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 25th2009. 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).
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
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
"People who consume coffee and other caffeinated products are more likely to have hallucinations, according to a study published today.
The more caffeine students had, the more likely they were to hear voices, smell things and see things that were not there, researchers at Durham University found. They suggested that increased levels of the hormone cortisol caused by caffeine could be behind the link."
Bad science is forever with us. Next time I hope they'll obey best practice, control properly for bias, and ask the students how many of them sip their cappuccino while trying to write their first novel, play, or epic poem.
Homer's brain. Which is slightly bigger than mine. (This picture's pirated so thoroughly that I couldn't track down a credit. Anyone know who did it? One of Groening's peeps, I assume. Kudos to you, unknown worker ant, labouring anonymously for our pleasure in a cruel and hostile digiverse.)
I think a lot about the future of the book. So imagine! my! delight! when I stumbled on The Institute for the Future of the Book, a think tank who do nothing but think about the future of the book. While lying in the bath, eating chocolate, and sipping a latte macchiato through a straw. I hope.
Their blog, if:book, ponders a bunch of good stuff.
Best thing is to just quote a big chunk of it. Here she is on the idiotic and inefficient way the publishing industry, as currently set up, makes money for authors. (Do I agree with her? If I agreed with her any more, I'd be her):
"Well, the way it works is, you try to sell a very large number of physical objects, collecting a dollar or two off each one for the author – from people you never contact again.
I once knew a senior partner in a Wall Street firm who loved Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover. He talked at length about the wonderfulness of this book, the character of the Collector, the general brilliance. He was making $1 million or so a year. Of which Andrew Wylie, Sontag's agent, had cleverly managed to garner a couple of bucks for Sontag. There was no structure in place to encourage this ardent fan to, say, sponsor Sontag's travel expenses, offer Sontag six months' writing time at his vacation home in Maine, buy Sontag a new car, who knows.
This is deeply baffling. One of the problems for a fundraiser is that it's hard to raise undedicated funds. Good fundraising copy often focuses on an individual; you excite the donor's sympathy for Precious, who walks 10km twice a day to go to school, and then the donors all want to buy books, school uniform and a bicycle for Precious. If you're not careful with the wording you could find yourself under a legal obligation to send half the take from the appeal to Precious. And you hauled in all this money and goodwill for someone donors had never heard of before, with a single page of copy. It takes five minutes to read, and you're sweating blood to draft something that will get people to spend the five minutes. Whereas.
When people read a book they typically spend a minimum of a couple of hours on it. Sometimes they read it at a single sitting; sometimes they live with it for weeks. Sometimes they forget it – but sometimes it stays in the mind for years, sometimes it saves the reader from suicide, sometimes it changes the reader's life. So it has the power to make a much stronger connection with the reader than a little read-and-toss mailshot – but the strength of this connection does not translate into extra time for the writer to write.
Writers spend a lot of time getting in each other's way. There are a few places that offer residencies – normally, disruptively, places that have a lot of other writers and artists also in residence. But there are plenty of readers like my Wall Street lawyer, people with second and third homes they never have time to visit – and even the most highpowered agents never think of encouraging those readers to give the freedom of silence to writers they admire. Agents go after big advances – which means a writer does a roadshow to buy silence somewhere down the line. It's done this way because this is the way it's done. It doesn't have to be done this way; if it were done a different way, writers would write better books in less time.
So, to revert to the role of the Internet in all this: the Internet has the power to reduce the amount of time writers have to trade for legitimacy. It has the power to change readers' relationship to writers. If a book (or a blog, or a web comic) changed your life, why not buy its author a bicycle? Or a goat? Or a bottle of wine? Why not offer its author six off-season months in your summer cottage on the Cape?
Those look to me to be likelier ways forward than for writers to pay the rent by selling PDFs online."
That's Helen De Witt. Much more of that interview here. Send her a bicycle, a red rose, and champagne this instant.
Oh wait. There's no mechanism in place to do that. Bummer.
I've been saying this for years. We need a global patron/artist connecting tool, and the internet can do that. Look what rich people waste money on, in its absence. Hedge funds they don't understand. Overpriced condos in the hurricane corridor. Or they give it to Bernie Madoff, and he spends half on gold taps for his dog's bathroom, and gives the rest to the rich sucker he met last month, pretending it's December's "investment profits".
