A week or so back I wrote a rather angry piece on this blog that both got the tone wrong, and conveyed completely the wrong message as a result. The danger of writing generalistic pieces is that they are, well, generalistic and weak as a consequence. So I put examples in, and as a result came across as snarky, having more chips than Harry Ramsden, and aiming my shots where they weren't intended.
So an unconditional apology for aiming my snarks at Ben and Lee, and Todd and Emma - neither you personally nor Richard, The Canal, Literary Death Match or To Hell With The Lighthouse (now The Book Stops Here) were intended to be in my crosshairs. I also forgot the golden rule (that I finally got into my noodle with respect to "the mainstream" last year) that the best thing to do when you don't like something is to carry on doing what you're doing, only even better.
I did have a gripe, and it was this - the media portrays a literary scene as being new that is not, as being cutting edge that has actually been around long enough that it has donned its pipe and slippers and no longer occupies the front line position in the fight against "the boundaries" whatever they might be, that disproportionately reviews titles by its circle whilst refusing to look at other small releases; and there is also a part of the peripheral literary scene that likes to portray itself as these things in order to appear cool. The losers in all this are the public, who get disappointed, and never get to see the real boundaries until they too have donned pipe and slippers. The answer is for the literary media to spend more time looking around outside of what it already knows either from its friends, or from slick PR or the London circuit; and to be less frightened to champion something that other people don't like or don't get - to stop playing safe all the time. As writers and independent publishers we need to keep putting our message in front of the media to show them there is an alternative - and to do so vigorously and unapologetically - it deserves to be there as much as anything else does. Calling out laziness and prejudice is very much part of what we need to do. Snarking doesn't help our cause, but more than that it's not what I'm about and it's not what great literature's about. And the last thing for me to do is to piss off people who have done great things to bring great literature to the public. Sure, now they're successful I 100% expect them to extend a totally non-insular non-introspective outlook to everything else going on, just like they did when they were smaller. But I'll stick to bruhaha designed to promote the work I really beieve in, not to do down anything else.
So, I manifest myself to promote only manifestos of action not snark - I think at both Year Zero and latterly at eight cuts gallery I've done that - that needs to be done more transferably, and to work with people who want to promote great literature, to give the public the great stuff it deserves.
I could remove the previous piece and have done with it, but I won't, because that would be disingenuous to the people who took time to comment (even those who did so anonymously), and, having had my ass whooped, it would do me well for the ass-qhooping to remain public.
Saturday, 13 November 2010
Sunday, 7 November 2010
NaNoWrimo: The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes
I've met an awful lot of people here and on twitter in the last 18 months. And most of them have no idea why my blog is called what it is, why it has the funny little avvie it does, and why my twittername is unspellable. Well, without gong into the long version, The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes is a novel I began in the spring of 2009. And never quite finished. And for all I have other ideas and novels, I keep coming back to it, so I have decided to use NaNoWriMo to edit and finish it for good.
The avvie is the central image from the book, the eyes a pair of trainers - look closely and you'll see the pupils are the 500 logo)
Here's the opening, so you can all see at last why I have the username I do. It's a work of (increasingly - the opening section is harmless enough) transgressive literary fiction, and I'm going to quit the usual self-deprecation and come out and say it. It's the best thing I've ever written, and I need to finish it (I have 56,000 of a projected 65k already but lots of editing to do).
Blurb
Why are some images impossible to ignore, while others disappear without ever being seen?
In 2009 one image became as iconic as the face of Che Guevara.
A story of art, politics, online communities, environmentalism, and the nature of celebrity;
Of the search for the truth behind a seemingly tragic death, that became the most watched YouTube video in history;
Of two personal journeys – a man whose daughter, missing for ten years, is fading from existence in a world he cannot reach; a schoolboy whose quest for beauty in mathematics has kept him locked in his room for three years; and the website that unites them;
Of the world’s most reclusive artist; of a dominatrix who uses other people’s pain to break down the doors to parallel worlds in search of the origin of her own agony; of an astrophysicist determined to preserve the moment of his wife’s death forever; of a vicious vigilante who spends his evenings composing haiku.
Of the relationship between beauty, pain, and reality.
One
It’s nearly midnight, and I’ve watched Agnieszka die 103 times since I woke.
In that time, the clip has had 274,392 views.
I click the play arrow for the 104th time.
Agnieszka.
Running on the treadmill like millions of other middle class woman in their twenties. She looks fantastic in her lycra – she has the time and money to do this on a regular basis. Stop here and you’d never have noticed the silver and greens on her feet.
The camera wobbles. Has her friend turned to check out someone on the pec deck? Another tiny wobble, enough to remind you how casual the whole scene is, that she has no idea what she’s about to film – although there’s been speculation about that, of course, just like everything else.
Here it is. Three seconds of footage, the seconds before she stumbles. She turns, and over her shoulder she says something to her friend. It indecipherable. Not one of the people at the gym that day can remember her speaking at all. The best Polish and English lipreaders are clueless.
Everyone in the chatrooms devoted to her has their own theory. She’s calling out to a child she
gave away as a teenager in Gdansk; she realises she’s lost her footing and lets out an expletive; she’s begging her friend for help; she’s fluffing up the camera for posterity. The truth is she says something different to everyone who watches the clip. It’s as though, in those final seconds, she’s stepped out of her own body and time and speaks straight to you, the viewer.
Just you.
Just me.
See you, Dad! I’m sure that’s what she says. Every time I watch I’m even more certain. I pause the clip. Play. Pause. Play. Pause. I see her mouth form the shapes.
The gate closes. Her hair moves first, and then her head turns; she looks at me over the burgundy uniform; “See you, Dad!” she shouts. “Take care, love!” I shout back from the kitchen window but she’s already turned away, heading for school.
See you, Dad!
Was that the last thing she ever said? Why say it that morning? Was she worried? Did she know something I didn’t? No matter how many times I go through it, I just don’t know.
“Take care, love,” I whisper at the screen.
Play.
Ten seconds and it’s over. Nothing left of Agnieszka but her silver and green Mercury 500 trainers, logos filling the camera like startled eyebrows. The image of the year; of the decade, probably. The picture on every student’s wall, on T-shirts and placards and newspaper spreads.
