Performing Differently

I've never been that regular a performer of my own work, though I guess I've been reading off and on irregularly for about 15 years. When I had my Salt book out I did a flurry of "gigs" reading from that - but over the last year, I realise that pretty much all of my "performances" have been either collaborative and/or involved new work.

About a year ago I was asked to perform at Whitworth Gallery's "late night" - when I read some of my more technologically focused poems and one written for one of the art works showing in the "Dark Matters" exhibition. Performing in semi-darkness I could hardly see my audience - they could see me - and themselves reflected in the "snow mirror."

Then in the Spring I was part of an ensemble piece at the Custard Factory in Birmingham, where a dozen or so performers did a small segment of "Citizen Kane" - reinterpreting the whole movie during a fascinating and spontaneous hour and a half live performance.

A brief interlude of normality - my performing for the 2nd year in a row - at the Manchester independent book market in St. Anne's Square, and then onto the Flashtag collective's "WORD>PLAY" evening for Didsbury Arts Festival where I performed a soundtracked story where I'd written both words and music.

Then to last night, where I was so pleased to be one of the poets invited by Scott Thurston to read a "letter" from Bob Cobbing's 60s sound poetry piece "ABC in Sound" - where different word patterns for each letter created a wonderfully varied and somewhat mesmerising piece. With the minimalist "N" to go on, I extemporised a little, which seemed to go down well - probably a good thing, given that I was following on from established sound poet, Holly Pester. (The video is below, I'm about 19 minutes in!)

Bob Cobbing's ABC in sound - an Other Room ensemble performance from The Other Room on Vimeo.

So there you go, as much performance art as performance, I've thoroughly enjoyed these slightly unusual little projects - and in particular have enjoyed working with other people or working to a brief that is open to interpretation.

Its interesting - but you wouldn't know from the newspapers or cultural commentators - the wealth of interesting, improvisational work that is currently going on. All of these were really well attended, albeit in small venues; many of them had a multimedia component or at least were captured on film for later showing on the web. As an audience member I've been to quite a few other improvisational events - with musicians, sound artists, writers and artists - and they've almost all been far more interesting and inspiring than some of the more "traditional" audience-performer stand offs that we are used to; whether its Mark Leckey's live mixing at Manchester Art Gallery; the Janet Cardiff audio sculpture at the Sage or the improvisional music collaboration between New York and Manchester at Contact Theatre.

I think if the "real time web" has been transformative in how we consume the virtual world recently, this kind of "real time poetry" or "real time art" is successfully fusing the fun and edginess of a live performance with the thoughtfulness and depth of artistic creation.

May it continue.

NW by Zadie Smith

 There are a couple of spoilers in this review.

In her debut novel, "White Teeth", Zadie Smith showed herself to be a writer both of talent and bravery. This was a vibrant debut that seemed unafraid - especially impressive in one so young - to be a big, baggy novel of the city. She was immediately applauded by a generation of writers much older than her, as "the real thing." Her second book "The Autograph Man" showed that she had more interest in the work coming across the Atlantic, gathered around David Eggars and McSweeney's magazine, than in Amis and Barnes. Along with Nick Hornby she was adopted as a kind of British wing of this vibrant new literary school. "The Autograph Man" disappointed, though it started well enough, and it seemed that she was torn a little between the novel that she wanted to write and that which was expected of her. The broad middle class comedy of her debut was reduced a little to sitcom-like skits by the end of this sophomore work. In retrospect, the subject-matter, a nerdish autograph hunter, simply wasn't strong enough to hold a novel. "On Beauty" found her on sounder ground, but in its plot steals from "Howard's End" and its American campus setting it seemed a well-written but complacent affair; despite the praise it got.

"NW" is her first novel for seven years, an astonishing gap really, and its a curious return, that does, to some extent fuse some of the disparate aspects of her talent, whilst at the same time, seeming tentative - almost like a restart for her career. Like "White Teeth" it is a London novel, and like Amis or Barnes she seems happier in its enclaves, for its the one part of the country where race, ambition and money are as interchangeable in a character's lives as they were in Dickens time. Taking as its subject a group of young people who grew up on a poor, but not unfriendly estate, "the Caldwell", the character's seem to be making up for the lack of jeopardy that seemed a failing in the middle class lives in "On Beauty", by being never that far from personal and societal precipices. This is not John Lanchester's snapshot of a street in "Capital" but a portrait of social (im)mobility over an awkward twenty years - the decades either side of the millennium. Smith is mostly deft at the cultural signifiers, whether its drugs, items in the news, or pop culture. There's never been any doubt about the authenticity of her writing - and her observational skills in "NW" are more honed than in anything she's written since her debut. At the heart are two school friends, Leah and Keisha (later changing her name to Natalie), who remain friends even after their lives change in different ways. These two girls -women - are the aspirant middle class. White Leah is unhappy with her own lower middle-class background, and is drawn to both the rough boys at school, and has "a phase" as a lesbian with the girls she meets clubbing and socialising. Keisha is from a West Indian church family, and is always set aside from almost everyone, finding solace in a similarly church-y boyfriend, with whom she goes away to the same University with. Keisha is driven - and will eventually become that rarity, a black female barrister - whilst Leah's drive is almost all in the negative. The story pulls us back and forth through their lives - and the lives of others; Nathan, a beautiful boy at school who once his football career ends, ends up on the wrong side of the tracks, and Felix, who in his thirties is starting a new life, having got out and away from the troubles that once defned in him.

We make our own choices, it seems, but those choices are already taking us back full circle. Natalie can never quite stop being "Keisha" and doesn't want to in some ways - being drawn back to the Caldwell when the difficulties of living a life she doesn't ever quite feel belongs to here starts to become a problem - whilst Leah, though on the surface successful, and having married a good man, for lust, is never quite sure that the life that she should be hoping for - house, kids, job - is actually what she wants. And these are the two who through hard work and their own personalities and friendships have made their own choices. Keisha's sister Cheryl gets pregnant young, and never leaves the Caldwell. Like in all families, Natalie can never quite drag herself away from her roots - she is always Keisha to her sister and mother.

Smith is excellent on family and relationship dynamics, and the book is at its best, when the subtle tones of our family and friend relationships are being contrasted. Yet it is also a tricky novel, experimental in the way her previous books have only occasionally hinted at. The perspective changes, as does the time line, but so does the style. The incident that starts the novel - where Leah gets scammed by a local addict - is both tiny, but emblematic. For in London you are only ever that far from the street - from homelessness, helplessness, and the inner city crime that is every night on the news. Her husband, Michel, is French African and expects her to want to children; she doesn't. But we leave Leah's story to find ourselves with Felix - here's a story within a story - the section entitled (lower case) "guest".Whilst the Leah section seems too thin, in Felix's section she is writing with an eye for realism, with little trickiness. If Forster is the model for "On Beauty" it is Woolf who haunts "NW". If Leah makes quite a reasonable "Mrs. Dalloway", Felix takes the same technique - a journey through a person's day - an ordinary day, one that shouldn't really be memorable, but becomes so tragically as it progresses. We learn about Felix's life through the minutiae of his day. He is doing "this" and "that", he's a bit of a chancer, but no longer the stereotype - his life is back on track - he's even getting rid of the negative things from his past; his disastrous mother, his imprisoned brother, and the strangely disfunctional relationship he had with a fellow addict in Soho. Felix is coming clean. This section, almost a long short story has a powerful climax that has already been telegraphed in the previous section - showing how lives intertwine - and it may well be the best thing Smith has ever written. The complex structure of the book is the complexity of the fragmented city. It's not unlike Ridgeway's recent "Hawthorn and Child" in this, but without that novel's deliberate randomness. Here there's a prescription about what is shown, what is told.

Leaving Felix, we  now follow Keisha through her rise from quiet school student, to university, to Barrister - along the way, shedding not just her name and the religious boyfriend from home, but much more. She falls in love with a rich, confident but somewhat insouciant city trader, Frank; like Leah, going far outside of her own background, yet never geographically straying far from it.

This is not a long book, yet it attempts to tell full stories of the lives intertwined. The "mini chapters" that tell Keisha and Leah's friendship is a reasonably effective deconstruction, yet at some point the sections get longer, and Smith is telling a linear story, at some length. It feels a contrivance that has outlived its usefulness. For like that advert where a couple meet, marry, have children, divorce in just a few minutes, we whizz through a life that we've already encountered but in a parallel deconstruction. Keisha/Natalie, like Leah before her remains a little unknowable. If this is the story of their disappointment, the mistakes they make, then it seems a little forced - as if the action is accelerated. There's talk of "living a dream" and in terms of their material lives they surely are - yet its hard to see what it is that is actually wrong in their lives; not even sure if they've actually met the wrong men. Thinking of similar couples I know of, its their joint-purpose that sticks out, and here Frank and Michel are offstage, confused at why their wives aren't happy. The external trauma that Leah faces, is a small, but significant one, but it hardly feels life-changing; here the middle-class "dread" - of being confronted with someone in your life that you're trying to avoid seems hardly the thing to bring on a breakdown; and likewise, with Natalie we see so many changes, from religious swot, to hardworking legal poster girl, to devoted mother and wife, to a woman who begins to search the internet for sex with strangers - here the fragmentary telling means that we're not so much shocked as unbelieving. There's something odd about all this as well: for these are the "This Life" generation - socially mobile, marrying for love and for sex, rich or at least not poor, in London, the city where everything is available, and yet they seem broken by it all. Writers like Margaret Drabble in "The Millstone" or Doris Lessing in "The Golden Notebook" told of woman's lives that were constrained by their circumstance, and what they had to do to break out (or to breakdown), but Leah and Natalie seem odd victims.

