Comedy versus Tragedy

Once again I haven't been blogging here. Partly it's because I've been working on a new publication, a reissue of my first novel The Birth Machine, which has taken up much of the time and headspace left over from any actual writing I've managed to do. But partly, too, I have to admit there's the loss of impetus which others have reported, connected to the rise of Facebook and Twitter. As Tania Hershman says, on social networking sites you can get instant feedback and have instant conversations - and without having to write whole mini-essays - and reach a wider audience than just the blogging fraternity. Another thing which has struck me is that by the time you get around to blogging about an issue, on Twitter or Fb things have moved on, and it's become old hat.

But that, precisely, is the value of blogs. The reason that sometimes one doesn't instantly get around to blogging about an issue is that blogs can take a commitment of time, and the reason they do us that is that they can also take a commitment of thought. A blog, it seems to me, is an excellent vehicle for contemplating nuances which can easily be submerged in instant discussions. Take for instance the recent issue of Orange Prize Chair Daisy Goodwin's plea for women writers to lighten up. I've been mulling this for some time, and wondering why I didn't want to join in the discussions, and why something about it all has worried me. Once I had a moment free from retrieving files from old computers and reading proofs, it struck me.

I know there were one or two more subtle voices, but the general thrust of the conversation on the web seemed to fall into bald either-or arguments: there were those who believed that women were too miserable and those who didn't and thought men were just as bad; there were those who were for comedy and those who weren't. Even the intelligent article by Erica Wagner in The Times arguing that comedy is harder to do than tragedy (comedy requires a particularly incisive verbal facility) seemed to imply that comedy is therefore better.

Why does one have to be better than the other? Aren't they simply different sides of the coin of human nature, expressions of different but equally valid individual and social states of mind? Sometimes comedy answers our emotional needs, sometimes tragedy does. Why, as artists, can't we do both? (I certainly like to.)

I'm troubled by this thrust towards either/or and black-and-white thinking, and not just as a writer fighting the culture of branding.

Author Blog Awards

I've been asked to let you know about the Author Blog Awards being run by CompletelyNovel in association with Quartet, Allison and Busby, Simon and Schuster and BookBrunch. Here's what they say they're all about:

There are over 10,000 published and unpublished authors blogging to readers, writers and industry professionals. Despite huge loyal followings and a remarkable wealth of new content, many readers remain unaware of these blogs.

The Author Blog Awards aim to honour the best blogs by both published and unpublished writers. They will recognise the writers who use their blogs to connect with readers in the most imaginative, engaging and inspiring ways. At the same time we hope to attract new audiences to these blogs and help readers find out more about the authors they love…and new authors too.

You can nominate your favourite author blog to win an award and will also have the chance to win something from a selection of prizes including free eReaders, new books, free eBooks, and book tokens. There are three categories: Best Published Author Blog, Best Unpublished Author Blog, and Best Author Microblog. The winners will be announced in April.

Go to the site here.

Crossposted with Elizabeth Baines.

Stationery Lust

I love Hilary Mantel's Guardian article about stationery and its relationship to our writing processes. I am so gratified by her praise for the loose leaf and the ring binder as the best media for writing novels, and her denunciation of the bound notebook, in particular the Moleskine, and its straitjacket of linearity, which I totally agree is not the way you write novels. (And I'm so glad she said it for me: 'Chatwin, Hemingway: has the earth ever held two greater posers?'). 'You must be able to loop back on yourself,' she says, 'and to be able to arrange the elements of which your story consists in an order that is entirely flexible.' And she's right: crossings out won't do: you need to be able to restore those bits you abandoned when you realize they are necessary after all.

Mantel says that 'at twilight' she starts dreaming about old-fashioned stationery: 'pink tape, for instance, that barristers use to tie up their bundles'. But I can go one better: I actually have it! (Don't ask me where to get it, someone gave it to me years ago, a huge cardboard roll of it, and I don't know where they got it.) I use it to tie up those old drafts which, you never know, I might loop back to for those bits I do need after all. And she wonders if you can still still get treasury tags. Well, I can tell her, yes you can, in Staples - or you could last time I needed them - and I use them all the time to bind plays, and yes, there's something really nice about threading those lovely dark-green strings with their sharp metals ends through the holes... Ah, stationery!

