Over a period of around ten years, from about 1995-2005, give or take six months, I wrote six very different novels and a novella. (Not that the novels were all that long, but the novella clocked in at less than thirty thousand words.) In one sense my writing hurtled back and forth between genres and styles and between the comic and serious, and had this motley collection of books found publishers (I came close), then who knows whether I would have still have written in such a variety.
Since then I've struggled a bit to write a longer piece of fiction, caught, I think, a little between the need to tell a story and the desire to write something good. Rather than gain confidence over time, I feel I've lost some. It makes me think that all writing is hard won, at the end of the day.
Yet for all my "variety" of tone and style, I think that fiction is essentially a struggle with realism; and increasingly I begin to think that the nature of that struggle is actually more meaningful than any split between the experimental and the naturalistic, or between the commercial and the literary. There's a default setting, it seems, in contemporary fiction (but perhaps going back further), that is very recognisable in its tropes. In the 80s and 90s, there was some talk about a "return to the Victorian novel." This mostly meant the "realist" novel or even the "socio-realist" novel; yet as time winnows the field, and the canon of books we remember from fifties, sixties and seventies becomes smaller, I wonder if the key "struggle" in literature is not between the modernist and the realist, or the linear novel and the postmodern, or even between the storyteller and the existentialist, but between those writers who acknowledge their struggle in their work and those that don't.
For all novels are untruths attempting to tell a truth in some ways. They are "fictions", "constructs", and yet want us to believe in them. The fantasias of Tolkein or Rowling, even of Mieville and Asimov, are rooted in our realities: they have to be in some ways, to engage us however alien their settings are. Our default setting is a somewhat dreary realism, which is why the books that began as cults, but remain popular, "Catcher in the Rye", "1984", "The Naked Lunch", "A Clockwork Orange" remain with us.
Going back to when Zadie Smith compared Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" with Tom McCarthy's "Remainder" as different paths for the modern novelist, the difference, now I think about it, is to some degree one of the admittance of artifice. "Netherland" purports to tell a real story, McCarthy's novel, though it plays it deadpan, never does. Yet its something that we see in Smith's latest, "NW", where the most realist parts of the novel are shown in a kind of snippet-shorthand, whereas the one truly imagined story is given a straight treatment. It is all artifice and yet we are trying to make the reader believe in this world, these characters. We struggle with this - so its not surprising that the default setting is to just set things down. In this sense its possible to believe that the possibilities of the novel have all been done, are so limited that all we can do is just tell the story straight, even when its the Russian doll-like stories of "Cloud Atlas" or the chopped up narrative of "A Visit from the Goon Squad." Inventive novelists like Mitchell and Egan are enjoying the struggle; but lets not kid ourselves, the stories included here are realistic vignettes.
There was a time when writers were more explicit about what they were doing though sometimes this comes down to the admittance that this is a "writer" doing it, rather than a story being told. In Roth's "The Ghost Writer" we are in no doubt that we are reading a contrivance, yet by "American Pastoral", an unbelievable story is told with the straight-up panache of the on-the-scene reporter. Roth hadn't abandoned the artifice, the later novel just required readerly connivance. In "The Ghost Writer" he's playing with us, as Amis is in "London Fields," Fowles in "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and Ellis in "Lunar Park." Plonking the writer in the very text is less, I think now, a postmodern trope, as an admittance - maybe a baton passed down writer to writer - that they are at least engaged with the struggle with realism. At its most explicit, we get B.S. Johnson telling us the whole novel is bullshit; at its most ironic, Salinger's Holden Caulfield giving the game away by not wanting to tell us any of that David Copperfield crap.
So, here we go, making something up that is very like life, and we want it to tell a truth; and because we've moved into prose, rather than poetry, where the artifice is less on the page, we either have to go the whole hog and say, "this is the saddest story" (but its still a story) or find another way round the struggle. Because, whether we ignore the description of the street down which our character walks, or make the description of the street the most important bit, we are engaging in that struggle. Contemporary fictions like "Remainder", like Lee Rourke's "The Canal", like Nicola Barker's "Clear", are explicit about the place they are writing of: name, postcode even. Zadie Smith's London is the same; yet its her most realist novel, "On Beauty" that she actually pretends the more: I'm not sure these places are real, even as she apes the pseudonymous sense of place of "Howard's End". In "NW" you are expected to take the same amount of time to walk from A to explicit B as her named character. Sometimes the struggle with realism is to given in to it, and play around with something else: with form, with y, with structure.
A Joycean will rejoice in the mapping of time and place so exactly in "Ulysses" and we've been a bit spoilt I think by these modernist titans - who had a slightly different battle: to tell a truth rather than fictionalise the truth. Its why contemporary writers seem drawn to Proust or Joyce when they can't write half as well as them; there's something about such comprehensive "telling" that seems to have the whiff of truth - of a struggle won. Was Fitzgerald's allegorical take on the Jazz Age in "The Great Gatsby" so unsuccessful at the time because it was winning that struggle with realism - for we now see that period through Gatsby, through Fitzgerald's prose (and the prose becomes the main tool the best writers have, for telling this story anew).
So I'm trying to write something new; and to come to terms with the five or six or seven novels I've written previously, and think that maybe they were just too explicitly "turns" trying to be unified in their take on reality and I should loosen up more, admit I'm making it up, or pretend its all true, whatever works best. Its about learning that what is real in fiction is not mere ventroliquism; though ventriliquism (say, "Wolf Hall") can be seductive at its best. If contemporary poetry sometimes tears itself apart with the need to find a new way of writing about feeling (or honesty, or the self, or any of those interior things that poetry is mostly struggling to describe) then fiction has the same battles with the realistic. A Foster Wallace (or a Brett Easton Ellis or even a Tao Lin) may go down the symbolic or the ironic or the plain clever route, but they're still at heart, describing a thing in all its thinginess; whilst Frantzen may pretend that he's nailed realism with his unspun sentences; yet I'm beginning to think that there's not so much difference. There's good and bad of course, and there's the level of engagement; but the novel's an infinitely simple thing. We should perhaps not expect to rewrite the very rules of it this late in the day; at least not when we're all trying to do the same thing.
Monday, July 29, 2013
Sunday, July 28, 2013
When It Happens to You by Molly Ringwald
Connected stories. A Los Angeles setting. Broken families. We could be talking about Brett Easton Ellis's "The Informers", but Molly Ringwald's debut fiction (and second book) is a very different beast. In an interview at the end of the paperback edition she talks of the influence of Carver and Lorrie Moore, and that's almost a given; but Ringwald sensibly avoids the blue collar lives of the former and the disorientated loners of the latter, and weaves a web of stories around a modern family's slow, but predictable breakdown.
Ostensibly a collection of stories, the majority focus on the relationship of Phillip and Greta, together from college, but drifting apart as his consultancy job takes him away and she struggles with the fertility treatment that she hopes will give them a sibling for 6-year old Charlotte. In Ringwald's modern day Los Angeles the lives are as flat as the landscape and we rarely get a specific sense of place - which seems at one with our common fictional depiction of that west coast city's sprawl. Yet the lack of specificity, with malls, restaurants, doctors' waiting rooms and airport lounge being the public places where the drama plays out, seems appropriate for a book that is far more forensic about the little things that define who we love and whom. The opener, "The Harvest Moon", may well be the book's strongest story as - and here we do see an echo of Carver's sense of the beautiful moment - Greta and Phillip rush to get Charlotte in the car so they can catch sight of the harvest moon of the title. They fail to see it, and have to get back for Charlotte's violin lesson. When, later in the evening he takes the young violin teacher home, returning much later, waking his wife when he gets back in, the sense of a moment of domestic crisis is subtley handled.
But Ringwald has written a collection of stories rather than a novel - and though basically in chronological order - this allows a selecting of which parts of the story she wants to tell. We see the aftermath's of a couple's separation and the story of how they got there is told obliquely. Greta and Phillip were both high fliers, but he was the one who went for the career and she played down her ambitions to stay with him, first by following him to the same college, then through becoming a homemaker. Somewhere along the way, the 44-year old Greta seems to have lost a decade; and declining fertility, and the various treatments that mean the couple have six embryos stored in a clinic somewhere, are a stark reminder of how marriage breakdown is also about life and death.
Along the way, we are introduced to other characters whose lives intersect with Phillip, Greta and Charlotte's : Peter, a youngish vain actor who found a paycheck for a dozen years in a children's TV show, but is now lost and out of work in an adult world he's been somewhat avoiding; and Oliver, a little boy who wants to be a girl, and how his single mother deals with this. It is a book that deliberately eschews the showy or the over-the-top, instead finding its centre in the little (melo)dramas off what are on the surface comfortable lives.
There's very few externalities in these stories, but you do get a sense of the contemporary middle American experience at a time of recession and uncertainty; where lives can sometimes be thrown apart through the simple lonelinesses of modernity - of which Los Angeles remains the supreme capital. The old lady next door to Charlotte who befriends the six-year-old as she strays into first her garden, then her house, remains utterly unknown to Charlotte's mother - who only knows something has happened when the moving van arrives outside. In what is probably the weakest story, Phillip, having been served with divorce papers by his wife, goes to see his brother - a recovering alcoholic who now runs the family diner. Ringwald writes that she struggles with the male perspective yet its not this so much as the lack of centre to the story. Too much is hinted at and brought in with the introduction of Phillip's brother, without being fully resolved.
Family is therefore seen as both the cause and solution - and Ringwald is adept at the little details of familiarity that exist between siblings, husbands and wives, parents and their children; at equal parts knowing and unknowing. At times there is not enough to keep the longer stories going, and Ringwald resorts to too much exposition, yet skip these longeurs and you can forgive these lesser parts, as the stories become a more satisfying whole. Its no more a novel than or "Cathedral" or "Birds of America" or less one than "A Visit from the Goon Squad" or "Hawthorn and Child" with Ringwald's characters given an inter-locking narrative which strengthens rather than weakens the parts. I'm reminded more of our English chronicler of the middle class, Helen Simpson, in the way Ringwald finds the points of interest in what might otherwise be somewhat uninteresting lives.
Ringwald is, of course, better known as an actress, and though I think she brings a confidence to these stories which is somewhat cinematic, the collection is almost deliberately about people outside the movie industry, only the story of Peter, "Ursa Minor" being set in that celebrity world. The title story is more of an interlude, written in the second person, addressed from the wronged woman to the younger woman who took her husband, and its foregrounding as a title is, I think, an attempt to unify these stories which it probably helps achieve. Much quieter a book than you might imagine to come from our contemporary America, Ringwald's debut is in some ways far more realistic in its portrayals of women and family than the similarly middle-class family in Frantzen's "Freedom." It will be interesting to see if she expands her ambitions following this well-received debut.
Ostensibly a collection of stories, the majority focus on the relationship of Phillip and Greta, together from college, but drifting apart as his consultancy job takes him away and she struggles with the fertility treatment that she hopes will give them a sibling for 6-year old Charlotte. In Ringwald's modern day Los Angeles the lives are as flat as the landscape and we rarely get a specific sense of place - which seems at one with our common fictional depiction of that west coast city's sprawl. Yet the lack of specificity, with malls, restaurants, doctors' waiting rooms and airport lounge being the public places where the drama plays out, seems appropriate for a book that is far more forensic about the little things that define who we love and whom. The opener, "The Harvest Moon", may well be the book's strongest story as - and here we do see an echo of Carver's sense of the beautiful moment - Greta and Phillip rush to get Charlotte in the car so they can catch sight of the harvest moon of the title. They fail to see it, and have to get back for Charlotte's violin lesson. When, later in the evening he takes the young violin teacher home, returning much later, waking his wife when he gets back in, the sense of a moment of domestic crisis is subtley handled.
But Ringwald has written a collection of stories rather than a novel - and though basically in chronological order - this allows a selecting of which parts of the story she wants to tell. We see the aftermath's of a couple's separation and the story of how they got there is told obliquely. Greta and Phillip were both high fliers, but he was the one who went for the career and she played down her ambitions to stay with him, first by following him to the same college, then through becoming a homemaker. Somewhere along the way, the 44-year old Greta seems to have lost a decade; and declining fertility, and the various treatments that mean the couple have six embryos stored in a clinic somewhere, are a stark reminder of how marriage breakdown is also about life and death.
Along the way, we are introduced to other characters whose lives intersect with Phillip, Greta and Charlotte's : Peter, a youngish vain actor who found a paycheck for a dozen years in a children's TV show, but is now lost and out of work in an adult world he's been somewhat avoiding; and Oliver, a little boy who wants to be a girl, and how his single mother deals with this. It is a book that deliberately eschews the showy or the over-the-top, instead finding its centre in the little (melo)dramas off what are on the surface comfortable lives.
There's very few externalities in these stories, but you do get a sense of the contemporary middle American experience at a time of recession and uncertainty; where lives can sometimes be thrown apart through the simple lonelinesses of modernity - of which Los Angeles remains the supreme capital. The old lady next door to Charlotte who befriends the six-year-old as she strays into first her garden, then her house, remains utterly unknown to Charlotte's mother - who only knows something has happened when the moving van arrives outside. In what is probably the weakest story, Phillip, having been served with divorce papers by his wife, goes to see his brother - a recovering alcoholic who now runs the family diner. Ringwald writes that she struggles with the male perspective yet its not this so much as the lack of centre to the story. Too much is hinted at and brought in with the introduction of Phillip's brother, without being fully resolved.
Family is therefore seen as both the cause and solution - and Ringwald is adept at the little details of familiarity that exist between siblings, husbands and wives, parents and their children; at equal parts knowing and unknowing. At times there is not enough to keep the longer stories going, and Ringwald resorts to too much exposition, yet skip these longeurs and you can forgive these lesser parts, as the stories become a more satisfying whole. Its no more a novel than or "Cathedral" or "Birds of America" or less one than "A Visit from the Goon Squad" or "Hawthorn and Child" with Ringwald's characters given an inter-locking narrative which strengthens rather than weakens the parts. I'm reminded more of our English chronicler of the middle class, Helen Simpson, in the way Ringwald finds the points of interest in what might otherwise be somewhat uninteresting lives.
Ringwald is, of course, better known as an actress, and though I think she brings a confidence to these stories which is somewhat cinematic, the collection is almost deliberately about people outside the movie industry, only the story of Peter, "Ursa Minor" being set in that celebrity world. The title story is more of an interlude, written in the second person, addressed from the wronged woman to the younger woman who took her husband, and its foregrounding as a title is, I think, an attempt to unify these stories which it probably helps achieve. Much quieter a book than you might imagine to come from our contemporary America, Ringwald's debut is in some ways far more realistic in its portrayals of women and family than the similarly middle-class family in Frantzen's "Freedom." It will be interesting to see if she expands her ambitions following this well-received debut.
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Booker 2013
Its Booker longlist day, which despite been drowned out a little by the r***l b***h, is still one of my favourite days of the year. I love the Booker, its longevity, its primacy - they make it fun even when you quibble with the results. But though I usually read the winner and always buy the shortlist, funnily enough its since they've started announcing the longlist that things have got really interesting. Amongst the "who is on" or "who is off", this year there doesn't seem to be any outcrying about big names missing; and maybe that's because its quite hard to know who are the big names these days. The older generation aren't exactly novel-a-year types these days after all. I was surprised to read that Jim Crace (on the list for the intriguely sounding "Harvest") has talked about this as his last novel. Remarkably he's 67 - the same age as Julian Barnes and four years older than Martin Amis. Somehow I'd thought him the next generation... always an interesting writer, his "Arcadia" remains one of my favourite late 20th century novels. Crace, alongside Colm Toibin is probably the best known writer on the list this year.
The judges have proclaimed the list the most "diverse" ever - which you'd probably only know if you'd read all the books. As usual there's a mix of the contemporary and the historical; the very British and the very commonwealth, with at least one pseudo-American writer on the list. (The quirk of Booker qualification means that most years we seem to have one writer who is eligible through birth or passport whilst being to all intents and purposes an American novelist.) None of the Best of Young British Granta list have made this years Booker longlist, surprisingly, I'd have said in the case of at least a couple, but it may be that not that many had novels published in this years "window." I like the snapshot the Booker gives of fiction each year, and its usually the longlist that furnishes the books that I really treasure - perhaps something about the need to create a consensual shortlist means the more quirky or individualistic books often drop off before that point. I'm particularly fascinated by the sound of Richard House's "1000 page" "The Kills".
It wouldn't be the Booker without a gripe or two of course - there are at least five of the books on this years longlist that you can't get in the shops yet. Given that a few of these books will drop off the longlist in early September I kind of hope that good books don't lose their brief moment in the sun through tardy publishing dates.
And of course, if its Booker time, its also "Not the Booker" time - the Guardian's always fun, always chaotic attempt to find an alternate list to the real one.
