Hurling Bricks

I've not yet read "Brick Lane", Monica Ali's novel, but recently saw an interview with her. She is no doubt perplexed by the reaction of the Bangladeshi community of Brick Lane to its protests about filming there. On the one hand, one feels that its refreshing that at least one part of the world doesn't want to be in the movies, no matter what, but that idea soon palls. Ali is not an arriviste, but Bangladeshi, and, more importantly a writer who wants to write about contemporary Britain. Post 9/11 it seems that almost any artistic work that addresses our multicultural society comes under threat from some. It worries me. "Political correctness gone mad" is a neat Daily Mail term, but its about time that works of art are seen for what they are, given more protection than they currently get. The majority of contemporary writers hide in the past, or worse, in the middle classes, and one can only feel that will get worse. More informed comment on this from Baroque in Hackney. The most telling thing is, that like myself, she's a slight worry that we're not even supposed to be debating these things. Its not just Islam, its any religion now seems to be getting special protections. Many councils now have rules of conduct which state that your behaviour should respect not only people's race, gender and sexuality, but their religion. This would be fine, in itself, and like Baroque, I work with a wide range of community groups. What I also am, is secular, and believe we live in a secular society, and we're seeing more and more religious organisations/organisers (many of whom have problems with other people's gender and sexuality) wanting complicity in their own prejudices. I'm suddenly acutely aware that if you make any comments whatsoever about any religion, there's becoming a culture of suspicion. This, of course, does not just come from "multiculturalism", but with leaders both in the UK and America who are not afraid to use their own religion, and relationship with God, as justification and rhetoric - with policies being led by the religious interests or religious ideas (stem cell research in America, for instance, Religious Hatred bill here) - it creates a climate where, I have no doubt, should another fatwa be handed down on a living writer, they'd be very lucky to receive the grudging level of protection given to Rushdie. As Baroque pointed out, the voice that is silenced in all of this, is often female.

When did I lose interest in Brian Eno?

I've recently found myself getting irritated when I hear of something that Brian Eno's been up to. This is ridiculous, since he's one of my heros. When nobody else was buying his records or knew who he was, he seemed the most interesting artist in the world. I remember a Paul Morley show where he talked of the history of music as if Eno had been involved in every worthwhile bit of it, and in a way he had. Yet, at some point - probably after his 3rd or 4th U2 collaboration - he became the ubiquitous cultural commentator that he is today. And more than that, it seems if anyone wants to add a bit of artiness to a project he gets called in to add his bit. He curated meltdown, he had that exhibition of storage spaces in London, he's produced the new Paul Simon album (Paul bloody Simon!), and he's added humanitarian work - through War child and opposition to the Iraq war - to the long cv. Even now he casts a long shadow - I was thinking of his "long now" project at the Futuresonic event mentioned earlier. I think the problem is that in the past Eno was almost ridiculously interesting. Most of the projects were ones he generated himself that seemed to exist outside of the mainstream - and appeared totally perplexing to it. Yet now its as if he's called in to add a bit of Eno to anything that might warrant it. I was excited - still - to hear he'd written a soundtrack to a podcast of Michael Faber's "Fahrenheit Twins" story, but then, somehow I lost interest. Faber's a bit of an acquired taste, full of inventiveness, but you'll either love or hate his prose style. It strikes me, listening to it, that its an interesting idea, a mutual appreciation between writer and musician, but that I'm not sure there's much more to say on it. It works well - in the Guardian extract - and is perhaps a step beyond the usual audiobook. The story is quite a traditional narrative - atmospheric and descriptive - and in that sense the music can only be a backdrop, rather than integral. Reading about how it was put together, this is perhaps no surprise, but perhaps I'd expected more. I guess I want the Eno of past surprises. Also, it's clearly a commercial venture - the story was cropped to fit on a CD (and one has to admire any musician able to come up with a 70 minute piece as a backdrop of music). But its made me think (as Eno always does.) The audiobook podcast is something that is both nascent, but accessible. So perhaps I'm not irritated by Eno as much as remembering that one of Eno's aims, as I saw it, was to encourage others to work in these areas. That he's still the one being asked, is probably the problem. Part of the project, I think, was that people like me should lose interest in Brian Eno.

(And for the record: 5 great Eno moments -: "Baby's on Fire" live - from 1st June 1974 CD, "The True Wheel" from Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) - the band A Certain Ratio took their name from this song, "I Zimbra" - Talking Head's finest ethnofunk moment, "Miss Sarajevo" - from the Passengers project with U2, Warszawa - with Bowie from "Low".)

I, Conservationist (a poem)

The wonderful summer is with us at last –
though it comes bearing warnings.
The butterfly, for instance, is in peril
and I trust we’ll do enough to save it’s neck
before its too late.

I would grow wild buddleia for bees in my garden
and plant flowering honeysuckle for the butterfly,
but I’ve not a garden in my first floor flat.
Perhaps I can donate a small sum,
for retaining meadows across the counties.

Though come to think of it, I should save my cash
to build a windfarm and make my own power,
instead of relying on the nuclear option.
And then there’s the worry of saving for a pension,
and for the cost of my radiation cure.

Despite a country past, I’m stuck indoors,
with antihistamines and fridge-cooled water
to take me through the wilting day.
A common moth hovers outside my window,
and with twitching nose, I shut it out.

The Future is...niche

I seem to have overdosed on futurology by uber-geeks this week. First was Paul Caplan of the Mediatrust evangalising about new media made easy. His talk was invigorating, but since it was aimed at community groups, a couple of points are worth making. He said, "if I can use Wordpress anyone can...all it needs is a server with MySQL", which kind of seems a little extreme for any of us without a server or MySQL. (For the record, I've a "server", I guess, for my website, but it would cost me quite a bit more for the other bit.) A little hubristic I felt. And then I looked at his website - and God, when did he think that white print on a black background and a really small and very odd font was a good idea. Get accessible Paul! As always with such people they use a Mac, and have a bit of a blindspot about the 99% of the world that doesn't. Then, it was Futuresonic today, which is, I guess, where art and technology collide. It's always quite difficult to get a handle on. There's a bit of a private club sort of feel to this - a niche too far, so to speak - but it was interesting. Anyone visiting the 1830 warehouse at the Museum of Science and Industry over the next week will see some great "homemade" musical instruments. This quirky arts 'n' craft side of things is what endears me to Futuresonic. Masaki Fujihata's digital mapping was partly aweinspiring - a GPS stream made into a visual movie with photos/videos along the route - and partly banal - the content was mostless pointless, arbitrary. Yet its early days for this sort of thing; the "doing it" is enough for now. For lovers of Sebald and Sinclair, a must, methinks. Maria Stukoff was evaluating the conference on behalf of where I work, and will no doubt blog on it shortly. Matt Webb's futuregazing was all over the place, a maybe attached to another maybe, but invigorating. He posited the sci-fi staple of a "generation" spaceship where whole generations grow up on a long distance space ship on the way to somewhere - and how they might adapt to the space. I began reading Brian Aldiss's "Non Stop" (1958) recently, its a similar premise, so nothing new under that sun. A particular point though: the web - "the space" - we're now inhabiting is consuming. It has a Year Zero, beyond which everything seems less documented; and it is also consistently, constantly re-inventing itself so that there are no equivalent of internet Victorian terraces we could live in - they've all been torn down so that we can live cheek and jowl in our neighbourhood of Myspace and Blogger identical boxes. I'm too cynical (and too old) to be too obsessed with the cusp, the margin of the new - it seems that it hasn't alway furnished us with the same leaps of imagination that you find in Burroughs and Gysin for instance. Webb talked about "Second Life" - a virtual world - where, because second lifers don't have genitals, someone has invented genital underwear to put on their second lifer characters, and just as inevitable perhaps, someone else has started doing "upskirt" shots of secondlife characters. This is a maybe of a maybe of a maybe of a maybe which maybe a new record. What has this to do with literature? Nothing. And everything. Literature kind of invented the web (from Douglas Adam's Babel fish to Burrough's Interzone to "Slaughterhouse 5" to Jerry Cornelius) - and now its everywhere, can a book truly exist that doesn't reference it? Last week's Guardian summer short story selection was a treasure trove, but distinctly ancient in its references. I'd recommend everyone reads Colm Toibin's striking "A Summer Job". It's from a different world, but the emotional strangeness is strongly contemporary.

Mercury Rising

This year's Mercury Prize shortlist for best album of the year doesn't seem one of its best - despite all the talk about "best years for music ever" - the Arctic Monkeys aside, its a little lightweight. Not that I've heard enough new albums recently to be sure. No Primal Scream - but then its long ago been moving away from the venerable to the very recent - and no Sandi Thom or Lily Allen (like they need the publicity). I think its become a bit too music critic for its own good - you can't imagine a Spice Girl or even a Ms. Dynamite these days. My money's on either Muse as a potential "grower" taking a cult band mainstream - or Guillemots, as an only just out, but sure to get big this summer breakout hit. Interesting that very not-British Mark Lanegan makes it in collaboration with Isobel Campbell (perhaps Guns N Roses might have once been eligible, who knows?) and if you were wondering whether new albums from Razorlight, Snow Patrol were really as good as the reviews stated, none of them are to be seen. It's clearly an award for new music, even if its comeback-style such as Scritti Politti. There's usually at least one unexpected gem on the list - last year it was my introduction to the Go Team.

