Town & Country, edited by Kevin Barry. A mysterious new book of mysterious new stories by mysterious new writers. And some old writers.

I can't say much about this yet, or they will KILL ME AND FEED ME TO THE RATS, in the dungeon beneath the Faber & Faber HQ. (OK, OK, I am exaggerating. The dungeon beneath the Faber & Faber HQ is only used for consensual BDSM sex.)

Town. Not to mention Country. On Amazon. Or in your local bookshop. Wait, no that's a boutique now. Hang on, didn't they go bust? It's an artisan bakery. Feck it, there's always the library... Hey, where's the library?

But I can say, it's the cover of a book that may or may not contain stories by **k* ********k, and *e**** *e***, and good lord, *****n* ****n.

And, wow, *i*í* *í ***i****, and the excellent **i** *i*****, and **ll* ***l*****!

And *a* ***a**, not to be confused with *a** ****a*, who ALSO has a story in it... What's that noise? That squeaking noise, from behind the door? Two kinds of similar, yet distinct, squeaking? Getting louder... The door! It's swinging open... Rats! Rats in bondage gear! Their tiny, rubber-clad thighs rubbing together as they cautiously approach... break suddenly into a run... leap for my throat!

AAaaaaAAAAaaaaaAAaaaaaaaaaAAAääaäàááaAAAaááaááæaaãããæAAAæææååååāaāaāäaääààaa.....

It’s Official; I’m Writing the Biography of Octavia Friedman, CEO of Octo. (See you at Transmediale…)

Well, this is my big news for 2013. (I had to keep quiet till all the contracts were signed.) Where do I start? A traditional biography would probably begin,Octavia Allende Friedman is the CEO of Octo. She plans to transform the world. (And her plan is right on track.) Octavia was born in Venezuela, in 1970, to a mathematician and a dancer, and learned binary before she learned the alphabet…”

 

But if you've been reading the news recently, you will already know all about Octavia. Wall Street Journal: "Octavia Friedman is the next Steve Jobs." (Paywalled). Wired: “Octavia Friedman, and Octo, Build The Internet Of Things.” TechCrunch: "Octavia Sues Samsung and Manolo Blahnik For Patent Infringement." National Enquirer; "Red-Headed Female Billionaire Accused of Pushing Bankers Into Volcano From Helicopter."

 

Many details of Octavia’s life are in the public domain. But the full truth is waaaay stranger. If I get it right, this is going to be one hell of a book.

 

Of course Octo hasn't transformed the world yet, but seasoned veterans of the tech wars, and her celebrity friends, give her a damn good chance of succeeding. (Robert Scoble: "I haven't been this excited by a startup since Friendfeed." Cory Doctorow: "I haven't been this excited by a startup since Github.” George Michael: "I haven't been this excited by a startup since Grindr.”)

 

The story of her extraordinary company is inextricably tangled up with the story of her extraordinary life. A role model for millions; a powerful woman at the top of a male dominated industry; an occasionally controversial figure (though the deaths of her former associates were, eventually, ruled accidental); and the most glamorous CEO of the modern era; it is unsurprising that her biography is predicted to be the number-one non-fiction book, worldwide, this Christmas, even though it hasn't actually been written yet.

 

So, yes, I'm pretty pleased to have been given the gig of writing it. And I’m not just saying that because one of her minders is standing behind me with a gun. (Ha ha! (Just joking. (Honest.)))

 

PHOTO: The view (straight up) from the bottom of the well they threw me down 

 

I can't say much more about this now (even the UK and US publishers want to keep their names under wraps until certain subsidiary rights deals are signed), but I can tell you that the contract to write the book is now firmly in place. The rumour that I was required to sign it in blood is entirely false. (A couple of drops may have got splashed on the contract during negotiations, but it was nothing, really.) The book will be fully illustrated with candid shots and family photos, plus specially commissioned portraits by Katy Grannan and David LaChapelle, and will come out in hardback and e-formats on November 21st this year, in all markets.

 

To be totally honest, I wasn't sure if I had time to do this (I have my own novel, screenplay, and computer game to write), but it turns out Octavia is a big fan of my story "The iHole", which recounts the history of a new technology; and she and her associates were very persuasive. They flew me to Austria last week (very hush-hush: I had to pretend I was going there to give a talk at the University of Vienna), and we talked terms in her little Mittel-European pied-a-terre, Schloss Octo, just outside Vienna.

 

PHOTO: The view (straight down) from the window they dangled me from.

 

 

So, there you go. I'll tell you more as it becomes legally possible. Meanwhile, Octavia will be launching a proof-of-concept of Octo's new product at the transmediale festival in Berlin this week; I'll be there, covering the launch, and interviewing Octavia for the book. If you bump into us, say hello...

 

Irish Writer Pardoned For Stealing Pig

 "The pig is rightfully MINE, Sir Terence!" (Photo by Sophie Gough Fives.) Actually, to contradict the caption, (which, on reflection, I realise is more Sherlock Holmes than Bertie Wooster) - I hope Sir Terry Pratchett wins. THIS time...

Well, well, well. My new novel, Jude in London, has been shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. Older readers will understand why I am so surprised (as well as, of course, delighted); younger readers will have it explained to them shortly. It involves dark literary doings, and the theft of livestock. Stick around.

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction is the one where they give you the prize at the Hay Festival, name a pig after your book, and take your photo with the pig. A great, idiosyncratic prize, with a good track record. The Wodehouse judges discovered
Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, they chose Vernon God Little before it won the Booker, and last year they gave the prize to Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.

This year, it's a very strong shortlist: the other four are Terry Pratchett (for Snuff), Sue Townsend (of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole fame, for The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year), John O'Farrell (for The Man Who Forgot His Wife), and John Lanchester (for his sprawling financial comedy of London life, Capital). Normally, natural humility would cause any author surprise at being on such a splendid shortlist. However, as regular readers of my work will know, I do not suffer from humility. My surprise at being on the shortlist comes from the fact that, last time I was on it, I disgraced myself so thoroughly that I'd assumed the judges were more likely to put me on a blacklist than a second shortlist.