Jewish Book Week: A Beginner's Guide to Jews on the Edge

Billed as a discussion between novelists Will Self and Adam Thirwell about 'the many possible manifestations of Judaism - half-Jews, non-Jewish Jews, self-hating Jews, anti-semitic Jews et al - and whether any of these semitic permutations actually matters', this Sunday afternoon session could not have been more different in atmosphere from the Theresienstadt session I attended in the morning. Maybe it was the jokey billing, maybe it was the thought of Will Self's rebellious intellect, but long before it began there was a thrill of anarchy and rebellion in the air. Having been late for the morning session, I determined to be early for this one, entering as people were leaving from the last session, only to find myself, along with other early arrivers, turfed out for security reasons. Well, the woman in front of me and in the front row wasn't having that. She refused to move, she said she needed that seat, she was hard of hearing, and they would have to lift her bodily (and, as she pointed out, she wasn't exactly petite), and things were held up as they failed to remove her and the rest of us exiles watched the altercation from the door, highly entertained.

Well, I got my seat behind her back, and the huge hall filled up almost to capacity. Adam Thirwell kicked off by pointing out that he and Self hadn't chosen the title of the event, and, needless to say (and gratifyingly for me) the thrust of their interest turned out to be literary rather than sociological. They had had the idea, Self said, while at a literary festival in Lyon, and as a result of a talk in praise of the novelist Celine, a passionate anti-semite. Turning to examine the concepts of Jewishness held by Jews and others, he said that when he tells Gentiles that he is half-Jewish, they often ask which of his parents is Jewish, and when he says his mother they say, 'Oh, well, you're Jewish then!', and he found it interesting that Jews had managed to impose so successfully on Gentiles this matrilineal notion of Jewishness. For him, he said, such a notion simply doesn't add up: his mother wasn't observant, and he feels it ill behoves him to claim to be more than half Jewish.

Thirwell then said he was a matrilineal Jew (ie he wasn't claiming the matrilineal notion, just saying his mother is Jewish), but 'barely cultural', and he feels embattled when he is forced to 'be' more Jewish than he feels because of this matrilineal notion. Why was it not possible to have a two-part identity? Self referred to a piece he had written for the Jewish Quarterly, 'On Writing Half-Jewishly', which he said he had thought a sweet little piece, but had been attacked for it by the author Cynthia Ozik, who said that he may be famous but if he claims placelessness he can only be a blur; that people are born whole not half. Untrue, said Self (rightly): people are born multifarious.

In fairness, though, said Self, we have to look at it historically. Up until very recently it was possible to hear casually anti-semitic remarks (and older people are far more familiar with the experience). Self had memories of hearing them as late as the eighties, and each time he had had a choice in terms of identity: either to express a Jewish identity or deny it by remaining silent (implying that neither expressed the truth of his sense of identity). The state of half or demi can only be realized in the absence of anti-semitism.

There is an interesting category, he said, where Jewishness is often formed against anti-semitism, and I was reminded of Philipp Manes's growing espousal of Jewishness in the Theresienstadt ghetto, as discussed in the morning - which momentarily made me lose my grip on the current discussion, and the point that Self went on to make about Sartre (who wrote that 'if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him'). We have to look at it all, Self said, in terms of the diaspora and the 1880s and 1890s pogroms. One interesting thing is the reaction of indigenous Jews to that of 'stetl' Jews, as they called them; the ambivalence towards the latter, particularly from Sephardic aristocratic Jews. At this Thirwell commented that one strand of his family had been very established, but another strand had arrived from Lithuania in this era, and one of the things that interested him was this intermingling (by which I think he meant the interest of multifariousness within Jewishness.) Self said that at first there had been a repression of these newcomers, then acceptance and fast assimilation aided by a religious mission and the opening of numerous synagogues.

So where does that leave us as writers? Self asked, getting to (for me) the nub of the matter. Self-hating, said Thirwell, which people half-laughed at, but which actually sent off a ripple of shock. What is a Jewish writer? Self asked. Would we only be Jewish writers if we wrote in Hebrew or Yiddish? The two then discussed Kafka, a Jewish writer who wrote in German as a way of 'avoiding his fathers' (Self) but who wrote of being, in doing so, like a donkey with its back legs stuck in mud and its front legs flailing. Thirwell pointed out the similarities of this to the image of the cockroach on its back in Metamorphosis - the fact that Kafka was obsessed with the notion of the difficulties of linguistic assimilation and mutant forms. He also noted that Kafka had problems with the word 'Mutter' - he felt it was not his word, it seemed far too comical to describe a Jewish mother.

Self said, but as far as he knew Kafka's family were assimilated and didn't speak Yiddish in the home at all, and the fact that he wrote in a very Czech German wasn't commensurate with his having a Yiddish background. Thirwell said but the fact is that there was a there was a Yiddish theatre in Prague at the time which attracted Kafka as having a more sincere language. In any case, Self said, Kafka seems the paradigmatic example of the fact that you can't really speak of Jewish writers in relation to language. He is marked out for his quality of prescience of the coming Holocaust, and while you can say he is a paradigmatic Jewish writer, he is a world writer at the same time. Thirwell said though that he did think there was something in Kafka that was in danger of being lost: that he represents a way of thinking about what assimilation and identity mean, that he is concerned with complicated identity; and Self agreed that there was a dialectical process of assimilation taking place (analagous with what took place in the 1960s here) (and which the Shoah would replace with a different set of priorities) which involved anxieties about assimilation.

