They Didn't Teach Music In My School

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Speaking of Toasted Heretic has reminded me of a small but annoying itch I'd been meaning to scratch. Here goes.

 

The report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse has finally been published in Ireland. It is 2,000 pages long. It tells us that the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland (which ran most Irish schools until very recently, including the one I attended, the Christian Brothers, Nenagh), systematically sexually and physically abused the children in its care, particularly the boys. In particular the "industrial schools" run by the religious orders were tiny gulags. I have been reading, with mild annoyance, responses to this. John Banville's, in the New York Times, is typical:


"Never tell, never acknowledge, that was the unspoken watchword. Everyone knew, but no one said.

Amid all the reaction to these terrible revelations, I have heard no one address the question of what it means, in this context, to know. Human beings — human beings everywhere, not just in Ireland — have a remarkable ability to entertain simultaneously any number of contradictory propositions. Perfectly decent people can know a thing and at the same time not know it. Think of Turkey and the Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century, think of Germany and the Jews in the 1940s, think of Bosnia and Rwanda in our own time.

Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state, ruled — the word is not too strong — by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours.

We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today."

 

Hmmm. "Everyone knew, but no one said." Below are the lyrics of a Toasted Heretic song, released in Ireland (on vinyl and cassette) as part of the Smug EP in 1990 (well within Banville's definition of that "closed state"). The song is called "They Didn't Teach Music in My School". Its real title is, of course (as it should be in any good pop song), the key line of the chorus, "Sliding Up Seamus". However, we foolishly believed that it was a good song, that it was - in as much as a pop song can be - an important song, and that the national broadcaster RTÉ might actually play it, so we made life easier for them by giving it a title they could actually read out on air. They, of course, didn't play it.

 

 

They Didn't Teach Music In My School.

 

"When your calls go uncollected and the neighbours have electrified the fence

Then will you start thinking, will it sink in, will you exercise some sense?

Everybody hates you, thinks it's great you got the flu, do you know why?

It's because you're such a shite we'll laugh all night with sheer delight the day you die


Your hand inside your habit, you would grab it and emit a gasping noise

As you walked in your black cassock past the showers and slapped the buttocks of the boys

 

 

But we got out alive

We're rich, we're famous

And you're inside

For sliding up Seamus

 

 

In our religion classes you would glare through black-rimmed glasses down the back

And summon up the sinner who'd regurgitated dinner, to be smacked

Vomiting in terror was a tactical error, he'd find

As you lowered his trews and began to bruise his behind

Picture our joy when you were caught inside a boy behind the bike shed

Oh summer holidays forever, and much better weather, when you're dead.

 

 

But we got out alive

We're rich, we're famous

And you're still inside

For sliding up Seamus..."

 

 

 

Of course, pop culture never gets much credit for saying anything of any importance, though it often speaks truth well ahead of high culture. John Banville, who is an excellent writer (though of the kind of novel I don't like), and by all accounts a very nice, decent man, appears to be speaking for Ireland when he tells the readers of the New York Times "Everyone knew, but no one said." "What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours." "We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today."

 

Well, it's not MY bleedin' shame, mate. "Sliding Up Seamus" was being played live in towns across Ireland, and being cheered to the rafters by pupils and ex-pupils of the Christian Brothers, twenty years ago, before it was even recorded. And my friends and I officially released our report, on vinyl and cassette, 19 years before the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse released its report.

 

And, of course, being a disposable piece of pop, existing only in analogue recordings on vinyl and cassette, on an indie label,  before the internet, it has vanished almost entirely now. I don't even have a copy myself. But just to prove it existed, here is a rotten recording, with terrible sound, of a live performance of "They Didn't Teach Music In My School" - which we may as well officially rename "Sliding Up Seamus", now that it doesn't matter any more - in Róisín Dubh, Galway, on the Now In New Nostalgia Flavour Tour.

 

 

(The actual vinyl version was unusually well recorded, for a Toasted Heretic song, and sounded darn good. Renouncing our 4-track Tascam 244 for the first time, we recorded the Smug EP on 16-track in West One, with the great Pat Neary engineering.)

