The 80s is Now History

This is really just another excuse to mention BBC4's exemplary "In their own words" and suggest that you watch all 3 episodes on iPlayer before it disappears next Sunday or so.

I had a feeling that the 70s and 80s episode would be far less interesting than the previous two. However, perhaps because they had more footage to choose from, or because there was more linkages between history and literature during this period, it stood up well. We get McEwan, Rushdie and Amis Jr. in spades, of course, but their contemporary younger selves. Respectively earnest, mischievous and slightly prissy, which possibly reflects their books of that period, the show pulled out a great piece with Martin Amis appearing as Martin Amis in "Money" opposite Mel Smith, as well as a weird dramatisation of Rushdie over some blue-screen animation. Even better was the legendary footage of a leggy Selina Scott making a buffoon of herself by asking Booker judge Angela Carter (a) what she thought of the judges choices and (b) who she was; the other Booker highlights - Rushdie's anecdote of being invited to meet Indira Gandhi at Downing Street, and John Berger's giving away his prize money to the black panthers, were equally fantastic.

As a study in literature of the 70s and 80s, it was a little thin - the seventies hasn't worn well, after all - and a shame they hadn't anything of Doris Lessing on this episode, whose "The Good Terrorist" remains one of the best novels about the 80s - but it was great footage, nonetheless.

That the 80s is now history, no different than the 60s or 20s, seems strange, but is emphasised by the other worldiness of some of the footage, as well as a few perceptive comments. Thatcher had quickly gone from being ignored to being a mocked charicature. A little like George W. Bush twenty years later, the liberal intelligentsia's hatred for Thatcher meant that in novels of the day she was dismissed satirically, despite her dominant appeal to a certain element of the British psyche. If someone's not already done it, there's a clear essay to be written on depictions of Thatcher in fiction over the last 30 years. Songwriters like Elvis Costello and Morrissey mocked her, and took her seriously, in comparison. It's perhaps why the portrayal of her in Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty" received such attention. Yet if the Spitting Image-ish Thatcher of 80s novels is a dangerous reductionism, I'm not sure that the latter's revisionism, so centred on the monied England that she so appealed to, is any more valid.

Past Scrapings

As its a bank holiday, as good a time as any to go back through old writings, and start archiving things properly. It's a Herculean task - fifteen years of computer files, before I even look at boxes of pre-computer typescripts - yet, I'm trying to be my own "literary executor" - for if not now, when will I ever find the time? I recently read Jon McGregor's excellent "If nobody speaks of remarkable things" and was surprised that it was published as long ago as 2003. I was reading it as a new reader, yet its a work the writer probably let go of seven or eight years before, began on a decade ago. My "ancient" manuscripts may yet have an after life.

It's not that you just discover past fragments you hardly remember, but whole stories that you lovingly sent off to this magazine or that, but haven't read for a decade. I like these "past scrapings" of a literary lifestyle, but they also perplex me. Roads not travelled mostly, or, more often, travelled down a bit, then reversed away from. I've suddenly found a story "Last Train from Euston" that I remember well, but apparently never included in any of the photocopied story magazines I used to hand out to friends. I have a feeling its pre-2000, but can't be at all certain (as its been copied from one computer to another over the years.) Another story is sat on my computer in a half-finished version, yet I've a copy of the full story in print somewhere. It's like the file somehow got half erased, like digital termites got in and began eating it away. There are two or three stories of autobiographical youth, a genre I rarely think about - genre stories; fairy stories; travel stories. My collected works would be the size of a house!

Yet funnily enough, this slightly distant past - some of it seemingly a lifetime away - seems nearer than things I've started in the last year or two then neglected. Perhaps its a sense of distance, but I can recognise the writer I am then, easier than the one I am now. Going through old works allows me to reconstruct my own narrative - give it form - in a way that has some coherence to it. The future, in comparison, remains an open book.

Festival Season

This weekend is culmination of the "festival season." The late August bank holiday, a holiday without any religious or symbolic pretensions, has created it's own traditions. Manchester has Pride, Liverpool has the Matthew Street Festival and London has Notting Hill. Then there's music, with the double-venue event that is Leeds/Reading. Throw in a Rugby League final, the Grand Prix on tele, and the 3rd weekend of the football season (and the first before the international break), the culmination of Edinburgh's festival summer and a myriad of localised events, and it's almost like a national party. But whereas Christmas and Easter might have some kind of common thread, August bank holiday is random in the extreme. And, if you can't face the roads and the trains, then the stay-at-home weekend probably offers a level of calm that is only available when everyone else in the country is travelling to or from somewhere. Given that we're not all teachers or students it's a little odd that we have these "last party of the summer" rituals, but there's not much I can do about it.

It only seems appropriate then to share a poem that I wrote a couple of years ago from my recent Salt collection "Playing Solitaire for Money." Have a good weekend.

Festival Season

India’s gone to Glastonbury
For the first time
Packed Wellingtons and combats
Bikini top and Marlborough lites.

Her mother went twenty years ago
Now she’s queueing for centre court,
Paying tenners out for punnets,
Applauding Roger Federer.

Her ex-husband’s paid a fortune
To catch the Who at Wembley,
Then on to Silverstone,
£200 for a circuit;

And Andy’s borrowed money
From all his friends & family,
For a one man show at Edinburgh,
Mixing nudity and poker.

Dead Weeks, but Future Promises

Manchester in August. Nobody would write  a poem about it. It seems to be one of the wettest months, not only this year, but the last two or three. I'm hoping for an Indian summer. Having took a week off, I stayed in mostly, reading books, and recording music. These are the dead weeks of summer, and I look back a little on school days, or my long university holidays (youngsters: in those days they not only gave you a grant, but unemployment pay during the summer).  I wrote most of my music and stories during the summers, always something to do when you'd a pen or a typewriter or a 4-track to hand. So, not a bad time for it to rain, and for me to have some time to myself. If you can judge your state of mind by dreams then woke up this morning after dreaming I'd been to see an intimate Joni Mitchell concert in Albert Square, just her and her guitar and an audience of no more than twenty. I've woke up before now having dreamt a job interview in its entirety thinking "thank God, its over" only for it still to come, and in a particular piece of dream-engineering I learnt to drive, passed my test, etc. only to wake up as baffled by cars as when I went to bed. So a dream which finishes with a virtually private rendition of "Carey" and "Amelia" can be seen as some kind of psychic progress, I think. And if a week of solitude, poetry and music manifests itself in the wonder that is Mitchell's "Hejira" I should clearly do it more often.

But dead weeks won't last for long and come September everything will kick back in with vitality. First up, on Thursday 2nd September is Howard Jacobsen reading from "The Finkler Question" at the Anthony Burgess Foundation, just off Whitworth Street. My (and other people's) new favourite venue in town - I imagine it will be one not to be missed. A son of Manchester who seems to genuinely relish returning (as he did in fiction in "The Mighty Waltzer") it's certainly a new term event worth getting a new pencil case for.

For soon after, it's festival season. I'm reading from my new collection, alongside the estimable James Davies on Thursday 30th September at Pizza Express, as part of the Didsbury Arts Festival.  Not that we're the only poets or writers, reading that week. I'm sure I'll try and get to a few things, but particularly Nicholas Royle's "Nightjar Press" night, and a reading by Jon McAuliffe. You can download complete listings on the DAF website or find them on Facebook.

...then a couple of weeks to go before its Manchester Literature Festival, though my highlight would have to be the appearance of the wonderful American poet CK Williams at the Martin Harris Centre on 4th October. Anyone who loves poetry should make a beeline for this event. Williams, who I met, and saw read in Norwich two years ago, has a poetic sensibility that we rarely see on these shores. His collection of late middle age, "Repair" remains a particular favourite.The literature festival itself has the usual collection of the unusual - where literature  seems too staid a word for a diverse range of events, that, yes, are all somehow literary.  Its usually a horribly busy time of year for me, but I'm hoping that I'll get a few passes out.

So, a few random events for your diary, but heralding a fine literary autumn, rain or no rain.

The 20th Century Writer

BBC4's new 3-parter "In their own words" shows the best of the BBC (and BBC4). A whistlestop tour of twentieth century British novelists, the first show, last Monday, covers the interwar years - 1919-1939. The series, in conjunction with the OU, uses archive footage of writers, often - in this early episode - later in their lives, from the BBC's vaults. This is without exception wonderful stuff, an off-camera Graham Greene (he refused to be filmed), Christopher Isherwood in the US reflecting on his time in Berlin in the 30s, a beautiful few seconds of Virginia Woolf's considered thoughts on the English language, E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh and others. There's no George Orwell, as in a slightly Orwellian move, the BBC wiped every word of their most famous employee, and rather too much Barbara Cartland. The existence of footage clearly being the main driver for the choices, and much of it is wonderful, worth watching and re-watching for this alone. As an educational programme, it lacks any coherent narrative, and many of its assertions are questionable to say the least, but there's something visceral about seeing and hearing the voices of so many true greats. The 2nd episode is on Monday night, and it's also available on the iPlayer, and more information is available here, and, even better, you can watch the full interviews on the BBC's archive.

***

The 20th century novel was on a few minds this week with the death of the critic Frank Kermode. I know the name well, but I'm not sure I've got any of his books, or even read much of his work. Yet John Sutherland's great piece on him in today's Guardian makes me think I ought to.

Playing Solitaire for Money

I've spent quite a bit of the last few months preparing my first chapbook for Salt Publishing. The book, "Playing Solitaire for Money", is the 2nd in their new series of chapbooks, Salt Modern Voices, and as you can see from the picture, it's a handsome little thing. The book has 24 poems, and when I was first asked to submit a collection for this series, I had to give a lot of thought to what poems I'd choose, and how far back I'd go, for what is, to all intents and purposes a first proper collection.

