Bad Penny Blues

My review of Cathi Unsworth’s London noir novel is now available at 3:AM.

Monkey Tennis

‘It had to be a two-word pitch,’ Steve Coogan said, ‘that created an immediate visual image.’ He’s talking about the classic Alan Partridge scene in which the TV presenter, down on his luck and living in a TravelTavern, meets with BBC commissioning editor Tony Hayers with the aim of securing a second series of his chat show. After Hayers tells him straight out that this won’t happen, Alan produces a dossier of ideas for potential programmes that get weaker and sillier as he works his way down the list. An increasingly amused and bewildered Hayers turns down all these ideas as well. In panicky desperation, Alan pushes the folder to one side and starts pitching new titles off the top of his head. Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank, Inner City Sumo (‘If you don’t do it, Sky will’) A Partridge Amongst the Pigeons - all are rejected by Hayers. Finally, Alan gathers his thoughts and manages to summon up one final pitch: ‘Monkey Tennis?’

It’s a classic scene, one that still makes me smile when I think about it. Still, that icon of Middle England may have (needless to say) the last laugh. This week’s Popbitch features a list of real life upcoming TV shows. It may be bullshit, a mistake or a parody but somehow I doubt it. Here they are:

‘Maggot’s on a Mission’ - Maggot from Goldie Lookin’ Chain tackles environmental myths, dressed in a furry green suit.

‘Muslim Driving School’ – Hilarious tales of Muslim women learning to drive.

‘A Band For Britain’ - Sue Perkins gets to recruit a brass band!

‘Alan Yentob on Las Vegas’ - Cerebral BBC arts commentator wants a free trip to Las Vegas. Sorry, is obviously the right person to analyse Sin City.

Finally, there’s apparently going to be a reality show called ‘Clink Cuisine’ featuring cooking in prison – which was the exact title for one of Alan’s risible ideas. Apparently BBC One Controller Peter Fincham once quipped that he had ‘always said quite a few of those shows would have been commissioned’.

Cultural Advancements Make Benefit Glorious City Manchester

Kate Feld links, with justifiable triumphalism, to a Guardian piece by Jerome de Groot that raves about Manchester’s thriving litscene. Universities have brought in talented names and developed strong creative writing courses with public debates and functions. Workshops and literary magazines have flourished like bindweed. But that’s only part of the picture: ’live and grassroots writing is where Manchester really comes into its own.’

The many writing movements in the city support speakeasies, literary salons, readings, musical events, open mic evenings, online publishing, poetry slams; there is a thriving magazine and blog scene (as the Guide observed back in 2007). The city’s literati are young, hip and hungry, and writing in an enviably diverse range of styles and media. I’ve seen short stories told by Powerpoint, cabaret and performance poetry in abandoned mills. There are radical left newsgroups and resident dreamers writing Rainy City Stories; hip-hop performers and buskers and surrealist novelists and women’s writing groups and multiple festivals and DJs and art car boot sales and exciting venues. There are excellent Manchester magazines and journals like if p then q, Transmission, Geeek, and the Manchester Review, mixing Manchester-based writing with international authors, commentators and artists.

Our city is well known for ridiculous hype but for once the hype has substance. Trust me on this.

I’m a Londoner by birth and a Mancunian by adoption. The litscene is a hundred times bigger and better than it was when I first started following it five years or so ago. The Arts Council funded, box-ticking, hoop-jumping hack slams have vanished. They have been replaced by strong and diverse nights run by intelligent, creative artists and promoters who aren’t afraid to say something serious. As a result attendance is higher and wider. The contemporary complaint about modern spoken word nights is that the venue is too small. The room is like a Glasto moshpit and chairs are lost on the three-second rule. The nights are long and intoxicated and people attend for pleasure, not duty or networking.

The people who made this possible are too legion to list. Few receive assistance from the Arts Council or any body like it. I’ll name just one: the phenomenal John G Hall.

Of course it’s not all perfect, there are duds, creeps and morons in Manchester’s litscene just like in any other place. But things are better here than I’ve ever known them.