Thirwell now turned the conversation to the issue of the Jew as victim in literature. Roth admired Bellow, he said, but attacks Bellow for returning in his later fiction to a Gentile-imposed model of the Jew as victim. We must stop acting as victims, Roth said: it's not always 1933. (Though it felt very close this morning, I couldn't help thinking.) In Thirwell's opinion one strand in American fiction does think it's still 1933, that there is still a tragedy about to happen, and Israel has a role in this perception. Self agreed: Israel is made to stand as proxy for this historical memory. Both agreed that, in spite of his criticisms of Bellow, Roth himself has failed to come to terms with victimology and the trap of the self-hating Jew. Self now expressed the view that Roth, in his flight from humanism and his fear that it could drive him back to Judeo-Christianity, is a curiously cold, dessicated, arid writer. Thirwell noted that on the level of structure and form, Roth is an interesting writer, but on the sentence level he is indeed dessicated, bland, and here the conversation turned to an issue which was of greatest interest of all to me, the issue of Jewishness and literary style.

Self noted that Kafka wrote a kind of unornamented anti-style, whereas Proust could be placed at the other extreme, consisting of a highly stylised anxiety about Jewish assimilation. Thirwell said that, re Kafka, even so he creates a specific Kafka-language, which Self said was a microcosm of a pre-existant dialect, a crudescence of a certain kind of Czech German. In Proust, Thirwell said, it's a question of who you're allowed to desire, and the (unfettered) style is an expression of that - the problem of borders. Self referred to Otto Weininger's pre-WW1 book Sex and Character in which he characterizes the Jew as hermaphroditic, a book which was influential on both Proust and Joyce (who of course presented a positive non-victim portrait of a Jew).

This was all getting extremely interesting to me when the hard-of-hearing woman in front of me stood up and said Couldn't we ask questions? and started to ask one which appeared to be intended to bring the whole thing back to what she seemed to consider the matter in hand, the question of half- and quarter-Jewishness (maybe she hadn't heard their protestation that they weren't responsible for the thrust of the title).

There was now a bit of an altercation: the audience shouted out for discussion to continue rather as it had been doing, and the woman sat down, but accused Self of delaying the start of the session (and so running on too long) by taking too long eating his lunch, at which Self quipped, No, it was drugs. The thread of the argument was sadly lost. What we were trying to say, said Self, is that it's good to stand outside as a writer (to be half), and Thirwell got back to the issue of language/style by saying that every writer creates his or her own minor language anyway, and there are certain ways in which the issue of language gets inflected by identity, and there was a brief discussion about Bashevis Singer.

After that, the floor really was thrown open to questions. One of the most interesting was the first: a woman asked what they thought about Pinter who she felt lost by never declaring his Jewishness in his work. Self said that he liked her style! which caused laughter, but Thirwell defended Pinter by pointing out that Ashes to Ashes is a play about the Holocaust, and asked why anyone has to be Jewish in their writing. Self said, Yes, are we looking at him through identity politics he wouldn't have agreed with, or is there really a lack in his work? But then do we think Beckett paid attention to his Irishness in his writing? Yes, of course he did! Thirwell said, But does this have anything to do with whether or not these two are good writers? Self said perhaps all the silences in Pinter are really him saying, 'I'm Jewish! I'm Jewish'! which caused a good deal of laughter.

Jewish book Week runs until Sunday March 7th, and you can book for events here.

Jewish Book Week: Philipp Manes: A Theresienstadt Chronicle

A session chaired by Victoria Glendinning, in which editors Ben Barkow and Klaus Leist read from and discussed As If It Were Life, an account by Pilipp Manes of life in the Czech ghetto of Theresienstadt.

Asked to blog for Jewish Book Week, I instantly chose to cover this session. The Jewish ghetto Theresienstadt had haunted me since reading WG Sebold's Austerlitz, and then last month, on my trip to Prague, I visited the place, isolated among the flat fields, and was overcome, as was Sebold's narrator, and as were my companions, by an oppressive desolation which seems to hang over the place. Built in the late eighteenth century as a garrison town for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was emptied in October 1941, its population relocated, and designated as a collection point for Jews from Bohemia and Moravia (today's Czech Republic) and from Germany and German-occupied territories. It is remarkable for having been used by the Nazis as an apparently (I use the word 'apparently' advisedly) model ghetto to disguise the Nazi's extermination plans, in particular to receive an investigatory visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and for its seemingly deliberate concentration of Jews who were well-known outside the Jewish community, members of the professional, intellectual and artistic elites.