Not on the Booker list, but surely a contender for Not the Booker, Manchester-based Socrates Adams' 2nd novel is being launched this week in at Blackwells this Thursday.
The judges have proclaimed the list the most "diverse" ever - which you'd probably only know if you'd read all the books. As usual there's a mix of the contemporary and the historical; the very British and the very commonwealth, with at least one pseudo-American writer on the list. (The quirk of Booker qualification means that most years we seem to have one writer who is eligible through birth or passport whilst being to all intents and purposes an American novelist.) None of the Best of Young British Granta list have made this years Booker longlist, surprisingly, I'd have said in the case of at least a couple, but it may be that not that many had novels published in this years "window." I like the snapshot the Booker gives of fiction each year, and its usually the longlist that furnishes the books that I really treasure - perhaps something about the need to create a consensual shortlist means the more quirky or individualistic books often drop off before that point. I'm particularly fascinated by the sound of Richard House's "1000 page" "The Kills".
It wouldn't be the Booker without a gripe or two of course - there are at least five of the books on this years longlist that you can't get in the shops yet. Given that a few of these books will drop off the longlist in early September I kind of hope that good books don't lose their brief moment in the sun through tardy publishing dates.
And of course, if its Booker time, its also "Not the Booker" time - the Guardian's always fun, always chaotic attempt to find an alternate list to the real one.
Not on the Booker list, but surely a contender for Not the Booker, Manchester-based Socrates Adams' 2nd novel is being launched this week in at Blackwells this Thursday.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
The Order of Things
If you are lucky enough to get a novel published then mostly that's the way it stays: an unchangeable and unchanging book; maybe part of your "backlist". Different editions come and go, but if the cover or introduction or font changes the chances are its the same thing. When we read "Wuthering Heights" or "The Great Gatsby" its pretty close to the same book that its first readers would have seen - the odd proofing error aside. There are exceptions of course - the two versions of "Tender is the Night" comes to mind; then there are books in translation where we can only hope that new translations are improvement - or closer to the original.
Its the same in music of course - where since "Rubber Soul" at least, the album has been a "thing". That my cassette copy of "Diamond Dogs" changed the tracklisting (to make the sides equal length - absurd for what is a concept album) or that the vinyl of "Defnitely Maybe" features a track that's not on the CD, are not so uncommon; and there are a few albums over the years which have appeared in multiple versions.
Yet the album compiler is making some decisions: about what to include and what not. "What's the new Mary Jane?" was left off "The White Album" and was no great loss; and one wonders what "Sgt. Pepper" would have been like if "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" hadn't been pulled from the sessions as a single. Compilations tend to slice and dice albums, or, for those that remain popular years later, do we lose the original context? Forgetting perhaps that this or that song first appeared as a single.
Not all novels appear fully formed. "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" was a long story issued along time before the Diaz turned it into the novel; "Finnegan's Wake" and "Ulysses" were first read in fragments and chapters. Its always interesting to come across poems or stories in their original context. SF writers have a long history of reworking work across different medium: the magazine version being almost a first draft of the idea. Poetry has many different lives: from magazine, to anthology, to collection, to selection. Sometimes the poem survives these changes, sometimes not.
I'm less wondering about the minor changes that take place between different versions of work - more about the way we as creatives decide to write and order things. The "themed" collection seems all the rage in poetry these days - whether a long "in memoriam" or inspired by a historical figure or particular place. When we first saw "Birthday Letters" by Ted Hughes, the "ordering" was pretty much chronological - though of when the events happened, rather than when the poems were written. I know that writers, artists, songwriters do often come back to themes or characters - and I guess we make our own rules as we go along. Maybe Hughes consciously or unconsciously realised that he was writing another "Sylvia" poem and developed a "house style" even if they weren't published for years later.
I've recently been recording some more music, and as usual, after a few tracks, I begin to realise that I'm not just recording one off pieces, but begin to think about how I can present these to the world. I've always done this: whether its poems, stories or songs; and whether or not they are getting published wider. Its partly a need to box off projects, rather than continue without any overarching structure; sometimes its just to give me a way of listening to my songs or letting other people read my stories or poems. I don't think there's any right or wrong - certainly outside of commercial considerations - but there's hopefully some artistic considerations going on. Half way through recording these new songs I suddenly got the idea to make a medley, Abbey Road-style, of some of those songs that I've been humming away in my head for years, but for some reason haven't ever made into songs. Often there's just been a chorus or a melody line, and so its hard to say when the song was actually written: several years ago - or now when I've got to flesh out the verses?
And I think there's always a bit of a difficulty - outside of novels at least - about the different orderings that we do. There's the order of things being written, the order of things being "published" or recorded, the order that we decide to put things into in a collection or an album. There's also the order with which people might come across what we write. At our NW Poets group yesterday, we had a nice discussion about Stevie Smith, one of our quirkier "minor poets". Smith is one of those writers most famous for a single poem, "Not Waving, but Drowning" and it strikes me that there will be thos who encountered it as it originally appeared in the collection of the same name in the late 1950s. (And as a popular reader of her work, maybe it was tested out on audiences before then.)
To what extent does it matter? There are plenty of songs that are best listened to on their own rather than in their parent album - and sometimes its quite bizarre where particularly lasting pieces turn up. Then there's the works that gain a reputation outside of the time they are written. Posthumous publication of Shelley's "The Masque of Anarchy", his poem about the Peterloo Massacre, revisited at the Manchester International Festival last week, makes one wonder about its impact - though it appearing in 1832, at the time of the Reform Act, can't be that coincidental. Political poems, of which I've written a few, need to be aired at the time of writing, I think, and do well to last.
Writers are defined not so much by what they write, but how they publish it and when. Poetry tends to happen in a certain silence anyway, a "news that remains news" if we are lucky. Even the successful poet will soon come to rely on his or her anthology appearances. Some works simply have a life of their own.
Yet I'm still struck by the artistic statement involved in "ordering", whether its a private collection, a live "set", or something grander. If we're successful then chances are that everything we write that makes a certain standard may come out at some time - but I think its interesting how writers and musicians (and artists as well no doubt) are canny enough not to forget their dribs and drabs. Rock historians will find songs by David Bowie or Brian Wilson cropping up out of time; and I'm sure poets and story writers might do the same. I've had stories that have took years to write one way or another - either from an idea or title I've long had, or something that's been abandoned and returned to.
Then of course there are the memories and the other material that come into our work. Do we order these chronologically? Of course we don't. I'm just writing a poem about the second world war, not my obvious subject, but based squarely in things I remembered my grandparents mentioning about their experience of it. Showing the first draft to my poetry group I had the unusual advice that maybe the poem's got too much stuff in it - and needs to be longer, or a series of poems - I realise that without realising it I was pouring memories into this small piece. Whether this is recycled (because they are so familiar to me) or new (because I've not used them before) hardly matters.
And when we look back on what we've done we also have some ordering to do: missing out weaker work or things that reflect a different mindset. I'm struck by how often I've adopted a persona in my music or my writing and yet now, stripped of an alias, I'd almost certainly have to have it directly under my own name. The work somehow changes in its new context.
It is, I think, as much part of being a creative as the thinking, as the writing. Even novels, those long and immutable works are only another way that we order things.
Its the same in music of course - where since "Rubber Soul" at least, the album has been a "thing". That my cassette copy of "Diamond Dogs" changed the tracklisting (to make the sides equal length - absurd for what is a concept album) or that the vinyl of "Defnitely Maybe" features a track that's not on the CD, are not so uncommon; and there are a few albums over the years which have appeared in multiple versions.
Yet the album compiler is making some decisions: about what to include and what not. "What's the new Mary Jane?" was left off "The White Album" and was no great loss; and one wonders what "Sgt. Pepper" would have been like if "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" hadn't been pulled from the sessions as a single. Compilations tend to slice and dice albums, or, for those that remain popular years later, do we lose the original context? Forgetting perhaps that this or that song first appeared as a single.
Not all novels appear fully formed. "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" was a long story issued along time before the Diaz turned it into the novel; "Finnegan's Wake" and "Ulysses" were first read in fragments and chapters. Its always interesting to come across poems or stories in their original context. SF writers have a long history of reworking work across different medium: the magazine version being almost a first draft of the idea. Poetry has many different lives: from magazine, to anthology, to collection, to selection. Sometimes the poem survives these changes, sometimes not.
I'm less wondering about the minor changes that take place between different versions of work - more about the way we as creatives decide to write and order things. The "themed" collection seems all the rage in poetry these days - whether a long "in memoriam" or inspired by a historical figure or particular place. When we first saw "Birthday Letters" by Ted Hughes, the "ordering" was pretty much chronological - though of when the events happened, rather than when the poems were written. I know that writers, artists, songwriters do often come back to themes or characters - and I guess we make our own rules as we go along. Maybe Hughes consciously or unconsciously realised that he was writing another "Sylvia" poem and developed a "house style" even if they weren't published for years later.
I've recently been recording some more music, and as usual, after a few tracks, I begin to realise that I'm not just recording one off pieces, but begin to think about how I can present these to the world. I've always done this: whether its poems, stories or songs; and whether or not they are getting published wider. Its partly a need to box off projects, rather than continue without any overarching structure; sometimes its just to give me a way of listening to my songs or letting other people read my stories or poems. I don't think there's any right or wrong - certainly outside of commercial considerations - but there's hopefully some artistic considerations going on. Half way through recording these new songs I suddenly got the idea to make a medley, Abbey Road-style, of some of those songs that I've been humming away in my head for years, but for some reason haven't ever made into songs. Often there's just been a chorus or a melody line, and so its hard to say when the song was actually written: several years ago - or now when I've got to flesh out the verses?
And I think there's always a bit of a difficulty - outside of novels at least - about the different orderings that we do. There's the order of things being written, the order of things being "published" or recorded, the order that we decide to put things into in a collection or an album. There's also the order with which people might come across what we write. At our NW Poets group yesterday, we had a nice discussion about Stevie Smith, one of our quirkier "minor poets". Smith is one of those writers most famous for a single poem, "Not Waving, but Drowning" and it strikes me that there will be thos who encountered it as it originally appeared in the collection of the same name in the late 1950s. (And as a popular reader of her work, maybe it was tested out on audiences before then.)
To what extent does it matter? There are plenty of songs that are best listened to on their own rather than in their parent album - and sometimes its quite bizarre where particularly lasting pieces turn up. Then there's the works that gain a reputation outside of the time they are written. Posthumous publication of Shelley's "The Masque of Anarchy", his poem about the Peterloo Massacre, revisited at the Manchester International Festival last week, makes one wonder about its impact - though it appearing in 1832, at the time of the Reform Act, can't be that coincidental. Political poems, of which I've written a few, need to be aired at the time of writing, I think, and do well to last.
Writers are defined not so much by what they write, but how they publish it and when. Poetry tends to happen in a certain silence anyway, a "news that remains news" if we are lucky. Even the successful poet will soon come to rely on his or her anthology appearances. Some works simply have a life of their own.
Yet I'm still struck by the artistic statement involved in "ordering", whether its a private collection, a live "set", or something grander. If we're successful then chances are that everything we write that makes a certain standard may come out at some time - but I think its interesting how writers and musicians (and artists as well no doubt) are canny enough not to forget their dribs and drabs. Rock historians will find songs by David Bowie or Brian Wilson cropping up out of time; and I'm sure poets and story writers might do the same. I've had stories that have took years to write one way or another - either from an idea or title I've long had, or something that's been abandoned and returned to.
Then of course there are the memories and the other material that come into our work. Do we order these chronologically? Of course we don't. I'm just writing a poem about the second world war, not my obvious subject, but based squarely in things I remembered my grandparents mentioning about their experience of it. Showing the first draft to my poetry group I had the unusual advice that maybe the poem's got too much stuff in it - and needs to be longer, or a series of poems - I realise that without realising it I was pouring memories into this small piece. Whether this is recycled (because they are so familiar to me) or new (because I've not used them before) hardly matters.
And when we look back on what we've done we also have some ordering to do: missing out weaker work or things that reflect a different mindset. I'm struck by how often I've adopted a persona in my music or my writing and yet now, stripped of an alias, I'd almost certainly have to have it directly under my own name. The work somehow changes in its new context.
It is, I think, as much part of being a creative as the thinking, as the writing. Even novels, those long and immutable works are only another way that we order things.
Monday, July 15, 2013
The Great Crash
Sadly, the only time literature makes the news these days is when the story is about the marketing. A book is not news, the marketing of a book is. J.K. Rowling (a writer I've never read more than a few pages of, but of whom I probably know more about than most writers) has written a crime novel under a pseudonym, Robert Galbraith. We've not been given chapter and verse on this - other than that she wanted to have a book out without any of the usual hoopla of a new novel - but of course, now that its known that she is the writer, it has moved from selling a few copies to being top of the sales list.
I've a few thoughts: though more about the response to this than the idea itself. First of all, that name: the other famous J.K. is the left-wing economist Galbraith, writer of "The Great Crash." I've not seen anyone else mention this, but I can't imagine that the left-leaning Rowling did this accidentally. It's a nice touch.
Secondly, I'm confused a little by what the gameplan was here - surely as soon as the book's real author was known, it was going to sell - after all, Rowling is not just another author, but almost uniquely famous. (Dan Brown and a few others may be almost as successful, but they remain relatively anonymous - whereas Rowling has used her public profile for many different purposes.) I have a vision of a warehouse of copies of the new Galbraith book ready to be let out into the shops. The book is listed as "in stock" on Amazon - yet the "unveiling" of Galbraith only happened at the weekend - and I would imagine sales would be in the hundreds of thousands, not the tens. I know that with digital printing this is possible - but this seems a little surprising. (I think the real signifier will be when the book appears in the Supermarket and at what price.) Apparently the book WAS sent out anonymously; with at least one publisher admitting to her Dick James moment (the Decca executive who rejected the Beatles), and having turned the book down as being nothing exceptional. Yet, somehow Rowling's existing publisher took it on (so questions there), and also, its blurb features endorsements by top crime writers. Hard to know what's going on here - was everyone in the dark?
Thirdly, there's something important here about Rowling's future plans. "The Casual Vacancy", her first adult novel received a respectful response from critics and audience alike. Yet a local government/small town fiction hardly seems likely to be a "genre" or a future cash-cow. Crime fiction on the other hands is almost predicated on the idea of "series." When articles have been making the point that "The Cuckoo's Calling" (her titles remain dreadful!) had only sold a few hundred copies I'm hardly surprised: crime fiction is about building a reputation; first books in an overcrowded genre, I'm assuming, are often only as successful as what comes next. The poet Sophie Hannah and the novelists Kate Atkinson and John Banville both moved into the genre and started sequences of books rather than one-offs. I'm thinking that "The Casual Vacancy" was probably an important book for her to get out of her system - a bit like Grisham's non-crime novel "A Painted House" - a story she wanted to tell but which was not going to be what she continues writing. Notably, predictably, the new Rowling has a lead character, Cormoran Strike (!) who has presumably another book or more in him.
I'm not someone who reads much crime fiction, but its a massive market, and readers are incredibly loyal. They love particular writers - and read them faster than their authors' can write them. Is this really the world that Rowling has now entered? She's clearly a prolific storyteller, and any story teller will tell you that its never a problem to find new ideas. The phenomenal sales of previous books would have followed her around for a while (with the possible frustration of disappointed readers missing the magic of the Harry Potters) so I'm wondering if the cleverest thing about this is that the ruse may actually help to puncture the phenomenon of Rowling: unlike her first adult novel or the last Potter, the release of the book hasn't been a major media event - though the unveiling of the true identity is a classic 21st century media story. Whether her millions of readers will follow her into the pragmatic problem solving of the contemporary detective story is anotther matter: any writer who can keep an audience is unlikely to disappoint her readers for long. Whether or not future Cormoran Strike stories will come out under the Galbraith name or some convolution ("J.K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith") we'll have to see - for now, its a nice summer story. I can't blame readers for choosing a familiar name rather than an unknown; but the publishing industry's reliance on these mega-writers is more worrying.
I've a few thoughts: though more about the response to this than the idea itself. First of all, that name: the other famous J.K. is the left-wing economist Galbraith, writer of "The Great Crash." I've not seen anyone else mention this, but I can't imagine that the left-leaning Rowling did this accidentally. It's a nice touch.