What a Poetry Magazine Needs to do to Survive

If you haven't seen it, the estimable Michael Schmidt writes about PN Review being 30 years old, and how it lasted so long. In truth, not the most illuminating of articles. Like a lot of the poetry scene it seems to be tilting at windmills that only other branches of the poetry scene can see. "Anglo-American and European modernisms and their legacies are to be valued and taken to heart, and the postmodern condition is not to be seen as inescapable" is his conclusion at the magazine's value and agenda, and I can't disagree with that, but mainly because I don't really know what he means by it! His comment on Poetry Review, which "might be thought (erroneously, it seems to me) to have a duty to be a magazine of record" sets up an argument that I'm not sure anyone's making - that in the brackets he repudiates, though I like the idea of a "history of taste" seen through its varied editors. Poetry Review is sometimes the Newcastle United of poetry magazines, never sure whether it wants a dour traditionalist keeping the dressing room in line - and never winning anything - or a risktaking libero who'll upset the directors - and never win anything. All I can say, is that if you ever come across PN Review you'll come away with something, and the new website looks good. 30 years for any literary endeavour is worth celebrating, though I can't help think that whilst PN Review was opening its doors, a number of "poets" - Mark E. Smith, Pete Shelley, Howard Devoto etc. - were watching the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Recent magazines are not really mentioned; and so many have fallen by the wayside over the last few years, from an exhausted Angel Exhaust, through Prop and Brando's Hat, through Thumbscrew, that it's hard to see without London Magazine-Ambit-Agenda-PN Review-Poetry Review there'd even be a poetry magazine scene. Yet, the Rialto still goes about its own quiet businesses, and smaller, more locally based zines proliferate. Best place to start is the Poetry Library - currently closed for refurbishment, but still there in cyberspace. Is it just me, or has the gloss worn off poetry a little? I don't see quite the same "hype", and that's probably for the best. But since the surfeit of millennial anthologies there's been nothing for the casual or interested reader to use as a roadmap through contemporary poetry.

Old? No way

I watched an interview on BBC News 24 "HardTalk" last night with Patti Smith. I saw her in concert a couple of years ago, and although the set was predominantly her later career - she had a 16 year break from music to bring up her children - her voice and presence were remarkable. I first heard "Horses" at University in 1985, and its a great album, obviously, but more than that, despite her being linked with the punk/new wave scene, its clearly more than that; and owes quite a lot to some of the progressive/art rock tendencies of the early 70s (note her involvement with Blue Oyster Cult!) That run of albums - with "Wave" "Easter" and "Radio Ethiopia" formed part one of the career - but part 2 has also got value, there's great songs on all of her subsequent albums, and the 2-CD best of a few years ago made a good attempt at summarising the career. Although still an activist, she's also still an artist - and, though it was a bit oblique what she plans - its less likely to be music than art, writing etc. Her identification with romantic heroes such as Blake and Rimbaud is well known. I read a biography by Victor Bockris, which emphasised that the New York scene that she was on in the early 70s, centred round the St. Marks' Poetry Project, was as likely to have George Harrison and John Lennon dropping in, alongside readings by Smith and others. The Factory was in full flow of course, and she was a close friend with Robert Mapplethorpe (who took the iconic photo for the "Horses" cover.) You had great energy from the second wave of the New York School, people like Anne Waldman; Ginsberg was still writing, and very public; and its a period that is ripe for re-assessment, the equivalent, clearly of other high water marks of artistic highs, such as the "beats" and "Bloomsbury's." Moreover, that moment when the biggest band in the world - the Beatles - had split, but were intimately involved in the avant garde, in the openended artistic scene in New York, sees a rare confluence between music, literature, visual arts and film.

Mixed Feelings

As a subscriber to the deceased Zembla Magazine, like Bookworld, I began receiving strange letters from solicitors about its untimely demise, with debts of £400,000, and being a creditor of one, Simon Finch Books. That can't be the same Simon Finch who has just paid £2.8 million for Shakespeare's first folio, can it?

Spam Poem

I hope Tony Trehy creator of the Bury Text Festival might like this one,

Spam Poem#1 (Stanley Stephenson)

I am Stanley Stephenson
to deemphasize
Amelia postmark from,
go burglarproof
go do dragonfly Amelia
then conclude go
showroom downturn
this bourbaki. can,
why baboon deemphasize
go me comport Amelia
the entice the garland
shakespearian this
pole Amelia
that aries can
afar from sleigh.
transvestite that this
Amelia from budge me
shakespearian bourbaki
drove that bergen.

I fear that J.H. Prynne might be out of a job. Those last 3 lines get me every time. "Amelia from budge me shakespearian bourbaki drove that bergen" has anyone ever said it better? (More soon.)

Keep up to date

In the absence of City Life, various websites can help you keep up to date on activity in the North West.

Anyone missing City Life's literary listings should keep up to date with the fine, clean lines of Literature North West.

If you want to check out the wide range of publishers and publications in the region - or are starting one yourself - then try its sister site Publishing North West. Who says publishing is a London thing?

For film and related activity you can have a look at the Northern Film Network's informative blog, and I'd recommend subscribing to their very useful email newsletter.

To whet your appetite for the autumn, the first Manchester Literature Festival will be with us in October. The website and brochure are coming soon.

And for all things Mancunian worth reminding people of the Manchester Blogger's Aggregator and for more blogs than you can shake a piece of hypertext at, Manchizzle's blogroll.

Not Manchester based, but anyone who caught poetry boy band Aisle 16 last year - and anyone who likes a bit of humour in their verse - should try and catch Luke Wright at this year's Edinburgh festival.

O! To Be...Postmodern

So this is what we do, innit? We go to a literary do on th' evening and can't wait to leave so we can get home an' file our copy. Here goes then. Names have been psychologicallly morphed to protect the innocent (and hey, they won't come up in a Google search) -: So it was Crispian Rizzle's leaving thang where we all gathered at the Copa Cobana bar at the bottomend of the Fifthways Building down in the Northend Quarter. Fuck, I arrived too late for canapes, and first stunner I saw was blogmeister extraordianaire Catriona Delf where we cut to the quick and talked about the footcha, inc. Bloggers meet at Rubbish in a few wks. Sure I'm up to it. I blog! I am! Then she had to go talk to someone and I needed a break. Caught Rizzle's eye, but he was being surrounded by friends all night. At bar, bumped into Pa Rage, doyenne of Mancunian publishers, SemiColon Press, and he was his usual self, albeit a little drunker by this stage. You never know whether to talk serious or silly wit' da Pa, because he's always checking his options, and I'm only glad I aint got anything on his slush pile at the mo' that we can avoid talking about. He asks me, as everyone does, how the magazine, Lemming Bridge, is doing, but I have to inform them I'm no longer editor. You can see the shock! Advert Catcher has jumped from the Lemming Bridge, but alas it's so. Then as I try and grab a few words with Dee Lumley - who is Crispian's right-hand-woman on the festival, and she's deep in converse with top art poet Walmart Welsteve. I always shake Walmart's hand and have the same conversation with him - kind of about has he written anything lately? I don't mean it in a bad way, and its become a joke between us, I think. Walmart's sticking with his ouvre, Thursday night at Stans if you're interested in hearing the latest interpretation. Then there's old stalwart from back-in-the-days of Stonewart's readings, Walmart Ice, sporting a dapper 'tache. We have non-lit connections so we talk about this and that. But everyone's always got someone else to talk to. So I'm there with the guy who I met at the Burton Anthony reading, who is there with Dilly Storm from the library. And we huddle like non-speaking guests at a Tourette's conference, giggling quietly at the "fucks" and "buggers." Hey, it's a motley crue, that's for sure, and no Tommy Lee! Just time to catch a few spoken words with Zara Spake Thunustra, who runs the spoken word night and works with Welsteve at Lontob college. I tell her "not to worry" because she always seems to.. I leave quickly to go home and write my blog, which was my whole parasitical take on th' evening, though I have been known to be "fond of a drink". Kind of think Crispian Rizzle will slam dunk Norwich when he get's there, there's my boy. Wot a bloomin' sendoff! Zinedine Zidane!

Shine on You Crazy Diamond

Sad to say, Syd Barrett is dead at 60.

Lonely Rebellions

One of my lonelier rebellions is against bad avant garde writing. Cult publishers, blogs and magazines seem to have no quality control whatsoever when it comes to particular writers, writing and subjects. Transgressive sex makes transgressive writing, seems to be the mantra, when really, it can just be S&M Mills and Boon. I am grateful, therefore, to 3AM Magazine for providing an extract of some of the worst writing I've ever read. Stephen Barber has all the right credentials of course; he's an academic, usually a signifier of limited literary merit; in digital and media arts; which adds a certain certainty to it; and, here's the killer has been described as the most "dangerous man in Britain" by the Independent. Given such credentials, it would be a near miracle if he wrote anything good at all, but this extract from "Tokyo Sodom" is numbingly bad. It's almost pointless to quote from it, since every line is a gem. Like an ethics professor with Tourette's he can only interrupt the S&M Mills and Boon of his porn movie fuckfest, to spout, verbatim, chunks of geopolitics. His banality can describe breasts as "Mount Fuji-like", and his erudition can include mid-sex dialogue such as "In the Second World War, (the Slovakians) were the only nation in Europe that actually paid the Nazis to take our Jews away to Auschwitz! 20,000 of them,at the cost of 50 crowns per deportation." Though I did enjoy the choice Slovakian insults. Well-heeled academics write trash for money most of the time, but we don't have to pretend there's the remotest thing interesting about fiction this bad.

