Four Story Day

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

The Blog Life

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

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

When Worlds Collide

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

Worth Every Penny of the License Fee

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

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

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

A Booker for our times?

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

Where to start?

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

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

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

Amongst them was Eric Mansion.

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

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

Death of the Critical Essay

The Reading Experience has articulated a point that I've been thinking for a while; that blogs should be doing far more than just commenting on the this and that of contemporary literature, but acting as a more reliable critical guide. It has always seemed to me that without a critical culture, its hard to agree that we have a culture.

"I would like this site to focus not on new books but on books from the recent past (post-1980) that deserve additional close reading beyond the attention they received in their initial reviews, by writers who deserve careful consideration (perhaps more careful consideration than they've previously received) as writers whose work may last", he writes.

It's a more than laudable aim. It strikes me that the instant review isn't so helpful - particularly if it doesn't find room to contextualise both within the writer's other books and within the cultural framework in which it was written and received. It's a given, these days, that "success" is enough, whether its Phillip Pullman or Nick Hornby or Alan Hollinghurst. School teacher friends tell me that the "reading list" at secondary schools is hardly changed from the seventies, perhaps with the odd Carole Ann Duffy or Simon Armitage poem to lighten the mood after a good dose of "Lord of the Flies." Yet there's plenty of questions here, already. Wouldn't now - with the film version of "Blindness" about to go on release - be a good time for making the case for Saramago's novel as the key text of the late twentieth century? Or, having time to consider "American Psycho" with the reflection of the years - and with the somewhat diminishing returns of Ellis's later books - can we now place it properly as a historical artefact, rather than a contemporary classic? (And in doing so, make the case for the linked short stories of "The Informers" as his truly radical work.)

I'd like to rise to this - as I'm sure a few other writers would - but there's a fear - all the work that a considered essay requires - is their a readership? I've found critical works as critical to my reading as more primary texts over the years as a good critic can be a light leading a pathway through the darkest of literary undergrowths. We have, here with our bloggers and wordpresses, the tools. Have we the intelligence to use them?

(With thanks to This Space for pointing me in the right direction.)

I told you so...

It is the job of a writer to prod at the complacencies of the society we live in... and I do believe I always do this. On a day that we saw the last of Thatcher's demutualised building societies disappear into oblivion; when the pound had its biggest fall for more than a decade; and when it was the Republicans who baulked at bailing out the failed model of early 21st century century American capitalism, it is worth saying that there have been cassandras talking about this for a while, and I was one. I hid under a pseudonym for this particular experiment - mainly because my name would take up too much of a cartoon strip - but I'm indebted to the wonderful Parameter Magazine for giving me the space for my jaundiced - and it appears, prophetic - view of late twentieth century capitalism; otherwise known as TREEVILLE.

Pome for Paulson

The dance continues
Even though the musicians haven’t been paid for weeks.
I believe there’s something special in our fear,
That we do not know where it leads.
Our stupidity makes us reckless.
There’s a love of strange rhythms,
Even though the music’s stopped.
And no-one knows
Where it will end.
The slight feeling of discontent
Is nothing to what we felt before
When whole streets lost their jobs
At an instant, because Margaret said,
They had no market for their wares.
Well, see this, Dear Market,
How well you cope with wares to sell
More pricey than anyone could want
And nobody stupid enough to buy today.

Once I was one, now I am many

I am pre-blog, and post-blog; I had a blog - online diary - before blogs existed, and now, I feel I'm vaguely post-blog in that I blog about things elsewhere, for work and other reasons. I'm probably just a link regurgitator in that sense - or, if I'm more positive about it, a communicator! Anyway you can find my thoughts on literature at the Mancunian Way at the MEN . Which tells you, you should all come along to the Old Abbey Inn on Manchester Science Park for the latest Other Room.

Stories...

I was at the Friends Meeting House in Manchester yesterday afternoon for a very welcome event celebrating the short story. Organised by Manchester Libraries and the National Short Story Campaign, it was an event for writers and readers of the short story. There's something always potentially a little compromising about such things but luckily Manchester has a bit of sense about such things. Three writers and a publisher - now there's a pitch for a Hollywood movie - talked about their favourite short stories, before we split into smaller groups for a couple of hour long workshops. The highlight of the day for me was just being in a stimulating environment, where the subject itself didn't require any particular case to be made for it. I've sometimes been to poetry events where there's been so much emphasis on encouraging people not to be scared by the subject, that there's been little time left for those of us who are anything but scared.

I'm not sure the short story requires a campaign, or a national prize - the BBC's support of short stories is welcome, but I fear, always on their own terms, i.e. what they consider will work on radio in a particular way - rather, what it needs is readers, and opportunities for writers, preferably on a reasonably local basis. It's after all, the model that has made American literature so strong in these area over the years. For once, magazines like "Transmission" weren't present, but it was important to have local story specialists Comma here, and the attempt to show us a film of a David Constantine story on the break was a good example of how stories can transcend the page.

I suppose some of our peculiarity over the short story is that its too much of a catch all, finding room for Grimm's fairy tales, alongside sci-fi, the BBC's short story spot, alongside both the nascent writer and the overly venerable. Yet, as a reader, its the place the story has in the development of the main literary trends of the 20th century that interest me. Modernism is best served in the short story, and novella; as are the post-modernist tributaries that flowed after the 2nd world war, and even contemporary greats such as the recently deceased David Foster Wallace, are, I think, likely to be remembered as much - or more - for their shorter form than the longer. In this sense, the short story remains something of the heartbeat of literature. Whatever comes next, you can be assured, will more than likely exhibit itself here first rather than in the novel.

eLit for the illiterate

Interestingly provocative piece on the Guardian book blogs a few days ago from Andrew Gallix, asking if e-literature is a big anti-climax? I've definitely been disappointed at the way the web has gone in terms of literature - and I'm part of the problem - commentary rather than creativity. In fact, like the music business, its often the conventional rather than the experimental who have made the web their own. If in music its bands like King Crimson and Marillion communing with their fans, then on the web its writers like Susan Hill giving access to her readers. Where are the new, the young, the experimental? The web as a medium for all of those things is certainly that - but perhaps not in literature.

Certainly there are a million writers on the web. A few years ago I was part of an online writing community - and the one thing all the stories had in common was there utter lack of experimentation. In many ways the ideas of "hypertext" fiction and poetry remains a valid and vivid one - but many of these "techniques" are hardly new to the web, as a trawl through the wonderful Ubu.web reminds one. A newish avant garde magazine/publisher such as Manchester's ifpthenq or Norwich's Landfill appears to prefer the traditional book/pamphlet for their non-traditional work.

Just as a lot of visual poetry is more properly seen as being part of contemporary artistic practice than standing on the shoulders of literary giants, much of the more innovative web writing is hardly writing at all, in that sense, but multimedia, like Kate Pullinger's Inanimate Alice. "Media arts" is a cross genre label that can be spectacular - but where the literary component is crowded out by everything else.

I think the problems around developing a truly innovative web writing are many. For though the web itself is non-linear, so much writing on the web, from this blog outwards, is entirely linear. When Elizabeth Baines wrote last year's Manchester "blog story" the tendency towards the conventional was perhaps more pronounced than in her written work - for the linear pull of the blog, episode by episode, is in itself reductionist. Its a few years since I had a few stories as part of the-phone-book.com - which has only lately gone offline. Yet here's part of the problem. The web is both there forever (thanks Google), and gone as soon as the domain name or the hosting expires.

In about 2000 I wrote a somewhat experimental, episodic story about the internet called "Where do you want to go today?" and put it on the web with a vague attempt to make it as one with the medium (see image at the top - I've hunted it down off my hard disk.) The page seems terribly dated, quaint in its way. Pre-wikipedia, the idea was that things referenced in the story would be linked to. Yet, as soon as one goes out onto the internet the links start fraying, becoming dead over time.

I'm fascinated as a writer, with this idea of the incomplete - and I think that the idea of "permanence" around e-lit doesn't particularly worry me. Yet there remains the question: how can the words exist when the medium no longer does? Laurence Sterne and B.S. Johnson rely on their book origins - and neither would gain from being available as text files. Yet, surely a facsimile of "On the Road" would be a wonderful blog?

In the end, of course, it comes down to the writing - and very few of our best writers have made their work available on the web, at the expense of the print - and as for the others, who'll remember them anyway?

I'm thinking back to what I was trying to do with "Where do you want to go today?" and some other work I'd done at that time - I was into "exploding" the short story. Yet, as its recent partial renaissance has shown, the story doesn't want to be exploded. It is Carver, Mansfield, Chekhov who are more often than not the models, less so Borges. Those stories I've made available on the web are not always linear (see The Personals, for instance) but they are page-bound. For me, at least, the difficulty with doing something else - something more appropriate to the medium - is twofold; one, where is the audience? and two, have I the skills. Compared with a media artist or some digital production team, the increased sophistication of much media art these days means that the lone writer is no longer able to get away with something as simplistic as a hypertext story; whilst with a few honourable exceptions, such as Great Works, many web magazines are highly traditional.

