My Writing Year

Is this the last post of 2009? The last post of the noughties? Maybe... I've written more on this blog that last year, less than the previous two. Perhaps it creates its own rhythm?

Its been an odd year in many ways, busy, fast-moving, and, up-to-a-point productive. A lot has happened since a year ago, but also, perhaps not that much. These annual surveys are a bit meaningless I guess, but like the seasons, good to mark their passing.

I had a couple of things published, both online, at Horizon Review, an essay I wrote last year, that, with the adulation for "The Road" growing all the time, seems appropriate and timely in its observations on the contemporary apocalyptic, and the 2 pieces I wrote for Flax Books' "Mostly Truthful." Non-fiction all of these, of course. I enjoyed reading in Lancaster's Storey Institute at the Flax launch, not just because I enjoy reading my work, but because it was such a pleasant environment to do so. An honourable mention as well to the lovely idea that is Everyday Genius, to which I contributed a piece in the Autumn.

Online is the way, one way or another - whether its eBooks, iPhone Apps, or print-on-demand - online facilitates. I have no problems with this, but if new writers have to also find "an audience", and this online presence is their way to it, then one does wonder about publishing as a model? Good writers may be many things but rarely are they good marketeers. Nearly four hundred downloads of my earlier novella "For the want of a gas barbecue" from Feedbooks, I know nothing about this "audience", as the site has such poor social networking characteristics. Soon, before or after the new year, I need to think carefully about improving my own online presence - for the first time, with mobile devices such as iPhones, I think there may well be an audience for writing via the web. I don't think you'd want to read "Wolf Hall" this way, but maybe there's writing better suited to the medium.

I've written poems and fiction this year as well, but in between times, in between things. I need to spend some time completing that which is in draft, and concentrating on what to write next. It may mean prioritising. But for now - for the next two weeks, I'll have a bit of time to reflect on things, package things.

Last post of the year or the decade? Four days left, time enough to change my mind.

Near Christmas

The snow has made life a little miserable for people this week, though I always quite like it when the weather manages to slow us all down. Manchester has been treacherous under foot, but I live close enough to the city that it hasn't affected getting into work, even up till Christmas eve. Because its not just the end of the year, but the end of the decade there's all these lists coming up about "best books" and "best films" and "best albums." The decade hasn't really left too much of a cultural footprint - perhaps the great politic issues of the time; from 9/11 and "the war on terror", to the growing worry about climate change (culminating in the near empty rhetoric of Copenhagen), to globalisation and the ensuing financial meltdown; have been too all consuming, yet too distant, to create the human narratives that great art requires. Yet from "24" through to "The Road", the filtering through does take place.

Despite "long tails" and social media; it's the mega-blockbuster, from "Da Vinci Code" to this month's "Avatar" that has "united" us, yet its a unity of a shared popcorn more than a shared culture. That our audiences prefer adolescent spectacle than a deeper conversation is perhaps a given.

Yet 2009 has had its moments. I've read some good books, from this year and previous years, and blogged about those as I've gone along. Nothing spectacular in fiction, but some good novels nonetheless. I'm finishing the year reading Hilary Mantel's Booker winner "Wolf Hall" and after a few pages already feel somewhat immersed in the febrile politics of Tudor England. I think its been something of a remarkable year for poetry, in contrast, or maybe I've been paying more attention. Tom Chivers' Crashaw Prize collection from Salt Publishing was a highlight, and other Salt collections from Luke Kennard and Chris McCabe have repaid the time. The best poetry books require time; and reading George Szirtses excellent "The Burning of the Books," there does seem a welcome move away from minimalism, to lets call it maximilism in the best writing of the moment.

Swearing isn't Clever, but it is Funny

I bought "Killing in the Name" on CD-single when it first came out in 1992 from the little record shop in the arcade in Eccles. I used to pick up any new singles that looked interesting, and a band called Rage Against the Machine certainly fit the bill. No exaggerration to say that the first time I played it, it blew me away. There'd been a few rap-grunge crossover records, most notably the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' "Give it Away", and Bodycount's "Bodycount's in the House", but Rage's debut was something else. The album was every bit as good as the single, and both "Killing in the Name" and "Bullet in the Head" were regulars at the Ritz on a Monday night. I crammed into the same venue to see them play their later, a gig that remains one of the most incendiary I've ever been to - and would definitely be in my all time top ten.