Back in 2008, the first novel in my Jude trilogy - Jude in Ireland - was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, alongside Alan Bennett, Will Self, Garrison Keillor (of Lake Wobegon Days fame), and Joe Dunthorne. I swelled with pride, chiefly in the region of the head. I blogged about my joy. But... well, at this point I may as well quote from a slightly later blog entry:

"You can imagine then my dismay when I discovered, shortly afterwards, buried in the small print of the Hay-on-Wye festival programme, the odd phrase "Will Self, winner of the 2008  Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize." Winner? WINNER?!?!?!

As the festival program had gone to print before the shortlist was announced, this meant that the prize committee had picked the winner before they had announced, or perhaps even picked, the shortlist. It was a stitch-up. But worse, I had been denied my rightful month of anticipation, tingling, hiccups and giddy excitement.

Also I'd put serious money on Alan Bennett to win. His The Uncommon Reader is a little masterpiece. Something had to be done.

I thought long and hard. The prize is named after that comic god, P. G. Wodehouse, inventor of Jeeves and Wooster. What, I thought would Wodehouse have done, faced with such provocation? Sat in his room and written another comic novel, probably. That's how he reacted to everything, including World War 2. As I was already sitting in a room writing a comic novel this wasn't much help. Action was called for, dash it. So I asked myself, what would P. G. Wodehouse's greatest creation Bertie Wooster do, nobly backed by the genius of his manservant Jeeves?

 

And the answer came to me as in a vision - as though the ghost of Wodehouse himself whispered in my ear - he would steal the pig.

For if there is one constant in the work of P. G. Wodehouse, from Pigs Have Wings to Pig Hooey, it is that God put pigs on this good green earth to be kidnapped. Not a chapter goes by without somebody chloroforming Lord Emsworth's favourite sow, The Empress of Blandings.

And thus I made my way to the Welsh borders and, with the assistant of my trusty gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves (not his real name, but he would like to remain anonymous for some reason), I stole Will Self's pig.

I sent the organisers this, ah, pignapping video, containing my ransom demands. Tense negotiations continued up until the last minute. They, understandably, did not wish to give the prize to the man who had stolen their pig. I offered, as a very reasonable compromise, to deliver the pig to Alan Bennett's door in London if they would re-award the prize to him. They baulked - Will Self was in the program - his angry fans, denied, might rampage, torching tents, incinerating Gore Vidal in his invalid chair... The intervention of a bishop almost led to a compromise candidate (Joe Dunthorne), but we ran out of time..."

The full story is here. And in this story in The Mail. And in various pieces by Hugo Rifkind, now stuck behind The Times paywall... And The New York Times' arts blog... And in India's Sunday Tribune... I know, I know. And not a thought for my long-suffering mother.


OK, basically, I got a bit carried away. It's always a bad idea for comic writers to leave their padded cells and attempt to do things in a real world for which they are so ill prepared. Still, one learns valuable lessons, which can be fed back into the fiction. I learnt that stealing pigs, for instance, is considerably harder and more complicated in real life than in books. The paperwork for the transfer of livestock across EU borders is shockingly complex. I strongly suspect that PG Wodehouse never stole a pig in his life...

Anyway, it all turned out OK; Will Self kept the title, but I made my point, and I got a pig out of it, which, once converted into wurst and salty bacon, got me through the long Berlin winter.

The only downside, I thought, was that I'd thoroughly burnt all my bridges to the only prize in these islands for comic fiction - pretty much the prize I most wanted.

And thus my surprise at being shortlisted again this week. I think it reflects very well on the people who run the Prize. They have shown true Christian - or Wodehousian - charity. Moral of the story (if there is one): There is greater rejoicing in the literary world over the pig thief who repents, than over the author who never steals a pig at all.


 

(For those not put off Jude in London by the moral depravity of its author... the free Trust Edition is available from Ben, my publisher, here. You may download it and read it for nothing. If you like it, you can pay whatever you think it was worth. More orthodox editions of the book are available here...)

The Jude in London, Not The Booker Prize, Flashmob Book Club

OK, if you want something meaningful and life-changing to do this weekend (and who doesn't?), you can join this one-off, high-speed, hold-onto-your-hats, Jude in London/Not The Booker Prize, flashmob bookclub. Will the life you change be yours, or mine, or both? We won't know till Monday.

 

A totally gratuitous topless shot of the author. Wearing a David Shrigley temporary tattoo. Long story.Here's the deal: my publisher and I will let you download my brand new book, for free, here. (It's usually £12.99 in trade paperback, or £4.99 on Kindle). You read it over the weekend, throwing in comments and arguing with each other (and me) in the comments section below. And if you love the book - and only if you love it - you can vote for it to win the Guardian's (in)famous Not The Booker Prize, anytime before midnight London time, this Monday (17th of October, 2011).

 

If you choose to vote for Jude in London to win the Not The Booker Prize, you'll need to vote in the comments on this page, and write a very short review here to prove you've read it. Also, bear in mind there's several other excellent books on the shortlist for the prize (I'm thinking in particular of Spurious, by Lars Iyer, and King Crow by Michael Stewart), so feel free to check those out, or read and discuss them instead.

 

And yes, when it's all over, you can pay as much (or as little) as you think the book was worth, directly to me & my publisher Ben. (We'll split it equally between us.) But if you're really poor, forget it, the book is on me & Ben. (I was on the dole for ten years, learning to write. I know what it's like to be too broke to join in the fun.)

 

So, it's an experiment - we're going to try and assemble a virtual flashmob book club. If you have any friends who might be interested, tell them. And I'll see you in the comments section down below, later.

 

Just click to go to the download page for the Jude in London Trust Edition

Oh, if you're wondering will Jude in London be to your taste, here's some recent reviews from The Guardian, The Irish Times, and The Cadaverine. (And if you want to go straight to the source and judge for yourself, here's an instant extract you don't have to download, about goats and financial bubbles: The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble...)

 

If you've any problems downloading the book free from here, just email me at JulianGoughsSecretEmailAddress@gmail.com, or tell me on Twitter (I'm @juliangough), and I'll email you a copy directly.

