Lockdown CBe food, part 1

The story so far: on the first day of Lockdown 3, I received in the post a notebook for recipes along with an author’s corrected proofs. So, Lockdown project: I invited all CBe writers to send recipes. More will follow: squirrels, haggis, flapjacks … I’ll probably blog two or three at a time.

It’s fascinating, how could it not be. I’m getting recipes invented on the street – ‘absently picking on a sprig of rosemary as I ate a flapjack’ – and recipes as cooked by granny in the 1940s, using powdered egg. You could email to ask for the exact recipes and I’ll happily send those but in most cases you’re going to be none the wiser: most people are not calculating in teaspoons or precise timings (‘Put into the oven for an unspecified amount of time’). Except in the foundational sense that it is – how this thing reacts to that thing at a given temperature and for a given time – this isn’t science. It’s pleasure, and play.

1 Will Eaves (The Absent Therapist; The Inevitable Giftshop; Broken Consort; and Murmur, first from CBe but now with Canongate): Haddock and Cannellini Cassoulet. Leek, mushrooms, courgette, beans, veg stock, and haddock; paprika, turmeric, ‘a blast of Worcestershire sauce, a shake of balsamic vinegar and a splodge of tomato concentrate’. This is my regular kind of cooking, so an easy way in, but delicious, I’ll go here again. New to me, about the tin of beans: ‘Don’t bother draining them, or only drain them a little: the salty sludge is good’ – a line Nigella would be proud of.

2 Eric Mace-Tessler (translator of Gert Hofmann, Veilchenfeld): I’m out of my comfort zone here, not just because I’m not vegan but also because I don’t have a thing his recipe calls a ‘pressure cooker’. I have pans. (During the last lockdown, or was it the one before, I did acquire a skillet, for hob and oven both, but I’ve only used it once.) So this is a ‘version’, as free-wheeling translators sometimes say, of the original. My expectations were not high: how can bully-boy chickpeas be, as Eric promises, ‘subtle’? Turns out they can. A little salt, no other spices. Onion, chickpeas, ‘scallions’, buckwheat noodles, and the green bits are roasted nori.

3 and 4 Schnitzel from Stephen Knight (The Prince of Wails; Drizzle Mizzle Downpour Deluge), pork not veal. Here, with red cabbage and from David Collard (About a Girl: a Reader’s Guide to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing), Leftover Roast Potatoes, as served (for free) by Rose in The George, Parkholme Road, Hackney, in the 1980s. Potatoes get the regular treatment (but the oil mustn’t be olive, ‘which smokes’, or goose fat, ‘which is an ostentation’); the only ‘difficult part’ is leaving them in a bowl (not in the fridge) for 24 hours: ‘They're best eaten cold the following day as leftovers, sprinkled with sea salt.’

The recipe for Stephen Knight’s Schnitzel is printed in the form of a letter from his mother at the end of his superb novel Mr Schnitzel (2000; long out of print but try AbeBooks). ‘PS If not clear please ring.’ The centrepiece of Knight’s Drizzle Mizzle Downpour Deluge is an elegy of sorts for his mother, who died in 2019; it’s a poem of contained fury at the kind of poetry that offers itself as consolatory – ‘faced with this pabulum / who wouldn’t look glum’. Pabulum: ‘pap,’ says my online dictionary, adding: ‘mid 17th century (in the sense “food”): from Latin, from the stem of pascere “to feed”.’ This business of writing and food and mothers is complicated.

Bad weather, good books

1st January, late afternoon, cold sleety weather, the UK now un-moored from Europe and Covid rampant and the ship run by incompetent bastards and I overhear a drunk woman in the street ask a stranger if he knows someone called Mohammed and he replies: ‘Everyone does, don’t they?’ I love this city. This country too – which is not easy right now, but it needs love most when the times are hard.

Meanwhile, here’s a book, Spring Journal, that took on 2020 on directly, week by week, and was published in December: ‘The virus reveals the flaw / In our way of living: the rich fly it around the planet / And dump it on the doorsteps of the poor.’ Responding fast and honestly to the times we live in is one of the things writing and publishing are for.

Slow works too: Simple Annals by Roy Watkins, the first title from CBe in 2021, a memoir of childhood in Lancashire in the 1940s and early 50s, is short (around 120 pages) but was many years in the writing: the author remembers hearing an early version read aloud by Ted Hughes. The writing has an immediacy that belies the decades.