And the reason my boss will call me tonight – the front cover for Epoch magazine’s Review of the Year.
Give me a different angle on it, Sarah will say. Make it fresh. Sure. Three weeks to find a completely new take on the most reproduced, rehashed, reformatted image of the century.
There’s the phone. The ringtone’s the riff from Smells Like Teen Spirit. Emma had Nevermind in her CD player when she left. I let the second bar finish and press accept.
“Hi!” I get ready for the inevitable banter about calling the wrong side of midnight, and click the mouse out of habit.
105.
It’s not Sarah’s voice. It takes a few seconds to place and by the time I do the line’s dead. The phone’s still against my ear and I hear every word in real time, as though the line’s on a delay.
“Dad? Can you hear me? I’m safe but I don’t know where I am. Dad, I can’t explain it but it feels like I’m fading. Like now; I’m shouting but it feels like nothing’s coming out. And sometimes when I look down at my feet I think I can see through them. Does that make any sense? Dad, you have to come and find me. Please.” The line clicks dead.
Find me. Please. The words synch perfectly with Agnieszka’s lips.
“I’m coming, love.”
But she’s already turned away.
She trips, tangles, and the film ends.
Two
We can see her clearly. She’s sitting with her legs folded underneath her, gripping the phone with both hands. It takes a moment for us to register things are wrong with this image. We have to blink several times, but still our eyes don’t feel right. We look closer, and then we see that although she is sitting on her legs, her legs aren’t on anything.
She’s not floating. Nor is she in a darkened room, lit only by an infinitely precise light. We don’t even have noticeably tunnelled vision. It’s just that we only see her.
Sometimes when we stare at a flecked carpet in summer we sense that something is amiss. Then we notice a movement. A few seconds later we see an ant scurry through the fibres, and suddenly our optic nerve turns on a switch and we see that the whole floor is a teeming sea of ants.
In the same sickening way we see all at once: this is Emma, and she is still 14 years old, the age she was when she disappeared; but the telephone she clutches like a parachute rip-cord is an iPhone; her skin and clothes are blurred. It’s not our eyes. We see the iPhone perfectly well. It’s her.
She is blurred.
She turns. Her eyes make us seasick. Instead of colour there’s a soup of grey strobing and fuzzing. “Where am I?” she asks.
She sounds sad. Or maybe we just imagine that she must be sad, because through the white noise in the pits where her eyes should be it’s impossible to say if she’s crying or not.
“I don’t know,” we reply. “How long have you been there?”
“I don’t know. No, that’s wrong. I’ve been here a day. Only this day seems to happen again and again and again. I don’t know how many times. It feels like someone’s caught it on tape and they keep playing it over and over and over, and the tape’s wearing thin in places. What will happen if they play it too many times and the tape snaps?”
She’s speaking quickly, like she only has one lungful of air and she has to get everything out in that single breath. We daren’t interrupt, even if we could answer her questions, in case she goes silent for ever.
“I’m scared. I don’t understand what’s happening. Would it be better if they stopped the tape and left it in an archive somewhere it could never be played again? Does that make any sense?”
“Tell Dad,” she begins but whatever the connection was, it’s cut. We blink several times.
Everything is sharp again. We stare at our computer screens, and Emma exists only in the words we see there.
Three
Shuji Nomoto stands with his head pressed against the door. He has been listening for ten minutes as his mother, Junko, and his older brother, Yuichi, argue about something inconsequential downstairs. At last he is satisfied there is no one on this floor, but still his muscles pull against him as he puts his fingers on the handle. His grip falters; the sweat on his palm slides against the metal. He swallows hard and listens to the sound of blood in his ears, the quick, quick, quick beat of his heart, the only fragile thing that separates life from death.
Silently.
Silently – every day he uses oil from his fried tofu lunch to keep the door from making a sound. A crack of strange light appears from the corridor and Shuji winces. Cooler air and the smell of bean curd catch his face and he feels giddy. He closes his eyes, pushes, feels for the tray with his feet, pulls the door, eases the handle back, turns the lock, and leans back against the door, fighting back shameful tears as he waits for his heart to slow.
Eventually he is calm. He sits at his desk, his back rod-straight, and moves his finger in a perfect nautilus spiral on the mouse pad to bringing to life the ageing laptop his mother bought before his confinement began.
One morning, when he was 14, Shuji stepped out of the shower in the corner of his Kobe room and towelled himself dry. He pulled on his underwear, trousers, socks, a vest, and a clean white shirt. He stood in front of the mirror, pulling wax through his short hair, expertly teasing it into spikes between his fingers. Without any warning, he stopped, stared, and saw someone he didn’t recognise staring back at him from the mirror. It was like he was looking at a mannequin in a shop window, a model on a billboard.
There was a stranger in his room, and the stranger was him.
He took off his school uniform, emptied the identikit outfits from their drawer, bundled them into a bag, placed them outside his bedroom, closed the door, and locked it behind him. He washed the gel from his hair, dressed in jeans and a Nirvana T-shirt, sat at his desk, fired up his laptop, and began scouring the internet for every reference he could find to the Byfield Effect .
He hasn’t spoken to, seen, or been seen by, another person since.
At first he was fascinated. He devoted every second of his time to understanding the Effect. It felt to him as though knowing it better than he knew anything else in or about the world was all that mattered. He had been given a task of monumental importance, but he had no idea what, or why. All he knew was he had to prepare for it by mastering this theory.
Two years later, Shuji saw the clip of Agnieszka Iwanowa’s death. He played the clip through five times. Each time Agnieszka turned her head to the camera, he pressed his face closer to the screen, trying to decipher her words, to make out what she was saying to him. He knew what he was watching change his life forever, but he had no idea how.
Eventually his eyes hurt so much from the concentration he cradled his head in his hands, massaging his brow with his fingertips. Through the gaps between his fingers, he saw on a piece of paper handwriting he recognised as his own: Nomoto-Byfield Conjecture.
The avvie is the central image from the book, the eyes a pair of trainers - look closely and you'll see the pupils are the 500 logo)
Here's the opening, so you can all see at last why I have the username I do. It's a work of (increasingly - the opening section is harmless enough) transgressive literary fiction, and I'm going to quit the usual self-deprecation and come out and say it. It's the best thing I've ever written, and I need to finish it (I have 56,000 of a projected 65k already but lots of editing to do).