As the novel goes beyond its central scenes - the catastrophic event that effects all the characters in some way, but where Felix is the victim - the fragments don't add up so much as reduce. We are back on the Caldwell. There has been an incident. Nathan, the boy everyone loved, is now a homeless crack addict, Natalie/Keisha has come here to find what? An answer? An escape?  For though these lives are well-defined and their stories are somewhat compelling, there doesn't, in the end, seem quite enough to hold up the complex structure, and the long individual sections. In many ways, the problem is that which we saw in "The Autograph Man", that Smith's scene-setting is relatively small scale, even though her storytelling is large and vivid. There are few things more damning in English fiction than the phrase "provincial novel", but I'm thinking that if this wasn't set in London then that's what it would be referred to. Yet a non-London provincial novel would not be so obsessive about its postcode (from the title, to many, many references throughout), to its street names and districts. Like "Capital" this is a novel about the capital that stays very much within some narrow bounds - its much better than Lanchester's book, in that her real strength, in describing family and relationships is at the fore throughout. As a debut novel this would seem a powerful piece; as a fourth book it is not without its many pleasures - particularly in Felix's story - but it also feels like that the literary trickery, though often impressive, is more to cover up the novel's essentially slight concerns. Far more true to the contemporary experience than her previous satires, one is never bored by Smith's tightly controlled cast and locale, but one is never entirely convinced either. There are the makings of a very good novel here, but it does fall a little short, as the potential vast chaos of the city is reduced to small things: secrets shared, crimes observed, and friendships - always fragile - surviving, but at a cost.

Read an alternative review of "NW" from Valerie O'Riordan on the Bookmuunch website. 

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

In "Wolf Hall" Hilary Mantel did two remarkable things. She gave a voice to Thomas Cromwell, one of the more shadowy figures in British history, and in doing so she opened up the smells and sounds of Tudor England in a way that was astonishing. That book,.seeing Cromwell's rise at the court of Henry VIII, first through his intrigueing for Cardinal Wolsey, and then for the King himself had a particular design on us, I felt. The Tudors are a fascination that have always puzzled me, but Mantel showed us not so much the intrigues that led to the ditching of Henry's first wife as he fell in love with Anne Boleyn but the reasons behind it. For without an heir the newly peaceful England would be back at war - and as a distant outpost of Rome, its people would remain trapped in an age of fear and suspicion, unable to read the word of God in their own tongue. "Wolf Hall" showed the birth of protestant England, and it was this aspect - with Boleyn, Cromwell and others able to read the Tyndale Bible in private whilst their countrymen faced death for the same "crime" - that gave it so much of its fascination.

"Bring up the Bodies" continues the story. Boleyn is now Queen, her family are esconced at court, and Cromwell is now, amongst other titles, "Master Secretary" to Henry Tudor, middle aged and wealthy. The odd tense construction that she developed in "Wolf Hall" for Cromwell, is less obtrusive here, or perhaps more fluent. In that sense it is probably an easier read. The odd "said he, Thomas Cromwell" usage is for emphasis here, and only occasionally is the reader confused as to whom is being referred. Cromwell in middle age is denied the interior life that his younger self had - or at least it is more restricted; the bare facts of biography deny it somewhat. For Cromwell is now an arch-fixer, not just for himself, but for his circle, and inevitably for Henry. There's at least one misplaced "I" that I remember, wondering to what extent Booker winners ever get a proper editing, but otherwise the book is if anything more readable than its page-turning predecessor.

And in places it is brilliant. Beginning at "Wolf Hall" out hunting with the King, Cromwell notes his Lord has shown an interest in the plain, virgin Jane Seymour, and so it begins. With a son and heir, but with his own wife and daughters dead from plague (in the arresting opening scene, Cromwell has named his falcons after them), Cromwell doesn't mourn so much as put his experience and regret to the King's purpose. But he always has a soft spot for women; and tempers Anne's dislike of Katherine of Aragon's daughter Mary, or coaching the elusive Seymour. We are now at the heart of court; yet oddly, this second book seems less knowledgeable in many ways. The entourage of both King and Queen reminds one of The Sopranos, where individuals jostle for preferment, and never quite know if they are to be a "made" man or a dead man. Cromwell is a string-puller at the heart of this intrigue. He is no longer a confidante of Anne - for he is a confidante of the King - and whereas previously he owed allegiance to the Cardinal, here he uses cardinals, ambassadors, and Earls of the realm as mere pawns on his board. There is plenty here to arrest the attention; and occasional reminisces into the endless variety of Thomas's imagined past. Yet, this is less a book about Cromwell than it is about Henry.

For the Henry we think about from history is not the young fearless man, but the one of the six wives, the giant fellow who sits overseeing both court and country. We see a drunk Henry falling asleep after the hunt, and the Lords almost daring each other which will be the one to wake their king. We see him in love again, but this time with the demure Seymour rather than the alluring Boleyn. We see him at the heart of decision-making that are hard to fathom but which could pitch England back into favour with Rome, as the latter finds itself at war with France. Cromwell entertains the ambassadors; he arranges new sinecures for troublesome Lords; he gossips with the ladies-in-waiting around the Queen; he worries about his son's debut in the Lists (the jousting tournament that the King still performs in); he speaks little of the project that was Protestant England, except to somehow give a prayer in their own tongue to the troublesome Welsh; and he is the kings man in the Commons, wanting laws that will aid the people of England (a common man to the last, is Cromwell) and money taken from the coffers of the monasteries.

Yet this second outing seems both more familiar and less purposeful. It takes place in a tighter timescale, and has really one main story line. For Boleyn having provided Henry with only a female heir (baby Elizabeth) he now wants another woman, but having no heir, wants a Queen not a concubine. It is Cromwell's job to enable this. This then is a drama less about the country, and more about the intrigue at court. What the king wants of course, the king will have. This has become a given after the break with Rome; yet this is still a religious monarch and a religious country. An heir from another needs to be a legitimate one (for the king has one male Bastard already). The downfall of Boleyn and her inner circle is inevitable, we know that, and Mantel is superb in showing the way the drama may have unfolded - even though the history is a mystery. We are no longer in the superstitious England of the first book, but in an era where Tudor England will begin to assert its power and supremacy. This is the "great man" view of history - where we rarely stray beyond the courtly circle, and its rich families jostling for power and influence. To what extent you like playing Kings and Queens will determine how you rate this novel. What might be fascinating on a BBC costume drama seems melodramatic at times on the page. For Mantel is being truth to whats known, whilst constructing a fiction. Oddly, its the conspiracy-theories of James Ellroy that the book reminds me in places; as the style is as breathless in its way as his Kennedy conspiracy thriller "American Tabloid." But it also reminds me of a lesser book, one that also got carried away with the detail of its historical subject, and tackled voices from the past: John Fowles late, and disappointing "A Maggot." At times, Mantel all but abandons description as she shares in-depth conversations like characters in a soap opera; and the drive to some sort of conclusion is all that matters. Like a storyliner for an American mini-series she has to tie up all the loose ends that Cromwell has set hanging. For this is Cromwell as master-fixer. The end to his story will come in a third book, and he is already suspecting that his own end may be no less bloody than that of the Queen he helped place on the throne.

"Bring up the Bodies" is a brilliant read; a worthy sequel to "Wolf Hall" and in parts surpasses it in its style and readability. Yet it seems to me to not add too much to that book. It is tighter and more concentrated, but here the subject is more Henry Tudor, and less Thomas Cromwell. In biographies it is always the story of how they get to where they are that fascinates, not what they did when they got there - for the latter is already a public story - and I think that, if anything, is why the book seemed less remarkable than its predecessor. The story is less international in scope as well, for whereas the fate of England (both then and in the future) seemed to hang on the break from Rome; we are now cloistered in the politics of a Ceasar (or a Corleone.) The Lords and Ladies of Henry's court are frankly not that interesting. Like a Russian novel, they have several names, yet Mantel rarely gives them anything more than soap opera characterisation. This one is weak; this one vain etc. There is no great villain in the novel - yet surely they should be? Anne Boleyn is not fit for the role, for her "villainy" is to have given Henry no heir and for him to have tired of her.

The novel has remarkably given Mantel her second Booker prize. Without having read the others on the shortlist (and longlist for that matter), its hard to say whether its worthy. There are sequels that do something different and better than their predecessors - think "Rabbit Redux" or "The Western Lands" - but I'm not sure that one does. Its the classic "middle" part of a trilogy. "The Empire Strikes Back" may be the tighter film, but its not as loved as "Star Wars", and there's something similar about "Bring up the Bodies." Despite its name, its far less violent than its predecessor. The ransacking of the monasteries mostly takes place off-stage. Instead it topples into melodrama at times; for the courtly intrigue, and the gossip about Boleyn's alleged infidelities are the stuff of soap opera. Perhaps Mantel had no choice, given the facts of the time - but though it is a remarkably readable book, and the voice is, if anything, even more convincing than in "Wolf Hall", it doesn't add to that novel's achievements, and may, in some way, detract from them - for here we are back in the Tudor England that never really appealed; of great men and women, in great halls, eating great feasts. The historical novel, which you felt Mantel was giving an overdue reboot in "Wolf Hall", is not that easily removed from its default setting. Anybody who enjoyed "Wolf Hall" must read this sequel, I devoured on a plane to Istanbul, landing in the heart of one of the world's most ancient cities, with the intrigue of the 16th century spinning around my head, but its Booker elevation seems a conservative choice.