A final point: The song, rather optimistically, places the chap in the black cassock behind bars. In that, "Sliding Up Seamus" was less a description of the Irish present in the late 1980s, when it was written, and more a projection of a possible future, a wish-fulfillment exercise written to cheer up some friends of mine, who had suffered under the regime, and give them a laugh. No priests or Christian Brothers were getting jail sentences back when that song was written. But it is slightly sad to be reading this on Wikipedia, twenty years later:


"The report itself cannot be used for criminal proceedings (in part because the Christian Brothers successfully sued the commission to prevent its members from being named in the report) and victims say they feel "cheated and deceived" by the lack of prosecutions,[18] and "because of that this inquiry is deeply flawed, it's incomplete and many might call it a whitewash."[17]"

Goats! Trains! Aeroplanes! Pet Shop Boys!

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I've finally heard The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble, and it's fab! Hurrah! Hugh Quarshie is a splendid Ibrahim Bihi, utterly real and grounded. And Sam O'Mahony-Adams as Jude is a terrific comic foil to Quarshie. The BBC economics correspondent, Stephanie Flanders, really threw herself into it, and her interviews from Hargeisa Goat Market are a delight. (I love creating such unstable moments, where the real and the fictional are perfectly mixed. A real BBC correspondent fiercely interviewing a fictional character about theoretical goats... Bliss!)

The director Di Speirs did a great job making all these elements, and performances, work together. A tricky task, mixing actors and non-actors, present tense and flashback, thoughts and actions, and keeping it all clear and artistically coherent. And I'm very happy with David's sound design... Goats! Trains! Aeroplanes! Pet Shop Boys! Beautifully blended.

 

That distant wind you hear is my great sigh of relief.

The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble

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Well, my first radio play, The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble, went out on BBC Radio 4 today, but my highly strung, indeed neurotic, computer wouldn't let me listen to it. I gather it is available for the next week here, so I'll try and listen to it tomorrow. But if any of you heard it, tell me what you thought, I'd be very interested... My parents heard it, in a shed in Tipperary (don't ask), and thought it was marvellous, but they are biased.

 

If any of you are BBC listeners looking for the original short story, it is here.

 

It will also be appearing as part of Jude: Level 2 later this year...

There are worse jobs

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Oh, all right, sometimes the writing life IS glamourous. A bit.

 

My last day in Dubrovnik started with a cappuccino at a café near the Ploče gate end of the Stradun (the main, white marble street of the old town). There, sitting in the sun, I did an hour of work on the filmscript. Then a  break, a stretch, a move into the shade... I ordered a coffee with cream, in Croatian (kafa sa slagom) and got an enthusiastic and unironic "Bravo!" from the waitress, which made me blush (and think, hmmm, the average tourist mustn't try very hard here). I did an hour's work on my Prospect column.

 

Then I wandered the hundred yards or so to the Gradska Kavana (the City Café), where I was due to meet the wonderful Croatian actor Niko Kovač. Everybody knows him, so the waitress led me over to him (we'd only ever talked on the phone before). Soon we were joined on the terrace by those I love, and we all drank more coffee and tea and talked of disgraceful and amusing things. Niko is recovering from throat cancer, and thus of course talked more than all of us, pressing on a valve in his throat to do so. Splendid stories of Tom Stoppard, of Peter Brooks,  of legendary performances of Chekhov in the former Yugoslavia, of doing Beckett during the war as Yugoslavia ripped apart, in a blacked out theatre in the rubble of Dubrovnik. The tales were enhanced if anything by the whispering, hissing delivery.

 

Then later an idyllic couple of hours drinking on the cliffs outside the city walls, at Café Buža (well, one of two such cafés... Buža just means a hole in the wall...) Down the steps to the sea with the ones I love, and a quick swim in the Adriatic... I hadn't thought to bring swimming togs, but so what.

 

I looked back, over turquoise water, at the towering medieval walls, nougat in the sunlight. Hard to believe that, during the most recent war, REM were in the charts... (it was the worst of times - Vanilla Ice, Color Me Badd, Michael Bolton, Bryan bloody Adams at number one forever with (Everything I Do) I Do It For You)... I  couldn't help but remember, as I swam, that in 1991 people swam here even in December, just to stay clean, because the shelling had cut off the water in the city.