Blurb
Why are some images impossible to ignore, while others disappear without ever being seen?
In 2009 one image became as iconic as the face of Che Guevara.
A story of art, politics, online communities, environmentalism, and the nature of celebrity;
Of the search for the truth behind a seemingly tragic death, that became the most watched YouTube video in history;
Of two personal journeys – a man whose daughter, missing for ten years, is fading from existence in a world he cannot reach; a schoolboy whose quest for beauty in mathematics has kept him locked in his room for three years; and the website that unites them;
Of the world’s most reclusive artist; of a dominatrix who uses other people’s pain to break down the doors to parallel worlds in search of the origin of her own agony; of an astrophysicist determined to preserve the moment of his wife’s death forever; of a vicious vigilante who spends his evenings composing haiku.
Of the relationship between beauty, pain, and reality.
One
It’s nearly midnight, and I’ve watched Agnieszka die 103 times since I woke.
In that time, the clip has had 274,392 views.
I click the play arrow for the 104th time.
Agnieszka.
Running on the treadmill like millions of other middle class woman in their twenties. She looks fantastic in her lycra – she has the time and money to do this on a regular basis. Stop here and you’d never have noticed the silver and greens on her feet.
The camera wobbles. Has her friend turned to check out someone on the pec deck? Another tiny wobble, enough to remind you how casual the whole scene is, that she has no idea what she’s about to film – although there’s been speculation about that, of course, just like everything else.
Here it is. Three seconds of footage, the seconds before she stumbles. She turns, and over her shoulder she says something to her friend. It indecipherable. Not one of the people at the gym that day can remember her speaking at all. The best Polish and English lipreaders are clueless.
Everyone in the chatrooms devoted to her has their own theory. She’s calling out to a child she
gave away as a teenager in Gdansk; she realises she’s lost her footing and lets out an expletive; she’s begging her friend for help; she’s fluffing up the camera for posterity. The truth is she says something different to everyone who watches the clip. It’s as though, in those final seconds, she’s stepped out of her own body and time and speaks straight to you, the viewer.
Just you.
Just me.
See you, Dad! I’m sure that’s what she says. Every time I watch I’m even more certain. I pause the clip. Play. Pause. Play. Pause. I see her mouth form the shapes.
The gate closes. Her hair moves first, and then her head turns; she looks at me over the burgundy uniform; “See you, Dad!” she shouts. “Take care, love!” I shout back from the kitchen window but she’s already turned away, heading for school.
See you, Dad!
Was that the last thing she ever said? Why say it that morning? Was she worried? Did she know something I didn’t? No matter how many times I go through it, I just don’t know.
“Take care, love,” I whisper at the screen.
Play.
Ten seconds and it’s over. Nothing left of Agnieszka but her silver and green Mercury 500 trainers, logos filling the camera like startled eyebrows. The image of the year; of the decade, probably. The picture on every student’s wall, on T-shirts and placards and newspaper spreads.
And the reason my boss will call me tonight – the front cover for Epoch magazine’s Review of the Year.
Give me a different angle on it, Sarah will say. Make it fresh. Sure. Three weeks to find a completely new take on the most reproduced, rehashed, reformatted image of the century.
There’s the phone. The ringtone’s the riff from Smells Like Teen Spirit. Emma had Nevermind in her CD player when she left. I let the second bar finish and press accept.
“Hi!” I get ready for the inevitable banter about calling the wrong side of midnight, and click the mouse out of habit.
105.
It’s not Sarah’s voice. It takes a few seconds to place and by the time I do the line’s dead. The phone’s still against my ear and I hear every word in real time, as though the line’s on a delay.
“Dad? Can you hear me? I’m safe but I don’t know where I am. Dad, I can’t explain it but it feels like I’m fading. Like now; I’m shouting but it feels like nothing’s coming out. And sometimes when I look down at my feet I think I can see through them. Does that make any sense? Dad, you have to come and find me. Please.” The line clicks dead.
Find me. Please. The words synch perfectly with Agnieszka’s lips.
“I’m coming, love.”
But she’s already turned away.
She trips, tangles, and the film ends.
Two
We can see her clearly. She’s sitting with her legs folded underneath her, gripping the phone with both hands. It takes a moment for us to register things are wrong with this image. We have to blink several times, but still our eyes don’t feel right. We look closer, and then we see that although she is sitting on her legs, her legs aren’t on anything.
She’s not floating. Nor is she in a darkened room, lit only by an infinitely precise light. We don’t even have noticeably tunnelled vision. It’s just that we only see her.
Sometimes when we stare at a flecked carpet in summer we sense that something is amiss. Then we notice a movement. A few seconds later we see an ant scurry through the fibres, and suddenly our optic nerve turns on a switch and we see that the whole floor is a teeming sea of ants.
In the same sickening way we see all at once: this is Emma, and she is still 14 years old, the age she was when she disappeared; but the telephone she clutches like a parachute rip-cord is an iPhone; her skin and clothes are blurred. It’s not our eyes. We see the iPhone perfectly well. It’s her.
She is blurred.
She turns. Her eyes make us seasick. Instead of colour there’s a soup of grey strobing and fuzzing. “Where am I?” she asks.
She sounds sad. Or maybe we just imagine that she must be sad, because through the white noise in the pits where her eyes should be it’s impossible to say if she’s crying or not.
“I don’t know,” we reply. “How long have you been there?”
“I don’t know. No, that’s wrong. I’ve been here a day. Only this day seems to happen again and again and again. I don’t know how many times. It feels like someone’s caught it on tape and they keep playing it over and over and over, and the tape’s wearing thin in places. What will happen if they play it too many times and the tape snaps?”
She’s speaking quickly, like she only has one lungful of air and she has to get everything out in that single breath. We daren’t interrupt, even if we could answer her questions, in case she goes silent for ever.
“I’m scared. I don’t understand what’s happening. Would it be better if they stopped the tape and left it in an archive somewhere it could never be played again? Does that make any sense?”
