tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159161382024-03-13T05:39:11.077-07:00The Art of FictionThe Art of Fiction was a famous essay by Henry James, from 1885. This blog is written by Adrian Slatcher, who is a writer amongst other things, based in Manchester. His poetry collection "Playing Solitaire for Money" was published by Salt in 2010. I write about literature, music, politics and other stuff. You can find more about me and my writing at www.adrianslatcher.comUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1221125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-81371430334840550822019-12-04T13:53:00.004-08:002019-12-04T15:00:14.983-08:00Blogging OffI've been blogging for a long time, but what was once called "push button publishing" has found itself left behind in an era of social media tweets and Facebook posts on the one hand, and web zines and memes on the other.<br />
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I've been not writing that much here for quite some time, an the odd review or feature couldn't really make up for the fact that the platform, and my adherence to it, were both running out of steam.</div>
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So on the cusp of a new decade I think its time to blog off. Its a long time since people regularly commented on this blog, or any blogs for that matter - the two way conversation having gone over to Facebook a long time ago - there it was easier, in their walled garden, to cultivate an audience, to follow a person or a group, whilst hear on the open internet, what once was easily found was now swallowed up by all the noise going on elsewhere. </div>
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I'd thought I might try and re-invent the blog as something else, perhaps focussing on the esoteric or small press publications. A couple of years ago I did move over to a podcast, but that took a hell of a lot of work. Video would be even worse, and I'm not sure what or who my audience would be - unless I started an unboxing video series. </div>
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Over the years I've used this place as somewhere to road test ideas or thoughts around the creative process or cultural stuff that's going on; to highlight good things happening in Manchester or elsewhere; to review books when I've finished them; and to talk a little about music and art as well as literature. </div>
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I hope its been an interesting read. It will stay here, at least for as long as Google keeps the platform going. Years back it was part of a series of "Brit Lit Blogs" some of which are no doubt still thriving, and even, for a while was being archived by the British Library. /That stopped at some point - maybe I'd got less interesting or less zeitgeisty or maybe they'd stopped bothering. The cultural moment had clearly gone.</div>
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And I'm not saying that the end is the end is the end. It's occasionally useful to have a place to just put stuff. Maybe, next Friday after the general election, I'll find the need to write a coda to this piece - who knows?</div>
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My own writing can still be read about at <a href="http://www.adrianslatcher.com/">www.adrianslatcher.com</a> and the poetry magazine and press I've recently started with Steve Hanson can be found at <a href="http://someroastpoetry.wordpress.com/">someroastpoetry.wordpress.com </a></div>
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But for now, with my 1221st post, this is me blogging off. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-71509650823822102002019-10-28T13:42:00.001-07:002019-10-28T13:45:13.158-07:00Albums of the DecadeWith 2019 - and the decade - coming to a rapid close, the first lists of "best albums of the 20-teens" have started to come out. Whereas the younger me could tell you what year any album had come out, everything gets a bit hazy around the millennium...and continues to be so.<br />
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Was "The Suburbs", easily my favourite Arcade Fire album as long ago as 2010? It appears so. So that's a contender - it made my contemporary <a href="http://artoffiction.blogspot.com/2010/12/albums-of-year.html">list</a>. Flying Lotus "Cosmogramma" and "Maya" by MIA were also favourites at the time. Apparently I also had a lot of time for the Shit Robot album, which I can't even remember now!<br />
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<a href="http://artoffiction.blogspot.com/2011/12/albums-of-year-2011.html">2011</a> was P.J. Harvey's year with "Let England Shake" and time hasn't dimmed it. I also liked "James Blake", a highly original debut, and at the time, "Build a rocket, boys" by Elbow, a band who perhaps tend to be a bit samey - but that's probably their best since their debut. Jay Z and Kanye West's "Watch the Throne" was one of the decades best hip hop albums. I still like David Comes to Life by Fucked Up, but would have to listen to the Naked and the Dead again, same goes for Liam Finn and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.<br />
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By <a href="http://artoffiction.blogspot.com/2012/12/albums-of-year-2012.html">2012</a> there were quite a few excellent female artists such as Grimes, Lana del Rey, and the always reliable Cat Power. I think my favourite of the year would probably have to be The Allah-las debut, its one I've still kept listening to. I missed it at the time but "Channel Orange" by Frank Ocean remains a favourite.<br />
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It seems I was paying a bit more attention to indie guitar music in <a href="http://artoffiction.blogspot.com/2013/12/albums-of-year-2013.html">2013</a>, local heroines PINS debut, plus albums by Kurt Vile and Ducktails were favourites. I also still listen to Bowie's "The Next Day" and Daft Punk's "Random Access Melodies." Though perhaps "Enjoy Yourself" by Savages is pick of the bunch. A couple of pop albums I came to a bit later: Chvrches "The Bones of What You Believe" and Lorde "Pure Heroine". "Fields of Reeds" by These New Puritans also came out that year and I've listened to Haim's debut a lot.<br />
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I don't seem to have done more than a cursory list for 2014 - but honourable mentions to "The Silver Globe" by Jane Weaver" and "LP1" by FKA Twigs seem worthwhile ones, as well as Manic Street Preachers' return to form with "Futurology." "Singles" by Future Islands and "1989" by Taylor Swift ought also to be in there. John Grant "Queen of Denmark" remains a favourite.<br />
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<a href="http://artoffiction.blogspot.com/2015/12/year-in-song-best-records-of-2015.html">2015</a> I was seeing a few more gigs and bands I'd seen out and about like PINS and Sauna Youth and Bernard and Edith did excellent records as did Lonelady with her second album "Hinterland". "Key Markets" by Sleaford Mods was a highlight as well. The best albums were ones I discovered a few months later, Courtney Barnett, Father John Misty and particularly - my favourite of 2015, Julia Holter's astonishing "Have you in my wilderness." Also a late discovery was Jenny Hval "Apocalypse, Girl". Its also the year of jazz tour de force "The Epic" by Kamasi Washington. Actually this was a stunning year - also loved "Songs in the Dark" by Wainwright Sisters.<br />
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I didn't make a list in 2016 either....but Rihanna with "Anti", Bowie with his final album "Blackstar" and albums by Iggy Pop and Tegan and Sara, as well as the ubiquitous Beyonce would probably be in contention. I also liked Lambchop's "FLOTUS" a lot. Eno's "The Ship" was a real pleasure as well.<br />
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2017 seems ridiculously close - Protomartyr "Relatives in Descent" is a highlight, as was LCD Soundsystem's return and return to form "American Dream." What else? "Pure Comedy" by Father John Misty stood out.<br />
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A mere year ago my favourites were probably U.S. Girls, Amber Arcades, Goat Girl and Parquet Courts, oh and "Honey" by Robyn. This year...heck....I've not even thought about it yet!<br />
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So out of that lot.... lots of great female artists, or female-led bands, and I'm sure I've missed a few, a good indie scene, often bands I've caught live early career, not much in the way of rock music - and not many great albums by legacy acts, more echoes of former glories it seems. A certain general electronica that is often attached to classy songwriting and inventive production. Glad to see some interesting singers like John Grant and Future Islands appear. I've only been blown away by a couple of pop albums - maybe they are all pop albums these days - and whereas rap is now the biggest selling genre in the world, I've not quite got into, say, Kendrick Lamarr, like previous generations of rappers.<br />
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Off top of my heard my top 5 would be Arcade Fire, Julia Holter, Jenny Hval, John Grant and P.J. Harvey but will have a listen to a few things between now and decade end.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-30178820951127116802019-09-30T10:53:00.002-07:002019-09-30T10:53:55.390-07:00Never Mind / Bad News / Some Hope - Edward St. AubynThe three novels Edward St. Aubyn wrote about "Patrick Melrose" between 1992-94, though they've since been expanded to a quintology, are really three long chapters of the same book. In "Brideshead Revisited" Sebastian Flyte warns Charles Ryder about his family, not wanting them to first charm him, and then destroy him; but any such warning for Patrick Melrose - or for St. Aubyn, whose life they mirror (more of which later) - was impossible, for he was born into this dysfunctional family at the very centre of British aristocratic life. Whereas previous novelists such as Waugh and Anthony Powell, may have written about toff life partly to chronicle a dying breed, St. Aubyn's books are both less obviously explanatory of the millieu in which they are set, and at the same time - taking place throughout the late sixties to the late eighties - accepting of the stubborn survival of a class that Waugh, writing between the wars, might have thought on its way out.<br />
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"Never Mind" joins that long line of French chateau novels - from "The Ebony Tower", to "Black Dogs", to "The Pregnant Widow" to "Swimming Home" to "Conversations with Friends" - where the rich go on holiday and "entertain" various friends and acquaintances. Told from a suitable authorial distance, its rich with detail, almost sonorous in its descriptions, but also, wryly funny. But from the off the humour is tinged with darkness. We are with David Melrose, a vituperative upper class man, who, in the absence of money has married into it with his submissive wife. The holiday home is where he made her get on her knees and eat the fallen figs from the floor on one of their first dates. He wanted to abuse her before he married her. Their son is five years old, and has been playing happily with a friend; for Patrick Melrose this is Eden before the fall, and though he doesn't know it this is the end of his too short innocence. The various visitors are there for a variety of reasons - boredom, proximity, or simply because David enjoys the opportunity to be cruel to them in many different ways. They are almost without exception, horrible, and horribly damaged people. It is the late sixties and things are changing - for the rich and the aristocratic it means that sex is more available and less discreet than it was before for instance. An old "friend" of David's, Nicholas, is arriving with his new girlfriend, Bridget, an upward mobile hippy girl, who he is already regretting bringing, but who David will lasciviously paw under the table regardless. The heart of this short novel when it comes is a real shock, for we are back with Patrick, this time with his father, who turns brutish on him for no reason, and suddenly - and for the first time - sexually abuses him. Against the flow of comedy it comes as a shock, but David Melrose is a dreadful man, a mix of failed ambitions and over-entitlement who has married - and it seems had a child - mainly to have some people closer that he can be cruel to.<br />
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Taking place around a single dinner party, you see the whole horror of Patrick's family and friends in a single night. It stays in the mind as no ordinary night, because of what his father did.<br />
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The second novel sees a twenty something Patrick Melrose on Concorde (echoes of the start of Amis's "Money") heading to America because his father has just died. The intervening years saw the abuse continue; his parents divorce; and David reduce to a bitter shadow; but for Patrick worse was to come, for he inherited millions from his mother's side of the family, and quickly becomes every sort of addict. It is the early eighties (the cultural references throughout the novels are sparse, and sometimes awkward - Talking Heads being referred to as The Talking Heads for instance), and Patrick is spending five thousand dollars a week on drugs. He has a girlfriend - in fact, several - and is Sebastian Flyte made flesh. "Bad News" is to my mind, easily the best of the three books - or the key section of the trilogy-as-novel. Rarely has there been such an unexpurgated tale of heroin addiction and the addict's life; it makes the Motley Crue biography seem almost sedate. Another Patrick, Brett Easton Ellis's Patrick Bateman, comes to mind; for the character here is excessive in everything he does. Senses his heightened by the late flight, and by the emotional charge of knowing his hated father is actually dead, the comedy here is another level than the debut - it's got a mania to it; the New York setting; the movement of Patrick into adulthood; and the gimlet-eyed obsessions of the addict combining. There are scenes where he only just about makes it, or where his own addiction seems less horrifying than the addictions and obsessions of the terrible and terribly rich men who knew his father. The women in the novel are treated terribly; he tries to get off with a friend of his girlfriend, who in a nice twist, can't wait to get away from this monster; but at the end, with his father's ashes in his hotel room prior to his next morning flight out, he goes to the Mudd Club, and picks up a girl who he is disgusted by even as his own focus is purely on his addictions.<br />
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In contrast, the third novel, coming two years after the second, is a more sedate affair. Patrick is now clean - though it is his friend who goes to Narcotics Anonymous, not himself. This time its more of a chamber piece: there is a big party in the country, or rather two parties side by side. One at the house of Sonny and Bridget (yes, the Bridget from the first novel, now in her forties and married to a horrible aristocrat whom she has failed to give a male heir), and another just down the road, which Patrick has been invited to. The weekend is taking place, as far as we can tell, for a key birthday party, and the guest of honour is Princess Margaret. Here, St. Aubyn is at his nastiest, rarely can a portrait of a famous person - still alive at the time of the novel - be so beautifully described in all her awfulness. It seems oddly insular though, in some ways. Like Alan Hollinghurst in "The Line of Beauty" there's a frisson about the arrival of the famous in the pages of a fictional work - but whereas the young gay man dancing with Mrs. Thatcher at a party is vignette - here this seems vindictive.<br />
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And this is where we are left at the end of the third book - with having to consider what we already know - that these books, though fiction, are based squarely on St. Aubyn's own life, including the abuse, the heroin addiction, and one presumes, what an awful snob Princess Margaret is. But the nastiness is there throughout, particularly against women, and poor people (which seems to mean anyone who is less than titled). What to make of this? Is it satire? Yes, and brilliantly so at times - yet there's something unforgiving about his prose, which whilst sometimes breathtaking, is as likely to be as clunky as the personalities of some of these friends of his fathers. Patrick is part of this "scene" - and its a hermetically sealed one. In the third book, we see a couple of walk on parts from the previous books, and they seem frivolous, unnecessary, but then again, nobody in this world ever entirely walks away from it, or wants to.<br />
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I've not seen the recent TV dramatisation of the books, but ironically, what seems a little stodgy at times, can, I imagine also provide a certain timelessness. After all we've lapped up Downton Abbey where the comedy is always of the more sugared variety, and the rich are there to be admired. In St. Aubyn there is literally nothing to be admired about them. Hemingway's reply to Fitzgerald saying, "the rich are different..." with "yes they have more money" comes to mind. The rich in St. Aubyn are titled, landed, and that is what they care about - whereas in Fitzgerald it is the coarseness of new money, here it is the decadence of the old. Being of and from this group, St. Aubyn's hatred is both self preservation from his real traumas, but also at times awkward to swallow; his comedy, highly readable, occasionally slapstick (the French ambassador spilling gravy on Princess Margaret's dress and being made at length to wipe it off), and always acerbic is the tone which keeps the pages turning; but the world is a narrow one, and the concentrated nature of each of the three books, makes it more hermetic still. I look forward to finishing the series; but with a little trepidation.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-44119823120635224022019-08-29T12:23:00.000-07:002019-08-29T12:23:06.484-07:00Short StoriesI had a bit of a flurry of getting short stories published a few years ago, but nothing in the last year or so. Strangely the last story I had published was picked up for Best British Short Stories 2018. I think I've lost the thread of who is publishing what, but doing a bit of writer's admin, I've found I've got about half a dozen completed ones that are on the publishable (i.e. short) side. A couple of these I've sent out to competitions but they're not really competition stories, as they're all a little downbeat, introspective and philosophical. I seem to have a few unnamed protagonists, in faceless towns, and perhaps that's too colourless for some.<br />
