Sonofabook

Eva Trout

2012-01-29T22:06:00.002Z

So, being (as I was) at the seaside, and thinking about doing some rereading of Elizabeth Bowen, and happening to read a piece by Tessa Hadley in the Guardian about Eva Trout, her last novel (1969), in which she says that for Bowen ‘English seaside towns are carnival, unsound, stimulating places, where anything crazy might happen’, Eva Trout it was.

Eva is big, ungainly, awkward, solitary, wealthy, ungovernable, and she creates havoc: friendships splinter, marriages break up, estate agents are bewildered. Not least because of the misfit between, on the one hand, love and sex and desire, and on the other, the social codes. Eva is on the back foot from the start: family ties, after her father’s affair with the man who, until she comes into her inheritance, is her guardian, are nil.

Eva remembering another girl at the ‘experimental’ school she was sent to: ‘The hand on the blanket, the beseeching answering beating heart. The dark: the unseen distance, the known nearness. Love: the here and the now and the nothing-but. The step on the stairs. Don’t take her away, DON’T take her away. She is all I am. We are all there is.’ Against such, the whole awkwardness and comic absurdity of frustrated desire in action – here is Eric responding impulsively to Eva’s bland indifference to why he has left his wife to come to her: ‘Eric got hold of Eva by the pouchy front of her anorak and shook her. The easy articulation of her joints made this rewarding – her head rolled on her shoulders, her arms swung from them. Her teeth did not rattle, being firm in their gums, but coins and keys all over her clinked and jingled. Her hair flumped all ways like a fiddled-about-with mop. The crisis became an experiment: he ended by keeping her rocking, at slowing tempo, left-right, left-right, off one heel and onto the other, meanwhile pursing his lips and frowning speculatively. The experiment interested Eva too. Did it gratify her too much? – he let go abruptly.’

Like Eva herself, the novel is preposterous. A child is acquired by criminal means; the child turns out to be deaf and dumb; a chapter is given over to a letter from a character never met, and which is never received by its addressee; a mock marriage verges on becoming a real one; a gun is introduced, and you know that at some point it will be fired, and it is. Many of the sentences too (‘those prickly sentences,’ says Tessa Hadley of Bowen’s habitual style; my italics): ‘As though the train had started and started swaying, they swayed slightly.’ But it’s one of those late works in which an author has earned the right to go off the rails (TH: ‘There’s something of a lordly, deliberate carelessness in how Eva’s story’s emphasis is on accidentals, random swerves’), and in this case the ride is exhilarating.

For Tessa Hadley on Eva Trout, see here; or buy the new Vintage edition, which has Hadley’s piece as an introduction.

(I'd've prefaced this with a photo of my 1971 Panther paperback edition, whose cover is more true to the book than than the new Vintage edition, which suggests 1920s/30s and is altogether too slick, if the connecting cable hadn't vanished.)

A century ago

2012-01-29T15:08:00.001Z

Matthew Hollis’s Now All Roads Lead to France, winner of the Costa biography prize and so very nearly overall winner, is a lovely book. Today’s lesson is taken from one of the early chapters:

‘Rupert Brooke was a frequent guest at Edward Marsh’s apartment in Gray’s Inn, London, and one night in September 1912 he and Marsh sat up late, discussing how best to shake the public of their ignorance of contemporary poetry. There and then, they counted a dozen poets worth publishing, and put the idea of an anthology to [Harold] Munro. Five hundred copies were printed: half received on 16 December 1912, the remainder on Christmas Eve; all were sold by Christmas Day. A reprint was hurried through, then another and another. By the end of its first year, the book was in its ninth printing and was on its way to 15,000 sales. The name of this remarkable anthology was Georgian Poetry.’

15,000 copies of a book of poems by writers unknown to the general reading public, from a publisher equally unknown. Of poems of a kind – ‘Georgian’ – that, even as the book was being printed, was being put out to grass by Pound and Imagism and then Eliot and all that followed.

The first (and in most cases last) print run of a poetry book put out now by, say, Faber, is – an educated guess – perhaps 3,000. Sales of many poetry books, good poetry books, put out by small presses struggle to reach 100. And the UK population, by the way, is now 50 per cent bigger than it was in 1912.

Given that books do not now occupy as central a position in the culture as they once did (and that even within books, poetry is marginal), does that leave those of us who still engage with the stuff – as writers, as readers, as publishers – like a soon-to-be-extinct tribe on the Andaman Islands, whose language will cease when they do? No, because there was poetry before books and there will be after. But meanwhile, it’s damn hard to sell the things.

‘Passed art’

2012-01-27T17:13:00.000Z

I’ve been making space. (Which is what you do when you come home from time away and see what a tip you live in.) That is, carting off whole shelves of books to Oxfam. I shift into ruthless mode – but then, as the books come off the shelves, the letters fall out, the postcards, the yellowing reviews and interviews, and it takes a little longer than I’d expected.

The letters are for me to deal with. The clippings from newspapers remind me how repetitive newspapers are, of how much that is said now has been been said before. ‘I dislike the whole social context of the novel, and where it is, the conventional apparatus which has featured so largely for so long. The novel in England in this kind of society is passed art. The tradition wanders on in a desultory fashion . . . The novel is no longer a reliable metaphor for what’s going on.’ That’s 1970, forty-odd years ago. That’s David Storey.

David Storey’s first three novels – This Sporting Life (1960), Flight into Camden (1961), Radcliffe (1963) – didn’t so much speak to me as grab me by the goolies. Northern, father a miner, wrestling with the inner life and the social codes, he was, in a rough way, Lawrence, but alive and writing now (then). After those, plays, and other, cooler novels (he won the Booker in 1976), and long silences. Sometime while I was working at Faber they published a book by his daughter, the fashion designer Helen Storey; there was a party at some extravagant venue to which I didn’t go, and when someone told me there was an older man there, on his own, not mixing, wished I had.

AWOL

2012-01-26T14:16:00.003Z

I’ve been AWOL for a couple of weeks, a bit longer. Some writing, some reading, at the out-of-season seaside. This may be a way of training CBe, and myself, to understand that, entangled though we are, occasionally varying the distance, or the perspective, may be no bad thing; that there is no reason why our needs should always coincide; that neither of us is indispensable.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Nick Lezard has featured BB Brahic’s translation of Apollinaire in his Guardian books column. (The above picture, showing a sequence of Apollinaire and a friend made at a photobooth in Paris in August 1914, is on the CBe page where you can order the book; other photos of Apollinaire have just gone up on Wayne Burrows’ fine Serendipity Project site.) And Beverley Bie Brahic’s own collection of poems, White Sheets, due from CBe in June, has been chosen as a PBS Recommendation for the Summer quarter. And planning for next September’s poetry book fair has been humming along. And it’s become important that a new CBe title, fiction this time, Dai Vaughan’s Sister of the artist, is published now rather than later. More on that next week.

When the Guardian asked me for the cover image of the Apollinaire book to go with the review, they addressed their email ‘Dear Charles and team’. As if. But it’s still possible to get in my own way, or have days or even longer when I’m not on speaking terms. Back now.

Alfred Hayes

2011-12-22T17:20:00.002Z

1911–85; born in London, worked in the US and Italy. He was in the US army in Italy in WW2, and stayed on as a screenwriter for Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica. Later, scriptwriting in Hollywood, and for TV. Not much seems to be known about him. Three books of poetry and half a dozen short novels. If he’d happened to be female some of those would have been reissued by Persephone Books by now, though their decorative endpapers wouldn’t have sat comfortably with the contents.

In The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949; reissued a few years ago by Europa, a Brooklyn-based publisher) an American soldier in Rome near the end of the war takes a room with an Italian girl; the deal, he thinks, is straightforward – he gets sex, she gets chocolate and cigarettes and a roof over her head and sex too – but it isn’t, and when the woman running the house is denounced, the police issue the girl with an official prostitute’s license. It’s just possible, near the end, that the couple’s barely articulated feelings for each other will enable them to rise above this mess, but the book isn’t saying.

In Love (1954; in print with Peter Owen; my copy a 1961 Penguin, £1.99 from an Oxfam shop): a girl in a convenient (to them both) relationship with a man is offered a thousand dollars by a rich businessman for one night. (Familiar scenario? Frederic Raphael: ‘To measure the difference between a work of art and its degradation, compare In Love with Adrian Lyne’s 1993 film, Indecent Proposal, in which Robert Redford offers Demi Moore a million dollars to sleep with him and you don’t believe a word of it, or give a damn whether she does or not, because the whole thing is famous-people confectionery.’) The story is recounted by the boyfriend to another girl in a bar, the story of an affair in which the needs and capacities for love of himself and the girlfriend intersect and then don’t and then maybe do again and then maybe don’t, and in which neither behaves in ways that would would win them a medal of honour.

My Face for the World to See (1958; my copy a 1960 Arrow Books paperback, also courtesy Oxfam): a jobbing Hollywood screenwriter pulls a drunk girl out of the sea at a party and starts a desultory affair that ends in melodrama (‘Had I thought once there were acts of which I was incapable?’).

Elizabeth Bowen called In Love a masterpiece; John Lehman and Antonia White reckoned pretty much the same. Echoed by The Times and the Independent on its reissue in 2007. Paul Bailey, who wrote an introduction for the reissue of of The Girl on the Via Flaminia: ‘Hayes has done for bruised men what Jean Rhys does for bruised women, and they both write heartbreakingly beautiful sentences.’

The sentences are what win me, of course. Plain but exact, one after another. Hayes has become one of the writers I’m liable to bore people about. The story-lines above are hardly original, and each time there’s something a little dated in their setting-up, as if you’re watching a black-and-white film, but once he gets the he and the she together he’s electric. The restaurant/nightclub scene in My Face for the World to See, after he’s told her he’ll be meeting his wife off a plane the following Monday, is not only lacerating, hilarious, drunken (‘She was very articulate when she was drunk; hadn’t I noticed? Martinis improved her vocabulary’), but done with a control – direct speech (you can see why he was a screenwriter), a kind of indirect reported speech I don’t know the technical term for, observation – that amounts to wizardry.

For Christmas, please can someone find me a cheap copy of Hayes’ The End of Me.

Whitman & Co.

2011-12-15T22:38:00.002Z

Mortality kicks in. My mum once told me she’d been to three funerals in a week, and I’m starting to know how she was feeling. In the past weeks, and limiting this to the Anglo bookworld, Peter Reading, Christopher Logue, Gilbert Adair, Russell Hoban, George Whitman – have died. It’s bloody.

Logue and Adair I’ve mentioned. Russell Hoban I first met in the 80s; I was living round the corner, and asked if I could show him some stories for children I’d written, which were crap, and he said so in the kindest possible way, by praising the illustrations done by my wife. George Whitman I met in November of last year, when three of the CBe writers read at the Shakespeare & Co bookshop in Paris. It was a little late for me to have done so. The NY Times obituary quotes his own estimate of 40,000 writerly wanderers having been put up – been given bed and pancakes, in return for a few hours work and talk and a promise to read – in that shop over the years. Jeanette Winterson in the Guardian: ‘The shop was open from midday till midnight and, if you needed a place to stay, you could sleep in one of the beds hidden under the bookshelves . . . I found a second home at Shakespeare and Company. George always gave special privileges to writers – he lent me his dog to keep me company. He was an affront to modern capitalism, because he ran a successful business that put people, culture and books before money. He made his own world, and that is the best that anyone can do.’

Founded in 1951, a port in a storm for Durrell & Burroughs & Ginsberg & Ferlinghetti and countless others since, Shakespeare & Co has become ‘heritage’, a place to tick off on the tourist map. It can’t help but. Is it just that? Because of George Whitman, and because of Sylvia his daughter, no. They still take in the tumbleweeds. They still have a whole floor of books that are there not for selling but for reading, that’s a library from which you can borrow for free. Saara Marchadour, ex the Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill, now works there. If not exactly your own home, it’s like your best friend’s home: a place more interesting, more exciting, than your own, and you wish it was yours, and though you’ll leave or it will kick you out, because that’s the other thing homes are for, it will still be there.

For the record

2011-12-13T21:37:00.003Z

I was asked today for a photo of my mum, so I went into the albums, and here is not my mum but the first school I went to, in a village in Yorkshire. ‘Village’ romanticises it, it was really a dormitory suburb of Leeds, but it wasn’t big and this was the complete local school. That’s Miss Williams at the back, who taught everything: reading, writing, maths up to long division. The school was not a building, it was this gathering of children that took up space where space was offered. The church was welcoming, offering its adjacent hall, outside which the second picture is posed. Circa 1960. Have you ever seen so many little white cotton socks in a row? My brother is in there, on Miss W’s left, peeking from behind the girl in front. The punishment for badness was this: to have to stand in the corner, facing the wall, with a blackboard duster on your head.

I don’t remember much. Maths: a number on the doorstep, to be carried over and knock on the next door. I do remember that I wasn’t good at bowing my head at the name of Jesus, during prayers. I think (all this thinking) I was thinking about it too much, and came in a bit early or late. I had to have private lessons in the cloakroom, where everyone hung up their wet coats. (Did Miss W speak some random speech, with the name of Jesus thrown in at random?) I did try. The whole thing was not about trouble-making but about being over-conscientious, which made me physically inhibited. I was the older brother. (Later, at an appalling minor public school, I was hopeless at marching, at getting the left arm forward at the same time as the right foot, and I had to have private lessons in that too. In the end they gave up and made me a lance-corporal, so I could stand to the side and shout.)

I had left the village school by the time of the second photo, but I’m in the top one, taken a year or two earlier, when the children were fewer and Miss W is looking a little less weary. For the record: back row, left to right: Stephen Nettle, Jeremy Willis, me, Jane Kirby, Keith Wallace, Howard Cliff, Michael Yeadon. Front row: Diana Macintosh, Alastair Cliff, Richard Ginever(?), Marta Watson, Philip Sinclair.

Thief in the night

2011-12-10T13:11:00.003Z

I was tired, and I left three boxes of books, collected from the printer, in the car overnight. Someone got into the car (I have difficulty with always remembering to lock doors and to turn off the gas ring after cooking scrambled eggs). I know this because my reserve pack of cigarettes had gone and one of the boxes had been torn open – but none of the books had been taken, not one. (This appears to be supporting evidence for the statement by James Sutherland-Smith in a review in the new issue of The Bow-Wow Shop that 'CB editions has established a reputation for publishing what it likes rather than what everybody else likes'.)

Last week Christopher Logue died – whom I worked with at Faber, of whom I was very fond. This week, Gilbert Adair – whom I also worked with, whom I also was very fond of. Patient, funny, tireless; for the paperback editions of his books, following the hardbacks, he’d make many revisions, tiny and perfectionist, and because nothing was ever done until it was seen to be done he insisted on sitting next to me and watching as I took in those corrections onscreen. I told him that I’d started CBe not for the money but for the pleasure, the fun; ah, he said, une petite danseuse.

Camden / Cecil Sharp / Pudkin

2011-12-08T22:07:00.000Z

I went to Cecil Sharp House in Camden, home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, to look at the main hall as a possible venue for a book fair next year, and there’s a readings room downstairs and through the café and it’s all magnificent. Except that it costs (but we can find ways), and except that it’s asking a lot of people to trek up Parkway and then cross a road or two, and except that for almost every Saturday next year they’re already booked. To be continued.

Meanwhile, Cecil Sharp: who early in the last century travelled around the West Country collecting folk songs. The very first he collected, in 1903, he took from the gardener of a vicar he happened to be staying with – a man (the gardener) called (you couldn’t make this up) John England: ‘Sharp whipped out out his notebook, took down the tune, and afterwards persuaded John to give him the words.’ The words, yes. I’m not a song man, and anyway the original tune, once it has been re-whatevered and re-presented from a stage, has surely been gentrified, but the words can stand alone (though robbed in print of the dialect voice), and they do so in a book I bought second-hand in York a week ago: The Idiom of the People, 1958, edited by James Reeves from Cecil Sharp’s manuscripts. ‘Clean wantonness’. Wonderful book. (Re-issued in the print-on-demand Faber Finds list, which normally I wouldn’t be advertising at all – badly designed, expensive editions of out-of-print books, most of which you can still find on abebooks.co.uk – but in this case I’ll make an exception.)

And after Cecil Sharp House, on to Ken Garland, on the way back to the tube. To call him a designer (he designed the banners for the first CND Aldermaston marches, and Galt toys in the 1960s and early 70s, and onwards and onwards, with lots of digressions) is woefully short of the mark. His website is here; you’ll need walking boots and willingness to keep changing direction. Late each year he publishes three small-format books of photographs (leaves, fire hydrants, Bangladeshi rickshaws, Mexican windows: eclectic). I swapped two CBe books for two of his new ones: drawings of children playing in the street made by his daughter when she was 14 (decades ago), and photographs by Lana Durovic of those things the eye usually glides over but which may in fact be central: they train you how to look. Pudkin Books, available direct from Ken Garland.

Lists, presents, that time of year

2011-12-01T16:27:00.003Z

In the Observer last Sunday Daljit Nagra wrote that J. O. Morgan’s Long Cuts ‘would be an ideal gift as I loved his first collection, Natural Mechanical, and reviews suggest this one is even better’. Anyone wanting to take the hint and send him a copy for Christmas, order a copy here. (If you decide not to keep to keep it for yourself, address it to Daljit Nagra, c/o Faber, London WC1B 3DA, and it will get to him.)