My review of Wolf Hall is here. 

Long Fiction in the 21st Century

On Tuesday the 13th Booker prize of the 21st century will be awarded. It could make history, with Hilary Mantel becoming the first British author to win it twice, and, moreover, with a sequel to her previous winner. Though books from trilogies have won in the past (Pat Barker, William Golding) two from the same series have never won. There are a number of new names on the list, including Alison Moore's "The Lighthouse", from my own small publisher Salt. It may well be that Moore, or another newish writer will prove to be more than famous for just one book (though the Booker has done that as well in the past: think DBC Pierre or Yann Martel).

If the Booker felt like a defining prize during much of the eighties and early nineties, I don't think it has been so central to the literary discussion since. A competition where essentially the rules change every year - because each set of judges is so different - is not a place to go for a defnining narrative. Like the Turner Prize or Mercury Prize it's position in the ecosystem of its artform has periods when it appears to so get it right, and others when it appears to so get it wrong. Two distinctly twentieth century novelists, Julian Barnes and Howard Jacobsen won the prize the last two years, with novels that are far below their best; whilst Mantel joined Anne Enright and John Banville in the list of respectable mid-listers who were elevated a little by their win. Elsewhere, books by Adiga and Desai, seem one offs that have less cultural import than the Martel and Pierre.

In other words, forgetting about the Booker for a minute - where are the culturally important fiction writers of the last 15 years or so? (Century boundaries not being very helpful.) David Peace, David Mitchell, Magnus Mills, A.L. Kennedy, Nicola Barker, Will Self, Sarah Hall, Ali Smith, Toby Litt, Gwendoline Riley and China Mieville would be a good starting eleven, yet they've notched up not a single Booker win, despite (at a quick count) 8 shortlistings between them. If we're talking books, "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet", "Three to see the king", "Five Miles from Outer Hope", "Day", "Wide Open", "The City and the City", "The Damned United",  "Cold Water", "The Carhullan Army" and "The Book of Dave" are important novels that any survey of the last decade or so would have to take into account and yet didn't make the shortlist.

Five of that first eleven did make the last Granta list of "Best Young British Novelists" in 2003 - but these decade long surveys are prone with difficulties - after all, Moore will be ineligible for the next list, despite "The Lighthouse" being a debut novel - and, should Will Self win with his first shortlisting "Umbrella", it will be a belated vindication (not that the writer of "The Book of Dave" and "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" needs any vindication) for his 1993 listing.

So, Tuesday's announcement will be interesting - the longlist (if not the shortlist) for this year's prize was certainly a more adventurous one - and good books such as Anne Enright's "The Gathering" or Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" have won the prize without necessarily being representative of the fiction of the age. The books of course aren't changed by the winning of a prize, they would have been there to read regardless; but obviously the winning writers future (and if its a small press, possibly their publishers' future) will inevitably be changed by the success. Let the anticipation commence....

Casaubon in the age of Facebook

Culture has always been commodified. The Elizabethan theatre would expect an instant turnaround from its playwrights. A "hit" might run for longer, a "miss" would require a new play to be rushed onto the stage. There was probably a good market in fresco paintings in Renaissance Florence as well. Our current equivalent; a decade or so after the "cultural industries" became commodified - that post-Bilbao rush to urban cultural flag-planting - there are a number of questions relating to our new austeritied times. On the one hand there are probably more artists, poets and musicians than any time in history. On the other; where are the culturally significant? Are we stuck with "names" living off reputations forged ten or twenty years ago  - or in a world where curators can make a name from themselves by magpie-like, picking up the "hot" names just before they sizzle in the mainstream sun, is there some kind of arms-race amongst the big galleries; the big prizes?

Our audiences as well - are they "finite" or ever changing? Life is not so consistent as in previous generations. Watching a Simon and Garfunkel concert from the late 1960s we see not hippy flower children, but the well-to-do baby-boomers, post-marriage and possibly pre-children, respectable couples that are fated to the conventional marriages that Dustin Hoffman was ready for before he met "Mrs. Robinson". At a gallery launch in Manchester, you don't just see the same faces; but the same type of faces - a new year's crop of students, post-students, etc etc.

I marvel, even in the age of austerity, at how late Capitalism's exagerrated Ponzi scheme has somehow spilled over into culture. All this activity going into an album or a film that is forgotten after a weekend; a constant sense of activity to keep the paying (or non-paying) customer busy. How to keep up? How to even keep up in a smallish city like Manchester when this week alone there were two major exhibition launches? The First Cut at Manchester Art Gallery on Thursday (all I can say is GO!) and David Shrigley at the Cornerhouse on Friday.  The paper works in The First Cut belie this frantic activity - who knew there were s many artists doing frankly astonishing things with paper? Origami this isn't. Impossible to write a review based on an opening - but the sense of wow was there from the start, and the range and complexity of the work on display (from massive installations to tiny sculptures) made me wonder: who knew there was a whole world of paper-artists doing there own little thing? Perhaps that is what modern curation amounts to - a bringing together; not of a scene, but of like-minded artists. I've not been to the Shrigley yet, but here's an artist who is better known outside of Fine Art, perhaps like Grayson Perry, crossing that line. I imagine this will be incredibly popular; familiarity with an artist's name encouraging engagement. Though I doubt we'd see a Jack Vettriano show at the Cornerhouse; interesting how art is categorised. I was at the Buy Art Fair and the Manchester Contemporary the week before, and the former, with its commercial galleries, seemed not just stale, but little more than decoration - whilst the latter, representing a range of galleries where more cutting edge art is being exhibited - seemed not just collectable, but accessible. I'm wondering if we're seeing something of what happens a decade on from the "creation of a taste" that Tate Modern and the YBAs heralded. I headed to Damian Hirst's Artist's Room (a travelling portfolio, placing contemporary artists in provincial galleries) at the New Art Gallery in Walsall. It was great to see "Away from the Flock" again, like bumping into an old friend, and his work - anatomical, mortality-obsessed, always somewhat sculptural in its form - fitted surprisingly well with the Epstein's of the Garman-Ryan collection. Genuine dialogue between the two artists.

The artists gathered in the First Cut aren't made for a one-night wonder; there's too much technique, too much intricacy in the use of their material. Yet, we move on. I was interested to see that the Frieze fair now has a pre-2000 tent (and accompanying magazine.) On occasional trips to London or elsewhere I tend to visit historical shows. My interest in contemporary art is strong, but its contextualised for me, by a trip to the V&A or wherever. This is me catching up on the art history I never got at school or afterwards. But history also reveals. My poetry has rarely felt much affinity with whichever contemporary books are du jour at any one point. This week you could have drowned in poetry; it was national poetry day (this year's nonsensical theme: Stars), the Forward Prizes went to Denise Riley, Jorie Graham and Sam Riviere. The shortlist for the Manchester Poetry Prize was published. If you'd thought from the Riviere listing that there was some poetic break with the past - that a poetry that referenced the present, that appeared on a blog - could not only be published by venerable Faber; you'll look in vain for contemporary references in the Manchester shortlist, even as you admire the poems.  (Full disclosure: I entered this one, with poems that talked about the coalition government and Mars' Curiousity Rover.)

Micheal Chabon, last night being intereviewed as part of the Manchester Literature Festival, was philosophical about the failure of the John Carter film that he was part of. All that work (all that money) and the film arrived stillborn at the Box Office. This week we heard that career/studio wrecking "Heaven's Gate" was being reissued.

Pop into HMV and they're clearing out last Christmas's box sets so that £200 would buy you the complete Sopranos, West Wing, The Wire and "24", which would be an undergraduate module in 21st century TV drama all by itself. The reason these programmes are so long is the market: no longer a self-contained narrative, but something that has to reinvent and spiral out based on it being a hit in this most competitive of markets.

You see, there are two things at play here. The speed of transmission, or even of consumption of late Capitalism, when it's applied to art; and then the much, much slower transmission of influence, of hard craft, of individual vision, of articulating a personal space in a world that is shouting loudly about what sells and how. What should be a moderator between the two - critical culture - seems swamped by the hype of the market; or at least by the competing voices that require to be heard. Even in the blog space one tends to keep quiet about the crap that's out there, as there's only so much time that you'd rather concentrate on the good stuff. Since the millennium I get a sense that contemporary art hasn't been as effective as in the brash decade before; whilst at the same time appearing to be more successful.Are younger artists creating their own underground space (say, in zines, like Laura Oldfield Ford, or in quirky books like Shrigley?) but with the suss of the Hirst generation's marketing gene? I get a sense that poetry has been healthier this last few years from not being so dependent on Faber-favour, and would only wonder whether Riviere's "81 Austerities" should be interrogated in a wider context - whether the poets he shared Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives with, or others. The HBO/TV boxset has given grand guignol drama on a scale that those of us brought up on the 50 minute standalone story can hardly believe has happened - and made most contemporary film appear childish (or at least, for a younger popcorn gorging audience than the serious work on our screens.)

