booker judges only choose their winner on the night, and so one wonders whether the credit crunch will have helped the chances of Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs - its story loosely based on the slum landlord Peter Rachman. As a 7-1 outsider, it might be worth a few quid!

Where to start?

Where is one to start? With National Poetry Day, perhaps. Yes, it's here - and yet hardly here at all. Or with Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a writer I've never heard of, I'm ashamed to say, winning the Nobel. How can it be that a writer of such stature in our cultural neighbours should be so unknown in England? Or what about the Forward Prize, won by Mick Imlah after a 20 year silence. If only other poets would take that hint! Only joking of course. The poetry prizes in this country are notoriously catholic in their choices...so that its rare for one book to even get nominated for more than one, or for one writer to consistently be listed. One has to be a little amused that the poem of the year was Don Paterson's homage to an obscure techno artist, "Love Poem for Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze," since its rare for modern culture to make more than a fleeting appearance in the poetry prizes. My Ellen Allien homage will be finished by bedtime.

Where will one end? With William Skidelsky's cry in the Guardian about the lack of contemporary novels wrestling with the corrupt wealth of the last few years. It's always "where's our Balzac/Dickens?" of course. It always both amuses and annoys me - all I can say is that when I wrote a somewhat disdainful novel "High Wire" set partly on election night 1997, and encompassing greed, IT and modern art, it wasn't what the publishers were wanting not at all, but in one of its character's Eric Mansion, a politician and a businessman, I like to think I came close to the spirit of the age...

"Sat around the table, expectantly, were the money men. The new company was being financed by a firm of venture capitalists, Innovision, whose portfolio concentrated on fast growth, high risk companies in the areas of bio-technology and information technology...

Amongst them was Eric Mansion.

...Digests of Hansard painted a picture of an economic libertarian with an off-the-peg set of right-wing social views. Eric Mansion believed in God, the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection and possibly even the bit about needles and camels, but it hadn't hindered him in making millions out of property deals with the church commissioners. He hated the E.U. but picked up European subsidies for both farming and urban renewal, so no hard feelings there. He was pro-America, Saudi, Indonesia and Beijing and would perhaps even find a good word for Castro if cigars became his next cash cow. His was the profile of a businessman through and through who cut his ideological cloth accordingly. It was Mansion's unswerving pragmatism that most frightened Adam, and he realised that the man might just as easily sit in the current cabinet as the last, a veritable Talleyrand of today."

I wrote that in 1998 - I think I might come back to Mansion, as a character, see what he's been up to!