Room to Live (Remainder by Tom McCarthy)

I've finally got round to reading the much lauded "Remainder" by Tom McCarthy, (Alma Books). After an accident, its narrator wins 8 and a half million pounds compensation; yet this narrow premise is really just a jumping off point for what comes next. The book is one packed with detail, often mundane, as we see the recreation of episode upon episode. In many ways, the book could have been called Deja Vu, since its this physical recreation of past (and not so past) scenes that creates the narrative. I had my own sense of deja vu, in parts, since its set in almost the exact same locale, Brixton, as my London novel, and this mundane sense of place gives an extra dimension to what is otherwise in every sense rootless. You always got the sense that the existential writings of Beckett, Camus and others was at least partly a response to the diaspora of post-war Europe, where everything from country borders to national identity had been ripped up - it seems that a new generation of writers (McCarthy is under 40), are faced with a world that is so unknowable, that the fictional response to it can only be through this kind of fascinated ennui. Whereas McEwan and Amis might use their London backdrops as credible settings for high drama, McCarthy is surely writing a more grounded and at the same time a more elevated kind of fiction. The writing is both taut, and unshowy, and it will be interesting to see if that "style" is just that of his coma-victim narrator or a constant for him. The flat, plainness will appeal to fans of Magnus Mills (of which I'm one), almost obsessively non-showy writing, yet you get the sense that McCarthy is holding in or holding back. When he releases his "bombs" they are never predictable even if you have half guessed what is coming. I read the book slowly, since I think the slow build up of non-events can be a little difficult to digest, even boring, and it might be this "ennui" rather than the forward tension of the latter quarter of the novel which kept it away from the prizes - yet its far better at doing this than Ishiguro's misfiring "Never Let you go." There's a modernity to the cultural references that is both thrillingly now, and, a bit like Mills, slightly off centre. You kind of think that McCarthy might be using "remembered" experiences rather than anything more real. The Dogstar, a Brixton institution; Psion organisers; "History Repeating" by the Propellorheads, speak of a gestation period that goes back to the last century - and, indeed the dot.com crash post-millennium also is an important plot point, that is there from the moment the narrator puts his money in the speculative area of "technology" shares. Precedents for the book must include John Fowles' iconic "The Collector" where a similarly ordinary man comes into money and uses it for less than orthodox purpose, or the re-staged car crashes of Ballard's "Crash". Here, as in "The Collector", we are drawn in by our unreliable narrator. He prods us - we like him - his fictional precedents will go back as far as Knut Hamsun's early modernist classic "Hunger". Yet, the subject matter here is far from any "brutalist" or "new puritan" manifesto. The things that our narrator wants are the stuff of reality tv shows; of "through the keyhole"; of "the Truman show". It is almost all men who have praised this novel, and I can see why in some way. The novel is about an extreme form of Obesessive Compulsiveness. There is a short ride from the narrator's obsessive recreations to the listmaking tendency of a certain kind of male; or even all the way back to the mad wall-hangings of John Nash in "A Brilliant Mind." At some point, he complains about how all his actions - even those before the accident - seem inauthentic or learnt. I don't think many women would recognise that awkwardness, but it seems almost endemic in the modern male psyche. The female characters are nearly non-existent, useless cutouts, there for only formulaic purpose. It is the men - the old friend who thinks he should spend his money on hookers; the various faceless professionals - lawyer, broker, logistics specialist, doctor, bankrobber - he calls in at various points, who are complicit in the "game" that he is involved in. Here it almost fits into that "greed literature" genre that gave us "Money" and "Bonfire of the Vanities", but it seems to only do this in fits and starts. We are in a recognisable world, which is rendered ever more mundanely, but in doing so becomes a more frightening plot. He is not creating Frankenstein's monster so much as Gatsby recreation of a dream. I'm reminded of when Gatsby's parties end, when the house is no longer anything other than an empty stage where these things were once put on. Inevitably, the book gets darker; it would not survive its own ennui, if McCarthy wasn't willing to draw us further in. Yet he does not seem particularly interested in a logically drawing back into his characters' past; more in an exploration of what horrors we are capable of when so single-mindedly following a pyrrhic objective. Like Saramago's wonderful "Blindness", allegory can only go so far; "Remainder" has to survive according to its own internal logic. That it does this, is its triumph. I'm not sure whether it has the wider canvas required to be a masterpiece; but as a first novel of a driven, if circumscribed, ambition, it succeeds admirably.

I read it bookending a weekend in London, where, despite now having an Oyster card, the travel still takes its toll. Everywhere was so busy! I remember a few years ago how empty London sometimes seemed in January, but not any more it seemed. My once favoured bookshop, in Balham, was overpriced and understocked - I fear for its health - and fear that the internet may have added interesting secondhand bookshops to its list of approved kills. Never mind; its always a little reassuring to know that London's both still there, and, at the same time, so impossible (house prices, the tube, the tired faces).

Time Enough at Last

Dear Guardian readers, I occasionally buy the Times, so that you don't have to. Only joking, but their books section is often far better than the Julian Barnes Supplement that is the Guardian's. Where do I start? A feature on the Paris Review interviews, which Canongate, obviously anticipating my birthday, is making available in book form. Then, Elaine Feinstein's article on the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of my favourite poets, Louis Macneice. My favourite poem is "Meeting Point" from 1939, effortless in its language, beautifully lyrical, both solemn and serene. He died a few months after Sylvia Plath, but is lodged in the memory as a "thirties poet." Time enough at last, to uncouple him from that and read him for himself. Faber have got a new collected out now, and its already in my shopping basket. All this, and a poem from Margaret Atwood which will be of immense help, I would think, to anyone seeing an aged loved one fade away. There was also an article, elsewhere in yesterday's paper about Mark E. Smith of the Fall, confirming yesterday's post of it being "the year of the Fall." I went to see "The Last King of Scotland" last night, about Idi Amin, and its a powerful, intense movie, that only occasionally falls into cliche. What it lacks in visual literacy, it makes up for, as you might expect from Kevin "Touching the Void" Macdonald, is a ratcheting up of the tension, as sat inside the court of Amin, we get the glimpses of a regime turning from popular acclaim to terror, in small glimpses, whilst always being equally affronted/charmed by Forrest Whittaker's brilliant portrayal of the dictator.

Hit the North

Not sure if the Fall have ever written a boxing song to go along with their various football ones, but Manchester's favourite son, Ricky Hatton, fights in Las Vegas for the first time tonight against the Colombian Juan Urango. It's a long way from Tameside to Vegas, yet one can only hope that Hatton's preparation is good enough to win this one. Boxing has long lost its lustre, with too many titles, too much politics, but it remains essentially the same sport as it's always been, whatever the showbiz vagaries that surrounded it. I saw Hatton at the M.E.N. a few years ago and it was a very knowledgeable crowd, all dressed up to nines, like a convention of gangsters and their molls. The theatrics of the M.E.N. is taken straight from Vegas, of course, so I think Hatton will feel at home, though when he comes out to "Blue Moon" will the Americans realise its for his beloved Manchester City? In the week that a 60 year old Sylvester Stallone is re-selling his imaginary Rocky franchise one more time, its worth remembering that a real fight is going on across the ocean.

Perverted by Language

Odd to think that 2007 could be the year of "The Fall." Last year was bereft of new Fall product, though the band changed again and again, and live gigs showed a wealth of new material. The lack of an equivalent of the "Peel Sessions" has meant that new material doesn't get roadtested on the radio like it did. Despite Myspace and XFM and 6Music, its fair to say that we've not really replaced John Peel's show. In fact, like literature, music seems to be a well-trodden path these days, where even surprising stuff is telegraphed well in advance. But the literary and music worlds collide, with a book of stories inspired by the Fall and Mark E. Smith's biography. I'm disappointed that its called "Renegade: the Gospel According to Mark E. Smith". Surely it should be "How I wrote Elastic Man?" for real? Some readers of this blog will be Fall fans no doubt, but others will probably have never heard a single song. A new album, the wonderfully titled Reformation Post TLC, is out in February and intrigued readers could do worse than spending their 40 Free downloads at eMusic on their extensive Fall collection - 458489 - the A sides, and "Palace of Swords Reversed" would be 2 good places to start, and "Extricate" is perhaps there most diverse and commercial album.

Racism Returns

(Courtesy of the Lancashire Telegraph)

THE chief executive of an agency charged with regenerating the North West has admitted sending a racist joke in a text message.

Steven Broomhead, who heads the North West Development Agency, apologised after it emerged he had sent a joke about a Pakistani shopkeeper via text.

He said: "I received an inappropriate text message to my mobile.

"Without thinking, I forwarded the message on to the mobile phone of an individual outside the NWDA.

"Forwarding this message was an error of judgment on my part and is something that I deeply regret.

"It was inappropriate and thoughtless and does not reflect my personal opinions in any way.
Advertisement continued...

"There was no intention on my part to cause offence and I would like to apologise unreservedly."

The NWDA is responsible for supporting businesses, encouraging investment, lobbying for better infastructure and promoting the region's quality of life.

ENDS HERE

Many Local Government employees have been sacked or reprimanded for similar offences, so I do hope that the investigation comes down heavy on Mr. Broomhead. Ignorance, in this instance, is no excuse; particularly given the furore this week over racism on Big Brother. It is worth considering that Mr. Broomhead is on a salary of over £170,000. I like that "Without thinking, I forwarded a message...." I received loads of text messages over Christmas asking me to "forward" them and "not break the chain". It is impossible to "forward" a message "without thinking" after all you have to first of all work out who you are going to forward it to.

