Amongst the Leaves

Links to Stuff III

2012-01-17T16:12:00.000Z

Congratulations to Peter Falconer over at A Song A Week 2011! for writing and recording 52 songs in 52 weeks.

Going Dark at the Young Vic looks like it will be great - I'm going in early March because it is one of the things my students have to go to for the course I teach this term.

Some of BBC Radio 3's New Generation Thinker's are broadcasting on The Essay this week.

Links to Stuff II

2011-12-04T13:24:00.000Z

Baz Productions are a very exciting theatre company based in London who recently had a production of Macbeth running in the Crypt at St Andrews in Holborn. You can read their blog here. This was the first production I've seen in a long time which actually made me realise how much I miss working in the theatre. I'm looking forward to seeing the work Baz Productions make in the future.

I'm giving a paper at a conference in Ottowa next year: History, Memory, Performance. My paper will be on history, memory and storytelling in some Stephen Poliakoff dramas. I'm very excited about it, but I'm trying to pretend I don't have to fly - I'm not scared of flying I just hate it, and the cheapest flight to Ottowa is nearly 15 hours with a stop over... Maybe I could row over there or something?

The Electric Forest are fantastic light installations and walks through British forests. I'm looking forward to going to the one in Thetford Forest.

Critics

2011-11-26T18:24:00.000Z

I've been thinking about critics lately.

The first two assignments my students have to hand in on the course I am teaching this term are book reviews. This might sound easy: it is not. The work they need to produce should be well written, well argued and succinct - the word limit is a very strict five hundred words maximum. Only a very few of them asked before they began their work what the role of the critic in a review is. This is a question which attracts different answers, and over the last few years there have been discussions - in theatre and literature - about who should review work, how, and for what purpose.

On Wednesday evening some friends and I went to see the new production of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin at English National Opera directed by Deborah Warner, whose production of School for Scandal at the Barbican in early summer was badly reviewed by some (not all) critics - to which Warner responded, and a low key, short lived - but media inflated - 'spat' occurred when two critics took this response very poorly and then themselves responded... are you bored already? What always seems to come out of things is an air of critics in one camp and writers, artists, actors, theatre directors - or whatever other artists I have left out - in another, with no real dialogue occurring between them: critics - and the newspapers they write for - do not want to change the way they do things, which leaves everybody feeling frustrated. Warner - I should declare now that I have great respect for her work and have yet to see anything directed by her in the theatre or opera house which I have disliked - seems to have been attempting (I may be entirely wrong about this of course) to get some sort of discussion going for a while, at least since late 2009 when I heard her on BBC Radio 4's current affairs programme PM talking about critics and criticism and role/responsibility of the critic - but consistently the response to this from senior theatre critics has been patronising and condescending if nothing else. Which, for me, is disappointing, because I feel very strongly that this is a discussion which should be had - there must be a way of properly jump-starting this conversation and preventing it from becoming some sort of pathetic newspaper argument. Before my students hand in their next review I will be encouraging them to think about the role of the critic, or rather think about what the responsibility of the critic is, and what they - as writers, critics, readers, and audience members - want from a review.

The production of Onegin is stunningly beautiful (the lighting alone was worth the price of the ticket) and without a doubt the best thing I've seen all year - I would go again every night before the run ends if I could, but I can't so I hope it returns to the Coliseum in the future. There were six of us, each enjoyed it, but from different points of view - at the first interval we had a great discussion about the date the production had settled upon - the story is an 1820s one, but this production was firmly rooted in 1890, and our discussion ranged from Jane Austen to Chekhov via wars, revolutions, 'The New Woman' and Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (one of my favorite films, but it entered our discussion because of the duel in both that film and Onegin) . If you want you can listen to a live recording of it via the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer, but I really do urge you to go an see it if you can.

Links to stuff

2011-11-22T11:38:00.001Z

I'm going to try to blog more, so if I can't write a proper blog my compromise is going to be to post some links to interesting things (things which I think are interesting and hope you will too).

Quick reminder about my friend Peter Falconer's project to write A Song A Week in 2011. He has ten songs left to write, record and produce - and there aren't ten weeks of the year left so if you haven't already take a look at the SAW2011 blog and give him a comment or two to encourage him, and a few pounds for the charity pot if you can.

High Arctic exhibition at the National Maritime Museum - is a rather extraordinary exhibition conceived by Matt Clark of United Visual Artists after he went on the 2010 Cape Farewell High Arctic expedition. The blogs by the people who went on the expedition can be found here.

BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival is currently happening in Gateshead. Radio 3 broadcast various lectures and events and you can catch up on the iplayer.

And for something absurd and hilarious: French and Saunders Hungarian Madonna Interview (with thanks to Mr Falconer for sending me this link).

Reading Lists, libraries and beautiful books

2011-11-18T00:06:00.001Z

Somebody asked me recently what books I'd read recently - I had to think about this, which is unusual as I can usually reel off quite a few without thinking at all. I read everyday, but rarely these are books anyone else would want to read - New Perspectives in Historical Writing, Probing the Limits of Representation, Practicing New Historicism, anyone? Thought not.

To add to this I've been stuck in interminable chapter writing hell since sometime in March, which finally came to an end about ten days ago, but which has meant I've not been able to read anything non-chapter related, mostly because I've just been too tired to read anything else at the end of the day.

This term though I've been teaching a course on contemporary writing, so I've been reading a book a week, and this is the reading list:

Marilynne Robinson - Home
Ali Smith - The First Person and Other Stories
Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger
Michelle Paver - Dark Matter
Jackie Kay - The Red Dust Road
Jackie Kay -Fiere
Jeanette Winterson - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jose Saramargo - The Elephant's Journey
Alex Wheatle - Brenton Brown
Bel Mooney - A Small Dog Saved My Life

In the last week of term the students get to choose the book they want to read. A few of my students raised their hands 'What do we do in week 12?' questions abound. Choose a book you like and suggest it to the rest of the class. 'What?' - none of them could think of a book they had read. What did you read in the summer? Silence. You must have read something. One finally mumbled that he spent the rest of the year reading and so didn't read anything over the summer. What is he doing an English degree for if he doesn't like reading? When I finished my undergraduate degree I was so tired I couldn't read any of the books I loved or wanted to read, but I needed to read something so I trundled my way through all my Dad's crime novels. How can these students spend a whole summer not reading?

I would go crazy if I didn't or wasn't able to read - books have been there at the most difficult and terrible times and I've always used books as a way of escaping the terribleness. When I worked as a bank clerk I used to use my lunch hour to go to the library in the town (whatever town, as I was moved about a lot) where I was based and sit in there and read; it was an hour of grace day on day, week on week while I was doing a job which made me very unhappy; it got me out of the bank and effectively made the job bearable until a job I wanted to do came along. In the last month I have learned four out of the seven public libraries I used have been shut down, two have had their hours cut, and one risks closure.

The Kindle advert may be claiming the thing replaces the book (it doesn't because you can't drop in the the bath for a start, not to mention all the other things, which I won't mention otherwise I will be ranting) but I cannot replace the library: the experience of going into a place filled with books, pulling something off the shelf at random and starting the reading journey. Or going into a library with the reading list for your course and looking at the shelves and pulling books off to find which ones you need, which are interesting or helpful, and which are no good and can go back on the shelf. The rejection process in the academic library is as important as the act of discovery.

I haven't managed to finish AL Kennedy's The Blue Book - I was just too tired and couldn't actually hold the book upright in bed, and decided the book and I would be much happier if we left each other alone for a while. I'll be reading it at Christmas though and I still love looking at it in all its blueness on my shelf. Slight aside - there seems to be a small trend at Vintage/Jonathan Cape at the moment to publish books which have the ends of the pages the same colour as the cover - Julian Barnes' Booker winner has a black hardcover with the ends of the pages also black, and the edges of the dust jacket also black so it sort of melds, the new Vintage edition of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is very orange in the same way that The Blue Book is blue. I wonder if the rise of the Kindle (how much do I hate that TV advert? More than the actual Kindle I think) and the iPad and other assorted e-reader things, has meant that publishers are trying to make (some) effort to produce hardback editions which look beautiful.

After I escaped chapter hell, I started reading Sara Wheeler's wonderful book Terra Incognita, which is about her travels in Antarctica. This is the first non-work book I've read since sometime in the spring. I've never read much travel writing before - there is so much fiction I haven't read, not to mention the poetry, that non-fiction - unless it is really vital and essential - tends to slightly fall off my radar. But this year I started to give in to my desire to read books about the Arctic and Antarctica, starting safely with a travel book about Norway, where I turned immediately to the bit about the Arctic Circle, and then picked up a copy of a novel called The Still Point whilst traveling to a conference in Exeter which I read in huge gulps on the train there and back, along with an article about the Northern Lights in the Saturday Guardian Magazine someone had left on the seat of the train from Exeter. Chapter hell began, along with some other awful things and my snow and ice filled reading dreams had to wait; I'm back there now and loving it.

I'm off to jump down another chapter black hole - I may be some time.

What's in a title?

2011-11-17T23:57:00.000Z

I had a meeting this afternoon about a paper I am giving at a research seminar on a panel with two of my friends and colleagues in March. Our research is quite varied and does not really link up in anyway - one of us is researching scientific writing and the Royal Society in the 17th/18th century, another on the East India Company Archive 17th-19th century, and my research is on Stephen Poliakoff, which puts me firmly in the late 20th/21st century.

There is, however, one area in which we are all interested and have talked about with varying degrees of intellectual depth: the archive. But none of us could face yet another panel on this subject and have happily discovered that we are also interested in the anecdote - so that will be our general subject for our panel.

From there we had to write a title for our panel - this sounds easier than it actually is.

In today's lecture for the course I teach on we were discussing contemporary publishing in all its glory and shallowness, and one of the questions was about whether we read a book because of its title. To our surprise none of the students said they were attracted to a book by a title - other factors were more important for them, particularly front covers it seems, so that old saying about judging and covers never goes away. But do we judge a book, or a play, or opera, or an art exhibition, or a film, or a song, or whatever else, by its title? What impact does a title have? Do we learn anything from a title?

We decided our panel title needed to have a colon - the colon in academic paper titles is all. Or not. I still maintain my best title was a two word title for a paper on AL Kennedy - Writing Home - now though I have long wordy titles with quotes and colons. We wanted something about fragments in our title to reflect the fragmentary, shard like, nature of the anecdotes and anecdotal stories and incidents we would be discussing. The only thing which came to mind over and over again was 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins' - the famous line which comes four lines before the end of the fifth section - What the Thunder Said - of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and while I'm talking about titles, it is interesting to observe the reason why the European Parliament wouldn't allow Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw to stage The Waste Land in their new parliament building in Brussels was because the powers that be didn't care for the title...What if T.S. Eliot had kept the title he originally considered - He Do the Police in Different Voices? Or on a less dramatic level if Ian McEwan had maintained the original title of Atonement so that it was An Atonement - it was his publisher who wanted it to be just Atonement and McEwan relented.

