The Crash

It's 80 years since the Wall Street Crash and, because of our recent travails, Newsnight and Newsnight Review ran a programme on it last night. Worth catching on the iPlayer. Newsnight Review asked the question about how art would respond to the credit crunch. After all, from books like "The Grapes of Wrath", to songs like "Buddy, can you spare a dime?" the crash of 1929 went into artistic as well as economic history. The panel was heavily American-focused, and concentrated a little too much on a film few have yet seen, Michael Moore's "Capitalism: a Love story."

What annoyed me about the programme was the assumption that this credit crunch is inevitably a subject for an author or film maker to grapple with. Perhaps the example of 9/11, whose spectre has inhabited the insides of lots of bad novels (and a few decent ones), this decade has made the world expect the instant rebuttal system of a political party, rather than the measured reflection of a writer. But there's something else...I've yet to see the consequences of this recession in the way that the recessions of the eighties still burn into my mind. Rather, I'm still seeing the consequences of the "boom", the ridiculous house prices, the unsuitable inner city apartments, the valuing of economic growth above all other values, the targets culture of the public sector. And, guess what? I've been writing about these pretty much constantly for the last ten years. Not that you'd know this - as getting a London-based publisher interested in anything with an anti-capitalist hue to it has been almost impossible. Newsnight interviewed some improbably named chick litter, drinking cocktails on a manhattan balcony, talking about her book about downsizing Hedge Fund wives.

You realise that the literature of the decade has been an odd mix of champagne froth and misery memoir, with serious writers stepping back into history as they look on dumb founded on the contemporary world uninterested in it, or unable to understand it. In 1998 I was writing about a Capitalism that was a pyramid scheme of false information, overexpectation and short-term gains, as a character built up a dot.com company purely to float it on the stock exchange, its product as ephemeral as anything Enron gave us. In one scene a group of protestors from a northern industrial company try and disrupt a product launch, as their own factory is been closed down.

The writing about the American thirties concentrated on the economic tsunami that swept through the nation, not on the billionaires who'd had to lose a few zeroes off their income. In my essay "Writing Catastrophe" earlier this year I talked about the tendency for post-apocalyptic scenarios in contemporary literature, a view echoed in the programme, but questioned whether this particular crash would lead to a novel like "Bonfire of the Vanities." I'm still questioning. A book like "Netherland" by Joseph O'Neill captured some of the post 9/11 angst of New York, but the victims of the Madoff fraud will have their safety nets and their story, one driven by greed, hardly makes them interesting case studies.

The real tragedies of this recession will be elsewhere, in the council estates and poorly built housing, in the broken marriages and errant children - and more than that, in the aftermath, if a dozen years of progressive politics gets sweeped away because it wasn't progressive enough, because it believed that the market was self-correcting.

Writers can't just take on those subjects like a new set of clothes, particularly if their fascinations have been the millionaire class. The writers on Newsnight review were more circumspect than the film makers and internet editors - suggesting that it takes time to make this your story. Only Jay McInerney, who had already written twice about the glittering world of the New York rich in Brightness Falls and the Good Life, is preparing his next one to include much of this material, but its always been his territory. I think it was Simon Schama who added that there also an alternative narrative to the thirties, the promises of socialism. Our skies may not be as dark with Nazism as they were back then, for which we have to be grateful, but neither are they as light with promise.

There's a nostalgic tendency to British fiction that precludes a more immediate response to issues of the day. There's not a writer like McInerney or Easton Ellis who is alert to the zeitgeist and can simply adjust their latest writing to match it. I'd say that the more interesting responses are likely to be found through allegory or story. A writer like China Mieville, with radical politics to match his radical writing, knows fully well that a critique of our current systems would be more a fantasy set in contemporary London, than set in one of his parallel worlds. With the internet providing the "instant response" button that we require to current events, the writer's job here, doesn't seem to change. All I can hope is that those of us who can and do write about contemporary issues, may become a little more noticeable than we have over the last few years. In a 2006 poem called "Mean Time", I asked the question "What is the central act of our time?" Lamport Court, where it was published, is now online at the Poetry Archive where you can read this and other work.

Mostly Truthful Launch

The online publication Mostly Truthful will be launched at Lancaster's Storey Institute tomorrow as part of the 2009 Lancaster Literature Festival. Here's the elegantly stylish cover. The publication will be available on line shortly from the Litfest website.

Disjunctions

In a blog post from yesterday (before, it has to be said, her reading at the Manchester Blog Awards, where she seemed quite chipper), Jenn Ashworth wrote eloquently about a particular kind of "sad." It must be a writer's thing because I know exactly what she means. It's a little bit of longing, a little bit of nostalgia, and under it all, perhaps, a sense of anxiety, like you've slipped away from what makes you tick. I put it down to some disjunction of the planets or my biorhythms all dipping together, or my other self having taken a vacation leave this husk behind to deal with the reality of life. Jenn's analogy of it being like walking into a house on the different side of the street, and feel like you're going the wrong way, everything backwards, is spot on.

What it means, really, is that I need to take some time out. I need to pull away, create some space, create some perspective, because that's what you need. I was at Brussels airport on Tuesday and could see the Belgium airways plane through the glass of the departure gate. When I got to where I thought it was, the plane had seemed to move, an optical illusion - it was a few gates further down. I found myself unable to compute this distinction. I was tired and in the bubble that you get when you're travelling a long way for a long meeting. Coming back to Manchester, and going out the next night to the blog awards, that disjunction remained. I seemed to be getting every little nuance wrong. The venue, familiar old Band on the Wall, was also the same, but different, the first time I'd been since it reopened. I remembered seeing an Elbow showcase gig here, before "Asleep in the Back" had come out, I remembered swaying next to a swaying Andrew O'Hagan talking about writing after him and Dave Haslam had took me there after a reading at Waterstones.

I'm imagining writing a story about a character who is so at the extent of their senses that its a constant adrenaline rush, but the story would have to be called "burn out." We are all fire, but only with sufficient kindling. Tonight at the Selfridges Moet bar, another episode of the week's soap opera. Meeting friends in public places drinking other people's wine and eating other people's canapes. Tomorrow I step down from the heady air of the last few days and try and regain a sense of equilibrium. As you get older you are more likely to get "vertigo", not from tall buildings, but from your environment, becoming dizzy at the thought. As a kid you spin around and around until everything direction is down, collapsing in a delirious spiral. I've had enough delirium for a while.

Saturday I have to stand up and, in the lovely surroundings of Lancaster's literary festival, be one of four writers reading from the new Flax publication, "Mostly Truthful."

Night at the blog awards

At tonight's Manchester blog awards I had provided input to the judges, and so waited to see if I was vindicated, like a dodgy bloke in a betting shop. I got a couple right and a couple of runners-up, as problem gamblers always probably do. It was much fun, as always in the somewhat unchanged (from memory) interior of Band on the Wall. Last time I was here was an Elbow showcase gig before they'd released their first album. Go figure.

The Long Game

Fitting in a few thoughts about writing. It's not the lack of "doing" time that frustrates me at the moment but the lack of thinking and reflecting time. Sometimes you can get so much more "done" when you are busy, but it's like taking money out of your savings, the reserves get depleted after a while. So I seem to be being incredibly productive, in many different ways, but I know that the emotional, psychological and creative-artistic savings accounts are all running dangerously low. I get the occasional top up by going to an exhibition or reading a book or watching a TV series, but not had much time to think about even those things.

More productively I've been going back through the last five years or so of my writing. I've always been fitting this into a busy life, and that's been fine. Yet the five years before that, basically 1997-2002, my productivity was off the chart. I finished five very different novels, wrote a wide range of poems and short stories, fitted in a screenplay; let alone at least three unfinished novels that I really should go back to one day. But quantity isn't as important as quality - and what's been good is going back and reading work that I might be dismissive of because of how long ago it was, and finding that it's actually well written and carefully edited. The time went into it. I don't mind playing the long game. The person I was then has a different perspective and sensibility to the one I am now, but the difference is more circumstances and age, than anything fundamental. Writers, musicians, we're the lucky ones in many ways. Most people can only look at old photographs and recall what they were like on the outside, we get to read our old thoughts, and recall what we felt like on the inside.

Festivals

The Manchester Literature Festival will have to survive a little bit without me this year (I'm sure it will manage) as I've got a busy week or so. I hope to get to the Whitworth tomorrow for a dose of Salt writers - its a great venue for catching literature, and nice not to have to go all the way into town. Then I'll be making time to get to the Blog Awards on Wednesday at Band on the Wall - first time I'll have made it to the re-opened venue.

Part of my reason for not being around is that I'm in Lancaster next Saturday for the launch of the latest publication from Flax books, Mostly Truthful, which I'm one of 4 non-fiction contributors to. Read a little bit more about it here. I went to University in Lancaster (finishing with an English degree) so it feels a kind of homecoming.

I've continued to enjoy the contributions to Everyday Genius this month as well.

Poetry's Long Fade Out

It's been an important week in poetry, with the announcement of the Forward Prize winners (Don Paterson, Emma Jones and Robin Robertson) to coincide with National Poetry Day. The latter seems to limp along a little these days, though the BBC dutifully covers it (this year: Dreadlock Alien, Daisy Goodwin and Alison Steadman were the talking heads on breakfast) and I'm sure there's a lot of decent education work goes on. I've always liked Paterson's poetry, and its a surprise he's not won the Forward before - though he won "best poem" last year. The last six Forward Prizes for best collection, and 9 out of the last 10, have been won by Faber and Picador, which hardly seems to represent the state of poetry publishing in Britain at the moment. Of all the poetry prizes, faced with a diverse shortlist, the Forward does seem to veer towards the bigger names. An observation, that's all.