A Lot of Wind

I'm sitting there watching the BBC news, wondering why it's going on about severe weather throughout the country when it seems quite a nice morning here, and then whoosh!, here it comes. Its like its just arrived, on cue with the TV broadcast. For not the first time this week, I've got a lot of rushing around to do, lets just hope I'm rushing in the right direction.

As comebacks go...

The new issue of The Rialto popped through my letterbox this morning, and it includes a short poem of mine, "Because the Beach Needs Sweeping." I had a couple of poems in this magazine about 5 years ago, and they were strange, experimental one-offs, so it's nice that I've had a lyric poem published by them! The editor, Michael Mackmin, wonders why established poets don't send poems to magazines that often - unlike the American ones - unless they have a book coming out. Its a good point, really. I'm not likely to buy the books on the T.S. Eliot shortlist without reading a poem or two from them first. Seamus Heaney won that prize, for "District and Circle." This poem doesn't really make me want to read it anymore than his other books; I just read nostalgia and violence in his poems, more often than not, and neither are my favourite subjects. Mackmin also makes the point that he'd like more political poems - or more poets engaging politically. Its sometimes part of what I do, but I don't think it ever follows immediately from an event. "Was the sequence unknown?" from my last pamphlet, "The Question", was a direct response to the London bombing in both when I wrote it, and its subject, but other poems were more obliquely political.

So that's why I'm poor

I've for a long time wondered how inflation can be so low, when prices seem to be going up. Yes, my CDs and books get cheaper (but only when I buy them secondhand or from a discounter - just look at the RRP of an average novel that's NOT in the 2-for-1), but since most of my income goes on must-haves, (fuel, transport, food), and would-miss (wine, meals, cinema), its not surprising that I've consistently had a personal inflation rate of 2 per cent above the national. Consumer goods, it seems, feature very low in my life, despite the aforementioned books and CDs, and as for air flights, holidays etc. hmmm, chance would be a fine thing.

The red line is me; the green line is inflation. www.statistics.gov.uk is where you need to look, check the button on the right hand side of the page.

Alice as Alice saw it...

Wow is the only word to describe the British Library's pageturning facsimiles. I've been looking at William Blake's notebook, and Lewis Carroll's original hand-written/hand-drawn Alice. I've been always a wee bit sceptical of e-Books and the like, but here, for once, is something where the web can genuinely give us an experience, whether at home or in a museum, that wasn't available before. I always love seeing the "behind glass" orginal manuscripts in places like the Haworth parsonage etc. but obviously you never get to feel the book or even to really gaze at what they contain. This is more than "scholarship" - it seems to allow a connection with the very heart of the original writer. More Please!

Brave Writers

I am heartened that there seems to be, finally, a little literary rumbling of the complacency of so much published fiction. Here is Rod Liddle, in the Sunday Times, not, admittedly, a journalist whose opinion counts for much, asking "has fiction lost its power?" - that had literature had "started being like every other form of mass entertainment, aiming wide and broad, hoping to alienate nobody." In yesterday's Guardian, Zadie Smith was making a similar point; another writer has emailed her in response to "how would you define literary failure?" as being "so eager to please." It would be interesting to see how Smith sees her own work there - my criticism of "On Beauty" was related very much to this; or at least Smith's obvious love of the cloistered privilege of top-end universities, and the fact that for the middle classes, even failure is only relative, it allows them to return to their pathway, perhaps a little wiser. Expanding on this lack of "bravery" - and I guess its publishers and audiences as well as writers who can create a culture of temerity - it's surely what characterised so much of the post-war British novel. Characters started at a certain point - by the end of the novel they had returned back there - or the status quo had been restored. There is no looking into the abyss; none of the total failure of the social system to look after them that you find in, say, "Mill on the Floss" when the Tulliver's court case is lost. Circularity - implicit in "On Beauty" (and its model "Howard's End") is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does lead to some complacency. Things have happened; but the status quo is returned to. You find it in Kingsley Amis; in Iris Murdoch; rarely, in Doris Lessing or Martin Amis. Of course, it can be as powerful as novelstic tool as any other - a troubled marriage at the start of the novel might be the status quo that is returned to - in itself a knowing tragedy. Liddle is also talking about brave writing; where style as well as content is vital to making a novel matter as more than entertainment. I've long been of the view that a certain kind of "talking point" novel - can be little more than a drama-documentary; not leaving a psychological scar or an emotional revealing. The difficulty, of course, is that if everyone's looking for a "happy ending" (and even in the saddest novel, that "happy ending" can simply be a return to the status quo, after the devastation has taken place), then that will be more what gets written, what gets published. Is it just me, or is there far more complacency in the domestic horror of McEwan's "Saturday" than in "Enduring Love" or "The Innocent", where actions most definitely had costs - not for the peripheral characters - but for the mains?

Yee-Haw, a bit of a Round-up

A friend has invited me over to Sheffield to see an intriguing sounding play, "Talking to Space Hoppers." Any other week I'd have happily gone - I've only been to Sheffield twice in my life, and yet its not far by train. Interesting that the unknown (to me at least) poet John Haynes has won the Costa (nee Whitbread) poetry prize for his book "Letters to Patience." Like David Harsent's "Legion" and Alice Oswald's "Dart", these "thematic" books of poetry have really taken all the prizes in the last few years, and yet this development has - to my mind - never really been mentioned. All 3 poets have simply come up with a book that has overturned more favoured names - and it does make me wonder whether the "beauty contest" of contemporary poetry ever really knows what its doing? Perhaps the book length poem, presumed dead since "The Dynasts", has made a quiet recovery? Writing poetry can be hard, and hard-fought (Haynes' book took him 13 years). We tried to find room for longer poems in "Lamport Court," and a new issue, the 2nd solely edited by Neil Campbell, is out shortly. His own first book - a short story collection - follows in March. Magazines remain the lifeblood of a literary scene and 2nd issues should be more celebrated than 1st issues (they're usually far better as well, casting their net further), so I'm sure there will be plenty of people at Manchester Central Library on Friday for the new issue of "Libertine Magazine." In the non-literary world people have been literally falling over in amazement at the launch of Apple's new iPhone. Didn't Speak and Spell used to make something that looked a bit similar?

Ziggy is Sixty

Of all the draw-droppingly unbelievable birthdays, surely David Bowie being 60 is the most astonishing? He remains one of the critical influences on my life. I probably first heard him when "Space Oddity" was unexpectedly reissued to become a number one in 1975. I remember getting "The very best of Bowie" (probably the worst of a whole range of compilations he's released over the years) when I was about 13 or 14, and that probably presaged the amazement of hearing (and seeing the video for) "Ashes to Ashes." Already past his prime - its parent album, "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)" is generally seen as the last great album of a run that goes back to his second "The Man Who Sold the World" a decade earlier - I was turned into a Bowie fan more by the prescience of RCA records to cheaply re-sell his back catalogue, at £2.99 each, so that every few weeks I'd add "Low", "Hunky Dory" or "Ziggy Stardust" to my collection. A good time to catch up with Bowie, if not that great a time to be a manic fan (oddities like "Alabama Song", his debatable movie career), I know I'd heard Bauhaus's note perfect version of "Ziggy Stardust" before I'd heard Bowie's. I've therefore got quite a skewed view of his back catalogue - I heard things in the wrong order, and some not till years later. Therefore I'm not a particular fan of "Young Americans" "Aladdin Sane" or "Lodger", since they seemed weak compared with "Station to Station", "Diamond Dogs" and "Low" respectively.

"Let's Dance", of course, was his biggest success - the title track following "Ashes to Ashes" and his Queen collaboration "Under Pressure" to number one - yet outside the singles I've probably not played it for a decade. After that, it was a Bowie that had, after being the ultimate outsider artist (albeit a massive selling one), embraced the mainstream. "Blue Jean", off "Tonight" was probably his last truly great single for a decade or so. Yet every album - even the "Tin Machine" ones - offered hope of a return to form. It's strange, how, in retrospect, the partial renaissance - perhaps since "Black Tie, White Noise" onwards - has made his eighties "blip" seem just that. The musician who'd experimented with electronics, plastic soul and artifice in the 70s was unable to survive the artifice, plastic soul and electronics of the 80s. Somewhere, sometime I've a massive essay unfinished on Bowie - why he means so much to so many, yet is still mistrusted by others. I've seen him twice - both in massive venues and in the last decade - and I'm not sure that I quite believed it was him. I prefer him as the alien he played in the masterful "The Man Who Fell to Earth." Yet, as rock stars go, he's never stopped being what rock stars should be... interesting. I realised, that with his recent heart problem, the gap since "Heathen" is one of the longest in his career. Bowie the businessman is always problematic - Bowie.net, Bowie bonds, endless, endless reissues and greatest hits, which have never quite tempted me to replace my RCA £2.99ers.

A great singer, but a poor interpreter (except where the songs are obscure - like his Pixies and Pop covers); and almost uninterpretable himself. Considering how great the songs often are, they generally defy anyone to do another version (I like the Bauhaus cover, Lulu's "The Man Who Sold the world" and Mott the Hoople's "All the Young Dudes" but that's about it - but have a look here!); and what is often forgotten in the torrent of "Best ofs" and the ubiquitous footage of "Changes" or "Starman", is how rich that back catalogue is. "Quicksand" from "Hunky Dory", "Five Years" from "Ziggy Stardust", "Be My Wife" from "Low" and "Teenage Wildlife" from "Scary Monsters" would all squeeze into my "best of." He's experimented with different bands; different styles; but its only music that aspires to be glamorous - and yes, alien - that has really worked for him. Faced with an r&b, folk or pop backing, his vocal mannerisms sit awkwardly. It is the driving, drama of his glam rock backing; or the glacial avant gardeism of Eno that suits him best. His supporting of those keystones of the alternative - the Velvets, Iggy in particular - would deserve praise whatever else he's done. I hope there's many more albums, however, bad, misconceived, odd or inspirational (on every record there's been a track or two that deserves the latter epithet, "Never Let Me Down" and "Tin Machine II" apart!). For me, he's not the bisexual icon that appealed to Jake Arnott or Anthony and the Johnsons, nor is he the global rock star of "Live Aid" and "Dancing in the Streets", or the elder statesman of "mature" Q awards and live webcasts. Rather, he's the avant garde-ner extraordinary, tending that garden even when at its most barren - making a strangely powerful alchemy of rock and roll, pop, experiment and theatre work time and again.