So I've lived with the choices through the last two or three months of proofing, and I'm happy with the poems, and, as importantly, how they hang together. For a chapbook, I think its quite a substantial collection, and one I'll be more than happy to "take on the road" at readings over the next six months or so.

I really hope than anyone who has enjoyed this blog over the years, will take a look at the collection (more details on my writing website here).  "Little books" such as the Salt Modern Voices collections, have their own pleasures - one step up from the homemade - they seem to more accurately document the time and place of their publication than larger publications, that made have been the culmination of many years work.

I enjoyed putting the collection together and think it gives a good overview of my poetic practice, and includes many of my best poems. I've always thought that titles are important, and without an overarching concept, I always wanted to take a line from one of the poems. "Playing Solitaire for Money" is a line from one of the signature poems in the book, "My Monster", and seemed the correct title for a collection of poems that often plays with contradiction.

Beats Working

Strangely enough I'd never got round to reading Charles Bukowski's prose (I've a collection of his poetry somewhere, that I always quite liked). I never had enough interest to buy the books. I picked up "Post Office", ironically enough, in the Heart Foundation charity shop in Stafford earlier in the week, and having just finished one book, thought I'd give it a go. The story of Bukowski's 12 years working as a postal worker in California during the late 50s and 60s, its quite hard to understand its cult appeal. Perhaps this kind of demotic, beat prose, spoken straight to camera has become a de facto standard since it was published in the early 70s. It does read like a book that was pulled together from different scraps of life. There's a great sense of claustrophobia here. Bukowski's lead character, Henry Chinaski is another in that great line of American literary Henrys, an everyman - in this case a hard drinking, hard womanising everyman. He takes no shit from his supervisors, yet ends up staying in the job longer than anyone else, an immovable object. It's as if the beat dream of packing your bags and travelling finds its immediate endgame in Bukowski, a dead end job, a dead end life, because at the end of the day, if all you want is another bar, all bars are essentially the same. There's no glamour in Chinaski, even in his womanising, and you realise the writer was over 50 when the book came out, old enough to have fought in the war (he wasn't deemed fit for service), and two generations out from the hippies who were probably going to be his first readers. I think it's the "out of time" sense of the novel that gives it a lasting power, for there's no sense of optimism here - this is the harsh real hangover of an alcoholic's life. Reading about Bukowski, a bit like Carver, you warm to him, as a writer to his bones, who had enough talent to rise through against the obstacles. At the end of the book, despite its episodic nature, and its narrow parameters, its Bukowski's literary style, an extended anecdote like the funniest guy in the bar, and the warmth of his little-man-against-the-world schtick that gives it resonance. We've seen Chinaski since of course, he's the Dude in the Big Lebowski, he's every Micky Rourke character (and not just when he played Chinaski in "Barfly.")

Subjects for Poetry

Imagine you are an anthologist. The subject could be anything (and has been anything, I've seen anthologies for therapy, books of beasts, poetry about cinema...the list goes on), where do you start - with the poems or the idea?

Anthologies of nature poetry, religious poetry, poetry about children, poetry about death... these would probably be easy subjects, with most poets having written about most of these subjects over the years, and some poets being "specialist" nature poets or religious poets or whatever. A sensible anthologist might pitch a "poems of the city" book, (I'm sure there is one), but what about "poems about Manchester" (I'm not sure one's yet appeared, despite the number of poets based here - passing through here)?

As a writer you don't always choose your subjects, but sometimes your subjects choose you. In the collection I've got coming out shortly there are a number of "subject" poems (not all poems are so easily categorised) - a poem about the cinema ("Cinema"), a poem about festivals ("Festival Season"), and a poem about American literature ("Love and Death in the American Novel.") I'm not always that literal, and I'm not sure poets generally are.

I can't imagine writing a book of elegies, or love poems or nature poems, though I'm fond of the sequence and the longer poem. I admire writers who can focus their poetry on a particular subject, but I'm not sure I always like that approach, unless the poetry stands up to it. Prizes seem to be often won by themed collections - and a poet who manages the difficult trick of extracting a whole collection from a subject (even one as strong as love or death) probably wins them for having achieved this particularly difficult challenge. But a poem can also be a stand-alone object. Looking at recent poems I've written one about Cyprus (after going there) and one about Indonesia (after reading a newspaper article). It seems that there's always an element of chance, just as there was for Larkin when he caught a train journey safe one Whitsun, seeing the weddings taking place en route. Perhaps a poet has a keen antennae for the poetic subject, as well as the poetic image...and it can be a Georgian Techno Star (Don Paterson) or an inconsiderate snipping of a woman's hair (Alexander Pope).

Activity Holiday

A mid-August break and I'm not going anywhere; but I am doing things. Since my week in Norwich in June, I've hardly had time to process the creative thoughts from that week, so I'm wanting to spend this week being creative. It's not so easy to kickstart the creative engine in the summer months after a few weeks or months of disuse. There's so many half projects I need to pull together; quite a few ideas that have been left mouldering; and lots of the usual "I also need to find time to do that" stuff as well.

So, what's my methodology? Had a couple of days away already, and today has to be a clear the decks, get things nice and shiny kind of day. I'd like to have got up this morning and written several thousand words, but I'm not quite at that point yet. So, a bit of reading, a bit of wandering, a bit of sorting things out is in order. Later, I might even get my 8-track out and immerse myself in a bit of recording for a few hours.

Too many blogs and too many tweets and you know that I've not managed to achieve a thing...

My Own Rhythms

There have been a number of deadlines - either for specific magazines or competitions with specific themes - or more "open" but still requiring X number of poems, or Y number of lines. One by one I've missed them. I realise I should be more organised about this. Perhaps, like some kind of literary cost accountant, you could have Writings on the left of the margin, with Opportunities on the right. Ideally your writings should all be in for a competition or sent to some magazine, matching up at the end of the summer or year to a zero sum. An audit of your literary season comes up satisfactory then: 8 things written, 6 things published, 2 in contention.

Yet, it may not surprise you to know, these aren't the rhythms of the writer. I've been grazing the recent Granta Sex issue, and enjoying its irreverancies, though there's no way that - say - Marie Darrieusecq's story "Rousseau and the Pussycat" is her finest work, though it has some fine lines, and a neat little idea. You wonder? Was it already mildewing on the shelf when Granta came calling with a "we're doing a sex issue, you have to be in, Marie?" or was it written specially for it. Whether the extract from Tom McCarthy's "C" is about sex at all, or simply had to be in as an exclusive on the book is another matter. The perils of a theme of course. It can bring out the best of anthologist and writers; but also runs the risk of work that's not as good as it might be. (Though, at least with sex, there's going to be some fun trying.)

Yet, I'm not wanting to criticise the new-style fatter, livelier Granta - which is becoming, perhaps for the first time in years, a go to place for the most interesting fiction - rather to use it to illustrate that literature, despite its many practitioners goes on at its own pace. I've just read Isherwood's "Mr. Norris Changes Trains" - published in 1935, with all that we know since of the Nazi atrocities, it remains a remarkable book. We see Nazi Germany's demonic moth developing from the spent chrysalis of Weimar Germany, yet much of its power is perhaps from one we know happens after. I'm not sure there were many novels published in the mid-thirties which were so aware of what was going on. Yet, relevance doesn't mean greatness of course.

Publishing schedules seem to be going back, in some ways, to the rhythms of the 1920s, where books came out almost as soon as they were finished, marketing - in those days - being indistinguishable from publishing. A writer will now deliver a novel or a poem and see it in print six months, a year, or even longer in the future. Give it a fair wind - a prize, a good review, whatever - and it's after life lasts longer. The "next book" may never come, may be affected by the reception to the first, or may take two or three years, as that's the publicity cycle's requirements. Ironically, that bestselling genre writers can churn their books out (and perhaps have to) to a pre-determined schedule.

Back to writing: and I've been writing. I've also been thinking about writing, squeezing in the actual "stuff", though with a week off I'm hoping to do more than just squeezing. It's the thinking that has stopped me entering this competition or that, for on the left side of my margin I've got some more work to do - something a little more ambitious than a standalone short story - and the right hand side, well, I never was much of an accountant.

Clear by Nicola Barker

How is a writer to write about the very contemporary? It's an interesting question, and one that rarely gets answered in the history-centric subjects of much literary fiction. Reading "Clear" by Nicola Barker, I was surprised that it is now 6 years old, published in 2004, when it was longlisted for the Booker. It's still just about "contemporary" then - though it's narrator's interest in, and then boredom with the novelty that is the "iPod" just about stops it from being anachronistic. Barker's sizzling prose has always had a liveliness about it that echoes London writers like Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, and in this case, her young, male narrator, Adair Graham MacKenny seems reminiscent of say, "The Rachel Papers" and "Talking it Over."

Adair is an administrator working on the South Bank and so unable to ignore the summer of 2003 media event, of David Blaine, the illusionist, suspended in a glass box for 44 days. Like a medieval saint, this show attracts the bored, the curious, the lonely and the abusive. Adair stands in the crowd, chatting up women, one of whom, the distant and damaged Aphra, he becomes involved with. But it is not Barker's small cast of weird characters who dominate the novel, but Blaine in his box. Adair tries to get closer to the meaning of it all through copious readings from Blaine's biography.

