NE Sojourn

I've been in the North East for a few days, seeing friends and family. I didn't read much - too busy for that, but good to have a change of scene. I popped into MIMA - the modern art gallery in Middlesborough, which was a fantastic building, but a little less impressive inside. It's signature summer exhibition being a large show by potter Julian Stair. As interesting as burial pots and sarcophagi can be, I'm not sure in what way this was modern or even art (as opposed to craft.).Worth the visit though since I finally got to see Claes Oldenfield's "Bottle of Notes" which was (is?) his only large scale piece in the UK - and which I'd first heard about when going to an exhibition of his work in Los Angeles in 1995.

A second gallery visit was on the recommendation of a friend, to the BALTIC to see (or rather hear) Janet Cardiff's sound piece, The Forty Part Motet, which takes a choral piece by Tallis and has it playing through 40 different speakers, with the audience in the middle of the circle. A lovely piece of work, that was worth the trip. I was less enamoured of the Mark Wallinger exhibition that filled the top floor of the gallery. The execution was good, but the ideas seemed weak, or maybe that's me trying to find meaning in work that is not particularly meaningful. But I'm not in review mode, being on holiday, so go see for yourself.

I've been following the Pussy Riot trial before it got picked up by the majority of the media, thinking their art performance/provocation was a stunning piece of agit prop. That its now lead to a 2-year sentence for the 3 perpetrators is not surprising; I don't think I'd ever any illusions about Russia's new found "freedoms", but its been instructive seeing the Western media come slowly to the cause. For Pussy Riot bring into question not only the veneer of Putin's new Russia, and are as relevant a protest as the student protests of 1968, but also ask questions for the West. For its almost impossible to imagine a musical/performance creating such moral outrage in the UK - or, perhaps, more importantly -  gaining such traction. Even hearing their raw Riot Grrrl styled "punk prayer" on the news seems to me the first time I've heard loud, aggressive, under-produced music on mainstream media in years. Pussy Riot would be confrontational anywhere, I feel, but I immediately saw what they were doing, responded to their actions and methodology. It has to be one of my worries of the times that organised religion, rather than retreating into its rightful place as private faith, is reasserting itself as somehow "special". When this is closely allied with the state, as it apparently is in contemporary Russia, then its a dangerously illiberal cocktail. And, to choose a religious turn of phrase, let him without sin cast the first stone. We aren't jailing colourful performance artists in the UK, but we are trying to extradite young computer geeks to America. I liked Peaches quickly written "Free Pussy Riot."

This year's Booker longlist has got people's interest up in a way usually reserved for the shortlist. My publisher, Salt, has a debut novel on the list, Alison Moore's "The Lighthouse", and its one of several interesting looking books up for the September winnowing. I notice displays of the longlist in various Waterstones, and I just hope when the shortlist is announced in early September, that the longlisted books don't disappear from view, as "losers", after all, the best British novel of the last few years, David Mitchell's Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, was only longlisted.

After the Sport's Over

I've been trying to write a blog post for a fortnight. But the Olympics has been like some big brainwipe machine and every time I try and write something I get swamped in sporting metaphors and images of Jessie's J's catsuit.

Given that, I'll stick to the more regular fare. What to do in Manchester when the 'Lympic dream is over.

You could go to Castlefield Gallery - which has reopened with a fascinating exhibition by Dave Griffiths, from MMU, with his solo show "Babel Fiche."

Or tomorrow night for instance its the latest addition of the Other Room. I've missed the last couple so I'm looking forward to this one. Varied line-up as well. Its now at the Castle on Oldham Street. (AKA the Bermuda Triangle, because you can never remember leaving.)

We've had a Booker longlist since we last spoke - but I've not read any of them (though hope to get through the Hilary Mantel in next couple of weeks). Quite a few of the books AREN'T EVEN PUBLISHED YET, which I always hate; but there you go, 'tis the way it is.

That's all I've got, the five hoops have still got me ensnared. 

More Ballard than Orwell, our Weird Country nailed by Danny Boyle

I've been looking forward to the Olympics. I enjoy spectator sport, and the Olympics is a bit of an all-you-can-eat buffet. I first fell for the Olympics in 1988 when unemployed after university, and getting up early or staying up late to watch the men's hockey at Seoul, coverage fronted by a young, cute Hazel Irvine.

Politically the Olympics is something else entirely, of course, like an unemployed man blowing his redundancy check on a binge holiday for all his friends and family, and the corporate omnishambles of the last few weeks have only highlighted how corporates interests are just that - "interests" - that we should look to ridicule and curtail at any opportunity.

To last night, then, and the opening ceremony. When did these become so much the main event? I guess we live in an age of spectacle, both live and on television, from SuperBowl to X-Factor. Luckily, somebody, somewhere made a brave decision that paid off and gave the ceremony to the singular vision of Danny Boyle, a diverse and creative film maker who went from the no budget of "Shallow Grave", to the countercultural classic "Trainspotting" to world-beater with the lovably sentimental "Slumdog Millionaire". He, in turn, gave over the music to Underworld, who soundtracked "Trainspotting" all those years back with the "lager-lager" refrain of "Born Slippy."

I was at a party at Islington Mill, where we watched the opening and ending in a communal situation, and turned down the sound for the A-Z of countries. The bucolic opening seemed more of a pitch to whoever commissioned "The Hobbit", Constable's Hay Wain reimagined as "The Shire." Angel-voiced children singing "Jerusalem" etc. - all very BBC. Then came the tumbling of Boyle's Horrible History. I grew up with the "industrial revolution" as the staple of my own history, and to be frank, I'm a little tired of it. Watching this in an actual mill, now re-used as an arts centre, seemed nicely ironic. History is perhaps not Boyle's strong point. Very Dickensian, we're still in thrall to a Victorian vision, when England ruled the waves etc. Then, surprisingly - one of many - we were thrust into the post-50s Britain of the NHS, as if a personal rebuke to coalition politicians, and accidentally, the clueless Mitt Romney. I have to say, I got a little lost around here - or the wine was beginning to take hold - but we had child catchers, J.K. Rowling, Great Ormond Street Hospital and god knows what else.

The whole ceremony had some of the something-for-everyone I'd expected, but it then upped a gear. There were two genuine innovations that seemed remarkable: the angels-on-bikes that spread out around the stadium; and Thomas Hetherington's remarkable lighted cauldron. Manchester's lovely but misplaced B of the Bang - an earlier Hetherington work - seems a distant memory. There were also two very good jokes: Mr. Bean playing a single note throughout the "Chariots of Fire" theme, upstaging the poor orchestral straight men playing the rest of the tune; and a somewhat silly-surreal film/live sequence where James Bond and the Queen parachuted into the ground. Very game, your majesty. She's probably wishing she'd retired a yaer ago. Mr. Bean, of course, is the most famous Britain worldwide - but this little piece reminded us of the sheer joy of when he first arrived, before becoming ubiquitous and annoying.

It was fascinating how many of the cultural icons here came from the wrong side of the tracks. There was none of the Andrew Lloyd Webber/X-Factor/Gary Barlow/Simon Cowell shite that passes for contemporary light entertainment. The Beeb, you felt, was kept well away from this one - having had plenty of C list celebrity fun with the torch relay. Compare tonight's line up with the Barlow-curated Queen's Jubilee concert... or rather, please don't. Rowan Atkinson cut his teeth on the alt. comedy scene in the early 80s, Boyle began with the no budget dark comedy "Shallow Grave", Underworld started as unpronounceable art band freur, before morphing into electronic pioneers; and Arctic Monkeys are just about the last great British indie band.

Arctic Monkeys came on to play two songs - their debut "I bet you look good on the dancefloor" and the Beatles' "Come Together." Alex Turner actually looked like the young John Lennon, lean, mean, and quiffed - and I was reminded that "Come Together" was so similar to a Chuck Berry song that Lennon had to make amends by recording several Berry numbers on the "Rock and Roll" album, the cover of which - Lennon in Hamburg in the 50s - Turner seemed to have styled himself on. Music remains Britains one world beater of the last 50 years; from the Beatles through to Adele, and it was no surprise that pop culturally obsessed Danny Boyle would do his best with a medley that included a personal "best of" list that could hardly be faulted; even if it occasionally slipped into Stars on 45 territory. One might have paused to wonder where classical music or jazz were in all this - or even contemporary literature or film - only to then remember that whilst we've been pretty unassailable in pop music this last half a century; in other art forms we're much less renowned. No YBAs were involved in the making of this it seems - though Martin Creed had started the day off with a nationwide bell ringing contest.

Even here though our mongrel nature came through. No idea why Boyle decided to single-handedly resurrect Mike Oldfield's career - though as English as his music is, the theme from Tubular Bells is indelibly attached to that most horrific of movies, the Exorcist. Also, if "Come Together" is part Chuck Berry; the soundtrack to that most British of films, Chariots of Fire, was written by the Greek Vangelis. Even Pink Floyd (a spellbinding use of "Eclipse" from "Dark Side of the Moon") seems as American as they are British. Perhaps that was the point: an island nation; a trading nation; our uniqueness is also due to our diversity.

