Blogging Live from Prague

Well, I've just had two blindingly good days in Prague. Met enough lovely people to hold a World Hugging Championships. Read to two of the finest, most receptive audiences ever assembled (in the Globe, and Shakespeare & Sons). They were both engaged and engaging, which is a heck of a feat. Sold all my copies of Jude: Level 1, which shows you how fabulously discerning they were. Wrote some of the new opening to Jude: Level 2 while sitting sipping cappuccino, in the sunlight, outside a cafe in Náměstí Míru (Peace Square). Bought all of Kafka's short fiction, again. And spent many fine hours in bars where the smoke grew so thick you could lie down on it and have a brief nap before returning, refreshed, to the scintillating conversation.

In short, I have been having far too good a time to blog, so that'll have to wait till I'm back in Berlin.

I'm reading in Prague! Later today! And again tomorrow!

 

Holy guacamole, I totally forgot to mention that I'm  reading in Prague later today, and again tomorrow. (Monday 7th of April 2008, and Tuesday 8th of same...) I should have had this up as a news thing weeks ago. Months ago.

Anyway, if you've any English-speaking  friends in Prague, tell them it'll be funny, intellectually titillating, and I may get my kit off if enough people throw their underwear at me.

I note with gloom that the Prague Daily Monitor has listed it as a poetry reading, so there goes my casual walk-in audience. (Just to clarify: It won't be a poetry reading. 100% uncut, hardcore prose, all the way.)

I'm planning to read the award-winning short story "The Orphan and the Mob" tonight, that's Monday night, in the Globe bookshop (as part of Alchemy Prague)... (For new readers, "The Orphan and the Mob" is also the prologue to my fab, book-of-the-year, comic novel, Jude: Level 1), which I strongly advise you to buy immediately.)

...and I'll be reading "The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble" (which had the peculiar honour of being the first short story ever published in the Financial Times), on Tuesday night in  Shakespeare and Sons.

It's practically a world tour!

Arguing About Nothing

 

I spent today arguing about MFA programs, over on the New York Times' Papercuts blog. You can tell I'm dodging some serious writing, huh? A typical contribution from me went something like this...

"Literature is, among other things, a long cascade of mentorings. Fitzgerald helped Hemingway. Beckett sat at the foot of blind Joyce, taking dictation for Finnegans Wake.

But Fitzgerald didn’t invoice Hemingway. And Beckett didn’t have to pay Joyce $100,000 to sit there.

(In fact, Joyce paid Beckett - in cast-off clothes, neither of them being commercially glorious).

It is remarkably cheeky of the universities to try to put mentoring - something which has to be extraordinarily personal, intimate, and freely given, if it is to have any meaning - on a sound commercial footing. Buying the mentoring of better writers is an extraordinary form of prostitution, which degrades both parties. (You should hear what creative writing teachers say to each other about their students after a workshop. Very reminiscent of what prostitutes say to each other after the johns have left.)

Perhaps, occasionally, a good writer will discover a potentially good writer, and real mentoring will take place. But what is the moral condition of the vast mass of relationships which have been forced into existence? Bad faith, bad faith.

And there is a more fundamental philosophical problem.

The novel is against authority, or it is nothing.

The university is authority, or it is nothing.

The two are uniquely unsuited to a close embrace.

Universities (given the way society is currently organised), have to expand. Sometimes they expand into territory to which they are wildly unsuited. The novel is one place they should never have ventured. Claiming to “teach” creative writing for money is morally dubious. But for the universities to employ such large numbers of potentially good writers as teachers, forcing them to daily read the worst prose ever written… well, it’s the kind of hellish torture Dante would have found a bit much. What sin could have earned such punishment?

Betraying your muse, perhaps.

The MFA in creative writing is a very successful industry. But its main product is embittered teachers of creative writing, (who nightly stifle the thought of what they might have written had they not had to read, grade and workshop student dreck for 20 years).

Not writers."

I, of course, totally overstate my case, and repeatedly break my only rule, that a writer should have no opinions. 

The whole thing, may God have mercy on us all, is here. 

The Latest on Jude: Level 2

 

A bunch of people have been asking me what's happening with Jude Online. (Hi Iarla! Hi Liz!). Or rather, what's not happening, as there hasn't been a new episode posted since October 2007.

