Cultural Cringe

The Internet Bound

2009-10-31T03:12:00.011-07:00

So I just got a new phone . . . not just any phone but an iPhone . . . (yes, I know they project an image of smug urban excess and encourage a certain kind of tosserish discourse) but this is not to dismiss the fact that they are actually, really, properly, amazing. In fact, the phone is the least functional aspect of this device which operates not just as a phone but a pocket computer, a torch, a handy spirit level, a game console, a compass, an interactive map, a GPS, and most interestingly of all to me, a pocket e-reader . . .
I now have the complete works of Shakespeare and Aristotle on my phone (and in a Luddite sort of way I can't believe I just wrote that), not to mention a bookshelf of classics from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens. Several feet of books shrunk to a device the size of a cigarette packet. I have previously blogged about how I was unconvinced by the Kindles and the Sony eReaders - these bulky, strange almost analogue hybrids - which don't make reading a pleasure and might be useful to editors and lawyers but have little functionality to offer in terms of the novel. The iPhone however, provides something genuinely different not just in the touchscreen format but in the App Store and the way in which content for the phone is delivered and controlled.
The Apps are essentially remixed versions of poplar software (productivity, games, utilities etc) or Internet content (Flixter, Facebook etc) or ebooks. With the ebooks the reading experience is surprisingly good. The screen is bright and crucially colour, the text is readable and bookmarkable and in the case of Andrew Kaz and Phill Ryu's 'Classics' the pages even turn in an with an old school shimmy of the page. Most impressive in terms of design is the McSweeney's magazine App - designed by the very cool Russell Quinn. The content is the usual McSweeney's mix of interesting journalism - David Orr's Dispatches from India is a fascinating piece of travel writing - to the more whimsical and annoying sophomore pieces - 'Nipple Synonyms' anyone? This is a subscription model - £3.50 for 6 months worth of content which updates itself automatically.
What is strikingly obvious to me is that the App model makes an interesting case for the subscription model of delivering content. The iPhone platform makes the Internet suddenly look messy - too much clutter, too many links, too much advertising in between you and the content you want. The iPhone model strips the Internet back and boxes it into individual software packages some of which are free, most of which you pay some modest premium for. If Apple follows this model forward into its rumored new 'tablet' I can see a case for paying a subscription for a Guardian App or a Times App and perhaps even, downloading Wolf Hall (hello that hardback is just too bloody big . . .) for my commute to work. There is something attractive about being able to have content without all the hyper links (which I believe just makes us hyper anyway) and in a portable format which allows for focus on the individual article or document.
Maybe it's just the shock of the new, but as the ipod made the case for digital music, the iPhone is making a much stronger, louder case for digital books than has ever been made before. Interesting times for writers and publishers . . .

We would rather be ruined than changed
~W.H. Auden

Beat on the street

2009-04-08T02:57:00.008-07:00

Here, some more language from the street...

Proper blog, sometime . . .

Happy Summer

Snail Mail

2009-03-13T14:57:00.002-07:00

Since email has led to the decline of snail mail there have been many mourners of the old fashioned letter and envelope approach to contacting friends and lovers. None more charming than postletters.org which encourages us to 'buy a second hand book and tear out page at a time and send to the same person or to lots of different people'. Whimsical, maybe, but I do wonder, with the relentless march of technological progress, what has been lost - handwriting, composition, stamps, patience, a sense of anticipation at the sound of the postman, the pleasure of an unexpected love letter...

I have some old letters of my grandmas which are precious for the documentary evidence they present on her life. Archivists of the future will have to mine datastreams and hard drives to find contemporary correspondences, if they survive at all. And we would be culturally poorer without the documentary evidence of great correspondences - like Woolf and Sackville West, or Kingsley Amis and Phillip Larkin, or the letters of the Mitfords, or Ted Hughes or Rilke etc.

So I will make it my resolution to write a letter to a friend this weekend. Now I've just got to find somewhere to buy a stamp . . .

Publish and be damned

2009-03-07T08:34:00.007-08:00

So the subject on my mind this week which can't somehow be turned into fiction is the Julie Myerson debacle. I have met this strange woman on several occasions, each time she seemed more preening and self-congratulatory than the last. In Spring '08 she gave a reading at the Cambridge WordFest where she spoke about her problems with her teenage son and how it was the subject of her new book. At the time I took a pretty dim view of this, thinking that as a writer she lacked a clear sense of boundaries between her work as a writer and her parental responsibilities. Whatever the wrongs of her her son's behaviour he was still a teenager and entitled to his privacy.

Now the book is on the threshold of publication - rushed forward by Bloomsbury to capitalise on the public interest - I feel even more strongly that we are witnessing, not the bold public account of her private hurts, but the the very public humiliation of a narcissistic London lit-chick who has become rather too used to notions of her own grandeur and forgotten that along with authorial power comes a whole heap of authorial responsibilities.

She begs us not to judge her until we've read the book. Well this extract was enough for me. The strategic device of the collusive 'you' - assuming the reader's complete agreement with her worldview - is annoying enough, but the especially noxious part is the description of rushing the pregnant teenager to an abortion clinic. What comes across most strongly is her obsessive need for control. Not just of us her readers - in the use of second person - but of her children and of her self image. As much as she might like to blame skunk for her son's behaviour (she is lucky it wasn't smack or crack) what is evident, even in this short extract, is that her son is desperately angry with her. If I were her son, I would be too. She has written about him for years and in doing so objectified him, lionised him, fictionalised him, until he is no longer the person that he really is, rather a simulation of the real thing. (I think Henry James is especially instructive on this kind of subject.) And when he begins to have fairly normal behavioural issues trying to separate his identity from his parents and indulging in brattish behaviour it is a shock that this precious middle class mum can't handle. Who knew? This whole situation actually reveals much more about Ms Myerson's personality than it does about the dangers of drugs and teenage boys.

