Storyplaces

A story comes from different places at the same time. It seems it also requires space and time. It is my 4th day off work, being a long weekend, and only this morning have I managed to both shut out the clutter in my head and the clutter in my life (this weekend: the faultering computer) to tentatively write a few words. I began a story a couple of weeks ago called, initially at least, "The Invitee." Its a story that relates well to the Robert McCrum article I mentioned below, since its essentially about modern celebrity, identity, and literary insecurity. I've often thought one of the main themes of my fiction is "doubt" and this story, as it painfully works itself alive, is full of different levels of "doubt." Yet I realise, now that I'm writing it, and trying to fix its coordinates in my head (I rarely write a synopsis), that I'm pulling on longheld ideas for a longer piece, perhaps around the same subject. Maybe this is the first tentative stab at an idea that I've been brewing for a decade at least? Yet I've got to keep things in perspective. Its a 3,000 word story tops, with a clear arc to it, but one that requires careful handling. I'm writing a story about absences - the absence of a guest at dinner; the absence of success in the case of one character; and finally the absence of integrity. I have to get through this one: and soon - my own absence is increasingly the "art" itself rather than (like this post) the talking about it. I've read a little as well, but my concentration is poor at best. I'm trying to finish the "least completed" of my recent stories: and once I've done that maybe I'll find a key to unlock the nearly there ones. More than anything, I think I need a concentration of time writing fiction - even if not a "long piece", perhaps several short ones, locking together at some point.

McCrums of Comfort

I've read it twice now and I'm still not entirely sure what Robert McCrum is getting at in today's Observer.The Tart of Fiction found it a bit more comprehensible - basically that if it aint hyped you don't get attention. "Once, British novelists were under-paid and overworked. Now, with glittering prizes, huge advances, endless festivals and immediate celebrity, they've never had it so good," reads the headline. Which may be true, but for how many? And can we name names? I think there's a truth here that its not healthy for our writers, like our musicians, to be commercially "fully formed." To give a few examples, certainly Zadie Smith's 2nd novel was an awkward mix of the nice, lively American writing she was now reading, and "White Teeth's" sitcom sketches; which probably neither pleased herself or her audience - yet marketable commodity or not, I think she's shown in "On Beauty" that she's no more or less than a good, contemporary middle class establishment writer, with all that that implies, both good and bad. Perhaps the big advance culture for some other writers is damaging; but for whom exactly? I think anyone who read Richard Mason's "The Drowning People", a much-hyped big advance novel of a few years ago, would think good luck to him, and more fool the publisher and agent who hyped him as the best Oxford writer since Amis or some such thing. Clearly there's always an interest in first novel's, but its surely rare that they are a writer's best. In his trashing of the hype around Gautam Malkani's "Londonstani", McCrum is surely being part of the same "machine" that creates all this hyperbole in the first place, saying that "everything about its short life has been a disaster." Well, if you can call a big advance; blanket reviews; and 165 on Amazon.co.uk a disaster. If the book's any good, I'm sure it will survive it; and if not, well, he's hopefully been told to invest the money wisely. It's a while since the Guardian put a batch of "first novelists" on its cover, and I'd be interested to know if it gave as much - or any publicity to their follow ups? There's probably some truth in the idea that the "celebrity" culture for writers isn't particularly good for them, but the non-celebrity culture of most of the writers I know, isn't particularly good for them either. Better to be tempted at Hay, then temping for Hays. The problem comes - I think - when being a "celebrity writer" makes everyone consider them a good writer. Tony Parsons could never do a book reading again and it wouldn't help him write a good novel - whilst it might do a few literary types good to get out of the house more. I'm wondering what McCrum, usually quite perceptive on the industry, is wanting. I think he senses that the internet may yet have its day. Yet, he's not, as far as I know, signed up any literary bloggers as Observer reviewers. There are several points I think I've teased out of this article: that celebrity is becoming an end in itself for writers; that we're in dire need of a critical culture that can push and shape the contemporary novel; and that though the Booker sometimes gets it right, its part of a prize culture, that may cause some brilliant blooms, but which sucks the earth dry below it. I'd quibble with his view that books are "better printed, better designed and and better marketed" than ever before - the modern English paperback is mostly a shockingly throwaway item (with the pound doing so well against the dollar, splash out on the US edition, you'll rarely be disappointed), with only rarely (Julian Barnes' last novel for instance), a sense of elegance to the design. I think, possibly, he's just not found any decent books recently - no surprise with the culture he's describing - perhaps the Observer could lead the way, hunting down those small presses, and yes, those blogs, that are not purely - if at all - about money and marketing.

Nostalgia

I am still enjoying "the Line of Beauty", more so than the book in fact, since I think Andrew Davies has reduced it to its elements, identifying it as upper-class lit Mills & Boon at heart. The characters are still all surface, like in the book, and its clear that despite its length, there wasn't actually that much to go on in terms of the characters. The "class" issue is a funny one in "the Line of Beauty" - since there's always someone richer, someone more powerful, with the appearance of "the Lady" (Thatcher) as the ultimate status symbol. Ironically, this seems the one real insight of the novel, that Thatcher, to these people, was something "special", just as she was something demonic to so many others. Not just another politician. David Cameron having to ask Rebekah Wade to get him a ticket to the Beckham's party shows where celebrity has shifted, of course. I'm still having anachronistic qualms about the music (see below, and Rose Darling here) though I can perhaps excuse the use of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "The Power of Love" as an anthem for a generation dying of AIDS, since that was what it would become. I have gay friends who simply cannot hear the song, because of the number of funerals it reminds them of. As for the sex scenes in "The Line of Beauty", I notice that the lead character always gives, shall we say, never receives. Perhaps there's a last taboo in here? The utter lack of pumping house music (it's up to 1986 for chrissakes!) has sent me to my record collection, and I spent a pleasant evening digging out obscure house and dance tracks from that golden era. Amazing how quickly everyone, from Paul Weller, to the Pet Shop Boys ended up recording house tracks. There was a fine documentary on C4 about the Pet Shop Boys. A nice comment that they recycled about themselves - that their music was "depth through surface" - seemed worth repeating. I remember when they first made the charts, they weren't particularly seen as a "gay" act, and Tennant in particular very much didn't want to be viewed through the prism of gay experience. If anything they were most popular with teenage girls. I only really liked them when they did become a full-on electronic dance act, around "Introspection", but the claim of some of the vox pops that they songwriters as good as Lennon/McCartney seems a little off. Their best tracks are almost always interpretations: Go West (which didn't get a mention - though I always thought it wonderful that having avoided cliche for so long, they had the sense of humour to cover the Village People's hedonistic anthem), Always on My Mind, It's All Right, and Where the Streets Have No Name. I must admit that their later stuff has somewhat passed me by - and picking up 1999's "Night Life" for a few quid yesterday, I can see why, musically it had become very dated. It would have been nice if the documentary could have found a wider variety of celebrity fans than it did. As I remember it, Pet Shop Boys were very popular with girls. "The Smiths you can dance to" was always my favourite description of them (though of course: you could dance to the Smiths, just not in a white t-shirt at Heaven, on a load of poppers!) As if on cue, the BBC is asking for short plays about meeting your favourite rock star. David Bowie has already done the best of these in the "Jazzin' for Blue Jean" video, but I'll see if can think of anything else. I kind of think there's good nostalgia and bad nostalgia. Bad nostalgia is the increasing fetishisation of Joy Division/New Order/Factory Records/Peter Saville etc. aiming to do to Manchester what the Beatles Museum did for Liverpool (kill aspiration stone dead). whilst good nostalgia is me digging out these old house records, and wondering: wow, where did all this great music come from? "The Line of Beauty", though fun, is very much on the bad side - heritage Britain - the Pet Shop Boys documentary was somewhere in the middle (good when they were on the screen, bad when they weren't.)

Rock 'n' Roll Novels

No-one has yet wrote the great rock and roll novel, says Sean O'Hagan in this week's Observer Music Monthly. I don't think one can argue with that; but it does make me wonder how rarely authors admit to the existence of rock and roll. I've commented before that the musical soundtrack to Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty" seems phoned in by researchers rather than written from memory, which has allowed the TV guys to soundtrack it how it wants - I heard the Passions' "In Love with a German Film Star" anachronistically in the opening scenes, from 1983. If writers can't be bothered to get the soundtrack write, I'm not sure we should trust them on all the other ersatz detail; after all, a song can evoke an era. I look forward to reading David Mitchell's new novel, despite Lee Rourke's misgivings, at least to see whether 1983, a year written strongly in my memory, (favourite single: Trees and Flowers by Strawberry Switchblade, favourite album: Torment and Toreros by Marc and the Mambas) comes alive. Radiohead's "Ok Computer" was a dark, dismal presence in my MA novel "High Wire" (I never liked that album, and yet it dominated 1997, in cruel opposition to the euphoria of New Labour, and almost foretelling Princess Diana's death). For what it's worth, there's been a few decent rock and roll novels that O'Hagan doesn't mention. "Espedair Street" by Iain Banks and "Namedropper" by Emma Forrest come to mind. I'm glad he mentions Tony Parsons' "Platinum Logic" a rewriting of the Phil Spector story, that has mysteriously disappeared from his CV. Also, the best music novel I've ever read is the jazz and heroin drama of Evan Hunter's "Second Ending" (he also wrote "Blackboard Jungle" which became the film "Rock Around the Clock.") After returning to Manchester in 1997, I decided to set my follow up to "High Wire" here, and whereas that had centred around the night that Tony Blair got elected, "All This Scenery"(do you like the Joy Division-ish title?) was entirely set on the night that a feted Manchester band gets back together for a one-off gig, only the off-stage presence of their dead drummer (hey, its fiction remember?), overshadowing the triumphant evening. I never quite finished it - the first, completed half, drawing more than lukewarm responses from agents - mostly: its hard to get publishers interested in novels about music. The novel, of course, was about so much more. But maybe that's why there haven't been many published; and why writers prefer to use rock music as scene dressing or for their titles ("Girlfriend in a Coma"); or why it is more likely to work the other way round: Paul Kantner/Jefferson Starship's Heinlein apeing "Blows Against the Empire" (a remarkable piece of space age scifi folk), being given a sci-fi writing award. If I get a bit worked up about the music/lit crossover its probably after having such a dismal experience as last night's Top of the Pops. I rarely catch this; but the shower of 3rd rate no-hope major label shysters was unstoppable: Orson, the Feeling, the Beautiful South (er...it rains in Manchester apparently), a Gnarls Barkley album track about a monster (yes, "Crazy" is great, but that's not a carte blanche for crap), the very Ordinary Boys, and possibly indescribably worst of all, the Breaks Co-op. I don't think 30 minutes of music has ever made me feel so despairing - and I've got records by SPK, Scott Walker, the Cure and Swans in my collection.

