The Engagement by Chloe Hooper

Despite all the resources at the hands of the modern novelist, certainly types of stories have become more complex to tell. In Chloe Hooper's "The Engagement" we have a contemporaneous sexual thriller, where our narrator, Liese, is lured into the countryside for a weekend with the man she has been having (paid) illicit sex with. This dark tale is very much in the territory of Daphne du Maurier or particularly Patricia Highsmith; yet its contemporary setting could cause all sorts of problems - one mobile phone call; one internet search and the the story is over. Yet, Hooper cleverly gives us a set up which deftly sidesteps these difficulties and delivers what in some ways is an old fashioned psychological thriller, albeit tinged with erotic power plays that seem very born out of a world of "swingers clubs" and "fuck buddies." Liese is English, whilst Alexander, ten years older than her, in his mid forties, is Australian; she is basically an urbanite, he is a country landowner. Coming up to the city (Melbourne) to search for apartments there is an immediate attraction between the woman showing him round, Liese, and him, and they begin to use the apartment "showings" as stage sets for their "affair" - complicated by the fact that after that first time he pays her, and, though she has not done this before, she accepts. The somewhat prissy title might have been better called "The Transaction" for it implies something more genteel (as does the cover) - a kind of dark Jane Austen anti-romance; when in fact the story is as suspenseful and unnerving as psychological powerplays such as "The Collector."

By agreeing to go away for a weekend with Alexander, at a time when she is due to leave Australia anyway, she is suddenly in a situation of intense excitement but also intense jeopardy. The money is the key to her staying but like that hoary 90s movie "Indecent Proposal", just because you accept money doesn't mean that you are the bad person in this transaction. For their relationship is a strange one of role playing and misunderstandings, and, told through Liese's eyes, we are never entirely sure at the full truth - though she is a compelling witness, the stories that excite Alexander about her "fallen" past are ones that she has admitted to fabricate. As the fabrications become more complex, we have to rely ever more on Liese's testimony, yet see that though Alexander is apparently keeping her trapped against her will, she is not making any great attempts at escape.

What Hooper does well is create a very believable modern scenario that offers up some tantalising questions about the "roles" that people create for themselves and each other - from "whore" to "bride" they are all fantasies. Alexander has his own dark past we find. He is a broken individual who is perfect for these fantasies - but his own cruelty is emotional as much as physical. He is like the religious playboy who has a past of sexual promiscuity but imagines a chase marriage to an imagined "wife." By setting it at the end of her stay in Australia (before she returns to an uncertain recession in Norwich of all places) and in a remote outpost that is also a sprawling 19th century ranch full of old furniture and old ghosts, she has given us a plausible retelling of old stories of lust and possession. Its a relatively short book, but though I think you could read it in one go, it took me a while, as  Hooper's writing has a forensic intensity which needs savouring. There's always the sense of something delayed - something suspended - whether its a sexual fulfilment or calamity, which makes it a very sexy book even though the descriptions of Liese and Alexandar together are told plainly, as if a script for a porn movie. For the sexiness in the book is in the regard that Liese - an architect by trade - has for "things." Hooper's writing has a real clarity about it, particularly when its describing things, and so though the book is all through Liese's eyes, those eyes are keen on showing the static detail of both Alexander's old house, and the dreadfully sterile apartments where there affair begins. Equally at home writing about a cow having a breach birth as interior decor, the descriptiveness is always used to power the narrative. If the trip into the country seems allegorical it also feels like a trip into the heart of darkness, and there's something of Conrad's twisting of the knife, in the slow unreeling of her story.

Its impossible to say much more without bringing in spoilers, except to say that in many ways Hooper prepares you only for the upsetting of your expectations. The book is at its weakest when it becomes too much like a nineteenth century tryst, and the tone of the dialogue never qutie convinces. Alexander speaks like an old English squire rather than the backwoods scion that he is, and Liese is occasionally coquettish and crude, but mostly her dialogue comes across as a little bland, especially compared with the knowing intelligence of the narration. Though "The Engagement" is the much darker book, I'm reminded a little of Rachel Cusk's city-girl-goes-country "The Country Life" where the change of scenario, coupled with an unreliable narrator creates the sense of dislocation.

Overall, its a fine, intense novel that successfully marries a powerfully seductive template common to much older fictions with a very modern sensibility.

Hot Writers

Have you ever been hot? Writers are like other creative athletes, they have streaks, they hit their groove, they sometimes can't do any wrong. All creatives know this; and its important to recognise this. We all know that between 1965-8 the Beatles could do no wrong; or think of the Clash from 1979-80... or that initial period of songwriting by Noel Gallagher that fuelled Oasis's first two albums. For writers its the same sometimes. Martin Amis through Money, Time's Arrow and London Fields, before it came crashing down around The Information; John Fowles from The Collector through French Lieutenant's Woman, the Magus and the Ebony Tower. For poets: think of those midnight writing sessions that fuelled Plath's tragic Ariel poems; or going back, the year of Keats' Odes.

Hot writing is the most exciting kind - its not just about a steady career or an accumulation of skills, but some kind of breakthrough from what went before. There's little in Chatwin's work before In Patagonia to suggest he was about to hit  a hot spot, yet there'd been plenty of people who'd seen his potential: for publishers and editors and agents surely the job shouldn't be about shoring up writers who are predictabley competent but ideally spotting the hot spot and going for it. Zadie Smith was clearly hot around the time she was signed up prior to White Teeth, but since then has she merely been competent? Hot is a particularly conflation of risk taking, ego, opportunity and zeitgeist. It might happen "overnight" but an overnight sensation is usually a decade or more in the coming. In the visual arts we often see it more clearly as the first time a painter paints in what we later know as their clear style (think of Pollocks splatter paintings for instance). Grab artists whilst they are hot - and work their asses off; they'll enjoy it as there's nothing better than being a creative person when you get in the zone.

I was hot for a while, I think - perhaps '96-'99 whilst I was both learning my stuff with fiction, getting a few things published, and moving on. I felt at the time that I could do anything with my material, that I was brave enough to keep getting better. It's something I hope will happen with poetry - and there's been moments over the last two or three years where I've felt the sizzle, yet there's such a gap between you as the artist and the world your art comes into. You know you're hot, but few of us have that entree to capture that heat and do what's necessary. Didn't Chatwin have a book contract for a novel he'd never write when he sent that famous postcard "gone to Patagonia?"

That's the thing: did Plath realise she'd made a fundamental breakthrough? or did she think this stuff was useless and moreover, how could anyone publish it? This is where the business end of the industry needs to step in I guess. Are publishers and agents looking for what's hot? I sometimes think so, but more often think they're just keeping their fingers crossed that their newst prodigy is not going to fuck up. The thing is the real leaps you find in "hot" writing - which is the zeitgeist defining Money rather than the funny, but little novels that preceded it - can sometimes be prophecied and sometimes not. Its only in retrospect, when the writing has gone lukewarm again, that we notice it's gone. Maybe that's why late career writers like Amis and Winterson take the University shilling? Because they want to feel the heat again and new writing is always where it's going to come from.

Hot writing is not just good writing, not competent writing, not even successful writing - it can even be bad writing at times - but what it is, is when a writer seems to get everything right - the subject, the form, the execution, and over not one thing but two or three. I'm sure some very good writers have never been hot - and also sure that some hot writers have burnt out tragically or been spectacularly unsuccessful (hello, Franz Kafka), but also that if there's anything that we as writers should be looking out for amongst our peers is when they start to heat up; catch them whilst they can, or as Snoop Doggy Dogg said, drop it like its hot.

Review: Glam at Liverpool Tate

Glam rock is as seventies as power cuts, Watney's Party six and the Sweeney. Yet the "decade that taste forgot" has recently had a bit of a revival. Statistics show that we were never as equal a society as the early 70s, and the  music scene from the early seventies (before everything went off the boil prior to Punk) has rightly been lauded for its diversity.

But was Glam a movement? In some senses the 70s seems the art-less decade. Literature was in the doldrums, the American new wave of cinema had begun to peter out by its middle years before "Star Wars" changed the game for good, and its hard to think of a single visual artistic great associated with that era; no Warhol (though he was still very active), no Picasso, no Dali.

Liverpool Tate in its latest show Glam - the Performance of Style, has put together a portmanteau show that puts the "glam" of the era to the forefront. A mix of V&A style pop culture references and juidiciously chosen art from the collection, there is certainly much to engage and admire, but whether it entirely convinces as a show I'm not so sure.

The book that comes with the show is more helpful in some ways. Essays by Micheal Bracewell, Simon Reynolds and others pull together particular strands of seventies aesthetic from glam rock, to queer art, to the conflation of consumer culture with art. The exhibition itself is split into a UK and American section, with a little bit of European political art at the very end. Glam rock of course was a nearly entirely British phenomenon, and I've always seen it a little as a mainstreaming of the King's Road (where Malcolm Maclaren's shop, in its frequent renaming from Let it Rock through to Sex, nicely maps the changed aesthetics of a decade) - as for many people the "sixties", the pill, gay liberation, the women's movement, and the music and the fashions, only made it to the English Midlands and North in the early 70s. In this sense glam rock can be seen as a more down-to-earth and working class version of the hippy culture, ditching the politics and upping the sparkle.