 

There are worse jobs. There are worse lives.

Radioactivity

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I should mention a couple of things that are coming up on the radio in the UK and Ireland...

 

I'll be one of the people talking about Chekhov on RTE Radio 1, on the Arts Show, on Tuesday night.

 

And (far more exciting for me, as I am thoroughly sick of the sound of myself), BBC Radio 4 will be broadcasting The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble as a lunchtime play on Friday,  May 15th. I haven't heard it yet (I finished the script at 3am on the day I left Berlin for the Balkans, and it was recorded in London while I've been here), but the cast are terrific, and I'm greatly looking forward to hearing what they did with it.

 

Cast and info here: http://www.comedy.org.uk/guide/radio/great_hargeisa_goat_bubble/

 

More on that next week, but I thought I'd mention it well in advance. It should be available live, streamed, worldwide, from the BBC and I'd imagine it'll be archived for some time afterwards.

Carnival in Budva

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Well, the floods finally overwhelmed us, and we fled to Budva... One of the nice things about being a Tipperary lad is that, no matter where you go, you have a global Mafia of excellent cousins who will aid and assist you in times of affliction. Thus a splendid time was had in Budva, thanks chiefly to my cousin Colm Mitchell, who runs the Irish bar in the old town, Chest O'Sheas. (Yes, there is a story behind that name, but I cannot tell it to you...)

We ate, we drank, we Carnivalled in splendid feathered masks. Photos may - or may not - be posted when I get back to Berlin and run them past the lawyers. Much film script got written, over many cappuccinos, each morning in Hemingway's. And we had two of the most enjoyable meals I've ever had. The first was on our first night, in the huge and atmospheric Jadran, on the seafront. Grilled squid, octopus salad, spuds and Swiss chard. Stunning domestic wines, whose names I, shamefully, do not recall. (A red as rich as port... a white as crisp as apples...) Extraordinary singing from the vocal quartet who drifted from table to table, singing a glorious mixture of songs, from Serbian Orthodox religious stuff to Stand By Me. And a waiter who really should run for president. (His name is entirely comprised of those syllables which you can write in Cyrillic but not in English, so I am not brave enought to try putting it down here.)

 

The second great meal was in Knez, in the old town, on our last night. The restaurant is so intimate (three tables, and the kitchen's in the corner), that you are in severe danger of joining the family by the end of the evening and never leaving. Petar was both chef and maître d', welcoming guests with one hand while doing extraordinary things to fish with the other. A remarkable performance from a top chap. (And he gave us free strawberries and biscuits! Hero!)

 

To set your mind at ease, we had some rotten meals elsewhere, but I shall not name and shame. These two really stood out (and were of course the two recommendations Colm made... run to him! Seek his wisdom, oh visitor to Budva!)

 

Anyway, that idyll has now ended, and a new one begun in Dubrovnik... more on that later, perhaps... Got to order some coffee and write in the sunshine now...

The Glamourous Life

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The blog is, and will remain, quiet for a bit, as I am currently in Montenegro, writing a film script. This sounds far, far more glamourous than it is - I spent yesterday standing on a toilet seat, gingerly using a long-handled dustpan to scoop raw sewage off the flooded floor. Montenegran plumbers are fierce, hardy men, who know that life is brutal and meaningless. Their plumbing reflects their philosophy of life.

The nearest internet connection is in Herceg Novi, some considerable distance from the small village in which I pace, drink coffee, and scribble.

We shall speak on my return...

Toodle-pip...

Covering Will Young's Buttocks With Butter

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Will Young covered in butter

Well, that was a splendidly enjoyable reading in Kaffee Burger on Wednesday night. A lovely crowd, and excellent questions afterwards (except for Clare's one about bondage). One is always delighted with a crowd that contains both one's parents and Momus. (Giving the evening the air of a disturbing teenage dream.) I do like the way you can stay on in Kaffee Burger after the reading to catch the band, then the disco, and dance till dawn. (Though I wussed out, and only danced till 3.30am.)

 

I have just been contributing my opinion to a row on the Guardian's Books Unlimited about Will Young's fitness to judge the National Short Story Prize. I may as well cut 'n' paste my contribution in here too... Feel free to head over, and add your own thoughts...