Occasionally I feel this weird obligation to move to London. Then I remember the Cornerhouse, the cosmopolitan spine, the Fallowfield Loop in its early evening gold. And, do you know, the smoke feels a little less like the place I was born.

City of Manchester: all the other cities have inferior potassium

Pure Story

‘You have Asperger’s Syndrome.’

The woman in the bar made my head turn. Your correspondent is checking his emails over a pint of Czech Bud when she makes this observation. ‘Sorry?’

‘You have Asperger’s. But don’t worry,’ she said, ‘it’s not gonna affect you.’

It’s not often someone sees right through you, and it made me disorientated and afraid. We talked a little. She told me that she did have Asperger’s syndrome plus learning difficulties and a support worker. I explained that I’d been tested for the condition as a primary school child because of my echolalia habit. If you said something to me, I’d repeat it back. I never found out the conclusions of that test and my parents didn’t mention this to me until twenty years later when it came up during breakdown numero uno. I was angry at the time but now I think they made the right decision. It’s not good to grow up labelled, and to have a convenient excuse for your failures and mistakes.

The question of whether or not I have this autistic spectrum disorder has never been resolved and I suspect it never will be. My therapist, a intelligent and practical woman who saved my life, told me that you can find just about anyone on these spectrums. So I’ll probably never know and it probably doesn’t matter. Perhaps it’s best for some things in your life to remain unexamined mysteries.

In two days I’ll be twenty-eight – as Alabama 3 said, ‘one more step towards the grave, you know the box.’ Thing is I started thinking semi-seriously about mortality at the age of nineteen or so. I expected this feeling to intensify with the passing years but instead it’s dissipating like snow in sunshine. You still dwell on life’s impermanence but without the same urgency. Maybe because there’s so much going on that boredom is a luxury.

I can’t believe it’s been over two years since I started this blog! Two years of unreasonable attacks on various writers and politicians, mixed with ill-advised confessional autobiography and shameless promotions of my fiction and criticism. I started the weblog as an outlet for my own obsessions about what was happening in political debate; as time’s gone by it has begun to mean a little more to me than that.

Things are going a great deal better for me than they were this time last year. I feel little or no anxiety. The move to South Manchester has given me opportunities to explore more of this amazing city of ours.  I even love my new job at JLB Credit and it’s good to have some certainty about where the next rent cheque is coming from. I’m still writing, continuously, at every conceivable opportunity – that novella I talked about has colonised most weekday evenings. I feel that, like Lucky Jim, I may yet be of use to somebody.

Michel Houellebecq introduced his 2005 novel, The Possibility of an Island, by crediting its existence to a Berlin journalist called Harriet Wolff. ‘Before putting her questions to me,’  he wrote, ‘Harriet wanted to recount a little fable.’ For Wolff. the following summed up Houellebecq as a novelist. I think it can be applied to anyone who writes online.

I am in a telephone box, after the end of the world. I can make as many telephone calls as I like, there is no limit. I have no idea if anyone else has survived, or if my calls are just the monologues of a lunatic. Sometimes the call is brief, as if someone has hung up on me; sometimes it goes on for a while, as if someone is listening with guilty curiosity. There is neither day nor night; the situation is without end.

Welcome to eternal life, Harriet.

Celebrity Skin

There I was thinking Peter Kay was an aberration and that most celeb books don’t earn out their advances. But Philip Stone says he can prove otherwise. He’s the ‘chart editor’ of the Bookseller and a former bookseller at Waterstone’s. In his piece he lists some huge figures for celeb sales and then has a go at literary elitists who insist that publishers should concentrate on books that the author has themselves written, or at least proofread.

Yes, when not lambasting publishers… many snobs bemoan the fact that celebrities outsell literary novelists (perhaps I encourage this a little). It is incredibly difficult to get literary fiction to sell on a large scale, short of a Man Booker win or (previously) a ‘Richard and Judy’ book club selection. Publishers know this. They know it’s a lot easier to sell 100,000 copies of a celeb memoir than it is to sell 10,000 copies of what could well be a great work by a ‘literary novelist’ (Martin Amis’ worth to UK book retailers last year: £0.2m; Alan Titchmarsh: £1.7m). So, shock horror, publishers have a willingness to publish popular books. Yes, by those boo-hoo, horrid little celebs. I know, outrageous!