Its perhaps time - as Gallix implies, in his comments if not in the initial article - for us to look at the possibilities of eLit with new eyes: an underexplored arm of contemporary literature - and it has to be literature, not anima, or podcasts, or media art - that is still waiting for a writer or two to make it their own.

Adrian's on Authonomy

I've been keeping a north eye on Harper Collins' "online slushpile" experiment - Authonomy - and have now made available the last longer piece of fiction I wrote, the novella "For the Want of a Gas Barbecue."

I'll be interested to see if it finds a readership - or what sort of comments it gets. I was involved a few years ago with an online writing community which went from being very positive, to being somewhat negative (not just for myself), in a short period, and there's been quite a few other experiments over the years. This does at least seem to have a sensible "model" - it was easy to upload the chapters, and immediately you've got a "shop front".

As for the novella, its the perfect one to test this out - since its a novella, which I think is a difficult length to sell, but probably quite fun to read on the web - and its also contemporary, lively and humorous.

You can read it for yourself at Authonomy.

Credit Crunch Fictions

Economics is rarely the stuff of literature, more, I think, because very few writers have more than a basic understanding of economics, rather than there being something inherently unliterary about it. I say its rarely the stuff of literature, but I guess it depends on definition. George Eliot's novels were steeped in the socio-economics of the day, and even Jane Austen's novels were routed in the economics of her day (think of Rochester's history in the plantations, or the "entail" that is the cause of so much worry in "Pride and Prejudice.") Of course, Ezra Pound's attempts to leverage a particular economic theory into the cantos was doomed as much for literary reasons as for the dubious politics underpinning those economics; and Ayn Rand's mammoth "Atlas Shrugged" shows that though its possible to write a novel about capitalism, its possibly not that wise. Science fiction has often done it better of course - a particular favourite is "Monument" by Lloyd Biggle about a man who crash lands on a beautiful planet and gives them a plan for their development in preparation for the day when the planet gets found and exploited. Jim Crace's "Arcadia", is my favourite of his novels, telling the story of a multi-millionaire who begins with nothing.

But faced with the "credit crunch", the dissolution of investment banks, the merger of high street names, the nationalisation of financial institutions and the banning of "short selling", its no wonder that fiction holds up its hands. Merchant bankers make poor heroes, though Sherman McCoy in "Bonfire of the Vanities" is an honourable exception. Yet financial crises are classic pieces of real life plotting - "black swans" if you like, or unknown unknowns - that can turn the impossible to the inevitable with a speed that is breathtaking. It will have to be seen whether some future novelist finds a gem of a story in the current "credit crunch," but two very honourable mentions of past financial crises turned into art are Jay McInerney's stunning "Brightness Falls" and Michael Bracewell's English equivalent, "The Conclave." An enterprising publisher should bring the latter back into print.

Perhaps the next J.K. Rowling novel will be about economics - or politics. There's certainly some useful dramatic timing in her £1 million donation to the Labour Party being announced on the eve of the Labour Party Conference. I'll be popping into town later, to see what gridlock for Gordon is like this year. Last time the conference came to Manchester, it was nearly impossible to get into work, with half the city centre cordoned off for security purposes.

Bloggers and Journalists

I've never wanted to be a journalist, so it's perhaps hardly surprising that I've never stepped into a newsroom - at least not until Wednesday, when, along with over a dozen other Manchester bloggers I was invited by Sarah Hartley to the new Manchester Evening News offices. Its a fascinating sign of the times to be ushered into the heart of Manchester's "old media", albeit a rather state-of-the-art heart. After all, isn't this the year that the blogging community and the cult of the amateur has been most derided? A friend used to work for London's News Network, and ten years ago I went into their offices a number of times - what struck me here was that print media is still a people-business, rows and rows of them, (though not that many there at 6.00 on a Wednesday), designers, writers, reporters, subs, editors. For every page of a paper still needs to be sourced, written, designed, published, and this is in every way a 24-hour news operation, with that almost-a-video-blog Channel M, and Manchester Online broadcast from the same offices. And like every journalist I've ever spoken to, they're not too proud where they get the story from - readers comments and blogs being part of their feedback loop.

And most of Wednesday's bloggers were anything but amateur - as anyone who has kept up with Manchester Blog Awards over the last couple of years would be sure of. It felt like a rare opportunity for two conflicting worlds to get to understand each other a little more. With City Life, so summarily dismissed by Guardian Media Group a few years back, about to be relaunched as a flagship online brand its clear that the media landscape has changed to the extent that anyone interested in the city's more edgy side will be bookmarking blogs, rather than checking out a clunky corporate, and City Life's need to negotiate the two will be fascinating to see.

***

Work - as well as technical incompetency (I know, I know) - might prevent me from listening to Elizabeth Baines short story being read on Radio 4 later today, and may well prevent me from attending a very exciting sounding "other room" the week after next, but I will try. I'm certainly in Cambridge the following day when the next of Martin Amis's public lectures, about old family friend Philip Larkin, takes place.

Futureproof

It is to other blogs I direct you today. First to Ready Steady Book, who break the news, via the Associated Press, that the great American writer and essayist David Foster Wallace has committed suicide at 46. There are few contemporary writers who have consistently proved their exception talent, and even though I've not read his massive "Infinite Jest". A very sad day, a great loss.

I know Lee Rourke at Scarecrow will be shocked by the news. His comment on the Booker Prize list this year is one that I would probably echo. The judges appear to like well-written stories, preferably historical. I can't comment on the books themselves having not read any of them, but I'd agree with Lee that the prize is becoming ever more an irrelevance - if, as you'd expect, its role was to identify the best contemporary fiction.

Its only a month to the Manchester Literature Festival and as ever, I'll try and go to a thing or two, but know full well that I won't get to more than a few things. Bumping into MMU's Andrew Biswell earlier in the week, he mentioned the opening event, a poetry reading at the RNCM, including the awarding of the first Manchester Poetry Prize.

The Good and the Great

I hardly know where to start in talking about Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier". Having read two contemporary prize winners in the week before, it wasn't that this novel was necessarily better, older, or more venerable than them - in fact, at times its language and style was a little tiresome - yet, when push came to shove I felt I'd read something of real substance, and its been a while since a contemporary novel has that to be said about it. We live in an age of froth and I think that it spills over into most contemporary fiction. It's hard, I know, since the first quarter of the 20th century provided more than its fair share of literary thrills - turning the Victorian novel personal in many ways. How can one deal with such archetypes?

Enough. Back to "The Good Soldier." It starts as "Wuthering Heights" does, with an apologetic narrator, but whereas that story is framed, this is told from experience. It's the most enigmatic of novels, not just the "saddest story" of that famous first paragraph. Where is the sadness in the novel? For those who haven't read it - it's the story of two couples, one American, one English, who have met for a number of years at a German spa. Each couple has an "invalid", and it these invalids who are the book's tragic love story. Yet, it is their caring partners - one of whom is our narrator - who are more intriguing. This is a story of passion, told through a prism of weakness. It unfolds slowly, as a story told around a fire. I don't believe our narrator is the key figure of the novel, nor the affair. It is - primarily - a tragedy - of emotions either smouldering or snuffed out on the anvil of a particular time in history. It is new America beholden to old Europe at the start of the conflagration - the Great War - that will then swap over those roles for a hundred years.

Ford Madox Ford

Having just read Ford Madox Ford's remarkable novel "The Good Soldier" (more of which later) I wondered if I had a biography of him. He seems not to have been "done" for a while; but I did find this picture from John Tytell's "Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano" with Ford to the left of Joyce, Pound and John Quinn in 1922. "The Good Soldier" is nothing if not a novel about and for adults, so, even if this picture is seven years after its publication, its quite nice to see he was a man of some substance.