I'm probably slightly biased in favour of the National Short Story Prize, as I won it in its second year.

But Alison, I think you are completely wrong when you say

"What's the point of having a literary prize if it isn't judged by someone with some kind of literary knowledge/qualifications?"

Wrong on two levels. The prize isn't judged by "someone", it is judged by a team of five. It's the overall balance of the team that you have to consider. I hope you agree that a team of, say, five professional semioticians would be very high in literary knowledge and qualifications. But they'd make for a lousy, unbalanced team of judges.

A short story contains a lot more than just literature. I note that the Guardian have linked, just below these comments, to an account of my 2007 win, headed "'Tipperary Star Wars' wins National Short Story Prize". Now, the team of judges in my particular year included the magnificent A.S. Byatt. I'm sure she got my references to Yeats, and to Voltaire's Candide. But I have no idea whether or not she got my story's references to, say, the Eurovision Song Contest, or knew what I was on about in lines like - "A brief chant went up from the Young Farmers in the Mosh Pit: "Who put the ball in the England net?" Older farmers, further back, added bass to the reply of "Houghton! Houghton!""

Yet I do know that the judges read and reread the stories, discussed them, and were unanimous in their final decision. And I believe a good range in age, sex, class, nationality, and experience of both life and literature can make for a richer collective decision.

This year, Margaret Drabble, for example, who was born before World War Two kicked off, needs a great deal of balancing in certain important areas. So, of course, does Will Young - but between them, there are very few references that they won't be able to explain to each other.

Last of all, but very important; a short story is not designed to be analysed by professionals. It is created to be read by human beings. If a short story, after several rereadings and much discussion with Margaret Drabble and others, still fails to make a connection with an intelligent young man who has read Ulysses, then it has on some level failed.

Will Young is OK by me as a judge (and no, I've no story entered this year, so I'm not covering his buttocks in butter with any selfish intent).

However, if you want a tip for a potential future judge from the pop world who likes his short fiction literary: I met Morrissey in a hotel in Galway when I was a teenager (long story). I happened to be holding a copy of James Joyce's Dubliners. "Dubliners!" he exclaimed. "Oh, you've read it?" I said. "Read it? I have it tattooed all over my body," he said.

I'm reading in Kaffee Burger on Wednesday

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Just a reminder that I'm reading in Kaffee Burger, on Torstrasse, this Wednesday (March 25th 2009), at 9pm... Five euro in, and there's a band on after (a New England electrofolk trio called Erving).

I will extend to you the offer I just extended to my Berlin friends by email: If you'd like to come and you're broke this week, give me a shout and I'll try and get you in free... (There's an "Email me" button lurking somewhere on the sidebar.)

(Er, this offer is going to collapse into ignominious chaos, failure and bitter recrimination if more than three of you ask. But, this being Literature, that's not very likely...)

Not sure what I'm going to read... I might read The Orphan and the Mob, because it's won prizes, and it works well live, and I haven't read it here before. But it is also the opening section of Jude: Level 1, so some of you will be bored sick of it already.

Anyway, more information here.


And here.

 

And there's a charming picture of the magnificent venue here (it's not known as the Taj Mahal of Torstrasse for nothing).

See you down the mosh pit...

Do Not Approach This Man. He Has Just Finished Writing A Novel, And May Be Dangerous.

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I have finished writing Jude: Level 2. Thus the depraved and hideous face you see above, exhausted from months of writing and rewriting. (Twenty drafts of the toughest sections... though of course by the last few drafts you're just tweaking, or - to use the more accurate technical term favoured by the serious novelist - disappearing up your own hole). Exhausted, in particular, from the final weeks of staying up till 5am every night, with no days off or weekends. By the end I wasn't entirely sure what year it was. (1987, by the look of the shirt and stubble.) I look like a released prisoner, bewildered by his freedom. Which is appropriate, because I am.

 

 

With three days to go, I developed stigmata. The skin on the backs of my hands began to break down as I wrote. I was quite pleased when I noticed. Oh you know you've given it everything, by God, when you develop stigmata in the final furlong. You haven't cheated the book by selfishly holding anything in reserve, for yourself, or those you love, or the future.

