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.

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.

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.

(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.

Rushed notes from what is rapidly becoming my local. My broadband is still fucked and I’m working most days at JLB Credit. In the evenings I’m writing a story. It’s one of those long stories that’s been going around in my head for a while; now it’s being written it is threatening to turn into a novella.

So this is just a quick update on recent articles (I know you have all missed me terribly). I reviewed Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis: All 50 Chapters at 3:AM magazine and wrote about the Medialens book, also at 3:AM. There’s a response from Medialens which reads pretty much how you’d expect.

Right now I’m relaxing with a few beers. Happy Hallowe’en everybody and I will be back as soon as I sort out these IT problems.

My review of Douglas Coupland’s Generation A is now available at 3:AM.

I’m writing this in Withington library as my broadband’s dead. It’s not a phone issue, it’s some problem with my laptop and it looks like I’m going to have to get a new one. I’m not sure when I can get the cash together for this and I am back on full time work now. The rate of posting, already sporadic, will grow sketchier still. I will have a crack at posting some reviews this week but apart from that, don’t expect much from here.

Johann Hari has an essential piece on British fascism. You need to read it all but these are the main points.

There is a terror threat from white British males that is on a level with the Islamist version. The police are incredibly worried about this, they take it seriously, they know there are people in this country talking about race wars on web forums. They have caught people with explosives, often by chance. Hari: ‘The West Yorkshire Police recently launched a huge series of raids against far-right groups and found them in possession of 80 bombs – considerably more even than any jihadi group has been caught with in British history.’ White fascists are as great a threat to British civilians as Al-Qaeda. 

Despite many arrests, the issue of white fascist terror doesn’t get nearly as much attention from the mainstream media as Asian Islamist terror. It’s hard to believe there is no element of bigotry in this.  

There is what Hari calls a ‘perception gap’ between the conventional view of the twenty-first century BNP and its reality. The conventional view expressed by many in newspapers, on streets and at dinner parties is that the BNP is merely a fringe reaction to ‘uncontrolled immigration’ and ‘political correctness’. In reality, it is a criminal gang of supremacist ideologues.

Hari points out that many on the left have paved the way for this with their ‘understanding’ approach to Islamist terror (seeing it as a natural response to Western foreign policy and nineteenth-century imperialism). He could have added that many conservatives have mirrored this stupidity when it comes to the BNP and its supporters (seeing their racism as a natural response to immigration/political correctness/Zionists/Diversity winning Britain’s Got Talent). This sin is compounded by the conspiratorial rhetoric and outrageous lies about immigration and multiculturalism you see in the conservative tabloids and also in the writing of some respected conservative intellectuals.

First thing you see is the smoking shelter by the trees. The Ten O’Clock People are one of the world’s signature sights. Whatever the weather, in any country on the planet, come the end of time and against boiling skies there will still be knots and clutches of men and women in cheap suits and plastic IDs slung round their necks smoking cigarettes by wall-mounted metal ashtrays.

What is this? Yes, I’m back at work. It is almost two weeks now and I’m getting into my stride. Reading review books on the train, banging out timesheets, swiping the doors like I’ve never been away. It’s a busy time. Days and nights click and ratchet past in shutters of black and white, like early filmreels, like the window view of a train rocketing through a forgotten platform.

Still, moments stand out. First smoke of the day, at six in the am, in my garden under last night’s stars. I looked through the window as we were cruising across the flyaway and I felt afraid for a second. Then I forgot it. I’ve had ‘Daysleeper,’ by REM, in my head: I’m the screen. I’m the screen. I work at night… And something else; an amazing poem by Stephen Dobyns, called ‘Pursuit’.

I love Dobyns because his poems are like stories with rhythm. I think this one is worth quoting in full; it seems to encapsulate and universalise a feeling I never thought anyone else possessed.

Each thing I do I rush through so I can do
something else. In such a way do the days pass -
a blend of stock car racing and the never
ending building of a gothic cathedral.
Through the windows of my speeding car, I see
all that I love falling away: books unread,
jokes untold, landscapes unvisited. And why?
What treasure do I expect in my future?
Rather it is the confusion of childhood
loping behind me, the chaos in the mind,
the failure chipping away at each success.
Glancing over my shoulder I see its shape
and so move forward, as someone in the woods
at night might hear the sound of approaching feet
and stop to listen, then, instead of silence
he hears some creature trying to be silent.
What else can he do but run? Rushing blindly
down the path, stumbling, struck in the face by sticks;
the other ever closer, yet not really
hurrying or out of breath, teasing its kill. 

The Obama administration has adopted an aggressive policy towards the increasingly deranged Fox News, with spokesperson Anita Dunn describing the channel as ‘the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party’.

She went on to say this:

If we went back a year ago to the fall of 2008, to the campaign, that was a time this country was in two wars that we had a financial collapse probably more significant than any financial collapse since the Great Depression. If you were a Fox News viewer in the fall election what you would have seen were that the biggest stories and the biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and a something called ACORN.

Guardian US correspondent Michael Tomasky explains why this was the right decision.

Fox will make a crusade out of this, in the way that McGreal describes Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly as doing. But who cares what Beck and O’Reilly say, beyond the universe of people who are already proven to care what they say? Nobody. They have their 2 or 3 million viewers. Fine. Bully for them. The other 307 million Americans are busy doing other things.

News junkies constantly overestimate cable television’s reach and influence. Always remember: If Fox were that powerful, we’d be watching President McCain calling the shots.

Exactly. Compromise with the rightwing media never works because you can never compromise enough. Nothing will ever satisfy these people.

The UK also has a reactionary media with massive delusions of relevance. If Labour had taken Obama’s attitude in ‘97, imagine what a great country we could be living in today.

(Image via 44Diaries)