Art is in the eye of the Stakeholder

Tony Trehy, who curated the excellent Text festival at Bury Art Gallery, makes a very valid point about the problems of curation in our public galleries, particularly bemoaning Manchester Art Gallery's current, and popular exhibition of Lauren Child. He makes the point that Manchester can't ever be seen to be a world class city unless it has a world class gallery. It's certainly true that Manchester - despite being a hotbed of the visual arts - is always going to find it difficult to compete, not just with London, but with Liverpool and even parts of Yorkshire. The city art gallery suffers from being a civic amenity, which although it makes for a well-used space, with a "lovely cafe", has quite a schizophrenia when it comes to the shows it puts on. I suppose, that in the wider scheme of things, as one of the few sizeable public viewing spaces in the city centre, it has to double up as Manchester's V&A, it's Walker, it's Tate Modern. Remember, the popular, and utterly risible Kylie show came here from the V&A, a space that can get away with murder in the name of "design." I was disappointed in the Klimt exhibition at Liverpool Tate, because of it being too much about design and not enough about art, and I think this is more at the heart of the problem than anything else. Where else would you have put the Kylie-fest on, for instance? I rarely visit the gallery myself, at least partly because of these reasons, but also because of its very local authority opening hours. Its an absurdity that it closes at 5.00 each evening. In many ways, Manchester Art Gallery's primary function is not the travelling shows, but the permanent collection and the glorious building. I don't believe every town, every city can be a "centre of excellence" in everything, and with the Tate, the Walker and the Biennial, we should perhaps admit that Liverpool is the NW's centre of visual arts, with Manchester having other strengths, such as in literature and music.

The Late Review(er)

Since its still raining in Manchester, (you'll be surprised to hear), I've got on with some reading. Coincidentally, two female-authored prizewinners, Catherine O'Flynn's "What Was Lost" and Anne Enright's "The Gathering." They're both very readable books, and couldn't be more different, of course, except, like McEwan's "Atonement" beforehand, they revolve somewhat around childhood secrets. I'm wondering whether this is a contemporary trend, or is simply a recurring literary device? Children, I suppose, are almost always unreliable narrators, or unwilling witnesses to adult life. I'm wondering if the trend for memoir - particularly the "misery memoir" - is influencing the kind of subjects that get written about? Perhaps more accurately, in contemporary Britain, there aren't quite the same social mores that existed in the past. Both "The Gathering" and "What Was Lost" delve into the past, but in very different ways. I don't think its really possible to review either book in any depth without giving too much away. I enjoyed them both - and again, just as I'd heard Enright read from her novel last year, I also saw Catherine O'Flynn at Manchester Library.

"What Was Lost" is the 2nd book I've read recently - after "Black Swan Green" - to mine a Midlands eighties childhood and its recognisability, as well as its humour make it a very enjoyable read. However, I wasn't expecting it to be anything more than amiable. What impressed me was how well structured the novel is, and how even the smallest of characters are given a believability. There's always a temptation, I think, for new writers, to write from life, and yet I think O'Flynn takes her raw material and creates something very powerful from it. Ostensibly the story of a young girl who goes missing in the early 80s, it is the more adult sections which give the novel weight. It might have groaned a little under the weight of its coincidences (but no more than "White Teeth" for instance), but what is really impressive is that beyond the plot and characterisation, the real star of the novel is the gigantic shopping centre where the majority of the action takes place. Not since George A. Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" has a shopping centre seemed so sinister. The novel is humorous, well-paced, and written with a nice economy that is far harder to pull off than it appears.

"The Gathering" is all about its language - for Enright writes beautifully, with a real physicality that can occasionally seem a little too insistent - and its slim premise, the gathering of a large Irish family following the death of one of them, is skilfully clothed in layer after layer of memory. It should be a grim novel - but it never is - and I think its partly her voice (or the voice of Veronica, the novel's narrator), but also partly because its a very indulgent novel - not self-indulgent, that would be wrong - but indulgent in the way that its narrator is indulgent. Grief and anger and breakdown are all intertwined in her telling of the story - and of her imaginings of how her grandparents met - and as a reader you either have to go with it, or run away from such intimacy.

What struck me about both books was that they without the "prizes" I doubt I'd have been interested in picking them up, they both - in very different ways - are unappealing in precis. Also, though very different in style, subject, and intention, they are both constructed with such skill and care, that I can only applaud. The idea of these two novels head-to-head in any prize seems absurd, since they are such different beasts. Let's hope this year's prize season unearths some equivalent gems.

Hellboy, Epstein & Enright

Seeing family has limited my cultural happenings. It's not that the things are mutually exclusive, just that they don't always coincide. For instance, Alnwick Gardens, is a very modern compromise. A new garden, but with public money replacing what would have been previously the landowners - and with it a new set of obligations - to let the people in, to make it ecological, to make it family friendly. A pleasant day out, with children, and on a mostly warm day last week, but I'm not sure I'd go back. Much less compromised, in some ways, was the New Art Gallery in Walsall. Shockingly, this was my first visit, but then my trips back to the Midlands tend to be short, and seeing the family. It's a great space, with any compromise between being a repository for superb collection of modern art, an exhibition space, and a community facility, being minimised by the design of the building providing room enough for all. On Saturday, it was particularly busy, which goes some way to justify why we should have art galleries not just in our minor towns, but when we do, that they should be close to the city centre, allowing easy drop-in. There's something inspiring about the story here: that the Garman Ryan collection was donated to Walsall since that was where Kathleen Garman, lover and wife of Jacob Epstein was born. Inspiring, because, almost unbelievably, Walsall, that least impressive of industrial towns, is connected by her, to the very heart of 20th century Modernism.

I'd missed the film Hellboy when it was on Five a couple of weeks ago, so watched the DVD last night. It wasn't bad, if you like that kind of thing, with a nice line in humour, but I kind of remembered, half way through, that I don't really like that kind of thing, not much anyhow - and, as I get back to reading Anne Enright's Booker winning "The Gathering", I'm pleased I heard her read from it at the Manchester Literature Festival, since I've got her Irish accent keeping me company throughout. The book's probably not my kind of thing either, but I'm enjoying the company at least.

Time Capsules

I was quite taken by Brian Appleyard's feature on "time capsules" in the Sunday Times. Commenting on Warhol's habit of creating various time capsules to tell the truth of his life - many of which remain unopened - he asks quite a few luminaries what they'd save for the future. An interesting side-point he takes from James Lovelock, that we should be creating a "bible" for our times, also made me think. I'm not sure that " a year of Radio 4" buried on a memory-stick would be quite the thing the future wants or needs. It struck me that one of the problems about what is deemed to survive is the famous, the already mediated. There's been a few fascinating programmes recently around old colour films and photographs and what's perhaps most interesting is that in the days before mass media, there was less of a consensus about what should be filmed or recorded.

My own time capsule would be - as I think all should be - a bit of a personal thing. I'd probably include some of my writings - some of my stories set in contemporary Manchester perhaps, or "High Wire", the novel that I wrote starting with election night 1997. Although fictional - I was trying to write the truth as I remembered it, not something re-discovered through research or artefacts. It's what spoils books like David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green" for me; too many cultural signifiers. I reckon our own cultural signifiers are personal, perverse, non-universal. I'd probably include a CD of my favourite songs of say, last year, which already seems out of date, but the future probably needs to hear "With Every Heartbeat" by Robyn next to something by Thurston Moore. One of the NOW series would only tell a quarter of a story. I'd also include half a dozen literary magazines of the last few years that I've read or had something to do with - and more importantly, kept around. Again, I'd probably include some of my own poems rather than someone else's - they have a particular truth about them, that I find hard to uncover in much contemporary poetry. I don't think I'd include this blog - or any other for that matter - though perhaps this is the ephemera that one should be looking to preserve. Perhaps a few YouTube videos. I'd also find room for the Aldi brochure or an Argos catalogue. Surely more historical truth in there than in any official statistics or the like? Brian Appleyard includes series 4 of "The Wire" and the iPhone. I guess if the box was big enough you might put this Dell computer in it - I think the future will probably think we all sat there with our laptops and our tiny devices, it might come as a surprise to see the hulking beasts that still dominate the home and the office. As for "The Wire," love it as I do, I don't think its anyone in this country's job to try and "get" America. I'd probably choose a DVD of something relatively unloved; BBC3's "Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps" perhaps, alongside probably the best satire of the last few years, the first Christopher Ecclestone-led series of "Dr. Who." As for novels of the last few years, I'd probably pick Will Self's "The Book of Dave" if only because it has a buried time capsule at its own centre - and, something by Magnus Mills, probably "All Quiet on the Orient Express."

Now all I need is a tin box....

World enough and time...

