Town of Books or Town of Telly? Cultures Clashing in a Welsh Valley

Three years ago I read at the Hay Festival, and I guess you get a different perspective as a reading author, but I don't know, I had been before as an anonymous punter, and things seemed very different to me this year. I went as a guest of Debi Alper, who was standing in over the first weekend for John Baker, blogging reporter for SkyARTS, the new sponsors of the festival.

First surprise: I drove down with my partner, and as we entered the town from the north the festival signs directed us not left as before but right: the festival is now so huge that it needs a much bigger site, three-quarters of a mile or so out of town, and a shuttle bus to take you between the two. No more wandering straight from the tents into the scores of second-hand bookshops in the hour or so between shows. And there was unsettling evidence of institutionalised crowd control: police tape lined the roads and guys in luminous jackets waved us into the parking field and charged us £4.50 (I never remember paying before!) and pointed to the spot we must park in. We got out, and below us was the huge white-tented site with the SkyARTS flags flying and, scoring the hill above it, the works for the oil* pipeline which is crossing Wales from Milford Haven.
(* Edited-in correction: Not oil, but gas! But then, even David Miliband, the environment secretary, apparently appeared to reveal at Hay that he didn't know what it was, or anything at all about the pipeline itself.)

You're not supposed to bite the hand that feeds you, and Sam, the Sky PR who met us, was as sweet as the schoolgirls who had minded me last time, but I'd be betraying my dead Irish dad's injunctions about being true to my hunches if I didn't report to you, dear bloggers, that my heart sank with a sense of corporate might quite antipathetic to the festival's creative origins.

And wouldn't you know it, my first event was a media event: the daily roundup of the festival with Mariella Frostrup, filmed for Sky TV. The woman next to me, on the other side to Debi, was a veteran of the festival. Well, she said to me ruefully, without much conviction: we have to move with the times and nostalgia's a terrible thing. And then on came Mariella, beautiful and intelligent, and interviewed Peter Florence who began the festival 20 years ago, and indeed she questioned him precisely about the change in the nature of the festival - less emphasis on literature and books and more on politics and the media. It hasn't really changed, he said, not in spirit, but boy did he seem defensive to me, and of course, this was telly, so she let him get away with it, and then he was gone and there was a break and the makeup woman came in and redid Mariella's makeup and hair and powdered the bald head of composer Michael Nyman who was due on next.

Ha! 'What did you think?' asked Sam afterwards. 'Isn't Mariella professional?' we said truthfully. 'And isn't Sandi Toksvig quick-witted?' 'Oh yes! But what did you think of the stage?' Ah yes, it was true, that was the real star, the stage...

And where were the books? There were things mimicking books: Penguin-cover deckchairs, Penguin-cover mugs:

huge models near the entrance:

but books, real books? At last we found some, in Pemberton's festival bookshop, but only the festival authors were stocked there, and there simply wasn't time to get into town between shows for that staple traditional Hay experience - emerging inspired from a literary event to browse the fund of literary history on offer in the town (or to escape the Sky-high site food prices!).

Of course we went into town. It was dead, but then it was only Friday and the festival hadn't really got going. How do you feel about the change? we asked one bookshop owner. It had definitely made a difference to her trade, she said. At the Honesty Bookshop, where you leave the money for your book in a box, there was no one around to be honest or cheat:

This and the Castle Bookshop (below), which has a fantastic stock of old prints, were not the only ones we found empty.

Back at the festival, and there still wasn't much literature on offer. Debi and I attended a comic revue with Bonnie Langford and Sandi Toksvig and then my partner and I went to a concert given by the contemporary folk musician Seth Lakeman in the biggest tent of all, a huge stadium which filled up with young people who suddenly appeared from nowhere in their droves, but were no longer in evidence next day.

Next day, Saturday, things were suddenly buzzing - queues of traffic down the lanes (and police everywhere) and long queues of people at the ticket office and outside the events) - and it looked as if the festival would be unlikely to have a detrimental impact on the town businesses after all. And at last, there was a literary event I could go to: David Freeman, who runs the Meet the Author website, interviewing two novelists, Australian Gail Jones and Booker-shortlisted Hisham Matar. Freeman's gushing style seemed designed to provoke a self-congratulatory stance in his guests, which Matar failed to avoid altogether. However, even I was near to tears when he described how a friend smuggled copies of his books into Libya and he thought, like Ovid (overlook the self-flattering comparison) 'My book has gone back without me.' This interview seemed to me somehow to sum up the culture clash at the heart of this festival, and which has perhaps been at the heart of it all along, and of all author readings. The whole thrust of Freeman's questioning was to make parallels between the books and the authors' lives, or even to privilege their lives over their books. Gail Jones, an academic clearly aware of such problems, smartly side-stepped this trap, but then she sounded off-puttingly like an academic, so hey... (Hay). Matar had a Thing about not signing books for dealers, and as an author I can see his point, but he even refused to sign blank copies for Tim of KC Books, not knowing perhaps that Tim had sponsored this event...

And then we thought we'd check out an aspect of the Fringe Festival which has started up as a response to the changes. Each day this week there is an event sponsored by Welsh Academi at the Hay Poetry Bookshop in the town, and on Saturday the internationally esteemed Irish poet Tony Curtis was reading from his brilliant and moving new book, The Well in the Rain. What a difference! A tiny space, crammed with an audience, no microphones needed, the poet (a poet!) chatting to us all individually, informal in his reading, even answering his phone halfway through and giving us all a laugh. The kind of event with which festivals begin... But then how much money did that event make, eh, and for whom?


Back at the site the protesters to the pipeline had set up outside.



A big concern of the festival this year is the environment, and the first day, Thursday, was devoted to a conference on the topic. However, the pipeline protesters were keen to tell me that they'd been offered a stall by one of the local shop owners, but had been evicted by the festival organisers. You could say they were paranoid, but of course this was the day Gordon Brown was speaking, and it was hard to think they were with this security guard standing at the entrance nearby:

and these signs on the gate to the 'VIP' car park:


But not everyone's so hot on security. The Guardian seem to be having a high old time in their festival bus. On Saturday afternoon my partner wandered into their enclosure and had a glass of champagne and a scone with jam and strawberries and cream, before he realised he was in a private party...

I'm left with the words of the woman who runs the Castle Bookshop. 'We've hardly had a soul in all day,' she said on Friday. 'But even so, we've had something stolen.'

Blogging Reporter at Hay

Debi Alper has been invited by ArtsWOM to attend the Hay-on-Wye Festival as a blogging reporter, from this afternoon's opening to Saturday morning. To my great delight she invited me to accompany her as her guest, and I accepted right away, only then to be faced with sudden complications in producing one of my plays, so it remains to be seen when I actually make it to Hay.

John Baker will take over the Hay blogging later in the week.

Net Value

Thanks to Zoe Margolis for the link to a Guardian article today by John Crace questioning whether material published on the web can afterwards have any financial value, and her own counterpoint argument in the comments section.

And in the same edition John Crace gives good giggle as usual over the morning cuppa, with a digested read of the novel harshly critiqued on Saturday by Pankaj Mishra: Don Delillo's This Falling Man:

Keith had been alive for six days now yet all he could feel was the symbolism of his alienation. The planes had hit, but everyone else was missing. Even the living were missing each other. Missing themselves. Deep.

Up above the New York skyline, she saw a man dangling from a rope. It was a performance artist. The Falling Man. Lianne felt her guts cramp with poignancy. The image of the towers. He was falling. She was falling. And the critics would certainly fall for it.

Your Freedom, My Restraint

Vanessa Gebbie alerts us, in the comments section of my post below, to David Edgar's recent Asham lecture at Sussex University, in which he spoke of the new censorship facing authors from groups demanding 'the freedom not to be upset'.

Post-9/11 Literature

Not often I get actually excited by a literary article nowadays, but I am excited by Pankaj Mishra's article in yesterday's Guardian Review, in which he considers the response of American and British novelists to 9/11 and the newly emerged world order.