“Tell Dad,” she begins but whatever the connection was, it’s cut. We blink several times.
Everything is sharp again. We stare at our computer screens, and Emma exists only in the words we see there.
Three
Shuji Nomoto stands with his head pressed against the door. He has been listening for ten minutes as his mother, Junko, and his older brother, Yuichi, argue about something inconsequential downstairs. At last he is satisfied there is no one on this floor, but still his muscles pull against him as he puts his fingers on the handle. His grip falters; the sweat on his palm slides against the metal. He swallows hard and listens to the sound of blood in his ears, the quick, quick, quick beat of his heart, the only fragile thing that separates life from death.
Silently.
Silently – every day he uses oil from his fried tofu lunch to keep the door from making a sound. A crack of strange light appears from the corridor and Shuji winces. Cooler air and the smell of bean curd catch his face and he feels giddy. He closes his eyes, pushes, feels for the tray with his feet, pulls the door, eases the handle back, turns the lock, and leans back against the door, fighting back shameful tears as he waits for his heart to slow.
Eventually he is calm. He sits at his desk, his back rod-straight, and moves his finger in a perfect nautilus spiral on the mouse pad to bringing to life the ageing laptop his mother bought before his confinement began.
One morning, when he was 14, Shuji stepped out of the shower in the corner of his Kobe room and towelled himself dry. He pulled on his underwear, trousers, socks, a vest, and a clean white shirt. He stood in front of the mirror, pulling wax through his short hair, expertly teasing it into spikes between his fingers. Without any warning, he stopped, stared, and saw someone he didn’t recognise staring back at him from the mirror. It was like he was looking at a mannequin in a shop window, a model on a billboard.
There was a stranger in his room, and the stranger was him.
He took off his school uniform, emptied the identikit outfits from their drawer, bundled them into a bag, placed them outside his bedroom, closed the door, and locked it behind him. He washed the gel from his hair, dressed in jeans and a Nirvana T-shirt, sat at his desk, fired up his laptop, and began scouring the internet for every reference he could find to the Byfield Effect .
He hasn’t spoken to, seen, or been seen by, another person since.
At first he was fascinated. He devoted every second of his time to understanding the Effect. It felt to him as though knowing it better than he knew anything else in or about the world was all that mattered. He had been given a task of monumental importance, but he had no idea what, or why. All he knew was he had to prepare for it by mastering this theory.
Two years later, Shuji saw the clip of Agnieszka Iwanowa’s death. He played the clip through five times. Each time Agnieszka turned her head to the camera, he pressed his face closer to the screen, trying to decipher her words, to make out what she was saying to him. He knew what he was watching change his life forever, but he had no idea how.
Eventually his eyes hurt so much from the concentration he cradled his head in his hands, massaging his brow with his fingertips. Through the gaps between his fingers, he saw on a piece of paper handwriting he recognised as his own: Nomoto-Byfield Conjecture.
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
4:am fiction : writing in the slips
OK, so Brutalism was a stunt. The Book of Fuck was actually The Book of Fuck All Else to Do. But still. Once upon a time (can you see the jokes coming? Can you? Both of them?) we knew where the boundaries were, and we knew who was pushing them (can you now?). Fuck the mainstream said Ben Myers, and Adelle Stripe. And the other one. People oohed and aahed at 3:am and remembered that the klf actually had more to say than the Venga Boys even if everyone else had forgotten it.
In fact, while everyone else was still talking about Amis and McEwan, Barnes and Rushdie and Ishiguro, even though they'd been really quite shit for a good few years; and Zadie Smith was cool even though she went from zero to sellout faster than the Lambo Countach they'd had on their walls as pre-pubescents; and there were whispers about slams and things that had to do with hopping were a little but hip; but actually it was all about the lyric, the sound in your ear the thank-fuck-punk-is-dead return to syncopated sensibilities. While all that was going on there were geeks who got in your face and did stuff that made you nervous you might get glassed or your mum might walk in. But that was kind of the point. And who cares that their influences were Burroughs and Fante and Richard Hell and people old enough to be their dealer's dealer if they'd had a dealer anywhere but their overactive imaginations. Because all we'd really had was three chord shit and Pink Floyd and David Bowie. And all of a sudden we were Where It's At.
We had people who were doing things with language. And saying social stuff. Big social stuff. With odd sentence structures. It was like Brett Easton Ellis and Doug Coupland had had their brains transplanted with a bunch of British nobodies and that's why they seemed so crap all of a sudden. Eventually they got names like The Brutalists. Or The Offbeats. And their CBGB's, their Chelsea Hotel, was 3:am the granddaddy of all literary ezines. And in those early days you sense if they'd had gigs there would have been police raids; and speed-fuelled fights; and taking to the streets to smash the windows of M&S.
And then. Then the boundaries dried up and they found themselves fielding in the slips. They got blogs for The Guardian. and "fuck the mainstream" became Lee Rourke's debut novel The Canal - with an indie publisher (kind of) but a publisher nonetheless. And the granddaddy of anti-culture produced the granddaddy of all sellouts (without even the irony of John Lydon selling butter) and Ben Myerts signed the dotted line with Picador.
And I don't think I've seen a single piece in the papers that stood back and said what the fuck!
WTF is that we have a literary scene - primarily a London literary scene (but the Brutalists were Northern, weren't they? Wasn't that part of the point? - that's as vacucous as Manchester music became in the mid 90s.
Not that this is bad *in itself*. What's bad is how it's being spun (largely by each other). This WAS the *edge*. It's now the flabby middle, but the names are still being spun as edgy. The public is being sold Richard as though it's Book of Fuck. As though IT, the sellout, is at the limits of the written word. Is it any wonder that when they find out it's yet another slightly blank slightly non-linear spin-off of ladlit more via Glamorama than Less Than Zero they think literature is moribund?
And this would be edge (we could call it U3 as much as we could call it 4:am fiction) has attracted around it (hint - edges don't HAVE things around them) a whole world that sells itself as the literary avant garde. But it's not. It's a scenester scam where what matters is playing namedrop bingo with the beautiful people. And that's the problem. People are being sold a pup. I've seen it from the inside, and it's not nice. Not that it's nasty. It's just, well, a shame. Literary Death Match, To Hell With the Lighthouse - high profile events getting the public whipped up about some exciting new things in literature - only to offer them people who may have had something to say (or whose predecessors may have done). Once. But are now part of an inward-looking group who are rather pleased with how cool they are.