Its been interesting to see how many fellow literary bloggers have normal summer holidays, as if its a given. Perhaps its when you've a family, or work in education. I've a fortnight off, soon, but its a moveable feast in terms of what I'll be doing. Of course, chances are, I'll spend at least half of it doing my real "work", writing, reading etc. - and, I have to say, the easiest place to do that is here, at home. Particularly given that I'm going to be buzzing off quite a lot from mid-September in my day job. I marvel at the piles of books that people take away with them, but guess, I've my perfect library here. Last weekend - was it so long ago? - I read 2 novels. Unheard of. They were short which helped. But that means I should easily get myself going with a few others that are waiting me. Yet, in Liverpool on Thursday, on the way to see the Klimt exhibition, I picked up "Terrorist" by John Updike and "Then we came to the end" by Joshua Ferris, as well as "The Black Swan", by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, all remaindered hardbacks for £2.99 each. The Updike I want to read as part of my ongoing (and somewhat pyrhhic) attempt to read all the 9/11 fictions that have come out; the Ferris was a recommendation, whilst "Black Swan" theory - i.e. using evidence of what has happened in the past is a flawed way of predicting the future, since just one "black swan" can blow away the idea that all swans are white - fits in with a few ideas I've had/got myself. Add to those a belated purchase of Gwendoline Riley's 3rd novel, "Joshua Spassky", and the must-read but haven't books by Catherine O'Flynn, Junot Diaz, Anne Enright and Ian McEwan (yep, still haven't gone "On Chesil Beach"), never mind a number of poetry books, and I might as well give up now. I would almost pray for rain, except that yesterday's heavy skies gave me the foggiest of heads. And of course, you only have to step off the steps of your treadmill for a minute, and you've all these other ideas swimming around - I felt that there wasn't enough context in the Klimt exhibition, and I want to know more about the history, about Vienna at the end of the 19th century, about the Viennese "Secession". (Surely, there's some connection with Richard Strauss's "Salome" in there?) I re-watched the lovely movie "Ghost World" last night, and wikipediaing both the film and the comic book, realise I want to know what the original comic was like, and that reminds me of all the other comics I've either got and haven't read, or haven't got, but feel I ought to - given its such a productive strand of the modern literary/artistic firmament. And then there's "Hellboy" on Five tonight, which if I'm going to ever watch the sequel, I need to get my head around... We live in rich times, no doubt about it, with all of artistic, literary, and musical history lying around just waiting to be picked up and run with. And I've not even mentioned the Olympics or the new football season...

An Author's Entitlement

I'm not sure whether to laugh, cry, or just despair at the news that the chick lit author Jenny Colgan, was advised to change the title of her new novel, from the rather excellent "Cinderella of the Old Kent Road", to the rather terrible, "Diamond's are a girls best friend," partly because it won't play well in Australia (clearly their Monopoly is full of Wagga Waggas and Ayre's Rocks) and partly because Tesco preferred it. Yes, Tesco! We all know that authors get very little say in their covers, their marketing campaigns etc, but you kind of think you can get a say in your title. Poor Toby Litt, up to "I" in his alphabetical titles, imagine, if the supermarket gets iffy about his "J" or "K"? Authors - being - like - the people who write the words would, you think be able to claim an entitlement to er...titling those works. Mind you, Fitzgerald's titles for "The Great Gatsby" included "Trimalchio at West Egg" which sounds more like an album track by the Hold Steady than one of the classics of American literature. I'm a great fan of titles, whether writing a song, a story, a poem or a novel, and can't imagine giving them up to a 3rd party, though I've changed a number of story titles where the original gave too much away. Put that down to laziness. When you nail a title, I sometimes think you nail the piece, or at least tie it a little less precariously to the earth. Anyway, I reckon Shane Macgowan could write a great song called "Cinderella of the Old Kent Road," - Jenny should give him a call.

Why the Gulag Speaks to Us

Ashamed to say I'd never read Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died this week. So, with a free morning, I realised I'd a copy of his short novel "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". I'm a great fan of shorter novels - it's a format that seems perfect to certain subjects. Everything in the novel was familiar, I guess, though whether its a case that all prison camps are to some extent the same, or because over the years I've imbibed enough Russian history to recognise what the novel, when it was first published, exposed to the world for the first time. You wonder whether a Guantanamo Bay novel would have a similar effect today - particularly, as the Olympics starts in Beijing, with George Bush, talking about the right to speak freely. Ivan Denisovich is an everyman, and the detailing of his day, with only the briefest of passages about his past life, is a highly effective vehicle to talk about a regime - about our humanity. I recently read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and it is the survival of humanity amidst simply staying alive, which connects the two books. Denisovich, at least in this translation, is a particular type of European literary figure - recognisable from Hamsun's "Hunger" to the workers in Magnus Mills' "The Restraint of Beasts." Even in the straits of his condition there is some dignity in labour - yet at the same time, the worker has to deal with the Kafkaesque absurdities of their bosses. Apparently, it was the dignity of Denisovich's labour that convinced Krushchev of the novel's worth. It seems strange in the modern world, in our advanced, and recently deracinated version of capitalism, how "work" remains such a problematic subject for a novel. I'm not so sure about the dignity of labour; for Solzhenitsyn, I think, in this short novel, its more a case of where work is all there is to keep mind, body and soul together, then it becomes a metaphor for life itself. Denisovich ponders how he, who once provided for his whole family, can now hardly provide for himself. Every step he takes in the novel exposes another absurdity, another compromise.

Publish and Be Damned

In these days of "Twitter", its not particularly a surprise to be eavesdropping on the minutiae of a life, but Chris Hamilton-Emery's recent blogs about the multitude of tasks in "a day in the life" at Salt Publishing, have been particularly fascinating. So much for the myth that men can't multitask (perhaps poets can? publishers certainly must?). And - on previous blogs - he reminds me that publishing is also a seasonal business, with so much relying on the next few months. A credit crunch Christmas, with a winter of heavy heating bills aheads, won't do much good for most of us. Yet, sitting at home with a good book perhaps is what's needed. And I'm reminded that Salt's books are good and I've not bought one for a while. Is this guilt marketing? I'm not sure - but like that little record shop you used to visit before bypassing it for Amazon, or the butcher's you'd queue at before driving to Tescos - its probably a case of use 'em or lose 'em. I remember Michael Schmidt at Carcanet saying that if everyone who sent him poems also bought one of their books they'd never have a problem. I've been doing some work with the arts recently, and orchestras, theatres, cinemas etc. have the same problem. At certain points in your life you might be a loyal, regular theatre/concert/cinema-goer, then ask yourself. When did you last go? There's 2 films on at the Cornerhouse next week I want to see, "Man on Wire" and the Brazilian "Empire State". Blink and I'll miss them. When you think of the cost of the Olympics, not just this one, but the next one in London, you have to also think... support your local sheriff! Or...Salt Needs You! Particularly in the summer.

Summer Is

I'm not entirely sure why it is that everything goes so quiet in August, not just the students, but other people as well. Surely as many people are returning to Manchester, and/or visiting? The bars seem busy at least. I hesitate to invite people to the Old Abbey Inn on Wednesday for the next - the third - night of The Other Room, since the previous two have seen the bar nicely filled. However, it is summer, and we can always spill out onto the street between poets.

***

The Forward Prizes for Poetry shortlists have also been announced. Forward's website seems to still think its 2006, so they don't get a link, we just have to rely on the Guardian's word for all of this!

***
...and the Booker longlist slipped out without me noticing, on Thursday. A baker's dozen, yet again featuring a few of the unflashy mid-list authors that have dominated the last few years, and, of course, the return of Rushdie, and, in "Child 44", what is surely that least Booker of genres, a thriller.

The art of brevity

In his panegyric for Penelope Fitzgerald, reviewing a book of her letters, Julian Barnes certainly brings out some interesting points, but, boy does he go on, giving close on 5000 words to this renowned miniaturist of a novelist. I'm sure there's probably some kind of literary equation, where the shorter the books, the longer the critical encomiums. And some of it just seems silly. Surely his detailed story of travelling back to London with her from a reading in York is the least interesting literary anecdote that's ever been shared? I've not read Fitzgerald so I can't comment on her place in the rankings of our top novelists, and certainly, there's much in this review that makes one interested to read her, but perhaps a little too much. To be fair to Barnes, I've got enough of a sense of her personality from his piece, that had she been able to read it, she'd have seen how overblown it was. In future, perhaps, less is more?

Mercury and Mad Hatters

I was in the Portland Basin museum in Ashton-under-Lyne yesterday afternoon, and amidst the depictions of ye olde Tameside life (long before it was called Tameside of course), and examples of industrial heritage, there was a little display case that pointed out that the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland wasn't purely fiction, since hatmakers frequently became poisoned by the mercury used in the hatmaking process, and would appear drunken, and incoherent. Which seems a nice segue into this years Mercury music prize, for drunken and incoherent are some of the epithets flung at this mid-yearly attempt to boost sales of some of the years best British albums. But as always, far better that it's drunken and incoherent than boring and respectable. I've already been listening to four of this year's shortlist, so I can hardly complain about it, even if the one glaring omission, M.I.A.'s "Kala", seems a little inexplicable, unless, since its been around a while now, its wilfulness had gone from sounded fresh to sounding annoying. Judge Jude Rogers (which could be a good title for a tv series...) has entered robustly into the debate in the Guardian, praising the number of albums on the list this year, not by first-timers, but by artists who have always been well-respected, but only now are getting into their stride, such as Elbow and British Sea Power. It's a good point, well-made, though perhaps notable that neither of these albums have ever had a "Chelsea Dagger" style singalong hit. The hit, I think, can sink even the best of bands. My favourite on the list is Rachel Unthank and the Winterset's folk album "The Bairns" not least because of its inclusion of Robert Wyatt's "Sea Song", but I'd put your fiver on Burial. whose 2nd album "Untrue", though perhaps not as much "shock of the new" as his debut, has enough about it to become a 21th century "Blue Lines" or "Screamadelica," though Elbow's introspective melancholia might be just what Britain in 2008 is looking for.