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Going back a bit, my short story writing has never fitted into a particular theme or groove or even single voice.<br />
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There are some commonalities. I write a lot of two-handers, where two characters (usually, but not always, two male characters) are interacting with each other in different or unusual ways. I'm interested in the way that men interact: as something more than acquaintance, but not quite friends. One of those male traits that seems to be undervalued is how often we rub along together, finding some commonality - drink, football, or simply the group - where personality wise there wouldn't be much in common; or even a certain symbiotic relationship. I realise this isn't exactly a radical theme, how many stories are about the master and the pupil for instance? but its interesting that I draw back to it. In a reversal (or confirmation) of Alison Bechdal's Bechdal test (two women in a scene talking about something other than a man), its rare that two men in my stories would talk about a woman. In "The Good Citizen" which was published in VLAK magazine, two Asian men become wary friends, as they live in the same rooming house. The one is trying to keep his head down, the other is becoming entepreneurial, the misunderstanding is the tragedy at the heart of the story. In "Life Grabs" (from Best British Short Stories), the two men have only a business relationship - the man whose son went missing, and the man in the computer shop who helps him piece together what happened. These easy/uneasy friendships are at the heart of how many interact, its transactional as much as anything. When I meet an old friend we talk about old friends we have lost touch with; its not that we were ever really close, but we want to pretend that the transactional friendship meant more than it did.<br />
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Another theme of my stories has been the hidden, or mysterious - something on the edge of believability. Sometimes it has a Borgesian text (as in The Four Hills of Manchester, which also acts as the title of a book extracted from in the story), other times its the location (as in Last Testament of a Lighthouse Keeper, where the protagonist is on an island, alone, his past a mystery.) In The Cat (from Unthology 4) its left open whether the cat of the title is real or a metaphor. Perhaps its both. Occasionally its been deliberately fantastical, Aliens landing in Ashton IKEA in The IKEA in Ahston Can Be Seen From Space, or a drone that is personified in Dear Papa.<br />
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Longer stories have used real events or have a parallel with what's going on in the world. Finding a way into writing about contemporary politics I've often approached things from a different angel - here it is the structure of the story that helps. I've often talked about stories having a slow reveal, where the truth about the story has been there from the start but its approached sideways.<br />
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But more recent stories have been more introverted I think: the character is often alone, and the thing that is happening to them they are unaware of. They are less plot, more philosophical. I think perhaps I need to improve their saleability by developing the plot a bit more. Part of the problem is how Manchester has changed - it used to be a city I could easily write about, but increasingly I find it hard to describe - there's nothing memorable about its sleek glass towers, its chain bars and restaurants.<br />
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So here I am, writing about writing, rather than writing... procrastination of the highest order!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-74633104230012096932019-08-18T00:41:00.003-07:002019-08-18T00:41:39.364-07:00Art ThoughtsI've been thinking of doing more visual art for a while, and finally having a space of my own where I can set up a "studio" has led me to do it. Not being an "artist" I wondered why I was wanting to do this as well as my writing and music. Here are a few thoughts.<br />
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I am not an artist. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Or rather I haven’t the skill of an artist, even if I have
the sensibility.<o:p></o:p></div>
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My other art forms – poetry, fiction, music – are informed
by a very visual sense, conceptually, and in execution.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What I can do is create stuff, using whichever tools are to
hand. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Collage is my perfect medium. Collage is part of my artistic
practice going back thirty years.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I like the physicality of the collage. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Juxtaposition gives meaning. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Art is not just about a literal meaning, but a non-literal
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As Frank O’Hara writes in “Why I am not a Painter”, his
artist friend includes a sardine in the picture because “it needed something.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Abstract art has value.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Abstract art comes from something that is not abstract at
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Rendition or representation is in itself a questionable task<o:p></o:p></div>
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In the age of mechanical reproduction there is value in the
non-repeatable, the random chance. In the age of digital reproduction the physical object has its own meaning and value. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Constraints are good.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Constraints enable you to make decisions confined within
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You have to start somewhere.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m interested in the fragile; and I’m interested in the
reproduction<o:p></o:p></div>
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Is the art the original, or the print?<o:p></o:p></div>
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There can different levels – so that an original work can be
photographed, can be amended on the computer, can be placed somewhere, and can
then be a new original work.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m interested in the sculptural, the space, the room. <o:p></o:p></div>
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We live inside boxes. Rooms, houses, cars, offices. That seems significant. </div>
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The modern world is cramped. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Pictures speak easier than words and with more clarity. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I don’t know if I want to represent a thing, or the thing to
be simply the starting point because “it needed something.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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It feels good to be released from the need for a narrative; or am I just attempting to apply a narrative to another artform? </div>
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Scissors and glue takes us back to childhood; never a bad place to go for revitalising our wonder at the world.</div>
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Art is recycling. </div>
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I'm some way off having something that I can explain in "art speak", that is a good thing. </div>
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Maybe I can exhibit this some time; who knows?</div>
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Learning new things by doing feels good. </div>
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I think I am working towards something, but maybe that's less important than the single steps on the way. </div>
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Creative people need to be creative - and sometimes that means changing what you do. </div>
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"Only ever doing what's expected of you is a tragedy." (This is the title of my next music project.)</div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-44636317898461053842019-07-05T16:09:00.001-07:002019-07-05T16:09:55.812-07:00Bells for Peace<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When John Lennon first met Yoko Ono she was already an established artist. In fact, he was at her show. not her at his, and he asked to participate in a work of art that offered the opportunity to hammer a nail in. Ono's art has always been participatory but has also been very aware of its value. <div>
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What was wonderful about "Bells for Peace" at Cathedral Gardens in Manchester last night was that after at least 30 years of being a fan, I was able to participate in one of Yoko's works. Whereas artists like Tunick and Deller can seem to use people as material, Ono, one of the original Fluxus associates, has work that can only exist when we participate - we are the art - and so it was last night, as we responded to her instructions, simple do-able actions that are familiar to any readers of her book "Grapefruit", but made real because there are 4000 of us. The "bells" are a McGuffin in some sense, a way that we can physically understand the instrutions to believe in love and peace.</div>
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It was a wonderful occasion. Given that the last MIF ended with the cynicism of Phil Collin's terrible "Ceremony", this was wonderful palliative - an art of giving - of belonging. We rang our bells in catherdral gardens and for a brief point in time, the 50 years of calling for peace, that is central not just to Yoko's art, but to the vision we have of her and John Lennon, was palpable. Even the call to speak to a cloud - in a Manchester sky where a single grey alabaster dominated - didn't dampen the mood but instead made us laugh in a communion. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-7065962628500451002019-06-22T02:47:00.001-07:002019-06-22T02:47:17.096-07:00...but I've written it.How much is there left in the tank? I wonder about this. Writing is so much more than just putting words on the page, but about the harnessing of some cosmic energy, that is both within you and outside of you. If the drive to write was always there, then what if then it stops? I think I will always be creative, its innate within me, but writing...what is it exactly? Its not a job....its a strange vocation. Like Greene's Whiskey Priest what if the only thing left is to continue writing, but not believing it anymore than he did? I suspect that's why it's one of Greene's most resonant works. In a world where you've been conditioned for a certain faith, or belief, to be told that is no longer acceptable. It may wither, but can it truly die? The withering is enough, I think.<br />
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I seem to be finding less time to do this faithless task of writing, and with less certainty about why to do it. There's always been too sides, the private side of writing, a pleasure, a prayer, but the public side, an act of worship, a getting the work out there. On which side of these am I on? There's half a dozen unfinished - or is that "hardly started" - stories on my laptop, the incomplete novel I keep promising to return to, to put it out of its misery if nothing else, poems in notebooks that whenever I try and pull together seem to have no coherence other than that they were written by me, at some point. Life gets in the way, eats up time. I sometimes think writing does require some kind of state "in extremis" (as an old poem of mine was titled), something to fight against. Watching Russel T. Davis's "Years and Years" this last few weeks, it feels like television as novel, with a heft that only the longer work can have. Certainly we are in novelisable times, and Manchester, where it, and I are set, is a cinematic backdrop. We are also a city of literature, yet one that has yet to find its great city work. The contenders are all peripheral I would say: A Clockwork Orange is not set here, but feels Mancunian in its Ultraviolence. It's always timely, that novel of the psychopathic free will, in an age of Trump, Putin, and now, it seems Johnson. A Taste of Honey comes close, but its a play of course, and stubbornly in the sister city of Shelagh Delaney's Salford. I'd put a marker down for This Nation's Saving Grace, Unknown Pleasures or The Smiths, musical markers of the city. And yes, there are the older novels, the Gaskell novels, or working class fare like Love on the Dole. So there's still something to be written, I think, of Manchester, about Manchester, and I used to think I would write it, but I'm not sure now if anyone wants to hear it or read it. We live in optimistic times when it comes to culture, there's too much nihilism in public life for there to be room for it in art it seems. Even "Years and Years" which has the world going to hell in a handcart, is written optimistically, life, family, rebirth.<br />
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So at the moment the particular challenge I have is that everything I sit down to write, I think, wait a minute, I've already written it. There's twenty five years of this stuff on laptops and hard drives, quite enough for one man, one writer, one life I'd have thought. I don't necessarily think I can do it better than I have done already, and that's clearly not been good enough one way or another. Magazine editors and people running literary nights get younger, are overrun with enthusiasm and optimism, even as they struggle with the hand of being young in 2019 - but at least they are young. There's not much of a model for the writer who hasn't defined themselves fully after a quarter of a century.<br />
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Perhaps writing this is an attempt to kick me from out of the slumber. I've plenty to "do" - even literary wise, given some of the projects I've become involved in, and I know I crave, as ever, the requirement to be creative - maybe its back to the music, which similarly sits in a state of disarray, a dozen unfinished songs from "the next album." It's not writers block I think so much as taking pause, and asking what next.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-23534051397726561282019-06-06T23:33:00.002-07:002019-06-06T23:38:02.012-07:00Fancy a literary swim?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This weekend, if you fancy a literary swim the place to be is <a href="http://www.victoriabaths.org.uk/visit/">Victoria Baths</a>, the restored community venue just behind the universities and hospitals. A great venue to host, and a great venue to explore.<br />
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This <a href="http://www.victoriabaths.org.uk/visit/2019/weekend-of-words-saturday/">Saturday</a> sees a range of workshops during the day, and then on the evening a specially commissioned reading of <a href="http://www.victoriabaths.org.uk/visit/2019/weekend-of-words-replace/">6 new stories</a> by some of our finest writers - that's from 7, with a bar open from 6. You'll need a ticket for particular events to attend. Then on Sunday more workshops and an i<a href="http://www.victoriabaths.org.uk/visit/2019/weekend-of-words-sunday/">ndy book fair,</a> so more of a drop in day, where I'll be selling copies of the Some Roast Poet magazine and hopefully a cassette (!) of my live poetry.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-42187093887996395522019-04-17T00:18:00.000-07:002019-04-17T00:18:21.151-07:00The Forensic Records Society by Magnus MillsThe banal doesn't sit well with fiction. The novel insists, too often, on action of one kind or another. It is left to theatre - "Waiting for Godot" perhaps - or comedy, "Viz" or "Early Doors", to find an artistic mode for the passing of the days. Occasionally attempts like Sylvia Smith's "Misadventures" have not been well received. Yet banality is one of the tropes - perhaps the main trope - at the heart of Magnus Mills' is fiction. Perhaps its because most of his characters are workers of one sort or another that this is the case, although in his latest, "The Forensic Records Society", the whole people who actually work are George and Alice, the licensee and barmaid of the pub where the majority of the (in)action takes place.<br />
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Two record collecting nerds would sit round each other's house, listening in turn to three records of the other's choice, an unspoken set of rules meaning that their comments on each were of the minimum. They were beyond taste, seeing that as merely opinion; yet tacitly they shared certain values. I'm reminded of when I was a teenager and three of us would come back from Birmingham laden with records and the rule was that we had to listen to the other's purchases, however much we hated them.<br />
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James, the leader of the pair, has a plan, that he suggests to the narrator, as his willing foil, that they should start a Forensic Records Society at their nearby pub on a Monday night. They do so, and gradually, draw in other blokes (always blokes), to their Monday ritual. Like early Christians or prototype Marxists, their club develops rules, and is both rigorous in the applying of them, and solemn in the seriousness of their purpose. Time passes in a vacuum, regardless of how many records they play it is always a surprise when last orders is called.<br />