Fittingly, it's literary journalism of the most iconoclastic, offering a fundamental reappraisal of the nature and value of contemporary western fiction. He considers the usual suspects, those white male writers who are viewed as having claimed this ground and who so often seem to inhabit a literary tower impenetrable to criticism, and finds them lacking:

Struggling to define cultural otherness, DeLillo, Updike and Amis fail to recognise that belief and ideology remain the unseen and overwhelming forces behind gaudy fantasies about virgins. Assembled from jihad-mongering journalism and propaganda videos and websites, their identikit terrorists make Conrad's witheringly evoked revolutionaries in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes look multidimensional.

These authors fail to transcend the Western literary cult of individual experience, he implies, and continue to see the situation in terms of a simple opposition between 'Muslims' and 'the west' which simply does not echo the experience of many Muslims for whom 'the west is inseparable from their deepest sense of themselves'.

'Most of the literary fiction that self-consciously addresses 9/11 still seems underpinned by outdated assumptions of national isolation and self-sufficiency', he says. He sees too the voyeuristic fictive efforts of these writers to recreate the twin-towers experience as 'fuelled by masculine anxiety' and points out that female writers like Deborah Eisenberg, Claire Messud and Jennifer Egan, who treat the events more glancingly, are more successful at conveying 'how the obsessions with terror, image, novelty and celebrity work out in ordinary ... life'. There is a rich fund of such writing, he tells us - including that from Kiran Desai, David Mitchell and Jeffrey Eugenides - to which we should be looking for a true evocation of a 'new spiritual homelessness.'

And for me, as a writer, this was truly the best and most dynamic kind of criticism: it has inspired me to rush to my desk and write!

Reversion of Rights at Risk?

Danuta Kean alerts us to an article in yesterday's New York Times reporting a move by publishers Simon and Schuster which is seen as extremely worrying by the American Author's Guild. Traditionally, once books fall out of print, if the publisher is not prepared to reprint, the rights revert to the author, but it seems that a change in Simon and Schuster's author contract allows them to retain the rights as long as it exists in any form, including electronic.

Simon and Schuster claim that this is simply a response to new technology, ie print on demand, whereby it is no longer necessary for publishers to retain a minimum number of warehoused printed copies. However, Guild executive Paul Aiken sees great danger in print on demand which can mean that the book is available 'only in dribs and drabs' (and therefore not aggressively published) and this new contract as allowing Simon and Schuster to sit on the rights to a book indefinitely while they stop bothering to publish it altogether. “We’re not against the technology," he says, "we’re just against the technology being used to lock up rights.”

However, on the Guardian books blog, Nicholas Clee reports Mark LeFanu, general secretary of the UK Society of Authors, as seeing such changes in contracts as inevitable: "We need to work out a way in which we can give reasonable protection to publishers' interests while at the same time giving authors the opportunity to withdraw from contracts if sales are low."

Recently the Writer's Guild lawyer, vetting my contract with Salt, advised striking the clause which gave them electronic rights. But electronic rights are precisely the basis of Salt's innovative business model, and there was indeed a clause giving me back the rights if sales fall beneath a certain level within a certain time span.

Publishers With a One Track Mind

An interesting post from Debi Alper on a rash of book covers spectacularly similar to this:

Books as Dice

Publishers may be obsessed with the market but apparently they know nothing about marketing, according to an amusing article in the New York Times. Curtis Sittenfeld, author of the best-selling Prep, is quoted thus: “People think publishing is a business, but it’s a casino.”

Thanks to David Isaak for the link.

Orwell, Where Are You?

Nicholas Wroe reports John Lanchester's view that the word literary has joined feminist and socialist in connotation and is now seen as the 'publishing kiss of death'.

Excuse me while I go and cover my head in grief for my life-long belief in the power of words, now that words can mean whatever you decide, and the people who are doing the deciding are those whose real interests are anything but verbal.

The Writing Tag

David Isaak has tagged me. I don't usually respond to being tagged, but since this one's about writing I've made an exception.

Copy the questions into your blog and answer them. Then tag five other writers to do the same!

1. Do you outline? As a novelist? Is the Pope Protestant? (Well, there's always something there, sometimes clearer, sometimes fuzzier, like the outline of a ghost, lurking in an image, or an idea. But I never want it to be too clear, actually, otherwise why write the bloody thing? Writing's an exploration, not knowing everything and having to find it out is a great deal of the excitement, which will be transmitted to the reader). But as a radio dramatist? Is the Pope of the other persuasion? No one will let you write anything for radio or screen without an outline they can approve, and quite frankly that's writing by numbers: many's the time I've discovered that a play doesn't really want to and shouldn't be made to go the way it seemed logical at outline stage that it should. And that, not to put too fine a point on it, is why so much in the media is bland, unsurprising trash.

2. Do you write straight through a book, or do you sometimes tackle the scenes out of order? I don't do straight, my novels aren't linear, the episodes are always out of order, but yes, because there's another sort of order, the thematic, they do tend to stay in the sequence in which they come out.

3. Do you prefer writing with a pen or using a computer? You're joking me, encha? Isn't this the question writers can wearily and sneerily predict will be asked at every reading and render them gob-smacked because they do not understand why anybody wants to know or even gives a flying f***??? And if you think I'm going to confess to the panics I undergo when I can't find my silver Cross fountain pen...

4. Do you prefer writing in first person or third? Preference doesn't come into it. Each book, or section of a book makes its own demands in this respect.

5. Do you listen to music while you write? If so, do you create a playlist, listen randomly, or pick a single song that fits the book? Come off it, I'm making my own music in my head!

6. How do you come up with the perfect names for your characters? Who said they were perfect? Usually they just come, and like names in real life, once they're there you accept them and they fit. And then it's pretty hard having to ditch them because they turn out to be the names of real people, say...

7. When you're writing, do you ever imagine your book as a television show or movie? No, no, no... this is what makes me furious! When will people learn that novels aren't just fodder for movies or TV dramas? If I want to write a movie I'll damn well write a movie. (Didn't stop me thrilling, though, when one of my novels was optioned for TV).

8. Have you ever had a character insist on doing something you really didn't want him/her to do? Nah, they can do what they like and they do.

9. Do you know how a book is going to end when you start it? Sometimes. But then sometimes I turn out to be wrong.

10. Where do you write? You're at it again. I'd like to say on the roof or down a cave. You know where I write really, don't you?

11. What do you do when you get writer's block? Spit. Shout. Sigh. Eat. Feel sick. Drive my partner round the bend. No solutions, I'm afraid.

12. What size increments do you write in (either in terms of wordcount, or as a percentage of the book as a whole)? About three pages a day.

13. How many different drafts did you write for your last project? Three, if you count the aborted first go a few years ago when I hadn't guessed the secret, ie what the novel was really about.

14. Have you ever changed a character's name midway through a draft? Oh yes, see above. My mum reminded me that I hadn't changed the name of a right bitch. (Oops, I'm supposed to be writing fiction.)

15. Do you let anyone read your book while you're working on it, or do you wait until you've completed a draft before letting someone else see it? It's not a question of letting, it's a question of forcing - just one person, my partner: I make him sit down at the end of every writing day and look at what I've written, notwithstanding the weary set of his shoulders and the faint sigh...

16. What do you do to celebrate when you finish a draft? Go out! And fling my arms about and run!

17. One project at a time, or multiple projects at once? More than one? God forbid!

18. Do your books grow or shrink in revision? Mmm, neither really. Maybe I should be worried...

19. Do you have any writing or critique partners? Well, I don't think when it's done at knife point you see it as a partnership (see above), but my real-life partner's a damn good critic.

20. Do you prefer drafting or revising? I can't answer this. It's all a continuum for me, and although I know that later it's more like fine-tuning, it still feels part of the same process of pulling this thing together out of the ether.

I'm supposed to tag five other novelists now, and they can take it up or not as they wish:

Debi Alper
Amanda Mann
Clare Sudbury
Marie Phillips
Lucy Diamond

What Do They Think Novels Are for?

Although Daniel Green at The Reading Experience was pretty harsh in his judgement of Zadie Smith's recent essay on fiction, he now offers an incisive post which concurs with her complaint therein that editors and academics now read novels primarily for subject matter, ignoring elements such as form and language and thus missing the essential point of fiction.