Hollywood

Reading David Thompson's intriguing history/polemic of Hollywood, "The Whole Equation." It's not just the Fitzgerald quote of the title (from "The Last Tycoon") but Thompson's clearly a Fitzgerald obsessive, which is great. Already I get the sense - a few chapters in - that Hollywood has lost it, will no longer keep our collective pulse raising, and yet...it still might. There's a few more novels about Hollywood than rock music; and I'd guess there's a whole raft of novels that owe something to the grammar and the glamour of film. (David Foster Wallace might say its television that influences his generation of writers, but he's American - growing up in Britain in the '70s there wasn't really enough television to influence a writer; and the BBC, despite its legendary remit to entertain, educate and inform, never touched on the wider vocabularies that I was discovering through literature, music and movies. Only Channel 4's arrival provided that stimuli.) Somewhere I've a book about poetry and the movies, (American movies), and I guess it mentions the D.W. Griffiths' short "The Lonedale Operator" which John Ashbery paraphrases in an early prose poem. It strikes me that this was the same technique - a film from memory - that Fiona Banner was so successful with in her writing-on-the-wall pieces such as "Hunt for Red October." Interestingly, around the time that I was at my most Ashbery-esque, I wrote a poem called "How I came to Love the 20th Century", which mentions Griffiths' epic "Birth of a Nation", without, I'm sure, having been aware of "The Lonedale Operator." Thompson makes much of the Griffiths' films economic as well as cinematic connotations. That the Griffiths' film was based on the novel "The Klansman" and may have led to further lynchings in the year after its release, is one of the great embarassment's of American movies. But we're not yet at Hollywood at this point - and Hollywood - and the Californian light, so memorable an image for Hockney's swimming pools (another reference I used in my poetry), is the central subject of the book.' You read the dates in the book, and you realise how young an art form cinema is, and he compares and contrasts the films being made in the first quarter of the century with the literature, the music, the art. This mass medium had yet to find its vocabulary. I think it does, later, and does with the power of a symphony, or a great novel. I'm reminded by the Manchizzle, that George Clinton comes to Manchester next week. He of course produced and co-starred on the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' early highlight "Hollywood", and I guess for any non-initiates a good starting point in all things Clinton would be a Parliament compilation, or even Bootsy Collins' "Back in the day" compilation. "The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership" can be recommended unadvisedly as well, if you can find it.

It's a flap, jack

In the ten years since the IRA bomb, much has been made of the city centre's regeneration; and perhaps not enough of what's lost as a result. In a city like Manchester, messy, unplanned - you get the unexpected amidst the chain stores. Little by little, we regenerate away. The last jack has been flapped, the last pancake flipped, the Dutch Pancake House is no more. Despite not having changed either its menu or its window display for the 24 years of its existence on the corner of Oxford Street, somehow it survived all that the city and it's fashions could throw at it. It would have been almost new when I first came to the city; yet I can't imagine it ever was fashionable. I only went once - you'd be unlikely to go twice - and had a savoury pancake followed by a sweet pancake. I always imagined it must have been a front organisation for some Dutch Cosa Nostra, and, like the VIP adult cinema club a little further down the road, I've never actually seen anyone come in or out. (Though I did once see an ambulance outside apparently taking care of an overindulged punter - the adult cinema, that is, not the Dutch Pancake House. )

England's Glory

Sunday night. Post-England game. Feel like writing terse sentences a la James Elroy or David Peace. The typical England under adversity fight after the team were down to ten men is undeniably valiant, but makes you wonder why it always has to get to that point? Ah, football, mirror to a nation's soul. The links on the side of this page have expanded a little, so I'm going to try and rationalise - more categories so you know what you're looking for - but also I'm tempted to get rid of any that are not paying their way (e.g. are not being updated.) Susan Tranter dropped by the site to point me in the direction of Encompass Culture, and her blog on it. Its the British Council, which always seems to treat literature as being a bit more important than the Arts Council ever does. Perhaps because internationally at least, we're still the land of "Dickens and Shakespeare" (and probably Rowling, but I'll let that pass.) Though its annual new writing anthologies - number 14 is just out, just published by Granta - are an often uneasy mix of the new, the worthy and the popular. Perhaps necessarily so, though I've not found them essential for quite a few years, but a useful starting point, I guess, for a snapshot of contemporary writing. I think David Mitchell got his first break in one, a few years back, so they've something of a talent spotter role to play. The latest one contains eleven "novel extracts", a format that seems pointless to me, though we've all had cause to provide an extract for something or other over time. I usually cheat and call them short stories, which brings me neatly to my new, long-delayed task, of putting a few of my older stories online. I'm starting those that have had some kind of public life - either been published or otherwise disseminated. Our premature World Cup exit will at least let us get to the beach before the Germans and the Sunday Papers are full of their holiday reading, which always makes me imagine that there is a "holiday season" with everyone going off to the French Riviera for the summer, like they do in "Tender is the Night." Perhaps Robert McCrum does. Who knows? My time off work tends to be spent frantically catching up with my own, oft-neglected writing. Those for whom neither "New Writing 14" or the Richard and Judy booklist provide summer solace, might be thinking of a social disease to take on holiday rather than bring back from there, such as H.P. Tinker.

In Praise of Serious Art

In his introduction to the "Portable Faulkner", Malcolm Cowley makes the point that it is not Faulkner's individual novels which are the masterpiece, but parts thereof, and, most of all, the entire sequence of Yoknapatawpha county stories and novels. Having just finished Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" I'm tempted to say the same thing about his Newark, New Jersey. Since "American Pastoral" - but not excluding what went before - Roth's subjects have widened to the whole of American living memory whilst focussing on his own experience, his family, the Jewish community, and Newark. "The Plot Against America" has its faults - is in parts brilliant - and adds yet another dimension to Roth's American pastoral. An alternate history of America during the 2nd World War, delaying America's entry into that war; siding with Hitler, with a pro-Hitler president imagined in the election of aviation pioneer Lindbergh; but told against the backdrop of one family - the Roths - and the memories of the 9 year old younger son, Philip. This mixture of the political and the personal has characterised much of his recent work. His phenomenal unfolding sentences are still here; albeit curtailed somewhat in the voice of a child. Yet it is the view of the child - seeing things only partially, which lets the horror unwind. If an adult's role is to keep the true horrors of the world from their children, then in times of terror, doubly so. Yet that same child is here manipulative, part of the "cause", as well as the victim of "effect." The poor, decent Roth family are connected by birth and marriage to the city's Jewish aristocracy, who consider themselves American first, Jewish second - and therefore immune to the historical terrors afflicting their forefathers. This is not an alternate history in the manner of "The Man in the High Castle" or "SSGB", but a "what if" certain small things changed - and how that will affect everyone. It doesn't seem coincidental that it is post-9/11 - that "small thing" had it not happened, would have altered several histories; but how much, its too early to show. There are longeurs; to the 9 year old (and perhaps the elderly) Roth everything has equal importance, equal value. Whereas the glovemaking episode in "American Pastoral" was a masterly aside, here the asides sometimes feel a little force, a little unedited. Here, Roth is a nostalgist, like DeLillo in "Underworld", Scorsese in "Goodfellas" or Woody Allen, fascinated by the detail. It's a thin line. Yet, the "stamp collection" that means so much to the young Philip means much less to us. The "Winchell riots" section, where America's own Kristallnacht is underway sees a different writing - the clipped newspaper tautness of James Elroy's "American Tabloid" - interesting that Elroy's brutally effective reportage should find such a welcome home as a Philip Roth novel. Perhaps there's a limit to what Roth can envisage in an America that has gone to pot, (and I'm talking George W. Bush's America here), but which is still the promised land - and the allegory is occasionally a little heavy - for Roth still thinks America is good, and that Americans are good, and that the cancer of Nazism, though able to take a localised hold on this reimagined America, can never spread to the whole patient. Again, the second world war, from this perspective is reimagined through the terrible prism of the Holocaust; yet its hard to imagine what would have happened to a valiant Britain left to fight alone? It is worth recalling, that the second world war wasn't just a Jewish tragedy. Yet in all of this, despite some caveats, the force of this novel is that it makes you think - and in doing so reduces so many other writers to mere entertainers. Yet Roth also entertains, and adds another vital chapter to his expanding Americna pastoral. Coincidentally, or not, in between reading "The Plot Against America" I went to see "The Wind that Shakes the Barley", Ken Loach's latest excellent film about the Irish Free State. Like his Spanish Civil War dramatisation "Land and Freedom", this personalises a conflict that can easily become unimaginable. Yet it is even denser and bleaker than that earlier film. Loach doesn't shirk on the intensity, and the first hour of the movie is intense. Not that it lets off the tension much. Again, it is in the aftermath of the movie that you feel its accumulated power. Loach doesn't explain or lecture, he merely attempts to show - and in doing so, makes you think. In the 10th Anniversary of the largest ever bomb to go off in mainland Britain, here in Manchester, its a reminder that the roots of that explosion go back - in Sebastian Barry's phrase - a long, long way.

