Talking sexy science fiction, over at the Guardian Books blog

Spent all day yesterday talking about science fiction and literature on the Guardian Books blog. The row is still going on, feel free to pop across and join in.

 I'll copy over one of my contributions to give you a flavour...

 

(From the Guardian Books blog:) 

A lot of those who don't like SF, and who seem not to have read much of it (and fair enough) are speaking about SF on this thread as if it were naive and unaware of its failings. But SF is one of the most intensely self-aware and reflexive genres. SF writers think and argue about SF, its vices and its virtues, all the time, always have.

Frederik Pohl wrote one of the best defences of SF in his autobiographical essay "Ragged Claws", collected in Hell's Cartographers (edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison, and a book I recommend highly to anyone interested in either writing or science fiction.)

I'm going to quote, at length, his defence of an almost indefensibly bad writer, E. E. "Doc" Smith, the inventor of space opera (and yes, I read a ton of Smith's stuff between the ages of twelve and sixteen. I even read the unreadable Spacehounds of IPC, under my desk in Irish class...)

Pohl first takes apart E E "Doc" Smith's awful failings, which are many. Then he writes:

"And yet-

None of this greatly matters. It turns many readers off, and that is a pity; but there are few novels that don't turn a good many readers off for one reason or another, and to close one's mind to Doc Smith because of his conspicuous flaws is to miss his conspicuous virtues. One might as well reject Moby Dick because of Melville's really pathetic inability to write the sounds of Chinese dialect, or because of his gross mis-statements of the natural history of cetaceans.

What Smith set out to do he did, and he did it superlatively well, and he taught a hundred other writers how to do it.

(...)

All of the things Doc Smith did badly fade in comparison with the one thing he did well. He taught a whole generation how to dream on a cosmic scale.

In the bestiary of science fiction, Doc Smith was a fiddler crab. The male fiddler has one huge claw. It is so big and clumsy that he can't use it to fight, defend or eat, he can only use it to brandish in a sexy, provocative way, impressing the hell out of the dewy-eyed female fiddler crabs.

Smith is not sf's only fiddler crab, they run rampant over the pages of the early Amazings and they are with us today: Harlan Ellison is one, so is A E van Vogt, so is Ray Bradbury. They are characterized by such extreme hypertrophy of one aspect of their writing that we forgive them conspicuous lacks in others.

What Doc Smith, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and a dozen others gave us was a new way of looking at the world, at all the worlds. In the grimy, chill early thirties the vision was revelatory. It is revelatory today."

-Frederik Pohl, "Ragged Claws", from Hell's Cartographers, 1975.

And let me second Readgrin's post, way up the thread, recommending Frederik Pohl's Gateway. A beautiful, thoughtful novel which takes the legacy of Smith and Burroughs and adds bleaker, modern layers of doubt, of despair in the face of the enormity and unknowability of the universe. (I also second, or third, McLeodP's plug for Roadside Picnic, a great piece of Russian SF by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. Those two books, cold-war era US and Russian, read very well together.)

-Julian Gough
London, Boherlahan, Berlin
http://www.juliangough.com/
"The novel rejigged while you wait"

The Illustrated "Dromineer, December 2007" (my last poem of 2007)

 

Dromineer, December 2007

I

A winter storm has thatched the east shore of Lough Derg
In the traditional manner, by breaking
All last year’s dead reeds across the knee of the wind,
Then waves – chop-chop – chivvy ten thousand tons of them
Across the lake and into position
Interlocked along seventy miles of shore.

Today, the obsessive-compulsive waves have
Calmed down a bit, but
Still fiddle with it every few seconds
Like Christo adjusting the silk hem of an island,
Unable to drag himself away.
Like a writer at Christmas, poking a poem
Trying to enjoy the break
Unable to enjoy the break
Trying to enjoy the break
From writing.

II

The sun makes a grudging appearance
For one minute, to two shivering fans
Who’ve been standing on the concrete jetty in the rain.
“That’ll have ta do ye.”
It ducks back behind the zinc clouds
And sinks fast below the black hills.

“Fuck this, I’m off back to Australia,”
Mumbles one of the fans, or the sun.

It’s hard to tell over the
Splash of the lake waves, the
Crash of the lakeside
Property prices, the
Crying of developers and birds.

(Julian Gough, Tipperary, 2007.) 

 

(Photos by Julian Gough. Taken in Dromineer on the day he wrote the first draft of the poem.)
 