Well, it's all my fault. Back in October, I had an idea for Jude: Level 2. I thought it would improve the book, and I asked Ben Yarde-Buller, my publisher at Old Street, to hold off putting up new episodes of Level 2 while I  took off my clothes, oiled my muscular torso, and wrestled with the manuscript in front of an open fire.

I didn't say anything earlier because I wanted to be sure the rewrite would work. Months later, it does. But rewriting Level 2 has had interesting consequences, and I now feel it makes a very interesting book in its own right, with its own unique flavour. So Old Street are going to publish Jude: Level 2 as a book, sometime in 2009. (Level 3 will follow in 2010, and THEN a handsome omnibus will collect all three.)

I know, I know, publishing is the slowest business in the world. Blame the retailers. Chains like Waterstones say they need to see the finished book, cover and all, at least six months in advance of publication, or they won't look at it and they won't order it. And you need even longer to organise proper media coverage. (Why, I don't know. A plane falls out of the sky, there's no problem getting radio, TV, newspaper and internet coverage immediately. A novel falls out of the sky, and it takes nine months. Go figure.)

We're still figuring out what the heck to do about the online version. I don't have a finished version of the new Level 2, so I don't want to show it online yet. I'm extremely happy with how the rewrite is turning out but, having already written one big new section, I've realised I now need - for aesthetic reasons with which I shall not bore you - a new opening for the book.  Which I've just begun writing. (Given that I like to put my stuff through an absolutely ferocious number of drafts and polishes before I publish it, and given that, like most authors, I spend the vast majority of my time idling beneath a coconut tree eating barbecued hummingbirds when I should be writing, it's going to be quite a while before it's ready.)

Also, publishing Jude: Level 2 as a physical book has loads of implications which we haven't worked through yet. (For example, if Jude: Level 2 is to win the Booker Prize it so richly deserves, the online edition would need to be published the same year the physical book is published...) So we're going to keep Jude Online on hold till we've worked all that out. Anyway, best guess is that we'll eventually get back to putting Jude: Level 2 up on the Jude Online site, but closer to the publication of the physical book.

If you've any questions about any of this, ask away. All questions and comments welcome, either here or in the forum. If it's a private remark or question, feel free to email me directly (there's a Mail Me button lurking down there somewhere on the navigation bar.)

And if you'd like me to tell you when Jude: Level 2 is coming out, email me and say so. I'll put you on my mailing list, when I finally put my mailing list together. (Been meaning to do that for a year... hi all you old Toasted Heretic fans who asked to be put on my mailing list, I'll get it together soon! Soon!)

Thanks for your patience. I know I'm being infuriatingly Artistic, but it took seven years to write the entire saga, and another couple of years to get Level 1 published, so an extra year or two won't make much difference. And I think it will be worth it.

 
I hope you, or your descendents, will, eventually, agree...

 

And the Ossian for Rudest Book goes to...

 

Thank you Kevin, Siobhán and Ariel for the congratulations and comments on my last post...

I did indeed get given a nice piece of bog oak, Kevin. Apparently it's called an Ossian.

The award (and I will probably give myself RSI typing this out in full), is one of the annual NUIG (National University of Ireland Galway) Alumni Awards. Mine was the AIB Award for Literature, Communications and the Arts.

Met some very interesting people there. The other award winners included Gráinne Seoige of Irish-language TV fame, and Séamus Brennan, the current minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism (the ever-mutating government department which inspired the Ministry for Beef, Culture and the Islands in Jude: Level 1). As you can see above, I flirted outrageously with Séamus, while grilling Gráinne on the leading political questions of the day.

A fun night out, and Aengus has sent me many other nice pictures, which I do intend to put up on the site... But, right now, I'm more excited by the goings-on in the credit markets. You don't normally see the words "wild and inexplicable" popping up on the front page of the Financial Times...

I'm reading at Bookslam, in London, on Thursday, February 28th 2008

I'm reading at Bookslam, in London, on Thursday, February 28th, this year of our lord 2008. (That is, later this week). Please do come if you can. Or tell any of your London friends you think might enjoy it. I will not only read from, but also sign, copies of Jude: Level 1, while flirting with your disapproving partner. And I fully intend to end the night by disgracing myself thoroughly in a new and entertaining fashion.

 

 I am operating on 2 hours sleep, so if this ends abruptly, it's because I've fallen asleep and my forehead, as it sinks gently to the keyboard, has posted an unfinished message.