 

Have fun, be nice. Enjoy the weekend.

 

(EDIT: As soon as I posted this, and tweeted about it, the responses began - on Twitter. D'oh! I hadn't thought this through... So yes, we can talk about the book here; but also on Twitter (where I am @juliangough), using the hashtag #judeinlondon. I'll mosey back and forth. Talk soon...)

Help save civilization by reading a funny book

It's not every day you get a chance to help an award-winning impoverished author (er, that's me) solve a major dilemma, while simultaneously helping to humanise Capitalism, revolutionise Publishing, and save Civilization. But today is that day.

 

Jude in London - soon to be a major bookHere's the background (the dilemma will follow): my new novel, Jude in London, has just been longlisted for the Guardian's Not The Booker Prize. Now, The Not The Booker Prize is the most entertaining prize in the literary calendar; an annual online flame-war-slash-literary-debate that can be very helpful in drawing attention to unusual books. (The prize itself is a mug, worth about £1.50. But the glory is incalculable!)

 

BUT: For a long-listed novel to make the shortlist, readers have to nominate the book, and post a very short review on the Guardian website (to prove they've read it). The process is explained in detail here.

 

Here's the dilemma: Jude in London is officially published on September 6th. But the shortlist votes (and reviews) have to be in by this coming Wednesday. As my novel isn't in the shops for another fortnight, I don't have any readers yet to nominate it.

 

So, if any of you would like to read Jude in London, for free, I can send you a pdf of the entire finished book, nicely laid out and readable, today. And if you like it a lot, I'd be extremely pleased if you would post a 150 word review, and nominate it for the shortlist by Wednesday. You're under no pressure to review it or vote for it: only do that if you genuinely like it a lot and think it's worthy of going through to the next round.

 

There you go. Anyone who wants a free pdf of Jude in London, just ask in the comments below, or on Twitter (I'm @juliangough), or email me at juliangoughssecretemailaddress@gmail.com...

 

Now, here's the bit where we revolutionise Capitalism. My beloved publisher Ben, who runs Old Street, has conniptions at the thought of a professional-quality pdf of the entire book escaping into the wild before publication. Understandably so - he's sunk a lot of time and money into making a beautiful book out of Jude in London. But I think the future for peculiar writers like me has to be a kind of love-based mutant version of capitalism where you trust your readers, and in return your readers help to keep you alive. Because the free market isn't going to. Bear in mind, I've gone bust and been evicted while writing this book. I've wandered Europe homeless, relying on the kindness of friends (and the occasional stranger) to get it finished. So I, too, would like to see it, somehow, earn me enough to keep going and finish the next one.

 

So here's the deal: I give you the book for free. You don't have to review it or nominate it. But if you really like the book, if you read all the way to the end and have a good time... I'd love you to buy a copy for a friend. Does that seem fair?

 

And if you do like it, and buy a copy for a friend, tell me, and I'll tell my publisher, and maybe this trust-based model (where a book is always a present, and yet small publishers stay in business and weird writers get to eat) could take off.

Jude in Tate Modern... A girl! A gun! The Turner Prize!

Here (hot from my inbox!) is a sneak preview of an illustration, and a chapter, from Jude in London (due to be published in September). In the picture, Jude is about to find out if he has won the greatest prize in art - the Turner of Turners. The crowd lift him aloft... his former lover, Babette, flips a golden coin...

No, I won't tell you who is sneaking up behind him with a gun.

 

For now, clicking on the picture takes you to the first book. Which is also excellent.

 

And here's some free new book to go with the picture. This is from a little earlier on, before the prize ceremony... Enjoy...

(Oh, by the way, the artist, Gareth McNamee Allen, once did this fine homage to Tayto crisps for my old band, Toasted Heretic's first album, Songs for Swinging Celibates. There's more of his work on his website. Top chap... OK, here we go... )

 

 

From Jude in London...

 

CHAPTER 80

I entered Tate Modern. The floor sloped away and down, beneath a high walkway, and out into one enormous Room. I walked for a long time, until I was in the centre of the Room, and looked around. I was obviously very early, for the Art had not arrived yet. Certainly there was more than enough blank space on the walls for it. It was a room into which you could have fitted Galway City’s great Car Park of the Roaches itself. I had never seen the like. Its scale was inhuman. Yet the Tate Family evidently still lived here, and spent all their time in this room, for their possessions lay all about me. At the far end of the room, and proof I was in the right place, a stage stood before a backdrop of vast, dead television screens. Great lights, unlit as yet, hung above the stage from steel beams.

No doubt the Prize-Giving will take place upon that stage. Oh, I hope they will not be too disappointed that I have neglected to create any Art …

Perhaps I could make up for my failure by helping to get the place ready, before the other artists’ Art arrived. I looked all about me.

There was very little furniture in the room, and that in bad order. The bed in the far left corner was in most need of attention, the sheets crumpled and filthy. The last party had obviously congregated here, for on the bed, the rug, and the surrounding floor, were empty cigarette packets, stubbed butts, vodka bottles and general debris.

Ceci n'est pas un litIt was an easy matter to collect the rubbish, turn the mattress, shake out the sheets, plump the pillows, and remake the bed. This ritual, familiar to me from the Orphanage, soothed. I sang softly as I worked. Too soft a sound to rebound in echo from the bare walls.

The fish tank proved trickier than the bed. Enormous though the tank was, the fish was far too big for it. I estimated the poor creature at thirty-five feet. Presumably, in the way of family pets, it had simply outgrown its accommodation. The older Tate children, who loved it, had themselves, I supposed, reached adolescence, and become too busy to care for it: and the aging parents slowly forgot it, in its forty foot tank in the far right corner. It appeared to have been dead for some time. Bubbles of decomposition rocked it occasionally in the thickening water, as they emerged from the decaying grey flesh. The top of the tank was sealed, which cannot have been healthy for the fish while it lived. Certainly, it made my task of emptying and cleaning the tank more difficult than it needed to be.

