Pop-up shop (1): the programme

Left: the Shop, empty – at 201 Portobello Road, London W11 1LU. Next week: 1st to 7th July, the Shop filled with books (CBe, Eyewear, Arc, Five Leaves, Flipped Eye, and more), photographs by Ken Garland, other things. Various writers will be calling in to do brief pop-up readings through the week. The programme for the week at present looks like this (think of the whole thing as a work in progress, and if you’re in striking distance do call in to see how it’s going):

Monday 1st July
Evening: 7 pm: Eyewear party, with reading by Mark Ford

Tuesday 2nd July
Day readers: 2.30 pm, Leah Fritz; 3.30 pm, Kimberly Campanello;
4 pm, Christopher Reid; 4.30 pm, Astrid Alben; 5pm, Liane Strauss

Wednesday 3rd July
Day readers: 1.30 pm, Tim Dooley; 3 pm, Fiona Curran; 3.30 pm, Andrew Motion;
4 pm, Sandeep Parmar & James Byrne

Evening: Flipped Eye event:
6 pm: Sarah Westcott – runner up in the first Venture Award, reading from her new pamphlet Inklings for followed by Q&A/signing.
6.45 pm: Introducing The mouthmark Book of Poetry – a hardback anthology of all the single-author pamphlets produced under the mouthmark series, including Jacob Sam-La Rose’s Communion, Denise Saul’s White Narcissi, Inua Ellams’ 13 Fairy Negro Tales and Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth

Thursday 4th July
Day readers: 3.30 pm, Anthony Howell; 5 pm, Harry Man

Evening: 6.30 pm, Laura Del Rivo and Cathi Unsworth
Laura Del Rivo has been living in the Portobello Road area for over fifty years. She still runs a market stall. In 2011 Five Leaves reissued her debut novel, The Furnished Room (1961; filmed by Michael Winner in 1963 as West 11): ‘an evocative taste of black-coffee blues ... a perfect encapsulation of that shady, shifting Ladbroke Grove on the cusp of profound social change’ (Guardian). She has a story in the new Salt anthology of Best British Short Stories 2013, and a new collection will be published by Holland Park Press this year.
Cathi Unsworth is also a local author. Her novels include Bad Penny Blues, an exploration of the unsolved ‘Jack the Stripper’ murders of eight working girls in along the Thames in the1960s, The Not Knowing and The Singer (‘Cathi Unsworth has written the Great Punk Novel’ – David Peace). Her most recent novel, The Weirdo, was published in paperback in June. In the book of essays on London Fictions (Five Leaves, 2013) she writes on Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room (1960).

Friday 5th July
Day readers: 1 pm; Tamar Yoseloff; 1.30 pm, John Greening; 3.30 pm, Steven Fowler;
4 pm, Michael Horovitz

Saturday 6th July and Sunday 7th July: still open, very open (we won't have sold ALL the books by then, will we?)

Things

The photo here is descriptive of how a ship gets put in a bottle. It’s a thing I did, for a while, a few years ago, when I wasn’t writing. That period began when my children were at primary school and were being asked to make things for homework – a boat (its hull a halved water bottle), a bridge (string and toilet-roll tubes to raise Tower Bridge) – and then I moved in closer. The photos below show a fraction of what got made.

The first photo has parrots that dip and rise when you turn a handle, and my children at the age we made these things. The Chapeaux de Napoleon have batteries: no turning, just press the switch (bottom right). The box with ships also has batteries: switch (again bottom right) and the lighthouse flashes. Papier mâché factories, painted pink. The bottled ship: there were around 20 of these. The big wheel: turn the handle and the wheel turns too. There was a roundabout too. And those were the end: my children were growing away, leaving me stranded as a toy-maker.

My father left school at 14 to work in the iron foundry that his own father had helped establish. My mother was a ‘home-maker’ and was raised a Methodist, and I’m still not convinced that sitting at a desk all day constitutes work. Unless I engage manually with actual physical stuff, I’m not sure I’m doing anything. This why CBe does not, so far, publish ebooks – it’s the thinginess of the physical object that makes a book a book. This is why I collect the printed books from the printer myself and lug them over to the warehouse. This is why, though I’m not at all sure about how the pop-up shop (below) is going to work out through the week, I’m looking forward to the morning of Monday, July 1st, which is when we move into an empty space and set up.