Emblematic of this is the 2nd Roxy Music album, For Your Pleasure, their musical high point was also an aesthetic high - a gatefold sleeve with Amanda Lear on the cover, and the band dressed in outlandish costumes, mostly designed by fashion designer Antony Price, on the inner fold. Eno and Ferry's costumes are here in the first part of the show, and Price himself photographed by Karl Stoeker as a catwalk Teddy Boy. Stoeker's photos are a revelation, taken from the context of the album, and put alongside the images of Price and Lear, there's the aesthetic of the glamour shot but through a dark and decadent reversioning. They feel both bright and stark at the same time. The early 70s most iconic pop moment may well be the hugging of glammed up Bowie and Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops, and it is Ronson - who in another life might have been a northern bricklayer - dressed to the nines, but ever the hard man, as if its the most normal look in the world which is as telling as anything. Basically, in the simple aesthetic of the 70s provincial high street you can be as glam looking as you like, and nobody would think there was anything gay going on, as mainstream Britain has always preferred camp. There are some fascinating pieces of social history. A student film of Roxy fans attending a Bryan Ferry show at Manchester Opera House in 1977 are a perfect template for Blitz kids three years later; an early Derek Jarman film sees his aesthetic already in place in a cheaply shot vignette; and some early Martin Parr shots of Osmonds fans, nicely captures the awkwardness of British youth.

The art of the time is more difficult in some ways. Allen Jones' Table from 1969 and David Hockney's Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy are perhaps the two most recognisable works; yet the rubberised fetishism of the former (echoed in Roxy's "In Every Dream Home a Heartache") and the slightly chilling formalism of the Hockney speak of different things than "glam." Here is where the exhibition seems more a portmanteau than a genuine movement. The "best" art is from before glam was articulated; yet its not clear that it led to "glam" except indirectly; Richard Hamilton's work - an SF aesthetic of cut-up and post-modern appropriation for instance speaks of a starker world than the artifice of glam; its more akin to the bleached colours of Roeg's films "Performance" and particularly "The Man Who Fell to Earth." The most interesting exhibit in many ways is the "scatter room" that recreates a piece of work that has been shown since the early 70s and looks like a display of bric-a-brac. In some ways the art of the early 70s, particularly British art, has almost disappeared in this show, either because it is was ephemeral in some way, or because it was contrary to this glam aesthetic.

The American story is a different one and is wrapped up with gay rights and feminism. Here we see familiar pieces, such as Cindy Sherman's different personas or Nan Goldin's photographs of performers. Glam never made it in the US, at least until it was unpicked and turned into cabaret by Alice Cooper or Kiss. Whereas middle Britain has always had bit of a flirtation with gay culture, as long as its Larry Grayson or John Inman rather than anything too out there, in America it has rarely gone big except without attaching itself to something else: Broadway for instance, or disco. It was chameleon Bowie who came out remember, not Elton John or Freddie Mercury.

Glam, American style, comes out of the post-Stonewall freedoms of New York, San Francisco and a few other cities and because of this was much artier. The Cockettes were just one of a number of "cabaret" acts that we find in the show, rescued a little from history here. It is the aesthetic that fed into the big mainstream success of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Though absent from this show, Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon" seems perfectly set in this moment - where straight America comes up against its fears. Films of that era, such as the Lumet film, John Waters' "Pink Flamingoes" and "Rocky Horror" are surely key to unpicking this show, and the Waters one is one of three being shown in tandem with the exhibition at FACT in March. 

The final room of the show lets another story in, and its a welcome one. Works from European artists like Polke and Paschke are politic in tone; and its a useful (and overdue) reminder that glam didn't exist in a world of plenty, as much of a world that needed some kind escapism. Baader Meinhoff, Vietnam, Watergate, the oil crisis, the cold war, these are the real world events underneath all of this. What we are seeing is how we often follow personal freedoms even when the social or national picture is darker.

I'm not sure Glam entirely succeeds either as social history or art exhibition, but its probably the latter that's more problematic - in that this portmanteau show places different things together under a single banner. The accompanying book reflects this honestly, but the show itself seems sometimes confused and partial. More difficult I think is that we are now at the point where the art of the last third of the twentieth century is facing a more critical judgement: that of posterity; and its not that its found wanting, but that there's a curatorial desire to hijack the better works and artists for myriad reasons. Liverpool Tate has previously had a Summer of Love exhibition from the late 60s, whilst the V&A has comprehensively covered Post-Modernism; individual works and artists are being rolled out to answer different questions, and not always satisfactorily. There's a political point here as well - though this is more about the social history: glam in Britain was a working-class movement in many ways, and therein lies its historical fascination; whilst in the US its intimately wound up in gay and women's liberation; these, rather than the allure of the glitterball, are the key themes of the art and popular culture of the era. Its a show full of interesting works, though some may be over-familiar, and the book is excellent and answers, to a large degree, my criticisms. Go see, but perhaps read one or two of the essays first.

Dear World and Everyone In it ed. by Nathan Hamilton

In her review of Sam Riviere's "81 Austerities" Ruth Padel describes his poetry as being developed through (a) the internet (b) university creative writing courses. Riviere is one of the 60 young ("more or less (under) 35 ") poets featured in this substantial new anthology "Dear World and Everyone In It" edited by Nathan Hamilton. Asked by his publisher why certain young poets aren't included he says, repeated in his combative introduction, "some new Young Poets still write Old Poetry" But this is not the old mainstream v. non-mainstream argument retrod, more that the techniques and subject matter of some of the best contemporary poets don't seem to owe much to the generations that come directly before. The 2004 "next generation" poets were very recognisable to the crop of 1994's "new generation" poets, so something has clearly changed. There are few poems in this selection that owe much to Duffy or Armitage or Heaney or Hughes. A decade ago, it was like poetry - and particular the main presses - had closed their doors to new voices and new poets. Rather than conform to get heard, we've seen a sprouting of  a "networked" culture where live events, magazines, websites and pamphlets, and university creative writing course have combined outside of this "mainstream." More recently, pamphlet series from Salt, tall lighthouse, and even Faber amongst others have filled the publication gap, and those poets are amply represented here. And it is this networked culture, rather than the "internet" which has created that gap between new and "Old Poetry."

What of the poems though? This elegantly presented Bloodaxe book has reassuringly wide pages, enabling longer poems, prose poems and experiments alongside lyrics. Hamilton's introduction, a series of "Dear so-and-so" interjections that is both irreverant and combative, sets the scene. Flicking backwards through the book I came upon these lines:

"..."They were eating omelettes with dry bread."
It isn't 2 way: I read their questions in their eyes' laptops:
"What? WHAT? WHAT?! WHAT?! WHAT?!"
They sign the guest book grudgingly, like bears..." 


Easily recognisable as Luke Kennard, one of the prevailing voices of this generation. Kennard, like Armitage before him is an easy poet to copy, a difficult poet to copy well. Luckily, if there is a School of Kennard here - perhaps Riviere, Underwood, Berry might be lined up alongside him - its one with few rules. Returning to the beginning of the collection, Éireann Lorsung may seem an untypical poet to begin with; coming out of America-Nottingham; feminist in perspective, but imaginative in style, her opening poem "The Book of Splendor" is a beautiful choice. If Hamilton is setting his stall out, its for good poems and good poets over a particular style or subject. If the collection has a centre of gravity then perhaps its eastwards - East London, University of East Anglia, east coast of America - but that's only a partial telling. The crop of hybrid nationalities - frequently Americans or Europeans studying in the UK or a British poet, Amy De'ath, studying in Canada - is clearly one of the key characteristics that has fed into this 21st century poetry. At last we are moving away from the prevailing voices of Heaney and Hughes, Armitage and Duffy and O'Brien; poetry is urbanised, not so much rooted in the poetics of the Celtic fringe. Not that such distinctions are in anyway total, though there's no place for Faber Heaneyite Nick Laird, Michael McKimm's elegantly formal "The Annals of Antrim" won't scare any Irish horses.

I think what it is, is that networked culture has provided an alternate range of influences and stakeholders, and the poetry world is the better for it. There are, as Padel noted, a prevalence of university based poets.  This selection is confidently middle-class, confidently London/SE, confidently academic. It does make you ask: where are the working class voices? (No William Letford for instance.) Where are the Asian and black voices? Are writers like Kei Miller and Sandeep Parmar representative, or simply poets, cultural differences no longer as vital? Perhaps the next wave will be Anglo-Polish poets, disciples of Adam Zagajewski; for now we've Anglo-Hungarian Ágnes Lehóczky.

In the choice of poetry I think we're seeing a development of this generation. Attending a Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives event a few years ago I enjoyed some of these poets - it was a lively entertaining evening if a little solipsitic. These poets aren't actually now that young (many are 30 or over), and Hamilton has been judicious in his choice of work. What are they writing about is now as important as how they are writing it. Thank God we've moved from the anecdotal poem that seemed to dominate English lyrics for a decade or more; here we have stories, digressions, philosophy, even politics on occasion - an art in discussion with itself but not just about itself.  There are longer poems, prose poems, experimental and visual work alongside  the more formally lyrically. There aren't really any "giants" here or presiding voices - its as if the 35 age cut off has deprived us a little of some perspective (a Richard Price for instance, a Matthew Welton.) This generation now has Salt Younger Poets, Lung Jazz, Dear World and other anthologies... it may be time to tone down the ageism - after all they're all getting older. With perhaps the exception of Keston Sutherland, who is perhaps too niche to be any generational lead, the majority of the poets have only published this century - there feels a gap in the narrative - between this generation and the new and next generation poets.