Yet, Rage were always contradictory. They arrived on these shores fully formed, and signed to a major. Their politics, which echoed the activist politics of hardcore bands like Fugazi and Consolidated, were part of what they did, but seemed a little strange in a UK context - after all, these were the dull days of John Major's premiership not the all out war of the Thatcher years. Musically, as well, that rap-metal template was something they never really deviated from, even on their only partially successful cover versions album, (where, their takes on icons like Dylan and Springsteen seemed a little less successful than their rap covers.) Yet they remained a real favourite of mine over the next few years - and, if second album "Evil Empire" lacked the dynamics of their debut, "The Battle of Los Angeles" and particularly the single "Sleep Now in the Fire" was almost as good as their first.

In many ways then, the internet campaign which has put "Killing in the Name" to number for Christmas 2009, ahead of a truly dreadful song recorded by this year's mediocre X-factor winner, chose its song well. A modern classic, with that refrain, "fuck you I won't do what you tell me", which retains its adolescent anger, but was always funny, since I remember everyone shouting along to it, punching their fists in the air in unison. Rock protest songs work best when they can be appropriated for any kind of campaign, and "Killing in the Name" is in many ways a "Times They are a-Changin'" for the grunge generation. Neither Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder wrote songs with a public, rather than private focus, and in Rage, the protest song - still alive and well in rap - made a welcome come back.

Yes, Sony are a multinational, yet it's always been the case that major labels have recorded outsider artists. There's no greater capitalist than Richard Branson, but his Virgin records found room not just for the Sex Pistols, but genuine outsiders like Robert Wyatt. Labels like Rough Trade, Creation and Factory, may have had a different philosophy from the majors, but you only have to read the stories of their various original demises to see that its creative freedom that matters, not corporate structure. For a time in the 90s, some of the biggest selling bands were global phenomenon like Rage Against the Machine, the Beastie Boy, NWA and Pearl Jam, rather than the Whitneys and Mariahs that had once dominated the sales charts.

At the end of the day, we'll always just music on what we hear - not anything else - and that a 17 year old song can still upset the armchair listener, but also inspire 500,000 downloads in a week, shows that its as great a track now as when I first heard it. Indie purists (and I've been one) may ask why it can't be something more obscure or on a minor label that is used as the jump-leads for kickstarting this kind of protest, but I can't see the navel gazing music of so much contemporary indie having the sheer bravado to make a difference. In a couple of years time, we might find a whole new range of poltically inclined bands who were inspired by this one instance. Maybe it doesn't quite stick it to "the man", but in giving us a different narrative, it reminds us of how music has the ability to surprise us.

As someone who is not immune to writing the odd protest song myself, it made me go back and have a listen to "Wonderful Products" that I recorded last year.You can't even buy it, just download for free.

Old Rockers

I went to see the reformed Public Image Limited last night at Manchester Academy. They did a full 2 and a quarter hour set as advertised, started and finished on time, and Johnny Rotten (he seems to refer to himself as that, not John Lydon), was on fine form. I realised its the first time I've ever seen him live either as Sex Pistols or PIL. Public Image's original heyday was virtually over by the time I was getting into music, aged 14-15, in 1981-2. I remember "Flowers of Romance", their 3rd album, coming out and liking it even though it was clearly unlistenable! It's aged very well, of course, a unique uncompromising statement, that couldn't ever hope to have the influence of the earlier "Metal Box." By 1984 PIL were just another rock band and though "This is not a Love Song" and, later, "Rise", were student disco favourites,  I remember hearing an appallingly bloated live album, "Live in Tokyo", that a friend had bought and not been impressed. Be interesting to hear it again. In a world of the Cure, Killing Joke, SPK, Psychic TV, Cocteau Twins, the Fall and others, PIL seemed a minor player, and the Sex Pistols legacy, with its rockist songs, and cartoon-punk stylings never really appealed.