Far better that some of the rich give some of their spare cash to the writers they really believe in, to write. And if the writer does come up with something that's remembered long after they're both dead, what greater glory than being remembered as the patron of a great piece of art? Harriet Shaw Weaver will be remembered long after her rich contemporaries are forgotten.
So, if anyone wants to pay my rent while I finish Jude: Level 2, mail me.
I'm writing a lot lately. (More on that soon…) It's enjoyable. Tiring. But it means I'm too busy to blog the way I like to blog (in long, rambling meditations on Christ knows what). So here's someone older and wiser than me to keep you happy, or miserable. This is Jack Gilbert, from The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1. He was 80 when he said this, back in 2005, and renting a room in a friend's house in Northampton, Massachusetts.
The interviewer, Sarah Fay, asked him “What, other than yourself, is the subject of your poems?”
"Those I love. Being. Living my life without being diverted into things that people so often get diverted into. Being alive is so extraordinary I don't know why people limit it to riches, pride, security–all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can't see anything from a car. It's moving too fast. People take vacations. That's their reward–the vacation. Why not the life? Vacations are second-rate. People deprive themselves of so much of their lives–until it's too late. Though I understand that often you don't have a choice."
A note on the images: they are taken from the first solo exhibition in Europe of the Tokyo-based artists Exonemo, hosted in the Basel gallery [plug.in]. The piano and tape recorder are part of an installation called UN-DEAD-LINK, in which Sembo Kensuke and Yae Akaiwa from Exonemo modified the computer game Half-Life2 and connected its output to a piano upstairs (and to a sewing machine, paper-shredder, music turntable, some lamps...) Each death in the game turns on a machine. The murdered mouse is taken from the Exonemo film DanmatsuMouse...
Below is a guest posting by the American poet James P. Lenfestey. He knows a lot about pigs, and a lot about poetry. I'd go so far as to say, he taught me everything I know about stealing pigs. Sadly, he only taught me it after I'd stolen them...
"Frankly, Julian -- that was an unconvincing pignapping -- an activity with a long and honorable list of common practices in my part of the world. Best techniques, which you amateurishly missed: under cover of NIGHT, you dolt! Then- cover the eyes! Throw a sack over the entire body. While they gently sleep, you fool! The next step frankly may be beyond you -- no reflection on the fairly slight, if energetic, frame revealed in the video. But you gotta PICK THAT SUCKER UP! Perhaps your Jeeves is beefy."
Yep, Jim is a tough critic. But a good poet and editor. And I know some of you write poems - don't deny it! So I thought I'd post his invitation to submit work to an anthology he's editing. But before I do, one last word of warning from Jim:
"...Make clear to all the sausage versifiers out there that I demand and accept only very high quality verse -- no manure, this is a serious enterprise which will be turned into a serious book to be purchased with real money by serious people interested in the soul and story and the smile, as well as the body, of the pig. And I am a vicious editor, a veritable feral boar, biting fearlessly. Some of the best poets alive, and several dead, are already feeding at the trough. PAYMENT IS IN PRAISE (and maybe a copy of the book)."
So here's the official invite. Pass it on to any quality pig poets of your acquaintance...
Soo-eee! -- Call for pig poems for anthology
Hey. Got any poems about pigs? I'm working this month on an anthology, SOME PIG, to be published in early 2009 by Red Dragonfly Press.
If you have 1-3 poems you think appropriate, send to me asap. Should any be accepted, a seriously selective process, you will receive one copy of the book as payment, and be damn happy about it, as we do this for love -- of pigs, mankind's true friend, who take us lightly, feed us copiously, and nourish our sense of justice and its opposite. Your other good works will of course be credited in brief bios.
Jim Lenfestey, Editor SOME PIG, Red Dragonfly Press *** James P. Lenfestey TURNING 40 PRODUCTIONS 1833 Girard Ave. So. Minneapolis, MN 55403 cell: 612-730-7435 www.coyotepoet.com
(A note from about a week after I posted this: the guys at Prospect magazine read it, laughed a hollow laugh, and asked for a longer, slightly different version, which you can read here...)
Well, Sarah Palin is back in Alaska, and all you can hear around these parts is the lonesome wail of the broken-hearted satirists of Europe. Come back Sarah! We love you! It's OK if you think Africa's a country! We don't mind. It's not like you were running for President of Africa. Hell, there's people over here in Europe think America's a country...
At least she's still giving interviews, to sort out these terrible misconceptions, so I can still get my regular fix. In today's one, with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, "the Alaska governor explains what she would have discussed had she been more available to the press."