Happy Birthday, Ziggy.

Going Back

I've been leafing through a few old books; anthologies and the like - you don't always read them in full when they come out. Conjunctions is one of my favourite magazines, though its issues are often the size of encyclopedias. Its 25th anniversary issue is just out, but before ordering it, I decided to have a re-read of a couple of issues that it published a few years ago, collecting together a snapshot of current American poetry in one and fiction in another. I say a snapshot, but Conjunctions, as lot of the better magazines with a web presence are, is about the American avant garde. Interesting that a couple of British writers, Jim Crace and Will Self, make the 25th anniversary edition. Anyway, re-reading their "American poetry: state of the art" collection from a few years ago I came across a brilliant poet I'd not read before, C.D. Wright. It appears she's never been published in England, but the prose poems I read - from "One Big Self" a collaboration with a photographer about Louisana prisoners - were rich in language, invention and emotion. She's got a "new and selected" "Steal Away", so I'll hopefully find out more. Going back to the point I made a few posts ago, about the difficulty of keeping up with American poetry, Conjunctions is one way.

Delays

I'm still delaying my new poetry pamphlet, "Loosely", from seeing light o' day. A number of the poems needs tweaks, small changes. I'm shedding commas, semi colons and hyphens - I must have been given a job-lot in the summer when I wrote most of these poems. I'm having to replace "reflect in a window" with "reflected in a window" and I don't like either. I'm excising prose-words like "that" and "only". Stripping the engine, putting it back in the poem. It will purr better. Which reminds me, suddenly, of a pseudo-poem (actually a "chapter" of my 250 chapter experimental novel).

WAX CAT

I have a wax cat, she purrs like a candle.


I still like that one. Delays are extending to my latest short story, which needs a clear head (I'm not talking alcohol here, I'm talking all the other detritus) to complete. I'm a little absent at the moment (not from my blog, here I seem very present), waiting for something to happen. I'm like one of the weevil's in Torchwood. They sense something... (Torchwood's been a pleasure, guilty or not, and despite some episodes not cutting it. It's interesting as well to work out what they've ripped off. There's a little of "Don't Look Now" in the last episode of the first series. Oh, and Jack "came out", I guess, though him being gay seems somewhat irrelevant when HE CAN'T BE KILLED.)

See, I can do paragraphs? All that white space. Might have to try a poem...

***
In other news, just read about this intriguing collaboration between Scottish musicians and poets/novelists.
Idlewild and Edwin Morgan, now there's a thought.

Stop, already

I'm getting distinctly tired of "guilty pleasures" and now, "guilty reads." Not sure that Stephen King should be anyone's guilty read. If you like someone, stand up for their writing/music, and if you think they're not that great a writer/singer etc. don't be embarassed to admit it. Stephen King's always been a great writer - probably one of the best writers about childhood in the last thirty years or so, as readers of "Firestarter", "Carrie", "The Body" (made into the film "Stand by Me") and "It" can attest. I've not read any for a while - but seem to recall either "The Dark Half" or "Pet Semetary" as my favourites. I also like "Bridges of Madison County," so sue me - I think its structurally clever, and I like its sentimentality and its morality. I know - as surely everyone does - that we're no better judge today of what contemporary books will stand the test of time than anyone in the past. From Shakespeare to Donne, from "Wuthering Heights" to "The Great Gatsby", the current judgement is more often flawed. I've heard so many people tell me that "Da Vinci Code" is badly written (even people who wouldn't notice such a thing) that I've no desire to read it; but so's "Moo" by Jane Smiley, "Larry's Party" by Carol Shields, and "Anil's Ghost" by Michael Ondaatje; exceptionally terrible novels all. Remember, when Oasis's "(What's the story) Morning Glory" came out, dumb critics preferred Blur's "The Great Escape." Stick by your guns; like what you like; defend your choices; and don't ever call them guilty ones.

That was This Life

Just watched the 10 year reunion episode of "This Life." So, don't read on if you've videod it, or watching it on play-again or are going to bit torrent it from somewhere. Yes, "This life - ten years on" was probably the most hypertextual piece of television we've seen since Dennis Potter's swansong pieces appeared simultaneously on the Beeb and Channel 4. The soundtrack was conveniently loaded into Eg's iPod, so we got Everything but the Girl and Massive Attack for the quiet bits, and Manic Street Preachers "Design for Life" for when they were dancing. Music was always an important part of this life, mainly because it was both dashed off (i.e. it was playing incidentally at all moments) and candid (yes, they knew what they were doing.) In a sense it was a rare occasion when tele gets it right - rather than retrospectively adding window dressing (like the tele version of "The Line of Beauty.") Eg, much liked by most of my female friends, remains the most annoying man in television history - soppy, useless, like a pet dog that's none too bright - and he's STILL like that. Only thing is, he's written a bestselling novel about, yes, "This life" the first time round. God, this gets complex. Originally conceived by Amy Jenkins, about her own housesharing experience, is Eg Amy then? And what happened to Amy after that much hyped first bestseller? Never mind, everyone admits the series got better when other writers got involved, which always seemed a little unfair (and I liked the first series alot, just took everyone else a time to get back into it.) A shame that Ramon Tikaram never made the cut (he's the excuse for the get together) but he's tried to be a serious actor ever since and maybe's glad of the let off. This life was always less comfortable when it had characters outside of the main set - and so it is here, where Miles' Vietnamese bride, and Claire, the young northern film maker, are dismissed as soon as they possibly can. The reunion show was ace - because it concentrated on the verbal sparring between the 5 remaining characters. Millie, never the least bit sexy in the original, looked great, whilst Anna was looking a little worse for wear - though not as bad as Miles' long backpackers hair. (And this guy was supposed to be running a chain of hotels?) They were always a bit posh the people in This Life, and in the reunion the Beeb and the writers can't resist a bit of the Richard Curtis treatment. And its not a bad idea - arriving at the hotel, sorry, Miles' palatial home - they're like an Agatha Christie dinner party, and we're left waiting for the first body to turn up. And the body here, of course, is the past. Like a 5-person marriage, what was always so great about the show is how they're all best friends who bring out the very worst in each other. Eg gets turned into a child by sensible Millie (and she really likes that as well - smiling when her real child beats her with a toy teddy to wake her up, when Eg's been up and doing childcare for all of 5 seconds) - the book, remember, was always a bit of a laugh for him, a kind of "I'm not working, I'm an author" schtick that has never worked that well for me! Anna hates Millie's conformity but really wishes she had a proper boyfriend/baby/house etc. whilst Millie would like to be a bit more devilish. Anna's devilishness was always a little overplayed of course - she's a topdog lawyer, as always, and still smokes like a chimney. (Good job they didn't do it next year.) Whilst Warren was always the bit of grease between the other relationships, helping them all rub along together - glad to not be worrying about himself for once. In one of many clever little touches, he's replaced his old therapy sessions with, yes, being a life coach. Though its always been touch and go whether him or Little Britain's Dafydd, the only other Welsh gay in the village, perhaps?, was the least self aware. I guess, the only thing wrong with the show was the speed at which it zoomed through things - like a Noel Coward on steroids (and Amy's first novel was a Coward-filch if I remember rightly). So a good piece of nostalgia for once, and my head's spinning like the tracks on an iPod keeping up with all the subtexts, which is as it should be. Don't know where you'd come back from here? After all, getting back together, like any old group of friends, they eventually fall back to what they were - Milly girly, Eg daft, Miles still trying not to turn into his dad, Warren coming to terms with whatever he needs to come to terms with and Anna being Anna. I can see them again in another decade - yet it would be like being in aspic, their characters unchanging, just life changing around them. If anything they'd all be a bit young to be going all middle aged on us. I wrote my own state-of-the-nineties novel about my year in London in 1996-7, and yet by moving out of there, I missed out on the prosperity of the Blair years. There's a few friends, older than that lot, who'd kind of fit the cliches, but it probably takes a bit longer, and then again, quite a few of them have either not yet made it (still waiting, like Anna, for the house, the partner, the baby...) or simply fled the city for the countryside. As the Manic Street Preachers would have it, "We don't talk about love, we only want to get drunk." That song, of course, could even make the charts next week - since for the first time - ALL downloads will count, they don't need a physical reissue accompanying the song. So, anyone plugging in their iPod tonight for a bit of nostalgia might just be tempted to flash 79p!

