Topsyturvydom

The Tie That Binds

2011-11-05T11:32:00.000Z

The first time I ever got paid for writing something was in 1985. I'd forgotten about it until yesterday when I found myself in a dusty corner of Manchester University library faced with a long shelf containing bound volumes of The Times Educational Supplement from the sixties to the nineties. I remembered writing a piece for them, and some of the aftermath. I knew it had printed in August, and I knew it must have been the mid-eighties, so it was easy to find. Hint to aspiring writers of educational stuff - pitch your article in July: they are desperate to fill the August columns. My piece was a lighthearted one about the tyranny (which seems even more in evidence now) of the tie as an essential item of the male teacher's wardrobe. I never liked wearing them, and expressed my view in the article. I now wear ties for graduations and funerals, never for an ordinary day at work; but in a school, then as now, it was considered a major transgression not to wrap a piece of silk or polyester around your neck every day. So I wrote this:

We were on holiday in France when the article was printed, and in those pre-mobile days, virtually uncontactable. About a week into the holiday, we found a working phone box and fed it with ten-franc pieces to speak to my father, just to report that we were having a great time. "Have you done something?" he said. "I'm sure I heard your name on the radio - something about an article.." I thought it must be the TES article, but didn't think much more about it until we got home, to find requests from various newspapers for interviews. By then, the moment had passed, of course. This was classic silly-season stuff, but I gathered that for a couple of days the article had generated phone-ins on radio shows and some brief comments in newspapers. Probably the best part of the whole episode was the cartoon which accompanied the piece, reproduced above. I wish I could ever have looked that insouciant and elegant...

David Lodge

2011-10-25T18:05:00.000+01:00

To the Whitworth, to see David Lodge talk about his new novel, based on the tangled love-life of H.G. Wells. I've admired Lodge for decades - Changing Places is one of the great comic novels, and certainly one of the top three examples of campus fiction ever written, I think. Lodge also wrote The Art of Fiction, one of the most sensible things available on that topic. Mostly, when authors are promoting their latest book, the routine is that the author reads a bit, and then answers some questions (often completely footling ones: "Where do you get your ideas from?") before everyone queues to have their copy of the book signed. Lodge didn't do this. Perhaps because he spent his working life as an academic, Lodge decided that the best thing to do was to give us a lecture on Wells. It was quite a formal one - he read, at a lectern, from a script, with very few ad-libs, in a style I imagine Birmingham Eng Lit undergraduates would have recognised. It was, nonetheless, an enlightening and engaging talk, ranging over Wells's incredibly productive career, and making a strong claim for a revaluation of his reputation. At one point, Lodge recounted how the elderly Wells refused to move out of London during the blitz, declaring that he would not be beaten by "that shit, Hitler". and that he took his turn firewatching in a tin hat. Wells presciently saw how aircraft would be used in future wars, and also posited the development of something very like the WWW - the World Brain, which would keep all human knowledge on microfiche. Lodge, whose hearing is weak, was supported by an energetic assistant signing his words. He then did the readings and answered questions, which for once were pertinent and intelligent - and no, I didn't ask any. One point which he spoke about at length was the emergence of what he called the "bio-novel", the fictional work based on the life of a real person. A Man of Parts is one such of course, as is Lodge's Author Author, based on the life of Henry James. Julian Barnes's Arthur and George would be another example. That seems to me to be an interesting line of research - I'm just wondering what other novels fit this category. Lodge said that his rule was not to make anything up except the dialogue and the extradiegetic narrative. As he said, that solves a basic problem, since the plot is already there. Rather than tell the whole life story, he comcentrated on the central years of HG's life, when he was extraordinarily entangled with a series of women.

What was so attractive to women about Wells? He was short, physically weak, and hardly a pin-up. But he was full of energy, full of ideas, and compelling as a speaker. That seemed to do the trick. His narrative gift, allied with his knowledge of science, makes his work unusual, and, according to Lodge, ripe for rediscovery. Of course. Lodge's book will obviously aid that process. At the end of his life, according to Lodge, Wells was working simultaneously on two factual pieces, one which despaired of mankind ever evolving into something nobler, and one which predicted a utopian future. I wonder what he would make of us now?

Roma Tearne

2011-10-16T19:09:00.000+01:00

To the place everyone now calls the Burgess for a Manchester Literature Festival event with Roma Tearne. She was reading from her most-recently published novel, The Swimmer, and talking about her career, her novels, her other activities as an artist and film-maker, and, inevitably, about her views on Sri Lanka. She left her native country for Britain in 1964, and has made her life here ever since. Sadly, when someone asked her if she ever planned to go back to Sri Lanka, she replied that it was impossible, given the death threats she has received as an outspoken opponent of the regime.
Most writers, because they are writers and not performers, don't read their work particularly well. Roma is an exception. She read a passage from The Swimmer beautifully, bringing a poignancy that was palpable to a scene of great sadness. She answered questions with great good humour, and revealed a good deal about her working methods. One particularly striking aspect was her revelation that she always starts with an image. In the case of The Swimmer it was a photograph of a windswept Aldeburgh beach on which three figures were walking. She imagined the story of these three characters, and the novel grew from there. Several members of the audience commented on the power of her landscape scenes, and one questioner asked whether she painted landscapes - yes, she does. The evocative atmosphere of the East Anglian coast, with its melancholy emptiness, and sense of liminality, seems an appropriate setting for this tale.
What's more, she has used one aspect of The Swimmer to inform the film that she made for the Venice Biennale. The novel, which features a plot about a Sri Lankan immigrant, is used to complement the horrific footage of brutal attacks by the Sri Lankan army on the Tamils during the civil war. The found footage is intercut with the new film, shot on iPhone to merge with the raw images of the massacre.
It was a privilege to have a short conversation with her after the event, and now I must get down to reading the novels, starting with the semi-autobiographical Brixton Beach.

My Motorway Reading (2)

2011-08-23T09:35:00.000+01:00

I've posted before about the fatuous and often bizarre language used by companies to describe what they do. The slogans and mission statements often use 'solutions' as a catch-all term, and tend to pomposity when describing the most mundane matters. I observed a cracker today, on a van belonging to a company I hadn't heard of before: ProLicht, with the trendy inter-capital. Their business, according to the statement on the van, is "turnkey solutions for national and international corporate brand programmes." No, I had no idea, either. So I looked them up. As you might expect from the name, they are a German company, and their business is making signs. So, "turnkey solutions for national and international corporate brand programmes" means "signage". Their website is a treasure trove of corporate bollocks-speak, often using those incomplete sentences. You know. Like this. To seem more important. Or something.
They clearly don't think it's necessary to tell us what a turnkey solution is, so I checked with Wisegeek (much plagiarised by students, I note in passing) where I am told that a turnkey solution is "a solution that can easily be implemented based on the resources already at the disposal of a company or individual." I'm not sure that gets me much further, but maybe it means that ProLicht will make you some signs that you canafford. I'm not sure, and the language of the website doesn't enlighten mefurther. For example – “Our customers are happy to work with us. We see this inthe fact that they are doing so more and more intensively. Every year, theydevelop their cooperation with us on an ongoing basis.” I’m assuming that, as acustomer, developing my co-operation with them on an ongoing basis means I usethem more than once. Obviously, the fact that “The entire process chain within view ensuresthe best quality” will make me want to use them again. It would, I’m sure, beenlightening to meet them. After all, “We would be happy to present in apersonal meeting our company, our mindset, our approach, our diverse referencesand why our customers continuously extend their cooperation with us.”

Far out, man.

2011-08-06T14:56:00.002+01:00

I spotted this poster whilst enjoying an excellent Warsteiner at Mary and Archie's yesterday. I took a picture on my rather basic phone, which is rubbish, so I found a better version here. It's a poster for Cream's farewell gig, at the Royal Albert Hall, in November 1968. It's fascinating for several reasons. The groovy outfits sported by Baker, Bruce and Clapton are, even at the distance of 42 years, startling, but you might be able to make out that there were two shows, at 6.00 and 8.00, and that there were two support acts, Yes and Rory Gallagher. And that tickets were a whole pound. I've been trying to think what a pound would buy back then - I was just 14 when they played this concert. According to this site, it would be about £12.90 in today's money. So, quite a lot to a 14 year old, but not a fortune, to see arguably the top rock group in the world at the time, together with another huge act, and a highly regarded third act. What would it be today - U2 supported by Coldplay and Rufus Wainwright, perhaps?
They played two sets, separated by just two hours, so presumably, Cream can't have played more than 45 minutes, and maybe Yes half an hour (one song for them) and Gallagher perhaps twenty minutes. One creepy reflection: Clapton is, of course, still going strong, as are Bruce and Baker. Rory Gallagher died years ago, but who would have thought in 1968 that, with dozens of line-up changes, there'd still be an entity called Yes, still touring and making what we used to call LPs, over four decades later? This rather disturbing publicity shot of the current band, featuring three very long serving members, shows that there are no strange portraits in anyone's attic.

Feet of Clay (2)

2011-07-18T08:56:00.001+01:00

A.C. Grayling's pieces on moral dilemmas in The Guardian (later collected into various books) always impressed me. Witty, erudite, elegant, they anatomised the modern ethical landscape, and presented solutions that were often informed by references to classical literature. Grayling has had his detractors as a so-called media don, but it always seemed to me that you don't get to be a media don without some reputation to start with. Schama, Starkey and the rest became TV personalities because they were serious academics with prestigious positions, not the other way round.
Grayling would be an obvious champion of the humanities at a time when they are under threat in the academy. So it was not a surprise that he should be the figurehead behind the launch of a new educational institution, the New College for the Humanities, dedicated to, as Grayling says on the website, "personal enrichment, intellectual training, breadth of vision, and the well-informed, sharply questioning cast of mind needed for success in this complex and competitive world." Well, that's just great, and many of us in the humanities would love to work for an institution with that as a mission statement.
But here's the rub. Elsewhere, Grayling asserts that "We're open to anybody who has talent and ability." Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. The standard fee for the NCH will be a whopping £18,000 a year, meaning that it is out of reach for all but a tiny minority. Given the promises that Grayling is making, the fees might be justified in some people's eyes: stellar academics (Dawkins, Pinker, Ricks et al) supported by a dedicated teaching staff unencumbered by admin duties, who will offer small group and one-to-one tuition. Marvellous. But that £18k fee, despite some suggestions that some students will have the fee waived, remains a huge barrier. I'm reminded of the well-worn quip of Justice Mathews - 'In England, justice is open to all - like the Ritz Hotel.'
What makes the enterprise (and that's clearly what it is) smack even more of opportunism is that perforce, since the NCH isn't an accredited university, study will lead to a University of London award, and students will use London facilities. Even the course materials have been lifted wholesale, as Amanda Vickery, and a number of others pointed out. As Vickery said on Twitter "NCH thinks my 18th-century women course worth £18k. Come & have it @QMUL for half that, & taught by Prof who designed it." Moreover, it transpires that the "Professoriate" of big name dons might teach for as little as one hour per year.
It's difficult to see what NCH can offer, other than an alternative route into a prestigious degree for the rich who don't manage a place at Oxbridge. The NCH, if it were to charge low fees, or use sponsorship to offer humanities degrees to the brightest, would be a noble enterprise. As it stands, though, it is, in its way, simply another example of the commercialisation of HE in this country.

Feet of Clay

2011-07-12T18:54:00.005+01:00

I began writing this post before the news broke today that Johann Hari had been suspended by The Independent, so much of what I was going to write is redundant now - read the Guardian article for the details. I have been a fan of Johann Hari for some time. I liked his style, and that he seemed an individual in a sea of identikit rent-a-gob commentators. I sometimes disagreed with him, but always found his articles lively and entertaining. Then the news that he routinely passed off quotations from books as quotes he had obtained in interviews appeared, and he immediately lost some credibility. That was compounded by his initial denial that this was wrong.
That was bad enough, and then, a couple of days ago, Nick Cohen wrote a blistering piece on Hari, characterising him as a vindictive and deceitful prat. Then a tweet by David Allen Green, alias Jack of Kent, suggested that there was something even murkier about Mr Hari. Green wrote this, which confirmed that the Orwell Prize winning author seemed to be at the very least condoning some juvenile and nasty behaviour. This evening, Green said that he now knew the identity of "David Rose", but was not going to reveal it, for fear of triggering an expensive libel action.
It's a sorry tale, and you wonder if Hari can recover from it. I can't imagine taking one of his columns at face value again.
Update: and, according to Guido Fawkes, even his Orwell piece was nicked.
Update 20th July: Hari has taken his website down completely.
Update 21st July: Hari is accused of more dishonesty here.
Update 26th July: Hari has broken his silence to say he's been instructed by the Indy not to say anything until the outcome of their investigation. Meanwhile, the Orwell prize committee all but confirm he's to be stripped of the prize.

Fartlek with Laura

2011-07-10T10:19:00.001+01:00

OK, I'm 56, I'm unfit, and I'm overweight. So I had a choice to make at the end of last month - do I renew my gym membership again, or try something else? I'm not a great fan of the gym, as I've mentioned before, so I decided to save my money, and try a different tack. I'm lucky enough to live close to an urban water park, so I have the perfect environment for some outdoor workouts. I came across the C25k (Couch potato to 5 kilometer) programme, and on the recommendation of a friend (thanks Lisa!) chose the NHS version. The advantage of this is that you have a podcast to guide you through, rather than having to check your (in my case, non-existent) watch to keep on track.
The programme itself seems to be based on what I used to know as Fartlek. My gym teacher at school, Reggie Bell, used to make us do fartlek at the end of games sessions. As the name was already inherently hilarious to us, we used to find it hard when Reggie's rich Lankysheer voice urged us to "do some Fartlek, lads!" The word is Swedish, and means speed-play, and the technique is really simply about alternating bursts of more and less intense activity. The etymology is interesting - the first syllable survives in the German "Fahrt" meaning journey. "Gute Fahrt" - bon voyage - can always raise a laugh in a German lesson, and you can hear the Viking echo of "lek" in Yorkshire where kids still ask their mates if they are "laikin' out".
Anyway, I downloaded the podcast, loaded up the iPod, and have now completed the first week. Your guide is Laura, who is very encouraging and sympathetic. She tells you when to run and when to maintain a brisk walking pace. Whilst you are running or walking, music takes over - a kind of bland, sub-Coldplay vaguely uplifting wash of guitars and keyboards when walking, and a more urgent generic 70s / 80s rockular sound when running, probably knocked out in a morning by old session guys on union rates. One riff sounds suspiciously like "Sweet Home Alabama". But I digress.

You run, you walk. You sweat, you get a bit breathless. Laura encourages you - "You're doing really well," she says. How does she know? But it works, and eventually, you have managed a fairly basic half-hour aerobic workout. And that isn't much at all, but it's a small step for me. I do feel a bit fitter, and I will try to complete the nine-week programme. So far so good. And Laura says I'm doing great.
Photo: by me!

See You Later, x

2011-07-03T16:47:00.000+01:00

A typical exchange with the spotty youth manning, or teenagering, the supermarket checkout yesterday. After we paid and packed, I said "thanks" and he said "see you later." Actually, what he said was more like "see yers later", but that's besides the point really. Now, unless I've missed a very subtle invitation from a boy young enough to be my grandson, he didn't really mean he'd see us later. He didn't even mean he'd see us. "Later" has been added to the ubiquitous "see ya" for no apparent reason, as far as I can see. I'm tempted in these situations to say "oh right, where shall we meet?" or something along those lines. It's another example of how informal speech has replaced formal in situations where two people's lives intersect briefly. For some reason, we have to appear to be on terms of deep familiarity. "'Scuse me, mate," someone said as he approached me for directions the other day. I'm not his mate, and "excuse me" would do the job. "Cheers," says someone when I hold the door in a shop. I'm not having a drink with them, merely offering a tiny courtesy. The worst one doesn't occur in speech, but in email: an increasing number of my students seem unable to complete a message without signing off with a 'x'. Aaargh!

David Mitchell: Critical Essays

2011-06-15T12:00:00.001+01:00

This is a first for me. I'm reviewing a book that I haven't held in my hands - yes, it's my first e-book. My friend Anthony Levings, the onlie begetter of Gylphi, the new publisher for arts and humanities, sent me an E-Pub version of this new volume of critical essays on David Mitchell, and I've been reading it on my iPod. It's been an interesting experience, and largely an enjoyable one. I'm still not quite used to turning over the virtual pages with a finger gesture on screen, but I was agreeably surprised by how book-like the experience was. The print is clear and crisp, and I can annotate as I might a physical book. I won't rehearse here all the pros and cons of ebooks, but suffice to say that this convinced me that the format is viable, useful, handy and attractive.
What of the contents? The volume, edited by Sarah Dillon of St Andrews, arose from a conference held there, the first on Mitchell, and it ranges over his entire oeuvre, including his most recent novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet in Dillon's introduction. An added feature, most unusual in books of this type, is a piece by the author under consideration, in which he expresses his delight in the critical attention his work is receiving, as evidenced by this volume. The articles, by an eclectic bunch of academics, demonstrate the variety and complexity of Mitchell's work. As a particular fan of Cloud Atlas, I was very interested in Will McMorran's contribution 'Cloud Atlas and If On a Winter's Night a Traveller: Fragmentation and Integrity in the Postmodern Novel' in which he demonstrates some striking parallels between Mitchell's Matrioshka doll structure and Calvino's endlessly recursive vignettes. It certainly enhanced my understanding of both Calvino and Cloud Atlas, which I have used as an exemplar of the postmodern novel in my teaching.
'The Stories We Tell: Discursive Identity Through Narrative Form in Cloud Atlas' by Courtney Hopf offers some sharp insights on the self-reflexive nature of Mitchell's fiction, and 'Speculative Fiction as Postcolonial: Critique in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas' by Nicholas Dunlop higlighted aspects of those two novels that have been neglected so far in the developing critical response to Mitchell's work.
It is clear that David Mitchell is a very important contemporary writer, and Gylphi can be proud that they have produced the first critical work about him. I am sure it won't be the last. Like all good works of criticism, it sends you back to the original texts with a renewed interest and curiosity. This is an auspicious debut volume for Gylphi's Contemporary Writers series. I look forward to the next one.