I will awake in a few hours, with much of the alphabet embossed in small squares on my forehead, like a man punished by the Puritans for writing fiction.

(That's three paragraphs in a row that start with "I". A sin I wouldn't commit, even in a blog, were I sufficiently rested.)

Bookslam, for those of you too lazy to click on the hyper-link, is a kick-ass literary night out in London, with live music, a DJ, a poet and, on this particularly marvellous Thursday, me.

It's on in the west-end club now known as Neighbourhood, at No. 12 Acklam Road, London, W10 5QZ.

(Back when I were but a lad wearing nowt but clogs and a loincloth, No. 12 Acklam Road was better known as  Subterania, and hosted everyone from My Bloody Valentine to We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It.)

 On Thursday, the culture will be provided by NOT ONLY Julian Gough BUT ALSO:

Zubz (known to his mum as Ndabaningi Mabuye), the Zambian-born, Zimbabwe-raised, South Africa-based MC, flying in, fresh as a daisy, from Johannesberg, with a feather in his flat but sexy cap.

 James Yuill, the hippy zippy folk bloke who's not afraid of electricity. (Not to be confused with the recently deceased Scottish road haulage industry legend).

 And Salena Saliva Godden, the writer and poet and musician and assassin and astronaut and...

(THUD) 

 

Memories Of A Small Tribe In Galway

Along with a few other writers (DBC Pierre, Howard Marks, Sebastian Horsley etc) I was asked to contribute some of my few surviving tattered memories to the current issue of Hot Press. The issue is a wonderfully exploitative and tacky DRUGS!!! special, with a coke-smeared model on the cover who happens to look a bit like the young Irish lingerie model, Katie French, who died recently after her coke-fueled 24th birthday party.

As the memories I contributed were from the same place and time as the Toasted Heretic gigs we've been discussing in the forum, I thought I'd repeat them here...

My earliest experience of drugs was as a member of a small tribe in Galway.

We would collect magic mushrooms in the traditional manner, on the sacred golf-course of Knocknacarra. Every season, Joe Seal, a priest of the tribe, would make magic mushroom wine. My first trip, the young men of the tribe gathered in a holy place in Salthill and drank deeply of mushroom tea. A heck of a lot of mushroom tea. Then we went to the Warwick. The night lasted several years, and I sank into the floor several inches whenever I lay down, which was often. Then it started raining in the Warwick. Then tribes of pygmies wandered across the dance floor.

It was unnerving, and many of our tribe fled. (Days later, we discovered that a busload of dwarves on holiday were staying in the Warwick: and that the place was so packed the condensation had been pouring from the ceiling.)

Some of us ended up in Spar, where one of our number demanded that the shopkeeper slice his Mars Bar into many slices with the bacon slicer. However, his urgent request was not understood, and our tribesman fled. Soon many of the tribesmen were in flight, through space and time. Several walked a number of miles out of town. One slept in a field. Another was found at dawn, still walking, past Spiddal, and was brought home by the forces of law and order.

They were the best days of our lives, and they destroyed many of us. Over the next few years, some of us achieved enlightenment. Some of us died. Joe Seal died in India. A girl I liked killed herself. A girl I loved lost her mind and never found it again, and is still lost. Quite a few of us ended up in psychiatric hospitals, or with terrible depressions… We didn't know what we were doing, we didn't take it seriously enough. As Philip K. Dick said of his friends, and of mine,

"They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed - run over, maimed, destroyed - but they continued to play anyhow."

I have two very strong opinions on drugs. Those who are against drugs should take more of them: those who are for drugs should take less of them.  Most societies make sure that their young people take dangerous drugs in controlled circumstances, very rarely, and with an experienced guide to make sure they come back with new knowledge of themselves, and of their relationship to the universe. We neck anything that's going, head down to Abrakebabra, and fight. Few achieve enlightenment in Abrakebabra.

 

A note on the images in this post:

The first is a fabulous fractal freakout called "This Is Your Brain On Drugs", by the artist Sven Geier, who also works in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The second image is of Yapa, Joel, JJ, Posen and Albi, visiting London from the island of Tanna, at the southern tip of the island nation of Vanuatu. It is from the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary, Meet The Natives.

The third image is a crop of a digital landscape called "Enlightenment", created using Terragen by the Arizona artist Pat Goltz.