When the Olympic flag was carried around the stadium, it was a genuinely emotional moment; and grown men were tweeting about the tears in their eyes as the much loved Muhammad Ali, ill with Parkinson's disease, made a welcome appearance. At that point you realised why all the dreadful corporate sponsors wanted to be associated with the Olympics, they stand so far from this triumph of the human spirit that they have to leach on it by association, whatever the cost. Luckily, it seems the Olympic ideal can cope with this cynicism; at least when its done with the humour, pathos and counter-cultural knowingness that Boyle gave us. Sebastian Coe made a less than impressive politician, but the singlemindedness he brought to his running has been carried over into his bringing of the Olympics to us. Not for the first time one is reminded that if you get the best people in to do a particular job then it will be done far better than any committee or demagogue can expect.

As Team GB came into the stadium at the end of the 200+ nations, dressed by Stella McCartney (a few minutes before her dad would take us out with a rousing "Hey Jude") apparently as extras at a Glenn Campbell convention; the whole madness of the whole thing seemed the point. Our weird dysfunctional country treasures its eccentricities whilst trying to eradicate them in the name of "globalisation" or "efficiency". Whether this is a last hurrah for British eccentricity, one can only doubt, though the managerial culture that was efficient enough to bring us the games, has clearly had to take a back seat now it comes to the money shots. Rather than the much quoted George Orwell, it seems that our dystopian suburban surrealist, J.G. Ballard is the muse that Boyle's vision of Britain was channelling - and we're the better for it. 

Bring on the games.

The Emotional Life and Creativity

Workshopping a poem at the weekend, I'd taken this one along because it wasn't quite right in a number of ways. The workshop brought out its problems; though perhaps not its solutions. I'm not always that linear in my poetry - even though I sometimes appear to be. As often, I'll find a theme and spin a few different thoughts around it. I realised that the poem was caught between being linear and this more abstracted approach - and of course, to the reader, unless the juxtapositions are obviously different, there's a tendency to want to read these things straight.

Part of the reason was that it was a poem about mental illness - or was it? I'd begun with a conceit - even, a title - and had used this to write a poem that was quite dark in its subject matter. Yet it wasn't a personal poem and certainly wasn't "specific" about me or anyone else. Rather, it was seeking a little to pull together observations on how in adult life the "monsters under the bed" that frighten us as children can be real. I'll not post the poem here, as it's currently failed to express my thoughts - perhaps they weren't quite there; and the poem was more a random gathering of images. One person said that there are so many poems about personal experience of depression/mental illness that a non-personalised view didn't seem strong enough. I guess I agreed, except by the very sense of observation I think I was trying to move away from that more "confessional" strand - Plath, Berryman et al.

But it did make me think a bit. When I tried to write a poem a month a while back for National Poetry Writing Month it stopped me writing for a couple of months afterwards. I was literally sick of poems. Or rather, I was wrung out with the sense I was writing poems as "things" rather than poems that meant "something." Although I've always felt my best poems are, in a somewhat un-British way, poems of ideas, they've also only ever really come from the emotion: "only connect the prose and the passion" as E.M. Forster had it. When you write a poem about love or about death or about any of the very human things that console and confront us, do we always need to tap into the emotional wells? There are, of course, other forms of poetry than the confessional - and I'm uneasy about the poetry sequence that is always "in memoriam" or similarly felt; yet at times it sees poets at their very best. I think that has to be some distance.

Writing from emotion or at an emotional time can be cathartic but it can also be to much "about" the self when I think it probably needs to be "of" the self. There seems a distinct difference between things I've written when I've felt a bit of a "black dog" of depressiveness descending - which sometimes seems to be a ball of creativity that needs pushing out - and when I've written self-defeatedly about the thing that's depressing me. Too close to the cause of your anger, and the writing is infected by it, rather than inspired by it. Or at least, that's what I've often felt. "Revenge is a dish best eaten cold", they say, and it's probably true of writing as well.

Yet emotion is not merely a negative - love; elation; whatever - these are equally important - and, thinking back, I've often upped my game when I've been inspired, even briefly, by more positive emotions. Having just had a poem accepted for a magazine for the first time in ages, I wondered why that one in particular. And perhaps its because its a poem about desire; but not a delayed, or distant desire, but a palpable, real one. The girl in the poem has a face; even if I didn't actually go much further in describing it. If anything, it was a poem about a "moment" of desire; and that was already gone - already able to make the transition from feeling into art. Thinking back, and looking at the poems in "Playing Solitaire for Money" and even the first section of "Extracts from Levona", I realise that these often came out of a similar heightening of emotion. Looking back, they weren't necessarily great loves, or terrible despairs, but moments of anticipation, or splinters of uncertainty. The poem acts as a divining rod, often failing to twitch when it is moved over dry grounds, but frantic and insistent when it divines the water below.

Re-reading John Ashbery ("Soonest Mended")

I first came aware of John Ashbery in the late 90s. If that seems a little late its probably a sign of the impoverished poetry teaching I received on my undergraduate degree (the Morrison/Motion Penguin anthology, Heaney & Hughes) and a subsequent disinterest in poetry that lasted best part of a decade. I'd probably heard the name and would have looked up a few poems in one of those monstrous Norton Anthologies I'd had bought whilst studying 20th century American fiction. Poems like "The Instruction Manual" immediately resonated with me. It helped that I'd just started on an M.A. with his British publisher, Michael Schmidt, and over the next few years I picked up quite a few Carcanet volumes. I was amazed that, Mark Ford aside, nobody in British poetry seemed to have much time for Ashbery, (if they did like the New York Poets, it was always O'Hara), and when occasionally poets tried to write like him they would go for the surrealism and juxtaposition and miss what I always liked about his work: the generosity; the openness.

For I've always thought its a bit stupid trying to "understand" or "paraphrase" an Ashbery poem. He came out of a millieu that included Charles Ives and Jackson Pollock. We can hardly gloss their work - so why should Ashbery be any different? Of course, British poetry's infatuation with America had got as far as the Beats - for their looseness - and the confessionals - for their unbuttoned emotion; and Ashbery was something else. I got the chance to see him read a couple of times at the turn of the century, and he's thankfully still with us, aged 84, and still writing. That he's not won the Nobel yet is one of the Swedish Academy's most consistent oversights.

But all of that wouldn't mean much: for poetry is read one-to-one, or occasionally to a crowd where the experience is still the singular one. I can't get far in a Heaney book without putting it down; he has never seemed a "modern" poet to me; yet Ashbery - I'd realised I'd not been reading him for a while - is hard to put down. Flicking through the first 5 collections, anthologised as "The Mooring of Starting Out", I skipped the usual pleasures of "The Tennis Court Oath" and went for 1970's "The Double Dream of Spring." Its a more straightforward collection than people sometimes ascribe to Ashbery, but his work is vast and varied. These poems, written during a liberating time, the late 60s, seem to have a lightness and generosity that has none of the hippy overtones of the Beats or the English poets who attended the Poetry International. These are quieter works, about a complex America; as much Dickinson's quiet corners as Whitman's great spaces. One poem in particular stood out as I was reading last night. "Soonest Mended", a medium length poem from which "The Mooring of Starting Out" takes its name. Its easy to forget, with thinking of Ashbery as a "New York" poet, part of an urban demi-monde, how many of his better poems are embedded in lands, in other lands. "Soonest Mended" is about that other "hippy" dream, of going back to nature, or being from nature; but really, in typical with so much of his best work, the "it" in an Ashbery poem is a malleable one, he wants the poem to be applyable elsewwhere. The details of the poem "Angelica, in the Ingres painting" or "Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile" give it a centre, but one which doesn't dominate. It is a painterly technique, where the focus is as much on the horizon or the light, as on the individual figures that create that perspective. "This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free" he writes, a small ambition, at odds with "The American Dream" but also part of it - to have a little piece of this vast continent that we can make our own; where we can live, cheaply and happily. We know now how much that "dream" has been brutalised -

"It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later,   

The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time.   

They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game   

Were merely spectators...."

- writing in the mid-60s, Ashbery is surely looking back. On what? The dust bowl farmers of his youth in the depression perhaps? But it feels a little timeless. This idea of familiar struggle; where we believe that our hard work and the close ties of our friends and family will keep us "in the game", and only later do we realise our role - as spectators (consumers perhaps). It seems a very appropriate poem for today; an ecological poem in some ways; this is shortly after "Silent Spring" for instancel; and the late sixties would see the music of the Band and others extolling a rural simplicity. Yet, for Ashbery, he isn't a sentimentalist (or at least not in this poem), and instead accepts time's passing as not a game to be "won" but as a life to be lived. The result: we may not be any further forward; yet we have to believe that it is possible - not necessarily for the great ambitions - but for the smaller ones. There is much more in the poem, and like so much of his work, a literal interpretation seems rather pointless. When others write Ashbery-like they often write with a rigidity that his plain, but expressive language avoids. He is uniquely expert at creating an atmosphere that seems to stay in the poem, beneath the meaning of the words. The colloquialism, "least said, soonest mended" that my own farmer grandparents would use to get over a minor upset, seems exactly right for the poem's tone of getting on with life, but still retaining our hope, based upon the strengths and desires we have had all along. 

The poem can be read at the Poetry Foundation website here and is in his "Selected Poems".