Sunday Things

James Lasdun won the national short story prize. He's a good short story writer and poet, although frightfully patrician at times. You can usually pick up his collection The Silver Age, reasonably cheaply, and I'd recommend it, though as you can see, it came out in 1985, so although an undervalued writer in many ways, he's no new kid on the block(he's undervalued on the web as well, a mere stub at Wikipedia, and his publisher only barely acknowledges his existence, but I found a very good recent interview from Identity Theory) But these things take time; and I was reminded of that last night, at a very successful Verberate as part of the Chorlton Arts Festival. In a room overlooking the quiet of a bowling green it was quite easy to close your eyes in quiet comtemplation, only to be drawn back to the room by the sparkiness of the performers. I enjoyed the whole night; and the catholic nature of the event - fiction, poetry and music - is part of its appeal to me. Yet, this event, like so many others in Manchester is in some way an offshoot of the city's creative writing courses - mainly the MMU one now - in that without a publishing industry as such, there are a large number of writers studying and writing in the city at any one time, and an event like this sees graduate students from the last ten years of courses, some tutoring, some writing plays and poetry, a few published, a few self-publishing. It made me wonder whether, though its valuable to go on one of these courses, universities - particularly in the UK - might be the very worst places to let literature flourish. It seems that the things university's could provide: a magazine and events culture (similar to American universities, and in the UK, UEA), are almost absent. I would guess that the creative writing courses are net contributors to the university's finances rather than taking from it - and that whatever money they do spend is probably on high profile names as a "draw". At least the MMU backs up its collection of quality poets, Carole Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage and Jeffery Wainwright, with having a poetry MA, but too often you've got poets taking courses in fiction - when its the rare example - James Lasdun for instance, of Jackie Kay - who makes both work. And, inevitably, people need to make a living. Outside of arts council largesse, or university tenure, I guess we can move quicker, more imaginatively; but until we provide a real alternative - as I think Verberate and some of the magazines are beginning to do - the universities will be the main place where literary culture in this country flourishes; probably, I fear, to its detriment.

We have Personal Document Facility

I was in Brussels with work for 3 days, this work, an international network of thingummy bobs. The EU has international networks of everything, it appears, and sometimes 2. I looked in vain for second-hand bookshops, but did find a really good secondhand/bootleg record shop but he was closing and so I couldn't spend the next couple of hours rooting out that Plastic Bertrand bootleg I'd always been looking for. Hence, my blog-lightness of the last week. I did take last Friday off and spent much of the weekend in sorting out my PDF for Lulu.com's print on demand facility. Basically I ended up using their own conversion routine; which was simpler, but meant I had to make changes so that it utilised their standard fonts rather than my favoured choice. I guess if I had a proper (e.g. paid for) PDF creator it could save PDFs in different formats, but unless I've missed something, mine converts everything into A4 as a default. Similarly, the cover requires PDF's of certain sizes and resolutions for both the back and front, and I struggled a little with this; but because I was going for a simple approach, I did final achieve lift off, and the proof copy should be winging its way to me as I speak. Tonight is Verberate in Chorlton, which will make a nice change of venue. The million and one things I want and need to do this weekend are already fading into the distance, so I'm hopefully going to go easy on the alcohol, so that I wake up bright and early tomorrow morning and actually do some of them.

The Informationists

I came across Richard Price and the Informationists only last year when his first book length collection Lucky Day came out from Carcanet. I was intrigued, not least because I'd not heard of them before! Yet, I liked the way that Scottish poets from Edwin Morgan to Don Paterson seemed more tuned in to the possibilities of the avant garde than their English and Irish contemporaries. In short, Scottish poetry seems not unafraid to have fun - with language and subject. Keen to find out more I came across talk of the informationist anthology, Contraflow on the Superhighway, a great and evocative title, which was even for sale on Amazon. I sent off for it on 1st January and waited, and waited. Remarkably, having given up all hope, it arrived today. I'd upload the cover image but Blogger's saying "no" at the mo. Its a lovely book of its type, full of manifesto and quirkiness. Price is about my age; and the concern of the informationists, seems similar to the American prose writers around McSweeneys, to take the detritus of this information age and make something of it; the tools, they see, are all around us; in the redudant day-glo language of late capitalism. My own occasional experiments with this kind of writing seem a little less alone today.

Unquiet Desperation

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" is the quote from Thoreau which gives its name to a new Sheffield based magazine (contact editor at unquietdesperation.co.uk) - a mere 8 pages to start with it shows that the DIY ethic can still produce something pleasing. I contribute a short story "The Tenth Planet" to the first issue, which kind of fits the tone, and there are poems by half a dozen others. As always with such ventures, I wish it well.

The new poetry

I'm in Brussels next week, so will miss Michael Schmidt, my old tutor, and James Davies, one of our favourite local poets, reading at the Tai Chi Village Hall in Didsbury. The poets and players nights there include musicians as well as poets, and the mix works well, although the evenings are a little surreal, since the village hall is a "no shoes" venue, and the refreshments are green tea and biscuits rather than cigarettes and alcohol. Its no reflection on the poets that your usually gagging for an alcoholic drink at the end of the evening. In fact, the suburbs are where its at, with the Chorlton Arts Festival beginning next week as well. There's a poetry competition attached to it, and I might have a go, though my only previous Chorlton poem was called "Get Out of Chorlton!" I know Michael Schmidt from my MA, back in 1997-9, and obviously we've bumped into each other now and then since then. I met with one of my other coursemates on Tuesday, for the first time in an age, and as always, I was impressed that he is still writing, quite methodically, a book a year, despite, like myself being no nearer to finding a publisher. I've decided to try and become my own publisher, through the online print-on-demand facility Lulu.com. It looks straightforward, and so I'm just going to jump in and have a go. First things first: what would be my first book? I've decided to package the 3 poetry pamphlets I issued during 2004-5 (2 of them are available to download) as a single book. Of the various page formats they offer, I quite like the idea of the 7" by 7" square, I think it will make for distinctive books. In an attempt to pull the village where I grew up back from the clutches of the BNP (see post below), I'm going to call this venture "norton canes editions." If anyone reading this blog has experience of Lulu.com I'd be grateful for any tips - otherwise I'll let you know my progress on this blog.

Reading Poetry

I was pleased to pick up Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl and other poems", on CD. It reminded me that we should cherish these recordings more than we do. I'm wondering if there's an anthology of live recordings from the St. Marks poetry project? Google, of course, can furnish some of the answers; the online poetry archive some of the others; but this is one place where I feel the internet's difficulties in dealing with copyright material (both the recording and the writing) expose its limitations. Its not that there's particular monetary "value" in these recordings - they will never be bestsellers - but cultural value, yes indeed. And whilst the original master tapes are probably climate controlled and worth a fortune, its the wider dissemination we need. There's only 3 Ginsberg poems currently on the poetry archive, and its choice of Real Player is annoying, since it requires an intrusive download - why wasn't a choice of players considered? Also a quick scan sees the absence of such as Eliot, Plath and Lowell amongst others. It's early days I guess, and copyright is always problematic - but listening to poetry - whether in a classroom, on the radio or a podcast seems as good a way as any as educating and enlightening. Each poet links to an expensive CD which can only ever have a very limited audience. It would be great if some of the contemporary poets herein had looked to creative commons licences and the like. I prefer the internet archive - a lecture by Anne Waldman for instance; or Ubuweb; I'm sure this all has some commercial value but I guess its limited, even a Plath reading. And of course you can buy CDs, ever more cheaply, which makes all the arguments against putting this stuff on the web in as accessible way as possible, deeply flawed. Writers are often interviewed, but wonder how many of the festival readings this year will be recorded for posterity? The BBC is wrestling with all this on a global scale; but it would be good to see more poetry made available - it can surely be free at point of use and maybe the arts council or the BBC pays the poets? Luckily you can catch the Verberate readings on the web and CD, and Comma are archiving many of their readings. Then there's Route with their book/CD projects, and the inimitable AK Press. You can get the book of Gynomite: Fearless Feminist Porn poetry from them; but I managed to pick up the CD, which doesn't seem to be available anywhere, when I was in Los Angeles 10 years ago, a prized possession.