Which turns out to be stuff like - I know Africa is a continent! Embedded in sentences like this one:
"I don't know, because I remember the discussion about Africa, my concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue, as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska's investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars, I wanted to make sure that that didn't happen anymore."
I like the middle bit of that sentence the best. It has a kind of poetry. And she says "continent", just to bang it home that she knows it's a continent. Subtle, but brilliant.
Hell, it IS poetry. Read it again:
Africa, a poem by Sarah Palin
"And the relevance
To me
With that issue,
As we spoke
About Africa and some
Of the countries
There that were
Kind of the people
Succumbing to the dictators
And the corruption
Of some
Collapsed governments
On the
Continent,
The relevance
Was Alaska's"
As Kurtz should have said at the end of Heart of Darkness, "The relevance! The relevance!"
If Obama is serious about reaching out across the aisle; about ending the divisions between Republican and Democrat - between red states and blue states - between people who believe in evolution and people who believe in creation - between monkeys and humans - between literate and illiterate - if Barack Hussein Obama truly believes in Change - then he will appoint Sarah Palin as the United States' seventeenth, and greatest, Poet Laureate.
Almost forgot to mention... I'll be chatting about writers and cities at the Battle of Ideas in London on Saturday.
There's going to be a short film, Kolkata City of Literature, directed by Soumyak Kanti De Biswas and Tanaji Dasgupta, followed by a discussion with Professor Swapan Chakravorty, Gerry Feehily, andme.
The chat (or battle) is calledText and the City: what is a city of literature?, and will be chaired byTiffany Jenkins. For more on exactly what it is, where it is, and when we kick off, click here.
If you’re interested in my thoughts on the future of
the electronic book, I’m quoted in today’s Irish Times,
towards the end of this piece by the mighty Conor Pope. (And how quaint
“electronic book” will seem in a few years! It’ll read like “horseless
carriage” does now…)
Sample quote from me:
"I can't see how you can control the distribution of words. Good writers
could end up with huge readership but they will probably have to find
new ways of earning a living from it, which is fine. Good writers were
never likely to make much money. Yeats never made more than £200 a year
from his writing until he won the Nobel Prize."
(James Wood teaching in Harvard, shortly before being kicked in the knee from behind)
My short essay on David Foster Wallace has appeared in Prospect, under the title The Rest is Silence.
The first two responses I received were both from James Wood, one of the three finest literary critics of the age (and currently top book bloke at the New Yorker). His first email started, “You have a lot of gall…”
I couldn’t really disagree. I took a wild swipe at him out of nowhere, late in the article. This is partly the result of the extreme overcompression that all my essays undergo as I write them. I try to jam about a book’s worth of ideas into the single page available, and so a long, nuanced sequence of subtle, gossamer-delicate thoughts gets reduced to a blow from a brick in a sock.
Though I do disagree with some of James Wood’s notions, I don’t disagree nearly as strongly as is implied by my rude and unfair sentence. (In fact, having reread it, I’m thinking of writing a letter to Prospect complaining about myself.)
(James Wood’s second email, an hour later, was a fine, dignified and reasonable restatement of his position on David Foster Wallace. Such a civilised response to being mugged reflects very well on the man. I look forward to arguing with him properly sometime. If he’ll ever speak to me again.)
The pro-guns, pro-liberty blog The Smallest Minority has suggested that a line from my piece ("If it has an off-button, it is not oppression"), should be put on T-shirts. A splendid idea.
And over on Prospect’s First Drafts blog, I am accused of fascism, and told to hang myself.
As ever, I agree with everyone. Many fine points, splendidly expressed. I shall go away, brood upon them, and reform my character.
If you've never heard of him or read his stuff, nothing to see here, move on. But on the small, strange, planet (or, more accurately, asteroid) inhabited by novelists doing their best to re-invent the novel, this is the death of Kurt Cobain. You are going to be reading agonised analyses of who he was, how he died, and why he mattered, in every books section of every newspaper, on every major anniversary of his death, for the rest of your lives.
Well, OK, not for the rest of your lives, because newspapers won't have book sections in another six months. But you get the gist.