Secondly, I'm confused a little by what the gameplan was here - surely as soon as the book's real author was known, it was going to sell - after all, Rowling is not just another author, but almost uniquely famous. (Dan Brown and a few others may be almost as successful, but they remain relatively anonymous - whereas Rowling has used her public profile for many different purposes.) I have a vision of a warehouse of copies of the new Galbraith book ready to be let out into the shops. The book is listed as "in stock" on Amazon - yet the "unveiling" of Galbraith only happened at the weekend - and I would imagine sales would be in the hundreds of thousands, not the tens. I know that with digital printing this is possible - but this seems a little surprising. (I think the real signifier will be when the book appears in the Supermarket and at what price.) Apparently the book WAS sent out anonymously; with at least one publisher admitting to her Dick James moment (the Decca executive who rejected the Beatles), and having turned the book down as being nothing exceptional. Yet, somehow Rowling's existing publisher took it on (so questions there), and also, its blurb features endorsements by top crime writers. Hard to know what's going on here - was everyone in the dark?
Thirdly, there's something important here about Rowling's future plans. "The Casual Vacancy", her first adult novel received a respectful response from critics and audience alike. Yet a local government/small town fiction hardly seems likely to be a "genre" or a future cash-cow. Crime fiction on the other hands is almost predicated on the idea of "series." When articles have been making the point that "The Cuckoo's Calling" (her titles remain dreadful!) had only sold a few hundred copies I'm hardly surprised: crime fiction is about building a reputation; first books in an overcrowded genre, I'm assuming, are often only as successful as what comes next. The poet Sophie Hannah and the novelists Kate Atkinson and John Banville both moved into the genre and started sequences of books rather than one-offs. I'm thinking that "The Casual Vacancy" was probably an important book for her to get out of her system - a bit like Grisham's non-crime novel "A Painted House" - a story she wanted to tell but which was not going to be what she continues writing. Notably, predictably, the new Rowling has a lead character, Cormoran Strike (!) who has presumably another book or more in him.
I'm not someone who reads much crime fiction, but its a massive market, and readers are incredibly loyal. They love particular writers - and read them faster than their authors' can write them. Is this really the world that Rowling has now entered? She's clearly a prolific storyteller, and any story teller will tell you that its never a problem to find new ideas. The phenomenal sales of previous books would have followed her around for a while (with the possible frustration of disappointed readers missing the magic of the Harry Potters) so I'm wondering if the cleverest thing about this is that the ruse may actually help to puncture the phenomenon of Rowling: unlike her first adult novel or the last Potter, the release of the book hasn't been a major media event - though the unveiling of the true identity is a classic 21st century media story. Whether her millions of readers will follow her into the pragmatic problem solving of the contemporary detective story is anotther matter: any writer who can keep an audience is unlikely to disappoint her readers for long. Whether or not future Cormoran Strike stories will come out under the Galbraith name or some convolution ("J.K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith") we'll have to see - for now, its a nice summer story. I can't blame readers for choosing a familiar name rather than an unknown; but the publishing industry's reliance on these mega-writers is more worrying.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
High brow and low brow
I always swing a bit on this issue - between high brow and low brow art, yet I have an inkling its coming back into fashion as a (too) easy dualism. In a world of "Fifty Shades of Grey"and Dan Brown it becomes easier, I guess, to use these bestsellers as a distinguishing mark: that literature is over there, and these are just entertainments for the masses. Then we have those writers like the very entertaining novelist-blogger Matt Haig who is wryly pithy about the writing life with posts like "literary fiction must go." I've not read his novel(s) so can't really comment, but lines like "Our minds aren’t VIP rooms that only allow Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence passed the velvet rope" play into this idea that there is high brow and low brow fiction. The choice of those two authors is interesting (after all Woolf was no fan of Lawrence), as somewhere along the line in the last 20 years or so, modernism has gained a label for being "difficult". I don't remember this being the case when I studied them. Perhaps its the case that nowadays with nearly 50% of people going to university, there's a kind of new inverse snobbishness, backed by the confidence that being a university student gives. I think in the past maybe only English graduates had an opinion on literature - these days being an English graduate seems almost a curious affectation, even for wannabe novelists.ere
Until Joyce of course, it was relatively uncommon for novelists (or at least the ones we still read) to have gone to university. They were journalists, or working or lower-middle class, or women... auto didacts perhaps but not necessarily with a "classical education." Not so true of poets of course, but whatever the background the writers that we remember tend to not fit any kind of template. Yet at the same time its fair to say that's there's a literary culture that sits fair and square at some kind of top table; that if not quite "posh", is certainly not poor. On the few occasions I came into contact with literary London in the late 90s, I was almost always "put in my place" as an aspiring writer; I looked wrong, spoke wrong. Maybe now that literature is so internationalised (taking a look at the hybrid nationalities of the Granta Best of Young British novelists for instance), there does seem to be a little drawing of ranks around "high brow" literature that has little, I think, to do with the writing itself. We know that poetry doesn't sell, but neither, increasingly does literary fiction. How does a man (or woman) of letters exitist in this world? Clearly somewhere between the broadsheets and the BBC, or in the pages of the LRB/TLS or - increasingly - in the universities. This shouldn't be so bad, of course, but does there come a point where its not a university education that is the problem so much as the university berth? Like our political class rarely getting "real jobs", the winnowing of the press has clearly had an impact on writers' "other" incomes. In this world I guess there can be a sense that the "intellectual stamp" of an academic career becomes something that people must fight to keep.
Yet I wonder if we end up with a strange kind of dualism where there is an out-and-out commercial fiction (it hardly stretches to poetry of course, but can include TV and film) on the one hand - a kind of well-heeled, and possibly complacent merchant class, with a tendency towards either the safe or the kitsch; and on the other academy-centred literary careerists, who, inevitably, need to subsidise their novels, stories and poems with a mix of research, teaching and media work. Careerist - by the way - I'm not meaning to have a negative connotation here; in many ways I admire the portfolio lives that our university system makes possible. I think of the rich intertwining of an editor likemy old tutor Michael Schmidt at Carcanet, and how much his publishing career benefits from his academic career and vice versa; or the brilliant work that Writers' Centre Norwich does, bringing in great - but often mid-list - authors from round the world and their close links with the literary powerhouse that is UEA. (Where I stand on these initiatives should be clear enough: I've long thought the universities should do MORE rather than less for contemporary writing - surely the raw material for future critical thinking?)
In 2011 UEA celebrated it (and the UKs) 40 years of creative writing with a lovely anthology "Body of Work." Philip Hensher's castigation of this in the Spectator felt churlish. Any "anniversary" will list as many good books as bad, failures as successes. Also, surely the long review of the weekly magazines is exactly the same kind of literary careerist move I'm talking about above? From my perspective - northern-based, small press published, blogger, writer-with-a-day-job - surely Hensher was part of that same "industry"? However, I do think, in retrospect he was touching on something....
...for if we look at the work that matters now, mattered then (and I'm going back as far as you care), literature is something that defies the career planner. This obviously causes a few problems. After all if I'm a writer based in an institution its not just my writing that is at risk, but the other elements of my portfolio. At the other end of things, how much easier for a journalist to get a book deal than someone who isn't in the "industry." This all feeds on itself of course. We all need a track record. Yet, I'm wondering if - going back to the "high brow" and "low brow" thing we're seeing a little bit of a cutting off between the two. You'll read a certain kind of poem in some of the "big" names - whether its the LRB, PN Review or one of Duffy's poetry spreads for the Guardian - and moreover, there's a certain kind of poem you won't ever see; even if its happening on the ground. Say the same for the big prizes and for the BBC and Times short story competitions. In these unpopular art forms, there's as much circling of the wagons as elsewhere; yet when someone a little bit new or different does breakthrough they are often embraced even more closely as it kind of proves the system is "working." Alice Oswald, say, one of our best-loved poets, or Daljit Nagra, one of our more original ones; I don't remember either of them being particularly lauded before their breakthrough. The poetry did the work.
And that's what we see with the Booker and other prizes. Its rare to find a totally untutored writers; and dig a little deep in the biog of a Magnus Mills or Jon McGregor or Gwendoline Riley or William Letford or Alison Moore or Chris McCabe and they're not so different than me or a hundred other "wannabe" writers - educated, self or university; driven to find the time, to finish the work, rarely "trust funded" or other sinecures - often successful after quite a period of not failure exactly but quiet, slow endeavour; and - and this is the curious thing: they've written something good. Not high brow or low brow, and that's what I think's quite important: that the work itself is what determines. What's next of course is dependent on the realities of the current literary world - do you take what work comes your way: judging competitions, running writing classes, joining a university department, working for the BBC or the Guardian in some capacity; or will the writing provide....
...you see the latter is what's in question now. Whereas a commercial author can, I guess, build a loyal audience on a thriller a year, and the high brow writer use their work as a calling card to be invited to literary festivals or whatever else is on offer - I do wonder whether we might lose something of the "high-low hybrid" that for me has almost always offered the best writing. Whether that's bohemian writers getting picked up by a changing literary establishment (Miller, Nin, Burroughs, Kerouac) and readership; storytellers stretching their art (Burgess, Fowles, Lessing, Orwell); or poets demanding a voice in the conversation (O'Hara, Ashbery, Ginsberg.) The "bold spirit" as Hensher mentioned is of course the only kind that literature should have time for. That means drawing some lines of connection that trash the assumptions of which literature is high brow and which is low brow. Writers sometimes do it themselves of course: the restrained police procedural that is Amis's "Night Train" for instance felt like a different writer than the wunderkind of "Money." Yet is there a book published this century that is as low brow as "Yellow Dog?"
With poetry its the same, but perhaps even more vital. Its not that poets are so identical as the be indistinguishable, though there have been times in the not-so-distant past when that is the case. I'd say the "evidence" of "Identity Parade", recent Forward and Salt "best of" anthologies, and "Dear World" make the case for poetry being as wide as its ever been. Poetry seems able, in my mind, to make itself anew - there are so many good people writing it. Short fiction seems to be a little too identikit for my tastes at present - though I'm not sure if it lends itself to revolution.
I'm taken by the way that literature is itself an educator: that a writer who strives beyond the mere chase of audience is always going to be part of my high-brow conversation. Its a truism that men (mainly) who've never read a book will rave about Bukowski or Carver or Irvine Welsh; yet those writers have to different degrees rewritten our understanding of "literary fiction". If Salinger's Caulfield dismissed "all that David Copperfield crap", its something that all writer-narrators have to do at some point.
The worst thing we can do is see a solidifying of both commercial and career writers into their equally listless trajectories: a midlist writer like Hilary Mantel gained massively from what might not seem like a risk in retrospect, but may well have done at the time. A "one of the many" poets David Constantine, has a flourishing second career as one of our most consistent short story writers, because (at least partly) of the faith his small publisher put in him. There are a few hares in literature, of course, but its not quite untrue to say that before they were hares, they were often tortoises.
Until Joyce of course, it was relatively uncommon for novelists (or at least the ones we still read) to have gone to university. They were journalists, or working or lower-middle class, or women... auto didacts perhaps but not necessarily with a "classical education." Not so true of poets of course, but whatever the background the writers that we remember tend to not fit any kind of template. Yet at the same time its fair to say that's there's a literary culture that sits fair and square at some kind of top table; that if not quite "posh", is certainly not poor. On the few occasions I came into contact with literary London in the late 90s, I was almost always "put in my place" as an aspiring writer; I looked wrong, spoke wrong. Maybe now that literature is so internationalised (taking a look at the hybrid nationalities of the Granta Best of Young British novelists for instance), there does seem to be a little drawing of ranks around "high brow" literature that has little, I think, to do with the writing itself. We know that poetry doesn't sell, but neither, increasingly does literary fiction. How does a man (or woman) of letters exitist in this world? Clearly somewhere between the broadsheets and the BBC, or in the pages of the LRB/TLS or - increasingly - in the universities. This shouldn't be so bad, of course, but does there come a point where its not a university education that is the problem so much as the university berth? Like our political class rarely getting "real jobs", the winnowing of the press has clearly had an impact on writers' "other" incomes. In this world I guess there can be a sense that the "intellectual stamp" of an academic career becomes something that people must fight to keep.
Yet I wonder if we end up with a strange kind of dualism where there is an out-and-out commercial fiction (it hardly stretches to poetry of course, but can include TV and film) on the one hand - a kind of well-heeled, and possibly complacent merchant class, with a tendency towards either the safe or the kitsch; and on the other academy-centred literary careerists, who, inevitably, need to subsidise their novels, stories and poems with a mix of research, teaching and media work. Careerist - by the way - I'm not meaning to have a negative connotation here; in many ways I admire the portfolio lives that our university system makes possible. I think of the rich intertwining of an editor likemy old tutor Michael Schmidt at Carcanet, and how much his publishing career benefits from his academic career and vice versa; or the brilliant work that Writers' Centre Norwich does, bringing in great - but often mid-list - authors from round the world and their close links with the literary powerhouse that is UEA. (Where I stand on these initiatives should be clear enough: I've long thought the universities should do MORE rather than less for contemporary writing - surely the raw material for future critical thinking?)
In 2011 UEA celebrated it (and the UKs) 40 years of creative writing with a lovely anthology "Body of Work." Philip Hensher's castigation of this in the Spectator felt churlish. Any "anniversary" will list as many good books as bad, failures as successes. Also, surely the long review of the weekly magazines is exactly the same kind of literary careerist move I'm talking about above? From my perspective - northern-based, small press published, blogger, writer-with-a-day-job - surely Hensher was part of that same "industry"? However, I do think, in retrospect he was touching on something....
...for if we look at the work that matters now, mattered then (and I'm going back as far as you care), literature is something that defies the career planner. This obviously causes a few problems. After all if I'm a writer based in an institution its not just my writing that is at risk, but the other elements of my portfolio. At the other end of things, how much easier for a journalist to get a book deal than someone who isn't in the "industry." This all feeds on itself of course. We all need a track record. Yet, I'm wondering if - going back to the "high brow" and "low brow" thing we're seeing a little bit of a cutting off between the two. You'll read a certain kind of poem in some of the "big" names - whether its the LRB, PN Review or one of Duffy's poetry spreads for the Guardian - and moreover, there's a certain kind of poem you won't ever see; even if its happening on the ground. Say the same for the big prizes and for the BBC and Times short story competitions. In these unpopular art forms, there's as much circling of the wagons as elsewhere; yet when someone a little bit new or different does breakthrough they are often embraced even more closely as it kind of proves the system is "working." Alice Oswald, say, one of our best-loved poets, or Daljit Nagra, one of our more original ones; I don't remember either of them being particularly lauded before their breakthrough. The poetry did the work.
And that's what we see with the Booker and other prizes. Its rare to find a totally untutored writers; and dig a little deep in the biog of a Magnus Mills or Jon McGregor or Gwendoline Riley or William Letford or Alison Moore or Chris McCabe and they're not so different than me or a hundred other "wannabe" writers - educated, self or university; driven to find the time, to finish the work, rarely "trust funded" or other sinecures - often successful after quite a period of not failure exactly but quiet, slow endeavour; and - and this is the curious thing: they've written something good. Not high brow or low brow, and that's what I think's quite important: that the work itself is what determines. What's next of course is dependent on the realities of the current literary world - do you take what work comes your way: judging competitions, running writing classes, joining a university department, working for the BBC or the Guardian in some capacity; or will the writing provide....
...you see the latter is what's in question now. Whereas a commercial author can, I guess, build a loyal audience on a thriller a year, and the high brow writer use their work as a calling card to be invited to literary festivals or whatever else is on offer - I do wonder whether we might lose something of the "high-low hybrid" that for me has almost always offered the best writing. Whether that's bohemian writers getting picked up by a changing literary establishment (Miller, Nin, Burroughs, Kerouac) and readership; storytellers stretching their art (Burgess, Fowles, Lessing, Orwell); or poets demanding a voice in the conversation (O'Hara, Ashbery, Ginsberg.) The "bold spirit" as Hensher mentioned is of course the only kind that literature should have time for. That means drawing some lines of connection that trash the assumptions of which literature is high brow and which is low brow. Writers sometimes do it themselves of course: the restrained police procedural that is Amis's "Night Train" for instance felt like a different writer than the wunderkind of "Money." Yet is there a book published this century that is as low brow as "Yellow Dog?"
With poetry its the same, but perhaps even more vital. Its not that poets are so identical as the be indistinguishable, though there have been times in the not-so-distant past when that is the case. I'd say the "evidence" of "Identity Parade", recent Forward and Salt "best of" anthologies, and "Dear World" make the case for poetry being as wide as its ever been. Poetry seems able, in my mind, to make itself anew - there are so many good people writing it. Short fiction seems to be a little too identikit for my tastes at present - though I'm not sure if it lends itself to revolution.
I'm taken by the way that literature is itself an educator: that a writer who strives beyond the mere chase of audience is always going to be part of my high-brow conversation. Its a truism that men (mainly) who've never read a book will rave about Bukowski or Carver or Irvine Welsh; yet those writers have to different degrees rewritten our understanding of "literary fiction". If Salinger's Caulfield dismissed "all that David Copperfield crap", its something that all writer-narrators have to do at some point.