Rue des Mensonges

2011-06-05T15:57:00.002+01:00

One of the pleasures of the internet is making connections with people who share your interest. Martin Phipps, a Canadian, whose path I would not otherwise have crossed, is one such: our mutual interest in Anthony Burgess led to some exchanges via Facebook and the Burgess forums, and made me keen to read his novel Rue des Mensonges. The book is published, as Martin's others have been, through Blurb, an innovative internet company offering authors the chance to self-publish and market their work. The result is, in effect, a bespoke copy of the book delivered to your door. I liked the quality of the paper and the binding, which I'd say was better than most mass-market paperbacks these days.
So- what do we have here? It's a short (about 130 pages) fast-paced thriller, set in locales ranging from expensive Paris penthouses to Roma encampments in rural Slovakia. It has a very contemporary feel, since the backdrop is the recent financial scandals and the global economic downturn. At the centre of events is the unpleasant crooked former financier James Moody, now enjoying his ill-gotten millions in Paris. His plan to disappear by faking his own death begins to unravel, and triggers a quickly moving succession of scenes in which Moody becomes embroiled in a maelstrom of lies, deceits and double-bluffs. What distinguishes this from your standard thriller is that the novel engages with the moral bankruptcy of modern capitalism, embodied in the figure of Moody. There are no clean-cut heroes on the street of liars - everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, is on the make. It's gripping, vivid and thought-provoking. Great stuff, Marty!

No problem revisited

2011-04-09T08:16:00.001+01:00

I blogged before - blimey, nearly six years ago - about the use of "no problem" as an all-purpose response by people who serve you in shops, bars etc. There was a classic instance of it last night. We went for a pre-event meal to a branch of a well-known pizza chain, whose name begins with Pizza and ends with Express. In a largely empty restaurant, we were escorted by our waiter to a back room, which was perfectly pleasant, but from where we couldn't be seen by the passing trade on the street. We decided we were too old / too uncool to occupy the visible seats, an idea confirmed as we were joined by punters of a similar age.
Anyway, pleasant young waiter took our order. Drinks would be 'no problem.' The fact that we didn't want water as well as beer would be 'no problem'. The fact that we wanted just one salad to accompany the pizzas was 'no problem'. Could we have a soft egg on the Fiorentina? No problem. Could we have some pepper? No problem. Could we have the bill? No problem. Could we actually have the correct bill, with the special offer price he had recommended? No problem.
Pizza Express operates a rigid recipe control system, to ensure that wherever you are, your Fiorentina is going to be the same as the last one you had. So I wish their training people would instruct waiters that the language has a number of responses that are appropriate to customer questions - of course, right away, I'll bring it to you now, certainly... Getting staff to use them? - no problem, you'd think.

In this day and age

2011-03-10T19:58:00.000Z

I found this story astonishing. In the year of my birth, about a mile from where I lived, a teenage girl was being sectioned under the mental health act for the crime of having a baby. That boy, a few months older than me, was adopted, and has never known his mother. I thought this kind of barbarity had stopped before the war - it's a shock to know it was still going on in my lifetime. There's a happy end, of a kind - but as the woman's second-born son says, she's the victim here.

Chinese Whispers

2011-03-10T08:57:00.000Z

An interesting example of how stories are distorted in the telling, and how 'news' is created. Yesterday, at my place of work, there was a power cut. It happened around lunch time. I went out of my office to see if it was just my room, or more general. It was quickly apparent that the whole campus had lost electricity. Soon, a helicopter, a fire engine and two ambulances arrived. People on the corridor were immediately speculating as to what had caused the problem. In the space of three minutes I heard that construction workers on site had cut through cables, that there had been an explosion in a lab, and that there had been an explosion elsewhere, that the helicopter was there to take someone seriously injured to hospital. The local press reported it as a major incident.What had actually happened, it transpired, was that a power cut in the area had caused a distribution board to short-circuit, making a loud bang. Maybe whoever called 999 had been a little over-dramatic in describing the event. I imagine that person is a bit embarrassed.
The campus was not evacuated, classes were not particularly affected (especially as not that many classes happen on a Wednesday afternoon) and things were back to normal by mid-afternoon. Nothing to see here, move along...
Image: DailyPic

Nick and Nick

2011-02-12T12:26:00.001Z

To the IABF once more for the latest in their literary event series. The subject this week was Nicholas Royle, together with Nicholas Royle. Royle mark 1 is an academic, the co-author of the very successful undergraduate text An Introduction to Literature Criticism and Theory, and the sole author of The Uncanny. He is also, and this was one of the main impulses for the event, the author of an intriguing new novel, Quilt. This new work gained laudatory reviews from some very important people, including Cixous and Kermode, so this is clearly a major work. T'other Royle is the Mancunian short story writer and novelist who also teaches Creative Writing at MMU. He is also the publisher of beautifully produced chapbooks from The Nightjar Press. I have admired his short stories in the past, and very much enjoyed his reading at an Edge Hill conference on the short story a few years ago. Our paths have crossed professionally too, when he was the external on a PhD viva. This Royle has developed a line in rather chilling, discomforting prose, with a dash of the surreal. Uncannily, the other Royle has similar tastes.
Obviously, the two Royles are frequently confused. What I didn't know until this event was that Nick Royle the academic had written about Nick Royle the novelist, and had delivered a conference paper about him. This was at a University of London conference, and the two of them had arranged to meet there, but in a kind of publicly theatrical way. Nick mark 1 delivered the paper, and then stepped down from the platform, shook hands with Nick mark 2, who stepped up to take questions on his own novel. An uneasy silence ensued...
Of course, the two Royles are inextricably entwined. Look on a book site and you'll see there's no discriminating between the two. The Manchester Nick mentioned that, at the Cheltenham Festival, he'd done a talk and then was invited to sign books, many of which were - well, you fill in the rest. The Sussex Royle has a short story in the other Royle's new anthology, and so the seeds for more confusion are being planted there too. To digress briefly, congratulations to Edge Hill student Claire Massey on being included in Nick's new Best of British collection, where she finds herself in the company of Hilary Mantel among others.
The IABF event was well-attended, and the format of alternating Royles reading from their work made for a lively opening half. They then had an informal chat, and took questions before signing their (own) books. Despite the frequently rather dark materials of the respective writers' work, the evening was light-hearted and very enjoyable. As always at the IABF, a good few friends and acquaintances were present as well.
We came away with a copy of The Uncanny and The Matter of the Heart, which will be the first in what I expect will be a Nicholas Royle reading marathon, of both flavours.
Picture: Matthew Frost. On the left: Nicholas Royle. On the right: Nicholas Royle.

Bedlam sans Merci

2011-02-06T13:58:00.001Z

To the Dancehouse with Caroline for a celebratory gig with Louis Barabbas and the Bedlam Six. The prolific Mr Barabbas has a new album out, but this gig was really a showcase for the band, and an opportunity to feature John Otway, self-styled "rock and roll's greatest failure", whose extraordinary career includes two hit singles and being voted seventh in a poll of Britain's best songwriters - just after some unknown called McCartney.
Much of the gig was organised via Facebook, and this was a boon, because it meant that punters were able to avoid the stupid admin charges that the ticket-sellers add on. In fact, the whole thing was a great bargain. After paying via Paypal, an email from the band was exchanged at the box office for a ticket on the night, which also entitled you to a CD of the show, and a mention on the cover. Louis certainly isn't going to be a millionaire any time soon working this way, but he will have a loyal fanbase.
The venue was pretty full, and we arrived just in time for the opening, energetic song. If you haven't come across Louis Barabbas, imagine a louche, bowler-hatted figure, wild-eyed and bearded like the prophet, frantically strumming a guitar and singing like Tom Waits would if his voice was a bit more gravelly. The band is the usual rock line up - bass, drums, keyboards, lead guitar, rhythm guitar and, er, trombone, used to good effect in most of the songs. Louis shares lead vocals with Alison Cegielka, a sultry chanteuse with a clear, melodic voice. Her duets with Louis - and most of the songs are written to be sung as duets - work surprisingly well, her smoothness complementing the rasp of Louis.
The songs are uniformly dark, dealing with a downbeat world of gloom and doom inhabited by eccentrics, inadequates and losers. If Weill and Brecht had written for rock band, it might have sounded like this. Not for nothing is the Barabbas label called Debt Records. One little line sums up the mood of the songs for me - a character says " I'm a man of my word, and the word is deceit."
The gig was divided into three, with LB performing a short opening set, and giving way to John Otway, on his own.

I didn't know what to expect of him really, dimly remembering his 1977 hit "Really Free" which had a quirky charm. Otway, it turned out, is a natural showman, making much of his apparent amateurishness, and producing a nicely-judged stream of comic and self-deprecating patter. Genuinely funny and inventive, having fun with a theremin and with a bizarre double-necked guitar, which was used to do a cover of Sweet's Blockbuster. After a tune with the band, Otway left, and the final session was back to Louis and the Bedlam Six. They really raised the roof, and had everyone dancing is the aisles. It was an energising, entertaining night out. Can't wait for the CD!
Update: 'er indoors points out that LB has a blog here.

Seeing Galileo

2011-01-20T12:43:00.000Z

Gylphi, run by my friend Anthony Levings, published this book last month, and it is a strange beast. I have been trying to make my mind up about it, but trying to categorize it is difficult - it contains poems, essays, playlets, photos and meditations. It's a collaborative effort, from Jason Lee - no, not that one - and the photographer Rebecca Griffith. This Jason Lee is Head of Film and Media with Creative and Professional Writing at the University of Derby, and an expert on transgression. Certainly, this book is a kind of transgressive artefact in itself, in its resolute defiance of category.
The reader's experience is, and I'm sure this is deliberate, an uncomfortable one. Beginning like a modern piece of lit crit, complete with scholarly references and a bibliography, it locates John Milton within the contemporary zeitgeist and then swiftly, and occasionally bewilderingly, moves on to introduce Galileo, Prospero and Caliban, the Virgin Mary, Picasso, Fassbinder, T.S. Eliot and a range of other fictional and real characters, inhabiting landscapes real and imagined from New Jerusalem to Pisa, Florence, and beyond. The text is illuminated by Griffith's evocative black-and-white photographs, taken on instruction by the author in the cities where Milton may - or may not - have encountered Galileo. The central conceit of the book is an encounter between these two figures, which spirals into a consideration of the modern and postmodern world of existential angst and technological carnage. The figure of Milton, the author of Paradise Lost seems to anchor the ancient world, and the figure of Galileo, with his telescope, seems to represent the modern world. Here, in these ancient Italian cities, the two worlds collide, and the two visions inter-penetrate each other. Of course, the fact that both the protagonists went blind adds a further layer of postmodern irony to the idea of what they 'saw' - as does the decision to illustrate the book with photographs.
The early poems in the book explore the nature of the encounter between Galileo and Milton using a sometimes daunting range of references and allusions, expressed in ludic and occasionally baffling free verse. Here's a typical sample from the poem 'Seeing Galileo I':

Scrying the inexcusable,
Telling the tale of the future
Of the world corporations only allow;
For the man who posts a letter in every
French box in the city - hold it there, Daguerre...

This is playfully obscure, using, paradoxically perhaps, the predominant metaphor of the text - sight - to describe a future unknowable to either of Lee's protagonists. The meaning remains opaque, though, and I wonder about that placing of 'only' - might it have been better after 'the'? And what's a French box? A letter box, or...? Doubtless the poems will repay further study, and indeed this is a book to return to, as, although it is unified by its theme, it has the feel of a series of loosely connected pieces, an anthology of sorts.
In other parts of the book, critical discourse and historical narrative give way to other types of writing. I was particularly struck by the Edward Bond-style playlet 'The Four Minute Warning' which vividly dramatizes our inhumanity in extremis during an apparent nuclear attack.
I'm still not sure about this text. It's certainly intriguing, and challenging, though sometimes too much so for comfort. But then, I'm sure it isn't meant as a cosy read. A couple of stylistic touches did jar, however: Lee tends to write sentences without main verbs. Like this. As if it's advertising copy. Which it isn't. That's probably me being pedantic, I suppose. I also couldn't really go along with his occasional baring of the device; for example, he leaves what appear to be notes to the photographer in his text as annotations. I'm not sure that works, but, like other features of the book, it underlines the boundary-busting nature of the enterprise. On a more positive note, it's a pleasure to read and to handle such a well-produced volume. The production values are high, and would put bigger companies to shame.
So - a challenging, provocative and original book, that blurs conventional genres and plays fruitfully with our postmodern condition.

Look Back at Angers

2010-11-28T10:11:00.002Z

To Angers, for the fourth international colloquium at the Anthony Burgess Centre, this time focusing on Burgess's encounters with the Elizabethans. It was, as usual, a very enjoyable event, and it was great to meet up with old Burgessian pals, and to make some new ones. Angers is a very pleasant town, with a chateau, some delightful Renaissance architecture, and some very fine shops. Our hosts, as ever, did us proud: this is the only conference I go to where lunch is a two-hour affair with a choice of three fine wines. As Sterne said, "They order this matter better in France." Not much time for sightseeing on this occasion, but the curious traveller in this part of the world should certainly check out the chateau, and particularly the tapestry depicting the Apocalypse: it's 100 metres long (of an original 140m) and was made between 1373 and 1382 for Louis I of Anjou. It is a stunning piece, set in its own spacious room at the chateau.

The town itself has something to delight the eye around every corner, such as this:

or this:

More images are available all over the web. The city website is much animated by the arrival of the tramway, which will run through the town, and which is nearing completion at the moment.

The colloque went very well, with some very interesting and stimulating papers from some of my fellow Burgessians, including Alan Shockley, Katherine Adamson, Jonathan Mann, Anthony Levings and Aude Haffen. Gareth Farmer's paper was a tour-de-force worth a listen. Andrew Biswell, doyen of Burgess studies, and director of the IABF presented a paper in his usual urbane manner. It was a great pleasure to meet and indeed eat with Charles Nicholl, our keynote speaker, and the distinguished author of The Reckoning, source of most of the information in my paper. If you haven't read The Reckoning, you really should - it's a detailed and fascinating account of the Elizabethan spy world. Charles's later book, The Lodger, on Shakespeare's time in London, also displays the depth of his learning, but in a very accessible way. All the talks were recorded, so I'm hoping some will be on the Angers web site soon.

There was no book lack in Angers, as Paul Phillips, the leading critic of Burgess's music, was able to launch his new book on the subject. I cannily managed to purchase an unsigned copy, which I think will be a rare item in future...

Paul's major contribution to the event was the first ever staging of Burgess's only ballet, 'Mr WS', for which he conducted a large orchestra of largely amateur musicians. Friends of Topsyturvydom will know that modern interpretive dance is really not my thing, so you may be surprised to read that I was gripped throughout by the ability of four dancers to produce a mesmerising display of acrobatic and inexhaustibly inventive movement to represent Shakespeare's life and times. It was a privilege to talk to one of the dancers, Mélisande Carré Angeli at the conference dinner, where she told me that remembering all the complex moves was simply a question of repetition. I was exhausted just watching.

So, another memorable visit to Angers. The next Burgess milestone will be 2012, and the 50th anniversary of the publication of A Clockwork Orange.

Update 30th Nov: The image of the tapestry which I linked to seems to have been removed. It was Creative Commons, and I did credit the photographer, but hey... So I've substituted some pictures taken whilst I was there of the chateau and the town.

Bonfire of the Humanities

2010-11-15T19:25:00.002Z

It's quite likely that I will be out of a job in eighteen months or so. The funding cuts announced by the government in the wake of the Browne review are particularly savage in the subject area where I work, and in the kind of institution where I work. The emphasis on the so-called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) subjects means that, in effect, arts and humanities subjects are going to be denied any funding at all, and will have to survive on vastly increased student fees. The real terms cut for a department like mine in the sector of the university market we are in is about 98%. Whether there is a pool of students prepared to pay those fees is another matter, and it seems clear that lots of departments will close, and it is by no means inconceivable that entire universities will have to shut up shop. And, you know, I somehow don't think that will be Oxford and Cambridge. Already, redundancies have been announced, and I know of several institutions where departing staff are simply not being replaced.

Since this is my livelihood, I am obviously concerned, but, like any scholar of the humanities, I can see both sides of the argument. The country is in an almighty mess economically. Cuts have to be made. The subjects with practical applications must be privileged. All right, up to a point. But we have been told for the last twenty years that we are now in a knowledge economy, where what matters is the mix of skills you have, and your agility and adaptability in a fast-changing environment. As I pointed out in a previous post, employers are generally not that bothered about the content of a degree; they want people who are smart, articulate, and able to work on their own initiative and as part of a team. So yes, whilst a degree in engineering is clearly very desirable if you want to be an engineer, there are many jobs (70% of graduate jobs according to a recent analysis) where the subject is not specified.

If, as seems likely, we lose much of our traditional capacity in the humanities, and the university sector shrinks as a result, would that matter? The short answer is yes. Stefan Collini, whose brilliant demolition of the ludicrous REF emphasis on 'impact' I highlighted some time ago, has produced an equally withering analysis of the Browne review. Here's a taste, but as with the previous one, you really should read it all.