I liked some of his stuff very much. The last of his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (in his short story collection called, ah, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men) is extraordinarily moving, effective, and technically tricksy. It is, I think, one of the greatest short stories of the past couple of decades. In it, Wallace tells a story of a man telling an unnamed listener a story about a woman telling him a story about a man raping her. All those frames within frames should push the pain far, far away, but they don't, they pull it closer. The story is post-modern and emotionally direct at the same time, and that's really hard to do. It is magnificent and you should read it.
But mostly I disagreed with David Foster Wallace, with his attitude to his style (comedy) and his content ( America). I had just finished writing a long essay about comedy and the American novel when I heard of his death. So the last thing I wrote about him while he was alive was negative, which seems very sad now, today, because the only reason I included him was because I thought he was important, and good, but could be even better.
What I would have liked was a long conversation with him, a few emails over a few months perhaps, wrestling with the big, fun, important stuff that nobody off our tiny asteroid cares about.
And now that won't happen. I thought about not printing my recent thoughts on David Foster Wallace, because they aren't positive, and it seems so mean to say something harsh about a guy who has just tied something around his neck to cut off the air to his brain because being conscious has come to hurt too much.
But he's dead, it won't hurt him. And if there is truth in it, then better to say it.
The essay is several thousand words long, I'll spare you. But this is the bit that mentions David Foster Wallace. Bear in mind that for every vice I mention here, he had a bigger virtue. He cared, he tried, he died. We can't do more than that.
"Meanwhile, much American writing is still comic. But something has gone terribly wrong with it.
Potentially great comic writers like George Saundersand David Foster Wallace use comedy as their weapon of choice. But they have been unplugged from electric, living America by lives spent inside the university, first learning, then teaching. (The immensely influential George Saunders is a tremendously talented writer who, at 49, has never left school, and never written a novel.) Disconnected, they have, like so many academics, become obsessed with the white whale (or pink elephant) of the authentic.
Thus they spend much of their time attacking forms of language of which they disapprove (advertising, television, military jargon, corporate PR) This is literary criticism disguised as literature. These are grenade attacks on a theme park. Frequently, and disturbingly, they put this dead language in the mouths of aggressively outlined “ordinary Americans” foolish figures without college degrees and therefore without self-awareness. Bums. Thus they end up mocking those below them, not those above. The gun is pointed in the wrong direction. Shooting at the bums, they have become the Establishment.
In the absence of suffering, in the absence of a subject, American literary novelists again and again waste their power attacking America’s debased, overwhelming, industrial pop-culture. They attack it with the energy appropriate to attacking fascism, or communism, or death. But that pop culture (bad TV, bad movies, ads, bad pop songs) is a snivelling, ingratiating whimpering billion dollar cur. It has to be chosen in order to be consumed: so it flashes its tits and laughs at your jokes and replays your prejudices and smiles smiles smiles. It isn’t worthy of satire, because it cannot use force to oppress. If it has an off-button, it is not oppression. Attacking it is unworthy, empty, meaningless. It is like beating up prostitutes."
Well, at the last, he found a moment that was unironic and authentic.
I wish he hadn't feared America so much. But then again, if we were able to ask him, he would probably say America killed him.
Forgot to mention, I'll be talking about the short story, and the BBC National Short Story Award, on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, later today (Friday July 4th 2008) at the maythesweetlordhelpus hour of 7.20 in the morning. (There's a seven-twenty in the MORNING as well? Who knew?)
Totally forgot to mention it in time for anyone to actually tune in, sorry. This is not because I'm blasé, it's because I'm totally untogether (and find it hard to believe anyone would be interested in my opinion of the short story).
I will be talking for about ten seconds, probably, so you missed nuthin'.
There's an enjoyable discussion of spam poetry going on, over at the Guardian Books blog. I just posted a contribution there, so I may as well repeat it here...
I'm a fan of spam. I like the way that, beset by predators, predatory itself, it evolves with furious speed. I like to have a dip into my spam box every couple of weeks to see the new trends evolving (like the recent "What a stupid face you have" / "You look so stupid in this photo" variations.)
Ben Myers is right on both points, it's a stunning resource for poets, but to make good poetry out of it you have to be a very good editor. Alive to nuance and resonance. I've been playing with spam poems for years. (Not just spam: this week, I wrote two poems I'm very pleased with, constructed entirely from the legal disclaimers on poetry websites.)