If Houdini has been catnip for novelists for years, Blaine seems an entirely less interesting character. His illusions have a cynicism about them as well as a showmanship. In keeping with the age, Blaine is the central theme of his own piece. The fact is, even six years on, I had only the vaguest memory of the Blaine media-storm, perhaps overshadowed by that more recent study in boredom, Anthony Gormley's "One and Other." Written at speed following the Blaine stunt, its hard, from a distance of a few years, to see what drew Barker to this. The novel is called "Clear" and subtitled "a transparent novel", and it's an experimental work, full of digression, and with the thinnest of plots, that reminds one more of an Aldomovar movie or (it's nearest stylistic cousin) the scabrous media satire "Nathan Barley."
Barker does a great job of sketching a soulless lonely age, where nothing, not art, not work, not sex has any real meaning. There is love in the novel, but it is of a damaged kind - and the overwhelming emotion is the loneliness of the contemporary city, where we are strangers even to our work colleagues, housemates, and sexual partners, find more empathy in the blank celebrity of the Blaine publicity stunt.

It was an engaging read, and I realise I need to read more of Barker's recent work (particularly the epic "Darkmans") as she's one of our most interesting novelists. "Clear" is an oddity, it's central act already a piece of historical marginalia.

The Orthodox Marketing of Experimental Fiction

I've often wondered why literature hasn't learnt something from the success/hype of contemporary British art over the last decade or so. If there's not the equivalent of a literary unmade bed or pickled shark, perhaps there should have been. It's perhaps no surprise that its taken a writer steeped in artistic interventions, Tom McCarthy, to bring into the public eye the very idea of a British experimental writer. In her famous comparison of McCarthy and Joseph O'Neill, Zadie Smith posited these as two directions for the contemporary novel. (I didn't agree that these two novelists were actually doing so much that was different, simply approaching similar subjects in a different way.)

What has happened since, is that McCarthy's 3rd novel, "C", has been longlisted for the Booker even though it is only available to read from next week, and as a result, McCarthy is suddenly news, and his novel, and a discussion about it, are everywhere. Now signed to a "major" rather than tiny Alma Books (it appears that his second novel "Men in Space" may have been one he had prepared earlier), a very orthodox marketing campaign seems to have replaced any "guerilla" appeal to the blogosphere.

Amazingly it's 2 and a half years since I reviewed his debut "Remainder". I recognised it's European debt, calling his writing "taut, and unshowy", and that his response to our current "unknowable" world was one of "fascinated ennui." Its certainly not a realist novel, yet it inhabits a world that is more geographically accurate than, say, the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro.

My sense for "Remainder", and from much of the blogosphere interest in it, and McCarthy, was because it fitted a certain aesthetic drawn from writers such as Beckett, and which, to be fair, has been somewhat absent from British fiction for a while. (Though, I use the term British warily - surely readers of Kelman, Gray, Warner and even Welsh might baulk at being drawn in to that world.)

Last week we had a fascinating piece by McCarthy sketching the development of his new novel in the context of technological and artistic developments almost a century ago. Its a fascinating, if selective article, as it wasn't just the modernists, but late Victorians such as William Morris, and Edwardians like H.G. Wells who were most interested in how the technological age was changing both the world, and art. The Futurism exhibition at Tate Modern recently highlighted the electric charge of that period, yet like the imagists, the Futurists, didn't necessarily produce first rate art, for all their fascination with the electric light and the mechanical engine. Where McCarthy's piece is at its most interesting is where he talks about how a "technologically savvy sensibility might see (literature) completely differently: as a set of transmissions," - rather than as a work of self-expression. This is fascinating, and is also quite a subtle position, for it unhooks his work from modernism (which was nothing if it wasn't self-expression), and places it elsewhere. Where that "elsewhere" may be might be problematic. I already see literature absent from discussions of digital technology, arts, culture - even politics - and have a suspicion its to do with language. A poetic or descriptive language doesn't survive long in a technocracy.

In interview with McCarthy in the Observer today, is well worth reading as it reinforces the subtlety of his position. McCarthy gives good quote, but also he's unafraid to talk about his intellectual (re)sources. "The avant garde can't be ignored, so to ignore it – as most humanist British novelists do – is the equivalent of ignoring Darwin" says McCarthy, and it succinctly puts a point that I've often made about the head-in-the-sand quality of much English fiction (and poetry). Like all good writers, McCarthy is careful to map out his own canon - for him its Tristram Shandy and Cervantes as well as the modernists. It can be argued that a canon that doesn't include George Eliot, E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence isn't one that I'd subscribe to, (and I have no idea whether these are writers he would in/exclude), but I'm glad the argument is being had at all. (Just as Leavis was perfectly at liberty to leave Sterne out of his "Great Tradition.") At times like this you wonder if this is the critical-theory wars all over again...yet refreshingly, we now have writers like McCarthy, China Mieville, Alan Warner and others who have read theory, who have read philosophy.

Accompanying the McCarthy piece, William Skidelsky writes briefly about what this means for "experimental fiction?" Without having read the unpublished "C" its hard to know whether the book will fit into any such description. Tellingly he says that David Mitchell is "hardly an avant garde figure", though I'd say, and have said they are steeped in the tropes of post-modernism as McCarthy, to say the least. Mitchell, of course, has no aspirations to be a counter-culture figure. I think the problem is that the avant garde as it was defined in the post-war years is in itself a genre with its own orthodoxies. Are books like Sylvia Smith's "Misadventures", Graham Rawle's "Woman's World" or Magnus Mills "Three to See the King" "avant garde" novels for instance? What about Adam Thirlwell's recent "Miss Herbert"? Are is the term only to be used for counter-culture writers like Stewart Home?

The cross-genre book (whether its "Me Cheeta", "Elizabeth Costello" or "Schindler's Ark") has been a staple of publishing over the last two decades, whilst we've also had novels in verse, novels in email et al. The "novelty" is alive and well and probably living in a bestselling novel near you. Off-the-wall fantasias like "Pig Tales" or "Atomised" remain rare in British fiction however.

Reviews of "C" indicate it is a very different beast to the intricate but page-turning "Remainder" and as a reader with a facination for the years immediately before and after the Great War, I'm sure I'll find much of interest in it. Whether it's as modern and as innovative as Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier" (the first chapter of which appeared in Wyndham Lewis's "Blast") will be an interesting test of what those words actually mean.

(*Addendum: I've just read a chapter of "C" which was in last month's Granta Magazine, after having written this piece, and the chapter reminded me massively of "The Good Soldier" - with its sanatarium setting. Looking forward to the book immensely after reading this extract.)

Popular Fictions

I don't often read popular fiction, not out of snobbishness, but because I don't get that much time to read anything, and whether its the Time Traveller's Wife or Da Vinci Code it's quite a way down my wishlist. However, I've always enjoyed a well-written thriller, and I've had Stieg Larrson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" on my shelf for a while. Though it starts slowly, with too much exposition, and a rather dull opening to do with financial accounting fraud, it soon speeds up, and I can see why it's been successful. Not reading too much crime fiction, I couldn't really say how original or otherwise the novel is, but though intricately plotted, it felt very familiar. A cold case; a missing girl; and an unlikely hero (Mikael Blomkvist, a financial reporter rather than a P.I. or policeman). Of course the novel really comes alive when the girl with the dragon tattoo herself, Lisbeth Salander, comes on the scene. She's a brilliant creation, a hacker from the wrong side of the tracks who grew up in state care, and is still, in adulthood (in a detail that seems strange to British readers) under state guardianship. The story that Blomkvist investigates has everything - its a missing girl, Harriet Vanger, who has not been seen since the day she disappeared over 40 years before. Her family, the Vangers, are a major industrialist family, but also a pack of monsters. There's Nazism, mental illness, child abuse, and much more. What Larrson does, similar to the best crime novels, is hitch an issue onto a complex detailed story. In this case it is men's violence to women (and the original title in Swedish translates as Men Who Hate Women,) and the damaged Lisbeth is as much a part of that narrative as the awful Vangers.

I guess the book is so ubiquitous - and is already one film, in Swedish, and about to become another - that none of this is a surprise. Writers like Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton get namechecked throughout the novel, and Larsson was clearly writing in style that he knew well and loved. At times the writing is very prosaic, but it does zapp along at a pace, and with it's pacing, and keen sense of place and family I was reminded as much of Stephen King's storytelling as the detective genre. The grisliness, and action, when it comes, is told sparingly, rather than wallowed in, despite its horrible nature. The story of an undisclosed serial killer - a man who hurts women - going back over decades reminded me of James Elroy's masterly The Black Dahlia. Blomkvist, reporter on the investigative magazine Millennium, is not only endearing, but a hit with the ladies, with two women who have been abused, quickly finding themselves in bed with him. This, and Lisbeth's change from socially inept mystery girl to Blomkvist's articulate confidante, raised eyebrows, but as the pace cracked on, and Larsson trawled us round his large cast of suspects, like Poirot in a country house mystery, it's undoubtedly a good read.

Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Since his debut "Ghostwritten" David Mitchell's novels have dazzled. Perhaps culminating in the tour de force that was "Cloud Atlas" where it's Russian-doll story structure saw him as equally at home in any genre that he had a mind to take on. For a writer with such a strong and distinctive narrative voice, his ability to inhabit not only different genres, but different lexicons is far more than ventriliquism. "Cloud Atlas" was almost uniquely a critical and popular success, getting Richard & Judy "good read" status, as well as being lauded by literary critics.

Any publisher who asks his writers to repeat the same book time after time should be sat in a closed room with Mitchell's complete works for a re-education on what is possible. Following his novel about growing up in the 80s, "Black Swan Green," his fifth book tells a single story, and is set in a highly specific historical era. "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" sees a new administrator, Jacob, join the small Dutch settlement at Dejima, a portal into an otherwise closed Japan. Jacob arrives in 1799, his role to uncover the corruption that has taken place. Dejima is literally a portal, with Nagasaki all but closed to the foreign visitors, and the Japan that lies beyond it an unknown country, like North Korea today. The interpreters who translate from Dutch to Japanese are as much diplomats as linguists.