An artist can only do so much - a life's work can be a series of moments - a great song may come in a minute. Needing an extra track to complete "Revolver" Lennon came up with "She Said, She Said" which kind of invented power pop. "The Wasteland" or "The Cantos" took large chunks of their author's lives. In Middlemarch we are made to laugh at Casaubon, the old academic, unable to publish, as he works on the impossible task that is the "Key to all mythologies" - but Dorothea marries him because she perceives in him a seriousness of purpose that isn't actually there (no more than it is in the dashing Ladislaw.) There are plenty of Casaubon-like tasks littered through 20th century art - whether it's "Finnegan's Wake" or the late novels of too many "great" writers. Yet we need a bit of that seriousness (even if we're drawing cartoons - will there be a better object this year than the new Chris Ware for instance?) As audience-critic-blogger we can just consume if we want - concentrate on the next thing, next show, next song, next poem, next book - and hardly have time to assimilate the last. Caught between the impossible task of a Casaubon, we relentlessly check the goldfish memory of our Facebook status. Somewhere in between these two extremes is where the worthwhile happens.

Poems for Pussy Riot

The imprisonment of the 3 women who sung a protest song as part of the Pussy Riot arts/music collective in Russia has galvanised opinion world wide. I'm so pleased that the poetry community has been part of this, and a herculean effort over the last few weeks has seen 110 poets submit new work in support of Pussy Riot. Ranging from Booker-listed Ali Smith, to myself, via a wide range of young, old, male, female, mainstream, experimental poems its looking like a great book in itself. The book is called CATECHISM: Poems for Pussy Riot.

Supported and supporting English PEN, with its long history of supporting incarcerated and otherwise censored writers, this is not just a worthy campaign, but an active component of the struggle against state and religious censorship and the crackdown of artistic freedom. This is not just about Russia, or Putin, or the women in Pussy Riot, but a reminder that the powers-that-be are always to happy to hide behind legal frameworks, state apparatus and the religious sensitivities when it comes to cracking down on voices they don't like to be heard. (Remember, that Tony Blair's Labour government attempted to make religious satire a criminal offence.)

There will be a protest event in London tomorrow with some of the poets reading, and this will coincide with the release of the e-book, proceeds from which will go to the defence fund of the imprisoned Pussy Riot members. Its also, from the poems that I've seen posted already on the PEN website, a brilliant collection of some of the most interesting poets around.

Its worth remembering that the real women in this case are being separated from their friends and families for what are essentially political reasons, and that even if their case is no longer the first item on the news, that their situation is something that no artist here or abroad should ever face. 

You will be able to download and donate from midnight tonight at this web page on a name your price basis. Whatever you give will be welcome and the book itself will, I'm sure be worth your contribution on its own.You can read a number of the poems if you follow the links on this page.

Many thanks to Sophie Mayer, Sarah Crewe, Amy Key, Mark Burnhope and the other poets and translators who have made this happen.

Jumping Genres

Much fun was had on Thursday night at the Didsbury Arts Festival where the #flashtag collective put on a night of words and music called WORDPLAY, which I was asked to perform at.  My piece was a ten minute "audio comic" basically a noirish story with a soundtrack. I hope it went down well. An extract of my reading "Nerdtown" can be heard here. The night was all about jumping genres. The #flashtag writers basically came together from a love of flash fiction and performing - and the live literature scene is beginning to transform fiction in the same way as performance poetry gave a boot up the backside to poetry.

Second up, was Tom Mason with a soundtracked story that had the scariest image of the evening - a bus load of musicians transformed into the grinning members of Jools Holland's big band, all turned into clones of the boogie-woogie piano man. It was a model that continued through Fat Roland's piece - where the narrator is being haunted by a spectral dead Whitney Houston, the dark rumbling soundtrack morphing into Whitney singing "I will always love you".

listen to ‘Here's @fatroland reading from his ghost story @didsartsfest #wordplay’ on Audioboo

Completing the first half of the show was  "Tether" by (murmur) featuring David Hartley with an ambitious music concept piece about Russian cosmonauts going into space via a giant umbilical cord "tethered" to the earth. Over a changing soundtrack of drum and bass stylings Hartley told the story of these first cosmonauts. What was this? Musical piece? Story? Hard to tell, but they had created a whole concept with images, video and CD to accompany the music. After a break, where we refreshed glasses, and videos of Alabaster de Plume were shown, Les Malheureux commenced the second half. A duo of Sarah Clare Conlon and David Gaffney, deadpan short stories are intoned by Clare over Gaffney's cabaret keyboard stylings as a powerpoint goes on in the background. Clare reads from a smart phone, as did Tom, and its fascinating to see how easy to use technology is helping writers be more ambitious in their presentations.

Whilst the final act set up, Benjamin Judge read from his brilliant little booklet "50 Stories about Sting."  The final act was the most ambitious of the evening as the collective had paired local art rock band Monkeys in Love with the fiction writer Valerie O'Riordan. Taking her cue from their song titles we had a series of parallel plays - story, then song - with the first piece being a collaboration where the Monkeys accompanied her; and there was even some effective use of the first overhead projector I've seen in about 20 years, to add some visuals to the story. The final song, Owl with Hands, explained Laura's "owl" costume. I think.

So that was it: a unique jumping of genres that actually made perfect sense when you were there. Loved being part of it; and glad that I was prompted to do the most ambitious of my ideas. Lots of writers I know have an interest in music, and I think all of us will be interested in continuing such juxtapositions in the future.

Literary Snobbishness

To complain about a lingering literary snobbishness around the Booker might seem pointless; and given some of its less than overwhelming choices in recent years, I'm not sure it even matters. The novel was never the snobbish one in the literary family. It was born over the other side of the blanket, the progeny of journalists, chancers and even, God forbid, women. If it became respectable in the late 19th century it was still peopled by writers who'd not gone to university; who'd had their education in the fields around Haworth or the pubs around Fleet Street rather than Oxford and Cambridge.

That at some point the novel became the "tour de force" that we like to think of it - and perhaps supplanted poetry, the essay and drama as the jewel in our literary crown - didn't particularly make it respectable. After all, what had begun as a "romance", as "a novel" entertainment, was now (and for a long time had been) capable of being amongst the greatest art - yet technically a novel was any prose story pushed between covers, whether a Mrs. Oliphant or a George Eliot, a Mills & Boon or Midnight's Children. The French have long had their literary prizes (and other kinds of prizes) with a keen sense of where those books fit in the culture. The Booker grew out of corporate sponsorship; a desire to recognise the Commonwealth as something more than an outmoded concept; and possibly a desire to reward the respectable, at a time, the late 60s, when the world was changing.

Its remained its middle-browness as a prize of course, and I'm always amazed by the breadth of British literary culture - where we have these touchstones, like the Booker, the Queen's Medal for Literature, the Poet Laureate, the TLS and LRB, and then have these many layers of literary culture under and around. Like the class system these aristocratic pursuits seem to almost exist in another world - and when an upstart Australian (DBC Pierre) arrives at the party there's something of a collective shudder. So even though its for the "best books of the year" there's always a sense that it is an establishment sense of this.

After last year's "page turners" (which weren't particularly page-turning, from my reading of them, Patrick DeWitt aside) we've a more patrician head of the judges this year, Peter Stothard. Its something of course isn't it? That these men of letters exist. I've been immersed in literature for 30 years or more and not really come across him till now, though that's probably a triumph to his integrity - after all I love the TLS at its best, though I'd rarely consider it a reliable source for reviews of  fiction or poetry. In an otherwise illuminating interview in the Independent he blows it all by complaining that Book Bloggers are harming literature. Hard to know what he's saying, as it seems to be about a critical culture that is no longer there on the web; but it somehow all about friends puffing their friends books. (Not that that has ever happened in the mainstream press at all!) Its of course more nuanced that criticising blogs - what he's doing is criticising a "mass of unargued opinion." Whilst that might be true of Amazon reviews for instance, its almost the opposite of what you find from the book blogs. Whether its a collective effort like Bookmunch, where books routinely disappoint careful reviewers, or philosophical heavyweights like Stephen Michelmore or John Self, or literary magazines like 3AM, or (dare I say it) this blog, there's always seemed an independence about book blogging that is far more trustworthy than the Guardian's usual suspects approach to reviewing.

All I'd ask is that the Booker, one day soon, actually invites a book blogger to be one of its judges - after all we've had politicians, civil servants and actors alongside the more literary folks, but if I'm not mistaken, they've yet to invite (or be accepted by) a blogger. Then perhaps we'll stop getting this kind of reactionary snobbishness from a literary establishment that is rarely relevant outside their (admirable) day jobs.

One final point - Stothard admits that he's only seen something like six films in his life. This is astonishing in the extreme. His point - that "the great works of art have to renew the language in which they're written" is one I wholly agree with, but I'd argue that over the last fifty years (or longer) its as likely to be the movies "Chinatown" and "The Godfather" that have done that, as Graham Greene and Angela Carter. Are we here again seeing the distinctiion between a high art and a low art? Hard to know - and he's chaired an interesting looking list that has admirably lifted up some of that literary underground to the top table. Whether, like the servants in Downton Abbey, those will be let in more regularly, remains to be seen.

(I've just noticed the Guardian has done a piece on this and has asked a couple of Bloggers for their POV. Read it here.) 

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max

We have the "ghost story" because on September 12th 2008 the writer David Foster Wallace hung himself at the age of 46. He had published his first novel 21 years earlier, "The Broom of the System", had with his epochal second book "Infinite Jest" written one of the key novels of the late 20th century, and published widely as a short story and essay writer. His unfinished third novel "The Pale King" was published this year, and now we have D.T. Max's biography.