It is, incidentally, one of the several dispiriting features of this report that even when it shows an inconsistent twitch of non-market reflexes and recognises that there may be a public interest in making sure that certain subjects are offered and studied, it in effect confines these subjects to science and technology (with a token nod to the possible economic usefulness of some foreign languages). The only social value the report seems able to think of is economic: these subjects contribute directly to the economy, it is alleged, and so we must have them. The Comprehensive Spending Review has reinforced this emphasis on science and technology by maintaining the science budget (which supports research, not teaching) at its present level. Browne implies that other subjects, especially the arts and humanities, are just optional extras. If students are willing to cash in their voucher to study them – perhaps because, for some unexamined reason, they are thought to lead to higher-paid jobs – so be it; but if they’re not, then there’s no public interest in having them. Despite the occasional (very occasional) mention of, say, ‘culture’, the logic of the report’s proposals gives such values no independent standing. Overwhelmingly, the general statements announce, with startling confidence, the real point of higher education: ‘Higher education matters because it drives innovation and economic transformation. Higher education helps to produce economic growth, which in turn contributes to national prosperity.’ And just when you might think there was going to be a glimpse of something broader, your knuckles are smartly rapped: ‘Higher education matters because it transforms the lives of individuals. On graduating, graduates are more likely to be employed, more likely to enjoy higher wages and better job satisfaction, and more likely to find it easier to move from one job to the next.’ This report displays no real interest in universities as places of education; they are conceived of simply as engines of economic prosperity and as agencies for equipping future employees to earn higher salaries.

David "Call me Dave" Cameron is fond of saying "we are all in this together". The trouble is, we aren't. Lord Snooty and his pals will not be facing any pain at all, because they are all extremely rich, as this article shows. (Sorry about linking to the Daily Malice, but this does graphically illustrate the gap between Dave 'n' George and the rest of us). So when Charlotte and Oliver want to go to Daddy's alma mater to study Art History or Old Norse, that will be fine, because those universities will be able to charge huge fees to people for whom it's small change, and they'll be able to keep on their humanities provision. And there'll be a job at the end of it too - in the city for Oliver with Daddy's old firm, or running a chi-chi handbag shop in Kensington for Charlotte.

This cabinet of millionaires is happy to consign the life-chances of thousands to the scrapheap, and in doing so to debase our over-materialist culture still further, despite being the beneficiaries of the system themselves. David Willetts (private school and Oxford, degree in that distinctly non-STEM subject PPE, wealth estimated at £2 million) is presiding over a regime he himself declared unfair in his own book. Dave, descended from one of William IV's bastards (Eton, Oxford, Bullingdon Club, PPE again, personal wealth about £25 million) says "We won't go back. Look, even if we wanted to, we shouldn't go back to the idea that university is free." I never thought it was. When I was at university, I received a grant. It covered the cost of my rent. For the rest, I depended, as everyone else I knew did, on parental contributions. My parents were fantastically supportive, making real sacrifices to help me. But neither they, nor I, were faced with the prospect of a £30,000 price tag for a degree. The chancellor, George Osborne (St Paul's, Oxford, degree in History, personal wealth £4 million trust fund, heir to a baronetcy) says "Our universities are jewels in our economic crown, and it is clear that if we want to keep our place near the top of the world league tables then we need to reform our system of funding." OK, George - but reform to you means slashing the budget to almost nothing for the subject you studied at university. I could go on, but you get the idea. It doesn't help when people like Simon Jenkins write fatuously that "It may be irksome for poor students to see rich ones having their fees paid off by parents, but the rich are always different." That's Sir Simon Jenkins, (Mill Hill, Oxford, degree in a subject he seems coy about, but I bet it wasn't engineering) who has the nerve to say that "There is not an arts course invented that could not be completed in 18 months, and probably not a science one. As for most postgraduate degrees and doctorates, they are plain indulgences." Oxford terms are eight weeks...

So today I'm thinking about some of the students I met again at our recent event featuring Billy Collins and Carol Ann Duffy. I'm thinking of student A, a single mother, who did our access course to gain a university place, and worked her socks off for six years to get her richly deserved first class degree part time. She then did a year's teacher training, and is now enjoying the challenge of teaching English to a new generation. I'm thinking of student C, who came to us with a mediocre degree in another subject, and some years of work in a job he didn't like. He studied for two extra years to gain a degree in English, because he loved English, and wanted to make it the basis of his career. He too is now a teacher, transmitting that love of language and literature to the citizens of tomorrow. I'm thinking of the mature woman who did our access course, and overcame the death of her husband, a serious accident and a chronic illness to battle through to win her degree. I'm thinking of student L, who entered our university in her late twenties, bored with her office job. She thrived as a student, gained a first class degree, and is now pursuing postgraduate work. For these people, and for countless others, the chance to study the humanities at university has been a life-changing experience. If Dave and his pals get their way, this type of student would never get that chance, and I won't have the privilege of teaching them.
I hope the brilliant Martin Rowson doesn't mind me nicking his cartoon. It's from here.

Sir John Summerscale

2010-11-13T23:22:00.000Z

It occurred to me to look at The Times obituaries for the elusive Sir John, editor of The Penguin Encyclopedia. And there he is. It's a classic diplomat's career, in countries that no longer exist. I am fascinated by these men of the late Empire. They were there as the world changed, and presided over it as an afterthought. Sir John probably signed away lives and fortunes before settling down to his game of bridge.

Billy Collins

2010-10-29T19:05:00.001+01:00

Last night I had the good fortune to meet Billy Collins after he had performed at Edge Hill's Poets Laureate event with Carol Ann Duffy.
As my students know, American Literature is a bit of a blind spot with me, but I have been a fan of Collins since first hearing him read on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion. His poetry is wry, funny, thought-provoking, and accessible. Its deceptive simplicity is its strong suit. Collins observes life and re-presents it to his reader with gentle irony and wit. Its art lies very much in its seeming lack of art.

My friend and colleague Daniele Pantano was instrumental in bringing Collins over, and he did not disappoint. Together with Carol Ann Duffy, he provided a memorable evening's entertainment. Duffy was sharp, sour, rather angry at times (she self-deprecatingly referred to herself as 'Disgusted of Didsbury' at one point) and showcased some new work, alongside old favourites from The World's Wife.
Collins read some new poems too, but also delighted with a reading of 'Forgetfulness', quirkily interpreted in this video:

Thanks to my friend Tim Power who took the photograph which captures brilliantly Collins's air of slight bemusement. I'm told video of the event will soon be on the EHU website - do have a look.

Housekeeping- Apture should now be enabled across the blog, so anything that takes your fancy, highlight, and you'll get some links.

Venice

2010-10-17T09:23:00.002+01:00

To Venice, with 'er indoors. Both of us were experiencing The Serenissima for the first time. The new image at the top of the blog is a photograph taken from the Rialto bridge, and it, like so many other photos we took, is eerily reminiscent of a Canaletto painting. And that's the thing with Venice - it oozes history at every turn. The first thing we did when we got back was to begin planning our next trip. So - what is it that makes Venice the destination of choice for sophisticated travellers like what we are?
A colleague of mine who went to Venice a couple of years ago reported meeting a couple of English people who had been on a day trip. They didn't like it: "Just like Blackpool," they said. I lived near Blackpool for seventeen years, and don't recall its abundance of Renaissance palaces, its churches stuffed with priceless works of art, its gondolas... It seems that they hadn't got much further than the Piazzale Roma, which is, it has to be said, an unlovely bus depot enlivened only by a scattering of souvenir stalls selling cheap made-in-China tat. Even so, I'd prefer it to the Golden Mile, if only because it leads to the treasures of this sublime city. Venice has twenty million visitors a year, and less than half of them stay overnight. So it's no surprise that the Piazza San Marco and the Rialto bridge were, even out of the main holiday season, packed with camera-clicking hordes. They might only have a few hours in the city, so they were going to prove they were there by taking as many photos as possible against iconic backdrops. When we first started exploring, this was annoying, but it soon became apparent that when you moved away from the honeypot sites, the rest of the place was, whilst often busy, surprisingly easy to move around. We walked everywhere - the vaporetti are expensive, with a single trip at €6,50, and usually we could walk where we wanted much quicker anyway. We did splash out on a 36 hour ticket to visit the outlying islands, and that was well worth it.
So, armed with the wit and wisdom of J.G. Links's lovely book Venice for Pleasure, (thanks to the Coopers for the tip) we followed his suggestions and walked around each district. We stayed in an apartment in the Cannareggio district, which was very handy for the Ghetto and Madonna dell'Orto, both well worth a visit. Even staying in that area, away from the main tourist trail, we found that a fifteen-minute stroll would land us pretty well anywhere we wanted to be. It's such a compact place, so, with (obviously) no traffic, it's ideal for walking.

After a while, we began to enjoy the unsung corners of the place - a quiet fondamenta, a local campo - as much as the gorgeous excesses of the churches and palaces.

But it is the art and architecture that astonishes, and we did explore it at length. If our top tourist tip is to walk everywhere, our second is to buy a Chorus pass. This entitles you to one visit to a group of churches, each of which has its particular charm, and all of which are replete with jaw-droppingly magnificent works of art. In most of our visits, we were amongst a small number of visitors, so we really had time to look at everything. Some highlights for me were the Frari, of which more later, the aforementioned Madonna dell'Orto, with its Tintorettos - he is buried there - and Sant'Alvise, with its amazing ceiling. But everywhere the visitor is ambushed by the rich artistic heritage of the place, and it's almost impossible to single out particular sites for a special mention.
That's what I am going to do for the Frari, though, if only because we spent more time in there. We visited in the daytime, and were suitably bowled over by such items as the Bellini altarpiece, the various Titians, and the beautiful interior, with its stupendous scale. We noticed that a concert was to be held the next day. We went, and it was one of the highlights of the holiday. The Frari is the church where Monteverdi, maestro di cappella of San Marco, is buried, and where Philip Thorby, the leading scholar-performer of early music, had assembled a choir, soloists and orchestra to play the 1610 Vespers in the year of their 400th anniversary. This was sublime. The music, which as maestro Thorby pointed out in his bilingual introduction, would have seemed daringly avant-garde to a contemporary audience, echoed beguilingly around this impossibly sumptuous building. Thorby laid a wreath at Monteverdi's tomb at the end of the performance, to rapturous applause. And it was ingresso libero, too!

We did use the vaporetti in order to visit San Michele, the cemetery island, and the subject of a moving poem by Simon Barraclough. We found the graves of Ezra Pound and Stravinsky, as well as some unexpected ones, often British exiles. We also visited the Lido, where the famous Hotel des Bains, as featured in Visconti's Death in Venice, is now closed and covered with scaffolding as it is turned into apartments, but where there is a remarkable art nouveau exterior at the Hotel Ausonia:

The most rewarding journey to the outer islands was to Torcello, the original settlement of the refugees who created Venice. There, the church of Santa Maria Assunta contains some thousand year old mosaics, and a wonderful display of Byzantine religious art. And you can sit on a throne carved out of rock, allegedly used by Attila the Hun...

On several evenings we escaped the tourist hordes to enjoy a quiet drink in one of the biggest campi, the Campo San Margarita, where young kids charged around playing football whilst their mums gossiped.

This seemed a much better bet than a visit to Florian's at San Marco, where a coffee will set you back at least €10, with a further €7 if the band is playing insipid cocktail jazz or easy-listening classics at the time. For two people, having a quick drink and a cake can easily cost thirty quid. Nearby places will serve you delicious coffee for less than a quarter of Florian's price.
There's lots more to say, and I'll return to the Venice theme again, I suspect.

The Finkler Question

2010-09-03T12:01:00.002+01:00

To the new headquarters of the IABF for the first in its series of events with contemporary writers. Mancunian Howard Jacobson was presenting his latest novel, The Finkler Question . What an excellent speaker and reader he is! Too often, writers are not actually terribly good at reading their own stuff, as students in my Modernism class who were subjected to recordings of T.S. Eliot will attest, but Jacobson has a Martin Jarvis-esque command of the spoken word, and entertained us hugely with his lively reading of some extracts from early in the novel.

He answered questions in animated fashion, and really engaged with his questioners. It helped that the questions were mostly well-informed and intelligent, though one, which seemed pretty banal ('Which books should I read?') elicited a highly entertaining riff on the importance of the classics. I had a short conversation with him, picking up on something he'd said about people's opinions on books, that when stated baldly ("This book is boring") they are the least interesting thing to say. As he said, an opinion is more about the speaker than the book; only when you show by your close attention to the text what your opinion is based on can you really say what you think. People used to instant responses (e.g. nearly everyone under 30) find this difficult, hence the sort of conversations academics have with students.

He also said something about the complexity of comedy which struck a chord. Earlier that day, I had been talking to a colleague about a mutual acquaintance, who simply doesn't get irony, or indeed tone at all. Jacobson made the point that comic effects need the reader to engage in order to succeed, in a way a tragic passage doesn't. Comedy is more intellectually demanding, because you have to work out the joke, to oversimplify a complex point.

The Finkler Question has had excellent reviews, and is longlisted for the Booker. It examines some fundamental questions about life and death, but, if the extracts Jacobson read are anything to go by, does so in a hugely entertaining manner. Review to follow, when I've read it. Thanks to all at the IABF for a great event.

Note for Burgessians: he was asked about the review of Any Old Iron.* He said it embarrassed him to read how he had rubbished established writers when he was a young turk, and he wouldn't say that now. He still doesn't like it, but was very laudatory about Earthly Powers. So we'll let him off.
*Note that some deluded person is trying to flog this on Amazon for £155.95, which is £155.94 more than one needs to spend to acquire this fine novel.

Encyclopedia Spheniscida

2010-08-30T11:14:00.005+01:00

In 1966, Manchester Education Committee decided that the city was to abolish grammar schools, and go comprehensive. So that was the last year of the 11-plus examination. I was 11 at the time, and sometime in March of that year - I think - my class at Alfred Street sat the final Manchester exam, the results of which would decide whether they would be the last intake in a grammar, technical, or secondary modern school. It consisted of maths questions, logical puzzles (which is the odd shape in this sequence, etc) and what was then called a 'composition'. This was the creative writing bit, and we were expected to come up with something based on titles such as 'A Day in the Life of a Penny' or 'My favourite place'. I chose one about pets, and, with the contrariness of youth, wrote about a hamster, despite knowing nothing about them- we were always a cat family.

I passed the exam, and sometime later, we received a letter from the Mayor's office to say that my hamster essay had been judged one of the best of that year in Manchester, and inviting me and my family to a ceremony at the Town Hall to receive a prize. My mother took time off from working in her uncle's greengrocer's shop to take me. I was wearing my smartest clothes, which comprised my new secondary school uniform - short trousers, obviously - and was very impressed by the splendour of the mayor's parlour. It's difficult to find images of the old smoke-blackened Town Hall now, but the one here, though taken in the early 20th century, gives an idea of what it looked like back then.

The mayor turned out to be a Lady Mayoress, with an ideal name for a northern civic dignitary: Nellie Beer. She would obviously be played by Hylda Baker, if we had been casting, but in truth she was, to my junior eye, quite posh. Not as posh as Lady Simon, who was, with her late husband the sponsor of the prize. Lord and Lady Simon's good works, particularly in education, were a feature of the civic scene in Manchester, but still... She served Manchester well, it seems, and is remembered on this curious website thus:

Mrs Beer served for thirty-five years (1937 – 1972) as a member of the Manchester City Council and was appointed OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) (1957) by Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of her valuable civic work. Mrs Beer served as an alderman (1964 – 1972) and then as the Lord Mayor of Manchester (1966). She was also a Justice of the Peace and received an honorary degree from Manchester University (1978). Nellie Beer died (Sept 17, 1988) aged eighty-eight.

My prize, and this is the point of this post, was the newly published Penguin Encyclopedia, priced 12/6. It advertised itself as the encyclopedia for the modern age. I have it still, and still occasionally consult it for its concise and authoritative entries. It was obviously conceived as the reference equivalent of Penguin's trendy paperbacks of the time, and, like them, it has stood the test of time. I don't think Penguin pursued it much after this initial publication, but its ghost still lives in the rather bigger Penguin Encyclopedia now edited by the ubiquitous David Crystal.

My version was edited by Sir John Summerscale, about whom I know next to nothing. Google, the twenty-first century reference source of first resort, offers very scant pickings, and most of those are book listings of the Encyclopedia. I think he must be the Sir John Summerscale who was the Commercial Secretary of the British Embassy in Iraq before the Second World War, mentioned in a footnote to a fascinating article on Jewish Refugees From Arab Countries. I imagine a gentleman's club in Mayfair, and a meeting between Allen Lane and this pillar of the old Empire: "John, old thing - we're thinking of publishing a modern encyclopedia. You've lots of time on your hands now- do you fancy being editor?"

"Well, I suppose I could."

"Good show- I'll get the lawyer chaps to send over a contract."

Whatever the circumstances, Sir John seems to have assembled a top team - none of whom are named, by the way - and those subjects about which I have reasonable knowledge appear to me to be very well covered in clear, unfussy prose. The book is illustrated by line drawings, contributed by Wolf Spoerl, a designer with a knack for rendering complex things simply. Spoerl is mentioned en passant in this interesting account of the design revolution at Penguin in the sixties. Here's Spoerl's rendition of eclipse:

The book, at 650 pages, is compact for an encyclopedia, following the editor's wise decision to "assume the reader to be a reasonably educated, intelligent person who at least knows what 'every schoolboy knows' ". Simple dictionary definitions, and biographical information were also excluded, so relativity is in, but Einstein isn't.

Inevitably, some material is badly dated now, though usually not in a way that grates. ('Computer' begins: "Machine for solving problems that are essentially mathematical".) I have another encyclopedia, published in 1990, (the Cambridge, edited by the industrious Prof Crystal) which includes items such as lists of sporting records, winners of Oscars etc., which must have been out of date on publication day. The Penguin has a timeless quality, though time has taken its toll on some entries - the section on Educational Subnormality makes for painful reading today:

Educationally backward children fall into three categories: (a) Educationally subnormal (ESN) with IQ between 80 and 60; (b) Ineducable, with IQ below 60; (c) Morons, with IQ still lower.

Elsewhere, though, the book is a model of concision. Could this entry on Dadaism be bettered as a clear initial statement for someone who has just encountered the term?:

Dadaism. An extremist anti-art movement, rooted in the nihilism caused by the First World War, originated with Arp and others in Zurich in 1916 and spread to France, Germany and (with Marcel Duchamp) U.S.A. Its members set out to shock a bourgeois public with productions which outraged all accepted literary and artistic traditions, e.g. its productions included a urinal obtained by Duchamp and exhibited as The Fountain under the maker's name. Max Ernst, Picabia, and the painter-photographer Man Ray were among the prominent Dadaist artists. Betrayed by its own nihilism, the movement dissolved in the early 1920s; by contrast, Surrealism, which grew out of it, had a constructive philosophy.