Yet, if National Poetry Day seems less lustrous than it did when it started (partly, I think, because of its obsession with gimmicks and "accessibility" ahead of creating a genuine culture of poetic exploration), its not the only place where poetry seems to be continuing its long fade into darkness. You have to go back to 1996 to find a poet on the list, though this year's winner Herta Muller writes poetry and prose. American poet John Ashbery or Australian poet Les Murray would seem to be massive names that the Nobel has so far overlooked.

On the other hand, grass roots poetry writing, publishing and events continues in abundance. It was reassuring that when the Poetry Society asked who our favourite poet was, T.S. Eliot won. I watched the recent Arena documentary, and fascinating as it was, it always takes you back to the poetry. He remains our "brand poetry" - whether its the T.S. Eliot prize, or with the continued respect, that Faber's list receives. I'm wondering if they still read him in schools? He's allusive rather than difficult of course, and, perhaps uniquely, a writer of long poems that are still read, ahead of shorter lyrics. At the Other Room this week, Michael Haslam introduced one of his poems talking about the great "wrecks" of modernism such as Finnegan's Wake or the Cantos. I think it's a great way of talking about them - these colossal vessels that set sail, and finally ran aground. Eliot, a cautious sailor one imagines, pretty much avoided writing those great "wrecks", though his later verse dramas may be his equivalent, and it is interesting: the first truly modern poet, (with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), saw that he had arrived at the point of the modern, and did not need to race ahead in a futile race to be ever more so. On BBC Breakfast a spurious connection was made between T.S. Eliot's "newness" and that of performance poetry, a brand that hasn't had a new idea for thirty years or more.

Eliot, himself a Nobel winner, is an impossible example for contemporary poetry - the world is so different - but at the same time, his seriousness, his commitment, and his promotion of both the best of the past, and through his work at Faber, the talent of the present is a touchstone. In the documentary, he says that the one thing that you can say about contemporary poetry, is that it is written by your contemporaries.

Maps and Stuff

My very short story "The Girlfriend Who Got Me Into Mazzy Star" is now online as today's choice at Everyday Genius, which this month is being edited by Lee Rourke, author of "Everyday." I was pleased to be asked to contribute, and I've enjoyed the variety so far. I've done something a little bit different, as this short story comes with a Google Map, so you can see where it takes place! More map-based stories can be found at the excellent Rainy City Stories. Offline, I'm about to read the first two handsome publications from Nick Royle's "Nightjar" press. You can also check out the video podcast of Craig Dworkin which was shown on Wednesday at The Other Room. His hip hop Beowulf's particularly good.

Back to Writing

Other things have been going on, in digital, art and politics, so haven't had much to write about writing. This will be short, but to point out a few goings on.

The ever-excellent night "The Other Room" returns on Wednesday at the Old Abbey Inn. It also showcases the launch of the bumper "final issue" of if P then q . Related to the same event, is the launch of the occasional editions from the intriguely named zimZalla.

One of the more interesting literary blogs is Everyday Genius, which has a monthly guest editor inviting their writing cohort to supply daily doses of "everyday genius." This month its "Everyday" author, and Scarecrow editor Lee Rourke. First three contributions are by Pete Wild, Steve Finbow and Stuart Evers. A little piece by me will also be along in a few days, all being well.

Now its October, the forthcoming launch of "Mostly Truthful", the new online Flax publication at Lancaster Literature festival gets ever closer, and it will be great to return to the Storey Institute, this time as a reader, rather than in the audience. Tickets are free.

Tomorrow night is Booker Prize night, and "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel seems a "shoe in" but of course, the Booker doesn't do shoe-ins. It wouldn't surprise me if one of the lesser known writers on the list, Adam Foulds or Simon Mawer, came in as a surprise winner. Unlike "Sea the Stars", the remarkable horse that has just added the Arc to its Derby and 2000 Guineas, the thoroughbreds of the Booker don't always come first.

Alien Invasion

There's an alien invasion in Manchester this week, as the Conservative party conference comes to town. Alien, in a very real sense, as whilst when Labour comes to town there will be lots of meeting with old friends, and obvious allies, there's hardly any Conservative presence in the city - with not a single Conservative councillor in Manchester itself.

But this is a precursor, in many ways, for what will happen if the Conservative Party win the next election. They will be, to all intents and purposes, the party of the south, with some northern outposts. Manchester, being very welcoming, might even welcome these particular aliens, but not if they bring with them their bad habits - you know the kind of thing, slashing taxes for the rich, foxhunting, closing SureStart centres, hanging out with jackbooted far right groups in Europe. A few little local customs are one thing, but these aliens need to do a lot more to assimilate if they want to be taken seriously across the whole country. The legacy of Thatcher, of course, is that they didn't ever see this as important - its why they hardly exist in Scotland these days, for instance. Whereas the Scots might grumble about a Labour government in England, at least its a grumble that is more of a family feud. A Conservative government in England could potentially have next to no representation in Scotland - which would surely precipitate the breakup of the UK. Hardly what David Cameron wants on his plate in his first days in power.

I'd like to know where Cameron, and more correctly, the party that stands behind him, stand on a number of issues. Sometimes Cameron, with his Smiths albums, easy charm, and liberal tendencies, appears the nicer side of Conservatism, but you wonder about the antediluvian hordes coming up his rear. They will, I'm sure, have initiatives aplenty, but initiatives are what breeds the kind of quango that the Conservatives have loathed (and perhaps rightly so) about "new Labour." I can't imagine a new localism coming from the centre, not when Northern cities such as Manchester remain Labour, even if the love for the party nationally is highly strained.

The arts, I fear, will suffer immeasurably, under a Conservative administration - its one of those "softer" areas of public spending that Labour, to its infinite credit, has seen "in the round", offering economic and social as well as more direct benefits. If we're a society that can afford £2,000 to new car owners, to scrap their old, then I'm sure we can afford the "experience" culture that is crucial in the arts. I was at the TedX Manchester Conference yesterday, and it was a mixed bag of speakers, but with the wonderfully diverse people ecology of urban Manchester out in force. The repeated message of the day seemed to be about disruption to business models, a deliberate provocation given we were in the BBC on Oxford Road. The week before I heard Andrew Keen speak in Liverpool, and its interesting to get his contrarian views on social media, the internet, and, yes, blogging. Somebody somewhere needs people to be paid for what they do. After all, the freelancers and others at these conferences don't get their networking drinks paid all evening, or the taxi home. One imagines a journalist is often tempted, when asked to provide their expertise for free, to say, "yes, but can I have this round on the house as well?"

I don't see this as a natural constituency even amongst the libertarian wing of the Conservative party - despite there being more right-wing than left-wing political bloggers. I guess blogging is partially a culture of opposition, as it is.

So if an alien from the Conservative party finds themselves in the Northern Quarter on Tuesday night, I do hope they pop into the Manchester Social Media Cafe at the Northern - just as long they keep some of their more alien habits to themselves

The Morality of Art

There is, I believe, always a morality to art, or should be. For the artist - and the curator, the editor, the critic, those other interlocutors - is a maker of choices as well as the work itself. We still refer to certain art as "naive" or "primitive" or "outsider" usually because we see it as coming without the interlocution or that it doesn't come with an intellectual (and for that read: moral) framework. Even where anarchy rules its the controls on that anarchy which are so important. Composers such as Cornelius Cardew or John Cage created set pieces in which a playful lack of control could take place. A Kenneth Anger film plays with the social mores of the day; and a Charles Manson or Adolf Hitler's own art tells us next to nothing about their diabolical nature. The thousand monkeys typing away forever to create "Hamlet", have to, first of all, be taught how to use a typewriter.

The artist's personal morality is as nothing to the morality of the work. You can have a very poor opinion of Polanski's life choices, and still find Chinatown remarkable. "Billie Jean" can be enjoyed without questioning the motives of its writer. That we might think less of the work, the more we know about the life is a judgement that all art faces. Yet in an irreligious age, religious paintings and great cathedrals can sometimes seem the only thing remaining of our Christian mythos, the Christian art of today - whether Christian rock bands or "moral" films - offering us only a reflection of the decentralised place that the belief now has in society.

I am primarily a libertarian, as I believe censorship is always problematic, and on these grounds alone, I would be appalled at the Met visiting the Tate (now there would be a title for a reality TV show) to remove Richard Prince's "Spiritual America" on the say-so of the Daily Mail. There is always something so wrong, and so predictable about this particular catalogue of events that you almost feel that the Daily Mail must have a staff position, Our Special Correspondent in Dirty Art, or something similar. We are told in the Guardian that "the catalogue for the exhibition withdrawn from sale. The work had been accompanied by a warning, and the Tate had sought legal advice before displaying it."

On the one hand, in British law, something can only be deemed obscene by the courts, not by PC Plod, but on the other, there is an exception to this - in that possession of indecent photographs of children is in itself an offence. The logic of this, legal advice notwithstanding, is that the police should track down the said child in the picture, one "Brooke Shields", put a warrant out for the photographer (as well as the "possessor", which may or may not be the artist, the Tate Modern) and probably then destroy all copies of the picture.

