Now that the newspapers have picked up Susan Hill's passionate and eloquent plea for libraries to stop turning away from books and becoming social centres instead, blog innocents are discussing the matter. 'What do you think?' asked the Partner of the Bitch on the way into the pub. 'She's right!' I cried as we ordered.
'But don't you think the libraries have a place as social centres - now that there's no longer the church or the village hall?'
The Bitch choked on her Pinot Grigio and considered going home to pack her bags.
'In fact,' went on The Partner, 'social centres are precisely what libraries are not becoming. The shift to computers is just as isolating as silent reading rooms: more so. Wouldn't it be better, if libraries want to expand, that they expanded into activities centred around books?'
He had a point. The Bitch abandoned her plans for packing.
'Though, you know,' he said, 'I have a hunch that for a lot of people libraries were never places for fiction. Many people went to the library mainly for facts.'
The Partner works with people's problems. 'Even so,' he went on, 'in the old days no one ever came to me and said that they had been to the library and read up about their condition. But every day I get people coming to me and saying that they've looked it up on the internet. So you can see why libraries might shift towards computers...'
Hm.
'Also,' he said: 'this argument that libraries shouldn't abandon books because the expansion of the bookshops shows how much people love them and need them: well, couldn't that be an argument for the other side: people buy books now, so they borrow them less?'
Oh yeah. The Bitch's very own subject: commercialisation and commodification.
A bleakness descended over The Bitch. She decided to drown her sorrows and ended up pretty drunk.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
An Extra Large Slice of Cheer
Something today to sweeten a bitch's whole outlook on the world:
In a comment on my post 'Big Slices of the Literary Tart' Susan Hill alerts us to that fact that 1,200 copies have now been sold of the first novel by Helen Slavin, The Extra Large Medium, recently published by Susan's press, Long Barn Books - when apparently 400 copies is normal for a first novel. On Monday I went out to buy it, and found it on a 3 for 2 offer in Waterstone's, which as far as I know is no mean feat for a small publisher. Yesterday I sat down to read it. I could not put it down. The dishes went unwashed, the writing I'm supposed to be doing went unwritten. I did not stop until I had finished, and when I looked up my eyes could no longer focus, literally, on the real world. This is some sassy book, written in a spare, witty and streetwise style, packed with word play, yet managing to tackle the serious issue of the nature of loss with the kind of interiority I value most in novels.
A small press, but an extra large, not medium achievement...
In a comment on my post 'Big Slices of the Literary Tart' Susan Hill alerts us to that fact that 1,200 copies have now been sold of the first novel by Helen Slavin, The Extra Large Medium, recently published by Susan's press, Long Barn Books - when apparently 400 copies is normal for a first novel. On Monday I went out to buy it, and found it on a 3 for 2 offer in Waterstone's, which as far as I know is no mean feat for a small publisher. Yesterday I sat down to read it. I could not put it down. The dishes went unwashed, the writing I'm supposed to be doing went unwritten. I did not stop until I had finished, and when I looked up my eyes could no longer focus, literally, on the real world. This is some sassy book, written in a spare, witty and streetwise style, packed with word play, yet managing to tackle the serious issue of the nature of loss with the kind of interiority I value most in novels.
A small press, but an extra large, not medium achievement...
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Ideas as commodities
This business of nicked ideas keeps buzzing round my head and won't be swatted away.
It's absolutely true that - as Jessica, Alan Kellogg and Susan Hill point out, and as the recent Dan Brown trial showed - there's no copyright on ideas, nor should there be. And that many great writers are great on the strength of borrowed ideas, and, as Alan says, Shakespeare is the biggest nicker of them all. Modern copyright only applies to text (in the broadest sense, including all the art forms), which is why, as Jessica, says, so many new writers rush around putting sealed envelopes in their bank safe deposits.
It all seems so simple. It's not. When does an idea become text? As Susan and Alan say, once it gets fleshed out with characters etc and becomes imbued with an author's voice. But according to the law, this has to be written down, and more fool you if you spend an evening in the bar with a famour writer telling him your plot. And what about what people can do with a text? That treatment you wrote, the storyline of which was cleverly enough distorted that lawyers might argue for days: the young boy turned into a young girl, the three separate but linking story strands brilliantly teased to make three separate episodes of a drama series (and thus losing the subtleties)? You might think that this makes the original treatment unrecognisable, and that therefore it doesn't matter, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the TV company wouldn't think so. A storyline about x? Sorry, it's been done... TV companies do not take the line that it's not the idea that matters but what you do with it, the way you write it. They are not interested in writing but in ideas as commodities.
This is what's at the root of the problem: the commodification of ideas and art. That offending clause I mentioned previously is based on the notion that TV companies can buy ideas off you, and not only ideas but ownership of what you've written, and they often do, sometimes replacing the writer halfway through the development process - another thing the standard contract allows for (and which my contract allowed for). The concept of copyright drops by the wayside in this scenario. In fact, it's the big boys who benefit from copyright law (how successful would I have been, rushing round and waving my little safe deposit box in the face of that big powerful organisation with Miss Ice-Cool TV Executive folding her arms at the door?). Which is why traditional copyright is now being challenged by the Creative Commons initiative, based as I understand it on the notion of making artists' work more freely available for acknowledged borrowing, and on a democratic melting pot of creativity in which one artist's work can enrich and generate that of another - but in which the operative words are acknowledged and democratic.
It's absolutely true that - as Jessica, Alan Kellogg and Susan Hill point out, and as the recent Dan Brown trial showed - there's no copyright on ideas, nor should there be. And that many great writers are great on the strength of borrowed ideas, and, as Alan says, Shakespeare is the biggest nicker of them all. Modern copyright only applies to text (in the broadest sense, including all the art forms), which is why, as Jessica, says, so many new writers rush around putting sealed envelopes in their bank safe deposits.