All of this comes as shocking news to the snobs who are disgusted by the reality of the world we live in—a world in which Katie Price outsells the Man Booker dozen. But this is the world we live in. Stop moaning about it. Publishers give the public what the public wants. Get over it!

Publishers give the public what they want – well, up to a point. Most people I know watch X-Factor, but I can’t see them queuing up for a ghosted autobio of Alex Burke. Icons don’t always translate across media yet Stone’s numbers impress. There are actually people in the UK who will spend maybe like £18.99 on a hardback book, simply because it bears a familiar face from TV. Who knew?

I do and don’t understand the appeal. Some celebrities have interesting lives and stories to tell. Marco Pierre White’s The Devil in the Kitchen is a fascinating insight into the London restaurant trade as well as an inspiring personal story of somehow making it against the odds. And Kerry Katona is such a bizarre, chaotic personality that no publishing novelist would dare base a character on her – the editor would cut it immediately for lack of realism.

But seriously, how much insight and fun can you get from a book by Alan Titchmarsh? Dawn French? David Gest for fuck’s sake?

Whatever its secret, the commercial appeal does annoy actual fiction writers. The irritation is aesthetic, and also territorial. Stuart Evers points out that ‘Celebrity authors and novels can tie up publicity and marketing budgets, deflecting attention away from other authors.’ The disillusioned publisher in Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up ranted for neglected artists when he is forced to publish a worthless book by elite populist columnist Hilary Winshaw.

It’s not enough to be stinking rich, land yourself one of the most powerful jobs in television and have two million readers paying good money every week to find out about the dry rot in your skirting-board: these people want fucking immortality! They want their names in the British Library catalogue, they want their six presentation copies, they want to be able to slot that handsome hardback volume between the Shakespeare and the Tolstoy on their living-room bookshelf. And they’re going to get it. They’re going to get it because people like me know only too well that even if we decide we’ve found the new Dostoevsky, we’re still not going to sell half as many copies as we would of any old crap written by some bloke who reads the weather on the fucking television!

And there’s a suspicion in the back of the mind that most people don’t really want this shit. It’s nothing so vulgar as the manufacture of consent, more the will to belong. You feel you have to buy into a thing because you’ve been told so many times that everyone else has. If you resist, you’re an elitist, a snob, a PC bore – etc. This is Keynes’s beauty contest: ‘It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.’

And yet popular culture isn’t as popular as it seems. Most young people go out on Saturday nights rather than watch Strictly - that was why the sacking of Arlene Phillips was such a PR fuckup for the BBC. Meanwhile there have been nights when televised bowls tournaments get higher ratings than hyped up reality shows.

There’s a slightly manic edge to Stone’s piece. Maybe it’s his Waterstones background. The chain built success on a philosophy of selling books as if they were cans of beans. In the last few years though, it has been hit by online retail, which is cheaper and more convenient with a far wider range. I’ve met a lot of people who worked for Waterstones. They told me stories of mass layoffs, meaningless sales training and supervisory incompetence. A bookseller friend nicknamed one manager ‘Paperclip’ because he couldn’t do anything on Word without consulting the ‘Clippit’ help icon.

There’s a potential positive side to throwing deals at tabloid characters. Alison Flood reckons that ‘The more these celebrity novels sell, the more money publishers will have to fund debut literary fiction writers, poets, biographers; the kinds of books that might not sell hundreds of thousands of copies, which in fact might barely sell 1,000 copies, but which make it all worthwhile.’

That’s the positive side – a kind of tax with the stupid rich funding the creative poor. But is that how it works in publishing today? Does anyone know?

Border Line

Most people find airports an absolute nightmare. Like seeing a doctor or renting a flat, simple procedures involve more and more box-ticking and form-filling as the technology improves. Spare a thought though for returning soldiers on RAF flights to Edinburgh. Frazzled and weary after high-intensity tours in Afghanistan, they then ‘find themselves subjected to a level of scrutiny by the UK Borders Agency above that of an asylum seeker.’ One para told Private Eye’s military correspondent ‘Squarebasher’ that ‘The only way to avoid the hassle is to come home in a fucking box.’

