The Real Reason Ireland Said No to the Lisbon Treaty

Forget the last week of commentary on the Lisbon Treaty debacle. Nobody really knows why the Irish voted no. Except me and four million other Irish people.

I'm an Irish citizen (albeit one living in Berlin), who has read the Irish Referendum Commission's free, impartial, 16 page guide to the Lisbon Treaty. I've even tried to read a bit of the treaty itself (dear God). Did you know the first words are - in wonderfully shouty capital letters -

"PREAMBLE

HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS..."

A promising, even rousing, start, but it's all downhill from there. Reading the 294 pages of the treaty tells you absolutely nothing, unless you also happen to be holding your old copy of the Treaty on European Union in your other hand. While sitting on your well-worn copy of the Treaty Establishing the European Community.

Typical random chunk of the Treaty of Lisbon (I think it's article 9(b):

"At the end of the first sentence of the first subparagraph of paragraph 1, the words "and address appropriate recommendations to that State" shall be deleted; at the end of the last sentence, the words "and, acting in accordance with the same procedure, may call on independent persons to submit within a reasonable time limit a report on the situation in the Member State in question" shall be replaced by "and may address recommendations to it, acting in accordance with the same procedure."


Eh? EH? Vote for what again? And there's 294 pages of this stuff.

So we had no idea what we were voting for, and the  commentators in the papers (who definitely haven't read it), have no idea what they are commenting on. Given that huge teams of negotiators and translators worked on this in sections, there is absolutely nobody on earth who knows what's in it. It could all be a complicated joke - after all, the first letter of each paragraph in the Maltese translation spells "Sarkozy's bum smells." Though perhaps that's a coincidence.

My feeling, for what it's worth, is that they should have put in a paragraph promising us all an icecream if we voted yes. At least that would have been something concrete that we could have visualised. It would have stood out a mile, for its clarity and lack of ambiguity, in the Irish Referendum Commission's summary of the Treaty. And given that the weather was fairly good on the day of the vote, it might well have swung the referendum.

Dig the Shoes

 

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. 

Croatia 2, Germany 1

Well, if that ain't symbolic.

(For the benefit of my North American readers, Croatia, with a population of four million people, just beat Germany, population eighty two million - and the 1954, 1974, & 1990 world champions - by two goals to one in the group stage of the European Football Championship Finals.) 

Ah, the pathetic fallacy. Back when Shelley and Byron and Wordsworth were lads, it was the weather in their poems that reflected their moods. Now, it's the football scores in our blogs. That's progress.

 Actually, my mood is more Croatia 9, Germany 9.  I hope Croatia and Germany both go through.

Nikolina just wrote from Zagreb, "Everybody here went crazy, if we get to the final, I foresee a baby boom in March '09."

The silence of the streets of Berlin is  one heck of a big, gloomy silence. They've all gone to bed early, but baby boom? Germany has lost its erection.

Croatia

 

I'm back from Croatia, and suffering an immense emotional hangover. That was one of the most intense, action-packed and enjoyable weeks I've ever had. I feel as though, since June 1st, I've lived an entire short, vivid life at high speed.

I was there for the International Festival of the Short Story, which took place this year in Zagreb and Dubrovnik. I cannot praise the festival highly enough. Best festival I've ever taken part in. And of course, as always, the quality comes down to the people. Charismatic organisers, magnificent volunteers, excellent translators, and great rattling crates full of terrific writers.

I'll post again on this, but right now I'm still too full of sights and sounds and memories I haven't processed.

Also, I can feel a lot of what happened in Zagreb and Dubrovnik already beginning the mysterious alchemical transformation into fiction. (Examples - I wrote a poem I really like, in the quarantine buildings outside the walls of Dubrovnik, and  got the entire plot for a damn good film while walking through the Square of the Loggia. And there's more on the way, I can tell by the tingle... It's extraordinary to think that in 1991, the year I was enjoying a hit single in Ireland with Toasted Heretic, this city was being hit by artillery shells and guided missiles.)

So, anyway, I can't really blog about the most intense or interesting stuff, because it would interfere with the fermentation process.

 But damn, I laughed, I cried, I swam, I ran, I nearly died.

On The Run In Croatia

I am currently on the run in Croatia, after an unfortunate pignapping incident got slightly out of hand...  I'll post properly soon, if possible, but I hear footsteps on the stairs... got to go now...

Don't worry, Will Self's pig is safe and happy, though jetlagged, and perhaps a little hungover...

Stealing Will Self's Pig

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. 

Blau Blau Blau

What do you mean, what does it mean? Must I explain everything? Can't we have a little mystery between us? Every relationship needs a little mystery.

 It's a Blau Blau Blau thing, you wouldn't understand.