I realise I am only getting excised by this because I had some experience of this myself with parents who treated their children as adjuncts to their very public project of getting the world to turn to God. When it became clear that I had an identity and ideas of my own that did not fit into their worldview, it was hard for them to accept. And years of wrangling and fighting and unpleasantness ensued. There is a whole long book in this - but out of respect for myself and my siblings - I don't see that it's appropriate to write about it, at least not yet. And certainly it would make a better piece of fiction than a 'poor me' sob story.

Publish and be damned? When the subject is your own son, that damnation will be, trust me, pretty long and horrible. I just hope she's prepared for it.

Pillow for a Pound

2009-02-01T03:19:00.004-08:00

So there I am in Poundland . . . the new credit crunch star on the High Street and one which, if you live near Wood Green, is an unavoidable stop on the monthly schelp to stock up on household goods like drain cleaner and bleach. Pound Land. What a name for the new world in which we find ourselves. A land of round pounds where everything is so cheap it's almost free! And the kind of place which has none of the sense of discovery you might get in a Turkish 99p/c store where the cheap tackiness is also surrounded by the plain weird - Neon Virgin Marys anyone?

And so I'm in there, feeling depressed by the green and yellow branding and the cheap signs and the dirt and trampled goods on the floor and the general sense of the cheapness of our new and shiny lives in 2009 when I come across a section selling pillows. Not just any pillows mind you, these are only a pound! One whole round pound! So cheap it's almost free! And in return I will get a selection of what appear to be the lightest foam offcuts encased in the kind of nylon that gives static shock. What a bargain. . . except . . . a pillow is, surely, a thing of comfort, a resting place for a weary head, support for your neck while reading, a palliative for backache. This pillow is more likely to cause backache, or leave the pressure points so unsupported you wake up with a red ear or a crushed cheek.

So it may be cheap but if it is not comfortable then why spend even a pound on it, if it doesn't work?

Montaigne said somewhere that 'ignorance makes the softest pillow', which perhaps might be the only way to turn these cheap goods to our service. If we pretend that somehow all this excess of production, however cheap, isn't really made in third world sweatshops at the expense of the planet, it might be possible to turn a few wedges of foam into a nest of goose down. But then maybe we can't afford much else. The £200 pillow that might have gone on the credit card seems suddenly like a genuinely pointless excess when you might lose your job tomorrow.This what it must have felt like in Japan through their decade of deflation, or maybe just for everyone who shops in Poundland on a cold Saturday afternoon: ain't nothin going on but the rent.

Crash!

2008-10-12T11:52:00.007-07:00

My favourite website - Pictures of Walls - have included one of my photos! Unfortunately they've also called me Julie. Here's another one I spotted at St Paul's last weekend . . .

I don't know about you but I'm finding the semantics of the 'credit crunch' fascinating . . . I'm kind of addicted to the coverage too, because language seems to me to be at the heart of the problem. Fancy terms like Credit Default Swap and Collateralised Debt Obligations are invented to cover up complex trades that no one really understands as if this will hide the fact that the money they are inflating just doesn't exist. The banks, like us, have in very plain old English, been living beyond their means.

Joseph Stiglitz gives a very interesting lecture on the subject available free on itunes - the fraudulent action of the market is so glaringly obvious in his analysis it's really frightening to think that no one listened to him before, even though they gave him the Nobel . . . Hello? World? Is anyone out there paying attention?

When I was 21 in 1992 I graduated into a recession. There were very few graduate jobs, especially in Birmingham, and most of the people I knew took a few years to get on their feet and off to good start with plenty of poorly paid part-time jobs until the economy picked up again in 1995 or so. It was pretty grim, except that there's nothing like a good recession to encourage creativity. I certainly wrote a lot then. If being able to have what we want when we want it is only contingent on us having a credit card, then finding more thoughtful ways to entertain ourselves can only be a good thing . . .

Pirates Ahoy!

2008-10-04T03:46:00.007-07:00

I suppose it had to happen eventually, but I have just discovered, thanks to a vigilant fan, that my first novel Massive is now available to download from the Internet . . .

My first response is actually to be flattered that someone has bothered to scan the whole thing in and make it available in separate double-page spreads - I know from standing over a hot and dysfunctional department photocopier how long this actually takes. And the 'crap capitalist' in me is quite glad to save kids, who have to read my book at school or write a projects on it, seven bucks. Seven bucks, of which I would probably only see a few cents, and with the pound/US peso (sorry, dollar) exchange rate the way it is, would only work out at 1p a copy or something. And the karmic solider in me thinks well, it's payback time for all that downloading I did years ago, ahem.

For the publishing companies & music companies there is of course something innately worrying about this kind of cultural theft, a little problem called Lost Revenue. How will the artist get paid? they squawk, invoking an argument that they exist solely at the benefit of the artist, as the only legitimate conduit to audience. This kind of propaganda allows them to engage in acts of petty revenge against downloading teenagers (and by proxy their parents); or more recenly, lobby parliament to get the ISP's to send out threatening letters to downloading customers; children are even having lessons at school about the difference between legal and illegal downloading . . . All in the name of 'protecting the artist' as if it were some kind of ethical imperative.

Which takes me back to my ambivalent feelings about being pirated. Trying to get my novel taken down off Photobucket is proving to be a long and time consuming process of proving to them that I'm me, and that I actually did write the book (what do they want? Photos of me at my desk? Writing is not exactly action sport . . .) And although I obviously want to be renumerated for what I do, I'm aware of having money skimmed off the potential profit of my projects at every step in the publishing process from the percentage I pay my agent to the percentages I get in return for foreign rights sales. And of the power exerted by Marketing in the purchase and promotion of new books.

Frankly, I'm glad to know that someone was bothered enough share my work with others - bit like lending a book - than get too het up about it. (I told you I was a crap capitalist.) And I hardly think there will be a sudden flurry of bootlegged copies the back streets of Bangkok based on a bit of crap scanning. So it's a small crime against my intellectual property rights, and a stiff little finger to Big Corp (or maybe in this case, just High School). I think I can live with that.