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel was a surprise absence from last year's Booker list; though having read the majority of the shortlist it, like a couple of the other novels on the list, is a contemporary history concerned with the secrets that we hide from each other; and the consequences therein. In five chronological, and somewhat separate sections, "The Stranger's Child" covers over a century, beginning just before the first world war, and ending in 2008. Amongst the many complimentary cover blurbs, the Independent compares it to "Middlemarch" which makes you wonder if the reviewer had read either this or the Eliot. For what "The Stranger's Child" is not, in any way, is a vast societal novel. Rather, Hollinghurst writes about minutiae; whether its the intimacies of gay relationships; or the architectural features of great houses; he is at heart a miniaturist.

Cecil Valance is a charismatic, aristocratic gay poet who visits with his new lover, the quiet, naive George Sawle. Sawle's family have a small house called "Two Acres"; he has a brother and a sister, and a young widowed mother who drinks too much. From this small beginning Hollinghurst maps out a century of emotional and literary intrigues. For George's sister Daphne, a susceptible, romantic girl of sixteen, is immediately obsessed with the visiting Cecil - who's undoubted charisma and confidence comes from his station in life; heir to a baronetcy, and member of a Cambridge secret society. She hands him her autograph book, but rather than a signature, over five scrawled pages, he writes what will become his most famous poem "Two Acres." This first section is Jamesian in its detail, but owes as much to that other gay writer E.M. Forster. "Two Acres" is a house not unlike "Howard's End" with it changing from country to city as the railway broadens the London suburbs into Middlesex. Yet, whereas Forster was comparing "new" and "old" money, Hollinghurst as ever, is enamoured of aristocracy; their giant houses; and their insouciant lives of privilege. The first section, "Two Acres" is as masterful as Cecil's poem; though we already feel that Cecil is going to be a minor poet - if not a minor character in the novel. The Great War is looming, and inevitably, all the character's lives will be shook up by this.

In many ways "The Stranger's Child" - a title taken from Tennyson - is the equivalent of one of those "group biographies" that have proven so popular when writing about the "Bloomsbury set." Here, Valance is another branch. In Hollinghurst's universe, he's in the Georgian anthologies, and knows (but doesn't have much time for) Rupert Brooke. Yet, his biography is very similar to Brooke's - a second rate poet who is remembered for some well-loved verses. Our fascination with the first world war; the Edwardian and late Victorian worlds that it destroyed; and with the emerging world that follows; is at the heart of this book. It's a well-trodden path of course - and at times one wonders why Hollinghurst's fascination with a world that has been written over three times already: in the contemporary books of the day; in the biographies of Bloomsbury and others; and in more than a few contemporary novelisations. The subject, however ably Hollinghurst rehashes it, is a tired one. Having read the recent Edward Thomas biography by Matthew Hollis I couldn't help but thinking how much more interesting Thomas's world is than this one. A "real" poet of the first world war, Thomas was from a poor background; working as a hack for many years; yet Hollinghurst - like McEwan in "Saturday" - has to create a poet of the aristocracy as his "hero."

For Cecil Valance is very much a "hero" in inverted commas. In him, Hollinghurst is writing the first chapter of a gay history of the 20th century, where gay men throughout the years pass down his coded poems like a baton. Though it's only towards the end of the long novel that this seems to be the novel's purpose. A young girl being privy to a secret is the slightly schematic plot line of McEwan's "Atonement", and, I wonder to what extent the success of that novel sent Hollinghurst to plough the same furrow? That said, it is "Brideshead Revisited" that the novel most echoes. There are plenty of mentions for "real" writers in the book - Waugh being one of them - but given that novel's beautiful writing and its inherent tragedy, it seems the setting up here of an almost parallel story, albeit with a literary rather than a Catholic subtext, is always going to come out secondary.

Hollinghurst is at his best in the first and fourth sections of the novel. In the middle two, we are thrown into the cast of characters - the Valances and Sawles mostly - at different points in the 20th century. He avoids the "big moments" - the births and deaths - and instead throws us into the aftermath. Daphne Sawle, now Lady Valance, but married - we discover in a neat feint - to Cecil's brother Dudley. This section is pure Downton Abbey. A big country house gathering with wounded war hero; visiting in-laws; damaged children and ageing matriarch thrown together for the purpose of the next revelation. Though, this and the third section - for Daphne's 70th birthday party, half a century later - have as much a touch of the plotting of Gavin & Stacey, where the two contrasting families and various hangers-on are thrown together once again, and the sparks fly.

For Hollinghurst isn't really doing plot: the plot is all hidden from us. There are secrets we know about (such as George and Cecil) and then ones that we don't - as we've only been made privy to certain aspects of the family history. Given that in the first Jamesian chapters we are told the meaning of every glance; the middle part of the book sags heavily into two somewhat endless "party" scenes - the first letting us glimpse the wrecked changes that the world has given us after the Great War - the second glimpsing sixties gay liberation. Unlike previous Hollinghurst's the sex is not overly described; yet he revels in writing about the preamble to sex - as whole scenes are set pieces leading to consummation in a glade or in a corridor. I guess, a little like Sarah Waters, this is one of the motivation's of writing these histories, with more candour than a contemporary writer would have done. Yet, at times sex - and relationshps - gets reduced to a transactional level which has little of the wracked pain of James or Forster at their most acute. In th 1960s section we are introduced to Paul Bryant, a young gay fantasist, working for a bank who becomes a somewhat sleazy biographer. Accidentally coming into contact with the Sawles and Valances's he's given an entree into sixties literary life that he yearned for reading Valance's poems, but otherwise would have not found it easy to find.

Bryant is the book's most troubling character - though there are plenty here who are unsympathetic, even grotesque (one of the joys of the book is the simple hideousness of almost all its characters, that Hollinghurst draws out with a certain sardonic relish) - for we next meet him in the mid-70s when he is beginning to earn a living writing reviews for the TLS. Like the first part of the novel this seems to work better; as it's squarely about a literary life. You have to feel, with the book's dedication to the late poet Mick Imlah, that Hollinghurst is writing something of a roman a clef, albeit about the generation before him and Imlah worked the London literary scene. Bryant, a sensationalist biographer who is terribly bad at actually interviewing his subjects, is skewered repeatedly as a comic figure; even as he somehow gets lucky and discovers the revelations that we, the reader, have been denied - even though we've been there at the start of things. In some ways, the book comes back to life at this point; the hubris and longeurs of those gossipy central scenes is sharpened and brought into focus as Bryant starts out on his literary detective story. Cecil Valance, from being a figure of fun, is somehow a "stayer", his few decent poems have made him more of interest in the late 20th century than he had been when alive. As his brother points out the irony of him being famous for a poem called "Two Acres" when he was heir to 3,000, the chopping and changing fortunes of a somewhat undeserving aristocracy are followed right up to the present day.

We get a sense of the great turning of history - but only a sense of it - for though these characters are famed in their day; know Generals and politicians, there does seem to be a mixed message in Hollinghurst's treatment of them. For, like the Bells, Stracheys and Sitwells they are mostly minor figures; more remembered for their chaotic personal lives than for their artistic endeavours. I'm never quite sure if Hollinghurst with his love for country houses, boarding schools and posh, artistic lives, is entirely satirising these people or not. The other characters - a German widow, Paul Bryant, a lesbian interior decorater - are, if anything, treated with even more disdain. The comedy, which is there, is one of manners - for this is, like Downton, superior literary melodrama at heart. Tying it to his earlier novels, there is also, I think, a fittingly successful attempt to tell a story of hidden or at least closeted, gay lives throughout a swathe of time, with a fragment of a poem offering an olive branch to each generation that manages to detect its code.

What we're doing reading this fake life in 2011/2012 I do wonder. It has none of the expansiveness of Burgess's "Earthly Powers", and comes up short, both literally and psychologically against those books it most echoes - Howard's End and Brideshead. I think Hollinghurst's meticulous prose, so good at the psychological miniature that starts the book, falls away, and becomes sloppy when it has to take in too much, or has to describe too much - a problem I also found with "The Line of Beauty." I sometimes think that like Dudley Valance - who covers up what he thinks of as Victorian ugliness with 1920s decoration -  he's boxing something in. After all, if there is a contemporaneous gay history of the 20th century its there - at least now - in the histories of some of it more illustrious poets and novelists. The usual Hollinghurst obsessions - with grand houses and even grander families - seems the least interesting part of this book. There's also a sense, with writing that is done in an equally grand matter, and which is highly conventional in its stylisation, that he's ignoring to the point of evasion the importance of modernism in all of this. Henry James or Edith Wharton may have been a little shocked by the ease with which his characters move towards consummation, but I think they'd find the book, if anything, a little too conventional for their tastes.

There is much to enjoy, and admire in the novel, but I feel it probably missed on the Booker shortlisting either because of its literary focus or because the theme of secrets hidden was also there in two books that did make the list, including the winning Julian Barnes. You can't help but enjoy Hollinghurst's prose, though its Jamesian overemphasis and tendency to melodrama makes me wonder at those reviewers who praise his great style. For someone like me, who has an abiding fascination with the literature of the first third of the 20th century there is much to enjoy, even though this is a fake branch of history that Hollinghurst has added. It has quite a few clever things to say on posthumous reputation, and, I think, on the need that marginalised communities have to find precursors texts - alternative histories. A long book, it's a worthwhile literary page-turner, yet, like "The Line of Beauty" it seems to be part of an over-populous part of the contemporary literary city.