In this week’s TLS Books of the Year, Beverley Bie Brahic finds Morgan’s Long Cuts ‘every bit as startling in its originality as Natural Mechanical’, and Andrew Motion chooses, as one of ‘the two most impressive books of poetry I’ve read this year', D. Nurkse’s Voices over Water – ‘an ambitious saga (broken into fragments) of emigration and re-settling’.

In the Glasgow Herald, Todd McEwan promises that ‘Nancy Gaffield’s Tokaido Road, based on a series of prints by Ando Hiroshige, by turns antique and modern, elegiac and dazzlingly clear, will surprise you at every turn.’ (For an online review by Mike Loveday from last week go here.)

For a bargain offer of all three 2011 CBe poetry titles – J. O. Morgan’s Long Cuts, Nancy Gaffield’s Tokaido Road (winner of the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize) and D. Nurkse’s Forward-shortlisted Voices over Water – for £20, go to Special Offer 2 at the foot of the Books page of the website. Free postage within UK.

On the same page, Special Offer 1 has Fergus Allen’s Before Troy and Marjorie Ann Watts’s Are they funny, are they dead? for £13.50. Fergus Allen is 90; Marjorie Ann Watts is 80-something. This is the Prolong Active Life offer. These books may be for yourself, your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents; they’re a lot more inspiriting than chocolates or socks.

The above offers are only available until Christmas. Or thereabouts.

Something for someone younger? Nicky Singer’s Knight Crew, which updates the King Arthur legend to contemporary gangland. Staged at Glyndebourne last year. Benjamin Zephaniah: ‘A story for this generation . . . written with love, passion and intelligence’. Perhaps her best book, this is still woefully undersold by me. Put ‘2 copies please’ or similar in the ‘instructions to merchant’ box as you check through when ordering a single copy and I’ll send exactly that. (And if anyone thinks that writing for ‘young adults’, or whatever they may now be termed, is a soft option, read Nicky Singer’s account of prison-visiting during her writing of this book here. I’ve linked there before, but it’s worth it again. The prison service is not charged with Christmas spirit.)

Bursa, 195?

2011-12-01T00:45:00.003Z

Andrzej Bursa on the left. Born in Krakow, Poland, in 1932, he had a brief publishing opportunity between Stalin’s death in 1953 and his own death at the age of 25. I had lost this photo, then found it tonight. He's neither writing nor posing, and how I come to have this photo is one of several mysteries. The child in the centre, pirate’s cutlass in his lap; the old woman already fading to the right, as if just waiting to be cropped out; something off-stage, to the left, they are looking at. It’s not how author photos usually come. Buy the book.

Boyd Tonkin in the Independent: ‘Dead at 25 in 1957, the Polish postwar firebrand Andrzej Bursa acquired a reputation as a quick-burning, existentially tormented rebel: a literary James Dean of the Stalinist era. This selection of his quirky, darkly witty work – poems, fables, above all the titular novella – does indeed summon the shades of Beckett or Kafka from time to time. Everyday life slips into scenes of fantasy or horror, as when the local Party secretary sacrifices children to a dragon, “an old, blind, mouldy beast” that still tears them apart. Yet Bursa’s dark humour and deadpan satire – finely captured here by translator Wiesiek Powaga – keep utter bleakness at bay. Some will think of Dostoyevsky when it comes to the snuffed-out relative in the novella; read to the end and you hear something like Joe Orton’s wicked cackle too.’

‘A world of shadows and decoys’

2011-11-26T12:05:00.003Z

Yesterday was the annual get-together of the small presses who are members of Inpress, an organisation which in principle is a wholly good thing: given the lack of conversation between, say, Waterstone’s and any individual small press – they big and corporate, we in our back-bedrooms: the gears don’t mesh – Inpress steps in with the combined clout of several presses joined together and starts talking.

Patrick McGuinness gave an opening talk that hit the right note: both encouraging – his writing has been enabled by several small presses (Smith/Doorstop, then Carcanet for his poetry, Seren for his fiction, others too) – and realistic, demonstrating how at every stage of the process the odds are stacked against small presses. For example: it wasn’t until his recent novel, The Last Hundred Days, published by Seren, was longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, that it was deemed worth reviewing. Please send us review copies, asked the broadsheets et al. You’ve already got them, said Seren, who had logged their sending-out. But they had somehow gone astray. Please send again.

Patrick McG’s novel – now shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Prize – charts the final period of Ceausescu’s regime in Romania. It depicts ‘a world of shadows and decoys, double and triple bluffs’; in which the lies ‘eat away at you until you believe nothing’, until the very capacity for belief dies away ‘into irony and cynicism’; in which offices are peopled by ‘regional secretaries, vice-ministers, provincial chiefs . . . they looked as if they both felt and provoked fear in equal measure. Another of the system’s equalising mechanisms.’

The system of the British book world is not the Ceausescu one, but it’s still dispiriting. I’ve banged on before about how heavy discounting actually forces up the cover price of books, and has been a major cause of hundreds of independent bookshops closing down (‘independent bookshop numbers have fallen by more than a quarter since 2006,’ the Guardian reported last month, using figures from the Booksellers Association). Very few bookshops stock titles outside the predictable range; very few newspapers review outside that range. And to get more CBe books into shops – which is what Inpress set out to do – is a process both strange (involving buyers and sellers talking about books which in most cases neither of them has read) and expensive. If Waterstone’s do stock a CBe £7.99 book I get – after the wholesaler’s discount and the distributor’s cut and the Inpress cut and VAT on those – under £3; deduct from that the author’s royalty and the cost of printing-&-binding and we’re down into the pennies. (And if I costed in editing, design, typesetting, etc, I’d be into sub-zero.)

We can change the system (bring back the Net Book Agreement, or at least legislate – as France and Germany do – to restrict discounting). Unlikely, that. We can work around rather than within the system (book fairs, mobile bookshops). I never set out to be a dissident, but it seems it comes with the job.

A vague impression of urine

2011-11-23T19:22:00.003Z

Some days not so good. There is A with his infected wisdom tooth and grumpy, there is the long wait in hospital (and though I've brought a book I've managed not to bring my glasses) with B, whose broken metatarsal will mean crutches for weeks, possibly months. There is me who should be sacked as a salesman: despite Andrew Barrow’s fine talk on The Queue for the Sohemian Society last night, no expletives deleted, in a room so packed that at least one latecomer left a note instead of forcing his way in, I managed not only to sell just 5 copies but somehow – it all got a bit confused – at less than half price. (Plus online today becoming offline, and attempts to pay a bill fading into ‘timed out’, devolving into hour-long phone calls to try to find out where now is the money, with them or still with me.)

And the cover for the Apollinaire book needs to be rejigged: when it comes to the printing, that off-white colour for his name on the front and the panel on the back refuses to sit proud, it soaks so far into the manilla board as to leave just a vague impression of urine.

One of those days. But two good things. The NHS doctor, when eventually we got to him, was excellent: he'd actually read the notes, so we didn't have to recite the whole long history yet again, and he tailored treatment as much to the person as the injury.

And this notice in the new PBS Bulletin for J. O. Morgan’s Long Cuts: ‘A sequel equal to the seemingly matchless Natural Mechanical, a former PBS Recommendation and Aldeburgh Poetry Prize winner, Long Cuts depicts “further wanderings in the life of Iain Seoras Rockcliffe”, as Nature Boy turns man, striking his native wit on the edge of the wider world, sparking like flint on stone. A bravura performance of poetic ventriloquism, Morgan transcribes Rocky’s hard-won voice into hard-spun verse as vital and varied as the hero’s own freewheeling adventures.’

Whoever wrote that is welcome to the job of CBe blurb-writer. And sales person too.

Who?

2011-11-20T13:09:00.001Z

I was browsing in my favourite bookshop yesterday and talking in a dilatory kind of way with the woman who runs it when a man and woman came in and the conversation expanded – always in these bookshop conversations there’s a point at which someone remembers a book but not the author’s name, or a name but not a title, and someone else tentatively supplies the missing information and the current moves on – and after the couple had left the bookshop woman referred to the man by name. That was David Attenborough? Yes, it was. I’d been talking to him unknowingly.

Of course the world, and more particularly the media, is full of famous names I can’t put faces to or faces I can’t put names to, and of people who are presented as famous – their names are checked – but I have not the slightest idea, except for what might be suggested by the context of the name-checking, what they are famous for. The published faces that irritate me most just now – even more than politicians attempting to look statesmanlike or writers attempting to look mature and thoughtful – are those of comedians: there they are, on the posters for their shows and their DVDs, pulling a face, often with a kind of quizzical or ‘it wasn’t me, guv, honest’ expression that seems to be the current code for ‘comic’, and already I feel I’m being manipulated.

Dear sir or madam

2011-11-17T13:46:00.002Z

The BBC film adaptation (starry: Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman) of Christopher Reid’s The Song of Lunch was broadcast this week in the US. The book was first published by CBe in 2009; it’s now with Faber. But any US TV-viewers interested in buying the book and going to amazon.com are stalled: it has no US publisher; the Faber print edition is not listed there; there’s a single used CBe edition for $221. The Faber kindle edition (which you can see a sample of by clicking the CBe cover, and the setting is a mockery of the original) is available, but what if they want the book, the thing with pages between covers? I’ve been getting emails from the US from would-be buyers who’ve done some research on the net and found me. Some of them want to send me their poems. I compose replies. Officially I am not allowed to sell them one of the very few remaining CBe copies, as I am no longer the publisher, but if they want to send me money, inclusive of postage . . .

Why does buying a book have to be so complicated? And buying a train ticket, and phoning your bank, and going to see your GP? TfL have been sending emails telling people they can now get now ‘get real-time bus information on your phone, Smartphone or online’, which ‘gives control of your journey’: why do they think that telling people the bus is running late is something helpful and positive, something that makes life easier?

Aldeburgh: floating your boat

2011-11-07T15:02:00.013Z

I could have made a rash and silly promise: have said, for example, that if Nancy Gaffield won the Aldeburgh 2011 First Collection Prize I’d go there and swim in the sea (the North Sea, in November). I didn’t. But her book Tokaido Road did win the prize. And I did swim in the sea. Congratulations to Nancy. And a thank you to Anna Selby, despite her telling me – a bare-faced lie – that the water was warmer than it looked.

The word is, for when you come out of the sea, ‘invigorated’. But sometimes you don’t need to go into the sea to feel that.

On Friday evening in Aldeburgh Fergus Allen, now aged 90, gave a short talk on a poem by Auden (that’s Fergus doing exactly that, above; photo courtesy the Poetry Trust). By the time I arrived, about 10 minutes before the start of this talk by a little-known poet on a little-known poem, all seats were taken, so it was standing-room only. On Saturday evening Fergus Allen read his own poems (mostly from his recent CBe book, Before Troy), alongside Amjad Nasser and Kay Ryan; none of these are household names, but the reading was sold out in advance. As one-off events in London, these would have attracted a fraction of those audiences. But Aldeburgh is accumulative. Each year its several official parts include readings, talks, workshops, interview/conversations, panel discussions, Q-&-As; add in the sea, fish and chips, Adnams beer, random encounters not just with poets read but never met before but also with unread poets, and unmet readers, and the place becomes more than the sum of its parts. And it’s accumulative year-upon-year too, which is why it feels important that the Arts Council’s withdrawal of secure funding for this festival must somehow be remedied.

In Fergus Allen’s third appearance at the festival he talked with Peter Blegvad, part of a series of conversations titled Floating Boat. Which is the excuse for this post’s title, and for the photos, all taken in Aldeburgh at the weekend.

Two last random comments. As Katy Evans-Bush points out in her own post on the festival, and despite the sprinkling of free events, there aren’t many poetry-world folk who, once they’ve got there, can afford tickets to all the events they’d like to go to. Some kind of 3-for-2 might be offered? And it’s a devil of a place to get to (and from). A minibus service from London? A boat from London? (There seem to be plenty around, in need of refloating.) (And another from Scotland, from where this year a large number of people made the long trek down.)

White van men

2011-11-02T22:01:00.003Z

That’s a Luton, above. Most of them look a bit more battered, but you can fit a lot into a Luton. Much of today was spent loading up a Luton with a 70-odd-year-old poet’s boxes (of books, of papers) and some bookcases and other furniture too and moving them from one part of London to storage in another part. Two recent days have been spent doing the same with twenty years’ accumulation of paintings by an artist (who is being evicted from her charity-controlled studio on the grounds she doesn’t use it enough), and tomorrow the same. The drivers – Hungarian and Romanian – have been a joy: cheerful, helpful, gsoh, and – even allowing for the cigarette breaks – amazingly fast and efficient.

A few years ago we regularly used a Luton driver who was German, had a philosophy degree, and whose conversation made the time (some of the journeys were to or from far outside London) speed by. He asked us to supper. The meal – cooked by his French wife, and eaten outside in summertime on a cracked patio overlooking a unkempt garden somewhere in Harrow; three courses at least, with a different wine for each course – was one of the best I’ve had. Then he moved on. He told us to go to his abandoned house and take what furniture we liked. My desk chair, the one I’m sitting on, was his chair. I’m privileged.

799 miles

2011-10-30T22:59:00.001Z

Here is Rocky (see Natural Mechanical, then see Long Cuts, now available) at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh last Thursday. A library isn’t his natural habitat – he’s happier out of doors, or when the weather’s foul in the workshop with his vintage motorbikes – but he’s not going to be daunted by that.

Back home tonight from Edinburgh: 799 miles on the mileometer, and all of them worth it. The book fair at the Scottish Poetry Library, the company, the morning swims followed by porridge, the whisky, all good. (The one thing I’d happily erase from my memory was the film I stumbled into on Friday afternoon, We Need to Talk about Kevin; the lead review on IMDB gives it 9 out 10 and calls it ‘poetry’; I walked out.)

Points north and others

2011-10-23T20:42:00.001+01:00

The Anarchist Book Fair in London on Saturday was well-attended and perversely well-organised: there was even a crèche for tiny anarchists. Plus film, discussions, etc., and a lot more tattoos and piercings on show than at the poetry book fair.

Chris Power’s continuing online-Guardian ‘Brief Survey of the Short Story’ looks at Denis Johnson this month. This is such a good series.

During this coming week I head up to Scotland for the launch of J. O. Morgan’s Long Cuts at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh on Thursday – from 6.30, and Rocky himself will be there – and then the book fair at the same place on Saturday. Everyone welcome. (Though obviously, those within striking distance of Edinburgh will find it easier.)

A rare trip out of London, and about time. I’m driving, because books are heavy and it gives me an excuse to digress on the way up or down. The car radio is bust, and it doesn’t have a CD-player, but it does have a tape thing and I’ve stocked up on cassettes from an Oxfam shop. And on the whole – meaning, dodgy generalisation coming – I’ve found out-of-London publishing folk not just friendlier and more open and interested but also more downright efficient than the London lot. (I’m not talking the London small-press people here, so maybe it’s a small press/big publisher divide rather than a London/‘the regions’ one, but still.) In London there’s so often a we-are-the-universe assumption, attitude, reinforced by the media, that needs to be negotiated before you can properly start talking. It’s patronising and it’s silly and any truth to it is surely long outdated.

Further to the below

2011-10-20T00:46:00.003+01:00

Clare Conville, who teaches on the Faber Academy two-day course titled ‘Getting Your Novel Published’ (9 hours, £199), says in the Guardian supplement that her agency ‘receives 4,000-5,000 unsolicited manuscripts a year and on average take on a maximum of five a year’. Francis Bickmore, the other teacher on that course, says that Canongate receive around 3,000 submissions a year, from which ‘we are looking to find around 30 new books a year. Perhaps only five are going to be from a debut voice.’

(I’ll mention, why not, that CBe has published one of Clare Conville’s authors whose novel, despite the author’s excellent sales and prize-winning record, and despite this novel being already scheduled for a Glyndebourne opera adaptation, and despite it being a fine book – so very fine that I was more than happy interrupt the regular, as it seems, CBe profile to welcome it in – was turned down by all major publishers. See Knight Crew.)

It’s a lottery. £199 well spent? The desire to have your work in print, as another concrete object in the world, detached from yourself, seems entirely reasonable to me. (Online and downloadable is not, from the perspective of many writers, the same thing. And while music, most of it, is online, and except for dedicated concert-goers no one is objecting, art is not: to see three major contemporary artists now showing in London – Richter, Dumas, Sasnal – you have to go to the galleries, and no one is suggesting otherwise.) This desire, hunger, while being catered for by public sector courses in a decent way – though god knows who’s going to publish all those BAs and MAs – is being exploited by Faber and the Guardian, most conspicuously, for financial gain above all other reasons. (And Faber still get ACE money, public money, to publish new poets.) No reason why they shouldn’t: they are businesses, no less so than any other publisher or newspaper, all with their target audiences. It’s a free market. A controlled (by who?) market wouldn’t be any less messy, but still.

‘Describe cancer. Describe calico.’

2011-10-19T19:50:00.004+01:00

I’ve never done a writing course (as either student or teacher). I’d feel hugely self-conscious if I signed up to one. Not sure why; no one else seems to have this hang-up, and nor did the wannabe artists who went to art college decades ago, before ‘creative writing’ was on any syllabus. I tend to be cynical about them.