'These fragments I have shored against my ruins' is an incredible line, but one which we could not use: how could we?

The line has been haunting me for the rest of the day, and whilst I listened to a paper on mourning this evening it kept returning: 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins'.

Eventually we came across a fantastic Francis Bacon (Bacon senior, the 16th century statesman, not the 20th century painter) quote: 'Out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books, and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time'. But this was too long, so after a bit of chopping and twisting we came up with 'Recovering from the deluge of Time' as our before the colon bit of the title. We liked it, but while we were trying to work out the post colon bit, we started playing around with a (mis)quote from Paul Simon's song 'You can call me Al'. So now we had 'Incidents and Accidents, Hints and Allegations'... we stuck with it, but I do wonder a little bit if we cheated. We had moved away from our desire for fragments, the Bacon quote seemed a long way away, but I like it so much I know I have to use it at some point.

What is in a title? Would you read a book just because of its title? Or see a play?

In Search of the Perfect Notebook: Part 2 The Search Continues

2011-08-25T13:38:00.000+01:00

After some thought I managed to work out where I might have bought the 'perfect' notebook for my work back in 2008. I narrowed it down to two shops in London, one on Devonshire Row opposite Liverpool Street and another on the Holloway Road near where I used to work. I was in London yesterday for a meeting about my difficult third chapter (which I'm told is reasonably good... but I'm not convinced, all I can see is a mess), so I decided I'd visit these two shops, however my day did not go quite to plan and I never got to the Holloway Road stationers, and when I got to Devonshire Row Crane Stationers were no longer there - just a row of empty shops.
I rang Holloway Road shop and explained my predicament with regards to the paper in particular, and although they were not sure what make the notebook was or if they still stocked it, but they said if I took it along with me they would see what they could do. So that will be a job for my next trip to London.
As a precaution - because my current notebooks are almost used up - I went into WH Smith at the train station and went to pick up one of their 'ok, but not great' notebooks, and found a label on the front saying the paper is 70gsm, which means they have downgraded it because I am sure the one I have is 80gsm. So I left it on the shelf and ended up with the New Statesman, the London Review of Books and the Independent's daily mini paper. Which is just as well because the train was delayed...

In Search of the Perfect Notebook

2011-08-23T17:59:00.000+01:00

It seems many people who need to use, or want to use, notebooks - I mean the paper kind not the computers - is not really satisfied with the one they have got, and are therefore always in search of one which is better suited to what they want. I am no different. I wrote a few months ago about the notebooks I need to use - of all the notebooks listed the most important notebook I use on a daily basis is the one for my PhD research.
My requirements are: A5, casebound in a hardback cover, good quality paper which takes fountain pen ink and pencil well, I need lined pages, the notebook must lie flat when opened, and for bizarre reasons know only to myself and my archiving needs, the notebook must have a red cover.
I have tried making my notes directly onto my laptop but this just does not work for me - I need the feeling of pen or pencil on paper to process my thoughts - so I use the notebooks. I am currently using a WH Smith own brand notebook, which is ok, but the paper is not as good as I would like - some inks feather and bleed on it - but it does its job in most cases, but I'm still on the search for a better notebook, and I'm not that keen on the shade of red.
Over the last few weeks I've been writing the third chapter of my PhD, and I expect this notebook will be used up in the next few days as I struggle - and this chapter really has been a struggle - to finish the first draft. This academic year has been difficult for so many reasons and this chapter should have been completed some months ago. This time last year I was on target, now I feel horribly behind. I am having to write huge stretches of the chapter longhand before typing them up because I cannot seem to be able to work out what I want to write on the screen. This is both time and notebook consuming.
After I finish this notebook I will use up the few remaining pages in my Seawhite of Brighton notebook, which I stopped using when I realised how much I need lines. It is actually a sketch book because Seawhite of Brighton are an art supply company; it is a great notebook, I like the cover, and I like the thick pages, but I really do need lines. So I need to find something else.
I know all the paper aficianados out there are shouting 'Clairefontaine', but have you seen the price? I go through these notebooks too quickly to justify spending over £7 per notebook, and although I agree the paper is great for fountain pens, I do find the ink takes a bit too long to dry on this paper - and if my thoughts are flowing I need to get them down and keep going, not wait while the page dries before turning it.
Yesterday I discovered I did once have the perfect notebook. Searching through a pile of Poliakoff plays I found one of my old notebooks from my MA. It seems I filled this book up with terrifying speed in the British Library whilst doing some research on Irish writers broadcasting on the Third Programme in the late 1940s and early 1950s: it is full of pencil scribbles about dates and times and content of broadcasts made by Irish writers, copied from piles and piles of archive copies of the Radio Times. I flicked through the notebook and realised what a good book it was - the paper was smooth but not slick, it had lines, the cover was a nice shade of red and had a smooth texture, it opened flat. I'd only written in it in pencil (pens are banned in the BL) so I needed to find out if the paper was up to the worst behaving inks I own. I found a page with a small amount of space took it to my desk and tried the inks.
It was perfect. But where on earth did I buy it? There is no brand or identifying marks on the cover. Are they still made? The search begins...

Browns

2011-08-21T18:39:00.000+01:00

It may be late August, but it is still the summer. However, where I live almost all the fields which surround us have already been harvested and ploughed - the greens and golds of the peas, parsley, barley, wheat and oilseed rape have all gone, only the deep shiny green leaves of the sugar beet remain. Ten or twenty years ago I remember the farmers leaving the fields for weeks, even months, after the harvest, and I can recall playing as a child in the stubble and pea mush well into the autumn months. Today it seems the farmers do not leave the fields for more than a few days before they start breaking up the earth and turning the soil.
We are now surrounded by varying shades of brown as the earth is turned to expose the dark moist clay soil underneath, before it dries to a different hue, and is turned again and again, each time the lumps of earth becoming smaller until the soil is ready for drilling and sowing for next year's crops.
This week I will harvest the onions in the garden and lay them out in the sun to dry. I will dig over the earth and sow rows of carrots for the winter. Soon the bright green shoots of the carrots' foliage will start peeking above the top layer of soil.
The brown of the fields surrounding us got me thinking today about brown ink in my pens. Brown is not really a colour people use to write - when they do actually write and not type, but that is another subject altogether - and I will admit that had it not been for my avid tea drinking habits, I would not have purchased a bottle of J. Herbin's Lie de The ink some months ago, and I certainly would not have thought about other brown inks. I do love Lie de The and have used it in two pens, and so far it has been my favourite ink in my silver-green Lamy Al Star.
I was undecided about the exact shade of brown I wanted to try next - Lie de The has beautiful shades of brown and yellow and green - and I was reluctant to buy random bottles of brown inks to find ones I liked, so instead I decided to buy a number of ink samples from the fabulous Goulet Pen Company in the US. I have now tried Noodler's Brown, Noodler's Golden Brown, and Noodler's Burma Road Brown, all of which I like, but I think I will definitely be buying a bottle of Noodler's Brown, which is a rich brown with a hint of red, and looks great in my Brown Esterbrook J. The ink and the pen suit each other perfectly, and the ink behaves extremely well on almost all the papers I have tried it on. I will certainly be trying some other browns - probably a few more from Noodler's and some from Diamine.

New blue pen for making notes on The Blue Book!

2011-08-02T16:10:00.006+01:00

This is my most recent pen purchase. It is a 1940s Waterman 513 with a W-3 (mediumish) nib.

Contrary to the heading of this post I didn't buy it to make notes on AL Kennedy's new novel The Blue Book (published this week, go and buy it, it looks beautiful and is an awesome book). And it is very, very, blue!

I won't say anything more about it yet since it is a couple of days before it is in the shops - although I notice it hasn't prevented some newspapers from printing reviews of it, which I'm not reading because I don't want to know what happens before I get to the end.

Do books have a season?

2011-07-28T19:14:00.004+01:00

If you visit here often - there are some of you out there I think - you'll have noticed that To Siberia has been in the 'currently reading' list on the left hand panel for about 8 or 9 months. It isn't a difficult book, but I find that I can only read it in small sections, and then put it down for a while, and leave it for sometime. I had this with another of Per Petterson's novels - Out Stealing Horses - and I have a friend who said it was a 'winter book'. I struggled to get into it in the summer months, even though a fair amount of the narrative was set in woodland during the summer, so I put it down and began it again last winter, and finished it in a few days. I began To Siberia a few weeks later, but still have it on the go - I thought it might be another 'winter book' but it seems I was wrong, and haven't yet found the right season for it. Do you think books have a season? I can't decide...

Tea Leaves, Tree Leaves, Book Leaves

2011-02-23T15:22:00.008Z

My new TWSBI Diamond 530 arrived on Saturday morning from the super efficient online pen shop The Writing Desk - I placed my order for one pen, one bottle of J. Herbin Éclat de Saphir ink and a Clairefontaine notebook at around 10:55am on Friday morning and less than 24 hours later the postman was at the door - at about 8:20am. So The Writing Desk get a big thumbs up from me for excellently swift service, and I will certainly use them again in the future - probably to buy more ink in the near future, maybe even Herbin's Lie de Tea ink, because I am also a slightly obsessive tea drinker.

Indeed, as I type I am drinking a mug of freshly made Mélange Madeleine tea from Hédiard in Paris, which might be my favourite blend of tea. My mainstay teas are Earl Grey and Brodie's Afternoon Tea, both of which I have in the cupboard as tea bag teas for a quick cup of tea, then I have many different types of tea as tea leaves - including various green teas, an Earl Grey from Hédiard, a black tea and flower blend called Blue Lady which has mallow flowers, marigold flowers and grapefruit petals which I got somewhere in Scotland, a tea called Nirvana from another shop in Paris called Compagnie Anglaise des Thés, which my parents bought for me along with a rather lovely tea pot.