Philipp Manes, a Berlin furrier in his sixties, and his wife were taken to Theresienstadt in July 1942, and were there until October 1944 when they were transported to Auschwitz and were two of the last people to enter the gas chambers. During his time in Theresienstadt, Manes, who had always been an enthusiastic diarist, wrote in nine notebooks his detailed account of life in the ghetto where he played a key role as an artistic impresario, developing an intellectual and artistic community which served as a kind of spiritual resistance against imprisonment and debilitating conditions. He seems to have intended the account for publication after the war, and once his final deportation was due he handed it secretly for safe keeping to a fellow inmate who survived. Tragically, the memoir ends in mid-sentence when Manes was deported. After some difficulties and delays, in 1948 the manuscript finally reached his daughter Eva in London. Eventually the manuscript was deposited, along with others of Manes' writings, in the Wiener Library in London, but only in 2005 did it find a publisher and only in 2009 was it translated into English.

The book, which I am half-way through reading, is a fascinating and contradictory expression of fear and hope, of critical reportage and German-patriotic pride in hard work and achievement, and of descriptions of harsh conditions alongside those of soaring artistic and intellectual pursuit - a remarkable expression, in fact, of the reality conundrum that Theresienstadt must have been.

I'm afraid I was a little late arriving at this session, and it had already begun as I entered. There was a deep hush over the room, and a quiet dignity about the three-person panel. Editor Ben Barkow, director of The Wiener Library, was providing an account of Pilipp Manes' life before he entered Theresienstadt: his childhood love of the theatrical, the travel and connection with the artistic community he enjoyed as an employee of the New Photographic Society, the later necessity of taking over his father's furrier firm, the loss of freedom and property as the Nazis put pressure on the Jews, and the consolation he found in writing.

Editor Klaus Leist then read from the very moving account Manes wrote at this time, Last Days in Berlin, which forms the Prologue to this book and describes the preparations Manes and his wife were forced to make for departure, and their feelings of grief as they did so.

The Theresienstadt account takes up where this prologue leaves off, and Ben Barkow outlined its main events - Klaus Leist reading relevant sections - from the first horrible experience, the Schleuse (sluice) when newcomers were deprived of all possessions they had brought, afterwards being put to sleep without cover on the floor of bare stables and later of barracks. However, Manes was very soon put in charge of the 'Orientation Service', meant to direct those who were lost in the ghetto. This was necessary because although Theresienstadt was a small town, built for a population of 7,000, it now held over 50,000, many of whom were disorientated and traumatised: there are, as Barkow said, many heartbreaking stories in the book. Manes was proud of his work in the Orientation Service, which he developed into a kind of adult education centre and cultural agency, organising over 500 lectures, play readings and music concerts in two years. German officers were rarely seen in the ghetto - the place was policed by Czech gendarmes - as the administration tried to keep up an appearance of normality, which the prisoners tended to support 'for the good of the ghetto'. Many, however, sensed an air of unreality which reached its peak in the 'beautification' of the town in preparation for the Red Cross visit of June 1944. Manes's attitude, Barkow said, was realistic, if not cynical. He knew that the measures were meant to cover up the truth, but accepted them. As he wrote: 'Whatever the reasons, they make our life better.'

The main problem Manes had to contend with for his cultural project was the loss of his contributors through transport to the east or the collapse of their morale or health. No one was murdered in Theresienstadt [EB: there were no gas chambers there, though on my visit there I learned that some had begun to be built and then abandoned], but many died, so Manes always had an eye on the hospital and on departing and arriving transports. By the date of his last event, in August 1944, he had lost most of his audience and speakers.

The account describes in stark detail the horrible conditions - the bedbugs and lice, the delousing sessions, the inequities between the German and Czech Jews - and is a fascinating insight into the maintenance of the place. There was no doubt, though, said Barkow, that Manes was starstruck by the intellectual elite among his inmates, and that he felt fulfilled by his role there as a cultural impresario. Even by the end he appeared to have no complete notion of what Auschwitz really was [EB: and it's true that every so often he appears to entertain the German propaganda that it's the place of a new and perfect life for Jews].