The worst thing we can do is see a solidifying of both commercial and career writers into their equally listless trajectories: a midlist writer like Hilary Mantel gained massively from what might not seem like a risk in retrospect, but may well have done at the time. A "one of the many" poets David Constantine, has a flourishing second career as one of our most consistent short story writers, because (at least partly) of the faith his small publisher put in him. There are a few hares in literature, of course, but its not quite untrue to say that before they were hares, they were often tortoises.
Saturday, July 06, 2013
When the Writing Stops
My relationship with writing poetry remains a complex one, though I'm not the only one. In an interesting White Review interview, Paul Muldoon says "I haven’t written a poem for a while and I think – as many people do – that maybe I won’t be writing another one." In a discussion mainly about poetry vs. lyrics (Muldoon has recently published a book of the latter) he talks about not kniwing what he is doing when he writes. Its fascinating, as Muldoon - almost ridiculously consistently acclaimed - seems an interesting poet to me not because everything he writes is good, but because it at least tries to be interesting. He also says that "I never know what I'm doing," and I wondered about this. Certainly I would say that Heaney, who gave him his first leg up, seems to be a poet that always knows what he's doing; and I wondered whether this is just the kind of thing one says to interviewers, particularly when you're talking about the delicate subject of publishing your lyrics. He makes the interesting point that he grew up with the inner sleeve, often festooned in lyrics, and that he thinks that's important - in other words these lyrics - Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne whoever - were meant to be read, and not just, I think, to enable you to karaoke along.
I've frequently "not written a poem for a while" - but its more often the case that I've not published a poem for a while, and I don't really understand, even after all this time, where to go with that. Reading a few poems recently I've gone back to my little book, because, three years down the line, they're still there, still in print. I have to acknowledge them. Thats not always the case with manuscript poems. I can certainly remember reading this poem or that poem out some time but nobody's keeping my set lists, so unless it was recorded, I guess those poems are ultimately "deniable."
In some ways it does seem a little absurd to keep writing poetry (or for that matter songs or stories) if they are going to remain in the bottom drawer. I envy those writers who have the confidence that all their work will get published; or find a place. My ambition stops a little with the most recent work: wondering if this is good enough and then wondering "for whom?"
It does seem important to write poems that move on, somehow, rather than be versions of what's come before; yet also there's a sense that maybe if you've found a model or two that works then a few replicas wouldn't be such a good idea. Its that old rock and roll cliche again, we like a band's style so wish they'd give us more in that style: too similar and we're bored; too different and we're not convinced. Yet I've always been interested in little artistic projects as much as individual poems - and fusing the two is one of the difficulties. I can sometimes follow an idea and write a bad poem around it; other times write something pleasant enough but which lacks any sense of originality to itself.
I've frequently "not written a poem for a while" - but its more often the case that I've not published a poem for a while, and I don't really understand, even after all this time, where to go with that. Reading a few poems recently I've gone back to my little book, because, three years down the line, they're still there, still in print. I have to acknowledge them. Thats not always the case with manuscript poems. I can certainly remember reading this poem or that poem out some time but nobody's keeping my set lists, so unless it was recorded, I guess those poems are ultimately "deniable."
In some ways it does seem a little absurd to keep writing poetry (or for that matter songs or stories) if they are going to remain in the bottom drawer. I envy those writers who have the confidence that all their work will get published; or find a place. My ambition stops a little with the most recent work: wondering if this is good enough and then wondering "for whom?"
It does seem important to write poems that move on, somehow, rather than be versions of what's come before; yet also there's a sense that maybe if you've found a model or two that works then a few replicas wouldn't be such a good idea. Its that old rock and roll cliche again, we like a band's style so wish they'd give us more in that style: too similar and we're bored; too different and we're not convinced. Yet I've always been interested in little artistic projects as much as individual poems - and fusing the two is one of the difficulties. I can sometimes follow an idea and write a bad poem around it; other times write something pleasant enough but which lacks any sense of originality to itself.
Depends which way you look at these things whether that makes me a bad poet or a good poet - I'm certainly not convinced my every utterance is worth your time; but surely they are not all one-offs? We trust a poet to, say, contribute to an anthology, because they have a track record; they have some of the tools - yet isn't the best work the stuff that surprises? Its certainly not the case that an intense experience - say, an operation - leads to an intense poem: I kind of think this is where the art comes in; its in the execution of the idea that we give it our best shot.
So here I am again, in a bit of a poetry limboland, not really sure if I've got some poems that I should send out into the world, yet knowing that if I don't do that - by whatever means - that there's no way of anyone finding out that little bit more about my writing. The writing sometimes stops, by which I mean the serious writing. It feels a bit like that at the moment, which probably means that something good is round the corner, or maybe not.
I was going to stop there, but realise I'd forgotten something. I'm a bit overwhelmed by the seriousness (that's the wrong word, but will have to do) of other poets I know. I'm here questioning the why of it all, and they're so often convinced that there's a method in the madness - and, equally as important, are getting their work out there. Not for the first time, I think that's its possible to have missed the boat - to be like Eliot's Magi, glad to see the Messiah, but wishing they were young enough to enjoy it. We all can't be Huxleys or Gunns taking advantage of the new world. I guess there's a time in your life when slings and arrows are good for you - I don't think your middle 40s is that time. There's time to do a few things I think but not to start again; and somehow - in a way that I'm finding difficult to articulate at the moment - starting again seems to be where I'm up to; roads less travelled and all that.
I was going to stop there, but realise I'd forgotten something. I'm a bit overwhelmed by the seriousness (that's the wrong word, but will have to do) of other poets I know. I'm here questioning the why of it all, and they're so often convinced that there's a method in the madness - and, equally as important, are getting their work out there. Not for the first time, I think that's its possible to have missed the boat - to be like Eliot's Magi, glad to see the Messiah, but wishing they were young enough to enjoy it. We all can't be Huxleys or Gunns taking advantage of the new world. I guess there's a time in your life when slings and arrows are good for you - I don't think your middle 40s is that time. There's time to do a few things I think but not to start again; and somehow - in a way that I'm finding difficult to articulate at the moment - starting again seems to be where I'm up to; roads less travelled and all that.
Friday, June 28, 2013
Impossibly Cool - eighties indie pop remembered.
The release of the boxset "Scared to get happy" and the publicity its getting is part the result of journalists of a certain age being a bit nostalgic for their youth, and partly a sense in younger writers/readers that here's a pre-internet culture of musical innocence that seems utterly alien compared to our currrent media-sophistication. To both groups I say "approach carefully", for if ever a "movement" was gloriously, ridiculously of its time its "indie pop." So much so though one of the names given to the genre is "C86" to reflect the NME compilation tape that came out during my first year at University.
Indie music as "independently distributed" is there throughout punk rock, but spikey pop like the Stiff roster was still musically sophisticated and aiming for the charts. Indie's ambition were aimed at the indie charts, if that. Musically, the roots of C86 are there in the Postcard roster. Josef K, Orange Juice and Aztec Camera did "indie" better than anything that came after, and if that makes indie a Caledonian music then so be it - and Rough Trade acts like Scritti Politti were also important. Yet, thinking about it, back to that time, in the myriad of styles that were around in the early 80s, the two things I took from bands like this - which I probably didn't get from goth or New Romanticism or industrial - were their kinship with some of the melodic sixties music I loved and a sense of realism about their kitchen-sink lyrics. Being a poetic soul wasn't that easy in the early 80s, and though I might listen to Cabaret Voltaire and Bauhaus, I also had the name Tracey Thorn scribbled on my pencil case. ("Is she your girlfriend?" someone asked, "no, she's my favourite singer," I replied.) The music papers of that time were a little serious; on the one hand caught up in the idea that rock music was important, on the other hand trying to deal with a world of Altered Images and Haircut 100. No wonder I soon ditched the NME and Sounds for the always ironic Record Mirror.
Looking back on my favourite records of the year 1983's the year that matters to me - with my favourite songs of the years being indie 7" "Trees and Flowers" by Strawberry Switchblade, obscure Irish band Microdisney with "Pink Skinned Man" and This Mortal Coil's ethereal "Song to the Siren." That I was also listening to Xmal Deutschland and the Birthday Party is another side of the story.
The Smiths would turn up around this time as well, and I guess the Byrds-y guitar of Johnny Marr meant that we were now allowed to like the 60s again. As I'd been spinning "Forever Changes" and the best of the Lovin' Spoonful I was very receptive. Its easy to forget how much music had been moved to the dumper by the mid-80s, from the Rolling Stones to Nick Drake, only to be "rediscovered" a year or two later. By the time I went to college, I was obviously hoping to see regular bands, but on turning up at Lancaster University the two biggest gigs of that first term were the Sweet and Fairport Convention. I had to look elsewhere - at the flyers in Ear 'Ere records - to find out that some of my favourite bands were coming to town. I saw the Shop Assistants, the Bodines, the Wedding Present, Bogshed, My Bloody Valentine and any other number of "indie" bands, alongside brasher names such as the Inca Babies, Ghostdance and Crazyhead.
This was definitely a time of innocence - and the number of "indie kids" you could count on two hands compared with almost any other sub-genre. Yet there was also something fully-formed about it. It might seem odd to say this now, but indie was impossibly cool. The indie look was very pre-hipster, it was non-sexual (but very sexy) quirky, cutesy, especially the girls. It was as much about the thrift store look as the music.And I have to say that it was a scene that not only celebrated itself, but that wasn't particularly easy to break into. There was a wilful confidence about these bands and their audiences - like a private members club. (Creation records started in this way: above a pub in London putting on nights for this cognosceti.) In retrospect, I think the scene was horribly middle-class, very southern, a bit art school - its no surprise that indie artists have gone on to be TV presenters or authors. Liking hip hop or house or garage rock was almost frowned upon; yet the genre itself was both narrow and derivative, pulling in Velvet Underground riffs or psychedelic sounds. Yet during those couple of years, there was nothing better than picking up a cheap 7" by one of the bands beginning "The..." The Smiths had made ordinariness hip even though they were from ordinary. A band like the Wedding Present could almost sell itself on being Smiths fans 2nd favourite band!
I don't think this kind of indie lasted for me more than a couple of summers. By the time of the Creation compilation "Doing it for the Kids" it was already a little too late; innocence was being hijacked by experience - whether it was the Pixies and Sonic Youth ripping things up, or the Stone Roses and (original C86ers) Primal Scream getting high. I remember going to see Prince on the Lovesexy tour, with my late friend Nick, and Hugh, a guy who worked the record fairs with him, but was also the singer in indie hopefuls Mighty Mighty. Seeing Prince and the Revolution come on a stage in a car attached to a robotic arm in the round in the middle of the NEC was about as far from indie as you could imagine.
It had never been a popular music, though odd 7" singles or 12" e.p.s. by bands like the Woodentops and the Weather Prophets became much loved classics, yet after this time it didn't so much die as retreat to its heartlands. The Sarah label reduced indie to its bare essentials, jangly guitar, and Francois Hardy style vocals, and catered very well for its niche. The naivety and innocence of those early sides was replicated a few years later through the more politicised Riot Grrrl scene - and of course, Oasis and Creation broke out of the indie ghetto in the mid 90s to become briefly the biggest thing in the country.
Five must-have indie records....
1. The Shop Assistants - The Shop Assistants (LP, the one truly sparkling album from the scene)
2. Move Me - The Woodentops (7", their finest moment, and proof you could dance to indie - their album "Giant" was also great, but almost too polished for indie)
3. Therese - The Bodines (7", indie was all about songs about girls, this is the best)
4. Almost Prayed - The Weather Prophets (12" e.p,, could have been contenders, but signed to a major and then flopped)
5. Primitive Painters - Felt (12", in a career of wonderful records, this was their most wonderful)
Indie music as "independently distributed" is there throughout punk rock, but spikey pop like the Stiff roster was still musically sophisticated and aiming for the charts. Indie's ambition were aimed at the indie charts, if that. Musically, the roots of C86 are there in the Postcard roster. Josef K, Orange Juice and Aztec Camera did "indie" better than anything that came after, and if that makes indie a Caledonian music then so be it - and Rough Trade acts like Scritti Politti were also important. Yet, thinking about it, back to that time, in the myriad of styles that were around in the early 80s, the two things I took from bands like this - which I probably didn't get from goth or New Romanticism or industrial - were their kinship with some of the melodic sixties music I loved and a sense of realism about their kitchen-sink lyrics. Being a poetic soul wasn't that easy in the early 80s, and though I might listen to Cabaret Voltaire and Bauhaus, I also had the name Tracey Thorn scribbled on my pencil case. ("Is she your girlfriend?" someone asked, "no, she's my favourite singer," I replied.) The music papers of that time were a little serious; on the one hand caught up in the idea that rock music was important, on the other hand trying to deal with a world of Altered Images and Haircut 100. No wonder I soon ditched the NME and Sounds for the always ironic Record Mirror.
Looking back on my favourite records of the year 1983's the year that matters to me - with my favourite songs of the years being indie 7" "Trees and Flowers" by Strawberry Switchblade, obscure Irish band Microdisney with "Pink Skinned Man" and This Mortal Coil's ethereal "Song to the Siren." That I was also listening to Xmal Deutschland and the Birthday Party is another side of the story.
The Smiths would turn up around this time as well, and I guess the Byrds-y guitar of Johnny Marr meant that we were now allowed to like the 60s again. As I'd been spinning "Forever Changes" and the best of the Lovin' Spoonful I was very receptive. Its easy to forget how much music had been moved to the dumper by the mid-80s, from the Rolling Stones to Nick Drake, only to be "rediscovered" a year or two later. By the time I went to college, I was obviously hoping to see regular bands, but on turning up at Lancaster University the two biggest gigs of that first term were the Sweet and Fairport Convention. I had to look elsewhere - at the flyers in Ear 'Ere records - to find out that some of my favourite bands were coming to town. I saw the Shop Assistants, the Bodines, the Wedding Present, Bogshed, My Bloody Valentine and any other number of "indie" bands, alongside brasher names such as the Inca Babies, Ghostdance and Crazyhead.
This was definitely a time of innocence - and the number of "indie kids" you could count on two hands compared with almost any other sub-genre. Yet there was also something fully-formed about it. It might seem odd to say this now, but indie was impossibly cool. The indie look was very pre-hipster, it was non-sexual (but very sexy) quirky, cutesy, especially the girls. It was as much about the thrift store look as the music.And I have to say that it was a scene that not only celebrated itself, but that wasn't particularly easy to break into. There was a wilful confidence about these bands and their audiences - like a private members club. (Creation records started in this way: above a pub in London putting on nights for this cognosceti.) In retrospect, I think the scene was horribly middle-class, very southern, a bit art school - its no surprise that indie artists have gone on to be TV presenters or authors. Liking hip hop or house or garage rock was almost frowned upon; yet the genre itself was both narrow and derivative, pulling in Velvet Underground riffs or psychedelic sounds. Yet during those couple of years, there was nothing better than picking up a cheap 7" by one of the bands beginning "The..." The Smiths had made ordinariness hip even though they were from ordinary. A band like the Wedding Present could almost sell itself on being Smiths fans 2nd favourite band!
I don't think this kind of indie lasted for me more than a couple of summers. By the time of the Creation compilation "Doing it for the Kids" it was already a little too late; innocence was being hijacked by experience - whether it was the Pixies and Sonic Youth ripping things up, or the Stone Roses and (original C86ers) Primal Scream getting high. I remember going to see Prince on the Lovesexy tour, with my late friend Nick, and Hugh, a guy who worked the record fairs with him, but was also the singer in indie hopefuls Mighty Mighty. Seeing Prince and the Revolution come on a stage in a car attached to a robotic arm in the round in the middle of the NEC was about as far from indie as you could imagine.
It had never been a popular music, though odd 7" singles or 12" e.p.s. by bands like the Woodentops and the Weather Prophets became much loved classics, yet after this time it didn't so much die as retreat to its heartlands. The Sarah label reduced indie to its bare essentials, jangly guitar, and Francois Hardy style vocals, and catered very well for its niche. The naivety and innocence of those early sides was replicated a few years later through the more politicised Riot Grrrl scene - and of course, Oasis and Creation broke out of the indie ghetto in the mid 90s to become briefly the biggest thing in the country.
Five must-have indie records....
1. The Shop Assistants - The Shop Assistants (LP, the one truly sparkling album from the scene)
2. Move Me - The Woodentops (7", their finest moment, and proof you could dance to indie - their album "Giant" was also great, but almost too polished for indie)
3. Therese - The Bodines (7", indie was all about songs about girls, this is the best)
4. Almost Prayed - The Weather Prophets (12" e.p,, could have been contenders, but signed to a major and then flopped)
5. Primitive Painters - Felt (12", in a career of wonderful records, this was their most wonderful)
Monday, June 17, 2013
Praxis and Poetry
I've always been interested in the idea of "praxis" - process and the reflection on process in relation to art. It seems to me that this is the one area that is often missing in creative writing education, which seems strange as understanding the philosophical underpinnings of art is, to me at least, a necessary component of the art - and one that is probably eminently teachable. A fine art education will give you this in spades of course, and its notable that poets from the more experimental end of the spectrum have often come through some such funnel - and may well end up back there.