Binge Poetry

Poets are notoriously a hard up bunch, and money for poetry is always in short supply; yet every now and then poetry gets a bit of a windfall, and rather than save it for a rainy day, like a dock worker picking up his paycheck on a Friday, poetry tends to go and spend it on a big party. Chances are the next day there will be plenty of regret, an empty wallet and a thick head, but at least it was a good do. The biggest party of the lot is the Olympics - the most expensive binge the country has ever had - but as part of the cultural Olympiad poetry has decided not just to have a big party but to invite all its friends. So the Poetry Parnassus sees a poet from every competing nation descend on the UK, though mostly on London, for a few days of "stuff." I say "stuff" because to be honest I'm not quite sure what is going on. As usual, poetry's big events seem to happen at a considerable distance from its everyday - both geographically (its always London) and organisationally. Though there are some readings of Carcanet poets in Manchester and Arc poets in Hebden this seems a party to which hasn't made much effort to involve the rest of poetry, (with the caveat that most London poetry organisations seem to have something going on during the week), which is a shame, as British poetry frequently needs reminding that their artform is an international one, and there are some admirable initiatives around poets who don't have the freedom that we have (he says, carefully.) As I say, its a bit of a binge, and if you're around to enjoy it, then please do - lets hope there are some new connections made between nations and poets. I think it starts today but the South Bank website is confusing as hell, so I'd suggest you just head over there and look for the couplets.

Want to read some of the poems then explore the Guardian's interactive map here.
Or buy the Bloodaxe anthology of the event here.
Lousy one-pager on the London 2012 website here  
And equally hard-to-find page on South Bank Centre's website here.

Hungry, the Stars and Everything by Emma Jane Unsworth

Having known Emma Jane Unsworth for a few years, and having seen her read from her debut novel "Hungry, the Stars and Everything," first release from new Manchester press, Hidden Gem, it shouldn't have took me so long to getting round to reading it. The novel has just won a Betty Trask Prize. However, I was glad I waited, as its a novel to be devoured at one go; appropriately so, since part of its structure is to start most chapters with a course from the "taster" menu from new restaurant Bethel.

Food and novels have a long history - think Proust, Joyce and Waugh, to name but three whose most famous lines centre around food - yet given the contemporary obsession with celebrity chefs and Michelin stars, its not that often that a novel wallows in the culinary. Unsworth's heroine is Helen Burns, an accidental food reviewer for the local Manchester paper. Known for her somewhat scathing reviews (with at least one death threat received), its an ideal job for someone, who, on the first page, tells us that from an early age she wanted "more." For contemporary dining isn't about satisfaction or need, rather its as much a status symbol as an expensive handbag or a luxury car. Synonymous with the city-living of affluent twentysomethings, its also an international business. Manchester, infamously, hasn't got a single Michelin starred restaurant, and therefore being a food critic in the city is an experience that rarely rises about the bearable.

Told in the first person, Helen is a classic unreliable narrator, approaching her 29th birthday, in a steady but dull relationship with a chef who gives her pleasant comfort food, without ever really enriching the senses. If its a novel about finding "the one", Unsworth goes about it in a topsy turvey way - for Helen found hers at an early age; cloven hoofed, and coming if you call; the devil makes an early appearance in the book whenever she is trying to decide on a bit of devilment herself. As the meal at the new highly anticipated restaurant Bethel begins, with Helen dining alone to savour the evening, she finds the courses almost perfect chosen to remind her of things from her past. She's described as being like a "Russian doll" and the novel is structured similarly, with several layers to peel off before we get to the nub of the story - the "love of her life" which turned out into such a disaster. She's never mentioned this previous relationship to the man she shares a house with and who has just asked her to marry him. We are taken back, through a myriad of increasingly pretentious courses of the meal, to when she met Luke, an accident that seemed to be romantically fatal to her. Luke's not the usual bad boy, (she lists those: boys in bands, French exchange students etc. as mostly forgotten experiments) as he's studying for a PhD in cosmology. For the dreamy Helen, the stars are real but abstract, and Luke explains what they really are - the science, in some ways, even more astonishing than the poetry.

Over the next few chapters we edge back and forth between the present, the past, and with a new course delivered to her table at just the right time. For her and Luke was a classic relationship of dependency - moving in at the first chance and living a life of high emotion and constant drunkenness. Helen, it appears, is the sort of woman who has to throw her all into a man, whether its the love of her life, or the steady soul who replaces him - and in doing so, she's found it hard to even identify who she is or what she really wants.

It's a short book, that packs quite a lot in, yet at heart its a story that's purely about the romantic ideal. There's a drifting at the heart of these early 21st century relationships, that echoes those in Unsworth's Manchester contemporary Gwendoline Riley; yet Unsworth is more King Street to Riley's Northern Quarter. Set primarily in Manchester and Liverpool, its a metropolitan novel outside of the bigger metropolis. Here, the glamour is strictly seen through rain-splattered glass, and in remembering her true love, its a squalid bedsit and dirty hotel rooms that chequer the memories.

Like a lot of first novels, it can sometimes seem a bit uneven in its tone - the scaffolding of the meal providing a little too rigid for her needs, and at the beginning and end its abandoned. I'm not so sure the devil needs to be quite so physical a presence as he is in the early pages - if anything its the "idea" of the devil - "the devil in me" if you like that she's hunting down. Yet Helen is at heart a good girl, and its looking back on her younger self where you see how she's repeatedly damaged herself through relationships that haven't been good to her. Like a Rachael Cusk heroine she seems unable to have any perspective on her own life, and runs away from those - her mother and grandmother - who most want to help her. I felt that we could have had more of the life of the food critic, but the structure of the book, round this one stupendous meal, precludes this to some extent. I wonder if the slightly unclassifiable nature of what is essentially a love story, but with a twist at its heart, is what led it to being picked up by a small press rather than a major? But like Catherine O'Flynn's "What was lost"  it seems to be a much needed antidote to London-centred stories. Northern grit is never a bad addition to a story. Overall, it was a fulfilling read, that like all the best meals left me wanting just a little bit more. There's even a parrot called Adrian; of which, least said the better.

Longest day...but shortest night

"International" short story day, is on the longest day (or shortest night) of the year, in the UK, but elsewhere of course, its the other way round. Any excuse, you might say, but given the unseasonal (seasonal?) weather of late, snuggling down with a good story is as much a thing for the long summer evenings as the short winter ones.

There's a whole range of activities going on  - possibly at a location near you - on Wednesday night for International Short Story Day, and the website has its fair share of resources if you're not sure where to start.

I'm actually in Belfast with work, so I'll miss the Manchester offering, but don't let that stop you going to see England v. Germany (or a variation thereof) at Blackwells, with Clare Massey and Anneliese Mackintosh. 


For my part, I'll probably take the new Salt Book of Best British Short Stories  along on my travels, or possibly "Last Night" by James Salter. 


Which reminds me, that following on from last week's independent book market, you can now download (for a short time for Free) an anthology of short fiction and poetry from readers at that event, including my good self. Its called The Hat You Wear and is available for Kindle. Don't worry if you've not got a Kindle, you can still download the Kindle app for iPhone, iPad or Android from your various market places.

Mr. Heinlein was Already Upset about the Communists

I have been reading the New Yorker SF fiction edition this week. Some intriguing stories, but also some one page reminisces from William Gibson, Ray Bradbury (who sadly died yesterday), and Ursula Le Guin among others.

The latter tells of how SF in the 60s was quite a small, and mostly male club. "There were the expectably enormous male egos and also some fiercely conservative opinions, which I hadn't expected among people who were supposed to be looking forward, not back" she said on joing the Science Fiction Writers of America meeting. Having spilt a drink on Mrs. Heinlein's dress she doesn't identify herself as "Mr. Heinlein was already extremely upset about the Communists at the University."

And this is interesting of course, because from this distance it seems that SF is as likely to be a conservative medium as a liberal one. Didn't Iain M. Banks invent his "culture" books because he was fed up of all future societies being right wing and totalitarian? Certainly, Heinlein is not the only one, but probably the worst, when it comes to seeing the future in right wing terms. I still have difficulty agreeing with the view that Starship Troopers (the film) is a satire; Verhoeven has too big a budget and the satire is played too straight for that. But how amazing that a nearly forgotten novel could get "green lit" in Hollywood at all?

Writers who are too politically aligned are often harder to read. I baulked at Heinlein's world in "Stranger in a Strange Land" - there's an uneasy mix of sex and censoriousness - and that was without knowing his politics. Yet "1984" doesn't become a problem when you're aware of Orwell's politics, perhaps because they were themselves not aligned to "party lines." There are plenty of writers who are politically liberally, socially left wing, and yet linguistically conservative (think Carol Ann Duffy or Alan Hollinghurst), though I doubt if there are that many contemporary experimentalists who are "right wing". (But in Britain we've rarely had an intellectual, as opposed to a populist extreme; except, briefly, on the Marxist left - readers of BNP literature or the Daily Worker will not find that much to tax their intellectual capacities.) One of our leading contemporary SF writers, China Mieville, is a political radical, but in Britain there seems quite a disconnect these days between activist and activist thinker. Although perhaps I'm being optimistic; the social democratic middle is the ideal which thinkers are shrinking away from given the disappointments of Tony Blair and Nick Clegg.