More (or less)

I meant to mention James Davies's poems "Two Fat Boys" - a long sequence, funny, controlled, irreverant, minimalist - of which a number are in the latest edition of Scarecrow. Also that Transmission's ever more professional looking publication is up to issue 5. Interviews with A. L. Kennedy and Toby Litt are professional rather than revelatory, though I hadn't realised that Litt's books are alphabetical, "Adventures in Capitalism", "Beatniks", "Corpsing..." etc - somehow I felt a little disturbed by this, not sure why. (And I'm someone who loved the double L's of the Go Betweens albums - Send me a LuLLaby, TaLLulah, Spring HiLL Fair etc. - Grant Mclennan's untimely death recently was a genuine loss.)

Out of absentia

The sound that my computer was making a few weeks ago turned out to be terminal, but I'm now back up and running, and wondering what it is I should be blogging about. It's not just been my computer that's been malfunctioning; it's looking like my job might not outlast the year and I've some family health concerns. But those are the travails of life - not the stuff of this blog. The world has been taken over by world cup fever, though I feel it has lessened a little with each England performance. We live in a hyped up world where it is the "before" rather than the during or after that is critical. I'm tempted to turn back to my nascent football novel, but fear it will be another world cup before I get that anywhere near completion. Last night's Verberate was a night of prose and song, with writers from Pulp.Net - I've read some good stories on the site, but I was a bit underwhelmed by last night's readers. The prose was somewhat in that reductionist vein that has been a little in the ascendant since "All Hail the New Puritans." Like English fiction needs to narrow its linguistic horizons! They read well, and there was nothing particular wrong with it, but nothing to grab one either. Tariq Mahmood's "young adults" allegory - about the Iraq war, was the most interesting, yet ruined somewhat by his insisting on having a political Q&A afterwards. The story was strong enough not to require explication, I thought. In a political vein, I'm reading "The Plot Against America" by Philip Roth. I've been a great fan since the astounding "American Pastoral", but part of me wonders if we're suffering from Neil Young syndrome, where every new work is hailed as a masterpiece even before the paint has dried. Like "The Human Stain" and "I Married a Communist" the writing is almost too raw in being dragged from real life, and though the momentum, as always with Roth, is astonishingly controlled, like his unwinding sentences, I've struggled a little with the intimacy of it all. Being voiced by a nine-year old (one of my pet hates) probably hasn't helped; I'm appreciating it rather than particularly enjoying it. But I shouldn't comment whilst still eating the meal, should I? - it's rude to talk with your mouth full!

Oranges, lemons

3rd time lucky for Zadie Smith with "On Beauty" winning the Orange prize for fiction. It might sometimes seems that I'm not a fan of her writing, that would be unfair, their are few contemporary novelists I've avidly read their first 3 books. Whilst I like, sometimes love, her writing, I've drawn short of thinking them the masterpieces that the media insists on, that's all. I think, and hope she'll write a great book one of these days, but I don't think she has as yet. I find competitors Ali Smith and Sarah Walters not to my taste, though I'll no doubt persevere when I get the chance. My problem with "On Beauty" when I reviewed it on this blog, was how in love it is with the middle class collegiate life of its characters, rather than the characters themselves. Nobody in the book, except for the young black street poet, suffers from their errors, so its a strange kind of morality. The middle class may well be fearful of it all being taken away, and it may be unlikely that it ever will be (read a novel like Michael Bracewell's "The Conclave" or Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" for that), but it just strikes me as an odd preoccupation of a novelist. Perhaps I just like a bit more angst. I do like the sunshine, but it doesn't really like me - so I missed Dave Maass's leavetaking on Monday through hayfever; and getting caught in today's stifling heat led to a migraine that made me miss C.P. Lee's book launch at Urbis, for "I Swear I was There", about the legendary free trade hall, where I was also hoping to meet up with my old DJ partner Rupa Huq, who was up to promote her cultural studies book "Beyond Subculture". Next week sees the latest Transmission launch, as well as Michael Symons Roberts reading at the MMU. Tomorrow you can escape from the sun for the first of a series of student readings from MMU students at the Central Library.

6-6-6 not a formation I''d recommend

My Lulu.com "first collection" has been sat at "fulfilling" status for about 3 weeks - and I was beginning to worry about this whole print-on-demand type thing, but I got an email today saying it's dispatched. So, once it's done, it's out. I was expecting other delays for some reason. 3 weeks is okay. It comes from the US so that's longer, and this is for one copy not many. I guess I was just impatient!

Ah, so that's it

Lured by a glossy Baddiel/Skinner World Cup Wallchart, I picked up the Times rather than the Guardian today. It's book pages is comparable in quality, and at least you get a breather from David Lodge and Julian Barnes; and there was this interesting article by Helen Rumblelow. First, thanks for highlighting that Allan Ginsberg would have been 80 today, and that "Howl" is 50 this year. She asks the very apposite question: "what would he make of today’s young generation of literary talent?" And provides a considered answer: "I can’t help but think he would be disappointed." Ginsberg and Kerouac, she continues, wrote as adults, but too many of today's feted writers "write as teenagers, looking back through the rear window of the school bus." She's put a finger on why I find myself frustrated with so much contemporary writing. Struggling with my own prolonged adolescence (look, I've just a reissue of the first Violent Femmes album playing in the background), the last thing, I think, I want from my writers, is nostalgia for a 60s, 70s or 80s childhood. And as someone who writes, I realise I got writing that out of my system quite early on thank you. I'd like to write - and read - about adulthood, for my generation, and there's precious little of it out there. Perhaps with us all expecting to live to 80+ there's still plenty of time - but I don't know - the beats were clearly avoiding the prescripted life; and therefore had little nostalgia from where they'd come from, far more interested in where they were going. What begins as a criticism from Rumblelow becomes less grudging as she concludes the article - its the urgency of teenage life that appeals to the contemporary writer. I'm not so sure. I noticed how many of the novels on my MA were not only first person narratives, but also from relatively inarticulate characters - the teenager, the drug addict, the mental patient. It was like Holden Caulfield was the only literary role model allowed. As Mark E. Smith wrote in "It's a curse", "balti and vimto and spangles were always crap, regardless of the look back bores." Just time to remind you - and me - that Mark Lawson's interviewing Philip Roth on BBC4 tonight at 7. So much for watching Dr. Who! BBC get your demographics sorted.

Various Things (inc. Booker Prize Expt #3)

I finished Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let You Go." Its a strange book, almost terrible, but redeemed by its ending. Science fiction can be a mainstream writer's achilles heel: neither McEwan's "Child in Time" or Amis's "Time's Arrow" (which uses a sci-fi technique I guess) are among their more satisfying work. Ishiguro's previous novel set in an unnamed place, "The Unconsoled" was a stylistic triumph, if not, ultimately that satisfying a novel, and "Never Let You Go" suffers both in comparison to that and his other work. It's probably giving nothing away now to say its about "clones" which information - though not trailed in the book, was trailed in all the publicity. Yet he's made some curious decisions. It takes place in the current time, "the war" it refers to surely the 2nd world war, and in this way its both a parallel world to the one we know, and one that is clearly ours. References to cassette tapes, Walkmans and other things are necessary for the plot, but highlight the difficulty of a world that remains deliberately un-imagined and underwritten. You could get away with this in a short story, but not in a novel. The main characters are seen growing up, first in a mix between public school and children's home; then in remote chalets; before being placed in the homes and hospitals which are their destinies. This cloistered environments are the only way for Ishiguro to give us both the inner lives of his characters - all told in one consistent, but dated voice - and to keep them away from the difficulties of the real world. Had he set it in the future there would have been a whole different set of imaginative problems; by setting it in post-war England leading up to the present, he can attempt to give his character's a "normal" life. They are normal children then normal adults. They are allowed - even encouraged - to have sex but cannot be allowed to form relationships. The novel is repetitive, boring, and annoying, yet, the clear aim is to humanise the characters, and in this, I think, he succeeds, so that at the end of the book, he has created a very genuine sense of sympathy. The "care" he always has shown for his characters in previous books is still here. He's always the most humane of writers, and this novel would have made a powerful short, or novella. Yet at length its contradictions, and the choices that he makes, seem to be lifted from the fifties sci-fi of a writer like John Wyndham, without any updating. Covering the same subject in "Cloud Atlas" David Mitchell achieves so much more, does it so much better, but without managing the same empathy. So this is, in the end, a mediocre book, with a good heart. Seems that the Bank Holiday gave everyone time to ruminate on Robert McCrum's article last week in the Observer. I can't really get worked up about it either way - because since then I've been busy with the story I talked about in my last post. I've spent the morning taking it apart, and putting it back together, and hopefully its a lot sharper in the new version, though I'm pleased that the story itself required little change, just the bagginess of the writing in my first-cut.

Storyplaces

A story comes from different places at the same time. It seems it also requires space and time. It is my 4th day off work, being a long weekend, and only this morning have I managed to both shut out the clutter in my head and the clutter in my life (this weekend: the faultering computer) to tentatively write a few words. I began a story a couple of weeks ago called, initially at least, "The Invitee." Its a story that relates well to the Robert McCrum article I mentioned below, since its essentially about modern celebrity, identity, and literary insecurity. I've often thought one of the main themes of my fiction is "doubt" and this story, as it painfully works itself alive, is full of different levels of "doubt." Yet I realise, now that I'm writing it, and trying to fix its coordinates in my head (I rarely write a synopsis), that I'm pulling on longheld ideas for a longer piece, perhaps around the same subject. Maybe this is the first tentative stab at an idea that I've been brewing for a decade at least? Yet I've got to keep things in perspective. Its a 3,000 word story tops, with a clear arc to it, but one that requires careful handling. I'm writing a story about absences - the absence of a guest at dinner; the absence of success in the case of one character; and finally the absence of integrity. I have to get through this one: and soon - my own absence is increasingly the "art" itself rather than (like this post) the talking about it. I've read a little as well, but my concentration is poor at best. I'm trying to finish the "least completed" of my recent stories: and once I've done that maybe I'll find a key to unlock the nearly there ones. More than anything, I think I need a concentration of time writing fiction - even if not a "long piece", perhaps several short ones, locking together at some point.