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On ejecting one person from the club for arriving too late they find that he has set up a rival - a "confessional" records club, on the next night. Infiltrating this night they find it is very different. That people confess their feelings brought on by a particular record, and pay £5 for the privilege; it is attended by a mixed crowd, women included, and the leader becomes a bit of an icon. It's like Simon Bates' "Our Tune" mixed with "The Matrix."<br />
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In the mean time, the pettiness of James' rules causes disquiet amongst the members, even as they turn up to listen to classic 7" singles. The song titles are planted throughout the book without explanation, so we too can almost become members of the club. There's a debate going on about the "perfect" song - not because of artistic merit but because it lasts for exactly three minutes, the "three minute pop song" being more a thing of legend than reality. This is the kind of thing that gets the men who attend this club excited.<br />
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Our narrator, common to many of Mill's characters, is unworldy whilst having a highly developed sense of his own perceptions. He slowly comes to realise that James is seeing Alice, the barmaid, who nonetheless remains incredibly frosty with himself. She has, it turns out, been singer on a very rare demo single, and the plot of the novel - if there is one - swings around this being heard. Alice, in her turn, has strong views on the narrator, describing him as someone who doesn't like music.<br />
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The humour in "The Forensic Records Society" is in how Mills, as ever, works wonders on a tiny, restricted canvas, and draws out of it all its comic possibilities. The uncertain time keeping of the meetings is part of it. In Magnus Mills' world even physics can bend to the comic possibilities of the narrative.<br />
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Things come to a head of sorts, when a 3rd rival organisation, playing records that are more "meaningful", comes into existence. There's quite a few nice digs at the world of the record collector in this narcissism of small differences, from those who fetishise the object, to those who want the innocence of the classic jukebox 45. Amongst the many records listed, there are rap and ska and indie and classic rock and soul, but not much room for ABBA or house music or anything too modern. Even an avid record collector such as myself only recognised about two/thirds of the titles.<br />
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Its a short novel, but more packed than the above description can give a sense of, since in talking about the banal and the unimportant, there's clearly bigger things going on here. One reviewer calls it <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/07/forensic-records-society-by-magnus-mills-review">Animal Farm "with much better songs"</a>, but I always think Mills is less interested in metaphor, than in the small systems that exist within our everyday mundane society, such as the rules of the forensic records society, or the maintenance of headway that bus drivers pursue in a previous of his books. This fondness for an enclosed, regulated society, and what happens when the rules are broken or not fit for purpose is a way of exploring how men (and it is always men, the "love interest" like Alice, is hardly there at all) negotiate the world. That the world is not quite the one we perceive, is part of their charm.<br />
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This latest novel seems the closest in many ways to his debut "Restraint of Beasts", and like that its ending is uncertain, and ambiguous. The return to an every day setting after some of the more fantastical or out of time settings of recent novels is a welcome return to his home turf. It's one of his best.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-62912770296478498172019-04-02T14:41:00.002-07:002019-04-02T14:41:22.454-07:00Art CurrentsAt the start of March I was in Oxford for the first time, ostensibly to see the Jeff Koons show at the Ashmolean, though that was really just my excuse to go down, as I was off work for a week, and needed a trip away. I have always liked Koons, as more than any other contemporary artist he seemed to embody the times in which he creates. Sure, he's a late pop-artist but what he always brought to the table, as good artists do I think, is an unabashed sense of the work itself. Post-modern times require post-modern artists and Koons came at it without shame. His best work, some of which is shown here, really does stand the test of time. His balloon rabbit, made from stainless steel, is an iconic image - I used it as a cassette cover as far back as 1994 - but in the presence of it, you realise how good it really is, unphotographable in a sense, or rather, its reflective surface will reflect back the photographer, so its impossible to get a "clean" picture of it; also, being a 3 dimensional object, its appearance on postcards and the like reduces it to something less than it is, a flat Warhol surface, rather than the Oldenberg readymade that it is more akin to. Similarly, his floating basketballs are things of delicate wonder. You can see where Hirst got his ideas from maybe, though here we get the title "One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank" rather than "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living." Koons doesn't like the word kitsch to describe his work, as that's an arbitration on taste, and in many ways, his work has always been about stripping back the pretension of art to being - like Warhol's soapboxes and soup tins - something that you can imagine anywhere.<br />
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The exhibition at the Ashmolean has this first room of Koons classics, which are great to see, but do somewhat diminish what is there besides. The centrepiece of the second room is "Balloon Venus" which sees Koons playing similar games of reappropriation with "antiquities". This dialogue with art is why the show is at the Ashmolean, though oddly, its not really the Ashmolean's art that is being discussed. The superstar artist of course can plonk his franchise anywhere in the world for a few months before moving on. This room of "antiquities" - paintings scribbled on, or large scale recreations of other's works, seems more crass, though they are as bold as what came before. Its clearly monied art that exists because of that money. Its impressive but somewhat lacking in either wonder or humour. I preferred the third room, the Gazing Ball series again finds recreated classical sculptures and the like, but has a blue glazing ball added to each - these, apparently, can be found in the mid-west, as ornaments outside peoples houses, little baubles which you can look in and be reflected back in. They reminded me of the sort of art you see in Dr. Who, in a museum of the future, where Mona Lisa's and David's have been given a SF makeover. Yet, this isn't his purpose - the glazing balls are an American commonplace, which doesn't make them work quite as well in a British context where they just appear exotic.<br />
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So it was a small, but interesting show. In the video accompanying it, Koons, looking less like the Anthony Robbins/Jim Carrey of old and a more groomed Nicholas Cage, or perhaps more accurately, a well-heeled business school professor, talks about how having a family changes his views on things. There are no sex games with Cicciolina in this show then. The<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/feb/10/jeff-koons-ashmolean-museum-oxford-review-master-of-deflection"> Guardian review </a>has plenty of pictures, but I agree with the conclusion really, its a show of surface, not much more.<br />
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Back in Manchester I managed to get along to Niamos centre, an old ballroom in Hulme which has its own grandeur and is now back in use as a community-run venue. There was a music conference, Unconference, with the band PINS performing alongside others. They have changed lineup since I last saw them, and added more electronica to their garage pop, but it as a fine gig regardless, despite the "suits" in the audience not being as lively as their usual crowds.<br />
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I then got over to <a href="https://buryartmuseum.co.uk/Sculpture-Centre-Exhibitions">Bury Art Gallery</a>, where one of my favourite local artists, Sarah Hardacre was exhibiting as part of the "Architecture Now" exhibition. Her prints and collages appear alongside cardboard building designs by Maurice Shapero. I've usually only seen one or two of Sarah's pieces at a time, but its instructive to see a much larger group of them for even if the format is unchanging - seventies porn pictures juxtaposed over urban scenes - what she does with them changes a lot, and seeing a whole group, with some Bury specific ones, made me smile more than the overinflated Koons work did.<br />
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Smiling was the order of the day at the third show I've seen recently - with <a href="https://www.paradise-works.com/new-page-1">Cherry Tennyson</a>'s solo show at Paradise Works. Half of Two Days of Everything brings her work from out of the studio and into the gallery; more readymades, more collages, but here with artefacts rather than paintings. The work feels fully realised, with aspects that are surreal or abstract, but with an impact that seems more subtle than that might apply. These works seem quite architectural in their own way; quite "made". Its on for the following 2 Saturdays, so well worth a visit if you can find the time.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-60170538431232050132019-03-17T13:51:00.002-07:002019-03-17T13:51:50.887-07:00This weekIts a busy week coming up with some excellent events on in Manchester.<div>
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On Thursday its the new Castlefield Gallery exhibition launch, Ever since CUBE gallery was closed there's been a gap in terms of design-led exhibitions, so its good to see this new show, <a href="https://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/event/preview-undoing/">UnDoing</a>, a collaboration with Manchester School of Architecture. </div>
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Also on Thursday, <a href="https://www.brightersound.com/event/bsn-international-showcase/">Brighter Sound</a> have a cross-border collaboration, Both Sides Now, featuring emerging musicians from Liverpool and Helsinki, with mentoring from Manchester's LoneLady. A panel discussion will be followed by a one-off performance of new work. </div>
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Then on Friday I'm looking forward to a talk from Kaye Mitchell, whose new book Avant-garde fiction of the 1960s, coincides with the reissue of Ann Quin's "Berg". Its £3 to attend and on at the <a href="https://www.andotherstories.org/events/ann-quin-the-avant-garde/">Anthony Burgess Foundation</a>. </div>
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It's also the launch of the <a href="https://homemcr.org/event/viva-spanish-latin-american-festival-2019/">Viva Spanish Film Festival </a>at HOME all evening. </div>
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Then on Saturday, I'm performing poetry at a night of DJs, music and words as a benefit for the male suicide prevention charity <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1462269657243331/">C.A.L.M. King Kenton's Greedy Band Selection</a> costs £5 and takes place at Gulliver's on Saturday. Doors from 6pm, it all starts at 6.30pm, and I'll be on around 7.30pn. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-42203343663689606782019-03-05T14:16:00.002-08:002019-03-05T14:16:36.878-08:00All Our Pasts and FuturesWhen David Bowie came back with his "The Next Day" album it was knowingly an album that mined the various stages of his career. Not because that was all he could do (as the future-gazing "Blackstar" would prove) but because it was some of the things he could do. The cover of that album was a pop art collage recreation of "Heroes", belatedly (since it didn't sell that well), one of his most iconic records.<br />
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He is not alone. Zappa's first three albums were cut up collage affairs that mined a multifaceted musical past and pasted them together. In the years to come he would separate out these instincts - so "Hot Rats" was his funky jazz album, "Cruisin' with Ruben and the Jets" his doo wop album etc. There are artists who have a thin seam they mine - maybe Dylan is like this, but he mines it deep. In retrospect the reviled double album "Self Portrait" is the most emblematic of this. Here is Dylan explicitly as magpie. Mark E. Smith was similar: always sounding like the Fall whether he took in garage rock, rockabilly, disco, cheesy '70s pop. British Beat, Krautrock or even Zappa.<br />
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I like to think musicians as they get older are able to pull in a wider palette than their forbears. As someone who has only ever used synthesizers in my music I've been always a bit in denial about those forbears - trying (in my own head at least) to emulate non-synth musicians. But I had a bit of a revelation before Christmas when I listened to my albums from '85 onwards in order. I saw that I was working my way through the various archetypes of electronic music - on the way to my own version of this. In 1985 it wasn't very fashionable to sound like early 1970s Tangerine Dream, but that was clearly what I sounded like; but a year later I was stumbling through early electronic new wave like the Normal and Cabaret Voltaire, and onto to electronic pop like Human League, before heading into New Order, house music and maybe rave. Yet my first house track was a few months before I'd heard Jack Your Body, so I went from being an imitator of past styles to being an unconscious designer of future ones.<br />
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Listening to my music over the last few years, this mix of the retro and futuristic is something that is at the heart of my musical project. I am past, present and future, but then I always was. Imitators often become the thing they tried to imitate - so Dylan is our examplar of Greenwich folk, or Depeche Mode quickly became the biggest electronic band in the world. I can't pretend any such power for my own music of course, but I think there's a sense that a steady sticking to the same electronica means that its possible to step outside of time somehow and just become part of the historical narrative you were initially imitating.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-52987731847360879792019-02-03T04:16:00.002-08:002019-02-03T04:51:00.035-08:00Resisting Conservative Narratives in Culture<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The 1930s have long been on my mind. Weimar art and culture is a vibrant pot that continues to be worth stirring, and its ending as the Nazis came to power, remains the lesser tragedy, given what happened in the war, but nonetheless a tragedy that still resonates. And given that memories fade, or history gets rewritten, art continues to be a rebuke against forgetting.<br />
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Listening to Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), and reading about its genesis, its fascinating to consider the piece in its relationship between high and low culture, and between the mainstream and the avant garde. Gay's Beggar's Opera was a popular success, the word "opera" being appropriated for a song cycle that appropriated the best of popular culture of the day. It was clearly something that Brecht and Weill picked up on - and sure enough - from its first performance they had a popular success on their hands, that nonetheless attracted the middle classes to the work, as a "must see."<br />
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British and American audiences have mostly come through its songs - "Mack the Knife", the English translation of its most popular song, was one of the most popular standards of the 1950s, widely recorded by a range of popular crooners. By the 1970s Weill/Brecht were well established in the repertoire, and with suitably strong reputations in their respective fields; but its interesting that its been those on the avant garde who have been drawn into interpretations - at least within the pop field, particularly of later work such as "Alabama Song." The drama (and decadance) of 1930s Berlin finds favour with David Bowie, Klaus Nomi, Marc Almond, Ian McCullough and others, whilst being somewhat expunged from the commercial record. It would be a brave and nuanced performer who would bring their work to the X Factor or The Voice.<br />
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I've recently been listening a lot to Lotte Lenya, who appears here, and was Weill's partner. Her long career included a role in popular culture as Rosa Klebb in the Bond movie "From Russia With Love", as well as the appearance of one her albums appearing on the cover of Dylan's "Bringing it all back home." For those of us with a prediliction towards the international avant garde, its strange how certain erstwhile popular works ("Mack the Knife" is probably as famous as a song can get), can retain their cultural currency.<br />
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It's no coincidence that both The Beggar's Opera and Die Dreigroschenoper have remained popular works as well as having great success in their day - for I think they have a universality that cleverly taps into various cultural currents. The avant garde, if its anything, is a hybrid, a shaking up of parts: no wonder it is drawn to collage, and that can be re-purposed, think of Burroughs and Gysin's "cut ups" or Kathy Acker's rewriting of classic works. As in literature, so in art, with Hannah Hoch, Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton and others; and in music with sampling, and unorthodox covers, as well as the cyclical influence that sees Philip Glass reappropriating Bowie and Eno's Heroes and Low to make his most "traditionally" classical pieces.<br />
