Summer in the city

The market in Portobello Road on Saturday.

A rare quality

In a feature in the Camden New Journal about both the book Are they funny, are they dead? and its author, Marjorie Ann Watts recalls how she was told by a publisher that she could only have her stories published after she’d written a novel; so she did so, and the publisher liked it, but then ‘told me I was too old – I didn’t have a three-book deal in me’.

The article continues: ‘Breathtaking ageism, which is their loss. Her writing is both beautiful and spare, immediately gripping, and has the rare quality of revealing a character in a few words. “How Things Turn Out”, the story of a tycoon’s flawed relationship with his children, starts: “Lord Porter had married young and then forgotten about it. He supposed he had loved his wife, he had never given it much thought.” In “Birthdays” (which won a literary prize), the entire tragedy of one woman’s life is there in a few domestic exchanges over the breakfast table . . .’

Buy the book here. Or order from your local bookshop.

An interruption

Way back in the 70s I was driving north on the M1 when the radio programme I was listening to in the car was interrupted for the announcement of the death of an American poet. (Would they make that interruption now? For the death of a writer?)

A cloud scuds across the sun. The landscape changes. This year, recently, Peter Porter, Alan Sillitoe, and now David Markson. You don’t have to have met them, known them personally; if you’ve read their work and taken something from it, it hits. Here’s Coleridge: ‘The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another race in respect to which his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to stars and mountains. But the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances and disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for man . . . The poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood.’ A contemporary writer is someone who is alive while you are alive; listening to the same news, being moved to anger or splendour by the same currents, and writing, present continuous, practically in the same room; and then they’re not, and it’s different.

Not the World Cup

J. O. Morgan is reading from Natural Mechanical at the Bridlington Poetry Festival tomorrow, Saturday the 12th. Marjorie Ann Watts (Are they funny, are they dead?) writes about Cornwall in the Sunday Telegraph on the 13th. Next week, on Thursday the 17th the first of three programmes on the making of the Glyndebourne opera from Nicky Singer’s Knight Crew is presented by Gareth Malone on BBC2 at 9 p.m.

The BBC has commissioned a film adaptation of Christopher Reid’s The Song of Lunch, starring Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson, to be broadcast later this year.

Michael Wojas, 1956–2010

Michael Wojas of the Colony Room has died. After school and university, ‘the rest of his life he gave to Soho’ ( Telegraph obituary ). Courtesy of Michael, Wiesiek read from his Grabinski book at the Colony Room back in early 2008; the drinking, chat, gossip and general to-ing and fro-ing were not exactly interrupted by reverent silence, nor should they have been; it wasn’t that kind of place.

David Markson, 1927–2010

David Markson, whose This Is Not a Novel was published by CBe in February this year, has died in New York. The end of that book: Then I go out at night to paint the stars. / Says a van Gogh letter. // Farewell and be kind.

And the opening of Wittgenstein’s Mistress: In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.

Buttercups

Devon: trees in a field with buttercups. There aren’t many fields left in England in summertime without tents in them in which authors are debating the future of the book and being politely applauded. This one was nice.