McCrums of Comfort

I've read it twice now and I'm still not entirely sure what Robert McCrum is getting at in today's Observer.The Tart of Fiction found it a bit more comprehensible - basically that if it aint hyped you don't get attention. "Once, British novelists were under-paid and overworked. Now, with glittering prizes, huge advances, endless festivals and immediate celebrity, they've never had it so good," reads the headline. Which may be true, but for how many? And can we name names? I think there's a truth here that its not healthy for our writers, like our musicians, to be commercially "fully formed." To give a few examples, certainly Zadie Smith's 2nd novel was an awkward mix of the nice, lively American writing she was now reading, and "White Teeth's" sitcom sketches; which probably neither pleased herself or her audience - yet marketable commodity or not, I think she's shown in "On Beauty" that she's no more or less than a good, contemporary middle class establishment writer, with all that that implies, both good and bad. Perhaps the big advance culture for some other writers is damaging; but for whom exactly? I think anyone who read Richard Mason's "The Drowning People", a much-hyped big advance novel of a few years ago, would think good luck to him, and more fool the publisher and agent who hyped him as the best Oxford writer since Amis or some such thing. Clearly there's always an interest in first novel's, but its surely rare that they are a writer's best. In his trashing of the hype around Gautam Malkani's "Londonstani", McCrum is surely being part of the same "machine" that creates all this hyperbole in the first place, saying that "everything about its short life has been a disaster." Well, if you can call a big advance; blanket reviews; and 165 on Amazon.co.uk a disaster. If the book's any good, I'm sure it will survive it; and if not, well, he's hopefully been told to invest the money wisely. It's a while since the Guardian put a batch of "first novelists" on its cover, and I'd be interested to know if it gave as much - or any publicity to their follow ups? There's probably some truth in the idea that the "celebrity" culture for writers isn't particularly good for them, but the non-celebrity culture of most of the writers I know, isn't particularly good for them either. Better to be tempted at Hay, then temping for Hays. The problem comes - I think - when being a "celebrity writer" makes everyone consider them a good writer. Tony Parsons could never do a book reading again and it wouldn't help him write a good novel - whilst it might do a few literary types good to get out of the house more. I'm wondering what McCrum, usually quite perceptive on the industry, is wanting. I think he senses that the internet may yet have its day. Yet, he's not, as far as I know, signed up any literary bloggers as Observer reviewers. There are several points I think I've teased out of this article: that celebrity is becoming an end in itself for writers; that we're in dire need of a critical culture that can push and shape the contemporary novel; and that though the Booker sometimes gets it right, its part of a prize culture, that may cause some brilliant blooms, but which sucks the earth dry below it. I'd quibble with his view that books are "better printed, better designed and and better marketed" than ever before - the modern English paperback is mostly a shockingly throwaway item (with the pound doing so well against the dollar, splash out on the US edition, you'll rarely be disappointed), with only rarely (Julian Barnes' last novel for instance), a sense of elegance to the design. I think, possibly, he's just not found any decent books recently - no surprise with the culture he's describing - perhaps the Observer could lead the way, hunting down those small presses, and yes, those blogs, that are not purely - if at all - about money and marketing.

Nostalgia

I am still enjoying "the Line of Beauty", more so than the book in fact, since I think Andrew Davies has reduced it to its elements, identifying it as upper-class lit Mills & Boon at heart. The characters are still all surface, like in the book, and its clear that despite its length, there wasn't actually that much to go on in terms of the characters. The "class" issue is a funny one in "the Line of Beauty" - since there's always someone richer, someone more powerful, with the appearance of "the Lady" (Thatcher) as the ultimate status symbol. Ironically, this seems the one real insight of the novel, that Thatcher, to these people, was something "special", just as she was something demonic to so many others. Not just another politician. David Cameron having to ask Rebekah Wade to get him a ticket to the Beckham's party shows where celebrity has shifted, of course. I'm still having anachronistic qualms about the music (see below, and Rose Darling here) though I can perhaps excuse the use of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "The Power of Love" as an anthem for a generation dying of AIDS, since that was what it would become. I have gay friends who simply cannot hear the song, because of the number of funerals it reminds them of. As for the sex scenes in "The Line of Beauty", I notice that the lead character always gives, shall we say, never receives. Perhaps there's a last taboo in here? The utter lack of pumping house music (it's up to 1986 for chrissakes!) has sent me to my record collection, and I spent a pleasant evening digging out obscure house and dance tracks from that golden era. Amazing how quickly everyone, from Paul Weller, to the Pet Shop Boys ended up recording house tracks. There was a fine documentary on C4 about the Pet Shop Boys. A nice comment that they recycled about themselves - that their music was "depth through surface" - seemed worth repeating. I remember when they first made the charts, they weren't particularly seen as a "gay" act, and Tennant in particular very much didn't want to be viewed through the prism of gay experience. If anything they were most popular with teenage girls. I only really liked them when they did become a full-on electronic dance act, around "Introspection", but the claim of some of the vox pops that they songwriters as good as Lennon/McCartney seems a little off. Their best tracks are almost always interpretations: Go West (which didn't get a mention - though I always thought it wonderful that having avoided cliche for so long, they had the sense of humour to cover the Village People's hedonistic anthem), Always on My Mind, It's All Right, and Where the Streets Have No Name. I must admit that their later stuff has somewhat passed me by - and picking up 1999's "Night Life" for a few quid yesterday, I can see why, musically it had become very dated. It would have been nice if the documentary could have found a wider variety of celebrity fans than it did. As I remember it, Pet Shop Boys were very popular with girls. "The Smiths you can dance to" was always my favourite description of them (though of course: you could dance to the Smiths, just not in a white t-shirt at Heaven, on a load of poppers!) As if on cue, the BBC is asking for short plays about meeting your favourite rock star. David Bowie has already done the best of these in the "Jazzin' for Blue Jean" video, but I'll see if can think of anything else. I kind of think there's good nostalgia and bad nostalgia. Bad nostalgia is the increasing fetishisation of Joy Division/New Order/Factory Records/Peter Saville etc. aiming to do to Manchester what the Beatles Museum did for Liverpool (kill aspiration stone dead). whilst good nostalgia is me digging out these old house records, and wondering: wow, where did all this great music come from? "The Line of Beauty", though fun, is very much on the bad side - heritage Britain - the Pet Shop Boys documentary was somewhere in the middle (good when they were on the screen, bad when they weren't.)

Rock 'n' Roll Novels

No-one has yet wrote the great rock and roll novel, says Sean O'Hagan in this week's Observer Music Monthly. I don't think one can argue with that; but it does make me wonder how rarely authors admit to the existence of rock and roll. I've commented before that the musical soundtrack to Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty" seems phoned in by researchers rather than written from memory, which has allowed the TV guys to soundtrack it how it wants - I heard the Passions' "In Love with a German Film Star" anachronistically in the opening scenes, from 1983. If writers can't be bothered to get the soundtrack write, I'm not sure we should trust them on all the other ersatz detail; after all, a song can evoke an era. I look forward to reading David Mitchell's new novel, despite Lee Rourke's misgivings, at least to see whether 1983, a year written strongly in my memory, (favourite single: Trees and Flowers by Strawberry Switchblade, favourite album: Torment and Toreros by Marc and the Mambas) comes alive. Radiohead's "Ok Computer" was a dark, dismal presence in my MA novel "High Wire" (I never liked that album, and yet it dominated 1997, in cruel opposition to the euphoria of New Labour, and almost foretelling Princess Diana's death). For what it's worth, there's been a few decent rock and roll novels that O'Hagan doesn't mention. "Espedair Street" by Iain Banks and "Namedropper" by Emma Forrest come to mind. I'm glad he mentions Tony Parsons' "Platinum Logic" a rewriting of the Phil Spector story, that has mysteriously disappeared from his CV. Also, the best music novel I've ever read is the jazz and heroin drama of Evan Hunter's "Second Ending" (he also wrote "Blackboard Jungle" which became the film "Rock Around the Clock.") After returning to Manchester in 1997, I decided to set my follow up to "High Wire" here, and whereas that had centred around the night that Tony Blair got elected, "All This Scenery"(do you like the Joy Division-ish title?) was entirely set on the night that a feted Manchester band gets back together for a one-off gig, only the off-stage presence of their dead drummer (hey, its fiction remember?), overshadowing the triumphant evening. I never quite finished it - the first, completed half, drawing more than lukewarm responses from agents - mostly: its hard to get publishers interested in novels about music. The novel, of course, was about so much more. But maybe that's why there haven't been many published; and why writers prefer to use rock music as scene dressing or for their titles ("Girlfriend in a Coma"); or why it is more likely to work the other way round: Paul Kantner/Jefferson Starship's Heinlein apeing "Blows Against the Empire" (a remarkable piece of space age scifi folk), being given a sci-fi writing award. If I get a bit worked up about the music/lit crossover its probably after having such a dismal experience as last night's Top of the Pops. I rarely catch this; but the shower of 3rd rate no-hope major label shysters was unstoppable: Orson, the Feeling, the Beautiful South (er...it rains in Manchester apparently), a Gnarls Barkley album track about a monster (yes, "Crazy" is great, but that's not a carte blanche for crap), the very Ordinary Boys, and possibly indescribably worst of all, the Breaks Co-op. I don't think 30 minutes of music has ever made me feel so despairing - and I've got records by SPK, Scott Walker, the Cure and Swans in my collection.