This isn’t just a tale of red tape strangling what should be an easy process – Squarebasher’s piece also provides an insight into the nasty, squalid world of the UKBA.

Despite still being in uniform and carrying an MOD90 identity card and a full British passport, it can take up to five hours to satisfy officials of their allegiance to the country they have just risked life and limb to serve.

One returning soldier who had already completed a tour in Afghanistan found himself at the back of a long line in front of a UKBA immigration officer who, when asked about passport requirements, was heard to remark, ‘Just the brown faced ones.’ The comment enraged troops serving alongside ‘brown faced’ comrades who had faced identical threats, made identical sacrifices and won identical medals.

We can’t know if this is a case of one bad apple or a whole rotten barrel. But it’s not a great sign, is it?

Succour Banal

This is out now, and should soon be in the shops:

The Autumn/Winter 2009/10 issue is a collection of work that takes the everyday, the ordinary, the unlauded, the daily grind or even the outright boring and, in the modernist tradition, turns it into the subject of compelling literature and art.

Featured writers and artists are:

Prose: Duncan Brett, Kevin Brown, Gary Cansell, Abi Curtis, Cassandra Moss and Mark Staniforth

Poetry: Judy Brown, Isobel Dixon, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Christodoulos Makris, Shaunagh Darling Robertson, Ben Rogers, Lee Rourke, Maurice Scully, Cherry Smyth and Grace Wells

Prose poems: Annie Clarkson and John Clegg

 Artwork: Derek Ogbourne and Martin Skauen

The guidelines for Succour 11 are, erm, a bit different:

For Succour 11, our Spring/Summer 2010 issue, we would like to invite submissions which pertain not to a theme, as has hitherto been the case, but which adhere to a pair of conditions.

Condition 1: All submissions should be written on Saturday February 6th, 2010.

Condition 2: What you write should not be an attempt to execute an idea – for a story, for a poem, etc – that has previously occurred to you. Rather, we would prefer you to write whatever happens to come into your head at that particular time.

The idea for this issue was inspired by 20 Lines a Day by Harry Mathews, in which the author sets out to follow a rule Stendhal once set himself, to write ‘Twenty lines a day, genius or not’. Mathews undertakes this project in an attempt to overcome ‘the anxiety of the blank page’; it becomes part of his writing practice, his way of starting off, getting in the zone, before going on to whatever his main writing project may be. We would like submissions to February 6th, 2010 to be written in the same spirit.

We will be accepting submissions to February 6th, 2010 from Saturday February 6th 2010 until Monday February 8th 2010 – thereby allowing a couple of days for typing up etc.

Maximum word count: 400

Send all work to: submissions@succour.org

Contact Details
Anthony Banks
Editor
anthonybanks@succour.org

Max Dunbar
Regional Editor Manchester
maxdunbar@succour.org

Luke Kennard
Regional Editor Birmingham
lukekennard@succour.org

Christodoulos Makris
Regional Editor Dublin
succourdublin@gmail.com

Shaun Morrison/picturesandwriting.com
Website Design
shaun@picturesandwriting.com

Chloe Briggs
Art Editor
chloebriggs@succour.org

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

Everything But The Kitchen Sink

Right, a guy came round this weekend and fixed my broadband connection. If you’re in Manchester/Cheshire and are having IT problems, I recommend this guy – email me for his contact details, he does a good service at reasonable rates. We’re cooking with charcoal now! There’s my review of Anthony Cartwright’s Heartland over at 3:AM.

State of English Literature

AL Kennedy sums up, as well as I’ve ever seen it summed up, the crisis in writing and publishing.

I have no idea what a new writer would do now – attempting to burrow into a market that’s in free fall and a literary ‘culture’ that drastically limits the numbers of books that are published or that will ever be visible in major bookshop chains, reviews or the media generally. Publishers are beyond risk-averse and are currently decision-averse. It is possible that published writers will no longer ever leave whatever other employment they use to subsidise themselves. Meanwhile, the increase in poorly conceived and exploitative creative writing courses will continue, and increasingly the writers who teach on them will end up training potential writers to teach other potential writers to teach on other courses and round and round they all will go – never knowing how good they might be, or what they’re missing.