Ceci n'est pas un poissonWhen I was finally done with the fish tank, I examined the room in more detail. The place was in a shocking state. The closer I looked, the more shocked I was. The very basics of child-rearing seemed to have been neglected by the Tate parents. Neither the young Tate children nor their many pets seemed to have been adequately toilet trained. There were lumps of elephant dung everywhere. Some had even stuck to the paintings, and dried there. It was a hell of a job to get it all off.

The children themselves seemed to go anywhere. I even found a bottle of urine with a crucifix in it. Sighing, I retrieved our Lord Jesus on his cross, and hung him back up on a clean wall.

I began to clean the handprints and splashes of dried mud off the end wall.

As I worked, others quietly entered the enormous room. Some introduced themselves to me, and shook my hand.

“Judges,” they murmured.

“Brian Eno,”

“Brian Sewell,”

“Brian Balfour-Oatts.”

“Fascinating piece.”

“Please, ignore us.”

“Carry on, carry on.”

They crept into the shadows, murmuring.

“And while dressed as a rabbit! Brilliant!”

“I thought Mark Wallinger’s Sleeper couldn’t be improved on, but by golly…”

“I beg to differ…”

I finished cleaning the wall, and looked around. Still a great deal of work to do, to get the place ready … Unbelievable that a family as rich as the Tates lived in such squalor. Nothing seemed to work. I decided to fix the fluorescent light, which had been flickering erratically since I’d arrived. I tracked the fault to a hidden timer that someone had mistakenly set to turn the light on and off again every minute or so. It was a simple matter to route the circuit around it.

Even their big, new, colour television seemed broken. I couldn’t get any sound out of it. It was showing a rather dull film, about a woman trying to clean a shower. The pictures had gone very slow for some reason, and were in black and white. The whole thing seemed banjaxed. I switched it off.

Then I picked up some old firebricks, which had been left lying where someone might trip. Gasps came from the shadows. Brian Sewell clapped.

I put the firebricks in an old, water-damaged shed. Its overlapping boards and weathered paint reminded me of the lakeboats of Lough Derg. A pleasing warm feeling rose in me.

Now to deal with the graffiti.

The older Tate children seemed to have thrown several parties recently, without the benefit of parental supervision. Many of their friends had scrawled their names, and worse, across all kinds of objects and surfaces. I set to scrubbing. An illiterate fellow called Chris, from County Offaly, seemed to be one of the worst offenders. I was sad to see a fellow Irishman letting the side down. “Ofili” indeed.

Tired, and in need of a break after removing the graffiti, I looked for the toilet facilities. A urinal was mounted in the centre of the room. It was mounted at a curious height, and on its back: but no doubt that was the modern way. Oh, more fecking graffiti… On its rim someone had scribbled their name, and the date or time of the party. R. Mutt. 1917? 19.17? 7.17pm? I carefully scraped it off, before urinating.

 

Ceci n'est pas un urinoir

(There you go. Feel free to comment below, or explore more of the book for free here.)







World Women in Literature Day

Mr. Jonathan Franzen, author of the acclaimed novel, Freedom, was unable to attend the launch of World Women in Literarature Day.

 BREAKING NEWS: Jonathan Franzen, author of the acclaimed novel Freedom, was unable to attend the launch of World Women in Literature Day.

 

Philip Roth and the President of America discuss World Women in Literature Day

Philip Roth, author of the great American novels, The Great American Novel, American Pastoral, and The Plot Against America, said last night "It is a tragedy for world literature that Jonathan Franzen was unable to attend."

 

Women's literature is currently making a big splash in America. News that a woman had won the recent Pulizer prize for fiction was covered by the New York Times, who devoted a full line to it in their initial announcement. In a break with tradition, they even spelt her name correctly in some later editions of the paper (see correction below the article).

 

David Foster Wallace celebrates World Women in Literature Day. Image courtesy Esquire and the collective unconscious.And the publishing world has been swept by rumours that several female Nobel Prize winning authors from unfashionable countries may be briefly reviewed in two, or even three, American news outlets next year, so long as David Foster Wallace (author of the wildly acclaimed first half of a novel, The Pale King), doesn't release a collection of unfinished short stories, or a facsimile of a notebook.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A spokesman for the American Press Association said last night: "Your mouth is moving but I can't hear you, I think because your voice is so high."



Please click on the three photographs for further information on this story.

The State of Irish Literature 2010

 

To my slight surprise (and immense delight), my story “The Orphan and the Mob” was chosen to represent Ireland in the ambitious new anthology, Best European Fiction 2010 (edited by Aleksandar Hemon, and introduced by Zadie Smith). The book’s publishers, Dalkey Archive Press, recently asked me five polite questions about the state of Irish literature. I replied with an intemperate rant. A slightly updated version follows below…

 

1. Are there any exciting trends, movement, or schools in contemporary Irish fiction? Who do you feel are the overlooked contemporary authors in Ireland who should be more widely read and translated?

 

I haven’t the faintest idea. As is traditional with my people, on achieving the status of Writer, I was strapped to an ass and driven from the City. I’ve lived in Berlin for the past few years. When I was in Ireland, I lived in Galway city, which is on the opposite side of the country to Dublin, where the novelists fester. Galway doesn’t really do literature. And I grew up in Tipperary, in the midlands, where writers were, until recently, killed and eaten. And quite rightly.

 

If there are exciting trends in literary Ireland, the excitement hasn’t made its way to Berlin yet. Anyway, I don’t believe in trends, movements, schools, and the whole German classification mania. That’s all made up after the fact, to help university libraries with their filing.  Each pen is held by a single hand. But for what it’s worth, none of my Irish friends read Irish books any more.

 

Indeed, I hardly read Irish writers any more, I’ve been disappointed so often. I mean, what the FECK are writers in their 20s and 30s doing, copying the very great John McGahern, his style, his subject matter, in the 21st century? To revive a useful old Celtic literary-critical expression: I puke my ring. And the older, more sophisticated Irish writers that want to be Nabokov give me the yellow squirts and a scaldy hole. If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award-winning Irish literary  fiction, you wouldn’t know television had been invented. Indeed, they seem apologetic about acknowledging electricity (or “the new Mechanikal Galvinism” as they like to call it.)