The Apocalypse is Now

The 2-part eco-thriller, "Burn Up", of which I saw the first part yesterday - the final part's tonight - is a classier beast than other recent BBC dramas, though at one point you forget which drama you're actually in since there's Marc Warren (Hustle/Dr. Who) Rupert Penry-Jones (Spooks) and Bradley Whitford (The West Wing). I half expected Torchwood to appear at some point and introduce some extra-terrestrial element. Probably having its narrative squeezed into 3 hours has helped it somewhat. I said its an eco-thriller, but its really a techno-thriller with a bit of "greenwash" to use the term the oil industry uses here to talk about "renewables." Penry-Jones playing Tom McConnell, young oil exec, manages to sum up the climate change debate as "either we're right, or they're right", which certainly saves you having to watch "An Inconvenient Truth." The convenient truth here of course is that catastrophic as most of the numbers appear regarding climate change, for a writer - whether in fiction, or in a teleplay - catastrophe is always a box office winner. The apocalypse, once nuclear in nature, is now ecological, and though even less reduceable to a human narrative than an atomic bomb, it gives any number of writers something a little more malleable to play with than, say, 9/11. In a post-biblical age, it seems we are drawn more and more to biblical stories, of floods and apocalypses. It's somewhat surprising, watching "Burn Up", to find that the writer is Simon Beaufoy, most famous for "The Full Monty." I'm looking forward to tonight's conclusion. My standby button remains off.

***

Part Two wasn't quite as exciting as part one. Being set entirely at "Kyoto 2" in Calgary (why didn't they just call it Calgary then?) it was a bit of an uneasy mix between an episode of the West Wing (lots of scenes drafting documents) with an episode of "Spooks." I'm not sure I cared by the end, which of the "powers that be" won out. It was clever, but required quite a lot of suspension of belief. In the end, I guess it was wanting it both ways - to be a bit of a polemic on the one hand, and a thriller on the other. You only have to compare with Channel 4's classic "Traffik" to see how this kind of thing can be done. Worth watching, particular in the desert of summer viewing, but a little disappointing.

When you were great

Was there ever a time when you were great? I think there was actually, even if I'm not sure who exactly I'm talking to at this point in time. I've long been of the view that musicians - at least rock and pop musicians - are touched with something remarkable for only a short time, and its what they do with that, then and later that matters most. In it's simplest form, I'm talking about individuality - and in doing so I'm talking about musicians who contribute something more than just their playing (though that can be part of it as well.) We've all seen bands who are looking for the latest wagon to jump on (which is probably why it's called the bandwagon!) and there are whole record company departments devoted to this. Yes, I know there's sometimes something in the air - whether in Laurel Canyon in '68 or the lesser Free Trade Hall in '76 - but whether this or not, doesn't seem to make too many odds. Individuality shines through, and you've only got so long to mine that seam whether it comes to you early or late. Of course it doesn't mean that all good music is made by teenagers and twenty-somethings, just that if you spend enough of this time doing what you should be doing (living, thinking, writing about it) then you'll probably be good for life. It allowed Morrissey to always have a store of thoughts, ideas, tropes and concepts to come back to for "You are the Quarry" or Bowie to wipe the memory of his dreadful eighties with the half decent albums that came after.

They say poets are best when they are young - though the current poetic career path is such a hard climb you wonder how many would get anywhere in five years, ten years whatever. A book of poetry could have a ten year curve to it - the writing, the acceptance, the path to publication, the wait for reviews and prizes, and finally, the sense that this has found a readership, however small and select, and, if its any good, or if tells a new story, or finds a new way of telling an old story, then it will have an impact on what comes next. But what if you start late?

I can well believe that one's world view is formed early, that one's influences are embedded in adolescence, and that one's preoccupations are at least beginning to form before your twenties, whether they are sex, or work, or politics, or nature. Yet for a fiction writer to build on that framework? There's life to be lived, for a start. The writing doesn't always come first, and sometimes comes very last. It's why there's more than a few good fiction writers who began after their children were over; or after they gave up some other career; or had a breakdown of some sort. Is the older fiction writer - telling stories with all the experience at his/her control? - as valid a model as the young poet, the young songwriter? If so, are these lives mirror opposites - with the "store" that a poet draws on later in life only a simulacrum of what's before, no different than the rough drafts, failed attempts and abandoned manuscripts of the young fiction writer? Or, is this the very stuff, the very thing, that the writing life is both afraid of and needs - the essential individuality that every artist must possess if they are going to do anything worthwhile.

An old friend has asked me why my music never progressed - or rather, he wondered if that was in fact the case - that the "sound" I make is the same, near enough, now as twenty years before. It has the same voice, the same-ish instruments, and the same homemade production. I was trying to explain to him, that since I'm not a "proper" recording artist/musician, I'm less interested in sounding like everything else on the radio, and more interested in some exploration of a small plot of land that I've made my own. I'm not even sure if its real - or whether, my musical interest, is itself a simulacrum, a version of myself that is forever going back over certain things: music as art project on the one hand, music as psychological examination on the other. I wasn't sure what I was writing about, and so I went back to some of the music I recorded in 1984-5, and yes, I'm there in my more recent stuff, almost exactly as then. The same preoccupations, the same aesthetic questions (or: if they're not questions - the same answers). I've recently been trying to synthesize my poetry into a single book-length volume, and though there's progression, there's also it's opposite. A hall of mirrors or a version of myself that's all about closing the door on a room and looking only at what's inside. I don't think that poetry and songs are necessarily adolescent, but I wonder, if away from a gaze that expects a progression - an increased sophistication with each iteration - something different can go on, than otherwise. When we look at the career of an Emily Dickinson or a Nick Drake, we are saddened that they never had the success that the work deserved; but part of me wonders if we need more of these hidden careers, the disappointment providing an opportunity to concentrate not on the career, or even on the work, so much as the inspiration that makes the individuality.

When you were great, I never knew your work. Now I do, I'm not so sure...

John Wilmot

Just watching The Libertine starring Johnny Depp as the Earl of Rochester aka John Wilmot aka the Libertine. Great film, actually. Not sure whether it was successful or stuff. My old friend Samantha was a great fan of Rochester, and she was always entirely accurate in her taste, and liked a bit of older stuff. I realise I'm a bit naive about the 17th century, and if the film has done nothing else, it will make me investigate. What's really scarey, is, that apart from the whores, the aristocracy, the arrogance, the theatre, the insensitivity and the nastiness, I really related to him. More, I AM him. Bloody hell. Proof, I guess, that I'm having a bad week. But, I'm beginning to think that it's a good week. The Libertine shows Wilmot as a flawed person, but an honest one, whose main problem was against the world he lived in. I realise I keep referring to things as Puritans and Cavaliers without really knowing what I mean by that. So, Spain beating Germany in the European Championships was a victory for the cavaliers, though it looked, for a while that the puritans were going to win - equally, Man Utd rather than Chelsea last year in the league and champions league. It's not one way, is it? Coldplay - a puritan band if there ever has been one - are doing well. I've a puritan in my head, with a cavalier mind, and the film made me think about what I really am. In a puritan age - which is where I think we are now - I'm Lord Rochester. There is a cost, there is a cost. I'm beginning to think it's worth paying.

When the avant garde comes will I be invited?

I have often wondered, and its appropriate to think about again following this blog post in the Guardian from Lee Rourke, whether I would ever be thought of as part of a new movement? I've always felt I'd be more of a John The Baptist or an T.E. Hulne than the messiahs that followed, still, I like to think I know an avant garde work when I see it - or indeed write it. A bit like being a goth, if you call yourself avant garde, you're probably not, if you deny it, maybe you are. All you avant gardeists out there - you're just Iris Murdoch with more anal sex.

The Future of the Book

I'm not sure anyone can truly accurate in talking about the future of the book, when they never even asked my opinion. That said, they did ask the opinion of a few people I would have told them to speak to (though not everyone), and a few more I've not heard of, for a report for the Arts Council called Read:Write. See what they did there? Computer style terminology. Interesting stuff, though I've only just been sent it, so you get to read it before I do. Isn't that clever? Funnily enough I was just reading Douglas Coupland's "JPod" which is fun, but a little too arch for its own good. Its not quite as original sounding as his older fictions, perhaps because so many people have copied his style (something he makes a play on in the novel.) But it is fun. Just skip the computery bits.

