Blogs and Biogs

The Guardian used to do a bit of a Saturday round-up of the blogs, but perhaps because it's got such a well-used blog itself now, or simply realised the absurdity of taking the online offline, its given up the habit. It's a bit of a relief, really. This blog, amongst others, used to occasionally get a quote, and I wasn't then sure whether I should mention it in this blog, before realising that if you were reading this blog you'd probably already read what had been extracted in the Guardian. Such circularity! There is some point to this point, of course - in that the print/online relationship goes two ways. There's been a move over the last few years to put "online" (or at least on DVD) magazines from the archive. so that, for instance, the hard-to-find final Salinger Glass family story, Hapworth 16, 1924 is now easily retrievable, the complete "New Yorker" having been available as a boxed set for a few years now. I guess that's the idea behind the Google (and others) digitisation projects, though I'm not sure that scanning books en masse is as important a job as preserving printed materials. Moreover, who - and to what extent - is preserving the cyberspace only words that fill the blogs? The letters of Julian Mclaren-Ross has just come out for instance, a virtually forgotten writer who died in 1965, and is more famous for his lifestyle than his works, it seems almost ridiculous that 43 years after he died, that a well-edited selection of his letters should be given so much floorspace in our literary pages; yet that's the point. As DJ Taylor points out in his Guardian review, "even half a century ago the life of the rackety freelance, a feature of English literature since the days of Johnson, was growing steadily less tenable. Here in the age of Richard & Judy and the Waterstone's three-for-two, it is virtually extinct." The rackety freelance now will, I'm sure have a blog, and instead of begging letters to editors, will have a brisk, businesslike email conversation with commissioners, as well as whatever day job is necessary, still trying to carve out enough time to write "the novel". It's not that this stuff isn't being stored away, but that it could, indeed, take 43 years to identify what blogs are worthwhile. In a world where every new graduate - and every job - seems to be something to do with "marketing", it takes quite a lot of conviction to do something as economically useless as write a poem, a song or a story. Yet, it is these things, not the conferences, seminars, think-pieces, or reality TV shows, which have the only continuing value. Think of all the footage of old European Championships and Wimbledons, its always the shots, the games, not the comment, that gets repeated. Kathryn Hughes writes quite a considered, but somewhat redundant piece on "what happened to the golden age of biography?" Or rather she doesn't. The "crisis" is only really in the headlines, the piece itself is far more even-handed, bemoaning only the lack of time (and resource) that is being given to biographers these days to research their subjects. I think- at least in terms of literary biography - there is something else. Not just that everyone of stature has been done, as she says, but that our long-lived writers these days seem to fade away, not forgottten, not yet discovered. And, more than likely, with their literary archives bequeathed to one or other university. What will the blog generation have to bequeath, I wonder? A USB stick?

David Bowie in the Mail on Sunday....

...there's definitely something wrong there. Yes, this coming Sunday you can get a free David Bowie CD, his own selection of favourite tracks, rarities etc. I know, its the Mail on Sunday. Prince was one thing, but David Bowie? The Thin White Duke? Aladdin Sane? Ziggy Stardust?...and middle England's weekly bible of misery-porn? But that's the world today, you see. No certainty anymore. There's probably some demographic I'm missing here - perhaps its the "Lets Dance"/Serious Moonlight era Bowie fans - as for me, well, its good to read what the enemy think now and then. Still, I'm shaking my head with some kind of disbelief. Whatever next? Slipknot in Hello Magazine? My Bloody Valentine in Vanity Fair? Fuck Buttons in FHM?

Talking, more talking

Something about this time of year sees every activity under the sun taking place at the same time. I've another window open, with the Tony Wilson Experience going on live at Urbis, and the composer Steve Martland and poet Simon Armitage speaking, twenty hours into a twenty four hour period. Armitage has just written a book about his interest in music, "Gig." He's recently formed a band, and kind of sees his poetry life as a replacement for him not-being-in-a-band. As he says, his reputation nowadays depends on the poetry, so it creates a pressure that's perhaps not there when he's doing music - that's just fun. Last night, Paul Morley and Irvine Welsh talked about how the "middleman" and the "media" are being so damaging these days - as a stop on talent, and that other models; print-on-demand, ebooks etc. will work around the edge of the mainstream.

It's interesting, all this talk... I've spent the last week in a different talking environment at New Writing Worlds in Norwich ; and how different it was. The Tony Wilson Experience came about as a way of "passing on" from old talent to new talent; and though I've been enjoying the talks, despite the low-band video streaming, it has been a bit one-to-many. Manchester's a highly creative city, in terms of the amount of people making good quality material, but it still seems to lack something in terms of the opportunities. In terms of the arts, its only really music - whether classical or contemporary - where there seems real opportunities. Manchester's publishing scene, for instance, is tiny and subsidised; and the university creative writing courses have been as likely to import the talent as use what's already around. Later today, hurricanes willing, the Poets & Players garden party creates another city subset: readings from Carole Ann Duffy and Matthew Welton amongst others.

Armitage, now, is talking about how writers need to have passion - and also need to read, as well as to write. It's the simple advice that's the best. When I first read Armitage, it gave me a reason to start reading poetry again, after university had turned me off poetry. I'm still wrestling with some of these conflicts.

Latest posts from New Writing Worlds

Busy blogging at New Writing Worlds. Catch my posts here....

Nature and Nation

My new post on today's literary salon at New Writing Worlds is here.

New Writing Worlds 2008

Tuesday night at New Writing worlds, readings and a debate... details here.

Flatlands

I'm in Norwich, looking at out on a flat, tree-lined landscape. The train journey down was pleasant, uneventful. I wasn't the beneficiary of Whitsun weddings or similar phenomena to write about; though every town I passed through did seem to have a cathedral high on the brow; but the medieval cathedrals were built fortified and high for many reasons, not least protection and security. All around and in between these towns you get to see things not dissimilarly to how they'd have been forty, fifty years ago. Farming in this country was industrialising a long time ago, and though the polytunnels and rural structures of Thanet Earth are a more recent thing; I guess the difference now, compared with around World War Two, would be how few people now "work the land." During the war my grandparents had an army of their own; land girls (and boys). The other sign of the times, I guess, would be the redbrick sprawl as you come into Margaret Thatcher's Grantham, and then, next to the station, a massive supermarket. In Norwich itself, coming from the station, the traffic was busy as it is everywhere these days, and on reaching the university, I found myself queueing in the rain behind a conference party of Spanish students. It gave me a chance to find the campus Waterstones. With such a range of readings over the next few days, I'm sure I'll be back there as purchaser. Tonight sees readings from Mimi Khalvati and Adam Thorpe, with a debate "Future Imperfect?" later on, which I hope will be a bit of a scene-setter for the next few days. Everything, as New Order once had it, has gone green these days - the next thing is to tease out the contradictions, and work out that means. I could, have course, have flown to Norwich; my pleasant and relaxing train journey was an appropriate start.

Version Control

"Version control" is a term from software development; but it's not something new to writers. And like software, writing has it's development and production phases; yet, just as a "software release" isn't necessarily the final say, neither is publication. In the past, it was the technical and human limitations of turning a handwritten script into a fair copy or typescript and then again, into the moveable type of a book. I'm always quite surprised when I read of writers - even younger writers who still write initially by hand, or even continue with a heavy manual typewriter long after they've fallen out of favour elsewhere. But if the technique's not broke then don't look to fixing it. It was still a surprise to read in the Sunday Times that Nietzsche used a typewriter. So says Andrew Sullivan pace Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic. I've long argued that the tools of your trade can effect the work - whether its Hemingway's heavy-duty Remington or Kerouac's continuous scroll. When I write poetry the page length can be a determinant (which is why when writing longhand I tend to steal the blank white space of copier paper), as can whether I write it direct to the PC (landscape) rather than in a notebook (portrait.) As Sullivan points out, Google, for all it's advantages, can give us "pond skater minds." Yet, it's not just that. Finding yourself without the internet nowadays, seems to make using a PC almost impossible - yet for years we used the computer as little more than a glorified typewriter anyhow. Tomorrow, on a long train journey, I'll have a choice: laptop whilst the batteries last or longhand. I think I might get a few thousand uninterrupted words on the former if I'm lucky, since without the distractions of my Google and Facebook and whatever else, there'll be nothing else to concentrate on. Yet, going back to my initial point: about "version control" - in a connected world, the distinction between "on" and "off" line is becoming less certain; and in the same way, the internet gives us (mostly) the latest version. A future literary sleuth may well find themselves going over the log files of a writer's wiki, to see what he or she changed, and when. I think its different for poetry, where a number of different versions of a poem can probably co-exist quite easily - the poem you read at the reading; the manuscript version; the one in the little magazine; the first collection; the selected etc etc - and I'm often surprised when I see a poet reading armed with nothing more than the published book. It seems a little disappointing in some ways, yet one assumes a well-edited collection will be the definitive version; but disappointing in a way that a gig that sounds like the album is disappointing, no surprises. I prefer the Roger McGoughs and Les Murrays of the world skipping through the career, picking plums, and armed with some recent manuscript poems. Fiction though, it's usually error or commerce that creates the different versions, at least these days. Whenever you read a work in progress in Granta, I doubt it changes much before the final version - and this, again, disappoints me a little. I think that "publishing" something gives you a sense of closure on the piece - perhaps "sets it" for you, even if you'd perhaps have gone back and changed it later. It's perhaps indicative of my preference for flux, that my favourite novel, "Tender is the Night" by Fitzgerald exists in two very distinct versions. The original - and restored version - begins with the moment when Dick Diver begins his fall, whilst the revised version (that was the popularly known one for so long) is chronological. It's clear to me that the chronological one isn't the right one - but picking up, at last, a copy of this secondhand earlier today, I'm looking forward to reading the wrong version at some point.