Blau Blau Blau. 

Listowel Writers' Week

I'm going to be reading at Listowel Writers' Week, on Friday 30th of May 2008, at 2pm, in the Arms Hotel. It's a programme packed with some pretty heavy Irish names - Seamus Heaney, Anne Enright, John Banville, and my favourite Irish economist, David McWilliams - as well as the occasional top-quality foreigner, such as Lloyd Jones (author of Mister Pip).

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.

Listowel rocks.

Jude: Level 1 in Greek

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.

Anyway, Jude: Level 1, in Greek.

Tell all your Greek friends. You don't have Greek friends? Shame on you. Go to Greece at once, make some friends, and tell them. 

Senile Dementia versus Penile Dementia - the Queen and Jude battle it out for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize

Well, it seems I have been shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, alongside Alan Bennett (he wrote The Madness of King George!), Will Self (he wrote Great Apes!), Garrison Keillor (he wrote Lake Wobegon Days!), John Walsh (he once wrote in the Independent that I looked like a member of the Proclaimers!), and Joe Dunthorne (he wrote the extremely acclaimed first novel Submarine, and is only eight years old!)

Very very exciting. Previous winners include DBC Pierre, for Vernon God Little, Jonathan Coe, for The Rotters' Club, Jasper Fforde, for The Well of Lost Plots, and Marina Lewycka, for A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

 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?

We shall see. 

My Enormous Gherkin

As I passed through Orly airport on Saturday (about to fly home to Berlin), the woman running the x-ray machine frowned. She signaled to the man beside her. He frowned, and  signaled to the second woman, further along the conveyer belt.

The second woman grabbed my rucksack as it came out of the X-ray machine.

"Is this your bag?" she said in French.

Oui, I said.

She frowned, perhaps at my pronunciation, and began to pull on her black gloves. I tried to think what the heck I was carrying, that could look so suspicious on an X-ray. The woman plunged her gloved hands deep into my rucksack, and rummaged. I remembered what she was going to find just before she found it...

 Let us pause a moment, while I give you a little backstory.

I had spent the previous few days just outside Paris, working on the stage version of Jude: Level 1. I had wished to bring my noble co-workers a gift from Berlin, to give them strength for the coming ordeal, but there is no point bringing wine to France, chocolate is a problematic present, and what else is there? In duty-free I had almost despaired when I saw the discreet pile of cans marked in big letters Get One!, and in little letters, 1 große echte Spreewälder Gewürzgurke.

The perfect gift from Berlin! A huge local gherkin, in a can. "The gherkin snack from the homelandplace for gherkinfans" as the can said. ("Der Gurken-Snack vom Heimathof für Gurkenfans.")

 So I loaded up with enormous gherkins, one to a can, and brought them to France. We had one each. However, I was so busy I forgot to eat mine, and thus it was that on my way back through Orly airport this refined French lady now found herself holding my enormous gherkin, canned, in her black-gloved hand. "What," she said in elegant French, "is THIS?"

I was distracted from her question by the dawning realisation that I was living through a postmodern, canned version of the great moment in the rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, when bass player Derek Smalls sets off the metal detector at an American airport by walking through it with a cucumber, wrapped in tinfoil, stuffed down his pants.

Blinded by this vision, I couldn't remember the French for gherkin. Our conversation got increasingly surreal as she tried to guess what the lurid, warty, green thing, pictured on the can, might be. "Get One!" didn't really help, and she couldn't read German. At one point you could see her thinking "Glow-in-the-dark vibrator? Dildo?" In French. ("Vibrateur phosphorescent ? Dildo?")

Seconds from disaster, we finally communicated. "Cornichon!" I cried. "Ein große, er sorry, c'est un grand cornichon."  "Ah!" she cried, enormously relieved. "Un cornichon!" All smiles, she handed it back to me, and I was able to bring meine große Essiggurke home to the banks of the Spree.

(An aside: I am shocked to discover that, according to Google, nobody in the long, rich, and well-documented history of the world has ever, before this glorious day, used the phrase "My Enormous Gherkin" on the internet. This seems to me extraordinary. Hardly a day goes by when I don't say it at least twice.)

Jude: Level 1 is the Book on One in Ireland this week

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. 

A woman of great taste and discernment, Lucille Redmond.

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...

And if you like that sort of filth, you can buy the book here...

Kassel Rocks.

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.

Review Jude: Level 1 by Wednesday, and win a €100 book token

 

Should have mentioned this weeks ago, forgot.

Start magazine (which covers arts and culture in the south-east of Ireland) is running an open competition to review Jude: Level 1.  Reviews can be up to 600 words long, and should be sent to startmagazine@eircom.net . The best review will win a €100 book token, and will be printed in the summer issue of the magazine.