A writer's life has two narratives - that expressed in the work and that as lived. For the reader, often the first is all they know, though there are hints of something else. Wallace's success came at the time of the book tour, but just before the ubiquity of the internet. Whereas Brett Easton Ellis criticises Wallace on his Twitter feed, DFW was a reluctant user of the internet. In some ways "Infinite Jest"'s success is representative of it coming at a time just before the web became our primary communications medium. So though Wallace died young, and this biography is one of the first literary biography's I've read where I can say "that was the year I was doing that", there does seem something that connects him to a slightly earlier time. His two great literary friends were Jonathan Franzen and Don DeLillo, the latter, an older mentor. All three writers have written extensively about the media. I first came across Wallace in the late 90s through his short stories and essays. I was reading "Conjunctions" and other American literary magazines; and there was this other wave, of what I guess you could call post-post-modern writing, beginning to show through which seemed a relief amidst the still prelavent "dirty realism."  "Irony" - that thing we in England always criticise the Americans for not getting - was a new trope in its fiction.

What I hadn't realised, until reading the life, was the arc of Wallace's career. Picked up for his first novel by a young agent whilst still at college, a respectful success with his debut, leading to opportunities such as a residency at writer's colony at Yaddo (where he got drunk with Jay McInerney, and according to Max, saw a way to be successful that he was both tempted by, but demurred from) or teaching residency's on various MFA programmes. From the mid-west, Wallace - who I'd always thought as a highly urban, media-saturated novelist - lived in a succession of small college towns; trips to NYC or large cities infrequent, or not that vital. Unless I missed something he hardly ever travelled outside of the USA; there's not a single trip to Europe mentioned - which in the age of the global superstar writer seems highly surprising.

However, there was another side to Wallace's life which perhaps explains the lack of travel. From his high school days onwards he suffered badly from depression. The life told, in Max's carefully non-judgemental life, is one of highs and lows. Wallace has an intensity that you'd probably gather from his fiction. Highly driven straight-A's student; then pot fiend; then - in a matter of months it seems - alcoholic; serial womaniser. The America of the 80s and 90s promises "everything" - but Wallace is the other side of that American dream; self-medicating I guess, against the depression. Highly intelligent, he never strays far from the academy, but the traditional discipline of study is not what he is best at - it causes horrendous strains - the worst of which, an ill-advised PhD in philosophy begun at Harvard which sends him spiralling into alcohol abuse, and being institutionalised. The painful slow recovery, from hospital, to half-way house, to a new routine of sobriety and recovery groups is the unexpected narrative of much of this excellent biography. From a British perspective, there is something alien about this world of therapy and AA groups; yet its clear that Wallace had a serious illness that stopped him, for so much of his life, doing the thing he was best at, writing.

Max is generous with his descriptions of Wallace's writing and this book should be of interest to anyone who has read him, and anyone who wants to think about the nature of the writing life. The crumpled up pages; the manic writing sprees; the agonising arguments with editors over length and house-style; but also the nature of writing for a novelist who was never comfortable with story - who quickly went from a love of Barthes and Gaddis to wanting to create something more humanised that could keep the manic energy of the surreally post-modern, but centre it on something much more real. Perhaps its no surprise that Franzen was a friend, and that DeLillo, who has more than most writers fused these two things, was a mentor. Though a "writer's writer" Wallace's base at a series of American campus's, and the necessity of the sober life, with its local support groups, means that he's serious relationships are often with "ordinary" people. He hides how he met them by saying they were from his "local church" but in reality they are his support group following addiction. He has a few mild literary feuds. Brett Easton Ellis - an early influence - is dismissed as is Mark Leyner, writer of briefly popular post-modern entertainment "My son, the gastroenterologist." He writes a long, long essay castigating a dreadful late Updike novel, and then regrets it. His popular essays are long, unexpected pieces for American magazines, ironic semi-fictional accounts of cruise ships, state fairs, and tennis. He co-writes a book on Rap music just as the music goes mainstream.

"Infinite Jest" is a massive novel and began as even bigger. This "gigantism" is still the thing that puzzles me a little. Like Fitzgerald he wanted to write novels, but could sometimes only write short fiction or essays. "Infinite Jest" grows out of a creative/destructive friendship then relationship with a poet, Mary Karr, and the experiences of the "half way house" where he met a different type of person, saw a different side of life. Yet in the long gap between "Infinite Jest" and his death, he takes on a non-fiction book about mathematics; he writes a long essay about John McCain. Reading Wallace you feel that he takes his inspiration from the culture of the time, and these pop culture essays brought him name recognition, and a wider readership. Max tries to untangle to what extent they helped or hindered the writing of the novels. If "The Broom of the System" was something he dismissed later in his life; and "Infinite Jest" seemed an impossible act to follow; one wonders about him as a novelist.Is he, like Faulkner, trying to write something large than a single book? Many parts of "Infinite Jest" and "The Pale King" were published before the novels, or read aloud at readings. The pile of papers left beside him when he committed suicide was some kind of ordering; but there was much else left out.

This, I think, is where the life does become vital. For he is never happy for long - in jobs or relationships. There is a tension between teaching (which he likes) and writing. He needs money to buy him time to write, but seems uncertain how to react when he receives a massive fellowship, or when a job at a college comes with only the slightest of teaching commitments. His problems with his family are deep-rooted, but they are also supportive; his relationships with women are many, but often self-destructive - often with women also coming out of recovery or older than him, with children. Reading the life, I'm reminded of what I think Neil Young had advised Kurt Cobain, to just stop doing what you don't want to do. Wallace's brilliance, his straight A life, his unexpected success with "Infinite Jest", and his need to keep grounded in the absence of the addictions that are killing him, are mapped out in a well-ordered biography, that goes into just enough detail, without over-emphasising the day-to-day life of the writer. I read it straight through in a day and a half. The latter part of the book sees Wallace first grounded back in the mid-west at a small college, surrounding himself with dogs and friends in recovery; then moving west again - where he finally settles down with the artist Karen Green. Though even here normal life is not that possible. "They are soon in couples therapy" writes Max. He is with Karen when he tries to go off his long term meds, and the last period of his life, leading to the suicide, seems to be the returning of the illness, that will finally kill him. The complexities of his personal life feed into "Infinite Jest", so the life and writing are somewhat entwined. In contrast, researching for "The Pale King" he goes back to the straight A student, studying accountancy this time as he wants to research a novel about the IRS. More than anything, reading Max's biography, it is not his failures that stick with you; rather that, given so much pain and difficulty in his life, he wrote and achieved so much.

The Five Foot Shelf

A series of internet links took me to an article about Dr. Eliot's "five foot shelf" otherwise known as "Harvard Classics." The president of Harvard Charles W. Eliot had said that the books central to a liberal education could be fit on a 5-foot shelf. A publisher took him up on the offer, and in 1909 the "Harvard Classics" series was published - a set of 51 books containing, where possible, whole texts.  It seems appropriate, in this age of compression - via the Kindle - that over a century ago, there was a sense that one didn't need vast space to gain an education. I guess America is home to this kind of self-improvement through books - think Encyclopeadia Brittanica and Readers Digest - but its also quite pervasive. When a family friend passed away a more modern collection - running from fairy stories, to Shakespeare, to even a Graham Greene - ended up in my direction. The list on the "five foot shelf" is heavy on philosophy, poetry, and key science texts such as "Origin of the Species" but it also finds room for fables, political speeches and essays. Fiction is there in "Don Quixote" and others - but a 2nd list - of a shelf of fiction - 20 books long - followed. Its heavy on the Russians, has no room for Melville.

It got me to wondering what would a "twentieth century" five foot shelf contain? We seem less enamoured of non fiction these days - or rather books of science get superceded. Is there one or more poetry anthologies that would suffice or would we have to create a new one? Which novels would survive? Should we find room for much science or language - and what about "art"? What about religion?  So here's the thing - five, ten, fifteen books if you please in the comments that should be there on the "five foot shelf" - or rather on our new "5 Gb Shelf" on our Kindle or iPad. I'll let you go back to 1900, and if there's anything this century that deserves preserving already then put it in there.

Its non fiction I'd find problematic - so few of the key texts have I read - I'd have to find room for some Walter Benjamin, but what about Sartre? Derrida? What about "The Second Sex" and "The Female Eunuch"?

I've made a start with 25 books that would be in contention....

Complete Poems of T.S. Eliot
The first 49 Stories - Ernest Hemingway
The Penguin Book of the Beats
The New Poetry ed. by Alvarez
The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
Howard's End by E.M. Forster
Essays by George Orwell
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Madwoman in the Attic by Gilbert & Gubar
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvestor
Kafka's Diaries
The Essential Writings by Mahatma Gandhi
The Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
The Glass Stories by J.D. Salinger
All my Sons by Arthur Miller
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Solibo the Magnificent by Patrick Chamoiseau
Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus
The Origins of the Second World War by A.J.P. Taylor
Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly

The Death and Afterlife of a Modern Novelist

When David Foster Wallace committed suicide I was profoundly shocked, but hadn't really thought much about him as a man, rather than a writer. I knew him only from his books, including the big one, "Infinite Jest", that I'm still to read. In death - or rather in the afterlife of an artist who's died tragically - much more focus comes to the man than the work; though the two become linked when his unfinished novel "The Pale King" was released with much fanfare.

This week we will have the first biography of DFW, (by D.T. Max)  and in some ways it was more of a shock reading a review and then an extract of this than by the "fact" four years ago of his suicide. Whereas I once knew just the writing now I know something of what is underwriting it. I've ordered the autobiography and will no doubt review that at some point; but it got me thinking about him as a writer.