Various versions of "Galway and Los Angeles" by Toasted Heretic

 

My site traffic counter tells me there's been a lot of visits to a rather obscure page on the Forum this week (the Good Lord alone knows why). The page discusses Toasted Heretic's 1991 hit single, "Galway and Los Angeles", so I thought I'd add these links for the various versions of "Galway and Los Angeles" available free on Youtube...

1.) The second version of the original video (slightly muffled audio, I think it was uploaded from an old VHS tape). There was an earlier, artier version of this video, which I prefer (one long take of my mouth singing, it gets hypnotic, and the lips, when closed, start to look like a leaf or an old sofa after a while), but I don't know where to find it. Brian Shanley shot the original, but the record company freaked out and wanted another version, so we shot some stills of photos by Aengus McMahon and cut them in to make this second version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BxIvxUvfIE


2.) Toasted Heretic playing "Galway and Los Angeles" live on the Late Late Show (RTE 1 television), 2007:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlSa21EmHkw&feature=related


3.) Toasted Heretic play "Galway and Los Angeles" live in Róisín Dubh, Galway, August 2005, on the Now In New Nostalgia Flavour tour... (Very dodgy one-camera version! This was an all-ages, alcohol-free gig, in the daytime, so that the band's children and the children of our original fans could come. Thus the kids doing the amusing hand-gestures down the front. We did a far more blood, sweat and alcohol-soaked gig in Róisín Dubh the night before, for adults only, so don't worry if this version doesn't tally with your memory of the Róisín Dubh gig you attended...):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BtXFOSw650


While I'm at it, this is our most popular video on Youtube... Toasted Heretic do "Stay Tonight" (off Charm & Arrogance), on the Den with Zig and Zag... in which I stand on Zig, and throw a lot of dollars in the air, Declan speaks fluent Guitar, and Zig and Zag provide rather lovely backing vocals...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4mWrMOm51E&feature=related

 

"I've been warned about you lot..." - Zag

Dromineer, December 2007

Dromineer, December 2007

I

A winter storm has thatched the east shore of Lough Derg
In the traditional manner, by breaking
All last year’s dead reeds across the knee of the wind,
Then waves – chop-chop – chivvy ten thousand tons of them
Across the lake and into position
Interlocked along seventy miles of shore.

Today, the obsessive-compulsive waves have
Calmed down a bit, but
Still fiddle with it every few seconds
Like Christo adjusting the silk hem of an island,
Unable to drag himself away.
Like a writer at Christmas, poking a poem
Trying to enjoy the break
Unable to enjoy the break
Trying to enjoy the break
From writing.

II

The sun makes a grudging appearance
For one minute, to two shivering fans
Who’ve been standing on the concrete jetty in the rain.
“That’ll have ta do ye.”
It ducks back behind the zinc clouds
And sinks fast below the black hills.

“Fuck this, I’m off back to Australia,”
Mumbles one of the fans, or the sun.

It’s hard to tell over the
Splash of the lake waves, the
Crash of the lakeside
Property prices, the
Crying of developers and birds.

(Julian Gough, Tipperary, 2007.) 

Poem of the Year 2007

I should stop saying I hate poetry. It's not true. My position is far more nuanced and subtle than that. I just think 98% of all poetry is shite.

And who, citizen, subject or slave, could disagree with that grave judgement, pondered long?

I didn't read much good poetry this year, and the good poetry I read was mostly old stuff. But as the knackered year gasped its last, its liver packing in as it fell over the finish line, I read a poem that I loved (well, wanted to shag... what do you think this is, the Age of Chivalry?)

It's a Christmas poem (God help us) and it's in the Guardian (may Marx preserve us), so it should be shit squared. But Christmas is a time of miracles.

It's by Glyn Maxwell, and it's called Hometown Mystery Cycle.

Enjoy.

Too sick to write (just sick enough to blog)

Sick as a pig this morning.

Puked my ring. Scaldy hole.

 

You do not want details.

So, as I was unfit for real writing, I hung out on the Guardian Books Blog all day. Very enjoyable. At one point I was asked "Julian, are you on SSRIs?" so I may have been a bit too sick to be posting, but feckit. Mostly I argued about people's right to email poems to their friends without written legal permission from the poet's publishers (Wendy Cope is, bizarrely, against this right. I am for it... OK, it's a bit more complicated than that, but you'll have to read it, I'm not summarizing an all-day argument.) The discussion starts with a fine article by Oliver Burkeman, well worth reading.

And I helped slag off the Guardian's decision to publish their review team's Book of the Year recommendations as a 41-minute podcast instead of a list. 