And that's where it's harming literature. Today's movers and shakers want to be the first to tell their friends they discovered the new cool. They don't want to stand up and tell their friends they found something no one else likes that they think is the bollox.
Which is no different from the rest of the publishing industry, of course. Fine. But they're selling it like it is, and that's going to be their downfall. The slick, blank, rather shallow Ellis-lite Welsh-liter 4:am fiction they flog is all knob gags and middle class angst and surfaces that are no longer surfaces to expose the shallowness of society, but surfaces that expose the shallowness of the form itself.
There IS a new underground, of course, that has nothing really to do with 3:am (even if some of its practitioners have moved on and stayed fresh) or 4:am or anything else you could name from a clockface. And the irony is, that while cool slowly eats itself, the old industry that's so far behind the scenesters who are behind, might actually be so oblivious they inadvertently pick it up without knowing.
So what is the new underground? Well, it's so underground I probably don't know about it (but unlike the scenester-setters it's my daily quest to look and not be told about it by a style bible). As I've said elsewhere, I think Sean McGahey nailed it in a recent Facebook status update when he talked about those not afraid to stand up and be mocked for being sentimental. As punk gave way to New Romanticism, so I think the age of blank will give way to a new kind of writing that's not ashamed of emotion and adjectives, of scratching the surface and tapping the romance below. It will be unashamed of rather old-fashioned art forms like painting. It will have sweeping palettes, and be somewhat like the Italian horror of the 70s. Modern fairytales, salon culture that's not quite what it seems, burlesque - like the transgressive masterpieces of the 19th century, look here for the really new of the 21st. Look hard and look quick though, because sentimentalism soon becomes dandyism, and the whole thing will have started again before any of it hits the media.
In fact, while everyone else was still talking about Amis and McEwan, Barnes and Rushdie and Ishiguro, even though they'd been really quite shit for a good few years; and Zadie Smith was cool even though she went from zero to sellout faster than the Lambo Countach they'd had on their walls as pre-pubescents; and there were whispers about slams and things that had to do with hopping were a little but hip; but actually it was all about the lyric, the sound in your ear the thank-fuck-punk-is-dead return to syncopated sensibilities. While all that was going on there were geeks who got in your face and did stuff that made you nervous you might get glassed or your mum might walk in. But that was kind of the point. And who cares that their influences were Burroughs and Fante and Richard Hell and people old enough to be their dealer's dealer if they'd had a dealer anywhere but their overactive imaginations. Because all we'd really had was three chord shit and Pink Floyd and David Bowie. And all of a sudden we were Where It's At.
We had people who were doing things with language. And saying social stuff. Big social stuff. With odd sentence structures. It was like Brett Easton Ellis and Doug Coupland had had their brains transplanted with a bunch of British nobodies and that's why they seemed so crap all of a sudden. Eventually they got names like The Brutalists. Or The Offbeats. And their CBGB's, their Chelsea Hotel, was 3:am the granddaddy of all literary ezines. And in those early days you sense if they'd had gigs there would have been police raids; and speed-fuelled fights; and taking to the streets to smash the windows of M&S.
And then. Then the boundaries dried up and they found themselves fielding in the slips. They got blogs for The Guardian. and "fuck the mainstream" became Lee Rourke's debut novel The Canal - with an indie publisher (kind of) but a publisher nonetheless. And the granddaddy of anti-culture produced the granddaddy of all sellouts (without even the irony of John Lydon selling butter) and Ben Myerts signed the dotted line with Picador.
And I don't think I've seen a single piece in the papers that stood back and said what the fuck!
WTF is that we have a literary scene - primarily a London literary scene (but the Brutalists were Northern, weren't they? Wasn't that part of the point? - that's as vacucous as Manchester music became in the mid 90s.
Not that this is bad *in itself*. What's bad is how it's being spun (largely by each other). This WAS the *edge*. It's now the flabby middle, but the names are still being spun as edgy. The public is being sold Richard as though it's Book of Fuck. As though IT, the sellout, is at the limits of the written word. Is it any wonder that when they find out it's yet another slightly blank slightly non-linear spin-off of ladlit more via Glamorama than Less Than Zero they think literature is moribund?
And this would be edge (we could call it U3 as much as we could call it 4:am fiction) has attracted around it (hint - edges don't HAVE things around them) a whole world that sells itself as the literary avant garde. But it's not. It's a scenester scam where what matters is playing namedrop bingo with the beautiful people. And that's the problem. People are being sold a pup. I've seen it from the inside, and it's not nice. Not that it's nasty. It's just, well, a shame. Literary Death Match, To Hell With the Lighthouse - high profile events getting the public whipped up about some exciting new things in literature - only to offer them people who may have had something to say (or whose predecessors may have done). Once. But are now part of an inward-looking group who are rather pleased with how cool they are.
And that's where it's harming literature. Today's movers and shakers want to be the first to tell their friends they discovered the new cool. They don't want to stand up and tell their friends they found something no one else likes that they think is the bollox.
Which is no different from the rest of the publishing industry, of course. Fine. But they're selling it like it is, and that's going to be their downfall. The slick, blank, rather shallow Ellis-lite Welsh-liter 4:am fiction they flog is all knob gags and middle class angst and surfaces that are no longer surfaces to expose the shallowness of society, but surfaces that expose the shallowness of the form itself.
There IS a new underground, of course, that has nothing really to do with 3:am (even if some of its practitioners have moved on and stayed fresh) or 4:am or anything else you could name from a clockface. And the irony is, that while cool slowly eats itself, the old industry that's so far behind the scenesters who are behind, might actually be so oblivious they inadvertently pick it up without knowing.