By giving us not one, but two unfamiliar worlds, the Dutch trading post, and the Japanese empire, Mitchell asks a lot of his readers, for there is little here that is familiar. A historical novel it might be, but his technique is similar to Hilary Mantel's in "Wolf Hall", immersing the reader from the start in the details of the situation. And similar to "Wolf Hall" this world we inhabit is not only a strange, and somewhat mystical one, but one of scarcely comprehensible savagery. From press-ganged sailors, to the half-caste offspring of Dutch traders with their Japanese concubines, everyone is some kind of prisoner. Whilst the Japanese state is forbidden and formidable, stratified by family names, Shogun power, and the desperate lives of poverty that many of it's people live in. And Dejima in 1799 is a quiet spot on a tumultuous planet, the beginning, remember of the Napoleonic empire. Jacob, as with the other crew and traders, has come to this far end of the earth to make something of his life. The world he has known is meanwhile collapsing behind him.

Yet, "Thousand Autumns" is more than just a historical tableau but a love story, for if Jacob is an outlier amongst the Dutch traders, the beautiful but scarred midwife Orito Aibagawa is unique amongst the Japanese. The only other women allowed onto Dejima are prostitutes, but she has gained permission to study under the Dutch doctor Marinus. If Jacob's falling in love with Orito is the key narrative driver of the novel, it also creates an impossibility for Mitchell, for the historical reality of Japan appears to offer no way that Jacob can help Orito. When Orito is spirited away to a possibly terrible fate, there is semingly nothing that Jacob can do, yet Mitchell's dexterity brings us a proxy in the equally lovelorn translator, who has already risked his life by not exposing Jacob's book of Psalms (all signs of Christianity being prohibited by the Japanese). The most beautiful and one of the most powerful scenes in the novel is when Jacob and Orito are able to have a short space of time together. Here, as in many other parts of the book, Mitchell's dazzling prose goes up several gears.

Yet, Mitchell is not without his surprises, and the impossible plot, simplistic as it is, carries on in unexpected ways. We join Orito in her new prison, and later we have the "Black Swan" of an English frigate appearing on the horizon, jolting this enclosed world into the main wave of European events. What it is impossible to convey in a review like this, is the sheer joy of reading this novel. If there are moments when Mitchell's flashiness seems too much for the material it's describing, the sense of immersion in a world of difference is so fantastically rendered that you wouldn't want it any other way.

When the book was featured on "The Late Review" the reviewers complained about the book being too cleverly written, overwhelming the story. Yet, the story is hardly there at all - other than to give a welcome narrative drive. Instead, Mitchell gives us a small cast of carefully drawn characters whose every move is under scrutiny, not just of us as readers, but of the world in which they exist. The horrors of that world, like in Hilary Mantel's Tudor England, are put clearly at the door of superstition and tradition. This is an enlightenment novel, where not only Marinus's teachings have given Orito a power to save many of the pregnant women under her care, but where, later in the book, Jacob's Dutch-Japanese dictionary has spread throughout schools in Japan.

Whereas the novel does plunder quite a number of tropes from magic realism, Mitchell is exemplary in being true to his world, so that even his denouements are perfectly considered for their possibilities. From its beautiful woodcut-style embossed cover (in the hardback), to it's intimately detailed portrayal of a world that was not just unknown to me, but might seem unknowable, to it's simple but powerful narrative, to Mitchell's linguistic extravagance, "Thousand Autumns" is a remarkable novel. Longlisted for this year's Booker, I think that as more readers encounter it's treasures it may well be unquestionably the book of 2010.

Overwhelmed

T.S. Eliot was wrong, it's July that is the cruellest month. Everyone off on hols or finished school or university, and I'm sat in half-strength office trying to finish off things from the last few projects, and kickstart the next few. All our European colleagues take a month off (a month!), July in Northern Europe, August in Southern Europe, and yet we don't. But it's not work that's overwhelming me such as the things that Manchester and elsewhere puts on to keep us busy during the summer months. I can understand all the out-of-school activities but this week I've clearly not found time to go to either the 24/7 Festival of new theatre writing OR the Manchester Jazz Festival. Last night there was what sounded like a fascinating performance - half jazz, half soap opera - at the RNCM. Instead I was in a packed Atlas bar with 350 or so of Manchester's digital community for the ever-popular Manchester Digital barbecue, drinking mojitos and catching up with old friends and colleagues. Then there's art - with a show tonight opening at CUBE gallery following on from last week's launch at Cornerhouse - and the various talks and similar surrounding it. The Manchester weather defies allcomers of course, and we barbecued under the threat of rain - though sheltered - and the sight of jazz fans chin stroking and head nodding but wet and bedraggled in St. Anne's Square is one of Manchester's yearly traditions. I'm reading a book, David Mitchell's "Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet", wondering if I'll get round to seeing "Inception" at the cinema (or more importantly finding a small child to take me to "Toy Story 3") and contemplating this year's Booker long list. My creative "to do" list includes writing up the various poems I've been writing on the bus on the way to work (I'm thinking of a collection similar to Frank O'Hara called "bus poems"), recording some of my poems for my new website, and recording some music. At some point, I think I'd promised myself that I'd start househunting, but unless one's delivered through my letterbox by Royal Mail I'm not sure when I'll achieve it.

Bookertime

I'm sure Bookertime comes earlier ever year. The (not so) longlist came out yesterday. Sans McEwan (a bit of a surprise, he's almost always on there) and Amis (no surprise there, he rarely made the list) it looks quite a vibrant list - though the longlist is in itself a bit of a strange beast. Sometimes I think its a way of ensuring that books that the publishing industry wants on there, can get a mention, even if they don't make the last six - or a way to reward some plucky independents, even if they've no chance of being chosen. This year, there's an absence of big names and plucky independents, so perhaps its just the best 13 books of the year (yeah, right), as chosen by this year's panel. Inevitably, the last six always looks a little less interesting, a bit like the England squad when you boil it down to the first team. Interesting to see Tom McCarthy on now he's on a big publisher (as if that matters...) with "C", which would be a nice winner if only because John Berger's win for "G" was so memorable all those years ago. (He gave the prize to the Black Panthers, I think I read.) I'm in the delightful throes of David Mitchell's new novel, which I'll blog about here shortly, and any list that it wasn't on would definitely have something wrong with it.

Lennon's On Sale Again

I don't go out of my way to get books to review on this blog, but when Vintage offered a copy of their reissue of John Lennon's "In His Own Write" and "A Spaniard in the Works" as a single lovely volume, I couldn't resist. I must have read these years ago, perhaps from the library, as I've never owned a copy. A mix of poems, short-short stories, scribbles and drawings they're almost unclassifiable - though would be instantly recognisable to any fan of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll or particularly Spike Milligan. It's the latter's "Puckoon" and "The Little Pot Boiler" from 1963 that they most resemble. The absurdist humour, madly random spelling and Joycean wordplay combine to create a little pocket book that, despite the occasional piece that seems dated, is still a joy to read and look at today.

What's mostly of interest of course, is what they tell us about the Lennon who had just become one quarter of this new pop sensation singing "She Loves You" and "From Me to You." Here's one of the earliest evidences of Lennon having wit and intelligence difference than the average musician. It's the art school student who made it in a band; but it's also a fascinating template for the Beatle's own forthcoming surrealism. Lennonism's like "A Hard Day's Night" and "Eight Days a Week" are all over these pieces, and Lennon was clearly writing a superior kind of nonsense long before "I am the Walrus"'s psychedelic verbosity. It wouldn't take long for the intelligent wit of these two books to find their way into the Beatles' songs.

The 2nd book, "A Spaniard in the Works" has longer prose pieces than the first, and is a little more acerbic if anything, but nothing here is too serious. Clearly when he first saw Yoko Ono's pop art installations he recognised a kindred sense of humour.

The Beatles are so familiar that it's always a shock to encounter them in an unfamiliar form, and though these two books have been available for over 40 years, the reissue, in the year when Lennon would have been 70, seems entirely appropriate. Who can not smile to read how "Harassed Wilsod won the General Erection with a very small marjorie over the Torchies." In 2010, I think we can all be a little wary of small marjories, and a little worried about the Torchies.

Disappointment Prizes

There are, I think, too types of disappointment. The disappointment of hope, and the disappointment of inevitability. Of the two, the first is the worst, but I'd take it every time. Let us take the disappointment of inevitability first. This is where the world is as we expect, and because of that expectation we should be contented, and many people are. It is the town where it always rains or the resort where it always sunny, or "My Family" or "The One Show" or Andrew Marr or Kasabian. You will never be truly disappointed, because there is so little other than the expectation. The hope is that there will be an above-average episode of "My Family" or a Kasabian record that doesn't sound like a Primal Scream b-side, or Andrew Marr asking a difficult question. It is a shooting fish in a barrel disappointment.

The first type of disappointment is worse: the disappointment of hope. Because it comes with a possibility that the world might change. It's Ghana vs. Uruguay, it's the 2nd Elastica album, it's Saxondale, it's Michel Houellebecq's novels after "Atomised." But these are merely aesthetics - the real difference between the two types of disappointment is exemplified by Prizes. This week, we have the announcement of shortlists for the Forward Prize for Poetry and the Mercury Prize for music. There's something disappointing (the first kind) about Seamus Heaney on the first, and Paul Weller on the second. It doesn't matter whether either book or album is good, bad or indifferent, since there is nothing, I think, new or surprising that either Heaney or Weller will come up with. However "good" these books or records are they are the product of artists for whom "good" no longer has meaning. I've never read or listened to much by either, and so I think I just feel a little bit of tiredness when I see them on a shortlist. It would be easy for someone to say "give them another chance", that it's more "me" than "them", but it's not like I've never read/listened to them.

