Portobello Books: Comment

Goodbye Isla da Fuzeta

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:58:00 +0000

It’s a small thing. It’s only where I come to write. It isn’t my home; it’s a home. Nevertheless, it might be gone by now.

This weekend in Southern Portugal the storms were so bad that a little of the island I sometimes live on, ‘went’. Alert the world: a little bit of Portugal has gone missing.

THE STORMS ON THE NEWS

News crews came over on Monday. We tried to hoist gas fridges and beds onto boats, and out, the same day. The sea kept coming in. It has dredged a new channel through Armona Island. It’s not all gone, and some houses remain. Of course these are ‘houses’ built out of wood, rock and whatever was found lying around 100 years ago. There’s shell and rope in my walls, and yes, for now, it’s still standing. It’s surrounded by sea, though. It’s also surrounded by other wooden houses bobbing about in the grey water like buoys, and last night as I slept in the town, thunder and lighting told me it wasn’t over yet.

brass bed

I came to Armona Island – Isla da Fuzeta – as a teenager. I’d sleep out there with friends. I had my first kiss and fumble on the white sand. A friend’s father once told me not to swim in the open sea at night. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It’s feeding time,’ he replied, and wagged his stump of a finger at me. I saw my first whale in the Ria – the inlet of water on the other side of the island. Over the years and in other storms I’ve walked from one end of the Armona sand bar to the other. Beach combing, I’ve found: a huge (and dead) leatherback turtle, a pair of louvered doors, the end of a brass bed, and lots of single shoes.

Beach combing, I’ve found: a huge (and dead) leatherback turtle, a pair of louvered doors, the end of a brass bed, and lots of single shoes.

My next novel is set on the island and I wonder if lived experience will alter the fiction?

This end of Armona has poshed up over the years. Tourists have meant a new shack-café, and, last year: parasols. It’s a working island, though: fishermen dominate, and there are French-owned oyster beds outside our door. I have a little rowboat, my father named it after my first novel – Happy Accidents. I’d row in the Ria with ‘Happy’ on one side and ‘Accidents’ on the other. I was slightly embarrassed; but the rowboat has gone.

And now? I have no idea. What will the fishermen do? What will the aqua taxi man do? Families have lost homes they’ve had for generations. ‘It’s the force of nature, you can’t do anything about that,’ my friend said. He was standing by his cracked house in his waterproofs, staring out at the grinding sea.

Is There Anybody Out There ?

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:39:00 +0000

Writing is a solitary business. For six years I’ve been (pretty much) alone in a blue room with a screen and occasional pen. I’ve yelled at the dogs, ‘Shut up!’ I’ve needed complete silence. That’s strange because Diamond Star Halo is a novel that is not only riddled with music, it was born of music – my love for certain singers, bands, and the tracks that suckled me. These are tracks that suckled generations.

Bowie’s Five Years and Gram Parson’s She are two of the best short stories I’ve ever heard.

Yesterday on Twitter (I’m trying) a musician asked me if I listened to music as I wrote. The answer was no. I wish I could. I simply can’t write and listen at the same time. Each takes all my energy, all of my attention. I don’t seem to have the knack of letting one bleed into the other. Both stun me –I’m a rabbit in the headlights. I’m equally stunned at how some writers do write to music, whatever the genre. Maybe it’s because I see certain melodies as memories, and certain songs as stories. For me, Bowie’s Five Years and Gram Parson’s She are two of the best short stories I’ve ever heard.

Gram Parsons

Diamond Star Halo is out now and it belongs to the reader not to me, and so I’m out of the blue room (for a short while). As I blink in the light, I see that the novel does have another life, and so there is more work to do, but it’s fun work because at last I can turn the volume up.

Diamond Star Halo is not just riddled with music – it’s riddled with new songs. I wrote these songs and I’m no songwriter. My father was. I wrote these songs easily because they belong to my fictional band Tequila – seven golden brothers and a hung-lipped girl called Jenny, all the way from America. Tequila are a mash up of The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Kings of Leon, The Band, maybe The Felice Brothers, and certainly Band of Horses. There are other bands and singers in there too, but these guys and one gal are also Tequila my fictional band.

I didn’t notice this chord change on the page until I was slotting the written songs into the final draft.