The encyclopedia has been superseded of course, as, it appears, has the dictionary. But when I don't want to google away, my old Penguin remains a trusted friend.

Blog Award

2010-07-14T11:20:00.002+01:00

My friend Harriet Devine is once again up in the stratosphere of literary bloggers with her latest placing in the Wikio listing where I come a distant 2000 places behind, but I was pleased to be notified that someone must have liked me, because Topsyturvydom has received an award as one of the 2010 Top 45 Literary Studies Blogs from Awarding the Web. Yes, it isn't exactly the Pulitzer, but hey, you get a nice badge...
Image: Ruminatrix

Italy in Notting Hill

2010-07-06T14:28:00.000+01:00

Simon Barraclough

To the Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill for the launch of Any Human Face. Hugh Grant seems to have ceased employment there, so the paparazzi were not in evidence as I mingled before the event, trying - and failing - to look elegant on a sweltering evening. The very quaffable Italian wine, provided by our hosts certainly oiled the wheels, and I had the great pleasure of meeting Charles Lambert in the flesh for the first time. I also met Anne (A.C.) Tillyer, whose intriguing collection of short stories, An A-Z of Possible Worlds, comes, BS Johnson style, as a boxed set, and Simon Barraclough who read poems with an Italian connection from his collections Los Alamos Mon Amour and Bonjour Tetris.
The event was introduced by Charles's agent - and a considerable poet herself - Isobel Dixon. Simon read some of his thought-provoking poems first. More of these anon - suffice to say that I was ashamed not to have read his work before. Charles read three passages from early in the novel, one for each of the three narrative threads. I enjoyed revisiting the book, and people I spoke to who hadn't read it were very intrigued- they were hooked by the thriller aspect, and reeled in by the superbly evocative language.

Charles Lambert

All in all, a lovely way to spend a balmy summer evening in Notting Hill.

Any Human Face

2010-05-30T12:50:00.001+01:00

After enjoying Charles Lambert's Little Monsters so much, I was looking forward to his latest novel, Any Human Face, and I was not disappointed. Set in Rome, this novel is a fast-paced and dark tale of murky deeds in high and low places, recounted from multiple perspectives over a span of nearly three decades. What Hitchcock would call the McGuffin (and there is something Hitchcockian about this) in the tale, is a set of photos, entrusted by an investigative journalist to his gay lover on the night of his (the journalist's) brutal and apparently homophobic murder. The photos come into the possession of Andrew Caruso, half Scottish, half Italian, whose shambolic existence centres around the secondhand bookshop he runs. Soon, he is involved in a frightening chain of events that may have something to do with the journalist's murder, a quarter of a century earlier.
Lambert handles a complex narrative with great authority, moving in cinematic style from the near present day (2008) to 1982, to 1985 and back, each time focalising his narrative through the perspective of one of his characters. One of the many things I like about Lambert's work is that he doesn't give the reader an easy ride. There is not here, or in Little Monsters, a character with whom we can readily empathise - all of them have their frailties and vulnerabilities. They are all too human in their failings, and Lambert's unflinching and unsentimental portrayal of their interlocking lives is a fascinating exercise in close observation. Paradoxically, because Lambert is so good at unfolding the delicate nuances of individual behaviour, the reader soon becomes involved in this seedy world of clandestine affairs and shabby deals, and does indeed care about the fate of the protagonists. Indeed, I found that this was one of those books that demanded to be read through as quickly as possible, so immersed did I become in this world.
There are dark hints throughout at institutionalised corruption, whether of the church or the state, but the focus throughout remains on the human story, and how we are all connected, in ways we can't begin to comprehend. I was struck by one passage on this theme, where Alex, the journalist's lover, reflects on the transient world he is part of:

"All these nameless friendships that entangled the city in a taut invisible web. A secretive web, because no one knew anything about it, or everyone pretended to know nothing about it. A web that stretched across hotels and galleries and studio flats in the richest parts of the city, from the Vatican to the senate to the station, of favours and small, sweet acts of generosity and asked-for, insisted-on violence. And then it went wrong and someone died, and the web closed to hide the rift so quickly no one would know it had ever been torn. Webs heal themselves."

This novel is, in concept, an excellent, disturbing, stylish thriller, but one with aspirations beyond the working out of a criminal act. It uses most of the thriller conventions, but goes well beyond them, to offer a story which deals with universal themes, particularly of man's inhumanity to man, and the dark heart of loneliness at the centre of many lives.

Going Live...

2010-05-02T12:22:00.000+01:00

Chez Topsyturvydom, our Sunday morning news source tends to be Radio 5 Live, on the basis that Radio 4 is god-bothering until 9.00 a.m. Today's top story was about the discovery of a car-bomb in Times Square, New York. Part of the report featured an admirably factual and concise statement from the NYPD police chief, who explained the circumstances of the car's discovery, what exactly had been found in the car, what the police bomb disposal team had done, and that, as yet, they had no information on who might have planted the device. Job done, you might think. Time to move on to the next item. But no, we instead were taken live to New York where a British man who had been in Times Square at the time was waiting to be interviewed. What could he add to what we already knew? Well, er, nothing. He had been on his way to the theatre when a lot of police had appeared and cordoned off the square. He had been instructed to get out of the way quickly. He had heard that someone had been told by a police officer to run. "So, you're saying the police told people to run away?" Well, that's what he had heard, he said. Not him personally. It must have been scary, the interviewer prompted. Well, no, actually: in fact the theatres carried on, after a delay. Finally, the classic fatuous question - how did he feel?
He felt OK. People seemed to take it in their stride. End of interview.
So what was the point of this? Presumably to get the "human angle". It's another indication of the relentless tabloidisation of the BBC. Instead of being content to report the news authoritatively, we have to suffer the vacuous follow-up, itself longer than the original item, which reveals precisely nothing about the incident, because the interviewee knows nothing.
Image: joiseyshowaa

Way to go...

2010-04-05T21:40:00.004+01:00

My sharp-eyed reader will have noted that Topsyturvydom now proudly displays the badge proclaiming that we are the 2161st rated general blog in the UK and Ireland blogospshere. The estimable Dovegreyreader is at number 1 in culture and literature. She is veritably the Chelsea to my Forest Green Rovers. Unfortunately, there's no prospect of a third round giant killing act, so I will just have to accept that we have a mountain to climb, Brian, we've got to take the positives, and take each game as it comes. Oh, and the ref was diabolical.
Image: Nicksarebi

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - David Mitchell

2010-03-31T16:22:00.002+01:00

Here's an example of how books are marketed these days. I've admired David Mitchell for some time, particularly for his brilliant Cloud Atlas.
Thanks to my friend Anthony Levings for the tip.

Housekeeping

2010-03-29T16:07:00.001+01:00

Playing around with Blogger's new templates. I like this look - clean, I think.

The sublime Ella

2010-03-27T08:56:00.006Z

In 1970-71, I had a Saturday job at a grocer's on Oldham Street, Manchester. The shop, and the small chain it belonged to - Maypole - have long gone, of course, but when I bought some CDs yesterday, I was reminded of it. My wage, for a nine-hour day, was 25s, (£1.25) less 5d for my insurance stamp, so I took home 24s 7d, in a brown envelope, usually two ten-shilling notes, two florins, a sixpence and a penny. I remember going out in my lunch hour to buy an LP, probably Paul McCartney's first post-Beatles effort. It cost me 39s/11d, and would have cost that wherever I bought it because of retail price maintenance. So, for my younger reader, that's all but £2. In other words, Sir Thumbs Aloft's magnum opus cost me about as much as I earned in one and three-quarter days. If I were 16 now, I would have to be paid at least the minimum wage, which Dr Broon and his pals have currently fixed at £3.57 per hour, so I'd have been making about £30 for a day spent lugging boxes of tinned peas up from the cellar, swabbing down surfaces, making tea for my superiors, and so on. If I chose to spend this largesse on those quaintly old-fashioned CDs that old people have, even at top prices, I could afford three with my day's pay, and more if I bought at the frequently available discount. In effect, then, my labour would buy at least five times the product it would have bought in 1970. What's more, LPs, because of the restrictions of the vinyl format, rarely contained much more than about half - an - hour's music: five or six three minute tracks per side. A forty - minute running time was rare. So with CDs routinely clocking in at an hour or more, I estimate that my day's wage now would be worth about eight times the amount of music it was worth then. If I downloaded, instead of buying the compact shaving - mirrors, I could probably double that. Music can never have been as cheap as it is now.
In Fopp yesterday, I spent a massive £7 - two hours' minimum wage for a 16 year old - on two items. The first, costing the same as I spent nearly forty years ago on McCartney, was a double reissue of Count Basie's two albums from the late fifties, The Atomic Mr Basie and the live album of Quincy Jones tunes, One More Time.

My other purchase, for £5, was the complete Ella Fitzgerald Sings Gershwin, from the songbook series. This was originally issued as five LPs, and is now presented as 3 CDs, each with about 20 tracks, so the cost is about eight of your earth pence per track. For that, you get Ella on absolutely sensational form, singing some of the all-time great songs from the Gershwin catalogue: "A Foggy Day", "But Not For Me", "Nice Work If You Can Get It", "I've Got A Crush On You", "How Long Has This Been Going On", "Strike Up The Band", "They All Laughed", "Fascinating Rhythm", "Embraceable You"....She recorded this in her forties, when she was arguably at the peak of her powers, and she soars effortlessly over the swinging Nelson Riddle arrangements. It is sublime.
Both of these buys are new reissues from a company I'd not heard of before, the curiously named Not Now Music, from that hotbed of popular song, er, West Hampstead. They've done a great job here, so next time I have a few spare shillings, I'll be on the lookout for more.

One Day

2010-03-24T08:38:00.006Z

This is the kind of book that I don't normally read. It is a book group choice, heavily discounted on the shelves of the supermarket, and promoted through its own website. But I heard the author David Nicholls interviewed on the radio, and he seemed a very engaging cove, so when I saw the book at a ludicrously cheap price in the supermarket, I thought I'd give it a go.
I'm glad I did. Nicholls has had success before it seems, having written a bestseller that passed me by, and episodes for a "programme" that may be viewed on Mr Baird's televisual apparatus. On this occasion, he has written a quirky love story whose central conceit is that, rather as in The Good Soldier, all the major events happen on a particular day. We first meet the protagonists on the night of their graduation on St Swithin's Day, 1988, and revisit them on that day each year after that until 2008. Emma is a clone of the persona Lucy Mangan presents in her Guardian column: sassy, northern, funny, but consumed with self-doubt. Dexter is the middle-class loafer who has drifted through his degree, and whose ego never allows him to realise how fortunate he is. After a one-night stand, the two agree to remain friends, and we encounter them as they make their way through late Thatcherism and into the Blair years. Em has a succession of awful jobs before ending up as a teacher. The hilarious account of life as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant will put you off your enchilladas for a while. Dex lucks into a career as a vapid TV presenter, all Mockney accent and laddishness. The structure allows a kind of annual report on the vicissitudes of their lives, and affords also a running social history of the last twenty years. That's the book's great strength, to my mind: its sharply observed vignettes of popular culture and and fashion, from lattes to boutique hotels, from Islington's yummy mummies to the cult of the DJ. It presents a very recognisable and at times painfully accurate portrait of the nation we have become in the last quarter-century.
The tone is often jokey, veering from first to third person, with much interior monologue, and you get a real sense of the developing sensibilities and preoccupations of the main characters. There's also an ending which I didn't see coming, and which knocked me for six. Definitely a cut above what you might expect, given the ghastly front cover and torrent of endorsements on the endpapers from such authorities as Heat and Jenny Colgan. Recommended!

They Still Don't Get It

2010-03-22T08:09:00.003Z

Ex-minister Stephen Byers is caught out demanding £5,000 a day - a day!- for securing access to government ministers and influencing policy on behalf of clients. Other friends of Tony are similarly caught bang to rights prostituting themselves for fat fees. Can anything illustrate better the moral bankruptcy of the political class in this country than Byers's pathetic excuse: he was lying. So now we've reached the point where mendacity is seen as a perfectly reasonable position to adopt when you're exposed as a moneygrubbing, amoral, unprincipled shit. And they wonder why we have no faith in our elected representatives.
Image: Kodama

Rap it up

2010-03-07T10:18:00.004Z

Is writing an email to Radio 4 the modern equivalent of an outraged of Tunbridge Wells-type letter to the Maily Torygraph? Possibly. I was moved to fire off an email yesterday whilst listening to the Saturday Live programme, usually with the delightful Fi Glover, but this week presented by the creepy Rev. Richard Coles(he always insists on the Rev., I notice) whose bizarre career has taken him from gay pop icon in The Communards and Bronski Beat to a comfortable living in the Anglican High Church surroundings of Knightsbridge.
The guest on the show was Dreda Say Mitchell, writer and teacher, now working also as an educational consultant. She is clearly a formidable woman who has achieved a lot ("Listen to my inspirational interview with Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour")and I have no problem, as another listener did, with her glottal stops. She has deeply held, sincere beliefs about education, which she promotes with vigour and charm. What had me reaching for the keyboard was her insistence that a good way of engaging disaffected working class boys - particularly white boys - was to use rap in the classroom. I've used the tired and frankly juvenile line that "the c in rap is silent" too often to use it again -oh, I just did - but I do wonder why this violent, misogynistic and often illiterate form is considered appropriate. So I asked the question, and the oleaginous Rev Coles read it out. Mitchell's answer was along the lines that this is a form that they like and it engages them. Well, I knew that. They listen to it all the time, on their phones and ipods, often making other people's lives on buses, trains and in the street a lot less pleasant as a result. Shouldn't school offer something different from what they experience every day outside?
I know a bit about teaching disaffected white boys (and black boys and Asian boys) from fifteen years in secondary school teaching, and this advocacy of rap reminds me of the debate on "relevance" when I was training. The idea was that to get young people interested in reading, you had to present them with stories about people like them, leading difficult lives in modern urban settings. Thus, a slew of books about truanting inner-city kids with alcoholic mums and absent dads appeared to fill this niche, and were quickly forgotten. The biggest success story in children's literature of recent years - of any years - is of course Harry Potter, a series which, as we all know, presents the gritty reality of life in twenty-first century Britain...
I also wonder what happens to the class after they have rapped away with Ms Mitchell. Pity the poor teacher who follows, and who has to teach them the past tense in French or the properties of hydrogen. And what, exactly, do they learn through rapping? They can do it anyway, and they know more about it than their teacher ever will. If school is about expanding horizons, as Dreda Mitchell and I agree, then surely we should offer the children something outside their ordinary experience?
Image: Nite Owl

End of civilisation as we know it

2010-03-01T19:33:00.007Z

In 1973, when I went to university as an undergraduate, there were no open days. You were invited for interview, and maybe someone would show you round. Or not. Certainly, no parents would go, and anyone of my generation would have been mortified to be accompanied by parents on this very adult enterprise. Not so now, of course. At our open days, there are frequently more parents than students, and it's the parents who tend to dominate the question and answer sessions. The most frequently asked question when I am performing is "what can my son/daughter do with an English degree?" I usually answer by agreeing that studying the Victorian novel or seventeenth century poetry is not, in itself, going to open any doors for them, but that the attributes they will acquire through diligent study and participation on their degree programme will be useful in a wide variety of careers. I often throw in an anecdote about a big cheese from a giant multinational computer company who visited the campus a few years ago. "I don't care what degree subjects they have," he said, "we can teach them all they need to know about computers in our training sessions. What I need are confident, articulate people, who can communicate well, who can work in teams and on their own initiative, who can write clearly and produce the goods under pressure, who can be organised and intelligent in their approach to work." Which is, I point out to the parents, exactly the range of attributes we seek to instil in our students. I also add that an instrumental view of a degree programme misses the sheer pleasure of broadening horizons, discovering new ideas - of becoming culturally informed, not for any pecuniary reward or because of a job it might lead to, but to make you a better person- better informed, better educated, better placed to enjoy your life.
So I am dismayed at the current proposals to cut funding to humanities courses in the UK, at the behest of Lord Mandelson. We now have a government which doesn't even have a department with the word "Education" in its title, and where HE is subsumed within the Business empire of the dark lord. Thus, courses which don't have a vocational bent are to be sneered at: golf course management is better than History.
The great and the good of the world of scholarship have expressed their anger at this philistine and ruinous policy in a letter to the Observer. Here's a taste:
The challenges facing the country and the world cannot be addressed without the arts and humanities. People's complexity comes from their language, identities, histories, faiths and cultures. Without understanding that complexity we cannot address these challenges. Subjects such as literature, philosophy and history teach students to look at the world from a different perspective, to challenge ideas and to communicate effectively, to bring the flexibility and imagination that employers need and welcome.
We have already had the fatuous introduction of so-called "impact" into the Research Assessment Exercise (or "Research Excellence Framework" as we must now call it). Stefan Collini said all that needed to be said about that nonsense in this brilliant demolition job. Here's a section, but you should really read the whole thing:
Let us take a hypothetical case. Let us assume that I have a colleague at another university (not all colleagues are in one’s own department, despite the league-table competitiveness of these assessment exercises) who is a leading expert on Victorian poetry, and that over a number of years she works on a critical study of what we might call a three-star Victorian poet (“highly innovative but not quite groundbreaking”). The book is hailed by several expert reviewers as the best on the topic: it draws on deep familiarity not just with Victorian poetry, but with other kinds of poetry; it integrates a wealth of historical and biographical learning in ways that illuminate the verse; it is exact and scrupulous in adjudicating various textual complexities; and it clarifies, modifies, and animates the understanding of this poet’s work on the part of other critics and, through their writing and teaching, of future generations of students, as well as of interested general readers. It also, it is worth saying, exemplifies the general values of careful scholarship and reminds its readers of the qualities of responsiveness, judgement, and literary tact called upon by the best criticism. It is a model piece of “excellent” research in the humanities. And its “impact” is zero.