If anyone wants to read all about it, or join in, here's the discussion of Wendy Cope Forbids You To Email That Poem... Put Down The Poem... Move Away From The Poem...

And here's a link to the (slightly less intellectually stimulating) People Slagging Off The 41-Minute Book of the Year Podcast...

And I'm off to bed. 

Books of the Year 2007

BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2007


These lists are always ridiculous, because no matter how much you read, you've only read the thinnest sliver of all that's been published in the year. (And what freak only reads books that came out that year? As though books went off, like cartons of milk?) Back when I was utterly broke, I could quite easily read a couple of hundred books annually, not one of which was published that year. Even now, I spent far more of this year re-reading 1960s and ‘70s science fiction (by Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, Frederick Pohl and Thomas M. Disch), than I did reading new stuff. (I have my reasons...)

Also, I still tend to read things a year or two after they've come out. That's partly because they're cheaper in paperback, but partly because I like to let history sort them out a bit for me, or I'd waste too much of my precious reading life on each year's most-hyped books. A couple of years after publication, the word-of-mouth is still doing its wonderful job. As a result, the few books that made a real impact on people are still hanging in there on the shelves, while the hyped and empty have long been remaindered. (This year I finally bought Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey, after thinking about doing so for ages, because people I like kept mentioning it. And I’m halfway through it, and it’s great…)

But I did read some freshly delivered books this year, still with the umbilicus attached and throbbing, and some of them were very good. So here are my favourites, and why. (Recycling is good and wholesome and approved of by society, so a version of these may well pop up in the Irish edition of the Mail on Sunday soon, and also on Mark Farley’s excellent and bolshy blog, The Bookseller to the Stars):


BEST BOOKS OF 2007 THAT I’VE READ

Then We Came To The End – Joshua Ferris.

A smart, funny, painfully accurate book about office life (and death). And he’s written it from the collective point of view of all the workers (“How we hated our coffee mugs!”) Technically amazing, and FABULOUSLY difficult, he makes it look so easy you forget about it after sixty seconds. A Great American Novel. Serious respect is due.

There Are Little Kingdoms – Kevin Barry.

Vinnie Browne, in Charlie Byrne’s bookshop in Galway, forced me to buy this. Ignoring my anguished protests that modern Irish short stories are shite and I hate them. Well, I don’t hate these ones. Vinnie was right. This is the best Irish short story collection since Mike McCormack’s Getting It In The Head, which was the best since Frank O’Connor’s My Oedipus Complex. Small-town Ireland, given a good, loving, seeing-to, from behind.

The Uncommon Reader – Alan Bennett.

The Queen joins a library, late in life, and, lost in literature, starts to neglect her duties. Her courtiers, concerned, take ever more drastic action… An utter, utter delight. I’m giving my mum a copy.

The Paris Review Interviews (Volume 2) – edited by Philip Gourevitch.

Writers from Isaac Bashevis Singer through Alice Monro to Stephen King discuss everything from their philosophy of life to their choice of pencil eraser. If you’re addicted to this sort of thing, as I am, then this is a lucky bag full of fecking huge rocks of crack.


OK that’s the official list I sent out. But writing it up, I totally forgot that Milan Kundera's The Curtain had  been published earlier this year. I'd read it so thoroughly (several times), and it had sunk in so deep, that I'd vaguely assumed I'd had my bent, trashed copy for a couple of years. (And of course it overlaps a little with his earlier book, The Art Of The Novel - ie he nicks bits and reuses them – so I had read some of it years ago). But The Curtain pretty much replaces The Art of the Novel. There’s a few extra years thinking and reading gone into it.

So add that to my list. Milan Kundera is one of the great thinkers about the novel, what it has done and what it can do. (And, as a gifted novelist, he's a lot easier to read than the most brilliantly original 20th century theorist of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin, whose genius is muffled by godawfully impenetrable Russian Formalist prose).

Kundera's key image is of the novel as a great forest, which writers have only just begun to explore. The Curtain is enlightening, entertaining, intriguing, and reassuring. Especially if, machete in one hand and pen in the other, you happen to be trying to cut your own path through that forest.