It all seems so simple. It's not. When does an idea become text? As Susan and Alan say, once it gets fleshed out with characters etc and becomes imbued with an author's voice. But according to the law, this has to be written down, and more fool you if you spend an evening in the bar with a famour writer telling him your plot. And what about what people can do with a text? That treatment you wrote, the storyline of which was cleverly enough distorted that lawyers might argue for days: the young boy turned into a young girl, the three separate but linking story strands brilliantly teased to make three separate episodes of a drama series (and thus losing the subtleties)? You might think that this makes the original treatment unrecognisable, and that therefore it doesn't matter, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the TV company wouldn't think so. A storyline about x? Sorry, it's been done... TV companies do not take the line that it's not the idea that matters but what you do with it, the way you write it. They are not interested in writing but in ideas as commodities.
This is what's at the root of the problem: the commodification of ideas and art. That offending clause I mentioned previously is based on the notion that TV companies can buy ideas off you, and not only ideas but ownership of what you've written, and they often do, sometimes replacing the writer halfway through the development process - another thing the standard contract allows for (and which my contract allowed for). The concept of copyright drops by the wayside in this scenario. In fact, it's the big boys who benefit from copyright law (how successful would I have been, rushing round and waving my little safe deposit box in the face of that big powerful organisation with Miss Ice-Cool TV Executive folding her arms at the door?). Which is why traditional copyright is now being challenged by the Creative Commons initiative, based as I understand it on the notion of making artists' work more freely available for acknowledged borrowing, and on a democratic melting pot of creativity in which one artist's work can enrich and generate that of another - but in which the operative words are acknowledged and democratic.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
The Bitch is a Dunce
Today The Bitch goes down on bended knee to beg forgiveness from all those people who have left witty and thoughtful comments on this blog which have only now appeared...
Pray give me leave to tell you a tale of a Blogger-Boggled Bitch.
Once upon a time a Bitch was blogging happily away, her comment settings fixed at the default mode they came with - Registered Users only, Comment Moderation unticked - and with email notification ticked, comments appearing on her posts (and in her email box) now and then. Then one day (this week) Jessica commented on Scott's Pack's blog that she had wanted to leave a comment on The Bitch's blog, but hadn't wanted the hassle of registering. Quickly, The Bitch adjusted her comments settings to allow anyone to comment, and generously Jessica tried again and The Bitch was rewarded by hearing what she had to say.
Next, The Bitch gets a gentle hint from Alan Kellogg: he presumes she's checking comment moderation. Yikes! thinks The Bitch, completely misunderstanding and thinking he means tick when he says check and is warning her against junk and offensive posts now that anyone can comment, and she dashes to the settings page and ticks 'Comment Moderation'. Some hours later she opens the Comment Moderation menu, and lo and behold, what does she find but a long list of comments waiting for moderation, some of them dating way back, one person even wondering why the comment she posted previously hadn't appeared! (And since The Bitch was away from her broadband and using a mobile connect card and paying for every kilobite downloaded, and every one of those beeps was audibly chipping at her meagre bank balance, she went hot, started a migraine, and published the lot without loading them up, so that junk and offensive stuff got published anyway!)
The Bitch is still scratching her word-filled but technologically-deficient little head about this, and maybe someday some kind person of a more worldly-wise character will take her by the hand, sit her down and explain, but in the meantime, folks, a thousand apologies and thanks for all your insight and wit.
Pray give me leave to tell you a tale of a Blogger-Boggled Bitch.
Once upon a time a Bitch was blogging happily away, her comment settings fixed at the default mode they came with - Registered Users only, Comment Moderation unticked - and with email notification ticked, comments appearing on her posts (and in her email box) now and then. Then one day (this week) Jessica commented on Scott's Pack's blog that she had wanted to leave a comment on The Bitch's blog, but hadn't wanted the hassle of registering. Quickly, The Bitch adjusted her comments settings to allow anyone to comment, and generously Jessica tried again and The Bitch was rewarded by hearing what she had to say.
Next, The Bitch gets a gentle hint from Alan Kellogg: he presumes she's checking comment moderation. Yikes! thinks The Bitch, completely misunderstanding and thinking he means tick when he says check and is warning her against junk and offensive posts now that anyone can comment, and she dashes to the settings page and ticks 'Comment Moderation'. Some hours later she opens the Comment Moderation menu, and lo and behold, what does she find but a long list of comments waiting for moderation, some of them dating way back, one person even wondering why the comment she posted previously hadn't appeared! (And since The Bitch was away from her broadband and using a mobile connect card and paying for every kilobite downloaded, and every one of those beeps was audibly chipping at her meagre bank balance, she went hot, started a migraine, and published the lot without loading them up, so that junk and offensive stuff got published anyway!)
The Bitch is still scratching her word-filled but technologically-deficient little head about this, and maybe someday some kind person of a more worldly-wise character will take her by the hand, sit her down and explain, but in the meantime, folks, a thousand apologies and thanks for all your insight and wit.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Those slippery ideas...
Jessica Ruston at the enjoyable blog The Book Bar feels that writers are often over-concerned about protecting their ideas: there are bound to be zeitgeist ideas out there, and if another writer is first to write the one you had in mind, well you just pick yourself up and turn to another one...
Hm, says The Bitch, gnashing her teeth at the memory of what happened to her.
The Bitch thought the same as Jessica the time a freelance producer went down to London with a few of her ideas, all of which were duly rejected, only for one of them to appear as a well-received drama series a year later. You hear of it happening all the time, after all.