 

I do read the odd new, young writer, and it’s usually intensely disappointing. Mostly it’s grittily realistic, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting. Though, to be fair, sometimes it’s sub-Joycean, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting. I don’t get the impression many Irish writers have played Grand Theft Auto, or bought an X-Box, or watched Youporn. (And if there is good stuff coming up, for God’s sake someone, contact me, pass it on.) Really, Irish literary writers have become a priestly caste, scribbling by candlelight, cut off from the electric current of the culture. We’ve abolished the Catholic clergy, and replaced them with novelists. They wear black, they preach, they are concerned for our souls. Feck off.

 

But let us accentuate the positive, for the love of the Lord:

 

I do like Kevin Barry. His collection There Are Little Kingdoms had something special about it. Hints of glory ahead. (I gather there will be a novel. I’ll be buying it with cash money.) And from a few years back I loved Mike McCormack’s first book, the story collection Getting it in the Head. I always felt Mike McCormack had the great, demented, Irish small town heavy metal novel in him, he just needed to get it out. Then this week I discovered, from a very reliable source, that he’s finished his next novel, Pilgrim X, and it’s a post-apocalyptic Western set in the west of Ireland. Hurray! Exactly what Irish literature needs right now. I hear there’s a strong Scandinavian death metal vibe off it. This has all the signs of being his major breakthrough, and breakout.

 

For me, the only writer to grab the Celtic Tiger by the tail and pull hard while the tiger roared was Ross O’Carroll Kelly, the pseudonym of Paul Howard. And that was a newspaper column. (Collected every year into a new book – read them all if you want to understand Ireland’s rise and fall. No other writer caught it while it happened. The best, funniest, and most historically important run of Irish satirical journalism since Myles na gCopaleen.)

 

The Irish writer that most excited me recently was Diarmuid O’Brien, and he writes unproduced television scripts. Very funny, very Irish, on the edge of the surreal, a nice mixture of  WB Yeats and UK sitcoms. Padraig Kenny is another very funny, passionate, interesting guy trying to do interesting things with TV and radio scripts. (He has already managed to turn his Twitter rants into an artform.) Tommy Tiernan is Ireland’s most philosophical voice, but he has chosen stand-up comedy as his way of delivering his philosophical prose. Tiernan has read everything by Beckett, and everything by Lenny Bruce, and combined them. On the right night you will end up on the floor weeping tears of laughter and recognition as he takes Ireland apart. I remember reading Graham Linehan when he was only 17 and writing for Hot Press, and thinking, this guy is the funniest writer in Ireland. Of course, he got no recognition or encouragement in Ireland, so he went to London and co-wrote Father Ted, and Black Books, and now writes The I.T. Crowd. (Two days ago, as I write this, he won the British Comedy Award for writers.) The guy’s a genius, but he’s been working out of London, with UK broadcasters, since his early 20s, so he has no reason to address Ireland. (We had other geniuses, a decade or two back, but we didn't want them either. Cathal Coughlan tried to tell us who we were, spewing poetic vinegar with Microdisney, then sulphuric poetry with Fatima Mansions, but we didn't want to listen. Don't get me started on Cathal Coughlan, I'll cry.)

 

But then, why would our funniest, most original voices want to join a pompous, priestly, provincial literary community?  I’m pretty sure the best of the new, young Irish writers are writing for film, TV or computer games. Of course, anyone decent then has to go to England to get anything made. Another problem with Ireland is that its national broadcaster makes civil service television. Raidió Teilifís Éireann have never made a good comedy, they hardly ever make decent drama, and they treat writers like shit. Any work that has to go through an official Irish institution is slowly castrated by committee. All of those things are set up wrong. Our national theatre, The Abbey, is a weird, dysfunctional machine for setting fire to money. There is an almost total disconnect between the plays the Abbey puts on and the nation they are supposed to represent. (It does put on work by good playwrights: but with a thirty year delay.) Its most recent director, Fiach Mac Conghail, is doing his darndest, but turning round around The Abbey is like trying to do a wheelie in an Airbus full of American tourists. As an Irish playwright, you’ve a far better chance of getting your first play put on by the Royal Court in London than by any theatre in Dublin. Culturally, Ireland is a failed state. The fact is disguised because the UK and the USA have taken up the slack, and given our artists an outlet. But Ireland herself has, for example, never made a television program that anyone outside Ireland would want to watch. Given the quality of our writers, and the size of the global English-language TV audience, this is an immense national disgrace. (Just to repeat, everyone involved in Father Ted was Irish - but it was made by the British broadcaster Channel 4.) I know and like many of the individuals who work in RTÉ, but it is institutionally incapable of using the talents of its people, and it is institutionally incapable of change. Its news and sports coverage are excellent, the rest of it should be shut down. At the moment it’s a machine for wrecking talent, and the talented people inside it would be much happier under almost any other system.

 

The only area where Irish writing is thriving in Ireland itself is on the internet, because it’s a direct connection, writer-to-reader. Blogs captured, and capture, Ireland in a way literature  no longer does. Sweary Lady was brilliant (on her Arse End of Ireland blog), right through the Celtic Tiger years. Kav wrote the great Kav’s Blog. (Sweary and Kav both moved on to the Coddle Pot group blog…) And the quality, and quantity, of the swearing was and is very high on the Irish blogs, with guys like Twenty Major. The Irish swear better than almost anyone else on earth, bar maybe the Spanish and a couple of countries in Africa. That’s another area where I think recent Irish literary writers  – with the honourable exception of Roddy Doyle - have failed us badly. Ireland’s great lost playwright, Kevin McGee, was a master of the kind of swearing that had you desperately poking your inner ear with a biro to try and remove the images from your head. However, he was let down by professional theatre, moved into writing television soap operas (and translating the classics), and seems to have abandoned the stage. Who will swear for us now? Who will let rip the savage, guttural, primal utterance – half Yeats poem, half Guinness fart – required, DEMANDED, by the current state of Ireland? {EDIT: Probably Kevin Barry. Since this was first written, his apocalyptic story Fjord of Killary has appeared in the New Yorker, gracing its fragrant pages with North Galway lines as pinpoint accurate as these: 

“Fuckers are washin’ diesel up there again,” John Murphy said. “The Hourigans? Of course, they’d a father a diesel-washer before ’em, didn’t they? Cunts to a man.”