Sunday Things

James Lasdun won the national short story prize. He's a good short story writer and poet, although frightfully patrician at times. You can usually pick up his collection The Silver Age, reasonably cheaply, and I'd recommend it, though as you can see, it came out in 1985, so although an undervalued writer in many ways, he's no new kid on the block(he's undervalued on the web as well, a mere stub at Wikipedia, and his publisher only barely acknowledges his existence, but I found a very good recent interview from Identity Theory) But these things take time; and I was reminded of that last night, at a very successful Verberate as part of the Chorlton Arts Festival. In a room overlooking the quiet of a bowling green it was quite easy to close your eyes in quiet comtemplation, only to be drawn back to the room by the sparkiness of the performers. I enjoyed the whole night; and the catholic nature of the event - fiction, poetry and music - is part of its appeal to me. Yet, this event, like so many others in Manchester is in some way an offshoot of the city's creative writing courses - mainly the MMU one now - in that without a publishing industry as such, there are a large number of writers studying and writing in the city at any one time, and an event like this sees graduate students from the last ten years of courses, some tutoring, some writing plays and poetry, a few published, a few self-publishing. It made me wonder whether, though its valuable to go on one of these courses, universities - particularly in the UK - might be the very worst places to let literature flourish. It seems that the things university's could provide: a magazine and events culture (similar to American universities, and in the UK, UEA), are almost absent. I would guess that the creative writing courses are net contributors to the university's finances rather than taking from it - and that whatever money they do spend is probably on high profile names as a "draw". At least the MMU backs up its collection of quality poets, Carole Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage and Jeffery Wainwright, with having a poetry MA, but too often you've got poets taking courses in fiction - when its the rare example - James Lasdun for instance, of Jackie Kay - who makes both work. And, inevitably, people need to make a living. Outside of arts council largesse, or university tenure, I guess we can move quicker, more imaginatively; but until we provide a real alternative - as I think Verberate and some of the magazines are beginning to do - the universities will be the main place where literary culture in this country flourishes; probably, I fear, to its detriment.

We have Personal Document Facility

I was in Brussels with work for 3 days, this work, an international network of thingummy bobs. The EU has international networks of everything, it appears, and sometimes 2. I looked in vain for second-hand bookshops, but did find a really good secondhand/bootleg record shop but he was closing and so I couldn't spend the next couple of hours rooting out that Plastic Bertrand bootleg I'd always been looking for. Hence, my blog-lightness of the last week. I did take last Friday off and spent much of the weekend in sorting out my PDF for Lulu.com's print on demand facility. Basically I ended up using their own conversion routine; which was simpler, but meant I had to make changes so that it utilised their standard fonts rather than my favoured choice. I guess if I had a proper (e.g. paid for) PDF creator it could save PDFs in different formats, but unless I've missed something, mine converts everything into A4 as a default. Similarly, the cover requires PDF's of certain sizes and resolutions for both the back and front, and I struggled a little with this; but because I was going for a simple approach, I did final achieve lift off, and the proof copy should be winging its way to me as I speak. Tonight is Verberate in Chorlton, which will make a nice change of venue. The million and one things I want and need to do this weekend are already fading into the distance, so I'm hopefully going to go easy on the alcohol, so that I wake up bright and early tomorrow morning and actually do some of them.

The Informationists

I came across Richard Price and the Informationists only last year when his first book length collection Lucky Day came out from Carcanet. I was intrigued, not least because I'd not heard of them before! Yet, I liked the way that Scottish poets from Edwin Morgan to Don Paterson seemed more tuned in to the possibilities of the avant garde than their English and Irish contemporaries. In short, Scottish poetry seems not unafraid to have fun - with language and subject. Keen to find out more I came across talk of the informationist anthology, Contraflow on the Superhighway, a great and evocative title, which was even for sale on Amazon. I sent off for it on 1st January and waited, and waited. Remarkably, having given up all hope, it arrived today. I'd upload the cover image but Blogger's saying "no" at the mo. Its a lovely book of its type, full of manifesto and quirkiness. Price is about my age; and the concern of the informationists, seems similar to the American prose writers around McSweeneys, to take the detritus of this information age and make something of it; the tools, they see, are all around us; in the redudant day-glo language of late capitalism. My own occasional experiments with this kind of writing seem a little less alone today.

Unquiet Desperation

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" is the quote from Thoreau which gives its name to a new Sheffield based magazine (contact editor at unquietdesperation.co.uk) - a mere 8 pages to start with it shows that the DIY ethic can still produce something pleasing. I contribute a short story "The Tenth Planet" to the first issue, which kind of fits the tone, and there are poems by half a dozen others. As always with such ventures, I wish it well.

The new poetry

I'm in Brussels next week, so will miss Michael Schmidt, my old tutor, and James Davies, one of our favourite local poets, reading at the Tai Chi Village Hall in Didsbury. The poets and players nights there include musicians as well as poets, and the mix works well, although the evenings are a little surreal, since the village hall is a "no shoes" venue, and the refreshments are green tea and biscuits rather than cigarettes and alcohol. Its no reflection on the poets that your usually gagging for an alcoholic drink at the end of the evening. In fact, the suburbs are where its at, with the Chorlton Arts Festival beginning next week as well. There's a poetry competition attached to it, and I might have a go, though my only previous Chorlton poem was called "Get Out of Chorlton!" I know Michael Schmidt from my MA, back in 1997-9, and obviously we've bumped into each other now and then since then. I met with one of my other coursemates on Tuesday, for the first time in an age, and as always, I was impressed that he is still writing, quite methodically, a book a year, despite, like myself being no nearer to finding a publisher. I've decided to try and become my own publisher, through the online print-on-demand facility Lulu.com. It looks straightforward, and so I'm just going to jump in and have a go. First things first: what would be my first book? I've decided to package the 3 poetry pamphlets I issued during 2004-5 (2 of them are available to download) as a single book. Of the various page formats they offer, I quite like the idea of the 7" by 7" square, I think it will make for distinctive books. In an attempt to pull the village where I grew up back from the clutches of the BNP (see post below), I'm going to call this venture "norton canes editions." If anyone reading this blog has experience of Lulu.com I'd be grateful for any tips - otherwise I'll let you know my progress on this blog.

Reading Poetry

I was pleased to pick up Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl and other poems", on CD. It reminded me that we should cherish these recordings more than we do. I'm wondering if there's an anthology of live recordings from the St. Marks poetry project? Google, of course, can furnish some of the answers; the online poetry archive some of the others; but this is one place where I feel the internet's difficulties in dealing with copyright material (both the recording and the writing) expose its limitations. Its not that there's particular monetary "value" in these recordings - they will never be bestsellers - but cultural value, yes indeed. And whilst the original master tapes are probably climate controlled and worth a fortune, its the wider dissemination we need. There's only 3 Ginsberg poems currently on the poetry archive, and its choice of Real Player is annoying, since it requires an intrusive download - why wasn't a choice of players considered? Also a quick scan sees the absence of such as Eliot, Plath and Lowell amongst others. It's early days I guess, and copyright is always problematic - but listening to poetry - whether in a classroom, on the radio or a podcast seems as good a way as any as educating and enlightening. Each poet links to an expensive CD which can only ever have a very limited audience. It would be great if some of the contemporary poets herein had looked to creative commons licences and the like. I prefer the internet archive - a lecture by Anne Waldman for instance; or Ubuweb; I'm sure this all has some commercial value but I guess its limited, even a Plath reading. And of course you can buy CDs, ever more cheaply, which makes all the arguments against putting this stuff on the web in as accessible way as possible, deeply flawed. Writers are often interviewed, but wonder how many of the festival readings this year will be recorded for posterity? The BBC is wrestling with all this on a global scale; but it would be good to see more poetry made available - it can surely be free at point of use and maybe the arts council or the BBC pays the poets? Luckily you can catch the Verberate readings on the web and CD, and Comma are archiving many of their readings. Then there's Route with their book/CD projects, and the inimitable AK Press. You can get the book of Gynomite: Fearless Feminist Porn poetry from them; but I managed to pick up the CD, which doesn't seem to be available anywhere, when I was in Los Angeles 10 years ago, a prized possession.

