Kettles, Cages and Clean-ups

I'm sorry to have been silent for a while. I got stuck inside my own head, the way you sometimes do as a writer, and got to that stage where I just needed to get out and away and look at the outside world instead. So I borrowed someone's London flat and went walking and here are some of the things I saw:

A clean-up operation on the River Lee:


Some very nice polite schoolboys:


Environmental protesters on a bus stop in Bishopsgate:


Lib Dem Shadow Climate Change Secretary Simon Hughes and an environmental campaigner:


Some dancing environmental campaigners:


The City of London police in formation across Bishopsgate:


A very nice polite policeman:


The kettle in Threadneedle St not yet steaming:


Every exit barred:


Business as usual on the Millennium Bridge:


Three hunched figures and beds like cages in the Tate Modern:


John Siddique launching his Salt poetry collection, Recital: An Almanac under a beautiful moon at the National Portrait Gallery:


A lovely part of the (I presume) cleaned-up Regent's Canal:


Some more caged creatures:


Some free birds in a cultivated park:

The Low Concept of High Concept

Well, doh! I've only just found out what 'high concept' means, though I guess if I'd known it was a marketing term I'd have twigged: it doesn't mean, as I thought, subtle and sophisticated, but quite the opposite: it means clear and simple in concept, as well as recognizable (which means I guess I misunderstood some of the discussion at the Huddersfield Literature Festival last week, where the term was used.) Here's a Waxman Literary Agency blogger writing about the fact that books need to be 'high concept' to sell:

For writers who are drawn to the obscure and the un-covered, who think “but no one has ever written about this! why write about things people already know?” I hear you–this feels remarkably like commercial pandering. But I would encourage you to think about three things: 1. it is all in the execution but no one will ever see your execution if your premise doesn’t catch their attention; 2. it’s hard to be attentive to things we don’t recognize on at least some level; and 3. who do you write for? If it’s for readers, think about it not as selling out, but about seducing people into your world, giving them a point of entry that lets them feel comfortable. High concept is all about the touch of recognition that makes readers ready to go along on your ride.

Well, this seems to me only sensible, as I've said on many an occasion, but there is one aspect of the Waxman blog post I find unsettling, which emerges in this sentence:

If the idea you're kicking around is really high concept, it should feel natural to come up with a one or two sentence affair that conveys the general premise of the work.

Run that by me again: If the idea you’re kicking around is really high concept. Ah, so it's not after all the pitch that has to be high-concept, as the blogger has up to this point been implying, but the original idea in the first place. And there are ideas that are intrinsically 'high-concept' and there are ideas that are not. It's not after all, a matter of 'seducing people' or 'giving them a point of entry' into something more subtle. It's not that, as I'm always saying, with clever marketing you can sell anything. Some ideas are just too subtle after all.

And we know where this can lead for fiction.

The Wrong Question

Here's a telling little snippet from an interview with Paulo Coelho by Hannah Pool in The Guardian. He is talking about his novel The Alchemist which has sold 35m copies:

It was published, it did not sell, and then the publisher said, "This book is never going to sell." ... However, I was so convinced that it was a great book that I started knocking on doors. [Now] The Alchemist is the most translated book by a living author.

What do we conclude from this? Perhaps that whether a book 'will sell' is the wrong question. It is the one which publishers are of course always asking, but what it most often seems to mean is Will this book sell itself? This seems to me the great inconsistency in an industry which is supposed to have bought in wholesale to the concept of marketing. As any real marketer knows, nothing sells itself: customers have to be wooed; conversely, with clever marketing you can sell anything, as the 'door-knocking' snakeoil salesmen knew only too well. Perhaps the question should be rather: Do we believe in this book enough to bother to move hell and high water to sell it? But then for that to happen, the power in publishing houses would have to move back to the editors and away from the accounting - oh, sorry, so-called marketing departments...

Final Leg of my Virtual Book Tour

The final leg of my virtual book tour is up today on the blog of Tania Hershman, author of the inventive science-inspired collection of stories, The White Road . Promotion over, folks - though it has actually been more than just that, an opportunity for some in-depth discussion about the nature of fiction, the writing process and the writing life.

Will Who?

I like what Robert McCrum says in relation to the Cobbe portrait of Shakespeare:

The speculation about the life will rage until the crack of doom. The work remains.

The Logic of Literary Agents

After last week's 'Queryfail' on Twitter, in which literary agents spilled the beans about the daft and desperate query letters they receive, The Guardian reported yesterday uber-agent Jonny Geller as saying this:

'The fact is that publishers, and lots of agencies, have stopped accepting unsolicited manuscripts, so how is a writer meant to get into publishing? I can understand [authors'] frustration [with Queryfail], but I think the more help given the better.'

Now let me get this straight. Prospective authors need help in writing the letters that 'lots of agencies' won't even consider nowadays?

That's a bit daft, isn't it? Or maybe it's the desperate logic of agents who feel they need 'help' in discouraging authors from sending unsolicited stuff in the first place...

(Can't find the Guardian link, I'm afraid.)

Fact v Fiction and the Myersons

What to say about the gaping hole of pain which is the current Myerson family debacle? My stomach lurched when I read Jake Myerson's account in the Daily Mail, I cried when I watched Julie squirming under Paxman's unforgiving treatment, struggling to put her point across while clearly racked by both guilt and a frightened sense of injustice. My stomach turned over again when I read all the finger-pointing by journalists and the public alike: bad mother; spoilt brat.

How many of us can put up our hands and say we weren't troubled and troublesome teenagers? Not me, certainly. How many of those of us who have been parents can say we haven't made mistakes? Not I, mate. It's no coincidence that many of my radio plays and much of my prose are about the repercussions that adult behaviour can have on children's lives.

'I had to write about it,' Myerson told Paxman, and Paxman reacted with his trademark mix of regular-bloke disbelief and supercilious contempt, and the rest of the world threw up their hands in horror with accusations of selfishness (and Myerson retreated into her now familiar justification that she had to tell the world about skunk).

But the point is this: we writers have a constitutional urge to write about what moves and troubles us and seems to us of dire importance (and I'm betting that this is something Jake Myerson understood when he apparently assented to the book's publication, which makes it all a much greyer area than people seem to assume): without that urge, books would be dead things that moved no one and affected nothing.

But this is the problem: the people we are in the throes of such crises are not the people we will always be. We are not the incontrovertible 'fact' of ourselves. It seems to me that Myerson's biggest mistake was to write the book as fact and not as fiction. You can see why she did, if she felt an urgency to expose the problem of skunk, and given the supremacy of 'fact' over fiction in our culture. But it's hard not to see the tragedy for this family as the ultimate fallout from this pernicious contemporary cultural phenomenon.

Prose fiction v drama and adaptation: new leg of my virtual book tour

The penultimate leg of my virtual book tour, Around the Edges of the World, is now up. Crime-thriller writer Debi Alper asks me about the different processes in writing prose fiction and drama, and about the special problems of adapting one's own work from the first of these forms to the second.

An Apology

My apologies: I took from Alexander Chancellor's article yesterday that Julie Myerson's new book The Lost Child was a novel. It's not in fact - it's even subtitled A True Story, I discover. This raises different and even more urgent issues, of course, about the morality of such memoirs, which, bogged down with script-reading, article-writing etc I'm afraid I don't have time to tackle just now. However there's a sensible-looking article about them in today's Guardian (which I also havent yet had time to read) by Ian Jack, once editor of the great journal of reportage, Granta.