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What I think this shows is that modernity is very rarely derived from nowhere, or without influence, but whether we are talking about high culture or popular culture art forms that are relentlessly squeezed into their prevailing codes are unlikely to extend the form, and eventually become sclerotic and derivative.<br />
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Art is a threat because it does not necessarily respond to the prevailing narrative of the times, politically and culturally; and also because, as it is often non-explicit in its politics, it is open to interpretation which the sloganising of the time doesn't allow. In the excellent, though somewhat frightening, TV drama Brexit: the Uncivil War, the successful "leave" campaign is reduced down to the manipulations of backroom psychopaths, manipulating the message through algorithms and simple repetition to the extent that a complex relationship is reduced to a yes, a no, as required by the dumb logic of the plebiscite. In this its clear that art - because it can influence not just the way we think, but how we process complex worlds - becomes even more important if we are to retain a free-thinking capacity. It is no surprise that from the Nazi's crackdown on "degenerate art", to Stalin's policing of its composers, to China's cultural revolution, to the killing fields of Cambodia, to the Lord Chancellor's ban on what could be seen on a British stage, to McCarthyism, and now to the pulling of arts education from schools, the refusal to listen to "experts" across all kinds of fields in Britain and the U.S. today; that culture threatens conservative and repressive narratives in our society by questioning their very validity, and giving us the tools to do so.<br />
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A nostalgic art is one that is unchanged and unchanging, so that even fierce iconoclasts of the past become packaged. The sugar coated "Imagine" becomes a regular on Smooth.FM whilst the context behind it, Amsterdam bed-ins, the avant garde albums with Ono, are conveniently ignored; classical music hides behind the tailcoats and opera glasses of upper class entertainment. In The Uncivil War, the actors playing Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, two media-savvy careerists who've been amongst the architects of Brexit, see each other from their private boxes either side of some classical performance. This is where power happens, amongst culture that can no longer shock, or inform. The poetry festival, the blockbuster art show, these are also manifestations of this power, locking people out through their customs or price even as they pretend to an egalitarian. Outside, in a dingy warehouse or pop up space or dive bar, above a pub or in someone's bedsit, is where art is actually happening; if there is a resistance (there is always a resistance) this is where it begins.<br />
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And yet, we live in worrying times - and art, like civil protest, is beginning to be repressed as a result. The arrest and imprisonment of civil rights activists against fracking (which was successfully quashed on appeal) had the "couldn't make it up" scenario of happening when a particular judge gave judgement, despite having family connections in the energy industry, and - perhaps a sign of the small pool from which the ruling class comes from - coming from a line of judges which included the overseer of the Pendle witch trials.<br />
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More recently, and very <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-46932655">shocking,</a> is the arrest and suspended imprisonment sentences of drill musicians for performing their work live is perhaps the most shocking overreach of police and judicial power in the arts that we have seen in over twenty years. Skengdo and AM, names new to me, but big enough in their music community to be playing to large crowds, join a list of artists targeted for their work. It is a dark time.<br />
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With Brexit continuing to suck all the air from the room, its easy to forget how little Europe or being part of the European union has been part of our artistic discussions over the years. There's often a parochialism about our island nation that turns inward whenever there appears to be a threat or a difference that we don't understand. Like the cloud that covers the land in Ishiguro's metaphorical novel "The Buried Giant", we prefer the mist of isolation, than to see the ships arriving on the horizon - and that seems to be whether they bring enemies or new goods to trade. We've often, as a nation, punched above our weight creatively, benefiting as often as not, from our isolation, our cold, damp winters, and our English language; but also that's a chimera; many of our most important artists are imports - think Handel, T.S. Eliot, Epstein, even popular favourite Freddy Mercury - or from our polyglot margins, Celts, Scots, Irish, or imports from an English-speaking empire. Our last two Nobel writers - Lessing and Ishiguro - as examples.<br />
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This is not necessarily to aim for a political art, but to appreciate how political art can be in and of itself. Brecht clearly recognised the potency of reviving the Beggar's Opera in a different context, and it flew; for a contemporary Britain our narratives need to move past the sentimental. Even the uproar around Danny Boyle's attempts to create a corrective narrative for his Olympics opening ceremony in 2012, now seem partially obscured by what was clearly - in an age of austerity - a festival of bread and circuses. The avant garde - if such exists - and if we are even allowed to use such as French term (for which there is no direct English equivalent) has always been an international exchange of ideas, above and beyond the differences of language and culture; it is resisted by Putin in imprisoning Pussy Riot just as it was in other places and other times. Here and now, we see that government funding for the arts becomes more and more a creature of political whim; May's attempt for a post-Brexit festival of Britain could well fall flat on the impossibility of her uninspiring leadership delivering on any kind of Brexit that doesn't destroy the country. The funding will no doubt stay in place, the chosen artists may well be ones willing to bite the hand that feeds, but as ever, the scale and majesty of officially sanctioned art, can act to nullify even the most experimental of gestures.<br />
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At the same time - this weekend in Glasgow to see art - and hearing about a range of D.I.Y. and grassroots events in Manchester, our own resistance is far from subdued. Art on its own as is never enough, as the crowds flocking to Die Dreigschenoper would soon be going about their normal lives, fleeing or dead, or part of the nationalist war machine; its easy to forget (as we stockpile tins and bottled water for a "no deal" Brexit) that we need bread and circuses. Let's be careful who is providing them however, and what are their motives.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-5628939382013811352018-12-21T06:10:00.002-08:002018-12-21T06:38:16.999-08:00More Than Words: Book Design in Contemporary PoetrySometimes you only notice things when seeing from a different angle. Having recently moved house, I began unpacking my books, putting all the poetry books in one place for the first time. There are some striking designs in poetry history: the wonderful typographical covers of sixties and seventies Faber Thom Gunns; the stark look of New Directions beat poets; the uniform Stephen Raw covers of my many Carcanet books; the quirky seventies chic of Brian Patten's slim volumes; Penguin's classic Modern Poets series; the Pop Art appropriation of anthologies from Donald Hall and Al Alvarez.<br />
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Amidst all of these familiar covers, I began to notice that the most striking volumes were often much more recent ones, from tiny or barely existent presses, from the more interesting of our current crop of poets. The shelves quickly filled with a hotch-potch of different sized books, some reflecting on the work inside - wide pages, square covers chosen to fit in the internal content.<br />
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Its always been the way that far more than prose, poetry publishers have had to accomodate different line lengths, and different page designs as a result. The "long line" has challenged the uniform design of many a press. Yet without a broader page size a lot of contemporary poetry falters, feels cramped in a way that its not. Recent examples include "Sea Change" by Jorie Graham and "One Big Self" by C.D. Wright, the latter being testimonies from prisoners, and so having something of the verbatim of prose, those organised as poetry.<br />
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The importance of doing justice to the work is not a new thing. Ashbery's long poem "Flowchart" appears in a suitably large format hardback for instance. Even recent anthologies - such as the relaunched Penguin Modern Poets - and small format magazines such as Poetry, have tended to change the "direction" of wider poems, or have fold out pages. </div>
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In the background of all this are the wider changes in the publishing industry, where at the same time as major players reduce their lists of marginal sellers (poetry being one), the slack has been picked up by the ease in which a press can be set up and in a very short time established. Yet its also a sign of how open poets generally have been to producing work in a number of formats and for a number of publishers. </div>
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The pamphlet remains one of the entry-level routes into poetry. Pamphlet series such as the Salt Modern Voices one I was published in, as well as Faber's new poets, have been a good opening gambit for new poets. Yet, more established names have also found the pamphlet works as a perfect model for side projects. Cheap to produce, in limited runs, pamphlets tend to the ephemeral, and as a result we see some of the nicest examples of design - either because they are a one off, part of a generic series, or simply through the accident of materials and publishing method. Minimalism is employed to strong effect on the below examples from Rhys Trimble, Amy De'ath, Matthew Welton and J.T. Welsch - artisan covers offset the poems which are often presented in a very unadorned way, with little design beyond the use of white space. Things of simple beauty. </div>
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But the pamphlet is not just an occasional project, but a simple distribution mechanism, easy for poets to carry around, to sell at gigs, and short and cheap enough to encourage purchase. For just a few pounds you get to sample the poets work. In some ways the American term "chapbook" seems a better one - and some pamphlets are as long as "single collections" would have been thirty or forty years ago. In some cases, and with prolific presses such as Knives, Forks and Spoons, its hard to see where the gap between pamphlet and collection is. KFS have adopted - as did Salt with their Modern Voices, or Faber with its new poets pamphlets - a uniform design. This again cuts down on cost and production time but also creates a signature that is itself visually exciting, and perhaps even collectible. In the case of If P Then Q (Holly Pester below) the limitations of publishing platform Lulu encourage a more austere and minimalist design which has its own clarity to it. </div>
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For the bigger independent presses such as Bloodaxe and Carcanet their own "uniform" designs have perhaps begun to look a little overly familiar over the years despite their excellence. Stephen Raw's Carcanet covers have themselves been highly influential, and still have gravitas (see the 30th anniversary Ashbery below) but we've seen recent books from the publisher, from James Davies and Matthew Welton with a new aesthetic, from designer Luke Allan, which also reflects the particular nature of these poets, experimental, sequential. Similarly, take Bloodaxe and put an artist-poet on their roster and a new look appears, as with the Heather Phillipson below, designed by Phillipson and fellow poet-artist Ed Atkins. </div>
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Yet its not just an outward aesthetic that new poetry design is reflecting but a range of artistic decisions to do with what we consider a poem at all. The willingness of ZimZalla, Knives, Forks and Spoons and others to put the time and resource into creating more complex creations such as Leanne Bridgewater and Philip Davenport's books below, reflects the hybrid nature of the contents. The books themselves are art objects. Slightly out of scope for here, but ZimZalla has pioneered a range of different presentations of poetry, often as far from a book as you can imagine. Bridgewater and Davenport are both artist-writers and so the works have a coherence. The latter oversaw a major anthology and exhibition of visual poetry. </div>
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The thriving avant garde scene in Manchester means that quite a number of these presses are local, and attached to the now ended reading season "The Other Room." A book table was always available there. This year, a newer press ran and independent book fair in Manchester - and Dostoevsky Wannabe will be repeating this in early February. Their own books are another small press aesthetic - echoing old Penguin/Pelican designs - and again, using print on demand, in this case the much improved Amazon CreateSpace to create their books. The two books Richard Barrett has put out with them - "u make me laugh in a different way" and "The Acts", with Steve Hanson - cover a range of literary styles, prose, poetry, hybrid work, but the shared cover aesthetic makes all of their books desirable. If DW are using the new technologies, another local designer Lucy Wilkinson is using older techniques to create unique and highly desirable little booklets and books - again crossing over between text, poetry, prose and visual art. Her Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers imprint is politically charged but aesthetically driven. </div>
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Over the last few years Tom Chivers' Penned in the Margins has become an imprint of excellence, and their design has grown to match. His own 2nd collection was radically white text on black background from Test Centre in 2015, so design is clearly at the heart of his own practice. Penned in the Margins books are always attractive such as "Spacecraft" below from John McCullough, but their most effective one to date was Luke Kennard's brilliant "Cain" where the last part of the book - has two texts running side by side and the design is critical to the literary aesthetic. </div>
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Such aesthetic considerations are also at the heart of Amy McCauley's recent sold out collection "Oedipa", from Guillemot. Incorporating design on every page, like the Kennard book, such an ambitious layout might have been difficult to do at a reasonable cost a few years ago, but luckily the advances in print technology and digital design mean that even small presses can be highly ambitious. </div>
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Aesthetic considerations are also behind Chris McCabe's "Shad Thames" from a few years ago, which appears in a box, with an envelope of detritus. Just through my door is the new collection from Richard Barrett under the Happy Books imprint, which comes as a glorious yellow square, with each page as vibrant as the inner sleeve of a record cover. This "Face Book" is a great way to end 2018. Barrett has been published by a few of the presses here - and there does seem a wonderfully collaborative nature to the scene in Manchester - and further afield, that is beginning to show great work, but also make it attractive and relevant. </div>
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Clearly I've become attracted to the special edition, the odd work, the vibrant design. Most of these are single author collections - but its clear that representative anthologies of the future will need to be clever in how they present work given the wide range of original sources as to how it appears. Photography, design, collage as well as words are part of this renaissance in book design in contemporary poetry. Your bookshelves aren't designed to hold all of these of course, and there's something both ephemeral and to be cherished about such small run works, which is at one with the vibrancy of the writers who are producing this work. </div>
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The number of poets who are also designers, artists, musicians or performers means that there is always going to be a fluidity beyond the single volume. Some of the best anthologies reflect this, others - like the Herbert/Price "Contraflow on the Super Highway" from last century or this "Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives" anthology from a few years back - are coming from the same D.I.Y. aspect. </div>
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I limited myself in this article to books that I own, but there's clearly lots more out there - and I hope even the bigger presses are taking note - and they probably are - such as the larger footprint of the Danez Smith collection below. Like Shearsman's Lisa Robertson selection the larger cover creates a sense of permanence I think. </div>
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I wanted to finish this survey with a few other favourites that don't fit into a particular category but showcase that in good poetry you can judge a book by its cover. First, the uniform C.B. Editions design, in this case D. Nurkse, covering beautifully presented books, both fiction and poetry. And then striking designs from Christian Bok, Warsan Shire, Keston Sutherland, Agnes Lehoczky and Chris McCabe. If you're buying a poetry book this Christmas look out for any of these - the content and the cover won't disappoint.</div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-89632150474670238032018-12-01T00:59:00.003-08:002018-12-01T00:59:54.190-08:00Books Furnish a Room<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Having just moved house, it means I've also moved around 100 large boxes of books, CDs and records. A month in, and I'm still only some way through the unpacking. This is deliberate accumulation, years rummaging the second hand and charity shops as well as buying new stuff. I seem to have replaced the reading of books with the buying of them.<br />