I much prefer the possibility that I might like something... that I will be challenged, that my expectations will be "met". I've still a strange desire to listen in full to what may be the worst record of all time, Duran Duran's covers album "Thank You" if only because their version of Public Enemy's "911 is a Joke" is so remarkably unexpected - a bad record, but an interesting bad record. I know that a book of Patti Smith's poetry interests me more than a new Seamus Heaney - because I approach it without expectation. Like when Marie Osmond recites a native American poem on television (preserved on the CD of "Lipstick Traces") or T.S. Eliot comes up with "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," things being merely "good" or "bad" are rarely as fascinating as things being "different."

This years Mercury list is a middle-of-the-road collection of worthy, but probably uninteresting albums, that seems a shock reaction to the poor sales of last year's Speech Debelle; whilst the Forward list maybe had to have the next collection from Heaney who won the prize with his last one, if only to generate column inches. I've enjoyed the latter's essays and the former's recordings with the Style Council, but that's not how either of them prefers to be remembered. I praise by slight damning. I'm not going to buy records or books by artists I'm indifferent to just to change my opinion, not when there's so many lovely books and records out there - and to be fair to the Forward, it's sister list of "first collections" always opens up names that I want to look out for.

I choose hope over inevitability every time, and I'm trying to be honest about it - though honesty has it's limits. I wrote this late last night - and looking at it in the cool light of morning I was a little barbed, a little more damning than is strictly necessary, so I've rewritten the post slightly than the one that Jim Murdoch comments on below. There are plenty of poets and musicians who I'm indifferent to, and I don't particularly want to write about indifference - but it must be possible for an artist, for a critic, for a blogger to mention likes and dislikes. Proust and Joyce met at a party and famously said to each other, "I know who you are, but I haven't read you." It might disappoint the students of modernism, but it's an anecdote that delights me. Better not to have read a great poet, than be underwhelmed by him, I guess.

This Week in Manchester

I’ve had a busy couple of weeks since coming back from Norwich, so it was nice to attend a couple of more casual literary events this week. Yesterday I was at Oxfam’s Oldham Street emporium to hear short readings from Adele Geras and Nicholas Royle, two of the judges in their Oxfam Short Story Contest. It was a nicely civilised affair for what was a nice civilised competition. The winner and two runner ups were all asked to read a few lines at the end, which, given that they didn’t know they’d won until a few minutes before, indicates what a nicely informal event it was. For the rest of us, there was wine and truffles, and even a little literary quiz, which, to make up for not being a literary winner, I’m pleased to say I won. A lifetime of imbibing literary trivia has not been in waste! The night before, the event was even more informal – a gathering of contributors and others in Common bar, to launch the first issue of “3030 Magazine”, a slim, but pleasing-to-the-eye cultural magazine, that was given away free on the night. Though the first issue appears to be put together by a group of likeminded friends, they are open to submissions. I liked the feature on “where did you get your name?” answered for bands, club nights, record labels etc. and any magazine which has something nice and smelly inside (because smell evokes memory) has to be applauded.

It must be the start of the summer holidays as this weekend there's ample things to kids of all ages to do in Manchester. I'm looking forward to the Zombie invasion of Eccles shopping centre, and Hannah Nicklin's "The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You", part of the impossible to describe Hazard MMX festival - venues around town. All of this might mean I don't have time for the new exhibition at the Cornerhouse, the Future Artists picnic at Zion, and even A Certain Ratio tomorrow night at Fac251. I think I might treat tomorrow as an urban festival, and see where I end up!

The Modern Man

I can't remember where I read it, but someone once said that the European nihilist closes the window and shoots themself, whilst the American nihilist opens the window and shoots whoever they see. At the time, I remember thinking, that the English nihilist probably sits at home listening to Joy Division and the Cure. How wrong can a person be?

It is hard to know where to start in the case of Raoul Moat. If his death seemed likely, it wasn't inevitable. My sister lives nearby the chip shop he robbed, and for a week she could hear the police helicopters overhead and kept the children inside. The "risk" might seem minimal, absurd, but here was a mad man with a gun on a rampage. The involving of the public and TV seemed a perfectly sensible decision when he was on the run, but became terrifying when we were sat there like Bird Watchers waiting for a man to kill, be killed or be caught. It's less than a month ago since we saw the terrible rampage of another killer in Cumbria, so inevitably, prevention was better than cure.

I thought, in the Cumbrian case, that here was something of male disappointment - a man in his fifties, not, like so many of his country, in a position of power and affluence, but someone with debts, with broken families, almost past the midlife crisis and calling time on things. There's something wrong here - I thought - something wrong with that generation of men. I've seen it with others, bitter, twisted, divorced...

...but then this, and Raoul Moat is younger than me. He's not yet 40 and yet his horizons have reduced. This is something new I think. This is Thatcher's children gone wrong. That Paul Gascoigne, at 43, my age, turned up, seems absolutely appropriate. In an non-spiritual age there's always celebrity, there's always alcohol, there's always death. Moat, we will find out more about over the next days, weeks and months. So far, it's been unedifying enough. Yet its not just his macho cliches - a bouncer, with a young girlfriend, with a gun and the ability to use it - that freaks me out, but the acceptance that seems to come with this. His friends standing by him. A culture that seems to accept his dismal world view as being acceptable. Behind it all, the horrible lies that lead to a culture of domestic violence. This sort of man should surely have spent the last few weeks with better things to do than wanting to hunt down his ex-girlfriend and her new lover. Shouldn't he have been watching the football? Surely that's a matter of "life and death."

What stays with me, apart from the distaste, the disgust at this dreadful thug's sentimental sense of righteousness, is how awfully pointless it all is. In Will Self's "The Book of Dave" the writer does what all good writers do, and imagines a certain future, and Dave Rudman is not so far removed from Raoul Moat. Self has hit upon a character that is capable of scaring us - a self-righteous misanthrope who is both a macho charicature and sentimental in the extreme - I didn't expect him to exit. Men who have lost their girl and their children do not try and grab them back, but try and destroy what's left of that bond out of sheer hurt. Moat is Rudman made flesh, scarily. His long letters to the police and his girlfriend a strange articulation of that hurt; his own "Book of Dave."

The modern man was not supposed to be like this. In the iconic episode of "Cracker" where Robert Carlyle plays a divorced Liverpool fan, mourning for his father and angry with the police following still raw memories of Hillsborough, Jimmy McGovern wrote into existence a template for this man. Yet Carlyle's character had motive. He was destroyed as well as being destroyer. Moat and his premeditated, nihilistic helter skelter of destruction this week - leaving two dead (himself included), two injured, and many more scarred - seems the worst kind of narcissism. Guns are hard to come by in the UK - yet he found one hours or days after being let out of jail. On the radio this morning I heard an ex-girlfriend talking of the violence he inflicted on her, and a friend of his dismayed at his passing. How can one untangle the apparent attraction of this dismal nonentity who, in his mid-thirties, saw life as only a dead end, who was unable to take responsibility for his savage action?

Poetry Olympics

One of the most interesting things Carol Ann Duffy has done since becoming laureate is her curated portfolios, commissioning a range of poets to write about a particular subject, and yesterday, to coincide with the World Cup finals, saw a collection of poems about sport. Instead of the Laureate dashing off a single poem to commemorate an occasion, you therefore get a range of voices and subjects. Although the poets featured are quite a conservative bunch, there's some interesting subject and some good poems.

I'm not so convinced that sport and poetry are obvious bedfellows, and it's clear from some of the poets' responses to the subject, that for some poets it's the first time they've thought about sport since cowering at the back of the changing rooms during compulsory sports day, but that aside, it's worth spending some time with.

Carol Ann's offering, "The Shirt" is a nice idea - millionaire footballer not feeling worthy of wearing "the shirt" - let down by a throwaway last line that will probably get a laugh at Manchester readings. Football isn't as ubiquitous in this selection as in the sports pages, but does feature in the best poem here - Ann Gray's "The Wonder of You" - where the writer clearly understands the passions of supporting a particularly club, and uses these passions to investigate the complexities of belonging.

But, as Duffy says in her introduction, it is cricket that has been most beloved of English poets, perhaps because both English poetry and cricket are ever prone to a certain kind of sentimental nostalgia. Kit Wright's "The Roller in the Woods" is, as she says, a fine poem, but it's emotional canvas would be instantly recognisable to Betjeman or Larkin. And if there's nothing here quite as humorous as Billy Bragg's classic line, "I never made the first team, I just made the first team laugh," I liked the idea of these poets stretching their talents to address a subject matter that they may not have previously tried. On the weekend when a new team will win the World Cup, and the aesthetes of the Dutch and Spanish teams are all capable of what hyperbolic commentators may well refer to as poetry, the poets here have done a nice job in redressing the balance.

Problems with Paywalls

There's an interesting article in today's Sunday Times about Tom McCarthy, whose 3rd novel "C" is out in August. I would usually link to it, but of course, the Sunday Times is now behind a paywall. There's plenty I'd like to comment on about the article, but I'd have to laboriously paraphrase the various quotes and arguments, which would not be at all like reading the article. I could, I suppose, sign up to the Paywall (I'm reading the paper copy here) and then copy large chunks into my blog, and we could have a nice little debate about Tom McCarthy and whether or not he really is so different than the "mainstream" writers. We could also, I suppose pass on information about McCarthy word-of-mouth, like happened when his first novel, the admirable "Remainder" was published first by Paris art publishers Metronome press, and then by Alma Books. (I note that he is now with Jonathan Cape, though this isn't explained.) McCarthy's book was massively promoted by a number of blogs and bloggers, and was a definite word of mouth mini-hit. He probably doesn't need the Sunday Times article anyway.