Next stop Norwich

After a very hectic few months, weeks, days, I'm able to relax a little, and looking forward to visiting Norwich next week for New Writing Worlds, part conference, part literary salon, part festival, with this year's theme of "Human:Nature". I've only once been to Norwich; in 1997 I had an interview with Andrew Motion for the UEA MA. It seems a long time ago. The previous year, having been shortlisted for the Lichfield Prize for my novel "Lineage", I'd decided to apply for this prestigious course. I sent off a short story I'd written set the previous summer in Northern California, where I'd been on holiday, and got a slightly gnomic response, about the course being busy, and I should try next year. Next year I did, and presumably they still had my story on file, since I wasn't asked to send anything else. I went along for the interview and sat there with 5 other hopefuls. Hard as it is to believe, I'd never actually met any writers until that day, and here were lots of them. One of the candidates, Francis Liardet, I even bought her novel from the UEA campus bookshop after the interview, a little puzzled, I admit, why a published novelist would be wanting to go on a creative writing course. "The Game", her novel, was excellent, but I don't think she's ever published a follow-up, though she got on the course, and was featured in the next year's UEA anthology. I didn't get on that year's MA, but it convinced me that this was what I wanted to do, and I applied and got accepted for the Manchester one. A friend had recently moved to Norwich, and I think I was more interested in catching up with Ruth, than I was in the interview. So it will be interesting to spend a few days there, in a half-remembered city.

Something about Manchester

I'd had one of those worst of days, and you almost regret that you've tickets for a gig that night; but I can't remember the last time I bought a ticket without thought - as in, I've got to see this singer. The singer of course being Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power) the Atlanta, Georgia singer that earlier that day I'd vaguely described to colleagues as Marianne Faithfull meets Amy Winehouse; but actually, she's more Patti Smith meets Otis Redding - confirmed by a sublime cover of a sublime Try a Little Tenderness late in the gig - but more than that, and the reason I'd bought the ticket so far in advance, is because she's Cat Power. Shame on Manchester that the concert wasn't sold out (unlike, say, the Editors or such like), but the Academy is a bit of an unforgiving venue when it's full, and although I've seen some of my favourite gigs there its the first time I've ever seen the Academy aspire to intimacy. The first few songs were disappointing; there wasn't a thing that caught fire. I was wondering why I was there? Surely there was more emotion in my day than in these limp things? Yet, hold on there, she has to release a bit from her crack band, and when, a few songs in, she sings the self-written "Song for Bobby" (Dylan) off the recent "Jukebox" covers album the gig leaps into the stratosphere and never comes down. This famously fragile perfomer is enjoying herself, jigging on stage, and as the gig progresses you get the feeling - as so often happens - that because Manchester so loves its fragile singers, so loves it music, those singers and musicians start loving it back. By the end of the concert, she's still on stage, on her own, after nearly two hours, throwing a bouquet of flowers into the audience. It's a gesture from an indie-music past, but in indie-Manchester is entirely appropriate. As I say, the Academy doesn't usually run to intimacy; tonight it did. I'm sure in the context of her latest tour it was nothing special, but its the first concert I've been to for ages that has legitimate company in my list of the all the time greats.

Music is worthless

The first album I bought with my own money cost £3.99. I can't remember what the first single cost, but it was certainly more than a pound. That was in 1981-2 when music was anything but worthless, and you had to make some decisions about where you spent your money. The first CD -was "Brotherhood" by New Order and it cost me £11.99, in later 1986. So, excuse me, if I'm a little heady with excitement when I get the chance to buy "Los Angeles" by X for a fiver, or "Disintgration" by the Cure for three quid - and baulk at paying £7.99 or more for the Ting Tings album. And I feel quite sad about it all, really, that you don't have to worry too much about the cost anymore - after all, you can probably download it for free - and I think that maybe my giving my music away for free is the better way after all, cos after tax and the record shop costs, how does any of this make sense? Somehow I think we've got something terribly wrong, but I'm not sure what exactly, or...what I could have done about it. I buy my £3 CDs and wait for the end of the w0rld, that's all.

A week out

A busy week...was in Liverpool on Monday and went to see the comedian Jason Cook, whose show "My confessions" was perhaps a Geordie "My Name is Earl". Funny, painful, honest, and in the end comedy with a bit of soul. Highly recommended. Then Tuesday Redeye, Manchester's photography network had two very different photographic takes on Northern Ireland, Jill Jennings' photo essay on the dismantled Maze/Long Kesh explored its uniquely troublesome history through the random remains that were there on her restricted visits, prisoners' graffiti, handwritten notes etc. whilst C.J. Clarke's black and white pictures of the increasingly out-of-time loyalist community is an ongoing ethnographic portrait of a community almost as strange as an undiscovered Brazilian tribe. Then, at the 2nd night of the Other Room, on Wednesday for 3 poetry readings. the highlight for me being Alex Middleton's translations and reading of Danish poet Inger Christiensen.

Finding Your Aesthetic Centre

There's been quite a bit of debate about creative writing courses, after Kureishi's remark that they are "like mental hospitals." I can't entirely disagree (our course had its own tragic death a few weeks in to it, and another student who suffered from panic attacks), but more interesting was his comment that he gives everyone 71%. It feels about right. I can't remember now whether I was just below that or just above... that ballpark. More interesting is why do people go on creative writing courses? I think, simply, the time it gives you to write your novel, has to be invaluable - it certainly helps the prevaricators by giving them a target, and for those of us who were going to write a novel anyway, it allows us to have another answer when people ask "what do you do?" I recall at one of my interviews saying: "I want to find out what kind of writer I am." Oh, the naivety of the thirty year old! It came to mind this week, when someone suggested I should concentrate a bit more on one thing or another. Spreading myself thin. Yet, I'm not sure I am in that I've had quite a lot of consistency over the years - my aesthetic centre, if you like, has broadened, but hasn't changed that much. I was re-reading Motion's biography of Larkin - suitably entitled "A Writer's Life" - and its fascinating to read of Larkin at Oxford, so unimpressed by the Anglo-Saxons and others that he's supposed to read as part of his English course, even noting in the margins of the library copy of Spenser that it's the most boring poem in the language. Larkin, never a good example in some ways, knew what he liked - even as his influences changed from Yeats to Auden, and then went elsewhere - and also what he didn't like. If it came a bit too much of a fixed idea for him, then at least he backed up those limitations with the quality of his work. (Lowell loved his work, for instance, but it was hardly reciprocated, how could it have been, knowing what we know of Larkin's "centre"?) - and railing against a set orthodoxy, can be a powerful way of defining your own art. Whether its music, art, fiction or poetry, I've not changed massively in what I consider important - both in others, and in my own intentions. If I have a dilettante streak, its because I know how difficult it is to actually create an art that fulfils all of one's aesthetic desires. My creative course reconnected me with my aesthetic centre in a way that I hadn't really expected. Ten years on, the importance of having that centre, however wayward it might seem at times, remains critical, I think.

Culture & Creativity

I've had a divebombing mood this week, just a lot of things going on in my head, and around me, and without the time to really do what I needed to do, which was to have a break, get away, see friends, clear head etc. Yet, not for the first time, waking with a dark cloud over me, sometimes allows me to get down to writing something after too long prevaricating. It's with some astonishment that I've written two short stories this morning, and it's not even 3 in the afternoon yet. One's a sci-fi story, the other was meant to be, but ended up a little more grounded. The latter was an idea I'd had for a while, but the former, follows on from my thoughts about how the internet requires "water" and "electricity" to survive. I'm trying to write a range of so-called sci-fi/slipstream fictions to explore ideas like this.

And a good job I've done something this weekend, since next week's looking a little hectic. I'm hoping to get to the 2nd night of experimental poetry night The Other Room, at the Old Abbey on Wednesday, for instance.

Still the book...