But today, there on the kitchen table was a 40-page Guardian supplement entitled ‘How to Write Fiction’ – a thing I occasionally try and usually fail to do – and it looks, after a quick skim, pretty impressive: non-prescriptive (‘feel free to dispute or ignore everything in this introduction or in the articles that follow,’ writes Geoff Dyer), and enough text written by enough authors for readers to cherry-pick the bits that look juiciest and ignore the others. (The authors – Rachel Cusk, Adam Foulds, M. J. Hyland, Andrew Miller among them – teach a new range of ‘UEA/Guardian Masterclasses’. Cost of the first one I checked out: £4,000. Which for weekly 3-hour class sessions over 24 weeks works out at £55 an hour. Which is probably no more than the rate you’d pay a plumber to mend a dripping tap, but still enough for my cynicism to click back on. Even if they get taken on by one of the big publishers, most first-time novelists are, I believe, getting advances of far less than that course fee.)

For someone who has written previously as a poet and who is switching to prose, there’s a lot to learn. Hugo Williams once did a good column on this: all those ‘he said’s and ‘she said’s, all that getting people into and out of rooms. All that description.

Description. Geoff Dyer in his introduction licenses me to dispense with it and just get on with the stuff I’m better at (= enjoy more?). Depends how it’s done and what it’s done for, of course, but here’s Virginia Woolf on the subject, after quoting (in ‘Character in Fiction’) a passage from an Arnold Bennett novel describing the view from a window: ‘One line of insight would have done more than all those lines of description; but let them pass as the necessary drudgery of the novelist.’ Her essay goes on to talk about ‘how serious a matter it is when the tools of one generation are useless for the next’, and about the difficulty of putting into words even the simplest experience or observation (‘this vivid, this overmastering impression’), in this case of an old woman she happened to have shared a railway carriage with: ‘To tell you the truth, I was . . . strongly tempted to manufacture a three-volume novel about the old lady’s son, and his adventures crossing the Atlantic, and her daughter, and how she kept a milliner’s shop in Westminster, the past life of Smith himself, and his house at Sheffield, though such stories seem to me the most dreary, irrelevant, and humbugging affairs in the world but if I had done that I should have escaped the appalling effort of saying what I meant. And to have got at what I meant, I should have had to go back and back and back; to experiment with one thing and another; to try this sentence and that, referring each word to my vision matching it as exactly as possible . . . I admit that I shirked that arduous undertaking. I let my Mrs Brown slip through my fingers . . . But that is partly the great Edwardians’ fault. I asked them – they are my elders and betters – How shall I begin to describe this woman’s character? And they said, “Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe –” But I cried, “Stop! Stop!” and I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico my Mrs Brown, that vision to which I cling though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished for ever.’

From which, two things. Writing involves at least as much arguing with your ‘elders and betters’, shutting your eyes and ears to them even, as it does learning from them. And if it’s about ‘the appalling effort of saying what I meant’, there has to be something you mean to say. Even if you only discover what that is through writing – which is where, I guess, the writing courses come back in.

Oh, a last thing. The Faber Academy course titled ‘Becoming a poet’ (£3,500, working out at just under £40 an hour class time, a snip). Roland Barthes would have had fun with that, in his Mythologies. Not writing poetry: becoming ‘a poet’.

Aldeburgh: 1989–2011(?)

2011-10-16T14:48:00.004+01:00

Filey, on the Yorkshire coast, was the place we used to go to for our summer holidays when I was a child. And stay in a boarding house run by a Mrs Turner. Year after year after year. Every time, the suspense on the way there: would the car get stuck on Sutton Bank? Every time, a trip to the café in Goathland where there was a talking mynah bird. Every time, some unplanned, unexpected event (a plane crashing into the sea, after the pilot had ejected, was a star turn). What possible reason could there be to go anywhere else?

Aldeburgh (above), on the Suffolk coast, is where an annual poetry festival is held. Year after year after year, on the first weekend after the clocks go back, this is what happens: people go to the seaside to hear poets read and talk and discuss, eat fish & chips, walk by the sea. I read there myself in, I think, 1995, as one of three readers for the London Magazine (Peter Bland and Deryn Rees-Jones being the others), then run by Alan Ross. In the evening we gathered for drinks at the house of Herbert Lomas and then Alan blew the whole reading fee on a meal for us all at one of the restaurants.

Alan died ten years ago. Bertie Lomas died last month. Aldeburgh, astoundingly, renews itself each year: it has a policy of not inviting poets back (however well they’ve behaved), so has a new line-up each time you go, including poets from outside the UK (this year, from Albania, America, Australia, the Bahamas, Ireland, Jordan and New Zealand). Among those who go to listen to the poets there are, I suspect, regulars: they go to Aldeburgh as I was taken to Filey in the 1950s. And the place itself doesn’t change, much. But as well as new poets there are new visitors each year. And the mix of continuity and change creates a place from which you can expect both the familiar and the unexpected. (In around 2007 one poet at Aldeburgh happened to mention to another poet the name Francis Ponge; and the conversation continued; and the result was the CBe bilingual edition of Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud, the only UK edition of this writer. Each year there are many other such encounters.)

The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival is organised by the Poetry Trust – ‘one of the UK’s flagship poetry organisations, delivering a year-round live and digital programme, creative education opportunities, courses, prizes and publications’, which is website-speak, but they do in fact deliver. And they are remarkably inclusive: witness the constantly renewed programme; witness the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the history of whose winners and shortlists shows a far more open-minded outlook (in terms of gender, publisher, etc) than, most conspicuously, the Forward Prize.

But as far as I know (and please god there are, as they say, ‘continuing discussions’), this could be the last Aldeburgh. In March this year the Arts Council cut all secure funding to the Poetry Trust. Given the year-upon-year accumulation, the connections already made and there to be built on, the blend of discrimination and openness to the new, the continuity, this is vandalism.

I find it hard to believe this. It’s like my mother telling me no, from now on there is no Mrs Turner, no talking mynah bird, no Filey, no summer. She’s testing me. It cannot be right. Aldeburgh is simply there, each year, an essential part of the calendar. You don’t have to go, of course; you could give it a miss this year and go next year or the next. Except now, maybe not. 4th to the 6th November: see you there.

Spot the author

2011-10-16T12:33:00.003+01:00

J. O. Morgan at the West Port Book Festival in Edinburgh last night (photo courtesy Peggy Hughes). Next sighting will be at the launch of Long Cuts (now available from the CBe website) at the Scottish Poetry Library on 27 October: all welcome.

Trust the trustees?

2011-10-14T14:10:00.001+01:00

Chisenhale Art Place (CAP) is the name of the registered charity that runs Chisenhale Studios in east London. Its website lists 37 artist members. Until very recently there were 40, but during the summer the board of trustees gave notice to three members that their licenses were being revoked and that they had to quit their studios. One of those three happens to be Madeleine Strindberg, my wife.

Madeleine has been a member of CAP for 25 years. During that time she has used her studio to produce work that has been shown in numerous exhibitions and that won her the Jerwood Painting Prize. In recent years her work has been made at home as well as in her Chisenhale studio, which has also been used for storage of earlier work and for showing this work to interested galleries. The reasons given for Madeleine’s eviction are that she is not contributing sufficiently to the aims of CAP and that her studio is not an essential part of her practice. Eviction means that Madeleine has to find alternative space for several hundred paintings; many are over 6 foot; they weigh, I’d guess, several tons.

There is no appeals procedure. Nor has there been any opportunity to even talk with the trustees about their decision: all communication has been via the administrator, appointed by the board, who refuse to talk directly with Madeleine. And even if the board has reason to argue that Madeleine’s studio at Chisenhale is not being used as actively as they’d like, there are still things to talk about. Such as the infrequent use of studios by many members other than the three being evicted (yesterday morning only one studio in the whole building was being used by its licensee, and a glance through the signing in/out book showed that there are very few days when even half the studios are being used). Such as the fact that one artist member (who also happens to be on the board of trustees) doesn’t even live in England. Such as the regulations about subletting and the use of studios as business premises and whether a blind eye is sometimes being turned. Such as the rumours about the planned redevelopment of the building.

The decision to evict Madeleine and the two others appears to be arbitrary. The board’s attitude has been bullying. (One of the other members being evicted recently wrote to the board informing them of the concerns of the chair of the National Federation of Artists Studio Providers about the way the evictions were being handled; a trustee replied that those concerns ‘are of no interest to us’ and that ‘The Board has had quite enough correspondence and email about all of this already. Please do not bother us any more with this’; this reply was the only direct communication from any of the trustees that the member has had.) The refusal of the trustees to discuss the situation (I’ve seen an email from the chair of the board in which he says he has ‘more pressing issues’ to deal with) betrays the whole spirit of the place, which was established to give artists ‘secure premises’ to get on with their art in a cooperative manner.

‘Board of trustees’ is of course a term that’s recently become familiar to many in the poetry world, where the Poetry Society has had to deal with the fall-out from some clumsy decisions by its own board. You wander along for years without paying attention to the machinery of these places, then a gear slips and you have to make sense of it all. I think at least some of the artist members of Chisenhale are concerned about their board’s behaviour, but are also worried that if they speak out they may be next in line for eviction.

Apollinaire: the back issue

2011-10-13T01:39:00.006+01:00

Dodgy photos, but the first above is the cover of a 1968 issue of the London Magazine that I found in a crate outside a bookshop today. That’s Apollinaire with his friend André Rouveyre in a sequence of stills from a movie made in a coin-operated street booth in Paris in 1914 on the day the two of the them arrived in the city from Deauville, which happened also to be the day that general mobilisation was announced. Apollinaire signed on the dotted line and went to war and wrote the poems that will be in the CBe book early next next year, the French on the left and BB Brahic’s translations (she who translated the Ponge) on the right, and if your idea of ‘war poetry’ is over-conditioned by Wilfred Owen etc you may have to reconfigure. This is not, of course, an either/or thing; but mud-brown was not the only colour available, even in the trenches.

Apollinaire took a shrapnel wound in the head and died in 1918. 1968 is roughly halfway between then and where we are now.

These back-issues are always disorientating. There’s a heart-felt review of a poet whose ‘achievement is in being able to use domestic detail as a liberating symbolism’ and whose book ‘is the product of of a poet concerned with the most difficult and intransigent areas of experience’ and whose name is now forgotten. In the August 1968 London Magazine, also picked up from that crate, Kingsley Amis and Michael Holroyd and William Trevor and Peter Porter and many others reply to a questionnaire about political engagement; and Christopher Logue is interviewed about his poster poems; and not only are there are seven poems by Douglas Dunn from his Terry Street, which would be published by Faber the next year, but also six pages on good gloss paper of photographs (the second above) of Terry Street by Bob Whitaker.

There’s a flyer included offering me 12 issues for a annual subscription of 60 shillings (£3): bargain.

You won’t get any of those Bob Whitaker photographs of Terry Street by googling him (I’ve tried). Nor do you get me on my circa 1970 bicycle pilgrimage from Leeds to Hull (it’s flat land, easy cycling) to park the bike in Terry Street and just look. There’s a fair amount you don’t get on google.

19–12

2011-10-10T22:27:00.002+01:00

An oblique response to George Szirtes’ recent post on, with or without quote marks, Englishness:

1) 19-12 to France, and thank god England are out of the rugby world cup. Too much money, too much bureaucracy, too much strutting. But I’m English, and once upon a time I played the game. Now Wales, with great relief and with both head and heart.

2) I am English, male, white, middle-class, through-and-through, ineradicable, and if I have a habit of saying ‘sorry’ and stepping aside that’s all part of it. I know the codes, or some of them, and I’ve benefited from this. While also being someone who, in any neutral contest, naturally supports the underdog; someone whose favourite writers are either non-English or English-at-a-curious-angle (a conspicuous exception is Ford Madox Ford, but look at the writers he championed: Conrad, Pound, Joyce, Hemingway, James …); someone whose most important loves and friendships happen to have always been with non-English people; someone who feels them to be my countryfolk.

3) No sympathy required or expected or wanted. If I’m uneasy with the label English in any way that current labellers would define it, and certainly in any nationalistic way, clearly none of the other easy labels – minority, outsider, from-the-margins – will stick. What’s left is discomfort, conflictedness, under a camouflage of full-on Englishness, and I couldn’t ask for more.

Red sky at night, the mice will play

2011-10-06T21:02:00.000+01:00

The Forward poetry prizes are over for another year. Congratulations to John Burnside and Rachael Boast. The two CBe shortlistees, D. Nurkse and Nancy Gaffield, came, saw and left by the back door. One takes this philosophically, of course. A gift horse is always on the other side of the fence. A miss is as good as a silver lining. What goes up is better than no bread. Sleeping dogs wait for no man. Too many cooks spoil the dwarf. (And other such perverbs from Harry Mathews’ Selected Declarations of Dependence.)

Next: the travelling circus

2011-09-28T19:57:00.003+01:00

Above: a mobile library for sale. (One careful lady owner.) There are others.

One of the many enthusiastic online responses to last Saturday’s book fair ends thus: ‘Here’s hoping CB Editions will take their fair around the UK.’

Well. Given this: that in recent years hundreds of independent bookshops across the UK have closed; that in many towns a bricks-&-mortar bookshop is not now sustainable; that most (there are valiant exceptions) of the bookshops that do survive stock little other than the usual tedious and predictable titles –

Then why not this: a mobile bookshop. With a core stock of good books, which can be supplemented with books from local presses according to where the bookshop parks itself (Inverness, Aberystwyth, Land’s End, wherever). Doesn’t have to be a van like the above: a bus, a caravan, something smaller with a yurt packed in (I’ve always wanted a yurt). Its arrival would be a publicity event in itself. Can do the festivals as well as the bookless towns.

It takes just five days (I’ve checked) to train for an HGV license.

Seems to me a flippin’ obvious idea. So did the book fair, honestly, but no one was doing it. Comments?

Post-bookfair: I spy something beginning with . . .

2011-09-25T19:00:00.006+01:00

My sons turned up to the Free Verse poetry book fair in Exmouth Market on Saturday, and did shifts on the table outside with the programmes. A decade ago, maybe longer, we were sitting in a pizza restaurant in Cornwall and during the fidgety wait between ordering and the arrival of food we were playing I-Spy. ‘Something beginning with C,’ said one son. We gave up when the food arrived. Smugly, he gave us the answer: civilisation.

Something of the sort was happening on Saturday. Put together on a wing and a prayer, the event became what it was because of the support and good humour and generosity of everyone who turned up: the publishers, many of whom I’d guess were expecting a bit more space to display their books, shifting along a bit and making the best of what space they had; people saying yes, no problem, to an unscheduled reader getting time; and the visitors, whether friends of friends or just curious passers-by, not just mingling and talking but getting out their cash. (A few months ago one of the publishers had been doubtful whether the effort and time put into into book fairs were ever repaid in sales; late on Saturday, after selling far more than he’d expected, he said he took that all back.) Especial thanks to Chrissy Williams, Anna Selby, Michael Horovitz. Three early blog reports are here and here and here.

All planned events need an injection of the unplanned, the unpredictable. For me on Saturday this was the woman who happened to be busking nearby on the street outside. We’ve got a book fair going on in the hall, I said, and – Oh, she said, sorry, am I too loud?, I’ll move along. No, I didn’t mean that; would she like to step up on stage? She came in about halfway through the day and did a set of three songs. I loved them. Her website (from which you can buy her music) is here.

Sometime soon Chrissy and I will go to a pizza place, not necessarily in Cornwall, and discuss the future of civilisation. We’ll get some feedback from the publishers who took part on Saturday but anyone else who wants to chip in – visitors, presses we didn’t have room for on Saturday, whoever – please do. Things can be different. That’s the point.

Eve of the book fair

2011-09-23T16:15:00.003+01:00

There are now a few more trestle tables in the hall, and some books and string and miscellaneous. My son, delivering the tables with me, approved the street; a few doors along there’s a café/bar with three full size table-football tables. The only tricky bit tomorrow will be the setting up: there are now easily enough tables to fill the space, but not necessarily enough to accommodate all the presses in comfort. Meanwhile, the man who rented the trestle tables to me told me I looked like Lee Marvin (first pic). I still think more like Billy Bob Thornton in The Man Who Wasn’t There (second pic, with James Gandolfini). Just in case you arrive and are trying to work out which one is me.

The book fair: reasons to delight

2011-09-21T10:20:00.003+01:00

Selected reasons for coming along on Saturday to Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE: the poetry book fair, from 10 a.m.

1: It’s free, and the cricket season is over so what else are you going to do on a Saturday? The shopping?

13: There hasn’t been such a gathering of poetry presses in London for too long, and without your presence to show that it’s a worthwhile assembly there won’t be another for another long time.

14: Exmouth Market itself: cafés, bars, outdoor stalls and a fine independent bookshop (Clerkenwell Tales) next door to the book fair. Joseph Grimaldi, celebrated English clown, lived here between 1818 and 1828.

29: Madame Rosa, after reading your palm, has foreseen that at the book fair you will meet someone ‘who could be important in your life, / the future tells me / he could be the one.’ Or she. (I’m quoting from a Bill Manhire poem, so it must be true.)

33: There’ll be poets there from planet mainstream and poets from planets that do exist but whose discovery has never been recognised by the Royal Astronomical Society. The Poetry Wars: think of this event as the equivalent of that Christmas 1914 occasion when when the Tommies and the Boches clambered out of their trenches, dropped their rifles and played football.

34: There is no VAT on books. Yet.