Bombs and Blocks

Well, that bomb was dealt with immediately. The guy with the toothache probably still squezz in his appointment at the dentist's.

I said, weeks ago, that I was about to put up my next Great Book for Teenage Boys. Well, I've been trying. But for some reason I am blocked like crazy. I've written the damn thing three times, and not posted it. 

Whaddya do? Writers are crazy. And the book is a head-wrecker, so no wonder it's somehow still wrecking my head. Great book...

I'll try again tomorrow. Bombs won't stop me. Blocks won't stop me.

Something new will stop me. 

(I took the image from HERE. Not sure if they drew it themselves... 

Paris for Love

 

The reading in the cave was great. Conor Lovett IS Jude, which is a scary thought. And a tribute to the weird and timeless miracle of good acting. The first time I ever saw him act, he was totally convincing as an old man on the brink of death. Now, years later, he's totally convincing as an eighteen-year-old Tipperary orphan with two penises. Go figure.

(An aside: I know most of you proud and upright citizens avoid the theatre for religious reasons, but you might know Conor Lovett as Ronald, in The Mainland episode of Fr. Ted.)

We got great feedback from the assembled dignitaries (most of them theatre people, so their criticism was informed and knowledgeable). I was particularly happy with the negative feedback, because it was all stuff we can fix. The positive feedback was jolly nice too, though less useful. Most of the negative stuff was simply due to how brutally I'd edited it. I'd cut out so much to bring the reading down to 50 minutes that people, understandably, got lost. Scenes and characters weren't properly introduced. But the alternative would have been a two-hour edit where nobody would have got lost, but several would have died of hypothermia in the cave.

The finished show will be a lot longer, but the venues will be a lot warmer. 

People laughed all the way through the reading, and the dinner afterwards was very jolly and went on for hours. A good start. One of the guests, Albert, reckons the cave is a lot older than the War, and that the Germans definitely didn't build it. As he fought his way across Europe back in the day, liberating Paris en route (he was in US Military Intelligence during the War), he should know.

He also liberated the very beautiful Micheline on his way through Paris. Sixty two years later, they're still married, and a heck of a good couple they make. Even Albert's family are beginning to think it might work out.

To quote the wise words of Jimmy "Bungle" O'Bliss, from Jude: Level 1: "Ah, Paris for love... Dublin for the Fumbled Handjob. Dublin for the Drunken Fuck... Paris for Love."

 

Blogging Live from a Cave near Paris

 

I'm just outside Paris for a few days, helping adapt Jude: Level 1 into a stageplay for the Galway Arts Festival later this year. Very, very exciting. I'm working with Conor Lovett, the best Beckett actor of his generation, and Judy Hegarty Lovett, who directed him so brilliantly in the Gare St Lazare Players' production of Molloy, and indeed in the entire Beckett trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable).

Anyone who can adapt The Unnameable (fondly known even by many Beckett fans as The Unreadable) into totally gripping theatre can do anything.

We spend all day underground, in a cave cut into the chalk hillside. Looking up at the chalk-and-flint arches above us, as a heater slowly warms the dark space, I feel rather as early Christians must have in the catacombs, if they ever put on theatre. ("Waiting for God", now in its two thousandth triumphant year!)

Conor and Judy think the cave was probably built by the German army during World War II, perhaps as a bomb shelter, perhaps to store ammunition. (The Germans also placed a rather large gun on the nearby hill, a couple of hundred yards away, overlooking the Seine. Didn't work, the Allies made their first successful crossing of the Seine about two miles upriver from here.)

We've invited some people out to see Conor as Jude tonight, in the cave.  It'll be a short (55 minute) demo version, read rather than acted. Then we'll ask the audience for their responses, and suggestions.

Then we all go for dinner together. Theatre rocks! It's all talking and eating! Beats the shite out of sitting on your own, writing novels.

Too sick to write (just sick enough to blog)

Sick as a pig this morning.

Puked my ring. Scaldy hole.

 

You do not want details.

So, as I was unfit for real writing, I hung out on the Guardian Books Blog all day. Very enjoyable. At one point I was asked "Julian, are you on SSRIs?" so I may have been a bit too sick to be posting, but feckit. Mostly I argued about people's right to email poems to their friends without written legal permission from the poet's publishers (Wendy Cope is, bizarrely, against this right. I am for it... OK, it's a bit more complicated than that, but you'll have to read it, I'm not summarizing an all-day argument.) The discussion starts with a fine article by Oliver Burkeman, well worth reading.