I met the Guardian's games blogger Aleks Krotoski at Futuresonic a few weeks ago, and she was far more than just a "games blogger." In today's paper she turns her thoughts to fiction, and says: "there's a shift afoot in storytelling, one unavoidably inspired by computer games and new technologies." And well, there might be, but as she also indicates, you won't find it at Hay-on-Wye or in the literary pages. Hanif Kureishi was dismissive of her question regarding interactive literature, which would all be well and good, if I wasn't still trying to get through his latest highly disappointing novel (more of which when I've finished it). I've long bemoaned the fact that the web hasn't really thrown up much interesting in the way of literature, even if the critical culture of which I hope this blog is part, has benefited from the move to cyberspace; but perhaps it's just taking time. As a mass medium, I'm sure that the big web writing successes, interactive or otherwise, are likely to be at the populist end of the spectrum, at least for some time. Part of the problem is technological of course: it's only now that the average writer can do something with all the Web 2.0 tools available, without furrowing his/her brow over HTML (not usually a writers' primary skill); and though writers have always been asked to Hollywood I'm not sure they're as welcome in the plot development rooms of Grand Theft Auto IV. Yet, I agree with Aleks, that games offer quite a few useful tricks for would be innovative writers. I've a number of projects I've half tried over the years, but without a specific audience for them - I've never really invested the necessary time (and it is time) - to make them happen. As for collaboration, I've a book of Jerry Cornelius stories before me, "The New Nature of the Catastrophe", very few of which are written by his maker, Michael Moorcock. Nothing new under the sun it seems. Over the page (and I'd advise all literary types to stray to the Guardian's technology section now and then), Victor Keegan points out that "books are thriving on the internet." Which is one way of saying that the nature of the catastrophe facing the publishing industry isn't necessarily the same as that which the music industry has failed so badly to deal with. The reading experience - i.e. the book - has both "first mover" advantage and is, I'd suggest, still a "killer app;" though "Kindles" etc. are likely - eventually to have some kind of niche. Keegan mentions audio books and the success of audible.com and wonders about rivals - there's quite a range at eMusic, he might want to try. A few years ago I was roped into a project that Tony Wilson was planning, allowing downloads of stories (as well as music) for a few pence, and I even went as far as writing and recording a first "episode" of a continuing narrative . It's an idea whose time may well have come... yet, like everything on the web, the time it takes to make it good, is something that a writer needs to be paid for, just as much as a software engineer. All of this comes a few days after Robert McCrum's farewell soliloquy from 10 years at the helm of the Observer's literary pages. At least 3 of his 10 "highlights" were technological, and yet I wonder about that. Blogs, Amazon and ebook readers don't any kind of revolution make. It's hardly, Picasso, Stravinsky and Joyce, is it? If you're still calling it technology, I guess, you're still scared to use it. Aleks point, extrapolated, is that these are tools, and writer, use them. One final point, that came to mind reading another article in the Guardian, saying that the Olympics' need for power is going to limit the economic growth of the city of London, particularly in relation to data centres (i.e. banks of computers). We are so blissfully unaware of the real cost of "cyberspace" - all those servers running our blogs, eShops and videos - are served by water and electricity; and in the future, as those costs rise, then just as people are beginning to question the diversion of land to biofuels instead of wheat; what happens if we are more concerned with keeping our web servers running than our water and electricity? I'm going to go stock up on the candles.

A Sad Passing

Though I'm usually perplexed when overly popular artists/writers are lauded, the news that Beryl Cook has died proves an exception. Whenever I see her work, I can't do anything but smile. Her burly grotesques have more humanity than you'd find in a Lowry for instance, and I kind of think theres an affinity with the kitsch of Jeff Koons; though no doubt no art critic would deign to make the link. Koons is an interesting comparison, because although there's a sense that he must be "ironic" his work, when it works, works without irony - Michael Jackson and Bubbles; the glorious "Puppy". Cook's work is both instantly identifiable as hers, and also not that far removed from her contemporaries - and the humanity of her characters, scenes and the unstereotypical nature of her stereotypes puts her head and shoulders above similarly stylised painters. "The best that can be said is that Cook celebrates ordinariness," says the Guardian, quoting Adrian Searle, which, I have to say, misses the point of her paintings. There's nothing ordinary about her crowded tableaus - the very crowding is surrealist in instinct - and nothing ordinary about her grotesques either. All human life is there.

Zadie in Middlemarch

On my way to the Tatton Park Biennial art exhibition yesterday, I enjoyed reading a long essay by Zadie Smith on "Middlemarch" in the Guardian. I've long been of the opinion that Middlemarch is not only the peak of Victorian novel-writing, but a major innovative work in itself, every bit as radical in the possibilities that it gives a novelist as "Ulysses" or other later works. Smith agrees, and, given the length of a masters essay she gives it close reading, historical context, and a certain quirky take on it. I imagine its the first time David Foster Wallace has been mentioned in an essay on George Eliot, for instance. Reading the essay made me want to go back to the book again, not least because Smith concentrates some of her attention on the least showy of the books 3 main romantic relationships, that of Fred and Mary. She admits it would seem the least important of the 3 - but that Eliot gives it equal value. I'm not so sure, but its a long time since I read the novel. What is certain is that Eliot was always demotic in her approach to her characters - even more so in "Daniel Deronda" where the egalitarianism leads to some occasionally bizarre concentrations (less Gwendolyn, more Mordechai, as the novel progresses) - so that it is the ultra-serious Casaubon who becomes ridiculous, not because Eliot has told us, but because he has shown us; whilst the comic Mr. Brooke becomes a little tragic. That Eliot took as much from life as she did from philosophy, a point that Smith labours a little, should be self-evident - and its perhaps important that the most formidable of our Victorian novelists remains with a little of the reputation as an intellectual's favourite; when any reader will know that her light touch makes even her more lavish novelistic schema, a page-turner. George Eliot, Smith reminds us, reminds us about life lived, as well as life studied, and in Dorothea she is making fun of her younger self. Smith, despite her own celebrity status, sometimes, you feel, revels in a little Dorothea-envy herself. There's something seductive about the life of books; though, as Eliot knew, and Smith reminds us, nothing is as seductive of the book of life. It's surprising to read an essay on "Middlemarch" that hardly mentions Casaubon and his "Key to all mythologies", one of Eliot's more cautionary tales, and, by pressing so hard for the book's humanism, Smith almost entirely misses - or, perhaps, as someone less interested in history and politics, than in people and novels, doesn't see as important - that the novel came out after - and was written during the 1870 reform act; yet is set at the time of the more momentous 1832 act. Our greatest chronicler of the 19th century's age of political reform, and how it affected the average man and woman in every town, was, it should be remembered, never permitted the vote because of her gender. "Middlemarch"'s radicalism - and its challenge for future writers impressed by its range and depth - is at least partly because it was, and is, a political novel.

Cinema of the Damned

The destruction of Manchester's past continues, even on a weekend when Martin Parr's photographs of the city graced the Guardian; this time with yesterday's half-demolition of Cine City in Withington. Not sure when it started; always a little suspicious when they start demolishing something on a Saturday - so all that's there at the moment is the outershell of the ground floor, and the sign "Cine City." It's been closed, as has the next door White Lion, for some time, and though no reprieve was ever likely, it's more than sad to see it go. In a sane world, this would have been redeveloped as a South Manchester arts centre, but no, I'm sure we'll see it replaced with some bland residential shed, that will offer nothing distinctive to the local urban landscape. "Cine City" was a wonderful place to see a film - they used to have to change the reel half way through - me and my friend used to always smuggle a few cans of lager in to the late night showings - and I saw plenty of great films there, most notably that most modern of movies, "Natural Born Killers." Whenever anyone on Coronation Street went to the cinema they seemed to film it outside Cine City, since in the warped nostalgic logic of the show, the idea that Wetherfield residents would go to the multiplex like anyone else, simply defied belief. It's added to a certain melancholic anger I've had all week; not so much the hoards of Rangers fans drinking all day on Wednesday, but the inevitability of both the violence, and the public handwringing afterward, as the city indulges football, yet remains timid in the face of art. I've always liked Martin Parr's photographs, but the collection in the Guardian, though all well-composed, had an inevitable aurra of the tourist, up in Manchester for a week, almost a total opposite of the immersive technique that has made so much of his work classic. Yet, as the city continues its veneration of my beloved Joy Division/Factory Records/Tony Wilson (this week alone: the Tony Wilson experience in honour of his memory, Joy Division the documentary, and, Man Utd fans in O'Sheas singing "Giggs, Giggs will tear you apart again" during their league winning game against Wigan) its fascinating that Salford's the Ting Tings have just entered the UK charts at number one; probably the first genuine breakout act to really make it big from Manchester since Badly Drawn Boy. I didn't get tickets, but one of his - and Twisted Nerve's - iconic gigs was in Cine City. The Ting Tings grew out of the hotpot of artistic endeavour happening in the "other" city of Salford's Islington Mill. If the city had really wanted to honour Tony Wilson, then perhaps developing Cine City - a step away from the original Factory records address in Palatine Road - in some creative way, would have been applicable. It joins the list of ghostly venues in the city, alongside the Hacienda, the Boardwalk, the Banshee and many more before my time. I sometimes think of the ghosts that have been released by this destruction/regeneration as not being freed, more dissipated - into the air - and the spirit with them sent elsewhere, perhaps to Salford's Islington Mill, or another place, where the true possibilities of a creative city can make itself known. In the seventies Martin Parr decamped to Hebden Bridge where the cheap accomodation and mystical landscape led to it becoming a bohemian enclave away from the urban sprawl. These architectural deaths are totems, yet the modern creative spur - its X-factors, its "Mamma Mias", its international festivals - obscures any real renaissance. The city continues of course, with talk of Carol Ann Duffy or Simon Armitage - both some time of this parish - as the next Poet Laureate, and with a 12-year old from Chethams music school, the youngest ever BBC young musician of the year.

Ideas 0 Poetry 1

Baroque in Hackney, as ever, pulling out the better nuggets, mentions a lovely quote from Robert Rauschenberg, in response to the question "don't you ever run out of ideas?" he says he finds them limiting - and they don't go that far. There's quite a discussion in response to the post that I was going to enter, but realised, it was becoming a "post" in itself. I'm a little concerned that in the dismissal of "ideas" - not by Katy, but in some of the comments that follow - there's a confusion between an "idea for a poem" (which is kind of what Rauschenberg's questioner was asking, in relation to his paintings), and the "idea expressed by a poem." You can, of course, have hundreds (thousands?) of ideas for poems, and still never write a good one, yet, I think if your poetry (or painting or fiction or music) is trying to express an idea, then if the idea is good (or at least, important enough to you to be expressed), then the likelihood of the artwork being good is increased. This is not to say that I'm advocating an art of ideology, but that I feel we could do with more writers, artists, poets, musicians etc. expressing rather than just having an idea. One of the (many) reasons I like Robert Lowell is that his poems both have a strong "idea" for the poem, and, importantly, a larger idea that he is trying to express; "For the Union Dead" being one supreme example.