Victoria Glendinning now opened up a discussion between the panel members, drawing attention to the peculiar conflict Manes had between being a German and a Jew. He was very much a German patriot and his attitudes, in fact, are often those of a conservative German Christian. Barkow commented that Manes' sense of cultural (rather than religious) Jewishness grew in the ghetto, and while some of his patriotic statements about the SS are troubling, it's possible that they were inserted to protect him should the memoir be discovered [a point which seems valid to me, since some of these patriotic statements follow directly on from harsh criticism of conditions]. He was in fact very proud of Jewish self-sufficiency and capacity to work in the ghetto and thus could be said to be reaching towards a notion of Zionism.

Victoria Glendinning drew attention to Manes's attitude to the Czech Jews in the ghetto [he writes with sadness and possible bitterness of the greater privileges of the Czech Jews, but with almost sentimental admiration of their youth and beauty], and Klaus Leist talked about the snobbery of Germans towards eastern Jews and the anti-German feeling on the Czech side. Czech Jews, as the first to be brought to Theresienstadt, had originally envisaged building a self-sustaining and economically viable community there and thus, by being indispensable to the Germans, ride out the war, but once older Jews were brought in from elsewhere, that dream expired. Glendinning also pointed to the paradox that Manes was perhaps more fulfilled in his role as a cultural impresario there than he perhaps had ever been before in his life - that he even seems smug about it, with which Barkow agreed. She stressed the lack of clarity in the memoir about how much Manes knew of the truth - he did after all get his children out of the country before the war, and he makes quite clear at one point [elsewhere I think] that he understands that the aim of National Socialism is the destruction of Judaism. What about this ambivalence? Was it shared by a lot of Jews? Klaus Leist said that he thought it was, and this may have been a function of wishful thinking [EB: which I think it's possible to detect in Manes's document], and maybe anyway people didn't guess that destruction meant death. Ben Barkow added that very little was known about Auschwitz; Theresienstadt was very sealed off from the world (although someone, I think Glendinning, commented that Leo Baeck knew the truth, but deliberately decided to keep it secret). Possibly Manes chose not to believe: he was, after all, a very conforming individual.

I found that perhaps for me the most moving part of this session came now, when Victoria Glendinning opened it up to two or three questions from the floor. A white-haired woman across the room said that she had been in Theresienstadt and that she didn't recognize this description of people's knowledge about Auschwitz. Some people certainly knew: if a postcard arrived from a relative in a concentration camp and they had marked it with a cross, it meant that there were gas chambers there. But then, she said, in a statement that for me summed up everything, such things operate according to denial mechanisms.

Ben Barkow is the author of Alfred Wiener and the Making of the Holocaust Library and editor of Testaments of the Holocaust.

Dr Klaus Leist works at The Wiener Library, concentrating on deciphering and translating old documents. He edited As If It Were Life, A WWII Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto by Philipp Manes with Ben Barkow.

Jewish Book Week runs until Sunday March 7th, and you can book for events here.

Salt Sale, Hard Times and Doing It for Yourself

My publishers, Salt, are having an amazing sale, and anyone interested in poetry would be advised to get on over there quick, while stocks last. Salt make beautiful books and some are going for as little as £1 !

There's a serious side to this, though, of course. The reason Salt are running this sale is that they need an emergency injection of cash if they are to keep going. The Just One Book campaign started last summer continues, and as a Salt author I am asking you once more to do that: buy just one Salt book - and brighten up your life into the bargain! If you want prose, you could buy one of my own Salt books: Balancing on the Edge of the World, a story collection that lifts the lid on some of the untold stories in our everyday lives, or my novel Too Many Magpies, on the surface a spooky tale of adultery but on the deeper level a study of our present sense of the precariousness of the world, and of the ways in which we think. (If you've got them already, why not buy one for a relative or friend - Too Many Magpies, since motherhood is one of its themes, would make a great Mothers' Day present!) Or you could buy a book by one of the great short story writers I feel privileged to be published alongside: Carys Davies, Matthew Licht, Paul Magrs, Tania Hershman, Vanessa Gebbie, Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Chrissie Gittins, Padrika Tarrant, and on... Or you could buy Salt's guide to the art of the short story, Short Circuit.

Times are hard, the publishing industry has changed, and all but the most commercial sectors of publishing are suffering. Last night I attended a meeting of north-west women writers, convened by the novelist Sherry Ashworth and others with a view to setting up a press to publish fiction by women in the north west, in response to these changes. The reality of those changes was illustrated by the fact that there were several writers present, both prize-winning and mass-market, who were now facing difficulties in publishing their latest books or had moved to small presses. Basically the feeling is now that writers must do it for themselves.