No Dogs OK

2008-02-04T14:59:00.000-08:00

I've been taking some pictures of random graffiti/messages around London for my own amusement for some time now. I finally got them all together on one computer and I thought you might like to some selected the highlights . . .

New proper blog post coming soon . . .

People Called Julia Bell

2007-08-06T12:03:00.000-07:00

At the moment I seem to be averaging one post every two months. This seems like an heroically lazy speed to blog, in our age of up-to-the-moment forty posts a day bloggers. Anyway I am back from away and am enjoying the constant rainshine of an English Summer - although it seems to have sorted itself out a bit this week.

Anyway, the purpose of my new post is . . . Facebook.

I know I know everyone's talking about it (check this rant on craigslist which made me laugh). But it's a curious social experience. In the past two weeks I've been in contact with more old friends than I would have been in months and there's a comforting intimacy about suddenly knowing their status and seeing photos of their babies which in quite a few cases is more information than I have known about them for years. And I like the social anarchy of oops there's my long-lost lover and my sketchy family and my boss all on the same page. It's funny.

No, my problem with Facebook is waaaaay freakier than that . . . I have discovered that there is a group on Facebook called 'people called Julia Bell' . . .

And so my Facebook experience is clouded with all sorts of weird existential questions like Will the real Julia Bell please stand up? Who is Julia Bell? Since when has everyone been called Julia Bell?

I'm Julia Bell. I bought the domain name.

I hope to god none of them want to be writers. I knew I should have used my middle name. At least there aren't any Hephzibah Bell's on Facebook, I was vain enough to check. In fact, I'm vain enough to care, or perhaps it's the writer in me that can see the potential dangers of the doppelgänger which spookily translates as 'doublewalker' . . .

I should get over myself, I know, at least my name's not John Smith, so what if there are lots of Julia Bell's? (Although I can't get Bjork's Army of Me out of my head) But then, on the tube on the way home a stranger accosted me with 'Don't I know you? Aren't you Anna from Finsbury Park?' And she wouldn't shut up about it like I was lying about who I was. . .

So Facebook, thank you for putting me in touch with my long lost friends, but I'm going back to the trashy comfort of MySpace. At least I knew who I was over there.

Golly Gosh it's Gotham!

2007-05-12T18:32:00.000-07:00

So, I've been to NYC for a 3 night 4 day whirlwind visit. And I mean whirlwind. After the mellow streets of San Francisco, NYC was like being back in an even more frenetic version of London. The pace on the streets is chaotic, and full of traffic and people and building (like London) with some new 'scraper going up on nearly every block. It was hard not to be swept up in it. I walked the length of 8th, 7th & 5th Aves for about 50 blocks, just letting the tide of humanity carry me along. As well as being 'just like the movies', it was for me, who grew up reading her brother's comic books, just like Gotham. A surreal cartoon world of monstrously tall buildings designed to make the humans on the street feel like barnacles. I'm not ashamed to say for the first 24 hours I was properly awed.

Also, I was lucky enough to get a room at the Chelsea Hotel which meant I arrived in Manhattan and unexpectedly and delightfully felt right at home. The Chelsea is famous for being, as they say on their soap, 'a rest stop for rare individuals' . . . (visit the links for context . . .) At the desk I met Stanley Bard who in spite of giving me a stern look when I nervously called him 'dude' (oh the shame, it's a bad word I picked up in California), he gave me a great room with a view and took a kind of discreet but paternalistic interest in my welfare. I think I will certainly be going back.
Added to that, I was fortunate to meet up with Ed and Debbie who live at the hotel, and are the authors of a blog about the hotel. They took me for a huge plate of seafood next door at El Quijote, which out-Spains the most Spanish restaurant I have ever been to, right down to waiters in bullfighting jackets, complete with gold epaulets, and used to be the dining room of the Chelsea. As well as keeping the blog, Ed Hamilton writes stories and has authored a book about the hotel and its residents which comes out in September. As well as being charming hosts, they seemed like an example of the eclectic, artistic people that the Hotel attracts. And I owe them a big thank you for making me feel so at home.

Out on the street after midnight is another good way to meet a city and I was outside the hotel watching the world go by at about 12.30 am Thursday when I met Storme DeLarverie who is now a spry 86 years old and told me she had lived at the hotel for the past 36 years. She was off out to meet a friend, still keeping nocturnal habits. Like she said 'it's better than letting all them aches and pains get to you and giving up'. As we watched the world go by some random man came barreling over to us and offered us some Colombian marching powder . . . Needless to say we were both rendered speechless . . . oh hahaha . . . and I was completely made up to meet a true Chelsea legend in the flesh. I even got a kiss . . .

Of course there is so much more to write, than I have room for here. Including talking comic book movies with the very excellent Craig Anderson (Editor at Marvel) who happened to be at the hotel visiting a friend. The awful basement 'celebrity' club which has a "non-residents" policy but which trades on it's association with the hotel. (The basement club has nothing to do with the Hotel.) I.e. the real residents of the hotel are too real/old/scuzzy/weird/poor to make good eye candy. So stars like Lindsay Lohan & Sienna Miller & Josh Hartnett go there to drink and be cool by association, as long as they don't have to actually meet any real artists. The truth is, and I think it's probably Stanley Bard's genius for spotting it, genuine creativity doesn't look much like celebrity gloss. Like Storme and Ed both said to me separately: 'Andy (Warhol) would have gone into a place like that with people from the street'. My experience of the Hotel was that it was the complete antithesis of celebrity culture - a place that stalwartly defends the right to be bohemian, as defined by being something of a misfit, someone who is more obsessed with creating rather than self-mythologizing and who is most definitely un-clubable . . .
Oh, and then there was a delightful lunch with my US editor and a meeting at the Trailer Park bar with a lovely friend who lives in NY and I could almost have been at home. Like it says on all the t-shirts I heart NY . . .