Great Books for Teenage Boys: No. 3 - Catch-22

OK Ariel, here we go: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

It might be the funniest book ever written about war, and it might be the best book ever written about war, and the two are connected. It’s mostly set on an island off Italy, during World War 2. Does it avoid the dark heart of war? Hell no. You’ll get there, eventually. Just hang on tight, because Heller (who was a bombardier in World War Two, flying over and back across Europe, dropping bombs on people’s heads from several miles up), flies backwards and forwards in time, closing in on the truth and the darkness. Events are described again and again, from different characters’ points of view, until you get a horrible, hilarious, multiple, God’s-eye view of what really happened. The book (like life, like death, like war), is packed with paradoxes, the most famous of which is the one in the title, a catch, which may or may not exist, and which rules and ruins men’s lives:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," [Yossarian] observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

-(from Catch-22, by Joseph Heller.)

As Carl Jung said,“All great truths must end in paradox.”

Because I love this book so much, I felt I should practically write an essay about it here. No. No need, no point. Just read it.

Outsourcing My Blog

I've grown bored with my blogging style. My policy, recently, has been to say only nice things about nice people, which means I can't mention two-thirds of the people I'd like to, or say three-quarters of what I'd like.

(You will notice I said nothing at all about the recent Booker Prize, even though the winning book was written by a fellow Irish novelist, I used to share an agent with at least one of the judges, my brother knows another judge, and I had potential gossipy stories coming out my every orifice...)

So while I rethink my blogging style (what do you think, should I revoke the only-say-nice-things rule? Or can anyone think of a new rule that would liven things up?), I've decided to outsource my blog to someone who's much better at blogging than me...

Because this is Berlin, I found myself admiring sculptures of foetuses last Saturday while drinking whisky with Momus. Which led me to visit his magnificent blog, Click Opera. I hadn't been there for a while, and had forgotten how great it is. Much, much more interesting than mine. Go have a wander round it, while I build a new persona.

Meantime, feel free to make recommendations for my new personality, and blog style. What do you like in a blog? This blog? Other blogs?

What does nobody do with their blog, but should?

Sunday Tribune Books of the Year - Jude: Level 1

Back in Ireland, the Sunday Tribune just picked its books of the year.

I was INTENSELY pleased to see Jude: Level 1 among the (eight) Irish fiction titles. Especially when they called my darling little book "the picaresque bastard lovechild of Flann O'Brien and Matt Groening".

Anyway, here's what they said in full:

"Jude: Level 1

Julian Gough (Old Street Publishing)

Gough's novel is like the picaresque bastard lovechild of Flann O'Brien and Matt Groening, and yet is all Julian Gough. Possibly the finest comic novel to come out of Ireland since At Swim Two Birds, it recounts the story of Jude, an orphan, as he wanders through Ireland in a quest to find his true love and uncover the secret behind his parentage. Along the way he gains an erectile nose, and a startling resemblance to Leonardo Di Caprio. Each absurd episode is constructed meticulously, and is delivered with the kind of momentum which should collapse in on itself, and amazingly manages to ascend even greater heights of hilarity. Gough makes it look deceptively easy, with an instinctive sense of timing, and a razor-sharp and subversive intellect."

 The entire list can be found here...

Great Books for Teenaged Boys: No. 2 - Why Are We In Vietnam?

OK, the great Norman Mailer, who died earlier this month: his best book, if you are a teenage boy, is Why Are We In Vietnam? (I would have put it on the list anyway, even if he hadn't just died.)

I had my notebook with me over the weekend (I was away from my computer), and I wrote
 so many notes on Why Are We In Vietnam? that it would take me another week to type them up and turn them into something that made sense. It was more a long essay than a blog entry.

But Ariel is waiting for his next book, and I can't make him wait another week. So here goes... Inna blog styleeee, fukktup, no gramma...

Norman Mailer wrote Why Are We In Vietnam? around the time I was still in the womb. It came out in 1967 and it was red-hot relevant to the big American dilemma: why the fuck are we in Vietnam?

What is it about? Well in some ways it's a shaggy dog story, or a shaggy bear story, or a shaggy war story... And that story is pretty simple: DJ and his friend, two Texan teenage boys, go on a hunting trip to Alaska with their rich fathers. They shoot animals, and they walk in the forests. DJ tells the tale in a supercharged Texas-turboblast of language.

But it's about what it's not about. And it's not about what it's about. 

The title does half the work of the book, because it changes the meaning of every sentence that follows. Vietnam is hardly mentioned. But DJ and his friend have been drafted, and are going to Vietnam after this last trip with their fathers.