Anyway, what it makes me wonder is this an unexpected consequence of the Paywall - that it might become less important for writers (etc.) to be mentioned in the Times, or by being brought to a paying (therefore "discerning"?) audience whether it will help. Oh, I've bought the Times online, therefore I may as well buy the new Tom McCarthy novel. "Hey, I was in the Times yesterday," you might say, and then rather than link to it from your twitter or blog, you...can do nothing. Perhaps the Times will start letting its old content escape from the Paywall? I'm not sure. I'm not sure I care. Okay, most publicity is good publicity etc. and I'd love you to be able to read and comment on the McCarthy article, the fact that you can't, seems perhaps more important than the monetarising of the Times' website. One of the great joys of the last few years has been to read something in a newspaper on or off-line and then pass the details on to other online readers and use it as a catalyst for debate. Not so relevant to news content, but to premium cultural content it seems vital.

Back to McCarthy - in the piece by Robert Collins, Collins states that "McCarthy is no conventional novelist. His friends are visual artists. He hasn't read anything by McEwan or Mitchell." It's interesting that David Mitchell is now classed in the "mainstream," despite the form and language of his novels being probably far more unconventional than "Remainder". Something I'd want to put up for debate on a blog. I liked "Remainder", didn't read (or read much about, his second novel "Men in Space") and look forward to "C", (in that great tradition of literary books novels one letter titles, "G", and "V"), but wonder whether McCarthy is replacing one form of accepted thinking, the "realist" novel, with another, the familiar tropes of contemporary art, critical theory and late 20th century avant-gardeism. After all, according to Collins the new novel "brims with literary allusions and symbols...based partly on Alexander Bell...and one of Freud's case studies." Not so different one thinks then our history-obsessed mainstream, in other words. How Collins can think that in the hands of David Mitchell the novel has "regressed almost completely to its realist origins" is another point for discussion.

All of this is in line with the context created by David Shields' contentious book "Reality Hunger" and various responses to that. In other words, the contemporary literary debate is no longer in the pages of the LRB or wherever, but spread across media and publications, over a period of time. In it's lowering of the Paywall I'm wondering if the Times is withdrawing entirely from this discussion, a veiled land of which we know little, very like the Japan of David Mitchell's latest novel.

(* by the way, there's no reason I singled out McCarthy from today's Times, except that he's both an interesting novelist and an interesting case study in terms of debating the future of the novel - and it was only when I started thinking I should blog about some of the assertions in the piece that I realised that I could, but that half of the argument would be missing, invisible - which come to think of it, is quite a Tom McCarthy moment.)

Worlds Literature Festival 2010

I will be blogging about the Worlds Literature Festival in Norwich all of this week. This year's festival, and associated "literary salon" has a theme of "educating the imagination." Bringing around 40 writers and other literary professionals and academics together from all over the world, with this year a sizable contingent from both South Africa and Australia, it's a unique experience, beloved of writers who are looking for something different from the usual Festival experience. There are a series of public events, as well as the "private" sessions of the salon. For the 3rd year I'll be blogging about the latter, to give a flavour of the discussion and create an observational record, without betraying any of the confidences of the room.

The blog posts will appear on the Writers Centre Norwich website, and I'll include the links to them as they appear rather than replicating them on my own blog. Anyone in or about Norwich there are literary events each night, which are open to the public.

For my own part I'm so pleased to be able to contribute to the event, to meet such a diverse range of writers, and to return to Norwich and UEA, where each visit to date has been an absolute pleasure. This week, we're also priviliged to be visiting Snape Maltings in Aldeburgh, a place, as a Benjamin Britten fan, I've long hoped to visit.

Day One: Imagining "the public good"

Day Two: Scanning for the Imagination

Day Three: The Civic Imagination

and finally...

Three Readings in Norwich

Events, boy, events

It’s dangerous starting a blog post on a train – as chances are you’ll be cut off in your prime. The “cloud” is fine as a play to store our digital debris, but as a real time replacement for the computing power in our hands it’s not there yet. My first PC, a Dan 486, cost north of a grand, and I wore it into the ground within three years, only the last bit of which I had the internet on. It seemed a remarkable machine compared with the 2nd hand Apricot I’d written my first novel on, if only because it had an integral hard drive. Somehow, this technology, which can now be found at the heart of every tiny USB storage device, seemed to make a remarkable difference to our productivity. You switched off the computer, and, on switching it on again, your work was still there. This was 1994, not some ancient past.

So, a computer once could exist without the internet of course, yet I feel almost incapable of using one now, when it’s not connected. The next generation portable devices – iPad, Streak, ebook reader etc. – all have myriad connectivity options, but we’ve become nodes in a network – or at least, our outer-self, that collaborative, communicative, networked, human interaction that is, outside of hermits and loners, so much what we are, now comes requiring electricity and a connection – not to the world – but to other connections.

In our newly acquired nodal state we are not yet our machines, but we are, I think, visioning ourselves as “lesser”, when we haven’t those machines. The ease in which we write, communicate and publish are new. The act as well as the content of writing used to have cost and meaning. These days, much less so. Our future historians will have a treasure trove of content to take from, but will they able to make much of it? Anyone who works in a large corporation knows that the majority of data, is now machine, not human generated. Everything from our email signatures, to our payslips, happen without as much as a casting eye.

Elsewhere in the world, these luxuries are not yet there, and I sometimes think that like the gatherers in Golding’s “The Inheritors” we might yet be superceded; Visigoths at the gate. Martin Amis, speaking in Paris, questions Britain’s role in the world. He finds it difficult to get involved in politics, as he sees them as low in meaning, representing our diminished standing. In a wide-ranging article in last week’s Guardian, Geoff Dyer talks about how it is non-fiction that is describing our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not fiction writers.

Amis has always been happiest (and wrote better) under some cloud of existential dread or on feeling he is at a revolutionary point in history. For the west, most of us are as connected to such large forces as war and terrorism, as David Foster Wallace predicted a few years ago, in a signature essay, where he sees the future writer getting our inspiration second-hand from television and other media. In the age of professional armies it is no surprise that it is professional (embedded) journalists who might write the definitive first person accounts of stories in foreign places. Besides, a journalist now is no longer a neutral observer, but as likely to be a targeted combatant. The number of dead journalists in Iraq is shocking. If we see the Second World War through Heller, Mailer and Vonnegut, it’s worth recalling that they were returning soldiers from conscript armies. Many novels and poems lie dead and unwritten in the battlefields of Europe.

But isn’t this talk about “big events” a return to the arguments that belittled women’s fiction as being “domestic”, or prefers a history of “great men?” Not to refute Dyer’s article (it is more specific and nuanced than that) but what I know about the Belgian Congo, Trujillo’s Dominican Republic or Irish independence, comes from novels; Kingsolver, Diaz and Barry respectively. However, none of these subjects were ones that mattered to me, or I was part of; it was the writer and writing that made them matter.

Yet the events of our time are important; and they have literary importance; yet a fiction not experienced is less of a draw, somehow, than one where the author has some intimate connection. “Money” and “London Fields” are so good because of Amis’s fascination with both the decadence of the 80s, and it’s apparent counterpoint, impending nuclear disaster. It’s surprising to me that there are so few novels that have looked back at 1968 in any real and meaningful way. It seems that a generational shift happened then, which legitimised a certain kind of radical protest, yet artistic statements looking back on that time seem piecemeal unsatisfactory. Christopher Ecclestone will play John Lennon in a BBC 4 drama this week, Amsterdam Hilton, Yoko One and all. I think it will be an interesting period piece. There are few books (novels or otherwise) that have the power and ambition to follow through actual, real consequences as does Roth’s masterpiece, “American Pastoral.”

The novels of our 21st century crises surely cannot use the Twin Towers as much more than a backdrop, because we weren’t there. I can imagine a contemporary Iraqui-written novel that could do much more. Though whether writing ever flourishes in a warzone is a matter for discussion. I’ve just been reading Coetzee’s “Summertime” and one of it’s aims, I think, is to talk about a period and place – South Africa in the mid-1970s – which, given the momentous history that followed, may seem an irrelevance. Not all of us are there at the great points in history – some of us live our lives in the times in between. I’ve recently written a poem about what I perceive are my generation – now in their early forties – too young for punk, too old for acid house – we watch “24 Hour Party People” vicariously, having not lived close enough to that flame.

I am spending this week amongst writers, listening to writers, talking to writers. Our theme is the “education of the imagination” and I’m pleased that at least one of the sessions covers the political. In a week of an austerity budget; at a time when ideology seems redundant, and political ambition is stilted, I sense that literature clusters around large events because it makes it easier to explain literature’s relevance. Yet it is life, our own place in our shared histories, and the ongoing narrative which in reality absorbs the writer. A writer can be present at the fall of the Berlin Wall, but if he doesn’t understand that wider narrative, what, one wonders, has he been doing?

Home and Away

If you're in Manchester this week I'd recommend the launch of new books from my friends at If P Then Q, in Odder bar, opposite the BBC, listen to and buy new work by Lucy Harvest Clarke, Geoff Huth, Joy as Tiresome Vandalism and Tom Jenks. Tastefully scheduled to offer avant garde poetry solace or celebration following Eng-er-land's final group game against Slovenia. I'm not that hot on Slovenian poetry, so lets hope England play Joe Cole and achieve a little bit better with the rhythm and metaphor than last night against Algeria. Luckily, there's a crack in the (Dr. Who) universe, and any memories of that game have already slipped through it.

However, I've an away fixture this week as I'll be meeting with friends old and new at Writers Centre Norwich's Worlds Literary Festival. I'm looking forward to hearing some fascinating readings and having some great conversations. Like last year, I'm intending to be blogging from the festival, and will link to any posts from here.