Kingdom of the Blind

One of my favourite novels of the last few years was Jose Saramago's "Blindness", and I'd always thought it would make a brilliant, if difficult film. Telling the story of a blindness contagion that passes from person to person; leading to the blind being quarantined, and then left, as the world outside becomes equally sightless, it's obviously rich in metaphor. Yet, the novel is also a thriller, and a philosophical novel about what it is to be human. I am very much looking forward to seeing it in the cinema, now that it has opened at Cannes to good reviews.

Rare Football Post

So, can't say I'm disappointed that Birmingham City are relegated; being a Villa fan it's not bitterness, more a sense that I've never quite seen what Birmingham City were about - half owned by a porn baron, never done anything etc etc - and the real rivalry returns with West Brom back in the top league; all we need now is Wolves. Missed the "South Bank Show" on football fiction because it clashed with the end of season match of the day - apparently, half David Peace and his excellent "The Damned United" - half "why aren't there (m)any good football novels?" I've got a good football novel in me, same as I've got a good music novel - but doubt they're really the calling card for a new novelist, more's the shame. I see that the Booker of Bookers list has been announced - all very colonial - and I've written before that you'd get a better list from the shortlist than the winner. Yet again, Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" is there, I've still got a copy unread, and I really should one day; yet the only Rushdie I ever read - "The ground beneath her feet" - was not just a very poor novel, but awfully written, and seriously in need of decent editing, that I've bene put off ever since. Sure, shouldn't judge a writer by his lows; but without any real interest in Rushdie's subject, it may remain bottom of my pile for a while yet. Can I add, that I'm disappointed, though not surprised, that Coetzee is in there for "Disgrace" rather than "The Life and Times of Michael K." Both books are good, but I feel the earlier novel is remarkable.

Post-Amisian Misogyny in Female Characterisation

I've been watching the sitcom "Peep Show" - it's now on its 5th series but somehow it had passed me by. Back in 1998, whilst studying on my MA, our tutors got one of the students from a previous year, Sam Bain, and his writing partner, Jesse Armstrong to come and talk to us. They were a "comedy duo" in the they finished each other sentences, and were writing together - with quite a clear sense of this as a career path. They had something in development or as a pilot. It was interesting, but a little offcentre given that ours was a novel writing course, but both of our tutors tended to prefer their students "funny". Anyway, that pilot (a Jane Austen spoof, if I remember rightly) may never have got them anywhere, but I'd hear mention of Sam now and then as the years rolled by. Then I read about the new series and there was a big feature with the writers. For despite starring Mitchell and Webb, its Bain and Alexander who write the majority of it. So I've been enjoying watching past "Peep Shows" these last couple of weeks; but its also been a little too much . These are definitely Men Behaving (a little bit) Badly, but its slightly darker, slightly more surreal, certainly more misanthropic. These are males in that great dysfunctional British comedy tradition; yet, with, I guess, a London-centric 21st century view of sex as something that's always on tap. And this is where I've felt a little soiled having watched the shows back-to-back. The female characters in the show, though well-acted and important foils for the dysfunctional males, are all, I realise, sex objects. There's not a single female on the show who is not primarily there as a possible shag for the boring Mark or lazy Jess. Whether its a fifteen year old at a party, the mother of your friend's fiancee, or the girl in the shoe shop, every woman in the series is a potential shag. And yes, I know that its a comedy, and the joke's so often on Mitchell and Webb, but I'm wondering if this is what we've ended up with, a certain post-Amisian misogyny in female characterisation. Compare with the much-derided "2 Pints of Lager and a packet of crisps" where the actresses are generally funny, have a voice, want sex on their terms, have relationships (and children), and aren't on a perpetual stag weekend, and there's something a little queasy about "Peep Show's" relentlessness. It's a little too dark to be generally funny - and though one has to admire the general tone of the show (it pioneered the idea of leaving large bits of the story out, so, for instance Mark and Sophie's relationship we only see in snippets), I'm reminded of meeting the writers all those years ago, and the jokey mateyness, the metropolitan self-confidence, the TV mentality, and feel a little saddened that what is in many ways a sophisticated sitcom has an inbuilt flaw similar to lads down the pub on a friday night; whilst at the same time knowing that in its portrayal of the contemporary male it may be overdone, but it's not entirely untrue. But then again, I never quite understood how Frank Spencer got Betty to marry him in the first place. And yes, I do know its a comedy.

Boredom & Intelligence

I don't know if it's an excess of excitement last weekend, or whether the warm weather has one hankering after better things to do, or just a combination of things, but this last week I've just been excruciatingly bored. And...given boredom, what else is there to do than go for a drink? Actually, what I should be doing of course, is write, since I guess one of the reasons one writes is to stave off boredom - or rather writing fiction at least is probably the most highly charged intellectual pursuit I've got. You don't have to be intelligent to be a writer, of course, but I think if you are intelligent, or shall we say, easily bored - then writing is a stimulation of that intellect. I'm not an academic or musician or scientist or craftsman, so without creativity I'm reduced to paperwork, administration, watching TV, sitting in bars. All well and good, of course, but not really doing anything for the intelligence quotient. Dilletante that I am, I do find quite a lot of things in my life at the moment, not "easy" as such, but eminently doable, and, more than that, not exactly stimulating me intellectually. Perhaps I could learn a language or develop a computer system or something equally absurd, but no, I'm not just bored, I'm a little jaded. I feel a need to stretch my wings, yet I'm feeling particularly grounded at the moment. Whereas I tend to write poetry to emotional order, fiction is primarily intellectual with me, not that I'm wanting to write something particularly complex, just that the whole job of writing fiction is like building a large house from scratch, with the writer as architect, surveyor, designer, bricklayer, roofer and labourer all in one; and, though there are plenty of Barratt books and Wimpey Stories, I'm probably more interested in a one-off, a building without a particular template; something that will give me the "wow" factor; which will stop me feeling this boredom.

Changing Times

I'm thinking that this blog might be changing shortly; both in format, and content. But a few thoughts for now, based upon a heady few days in the maelstrom of the Futuresonic Festival

***
Wire, punk band? art band? In conversation with John Robb, they were articulate, at least when allowed to get further than 1977. (Lesson to promoters: never get an old punk to interview old punks, you'll never make it to the 80s.) An interesting - if ultimately flawed career(or is that careers) - 3 albums in the late 70s, then a brief poppy-dancey comeback in the late 80s/early 90s, then a more recent flurry of more experimental material. I got the sense that Wire still are an art project version of what a rock band is. And hence: breaking up or reforming isn't really the point. They rocked, kind of. And were the sonic Future, as seen from, say, 1978. They never had a hit, either, unless you count Elastica's "Connection." By the way, I'd seen both Elastica and Oasis in the same venue, at the time when they'd seemed the future (or, in Oasis's case very much the instant present.) The future is, of course, overrated, or already here. Or gone. Anyway, what has a punk ever done for us?

***
Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, legend of software development (though GNU is not Linux, and Free Software is not Open Source; Google if you need to), spoke about the importance of freedom in terms of software. That battle's over of course. The network has destroyed it, in many ways. Our data is stored on massive servers, Google, Yahoo, wherever. This blog is probably now the property of Google corp. Like a lot of things: I guess a "trade" takes place; in our case convenience for freedom. If you are a software developer, freedom outweighs everything; for the rest of us, perhaps its convenience, perhaps its even the access to a medium that allows a voice (and can Google censor us? will it? can it?), perhaps its portability. Basically, Stallman's a hippy; and remember, what have hippies ever done for us?

***
Thomson & Craighead are exhibiting their latest works at the CUBE gallery as part of Futuresonic. They gave an interesting artist talk on Saturday, alongside other artists showcasing at Futuresonic. I like how they take existing data, content, ephemera even, from the web, and tame it, box it, coerce it, make it look pretty. Make art out of it, in other words. A criticism came from the floor: "but your work is closed, it doesn't allow interaction." They defended this. After all, it wasn't what they did. The interaction is in the response to the work, not in a participatory involvement with it. I was recently at the Tate Liverpool, and a lot of the international works were politically engaged; participatory; and I hated them all. I want work that is of a higher level. Also, by making something still, elegant, beautiful, and new out of the chaotic information flux of the internet, I think they are more useful commentators and artists. Without the internet they would, I felt, still be artists. But then, what have artists ever done for us?

New Narratives

I'm so far away from literary matters this week, attending the Futuresonic conference/festival in Manchester. A celebration of art, music and ideas all with a "digital" side, I guess the one thing that does seem to be missing is the "literary" - or at the very least, a narrative strand, that could pull all this together. I'm sure there's a novel there somewhere based around a conference; though I kind of think there probably already is one - I just can't remember it. (Surely David Lodge's campus novels went there at some point?) The conference is about "social media", of which, dear reader, this blog is one. It's funny really, but inevitable, that writers have taken to blogs like fish to water, they are after all a written medium - but not for the first time, I'm quizzical about the absence of "literary matters" from any discussion of the digital future. Do writers just accept the new tools, and move on? Yes, there's plenty of hang-wringing around the Sony eReader or the Kindle, and I guess if I was an audiobook publisher I'd be wondering what the future was for their unabridged boxsets - yet the book remains an advanced storage and retrieval device, not easily replicable (at least not in fiction) digitally. Yet most of the discussions and events of the conference are stubbornly analogue anyway; people in a room (actually not interacting that much - the academics tend to dominate in a very traditional lecture theatre format - though this will be challenged a little this afternoon); gigs; clubs; art exhibitions; public art. Oh yes, there is, somewhere a blog, a Flickr group, a Twitter group, a wiki, a Second Life space; but I get the feeling that most people who wanted to be at the event would be at the event. Of course, one of the reasons why literature doesn't feature, or get involved, is how - with a few exceptions - "experimental" narrative or form is hidden within the stubbornly traditional literary scene. Yet I was there with colleagues from New Writing Partnership, and Lancaster Litfest, and we all feel, I think, that the nature of discourse is at least one thing that the "digital" agenda can address. But how to energise that discussion in the digital space - as opposed to the physical space of a symposium or similar - remains a question, that I don't think we'll answer until we at least make an attempt to. Whether writers, agents and publishers are wanting that - that's another question. I kind of think that we shouldn't be approaching discourse about writing in a linear way, journalistically, academically etc. but more dynamically, through some kind of narrative exposition.