The Lockdown Subscription – 10 books (plus extras) for £65 – is still available: see the Home page of the website. It is a complete bargain (especially now that postage has just gone up by 10%). This Lockdown Subscription was first offered in late March last year; it is now even more relevant than it was then.

Posting books since 2007

I first posted CBe books from this post office in November 2007. Between then and now, I’ve made more than 1,700 trips to the same post office.

The books posted are those ordered by individual readers from the website. Orders from bookshops are despatched from the distributor, Central Books, but I’m not good at getting the books into bookshops: out of 72 titles published since 2007, 23 – almost a third – have sold fewer than a hundred copies out of Central Books (and 14 of those, fewer than 50).

Postage costs have increased, year on year; the cover price of the books (most of them are £8.99) has not. CBe gets no Arts Council funding. I’m not quite sure how CBe is still alive: something to do, perhaps, with the momentum generated by walking to the post office. I commend to you the Lockdown Subscription offer, available from the website: 10 books of your choice for £65, free UK delivery. Every subscription keeps me posting.

Lockdown again

It won’t unlock lockdown, but week by week the CBe Lockdown Subscription will give you something to look forward to: 10 books for £65, posted over 10 weeks. Free UK delivery. Available on the website home page. A subscription now will take you into Christmas and beyond, and what are you going to give to the aunts and the uncles?

The CBe Lockdown Subscription (first offered at the start of the Lockdown 1 in March this year) differs from other subscription models, and also from those ‘curated bundles’, in several ways:
· You choose (if you want to) which books to receive.
· Occasional extras (books, pamphlets, etc.) are thrown in for free.
· You don’t give me your bank details.

Most subscriptions rely on customer inertia. On subscription, the London Review of Books is currently £1 per issue for six months. Shop price is £4.75 per issue. That’s enticing, if you want to read the LRB, or even if you don’t, but then the small print: ‘Then pay just £26.55 per quarter’. And you’ve given them your bank details. This explains, in part, the piles of unread copies of the LRB still in their eco-friendly mailing envelopes in bookish homes: ‘We enjoy intelligent debate; we lead such busy lives we haven’t time to read all that.’

A subscription taken out now will include, if you want, Spring Journal by Jonathan Gibbs, a book of this year whether or not anyone chooses it as such: written in instalments between March and late August, modelled on and responding to Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, itself a response to the public events and the mood on the streets in the latter months of 1938. Spring Journal is an act of witness: angry, desperately sad, sceptical about what writing is for even as it is written.

Also included (again, only if you want), Will Eaves’s Broken Consort, reviewed in this week’s TLS: ‘Broken Consort is that rare book of criticism: one that tells the truth about the limitations of both reading and writing.’

Spring Journal is available now but is included in the flyer for next year’s books (photo above). I’m getting ahead of myself. Pause: I want to thank all those who have clicked the Lockdown Subscription button during the past months. It’s a way of moving books around and is keeping this small boat afloat.

Journals: MacNeice 1938, Gibbs 2020

Stop press. Actually, the complete opposite: start press. Jonathan Gibbs’s Spring Journal, written between March and late August in the Year of Covid 2020 – and modelled on Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, itself written August to December 1938, an immediate personal response to the public events of those months and the mood on the streets as Fascism gripped Europe and war loomed – will be published by CBe in November/December. At any rate, before Christmas. The point of a small press is that it can turn on a sixpence.

Above: London rent strike, 1938; London, 2019 (from Good Morning, Mr Crusoe).

Spring Journal is an honest, angry, sad, thoughtful, appalled, urgent act of witness to this lousy year. Why would anyone want to be reminded? Those who have followed the week-by-week reading-aloud of the poem by Michael Hughes on David Collard’s Leaps-in-the-Dark on Zoom know that this is not a statistical summary or an op-ed piece; that something cumulative has been building, and that its sharing has been important. The poem itself is deeply sceptical of exaggerated or romantic notions of what poetry can do, or is for; it feels nevertheless, in part because of this scepticism, a necessary work.

It also feels to be not just coincidence that another book I’ve been preparing for print (to be published next year with a foreword by Michael Rosen) is a re-issue of Leila Berg’s classic autobiography, Flickerbook – which in present-tense observations and vignettes records the author’s childhood and early youth in the 1920s and 1930s, and her growing political engagement. The book ends with the sound of an air-raid siren in London in September 1939: ‘Something new is beginning, and we fumble because we don’t know what it is.’