As I said, its a substantial book and generally the poets are given plenty of space rather. A couple of quibbles. The acknowledgements at the end seem only partial - how many of these poems have appeared in books? Some are mentioned, others (like Tim Cockburn or Sam Riviere) aren't acknowledged directly - and those are the ones I know. Also, similar to the Lumsden anthology "Identity Parade" not all the poets are represented by their best work. Whether this is to do with rights, or the desire of editors and poets to include recent work, I'm not sure, but "New Lines", for instance included many of the iconic poems of the day - the Chris McCabe poems included, for instance don't really do justice to his range, for which I'd recommend his debut collection "The Hutton Inquiry", and  Lehóczky's prose work included here, means that we have no room for her excellent "Budapest to Babel".Still working through the book as a whole, but I already have my favourite poems anyway:"Immediately on Waking" by Tim Cockburn is stunning, alongside that opener from Éireann, Emily Berry's "Shriek", and the chosen extracts from "81 austerities."

This book grew out of a series of mini-anthologies in the Rialto, and is published by Bloodaxe. Michael Mackmin and Neil Astley deserve full credit for handing over to a younger editor to map this changing scene. There are omissions of course; as well as Letford I'd have found room for my fellow Salt modern voices Claire Trévien and J.T. Welsch, and one might quibble at some of the more out there selections. Good as Nat Raha and Holly Pester are, their work might be better experienced live, in audio, or over a longer selection.  The internet may not have been invented in 2004, as Padel seems to think, but at least its well represented in these poems: though rarely as the subject, more often as the material. With perhaps the exception of the polemical "Jo Crot"'s fun, but meandering "Poetsplain", and one or two other poems, Flarf and its cousins, and the Ken Goldsmith school of poetics haven't made much of an impact here; and though the Cambridge influence of Prynne hangs over some of the more experimental poets, they seem among the least interesting in this company. 

Where is British poetry nowadays? I'd like to think at a good point, its certainly not "dying" as was recently said (though slam poetry may well be the least interesting of the performance genres currently appearing at a pub near you.) Many of these poets cut their teeth live but are not "performance poets" in the slam sense.   It may seem easy to draw a line with what's gone before, but I know that many of the poets here have benefited from the generosity of older poets as academics and mentors, and mainstream techniques, by their very nature, can end up showing diminishing returns over time - how else are new poets to define themselves other than through accessing a wider palate? If critics of these poems and poets might complain about their "newness", their "novelty", their "meaninglessness", then Hamiltons selection refutes most of these complains: these are substantial works, and some are substantial poets. If there is less of the anecdotal, less of the "I am" poem, less of the nostalgic, then that's a good thing - they all have plenty of time left to write their elegies.

Holophin by Luke Kennard

In his SF novella Holophin Luke Kennard posits a future world where our memories are aided by the Holophin, a kind of Babel-fish of the mind, that cutely branded as a dolphin allows us to enhance different aspects of our presence. Its most practical element: that it can attend "virtual" board meetings on our behalf is the killler app that makes it so successful. Yet the Holophin and the corporation that designs it is not so much an industrial megacorp as a benevolent cooperative, development of their soft-hardware taking place in their school for geniuses, where much of the short novel is set. Hatsuka and Max are students of the school, and as well as there studies, they are involved in various secret projects which may or may not be with the permission of the school's enigmatic leadership. So far, so good, this is a pithy SF tale, set in that notoriously Asian millieu that we find in books like The Wind Up Girl, and in much of Murakami. In a fucked up world, corporations of various kinds have replaced the nation states we were used to and a certain pan-Asian sensibility is a default setting for this new world.

Yet, this is Kennard we are talking about, a poet who, in his books to date has shown an admirable desire not just to have his cake and eat it, but to let us know that is what he wants. Like David Mitchell, he seems to have assimilated a wide range of influences in such a way that whatever he lays out, he has considered all the angles. In this case, what starts as a tight, imaginative flight of fancy, soon collapses in on itself. Hatsuka, the girl genius, is carrying her own secret with her, the Holophin as novelist, who narrates the tale to us, whilst her "boyfriend" Max is increasingly absent from the tale. Wondering why he has left his own Holophin behind, in a nice twist on the reading-his-diary scenario, she quizzes the Holophin and finds a dark, grim(m) bedtime story which is then embedded in this manuscript. Asking to be placed in the story herself, it also changes and we are moved from a standard SF tale, into the halls and mirrors of Kennard's poems, which often tell a story then step inside or outside the story to let us know (or at least partially know) we are being "had." Here it is Calvino that most readily comes to mind; and there's a wonderful sense with Kennard, that even at his most wayward, he's more interested in jumping into the next place, than worrying about what that might actually be or entail.

Coincidentally (or not - it prompted me to read Holophin, which had been sat on my shelf for a while), Kennard read at  Poets and Players yesterday.  (alongside Sandeep Parmar, whose poem about her mother seen through an "archive" of her life, had a contrasting take on memory.) Though now turned 30, he is every much the well-spoken young poet-academic, but he disarms us with a poem from his latest book which confronts his affectations and lampoons them. Reading a number of poems from across his various books, his knowingness, which could appear wearisome, seems at one with the playful uncertainty of his work. As he says, when asked to write a wedding poem and being criticised afterwards for it not being poetic enough, "it has rhythm, form, assonance and alliteration, what more do you want?"

It is this sense of playful self criticism which I think gives Holophin a charm that lasts beyond the last page; for the "bedtime" stories that the device tells us are merely different "doors" into a consciousness that then gets corrupted and affected. Here is Orwell's forever war between competing armies, but replayed by corporations (Apple v. Microsoft perhaps?) as Hatsuka gets head-hunted by the open-source enemy of the Takin Corporation whose own logo, more glitzy than the plain dolphin, is a nautilus. The simple sea creatures are metaphors in the extreme: Hatsuka's father was a fisherman; but the seas have long since been polluted beyond being fishable. In this short, wayward but fascinating story, Kennard wants to show us more than a single possibility. The stories we are told - like the memories we hold - are unreliable, but may well be all we've got. The Holophin is in a nice pulp tradition of "life changing" devices - whether its Douglas Adam's Babel Fish, the horror movie The Stuff, the Adipose in Dr. Who or Carl Tighe's Kssss - which in itself seem to hark back to an older world of magic lamps and monkey's hands; and the story within a story here brings these echoes back full circle.

Holophin is still available as an e-book from Penned in the Margins. 

The Week Ahead

Something every night virtually, and something for everyone.... so public service announcement, here's what's on. You might see at me at some/all of the following

Sat 2nd Feb - Poets and Players, Luke Kennard and Sandeep Parmar, Whitworth Gallery, 2.30pm
Sun 3rd Feb - Words n Music, Fuel, Withington, 4.30pm
Mon 4th Feb - Stirred Poetry, Sand Bar, with Janet Rogerson and Richard Barrett, 8pm
Tues 5th Feb - Social Media Cafe, Northern, 6pm 
Wed 6th Feb - The Other Room, The Castle, 7pm 
Thur 7th Feb - Castlefield Gallery, Maurice Carlin, Launchpad, Preview
Thurs 7th Feb - Anthony Burgess, Sarah Butler and Emma Chapman Novel Launch
Fri 8th Feb - Levy Jamboree, feat. Monkeys in Love, Klondyke
Fri 8th Feb - Gesamkunstwerk - new night of electronic experimentation, Islington Mill 

What a vibrant city! 

Where is the 21st Century Literature?

What did the future look like 100 year ago? Culturally it was very interesting, for Stravinsky must have been putting the final touches to the new ballet he was working on with Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes which would premiere in May 1913, the crates containing the art works that would appear as "The Armory Show" in New York in February were probably en route or already docked; Ezra Pound was presumably collating the poetry that would appear in 1914 as "Des Imagistes."

Yet, the world at large wasn't yet aware. The 1890s had been an odd decade. The spoils of Empire were being shared around the European capitals; mechanised culture was becoming commonplace in our cities; nationalism was on its march to disaster; America was yet to ascend, though its East Coast wealthy were apeing the European bourgeoisie. For art you had to look elsewhere than England and America; the art of Fin de siècle, was a sign of the times; safe; genteel – or in the word that stuck to it, decadent. Henry James and Joseph Conrad's new fictions were doing extraordinary things but these were 19th century novelists moving beyond the books that had first got them noticed into a new and unusual place; the late Victorian poets collected in Quiller-Couch's 1900 anthology "The Oxford Book of English Verse" – were, Tennyson aside, an insipid bunch.

The modernist sensibility cannot be said to be have been conceived in one particular place at one particular time, yet by 1913, the conception was about to lead to the birth. "The Rite of Spring", "The Armory Show" and Blast! (which published in 1914 would include the first chapter of Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier") weren't to prove anomalies, but summations of the new style. The devastation of the First World War would take many great artists and writers from us, alongside the rest of their generation, but there was already an art appropriate to the challenge of giving some sort of explanation.

So, how have we got as deep into the next century without finding a similar point of entry? Our "war" - on "terror"  - following on from the Twin Towers is a proxy one of course; for we are not really combatants or victims of it. For the Zeppelin, let us replace with the remote controlled drone. A literature that could reflect that terror may well be being sourced in the hills of Pakistan and the deserts of north Africa, but will it be ours?