41: To hear an early-autumn chorus of 30 poets reading from their work throughout the day.

57: If you think any event larger than than a one-off book launch has to have corporate resources and/or Arts Council money behind it but would like to believe otherwise, then come and believe.

99, 100 and 101: Michael Horovitz. From even before the 1965 Albert Hall reading (Ferlinghetti, Corso, Burroughs, Logue, Horovitz et al, and an audience of 7,000), he has carried the New Departures and Poetry Olympics torch through to today. Legend. On stage at 11 a.m.

293, 408 and 666: Because there’ll be books at the fair you won’t come across elsewhere. Because a book in the hand at the fair is worth six in the post from a rainforest in South America. Because you’re worth it.

Twinkle, twinkle

2011-09-17T09:36:00.003+01:00

This week the online Guardian carried a review not of one of the books, but of CBe – here. ‘A brilliantly idiosyncratic operation . . . some truly dazzling books’ – that, from the come-on line at the top, may have been written by the sub-ed rather than John Self, who wrote the piece itself, but you get the flavour. Do I read reviews of my own work? Of course I don’t. Do I let them go to my head? Of course I do.

A new online review of D. Nurkse’s Voices over Water – ‘this excellent book, being full of startling images and crisp language . . . one of the most consistently satisfying collections I have read this year’.

On editing (or not)

2011-09-15T21:07:00.001+01:00

‘Impeccably researched, written in an accessible, lively and lucid style, with useful appendices, notes, and bibliography, this is a gem of a book which will delight the scholar and the general reader alike’ – that’s from the most recent review of the book by Tony Lurcock that CBe published late last year.

CBe doesn’t, as a rule, publish non-fiction. The main reason why this one got through is because I like Tony Lurcock’s writing: lucid, yes, and with wit. A large number of non-fiction books aren’t written nearly so well, because their authors are not, primarily, writers – they are, first, academics, or TV presenters or whatever. And they need editing. Not just the line-by-line stuff but the major structural work too.

Once upon a time (the 1980s) I worked for Time-Life Books, which published up-market, heavily illustrated non-fiction. Each chapter in each book was commissioned from a freelance writer (and generously paid for: more money for a few thousand words than many novelists now get paid as an advance for a whole book), whose research was guided by a specialist academic consultant. When the copy came in, it was edited by the volume editor; and then by the series editor; and then by the European editor-in-chief; and then by an editor in America. Each of those editors could, and often did, ask for re-writes. The final text may have been a bit flattened out, but editing, however expensive, was a clearly recognised priority (there were others; I had a drinks cabinet in my office, restocked every week).

That amount of editing doesn’t exist now, anywhere. There are exceptions, there are fine editors who work with authors through draft after draft, but there are many books from whose opening paragraphs you can deduce the background scenario: the book is announced to the trade with a fixed publication date, the manuscript comes in late and the time factor reduces editing to a cosmetic process, not an organic part of the making of the book. (On my desk I have a book, not a CBe one, whose Word file came in on 7 September and that has to be copy-edited, typeset, proofread, corrected and sent to the printer on 20 September. It will happen.)

And the point? Not nostalgia for any golden age. (The Time-Life routine was over-egged, a bureaucracy, each editor editing for the next one above.) But no sympathy for publishers complaining about poor sales unless they’ve put everything they can not just into the packaging but into the words too.

Tuesday

2011-09-13T18:33:00.003+01:00

All over London there are rooms with tottering piles of boxes of books (a revolution waiting to happen). A fair proportion of the books are by Michael Horovitz. Today he, I and Tuesday – that’s her with Michael in the picture –contribruted to this distribution of poetry, loading up the car first at the Barbican and then at Central Books (where the photo was taken, at the delivery door) in Hackney Wick and and offloading boxes at various points on the journey back west. Many of the rooms piled high with boxes are up four flights of stairs. This publishing game isn’t just deskwork, oh no. It was a good day, a day that had started with me waking late in the middle of dream in which I wasn’t just looking after a herd of cows but teaching them for GCSE Drama, and before I left (but who would then milk them?) we had to perform in front of the examiners.

‘He’s still alive, I think’

2011-09-11T21:48:00.003+01:00

Lucian Freud died in July this year.

‘It’s just a picture, really it’s of a leaf or a few leaves, nothing more. It’s kept here in the Allan Ramsay School of Drawing and it’s by one of your English artists, by a man called Lucian Freud. And it gets me . . . There’s no tricks about it. No shit, d’you know? It’s just a few leaves, and it fascinates me because when you’ve seen it you feel you’ve never looked at a leaf before.’
‘You mean it’s realistic?’
‘No. I mean it’s true . . . I know nothing about the man, but he’s still alive, I think. And someone once said of him, “He’s got a long, unblinking stare.” If I were an artist I’d like them to say that about me.’

The above is from James Kennaway’s The Cost of Living Like This, which I’m re-reading. That novel was published in 1969, the year after Kennaway died at the age of forty. Of course it’s out of print now; Canongate have an omnibus edition of three of Kennaway’s short novels, but really they should be doing more than that. There are many things this post could be about, but first, Kennaway. From Frederick Raphael’s introduction to The Cost: ‘He refused to to make mere literature out of living experience (not his necessarily, but his time’s). He forced life into the page; savour his dialogue and you will feel the barbs still in it, the poison no less than the poise. Watch his characters and you would swear that they were struggling to get off the page.’ Later: ‘The reader may, if he can remain aloof (which I doubt), amuse himself by trying to make cuts in The Cost of Living Like This. I doubt if it’s possible to excise more than, say, a dozen lines.’ Kennaway – ex-soldier, professional (he also wrote screenplays) – could write.

The quoted conversation takes place in Glasgow and is between Mozart (underpaid clarinet-playing football referee) and Christabel, wife of the dying Julian, who is having a tortuous affair with a 19-year-old swimmer (Kennaway specialised in triangles). They never see the Freud painting because the Allan Ramsay college is being occupied by protesting students; the protest turns violent, and someone dies in a fire. I’ve tried to find out which Freud painting Mozart is talking about, but I don’t know. It’s not the one above. (I did discover that after a tiny portrait of Francis Bacon was stolen in Berlin in 1988, Freud allowed its reproduction only in black-and-white; and that another Freud portrait of Bacon sold earlier this year for £23 million.)

I first saw Lucian Freud’s paintings around the time Kennaway was writing, in the city art gallery in Leeds, and I felt like Mozart does. Late teens. Reading rather than looking at art, but these connected. The stark, focused intensity. Always there’s the matter of timing in the reception of art, both historical (a couple of years earlier or later, Osborne’s Look Back in Anger wouldn’t have been the same thing) and personal. Freud went on to become celebrated above all as the painter of flesh, the naked body, but for me this wasn’t it at all, it didn’t matter whether the bodies were clothed or unclothed, it was more to do with isolation and that ‘long, unblinking stare’, and the later Freuds, though I admire them deeply, never had the same impact on me as those early ones in Leeds.

I, and the times – I in the times – have moved on. I still occasionally respond to art, writing, with the same shock of recognition (not necessarily of something I know) as I did in Leeds, but it takes something different: connection rather than isolation, perhaps; blinking, not unblinking. But Kennaway still does it. The opening lines of The Cost of Living Like This: ‘They were painting the gothic corridors of railway hotel when the economist arrived. It was about six o’clock in the evening, early in May, which is no time to die, and it had been raining heavily.’ The first chapter – 42 pages – is a wonder. The other 15 chapters take up just 150-odd pages. It’s one of those novels that, when you stand back, looks to have been artfully constructed, but while you’re reading it makes itself up as it goes along.

Aldeburgh prize shortlist

2011-09-06T13:20:00.002+01:00

Autumn, season of lists. Nancy Gaffield’s Tokaido Road, already shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize, has been shortlisted for the 2011 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.

CBe is not a poetry press. It’s a small press that publishes some poetry alongside other books, mostly fiction. Since November 2007, when the first books were published, the list has included just six poetry titles, and just two of those were first collections. But both those two first collections – J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical and Nancy Gaffield’s Tokaido Road – can boast the following: Poetry Book Society recommendations, shortlistings for the Forward First Collection Prize, shortlistings for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize (Morgan’s book won that prize in 2009).

Nothing there to generalise from, but (allow me) two observations. First, the convention whereby a poet proceeds to first collection through an accumulation of poems in magazines (a convention backed up by the advice given on many writing courses and by the submissions guidelines of many publishers) is just that, a convention. It’s not a rule. Morgan had published nothing prior to Natural Mechanical; nor, at the time I first read her collection, had Gaffield (she’s since had poems in a Children in Need anthology, in the online magazine The Bow-Wow Shop and in the print magazines Fourteen and Magma).

Second, the decision earlier this year by Arts Council England to cut regular funding to the Poetry Book Society and the Poetry Trust (who administer the Aldeburgh prize) is a disaster. CBe and similar small presses do not have the resources to make new work widely known; both the PBS and the PT do perform this role, and by cutting their funding ACE is preventing good new work from finding the readers it deserves.

As a PS, see here for a new blog review of CBe’s bilingual edition of Francis Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic.

Jacques Robinson

2011-09-05T17:14:00.001+01:00

‘Less filling’ – weight-watchers’ edition.

‘A man walked into a bank . . .’

2011-09-05T08:50:00.000+01:00

At the weekend I wandered around town a bit, leaving flyers and the occasional poster for the book fair in what seemed appropriate places. Lord knows if it’ll do any good. I’ve noticed that people – well, not all people – tend not to see what’s in front of them; they see instead what they expect to see. But I stumbled across a tiny second-hand bookshop in which I found a proof copy of George Barker’s In Memory of David Archer, copyright 1973 but, printed on the cover, ‘publication date not settled’. Lunch in a café where there was notice promising 10 per cent off if I told the man behind the counter a joke (not rude, not racist) which made him laugh. I told him one that was in the JC column on the back page of the TLS a week or so back, and got a salt beef sandwich for around £2. In another second-hand shop I bought a purple, more aubergine really, velvet jacket, I’ve no idea why, except that it fitted and the mood was on me. And in another café I bumped into the man who turns up once or twice a year on my doorstep selling his poetry pamphlets. I told him the joke from the TLS and he laughed too but he didn’t offer me a discount. I’ve always meant to ask him how many he sells, and have felt awkward about it: asking about sales figures, like asking about someone’s salary or sexual history, feels intrusive, because numbers alone are stark without some surrounding context to take the edge off them. Today I asked, in a roundabout way. He told me he’s heard of publishers who print a run of as few as 350 copies, and he grinned. Though what he saves on postage he probably spends on shoe leather, I don’t think he does badly.

Fergus Allen at 90

2011-09-03T09:09:00.001+01:00

Congratulations and the very best wishes to Fergus Allen, who is 90 today.

There’s an interview with Fergus Allen in PN Review earlier this year in which Joanna Blachnio cannot resist a brief description of the man himself – ‘scintillating with wit, dressed in canary-yellow corduroy trousers and white trainers’ – and opening with talk about peacocks: ‘The first one just strayed down our garden path one day,’ her host explains. ‘A neighbour thought it was sad he didn’t have a mate, got him a white pea-hen – and the pair soon began to hatch young ones all over the place. Now we have only one, simultaneously the son and grandson of the first peacock.’

Fergus Allen’s first collection was published by Faber in 1993, when he was seventy-two; two more Faber collections followed, then one with Dedalus, and most recently Before Troy from CBe in 2010. ‘Allen writes poetry that is limpid, very subtle and marvellously wise,’ says William Boyd, and if that makes him sound too much like a venerable elder I’ll add that the poetry is written with, and offers, enormous fine-tuned pleasure. From Before Troy, here’s ‘Musselburgh’:

I think it was Musselburgh where I confronted,
Or was confronted by, that girl with the long hair,
Soft brown and waving gently to her shoulders.
She stood behind the counter, hidden to breast height
By glass cases displaying soaps and toiletries,
The air scented with synthetic attar of roses.
When I asked for aspirin or something like,
She restated the question in a local accent,
Looking at me as she did so with a gaze
So unwavering, calm and disregarding
Of the niceties of social intercourse
That my headache or whatever it was
Ceased to exist or at any rate to matter,
And that day’s issue of my soul was soaked up
By the absorbent blotting paper of her retinas.

There’s a line, a line and a half, that was batted back and forth so often during proofs that I couldn’t swear on – on what? why not this very book – that the printed version accords with Fergus’s final decision; I believe it does, but I believe that he believes it doesn’t, but I also believe that his recall of the final decision reverts to a version previously discarded (though of course there’s no reason why he shouldn’t go back to it). So much artfulness to make the thing seem artless. To settle the matter, please buy a copy from the website, to edge us towards a reprint in which we can print exactly, or a little more exactly, what he intended.

A poem from Before Troy is included in the 2011 Forward Book of Poetry. Fergus Allen will be reading at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival at the start of November.

Add to cart

2011-09-01T10:53:00.003+01:00

The revised CBe website is now up. It’s not singing-and-dancing, but there are tweaks: each book has its own page, special offers, that stuff. I’d like to sell more of these books; I am not, by temperament, a salesman; the site feels to me OK.

I am, of course, inordinately proud of the books. (I hadn’t realised, before starting this thing, that a publisher can be more simply proud than an author; the author is always dogged by that ‘but it could have been even better’ feeling.) In the past year CBe has published three poetry books: one is on the Forward Prize shortlist, one is on the Forward First Collection Prize shortlist and has a PBS Recommendation, a poem from the third is in the Forward anthology and the author is reading at Aldeburgh in November. Previous: McKitterick Prize (best first novel by a writer aged over 40) in 2008; Aldeburgh Poetry Prize 2009; shortlisting for a European poetry in translation prize; other shortlistings. Christopher Reid’s The Song of Lunch was broadcast by the BBC as a TV film with Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman; Nicky Singer’s Knight Crew was staged as a youth opera at Glyndebourne, with a BBC series of programmes about that.

Some good breaks as well as books. But given that I had no expectation that this adventure would continue beyond its first four books in late 2007, and that I don’t publish to win prizes, the above paragraph is bizarre.

There are occasions when prizes can be helpful to a small publisher but as a reader and writer I shy away. (CBe publishes mainly fiction, but I don’t think I’ve read a single novel even shortlisted for the Booker, never mind the winners, since Coetzee’s Disgrace.) Likewise many other aspects of the present book culture. Books as show business (the Edinburgh Book Festival is a cattle market, not even an efficient one; I sent some books up last year for a reading by a CBe writer and they lost them). Writing as a professional career (with courses and qualifications and all that grooming). The idea (lurking behind the funding mechanisms of the Arts Council and the mission-statement business-speak of public arts organisations) of literature as being ‘good for you’. [Insert Bolaño quote here.*] Not to mention the bland indifference – it’s not active dislike and it’s nothing personal, it’s just the standard behaviour of institutions grown too big for their roots – to small presses shown by the big retailers, the broadsheets and other arbiters of what gets attention.

None of those things has anything to do with my personal reading and writing – of which CBe is an extension by other means. Some engagement with the mad world is of course necessary, if the books aren’t just going to moulder in boxes, but CBe will stay small. (The entire team consists of printer Chris, down the road; distributor Bill, at Central Books; web-man Alan; and me. No designers (except for two of the covers), no typesetters, no publicity or marketing folk, no envelope-stuffers. No receptionist, no nightwatchman. No water cooler. No spreadsheets. And no external funding; I’ve applied twice to the Arts Council for sums of under £5K and twice been refused.)

Fortunately, books are not expensive to produce. Compared to films, obviously, but compared to pretty well all the other arts too. (I used to wish I was an artist, mainly because I wanted a studio – a den, a playroom – and now I’m glad I escaped that.) But to keep the show on the road, I do need to sell them too. Off you go to the website. Press the ‘Add to cart’ button more times than you really want to, and give me a good reason to get away from this desk and join the queue at the post office.

* Bolaño: ‘Writers today . . . are no longer young men of means unafraid to inveigh against the norms of respectable society, much less a bunch of misfits, but products of the middle and working classes determined to scale the Everest of respectability, hungry for respectability . . . They pursue it desperately. And in order to attain it they really have to sweat. They have to sign books, smile, travel to unfamiliar places, smile, make fools of themselves on celebrity talk shows, keep on smiling, never, never bite the hand that feeds them, participate in literary festivals and reply good-humoredly to the most moronic questions, smile in the most appalling situations, look intelligent, control population growth, and always say thank you.’

‘The Year of Reading Dangerously’

2011-08-29T11:37:00.000+01:00

See here for a new blog review of Markson’s This Is Not a Novel. But don’t go there for just that. In January the blog-writer announced that ‘Over the next year I’m going to explore the world of experimental fiction. Some of the writers will be well known, and others more obscure. Hopefully some new names will surface. While I intend to read many of the “classic” experimental novels, I have no intention of attempting to be exhaustive . . . At times it will be difficult, but – who knows? – I might enjoy it.’

He/she (I have no idea who 1streader is) has been busy, and the enjoyment level has been pretty high. In the past two months alone there are reviews of books by Enrique Vita-Matas, Robert Coover, Quim Monzo, Jean Echenzo, G-O Chateaureynard and others. Many of these reviews are Lezardish, in the sense that they make me want to read those books myself, and soon.