In the garden all the autumn leaves have finally been cleared up, and put in the compost bin. I've just ordered some new roses for my garden from Peter Beales Roses - I've ordered three ramblers to be trained against my garden fence panels:

Ghislaine de Feligone:

Phyllis Bide:

Narrow Water:

Now moving onto books. Why are there so many people with Kindles? I'm less bothered about iPads than I am about the Kindle, because the Kindle seems to be trying to pretend it is a book replacement. What is the appeal? I don't get it, and it isn't because I am a technophobe, because I'm not - I like my gadgets quite a lot, but I could do without them if it came to that, because there are books, and paper, and pens and pencils. BBC Four's series The Beauty of Books is a wonderful celebration of the book, and as one of the commentators points out - I think it might be Stephen Bayley - at the beginning, the book is the best information storage and retrival system ever created, and that you can read it in the bath - by which I think he is really saying 'you can read it in the bath, and drop it in the bath, without permanently, irrecoverably, damaging it. If you drop a paperback in the bath it will not be rendered unreadable - it will get a little warped but other than that you're still going to be able to use it. My main problem with e-readers of all types though is the lack of actual, physical, turnable, pages - essentially there are no 'leaves'. E-readers can attempt to manufacture the turning of the page all they want, but the thrill of opening a book and turning the page is gone. I'm sure there are people less bothered and obsessed about this than I am, but part of the reason I love books is the page-turning. I love that you can pass them onto other people, make a gift of a book which is especially special to you, make annotations or leave messages in them, not worry too much about dropping them, you can get them second hand so they have some past before coming to you, they are like old friends - my list could go on quite excessively.

Writing of books which are like old friends - yes you guessed it - my non-PhD reading this week has been a collection of AL Kennedy short stories, my brain is tired at the moment and can't sustain reading a novel, so I've been reading Indelible Acts again. Kennedy's new novel comes out in August and has a very blue front cover. Well, it is called The Blue Book. Hoping I might get my hands on a proof copy sometime in the next couple of months.

My visits to the British Library are becoming quite rare because it is becoming increasingly noisy in the reading rooms. Why? Mobile phones. Last time I was there the man sat next to me kept listening to his voicemail messages in the reading rooms. So I've taken refuge in the periodicals reading room at Senate House. However, when I have been at the BL I've taken to ordering up a book called How I Write, which is edited by Dan Crowe and Philip Olterman, and is really a collection of essays by different writers on various writing subjects - Will Self on post-it notes for example. I have a slump about half an hour before lunch so I read a couple of entries and then go off and have lunch. I've been working through it slowly and will soon reach ALK's entry called 'Notebooks thrown across rooms'.

I've been saving this entry - I was tempted to jump right to it, but have restrained myself - and have been wondering lately about notebooks, because I use them everyday for my work and I am beginning to understand exactly what I want from a notebook. Primarily three things: sturdiness, good paper and the ability to lie flat. I need one for my PhD research, a pocket notebook for other stuff and a diary (I've tried using my phone and computer for the latter but it doesn't work for me: I do use the laptop for 'to do lists' on iCal though). I used to get the 'pocket' sized page-a-day Moleskine diaries, but came to the conclusion that they were too bulky and I wasted many of the pages. This year I've got a soft-cover pocket size, page-a-week Moleskine diary, which has a lined page for notes on the opposite page. So far I quite like it - I have enough space for weekly notes, and if I keep my writing neat I can fit all my appointments and meetings in each day section. I've heard that some people have found the soft-cover Moleskines damage easily - the covers rip off and such like. The bugbear I have with it is really to do with the elastic band - it seems to have got baggier and a bit flimsy. And why do they persist in providing an address book in each and every diary? I've got three now which I will never need to use. We shall see.

My notebooks for my research tend to be hardback A5 hardback books, plain or lined pages, and most of them are red or some sort of reddish shade - not sure why - I've four in total: a Collins Ideal, which was started for an undergraduate journal I had to submit for a course years ago and which is actually larger than the A5 size, the first 20 pages or so are used, but I will cut them out and use the book at some point; a Seawhite of Brighton book, which I think is actually a sketch book; and two standard A5 notebooks with lined pages which I think came from WH Smiths, one of which is full and the other I am currently using. I expect to finish both the Seawhite and the Smiths books in the next few months and then will start using the Clairefontaine book I purchased last week. I also got a pile of black soft cover A5 notebooks free a few years ago on a festival I worked on, I don't actually like them all that much - the front cover is embossed with The Times logo, and they don't open out flat. I only continue to use them because I like the paper - pencils don't smudge and fountain pens don't feather or bleed through the page. On closer inspection the paper is made by Conquerer. I've got two of these Times notebooks on the go, I've donated two to my sister, and have two left which I will willingly send to anyone who asks. I'm quite happy with my red A5 notebooks for research notes and shall continue with them - they've all been sturdy and have good paper.

My problem is with the pocket sized notebooks. I've been using a hard cover, blank page, Moleskine for a few years and am towards the end of it now. It has withstood several festivals, a house renovation, many, many train journeys, and being in my bag on a day-to-day basis. It is one of the older Moleskines so has one of the older, tighter, sturdier, elastic bands. The top and bottom edges of the spine are slightly worn, but not enough to bother me. On the whole I like it, but I do have issues with it. My problem with Moleskine is about the paper, and about the falsified Moleskine 'legend'. I could overlook the latter - but I'm not willing to pay for it. The paper, however, I can't overlook because ink bleeds through and feathers - I've had problems with rollerballs, gel pens, and fountain pens, and the paper is particularly bad with some fountain pens and inks - although, oddly for a pen which can be a bit temperamental, my Waterman Hemisphere with black Waterman ink writes on Moleskine paper very well, doesn't put down a dry line, feather, or bleed through. However, because the Waterman pen was given to me as a present by my parents I consider it to be my best pen and don't want to have to carry it around with me everyday just because it is the only pen I have which writes perfectly in a Moleskine.

So while it is generally a good notebook, and I do have another blank page Moleskine, I am on a search for a new pocket notebook. There are several blogs who are on a quest to either find a Moleskine alternative, or inks and pens which are Moleskine 'friendly' - you can find links in the blog list on the left - I've read a few of these and recommendations include the Stifflexible (which I can't find anywhere online or in a shop), the Alwych 'All Weather Notebook', the Quo Vadis Habana, the Rite in the Rain notebook - another all weather notebook - Rhodia notebooks, and Cartesio notebooks. The Journal Shop offers paper samples from some of the notebooks they supply, so I'm going to ask for a sample from the Cartesio - I do quite like this bluey coloured notebook in the Cartesio range.

In the meantime I very much like my new TWSBI Diamond 530 and am going to enjoy using it on a daily basis.

On a final note, The Morgan Library in New York is currently holding an exhibition called The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives. If - like me - you are not in, or near, or going to or near, New York, then they have pictures from the exhibition online and an audio tour you can download.

2011-02-18T17:57:00.002Z

Last time I wrote it was to plug my friend Peter's new songwriting project A Song A Week (if you haven't taken a look at his site, then what are you waiting for? It will make you laugh if nothing else) and I mentioned office hours and having to hold free ones, as well as the four I get paid for. Having been begged by my students to hold office hours so they could come and discuss the forthcoming assignment I duly booked an office in which to hold them (there were two of these hours), got up early like a grow up person with a proper job, ironed my shirt (this is very rare) had breakfast (also rare) and got on the tube a rush hour (even rarer) arrived in my borrowed office at 9am and spent two hours drinking tea and faffing about on the internet, until one student finally appeared. I was not impressed - I was expecting all 35 odd of them... because virtually none of them came to my paid for office hours I then had to hold another not-paid-for office hour - just to clarify I get paid to hold four office hours a term, but this is never enough and I always end up having to do more.

Anyway, the point of this waffle is to say that the first installment for Peter's charity fund has been safely put somewhere where I can't spend it on note books or pencils; but also to direct you to the current PhD Comic: The PhD Comics Guide to TA Office Hours.

For those of you who are wondering the 'PhD' in 'PhD Comics' stands for 'Piled Higher and Deeper'. Enough said...

Meanwhile my thesis is now onto chapter 3 - and a very cheerful chapter it is proving to be: children, Second World War, evacuation, trauma.... chapter 1 needs some tinkering with, but we like each other so that is fine, we won't fall out over the tinkering, chapter 2 on the other hand needs to be hit with a mallet, and we don't like each other at all. It is in fact sulking under a dictionary at present. If you think I've finally lost it take a look at another PhD Comic offering: How Do I Love You, Thesis? Let Me Count The Ways...

It is Reading Week - which is like half term for academics (in which students arse about, and academics catch up on sleep and research) - unfortunately it seems to have clashed with half term for school children and so there will be no peace. And I have marking. Lots of marking. But I am going to read a non-PhD book this week. Not sure what at the moment...

but I have brought myself a new fountain pen with which to improve my truly awful handwriting (this is what comes of using pencil all the time - biro becomes impossible to use without turning your handwriting into a spidery mess). It is in the post on its way to me and is a TWSBI Diamond 530 and is blue and looks like this - I think it looks quite cool, but I am a geek, so my opinion may be meaningless. It requires proper ink from a jar, I might not be able to cope, and the ink will no doubt pour everywhere. We shall see.

A Song A Week

2011-01-11T13:21:00.002Z

My singing, songwriting, tea-with-no-milk drinking friend, Peter Falconer, has challenged himself to write a song every week in 2011 - he says this is partly to stop himself being a lazy bastard, but he's also going to raise some cash for Parkinson's UK.

If he manages to write the 45 songs he's aiming for then I will donate him the money I would have earned for doing extra office hours for my students this term, that is if I was being paid to do extra office hours, which I'm not, but I do them anyway, otherwise my students would get 2 minutes of one-to-one time a term, which I'm sure you will all agree is a bit rubbish.

Not sure how much it would be, but it should be an unstingy amount...

Why don't you take a look at his blog and listen to the first song of the year: A Song A Week!; and if you are so inclined donate some money.

2010-08-05T15:52:00.002+01:00

Sometimes I think I might delete this blog to free up the tiny bit of internet space it takes up... especially since I only manage to do anything with it about once a year.

This is going to be a quick run through everything I've read this year (don't worry all the PhD related stuff has been left out) which turns out to be not very much at all, due to PhD stuff, and being chained to a laptop everyday all day. Titles with very brief reviews, in no particular order:

Bonnie Greer - Entropy: sad, joyful; introspective, retrospective; and like the author, full of ideas.

Adam Foulds - The Quickening Maze: beautifully written, but a bit too slight for everything packed into it.

Ali Smith - The First Person and Other Stories: I'm not reviewing this - as far as I'm concerned Ali Smith can do no wrong when it comes to books.

AL Kennedy - What Becomes: Yes I read it again. And again. And before the year is out I might yet read it again. Do I need to explain...?

Stuart Hall - The Raw Shark Texts: Mad, mad, book about ... well, I couldn't even begin to explain. You'd think I'm insane. Go away and read it.

Nathaniel Rich - The Mayor's Tongue: The ending, sadly, lets it down.

Mohammed Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes: This one surprised me - a serious book which is having too much fun to take itself seriously. Go away and read it.

Peter Ferry - Travel Writing: Can't remember if I read this at the end of 2009 or not, I seem to remember that its about storytelling and obsession and love and travel. Or something.