Fundamentally, the innovations of over a hundred years ago - from social innovations such as Marxism and Freud to the growth of "mechanical reproduction," may well dwarf the innovations of the last twenty years, yet our "information age" is still in its infancy - we are, in some ways, redrawing the systems of our forebears with data (Google maps to replace the A-Z; email and twitter to replace the twice-daily post), rather than anything more fundamental: yet that will come. The art of the time reflects this change in two ways; a conservative nostalgia for old forms and old histories; and a frenetic activity that reflects our information age sensibility but rarely offers a fundamentally new art. In other words, we are hankering after the times gone, or simply drawing pictures of the latest innovation. Not so dissimilar to one hundred years ago. The art of modernism in the end soon diversified from the documentary attempts of the Futurists into something more abstract; modernist poets went back into antiquity in a reaction against the times; the music of Schoenberg and others was already reflecting a world where the symphony orchestra or the tea room quartet were anachronisms, or easily enough preserved on shellac discs.

When we look back in twenty or thirty years in this first part of the century I don't think it will be rushed fictions by middle-aged men about the impact of 9/11 or nostalgic poem sequences about dead loved ones or even novel sequences about the Tudors that will speak of the age; these are leftovers in many ways from a generation that is growing old slowly. Technology is both ubiquitous and in some way forbidding: how many of the X Factor youngsters have been taught any more than singing like Whitney Houston? Do they understand the mathematics and the science and the technology behind the auto-tuning or the compression techniques that blasts the new Calvin Harris production out of the radio? A hundred years on from modernism its "usefulness" as a term seems less obvious. There were writers with the same sensibility before it was named; there were writers who did different things who came afterwards and would have been impossible without it - whether or not they reacted for or against it. In many ways, literature is as much a social more as an artistic one. The soldiers coming back from World War II to educational grants because of the American G.I. act weren't just Mailer or Vidal, but a ready audience. Heaney would have surely succeeded in any age; but his role was probably consolidated by the Troubles, as was Coetzee writing in and against apartheid South Africa. The baby boomers generation are hitting retirement age and to put it simply: the generation born in the 70s is smaller, less wealthy and in many ways straddles the pre- and post-digital eras. In some sense we might be the ones to make sense of it: in other ways perhaps it requires "digital natives" born with a mobile phone at their fingertips to create the art of the 21st century.

And talent has a tendency to carry on regardless; to find a way - whether its a troubled Edward Thomas turning to poetry in the last couple of years of his life, or Kafka struggling between the expectations of his class and family and the realities of his uncompromising work. But also, we should recognize the qualities of the age. The contemporary media that has given us the ensemble art of the Sopranos, the West Wing, Breaking Bad, the Wire et al, is hardly one that has no new artistic surprises in it after all. Few artists are able to fully understand the technological age that we live in, or even realise that we’re still at the start of a period transformation not the end - and we are therefore yet to see fully the artistic advances of the disruptive technology.

The 21st century literature: it will come; it will come, as sure as night follows day. Forgive me for thinking that it has not arrived yet, but I'm enjoying the looking. 

Puzzles and Frustrations

January's gone quickly hasn't it? Are you all getting ready to start drinking and giving up on the gym on the 1st February? I thought it was the wrong month to try such tactics as I was in Barcelona last week and will be in Brussels for a few days next week. I will be back for Bad Language at the Castle on Wednesday, where I'm reading in the open mic spot. Nice to have something doing; even a small thing; as since Christmas I've hardly had a space to think creatively.

Poetry's a strange thing in that when you're not doing it, I don't think I think of myself in any way as a poet. There's something distant from the writing of poetry and its place in the world. The distance is, I think, what makes it good, but it also disconcerts a little bit. There's an anthology coming out shortly where I've a couple of poems; so that's good; and various other poems have been sent off somewhere or other and I've just remembered about the Pighog poetry prize - deadline end of the month. I've been working on two separate "collections" if you like: the first is a series of poems set in Manchester; a project I've been thinking about for a while and are some way along with. I'll possibly read some of these at Bad Language. The second is a more general "follow up" to my Salt Modern Voices collection "Playing Solitaire for Money", though I'm not sure if and when it will come out; my other press Knives Forks and Spoons has stopped publishing, and Salt's had a few changes as well. So, I've two pamphlets that may or may not be doing the rounds; may or may not be published later in the year. The good thing is that some of the individual poems are among my best, I think. Its taken me a while to work up my muse in a particular way since touring "Solitaire" - whereas in my other writing I'm quite project focussed, in poetry I'm much more of an organic writer. So if anyone out there's looking to publish a nice pamphlet with some of my best work; or in particular is interested in a Manchester sequence - then please get in touch (www.adrianslatcher.com has the details!).

The frustration has been not having much time to get on with anything. I even started a prose piece a week or two ago and then abandoned it as last weekend and this have been dominated by travel. I'm still reading the first book I downloaded to my Nook before Christmas as well! The puzzle is what to do next... as busy as the literary scene is in Manchester, I'm not particularly interested in just reading for the sake of it - more in creating finished work, in whatever genre.

Anyway, these things have a tendency to ebb and flow - there just always seems a weird disconnect between when you are actually writing something good (which I feel I have this last year or so) and the world in which it needs to appear in to have any presence.

The list of writers shortlisted for the international Man Booker was interesting...I'd only heard of three, and I'm reasonably literate...but then again, Tim Parks on the judging panel had only heard of one beforehand. I think if the prize is about bringing forward writers of merit that we might not know about it, rather than a pseudo-Nobel, then it will be a good thing.

The Write Stuff for 2013

The literary event season hasn't stopped. A night of poetry, music and performance, Free Frame of Reference on Tuesday just gone at Sand Bar; and then Jenn Ashworth's novel launch (for her 3rd novel, the multi-narrated "The Friday Gospels") at Blackwells on Friday. Poets at the first, fiction writers at the second, it seems - and me at both!

This week poets should be directed to the Penning Perfumes launch on Wednesday at Kraak Gallery - "a scented evening of poems inspired by perfumes, and perfumes inspired by poems". Whilst the novelists will no doubt be looking for familiar faces - both on and off the page - at the Anthony Burgess Foundation on Thursday, when Nicholas Royle launches his Didsbury-set (the Didsbury set?) "First Novel" along with Booker shortlisted Alison Moore.

Short story writers and readers may give this a miss and head for a Comma Press reading at Madlab on Edge Street - Icelandic short story writer Agust Borgthor Sverrison. I guess you pays your money (or not, both events are free), and takes your choice.

Though of course, just because you read one thing, doesn't mean that you can't benefit from seeing another - and increasingly - with performance events especially there's a pluralism. The following week I've got a short open mic spot at Bad Language, first time I've managed to read there, at the Castle on Wednesday 30th, and haven't decided yet whether it will be fiction or poetry; then on the 31st Manchester Art Gallery is open for a zine fair which should appeal to artistic and literary types alike. 

 Not bad for quiet January. Now, to find time to read a book. 

Delia Derbyshire Day

Yesterday was "Delia Derbyshire Day", a day of screenings, talks and performances at Band on the Wall in Manchester to celebrate the late Delia Derbyshire, who is famed for her work primarily with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Derbyshire is an unusual cult figure in that her work was ubiquitous in homes throughout Britain, albeit virtually anonymously. Most famously, her treatment of Ron Grainger's "Dr. Who Theme", for which she was denied a songwriting credit (Grainger wanted her to have one, but it was against BBC policy.) Her name became better known towards the end of her life (she died in 2001), as cult artists like Sonic Boom, Broadcast and Stereolab, took inspiration from her early sonic experiments; yet even now very little of her music - primarily written for commission - is available; yet in the late 1960s she was already recognised as a pioneer of electronic music and her music appeared at "happenings" and art festivals.

The day started with Canadian film maker Kara Blake's short documentary, "The Delian Mode." A compact 25 minutes, its more like a film essay or visual tone poem than a traditional film; using Delia's music and words throughout to construct a portrait of her creative process. A deserved award-winner, its pulls up some great footage and audio. This was followed by a Q&A particularly focussing on the Delia Derbyshire archive which is now at the University of Manchester. Those in the packed audience hoping for some announcements about new Delia material were to be disappointed, as the archive process is a slow and painstaking one; as the tapes they had been left in Delia's loft for years, and any "context" for them was missing. There is also a BBC Radiophonic Workshop archive, looked after by Mark Ayres - and the story of the workshop, Delia's role in it, and the interest that remains in the both it and her have grown steadily over the years.