Where I come from

I left the Staffordshire village where I was brought up in 1985, and though my family and a couple of friends still live there, apart from a few months after university, I've never been back for more than a visit. I was there this weekend. Norton Canes is old enough to be in the Domesday book, it has an ancient heart, and grew first as a pit village in the early 20th century, and then, more recently, as a dormitory town, for Cannock, Walsall and Birmingham. The first act of the Blair government in 1997 was to give the go-ahead to the Birmingham Northern Relief Road, Britain's first and so-far "only" toll road. It was this decision - not because it was the right thing, but because it would have cost more to get out of the contracts, apparently - that led me to leave the Labour party; I sign, I see now, of things to come, decisions being made for fiscal decisions or to not upset vested interests, rather than because they were the right ones. I wrote a poem about it called, appropriately, "The end of the road". The jury is still out on what effect having a motorway cleaved through a part of the country with some of the worst bronchial conditions in England, but for the village, it meant that for the first time in my lifetime it had some real investment - roads, signage etc. The village looks better than it ever has; caught now in a triangle with the old Watling Street, Norton Pool, and Cannock Chase, its reached a pitch of development. I read once that it was the largest village in England - not picturesque, with hardly a pub or a cash machine or shops or cafes - its a place where people live, and some work, and commute - every drive has two or three cars in it. Kids I was at school with still live there, married others from the village, bought houses down the street from their parents. It is a down-to-earth place, but its also stifling. It is mostly white, reasonably well-off, and, Last Thursday, 550 of those villagers voted for the British National Party, which, despite coming 3rd, received a shocking 30% of the vote. It is where I come from, but has never been where I belong. I'm shocked, but perhaps worse than that, I'm not surprised.

My other blog's a Porsche

I've decided to set up a second blog for "downloads" of my writing, so the 2 poetry pamphlets "2004" and "The Question" can now be found here. I'll add a few older stories in time. A poem I wrote a year or so ago, called "1970" is in the latest edition of Scarecrow. I was going to write a poem about every year in the seventies, but for some reason forgot about that particular project as soon as I'd started it, so just the one poem. My computer sounds like its swallowed a goose, so I fear impending hard drive failure. Something's not right, anyway. It may well be possessed, since I've just tried to get to the Guardian website and it says "bad gateway." Yet I'm still able to listen to the live broadcast of Hoodlum Tribe, which I've caught the last 20 minutes or so of. It was a relief to go to the theatre last night, to see Terence Rattigan's "Separate Tables" at the Royal Exchange. It was well-performed and worked well in the space; but I have to say it's a play that doesn't really deserve a revival; the second half lacking the emotional bit of the first half, so much so, that it could almost have been two plays. Written in 1956 its a world away from the gathering storm of the Angry Young Men; and you can see why (a) they were needed and (b) why this kind of politely veiled emotion lost its pre-eminence. It's nearly 30 years since the Sex Pistols created the Manchester music scene through their gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, and I wonder if that paradigm shift is being somehow repeated by the MySpace phenomenon. The MySpace "chums" network is the equivalent of those late seventies musicians' collective spaces. And with Reason, broadband and Cubase its possible never even to need to meet. To keep up with the kids, I set up my own Myspace the other day. I've already got a Romanian goth who has signed up. Now, I'm scared.

The Premiership.

I read with interest the interview with Alex Poots, director of Manchester International Festival, in Creative Times, the regular CIDS publication. It's a difficult brief, a festival of new commissions, with an international profile, and perhaps one should just let him get on with it for the first year - since if its a success it will inevitably grow - however, since it's a difficult brief with a £5 million budget, £2 million of it from the City, I think Manchester creative's should be able to have an opinion, if not - as seems likely - be involved. His main argument seems to be that by bringing world renowned figures to the city for the first time, the connections can be made on that "networking" level, which will, at some distant point, bear fruit. Now, no doubt a few individuals will benefit from this - after all the arts is an "international" market - and I'm hoping that we get an opportunity to see some of those artists who usually visit only London or Edinburgh; but I've a real concern that this is the same argument about the Premiership. Being the "best league in the world" will be good for all. Yet, just as Arsenal have made the Champions League final without an English player or manager, maybe this international elite will simply squeeze out funding and opportunities for locally based innovators. I would hope the legacy of this - as with so many things - would be that if (and it could be a big "if") an artist or scene of international importance - whether in art, literature, theatre, music or whatever - develops in Manchester in the next few years that those international tastemakers who've never previously been to the city will see about making their own way here, rather than as special guests. Perhaps it depends where you're coming from in terms of culture. There are certain "international markets" in the arts - visual arts, theatre, dance, films etc. - so that Damon Albarn would have put on the Gorrilaz show anywhere that gave him the opportunity (and presumably the budget) - yet I don't think it gives the city any more opportunities. Yes, like with the BBC move, or with "Alfie" being filmed in the Northern Quarter, there's a spin off in terms of jobs; but if Manchester's great advantage is that you can be creative in a supportive environment, without having to go to the "big city" at the first opportunity, then there has to be a point when local talent takes centre stage. Despite its flaws, the highly enjoyable Manchester Passion, mostly saw a benefit in pulling in local artists - Denise Johnson rather than some TV talent show flavour of the month, for instance. I'm sure the Gorrilaz show was a wonderful event; albeit a typically safe one - after all they are currently one of the biggest artists in the world; lets hope that the festival proper pulls in some more edgy coups. Remember, a sold out match at Old Trafford may give great entertainment to those who can afford it, but it doesn't offer much opportunity to a promising young footballer on United's youth scheme. But lets play a bit of fantasy arts festival and see who I'd like to see being commissioned to perform or do some new work in Manchester: Liz Phair, Neil Young, Eno, Jeff Koons, Francis Ford Coppolla, Gilbert & George, Harmony Korine, Tony Kaye, Michel Houellebecq, Genesis P. Orridge, Roman Polanski, Philip Roth, Michael Winterbottom, A.M. Homes, McSweeney's, Captain Beefheart, N*E*R*D, Jose Saramago, a revival of "I Am Kurious Oranj" by Michael Clarke and the Fall, Bridget Riley, Gillian Wearing, John Adams, David Thewliss, Marie Darrieussecq, David Mitchell, Greg Sage, Mantronix...

Hello Children Everywhere

It always seemed slightly more than coincidence that the BBC programme Hello Children Everywhere should share the intials with Here Comes Everbody, from "Finnegan's Wake", but who knows? I'm trying to grasp with various things at the moment that don't particularly make sense, like a puzzle that you can't quite put together. Music is there, as is poetry, and fiction, but so too is the internet. I'm beginning to think there is a paradigm shift, and its happening kind of without our permission, but with our agreement, if that makes sense. Listening to Hoodlum Tribe on internet radio tonight, I wondered why I'd ever listen to anything else. I was in a taxi this afternoon and the boorish driver was listening to Radio 2 with the always abysmal Steve Wright still taking his silver shilling from the poor licence payers. He played Jaki Graham's forgotten, and forgettable "Round and Round" followed by the Who's eminent, incendiary, but clearly ancient, "My Generation", and I just had to wonder what was the audience? Where was the thought? Who had died? The whole process was bizarre. Perhaps a radio show is just a string of missed opportunities thrown together. How do these things stack up? Well...given the new digital multiplex future you can have a choice - the you've got to keep my interested to keep me listening approach of Hoodlum Tribe, or the we'll play any old shit the bastards have vaguely heard of approach of Steve Wright. Clearly Jaki Graham was an immunisation shot for the Who record that followed. It is with this in mind, that at the weekend I spent rather too much time putting my own teenage rock and roll (or to be truthful, synth and roll) musings on the web for the first time. For post-Adrian succour try Verberate's latest poet of the month, Lucy Burnett. I particularly like the apple poem. Five a day you see. Five a day.

Midlist Lists

Waterstones is promoting the midlist - i.e. those worthy books that don't sell all at once, but drip, drip over the years. Oddly enough, the celebrity list is even more interesting - or at least, the books and writers on it were mostly unknown to me. On Waterstones' list, there's one perennial favourite, Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut, (had it gone so out of fashion that it has to now be rediscovered?) and one book, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, which has been lauded so much on its rediscovery that its surely escaped obscurity forever. All lists require that one adds to them - and there are 2 books I read over 15 years ago that I'd still recommend, one sad, one funny. The sad one is "Mars" by Fritz Zorn, apparently not his real name, and it reads like an autobiography - its about a man who gets cancer, but because of how he lives his life. It was a Picador I picked up as a gloomy undergraduate, and reading this life of someone to whom nothing ever happens - except this terrible fate - its horribly addictive in the right mood. Far funnier, is a book that you can often see in secondhand bookshops, "Boy Wonder" by James Robert Baker. Told as a Citizen Kane style series of interviews it tells the story of a maverick film mogul, the gloriously named Shark Trager. Superb stuff.

Odds and ends

The Tart of Fiction gives a good and eloquent take on the Short story contest that I mentioned previously. I hope its not a one-off post, but another addition to the literary bloggers scene. She, (I'm assuming), will probably be equally angry about the UEA's "New Writing Partnership", another scheme to "help" new writers. I use the word "help" advisedly here. It costs £15 to enter, but clearly anybody who cares about short fiction would have set word limit higher than a paltry 3000 words. Yes, of course, there are good short stories under that length, but "Hills Like White Elephants" apart, there's not that many. I've often wondered why it is we are given a choice between a marathon (a novel - if you want to get published) and a sprint (if you want to win one of these spurious prizes.) You're excluding a lot of good middle distance runners there - "The Great Gatsby", "The Quantity Theory of Insanity", "A Rose for Emily", "Winesburg, Ohio," "The Dead", most of Borges, "Brokeback Mountain." I could go on. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to enter to get on their "mentoring" scheme, a well worked extract, or a story cut short at the neck? I think, going back to the Tart of Fiction, that the BBC/Radio 4 etc., like Nesta, "Save our Short Story", and all these other "well meaning" schemes have nothing to do with literature, and a lot to do with self-aggrandisement. Radio 4 likes news items, it likes traditional fiction - it has no interest in literature; and that, I'm afraid is what all of these initiatives are like; they have no interest in literature. Anyone who has ever gone for some of the BBC's northern exposure initiatives knows that you're given a straitjacket every time you want to enter - and next year its a totally different one. Good writing requires commitment, and commitment to the form as well as anything else. There's always the sneaking suspicion that the novelist slumming it as a short story writer thinks its a little extra earner between novels, a bit like driving a taxi on weekends to make ends meet. Those of us who like the short story - and, yes, even write them - have to just continue with them. Literature is what happens when the official version is looking elsewhere. I couldn't get published in Loot these days, but for those with a more optimistic bent, the links on the left of this page are a good place to start. Which neatly brings us to this following Monday's Verberate, where an alumni of Lamport Court, (with a fine, long short story called "The Quarry"), Max Dunbar will be amongst the readers. I'm also looking forward to Thursday and a 2-country internet broadcast simulcast thingy, debating "alternative media as social space."