New Year

If my blog could have new year's resolutions it would probably be to have a makeover - a new template is probably due, or even a move to Wordpress, we'll see if it finds the time. The post-Xmas period has seen me out late 4 nights in a row. Seeing the Runaways meets AC/DC of Crewe based the Tommys at Night and Day made me feel distinctly old. I'd say they're going to be massive, they're ridiculously good at their instruments, but the music's a bit on the heavy side for the charts. I bumped into my friend who runs the occasional arts and music night, Beat Your Art Out, their next one is in Hebden Bridge of all places. That night saw us come foul of the lack of 24 hour drinking in Manchester, Via Fossa closing at 1.00 and us having to gamely go to the place of no return (the New Union.) The village doesn't change, Italo-house classic "Keep Warm" by Armando was playing as we left Via Fossa. Tune! The following day saw us end up in Common in the Northern Quarter, where I can definitely say that "New Rave" is real and not just a media invention. Though nobody was dancing cos its a bar! Didn't stop them when they put Michael Jackson's "Beat it" on. A friend's birthday the day-before NYE, and then a pleasant meal for New Year itself where we got all competitive with the 1996 "Pub Quiz Book" and the game Taboo. (We were rubbish.) Somehow all these hangovers have helped a little with my creativity: namely I wrote a first draft of a new story that I'm wildly excited about. Before I return to work tomorrow I've been doing a bit of "housekeeping" finding old stories I wrote pre-computer days, which I really should type in one of these days. I even found my "author" photograph that I got done for City Life's Manchester Stories back in the day; good job really, since the publishers lost it as well. Realise I've been writing pretty seriously for about 20 years now - which seems a long, long time; but also, weirdly, could just seem like an apprenticeship. I've been looking through the ragged entrails of my past writings, finding connections, repeated motifs, failed and successful attempts at the same thing. Mostly, remarkably, there's some consistency. Unlike my record collection which flies all over the place. I picked up a rare Captain Beefheart yesterday, but the record player is attached to the computer as I dither about digitising stuff, so haven't listened to it yet. The Waterstones gift vouchers my sister gave me have already been spent: Jeffrey Wainwright's "Poetry: the basics" is something I've been meaning to get for ages, I've never had a poetry lesson/class in my life, and so when people talk about ceasuras and sestinas and the like, I go all schtum. Its a joy to read, and you'll come away from it knowing much more than you did before. Very catholic choice of poets he chooses from as well. That, and Tom McCarthy's heavily recommended "Remainder" should keep me going well into January. I was looking for a decent anthology of contemporary (even post-60s) American poetry and it doesn't seem that one exists. There's a few wide surveys of the more avant garde end of things, which stretch into the present day, but as far as I can see there's no decent "primer" for contemporary American poetry, made available for British readers. It makes you wonder what the Fabers, Carcanets etc. of the world are thinking of? And it may explain this essay in Poetry Review from John Burnside. In brief, Burnside finds himself in a conversation about the American poet Jorie Graham, and from this discovers that almost none of the UK poets at the event have read any contemporary American poetry, or like any of it. Even Ashbery was dismissed by this myopic crowd. I'm not a fan of Burnside's poetry, but this is a brave and important essay that should be a rallying cry. "You don't know what you're missing," he said to them, and he's right, but there's no easy way in to the contemporary American scene. I wish Burnside had named names, surely if that's their view they wouldn't be unhappy to make it publicly known? I think Fiona Sampson, the new editor of Poetry Review, should insist! Happy New Year.

American Mythos

I've been thinking alot about the lure of the American "mythos" - the web of stories and underlying narrative that seems to inhabit so much American art. It's there in the wandering troubadour that was the young Bob Dylan; there again in the songs about cars and girls of the Beach Boys; and there in the deep musical and mythical certainties that seem to inhabit songs by contemporary artists like Midlake and the White Stripes. Clearly there are lots of different stories here; but the sense of space - the sense of escape - the sense of exploration - the sense, I guess, of freedom are key to all of this. This week, with both James Brown and Gerry Ford passing away, we see it again. The latter seems like from another distant age; perhaps because he was an old man - the oldest president - and that the other faces from 1974 are either dead or ageing; whilst James Brown seemed still with us to the end - he was due to play another concert on New Years Eve - and the music has its own mythos about it. Anthemic, rhetorical titles help, of course, but art, in this sense, ages, but doesn't grow old. Yet is it merely distance that makes me think that America has this underlying narrative that is worthy of constant exploration, whilst we have none? Writers like Jake Arnott and David Peace have tried to construct their own recent histories - yet its notable that whilst Peace's major influence, James Ellroy, weaves the Kennedys, Cuba and Watergate in his stories, Peace's latest book is Brian Clough, Don Revie, Leeds United. Arnott has said in interview that he wanted to find a different kind of gay history, in his approximations of sixties gangster homosexuality, and again, in the adrogyny of early seventies Bowie. You can see these writers looking closely at their own mythos, and where it's not there, creating it, but using the archetypes that they can relate to: working class culture, hidden gay history. What if you're neither gay or working class? Or for that matter Scottish or Irish - other "mythos" that writers are not afraid of plugging into? There's a great Catherine Tate scene where its a support group for ginger-haired people, and after fighting amongst themselves, they bond and sing a song of togetherness, before the camera goes outside the hall, where a KKK style hate-mob is converging on them, about to raise it to the ground. I could, I guess, try and uncover the hidden ginger history of these lands - but I don't think it's exactly what I'm looking for (and that sketch is funny if only because the colour of your hair isn't something that draws people together in any real way.) Given this - and given the difficulty of untangling class from English literature - it seems that my tradition, my mythos, is one of "dissent" - the tradition of Tom Paine, Wesley, the Chartists on the one hand; Coleridge and Southey's utopias - Aleister Crowley, Oz Magazine and CRASS on the other. Yet, here lies disappointment - magazines like Citizen 32 and Dreams That Money Can Buy, as well as online zines like 3AM Magazine, would probably put themselves in that tradition; yet there's something prosaic about good intention that doesn't always lead to good art (never mind the problems of dismal collections such as Poets Against the War). And besides, part of the allure of a mythos is the shorthand it provides for readers, audiences, magazines and publishers. I'm increasingly fed up with the commodification of literature (see previous posts on just about everything), but aren't nearly all literary bloggers? Yet are we part of a dissenting tradition when we've not yet matched rhetoric with art? It is one thing to kick over the statues, but another to replace them with something equally glorious (and art is nothing if it doesn't aspire to glory as well as the utilitarian). There are artists, of course, Dante or Faulkner come to mind, who formed their own mythos from what was their in their own personal life and circumstance - but how to do that? How to find that? I'm looking through my work wanting to find the sense of connectedness, which I know is there, and the essential way forward. Partly, my fiction is stalled, in ideas that I'm finding it hard to write except through very matter-of-fact prose; and tired with the lack of wonder in so much that I read, I'm reluctant to add mere stories to the pile. Yet, there's something honest about the story - it is a connection between reader and writer and doesn't require much in the way of pyrotechnics. Besides, without a shared mythos, where can find a connection?

Over (and under) production

Katy at Baroque in Hackney has an interesting post on the New Yorker cartoonists and compares it with the lot of poets and poetry. It got me thinking about under and over production of work - poetry in particular - but other stuff as well. Whichever way it falls I write about 20-30 decent (i.e. finished) poems a year. And "decent" is a difficult one. My quality control's better these days; I don't write nearly so many pointless poems - in the past I guess I'd sometimes try and write poetry even when the muse (or the idea) wasn't there. There's a lot of this overproduction goes on these days of course - a friend who is recently finishing an MA in poetry has to submit something like 30-50 poems; in other words two years of my work, and that would be in a good two years. I don't think there's many current poets we'll be looking forward to the "complete" as opposed to the "selected". Yet, what is a "good haul" these days? Katy says she manages about 10 "publishable" a year - a New Yorker cartoonist can submit 700 and get 5 accepted. Obviously some poets get in a verbal groove, which appears to lead to book after book, poem after poem, all equally good or bad depending on your viewpoint, but for the rest of us each poem is a struggle, each page is blank, and - though I'm fairly sure that in 2007 I might manage oh, between 20 and 30 okay poems - there's always the possibility that I may not.

Can people be right, when they're so wrong?

I'm amazed when someone doesn't like a book (or film) that I think is a masterpiece. Mainly because I think my standards are pretty high, and I don't overhype that many things I've read. Yet, its admirable to admit when you don't get something. Scott Pack's blog lists his books of the year, but also the ones he didn't like - and I guess its amazing that someone whose read 132 books in a year hasn't read Philip Roth before, given the classic run of novels since "American Pastoral". Having said that, I've not read his latest "Everyman", it sounded a little unappetising, a meditation on death more than anything else. I thought "Pastoral" was an unassailable masterpiece, the style of writing impeccable and uncopiable, and the breadth unheard of elsewhere in British and American fiction. "I married a communist" was sloppy in comparison though still captivating; "The Human Stain" both brave and foolhardy in its premise (and probably the one people should choose for their book club) and "The Plot Against America" ambitious, but overlong. These faults, of course, are all virtues! I've a lot of earlier Roth I'd like to read, but have only got round to a couple. "The Ghost Writer" - one of the Zuckerman books - is a stunning novella that, like all his novels, keeps you thinking long after you've finished reading it. As for Pack not liking "Catcher in the Rye", reading it in your thirties for the first time, must be similar to trying to understand what the Sex Pistols are about if you'd somehow never heard them until now. I've re-read "Catcher..." later in life and it still packs a punch, though I think you need that coming-of-age empathy that you get from reading it early. That said, I don't think Salinger's other work, the short stories - predominantly about the Glass family - should be read UNTIL you're in your thirties. All the stories are worth reading, but I particularly like the story-novella paring of "Franny and Zooey." (The Wikipedia writer seems to think its a novel...so I've not linked to it!) It still reads very modern, although the crises of faith in both stories is a little rarified for contemporary readers, and I still think the Glass stories as a whole are one of the touchstones of 20th century literature. That Salinger himself ran out of road as the last stories came out, is hardly surprising - since in trying to determine a truth about human existence, they inevitably become more and more inward, so that by the last Glass story (published in the New Yorker, but never republished or collected), "Hapworth 16, 1924", there's nowhere left to go except into silence. So, going back to Pack, can people be right when they're so wrong? Yes, indeed, "Everyman" may well not be for everyone, and "Catcher in the Rye" is certainly not for us thirtysomethings, at least not the firs time. I've worked it out with film - I do like a particular type of stylised movie that some people simply hate, and I'm not adverse to a little sentimentality. With books, its somehow different. I do still believe that some writers are better than others, that some books are better than others, and some books/writers are so stunning that if you don't appreciate them (even if you don't like them), then you need a good reason why. And it works the other way, of course, elsewhere on the blog is a list of books Pack does love. Admittedly I found Jasper fForde, both unreadable and charityshopdonationable; but I'm tempted to try and find time for a few on his list, Brad Listi, for instance. That's the good thing about people who read 132 books a year, they can sort out wheat from chaff for the rest of us! One Christmas TV moment of literary note - in the otherwise mindnumbingly predictable "The Vicar of Dibley" - at Geraldine's book group they all sit down to read Zadie Smith's "On Beauty", and none of them have read it. Zadie shouldn't worry too much about this - I think being seen as the obvious book group choice on something as safe and uncontroversial as the Christmas special of Vicar of Dibley, means she's really up there with the greats!