By using spam, and other internet debris, poets can essentially outsource free association. But the best comment on the perils of the method comes from W.H. Auden, in a letter to the poet Frank O'Hara, long before the internet: “I think you (and John {Ashbery} too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.” -W. H. Auden
If your ear/nose/throat/soul (add to/delete as appropriate) are alive to authentic nonlogical relations, then spam and all the other digital junk of the internet are your friend. They can jolt you out of the deep groove of habit. The first and hardest step in surprising and delighting others is surprising and delighting yourself.
It is not often an author is driven by circumstances to steal another author's pig, but recent scandalous events forced my hand.
Some of you will recall my glee when I was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize a few weeks ago, alongside such old and new stars as Alan Bennett, Will Self, Garrison Keillor and Joe Dunthorne.
A noble prize, previously won by books such as Vernon God Little, and A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, the winner is showered in champagne and given a pig at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in Wales, just over the border from England. (You don't get to keep the pig, but they name it after your book, and take your photo with it, to the great amusement of future generations).
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.
This, of course, left them one pig short for the prize ceremony. And thus it was that, as you may have read in the Guardian and Bookseller over the weekend, Will Self was not awarded his pig. I was wondering how they would get over this, and so I attended the ceremony in disguise. The organisers, rather anticlimactically, pretended an outbreak of pig disease had kept the pig away, and they showed a video of a pig instead.
And so the situation rests. The pig is in a safe place, and receiving the best of care. For now.
It is to be hoped that the organisers of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize will give in to my very reasonable demands and re-award the Wodehouse Prize to Alan Bennett. Otherwise, I'm afraid they will get their pig back sausage by sausage.
Harsh, I know, but when you mess with the affections of six comic novelists, somebody's going to get hurt.
There's also some good films showing in their Film Club. May I most heartily recommend Todd Haynes' astonishing, poetic, jittery, thrilling dream life of Bob Dylan, I'm Not There. In particular, Cate Blanchett's performance is as good as acting can get. It is more alive and true than most of our own lived moments. See it.
If you see me wandering down Church Street, don't be afraid to give me a shout.
I know that some reviewers felt that Jude: Level 1 was all Greek to them. Well, now Jude: Level 1 can be all Greek to EVERYBODY. It's being published next week by Topos Books of Athens, in a translation by George Betsos. George and I have exchanged many profound, cultured and erudite emails over the past year, as we tried to work out the best way to translate "Ardcrony ballocks" into Greek, so I know that he has done as fine and conscientious a job as could be humanly achieved. (And what a fecker of a book to translate, the man is a hero.)
One of the great, odd pleasures of being translated lies in checking out who you're now being published alongside. It's a bit like joining a very, very peculiar football team. Like the players signed by a football manager, the writers signed to a publisher's list do tend to share some indefinable attitude. Some publishers are attack-minded (lots of odd books, young writers, high-risk experimental fiction narrated by a squid). Some are defensive (rather obvious mainstream contemporary stuff and a lot of the more tedious classics).
If Topos were a football team, it would be very entertaining to watch. I was delighted to see that I now share a list with Philip K. Dick's Ubik (a book I bought for the second time, and reread with pleasure, earlier this year. Indeed, I've raved about Dick elsewhere on the blog). An impetuous, unreliable, unpredictable and possibly drug-crazed star striker of a novel, very likely to score the winner with a spectacular bicycle kick in the dying seconds of extra time. Also, unfortunately, quite likely to get arrested just before the match.
And, though I have no idea what position it would play in, I am deeply intrigued by a book called The Insane President and Female Pleasure by the Greek writer Pepi Rigopoulou. Freud, Bosch, Goya, Ovid, Duchamp... definitely my kind of book. Good to see, too, that Topos have an experienced midfield general in Fidel Castro, whose memoirs they publish in the autumn. Though Alain Robbe-Grillet may have trouble passing a late fitness test after dying earlier this year.
They do not insult you with money, either. Bollinger give you a shitload of champagne, Everyman give you sixty volumes of PG Wodehouse in hardback, and the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival names a large pig after your book. What a year you could have, reading Wodehouse, drinking Bollinger, and... er... whatever it is that you do with pigs.
Unsurprisingly, for it is marvellous, I had picked Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader as one of my Books of 2007. I even bought my mother a copy for Christmas. Now he and I rub shoulders on a shortlist. My mother is delighted. I can only hope that none of the others bought their mothers a copy of my book for Christmas, considering how filthy it is. Personally, I hope Alan Bennett wins. His book is far more suitable for the nation's impressionable youth.