Mailer has knowledge of war (he fought in the Pacific in World War Two): DJ has not. But DJ will soon have Mailer's knowledge and the gap between character and author, so soon to be closed, crackles with literary electricity. The knowledge wants to discharge.: DJ wants to know, and Mailer wants him to know. Soon the trees, the animals, the guns are trying to tell him... The book contains some of the best ever descriptions of animals, plants, trees and soil (of the world without man in it). And then man comes into it...

The book is full of sex, shit and death, and of words invoking sex shit and death even when the subject is something else. Sex shit and death are the three-in-one God of this book, and it is best to hear these words as the (almost religious) speaking-in-tongues of a possessed young man, rather than as casual and meaningless obscenities. They are not casual and they are not meaningless (though they are often obscene, if the Latin root of obscene is ob caenum, "from filth").

A book in which rich Americans shoot animals from helicopters is obviously about 1960s Vietnam in a fairly direct way. But that is not the most important aspect of the book.

This book is not a history book. This book is prophecy, and thus timeless. You could slot it into the Bible as the Book of DJ, and it would fit in fine. To give the book its original force, and to totally refresh it, just scratch or paint out the word "Vietnam" on the cover, and scrawl in the word "Iraq", if you're American or British, "Chechnya" if you're Russian, "Tibet" if you're Chinese, "Palestine" if you're Israeli, "Congo" if you're from practically any of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's neighbours, "Darfur" if you're from Sudan, "Somalia" if you're from Ethiopia...

No really, do it. Make a physical mark. Damage the book. Make it yours.

It is not a clean and tidy book. It is not a nice, easy book. It is not a post-feminist book. It is not a left-liberal book. It's not even a "good" book, in a lot of ways (though it might be a great book). It doesn't give a shit whether you like it or not. A lot of recent readers have problems with that, as they do with Norman Mailer generally. But you cannot apply health and safety legislation to a shaman. The chicken has to really die (because you're going to really die). The blood has to splatter everywhere (because your atoms, too, will be scattered, and your pattern lost). Norman Mailer's art is messy because life is messy because death is messy.

OK that's it. That's all I can think of right now. Over to you. 

All Your Base Are Belong To Us (a poem made out of debris)

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

All your base are belong to us
Somebody set up
Us the bomb
We get signal
We get signal
We get signal
Main screen, turn on

What you say!!
What you say!!
The signs could be a borderline terrorist threat
Depending on what someone interprets it to mean

For great justice
For great justice
Turn on
Main screen:

All your base are belong to us.

The ideal Christmas present: Jude: Level 1

Hah! It was a cunning trap, all along! For a long, drowsy year I seduce you with poetry, philosophy, art and economics (OK, not many of you are very seduced by the economics...) All is bliss, and  then, when you have been lulled into lowering your guard... I pounce! And in the great tradition of the internet, I try to sell you something! Hah hah hah hah hah hah!

So anyway, Jude: Level 1 is great (look at these reviews!) and if you haven't read it yet you should. I wrote it in my own blood, you know. As Jesus said: Greater love hath no man than to lay down years of his life writing a comic novel in cafés, so that his friends might laugh. (This is slightly misquoted in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, in John 15:13, as the café in which Jesus was speaking was noisy.)

Jude: Level 1 also makes a great Christmas present for certain kinds of weird and twisted friend, and I think you know who I'm talking about. You've got at least five of them. They'll love it, the sick individuals.

If you're in Britain or Ireland, it's in most good bookshops (or they can order it). But, wherever you are, there's the www.amazon.co.uk option. (And thanks Liz, for telling me that amazon.co.uk will take orders from the States. I hadn't been sure. Amazon.com can't sell it yet, for copyright reasons.) Amazon.co.uk will even giftwrap it for you if you like, and include your personal message, and send it straight to your friend's door, wherever they are. In fact, Jude: Level 1 makes an ideal present for a nostalgic, possibly tearful Irish friend far from home. It'll reassure them that they were right to leave, thus saving their Christmas. And possibly their life, damn it. Do it now!

Three Poems Written Between Berlin and Bristol, November 12th 2007

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Really Something
(I)

I think continually of those who were really something
Creating a small universe every couple of years
Many of which continue to function
Receiving ambassadors, tourists and Vandals
Who, unfamiliar with the concept of stairs,
Walk through the squares, staring into doorways
Entirely unaware of the upper stories.

“It’s alright, but he can’t hold a candle to
Andy McNab” “…Cecelia Ahern.”

Behind them, high and unobserved
A single light, incandescent
Continues to burn.

City, star and satellite.

Stadt, Satellit, und Stern.