But she got a bit more cynical when, not so long ago, she went in for one of these New Writing Schemes run by a major television company and funded by the local arts body. She should have smelled a rat right at the start, of course - why would a major TV company need puny arts board funding to run such a scheme, which consisted of a single day of workshops with fees, presumably, to three well-known TV writers, a fee of £500 each to the fifteen or so participants to write a detailed treatment, and a big plate of sandwiches? Could it possibly just be to give the whole thing a veneer of worthy respectability? The project was supposed to be an investment for the company, after all: the stated aim was to look for new writers.
Ha. Well, I did smell a rat when I saw the contract. There was the clause which is apparently standard nowadays, based on Jessica's idea of a big Floating Tank of Ideas, stating that there was no come-back if my idea wasn't taken on but was later used by the company. But we were being asked to write detailed treatments, and were hardly being paid professional rates to do so... Was this really a cynical ideas-trawling exercise, and this time they were getting them on the cheap?
Well, true to form, The Bitch kicked up and tried to negotiate the contract, but she'd met her true match in the disgustingly young but steely woman running the show, who told her in no uncertain terms that the contract wasn't negotiable (did that woman own a dictionary?), that The Bitch had behaved pretty badly and joined the scheme in bad faith, and The Bitch was forthwith kicked off the scheme - without her £500.
Too late, like a fool she had already written her detailed treatment. And the real rat turned out to be not the company but a writer (as Jessica indicates): six months later the famous writer who read her treatment replicated in his drama series not only her storyline and theme but even the camera shots with which, in the workshop, he had been so taken. Well, maybe he did it subconsciously, and what's a Bitch to do, but take it as a compliment...
But you still wonder about the TV company. The writers on this scheme had all been chosen via stiff competition, all were of a professional standard and offered good ideas, and a series of six dramas was promised as an outcome. In the event, no series materialised. Only one of those ideas was produced under the name of a writer in that workshop, as a lone drama which went out about midnight when no one would be watching... perhaps to fulfill the conditions of the arts board grant?
Hm, says The Bitch, gnashing her teeth at the memory of what happened to her.
The Bitch thought the same as Jessica the time a freelance producer went down to London with a few of her ideas, all of which were duly rejected, only for one of them to appear as a well-received drama series a year later. You hear of it happening all the time, after all.
But she got a bit more cynical when, not so long ago, she went in for one of these New Writing Schemes run by a major television company and funded by the local arts body. She should have smelled a rat right at the start, of course - why would a major TV company need puny arts board funding to run such a scheme, which consisted of a single day of workshops with fees, presumably, to three well-known TV writers, a fee of £500 each to the fifteen or so participants to write a detailed treatment, and a big plate of sandwiches? Could it possibly just be to give the whole thing a veneer of worthy respectability? The project was supposed to be an investment for the company, after all: the stated aim was to look for new writers.
Ha. Well, I did smell a rat when I saw the contract. There was the clause which is apparently standard nowadays, based on Jessica's idea of a big Floating Tank of Ideas, stating that there was no come-back if my idea wasn't taken on but was later used by the company. But we were being asked to write detailed treatments, and were hardly being paid professional rates to do so... Was this really a cynical ideas-trawling exercise, and this time they were getting them on the cheap?
Well, true to form, The Bitch kicked up and tried to negotiate the contract, but she'd met her true match in the disgustingly young but steely woman running the show, who told her in no uncertain terms that the contract wasn't negotiable (did that woman own a dictionary?), that The Bitch had behaved pretty badly and joined the scheme in bad faith, and The Bitch was forthwith kicked off the scheme - without her £500.
Too late, like a fool she had already written her detailed treatment. And the real rat turned out to be not the company but a writer (as Jessica indicates): six months later the famous writer who read her treatment replicated in his drama series not only her storyline and theme but even the camera shots with which, in the workshop, he had been so taken. Well, maybe he did it subconsciously, and what's a Bitch to do, but take it as a compliment...
But you still wonder about the TV company. The writers on this scheme had all been chosen via stiff competition, all were of a professional standard and offered good ideas, and a series of six dramas was promised as an outcome. In the event, no series materialised. Only one of those ideas was produced under the name of a writer in that workshop, as a lone drama which went out about midnight when no one would be watching... perhaps to fulfill the conditions of the arts board grant?
Monday, August 28, 2006
Some joke, surely...
Others have commented on the contempt for blogs in the Observer books pages, but surely it's just a joke...
This week the Observer's 'Browser' pours vitriol over Scott Pack, former chief buyer for Waterstone's and now publisher with the online Friday Project, for starting his blog Me and My Big Mouth. Presumably someone sensible at the Friday Project will tell Mr Pack that it's his job to find interesting/amusing/informative new authors and not offend people with his tedious comments, says the Browser offensively (and under the tediously offensive title That's codswallop, Scott.) Impossible to believe that the Browser did not know that this would send us winging straight off to Scott's site to check this out and find not tedious comments but a chatty, personal, ironic and surprisingly self-deprecating tone, interesting insider's insights and among other things an informative and engaging post on literary magazines (which get short shrift in pages like the Observer). And in the process of course we are introduced to the Friday Project, so as Commercial Director, Pack is hardly failing to do his job...
And Pack alerted me to another site, The Age of Uncertainty, which I found I loved! Thanks, Browser!
This week the Observer's 'Browser' pours vitriol over Scott Pack, former chief buyer for Waterstone's and now publisher with the online Friday Project, for starting his blog Me and My Big Mouth. Presumably someone sensible at the Friday Project will tell Mr Pack that it's his job to find interesting/amusing/informative new authors and not offend people with his tedious comments, says the Browser offensively (and under the tediously offensive title That's codswallop, Scott.) Impossible to believe that the Browser did not know that this would send us winging straight off to Scott's site to check this out and find not tedious comments but a chatty, personal, ironic and surprisingly self-deprecating tone, interesting insider's insights and among other things an informative and engaging post on literary magazines (which get short shrift in pages like the Observer). And in the process of course we are introduced to the Friday Project, so as Commercial Director, Pack is hardly failing to do his job...