As often happens when I'm thinking about a new blogpost, several things tend to come together at once; similar to when you first here of someone or something and then they seem to crop up time and again. Alot of the writers I now know are very engaged in process - whether its through initiating projects or collaboration. However, though there's a focus to being part of an anthology or a particular event, I'm more interested, inevitably, about how my own practice works. Though I create individual "units" of art; poems; stories, I've always felt my work is very connected within itself, especially with regard to its themes, and sometimes, its forms (which is not to say form and theme aren't in themselves very connected). Of course, we're not necessarily encouraged, outside of the academic or publicity context, to "talk" about our work. I was reminded of this reading Emily Berry's commentary on her work on the Peony Moon blog.I'll quote the first paragraph in full since it seems very applicable:
"Some people seem to have the language for speaking about their own work very fluently – I am still not sure I have learnt the language for talking about mine. It’s like trying to explain one mode of communication via another very different kind, like telling someone about a phone call through the medium of sculpture. Still, a sculpture about a phone call could be something interesting."
That last line struck a chord: in other words just because it might seem counter-intuitive to be using one medium to discuss another doesn't mean that in itself it isn't somewhat of interest. In contemporary art practice we are seeing a lot of blurring of roles between artist and curator, or artist and performer, or artist and audience. Some of this is about control: at what point of the art work does the originator want to control. This seems more intrigueing than the art-as-factory of a Koons or Hirst's spot paintings; it can be the artist as choirmaster or conductor (Spencer Tunick's use of people as material; Jeremy Dellar's "Procession" and "Battle of Orgreave"); but it can also lead to more participatory frameworks - for instance where a curated show tours, only to be added to at each venue or older practices, such as "mail art" where different artists collaborate in producing a limited edition run. Temporary art spaces, and even temporary art organisations, (such as the Lionel Dobie Project in Manchester, or the DIY Art School that is hosted there).
For the writer there is perhaps less obvious scope for creating a "sculpture about a phone call" or rather, the imperative for dabbling in different medium often comes from commercial rather than artistic imperatives. (Ben Elton writing the er..."libretto" to "We Will Rock You.") Yet, those of us steeped in modernism, see that this is a key part of practice - such as Edith Sitwell's collaboration with William Walton for "Facade". I guess that the energies involved in not just one art form, but the attendant expectations around it (the developing of a "career" as a poet or a novelist) have generally been detrimental to any overt thoughts of developed "praxis." Yes, we may read Eliot mostly for his poems, but certainly when I was at school, his plays were often studied, and then there's the "entertainment" that is "Cats." Inevitably with major figures, they can often seem to be doing more "minor" work when they dip away from what they are best known for. Both Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a play; Fitzgerald and Faulkner dabbled in Hollywood; artists such as Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood have directed successful films.
In the underground, it is artistic as much as financial imperative that sees one "switching codes" - for myself, its important that I have the opportunity to explore those themes which interest me most: its why I will occasionally collaborate on a project like Poems for Pussy Riot, as I do have things that I want to say about art, free speech, protest, and (probably as important to me) rock and roll. As an artist who writes politically, the balance here will be different than someone who is a "political artist." I'm defiantly not an activist, for a number of reasons, and many of them are entangled with my views on the role of (my) art - that I reserve the right to explored different political angles, that I might find more difficult if I was more obviously aligned to a cause or party.
As an artist, I guess my own equivalent statement to "a sculpture about a phone call" would be that I'm increasingly keen to defend the artist's right to be wrong. I'm not talking politics here so much as artistic practice. I guess if you're known for a certain type of work; its quite difficult to explore beyond that - whether its the formalist becoming more avant garde, or the controlled writer becoming looser. I'm interested in those past writers who've adopted (and adapted) within that context. (The sad death of Iain Banks, for instance, robbed us not just of a good man and writer, but a good example when it came to working across genres.) In this space a "bad work" by a writer can be as vital as a good one. Mistakes (and I don't really like the word) are enablers - "what if?" moments. And besides, the themes that I addressed in, say, my pseudonymous cartoon, Treeville, aren't that far removed from a poem like "A Colossal Machine" or a story like "The Ikea in Ashton Can Be Seen from Space"; all three are absurdist takes on modern life, and imaginative templates for our possible futures.
Of course, one thing you lack as an underground or unnoticed artist is a critical culture around your work - or even an explicit engagement with that work. Publication doesn't just provide legitimisation it also gives a historio-cultural framework to your work. Why, a future researcher might ask, did he abandon the experimental poems or the realist stories? Chances are that things aren't as linear as all that. I've always been struck that an autobiographical writer like William Burroughs appears to be most literally truthful at his most absurdist. The things we make up, in other words, are probably the things that appear most plausible. Part of what one does as a writer is truth, but part is also a construct. I like to think that a person can be more complex than a fictional character (or rather that our fictional characters should necessarily be complex if we want them to appear human) - and yet I'm well aware of the roles that people inevitably apply to us.
In talking about my writing, I'm not talking about my writing so much as what I'd like a conversation about my writing to be about. There's not so much of it out there that it tells a coherent or even truthful picture; the "unpublished" writings are often as real to me as the published ones. The new work as vital as the old etc. etc. If there is a reason to talk through what I'm doing then I think for me its more about what I'm trying to do with my work. Sometimes that's about the themes and content of the work but other times about the style and the form. There was a point around the millennium where, perhaps through my increased interest in poetry, or because of the amount of concentration I was putting into my writing, I think I fell for a certain type of fictional aestheticism that probably didn't do me too good (at least not in terms of getting published) - it came, I think from reading American writing but with my English accent - I certainly couldn't put on the voice of a Roth or a Bellow or a DeLillo, but I could extract some of their aesthetic juice and apply it to my own work. Same goes, I think, with poetry. I'll never be able to find much to attract me in the Celtic fringes, as I've a very different (very English?) voice in my head; so I've had to look elsewhere than much mainstream British poetry for models. Recently, that's included an unusual one, the formalism of Thom Gunn, but I've had time for Macniece, for Lowell, for Ashbery in the not so distant past. I'm well aware that sometimes these models won't work for me: but perhaps its about that conversation - that extracting of what juice I can from these vivid blooms.
I'm happier talking about art at this level - and this distance - than "what is this poem about" - though maybe that's because I rarely get asked (other than "is it true?" or "who is it about?") We each of us, I think, need to adopt or develop a language for understanding our own work or at least our own practice. I guess some writers would see this as counter-intuitive, as breaking the mystery: but the very fact that I think there is a mystery makes me want to understand it more. Like the onset of a storm, though we can not tell the future, its useful to know whether or not the wind is blowing in our direction, and from where.
As often happens when I'm thinking about a new blogpost, several things tend to come together at once; similar to when you first here of someone or something and then they seem to crop up time and again. Alot of the writers I now know are very engaged in process - whether its through initiating projects or collaboration. However, though there's a focus to being part of an anthology or a particular event, I'm more interested, inevitably, about how my own practice works. Though I create individual "units" of art; poems; stories, I've always felt my work is very connected within itself, especially with regard to its themes, and sometimes, its forms (which is not to say form and theme aren't in themselves very connected). Of course, we're not necessarily encouraged, outside of the academic or publicity context, to "talk" about our work. I was reminded of this reading Emily Berry's commentary on her work on the Peony Moon blog.I'll quote the first paragraph in full since it seems very applicable:
"Some people seem to have the language for speaking about their own work very fluently – I am still not sure I have learnt the language for talking about mine. It’s like trying to explain one mode of communication via another very different kind, like telling someone about a phone call through the medium of sculpture. Still, a sculpture about a phone call could be something interesting."
That last line struck a chord: in other words just because it might seem counter-intuitive to be using one medium to discuss another doesn't mean that in itself it isn't somewhat of interest. In contemporary art practice we are seeing a lot of blurring of roles between artist and curator, or artist and performer, or artist and audience. Some of this is about control: at what point of the art work does the originator want to control. This seems more intrigueing than the art-as-factory of a Koons or Hirst's spot paintings; it can be the artist as choirmaster or conductor (Spencer Tunick's use of people as material; Jeremy Dellar's "Procession" and "Battle of Orgreave"); but it can also lead to more participatory frameworks - for instance where a curated show tours, only to be added to at each venue or older practices, such as "mail art" where different artists collaborate in producing a limited edition run. Temporary art spaces, and even temporary art organisations, (such as the Lionel Dobie Project in Manchester, or the DIY Art School that is hosted there).
For the writer there is perhaps less obvious scope for creating a "sculpture about a phone call" or rather, the imperative for dabbling in different medium often comes from commercial rather than artistic imperatives. (Ben Elton writing the er..."libretto" to "We Will Rock You.") Yet, those of us steeped in modernism, see that this is a key part of practice - such as Edith Sitwell's collaboration with William Walton for "Facade". I guess that the energies involved in not just one art form, but the attendant expectations around it (the developing of a "career" as a poet or a novelist) have generally been detrimental to any overt thoughts of developed "praxis." Yes, we may read Eliot mostly for his poems, but certainly when I was at school, his plays were often studied, and then there's the "entertainment" that is "Cats." Inevitably with major figures, they can often seem to be doing more "minor" work when they dip away from what they are best known for. Both Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a play; Fitzgerald and Faulkner dabbled in Hollywood; artists such as Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood have directed successful films.
In the underground, it is artistic as much as financial imperative that sees one "switching codes" - for myself, its important that I have the opportunity to explore those themes which interest me most: its why I will occasionally collaborate on a project like Poems for Pussy Riot, as I do have things that I want to say about art, free speech, protest, and (probably as important to me) rock and roll. As an artist who writes politically, the balance here will be different than someone who is a "political artist." I'm defiantly not an activist, for a number of reasons, and many of them are entangled with my views on the role of (my) art - that I reserve the right to explored different political angles, that I might find more difficult if I was more obviously aligned to a cause or party.
As an artist, I guess my own equivalent statement to "a sculpture about a phone call" would be that I'm increasingly keen to defend the artist's right to be wrong. I'm not talking politics here so much as artistic practice. I guess if you're known for a certain type of work; its quite difficult to explore beyond that - whether its the formalist becoming more avant garde, or the controlled writer becoming looser. I'm interested in those past writers who've adopted (and adapted) within that context. (The sad death of Iain Banks, for instance, robbed us not just of a good man and writer, but a good example when it came to working across genres.) In this space a "bad work" by a writer can be as vital as a good one. Mistakes (and I don't really like the word) are enablers - "what if?" moments. And besides, the themes that I addressed in, say, my pseudonymous cartoon, Treeville, aren't that far removed from a poem like "A Colossal Machine" or a story like "The Ikea in Ashton Can Be Seen from Space"; all three are absurdist takes on modern life, and imaginative templates for our possible futures.
Of course, one thing you lack as an underground or unnoticed artist is a critical culture around your work - or even an explicit engagement with that work. Publication doesn't just provide legitimisation it also gives a historio-cultural framework to your work. Why, a future researcher might ask, did he abandon the experimental poems or the realist stories? Chances are that things aren't as linear as all that. I've always been struck that an autobiographical writer like William Burroughs appears to be most literally truthful at his most absurdist. The things we make up, in other words, are probably the things that appear most plausible. Part of what one does as a writer is truth, but part is also a construct. I like to think that a person can be more complex than a fictional character (or rather that our fictional characters should necessarily be complex if we want them to appear human) - and yet I'm well aware of the roles that people inevitably apply to us.
In talking about my writing, I'm not talking about my writing so much as what I'd like a conversation about my writing to be about. There's not so much of it out there that it tells a coherent or even truthful picture; the "unpublished" writings are often as real to me as the published ones. The new work as vital as the old etc. etc. If there is a reason to talk through what I'm doing then I think for me its more about what I'm trying to do with my work. Sometimes that's about the themes and content of the work but other times about the style and the form. There was a point around the millennium where, perhaps through my increased interest in poetry, or because of the amount of concentration I was putting into my writing, I think I fell for a certain type of fictional aestheticism that probably didn't do me too good (at least not in terms of getting published) - it came, I think from reading American writing but with my English accent - I certainly couldn't put on the voice of a Roth or a Bellow or a DeLillo, but I could extract some of their aesthetic juice and apply it to my own work. Same goes, I think, with poetry. I'll never be able to find much to attract me in the Celtic fringes, as I've a very different (very English?) voice in my head; so I've had to look elsewhere than much mainstream British poetry for models. Recently, that's included an unusual one, the formalism of Thom Gunn, but I've had time for Macniece, for Lowell, for Ashbery in the not so distant past. I'm well aware that sometimes these models won't work for me: but perhaps its about that conversation - that extracting of what juice I can from these vivid blooms.
I'm happier talking about art at this level - and this distance - than "what is this poem about" - though maybe that's because I rarely get asked (other than "is it true?" or "who is it about?") We each of us, I think, need to adopt or develop a language for understanding our own work or at least our own practice. I guess some writers would see this as counter-intuitive, as breaking the mystery: but the very fact that I think there is a mystery makes me want to understand it more. Like the onset of a storm, though we can not tell the future, its useful to know whether or not the wind is blowing in our direction, and from where.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Subcultural Capital
We're all aware of the idea of "cultural capital" - where their is value placed on the cultural activities of a place or person. But what about "subcultural capital"? In other words, does the same equation exist for underground or subversive or even anti- art practice? Where the work and the practitioners are deliberately or accidentally excluded or ignored - is there the same "value"? Many activities, cultural and otherwise are somewhat hermetic; they exist within the bubble of their practitioners - primarily by and for those who are producing the work. Sometimes it might seem that the cultural capital of subcultures is negligible or even non-existent.
I think there are three different kinds of subcultures that I'm thinking of here. Firstly are those activities and institutions that are reactionary in their nature. There can be some snobbishness against certain kinds of "art" and "making". From knitting circles, to networks of cross-stitch fans, to classic car enthusiasts, to fan clubs (including fan fiction) these subcultures are often vibrant, popular, but hermetic. They speak only to themselves: are uninterested in audience; (though perhaps more interested in "market" for their goods). I can't quite dismiss this sort of subculture. Surely a local choir might be applauded for the opportunity it gives people to sing, or the inventiveness of their repetoire, or even the collaborative possibilities with other "professional" musicians. Within this context someone might realise they have a talent that hasn't been explored; or improve technique and skills. Yet there is also a problem of ambition. I have known hermetic creative writing groups, musical groups, art and photography groups where though they may publish, exhibit and perform, the scope of their work can actually be negative for an artist who joins but whose ambitions are slightly outside of the group's more reactionary scope.
The second subculture I'm thinking of may be anything but reactionary, but be self-reverential: about production, more than anything else. It can be the artist moving from one commissioned project to another; the writer endlessly being published in the same small press magazines; the musician spending all their energies on ploughing their narrow furrow without ever expanding it. This kind of grass roots activity has value for sure, but can it exist outside of a certain monomaniacal commitment? Does it self-define in terms of its ambition? In some ways, the micro industries of cult figures like Billy Childish or Momus might be seen in this way. There's an obstinacy here that is admirable whether or not you like the art or not. In a world that tends to let people's creativity wither, there's something to be said about the artist who maintains their production in spite of indifference - and as Childish and Momus show there are small audiences for this. In many ways, the idea of an artist's own capital, at whatever level, is related to this. There are poets published by Faber and others whose "capital" is merely that they produce and keep producing - they may often exist in a critical vacuum, or one that is purely kept going by acolytes, friends of vested interests. And, full disclosure, isn't this my own practice? And constant productivity by an artist is no different if you're Heaney or Duffy when you come to think of it - maybe the opportunities are more that's all; yet artistic opportunities are different than economic and cultural capital opportunities. The obsessive artist could be seen as a tragic figure, but I prefer to appreciate the artistic purity - i.e. if you've next to no cultural capital, then whatever art you produce is self-sustaining. It doesn't of course, make it good, but the difference between those who have got cultural capital is not the quality so much as the acceptance.