Of course, politics is not straightforwardly left-right; I personally find this coalition pretty right wing, yet in some aspects more socially liberal in its first couple of years, than Gordon Brown's Labour party (though that "liberalism" is a veneer that's quickly wearing thin.) If what we again practiced in Libya was a last attempt at "liberal intervention" then it was done with the rhetoric of the right - in British foreign relations there is apparently no other language.

And language is important: as well as ideas. SF at its best is as good as any other literature, but outside of a few outliers isn't necessarily linguistically that inventive. Political ly engaged writers, like the poet Sean Bonney, Tony Harrison going back a bit, or punk provocateur Stewart Home, can also be linguistically interesting. I'm not sure if it is possible to write a politically charged work in a conventional language. If there's outrage in Lanchester's "Capital" it is couched in the language of a Guardian op-ed.

And though all writing is political in some sense, it doesn't necessarily have to be about issues. I'd say Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" is a highly political novel, yet its historical setting makes it difficult to "read" anything into it. Her fascination is not, I feel, with the politics of the time she's writing about, as much as the politics of change. (She's previously written about the French revolution.) Easier to do, of course, looking at the past, rather than the present. As last summer's riots proved, there is both an underbelly of resentment in our society, and an establishment quite as willing as any in the 50s or 60s to throw the book at it. There were quite a few butterflies crushed on wheels in the aftermath; (as well as bad lads given their comeuppance.)

From a perspective of several hundred miles - I sit, nearer to Moscow than Manchester, in Helsinki, writing this - and reading the papers about the Eurozone's crisis, the UK seems both more likely to kick out against injustice, and less able to. History tells us that revolution (or even evolution) requires not just a citizen's will, but an intellectual or middle class. The Iraq war, a conflict that affected us personally hardly at all, a long way, away, has been the only issue in the last dozen years, that has exercised the latter in any number. It is (perhaps thankfully) impossible in the UK to imagine a fringe party gathering enough votes to affect the balance of power.

For a writer then - perhaps its enough to just document or, better still, imagine. That's what SF does after all. For Le Guin and Atwood, SF could make up for some of the compensations of the world they were living in. At the end of Le Guin's piece she tells of writing a story for Playboy, which she had to publish under her initials as the "readers" of that magazine would be frightened by a female byline. It was political enough that she was published there; and even, that Playboy published fiction at all. All kinds of deceptions were being practiced there of course - but it was the sixties, after all.

But a final word from those SF reminisces from Ray Bradbury; writing not long before his death yesterday he reminisces about his grandfather who died when he was five. In his story "The Fire Balloons" "one of the priests was like my grandpa whom I put on Mars to see the lovely balloons again, but this time they Martians, all fired and bright, adrift above a dead sea." The writer who made us remember the importance of books in "Fahrenheit 451" won't be writing any more sadly. RIP, our Martian chronicler.

Arty Stuff

It's been an arty week.

Castlefield Gallery fundraising auction on Wednesday night was fabulous night, and well over £30,000 was raised, thanks to the generosity of all the artists donating work. I came home (not yet, got to pick it up!) with a lovely Jim Medway painting.

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Last night at the Contact Theatre the whole building was taken over by artists, for a "24 Arty People" - a 24 hour spontaneous artistic collaboration, where 24 artists met from 10pm the previous evening and developed new works together around the theme of "sleep" and "sleeplessness" - appropriately. The audience were ushered around the building from performance to performance and it had some of the fractured dreaminess of a sleepless night about it. From short immersive theatre pieces to more cerebral performances, it was a fascinating evening where you had to let yourself into the dreamlike spirit of things. Videos of the various perfomers from earlier can be found here.

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I missed the launch of the major new exhibition of West African Art, We Face Forward, but already hearing great things about it - so will try and get to see it shortly - it takes place throughout the city.

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I've a busy few weeks, but finding some creative time at next weekend's Manchester book market, where I'll be reading on the Saturday afternoon after 3pm.

But if you're in Manchester Friday or Saturday then pop into St. Ann's Square for some book browsing and some readings.

Punk's Not Dead

There's a nice irony, that amid the wall-to-wall bunting which serves as BBC news at the moment, as it celebrates first the Jubillee, then the Olympics, that stirred in the mix, to add a bit of spice, is punk rock. Its not a particularly important anniversary - 35 years since 1977, Punk's year zero - but so wrapped up was the original spirit with that Jubilee - from Derek Jarman's film of the same name, to "God Save the Queen", that we've got a campaign to get "God Save the Queen" (Pistols version) to number one, and the "Punk Britannia" series on BBC 4.

I mischievously tweeted that "punk was crap" on Twitter last night; but I didn't really mean it. I was ten at the time, and had more pressing interests ("Star Wars" had just been released after all!) and I was aware of punk well before I'd ever heard it (the Daily Express, our house newspaper was particularly interested in the scene, oddly enough). It was probably a few years before I saw my first punks - after all they didn't make it to the rocky Midlands overnight - and it was three or four years later that friends at school were "punks" by which time the leather jackets had GBH, Anti-Nowhere League, Discharge and Exploited on the backs.

I've picked up punk albums over the years, without them ever being amongst my favourite, but one's still shocked a little by the viscerality of the Sex Pistols astonishing first four singles, or "The Clash" or "The Ramones." Music that raw, still sounds good all these years later. I remember hearing an early Boomtown Rats' track - "She's So Modern" perhaps - and disliking its "shouting" - though perhaps even at 11 or 12 I was discerning between the good and the mediocre!

It's funny watching old footage, and then seeing Top of the Pops, and realising, Sex Pistols aside, what a moveable feast punk was - Stiff Little Fingers' "Inflammable Material" didn't hit the racks till 1979 for instance. But punk - the sound - was very different I think than punk - the attitude. And pretty much every piece of music I got into after 1982 was coloured by punk. Bands such as the Cure, Joy Division, Simple Minds, Human League or the Fall were already veterans by then and this colourful but dark new wave was what I grew up loving. The reductionist sound of those 2nd wave punk bands was fun, I guess, but limited.

Years later, punk's in my record collection, albeit more on the cerebral art school rather than the glue-sniffing side of the tracks; and one kind of regrets that I was not around for such a seismic shift in music. The minor revolutions I saw - the Smiths, Goth, house music - don't really compare. Only Hip Hop has had such a broad cultural impact as punk did. Tony Wilson's oft quoted view of 13 year shifts - 1963, 1976, 1989 - appeared to fall apart in 2002, unless you broaden the defnitiion and not the that the iPod appeared at the tale end of 2001 - a different kind of musical revolution that one, but important nonetheless. If something's coming in 2015 its surely going to be partly fuelled by the ongoing fiscal disasters around us; as well as a bored unemployed youth - a bit like punk maybe.

The punks were generally quite young - as the Punk Britannia first episode points out, the pub rockers who came before them were a little bit old (a point that's made clear in the Ian Dury biopic, Sex, Drugs & Rock and Roll) - so its sad to think we've already lost Strummer, McLaren, Vicious and lesser lights like Epic Soundtracks and Nikki Sudden of Swell Maps.

It's hard to imagine the schizophrenia of Britain in 1977 - punk happening on the same streets as disco went mainstream with Saturday Night Fever.Though it was a schizophrenia that continued throughout much of the 80s, with a split between the "mainstream" and the "alternative" which became codified in the "indie" scene. Most of the punks were signed to the same record labels as their prog and glam predecessors.

Punk's not dead, to rephrase what Zappa said about jazz, it just smells funny..   

Ten great punk tracks.

1. Holidays in the Sun - Sex Pistols
2. Ambition - Vic Godard and the Subway Sect
3. California Uber Alles - Dead Kennedys
4. Armagideon Times - the Clash
5. Babylon's Burning - the Ruts
6. Jigsaw Feeling - Siouxsie and the Banshees
7. Suspect Device - Stiff Little Fingers.
8. Teenage Lobotomy - the Ramones
9. I am the Fly - Wire
10. Typical Girls - the Slits

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

F. Scott Fitzgerald remains one of the 20^th century’s most popular writers, and not just for “The Great Gatsby”, the short, iconic novel for which he is best known. His short stories have remained in print, and occasionally have a new lease of life – the film of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” – though it is for his novels that he is now best remembered; Gatsby in particular; but with only four completed, and one unfinished novel to his name, there are few writers who have quite so manageable an output. “This Side of Paradise” was his debut and the bestseller in his lifetime, but neither “The Great Gatsby” or the novel that belatedly followed it, “Tender is the Night,” sold sufficiently well in his lifetime for him to give up on more lucrative work: first magazine publication; then later writing for Hollywood.

            Published in 1934 but set a decade earlier, in “Tender is the Night” Fitzgerald sees his self-proclaimed “jazz age” through a different perspective. If Gatsby is a novel that always seems to reconcile the dazzling follies of that age with a romantic fallibility, so that even in Gatsby’s tragedy, we can still (as no doubt Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming film adaption will do) be seduced by the trappings of fame; in “Tender is the Night” there are no such comforts.