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Really Something
(II)

I think continually of those who were really something.
Spontaneously combusting, in a locked room,
Their fat burning, bones thinning
Hair, gums and memories receding
Til suddenly there’s nothing left
But a corpse and a pile of books.

I say goodbye, lock the door.
Settle into the chair.

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Really Something
(III)

I think continually of those who were really something
They hang around, watching me not write
As I sit selfish on a train
And a woman stands, caught between the age
When men stand for beauty, and the age
When men stand for age.

Later, on a plane, I trade my night’s sleep for the poem
And drink a late coffee to sharpen my brain
In the hope of nailing something in the last lines
To justify the day.

Later still, about to land,
I think:
It’s not even a good poem
And I made her stand.

Read Norman Mailer. Or Get A New Tailor.

That quote is from (as many of you will know, and many more won't) the 1984 hit single "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken", by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. (Lloyd Cole, back when he found it impossibly easy, before he realised it's impossibly hard.) It was good advice. As a very young man, I read Norman Mailer. I even, years later, got a new tailor. (Chris, of  Favourbrook, Jermyn Street.)

Well, Norman Mailer, Great American Novelist, died last week, and a generation of pop lyricists who were as influenced by novels as songs are looking even more thoughtful than usual. There's a lot to think about. Norman Mailer cannot be solved. Norman Mailer cannot be neatly summed up. His vices were his virtues and his virtues were his vices and his bark was worse than his bite but his bite was worse than his bark and his love was hateful and his hate was lovely, and oh didn't you just want to punch him and kiss him, Lloyd?

He was incredibly famous for a very long time, but he isn't really, now. (He will be again, after the traditional post-death, decade-long dip. And when he is famous again, it will be for radically different things, dug out of his most forgotten books.)

I saw him read in Amsterdam a few years ago, at the Crossing Border Festival, where I was also reading. He was great. Frail, slightly deaf, tiny, walking slowly with two sticks, white hair standing up all over his electric head. He read a self-deprecating piece from  Advertisements For Myself, and answered questions with wit and charm.

When goaded to (verbally) attack Tom Wolfe (who'd recently (verbally) savaged him), Mailer refused. "I think I'm the greatest writer in America. And there's maybe twenty more think the same. Novelists are an endangered species now, and when there's only twenty elk left in the world, they mustn't start trying to knock off each other's horns." (That quote is half from memory, and half from a Guardian interview of around the same time where he said almost the same thing in almost the same words... you can't do as much promotional work as Mailer did and not recycle some of the best lines.)

I wanted to go up to him onstage afterwards, and tell him something. But he was immediately surrounded by dozens of admirers from the audience, his tiny figure vanishing behind the seven-foot tall Dutch, and the seven-foot wide Americans. And I thought, he's got enough to deal with. And I'd be doing it mainly for me, not for him. Doing it to have my Mailer story. And he must have heard all this stuff so often... No, just because it's important to me doesn't mean I've the right to inflict it on him. So I didn't go up.

But if I had gone up I would have said something like...

When I was fourteen, maybe fifteen, I was reading The Naked and the Dead, in Tipperary. And I got to a scene where one of the American soldiers on patrol finds the corpse of a Japanese soldier lying in the sun, and stares at the body. And as I read the scene, and reread it, I realised that I was going to die. That my death was inevitable, and unavoidable. The knowledge was immense, direct, entirely untheoretical. It wasn't intellectual knowledge, it was physical. (I'd known before, obviously, that I would one day die, but I hadn't felt it, it wasn't real knowledge.)

And I put the book down. And for the next couple of weeks I thought about nothing else, I hardly spoke. I examined this new knowledge from every angle, I thought about the implications, I tried to work out how I should live, now that I knew that I was going to die. I was very depressed for most of that couple of weeks. And then I came to terms with it, and worked my way past it, and incorporated the knowledge into my life, and decided how I would try to live. And how I lived was better than how I'd lived before. More satisfying. More my own. And I was pretty happy, pretty much permanently, ever after.

Something like that. 

So, Norman Mailer gave me death. And I will always be grateful.

Well, this time, although I'm still saying it mainly for me, at least I'm not bothering him...

Thanks, Norman. And goodbye.

France, Berlin, Plymouth

I've been in France for the past couple of days, working on a really interesting potential stage version of Jude: Level 1. More on that, er, next year probably. It's far, far too early to talk about it now. (But shag it, I'm all excited...)