Mrs Dalloway

2011-08-27T14:33:00.004+01:00

Earlier this summer I read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, for the first time. It is – well, during the days I was reading it the world was a slightly different place, experienced more acutely; it’s right up there. A couple of weeks ago I picked up a second-hand copy of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which is structured around three women – VW during the early stages of writing Mrs D, a modern-day (1998) Mrs D, a woman in the late 1940s who is reading Mrs D. Early in the novel there’s a glimpse of a film star who may or may not be Meryl Streep. Yesterday, passing a rental store, I took out the film of The Hours (with Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore).

Layer upon layer. The Hours (the novel; also the original working title of Mrs D) is good, without reaching the heights of Mrs D, but that would be expecting too much. The Hours (the film) is also good, in a number of ways better than the novel. The extras on the DVD included something called ‘commentary’; usually I don’t bother with the extras, but this one was more than worthwhile: the director Stephen Daldry and the novelist Michael Cunningham talk over what feels to be almost a complete re-screening of the film, much of it with the volume off but with the sound brought up when they want to point to a particular scene. There was some engaging talk about the incidentals: about the visual leitmotifs (the blue cloth of a dressing gown, the breaking of eggs in a bowl); about the reaction shots of a very young child actor (some of them captured by Daldry telling him the story of Jack and the Beanstalk); about the 1920s steam train which appears briefly in a scene with Virginia and Leonard Woolf on the platform of Richmond station (the train was brought over from the Isle of Man; the scene was filmed at Loughborough). More interestingly, there was discussion of the changes the screenwriter (David Hare) had made in bringing the novel into a different medium: a scene added, a scene dropped, dialogue cut when it was found that action or expression could convey the point better, a scene between A and B in which in the novel A breaks down but in which in the film it’s B who breaks down.

Mrs Dalloway is a desert island book. Neither the novel The Hours nor the film The Hours for me make that rank, possibly because of their deference to the original Mrs D, neither being wholly its own thing; and because, for all the intelligence with which they are made, the structural seams show through, you can see how they’ve been put together. But the whole sequence – from Mrs D to contemporary novel to film – is enthralling. And the several versions of Mrs D are of course entirely appropriate to Virginia Woolf’s conception of character as a fluid, unstable thing. (Two sentences from a Yehuda Amichai short story on the stream-of-consciousness thing: ‘If we are trained well, we can do three or four things at the same time: ride in a car, cry, and look through a window; eat, love, think. And all the time consciousness passes like an elevator among the floors.’)

On blurbs

2011-08-23T11:08:00.002+01:00

Blurb – it’s not a nice word. Neither are they nice things to write: you’re trying to give both a summary and the flavour of the book and you’re trying to sell it (blurbs are essentially advertising, a sub-genre with its own rather tedious conventions), and this is a lot to do in a very few words.

Who needs ’em anyway? I mean, blurbs considered as the para or two on the back cover or the inside flap. Readers buying online see just an image of the front of the book, not the back, so don’t see the blurb at all; they get blurby things when they scroll down, but these can be configured quite separately from the book itself. And if I’m browsing in a bookshop, all I really want to know is whether the author can write, can turn a good sentence, can make me want more. I’m interested in the thing itself, not the advertising. Almost every unpremeditated purchase I’ve made in a bookshop has been made because I’ve flicked through the pages and found a paragraph, a passage of dialogue, a few lines of a peom (that’s how I constantly type it, and then have to go back and correct; ‘avaialble’ is another one, I stumble over my fingers, but this is for another riff, another post) I want more of.

Puffs from other writers, yes. And quotes from reviews, fine. There may be a name, a place, that I trust and am drawn in by. I’m nattering here just about blurbs. And given that the CBe covers already have a puritan bent, dispensing with (eschewing: there’s a word) images (there’s the occasional exception), I’m thinking of dispensing with blurbs too. Just, on the back of the cover, some lines quoted from what you’re going to get more of, if you like them and buy.

Some years ago, when I was chained to a Faber desk, among other daft things I was doing was processing the editor’s blurb on a book through to proofs (‘baselines’, did we call them?), and I half-seriously thought of instituting an annual in-house prize for the most ludicrous blurb. ‘Tour de force’ was vastly overused. One of my favourites included: ‘Her characters are short but sturdy.’ And now I’m footloose, the idea still holds. An annual Crap Blurb prize. Along the lines of the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex prize, and the Bookseller/Diagram prize for the most ridiculous title. I think this will run. I hereby and herewith copyright and trademark the whole thing.

White chair pink chair

2011-08-22T10:54:00.003+01:00

& cat with matching tongue.

Googling CBe throws up a mix of items. Here is someone happy that a book ordered from the CBe website at 13:51 on one day arrived the following morning. We aim to please. Here is the Telegraph round-up of the Forward Prize shortlistees reproduced on The Lyre blog; between the item as it appears in the Telegraph and this version the words ‘the admirably wayward small press’ have crept in to describe CBe.

Here is a Slovenian item on the occasion of Urska Zupanec, the translator of Miha Mazzini’s The German Lottery (to be published by CBe next February) being appointed, as far as I can make out, Slovenian cultural representative to the European Union in Brussels. Working the other way – i.e., into Slovenian – Zupanec has also translated Simon Armitage, Craig Raine, Margaret Atwood. If she has time to spare, the Google ‘translate this page’ facility could do with her services: ‘The balance between different roles in life and help her hunt mainly yoga.’

Amazon marketplace mysteries

2011-08-16T19:03:00.002+01:00

Athough I don’t, as mentioned before, subscribe to Amazon’s laughably entitled Advantage scheme for small publishers (because they wouldn’t pay me more than 40 per cent of the cover price, because I’d have to pay them an annual fee for the privilege of letting them do this, etc), I do sell the CBe books on the marketplace pages (click used & new and you’ll find them). But so do others. Where do these places get their copies from? Where, for example, does the ‘collectible’ copy of Days in Nights in W12 come from, ‘signed and inscribed by the author’? I’ve spoken to Jack; he has no memory of doing any signing and inscribing. It’s possible he was drunk at the time.

There are strange items on those marketplace pages. For example: a single new copy (or is it? The seller doesn’t seem too sure: ‘Almost like new’) of Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, ed. James Knowlson and John Pilling, for sale at £500,000.00. Plus £2.80 delivery.

‘Les chapeaux dansants de Napoleon’

2011-08-15T12:52:00.002+01:00

Three Good Things a-coming up:

1) The book fair – 24 September in Exmouth Market, London – is coming together. Twenty-two presses, readings through the day . . . See here. The event of the season. You wouldn’t miss Ladies’ Day at Ascot, would you, or Saturday at Lord’s for the first Test of the summer? This neither.

2) D. Nurkse, author of Voices over Water, shortlisted for the Forward Prize, will be in town in early October. At least one reading is being planned.

3) The revised CBe website – nothing outrageously different but a separate page for each book and special offers and the like – should be up and running in early September.

More details of all the above in the next newsletter. If you’re not on the mailing list and would like to receive that, sign up at the foot of the website home page or email me.

‘Les chapeaux dansants’, by the way, is something odd I made back in my ship-bottling days. There's a wee electric motor inside, and when you press the switch on the front the hats jig up and down.

That feeling again

2011-08-08T11:50:00.001+01:00

‘After David Cameron spoke to Theresa May, the home secretary, and Tim Godwin, acting commissioner of the Metropolitan police, about the riot from his holiday villa in Italy, Downing Street issued a statement saying: “There is no justification for the aggression the police and the public faced, or for the damage to property.” May echoed the words from No 10, saying: “Such disregard for public safety and property will not be tolerated.”’
The above from one of the continuous Guardian reports yesterday on the riots in London.

Nor, of course, is there any justification for the spit-in-your-face contempt for the public good shown by the bankers and the politicians who colluded with them, and the damage to the economy they caused. Nor should disregard for the humdrum daily hardship of most people in this country be tolerated.

Despite the UK being one of the top ten richest countries in the world (from Wiki, whichever list you choose), there is more debt than there is money, anywhere, to repay that debt; the money to repay has to come from ‘growth’, because that's the system we’ve subscribed to, and which has worked, on and off, for a few decades; but the current level of debt, even if there is the necessary ‘growth’ – which there won’t be, because no one is putting in any money to create it – will not be paid off either in my lifetime or in my children’s lifetime.

A few decades ago, during one of those periods when the US and Russia were ramping up the rhetoric, I remember walking down the street and looking at the normality of daily life and thinking this is all an illusion, the only reality is the Bomb. Not, really, ‘thinking’ that, but feeling it, a horrible kind of numbness. These days I’m having a similar feeling.

40 years on

2011-08-05T17:32:00.002+01:00

This week's TLS reviews Andrew Barrow’s ‘beautifully organised, thoughtful and resonant’ memoir Animal Magic along with Jonathan Barrow’s The Queue, the latter published by CBe this year four decades after its writing and the author’s death. (The former book includes excerpts from the latter; the two were also mentioned together in a recent TLS Freelance column by Hugo Williams.) The reviewer, Paul Binding, acknowledges that Jonathan’s The Queue ‘is difficult to define. Picaresque encounters, recounted at speed, include bizarre scatological episodes and much random violence. Unsurprisingly, Andrew was unable to find a publisher for it, attributing his failure to the work’s daring and originality . . . Yet [the] novel’s final sentences prove that he possessed and could express compassion.’

The Book Machine

2011-07-31T20:41:00.002+01:00

From Kenneth Patchen, Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (1945):

‘Would you like to see my laboratory?’
‘I’d like to very much,’ I said.
He led me into a room which I’d like you to look up a description of in some treatise on the scientific.
‘This is a machine that writes books,’ the Inventor said. ‘See these buttons – Description, Characters, Setting, Plot, Type – Well, first you press the Type key – that’s type of book – All right, you want a Light Novel. Set where? New England, OK. “Light Novel” under Type. “New England” under Setting. You like nice characters or meanies? Meanies, eh? We push down Characters . . . “Sophisticated.” Description - Let’s make it, “Not too well done.” OK. Plot – “Mama Don’t Love Papa No More.” We’re all set now. [. . .] It’s really a simple matter of ascending progressions; until we get back to one set of people out of the millions of possibles, one house, one chair, one particular incest, adultery, rape, or talk around a cocktail table about them . . .’
‘And what do you do with it?’ I asked him.
‘Why, write books of course,’ Mr Wan answered. ‘Would you be surprised to know that about ninety percent of the stuff you see reviewed was written by this machine?’
‘Even in the Times!’
‘Over there I've got a machine that writes the reviews for the Times –’
‘For the Times Book Section?’
‘Sure. Why, before long I’ll invent something that will even read them.’

Reach – Boris; OBO

2011-07-30T12:15:00.001+01:00

Reach being a term used by the Arts Council – something to do with getting the books out there, finding new readers. Boris being Boris. OBO – oh come now, even Virginia Woolf would have known this one: ‘But cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important. He could never help reading about cricket’ (Peter Walsh in Mrs Dalloway). Over By Over: the continuous online live commentary on the Test match on the Guardian website, consistently the most-viewed item on the site during the daytime when the cricket’s on.

Boris: as noted in previous post, the Mayor of London spent his Tube journey between Shepherd’s Bush and Chancery Lane on Thursday engrossed in the CBe edition of David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel. (Will he have to declare it as a gift on some public register? Hope so.)

OBO: Jennie Walker’s 24 for 3 is no longer a CBe book, it’s now published by Bloomsbury, but still, it takes place over the five days of a home Test between England and India that starts on a Friday, so I sent a copy to the OBO team and it got some chat (‘seems to be a bodice-ripper set at a Test match . . . essential summer reading for all OBO fans’) and Nick Lezard popped by during over 17 with a link to his original review and business was done on Amazon.

Next: Lichtenberg & The Little Flower Girl to Interflora. Only Joking to the British Association of Accordion-players.

Boris reads Markson

2011-07-28T15:19:00.001+01:00

Walking down the escalator this morning at Shepherd’s Bush tube station, I overheard the words ‘beautiful woman’ and ‘Shepherd’s Bush’, turned, and there was Boris Johnson with a couple of aides. Down on the platform I cursed myself for not having a copy of Days and Nights in W12 with me – and today there’s a new review of that on John Self’s Asylum – but I did have a box of Marksons and another of Nurkses, which I was taking over to Hackney Wick. I pressed a copy of This Is Not a Novel upon Boris. He asked me if I was Markson; I told him that Markson died last year. We travelled on, he engrossed in Markson, me in my book (James Salter, since you ask). At Chancery Lane he got off. As he fumbled with his backpack and his bike helmet, another man began talking with him – some other nutter, some other book.

Not the Poetry Society

2011-07-27T13:50:00.003+01:00

‘Small publishers are the backbone of our creative body and now there is a great need for them to come together to consider survival strategies.’ – Benjamin Zephanaiah, June 2011

Let’s have some good news. Let’s gather 20-plus of the smaller poetry presses in one place and have readings through the day and get anyone even slightly interested to come and buy the books. It will happen: Saturday, 24 September, Exmouth Market Hall, EC1R 4QE. Draft flyer above.

I talked yesterday with the Poetry Book Society, who nearer the time will use their mailing lists to help publicise the event. They suggested that we need a short, snappy TITLE for the event. (‘Poetry book fair’ being hardly the most thrilling come-on line.) I thought of Book Now some time ago, but that just led to confusion so it’s dropped. All suggestions welcome.

Cricket and infidelity

2011-07-25T20:29:00.003+01:00

Well, that was good. A day with the manuscript of Faber’s forthcoming Beckett: Collected Poems on my desk, and the Guardian’s OBO commentary on the final day of the first Test against India on my screen. It all fits. Result.

The next Test starts on Friday. If you need to bone up (is that really the right phrase?) – but really, no cricket knowledge is necessary – start with this: Jennie Walker’s 24 for 3: the five days of a home Test against India, starting on a Friday, as background to a woman between two men, each of whom knows more about the game than her. (‘Cricket and infidelity,’ said a complete stranger when I told him about the book: ‘two of my favourite pastimes.’)

This was one of the first CBe titles in November 2007; review to kill for from Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian; McKitterick Prize 2008 (best first novel by a writer over 40); now published by Bloomsbury.

Order from your friendly local independent bookshop. Or buy one of the present CBe titles from the website, write ‘24 for 3’ in the ‘instructions to merchant’ box that appears as you check through, and I’ll add in a copy of the US edition (of which I seem to have a bag-load) for free.

1913: Ho Chi Minh, Mae West, Madame Strindberg

2011-07-23T21:59:00.003+01:00

‘We rang for room service and the year 1913 answered.’– Khlebnikov

I first saw the above plaque years ago, and today came across it again. In my memory it’s on a different building, and the date is different, but still: Ho Chi Minh working in London at the Carlton Hotel in 1913.

(The Carlton, by the way, was founded by Cesar Ritz and the chef Auguste Escoffier with cash they’d skimmed off while working at the Savoy. ‘Ritz was implicated in the disappearance of over £3,400 of wine and spirits,’ says Wiki, quoting the DNB; in 1897 that was a lot of bottles. Ritz went on to open the Ritz hotels in Paris and then London.)

In 1968 the writer Gavin Young interviewed Mae West, who claimed that she stayed at the Carlton while starring in a show called Sex at the Haymarket Theatre, and while there she came across a kitchen porter called ‘Ho . . . Ho . . . Ho something . . . I know he had the slinkiest eyes though. We met in the corridor. We – well . . .’ Her voice, wrote Young, ‘trailed off in a husky sigh’.

The biographies state that Mae West’s Sex didn’t open on Broadway until 1926, by which time Ho was in China; and her first visit to Britain wasn’t until 1947. But I’m not letting that spoil a great story. If only the run of Sex had been a bit longer all capitalist/communist quarrels could have been settled in bed and the course of the 20th century might have been different.

Back to 1913: while Ho Chi Minh was kitchen-portering, a few streets away, in a basement just off Regent Street, a nightclub called The Cave of the Golden Calf was flourishing. Established in 1912 by Frida Strindberg (divorced from August in 1895), it had murals inspired by the Russian ballet, other art by Epstein and Wyndham Lewis, and a phallic motif designed by Eric Gill. Here’s Ford Madox Ford recalling that period: ‘There would be dinner, a theatre or a party, a dance. Usually a breakfast at four after that. Or Ezra and his gang carried me off to their night-club which was kept by Madame Strindberg, decorated by Epstein and situated underground . . . London was adorable then at four in the morning after a good dance. You walked along the south side of the park in the lovely pearl-grey coolness of the dawn . . . Then, as like as not, you turned into the house of someone who had gone before you from the dance to grill sausages and make coffee . . .’

1914: the club went bankrupt, war broke out and the century began in earnest.

Of the making of books

2011-07-17T11:43:00.004+01:00

I spent a couple of hours yesterday with a man who sent me some writing from prison a few months ago; he has been locked up for over two decades but will, if things go well, later this year re-enter the world as a free man. This is not a simple thing. There is the reason why he was put away; there is also his writing and his present way of dealing with the disaster of his life with a maturity I can only respect.

And on Friday I met in the street, by chance, Ken Garland, whom I haven’t seen for maybe a year. If you’re in the graphic design world, you may already know about him. If you’re not, start now: his website is here. I don’t think I know anyone who marries better, more seamlessly, seriousness about the things that matter and a sense of play. He designed the posters for the first CND Aldermaston march in 1962; in the late 60s and early 70s he designed wooden toys and board games for Galt Toys. He once told me of a speech he gave to a conference on play in education at the ICA: he took his children with him, and on the way there they gathered fallen leaves in bags, which during his speech were released and tossed around among the assembled academics.