We no longer "revere" writers as we may have sometimes done in the past, though occasionally a book surpasses all sales expectations. DFW seems almost like a throwback to an earlier age; a contemporary writer who is praised in his lifetime as being not just a connoisseurs choice, but as someone who has had some impact on the literary culture. How many of our peers are influential? Maybe one or two a generation.

For DFW would be 50 this year had he lived; he's in that middle generation, just about a 2nd generation baby boomer, at university just before our "modern age" was formed (Thatcher/Reagan/computers), but a little young for the faded dreams of the sixties. In this he is both my "peer" and not; and I'm thinking here of him as a writer (and of me as a writer.) He certainly writes about a world that I recognise. Reading Mailer or DeLillo or Roth or even McInerney, I've not just got the distance between American and British writing and culture, but of a different generation, and that's often a difference of morality as well as language and context.

But DFW died aged 46, the age I'll be in March. I've been writing for as long as he was, obviously with much less success, and this piece isn't meant to suggest any comparison in terms of us as writers; other than from the little I've read about him, I think we share the same sense of ambition for writing; and the same sense of how hard it is, how brilliant it is when you get it right, and how important it is not just to write but to write something that matters. (And that's contentious enough: it can take twenty years just to get to the point that you might have a clue what you're doing.)

What I think I'm trying to say is that here's a writer, not much older than me, had he lived, who had not only accomplished quite a lot, against a whole range of difficulties, but had he lived would surely not be "finished." The idea that my writing could be finished at 46 - however unfinished the actual work is - would seem absurd. Whereas in the past writers died young, nowadays, surely, they shouldn't? I hadn't known, to be honest, about DFW's depressions, alcoholism etc. until I heard of his suicide; and I'm going to read the biography not to wallow in those, as to get a closer look at the intellectual and imaginative anatomy of
a writer close to my generation. I can't imagine that many writers of his age being ready for a biography and he has one now for two reasons; one, because the life is definitively finished (and therefore with it goes the writing life - we have all there is), and two, because of all the writers of the last twenty years you'd have wanted to be writing for the next twenty years, DFW is certainly one of them.

It's as true in literature as in music that death can be a good career move. There certainly wouldn't be a biography (and in the near future, the "letters" of DFW) if he was still with us. The "unfinished" and "repackaged" work comes into its own. The scholarly mechanism as well: already I know of someone in Manchester completing a DFW PhD - I doubt there are that many living writers getting the same treatment.  Ghoulish as that is, and whatever a writer thinks about the "posthumous" or the "afterlife" in letters, we know it happens - and that a name that could be lost becomes better known because of the tragedy. There's something else of course: we don't have to deal with the disappointment - the Martin Amis of "Yellow Dog"  is no longer something that we have to contemplate with DFW, for instance. It makes writers' lives, and their writing lives, more manageable, more compact.

What I hope it doesn't do though is reinvigorate the cult of the "mad" writer, the doomed artist. We know that writers are often troubled souls, but actually DFW seems to have been particularly so: a rarity in my experience, most poets and novelists I know have their moments but are somewhat grounded; they have to be. The work isn't glamorous. Nowadays it seems more likely that accountants and web designers will be drug fiends, that writers - the counterculture is for everyone, not just the "artist."There are enough writer suicides out there, but in the last fifteen years I've known a steelworker suicide; a computer analyst suicide, and yes, a writer who killed herself before she'd had a thing published.

More positively, we have the acclaim. Here is a writer who was self-consciously clever. Who was highly aware of the literary history he wanted to be part of, and, as great writers often do, had chosen his own antecedents - writers like Pynchon and Barthes who were probably somewhat out of fashion in the 1980s and 1990s.  An American publishing industry not only found room for David Foster Wallace, but nurtured him, allowed him to develop the "great novel", and to publish a diverse selection of fiction and non-fiction. It is hard to imagine British literary culture being quite so accomodating. Difficult writers are highly marginalised here: are almost doomed to teach or to research. We lack publications like "The New Yorker", and we tend to hold on to our old names like a comfort blanket.

For though his suicide remains such a tragedy for his friends and family, the interest in his life - in his unpublished works - in his letters - is because he was a writer worth reading; and therefore a writer worth writing about. I'll look forward to the biography and review it when I've read it.

Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgway

"Hawthorn & Child" is Keith Ridgway's 6th book, but I must to admit I'd not really heard of him before. It has been heavily promoted on the web by book blogger John Self, as he points out in his blogpost, he is even credited in the acknowledgements. The last time there was a similar internet buzz around an experimental novel was for Tom McCarthy's debut "Remainder." Zadie Smith posited this as one of two directions for the modern novel, opposing it against Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland", however I said at the time I felt this was a false opposition. In some ways "Hawthorn & Child" would be a better choice. But I'll come back to that.

"Hawthorn & Child" begins with what appears to be a police procedural.The two detectives are on a particularly dull surveillance job when they get a call that something has happened. The tone is flat, they exude ennui. It's not all that easy to tell the two detectives apart, and the use of dashes rather than quotation marks for their conversation emphasises this. There is little description, little scene setting, but this is set in a contemporary London (albeit, in chapter that is titled, confusingly "1934"), with recognisably named streets and districts. This seems to be a contemporary default - you find it in "Remainder" but also in Lee Rourke's "The Canal" or Nicola Barker's "Clear" - a realism based around real London streets and place names; but like those novels, that's about as far as the realism goes. In Ridgway's police case, you're not ever convinced that policemen ever actually talk or act like this, though there feels a patina of truth about the boredom, about their interchangeability as individuals, and about their role as pawns in the service they work for - taken off one case to work on another as priorities change. The crime that they are investigating is a shooting. It may be gang related, it may have a gay subtext. We don't know, they don't know. The trail goes cold, then goes hot again - but away from their patch, as colleagues chase a suspect up North. Somehow it has a connection (or may not) with the surveillance case they are investigating.

Yet the fragments of these cases aren't about to be resolved. The novel shifts to a series of vignettes, short stories even. This too is a contemporary trope, and perhaps the oppositional approach that Smith was struggling to identify. Not that its that new an idea - Brett Easton Ellis's "The Informers" did it - but more recently we've had the novels of David Mitchell,  Jennifer Egan, and even, in some ways, Kate Atkinson. Hawthorn and Child don't particularly interest Ridgway, he is drawn to the fragmentation of city life. That we are all connected, but disconnected. Only in a couple of chapters are one of the detectives at the heart - For instance in "How to have fun with a fat man" the gay Hawthorn finds himself switching memories between the sexually promiscuity of the gay sauna, and the adrenalin rush of being in a riot situation. Both give him a hard on. The all-male scenarios are brilliantly juxtaposed. It feels a genuine piece of art.

This is a book of stories then: stories of the city, only loosely connected with these two detectives, who, on their beat, can be faced with anything - keeping a regular tab on a petty thief, called to a terrible suicide. The connections between the stories are there; as they are in "Ghostwritten" or "A Visit from the Goon Squad" but they are often minimal. There's no arching narrative. We come back to Hawthorn and Child but we hardly know them. When we do have a chapter with a policeman and his family it is their divorced superior Rivers. It turns out he knew the dead woman; yet it is the chapter from his daughter's point of view which is most striking. She's having her first teenage love affair with a boy who might actually be gay, and having strained conversations with her out of touch father who meets her in a cafe by her school. Rivers is interrupted a couple of times by unnamed policemen - Hawthorn and Child again.

It feels that our detective duo, whom we hardly get to know (or even differentiate, other than their sexuality) are not so much Vladimir and Estragon but Rozencrantz and Gildenstern as reimagined by Tom Stoppard. The "attendant Lords" whose destiny is out of their hands - and possibly never was in their hands. There's something here, I think, about the powerlessness of the individual man in a large organisation, or in modern life. The "power" that a policeman has, is only within the context of his daily rounds; that he can be redeployed at a moment's notice. The modern hero is not the anti-hero of the post-war period, but an inert character to whom things happen. In that there's a similarity to the Rourke and McCarthy novels - and to Magnus Mills, who, in his dark humour seems to do this kind of inert male friendship somewhat better than Ridgway does here.

For though there is much to like about the book, I found it both a difficult book to get into, and a novel that, finally, I don't think entirely succeeds; and given its fragmented nature, it does need, I think, to have a much better grasp of its material. Having not read him previously, I don't know if the sense I got that the author himself wasn't entirely convinced about where the book was going, or what his characters were about, is a deliberate thing. In itself, this uncertainty wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but thinking of writers who have done similar things, this tentative nature seems a failing. It reminds me a little of the tentative character-building that B.S. Johnson does, only then to belittle it as being a fiction. The early parts of the novel have such a flat tone, and such an undifferentiated voice, that the powerful poetry of some of the later chapters comes as a surprise. Like Micheal Cunningham or David Mitchell he can change register when needed, but the general style seems to lack conviction. "I don't know how to write" he disarmingly says in an article in the New Yorker, and that confusion actually comes across a little in "Hawthorn & Child." I'm thinking he perhaps thinks too much about this. The often underrated Kate Atkinson, in her early novels like "Human Croquet", was particularly adept at pulling different stories out of a city or a town, and somehow linking them together. Her recent move to the somewhat accidental detective Jackson Brody, finds her addressing the issue of how to "pull together" the chaos of the modern city - a detective of some kind or another is an obvious interlocutor. Hawthorn and Child aren't really believable as detectives, but they lack a reality as well, and in a book that has black comedy, and mock noir at its heart, this reader at least, found it difficult to give Ridgway the full benefit of the doubt.