And Pack alerted me to another site, The Age of Uncertainty, which I found I loved! Thanks, Browser!
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Newspapers, doncha just love em?
On Monday The Times runs a piece in its My Edinburgh column, apparently by Rose Heiney, 'actress and (in theory) novelist', who with two others is performing the show, Bite Me. Chattily she takes us through her accommodation experiences and her prior show nerves, and The Bitch mildly enjoys her somewhat transparent self-deprecating style. Until she hits this paragraph:
And those brackets have alerted The Bitch to what she should have realised all along: that this is one of those dishonest supposedly first-person accounts a journalist has concocted out of an interview (in this case Dominic Maxwell). The Bitch now imagines the scenario:
Dominic (down phone): Rose, both your parents are in broadcasting. Does that make things any easier?
Rose (thinking, Oh god he would come up with that one! Now no one will think I have any real talent! Defensively, with heart sinking and imagining the reaction of readers like The Bitch): Only in the sense that it gives you a little comfort in leading a freelance life.
You can imagine the conversation which led to this airily smug little paragraph, which even while she understood what was going on made The Bitch sneer:
It gets worse, though, much worse:
My parents [the Times columnist Libby Purves and Paul Heiney] are in broadcasting. Does that make things any easier? Only in the sense that it gives you a little comfort in leading a freelance life.The Bitch drops the paper. Is she kidding? Only in the sense that it gets you a two-thirds-page column with a colour photo (all that free publicity) in Mummy's paper!
And those brackets have alerted The Bitch to what she should have realised all along: that this is one of those dishonest supposedly first-person accounts a journalist has concocted out of an interview (in this case Dominic Maxwell). The Bitch now imagines the scenario:
Dominic (down phone): Rose, both your parents are in broadcasting. Does that make things any easier?
Rose (thinking, Oh god he would come up with that one! Now no one will think I have any real talent! Defensively, with heart sinking and imagining the reaction of readers like The Bitch): Only in the sense that it gives you a little comfort in leading a freelance life.
You can imagine the conversation which led to this airily smug little paragraph, which even while she understood what was going on made The Bitch sneer:
During the day I'm actually writing a novel... I've got an agent for it and we're hoping to sell it at the start of September.
It gets worse, though, much worse:
It's a difficult situation for me and my parents at the moment [Heiney's brother Nick committed suicide in June after suffering from depression for years] but I don't mind talking about it, it's such an elephant in the room. I didn't consider cancelling the show.At which point The Bitch was no longer sneering at Rose Heiney's apparent self-serving glibness but ready to bop Dominic Maxwell on the nose.
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Loss of Marbles
Last week The Telegraph, no less, treated us to a juicy instance of literary ageism.
Reporting on the Booker long list, Arts correspondent Nigel Reynolds tells us: ...the most remarkable is Nadine Gordimer.
And why is she so remarkable? Is it because, as he says, her long life has been devoted to writing about the moral and psychological traumas of her native South Africa? Apparently not. The most remarkable thing, it seems, is the fact that, at 82, she is almost certainly the oldest writer ever to make it into the count-off for the prize.
Perhaps, one thinks, he means merely that this is remarkable in view of the ageism rife in the contemporary literary world. But no: it would seem he is parroting the sentiment he quotes later, expressed by 'a Booker insider': Obviously it's remarkable that Nadine Gordimer is on the list at 82, and that he's absorbing without question the implication that writers at such an age should have lost their marbles, rather than have accumulated the kind of wisdom we ought to envy.
Reporting on the Booker long list, Arts correspondent Nigel Reynolds tells us: ...the most remarkable is Nadine Gordimer.
And why is she so remarkable? Is it because, as he says, her long life has been devoted to writing about the moral and psychological traumas of her native South Africa? Apparently not. The most remarkable thing, it seems, is the fact that, at 82, she is almost certainly the oldest writer ever to make it into the count-off for the prize.
Perhaps, one thinks, he means merely that this is remarkable in view of the ageism rife in the contemporary literary world. But no: it would seem he is parroting the sentiment he quotes later, expressed by 'a Booker insider': Obviously it's remarkable that Nadine Gordimer is on the list at 82, and that he's absorbing without question the implication that writers at such an age should have lost their marbles, rather than have accumulated the kind of wisdom we ought to envy.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Sophistry and Youth
Lionel Shriver gave us a laugh in last Friday's Guardian, and I'm still laughing.
She's fed up of looking so young for her age, she says (alongside a pic of herself I'd already seen in a women's mag makeover), and before we all start getting resentful, she says, well, there's a big disadvantage: people think you're less experienced and stupider than you are.
That'll be the people her own age (49), then - or even younger, but looking their age and still old enough to feel contempt for youth.
Hang on a sec, though. Aren't they the people who've all been pensioned off (or rather shrugged off without pensions) in this Blairite world of 'modernisation' and The Next New Thing, and a contempt for the past or its lessons and an outright horror of anyone associated with it, ie anyone over 40?
Well, she's not actually that fed up about it, she admits: she's rather dreading starting to crumble like everyone else, she's vain really, and, look, dead honest about it.
Yeah, right.
She's fed up of looking so young for her age, she says (alongside a pic of herself I'd already seen in a women's mag makeover), and before we all start getting resentful, she says, well, there's a big disadvantage: people think you're less experienced and stupider than you are.
That'll be the people her own age (49), then - or even younger, but looking their age and still old enough to feel contempt for youth.