I'm sure there are a million things I want to share with you, beyond that link, but after a couple of works working way too hard, I'm not sure whether my literary soul has died or is merely flattened at the back of the cupboard again. I was amazed and fascinated at a Redeye photography event last week by the blogger/photographer/generally good guy, Christian Payne, aka Documentally, who (pause for breath) live-streamed to the web from his Nokia N95 his conversation with me, which I'm sure wouldn't be easy for mere mortals as the digital evangelist that is Christian. If I look a bit worse for wear I'd just rushed back in the pouring rain from a hospital appointment. I feel I now need a smart phone!

Writers aren't sports stars

Watching the Williams sisters compete in the Wimbledon final today, it was a rare moment when victory in sport would be tinged with sadness, and defeat tinted with pride. Usually in sport, its "winner takes all", the loser forgotten; but hardly possible when the winner and loser will be sharing Thanksgiving and Christmas together? I only mention this, in contrast to writing, which whilst also a pursuit of solitary excellence, hasn't got quite such an easy measure of "success" and "failure." "It doesn't matter what you think about your work," writes Anne Enright in short, perceptive piece in today's Guardian, the finished work is just as is, whether you thought it good or bad. In a completed story are the opportunity costs of all the roads not travelled. Enright is sceptical of poets who "just know" when something is right, putting it down to something melancholic in the poet's spirit.

Of the more melancholic poets, seeing Morrissey in Hyde Park yesterday cheered me up no end. An exemplarily chosen set, mixing Smiths songs, obscurities, solo hits and a wonderful Buzzcocks cover, ("You say you don't love me", turned into a Billy Fury-style piece of crooning, a massive hit, I reckon, if he ever releases it), Morrissey was not just in a good mood, and fine voice, but seemed at one with both his place - on stage, a showman - and his career, ranging all over the shop, with his fine band able to do justice to such rarely played songs as "Death of a Disco Dancer." How strange, that Beck, preceding him, and about to launch a new album, was so perfunctory, coming on like a curmudgeonly still-young Neil Young, with black hat, shades and coat. Last time I saw Beck - in about 2000 - he was an impish, glammy glittering uber-popstar, yesterday, despite a few flurries from his varied back catalogue, it felt like he was going through the motions.

And for some other points of view on the Amis religious debate blogged about below, try Fictionbitch, Richard Madeley, and even the Guardian. Read them all and pretend to your friends that you were actually there.

Finally, this year's national short story prize is having the shortlisted stories broadcast on Radio 4 next week. Still a little sceptical about identifying "best of breed" in this way, but pleased that two of the writers I met in Norwich last week, the established poet and novelist Adam Thorpe, and the Canadian short story writer, Erin Soros, are on the list.

God and Amis in the Same Room

To Manchester University for the latest public lecture from Prof. Amis, this time with James Wood, and on the relationship between literature and God. A reasonably full Whitworth Hall, and I was remembering that the last time I was there, I was officiating at a graduate ceremony handing out scrolls. It's too big a subject of course, and the debate wasn't helped by the design - three men on a stage - and a vast hall ahead of them. Interesting that Amis quoted from Milton, Greene and Herbert; this was Amis the academic rather than Amis the satirist. The argument - a valid one - that literature is essentially secular, particularly the novel, but where the world in which it exists is a religious one, or rather where there is a struggle between the religious and the secular, then art inevitably reflects that society, that struggle, is a subtle one. As they were introduced to us as Professor Amis and Professor Wood, I got the sense that its not literature that wants to be an alternate religion, but academia itself. What is wrong with Martin and James? The professorial monikers hanging as heavy as ecclesiastical robes. Not, one thinks, an appropriate soubriquet for the writer of the scabrous "Yellow Dog." If the argument from the top table was both allusive and elusive, the audience let us down. Regulars at Manchester literature events knows the mad question is due at some point; where the questioner gives a partial biography, mentions their unpublished novel, and asks a question so oblique that the room appears to be on its side. Tonight we had pretty much five in the row, as evangelical hands shot up from the cheap seats. You have to feel a little sorry for evangelicals, not that they're the one section of society that is treated with withering contempt, as much as that they have an inability to recognise that their view of the world is a narrowcast one. It is impossible to imagine a novel that takes the evangelical seriously, after all, they take themselves so seriously - and the satirist is left with Chaucerian grotesques. Amis makes the point that even Greene's religious schematic creates an unreality that weakens the novels. For the second time in a fortnight, Cormac MacCarthy's "The Road" is a point of reference - and I have to squeeze my ears closed at the "spoilers" from the stage, I'm currently half way through it. Religion, in terms of tonight's meeting is very localised, Western, Christian, and it is Genesis and Revelations, with a nod to Job, that get the namechecks. The Bible is far richer a source for stories than its alpha and omega, but of course, it is original sin - and its fearsome opposite, eternity, that intrigues the novelist and the critic. A few interesting points were lost in the echoing space -: where are the secular novels that incorporate some kind of religious death? I wanted to bring up Louise Erdrich's "Tales of Burning Love" where the native American wife, walking out in the snow, becomes a metaphor. We live in an age, in Britain at least, where its almost impossible for a writer to give us a directly Christian story, since such a life and world would be unrecognisable in our low-key religious country. Yet, spiritualism, whether native American, or otherwise, has become the pick 'n' mix metaphor. Will Self creates his own inverted religion in "The Book of Dave", yet most novels remain both conservative and moral. Secular fiction - and Amis and Wood both seem to be hinting at this - loses out when it disconnects from the very human need to "believe."

Blogs and Biogs

The Guardian used to do a bit of a Saturday round-up of the blogs, but perhaps because it's got such a well-used blog itself now, or simply realised the absurdity of taking the online offline, its given up the habit. It's a bit of a relief, really. This blog, amongst others, used to occasionally get a quote, and I wasn't then sure whether I should mention it in this blog, before realising that if you were reading this blog you'd probably already read what had been extracted in the Guardian. Such circularity! There is some point to this point, of course - in that the print/online relationship goes two ways. There's been a move over the last few years to put "online" (or at least on DVD) magazines from the archive. so that, for instance, the hard-to-find final Salinger Glass family story, Hapworth 16, 1924 is now easily retrievable, the complete "New Yorker" having been available as a boxed set for a few years now. I guess that's the idea behind the Google (and others) digitisation projects, though I'm not sure that scanning books en masse is as important a job as preserving printed materials. Moreover, who - and to what extent - is preserving the cyberspace only words that fill the blogs? The letters of Julian Mclaren-Ross has just come out for instance, a virtually forgotten writer who died in 1965, and is more famous for his lifestyle than his works, it seems almost ridiculous that 43 years after he died, that a well-edited selection of his letters should be given so much floorspace in our literary pages; yet that's the point. As DJ Taylor points out in his Guardian review, "even half a century ago the life of the rackety freelance, a feature of English literature since the days of Johnson, was growing steadily less tenable. Here in the age of Richard & Judy and the Waterstone's three-for-two, it is virtually extinct." The rackety freelance now will, I'm sure have a blog, and instead of begging letters to editors, will have a brisk, businesslike email conversation with commissioners, as well as whatever day job is necessary, still trying to carve out enough time to write "the novel". It's not that this stuff isn't being stored away, but that it could, indeed, take 43 years to identify what blogs are worthwhile. In a world where every new graduate - and every job - seems to be something to do with "marketing", it takes quite a lot of conviction to do something as economically useless as write a poem, a song or a story. Yet, it is these things, not the conferences, seminars, think-pieces, or reality TV shows, which have the only continuing value. Think of all the footage of old European Championships and Wimbledons, its always the shots, the games, not the comment, that gets repeated. Kathryn Hughes writes quite a considered, but somewhat redundant piece on "what happened to the golden age of biography?" Or rather she doesn't. The "crisis" is only really in the headlines, the piece itself is far more even-handed, bemoaning only the lack of time (and resource) that is being given to biographers these days to research their subjects. I think- at least in terms of literary biography - there is something else. Not just that everyone of stature has been done, as she says, but that our long-lived writers these days seem to fade away, not forgottten, not yet discovered. And, more than likely, with their literary archives bequeathed to one or other university. What will the blog generation have to bequeath, I wonder? A USB stick?

David Bowie in the Mail on Sunday....

...there's definitely something wrong there. Yes, this coming Sunday you can get a free David Bowie CD, his own selection of favourite tracks, rarities etc. I know, its the Mail on Sunday. Prince was one thing, but David Bowie? The Thin White Duke? Aladdin Sane? Ziggy Stardust?...and middle England's weekly bible of misery-porn? But that's the world today, you see. No certainty anymore. There's probably some demographic I'm missing here - perhaps its the "Lets Dance"/Serious Moonlight era Bowie fans - as for me, well, its good to read what the enemy think now and then. Still, I'm shaking my head with some kind of disbelief. Whatever next? Slipknot in Hello Magazine? My Bloody Valentine in Vanity Fair? Fuck Buttons in FHM?