The third and most interesting subculture is the most interesting - the creation or emergency of some kind of "scene." I was thinking about this reading Dan Holloway's piece in the Guardian on Alt Lit and the mainstreaming via the new novel by Tao Lin. This self-defining of something called "Alt Lit" and the uncertainty about the term, as well as the annointing of American models seems a very contemporary - or networked - view on both scene building and subcultures. The literary subculture is almost always amongst friends, or co-existent writers: say in New York, London or Paris. What about a badging against which writers can self-define? Holloway talks of Alt Lit practitioners as mostly writing poetry - yet Lin and others are primarily prose writers. Certainly in the UK there's been little sign of or appetite for an experimental prose literature. Rather, avant garde poets and fellow travellers tend to work in hybrid forms. The comments after Holloway's piece are interesting, and amusing - as everyone's looking for a definition of "alt lit" yet surely the name gives it away a bit. Before social media there were newsgroups and listserves - acting as like-minded people networks. The alt. set of news feeds was a way of defining a wide range of subcultural interests. What pieces like this are trying to do I think is to provide the subculture with some capital. Tao Lin's writing is in its own tradition of course, of discursive, stream-of-conscious, non-linear writing. We're not a million miles from the bratpack writing of Brett Easton Ellis, or Mark Leyner's 1995 novel "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist." Hardcovers - or at least book length publication - give an impetus here; and I think subcultural capital has to be essential disruptive, anarchic even.
There's also something essentially fly-by-night about the kind of subcultural scene that we're seeing since the millennium. By the time its named, its over. And in the US where nothing apparently exists unless it has economic value, I can see that just as the ironic-sentimentalists at McSweeney's provided a suitable hipster room for the literary establishment a decade ago; there's a belief in commoditisation in America which insists that all subcultures have got capital - that they eventually crossover. I'm reminded that the first time I heard of "flarf", the post-millenial experimental poetry meme, it was in the most august of places, a special edition of "Poetry." Flarf's built in contradictions (where are the good writers going to come from in a literature that is all about "found" texts?) seem to burst at this point. Old avant gardeists were puzzled at the media storm; writers outside the hermetic scene, such as myself, were wondering where a flarf-type poem such as my "Title Poem of the Collection" which was published in the mainstream journal "The Rialto" as long ago as 2000 fitted into this.
So, Alt Lit or not, I kind of think that cultural capital and subcultural capital are anathemic to each other. For a genuine subcultural capital is in the live nights, the zines, the online debates and discussions that are by their very nature happening on the edge - even to the extent of being outside the countercultural online spaces such as 3AM Magazine or Barcelona Review or in the Prague-based print magazine Vlak. There's also a worry to what extent the academy is providing the "home" for more art-practice based writing; universities being just another kind of hermeticism at times. For subcultural capital is generated for its own purposes often - the writers that hovered online around 3AM and Lee Rourke's Scarecrow magazine a few years ago, have moved up or offstage. Self styled "New Puritans" or "Offbeat Generation" or "Alt Lit" writers provide a bit of a wind in the cultural sails. The citadel remains unbreached however. For subcultural capital isn't quite as clearcut a transference or crossover. It remains in fanzines, blogged, temporary or temporal, and shifts with the moment. If you've heard about it, chances are its over already, but there's something new, something next. Press record. Here's the scene.
I think there are three different kinds of subcultures that I'm thinking of here. Firstly are those activities and institutions that are reactionary in their nature. There can be some snobbishness against certain kinds of "art" and "making". From knitting circles, to networks of cross-stitch fans, to classic car enthusiasts, to fan clubs (including fan fiction) these subcultures are often vibrant, popular, but hermetic. They speak only to themselves: are uninterested in audience; (though perhaps more interested in "market" for their goods). I can't quite dismiss this sort of subculture. Surely a local choir might be applauded for the opportunity it gives people to sing, or the inventiveness of their repetoire, or even the collaborative possibilities with other "professional" musicians. Within this context someone might realise they have a talent that hasn't been explored; or improve technique and skills. Yet there is also a problem of ambition. I have known hermetic creative writing groups, musical groups, art and photography groups where though they may publish, exhibit and perform, the scope of their work can actually be negative for an artist who joins but whose ambitions are slightly outside of the group's more reactionary scope.
The second subculture I'm thinking of may be anything but reactionary, but be self-reverential: about production, more than anything else. It can be the artist moving from one commissioned project to another; the writer endlessly being published in the same small press magazines; the musician spending all their energies on ploughing their narrow furrow without ever expanding it. This kind of grass roots activity has value for sure, but can it exist outside of a certain monomaniacal commitment? Does it self-define in terms of its ambition? In some ways, the micro industries of cult figures like Billy Childish or Momus might be seen in this way. There's an obstinacy here that is admirable whether or not you like the art or not. In a world that tends to let people's creativity wither, there's something to be said about the artist who maintains their production in spite of indifference - and as Childish and Momus show there are small audiences for this. In many ways, the idea of an artist's own capital, at whatever level, is related to this. There are poets published by Faber and others whose "capital" is merely that they produce and keep producing - they may often exist in a critical vacuum, or one that is purely kept going by acolytes, friends of vested interests. And, full disclosure, isn't this my own practice? And constant productivity by an artist is no different if you're Heaney or Duffy when you come to think of it - maybe the opportunities are more that's all; yet artistic opportunities are different than economic and cultural capital opportunities. The obsessive artist could be seen as a tragic figure, but I prefer to appreciate the artistic purity - i.e. if you've next to no cultural capital, then whatever art you produce is self-sustaining. It doesn't of course, make it good, but the difference between those who have got cultural capital is not the quality so much as the acceptance.
The third and most interesting subculture is the most interesting - the creation or emergency of some kind of "scene." I was thinking about this reading Dan Holloway's piece in the Guardian on Alt Lit and the mainstreaming via the new novel by Tao Lin. This self-defining of something called "Alt Lit" and the uncertainty about the term, as well as the annointing of American models seems a very contemporary - or networked - view on both scene building and subcultures. The literary subculture is almost always amongst friends, or co-existent writers: say in New York, London or Paris. What about a badging against which writers can self-define? Holloway talks of Alt Lit practitioners as mostly writing poetry - yet Lin and others are primarily prose writers. Certainly in the UK there's been little sign of or appetite for an experimental prose literature. Rather, avant garde poets and fellow travellers tend to work in hybrid forms. The comments after Holloway's piece are interesting, and amusing - as everyone's looking for a definition of "alt lit" yet surely the name gives it away a bit. Before social media there were newsgroups and listserves - acting as like-minded people networks. The alt. set of news feeds was a way of defining a wide range of subcultural interests. What pieces like this are trying to do I think is to provide the subculture with some capital. Tao Lin's writing is in its own tradition of course, of discursive, stream-of-conscious, non-linear writing. We're not a million miles from the bratpack writing of Brett Easton Ellis, or Mark Leyner's 1995 novel "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist." Hardcovers - or at least book length publication - give an impetus here; and I think subcultural capital has to be essential disruptive, anarchic even.
There's also something essentially fly-by-night about the kind of subcultural scene that we're seeing since the millennium. By the time its named, its over. And in the US where nothing apparently exists unless it has economic value, I can see that just as the ironic-sentimentalists at McSweeney's provided a suitable hipster room for the literary establishment a decade ago; there's a belief in commoditisation in America which insists that all subcultures have got capital - that they eventually crossover. I'm reminded that the first time I heard of "flarf", the post-millenial experimental poetry meme, it was in the most august of places, a special edition of "Poetry." Flarf's built in contradictions (where are the good writers going to come from in a literature that is all about "found" texts?) seem to burst at this point. Old avant gardeists were puzzled at the media storm; writers outside the hermetic scene, such as myself, were wondering where a flarf-type poem such as my "Title Poem of the Collection" which was published in the mainstream journal "The Rialto" as long ago as 2000 fitted into this.
So, Alt Lit or not, I kind of think that cultural capital and subcultural capital are anathemic to each other. For a genuine subcultural capital is in the live nights, the zines, the online debates and discussions that are by their very nature happening on the edge - even to the extent of being outside the countercultural online spaces such as 3AM Magazine or Barcelona Review or in the Prague-based print magazine Vlak. There's also a worry to what extent the academy is providing the "home" for more art-practice based writing; universities being just another kind of hermeticism at times. For subcultural capital is generated for its own purposes often - the writers that hovered online around 3AM and Lee Rourke's Scarecrow magazine a few years ago, have moved up or offstage. Self styled "New Puritans" or "Offbeat Generation" or "Alt Lit" writers provide a bit of a wind in the cultural sails. The citadel remains unbreached however. For subcultural capital isn't quite as clearcut a transference or crossover. It remains in fanzines, blogged, temporary or temporal, and shifts with the moment. If you've heard about it, chances are its over already, but there's something new, something next. Press record. Here's the scene.
Saturday, June 01, 2013
Ripples on a smooth sea, or storm in a teacup?
The news that my publisher, Salt, was stopping publishing single collections following a drop-off in sales was alarming. Not only was Salt best known for its poetry, but having gone through a few choppy waters, had appointed a renowned poetry editor, Roddy Lumsden, had had a successful series of anthologies, and was finally seeing commerical success through its fiction arm, and the Booker shortlisted "The Lighthouse." In the way of things, the Guardian, who has conspicuously not reviewed most of Salt's single collections over the years, wrote it up as a news story primarily about the market for poetry. As a counter balance, Billy Mills made the counter-case that one publisher's decision isn't the last rites for poetry, and that poetry is actually thriving.
Serious as I am about my writing, I'm an amatuer writer in one sense: I've never got paid for it - and so I do look on these things with differing perspectives; as a writer, (and as someone published by Salt and in two of the award-winning anthologies mentioned by Billy Mills I guess I can declare an interest), and as a reader. When I hear of a falling off of sales - I wonder where from? I certainly buy more poetry now than I did five, ten, fifteen years ago. Many of these books haven't even got an ISBN. There's certainly more fish in the pool - so I don't think anyone will be making a living out of my largesse; still with books, magazines and readings, I contribute quite a few quid to the local (and wider) literary scenes. Where were these readers who have left off buying poetry? Poets are always poor - and, though much is talked about "poetry on the internet", you'll still be hard-pressed to find much work by published poets on there. I've been saying for years that this is stupid - that making poetry books available to download might actually increase sales rather than decrease them. The devil, I suspect, is in the detail.
Yet Salt did one thing very well; their books were lovely things; better even than Fabers in some ways; and with a much more contemporary look than Bloodaxe for instance. Only Carcanet look quite so well-formed on my shelves. I've bought Armitage,Berry and Riviere from Faber, Donahaye, Kennard, McCabe, Goldsworthy, Croggan and McCullough from Salt, Ivory, Williams and Wright from Bloodaxe and Ashbery, Murray, Welton and Letford from Carcanet in the last couple of years. A good spread, I think, though a mix of the well-seasoned favourites and the bright and bursting newcomers. All lists have their bigger names and more stable favourites, and I guess whoever you are, you need to nurture those if you are going to be able to take risks on the new. I've still no idea why Salt has done so badly in Poetry Book Society Recommendations or Guardian reviews, but Armitage aside I'm not sure when I last bought a PBS recommendation.
Bookshops are still important for picking up books - and you'll rarely find contemporary poetry from any of our publishers in these bookshops. The market may well have changed irreversibly; yet its hard to know really. I do think, same as anything else, a poetry book (or a poet) needs to have had some reviews, to have good word of mouth, to have some contemporary relevance and to be available: and though there are good books out there - not so many get all of these: and where one does (William Letford's "Bevel" for instance), its a tiny splash. In the small world of poetry publishing, there seems an unusually close relationship between press and poet - certainly no big transfer fees between them (though I notice the new Sophie Hannah revised Selected is from Penguin, not Carcanet.) Yet as the above list proves: I'm not one to choose one press above another as a reader. (Though I don't seem to have much of a liking for Cape or Picador's mainstream lists.)
So we get a bit of a storm in a teacup that makes me think that if I had a large fortune, maybe now would be the time to turn into a small one, by becoming a poetry publisher. I can think of half a dozen Salt poets I'd pick up immediately, and perhaps another half dozen from the Modern Voices series that I'd also find time for. I'm sure some enterprising individual is probably doing the same thing right now. Yes, there is no money in poetry, but as someone else said, there is no poetry in money either.
It may all turn out to be ripples on a smooth sea - Salt may have just been unlucky, publishing widely at a time of industry upheaval, gave it a good strong list, but also without the history to back it up, and, with a back catalogue of 400 or so collections nothing stops them coming back into the market in a few years if they felt it was worth doing so. Poetry as I know it is a cottage industry. Yet culturally its more important than a few jars of home made marmalade. I think that "audience" has long been neglected - both by publishers and bookshops who've not known what to do with their poetry (and that includes long neglect of electronic dissemination) and by the arts establishment. Was it Saatchi's touting of the YBAs or the Turner Prize and Tate Modern that made contemporary art both successful and edgy? I'm not sure; but it was certainly not by "dumbing down" and introducing a National Art Day where we all paint pictures of village greens; which is pretty much where the National Poetry Day has found itself. I've always felt the audience - if there is one - for poetry needs to come from left field; and certainly I've seen large audiences for poetry in Manchester on a regular basis than for Booker listed novelists. The difference is that the poetry reading is the art, whilst the book launch is merely a promotional tour to support it.
Not all of those in the room will have bought a poetry book: but all will have experienced the scene. A little ripple here and there doesn't stop us from seeing the calm straits of the blue ocean: if the horizon is only in our imagination, and really this is no bigger than a duckpond, then I don't much mind: perhaps we're okay in our skiffs, and don't need an ocean liner.
Serious as I am about my writing, I'm an amatuer writer in one sense: I've never got paid for it - and so I do look on these things with differing perspectives; as a writer, (and as someone published by Salt and in two of the award-winning anthologies mentioned by Billy Mills I guess I can declare an interest), and as a reader. When I hear of a falling off of sales - I wonder where from? I certainly buy more poetry now than I did five, ten, fifteen years ago. Many of these books haven't even got an ISBN. There's certainly more fish in the pool - so I don't think anyone will be making a living out of my largesse; still with books, magazines and readings, I contribute quite a few quid to the local (and wider) literary scenes. Where were these readers who have left off buying poetry? Poets are always poor - and, though much is talked about "poetry on the internet", you'll still be hard-pressed to find much work by published poets on there. I've been saying for years that this is stupid - that making poetry books available to download might actually increase sales rather than decrease them. The devil, I suspect, is in the detail.
Yet Salt did one thing very well; their books were lovely things; better even than Fabers in some ways; and with a much more contemporary look than Bloodaxe for instance. Only Carcanet look quite so well-formed on my shelves. I've bought Armitage,Berry and Riviere from Faber, Donahaye, Kennard, McCabe, Goldsworthy, Croggan and McCullough from Salt, Ivory, Williams and Wright from Bloodaxe and Ashbery, Murray, Welton and Letford from Carcanet in the last couple of years. A good spread, I think, though a mix of the well-seasoned favourites and the bright and bursting newcomers. All lists have their bigger names and more stable favourites, and I guess whoever you are, you need to nurture those if you are going to be able to take risks on the new. I've still no idea why Salt has done so badly in Poetry Book Society Recommendations or Guardian reviews, but Armitage aside I'm not sure when I last bought a PBS recommendation.
Bookshops are still important for picking up books - and you'll rarely find contemporary poetry from any of our publishers in these bookshops. The market may well have changed irreversibly; yet its hard to know really. I do think, same as anything else, a poetry book (or a poet) needs to have had some reviews, to have good word of mouth, to have some contemporary relevance and to be available: and though there are good books out there - not so many get all of these: and where one does (William Letford's "Bevel" for instance), its a tiny splash. In the small world of poetry publishing, there seems an unusually close relationship between press and poet - certainly no big transfer fees between them (though I notice the new Sophie Hannah revised Selected is from Penguin, not Carcanet.) Yet as the above list proves: I'm not one to choose one press above another as a reader. (Though I don't seem to have much of a liking for Cape or Picador's mainstream lists.)
So we get a bit of a storm in a teacup that makes me think that if I had a large fortune, maybe now would be the time to turn into a small one, by becoming a poetry publisher. I can think of half a dozen Salt poets I'd pick up immediately, and perhaps another half dozen from the Modern Voices series that I'd also find time for. I'm sure some enterprising individual is probably doing the same thing right now. Yes, there is no money in poetry, but as someone else said, there is no poetry in money either.
It may all turn out to be ripples on a smooth sea - Salt may have just been unlucky, publishing widely at a time of industry upheaval, gave it a good strong list, but also without the history to back it up, and, with a back catalogue of 400 or so collections nothing stops them coming back into the market in a few years if they felt it was worth doing so. Poetry as I know it is a cottage industry. Yet culturally its more important than a few jars of home made marmalade. I think that "audience" has long been neglected - both by publishers and bookshops who've not known what to do with their poetry (and that includes long neglect of electronic dissemination) and by the arts establishment. Was it Saatchi's touting of the YBAs or the Turner Prize and Tate Modern that made contemporary art both successful and edgy? I'm not sure; but it was certainly not by "dumbing down" and introducing a National Art Day where we all paint pictures of village greens; which is pretty much where the National Poetry Day has found itself. I've always felt the audience - if there is one - for poetry needs to come from left field; and certainly I've seen large audiences for poetry in Manchester on a regular basis than for Booker listed novelists. The difference is that the poetry reading is the art, whilst the book launch is merely a promotional tour to support it.