Where I come from

I left the Staffordshire village where I was brought up in 1985, and though my family and a couple of friends still live there, apart from a few months after university, I've never been back for more than a visit. I was there this weekend. Norton Canes is old enough to be in the Domesday book, it has an ancient heart, and grew first as a pit village in the early 20th century, and then, more recently, as a dormitory town, for Cannock, Walsall and Birmingham. The first act of the Blair government in 1997 was to give the go-ahead to the Birmingham Northern Relief Road, Britain's first and so-far "only" toll road. It was this decision - not because it was the right thing, but because it would have cost more to get out of the contracts, apparently - that led me to leave the Labour party; I sign, I see now, of things to come, decisions being made for fiscal decisions or to not upset vested interests, rather than because they were the right ones. I wrote a poem about it called, appropriately, "The end of the road". The jury is still out on what effect having a motorway cleaved through a part of the country with some of the worst bronchial conditions in England, but for the village, it meant that for the first time in my lifetime it had some real investment - roads, signage etc. The village looks better than it ever has; caught now in a triangle with the old Watling Street, Norton Pool, and Cannock Chase, its reached a pitch of development. I read once that it was the largest village in England - not picturesque, with hardly a pub or a cash machine or shops or cafes - its a place where people live, and some work, and commute - every drive has two or three cars in it. Kids I was at school with still live there, married others from the village, bought houses down the street from their parents. It is a down-to-earth place, but its also stifling. It is mostly white, reasonably well-off, and, Last Thursday, 550 of those villagers voted for the British National Party, which, despite coming 3rd, received a shocking 30% of the vote. It is where I come from, but has never been where I belong. I'm shocked, but perhaps worse than that, I'm not surprised.

My other blog's a Porsche

I've decided to set up a second blog for "downloads" of my writing, so the 2 poetry pamphlets "2004" and "The Question" can now be found here. I'll add a few older stories in time. A poem I wrote a year or so ago, called "1970" is in the latest edition of Scarecrow. I was going to write a poem about every year in the seventies, but for some reason forgot about that particular project as soon as I'd started it, so just the one poem. My computer sounds like its swallowed a goose, so I fear impending hard drive failure. Something's not right, anyway. It may well be possessed, since I've just tried to get to the Guardian website and it says "bad gateway." Yet I'm still able to listen to the live broadcast of Hoodlum Tribe, which I've caught the last 20 minutes or so of. It was a relief to go to the theatre last night, to see Terence Rattigan's "Separate Tables" at the Royal Exchange. It was well-performed and worked well in the space; but I have to say it's a play that doesn't really deserve a revival; the second half lacking the emotional bit of the first half, so much so, that it could almost have been two plays. Written in 1956 its a world away from the gathering storm of the Angry Young Men; and you can see why (a) they were needed and (b) why this kind of politely veiled emotion lost its pre-eminence. It's nearly 30 years since the Sex Pistols created the Manchester music scene through their gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, and I wonder if that paradigm shift is being somehow repeated by the MySpace phenomenon. The MySpace "chums" network is the equivalent of those late seventies musicians' collective spaces. And with Reason, broadband and Cubase its possible never even to need to meet. To keep up with the kids, I set up my own Myspace the other day. I've already got a Romanian goth who has signed up. Now, I'm scared.

The Premiership.

I read with interest the interview with Alex Poots, director of Manchester International Festival, in Creative Times, the regular CIDS publication. It's a difficult brief, a festival of new commissions, with an international profile, and perhaps one should just let him get on with it for the first year - since if its a success it will inevitably grow - however, since it's a difficult brief with a £5 million budget, £2 million of it from the City, I think Manchester creative's should be able to have an opinion, if not - as seems likely - be involved. His main argument seems to be that by bringing world renowned figures to the city for the first time, the connections can be made on that "networking" level, which will, at some distant point, bear fruit. Now, no doubt a few individuals will benefit from this - after all the arts is an "international" market - and I'm hoping that we get an opportunity to see some of those artists who usually visit only London or Edinburgh; but I've a real concern that this is the same argument about the Premiership. Being the "best league in the world" will be good for all. Yet, just as Arsenal have made the Champions League final without an English player or manager, maybe this international elite will simply squeeze out funding and opportunities for locally based innovators. I would hope the legacy of this - as with so many things - would be that if (and it could be a big "if") an artist or scene of international importance - whether in art, literature, theatre, music or whatever - develops in Manchester in the next few years that those international tastemakers who've never previously been to the city will see about making their own way here, rather than as special guests. Perhaps it depends where you're coming from in terms of culture. There are certain "international markets" in the arts - visual arts, theatre, dance, films etc. - so that Damon Albarn would have put on the Gorrilaz show anywhere that gave him the opportunity (and presumably the budget) - yet I don't think it gives the city any more opportunities. Yes, like with the BBC move, or with "Alfie" being filmed in the Northern Quarter, there's a spin off in terms of jobs; but if Manchester's great advantage is that you can be creative in a supportive environment, without having to go to the "big city" at the first opportunity, then there has to be a point when local talent takes centre stage. Despite its flaws, the highly enjoyable Manchester Passion, mostly saw a benefit in pulling in local artists - Denise Johnson rather than some TV talent show flavour of the month, for instance. I'm sure the Gorrilaz show was a wonderful event; albeit a typically safe one - after all they are currently one of the biggest artists in the world; lets hope that the festival proper pulls in some more edgy coups. Remember, a sold out match at Old Trafford may give great entertainment to those who can afford it, but it doesn't offer much opportunity to a promising young footballer on United's youth scheme. But lets play a bit of fantasy arts festival and see who I'd like to see being commissioned to perform or do some new work in Manchester: Liz Phair, Neil Young, Eno, Jeff Koons, Francis Ford Coppolla, Gilbert & George, Harmony Korine, Tony Kaye, Michel Houellebecq, Genesis P. Orridge, Roman Polanski, Philip Roth, Michael Winterbottom, A.M. Homes, McSweeney's, Captain Beefheart, N*E*R*D, Jose Saramago, a revival of "I Am Kurious Oranj" by Michael Clarke and the Fall, Bridget Riley, Gillian Wearing, John Adams, David Thewliss, Marie Darrieussecq, David Mitchell, Greg Sage, Mantronix...

Hello Children Everywhere

It always seemed slightly more than coincidence that the BBC programme Hello Children Everywhere should share the intials with Here Comes Everbody, from "Finnegan's Wake", but who knows? I'm trying to grasp with various things at the moment that don't particularly make sense, like a puzzle that you can't quite put together. Music is there, as is poetry, and fiction, but so too is the internet. I'm beginning to think there is a paradigm shift, and its happening kind of without our permission, but with our agreement, if that makes sense. Listening to Hoodlum Tribe on internet radio tonight, I wondered why I'd ever listen to anything else. I was in a taxi this afternoon and the boorish driver was listening to Radio 2 with the always abysmal Steve Wright still taking his silver shilling from the poor licence payers. He played Jaki Graham's forgotten, and forgettable "Round and Round" followed by the Who's eminent, incendiary, but clearly ancient, "My Generation", and I just had to wonder what was the audience? Where was the thought? Who had died? The whole process was bizarre. Perhaps a radio show is just a string of missed opportunities thrown together. How do these things stack up? Well...given the new digital multiplex future you can have a choice - the you've got to keep my interested to keep me listening approach of Hoodlum Tribe, or the we'll play any old shit the bastards have vaguely heard of approach of Steve Wright. Clearly Jaki Graham was an immunisation shot for the Who record that followed. It is with this in mind, that at the weekend I spent rather too much time putting my own teenage rock and roll (or to be truthful, synth and roll) musings on the web for the first time. For post-Adrian succour try Verberate's latest poet of the month, Lucy Burnett. I particularly like the apple poem. Five a day you see. Five a day.

Midlist Lists

Waterstones is promoting the midlist - i.e. those worthy books that don't sell all at once, but drip, drip over the years. Oddly enough, the celebrity list is even more interesting - or at least, the books and writers on it were mostly unknown to me. On Waterstones' list, there's one perennial favourite, Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut, (had it gone so out of fashion that it has to now be rediscovered?) and one book, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, which has been lauded so much on its rediscovery that its surely escaped obscurity forever. All lists require that one adds to them - and there are 2 books I read over 15 years ago that I'd still recommend, one sad, one funny. The sad one is "Mars" by Fritz Zorn, apparently not his real name, and it reads like an autobiography - its about a man who gets cancer, but because of how he lives his life. It was a Picador I picked up as a gloomy undergraduate, and reading this life of someone to whom nothing ever happens - except this terrible fate - its horribly addictive in the right mood. Far funnier, is a book that you can often see in secondhand bookshops, "Boy Wonder" by James Robert Baker. Told as a Citizen Kane style series of interviews it tells the story of a maverick film mogul, the gloriously named Shark Trager. Superb stuff.