Lala Land

2007-04-30T14:51:00.000-07:00

So I haven't blogged for ages because . . . I've been to LA . . . and I've been writing . . . and I have moved from the San Francisco neighborhoods to Nob Hill . . . which has a whole different atmosphere and fantastic views of GG Bridge . . . will upload some photos later.

But LA...

Well I don't know how well you can get the measure of a place in three days (daze) but our generous and gorgeous hosts took us to various drinking spots up and down Sunset and Santa Monica Blv as well as to the LA Times Book Fair at UCLA. And we had FUN just like in the Sheryl Crow song. I saw the Hollywood sign, the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, The Scientology Celebrity Centre (really), Rodeo Drive, Fox Studios, The Elliott Smith wall (see pic) and some very cool shops in Silverlake, a celebrity: Patrick Dempsey, and cars cars cars cars. The pollution is the weirdest thing. London is dirty and polluted too, but it's cooler and windier, so the pollution doesn't hang in the air so much, except on some really toxic summer days. In the LA heat, the smog is like a kind of apocalyptic miasma, that as well as spoiling the view makes the city seem even more of a dream space. The other really obvious thing is the lack of people on the sidewalks. Although pavement eating is all the LA thing, it seems you sit outside a restaurant to admire, not the view of promenading strangers, but the constant stream of traffic...
The LA Times Book fair was at the very beautiful UCLA campus, a whole town of little white tents with books and authors and publishers. Like the London Book fair, except this was for the punters not the industry and you could buy books direct from the publishers at a discount...

Am off to NYC next week and am staying at the infamous Chelsea Hotel . . . I am hella stoked as the kids say round here. As well as looking forward to catching up with the authors of the Hotel Chelsea blog.

Cultural Cringe

2007-04-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to clear something up for a while on this blog - I realize I stole my title from a concept in "Post Colonial" studies: the term 'cultural cringe' refers to a common internalized cringe noted by Antipodeans the Irish and the Canadians (I would add the Welsh to that list too), towards their own culture in the face of a perceived foreign cultural superiority. Suddenly back home seems rough and embarrassing, the rest of the world shiny and sophisticated . . .

I am of course am oversimplifying for the sake of illustration, for much more info on the subject go, of course, to wikipedia . . .

Traveling inevitably brings this cringe to the forefront too. Not that I am in anyway ashamed of the dirty, boozy, rude, xenophobic, residents of drear old UK, or that I might think CA is a sunshine paradise full of palm trees and movie stars. No, dear reader, it's more about an alienation from myself . . . In a world that wants us (women) to be glossy celebrity-style success freaks with brains that we left outside the shop, I certainly don't measure up, and cringe about it and then get angry that I even care . . . so there you go . . . all you cultural cringers I feel your pain.

Maybe I haven't been quite vocal enough about this yet, so here goes with a mixture of things which have made me cringe while I have been out here . . .

300: OMG this film is so gay. Gay gay gay gay gay. It couldn't have been any gayer if it had pink Easter bunny transsexuals running across the screen. For two hours the blood spurts like spunk and men in leather thongs fetishize death and each other's bodies and chop off limbs with, well, gay abandon . . . oh boy. It looks very pretty if you like films with the aesthetics computer games. But it annoyed me with its not very subtle messages about fighting evil (the Persians - who knew?) and honour and a good death and all that macho warmongering crap designed to recruit kids into the army, not to mention the lame homoeroticism. The film really only works (just) for the time that you're in the cinema, afterwards it just leaves a nasty taste in your mouth and the sense that you've been spent two hours in the naughty cinema watching a cheap porno . . . just say no, your imagination will thank you for it.

Trader Joes: why don't we have supermarkets like this at home? Why?

This blog: well it seems as if I've been getting some nice feedback on this blog thank you. I was beginning to wonder who, if anyone, was reading this. I have a little addiction to my stat counter which tells me all sorts of information about who has been on my site. Yes you - I know who you are and where you live . . . anyway, curiously I've been getting a lot of traffic from men (I'm making a wild generalization here) who search on the term 'bullwhipped women' . . . you will find both these words in this blog, though not together . . . (well, they will be now let's see how much that increases traffic. . .) I hope whoever you are, that you find whatever you so desperately need to get you off . . . but . . . don't you have any imagination? Quite a large % of the women in those pictures/movies have drug habits/history of emotional sexual abuse/have been trafficked/all of the above . . . just FYI . . . nothing to see here, move along now, please . . .

Word on the Street

2007-04-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

One of the other cool things about being in this infinitely cool city is the amount of stuff written on the streets - graffiti, messages, statements, random scribbles as well as lots of murals and art. I have noticed that Americans like to live out loud in a way that is totally alien to the English - on any given day on any given journey to the shop/laundry/bar/muni I am likely to be talked at by random strangers about the weather, next doors bad parking, the dogshit on the street, God, the cool scarf I'm wearing (lady, thank you for that one it made my day . . .), my accent, you get the picture . . .
This also, perhaps, explains all the language on the streets: all these random messages and scribbles and pictures visualize the chatter of a culture that likes to think out loud. I'm sure lots of visual art types might have interesting theories about context and temporality, but I am struck by how much there is to read on the streets of SF. Some further examples below.

People who like this kind of stuff can also find more on the fantastic Pictures of Walls website which is a gallery of pictures of walls with stuff written on them ranging from the obscure to the pertinently genius, and which proves I think that the British are the best in the world at creative swearing. For more SF pictures of walls go here.