Burgess/Hill

No, not a town in Sussex, but a way of conflating two things I wanted to "blog" about. On Wednesday I went to the launch of the Anthony Burgess Foundation. Astonishingly, given these straitened times, we now have a physical presence for the memory of Anthony Burgess in the centre of Manchester. With a cafe, performance space - and behind the scenes, archive and study space - the IABF (the "I" is suitably enough for "International") launched with a recital of some of Burgess's music, and the event was packed. I remember around the turn of the century talking to someone from the English faculty at one of our universities and saying "If I ever did a PhD I'd probably choose someone like Burgess..." and been told, "They wouldn't let you, they don't rate him." Thankfully that attitude has changed, and a lot is to do with the foundation being there to promote his memory, and, as importantly, the interest in him from abroad. A linguist, a polymath, Burgess may have had Manchester roots, but he was truly a global citizen as at home in Italy or New York as in England. Seeing shelves full of his many, many books, you get a genuine sense of a writer with an "oeuvre." That we use the French word for "a body of work" says it all really.  The new space will be having a range of events on over the next few months, and I'm sure I'll be mentioning them when they happen.

The absurd farrago when Ruth Padel jockeyed for position to become "Oxford Professor of Poetry" last year, was put into absolute perspective yesterday when Geoffrey Hill was voted into the post. Wikipedia says "In 1950 he was admitted to Keble College, Oxford to read English, where he published his first poems in 1952"... and pretty much ever since he's been a powerful presence in English poetry, again, renowned outside of his country. One wonders how on earth it took so long? The Guardian got out of it's Russell Brand worshipping hubris to actually have a lead article in G2 on "what is poetry for?"  A reprint of Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading might have done a better job, but there were interesting comments from George Szirtes and Don Paterson, even if the overall tone of the article reduced to that "page v. performance, commercial v obscure" set of cliches that bedevills English poetry.

But looking for the links to the article, I also saw the sad news that the great Portugeuse poet, and Nobel Laureate, Jose Saramago, has passed away. A sad day for European letters.

At Chets

Last night I had a lovely evening at Cheetham's music school in the centre of Manchester. It was the first time I'd been there, and the reading was in the old part of the building, a beautiful stone hall, surrounded by cloisters. It's a few years since I've seen Simon Armitage read. He's still got that 80s indie band haircut, and a warm, if downbeat tone to his voice; poetry remaining one of the few parts of society that is decidedly "unspun." Looking at the poems on the page of his new collection, "Seeing Stars", they appear to be almost prose poems, long dramatic monologues. He wrote many of these whilst working on his translation of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", and having had to follow the formal rules in the latter, was looking for a poetry without rules as a counterpoint. Yet hearing him read, they're not so much of a departure to the poems that made him famous. If his poetry has always been engaging through it's sense of anecdote and observation, the skills that have made his poetry stand out, are the muscularity of his language, and the slightly surreal take on the world that he's always pulled out of even the most mundane situations. In the new poems, the surrealism has reached new heights, and there's plenty of absurd juxtapositions that can recalls a poet like John Ashbery. It seems unlikely that Armitage has been reading Ashbery, however, his absurdities seem to be far more English in tone - perhaps that strand of absurdist comedy that you goes from Lewis Carroll through Monty Python to Vic and Bob. The poems are full of little joys, as Armitage's keen eye for contemporary life is heightened by his willingness to avoid the merely everyday, and after reading the first line of one poem, he stops, looks up, says "this book is full of great first lines", and reads us a few. When he reads a poem about picking up Dennis Bergkamp (the footballer who notoriously wouldn't fly to European games), it begins a little like a pub anecdote ("I had that Dennis Bergkamp in the back of my cab once" you can imagine someone saying), but ends with an absurd litany of other Dennis's that he has driven around., ending with Dennis Thatcher, and a pointed remark about the devastation that Margaret Thatcher delivered to South Yorkshire.

There's not such a wide difference between these new poems and the ones that Armitage jumped on the scene with all those years ago - and he reads another football poem, from an early book, as if to emphasise the connection. Armitage sometimes seemed a lone voice from a generation that was otherwise not being published, now, of course, there are many poets younger than him, who have reached some sort of prominence - yet his example, a willingness to see in pop culture the very "stuff" of poetry remains refreshing. I had to smile when one of the poems mentions a Microdisney concert - a deliberately absurd choice, for Microdisney (my 3rd favourite band of the time behind the Cocteau Twins and the Smiths) remain forgotten, a connoisseurs choice.

Armitage Week

Well, it certainly seems that this week is Simon Armitage week. Awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours, he seems a little young for a poet to be receiving it. Surely his best poetry should be long behind him, and he's now being honoured for his services to, I don't know, younger poets, railway stations, animal charities etc. Not seen the citation, but imagine it's his highly imaginative and commendable work with underprivileged groups in society that has elevated him so soon; and, in the age old question of whether or not you should accept such an honour, it surely helps if you are trying to drum up more public funding/bring poetry into institutions where it is absent.

Though I don't know Armitage personally, I imagine that this is far from being the most important thing on his mind this week, as he'll be reading from his new collection "Seeing Stars" at Chetham's in Manchester on Tuesday night. A free event, open for all, it's an imaginative choice of venue, and though I've now got four distinct things on that evening, the Armitage/Chets combination will hopefully swing it and I'll make it along. If Armitage's poetry has for some time been straying from its observational roots, the new collection sees him in entirely new trajectories of prose poetry, that looks as if he's bringing his various mixed media experiments into his mainstream poetry. Of all contemporary poets, he's always seemed most attuned to the various methods that both Hughes and Auden kept their core writing fresh.

There's a World Cup on, of course, more of which later, I think, as the pre-tournament hype (excessive) is now morphing into the first round hype. England v USA drawing may well be perfectly acceptable for both sides in the long run; yet so feverish is the fever pitch round England these days, that God only knows which new levels of hysteria it will have to uncover if we actually reach or go beyond the expectations (quarter final.)

The week's other literary event is the launch of the Anthony Burgess Foundation, which has moved to a brand new premises near Oxford Road, providing, particularly at the time that Central Library has closed, a valuable new venue for literary and related events in the city. Having had the pleasure of going to the Portico Library a few weeks ago, and hearing that the refurbishment of Gaskell house on Plymouth Grove is coming along nicely, I'm getting a welcome reintroduction to the city's most venerable buildings. Perhaps the coming "age of austerity" is focusing minds on past successes. This is one kind of nostalgia I'm happy to embrace.

High Noon

A writer likes to be remembered, recalled, I'm sure. Twice in the last week the name Jeff Noon has cropped up. "Where is he?" "I loved Vurt". "Where's the great contemporary Manchester novel? What about Jeff Noon?"

Back in the day, City Life (RIP) released two short story supplements (here and here) of the best writers in Manchester, with a couple of newcomers to add spice. I was one of the newcomers, but amongst the more established writers was Jeff Noon. In that post-acid house post-Trainspotting era he came up with some superior cyberpunk SF dystopias - "Vurt", "Pollen" and "Automated Alice" - that were bestsellers, but also had a bit of northern urban grit. His cyberspace was very centred on streets and districts of South Manchester, like some warped literary episode of "Cracker." Not since "North and South" had someone made Manchester such a strong character in a novel.

For personal reasons, I'm assuming, Noon went down to live in Brighton - which is probably as devastating a statement on Manchester as any: the city can't keep it's best sons (and daughters - two women I know are moving even now). Whilst contemporaries of his like Dave Haslam remain embedded in the Manchester scene, such as it is, Noon has disappeared from our consciousness. The "web" - which he was an early writerly conversant with - is almost silent on his latest works. After four well-received, best selling books, there was a sense of diminishing returns. Noon without Manchester didn't seem right, and the books disappeared as well - perhaps never quite as successful outside of Manchester as they were in. 2001's "Needle in the Groove" is the last I remember in the shops and an Amazon search shows his books mostly out of print - copies available online from anything from 1p to over £100. His work became increasingly experimental, and his audience presumably evaporated with it. A web-based collaboration, 217 Babel Street, is the only near contemporary work - giving a sense he's still writing.

"Trainspotting" and the books that came in its wake, including anthologies like "Disco Biscuits" were always more hyped than was applicable, but looking back I wonder if Noon, Blincoe et al (and remember that Manchester's Sarah Champion edited "Disco Biscuits") were as close as Manchester has ever got to creating a literature to match its impeccable music scene. "Vurt" was published by Manchester start up press "Ringpull" that aimed to be a commercial success, and for a while succeeded. If it was all a bit seat of the pants it was at least consistent with the city's ethos.

Where, a friend asked, is Jeff Noon now? I can't remember when he was last reading in the city. Like bands playing their classic album live, I get the feeling he'd be very welcome now, whatever he chose to read. Come back Jeff Noon, we miss you.

Paradox of Poetry

There seems a paradox to being a poet; to writing poetry. For though it is a perfectly malleable form, it's also not capable of doing everything - or at least not everything well. The paradox is there in prose as well, but you can get "poetic prose" that can be as breathtaking as anything in the best poem. Poetry, it seems, is an art of abstraction, yet - again, paradoxically - it aims to be precise in a way that other forms aren't. I don't, I think, write poetry to document the quotidian but to find a response to something that can't be said out loud, or  in a purely linear way.

Yet, in many ways, writing poetry, which I've always done - since seven or eight years old - has other functions as well. It's an outlet for instant emotion; it's a way of capturing sadness - and elation - in a state of permanence, rather than losing those emotions to memory; it's about a certain musicality of words, that prose can achieve, but is better when it does not. It used to be said that poetry was a young man (or woman)'s game - but I'm not sure that can be true these days, if it ever was. Indeed, though the "stuff of life" with which you fill a novel can accumulate over the years, the sheer bravado of the longer form seems more difficult to fit in with life. Poetry, for me now, seems better turned to express more complex emotions, deal with less everyday moments. It is also, perhaps, easier to do, because it only needs to be done when the muse calls - or rather I can put it aside, and not write a poem for a week or a month or more, and it won't feel wrong to have done that.