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That's perhaps a topic for another day. Clearly, building a personal library is different than just buying things to read, and the plethora of literary biographies and lit crit books testifies to that aim. But the library only works of course if you can find the books that you have got. With the internet still being quite stubborn about what is available online, it makes this resource both a valuable one and a frustrating one. There's also something about the context of a book - its font, its cover, its binding - which the virtual can never replicate.<br />
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More people than ever want to be writers, it seems in an age of instant gratification, the far from instant gratification of writing a novel is high on a lot of people's To Do lists. Perhaps this is the inevitable corollary to an educated workforce, many of whom are in dispiriting or uninspiring jobs. Despite all top employers asking for and valuing creativity, you'll find it near impossible to get a creative job without a hell of a lot of luck, graft and probably privilege.<br />
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Yet look at the thousands upon thousands of new flats popping up around Manchester and other cities, and they are hardly endowed with any storage, let alone room for bookshelves. Large glass windows, and integrated kitchen-living spaces reduce the amount of wall space available. We are a society driven by consumption, but have failed to create a space where we can enjoy what we can consume. No wonder the high street is dying to be replaced by "experiences", Years ago a girl at sixth form said she'd much rather spend her little money on a night out than a record, and at the time I disagreed with her - but over the years I guess I became far more outgoing. Yet the endless nights out morph into single memories, just as a pile of records becomes anonymous when hidden in a record case.<br />
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Without the charity shop I'm not sure where all these books would go - but even these seem to be reducing the space given over to books, CDs and DVDs. I reluctantly binned a load of VHS videos, thinking nowhere would take them. The one charity shop I know that has some still has them at 5 for £1. DVDs are going the same way - yet our reliance on paid for and subscription services is a risky one. Just as copyright restrictions meant it was often years before much loved BBC and ITV dramas and comedies made it onto a physical media, so it is nowadays, that the dog-eat-dog world of streaming services can see whole film catalogues disappear, even though absolutely everything appears to be on YouTube in one form or another. CDs are the same - the record industry having killed vinyl, only to see it become a revenue life saver, is rapidly killing CDs even though it remains their biggest selling format. One of the things that's happened is that the living room has been handed over to the tech giants who are far more interested in selling you the air that you breathe (or wifi that you watch) and the forever obsolete devices that act as filters than in offering you personal control over your living space. In the tiny city centre flat, where is the value in finding room for DVDs and the like?<br />
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Books do furnish a room however, and I'm spending the weekend building more bookcases. There still seems to be something noble and valuable in having, say, all Ian McEwan's novels together. But not just that - over the years I've picked up a few gems. I didn't realise I'd got half a dozen books by Jean Rhys for example, though I perhaps don't need three (so far) copies of "Wide Sargasso Sea", or a library of William Golding in their lovely 60s Faber covers, or those Nabokov reissues from the seventies with a uniform font and design. Putting all my poetry books in one place surprises me with the scope - though notably thin on the Picador-Cape-Faber establishment of the last twenty years, which tells its own story - whilst amongst my "most valuable" books (according to Abebooks at least) are several music related titles, as they rarely get reissued.<br />
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The idea of value is one that intrigues me. In a time when our experience of a Cafe Nero or Costa is worth £3 for an hour of contemplation and wifi, usually in a place that is too packed, and untidy, what price a novel? I'd struggle to sell most of mine for more than a penny (plus post and packing) online. Charity shops range from 75p to £3 for often the same book. Though I sometimes complain about Oxfam's prices (on records particularly), I can't criticise them for trying to value the books they sell more than the price of a hot beverage. I undertook an experiment a couple of years ago where I collected books I really loved and bought extra copies from charity shops when I saw them in near mint condition. I then sold them at a book fair for £4 each or 3 for a tenner, with a little bit of a back story. I did surprisingly well. Certain books will always fly off the shelves, the audience, unlike the audience for say, the first 2 Adele albums, is never sated. Recent bestsellers have included "The Handmaid's Tale", "The Great Gatsby" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" though all have been easily available secondhand for years.<br />
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The writers whose time has gone, I suspect are some of the big American boys (mostly boys) who dominate my shelves. The sheer prolificness of Roth, Bellow, Updike, Vidal and Mailer, as well as them being bestsellers in a time when books were read in numbers, means that they are as common as the Eagles' Greatest Hits. Rarity is the only thing that really appoints value, yet books are mass produced objects, so outside of small press poetry publications, and genuine first edition hardbacks, is there much that has value? The words should be enough of course, and its fascinating to note the amount of different covers that classics have had over the years, each reprint giving a book marketing department a chance for subtle changes or total overhauls. Beyond the big names, I'm struck by the number of books that already seem forgotten ready for pulping. You can wonder why a book like "Stoner" could be resurrected as a 21st century hit, but then when you see the sheer number of novels, good, bad and indifferent that have never won prizes or been otherwise recognised, its quite humbling as a writer who would still like to add one to the pile.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-7038516731267551872018-10-04T23:47:00.000-07:002018-10-04T23:47:24.721-07:00A Cultural CatastropheHistory moves like an iceberg cracks, first slowly and hardly noticeably, and then with an almighty jolt, as the fissure becomes a calamitous crack. Brexit feels ever more like that iceberg. It is not a catastrophe built in days, weeks or months, though the running commentary since the vote will no doubt be subject of quite a few history books, but in years. There was a quote on Facebook from Margaret Thatcher, then under Ted Heath's leadership, from 1975, in favour of being at the heart of Europe. That's a time that anyone under forty will have no memory of - yet the iceberg was there.<br />
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Increasingly it becomes clearer that the destruction of the European project is a longstanding aim of both a certain crazed variety of elected Conservative politician, but also of a shadowing monied class - international in focus, but parochial in concerns. The "why" of the anti-Europe obsession remains an oblique one grounded in fear, history, and self-interest. Both the right and a certain strand of the anti-European left are prone to conspiracy theories - yet there doesn't need to be a theory, when there is obvious collusion. What those forces are, are partly economic, but increasingly I'm seeing them as cultural. The "culture wars" is currently playing out a potentially catastrophic round in America with the election of a right winger to the supreme court, putting at risk Roe v. Wade, and with it women's autonomy over their body; such madness sometimes seems far away, but in the fringes of the Conservative party conference, a mix of toxic ideas and policies - where the state should have no intervention in our fiscal freedoms, but at the same time should be able to curtail any of our cultural ones - is the tune playing in the background whenever Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg speaks. I'm reminded of that episode of Dr. Who, where John Simms, playing The Master, has a constant refrain in his ear. Such a tinnitus that it cannot be got rid of.<br />
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Yet under the British system, the worst kind of government is the weak and the propped up one. John Major, so often given a free pass now he's an elder statesman, oversaw the privatisation of the railways, a disaster that continues to blight millions of peoples lives every day. Moreover, the long, limp years before Tony Blair's "New Labour" put the Conservatives (and the country) out of their misery was a period where a minority government failed to achieve anything. Yet in those years the iceberg continued to crack, modern life was held back, as those in office, but not in power did what they could. And here's the thing - when a government can hardly manage a majority about which restaurant they'll eat at that evening, the idle hands will find other work to do. This is the more benign explanation of Theresa May's announcement that it is not only skilled workers that this country wants, but only those earning £50,000 a year or more. At 51, I've not ever even come close to this figure in my career, yet it is not those, like myself, in everyday jobs, that this is aimed at - but a wider array of creative professions, particularly outside of hothouse London.<br />
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It seems that alongside the sidelining of the arts in schools under that arch villain Michael Gove, so that a rebalancing towards science and maths can only happen in fossilised Britain through burning up the opportunities that the creative arts gives, the unspoken assumption between so much of what is currently going on politically is also cultural. A far right, conveniently religious when it suits them, but rarely finding inspiration in a Jesus who loved the poor, begins to want a serf class, understanding full well that you control a population not just through holding back their financial aspirations, but also their cultural ones.<br />
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I grew up in the heart of Brexit Britain. The West Midlands is often a bellwether for politics in this country, its large number of small manufacturers, still revered status as "workshop of the world", and current place as an onshore logistics hub for London and the North, means that in good economic times it is bouyant, and in bad times it falls back on itself. Given that it is globalisation that powers the warehouses, big box stores, and business parks of that part of the world, you would think that a cosmopolitanism might have come with the access to cheap goods. But that's to underestimate how cultural all this is. Last time I was in Walsall for any length of time, the idea that it was a Brexit town was not at all fanciful - it wasn't just the poverty - cheap shops selling cheap goods and power quality food abounded - but the cultural poverty. The wonderful New Art Gallery sits alone at one end of the town, stubbornly unable to regenerate the area around it. There are no independent shops or artisan pop ups in Walsall. The one record shop that opened briefly in the Victorian arcade closed as quickly as it opened. A town with a diverse and long standing Asian community doesn't seem to have the vibrant colours and smells of the fresh food market place at least not in the city centre. More recently, that other bellwether of economic life, the Marks & Spencer's, where my mum used to work on the tills for a bit of Christmas money each year, closed down adding another empty unit to a high street that has in recent years lost Woolworths and BHS. I mention Walsall partly because <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2018/sep/17/brexit-breakdown-part-1-why-are-the-tories-winning-walsall">John Harris</a> in the Guardian has recently gone there, wanting to find out what makes Brexit Britain tick.<br />
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Growing up near Walsall, it was a microcosm of small towns everywhere - a place, when young to spend a Saturday afternoon - a couple of good record shops, books and magazines from the WH Smiths, and it closed down at five o'clock, where the main cultural activity was buying the "pink" sports paper as it came out, and checking the results in the window of the Rumbelow's. Most of my classmates left school at sixteen whilst 1 in 10 of us went to sixth form, then university. Birmingham was where we mostly got our culture fix whether shopping or music. Walsall and Cannock had small colleges - what used to be called technical colleges - but weren't university towns. It means that young people leave - less of an issue when few went to university, but more so when nearly half the population does. The ones "left behind" never thought of themselves of being "left behind" but as the ones who stayed: family ties are strong, community ties are strong. Working class culture often manifests itself in odd ways. The soap operas - Birmingham set Crossroads as much as the northern Coronation Street - and music - heavy metal and Elvis depending on your age and generation, were no different than elsewhere. There's a heavily filtered version of mainstream culture that you forget has a pervasiveness until you go back there. The charity shops are filled with "South Pacific", "The King and I", Bert Kaempfert, James Last and the like same as anywhere. People like their spicy food - the balti was a Birmingham invention after all - and they like their cars and their dogs. I sometimes think that the Brexit worm could grow in these places, because of two things - those of us who left and had little reason to come back, and landlocked in the middle of the country, our culture had become stymied, held back, earthy and earthbound, culture, like everything there, needs to be a solid one based upon real things. There is little room for mystery. Heavy metal, the area's one true cultural innovation of the last fifty years, is a manifestation of that normalcy, even though it comes with a countercultural belligerency.<br />
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The sweep of cultural influence can only go so far before becoming more a whisper than a roar. If you think, as I did growing up, of Europe as a newly available vista, mysterious, nearby, but accessible only by some effort - passport, plane, new language - that sense of promise can be invigorating: but it never leant itself to anything more than the package holiday or wanting to get away. For those who stayed or went back, culture remains white bread rather than pannini.<br />
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The 52 per cent includes some like the diabolical Farage who themselves have European partners and children, and yet still voted to "leave." What "leave" meant is still open to debate. Going through Walsall and Brownhills shortly after the vote I remember thinking I wasn't surprised that they'd voted for Brexit. Whatever dividend Europe gives, culturally and financially, gets laundered through London, then the big cities, so that little is left by the time it arrives at these doors. When you are concerned about your job, your family etc. culture can no doubt seem an add-on. Those of us who craved an escape from Saturday night light entertainment and the like, can now find anything they want on the internet - yet the rabbit holes we go down are likely to be the ones that are familiar to us - whereas the back pages of Melody Maker and the NME, the late night listens to John Peel, the revolving carousel of Picadors in the WH Smiths, these were lifeboats from the Titanic of my life, crashing into that iceberg. I see it now in the slowest of motions. The familiar names from school on my Facebook page are often static ones - others have gone, disappeared; some have died - a few, like myself, moved away, some across the world; the things shared are everyday memes, a lazy cultural currency that pays for less each time.<br />
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Yet in a country that still has a growing population, where many different nationalities live and work and speak English, where religion is only a minor pursuit, and where cultural identity (for the English at least) is more about what it is not, than a shared "what is", where our cultural bonding is more likely to be over an American or Danish boxset than the BBC, where those archetypes of literature - the priest, the soldier, the politician, the doctor, the professor - seem less achievable or desirable jobs than cosplaying Pokemon characters, you can begin to see that small shifts in how we are taught, spoken to, manipulated are important ones. When the Nazis first identified "decadent art" they didn't hide it or burn it or persecute the artists as they later would, but actually put it on show in Berlin, and encouraged all to go and see it and mock the pretensions. It doesn't take much though to take away the cultural oxygen from those who might need it most - those who are deprived of it. The middle classes can continue, as they did in apartheid South Africa, to access "dangerous" texts under the banner of art; what is worrying about Britain today is that one of our national characteristics, creativity, is being stifled, deliberately, as part of the cracking of the iceberg. From learning foreign languages, to the books we read at school and for pleasure, to what we are encouraged to study in school and university, a certain illiteracy amongst the ruling classes, combined with the reactionary "little Englander" paucity of ideas behind Brexit, are heading us to a cultural catastrophe, adrift, bereft of meaning, unable to articulate what it is we have lost.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-71645488312675070532018-09-29T03:07:00.003-07:002018-09-29T03:22:57.282-07:00Slade House by David MitchellI've not touched in with David Mitchell for a while, having not read his last major novel "The Bone Clocks", from which some ideas in "Slade House" are pulled out. In essence this is a book of ghost stories. The Slade House of the title did once exist but has since been demolished and built over, but once every nine years - relating to the stories here - its becomes corporeal again, accessible via a small hidden gate in a wall. The tropes of the classic ghost story are all here - the haunted house, the secret garden, and the two mysterious twins who inhabit this place. The story behind what it is, is something stranger and more in the fantasy genre than in the classic ghost story, but the tropes are ably handled.<br />