Which isn’t what we deserve. There’s a place for courses and some of them are excellent – I wouldn’t, for example, be at Warwick if I didn’t believe in what they do there. But it can’t be that our literature relies on false promises and academia to limp along. Established writers surely can’t feel morally comfortable about helping new writers to commit themselves to the life while ignoring the fact that the chances of success, or even of publication, are minimal. And we can’t pretend that teaching writers to teach writing is meaningful, or anything close to our primary purpose.

Classic Books: Time’s Arrow

(As with the first Amis novel in this series, I am indebted to Nicholas Trigell’s The Fiction of Martin Amis, which contains an extensive chapter on Time’s Arrow.)

The immediate question of Time’s Arrow is: who is telling this story? Its narrator occupies a body, but cannot control it: the physical vessel ‘won’t take orders from this will of mine.’ Quickly the narrator realises that he’s no more than ‘passenger or parasite’; he has no access to the body’s thoughts and no influence on events: he’s here for the duration.

Time’s Arrow begins with an old man coming to life. The man is rushed by paramedics to his suburban home where he suffers a heart attack and then does a bit of gardening, planting weeds, distributing dead leaves. Life is being lived backwards.

The idea of a whole novel played out in reverse time is an amusing thought experiment for Amis, and offers rich comic potential for a mind such as his, always looking for the leftfield angle. The possibilities are exploited in ways alternately funny, thought provoking, even touching. Council trucks cover the streets in garbage that is collected in trickles by casual walkers over the following day. Restaurants pay you upfront to bring up a meal, after which you sit there and describe it to the waiter, the food having been reduced with great care to its constituent parts. Amis has great scatological fun with the basic human processes, such as eating, and taking a shit. Everything of value comes from the bin, the toilet and the fire.

But this man, Tod Friendly, isn’t just a retired clinician. Although the narrator can’t access Friendly’s memories or knowledge, he can get a general idea of Friendly’s emotions, like ‘a crocodile in the thick river of his feeling tone’. Under the exterior of a genial retiree Friendly is filled with self-loathing and shame: he avoids mirrors, drinks too much, smashes up his furniture at night. Mysterious letters turn up in the grate, cryptic in their banality, informing Friendly that ‘the weather in New York continues to be temperate’; exasperated, the narrator notes Tod’s overreaction: ‘as if New York were next door, and as if temperate weather meant rat showers and devil winds and the mad strobes of Venusian lightning… How will he take it if the weather in New York turns really bad?’

The narrator does share Friendly’s nightmares of a recurring figure ‘in the white coat, his black boots straddling many acres’; around him ‘a blizzard of wind and sleet, like a storm of human souls.’ There’s a nightmare about a baby with ‘the ultimate power of life and death over its parents, its older brothers and sisters, its grandparents, and indeed everybody else who is gathered in the room’, a power that comes from ‘its voice, the sounds it makes, its capacity to weep.’ In a backwards reality there is no free will, everyone knows exactly how long they’ve got to live (the narrator theorises that babies cry because they’re ‘sad to be going’) it’s all been done before yet there is real suspense as we head towards the great and mysterious crime of Friendly’s past. As an old man Friendly makes little gestures of charity which the narrator, as always, misconstrues: he’s disgusted at Friendly’s habit of taking a ‘really big bill’ from the church collection plate. Yet these tokens of generosity are really acts of propitiation. He’s like the former Iraqi general in Wendell Steavenson’s The Weight of a Mustard Seed, who carries out similar small philanthropies to weigh the scales against the atrocities of his career and to petition for a better afterlife. The comparison is apt.