Hang on a sec, though. Aren't they the people who've all been pensioned off (or rather shrugged off without pensions) in this Blairite world of 'modernisation' and The Next New Thing, and a contempt for the past or its lessons and an outright horror of anyone associated with it, ie anyone over 40?
Well, she's not actually that fed up about it, she admits: she's rather dreading starting to crumble like everyone else, she's vain really, and, look, dead honest about it.
Yeah, right.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Which Reality?
It has struck me before, and it strikes me now, that Germaine Greer doesn't understand the nature of novels, Professor of Literature though she may be (and I think I'm right that I once read her as saying she doesn't like novels much, which fits.)
In Saturday's Guardian she made her promised riposte to last week's criticisms of her stance over the Brick Lane furore.
She goes on to tell us how others have represented her in books, in particular her ex-husband and also David Plante in Difficult Women, and how freaked out she felt. Well, I read the David Plante book, and a specious bit of nastiness it was too, but for God's sake, Germaine, it wasn't a novel! She seems to be making no distinction on this level between this book and the one by her ex-husband, which was indeed a novel, and interestingly, it seems she was far more upset by the latter (even given the fact that, as she implies, she was young then and not yet hardened.)
Well, The Bitch too has had a novel written about her, and she too knows how it feels, and therefore, like Greer, how certain people in Brick Lane might feel. God, what a nitwit that woman in that novel was! And what a sly, self-seeking cow, the way she did the dirty on the wonderful, sensitive, generous yet tortured hero (my ex's vision of himself). God, did I feel defiled, picked over, used, abused, you name it - and the effects were physical, I really did feel voo-dooed and possessed, my identity stolen, I was a trembling wreck and stopped eating for weeks.
But what did The Bitch do about it in the end? She wrote her own novel about the whole episode - ha! Wrote it like it was - yeah! - with a tough and feisty heroine (me) and a right bastard of a manipulative anti-hero. And The Bitch's novel got published - ha!- which the ex's didn't.
How's that for revenge?
Thing is, not long after publication, The Bitch and the partner she had now went into a bar and saw a mutual friend. We walked over, and he stood, looking rather stiff. 'Ive just read your novel,' he told me, and then turned to my partner, his fist clenching. 'You bastard!' he told him.
'It's not us!' we cried, laughing. But he didn't smile, and he was clearly never afterwards convinced.
See? Once real people and real places and real events get forged in the fire of fiction, you can't tell what's left of the reality, it simply doesn't relate to 'reality' in the way Greer, and the Muslim protestors, assume. 'Writers should beware of hanging the carcass of their imaginations around the necks of real people,' she says, but it ain't like that, novels can't be divided up into the reality bits and the imagination bits, it's just one big meld, and the only real 'reality' of a novel is the author's psyche, and if it's a good or great novel it will have the reality of emotional truth.
Greer seems to acknowledge this to some extent when she asks, 'Why did Monica Ali's book have to be called Brick Lane?' seeming to imply that she should have given it some other, fictional name. But the Brick Lane of the novel is the Brick Lane of a novelist's mind and claiming to be nothing else, and the trouble only comes when people fail to read it in this way.
And there is a regrettable tendency nowadays to read novels for fact. Quite apart from the cult of the Author as Personality and the consequent hunger to see connections between authors' books and their lives, there is a tendency to value those novels which provide 'information' and lists. Zadie Smith in a recent literary dispute with, I think, the critic James Wood, insisted that 'there is a beauty in information for its own sake [in novels]' - or words to that effect, and claimed it was something which only her generation appreciates. Grow up, Zadie: the beauty of information in novels depends on what you do with it, and the emotional truth you uncover in the process.
The reason Greer and the protestors and I and my ex (I heard he had a breakdown after my novel was published) were all so freaked is this: novels are not fact or 'information', but they are more powerful than either because they deal in emotional reality. My ex's novel told not the truth about me but the truth about what he wanted to do to me emotionally as our relationship was deteriorating, and my novel did the same in turn. I knew even as I was writing mine that I was doing him an injustice, but I knew too that the couple I was conjuring were not us but a symbol of my notion of a certain state of affairs between men and women. One has only to compare the two books to understand how little fiction is about factual reality, however much it may seem to be (and however even the author or his or her lovers and friends think it is), and how beside the point it is therefore to blame a novelist for getting the facts wrong.
If everyone understood this, then there wouldn't be people seeing Brick Lane as so dangerous or discrediting. While you can understand the Muslim protestors making this category error, it is a great shame that Germaine Greer, who ought to know better, is endorsing them.
People need to take a leaf from the book of The Bitch's stylish and gracious and sporting mother: she blithely refuses to recognise that any of the depictions of mothers in my work are her (even when I think I've skewered her with cruel accuracy).
In Saturday's Guardian she made her promised riposte to last week's criticisms of her stance over the Brick Lane furore.
"Perhaps [Natasha] Walter doesn't understand how disturbing it is to have
gobbets of your life sampled, digested and dished back up to you in recognisable form."
She goes on to tell us how others have represented her in books, in particular her ex-husband and also David Plante in Difficult Women, and how freaked out she felt. Well, I read the David Plante book, and a specious bit of nastiness it was too, but for God's sake, Germaine, it wasn't a novel! She seems to be making no distinction on this level between this book and the one by her ex-husband, which was indeed a novel, and interestingly, it seems she was far more upset by the latter (even given the fact that, as she implies, she was young then and not yet hardened.)
Well, The Bitch too has had a novel written about her, and she too knows how it feels, and therefore, like Greer, how certain people in Brick Lane might feel. God, what a nitwit that woman in that novel was! And what a sly, self-seeking cow, the way she did the dirty on the wonderful, sensitive, generous yet tortured hero (my ex's vision of himself). God, did I feel defiled, picked over, used, abused, you name it - and the effects were physical, I really did feel voo-dooed and possessed, my identity stolen, I was a trembling wreck and stopped eating for weeks.