Robert McCrum Shifts his View

In response to the flurry of literary prizes (including, incredibly, three new ones for short stories, the National, the Frank O'Connor, and the Edge Hill), Robert McCrum muses interestingly on their role.

In [the contemporary] blizzard of commentary, from the blogosphere to talk radio, he says, newspaper review pages are no longer the 'ultimate gatekeepers' of literary taste, and, while admitting to having had his own merry digs at lit prizes in the past, he says that now the time has come to acknowledge the role [literary prizes] play in shaping public taste.

For those to whom this will come as heresy, he asks (with a searing frankness which is one of the best comments on last autumn's newspaper/blog review debate):

How much more reliable are reviews? Would you rather submit your first novel to a clique of well-lunched literati in a Soho meeting room than a (probably) failed novelist writing late in his/her dressing gown somewhere in the purlieus of Dollis Hill? Are the deliberations of a prize jury any less contingent than the speculations of a literary editor and his/her reviewers?

The literary prize has many well-rehearsed drawbacks, but it has one great virtue: it is conducted in public and is answerable to scrutiny. To some, that just leads to another disqualification (timid juries, they say, simply confirm the conventional wisdom). But it does not have to be so.

Guest Article: Julian Gough on Short Stories and Winning the National Competition

For some reason which must be to do with the engaging and off-the-wall character which informs his writing, Julian Gough has decided to privilege the Fictionbitch and this blog by offering his funny yet acute take on winning the prize and on the short story in general, for posting below. Since my last post stirred up something of a row, still ongoing, in the comments section, about why short stories should be beleaguered, Julian's (previously written) piece is apposite and timely. Many many thanks, Julian, and all power to you, I say.

Here is the piece by Julian Gough:

Twelve hours after the announcement of the winner of the National Short Story Prize for 2007, I was still on the piss with A S Byatt. What a mind! I’d never met her before. I might never meet her again. Obviously I had to try. But she told me firmly that she is extremely married. So this might be shaky, due to heartache and champagne.

Some people worry that the short story, like the vole, is declining due to loss of habitat.

I am here with news of joy. It is going to be OK.

The modern short story is often to be found hiding in a novel, often an Irish novel. English novels tend to go for the one broad arc, like a cast iron bridge by Brunel, with some curlicue and filigree to give texture. The Irish novel tends to have a single structuring principle, which is used to give a different kind of unity to a thousand shards of story, mosaiced. The English novel is made of iron and is cast, the Irish novel is made of everything and is assembled. You see it in the many styles of Joyce’s Ulysses, the many sources and voices of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds, the various islands and incidents of Swift’s Gullivers’s Travels.

A fugitive short story could hide comfortably in any great Irish novel. A character could just open his mouth in a pub, and the story could inhabit his mouth like a cave. I’ve hidden short stories in the mouths of characters, deep inside novels, myself.

No, no need to worry. The short story is merely hiding out in the novel until it is safe to come out. And soon it will be safe to come out. Because the internet is creating a vast new habitat that has not yet found its final shape, or final inhabitants. Cyberspace is ripe to be colonized by the small and nimble vole of the short story, who will change his form to suit the new terrain. But it will still be short, and still a story. It’s going to be alright.

Meanwhile the people creating the biggest problems for the short story are the short story writers. Especially the dead ones. Because Chekhov was so good, so revolutionary, contemporary short story writers think that they can be revolutionary by copying him. They copy him: and the revolution doesn’t happen and the audience wanders off. Because that’s not how you do it.

Chekhov didn’t have a television. He didn’t have broadband access to everything ever right here and right now always on and ever ready. Chekhov wouldn’t write Chekhovian short stories if he were alive today. He’d write something else.

If you are a writer, maybe you should stop showing us in meticulously observed and realistic detail the realistic things which we (after a century of Chekhov’s subtle influence) meticulously observe ourselves every day, and which tell us nothing new about the world or ourselves.

Go wild. Wilder. Rip it up and start again. You can’t make a mistake, because there aren’t any rules yet…

A suggestion. If you want to go forward, go much further back. Take a running jump at it. Don’t read Ian McEwan. He’s very good, but he is of no use to you. Kill the father, and embrace the grand father. Read Rabelais. Read Erasmus. Read Aristophanes. Read somebody I’ve never heard of, someone out of print for the past three hundred years, who has just been put up online by Project Gutenberg, or Google Book Search. And rip them off something rotten. Steal it, take the wheels off, rebuild the engine, see if it can be converted into a seaplane, collide it with Krazy Kat, or Swedish jazz, or Somali hip hop, or the stories your mother tells about working on the production line at a pea canning factory in Germany when she was nineteen.

The spark of art comes from banging things together.

There is a potential downside to making it new. The publishing industry might have problems recognizing its merits, and will definitely have problems marketing it and selling it through channels which are friendlier to industrial product in standard packaging (Pink and pale blue and lime green for chick lit, dark orange flames against black, with gold type, for SAS memoirs… just slot book into package.)

I spent seven years having a go at revolutionizing the novel. At the end of it I had no money, no publisher, and was homeless. But I had some bloody good art, and that has to be enough for you because it may well be all you will get.

I was lucky. Halfway through writing my novel Jude, I realized I needed to step outside it, and write a short story. I needed to see where Jude had come from, and why he had left on the quest of the novel. So I wrote “The Orphan and the Mob”. And I wrote it as well as I could. I wrote it insanely meticulously (draft after draft, polish after polish, building in layer after layer), considering how it was a short story and would never earn me any money. And then it won the National Short Story Prize. And I cried.


It is incredibly important for writers to be able to write at any length.
Some ideas are short, and some ideas are long, and we need to make sure that the good stuff gets to the reader intact, neither cropped nor stretched to fit the publishing industry. This prize is terrific because it brings short stories out of hiding and into the spotlight, brings them to big audiences, at a time when the publishing industry either can’t or won’t.

Whatever you want to write, write it the way you want to write it, write it whatever length it wants to be, and stick it up on the internet if nobody will publish it. Don’t kill it to fit it into an industrial box. Artistically, we live in a golden age of freedom, and that’s terrifying. Commercially, we live with market censorship of certain forms. It’s a pain, but it’s survivable. I’m running out of time, the deadline is here, the champagne is wearing off, so, last suggestions: try comedy instead of tragedy. Ditch realism for a bit, see what happens. Because reality isn’t realistic any more.

Call this reality? Call this realistic? On the piss with A S Byatt, in a place that doesn’t allow mobile phones. A writer born in London, back in London, with an Irish mobile phone stuffed down my left sock and a German mobile phone stuck down my right sock, both phones vibrating with congratulations from England and Ireland and America and Berlin. Vibrating with love from around the one world.

It’s hard, being a writer. It’s lonely. May you all have such a moment in your future. May there be enough love to go round.

Julian Gough

Winterson Dares to Say it

In a sidebar column accompanying a Guardian article (today) on the effect of the Blair administration on the arts, Jeanette Winterson is quoted thus:

Blair is only interested in popular culture and not the arts. He is by nature and mission a leveller, and art asks people to be more than they are, better that they are; it asks for intensity, concentration and effort. Blair worries too much about elitism to recognise art's power to change lives.

Unfortunately, you can imagine that some people will give this statement scant intensity or concentration, for Winterson herself has sometimes been accused of elitism, for her challenging, uncompromising and sometimes extremely daring prose, and indeed for her very insistence on art as corrective and transformative. She takes a moral and evangelizing stance to literature which is easily dismissed when clearly stemming from her proselytizing religious background, and in a culture where government and big business go hand in hand to 'please' and pander to 'choice'.

It gets harder and harder to say some things. In a comment on my post below, Alan Kellog makes some points about why short stories are so hard to sell which, though true, made my heart sink, feeding as they could into prejudices against the short story form. And recently, after a reading by short-story writer Chrissie Gittins, several of us discussed an issue about short stories which I felt I could hardly replicate on my blog for fear of doing the same. Several commentators, we noted, had recently pushed the short story as ideal for our age of rush, when people don't have time for long novels, and I have done it myself when selling the short-story mag metropolitan. Yet I know I was wrong, and the other day all of us, all short-story writers, felt strongly that this not only did a disservice to short stories but reinforced the cultural expectations which are squashing them: short stories, more than novels, require the intensity, the concentration and attention which Winterson identifies - and which nowadays seem to many people a BAD THING.