‘other’

Today, for the second time, I was sent an email asking me to fill in a questionnaire for a survey ‘designed to provide the first really detailed picture of the different ways that arts and cultural organisations are using digital … Our hope is that this will turn into a key resource for all organisations across the sector …’

I click the link. First question: ‘Which one of the following best describes your role within the organisation?’ The tick-box options are: Managing Director / Deputy Director. Artistic or Creative Director. Director / Manager / Head of Marketing / Audience Development. Director / Manager / Head of Development. Director / Manager / Head of Digital. Director / Manager / Head of Programming/Curation. Finance Director / COO / General Manager. Other senior manager. Non-executive Director / Trustee / Chair. Other.

The survey is funded by the Arts Council, Nesta and AHRC. Of course I’m a little irritated and of course I’m not going to fill in this form. CBe’s applications for funding for its publishing have been turned down three times by the Arts Council. To see who the Arts Council does support through its Grants for the Arts programme, and how much each gets, click here and download a pdf or two.

‘paranormal romance’

Here’s a link to a fine talk on publishing I stumbled across this week (it dates from 2010, I think, but still): http://bit.ly/c8a0fs. He’s in Canada and he’s addressing, I assume, a conference of publishers.

He has notes but on the whole he’s improvising, and his delivery is engaging. Lots of quotable stuff (including the phrase above). The so-called golden age of publishing, 1950s: ‘white men in tweed suits’. ‘Oprah needed books more than books needed Oprah’. A book: ‘fifteen hours of another’s voice inside your head’. ‘Pulped wood bound in cardboard isn’t culture … the words in it are culture’. ‘We’re a tiny industry perched above a massive hobby.’ ‘It is too risky not to completely reconceive our business.’ Engage with new technology and media (‘you can get any text you want for free, it’s not going to not happen’), but not in the way of ‘throwing a whole bunch of tools against a wall and seeing what sticks’.

Also this week, informally, I heard Meike Zeirvogel talk about Peirene Press. Because it seems right now to be poetry-world folk especially who are worrying about publishing models, and because among them CBe seems to be understood as a poetry press (it’s not: there are more not-poetry books than poetry on the list), I’m rashly assuming that some readers here may not have read their books. But they’re doing fine, since you ask. They publish short (under 200 pages) European novels in translation, by authors unknown in the UK, with no UK track record, but their print runs put every poetry publisher, including Faber, to shame. For comparable titles, they out-sell what Random House can do. And they do this from a house in north London with no full-time staff other than Meike herself.

CBe 2013 5 / D. Nurkse, A Night in Brooklyn

from ‘The Present’:

And she who was driving said,
We know the coming disaster intimately but the present is unknowable.

Which disaster, I wondered, sexual or geological? But I was shy:
her beauty was like a language she didn’t speak and had never heard.

Then we were in Holyfield and it was the hour when the child
waves from a Welcome mat, his eyes full of longing, before turning
inward to his enforced sleep. We waved back but we were gone.

I rashly said in January that I’d do a blog post about why CBe is publishing each of this year’s books, so here we are again, but really for this one there should be no need. Starting with small presses, and more recently with Knopf, Nurkse has many books in print in the US and publishes regularly in both US and UK magazines. There is no good literary reason why his work hasn’t been introduced to the UK by a mainstream publisher – in the way that, for example, Faber (and Secker before them) has published Charles Simic, or Cape has published Sharon Olds. I did suggest this to editors at both those places, and in each case there was admiration for the work but a no to publishing. In 2011 CBe published one of Nurkse’s early books, Voices over Water, to which rights had reverted to the poet himself, and it was shortlisted for that year’s Forward Prize. A Night in Brooklyn, published in the US by Knopf, is his most recent book. I’ll leave the rest of the post to some of the US reviews:

Philip Levine, Ploughshares: ‘The voice behind these poems is certainly Nurkse’s, but more often than not I feel it’s that deepest voice we hear rarely if ever and then only in poems, the voice of those closest to us, those we love and care for and who–because they are human–remain mysteries: “All my life I have been dying, of hope and self-pity, / and an unknown force has been knitting me back together.” No one is writing more potently than this.’