            I first read the novel at university, and although there have been two versions – it seems right now, as then, that it is not the chronological telling of Dick Diver’s life that best tells this story but the restored original text, beginning with Diver and his wife Nicole at the centre of a “moment” on the French Riviera.

            Whereas we say Gatsby through the framing device of the amiable Nick Carraway, here it is Fitzgerald who is the observer; but for a brief moment in the first few pages, he chooses another lens, that of the beautiful and very young Hollywood starlet Rosemary Hoyt. As new to the world that her fame has brought her into as she is new to the pristine sands of the newly fashionable summer beaches, she is an ingénue unlike many of Fitzgerald’s knowing flappers. Compared to Nicole, the heiress wife of Diver, she is as unspoiled as the private beach areas where the three of them meet. But in Fitzgerald it is not enough to be a hero or heroine, the tale is one of a wider set: where the gradations between class, style, wealth and inheritance are played out beautifully scene after scene. This is rich America in old Europe and making it anew. The novel is full of Americans behaving appallingly abroad and hoping somehow that their money, their American identity, and mostly, their indignation, can get them out of all kinds of scrapes. The beach where we first see Rosemary is a stage on which Fitzgerald’s sets and sets up all kinds of rivalries. Money isn’t enough; nor where that money has come from; its how you behave with money. Dick and Nicole Diver are a golden couple around which everything else hovers. Rosemary, an American starlet, is allowed instant access into their inner circle but others aren’t – though Dick and Nicole, always keen on not just the attractiveness of their friends, but the distraction they bring, aren’t immune to rubbing a few different groups together. We’ll later find out why, of course.

            What Fitzgerald gives us in these opening scenes is a virtually 3D picture of a time and a place. The writing is never less than dazzling, and never more so than when he describes a particular place. He uses description in a way that few others do, to either slow down or speed up a scene. In their languid idleness these characters wile away the summer in an approximation of happiness that, indeed, may actually be the real thing. Yet, nothing lasts for long.

            Rosemary has come there for relaxation after the completion of the promotional tour for her film, with her protective but supportive mother, and only on meeting Dick and Nicole does she consider staying any longer; yet the Divers are themselves ready to go. Place cannot hold them. With a coterie of friends, servants and even two children (who Fitzgerald admirably never quite forgets are there),  the Riviera is one staging post on a regular journey. 

            This is a Europe that is reminiscent in many ways of the West Egg grandeur we see in Gatsby; but whereas Gatsby creates a Xanadu from scratch in order to entice Daisy back to him; the Divers’ move through old Europe like a monarchic entourage.

            Fitzgerald was one of the first subscribers to “Ulysses”, and though he is not often thought of specifically as a modernist, for me “Tender is the Night” brings to bear as much of the new sensibility that Joyce and others have been torturously exploring, and attaches it to the societal brilliance of his earlier writing. For despite the glamour of the Divers’ world it holds it own tragedies. Diver is a graceful southern gentleman, transformed into such a dazzling figure through his own charm, but also by his wife’s wealth. Yet Nicole’s story – and how she met the young Doctor Diver – in a psychiatric institution – is in itself a tragedy that we encounter almost from the first, when the nosey Mrs. McKisco accidentally comes across Nicole with the mask down.

            For “Tender is the Night” is not a novel about surfaces; it is about how those surfaces are simply that. For Nicole is as much a victim of corrupt familial relations as the most broken of Faulkners characters; and Dick Diver, the knight in shining armour who rescued is as much a tragic idealist as that other Doctor, Lydgate in George Eliot’s “Middlemarch”, a novel I’ve always seen to have certain aesthetic and emotional similarities to this one.

            For though it would be easy in some ways to speak of “Tender is the Night” as a tragic love story it would be hard to know of which story we speak. Fitzgerald is a dangerous writer to read as a teenager, as he gives you both love’s fairy story, and its hidden despair. The only “happy” love in Fitzgerald is one that seems to be accepting of its peripheral nature. Carraway can happily have “his girl”; but Gatsby need that girl. And whatever he does is never quite enough. If Fitzgerald’s scathing comment on Tom and Daisy Buchanan in Gatsby – that they are “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness” – isn’t enough then the path of true love in “Tender is the Night” is, if anything worse. Diver, our great romantic hero, is also proven to be all kinds of betrayer; but most of all of himself.

            Having met and loved Nicole, though she begins ostensibly as his patient, which in itself is perhaps the most terrible betrayal a medical man can make; he falls for Rosemary for reasons that are that of every middle aged man (though he is hardly thirty), because he can. Yet so believable is this ménage, with Rosemary almost in love with obth Nicole and Dick, that we wish it to be so: even though what must come from it is hard to envisage. This, after all, is an age of promise; pointedly, even after the action of the novel is over, we are given no word on the foreboding truth of the great crash of 1929. Nicole’s old money, we must assume, like that of our contemporary rich, is immune. For Diver, a promising psychologist, with a successful primer already to his name, has already seen the best of himself when he falls for Nicole. That he becomes a socialite, only ostensibly working on his practice is another layer of the many tragedies in here. Yet, whereas Gatsby can sometimes be seen as superior melodrama – where we know not how he made his money, or, what might have become of him, if tragedy hadn’t struck – in “Tender is the Night” there is an observational honesty that in literature seems to be almost twenty or so years too early. For Diver’s story fades; Nicole’s fate is to run from her Fitzgerald-like figure to a gruffer, Hemingway-type. Tempting as it is to map “Tender” onto Fitzgerald’s life, the bits that seem closest are to do with the sensibilities that make us fall in and out of love; and make us do the things that destroy that love. Alcohol is never an unbitter taste in “Tender is the Night”, its dark side is shown to us early on in the form of the spent-talent of Abe North; a warning, ignored, to Diver of what he might become. Even Rosemary, given to us as a near-Lolita-like coquette, is later shown to be a wooden talent, hanging on to a facile career in the movies, and the teen-love of Dick Diver having either spoilt her forever, or been a single moment of truth in an otherwise dishonest life.

            Nicole is fascinating – for she is a victim, who becomes stronger; and love, which she had unambivalently for Dick, becomes as much a sign of her malady as anything else. That Fitzgerald is writing this story of adult lives, whilst touching on so many of the societal shifts of the day is a marvel in itself. Reading the novel again after so many years, I’m struck by its modernism. Not its debt, so much, to Lawrence (in particular), and Joyce, but how he has learnt from their willingness to go so much deeper into the souls of their characters, how he might probe a little further himself. But there is never any solipsism in Fitzgerald; for he has always been the most honest of writers; honest in a specific way – observing the world as it is rather than how he might want it to be. Thus, Nicole’s horrific sister Baby Warren becomes almost bearable as the novel progresses – Dick’s fall being what she had hoped for, but in seeing it happen, her own silliness is put into some perspective.

            Throughout the novel Fitzgerald subtley, and in my view, magnificently manages as mix of the brilliantly written orchestrations that we know from Gatsby, with a deeper, more piercing sensibility, that renders the characters as alive as any in literature. Trying to shepherd the ever drunken Abe North away from Paris, they become embroiled in one of several dramas that pepper the book – yet seeing North and Nicole alone Fitzgerald has the presence of mind to add that “unlike lovers they possessed no past; unlike man and wife they possessed no future.”

            Away from the Riviera, away from Paris, the novel has to find different colours. We come to the young Dick Diver meeting Nicole for the first time. His tragedy, beginning even then, is that he is not the brilliant man he had hoped to be; is his love – or pity, for it may well be that – for Nicole reason enough for this, or would Dick Diver always have been looking for a brighter future than the one that beckoned as a psychological scholar? Compared to the rest of the novel, Diver’s medical years are somewhat underwritten, and it’s perhaps easy to see why. Here is a world that Fitzgerald only knew second hand – through Zelda’s travails mostly – but was already fascinating the 20^th century author. The “mind” not “God” is the new frontier of understanding and, to some extent, faith – yet Fitzgerald, a writer who, more than any other, always seems to believe in us – in men and women – despite our failings and frailties, is perhaps less suited to such a pursuit. Perhaps another lesson here from George Eliot; that Diver was to be no Casaubon forever trying to unlock the “Key to all Mythologies”, but someone dimly aware that the best he is to do, he has already done.

            Re-reading “Tender is the Night” after a number of years – though I’ve frequently gone back to the glorious early chapters – I’m struck by what a modern novel it is; that it seems to absorb the modernist lesson, whilst only once or twice falling for its more clunky teachings. A writer as good as Fitzgerald struggled for years with “Tender is the Night” yet the writing within belies that. His own struggles, with an ailing wife and alcoholism, seem to find more than just echoes in the novel – yet it doesn’t feel like autobiography; for that we have “The Crack up”; more it feels like a mature work by a writer who has personally known both the worst than life can do, but also the best that it might offer.