But what did The Bitch do about it in the end? She wrote her own novel about the whole episode - ha! Wrote it like it was - yeah! - with a tough and feisty heroine (me) and a right bastard of a manipulative anti-hero. And The Bitch's novel got published - ha!- which the ex's didn't.
How's that for revenge?
Thing is, not long after publication, The Bitch and the partner she had now went into a bar and saw a mutual friend. We walked over, and he stood, looking rather stiff. 'Ive just read your novel,' he told me, and then turned to my partner, his fist clenching. 'You bastard!' he told him.
'It's not us!' we cried, laughing. But he didn't smile, and he was clearly never afterwards convinced.
See? Once real people and real places and real events get forged in the fire of fiction, you can't tell what's left of the reality, it simply doesn't relate to 'reality' in the way Greer, and the Muslim protestors, assume. 'Writers should beware of hanging the carcass of their imaginations around the necks of real people,' she says, but it ain't like that, novels can't be divided up into the reality bits and the imagination bits, it's just one big meld, and the only real 'reality' of a novel is the author's psyche, and if it's a good or great novel it will have the reality of emotional truth.
Greer seems to acknowledge this to some extent when she asks, 'Why did Monica Ali's book have to be called Brick Lane?' seeming to imply that she should have given it some other, fictional name. But the Brick Lane of the novel is the Brick Lane of a novelist's mind and claiming to be nothing else, and the trouble only comes when people fail to read it in this way.
And there is a regrettable tendency nowadays to read novels for fact. Quite apart from the cult of the Author as Personality and the consequent hunger to see connections between authors' books and their lives, there is a tendency to value those novels which provide 'information' and lists. Zadie Smith in a recent literary dispute with, I think, the critic James Wood, insisted that 'there is a beauty in information for its own sake [in novels]' - or words to that effect, and claimed it was something which only her generation appreciates. Grow up, Zadie: the beauty of information in novels depends on what you do with it, and the emotional truth you uncover in the process.
The reason Greer and the protestors and I and my ex (I heard he had a breakdown after my novel was published) were all so freaked is this: novels are not fact or 'information', but they are more powerful than either because they deal in emotional reality. My ex's novel told not the truth about me but the truth about what he wanted to do to me emotionally as our relationship was deteriorating, and my novel did the same in turn. I knew even as I was writing mine that I was doing him an injustice, but I knew too that the couple I was conjuring were not us but a symbol of my notion of a certain state of affairs between men and women. One has only to compare the two books to understand how little fiction is about factual reality, however much it may seem to be (and however even the author or his or her lovers and friends think it is), and how beside the point it is therefore to blame a novelist for getting the facts wrong.
If everyone understood this, then there wouldn't be people seeing Brick Lane as so dangerous or discrediting. While you can understand the Muslim protestors making this category error, it is a great shame that Germaine Greer, who ought to know better, is endorsing them.
People need to take a leaf from the book of The Bitch's stylish and gracious and sporting mother: she blithely refuses to recognise that any of the depictions of mothers in my work are her (even when I think I've skewered her with cruel accuracy).
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Snoozing while Nothing Much Happens
So the protest came to nothing much, according to the Guardian - just '60 or 70 older men' (vexed about leeches, perhaps) - and no book was burnt, and Salman Rushdie, having rolled his sleeves up, now declares that the whole thing was blown out of proportion by the media. Natasha Walter argues that the view of the campaigners did not represent the views of the larger Brick Lane Bengali community, and makes the most important point that the media need to take more care as to whom they choose as spokespersons for diverse and varied communities. A 'damp squib' is how Rushdie describes yesterday's protest, but even damp squibs have been lit by someone...
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Snoozing While Books Burn
Today apparently people in London are marching to burn a book, but there's been no mention of it in any TV or radio bulletin I've heard today and I can find none in The Observer, not even on the Books Pages. I can see that people might feel that the situation in Lebanon pushes other things out (though not, it seems, a full-page article about a 'movie starlet'), but why is there no discussion there about the potential links, or otherwise, between these two things? (As there is on the web: see Baroque in Hackney's riveting Saturday post.)
If it's disinterest, it's mistaken, but you suspect it's something much worse: fear of inflaming things through discussion, which, as we all know, is the prime tool of any totalitarian state.
As for the literary pages, it confirms the view that they are moribund and lazy and operating nowadays merely as a function of publishing's publicity machine. And if the excuse is that these pages are prepared in advance, well, that simply proves the point.
If it's disinterest, it's mistaken, but you suspect it's something much worse: fear of inflaming things through discussion, which, as we all know, is the prime tool of any totalitarian state.
As for the literary pages, it confirms the view that they are moribund and lazy and operating nowadays merely as a function of publishing's publicity machine. And if the excuse is that these pages are prepared in advance, well, that simply proves the point.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Books and Literary Heavyweights on Fire
Apparently there's no leech in Brick Lane anyway. Oh, the joy, the horror of people who judge books without reading them! And oh, the joy and downright terror when two great jesters of English Letters weigh in on the fray: on the pages of the Guardian, the long-standing fight between Salman Rushdie and Germaine Greer is being renewed over the issue. Rushdie accuses Greer of simply supporting the campaigners, but her argument in Monday's article was more characteristically opaque than that. 'It hurts to be misrepresented, but there is no representation without misrepresentation,' she says, seeming to slap the campaigners' hands to make them see sense. But then she concludes: 'Bangaldeshi Britons would be better off not reading Brick Lane or seeing the film.' Really, Germaine? Isn't part of the problem the fact that many of them haven't?