And I helped slag off the Guardian's decision to publish their review team's Book of the Year recommendations as a 41-minute podcast instead of a list. 

If anyone wants to read all about it, or join in, here's the discussion of Wendy Cope Forbids You To Email That Poem... Put Down The Poem... Move Away From The Poem...

And here's a link to the (slightly less intellectually stimulating) People Slagging Off The 41-Minute Book of the Year Podcast...

And I'm off to bed. 

Outsourcing My Blog

I've grown bored with my blogging style. My policy, recently, has been to say only nice things about nice people, which means I can't mention two-thirds of the people I'd like to, or say three-quarters of what I'd like.

(You will notice I said nothing at all about the recent Booker Prize, even though the winning book was written by a fellow Irish novelist, I used to share an agent with at least one of the judges, my brother knows another judge, and I had potential gossipy stories coming out my every orifice...)

So while I rethink my blogging style (what do you think, should I revoke the only-say-nice-things rule? Or can anyone think of a new rule that would liven things up?), I've decided to outsource my blog to someone who's much better at blogging than me...

Because this is Berlin, I found myself admiring sculptures of foetuses last Saturday while drinking whisky with Momus. Which led me to visit his magnificent blog, Click Opera. I hadn't been there for a while, and had forgotten how great it is. Much, much more interesting than mine. Go have a wander round it, while I build a new persona.

Meantime, feel free to make recommendations for my new personality, and blog style. What do you like in a blog? This blog? Other blogs?

What does nobody do with their blog, but should?

Three Poems Written Between Berlin and Bristol, November 12th 2007

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Really Something
(I)

I think continually of those who were really something
Creating a small universe every couple of years
Many of which continue to function
Receiving ambassadors, tourists and Vandals
Who, unfamiliar with the concept of stairs,
Walk through the squares, staring into doorways
Entirely unaware of the upper stories.

“It’s alright, but he can’t hold a candle to
Andy McNab” “…Cecelia Ahern.”

Behind them, high and unobserved
A single light, incandescent
Continues to burn.

City, star and satellite.

Stadt, Satellit, und Stern.

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Really Something
(II)

I think continually of those who were really something.
Spontaneously combusting, in a locked room,
Their fat burning, bones thinning
Hair, gums and memories receding
Til suddenly there’s nothing left
But a corpse and a pile of books.

I say goodbye, lock the door.
Settle into the chair.

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Really Something
(III)

I think continually of those who were really something
They hang around, watching me not write
As I sit selfish on a train
And a woman stands, caught between the age
When men stand for beauty, and the age
When men stand for age.

Later, on a plane, I trade my night’s sleep for the poem
And drink a late coffee to sharpen my brain
In the hope of nailing something in the last lines
To justify the day.

Later still, about to land,
I think:
It’s not even a good poem
And I made her stand.

France, Berlin, Plymouth

I've been in France for the past couple of days, working on a really interesting potential stage version of Jude: Level 1. More on that, er, next year probably. It's far, far too early to talk about it now. (But shag it, I'm all excited...)

And after touching down briefly in Berlin, I'll be off to sunny Plymouth, where I read on Tuesday, November 13th (2007), as part of the launch of Short Fiction, a handsome new book/magazine/thing published by Plymouth University Press, and edited by Anthony Caleshu. I've a couple of very, very short pieces in it, one called "Latin Lover" that comes in  at a brisk 100 words exactly, and another called "Three Monkeys", which sprawls over an expansive three hundred words.  More on that launch and reading here...

If you're in the area (that's Plymouth, England, down the left-hand edge of Europe...), it's free, and I gather I'll be reading with Kevin Barry, author of the splendid There Are Little Kingdoms, which just carried off the Rooney Prize. (I hope he reads the one set in the amusement arcade.) Come one, come all.

So I'll try and tell more tales of Berlin porn, answer questions about the Irish language, recommend great books for teenaged boys, and catch up on all the other things I need to do around the website late next week... Enjoy your weekend...

Pornography and Literature

(OK, this one is going to be as short and snappy as a stepped-on daschund...)