Richard Hoffman, Solstice: ‘A Night in Brooklyn is a rich and deeply textured investigation of the intersection of memory, imagination, and history. It offers its humane and elegaic vision with the tonal range of a mature artist who has forged a voice by turns sorrowful, passionate, whimsical, and reflective. This is the finest book yet of one of our finest poets; no serious reader of contemporary poetry can afford to overlook it.’

New York Times: ‘These are not easy poems, but they don’t play tricks on the reader, either. Stay with one and it will unfold into a meditation on birth, death, longing or loneliness.’

Tina Chang, Brooklyn Poet Laureate: ‘Walking through these poems is like having a mythical landscape lit with as much brilliance as there is deep shadow. Filled with sensual beauty and fierce urgency, these poems usher the reader through “the doors, the stairs,/ the streets, the endless city”.’

And click here for a link to Nurkse talking about the book, and five poems from it, on the Gwarlingo site.

Two empty bookshops

Above is the empty shell of Notting Hill Books, less than five minutes from the tube station. For forty-four years, if you’d been waiting at the adjacent bus stop and seen something that caught your eye in the boxes on a table outside and gone through the door – there’ll be another bus along soon, and another – you’d have have found yourself in a version of heaven. Sheila’s shop.

I wrote briefly about Sheila’s shop in a TLS column early last year: ‘Once upon a time, Sheila came to London and found herself typing up manuscripts for Alexander Trocchi. I’ve arrived, she decided, without quite knowing where. For many years, from her shop round a corner in Notting Hill that feels like a shed or a ship’s galley, with timber ceiling and walls and the books in boxes as well as on shelves, she has been selling books that may not all be exactly new but neither are they second-hand and they’re certainly not remainders. She is known to many reviewers who don’t have shelf-space for all the books they are sent. From the price printed on the cover a buying price is roughly calculated, and a selling price is pencilled on the fly leaf, but these numbers are often, depending upon the interest of the conversation the books provoke, negotiable ...’

You can see from the slope of the ceiling behind the façade that this is more of a lean-to than a proper building. Paraffin heaters, not central heating, gave warmth. Accounts and receipts were written on scraps of paper. There were bargains galore (the poetry shelves not least), and always a fine selection of art books (from Phaidon and Thames & Hudson monographs to gallery catalogues). Sheila seemed to know everyone, or if not everyone then at least most of them, and even that is the wrong way of putting it because even if you were no one she drew you in, you were equal. Which shouldn’t really be difficult but in bookish circles can be rare. There wasn’t much money in that shop but there was a lot of good will.

Early last year Sheila had a stroke. She’s in a care home. I go round and read, and sometimes coincide with another former customer and sometimes with her brother, who is also in a wheelchair. A surreal place, it may be another version of heaven, an off-kilter one: strange moans from other rooms, the TV on loud in an empty day-room, institutional decorations, the staff few but patient, caring. Also in the day room: a shelf of board games with missing pieces; a set of plastic skittles; paperbacks of thrillers with embossed gold titles. We banter, gossip, she struggles for a name and we laugh.

Below is the shop in Portobello Road that in July, for one week only, the first week (1st to the 7th), I and Todd Swift of Eyewear Publishing will be taking as a pop-up bookshop (mostly small-press poetry, but not exclusively). One week compared to forty-four years – the blink of an eyelid. But selling books, and meeting random people who call in, whether or not they spend money, seems a decent way of spending time, and I’ll enjoy talking about it afterwards with Sheila.

Last week

Mis-read ‘the Centre for New Writing’ as ‘the Centre for Not Writing’. Considered who should go there, who would benefit.