Towards a first collection

The Poetry Trust, who I've been doing some work with lately, run a course called "Towards a First Collection", which if I ever did go on a poetry course, might be the one I went on. I suppose I don't want a course to get me to write poetry, since I seem to write poetry without ever having been on a course (in ebbs and flows, but it always returns); yet something about structuring these "single things" into a something coherent is a challenge that I'm not sure a poet should do on their own. I'm perhaps of the Whitman school, where my "selected poems" should be revised every year or so as "the leaves of grass" were, rather than the formal stricture of the slim volume. The latter has never really appealed, though I'd perhaps like to be a good enough poet to write these curiously static works; static in the sense that often the gap between completion of a manuscript and publication is closer to forever than not. Since we mostly read poems in the singular - or as a career summary - the poet is more akin to the pop band than the serious artist, more Girls Aloud, Blur or Madness than Portishead or Pink Floyd. I like picking up slim volumes, old and new, to see poems in their original context - it can make an old poem seem unfamiliar again. So, I'm in the process of putting together a "first collection" or a "selected poems" via the print-on-demand publishers Lulu.com and wonder when it became such an immense job to do so. Every poem requires something... some reformatting perhaps, even - heaven forbid! - a small revision - or a slight change to the title, or nothing at all, other than its placing next to the poem before and after. I'm being vaguely chronological, but even that has its downsides, something to do with balance - a series of similarly styled poems can suddenly dominate - and what of those lovely little one offs (the between album songs, the b-sides, the for-the-soundtrack moment), how to squeeze them in without squeezing them out. There are, I guess two types of collection - the one that narrows, the one that widens. A first collection should probably be the first of these, a selected the second. This is both and neither. It could take some months.

Things I like and dislike about Litt

Things I like and dislike about Toby Litt:
Likes... his short stories; his appropriate name; his spare, but imaginative prose style, his Englishness (he takes archetypes and brings them home),
Dislikes... his novels, that spare style when it goes all new puritan, his Englishness (he makes archetypes little and parochial), that his book titles are alphabetical.

Actually, I'm joking a bit, because I like Toby Litt but only seem to come back to him when he has some short stories out. But the book title thing did annoy me a bit, okay, its a nice OuLiPo like conceit, but it kind of plays fast and loose with something that's a bit close to my heart, that a book finds its own title in the writing of it. Anyway, I'm reading and enjoying his addition to the rock and roll fiction genre "I play the drums in a band called okay"; and it highlights all of the above really. I've always enjoyed these stories when they've come up in anthologies, and packaging them together this way, with a discography of the band, and some kind of chronological order, is the kind of thing I like in an author. Yet, there's also something very English (or now I come to think about it: Canadian) about his choice of band. For "okay" are a Canadian emo band. It's that littleing down of things (a bit like Beatniks was "On the Road" for Gap year students or something) that I'm talking about. Rock and roll doesn't get much less interesting than a Canadian emo band. And of course, its the fucking drummer writing it! (Even worse). But that's because its not a book about rock and roll at all, but about love, about failure, about maleness, about success, about a group of mates. I'd like to think that in this postmodern world there will be a band formed called okay, featuring 4 guys called Crab, Mono, Syph and Clap (yeah, I know!) who will set themselves the task of writing and recording okay's discography just as it says in the back of the book. And it would be crap, as only a Canadian emo band can be. Books about music can either take the fall from grace of a megastar (see Espedair Street) or something little (the Commitments), and I guess - a bit like the Cameron Crowe movie Almost Famous - Litt has gone for a middle ground, a band believably second tier, so with the potential to be Spinal Tap, but without inevitably settling into that absurdity. I reckon, pace Simon Armitage, most writers wish they could have been rockstars. Perhaps its a failure of imaginative nerve, when they invent one only to be the drummer in okay, but then anyone will tell you, a good drummer's worth his weight in gold. This isn't as good as Motley Crue's "The Dirt" of course, but then what Canadian emo band could be?

No new paradigms - just old gimmicks

The Friday Project formed a couple of years ago with a unique and interesting proposition - taking the best of the web, and making these sites into books. I've just read that its no more, having gone into liquidation. The new paradigm - getting books to the market, quicker, and sourcing them directly from the bloggers and other sites doing innovative stuff on the web - doesn't seem to have helped in the way that mattered: selling books in shops. Dreadful news for hopeful writers such as Nasim Marie Jafry, and Caroline Smailes, as well as bookseller turned blogger-editor-agent Scott Pack, whose amusing blog gave a sense that all was well in the world of the Friday Project. I guess I hoped that this small publisher, punching above its weight, would grow, and be successful, but I have to admit to always having my reservations. The bulk of their books seemed to be "toilet books" of one sort or another, seasonal stocking fillers such as Velcro Cows and TV Cream Toys; in other words gimmicky books with a short shelf life that we've all got a few off (Lost Consonants, the Meaning of Liff, Schott's Miscellany) but rarely add more than a bit of gaiety to life. No crime in itself; and I was looking forward to their list growing to include more fiction, and more interesting books. But, case in point, I've not bought a thing they've published. There's no crime in small publishers - as well as large publishers - publishing this harmless tat, and, I guess if you get a big hit (The Little Book of Calm perhaps), then it can help keep other more cerebral parts of your list going for years. However, I'm wondering if this is the very problem: by trying to grow as a publisher through selling on the internet's more gimmicky ideas, you need to have more hits than misses. And books like this, though they can become brands, are - like hit videos on YouTube - transitory one-offs, and none, ironically, had really "gone viral." The Friday Project was - at the end of the day - publishing the kind of books that every major publishes ad infinitum perhaps without the capitalisation (or the hits) to make their independence a virtue. Maybe with its assets and staff under the auspices of a major(HarperCollins according to Publishing News) the Friday Project will find some kind of future; but there's no new paradigm here, just the same old publishing business. Ouch. I'd like to be think here's something to be said for the old fashioned idea, of investing in authors rather than gimmicks.Whether this is a cautionary tale for serious (but niche) publishers also using the internet, like Salt and Snowbooks we'll have to see.

Music & F(r)iction

I'm always keen on finding the occasional confluences of literature and music; but the latest gives particular pleasure. A few years on from "Manchester, England" and the City Life Book of Manchester Stories, and over a decade since "Disco Biscuits", Manchester's demi monde is probably overdue a literary overskating, and who better to do it than Joe Stretch, who when he's not been writing "Friction", his well received debut, is playing with the band Performance. They appropriated the early eighties electronica that has since - through everyone from Dfa records to New Young Pony Club - become a de rigeur of cool; but typically, perhaps because they always delved in the deeper, more blood-soaked end of the pool, they've remained on the edge of both Manchester (and pop's) vision. All the better then that Stretch has moved into a more (or less?) respectable career. I've never really met him or the band, though used to read poetry at the same venues/same nights as they were around, but a few years ago, they were asking for stories written about their songs, and I wrote a short piece called "Architecture and police", which was, for a while, on their website. I look forward to reading his fictional debut.

If being in a band qualifies you to write about the city life, then being a (youngish) (male) writer seems to make you wish you were in a band. Simon Armitage has been all around the papers with "Gig", a prose memoir both about performing, and about not being in a band - whilst Toby Litt has collected his music stories together in a new book , "I play the drums in a band called okay"- so there's two books by writers who weren't in bands, and one by someone who was. Featured in that long ago City Life book was Mark E. Smith of the Fall of course, and his own long-awaited autobiography is out shortly, with an extract in today's Guardian. Following in the footsteps of that other hard-to-figure punk-poet Dylan; one's tempted to think that literature and music might mix after all. It just depends which side of the album you want to play first.

The Accessibility of Inaccessibilty

I've been to more poetry readings than a sane man should have ever been to. Yet I've rarely had a happier time than at the Old Abbey tonight, when Alan Halsey, Geradline Monk and Tom Jenks read, as the first of a regular reading of so-called avant garde poets. I'm not so sure. Halsey made fun, as an ex-bookseller might, of Ashbury's "Tennis Court Oath", and its value to collectors, "it always seemed to be the 4th edition, so we wondered if there ever was an earlier one; there was..."; Geraldine Monk confronted Mary Queen Of Scots head on, to great effect; whilst Tom Jenks managed to fit in both religious and secular saints (The Magic Band, thanks, Tom!). Reading from his very visual new collection, A Priori, you relished the words, whilst hankering for the visuals. My reluctant friend (there for a beer), enjoyed it thoroughly and bought the book. Go figure.

Various Things

With a new official biography of V.S. Naipaul coming out, there's been quite a lot of features about the venerable writer. He always gets referred to as our best prose writer, yet, apart from reading "A House for Mr. Biswas" many years ago, I've never read him. Probably not surprisingly, Biswas, wasn't the kind of book that really floats my boat, but I might try one of his other novels one of these days, to assuage my ignorance!