I finally finished editing my porn film at seven o'clock this morning, having worked on it all night without a break. Which was great, except the deadline for delivery of the finished edit had been midnight...

But hey, this is a Berlin  porn festival! Transgression is where it is at. BREAK that rule. SPANK that buttock. OK,  DON'T spank that buttock...Deadline? What deadline? It turned out several other film-makers had missed it too.  A couple of phonecalls, and a drop had been arranged. All was well. Then, just trying to output a finished edit took all day (looooong technical story), and I missed two more deadlines. A new record! I am the champion! I finally handed the tape over to Gaia outside Kotbusser Tor U-Bahn station, near midnight, in a scene gloriously reminiscent of any spy film you've ever seen set in Berlin. There had been a lot of urgent phonecalls, changing trains, running up steps, searching the darkness for someone in a specific outfit... then the hurried handover, and away she rushed to put tomorrow's programme together...

So my little film will be shown tomorrow (well, later today...), Friday 26th of October, around 6.15pm, in the Kant Kino 1, on Kant Strasse, as part of Cum2Cut's Kurtzfilmprogramm. It's called The Last Porn Film, it's five minutes long, and I'll tell you more later. All part of the big Berlin Porn Film Festival.

I am stunned and gutted that I'll miss the screening, but it coincides with my reading in Loughrea at the Baffle festival. I console myself with the thought that missing the Berlin festival screening of my porn debut because I'm in Ireland reading from Jude: Level 1 at a distinguished and eccentric literary festival at least shows that I'm wasting my days in interesting ways.

Is that the time? Bed... 

Off to Baffle in Loughrea (and shoot porn in Berlin).

On Friday, October 26th, 2007, I'll be reading at the Baffle literary festival in Loughrea, Co. Galway, Ireland. Baffle (BOWES' ACADEMIC FELLOWSHIP AND FRATERNITY OF LITERARY ESOTERICS) was formed in Bowes-Kennedy pub in Loughrea, back in 1984. The pub is no more, but Baffle, like the universe, continues to expand.

The annual festival is an offshoot of Baffle's regular, year-round, pub-based poetry slam, which has generated five books of poetry.

I'm greatly looking forward to it, and will be wearing a clean shirt especially for the occasion.

Meanwhile, I went out last night, to Club Velvet on Warschauer Strasse. As my friends all know, I hate going out, and never, ever do, because if you go out you have adventures, and things happen, and you don't get any writing done for a week, and I'M BUSY, and I have to wash my hair, and where would world literature be if Shakespeare went out every night, eh?

Sure enough, after about ten minutes I found myself talking to the delightful Tatiana Bazzichelli and the utterly charming Gaia Novati of cum2cut, and next thing I knew, I was signing up to direct an amateur porn film. Bloody typical.

I have four days to shoot and edit a five minute film, and if I do get it done in time, it'll be shown as part of the second Porn Film Festival Berlin. The festival is a very Berlin mixture of art, film, dancing, theory, furrow-browed lectures and dirty sex.

As of now, though I have a camera, I've no cast, no crew, no script, no time, and I can't remember how to use Final Cut Pro. I have, however, shot some deeply erotic footage of the little finger on a woman's right hand. You've got to start somewhere. (Thanks, Anca, for signing the release form!).

Meanwhile, if anyone has any friends in Berlin who want to be kinky indie film stars, or can edit on Final Cut Pro, tell them to mail me in the next three days...

I've had some ideas for it, but the safest thing to say is that it is unlikely to be a normal porn film.

I'll keep you informed.

Author returns, alive, from the Dromineer Literary Festival!

Well, I'm back in Berlin after six days in Ireland. Verrrrrry tired... But happy.

The excuse for the trip was an invitation to read at the Dromineer Literary Festival, on the shore of Lough Derg, in  the heart of Tipperary, and therefore Ireland, and thus the universe. The festival was great, though at several points I wasn't sure if I'd survive it. I spent a good chunk of my childhood only a few miles away from Dromineer, and "The Orphan and the Mob", which I planned to read, is set just up the road and (with its pissed-off priests, pissed-on politicians, rampaging farmers, murderous orphans and burning orphanages) does not perhaps project the image of Tipperary of which Fáilte Ireland approves.