Odds and ends

The Tart of Fiction gives a good and eloquent take on the Short story contest that I mentioned previously. I hope its not a one-off post, but another addition to the literary bloggers scene. She, (I'm assuming), will probably be equally angry about the UEA's "New Writing Partnership", another scheme to "help" new writers. I use the word "help" advisedly here. It costs £15 to enter, but clearly anybody who cares about short fiction would have set word limit higher than a paltry 3000 words. Yes, of course, there are good short stories under that length, but "Hills Like White Elephants" apart, there's not that many. I've often wondered why it is we are given a choice between a marathon (a novel - if you want to get published) and a sprint (if you want to win one of these spurious prizes.) You're excluding a lot of good middle distance runners there - "The Great Gatsby", "The Quantity Theory of Insanity", "A Rose for Emily", "Winesburg, Ohio," "The Dead", most of Borges, "Brokeback Mountain." I could go on. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to enter to get on their "mentoring" scheme, a well worked extract, or a story cut short at the neck? I think, going back to the Tart of Fiction, that the BBC/Radio 4 etc., like Nesta, "Save our Short Story", and all these other "well meaning" schemes have nothing to do with literature, and a lot to do with self-aggrandisement. Radio 4 likes news items, it likes traditional fiction - it has no interest in literature; and that, I'm afraid is what all of these initiatives are like; they have no interest in literature. Anyone who has ever gone for some of the BBC's northern exposure initiatives knows that you're given a straitjacket every time you want to enter - and next year its a totally different one. Good writing requires commitment, and commitment to the form as well as anything else. There's always the sneaking suspicion that the novelist slumming it as a short story writer thinks its a little extra earner between novels, a bit like driving a taxi on weekends to make ends meet. Those of us who like the short story - and, yes, even write them - have to just continue with them. Literature is what happens when the official version is looking elsewhere. I couldn't get published in Loot these days, but for those with a more optimistic bent, the links on the left of this page are a good place to start. Which neatly brings us to this following Monday's Verberate, where an alumni of Lamport Court, (with a fine, long short story called "The Quarry"), Max Dunbar will be amongst the readers. I'm also looking forward to Thursday and a 2-country internet broadcast simulcast thingy, debating "alternative media as social space."

First Influence

I may have touched on this before, but I wonder to what extent one is influenced by early exposure to art; and to what extent those early - first - influences stay with you. Last week at work, I decided to find an Easter poem to show people, and remembered George Herbert's Easter Wings. It's not the greatest poem in the world, but it was appropriate, and with its "shape", that of an angels' wings, and the lines reducing and expanding with the poet's mood, I feel it's an early "concrete poem." But the Metaphysicals, Herbert, Donne and Marvell, were foisted on me at 'O' Level, along with Macbeth and Pride and Prejudice. In their own way, they've all remained touchstones in some ways. I guess, left to my own devices, I may have found Shakespeare, but I wonder if I'd have found Donne, and "Pride and Prejudice" might have come too late. Then for A level it was more Shakespeare (Hamlet and Othello), Waiting for Godot, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Wuthering Heights. For non-American English literature I couldn't have had a better base; or so it seems. Othello, Wuthering Heights, P&P and Coleridge appealed - and still appeal - to my romantic nature, whilst the metaphysicals and Godot have a clarity about them, and a sense of the existential that is equally important to me; and I'd put Eliot alongside the metaphysicals there. Perhaps all great literature will have this effect but I think they were more close to my psyche than, say, Trollope, Dickens, King Lear and Tennyson might have been. So which came first, my sensibility or my set text list? Perhaps its just coincidence. From Godot I developed an appreciation of the minimalist, and the unsaid, rather than an appreciation of Beckett; whilst I've not read Coleridge or Austen that widely since. But these texts are lodestones - one s that I came across before I was 18, and have perhaps defined, to some extent what I want from literature. There have been others since - the Americans in particular - and George as well as T.S. Eliot, Borges, Calvino et al; but, having tentatively written a number of poems in the last week, and seeing that yes, they are romantic, and yes, metaphysical, it makes me wonder whether nature or nurture has most effect on my art. You do tend to study English exams at a particularly susceptible age.

London Hipsters

My friends at Scarecrow, 3AM et al will no doubt be devastated that the Guardian took notice of their little soiree last week in Fitzrovia, but probably relieved its in the online blog, not the paper proper. Nobody reads these blog things anyway, do they? Lee Rourke read at the one-and-only literary night that I organised, Wrote 4 Luck, back in Manchester in 1998, and I've already eulogised about his ace "Being Lee Rourke is Boring" story, but a "cherub had fluttered in from the 40s", he'll like that.

Private Investigations

I don't read alot of crime fiction but enjoy a few authors; one of whom is Sara Paretsky. I just read her first novel "Indemnity Only", having picked up a 2nd hand copy recently - its been a few years since I read one of her books, but V.I. Warshawski, her female Polish Private investigator based in Chicago is always compelling. Considering this was the first book, its interesting how little back story there is - though this is expanded in future novels - but also, how many of the signature ideas of her books are already there. Most compelling, of course, is that crime fiction is about the only place where a writer can finger big business and contemporary issues; though last night I caught BBC News 24's Hard Talk, and an interview with Jay McInerney. Despite being an open, willing interviewee, it was frustrating - going over his first book, Bright Lights, Big City again and the "image" that was in this book (though how anyone could ever read that and not see its more satire than lifestyle choice escapes me), and then jumping forward to his latest post-9/11 novel. That this revisits characters from what is probably his best book, "Brightness Falls", was not even alluded to. Missed opportunities.

Hacienda Classics

The release of a 3-CD "Hacienda Classics" compilation reminded me that I wrote a poem with that same name back in the day. Only 4 tracks in common, I'm afraid, though mine was more a chronological history of house (as well as supposed to make some sense as a poem.)

Hacienda Classics

Jack Your Body, No Way Back,
House Nation, Jack The Groove,

Beat Dis! Rok Da House,
Put The Needle On The Record,

Pump Up The Volume,
You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone,

Let's Get Brutal! Let It Roll,
Tired Of Getting Pushed Around,

We Call It Acieed! Big Fun,
Touch Me, Ride On Time,

Sure Beats Workin', Wait!
Respect, Finally, Promised Land,

I'm Talking With Myself,
Justified & Ancient,

An Ever Growing Globe
That Rules The Ultraverse,

French Kiss, Tricky Disco,
Charly Says....Pong!

I Got The Power,
You Got The Love,

Open up! Out Of Space,
Waterfall, Get up!

(Before The Night Is Over)
Things Can Only Get Better,

Satan, Firestarter,
Leave Home, Son Of A Gun,

Feel The Sunshine!

Poetry eMotion

My friends at Verberate have taken my live recording of the other week and put it on their website as "featured writer" for which I'm humbly grateful. A few remarks... I was horribly nervous when I did the reading, and felt I'd chosen the wrong poems for the occasion; but I did know they were poems I could read without fumbling too much, and I hope I did that. Listening to them, as well, I realise both my strengths and limitations. As a poet, my "unit of measurement" seems to be the sentence, and that's not what most poetry works with - its more rhythm, phrase, stanza etc. I think, equally humbly, this is why I've never been quite "got" by any poetry establishment going. It's a little about voice, I guess - not the way you write, or speak so much as how you sound in your head - your own emotional/literary connection with the world. My sort of poetry is attempting to be something that it's not; and really it should be something that it is. Also, my poetry, being essentially narrative (all those 4 poems have some narrative to them), has to take that fact into account. The question: what is poetry? comes into this. In this weeks Guardian we had Jackie Kay writing about her father; as did, in a very different way, John Burnside recently; and choosing prose - an article, a memoir - to do this. And then we have Robert Potts talking about literary magazines, particularly the online Jacket; yet not really acknowledging how closed these particular shops are as well. I'm interested, and intrigued by all this. Poetry requires, like anything else, some degree of success; so a poet like Alice Oswald, who, to be frank, was never mentioned in any dispatches until "Dart" was so successful, can have her own poetic "land grab." In other words, its only at the point that you are asked to write about poetry for the Guardian, or collected in some Bloodaxe anthology, or play that particular game, that you are officially "poetry." On the other hand, there's the whole performance poetry thing which gets along very well in its own world, thank you, but requires a certain "balls" to do it, and do it well. Who knows where all this leads to? If I get asked to read my poetry I will; and then, maybe, we'll see if I'm a poet - until then, I'm not sure; maybe I just write a different kind of prose. I'm trying to work out these contradictions. In the mean time, my muse is somewhat silent. I'll keep you posted.

The Usual Suspects

I'd forgotten Nesta's short story prize almost as soon as it was announced, because it seemed to be offering nothing more than a "beauty contest" for established prom queens, and so, it seems, that has come to pass, with William Trevor, James Lasdun, Rose Tremain and Michael Faber on the 5 person shortlist. I'm sure they're all fine, and good luck to Rana Dasgupta in such distinguished company. The reason I lost interest as soon as the prize was announced was because it wasn't clear what "record of publication" actually meant - and whether publication in such a small magazine as our own would count. I hardly want to bother mentioning the prize really. I'm impressed that they got such a distinguished list from 1400 entries or so; I wonder if they were anonymously judged? I like James Lasdun's fiction, and he's a writer's writer more than a popular success, so I guess it would be good if he gained a little popularity out of it. Certainly at least 4 of those 5 writers could ring up the editor of Granta any day of the week and get a story placed there; and probably anywhere else as well; so I'm not sure that the prize actually "helps" the short story. I just hope the stories are good.

Cast not the first stone

A contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? doesn't know the answer to "which British writer won the 2005 Nobel prize for literature". I can understand Splinters gloat, but I think we should be more humble. The reason Pinter's known as a name outside literary circles is that he has a certain "celebrity"status, at least partly because of his political profile. I can't name any of the other Nobel winners from 2005, British or otherwise, and whereas you can at least go and read a novel or a poem, it's hard to get to see most plays, or playwrights, unless you're in London, doing your English A Levels, or obsessed with the medium. I saw my first Pinter at the Edinburgh festival a couple of years ago, and have seen only The Birthday Party, and Betrayal on television. In fact, there are very few playwrights, Shakespeare aside, that I've seen produced more than 2 or 3 times. I'd like to see more, but however hard I try, I tend to go to three or four productions a yaer, regardless - mixture of time, money, location and - perhaps critically - other people to go with. I'll see the usual collection of Manchester writers at a poetry reading or a book launch, but never at the theatre. It's the 50th anniversary of Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" - again, I only saw it on television, and didn't much like the casual misanthropy. The ubiquitous Mark Lawson makes the point that it is oft mentioned but not oft revived. Osborne, of course, also became a celebrity playwright, it must be all that hanging around with beautiful actresses that does it; right, where's my 3rd act gone to?