Of course, in any intelligent use of the word, its impact is already evident from my description of its reception, but that, as we have seen, is explicitly excluded for this purpose. Moreover, any other kind of impact is only going to be credited to my colleague’s department if it can be shown to be the direct result of its own efforts. So if, say, the Departmental Impact Committee can be shown to have touted their colleague’s new “findings” to a range of producers in radio and television, and if, say, one of those producers takes an interest in this particular work, and if, say, this leads to a programme which bears some relation to the “findings” of the book (which, if they are interesting, can probably not be summarized as “findings” in the first place), and if, say, there is some measurable indicator of audience response to this programme, then, perhaps, the department’s score will go up slightly. And if not, not.

Let us leave aside for the moment the very considerable expenditure of time and effort any such process involves (often for no result), and let us also leave aside the fact that there is no reason to expect a literary scholar to be good at this kind of hustling and hawking.
As we approach May 6th, please ask your prospective candidate for the general election what his or her views are on funding for research in the humanities, and take the answer into account when you vote.
Image: Kairos-77

Thomson Loco

2010-02-27T08:00:00.009Z

A little while ago, in a fit of new year uncluttering, I signed up via a facebook group to a campaign to stop junk mail. Their website is a treasure trove of advice on how to stop the deluge of unsolicited junk that arrives on a daily basis. I used their web widget to get rid of junk mail from a variety of sources, and it is certainly making a difference.
Then, yesterday, came this:

So, Mr Meikle with the showbiz signature, you think that, instead of simply crossing my address off the list of houses you are going to dump your useless directory on, I should deface my front door with a 6" by 4" sticker in your corporate colours to prevent your operative delivering something once a year? It seems their response to a request to stop sending me junk is... to send me some junk. Here's the offending sticker:

I shall be contacting Mr Meikle, and will report back.
Update, 1st March. Reply from Thomson:
Thank you for your email. The stickers are offered as an option to make it easier for our distributors to identify a non-delivery household. Naturally, we respect your choice not use the sticker and will add your address to our list for non-delivery.

Thank you for your enquiry,

Yours sincerely,

Yo. Green
Hmmm - how will they know my address, since I've communicated by email? Not very convincing is it?
Top image: Fiasco

Writers Bureau revisited

2010-01-29T10:02:00.008Z

Slack blogging around here since Christmas. Sorry about that- pressure of work, and a trip to a snowy Munich are to blame. You can see the view towards Odeonsplatz from the Englischer Garten in the new header - schön, oder?
It seems that Topsyturvydom's glorious victory against the mighty Writers Bureau was not the unalloyed success it first appeared to be. I'm grateful to Padraig Colman for his excellent and detailed account of the, er, service they provide. Padraig is clearly an accomplished writer, as his work on Sri Lanka shows, so it is a concern that his experience was so dispiriting - but not really a surprise. My attention was drawn to a defensive piece by a Writers Bureau tutor, Nick Daws, who, whilst agreeing that the school's publicity was misleading, says that "The Writers Bureau is a reputable organisation which in general offers a good service to its students" and finds them merely "lazy" in their inflated and erroneous claims. Padraig and I, and a number of other students, might differ with the author of Write any Book in Under 28 Days (what, really? Like, you know, Ulysses and stuff? Cool!)
There is a school of thought that suggests that writing, particularly of the creative ilk, can't really be taught. Here's A.L. Kennedy on that issue, and, as always with her, it's worth reading.
Image: Busymonster

What are the chances?

2009-12-22T11:00:00.002Z

At the top of this page, you'll see a "next blog" button, and clicking it takes you to a random blog. In an idle moment, I clicked yesterday, and on the third click, was presented with a blog I didn't know, but which was written by someone I do know, and featured pictures of many people I know. Since, according to this, there are currently 133,000,000 blogs - and OK, Blogger is only one platform, but probably the biggest - what are the chances of this happening? And should I buy a lottery ticket this week?

Old Lags

2009-12-18T09:25:00.006Z

To the Martin Harris Centre, for an event with Martin Amis, one of a series that exists largely to justify his salary, I expect. The attraction for me was not so much Amis fils, but Clive James, who, since he's now three-score years and ten, was considered to be a suitable candidate for a debate about ageing and literature. Ghoulishly, Clive's old (in every sense of the word) sparring partner Peter Porter was too ill to attend. That didn't matter of course, since Clive can talk enough for a dozen. Amis looked like an ageing roué, in a raffish Leslie Phillips sort of way. Clive eschewed the trademark leather jacket in favour of a black polo shirt disturbingly like the ones I habitually wear.
The two of them then both made opening statements. Amis pointed out that the forties were the time when you discovered mortality, but the fifties were when you discovered death. You look in the mirror, and you know death is interested, is intrigued by you...
His basic premise was that writers invariably declined as they got older. Mr Amis is 60.
Clive, working with no notes, and speaking far more fluently than Amis - who did have notes - refuted the Amis argument with a string of examples. What struck me about Clive is that he speaks in sentences, perfectly formed, balanced, with barely a pause or an erm or a y'know. It's quite uncanny, really. There was some good knockabout stuff at the expense of Roth and Updike, but Clive insisted that even when youthful inspiration has gone, the craft remains to sustain the writer. He also confirmed what I have long suspected- that his recent prolificity is a conscious decision to get stuff out with time's winged chariot in the background.
...and doesn't Martin look exactly like his dad these days?
Update: Just read the review of two of Clive's recent books in the current (Dec 18th) TLS. As Oliver Dennis says: "In what is surely the final phase of a glittering career, Clive James is busier than ever. No other contemporary writer is more aware of the ticking clock, or more likely - time permitting - to deliver on a promise."
Further update: the podcast of the event is now available here.

Urban(e) Fox

2009-12-06T18:06:00.004Z

Great snap of a foxy traveller.
Credit: RadioKate

North by Northwest

2009-11-22T19:35:00.006Z

In my imagination, Hitchcock's film was in black and white - probably because I saw it on TV in about 1968 in b&w. Seeing the Vistavision print in colour at the Cornerhouse today was a revelation. Why is it, that even when you know the story, the shocks are still, well, shocking?
I don't think my adolescent self appreciated quite how much innuendo there is in the banter between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, though even I got the train-into-tunnel metaphor back then.
So- things I noticed that I hadn't before:
Cary Grant was my age then. He is old enough to be Eva Marie Saint's dad, although she was ten years older than the part she was playing.
Jessie Royce Landis, who played Cary Grant's mother, had also played Grace Kelly's mother in To Catch a Thief, and was just seven years older than Grant.
He was very tanned.
He, and the other male leads, wore suits of a blue-grey hue. Was this the dernier cri at the time?
Leo G Carroll as the Professor is trying out for his role in Man from UNCLE.
Why, other than to stage one of the best scenes ever, would you decide the best way to kill your victim was to arrange for him to travel to a remote landscape where you could attack him with a crop-spraying plane?
Hitch's traditional cameo appearance is in the first few seconds.

The real Henry Higgins

2009-11-19T08:18:00.004Z

Reading this obituary took me back thirty odd years to a lecture theatre in a brutalist concrete building in Leeds. The first year English students were being lectured about accent and dialect by the great Stanley Ellis. He asked one of our number, picked at random, to say a few words. He'd chosen Bob McNally, a lad whose accent to the rest of us was just "Geordie". Stanley had other ideas. After listening for no more than a few seconds, he identified the precise area within Newcastle where Bob came from, and also suggested that he'd spent some time in his adolescence away from Geordie land, naming, I think, an area in Yorkshire. An astonished Bob confirmed this was the case. We applauded.
Stanley Ellis was a delightful, down to earth man with a passion for the linguistic diversity of this country. Leeds had become a major centre for the study of accent and dialect, thanks to Harold Orton's Survey of English Dialects, to which Ellis contributed. The arrival of this man, in a caravan, with an unwieldy primitive tape-recorder, must have been startling for the rural communities he visited- especially when he asked the questions. The researchers wanted to avoid planting words in the minds of the subjects, so, if they wanted to elicit the local word for a cowshed, say, they would ask something like "What do you call the building where you keep the animals that go moo?" One can imagine how this might have gone down with the tough farming types who were the typical respondents.
Stanley's party piece could be useful, as the obituary reports:

He came to national prominence when he declared that a tape released by the police in June 1979, purporting to be the voice of the Yorkshire Ripper – then suspected of the murder of 10 women – was by a hoaxer, someone who hailed from Castletown, a small village on the edge of Sunderland, Tyne and Wear – many miles from the scenes of crime. The police disregarded his warning, a decision that may have put their investigation on the wrong track for more than 18 months.
Ellis was proved to have been right in 2005, when the hoaxer was identified and shown to have lived all his life within walking distance of the area Ellis had pinpointed.

Another former student wrote to the Guardian, with a similar story to mine - Stanley must have delighted and entertained thousands of students with his ability, born, of course, of intense study.

Visitors

2009-11-17T08:22:00.006Z

Too busy to blog much of late, but thought I would mention a gig by The Visitors. They were at The Studio in Manchester to launch their new CD, and a small but select band were there to see it. They are led by Karl Walsh, a Madchester scene veteran, and play power pop with some interestingly subtle vocal arrangements, mainly as a result of the interplay between Walsh and the other lead singer, Mike Crook.
As the website and video suggests, they've gone for a visual vibe that owes a lot to fifties science fiction, particularly, it seems to me The Day The Earth Stood Still, with Walsh as Klaatu. That's reflected in the song Visitor, which puts them in the select bracket of groups who have written a song with their own name as the title - Living in a Box springs to mind.
At the gig, from which my eardrums have just about now recovered, two weeks later, Karl turned up in silver lycra, but the rest of the band obviously didn't fancy the look, so there was a curious mismatch. From left to right, we had Klaatu, Mike as Steve Harley, and, behind them, er, two blokes who'd turned up from the council to collect your old fridge on bass and drums. Still, the sound, particularly from bassman Paul Petricco was prodigious, and, with a bit of exposure, there's no reason why they shouldn't do well. I'd drop the silver lycra though.

Ah, friends eclectic

2009-10-26T08:16:00.013Z

More music on this allegedly literary blog. People often claim to have very broad musical tastes, but this is frequently not borne out in fact. When some starlet or reality TV show participant says something like "Oh I love all kinds of music - anything from Rihanna to the Pussycat Dolls" you sense that their idea of music isn't, shall we say, particularly well-developed.
Jools Holland, whom God preserve, said on his radio show recently that it really annoyed him when people said of a particular artist or type of music "Oh sorry, before my time" as if anything that existed before they were born could not possibly have any relevance to them. Yes, quite. Thus, I feel happy with a really wide range of music. I never understood rap, in which I always find the c is silent, and I'd rather folk songs were sung by folk, instead of Peter Pears. And don't ever take me to your lieder. Apart from that, though, pretty much anything goes. So here's the latest eclectic mix of live music encountered by me and 'er indoors.
Quatuor Danel

If you are occasionally in Manchester on a Thursday lunchtime, and you need sustenance of the musical kind, the Martin Harris Centre is the place to be. This innovative centre presents regular free concerts at lunchtime, and recently this string quartet gave a performance of two standard repertoire items, Haydn's String Quartet op.1 No 1 and Mozart's String Quartet KV 465 together with a brand new piece by Pieter Schuermans. The Haydn and the Mozart were sublime, and the concentration of the players noticeable. I particular enjoyed the flourish which the leader, Marc Danel, brought to his work. The Schuermans piece was, as they say, "challenging", but was played with enormous attack by the four musicians, and the single long movement impressed with its energy.
>Damien Maddison

Damien recently went solo after some time with his band Maddison - there were, in the time-honoured phrase, musical differences. Damien appeared as part of the annual In the Cityevent at The Moon Under Water, a huge Deansgate pub. We went with the estimable local DJ and rock chick (she wishes) Caroline Rennie. Damien played with a pick up band, with whom he had one hour's rehearsal. Considering that, he was pretty good, and the current highlight of his set, the withering "Absolutely Tib St." (spot the Dylan reference) was certainly enhanced by the beefed-up electric sound. Damien's work is recognisably in an English singer-songwriter tradition, and whilst he clearly owes something to people such as Ray Daviesand Ian Broudie, he has a distinctive voice and a great facility with words. "Absolutely Tib St.", which is even more effective when you know what occasioned it, spits out bile in splendid fashion - and it's not often you come across "sanctimonious" in a pop lyric.
The Unthanks

To the newly refurbished Band on the Wall, last visited by me 27 years ago. It's changed a bit, as have Rachel Unthank and the Winterset, now officially The Unthanks. Ten of them crowded on to the small stage. The line-up is basically a string quartet, two brass players, drums, bass, keyboards, guitar, and various other instruments- all the players swapped instruments at regular intervals. The ethereal sound of Rachel and her sister's voices, that made the previous incarnation of the group such a success, is preserved in the big band version, but with hugely improved capacity for new textures and modulations. It helps that they have gathered some brilliant multi-instrumentalists around them, even if some of them looked like they had wandered in from the school band rehearsal. Great harmonies, some really unusual songs -not just folk - and some fantastic playing. The venue is mainly standing, but if you get there early, you can sit on the balcony, which is what we did.
So- an eclectic few days, and lots more to come in the musical maelstrom that is Manchester.

It's nice to be recognised...

2009-10-09T10:18:00.000+01:00

...especially by the mighty Normblog. Thanks Norm!

Thirty Year Man

2009-10-09T09:19:00.004+01:00

Clive James was 70 this week. When he was a mere stripling in his thirties, I discovered the work he had done with Pete Atkin on a series of albums just coming to a premature end in the face of indifference from the great British public and the big record companies. I've been a fan ever since, so when, not long after getting to grips with the internet, last century, I discovered Midnight Voices, an online community of Atkin / James fans, I joined up, and have watched with pleasure as Pete has responded to our interest by producing new versions of his older material, versions of previously unheard songs, and an album of all new material. This is one of the best things about the web- none of this would have been possible without it, although Steve Birkill, the onlie begetter of Midnight Voices deserves a huge vote of thanks for his tenacity in getting the whole thing moving, and keeping it going.
The website that Steve maintains contains more than you will ever need to know about Atkin and James, and I commend it to you. For the uninitiated, though, here's why I think this work is important. The songs (lyrics by James, music by Atkin) struck me then as a callow youth, and strike me even more so now as a grizzled pantaloon, as being quite extraordinary in their lyrical dexterity and musical adventurousness. To listen to them alongside some of the other products of the early seventies is to hear consummate skill and intelligence up against the derivative and inept inanities of the semi-literate. The lyrics of James, intense, allusive, topical, poetic, are set by Atkin using the full range of musical styles available in popular song. So, rather than a typical guitar bass drums set up, those early Atkin albums featured the cream of British sessionmen, often with a jazz background, such as Henry Mackenzie, Chris Spedding,Kenny Clare, Herbie Flowers, Alan Wakeman and many others.
In a series of albums in the early seventies, they produced a long list of brilliant songs, often tackling unlikely topics with intelligence and humour. In my view, they have produced the best songs about the music business; the best song about alcoholism; the funniest song about drug abuse; the only song about the fears of a Mafia boss; the best songs about the death of sixties idealism and the Vietnam war...I could go on, but you get the picture.
It was a real pleasure and privilege, then, to attend this year's Midnight Voices event, and to hear those songs again, often with new arrangements. My review is here.
If you are interested in intelligent lyrics, sung sensitively and with a brilliant musical setting, look no further. All the old albums are reissued in handsome new editions, and the later material is still available. You won't be disappointed.

Last Chance to See...

2009-09-27T16:58:00.007+01:00

Anxious as ever to be present at the cutting edge of vibrantly youthful popular culture, I hied me to the Bridgewater Hall on Friday, accompanied by 'er indoors and the man also known as the Silver Fox to witness a concert by two up and coming youngsters playing modern music. The elder of the two bandleaders, the prematurely grey Acker Bilk, was supporting the raven-haired whippersnapper Kenny Ball.
Blimey! Acker is 80, and Kenny a year younger. Between them, they've been trad-jazzing for over a century. That's remarkable enough, though not as remarkable as Kenny's hair. What is truly remarkable is that they can still put on an excellent show for a pretty good crowd of adoring fans.
Acker came on to stage painfully slowly - he's obviously not too mobile - but he performed well, helped out considerably by his excellent trumpet player, Enrico Tomasso, who dominated proceedings, as the six-piece band ran through a series of standards. Acker introduced most of them with a joke, and a running gag (at least I think it was) where he'd say, "The next number is... (turning to the pianist) what the hell's the next one called?" He had to do Stranger on the Shore, of course, and did, donning his bowler for the occasion,though his clarinet part was really reduced to some atmospheric noodlings. It was pleasant, but that was all.
Kenny Ball's group, with an identical lineup - drums, bass, piano, and a front row of trumpet (obviously)trombone and clarinet, produced a much beefier sound, aided considerably by excellent playing from the rhythm section, and the clarinet playing of Andy Cooper that reminded you rather poignantly of how much power Acker had lost. Kenny Ball can still blast it out, and certainly contributed mightily to the overall impact. The Jazzmen had fun, and included, as they had to, "I Wanna Be Like You" played as a request for a young lad (with his grandparents presumably) in the audience. I think they might have played it anyway...Andy Cooper's been singing that for 40 years now, but still obviously enjoyed it, and rocked the house, insofar as the Bridgewater is rockable. There were some surprises, notably an excursion into Jacques Loussier or David Rees-Williams territory, led by excellent pianist Hugh Ledigo and a fantastic (but, by definition, too long) drum solo by Nick Millward.
It was great fun, and I'm glad I saw these legends. Couldn't get Midnight in Moscow out of my head all day Saturday.