Starving Artists

2007-04-04T13:43:00.000-07:00

So I've been to Napa for a wine tour and Calistoga to for a spa treatment at Indian Springs. A volcanic geyser spits out 280° water which is cooled and feeds the beautiful blue pool which is still very hot, especially in 80° heat . . . The sulphurous smell is masked with plenty of eucalyptus oil and the spa treatment itself involves sitting in a concrete bath full of hot mud, which is made from a mixture of volcanic ash and hot spring water. For a beauty treatment it's as unpleasant as it is claustrophobic, and once they've covered you in mud, you literally can't move. . . I kept fighting the urge to panic, especially as I had cartoon visions of myself drowning in the gloop, going under with a few last comdey burps of air . . . It made my skin feel great afterwards, but I'm not sure I'm a convert to the beauty school of getting dirty to get clean . . . Before Sam Brannan founded the town in the 1860s the area was a Wapoo Indian territory, housing sweatlodges and three villages and, according to the blurb I read, used to be known as the 'Oven Place'. I couldn't help think about this, wandering around the cute town which is nestled at the end of Napa valley between plenty of picturesque forested hills, and I came over a bit Johnny Cash and got faintly disturbed by how near the decimation of the Native American tribes is to present history. 8,000 years of living on the land and less than a 100 to wipe them out and corral them into reservations . . .

Anyway, Calistoga seems like a cool place to live if you're a starving artist . . . you get supported by your local Calmart . . . see the sign in the picture . . . you can call the number for FUN . . . makes a change from an Arts Council applications I suppose. And I can't imagine Tescos throwing a party for a starving anyone.

This experience was followed by a boozy tour of the Napa valley wineries. From a really good one - Roche - to a really small mad one - Prager who make lovely port, but who have a tasting room with about $5,000 in dollar bills pinned to the walls of their little tasting shack - to the super corporate at Niebaum-Coppola winery which is $25 (!) for the tour which includes an exhibit of movie memerobilia which his oscar statuettes and a huge desk as seen in the Godfather movies . . . The most amusing part of the tours is the discourse of the wine tasting - one of the Cask Cabernet's we tried at Neibaum-Coppola was described as having 'an arresting perfume of wild raspberries, red cherries and cola . . . with modest tannin frames, long luscious flavors of cherry, cassis, coaco and French vanilla' sounds delicious, but in reality it smelled like old socks and had an aftertaste not unlike motor oil. I mean, I like nice wine, and I can appreciate the chemistry and botany involved in creating a good bottle, but the descriptions are so subjective as to be meaningless and hilarious all at the same time.

This weeks highlights have been somewhat thin on the ground after that, not that I mind. I've been working (really) and keeping a low-ish profile. The week will be capped by a live gig - The Gossip - yeay - and doing Easter mimosas and egg painting with my fabulous sister. Also tomorrow my first chance to visit the randomness at 16th & Mission which is an open air poetry/spoken word thing which just 'happens' at about 10pm by the BART station. I think the main audience consists of local crack dealers and crazies and a few hipster kids. I will report back...

War Poetry

2007-03-28T20:57:00.000-07:00

So I went to Cafe Royale on Post and Leavenworth last night to hear Carol Watts and Lesley Scalapino reading. An interesting event which felt like a lesson in female beat poetry. For me the least convincing part was when Scalapino read about the Iraq war, it was maybe appropriate to the form in the sense that it was born out of protest, but I wondered what the hobo I met in Golden Gate Park who lost an eye in Iraq would make of it . . . Nice intellectual poetry evening is a world away from the dark reality of sleeping in the park . . . But then again, it is the backdrop to all the newscasts here: Iraq, Iraq, Iraq . . . so maybe it was just the intervention of a subject which seems to be so utterly devoid of poetry that made me wince.

On the way home I encountered a doppelganger . . . as you can see I have been living a torrid and secret other life here in SF . . . who knew?

I have also encountered the dot com phenomenon with my very own eyes. No one goes to coffee shops in SF to chill with their homies anymore. They all sit in an intense kind of library silence, tweaked out on coffee using up the free wi fi for the price of a latte. Very amusing. I have to whisper my order in the place round the corner or risk getting dirty looks for interrupting the empire building.

But I also found this very cool website which will take you to places you never would have found otherwise and will waste hours of your life. Peace, out. (as they say round here).

Best In Show

2007-03-25T19:46:00.000-07:00

So I haven't posted for, like, ages, I know. But I have more good excuses, I've been promoting Dirty Work, writing a new book and traveling and settling in to San Francisco where I am right now until June . . . There's so much energy and creativity here - art, poetry, literature, performance art, burlesque, music, random happenings . . . everyone is doing something fun. So it's kind of sad to read, from a city where there are bookstores on every corner, about the state of the UK book trade - the Borders pull-out, Waterstone's closures and the threat to Gay's the Word: take your pick . . . Perhaps, in an ideal world where London rents aren't controlled by Big Bland Corp plc this might mean a resurgence of the independent bookshops . . . I live in hope.

Meanwhile, back in SF, I indulged my secret passion on Thursday with a trip to the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show. . . Chelsea it wasn't . . . but here is my favourite from the array of show gardens. I thought it might look especially fetching (sic) redone in my Tottenham front garden . . .

I have promised to report on my trip so upcoming this week will be another visit to the fabulous Pirate Shop at 826 Valencia, Birkbeck's own Carol Watts reading from her chapbook at Cafe Royale on Tuesday, Molly Crabapple doing sketchy burlesque on Saturday, a visit to a hot springs and an installation of the UK's own itinerant poetry librarian with her library of 'lost and forgotten' poetry at the Marsh Theatre Bar on Friday. Did I say I came here to write? Damn. Maybe if I forget to sleep there will be enough hours in the day . . .

Overdue Update

2007-01-19T07:33:00.000-08:00

Erm, yes, I disappeared off over Christmas & New Year . . . I know I know . . . I'm like a fickle lover with this blog. But then I always was an intermittent diary keeper.

Anyway, since the last rant, er, sorry, post, Christmas has been and gone in a tsunami of shopping (I realise the insensitivity of this hyperbole, but, really, Oxford St on Boxing Day was terrifying. . .); and New Year and my Birthday and my new novel (Dirty Work) has just been published. That's just one too many special occasions in a row for my liking and am glad they're all over.