Experimental Fictions

To the Library theatre earlier to day for the launch of Parenthesis, Comma Press's new anthology of short fiction, this time, aiming to be more experimental - at least in the approach to the short story. I kind of agree with that distinction; that overtly experimental writing can be self indulgence if it doesn't advance the story. In that sense, experiment is about form, style, language, but not any one of them alone. David Eggars' did a great short story about a dog writing letters to CEO's of major corporations: experimental yes, until you turn it round and remember that the epistolary novel was amongst the very first! I've decided to start posting occasional fiction of my own on this website - not new stuff, but work that maybe illustrates the main narrative. "You, the Writer" can be found in the downloads at the side of the page. Apart from being written in the second person, is it experimental? I think so, in its approach to the subject, in that it is entirely self-referential. I won't say any more than that. I look forward to reading Parenthesis; Ra Page's editorial includes graphs!

Curatorially Yours

I've not managed to be particularly creative on my week off, as yet. Perhaps its no surprise, after all it takes a while to shake off the day job, then a while longer to do the things you'd put off until you'd got a few days off, and then still longer as you "get your house in order." In my case, this seems to be an endless, enjoyable, but inherently pointless, curatorial role. I've written so much, and - going back a few years - recorded so much music that I spend a sizeable amount of time being my own librarian. With my music, a decade ago, I systematically put all my recordings on DAT so I'd got a decent digital copy - in doing so I scoured cupboards for old tapes, and ended up with over 25 hours of stuff. Inevitably, over the last 2 or 3 years, and somewhat less systematically, I've been putting it on CD, and some of it on the internet. Its one of those tasks - like digitising old photographs, or turning your cine films into video (or video into DVDs) - that has to be done at some point, but there's no particular rush. Of course, nobody else will ever do it for me (or for that matter, could.) It seems as if I've spent more time archiving the damn stuff than writing and recording it. But, as stories of old Beatles photos found in lofts prove (or this week, Marlon Brando's screen test for Rebel Without a Cause), you can never be too systematic. Not that my musical experiments have much intrinsic worth - they have a lot of personal value of course, and that's enough - had I turned into Jeff Buckley or Kurt Cobain, then they'd be in an expensive boxset in HMV of course, but I didn't so they haven't (and I lived to tell the tale - I wrote a song about Kurt, and a poem about Jeff - and his dad - so they're not just random names pulled out of the hat.) But I was at my parents at the weekend and my dad was (a) putting photographs from the christening on to the computer, mere hours after taking them and (b) rooting around in a box of old photos from the attic from the '50s. You see where I'm coming from? Unless someone prints off those christening photos, and stores them somewhere - say, in a suitcase, in an attic - then how long before they're lost and forgotten? A year? 5 years? Wherever I go, I guess I can put my old CDs, handmade magazines, and manuscripts in a box somewhere, and it will last - potentially forever - whilst these data disks, these hard disks... I'm not so sure. So curatorial me, will not only be backing up "My Documents" this week, but buying a few lever arch files and the like, and printing off that short little poem about Tim and Jeff Buckley. If I can only find where on my hard disk I've put it.

Not so swell

Nikki Sudden, legendary singer with Swell Maps died after a show in New York on Sunday. The short-lived Swell Maps - his brother Epic Soundtracks died a few years ago - remain an almost undiscovered by-way of late 70s music - neither punk, nor art rock but some amalgam of the two. Go buy the records. Last night's Verberate was a resounding success, ably managed by Zoe, and a mixture of the entertaining, the funny and the poignant, though inevitably more of the latter, since it included several remarkably confident readers speaking in their second language. The first Verberate live CD, produced with help from Citizen 32, is playing as I type, and it's good idea, that I hope they get a chance to repeat. Escaping the rain - it is Manchester, after all - the night went on; the 24 hour city only available in town as Fallowfield seemed closed or costly. It means I'm hardly capable of doing any of the things I was planning to do today, or even remembering what they are! I feel dumb, dull tasks are the order of the day - lying on the couch, looking out the window, watching the birds skating on the thermals.

Divine Inspiration

I tend to go to church for births, deaths and marriages. This weekend was a Christening, and I've done the lot now: Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, and now high-church Anglican. As you'd expect the devil makes more of an appearance the closer you get to Rome. The church was impressive, and the service had a gravitas which seemed incongruous with the (mainly non-religious) church goers. We began with "All Creatures Great and Small", which remains a lovely hymn, reminiscent of childhood, and it was good to hear it, and sing it again. The other hymns were more obscure, and without a choir, we murmured our way into silence. It made me think that churches aren't about religion but about the "absence of religion" - that's what they're railing against. You have to understand something of the fall, the expulsion from Eden, and the significance of the cross - and see how that had such a resonance for so many years, as humankind struggled with the impossible contradiction of consciousness in a world they didn't understand. Religion in that sense becomes a necessary comfort, and more than that, a promise that this world - our lives - can be understood and have meaning. Most people in that church yesterday would only have small tragedies in their lives - no less vital for that - loved ones dying in their fifties and sixties, jobs lost, marriages broken up, perhaps worse - and they'd come to religion at those points perhaps. But the rest of life? The unbroken mini-struggles of our day-to-day living? I got the feeling that this religion couldn't do much for that; that it's absence would not be as sorely felt as, say, an absence of work, or television or shopping centres. I'm not being banal here, but seeing things as they are. Renounce the devil? Easy for us all to do - our "sins" minimal in the scheme of things. Everyone there probably wants a slightly easier life; but other than that, we've reached a point where "absence of religion" is no longer a problem for most of us. And when we don't miss it...then what is it's value? In contrast, tonight, Verberate are staging a night of refugee poetry, partly as a benefit for a woman who could be deported. The devil may well be a recurring theme in the stories we hear. Religion, I fear, is poorly equipped to deal with him.

Texas Chainsaw Mascara

Though I was on t'other side of the world at the time, have to give a big congrats, to Lone Lady, who did what must be only one of her first dozen gigs solo in Austin, Texas as part of the SXSW festival. None so brave and all that. Just remembered that Janis Joplin came from Texas, so it's got soul in them there waters.

Which Leaves

A friend points out the F.A.Q. on the Comma Press website, including "what kind of stories Comma are NOT looking for." I usually hate prescriptiveness ("write to a theme", "we don't want genre") but this is David Eggars-ish in its comprehensive listiness (is that a word?) -: I get the feeling that once they got started they really went for it. I love the last one " If you’re a female writer: writing about ‘going mad 4 a bit and having lots of dangerous sex with unwholesome types’." You can see them going through the pile. "Oh God, another mad woman having dangerous sex with unwholesome types." Wonderful. I might put it in a spreadsheet and analyse every story I write against it. In fact any story ever. It's so much better than that dumb New Puritan "don't do" list of a few years ago. My own "don't do" list was previously "don't use the word Fuck on the first page, cos every novel that does that is rubbish" and (Kingsley Amis gave me this one, albeit through the pages of "The Kings English") "don't start adjacent paragraphs with the same word unless you meant to." And that was about it. But now I've really got something to work on. Watch this space!

Keats and Yeats by his side

Interesting piece in the current Mojo magazine; an interview with Morrissey around his new album "Ringleader of the Tormentors." A photo of him next to Keats' grave, and a side panel comparing his lyrics with poets that have influenced him - Auden, Betjeman, Stevie Smith, Eliot and Larkin. Slightly trite idea, really, (and no Plath? Surely "I know it's Over", or Yeats, "English Blood, Irish Heart"?) I always wonder whether our more literary musicians are that way inclined at all. This, like other interviews has gone on at length about Morrissey being gender specific in a love song for the first time - in a track called "Dear God, Please Help Me." It's alway seemed a little reductionist to me, this. After all, their first single couple "the sun shines out of your behind," with "oh, you, handsome devil," yet his fanatical followers were almost football-crowdishly heterosexual; like Bowie before him, the Smiths were a music for anyone who felt like an outsider, for whatever reason. Perhaps we've lost something of that ambiguity these days.

How he wrote Elastic Man

Forget Wayne Rooney's 5 book deal, if you want to really know the biography deal that matters, then surely its the Fall's Mark E. Smith's inking with Penguin for "Two Year Gap." Previous Smith writing has been gnomic in the extreme, (see the back of many of the albums, or the City Life Book of Manchester Stories), but then again, Dylan progressed from "Tarantula" to "Chronicles", and, luckily perhaps, Smith has a co-editor for this look back. Clearly aimed at the Peel biography market though it may be, the prospect of a full from-the-horses-mouth history must have most Fall fans in a tizzy of excitement already. I'm looking forward to it, and only hope it doesn't reduce the mystique. I remember trying to interview Smith once when he came to Lancaster University in 1985, but he refused all entreaties, and left that particular job to Brix and Craig Scanlon. Great gig, though.