So what is the new underground? Well, it's so underground I probably don't know about it (but unlike the scenester-setters it's my daily quest to look and not be told about it by a style bible). As I've said elsewhere, I think Sean McGahey nailed it in a recent Facebook status update when he talked about those not afraid to stand up and be mocked for being sentimental. As punk gave way to New Romanticism, so I think the age of blank will give way to a new kind of writing that's not ashamed of emotion and adjectives, of scratching the surface and tapping the romance below. It will be unashamed of rather old-fashioned art forms like painting. It will have sweeping palettes, and be somewhat like the Italian horror of the 70s. Modern fairytales, salon culture that's not quite what it seems, burlesque - like the transgressive masterpieces of the 19th century, look here for the really new of the 21st. Look hard and look quick though, because sentimentalism soon becomes dandyism, and the whole thing will have started again before any of it hits the media.
Sunday, 31 October 2010
Long Day's Journey Into Print
It's been a brief but rollercoaster ride since I set up eight cuts gallery press to publish some of the best underground writing on the planet. But this week it all came to fruition when I received my copies of Cody James' The Dead Beat and Oli Johns' Charcoal.
These two amazing books (which you can buy for just 6 pounds by clicking the covers) both seem to deal with the dark downside of life, but both celebrate the glorious uncertainty, the unexpected moments of light in the adventure of being human.
Cody James' The Dead Beat follows the lives of Adam and his neurotic, addicted friends through 1997 San Francisco as theywait for Hale-Bopp comet to come and change lives they are incapable of changing on their own. Oli Johns' Charcoal is the story of an anxierty-ridden man obsessed with the suicide of the model Daul Kim, desperately wrestling with the question if there was anything he could have done to save her, anything he could still do.
If there is a single message to these two tour de forces, it is simply this: there is very little that we can change in life. But that's not the point. The point is that we try, and never give up hope. And that what meaning life has is forged in that struggle and the moments of horror, humour, and humanity it brings.
You can also click
here to buy the ebook of The Dead Beat for $2.99
here to buy the ebook of Charcoal for $2.99
Thursday, 7 October 2010
Poetry Competition
Oxford International Women's Festival Poetry Competition
I am delighted to be involved with this fundraising event for Oxford International Women’s Festival:
Visit www.oxfordwomen.co.uk for more details about the festival, or find them on Facebook.
POEM THEME: Women and Wellbeing.
CLOSING DATE: Friday 5th November.
CATEGORIES: Open Category (all ages can apply), 3 prizes; Under 18s, 1 prize.
PRIZES: Perform your work at a local poetry event; win a creative writing tutorial, books by local authors and other great prizes. NB if you prefer not to perform your work in front of an audience on 17th November, you can nominate someone to do this on your behalf. The best 12 entries, in the opinion of the judges, will be published in an anthology, and will receive a copy. The 4 main prize winners will receive 5 copies each, and will have their work featured here on the eight cuts gallery website. Other featured poets will each get one copy.
ENTRY CRITERIA: The poem must be your own original work, and must be your interpretation of Women and Wellbeing (this can any interpretation as you wish). People may enter as many times as they wish, provided each entry is accompanied by the correct fee. Maximum length: 50 lines. Please do not write your personal details on the poem itself: provide a separate cover letter with your name, age (if entering the Under 18s category), and your preferred contact details. Entries cost £1.
Post your entries to Oxford International Women’s Festival, 25 East Street, Oxford OX2 0AU with payment by cheque or postal order. Cheques payable to Oxford International Women’s Festival, please. Alternatively, you can hand in your poem, cover letter and entry fee at the Albion Beatnik bookshop, Walton Street, Oxford.
Entries will be judged by local writers. Winners will be announced Monday 8th November.
Main event:
Poetry Performances and Prize-giving: Wednesday 17th November, 7pm- 10pm, East Oxford Community Centre. Winners from both categories can perform their poems as part of the event which will showcase poetry based on the theme, Women and Wellbeing.
Special performances from, amongst others,
Joan Barbara Simon, author of Mut@tus
Charlotte Geater
Ellie Tranter of Yak Shack
Christi Warner
+OPEN MIC
TICKETS: £4 per ticket for the event; competition winners get in free.
To sign up as a reader for the main event, please contact Anna Hobson annacreates@yahoo.com (ticket price will still apply, sorry!). Performances should not last more than 10 minutes and must be your own original work. NB please note that due to the under 18s category, all poems performed prior to 9pm must be suitable for this age group. If you require a later slot, please inform Anna.
Judges: Anna Hobson
Dan Holloway, founder, Year Zero Writers; owner, eight cuts gallery press
Ellie Tranter, poet in residence, YakShack
I am delighted to be involved with this fundraising event for Oxford International Women’s Festival:
Visit www.oxfordwomen.co.uk for more details about the festival, or find them on Facebook.
POEM THEME: Women and Wellbeing.
CLOSING DATE: Friday 5th November.
CATEGORIES: Open Category (all ages can apply), 3 prizes; Under 18s, 1 prize.
PRIZES: Perform your work at a local poetry event; win a creative writing tutorial, books by local authors and other great prizes. NB if you prefer not to perform your work in front of an audience on 17th November, you can nominate someone to do this on your behalf. The best 12 entries, in the opinion of the judges, will be published in an anthology, and will receive a copy. The 4 main prize winners will receive 5 copies each, and will have their work featured here on the eight cuts gallery website. Other featured poets will each get one copy.
ENTRY CRITERIA: The poem must be your own original work, and must be your interpretation of Women and Wellbeing (this can any interpretation as you wish). People may enter as many times as they wish, provided each entry is accompanied by the correct fee. Maximum length: 50 lines. Please do not write your personal details on the poem itself: provide a separate cover letter with your name, age (if entering the Under 18s category), and your preferred contact details. Entries cost £1.
Post your entries to Oxford International Women’s Festival, 25 East Street, Oxford OX2 0AU with payment by cheque or postal order. Cheques payable to Oxford International Women’s Festival, please. Alternatively, you can hand in your poem, cover letter and entry fee at the Albion Beatnik bookshop, Walton Street, Oxford.
Entries will be judged by local writers. Winners will be announced Monday 8th November.
Main event:
Poetry Performances and Prize-giving: Wednesday 17th November, 7pm- 10pm, East Oxford Community Centre. Winners from both categories can perform their poems as part of the event which will showcase poetry based on the theme, Women and Wellbeing.