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Mitchell has always been such an adept writer that the many different landscapes in his novels mean that it sometimes appears he can turn his hand to anything, and you can tell he leaps with glee on the ideas here. In the first story, set in a recognisably drab seventies, a young boy is dragged by his mother who is a struggling classical pianist, to play at the big house. On arrival he is met by a boy his own age who seems as much a loner as he is. Mitchell has previously written about growing up in the seventies in "Black Swan Green", the book this most resembles in his past works, as its also a novel that is at the same made up of somewhat distinct stories. Here the stories are sequential, one taking place every nine years. The best is the first - "The Right Sort" - where Nathan is our narrator. A bright but troubled child, possibly suffering from Asperger's or similar, he's a beguiling narrator, more perceptive than all the adult's around him, but also, with his own skewed view of the world, unable to fully understand what is happening to him. His parents are separated and his father is in "Rhodesia" (it's set in the seventies when that was still its name), where he has gone to visit. So unlike his uncomplicated, macho father, he's now tagging along with his distracted, artistic mother. For the first time in the garden of Slade House he meets Jonah Grayer, one of two twins who live there. Time begins to bend, and what appeared to be a magical place, turns into anything but.<br />
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The stories that follow take up the plot at nine yearly intervals. Mitchell has to be applauded in the invention he shows - so that rather than each visitation of Slade House into the real world being a repeat of the past one, it also shows changes, as the "operandi" of the two souls who inhabit it - the Grayer twins - becomes clearer.<br />
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I read the novel quickly on a short flight to Brussels and back and its as readable as all its work, but, as Graham Greene might have put it, one of his "entertainments." For all Mitchell's gifts, the one place I sometimes finds he struggles with is in writing about the contemporary everyday Britain. The second story, where a sexist policeman is our narrator, feels cliched in the extreme, whilst the third, about a group of nineties students at a party, also doesn't entirely ring true. Combining this with the fantasy elements forms an uneasy mix and tone. He's on a surer footing when telling the story of the twins' lives, as telepaths who learnt esoteric arts - this is Mitchell at his storytelling best, far away from the every day. It's certainly said to be standalone from "The Bone Clocks" but its a reminder I need to read that novel. All the stories here have their merits and feed on from each other and its a very clever book, with a satisfyingly ghoulish ending. So certainly an enjoyable read, but not essential by any means.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-17018421940971534632018-09-06T14:48:00.001-07:002018-09-06T14:48:31.457-07:00Lit in September.Hideously busy, with one thing and another, so this is an inarticulate list. Buy, go to, check out.<br />
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Michael Conley read from his new fiction collection tonight. Those who have seen him read know that Michael's great skill is to take ideas not just as far as they can go, but further. His story about a group of seals is another of his great animal stories - though he's equally as adept at finding absurdity in the human. <a href="https://thisissplice.co.uk/showcase/michael-conley/">Flare and Falter</a> is out now from new Birmingham based publisher Splice. Ably supported by local readers, Kate Feld, Tania Hershman, Abi Hines, Sarah Clare Conlon and Steve Smythe, it was a lovely evening at Didsbury's Metropolitan.<br />
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This Saturday is the ever excellent <a href="https://creativeindustriestrafford.net/forthcoming-events/2018/9/8/northern-lights-writers-conference-2018">Northern Lights </a>writing conference at the Waterside in Sale, Creative Industries Trafford now venerable event. Despite a plethora of writers and writing opportunities in Manchester, there's never been that much training or support for literary types, so this is a one day conference at a reasonable price that offers a great opportunity for networking, masterclasses and topping up your professional development as a writer. Should still be tickets if you are free on Saturday. Past keynotes have all been excellent - from A.L. Kennedy, Will Self and others - and this year's should be equally good, as its Chocolat author Joanne Harris, already a formidable social media presence, I expect a feisty opening before the day's wide range of workshops.<br />
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Then next Friday, its the launch of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/317248342401144/">"We Were Strangers"</a>, a book of short stories inspired by "Unknown Pleasures" the iconic first Joy Division album. Nearly 40 years after its release, this album - the only one released in Ian Curtis's lifetime - is now an acknowledge classic. The cover of this anthology, designed by Confingo's regular designer Zoe Maclean, is a nod to Peter Saville's original artwork. Edited by Manchester prize shortlisted author Richard V. Hirst, it is being launched with a reading at Waterstones in Manchester on Friday 13th September, including Booker longlistee, Sophie Mackintosh, alongside Zoe Lambert, Nicholas Royle and David Gaffney. Its sure to be a good night.<br />
The book is released today, and on sale online from <a href="http://www.confingopublishing.uk/">Confingo Publishing </a>in Didsbury.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-12614553017559098252018-08-25T03:32:00.001-07:002018-08-25T03:32:29.550-07:00The Viaduct by David WheldonThere was a brief moment in the early 1980s where strange, short minimal novels, often set in abstract or non-realistic worlds, were being published, partly as the influence of Ballard and Carter seeped into the works of the next generation of writers, and partly, I think, through a sense of longing for a more European cultural scene. Britain, with its rhetoric of stability against any kind of political revolution, is not an obvious place for the stateless work of art, yet our writers - perhaps knowingly hemmed in by our island state, have often dreamt of an elsewhere, or another time - whether a "Flatland", a "News from Nowhere" or the future found through "The Time Machine." Of course, it was also a way of coming to terms with the trauma of the post-war, where, it might be said, we had survivor's guilt. The British response to the Second World War was so often a humorous one, think "Dad's Army". Writers of a more serious inclination were likely to see Europe through a narrow lens, and in the distance, and there books reflected this displacement.<br />
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Alongside "Riddley Walker", "The White Hotel", "Utz" and"The Cement Garden", we should perhaps include the debut novel by David Wheldon, "The Viaduct." Wheldon is still writing (a recent story in <a href="http://www.confingopublishing.uk/product-page/c%C3%B5nfing%C5%8D-8-autumn-2017-hi-res-pdf-download">Confingo </a>for instance), and I only came across his name through recommendations from David Rose and Nicholas Royle. At the Old Pier Bookshop in Morecambe yesterday I came across his debut "The Viaduct" on the way home and read it in a single sitting.<br />
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The viaduct remains long after the railway has gone, yet it towers above the anonymous city. A man is walking his dog along the viaduct when another man approaches him and asks what time the train goes and where from. The man tells him the railway was closed a long time before, but of course the vast viaduct still dominates the skyline. The man (later known as "A") has been a political prisoner, but these earlier scene settings - we see the police visiting his ex-partner in the hope that she is hiding him and they can recapture him for another trial - are merely a prelude. For once he is seen, the man gets chased along the viaduct and only escapes by getting rid of his backpack which contains his seditious manuscript.<br />
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He comes into contact with two travellers who tell him he is safe now - that the people in the city will never cross over a certain barbed wire border. We later discover that the ownership of the railway line has been handed over to the various towns and villages it passes through. He joins these two travellers, again unnamed, one is a simple man and a thief who only speaks in sentences he has learnt from others, whilst the other is an outcast for a different reason - he has epileptic fits which change his personality - and he prefers to walk the railway than risk the embarassment of where he came from. This motley crew then starts walking the railway line. There is much talk of where they are going, where the terminus might be. "A" as we now call him is curious about the new life but soon becomes a traveller like the rest. It is summer so they do not need to go into the towns along the route, but in the winter they often do for food. Similarly, life on the rail is harsh and many travellers die.<br />
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In many ways the tale is a picaresque fable - with the nature of the world as unknown to us as it is to A. The travellers and the town dwellers are two different tribes, keeping a distance from each other - but occasionally interacting. Some of those interactions have led to suspicion - but mostly it is because those on the rail have reasons to be there, whilst those who are settled fear the travellers - don't really know where they are going or why. This otherworldliness is written in a simple, straightforward prose, which makes the reader empathise with A and the other travellers, at the same time, the characters are philosophical ones, questioning the unknown world they are walking through. All have things to hide, are unreliable tellers of their own tales. It is the people in the cities and towns who seem oppressed and provincial and somehow threatening.<br />
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The book is a short one - and at some point tragedy intervenes meaning that A has to leave his fellow travellers, but like any good picaresque, he picks up others along the way. Yet he is more troubled than the others about his destination. The railroad he is on seems endless, some people have even been born on the track and not known any other life. By the time the truth becomes known, there is an inevitability to it.<br />
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It's pointless to ask for an understanding of what Wheldon's world is meant to be - dream world, allegory, future dystopia or Dantesque purgatory - for it exists in a very European tradition of the un-place. Moreover, its strength is something that is beyond the Ballardian trope of imagining a world reduced to a tower block, a traffic island, but something more fundamental. We don't know (like A is Josef K) what he actually did or why, and this is no longer relevant; similarly the railway is surely an allegorical device, like the river Styx might have been for an earlier generation. "Older" travellers remember the railway when it existed, but its almost as if it never did except as a way to delineate the landscape. As the numbers of travellers grow I'm reminded of Magnus Mill's later philosophical book "Three to See the King" or even the film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" - where individuals are compelled to seek a particular place or way of life.<br />
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In some ways the book is unreviewable, despite brilliant notices from William Trevor and Graham Greene on the cover. But despite a few occasional moments that perhaps date it (women are referred to disparagingly by the authorities, like in a seventies sitcom; and in fact women are hardly present at all in the novel), it seems ridiculous that it has entirely disappeared. It's a small masterpiece, particularly for a debut novel, that even half a lifetime after it was written still resonates strongly - the sort of short book that stays with you. As a devotee of early 1980s Picadors often with European authors, it fits snugly into that tradition (though it was published by the Bodley Head and Penguin). In 1983 of course, something else happened in the British book trade. Granta published its special edition about the "20 novelists under 40" and the publicity circus around that could well have drowned out any author not amongst the 20. More than that, it ushered in an age of realisms, satirical, dirty and realism, as well as Booker-friendly historical novels. Like post-punk, a genre that sold very little and was a little too cold and unshouty for mainstream exceptance, this sort of brittle fable has never been well looked on by the publishing mainstream with its desire for TV adaptions and beach reading. That said, it's well worth seeking out.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-48392172464626130582018-08-18T16:15:00.002-07:002018-08-18T16:15:56.667-07:00Farewell, my Lovely by Raymond ChandlerRaymond Chandler's novel "Farewell, my Lovely" is a 1940s noir classic, and rightly so; but its also, like a number of other older books I've read recently - "The Man in the High Castle", "The Day of the Locust" - a very strange novel. I'm not sure whether it is it's strangeness or its familiarity - those noir tropes that Chandler partly invented - that make the book so compelling a read.<br />
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Philip Marlowe is our hero, a down on his luck Private Eye, who is also our slick talking narrator. He is looking for a missing husband, a mundane job, when he sees a man thrown out - literally hurled out - of a bar. Intervening he gets more than he bargained for, coming across the aptly named Moose Malloy, just out of jail and looking for the barmaid or showgirl that he was in love with when he went in. The bar has changed - its now in a black quarter of the city - and the new proprietors don't take kindly to the interruption, but Malloy is not a man to be trifled with - he is 6ft 5inches tall and a size to match. This man mountain literally drags Marlowe upstairs with him, getting him involved even if he didn't intend to be. It doesn't go well - and Marlowe finds himself having to report a killing to the local police, who, in 1940s L.A. aren't particularly interested in a dead black man.<br />
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Marlowe, with nothing much else to do, starts his own investigation, and this is where the convoluted plot kicks in. If Malloy is looking for the mysterious Velma, then this set back is unlikely to stop him. Marlowe tells the police they should look for the lady, but they're more interested in wild goose chases. Marlowe does the basis work himself and finds another dead end but something doesn't quite add up. The widow of the previous bar owner is definitely holding something back - even hiding the photograph of Velma. It seems that the Malloy/Velma plot is a shaggy dog story, when Marlowe gets called up by an unreliable playboy, Marriott, to ride bodyguard with him as he pays a ransom for some missing jade that has been stolen - on behalf of a rich woman he has been spending time with. The money is good, and Marlowe goes along with it, even though it doesn't feel right. He finds himself knocked unconscious and his patron, Marriott, dead. So now we have a real crime. He is partially rescued by a daughter of a cop, and sometime journalist Annie Riordan. She immediately takes a shine to Marlowe, but he only likes dangerous women.<br />
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But to detail the plot - which includes plenty of scrapes where the hapless Marlowe gets beaten around, drugged, and even incarcerated at one point; as well as a corrupt Bay City police force; gambling ships off the coast; and a bizarre encounter with a medium - would be to miss the point. Chandler's skills are in the evocation of a down at heel L.A. and the characters that reside there. Marlowe speaks in a coarse street slang of his own, even to Riordan, yet he has a certain rogueish charm, which certainly appeals to the rich temptress he meets when he begins investigating the jewel theft that led to Marriott's death.<br />
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The novel was cobbled together from three separate stories, which I think explains its complex structure, but it hardly matters, because though the cloth might be uneven, the weave is expertly done. Who knows what the connection is between this motley crew of characters, the most important of which are missing (Velma and Malloy) or dead, Marriott. Marlowe follows his nose, and doesn't entirely share his hunches with the audience.<br />