The Booker Prize Experiment #2

I've finally read a second off last year's Booker list, Zadie Smith's "On Beauty." I had tried Ali Smith's "The Accidental" but it was annoying me too much, and I'll have to come back to it. Firstly, I both like Zadie Smith's writing - having read all 3 of her novels - and think, in some ways, I might be the reader that she aims for, in that like "White Teeth" in particular, the mix of high and low culture "stuff" that fills the novel, clearly needs a reader who will warm to both rap music and classical. Some of her observational writing and her descriptions are perceptive, laugh-out-loud revealing, and constantly engaging. She's clever without being too clever; yet the real advances in technique that came through in the first half of "The Autograph Man" are smoothed out in "On Beauty." Ostensibly a rewrite of Forster's "Howard's End." That novel's overused epigram "only connect" should always be read in the context of the words that follow, "only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, " and this, as much as a reworking of plot, is Smith's aim in this modernisation. The novel is about two families, the Belseys and the Kipps, the patriarch's of both - a white liberal and a black conservative, Howard and Monty - in intellectual war over a detail in Rembrandt, but a detail that is symptomatic of a wider blurring of liberal and conservative values. In a comic sense, this is where Smith excels, she can readily poke fun at doctrines of all kinds, whilst retaining a certain love for the seriousness that attends it. A novelist can have their cake and eat it; in the Belsey's 3 children is a priggish, uncreative sophomore student, Zora, an off-stage romantic Christian, Jerome, and a middle-class street-kid hip hop idealist, Levi. They are all types, but also more than their cliches - Levi in particular a joy of middle-class teenage rebellion, with a streetwise patois, accurately and affectionately portrayed, who becomes obsessed with supporting the workers rights of the underpaid (and unseen) Haittian workers in the small college town, Wellington, where he lives. Howard is white, a son of a Cricklewood butcher, who left his country, class and race, marrying the black American woman Kiki, and becoming a respected, feared, albeit limited, college professor. Kiki is heart of the novel - a larger than life (in every way) woman - who becomes fed up of always having to be so "strong" as, perhaps inevitably, her husband tumbles into an uncomfortable mid-life crisis - mostly of his own making. Playing off against these are the Kipps family, Wilcoxes to Schlegels in the "Howard's End" parallel. The novel begins with an email exchange and ends with a Powerpoint presentation, a tinkering modernisation, rather than any real revelation, since these are easy concessions to modernity. The 2 or 3 modern updatings of "Howard's End" are quite witty, but its more of a ruse on which to hang a more general mixed-up family rivalry/study of social mores than something that sustains the novel. In fact, the "Howard's End" parallels become annoyances, particularly, with the introduction of the black "street poet" Carl, as the novel's Leonard Bast. For Carl is key to the novel in many senses, yet is underdeveloped. His own past - from which he is trying to escape by going to any "free" concerts going (Mozart in the park) - is hardly written, and he seems to return each time as a plot device, rather than a character. He turns up at the party he's been invited to at the Belsey's only to be turned away, but this - potentially a key scene - is forgotten about, shrugged off; his appearance at the "Bus Stop" reciting Performance Poetry, gets him into the University's poetry class, but his poetry is soon forgotten, when he can be more usefully utilised as a Hip Hop Archivist in the University's Black Studies department. Most shamefully, he disappears when the plot demands it - but, without going into details - entirely without the sense of consequence that Forster brings to "Howard's End." Having previously said you don't find bars in Zadie Smith novels, I guess the "Bus Stop" comes close, albeit one frequented by "tourists" from the "bohemian" poetry class at the university, that serves Moroccan food and where you have to smoke outside. But the emotional and geographical centre of the novel is far from there, far from the "street". Essentially "On Beauty" is another of that strange breed, the campus novel. I've taken 2 university degrees, and worked in 2 universities, but the world of "On Beauty" is unknown to me. It's the university of privilege, isolation and tradition. The "office politics" of the Dons, the cloistered self-regard of the university town, the rampant ambition of the focussed students - these are what the novel is most concerned about. Here lies a problem, since for satire to work, you have to, surely, be railing against what it is you are satirising, yet this is a paeon to the self-absorbtion of these people and places. Smith likes her characters, is too humane to their human foibles, sees them as self-obsessed whilst valuing that self-obsession, as being an important part of a civilised culture. There's nothing wrong with this, but it makes the novel - like much of her debut - more bourgeois than iconoclastic, and there's a sense that nothing bad can really happen to these privileged people. If there's more of the contemporary than you'll find in McEwan or Holllinghurst, there's the same love of big houses, and intellectual discourse. There's nothing, in the end, to match the savage sense of consequence that you get in Coetzee for instance, for in "On Beauty" there is always a chance to learn from your mistakes and learn from your experience. It's perhaps unfair to criticize Smith for being the novelist that she isn't, but it's a shame that someone so constantly inventive and entertaining in the detail, seems to choose the novel of manners as her preferred structure. I thought "White Teeth" was far more middle-class than multicultural, and "On Beauty", part campus novel, part a comedy of rivalry, confirms both her talents and her limitations. Worth reading, if you like this sort of thing, I guess.

London

London is still there, yes, I know it won't be a surprise to everyone, but its nearly a year since I last went, so it's reassuring at least. And despite it being so far south its also in England, so it's cold. Yet I felt the first bits of tree pollen hayfever today, and here in Manchester, its gone again, so perhaps there's a difference. It was a friend's 40th in a really nice pub just the back of the Royal Festival Hall, and because its England the pub hadn't got a late licence so we decamped to the Old Vic bar, where, star spotters, American actor, the very-tall Matthew Modine, was. You don't get Hollywood actors in bars in Manchester, despite our many other advantages. I also went to the world's best secondhand bookshop and got a few gems (aint gonna tell you where it is, I want to keep it full of gems!). But the party was good anyhow, and saw old friends and acquaintances, including Wendy Jones - she had a poem in my first poetry magazine, 1997's one-issue "Bananas from the Windward Islands" - who had helped Grayson Perry write "Portrait of the artist as young girl".

Sad Tale from a Scottish Sitting Room

I only just found out that Ivor Cutler passed away last Friday. I first heard Cutler on the John Peel show, where his short poems/skits were always worth a listen. I think he did more sessions for Peel than anyone else. Its fascinating how such an idiosyncratic writer and performer could have such a long lasting appeal - who else could have been a regular on the Home Service in the 50s, appeared in "Magical Mystery Tour", recited on my all time favourite album (Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom)sign to Creation records and be an unlikely inspiration for fellow Scots Franz Ferdinand? Born in 1923, the richness of his artistic life, and the continued connection he made with new generations of fans, was inspirational.

Missed Points

What could have been an interesting article on whether blogs and blogging are of real value by Trevor Butterworth in the FT, is ruined by its length. But one interesting quote from someone with Choire Sicha an editor at the New York Observer...

“The word blogosphere has no meaning,” he said from across a folding table vast enough to support the battle of Waterloo in miniature (the apartment owes much to eBay, the Ikea of bohemia). “There is no sphere; these people aren’t connected; they don’t have anything to do with each other.” The democratic promise of blogs, he explained, has just produced more fragmentation and segregation at a time when seeing the totality of things - the purview of old media - is arguably much more important.

As readers of this or other literary blogs must know, almost everything in that paragraph is wrong. Q.E.D. we must be doing something right, even if its only becoming, like Ready Steady Book's Mark Thwaite, the 51st most influential person in publishing.

Against Paraphrase

A few things recently have made me consider what I'm trying to do with fiction and poetry, in the bigger sense. It's difficult these days to have any "stylistic" aims, since there's clearly a preference by publishers, editors etc. for narrative and clarity, and a distrust of the oblique. This, I probably agree with, in general, but I think what we are seeing over a period of time is a creative body of work that can easily be paraphrased. Whether that's in the 2-liner of a Hollywood pitch, or a Guardian condensed read. All writers should be against such easy-paraphrase, since over time, it means there's no real need to read the book. Some of this is inevitably marketing hype, or the short attention span of both booksellers, and, presumably, bookshop browsers. Yet, increasingly I feel I've read books, when I've not turned a page of them, and when I do read them, I find that they're actually a disappointing fulfilment of the marketing promise. A poet like John Ashbery is the ultimate when it comes to avoiding paraphrase; you cannot paraphrase a stanza, never mind a poem or a collection or a career. This is not about difficulty - I think its more about the writer having a slightly higher aim (an additional aim if you prefer) than just telling the story, or - in a poem - exploring an emotional state. A dozen pages into Zadie Smith's "On Beauty" I know I'm in a clever contemporary version of "Howard's End" as the reviews informed me. I'm looking forward to being surprised, and sure I will be since she's a wilful writer, but you can perhaps understand the tiredness in discovering only expected pleasures. When someone says "What's it about?" then the answer should be, "I can't really tell you, you've just got to read it." Again, individual pieces can be very straightforward, but where they fit in a wider work, or in a career, that is what interests me. In music, albums as diverse as "Trout Mask Replica", "Tusk" and "Cats and Dogs" (Royal Trux) repay relistening because however many times you listen you never quite get to the end; it's why I like intelligently compiled boxsets - they turn away from the hit song into some uncharted territory. Sometimes there can be narrative in this - I think of how the Pollock exhibition in London several years ago contextualised the major splatter paintings by showing the arc of the development, creating a narrative where perhaps there previously wasn't one. Art and music are already difficult to paraphrase, of course, whereas literature, which explains itself in the same/similar language that is used in its creation, runs the risk of becoming explicable to the point where it loses its most valuable sense.

The Cost of Money

I looked in vain on Normblog for some comment on Jowellgate, so I'll fill the gap.

This from Tessa Jowell's statement:

"I first became aware in August 2004 that my husband had received in September 2000 a sum of money which he thought he had reasonable grounds to believe was a gift."