I have always argued that comedy is superior to tragedy, and this excellent shortlist proves my point. The tragic is a rather narrow genre, the comic is infinite. What other prize would place a story about a refined elderly lady reading books, in competition with the adventures of a Tipperary orphan with two penises who urinates on a politician while a mob of fifty thousand enraged farmers burn down his orphanage? Now, that's what the people want to see in a literary prize - senile dementia versus penile dementia.
May the best book win. Or, failing that, my one.
Indeed, I do believe that Jude: Level 1 is the first book featuring a hero with two penises to be nominated for a major UK literary award. Of course, it merely follows the American success of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize with a hero who had both a penis and a vagina.
In the everevolving literary world, are two sets of genitals the new one set of genitals? Will the next Booker winner be a realistic, psychologically nuanced, slightly depressed novel featuring a funeral at which a dark family secret is finally revealed and it turns out to be sex abuse yet again, but with two penises?
RTÉ Radio 1 (the Irish national broadcaster) will be nationally broadcasting little lumps of Jude: Level 1 all this week, from Monday to Friday. The short extracts will go out at 11.45pm each night (Irish time), and can be heard live, anywhere on earth, and probably far out into space, on the RTÉ Radio 1 stream. They are read by the brilliant Beckett actor Conor Lovett. (One of the select few actors - a band apart, a very special breed - who have appeared in both Waiting For Godot and Father Ted).
I would have posted this earlier and given you a bit of warning, but nobody had officially told me that it was happening, and I couldn't find any advance mention of it on the RTÉ website. Maybe it's a secret. Maybe I shouldn't even be telling you. (Or maybe I'm just not very good at navigating the RTÉ website...)
No, I've had another poke around the RTÉ website, and they've just updated the Book on One page (after the first episode had aired, naturally) to plug Jude. Ah, there is more rejoicing in heaven over the sinner who repents than over the goody-two-shoes who updates his website punctually.
And I've just noticed, Lucille Redmond in the Sunday Business Post previewed it, in their Radio Review section:
The Book on One this coming week sounds enticing. It’s Jude: Level 1, in which a Tipperary orphan sets off for Galway, ‘the Sodom of the West’, when the Mob burns down his orphanage. After facial surgery reconstructing him in the image of Leonardo DiCaprio (but for an erectile nose), he endures a chase through the Dublin of Ulysses. It’s to be read by Beckett interpreter Conor Lovett.
Anyway, I heard some of the first episode as it went out (the live streaming kept breaking up, I really must tinker with my internet connection... chase those storks off my chimney, hunt the voles out of the DSL box, unpeel the clinging vines from my cables), and the bits I heard sounded mighty. Sorry I couldn't warn you in advance about the first episode, but you can tune in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 11.45pm Irish time for more, more, MORE of Jude's adventures across Ireland.
I think he'll be walking through Tipperary, in the dark, tonight, and may well meet the mysterious Pat Sheeran, who will give him a lift on his motorbike to the Sodom of the West... I'm not sure where Jude will be tomorrow (possibly doing battle with James Bond super-villain Charlie Haughey, on Haughey's private island). On Thursday and Friday I do believe he'll be trying to preserve his innocence as he pursues former Supermacs employee, and his true love, Angela, through the Inferno of Dublin...
I spent last weekend in Kassel, pretty much spang plumb in the middle of Germany.
Why Kassel? Well - for reasons I may explain later - I wanted to visit the town which the young Samuel Beckett visited so often. (Between the ages of 22 and 26, he made eight lengthy visits to Kassel.) Beckett went there to see his cousins, the Sinclairs, and in particular Peggy Sinclair. Peggy and Sammy (as the kids in the neighbourhood knew him - they thought he was American, or English) had one of the all-time great disastrous relationships. He writes very cruelly about Peggy in his first book, More Pricks Than Kicks, and very tenderly in one of his late plays, Krapp's Last Tape. That's blokes for you.
She died of TB in 1933, and the Sinclairs returned to Ireland. Beckett never returned to Kassel after Peggy's death.
Many years later, a doctor in Kassel, Gottfried Büttner, wrote, care of Beckett's publishers, to say how moved he had been by a performance of Happy Days. Beckett wrote back, mentioned his connection with, and affection for, Kassel, and asked about the city. Beckett had heard much of it had been destroyed in the war. (The RAF smashed Kassel then burnt it, using high explosives and incendiaries, in late October 1943. Ten thousand people, the vast majority civilians, died as the medieval city centre was consumed in a firestorm.) I have a great affection for the RAF (after all, my dad served in it, and his RAF medals are on display in my parents' house, right beside my great grandfather's IRA medals). But I do wish they hadn't deliberately burnt down quite so many cities full of civilians.