It was a shame that Teresa Winter was unable to be on the panel as advertised, as the Q&A did tend to the anecdotal; when, for me at least, it is Derbyshire's role in the musical avant garde of the late 60s that is of interest. Though a woman composer, contemporary music still appears to be far behind visual arts and literature in acknowledging female composition - and even in the Radiophonic workshop, the classically trained Derbyshire was renowned as much for her mathematical background as her musical one. Yet, at the time, through her extra-curricular work in White Noise and Unit Delta Plus, she was part of that late 60s avant garde that could find Yoko One, Paul McCartney, the Pink Floyd, Alan Ginsberg, Soft Machine, Cornelius Cardew and others at the same events, festivals and happenings. There is very little early electronic music available, as the only people who had access to the equipment were institutions, such as conservatoires and the BBC, and rock stars like George Harrison and Pete Townsend who were often "loaned" equipment. What fascinates about Delia's work though is that it pre-dates the synthesizer, and yet the principals that it uses, where the "science of sound" is so critical to the painstakingly constructed sound collages made with magnetic tapes, are what has attracted so much contemporary interest. The history of electronic music has several phases, and each phase has a unique sound and context. Therefore Delia was uninterested in the monolithic synths of the late 60s and early 70s, as falling short of the potential of her own experiments; whilst our contemporary sample-based culture, and cheap phrase-samplers and digital audio workstations approximates her world, but in a virtual space, without something of the serendipity that caused the unique sound of much of her work.

For when the question was asked about "why Delia?" its not just about her being one of the few women making experimental music in that era, or because she was one of a small number of electronic pioneers, but because the work she created had such a range (as one might expect for one working to commission) and yet was so clearly informed by a creativity and emotional sensitivity. In many ways, the things that have always plagued acceptance of electronic music: that its just button-pushing, that its repetitive, that its "cold", are all refuted in her work; and are testament to her genius.

Following the Q&A a "deep listening" session, with tracks both published and unpublished, gave us an opportunity to hear tracks that had inspired the three female artists who would be playing that evening, and who had put together the day. The freshness of the sound, even today, of music mostly recorded around 40 years ago, came crisply through the Band on the Wall's impressive sound system. Yet there's a real mystery to this music - which is ironic really, given it was written for mass public consumption via TV and radio - in that individual pieces from the archive are sometimes uncredited. Working with early synth, the VCS-3, a brilliant electronic pop track from the early 70s, is ten years too early; yet is it Delia? We don't know. To these ears it has some similarity to the experiments of Tonto's Expanding Head Band, but with a rhythmic presence which is something new. For the many tapes in the archive aren't all Delia, and there is a magpie nature to that early Radiophonic workshop work, as a "sound" used on Dr. Who might be re-used elsewhere, both inside and outside the BBC; yet they also add to our understanding of her process, meticulous, perfectionist, time-consuming.

The 2nd half of the day was in its own an equal revelation. Electronic musician Caro C, composer Ailís Ní Ríain and artist Naomi Kashiwagi, along with visuals by Kara Blake, formed the "Delia Darlings" and had used the archive as a jumping off point for three original pieces of work. Ailís Ní Ríain piece for double bass and trumpet took some themes from the remarkable Pot au Feu, and used them as a jumping off point; the sparse but rhythmic arrangements, and the unusual choice of instruments was more of a dialogue between the two women composers, than a conventional "cover". The artist Kashiwagi is renowned for her performances using ancient technology, old wind-up gramophones and 78RPM records. As an artist, rather than composer, her challenge was to create something new - in this case a piece of sound art based on an old jazz standard. Using samplers and software for the first time, although I didn't think the piece quite worked as the finished article, the techniques (with an overhead projection of Kashiwagi's turntablism) were interesting, and of the three peformers, perhaps offered the closest dialogue with Delia's compositional technique. It will be interesting to see how Kashiwagi extends or continues with these experiments. Caro C, finished the evening, with a long multi-modal electronic piece. As the only electronic musician its perhaps not a surprise that her engagement with Derbyshire seemed the deepest, for electronic music remains a genre with its own history, and an approach which is often different than traditional forms. Though her piece was a long, multi-part song-suite, there were clear echoes of Derbyshire's musical achievements, filtered, I think, through that historical view of electronic music of which she is such a part. Echoing Derbyshire's technique, Caro C used different everyday objects to create interesting sounds that were added live to the soundtrack.Finishing off, she thanked the audience, and introduced the DJ, who, fittingly, began with Delia's "Dr. Who Theme."

I very much doubt if anywhere else in the country there was such a rapt audience on Saturday evening for three new, experimental music pieces; which in itself was a tribute, not just to Delia's influence, but to those who had been touched by her work. Audience, film maker, panellists and artists came together in what was a perfectly conceived day, and a tribute which, in an ideal world, Delia Derbyshire would have been alive to witness.  Anyone in Liverpool, Sheffield or Newcastle this week should go along to one of the film/performance events completing the tour.

***
Post script: just thinking about the day again; and what an interesting audience it was - people I knew from various communities - arts, digital, academic contexts - and how it refutes my post from earlier in the day about our love of "mediocrity" - for here we have the opposite in some ways; a brave, sometimes thankless archeology of a figure that can't realistically be called either "major" or "minor." The audience for her work is always going to be small, so whereas an unreleased Michael Jackson album might sell millions, an unreleased Delia Derbyshire record would be in the 1000s at best. Yet I think its her role in electronic music that is so critical - for electronic music is part of a whole wider dialogue about our information age. There's a point in the film where she talks about being influenced by the sound of the bombs falling in Coventry. Is electronic music the sound of our modernity? It still polarises. There's direct link her to the futurists and surrealists; and personally, what I found interesting was the serendipity in her work - she had to discover new sounds to match the visual briefs she'd been given, and because they weren't there, she invented techniques. That technology has made the job easier doesn't mean that the quest for new sounds has ended. Its certainly been core to my own music over the years, and I think fuelled the artists on the Bedroom Cassette Masters compilation that I was recently asked to contribute to.What's interesting about Delia's work, is that it suggests a different direction for electronic music than the one it eventually took; often emotional, often dark, but always both inventive and empathic.

In Praise of Mediocrity

There are two ways in which art affects a culture. One is that the artist, never out of nowhere, but perhaps not widely known, does something that changes perception. It comes at you like a cataclysm, it is a "black swan", an unexpected thing - even if it is what were are looking for ("the next big thing.") Yes, its "Anarchy in the UK" or "Reservoir Dogs", or - as importantly, those works that prove the potential, take it to a next level: "Pulp Fiction" then; or "Money." In a dynamic culture we are always looking for this, and are more surprised if it doesn't occur than if it does. A brief lull in the culture is the vacuum in which the new art will shine. Nobody was expecting the Smiths or Tarantino but the culture wasn't surprised when they appeared; and, as importantly, had the structures in place (independent record labels; Sundance festival) to quickly adapt to the new dynamic.

The other way, is where the cultural actor (it could be an artist, but as I'll explain it could be someone else), is where we have invested our cultural interest to such an extent that we are primarily looking in that direction. The structures we have - and more than that, the "tastes" of the nation - are as predictable as a military parade in North Korea. When the "event" happens then we have already put in place the receiving mechanism. It will be anything except ignored. A healthier culture would not invest so much in these cultural bombs; but we are not a healthy culture - too much depends on respecting the status quo, and without a demographic, political or technological shift to signal the need for the new, we can do nothing other than offer faint praise for the mediocrity. This is the world where the BBC gave over so much of its programming to the launch of the (now forgotten) U2 album "No Line on the Horizon" that Andrew Marr referred to working for "the U2 Broadcasting corporation." (Get well soon, Andrew.)  This is the world into which The Phantom Menace (and possibly The Hobbit) dropped; this is the world where "Be Here Now" is the fastest selling album ever, and this is the world where a mediocre, and possibly slightly strange portrait of an otherwise uninteresting person is front page news because she is married to the heir to the throne.

Its eminently possible that something culturally remarkable may have happened in the last few weeks, but our culture is now programmed to praise the mediocre to such an extent that it would not have the structures to do anything other. On a minor level, this is the Guardian only ever interviewing or reviewing poetry at any length when it has the imprimatur of Faber, Picador or Cape; it is the excitement over a new Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan or Martin Amis book; it is X-Factor, and the Olympics and the Premiership. It is, also, ironically, why there is such much interest in the new David Bowie single/album though his last real "hit" was nearly thirty years ago. For Bowie, like Tarantino, or "Star Wars" or Martin Amis  has enough cultural capital to make any return, any return-to-form, anything not too dreadful, a welcome one. We praise the mediocre because it has a familiarity which has already been approved. Kate Middleton's (I have no idea what her real name is nowadays, the royals make these things up as they go along) portrait will be the most talked about work of visual art this year and it is an irrelevance whether it is good or bad. It is meant to be mediocre; it could not be anything else. Or rather, if it transcends its origins, (as a good soundtrack album might adorn a poor film), then it is an accident.

For wherever we look, the most important work - the most important cultural work - is happening outside of these media bursts; and despite the availability of everything on the internet and elsewhere, the mainstream press and television have to show a willingness to look beyond the expected if they are to remain valid. There seems, I think, to have been some abdication of responsibility - not helped by our utilitarian leaders - in an age where the mainstream is able to set the agenda almost immune to failure. When a film crashes it used to bring down a studio, but even an absolute turkey like 2012's "John Carter" brought in enough box office to cover its production budget (if not its real costs.) Of course, away from the mainstream there are many things that do bloom, but to go back to my previous posting, artists need to find a way to live, publishers need to be able to make enough money to survive and grow, and audiences need to be able to access less publicised work.

The critic doesn't become mute in an age of mediocrity, but he or she knows that his voice cannot be heard above the deafening mainstream. That an okay single by a great artist, and a mediocre portrait of a woman famous only for who she married, are our two cultural signifiers this week is a sign of the times we live in - and bloggers, writers, friends-on-Facebook, tweeters end up all becoming part of that conversation, even though this week and next my own cultural experiences encompass new electronic music, poetry launches, and experimental performances.