Fact versus Fiction

As I have endlessly discussed on this blog, it's generally wise to resist public hunger to know the real-life sources of one's fiction, because for one thing, it can lead to mistaken biographical readings of the work as a whole, and for another, any sensible novelist is aware that once she has sent real life through the mangle of her own perceptions and the transformative process of fiction, it's become something else altogether and can no longer be claimed as factual truth. And such discussions do a great disservice to fiction, which is more than the sum of its parts - real life and imagination - and something more powerful altogether. Breaking it down into its 'components' is to reduce it and deny its transcendence.

It seems, however, that novelist Julie Myerson has not only admitted to the real-life trigger for her latest fiction, but is herself making the category error usually made by a naive public, and claiming that the troublesome drug-addicted boy in her latest novel is indeed her own son.

But one wonders what pressures she has been put under to do this (James Frey hovers virtually at my shoulder) with a public hungry for fact in fiction. She's getting plenty of publicity out of it, after all...

Literary Friends and the Spectre of Nepotism

Virtual book tours. Great publicity tools (I think, or at least hope, after all the work I'm putting into mine!), and more: opportunities for in-depth literary discussions; certainly I'm finding my own to be. But from under my Fictionbitch hat I don't find them unproblematic.

Today my tour goes to the blog of novelist and short-story writer Charles Lambert (where he asks me about my political consciousness - with a small p - as a writer, the differences between writing for a radio and a short story audience, and the reasons for the variety of the stories in my collection). Charles Lambert, I am pretty thrilled to say, is complimentary about my work, and the reasons I'm so thrilled are that I admire his writing greatly in turn and see in it some resonances with my own, and also - perhaps because of those resonances - he pays me the particular compliment of understanding my work on such a level that he is able to invite me to discuss the issues that are most important to me as a writer.

But here is the problem. What does this look like from the outside? Especially if you know the other, extraneous circumstances: we are published by the same publisher; we became friends via our blogs (and more latterly FaceBook); we have met twice, if briefly, at our publisher's book launches. And last year I hosted his book tour, expressing my admiration for his collection, A Scent of Cinnamon, and on another occasion wrote very positively about his novel, Little Monsters. Isn't this just a question of literary buddies bulling each other up? How can the outside observer take seriously any positive critical comments? This is of course the time-honoured complaint against reviewers, but the situation here is even more potentially dubious, since - although, as I say, I have discovered they can be far more - virtual book tours are fundamentally promotional tools.

Here at Bitch Towers I have historically distanced myself from promotion, and for this reason I tend to host book tours on my other, 'cuddlier' blog, as one publisher recently called it, and to promote there the books of my friends.

But the fact that is often overlooked is that our good opinions of the books of our literary friends most often precede our real-life friendships with them, and that the friendships only arise precisely because of literary resonance. One's writing, after all, is an expression of one's personality, and more often than not if I have been moved or impressed by a person's writing, then the odds are that when we meet in the flesh we will get on together and consequently become friends. Yet once we are friends, others may suspect that our claims for each others' work are not to be trusted.

This whole problem rears its ugly head when it comes to seeking cover quotes for a book, which I'm currently doing and which I wrote about last year, charting my somewhat ridiculous bid to avoid all accusations by searching for a quote from someone I didn't know.

Grim Rewards

In the second issue of the online Manchester Review from Manchester University, Colm Toibin reveals in an interview with M J Hyland that the best enjoyment he gets out of writing is the money. In a straw poll of authors conducted in response by The Guardian today (and which doesn't seem to be replicated in the online version of the Guardian article) most agree with his assessment that writing novels is actually pretty gruelling - Will Self is a notable exception - though Joyce Carol Oates points out pretty sharply that

...most literary writers don't write for money. A prose fiction writer's hourly wage, broken down into units, would be in the modest range of the US minimum wage of the 1950s - approximately $1 dollar per hour.

But then it's clear that even if it weren't for the money, Toibin would still be writing, like all of us unremunerated authors. He'd never quit, he says, writing is essentially a neurosis, an obsession.

Which is why, of course, the publishing industry has most of us over a ruddy barrel.

Rights versus Accessibilty

The rights versus accessibility debate, and fact that Amazon has caved in to the demands of the US Authors Guild to allow publishers to disable the text-to-speech function on the Kindle 2 here.

Literary Lenses, Writing Jumpers and a Prize Draw: my Virtual Book Tour

For someone so keen in theory on separating the work from the person of the writer, I am revealing a ridiculous amount of stuff on my virtual book tour: this week, on dovegreyreader scribbles, I even talk about my ruddy writing jumper! I'm beginning to think it's a joke, my having these principles...

We do also however talk about a more serious matter: whether short stories are 'miniatures' concentrating microscopically on the minute details of life, or whether they are something much more potentially dynamic and less cosy, capable of telescopically encompassing huge themes.

And this week there's a prize draw: a free copy of Balancing on the Edge of the World to each of three winners who leave their names in the comments section.

Response Time

I've been feeling kind of silenced lately - blog-silenced, that is. First of all because my virtual book tour has been taking up that bit of my brain I leave open for logical thought when I'm trying really hard to get on with my own writing, but also because what seems (from the depths of my latest story) to have been the literary sensation of last week - the row over Geraldine Bedell's book and the Dubai literature festival - has left me pondering, pondering, pondering rather than commenting...

Thing is, this so often happens to me - I'm often late to the bone-picking feast and sometimes I never get there at all before it's too late. I read a piece in the paper or on the web, and I think, Well, I need to think about this. And when I've thought a bit I think, Ah, yes, but is that really the case? How do they know? Where's the evidence? Etc etc... And so I don't feel qualified to have a bracing clear-cut opinion.

And what I'm pondering now is: is this what happens - the embarrassing situation in which Margaret Atwood has been placed over this issue - when we put too much trust in journalistic reports and respond accordingly too fast? And is this something to which the web, with its culture of quick-fire response, is contributing?

Fact versus Fiction

Today the Bitch abandons her principles. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my arguments against biographical readings of fiction, and as a writer in the past I've avoided discussions about the real-life triggers or 'components' of my fiction as reductive and leading to mistaken biographical readings of my work as a whole. Many of the questions of my virtual book tour, however, have centred on the writing process, so it's sometimes been hard to avoid.

This week the question has arisen: precisely HOW do I turn a real-life incident in to a fiction?, and I have had to bite the bullet.

Bad News, Old News

As if we didn't know it, the BBC Money Programme spells it out: literary writers, independent publishers and independent bookshops are suffering - although Will Self recommends cleaning Amanda Ross's stairs for her.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00hmbb2/Money_Programme_Media_Revolution_Title_Fight

My Virtual Book Tour: Stealing Stories and the Literary Dinner from Hell.

The latest leg of my virtual book tour is now up on the blog of novelist Sarah Salway, whose own excellent collection of stories, Leading the Dance, I wrote about here.

Discussed are the way so-called short stories can encompass huge themes, and whether or not stories can be 'stolen'. I also comment on our current literary climate by describing my idea of the literary dinner from hell.

You can get to it here.

Zadie Smith on Two Ways for the Novel

My friend and colleague, writer Sam Thorp, alerted me to this which to my shame I missed, an insightful article by Zadie Smith for the New York Review of Books, in which she compares Netherland by Joseph O’Neill and Remainder by Tom McCarthy, and the ways in which they represent two warring strands in what she calles 'our ailing literary culture':

From two recent novels, a story emerges about the future for the Anglophone novel. Both are the result of long journeys. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill, took seven years to write; Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, took seven years to find a mainstream publisher. The two novels are antipodal—indeed one is the strong refusal of the other. The violence of the rejection Remainder represents to a novel like Netherland is, in part, a function of our ailing literary culture. All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene.