Tomorrow sees the first night of "The Other Room" with Tom Jenks, Alan Halsey and Geraldine Monk. I'm intrigued to find how it will differ from readings with more traditional writers.

Torchwood, Dr. Who etc.

Torchwood finished its second series this week, just as Dr. Who begins its 4th (since being revived.) I was an avid watcher of this season's Torchwood, which was pretty consistent in tone, had good stories, and was quite clever in its use of back stories. That's the model of course, probably originated in the X-Files, where "stand alone" episodes are slotted into bigger story arcs. It's the latter story arcs that create the real emotional buy in, I think, and Dr. Who is certainly better when it does them, rather than too many episodes seeing Rose or Dawn or Martha being chased down another corridor by another alien. I know its inevitable these days, but there's so much other stuff that goes on around the TV series - from the "making of" documentaries shown incessantly on the digital channels, to the tours of the TV studios. I felt like I already knew the story for the new Dr. Who episode after having seen the extended clips on breakfast tv. I think we lose something when this happens - and also, I guess, when you get to know the actors and actresses too well. (This morning there was the actor who plays the Dalek's voice. Surely a little unecessary?) There's also been a bit of rewriting of history with the new doctor - with Christopher Eccleston's original series almost forgotten, as a result of David Tennant's success. Yet Eccleston was in many ways a more interesting doctor, a deeper character. I could see both shows going on for years, so infallible is the premise in both, and so "flexible" is the science fiction apparatus. I think there are literary archetypes for Captain Jack and the current Doctor, for instance Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat or Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius. There does seem to be an insatiability for sci-fi type shows; I notice that there are spin off TV series to both Total Recall and The Terminator series for instance. Much as I like such things, I guess I still prefer something original, which is why stories and novels remain so important. I'd never seen "The English Patient" till last weekend, for some reason, and I thought it was very good. The "framing" of the story being what made the film work. Probably what attracted to Minghella about it in the first place. Mind you, both this and The Talented Mr. Ripley are intriguing in their concentration on dysfunctional male emotion. "The English Patient" like "the Kite Runner" had its fair share of melodrama, but these books make good films, however disastrous the male stoicism is that they portray. Remember, Dr. Who and Captain Jack are also in this club.

Small "c" capital of culture

I was in Liverpool yesterday, since I like to go over now and then. It's more of a building site than ever, which surprised me - presumably this year of culture didn't stop the buildings that are going on. But you come out of the grubby-as-ever Lime Street and don't really feel that you're in a city where anything particular is going on, despite the billboards proclaiming it everywhere. Presumably later in the year all of this will change, but for now, a tourist would be disappointed I think. My favourite second hand bookshop, next to the station, is no more - it hung on grimly, longer than I expected - but now its gone, so Liverpool 1 Culture 0 on that count. However, things looked up when I got to the Tate, always a favourite gallery space, where they've had their most prominent rehang in years. Their exhibition of 20th century art is divided into the figurative and abstract over two floors, but in each case the theme weakens as you get towards the present day. There are a few misfirings - I felt the Andy Warhol cow wallpaper diminished the electric chair/chairman Mao prints over it; Warhol always teetering on kitsch, the wallpaper pushing it over - and though I like Mona Hartoum's work, the presence of three or four similar pieces actually detracted from the work - the frisson of seeing her electrified kitchen instruments lessened when you come to her cheesewire cot, or her knife handle wheelchair. The final room was an unmitigated disaster, a hotch-potch of contemporary art from round the world that was certain not abstract - but tended to be a half-baked documentary/artistic commentary on politics - a piece playing an amatuer recording of "Wonderful World" on a loop will probably cause health and safety problems for gallery staff, whilst a Julian Opie installation failed to achieve the optical illusion that it intends. That's the negatives out of the way; but the positives were many. In particular, a room dominated by female surrealists blew me away. I'd not seen any of the pieces before, and they had a freshness, and a cutting edge (politically and personally) that was quite inspiring. Similarly, by taking the theme of "bathers" in the first room, a powerful subset of ideas and representation was followed through a very wide ranging set of artists. On the abstract floor there was more of a concentration on particular movements: abstract expressionism; op art; minimalism but with some well chosen pieces - both well known and new to me. I can't remember the artist, but there was a brilliant silver disc on one wall, where the disc moved creating a powerful optical illusion. The show is full of these kinds of surprises. It's on for a long time, and I'm sure I'll revisit, since it covers much more than is really "doable" in a single go. Avoid reading the commentaries next to the paintings, if you can, since quite a few are absurdly reductive.

Afterwards, I met a friend and we went to see Hoi Polloi's The Doubtful Guest (based on the Edward Gorey cartoon) at the Everyman. A strange, funny show, and I enjoyed it - like the previous show of their's I'd seen, "Floating", it requires you to suspend your disbelief and open your imagination up, so one for imaginative children of all ages, I'd guess; though there's always a little padding in these things, with a sense that for all the dance, music and stagecraft, its been workshopped from something smaller. Yet something of the magic lingers afterwards, and you get a sense that there's been some magical transfer of imagination across the room; though to what extent that comes from Gorey's exquisite source material, and what extent to the players, is a matter for conjecture.

It's a shame the city's retailers don't seem to have embraced the opportunities of the capital of culture; the Waterstones was one of the most poorly-stocked and shabbiest I'd seen - where were the Gorey books for instance there? Most of the building work round the city seems to be leading towards the development of "Liverpool One", a new - guess what? - shopping centre. One hope's this year's legacy for the city is something more than their very own Arndale.

Opposite sides of the mountain

"Strauss and I tunnel from opposite sides of the mountain" said Mahler, "one day we shall meet", so writes Alex Ross in "The Rest is Noise." It's a quote that's stuck with me as I've read the first few chapters, and might be one that could be useful food for thought for any artist who is primarily taking a position. Its a reminder that the end result of art should be the same; something of value, something worth returning to, something - I tentatively add - that is new. Though "new" can mean many things; the artistic vision is always personal, so though a "new" Neil Young song might be as traditional as the hills, it will always add something to Young's singular vision. I don't think many musicians, poets or novelists would go through with the hard work, year on year, if they didn't consider it added something to what they'd done before. Ross makes the point that at the time of the premiere of "The Rites of Spring" there was little distance between the expectations of audience and artist - yes, it shocked and appalled some of the more conservative members of the crowd, but a few performances later it was the toast of Paris. Yet, at the same time, a change had come about - the "repertoire" was becoming fixed, the idea of a canon was being solidified. Ironic, really, at the time of great political and artistic change that came about in the first 2 decades of the 20th century, that the one result was a sundering of the relationship between artist and audience to such an extent that the latter would forever cry out for the familiar, whilst the former would increasingly refuse to meet the audience half way. It's the old, old story - yet it seems that before the phonograph, and other methods of "fixing" art, the audience was primarily interested in the new - not the same as they'd seen before. It seems hardly believable in an age of West End musicals, themselves increasingly a rehash of overfamiliar songs and plots, but before mass produced art was a possibility, art had to be "new" to get an audience.

Which brings me back to tunnelling through the mountain.... the first issue of James Davis's avant garde poetry magazine ipthenq dropped through the post yesterday, but despite its loose leaf format, and its concentration on a small group of avant garde-ish poets, its anything but inaccessible. I'm still reading the magazine, but the accompanying CD, with readings by Tom Jenks and Ceri Buck is a delight. Jenks' opener "Brief Lives of the Saints" and Buck's long poem "Permanent Agriculture" in particular are funny, informative, irreverant, and have more to them than more traditionally observational writers. Buck in particular seems a genuine "informationist" - her work part agit-prop, part political-seminar, part art-installation, yet having a cohesiveness and (vitally) a lyrical non-pomposity that belies any sense that this poetry is in any way pretentious. Tom will be reading with two other poets at "The Other Room" a new poetry night run in parallel with the magazine on 9th April at the Old Abbey Inn, just behind the University. With the last issue of the magazine I was once involved with, Lamport Court, due out shortly, I'm reminded that what we'd always wanted to do was have an "open" policy to poetry and fiction, letting the simple, the difficult, the traditional, the avant garde, whatever... sit side by side, as long as the work achieved its aim. Any pot holer will tell you that our mountains are riddled with holes, passages and tunnels; its a rich metaphor, worth exploring.

The Rest is Noise

I took delivery of Alex Ross's monumental tome "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century" today. It's a book I'd somehow heard about, and then found it in Waterstones and realised that yes, it was something I'd been waiting a long time for. Then, there was a review and an interview in the Guardian at the weekend. Essentially, a history of 20th century classical music, I've only just begun reading it, but already I know its going to be an essential addition to my collection. Importantly, Ross is not some ivory-towered musicologist in his eighties, but someone around my age, who took a very different route than me at 15, finding Shostakovich, whilst I was finding the Velvet Underground. Oddly, the latter get a mention on the cover, which wouldn't have gone down well in my school or household - yet that's what's got me all excited about this book; I've been a somewhat amateur fan of 20th century classical music for a while - and though I do like some older musics - its the 20th century composers that seem to resonate with me, even if its only through the familiarity of their influence. The first chapter sets a powerful start, the premiere of Strauss's "Salome" in 1906, bringing a welcome historiography to the party, alongside close readings of the work itself. On the afternoon of the premiere, Strauss went for a walk with Mahler, and that concert may well have been attended by Adolf Hitler as well as the German musical high caste. It's a reminder, if one's needed, that the 20th century began late; that it's political catastrophes were interlinked with its artistic triumphs and that its philosophical saws (or sores) were already well on their way at the century's start. Luckily, I saw Opera North perform "Salome" at the Sage a couple of years ago, so that piece at least is familiar to me: I can well see that the next few weeks may see me dipping in and out of the book, as I dip in and out of the contemporary classical sections of Amazon and eMusic. Ross keeps a regular blog with the same name as his book.