The Hidden Music of Future Past

 In the week that Robin Gibb and Donna Summer both died there have been many articles about disco, and the sense that it has remained ubiquitous despite its startling fall from grace at the end of the 70s. Was disco really a “future music” as we hear in Summer’s number 1 smash “I feel love” or is it mired in its age inseparable from those images of John Travolta in the white suit? It seems when you have the likes of Paul Gambacinni and Mike Read wheeled out, that they are not responding to disco’s future-modernism, but its cheese. Gambacinni has never to my knowledge praised anything countercultural, whilst Mike Read’s credentials for discussing disco in any way are damaged by his absurd banning of “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

We love disco because of its nostalgic hedonism – and when we talk about it we talk primarily about the good time music that included everyone from ABBA to Zappa. (“Sheik Yerbouti” indeed.) The excellent crate-digging of the “Disco Discharge” series does return us to the future shock of disco – but is as often seen rummaging around the 80s as it is finding gems from discos heyday.

House music - which began, to all intents and purposes, half a decade later seems to me to still be the future music that disco promised to be, but without the cheesiness, and without the superstars or the iconic movie. It remained black, gay and urban enough to mean that though eighties stars like Paul Weller, Pet Shop Boys and ABC dabbled in it, you’ll look hard to find a rock band making any house moves. (Though it could happen, as the various U2 remixes show – but it was the “remix” that created that at one remove.) As the “future disco” series of contemporary compilations shows, there’s a thin line between the most processed of disco moves and the more soulful side of house. Modern incarnates like dubstep seem to weave in and out of genre, creating a hybrid electronic dance music.

Yet, house music – during the decade on from 1985/6 – remains the soundtrack to the late 20^th century without the attendant nostalgia of bands like the Stone Roses reforming. There’s a vast variety to the house music of that decade – and subgenres multiplied – but has there been a musical form as recognisable as house since rockabilly? Whether it’s the Shamen’s “Move Any Mountain”, Candi Staton and the Source’s “You Got the Love” or Underworld’s “Born Slippy”, these are clearly brothers and sisters in house. Underworld began as pseudo prog-pop band freur, Candi Staton’s voice was lifted and placed over a Frankie Knuckles backing, and the Shamen were a psychedelic indie band who went more house than the Roses or Mondays would ever dream of.

It is 30 years since the Hacienda opened – and the club was probably one of  the first places in the UK to play house. Of course house didn’t come from nowhere. The underground disco of the early eighties was metronomic, machine music, at its best when flirting with electro beats like Shannon’s “Let the Music Play.” But house music simplified things as well as innovating in its own way. The innovations were stylistic and startling. For a start, house was the first music since the 1950s surf explosion to be primarily instrumental. Instead of verses and choruses, we had orchestral stabs, piano breaks, synthesizer breakdowns. Structurally these songs weren’t the blues. Hearing “Jack Your Body” and “Jack the Groove” (the first two breakout records) in 1986, at a disco in Preston I immediately heard a fracture with the jazz-soul-funk music that went for club music in the mid-80s. And that was probably the last time summer where anyone who really liked dance music went to a “disco” rather than a “club” or a “rave.” Hacienda was the first, but stark (and not so stark) house clubs turned up all over. It may have been particular drug-fuelled subgenres a year or two later that led to the phenomenon of the free party movement, raves and warehouse parties, but it was also happening in traditional night clubs – often turned over to house (and suddenly without a dress code) on a Monday or Wednesday night.

Whereas disco had Summer and the Bee Gees, a genuine superstar of the genre, and the most successfully crossover act to reinvent themselves as disco, house had nobody – not unless you count the “superstar DJs”. Even now, nearly 30 years later, it is clubs (Cream, Ministry of Sound, Hacienda) and DJs that are the most associated name with the genre – though to be honest the distinctions were always vague. A DJ could be become associated with a venue – a “night” might be more important than the venue where it took place – and early records by Frankie Knuckles or Marshall Jefferson or whoever, guaranteed a career for these luminaries for many years.

For despite its ubiquity – even now, house nights proliferate, and often fit seamlessly with dubstep and other genres – house music remains a “hidden music” in a way that few other genres have done. The lack of big names is part of it; and to some extent the nostalgic memories of Spike Island, the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays and the Hacienda are as much about the scene that they ran parallel to as the bands themselves. I don’t think the young kids listening to the Stone Roses 20 years on would even relate to the band as part of the house movement. Indeed, I remember going to the Hacienda on a packed Saturday night in 1988 and you wouldn’t have heard a guitar all night. Cheaply packaged album series like Jack Trax and Warehouse Raves were the suburbanites way into this specialist genre; but at the same time the least expected tracks would jump out and into the charts. That house music can still surprise can be seen by the massive US number one, “Like a G6” by Far East Movement, a minimalist slice of acid house, two decades out of place.

A couple of years ago I digitised a few of my vinyl house records – thinking I’d put together a decent enough CD compilation – I ended up with 10 volumes and could probably have added ten more if I’d repeated artists, or included CDs. It’s a wonderful reminder of ten years of invention. Rave, acid house, techno, trance, ambient, even early jungle/drum and bass, are all there. There are brilliant songs (“You Got the Love”, “Promised Land”), great reworkings of pop hits (“Even Better than the Real Thing”) and exciting instrumentals. Listening to “No Way Back” by Adonis or “Alright, Alright” by Masters at Work or “Let’s Get Brutal” by Nitro Deluxe I feel like I’m still listening to a future music. Yet this would be like thinking Ray Charles’s wonderful “What’d I say?” was still the future sound in 1986!

Electronic music has always been part of my life – I was 14 when “Dare” came out – and so though I like guitars, I’ve always been suspicious of guitar-lovers insistence that theirs is the only “real music.” Yet as a genre, house, which to my mind existed in its pure form for about a decade (what comes after does seem nostalgic in some ways), remains refreshing and futuristic. It will never have a Paul Gambaccini gushing over the death of one of its superstars (though men in their late 40s might still come up to Dave Haslam or Paul Oakenfold or whoever and say “Tune!” when they play an old school classic) and, in looking which of my vinyl rips were on Spotify, I see its strictly limited: the pop hits and the tracks that have been recycled on compilation after compilation. As much 60s garage or Northern Soul, house was a music of delicious one shots and cash-ins; often the remixer on the title was more important than the original band. In a world where absolutely everything seems at hand and on the internet it’s quite nice to find there is a bit of a gap in the official record – only half of the tracks I’d digitised can be found on Spotify, and then often not the same mix. Wikipedia doesn’t give anything like the same reverence for one-offs as it does for bands. There are specialist sites where I guess you’ll probably find most things; and every charity shop has a pile of anonymous 12”s that are worth investigating – but despite the plethora of “Cream Classics” and other such compilations; it’s also a hidden future-past. Perhaps you had to be there, popping along to your local record shop each Monday morning (Ear Ere in Lancaster or Tracks in York, for me) and picking up whatever looked worth investigating. I was at University in 1986, and wrestling my friends away from “indie” music to listen to the “House Sound of Chicago” was an impossible task (most of them got it later, either through E, or through hybrids like Trance), and I’m a little jealous of those a bit younger than me who came of age when club culture was already in full swing. By the time I made it to the big city, Manchester, it was 1992 and house had almost become part of a bigger thing – or rather, it had gone a bit underground again, as bands like the Prodigy and nights like Megadog took it another direction.

I’ve kept up with dance music from afar – with R&B and dubstep appealing now and then – but away from club culture and with the demise of Record Mirror and other dance friendly magazines, its been a while since I’ve really took much interest. House is the music of my late youth if you like; that period when you suddenly feel too old for things, on the cusp of adulthood. Yet if I’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic about this week, I don’t think it’s at all a nostalgic music. Crisp, minimal electronic music is a timeless style – and if most of it was produced cheaply in the late 80s and early 90s – it remains a somewhat hidden side of contemporary music; there is not, as far as I know, a “House Britannia” on BBC4. 

Listen to  My Spotify playlist

A Miscellany

The blog-life balance has been wildly to the latter; which is good - of course - but time for reflection has been a little limited. I might go for a few vignettes rather than something more substantive.

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NaPoWriMo was probably a bad idea as having written a poem a day, until the last few days when I ran out of steam, I've not been able to think poetry or read poetry since. The work itself lies forlorn and lonely in my notebook mainly. I need to structure my poetic thoughts as I'm reading in a couple of weeks in St. Ann's Square for the Manchester  Book Market and I need a "new set." The book market will have a wide range of small presses and performers, and I'm reading on the Saturday afternoon.

***

FutureEverything festival was stimulating as ever. I was involved with organising elements of it, this year, in my work context, which meant I didn't catch as much as I wanted. I particularly regret missing the Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir since as well as being an activist and politician, she is a poet, and apparently read a poem as part of her keynote. However, I was lucky enough to have a chat with her outside the venue - without realising at first who she was - where we compared notes on reading poetry to different sizes of crowds. Iceland, that small, unique nation, that got so badly treated by the financial collapse of some of its overreached banks and companies, seems a canary in the capitalist coalmine. Its hardly a surprise that they value art and culture as important.

 ***

Chorlton Arts Festival continues over this coming final weekend. There are many things going on - and if the weather keeps as nice, it will surely be vibrant. 