These aren't particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked. For Netherland, our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done—in a sense that's the problem. It's so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait. (More...)

To my mind this article is spot-on. Thanks to Mark Thwaite for the link.

The Reasons for Writing - My Virtual Book Tour

This week on my virtual book tour I'm required to tackle the fundamental question: why do I write stories?

Snarking

Good post by Dan Green on 'internet snarking', a response to David Denby's book Snark.

John Updike in My Headspace.

Apologies for not getting to this blog so much at the moment: just now my virtual book tour seems to have replaced it as the thing which takes up more (and the wrong kind of) head-space than is decent for someone who's supposed to be also immersed in a fiction project.

A quick thought instead: I've been less than positive about John Updike's novels now and then, but this week I have kept remembering how, when I was around fourteen, I kept getting Rabbit, Run out of the local library, and reading it over and over... As I've said already this week on my other blog (where I don't have to think so hard), you can be surprised sometimes about your own influences.

Meanwhile, Dan Green, who never lets up on the intellectual front, offers us two views of the future of fiction in the digital age, a pessimistic prophecy and his own more optimistic prediction.

My Virtual Book Tour

The latest leg of my Cyclone virtual book tour for Balancing on the Edge of the World is on Keeper of the Snails, the blog of novelist Clare Dudman. Discussed are my use of a child's perspective in my fiction and the possibilities of child narrators in fiction in general, the extent to which I use people and settings from life and the way in which acting relates to writing, among other things.

As a writer I'm finding this book tour an instructive and fulfilling process, because of the variety of response to my work and also the opportunity to talk about it in such depth, as I discuss in greater detail on my other blog today.

What Fiction Can Do

Here's a great piece by Jonathan Franzen on what fiction can still do in an era of competing media, which concludes thus:

Only written media, and maybe to some extent live theatre, can break down the wall between in and out. You’re not looking at your feeling from within. An Alice Munro story rushes you along in about 25 minutes to a point where you’re imaginatively going through a moment of deep crisis and significance in another person’s life. I know I’m expressing this in very vague terms, but I think these epiphanic moments have a social and political valence as well, because they’re what we mean when we talk about being a person, about being an individual, about having an identity. Identity is precisely not what consumer culture says it is. It’s not the playlist on your iPod. It’s not your personal preference in denim washes. The moment you become an individual is the moment when all that consumer stuff falls away and you’re left with the narrativity of your own life. All the things that would become impossible politically, emotionally, culturally, psychologically if people ever were to become simply the sum of their consumer choices: this is, indirectly, what the novel is trying to preserve and fight in favour of.

Thanks to Daniel Green for the link.

The Curse of Lists

God, how I hate lists - and have you noticed how linked to film adaptations that Guardian list is?

My Virtual Book Tour: Experiment Versus Saleability Discussed with Scott Pack

Scott Pack, publisher and former chief fiction buyer for Waterstones, hosts my virtual book tour this week and gets me talking about experimentation versus the need to please readers, and about the effect the pressures of the market have had on my writing.

Don't Bother Getting Older

Robert McCrum seems intent to endorse the literary cult of youth by strangling logic and stretching points, listing 7 writers who published in later life as exceptions to his rule ('Let's face, it, after 40 you're past it') and overlooking the fact that of those 13 he says 'prove' it by blossoming young, some - most notably Philip Roth - have in fact gone on to produce major works in later life.

Literary Luck

Read a sobering article on the Guardian books blog, showing how much luck is involved in the acknowledgement or neglect of literary genius.

And then have a laugh. (Thanks to The Guardian for the link.)

My Virtual Book Tour: The Writing Process

My virtual book tour kicks off today on Barbara's Bleeuugh, where, taking her cue from a comment by Anne Enright about her own writing process, Irish poet Barbara Smith asks me about mine.

The Threat to Intellectual Freedom

This weekend the books pages of the Guardian and Observer are distinguished by examination of 'global thinking', the ways in which it operates in the current tensions between Islam and 'the West', and the ways in which this intersects with literature.

On one hand, Pankaj Mishara accuses literary so-called intellectuals of engaging with the unsubtle notion of 'Islamofascism' and justifying the notion of 'collateral damage' and 'the harassment of Muslims and other swarthy foreigners'. Rightly he praises David Grossman and Arundhati Roy as exceptions to this anti-intellectual trend, for eschewing such black-and-white thinking and challenging their own governments, even at risk to their own personal safety.

The flip-side of this coin is presented today in a meticulously-argued and terrifying article by Andrew Anthony on the legacy of the Rushdie fatwah and the British reaction to it. A similar intellectual conflation, in which to speak out against terrorism is to speak against Islam, has led to a horrifying destruction of our intellectual freedom. 'Chief among [our voluntary adoption of multicultural manners],' he says, 'is the duty not to offend', and quotes Kenan Malik: 'The fatwa has in effect become internalised'. Meanwhile, as he points out, there are legal changes which have actively restricted our right not just to speak out, but to think and read...

Writing to Demand

I was as shocked as anyone by the low standard of Caroline Aherne's Royal Family as anyone, but I shouldn't have been, and it doesn't in the end stop me considering her a comic genius.

I think what this disappointment shows is that a culture in which writers are expected to perform to order is thoroughly detrimental to those writers and their art. Creativity has its own rhythm; writers write best when they are ready, and not when the rhythms of the TV and publishing schedules require (which I'm pretty sure is what happened here).

Recession Busters?

Here's a depressingly different view from that which some have expressed about the effect of the recession on publishing, and literary fiction.

Thanks to Angie Venezia for the link.

Fame and the Recluse

An interesting article by Charles McGrath about the reclusiveness of JD Salinger, which includes an assessment of the contemporary relevance of his work. I'm finding it quite hard, though, to get my head around its concluding suggestions, ie that Salinger's main theme of 'phoniness v authenticity' has become outdated, and that this is intimately linked to his self-imposed silence in that, like his fictional character Seymour, Salinger may have felt that his work was too subtle for a crass audience.

Maybe I'm just too distracted by the thought that such reclusiveness would be pretty impossible to establish nowadays...

Touch and Go

I was thrilled to be sent the lovely diary which Faber has produced on its 80th birthday, designed in the style of those early Faber books. Inside, each double-page spread is beautifully adorned with a picture of the cover of the first edition of a classic Faber, or some other archival material, and the one for the second week of April particularly struck me. It's a photo or scan of a 1957 letter, typed in red ink and sent by a reader to poetry editor 'Mr Eliot'. The reader is unsure of his/her own opinion of the book on which he/she is reporting, since it's 'won the First Publication Award in a contest sponsored by the New York Poetry Centre and judged by Auden, Spender and Marianne Moore' but the poet is a 'young Englishman whose poems have been chiefly published in America' (one senses a prejudice here) and 'the quality seems to me very uneven.' On balance, the reader feels that while it might be 'worth while asking Spender informally for some more information about the Award' and about the judges' assessment of the poet's work, 'I don't feel we'd want to take him on yet.'

But at least the reader is honest about his/her lack of confidence in his/her own doubts. And fortunately, as a result, the American-born TS Eliot has no hesitation in scribbling across the bottom, 'I'm inclined to think we ought to take this man now. Let's discuss him. TSE.'

The poet and book in question? Ted Hughes and his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain.

Such an interesting insight into how the fate of writers can sometimes hang in the balance...