 

In fact I finished on Oscar night, but I've been too knackered to post until now. When I finally, finally, finally finished, at 5.30am, and hit send, and it vanished from my screen in a swirling stream of zeros and ones down the phonelines to my agent and my publisher, I ran out into the street and danced and sang and sprinted through the melting slush.

 

If New York is the city that never sleeps, then Berlin is the city that doesn't have to get up in the morning (because it doesn't have a job), so there's always something on. And so I ran, singing, around the corner to the Babylon Kino, where they were still screening the Oscars, live from LA - nine timezones away - on the big screen. I arrived in the middle of Kate Winslet's acceptance speech, stayed till the end, and talked to friends afterwards. There was a great buzz in the cinema, as the crew for Spielzeugland / Toyland were there, and it had won an Oscar for Best Short Film earlier in the evening, to mighty cheers and screams. So, between them snaffling an Oscar and me finishing my book, there was a bunch of very happy people jumping up and down on the pavement on Rosa-Luxemberg Strasse at 6.30am, as the birds on the roof of the People's Theatre across the road cleared their throats and thought about singing.

 

Spent the last few days recovering, and dealing with the backlog of a life that has been on hold for months. Visited the doctor with my stigmata (they are beginning to heal). Today was the best day yet, I had a brilliant plan and I carried it out: I stayed in bed all day, dozing, reading, drinking coffee, and eating chocolate.

 

So, now, back to work. Radio play. Screenplay. Poetry. Life.

...And now I'm reading in Kaffee Burger, on March 25th (...2009)

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Well, my first reading in Berlin went so well that I'm going to do another one, dash it. And this time my Berlin friends will get more than a day's notice.

I'll be reading in Kaffee Burger, on Torstrasse (just around the corner from my house! Why, my butler and pantry staff will be able to attend!) on Wednesday March 25th 2009. That's the regular monthly English language reading sponsored by Ex-Berliner, the rather funky English language magazine. The evening will kick off at 9pm...

I love Kaffee Burger, and have been to some great readings there (in both English and German), so I'm delighted to be invited. Kaffee Burger used to be the home of the semi-underground DDR poetry scene, and not all the stains have been cleaned from the ceiling. (Nor have they bothered to remove the old DDR price list, which still quotes you the one, fixed, national price for a cup of coffee across the socialist paradise. Doesn't CHARGE it, sadly, just quotes it.)

Great, great place, and host to some mighty club nights too (it's still home to Wladimir Kaminer's legendary Russian Disco).  And do stop to admire the building itself - a superb example of East Berlin architecture, in which the pre-wall-fall DDR aesthetic (a knackered concrete building made with sand and no cement) has been enhanced by the best of post-wall-fall Western urban street art (illiterate graffiti and some dogshit).

East Berlin architecture at its finest

I'm reading in Berlin on Saturday

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Phil Rose took this picture of me in Berlin a while back

I'm reading a new piece from my next book (Jude: Level 2), this Saturday, January 24th 2009, at 4pm, in the Johann Rose in Kreutzberg. Why? Because the magnificent Nikola Richter asked me. Only a fool would say no, and my mamma didn't raise no fools. (Her Wikipedia entry is in German, but here she is in English.) I gather I'll be reading in the Hinterzimmer Salon (in the back room... I'll be everybody's darling...)

There will be cake. (In fact, I am being paid in cake.) This is, bizarrely, my first reading in Berlin. And I've never read this piece live before, so it may suck. But it may not. Anyway, it's free, so no whinging. Here's the address:

 

CafeBar & Lounge
Johann Rose
Forster Str. 57
10999 Berlin
U1 Görlitzer Bahnhof

Tel.: 0049 (0) 30- 55 10 35 90
news@johannrose.de

 

 

Elis will also be reading... Heck, read all about it in German (the key phrase is "Eintritt Frei"!)

 

Herzliche Einladung zum ersten Hinterzimmer-Salon im Johann Rose im neuen Jahr!

Come visit!