Moderation in all things

2009-09-18T09:45:00.005+01:00

One of the unexpected benefits of comment moderation has been that I've picked up on some comments on old posts that I wouldn't have otherwise seen - including some spam from China.
So, it seems that my titanic struggle with Writers Bureau wasn't quite the success I had thought judging by the new comment. I'll see if I can get a copy of their brochure - but does this count as advertising? And thanks to Thomas for his comment on the ways people try to get more money out of us.

Dee Time

2009-08-30T16:33:00.004+01:00

It's a never-failing indication of creeping old age when icons of your youth die. I'm old enough to have been enthralled by Simon Dee's tea-time show on TV. To an adolescent in grimy Moston, he seemed effortlessly cool, roaring off into the sunset in his E-type as the credits rolled at the end of the show. He was one of the first people who were famous for being famous- he had no discernible talent other than handsome features and a pleasantly unforced television manner. He seemed at the time to epitomise the new youth culture, as it took over the bastion of the establishment, the BBC. What happened after his flop at LWT is quite shocking. There were a couple of comeback attempts, but essentially, this man spent half his life on the scrapheap.

Fair enough

2009-08-25T21:06:00.005+01:00

So I'm in the local Co-op buying a bottle of wine. Spotty youth at the checkout is trying to scan it but it won't scan. He asks his camp co-worker why it won't. "Well, it's obvious", he says. "This is an evil bottle of wine - it's not Fairtrade, so it's probably produced by enslaved North Korean children!"
"Er... it's Italian," I say.
"Yes, probably produced by Mussolini's descendants" he says, and flounces theatrically to serve someone else.
I love this. It proves that, as John Shuttleworth wisely opined, "Shopkeepers in the north are nice."

Apture

2009-08-20T13:29:00.001+01:00

Just a quick post to say that I've enabled a new widget called Apture, which should produce lots of multi-media links at the click of a mouse, as MC Desmo says.

Trolls

2009-08-15T09:58:00.002+01:00

I suppose blogging is a kind of vanity publishing. There's no quality control - I can write what I like. But the main difference between Topsyturvydom and some execrable self-published collection of poems is that I can, to some extent, control the reaction to it. After all, an author publishing in the usual way is open to criticism and has to take it. On the interweb, however, my space (someone should use that as the name for a web site) is my castle, and I can repel boarders if I wish.
In four years of blogging, I've never attracted the kind of malicious commenter designated a troll by the internet geeks. Until now, that is. Thanks to a friend who understands how these things work, I have been able to use my sitemeter to identify the troll's IP address- not that I really needed to, as I know who the person is, but you never know when you might need proof. Having a colleague who is an expert in forensic linguistics is useful too.
The upshot is that comment moderation is now in place. It won't trouble any genuine commenter, beyond having to wait a matter of some hours perhaps before their comment appears. But I really don't see why I should give cyber house-room to people who simply want to insult me. So I won't.

Volleying and thundering

2009-06-25T08:34:00.003+01:00

You would think I might get these all right. No, I got 6 / 7. I even got the question on To Kill a Bleeding Mockingbird right. What I got wrong is the question on The Charge of the Light Brigade, where I was invited to declare why Tennyson had used certain verbs. All the answers were reasonable, but only one is right, apparently. My respect for GCSE examiners has increased exponentially, as it is clear they can communicate with long dead poets laureate to ask footling questions about their poems.
"Alf, are you there? Can you tell us why you chose the verbs "volleyed" and "thundered" in that long poem of yours?"
"Certainly: it's to reinforce the danger faced by the soldiers."
"Righto. Sure it's not to reinforce the noise of battle, what with those verbs being vaguely onamatopoeic and all?"
"Nope. Reinforce the danger."
"OK. Thanks Alf. Is Charlotte there by the way? Got a couple of questions for her."

Utt(er)ly barmy

2009-06-20T19:08:00.003+01:00

Authors routinely complain about boorish punters at book signings, but I don't think any of them tried the Uttley solution. The formidable children's author apparently didn't like the prospect of dealing with real children:
Dimly, she perceived an overwhelming mob running at her and with British pluck she unhesitatingly grabbed her duck-handled umbrella and waded into the attack, felling infants right and left. The kiddies paused, briefly regrouped, then broke up and ran off, screaming in terror. Uttley strode among them, lashing out freely.
I'm warming to her and her rabbits....

Voluntary = Compulsory

2009-06-16T22:19:00.003+01:00

In the brave new world of education, a "voluntary" contribution to the cost of a child's education is actually compulsory.
Sample:
It read like a letter from a debt-collector. "Our accounts indicate you have not made a contribution," it stated. "Our records indicate you have not contacted us." In fact, it was a letter from a state primary school. And it was asking for "voluntary" contributions of £40 from parents to its annual fund.

"I recognise that you may feel unable to pay the full amount," the chair of governors went on. "We always invite parents to write to us to explain their circumstances and propose an alternative."

Spoiling Charlotte

2009-06-01T08:51:00.004+01:00

The mighty Normblog has a nice post about the way the notes in classic editions of novels give away plot details, assuming we have all read it before. Norm cites Nick Hornsby's neat line about this:
Even the snootiest critic/publisher/whatever must presumably accept that we must all, at some point, read a book for the first time. I know that the only thing brainy people do with their lives is reread great works of fiction, but surely even James Wood and Harold Bloom read before they reread? (Maybe not. Maybe they've only ever reread, and that's what separates them from us. Hats off to them.)
I remember teaching Jane Eyre to a first year group a couple of years ago. We were in the final week of the unit, so all of them should have finished reading it weeks before. I was trying to get them to think about the ending, and to compare it with conventional endings a la Jane Austen. I mentioned the classic line "Reader, I married him" at which one member of the class exclaimed "What? She marries him! Stupid cow!"

The Only Living Boy

2009-05-25T13:55:00.002+01:00

To the Lloyd's Hotel, downtown Chorlton for a book launch by my friend and former colleague Robert Graham. His new collection of short stories, The Only Living Boy, was the main event, and a goodly crowd enjoyed his witty and self-deprecating chat, and his sensitive readings.
I was moved to write a review on Amazon:
This collection of stories, written over the last quarter-century, showcases Graham's talent for the fine detail and the telling turn of phrase. Many of the stories are set in (to me at any rate) very familiar locations, and one of the strengths of these stories is the sense they exude of being grounded in the real lives of the believable people who inhabit them. That's not to say that whimsy doesn't have its place here- one story in particular, "Playing Gershwin" has that almost magic realist quality one finds in, for example, Paul Auster.
What strikes me most about these stories is their wit, not just in the sense that they are often witty, and funny, but in the old - fashioned sense of the word: they display a high degree of verbal dexterity. There's no room in the short story for the wasted word, and Graham wastes none.
If you want to be entertained, amused, intrigued, and occasionally challenged to reflect on life's iniquities, this volume will suit you well. Here's an author at the top of his game.

Inspector Singh Investigates

2009-05-25T11:34:00.005+01:00

I am immersing myself in things Malaysian at the moment, in preparation for the forthcoming Burgess conference in Kuala Lumpur. That's one of the reasons I've changed my banner to a picture taken last year in Kuala Kangsar. So I was intrigued by this book: it must be the only English language detective story set in KL, I imagine. The detective is Inspector Singh, a Sikh seconded to Malaysia from Singapore in order to investigate the killing of a leading businessman, apparently by his estranged former model wife. My heart sank when Singh was described as a maverick in the opening pages (do fictional police forces contain any non-mavericks?) but the story soon picked up, and engaged me enough for me to finish it in two days. The author, Shamini Flint, is a former lawyer and also an environmental activist, so it's no surprise that aspects of Sharia law and a subplot concerning illegal logging are integral to this novel.
The picture of KL that emerges is one that will be familiar to those who have been there- certainly, the bustle, the grime, the contrasts, the traffic were all elements I noticed on my visit, and are all evoked well here. My one criticism of Shamini's use of local colour is that she usually feels obliged to explain quirks of behaviour, or cuisine, as if she doesn't quite trust her reader to accept her knowledge. I wondered if it was the heavy hand of an editor with an eye on the anglophone market.
Singh, whose character maybe owes something to HRF Keating's Inspector Ghote, keeps one step ahead of his Malaysian colleagues in a murky tale of corruption, bluff and passion. I enjoyed it, and look forward to the next in the projected series, to be set in Bali.
Shamini Flint is obviously very much a genre writer, and there's nothing wrong with that- but the burgeoning Malaysian literary scene contains some seriously impressive writers, and I will be turning to them in a future post. Meanwhile, this is a promising beginning, and Singh is a distinctive addition to the crowded detective story marketplace.

Boris the Bold

2009-05-23T12:36:00.004+01:00

This post is completely self-indulgent, though Petal will be interested. Boris is the head of our household. He had some kind of accident last year - exactly what we still don't know - and for a while there, things looked grim. But he was soon back to his old self, bossing us about and demanding fish. Here he is anyway, meditating above and surveying his domain below. If you like this, go to Petal's blog, where her Fidel, who looks very much like a young Boris, is currently starring.

Swine flu in proportion

2009-05-09T13:26:00.003+01:00

Partly posting this so I can get another picture of my second favourite animal species on the blog two days in succession, and partly to record my admiration for Dr Crippen, whose blog is well worth a look. Key quote:
There have been deaths in Mexico. There has been one in the US. Our Indian partner said: "There were 2,000 deaths, mainly children in Africa and Asia, yesterday."

Our medical student looked shocked: "I didn't know swine flu had reached that part of the world." "It hasn't," said our partner. "I'm talking of deaths from malaria. But that isn't news, is it?"

We were silent for a while. Time to get things in proportion.

They just don't get it

2009-05-08T08:06:00.005+01:00

The trickle of stories about the way MPs abuse the expenses system is now a flood. What's noticeable is the entirely predictable excuse that all of them offer- we didn't break any rules. They are so removed from the ordinary lives of their constituents that they can't see that's not the point. The rules (made by them of course) permit all kinds of clearly unjustifiable expenditure at taxpayers' expense. It's a gravy train, pure and simple.
I was amused, then actually annoyed, when it was revealed that Jacqui Smith was upset with her husband / employee for his claiming of porn films on her expenses, not because of the embarrassment, but because she had apparently spent a week going through her expenses, and was confident they were legit according to the rules. Well, I rather thought her job was to run the Home Office- who was in charge when she was trying to find her bath plug receipt?
I am a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and follow the blog of its director, Matthew Taylor. So when he weighed in with his thoughts on the matter, I posted a comment. My solution is this:
First, the government should requisition, buy or otherwise acquire about 500 central London flats, at a cost of a day or so bank bailout. This would also give some stimulus to the housing market. MPs whose constituencies are not within reasonable commuting distance of Westminster are allocated a flat. Furnishings are provided (I’m sure John Lewis would oblige). And, er, that’s it. No allowances, no claims to be made. Maintenance to be handled either by contractors who bill the House of Commons or via a dedicated team appointed by the state. Utility bills paid. MPs in London suburbs given a travel warrant to get them back home.
Matthew objected:
"But might it not cost more. There would be up to £300 million to buy the flats and then the cost of managing them, maintaining them, and servicing them. And if it was overseen by the House I’m not sure it would be the most efficient of services. Also, there would anyway have to be transitional arrangements as t wouldn’t really be fair to ask existing MPs to move out of homes they had lived in for years."

I think this is revealing- his instinct, perhaps understandable, since he is a former aide to Tony Blair, is to protect the MP. I replied:
Well, yes, I suppose £300m would be a lot- but that’s assuming each flat would cost on average about £600k. On one website, I found 55 flats in Central London at under £300k. Even so, the cost would be small change compared to the money the govt is currently spending on bailouts etc. Maintenance would obviously cost - but at the moment with MPs claiming for every last bath plug, I’m sure it would be cheaper. And if it were handled by an agency of the Commons, it would create jobs, apprenticeships etc.
No need for transitional arrangements. If this system were introduced at the next election, all qualifying MPs would get their allocated flat. Those who had a second home could sell it, keep it, whatever. They just wouldn’t be able to make any claims for it.
No reply from Mr Taylor. And fair enough, there's no reason why he should. I think the political classes need to realise the depth of the anger felt by what they would call in their patronising way "hard-working families". MPs receive a salary beyond the wildest dreams of 95% of the population for a job that doesn't require their attendance at their place of work - which is open on fewer days than an Oxford college - and which allows them to take any number of extra jobs, directorships etc. On top of that, there's the bottomless expenses fund. It stinks.

Update: Andrew Rawnsley says it all much more gracefully:
"Harriet Harman has been shoved before the cameras to try to defend the indefensible. She bleats that it was "all within the rules" as if the rules were not of Parliament's own invention, but had been handed down by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. All her exposed colleagues have likewise protested that everything they did was "within the rules" as if they were powerless to resist an invisible hand that forced them to sign the claim forms. Not every MP felt compelled to scoff at the trough. Hilary Benn, Ed Miliband and Alan Johnson emerge as acmes of frugality who make modest and entirely reasonable claims for performing their duties. The unblemished MPs should be furious with the avarice of their grasping colleagues who have tarred the whole political class with a reputation for being seedy and greedy."

Pope Right Shock Horror

2009-04-07T08:38:00.002+01:00

If only...
Still, the Onion is on top form with this story.
Thanks to Charles for the tip.

Pope Wrong Shock Horror

2009-03-12T08:44:00.001Z

Who'd have thought it? Er... isn't he supposed to be infallible? You can't get the staff these days, can you?

Inside Today...

2009-03-12T08:17:00.001Z

If you wake up to Radio 4, then you will enjoy this. If you don't, you'll have no idea what is so amusing about this film...

£5 worse off

2009-03-11T09:03:00.004Z

I bought some supplies in a nationally known store the other day. I won't identify the store, but the words "Marks" and "Spencer" appear prominently in their name. The cashier waved the goods across the barcode reader, and then asked me for £24.13. Unusually for me, I had actual cash money on my person, so I proffered a £20 and a £10 note. The cashier opened the till, and gave me 87p. I said "Erm, I think I gave you £30." She shot back, rather too quickly "No, you gave me a twenty and a five."
"Oh," I said, beginning to doubt it myself now, "I thought I gave you a tenner as well as the twenty." At this point, she rang furiously for the supervisor, who waddled over at leisurely pace. I said that I might well have been mistaken, and she said again that it was definitely a fiver, because she had to put it in a special drawer. A very brief conversation with the supervisor then ensued. The supervisor tapped in something on the till, the till opened, and the cashier handed me £5 and my receipt. The supervisor, who hadn't even acknowledged my presence, waddled off. I said to the cashier that if there wasn't a £10 note in the wrong place, I would accept that I'd been wrong. No, that wasn't possible: I had to accept the extra £5. No-one said it, but the underlying implication was that I'd tried it on, and they would just write off the loss.
So now, I feel guilty at having extracted £5 from this enormous company. What struck me was that, in the olden days, the cashier would probably have put the notes in a clip on top of the till while she rang the purchase up, so it would be very clear what had been tendered; and she would also have probably said "Twenty five pounds" when I gave her the money- two checks to ensure that the transaction was transparent.
I'm still not sure whether she was right or I was. The upshot is that, if I use that store again, I will always pay by card. And my favourite charity is £5 richer.

Photo: TheTruthAbout

Woolfpole: Charles Lambert on Normblog

2009-02-24T12:21:00.003Z

Chez Topsyturvydom, we are very pleased to see Charles Lambert occupying the guest slot over at the mighty Normblog. Charles has chosen Christopher Isherwood's little known book The Memorial, which I must admit I don't know. I would be curious to read it though, as Charles has whetted my appetite with this description: "It's an odd amalgam of faux-modernism and the traditional novel, as though Isherwood still hasn't made up his mind what kind of writer he plans to be: Virginia Woolf or Hugh Walpole." Still trying to imagine what a combination of Walpole and Woolf would look like...

Is that all right for yourself?

2009-02-19T09:41:00.009Z

My car is being repaired. The insurance company phoned to say it should be ready on Friday. You might predict that such an exchange would go:
Company person: Mr Spence? Just phoning to say your car should be ready on Friday.
Me: OK, thanks.
In fact, it goes like this:
Emily (for it is she): Hello, this is Emily from Megacorp insurance speaking. May I speak with Mr Spence?
Moi: Yes, speaking.
Emily: Is it all right for yourself to give you an update on your car repair, sir?
Me: Yes, please do.
Emily: OK, first I need to go through security. Can you confirm your full name, please?
Me: Robert John Spence
Emily: Great (she thinks it's great that I know my own name?) Now, can you give me the first line of your address?
Me: 3 Acacia Avenue Manchesterford
Emily: And the postcode?
Me: MZ56 OPQ
Emiy: Fantastic. (she thinks it's incredible that I know my own address?)Now I have to inform you that all calls may be recorded for security and training purposes. Is that all right for yourself?
Me: (wearily) Yes.(thinking- what if I say no, I can't be recorded, as I believe that a part of my soul will be taken away from me?)
Emily: OK, now I am phoning to update you on the current position with your car. The current position is that....(long pause whilst she searches for something on screen) your car should be ready on Friday. It may not be ready by Friday, but Honest Joe's garage are telling us it should be.
Me: Oh, right.
Emily: Are you satisfied with that update, sir?
Me (under my breath): Ecstatic. (Louder) Yes, thanks.
Emily: Is there anything else I can do for yourself, sir?
Me: Please go away. (I didn't really say that- I said No, thanks. Goodbye)
End of call. That's what I call service.