(I would scan the page for you, but I'm not sure about the copyright.)

The Richard and Judy Bottleneck

In his review of the 100 top bestsellers for 2008, John Dugdale forecasts bad times ahead for literary fiction as a result of Richard and Judy's move from prominence:

It's not just authors of commercial fiction who will miss the teatime taste dictators, as they regularly backed more ambitious writing.

Others expressed similar thoughts in the wake of the loss of the Jonathan Ross show, the view being that commercial fiction once promenaded there will now be forced into the 'lower-level' publicity slots, ousting more literary fiction.

Well, I don't know about you, but I have this weird hunch that it might not be such a bad world in which publishers can no longer bring home the (literary) bacon via a tiny selection of the literary titles published each year by relying on celebrity-based TV and a couple of dictators, as Dugdale calls them, and will maybe have to find some other way of upping their marketing game for literary fiction in general.

21: A New Online Critical Journal

The launch yesterday of 21, a new online critical journal from Edge Hill University, edited by Ailsa Cox and Rob Spence and concerned with contemporary and innovative fiction. Among the articles I haven't yet read is one on post 9/11 fiction, and those I have are a revealing interview with writer Charles Lambert and an interesting piece on the issue of collecting short stories in volumes by Ailsa Cox (instigator of the Edge Hill Prize for short story collections), including a report on a recent linked conference. There's also an article by me on the critical response to Anne Enright's The Gathering and its implications for the way we read now and the contemporary status of fiction.

One Person's Poison...

Robert McCrum is hopeful that the recession will actually be good for books, and for novels and poetry in particular.

What Are Bookshops For?

It's a few days now but this piece, in which Robert McCrum makes vivid what many have been saying about Waterstone's has stuck in my head. Read it and weep.

Amazon Exposed and a Poet Revealed

Sorry for the gap - been so busy, alternately gadding about and blowing my nose with a stinking cold. And now any Christmas spirit I may have salvaged is severely squashed by this news about Amazon, relayed by that fine exploder of icons, The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society. (I recommend his interview with poet Katy Evans-Bush).

The Uselessness of Literature

There's something in the air, an attitude to literature, which has been making me steam this past week. First and foremost it came wafting towards me from the stage at the Literature and Science 'debate' at Manchester University in a veritable CP-Snow-Two-Cultures attitude. As a result, since no one on the panel was a scientist, what emerged - most particularly from Martin Amis - was a sense of science as 'the other'. Now this in itself infuriates me. We live in a world increasingly dominated by science and a life increasingly technological in nature, and if literature sees itself as separate from this - and not, as it should, as the very means by which we process and come to terms with the effect of science on the way we think about the world and ourselves - then it simply declares itself irrelevant and indeed signs its own death warrant and justifies another reference to literature which made my blood boil last week:

Does it matter—in so far as anything literary matters these days—if historical fiction is inaccurate? (my italics) (A Historical Whopper, Theodore Dalrymple, BMJ). (Thanks to John Grue for the link.)

In fact Martis Amis has engaged in his fiction with notions presented to us by science, and it's becoming clear that there's a disjunction between his fiction and his public pronouncements, but while I find the latter understandable as a novelist's hyperbole and ironic provocation, I also consider them irresponsible and even dangerous in the context of public debate.

But it wasn't just the angle of the discussion which created this inadvertent demotion of literature; Amis was explicit: Literature doesn't make anything happen, he said.

I'm not the only one who is incensed by such a statement. Clare Dudman, chemist and fiction writer, commented on my post below:

Did Martin Amis really say that? The point of literature then is that it has no point. If any of us believed that then surely we wouldn't write at all!

Exactly. Call me an uncool idealist, but I would never have written my novel The Birth Machine, or the novella which is currently seeking a publisher, if I hadn't hoped they might at least cause some debate about certain modes of scientific thinking and their effects on our lives - and surely, to influence thought and opinion is potentially to influence action.

Today Robert McCrum (who once thought that good literature always finds a market, but who has clearly changed his mind on this) describes the very real way in which serious literature is being eradicated from our culture. He ends on a positive note, with the hope that the recession, by squeezing the publishing industry as a whole and along with it the bestseller culture, will make way for a resurgence of serious literature. Hope he's right, and just so long as Martin Amis and others stop announcing the urbane uselessness of literature...

Literature and Science at Manchester University

There's something I don't quite get about these public talks with Martin Amis, Professor of the Creative Writing School at Manchester University. Once more, last night, for 'Literature and Science', the last in this year's series, the huge Whitworth Hall was almost full - and this on a night of frost and threatened snow. It's as though there's a huge public appetite for intellectual debate, as though, despite the softer options of pop culture or the computer or books by the fire, people are prepared, for the sake of real-life debate, to battle through the freezing winds and stand with their toes dropping off at bus stops.

And yet. I dunno... Bear with me while I try to work it out.

Discussing the subject with Amis were psychotherapist Adam Phillips and philosopher John Gray, chaired by a woman I didn't know and who failed to identify herself but later said in passing that she had a scientific background.

The hall was freezing. People kept their coats on. The panel filed onto the stage and were introduced. John Gray, we were told, challenges the whole notion of science as modern and progressive, indeed challenges the whole notion of progress.

Well, I was interested already: this is the subject of some of my writing.

Amis began. He said there was something he felt he should mention before we went any further: the terrible events in Mumbai. You know, I just don't know what to think about the fact that he did this. It seems so right that someone with a public platform should use it to address a matter of current urgency - and some of what he said was interesting, but enough material for another (hot) debate - but there's something about this which is somehow also wrong: the hi-jacking of an agreed intellectual agenda, which is in danger of privileging, however briefly, the hi-jacker himself over that agenda. Not to mention the fact that he began by saying that 'Mumbai' was like a primitive baby-talk form of 'Bombay'...

I think this is my main problem with Amis when he steps away from writing the fiction which I, for one, have stoutly championed: so often when he speaks in public it's in terms of hierarchies. He turned to the subject in hand and immediately presented us with one: historically, he said, literature has been concerned [in response to the growth of science] with the following, in order: gods, demigods, kings and queens, statesmen and soldiers, the middle classes, Everyman and the working classes, down to the present age, the age of irony in literature.

This, our growing understanding that we are not the centre of the universe, may be an accurate assessment of our historical-psychological position, but the terms in which he spoke of it were interesting, and perhaps telling: he spoke of it as a 'descent' of literature, and of literature as 'historically looking downwards'. We still have cosmic yearnings, though, he said, we still aspire if not to godhead then at least to angeldom - and he informed us of another hierarchy, the nine orders of angels, of which we would probably hope to be Seraphim, he said (though perhaps he should speak for himself). The history of literature and science, he said, was one of increasing 'humiliation' - there he is with that word again! - and disappointment for the human species. The place we are now is realizing that we are not even intelligent enough as a species to understand the universe. As a result, a plausible future for the novel is to move inwards, as the ex-sci-fi writer JG Ballard has done, to a concern with the inner world, and with neuroscience and developmental psychology. The place of the novel is to recreate what it is to be human (not quite sure what he meant by that in this context - it could be seen as begging the question), but it was interesting, he said, that while Einstein would read philosophy to know how to think about his own science, Amis understood that not many present-day scientists would do such a thing.

Then in turn, Adam Phillips and John Gray were asked to speak. See, again, there is something about this, the way Amis always goes first, even when he says he doesn't know anything about the subject at hand: the others always end up looking as if they're responding to him whether or not they do, but in any case they mostly do, and yet it's not a proper debate, and so there's your real-life hierarchy right in front of your face.