First Influence

I may have touched on this before, but I wonder to what extent one is influenced by early exposure to art; and to what extent those early - first - influences stay with you. Last week at work, I decided to find an Easter poem to show people, and remembered George Herbert's Easter Wings. It's not the greatest poem in the world, but it was appropriate, and with its "shape", that of an angels' wings, and the lines reducing and expanding with the poet's mood, I feel it's an early "concrete poem." But the Metaphysicals, Herbert, Donne and Marvell, were foisted on me at 'O' Level, along with Macbeth and Pride and Prejudice. In their own way, they've all remained touchstones in some ways. I guess, left to my own devices, I may have found Shakespeare, but I wonder if I'd have found Donne, and "Pride and Prejudice" might have come too late. Then for A level it was more Shakespeare (Hamlet and Othello), Waiting for Godot, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Wuthering Heights. For non-American English literature I couldn't have had a better base; or so it seems. Othello, Wuthering Heights, P&P and Coleridge appealed - and still appeal - to my romantic nature, whilst the metaphysicals and Godot have a clarity about them, and a sense of the existential that is equally important to me; and I'd put Eliot alongside the metaphysicals there. Perhaps all great literature will have this effect but I think they were more close to my psyche than, say, Trollope, Dickens, King Lear and Tennyson might have been. So which came first, my sensibility or my set text list? Perhaps its just coincidence. From Godot I developed an appreciation of the minimalist, and the unsaid, rather than an appreciation of Beckett; whilst I've not read Coleridge or Austen that widely since. But these texts are lodestones - one s that I came across before I was 18, and have perhaps defined, to some extent what I want from literature. There have been others since - the Americans in particular - and George as well as T.S. Eliot, Borges, Calvino et al; but, having tentatively written a number of poems in the last week, and seeing that yes, they are romantic, and yes, metaphysical, it makes me wonder whether nature or nurture has most effect on my art. You do tend to study English exams at a particularly susceptible age.

London Hipsters

My friends at Scarecrow, 3AM et al will no doubt be devastated that the Guardian took notice of their little soiree last week in Fitzrovia, but probably relieved its in the online blog, not the paper proper. Nobody reads these blog things anyway, do they? Lee Rourke read at the one-and-only literary night that I organised, Wrote 4 Luck, back in Manchester in 1998, and I've already eulogised about his ace "Being Lee Rourke is Boring" story, but a "cherub had fluttered in from the 40s", he'll like that.

Private Investigations

I don't read alot of crime fiction but enjoy a few authors; one of whom is Sara Paretsky. I just read her first novel "Indemnity Only", having picked up a 2nd hand copy recently - its been a few years since I read one of her books, but V.I. Warshawski, her female Polish Private investigator based in Chicago is always compelling. Considering this was the first book, its interesting how little back story there is - though this is expanded in future novels - but also, how many of the signature ideas of her books are already there. Most compelling, of course, is that crime fiction is about the only place where a writer can finger big business and contemporary issues; though last night I caught BBC News 24's Hard Talk, and an interview with Jay McInerney. Despite being an open, willing interviewee, it was frustrating - going over his first book, Bright Lights, Big City again and the "image" that was in this book (though how anyone could ever read that and not see its more satire than lifestyle choice escapes me), and then jumping forward to his latest post-9/11 novel. That this revisits characters from what is probably his best book, "Brightness Falls", was not even alluded to. Missed opportunities.

Hacienda Classics

The release of a 3-CD "Hacienda Classics" compilation reminded me that I wrote a poem with that same name back in the day. Only 4 tracks in common, I'm afraid, though mine was more a chronological history of house (as well as supposed to make some sense as a poem.)

Hacienda Classics

Jack Your Body, No Way Back,
House Nation, Jack The Groove,

Beat Dis! Rok Da House,
Put The Needle On The Record,

Pump Up The Volume,
You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone,

Let's Get Brutal! Let It Roll,
Tired Of Getting Pushed Around,

We Call It Acieed! Big Fun,
Touch Me, Ride On Time,

Sure Beats Workin', Wait!
Respect, Finally, Promised Land,

I'm Talking With Myself,
Justified & Ancient,

An Ever Growing Globe
That Rules The Ultraverse,

French Kiss, Tricky Disco,
Charly Says....Pong!

I Got The Power,
You Got The Love,

Open up! Out Of Space,
Waterfall, Get up!

(Before The Night Is Over)
Things Can Only Get Better,

Satan, Firestarter,
Leave Home, Son Of A Gun,

Feel The Sunshine!

Poetry eMotion

My friends at Verberate have taken my live recording of the other week and put it on their website as "featured writer" for which I'm humbly grateful. A few remarks... I was horribly nervous when I did the reading, and felt I'd chosen the wrong poems for the occasion; but I did know they were poems I could read without fumbling too much, and I hope I did that. Listening to them, as well, I realise both my strengths and limitations. As a poet, my "unit of measurement" seems to be the sentence, and that's not what most poetry works with - its more rhythm, phrase, stanza etc. I think, equally humbly, this is why I've never been quite "got" by any poetry establishment going. It's a little about voice, I guess - not the way you write, or speak so much as how you sound in your head - your own emotional/literary connection with the world. My sort of poetry is attempting to be something that it's not; and really it should be something that it is. Also, my poetry, being essentially narrative (all those 4 poems have some narrative to them), has to take that fact into account. The question: what is poetry? comes into this. In this weeks Guardian we had Jackie Kay writing about her father; as did, in a very different way, John Burnside recently; and choosing prose - an article, a memoir - to do this. And then we have Robert Potts talking about literary magazines, particularly the online Jacket; yet not really acknowledging how closed these particular shops are as well. I'm interested, and intrigued by all this. Poetry requires, like anything else, some degree of success; so a poet like Alice Oswald, who, to be frank, was never mentioned in any dispatches until "Dart" was so successful, can have her own poetic "land grab." In other words, its only at the point that you are asked to write about poetry for the Guardian, or collected in some Bloodaxe anthology, or play that particular game, that you are officially "poetry." On the other hand, there's the whole performance poetry thing which gets along very well in its own world, thank you, but requires a certain "balls" to do it, and do it well. Who knows where all this leads to? If I get asked to read my poetry I will; and then, maybe, we'll see if I'm a poet - until then, I'm not sure; maybe I just write a different kind of prose. I'm trying to work out these contradictions. In the mean time, my muse is somewhat silent. I'll keep you posted.

The Usual Suspects

I'd forgotten Nesta's short story prize almost as soon as it was announced, because it seemed to be offering nothing more than a "beauty contest" for established prom queens, and so, it seems, that has come to pass, with William Trevor, James Lasdun, Rose Tremain and Michael Faber on the 5 person shortlist. I'm sure they're all fine, and good luck to Rana Dasgupta in such distinguished company. The reason I lost interest as soon as the prize was announced was because it wasn't clear what "record of publication" actually meant - and whether publication in such a small magazine as our own would count. I hardly want to bother mentioning the prize really. I'm impressed that they got such a distinguished list from 1400 entries or so; I wonder if they were anonymously judged? I like James Lasdun's fiction, and he's a writer's writer more than a popular success, so I guess it would be good if he gained a little popularity out of it. Certainly at least 4 of those 5 writers could ring up the editor of Granta any day of the week and get a story placed there; and probably anywhere else as well; so I'm not sure that the prize actually "helps" the short story. I just hope the stories are good.

Cast not the first stone

A contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? doesn't know the answer to "which British writer won the 2005 Nobel prize for literature". I can understand Splinters gloat, but I think we should be more humble. The reason Pinter's known as a name outside literary circles is that he has a certain "celebrity"status, at least partly because of his political profile. I can't name any of the other Nobel winners from 2005, British or otherwise, and whereas you can at least go and read a novel or a poem, it's hard to get to see most plays, or playwrights, unless you're in London, doing your English A Levels, or obsessed with the medium. I saw my first Pinter at the Edinburgh festival a couple of years ago, and have seen only The Birthday Party, and Betrayal on television. In fact, there are very few playwrights, Shakespeare aside, that I've seen produced more than 2 or 3 times. I'd like to see more, but however hard I try, I tend to go to three or four productions a yaer, regardless - mixture of time, money, location and - perhaps critically - other people to go with. I'll see the usual collection of Manchester writers at a poetry reading or a book launch, but never at the theatre. It's the 50th anniversary of Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" - again, I only saw it on television, and didn't much like the casual misanthropy. The ubiquitous Mark Lawson makes the point that it is oft mentioned but not oft revived. Osborne, of course, also became a celebrity playwright, it must be all that hanging around with beautiful actresses that does it; right, where's my 3rd act gone to?