Larkin wrote more prose when he was younger - fictional prose in the novels "Jill" and a "Girl in Winter", as well as the other stuff. Larkin slowed down his poetry production during the last decade of his life to virtually nothing. Thomas Hardy stopped writing novels after "Jude the Obscure" and began publishing the poetry he'd written throughout his life. Poet-bloggers like George Szirtes and Katy Evans-Bush write reams of words every week, though make it clear that the small poetry triumphs are the real work.

I'm stymied in writing prose fiction at the moment somehow - as if the language of prose has somehow grown tired and old in my hands. It seems that I can't now think above the language that I use everyday, and create an imaginative prose. I'm sure the internet is somehow to blame, and the endless words we have to write for "work speak." Having always had a disdain for journalists-turned-writers, I'm wondering if I'm a writer-turned-journalist. Poetry, on the other hand, is untainted. I can still hear a different tone when I begin a poem, and, when it's finished, marvel somewhat at it's mysteries.

Your Avant Garde Week!

Never been a better week to flirt with the avant garde. Tomorrow night's Eurocultured includes Czech band Psi Vojaci  which should be interesting. Then Wednesday it's the Other Room's June session - and Thursday a new night in Withington, at Fuel, promoting sound work, Counting Backwards. Holly Pester, who was fantastic at the Other Room earlier in the year is one of the performers. Then again, why not whiz down to London for the weekend and the Openned event on Brick Lane on Saturday, with their "Openned book table." 


In the mean time, the ever wonderful Ubu.web has put together a brilliantly comprehensive page of John Ashbery recordings. Sprinkle them through your iPod and be constantly surprised.


Typically, I'm not able to benefit from most of this because of work commitments, missing Tuesday's Social Media Cafe as well.

In a Lonely Place

Craig Finn, of American rock band The Hold Steady, writes a beautiful piece in yesterday's Guardian, about how, when writing a song on his new album, he remembered the obscure indie band Heavenly, their song "Space Manatee" which he had the single of a decade and a half ago, and of the suicide of Heavenly's drummer, Matthew Fletcher, an act which ended the band. I was a great fan of C86 style music, and, to a lesser degree, kept following the obscure bands that followed in its wake on labels such as Sarah Records and Fierce Panda. As Finn articulately states, this was music that was made with care, devotion almost, but without ever expecting fame or fortune. Yet a record recorded in obscurity could surface on a college radio station, and years later find itself the subject of a song by a band who are, in many ways, a world away from Heavenly. It reminds us that public suicides are also private ones. None of us could ever know Matthew Fletcher any more than we knew Kurt Cobain, yet in some ways we pretend to know the latter, and  share, somewhat, in an inherited grief. Around that time, the mid nineties, I wrote a song called "Glamour Suicide", partly as a response to a Jesus and Mary Chain song, but also against that whole myth of rock and roll suicide being a glamorous thing. I think it was Kurt Cobain's mother who put it best, referring to "that stupid club" of rock and roll deaths. Finn reminds us that there are many less celebrated figures who have taken their own life, and but for a few pieces of vinyl wouldn't be remembered at all, outside of their grieving family. When I wrote "Glamour Suicide" I hadn't known anyone who had taken their own life, though there was a guy who I had worked with a couple of years before who had made several attempts. Over a decade later, I know of three suicides, one a close friend, (which I touch on obliquely in my recent long poem, "Juxtaposition #4") and the sense that unlike other deaths, suicide is the one that never goes away - the pain that keeps on hurting - is self-evident. That song's rhythm slows down as if on life support - but it's quite a jaunty song, despite the lyrics and the theme. I was 27 when I wrote it. Was I in a lonely place (as the Joy Division song would have it) when I wrote it? I don't think I was - but it was almost like I had a premonition of the suicides that would touch me. Life seems really hard sometimes in your teens and early twenties, but later, you realise that its later that you get the real battle scars - you have seen people close to you die, accidentally, purposely, whatever.

What I liked about Finn's piece is that it somehow chimes with why we do art - not to be famous - but because somehow it matters, it can matter, and in ways which we don't always know - so that over a decade after last thinking about this particular song, another artist is reminded of it, and recalls it in song. I remember that great little song "Sweeping the Nation" by Spearmint with it's list of obscure bands, or Allen Ginsberg talking about "the best minds of my generation" in "Howl". There's a brilliant piece in this month's Uncut magazine about the Poetry International in 1965 which brought the counterculture to the UK for the first time. If the beats liked jazz, the hippies liked rock and roll, and it made all the difference somehow. In our creative spaces, it is as important to remember those who tried, as it is to remember those who may have succeeded. I like reading old poetry magazines and anthologies - such as the remarkable Angel Hair anthology  which celebrates the late 60s/early 70s poetry magazine of the same name. The lovely Poetry Magazines website is a great place to browse more recent British magazines.

Working Hard for the Money

It was one of those heavy weekends. Heavy sky, heavy head, heavy feet. Everything ached with the sheer heaviness of it all, and when I finally made it home, I hardly had time to hit the sofa, and pour a hair-of-the-dog beer before my eyes were losing it for me. I woke with the tele on, and it was like watching the inside of my own life. There was something delirious about it - the fat man with the seventies tash, flying in and out of New York on the redeye - making the most of the inflight catering, first class of course, leching at the air hostesses knowing that he'd always be invited back. The colours of the neon New York skyline - and then - as if jolted awake by a loud noise - coming up short in a pub in west London. Could almost smell the cigarette-whiskey seats. What's that? I can hardly hear it. Turn up the sound. A kicking soundtrack. Some Joy Division, some Gang of Four, some faggott disco music. John Self looking at the camera, looking right through the screen at me, as if to say, "I'll have you son."

So I experienced it, part one of the BBC's adaption of unfilmable Money, with Nick Frost well-cast as loser John Self. The period detail was just about right, and the colours of the sets and the filming gave the whole thing a bit of a hallucinatory hue. I can hardly remember reading Money, it's been so long ago, but Amis's classic always had that slightly dream-nightmare-like quality to it - as if any scene that went on for too long could be wished away in a hangover. So, halfway through, I watched it in the right frame of mind, half falling asleep like Self himself. I look forward to the concluding part.

Things I've learnt this week

A sweltering Sunday, and I need to stay indoors a bit just to catch up on various domestic chores, as I'm away a lot in the next month.

Had a couple of interesting weeks - almost back to normal activity following the op, and finally off the meds this weekend - though I go back in a month.

Manchester is busily vibrant at this time of year particularly if, like me, you get involved in different things. There are launches, workshops, conferences, festivals, as well as regular networking meetings, irregular art launches. In the bigger world there's signature TV shows like Dr. Who and Ashes to Ashes - though if the sun keeps shining I won't even watch them on iPlayer till the Autumn - new films ("Four Lions"), new books (David Mitchell). Someone somewhere is ordering their iPad. The festival season is coming up and and and and and...

Guess it makes us lucky. Yet all this frantic activity isn't necessarily that conducive to creative work. I've said it before, that the irony about literary fame and success is that the good work happens in the shadows, in the private time. Whereas sportsman have their greatest moments in front of the cameras, and despite all the hard work that goes into it, actors and musicians require the spotlight; writers only come blinking into the sunlight when the work is all done, when the good things have happened.

I've been putting together a short collection of poems, and though it took a week of intense re-reading to choose the line-up and the order, the hard work happened at other times. Pleasingly, there are three recent poems in the selection - and hopefully these are as good as ones I've had a longer time to consider. More of this later.

I'm going to be looking at my web presence shortly as well - as turning things on their head a bit - I realise that a writer has to do more than just write new stuff, good as it is. Readers, if there are still such things, want the full experience - a fulfilling finished work, nicely packaged, and with something of a backstory. What would you say when reading a poem out loud for instance?

Maybe the whirlpool of activity I get sucked into every spring and autumn will subside a bit under a new government - certainly I've drank my fair share of wine and ate my fair share of canapes and small dishes over the years - all paid for by some project somewhere. I have a horribly sneaking suspicion that the one area of cuts that the government will find it obstinately difficult to cut is the money paid out to consultants, particularly the big boys, who will surely bring in their restructuring expertise to replace their special advice departments.

Manchester's great virtues remains its underground, get-up-and-go side. Most of the gems in the year's creative cycle have come from individuals and groups of people getting together and just doing something. It may, in fact, turn out to be easier to do this in a harsher economic climate, though anyone who has ever run a volunteer programme knows that a little bit of funding goes further here than almost anywhere else.

Lots to do, lots to think about. Football season is over, but the World Cup will inevitably take over for a month or so. At Futureeverything this year one of the themes was serendipity city - and as a phrase to describe Manchester its ideal.

***
Forgot to mention that the BBC's adaption of "Money" is on tonight. I've often wondered why the BBC doesn't adapt more contemporary novels - though this is quarter of a century old now, so doesn't even count as that. Amis's novel has been referred to as unfilmable, which always seemed a little ridiculous, given its settings. I've some apprehension, given the way the BBC usually films the 80s (e.g. as costume drama) but was given hope by both the way they've done last week's Boy George drama "Worried about the Boy" (though that was Manchester's excellent Red Productions - home of Queer as Folk  - who clearly know what they're doing with pop culture) and by the presence of Nick Frost, who seems big and loud enough to play John Self. There's an interview with Martin Amis afterwards on BBC4 as well.