"Vertical Integration" by Bonbon Experiment

I've spent the last week completing a new CD, called "Vertical Integration", and available under the name Bonbon Experiment. It's available free to download using a Creative Commons license, from www.classicelectronica.co.uk

Who's that in your novel?

A very interesting and considered piece from David Jenkins in today's Guardian, about being portrayed in other people's novels. There's quite a bit of this in the news right now, partly because of the profile of the new Hanif Kureishi novel, and its something that I know has been blogged about quite a bit by other writers, like Elizabeth Baines. I guess the real person I've most written about is myself, so there's always a sense of who is being exposed here? But in 1995 when my novel "Lineage" was shortlisted for the Lichfield Prize, my dad, not a reader, read it. He was mildly surprised to find that the first chapter included an episode where the father went out on an icy lake near where we live, and the ice broke. In the novel, the breakage is fatal, for dramatic purposes rather than any patricidal purpose - but dad was amazed I remembered the incident, so vividly, since I couldn't have been even five. "Write what you know" and "who you know" I guess is the sting in the tail. It's always interesting when you read a novel about a hated parent/sibling/lover - because its something that we can all relate to in parts, but also when it seems so real (particularly if its a first person novel), you're always wondering how much and what bits are real? I think its in this that writers do exercise a little bit of cruel power. The Divers in Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" are a pair of my favourite characters in literature, yet they were modelled on real people, who, their friends always insisted, were terribly treated in this wonderful novel. I've always used fragments of real people in my writing, but have found the most pleasure when I've managed - somehow - to make people up. Interestingly, as well, I think friends who read your work, are probably interested in whether you've ever used "them" in anyway, and it can be as simple as a line or a characteristic that then makes them go, "but that's me!" And we all do it, and always do it without permission. There's another way of identification of course; I was amused to find that Slatcher's is a butcher's shop in Mark Powell's "Snap", and the row of shops also includes the names of two other friends from the MA in novel writing we all studied together. He'd not told me, and it was only when reading the passing reference that I could appreciate the mention. Luckily, writers aren't usually interesting enough to be featured in other people's novels, it's something that we reserve for our friends, families, acquaintances.

Viva! the movies

I managed to find time to go to Viva! the Spanish film festival at the Cornerhouse yesterday, and more by luck than judgement went to see La Soledad (Solitary Fragments.) It's a remarkably good film, winner of best film at the Goyas. Slow, cleverly framed, chatty, fragmentary it's like a low-wattage Aldovomar (in that there's less "event" and more "life"), with something of the ennui of Jim Jarmusch, or the stately pleasure of Wong Kar Wai. A slow unfolding of two loosely connected stories, a young woman and her young son moving to Madrid, and a widow with three daughters who lives there. The lack of explanation, and the fragmentary nature of the scenes takes a while to settle these relationships in the viewer's head, which seems a little too wilful, and there are a number of characters who are just there for a scene or two, and seem a bit too peripheral. What it does contain is a remarkable sense of ordinary life in contemporary times and - rare in an English/American movie - a concentration on the big issues of ordinary life; your parents growing old; unsuitable marriages; difficult relationships; illness and death. Yet none of this is handled grimly. The performances are stunning, particularly Petra Martinez as the mother of 3 daughters, singlehandedly keeping the family together through little nudges, little self-sacrifices. If it comes round again, or you have a chance to see it, take it. One film out of the many on show at Viva! isn't many, but that's the nature of festivals, unless you take the time out to catch as much as you can - it's hard to see more than a couple of things. I came back to watch Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train", which somehow I'd never got round to seeing. Another riveting example of how to do it; though with this, "Vertigo", "Rear Window" and "Rope" the subject is always the same, "the perfect murder."

Funky Paranoia

I've been listening to Talking Heads again the last few days. They're a band that weave in and out of fashion; too arty, too dancy. I remember it must have been my 15th birthday, and I was with my parents in the Woolworths in Stafford, and they wanted to buy me a record, and I think I'd only heard one song by Talking Heads at that time - "Once in a Lifetime" - but there was something alluring about a double live album of a band I didn't know. I got it home and it was horrifying - I'd not really heard any funk music, but I persevered and in many ways Talking Heads were my entry into dance music. Yet, listening to them now, you really get the paranoid nature of most of their songs and it was and is that paradox that makes them so great.

The Three (or four?) Phases of Booker

The Booker Prize began in 1969, so to celebrate its 40th anniversary, a new prize was announced a couple of weeks ago, a 2nd running of their Booker of Bookers. 2008 is the 40th Booker (but won't be eligible I guess), whilst 2 joint winners mean there are forty one books in contention. I've got the list of winners and shortlists here, and I think the Booker's had 3 distinct phases. The first, from 1969-1979, when, as far as I can gather (I was far too young), it didn't gain much notoriety, and the books that won it were worthy, earnest, quiet novels, albeit with the occasional jolt (John Berger's pro-Black Panther gesture for instance.) Of the winners I'd guess that only Naipaul's "In a Free State" and Murdoch's "The Sea, the Sea" are still read. Mostly the lists were made up of those midlist, midcareer novelists that had been writing regularly for a decade or more. The second phase, all agree, began with the title fight between Burgess v. Golding, which the latter won, in 1980, though I guess you could see this as the last gasp of that particular age - established writers, not previously rewarded by the prize, coming up with a couple of late classics. From 1981-1992 has to be the Booker's golden age; a time when the Booker book came into its own, and, more often than not, the judges got it right. "Midnights Children", "Schindler's Ark," "The Life and Times of Michael K", all worthy winners; the next 4 years saw the shortlist triumph, I think, with books by Carey, Lessing, Ishiguro, Ballard, Atwood and Achebe, probably lasting in the memory more than the winners. Yet, from "Oscar and Lucinda" in 1988 to "The English Patient" in 1992, books with some lasting substance all took the prize. The third phase, I think, begins in 1993, when Roddy Doyle's "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha" won the prize, proving that any well-written (and popular) book could win with the right set of jurors. Every year since, its been hard to know which way the Booker wind has blown, favouring unrepeatable one offs (Yann Martel, DBC Pierre) or long-service awards (Carey again, Attwood, McEwan). It's not that these books are bad (and Coetzee's "Disgrace" is a modern classic) just that they don't really tell us an awful lot about what's happening to our fiction, and, given the strange "qualification" to be a Booker novel (anyone but an American), the modern stateless novelist (whether it be shortlisted Michael Collins - long resident in America, or DBC Pierre, Australian-Mexican, both of whom wrote essentially American novels), was always in with a chance, given an enterprising publisher. Mind you, it's possible we're now in the fourth phase of Booker - where the last 3 winners, Enright, Desai and Banville, have gone back to the worthy midlists (though Desai's is the start of the career, she's hardly an iconoclast, and another stateless writer), that we saw throughout the seventies. In some ways I think this is the case. It's a devil to know what history will show - but when chapters by Stanley Middleton and V.S. Naipaul were roundly rejected a couple of ago, it goes to show how fashion's change; though I would say, that a literary novel with a wide audience (which is what a Booker winner is likely to be), has got a more than even chance of surviving. My own Booker of Bookers (having read a good number of winners since 1980 at least) would be "The life and times of Michael K" by Coetzee, closely followed by Peter Carey's "Oscar and Lucinda." More interesting, of course, are the books on the shortlist, where,"Illywhacker", "The Handmaid's Tale", "The Good Terrorist," "Earthly Powers," "Utz", "Atonement," "A Long, Long Way" and "Cloud Atlas" would all have been more than worthy winners.

Come Back Poetry, All is Forgiven

Whilst the Mail on Sunday continues its apparently random record collection (Prince, Jean Michel Jarre, tomorrow's Nigel Kennedy doing the Four Seasons), The Guardian's latest collection, starting next week is "20th Century Poets." As a spoiler (I'm guessing), the Independent has rushed out the first of a series of glossy booklets about much older poets - starting today with Chaucer. I'm only disappointed that the Guardian's little list is such a predictable one. Auden, Eliot, Plath, Hughes, Heaney, Larkin, Sassoon - is there one Guardian reader who doesn't know those already? It's like those little gift sets of poets, whittled down to a line up as predictable as anything. Imagine even a Pound, a Lowell or a Bishop in that set? Oh well, the set ends with a CD of readings, which should be worth having, at least; though in the age of Wikipedia and iTunes it all seems rather quaint to get a little insert with the paper! Though what is one to make of Sean O'Brien's muddied water of a column that is used to herald this new collection of poets? I've read it three times now, and I still have no idea what his point is, other than "poetry's good," and he's got a very weird way with writing sentences. Anyway, it's good that the Guardian Review seems to have remembered that poetry exists again. Simon Armitage's workspace, that Sean O'Brien piece, a book review about Dorothy Wordsworth and Linton Kwesi Johnson all in the same issue.

The Cocteau Twins

I've been in denial too long. I hardly ever listen to the Cocteau Twins these days and yet they are, in many ways, my favourite band. A friend came round tonight and said "have you got any Cocteau Twins?" I said, yes, but couldn't find them for a while then I realised I'd actually got a "Cocteau Twins Box" which was basically a record case featuring just Cocteau Twins records and CDs and the damn thing was full! I'm listening to "Victorialand" as I speak and I'm thinking that Cocteau Twins are kind of a higher level to all other music and I'd forgotten this - how stupid have I been? - there's a purity and a beauty about them that is incomparable.... and in this age of comparison, they are the best band ever. My favourite band. Oh god. And I'd forgot how good they were - but more than that I don't know if I can cope with how good they are.... its so "emotional"....