Anyway, Beckett asked Dr. Büttner to find out if the Sinclairs' old neighbourhood had survived (it had, being a few stops by tram away from the town centre... which reminds me of my favourite German word. Strassenbahnhaltestelle. It means... tramstop. And that is why German translations of English books are always 30% longer... Strassenbahnhaltestelle. For tramstop. Jesus.). They continued to correspond regularly for many years, and even met up a few times in Paris. Beckett said he could never go back to Kassel, too many memories.
A highlight of the trip was meeting the Samuel Beckett Gesellschaft (or, in English, SamSoc), and many of their friends. All together, an amazing bunch of people. Frau Büttner very kindly allowed me to visit her house, and see the portrait of Peggy Sinclair by Karl Leyhausen. (Leyhausen, unable to make a living as an artist in Kassel, went to Paris shortly after painting Peggy. Unable to make a living there either, he killed himself in 1931. He was 32 years old.) The photo of it here doesn't do it justice. A gorgeous, lively oil painting, it looks like it was painted last week. The scarf hops and pops in blocks of colour. You worry the paint might not be dry. But it's over eighty years old.
But, meanwhile, I'll occasionally copy some of those offsite, lit-blog comments into the blog here, and link to the full conversations, for anyone who's interested in reading further, or joining in.
I've praised Jonathan Coe's biography of B.S. Johnson before, but sure I'll go wild altogether, risk pulling my praising muscle, and praise it again.
As entertainment, as literature, Like A Fiery Elephant beats the shite out of most recent novels. First, it's better written. Second, even though as a biography it's blushingly wedded to the naked truth, Like A Fiery Elephant is far more inventive than most novels. A novelist's biography in both senses (biography of a novelist, biography by a novelist), it creatively rejigs the clichés of the form.
It's grippingly honest, too. While doing a far better job than most biographies, it never stops questioning itself and the entire idea of biography. It makes writing a dead man's life seem like a lively and a dangerous thing to do. There is an urgency to some chapters that gives it some of the tense virtues of a thriller, especially towards the end, when time is running out for Johnson. An ambitious English novelist is trying to understand why an ambitious English novelist killed himself...
Empathy, which is the key virtue of any novelist anyhow, is devastatingly well deployed here.
I'm wary of overpraising B.S. Johnson, because he had flaws the size of China, and his idea of the novel was so restrictive it may have strangled him. But he also had virtues as big as his tummy, and that was some tummy. If you haven't sampled his wares, first read Christie Malry's Own Double Entry. Then read Coe's biography, and explore from there.
And, yes, I do own a copy of The Unfortunates, dozens of bits in a box. What a lovely object it is, too. Wish that had become a standard format. All short story collections where the order isn't important should be published like that. You could bring one or two stories with you on a journey, or down to the beach, and not have to carry the whole book. You could throw away the ones you didn't like.
-Julian Gough
To which the poet Billy Mills very sensibly replied, "You could end up with a nice collection of empty boxes that way."
(Mark Hooper's original piece, "Let's Have A B.S. Johnson Day", and the subsequent conversation, are here.)
Julian Gough
The website of Julian Gough, author of Connect, Juno & Juliet, the Jude novels, and the ending to Minecraft. He is also the author of the Rabbit & Bear children’s books (illustrated beautifully by Jim Field).
This sidebar rather cunningly links you to the official Substack newsletter for The Egg And The Rock. That is where I am writing my next book, in public. Which is both terrifying and exhilarating… What’s it called? Er, The Egg and the Rock. It is a beautiful book about our beautiful universe. Go and subscribe, if you want to be kept up to date as the book develops. Or if you would like to help me develop it: I love to get your comments over there. It’s free, and once you’ve subscribed, you will be emailed each new piece of the book as I write it. There is also some other fun stuff going on. Click now! Subscribe! You will not regret it! (Well, you might regret it, but then you can just unsubscribe.)
East Berlin architecture at its finest
beats the shite out of most recent novels. First, it's better written. Second, even though as a biography it's blushingly wedded to the naked truth, Like A Fiery Elephant is far more inventive than most novels. A novelist's biography in both senses (biography of a novelist, biography by a novelist), it creatively rejigs the clichés of the form.