We are told that in fact, this is what Brooke Shields herself has tried to do on several occasions. Adrian Searle, also in the Guardian, adds "it is clear Prince took responsibility when he borrowed Gary Gross's photo, and knew exactly what he was doing." This is, I suppose the morality of the art that I am talking about. It is not an "absolute morality", but a relative one. Probably in the Tate, but certainly in the National Gallery, there are many, many pictures of naked children, whether realistic or "cherubs." The sexualisation of those images may not be as recent a thing as we sometimes think, yet it would be hard to think of them as being the target of the Met. In this particular case, as in other gallery showings of photographs of children in the past, is it the medium or the image itself, or the exhibition of the piece that is most unsettling? Or, in terms of the relative morality of art, is it the intention of the artist, that if it means anything at all, can and should be questioned rather than given "cart blanche" approval.

A libertarian cannot choose whether or not a particular image should be censored or not; but an artist - and those interlocutors - can decide. In an age when we have moved quickly from the indidividual iconography of a single artwork, to the mechanical reproduction of print, film and recording, to the multiple simulataneous imagery of the internet, it seems, more than ever, than the morality of the art is not a "given", but shifting, and that the artist, in order to call themselves that, has a responsibility that is not easily shirked by saying (and I'm not saying Prince is saying this), "here it is, make of it what you will." Artists are the first and best censors of their own work.

In this particular case, I'm minded that a ten year old girl was a "minor" when decisions were taken on her behalf, and that even if the genie can't be put back into the bottle (the internet being what it is), she should be able to have a say in rectifying that particular abuse (and it was an abuse.) It is in that context, not the context of the image itself and its exhibition, that we should question the morality of this particular artist and this particular show. That America had no apparent problem with it (yet was scandalised by Ofili's dung paintings) doesn't make them superior or inferior to us (whether its the "Daily Mail" reader or the Tate Curators), but reminds us instead that there aren't any absolutes in artistic morality.

Bookends

For a couple of years I've been looking for a pair of decent bookends. Yes, I've got shelves and book cases, but I've also got books on every other available surface, and those old fashioned adjudictors of mantlepiece collections, are just what I need. Yet, bookends aren't part of the fashionable modern interior it seems....and on the odd occasion I've found something that might do the job they've seemed too heavy or too gauche (there appear to be quite a few "erotic" bookends around, for those er... neo-classicists amongst you.) What I was looking for was something plain, but elegant, sturdy but not overly obtrusive. Two bits of nicely lacquered wood with a carved animal feature to add character, for instance. £6.99 from Didsbury Oxfam on Saturday. I am a happy man.

Art & Commerce

There's not much in the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition at the Cornerhouse that you'd feel comfortable with on your dining room wall, and, equally, there's little at the Urbis Buy Art Fair that I really want to see in a gallery. An observation, that's all, that when we talk about "art" we mean different things in different places, just as when we talk about "books" or "novels" we may not always be using the same measuring device. I admire any artist, from Vettriano down who manages to make money from their art, but the work that most surprised me at New Contemporaries - which showcases the best of the degree shows - is not aiming to be above anyone's mantlepiece any time soon.

I've always tried to go along to the New Contemporaries show, but realise it might have been a couple of years. What does it say of the state of the art? (Or the state of art?) I think there are threads of narrative, rather than a grand design. The conceptual appears to have played itself out, and in many ways I would say the binding thread for this years exhibition was one of "representation", which is one of the oldest of artistic aims. A representative art speaks of a generation that is perhaps re-learning how to look, which in itself offers a new intellectual challenge. Not all of this is successful, and some of the painters, illustrators (yes, drawing, that lowest-tech) and sculptors seem to have an affinity with the less flashy side of seventies art; a low key expressionism, a slightly affected minimalism. My three favourite pieces were all video works. Richard Healy's two video pieces were astonishing; playful, warm, confident, and easy with their postmodernist self-awareness. Brasher was Rachel Mclean's reinvention of Scottish mythos in her day-glo video montage, "Tae Think Again". So easily done badly, the sheer bravado of the piece was a clear highlight of the exhibition. And though I'm not sure whether it's much more than a very good joke, Susanne Ludwig's video installation left my smiling long after I'd left the gallery.

The gallery wasn't very busy, early on a Sunday afternoon, but I'd recommend a visit to what is a diverse, considered show.

"Buy Art Fair", in comparison is a commercial bazaar, with hundreds pushing through the space. You know the kind of thing, by now, commercial galleries, touting living room accessories. Artists must pay the bills, and a friend met us later, very happy that a couple of his paintings of the crane-scape of Media City's evolution had been sold.

In the distance between the exhibitions at Cornerhouse and Urbis you can find something of the gap between art and commerce. (It's worth adding, that the Manchester Contemporary, a side exhibition at Buy Art Fair, was a laudable attempt to narrow the gap, with providing space for some of Manchester's more contemporary galleries.)

Writing Life in Colour

I've been archiving my writing life the last few weeks, via Lulu's print on demand facility. It's quirky, but does the job I need it to do. And by keeping it simple, I think they look quite nice in a home-made sort of way. Only another ten volumes or so to go...

Random Something

It seems I wasn't the only one to be a little concerned at the Booker's past-fixation. It's not that they're in the past per se, but, as Elizabeth Baines points out, their contemporaneity. That the Booker is only one aspect of this is remarked upon by Tim Adams in the Observer, and now, Kim Stanley Robinson makes a good case for SF being worthy of inclusion. I'll certainly look out at the recommendations. Fascinating that James Naughtie, Booker judge, bemoans that no SF was submitted by publishers, though the admission that the Professor of English at UCL is "not aware of science fiction" should make John Mullan ponder his job decription. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy of course; what sort of book makes the Booker list? Either something set in the past, or in an exotic location...so lets enter those type of books. Having said that, a shortlist that is entirely made up of novels set in the past does make one question the judges. Perhaps they didn't want to be comparing books so different as to be incomparable. And Robinson's key point is worth repeating: "A good new novel about the first world war, for instance, is still not going to tell us more than Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford."

But let's be honest, this is no golden age for fiction, and the fascination with the past is a symptom of this. It doesn't make them bad books, it makes them limited books. But I'm not sure what arts are going through a golden age. Certainly not cinema or rock music. The vivid invention found in comic books, American TV serials, circuses and multimedia spectaculars since the early 90s might now be petering out...contemporary classical music is a niche art form. Architecture and visual arts have had an arc of grandeur that may, in retrospect, be fuelled by marketing and money. Theatre and poetry remain anachronistic. Digitisation has yet to give us a D.W.Griffiths rather than the sideshows of the Lumiere brothers.

Anyway, one finds gold in the unlikeliest of locations. Would a visitor to New York in the seventies have imagined that St. Mark's poetry project and CBGBs would become the temples of a renaissance rather than interesting cultural-anthropological niches?

The Didsbury Arts Festival runs next week, and there's a cornucopia of events. I think you don't plan it, just turn up somewhere, and there'll be something unusual on. It's all very Didsbury of course, (which is different, somehow, than very Chorlton).

***
I've a number of creative things to do today, and over the next week or so. I keep having vivid dreams, and being very busy has meant that although I don't have much time for reflection, I find that there's layer on layer on stimuli waiting to be processed. Part of that, of course, is looking back and I'm still reading through old computer files and listening to old music in a way of remembering things that I've perhaps half-forgotten - not so much the pieces themselves, but the intent behind them.

In from the sun

I've been in Cyprus since Tuesday, on work trip, and have an evening of travel ahead of me. Its been generally lovely weather and the people have been really hospitable, but it has been work, and after four full days I'm a bit desperate for some "me" time. I found myself talking to the mayor of Paralimni yesterday about George Seferis, as the only Greek poet I know, but I hadn't realised that much of his work was written in this part of Cyprus. I'll have to dig out my "Selected Poems" in English when I get back. Having read alot about the imagists recently, there's something mystical about seeing Greek language on all the signs. (Many early imagist poems were also Hellenist, with titles and epigrams in Greek.) Oh, for a classical education. Yet, despite all the culture shock, the world is the same all over and the local authorities want similar things for their citizens as anywhere else in the world, and see technology as one of the ways of achieving it.

I've written a few lines of poetry, but nothing finished yet, as it's been very much snatched time between the official functions. I arrive back in Manchester in the early hours, and I'll need a bit of time to reconnect with the day-to-day.

The reason for the visit was partly because all projects kick off again in September - we're a service economy; a people ecology - and all that people activity has to take place Monday-Friday, mid September to mid December.

Every Generation Gets the Beatles it Deserves

I was unusual among my friends in liking the Beatles. But my love for them went back to when I was eight or nine and the two double albums 62-66 and 67-70 had been bought into the house a joint present for me and my dad. I took them away and never gave them back. Far more than the music of the mid-seventies they appealed to me. There was plenty to like, from the kiddy-friendly movie "Yellow Submarine", to early singles like "Can't Buy Me Love" that you could sing loudly, to more sophisticated fare. Quite early on I made "A Day in the Life" my favourite song, not knowing that this "obscure" track had received universal critical adoration since the day it was released.