Stig Larsson - Millenium Trilogy: Ok, I gave in. Last week. Oddly compulsive. Run of the mill prose, needed 500 pages cutting from the total of about 2000, and a sharp editor, but hats off for creating a character who can kick that drivel which is Twilight out of the water (and no I haven't read those, and I won't be. Ever. Anyone caught reading them should be put on a compulsory and intensive course reading the likes of Virginia Woolf)

Back to the typing now.

2010-03-02T18:45:00.002Z

What sort of debate needs 76 rules?

Love the fact that there are 3 rules about the set.

And is one minute really enough time to respond to a question?

Clearly the people involved in this haven't watched the live debate episode in series 7 of The West Wing.

Meanwhile the sun is shining and I've been deciding what penstemons to put in my garden this year. And tomorrow I'm off to buy myself a colour wheel because I can't find a decent one online to print off.

You can tell I haven't done any work today can't you...

2010-03-02T11:25:00.003Z

I obviously had a moment of PhD avoidance at some point recently and ordered the above and then promptly forgot I'd ordered them. So it was a pleasant surprise to find a parcel in the letterbox this morning. I'm looking forward to reading these.

Next on my list of things to buy are two plays by Fin Kennedy and whatever I can get my hands on by David Rudkin, which is easier said than done as Methuen seem to have let all his plays go out of print. It is, however, possible to get an in print of his first play - Afore Night Come - from Oberon Books. For all the rest I feel a trip to Skoob coming on.

2010-02-26T16:28:00.002Z

A very fine new bookshop - The Book Hive - has opened on London Street in Norwich. So if you happen to be in or near Norwich, do go in and have a look.

Turnips

2010-02-24T16:20:00.004Z

And just in case you were wondering about the erstwhile turnip theme ... Last years turninps got eaten by bugs, and it is too cold to sow this years crop. So I dug out this.

It made me smile.

Period Comedy Podcast

2010-02-24T15:27:00.003Z

I you have half an hour, or if you have no time at all but are able to brilliantly multi task in a way which means everything gets your attention, then have a listen to this: Fanny Goodboddy

2009-12-04T14:11:00.003Z

Well, it has been some - not inconsiderable - time since I last posted here, but anyway, I thought I might today.

I've been back in London for a few months now, after a year away, and have (finally) started my PhD.

For those of you who haven't already, read AL Kennedy's short story collection What Becomes.
For a totally insane read take a look at The Raw Shark Texts.

And finally, take a look at this: Being and Tim.

16th Meyer Whitworth Award Winner Announced

2007-10-31T12:53:00.000Z

Morna Pearson has been awarded the 16th Meyer Whitworth Award for her play Distracted. To read the full press release go to the Playwrights' Studio Scotland website.

I would have to concur with Stuart Mullins (chair of the Meyer Whitworth judging panel) when he said about the play: "...without doubt an exciting and original voice that British theatre must nurture and cherish. The piece is truly theatrical and could be created through no other medium – its visual, visceral, poetical and magical…..it's ‘theatre’.”

2007-10-16T17:14:00.002+01:00

Last Thursday seems years ago - I have a dim memory of being in a sleep deprived state as an event manager at Cheltenham Literature Festival. At some point while deciding whether to have a scone (staple festival diet seems to be scones and apples) with or without cream, Cheltenham Festivals' Press Co-ordinator wandered up to me and informed me that they needed to steal Anne Enright away from me, and therefore her sound check because the BBC wished to interview her. I assumed this was some sort of pre-Booker publicity, and was quickly informed that no, it was not, in fact it was because we had just been informed that Doris Lessing had (about time too) been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and Enright was to be giving a response on the 10 o'clock news. So a hasty sound check was completed and Enright was whisked away and I was left to contemplate my scone. Meanwhile everyone else was having fun with the setup for Margaret Atwood's LongPen (which has also been called The Evil Claw) satellite link from Canada.

Between LongPens and Nobels; blocked loos and power cuts; it went entirely unnoticed by the gather literary types that AL Kennedy (sadly not programmed for this year's festival - I live in hope for 2008) had been awarded the Österreichische Staatspreis für Europäische Literatur (Austrian State Prize for European Literature). So not everyone has heard of it, and at €25,000 it isn't huge like, say the IMPAC or the Nobel, or the Booker, however it has a rather grand sounding title and you'd think that there might be some tiny mention of it somewhere in a British newspaper? Wouldn't you?

I've not paid any proper attention to this year's Booker Prize, but I'm going to say that I hope Anne Enright does win. I've only read Enright's The Gathering and McEwan's On Chesil Beach so have limited basis for any informed judgment. What I really hope is that On Chesil Beach does not win. It is usually broadcast on the 10 o'clock news, but I'll probably be asleep by then...

Cheltenham Literature Festival 2007

2007-08-23T16:31:00.000+01:00

The 58th Cheltenham Literature Festival has been on sale since the 6th August.

You can view the brochure online, or if you prefer a printed copy you can request one.

2007-07-19T16:53:00.000+01:00

Amidst all the chaos of flooding you may have heard the story about the man who plagiarised Jane Austen and that only one editor - Alex Bowler, assistant editor at Jonathan Cape and a very fine person indeed - appeared to have recognised the manuscript before him as a (slightly) revamped Pride and Prejudice. Much credit to him and also to his reader whose name escapes me but who Alex gave all due respect to in his Front Row interview last Thursday.

Putting aside debates about the value of the - so called - experiment (it is probably better described as an exercise in time wasting) to see if Austen would make the cut with the publishing houses of today, I would like to take this opportunity to raise yet another reason why you should all put those Harry Potter books down and go out and buy yourself a copy of Tod Wodicka's All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well.

What is that reason? Alex Bowler (yes the very same Austen spotter) is the editor. And a wonderful job he has done with Wodicka's book too: here we have a good editor who can spot good literature when he sees it and doesn't like to see it messed around with.

Short Stories

2007-07-12T15:17:00.000+01:00

I've mentioned in the past my love of short stories. I'm lucky that AL Kennedy - a writer whose work I greatly admire (as I know you will know I never tire of saying) - writes very fine short stories. Back in June she wrote an article for The Independent about short stories and below is an extract:

"Stories are allegedly what novelists knock off when they're feeling lazy, mere journalism with a dash of purple prose, something to read in the toilet, a waste of trees.

At which point I get a migraine and then ask you to bear with me for a moment, because together we have to rediscover what the short story is really all about. So go and get a glass, maybe one with a stem, if you're in that kind of household, but definitely a glass, not one of those plastic things your children chuck at one another. I'll wait here.

Sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Tap the glass gently with your nail, or a pen. If the glass has a fault or a crack, it won't make much of a sound. If it's flawless, it will sing, resonate beyond itself. That's the best way I can show you the nature of the short story. It may be small, fragile, but to create that kind of seamless clarity - that's a massive challenge to any writer, and a remarkable gift for any reader... make no mistake, the short story is an exercise in perfection."

A perfect description of a perfect form.

The full article can be read on The Independent's website.

2007-07-04T14:52:00.000+01:00

I mentioned the other day that Tod Wodicka's wonderful first novel All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner Of Things Shall Be Well, has a wonderful cover so here it is. It is published next Thursday, and it is in paperback so no excuses about it being too heavy for your luggage when you go on holiday.

2007-06-28T16:20:00.000+01:00

How to start this post - yes I know it is the first in many months - I could start by saying that Jerusalem Artichokes are the single most versatile vegetable on the plant (given half a chance they would run rampant and swallow the earth in a saga worthy of a Dr Who three-parter) or perhaps ask if anyone out there knows anything about Dahlias? I've been given two beautiful red plants to go in my new garden but know not what kind of soil or location they like.

Well that seems to have got me started.

I should really begin by mentioning AL Kennedy's book Day, which was published by Jonathan Cape in April. I read it back in December in proof format and thought it wonderful, honest, and achieved. It is a novel ambitious for the form and therefore not constricted. However not all those book reviewers out there have agreed with me, but I do urge you to read it. I like it because it is not strapped into a straight jacket - although the main character might think he should be - it is not linear in its narrative - I don't much like linear - and takes Kennedy's use of the second person to a new level. I was hyping it all last year before I read it and I can safely say that it lived up to expectations and also exceeded them.

Now the excuses: I know that saying that I've been busy since the end of Cheltenham Literature Festival last October is a very lame excuse, but I have been busy and somewhat computer-less since my two batteries for my laptop gave up the goat (I do mean goat not ghost), and the very old iMacs we had at work until last week were not capable of supporting any sort of browser without crashing. But we have lovely shiny new Mac Minis now with Firefox...

I left the festival in November last year. I enjoyed it immensely but my time was up. While I was sad to go it was, in hindsight, the right course of events. In January - I can't quite believe that six months have passed already - I started working for writernet and also as a teaching assistant/seminar leader in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.

Oh, and I brought a cottage in Suffolk - hence the red Dahlia's as a gift. I shall be spending my summer restoring it.

Book recommendation for July - aside from Day which you should buy today, on you way to the tube, bus, church, village hall, supermarket, farm shop, home etc - All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner Of Things Shall Be Well by Tod Wodicka is published by Cape on the 12th July is wonderful and beautiful and has a lovely front cover which is not an abstract from a postmodern photograph.

Being back in London means that I get to go to the theatre without having to do battle with long armed torygraph readers and First Great Western, and I've seen some brilliant, refreshing and imaginative work including Katie Mitchell's productions Waves and Attempts On Her Life at the National Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland's production of Anthony Neilson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia at the Royal Court ranking highly. I wasn't sure what to make of the ENO's Death in Venice, though - perhaps I was too distracted by the very uncomfortable balcony seats, next time I will stand.

I'm off now to do battle with One Railway - that unholy alliance of four train companies which serves East Anglia.

Cheltenham Literature Festival

2006-10-09T20:17:00.000+01:00

Well, the first weekend of The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival has ended and we are moving into the week - if you missed the last few days then you still have six more in which you can see some fantastic (even if I do say so myself) events.

There have been so many interesting, stimulating and wonderful events it is difficult to know where to begin. My number one event so far has been Stephen Poliakoff on Saturday 7th October, and our three events on Sunday 8th October with the RSC were exciting and fascinating, Shakespeare's Women with Tamsin Greig and Jane Lapotaire, Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter talking about Anthony and Cleopatra, and Janet Suzman giving the Shakespeare Lecture.

Today has seen the first of the Festival's commissions performed (and broadcast on Radio 4) by Helen Simpson - its a wonderfully funny short story and if you didn't catch it then you can listen to it again on the BBC Radio 4 website - http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/tellingtales/pip/n320n/.

Tommorrow of course sees the Booker awarded....

Booker Short List

2006-09-14T16:43:00.001+01:00

So here it is, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction Shortlist 2006.

Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss (Hamish Hamilton)
Kate Grenville - The Secret River (Canongate)
M.J. Hyland - Carry Me Down (Canongate)
Hisham Matar - In the Country of Men (Viking)
Edward St Aubyn - Mother’s Milk (Picador)
Sarah Waters - The Night Watch (Virago)

I'm very sorry to see that James Lasdun isn't there as his book Seven Lies is very fine. However I'm glad to see M.J. Hyland there. I've got a proof copy of Hisham Matar's book by my desk and we're currently debating its merits....

Beginnings and Endings

2006-09-12T13:25:00.000+01:00

So it begins...

The Ottakar's in Cheltenham is no more ... last night as I walked home it was being refurbished and this morning when I walked into work it had become Waterstone's. The branding is slightly different from the old Waterstone's stores - white and black instead of gold and black.

So as you pass your local Ottakar's take a moment to frequent it before it is no more.

One for the history books

2006-09-11T18:21:00.000+01:00

I taking a moment away from books. Just a moment, this isn't permanent....

Aside from the (mostly) unsporting activities of books (they occasionally require lifting, and are heavy) and turnips (all that digging is much more exciting than the gym) I sometimes dally in the world of sport. Not the partaking you understand, only as an onlooker, and even then I'm very selective - tennis and three-day eventing. Having worked in eventing ( did the wholly unglamorous job of being an event groom and loved it while it lasted, but am now too much of a cripple) I know that it can be at turns punishing and wonderfully rewarding - rather like the world of books - and this weekend saw both in shovelfuls. Andrew Hoy was in line for the Rolex Grand Slam - $250,000, which is a huge amount for a rider and has only been won once before by Pippa Funnel in 2003 - having won Kentucky and Badminton this year, all he had to do was win Burghley and he was there - but sadly it wasn't to be, with three poles down in the show-jumping - the final discipline out of Dressage, Cross-country and Show-jumping - he went down to second place.

But while one rider lost out on the biggest prize in eventing, another won the biggest event of her career to date, the British born Lucinda Fredericks (she married the Australian Clayton Fredericks so now rides for Australia) stormed away with the Land Rover sponsored prize money of £45,000 with a faultless clear round in the show-jumping, with a wonderful little mare (15.3hh) called Headley Britannia who tried her heart out and has been rewarded with her place in eventing history after becoming the first mare in 33 years to win the competition.

But its back to books now ... am off home with a copy of Gail Jones' Dreams of Speaking, published by Harvill Secker.

Harvest

2006-09-07T16:32:00.000+01:00

In the world of vegetable gardening September is a wonderful month - no planting required, only the very fulfilling job of harvesting. The only problem is what to do with it all when its picked, and you can't eat it all in one day.... This year the turnips are doing very well - they are lovely and sweet - we have an abundance of beans - Runner, French, Yellow Climbing, Borlotti, - the onions are all picked and drying out, an Italian green vegetable called l'agretto has gone mad and we can't keep up with it, as has the chard and beet leaf, the caterpillars have attacked the kale and the cabbages though, but there is hope, and enough time to re-sow the kale before the winter, last year we were cutting from September through to the following March before it gave out, it survived the snow and frost without ever needing covering; so as winter veg goes kale is my favorite - its green and needs hardly any fussing about. On the fruit front the apples and plums are ripening up nicely and we even have some pears this year.

And at work things are somewhat the same - almost all the books have arrived, and the festival is a month away, which means further temptations for this blogger. Christopher Hope's new novel has arrived - My Mother's Lovers published by Atlantic - as has Victor Sebestyen's book on the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 - Twelve Days published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

The trouble is that I have no time to read them. But come November when the nights have drawn in my time will be devoted to reading books, instead of just talking about them.

Digesting the Booker

2006-09-06T14:05:00.000+01:00

I know I know, everybody is talking about it and its beginning to get boring.... So I'll be brief.
Of the big publishing houses:

With 5 titles from 4 imprints Random House dominates.

Peguin has 4 titles from 2 imprints.

Pan Macmillan has 2 titles from it imprint Picador (who published last year's winner).

Hodder has 1 title with imprint Sceptre.

Little Brown has 1 title with imprint Virago.

Of the Independent Publishers:

Faber & Faber, Cannongate and Bloomsbury have 2 titles each.

With the shortlist just eight days away I dare say the judges are in for another epic debate on what stays and what goes. My personal shortlist keeps changing, but today is: Seven Lies by James Lasdun, The Testement of Gideon Mack by James Robertson, Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland, So Many Ways to begin by Jon McGregor, The Secret River by Kate Grenville, The Night Watch by Sarah Waters.

This of course will have changed by tomorrow. Except for Lasdun who has stayed on all my shortlists....

Walking Over Books

2006-09-02T12:34:00.000+01:00

For those of you who might have been wondering - I haven't fallen off the planet, I've just been rather bogged down of late. I had a fleeting trip to Edinburgh - for the Book Festival and to see a few things on the Fringe - where I discovered that I no longer know how to live like a student (sleeping on the floor and eating Pot Noodle was never my idea of fun, but now one night on the floor leaves me unable to walk!). And speaking of Pot Noodle, AL Kennedy did a very funny skit on the subject of this terrible food stuff, and on the whole her stand-up was considerably funnier than the critics gave her credit for (the day I was there the audience kept up a pretty constant flow of laughter). ALK's comedy aside ... Her new book Day will be published in the UK on 5th April 2007 (215 days to go). I have heard that there are plays and another collection of short stories to come as well.

With little over a month to go before the 57th Cheltenham Literature Festival begins everything is about to take off in our office - with everything from book deliveries to the colour of the tent lining to be sorted out. Having done a big clear out a month ago we're now piled high with books again - indeed you can't really move for books, and boxes of books, and parcels of books waiting to be posted, and very soon walking into the office every morning is going to be like climbing through over-growth, or paradise.

Wonderful though it is to be surrounded by so many books, it is also something of a struggle: books mean temptation, and my recent rummage amongst the leaves of the many titles we have turned up several temptations ... In no particular order:

The London Pigeon Wars by Patrick Neate (Penguin)
Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna (Bloomsbury)
Fatal Purity by Ruth Scurr (Chatto & Windus)
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell (Headline Review) (I have to admit that I am seduced by titles, and this is one of them)

Gautam Malkani's much-talked-about-first-novel Londonstani may win me over.

I realise I'm lagging somewhat behind with reviews of what I've read ... I'll get there soon.

Dead-heading

2006-07-28T11:32:00.000+01:00

As I was dead-heading the petunias last night it occurred to me we needed to do something similar in the office. With our programme finalised and the brochure at the printers its time to clear out the books we've been sent since the beginning of the year to make way for the books by writers who will be attending the festival.

So far I've gone through about 200 books and found two novels I'm interested in (Where are the Snows by Maggie Gee and Electrcity by Ray Robinson) a Granta City Guide for Budapest, and a book for my Dad... I may yet add Bad Faith by Carmen Callil to my selection. But the fact that out of so many books I can only find a handful which I want to read strikes me as slightly disconcerting. Yet there are some books here that make me wonder if anyone will read them at all. Does this, however, mean that they shouldn't be published....? I was reading an article a few weeks back (can't remember who wrote it or what paper it was in, sorry) suggesting that only the books that are needed should be published.

Who, then, will decide upon 'need'? Is this not a strange germination between dead-heading and pruning?

Onto better things: In our pigeon hole this morning was Issue Two of Pen Pusher - a free London based literary magazine. So I'm looking forward to going home this afternoon (we have a half day... What luxury!) and having a good read of it (I should of course catch up on the ironing, but who cares about creased shirts?)

Onto even better things: I have on the wall next to my desk the title information about AL Kennedy's forthcoming book Day. It says it will be published on 5th April 2007. I may grow to love April.

Onto truly excellent things: The turnips are ready to be harvested. They are the perfect size -not too big - and taste wonderful. Pity the weather is all wrong for mashed turnips and butter ....

I'm experimenting with font... let me know what you think.

Climbing Through the Undergrowth

2006-07-14T17:48:00.000+01:00

In case you were wondering, I'm not dead.

We've been finalising our programme here in Cheltenham, and that generally results in having no time.

But I have been reading, and weeding, and having a good rummage in the literary undergrowth second hand bookshop I pass every night on my way home.

My current reads are The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic and translated by Michael Heim, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and Benang by Australian writer Kim Scott, who isn't published in the UK but should be, and you can find details about his books at the Fremantle Arts Centre Press site. Another writer who is somewhat ignored in the UK is American Short Story writer Richard Bausch.

I've just finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Constitutional Stories by Helen Simpson, both good reads, and if you are going away somewhere peaceful where you can read all day these books are well worth packing. Unfortunatley I am not going away to anywhere warm and peaceful where I can sit reading all day (the irony of being surrounded by books all day is that you struggle to read more than one a week), instead I am going to make do with rooting about all the bookshops scattered around the South West and the Cotswolds (not too sure how I am going get to these places with the chronic lack of public transport round here -you have to get a train to Birmingham to get to Oxford which is half an hour or so up the road! - and my personal lack of car means I have to rely upon such transport). I'm going to start in Bath this weekend at the newly opened Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights.

Drought

2006-06-20T12:54:00.000+01:00

Of course I'd forgotten about the hosepipe ban. There I was happily watering all the cabbages and turnips, and some strange Italian green vegetable whose name I don't know but tastes very nice, when I was promptly reminded of the water shortage - thought it was only a problem in the South-East? And if there is a drought can someone explain to me why our back garden is still like a swamp?

All of a sudden the books have dried up. We've had no books for about ten days now, and I'm beginning to feel a bit bereft each morning when I pick up the post. It won't last long of course - soon we'll be drowning under the weight of books sent to us for each writer we have programmed. However, to keep me sane until the office book drought ends the lovely people at Transmission have sent me a copy of their latest issue, which I had a quick flick through this morning, and am looking forward to taking home with me tonight. If you haven't had a chance to read this magazine yet, buy one immediately.

Having seen it praised so much in various places, particularly Bookworld, when I saw a copy of Pinkerton's Sister by Peter Rushforth, looking lonely in Waterstone's one day I decided to liberate it. I began reading it last night, and am enjoying it - although I've only read five pages so that could all change!

Science for the Everyman

2006-06-11T11:02:00.000+01:00

So here we are, the final day of the Cheltenham Science Festival. Its been a bit of a departure for me - an interesting one nonetheless. So far I've learnt that the temperature of liquid Nitrogen is -196 degrees C; that stress does not exist, partly because the guy who named it got his words in a muddle when he stole it from the engineering bunch, it should have been strain; that caterers will go to extraordinary lengths to be classified as truly awful; that it is possible to get heat stroke without going anywhere near the sun - cue very bad things happening to me yesterday.