Adam Phillips asked the question which Amis's speech had raised but failed to address: why is it so disturbing, after all, to discover we're merely animals? (Well, he threw it out at us.) He then presented his view of the science/literature issue from the point of view of psychotherapy. He told us that having been educated in the sixties and seventies he'd grown up with an anti-technological, Lawrentian view of the world, and the great thing for him about literature then was that it did not have any pretensions [as science did] to progress. The issue of science versus literature was not really an issue for him until psychotherapy brought him up against it. Literature is about singularity (of a character or a voice), but science deals in generalities. Freud himself was perplexed because while you can apply certain general principles of psychology theory (eg we all have an Oedipus complex, all children develop in certain stages) each case history is individual and indeed like a story: singularity is asserted and dissolves the theoretical categories. Psychology therefore is symptomatic of the science/literature dichotomy and its debate around progress: it wants to be concerned with generalities but constantly comes up against idiosyncracy. (I think that's the gist of what he said.)

John Gray said it was interesting how science got used as part of a project of human redemption/salvation/liberation, and amongst writers who have embraced the idea of science as a way for humanity to lift itself out of the animal condition, the Darwinian HG Wells is the most interesting, and The Island of Doctor Moreau the most interesting of his books. Moreau's attempts to 'bring the animal out of humanity' fail, and it is interesting that despite Wells's personal commitment to the idea that progress in science could be used to elevate humanity, his fables point to a different notion: that [scientific] knowledge can't create human progress (and at the end of his life Wells came to the latter conclusion). Gray talked then about the fact that Stalin had tried to develop a supersoldier who would need less sleep and food and would have fewer responses of sympathy - an experiment which of course also failed (I wasn't quite sure of the thread of his argument here), before saying that on the whole literature has not embraced the idea of human progress through science.

Amis was then asked to comment, and he said something which seemed to me once again to appeal anxiously to hierarchy: that yes, we are animals, but the thing which 'marks us off ' (note that language) from the other animals is our knowledge of death, and the thing about literature is that it gives us immortality. But then he turned his statement into a question: Do we take this as a defining difference?

At this point I started to lose grip of the discussion, sitting there at the back of a cold hall (with people around me putting their scarves back on), and the mics not working properly so that John Gray's voice became a shuffly mumble and it all came over to me as not so much a discussion with a development but a choppy to-and-fro between various hobby horses, Amis (it seemed to me) throwing in smoke bombs of references to pseudoscience (which the others then tried to question or define: Gray: What do we mean by pseudoscience? The alchemists, after all, were the precursors of science; Phillips: Pseudoscience is propaganda) and repressive regimes, in particular the Nazi project, which he said was pseudoscience. (Here was one whiff of proper debate, when Gray countered that the Nazis did claim to be rational and scientific and that a lot of anthropology before then was racist.) There was reference to the fact that at certain periods of history knowledge has been seen as a temptation and/or a form of oppression (Gray) and that Stalin was perjorative about reason, since once you discredit reason you can believe anything is possible, which gives you all sorts of licence (Amis). There was agreement that there is a certain sado-masochism in our attitude to science, ie that we feel we must submit to scientific truth, and Phillips asked why we so value predictability [of which, presumably, science provides at least an illusion]? All this interspersed with little lectures (I began to feel like a second-rate student just not following), on the history of philosophy from Gray, on facts about the Nazis and Stalin from Amis.

I kept thinking, Eh? What? as statements came in apparently inconsequentially and begged far too many questions (Phillips: 'It's a paradox that we're animals who have to learn how to be better animals'; Gray: 'The Spanish Inquisition was an attempt to close off knowledge but also an attempt to close off doubt' (an opposition I thought debatable, but which was simply left hanging); Amis: 'Jewish science ( beg pardon?) - Einstein and others - was a revolt against pseudoscience'.

And then it was opened up to the audience. Someone asked (asked, notice: this was not a debate) what made literature different from science (a question which had not yet been addressed) and Amis said (in the patrician manner which he has in public nowadays) that it was a question of innovation (literature wasn't at all innovative; no literary technique is ever really new, but it will survive because people always want stories and literature is the ideal way to commune with oneself, that's what's human [and presumably not animal - EB] about it. Comma publisher Ra Page (looking ridiculously handsome the way he has grown his beard) said that he thought the panel had been making a category error in blaming science with all their talk of pseudoscience because pseudoscience was simply 'not science'. Well, I didn't think the panel had actually been blaming science, but others must have agreed with him because he got a big clap. John Gray argued that they were not making a category error. A man with an Eastern European accent stood up quivering with passion and said that he wanted to put the record straight: there had been a lot of talk tonight about totalitarian regimes using science, but the truth was that art was often their principle motivator. Amis suavely countered with the statement that the point of literature is that it makes nothing happen: the category error occurs when people mistake fiction for something else, as in the case of Salman Rushdie. Finally Gray came in with the ground-touching statement that all human activities - science and literature (look at the fascist thirties writers) - can be used either for good or bad.

And then we all got up (after we'd waited for them to leave: not hierarchy, apparently, but a chance for them to get to the book-signing tables) and went off out into the cold again, and the people I spoke to had apparently found it all far less frustrating than I. The Martin Show was over - for that's how it was billed. And you couldn't help wondering: was that why so many people had come?

Where Will We Keep the Knowledge?

Adam O'Riordan gets shot down in flames on the Guardian books blog for suggesting that the digitization of our libraries (he cites the replacement of Whitechapel Library with the Whitechapel Idea Store) may be some force for good.

Well, I was sitting in the cafe late afternoon the other day and a friend came in and told me, her eyes sparkling with enthusiasm, that she had only just come out, she had been at the computer all day preparing something for her students, and what she had been doing specifically was researching the history of religion in Britain. She proceeded to tell me breathlessly all about that history (much of which was new to her), and what shot through my mind as she did was the memory - not all that old a memory - of getting on the bus into Manchester and spending a whole morning in central library and waiting while they got books up from the stacks just to verify a small point in a play I was writing. And I thought, My god, isn't the internet wonderful? And: My god, hasn't the world changed?

And my friend came to the end of her account and paused, and then said to me: 'Isn't the internet wonderful? And hasn't the world changed?'

It's true, though, that the source of much of our digitized knowledge is physical books. Does it matter, therefore, that libraries are dispensing with them while installing the computers which anyway most people have at home...? And what does this mean for the future form of our knowledge repositories (our idea stores)?

Just Doing It

Anne Enright is another established writer adding weight to the argument (a good one, in my opinion) that writing can't be taught in any crude sense, that you learn how to do it by, well, doing it.

Writing is learned from the inside out; it is not a subject like geography, that can be doled out in parcels of information. Writing is a discipline and, as with any discipline, whether spiritual or physical, the doing is everything. No one can do it for you.

Nevertheless, she still refers to her 'teachers' (Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury), and suggests that the role they played (at UEA) was a nurturing one:

The job of the teacher in these hazy, dangerous circumstances, is to feed the student and to keep her safe. Angela Carter did the first, with a scattering of photocopies, musings and anecdotes (she never mentioned my work, I think) and Malcolm Bradbury did the second, by smiling a lot, and liking books, and keeping quiet (I don't think he ever mentioned my work either. I might be wrong). The other students did mention my work; they had various opinions about it, but that was fine, because Malcolm was there to like us all, and keep us safe.

As If Non-Readers Care Anyway

Seems we don't need publishers pushing us into making our novels more 'accessible' for non-readers when we've got Lionel Shriver.