Yet I'd say my generation, born at the end of the sixties, is the least smitten with the band. We came of age in a world of synthesizers, drum machines and floppy fringes and to be honest the authenticity of the Beatles was part of the problem. It's later generations that craved the simple pleasures of the original guitar combo. I was probably as interested in the "story" of the Beatles as the band itself - and waded through Philip Norman's "Shout!" preferring the picture book approach of the American-perspective "Beatles Forever." (Norman's choice of title said it all - naming his book after someone else's song - the book seemed more interested in the money than the music.)

But every generation gets the Beatles it deserves (as I wrote in a previous post). I've always found it hard to imagine the Beatles being anyone's favourite band, for two reasons - firstly their wonderful diversity makes them a difficult band to love wholesale, and secondly, unless you were "there" at the time, how could you possibly have a personal connection with this band? The Beatles, after all, were for everybody. I gave up on them for a bit in my teens, preferring the music that my parents couldn't and wouldn't love, the Cure, Joy Division and Cocteau Twins. Saying the Beatles is your favourite band seems a little on the perverse side, like having Shakespeare as your favourite writer; yes, yes we know they are good, but what about your own view? And to be honest, apart from Liam Gallagher, I don't think I've ever heard anyone call them their favourite band. The Clash, Joy Division, Led Zeppelin, Adam and the Ants even...but not the Beatles.

In the early seventies it wasn't yet clear what a sudden decline there would in the quality of their solo work. You could easily make a passable Beatles album out of the best of "All Things Must Pass", "Ram" and "McCartney", "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" and "Imagine", and accompanying singles. Yet by the time the "red" and "blue" albums came out there was a need to remember them at their best. Despite their faults, those two albums "cherry picked" the albums, and included the best of the non-collected singles and b-sides, and songs that had been hits for other people, such as "Obla-di Obla-da", "Michelle" and "Yesterday" became canonical. If the Beatles had suddenly reformed in 1976, their nostalgia set would likely enough be drawn from those 8 sides. Ironically, apart from the old slavish devotees like ELO, the "influence" of the Beatles own sound was hard to find in the seventies and eighties.

That they had fallen out of favour was even clear when Lennon was so tragically murdered. "Double Fantasy" was a world away from being a Beatles album, it was an adult, not an adolescent work, and Yoko Ono was a key component of the record. It was a mild critical and commercial success before he died, and then it was his solo records, "Imagine" in particular, which were revived. It wasn't John the Beatle that we remembered, but the John of the Amsterdam bed-in, white pianos, Yoko Ono and "Give Peace a Chance." Had he lived, its hard to see the eighties being kind to Lennon. The Geffen label he'd signed to saw many of the 70s artists David Geffen had given contracts to, such as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Donna Summer, release the most disappointing records of their careers.

The key "Beatles" record of the era was a novelty, the illegal bootleg that became Stars-on-45, a medley of the best bits of a dozen or so Beatles records was one of the biggest records of 1981. All we needed, it seemed, was not love, but the hooks we still heard at wedding discos. The late seventies and early eighties saw EMI treat the Beatles as poorly as any other back catalogue artist, with compilations albums called "Beatles ballads" or or compiling their movie songs.

It was the CD that saved them, as it did so much of the record industry. Re-issuing the catalogue was what financed the late 80s record industry, and the Beatles albums were the jewels in their crown. Realising that many of their best songs never made an album, "Past Masters" 1 & 2 swept up the debris, and briefly, "Sgt. Pepper" was back in the charts again. By the nineties, the CD reissue industry had become more and more bloated - it was not just original albums, but box sets and deluxe editions that the fans craved (or at least: that they'd buy.) Whereas every band worth its salt has had a boxset released, the Beatles canonical status meant that everything they ever did was worth a release. Combining a TV series, a glossy book, and a series of double CDs, the archives were raided to give us the Beatles, once more, this time as historical artefact.

Into the new century, with the internet age upon us, the contemporary fan wanted something simpler, and the single CD "1", collecting their number ones on one packed disc became one of the best selling CDs of the new decade. Here, in an age where people were starting to listen to songs as downloads or on MP3 players, the front cover was a vague design that had no connection with the band it contained. Its phenomenonal success seemed to imply that the Beatles would remain with us forever, even if, like ABBA or Queen, they were now reduced to a "canon" of twenty songs or so.

What then to make of the remastering of the original albums, from the original tapes, and, for completists, mono and stereo versions? This Beatles reissue programme seems like one last attempt to make money out of the catalogue, given that the recordings begin to go out of copyright in 2012. In other words, for EMI to keep selling their music their needed to be a new "digital remaster." Yet aware that people consume songs in games as well as on the radio, the Beatles Rock Band reinvents the band as animated moptops for the first time since "Yellow Submarine." Whatever your thoughts on their music, you can't deny we get the Beatles we deserve.

The History Books

Some of my favourite novels of the last few years are historical; "The Poisonwood Bible"; "The Plot Against America" and "American Pastoral"; "L.A. Confidential"; "Oscar and Lucinda"; "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"... so surely I shouldn't have much problem with a Booker shortlist that owes more to the history section of the library than current affairs? Well, yes and no. There's certainly some interesting sounding books on the list this year, whether its the semi-autobiographical "Summertime" by J.M. Coetzee, Hilary Mantel's much-acclaimed "Wolf Hall" set during the 16th Century, or Adam Foulds story about the life of John Clare, "The Quickening Maze." Yet, when all six of the shortlist are set in the past - with only the Coetzee being within my lifetime - one has to wonder, yet again, about the English novel. The books I listed at the beginning, American and Australian, seem to be history books in setting only, their concerns primarily contemporary. Will this Booker list have a similar focus? I do hope so. Of course, its what we do, in Britain, "the history business", its why people come to Stratford, to Windsor, to York, yet I can't be the only one who is uneasy that not a single contemporary-set novel published this year was deemed good enough to make the shortlist of our main literary prize. Those who do not remember the past may well be condemned to repeat it, but those who only remember the past, may struggle to be ready for the future. Good novels will be on this list, I'm sure, but one has to hope that its just the quirk of one year's shortlist, and that our best contemporary writers are addressing the challenges of the modern age, not just finding security in the certainties of the past.

Literature Played at Variable Speeds

The writers of stone tablets maybe managed a page a week; perhaps the ornate scripts of a Medieval monk took almost as long to craft a perfect page; moveable type saw a page set in several hours; a page could be typed in an hour or less on a typewriter, yet few writers were good typists. (Orwell's handwriting was so illegible that he had to do his own typing of "1984" even as his health faltered.) The many millions of copies of the new Dan Brown novel will have been printed at breakneck speed over a number of weeks, I imagine. A single web page can be written and published in the time it takes to think the words, and be distributed to the whole world, or at least that bit that is watching, at the touch of a button.

Literature has always ran at different speeds; in the writing of it, in the finishing of the manuscript, in the print and publication, and in the distribution; then there is the reading. However long the Dan Brown novel took to write, it will have been written to be read as quickly as possible. One of the oddest elements of the Harry Potter phenomenon was the desire to be the first readers to have completed the latest book. As those books got longer, and the time between appearances got longer, it was as if a gourmet feast was being swallowed down with the alacrity of a TV dinner.

Some books require repeated readings to give up their secrets, others are still unfinished, unfinishable. I've yet to complete "Ulysses", and the last time I tried to begin "from the top", it was the Sirens chapter that derailed me again. I've read the end, the middle, the start, but not the whole novel. A Borges story could be re-read on a perpetual loop, understanding not coming any quicker because one had memorised the piece. A memorisation of a passage of Shakespeare or off "Dover Beach" will give off more than an understanding, but an "inhabiting" of the words, yet the full meaning might not come even then.

But we live in fast times, we live in an impatient age. Blog posts are first drafts, sent out with only a cursory editing - and, increasingly so are first novels, newspaper articles and volumes of poetry. All text is dynamic of course, a book is not a machine with a certain number of moving parts which have to be in the same order to work; however if there turned out to be a "director's cut" of "White Teeth" or "Remainder" I doubt that there'd be many who'd have the time or inclination to read the new version, or, indeed, wonder at any differences. I've 3 versions of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", you can read both "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and "Stephen Hero;" "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" is even briefer, but maybe not as wondrous, in its New Yorker magazine version.

I've been thinking about this as I've re-read some recent prose. I know how long it takes even to write something that has appeared to come easy. There are some stories that I've sat down with a dozen times and not moved a word forward. I tend to avoid writing anything if I can't write anything good. Yet even as a I read what I've been working on, and seeing that it's not all bad, that there could be something of value in it already, which just needs work to become what it could be, then I also see something speeding away from me. I'm wanting fiction that is as fast as the age, I'm impatient for it. I don't mean I just want a "page turner", after all that's more to do with the speed of action, than the speed or otherwise of the writing, rather, the speed of the inaction is a problem - a "light" prose is almost a necessity. I cut out the dead wood, I prune, and trim, and cut; I expunge awkward formulations, convoluted sentences; the words are "true" to the subject, and say only that, yet that very lightness creates a problem - it's hard to stop reading at speed; it's hard to take in the detail. I've made a virtue of an economic descriptive style, and I have forgotten how to read it slowly. I don't want to read slowly. There is no reason to...