Got annoyed by someone saying Salt couldn’t sell poetry books because they didn’t have a ‘publicity budget’. Remembered, from earlier this month, when a CBe author was flown to London to read, the email from the freelance publicist (has worked for big publishers, big authors): she would find it ‘incredibly useful’ to know the date of publication of the CBe edition, and more info about the author. It being beyond her wit to click on (1) the CBe website, and (2) the author’s website, which includes a full ‘press pack’ (photos, CV, interviews, the lot). Remembered, also from earlier this month, asking big-name publisher if they’d care to contribute to the cost of wine at a reading by CBe author and one of their own authors. No: they didn’t have a ‘budget’ for this.

Wondered what hourly/weekly/project fee the aforesaid freelance publicist charges.

Wondered what hourly/weekly/project fee I might charge for editing/design/typesetting etc, and to whom I could send this invoice.

Looked hard at a postcard with a photo of the cave in the middle of nowhere where, supposedly, Bonnie Prince Charlie holed up. For a while.

Checked the cricket scores.

Discovered that if I am a member of the Society of Authors and the author/translator I want to get in touch with also happens to be a member, the process is wonderfully simple and efficient.

Went to have tea with translator. Tea extended into Campari-&-sodas.

Got sent a book to review which I didn’t take to, so suggested I do something instead on another new book that I really like. Was told OK, two reviews. Did both.

Took in PBS submissions by hand (saving on postage).

Worried that review of first book was too mean. Not much, but a little.

Drank the left-over wine that the big-name publisher didn’t have a budget for.

Wrote and sent off report on RLF Fellowship, which I could have done before but had been worrying about the ungratefulness of saying, to my hosts, that taking overseas students’ fees (up to £18,500 a year) for courses largely assessed on an ability to perform a task (writing essays) for which they are not equipped is deeply unfair on both the students and the teachers who assess them. Stopped worrying.

Watched DVD of Almost Famous. Lester Bangs (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman): ‘Be honest and be unmerciful.’ Repeated. Do I like this film just because I fancy Kate Hudson?

Watched DVD of the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There. Billy Bob Thornton, in that film, is my exact double.

Thought of a random number between 1 and 500 and sent a book (publishing in July) to print.

Collected new printing of hot-selling book from printer and took boxes over to warehouse, other side of London. Brought back boxes of cold-selling book of other publisher, involving delivery to storage in a legally squatted factory and subsequent visit to stationery shop close by house in which (see Nights and Days in W12, page 29) ‘Robert Graves lived in the 1920s in a ménage à quatre, where his lover Laura Riding jumped from a third-floor window (and broke her back) and Graves, in sympathy, jumped from a lower window (and twisted his ankle)’.

Met local poet, resulting in going to party at house with poets in one upstairs room, meditation in other, story-telling downstairs and music too. People named Piers and Tabitha. Woman with Indian headdress, man in horse-riding gear with whip. Left early.

Checked cricket scores.

Arranged to meet, next week, co-ingénues, not quite the right word, in the organising of the Free Verse book fair; and ditto in the organising of the pop-up shop, July; and a man, once local (that’s him in the cafe on page 107 of Days and Nights), now living in Norway, who has an agent for his novel; and a woman who has a long poem I like and who has been told by her agent that it can’t possibly be published by August, which is when it’s being put on as an opera.

Various days, queued in the post office. Wrote a long letter, by hand, with fountain pen, and posted this.

Said yes to freelance typesetting job.

Said no to several please-publish-me submissions. Started reading excellent manuscript novel, sent indirectly, which almost certainly I won’t publish but will read to the end. Also read: Nick Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro; Peter Stamm, Seven Years; Agota Kristof, The Notebook (for the third time).

Designed cover for a book I may well not publish (depends on how much they ask for the UK rights) but truly deeply madly want to.

Checked cricket scores. Had a haircut. Wrote zilch.

Paid £19.50 for two glasses of wine and a bowl of nuts. Lost crown on tooth from one of those nuts. Thought, for the umpteenth time, about the ridiculously privileged position I seem to have accidentally engineered myself into, and how to get out of this and what I might do when I do.