I've read a lot of portmanteau novels, and this one didn't quite manage to achieve the unity the form ultimately requires. That Ridgeway is perhaps unconcerned about this means that it will probably be a matter of taste whether you like this digressive novel or not. From Twitter and elsewhere, John Self's campaign has brought in quite a number of readers; and I hesitated about writing a review - for though I personally don't think it lives up to some of the praise it has been given, it's in no way a bad book. I'll certainly be interested in reading something else by Ridgeway as I think the flat, occasionally throwaway style of some of his prose, more than the fragmented nature of the narrative, was what I couldn't quite get over - yet in certain chapters he surprises you with a more fluid style that is much more powerful.

NE Sojourn

I've been in the North East for a few days, seeing friends and family. I didn't read much - too busy for that, but good to have a change of scene. I popped into MIMA - the modern art gallery in Middlesborough, which was a fantastic building, but a little less impressive inside. It's signature summer exhibition being a large show by potter Julian Stair. As interesting as burial pots and sarcophagi can be, I'm not sure in what way this was modern or even art (as opposed to craft.).Worth the visit though since I finally got to see Claes Oldenfield's "Bottle of Notes" which was (is?) his only large scale piece in the UK - and which I'd first heard about when going to an exhibition of his work in Los Angeles in 1995.

A second gallery visit was on the recommendation of a friend, to the BALTIC to see (or rather hear) Janet Cardiff's sound piece, The Forty Part Motet, which takes a choral piece by Tallis and has it playing through 40 different speakers, with the audience in the middle of the circle. A lovely piece of work, that was worth the trip. I was less enamoured of the Mark Wallinger exhibition that filled the top floor of the gallery. The execution was good, but the ideas seemed weak, or maybe that's me trying to find meaning in work that is not particularly meaningful. But I'm not in review mode, being on holiday, so go see for yourself.

I've been following the Pussy Riot trial before it got picked up by the majority of the media, thinking their art performance/provocation was a stunning piece of agit prop. That its now lead to a 2-year sentence for the 3 perpetrators is not surprising; I don't think I'd ever any illusions about Russia's new found "freedoms", but its been instructive seeing the Western media come slowly to the cause. For Pussy Riot bring into question not only the veneer of Putin's new Russia, and are as relevant a protest as the student protests of 1968, but also ask questions for the West. For its almost impossible to imagine a musical/performance creating such moral outrage in the UK - or, perhaps, more importantly -  gaining such traction. Even hearing their raw Riot Grrrl styled "punk prayer" on the news seems to me the first time I've heard loud, aggressive, under-produced music on mainstream media in years. Pussy Riot would be confrontational anywhere, I feel, but I immediately saw what they were doing, responded to their actions and methodology. It has to be one of my worries of the times that organised religion, rather than retreating into its rightful place as private faith, is reasserting itself as somehow "special". When this is closely allied with the state, as it apparently is in contemporary Russia, then its a dangerously illiberal cocktail. And, to choose a religious turn of phrase, let him without sin cast the first stone. We aren't jailing colourful performance artists in the UK, but we are trying to extradite young computer geeks to America. I liked Peaches quickly written "Free Pussy Riot."

This year's Booker longlist has got people's interest up in a way usually reserved for the shortlist. My publisher, Salt, has a debut novel on the list, Alison Moore's "The Lighthouse", and its one of several interesting looking books up for the September winnowing. I notice displays of the longlist in various Waterstones, and I just hope when the shortlist is announced in early September, that the longlisted books don't disappear from view, as "losers", after all, the best British novel of the last few years, David Mitchell's Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, was only longlisted.

After the Sport's Over

I've been trying to write a blog post for a fortnight. But the Olympics has been like some big brainwipe machine and every time I try and write something I get swamped in sporting metaphors and images of Jessie's J's catsuit.

Given that, I'll stick to the more regular fare. What to do in Manchester when the 'Lympic dream is over.

You could go to Castlefield Gallery - which has reopened with a fascinating exhibition by Dave Griffiths, from MMU, with his solo show "Babel Fiche."

Or tomorrow night for instance its the latest addition of the Other Room. I've missed the last couple so I'm looking forward to this one. Varied line-up as well. Its now at the Castle on Oldham Street. (AKA the Bermuda Triangle, because you can never remember leaving.)

We've had a Booker longlist since we last spoke - but I've not read any of them (though hope to get through the Hilary Mantel in next couple of weeks). Quite a few of the books AREN'T EVEN PUBLISHED YET, which I always hate; but there you go, 'tis the way it is.

That's all I've got, the five hoops have still got me ensnared. 

More Ballard than Orwell, our Weird Country nailed by Danny Boyle

I've been looking forward to the Olympics. I enjoy spectator sport, and the Olympics is a bit of an all-you-can-eat buffet. I first fell for the Olympics in 1988 when unemployed after university, and getting up early or staying up late to watch the men's hockey at Seoul, coverage fronted by a young, cute Hazel Irvine.

Politically the Olympics is something else entirely, of course, like an unemployed man blowing his redundancy check on a binge holiday for all his friends and family, and the corporate omnishambles of the last few weeks have only highlighted how corporates interests are just that - "interests" - that we should look to ridicule and curtail at any opportunity.

To last night, then, and the opening ceremony. When did these become so much the main event? I guess we live in an age of spectacle, both live and on television, from SuperBowl to X-Factor. Luckily, somebody, somewhere made a brave decision that paid off and gave the ceremony to the singular vision of Danny Boyle, a diverse and creative film maker who went from the no budget of "Shallow Grave", to the countercultural classic "Trainspotting" to world-beater with the lovably sentimental "Slumdog Millionaire". He, in turn, gave over the music to Underworld, who soundtracked "Trainspotting" all those years back with the "lager-lager" refrain of "Born Slippy."

I was at a party at Islington Mill, where we watched the opening and ending in a communal situation, and turned down the sound for the A-Z of countries. The bucolic opening seemed more of a pitch to whoever commissioned "The Hobbit", Constable's Hay Wain reimagined as "The Shire." Angel-voiced children singing "Jerusalem" etc. - all very BBC. Then came the tumbling of Boyle's Horrible History. I grew up with the "industrial revolution" as the staple of my own history, and to be frank, I'm a little tired of it. Watching this in an actual mill, now re-used as an arts centre, seemed nicely ironic. History is perhaps not Boyle's strong point. Very Dickensian, we're still in thrall to a Victorian vision, when England ruled the waves etc. Then, surprisingly - one of many - we were thrust into the post-50s Britain of the NHS, as if a personal rebuke to coalition politicians, and accidentally, the clueless Mitt Romney. I have to say, I got a little lost around here - or the wine was beginning to take hold - but we had child catchers, J.K. Rowling, Great Ormond Street Hospital and god knows what else.

The whole ceremony had some of the something-for-everyone I'd expected, but it then upped a gear. There were two genuine innovations that seemed remarkable: the angels-on-bikes that spread out around the stadium; and Thomas Hetherington's remarkable lighted cauldron. Manchester's lovely but misplaced B of the Bang - an earlier Hetherington work - seems a distant memory. There were also two very good jokes: Mr. Bean playing a single note throughout the "Chariots of Fire" theme, upstaging the poor orchestral straight men playing the rest of the tune; and a somewhat silly-surreal film/live sequence where James Bond and the Queen parachuted into the ground. Very game, your majesty. She's probably wishing she'd retired a yaer ago. Mr. Bean, of course, is the most famous Britain worldwide - but this little piece reminded us of the sheer joy of when he first arrived, before becoming ubiquitous and annoying.

It was fascinating how many of the cultural icons here came from the wrong side of the tracks. There was none of the Andrew Lloyd Webber/X-Factor/Gary Barlow/Simon Cowell shite that passes for contemporary light entertainment. The Beeb, you felt, was kept well away from this one - having had plenty of C list celebrity fun with the torch relay. Compare tonight's line up with the Barlow-curated Queen's Jubilee concert... or rather, please don't. Rowan Atkinson cut his teeth on the alt. comedy scene in the early 80s, Boyle began with the no budget dark comedy "Shallow Grave", Underworld started as unpronounceable art band freur, before morphing into electronic pioneers; and Arctic Monkeys are just about the last great British indie band.

Arctic Monkeys came on to play two songs - their debut "I bet you look good on the dancefloor" and the Beatles' "Come Together." Alex Turner actually looked like the young John Lennon, lean, mean, and quiffed - and I was reminded that "Come Together" was so similar to a Chuck Berry song that Lennon had to make amends by recording several Berry numbers on the "Rock and Roll" album, the cover of which - Lennon in Hamburg in the 50s - Turner seemed to have styled himself on. Music remains Britains one world beater of the last 50 years; from the Beatles through to Adele, and it was no surprise that pop culturally obsessed Danny Boyle would do his best with a medley that included a personal "best of" list that could hardly be faulted; even if it occasionally slipped into Stars on 45 territory. One might have paused to wonder where classical music or jazz were in all this - or even contemporary literature or film - only to then remember that whilst we've been pretty unassailable in pop music this last half a century; in other art forms we're much less renowned. No YBAs were involved in the making of this it seems - though Martin Creed had started the day off with a nationwide bell ringing contest.

Even here though our mongrel nature came through. No idea why Boyle decided to single-handedly resurrect Mike Oldfield's career - though as English as his music is, the theme from Tubular Bells is indelibly attached to that most horrific of movies, the Exorcist. Also, if "Come Together" is part Chuck Berry; the soundtrack to that most British of films, Chariots of Fire, was written by the Greek Vangelis. Even Pink Floyd (a spellbinding use of "Eclipse" from "Dark Side of the Moon") seems as American as they are British. Perhaps that was the point: an island nation; a trading nation; our uniqueness is also due to our diversity.