...I always liked "White Teeth" because it was so full of stuff, that, more than any other reason was why it seemed a good first novel. I was hungry for content. There are stories within stories, and Zadie Smith is a highly amusing teller. But you read a big Proustian book like Philip Hensher's "Northern Clemency" and there's hubris amongst the description. Its a vast book that demands its read reasonably fast, or else you'll despair at never making it to the end, yet the writing wants you to read slowly; yet hardly gives you the sustenance that slow reading requires. A non-literary novel from an earlier age will now seem too slow and too solid, whether its a workmanlike prose or highly literate.

Literature has always played at different speeds, but I'm not sure now, as writer as well as reader, what we want or expect. Something too complex will seem too slow, something simpler, but more honed, we'll whizz through without giving it the time it may require. All that's left are impressions, tastes. Somehow, as a writer, you have to ensure that the essence of the work remains, and style, length, and ease of reading, as well as the words you use, the sentences you form, are all part of that. Get it right, and the world, I suspect, is yours for the taking.

In Praise of Print

There have been a few Twitter threads recently asking "what is your oldest digital photo?" I guess I've got a few from 1999-2000, as that was the first time I had access to any sort of digital camera. I'm quite careful to keep archiving "My Documents" so even though those snaps would have been loaded onto a computer that was the one before the one before this one I've got a folder somewhere that says "Archives."

I've been writing to screen regularly since 1990, and for many years would ensure I'd got a print copy of absolutely everything I'd just written. CD-Rs, USB sticks and portable storage are all quite recent things; and, just like everyone else I've got lazy. The problem with backing things up electronically is that you can't actually see what's there. The shoebox under the bed full of photographs is there to be discovered - and its contents understood - ten, twenty years from now; but as for the USB stick? Will they even be readable in a decade or another piece of obsolete technology.

It is with this in mind that I've started to archive my writings on paper again, but rather than a lever arch file, I've gonna back to Lulu.com's Print on Demand facility. Its still not the easiest thing to negotiate, but with a bit of time and effort, putting together a "paper archive" is easier than ever. Even a prolific author's lifetime work doesn't add up that many pages or volumes in the scheme of things - yet just as we take endless digital snapshots (and treasure only a few), our writing on blogs, or into word documents probably doesn't get ordered now until it actually is ready for publication. When I was writing a novel full-time I used to print off the morning's writing for checking and re-reading in the evening.

Even at a time when I'm thinking about how writing can be made available online or via e-readers or iPhones, being able to get a good printout of your work remains important; both for re-reading and editing the work, and for creating an archive that seems to have a little more permanence than a series of "virtual files."

Non Review

I just read Aravind Adiga's "White Tiger" which won last year's Booker. An enjoyable enough debut, but a perplexing prizewinner. It seems a little ridiculous reviewing the Booker winner a year late, particularly when I didn't think it was a particularly memorable novel. I did enjoy it, but felt it had too many designs on the reader, which led to a certain predictability setting in after the first few (very good) chapters. Basically, when the character leaves the rural Indian "Darkness" for Delhi, it loses its strangeness, and becomes a little laboured; very much a journalistic novel that shows "the other side of India", yet I'm not sure how much most of us have taken in of India's "economic miracle" as it is. Everyone I know who has visited has always come back talking at length about the immense poverty. I finished it yesterday and its already slipping from memory somewhat. After reading three first person debuts with unreliable narrators, in the last couple of weeks, I think my next read needs to bring back the omniscient author. Third person, please.

Do blog posts last?

I'm not the most prolific of bloggers, but I have been consistent, writing online for a few years now. This blog, like a number of others, is archived at the British Library; not, I think, because I'm a name worth keeping, but because of that consistency of subject - literature - and my continued commitment. It's not so surprising, of course. Writers have always been prolific informal as well as formal communicators, whether through letters, diaries or journalism. Poets, in particular, who are often annoyingly spare in their published works, can churn out large volumes of "collected letters" or similar. I do think, as well, that writers, in what ever format, are likely to be aware of some "public" audience even for private communications. It is in letters, and now blogs, that we maybe work out some of our first draft ideas.

I've been spending the last couple of days doing some "housekeeping" of my writing life. I've always organised my computer documents reasonably well, but it's been a while since I've gone back a couple of years, and pulled together writings that have been half finished, or forgotten. I found quite a number of poems from last year that I'd forgotten about; and then, for the first time in a long time, went back to my blog posts. Perhaps a third of 2008's postings can stand outside their original place. Looking through what I'd written, I can see my main references were to novelists - and rarely the contemporary - though I'm often talking about the contemporary literary scene. Looking at my notes from New Writing Worlds 2008 the references of writers at that event were far likelier to be philosophers or other thinkers. I'm perhaps a little suspicious of "thinkers", finding fiction and poetry providing a better philosophical structure for my world. Am I getting ideas second hand? I don't think so - I just have a great respect for the imaginative, the literary, the artistic in general. It seems to reinforce my feeling that too much contemporary discussion is around half-formed ideas and ideologies - the agendas of academics, cultural commentators, consultants and journalists seeming to have more traction in our current society than those of artists. Artists, of course, often take longer to make their point - and we live in a fast culture - yet Victorian England is better discovered through Dickens and Eliot than the essayists of the day.

Blogs are part of that "noise" of course, and I realise that one of the major limitations of the format is that a blogger often uses a shorthand - referring to books or authors or ideas - without ever addressing the thing he is talking about directly. Where is my essay on Martin Amis or Ian McEwan? It doesn't exist in any meaningful form...yet I talk (sometimes authoritatively) about both authors, and reference them often in my blog. A blogger assumes what knowledge our imagined audience has, and, in that context, we do not need to explain further. It's a strange paradox.

As always, I'll leave these questions hanging in the air, half formed. What was pleasing - going back over past blog posts - was how often these tiny cells would develop, or be repeated, to replicate until they had a life of their own; that life, it probably goes without saying, is in my creative work. These, I begin to think, are sketches, before I paint a fuller canvas.

Debut Novels: Truth and Lies, Innocence and Experience

I've read two debut novels this week; however one of those was Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road", written before I was born. It's a very readable novel, and having recently written a novella about a disintegrating marriage, it was fascinating to read a successful novel on the same subject, but in a different age, and from a different place. I'm not sure that its a "classic", though it certainly deserves its rediscovery. Its a dark book, almost overlaying a noir sensibility over middle American lives. The three act structure and the subject matter and setting do remind me of plays such as "All My Sons" and "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?", but Yates is novelist, not playwright, and he gives us an interior monologue which achieves a psychological depth that explains its current popularity. When I say its not a "classic", its more that it feels quite familiar to me; reminding me of Cheever, Updike, even Evan Hunter. The America of the fifties salaryman is so familiar to us from television, that the novel does seem to be of its time and place. Its a contemporary novel from just before the modern America really begins, but its themes of family, work and love are universal.

What goes without saying is what an adult novel it is. Both Frank Wheeler and his wife April are mature characters. We meet them not at the beginning of their struggles to "fit in" but at the end, as their hopes and expectations bump up against the narrow life that they live. Not for the first time I was reminded how few contemporary novels seem comfortable with writing about mature lives, or real problems. Partly I think its because we live in safer, securer times, yet its rare - in English fiction at least - to find a writer addressing such issues. Perhaps McEwan of late, but that's all that comes to mind.

Its difficult for a debutant - a young writer particular - after all what life is their to write about. James Scudamore's "The Amnesia Clinic" I picked up after his second novel "Heliopolis" has been longlisted for this year's Booker. If its anywhere near as good as the debut, it should make the shortlist. Set in Ecuador, its a story about stories, clearly owing a debt to those South American fabulists such as Borges and Marquez, but with a down-to-earth feel that you'd expect from an English writer. Anti, the narrator, is an English boy in Ecuador, who becomes friends with Fabian, a local boy who lives with his uncle, and doesn't talk about what happened to his parents. Like McEwan's "Atonement", its about how children - the boys are 15 - can make decisions that have catastrophic consequences; because of what they see, how they interpret it. The stories in the novel are very much of the shaggy dog variety, and I think, in less capable hands, the novel could have come across as too faux for its own good. Yet because we are seeing the story through the narrow perspective of an English boy, its probably the right decision. Unlike Diaz's "Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" where "stories" seem more real than the horrible truth of the Trujillo regime, here the stories are like clothes used for dressing up. Anti and Fabian even have a formula for puncturing the myths of their stories, by asking "what would a really unimaginative person think."

When you are child, of course, your parents tell you off for "telling tales", as story becomes a synonym for lie. Its strange how often it comes up in contemporary fiction - because here the stories have tragic consequence, surely an odd moral for a novelist (a writer of stories!) to be giving? - and I think its partially because of that discomfort with maturity. Yates in "Revolutionary Road" has both Frank and April living a lie, or worse, believing each other's story to the point that the lie and the truth are inseperable. Only the novel's medically insane character, John, gets to speak, rather than think the truth. In the Scudamore novel I'm minded most often of Thornton Wilder's wonderful "The Bridge of San Luis Rey", where the stories are the truth - and you uncover the story of a man's life, to find his destiny. "The Amnesia Clinic", as the title perhaps suggests, is far more playful. Its also looking at memory, and how we give ourselves stories to help us remember, or to help us forget.

For debut novelists today, there does seem to be a desire to write from a position of innocence, rather than experience - whether a child as in "The Amnesia Clinic" (or Catherine O'Flynn's excellent "What Was Lost") or an adult with something missing, such as Annie as Jenn Ashworth's "A Kind of Intimacy". Experience, it seems, can wait.