I went to Borders in Brent Cross (Brent Cross: a new and terrible discovery! What a monstrosity! Scenic views of the M25 while you do your shopping in a claustrophobic little concrete bunker) and there was a pile of my new book, which was reassuring and then immediately disturbing - what if no one's bought a copy yet? etc etc. And then the lack of people in the Borders at Brent Cross made me worry about the state of books in general. The tight margins in the high street and just the sheer unnecessary scale of the stuff they had for sale - CDs, DVDs, all already gone digital - I can't help but think that it won't be long before books are next. It's inevitable. What format they'll take is another matter. I heard a rumour that tickets to the Hay Festival this year will come with a free Sony Reader . . . to the tune of 65,000 of them... Someone is clearly keen to force the change upon us . . .

Did I mention I'm on sabbatical. Oh joy. I'm off to the US at the beginning of March for 3 months so I'll try and keep blogging from over there. In the meanwhile I'll be working on my new book called Wise Up and a sequel to Dirty Work... downloadable to your inovelreader sometime in the near future.

Raunch Off

2006-12-10T12:20:00.000-08:00

Hey, yeah, right, pole dancing is such a breeze and so good for your health! And now you can even go to the gym to learn how to do it, sanitised, removed from the meat rack it’s a safe fun way to get fit! You can even buy kits on Tesco’s website complete with a garter to stuff all that money you’ll be earning from your routines…

Erm, since when has learning the moves to display your body for money been a sport? I’ve not noticed anyone down the pool recently swimming with a garter on. Of course top athletes are hugely aesthetically pleasing, but wrapping your body around a stainless steel pole - aping the moves of women who have made poorer life choices than you - is not cool, or aesthetically pleasing it’s just another sad detail in the current litany of details that make up our sad post-feminist world.

The truth is that this ‘raunch’ culture doesn’t really liberate women; it just puts them even more firmly on their knees. As I write police had discovered another body in Suffolk, one more in a series of prostitute murders that are likely to be linked. And in the Observer today a horrific report about a serial killer in Canada who murdered over 30 women (prostitutes and drug addicts) and fed them to his pigs . . . Not to mention Ciudad Juarez, Mexico where over 300 young women have ‘disappeared’ to be found dead and tortured and stuffed in dustbins a few weeks later.

What do women really have to gain from pole dancing classes? A novel way to lose weight? In the face of the continuing (and rising) culture of violence against women, gymtonic pole dancing classes seem like an ignorant and me-centred activity which prove that western women are encouraged to be so self-obsessed they couldn’t tell the truth from a pair of Manolo’s if they tried. When, I wonder will women wake up to all this? When we are all required to give pole dances in order for our prospective husbands to pick us out of a line up? The truth is that sex has become just another commodity, something which men can buy if not from us then from women who will, at will. If you’re a gangster and you want to make money you have three clear choices – guns, drugs and girls. By the law of supply and demand what men want in our increasingly fucked-up planet is to get high get laid and to kill each other. (And I say men because the market for guns and girls is 99.9% male – drugs, well that’s a different issue).

Ariana Huffington suggests that it’s fear that keeps us from speaking out. Feminism is such a dirty word that girls, always so scared of being wrong, or uncool, have eschewed it at their peril. Instead of investing in their stake in the world, women have been encouraged to invest wholesale in themselves. Which is just another way of saying that women have been encouraged to buy their way to personal nirvana, rather than to think about their place in the world and the things that they can do to change it. And what the girls are buying is an interesting indictment of the lie that they are buying into – clothes, beauty products, accessories – all of which turn us into a personal product, our own ‘brand’, or put it another way, eye candy for the boys.

In reality women are scared, and scarred by insecurity. Eating disorders are endemic – we even have a living skeleton (Victoria Beckham) as a style icon – in order to succeed women generally have to be bitches – always immaculate, dismissive of other women, angry and serially married to men who just get sick of trying to compete. Post feminism has created an interesting kind of monster in these girls, who think that going to pole dancing classes is at best harmless fun, at worst, makes them better in the bedroom. What it really does it frame them within the discourse of pornography, a discourse which infantilizes all of us, men especially, because they can never escape the slack jawed physiological response to certain visual stimuli.

Sorry about the MLK-style ranting, but this whole issue really pisses me off. Where are the women prepared to stand up against this shit? Ariel Levy’s book Female Chauvinist Pigs is a fantastic start, but it’s short and light and on its own. Never has the world needed a coherent women’s movement more and never has that possibility seemed to be more of a distant dream.

Bookmark 1 - The Observations

2006-12-04T03:21:00.000-08:00

Well congratulations to Jane Harris for writing a complete barnstormer of a novel - The Observations - she deserves to win a prize for this novel - much better than the David Mitchell book which is on the shortlist for the Costa Coffee prize... At least when it was call the Whitbread Prize it made me think of frothing beer and cosy pubs. Weak coffee and beige styling and baby takeaway cups doesn't really conjure up the right tone of seriousness... (and I know I said I was happy to swim along with the literary tycoons, but please, grant me good taste in coffee...) Ah well, just like everything else the prize culture is hijacked by the media as a lazy way of discussing books, and if they had any sense, nay, taste, Jane's book would be on that list and single estate San Augustin Colombian would be sponsoring the prize...

It's good for lots of reasons, but I was most impressed with the voice she created for her central character - Bessy - a young prostitute who is taken into service by a mysterious couple in an isolated Scottish farmhouse. The attention to detail Harris has put into creating an authentic voice is hugely impressive, and took her over a decade to complete. The use of Victorian dialect and slang has an uncannily genuine ring to it and it reads like a kind of Catcher in the Rye of the modern historical novel. It has none of the usual formality of say Sarah Waters or Michel Faber in The Crimson Petal and the White, who are reproducing a certain kind of Victorian idiom, Bessy is a truly original creation, full of skaz, and comedy and linguistic invention. I won't spoil the intrigue by telling you the story, suffice it to say, the plot twists and turns like a Henry James novel, keeping the reader guessing. I loved it and I hope it won't take her so long to write another.

Izlington, dahling?