When the Olympic flag was carried around the stadium, it was a genuinely emotional moment; and grown men were tweeting about the tears in their eyes as the much loved Muhammad Ali, ill with Parkinson's disease, made a welcome appearance. At that point you realised why all the dreadful corporate sponsors wanted to be associated with the Olympics, they stand so far from this triumph of the human spirit that they have to leach on it by association, whatever the cost. Luckily, it seems the Olympic ideal can cope with this cynicism; at least when its done with the humour, pathos and counter-cultural knowingness that Boyle gave us. Sebastian Coe made a less than impressive politician, but the singlemindedness he brought to his running has been carried over into his bringing of the Olympics to us. Not for the first time one is reminded that if you get the best people in to do a particular job then it will be done far better than any committee or demagogue can expect.

As Team GB came into the stadium at the end of the 200+ nations, dressed by Stella McCartney (a few minutes before her dad would take us out with a rousing "Hey Jude") apparently as extras at a Glenn Campbell convention; the whole madness of the whole thing seemed the point. Our weird dysfunctional country treasures its eccentricities whilst trying to eradicate them in the name of "globalisation" or "efficiency". Whether this is a last hurrah for British eccentricity, one can only doubt, though the managerial culture that was efficient enough to bring us the games, has clearly had to take a back seat now it comes to the money shots. Rather than the much quoted George Orwell, it seems that our dystopian suburban surrealist, J.G. Ballard is the muse that Boyle's vision of Britain was channelling - and we're the better for it. 

Bring on the games.

The Emotional Life and Creativity

Workshopping a poem at the weekend, I'd taken this one along because it wasn't quite right in a number of ways. The workshop brought out its problems; though perhaps not its solutions. I'm not always that linear in my poetry - even though I sometimes appear to be. As often, I'll find a theme and spin a few different thoughts around it. I realised that the poem was caught between being linear and this more abstracted approach - and of course, to the reader, unless the juxtapositions are obviously different, there's a tendency to want to read these things straight.

Part of the reason was that it was a poem about mental illness - or was it? I'd begun with a conceit - even, a title - and had used this to write a poem that was quite dark in its subject matter. Yet it wasn't a personal poem and certainly wasn't "specific" about me or anyone else. Rather, it was seeking a little to pull together observations on how in adult life the "monsters under the bed" that frighten us as children can be real. I'll not post the poem here, as it's currently failed to express my thoughts - perhaps they weren't quite there; and the poem was more a random gathering of images. One person said that there are so many poems about personal experience of depression/mental illness that a non-personalised view didn't seem strong enough. I guess I agreed, except by the very sense of observation I think I was trying to move away from that more "confessional" strand - Plath, Berryman et al.

But it did make me think a bit. When I tried to write a poem a month a while back for National Poetry Writing Month it stopped me writing for a couple of months afterwards. I was literally sick of poems. Or rather, I was wrung out with the sense I was writing poems as "things" rather than poems that meant "something." Although I've always felt my best poems are, in a somewhat un-British way, poems of ideas, they've also only ever really come from the emotion: "only connect the prose and the passion" as E.M. Forster had it. When you write a poem about love or about death or about any of the very human things that console and confront us, do we always need to tap into the emotional wells? There are, of course, other forms of poetry than the confessional - and I'm uneasy about the poetry sequence that is always "in memoriam" or similarly felt; yet at times it sees poets at their very best. I think that has to be some distance.

Writing from emotion or at an emotional time can be cathartic but it can also be to much "about" the self when I think it probably needs to be "of" the self. There seems a distinct difference between things I've written when I've felt a bit of a "black dog" of depressiveness descending - which sometimes seems to be a ball of creativity that needs pushing out - and when I've written self-defeatedly about the thing that's depressing me. Too close to the cause of your anger, and the writing is infected by it, rather than inspired by it. Or at least, that's what I've often felt. "Revenge is a dish best eaten cold", they say, and it's probably true of writing as well.

Yet emotion is not merely a negative - love; elation; whatever - these are equally important - and, thinking back, I've often upped my game when I've been inspired, even briefly, by more positive emotions. Having just had a poem accepted for a magazine for the first time in ages, I wondered why that one in particular. And perhaps its because its a poem about desire; but not a delayed, or distant desire, but a palpable, real one. The girl in the poem has a face; even if I didn't actually go much further in describing it. If anything, it was a poem about a "moment" of desire; and that was already gone - already able to make the transition from feeling into art. Thinking back, and looking at the poems in "Playing Solitaire for Money" and even the first section of "Extracts from Levona", I realise that these often came out of a similar heightening of emotion. Looking back, they weren't necessarily great loves, or terrible despairs, but moments of anticipation, or splinters of uncertainty. The poem acts as a divining rod, often failing to twitch when it is moved over dry grounds, but frantic and insistent when it divines the water below.

Re-reading John Ashbery ("Soonest Mended")

I first came aware of John Ashbery in the late 90s. If that seems a little late its probably a sign of the impoverished poetry teaching I received on my undergraduate degree (the Morrison/Motion Penguin anthology, Heaney & Hughes) and a subsequent disinterest in poetry that lasted best part of a decade. I'd probably heard the name and would have looked up a few poems in one of those monstrous Norton Anthologies I'd had bought whilst studying 20th century American fiction. Poems like "The Instruction Manual" immediately resonated with me. It helped that I'd just started on an M.A. with his British publisher, Michael Schmidt, and over the next few years I picked up quite a few Carcanet volumes. I was amazed that, Mark Ford aside, nobody in British poetry seemed to have much time for Ashbery, (if they did like the New York Poets, it was always O'Hara), and when occasionally poets tried to write like him they would go for the surrealism and juxtaposition and miss what I always liked about his work: the generosity; the openness.

For I've always thought its a bit stupid trying to "understand" or "paraphrase" an Ashbery poem. He came out of a millieu that included Charles Ives and Jackson Pollock. We can hardly gloss their work - so why should Ashbery be any different? Of course, British poetry's infatuation with America had got as far as the Beats - for their looseness - and the confessionals - for their unbuttoned emotion; and Ashbery was something else. I got the chance to see him read a couple of times at the turn of the century, and he's thankfully still with us, aged 84, and still writing. That he's not won the Nobel yet is one of the Swedish Academy's most consistent oversights.

But all of that wouldn't mean much: for poetry is read one-to-one, or occasionally to a crowd where the experience is still the singular one. I can't get far in a Heaney book without putting it down; he has never seemed a "modern" poet to me; yet Ashbery - I'd realised I'd not been reading him for a while - is hard to put down. Flicking through the first 5 collections, anthologised as "The Mooring of Starting Out", I skipped the usual pleasures of "The Tennis Court Oath" and went for 1970's "The Double Dream of Spring." Its a more straightforward collection than people sometimes ascribe to Ashbery, but his work is vast and varied. These poems, written during a liberating time, the late 60s, seem to have a lightness and generosity that has none of the hippy overtones of the Beats or the English poets who attended the Poetry International. These are quieter works, about a complex America; as much Dickinson's quiet corners as Whitman's great spaces. One poem in particular stood out as I was reading last night. "Soonest Mended", a medium length poem from which "The Mooring of Starting Out" takes its name. Its easy to forget, with thinking of Ashbery as a "New York" poet, part of an urban demi-monde, how many of his better poems are embedded in lands, in other lands. "Soonest Mended" is about that other "hippy" dream, of going back to nature, or being from nature; but really, in typical with so much of his best work, the "it" in an Ashbery poem is a malleable one, he wants the poem to be applyable elsewwhere. The details of the poem "Angelica, in the Ingres painting" or "Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile" give it a centre, but one which doesn't dominate. It is a painterly technique, where the focus is as much on the horizon or the light, as on the individual figures that create that perspective. "This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free" he writes, a small ambition, at odds with "The American Dream" but also part of it - to have a little piece of this vast continent that we can make our own; where we can live, cheaply and happily. We know now how much that "dream" has been brutalised -

"It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later,   

The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time.   

They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game   

Were merely spectators...."

- writing in the mid-60s, Ashbery is surely looking back. On what? The dust bowl farmers of his youth in the depression perhaps? But it feels a little timeless. This idea of familiar struggle; where we believe that our hard work and the close ties of our friends and family will keep us "in the game", and only later do we realise our role - as spectators (consumers perhaps). It seems a very appropriate poem for today; an ecological poem in some ways; this is shortly after "Silent Spring" for instancel; and the late sixties would see the music of the Band and others extolling a rural simplicity. Yet, for Ashbery, he isn't a sentimentalist (or at least not in this poem), and instead accepts time's passing as not a game to be "won" but as a life to be lived. The result: we may not be any further forward; yet we have to believe that it is possible - not necessarily for the great ambitions - but for the smaller ones. There is much more in the poem, and like so much of his work, a literal interpretation seems rather pointless. When others write Ashbery-like they often write with a rigidity that his plain, but expressive language avoids. He is uniquely expert at creating an atmosphere that seems to stay in the poem, beneath the meaning of the words. The colloquialism, "least said, soonest mended" that my own farmer grandparents would use to get over a minor upset, seems exactly right for the poem's tone of getting on with life, but still retaining our hope, based upon the strengths and desires we have had all along. 

The poem can be read at the Poetry Foundation website here and is in his "Selected Poems".