A propos this, my fellow Salt author Nuala Ni Chonchuir writes an interesting post on the subject of self-promotion by authors. I have come across criticisms on the web of authors who ceaselessly promote their own books, and I have to say that, although I try to do it conscientiously, it still goes against the grain for me, but the fact is that it's now an absolute necessity - most of all for authors with small presses, but also it seems now for most authors with big publishers. I'm sure that Vanessa Gebbie won't mind me replicating here her comment on Nuala's post:

I was at a large writer's convention last weekend, with talks from some senior figures in the publishing world - (Get Writing 2010 - and a speaker in question was the MD of Hachette) - it was a wake-up call for anyone in the audience who thought that all you had to do was get a book accepted and then sit back!

Cross-posted to my author blog.

The Pinch of Salt Rule for Writing.

Interesting that some of the 10 Rules for Writing offered by some of the authors in The Guardian tell you rather about those writers themselves.

Anne Enright's first rule, for instance: The first twelve years are the worst. Hm, obvious she's never been a mid-list author out on her ear.

Hilary Mantel's very first rule: Get an accountant. For god's sake, has she never been at the writing stage where you can't f***ing afford an accountant?

Interesting how conflicting the advice is, Atwood and others saying it's no use plodding on if something's going stale, someone (can't remember who) saying stick at it.

All relative, innit? And perhaps it's not surprising that it's the writers I like best with whom I mostly agree: Atwood, Enright (in spite of her opener), AL Kennedy, Joyce Carol Oates among others.

Jewish Book Week

I'm delighted to have been asked to blog for Jewish Book Week (27th February-27th March), and I'm covering two sessions on Sunday 28th in which I must say I'm immensely interested. After my recent visit to Theresiestadt, there was no way that I was going to miss the session at 11 am when Ben Barkow and Klaus Leist will read from and talk about the book they have edited, Philipp Manes' account of his experiences in the camp, written in the last days and broken off in mid-sentence when he was deported to Auschwitz. And at 2 pm I'm covering 'A Beginner's Guide to Jews on the Edge', a discussion between Will Self and Adam Thirwell on 'the many possible manifestations of Judaism and whether any of these semitic permutations actually matters'.

The week looks really interesting, other speakers including Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Lionel Shriver, Anne Fine, Rebecca Goldstein and Stephen Pinker. Probably a good idea to book, which you can do here. My colleague, author and blogger Sue Guiney, will also be blogging JBW.

Writers Are the New Proles

Foad Mardukhi alerts me to an article by Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, which spells out the pauperisation of writers and their loss of status in our new internet culture.

And, although I don't usually respond to requests to publicize things - once you start, you're never finished, and this is a commentary and not a listings blog - I've given in for once:

The Juniper Institute is an American summer writing conference hosted by the UMass-Amherst MFA program (www.umass.edu/juniperinstitute), giving new/emerging writers the chance to study with a stellar array of more established poets and fictionists. The April 1 deadline for scholarship applications to the 2010 Juniper Summer Writing Institute is fast approaching! From June 20-26, poets and writers will gather at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to explore the creative process and advance their craft. Faculty members Charles D’Ambrosio, Mark Doty, Noy Holland, Paul Lisicky, Dara Wier, and Matthew Zapruder will offer workshops in poetry, fiction, and memoir. Writers in residence (including James Tate, Joy Williams, and Thomas Sayers Ellis) will give readings, lead craft sessions, and participate in Q&As. For application forms and more information, visit http://www.umass.edu/juniperinstitute. Workshops fill quickly, so applicants are encouraged to submit their materials soon.

Who'd Be a Writer?

Apologies for the recent absence from this blog, which was due to much busy-ness. One of the very many things which preoccupied me was a visit to a private secondary school to conduct workshops with younger classes and to talk to upper school classes about the whole business of being a writer. My readers may be interested to know that the matter of greatest concern for the future guardians of our culture appeared to be that of Making a Living, and achieved its best expression when I addressed the whole of Year 10 in the hall at the end of the day:

Boy 1: What's your best-selling book?

Boy 2: How many of it have you sold?

Response of shock at the figure of 3,000 (they opened by asking me if I like Twilight, and know that it has sold in the millions), and I explain that I write literary and not commercial fiction, and that it's not on the whole possible to make a living out of literary fiction.

Boy 3 (puzzled): But what's the difference between literary and commercial fiction?

I explain, essentially that literary fiction doesn't obey the expected formulae, isn't simply entertainment.

Boy 4 (a bit incredulous): So why don't you write commercial fiction that sells?

I explain that though I may sometimes have thought of it, basically I can't and don't want to: I'm looking for the truth rather than just to entertain, and I'm constitutionally incapable of doing the expected thing (adding that I was always in trouble at school, which raises a titter).

Boy 4 (really incredulous): How do you buy things?

I explain that I do other things for money such as talks like the one I am giving now.

Boy 5: So isn't it just a hobby then, rather than a job?