Work and Writing

Back in November, Robert McCrum's Observer column talked about "writers with other careers." I didn't blog about it at the time as I was far too busy, yes, with my working life. Its an interesting subject and I wanted to go back to it, in part because, he conflates several different things here: the writer (a psychologist for instance) whose work gives them an additional insight; the poet who is glad to have a day-job as something to do; and the writer (Beryl Bainbridge) who also paints. Almost all of his examples are from the distant past, yet in an age when "work" has become a totem, and any interesting jobs are apparently being test-driven by unpaid interns, it's an important subject.

Most writers I know work. They certainly don't make much from their writing but more often than not, their writing, the thing they are best at, is - at least peripherally - at the centre of their work: whether its teaching, training, copywriting or journalism. But again, I don't think this is what McCrum is talking about. He's talking about "other jobs." I've been surprised how many poets I know seem to be based in the academy, either as creative writing tutors or teaching poetry. Three friends have recently started PhDs in contemporary poetry, and its this conflation of writer-researcher-teacher which seems to have become the default model. An obituary for the Irish poet Dennis O'Driscoll, makes much of his working life as a civil servant: "in the civil service you are assigned a grade. You know your status." It's kind of pleasing to read; since as someone who's always combined a non-literary job (currently in local government) with writing I have to say that it's often got puzzled looks from both sides. Within work, its seen as a quirk, a hobby, but not without its benefits (I once got asked to write a poem for an article), though its not something I'd tend to mention if I was going for a promotion. (Local government doesn't really go for quirks.) Its actually outside of work that I've had the most problem: where I've sometimes got the impression that I'm not really a writer, because I've got a day job.

What a day job does give is some other experience - though whether I write any more about offices than say someone who works from home every day is a moot point. In my case the travel I've undertaken over the last few years has fed into poems, and into the fiction I've recently started, as I've combined work meetings all over Europe with a bit of location scouting. What of course it doesn't give you is time. Nick Laird, also in yesterday's Guardian, talks about missing work - paid, non-literary work, that is - "it was lovely to work on a team and feel that the work you are doing is important" he says of his lawyer's life, but the contemporary professional has to do such long hours that it precludes anything else it seems. That, I think, is the rub. No wonder (young) writers work for minimum wage in bus shops and bars, the temporary hours allowing them time to write; the mundane work often allowing them to dream and even read. Yet, Laird's poetry - unlike O'Driscoll's it seems - is not overly concerned with the world of work: but with what he saw from his window growing up in Northern Ireland. Work, it seems, even exciting work, doesn't always have an easy translation into poetry or fiction; but then again why should it?

Yet, writers need more than Virginia Woolf's "room of one's own", they need money, they need publication, they need something other than splendid isolation. Like Laird, I've always done a professional job, as I've figured if I'm going to work at non-literary stuff then I should at least get a decent salary with it; yet there's also been compromise there: I'm certainly one of the lowest paid of my university group, as I've changed careers several times, and moved from the private to the public sector. For myself, its less the level of renumeration that matters; but the demands that the job has on you. There seems little room for the liberal arts in the coalition's grand plan for UK PLC, and though free university, or living off the dole, inevitably aren't going to come back any time shortly, we have to find some ways - as individuals, as society - for creative people to work AND live. I wasn't the only one shocked to hear that Factory musician Vini Reilly had got into financial difficulties struggling to pay "food, rent and electricity". This is in Manchester, where politicians and civil servants can't open their mouths without mentioning Factory records' legacy. Musicians, it turns out, and probably writers as well, aren't necessarily the best business people.

I guess in a time of austerity, it may seem ridiculous to wonder how we should fund artists, but at the same time, each of us who is creative makes our own deal. For some, like Laird, its an opportunity cost, I guess - for even if his literary life isn't massively lucrative, it's at least got profile and publication; and he understands too well the "deal" in terms of time and achievement. A literary figure with legal experience might be just what the age requires after all. For others, its about "buying" time - and for all the talk of more flexible work places, we don't seem to have moved on much from the seventies. (I couldn't easily take a sabbatical, for instance, and expect my job to be still there when I returned.) And for others, its about the wider culture, that will pay for teaching and for appearing on Radio 4, even if it's reluctant to pay for writers to just write. Yet, these routes are often closed off or (from what friends tell me) seeing a reduction in hours or hourly rate; or, equally as damaging, mostly open to those with certain profiles or talents. (A talent for writing doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to be articulate on Front Row or the Late Review.)


None of this is a case for special pleading; but one way or another writers need to find what suits them and allows them to both write and live; and perhaps a little more understanding how difficult that can sometimes be.

The Space Between Things by Charlie Hill

Charlie Hill's debut novel, "The Space Between Things" (Indigo Dreams), is set in one of those almost forgotten times, the early 90s John Major administration, where, for a brief moment, rave culture looked up from the dancefloor and the pills and became political. Arch is an all too typical boheme of the time, sat in his cheap digs in Moseley in Birmingham, smoking dope and partying as part of an ever shifting demi monde. It's that time in a person's life when responsibility hasn't intruded, when it's possible to believe that dope, music and squatting might be a true alternative to the 9-to-5. At a party he meets Vee, and his eyes are opened, albeit briefly, to another life. For whilst he is casual, Vee is serious, and yet they seem made for each other. When she goes off, almost as quickly as they've met, and then disappears for several months to a war-torn Balkans where she's taking photographs of potential war crimes, Arch has a slow coming-of-age.

The dawning of his own political views is a gradual one, and less to do with his pining for Vee, than the brutality that him and his friends encounter following a week long rave at Castle Morton. Between the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays dropping E in1989 and the rise of Britpop, there were a brief few years, when a strange fusion of hippy politics and dance culture fused together. In the grey years of the Major administration, road protestors and techno hippies, travellers and ravers, briefly became public enemy one, and the Criminal Justice Bill was rushed through parliament outlawing public gatherings with the playing of "regular beats." It is this millieu, almost written out of any pop cultural histories that I've read recently (certainly with none of the nostalgia of Britpop or grunge), that Charlie Hill so eloquently maps. For Arch is a bit of a poet-philosopher despite a can't be arse attitude that is typical of both the times and the place. There's hardly been any fictions that have looked at squat culture - Doris Lessing's "The Good Terrorist" from a decade earlier is the one that comes to mind - and this debut has some of the shambolic nature of that culture. Arch is sort-of an unreliable narrator in that we only get a partial view of the world. The Castle Morton rave is just another party to him and it's only afterwards that it becomes a big deal. The ne'er-do-wells who he shares a flat with are dropouts and drug casualties and drifters, and his loyalty to their wellbeing is somewhat less than that of a friend, but more than that of a stranger.

When Vee returns, the love story that frames the novel, begins in earnest. That they only existed as an idea before, a one night stand that is turned into a great love in Arch's mind, works up to a point, but she has returned from a horror that she won't even talk about to find Arch is no longer the loveable comic doper, but is putting his energies into this newly politicised scene. Yet, having come from a real civil war, Vee is exasperated to find that the only thing that has got this generation up in arms is freedom for the right to party!
Hill is excellent on the minutiae of this millieu, and the pre-regeneration, pre-internet of Britain's inner cities is nicely brought back to life. He's also very funny, although there are times when Arch's stream-of-consciousness telling of the tale reads verbatim. The short chapters help us whizz through the seasons, yet we're never entirely convinced by the love affair at the heart of things. There's so much veracity in the story, that one wonders a little at where the fiction begins and ends, and Arch and Vee's initial meeting is told in retrospect and doesn't entirely convince. That said, for a novel of near-contemporary events its fascinating to re-read the recent past. I'm suddenly puzzled as to why road building was the issue du jour of the traveller community - it seems parochial in the extreme! We rarely go beyond the squat culture of Moseley and Arch remains a somewhat inert presence as he takes us through the deteriorations of his community and his relationship, but that's perhaps inevitable given the looking-back nature of the novel.

Like Max Schaeffer's recent "Children of the Sun", Hill finds a wealth of material in a slightly forgotten recent subcultural world, and it brought back memories of going to see Back to the Planet, Chumbawumba and Megadog. But I was a tourist in this world, for by 1994 the illegal party scene was no more, and the traveller convoys were no longer in the news. A different nineties, disconnected from a drug subculture that briefly got political, was about to begin.

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano

Imagine a scabrous British poet (were such an individual to exist) writing a pseudo-novel positing an imagined alternate history of 20th century right wing literature, interweaving a motley collection of murderers and madmen alongside the existing canon, complete with scholarly footnotes and bibliography, it is likely, I think, that it would never see the light of day. Yet, this is exactly what we hope for and expect from a posthumously translated novel by Roberto Bolano, the Chilean writer who died in 2003 before his unexpected Western success.

"Nazi Literatures in the Americas" has one of the most arresting titles in recent fiction, and yet its not some clever device, it really does describe the novel's contents. Bolano has written an alternate literary history of the American continent (primarily focussed on South America, but with some entries for the North) which also acts as a compelling alternate history of that troubled continent. We've tended to think of radical literature in terms of the "left", whether its counter-cultural writers or utopian leftists, yet Bolano reminds us, through this dark satire, that much of the 20th century was blemished by various fascisms, and that the repressive regimes of the Americas were rarely communist, but led by powerful juntas whose role models, more often than not, could be found in the now-discredited Nazi Germany. It creates quite a jolt for a western reader; and one remembers half-forgotten stories of Argentina being a haven for Nazis after the war, and of the right-wing juntas (frequently supported, at least tacitly, by the U.S.) that have so often militarised the politics of that continent.