Disappointing Narratives

Such is the dearth of good contemporary drama on television that when a new series comes on you want to give it time, even if it falls well short of what you'd hoped for. When two disappointments come simultaneously it makes you wonder whether there's something wrong with the format/the commissioning process or the broadcaster? In both cases, the BBC. "The Last Enemy" began promisingly, albeit bafflingly so, but three episodes in I'm keeping watching it more out of sympathy than enjoyment. It's not bad per se, (more of that in a minute), but it lacks both a centre, and a meaningful narrative arc. Its like a Faberge egg, glitzy, cleverly constructed, but ultimately pointless. The "surveillance" society that underpins it is the most interesting bit - yet its nothing more than a glorified cold war thriller in the way it uses this information. Had it been released as a cash-in follow up to "The Ipcress file" it wouldn't have felt out of place. Probably what lets it down is the lack of genuine belief in any of the characters or their improbably relationships (the obsessive compulsive Stephen Ezzard seems to have dropped his OCD just as soon as the writers had done away with a need for it), plus, a distinct cheapness to the sets and the filming. This is surely TV, nothing more. The heart of T.I.A. is a desktop computer in a grubby basement room at the Houses of Parliament, and every second scene is either in a council tenement or a dockside warehouse. The Bill has better production values. There's enough loose ends (is it anything else?) to perhaps keep me watching till the end, but I've so little interests in the lead characters plight, that I don't think I'd be that upset if the bad guys got away with everything. Yet, if "The Last Enemy" seems a misfire, at least you can see why it was commissioned; "Ashes to Ashes", ill-conceived follow up to "Life on Mars" is an absolute disaster. "Life on Mars" wasn't ever quite as good and clever as it thought it was, with some episodes little more than second rate police procedurals only loosely linked to the central concept. "Ashes to Ashes" tries to mash together its two timezones but you almost have to go out and make a coffee during these bits, so excruciating are they. Keeley Hawes, a favourite actress of mine in the past, is unbelievably bad in this role - but it's hard to say what she could have done better with such a messed up narrative. Yes, when Gene Hunt appears on screen there's the usual fun, just about, that made "Life on Mars" such a pleasure, but overall, I'm not sure I can bear another episode. Only "Torchwood" in its new series, rescues the BBC's contemporary drama output from disaster, with only the last episode, featuring the Grim Reaper and a 12th century plague and Owen "defeating death", being a bit of a misfire - easily made up for by the brilliance of earlier episodes. You notice that all of these shows have both a "concept" to deliver and a weekly episode to knock out, and it seems the pressures of dealing with both is showing. Situation drama, in other words, with wooden characters, and a troublesome narrative arc. With a box set of, say, the Wire, Battlestar Galactica or the West Wing, just an internet order away, the Beeb needs to do better.

Poets & Players at the Whitworth

Yesterday afternoon, to the Whitworth gallery for Poets & Players. Now Arts Council funded, Linda Chase brings together a mix of poets - well known and upcoming - and mixes them with music. So yesterday had the somewhat incongruous mix of avant-garde new music collective House of Bedlam, alongside the understated charms of Tobias Hill and four other poets. The Whitworth gallery is a wonderful place for a reading on an afternoon, with views into the park, and a sense of genuinely getting away from the hustle and bustle of a Saturday afternoon. The event was packed, and well more than the "40 people" that I reckoned, rather glibly, last week, was a massive audience for a poetry event. That said, its all a little on the patrician side, and the poets were all very proper. I enjoyed Martin Malone's poems about old neighbours, and late night taxi rides with lovers; they felt like something I could relate to; whereas, though they both read very well, the young women poets Rachel Mann and Rebecca Perry seemed more exercises in form; life perhaps not yet furnishing them with the material to match their undoubted facility. Hill was okay, though I didn't think the reading added to the pleasures I've found in his book; his concentration on the longer poems from that collection, Nocturne & Chrome in Sunset Yellow, perhaps missed out some of the book's slighter pleasures. In other words, it was all very pleasant, but - perhaps in keeping with a Saturday afternoon visit to an art gallery - nothing to particularly stay in the mind. Afterwards, talking to James Davies, who is about to launch a new experimental poetry magazine and publisher If P then Q, whether the way to grow audiences for new music and poetry is this "mix and match" approach - the avant garde musicians possibly gaining a bigger audience than they would have got at an avant garde poetry reading. I was saying to someone the other day how rarely it is for me to go the Royal Northern College of Music, despite it having some music on I'd undoubtedly like. All of these things require ways in. Manchester does it better than most, but it's still not perfect. And as always, I find myself somewhat mystifyingly in the middle of all of this - neither mainstream or avant garde; as put off by performance poets as by Radio 4 wannabees, wanting rock music thats a little more than drums and guitars, and classical music that is less up its compositional alleys; fiction that can have some of the vivacity of the best poetry, and poetry that doesn't get locked into its own sentimental conventions. Artists, writers, musicians all need a freedom to "be", but there's a sense that its more important that they "belong". Choose your sub-genre carefully, you may be there for some time.

Art March

A few announcements today. In that its the time of year, (white rabbits, white rabbits, white rabbits), when we step out of our winter clobber and start thinking about "2008" as a real entity. So I went to my first gig of the year on Tuesday, the excellent (and somewhat joyous) the Hold Steady - kind of like Phil Silvers fronting the E Street Band to look at. In their world its always 1978, but a febrile version of that year, where the Clash, Lou Reed, Fleetwood Mac and Cheap Trick happily co-exist. They're a new band for old people - the audience was all 40somethings - which is an interesting development in itself. Next week there's some literary and art events going on, Andy Leyland, a friend, but also an excellent oil painter has a collection of new paintings on display at the Arison gallery in Chorlton. I'm looking forward to Monday's preview even if it does clash with the Lamport Court/Parameter/Ugly Tree reading at the Briton's Protection. Its a packed programme so I'll see if I can make both. I'd particularly like to see Chris McCabe read - a regular in Lamport Court from when I was involved in the magazine - and, in "The Hutton Report", writer of one of my favourite books of poetry of the last few years. And current LC editor Neil Campbell reads from his Salt collection, "Broken Doll" on Wednesday at the Thirsty Scholar alongside 2 other local writers. Somehow I've got to fit in a birthday meal, and since I've hardly been in the flat for a fortnight, would actually quite like to stay in a bit! Not that easy in art March.

Is Literature Art?

I'm not sure what started me on this line of thought: perhaps a mixture of envy at other art forms that seem to embody so much more innate talent than writing; music, painting, film and photography even. I can just about take a photograph, but any "eye" I had lost its sight a dozen years ago; and I can bash out a few chords or a bassline on a keyboard, but nothing more sophisticated than that; as for painting and drawing, I wasn't good enough to do an Art CSE back when I was thirteen, and I'd be even less able now. I've watched myself on film, and though I've never tried acting, I stand up in front of an audience enough to know that I don't ever really take the room with me - and that's being myself, never mind trying to be someone else. Enough flagellation though, for the one thing I can do is put one word after the other, and make something new from those raw materials. Yet, so, it seems can everyone else. Is literature art then? Taking another tack, I read the literary pages a little depressed at either the adulation of genuis (this week: the "rediscovery" of Richard Yates or the curiousity about Nabakov's unseen last work), or the hyperbole of the popular (most prize lists, the bestseller lists, J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman.) And then there's the argument going on elsewhere on the blog pages about whether literary bloggers are just envious fanboys (and girls), and shouldn't be confused with the great minds of the literary pages. Is literature art then? I'm intrigued and appalled by the various mediastorms around Martin Amis's ideas as opposed to his literary worth - the nothingness, I guess, of so much current literary discourse. And we're here again, in that whereas writing about music or art might add a side-dish to the meal, writing about writing might well be considered a reheating of the food we've just ate. So, is literature art? Whether the Arts Council's decisions over, say, the London Magazine or Dedalus press, are a sign of discomfort around the artform, or simply a concern over literature's audience, is a moot point. There's little enough money in literature, in that sense, yet there's plenty of books pouring out, even if its Delia Smith's coffee table latest that sells like the proverbial hotcakes. And, however many paperbacks are made with paper from "sustainable" trees, there's a sense that an object that is so poorly bound, or so carelessly edited, isn't receiving the same care as even the blandest of CD covers or the whitest of exhibition catalogues. Is literature art or have we done it the biggest of disservice's by badging it with that label? Were the storytellers, the troubadours, the poets artists or were they something else - fashionable men of their day, secular priest perhaps? I'm sitting here unable to draw or sing or act or play an instrument and calling myself an artist, and yes, there's artistry in what I do, a little craft, too, but far more - I think - in terms of the intellect than the heart. Perhaps the heart's just for poets - though I'd like to think that Fitzgerald, a bad poet, was the most poetic of men - though was it Gatsby or Carraway who was the artist? I don't think Scott had much time for artists. He was a good looking, well-dressed man, and his possibly stopped there. What he was doing for something less - and something more? So is literature art? Is it possible that we've mistaken it, wrapped it up wrong, given it a mistaken rule-book, a dubious assessment criteria, a self-deluded critical apparatus; and made it mean less as a result. It's an entertainment, a story, a fabrication. It tells the truth, yet no truth at all. (It sounds like one of those riddles, already.) Jeanette Winterson might think what she's doing is art. But Junot Diaz? Or come to that, Richard Yates? The best literatures are legislative, purposeful, moral, I guess (or with moral purpose), but is literature art? I only ask.