The Novelmaker Wizard for Word 97

(I just came across this short piece, whilst I was doing a bit of "housekeeping" of my PC. Not sure when I wrote it, but it seems a suitable end-of-year piece.)

The Novelmaker Wizard for Word 97

This wizard is compatible only with Microsoft Word 97. Earlier versions were not supported by the wizard and for later versions you are advised to download the appropriate upgrate, such as Novelmaker Wizard for Word 2003.
This read me file is supplied in addition to the online help function, however, the wizard has been designed to take you directly through the novel writing process without any further necessary knowledge.
The wizard was developed after it was discovered that many people were using Microsoft Word and associated products to produce novels. This ad hoc approach to writing indicated a demand for a product that would help standardise novel writing, to the benefit of all. Novelmaker Wizard is not currently available for other platforms such as Macintosh OS and Linux, however it is hoped that developments in the future will use the proprietary standard developed here.
The Novelmaker Wizard makes use of existing computer skills such as word processing, drag and drop, cut and paste, and style sheets. It is expected that your novels will benefit from being spellchecked and grammar checked and autocorrected by the standard functions in your word processing package. It is not the aim of Novelmaker Wizard to write the novel for you, simply to make it easier for you to do so and to introduce standards that mean your novel, once completed, will be of a publishable quality and similar to all other novels published.
Although other platforms (e.g. pen and paper) have been used for writing novels in the past they had obvious drawbacks. The lack of a word count in particular meant that some novels (e.g. Moby Dick, The Fountainhead) were far too long and some (e.g The Great Gatsby) were a little short. This causes problems for novel buyers who are increasingly likely to demand a standardised product. Novelmaker Wizard is fully customisable however it is recommended that the proper length of your novel is between 60,000 and 100,000 and these are the default settings. To change these, please see the online help.
The chosen font for your novel is Times New Roman, 12 Point. We realise you may want to change this, but it is has been proven that manuscripts written in this font are more likely to be taken seriously by overworked publishing executives.
The Novelmaker Wizard has several "Chapter" options that can be set at the outset. Because the contemporary reader is likely to be put off by long chapters the default setting for Chapter Length is four thousand words. Within this there are also defaults for Section and Paragraph. Clearly, there are novels that do not adhere to these standards, but frankly, who'd be interested in reading them? As always, there is a manual mode, but it rather defeats the object of using the wizard in the first place. Don't worry if your first draft overruns the suggested Paragraph, Section and Chapter lengths - they will be automatically adjusted to fit. (There are 2 options available: either split into 2 or more Paragraphs, Sections or Chapters or use the Novelmaker's extensive summarize functions to remove extraneous lines.)

Overdoing it

I know Christmas is the time of overindulgence, but now I've signed up beyond the free trial period for eMusic, I'm at risk of having more music than its ever possible to listen to, to go with the more books than I'll ever get to read. I love hearing new stuff, but it's also important to hear familiar music as well - and not just "Merry Christmas Everybody." So for now other reason, than the need to remind myself, here's my favourite tracks, in no particular order, from the and albums I've listened to this year. I might even burn a CD of them to listen to during the Christmas period.

So my tracks of the year would have to be…

1. Kona Coast – the Beach Boys (MIU Album)
2. A Fond Farewell – Elliot Smith (From the Basement to the Hill)
3. Amoreena – Elton John (Tumbleweed Connection)
4. Crash Street Kids – Mott The Hoople (The Hoople)
5. Sleeps with Angels – Neil Young (Sleeps with Angles)
6. Miss Black America – Curtis Mayfield (Curtis)
7. Major Leagues – Pavement (Terror Twilight)
8. Fake Tales of San Francisco – Arctic Monkeys (Whatever I say I am...)
9. Beautiful – Christina Aguilera (Stripped)
10. Standing in Your Shadows – Puressence (Only Forever)
11. Roscoe – Midlake (Trials of Van Occupanther)
12. Mucky Fingers – Oasis (Don’t Believe the Truth)
13. Loose – The Stooges (Funhouse)
14. Can’t You Hear Me Knocking – Rolling Stones (Sticky Fingers)
15. Lets Go Together – Jefferson Airplane (Blows Against the Empire)
16. Shining Star – Earth, Wind & Fire (That’s the Way of the World)
17. That Summer Feeling – Jonathan Richman (I, Jonathan)
18. We Need a War – Fischerspooner (Odyssey)
19. T-Shirt – Destiny’s Child (Destiny Fulfilled)
20. Better to Have It – Bobby Purify (Better to Have It)

Happy Christmas

271 Chris Moyles books and counting

I was in Waterstones in Manchester earlier looking for poetry magazines when my friend pointed out that the radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles had a book out. I'm only vaguely acquainted with Moyles but know that he is loud and shouty, and very radio. What on earth could he have a book out for? On page eight of the book he says something along the lines of, "I'm on page 8, who'd have thought I'd have got this far?" Its basically written by an illiterate 10 year old, albeit one who is published in hardback at £16.99. Bearing in mind it was in the arts and literature section of the shop I couldn't resist asking the assistant if they'd actually sold any of this absurd piece of publishing industry rubbish. I expected him to say "no", but diligently he looked it up on the computer. Waterstones in Manchester has sold 271 copies of this piece of illiterate shit. It's 304 pages are currently number 39 in the Amazon bestsellers chart.

Preview: "Loosely"

The last two years, I've collated recent poems in small pamphlets, "2004" and "The Question." This year I wasn't sure whether the poetry I'd written was finished enough for this treatment - yet two sequences I'd written earlier in the year, along with a smattering of individual poems - mean that I'm just putting the finishing touches to a 3rd pamphlet, "Loosely." I guess the poems are "loosely" connected in style and subject, and besides, I like the word. You can download the previous collections here, as a PDF, and I'll make the new collection available in the same way. However, if anyone would like a hardcopy - it should be available by the first week of January - then just email (adrian dot slatcher at gmail dot com) your name & address, and I'll put one in the post.

The contents page, subject to minor change, is here....

CONTENTS

Part 1: Last Lines

To thaw the freezing in our hearts
Twenty Years Left in the Rain
Changing Colours Over Time
The Fear of Sight to the Long Since Blind
We Were Never Good in Water
Of Love and Death in the American Novel
Making out I am grateful after all
In Any Garden But Eden
As the day, so the night
Drinking and Eating All on My Own
Tending the garden for your return
When Every Photograph is Packed Away
But Something Isn’t Loving

Part 2: October

1: “Clusters of birds are making their way south – “
2: “Damn life continues in some unholy way – “
3: “Could I have done things better?”
4: “Where I was when the mood struck – “
5: “Did the tragedy happen offstage?”

Part 3: Other Poems

Stay Here
I, Conservationist
Dog Clouds
The Dream with the Butterflies
The Decemberists
The Ordinary is not Necessary
The End of the Story

...and the most recent poem, "The Decemberists" is below. Happy Christmas

The Decemberists

The year has been the warmest yet
    and we notice the signs -:
It is December, yet half the trees are dressed;
    late autumnal browns amongst the evergreens –
And the late afternoon red sky
    acts as a banding of lights
Blinking through the impatient leaves,
    lighting a runway for birds.

Last week, I woke to find
    a carrion crow -:
Strutting with a Salford air,
    its bright eyes and tongue-beak
Daring the world to approach.
    The city is returning to nature,
And nature returns to the streets –
    gaunt foxes out looking for twilight rucks.

Books of the Year? Not a chance.

It's traditional to give a list of ones books of the year, but so patchy is (a) my buying and (b) my reading that it's near impossible to think of something I've actually read that came out in 2006. I did enjoy Tobias Hill's "Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow", a collection of poetry mostly about living in London, yet finding the pastoral in the city, rather than merely the everyday. A welcome romanticism that also finds room to namecheck iPods, and is contemporary enough to let the outside horrors of the Asian tsunami in. And I've just received from Amazon.com the very handsome "Up is Up..." about the downtown New York literary scene - the size of the Argos catalogue but infinitely more inspiring its a single-book archive, featuring artwork and photographs as well as the literature. An exemplary work from the always excellent NYUP. Its been a year when we saw the wonderfully diverse Verberate nights come to an end, and magazines like Transmission, the Quiet Feather, Citizen 32 (I've a short article on self censorship in the latest issue), and Parameter consolidate themselves. (See links on the side of the page for these and other magazines.) In other words; our very own downtown literary scene is going very nicely. Interesting, as well, that now magazines like Unquiet Desperation and Libertine are using Myspace as a way of growing their audience. (Blogs are so last year, don't you think?). I have some concerns, of course. The blog and the Myspace - and the internet in general - seem to be good at potting, concising, anthologising, cataloguing. They are quickly read, half-read, hardly read. Great for journalism (and indeed for "journal"-ism such as this) and for informing and selling, but the art, the culture remains elsewhere, in the book, the film, the album that we're writing about or selecting from or pointing to. Perhaps its because its so difficult to monetarise the web - that any good art created on it, soon moves off it - to the book deal, the record deal, the film deal.