But the Bad Thing in reality is a culture and a society in which this state of affairs can occur, in which people, including Tony Blair, see freedom only in placation and passivity. And as Adam Curtis recently showed in his stunning BBC film The Trap, such 'freedom for the people' is in fact nothing of the kind.

Salt and the Frank O'Connor Prize

I've been away for a few days and thought that now I'm back I'd be changing my tune, but the short story is keeping afloat as a subject. The longlist has been announced for the prestigious Frank O'Connor award for a collection of stories, and on the list alongside Alice Munro and David Malouf appear authors from independent British publisher Salt, Chrissie Gittins, Jay Merill and John Saul.

While Salt's self-styled 'literary' character is thus confirmed, their concern with business strategy is considered and energetic, as publisher Chris Hamilton-Emery demonstrates here, here and here.

Short Story Tricks

Well, Scott Pack is bigging up the short story anyway, and says he has something up his sleeve...

Yawning Over Short Stories?

Not that much talk about the short story, though. Admittedly I'm in a hurry this morning, but one newspaper report on the National Short Story Competition result , announced yesterday, is all I can find.

Coming Up Trumps

Congratulations to Julian Gough, perhaps the least well known of the shortlisters, for winning the National Short Story Competition. I heard his story, The Orphan and the Mob, on Radio 4, and it was indeed for me a true short story: something luminous and apparently miniature holding something huge and profound, texturally complex yet vivid, patterned and musical and rich with allusion and, above all, a close attention to language. And, in that these qualities were preserved, beautifully adapted for radio. A great winner, plenty of controversy to set people talking about the short story: maybe the competition has come up trumps after all.

I am privileged to pull up here Julian's comment on my posts on the subject, a fascinating description of his response to the radio adaptation process:

"I'm glad you liked my comments on the problems of pushing highly individual works of art down distribution channels designed to handle a standard product.

I have very recent experience of the process, having had my shortlisted story ("The Orphan and the Mob") cut to fit the BBC's thirty minute slot.

Not having read the small-print, I hadn't realised the BBC were going to cut my story until they'd already abridged it and recorded it. The deed was done with no input from me whatsoever. And as you say, when you take out bits of a short story, it isn't the same story any more. A story is about the arrangement of parts, about particular rhythms and resonances, and all of that is totally altered when bits are cut out.

In my case, they removed all the swearing and a lot of the biological detail. Jokes were shortened. (Three variations on a comic riff would be cut back to one, so there was no sense of a riff at all).

So what they broadcast wasn't my story. It was something else.

But... but... but... having been through the process... and having been furious at first... I have come round to another way of looking at it.

Because the finished broadcast was superb. It wasn't my story, but it was great radio. At my suggestion they had cast Conor Lovett, the finest Beckett actor of his generation, as the 18-year old Jude. The BBC had started by auditioning 18 and 20 year olds straight out of drama school. When I reacted with horror, and suggested Conor Lovett, they auditioned him and loved him and cast him. Trust me, the lack of ego required to do that, and the sensitivity to the writer's suggestions, would never occur in, say, the film industry.

And the abridgement was, in its way, terrific. It was sensitive to the rhythms of the piece, and when it changed them, as it did, it managed to find new rhythms that worked. Usually slightly faster, more staccato ones, because of the cuts, but that gave it an energy which a linear medium like radio needs.

They took out some of my favorite Irish swearing ("Ardcrony ballocks!") and all mentions of urethral sphincters (and the original had a lot of them), but I can understand that, at three thirty in the afternoon, if the BBC broadcast my story intact, it would probably not get its charter renewed. Do you really want the playgrounds of England to resound to cries of "Ardcrony ballocks!" I think not.

And much of the cutting made it work better for radio. You can't pretend a short story is best transferred intact to radio. It isn't. My story ended with a purely visual sequence, where Jude, as he leaves the burning orphanage, hears the scratched orphanage single clearly for the first time. We read his uncomprehending and phonetic version of the lyrics,

"Some...
Where...
Oh...
Werther...
Aon...
Bo..."

and we realise (but he does not) that it's "Somewhere over the rainbow..."

Well all that just cannot be done on the radio. The bilingual puns ("Aon bo" is the Irish for "One cow") and all the rest only exist as words on paper. They've got to go.

But this is radio: And what they replaced all the description with was simply this: the song itself, rising over Jude's final words (which are, unknown to Jude, from the Wizard of Oz, and from Yeats' "Leda and the Swan", and which work fine on the radio.)

And with Conor Lovett's truly extraordinary delivery, and Judy Garland's actual voice, I think the BBC created a moment that was better, more emotionally powerful, than my original. I really did feel the hairs rise on the back of my neck, and along my legs, no kidding.

And that is why, even though the BBC cut off my ballocks and removed my urethral sphincter, I think they should have their charter renewed. They can't win, trying to broadcast tough art in daytime slots. But they do as good a job as anyone could, and the alternative isn't a Nirvana of great art broadcast uncut to millions at lunchtime. It's no art broadcast at all.

A bit of me would like everyone, everywhere, to hear all of it, at all hours. But that's a child's wish. Everyone everywhere doesn't want to hear it, urethral sphincters and all.

And the original story still exists on the page for all of those who do.

And my mum rang me after the broadcast to tell me how much she'd enjoyed it. Which was a result."

Fact, Fiction and the Truth

Mark Lawson, chair of the judges for the NESTA-endowed National Short Story Competition (which I note he is calling the Radio4/Prospect prize) gives his take today on the censorship row (over Hanif's Kureishi's shortlisted entry), and in the process makes some acute points about fiction. He worries

that we are imposing a kind of touchy-feely D-notice on authors who achieve one of the main justifications of writing: describing the world as it is... Fiction should not be penalised for understanding fact.

It is as if, as I said earlier this week, we expect fiction to remain in some safe fantasy world which cushions us from reality. Yet here's an apparent conundrum. Earlier this week in the same paper, The Guardian, Mark Ravenhill bemoaned a situation about which I have also often complained: that there is an apparent tendency to look for fact in our literary art, that we seem hooked on plays about real events and real-life people.

But it's not a conundrum really. As I have said before, and as Ravenhill says, there's something of the security blanket about docu-dramas and memoirs. For the audience or the reader of these forms there is I believe a psychological mechanism working whereby we can distance the experience or situation being portrayed: it all happened to someone else, a particular defined person. Although many would claim to love a memoir because it 'described their own experience', the memoir in fact operates as a kind of 'shifting machine' and on the most fundamental level we don't have to identify. Whereas, as Mark Lawson points out, a successful piece of fiction creates a generic situation from a specific phenomenon, ie it universalises and thus forces identification by the reader.

As Ravenhill says, the creative imagination can be thus frightening. It is, as I said in my last post, why a story about a situation can be seen as too dangerous to broadcast when news reports of similar real-life situations aren't. It is why a certain kind of fiction apparently doesn't sell.

It is as if, caught in a world of spin and media-generated fantasy, we become hooked in compensation on 'fact, fact, fact', yet, creatures of our time, we can't really bear the truth.

Who's Afraid of the Big Short Story?

The BBC insists that it is not cancelling but postponing the broadcast of Hanif Kureishi's story Weddings and Beheadings (shortlisted for the National Short Story competition), and implies, interestingly, that its motives are not entirely political but also literary. On Radio 4's Today programme this morning, John Humphrys reports that one BBC concern is that if broadcast of the story were to take place during the current crisis (concerning BBC reporter Alan Johnston), this would affect the way 'the story would be perceived'.

But this of course begs all sorts of questions. For one, does the BBC - as some of us have long suspected - not consider that short stories should be perceived in any political light? Are short stories not meant to be political? Are they supposed to remain in some kind of cosy tea-and-buns English-heritage world of 'entertainment'? Kureishi, interviewed this morning by Humphrys, refuses to budge from his position, insisting that the move is censorship, stating that the BBC 'should be committed to relevant and contemporary work', and that one of his jobs as a writer is indeed to write about the contemporary world.

