Newsagent

J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical has been shortlisted in the First Book category of the 2010 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust (henceforward, SMIT; but I’m not sure that’s much better)/ Scottish Arts Council book awards. Details here.

This week’s TLS reviews The Letters of Sylvia Beach, who founded the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris and was ‘editor, publisher, distributor and seller’ of the first edition of Ulysses. In November – the 15th, it’s looking like – three CBe authors will be reading at the current incarnation of Shakespeare and Company: a school trip, a family outing.

Beauty and the beast

Spring, at last, and you get some nice reflections in shop windows. The DNA of gorillas and humans is pretty much the same.

And another thing

Recommended before, the Guardian Books Blog series A Brief Survey of the Short Story is getting less brief by the month. The new post, number 25, is on Tolstoy; the previous one was on Lydia Davis, the two before that on JF Powers and Julio Cortázar. Such a good series.

Still life with books

CBe needs a new website. Not because I don’t like the one we have, and not just because I get restless for distraction activity, but because there needs to be more information about each of the books, and excerpts you can download, and . . . Not too much, but a bit more. (Because I need, and the authors need, to sell more books. Sales in the current financial year are more than double last year’s figures; but that’s no more than saying 5 is more than 2 x 2, and it ain’t enough.)

I’ve been talking to web folk. Most want to dress me in a business suit, which doesn’t feel comfortable. So what I think I have to do, in my humdrum megalomaniac way, is work out exactly what I want and then find someone friendly, cheap and with know-how.

I hate stock photos. And books are not, in general, photogenic, unless they’re old and scruffy; new books tend to look like product; until they’re well thumbed and have coffee stains on them, they’re not properly worn in. A photograph like the one above does a job, but really it’s just a filler. So I’ve been talking with Martina Geccelli, who photographs books in the way Morandi painted jugs. And then thinking, how about, on this hypothetical new site, a gallery page? Showing photography, drawings, other visual work; which would change its content every few months, like an exhibition programme; and would be related to books, strongly or tenuously (and the artists would pay for their work to be displayed, or a commission on sales: but this bit’s in brackets, or the small print). It’s publishing, a continuation of. Comments welcome.

Glyndebourne, Wapping

This week, the Knight Crew opera at Glyndebourne. Around 60 young chorus singers, chosen from open auditions, plus half a dozen professional singers. I went on Wednesday, sitting in a £6 stalls seat (which for the summer Glyndebourne Festival would cost £195). It’s a huge achievement. There’ve been articles on this in the Financial Times and Spectator, etc, and there’ll be others, but for now here’s the editor of Gramophone : ‘What a happy surprise. What an inspiring evening . . . Where I had rather expected something energetic and willing but creatively box-ticking, Knight Crew delivered a genuinely superb theatrical experience . . . It goes beyond learning unfamiliar ways of performing, as does the entire show. By any standards, this is moving, entertaining, and really rather riveting. If everyone can take enough time away from school and work, it deserves some kind of tour, even a West End transfer. This or Mamma Mia? No competition.’

Now we have to sell more books off the back of this.

On Thursday Christopher Reid read from The Song of Lunch and A Scattering at the Wapping Project bookshop, a venue at the opposite end of the scale: a greenhouse that can hold an audience of sixteen at a pinch. Adjacent to the massive old pumping-house with its heavy industrial machinery still in place, its underground gallery, its restaurant lit by a hundred candles. It’s one of those rare combinations of place and people that makes wonderful things happen. Queuing to buy a book after the reading, someone turned to me and said, ‘This is one of the best places in London.’ She’s right.

Reid, Wapping, this Thursday

Christopher Reid will be reading from The Song of Lunch, A Scattering and perhaps others at the Wapping Project bookshop, E1W 3SG, this Thursday, 4 March, at 7.30. The space is small; to ensure a place, email lydia.fulton@mac.com.

‘Mechanical as well as natural’

Natural Mechanical again, and no apologies for returning to it. Two more reviews this week.

The first is on the Undiscovered Scotland website, not a place where you’d usually look for a poetry review. In fact the reviewer seems almost surprised by the form the book takes: ‘Natural Mechanical is a beautiful, lyrical book . . . Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the book is that although the content is biographical and the storyline like a short novel, it is actually told as a narrative poem . . . Natural Mechanical is very likely to increase significantly the number of people who regard themselves as readers of poetry.’

Hannah Salt in Magma (the March issue, not yet up on the site) attends to the prosody, and more. ‘Natural Mechanical is a higher achievement than Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave, with which it has some similarities, because it is more finely written. The verse is spare, clear, almost without simile or metaphor, building its effects and narrative thrust by noting details precisely and moving on. Rhythmically it moves constantly toward and away from iambic pentameter . . . There is restraint of language and also restraint as regard for truth . . . The book’s other achievement is that it treats Rocky not as a figure of pathos like Billy Caspar nor as a romantic hero, but as a boy who makes his way in the real world of social and economic relationships. His father works for the AA, Mr Ogilvie starts a chain of sandwich bars in Edinburgh, Rocky must get his rabbits to the butcher before they turn maggoty and must eventually teach himself a trade, in his case repairing machines. He is mechanical as well as natural.’

Which is where the above photos come in. As well as repairing others’ machines, Rocky has his own projects. The first photo shows the rusted chassis of a Brooklands Riley, circa 1929, as it was in his workshop when I visited Rocky last April. The second photo, from a book, shows what he’s aiming to achieve, the Brooklands Riley as good as new. And he’ll get there, as long as he doesn’t run out of money. All of us – engineers, poets, publishers – live in this so-called real world. Buy the book.

(Two editions – plain CBe-style cover, colour cover – available: see previous post.)