A gift? She's talking about £350,000 here. It's the "reasonable grounds" that I like.

But then again, it depends whether you think it was a large sum or not, and perhaps, for someone as astute in business as the Culture Secretary's husband, its not a lot of money at all. It's obviously incredibly irresponsible of me to juxtapose the Culture Secretary's personal financial affairs with the dealings of part of her remit, the Arts Council, but I'm reminded that the Peterloo Poets, loses its regularly funded organisation status come the end of March. It received £55,000 in 2005-6. I doubt that anyone ever referred to that money as a gift.

Our Friends in the North

I came, I saw, I was nervous. Tonight's Verberate was again successful, despite the weather. I was perhaps not that sensible in my choice of poems (my first was about the London bombings) coming straight after a song about an Orangutan and a prose piece about whether poodles shit is white, but hey, anything can be reduced to its elements, and that's unfair to both those pieces (though there was a bit of an Ape theme to the night, odd that) - overall it was a good evening, and just standing up there in front of a crowd for the first time in a while is refreshing. I once started a reading by punching my hand in the air and shouting "Hello Birmingham" in imitation of rock stars everywhere, which puzzled the hell out of people. Lesson 1: don't confuse the audience. I've only twice been to a reading in London, yet on both occasions they couldn't wait to get the poets/writers off stage so they could listen to bangin' techno or whatever it was they were into back-in-the-day. So a wet Monday night in Withington, forty or fifty appreciative people in a bar. Hello Birmingham!

Live on Stage

Tomorrow night is Verberate 7 at Trof in Fallowfield, Manchester. I'm a post-flyer addition to the bill, but its the sort of night where there's something for everyone anyhow. I'm going to be reading poetry, most of which will come from my latest pamphlet "The Question" , or its predecessor "2004". (Both are available as .pdfs to download.)

A Change is Gonna Come

A day off after a long, difficult week and my mood has swung every which way. The gap between my creative ambitions and my life-ambitions is as wide as ever, and possibly irreconciliable. Its my 39th birthday in 8 days and I guess that's probably affecting my mood as well. About 10 years ago I started cut and pasting my stories into a photocopied magazine that I then would give to a few friends to get feedback. The first story I wrote for this, "The Ghosts of Coos Bay", based on an American trip of the previous summer was definitely a step-change in the quality of my writing. As I put together issue 28 (!!!) of this occasional magazine, I realise that to all intents and purposes I've stayed in the same place since then - despite leaving Manchester for London, then giving up one job/career to do a creative writing degree, then changing career, public sector rather than private, I'm still this mixed bag of creative ambitions and projects, and unresolved life-ambitions, and there's always a tug between them. Life is in the living I guess, and that's what I try and do, but its a bundle of uncertainties still. The most recent story I wrote was as influenced by my current life, as the Ghosts of Coos Bay was by that trip abroad - yet the earlier story is a work of pure imagination, using only the place of memory (a Godforsaken logging town in Northern California), whilst the latest seems lazily self-involved. A day off, particularly one accompanied by a rare self-hating hangover, at least gives me time to make a few decisions. I'm far too quiescent, usually, and every now and then my anger at the injustices of the world froth over; but I'm a literary man not a firebrand. I wish I could be a politicised person like Normblog , he's almost quicker to comment than the Guardian - today its Ken Livingston's suspension, and what I realise is that although I'm interested in systems, I've no clear idea how the mechanisms of the modern world really work - where the real power lies. Belatedly I come to Roy Hattersley's piece on Andrew Motion, "how awful it must be to wake up in the morning and remember that you are the poet laureate" he writes. I'm not sure whether Motion's talents are genuinely "boundless", but he's certainly a good biographer, and more recently I guess, a successful "operator", using the Laureateship to prise open those bureaucratic doors that would otherwise remain shut. It's hard to know what he thinks about anything these days, as although he will pronounce to order for the papers, its almost always the expected line. I'm trying to remember when the Laureateship is over? I think this time it was time-limited, nobody would want that life sentence. He interviewed me for a place on the UEA course back in 1997. He was the first real-live writer I'd ever met, but by the end of a long day, the medication he was taking for a back injury was beginning to wear off, the interview was short and unsuccessful. I remember that one of the other candidates that day, a woman called Frances Liardet, was already a published writer, and I picked up her debut novel a rather good coming-of-age thriller "The Game" from the campus bookshop. So, not quite ten years ago, but whatever she got out of the course, it appears not to be a second novel. She was very kind and pleasant on the day, and it was the "literary atmosphere" rather than anything else that made me apply for the novel writing course at Manchester, a road that lead me here.

Ah, Poetry

A friend was here this weekend and since it was the first time he'd seen the flat he commented on my "poetry bookcase." I really have one. It's full as well, so newcomers have to relegate existing books to a backroom box. Its aesthetically pleasing, and, occasionally useful. So maybe I was thinking about poetry again. Or maybe its because I've not written any for a few weeks; or maybe because I missed Geoffrey Hill at the MMU on Thursday, arriving too late, after "something came up" at work, and meeting a few people afterwards for a drink. I was reminded of the monthly Verberate night at Trof in Fallowfield, and so on a whim I got in touch, and so I'm on the bill next week. Its a mixture of performance poetry, more considered stuff and fiction. Which sums me up! You don't get a big spot, but it usually gets a good, large and varied audience. From here I came across Steven Waling's blog, and surprised I've not come across it before. I once did a "gig" with Steven Waling at the Cornerhouse, me, him and Carol Batton, possibly a never-to-be repeated line up, and you see him around quite a lot, once in Sainsbury's in Fallowfield, where, had I been a bit quicker I'd have mentioned Ginsberg's poem about Whitman in the Supermarket. He'd have liked that. Now, of course, I've got to put together my setlist. And only a week to fret about it. A week!

Films & Reviews

I've not had much time recently to study whether a film is worth seeing or not, just get a sense of the "babble" in the air that it's good. So, went to "Good Night, and Good Luck" last night. Beautifully cinematographed (is that a word?) in monochrome, all those swathes of real black backgrounds on the large screen, with the wrinkled face of "Ed Morrow" emitting immense credibility. George Clooney's new movie is about a particular element from the McCarthy witchhunts where CBS and their news presenters finally stood up against McCarthy-ism's own unAmerican activities (accusation without trial or evidence for instance.) Beautifully filmed and edited, well-acted, I think the Sunday Times review got it right when it calls it "the best looking lecture you'll ever attend." I was glad I saw the film, but its no masterpiece, certainly not a worthy award winner (except for cinematographer.) The intensity was palpable, but in itself that wasn't enough. As a story about one man's fight against injustice it hardly registered. I wanted to see a documentary on the subject, as a companion piece, so narrow-focussed was the piece. One character asks "what if we're backing the wrong side?" and that was the one point where light intruded. Clearly, Clooney sees this as an appropriate moment to challenge the political elite, but he does it as an insider story, with the media (and Hollywood) seen as the white knights. It doesn't detract from what was a powerful hour and a half, but like that other recently well-reviewed film, Broken Flowers, it lacked depth. I realise, despite good dialogue, that it was painfully underwritten - ALL black and white - a director's film, with a limited source material, and - probably - a need to have known more about the subject before the film. A good small movie, visually exemplary, but short on the very articulacy that we're currently lacking.

Bar Fiction

Is there a new type of fiction being written these days? Or a new generation that's about to pop its head over the parapet? It sometimes seems so - though you wouldn't know it from the lists of the major publishers. Where's the contemporary experience? The last Booker shortlist was heavy on historical; packed with literary pastiche. Highly acclaimed and high selling writers like Sarah Waters seem to have it all ways; yet in Morrissey's immortal words, it says nowt about my life. I guess you get the high water mark of one sort of highly conservative writing in Ian McEwan's "Saturday", a novel set in the present day (and a very particular present day), but almost by mere accident. It's a fine drawing room novel. Yet, having rarely been in a drawing room, I'm not convinced its got any relevance to me either. I wouldn't say there's a generation as such - I'm close to 40, and I'm talking about writers as well who are closer to 20; but it does strikes me that the fallout of the Thatcher years is beginning to have its artistic fallout as well. If its people around my age and a little who were politicised by music (or got into music by the politics), then perhaps as the children being born then start, in certain circumstances with a different set of priorities. I guess there's two parallel generations now anyway, those who are born to be consumers, (mobile phone, iPod, gap year, Chantelle, Chelsea), and those who are already seeing themselves locked out (second-hand vinyl, Arctic Monkeys, Oxfam, FC United) - and its not a class thing; you can be in either lot whether you've been to a finishing school or just finished at a sink school. It's more a tribal attitude. If you want to do anything (say, bring up non-obese kids, recycle bottles and paper, eat knobbly carrots, see a local band, write a poem) that has no monetary value then you're in one tribe; if the cost not the value is what you value then you're in the other. Its perhaps that which makes one uneasy at tonight's vote banning smoking in public places - its an assault not just on bad health (and bad manners) which I applaud but on a life less governed. That it comes a day after the same government has ok-d I.d. cards despite not winning any of the arguments, seems only right. I guess any of these things can be picked and mixed on one side or the other. For me its those who think for themselves and those who don't. What has this to do with fiction? Well, everything, of course. I guess if we're not writing Sarah Waters' historical romps, or Zadie Smith pastiches, then we're writing something else. There's been various "names" for scenes over the years that have been both derogatory and explanatory of any kind of fiction that has a local or domestic focus; kitchen sink dramas; aga sagas. I guess what I'm seeing is a kind of "bar fiction" that's set in a bar - not a pub, not a wine bar - for its crucial scenes, since none of the characters own their own homes, or are part of inclusive professions. Bars are an English thing, kind of modelled on some historical antecedents, in Paris, New York, wherever a few writers and creatives gathered; but grown out of the English pub. I used to wonder why I wrote so many scenes set in bars and whether it was a lack of imagination, but then I realised that the bar is the common land of the contemporary city. In bars you drink, you sit, you read the paper, or write in your Moleskine; you might eat there or listen to music, but these are minor affectations. Unlike the "Disco Biscuits" club fiction, bars are where you talk, and listen. They're called things like "The Bar" (Chorlton-cum-Hardy); or Cord Bar or Bar Centro(the Northern Quarter, Manchester); they're not just a Manchester thing, but Manchester does them pretty well - I looked in vain for one in Newcastle at the weekend - and its the pivot for a particular kind of bar fiction. Gwendoline Riley's two novels "Cold Water" and "Sick Notes" hardly leave the place; Lee Rourke virtually lives in one; I pivot in and out; Max Dunbar - a writer we recently published in Lamport Court - stumbles in and out of them. But these might be the last days; the bars might already be over - the smoke (and smokers) gone, and something of their controlled anarchy. You won't find a bar in a novel by Ian McEwan, Sarah Waters or Zadie Smith. It's a small point, but a telling one.