Hm. Not so sure I fired up that particular lot to be writers...

Channel 4's Book Club

So you decide to have a television Book Club. Book Club. Note the precise phrase. For we all know, don't we, what book clubs are like? No one's really there for the books, are they? They're there for the wine, for the chat about house prices and bags and shoes, and the chosen book is just an excuse. So this is what we'll do for a television book club. We can't have wine, of course, well, not beyond the Green Room, but we can have the intoxication of celebrity, a very likeable fashion guru who confesses to read far less than he'd like, a couple of well-loved comedians (one of each sex), and a couple of good-looking actors (one of each sex again) who will at least be able to act looking interested and intelligent even if it's a bit obvious they're acting and even if the female ex-Footballers' Wives Laila Rouass never manages to say anything (and the camera will be able to focus strategically up the thighs of her crossed legs).

Stick them all randomly on sofas (that's how book clubs happen, don't they - people just turn up and plonk down on the nearest seat). Don't bother briefing them, that would be really unrealistic: in book clubs people just say the first thing that comes into their heads, and the biggest personalities get to say the most (although rarely the most considered). Make the main focus of your programme the writer of a celebrity memoir. He will be the focus, even though the billed focus is a novel. He will be the focus not only because the other celebrities are more excited by his presence than the novel, and because he and the female comedian immediately start a basically private but very entertaining bit of sparring (in which she also gets to plug her own celebrity memoir) (this is the sort of thing that happens in book clubs, isn't it?) but because you have allocated the greatest amount of time on the programme to this item. And the questioning is not only entirely adulatory, but focused not so much on his book but on his life. Well, you get a lot of that in books clubs, don't you, people going on about life rather than books, and, let's face it, who after all really wants dry old literary stuff - that's just gonna put people off books, isn't it?

So let's put the serious bookish bit off a bit more by an interview with a mega-selling chick-lit author who can provide some glamour and success and riches and stuff, and then by having a nice little lark, a film of a reporter rushing around Spitalfields with strange words stuck on big cards like street signs, getting charmingly engaged with the public (and hope it doesn't seem embarrassingly forced).

Well, it's getting towards the end of the programme now, so better bite the bullet and have a bit of a film of the serious novel's author talking intelligently about it (though sweeten the pill with some lurid spooky photography).

And finally, with five or fewer minutes to go, the promised discussion, which you have billed as the point of programme. The fashion guru says without elaboration that he doesn't go for Gothic stuff. The female comedian looks a bit uninterested in this, and fails to give an opinion of her own. Well, that's what it's like in book clubs, isn't it? No one's obliged to say anything, after all. Others make a few murmurs, and the general impression is that no one likes it very much. Well, that's how it goes: people in book clubs are so often far more interested in their own egos than books.

And that's it. Book club over. Really authentic. Brilliant.

Reading and the masses

Robert McCrum can't understand why, when book programmes are just about the cheapest to make and there's such interest in book festivals despite the fact that they're not even much hyped, there are in fact hardly any books programmes on TV.

Down with the internet - or at least off into part of the day!

Many bloggers are announcing their New Year resolutions, which is something I usually only do in the privacy of my journal: yes, I still have one of those old-fashioned black-and-red hardback A4 books in which I record by hand my writing thoughts, though I must say I write in it far less often nowadays since the internet has swallowed up so much of my time.

And here's the rub. I want to make a resolution to stop using the internet so much, since it has not only eaten into my writing time, but as Tania Hershman has indicated lately, and as David Ulin wrote recently, the presence of the internet in one's life can create a kind of scattering of focus that is entirely antipathetic to the writing of fiction, which for me, and I am sure for most fiction writers, requires a kind of shutting-off into a very personal dream world. It goes without saying that I thoroughly enjoy the social interaction, and the internet has been a stupendous marketing tool for both my recent books, but let's face it, it's like having social get-togethers and sales pitch meetings in your house all day long, and who can write under those circumstances?

But how can I make such a resolution, when the marketing of my books, which come from an independent publisher, depends on my being very much online? Would making such a resolution be the same as making a resolution to stop marketing my books? I'm very much afraid of this, but I guess I'm even more afraid of ending up never writing again.

Later this year (I think - or sometime soon, anyway) Salt will be reprinting the revised edition of my first novel The Birth Machine (which I guess is a bit of a feminist classic - see here [scroll down to Kimberley Osivwemu's entry]), so I'll have to work on promoting that, as well as keeping my other books afloat. But like Tania Hershman, I'm going to try to restrict my time on the internet each day. It will be interesting to see if it's just as effective, and if by being constantly connected I was just wasting time...