Not all of those in the room will have bought a poetry book: but all will have experienced the scene. A little ripple here and there doesn't stop us from seeing the calm straits of the blue ocean: if the horizon is only in our imagination, and really this is no bigger than a duckpond, then I don't much mind: perhaps we're okay in our skiffs, and don't need an ocean liner.
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
In Deborah Levy's Booker shortlisted "Swimming Home" nothing is quite as it seems on the surface. The poet Joe Jacobs ("JHJ") is in a villa near Nice with his wife and daughter and a couple of their friends. The sleepy village is one of bored intrigue, where a number of people have ended up drifting - the villas and cottages owned by an absentee landlady who apparently earned her money through high class prostitution. In some ways, this tableaux is one of the bored, classic tropes of the middle class English novel. It "Hotel du Lac" or "A Year in Provence" or "The Pregnant Widow" or "The Ebony Tower" or any number of Iris Murdochs. A retired doctor looks on curiously at the family in the neighbouring villa, and a German hippy acts as a reluctant concierge, but would rather smoke dope than do the odd jobs he's paid for.
Joe's wife Isabel is a war correspondant, and therefore they've reversed the usual patterns of family. He has stayed at home and looked after Nina, his fourteen year old daughter, whilst she has been away. They are, as always in the bourgeois novel, more than comfortably off. The setting - in a not-so-distant 1994 gives the story distance, if not quite enough; for despite Levy being one of our more interesting contemporary stylists, the novel is defiantly old-fashioned in many ways. There are modernist echoes, of course, back to "Tender is the Night" or "The Good Soldier" where the ennui of the hot summer abroad seems to sap the characters nerve, and slowly strip them of the pretence in which they live their lives.
Yet, "Swimming Home" is very comfortably contemporary as well - in that the modern novel revels in surfaces uncovered, and secrets to be hidden and then revealed at the author's own time. Joe and Isabel's friends, the corpulent Mitchell and his wife Laura, are escaping their own disaster - their shop is going bankrupt - whilst for the poet and his wife, the tenuous tie of their marriage, almost always at risk from his affairs and her absences, is stretched taut ready for breaking. Into this walks disaster in the shape of Kitty Finch, a beautiful but painfully thin redhead, who is first seen naked in the pool, her body easily mistaken for a corpse. Finch has come over there for a purpose: to meet Joe, whose poetry she has found empathy in. Against all good sense, Isabelle carelessly invites her to stay, "buying" the clear lie of her story that she got the wrong dates for coming to the villa.
Rarely wearing any clothes, Kitty is a obviously a dangerous interloper into this fragile family tableau. The sensible 14-year old, who has done without a mother for so much of her life, is at first intrigued by this big sister, particular as she finally has first period.
So is this a coming of age novel? A family breakdown story? Or a tale of mental illness? A bit of all three it turns out. Kitty - known as "Kitty Ket" to the German who loves her - has been there before. A "botanist" and "poet" she has come to the apartment with a single poem in an envelope, entitled "Swimming Home" which she wants Joe to read. On such thin grounds is this novel of surfaces built, and part of her success, I think, is in keeping this fragile edifice upright. She does this through her writing which is careful, calibrated, and as shimmering as the French heat.
Yet this small group of people are thrown together not so much by circumstance as by wilfulness. This is the unfortunate dinner parties of the people-loving Divers in "Tender is the Night" but here it feels forced. Mitchell is a boorish Abe North type, drinking and eating too much, and not much liking (or at least resenting) his richer friends. JHJ is a poet like none that really exist, closer to the artist in Fowles' "The Ebony Tower" than any real writer; somehow living off his royalties. His own past is of the changeling. Born before the war he is a Polish Jew, whose own past and identity are pretty unknown to him. The novel starts with him in a car with Kitty, so the obviousness of their having an affair is flagged from the start, but when she takes her hands off the wheel, where will this riskiness take them? That in some ways is the novel's "tease." This group of people though don't really garner much of our sympathy. Its a short novel, and could easily have been called "dreadful people." Not a single character comes across as deserving our sympathy. They are selfish, and self-centred, and pulling those around them into their own self-absorbtion.
In some ways, the novels strength is this clinical characterisation. Everyone's actions, however well meaning are freighted with consequence. Isabel letting Kitty stay for instance (and why is it that Isabelle has the casting vote?) - is this because she really wants Kitty to have an affair with her husband? The retired doctor Sheridan is an accomplice in the melodrama from having called the paramedics to a crazed, naked Kitty Finch the previous summer. Sheridan is scared at what Kitty will then do as revenge. Yet what doctor wouldn't have take that decision? Claude the Mick-Jagger lookalike who runs the local bar is leching after the pre-pubescent Nina; whilst Jurgen is the classic unreliable servant, doing favours only where he feels it can give him some kind of an edge.
Into this appalling group, the damaged Kitty seems to swoop in to somehow be both angel and devil. Its not that she captivates the group so much - she's too obviously mentally estranged and self-obsessed for that - more that she provides some kind of necessary grit in the unsaid seething politeness of this middle class cliche. Her own background is hardly mentioned - other than her time in hospital - but she swims in, literally, and everyone either falls in love with her, loathes her, or thinks she can be useful to them. We don't see the poem at the heart of things: and its a thin thing to hold things together. At one point the list of reasons that Joe Jacobs has come up with not to read a single poem becomes almost comical. I think the novel's small power is based upon its accumulation of little things: Nina's period; the growing tab that Mitchell has built up at the restaurant; Kitty's nakedness, Isabel's disappearance into town. They are staging their own drama (a melodrama in many ways), playing some kind of multi-dimensional chess game, the ending of which could go either way, but also feels inevitable.
This sort of fatalism is what drives the novel more than the characters - though the accumulation of detail, in small telling scenes is what Levy does best. There is not a chapter that is wasted. In many ways its a long short story. Apparently her first novel for 15 years, it doesn't feel like a book that was dying to be written. Its setting and characters are too familiar. There's little to make you think this is a parody of the bourgeois novel, instead it feels like it is the bourgeois novel exactly, albeit with more than a frisson of existentialism. Kitty is the heart of the book, but she's a distant heart as well, and all too familiar - the broken girl, the beautiful but mentally unstable woman. She's there in Nicola Barker's "Clear" and Lee Rourke's "The Canal" and also in the TV series Luther; a brilliant, seductive, but damaged waif, almost a signifier for contemporary neuroses. As we reach the denoument - as, if you like, the novel's fatalism reaches its point of closure - I wondered again about its mid-90s setting. Its just pre-internet which helps (Jacobs having a fax machine in the villa seems a clumsy detail, for instance) but the timing seems more to do with how Jacobs is aged. It has to be set in the 1994 to enable Joe Jacobs to have been a Polish Jewish evacuee who never saw his parents after the war; yet this ghostly past is so lightly sketched I'm not sure it has any greater reality to it. Levy's interest is in the psychological deadness of her damaged characters, and that's inevitably focussed on their vulnerable present, rather than the demons of their past.
Outside of the tableaux the characters feel they don't exist - and that anti-realism just about gives the novel an intrigue that takes it away from its slightly characterless origins. Its symbols might be slight, but they are not without some intellectual weight.
Joe's wife Isabel is a war correspondant, and therefore they've reversed the usual patterns of family. He has stayed at home and looked after Nina, his fourteen year old daughter, whilst she has been away. They are, as always in the bourgeois novel, more than comfortably off. The setting - in a not-so-distant 1994 gives the story distance, if not quite enough; for despite Levy being one of our more interesting contemporary stylists, the novel is defiantly old-fashioned in many ways. There are modernist echoes, of course, back to "Tender is the Night" or "The Good Soldier" where the ennui of the hot summer abroad seems to sap the characters nerve, and slowly strip them of the pretence in which they live their lives.
Yet, "Swimming Home" is very comfortably contemporary as well - in that the modern novel revels in surfaces uncovered, and secrets to be hidden and then revealed at the author's own time. Joe and Isabel's friends, the corpulent Mitchell and his wife Laura, are escaping their own disaster - their shop is going bankrupt - whilst for the poet and his wife, the tenuous tie of their marriage, almost always at risk from his affairs and her absences, is stretched taut ready for breaking. Into this walks disaster in the shape of Kitty Finch, a beautiful but painfully thin redhead, who is first seen naked in the pool, her body easily mistaken for a corpse. Finch has come over there for a purpose: to meet Joe, whose poetry she has found empathy in. Against all good sense, Isabelle carelessly invites her to stay, "buying" the clear lie of her story that she got the wrong dates for coming to the villa.
Rarely wearing any clothes, Kitty is a obviously a dangerous interloper into this fragile family tableau. The sensible 14-year old, who has done without a mother for so much of her life, is at first intrigued by this big sister, particular as she finally has first period.
So is this a coming of age novel? A family breakdown story? Or a tale of mental illness? A bit of all three it turns out. Kitty - known as "Kitty Ket" to the German who loves her - has been there before. A "botanist" and "poet" she has come to the apartment with a single poem in an envelope, entitled "Swimming Home" which she wants Joe to read. On such thin grounds is this novel of surfaces built, and part of her success, I think, is in keeping this fragile edifice upright. She does this through her writing which is careful, calibrated, and as shimmering as the French heat.
Yet this small group of people are thrown together not so much by circumstance as by wilfulness. This is the unfortunate dinner parties of the people-loving Divers in "Tender is the Night" but here it feels forced. Mitchell is a boorish Abe North type, drinking and eating too much, and not much liking (or at least resenting) his richer friends. JHJ is a poet like none that really exist, closer to the artist in Fowles' "The Ebony Tower" than any real writer; somehow living off his royalties. His own past is of the changeling. Born before the war he is a Polish Jew, whose own past and identity are pretty unknown to him. The novel starts with him in a car with Kitty, so the obviousness of their having an affair is flagged from the start, but when she takes her hands off the wheel, where will this riskiness take them? That in some ways is the novel's "tease." This group of people though don't really garner much of our sympathy. Its a short novel, and could easily have been called "dreadful people." Not a single character comes across as deserving our sympathy. They are selfish, and self-centred, and pulling those around them into their own self-absorbtion.
In some ways, the novels strength is this clinical characterisation. Everyone's actions, however well meaning are freighted with consequence. Isabel letting Kitty stay for instance (and why is it that Isabelle has the casting vote?) - is this because she really wants Kitty to have an affair with her husband? The retired doctor Sheridan is an accomplice in the melodrama from having called the paramedics to a crazed, naked Kitty Finch the previous summer. Sheridan is scared at what Kitty will then do as revenge. Yet what doctor wouldn't have take that decision? Claude the Mick-Jagger lookalike who runs the local bar is leching after the pre-pubescent Nina; whilst Jurgen is the classic unreliable servant, doing favours only where he feels it can give him some kind of an edge.
Into this appalling group, the damaged Kitty seems to swoop in to somehow be both angel and devil. Its not that she captivates the group so much - she's too obviously mentally estranged and self-obsessed for that - more that she provides some kind of necessary grit in the unsaid seething politeness of this middle class cliche. Her own background is hardly mentioned - other than her time in hospital - but she swims in, literally, and everyone either falls in love with her, loathes her, or thinks she can be useful to them. We don't see the poem at the heart of things: and its a thin thing to hold things together. At one point the list of reasons that Joe Jacobs has come up with not to read a single poem becomes almost comical. I think the novel's small power is based upon its accumulation of little things: Nina's period; the growing tab that Mitchell has built up at the restaurant; Kitty's nakedness, Isabel's disappearance into town. They are staging their own drama (a melodrama in many ways), playing some kind of multi-dimensional chess game, the ending of which could go either way, but also feels inevitable.
This sort of fatalism is what drives the novel more than the characters - though the accumulation of detail, in small telling scenes is what Levy does best. There is not a chapter that is wasted. In many ways its a long short story. Apparently her first novel for 15 years, it doesn't feel like a book that was dying to be written. Its setting and characters are too familiar. There's little to make you think this is a parody of the bourgeois novel, instead it feels like it is the bourgeois novel exactly, albeit with more than a frisson of existentialism. Kitty is the heart of the book, but she's a distant heart as well, and all too familiar - the broken girl, the beautiful but mentally unstable woman. She's there in Nicola Barker's "Clear" and Lee Rourke's "The Canal" and also in the TV series Luther; a brilliant, seductive, but damaged waif, almost a signifier for contemporary neuroses. As we reach the denoument - as, if you like, the novel's fatalism reaches its point of closure - I wondered again about its mid-90s setting. Its just pre-internet which helps (Jacobs having a fax machine in the villa seems a clumsy detail, for instance) but the timing seems more to do with how Jacobs is aged. It has to be set in the 1994 to enable Joe Jacobs to have been a Polish Jewish evacuee who never saw his parents after the war; yet this ghostly past is so lightly sketched I'm not sure it has any greater reality to it. Levy's interest is in the psychological deadness of her damaged characters, and that's inevitably focussed on their vulnerable present, rather than the demons of their past.
Outside of the tableaux the characters feel they don't exist - and that anti-realism just about gives the novel an intrigue that takes it away from its slightly characterless origins. Its symbols might be slight, but they are not without some intellectual weight.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Writing With and Without Fear
I used to write without fear. I didn't know what I didn't know. Like a child playing in front of the open grate, mesmerised by the flames and warmth but unprotected by a fire guard, I would write until I was roasted on one side, with nobody to pull me away. Partly this was because I didn't know any different; I'd always written - since being a child - and since nobody had took much interest in it, then why should they take much interest in warning me off? During my twenties I wrote a couple of novels, a number of short stories; beginning to photocopy them for distribution to a few friends, occasionally getting a poem or story published. This didn't happen until my late twenties by which time I was probably unteachable, caught in my own bad habits.
I began to take things more seriously: first a competition entry; then sending off to agents and others. I applied, and finally got on, an M.A. I still wrote with abandon, why shouldn't I? The fear came slowly, I think. Not the course, or my tutors or my fellow students - more the work was to blame. This new novel was different somehow. It could burn me. It could take me places I wasn't keen on going. It was more than a story. More than a tall tale. Slowly, I burned, slowly I moved away from the flame, put precautions in place. Then the writing world, which I'd known of, but never had much of an entry-point to, seemed ever nearer, and I approached that equally without fear. Beware of sabre-toothed tigers! At some point I began to write out of terror rather than unaware of the terror.
The fear was helpful. It kept my words under constant surveillance, it made me aware of their limitations; it made me think of what I needed to do to make them better. Fear made me a better writer. It made me a slower writer, it made me a more scared writer. Yet, the old fearlessness somehow remained. It would take a late night session; a glass or two of wine to intervene. But I'd trained myself to write breathlessly, fearlessly and that training held me in good stead. Only in the morning would I wonder what I'd done - think about this other fearless self that wrote at night and left something that I could only wonder at in the sober morning. Then the fear helped, I suppose, it clarified the confusions of the night before, it worked into the detail of the fearless work. At least sometimes: other times it stopped me. It stopped me from following through on the idea or the piece.
Time went on. I am older. I am a curator of old work now, as much as writer of new work. That was a different me, I think, that fearless one. It is better to be terrified; and to make sure things are perfect before you show them around; before you consider their vulnerability - yet I need the fearless writer to write the damn thing in the first place; the fearless me was the one that got to the end; the terrified writer is needed to look on this work with horror and make it approach some kind of completion. The fear has exactly the same role as my lack of it once had. It is to enable.
I began to take things more seriously: first a competition entry; then sending off to agents and others. I applied, and finally got on, an M.A. I still wrote with abandon, why shouldn't I? The fear came slowly, I think. Not the course, or my tutors or my fellow students - more the work was to blame. This new novel was different somehow. It could burn me. It could take me places I wasn't keen on going. It was more than a story. More than a tall tale. Slowly, I burned, slowly I moved away from the flame, put precautions in place. Then the writing world, which I'd known of, but never had much of an entry-point to, seemed ever nearer, and I approached that equally without fear. Beware of sabre-toothed tigers! At some point I began to write out of terror rather than unaware of the terror.
The fear was helpful. It kept my words under constant surveillance, it made me aware of their limitations; it made me think of what I needed to do to make them better. Fear made me a better writer. It made me a slower writer, it made me a more scared writer. Yet, the old fearlessness somehow remained. It would take a late night session; a glass or two of wine to intervene. But I'd trained myself to write breathlessly, fearlessly and that training held me in good stead. Only in the morning would I wonder what I'd done - think about this other fearless self that wrote at night and left something that I could only wonder at in the sober morning. Then the fear helped, I suppose, it clarified the confusions of the night before, it worked into the detail of the fearless work. At least sometimes: other times it stopped me. It stopped me from following through on the idea or the piece.