The Best (and worst) of Manchester

I dutifully went into town yesterday, first time for over a week. Manchester was under a pall of greyness. You noticed, in comparison with London in particular, how little of a tourist destination it is at times like these. You come to Manchester for reasons - football, shopping, occasionally an artistic event or a conference, to see friends - but not for Manchester. The building site that is the city centre as the trams are still being upgraded doesn't help. It hardly seems that long since they were put down - or the surfeit of cranes around the city before the Commonwealth Games, desperately finishing off Picaddilly Station. We've been a building site for years, and one's tempted to say that sometimes its building mostly over the cracks - and, extinguishing what little bit of green there might be in the city.

Through the rain, escaping the Arndale, I headed to Urbis, to catch the "best of Manchester" exhibition. Its a mini Turner prize for the creative arts (art, fashion and music), with the winners exhibited. Since only really the visual artists are meant to be on show (how can you exhibit a regular night like Club Brenda?) its a hotch potch but a vibrant one. Far better than the ragged New York exhibition downstairs. I liked Natalie Curtis's lightbox photographs of bands; and particularly Rachel Goodyears dark illustrations. Its a crowd-sourced competition, with judging from a number of luminaries. I'm not sure what its aim is - certainly Goodyear, the Owl Project, Babycakes and Switchflicker records have been doing their thing for a while now - but in pushing some of the more leftfield stuff in the city to a wider audience its good, and should probably be expanded (I would say this) to include film and writing.

Having been enjoying the guilty pleasure of "Desperate Romantics" these last few weeks I thought I'd pop into Manchester Art Gallery and check out their pre-raphaelites. I'd forgotten (if I ever knew) that the art gallery is completely shut on a Monday. I know the Cornerhouse's gallery is also closed on a Monday, but the rest of the venue remains open - the art gallery, our civic gem, was dormant and empty - and this in the school holidays. Somehow, it seemed something of the worst of Manchester, some civic decision made for good reasons of practicality, I'm sure, but frustrating. With the Central Library about to close for three years, the city becomes yet again, a place where all you can do is shop or drink. On the way to watch the football in a pub, I didn't notice a woman walking the other direction at speed, and slightly cut her up. I turned to apologise and got a mouthful of abuse. Perhaps a week away from the city has over-sensitised me a little; but for once, I'm in no hurry to get back there.

Paz and Possibilities

I've clearly been saving up these blog posts, after a week away. I picked up a number of second-hand books in the MIND charity shop in Highgate, including "Convergences - Essay on Art and Literature" by Octavio Paz. I was drawn immediately to the essay, published in 1967, "The new analogy: Poetry and Technology." It's worth a direct quotation:-

"There is no reason why the poet shouldn't use a computer to choose and combine the words that are to make up his poem. The computer no more does away with the poet than do dictionaries of rhyme or treatises on rhetoric. The computer poem is the result of a mechanical process somewhat comparable to the mental and verbal operations that a 17th century courtier in the West had to go through in order to write a sonnet...or a Japanese...the collective poems called haikai no renga....the results are also similar: pleasing, sometimes surprising, and in the end monotonous....Poetry enters the picture when impersonal memory - the vocabulary of the computer or dictionary - and our personal memory intersect: suspension of the rules and irruption of the the unexpected and unpredictable....poetry is always an alteration, a linguistic deviation."

There is much more of value in this long essay, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the book - and revisiting Paz's poetry at the same time; but I don't think this, or any other blogger could have said it better. In one nuanced paragraph Paz highlights the absurdities of those who proscribe poetry's boundaries by the imposition of a set of rules. Yes, there are rules, just as a computer operates on "impersonal" instructions, it is the human that chooses which sets of rules to follow, if any, and how to subvert - and, to make poetry. A good starting point, I think, for a week when I'm wanting to expend a few creative energies.

***

Further to my criticism of Poor.Old.Tired.Horse below, my frustration with the exhibition wasn't with individual art works, for I had gone with some expectation, but with the missed opportunity to properly address any of the exhibition's themes in a satisfactory way. I enjoyed seeing Liliane Lijn's work, and Alasdair Gray's illustrations (though the latter were very out of context in the exhibition)as well as seeing the old editions of the magazine itself. In the accompanying booklet, the exhibition is described as "an exhibition of art that verges on poetry" and it signally fails to do that - rather, choosing a number of somewhat random exhibits that in different ways exist at the interface between art and poetry. The final room has no poets, but artists using text. Given that there's a resurgence of poets working with visual forms, (and with sound art), often in far more valid ways than those conceptual artists who are merely appropriating text, or working in collaboration with artists, it was disappointing.

I was interested, given my recent engagement with computer-generated poetry, to find a free book to download on "Prehistoric Digital Poetry" from here. Well worth a browse.

Writing All Around Us

Thinking about "flarf" and "conceptual writing" - and about the concrete poetry at the ICA - and about the Futurists - and about Ezra Pound - there is writing all around us that we ignore, or treat as hieroglyphics. Took a few little photos in the week.

The way language gets used, debased, or made meaningless interests me. So I had to chuckle, given that we live on an island, at our "aquatic deprivation" in the first picture here; then as if to emphasise the stark warning black on yellow, and the wonderful, er...dead person drawn there (it was at some sort of electrical installation), the existential rubric "danger of death" - yes, we all face that, poets especially give it much thought. And, the anonymous graffitti artist in the toilets at Kentucky Fried Chicken, creating what - a warning? a haiku?

Manifestos

Poor.Old.Tired.Horse was the first exhibition I'd seen at the ICA, and it's very disappointing, one of the most poorly curated shows I've ever seen. Safe to say, you wouldn't get away with this in Manchester. What was it? A retrospective of the magazine of the same name, a selection of works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, its editor, and other associated poets, an overview of concrete poetry - but then a display of collaborations between artists and poets, and finally, artists-using-text. It did none of these things well, and compared with the two Bury Text festivals, it was an embarrassment. I wanted to see more of the magazines, and, to be honest, a less random selection of art. The ICA's "Roland" magazine acted as a catalogue, and was everything that the exhibition itself wasn't. If you pop in, treat yourself to that.

It was with some trepidation that I headed to another art exhibition, Futurism at the Tate Modern. Okay, we're contrasting a very small locally curated show with a major touring exhibition, but, still...

...I knew very little about the Futurists other than from the appropriations (ZTT, the cover of "Movement" etc.) so I was expecting, and got, an education. Although its fair to say that all of the art isn't premier division, as a group show, and as art history it was exemplary. Taking up a vast space on the fourth floor of Tate Modern, there was room enough to take in the art that flourished in Italy, and beyond, following the publication of Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto. I'm a sucker for manifestos in art, and the Futurists had them in spades. Yet the art they were making was more than just a parallel movement to cubism; it had its own aesthetics, its own innovations. Sometimes you can look back on art movements (such as modernism in poetry - with its fascination with the ancient past) and have trouble seeing what the battles were, and how the victories were won. But futurism did what it said on the tin; wanting to make an art of the mechanical, the modern, the industrial, the electrical, and to tear down the past.

Here, of course, is the risk with manifestos, that outside of art, they have a political dimension that is as destructive as an artistic one can be creative - and art has no role being part of that destruction. Yet, manifestos can serve as a break with the past, certainly. The Italian Futurist paintings at the Tate, many of which had appeared in London in 1912, causing a sensation, have something of the chaos of modernity about them. Reflecting speed in art was nothing new (remember Turner's paintings of the railways), but making it so central to the work, so that Bergson's idea of simultaneous time was reflected in the picture, was, and is highly interesting. But the exhibition was particularly interesting for contextualising Futurism within its times. I particularly liked seeing the Cubo-Futurists of Russia, many of them female, who rejected vehemently to Marinetti's misogyny, and incorporated a mix of styles, and subjects in their pre-revolutionary work. The English, inevitably, were poor modernists, and the few works that leant towards Europe seemed half-hearted in comparison; yet not all of this was artistic conservatism - Epstein's remarkable Torso in Metal with Rock Drill looks to be both an early design for "Darth Vader", and a frightening depiction of the machine age that was going to shortly overwhelm millions of young men on the Somme; and Wyndham Lewis's "BLAST" magazine was a rare English "radical" response to this European art.

Text was very important to the Futurists, incorporated into their art, as well as framing the debate; and Marinetti, of course, was a poet. There were no poets in the final room of Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, only artists using text, and it does seem to me that when artists of different mediums collaborate or even hang out together, more interesting things happen than when there's merely appropriation. The week's final artistic happening was in a pub in Farringdon, catching the launch of Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives/3, a collection of new poets. The book itself includes illustrations alongside the verse, as if to prove my earlier point. I only caught half the poets, but enjoyed what I heard. There's willingness to jump off into the surreal, or to follow a conceit through several different directions, that seems very refreshing.

The Devastation of Style

I've been thinking the unthinkable.

Actually, I've been thinking of something that seems to be terribly unfashionable. The idea of literary style. Are there writers who are even bothered about this any more? Yet it is the one thing that is un-copyrightable, un-copyable, un-biddable. There are certainly some stylish writers out there, and certainly, as well, some writers, who are clearly in thrall to a certain type of style.