Greer is sneering at Ali, Rushdie says. 'As I well remember,' he writes in his letter today, 'she has done this before,' and reminds us about her refusal to support him over the assult against The Satanic Verses. 'She went on to describe me as a "megalomaniac"', he tells us somewhat unnecessarily, before getting back to focus on Ali and the matter in hand.
There are serious issues here, of course, but what are they? It would be hard now to remain involved in this debate without reading this book. Community activists have confirmed that tomorrow a rally will go ahead and copies of the book will be burned. Yet you can't help but suspect that it's publicity for the book and the film which will be fanned.
Greer is sneering at Ali, Rushdie says. 'As I well remember,' he writes in his letter today, 'she has done this before,' and reminds us about her refusal to support him over the assult against The Satanic Verses. 'She went on to describe me as a "megalomaniac"', he tells us somewhat unnecessarily, before getting back to focus on Ali and the matter in hand.
There are serious issues here, of course, but what are they? It would be hard now to remain involved in this debate without reading this book. Community activists have confirmed that tomorrow a rally will go ahead and copies of the book will be burned. Yet you can't help but suspect that it's publicity for the book and the film which will be fanned.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Curries and Books
It's happening again - people threatening to burn copies of a book, this time Monica Ali's Brick Lane. So what does it mean? That books matter? I wonder. In fact, it's only now that a film comes to made of the book that the protest has taken off and the threat made. 'If [Monica Ali] has the right to freedom of speech,' says Abdus Salique, the lead campaigner, 'we have the right to burn books.' Hm. 'We are protecting our community's dignity and respect,' he says, and what, asks Mohammed Tahir Ali, a trustee of Shadwell Garden Mosque, will the episode in the book, where he says a leech drops from a Bangladeshi woman's hair into a Brick Lane restaurant curry pot, 'do to our businesses?'
Nothing, Mr Ali, as far as I'm concerned. I never got past the very good beginning of Brick Lane, after which I thought it deteriorated rapidly (so I'd never have known about the leech), and far too many of my acquaintances were put off from even trying by the media hype surrounding publication. Besides, we like our curries too damn much.
Nothing, Mr Ali, as far as I'm concerned. I never got past the very good beginning of Brick Lane, after which I thought it deteriorated rapidly (so I'd never have known about the leech), and far too many of my acquaintances were put off from even trying by the media hype surrounding publication. Besides, we like our curries too damn much.
Monday, July 10, 2006
The Horrible Truth
Today The Bitch discovered she had lost her building-society pass book and was obliged to sit in the Building Society giving all her personal details once again while they sorted her out.
'What is your job?' the counter clerk asked me (or counter services operative, or whatever they call them nowadays). 'Writer,' I replied, feeling as always slightly foolish. (I mean, I don't earn millions, I don't get invited to the fashion shows, my name's not Zadie, or Dan or Joanna, for God's sake.)
She looked thrilled. 'Oh, I love reading!' she exclaimed. 'But I don't like anything serious. I love to read to escape. I love magic. I love Harry Potter.'
I do not write books like Harry Potter. I kept the matey, conspiratorial grin plastered to my face.
'My husband loves reading too', she went on. 'But serious stuff which I can't stand.'
Thank God for people like her husband, I thought.
'You know,' she said: 'thriller-type things with gangsters and all in them.'
I think my smile froze. I do not write books with gangsters in them.
But worse, I was thinking: can these market-mad publishers be right?
'What is your job?' the counter clerk asked me (or counter services operative, or whatever they call them nowadays). 'Writer,' I replied, feeling as always slightly foolish. (I mean, I don't earn millions, I don't get invited to the fashion shows, my name's not Zadie, or Dan or Joanna, for God's sake.)
She looked thrilled. 'Oh, I love reading!' she exclaimed. 'But I don't like anything serious. I love to read to escape. I love magic. I love Harry Potter.'
I do not write books like Harry Potter. I kept the matey, conspiratorial grin plastered to my face.
'My husband loves reading too', she went on. 'But serious stuff which I can't stand.'
Thank God for people like her husband, I thought.
'You know,' she said: 'thriller-type things with gangsters and all in them.'
I think my smile froze. I do not write books with gangsters in them.
But worse, I was thinking: can these market-mad publishers be right?
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Female Waffling
The recent Art of Fiction post about the loss of the Manchester Dutch Pancake House reminds me of one of my more depressing writing experiences.
Having the misfortune of being women writers (and yes, you blasted feminists, I choose my words carefully!), I and a mate of mine were once invited to address The Women Writers' Network in London. One of the main features of this visit was the fact that the committee members would take us out to dinner beforehand at a Dutch Pancake House somewhere near Haymarket.
Indeed, the most important feature: we were greeted with great excitement about the treat in store, and it slowly dawned on us that our main function that evening was to serve as an excuse for this outing. As soon as we had begun to tuck in to our glutinous servings, a conversation began around us about the best store in London to have arrange your wedding list. I kid you not, this was only a few years ago.
Well, after a bit they realised that they were being rude to their visiting authors, and that we were sharing murderous glances, and so they asked us politely: 'Well, where would you get your wedding list from?'
'I don't know what the hell you're on about,' said my mate, and they froze in horror and offence over their blueberry waffles or whatever they were, and the rest of the evening was pretty strained, and that was it for the credentials of me and my mate in the Good Fellowship of Women Writers.
Having the misfortune of being women writers (and yes, you blasted feminists, I choose my words carefully!), I and a mate of mine were once invited to address The Women Writers' Network in London. One of the main features of this visit was the fact that the committee members would take us out to dinner beforehand at a Dutch Pancake House somewhere near Haymarket.
Indeed, the most important feature: we were greeted with great excitement about the treat in store, and it slowly dawned on us that our main function that evening was to serve as an excuse for this outing. As soon as we had begun to tuck in to our glutinous servings, a conversation began around us about the best store in London to have arrange your wedding list. I kid you not, this was only a few years ago.