***

I've talked before about the difference between British and American novels/novelists - and its interesting to read that the American's like our writers, yet according to novelist Benjamin Markovits, "England, as it appears in the US bestseller charts, is the country of Oxbridge and public schools." The thing is, he's not wrong is he? Our Ian McEwans and Zadie Smiths and Kazuo Ishiguros are all happiest in "traditional, elitist, class-ridden" England. There's many other Englands, yet our most successful writers ignore them, or only acknowledge them when set against the status quo of the establishment. Whilst these writers are our most successful exports, what chance that publishers will look elsewhere?

This story must have a valid ticket and cannot travel before 9.30

It is with mixed feelings that I draw attention to Virgin Trains' Short story competition. I would suggest you avoid writing it on a weekend, before 9.30 in the morning, or, if in London, during rush hour. The subject is "time" with a certain amount of irony, I hope. I have lost more time on Virgin trains than I'd like to think about. However, although that lost time could be well used, (a) if you've got a pen and paper/laptop (b) you've actually got a seat. I actually wrote the first chapter of my short novel "The Badger Farm Report" longhand on a trip to London, and several poems; and I wrote a very dark short story called "Last Train from Euston". There is a prize for the winner, and since nobody actually has time to read these days, it's a 500 word maximum.

***

Perhaps because I spent a dozen years recording synthesizer-based music, people sometimes expect me to be listening to a non-stop diet of Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, and Kraftwerk, with a smattering of Aphex Twin and Chemical Brothers for when I'm feeling a bit more modern. Yet, I've rarely done so - and those artists feature only marginally in my collection - but with it coming to the end of the 2006, what have I been listening to? This year it's been many things, but the artists I've kept coming back to are the Beach Boys (particular their 70s recordings), Elliot Smith, Mott the Hoople and Neil Young (his 90s stuff mainly.) All very melodic stuff, but with a bit of a rhythmic spine to it. That said, I've also a bit of a thing for synth/rock crossover at the moment - Tackhead, Fischerspooner, George Clinton and Armand Van Helden. Electronic rock often gets as bad a press as funk-rock; but when it's done well...

A Christmas Present from the Poetry Society

The poetry society website has been so bad, so ugly, for so long, that I'd given up on thinking that someone there might ever notice. Even as Poetry Review changed editors, or redesigned; even as schemes came and went; and national poetry days sped by; the Poetry Society retained the worst website around. I even used it as an exemplar of a bad site, (I advise on websites, particular to the creative sector) and compared it with the easy to use Poetry Book Society site. Well, its a very welcome Christmas present to see that the new site looks nice and fresh, and is relatively simple to use. It would be interesting to know how much they paid for this one - any more than £10,000 and they were robbed! It's a straightforward website for a straightforward organisation, and my only criticism would be that they've tried to squeeze a couple of things - a calendar and an online shop - into what is little more than a standard content managed template. It will do for now, and as any website like this is only as good as its information, its far better than they find it easy to use and keep up to date. A qualified well done; but I do wonder why it took so long?

Borges v. BBC4

Just reread Borges' classic story Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. It's been a while since I've read it, but it repays every re-reading. In the past I've been drawn by this idea of a parallel world, that's been created and can only be seen through a few scraps of writing about it; but this reading, its the end of the story that really got me - that it's the ideology of that world, the systemic certainty of that world, which makes people in this world start to take it on as their own mythology, their own language. Clearly it has resonance with the Nazis, but it's more than that, in the current day and age - you can look at it two ways; the "year zero" of the internet, the alternate reality of reality TV, where these people are our friends, our families, the weddings to which we're invited; and, much darker, I guess, the reliance on a partial "made up" text to guide our life. I'd not quite thought through the religious significance of that; but serendipitously, I was watching BBC4 tonight about the lost gospels; and how the gospels of Thomas, Peter, Philip and Mary Magdalene were excluded from the Bible. There's radicalism in these other testaments - the gnosticism of Thomas, a set of aphorisms which may be older than the ones we know; the idea that the man Jesus was inhabited by a spirit that then left him before he died on the cross; the separating of the vengeful God of the Old Testament from the New Testament Jesus. All of these things seem more plausible for our current age than the one's we've grown up with. Is it any more frightening than the idea that we can turn into the imaginary Tlon; that we can rely on this imaginary Bible? Fascinating stuff, and I'm still not tempted to read "Da Vinci Code." (Besides, I've got a lot more Borges to revisit.)

The difficulties of writing a sandwich

One of these days, I was going to write an essay comparing American and British fiction which will be called "How to Write an American Sandwich", because, whilst a character in an English novel will generally have "a sandwich" or if a particularly show off of a writer "a cheese sandwich" characters in an American novel will have something that lasts at least a paragraph, never mentions the sandwich, and will at some point mention "pastrami" and "rye". It seems a particular kink of our linguistic differences that English writers generally accept some things as being so obvious ("sandwiches" "doors" "Baronets" etc.) that they don't bother to illuminate them for the reader; whilst the American writer is aware, that without having a class system to help define his/her characters, he needs to give a little more information, and that inevitably includes a detailed description of what they eat. I was reading about American food for years before most of it made it into our supermarkets, and I could at last find what they were talking about. I even parodied/homaged this with a sandwich recipe of my own (yet to be made flesh), in a story, "Bat-She-Bop." So I can't say I was that surprised to read that McDonalds' is trying to patent making a sandwich. Charles Bukowski would be proud.

Poets as novelists...

Scott Pack has enlisted his readers' help for an article he's writing on the rash of poets as novelists. I guess its not a new rash - I wrote a similar article in 1999,(originally for PROP magazine, but never came out - you can read it here) noting how many were going down this route. It's strange, though, since most of the writers I know personally are either/or - they simply don't "get" the other discipline. I guess its more acute for fiction writers, who generally don't even seem to read poetry, never mind write it. Yet, there's quite a few poets I've met, mostly doing MA in poetry writing, admittedly, who can't imagine being fictionalists. Of course, many of these might stretch to the odd short story - and Comma Press, for instance, has often encouraged, not always wisely, this multi-tasking. Historically, the crossover has been minimal - at least amongst the successful ones - and this is probably the main point: if someone's successful at something, they'll keep at it, or if they're asked to do it, they'll keep at it. I've no doubt that a lot of the "brand name" contemporary poets, have simply decided to write novels as an alternative "day job" no less palatable than teaching or reviewing. The example of Nick Laird, who issued a debut novel and debut poetry collection in days of each other, is rare, but perhaps shouldn't have been - he's been around the literary edges for a while, and both a novel and a poetry collection take time. I'd be very surprised if he gave up writing novels until writing novels gives up on him; (i.e. he doesn't get a deal); whereas poetry is always possible as a glorified hobby with smaller publishers than Faber willing to take on board those ditched by the bigger publishers. From my survey a few years ago; the type of writers who thrive at both genres are those who've got a unique sensibility, and the form - poetry, short story or novel - hardly matters. These writers are usually more innovative - modernists or beats - their muse more important than the format, which has yet to be codified. At their best, they expand and join together the genres. I fear that many of the contemporary poet/fictionalists are merely moving their main subject into another genre, sometimes with less than sparkling results. So, there was something quite refreshing about Sophie Hannah's chick lit bon mots in her poetry, but turned into novels, she was suddenly in a very crowded field. Her latest successful book, is a thriller, a genre that, if successful, can be a career for life. Perhaps she's found her true calling? As for Simon Armitage his engaging poetry seemed to address a certain angsty working class male sensibility that you rarely found in poetry - yet in a novel, what is left, other than the plot and that predictable masculinity? Interesting that the more successful poet-novelists of late, Gerard Woodward's two autobiographical novels for instance, David Constantine's short stories, Jackie Kay's "Trumpet", have found subjects that translate well between the genres. Yet, Kay aside, they've perhaps been more "poets' poets", less known outside of the specialisms. It's perhaps too early to judge whether any of these writers will last - yet its interesting that Carcanet, the poetry specialists, has recently published poetry collections by writers more known as novelists, Anthony Burgess and Muriel Spark. Perhaps the lesson here, as with Plath, Lawrence, Joyce or Carver is that where a writer's sensibility is strong enough to be worth re-reading, then whatever they've written is worthy of investigation. Poets' beware, your "day job" novels could wreck your date with posterity! One thing we really encouraged with Lamport Court, and I'm sure will continue, was writing that didn't easily fit into the poetry or fiction (or even art) boxes. Artists like Tamzin Forster were as likely to be writing poetry or fiction for us as providing an art piece, whilst published poets like Togara Muzanenhemo and Chris McCabe were given room for longer pieces that were in many ways more narrative than poetry. Prose poems, and poetic pieces of prose rubbed shoulders with more traditional work.