Literature is not very popular these days, to put it mildly. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, nearly half of Americans do not read books at all, and those who do average a mere six a year. You'd think literary writers would be bending over backwards to ingratiate themselves to readers -- to make their work maximally accessible, straightforward and inviting. But no.

Dan Green and his commenters explain why her argument, which focuses on speech punctuation, is outrageous.

Misery Realized

Danuta Kean suggests that the misery memoir cult has paved the way for the graphic details recounted in newspaper and TV reports about Baby P, a development she condemns. In a comment on the post, however, Kay Lacey sounds a warning about freedom of speech.

The Toughness and the Impersonal Personality of Poetry

Jeanette Winterson, writing in today's Guardian about TS Eliot, argues (from her own experience) that poetry, far from being 'merely a luxury for the educated middle classes' offers tough language for tough lives (and indeed suggests that those who argue otherwise must have 'had things pretty easy'.)

As usual her thoughts are very quotable, including this passage which struck me particularly:

Eliot himself liked to talk about "impersonality" as a necessary virtue in a poet, but we should not misunderstand him. In his 1927 essay "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca", he muses on Shakespeare's "struggle to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, universal and impersonal".

In the land of reality TV and confessional talk shows, Eliot's wish to withdraw the personal from his poetry - from any poetry - is easy to misread. But the paradox of the best writing is that while the writer's voice is unmistakable, the writer has somehow performed the Indian rope trick and disappeared [my italics]. Celebrity culture can't imagine anyone wanting to disappear, or that such a thing might be necessary. Now, when we are told that everything depends on our "personality", it seems strange to hear Eliot saying, as he does in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", that "poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But of course only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from those things."

The Split Personality of the Writer-Blogger

Over at Dan Green's The Reading Experience, there's a debate about what is seen as the increasing tendency of literary bloggers to be coralled into publishers' marketing systems rather than to retain critical independence. Since I have championed the idea of critical independence on this blog, on one occasion pouring scorn on a publisher's enthusiasm for the virtual book tour, and yet today am hosting with happy enthusiasm such a tour on my author blog - Charles Lambert's The Scent of Cinnamon - I should perhaps say some words about my own position within what Dan sees as the evolving function or nature of 'lit-bloggers', and about the conflicting allegiances which we literary bloggers who are also writers need to negotiate.

Norm once asked me with a genuinely puzzled air why I had two blogs. Now Norm is of course an academic, with an academic's happy insulation from commercial demands (though he may disagree with me about that last), but others, including literary bloggers, have seemed as puzzled. The way it happened is very much to the point.

This was the blog with which I began blogging. I began it with the specific intention of discussing the increasing commercialization of publishing and its implictions for 'literary fiction', an agenda which inevitably included discussions on the nature of fiction. Since 'literary fiction', for want of a better word, is what I write myself - or at least what other people seem to have decided I write - and since I'd experienced this increasing commercialization at first hand, I can't claim that my aims were impartial, but I hoped to approach the matter in as rational a way as possible, and in order to focus attention on my arguments I made the blog pseudonymous (about which Susan Hill complained on Scott Pack's blog: she felt I should have the courage of my convictions and stand up and be counted rather than hide behind a pseudonym, and indeed seemed to feel that my views were less valid while they weren't contextualized by my identity). But there was of course another reason for assuming a blogging name: as I've discussed before, writers can be extremely vulnerable: after all, what writer in their right mind looking for a publisher (as I was at the time) would be seen as going round criticizing the publishing industry? Not that I was doing that; I understand that publishers too can be the victims of an increasingly commercial culture, but you never know... The joke was, though, that in the end Blogger outed me anyway, by combining the blog with the other, author blog I had started in the meantime.

So why had I started another, author blog? Whether we like it or not, whether we are ideologically opposed to it or not, any published author must nowadays take an active part in the publicity machine, and the blog is clearly the prime tool for this. I hadn't at that point found my short-story publisher, but it's instructive to read this in their current submissions guidelines: You should be prepared to assist in a wide range of marketing practices, including social networking sites and blogs. As a publisher or a writer, it's only sensible, after all, to embrace the marketing opportunities of the web. We writers want to sell our books because - apart from the odd purist who claims otherwise - we want people to read them, and we want our publishers take our next book (and not turn us down as someone who doesn't sell). Not that selling my work is all I'm doing on my author blog; what I'm doing is far more complex, and I hope has more integrity, than that - I'm engaging in thoughtful discussions with readers and other writers, mostly about the writing process and the writing life. But there is that necessary element of promotion which I'd like to keep separate from this blog as far as possible, and which does therefore result in something of a split personality.

Though, I know, I know, I've felt compelled to advertise my writing on this page too...

How to Talk About Writing and How to Write About Thinking

Is it me? I sometimes don't quite follow the Author, Author pieces in Saturday's Guardian Review, those articles in which authors talk about their own take on the writing process. Maybe it's something to do with the essentially idiosyncratic nature of the writing process for each writer: either those authors are talking to themselves in their own private language, using their own private short-cut associations, or I'm so caught up in my own that I can't always relate to the whole of their arguments. On Saturday Adam Thirwell wrote about the difficulty of representing thoughts and psychology truthfully in novels, but if you can sort out the difference between the description in the first paragraph here and the intimate third person, or between the two modes in the two separate paragraphs, then you're brighter (or more patient, or less hung up on your own writing obsessions) than I:

In an essay, I once wrote about how Franz Kafka invented a strange style in his novels about this man he called K: where, although it looks like a third-person narrative, it is in fact a disguised first-person narrative, belonging to K. And suddenly I thought that I understood more precisely why Kafka wanted to do this. It was a way of inventing a subterfuge, so that he could be true to the cloudiness of thoughts. In a diary entry, on January 12 1911, Kafka noted how he hadn't been writing much, partly because he was lazy, true, but also "because of the fear of betraying my self-perception". Because, he continued, if a thought cannot be written down "with the greatest completeness, with the incidental consequences, as well as with entire truthfulness" - which it couldn't - then what was written down would replace the vague thought "in such a way that the real feeling will disappear while the worthlessness of what has been noted down will be recognised too late". This is why Kafka needed to write in the third person, while really describing the personal contours of a character's thoughts: it was a way of outwitting the imprecise solidity of language.

This is one technique in the art of the novel. Another, however, is to use the completeness and truthfulness of the third person, while still talking as if it's really you.

Even so, there was something that seemed to chime with my own current thinking about the matter. Thirwell describes a thought of his own:

...there could be a way of describing reality which was both true to the seriousness of the world and yet also true to its absolute flippancy, because even the most passionate of experiences, especially the most passionate, were weightless.

That seemed akin to my current struggle to find narrative modes which don't deny the complexity of the emotional reality I want to convey or subtly change it.

Or was it? And is this last statement of mine too obtuse for anywhere but my private writing journal?

Why the Loss of Ross Matters

Scott Pack and Danuta Kean point out that the loss of the Jonathan Ross show means the loss of the main publicity opportunity for celeb Christmas books, and that their sales will suffer. Danuta spells out why this matters for less commercial books:

...the celebs scheduled for Ross will be hustled to the next shows in line – BBC’s One Show, Paul O’Grady, Graham Norton and Alan Titchmarsh. In turn the B List celebs previously scheduled for these shows will be bumped down to the next level and down and down they all go

until even the local radio stations will no longer be open to such books.