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Every page is fast moving, yet there's also a tendency to write compelling descriptive passages about the city. Together it makes the novel an absolute joy to read however complex the actual tale being told is. Even at this distance - the book was written in 1940, the prose is alive and exciting, and a template for any number of lesser writers since. Marlowe, famously portrayed on film by Bogart, is himself a fascination of whom we know little of his background, but a lot of his character. This is the first Chandler I've read, and I hope to read more.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-16098810188569629572018-08-18T00:59:00.001-07:002018-08-18T00:59:50.200-07:00Madonna at 60Madonna has tnrned 60, and if you should never mention a lady's age, I guess this has been hailed as a milestone as much because with her reaching (what once was) pensionable age, so much of our own youth goes with her; but also because of all the massive superstars, few embody youth like Madonna. Where did the years go? And more importantly, what's the party going to be like? Understandably, the Guardian has published a couple of pieces both bemoaning the press that she has got over the year - seeing her as <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=15916138#editor/target=post;postID=1609881018856962957">a woman who won't be quiet</a> and an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/aug/13/bigger-than-any-man-she-ever-encountered-the-under-appreciated-genius-of-madonna">underappreciated genius</a>. Sure, Madonna has had her fair sure of criticism over the years, and has caused more than an average amount of outrage, but ironically, there are few artists who have had such consistently good reviews for their art - and more importantly, very few of those have continued to sell albums and singles in the millions.<br />
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The world that Madonna came out of was the New York club scene, predominantly gay and black. Musically, New York was not only home to many record companies and recording studios, but its backstreets and warehouses held an underground. When Sonic Youth covered "Into the Groove(y)" as Ciccone Youth, it wasn't an alt.rock band taking pop music ironically, but as one time peers on the New York underground scene. Just as Blondie had done half a decade before, Madonna came out of an underground club millieu and took herself to the top of the charts. Her biography is a well known one - arriving in New York from Michigan, waitressing, getting work as a backing dancer, and doing the later infamous nude photo shoot to make ends meet. But there was another side to this. She signed pretty early on - albeit to a singles deal - to the astute Sire records, an indie that had ideas above its station and with bands such as Talking Heads, had turned art rock into hits.<br />
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The dance music scene of 1983, when she would release her first single, was an interesting one. On the one hand, new wave and new romantic bands were increasingly hitting big with danceable tracks, like Tom Tom Club's Wordy Rappinghood or Yazoo's Situation, or Thompson Twins' In the Name of Love, on the other black music was increasingly moving away from its soul roots, and production based music - often anonymous one offs - were hitting big. Madonna's first album has the same kind of electronic looping that Jam and Lewis were playing with SOS Band and Change. Her first number one on the U.S. charts - "Holiday/Lucky Star" - would be knocked off the top by Shannon's sublime "Let the Music Play." But whilst this would be a career high for Shannon it would only be the start for Madonna.<br />
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Hits with "Holiday", "Borderline" and "Lucky Star" had given her a platform to be more than just another producer's replaceable lead singer. Her second album, trialled by its flirtatious, "Like a Virgin", turned her into a superstar. I was at sixth form at the time, and had liked "Holiday" but this, and particularly the cynical "Material Girl", with its aspirational video, were anathemic to the bands I was listening to - the Smiths, the Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen. The girls understood, as they would throughout her career. Madonna mania - though I don't think it was every called that - saw "Holiday" back in the charts, and as well as the singles off "Like a Virgin", film tracks such as the middle of the road ballad "Crazy for You" were also massive. An astute performance as a version of herself in the film "Desperately Seeking Susan" saw Madonna's "look" appearing on the high street. Talking with a friend the other night, I pointed out that it takes a special kind of talent and empathy for a megastar to make music that can worm all the way into suburban lounges via Top of the Pops and Smash Hits. Madonna spoke directly to every girl who had dressed up, every teenager who'd aspired to something. In retrospect it looks astute, but I think it has always had the value of being real. Cyndi Lauper, the other platinum artist who emerged from America at that time was too studied, too kooky, too much a stage performer even if she had a better voice and (at first) better songs.<br />
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For me, it was another soundtrack song, "Into the Groove", that turned me into a Madonna fan. In the forward-looking UK it became her first number one, despite being initially only on "Desperately Seeking Susan" soundtrack. It was quickly added to the "Like a Virgin" album, though its pure dance exuberance was a little out of sync with the rest of the album. In retrospect, Madonna's early career seems incredibly well planned - like Bowie before her, and Prince at the time - each appearance of Madonna had a new look. Whereas Prince would lose half of his fan base after "Purple Rain" with musical about turns, Madonna kept and grew hers with each record. "True Blue" gave her the confidence to channel that obvious influence, Marilyn Monroe, whilst musically it was her most commercial record, Blindingly modern, but retro - and tastefully so - in its influences, it belied the idea of Madonna as someone always out to shock. "La Isla Bonita" channelled ABBA, whilst "Papa Don't Preach" was like a Raymond Carver story in miniature, more acute about young people in trouble than anything that Bruce Springsteen has ever penned. The album also includes her best ballad, "Live to Tell", and this willingness to show different sides of her, and to tell these different stories - each video being a mini-movie - was at the heart of her imperial period success.<br />
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The next album, "Like a Prayer" was her finest, with the title track causing controversy again, through a video that used Catholic iconography (the church had never much liked that Madonna now meant this pop star as well as Mary), but it was also a brilliant, widescreen album, inventive and imaginative. Only the collaboration with Prince was a let down. For those who question Madonna's star status she always comes off as the brightest one in the room - and her occasional collaborations with others have never been amongst her best work. The album also seemed highly personal with the evocative "Oh Father." As ever she kept one eye on the dancefloor, with "Express Yourself" one of the best that she did with frequent collaborator Stephen Bray, but her newer songwriting partner Pat Leonard was at the helm of much of the album. She's always been very careful in her choice of collaborators, as songwriters or producers, and Leonard and Bray both acted as brilliant foils to her.<br />
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As an eighties superstar, perhaps something had to break - her world record breaking "Blonde Ambition" tour, her performance alongside Warren Beatty in "Dick Tracy" (and subsequent soundtrack album, "I'm Breathless") and finally, her brilliantly timed and assembled "Immaculate Collection" double album saw 1990 as the peak of her powers.<br />
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Yet, whereas Prince, Springsteen, Janet Jackson and others would have tailspins in their careers, Madonna's next stages were simply less stellar. Life got in the way sometimes - highly publicised marriages to Sean Penn and Guy Ritchie, alpha males who didn't really seem to have her range and class. With Ritchie being a Brit she would relocate to London, which would please out tabloids. Yet the hits and albums would keep on coming. If "Erotica" and "Bedtime Stories" felt less essential, it always seemed because Madonna's eyes were elsewhere. Her film career, again like Bowie she is almost too much of a presence to make it as simply an actor, did well enough when the role suited. Of course she would play Eva Peron in "Evita" the movie, even though her voice, a pleasing, but limited instrument, would struggle with Lloyd Webber's epic tunes. The "Sex" book, a massively selling art-porn book that brought S&M into the mainstream was a sensation of the wrong kind in the early 90s. Madonna's ability to sell sex had always been done with it being on her terms, and I guess it was here as well - but neither this, the raunchy "Body of Evidence" movie, or the sighs of the "Erotica" single were anything as sexy as the work she'd done before. In retrospect, this slightly transgressive period - flirting with both bondage and bisexualism - was probably something she needed to do as a person, but as an artist it seemed only guaranteed to create controversy.<br />
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The last thing we expected on a comeback was an album as good as "Ray of Light" - where her new producer William Orbit - gave her a whole new more mature sound. When Madonna gets critical acclaim, as she did for this, she also sells lots of records. A mature record - but still with one foot in the dancefloor. With perhaps the exception of the ill-chosen "American Pie" cover, Madonna has never really embraced rock the way that maybe Prince and occasionally Michael Jackson did. Instead she has always taken elements of other musics, and placed them firmly in her own style, so that the country-stylings of "Don't tell me" on the "Music" album are through the lens of a DJ and dancer. Its easy to have lost track of her over the last twenty years as albums have become less frequent - but both "Music" and (especially) "Confessions on a Dancefloor" are superb records whilst singles such as "Hung Up" and "4 Minutes" continued to give her massive worldwide hits. Over her last two records, "MDNA" and "Rebel Heart", there have been more collaborations, and the payback has been less successful. In the meantime she moved from acting to directing with the film "W.E", about Wallace Edwards, another American woman who found herself in the full glare of the press. The Madonna influenced artists have kept coming in waves, whether its Britney Spears or Nicky Minaj. She's always remained supportive of women coming along in her wake, yet mostly by carrying on doing what she's doing. Controversies have also followed her, because she is Madonna, whether adopting a child from Africa, her relationships with younger men, or probably a dozen other things I've missed. A business woman as well as an artist, she signed Alanis Morrisette to Maverick, the imprint she ran through Warner Brothers until the early 2000s.<br />
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With her children growing up and coming into the spotlight, I think the glare of publicity for simply being sixty, is one that she would look wryly on. After all, she has always been in the news - because its Madonna its newsworthy. One of those artists known by a single name, she's never really looked back despite some astute compiling of her music on compilations. Just playing all her singles would take you the best part of a day.<br />
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So happy 60th Madonna, and like you sang, Where's the Party?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-57045582239239102912018-07-28T04:23:00.002-07:002018-07-28T19:53:20.874-07:0010 Good Things In the quest for recognition as a writer it can sometimes seem that life is full of disappointment and rejection. (Don't worry, life IS full of disappointment of rejection...just not all the time!) So I was thinking of some of the tangibly good things that have happened to me as a writer. Here are a few from over the years.<br />
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1. First Publication<br />
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I didn't really know how to get into magazines in the mid-1990s. So when I had a poem published in the delightfully named little magazine "The Affectionate Punch", in - I think - 1996, I was dead pleased. "Curly Wurly" the poem that was published there was aimed at being a publishable one - a nostalgic childhood poem, that I'm still proud of.<br />
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2. Being Shortlisted for the Lichfield Prize (Twice!)<br />
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Novelists have it hard - in that its all or nothing. So I'm still not a published novelist, but early on in my writing career I came close (twice) with shortlistings for the Lichfield Prize, a prize for "unpublished novels". In 1995 "Lineage" made the shortlist, but I wasn't able to attend the ceremony as I was in America (typical of my life - the first holiday in years and it clashed!) but I had another shortlisting in 1999 with "In Search of Sally Johnson" and thoroughly enjoyed the prize ceremony in a marquee outside of Lichfield cathedral. I remember thinking: this might be the only time I'm ever up for one of these, so enjoy it. To date, it is, and I did.<br />
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3. Selection for the M.A. in Novel Writing at University of Manchester<br />
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Back in 1996 when I applied there were less than half a dozen creative writing courses in the country. I'd applied the year before to UEA and got told to try again in 1996 which I did and got an interview, but not the place. A few weeks later I had an interview with Richard Francis at Manchester. I'd already handed my notice in at work even though I hadn't a definite place. I must have looked worried at some point, because he said, "don't worry, you're on the course." Thank you Richard.<br />
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4. "The Four Hills of Manchester"<br />
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City Life magazine - through literary editor Ra Page - was looking to produce some pamphlets of stories by Manchester writers inserted into the magazine and had agreed to have a call out for new, unknown writers. I had this idea in my head for a slightly surreal story about Manchester, set around the bookshops on Shude Hill. I was on my M.A. at the time, and intensely prolific. I wrote "The Four Hills of Manchester" in a couple of days, and to my surprise it got chosen and shortlisted.<br />
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6. Blogging at "Worlds"<br />
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For three years I was invited by Chris Gribble, director of Writers' Centre Norwich, to be blogger-in-residence during the "Worlds" festival - a symposia and literary festival taking place at UEA and Norwich every year. I met a great range of writers there - including big names such as J.M. Coetzee - but it was particularly meeting writers on the rise, such as Jen Ashworth, Jon McGregor, John McAuliffe and the Australian novelist Chloe Hooper that made it a real pleasure.<br />
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7. "Playing Solitaire for Money"<br />
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I had entered Salt Publishing's poetry prize a couple of times but not got anywhere. No surprise, these things are very competitive. I'd made some comment about giving up on poetry which prompted their editor Chris Hamilton-Emery to contact me. He was starting a new pamphlet series to try and capture writers who weren't quite ready for a full collection or were developing side projects. He asked me to be part of the series and "Playing Solitaire for Money" duly appeared in 2010 - a small, but nicely formed collection of which I'm still very proud. So, thanks Chris. (And thanks also Alec, who published 4 of my long experimental poems with his Knives, Forks and Spoons press the same year.)<br />
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8. Reading at Whitworth Art Gallery<br />
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I'm still not sure how this one happened. But I was approached to read some poetry at Whitworth Art Gallery during their show "Dark Matters" - which aligned with my subject matter of the digital and the spectral. I even managed to get a nice piece in the Manchester Evening News about it. I learnt that if you're going to read in a dark space its best to have a light with you.<br />
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9. Unthology 4<br />
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My story "The Cat" was one I had high hopes for - and it got picked up pretty quickly for "Unthology 4". I include it here as I realise it was the first time one of my stories had been featured in a book.<br />
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10. Best British Stories 2018<br />
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Back to Salt again, and I got an email from short story editor and fellow Didsbury resident Nicholas Royle last year that he'd like to include my story "Life Grabs" which had just appeared online, in the next edition of the annual Best British Stories anthology.<br />
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So ten highlights over a period of 23 years, and all things that make this weird "job" of writing imaginatively worthwhile. And thankfully, they weren't the only ten, just an important selection.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-59277491502525217842018-07-22T12:29:00.003-07:002018-07-22T12:44:25.804-07:00Art in JulyJuly used to be the month that the art world went into slumber - or at least on its holidays. I've not been over to the Liverpool Biennial which opened a week ago, but I have been catching a bit of art, both local and otherwise.<br />