Special performances from, amongst others,
Joan Barbara Simon, author of Mut@tus
Charlotte Geater
Ellie Tranter of Yak Shack
Christi Warner
+OPEN MIC
TICKETS: £4 per ticket for the event; competition winners get in free.
To sign up as a reader for the main event, please contact Anna Hobson annacreates@yahoo.com (ticket price will still apply, sorry!). Performances should not last more than 10 minutes and must be your own original work. NB please note that due to the under 18s category, all poems performed prior to 9pm must be suitable for this age group. If you require a later slot, please inform Anna.
Judges: Anna Hobson
Dan Holloway, founder, Year Zero Writers; owner, eight cuts gallery press
Ellie Tranter, poet in residence, YakShack
Sunday, 3 October 2010
Not an Anthology: Into the Desert
I have just finished putting together Into the Desert, the first ever collection at my new project, eight cuts gallery. It features work from 19 amazing writers, and I'm incredibly proud of it. But that is, in a way, by the by. Why I'm writing something about it is I think this is a new way of curating and showcasing literature, and I would love to know whether you think it works.
To return to the beginning. The very first point in the eight cuts gallery manifesto states:
■Culture has no boundaries. It has no preconceptions as to what is literature.
■Culture has no boundaries. It has no preconceptions as to what is literature.
So to showcase literature to its best effect, an anthology won't suffice. A website works rather well - I have been able to include not just amazing poetry and prose, but pictures, visual poetry, music, and even a stunning full-length documentary film.
The second thing that holding the exhibition online has been able to do is let me curate it mercilessly. The remit was simply to send in something that responded to the title, Into the Desert. The results were wonderfully diverse, literal, metaphorical, spiritual, and all taking a slightly different slant on what "the desert" might be and what a journey into it, and out of - where? - somewhere else might entail. It would be impossible to do anything with an anthology that wasn't really rather crude.
What I've been able to do online is to create a series of hyperlinks between pages that lead the reader through the exhibition in numerous different ways, placing different works together each time, making them question the meaning of each as they go, as well as giving them pictures of the overall theme that are as shifting as the desert sands themselves. And because the hyperlinks are anchored on words and images, I've been able to play with the audiene's expectations - to give them preconceptions about what comes next - preconceptions I can then either reinforce or upset.
In short, this format has been able to give me two exhibitions - that comprised of the pieces themselves, and that made up of the relations between them. Which, I think, is what good curation should always do. BUT, and here is the second question, does that kind oif curation have a place in literature?
There will also be a tie-in live show at Oxford's O3 gallery featuring readings, music and film, on November 18th. And I hope there will be both other live shows, and dedicated screenings of Cody James' full-length film, a documentary about the Columbine students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that forms a segment of the exhibition (along with Oli Johns' The Things They Let Into the Classroom and Sarah E Melville's French Lesson) that could be called something like "school is hell".
Monday, 13 September 2010
The View From the Shoe: The Indie Handbook
It's been a while since I did one of these, and they are always incredible fun. It's a privilege to welcome to the shoedome Eric Robertson, the guy behind the fabulous The Indie Handbook. Straight over to Eric:
The Indie Handbook started as a joke—a tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of commercialised American hipster culture. What I never expected was that people would take it seriously. I aim to provide much-needed press to unsigned and underexposed artists, trying to put as much effort into quality and style of writing as the artists I review put into their songs. I've been told this is stupid since no one wants to pay attention to anyone who sincerely tries, but in my mind, it's the least I can do—a sign of respect for the artists who pour so much of themselves into their work. My ultimate (and most likely unachievable) goal is to write beautiful criticism.
I operate a second blog, The Indie Handbook Annex , where I indulge my love for essay-writing in the myriad other topics that fascinate me—anything from music to linguistics to the poetics of advertising. I am also in the process of working out the logistics of and funding to launch a magazine dedicated to the DIY aesthetic.
Thank you so much for your time. So, Louboutin or Converse?
Well, I'm wearing Converse at the moment, so I suppose I've already made my choice. Though, they're women's Cons, for whatever it's worth.
What do you do?
I sit in the corners of coffee shops pulling odd faces whilst rifling through a unsettlingly extensive mental cache of T.S. Eliot extracts applying Jungian psychoanalysis to 17th century Scottish demonology through a filter of pre-Enlightenment pop culture references, Gilmore Girls quotations, particle physics, and Kierkegaard in search of a new metaphor to describe whatever happens to be pouring through my tartan earbuds. (I also drive around with my windows down, playing Tigermilk or If You're Feeling Sinister—at a slightly-louder-than-normal volume—in hopes that I will pull up beside a cute girl who'll then look at me and say “Oh, I love Belle & Sebastian!” etc., etc.)
Why is there no one in the world who does it quite like you?
I am a hyper-literate, nerdy, INFP loser fanboy with years of formal training, a dead-end job, an inferiority complex, and absolutely no social life. No, seriously, I can afford to spend 20-25 hours a week working on the blog because my only other option is to sit at home watching NCIS reruns. (Did I mention my charming, disarming, self-deprecating sense of humour?)
What do you really, really love about it?
More than anything, I love all the people involved with it. I know it sounds cheesy, but I really just love all aspects of the human condition from the artists and publicists who began as feature stories and became good friends to the writers and bloggers who have become collaborators. I am even weirdly enamored of the handful of people who hate me for being insufficiently cynical and not mean enough. For me, I suppose, it's always and only ever been about art and people. Though, I am also quite fond of the way new music just sort of materialises in my mailbox and inbox.
A bit more time in the day, or a bit more money in the bank?
Unless by “a bit more money”, you mean at least six figures, I would opt for a bit more time. Four hours would be enough, I think. I will gladly adopt this scheme (http://xkcd.com/320/), if I can convince everyone else to allow me to do so. I'd just love to not be angry at the prospect of waking up in the morning.
Imagine you “make it”. You wake up, and imagine the day ahead. Tell us about breakfast.
Another four or five hours of sleep, probably. Or waffles.
What’s your Jimmy Choo? And what’s just cobblers?
Jimmy Choo: Chet Baker singing “Born to be Blue”, one of the original 1000 copies of Belle & Sebastian's Tigermilk, a 1584 copy of Sir Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft, a date with Debo Mitford circa 1938. Just cobblers: Dave Matthews, bands with 1000-word press releases, Paste Magazine.