So, I'm there, watching Johnny Rotten for the first time, realising I've always had a lot of time for him, but that unlike 90% of the audience he never meant that much to me personally. Now, at a surprisingly young (and very sprightly) 53, he seems more than ever to be one of the timeless greats, a self-creation that can and did do anything he wanted. If PIL's music has its fair share of bombast and silliness at times, it also has a grandeur, a seriousness, and an intensity that I responded to last night. There was something in the air as the 70s turned into the 80s, and music was dark, serious and intense to reflect this. I now know that "Metal Box" in particular was a key influence on many of the bands I liked at the time. As the excellent post-punk history "Rip it up and start again" highlighted, the punks may have been style revolutionaries, but it was the post-punks who were the musical ones. I've often thought that pop music in all its many facets is a young man/woman's game - "Metal Box" was released when Rotten was 23. It's that period - from maybe 15-25 when musicians and songwriters seem to have their best ideas. I remember feeling older, and more "past it" in my mid 20s than at any time since, a sense of the moment passing. What's great about seeing PIL last night, 17 years after they last strutted the stage, is that sense that even if the best of Rotten's work creatively was done a quarter of a century or more ago, it's still part of him, still where his identity lies.

See the legends when they come to town, that's my motto. Finally catching up when Johnny Rotten, was nothing but a pleasure.

On McEwan

It must be a little infuriating for Ian McEwan, that most nuanced of writers, that praise and criticism for his work are anything but nuanced. There is a vehemence against McEwan’s work from certain quarters that almost makes him the James Blunt of literature, bought by all, praised by few. This story was played out again this week, when Sam Jordison's playful "worst novels of the decade" blog post brought out a flurry of McEwan haters, and, a long (and slightly mad) response from David Sexton. Poor Sam, who'd only mentioned one McEwan in his own blog post, for getting the response "by and large, bloggers remain writers who have not been able to find more rewarding outlets for their work and are therefore pre-packed with resentment, whatever subject they address." It was, one would have thought, the commenters on blogs, rather than bloggers who'd singled McEwan out. And poor McEwan to have such a perceptive critic as David Sexton on side, who, reviewing McEwan's books, "enjoyed and admired them all," kind of proving Sam's point.

It is, of course, this kind of unquestioning praise, that raises the McEwan haters' ire. Rare, it seems that you can appreciate McEwan's craft (as I do), but be baffled by the adulation for some of his weaker books. Perhaps, given a long enough career you'll create a few hardened positions on both sides, even as your audience grows book by book. Part of the dismay that some find in later McEwan may be because of his career trajectory, from dark, edgy short story writer to an elegant chronicler of (small c) conservative England. England is his subject, even when his books travel far and wide. Whereas the younger McEwan’s stories seem set in an entirely fictional milieu, a parallel world to the real seventies going on around him, his later books have found him at his best writing about a certain type of urbane England, past and present, which, on closer reflection, is where he came from. 

It is strange that a writer who is engaged with writing about the contemporary condition, as McEwan is, should be chastised, in part, for being true to himself. The later McEwan (perhaps since “Amsterdam”) is interested in a sub-class that few of us ever know or meet, yet it’s a class that in many ways does run the country – and we’re lucky, that in the absence of someone with Gore Vidal’s connections, McEwan has belatedly made it his subject. That his books still have the very readable mechanisms of love story, thriller or historical novel makes him that rarity, a literary writer who is widely read.

Looking back, the McEwan of the seventies and eighties wrote more interesting books, yet they are often naïve pieces of works, pushed along by a certain sense of impending doom. The protagonists of his early stories and novels are often unlucky ciphers, caught adrift in a world that they don’t quite understand, but through their actions have come to pass. This existential trepidation had its high point in the remarkable cold war thriller The Innocent. A piece of studied noir, to me, it was his most achieved work until Atonement.

Something changed with Enduring Love, in many ways a tour de force, but a book that shows too clearly McEwan’s faults as well as his achievements. It’s essentially a book about a marriage breakdown, hidden behind a psychological thriller that wouldn’t be too out of place in an episode of Cracker or the Fixer. There’s a real disdain in the novel for characters who are in any way coarse or ordinary. It is clear that McEwan's sympathies now lie with the educated, and occasionally, in Enduring Love, and to a greater extent in Saturday, it is this lack of sympathy for the characters from outside the professional classes which stands out so glaringly. Someone else once mentioned that despite taking place on the day of the London Stop the War march, none of McEwan's characters actually go on it. It's used as a backdrop only. Yet I don't think this is a failing, rather a failing of us to understand what McEwan is now doing. Go to David Peace if you want event reportage in your novels, for McEwan is now examining the psychological state of a particular class. 