Our readers, though, what do they think? Do they even care any more? Clearly in the non-fiction world, it is a populiser like Malcolm Gladwell who can take certain ideas and make them fly, and style must come into this - must be a commodity with value. Writers as disparate as Nick Hornby, Philip Pullman and A.L. Kennedy have quite recognisable voices. Yet, style, seems to be of an altogether different quality. It is, primarily, I think, a literary aim. Something that is so unreachable, yet so accidentally reached at times, that once it grabs hold of a writer, there's little else that matters; plot, character, whatever. It is a gold standard.

I've read several bloggers and other comments, that have been highly critical of Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye." Salinger, that most effortlessly stylish of writers! It is not the adolescent Holden Caulfield, nor the "classic" status of the book that gets them, I'm sure. It's "style." Somehow it's an affront. Can't the book be "more" than this? Like an aesthete who insists on everything being perfect for a dinner party, a stylist is laughed at for his or her pretension, even, for caring about style.

Yet how many writers have big ideas? There is an innate conservatism about long fiction, in particular. It does not trailblaze as often as it looks back; as if fifty or so year of modernist experimentation, was enough, thank you, and can we have our Dickens back? (Dickens, of course, is best read not for his stories or his characters - great as they may be, they're sometimes too melodramatic for every taste - but for his style.)

What style does for a certain type of reader (and I'm one), is remain in the mind long after the deux ex machina of the novel itself. By this reading, "Lolita" can never be a dirty book; Lawrence's novels can never be overwrought; Fitzgerald cannot be dismissed as a flapper. Style elevates the prose writer to music, to art. (To poetry, as well, though that's a different, and complex debate.) It is why "The Good Soldier" stays in my mind as the finest novel I've read in the last couple of years, yet I'd find it hard to paraphrase the plot. It is why I'm reading Thomas Mann's lugubrious late novel "Doctor Faustus", slowly, with Alex Ross's "The Rest is Noise", and the history of the 20th century always at hand.

Also, and this is why style is overwhelming my thoughts at present, I realise that it is the subject that demands; it is the sensibility that demands. A pot boiler can be written with the ingredients to hand; a bigger subject (and aren't all subjects that are worth writing about, by necessity "bigger"?) requires a far subtler ingredients list. This is not about getting things always right. Lawrence is a prime example of lines and paragraphs that seem wrong on their own, but become essential when together; Fitzgerald was a dreadful speller (his editors fixed that one.) In translated fiction, style is everything - for the workmanlike story can be re-told; the stylish prose has to be re-worked.

For style is devastating, as well as invigorating. It makes writers do things for the sake of it; it makes writers do things beyond them; it makes writers choose the wrong projects for too long; and its unwinnable, as all mortal battles are. Yet, the Gods knew this, I think; immortality doesn't come without it.

e is for easy...

Robert McCrum has declared the ebook to have come of age, at least in America, where Barns&Noble are fighting it out with the Amazon Kindle, whilst here we have only Sony Readers and lots of people reading ebooks on their iPhones. McCrum makes the suggestion that "Conceivably, e-readers will actually promote the sale of hardback books as readers, delighted by what they have browsed on the Kindle, turn to a more lasting version for their libraries." Yet, at the same point, we know that one of the main barriers to the take-up of technology is the pricing model - often the same as, even more than the physical book. I'm not sure what sort of readers have "libraries" these days, and I'm pretty sure, given past track record, that the small market for full-price ebooks will remain the publishers' obsession for a while yet - actually unpicking the business model, and making ebooks available as "try before you buy" seems unlikely, and who, really is going to download the first couple of chapters of a novel for free, and then have the inconvenience of paying for the rest or going to the bookshop? That seems counterintuitive to how people read and use books.

Yet in one way, I am sure he is right. There is a market for a convenient portable reader device that people can always have with them, and, unlike the reluctance to pay for stuff on the internet, there seems a willingness to pay for stuff on the move. "e is for easy" in other words. How many times have you turned up at the station to find WHSmiths either closed or with such a paltry book collection that you don't even bother? How many lost sales for the publishing industry are there, just from this simple example? I'd imagine its hundreds of thousands a year. There's clearly a crossover between the frequent traveller, and the tech-savvy, and its here that the e-reader will come into its own. Yet, most owners will probably do what they do now with their iPod and fill it up before leaving the house. The publishing industry needs to be more canny about this. At present the way it markets e-books is as if they're just exactly the same as paperbacks, and that you buy one at a time. Perhaps e-books need to be made available as "bundles", or buy the new book by an author, and get two older e-books for free (a version of the secondhand market, perhaps?) - also, I still feel that give this market enough legs, and the type of books that do well in it, will be slightly different. A couple of weeks into my own free e-book experiment, its been downloaded 135 times. I've no idea how often the novella's been read, or whether its been liked, but clearly these aren't all people I know. The limits of Feedbooks, where its stored - i.e. no social networking, the lack of any chance to "build" an audience, or even to buy other works - mean that I don't think I'd use it again; but since it made life so simple for uploading the book, it's been a useful experiment.

Yet, we don't really know what people will want or come back to. All the new devices out there from phones to iTouch to netbooks, are increasingly geared to include sound and vision as well as words. There's a revolution, not in ebooks, but in the internet, which still betrays so much of its print origins. I could well imagine the PC and its equivalents shrinking market over the next three years or so as all the functionality that most people want (outside of work) can be found on their iPhone or netbook. Its in this context that the release of Nick Cave's new novel, as an obvious multimedia experience, is interesting, but no more than an experiment. Somewhere, remember, there is a factory full of unsold CD-ROMs from a previous experiment in consumer multimedia.

Nasty Girls

I saw Jenn Ashworth read from her debut novel "A Kind of Intimacy" in Norwich last month, and I wanted to read the whole thing after that. It's a read in one sitting book, (or at least I did), though I found it a little uncomfortable to start with. From the start you are in the non-too pleasant mind of Annie, the novel's overweight heroine, a most unreliable of narrators. Because you meet Annie at her point of arrival (at her new home, her past behind her), there's quite a slowness to the start, like when you get the kids deciding whether to stay in the haunted house in a teen horror flick. Yet because of Annie's self-described unattractiveness, and her almost naked desire for attention from the very first page, its not the easiest of reads. Something wicked this way comes. I don't want to provide any spoilers, but Annie's not the nicest of women - as you get the sense from the first page, and from the blurb on the back cover - but as she's our guide, its quite an uncomfortable journey. In many ways this debut is a slightly diabolical inversion of a chick lit novel, kind of Bridget Jones with fangs, but after a lugubrious start, really comes into its own in the last third, where the past that she's escaping, and the future she's hurtling towards collide. On her acknowledgement's page, Ashworth thanks Anne Fine, and it reminds me a little of Fine's novel-for-adults "The Killjoy" about another unorthodox character with a character flaw. Both novels owe a little to a genre of stalker novels that we once thought began and ended with Fowles' "The Collector", and I suppose its against that novel's psychological depth it falls, inevitably, a little short, for there's not much rhyme or reason to Annie; she's neither a plausible victim of circumstance or an unexplained Iago. Yet Ashworth's prose has a shocking modernity to it, that is somewhat at odds with the setting, a dim Northern town (actually, Fleetwood), that seems to have no trappings of the present about it. Annie's a bit of a creation, and only puts into the shade some of the other characters, sit com staples mainly - the men in particular are charicatures. It used to be male writers who created unwholesome women characters, but the stiletto's on the other foot here, with Ashworth's heroine worthy of being played by Kathy Bates. A little more colouring in of the background characters, and it would be quite a debut, yet even with these limitations, there's an inescapable dark glee in what is a tale of sordid suburban squalor, a kitchen sink drama for the take-away generation.

The World Goes On and Away

We're more seasonal at the moment then any time I remember since school. August should be a full stop, yet I'm still working away, for another week. Yet everyone's shutting up shop, heading off. That's the thing with our current "always available" status. Maybe, Thursday's Twitter failure, like when Google made the whole internet "unavailable", is a reminder of the limits of these new tools. And, yes, since we don't actually pay for these services, perhaps the business models will have to come along that ensure these vital channels stay open. They are, of course, just built on the internet itself, and just as the Victorian house stays up without foundations, maybe these will as well, or, some new internet building regulations will come into place which means that we could more easily switch from Twitter to Twitter2 or whatever. My browser of choice, Firefox, is proving a little temperamental as well, and again its a free product for which I've never paid a penny. I don't think Rupert Murdoch will be able to successfully charge for content (The Sun? The Times? The Sunday Times? News of the World? They seem properties that are all so built into the physical world, with the websites only as add-ons, that a radical (and expensive) investment programme would be needed to even get them up to the level of the Guardian) yet maybe we'll all be willing to pay for mobile services/clients etc. in return for some service guarantees. I can see a whole business being built around portability of data/service for freelancers for instance. Someone more technical than me just needs to draw the diagram.

Yet we seem overly frantic still. There was yet another digital event (TedX) in Liverpool last week. It seems that the fast-moving world of technology requires this constant reiteration. It's perhaps the same for art as well; there's a brief sojourn whilst we take breath, but half of the artistic world will be heading up to Edinburgh, as players or audience, the other half, probably sat on the beach planning their September consumptions. It's why, in certain areas at least, the recession seems to have had a limited effect. The speed of modern life is like the replicating soldiers in that Dr. Who episode "The Doctor's Daughter", with, on the one hand, generations passing in a blink, and - on the other - a slowness (say, to the passing of the baton between generations), that seems increasingly culpable. Speed on the one hand, and delay and resistance on the other. It is a disastrous combination.