24. Januar: Wild komisch

Bei Kuchen und Kaffee und Musik vom Plattenteller geht es im Januarsalon am Samstag, den 24.1., darum, wie man eigentlich das Lachen in Texte hineinschreibt. Die Gäste sind:

Julian Gough ("Juno and Juliet", "Jude: Level 1"), Gewinner des BBC National Short Story Awards 2007, Sänger und Texter der literarischen und legendären irischen Band "Toasted Heretic", die mit "Galway and Los Angeles" einen Top Ten-Hit in Irland erzielte. Hier kann man erfahren, was er über den satirischen, lyrischen Autor Clive James denkt: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10530 Julians eigene Webseite findet man hier: http://www.juliangough.com/


Und Elis, Mitglied der Berliner Lesebühne LSD (Liebe statt Drogen), die jeden Dienstag im Lokal auftritt. Berühmt sind unter anderem seine McGyver-Geschichten bei der leider nicht mehr existenten Lesebühne O-Ton-Ute. Er liest neue Texte und vielleicht singt er auch eines seiner "Lieder für Kühe". Mehr hier: http://www.myspace.com/eliscbihn und hier http://www.liebestattdrogen.de/

 

Eintritt frei, Hutspende erbeten

----

Eine gemeinsame Lesereihe von Nikola Richter, René Hamann im Johann Rose, http://www.johannrose.de

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

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I've measured out my life with this image I keep borrowing from Marcelo Souza too.

People who drink coffee see and hear things that aren't there, says a new study.

Well, duh. Of course they do. They're called novelists.

Anyway, here's an article in the Independent on the report, and here's an extract:

"People who consume coffee and other caffeinated products are more likely to have hallucinations, according to a study published today.

The more caffeine students had, the more likely they were to hear voices, smell things and see things that were not there, researchers at Durham University found. They suggested that increased levels of the hormone cortisol caused by caffeine could be behind the link."

Bad science is forever with us. Next time I hope they'll obey best practice, control properly for bias, and ask the students how many of them sip their cappuccino while trying to write their first novel, play, or epic poem.

 

T.S. Eliot put in best, in the best poem of the last century, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

 

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room."

 

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to sink a pot of Lavazza Rosa, and hallucinate the last chapter of Jude: Level 2.

How To Patronise Writers Properly

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Homer's brain. Which is slightly bigger than mine. (This picture's pirated so thoroughly that I couldn't track down a credit. Anyone know who did it? One of Groening's peeps, I assume. Kudos to you, unknown worker ant, labouring anonymously for our pleasure in a cruel and hostile digiverse.)

I think a lot about the future of the book. So imagine! my! delight! when I stumbled on The Institute for the Future of the Book, a think tank who do nothing but think about the future of the book.  While lying in the bath, eating chocolate, and sipping a latte macchiato through a straw. I hope.

 

Their blog,  if:book, ponders a bunch of good stuff.

 

OK, I didn't really stumble on it. I got a Google Alert saying they'd mentioned my New York Times piece, and I clicked through. But once there, I stayed for ages, wandering around the site. I hugely enjoyed a tremendously thought-provoking interview with Helen De Witt (author of The Last Samurai, and Your Name Here). It couldn't have provoked my thoughts more if it'd poked them with a stick.

Best thing is to just quote a big chunk of it. Here she is on the idiotic and inefficient way the publishing industry, as currently set up, makes money for authors. (Do I agree with her? If I agreed with her any more, I'd be her):


"Well, the way it works is, you try to sell a very large number of physical objects, collecting a dollar or two off each one for the author – from people you never contact again.

I once knew a senior partner in a Wall Street firm who loved Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover. He talked at length about the wonderfulness of this book, the character of the Collector, the general brilliance. He was making $1 million or so a year. Of which Andrew Wylie, Sontag's agent, had cleverly managed to garner a couple of bucks for Sontag. There was no structure in place to encourage this ardent fan to, say, sponsor Sontag's travel expenses, offer Sontag six months' writing time at his vacation home in Maine, buy Sontag a new car, who knows.

This is deeply baffling. One of the problems for a fundraiser is that it's hard to raise undedicated funds. Good fundraising copy often focuses on an individual; you excite the donor's sympathy for Precious, who walks 10km twice a day to go to school, and then the donors all want to buy books, school uniform and a bicycle for Precious. If you're not careful with the wording you could find yourself under a legal obligation to send half the take from the appeal to Precious. And you hauled in all this money and goodwill for someone donors had never heard of before, with a single page of copy. It takes five minutes to read, and you're sweating blood to draft something that will get people to spend the five minutes. Whereas.