It turned out I was reading alongside Andrew Nugent, a white-haired monk of the order of St Benedict, and Prior at Glenstal Abbey.I wasn't quite sure how a seventy-something senior monk would react to the brutal deaths by coat-hook, boiling lead etc, of the Brothers of Jesus Christ Almighty. But it turned out he had been a trial lawyer before he was a monk, and he writes murder mysteries full of savage killings, so he was fine about it.

We read to over a hundred people (they had to get the emergency chairs out of storage, and wipe the dust off them, always a good sign). I read "The Orphan and the Mob", and it went down... No, I shan't drag out the suspense. It went down REALLY well. The audience got all the jokes and local references, and laughed even more than the audience at Charleston (in distant Sussex, far from the centre of the universe) the previous weekend. It was an advantage that most of those listening in Dromineer were familiar with, say,  Ardcroney, and had sampled its many wonders and delights. So a mention of it wasn't just a name; it summonsed in them beatific visions of the petrol station, the graveyard, the grass growing on the roof of Mick Reddan's house, and that huge rough cylindrical stone that cows scratch against (in the field at the bottom of the hill on the Nenagh side of Ardcrony)...

Great Q&A session afterwards too. Energetic, slightly terrifying, and thus enjoyable. It got off to a fine start when a man in a tweed jacket stood up and said that, as a Cloughjordan farmer, he felt he had to ask what I had against Cloughjordan farmers. I said I'd nothing against them, and that I thought they came out of the story particularly well. Didn't I describe them as sophisticated, and into Radiohead? It was hardly my fault they were beaten to death by orphans.

(Later, in the bar, a woman leaned over and whispered "Sure, that man isn't a Cloughjordan farmer at all. He's a Borrisokane farmer." )

 
 
Afterwards, I signed a reassuringly large number of books. One of the last to come up was a giant red-faced priest, who introduced himself by saying "I am a great admirer, a GREAT admirer, of Eamonn DeValera... and I am the  Priest for Puckane Parish... and I must say..." He leaned in closer, till our noses were nearly touching... "I enjoyed myself enormously! That was marvellous stuff! We're proud of you! Keep it up!"

I signed Father Slattery's book with a trembling hand. A mighty man. His brother, Martin "Speedy" Slattery used to teach me (though what subject I cannot now recall, as I was paying no attention at the time). Education was a simpler business back then. He would hit me with a hurley, and I would threaten to take him to the European Court of Human Rights. Ah, those were the days.

Julian Gough in the Guardian, and at Small Wonder. (Busy week for the lazy lad.)

I wrote a piece in today's Guardian about the increasingly pervy relationship between the short story and the novel. Feel free to read it, comment on it, ignore it, as you wish.

Why was I writing about the short story, you ask, given that I know bugger all about it?

Because on Saturday, September 22nd, at 4.30pm, I'm reading at the Small Wonder festival with James Lasdun, last year's winner of the National Short Story Prize.

Allow me to plug it shamelessly, because it is run by good people, and the Guardian forgot to print the festival dates or website address at the bottom of my article... Small Wonder is the only festival devoted entirely to short stories, and it runs from 19-23 September, at Charleston near Firle, East Sussex (in England, which is part of Europe...)

Their website with all the info is *here*.

Lots of interesting writers will be there: Monica Ali, Lucy Ellmann, Esther Freud, Etgar Keret, James Lasdun, Yiyun Li, Jon Snow, Colm Tóibín, Fay Weldon...

My hot tip for Small Wonder (apart from me and James Lasdun) is Lucy Ellmann and Etgar Keret, 7.30pm on Thursday. Should kick literary ass.

Who Killed Tony Wilson? We Name The Guilty Men.

The splendid Tony Wilson, former head of Factory Records, died on August 10th, aged 57. The death of the man who gave the world Joy Division, New Order, and Happy Mondays, and who built the Haçienda, has been attributed to complications arising from kidney cancer.

 
Nonsense.

 
I blame Tony Wilson's sadly early demise on the sequence of ferocious blows to the head he received from my friends Gareth Allen (the artist) and Phil "The Punk" Rose (the photographer), during a Toasted Heretic gig in the Powerhaüs in London around 1990. (Tony Wilson and some heavy friends were checking us out, after Factory's A&R chief at the time, the extraordinarily nice Phil Saxe, had praised us highly.)