For the past three years Ken has been putting out a continuing series of small books (three a year) of photographs: leaves (again), the stuff that washes up on beaches, graffiti in Brighton, fire hydrants, Mexican windows, Bangladeshi rickshaws . . . This year’s books will be mostly work by others, and there’ll be text as well as images. So far, these books have been sold from flyers mailed to his personal address list. I think something more can be done.

Go, little books

2011-07-14T12:35:00.003+01:00

The above CBe titles have been shortlisted for the 2011 Forward prizes – D. Nurkse’s Voices over Water for the best collection, Nancy Gaffield’s Tokaido Road for the best first collection. Huge congratulations to both authors. Both titles available direct from the website here. The shortlist game is hardly the main point, and anyone punching above their weight is liable at some point to get hit in a way that will hurt, but for today – well, this form of recognition for a tiny press operating from a desk in the living room, with no Arts Council support, feels no bad thing.

And this morning Yorkshire have just won against Worcestershire, only their second win in the county championship since the start of the season. Peter Walsh in Mrs Dalloway (which I’ve been reading this week: how could I have never read it before?): ‘. . . this interminable life. But cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important. He could never help reading about cricket.’

Parish news

2011-07-01T22:13:00.002+01:00

Yesterday was the day when I went to Oxford Brookes in the morning to receive recommendations on how CBe can Sell More Books. And I felt pretty happy: change! evolution! better & better! Today I’ve sobered up, and am thinking how much work.

I spent much of the afternoon chatting with Heathcote Williams, on the lame excuse of enticing a free poem out of him for the printed programme for the September book fair. If the name is not familiar, it should be: look him up. He has views; one of his recent poems has Obama and Hilary Clinton wanking to a video of Bin Laden being shot. A sunny afternoon, a kitchen that felt like home (books, heaps, every surface – covered with cards, drawings, messages – a palimspest), a leafy garden, and talk. I may have no income right now, but this was better.

The Slovenian writer and film-maker Miha Mazzini has won a Pushcart Prize for his first story to be published in a US magazine. He has written 23 books (including the all-time bestselling novel in the former Yugoslavia) and directed and written screenplays for films. His first book to be published in the UK, The German Lottery, will be published by CBe in February next year.

Meanwhile there are excerpts from Days and Nights in W12 currently being featured on the London Column. Go there. Buy.

Author & actress

2011-06-29T13:34:00.003+01:00

Tony Lurcock, the author of ‘Not So Barren or Uncultivated’: British Travellers in Finland 1760–1830, published by CBe a few months ago, with ‘British starlet’ (Daily Mail) Carey Mulligan. The occasion having something to do, Mr Lurcock tells me, and the second photo is designed to persuade me of this, with his Shakespearian expertise.

Shop window

2011-06-24T13:33:00.004+01:00

1 – new poems from Michael Glover, editor of The Bow-Wow Shop and art critic of the Independent, published by Savage Poets Collective, available here. Designed and typeset by CBe.

2 – three titles from Notting Hill Editions, available now. Five of the first seven NHE books have been typeset by CBe.

3 – three of the first four titles from And Other Stories, published this autumn. All typeset by CBe.

Any other publishers, new ones or old, needing typesetting, get in touch. Editing, typesetting, text design plus the occasional cover – this is my comfort zone. Getting out into the world and making a noise and selling books are not things in which I claim any expertise – which is why, next week, some kind consultant people at the Centre for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes will be giving me recommendations as to how I can Sell More Books. All the above have specialist marketing behind them; CBe, at present, doesn’t, but that needn’t stop you browsing the titles on the website and occasionally pushing the Buy Now button.

Cherries

2011-06-20T20:26:00.003+01:00

There are cherries, small ones, on the wild cherry tree in front of the terraced house where I live. (I say wild because because it wasn’t planted, it just came and rooted; as did the fig tree next to it, and there are figs too. Not edible yet.) On Saturday, courtesy of a near-neighbour who had booked tickets and then couldn’t use them, I saw The Cherry Orchard at the National, and oh, I could drown in Chekhov, and it barely matters which play: the talking at cross purposes, the not listening to what’s being said, the yearnings, the truth-telling (but there are as many truths as characters), the students with their absolute beliefs in a wonderful future, the opportunities there for the taking and wilfully passed by, the vodka and the samovar and the vastness of the land. Deep, serious, tear-inducing comedy. Ranyevskaya is centre stage, a fond and foolish woman. As Lear was a fond and foolish old man: in callous youth, sixth form, striking a pose, I once wrote an essay (‘King Lear, Kid Lear’) in which I argued that this sentimental, complacent, over-privileged old man deserved all he got. As if life was a thing of measurable cause and effect and just rewards. And then somewhere, in one of the lit crit books I was mugging up for A-level (G. Wilson Knight, Dover Wilson, Bonamy Dobree, EMW Tillyard, all those names; and the Polish man, Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary, who is dead now), I read that Lear isn’t like life, it is life. That set me back a bit.

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that there’s a short but good piece by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian in which he suggests that the tendency of the big prizes (he writes about art, but it applies to the books world too) ‘is to perpetuate the establishment taste of the day’.

Pamphlets

2011-06-14T10:37:00.003+01:00

Last night, a do at the British Library for the Michael Marks awards for poetry pamphlets. A pamphlet is something, anything – and that’s the joy of it – between a book and a photocopied A4 page: a dozen individual poems, a sequence, a thing that’s more artwork than text but is still poetry, a thing that’s made with passion and craft but which the lightest breeze can gust away. The awards provide, somewhat arbitrarily, which is the way of these things, some anchorage: look at these, before they vanish. And more than anchorage: £5,000 to a poet and the same to a publisher. There was a shortlist (brave faces required). The winning publisher this year is Crater Press. The winning poet is James McGonigle, whose pamphlet Cloud Pibroch is available from Mariscat and from the PBS. Cloud Pibroch is one of the best things I’ve read this year; it has the density and reach of a much longer publication; the writing, often within a single poem, is lyrical, funny, nimble, open to mystery.

I’ve been thinking about pamphlets; and about a friend’s remark that though he likes short stories he’s not too interested in book-length collections of short stories; and about doing, perhaps next year, a short series of prose pamphlets – each of which could be a single ‘story’ but need not really be a story, as that word is usually understood, at all.

‘Resignation leaves –– in turmoil’

2011-06-12T20:43:00.000+01:00

The final round of Have I Got News for You: filling in the blanks. The correct answer (the headline is from a newspaper I tripped over on the pavement yesterday) is the Rugby Football Union. The blank, in this case, not being the Poetry Society, from which – in case you hadn’t known, but why should you? Poetry-world admin doesn’t sell newspapers – the president, the director, the finance person, have all got out in recent days and weeks. And there’s curiosity, and more than that, in the poetry world, not least because, as Matthew Cain says in a recent Channel 4 blog post, ‘of all the arts, poetry is easily the one with the strongest sense of community’ (because it’s up against the wall? Because aside from whether that is true or not, that’s how it likes to define itself?).

I have no inside info; I don’t even have gossip. But what to me is a little bit interesting is that in the absence of hard fact, the speculation that fills the vacuum can become what a thing is about and start to influence what happens next. Some of the current speculation has the old guard (people my age) being self-protective in the face of the rising tide of a new generation (at ease with a range of things that were barely within the older generation’s experience: new technology, other ways of publishing than with Faber, public performance and the skills for that, creative writing courses that offer not just knowledge and ready-made structures in which you find your exemplary people but networks in which what you do is validated just by being part of them). There is always some institutional blockage to new talent: try getting new names through the ranks of broadsheet lit eds, Waterstone’s buyers and prize judging panels, for most of whom poetry still means Faber (a word I use as shorthand for mainstream conservatism, not that they don’t publish some very good things). On the other hand, people rarely divide neatly into two distinct camps. On the third hand, as the Poetry Society thing plays out, many (journalists not least) will see it in simple binary terms.

Meanwhile, Chris Hamilton-Emery, the Salt man, is posing on Facebook the idea of a British Academy of Poets and asking what do poets want done that such an organisation might do, and who do they want to be represented by. He refers to a US model (but the US is so different: even if only 0.01% of the population read poetry, that is so many more readers than here, and so much more sustenance for small presses). Wanting to answer him, I’m as confused as everyone else. Do I want more administrators? Do I want more people to know about and perhaps even read and buy more poetry books? Do I think that anything worthwhile really happens without madcap individuals making it happen? Would I like support to be available that enables those madcaps? No yes no yes. Questions are things poets are good at; answers, not.

Meanwhile, some lines in an email attachment, out of the blue: did I want to read more? That was J.O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical, which went on to win the 2009 Aldeburgh Prize, plus shortlistings for the Forward first book and others and reviews to kill for. Morgan had published nothing previously, even in the magazines, and if there’s an argument to be made for no public money to be spent on poetry at all you could start here – except that without the PBS (who gave the book a recommendation) and without the Poetry Trust (who administer the Aldeburgh), both of which have had their funding cut to zero by the Arts Council, the book would have sold 13 copies, or maybe 26. Now I’m typesetting his next book. For a tiny press, this is as good as it gets.

Meanwhile, the book fair idea is progressing. Saturday, 24 September, the market hall in Exmouth Market, London EC 1R 4QE. A dozen presses have committed; another ten or so are umming and erring. There’ll be a separate room, above where you buy books, for readings or whatever through the day. To get people in through the door, I’m going to need help – I sit at a desk, I can write and edit and design but that’s about my limit – and people have come forward. Young, with spark, and as seriously involved as anyone older with the language we use to write and wonder what we’re doing here, and I trust them absolutely. If the Russian avant-gardists turn up – I’ve heard about them: they strip off and pee on stage – we’ll cope. We might join them.

Sentence of the day, from the Observer, Tony Blair: ‘Sometimes it feels strange not to be prime minister.’ This afternoon I had this niggling feeling of dissatisfaction I couldn’t put into words, and now I can.

circa 1968

2011-06-11T14:02:00.004+01:00

There was a party for Jonathan Barrow’s The Queue last week. Jonathan Barrow died in a car crash in 1970, very shortly after writing The Queue, aged twenty-two. The party was most generously funded by Andrew Barrow, Jonathan’s brother – who has shepherded this book through the decades, through at least a couple of almost-publications, and has written in detail about it and about Jonathan in Animal Magic – and hosted by Martin Barrow, another of the brothers, and his wife Noriko. The party was, after far too long, a celebration of this book. Among those gathered were Andrew’s children and my own and many with long memories; one came with photographs of Jonathan in the late 1960s, some of which Andrew had never seen before; two of those are above. Jonathan was as an artist as well as a writer (and hotel worker, advertising copywriter, brilliant parodist, etc); some of his drawings are in The Queue, others in Animal Magic.

Amazon.com: the left hand and the right hand

2011-06-07T17:35:00.001+01:00

This was news to me: amazon.com in the US offers generous grants to ‘nonprofit author and publisher groups that share our obsession with fostering the creation, discussion and publication of books’. A list of around 50 organisations they support is here. News of the most recent grant is here. And amazon.co.uk? What’s stopping them?

Can Dawkins teach?

2011-06-06T23:40:00.004+01:00

‘A group of well-known academics are setting up a private college in London which will charge students £18,000 a year in tuition fees’ – the opening line of a piece by Terry Eagleton in the Guardian today – and there’s a hoo-ha about it, of course, because not only does it touch on some topical politics (student protests against the fees; what and who are universities for) but there are culture-celebs involved (i.e., the names the lit festivals all want: Dawkins, Grayling, Ricks) and there are fearsome sums of money. Add some sex and this will run.

Can Dawkins, Grayling, Ricks et al teach? A different skill entirely from writing books, from being an ‘academic’. Do they have any teaching qualifications? I’m just asking. I’m curious, but not to the tune of having to pay £18K a year to find out.

Sometime in recent decades it was decreed that tertiary education should be available to far more people than before (good). Sometime in recent decades the whole education system became so infected by business-management models that it has largely become a production line (bad). Sometime in recent decades the basic model of learning – a relationship, intimate and mutually challenging, between teacher and student – has become something that happens, if it happens at all, despite rather than because of the institution in which it takes place. The new private college is one response to this. The flak it’s attracting is largely to do with the fees, with the perception that on-the-whole generally respected and gifted leftish people are selling out; but what’s really depressing is the lack of other alternative education models being tested, ones that aren’t essentially businesses. (Plenty of other depressing things too: the continuing and largely unchallenged privileges of the public schools and faith schools; the billions spent on the Olympics, a three-week event, contrasting with the meanness towards education in a country that is still one of the richest in the world (6th out of 181 in the first GDP listing on Wiki)).

I write this because today I talked with a Royal Literary Fund man about my application to become a RLF fellow – which involves going into a college for two days a week to talk to students about their writing. You have a room; it’s one-to-one; a student knocks on the door and comes in and you talk to them about how best they can put what they want to say into the form of an essay (or poem or story or any other form, it doesn’t have to be course-work), about how they can discover through writing what they didn’t even know they wanted to say. It doesn’t cost the colleges a penny, it doesn’t cost the tax-payer a penny, it doesn’t cost the students a penny. It’s brilliant.

D Nurkse

2011-06-04T14:58:00.001+01:00

There should, of course, be a literary journal with a vast readership that reviews every single CBe publication and tells its readers their lives are not worth living if they don’t buy these books. In the absence of that, it’s a lottery, and 99 per cent of the books I send out for review end up, I guess, propping up the wobbly desks of literary editors or on the new-&-used pages of Amazon. But today the sun is shining and the Guardian pays attention to D. Nurkse’s Voices over Water:

‘Nearly all the poems that make up this narrative collection are written in the voices of a married couple born in Estonia who, sometime after the Russian revolution, leave for a new life in an isolated region of western Canada. The opening monologues, set in Europe, explore the rhythms of a traditional life disrupted more and more brutally by wider political events. These poems frequently swerve into the frightening and mysterious; in “The Hidden Fighters” the couple lose their way travelling through heavy forest – “Then we looked and saw the carcasses of butchered deer / lashed to the treetops and painted chalk white / like clumps of snow.” Nurkse's remarkable devotion to the particular and sensitivity to place make these poems compelling. The book reaches its poignant finale through lovingly conjured attention to detail, when one of the couple’s grandchildren attempts to connect with a fragmented inheritance: “All there is from that world is a locket / showing the infant Mozart playing silence / on a tiny clavichord, behind cracked glass.”’ (Charles Bainbridge)

Groundhog day

2011-05-29T15:45:00.001+01:00

– I mean in the sense derived from the film with Bill Murray, a day going through an experience again and again until you find a way through, over or under it. Yesterday was one such: the blog post below, written yesterday afternoon, about not having written a poem for a decade; then in the evening three people, in separate conversations, all quoting to me lines from poems that I’d forgotten having written; then discovering that, also yesterday, George Szirtes happened to have picked up (for £1, in a Cambridge second-hand bookshop) and read a poetry collection I published in 1993.

George says some generous things. So did the three people (all far younger than me; I’m not sure why this is relevant, but it feels so) I spoke with in the evening. Uncomfortable encounters. I felt I was being complimented on something I’d done by accident, for which the responsibility was not mine. It was a long time ago (‘but that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead’). I can see what’s being done in those poems, I can even see that on occasion it’s being done quite well, but whoever is doing those things is not someone I’m now especially fond of.

The account I gave below of stopping writing is a simplification; there were other factors, among them a certain person for whom my poetry-writing was largely an irrelevance and from whom I learned to like the non-poet more than the poet. But even if I stick to what’s on the page, one of the things George says as praise – ‘Your endings allow you to slip out of the poem so perfectly I can only envy them’ – is for me, now, something that utterly damns them: there’s a tactical evasion going on that allows some nice effects but which prevents the poems from ever being more than, well, decent page-fillers. More: the evasion is so built in to the whole way of writing that to write something more than page-fillers it was necessary to start writing in a completely different way. No wonder I stopped.

And here I am up to the same tricks again (‘something I’d done by accident’). Publishing other work under pen names (Jennie Walker, Jack Robinson, for those arriving late) is clearly also connected: they were liberating precisely because they enabled me to sidestep the Charles Boyle I felt a need to distance myself from. Which of course suggests that evasion may be what all the work is about, in which case . . . We’ll see.

Losing things

2011-05-28T13:48:00.002+01:00

As noted in a recent post (11 May) I left my notebook in Clerkenwell – well, someone posted it back to me. Last week I left my camera on a bus to Oxford; catching the bus back, I asked the man checking tickets about it and got my camera back. This week I left my bag (with proofs and stuff) in a café; I went back, it was still there.

Ten years ago this month I lost the habit, the knack, of writing poetry – not the will, I still had that – and that’s still missing. In Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview, which I was reading yesterday, Bolaño mentions three forms of stoppage. One is Georg Büchner’s – ‘the silence of death is the one that cuts the edge off what could have been and never will be.’ One is Rimbaud’s, which is ‘sought’. One is Juan Rulfo’s (he published a story collection and a short novel in the 50s, then nothing; he died in 1986), and this one ‘is so quotidian that explaining it is a waste of time’. Rulfo claimed he had an uncle who told him stories, and then the uncle died. Mine is the Rulfo type. A few years ago, when another poet me asked me what I was writing and I told him nothing, he was bracingly contemptuous: stop being so prissy, just sit down and get on with it. I tried but no result. Not because an uncle had died but because, and I do mean this, I wasn’t good enough. I wanted to get a new tone and a new range of material into the work, and I didn’t have the technique, the ability. Writing more of what I’d already written, variations on poems already in print, was pointless – firstly because there was no thrill in this, secondly because it wasn’t as if this was an income-generating activity that I needed to sustain to keep myself in cigarettes. So, quotidian reasons.