Photo: Doug8888

1000 years of popular music - in a black cab

2009-02-15T10:55:00.005Z

It's a somewhat sobering fact to reflect that I have been a Richard Thompson fan for forty years now. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen him play, but I always come back for more brilliant guitar work, darkly disturbing songs, and a surprisingly well-developed stage patter. His voice has deepened and matured with the years, too. He really is a pretty good singer these days. So, no surprise that 'er indoors and I hastened to the Lowry recently to see RT's "A Thousand Years of Popular Music" show. You might think it perverse for such an accomplished singer songwriter to perform a show containing no songs of his own, but Richard has fashioned a rare treat in this show. How many people, do you think, could sing and play in a single evening everything from medieval plainchant to madrigals, early opera, music hall, thirties jazz and sixties rock?
The guitar playing is mind-boggingly proficient, it goes without saying. The accompaniment on this occasion is provided by chanteuse and occasional pianist Judith Owen and percussionist Debra Dobkin. and they make a very fine noise together. They finished, not with Britney's "Oops I did it again", which he's used in the past, but with something by Nelly Furtado (during which, as a way of turning the wheel full circle, Richard included a verse he'd translated into Latin). Not everything came off -Judith Owen is much better at Cole Porter than Purcell - but you have to admire their chutzpah. It's not really a history, of course: medieval times to Victorian are covered in the first half, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are featured in the second, so it's weighted towards more recent stuff.
The show is available on CD and DVD, and is a must-buy for RT fans. A flavour of it can be had by viewing this bizarre video, from the Black Cab sessions web site, where, somewhat surreally, musicians play whilst being driven around London in the eponymous black cab. Barmy idea, but it works.

Orlando Lopez

2009-02-10T18:56:00.004Z

News of another death in music today. Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez, the bassist for the Buena Vista Social Club died in Havana. It was a joy to see these superb musicians in concert in Liverpool a few years ago. Sadly, Lopez is not the first of that group to die. I feel privileged to have caught them in that marvellous Indian summer, largely brought about by the work of the estimable Ry Cooder. The group were the subject of a film by Wim Wenders. We will not see their like again.

Blossom Dearie

2009-02-09T20:54:00.002Z

Sad to hear today of the death of Blossom Dearie, whose work I have admired for years. She was still working in her late seventies in a New York club. A very evocative voice, by no means technically brilliant, but somehow appropriate for the songs she chose- and her piano accompaniment was always brilliantly judged. Here, someone has put on Youtube her version of the fine Michael Barr song "Try Your Wings" with lyrics by Dion McGregor, from her Verve album of 1957 (and my favourite) "Give Him The Oo-La-La" Its visual accompaniment is from Breakfast at Tiffany's, one of my favourite films, with the peerless Audrey Hepburn.

Little Monsters in paperback

2009-02-08T09:53:00.006Z

So now there is no excuse for not buying this extraordinary first novel by Charles Lambert. Go on - you know you want to.

Keep Calm and Carry On

2009-02-05T09:22:00.004Z

I was interested by this article. The poster has been a fixture, and a talking point, in my office for a few years now. It never fails to intrigue the visitor. I saw it on a visit to Barter Books, and ordered it from them, before the avalanche of interest they report. What's the attraction? It's simple. And it's true.

This Just In: Man Splits up with Girlfriend

2009-01-24T21:49:00.004Z

This was the top story on BBC News website today. When are we going to get over this obsession with celeb royals?
Maybe they should be giving more attention to this.
And all hail Ed Stourton, for skewering the desperately feeble "Chief Operating Officer" on the Today programme.
That this came the day after the return of £6 million a year Woss to the airwaves simply added to the impression of a corporation that really needs to sort itself out.

Charles Lambert's Virtual Book Tour: The Scent of Cinnamon

2009-01-20T08:07:00.013Z

Topsyturvydom is proud to hold this leg of the virtual tour for Charles Lambert's The Scent of Cinnamon. This is Charles's second major publication, following his novel Little Monsters. First, a biographical note: Charles Lambert was born in Lichfield, in 1953. After going to eight different schools in the Midlands and Derbyshire, he won a scholarship to the University of Cambridge from 1972 to 1975. In 1976 he moved to Milan and, with brief interruptions in Ireland, Portugal and London, has lived and worked in Italy since then.
Currently a university teacher, academic translator and freelance editor for international agencies, his occupations have included kitchen hand, shop assistant, medical journal editor, guidebook writer, receptionist, teacher of political science, and journalist with ANSA, the Italian news agency. He now lives in Fondi, exactly halfway between Rome and Naples, a stone's throw from what was once the Appian Way.

The Scent of Cinnamon has been well received- Scott Pack went so far as to say that "the majority, the vast majority, of people who routinely enjoy the Richard & Judy books would wet their knickers (or pants, but let's face it, it would mainly be knickers) over the title story of this book." Well, up to a point, Scott... Where I would agree is that these stories are all exquisitely crafted, showing the same attention to the telling detail that was such a feature of Little Monsters. And if anything is going to restore the popularity of short fiction in this country, it must be the publication of stories such as these, by turns humorous, surreal, disturbing, but always memorable. Here's a short question and answer session I conducted with Charles:

RS: You mentioned when we corresponded that you are working on a novel that might loosely be described as detective fiction. In The Scent of Cinnamon, at least one story, "Moving the Needle Towards the Thread", might be said to have some of the characteristics of that genre. Are you attracted to genre fiction? I wondered if you like to subvert it, as, say, Gilbert Adair does.

CL: Yes, I am attracted to genre fiction but, bluntly, I’m not very good at it. What tends to happen on the occasions I set out to work within a genre is that, without wanting it, I find the writing wriggling off towards something else. The story you mention is a good example. The set-up – a corpse, a murder, a murderer, a sort of confession – certainly has the characteristics of, if not quite a whodunit, a whydunit, if you like. But what happens as the piece develops is that the narrator begins to find her own certainties questioned, so that by the end of the story what began as self-justification is crumbling in her hands and she no longer has an explanation for anything, least of all her own actions. The story has become, willy-nilly and regardless of its quality, ‘literary’ fiction in that it lends itself to, indeed necessitates, more than one reading. The Number Worm also looks like a pure genre piece - a classic horror story - before veering off into (and it’s been criticized for this by one irate SF/fantasy reviewer) ‘psychological metaphor’ (quite apart from its nodding salute to a story that has almost established its own genre, "Metamorphosis"). I’m a great admirer of certain genre writers, like Stephen King, say, or Ramsay Campbell, or Ian Rankin, and I have a special place in my heart for Patricia Highsmith, who has, I think, influenced me as much as any other writer, but these are all people who are challenged and stretched by the genre they’ve chosen to work in, rather than writers like, say, Patricia Cornwell, who stay within their genre for less creative reasons (I hesitate to use the word money). I also like and admire the work of Gilbert Adair, but I wouldn’t see my use of genre as involving the kind of very knowing operation he performs so skilfully in his Christie-inspired novels. The book you mention, by the way, has already broken free of its detective fiction moorings and is heading off who-knows-where… Right now, a study of what it means to be lonely might be a more accurate one-line description.

RS: We touched on your relatively late emergence as a writer in our interview. Many reviewers have commented on the sense of craftsmanship and maturity in these stories. Has it been an advantage to do your apprenticeship in private as it were?

CL: Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, talks about the numbers of hours a person needs to devote to a certain activity before becoming proficient in it. I haven’t read the book, but I think he suggests a minimum of 10,000. That would work out, roughly, as three hours a day for ten years, or one hour a day for thirty. In these terms, I’m definitely proficient, which, for me, means being aware of what I can do and of which limits I can profitably push against. Having said that, the stories in the collection cover a fair number of years and I hope they’re all both well-crafted and mature, though I’d like to think that some of the newer pieces were, if not better, perhaps more sparely written. It’s noticeable that the most recent work of, say, Bob Dylan and Alice Munro– to take names out of a mixed-genre hat of personal favourites – has a feeling of being stripped back, and I’d tend to say that maturity is also a process of freeing the text from what’s inessential and decorative. I hope that I’m doing this. As far as conducting my apprenticeship in private goes, I can take no credit for this at all. From the very start, I did everything in my power to go public and I’d still be happy to see a novel I wrote over 15 years ago sitting on readers’ shelves. Over to you, world of publishing.

RS: You've lived nearly all your adult life as an exile. Do you still feel as if you belong to Britain, and has your sense of place been affected by your long absence? Your novel Little Monsters moves easily between British and Italian settings, and there's a similar breadth of setting in The Scent of Cinnamon.

CL: I’m not sure I’d choose the word ‘exile’ to describe myself, though I might if the alternative were ‘ex-pat’. I don’t feel exiled, by myself or anyone else, from Britain. At the risk of alienating readers of Private Eye or the Daily Mail, one of the papers incidentally that reviewed Little Monsters most enthusiastically, I’d like to think of myself as European and equally at home in both the UK and Italy; but that wouldn’t be true either, because what I feel is not-quite-at-home in both, which I think is the state I was aspiring to when I first left Britain. Bilingual speakers are said to achieve 100% proficiency in neither language. I’m not bilingual, though I wonder sometimes about my linguistic competence in English and Italian, but I’m certainly bicultural, by which I mean twice incomplete. I’m made aware of this most strongly when I watch programmes like Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and discover that the first few questions are the ones that flummox me: I’d need to ask the audience. More seriously, I’m not sure how far I actually have a sense of place. In the sense of feeling rooted, or the need for that, I have very little. I had a fairly nomadic childhood, if only within the confines of the Midlands (from Lichfield to the Pennines, with quite a few stops in between), I’ve moved around quite a lot in Italy as well, and I’m beginning to look forward to the next country, whichever that might be. What I do have is a strong visual memory, which comes in handy, a strong curiosity in the minutiae of other people’s lives (a faculty that people who don’t have the excuse of being a writer call nosiness) and a sort of reckless belief that I can write about anything if I try hard enough. Transmitting the feel of a place, or time, is often a question of reducing detail to a minimum. There’s nothing less convincing than a sense that the author is ticking stuff off on a checklist of local colour: what I call the Bakelite ashtray syndrome. The thing that makes Penelope Fitzgerald’s other places so utterly convincing isn’t the precision of her attention – which is extraordinary – so much as the sparseness of detail. There’s a moment in Innocence when she talks about one of the characters buying school exercise books from the local Upim and it’s perfect. and all that’s needed to fix a world.

Thanks, Charles for those illuminating answers. Now, gentle reader, buy the book!

Something Rich and Strange

2009-01-12T21:04:00.003Z

Yes, that haunting line from The Tempest. It's one of the stories in Charles Lambert's new collection, The Scent of Cinnamon. Topsyturvydom is proud to be one of the virtual stopping points on Charles's virtual tour, and we will be virtually hosting him on 20th January. In the meantime, check out the tour so far at Salt, and read Charles's always entertaining blog, which I see currently features one of my faves, David Byrne.

Transition

2009-01-12T08:18:00.011Z

To Liverpool, for the Transition. My reader will recall that my views about Liverpool and its status as Capital of Culture were formed in the days when a new disaster was announced every hour on the hour, and the whole thing seemed an absolute joke. Well, time to eat my words, because, in the hands of Phil Redmond, a laughing stock was turned into a fantastic success.
There's still a tendency in Liverpool to trade on the past - come on, the Beatles split forty years ago- and a habit of trotting out the cliches about how everybody in the city has a marvellous sense of humour and community spirit - especially, and paradoxically, when something awful, such as the murder of a child, has happened. Boris Johnson, who was lampooned in the presentation, had to apologise for offending Liverpool's delicate sensibilities by using the "victim culture" stereotype- but at the time, Liverpudlians just subscribed to another stereotype.
Someone who had a similar experience to mine is the estimable Lynsey Hanley, who also mentions that bizarre phenomenon of the outdoor pyjama-wearer, but in a serious context. I noticed on my last visit to Liverpool that peculiar juxtaposition of dereliction and prosperity that she comments upon.
The transition night was great fun.
Big screens at the Pier Head showed a fast-changing collage of the year's events to the accompaniment of a soundtrack that cleverly referenced everything from Sgt Pepper to the La's (always hated that apostrophe) though, of course, Lennon's dreadful Imagine dirge had to be in the mix. It was all narrated by a bizarre disembodied Roger McGough head.
The official handover was done to the Lord Mayors of Linz and Vilnius- no speeches, as the thumping soundtrack was still going. (By the way, when did we finally crack the problem of public address systems, which, by definition, were always inaudible? At Liverpool, and in train stations, and football stadia, it's crystal clear now). Then a huge firework display - the best I've ever seen, and then 30,000 people went off to roam the streets, shop, visit art galleries and museums, and generally have fun. We had a brief visit to a very crowded Tate, where we had a glimpse of Blake's work, an even briefer visit to an even more crowded Bluecoat, and finished with an excellent pint or two at the Lion, before taking the train back to where we were staying (thanks for a great night out and, as usual, marvellous hospitality, Robert and Christine)

Credit Crunch Cloud has Silver Lining

2008-12-22T22:14:00.002Z

To a well-known supermarket (not T*sco, obviously) with 'er indoors to purchase such Christmas baubles as we require for our frugal Winterval celebration. Amongst the seasonal tat, I discover a CD of Ella Fitzgerald for one of your English pounds, or Euros, as we now call them. A quid! I spent £2.95 on a very indifferent coffee at Piccadilly station last week. For a third of that, I get Ella with Satchmo, the Inkspots, Louis Jordan and others singing a great collection of classic tunes. I can't think of anything for a pound that would give me greater pleasure.

An announcement

2008-12-12T12:00:00.002Z

Over the tannoy in a supermarket yesterday:
"Can a member of price integrity go to aisle 24, please? Customer waiting."
Price Integrity? Do you think there's a Price Integrity team? Do they have team meetings where they pledge to uphold price integrity against all threats? Do they finish with a group hug and a rousing chorus of "Simply the Best?"

Reading as a chore

2008-11-30T17:12:00.001Z

A colleague (thanks Anthony!) drew my attention to this rant from Susan Hill. It's not the first time she has expressed her views on this topic, and doubtless won't be the last as long as GCSE and A level students see the reading of books as a chore to be got through as painlessly as possible and with the least possible effort. I don't think it's actually their fault: the system encourages it, and has been running like this so long now, that, as "Suze" points out, there are teachers with the same attitude. I have commented in similar fashion myself before now.
Ms Hill used to publish a lively blog until she suddenly pulled it recently. At the time, I thought it might be because she'd received criticism for a post which, without apparent irony, praised Sarah Palin to the skies. I wonder if actually she just became so fed up with being accessible to all and sundry that she just felt she should concentrate on her writing.
We have a generation of students now for whom failure is not possible. A "pass" rate of 97% at A level means, in essence, that you pass by turning up. Coursework can, it seems, be endlessly deferred, and multiple attempts can be made to improve it. I have had to explain very patiently to lots of students what a deadline is, and also counsel them when they relapse into shock at the notion that once work is marked, that's it.
The idea that students of Literature might actually enjoy reading is seen as a quaint one by many eighteen-year-olds. I notice a distinct difference in the attitude of older students, who accept with equanimity, and, indeed, enthusiasm, the instruction to read a book - a whole book!- for next week's class.
I don't think there's any way round this. We need to re-establish in schools the habit of reading, and reading entire texts rather than the bleeding chunks beloved of A level syllabuses. I've no confidence that this will actually happen of course.

Next stop

2008-11-27T08:52:00.002Z

On the train to Stafford yesterday, the announcement for each stop went:
"We will shortly be arriving at Stoke. Stoke is the next stopping station on this service today"
How is this better than "The next stop is Stoke"?

The Pennine Host

2008-11-13T10:40:00.003Z

On the train to York yesterday, I was startled by an announcement: "The Pennine Host will shortly be passing through the train." I had a vision of some grizzled warriors dressed in sheepskins, rampaging through the ranks of commuters prior to a spot of ritual boat (or train) burning. Turns out it was a bloke wheeling a tea trolley.

My Motorway Reading

2008-10-31T08:46:00.003Z

..and no, I don't mean I tool along with War and Peace propped open on the dashboard. What strikes me as I make my journey to work, largely on motorways these days, is how vans and trucks have become mobile advertising hoardings, with a sprinkling of mission statement thrown in.
Years ago, if you were in the business of moving stuff from one place to another, you would call yourself a haulier, and your lorry would say something like "Thos. Jenkins, Hauliers, Derby". There would be a phone number, and, if you were at the cutting edge of technology, a fax. (By the way, what is the point of putting phone numbers on the side of trucks? Do people say, as they speed past, "Oh look darling, there's an Eddie Stobart - just scribble down the phone number, will you?") Now, however, the vehicle has to make a statement. So, forget being a haulier- you are in distribution, or, better, logistics. You don't want anything as obvious as your own name as the identifier of your company. You need to have a name that is preferably meaningless, and you need to combine it with a statement about what you do. So now, you may go on the road as something like "Interlock Logistics - delivering quality to the nation". Recently, of course, no activity has been considered worthy unless it contains the "solutions" tag. So, as we have seen, supermarkets now sell "meal solutions" instead of meals, hardware stores sell "DIY solutions" instead of tools, and one insurance company I noted wanted to sell me "risk solutions". It's all documented fortnightly in Private Eye, though not in the online version, I notice. This raises the stakes, of course, as haulage now has to become "logistics solutions", and the mission statement becomes ever more complex as companies struggle to present themselves as distinctive. Thus, a firm that might have got by with "Perkins: Refrigerated Distribution" a few years ago now has to have "Ice-spire: Delivering Coldchain Logistics Solutions to the Frozen Food Industry Community" or some such abomination.
There are some compensations to this thin reading diet on the road, though. I forgave one catering company its incorrect use of the apostrophe in "Caterer's" for its notice on the back of the van "No cakes are left in the van overnight". My favourite, though, is the firm of electricians I often spot on the way to work. Their logo is unmistakeable - a silhouette of a head with an aquiline nose, with a deerstalker and pipe. The name of the company? "Mr Ohms".

Muriel Spark, The Finishing School

2008-10-02T18:55:00.007+01:00

This novel was sent to me by Penguin, so that I could add a review to their Blog a Holiday Read site, where, apparently, it will appear sometime. You, discerning reader, can read about it now though.

Many things are coming to an end at the faux-bohemian College Sunrise: not just the education of a motley bunch of multi-national teenagers, but also the marriage of the proprietors, Rowland and Nina, and Rowland’s grip on sanity. It also marks another ending too: Muriel Spark, at the age of 87, published this novel in 2004. It was her last work. It is a testament to her vitality that the novel is as witty, sly and mordantly funny as the books for which she is most famous, Memento Mori, and, of course, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

The major conflict in the novel is between Rowland, whose youthful success as a playwright he cannot now replicate, and Chris, precocious and faintly sinister red-haired prodigy, whose half-written novel about Mary, Queen of Scots triggers a bout of uncontrollable jealousy in the older man.