Talking, more talking

Something about this time of year sees every activity under the sun taking place at the same time. I've another window open, with the Tony Wilson Experience going on live at Urbis, and the composer Steve Martland and poet Simon Armitage speaking, twenty hours into a twenty four hour period. Armitage has just written a book about his interest in music, "Gig." He's recently formed a band, and kind of sees his poetry life as a replacement for him not-being-in-a-band. As he says, his reputation nowadays depends on the poetry, so it creates a pressure that's perhaps not there when he's doing music - that's just fun. Last night, Paul Morley and Irvine Welsh talked about how the "middleman" and the "media" are being so damaging these days - as a stop on talent, and that other models; print-on-demand, ebooks etc. will work around the edge of the mainstream.

It's interesting, all this talk... I've spent the last week in a different talking environment at New Writing Worlds in Norwich ; and how different it was. The Tony Wilson Experience came about as a way of "passing on" from old talent to new talent; and though I've been enjoying the talks, despite the low-band video streaming, it has been a bit one-to-many. Manchester's a highly creative city, in terms of the amount of people making good quality material, but it still seems to lack something in terms of the opportunities. In terms of the arts, its only really music - whether classical or contemporary - where there seems real opportunities. Manchester's publishing scene, for instance, is tiny and subsidised; and the university creative writing courses have been as likely to import the talent as use what's already around. Later today, hurricanes willing, the Poets & Players garden party creates another city subset: readings from Carole Ann Duffy and Matthew Welton amongst others.

Armitage, now, is talking about how writers need to have passion - and also need to read, as well as to write. It's the simple advice that's the best. When I first read Armitage, it gave me a reason to start reading poetry again, after university had turned me off poetry. I'm still wrestling with some of these conflicts.

Latest posts from New Writing Worlds

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Nature and Nation

My new post on today's literary salon at New Writing Worlds is here.

New Writing Worlds 2008

Tuesday night at New Writing worlds, readings and a debate... details here.

Flatlands

I'm in Norwich, looking at out on a flat, tree-lined landscape. The train journey down was pleasant, uneventful. I wasn't the beneficiary of Whitsun weddings or similar phenomena to write about; though every town I passed through did seem to have a cathedral high on the brow; but the medieval cathedrals were built fortified and high for many reasons, not least protection and security. All around and in between these towns you get to see things not dissimilarly to how they'd have been forty, fifty years ago. Farming in this country was industrialising a long time ago, and though the polytunnels and rural structures of Thanet Earth are a more recent thing; I guess the difference now, compared with around World War Two, would be how few people now "work the land." During the war my grandparents had an army of their own; land girls (and boys). The other sign of the times, I guess, would be the redbrick sprawl as you come into Margaret Thatcher's Grantham, and then, next to the station, a massive supermarket. In Norwich itself, coming from the station, the traffic was busy as it is everywhere these days, and on reaching the university, I found myself queueing in the rain behind a conference party of Spanish students. It gave me a chance to find the campus Waterstones. With such a range of readings over the next few days, I'm sure I'll be back there as purchaser. Tonight sees readings from Mimi Khalvati and Adam Thorpe, with a debate "Future Imperfect?" later on, which I hope will be a bit of a scene-setter for the next few days. Everything, as New Order once had it, has gone green these days - the next thing is to tease out the contradictions, and work out that means. I could, have course, have flown to Norwich; my pleasant and relaxing train journey was an appropriate start.

Version Control

"Version control" is a term from software development; but it's not something new to writers. And like software, writing has it's development and production phases; yet, just as a "software release" isn't necessarily the final say, neither is publication. In the past, it was the technical and human limitations of turning a handwritten script into a fair copy or typescript and then again, into the moveable type of a book. I'm always quite surprised when I read of writers - even younger writers who still write initially by hand, or even continue with a heavy manual typewriter long after they've fallen out of favour elsewhere. But if the technique's not broke then don't look to fixing it. It was still a surprise to read in the Sunday Times that Nietzsche used a typewriter. So says Andrew Sullivan pace Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic. I've long argued that the tools of your trade can effect the work - whether its Hemingway's heavy-duty Remington or Kerouac's continuous scroll. When I write poetry the page length can be a determinant (which is why when writing longhand I tend to steal the blank white space of copier paper), as can whether I write it direct to the PC (landscape) rather than in a notebook (portrait.) As Sullivan points out, Google, for all it's advantages, can give us "pond skater minds." Yet, it's not just that. Finding yourself without the internet nowadays, seems to make using a PC almost impossible - yet for years we used the computer as little more than a glorified typewriter anyhow. Tomorrow, on a long train journey, I'll have a choice: laptop whilst the batteries last or longhand. I think I might get a few thousand uninterrupted words on the former if I'm lucky, since without the distractions of my Google and Facebook and whatever else, there'll be nothing else to concentrate on. Yet, going back to my initial point: about "version control" - in a connected world, the distinction between "on" and "off" line is becoming less certain; and in the same way, the internet gives us (mostly) the latest version. A future literary sleuth may well find themselves going over the log files of a writer's wiki, to see what he or she changed, and when. I think its different for poetry, where a number of different versions of a poem can probably co-exist quite easily - the poem you read at the reading; the manuscript version; the one in the little magazine; the first collection; the selected etc etc - and I'm often surprised when I see a poet reading armed with nothing more than the published book. It seems a little disappointing in some ways, yet one assumes a well-edited collection will be the definitive version; but disappointing in a way that a gig that sounds like the album is disappointing, no surprises. I prefer the Roger McGoughs and Les Murrays of the world skipping through the career, picking plums, and armed with some recent manuscript poems. Fiction though, it's usually error or commerce that creates the different versions, at least these days. Whenever you read a work in progress in Granta, I doubt it changes much before the final version - and this, again, disappoints me a little. I think that "publishing" something gives you a sense of closure on the piece - perhaps "sets it" for you, even if you'd perhaps have gone back and changed it later. It's perhaps indicative of my preference for flux, that my favourite novel, "Tender is the Night" by Fitzgerald exists in two very distinct versions. The original - and restored version - begins with the moment when Dick Diver begins his fall, whilst the revised version (that was the popularly known one for so long) is chronological. It's clear to me that the chronological one isn't the right one - but picking up, at last, a copy of this secondhand earlier today, I'm looking forward to reading the wrong version at some point.

Next stop Norwich

After a very hectic few months, weeks, days, I'm able to relax a little, and looking forward to visiting Norwich next week for New Writing Worlds, part conference, part literary salon, part festival, with this year's theme of "Human:Nature". I've only once been to Norwich; in 1997 I had an interview with Andrew Motion for the UEA MA. It seems a long time ago. The previous year, having been shortlisted for the Lichfield Prize for my novel "Lineage", I'd decided to apply for this prestigious course. I sent off a short story I'd written set the previous summer in Northern California, where I'd been on holiday, and got a slightly gnomic response, about the course being busy, and I should try next year. Next year I did, and presumably they still had my story on file, since I wasn't asked to send anything else. I went along for the interview and sat there with 5 other hopefuls. Hard as it is to believe, I'd never actually met any writers until that day, and here were lots of them. One of the candidates, Francis Liardet, I even bought her novel from the UEA campus bookshop after the interview, a little puzzled, I admit, why a published novelist would be wanting to go on a creative writing course. "The Game", her novel, was excellent, but I don't think she's ever published a follow-up, though she got on the course, and was featured in the next year's UEA anthology. I didn't get on that year's MA, but it convinced me that this was what I wanted to do, and I applied and got accepted for the Manchester one. A friend had recently moved to Norwich, and I think I was more interested in catching up with Ruth, than I was in the interview. So it will be interesting to spend a few days there, in a half-remembered city.

Something about Manchester

I'd had one of those worst of days, and you almost regret that you've tickets for a gig that night; but I can't remember the last time I bought a ticket without thought - as in, I've got to see this singer. The singer of course being Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power) the Atlanta, Georgia singer that earlier that day I'd vaguely described to colleagues as Marianne Faithfull meets Amy Winehouse; but actually, she's more Patti Smith meets Otis Redding - confirmed by a sublime cover of a sublime Try a Little Tenderness late in the gig - but more than that, and the reason I'd bought the ticket so far in advance, is because she's Cat Power. Shame on Manchester that the concert wasn't sold out (unlike, say, the Editors or such like), but the Academy is a bit of an unforgiving venue when it's full, and although I've seen some of my favourite gigs there its the first time I've ever seen the Academy aspire to intimacy. The first few songs were disappointing; there wasn't a thing that caught fire. I was wondering why I was there? Surely there was more emotion in my day than in these limp things? Yet, hold on there, she has to release a bit from her crack band, and when, a few songs in, she sings the self-written "Song for Bobby" (Dylan) off the recent "Jukebox" covers album the gig leaps into the stratosphere and never comes down. This famously fragile perfomer is enjoying herself, jigging on stage, and as the gig progresses you get the feeling - as so often happens - that because Manchester so loves its fragile singers, so loves it music, those singers and musicians start loving it back. By the end of the concert, she's still on stage, on her own, after nearly two hours, throwing a bouquet of flowers into the audience. It's a gesture from an indie-music past, but in indie-Manchester is entirely appropriate. As I say, the Academy doesn't usually run to intimacy; tonight it did. I'm sure in the context of her latest tour it was nothing special, but its the first concert I've been to for ages that has legitimate company in my list of the all the time greats.