Literature and Bands

I'm going to get a copy of the Sexus single "The Official End of it All" (ZTT records), courtesy of eBay, the band that Manchester-based writer Paul Southern was once in. Its a strange business the crossover between fiction and music. A recent Michael Moorcock interview reminded me of his time with the acquired taste that is Hawkwind; there's Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel, and Dylan's Tarantula, part of which made it into the Penguin Book of the Beats. Don Paterson's a musician as well as poet, and Rick Moody plays in a band. An ex-Belle and Sebastian member Stuart David wrote an acclaimed novel "Nalder Said" ; and then there's Sleeper's Louise Wener. Not as uncommon as one thinks, in other words. Writers have guested on records - e.g. William Burroughs - but tend to stick to it being a hobby like Moody; Moorcock's example a rare one of synergy, though Hawkwind may be one of the few bands that history will find impossible to rehabilitate. I guess the occasional article about the "poetry" or "narrative" of a singer/songwriter hides the fact that the more likely connection is none at all. Oasis's Noel Gallagher recently bragged about never having read a book; which says a lot for the Manchester education service - both good and bad - unkind non-fans might say, you can tell from his lyrics. Yet, the far more cerebral Thom Yorke writes indescribably bad lyrics.

Primary, Secondary, Tertiary

What sort of creative are you? Are you a "primary" - writing new work. Or a "secondary" perhaps a biographer or a journalist or something similar? Or "tertiary" working in the creative industries but a bureaucrat, an arts administrator or similar. I only ask. I'm a "primary", by the way, but this blog shows I'm also a "secondary", but I've never even quite managed to get a job as a "tertiary" - bookseller, administrator or the like - not in the arts at least. A recent job interview was pretty much a "tertiary" one, and I blew it. I was totally nervous, babbling about everything rather than answering the questions. Post-mortem; I was trying to fit my "primary" and "secondary" persona into a job that I could have done very well at if I'd just stuck to the "tertiary." The problem is: weirdly enough, you only seem to get a shot at these "secondary" and "tertiary" jobs if you ARE a successful "primary." Poets as professors; novelists as reviewers. Conversely, you ony seem to get a shot at the "primary" if you're already in the "secondary" or "tertiary" - journalists with book deals, agents turned authors. Doing a non-arts related "tertiary" job and combining this with my "primary" work seems to somehow suit my temperament; but it doesn't always make it easy to move between the two. And I'm probably making a moutain out of this particular molehill, of course. Because maybe its not the primary-secondary-tertiary split that is important but the professional/amatuer. I don't make money from any of my creative activities, so therefore I'm an amatuer. And maybe I'm happiest being that way. I wouldn't be the first.

Censorship

Since I mentioned the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, events have moved on a lot and I've thought long and hard whether I should add to the mountains of commentary. A friend once said I was a "rebel without a cause", but being civilised, educated, thoughtful and literary, I'd amend that to say I'm "without a cause", but have hardly rebelled. However a conformist without a cause (to conform to) is just as damaging in the long-run. If I have a cause, then "freedom of speech", is one. If I have an enemy, then "institutionalised religion" is it. Yet, being anti-religious in a country where that is perfectly all right, perhaps even encouraged, it makes me wonder whether I should concentrate what "fire" I have on something that has such an unimportant role in my life. May as well be anti-Speedway or anti-Morris-Dancing; my opinions on both are pretty much irrelevant. Yet being pro-free speech its the one thing that does get me riled. Though, even here, in the free-space of the internet, having been anonymously vilified a couple of times, I'm aware that with freedom comes responsibility. In the original pieces on the Danish cartoons (They are on the internet if you've not yet seen them, www.aldaily.com will take you there if you want to see them) nothing was said of their context - that they were published because of this very debate about "depicting" Mohammed. As someone from a Christian background I was a bit "deaf" to the particular offence of depiction. As Christianity iconises Christ (albeit usually a very white, non-Jewish looking Christ), I'd forgotten that Islam prevents this depiction of the prophet. You have to wonder if a 7th century Saatchi and Saatchi had come up with this peculiarity of the brand - "hey, Mohammed, keep your mystery, it's all you've got" - "but what about Jesus, he's everywhere...", "you're a me-too brand, Mohammed, you have to differentiate, Avis to Hertz, Pepsi to Coke..." Now, here's the problem, I'm not sure, if that conversation is in itself offensive to Muslims, if so, I apologise, but wonder how else I'm supposed to talk openly - and humorously - about this topic. Bill Hicks used to do a great skit on Jesus's 2nd coming, only to find everyone wearing jewellery showing him nailed to the cross. Now Allah is God, Mohammed is his prophet, therefore there's a massive difference with Christianity where Jesus is both prophet and deity. (The Catholic Church's veneration of Mary is more appropriate a distinction between the two religions, and perhaps an inevitable contradiction of a son of God born of woman.) But what I am sure of now, after the outrages of the last week, that it is the depiction of Mohammed that has so outraged Muslims, since this is forbidden by the religion. It's bad taste of the worst kind I guess. (I'm not sure whether you could show Allah instead or just read his name on a fish?) The Guardian has been all mealy-mouthed about free speech for the last couple of weeks, and generally dismayed at the cartoons, but has since decided that civil unrest is slightly worse in the scheme of things. (Ah, to see a liberal confused... a wonderful sight). I guess what I'm saying is that I think it is imperative that non-religious people and communities can comment and comment fiercely on the dogmatic beliefs, customs and views of organised religion; not forgetting, as someone who believes "all men and women are equal" there is not a religion in the world that doesn't find some excuse for oppressing women whicheve way it can get away with (another debate, but a very valid one - like when Tony Blair went to the Pope's funeral, you could only wonder whether he'd go to the funeral of anyone other Homophobe?) but that one should respect things that are gratuitously offensive to people who follow that faith. I've got the impression from the last week or so that Muslims are okay with satire, criticism, but not - and I don't think they should be - with this gratuitous disrespect. That kind of summarises my own permission. Yet there's something weird here. The very "world" nature of Islam seems to see a brotherhood amongst peoples that is in itself disturbing. A British Muslim aligning themselves in sympathy with the religious government of Iran for instance is deeply disturbing; just as a British working man in the thirties aligning himself with Hitler would have been. It is not "Islamophobia" which seems on the increase around the world but anti-semitism. I was stood outside of Marks and Spencers in Manchester a year or so ago and I asked why people were protesting against M&S. "Because they're Zionists", was the reply that the middle-aged white man gave me, "its well known." M&S is a PLC which means it predominantly owned by pension funds; you and me in other words. It would be entirely possible for a rich Muslim company to buy M&S if it so wanted, I guess. I wondered why M&S was being protested against as opposed to Debenhams or Sainsburys, and the only conclusion I could come to was that it was a company with a well-known Jewish history. This seemed perilously close to anti-semitism, rather than just being pro-Palestine. I mention this with some concern and some loathing, since - though these are things I have no right to have a real opinion on - the demonisation of the Jews was one of the key elements of Fascism, and it should be possible for us to now live in a world where it is possible to criticise America without being pro-Zionist, and it is possible to criticise the regimes of the Middle East, without being anti-Islam. It is with some misgiving that I hear that the abhorrent, opinionated, insane Abu Hamza has been jailed for seven years from today. This is astonishing to me: that in a country that believes in free speech anyone, however abhorrent their views (and it is for his views that he has been charged and jailed), could be imprisoned. (But on second thoughts, I'm not really that concerned that such a nasty piece of work is finally getting his comeuppance. Maybe I should be, but perhaps he created a climate of fear and loathing, and that's enough.) Unwrap all of this and I'm not sure there's a present here any more, just a series of wrappers, each smaller, more crumpled and more dispiriting than before. (But read this for a more erudite discussion of the issues.) An interesting article in yesterday's Times on a Manchester-based writer, Paul Southern who lives in Longsight as an "alien", unable to be seen with his Muslim girlfriend because of the approbation from her friends and family. I've not heard of Southern before, nor the almost-made-it band Sexus he was once in, yet the article seems to imply he's got no choice about where he finds himself, whilst being aware of the absurdity of it. The photograph that accompanies the piece sees him stood on the curry mile, rather than in the depths of Longsight, probably the most cosmopolitan road in Manchester.