Closing date is the 16th of April, so not a lot of time left... 

Thoughts on Jonathan Coe's biography of B.S. Johnson

I have of late been wasting my sweetness on the desert air of the literary blogs. (Chiefly the Guardian Books' blog, and the New York Times' Papercuts blog.) Bad habit, must stop.

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.

Here's a Guardian chat from yesterday about the (dead, English, experimental) novelist B.S. Johnson... (The chap in the picture, above.)

 My thought on the subject was this:

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.)

Blogging Live from Prague

Well, I've just had two blindingly good days in Prague. Met enough lovely people to hold a World Hugging Championships. Read to two of the finest, most receptive audiences ever assembled (in the Globe, and Shakespeare & Sons). They were both engaged and engaging, which is a heck of a feat. Sold all my copies of Jude: Level 1, which shows you how fabulously discerning they were. Wrote some of the new opening to Jude: Level 2 while sitting sipping cappuccino, in the sunlight, outside a cafe in Náměstí Míru (Peace Square). Bought all of Kafka's short fiction, again. And spent many fine hours in bars where the smoke grew so thick you could lie down on it and have a brief nap before returning, refreshed, to the scintillating conversation.

In short, I have been having far too good a time to blog, so that'll have to wait till I'm back in Berlin.

I'm reading in Prague! Later today! And again tomorrow!

 

Holy guacamole, I totally forgot to mention that I'm  reading in Prague later today, and again tomorrow. (Monday 7th of April 2008, and Tuesday 8th of same...) I should have had this up as a news thing weeks ago. Months ago.

Anyway, if you've any English-speaking  friends in Prague, tell them it'll be funny, intellectually titillating, and I may get my kit off if enough people throw their underwear at me.

I note with gloom that the Prague Daily Monitor has listed it as a poetry reading, so there goes my casual walk-in audience. (Just to clarify: It won't be a poetry reading. 100% uncut, hardcore prose, all the way.)

I'm planning to read the award-winning short story "The Orphan and the Mob" tonight, that's Monday night, in the Globe bookshop (as part of Alchemy Prague)... (For new readers, "The Orphan and the Mob" is also the prologue to my fab, book-of-the-year, comic novel, Jude: Level 1), which I strongly advise you to buy immediately.)

...and I'll be reading "The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble" (which had the peculiar honour of being the first short story ever published in the Financial Times), on Tuesday night in  Shakespeare and Sons.

It's practically a world tour!

Mapping Economics Onto Reality

 

I was recommending this article to my friends the other day, so I may as well recommend it to you guys too. I know my economics stuff is of minority interest, but how we live is going to be severely bent out of shape for the next few years by this single fact -  the economic theories used for the past two decades did  not map onto reality, and have totally screwed up the financial system, global credit, the housing markets, et bleeding cetera.

 

George Soros, apart from running one of the most successful hedge funds of all time, making a billion in a day by knocking sterling out of the EMS,  and then using the money to prop up democracy around the world,  is a terrific and original thinker on matters economic. (He's greatly influenced me. Those who know me may have have noticed that over the past few years the quality of my economic thinking, and of my predictions, has improved a great deal. A fair bit of that is down to reading Soros.)

 

Here's a juicy and clear-sighted quote from the article, in Wednesday's Financial Times, if you're too lazy to click:

 

"About 40 per cent of the 6m subprime loans outstanding will default in the next two years. The defaults of option-adjustable-rate mortgages and other mortgages subject to rate reset will be of the same order of magnitude but occur over a longer period. With single family home sales running at an annual rate of 600,000, foreclosures will overwhelm the market and cause prices to overshoot on the downside. This will swell the number of homeowners with negative equity who may be tempted to turn in their keys. The fall in house prices will become practically bottomless until the government intervenes. Cutting foreclosures should be a priority but the measures so far are public relations exercises."

The rest of the article is here.

 

In fact, if you liked that, you should read his interesting overview of the background to the crisis, going back sixty years... 

 

And if you're up for a bit of really meaty economic philosophy, there's a good 1994 paper on reflexivity by Soros here...

 

Did I mention I'm reading in Prague next week? Oh, I'll blog about that tomorrow.

Arguing About Nothing

 

I spent today arguing about MFA programs, over on the New York Times' Papercuts blog. You can tell I'm dodging some serious writing, huh? A typical contribution from me went something like this...

"Literature is, among other things, a long cascade of mentorings. Fitzgerald helped Hemingway. Beckett sat at the foot of blind Joyce, taking dictation for Finnegans Wake.

But Fitzgerald didn’t invoice Hemingway. And Beckett didn’t have to pay Joyce $100,000 to sit there.