And after touching down briefly in Berlin, I'll be off to sunny Plymouth, where I read on Tuesday, November 13th (2007), as part of the launch of Short Fiction, a handsome new book/magazine/thing published by Plymouth University Press, and edited by Anthony Caleshu. I've a couple of very, very short pieces in it, one called "Latin Lover" that comes in  at a brisk 100 words exactly, and another called "Three Monkeys", which sprawls over an expansive three hundred words.  More on that launch and reading here...

If you're in the area (that's Plymouth, England, down the left-hand edge of Europe...), it's free, and I gather I'll be reading with Kevin Barry, author of the splendid There Are Little Kingdoms, which just carried off the Rooney Prize. (I hope he reads the one set in the amusement arcade.) Come one, come all.

So I'll try and tell more tales of Berlin porn, answer questions about the Irish language, recommend great books for teenaged boys, and catch up on all the other things I need to do around the website late next week... Enjoy your weekend...

Great Books for Teenaged Boys: No. 1 - Portnoy's Complaint

OK, Ariel, here goes. I've been agonising over this ever since you asked me to recommend you some books to read while the teachers' strike is on. (Novelists shouldn't blog, we think too much and it nearly kills us. Then  we come up with these constipated, over-written postings, about one every six months. Ridiculous! I could have, I should have, banged out a list in twenty seconds. It's a week later, and I'm still agonising...)

 Anyway, I've given up on trying to do the list, and why they're good, in one go. I'll just try and do a book a day, roughly, for the next week or two, roughly.

Bear in mind, this isn't a list of the Greatest Books of All Time (though it overlaps such a list, a lot). It's a list of books that I'm glad I read as a teenaged boy, or that I wish I'd read as a teenaged boy, and that I think you might like too, maybe. I'd make a slightly different list for a teenaged girl, different again for a man in his twenties, a woman in her twenties...

They aren't in any particular order... 

Number 1:  Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth. An incredibly rude, incredibly funny book about growing up Jewish and horny in Newark. One warning: Portnoy's attitude to women is very 1969, when the book came out. And I wouldn't recommend it as a guide to behaviour. (Portnoy doesn't really believe that women are human beings, and a lot of his problems are made worse by this blind spot.). But boy is it honest and funny. Philip Roth is ruthlessly, brutally honest about what it feels like to be a boy, and then a man.

 

Pornography and Literature

(OK, this one is going to be as short and snappy as a stepped-on daschund...)

I finally finished editing my porn film at seven o'clock this morning, having worked on it all night without a break. Which was great, except the deadline for delivery of the finished edit had been midnight...

But hey, this is a Berlin  porn festival! Transgression is where it is at. BREAK that rule. SPANK that buttock. OK,  DON'T spank that buttock...Deadline? What deadline? It turned out several other film-makers had missed it too.  A couple of phonecalls, and a drop had been arranged. All was well. Then, just trying to output a finished edit took all day (looooong technical story), and I missed two more deadlines. A new record! I am the champion! I finally handed the tape over to Gaia outside Kotbusser Tor U-Bahn station, near midnight, in a scene gloriously reminiscent of any spy film you've ever seen set in Berlin. There had been a lot of urgent phonecalls, changing trains, running up steps, searching the darkness for someone in a specific outfit... then the hurried handover, and away she rushed to put tomorrow's programme together...

So my little film will be shown tomorrow (well, later today...), Friday 26th of October, around 6.15pm, in the Kant Kino 1, on Kant Strasse, as part of Cum2Cut's Kurtzfilmprogramm. It's called The Last Porn Film, it's five minutes long, and I'll tell you more later. All part of the big Berlin Porn Film Festival.

I am stunned and gutted that I'll miss the screening, but it coincides with my reading in Loughrea at the Baffle festival. I console myself with the thought that missing the Berlin festival screening of my porn debut because I'm in Ireland reading from Jude: Level 1 at a distinguished and eccentric literary festival at least shows that I'm wasting my days in interesting ways.

Is that the time? Bed... 

Off to Baffle in Loughrea (and shoot porn in Berlin).

On Friday, October 26th, 2007, I'll be reading at the Baffle literary festival in Loughrea, Co. Galway, Ireland. Baffle (BOWES' ACADEMIC FELLOWSHIP AND FRATERNITY OF LITERARY ESOTERICS) was formed in Bowes-Kennedy pub in Loughrea, back in 1984. The pub is no more, but Baffle, like the universe, continues to expand.

The annual festival is an offshoot of Baffle's regular, year-round, pub-based poetry slam, which has generated five books of poetry.

I'm greatly looking forward to it, and will be wearing a clean shirt especially for the occasion.