I'm half way through Helen Carr's "Verse Revolutionaries" and hardly half a dozen "imagist"-like poems have yet been written. The only incomparably great poem that Pound has yet written is his remarkable take on the Anglo-Saxon "The Seafarer." Yet things will speed up, artistic revolution, when it happens, being measured in days, weeks and months, not years and decades.

All thoughts of the moment, and I need to find time to relax and get away, contemplating a trip to Norfolk/Suffolk next week, since I'm already down in London; and at the same time, a desire not to let the year's most languid month slip away unheralded. I had a dense, doleful dream last night which seemed to be a little bit of a warning to get my house in order. Like the world, I've got the everyday actions, as well as the longer term plans. What get's broken is something in the middle.

Tonight's Poetry Fun

It's the August episode of The Other Room tonight at the Old Abbey Inn. I'm hoping to attend, although I don't know this month's poets, that's often been the case and I've not yet been disappointed. A chance to see friends as well.

When I'm in London in a couple of weeks I'm hoping also to get to the ICA for Poor.Old.Tired.Horse - an exhibition of concrete poetry, which I was alerted to by George Szirtes blog. No surprise that a poetry scene that has such a visual element is being showcased at a gallery, but it highlights again how poetry (and literature in general), sometimes can only get attention by disguise. Our expensive galleries need shows to put on, of course; literature without its cathedrals, loses out. Can you imagine if the same efforts and energies had been put into promoting modern poetry as modern art over the last twenty years? It's why I was so dispirited by Belinda Webb's reductionist take on the preservation of literary houses, such as Gaskell's in Manchester. I'd rather we had a better way of preserving the physicality of literature, but given that "the nation" feels a need to preserve and promote that very British invention, the Opera, a little literary restoration hardly seems out of order. (To put it in perspective: Manchester has a population of 2.5 million people; only the parsonage at Haworth, just outside of this, comes to mind as a literary landmark.)

I'm reading Helen Carr's immense study of the imagists, "Verse Revolutionaries", and the "revolution" has yet to happen; so its the period detail of the connections and influences of this small group of writers, all outsiders in their own way, that is so fascinating. Flitting between the book, and the Library of America's Collected Ezra Pound, you see how slow and painful any revolution was. Pound in particular was wanting a literary career of the old kind, it was when he realised this was no more a possibility, that he moved to becoming an iconoclast. Returning to America in 1910, he finds no literarily convivial scene in New York, had he come back three years later, its beginning's would have been there.

Reading this, its hard to recall that literary (and artistic) revolution can happen in a few years, across a generation. There's been, if anything, a counter-revolution in poetry since the sixties at least, particularly in the UK. Yet, I feel that despite the same conservatism of taste of the majority of the tiny poetry establishment that reminds me of the Royal Academy fellows up in arms in BBC's "Desperate Romantics". Reading of the small runs of books that Pound and others were producing in the first decade of the last century shows how poetry never changes in certain aspects. Poets would meet together to read their work, and sell editions of 50, 100 or 200 through friends, contacts, subscriptions and occasionally shops.

What would an anthology of poetry from this first decade of the 21st century look like? More like the Georgians, than the imagists I think. Yet, after too many years when the canon has been closed to any experimentation, it seems clear to me that the small audience who are fanatical about poetry are looking beyond a narrow view of what poetry can be - and, in parallel at least - finally a frustration at the either/or of poetry for "page" or "stage". As The Other Room and other events show, even more esoteric poetry can be electrifying live, it doesn't rely on the tired tropes of "performance poetry."

The Faded Grandeur of Certain Ideas

I have had W.G. Sebald's "Rings of Saturn" waiting to be read for too long. I was looking for it before my recent visit to Norwich, as we were driving out to Sebald country during the week. I looked everywhere in my boxes of books to no avail. Yet on arriving back after the week, there it was at the top of one of the boxes, on show, as if to say, "I've been here all along." A slightly Sebaldian moment, I now feel.

I also feel I should probably have read "The Emigrants" first; but that's to come I feel. "Rings of Saturn" is one of the few books of the last 15 years that has already achieved the status of modern classic, though I wonder whether it will last. Sebald's tragically early death, and the acclaim that all his books have received, as well as his obvious uniqueness are probably reason enough for his easy elevation to such status. Yet, speaking to a few friends (the sort who attend reading groups) they'd not heard of the book. I almost wonder if the acclaim that came with its publication and shortly afterwards is already fading a little? Again, that would be at one with the book.

It's not a novel as such, though we may as well call it a novel; since it uses the novelist's arts. A travelogue around the Suffolk coast, it's also a rumination on history, or rather the shards of history that you find here, there and everywhere in any slightly venerable part of the British isles. Suffolk's history encompasses greatness; and wars; and its proximity to Europe makes it have a particular interest to a European writer like the German Sebald. One wonders what the Germans make of it? It would be near impossible to imagine a German-based English writer writing a similar meditation.

It's beautifully written - and translated, by Michael Hulse - yet there's a couple of things that jar; whether in original or translation it's hard to know. The tendency for the narrator to slip into another's voice as he tells their tale is disconcerting. The narrator (presumably Sebald, he has no other name in the book), is like the narrator of the Canterbury Tales, yet the voices of other peoples' stories aren't differentiated enough. As I say, disconcerting. As is the companion, "Clara," who pops up unannounced on the last page, apparently - according to a review I read - fished out of the previous book. In a book so precisely wound, and with such a sense of the various circularities of history, these odd moments of imprecision stick out sorely.

What the reader - or this reader, at least - found mesmerising was the "connections" made. Whether internal to the book, or to my own life. I was surprised, but reassured to find Manchester, Borges and Amsterdam all present amongst the settings and characters; and I'm increasingly drawn to the Suffolk landscape he walks slowly through. (Though no mention of Borges visit to Wythenshawe, a Sebaldian trip, I think.) What struck me, as I read the detailed diversions and ruminations on a history that encompasses geography (or is that a geography that encompasses history?) was how this sensibility seems a past one. The slow pace seems to speak of a dissolution of the spirit, a breakdown, nature as "Cure" possibly; but learning - as a crutch that can hardly hold the weight. It seems that this is the crucified learning of a Casaubon, unrealistically trying to find the "key to all mythologies." Death stalks the pages. The simple death of a scholar or the genocidal deaths of Cathars or Jews or 19th century Chinese. It is the two wars of the 20th century that dominate the book, however obliquely they are looked at. The carpet bombing of Germany was launched from the fields of the East of England; yet Sebald circles round this anger, as he circles round so much.

It is the circularity of the maze at Somerleyton, re-remembered in a dream after the visit. He is not immmune to the absurdities of the English class system, but like Lampedusa seems unhappy for what is lost - the great houses, the great families. It strikes me as a modernist book, or pose, in the sense that it looks outward into history for a pattern book for the world that he is living through. Although written and published in the middle nineties, its a reflective book, that seems to speak more through the remembered impoverishment of the Britain of the fifties, sixties and seventies. The tragedies of the Suffolk landscape seem long ago, forgotten.

I realised, on finishing the book, how little I could relate to the sensibility; that there seemed a lack of either the anger or engagement that the present demands, and a certain sunken resignation in the lessons, learnt and unlearnt of the past. It's a book that allows you to put your own spin on it, and perhaps that's part of it's appeal; yet its reluctance to go beyond the accumulation of esoteric fact, makes it a philosopher's argument; like the maze, impossible to find the centre of, or, once there, the way out. A sombre book, it wins out by the liveliness of its observation, the quirky charm of the miscellany, and by the sense that you can't really take it too seriously. A good book, no doubt, but already, I feel, fading a little into the margins. The faded grandeur of Somerleyton Hall, or the streets of once-fashionable Lowestoft seem matched only by the fading ideas and tropes of 20th century Europe. It is a book of remembrance, at its angriest when remembering the Belgian Congo or carpet bombing of old Germany or the Opium Wars, at its most hopeful when recalling a handful of writers and eccentrics. Against the frozen backdrop of history, these smaller histories are our warming flame.

The Class of '97

I like the Guardian's summer reading fiction specials. One name this year was unfamiliar, except, strangely familiar. Competition winner Lisa Blower, was actually on the M.A. in novel writing with me in 1997 at the University of Manchester. Already working in commercial radio, that's where she went back to after the course, and I never knew whether she finished her novel - similar to her story it was voiced from the point of view of a young girl in Stoke in the eighties. 35 now, the picture of her in the paper was immediately familiar, and she's now left commercial radio to study "creative and writing at Bangor."

We were an unusual group, that class of '97; at the time there were only half a dozen or less M.A.s in the country, and our focus on the novel stood out. There were about 12 of us on the course. The course was in its 4th year, I think, and had a good track record - Anna Davis, Sophie Hannah, and one of the Peep Show writers and others were earlier alumni. These things take time, of course. Mark Powell had a two book deal almost immediately after the end of the course; Heather Beck became a lecturer at MMU and had her novel published by a small local firm; further down the line Lee Rourke's "Everyday" collection of stories came out from "Social Disease." It was a nice surprise to see Lisa's name, a dozen years on. It's a good story as well.