The Littleness of Big Ideas

I quite like this article by Germaine Greer in which she denounces 'big idea' books as missing the real point. I guess I feel that to put such stress on the notion that 'big idea' thinking is basically male (Greer's springboard is the recent debate about such books and gender) is also to miss the main point a little, or at least to distract from it (and arguably to be in danger of inadvertently condoning such thinking), but as a writer trying to write a literature addressing the fluidity and multiplicity of reality, it gives me a kick to read Greer's argument that 'there is no answer to everything'.

Politics, Fame and the Writer

Stuart Evers attends an audience with Toni Morrison and ends up reflecting ruefully on the dangers of fame (which he feels Morrison escapes) for writers and their writing.

Meanwhile, in the process of asking prominent Americans about the cultural legacy of the Bush administration (which you may think a very strange phrase), The Guardian elicits some interesting comments from writers, some of them on the nature of fiction and the process of writing:

Paul Auster: Art isn't journalism. Some of the greatest historical novels were written long after the events discussed in the book. You think of War and Peace, written in 1870 about things that happened in 1812. I think there's this confusion in the minds of the public that artists are supposed to respond immediately to things that are going on. We've been living through a new era. Everyone knows the world has changed, but exactly where the story is taking us is unclear right now and until it plays out further I don't know if anyone has a clear vision of what's happening.

Joyce Carol Oates: Most artists live through a sequence of administrations, and their art evolves in ways too individual to be related to larger, generic forces.

Gore Vidal: We have a president who cannot read. He's dyslexic, as was his father before him. It must have an effect. I watch a good deal of television because of the elections. The professional television people, all of them graduates of our finest universities, can't use proper English. We are losing the language, I suppose... Art is always needed in a country that doesn't much like it. Performance is all anybody cares about.

Edward Albee: I have found over the past eight years that commerce has taken over the arts in the United States... The only art that is allowed any great exposure is commercial art that is not going to rock the boat.

Lionel Shriver: ...here's the really bad news: Obama could be terrible for the arts. Why, when there's barely an artist in the States who doesn't support him? Art thrives on resistance. There's nothing more arid, more enervating, more stultifying, or more utterly uninspiring than getting your way.

The Golden Notebook Project

Bob Stein, director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, alerts us to a very interesting experiment in close reading, The Golden Notebook Project. Beginning on 10th November, seven women will read Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, making comments in the 'margin' in order, as I understand it, to conduct a progressive web-based discussion in line with the reading as part of an ongoing investigation into the ways in which the web interfaces with our reading. The comments will be made in a group blog, and the public will be able to read along and join in the discussion.

His email states:

The idea for the project arose out of my experience re-reading the novel in the summer of 2007 just before Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Golden Notebook was one of the two or three most influential books of my youth and I decided I wanted to "try it on" again after so many years. It turned out to be one of the most interesting reading experiences of my life. With an interval of thirty-seven years the lens of perception was so different; things that stood out the first-time around were now of lesser importance, and entire themes I missed the first time came front and center. When I told my younger colleagues what I was reading, I was surprised that not one of them had read it, not even the ones with degrees in English literature. It occurred to me that it would be very interesting to eavesdrop on a conversation between two readers, one under thirty, one over fifty or sixty, in which they react to the book and to each other's reactions. And then of course I realized that we now actually have the technology to do just that.

Should you wish to participate, the book is available online, but Stein suggests readers obtain printed copies:

This is not essentially an experiment in online reading itself. Although the online version of the text is quite readable, for now, we believe books made of paper still have a substantial advantage over the screen for sustained reading of a linear narrative.

Google Digitization Deal

The Guardian reports on the US deal which Google has struck with publishers and authors over digitization of books. The Writers' Guild blog gathers comment.

Hang On, Though...

Here's the original More4 interview with Richard Dawkins, which I'm sorry I didn't look at before posting below. Turns out he's not talking about fiction in general but myths (both religious and folklore) and his concern is much more specifically whether or not it's a good idea, or at all fair, to bring children up to believe in them. He states categorically that he is agnostic on the matter, since the research has not been done, and merely very curious. A censorious commenter on the Guardian post is suspicious that Dawkins has on the contrary already made up his mind that it's a pretty bad thing - and Dawkins does elsewhere call it child abuse - but quite frankly when I remember how scared I was of the bogeyman under my bed and how frightened of God's censure whenever I did wrong, and the appalling energy that went in that, the timidity it engendered in me as a child, I can't help making up my own mind against the practice...

Is That a Fact, Richard?

Jean Hannah Edelstein comments on Richard Dawkins' apparent belief (oh no, sorry, his thesis which he thinks should be put to scientific test) that children can't distinguish fact from fiction.

Battles, Manifestos and Very Tall Chairs

Today the Guardian reports the advent of Horizon Review and another new lit mag Artesian, and last night I went to the John Rylands Library for a Manchester Literature Festival Public Debate on the future of independent magazines. Here's my account of it (though do bear in mind that one woman's impression is another person's lie, and apologies to anyone I've misrepresented):

Michael Schmidt, founder of Carcanet and PN Review, chaired and was flanked by magazine editors Philip Davis (Liverpool-based The Reader), Margaret Obank (Banipal, which publishes contemporary Arab work in English translation), Adam Petite (online poetry mag Manifold) and Fiona Sampson (Poetry Review). This was the swish new glass-walled bit of the library, and the seating for the panel was very high chairs on spindly legs, and the first thing that happened was that Philip Davis declined to sit on his because, he said, his legs were too little, and thus, in a very physical way, he took a stand right at the start.

Michael began by asking each editor in turn to speak about the aims of their own magazine. I'm afraid I was still thinking about the business of the chairs (plus it suddenly struck me that Michael, whom I have known for years, and my ex-husband look like each other nowadays - though they are not remotely related - when once upon a time they didn't look like each other at all, which made me remember how at my grandmother's funeral all the older men of her village similarly looked like one another when as young men they didn't). So I don't actually remember the beginning of the discussion very well, but I see that I wrote down one word against each of Banipal (redress), The Reader (integrity) and Manifold (experimentation).

Then I started concentrating. Michael said that PN Review exists within the Anglo-European tradition, with a bias towards Modernism, and thus finds itself at odds with a lot of the literary establishment. Fiona Sampson, calm and articulate as ever, then spoke at some length and very interestingly about her editorship of PN Review. The magazine will be a hundred next year, she said. It is published by the Poetry Society and is therefore obliged to align itself with the aims of the Society. As its editor she has to accept that it is thus addressed to the mainstream readership of Society members already interested in poetry and probably writing it, but who don't buy too many books and may live in rural isolation from centres of culture. There has to be a mission to keep such readers in touch and also to educate them. As a poet herself she is not in line with this British poetic tradition, she is more internationalist, but she feels that this places her in a good position as editor. She knows she can't give her readership Geoffrey Hill from cover to cover, she doesn't like anecdotal poetry but she publishes it, yet she can also accommodate her more ideal, sceptical reader. There are two types of editor, she noted, advocates of particular schools and those who edit against the grain of personal taste, and she counts herself among the latter. The practice she is trying to develop is to publish whatever works on its own terms, and to open up a field of mutual respect between poetries. If poetries only speak to themselves, well that's the law of diminshing returns, she felt. And also: seduction is very important, so while print mags remain, production values remain important too.