But what about the feelings of Johnston's family? asks Humphrys. And here we get to the nub of the matter. What about the feelings of Johnston's family when Humphrys introduces the item by reminding us that a little-known group has claimed to have killed him? What's the difference? Well, of course we know the difference: good fiction makes us live and feel the truth of our contemporary world in a way far beyond the scope of news bulletins. This is the power of fiction; it is the power of which the BBC and much of our media nowadays, committed to bland entertainment, seem afraid.

But I am delighted to find the short-listers in this competition kicking up against this media stranglehold, on the short story in particular. First Julian Gough, now this, and later on in today's programme, Jonathan Falla using the publicity afforded by the competition to draw attention to the dire status of the short story within British culture: a publisher to whom he sent his short-listed story (offering a collection) replied that he had not even scanned it, since short stories are so hard to sell (something Salt would not agree with).

On the surface of things, the radio commitment seems like a brake on the possibilities of this competition, but in the event it seems to be exposing some of the important questions about the short story in Britain today.

Piping Up on the Wireless

Yesterday I wrote about the literary restrictions BBC broadcast must inevitably place on the short stories in the National Short Story Competition, but today we witness the BBC imposing a restriction of a different, but maybe not unconnected, kind: political censorship, as Hanif Kureishi calls the cancellation of his short-listed story Weddings and Beheadings 'in the wake of the news that BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston has been killed by a jihadist group'. Kureishi is implied to be furious, and is crying freedom of speech, as authors half-delight in doing on such occasions, knowing full well that if a piece of work is worth banning then it must have hit a true nerve and is probably pretty something.

And on this morning's BBC Today programme fellow short-lister Julian Gough, who made clear that his story too has profound political undercurrents, gave somewhat excited and rebellious voice to the idea that forcing literature into marketing time-slots is crazy: 'The art gets mangled going down that pipe.'

You can't hear Jackie Kay talking about her story yesterday, as the links on the BBC website seem in fact to have got mangled. Broadcast yesterday afternoon, it was the beautifully captured perspective of a Glaswegian man in despair and intent on committing suicide but slowly pulling himself together as he gets involved in the practicalities. For me, though, it was less subtle than many of her other stories, and you can just imagine that clever Jackie pitching it, with its single focus and repetitions, specifically for the parameters of radio.

National Short Story Competition

The shortlist for the National Short Story Competition was unveiled on Friday, and I'm wondering whether the fact that I can't find any news reports about it is yet more evidence of our national lack of interest in the short story, or of the fact that news editors, like me, find the competition an uninspiring creature. Last year, its first year, this competition attracted over 1,400 entries, but this year only 428 entered, presumably discouraged by the establishment status of last years' winners. Well, OK, nothing wrong with sorting the wheat from the chaff (ie ensuring the seriousness of entrants) and signalling from the start that this is to be a competition of status, but the suspicion arose then that there was a focus on a certain kind of status, and at the expense of innovation for which the short story can be a supreme vehicle.

It's hard to comment on something you went in for but failed at, without looking as if you're crying sour grapes, but (Bitch that I am) I'll go ahead anyway.

In fact there are names on this year's shortlist which are unfamiliar to me *, and clearly it is only by listening to the stories (all this week on Radio 4) that we'll be able to judge, but the fact that the shortlist consists of five men and one woman with a story about a man fails at this juncture to reassure that the establishment flavour has been dispelled. Jackie Kay, the one woman and the only writer on the list whose short stories I know well, is indeed a brilliant short-story writer: her stories are lucid, tight, vivid and utterly humane. And here's an important point: they work beautifully on radio.

For this is the unacknowledged requirement of any story submitted for this competition: it needs to work on radio, broadcast being part of the prize. Stories with a conversational voice like those of Jackie's work on radio, stories with strong characterisation (again like Jackie's) work on radio, as do monologues and stories without too much dialogue allowing a credible reading by an actor. There are stories which definitely don't work on radio: strongly non-linear stories, stories with typographical patterning, or any kind of innovation which can't be picked up easily by the ear. It is hard not to conclude that certain kinds of stories would be out of the running.

Here is one of the competition rules:

'By submitting a story Entrants agree that the BBC may in its sole discretion edit, adapt or abridge it for the sole purposes of broadcast.' (My italics)

Well, as far as I'm concerned anyone who can make a rule like that simply doesn't understand the nature of short stories - that the perfect short story is a web of connections, all of its parts perfectly orchestrated, that it has to be the length it is and not a scheduler's required minute count.

As last year, the judges' comments have betrayed a similarly reductive and slightly defensive approach to the short story. On Radio 4 Monica Ali spoke only of the range of subject-matter covered in the shortlist. On the BBC website chair Mark Lawson again stresses subject matter, stating that

this year's selection makes very clear that there is no connection at all between word-count and the scale of subject-matter or characterisation that can be achieved

and James Lasdun (also last year's winner), when asked what was the essential value of the short story(admittedly he was being rushed), reacted like a rabbit caught in the headlights and could only come up with 'Economy.'

* Edited in: As last year, every author on the short list is however a published novelist.

Kurt Vonnegut

A long time ago, when I was hardly a writer, I was taken to a talk given to a Science faculty by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut shambled onto a stage where an old-fashioned blackboard had been placed. He picked up the chalk and proceeded to draw. He drew waves and wiggly lines and arrows dipping in and out of the waves. He was drawing for us the creative process and his own imagination. I don't know what that scientific audience made of it, but it was the moment which crystallized for me what writing was all about: about making connections, and finding forms to show those connections, and, in the service of that, daring to be brave and eccentric and not to give a hoot for the expected conventions.

A great writer has gone. Everyone else has said it, so I may as well: So it goes.

Cult of Youth? Pff!

An unnamed editor and Arrow publishing director Kate Elton are to be congratulated for flying in the face of the cult of youth and, respectively, rescuing from the slush pile and publishing the memoir of 96-year-old Harry Bernstein. And hooray for Bernstein, I say.

Here's what Bernstein has to say:

If I had not lived until I was 90, I would not have been able to write this book. It just could not have been done even when I was 10 years younger. I wasn't ready. God knows what other potentials lurk in other people, if we could only keep them alive well into their 90s.

Interestingly, the International Herald Tribune reports: Because Bernstein's book arrived without a cover letter from an agent, Elton said, "it had none of the overhyped pitch that you sometimes get with these things, and I read it without knowing what I was getting at all" which makes one wonder if agent hype sometimes gets in the way of a book's chances with jaded or cynical publishers.

Mind you, this book is a memoir, the current golden egg laying goose of publishers. Bernstein, a lifelong writer who has only now achieved his breakthrough, tells us:

I realized ... why I had failed in writing novels. Because I turned away from personal experience and depended on imagination.

I know what he means: that had he confronted his personal experience via fiction, then his fiction might have been more successful, but the statement is unfortunately in danger of feeding into the current prejudice against fiction or 'imagination' in favour of memoir and 'fact'.

Thanks to Grumpy Old Bookman for the link.

Google Book Search

In yesterday's Guardian John Lanchester tackles the issue of copyright and Google Book Search in a wide-ranging and thoughtful article which counterbalances the alarmed views of publisher Nigel Newton expressed in the same paper a year ago. Lanchester points out that there is no breach of copyright in GBS: if publishers do not join the book-scanning programme then only a tiny snippet of text of any of their books in print is available, yet the books are drawn to public attention and links provided to shops and libraries where they are available - which seems to me more like a service and free advertising than anything, as Kate Hyde points out on her blog. And if publishers do opt in, then only 20% of a book is available online, and you have to buy it or borrow it from a library to read the rest.

The real area of contention, says Lanchester, is those books which are still in copyright but out of print, and which 'Google wants to make available online.' His implication seems to be that Google wants to make them available online in their entirety: 'It seems to me this would mean, in some crucial sense, Google was actually the publisher of the book.'