Well, after a bit they realised that they were being rude to their visiting authors, and that we were sharing murderous glances, and so they asked us politely: 'Well, where would you get your wedding list from?'
'I don't know what the hell you're on about,' said my mate, and they froze in horror and offence over their blueberry waffles or whatever they were, and the rest of the evening was pretty strained, and that was it for the credentials of me and my mate in the Good Fellowship of Women Writers.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Robert McCrum at it Again
In today's Observer McCrum pokes fun at book blurbs, and yes, they are damned annoying and we may as well ignore them, but I'm not sure that that's what McCrum is really saying. If it sounds like baloney, he says, it probably is baloney. 'A dark allegory about empathy, nuclear power and contemporary feminism' is not for us. And: ...that lit-crit jargon that says everything and nothing: 'ironic' (up itself) ... 'surreal' (no plot), 'humane' (unbelievably boring). Indeed, McCrum appears to be taking all too much notice, and in the process some of his prejudices are showing.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Great but not so Famous
The bitch hasn't been feeling very literary lately. Sometimes you just want a life, don't you?
But then I went on holiday and read a brilliant book. It's one which apparently I should have read before, but then its author has suffered from the great blinding light coming out of John Updike's arse. It's 'Revolutionary Road' by Richard Yates who has never until now impinged on my consciousness.
For anyone as ignorant as me, it's a novel set in the small-town America of the fifities and deals with the dissatisfactions of a young suburban couple. So far, so Updikish, and at first I read it as though it was by Updike. 'Good God!' I kept shrieking to The Partner of the Bitch, who was trying to sleep in the sun beside me. 'Listen to this: every woman this young guy comes across is characterised merely as either pretty or ugly! And he keeps feeling sorry for himself because his wife has got a little too heavy in the hips and thighs now that she's had two kids! And they have a row because she's upset about something that's happened to her and he can't stand her moaning, he's really sorry that he's got such an uptight bitch of a wife, so mad he raises his fist, but then really proud of himself for bringing it down on the top of the car instead and then of course really sorry for himself all over again because of his throbbing hand!'
'Disgusting!' I cried, and threw the book down in the grass. But something made me pick it up again, and I as read on the viewpoint shifted to that of another character, and it dawned on me, duh!: this book is satirical (and way ahead of its time), beautifully, coolly yet humanely satirical, and leaving John Updike, in my opinion, totally eclipsed.
Go read, though you probably already have.
But then I went on holiday and read a brilliant book. It's one which apparently I should have read before, but then its author has suffered from the great blinding light coming out of John Updike's arse. It's 'Revolutionary Road' by Richard Yates who has never until now impinged on my consciousness.
For anyone as ignorant as me, it's a novel set in the small-town America of the fifities and deals with the dissatisfactions of a young suburban couple. So far, so Updikish, and at first I read it as though it was by Updike. 'Good God!' I kept shrieking to The Partner of the Bitch, who was trying to sleep in the sun beside me. 'Listen to this: every woman this young guy comes across is characterised merely as either pretty or ugly! And he keeps feeling sorry for himself because his wife has got a little too heavy in the hips and thighs now that she's had two kids! And they have a row because she's upset about something that's happened to her and he can't stand her moaning, he's really sorry that he's got such an uptight bitch of a wife, so mad he raises his fist, but then really proud of himself for bringing it down on the top of the car instead and then of course really sorry for himself all over again because of his throbbing hand!'
'Disgusting!' I cried, and threw the book down in the grass. But something made me pick it up again, and I as read on the viewpoint shifted to that of another character, and it dawned on me, duh!: this book is satirical (and way ahead of its time), beautifully, coolly yet humanely satirical, and leaving John Updike, in my opinion, totally eclipsed.
Go read, though you probably already have.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Zadie and the Characters
Well, I've been away and while I was Zadie Smith won the Orange prize. How can I not be glad, I love Zadie, I love her linguistic talent and empathy, I love her take on contemporary society and the way she can pin it down via its linguistic codes, I love her human understanding. But something makes me sad, and it's that Ali Smith or Hilary Mantel or Nicole Krauss didn't win.
Maybe it's that I can't stand the idea of competition, the idea that one kind of writing should be pitted against another (it takes all sorts, after all) , but it's also that I'm a champion of the kind of interiority that these other writers practise, and which I don't think Zadie quite achieves. Zadie is so good at describing people and replicating the way they speak that you'd think they were there in front of you, but there's something dramatic, rather than novelistic, in the way she does it. She doesn't quite inhabit their mentality, however brilliantly she pins it down. However empathic she is there's always an ironic detachment which is akin to that of the playwright. Ali Smith and Sarah Waters eschew that coolness of irony and inhabit utterly the psyches of their characters, which to me is the bravest novelistic step of all.
Maybe it's that I can't stand the idea of competition, the idea that one kind of writing should be pitted against another (it takes all sorts, after all) , but it's also that I'm a champion of the kind of interiority that these other writers practise, and which I don't think Zadie quite achieves. Zadie is so good at describing people and replicating the way they speak that you'd think they were there in front of you, but there's something dramatic, rather than novelistic, in the way she does it. She doesn't quite inhabit their mentality, however brilliantly she pins it down. However empathic she is there's always an ironic detachment which is akin to that of the playwright. Ali Smith and Sarah Waters eschew that coolness of irony and inhabit utterly the psyches of their characters, which to me is the bravest novelistic step of all.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Haven't We All Nearly?
Here's a clip to give us a kick.
(Thanks to Miss Snark, the Literary Agent, Wise and Snarkolicious One.)
(Thanks to Miss Snark, the Literary Agent, Wise and Snarkolicious One.)
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