Sadly, only one photo survives from that night (and it's here). Phil and Gareth, to add a little class to the evening,  mingled with the crowd while wearing Roman togas (made from the curtains of their flat in Walthamstow), and fed the crowd grapes. When the grapes ran out, Gareth and Phil began to bang Tony Wilson on the head with a Charles and Di Royal Wedding full-colour souvenir teatray, tastefully adapted by Gareth with felt tip pens so that Charles and Di had swastikas for eyes. (Was a young Bobby Gillespie in the audience and taking thoughtful notes for these Primal Scream lyrics? We shall never know...)

It started out as a quite friendly tapping, and Tony was nervously amused. But soon the Romans were beating Tony Wilson like a gong, putting many dents in the tea tray, bringing him to his knees, while Wilson's extremely heavy minders looked on in tremendous confusion, unsure if this was part of the show, which was already a bit out of hand. (Maybe "out of hand" isn't quite the term. While I was singing "Lost and Found", a girl plunged a hand down the crotch of my skintight pink jumpsuit, and discovered that I wasn't wearing anything else. One of those awkward social moments, where you both hesitate, neither party quite sure what the etiquette is. I kept singing, though my voice may have briefly risen an octave.)

It ended, as did many Toasted Heretic gigs, in confusion.

We did not sign to Factory Records.

Later Gareth, while attempting to mount a bronze lion, fell into a fountain in Trafalgar Square and split his head open. Gareth and Phil wandered off, in their togas, in search of a hospital. We carried the drums and amps back to their place, and wondered would we see them again.

At dawn, Gareth, his soaked and bloodstained toga long lost, arrived home triumphant, having travelled barefoot across London wearing a backless hospital gown which revealed his bum. Protected only by his Virtue, and by Phil in a toga.

Ah yes, in those days we made our own entertainment. So anyway, Gareth and Phil murdered Tony Wilson. A long-forgotten fragment of Royal Wedding Tea-Tray must have shifted a fatal millimetre.

Prison, murder, fork-lift trucks, whisky and milk.

The more eventful life gets, the less time available to blog about the events. This tension is at the heart of blogging: running a well-crafted and frequently updated blog is best suited to a mildly depressed person who hasn't left their  house for a month.

I, as you can probably tell from the long silence, have been cheerful, and out of the house.

Since last I posted, I have been in Her Majesty's Prison, Birmingham,  performed at the Latitude Festival in Suffolk,  passed a few days in a Buddhist retreat centre in Cavan, met up with old friends in Tipperary, Galway, Dublin, Bray, Kildare, London, and Berlin, had interesting conversations with cocaine smugglers, drunken novelists, monks, and marine biologists. I have been awarded a Monaghan GAA medal, been photographed lying on the pavement in front of the GPO on O'Connell Street, and invited to write articles, kiss strangers, and play football. I have peered into the bulk storage tank of a milking parlour, been handed a large Celtic Cross in a Leitrim pub (made by a senior IRA member while interned in the Curragh during World War Two, out of matchsticks taken from the floor of that pub and sent to him by his mother), and fed home-made treacle bread.

I have passed through shrine rooms, paddling pools and X-ray machines. I have looked up Damon Albarn's nose. I have chatted with the delightful James Franco (Harry Osborn in the Spiderman films). I have failed to answer several hundred emails. I have stagedived at  three readings. I have read, written, and edited. I've had an article published. I have had a novel reprinted. I have been reviewed, interviewed, and body searched. I have lost my temper. I have brushed my teeth.

I have officially launched a novel in Filthy McNasties pub in Islington, signed hardbacks all day in a warehouse in Littlehampton, and tried to track down mysterious parcels that were sent to me in Berlin while I was away, and returned by Deutsch Post to their mysterious senders.

I have gone speeding in the tallest forklift truck in the world. 

I have drunk strong whisky (Laphroaig quarter cask, 48% alcohol by volume when bottled, barrier filtered, single Islay malt), and used strong language. I've drunk milk, and spoken mildly.

I have picked a fantasy football team, and read the poetry of Matthew Sweeney, and of T. S. Eliot, and of Dr. Seuss.

Friends of mine have married, sold cattle, broken their noses, and given evidence in murder trials. 

I have slept (but not enough, not enough) in tents, five star hotels and fields. On couches, floors, beds,  futons, and grass.

I've watched the Atlantic advance up the beaches of Salthill, and liquidity retreat from the markets of the world. 

I'll try to post something about some of it sometime but the future is arriving faster than I can process the past.