The transfer of my attentions from literature to science got off to a bad start: Zadie Smith winning the Orange Prize (if you still haven't got a copy of Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, why not?), however, working on the Science Festival has meant that I have been able to ignore that, and one event in particular restored my faith in good literature. A project in New Zealand involving a group of physicists and a group of writers has resulted in a book called Are Angels Ok? I don't know if its available anywhere in the UK yet - except Ottakar's in Cheltenham - but it is well worth buying.

I overheard someone yesterday saying that the festival was more for people already interested in science than for bringing science to those who are not. But for me all the festivals here are about bringing their subject to the everyman; yes we are here for those who already have an interest, but we are also here to provide an interest. Personally my interest in science has decreased over the years and ended in my failing A Level biology: this week I've been reminded that I did once have an interest in a range of scientific subjects and I might even have developed interests in a few more.

Orange Squash

2006-06-06T10:27:00.000+01:00

I'm taking a brief moment to escape the insanities which come with the 'get-in' of a festival. This week its Cheltenham Science Festival (7th-11th June), and I have to say from what I can see from my office it looks rather fun. I'll be making a temporary switch from literature to science for the next few days while I work on the Science Festival, and may even get round to reading a few scientific type books (I'm rather pleased that one of the events I'll be working on is with Gavin Pretor-Pinney the author of the Cloudspotter's Guide - I like the idea of cloudspotting, it sounds faintly therapeutic for want of a better word.)

In the meantime we've been discussing the Orange Prize for Fiction. According to the Observer Zadie Smith (On Beauty) is the favorite to win, but I've yet to find anyone who liked it, better to go away and read Howard's End instead; I've read the Ali Smith (The Accidental), and although a very fine novel I'm not sure if I think it a little too clever for its own good, but the prose is wonderful and the voice of twelve year old Astrid is outstanding; then there's Sarah Waters (The Night Watch) no denying its a good and popular book, I like the structure, and there are some exceptionally beautiful moments, but, but ... does it have the edge? Of the other three I've heard very good things about Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black and the book is currently staring at me rather intently from the shelf to my left, just catching my eye whenever I answer the phone: when we first discussed the shortlist a month ago it was this book which I said would win, I've no idea why. My ability to comment on the The History of Love by Nicole Krauss is rated at zero since I've very little idea what it is about and I've never read anything she's written. Then there is Carrie Tiffany with Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living - if there were a prize for best title this would win it - which I read over the weekend, a wonderful book in everyway, a brilliantly pitched underlying humour, an understanding of the complexities of failure - however minor and of whatever type -if you haven't got a copy, why not?.

This year's shortlist has been called one of the strongest in the prize's history. Its a bit of a squash of literary talent in there. You can see the prize ceremony via webcast between 6.30pm and 7.30pm tonight.

Oh and just in case you were wondering we're vying for Carrie Tiffany.

Picador Shots

2006-06-02T09:58:00.000+01:00

There I was complaining - again - about the lack of respect shown by publishers towards the short story, when one of our programming directors rang me to ask if I could get my hands on some copies of a new series of short stories published by Picador. I'm very fond of Picador - they have a good list, and have managed to maintain a good list for decades, and I like the fact that for a long time all their paperbacks had the same design on the spine - white with black writing - so there appeared to be some sort of unity on your bookshelf: even if in reality it was the opposite.

And now I like them even more because their new series - Picador Shots - is twleve short stories, each published in an individual book - which is small enough to fit in the back pocket of your jeans, but big enough to read - and the list of writers is good too: Jackie Kay, Colm Toibin, Aleksandar Hemon, Claire Messud, Nell Freudenberger, James Salter, Niall Williams, Craig Davidson, Shalom Auslander, Tim Winton, Bret Easton Ellis, and Matthew Kneale. The series is launched on the 16th June 2006 - in fact everything is happening on 16th June so its obviously a favorite date in the literary calendar.

And at £1 a book there is no excuse not to buy at least one book in the series (in some cases there are two stories in each book), so get out there in June and buy them, read them, leave them on a bus, train, park bench, in the staff room, for someone else to read after you. Use them to get your daily shot of short story in the same way you drink smoothies to get a dose of fruit. But most of all: love them for loving the short story form - and there is something oddly loveable about the little pastle coloured books which tumbled out of the post onto my desk this morning.

Round-up

2006-05-19T16:18:00.000+01:00

I've been catching up with everything I've missed over the last few weeks and have discovered a wealth of information, and vegatables, in need of harvesting.

On Friday I went to Hampton Court which was very nice, and the weather held out as well which was great. And then spent the rest of the weekend was spent reading various things and pulling books off my shelves to bring back to Gloucestershire. I now have no room at all for any more books.... unless of course I put up another shelf... or shelves

First off came the rocket in the garden, and then the excitment of seeing the turnips shooting up through the soil, followed by Maud Newton's AL Kennedy story (plus link to an ALK interview), and finally the dates for things at the Edinburgh Book Festival, and the fringe - in particular ... yes you guessed it: AL Kennedy's events.

Ok excitment over. For a moment.

I've started reading Clare Morrall's new book Natural Flights of the Human Mind (hardback published in January and paperback coming out in June) an I'm rather liking it. The jacket has gone missing somewhere in the office so I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but after a paragraph I was intrigued so I took it home with me. Along with a(nother) book set in Brick Lane, called An Acre of Barren Ground by Jeremy Gavron, which is looking very promising and takes its title from The Tempest. I picked up a copy of Carrie Tiffany's Orange Prize nominated book Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living which I began yesterday. Its set on a train which goes around Australia encouraging farmers to change the way they farm using scientific methods and lots of chemicals on your soil: stuff like phosphate and weed killer (a sort of early form of Round-up I suppose) - these days the same thing would happen to encourage farmers to go organic so the contradiction between 1934 and 2006 is interesting - and is full of an underlying humour.

And there is a new literary magazine which you can pick up in various places in London called Pen Pusher which I've not yet seen but have heard is good.

Oh and my turnips are doing very well. Did I mention the turnips already?

On Being Ill

2006-05-17T12:20:00.000+01:00

Sometime ago I read Virginia Woolf's essay 'On Being Ill' in a moment of essay avoidance. I don't remember much about it, except that Woolf wondered why illness: "has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature".

Why indeed?

Having been ill with a mystery, reoccurring virus myself I decided to go in search of contemporary books and short stories which deal with illness as a prime theme. Needless to say I'm not getting very far and except for an AL Kennedy short story called 'A Wrong Thing' in which the protagonist is lying in bed in a foreign hotel being outwardly ill and paranoid about being ill in a foreign country, but also inwardly considering their failing relationship. So I don't know if that means the story's prime theme is illness at all....

(Re)-Building a Library

2006-05-06T12:48:00.000+01:00

In case you were wondering I haven't died in the compost heap or been attacked by a killer turnip. But I have moved and finished the first week of my new job. Its great to be doing a job which doesn't involve till stamps and what's more I enjoy.

Which isn't to say that deserting the turnips was an easy thing. Also having to leave 90% of my books at home has left something of a gap. So now I have to build a new library. Which shouldn't be too hard as I have access to a huge amount of new titles at work because publishers wanting us to have their writers at the festival send us lots of books in the post. Only since I started we only seem to have been sent the truly strange titles. However I did pick up a few from the shelf behind my desk and my latest read is Bernard MacLaverty's new collection of short stories Matters of Life and Death. I first read MacLaverty when I picked up a copy of Grace Notes from the staff bookshop at the book wholesalers I worked for. What I remember of Grace Notes is that it was set in Scotland and Northern Ireland and examined the religious differences and troubles in the latter through a story of music, and told the more domestic but no less significant story of a young woman coming to terms with love and loss.
Having only read two of the short stories in MacLaverty's new collection I can't really comment much, except to say that the stories are short, which is unusual today as short stories seem to be getting longer: I recently read Alice Munro's collection Runaway and encountered some very long stories.
I expect I'll finish Matters of Life and Death this weekend - I have a train journey to the delightful Weston-on-the-Mud (aka Weston-Super-Mare) tomorrow to take my Granny out for lunch which will provide plenty of reading time - and now I have to think about what's next. I could read Helen Simpson's Constitutional and continue with my short story pattern (recently read all of AL Kennedy's short story collections again, her new novel is due in spring 2007 but no news of a new short story collection as yet. However the story printed in the Threepenny Review, Family with Young Children, is up to the usual Kennedy standard, and can be found at the Review's website), or I could read more poetry - I been reading a combination of some wonderful Scottish poets (John Burnside, Robin Robertson, Don Paterson, Kathleen Jamie and Carol Ann Duffy) for breakfast - or I could finally tackle Cloud Atlas, which I keep starting but then abandoning ... but then I did see a copy of ... oh dear, the paradox of choice.

Odds and Ends

2006-04-28T19:23:00.000+01:00

Having got myself a new job at the other side of the country and found somewhere to live (first rule of flat-hunting: buy a map), I now have to pack for the move, and what books I take are - of course - top priority (I keep telling myself that because the job is book related I need to take as many books as possible, and then remember that I'll end up getting loads of books through the job and won't have any time to read them all...).

Today was book packing day and in the end I had to have a huge amount of will power. So my system was to pack only books which I had not read yet, of which there are too many to list here, but include a number of poetry books - mostly John Burnside, Robin Robertson, Kathleen Jamie, Alice Oswald, Don Paterson, Carol Ann Duffy - a wedge of Borges, a couple of Elizabeth Bowen novels and Lanark which I'm embarrassed to say was very, very dusty when I pulled it off the shelf.
There are a few exceptions to the rule: 2 AL Kennedy books (Paradise and On Bullfighting) , the dictionary (the little one not the multi volume one), Findings by Kathleen Jamie, a book of Brendan Kennelly's poems, and a few I've forgotten. Mrs Woolf is staying behind for the moment as I don't think there is enough room for her where I'm going (she takes up more shelves that AL Kennedy and Ali Smith put together).

Given that I've spent a fair bit of time on public transport with nothing else to do but read my most recent reads have been Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland and A Jealous Ghost by A.N. Wilson. My brief verdict is read Carry Me Down (just mind the stomach turning bit near the beginning) and leave A Jealous Ghost at the bookshop. These books were the first time I'd read work by either of the writers so I had no idea of what I was going to get. Carry Me Down is original and well written; not dressed up with fussy language and is subtle. It tells the story of John Egan who discovers he is a human lie detector, a discovery that has bizarre and violent consequences. In the end it seems to be a book about the human capacity for love and forgiveness. A Jealous Ghost is a 'reworking' of James' The Turn of the Screw and it is interesting to see how Wilson pulls that off, but the resulting book was too snobby about its roots (problematic for readers not familiar with James' story and annoying for those who are) and the author is clearly disdainful of his central character an American PhD student called Sally, whose thesis is about the James story on which the book is based. From the beginning of the book Sally confuses her situation with that of The Turn of the Screw and the consequences are to be expected. Aside from the academic, literary and social snobbery of the book my main problem is that - in my reading of it - Wilson's story doesn't say anything new about James' story, it doesn't read as something fresh and doesn't make me see The Turn of the Screw in a different light.