For Tod Friendly turns out to be Odilo Unverdorben, a Nazi doctor and Mengele’s assistant at Auschwitz. It’s at the Holocaust chapters where Amis’s concept comes into its own. The reverse scatologies of the early scenes (where Unverdorben has fled to America through the Vatican escape tunnels with his false identity and his gold taken from Jewish teeth) take on new significance: people are created through shit, trash and fire. The narrator of Amis’s novel is horrified by what he sees during Unverdorben’s later career as a hospital physician: from his point of view doctors are there to inflict injury and incubate disease. But for him Auschwitz is a noble enterprise, and the only time where he experiences complete identification with his host body – signified by his repeated use of the phrase: ‘I, Odilo Unverdorben’. What could be better than to bring people back to life, to reunite families and heal wounds, to integrate Jews, gypsies and homosexuals into a society that becomes gradually liberalised as the Nazi machine dismantles itself? ‘Human ordure’ makes all this possible; the narrator can think of ‘no finer tribute’ to Auschwitz than the officers’ slang term ‘Anus Mundi’: the arsehole of the world.

While the camp is paradise to the narrator (continually and naively drawing the wrong conclusion from the events he witnesses) for the reader it is hell. Having been conditioned by the novel’s earlier chapters to make sense of what’s going on by mentally reversing process, motion and dialogue, we now can’t stop doing it – with harrowing results. ‘[T]he dental work was usually completed while the patients were not yet alive.’  ‘I saw the old Jew float to the surface of the deep latrine, how he splashed and struggled into life’. ‘A shockingly inflamed eyeball at once rectified by a single injection. Innumerable ovaries and testes seamlessly grafted into place.’ The danger with reading accounts of torture and genocide is that the sheer weight of human suffering can bludgeon the reader into desensitivity. Evil’s victory is that it forces one to look away: and so the horror is repeated and never again means nothing. But Amis makes us look. Rather than trivialising the Holocaust with his sci-fi concept, Amis makes it resonate. As Donald Morse said: ‘By so involving the reader Amis ensures that far from aestheticising the atrocities or providing aesthetic pleasure from the misery and pain of the victims as Adorno feared, this process renders them part of the reader’s immediate experience… historical reality is brought back to consciousness through imagination.’

In his afterword Amis pays tribute to Robert Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors: ‘My novel would not and could not have been written without it.’ And, in a sense, can’t be understood without it. In that book, Lifton interviewed scores of survivors and perpetrators with the aim of exploring the contradiction of the doctors’ medical training with their role in the camps. How could someone take the Hippocratic oath (‘In whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm…’) and go on to participate in systematic killing?

His theory was that the Nazi doctors engaged in ‘doubling… the formation of a functional second self, related to but more or less autonomous from the prior self.’ Doubling was not unique to fascism, we all practise it to some extent in our work and lives. But the Nazis took it to genocidal lengths. It was this ‘psychic numbing’ that allowed the SS officer to spend all day feeding the ovens and then buy a box of chocolates for his wife on the way home.

It was this paradox between ‘the reversals of healing and killing’ that animated Lifton in his psychological work and Amis in his fiction. The Nazis, of course, explained their vision in medical terms, with one camp doctor justifying his actions by comparing the Jews to a gangrenous appendix in the body. Lifton: ‘[T]he extreme numbing that rendered killing no longer killing… maintaining a medical identity while killing, and somehow finding meaning in the environment.’

Doubling is at the heart of Time’s Arrow. The narrator is Unverdorben’s soul, jettisoned at an early age. We can even pinpoint the moment of this monstrous separation. The baby in Unverdorben’s nightmares remains a mystery for so long: is it Unverdorben’s dead child, or perhaps a reference to the Hiroshima bomb? As a young man in the Waffen SS, Unverdorben is already packing the Jews into ghettoes and mass graves. Inspecting a rural warehouse, he becomes aware of a noise from the wall – the sound of a baby crying, and ‘the sound that perhaps the whole planet makes when it tries to soothe: ‘Schh… Schh…’’ Alone in the room, he understands that a family is hidden in some alcove behind the wall. The baby by its crying has given them away. At that moment Unverdorben has a choice. His deliberation is all the more poignant for the narrator’s unawareness of it. Eventually Unverdorben alerts his troops to the family behind the wall. He makes the wrong decision and cements his destiny as a war criminal, an active participant in the service of evil.

At that moment his soul is abandoned forever as an inner observer. Amis has worked too hard on his voice to disown it, and the soul’s narration has his signature combination of the colloquial and learned. But there’s a gentleness and a shyness, liberal and tolerant, full of yearning and sorrow, and humanity and love.