Time went on. I am older. I am a curator of old work now, as much as writer of new work. That was a different me, I think, that fearless one. It is better to be terrified; and to make sure things are perfect before you show them around; before you consider their vulnerability - yet I need the fearless writer to write the damn thing in the first place; the fearless me was the one that got to the end; the terrified writer is needed to look on this work with horror and make it approach some kind of completion. The fear has exactly the same role as my lack of it once had. It is to enable.
Do Movies Make us Culturally Lazy?
Last week I went to the cinema twice; first to see "A Taste of Honey", a film that is over 50 years old, and then to see the freshly pressed "The Great Gatsby." Suitably the first was in the grand surroundings of Stockport Plaza, and the second in the Dolby-enhanced experience zone of our local multiplex. I saw the latter in 2D, as 3D hurts my eyes, but the cinema was nonetheless full.
I mention this because I rarely go to the cinema these days. Not purposely, but amongst everything else its gone down my list of priorities. Besides, big TVs means that missing a film on the "big screen" is no longer the disaster it used to be. There may well be something about the falling off in quality of cinema - but I kind of don't necessarily buy that. The latter experience left something to desire. The multiplex had a small bar area with seats that had seen better days and lukewarm white wine; the first fifteen minutes of the film had large groups of people arriving late to find their seat; and, like most contemporary movies, Gatsby passes the 2 hour mark.
Yet cinema has proven remarkably resilient - albeit if the experience seems primarily aimed at a teenage/early 20s audience - with popcorn, and an adjacent Nandos. The films match this of course. There can be times when I've wanted to go and see a film but there's nothing on other than kids movies. (Its a bank holiday on Monday, I should probably have saved Gatsby for then.) Our art house cinemas are as likely to show a Tarantino as the "new" Tarantino, though festivals offer some hopes, though "catch it or miss it."
I love film. I used to sneak out of sixth form when I had a free afternoon and pop to an afternoon showing at the Cannock Classic, a three mile walk from school. The film club at university was the best and cheapest education I received in my first year at that institution. The video shop provided access to a smorgasbord of movies: from trash to classics (and sometimes they were both.) Yet at some point I kind of stopped going to films. The "must see" movies I haven't seen - whether its "Prometheus" of "Avatar." I catch things occasionally years afterwards on TV. I feel I've seen Harry Potter though I don't think I've caught more than a whole film.
It is, I think, easily to get culturally lazy through cinema. Partly as a shorthand for what other people are watching/seeing. The meme about "I've never seen Star Wars" shows our shock when people have opted out of this mainstream culture (and when did "cult" science fiction become necessarily ubiquitous?) - but also, and here's the rub, out "star" culture, our "celeb" culture, is primarily focussed on the beautiful people in the movies. Twas ever thus, I guess. Warhol understood: with his screen tests and his Factory "stars" - but he made unwatchable movies. The great artform of the twentieth century reduced to material...
...and I'm at one with thinking it is a great art form. Its certainly influenced by writing as much, if not more than novels have. I've written poems about cinema; and I still feel about the medium in a way that - even in the age of the HBO boxset, in itself a new "artform" - I've never felt for TV. Partly its the sort of films I've liked: noir is a genre that exists more on film than in books. You don't get noir on stage, that's for sure.
But "liking" a film is the easiest thing in the world it seems. The money spent is astronomical. Even now Goldman's warning that "nobody knows anything" is shown in the failure of something like "John Carter" (SF adaption - start of a new franchise - surely a winner?) or the unexpected success of the "The Artist". Yet a few days after seeing Gatsby, its Fitzgerald's prose that still shimmers, rather than Luhrmann's surfaces. I thought the film was thoroughly entertaining, surprisingly close to the book; but all of that effort and that's it a memory to be replaced - for most of the audience - by the new Star Trek movie or whatever big film is next. De Caprio, a good actor, is trapped in modern cinema as other good actors like Christian Bale or Ryan Gosling often are.
The Review Show was pretty dismissive of Gatsby the film, because it failed to get under the book. Would it ever be able? Great books rarely become great movies - though people try. This version of Gatsby was neither revolutionary or reverential. It worked best when it was more the former, and its a good modern movie, yet some well known in the source material that it was never in danger of celluloid overwhelming it.
Part of the reason I rarely go to the cinema is a social one of course. Two hours spent not talking to the person you went with! Catching up with particular friends too rarely these days, we tend to want to spend the time. But there's something I else I think. A list of the 100 best films of all time and I'll have only seen half - there's still time of course, but I've a pile of DVDs of classics and non-classics. I guess I've seen enough - just as I speak to people who feel they've read enough novels. As a creative practitioner do I want art that entertains or enriches? I can learn quite a lot from the structure and style of a great movie that might translate somehow into fiction - but many mulitplex films aren't that complex. The more complex narratives of the Sopranos or Fringe or The Wire seem to repay us more for the investment of time: movies are all about bang for the buck.
But if there is something "culturally lazy" about watching films I think its more to do with the Hollywood blockbuster as its evolved than something in the medium. These movies are such big events: the sequels create a narrative that feeds through from children's toys to pop culture parody (e.g. Spaced) to creating our own personal cultural signature. It becomes easy to fit in when everyone knows who Spiderman is. (Far easier than knowing who Fellini is.)
What place do movies play in the culture now? Where rock stars have faded in their excess, movie stars remain paramount in our celebrity culture - but the films themselves are more than that - they are so often cultural battering rams. Whereas a song or poem or a novel can still come from nowhere, a film - with its multi-million budget, its A-list stars, its billboards and trailers - can sometimes seem to scorch the cultural earth beneath it. Of course, the bigger the film the bigger the success, the less cultural impact it might really have - yes, you can see it three, four, many more times, but box office is primarily about reach: how many millions of people have been drawn into the cinema.
I was surprised as an adult rewatching "Jaws" and seeing "Saturday Night Fever" for the first time, how gritty those movies were. Like a book that surprises, they are still nuanced, despite the big set pieces that everyone remembers.
Some of my best artistic memories are seeing movies. "Breaking the Waves" at Brixton Ritzy on my own in 1996 after I'd just moved to London - what an overwhelming movie that was; "Reservoir Dogs" at the Cornerhouse; years before (not a great film - but a great day, I was in Manchester for the anti-Clause 28 march) "Sammy and Rosie Got Laid"; "Vertigo" at the Lumiere St. Martin's Lane, in 70mm; "Blue Velvet" for the first time at Lancaster university cinema club.... though sometimes I've seen favourite films on TV, even in the black and white portable in my old teenage bedroom. I'm sure there are lots of great movies out there even today; from all over the world; but wonder as well if they're a little drowned out by the loud culture of the blockbuster; of the sequel. Will I ever see the lovely Spanish film "Solitary Fragments" again? A split-screen movie about the Madrid bombings I accidentally caught at the Viva! Spanish film festival. Or what about "Target" that brilliant b-movie, "Targets" featuring Boris Karloff and directed by Peter Bogdanovich? Will Hollywood ever make a film as perfect again as "Once Upon a Time in the West?"
I began this blog post with a provocation - wondering if film culture - the multiplex showing the next Star Trek sequel or whatever - was the worst kind of culture; its sheer excessive professionalism drowning out everything else - yet there's something to be said for the craft and intelligence that goes into even the dumbest movie. Luhrmann overplays the symbolism in "Gatsby" but I can't help but be impressed by the zoom in and out of the New York apartments. One wonders at the utter pointless spectacle of the party scenes - everything over the top, but little different at heart than last Saturday's "Eurovision" song contest in Sweden, or the set-pieces of the Olympic opening ceremony. Was it really a surprise that we got one of our most imaginative film directors to direct that live event?
My real concern is that there will be more column inches for big blockbuster movies this year than for every book, poem, play that is out there - and something "little" - like "A Taste of Honey" was "little" (though how large were its concerns, wonderfully, achingly large....) cannot hope to compete in this world. The "shock of the new" that came briefly with the Dogme directors; or with Tarantino; is now subsumed into the whole mad machinery it takes to make a major movie. In a world of "franchises" the first casualty often seems story - with plots turning on the needs of the special effects makers rather than the other way round. An endless stream of Star Wars movies, or a reboot of Star Trek look like having none of the inventiveness that's there in J.J. Abram's small screen "Fringe." For British movie makers, films only seem to get a green light when they are picking up on a tabloid worthy subject - such as Winterbottom's life of Paul Raymond. Film has always been a magpie looking for the best source material - but sometimes it feels like books are being written as film treatments first.
I've lost my thread: I guess I'm trying to say that the most thrilling things I've seen lately have been live events one way or another - and its been a long time since I felt compelled to go see a new movie. Probably my loss, of course, and I'm sure there are some great films out there. Just not sure when I'll get around to them...
I mention this because I rarely go to the cinema these days. Not purposely, but amongst everything else its gone down my list of priorities. Besides, big TVs means that missing a film on the "big screen" is no longer the disaster it used to be. There may well be something about the falling off in quality of cinema - but I kind of don't necessarily buy that. The latter experience left something to desire. The multiplex had a small bar area with seats that had seen better days and lukewarm white wine; the first fifteen minutes of the film had large groups of people arriving late to find their seat; and, like most contemporary movies, Gatsby passes the 2 hour mark.
Yet cinema has proven remarkably resilient - albeit if the experience seems primarily aimed at a teenage/early 20s audience - with popcorn, and an adjacent Nandos. The films match this of course. There can be times when I've wanted to go and see a film but there's nothing on other than kids movies. (Its a bank holiday on Monday, I should probably have saved Gatsby for then.) Our art house cinemas are as likely to show a Tarantino as the "new" Tarantino, though festivals offer some hopes, though "catch it or miss it."
I love film. I used to sneak out of sixth form when I had a free afternoon and pop to an afternoon showing at the Cannock Classic, a three mile walk from school. The film club at university was the best and cheapest education I received in my first year at that institution. The video shop provided access to a smorgasbord of movies: from trash to classics (and sometimes they were both.) Yet at some point I kind of stopped going to films. The "must see" movies I haven't seen - whether its "Prometheus" of "Avatar." I catch things occasionally years afterwards on TV. I feel I've seen Harry Potter though I don't think I've caught more than a whole film.
It is, I think, easily to get culturally lazy through cinema. Partly as a shorthand for what other people are watching/seeing. The meme about "I've never seen Star Wars" shows our shock when people have opted out of this mainstream culture (and when did "cult" science fiction become necessarily ubiquitous?) - but also, and here's the rub, out "star" culture, our "celeb" culture, is primarily focussed on the beautiful people in the movies. Twas ever thus, I guess. Warhol understood: with his screen tests and his Factory "stars" - but he made unwatchable movies. The great artform of the twentieth century reduced to material...
...and I'm at one with thinking it is a great art form. Its certainly influenced by writing as much, if not more than novels have. I've written poems about cinema; and I still feel about the medium in a way that - even in the age of the HBO boxset, in itself a new "artform" - I've never felt for TV. Partly its the sort of films I've liked: noir is a genre that exists more on film than in books. You don't get noir on stage, that's for sure.
But "liking" a film is the easiest thing in the world it seems. The money spent is astronomical. Even now Goldman's warning that "nobody knows anything" is shown in the failure of something like "John Carter" (SF adaption - start of a new franchise - surely a winner?) or the unexpected success of the "The Artist". Yet a few days after seeing Gatsby, its Fitzgerald's prose that still shimmers, rather than Luhrmann's surfaces. I thought the film was thoroughly entertaining, surprisingly close to the book; but all of that effort and that's it a memory to be replaced - for most of the audience - by the new Star Trek movie or whatever big film is next. De Caprio, a good actor, is trapped in modern cinema as other good actors like Christian Bale or Ryan Gosling often are.
The Review Show was pretty dismissive of Gatsby the film, because it failed to get under the book. Would it ever be able? Great books rarely become great movies - though people try. This version of Gatsby was neither revolutionary or reverential. It worked best when it was more the former, and its a good modern movie, yet some well known in the source material that it was never in danger of celluloid overwhelming it.
Part of the reason I rarely go to the cinema is a social one of course. Two hours spent not talking to the person you went with! Catching up with particular friends too rarely these days, we tend to want to spend the time. But there's something I else I think. A list of the 100 best films of all time and I'll have only seen half - there's still time of course, but I've a pile of DVDs of classics and non-classics. I guess I've seen enough - just as I speak to people who feel they've read enough novels. As a creative practitioner do I want art that entertains or enriches? I can learn quite a lot from the structure and style of a great movie that might translate somehow into fiction - but many mulitplex films aren't that complex. The more complex narratives of the Sopranos or Fringe or The Wire seem to repay us more for the investment of time: movies are all about bang for the buck.
But if there is something "culturally lazy" about watching films I think its more to do with the Hollywood blockbuster as its evolved than something in the medium. These movies are such big events: the sequels create a narrative that feeds through from children's toys to pop culture parody (e.g. Spaced) to creating our own personal cultural signature. It becomes easy to fit in when everyone knows who Spiderman is. (Far easier than knowing who Fellini is.)
What place do movies play in the culture now? Where rock stars have faded in their excess, movie stars remain paramount in our celebrity culture - but the films themselves are more than that - they are so often cultural battering rams. Whereas a song or poem or a novel can still come from nowhere, a film - with its multi-million budget, its A-list stars, its billboards and trailers - can sometimes seem to scorch the cultural earth beneath it. Of course, the bigger the film the bigger the success, the less cultural impact it might really have - yes, you can see it three, four, many more times, but box office is primarily about reach: how many millions of people have been drawn into the cinema.
I was surprised as an adult rewatching "Jaws" and seeing "Saturday Night Fever" for the first time, how gritty those movies were. Like a book that surprises, they are still nuanced, despite the big set pieces that everyone remembers.
Some of my best artistic memories are seeing movies. "Breaking the Waves" at Brixton Ritzy on my own in 1996 after I'd just moved to London - what an overwhelming movie that was; "Reservoir Dogs" at the Cornerhouse; years before (not a great film - but a great day, I was in Manchester for the anti-Clause 28 march) "Sammy and Rosie Got Laid"; "Vertigo" at the Lumiere St. Martin's Lane, in 70mm; "Blue Velvet" for the first time at Lancaster university cinema club.... though sometimes I've seen favourite films on TV, even in the black and white portable in my old teenage bedroom. I'm sure there are lots of great movies out there even today; from all over the world; but wonder as well if they're a little drowned out by the loud culture of the blockbuster; of the sequel. Will I ever see the lovely Spanish film "Solitary Fragments" again? A split-screen movie about the Madrid bombings I accidentally caught at the Viva! Spanish film festival. Or what about "Target" that brilliant b-movie, "Targets" featuring Boris Karloff and directed by Peter Bogdanovich? Will Hollywood ever make a film as perfect again as "Once Upon a Time in the West?"
I began this blog post with a provocation - wondering if film culture - the multiplex showing the next Star Trek sequel or whatever - was the worst kind of culture; its sheer excessive professionalism drowning out everything else - yet there's something to be said for the craft and intelligence that goes into even the dumbest movie. Luhrmann overplays the symbolism in "Gatsby" but I can't help but be impressed by the zoom in and out of the New York apartments. One wonders at the utter pointless spectacle of the party scenes - everything over the top, but little different at heart than last Saturday's "Eurovision" song contest in Sweden, or the set-pieces of the Olympic opening ceremony. Was it really a surprise that we got one of our most imaginative film directors to direct that live event?
My real concern is that there will be more column inches for big blockbuster movies this year than for every book, poem, play that is out there - and something "little" - like "A Taste of Honey" was "little" (though how large were its concerns, wonderfully, achingly large....) cannot hope to compete in this world. The "shock of the new" that came briefly with the Dogme directors; or with Tarantino; is now subsumed into the whole mad machinery it takes to make a major movie. In a world of "franchises" the first casualty often seems story - with plots turning on the needs of the special effects makers rather than the other way round. An endless stream of Star Wars movies, or a reboot of Star Trek look like having none of the inventiveness that's there in J.J. Abram's small screen "Fringe." For British movie makers, films only seem to get a green light when they are picking up on a tabloid worthy subject - such as Winterbottom's life of Paul Raymond. Film has always been a magpie looking for the best source material - but sometimes it feels like books are being written as film treatments first.
I've lost my thread: I guess I'm trying to say that the most thrilling things I've seen lately have been live events one way or another - and its been a long time since I felt compelled to go see a new movie. Probably my loss, of course, and I'm sure there are some great films out there. Just not sure when I'll get around to them...
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