Yet, by writing a history of imagined "Nazi Literature", Bolano cleverly highlights how art and culture can exist in even the most oppressive of regimes, and how absurd the idea of a "Nazi Literature" actually is. For the "brief lives" described in this entertaining selection of short biographies, covers a continent with misanthropic literary losers, writing dark tracts in isolation, creating phantom presses, publishing houses and magazines that disseminate a certain kind of right-wing literature. Its only a novel in the loosest sense of the word, but hangs together as a succession of connected anecdotes or stories. The structure is that of popular criticism, chapters on "North American Poets", "Magicians, Mercenaries and Miserable Creatures" and "Wandering Women of Letters," with pen portraits running from a page to many, and an epilogue consisting of a bibliography and extended list of "secondary figures." In this book, Bolano takes great delight in documenting a series of monstrous literary follies that one can only be glad don't exist, but which would make perfect sense in a right wing canon. From epic poems, to memoirs, to small poetry sequences, to experimental manifestoes, Bolano's litany of writers cover ever conceivable genre. Yet the tone throughout is always satirical. Books are released "to little impact"; novelists and poets disappear for years at a time; magazines and publishing houses appear almost as ghosts. The longest story in the book, the final one, about "The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman" sees Bolano himself make an appearance. It appears to be the touchstone story of the book - (perhaps the first written? or at least the key to what has come before) - where a notorious murderer-poet is more myth than man, yet Bolano is tasked to find him, both in the pseudonyms he may have used to write his work and in real life. I do wonder how well we are served in the translation here, and in other stories, as these tales are fabular ones in many ways, and at times it feels like we are losing some of the archness and directness of the stories in their translation to English.

Beyond this pen portrait of the novel, its difficult to analyse in great depth - the allusions to writers and scenes are probably packed with the actual literary history of the continent, and there may well be antecedents to many of these misanthropes, yet it is enough, I think, to appreciate Bolano's deadpan humour. These writers are literary archetypes of the worst kind. They strive away for years in their madness; their life stories are full of death, despair and destruction; their career trajectories are those of madmen and monsters; yet this all makes some kind of cruel, satirical sense. Each is given a birth date and death date - even those outliving the author - and we cross a continent, with Argentinians, Mexicans, Chileans, even North Americans.  As a kind of richly comic literary tableaux it even works, in some ways, as a novel, though its clever structure, and Bolano's dark humour make it a genuine one-off.

New Years Resolutions

Wasn't going to write any resolutions, but the blog was looking a bit bereft with "zero posts" in the 2013 category and my early visit to the shops has been curtailed by a late get-up.And actually these aren't resolutions as scuh - more dichotomies - and I need to move the slider along the line a bit.

1. Work-life balance: this has to change a bit. I hardly took any holiday in 2012, but with work I went abroad 12 times. Great fun and experience, but each trip tends to lead to it being a 60 hour week, as though I can claim time back, I've not had the time to claim it back. So, one way or another, need to make sure I take more holidays/days oweing or cut down on the demands of the job.

2. Books v Space. This is an ongoing battle, and currently the books I buy are almost going straight into boxes ne'er to be seen again, which is a bit pointless, or else creating tottering towers of words, which daunt me even when I think "what shall I read next?" Though I've got a Nook now, I'm not sure it will have much impact on my hardback love. So, I either need more space (move to a bigger flat/house), or less books. Rightmove it is then.

3.  Music v Fiction. I've written very little fiction in 2012, but have recorded over 40 songs. During 1999-2006 I wrote very few songs, but several novels and lots of short stories. There's not an exact correlation but time spent on music takes away from time spent on writing fiction. The key factor is "time" of course. Poems I squeeze in regardless (though they do take other types of time, writing time, emotional time.) So with the 2012 music project finished, I probably need to not just promise to write more, but also to record less. (This relates to 1. above - as you need extended time to write fiction.)

4. Laptop v Desktop. I'm still desktop, but to do more, to be more mobile, even to take some time away from the internet to write etc. will probably need me getting a laptop. I have a bit of a phobia of portable devices in that I don't find they actually add much to my life - they seem more like toys than anything else. The ease of putting a CD on still seems easier than burning all my CDs to PC then deciding which ones to download to an MP3 player etc. But, I've just bought a Nook, and it has made me read more on the move - so I guess some thought needs to go into my portable productivity. The desktop has probably got a year or more still in it though, so don't think its going anywhere yet (and if I upgrade from Windows XP most of my software won't work more than likely.)

5. Ottolenghi v KFC. Not that I go to KFC very often - once a quarter I'd reckon these days - but neither do I cook that much either. I got Ottolenghi's Jerusalem for Xmas, so cooking a bit more, a bit better, is something I want to do. Used to cook a lot, and like recipe books, but got lazy (or too busy), both to cook and shop for the ingredients. So more Ottolenghi (or Nigel Slater or whoever) and less crap food on the run.

6. Poetry v Fiction. Difficult one. In one of my periods of self-analysis, aided by a bit of literary life coaching, I realised that I have a tendency to move from one project to another when one thing is finished - not a bad thing in itself but sometimes the projects would be in totally different art forms. Good for the soul etc. but not that good for self definition. So I wrote short stories, when I was trying to get a novel published, talked about starting a fiction magazine when I'd just had a poetry collection out. D.H. Lawrence never got this kind of brand confusion - you were allowed to be varied back then, but unless you've "made it" (hello Damon Albarn), you're now expected to stay right where you are, which makes it much easier for the world to ignore you, I think. So its not an either or with poetry or fiction, more a case of "don't give up when the going get's tough." So, today Jeremy, I'm still predominantly a poet, and I'm not giving that hard-fought epithet lightly, at least not when my new stuff's pretty good. But I'd like to write another novel...oh crumbs....

7. Twitter v Facebook. Not really. I've always been catholic with my social media, though find them less compelling than I used to Great for social connection (hello Facebook poets) and for finding out stuff (hello Twitter link bait) but my suspicions that they are not exactly revolutions, but evolutions seems to be coming true. But I guess though my job requires me to "keep up", I've not really "kept up" with Path or Google plus or Instagram or whatever the latest thing might be. If data is the new oil, then to be honest, the pipes are already there; other things are likely to be mere add-ons. But given that I'm not taking these platforms too seriously, a New Years Resolution should be to not to take them too seriously. Twitter rage is a real phenomenon and drowns out real debate. Ignore or block.

8. Literature v Literature. Not a dichotomy even. I don't really read much that isn't literature, one way or another. Fifty Shades of Harry Potter will have to wait until my dotage when I can only consume mush, I guess. But literature's a broad enough church I think. However, the "must read" list gets longer, and with tired eyes I don't read half as much as I'd like. So, New Year's resolution of traditional kind: read more.

9. Dance v Rock. I joked a while back that nobody's wrote a song called "Rock and Disco" and its true - I've always veered between the two. White boys doing funk has always been a pleasure (up to a point), and the most vibrant times in music are when different types of music go cheek and jowl, whether its Miles Davis and the Allman Brothers,  The Clash and roots reggae, or New Order meeting Arthur Baker. Internet availability seems to have made everyone happy with their genre and not willing to explore. But, to be honest, in a world of David Guetta, and Pitchfork approved college rock, a bit more rock in 2012 per-lease....

10. 2013 v 2014. Is this a year for now or a year for preparing the ground for the next now? I'm a bit live for the day, really, it tends to make me a bit happier - and I can fret about the future as much as anyone. However, there's a sense that decisions I make this year might have longevity; so a bit more future-planning wouldn't go amiss right now. Isn't that what resolutions are about anyway?

Last Post (of the year)

It's been a bit of a year for me; hardly had time to catch my breath. I realised this, having been at home for a few days. I've been working so hard on new projects at work, that have also took me away a lot. I'm grateful for the opportunity to have gone to (deep breath), Bologna, Warsaw, Krakow, Istanbul, Helsinki, Amsterdam, Belfast, Berlin, Brussels, and Ghent this year; but its taken up a lot of time and its only taking stock at Christmas that I realise how much. I've hardly seen any films, or gone to any bands, or even read that many books, never mind any bigger things, like buy a house.

Creatively its been okay, though. The opportunities to read my poetry haven't been quite so many - and I can't believe its a year since we finished the Salt Modern Voices tour - but there have been a few, and I've also got involved in quite a few mixed media type events which have been interesting. I like performing, but perhaps more when its part of the art, rather than to promote the art (e.g. a book.) That said, I didn't have much published during the year, just a couple of poems, in the excellent Pussy Riot anthology, Catechism, and in the latest issue of the Rialto (wth a mention on the cover, no less!) of my poem "Beauty."

Not that I've been idle. I've probably written more poems this year, and more that I'm pleased with, than for a decade. Part of this I think is having spent time as part of the NW Poets group, organised by Lindsey Holland. Pleasingly, the group's first anthology will be due in 2013, with a couple more poems from myself included.