When I recently discovered on Google Book Search two out-of-print short-story anthologies in which my work had appeared (courtesy of the participating Library of the University of Michigan) I was delighted - work which had been seemed to slip off the face of the earth was suddenly current again! - and when they disappeared off GBS a week or so later (as a result of the ongoing dispute?) I was disappointed. How many people will come across those publications if they are not reinstated on Google? In fact the books appeared in the usual Google formula: only a tiny snippet of the contents page of one was readable, and nothing of the other. Personally, though, I wouldn't have cared a fig if they had appeared whole. Actually, I'd have been happier: one of those stories of mine is not available to read anywhere else, the publishers are never going to reprint those books, and I can find only one used copy of one book and four of the other for sale on the web. Neither the publishers nor we contributors are going to make any more money out of those books, and I for one would rather those stories were still being read.

Identity Crisis

I haven't read Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, so I can't comment on Natasha Walter's review in last week's Guardian, but I am very interested in McEwan's reply to it this week. While acknowledging that the review was generally positive, he takes exception to the fact that Walter conflates one character's views of anti-nuclear campaigners with his own as the author - or indeed as a real-life person: Walter pronounces, 'You cannot judge a novelist for his political views'.

One would need to read the novel to be able to say whether there is a true distinction in attitude between character and author, but McEwan is a sophisticated and more than conscious enough writer for me to believe that there is, and for me his closing statement strikes a true chord:

I sometimes wonder whether these common critical confusions arise unconsciously from a prevailing atmosphere of empowering consumerism - the exaltation of the subjective, the "not in my name" syndrome. It certainly seems odd to me that such simple precepts need pointing up: your not "liking" the characters is not the same as your not liking the book; you don't have to think the central character is nice; the views of the characters don't have to be yours, and are not necessarily those of the author; a novel is not always all about you.

I have written previously here about the way that the Cult of Personality - powered, as McEwan indicates, by commercial imperatives - and the consequent appetite for memoir and the focus on the author of a fiction rather than the book, are eroding our understanding of the nature of fiction and the fictive process. This in turn erodes our appreciation of fiction and devalues it and leads to a situation in which, if he is to be believed, a publisher can persuade James Frey against his wishes to allow his work of fiction to be marketed as a memoir.

Literary Magazines and Online and Print Literary Communities

Daniel Green at The Reading Experience reacts more negatively than the Bitch, to say the least, to the news of Laurence Johns' new literary venture. He concentrates on a point the Bitch skipped over, Johns' statement made in answer to the question, What on earth would possess anybody, in the age of user-generated content and online communities, to engage with the expense and practical difficulties of a print magazine?: 'Reading is not something you do in front of a computer'. Green pours scorn on such a statement, pointing out that plenty of us are doing that just now, engaging in debates about literature at our computers.

Well, this last is true, of course, but one would hope that To Hell with Publishing will include a substantial element of online activity, as do US McSweeney's and innovative UK publisher Salt. Green says:

If Laurence Johns was truly interested in bringing readers to writers, he'd save himself money, and inevitable failure, by publishing those stories in a form accessible to readers who do spend at least some of their time "in front of a computer" but are nevertheless "people who love reading."

My reactions to this are mixed. Having once published a print literary magazine (in the days just before literature took off on the web) I have always said precisely that, that I would never do it that way again now that there is the web. But then, as Johns says, people do like a book to hold (and take to the bath), don't we? And how much of what we read online is literature, the primary thing, as opposed to debates about literature? And isn't it actual books which are generating discussion online? And as for community: well, I love this online literary community, but isn't it primarily a community of readers, rather than of Johns' concept of readers and writers interacting - and isn't it in the main reacting to the output of the mainstream publishers which, as we have established, are instrumental in suppressing our writers' most innovative and challenging work?

In the midst of all this comes news today of the possibility of an Arts Council-funding threat to one of our longest-running print literary mags, the London Magazine, which DJ Taylor, echoing Johns, claims 'prints work of genuine merit that would otherwise have difficulty finding a publisher'. Well, again, I have mixed feelings. Having once been published by the London Magazine I have a reflex reaction of loyalty, and I'm with Taylor when he points out that it's outrageous that such a project should suffer - nay, be killed off - for the sake of the Olympics. On the other hand, I have to say that the story I had printed there, and indeed any of the stories I have had printed in traditional print lit mags, have never had the kind of international attention given to those I've had published in an online magazine.

I can't help thinking that there has to be a new model (which maybe the London Magazine could embrace), a blending of the virtual and concrete literary worlds. I suppose it remains to be seen whether Johns' venture will be one answer.

Hellish Good Writing Gets an Alternative

The Observer reports an interesting and potentially exciting answer to an author problem discussed here recently, the difficulty of getting one's most innovative or challenging work published in an era of rampant commercialisation.

Rare book dealer Laurence Johns, Faber editor Lee Brackstone and Kevin Conroy Scott of the Wylie literary agency have launched a new project, To Hell with Publishing, which will embrace a limited edition traditional print literary journal, events with music and readings, and independently published books. The mission behind it all is, according to Johns, to create a literary community and to 'make it easer for writers and readers to communicate', as well as to allow authors to 'wrest back their creative freedom from the accountants' and to 'show work that ordinarily trade and mainstream publishers wouldn't publish', all beside finding 'space for new writers.'

This sounds great, and as far as the Bitch is concerned is truly innovative, at least in concept, since up to now, as I have pointed out previously, most alternative 'new writing schemes' have been concentrated on new writers, rather than on writing, and there has been no outlet for the work by more established writers which mainstream publishers, in their wisdom or folly (Who knows? But we should get a chance to judge for ourselves), deem uncommercial.

As the Observer points out, there's a clear precedent in the activities around Dave Eggers' US McSweeney's magazine, but there are already moves in this direction in the UK. My own publisher, Salt, is using innovative techniques to sell poetry and short stories and is about to begin a similar series of events in London's Whitechapel Gallery.

On Friday a standing-room-only Salt reading in Manchester provided the opportunity for several of us Salt authors to get together and plan further events, and seemed to prove that there are audiences eager to interact with writers in creative communities of this kind. (And it's not that it was non-commercial: a fair number of the authors' books were sold.)

Hell in a Handcart

Now let's get this straight:

Last week Danuta Kean got publishers to fess up to the way commercial pressures are cutting off authors' careers (and therefore, it follows, literature).

On Sunday Kate Kellaway got an agent to admit that an author's looks definitely come into the equation.

Some time in the last few days we heard that Wordsworth Editions has found it necessary to photoshop Jane Austen's portrait to make her prettier, and that since poor Virginia Woolf 'wasn't much of a looker' and George Eliot was 'frumpy' they're considering giving them a makeover as well. (Ms Baroque has an excellent post on the matter.)

And now the Bookseller announces 'a Dragon's Den-style show on ITV London which will seek out new author talent for publication under the Random House Group's Arrow imprint' involving top agent Ali Gunn and Simon Cowell's brother Anthony. (Thanks to Jessica at The Book Bar.) (Debut novelist Struggling Author has a great take on this.)

Hm.

Any one still up for claiming that publishers can still afford to care much about good literature?

But hey, publishers, here's a good wheeze: if photoshop can work for Jane, why not for the rest of us? (Oh, OK, I know, those TV appearances....)

A Triumph in Spite of it All

This morning all Bitchiness melts away from your blogger and she looks out at the sun-filled world and thinks: Here be justice.

Why? Because last night she had an email telling her that Tamar Yellin, a writer she considers brilliant and whom she once published in the short-story magazine Metropolitan, but whose subsequent novel was roundly declined by British publishers, has won with that very novel a major US-based international prize, the newly-inaugurated Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, 'the largest-ever Jewish literary prize given and one of the largest literary prizes in the nation.'

The independent US Toby Press should be congratulated for taking up Tamar's novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher, after a British literary agent failed to sell it to British publishers. (And today the Bitch and her erstwhile co-editor Ailsa Cox are patting themselves on the back for having published two of her early stories).

Ailsa and I set up Metropolitan as a deliberate attempt to counteract the loss of platform for short stories due to the increasing commercialisation of fiction publishing. We are very proud of the writers we published, both known and unknown. One of these was Russell Hoban, to whom Susan Hill recently drew attention in her 'underrated writers' series of blog posts.
So why did we jump on Tamar's stories the moment they came out of the envelopes when we were editing Metropolitan from my back room? Because they are written in the most beautiful prose, precise and spare and telling. They are utterly serious and political yet entirely accessible and filled with a wry humour and humanity. We just LOVED them!! How could she not have got published in Britain?? And it's not that she ain't young and attractive (re Kate Kellaway's recent depressing Observer article) (just look at the picture on the Jewish Book Council site).