Atonement, in many ways is key to this. A writer of great set pieces, you've sometimes seen the stitching together too easily, even a powerful work like Enduring Love, but with Atonement, the different sections are handled evenly. It's a construction, a fake, just as the stories that lie behind the novel are, and a reader could feel manipulated (you're meant to feel manipulated) by the novel's extended lie, it's slow reveal; yet it's this holding back that makes the novel work so well. We feel we know McEwan's characters, yet their flaws are held back, we need to grow an understanding of them. Like Iris Murdoch, with her intellectual menage a trois's, kind of romantic fiction with a PhD, the later McEwan novels seem to have "found a way" - his subject is becoming clearer, he is interested in the psychological stresses of his characters, faced with first the ordinary stresses of life, and then, ramping up the pressures (and nobody does invasion of space quite like McEwan), the extraordinary ones. I'd be surprised, now he's found this groove, if he doesn't stick with it for the remainder of his career. If there is some "class envy" about the well-to-do characters in these novels, then I'm not surprised. See them not as societal statements (as unfortunately some critics still do) but as psychological explorations and McEwan remains always worth reading. His novels are not without their faults, but it seems to me that a writer should receive a proper criticism for what he is, not for what he is not.

What Makes a Good Poem?

I only ask. I've just received some poems back from the Rialto that I sent some time ago. I've had 3 poems in the Rialto over the years, though they've always been somewhat odd choices. These poems I sent were amongst my very best, so I thought. I'm pretty sure, when you write a bad poem, that you send things off more in hope than expectation, but when you write a good one, and they are rare, there's an element of greater concern when they get rejected: maybe I know nothing, maybe, this, which is the rare good one, the best I can do, in fact, is still pretty mediocre. I'm not a fan of mediocre poetry in my own work or anyone elses. When you "interrogate" even one of your good poems it tends to fall apart; so hard is the art. Though I think, over time, I'm quite a good judge of my own work, I haven't the luxury of everything (anything) I write being published. I wrote another "good" poem (in my terms) recently and I'm very pleased with it, but also scared... whatever is good in my criteria doesn't necessarily filter through. Already, good poem that it is, I know it's not perfect.. What to do? What to do?

Reappraising Nabokov

Stephen Smith's brilliant Broomfield style documentary travelogue in search of the essence of Nabokov was an exemplary TV take on literature, despite its punning title, "How do you solve a problem like Lolita?" It's also full of surprises. The somewhat odd decision to refer to Nabokov, as NabOkov aside (that was how Nabokov said his own name, yet I've never heard anyone say it that way before), the footage of Nabokov himself was revelatory. I hadn't realise he spoke English with an English, not American accent, presumably from him having studied at Cambridge in the early 1920s. England left little impression on a travelling life that began as a rich and privileged Russian, saw him live in both Germany and America, and ended with 17 years living in a hotel in Switzerland. When I read "Lolita" in the mid-eighties, there wasn't the same notoriety as maybe there is these days, or rather, discussions about it were a little more adult. It's clearly, as Smith tries to prove, a moral tale, first and foremost. Interestingly, Martin Amis, an articulate Nabokovian, points out that it is not Lolita itself that is troublesome, but that Nabokov went back time and again to the story of an older man and a young girl, the subject almost obsessively revisited.

Yet, Nabokov the artist does seem to be a man of continual obsessions, whether through his writing or his butterfly collecting. Rightly, I think, the capture and pinning down of elusive beauty, which the butterfly collector does, is seen by Smith as pivotal to Nabokov's vision. He's referred to as a writer of contradictions; as if such a thing is in itself unusual. Writers, I think, are inevitably contradictory, at least the very best are. There is something contradictory in the very art of doing it: sitting in solitary confinement writing something that is then shared with the world. A man who was born in 1899, Nabokov, in this documentary, seems a clear internationalist, one who spanned the century, yet chose carefully his obsessions, his interests and his aesthetic. In a town house in St. Petersburg a few streets away from revolution happening, Nabakov wrote love poems instead of journalism. Such an aesthetic sensibility can sometimes be seen as the worst kind of dilettanteism, yet when the work is so lasting, it makes one consider again the utilitarianism of art. A utilitarian art has very little to recommend compared with something more rarified.

Stephen Smith's obsession with his quarry (and at one point an interviewee, the literary editor at Playboy, says "you are beginning to look like him") seems perfectly at one with the subject. Lolita, in my memory of the book, but also echoed in the Kubrick film version, seems both hymn to and elegy for American life. Lolita prefigures David Lynch's dark fables of what goes on behind the picket fence. A perfectly judged documentary, catch it whilst you can.