‘What made you start to write?’ is a common and usually boring interview question. The process of stopping writing has no less mystique attached to it. The photo above, taken in Yemen in 1880, was bought by two French booksellers in a flea-market and put on public display last year: some say the man second from the right is Rimbaud, some say it isn’t.

Tokaido Road

2011-05-26T14:00:00.004+01:00

A blog review– from Scotland – of Nancy Gaffield’s Tokaido Road. There was a party for the book last week at the University of Kent in Canterbury, a party for friends, family, colleagues, ex-colleagues, people who knew a lot about poetry and people who probably hadn’t read a poem since school, and it was a lovely mix. The book is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and it’s worth saying again that for the Arts Council to pull the rug from under the PBS, which is able to send books like this down more roads than I could ever travel myself, is a crying shame.

Illustrated days

2011-05-23T10:42:00.003+01:00

1. Taken on the ferry back from the Baltic island at the very end of March. I grew very fond of that island (which features largely in Susan Wicks’s new collection from Bloodaxe, House of Tongues; she too spent time there; it doesn’t just disappear over the horizon, it haunts).

2. Chip, on top of boxes of books that need to be sold. I’ve started a consultancy process with people at the publishing studies place at Oxford Brookes. There won’t be uniforms and compulsory company songs, but there’ll be changes.

3. A cockatoo feeding on the neighbour’s feeder. The unexpected happens anyway, no need to plan for it.

4. The fairytale bookshop at the Wapping Project, which is now stocked with a few more CBe titles. Lydia Fulton having gone away to have a child, which is a more important thing than running a bookshop, it’s now run by Benjamin Eastham, co-editor of The White Review, for which I’ve written (too late for the new print issue, which will be out in a week or so, but it's on their website ) a piece on the Arts Council cuts.

How funding decisions get made

2011-05-13T19:25:00.004+01:00

A reader in Hampstead ordered 20 copies of the Finland book, Not So Barren or Uncultivated, and would there were more such as him, and I took the books up there on the Tube, thinking this was the cheapest way of getting them there, but then paused in the Oxfam bookshop and spent the money I’d saved (on D. J. Enright’s book on irony, and on a Harry Mathews collection that includes his piece of 61 paragraphs each of which describes someone masturbating; which is more funny and touching than erotic, and good, and which I started reading on the Tube back home with my next-seat neighbour also taking an interest).

Money and books is always an awkward mix. This afternoon I came across the above diagram, from the Wikipedia entry on algorithm, and I am now convinced that this is how the recent Arts Council decisions were made: they input some data from tick-boxes, then applied the formula. No one has offered any better explanation.

In May (‘Nine completely naked girls’)

2011-05-11T00:21:00.001+01:00

May, the best month: all summer to come, and not having to put on layers of clothing when I get up in the early hours. And this afternoon I stumbled across a lovely exhibition in an alleyway in Clerkenwell titled Savage Messiah – which is the title of the Ken Russell film about Gaudier-Brzeska, screenplay by Christopher Logue – and there was a poster poem by Logue titled ‘In May’ which gave me the perfect cue, and I copied the first lines into my notebook.

Then I left my notebook in the adjacent cafe. I was, a little bit, bereft. Then this evening someone calls me, and can recite those lines from memory: ‘Nine completely naked girls / Will dance all afternoon/ On the tomb of the Unknown Conscientious Objector. / In keeping with tradition / Their profitable mounds will be close-shaved; / There will, however, be no posing.’ Some kind of magic is operating here.

The exhibition (at 1 Sutton Lane, London EC1M 5PU, until the end of May) is worth calling by. No queues. This is not official art history but it’s a sly and winning take on it: beginning just pre-1914, time of of mad manifestoes (‘Vortex is the point one and indivisible!’) but a period that’s still wide open, that no one has taken a conclusive measure of, and there’s Bill Woodrow and Paolozzi and contemporary artists in there too and photos of Jane Birkin with nothing on and videos of Logue reading and Ezra Pound stalking about a room and slamming books down on the floor. It’s why London isn’t a bad place to live, especially in May.

Book Now (1)

2011-05-08T18:47:00.002+01:00

The above is from a new page on the CBe website, giving early notice of the poetry book fair to be held in September. The image is a bit austere (there’s another one coming soon), but you’ll notice that there’s plenty of room on it to add place and date and names of presses. If interested get in touch.

Typesetting: as well as for Notting Hill Editions, And Other Stories and Istros Books, I’m now doing this for an about-to-exist imprint called Savage Poets Collective, who are, so far, very mild-mannered. Anyone interested in adding to the heaps on my desk, speak.

A drawing I remembered last week and that I wanted to photograph turns out to have been made for a project in which all the drawings were rolled up, inserted into tubes and sent out to sea. The girl in my local café has got RSI from making too many coffees. (What happened to RSI, by the way? Wasn’t there a time when everyone was getting it, or worrying about getting it?) The parakeets are back feeding in my neighbour’s garden, but the vodka business is looking fragile – something to do with exchange rates. I met a man who last year sent me some writing from prison. I too, to my own surprise, have been writing (the good weather makes the early hours more usable). My income has been taking a whack. If the Earl of Southampton happens to be reading, or any other generous patron, get in touch.

Dragon’s Day

2011-04-29T08:48:00.001+01:00

A researcher from the city travels to a backward mountain village, where he learns of the old custom – ‘going back maybe even to pagan times’ – of Dragon’s Day, which involves a handsome young lad and a pretty maiden being ‘thrown to the dragon who lives in a cave by the river’. He happens to be there on the very day of the ceremony, and witnesses the whole thing: the boy whose brow is ‘furrowed by a deep horizontal frown’ and whose ‘jaw trembled’, the girl who is ‘dressed in a silk dress and high-heeled shoes’. The dragon itself is ‘an old, blind, mouldy beast’. At the end, ‘The chairman intoned a song. People sang lazily, in fact no one even bothered to sing the last words. The crowd began to disperse.’

Just thought I’d mention it. The story (like the quote in the last post) is in Andrzej Bursa’s Killing Auntie and Other Work, translated by Wiesiek Powaga, published by CBe a year ago. And now I’m off to my allotment.

‘I may even get a grant /

2011-04-21T20:21:00.003+01:00

If I get to know the right people’ – from Andrzej Bursa’s poem ‘I’d Like to Be a Poet’ (in Killing Auntie and Other Work). The poem doesn’t end happily (‘always searching and always stuck’). But though the Arts Council funding cuts have hit some of the poetry publishers hard (and I don't forget those who never had any funding to begin with, for whom hardness is a way of life), I’m not talking, yet, about endings. I’m talking about the book-fair idea.

Yesterday I found a hall I liked, run by a nice woman with a chocolate-brown labrador dog, and booked it for a date in September. Today some of the publishers have been saying yes, they’d like to join in. They’re an awkward bunch. Independent-minded (that’s the point of what they’re doing). Not best known for cooperation and the milk of human kindness (the margins are too tight for much of that). The work that any one of them publishes may not be at all to the taste of many of the others. So even getting them to share a room will be an achievement of sorts. (Like a wedding party where those relatives turn up who fell out decades ago and don’t speak to each other? A little bit.) Getting some books sold (this is about survival) will be even better. And though we’ll use the mailing lists (I’m getting there, slowly), preaching to the converted is tedious, so we’ll try to get some of the unconverted in there too. And there seems to be a strong possibility that the camp will move on . . . More later.

(See that slash, by the way, in the heading? It’s a line break. People will lose jobs, and some of them I know; poems, fewer of them, will go on getting written, chosen, published, read; all of this hurts; we deal with this.)

And I’ve been playing today – possible designs for flyers, posters (I, with publisher’s hat on, never really feel I have a handle on anything until I have an idea, a rough idea, of how it will look). And Antonia Byatt at the Arts Council replied to my email about the literature cuts (a heart-felt but pompous thing, telling them they’d betrayed the purpose for their existence), which was good of her, but she doesn’t know what she’s started: I’ve replied to her reply. And I’ve been thinking of possible quotes. Satire, no-holds-barred satire, written by anonymous (I proposed to Faber, once, an anthology of poems by anonymous, but that’s another story) . . . In Geoffrey Grigson’s Unrespectable Verse I stumbled upon (it brings me up short, every time) Marianne Moore’s ‘Poetry’ (slashes to indicate line breaks again, because I don’t trust this platform, any more than I'd trust Kindle or other e-formats, to get the indents right):
I, too, dislike it. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Fine words

2011-04-14T13:52:00.001+01:00

There is a lot of material on the Arts Council of England website. Not just the mission-statement stuff (‘Arts Council England works to get great art to everyone by championing, developing and investing in artistic experiences that enrich people’s lives’) and the topical stuff (‘a transformational Olympics opportunity’) and some literature priorities (‘Our role in relation to production is to focus on areas that are not commercially viable, such as contemporary poetry and literary translation’) and a press release on the recent funding decisions (‘In making its decisions, the Arts Council has endeavoured to support and protect . . . poetry, new writers and literature in translation (eg Faber and Faber; Arvon Foundation)’). There is also a 47-page ‘review of research and literature to inform the Arts Council’s 10-year strategic framework’, whose 5 pages of references include a report on ‘UK Music Industry Greenhouse Gas Emissions for 2007’. There are probably enough statistics to argue any case you want. You could get lost in there.

For at least the past decade, mainstream publishers have been narrowing down: taking fewer risks, offering fewer openings to new or neglected talent. A number of the ACE cuts – the PBS, Arc, Enitharmon, Flambard and certain others – abet and collude with this process. If one of the purposes of ACE is to offset the effects of purely commercial interests on the distribution of literature, and to enable good work of minority interest to thrive, then these cuts betray that purpose.

There are ways to respond. For example, a book fair that brings together some of the independent poetry presses. Anyone interested, get in touch.

‘Erotically polymorphous’, etc

2011-04-09T12:33:00.001+01:00

How do you get reviewers to write about a book even before it is published? It helps if large chunks of the book (in this case, Jonathan Barrow’s The Queue) are quoted in another book (in this case, Andrew Barrow’s Animal Magic, his memoir of his brother, the author of The Queue, published by Cape in February). From reviews of AM, here are some words and phrases about The Queue: ‘Wildly inventive and surreal . . . erotically polymorphous . . . bizarre and beautiful . . . darkly comic . . . macabre . . . fantastical . . . savagely surreal . . . apocalyptically violent . . . scabrous . . . a thin line between brilliance and total barminess . . . slightly irritating’. Names invoked include Evelyn Waugh, Joe Orton, Mervyn Peake. Richard Canning in the Independent: ‘No stranger book than [Animal Magic] will appear this year – with the possible exception of Andrew Barrow’s deceased brother Jonathan’s novel The Queue, which sees publication in May, after more than 40 years of neglect.’

Expanded quotes are on the CBe website page for The Queue – which is available NOW from that page.

Changing the subject: fiction

2011-04-07T19:42:00.002+01:00

On Saturday I’m going to an event at the Free Word Centre at which Gabriel Josipovici, Geoff Dyer and Dubravka Ugresic (whose Thank You for Not Reading, 2003, was, the blurb rightly says, ‘a biting critique of book publishing’; many of the idiocies it describes are now accepted with a shrug as the norm) will discuss the novel.

Readers from the poetry planet (the focus of the last post) should know that the fiction planet is inhabited by just as many factions as their own. Devotees of Kafka, Beckett, Bernhard tend to find McEwan, Barnes, Amis unreadable, and vice versa. There are many other positions (nostalgists, reconnaissance parties, etc). In which camp does CBe pitch its tent? I’ve never been much good at putting up tents. On the one hand, I did recently read a McEwan and found it writing-by-numbers, a waste of my time. On the other hand, there are some writers just about within the mainstream (Penelope Fitzgerald, James Salter, James Kennaway) I worship.

Meanwhile, for a terrific interview with a writer whose recent book was billed by the publisher as a memoir ‘but increasingly I’d be just as happy to call it a book, and let the reader decide, or better yet, not decide’, go to John Self’s Asylum.

PS. Readers of the CBe edition of Francis Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic, may like a Kleinzahler poem in the current LRB in which Ponge (‘lapsed surrealist, champion of the apple / in all its appleness, and so on’) watches a Bugs Bunny video.

The cuts

2011-04-04T01:17:00.003+01:00

Bless them, and god save them. I mean the Poetry Book Society and the Poetry Trust. Both organisations – the PBS through their seasonal recommendations, the PT through their Aldeburgh first-collection prize and invitations to read at the Aldeburgh festival – have done far more to enable the books I publish to gain readers than the Arts Council (of England; ACE) has ever done. Without them, life will be harder. Without them, the job of spreading the word about poetry books of quality will be even more monopolised by the publicity and marketing departments of the bigger publishers. I am dumbstruck (obviously not literally) by the slashing of their funding. And I’m angry too about the slash to Arc, more dedicated and more adventurous than we deserve.

There’s been a buzz of anger, analysis, comment, on Facebook and other forums, about the poetry cuts. The poets’ world – I generalise – is a vociferous, inbred subculture, the Habsburgs without the power or wealth, and when it hits the news all the factions parade; this is one of the things that puts me off, the lack of generosity, and of interest in writing outside their chosen territory, but it comes perhaps from always having to fight from a tight corner.

On the other hand. I spoke the other day with a writer who’d been sent an email asking him to sign something in support of the PBS, and he knew nothing about why he’d been asked; he’d been getting on with his writing; often he’s without paid employment, and the jobs he does get are minimally paid; and he’ll sign but he’s ambivalent. Why should publishers and administrators be publicly funded? Writers starve in garrets, duck and dive, why (I’m on my own here, not voicing him) shouldn’t publishers? The phrase ‘dependency culture’ gets used. The arguments are obvious: in a consumer, profit-led culture, minority interests need a leg up, and if my man writes well and his work deserves more than tucking under the mattress, even if only a few hundred readers are going to enjoy it, then some help is needed; and I’d like to believe that the society I’m part of values good writing enough to pay it a bit more than lip-service. But I do share his ambivalence. The whole point of writing is independence and subversion. Taking the tax-payer’s coin is compromising.

On the third hand, it’s the end of the financial year, and I’ve been totting up figures. Not bad, not good. Not even a token gesture towards what I could earn a living from, the authors neither, but just about enough – that tricky line – for me to kid myself that this addiction is worth continuing (and in the past few weeks I’ve committed to two books I’d go to the wall for). And I’m indecently proud of the books I’ve published (among them, Josipovici, David Markson, Christopher Reid, Francis Ponge, a couple of first-book poets out of nowhere who both got PBS recommendations; check the website). But – isn’t this considered a barrier, something hard to to admit to? – I too need help. I can write, edit, design, typeset, and occasionally schmooze, but I can’t sell these books in the numbers they deserve. Give me money, give me expertise; talk to me.

There are fourth hands and fifth hands and onwards. This isn’t binary. It’s about writing, and reading too, and that strange thing called publishing, strange because it’s conflicted, always mediating between the intimacy of the writer’s desk and the hullabaloo of the marketplace, and how these things are part – and, yes, are enabled to be part, but this doesn’t have to be the binary thing of getting or not getting ACE funding – of the lives we choose to live.

Golly, it’s Monday already, and today the PBS meets with ACE. If I were picking teams for any such argument, I’d claim George Szirtes first – grounded, articulate, passionate. Alan Davey, the ACE chief exec, doesn’t stand a chance. But the purse strings are in his clammy hands.

The good news

2011-04-01T21:36:00.003+01:00

1) The two spring CBe titles are now available from the website: Nancy Gaffield’s Tokaido Road (a Poetry Book Society Recommendation) and Jonathan Barrow’s The Queue (‘A wild picareseque fantasy, erotically polymorphous’ says the Independent on Sunday).

2) Walking home this morning from the post office, I saw my neighbour accepting a delivery of 30 cases of vodka. I live next door to a man who imports vodka.

Homecoming

2011-03-31T09:40:00.002+01:00

A few days ago I was on the-island-in-the-middle-of-nowhere celebrating the news that a colleague there, a young Norwegian translator, had just got a grant that would enable her to live for a year translating from the Russian, and among the company was a Finnish short-story writer whose income derives less from the stories than from a state scholarship . . . I came home yesterday, the day of the long knives, when the Poetry Book Society and the Poetry Trust and Arc and others were cast adrift by the Arts Council. Is this the real world, or was my island – and its walled town with one main square, one main food shop, a fire station the size of a small garage – the real world? Neither is more real than the other, but this one is certainly more complicated, competitive, messy, mean. Over the past three years I’ve made two failed applications to ACE for grants for CBe, both times for sums under £5K, dutifully making up answers to those questions on the form that are there simply for the sake of form-filling; yesterday I read (where? I’ve lost the link) that ACE spends £27 million on rent for its own buildings and other unlikely sums before it even gets round to distribution; and I suspect that if ACE applied to itself for money to stay alive it too would be turned down. An appropriate response is to hold a party. I’m thinking of having one, a fundraising one, in the summer.