Michael noted the connection between what she'd said and Thom Gunn's essay on the Spectrum of Poetry, and then asked Philip Davis to speak. From his separate position on the floor Philip Davis said this: Here were the words he hated: art, culture, academic, intellectual, lucidity, respect. What he values is liveliness across a wide range, and he wants his magazine to have to do with life rather than artiness. He's interested in new writing of all sorts, poetry, fiction and non-fiction (but not reviews - he hates reviews) and also old writing: in each issue he has a very old poem with writing around it as a context for reading, since the whole point of his magazine is to foster the practice of reading. He wants writers writing as hard as they can, the thing he values is honesty, it doesn't matter if work is rough, if it's difficult, dealing with difficult thoughts, then that might be necessary, what he doesn't want is anything second-hand - and the lucid is all too often second-hand, which is condescending to the reader. Above all he would like the magazine to be at the centre of a reading revolution. He has no set agenda, he hates agendas - political, religious, social etc - he is tired to death of people knowing what they think in advance and what he wants most of all in the writing he publishes is surprise. To pigeonhle anything in advance is dangerous. He wants as wide and general and liberal a mixture as possible (though too wide a range might be worrying); at the same time he would love to be able to publish an issue where he agreed with everything in it. The main point, he reiterated, is that the whole magazine must be alert to surprise, and human experience is more important than artiness.

Then Margaret Obank said that Banipal was established to promote new cultural voices and ideas, that she and her colleagues had discovered that there was an appetite for them but the problem remained to be solved as to how to allow people to access them in the magazine: they'd had a distributor but the distributor didn't provide promotion to bookshops and their main sales were through subscriptions. They had also begun conducting reading tours, ie physically bringing the literature to readers, and developing other activities around the mag. Michael asked her if they had a website, and she said they had, which led onto Adam Petite and online Manifold. I was really interested in this, but I'm afraid I couldn't follow anything he said for some reason, mainly I think because his comments were virtual in the old sense, ie he never seemed to complete his sentences.

Or maybe my concentration was packing up. Next Fiona said something about 'the poetic sulk' and how she sometimes wishes the idiots, the anoraks in bedsits would get over themselves, can't they see that they're not doing anything all that different from each other, but I couldn't work out what point she was making. It must have been to do with her notion of mutual poetic respect, because then Philip said he doesn't want to be in any field of mutual respect, he's interested in individual voices. At some point Michael said he was trying to get Philip to make a point that wasn't aggressive at which Philip couldn't help laughing with everyone else.

Then the discussion was opened up to the floor, and MMU's Andrew Biswell who was sitting in front of me asked if there are too many lit mags chasing too few grants, and what about the argument that if they don't sell they don't deserve to exist. I long ago got weary with this particular issue so now I got distracted by thinking how soft Andrew's crewcut looked, but I did note that Fiona swiftly apprised the room of the fact that Poetry Review doesn't receive a penny grant and is profit-making, yet she was very much down on that last idea: you may as well say let's close down the universities because they don't make a profit. Andrew said, But people want degrees; if they don't want little mags... and then the panel gave varying responses to that: Adam said that people do have a hunger for literature that's not populist, and Philip said that he doesn't care about economics and - I didn't quite get the connection - he wishes that the TLS and the LRB didn't exist; he just felt that if people ever didn't want The Reader then it should go, he'd want it killed. He didn't like the idea of an overprotected bloom for a small number of people, and if that happened to The Reader he'd accept he'd failed.

Barry Wood, whom I've also known for years, then picked up on a reference to bagpipes and said he thought that little mags were like that, bagpipes, they can be annoying and/or stimulating, and that that's what they're for: to extend and intensify readers' experience. Fiona said we should distinguish between little mags and literary periodicals, but either this distinction wasn't adequately defined or I was losing grip again. When I next picked up the thread Philip was saying , "If it moves me, it's good", and then James Byrne of Wolf Magazine challenged him and said wasn't it as important to move your readers (since you claim to be so concerned with reading, was the implication, I think)? Philip said it was foolish to imagine you can ever respond on behalf of others, ie to fabricate an imaginary reader; and then he repeated what he himself did and didn't like in writing: he didn't like cool or hypothetical, he liked commitment and belief and the things that are about human experience. James then asked the whole panel about the problem of most magazine readers being subscribers who are in turn contributors, and they all chewed over this extremely boring though no doubt important point, which somehow took them back again to the matter of editor bias, and Michael said, interestingly, that as an editor he is often very excited by work he simply doesn't understand, because his own lack of understanding interests him.

John Atkins asked the panel how important they felt a manifesto was to the long-term existence of a magazine, and each reiterated his or her manifesto, including, with amusement at himself, the apparently anti-manifesto Philip; Cathy Bolton asked whether mags should serve writers or readers which took us back over quite a lot of the same ground again, Michael seeing a strong tension between the two though feeling that his role on the whole was to serve 'writers who are readers', Fiona agreeing that there was a real tension but that on the whole her mag was there to serve writers, especially emerging writers, Philip saying that he was there to serve readers, to change the climate of England. Adam said Manifold was meant to serve both, at which Michael created something of a short silence by pronouncing that if a piece is published online then no print magazine will touch it afterwards (well, I think that's what he said).

Someone in the audience then mentioned the new online Horizon Review - which references Cyril Connolly's magazine Horizon - and basically asked the panel to say what they thought of it (at which point I started cringeing, since I have a story in the first issue). Fiona said its editor Jane Holland is a good tough woman and that she should do well with it. Michael said he thought it was a mistake to use the same name: Connolly's Horizon belonged to its moment and to reference it so strongly was to create the error of nostalgia.

At which Fiona said, "Yes, but she got on Start the Week with it, didn't she?"

And that was it (and I'm not sure that the future of lit mags was all that much addressed.) But then I could have misheard everything, in view of what happened later: it was John's birthday and he and I went to Livebait where we'll never go again, because they were so short-staffed we had to wait for ever and the sweet young male waiter offered us puddings on the house in compensation - or rather we thought he did, we both heard it - but then the waitress putting out our pudding spoons said, Well, she was the acting manageress and if we were getting free puddings they would have to be on him, not the house; and he was forced to come and apologize (cringeing with agony) and tell us we'd misheard! Can you imagine the embarrassment? Though as John said, (bless his shopkeeper's grandson's socks), Whatever happened to the customer is always right?

Big Brother in Hackney

I feel duty-bound to draw attention to this article by Iain Sinclair in today's Guardian, describing Orwellian censorship by Hackney local authority and its library so-called service.

Even If It's Not True...

Interesting that an author (Milan Kundera) who has worked so hard to keep his life separate from his work should now have his activities publicly investigated, and depressing to think that his work may now be viewed through this prism.

Slow Brilliance

An interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker arguing that to associate genius with precocity is to misunderstand the nature of a certain experimental type of genius. Thanks to Kate Brown for the link.

Jane Holland Discusses Horizon Review on Start the Week

An email today from Jane Holland, editor of Horizon Review (in the first and current issue of which there's a story by yours truly): she'll be discussing Horizon Review and the current state of literary criticism on Radio 4's "Start the Week" this coming Monday, 20th October, at 9am.

Apology

Profuse apologies to Paul Magrs for omitting, in my post on Metropolitan alumni, his reputation as a novelist for adults. Since the year in which we published his story, 1996, Paul has published a phenomenal ten novels for adults (as well as another ten for young adults).

Ironically, the error occurred precisely due to the fact that half-way through writing the blog I decided that Paul hardly qualified for the list of then unknowns we had published. Looking back at his Metropolitan biog I saw that the same year he had already published his first novel and had another and a volume of stories due out. I whipped him out - or I thought I did: I left in the bit about his children's novels and ended up inadvertently giving quite the wrong impression.

Apologies to Paul, and I really should stop blogging late at night, especially when it comes to long lists of names with links...