All this detail and much more is deftly delineated in the opening pages of this slight but immensely enjoyable novel. Spark’s reputation for a kind of elegant nastiness, most obviously on show in novels such as The Abbess of Crewe and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, is certainly sustained here. The lives of the characters are sharply observed, with the telling detail often being used to skewer the pretensions of her cast of minor European royals, county-set girls, ambitious youths and phlegmatic locals. The running joke throughout is that Rowland, consumed utterly by his jealousy of Chris, has writer’s block, but is obliged to teach creative writing.

Those reviews that claim this is a satire on the publishing industry seem wide of the mark to me. True, a couple of publishers are exposed as shallow and grasping, but then, no-one emerges as wholly pleasant, as Spark anatomises the rivalries, ambitions and narcissism of her entirely believable characters.

This novel is not great literature, yet it is compelling, a genuine page-turner that can be read in a day with comfort. What keeps you turning the pages is the sheer pleasure of discovering what the next development will be in this fascinating tale of obsession and jealousy.

A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena de Blasi

2008-10-02T16:10:00.005+01:00

This is not the sort of book I would usually read, but since I was going to be in Tuscany for seven days, I thought it seemed an appropriate travelling companion. Evidently, it's a sequel to her A Thousand Days in Venice, and there are other volumes on Umbria and Sicily- so you can see a pattern, no? In the Venice volume, this American-Italian gourmet journalist of a certain age meets, falls in love with, and marries Fernando, a Venetian banker. The sequel chronicles their new life in a Tuscan village. It's a romanticised version of Tuscany, to be sure, and the heavy emphasis on the food of the region contributes to the production of a bucolic utopia only occasionally darkened by the intrusions of modern life.
Having made a leap into the dark by deciding to forge a new life in Tuscany, the couple immediately become the gastronomic heart and soul of the village, a fixture at the Bar Centrale, and enthusiastic preservers and revivers of old Tuscan customs. Their main ally in this project is a kind of village elder called Barlazzo whose knowledge is apparently infinite- he becomes their guide.
It's an entertaining journey, following the rustic rituals of the calendar, interspersed with recipes that, to this vegetarian seem somewhat long on preparation and short on consumption. My favourite was a leg of pork marinaded in three bottles of wine and cooked over seven days in a specially built outdoor oven. Life's too short.
The author, clearly a somewhat head-in-clouds romantic, veers off from her account of the ways of the Tuscan peasant occasionally to indulge in the kind of soul searching often to be found in those "follow your dream" life coaching manuals beloved of Americans. These passages are rather cloying, but they are compensated for by the pervasive presence of Barlazzo, for me the hero of this book. It is his dark secret that provides a teasing thread through the narrative.
Barlazzo's status as the village chieftain (de Blasi calls him 'the duke') is undisputed, and he is at the heart of every culinary activity. He also provides the historical and cultural context in not entirely credible style when, for no apparent reason, he decides to recount the history of Tuscany in guide book fashion. These sections are clunky, and although the context is useful, I don't see why de Blasi couldn't have told us in her own voice.
The book is published here by Virago, once fiercely feminist but now just another imprint of the giant Hachette empire. The text is, as is the way of things these days, resolutely American, so the usual linguistic differences occur- rigor, clamor, practicing, fall and so on. Less acceptable, it seems to me, is the use of 'sharecroppers' for the Tuscan tenant farmers, and 'unphased' for 'unfazed'.

It's an enjoyable read, especially if, like I did, you read it whilst gazing out over a beautiful Tuscan valley as pictured above. It's educational too, as even herbivores are provided with some useful recipes. And now I can pronounce 'bruschetta' correctly.

Gruaniad in shock horror

2008-09-01T18:29:00.012+01:00

The Guardian has a feature where readers say how wonderful the paper is. It's usually either someone who has read the paper man and boy for fifty years, or some youngster who says how he picked up a copy in an idle moment, and abandoned the Daily Telegraph, or the Neasden Gazette, or whatever, on the spot. It's not particularly edifying, and a bit pointless, since, because it's printed in the Guardian, it's unlikely to convince non-readers to switch. The second group is presumably the demographic that the Guardian is trying to attract with its Saturday Guide, in which events are listed, and associated articles are printed. One section is on Clubs, and I don't mean the Athenaeum or Whites- I mean ones where rare groove trance grunge garage house- or whatever it is - is played. Given the average Guardian reader is distinctly middle-aged, I wonder who they think reads these pages. I do use the listings bits, but this week my attention was drawn to the opening page, which attempts to dissect a current TV commercial.This week's was about an advert for Northampton University, but also contains a gratuitous attack on my place of work, Edge Hill University.
It's the worst kind of lazy journalism. The author, one James Donaghy, has decided, on no evidence at all, that Edge Hill's degrees are worthless, and that anyone who goes there is an idiot. I think he's trying to be funny, but it's hard to say, so puerile is his prose. A sample: "Too thick to get into a real uni? Come to Edge Hill University where we will ruin your life with a meaningless qualification, rubbish social scene and low quality sex and drugs". (But see update at the end of this post) Now, I suppose one could say, well, this guy is obviously a complete tosser so why bother even acknowledging him? If he'd published this in some grotty little internet forum, I would- but he's published it in the paper I read every day, a serious national newspaper, whose readers will include many potential Edge Hill students and their parents. It's easy enough to refute his pathetic drivel- any serious examination of the progress at Edge Hill over recent years will confirm this- we were shortlisted for the Times Higher's University of the Year award last year, and there's endless material available to show that we have an excellent reputation in our field. But Donaghy isn't interested in facts. And that's really my point. Famously, CP Scott, the guiding light of the Guardian, said that "comment is free" as the Guardian blog pages confirm on a daily basis- but the second part of his statement was "...but facts are sacred" . Donaghy's vile little piece sets out consciously to ignore the facts, in the name of humour- but I'm afraid it fails there, because it just isn't funny.
Donaghy appears to be a freelance, who runs a website. It's not an edifying read. Those of a nervous disposition should look away now as I give you a sample of his marvellous wit:
Imagine it. It is December 2001. You are Spencer McCallum, Keeley Hawes's newly acquired husband. You couldn't be happier....Update: in the original post, I quoted a lot more of this, but I think it's sullied my blog enough now. Go to the website for the full experience, but take a shower afterwards.
Brilliant, eh? There's loads more like this. Why let this man loose in the pages of the Guardian? Well, presumably because the Graun wants to attract the kind of readers who like this sort of thing - the same reason they are increasingly covering the vacuous lives of alleged celebs, and dumbing down all over the place. And to do this, they are employing people such as Donaghy. Well, I'm afraid the schoolboy pottymouth "humour" has made me consider whether I need to part with my cash every day for this stuff- and since I can get the diminishing amount of readable material on the net anyway, I've decided I've had enough. So if the Guardian want a column on why a former reader has stopped reading, I'll be happy to provide it. This stuff is not big, not clever, and not funny. The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust. They have betrayed the principles of that great editor, and lost me as a reader.
Update: the reference to Edge Hill has now been removed...

Bog people, Rosencrantz and a fake grave

2008-08-30T13:51:00.005+01:00

To Aarhus for the 9th international ESSE conference.'Er indoors accompanied me to this lovely city in Denmark, and we had a great time, both academically and socially. Aarhus has a very pleasant feel to it, and we certainly intend to be back in the future. You can get a flavour of what we saw from the flickr stream on the right.
Highlights included Den Gamle By, or the Old Town, where you can wander about the 17th century buildings; the buzz of the cafes and bars on Aboulevarden; and the Museum at Moesgård where the Grauballe Man is exhibited. This was a really impressive place, and the story of Grauballe Man, and other peat bog sacifices is told very clearly. The exhibit is displayed brilliantly, and I was reminded of how disappointed I was with Manchester Museum's recent Lindow Man exhibition, which focuses, for reasons that escape me, on the lives and times of the people who found it in the sixties. Seamus Heaney's poem about Grauballe Man conveys some of the impact of the sight of this man, apparently sacrificed to the gods of the bog two thousand years ago.
We also went on an organised trip to Rosenholm, castle residence of the Rosencrantz family. There's no real Hamlet conection, though the guide told us that a member of the family and his friend Guildenstern were reportedly in London in the 1590s. The family was very aristocratic, and that's reflected in the grandeur of the castle. It was occupied by the family until relatively recently, and is now run by a trust. As part of the trip we were taken to an unremarkable mound where a stone with a poem about Hamlet is located. It's not Hamlet's grave, but is roughly where it might have been, according to the 1930s councillors who wanted to drum up a little tourist custom.
Did I learn any Danish? No- everybody, but everybody, speaks excellent English. I did note the connection between the By (pronounced Bu) of Den Gamle By and the Orkney word Bu, meaning place of dwelling. On the academic front, there was much of interest, but I'll save that for another post.

Penelope Fitzgerald

2008-08-20T08:53:00.003+01:00

Good news that Penelope Fitzgerald now has a permanent space on the web, and a little shameful that the originators are American- why couldn't we manage it in Britain? Well, I suppose the web knows no boundaries, and it is an excellent site- congratulations to those who put it together. It's curious, as Dovegreyreader says, how PF has never had the kind of reputation that her work deserves. I hope this will be the start of an upswing in her fortunes. It would help if the US press would review her letters!

Powers of 10

2008-08-16T03:29:00.002+01:00

This film was made by the Eameses thirty-one years ago. I thought they made chairs...
Fascinating, and remarkable to think that it's three decades since it was made. Not sure about the cheesy organ though, even if it is by Elmer Bernstein.

Little Monsters

2008-08-12T08:38:00.005+01:00

I suppose the way I encountered Charles Lambert's excellent debut novel Little Monsters is emblematic of how the interweb works these days. I hadn't read a review, despite my voracious appetite for the book pages of the proper papers, but came across Charles's engaging blog, which in turn led to some correspondence. The upshot is, I have had the privilege of reading a brilliant novel, and now Charles has very kindly agreed to a kind of long distance Q and A session, which I will be including in the new e-journal I am co-editing at Edge Hill. As we speak, Charles is eating pork pies in Wolverhampton, apparently, but when he returns to his lovely home in Italy, I hope to do the email interview. With luck, that will be available in September via Edge Hill's web site.
The novel is a study of damaged people, but also touches on the possibilities of human renewal in the face of what used to be called man's inhumanity to man. The opening sentence has already lodged itself in my consciousness as one of the most startling and arresting I've read: "When I was thirteen my father killed my mother." I still think Burgess's opening line in Earthly Powers is my favourite, but this is now a high new entry on the chart.
The central character and narrator, Carol, deals with the traumatic events of her childhood, and her exile to the loveless home of her aunt, by reinventing herself. The narrative switches from the memories of an adolescence growing up in the pub owned by her aunt and her Polish refugee husband in the sixties, to the contemporary setting of the camp for asylum seekers in Italy where the present day Carol works. Lambert's prose is delicate and nuanced, and one of the delights of the novel is seeing how each narrative strand informs the other, through the repetition and variation of images and references. I was particularly struck by the use of what pompous academics would call tropes of flight, used by the author to link the strands and the characters. It is a beautifully realised novel, and one which manages to deal with very big issues on a human scale. I loved it.
Charles writes about it here, and there are reviews by John Self here and Scott Pack here. Oh, and now I know what Pokemon means, so it's educational too...

Leonard Cohen: First he took Manchester

2008-07-22T12:38:00.005+01:00

I expect that, by now, septuagenarian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen will have his feet up, having completed a remarkable series of gigs in Europe, largely, it seems, to supplement his pension after being ripped off by his accountant. It was quite a coup for the Manchester International Festival to book him for a series of concerts in the intimate surroundings of the City's Opera House, especially since the festival is due to begin, er, next year. One in the eye for the Scouse capital of kulchur, methinks.
I was there for one of these concerts, with 'er indoors, who has always been a big Laughing Len fan, courtesy of The Guardian. They advertised a free prize draw, and, extraordinarily, I won- so, two prime £75 tickets on row D were mine.
We went with a friend, Rachel, who was going for the second time. She is a stalwart of the Len discussion forums, and we met up with some of her correspondents at the Deansgate pub beforehand where I learned that tickets were going for £400 on ebay. What a lovely bunch the Cohenites are - a man in a pinstripe suit bought me a drink before scurrying off to the venue, and afterwards, we had a great chat with some fans before they got their bus home.
The concert itself was fabulous, and I won't go into the detail here - you can read very good accounts at the Leonard Cohen files and at the Guardian. I was hugely impressed at the professionalism and intensity of the presentation. Despite the rather snide reference in the Guardian review, I thought Dino Soldo's energy and humour added a great deal to the band sound. The youngest people on stage were the sublime (Len's word) Webb Sisters, who judged their contribution perfectly. They were really impressive, especially when they took over the very moving song If It Be Your Will. A really brilliant multi-instrumentalist band, and some very sensitive singing made this as good a show as it gets- one of the most memorable nights I've experienced in my concert-going career.

Elizium

2008-07-17T10:14:00.005+01:00

Playing tunefully away on the right is music by Pantagruel, whose album is available from the estimable Magnatune. They are appearing on simpering Sean Rafferty's In Tune tonight on Radio 3. I'd love to see them perform.
Update: I've taken the link down, because I got fed up with the same tune starting up every time I visited the blog. But it's still available on Magnatune.

Wigfall windfall

2008-07-17T09:55:00.005+01:00

I haven't read Clare Wigfall's short stories, but with a bio like this, she just had to become a writer, didn't she?:
"Wigfall was born in London, but spent the first years of her childhood under the liberal sway of late 1970s California. She returned to England for most of her schooling, but her vital early impressions of travel are reflected in the places she has considered home and put pen to paper - from Morocco to Norwich to Prague. She now lives in Berlin."

It's Woody's birthday

2008-07-14T21:00:00.002+01:00

Woody Guthrie was born today, and I suppose it's kind of appropriate that he shares his birthday with Bastille day.

Pig in Boots

2008-06-12T08:37:00.003+01:00

As a vegetarian, I can enjoy this with unalloyed pleasure. If you are a carnivore - how can you eat this?

The Meaning of Recognition

2008-06-07T12:00:00.004+01:00

If you go, and you should, regularly, to the Clive James website, you'll now find, in the links on the Cultural Amnesia page, a link to my review. I'm chuffed at that, and so I bring you, by commodious vicus of recirculation back to Topsyturvydom.

Singing in the Baths

2008-06-07T07:22:00.004+01:00

To Victoria Baths, star of BBC's Restoration programme, and also star, I now know, of Life on Mars, for which it provided some atmospheric locations. Our object was to see and hear the Clerks, best known for their performances of medieval and renaissance polyphony - so why are we at the baths? Because, dear reader, in an innovative and imaginative step, the Clerks are performing a new programme in some unusual places, and the acoustic of the empty pool is ideal. The ambience is ideal too, and more of that anon.
First, we had a tour of the building, which is essentially still derelict, even some years after the votes of viewers made it the winner in Restoration. We were told about the various difficulties that the council, who own the building had had with the people they contracted to work on the building, and the various plans that had been proposed and rejected. It seems though, that there is little chance that the baths, with its three pools (First Class Men's, Second Class Men's...and Ladies) will be restored to the condition it was at its opening in 1903, but the aim is to have at least one of the pools operating again. We saw all the pools, heard tales of famous swimmers, and of the local people for whom the baths was an important resource in the days before washing machines; we inspected the tanks and the chimney, and nodded sagely as we were told about the filtering process; but mostly we admired the scale and grandeur of the place, redolent of the civic optimism of the time.
The Clerks were arrayed in the main pool, and we watched from the dusty seats in the gallery above. The programme is an unusual one. It's called In Memoria, and, whilst part of it is familiar territory for them, one piece is a new commission, and the whole is performed as a single piece, interwoven with a recorded collage of sounds and voices, mainly children's, speaking about the topic of death. That might sound unbearably pretentious, but it worked brilliantly. The programme features ancient chant from the Mass of the Dead, motets by Josquin Desprez, Guillaume Dufay and Jean Ockeghem and a new work by composer and sound artist Antony Pitts. Visually, the sight of the six black-clad Clerks gathered in the pool was arresting, and as they sung, their voices rose up through the building to the glass roof, where the evening sun shone through the cracked and broken panes. It seemed somehow appropriate to be listening to these laments in this noble but fractured building, in the dust and the peeling paintwork.
The Clerks are to be commended for going way beyond the normal confines of early music, to produce an intense and vibrant experience.

On this day...

2008-05-16T18:17:00.003+01:00

Encyclopedia Britannica has made all of its content available to bloggers and other "web publishers". Which is nice. It means I can link to their "On the Day" feature, which today is about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. There was a certain resonance in this, as nestling in my inbox today was the latest "Stop the Boycott" bulletin. When academic freedom is attacked in the way that some members of the UCU propose, it is salutary to heed the warnings of history.
Update:
So, rather predictably, UCU have decided to keep the boycott as a live possibility, without even having a debate. How marvellously democratic.

Make this man the DG!

2008-05-12T21:25:00.003+01:00

How many millions of words, what seas of verbiage, what torrents of tosh have been expended on the problem of public service broadcasting? And to what end? Into the debate steps Stephen Fry, and in a speech of forty minutes absolutely nails the problem. He was invited to make a contribution to the current inquiry into public service broadcasting. And this is some contribution. I defy you not to be impressed with this serious, but witty and incisive analysis. No fancy graphics, no sound or video clips, just that highly intelligent talking head. Go on - get a cup of coffee, and watch- and if you want a further incentive, you get to see Kirsty Wark telling people where the fire exits are.

Procrastination

2008-04-12T10:14:00.002+01:00

This is a fabulous little film. And most of us will recognise most of these techniques...

Thanks to Mister Roy for the tip.