Baltic (5)

2011-03-26T08:43:00.005Z

Outside the tourist season, which is to say most of the year, life here is quiet and slow. People have time to do unnecessary but nice things, such as decorate their postboxes. And me? I have written about a couple whose arguments in public are photographed by Japanese tourists and about a family in the 1950s who travel around in a hearse and about rain, and am currently in discussions with a man who can walk on the ceiling. Coming home next week will be a culture shock.

Baltic (4): Falun red/brown

2011-03-24T13:52:00.005Z

You know how every city is a different colour? And how every country has its own colour palette? To do with the light, the climate, the landscape. Sweden, this bit of it anyway, has a lovely pale yellow and a deep, warm blue – not the yellow and blue of the flag or the Ikea logo at all, but colours that even when new seem to have had any sharpness weathered out of them. There’s also a deep reddish brown, everywhere – window frames, doors, whole houses, in places in the countryside whole villages. It’s derived (quote from falunpaint.co.uk) ‘from the naturally-existing pigments in the earth which can only be found in the copper mine in Falun, Sweden. These pigments have a unique mineral composition which includes iron ochre, silicon dioxide, copper and zinc, all of which help preserve and protect wood.’ And it’s pretty damn equivalent to Pantone 484, which is the colour used most frequently by CBe (see the website home page, the logo and booklist; and the print catalogues), so no wonder I’m feeling at home here.

Baltic (3)

2011-03-20T11:34:00.003Z

The town library is good, even if the English section is a bit like a second-hand bookstore: what you’re looking for isn’t there, but on the other hand there’s plenty you didn’t realise you wanted to read until now. Last week I read the story collection by Wells Tower, who is annoyingly young and ridiculously talented. But. Then I read Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon, a swashbuckling yarn set around the Caspian Sea in the 10th century, which is terrific, and here’s a quote from the Afterword (you can quote it back to anyone who tells you to write from what you know, from your own experience) in which he recalls that most of his early stories ‘featured unarmed Americans undergoing the eternal fates of contemporary short-story characters – disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace. Divorce; death; illness; violence, random and domestic; divorce; bad faith; deception and self-deception; love and hate between fathers and sons, men and women, friends and lovers; the transience of beauty and desire; divorce – I guess that about covers it. Story, more or less, of my life . . . I’m not saying – let me be clear about this – I am not saying that I disparage or repudiate my early work, or the genre (late-century naturalism) it mostly exemplifies . . . It’s just that here, in Gentlemen of the Road as in some of its recent predecessors, you catch me in the act of trying, as a writer, to do what many of the characters in my earlier stories were trying, longing, ready to do: I have gone off in search of a little adventure.’

Why is Orhan Pamuk – in the photograph, captioned ‘wittering’, at the top of the Observer review of his book about the novel (the online version anyway, I don’t know about the print edition) – standing in the doorway to the fire escape on the old Faber building in Queen Square? That’s the smoking place. I know this because I worked on the top floor of that building for several years, and made daily use of that doorway and the little rusting balcony.

Baltic (2)

2011-03-16T11:19:00.006Z

More photos from Visby. Little to report (that is the point of being here). Other than that down by the sea the other day I stumbled across a dead swan, which has to be a doomy Ibsenite symbol for something or other. That the town library of Visby (population 23,000) is superb: fine modern building, café, and shelves more generously and intelligently stocked (including books in English) than in any equivalent library I’ve come across in the UK. That I have watched more films (on my laptop) than I have seen in the cinema in the past several years. That I am becoming a monk.

Baltic

2011-03-10T09:46:00.002Z

This is the view from my window, in the late afternoon: not just the cathedral but the sunset too. Never have I been so closely jammed up against a holy edifice; this is between me and god, with nature thrown in for good measure. The town of Visby is very cold, very quiet, and astonishingly beautiful. I came here partly out of curiosity, to see what would happen if, after many months of busy-ness, I got up in the morning with only a blank white page in front of me. The answer may be nothing. And I’m not knocking nothing, not at all. I have settled into a rhythm of sleep, coffee, long walks by the sea, saunas. I lie and sweat for long periods on the top bench in the sauna in the pose, it occurred to me yesterday, of Marat assassinated by Charlotte Corday.

Out to lunch (back in April)

2011-02-25T10:34:00.002Z

The more time (unpaid) I devote to CBe, the more time (paid) I have to give to the other work that keeps the whole boat afloat – an equation that’s bad for my sleep patterns and squeezes out any scribbling of my own. So I’m taking a break, off for a month to an island – this one, above, though not quite as sunny as it looks: current temperatures are sub-zero – courtesy of the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators.

And there is no Plan B. Which is to say that while I’m away, although the home premises will be fully occupied and guarded by ferocious hounds of Baskerville (and Goudy, Garamond, Helvetica, etc), there’ll be no one to put books in envelopes and lick stamps, so anyone ordering from the website will have to wait for their books until I’m back in early April. Apologies for inconvenience. (During this period the books may still be ordered, of course, from bookshops, which are supplied by Central Books, or online from the Book Depository.)

Housekeeping

2011-02-23T13:06:00.003Z

Plumbers do turn up: on Monday morning I faced up to the fact that this house is disintegrating around me, and by lunchtime there was a plumber in the kitchen ripping out the kitchen sink and replacing taps and a glazier replacing a window broken about three months ago.

Books turn up too, eventually: a package containing copies of Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud, mailed to the US on 17 January at a cost of around £25, has just arrived at its destination.

Yesterday evening the Rack Press launched its new set of four pamphlets, including Christopher Reid’s Airs and Ditties of No Man’s Land, which is being set to music by Colin Matthews and will be performed at the the BBC Proms this summer. Christopher has recently published with Areté, CBe, Ondt & Gracehoper and Faber; he is leading his future bibliographer a merry dance. The other Rack Press pamphlets are by Roísín Tierney, Angela Topping and Nicholas Murray (‘a scathing verse broadside against the coalition government’).

The spring CBe books – Nancy Gaffield’s Tokaido Road and Jonathan Barrow’s The Queue – are printed, and will be available from the website in April. Nancy will be reading at the British Council in Tokyo on 9 April.

The new Hammersmith & Fulham News has a piece on Days and Nights in W12 which goes some way towards clearing up the mystery of the single shoes on page 80: ‘The single shoe (often spotted on a bus shelter roof) is a west London street sign indicating a drug dealer is operating in the immediate area.’

In defiance, even denial of cuts and slashes, here are three new presses that will be publishing their first books this year: Notting Hill Editions, And Other Stories (mostly work in translation), Istros Books (translations from Eastern Europe). CBe will be typesetting for all three.

14 February

2011-02-14T17:36:00.004Z

Valentine's day, so appropriate that there should be not one but two wild cockatoos at the bird-feeder in the next door's garden. Five minutes later, a third joins in.

A novel, ‘if that’s quite the word for it’

2011-02-14T11:56:00.001Z

David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel was talked about on this morning’s Start the Week by David Shields and Andrew Motion, the latter calling it ‘a tremendous palate cleanser’. A friend phoned to say she’s been waiting for two weeks for Daunts in Marylebone High St to get hold of the book; you’d get it quicker from the CBe website – but click the button now rather than later, because later this month I’m going out to lunch and won’t be back for a month (more on this later).

Lots of review coverage for Andrew Barrow’s Animal Magic (Jonathan Cape) – ‘this strange and unnerving book’: Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times; ‘a book unlike anything I have ever read’: Elizabeth Day, Observer; also in the Independent on Sunday, Spectator, Telegraph. Given that Andrew Barrow quotes extensively in Animal Magic from Jonathan Barrow’s The Queue, the reviews function as previews for that: ‘darkly comic, treading a thin line between brilliance and total barminess’ (Observer); ‘a wild picaresque fantasy, erotically polymorphous’ (IoS). The Queue will be available from CBe in April/May.

A ghost in Cambridge

2011-02-11T21:33:00.001Z

Back from Cambridge, St John’s College, where last night I read with Sarah Howe (Gregory Award; tall-lighthouse) and Dan Burt (Lintott Press/Carcanet). (Several decades ago, from Philadelphia and from the wrong side of the tracks, Dan wrote a letter to Cambridge, enclosing something he’d written on The Waste Land; Hugh Sykes Davies – see here – liked it, and he was in; those were the days.) Poems, wine, good talk. The welcome surprise presence of Jane Monson, who first got in touch when CBe published the Francis Ponge book, who last year published her own prose poems (Speaking without Tongues, Cinnamon) and who is editing a prose-poems anthology out later this year.

And, discomfortingly, the ghost of myself around every corner. I was an undergraduate there; for various reasons, those were not the happiest three years of my life; this was my first return visit (it’s less than a hour on the train) in nearly forty years. I did a lot of solitary cycling around the flat countryside; I left my bike in the college basement in 1972, and now it’s gone. I did a lot of solitary reading of European lit; a contemporary, now a medievalist at the college, still has an ancient Penguin Classics Chekhov in which there’s a scrap of paper on which I’ve copied out certain lines. What will survive of us is bookmarks.

Later in the 70s I did have some happy years, in Egypt. Most of the present population of Egypt weren’t even born then, but tonight I guess they’re happy too, and I’m thrilled for them.

Prizes

2011-02-09T11:49:00.001Z

A couple of weeks back, when poets were in the newspapers for winning prizes on every street corner, Conor wanted me to write about that Guardian piece that ended with: ‘Poetry rocks.’ I don’t need to; we’re over that now, and 99.8 per cent of the population are getting on with their lives, happily or miserably, without feeling any need to read poetry, and 99.8 per cent of poets are checking their sales figures and wondering where this rocking is going on. The attention is nice, but it’s not the business of poetry to rock. Whatever that business is, it’s something more against the grain. What grated in that piece was the triumphalism.

But here’s something about prizes, anyway. You never quite get a photo of the bashful winner holding up a vastly oversized cheque, as for pools and lottery winners. They draw back from that; a slim envelope is handed over and hurriedly pocketed; it doesn’t do to rub in the money aspect, because this is supposed to be about the honour of winning and the quality of the work. (Money and poetry is always awkward. I seem to recall Don Paterson being asked what he was going to do with his prize money and him saying – or was this DBC Pierre? or both? – he was going to pay off some debts; and someone else saying she was going to buy new curtains.) The point being this: if the cash is secondary to the honour, then let them come up with something a lot more original as the prize. Last night I had a dream in which a friend won a poetry prize, and the prize was this: meeting the Pope and rearranging the furniture in the Vatican.

Bookshop matters (2)

2011-02-07T19:36:00.003Z

The Travel Bookshop this time, Notting Hill. Happy. I was taking in a re-order of Days and Nights in W12, and a couple of Not So Barrens, and it’s long and narrow and the further you go in the better it gets: this afternoon, cake (with icing) and champagne (Saara’s birthday, sometime recently), and Hermione Cameron, local author, who in March will be walking to Monte Carlo (700 miles; she’s already walked to Paris) because (a) this is a fine thing to do and (b) it could buy a lifeboat (see here to donate). Bookshops, this kind, are not just places to buy books (though it does help).

Bookshop matters

2011-02-01T10:41:00.002Z

This is the Albion Beatnik bookstore in Walton Street, Oxford. All independent bookshops are different (that’s the point). This one: the beats, jazz, lots of US books, good second-hand selection, tea/coffee, sofa; and, just in case you thought you’d got this one labelled, a better selection of modern writing than you’d find in any equivalent-size chainstore, including much in translation. I left some CBe books there in December, got a cheque yesterday and a covering letter telling me that the Francis Ponge book ‘flew out’, as did the translations from the Polish writers Andrzej Bursa and Stefan Grabinski. There are readers.

An idea I noticed on the website of a US publisher (Ugly Duckling Presse): partner bookstores. A number of independent bookstores, all interested in the kind of work a particular press publishes, commit to stocking all that press’s new titles (maybe some backlist too), presumably in return for a higher-than-normal trade discount. There’s something in there for everyone; it seems to me an obvious and simple idea; just a pity that right now I haven’t got the time or energy to get buzzing.

On the website page for Natural Mechanical, there’s now a link to a Poetry Trust podcast in which J. O. Morgan talks about the writing of the book and the experience of winning the Aldeburgh Prize (‘I was suddenly in this world of poets’).

Jonathan Barrow

2011-01-29T18:58:00.002Z

‘Tragic early deaths, even double deaths, are alas not rare, but Jonathan’s case is stranger than most. Days, even hours, before he and Anita Fielding crashed into another car at Olney in Buckinghamshire, my brother had finished writing a short novel in which accidents, especially head-on collisions, feature often and in which he had predicted and described his own sudden, violent death in excruciating, semi-comic detail.’

Over four pages in today’s Telegraph magazine Andrew Barrow remembers his brother Jonathan, who died aged 22, along with his girlfriend, in 1970. Jonathan, a ‘genuine dunce’ at school, had worked in hotels, then in advertising; he had published stories in the London Magazine and exhibited drawings at the Redfern Gallery. Andrew’s piece coincides with the publication of Animal Magic (Jonathan Cape), his memoir of his brother. The short novel referred to above, titled The Queue, will be published by CBe in May.

Cairo, present days

2011-01-29T16:53:00.001Z

I’ve been watching, compulsively, the live coverage on Al Jazeera. A long time ago I lived in Cairo for three years, three formative years. I taught in a language school (everyone accepted that in many of the classes there’d be an undercover policeman, keeping an eye on his fellow students, keeping an eye on me). The Egyptian people were welcoming, generous, inventive, open, interested, fun-loving. I hardly slept. (My first poetry pamphlet I Letrasetted there and had copied and stapled by a back-street Armenian printer.) Now, on my computer screen, so many of the details are familiar: faces, clothes (it’s winter now in Egypt too), the gimcrack modern buildings and the gorgeous run-down old ones, the litter in the streets, the sheer press of people, people everywhere. (A discussion one day on the meaning of the English word ‘alone’, me claiming it was possible to be content, even happy when alone and they seeing only the meaning ‘lonely’.) Of course I worry that the outcome of the current events will be hijacked by hard-line religious or ideological factions, but in as much as it is possible to trust such an abstract entity as ‘the people’, I do trust the Egyptian people, whom I’ve known as enormously resourceful and fair-minded, and wish them every success.

Late and early

2011-01-29T14:17:00.001Z

Fergus Allen’s Before Troy, published by CBe in October, has at last been paid attention to. From a review by Keith Richmond in Tribune:

‘Fergus Allen [born 1921] doesn’t write like an old man. When he talks of “the bad-tempered geese in St Stephen’s Green”; “the treacherous stone steps down to the well/ being slippery as the smile of Morgan le Fay” and of how “a seagull sniggered overhead” he writes with the fresh eye of a younger man, although elsewhere he writes, with a smile, from experience: “flying ants came at us out of the sun,/ Sweeping inside our shirts, biting our midriffs/ And tangling in our hair like semen.” He can be gloriously colloquial, too, as when, in “Some Days Later”, he suddenly stops: “Sorry, that was a false start,/ A mixing up of cycles./ Let me take another run at it”, and then he’s off again. In his best pieces – “The Women on the Islands”, “Southern Ocean” (“And still alive with leopard seals and creatures,/ Eternally eating and being eaten”), “Lovers”, “A Note from the Superman” and the title poem – he is subtle, amusing and, above all, deeply human.’

Nancy Gaffield’s Tokaido Road, which CBe will publish in April, is a Poetry Book Society recommendation for the summer quarter. Following J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical, this is the second first poetry book from CBe; neither poet had a stand-out track record of magazine publicaton (J.O. nothing, Nancy Magma and Stand); both got PBS recommendations. (And J.O. went on to get a Forward shortlisting and win the Aldeburgh prize.) There’s no point in making much of this, because in all such accolades the luck of the draw counts for a lot; in a different season, with different selectors, the result might have been different too. (‘Where there is judging,’ remarks a minor character somewhere in War and Peace, ‘there is always injustice.’) But still, this is good. Congratulations to Nancy.

The morning after

2011-01-25T12:05:00.001Z

24 lengths of the swimming pool this morning aided recovery from plentiful wine at the T S Eliot prize event last night, at which a good time was had. Two observations.

Firstly, these prizegivings are rituals, with etiquette and due process. And while the two speech-givers last night, George Szirtes and Anne Stevenson, were wholly admirable, I find the slow build-up to the naming of the winner excruciating. (And if I find it thus, the poor shortlistees, on parade at the front of the crowd, must find it even worse.) Yesterday I (not a patient man) went outside for a cigarette and returned after the announcement.

Secondly, I was there with James Tennant of Dalkey Archive Press (‘one of the best little publishers in the world’: Guardian, December 2010), and the number of poetry-world folk who had never heard of DA was, to me, surprising. I’m pretty sure that poetry for breakfast, lunch and supper is not a healthy diet; a nutritionist would advise more variety.

Caryatids

2011-01-17T12:01:00.003Z

So much rain. The caryatids at St Pancras Parish Church, Jack Robinson noted on a trip into town last week, have given up trying to look pretty all day and night and have put on their waterproofs.

Meanwhile, there is a long review of Tony Lurcock’s Not So Barren or Uncultivated in Huvudstatsbladet, Finland’s principal Swedish-language newspaper. Att det är fråga om helt olika förhållningssätt övertygar Lurcock en skichligt om. I have no idea what this means, but this could soon change: in March I’m off to a writers’/translators’ retreat on a Swedish island in the Baltic.