“Cunts,” Bill Knott confirmed.}


But I am biased, unstable, bitter, twisted, and living abroad, so don’t rely on my judgement. I’m sure there’s millions of brilliant writers in Ireland, I’m just mysteriously missing them every time I go there and look. In fact, aware of this, I outsourced the search to Twitter and asked who were the overlooked or neglected Irish writers that I’d missed. Here were the suggestions I got back, to balance my bile:

 

John MacKenna, Tomas O'Crohan, Mark O' Rowe (playwright and screenwriter), Antonia Logue, Sean O'Reilly, Vincent Woods (for “At the Black Pig's Dyke, the most underappreciated Irish play in the past 20 years.”), Gavin Duff, John Moriarty, Mike McCormack.

 

In an enjoyable and robust Twitter debate, Rosita Boland of the Irish Times took issue with the idea that O’Rowe, McCormack or O’Reilly were overlooked. This is a fair point, as all three do get excellent coverage in the Irish Times and on RTÉ, and O’Rowe has a powerful, thoughtful patron in Michael Colgan of the Gate Theatre.

 

Others on Twitter (some of them from lands far from Ireland) suggested Philip O Ceallaigh, Ken Bruen, and Dermot Healy, but it’s hard to think of these excellent, award-winning and acclaimed writers as being “overlooked” in any meaningful way.

 

As for Irish language writers – I’m not qualified to judge. They could all be geniuses for all I know.

 

 

2. Who are the contemporary European writers from other countries that are writing compelling fiction?

 

I’d only be bullshitting you if I tried to answer that question. My pitiful French, street-German, bar-Spanish and school-Irish are not remotely good enough to make literary judgements. I can barely mangle my way through comics in any of them. So, for me, all of European mainland literature is at the mercy of the quality of its translators, which makes me reluctant to judge. For all I know, I should be praising the translator, not the original writer. If you read my first book in Swedish, you would think I was a genius. If you read my first book in German, you would think I was a fool. So it goes. In fact, I strongly suspect that the Swedish translator of my first novel is a better writer than me, and wrote a better book. Molle Kanmert’s emails asking me questions were far funnier than mine, and the Swedish version outsold every other version. Someone sign her up for a novel…

 

3. Do you want your work to be translated? Why or why not?


Of course I do. I want readers. I want to be understood, I want to be misunderstood, I want to get into fights, I want to swim in the Dead Sea, I want to die in my swimsuit, I want to visit Siberia (but leave again), I want to butt in on your national conversation, drink your national drink, shoot and stuff your national bird, eat your national icecream, kiss your poets and pat your dogs and weep at the airport as we hug each other and exchange email addresses and our respective national varieties of flu.

 

4. Are there enough publishing outlets in Ireland for contemporary fiction? Is there a market for literary fiction in Ireland?

 

Well, we have the usual situation that arises when you share a language with a larger neighbour. A perverse, S&M relationship. You fight your oppressor & occupier for 800 years, get your freedom, then immediately ask  them for a publishing deal. Just as Bosnian writers seek Croatian publishers, Irish writers seek English publishers. Of course, English publishers seek Irish writers, so it’s a healthy, wholesome S&M relationship. 80% of Irish novels come out of London publishing houses. There’s always a slight tension in that relationship, of course, because some of your jokes and references won’t be understood by your publisher. But London publishers are very good at making sure that doesn’t become a problem, and that the integrity of the work is protected. They have to navigate the same issues with Welsh and Scottish and Indian and Australian novelists, so it’s not a big deal. There are a lot of small, very noble but very undercapitalised Irish publishers, but they have great difficulty hanging on to their writers if a UK publisher offers a decent advance. Or any advance at all.

 

We don’t really have a problem with lack of recognition, lack of outlets. The best Irish writers get recognised, usually in London first, after which the Irish literary establishment falls into line.  Ireland very, very seldom discovers its own writers first. Roddy Doyle had to take out a bank loan to publish the Commitments in Ireland. After which, he was picked up by an English publisher.

 

That has an interesting effect, though. Knowing that you are addressing sixteen UK readers for every one Irish reader, in a very mild way your book goes into translation in your head, as you write it. Most Irish writers will deny this, but I think it’s true. Of course I was born in London to emigrant Irish parents, so I feel equally at home, or not at home, in both places.

 

 

5. Given a choice, would you prefer a faithful, literal translation of your work or an interpretive re-imagining of it? Why?

 

An interpretive re-imaging, definitely. I don’t think a “faithful, literal” translation of my work – of any work - is even possible. If a translation were to be literal, it wouldn’t be faithful, and vice versa. Any decent writer is playing with nuances, rhythms, echoes, soundstuff that will evaporate in any literal translation. I like a lot of layers. Puns, resonances, double-meanings, Tipperaryisms, things my mum says at Christmas. Often the point of the sentence hasn’t anything to do with its literal meaning at all.

 

I use deliberately “wrong”, literal translations of phrases from the Irish language sometimes myself, because they sound fecking great in English. Friends of my dad would still say “I walked several strong miles”, and that is straight out of the Irish.

 

The Jude books are deliberately written in a stilted, old-fashioned, formal English, of the type spoken in Ireland a century ago. It’s the first-generation English of speakers who learnt English in school, from books, because their parents spoke Irish at home. For me this is a very rich form of English, because you can let the underlying Irish thoughts, structured in Irish grammar, burst through now and again. There is always a nice tension in the speech, as though Jude is walking on linguistic stilts, and has to be careful. He is trying to be terribly precise with a language he doesn’t really control or own.