Music is worthless

The first album I bought with my own money cost £3.99. I can't remember what the first single cost, but it was certainly more than a pound. That was in 1981-2 when music was anything but worthless, and you had to make some decisions about where you spent your money. The first CD -was "Brotherhood" by New Order and it cost me £11.99, in later 1986. So, excuse me, if I'm a little heady with excitement when I get the chance to buy "Los Angeles" by X for a fiver, or "Disintgration" by the Cure for three quid - and baulk at paying £7.99 or more for the Ting Tings album. And I feel quite sad about it all, really, that you don't have to worry too much about the cost anymore - after all, you can probably download it for free - and I think that maybe my giving my music away for free is the better way after all, cos after tax and the record shop costs, how does any of this make sense? Somehow I think we've got something terribly wrong, but I'm not sure what exactly, or...what I could have done about it. I buy my £3 CDs and wait for the end of the w0rld, that's all.

A week out

A busy week...was in Liverpool on Monday and went to see the comedian Jason Cook, whose show "My confessions" was perhaps a Geordie "My Name is Earl". Funny, painful, honest, and in the end comedy with a bit of soul. Highly recommended. Then Tuesday Redeye, Manchester's photography network had two very different photographic takes on Northern Ireland, Jill Jennings' photo essay on the dismantled Maze/Long Kesh explored its uniquely troublesome history through the random remains that were there on her restricted visits, prisoners' graffiti, handwritten notes etc. whilst C.J. Clarke's black and white pictures of the increasingly out-of-time loyalist community is an ongoing ethnographic portrait of a community almost as strange as an undiscovered Brazilian tribe. Then, at the 2nd night of the Other Room, on Wednesday for 3 poetry readings. the highlight for me being Alex Middleton's translations and reading of Danish poet Inger Christiensen.

Finding Your Aesthetic Centre

There's been quite a bit of debate about creative writing courses, after Kureishi's remark that they are "like mental hospitals." I can't entirely disagree (our course had its own tragic death a few weeks in to it, and another student who suffered from panic attacks), but more interesting was his comment that he gives everyone 71%. It feels about right. I can't remember now whether I was just below that or just above... that ballpark. More interesting is why do people go on creative writing courses? I think, simply, the time it gives you to write your novel, has to be invaluable - it certainly helps the prevaricators by giving them a target, and for those of us who were going to write a novel anyway, it allows us to have another answer when people ask "what do you do?" I recall at one of my interviews saying: "I want to find out what kind of writer I am." Oh, the naivety of the thirty year old! It came to mind this week, when someone suggested I should concentrate a bit more on one thing or another. Spreading myself thin. Yet, I'm not sure I am in that I've had quite a lot of consistency over the years - my aesthetic centre, if you like, has broadened, but hasn't changed that much. I was re-reading Motion's biography of Larkin - suitably entitled "A Writer's Life" - and its fascinating to read of Larkin at Oxford, so unimpressed by the Anglo-Saxons and others that he's supposed to read as part of his English course, even noting in the margins of the library copy of Spenser that it's the most boring poem in the language. Larkin, never a good example in some ways, knew what he liked - even as his influences changed from Yeats to Auden, and then went elsewhere - and also what he didn't like. If it came a bit too much of a fixed idea for him, then at least he backed up those limitations with the quality of his work. (Lowell loved his work, for instance, but it was hardly reciprocated, how could it have been, knowing what we know of Larkin's "centre"?) - and railing against a set orthodoxy, can be a powerful way of defining your own art. Whether its music, art, fiction or poetry, I've not changed massively in what I consider important - both in others, and in my own intentions. If I have a dilettante streak, its because I know how difficult it is to actually create an art that fulfils all of one's aesthetic desires. My creative course reconnected me with my aesthetic centre in a way that I hadn't really expected. Ten years on, the importance of having that centre, however wayward it might seem at times, remains critical, I think.

Culture & Creativity

I've had a divebombing mood this week, just a lot of things going on in my head, and around me, and without the time to really do what I needed to do, which was to have a break, get away, see friends, clear head etc. Yet, not for the first time, waking with a dark cloud over me, sometimes allows me to get down to writing something after too long prevaricating. It's with some astonishment that I've written two short stories this morning, and it's not even 3 in the afternoon yet. One's a sci-fi story, the other was meant to be, but ended up a little more grounded. The latter was an idea I'd had for a while, but the former, follows on from my thoughts about how the internet requires "water" and "electricity" to survive. I'm trying to write a range of so-called sci-fi/slipstream fictions to explore ideas like this.

And a good job I've done something this weekend, since next week's looking a little hectic. I'm hoping to get to the 2nd night of experimental poetry night The Other Room, at the Old Abbey on Wednesday, for instance.

Still the book...

I met the Guardian's games blogger Aleks Krotoski at Futuresonic a few weeks ago, and she was far more than just a "games blogger." In today's paper she turns her thoughts to fiction, and says: "there's a shift afoot in storytelling, one unavoidably inspired by computer games and new technologies." And well, there might be, but as she also indicates, you won't find it at Hay-on-Wye or in the literary pages. Hanif Kureishi was dismissive of her question regarding interactive literature, which would all be well and good, if I wasn't still trying to get through his latest highly disappointing novel (more of which when I've finished it). I've long bemoaned the fact that the web hasn't really thrown up much interesting in the way of literature, even if the critical culture of which I hope this blog is part, has benefited from the move to cyberspace; but perhaps it's just taking time. As a mass medium, I'm sure that the big web writing successes, interactive or otherwise, are likely to be at the populist end of the spectrum, at least for some time. Part of the problem is technological of course: it's only now that the average writer can do something with all the Web 2.0 tools available, without furrowing his/her brow over HTML (not usually a writers' primary skill); and though writers have always been asked to Hollywood I'm not sure they're as welcome in the plot development rooms of Grand Theft Auto IV. Yet, I agree with Aleks, that games offer quite a few useful tricks for would be innovative writers. I've a number of projects I've half tried over the years, but without a specific audience for them - I've never really invested the necessary time (and it is time) - to make them happen. As for collaboration, I've a book of Jerry Cornelius stories before me, "The New Nature of the Catastrophe", very few of which are written by his maker, Michael Moorcock. Nothing new under the sun it seems. Over the page (and I'd advise all literary types to stray to the Guardian's technology section now and then), Victor Keegan points out that "books are thriving on the internet." Which is one way of saying that the nature of the catastrophe facing the publishing industry isn't necessarily the same as that which the music industry has failed so badly to deal with. The reading experience - i.e. the book - has both "first mover" advantage and is, I'd suggest, still a "killer app;" though "Kindles" etc. are likely - eventually to have some kind of niche. Keegan mentions audio books and the success of audible.com and wonders about rivals - there's quite a range at eMusic, he might want to try. A few years ago I was roped into a project that Tony Wilson was planning, allowing downloads of stories (as well as music) for a few pence, and I even went as far as writing and recording a first "episode" of a continuing narrative . It's an idea whose time may well have come... yet, like everything on the web, the time it takes to make it good, is something that a writer needs to be paid for, just as much as a software engineer. All of this comes a few days after Robert McCrum's farewell soliloquy from 10 years at the helm of the Observer's literary pages. At least 3 of his 10 "highlights" were technological, and yet I wonder about that. Blogs, Amazon and ebook readers don't any kind of revolution make. It's hardly, Picasso, Stravinsky and Joyce, is it? If you're still calling it technology, I guess, you're still scared to use it. Aleks point, extrapolated, is that these are tools, and writer, use them. One final point, that came to mind reading another article in the Guardian, saying that the Olympics' need for power is going to limit the economic growth of the city of London, particularly in relation to data centres (i.e. banks of computers). We are so blissfully unaware of the real cost of "cyberspace" - all those servers running our blogs, eShops and videos - are served by water and electricity; and in the future, as those costs rise, then just as people are beginning to question the diversion of land to biofuels instead of wheat; what happens if we are more concerned with keeping our web servers running than our water and electricity? I'm going to go stock up on the candles.