Meanwhile, I went out last night, to Club Velvet on Warschauer Strasse. As my friends all know, I hate going out, and never, ever do, because if you go out you have adventures, and things happen, and you don't get any writing done for a week, and I'M BUSY, and I have to wash my hair, and where would world literature be if Shakespeare went out every night, eh?

Sure enough, after about ten minutes I found myself talking to the delightful Tatiana Bazzichelli and the utterly charming Gaia Novati of cum2cut, and next thing I knew, I was signing up to direct an amateur porn film. Bloody typical.

I have four days to shoot and edit a five minute film, and if I do get it done in time, it'll be shown as part of the second Porn Film Festival Berlin. The festival is a very Berlin mixture of art, film, dancing, theory, furrow-browed lectures and dirty sex.

As of now, though I have a camera, I've no cast, no crew, no script, no time, and I can't remember how to use Final Cut Pro. I have, however, shot some deeply erotic footage of the little finger on a woman's right hand. You've got to start somewhere. (Thanks, Anca, for signing the release form!).

Meanwhile, if anyone has any friends in Berlin who want to be kinky indie film stars, or can edit on Final Cut Pro, tell them to mail me in the next three days...

I've had some ideas for it, but the safest thing to say is that it is unlikely to be a normal porn film.

I'll keep you informed.

Author returns, alive, from the Dromineer Literary Festival!

Well, I'm back in Berlin after six days in Ireland. Verrrrrry tired... But happy.

The excuse for the trip was an invitation to read at the Dromineer Literary Festival, on the shore of Lough Derg, in  the heart of Tipperary, and therefore Ireland, and thus the universe. The festival was great, though at several points I wasn't sure if I'd survive it. I spent a good chunk of my childhood only a few miles away from Dromineer, and "The Orphan and the Mob", which I planned to read, is set just up the road and (with its pissed-off priests, pissed-on politicians, rampaging farmers, murderous orphans and burning orphanages) does not perhaps project the image of Tipperary of which Fáilte Ireland approves.

It turned out I was reading alongside Andrew Nugent, a white-haired monk of the order of St Benedict, and Prior at Glenstal Abbey.I wasn't quite sure how a seventy-something senior monk would react to the brutal deaths by coat-hook, boiling lead etc, of the Brothers of Jesus Christ Almighty. But it turned out he had been a trial lawyer before he was a monk, and he writes murder mysteries full of savage killings, so he was fine about it.

We read to over a hundred people (they had to get the emergency chairs out of storage, and wipe the dust off them, always a good sign). I read "The Orphan and the Mob", and it went down... No, I shan't drag out the suspense. It went down REALLY well. The audience got all the jokes and local references, and laughed even more than the audience at Charleston (in distant Sussex, far from the centre of the universe) the previous weekend. It was an advantage that most of those listening in Dromineer were familiar with, say,  Ardcroney, and had sampled its many wonders and delights. So a mention of it wasn't just a name; it summonsed in them beatific visions of the petrol station, the graveyard, the grass growing on the roof of Mick Reddan's house, and that huge rough cylindrical stone that cows scratch against (in the field at the bottom of the hill on the Nenagh side of Ardcrony)...

Great Q&A session afterwards too. Energetic, slightly terrifying, and thus enjoyable. It got off to a fine start when a man in a tweed jacket stood up and said that, as a Cloughjordan farmer, he felt he had to ask what I had against Cloughjordan farmers. I said I'd nothing against them, and that I thought they came out of the story particularly well. Didn't I describe them as sophisticated, and into Radiohead? It was hardly my fault they were beaten to death by orphans.

(Later, in the bar, a woman leaned over and whispered "Sure, that man isn't a Cloughjordan farmer at all. He's a Borrisokane farmer." )

 
 
Afterwards, I signed a reassuringly large number of books. One of the last to come up was a giant red-faced priest, who introduced himself by saying "I am a great admirer, a GREAT admirer, of Eamonn DeValera... and I am the  Priest for Puckane Parish... and I must say..." He leaned in closer, till our noses were nearly touching... "I enjoyed myself enormously! That was marvellous stuff! We're proud of you! Keep it up!"

I signed Father Slattery's book with a trembling hand. A mighty man. His brother, Martin "Speedy" Slattery used to teach me (though what subject I cannot now recall, as I was paying no attention at the time). Education was a simpler business back then. He would hit me with a hurley, and I would threaten to take him to the European Court of Human Rights. Ah, those were the days.