 

Sometimes the games I play with the various versions of English are fairly explicit, as in the case of this head injury in Jude in London:

 

           “Their noble Tipperary speech reminded me of my mental catastrophe. I looked up from my book, and took the opportunity to experiment with my deformity: I spoke a Catholic thought, and it came out Church of England: I praised a fine All-Ireland semi-final performance by the Tipperary Under-21 hurlers against Kilkenny; and from my mouth came alien speech of an F.A. Cup semi-final replay at Villa Park.

           Sweet Mother of Jesus, I thought, astonished, and

           “Queen of Heaven!” I said.

           Christ on a bicycle, I thought.

           “Good Lord!”

           Holy fuck.

           “Blessed Union!”


           I gave up the attempt to accurately express myself, and returned to my book.”

 

 

I must be a real bastard for translators, because increasingly I like to back-engineer scenes so that a crucial line of narrative, thrown up by the action, is also a line of poetry by Yeats, or a line of dialogue is also a line of Joyce, or Kafka, or is made out of Radiohead song titles. They can be tricky to spot - most of my native-English readers miss most of them. And I also use the misunderstandings and gaps between American English and English English and Irish English to generate jokes and misunderstandings, and moments of unease.

 

 

A single English word sings in many voices, and I like to set off a couple of them, and make my words sing harmonies with themselves, or beat each other up. I doubt if anyone but me gets the half of it, but I think readers find pleasure in it anyway. I remember a woman on a blog quoting her favourite piece of my writing. She said she couldn’t put her finger on why she liked it so much. Well, I could. It was the end of a chapter, and I’d written it in iambic pentameter. Because it was laid out like prose, she hadn’t consciously registered the formal rhythm, the internal rhymes. But subconsciously, she got it...

 

That makes me sound too much of a word wizard – I should also say that most of my sentences are extremely straightforward attempts to get a character through a door in such a way that the reader understands it without having to read it twice, and I don’t always even succeed at that.

 

 

{EDIT: OK, I'm getting Repetitive Strain Injury from putting in links to all these bastards, enough for tonight. Hope you enjoyed it, if you got this far. I'll link a few more lads tomorrow. Your comments are very welcome.}



What I'm Doing In 2010. (Books, Mostly.)

In 2010, I plan to make lots of paper aeroplanes

Allan Cavanagh (or @AllanCavanagh, as I fondly know him) just tweeted to ask me, "have you got a poetry collection coming out?" Which is one of those embarrassingly intimate questions about shameful practices best unmentioned. Apparently he had heard the magnificent Jessie Lendennie mention it earlier tonight on Lyric FM.

But the question reminded my that I haven't actually talked about, you know, books. The things I write. And what state they are in. For a long time. So let's deal with that distasteful stuff, category by category.

 

1.) Poems. Yes, I do have a poetry collection coming out. Salmon Poetry will publish my first collection in February 2010, God willing. It will contain all the poetry I've ever written that I'm not utterly ashamed of (which means, mostly, the recent poetry written in Berlin, and a mutilated fistful of older pieces), and all the Toasted Heretic lyrics that are fit to print. Working title is Free Sex Chocolate (collected songs and poems). And if anyone has a suitable cover image for such a book, with such a title, I'd be very interested to see it. It's poetry, so there's not much of a budget, but the glory! The glory! (You can contact me through the Mail Me button, off down there to the right.)

 

2.) Novels. Yes, Jude: Level 2 will finally emerge into the harsh global spotlight in June 2010, blinking, eating roadkill, and shagging anything that moves. It's set largely in London, and indeed may well get called Jude in London. You can read a piece from it here.


3.) Short Stories. I am very happy to be the official representative of the Republic of Ireland in the Dalkey Archive's scarily ambitious anthology, Best European Fiction 2010. If I were capable of humility, I'd be humbled. Here's a description I nicked off Amazon:


"Best European Fiction 2010 is the inaugural installment of what will become an annual anthology of stories from across Europe. Edited by acclaimed Bosnian novelist and MacArthur “Genius-Award” winner Aleksandar Hemon, and with dozens of editorial, media, and programming partners in the U.S., UK, and Europe, the Best European Fiction series will be a window onto what’s happening right now in literary scenes throughout Europe, where the next Kafka, Flaubert, or Mann is waiting to be discovered."

They've chosen "The Orphan and the Mob", which a lot of you will know already.

 

My exciting adventures in the categories of:

4.) Children's Books

5.) Feature Films

6.) Animated Films

7.) Theatre

8.) Computer Games, and

9.) Opera

 

...will all have to wait till I've had a good night's sleep.

(I'm afraid I lied about Opera. I have no plans to write an opera for 2010. Although 2011, now, is another matter...)

 

I'm reading in Kaffee Burger on Wednesday

Just a reminder that I'm reading in Kaffee Burger, on Torstrasse, this Wednesday (March 25th 2009), at 9pm... Five euro in, and there's a band on after (a New England electrofolk trio called Erving).

I will extend to you the offer I just extended to my Berlin friends by email: If you'd like to come and you're broke this week, give me a shout and I'll try and get you in free... (There's an "Email me" button lurking somewhere on the sidebar.)

(Er, this offer is going to collapse into ignominious chaos, failure and bitter recrimination if more than three of you ask. But, this being Literature, that's not very likely...)

Not sure what I'm going to read... I might read The Orphan and the Mob, because it's won prizes, and it works well live, and I haven't read it here before. But it is also the opening section of Jude: Level 1, so some of you will be bored sick of it already.

Anyway, more information here.


And here.

 

And there's a charming picture of the magnificent venue here (it's not known as the Taj Mahal of Torstrasse for nothing).

See you down the mosh pit...

Do Not Approach This Man. He Has Just Finished Writing A Novel, And May Be Dangerous.

 

I have finished writing Jude: Level 2. Thus the depraved and hideous face you see above, exhausted from months of writing and rewriting. (Twenty drafts of the toughest sections... though of course by the last few drafts you're just tweaking, or - to use the more accurate technical term favoured by the serious novelist - disappearing up your own hole). Exhausted, in particular, from the final weeks of staying up till 5am every night, with no days off or weekends. By the end I wasn't entirely sure what year it was. (1987, by the look of the shirt and stubble.) I look like a released prisoner, bewildered by his freedom. Which is appropriate, because I am.