I'm posting this across my two blogs, as it seems both very personal to my own writing and a subject of more general literary import.

The (Dis)Comfort of the Familiar

In today's Guardian John Dugdale assesses the implications of the 2009 Bestsellers list, which is dominated by genre fiction, and from which literary fiction and non-fiction are largely exiled (can't find a link, I'm afraid):

...there's a narrowing of the range of work that sells in bulk, a sense of the public grasping for novels that will conform to a familiar structure.

How Can You Be Dissident?

Robert McCrum asserts that our contemporary market-driven culture has no room for the dissident writer, and that ' "the habit of art" has become the "addiction of charm" '. His heart's in the right place, and in my view he's absolutely right about the general trend, but the thrust of his argument is to blame writers themselves - he accuses them of 'want[ing] to join the system, not keep it at arm's length', and refers to 'artistic vanity' and 'complacency and an appetite for entertaining' which leads to a 'sapping [of] the instinct to ask awkward questions of the status quo.'

But this overlooks the power of a system within which it is just not possible for the dissident or avant-garde author to operate. If authors are 'fearful of risk', as he says they are, it is only because in this day and age your agent or editor will simply turn you down if you're 'not commercial enough'. McCrum says authors nowadays just wanna belong, but maybe it's more a case of not belonging meaning not being published at all.

Women and Writing

I have more than I can possibly settle down to say about Rachel Cusk's Guardian article on women and writing, and the way it relates to my own writing experience - on a weekend, that is, when I'm gearing up for builders, meetings, another trip to London, pre-Christmas and Christmas visitors and, ironically, trying to find time even to get back into my room of my own to actually write (and realizing that December, which I had planned to set aside for a new story, is in all practical ways nearly over). Maybe I'll write about the article soon (on the train, perhaps, though laptopping on those Pendolinos makes me trainsick). Suffice for the present to say that she rang a lot of bells for me, and I'm still ringing...

Ten Awful Truths About Publishing.

Enough to make you give up writing altogether. Thanks (or not) to Eva Ulian.

Women Writers and the Short Story

Sarah Crown ponders the recent successes of female writers with the short story, and concludes:

Whatever the reason, their current success has the welcome effect of reminding us that great writing doesn't have to be set on the grand scale.

Selling lit fic to Waterstone's

As I write I am in Waterstone's Gower St again, where on November 16th Verona kindly ordered a copy of my novel Too Many Magpies. When I wrote about this , Salt's Chris Hamilton-Emery explained that bookshops rarely re-order even if they do sell such writer-motored orders, and David Knowles of Two Ravens Press questioned that they were even really ordered in the first place:

But the real value of your experiment will come if you ever manage to find out how many of those 'Magpies' actually got ordered after you left - and, more importantly, how many have come home to roost in 3 or 4 month's time.

Well, I have to report that there is no copy of Too Many Magpies here on the fiction shelves. So was it not really ordered? Or did they send it back double-quick, or did it sell, and it hasn't been replaced?

Do you know, I feel too weary to ask...

The BBC National Short Story Award

Yesterday afternoon I managed to catch up with the BBC National Short Short Award on the BBC website, where podcasts of four of the five selected stories remained. Kate Clanchy's winning story, The Not-Dead and the Saved was certainly very impressive and extremely moving, and I'm not surprised that it won both this and the V S Pritchett awards. It's interesting that the press-release story stresses the wonder of the winner being a poet with only the third short story she has written (the implication being that she is not practised at the form). It seems to me that that's no wonder at all: short stories, as I'm frequently saying, are closer to poetry than novels, and this short story bears all the hallmarks of that: a linguistic attention and the structural and verbal patterning at which Clanchy as a poet is supremely practised, and it is these elements which create the control of emotion and tone for which this story has been rightly praised, and make it so moving.

The other stories were prosey by comparison, I thought. Sara Maitland's Moss Witch was an interesting choice as runner-up: it's typical of Maitland's oevre - ecological and feminist with a good dollop of fairytale quality. The judging panel were of course female, which might explain this, though I do wonder if it was the ecological theme that did it. It felt a little forced, even clunky, at times, I thought, but was certainly a most interesting concept, and memorable as so much of Maitland's writing is. Lionel Shriver's Exchange Rates was competent, indeed extremely well-oiled, but pretty much a traditional New-Yorker type story, I thought, and Jane Rogers' Hitting Trees With Sticks betrayed her drama background by being a dramatic monologue narrated by a woman beginning to suffer senility - a difficult feat to pull off with psychological authenticity, as the authorial voice was more knowing than the narrative voice, and I have to say I wasn't absolutely sure it worked - or maybe I was just put off by Julia McKenzie's reading which rendered the narrator rather irritating.