Ee, British publishers, eh?

First or Second Novels?

Kate Kellaway writes in today's Observer about the difficulties for first-time novelists in an article titled: That difficult first novel. Well, I guess it's an ironic title (a play on the more usual phrase that difficult second novel), but I can't decide if the article itself is ironic or confused, as many of the problems it outlines seem indeed not to be the problems of first-time novelists but of second- or third-time ones. Getting a first novel published - and publicised - is harder than ever before, she says, but if Danuta Keane's research is anything to go by, publishers are publishing more first novels than previously and cutting back on their mid-list authors - for the very reasons of unearned advances, Neilsen Bookscan monitoring and heavily discounted books which Kellaway quotes.

The issue of publicity is a different matter. Kellaway quotes Kate Saunders, currently a judge of the Orange Prize: 'It is harder for first-time novelists to get noticed now. They will find, increasingly, that they are judged alongside their work - and are less likely to be taken on if they are not photogenic or newsworthy.' And as for first-time innovators, well, here's Kate Saunders again: 'Publishers seem enormously scared of too much originality. Many of the first novels we read this year appeared to be watered-down copies of something else.'

Well, this is indeed serious confirmation of what a lot of us have been saying, but if it's bad for first-timers, what's it like for the second-timers starting to grow crow's-feet, especially if they're stupidly innovative enough to divert from their own 'formulae'? And sure enough, it is those second-timers who did make it as first novelists which Kellaway ends up concentrating on. How do you follow a brilliant first novel with a second? she asks, and one publisher replies in ominous terms: 'I'm staring down the barrel of that particular gun at the moment.'

Book Chains Breaking

Now it's Borders shutting up shop.

And If It Is Their Fault, They're Paying For It...

This article confirms what I've always been saying.

Thanks to Clare for the link.

Is It the Writers' Fault?

Ms Baroque puts her mind to answering Henry Porter's question, Where are our Orwell and Dickens? and comes down to the view that we writers had better start getting our political act together. In today's Guardian, however, playwright Anthony Neilson bemoans the fact that much of our theatre is downright boring due to a contemporary playwriting concern with issues at the expense of story-telling. Like Porter he seems to be blaming the writers themselves, but, as I have said on my other, writer blog, my hunch is that a lot of this is down to the pressures on playwrights from theatre policies. As I indicated in my last post here, writers are now under such marketing pressure - whether of the populist variety predominant in the publishing industry and our larger theatres, or the bureaucratic mission-statement sort still holding sway in our alternative theatres - that they are no longer always in control of subject matter or even of style.

I went to the theatre last night and when I lit this morning on Neilson's statement that theatres are too often failing in their unique task of providing 'live magic', I thought: Funny he should say that...

It was the Library Theatre press night for Chapter Two by Neil Simon. The lights went up on an immaculately designed set: the living rooms of two flats. Nineteen-seventies? New York? - don't ask, I neither really know or care: in spite of the suggestion of surrealism in the two simultaneous locations, it was so rigidly (and yet somehow surreally) naturalistic and indicating so ominously what was to come that the Bitch's heart sank and her mind stopped focussing right from the start. And it came. A long silence while the audience 'appreciated' the set and its emptiness of people and developed an expectation. And then, just as we had expected (no surprise, no magic) a middle-aged man came in with a suitcase, put it down, and laboriously went through the usual, only-to-be expected rituals of someone returning from holiday.

The Bitch's partner yawned noisily. The Bitch, furious, biffed him in the ribs. As an occasional actor, the Bitch knows only too well how attuned an actor is to the responses of the audience and its tiniest sounds, most particularly in those first moments on that first night... The Bitch's partner hissed: 'But it's so boring!' and the Bitch wanted to crawl under her seat.

But he was right: as Anthony Neilson says, Boring an audience is the one true sin in theatre. Neilson is talking in the main about over-consciously political or 'poetic' theatre, but the same objection can be applied to hackneyed naturalistic theatre. OK, so this was a period piece, you could say, and OK, much of last night's audience - which, at the risk of sounding ageist and classist, was middle-aged, even elderly, and middle class - seemed to enjoy this play a lot better than did the Bitch and her partner. But I'd say that the laughter was too comfortable, and far too automatic, and one could ask why a present-day theatre wants to put on such an unchallenging piece.

What Neilson is saying is pretty important: we do need to challenge, as Henry Porter has said, but we need to do it in ways that first and foremost transport and entertain. But then what do you do when the first priority of publishers and producers is to pander to the market which wishes not to be challenged?

Whether Novels Matter

Plenty of meat in the newspaper literary pages this weekend, and some to delight the Bitch. Jed Mercurio, flouting Milan Kundera's warning that film adaptations of novels steal their essence, describes with relish in the Guardian the process of doing so (though I'd say not without revealing the odd doubt). However, a posthumous essay from Susan Sontag in the same paper sounds a deeply serious note about the growing encroachment of television culture on novels and on their crucial role in our social and intellectual life. Sontag says:

What serves "the modern" is standardization, homogenization. (Indeed, "the modern" is homogenization, standardization. The quintessential site of the modern is an airport; and all airports are alike, as all new modern cities, from Seoul to São Paulo, tend to look alike.) This pull toward homogenization cannot fail to affect the project of literature. The novel, which is marked by singularity, can only enter this system of maximum diff usion through the agency of translation, which, however necessary, entails a built-in distortion of what the novel is at the deepest level - which is not the communication of information, or even the telling of engaging stories, but the perpetuation of the project of literature itself, with its invitation to develop the kind of inwardness that resists the modern satieties

Television distances, she says, whereas novels pay attention and require the reader to do so:

I would argue that the mindset [the media] foster and the appetites they feed are entirely inimical to the writing (production) and reading (consumption) of serious literature... On the one hand, we have, through translation and through recycling in the media, the possibility of a greater and greater diffusion of our work. On the other hand, the ideology behind these unprecedented opportunities for diffusion, for translation - the ideology now dominant in what passes for culture in modern societies - is designed to render obsolete the novelist's prophetic and critical, even subversive, task, and that is to deepen and sometimes, as needed, to oppose the common understandings of our fate.

These should be words close to the hearts of us novelists but Henry Porter in the Observer suggests that our well-known writers are now colluding with this non-engaged market culture. None is engaging with the urgent issues, he says:

...the widening gap between poor and rich, the seething anger of the underclass, the steady attack on the rights of those who cannot protect themselves, the war in Iraq, the regular deaths of British soldiers in Helmand province, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, rendition. Instead, he says, the widening gap between poor and rich, the seething anger of the underclass, the steady attack on the rights of those who cannot protect themselves, the war in Iraq, the regular deaths of British soldiers in Helmand province, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, rendition.

Instead, he says:

Nowadays, there seem to be an awful lot of middle-aged blokes dragging their tortured souls around the literary circuit, fretting about their display in Waterstone's.

Maybe he shouldn't be blaming the writers, though. Maybe the reason they're tortured is that their most political and 'singular' work, like that of the Bitch and others of her acquaintance, is not always the work which is published or produced, but is pushed away into drawers, declined by the publishers and producers as 'too challenging' for the market.

It's All Relative

Children's laureate Jacqueline Wilson answers a question for the Guardian:

How do you feel when you read reports of how fabulously wealthy you must be?

I wish it were true. It's very odd. People see JK Rowling and assume that if you are high-profile children's author you're in a similar position. I certainly earn far more money than I ever dreamed possible, but give or take a lovely house for me, a nice house for my daughter, a few treats for friends, money there in case I gently lose it myself and need a nursing home, there's not huge wads of money. I'm very small beer compared with actresses and rock singers.

The Bitch (who is reliant on someone else for a roof over her head, whose kids will have to get their own houses, and who when she loses it anything but gently will no doubt be off into the sunset with a plastic bag or two) has to smile.