Prematurely Reviewing the Year

Now its December I think I can offer a little reflection on my creative year. A little early, but I know how December pans out, and time for reflection goes by the wayside. I doubt anything particularly exciting is likely to happen in the next month, anyway. I've not had as much time for reading, writing, watching films, going to galleries as I'd like. I managed a couple of days with work in Brussels, and a couple of trips to London, one for the modernism exhibition at the V&A. I was trying to remember when I last went to the cinema - it might even have been Ken Loach's "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" when I was over in Liverpool. A long hot summer put me off being indoors more than was necessary. Creatively, I seem to have been hardly awake at all: yet I finished the first draft of the novella I started in 2005. There's been a couple of decent short stories as well, but I'd wanted to write more - or at least complete more; there's a number I've started, and perhaps the one thing I might find some time to do before the end of the year. Not that it matters that much; since outlets remain limited - my stories tend to be over 3000 words in general, so a lot of magazines look for something shorter. I've also almost completed a 3rd poetry pamphlet, with around 25 poems, more metaphysical than usual, probably more consistent in tone. But need to spend a little more time on it before I make it available. Collation - of my music in particular - has taken up more energy than creation; it's not a bad thing to do, but I always wish I'd more time - or was able to create more time - to make some new music as well as new fiction/poetry. There's clearly a limit to what I can fit in. It seems a year of treading water; and though this blog has kept me a little connected in a literary sense; I've not had time or inclination to hobnob that much. "Verberate" was a nice regularly literary evening out, and I read at it earlier in the year; more nervous than I'd been at past readings, for some reason. Though I think I'm a good reader, I don't think I'm that disposed to reading - or that my work's particularly suitable for it. That was poetry of course. I've read a few books this year, and tried to fit in more than usual. I liked Sebastian Barry's "A Long, Long Way", but was as likely to read genre fiction - Asimov, Paretsky - as contemporary literature. The literary prizes haven't seemed particular exciting - or even consistent this year - and I think we're suffering a little from a new voice, or a new way of seeing things. Politics, so often out of the frame, has made some little comeback, but inevitably its non-fiction books rather than the increasing number of novels referencing "the war against terror" that most of us turn to. I don't seem to have either the patience, or the routine, to embed reading into my life in the way that I'd like, and whether I get a new job or stay where I am, improving that equilibrium seems a key one. I've got time - as time spent writing this blog proves - but haven't got the focus I used to have. That said, the one longer story that I did write, which I'm still waiting to hear from one of our slower magazines about, is as good as any I've written, I think. I believe I'm somehow sharpening my own political intent in the things I am writing, and effectively. The sometime ephemera of contemporary life seems to get more ephemeral as time goes by; whether its the Z-list celebrities of reality TV shows, or the bitesized commentary of so many blogs. I'm writing a new story this weekend, which is about the ephemera of success/popularity - how the opportunities it can sometimes provide often squeeze out the original reason you were doing things. Its thinking about the designer Peter Saville now creating a "brand" for Manchester; and what that sort of corporate commission might do to a creative's muse. "YouTube" and "MySpace" for instance, despite their estimable worth as "connectors", seem to create an endless clickable nothingness. I'm perhaps at an age and time in my life, where I want something with a little more depth - and yet contemporary culture seems less willing to provide it. I end up on little annoying crusades, like that which Patrick Ness has joined today in the Guardian, complaining about the poor quality of most books these days. Its ironic, that at a time when the "physical" product - whether book, CD or film - is under an assault from the "virtual", the care that once went into that physical product seems so much less. Its not just the yellowing pages of non-acid-free paper, but the seeming lack of interest in creating a product that will last beyond the season. In the next few weeks, I'm going to start early on new years resolutions: read more, write more. The blog still helps more than it hinders, but I'm wondering for how long?

A story

I haven't been too bothered about the kerfuffle started by Rachel Cooke in the Observer, dissing online reviews in favour of newspaper ones. For me, the Guardian/Observer have long ago stopped being an essential cultural lead. But I've always had a bit of a disdain for journalists anyway. This is not me being bitter that I'm not a writer for the 4th Estate - in fact I've hardly ever tried to get anything in a newspaper, and then its been against my better judgement. What I've found is that journalists I've had some dealings with are almost always very disorganised; unreachable when you want to speak to them; but insist on an instant response when they want to speak to you. A few years ago I was asked to contribute to a debate on the digital opportunities for writers, for the defunkt City Life, and after a phone conversation, also sent it in an email. The misquoting was ludicrous, lax, lacking sense. And there was no excuse for it - my words were there in order, ready to cut and paste. Another time, I almost did some writing for Janet Street Porter when she was editing the Independent on Sunday. I'd come up with some story ideas; they'd been passed on to a particular editor, who rang me up desperate to get in touch - having presumably been told to by JSP - and then, when I fleshed out the ideas and sent them through; nothing, despite repeated phone calls. "Did you get them?" "Oh yes, they're here, I've got your email but I've not opened the attachments." "So, you've not read them?" "No." "But you asked for them..." etc etc. But my worst story, I'll leave till last. In 1999, having completed my MA in novel writing, and combining finishing of the book with some voluntary work, I was, for a period on the dole. I'd paid my stamp for a good nine years, so was totally entitled to this "Job Seekers' Allowance." I found myself, rarely, at a rather high-brow (and low drinking) literary party in Clapham. Imagine how lucky I thought I was, when, in the kitchen, I got talking to someone who was the then new fiction editor of the Observer. How fortuitous!. "I'm writing a novel," I said. "But what do you do?" she said. "Like I said..." "But where do you work..." "I'm actually unemployed at the moment." "That's just diabolical," she said. "You're scabbing off all of us paying our taxes." "I'm finishing my novel, I'm doing voluntary work, yes, I'm going to get a job when I've finished..." I spluttered. "That's not just good enough," she said, and left to chat up my mate. It was quite amusing to think of her, a few years later, when this journalist moved on to one of the few well-paid jobs in British poetry! I wondered what she said to all the poets she was now meeting. "What do you mean? You've never worked...how wonderfully bohemian!" Despite my day job's being anything but ideal; I don't think I'd ever have had the appropriate levels of shamelessness to be proper journalist.

Lame at Fast

Crumbs. I'm now RSS fed into the wonderful "Britlitblogs" which now has a new autumnal look, your one stop shop for people like me making ill observed but well intentioned comments about things that may or may not be literature.

Scriptease

I've been enjoying "The State Within", BBC's American Ambassadorial drama, but mainly for the editing and the acting. The script, though riveting in the way it sets up its conspiracies, is actually one of the worst ever. Until this week's episode the whole farrago could have been overturned if the ambassador had found out that the "internal mole" was his MI6 trusted agent. Everything in the plot went through this guy, who just so happened to sleeping with his US equivalent. None of the leaks or anything else would have happened if he'd told Mark what was going on. But this week, oh god, despite him betraying the ambassador's new girlfriend, and destroying evidence of his wife's death, as soon as this duplicitousness is out in the open, Mark's treating him like trusted best buddy again. The ridiculousness of this has ruined my enjoyment of "The State Within" from day one. The multiple conspiracies, the unconnected strands, I don't mind that; but the whole thing been easily seen through if the secret service guy actually did his job rather than just shagging his American mate. Even though "24" and "Spooks" are far less realistic than this, neither of them is quite so dependent on such a bad plot point. Now that it's out, and Mark knows who the internal enemy is, they've become a bloody double act for chrissakes! Yes, I still enjoy it, but such terrible scriptwriting has come close to scuppering it entirely.

The Future!

I'm thinking of something post-blog; apres-blog; uber-blog; something that is less about the bad spelling mistakes of the moment but the considered spelling mistakes of poor proofreading. In other words, a blog like magazine or magazine like blog or some combination of those words that I've yet not made. Not that it makes one iota of difference. Iota is a great word isn't it? You only ever get "one iota" never two or zillions or none. Yet iota never stands alone either, it requires that "one" in front of it, or at the very least "an" which is near enough the same except with one less letter, and a different vowel. It's one of the world's great mysteries how there's never, to my knowledge, been a band called "one iota" or even "iota." I think the former would be a bit post-jazz, whilst the latter a little Slipknot. Then again it might be because Slipknot had a number one album called "iowa" which is one letter away from being iota. It's a funny old world.

The End of Rock and Roll

It's long been prophecied, but surely this week is the end of rock and roll?

Not only are "Take That" number one in the singles chart, but here is the album chart top 8...

1. The Love Album - Westlife
2. Stop the Clocks - Oasis
3. Love - the Beatles
4. u218 singles - U2
5. Twenty Five - George Michael
6. High Times - Jamiroquai
7. The Sound of Girls Aloud
8. Overloaded - Sugababes

In other words, everyone is a greatest hits, apart from the Westlife album, which is a covers album.

Globalnomics

Never been a better time to buy books from America, with virtually $2 to a £1. I've used it as an opportunity to get Borges' Collected Fictions and even more interestingly, Up is Up, but so is down, New York's Downtown literary scene 1974-1992, a 500 page illustrated tome, that's title alone is excitement itself. I've also been fascinated by the seventies crossover in New York of music, poetry and fiction. The 70s was a strange time for literature, a relatively few English-American books of real note - but a lot going on under the surface that I think the future (i.e. now) will reckon as important; a period when more minor authors are actually more important- the real deal. I've always been blown away by Kathy Acker's writing, for instance, yet she never really wrote a satisfactory novel; somehow that doesn't matter. I guess my occasional rants about bad avant garde writing, are based on my appreciation of good avant garde writing, and also a sense that 2nd-rate Acker or 2nd-rate Burroughs shouldn't be worthy of our attention. A musical equivalent would be all the sub-Stooges bands out these days - its made me go back to Iggy Pop himself, and pick up some of his forgotten 80s and 90s albums for a few pence on eBay. With a new Stooges album due in March with Steve Albini at the helm, I'm definitely regressing. I've had an incredibly busy week, 12 hour days at work because of evening events, a stinking cold, and some other personal stuff, so I'm just coming up for air. I looked out the window this morning a saw a giant black bird stalking the back of the flats. After a few moments thinking a raven had come for me, (perhaps bringing me a message from Odin!), I located my RSPB book, and I'm pretty certain it was a carrion crow, it indeed had a "a bold, upright stance and confident, long-striding walk." I will have to leave out some carrion, next time I leave the house!