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At Castlefield Gallery, the current show is a selection of recent graduates from the MMU School of Art. Recent graduates are always at an interesting cusp: out of the need to create art that will also get them their degree, they also may find themselves removed from some of the opportunities that being part of an art school provides. This <a href="https://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/event/katerina-eleftheriadou-riikka-enne-maite-pinto/">latest show,</a> (on until 12th August) gives an early career opportunity to showcase work. The three chosen artists are all female, and all mainland Europeans, a coincidence around the selection, but which gave an added coherence to their work when put together. Given the opportunity not just to show pre-existing work, but develop concepts and ideas, the three artists share concerns around the personal, the political and the sense of longing for home - whether in the remembered smells of a relative's kitchen, the resonance of found objects repurposed, or a previously forgotten bit of history in Maite Pinto's discovery of the story of children evacuated from Spain to the UK during the Spanish Civil War. The Basque artist's work resonated particularly with me, as I'm currently writing about how we remember things, and the Franco regime's rewriting of history, to find no place for those on the war's losing side, was part of my own research. Well worth a visit.<br />
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It's too late now for the <a href="http://manchesterartgallery.org/exhibitions-and-events/exhibition/sonia-boyce/">Sonia Boyce</a> retrospective at Manchester Art Gallery - I've visited twice, once on the opening and last week, but the show closed today. Although a "retrospective" the show felt anything but historical, partly, I think, because Boyce is a curatorial artist - curating a room full of black female cultural items over a period of years - or setting up juxtapositions in some of the other works. That she had previously photographed Mancunians at the old Cornerhouse in the late 1990s wearing an afro wig was a nice piece to revisit, as faces, familiar and unfamiliar, were in the pictures two decades on. The best piece but also the most problematic was 2015's Exquisite Cacophony, a closely observed film of a live performance between two very different artists. It's an exciting, exhilarating piece but the art seemed very much in the two performers - what role had the artist here other than as documentarian? As a collaborative work I liked it alot, marred only by the staging in the art gallery, where the sound from the the various film pieces made it difficult at times to concentrate on the one piece. The new work - a series of interventions in the gallery followed this theme of setting up confrontations and worked very well, as a series of short films created a split screen montage that was funny, chaotic, and intrigueing, and put into context the contentious removal of "Hylas and the Nymphs", a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-42917974">controversy </a>that erupted earlier in the year as part of the creation of the new piece. So, a good, brave show that possibly deserved a more sympathetic install.<br />
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For artists working in their studios, the role of studio as gallery is always an interesting one. With Rogue Studios closing and being replaced by a new site in Gorton, and a takeover of a building in Salford - Paradise Works, the latter at least has been developed with an eye on how to present as well as to make work. Richard Shields was commissioned to be an artist in residence at the Curfew tower, in Cushendall in Northern Ireland. His <a href="https://www.paradise-works.com/new-page-1/">current show</a> brings this work back to his studio space. Featuring artefacts and a mural, as well as a documentary film, it - like Boyce - shows art as process, as well as end result - and that's increasingly fascinating as artists explore both their identity in culture and in their work. "The Future is Bright the Past is Colourful" plays with the idea of a "colour" being appropriated for political reasons. Shields has created a character that is made of various archetypes which both satirises and recognises the symbolism inherent in cultural identity. The show will be open next weekend or by appointment till early August.<br />
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Meanwhile, I found myself in Nottingham during changeover of their current exhibitions at the Nottingham Contemporary and so went along to the launch. I was very impressed by Mexican artist <a href="http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/art/pia-camil-split-wall">Pia Camil,</a> whose solo show, is incredibly playful, but also uniquely her own. In "Split Screen" - covering two of the gallery spaces, you go behind the curtain and find yourself in a surreal world of the artist's imagination, where material is repurposed extravagantly, and, like with Richard Shields, a series of characters are presented - a bit like following Alice into Wonderland. A fine retrospective of Swiss design and architectural practice Trix and Robert Haussmann runs alongside the Camil exhibition and again blurs the boundaries between art and design.<br />
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Earlier in the month, and last, but definitely not least, I went to the ever wonderful Bury Art Gallery for a new show, "Shonky: the Aesthetics of Awkwardness", a touring show from the Hayward, which is a cornucopia of the delightful, the bizarre, and the downright hilarious. Like a cabinet of curiosities played out across two galleries, it is an assault on the senses, as well as a beautifully chaotic mish-mash of old and new artists working with some kind of kitsch aesthetic. On until mid-September, it is highly recommended.<br />
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Finally, this weekend to come sees one of our more design-led publishers, experimental press <a href="https://twitter.com/dw_wannabe?lang=en">Dostoyevsky Wannabe</a>, stage an <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/292625434614754/">independent book market </a>at PLANT, near Shude Hill in town. Come along on Saturday afternoon for launch of new books on Manchester and by Richard Barrett and Steve Hanson amongst other small interesting publishers.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-19123640875199430952018-07-16T01:36:00.001-07:002018-07-16T01:36:22.645-07:00A Horse Walks into a Bar by David GrossmanIn David Grossman's award winning (it won the International Booker for novels in translation) novel "A Horse Walks into a Bar", a 57-year old comedian comes on stage at a supper club in the Israeli town of Netanya. In the audience is a man who he has invited, to bear witness, a retired judge, who the comedian, Dovaleh G, was at school with. This was the area where he grew up and there is another person who remembers him, a tiny woman, whom he was once kind to. Yet this is not a triumphant homecoming gig, but a matter of catharses. Over an hour and a half, or longer as the reader rather than an audience member, this one man show starts funny, but turns scabrous, sad, searing, until there are only a handful left in the audience to witness his pain. The novel is not quite a single monologue. The judge is our narrator and interjects as the going gets tough (and the going does get tough) and gives us something of a back story. For Dovaleh's own back story is one told sparingly, furstratingly through many discursions.<br />
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The audience are there for jokes and there are jokes here - old jokes, good ones, but in the old style. The man who offers a ticket to the game to a stranger. "Can't your wife go?" says the stranger, "no, she's dead." "What about her friends?" he asks, "They'd all rather be at her funeral." Humour is such a strange beast that its risky to erect a novel on top of a bed of such jokes. But they provide light relief. There's some mileage in the fictional comedian. "The Entertainer", "The King of Comedy" come to mind - though its older archetypes that Dovaleh reminds us off: his tale, a shaggy dog story of sorts, but one that is avoiding, circling round the thing he wants to tell - the terrible thing that was done to him nearly half a century before which led to him becoming a comedian, led to his broken marriages and distant relationships with his own children. That circling away from the tale is there in some of Shakespeare's more contemplative heroes, but finds its comedic home in that early English novel by Sterne, "Tristram Shandy". <br />
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The retired judge didn't recognise Dovaleh when he first called and asked him to come. He didn't remember the incidents that Dovaleh prompted him to remember. But his own wife has died, and he has his own loneliness to feel regret so he turns up - but early in the performance he doesn't understand why he is there, why he has any responsibility to this man. He almost leaves, but of course, he stays to the end, as we do, as readers.<br />
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For Dovaleh is not a nice man, he is misanthropic certainly, possibly misogynistic as well. He is a clown but he has a dark side. At the same time his craft is such that he can pull the audience back from the brink. He talks directly to them in a way that probably makes other members of the audience not want to be picked on. Its an older crowd, and this is an old kind of humour. Its the endurance act of certain music hall comedians, surviving on a high wire act of their own making. As the night goes on the jokes drop away and he begins to tell his story - of when he was away at an army training camp for kids, and whilst away one of his parents died, and he has to go back to them - but in the all chaos - he is never told - or never listens - to hear which one has died. During the long journey, with a driver who is himself an amateur comedian, whiling away the ride whilst telling jokes, he has his own judgement of Solomon to make: which of his parents does he want to be alive, and which to find in the coffin.<br />
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In some ways the nature of this horror is spun out - there is no plot as such - but its using this cathartic night to look back on the worst moment in a person's life and from it try and construct what went wrong and how. Dovaleh the child was happy but somewhat insane - he walked on his hands, which stopped him being bullied (how could you a hit a kid walking on his hands?) until his dad found him doing it and banned him from it. His mother was a Holocaust survivor, his father loved her but loved work even more, and saw the two entwined - so making a business from nothing and work took the place of loving his son. We know some of this because the narrator tells us. A shy, lonely boy, he finds that talking to Dovaleh on their walks back from some tutoring classes, gave him his first friend, and also took him away from the rules and regulations of his home life and adult world. The world intrudes of course. How can it not in Israel throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties? But the darker jokes, about the Holocaust, about the Palestinians, bring out only sharp laughs from the audience who are naturally enough wanting a good time.<br />
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The novel has been highly acclaimed, and its no doubt that the original and the excellent translation are both a tour de force, but its also a difficult novel, hard to like, that asks a lot of its readers, just as Dovaleh asks alot of his audience. Firstly, we know early on that this is what we are going to get, and Dovaleh is not a pleasant man. He has a hectoring style, its full of hate, but also self-hate. He's a 57 year old man, but doesn't feel like someone who could have come of age during the disco and punk era, but an older archetype, like the miserable protagonist of Heller's "Good as Gold." We hear nothing about his wives and children, collateral damage it seems. And we are with him for the duration. The narrator can hardly bear it, and we wonder if we can as well. There's a point when those in the audience no longer want the jokes, they want to hear his story, however terrible it might be - I guess the reader settles in for the same thing. Yet, it seems a little alien to me - I can't place Dovaleh, I can't make sense of his upbringing, his world. There is no description, other than of the comedy club, so it feels an arid world that he describes, and its as if he and us are surrounded by ghosts. Most of the reviews I've read of the novel since finishing it reference a tragedy in Grossman's own life, as well as the troubles of the Israeli state - but without this biographical background (of the writer, not the character) - we only have what is here to go on, and though one eventually feels some sympathy for Dovaleh, it falls far short of empathy. We can see the man he has become - an ill man - prematurely aged - but also a successful one, making a career from his humour and his foibles. The payback to the reader - or at least this reader - didn't really come - in that I still felt unknowing about why we were here, with this character. It feels an old fashioned novel in some ways, despite the brave structure, and though one can appreciate its seriousness, I'm not sure I ever bought into its artfulness. Dovaleh seems to belong to a different time, a different world. Somehow, his story didn't resonate, and the somewhat pained execution, though masterfully done, meant this short book felt much longe than it was.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15916138.post-83663940860149737702018-07-07T02:04:00.004-07:002018-07-07T02:04:35.406-07:00What a Time to be AliveBeing a writer of contemporary fiction I always try and keep a keen eye on the zeitgeist. As you get older its interesting that ones concerns change a little: I'm not so much perplexed by the success of say, Drake, the Greatest Showman, and Love Island, as disinterested. Had I kids then I guess I'd be sharing their enthusiasms, as it is I realise that my own interests and fascinations aren't necessarily stuck in amber, but are perhaps a different pace, a different timbre.<br />
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Where that leaves one as a writer is another question. I'm just reading David Grossman's "A Horse Walks into a Bar" and finding it a little dated in its protagonist, and its concerns, and its way of telling them - yet I suspect my own approach is also not as contemporary as my material. The appreciation of fine wines as one gets older is also accompanied by an appreciation that too much of a good thing can kill you, or at least give you health problems.<br />
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Ah well, we are what we consume: and so I'm glad to be missing Love Island at least. I've been busy, and I've been too busy - the latter meaning I've not really much to say about literary matters. Yet I'm also acutely aware that the usual "end of year" sense of the British summer, is heightened this year by two things: by the unexpected and uninterrupted hot spell (the longest winter is just a distant memory now), and by the England football team overperforming in the World Cup. Its now an all European competition after Belgium lived up to their potential and beat Brazil last night. England have Sweden this afternoon before a potential semi-final against either Croatia or Russia. All three sides are eminently beatable, or, lets not forget we are England, eminently able to beat us. Despite Pickford's penalty shootout success, we've not yet to have a clean sheet at this World Cup - lucky that most of the goals against us have been late ones that have meant less.<br />
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The summer is already one that is burning into memory like that of 1976, with the accompanying moor fires of Saddleworth leavening an acrid burning smell over Manchester city centre for over a week, it feels like a moment when you could set a story, live a life. It's also interesting that the hot weather and the football make one put other things on hold a little - its better to stare at the unexpected moment: this is the new plan, whatever your previous ones were.<br />
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But I have stepped out to a couple of things. I enjoyed the launch of the <a href="https://www.anthonyburgess.org/blog-posts/new-exhibition-banned-books-anthony-burgess-and-censorship/">Banned Books </a>exhibition at the Anthony Burgess foundation last week. Worth a look. Pleased to see I'd got a few of the pulpier ones - Dennis Wheatley, Lesley Phillips. Burgess had moved to Malta with his second wife Liana, in the late sixties avoiding high tax rates amongst other things. Malta was (and is) a censorious place - and his books were impounded and burned. They've recreated the collection as much as they can (some titles are ambiguous). He was in Malta for a few years, and only left after getting into more trouble politically, and having his house briefly impounded by the authorities. Malta is the model for the start of "Earthly Powers" which he began writing there.<br />
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You can do a nice little tour round that part of town at present - as a new show opened last night at HOME, a mix of retrospective and new work from <a href="https://homemcr.org/exhibition/phil-collins-ceremony/">Phil Collins, </a>and 3 MFA graduates from Manchester School of Art are included in a group show at <a href="https://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/event-type/exhibition/">Castlefield Gallery,</a> minimalist work mixing the personal and political.<br />
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A couple of fascinating literary events are coming up: a talk about his book on depitctions of terrorism in 1970s novels from J<a href="https://www.anthonyburgess.org/event/literature-joe-darlington-terrorist-novels-1970s/">oe Darlington</a> particularly interests me this Thursday - whilst the following week, <a href="https://www.creativetourist.com/event/pn-review-summer-launch/">Carcanet </a>have a summer party, taking place in Castlefield Gallery.<br />
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Finally, I'm very pleased to say that I've a story in <a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/best-british-short-stories-2018-9781784631369">Best British Stories 2018 </a>from Salt, alongside the usual fascinating mix of writers - out next week.<br />
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