2006-11-26T09:59:00.000-08:00

What is it with Islington? I don't see what's so great. Upper Street cuts the place in half, there are some pubs and restaurants, but in the black grime of a wintry Sunday afternoon there is very little aesthetic pleasure in bullying your way along the streets to stand in a mile-long queue at Borders. My inner old bag lady gets very irritated at all this overcrowding. London sometimes seems to be literally busting at the seams.
On a lighter note I bought: Helen Simpson - Four Bare Legs in a Bed, Carol Ann Duffy - Rapture, Ian McEwan's Saturday because I've been putting it off and Jane Harris The Observations which I've been looking forward to for ages. Jane Harris used to teach at UEA when I first started working there and I was hugely pleased to see her novel getting such great reviews. It looks like the perfect material for the darkening winter days. Very much looking forward to Helen Simpson too - I try to read short stories on the tube as I can usually read one or two in the journey to work & back. Although I worry about the impact on book sales of the snowstorm of free papers currently being handed out to commuters outside the tube . . .
This week promises to really busy and am away teaching in Maidenhead at the weekend - a workshop for men on how to write female characters . . . I will report back . . .

The Mischief of Being Blond and Back to Black

2006-11-16T04:53:00.000-08:00

So I've been too busy to post so here comes a big one - my cultural fortnight has included the following watercooler highlights:

A preview screening of Casino Royale, Amy Winehouse @ Koko's in Camden on Tuesday, and Penny Woolcocks movie Mischief Night. So in journo style I've given myself 300 words on each . . .

Blond is Back

Phwoar... Usually it's the girls that are up for grabs in the Bond flicks, rising out of the water, getting their tits out, playing vampy campy Mistresses. In this incarnation it's Daniel Craig's physique that rises out of the surf, and his naked body that gets bullwhipped by the evil Le Chiffre. A more realistic, grittier Bond? Well, this is just as panto as the rest of them - especially towards the silly denouement - but there is a curious kind of iconography going on with Bonds' physicality. He's harder, bigger, tougher, more of a 'blunt instrument' than Pierce Brosnan or Roger Moore and their school of smooth moves ever were. His physique is all sculpted Atlas, bulging pecs, thick shoulders, and when he punches people you know they really feel it. Every generation gets the Bond that they deserve, what I wonder, does this Bond say about us?

Back to Black

She's all arms and legs, gawky in her silly short dress, pissed but in control of it. She flails around and sings like a proper soul diva. Amy Winehouse is a fabulous contradictory, loudmouth mess with more talent in her little finger than any of the other pop glossed bitches currently in the charts. She grabs headlines because of her refusal to opt-in to the nanny rehab culture, and the 'you will walk 10,000 steps a day, eat Special K, because you're worth it' school of femininity. She made a towering figure in her heels as she rattled through her new album in front of an appreciative home crowd - cue lots of props to Mum and Dad and her band. Songs like Back to Black and Me & Mr Jones have a real old-school genius about them and she really delivers vocally. What is curious is the fuck-you fragility of her. Like Courtney Love or Janis Joplin before her, society frowns on women who want the rock and roll lifestyle to go along with the fame. It's like too masculine to turn up to do TV shows pissed out of your brains - check YouTube for pissed Amy on the Charlotte Church show - and if you do your hair a bit weird and wear too much make up it means that the gymtonic, neurotic, Daily Wail columnists have the right to criticise you - for being too fat, too thin, too pissed, too loud, and hanging out with Pete Doherty. What Amy Winehouse stands against is very clear, whether she will be allowed to stand for herself is still to be seen.

Mischief Night

This film got footnote reviews in most of the papers and was on in the cinemas for about a week - so blink and you probably missed it. In case you haven't seen them Penny Woolcock's films are genius - if you missed Tina Takes a Break and Tina Goes Shopping - watch them before you see this. It's a kind of urban fairytale set in Leeds on 'Mischief Night' and between the English & Asian communities whose territory is separated by the park. It' s an ensemble piece with about five different storylines playing out at once. The editing is deft and the humour laugh out loud - and the story cuts to the quick when we encounter Darren at the Mosque - the one-eyed cleric who is showing Jihad videos to the kids. A great example of British film making, bawdy, funny, clever and current. It's a shame that the industry doesn't promote home-grown movies like this more. It's so much better than any of the usual soupy American excuses for RomComs that clog up our cinemas like aneurysms.

9 to 5

2006-11-13T10:44:00.000-08:00

Dolly Parton rocks, or at least the Soulwax/2 Many DJs mix on my ipod at the moment which segues 9 to 5 into I Wish by Skeelo - is a genius bit of mixing. It saved my life tonight on a packed Picadilly Line. I bet Dolly didn't think about the hell of being crammed face to face with your fellow humans for a minging 45 minute crawl home.
The tube is only cool when it's actually moving. When it stops between stations I am always worried about how long we're going to be stuck there and it's worse when the train is packed to third world levels. And there's always the shadow of a bomber, although no one talks about that either.
So I closed my eyes and try to groove out to Dolly and ignore all the bodies and smells and sheer unpleasant crush and hoped we wouldn't be stuck between Arsenal and Finsbury Park for too long, and that no one would panic, and that I wouldn't need a toilet break.
And thank God I'm home and America's Next Top Model is on Living TV.

Everybody's Talking

2006-11-13T07:12:00.000-08:00

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera talks about the fact that we're all graphomaniacs - we all want to write but no one wants to read . . . Browsing through some blogs this morning while killing some Monday Morning time (Monday mornings are not my best look) I got a real sense of vertigo. So much verbiage! So much context-less rabbiting! So much graphomania!

It's taken me about a year to get to the point of adding my blog to this Babel of blabbering, partly because I thought who'd wanna read about me and partly because I wasn't sure I could deal with the commitment of regularly sharing my thoughts with the world. (I mean somedays I just don't think that much about anything...)