Plus (this isn’t an add-on: it’s survival) – CBe’s Lockdown Subscription is still running: for £65, a book each week for 10 weeks (free delivery in the UK). Sign up on the website home page. As mentioned in a previous post, sales of CBe books to bookshops April to July this year were just 3% of what they were in the previous two years. The subscription offer keeps books moving around and me busy. Subscribers can choose which titles on the CBe list they want to receive. These can include, if wanted, the 2020 new titles – Will Eaves’s Broken Consort, Gert Hofmann’s Veilchenfeld, Todd McEwen’s Who Sleeps with Katz and Stephen Knight’s Drizzle Mizzle Downpour Deluge – and the new reprint of Andrzej Bursa’s Killing Auntie. And, when copies are in from the printer, Jonathan Gibbs’s Spring Journal.

New titles, and some ridiculous numbers

Two new titles this month. Veilchenfeld, the first English translation of a novel by Gert Hofmann (Germany, 1930s: ‘It has happened little by little, as many things simply happen little by little, Mother said, and told us everything about Herr Veilchenfeld, as far as it was known to her’). Broken Consort, essays (on many different things under the sun) and reviews by Will Eaves, characterised by inquiry and generosity (‘We are taught by what we find … And what we find, we have to give away’).

These books will be noticed, god willing, and find readers. Sales of CBe books out of the distributor, Central Books, April to July 2018: 1,358 books. Same period, 2019: 1,472 books. Same period, 2020: 46 books. Between last year and this, that’s a drop of 97%.

Veilchenfeld will be a slow burner, perhaps: staying around, finding a few new readers year by year. Killing Auntie by Andrzej Bursa has been this: one of the very early CBe books, the original print run picked off over a decade in single figures. Some of the early CBe titles are now out of print, but this one is currently reprinting (re-set and with new cover, because the original files have given up the ghost). Sample spread here (the book also includes a short novel):

In the 1950s Bursa worked in Krakow with Tadeusz Kantor – who provides the epigraph (‘An object exists between eternity and the rubbish heap’) for Present Tense, an exhibition opening this week at Studio Expurgamento, with whom CBe co-published Blush – free entry but for social-distancing reasons you need to book a time.

One Good Thing over the past few months – both for me and, I hope, for those who have taken up the offer – has been the Lockdown Subscription: 10 books for £65, posted over 10 weeks. The first books were posted off on 31 March; anyone who subscribed in July is still receiving. New subscribers welcome – because lockdown isn’t really over until the fat lady sings, and that ain’t happening yet. Details on the website home page (you can specify which books you’d like; new titles included in the offer; UK only).

Next year’s programme is looking like this: poetry, memoir, memoir, essays. A novel will turn up, I’m betting on it. Thank you for your support.

Out of Lockdown: new titles

The two CBe September titles – the first English translation of Veilchenfeld by Gert Hofmann, published in Germany in 1986, and Will Eaves’s Broken Consort, subtitled Essays, reviews, and other writings – are now available for pre-order on the website.

‘People don’t read books of essays.’ Oh no? Along with ‘No one reads short stories’, that’s one of those pronouncements carved into the tablet of Publishing Wisdom that get muttered at high table as the port is passed round. Of course no one reads them if no one publishes them. On the other hand, aren’t we living through a new Golden Age of the Essay? I’m as suspicious of Golden Age declarations as of ‘People don’t read …’ statements. It’s not as if good essays haven’t been written continually, all the time. The Contents page of Will Eaves’s book – which is similar in length to the Contents page of many poetry collections: another genre subject to the ‘no one reads’/Golden Age, whore/Madonna split, as if readers can’t be trusted to take books on their merit, whatever their genre – can be viewed from the book’s page on the website.

‘People don’t read Gert Hofmann these days’ – there’s some truth in that, because most of the English translations of his work are now out of print. During lockdown I re-read his The Parable of the Blind and Balzac’s Horse and Other Stories and have decided that he is an even funnier, more lugubrious, more essential writer than I remembered. I’d love to be able to bring some of the vanished editions back into print with CBe.

I won’t be doing that, because CBe isn’t big enough: just two books last year, four this year (and another four, maybe even five, coming along next year). And it’s not as if I’m a wizard at selling them. Many of the titles are listed on Amazon as ‘out of stock’. Your best bet is still the website – where the Lockdown Subscription, 10 books + extras posted over 10 weeks for £65, is still available (and can include the new September titles, if you wish).