When people read a book they typically spend a minimum of a couple of hours on it. Sometimes they read it at a single sitting; sometimes they live with it for weeks. Sometimes they forget it – but sometimes it stays in the mind for years, sometimes it saves the reader from suicide, sometimes it changes the reader's life. So it has the power to make a much stronger connection with the reader than a little read-and-toss mailshot – but the strength of this connection does not translate into extra time for the writer to write.

Writers spend a lot of time getting in each other's way. There are a few places that offer residencies – normally, disruptively, places that have a lot of other writers and artists also in residence. But there are plenty of readers like my Wall Street lawyer, people with second and third homes they never have time to visit – and even the most highpowered agents never think of encouraging those readers to give the freedom of silence to writers they admire. Agents go after big advances – which means a writer does a roadshow to buy silence somewhere down the line. It's done this way because this is the way it's done. It doesn't have to be done this way; if it were done a different way, writers would write better books in less time.

So, to revert to the role of the Internet in all this: the Internet has the power to reduce the amount of time writers have to trade for legitimacy. It has the power to change readers' relationship to writers. If a book (or a blog, or a web comic) changed your life, why not buy its author a bicycle? Or a goat? Or a bottle of wine? Why not offer its author six off-season months in your summer cottage on the Cape?

Those look to me to be likelier ways forward than for writers to pay the rent by selling PDFs online."

 

That's Helen De Witt. Much more of that interview here. Send her a bicycle, a red rose, and champagne this instant.

 

Oh wait. There's no mechanism in place to do that. Bummer.

 

I've been saying this for years. We need a global patron/artist connecting tool, and the internet can do that. Look what rich people waste money on, in its absence. Hedge funds they don't understand. Overpriced condos in the hurricane corridor. Or they give it to Bernie Madoff, and he spends half on gold taps for his dog's bathroom, and gives the rest to the rich sucker he met last month, pretending it's December's "investment profits".

Far better that some of the rich give some of their spare cash to the writers they really believe in, to write. And if the writer does come up with something that's remembered long after they're both dead, what greater glory than being remembered as the patron of a great piece of art? Harriet Shaw Weaver will be remembered long after her rich contemporaries are forgotten.

So, if anyone wants to pay my rent while I finish Jude: Level 2, mail me.

Happy New Year

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Back home in Berlin, and sick as a dog. My gang came down with a selection-box of diseases over the Christmas in Ireland. Returning half-conscious to Berlin - coughing and hawking our way through airports, train stations, cafés and public toilets - we spread our plagues in a mighty swathe across Europe. So if civilisation is consequently snuffed out, sorry about that.

 

(The Plain People of the Internet: Ah! Is that a rare reference there to the five wives and forty children he is rumoured to  have stashed away in Berlin? Make a note...)

 

So on a human level, I and all I love start 2009 utterly banjaxed. But as a writer (far more important, natch), my year has got off to a nice start. The New York Times has just printed a piece by me. The piece is probably funnier if you have read all of US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's official bailout statements over the past six months. (But, you know, don't. It's too high a price to pay to get a gag.)

 

I'll put it up on the site here, once the New York Times has had a fair run at it. But meanwhile here's their version. They even commissioned a cartoon from R. O. Blechman, which is a heck of an honour. (Blechman is seventy-eight now, and won an Emmy for his animated film of Stravinsky and Ramuz's theatre thingy, The Soldier's Tale.)

 

Oh, and a happy, happy, HAPPY, HAPPY New Year to you all.

 

(The eloquent photo above is borrowed from PawsAroundChicago.com. They give pets lifts. Oh you laugh and call it decadence, but it is only through such - not entirely necessary, yet welcome - innovations that civilization advances. I don't know the name of the photographer. A haunting picture, suffused with empathy and a deep understanding of suffering, it is possible it is a self portrait.)

Why not the life?

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I'm writing a lot lately. (More on that soon…) It's enjoyable. Tiring. But it means I'm too busy to blog the way I like to blog (in long, rambling meditations on Christ knows what). So here's someone older and wiser than me to keep you happy, or miserable. This is Jack Gilbert, from The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1. He was 80 when he said this, back in 2005, and renting a room in a friend's house in Northampton, Massachusetts.