I've also been very busy musically, as I mentioned in a previous post, with a series of 12 cassette singles - some 47 tracks - being "released" online during the year, making it my most prolific year musically since 1989. The best tracks from this series will be compiled on an album early in the new year, but can all be downloaded or listened to anyway at my online music site.

My own art is not to be seen in isolation of course, as I've always felt that I belong to a cultural millieu, to which I react, and with which I occasionally engage. From going to see gigs such as Dexy's Midnight Runners, Grimes and Laetitia Sadler; to attending festivals like FutureEverything, Flatpack Festival and Abandon Normal Devices, there's something quite porous between my own artistic practice, and the cultural life here in Manchester in particular.

The Pussy Riot book was published using print-on-demand and available as an e-book and this year was the year when such things came of age. I wonder a little about the publishing industry, whether its now relying too much on small presses, start up ventures, and self-publishing to act as an A&R, or worse still, whether it only takes notice of such ventures when the books make a splash in the traditional places (e.g. a Booker listing.) Poetry in particular seems to have endless vibrant tributaries, yet the main rivers are slow-moving and slow to absorb what's happening elsewhere. Maybe its a bit much to expect literature to have its punk rock/YBA moment so late in the day, but it seems that it might happen some time - maybe 2013?

So, on 30th December, no new years resolutions just yet, particularly as the fundamental things for next year are so fragile. Like everyone else where I work, I've been offered voluntary redundancy, which speaks clearly of the problems everyone in the public sector is facing - even if my projects are funded for another year or so - one wonders what comes next? There's certainly no reassuring noises coming from Central Government. I've now been in Manchester for longer than I lived in Staffordshire, which is some milestone of sorts- given I lived there from the day I was born until I left for university - and if its imprinted on my life, it doesn't feel that permanent. I've begun to write about it, in a series of poems that I'm currently putting together - and that's one resolution for 2013 - to get those, at least, published in some form or other (get in touch if you're a publisher who might be interested in seeing them!)

Art and culture have always been political statements to my mind, and this will get more so, even if the most political poems and stories often aren't the most explicit ones. Yet, as Pussy Riot showed, a cultural act can quickly become a political and then a human act. The 21st century is only just beginning to show its characteristics, and just as Modernism only really came through in the 2nd decade of last century, I think the ramifications of our information society are yet to find themselves clearly articulated in the art and literature of the day. Again, 2013, may well surprise us.

Hauntology

I read an article on the Beatles one time, I think it was Greil Marcus, but may be wrong, where the writer made the case that the Beatles were actually their own antecedents: that the band playing in Hamburg in the late 50s, writing their own songs as callow teenagers, long before they'd met Brian Epstein, were actually peers of the early rock and rollers. He's a little right and a little wrong, I think. There's a fast transmission mechanism in music; and if you're around at the right time with the right influences - say, rockabilly quiff in 1957, a stash of LSD in 1967 or a battered guitar and an attitude in 1977 - then there's not a long distance from seeing the Pistols, say, and becoming the Pistols.

I first wrote/recorded a song in 1982, when I was 15, though I'd probably had tunes in my head and lyrics in my school book for years before. The music I liked - electronic music such as Kraftwerk, OMD, Soft Cell and Human League - was way beyond my suburban imagination, I don't think anyone in my class realised that some of these bands had been plugging away for years. But more important than the influences was the availability of cheap equipment. From the Casio VL-Tone which appeared on Top of the Pops (Trio's "Da Da Da") almost as soon as it appeared in the Kays Catalogue; to proper fully featured synthesizers. But I wasn't the only entranced by both the sounds and the possibilities of the cheap synth. It appears that in bedroom's the country long, people were swapping guitar aspiration for synth love and then with a quick press of the record button and a smidgin of imagination creating their own electronica.

Fast forward 30 years and the internet makes eveything available. So I was both surprised and not when a guy called Simon Holland approached me with the idea of an internet album consisting of electronica from that era. I contributed a track called "Exit to Maya" from 1987 to what has now evolved into a beautifully presented compilation called "Bedroom Cassette Masters." 

In the excellent download insert, he talks about what Simon Reynolds - in his book "Retromania" - has referred to as "hauntology" - a music that has a ghostly imprint of the music from the past. So though some of the tracks on BCM are originals uploaded from compact cassettes, others have the sound of that era. Listen and download, its a lovely selection.

Thinking of my own music and how it fits in, I'm not sure I've ever been as close to the zeitgeist as I am now - which is kind of weird given that I've been recording music for around 30 years. To celebrate this "milestone" during 2012, I set myself a task to record a monthly cassette single - and with December coming to a close I'm just finishing off the 12th in the set, featuring the Christmas song "Christmas in Siberia"

2012's cassette singles from Jan-Nov. December coming soon.

.Its been a fascinating project recording over 40 tracks in a year; taking inspiration from stuff I've done before or hearing sounds around me that I've tried to emulate. All of this would be recognisable to my 15 year old self, I think, perhaps inevitable when I'm using a very similar instrument set up as all those years ago. Yet listening to my favourite albums of 2012 - I hear a familiar electronic palate in Grimes or Chromatics - and wonder where those thirty years have gone. In the New Year I'll be "releasing" an album featuring the "best" tracks from the cassette singles series.

One thought is that I might look at some more collaborative stuff in 2013 - as I very much enjoyed a few "live" events during 2012 where my poetry and music lives began to merge a little. There's some interest in Manchester for a joint electronic "jam" session - putting together an album in a day. We'll see what happens. If interested leave a comment or email me at adrian dot slatcher at gmail dot com.

A Hard Year

It's felt like a hard year. It has gone fast, but there's been little time for reflection. The culture of anxiety that is a distinct policy objective each time the Conservative party gets into power, has gone into overdrive. They want us all to be afraid that we might lose our jobs; they want our institutions to be both valued for cutting staff to create "efficiencies", and to be as equally anxious. Rarely, and certainly more than most other places in Europe, has power been so centralised. We see it time and again. The decision to spend precious police resources on the storm-in-a-Tory-teacup "plebgate", against the lack of prosecutions for the illegal fraud that the banks perpetuated on the Libor rate; the de-coupling of the welfare benefit system from any reality so that those with disabilities aren't judged on their real condition but on an arbitrary system that would be more at home in a Polish ghetto; and most of all in the corporate coup that has taken over not just much of Britain, but much of Europe, with EU territories such as "Luxembourg" or "Jersey" creating tax holes that can help corporates escape billions in tax, and fiascos such as the rail franchising system and the continuing disaster of PFI, where the systems have been designed as if to maximise the vulnerability of the public sector in order for the fake mantra of free trade (fake because these companies hate fair competition) to be the only thing we hear.

In a year of Olympic triumph it might seem that the crass dismantling of our better natures, begun by Thatcher, and continued by Cameron and Clegg, hasn't yet happened. Yet all the Olympics told us was that a publicly funded stable system that rewarded real excellence (regardless of class) and was fully resourced could be a triumph. For after all, lets not beat ourselves up, Britain has often excelled, despite, rather than because of its leaders and its institutions. But cracks are already showing. There seems a quiescence among the struggling young. The DIY art culture of the 70s has come back a little, helped by all these empty bars and shops which can no longer guarantee a puprose, yet University numbers are down, the effect of that debt culture is yet to be seen; I'm seeing arts and literature and music at a grass roots level, shrivelling up after the initial enthusiasm fails, with a time-rich but cash-poor artistic audience looking at the artificially high rents and house prices, and the low salaries offered in 2012 Northern Britain, and wondering where they go with this? There needs to be a massive redistribution, as Heseltine suggested, from central government to the regions, and then there has to be redistribution from our failing institutions to the grass roots. Yet I'm not seeing any political discussion about these things. The need for economic growth - with its false leveraging of debts above investment as "investment grade" financial instruments - comes at a price. The flow of people and goods is now destroying whatever bit of localism that had managed to gain ground.

Art and culture are as worldwide a market as precious metals or scarce foods, yet we were once - and still are - rich in them. Yet you wouldn't think so, listening to our politicians, who explain everything but understand nothing. The lie that Labour caused our debts through overspending is exposed by the coalition's own "blaming" of the lack of growth on crises in Europe and elsewhere; yet world growth has been growing again.

And, if the Olympics distracted us, and we could be accused of navel-gazing on our own first world problems - most of our own making - I don't think any of us with any compassion went through the year entirely comfortably about what was happening in the wider world. The ongoing murder of civilians in Syria, the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the late year massacre in gun-crazed America, the repression of free speech on the internet, including here and in the US, but also the remarkable women of Pussy Riot. This world remains adept at flinging more problems on top of those it already has, apparently intractably. And yet amidst all the swivel-eyed loathing, the somewhat battered President Obama made it to a second term, which like with Tony Blair's time in power, is the period when difference can really be made (and lets hope he doesn't embark on any disatrous wars); the Olympics showed that whether competitor, volunteer or audience, the British always know how to throw a party (unlike most politicians; they may have "Ok-d" it but the booing of George Osborne must have been one of the highlights of the year); and elsewhere millions of us continue to the best in a difficult situation. Unlikely as it is that we'll overthrow the rentier class any time soon, but Leveson and Uncut and public debate (though rarely, this year, the diminished BBC), at least have the power to embarass them occasionally.

Not yet over, but I've finished work for the year, and intend to have a couple of weeks of reflection myself.