Bookshops at Risk

Last night the Bitch and her partner went to a reading at Manchester Waterstone's Deansgate, and it was just like the old days: a thrilling display of books from the radical small press Dedalus, the publisher Eric Lane and his companions travelled to be there in person, two Dedalus authors - Nick Royle and Andy Oakes - reading, a small but intensely dedicated audience, nice red wine and bookish conversations before and after, and everyone, thus mellowed, (including the impecunious Bitch) buying far more books than they might otherwise have done, and going away with a new body of literature to relate to and purchase in future.

But you can't help thinking it was just a last dying gasp: Robert Jones, Deansgate events manager responsible for the evening, announced his departure in a fortnight's time to Bath, where he will help to run a new independent bookshop being set up by Robert Topping, ex-manager of Deansgate and king of that old author-reading era. And this morning we read that HMV is to close 30 of its Waterstone's stores and reduce the number of 'highbrow' books it stocks to combat falling profits which it blames on the encroachment by Amazon and the supermarkets. (Will this give some breathing space to independents like the new one in Bath, or will they continue to fall similarly prey to the internet and the supermarkets?)

And how about this from Monday's Guardian article on the books people fail to read: "The important thing from a bookseller's point of view," said a spokesman for Waterstone's, "is that people buy the books in the first place." Understandable of course, but yet another indication of the increasing enforced commodification of literature.

Crumbs for Bottom Feeders

Here's one effect of those big advances:

The average author earns about £16,000, a third less than the national average wage... But hidden behind that figure released by the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) is a grimmer truth: when you take away the superstars who are earning shedloads, the actual figure for the rest is closer to £4,000.

Thanks to Charles Lambert and Debi Alper for pointing me to the link.

Best of What?

Yet another 'Best of', this time Granta's second Best of Young American Novelists. For Cult-of-Youth watchers, the cut-off age has come down from 40 to 35 (and in my opinion Jack's explanation does nothing to dignify this), but the really interesting thing to me is the fact that 7 of the 21 are not novelists at all but short-story writers. Jack says:

Reading the submissions, it seemed to us that many story collections deserved as much if not more attention than the novels, that there was a great liveliness and insight in them...

You could look on this as a good thing, more proof that short stories are in the ascendant, but I wonder. Why call these writers novelists, then? Why not call the list Best of Young American Fiction Writers? Short stories are after all a very different form from novels, requiring very different narrative skills, and not all writers of one can write the other. You read on and it becomes clear:

...often, given their binding structure of character and location, they were nearly novels in any case. This accounts for the number of writers on our list (seven) who have yet to publish a novel.

Ah, so they were short story collections aspiring to be novels! And notice that yet, implying that old notion that short stories are merely an apprenticeship for writing novels.

Money Again, and Life versus Literature

In a comment on my last post, David Isaak alerts us to the fact that he continues his theme of publishers' advances. Here is his latest thought-provoking post.

And in a Guardian profile playwright Martin Crimp touches on a continuing theme of this blog, his desire to separate his life from his work and a culture insistent on conflating the two:

...he finds being interviewed unsettling: he doesn't want to talk about his family ("People you're close to shouldn't be part of your public world"), his life in London, or indeed anything except his 20-odd plays and translations, least of all the personality behind them.

Advance Thinking

Macmillan New Writing author David Isaak has an interesting post about the matter of publishers' advances which relates to my own post of last year.

Like the Macmillan New Writers, the Bitch has also recently done a deal which does not include an advance and, skint though she is, quite frankly she doesn't give a damn. After the experience of having a (different) book put up for auction under a new pseudonym (as a concession to the cult of the Next New Thing) and then dropped like a hot brick when the hoped-for half a million or whatever didn't materialise, the news from her new publishers that they are interested in nurturing her career as a writer - rather than just in her book as a single commodity - is music to her ears.

Amazon Marketplace

As I describe on my other, author blog, when one of my novels went out of print, I printed a revised edition myself. The other day I looked it up on Amazon Marketplace, the place where second-hand books are sold. There were copies of this revised edition being sold there as new. NEW? That's odd, I thought: the new copies are on Amazon Advantage, the facility for publishers, and apart from that it's only I, as the publisher, who have new copies, and those bookshops which have ordered it from me. I looked closer. One of the Amazon Marketplace sellers describes their copy of my book as 'sourced direct from the publisher': it seems that some of those Gardners orders were for bookshops or companies selling through the net.

In his Guardian Bookseller column yesterday Joel Rickett comments on the threat which publishers see Amazon Marketplace as posing:

...there are now hundreds of small companies specialising in importing books, or even finding them in charity shops and posting them up. They are able to offer such low prices because of the standard £2.75 charged for UK postage, of which they receive £2.26 - much more than it costs to post an average book through the Royal Mail. Publishers are convinced that the Marketplace option eats away at their sales, but it has so far been impossible to discern by how much. A new piece of research shows how popular the service is among students: nearly 29% of students bought their last secondhand course book from Marketplace, compared to 12% from their university bookshop. Many of them will also re-sell those books via the site; that's the kind of perpetual exchange that gives publishers nightmares.

In the same paper yesterday, Stephen Page argued that it is only by embracing the opportunities for publishing and marketing offered by the net that publishers will be able to combat such threats.

Enough to make the boat list

Oy-oy-oy, another pesky list, and Robert McCrum has some good tart things to say about it, and about lists in general.

The End of the Literary World?

Rich food for thought about novels and their future in today's Guardian Review: Giles Foden bemoaning the fact that 'literary' is a term of abuse, Milan Kundera reflecting on the nature of novels and their creation, and Stephen Page arguing for a more, rather than a less, significant role for publishers and editors in the digital age, all of them circling a central preoccupation expressed thus by Stephen Page:

The world emerging at the start of the 21st century is full of threat to those who create. The desire to commodify all art as some form of entertainment, and the growth of a monoculture based around mass-market tastes and distribution, make many writers feel precarious.

Giles Foden has it in for Richard and Judy and their producer Amanda Ross (who recently stated that she hated the word 'literary' since readers bring to it negative associations) and says:

Personally, I'd rather not listen to the twitterings of a pair of permatanned nincompoops on literary matters.

Well, personally, I'd rather people didn't blame the messengers (or insult them so personally), but to some extent Stephen Page concurs:

For all their great benefits, one of the effects of Oprah Winfrey's book recommendations in the US, and to some extent Richard & Judy's in the UK, is that they create a migration towards a small number of books.

Kundera's fascinating piece is excerpts from a forthcoming book from Fabers. An idea which jumps out for me in the wake of Zadie Smith's recent argument that novels are essentially expressions of an author's personality is Kundera's notion that art, including the novel, is an artist's/author's property to alter or suppress as he/she sees fit (an idea which I discuss on my other blog in relation to my own work). The piece ends on a reflection about the novel as novel, and whether it can survive:

For turning a novel into a theatre piece or a film requires first decomposing the composition; reducing it to just its "story"; renouncing its form. But what is left of a work of art once it's stripped of its form? One means to prolong a great novel's life through an adaptation and only builds a mausoleum, with just a small marble plaque recalling the name of a person who is not there

an issue which I also discuss, in relation to my own writing experience, here.

World Books?

Do you know, I'd really rather not talk about this:

The World Book Day poll for the ten books the world could not do without.

Anyone familiar with this blog will know that the Bitch hates lists, that they bore her stiff and that she has a constitutional aversion, rooted no doubt in ancestral trauma (those peasants, servants and slaves still floating about in her genes, those relatives who failed the eleven-plus), of anything which smacks of EXCLUSIVITY or COMPETITION, or choices made by any select few, most especially a self-selected few.

And she's sick of saying these things, but guesses they need to go on being said:

I'm all for schemes and ploys which draw attention to books, but I would venture that polls like this may even be counterproductive: they do nothing to encourage a spirit of inquiry about books and to broaden the canon. Time is the best critic, said Martin Amis earlier this week, and the Guardian suggests today that this list proves it. But look at all those childhood favourites and school staples turning up on the longer list, and 'time' turns into 'nostalgia' and a lazy reliance on the status quo. And the 'top-ten' list which emerges is not only the result of this impulse rather than of any true test of literature, but offers a closed conclusion, a tiny section of the spectrum of literature, beyond which, it could be implied, we need not look, because it is the definitive best.