The Names have been changed

Although one has a little sympathy for Jake Arnotts having inadvertently used a real persons name in his latest novel - and one in the similar line of work to his character (Though would a Tony Rocco be anything else other than a nightclub singer?) - I did find it funny as well. After all, Jake Arnott's novels are heavily modelled on the real world of the sixties and seventies, with thinly veiled versions of some real life characters. A name's a different thing of course, since you can't change it. There's no doubt a George W. Bush somewhere in Gateshead that curses the day the American judges found against Al Gore; and I'm sure there must be a peace activist Anthony Blair somewhere in the home counties. Luckily there's a ready made pool of useful names available free of charge to all novelists. Just check the "spam" folder of your email, and see what the randomly generated names that spammers use appeal to you: Sven Brown and Hussein Mercier would make a great pair of dodgy small time crooks, whilst Aileen Otero must surely be an octogenarian activist; and as for Sallie Stringer - nightclub singer anyone?

Oh no the Beatles

There's been a lot of hype about the Beatles Vegas mash-up "Love." I've always felt every few years we get the Beatles we deserve. In the 70s it was the reverential, but selective red and blue albums. In the 80s it was shallow retread collections, "The Beatles Love Songs", "The Beatles Rock and Roll Music", or Stars-on-45 style Beatles Movie Medley, then it was the re-issue everything in the vaults of the Anthologies, or get the whole collection on CD, for those who don't like any chance or mystery in the collection. Come the millennium we had the "if you only get 1 Beatles disc get this" of the number ones - just like any other band - and now, mashed up soundtrack to a hit show. When they finally remaster everything and put them on to iTunes we'll no doubt get our own personal Beatles albums, synchronised to our personality and mood, and I'll never have to hear "ob-la-di ob-la-da" again. I think its very hard to love everything they did unless you were there at the time - but they were so prolific and varied that you almost create your own Beatles from the debris. So, they were my favourite band when I was 11, but have long since been superceded by others - yet they still hold an interest; I think they'll survive "Love" the same way they survived "Free as a bird", "Beatles Love Songs" and "Magical Mystery Tour."

Roger & Out

We were going to go and see Roger Mcgough reading in Liverpool last night, but left it late to get tickets and unfortunately he'd sold out. He's got an autobiography out from Century, called "Said and Done". I've missed any reviews of it, yet he's one poet whose autobiography I'd certainly pay to hear read. I saw him ten years ago in Croydon reading poems - but in between anecdoting with the best of them. If I sometimes seem a bit dismissive of "funny" poets its probably because I've got so much time for McGough who is, of course, so much more than funny. His "Blazing Fruit" selected poems is a continually great read. I recently picked up a rewarding anthology, Penguin's "British Poetry Since 1945" which was published in 1970. When I was at college we studied the contemporary poetry scene through "the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry." Reading Edward Lucie-Smith's 1970 summary, highlights how pernicious the Blake Morrison/Andrew Motion anthology from 1982 has been. I hated the book then, and hate it more now, for the way it restricted not just the number of poets in the "contemporary canon" but the range. In essense the Motion/Morrison book excludes those featured in Alvarez's "New Poetry" published in 1962 so has 20 years to play with - compared with the 25 years that Lucie-Smith has. It is not just the number of poets that is different but the range. The final chapter of the 1970 book "New Voices" finds room for Tom Raworth, Lee Harwood, Barry Macsweeney, Brian Patten, Adrian Henri and Roger McGough - all absent from the later book, onlly the 2 Irish writers, Heaney and Mahon making the cut. It seems now, more than ever, that Motion and Morrison's influence over the direction of English poetry, so codified in this book, has been nothing but disastrous, through both the exclusion of some of the poets listed above, but also through what followed. There's something of a private club feel to their book, that hasn't served us well since. It's notable that Morrison is most famous for a memoir, and that Motion's latest book is one as well. I think I'll be searching out Mcgough's instead.

I was walking down the road the other day

I'm giddy with excitement at the re-emergence of the funniest man alive, Ted Chippington. Not only has he a Myspace but in a bizarre move, usually reserved for those who are dead or paraplegic, there is a fundraising tribute concert in aid of getting a 4CD boxset produced and released, at the Bloomsbury theatre in London. I'm not entirely sure what this bunch of talentless no-marks think they can achieve, and the news that "Ted Chippington will not be performing or attending the event" is a reminder of comedy's loss. Ted, for those who don't know was and possibly still is the funniest man alive. Dressed like Jack Dee (who certainly stole his suits) and with pithy jokes more deadpan than er... a dead pan, Ted was also a bona fide popstar on the classic "Rockin' with Rita" Vindaloo Special EP ("you sure can't beat her, oh no".) Luckily the power of th' internet offers a chance to catch up with Ted's illustrious history. I first saw him supporting the Fall, and he certainly shared something of Mark E. Smith's unique take on the world. All together now, D.I.S.C.O.....

By the Sea

I've been in Whitley Bay for the weekend seeing family, and, last night, at Sage Gateshead, Herbie Hancock, which was a remarkably good three hour set including classics such as "Watermelon Man" and "Chameleon." I didn't know what to expect, having never been to a jazz "gig" before, but the musicianship - they were just a four piece - Herbie's crowd friendly banter, and a smattering of great songs that I knew showed how to do it. So this year, I've seen Public Enemy, George Clinton and Herbie, its like an all time soul hall of fame all to myself. Otherwise, I've still been recovering from pernicious bug, and though I'm now better, its like I'm now recovering from the convalescence. Take it easy, chicken, in other words. I've begun reading Martin Amis's "House of Meetings." Whilst his last novel "Yellow Dog" was a good book, sometimes shockingly written, the writing here is so far exemplary - I'd go so far as to say, the best he's done. Too early to say if the book lives up to the prose but its a promising start. And a promising start was all I managed in National Write a Novel Month or whatever its called, derailed, by sickness after 2000 words or so. Good luck to those, like the Manchizzle, who are continuing. For what its worth, I found the bit I did do, a little liberating, piling words on words rather than some higher purpose, and, if nothing else, I've the start of a new piece. In the week I gave a presentation to a number of artists/creatives we had at a drop in event with lots of other arts support agencies. "Ten ways for a creative to go digital" or some such thing. Get a Myspace, write a blog, buy a digital camera, start selling on eBay, investigate Creative Commons, post a video to YouTube, tag everything, use Adwords, set up a remote office and publish on demand. I've only done 4 out of 10 myself, but you get the idea...

Shelve It

A formidable response to the Guardian's question, "How do you arrange your books?" - as many answers as bookshelves I guess, clearly a hot topic, and the shelving advertisers at the backend of Weekend must be making a killing. I can certainly see the appeal of alphabetical for large collections, but somehow it always seems a little arbitrary. From being stacked perilously at my last place, to all over the place, but somewhat ordered where I am now - I'm particularly pleased of my poetry bookshelf, my literary biography bookshelf (they're all TOMES so it needed to be big), my reference shelf, and my "favourite authors" corner. Other things are in boxes, albeit alphabetical-ish and thematic-ish. One of these days I'll move to somewhere with perfect shelves and will be able to decorate them perfectly. I think I'm aiming for the feel of an exciting, but adventurous bookshop. Unlike Waterstones - 90% of my books would fit into the fiction/poetry/lit crit/letters departments - with my cookery books in a messy pile in the kitchen (where else?) and my music books strewn by the stereo and next to the CDs.

You Know You Should Like Them, But...

In David Lodge's "Changing Places" a parlour game between Eng. Lit. lecturers is about books you should have read but haven't. Poet Steven Waling has come up with a new variation on this, on "not liking Auden." "Admitting you don't like someone that everyone else thinks is great feels like letting out a great secret" he says, and its pleasing to have some a poet openly admitting to defeat when it comes to other poets. As it happens, I do like Auden, but kind of agree that its hard to read him. I think its partly because there's not really a good anthology. The little Faber books that introduced by to Pound and others, selected by another poet, falls flat in the case of Auden where a poem is chosen from every year. It's almost as if John Fuller was throwing up his hands and saying "There's so much of this stuff how am I ever going to choose?" and the classic "Selected" is a hard read. My favourite Auden collection is the lightest, "As I walked out one evening" - ballads, songs, lullabies and limericks - and at least it includes "Night Mail" which neither the Selected or John Fuller's collection does. I'm always amazed, reading Auden, he can seemingly do ANYTHING, but that almighty talent is a bit overwhelming. Every time I think about buying the "the collected longer poems" or "the English Auden" I groan a little and go back - perhaps like Waling - to my favourite Macneice poems. I can't say I've been shy about the two poets that I don't like that everyone else seems to, but they tower so much over the last three decades of English poetry that rejected them, also means rejecting much that follows. Like Waling with Auden, I kind of know that I should find more of value in Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, but they've just never done it for me. I'm not sure if it was a bad experience as an undergraduate being forcefed "Digging" and "View of a Pig" or is something more profound. But I liked "Birthday Letters" and you can't not like "Beowulf" so perhaps its something I'll get over? But I think Waling has hit on something, the poets that you don't like being perhaps more illuminating than the ones you do. I know that in both Hughes and Heaney I don't find the emotional response that I get in the poets I like; why is that? Be interesting what other pet hates people have. I guess since poetry lovers are so passionate about their likes, its more meaningful than disliking prose writers. Sure, I don't dig Rushdie or Carole Shields, but there's plenty more literary fish in the sea - poets, for good or for bad - do bestride their art; and sometimes the literature of the age. Without Hughes and Heaney in my pantheon, there's clearly a couple of missing "giants".