(In fact, Joyce paid Beckett - in cast-off clothes, neither of them being commercially glorious).

It is remarkably cheeky of the universities to try to put mentoring - something which has to be extraordinarily personal, intimate, and freely given, if it is to have any meaning - on a sound commercial footing. Buying the mentoring of better writers is an extraordinary form of prostitution, which degrades both parties. (You should hear what creative writing teachers say to each other about their students after a workshop. Very reminiscent of what prostitutes say to each other after the johns have left.)

Perhaps, occasionally, a good writer will discover a potentially good writer, and real mentoring will take place. But what is the moral condition of the vast mass of relationships which have been forced into existence? Bad faith, bad faith.

And there is a more fundamental philosophical problem.

The novel is against authority, or it is nothing.

The university is authority, or it is nothing.

The two are uniquely unsuited to a close embrace.

Universities (given the way society is currently organised), have to expand. Sometimes they expand into territory to which they are wildly unsuited. The novel is one place they should never have ventured. Claiming to “teach” creative writing for money is morally dubious. But for the universities to employ such large numbers of potentially good writers as teachers, forcing them to daily read the worst prose ever written… well, it’s the kind of hellish torture Dante would have found a bit much. What sin could have earned such punishment?

Betraying your muse, perhaps.

The MFA in creative writing is a very successful industry. But its main product is embittered teachers of creative writing, (who nightly stifle the thought of what they might have written had they not had to read, grade and workshop student dreck for 20 years).

Not writers."

I, of course, totally overstate my case, and repeatedly break my only rule, that a writer should have no opinions. 

The whole thing, may God have mercy on us all, is here. 

The Latest on Jude: Level 2

 

A bunch of people have been asking me what's happening with Jude Online. (Hi Iarla! Hi Liz!). Or rather, what's not happening, as there hasn't been a new episode posted since October 2007.

Well, it's all my fault. Back in October, I had an idea for Jude: Level 2. I thought it would improve the book, and I asked Ben Yarde-Buller, my publisher at Old Street, to hold off putting up new episodes of Level 2 while I  took off my clothes, oiled my muscular torso, and wrestled with the manuscript in front of an open fire.

I didn't say anything earlier because I wanted to be sure the rewrite would work. Months later, it does. But rewriting Level 2 has had interesting consequences, and I now feel it makes a very interesting book in its own right, with its own unique flavour. So Old Street are going to publish Jude: Level 2 as a book, sometime in 2009. (Level 3 will follow in 2010, and THEN a handsome omnibus will collect all three.)

I know, I know, publishing is the slowest business in the world. Blame the retailers. Chains like Waterstones say they need to see the finished book, cover and all, at least six months in advance of publication, or they won't look at it and they won't order it. And you need even longer to organise proper media coverage. (Why, I don't know. A plane falls out of the sky, there's no problem getting radio, TV, newspaper and internet coverage immediately. A novel falls out of the sky, and it takes nine months. Go figure.)

We're still figuring out what the heck to do about the online version. I don't have a finished version of the new Level 2, so I don't want to show it online yet. I'm extremely happy with how the rewrite is turning out but, having already written one big new section, I've realised I now need - for aesthetic reasons with which I shall not bore you - a new opening for the book.  Which I've just begun writing. (Given that I like to put my stuff through an absolutely ferocious number of drafts and polishes before I publish it, and given that, like most authors, I spend the vast majority of my time idling beneath a coconut tree eating barbecued hummingbirds when I should be writing, it's going to be quite a while before it's ready.)

Also, publishing Jude: Level 2 as a physical book has loads of implications which we haven't worked through yet. (For example, if Jude: Level 2 is to win the Booker Prize it so richly deserves, the online edition would need to be published the same year the physical book is published...) So we're going to keep Jude Online on hold till we've worked all that out. Anyway, best guess is that we'll eventually get back to putting Jude: Level 2 up on the Jude Online site, but closer to the publication of the physical book.

If you've any questions about any of this, ask away. All questions and comments welcome, either here or in the forum. If it's a private remark or question, feel free to email me directly (there's a Mail Me button lurking down there somewhere on the navigation bar.)

And if you'd like me to tell you when Jude: Level 2 is coming out, email me and say so. I'll put you on my mailing list, when I finally put my mailing list together. (Been meaning to do that for a year... hi all you old Toasted Heretic fans who asked to be put on my mailing list, I'll get it together soon! Soon!)

Thanks for your patience. I know I'm being infuriatingly Artistic, but it took seven years to write the entire saga, and another couple of years to get Level 1 published, so an extra year or two won't make much difference. And I think it will be worth it.

 
I hope you, or your descendents, will, eventually, agree...