Departure and Arrival

2006-04-24T12:07:00.000+01:00

My excuse for not posting for a week is that the first part of last week was spent travelling from one side of England to the other - in between the trains and freezing platforms I got a new job!! - and the second half was spent attempting to find somewhere to live.
I'm moving at the end of this week, so for the next week or so the blog will be a bit light on posts. In the meantime I'll be wondering which books to take with me, which books belong to the library, taking books back to the library, recovering books borrowed from me and not returned, and so on. My current dilema is whether or not I actually need to pack all six volumes of Virginia Woolf's letters or whether carry them on public transport is in fact too much. And I could carry considerably more poetry books - which are not nearly so heavy - if I don't pack them....

Not Another Literary Magazine

2006-04-17T11:45:00.000+01:00

Given the weather we've been having, the last few days have largely been taken up sowing this year's veg and dealing with the complications of planting grid patterns of carrots, onions and marigolds (keeps the carrot fly away). This all left little time for reading anything too long and I began to realise that not being a member of an academic library anymore meant no access to full paper editions of all the magazines and journals I once read. Other than Granta I don't subscribe to anything and I'm beginning to feel a lack, so I trawled through the internet in search of some of the ones I used to read and at the same time came across some new ones, of which there are many.

This reminded me of the Oxford Don Sillery (Alan Bennett in the TV adaptation) in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time bemoaning the fact that one of his former students is setting up a new literary magazine - Fission - which seems doomed to fail from the start.

So my plan is to read a back copy which features a writer or writers I know I like and then if I like it consider subscribing. Here's what I'm going to try (or have already tried) over the next few weeks:

The new(ish) literary magazine Zembla seems to combine typical literary magazine content with truly mad things - like interviews with dead authors. Its designed in Australia and edited in the UK, and has a very annoying website. Its motto is 'Fun With Words'.

Canadian Literary Journal Brick is well worth a look. I ordered a back issue from them a while back and there was some confusion and I got sent the then current issue, but after numerous emails with a nice person called Emily I got the issue I wanted and they let me keep the one they sent me by accident.

Mslexia: If I could get hold of issues 2 and 18 then I might consider subscribing. Anyone out there have a copy of issue 2 and/or 18 they would consider parting with?

At £17 a year for three issues - each issue is now published in multi-volume format - the Edinburgh Review is I think pretty good value, and you should believe what Time Out said a few years back about it being better than Granta.

I'm giving issue 104 of The Threepenny Review a go purely because there is a new short story by AL Kennedy.

Then there are the e-zines: The Roundtable Review is launched on Wednesday 19th April; 3AM Magazine is interesting and diverse; and Inkwell Newswatch has everything you could possibly want from a literary e-zine.

Now off to work out the complications oftravelingg from the east of England to the west by train - how many changes? No less than five.

As The Crow Flies

2006-04-16T17:29:00.000+01:00

Kafka on The Shore
by Haruki Murakami
Vintage, £7.99; pp 505
ISBN 0 099 45832 2

The boy named Crow seems to know the answers to everything, so following his advice Kafka Tamura takes flight on his fifteenth birthday. Everything Kafka has done in his life have lead him to this moment: the moment when he can leave home and run away from his father's oedipal prophecy. However fate, or chance, or destiny, lead him to fulfill the prophecy. When Kafka's father is found murdered, he takes refuge in a private library where he begins to dream. But Kafka is reminded that 'in dreams begin responsibility' and he comes to learn that he is responsible for more than just himself.

Meanwhile Nakata is searching for a missing cat. Left unable to read or write after an incident as a child Nakata's only talent is being able to talk to cats. What began as a simple task becomes complicated and confusing as someone takes advantage of his talent and leads him into a grotesque and violent nightmare. And the only way to put a stop to it will result in murder. Waking up under a bush Nakata discovers that his ability to speak to cats has evaporated and has been replaced with more surreal abilities.

As fish fall out of the sky Nakata and Kafka's lives collide and prophecies and destinies are fulfilled. Each are helped along their way - as any Greek hero would be - by an assortment of strange people; a gender confused librarian, symbols of American culture, truck drivers bunking off work, soldiers living in the woods since World War II, and ghosts of past happiness.

Kafka on the Shore is beautiful, comic, sad and at times baffling: read it and dream. But don't expect to find all the answers at once.

Arguging with the Celebrations

2006-04-15T20:22:00.000+01:00

In The bookseller column of the review section of today's Guardian the 'industry row' over the Short Story Prize goes on.

"The new national Short Story Prize is a 'missed opportunity of gigantic proportions', according to a specialist short story publisher. Ra Page, editor of the Manchester-based Comma Press claims that the prize's inaugural shortlist has dealt a 'body blow to real investors in the short story', such as fellow small publishers Comma, Tindal Street, Route, Maia and Flambard. The stories in the running for the Radio 4/Prospect-backed award are mostly by authors published by major houses: Rana Dasgupta (Fourth Estate), Michel Faber (Canongate), James Lasdun (Jonathan Cape), Rose Tremain (Sceptre) and William Trevor (Penguin). Page complains that the shortlist 'reads like and invite checklist to make sure all the 'right' people - or same people - are coming to the party.' He adds: 'The message it sends us is : 'its OK, you don't have to look very hard to find short stories - the writers you're familiar with anyway will fulfill this need.'' But Radio 4 broadcaster Francine Stock, who chaired the prize says the shortlist was drawn up from 1,400 entries on merit alone: ' It was just a question of what succeeded on the page. If you set out with an agenda [to support smaller presses] then its not a valid competition, however valid the claim is'. And fellow judge Alex Linklater, deputy editor of Prospect, argues that most of the authors are still outside the 'mainstream' of British publishing. 'We wanted to find the finest out there - it is meant to be a celebration of the art of the short story."

Which brings us back to the never ending argument about literary prizes in general. Which is something Erica Wagner brings up in the books section of today's Times. Having argued the pros and cons of such prizes she concludes her column with: "It seems to me that the way for the book to fight back, if such a fight is needed, is for books to rejoice in their existence as objects. Books are beautiful in themselves ... "

So if prizes are supposed to be a celebration of books, of stories, of words, why then does such rejoicing invariably end in argument?

Avoidance

2006-04-12T21:03:00.000+01:00

Its happened again. More books have just appeared inexplicably on my shelves. After considering the piles balanced on first set of shelves near the bedroom door (have run out of space to put the books in neat rows) I counted at least twenty new books - not including the ones from the library of which there are three - which I haven't opened yet. Moving onto the other two sets of shelving in the corner of the room I noticed there was a pile of poetry books which just appeared one day. I wonder if I'm buying so many books as some form of avoidance?

In fact today has been all about avoidance - avoiding filling in the thousands of forms I seem to have been sent by numerous people; avoiding being in the house too much due to family suddenly appearing out of thin air; avoiding writing article about writers in fiction; avoiding finishing Kafka on the Shore so I can avoid writing review of it ....

So to further avoid doing anything - in no particular order here's what I'll be reading in the coming weeks and I've got a couple of long trips to make so these should fill up the time spent on trains.

Pinkerton's Sister - Peter Rushforth (this was recommended on Book World)
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
Carry Me Down - M.J. Hyland (no idea what its about but Ali Smith likes it so that is good enough for me)
Beyond Black - Hillary Mantel
The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova
Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
Findings - Kathleen Jamie (I was about halfway through this at the beginning of the year but got side tracked which is bad because this is a very wonderful book)
A Good neighbor - John Burnside
Swithering - Robin Robertson
Arthur and George - Julian Barnes (because I think this copy belongs to somebody other than myself)
Granta 98 - really the books aren't satisfied with appearing on my shelves so they have to appear in the post box as well! And its got a short essay about climbing Mount Sinai by AL Kennedy.

Container Culture

2006-04-10T19:51:00.000+01:00

In vegetable gardening - or any gardening for that fact - the benefits of container growing are that it allows the gardener almost total control over what happens with the container and its contents. Obviously we don't want our lovingly sown cucumbers, tomatoes, rhubarb, sweetcorn, radishes, aubergines ... stop me before I run out of appropriate veg ... mixing in an uncontrolled environment with disease ridden soil and the possibility that if we just gave them a little space to do their own thing, they would turn out alright without too much intervention on our part.
There is a point to this ramble about container growing: have readers been unwittingly forced into a container culture controlled by the head gardeners of the book trade?

A recent wander through a London branch of a soulless chain pointed me in the direction of the answer whose only word was "yes". Having temporarily escaped the clutches of the medical profession I was in search of escapism. But it needed to be short escapism. So I flicked through the leaves of a few poetry books of the pathetically light poetry section of the store - sorry Mr Motion but the Scots do it better than you - and found nothing in the way of escapism at all. Deflated but not entirely defeated I forked through some short looking novels, which may have provided escapism, but escapism which wasn't short enough for my requirements.

What I needed was a short story collection.
Boy (who looked about nine, is it really that difficult to find staff who want to sell books?)behind the counter: No we don't sell those
Me: Why not?
9 year old: Nobody wants to buy them.

Which in turn reminded me of a publisher (who shall remain nameless because I've forgotten their first name) talking to a group of - possibly interested - undergraduate students about ... publishing (can you believe it?). Somewhere towards the end of this talk/ discussion/suicidal adventure the publisher in question told the writers among us not to bother writing short stories because nobody published short stories if they could possibly help it, because nobody brought collections of short stories and therefore nobody read them. It sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. No short stories: no readers.

And we should feel at times, if not permanently, concerned/angry/offended/upset/deprived about the lack of short stories being published. Because short stories have an important place in the world of literature. They can provide moments of escapism when a novel would be too much and a (shortish) poem not enough; in lunch hours/minutes, in doctors' waiting rooms, on buses, at train stations ...

Which is why the National Short Story Prize is important. The short list is being aired on Radio 4 this week at the absurd time of 11.30pm: a time which proves that the media has a reponsibility to the short story which it too has shirked. One can only hope that the publishers and booksellers are humble enough to realise their errors and publish more short story collections.

This is not to say that nobody cares about short stories: for the 2005 festival The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival comissioned eleven short stories from a diverse range of writers, to be performed for the first time at the festival, all under the heading of MultiStory. This was a poineering project, unique in its importance and bravery and one can only hope its a project which is continued in the future. In the meantime as readers we need to rebel against the container we've been forced into.