This democratisation of writing is a real problem for the traditional gatekeepers of knowledge - the wave will soon become a tsunami and - oh horror! - it won't be long before every half-educated ill-informed oik will have a platform for their views/ranting/disinformation/fantasies/lies . . . if you go to Lulu.com you can even upload your book in case someone might want to pay to have it printed - cue the horrified Literary writers whose livelihoods are being obliterated before their eyes.

But perhaps I'm also warming to this new climate of change. I'd rather jostle along with the postmen and ambulance drivers and literary tycoons than be in some high-brow library with the elitist bores. Their audience is shrinking by the day (a Martin Amis reading was recently cancelled due to absence of an audience). And for those who fear that this current climate will mean the death of the classics, er, no. I'll still be reading The Great Gatsby till I die.

Just Do It

2006-11-08T10:24:00.000-08:00

And I guess my faith paid off in the end, because mid-way through my week-long writing binge, joy returns...

Maybe it's the fact that the Democrats won the election - although why US politics seems more vital than our own begs all sort of interesting questions about Tony Bear's govt, but maybe that's for another post . . .

Like Nike says - Just Do It.

Why Not?

2006-11-06T01:38:00.000-08:00

All last week I've been longing to get back to my desk to work on new book. In fact I am working on two new books right now - I think it's called being ambidextrous, or promiscuous or bisexual or something . . . or maybe it's just that like everyone else on the planet I've eveloved my attention span to ADD levels - anyway, all week I've been distracted by my characters, kept configuring new scenes on the tube, writing little nuggets in my notebook, frustrated with all the college admin that has landed on my desk, but now I sit down to write, the blank page of a whole week to write stretching out in front of me and . . .
suddenly the flat is like, really dirty...
and the garden needs attention, all those perennials I should be splitting...
and there's a documentary about Marlene Dietrich on the Biography Channel...
and I must check out amazon for present ideas. . .
and that new amy winehouse album deserves another listen on LOUD
and the book is first-draftish and the story pedestrian, obscure . . .
I mean, where is the joy?
Perhaps I should try working on the other book instead - that's the point after all of being ambidextrous - you get stuck on one, move on to the other - but this morning even that option looks unappealing too. All the things I can think are Why Not to write.
Perhaps the real question is why am I so predictably perverse?
Why do I want it when I can't have it, and hate it when I can?
Who knows?
I can't be bothered to spend a fortune in therpay finding out - much cheaper to write books - the key to the conundrum I have discovered - is just to bloody do it.
And slowly, maybe in an hour or so, when the fuzz of Monday morning is gone, and the work starts to bend under the weight of concentration, joy returns.

Why?

2006-11-02T10:47:00.000-08:00

Why do so many people want to do be novelists? It's not like it's a glamorous job. Spend a lot of time on your own; have an unhealthy ability to live in/with your own imagination; lose friends because you get so anti-socially obsessed with your ideas; work like a **** for years only to be published to bad reviews, develop an uncomfortable stoop and a thwarted cast in your eye. . .

But still they keep coming – Creative Writing is the fastest growing subject in English Studies at the moment almost at the expense of more traditional practices like er, reading. On my CW MA I am inundated with applications from people who say they feel as if they were 'always' writers but accidentally ended up working at McCorporation instead. Their applications are like confessions; they ignored their vocation in the pursuit of mammon and now they are sorry and want to return to their creative selves by finally taking that year out to write that one novel that’s in all of us. On the fast track to success that is a Creative Writing MA.

Mention Creative Writing MA and there is a long queue of Real Writers (read Published Writers) waiting in line to give the idea a good kicking. The usual round of old snores always trawl out the same creaky and elitist set of arguments perhaps in a way to preserve their own mystique: writers are born not made; you can’t teach genius; the cash-strapped universities need money – cf Jenny Diski on the Guardian book blog who makes out that CW courses are little more than a rip-off (interesting to note that she still took money from Nottingham for a Fellowship); and therefore by implication, the students are all stupid by even enrolling on such courses because of course their writing’s all crap and they’ll never make it to print anyway.

Perhaps for the literary or vocational writer (and I include myself in the latter), Creative Writing courses can cause a crisis of confidence. The exiled Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic in her collection of essays on writing and reading – Thank You for not Reading (Dalkey Archive, 2001) mourns this storming of Parnassus, by the ‘novel-writing chauffeurs’ and ‘literary tycoons’ who have created an identity crisis for the vocational or literary writer.

In such a culture, where a book is just a part of a wider portfolio – the film, the DVD, the videogame, the CD – and publishers squander good money on bad, barely-experienced-life stories by celebrities and footballers – sums that to you would be life-changing that are to them small change for 888.com – it is hard for writers to find a sense of integrity in the text. In both Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code it’s the concepts that matter more than the writing. Easily digestible, transferable into other media, and lazily derivative, commercial success seems to depend on telling stories we have vaguely heard before, rather than challenging assumptions and pushing the form.

Cue a good CW course.

Writers should be celebrating their existence not loftily putting them down. The academy has become one of the few places of refuge for genuinely literary writing. As well as jobs (thank you very much, God, for mine) it provides a space in which to experiment free of the concerns of the market. There are a million other reasons why Creative Writing Courses are good news for the students who take them – self-development, improved literacy, mastery of technique, pure jouisannce, the unexpected, the sense of a collective struggle.

On the other hand, of course, wannabes and Real Writers are all horrible egoists who want their voices to sound more loudly, more proudly than everyone else in the room. While it’s possible to create a creative space where good technique can be taught there’s no legislating for personality or an openness to self investigation. Wankers will still be wankers, and bores will still be bores and the workshop will always pull people out of themselves at unexpected angles, the group experience revert them back to childhood in very interesting and revealing ways.

Teaching Creative Writing is like a cross between being a priest and a therapist and the workshop is a strange kind of confessional. In applying technique students become able to distance themselves from their stories and get a stronger sense of how to develop a technically better piece of work. Perhaps it does just come down to the study of rhetoric, the uses of effects, what David Lodge calls the ‘arts’ of fiction. Whatever, it’s been a kind of interesting journey so far.