Tell us about the last time a fan made you feel 100 feet tall.
I literally have almost no immediate contact with anyone who reads the blog. If it weren't for the Wordpress stats page, I wouldn't even know I had fans. I suppose a lot of it is wrapped up in the sort of people who are fans—musicians and writers and radio people. I find it incredibly flattering to know that they (at least occasionally) are reading what I have to say. I was absolutely over the moon when, after an interview, Emilie Simon (my all-time musical idol, number one celebrity crush, and genius behind Végétal which I chose as Album of the Decade) asked me what Brooklyn bands (where she currently lives) I thought she would like. More recently, an artist I wrote about well over a year ago said she continues to read the blog not because she always likes the recommendations, but because she loves the writing.
Independent and poor, or under contract and rich?
Independent. Marry rich.
Do you remember that bit on Play Away where Brian Cant stood behind people and did the actions whilst they spoke? If you could choose anyone to stand behind you and do the actions to your sales pitch, who would it be and why?
Laura Bettinson, a.k.a. Dimbleby & Capper because: A) She's better looking than I and therefore more marketable. B) Gaffer tape.
Frocks or socks?
Well, there was that one time in my History of Fashion class at uni when my friend Dan and I were led to believe we might have the opportunity to try on a corset. When the day came, the amateur costume shop girls opted to wear them themselves—in an entirely historically inaccurate manner, I might add. So disappointing. We had quite been looking forward to that.
The Indie Handbook started as a joke—a tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of commercialised American hipster culture. What I never expected was that people would take it seriously. I aim to provide much-needed press to unsigned and underexposed artists, trying to put as much effort into quality and style of writing as the artists I review put into their songs. I've been told this is stupid since no one wants to pay attention to anyone who sincerely tries, but in my mind, it's the least I can do—a sign of respect for the artists who pour so much of themselves into their work. My ultimate (and most likely unachievable) goal is to write beautiful criticism.
I operate a second blog, The Indie Handbook Annex , where I indulge my love for essay-writing in the myriad other topics that fascinate me—anything from music to linguistics to the poetics of advertising. I am also in the process of working out the logistics of and funding to launch a magazine dedicated to the DIY aesthetic.
Thank you so much for your time. So, Louboutin or Converse?
Well, I'm wearing Converse at the moment, so I suppose I've already made my choice. Though, they're women's Cons, for whatever it's worth.
What do you do?
I sit in the corners of coffee shops pulling odd faces whilst rifling through a unsettlingly extensive mental cache of T.S. Eliot extracts applying Jungian psychoanalysis to 17th century Scottish demonology through a filter of pre-Enlightenment pop culture references, Gilmore Girls quotations, particle physics, and Kierkegaard in search of a new metaphor to describe whatever happens to be pouring through my tartan earbuds. (I also drive around with my windows down, playing Tigermilk or If You're Feeling Sinister—at a slightly-louder-than-normal volume—in hopes that I will pull up beside a cute girl who'll then look at me and say “Oh, I love Belle & Sebastian!” etc., etc.)
Why is there no one in the world who does it quite like you?
I am a hyper-literate, nerdy, INFP loser fanboy with years of formal training, a dead-end job, an inferiority complex, and absolutely no social life. No, seriously, I can afford to spend 20-25 hours a week working on the blog because my only other option is to sit at home watching NCIS reruns. (Did I mention my charming, disarming, self-deprecating sense of humour?)
What do you really, really love about it?
More than anything, I love all the people involved with it. I know it sounds cheesy, but I really just love all aspects of the human condition from the artists and publicists who began as feature stories and became good friends to the writers and bloggers who have become collaborators. I am even weirdly enamored of the handful of people who hate me for being insufficiently cynical and not mean enough. For me, I suppose, it's always and only ever been about art and people. Though, I am also quite fond of the way new music just sort of materialises in my mailbox and inbox.
A bit more time in the day, or a bit more money in the bank?
Unless by “a bit more money”, you mean at least six figures, I would opt for a bit more time. Four hours would be enough, I think. I will gladly adopt this scheme (http://xkcd.com/320/), if I can convince everyone else to allow me to do so. I'd just love to not be angry at the prospect of waking up in the morning.
Imagine you “make it”. You wake up, and imagine the day ahead. Tell us about breakfast.
Another four or five hours of sleep, probably. Or waffles.
What’s your Jimmy Choo? And what’s just cobblers?
Jimmy Choo: Chet Baker singing “Born to be Blue”, one of the original 1000 copies of Belle & Sebastian's Tigermilk, a 1584 copy of Sir Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft, a date with Debo Mitford circa 1938. Just cobblers: Dave Matthews, bands with 1000-word press releases, Paste Magazine.
Tell us about the last time a fan made you feel 100 feet tall.
I literally have almost no immediate contact with anyone who reads the blog. If it weren't for the Wordpress stats page, I wouldn't even know I had fans. I suppose a lot of it is wrapped up in the sort of people who are fans—musicians and writers and radio people. I find it incredibly flattering to know that they (at least occasionally) are reading what I have to say. I was absolutely over the moon when, after an interview, Emilie Simon (my all-time musical idol, number one celebrity crush, and genius behind Végétal which I chose as Album of the Decade) asked me what Brooklyn bands (where she currently lives) I thought she would like. More recently, an artist I wrote about well over a year ago said she continues to read the blog not because she always likes the recommendations, but because she loves the writing.
Independent and poor, or under contract and rich?
Independent. Marry rich.
Do you remember that bit on Play Away where Brian Cant stood behind people and did the actions whilst they spoke? If you could choose anyone to stand behind you and do the actions to your sales pitch, who would it be and why?
Laura Bettinson, a.k.a. Dimbleby & Capper because: A) She's better looking than I and therefore more marketable. B) Gaffer tape.
Frocks or socks?
Well, there was that one time in my History of Fashion class at uni when my friend Dan and I were led to believe we might have the opportunity to try on a corset. When the day came, the amateur costume shop girls opted to wear them themselves—in an entirely historically inaccurate manner, I might add. So disappointing. We had quite been looking forward to that.
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