Can Books Propagate?

2006-04-07T22:54:00.000+01:00

There I was happily wandering about looking at the pavement when all of a sudden a bag full of books appeared in my hand.

I've no idea how it happened to be there.

I swear.

Clearly my books are breeding, like there is some sort of greenhouse effect going on on my shelves - like the artichoke plants I put in the greenhouse at the weekend which suddenly shot up - although I'd like to think that was the effect Kafka on the Shore had on them.

If truth be told I went in search of a paperback copy of John Clare's complete poems - didn't find it and not sure if it exists - and Iain Sinclair's book about John Clare, Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's 'Journey Out of Essex' - out of print apparently and waiting for paperback edition - but I came out with The Third Policeman, Turn of the Screw and two more Murakami books. Oh and a new notebook, and a collection of Virginia Woolf essays - the Penguin 70th birthday edition of Street Haunting. And I've yet to spend the book tokens my fellow slaves at the bank gave me as a leaving present. So after those are spent and I've purchased the various volumes which make up Brecht's letters and diaries from a secondhand bookshop near where I worked, I'm going to attempted not to buy any books for two months ...

... although I did see a complete set of e e cummings complete works the other day ... and a hardback copy of AL Kennedy's On Bullfighting because my paperback copy fell apart the other day ...

Censoring the dung-heap and crossing the milestone

2006-04-06T20:19:00.000+01:00

I'm nearing the end of Kafka on the Shore and I'm trying to gather my thoughts about it. Its one of those books which is almost overflowing - so much in it that you can't or don't or won't take it all in the first time you read it.

Taking a moment between chapters in Kafka on the Shore, I flicked through the Folio Society edition of Anton Chekhov's letters (Chekhov: A Life in Letters, trans., and ed., Gordon McVay, London: The Folio Society, 1994) and came across this letter from early 1887 pp 36-37:

I don't know who is right: Homer, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, the ancients as a whole, who were not afraid to rummage in the 'dung-heap' but who remained morally much more stable than we are, or modern writers who are prim on paper but cold and cynical in their spiritual and personal life? ... Journalists, lawyers and doctors, who are initiated into all the mysteries of human sin, are not renowned for their immorality; and realist writers are in most cases more moral that archimandrites...
Literature is accepted as an art form because it portrays life as it really is. Its aim is absolute and honest truth...
To a chemist nothing in the world is impure. A writer must be just as objective as a chemist - he must reject everyday subjectivity and realise that dung-heaps play a very honorable role in a landscape , while evil passions are just as much a feature of life as are good ones ...
No police force is competent to judge literature ... However hard you try, you won't come up with a better police force for literature than literary criticism and the author's own conscience ...

The final part seemed to be particularly prevalent at the moment with Orhan Pamuk being released and PEN lodging a complaint against Yahoo following imprisonment of the Chinese poet Shi Tao. Yahoo handed over private emails from Shi Tao's email account to the Chinese government and now he's serving a 10 year prison sentence. There are a few articles in yesterday's Guardian giving more details.

But I'm not sure that I agree with Chekhov that literary criticism is the best 'police force' for literature. Surely after 'the author's own conscience...' the best judge of literature is its readership? ...

And talking about readership, I notice Professor Lisa Jardine has been researching the effects of literature upon the nation's readership again. Last time it was the Women's Watershed Fiction, this time around its the same thing for men with the Men's Milestone Fiction. Naturally everyone is going to be getting all hot and bothered about the fact that there is only one woman writer amongst the men's top 20 most life changing/life saving/influential/inspirational etc books. However I think the titles of the two research projects are much more interesting - men get a milestone and women have a watershed: milestone sounds a bit tiring. What do you think?

Telling Tales

2006-04-04T21:12:00.000+01:00

While I'm enjoying my ramble through the leaves of Kafka on the Shore and Ferdydurke (a bit like Kafka crossed with Ionesco maybe?) here's my verdict on one McEwan book which didn't end up in the charity pile when I was pruning.

Atonement
By Ian McEwan.
Vintage, £7.99; 372 pp.
ISBN 0 099 42979 9

It does well to remember that everybody lies. Nobody is to be trusted. Not even established literary figures. In Atonement by Ian McEwan lies are the illusion of fiction. As readers we accept the illusion because we trust the writer. We believe the story is true. We ignore the fact that stories are untrue. We trust in characters who do not exist. We allow ourselves to be lied to by the author.
Atonement is written in four parts. The first gives an account of a day which ends with two crimes: a rape and a lie. The lie belongs to thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis. Her lie is the naming of Robbie Turner – her sister Cecilia Tallis’ lover – as the rapist. The outcome is the locking up of Robbie and a family who can’t talk to each other because of a lie.
The second part is the story of Robbie’s survival at Dunkirk – but remember stories are untruths – and his return to Cecilia. The third is the beginning of Briony’s quest for atonement. A quest which lasts her sixty years. Briony intends to atone herself through writing. We learn that she has written a novella about her crime and that a publisher has rejected it. When Robbie asks for a letter of explanation Briony’s response is not a letter but a new draft.
The final part is set in 1999. Briony who begins the novel as a child writer - we first meet her writing her melodrama The Trials of Arabella – ends the book a well-known writer. We learn that she continues to lie about her crime. She calls it ‘our crime’ believing that the rapist and victim – her cousin ‘from the north’ Lola - to be guilty of lying as well. By the end of the book she has rewritten her story – her atonement – until the end result is the novel Atonement.
But there is no atonement: The title is a suggestion – even a question – not a statement of fact. If the reader takes the title as a fact then it too becomes a lie. McEwan writes that the novelist is God because there is nothing higher than their imagination. An imagination which lies. The writer is a God who deludes people but cannot be atoned: "No atonement for God, or novelists" But gods – and therefore writers – do not need to achieve atonement. Briony tells us that attempting atonement is enough: "It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all."
Atonement is a book about lies and writers and the lies writers are allowed to create. It is a book which tells us we should not believe in fiction as truth. We should not trust writers – especially not Briony – because they tell stories. Writers are illusionists and Atonement is an illusion which exposes itself. Everybody in Atonement lies – to themselves and each other - and McEwan is a writer who tells us that writers are liars. So we shouldn’t trust him. But we do.

You'll have noticed I've added a few webside links to the sidebar. The link to Theatremonkey is for a wonderful site about London theatre - Mr Theatremonkey provided the name for this blog - and is well worth a visit. Peter Falconer and The Mutiny are an exciting new band based in Greater London and you can hear clips of their music and get the details for their gigs amongst other things. Of all the literature festivals in this country The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival has to be the best and the Edinburgh Book Festival is pretty much on the same level - I just wish it wasn't in Edinburgh, but it is true to say that when you are in one of those tents in Charlotte Square Gardens you could be anywhere you wanted to be! And because I'm very biased on the subject of AL Kennedy's books there is a link to her site as well.

Why Pruning Doesn't Always Work

2006-04-03T15:49:00.000+01:00

I used to serve a customer at the bank who owned an orchard containing something like a thousand apple trees. The last time I saw him he was bemoaning the fact that some of the trees were not doing too well - not enough apples, not enough height, not enough bark, not enough sun, not enough blossom etc - and that something drastic had to be done.

For the trees with not enough bark the drastic measure was to chop them down. Apparently rabbits and hares like to chew the bark on fruit trees and a number of this man's trees had been chewed all the way around the bottom and this I'm told spells doom. No bark: No tree. Because the bark protects the tree like a dustjacket protects a book (perhaps that explains why in the antquiarian book world dustjackets are so important to the value of the book?).

For the trees with not enough height, blossom or apples, the answer to the problem was some rather brutal pruning. No good taking a bit off here and there - you have to really go for it, and if the tree doesn't survive that then they also get the chop.

And therein lies the problem with pruning your 'library'. If its going to work you have to be brutal; and each time I go in for a bit of book pruning I invariably fail. My most recent pruning session was about two months ago. I embarked on this task partly because I had brought a first edition of AL Kennedy's first novel Looking for the Possible Dance and decided it needed to have a proper space on the bookshelves and partly because of the dust. But by the time I'd got all the books off the shelves in order to dust everything I discovered I owned considerably more books than I realised and therefore had to do a bit of pruning. Isn't it amazing the books we are delighted to discover we own, the books we are not, and the books we had forgotten about completely?

So I managed to remove something like 90 books which were then left in piles on the bedroom floor. However in the weeks gone by certain books have found their way back onto the shelves - DH Lawrence and Ian McEwan to name just two who thought they could escape the charity shop pile. But the problem lies with my inability to part with a book I may, possibily, want to read in the future. I'm simply not brutal enough; if I was I would have taken all the books to the charity shop the very same day and not left them in piles on the bedroom floor for two months while I slowly returned them to the shelves. So pruning doesn't always have the desired result and therefore doesn't always work.

The man who owned the orchard was having the same problem with his apple trees - he was a little bit too attached to them and couldn't hack away as much tree as he really should have for fear of killing off some of the weaker trees. His answer to the problem was to rent the orchard out to some else. Perhaps that is what I should do with my books?

But then the person I rent them out to may get rid of all my AL Kennedy books and that would have serious consequences.

Germination

2006-04-02T21:39:00.000+01:00

Starting a book related blog and sorting out the vegetable garden were supposed to keep me as sane as possible while I was slaving away in the evil clutches of a High Street banking corporation. However as one thing does not follow the other and all the best laid plans go to pot I escaped the brain mulching daily grind of being a bank clerk before I had the time to start this blog. Nonetheless I now need something to keep me distracted whilst trying to find new employment (though nothing involving till stamps or the parents of Jacquline Wilson fans).

A recent glance at my bookshelves proved to me that I own a number of books which I have not yet read (I do also own double the number of unread books in books I have read more than once) and those books keep being added to on an almost weekly (if not daily) basis. Amongst the Leaves is an attempt to prevent the piles of forgotten titles gathering more dust: I'm going to read every title on my shelves and then write a review on it. To add a bit of eccentricity to it I'm going to conduct an experiment - of sorts - by reading at least one chapter of every book to my turnips and assorted other vegetables and see how they grow. So this blog will chart my journey through the paper and vegetable foliage of my life, with the occasional rambling about things unconcerened with either books or vegetables.

At the moment I'm reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz, which was kindly lent to me by the owner of the wonderful Harleston Bookshop in Norfolk, East Anglia, when I couldn't find anything to spend my book tokens (leaving present from the brach of High Street banking corporation, so capitalists can be nice, occasionally) on.

A note about the turnips: I am fully aware that I am not - in any way - cut out for farming as a career. However in years gone by my fantasy alternative life was to be a turnip farmer. Don't ask me why. There is no explaination for it.