 ***

I've been thinking again about my artistic process. Malcolm Gladwell's writing that "genius" is the result of "10,000 hours" of work is one of those memes that once heard, sticks with you. As someone who writes short and long fiction, poetry and music, I've certainly put in the hours, but I'm wondering whether that's too diverse a field. Do you get better by writing more? Is there a limit? Many writers say they are "rewriters" but I'm not sure I've ever agreed that that's the most important thing. I've often said to musician friends that they should write and record as much as they can at an early age - and same for writers - in that the "spark" or "inspiration"  - the ideas that you have often die out as you grow older: but if you've a large enough palette to go back to you can refresh and renew. I'm wondering if I'd have been a better/more successful writer if I'd kept writing novels? Its not that the ideas ran out, but that the energy involved seemed too great. I do know that I went from not really knowing what a short story was, to becoming a good story writer - and had, in the late 90s - quite a number published. Since then I've found it harder. Have I got worse? Have my ideas narrowed? I'm not sure. I've written over 100 stories yet have had very little success in the genre. Have I got worse? I don't think so - but perhaps I've got less focussed; or, here's another view, less brave. My stories used to be flights of fancy, written in a rush of inspiration - more recently they are worked over; sometimes painfully, sometimes over months. That said, I've read quite a lot of stories recently; there's been a resurgence in the publishing of the form; but I have to say I've been a little underwhelmed. I'm looking forward to the 2nd Salt anthology of "best short stories" as a snapshot of the art. So, is the issue that one needs to be single-minded about ones art to exclusion? I'm not so sure. A lot of poets/writers/musicians/artists I know want to diversify: whether its poets writing radio plays or stories or novels or whatever. Being very good in one genre doesn't necessarily lead to being very good in other areas of course, but something must survive, something must transfer. So, what to write next? I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking about it. 

***

A friend's book group was unimpressed by F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night", it was my favourite novel. But is it still? I picked it out of the cupboard and started reading it again; its been way too long. The copy I've got has pencil marks in the margin from when I was studying it at University (I've read it since, but at least a decade or go.) The reading group comments have been helpful actually; it is a novel not without flaws (as I've always known, and part of my fascination with it.) I could write 10,000 words just on this novel. Maybe I will. 

Influence and Genre

The always fascinating SF writer Charles Stross has written a blog post entitled The Death of Genre. Its well worth reading the whole post, but he starts by saying "Science Fiction literature is unusual in that much of the work within the field exists in constant dialog with other works." Unusual, but not unique of course; but what I call the "transmission mechanism" that allows ideas to populate is perhaps more integral to the SF community. Partly this is its future-sense: you want to know where the ideas are coming from, and where they might go to. Partly its the close relationship between SF readers and SF writers. All writers are readers first (at least, all good writers are), but in SF I imagine there's an intensity of the relationship that isn't as obvious in other genres. Hilary Mantel clearly likes history, but whether she likes historical fiction is less obvious - one could even argue that "Wolf Hall" is a refutation of so much of historical fiction's attachment to narrative.

That's an aside. But the SF reader = the SF writer in a way that is unusual in most other genres. The filter for ideas is other science fiction as much (or more) than non-fiction or other genres. Part of that is because it exists as cult as much as genre. But it's a big cult these days; witness film successes such as "Avatar" and the continuing repackaging of "Star Wars." Stross reminds us that "around 30% of the big budget movies to come out of Hollywood each year are recognizably science fiction" but its a particular version of SF, signifiers being aliens; spaceships - and "something is missing upstairs."

For the SF writer/reader doesn't come to it - or never used to come to it - because he or she wants relentless space opera. Its for the ideas, stupid. And here's the interesting thing about Stross's article it's that he explicitly acknowledges the dialogue that happens between SF writers - that they explicitly and implicitly respond artistically (intellectually, if you like) to what others are doing. This is interesting in itself - because I guess many writers in other genres probably curse when an idea they've been playing with gets taken up by someone else. The idea that you don't just respond to another writer because you're looking for a bandwagon to jump on, but because it has opened up an interesting artistic/intellectual pathway is a fascinating one. And of course, there's one other genre where it also takes place: and that is poetry.

But to remain with Stross for a minute; he's asking how e-books are changing things. The argument, I think, is that genre becomes more rather than less  with e-books. Personalisation (whether through Amazon recommends or whatever) narrows rather than expands. The serendipity of the old bookshop is being replaced by an endless market place - where "the infinite bookshelf is already a problem for us." Choice in this sense becomes problematic. "There was so much less SF in the 1970s that it was quite possible for those of us who grew up reading the field back then to acquire a comprehensive coverage of it" concludes Stross and here is the nub of the problem as he perceives it. A genre that has, on the one hand become pretty massive and mainstream; and on the other hand has spawned imitation rather than conversation. In that space, he's arguing the lack of clear curation is going to have a debilitating effect on the future SF writer.

What struck me from reading Stross's piece - and re-reading it today - was that it echoes our field; poetry. Even as recently as 1995 when I had my first poem published in a small magazine it was possible to sit in the Poetry Library on the South Bank and pretty much read every magazine; get a sense of the "scene" from the few anthologies available; and memorise most of the names. There was a loss here as well; the British "scene" had narrowed quite considerably, so that you could read Peter Forbes' "Poetry Review" or your Motion/Morrison Penguin anthology and not even realise there had ever been anything like an avant garde. But still, that aside, by 1997 I'd found room for Les Murray and John Ashbery in my personal canon. It's perhaps no coincidence that 1996 saw the publication of the Sweeney/Shapcott anthology "Emergency Kit" which explicitly states something is wrong in the state of English poetry and looks wider.

The doors have come off since then. The rise of the MA (Poetry) (almost invisible in the late 90s) and a rash of cheap offline and online publications - as well as a revival in interest in new forms; and the continued baptisms of fire that the festival and spoken word scenes provide - has meant that whereas you might survey the scene in the 1990s and keep coming across the same names; get a sense of who was writing what - and have a dialogue with them; it may well be impossible to do that now. Add together the number of poets in Salt's younger poets or Nathan Hamilton's selections for the Rialto and the list of names stretches into the distance. Re-reading the Salt book yesterday, it was "Emergency Kit" that came to mind. These seemed to be poems that responded to that invocation of "poems for strange times." Along with the inevitable introspection and solipsism of young writing, there are myriad worlds of influence and style. The quality, I'd hasten to add, is pretty high - and, even more so, there's very few of those "I did this, I did that" poem that sometimes seemed to suffocate British poetry in a blanket of the overly-familiar.

So, on the one hand things are pretty good: that the transmission mechanism is not only there, but in a fully working order - and clearly there are poets who know each other; scenes within scenes - and there are clearly influences (Ashbery amongst them) that are to be welcomed. Ironically, our high priests, the Sean O'Briens, the Simon Armitages, the Carol Ann Duffy's seem less apparent as influence than one might have imagined half a dozen years ago. Cheap and on-demand publication has made it much easier to publish a wider range of poets. The letter I got a dozen years ago from an editor apologising that (I paraphrase), "a lot of poetry that would have got published, doesn't now, because our lists are full" thankfully doesn't still apply. 

Yet, I've been reading Chicago's "Poetry" for the last three years in an attempt to get the temperature of American verse, and I've failed to. The names of poets come and go, they are all good, all more than competent - and there are so many of them. The better known names, I see now, seem to be from a slightly early group, and making sense of the many is harder and harder. Because that dialogue that Stross talks about in SF is also necessary in poetry. Does one jump across the generations to talk with Robert Lowell or Allan Ginsberg? Or does one talk in university common rooms or urban pubs with ones peers? Or does one peruse the internet - plucking out those pluckier poets who publish there? Shamefully, we've not seen a second northern poetry library to match the southern one. I was lucky enough to be living in London from 1996-7 and that helped in so many ways as I started taking poetry seriously once more, in my late 20s. Anthologies, magazines and nights offer their own entry-point: but though we are at a good point in so many ways; so many poets, so much of it a reasonably quality, so many different facets - I'm much less sure that one can keep the whole thing in one's mind. Pick out a poem or a poet that you quite like - say in the Bloodaxe anthology "Identity Parade" - and explore a little. Editors like Roddy Lumsden have been remarkably catholic compared with their predecessors (that Motion/Morrison book again), but reading more poems and more poets than I've ever done, I find it harder to pick it out the stand out poem of the year or the generation or even of the moment; I find it harder to use reading (at least reading of contemporary work) as a useful counterpoint to my writing.

In the US this "problem" (if it is a problem) is multiplied. The number of English-language poets writing in the world would make a small army now. Its possible to ignore (wilfully or accidentally) the big names, or the local scenes without even noticing. Over time, I wonder if this call for attention - that me, every other poet, makes - becomes a cry of loneliness? And if it is other poets that remain key to any poet's own development (even if its in rejection of their work), then I do think its the poem that is the thing that makes a difference. With a couple of exceptions, its hard to recall a particular poem of this last decade that either exemplifies the age, or stands beyond it. My sense is that I'm worrying too much; that Stross is worrying too much. But poetry and SF have a few things in common. They have both a popular image, and a hardcore following. The former can sometimes deafen the latter (We're still in a world where "If" is our nation's favourite poem!) - their advocates are passionate; their best writers are often their best readers. But also I wonder if both are accidental victims of the paradigm shifts of the information age? Where is SF in a world that looks so much like the future that it predicted? And where is poetry when it leaves behind the bearings of its age, and speaks only to and of itself? The answer, as ever, is in the works that are yet to come. Bring them on.