 

 

With three days to go, I developed stigmata. The skin on the backs of my hands began to break down as I wrote. I was quite pleased when I noticed. Oh you know you've given it everything, by God, when you develop stigmata in the final furlong. You haven't cheated the book by selfishly holding anything in reserve, for yourself, or those you love, or the future.

 

In fact I finished on Oscar night, but I've been too knackered to post until now. When I finally, finally, finally finished, at 5.30am, and hit send, and it vanished from my screen in a swirling stream of zeros and ones down the phonelines to my agent and my publisher, I ran out into the street and danced and sang and sprinted through the melting slush.

 

If New York is the city that never sleeps, then Berlin is the city that doesn't have to get up in the morning (because it doesn't have a job), so there's always something on. And so I ran, singing, around the corner to the Babylon Kino, where they were still screening the Oscars, live from LA - nine timezones away - on the big screen. I arrived in the middle of Kate Winslet's acceptance speech, stayed till the end, and talked to friends afterwards. There was a great buzz in the cinema, as the crew for Spielzeugland / Toyland were there, and it had won an Oscar for Best Short Film earlier in the evening, to mighty cheers and screams. So, between them snaffling an Oscar and me finishing my book, there was a bunch of very happy people jumping up and down on the pavement on Rosa-Luxemberg Strasse at 6.30am, as the birds on the roof of the People's Theatre across the road cleared their throats and thought about singing.

 

Spent the last few days recovering, and dealing with the backlog of a life that has been on hold for months. Visited the doctor with my stigmata (they are beginning to heal). Today was the best day yet, I had a brilliant plan and I carried it out: I stayed in bed all day, dozing, reading, drinking coffee, and eating chocolate.

 

So, now, back to work. Radio play. Screenplay. Poetry. Life.

...And now I'm reading in Kaffee Burger, on March 25th (...2009)

Well, my first reading in Berlin went so well that I'm going to do another one, dash it. And this time my Berlin friends will get more than a day's notice.

I'll be reading in Kaffee Burger, on Torstrasse (just around the corner from my house! Why, my butler and pantry staff will be able to attend!) on Wednesday March 25th 2009. That's the regular monthly English language reading sponsored by Ex-Berliner, the rather funky English language magazine. The evening will kick off at 9pm...

I love Kaffee Burger, and have been to some great readings there (in both English and German), so I'm delighted to be invited. Kaffee Burger used to be the home of the semi-underground DDR poetry scene, and not all the stains have been cleaned from the ceiling. (Nor have they bothered to remove the old DDR price list, which still quotes you the one, fixed, national price for a cup of coffee across the socialist paradise. Doesn't CHARGE it, sadly, just quotes it.)

Great, great place, and host to some mighty club nights too (it's still home to Wladimir Kaminer's legendary Russian Disco).  And do stop to admire the building itself - a superb example of East Berlin architecture, in which the pre-wall-fall DDR aesthetic (a knackered concrete building made with sand and no cement) has been enhanced by the best of post-wall-fall Western urban street art (illiterate graffiti and some dogshit).

East Berlin architecture at its finest

I'm reading in Berlin on Saturday

Phil Rose took this picture of me in Berlin a while back

I'm reading a new piece from my next book (Jude: Level 2), this Saturday, January 24th 2009, at 4pm, in the Johann Rose in Kreutzberg. Why? Because the magnificent Nikola Richter asked me. Only a fool would say no, and my mamma didn't raise no fools. (Her Wikipedia entry is in German, but here she is in English.) I gather I'll be reading in the Hinterzimmer Salon (in the back room... I'll be everybody's darling...)

There will be cake. (In fact, I am being paid in cake.) This is, bizarrely, my first reading in Berlin. And I've never read this piece live before, so it may suck. But it may not. Anyway, it's free, so no whinging. Here's the address:

 

CafeBar & Lounge
Johann Rose
Forster Str. 57
10999 Berlin
U1 Görlitzer Bahnhof

Tel.: 0049 (0) 30- 55 10 35 90
news@johannrose.de

 

 

Elis will also be reading... Heck, read all about it in German (the key phrase is "Eintritt Frei"!)

 

Herzliche Einladung zum ersten Hinterzimmer-Salon im Johann Rose im neuen Jahr!

Come visit!

24. Januar: Wild komisch

Bei Kuchen und Kaffee und Musik vom Plattenteller geht es im Januarsalon am Samstag, den 24.1., darum, wie man eigentlich das Lachen in Texte hineinschreibt. Die Gäste sind:

Julian Gough ("Juno and Juliet", "Jude: Level 1"), Gewinner des BBC National Short Story Awards 2007, Sänger und Texter der literarischen und legendären irischen Band "Toasted Heretic", die mit "Galway and Los Angeles" einen Top Ten-Hit in Irland erzielte. Hier kann man erfahren, was er über den satirischen, lyrischen Autor Clive James denkt: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10530 Julians eigene Webseite findet man hier: http://www.juliangough.com/


Und Elis, Mitglied der Berliner Lesebühne LSD (Liebe statt Drogen), die jeden Dienstag im Lokal auftritt. Berühmt sind unter anderem seine McGyver-Geschichten bei der leider nicht mehr existenten Lesebühne O-Ton-Ute. Er liest neue Texte und vielleicht singt er auch eines seiner "Lieder für Kühe". Mehr hier: http://www.myspace.com/eliscbihn und hier http://www.liebestattdrogen.de/

 

Eintritt frei, Hutspende erbeten

----

Eine gemeinsame Lesereihe von Nikola Richter, René Hamann im Johann Rose, http://www.johannrose.de

Dig the Shoes

julian sitting on dubrovnik.jpg 

The really rather terrifically wonderful Susie Maguire just sent me a nice picture of me sitting down in Dubrovnik. I won't explain what the heck I am doing, or why I appear to have a tinted monocle.

 

A chap needs to maintain an air of mystery.

 

My shoes are definitely the stars of this photo. They look like they're celebrating getting their own TV series.