 

The interviewer, Sarah Fay, asked him “What, other than yourself, is the subject of your poems?”


"Those I love. Being. Living my life without being diverted into things that people so often get diverted into. Being alive is so extraordinary I don't know why people limit it to riches, pride, security–all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can't see anything from a car. It's moving too fast. People take vacations. That's their reward–the vacation. Why not the life? Vacations are second-rate. People deprive themselves of so much of their lives–until it's too late. Though I understand that often you don't have a choice."

 

A note on the images: they are taken from the first solo exhibition in Europe of the Tokyo-based artists Exonemo, hosted in the Basel gallery [plug.in]. The piano and tape recorder are part of an installation called UN-DEAD-LINK, in which Sembo Kensuke and Yae Akaiwa from Exonemo modified the computer game Half-Life2 and connected its output to a piano upstairs (and to a sewing machine, paper-shredder, music turntable, some lamps...) Each death in the game turns on a machine. The murdered mouse is taken from the Exonemo film  DanmatsuMouse...

Pigs and Poems

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Below is a guest posting by the American poet James P. Lenfestey. He knows a lot about pigs, and a lot about poetry. I'd go so far as to say, he taught me everything I know about stealing pigs. Sadly, he only taught me it after I'd stolen them...

"Frankly, Julian -- that was an unconvincing pignapping -- an activity with a long and honorable list of common practices in my part of the world.  Best techniques, which you amateurishly missed: under cover of NIGHT, you dolt!  Then- cover the eyes!  Throw a sack over the entire body.  While they gently sleep, you fool!  The next step frankly may be beyond you -- no reflection on the fairly slight, if energetic, frame revealed in the video.  But you gotta PICK THAT SUCKER UP!  Perhaps your Jeeves is beefy."

 

Yep, Jim is a tough critic. But a good poet and editor. And I know some of you write poems - don't deny it! So I thought I'd post his invitation to submit work to an anthology he's editing. But before I do, one last word of warning from Jim:


"...Make clear to all the sausage versifiers out there that I demand and accept only very high quality verse -- no manure, this is a serious enterprise which will be turned into a serious book to be purchased with real money by serious people interested in the soul and story and the smile, as well as the body, of the pig.  And I am a vicious editor, a veritable feral boar, biting fearlessly.  Some of the best poets alive, and several dead, are already feeding at the trough.  PAYMENT IS IN PRAISE (and maybe a copy of the book)."


So here's the official invite. Pass it on to any quality pig poets of your acquaintance...

 

 

Soo-eee! -- Call for pig poems for anthology


Hey.  Got any poems about pigs?  I'm working this month on an anthology, SOME PIG, to be published in early 2009 by Red Dragonfly Press. 

Right now the anthology contains poems by Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Ruth Schwartz, David Lee, Carol Bly, Bill Holm, Martin Espada, Robert Hedin, Scott King, Jim Lenfestey.

If you have 1-3 poems you think appropriate, send to me asap.  Should any be accepted, a seriously selective process, you will receive one copy of the book as payment, and be damn happy about it,  as we do this for love -- of pigs, mankind's true friend, who take us lightly, feed us copiously, and nourish our sense of justice and its opposite.  Your other good works will of course be credited in brief bios.

Jim Lenfestey, Editor
SOME PIG, Red Dragonfly Press
***
James P. Lenfestey
TURNING 40 PRODUCTIONS
1833 Girard Ave. So.
Minneapolis, MN 55403
cell: 612-730-7435
www.coyotepoet.com

I'm in London this weekend, for the Battle of Ideas

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Almost forgot to mention... I'll be chatting about writers and cities at the Battle of Ideas in London on Saturday.

There's going to be a short film, Kolkata City of Literature, directed by Soumyak Kanti De Biswas and Tanaji Dasgupta, followed by a discussion with Professor Swapan Chakravorty, Gerry Feehily, and me.

The chat (or battle)  is called Text and the City: what is a city of literature?, and will be chaired by Tiffany Jenkins. For more on exactly what it is, where it is, and when we kick off, click here.