I knew how I wanted them to sound, without putting one record on. I would send the lyrics to my father, Fritz, and he’d send back an mpeg with his interpretation of the song. It was fun. He recorded Tequila’s signature tune, Stallion Boys. Ever the demanding daughter, I wrote, ‘I want it to sound Cosmic American Music, like fun Gram, OK, Fritz?’ When it came to a song that mourns a character’s untimely death, Fritz came back with a folk dirge. The chords ran, D/A/D most of the way through. I didn’t notice this chord change on the page until I was slotting the written songs into the final draft. I had Fritz’s songs on mpegs but I couldn’t listen to them anymore. Fritz had died and our family was lost.

slide guitar

Now the book is out there I still can’t listen, but other musicians have come on board. Rob Philips has composed new music for The Boy’s Song, and he’s re-imagined Fritz’s takes. In May I’m reading with an entire band at the Lincoln Book Festival. I’m beyond excited. I heard a rumour that there will be a slide guitar.

I’d like more musicians to have a go. I may not be able to listen to music as I write, but I’m all ears now. So I’m sending the songs out there – Jack, Meg, Brendan, Florence, Joni, Polly, Cerys – have a go!

Fred Connor's MySpace page

My Brilliant Career

Anouchka Grose — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:00:00 +0000

I first heard the word ‘psychoanalyst’ when I was ten. My Dad was running though a list of all the things I might want to be when I grew up. ‘Psychoanalyst’ was the only word on the list that I didn’t recognise, so I asked my Dad what it meant. All I remember about his answer was that it would involve lots and lots of years of study, that I would have to be psychoanalysed myself, and that I would work with crazy people. Compared with the other options it sounded great. For the next few years, if anyone ever asked, I told them I was going to be a shrink. I didn’t necessarily mean it, but it seemed to shut them up.

My Mum and Dad called a meeting. They said, ‘Time is money.’ I’m still trying to work out what they meant.

When I turned fifteen things changed. I was suspended from school for having evil hair. Immediately after that I had an operation on my spine. Suddenly I didn’t like school any more — and it didn’t like me. I scraped through my O Levels and then dropped out. I told my parents I wanted to be a hairdresser. They weren’t impressed. I lounged around the house until my Mum and Dad called a meeting. They said, ‘Time is money.’ I’m still trying to work out what they meant. The bit I did understand was that they weren’t going to waste their time earning money in order to give it to me. I had to earn it myself. So I got a job making lampshades in the basement of a shop in Kensington Church Street. It was hair-tearingly boring, incredibly hard and the people weren’t nice to you.

Boy George

The only good thing about it was that it was down the road from a hairdresser called Antenna, who did Boy George’s hair. Because I had no money I offered myself to them to experiment on and, from then on, I had a different weird hairstyle every other week.

I quit the lampshade shop and moved into market research. The great thing about telephone jobs is that you can look as strange as you like because no one can see you. The office was full of transvestites and freaks. Apart from the work, it was fun. But the work was quite a big part of it.

It was the eighties and hairstyles were much better than they are now.

Thanks to the weird hair, an ex-secretary of my Dad’s got in touch. She was working for a publisher and they wanted a young person to do a book about hairstyles. It was the eighties and hairstyles were much better than they are now. I wrote some sample pages and they gave me an advance of £1000. Straight after that I wrote another book about vegetarianism. It was preferable to having a job, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to write teen books for the rest of my life. Plus the money was terrible. While I was writing the books I made jewellery for some small shops, worked as a sales assistant and carried on getting free haircuts.

Terry Hall

One day the hairdresser just happened to mention that Terry Hall, of The Specials and Fun Boy Three, was looking for a girl guitarist. He passed on my number and I got the job. It was quite well paid —£700 a song. We made an album and then immediately stopped working together.

Sometime during the album-making I went to visit a friend in Manchester for the weekend and ended up staying for three years. When the band disbanded I signed on and started going to art evening classes. I put a portfolio together and got into a community college. From there I managed to get a place at Goldsmiths’, in spite of my lack of A Levels. In those days they gave you money to study, but not much. After a brief stint in a hostess bar (unbearable!) I decided to supplement my grant by working as a receptionist (at least the clothes were better).

At Goldsmiths’ they made us read Freud and Lacan. It was almost impossibly exciting. I remembered the conversation with my father; maybe I really did want to be a shrink. I spent three years at art school writing about psychoanalysis and then went on to do an MA in modern literature. I also worked in a shoe shop.

In order to inject a bit of reality into the situation I had a baby.

But after four years of being totally spoilt by university I suddenly found myself out on my ear again. I was twenty-five. I got a more permanent job as a receptionist and almost went out of my mind. In order to try to fix this I got married, wrote a novel and started seeing a shrink. The novel sold and I didn’t have to think about jobs again for a while. I wrote a second one. But sitting on my own every day writing about imaginary people doing things in the world started to get to me. In order to inject a bit of reality into the situation I had a baby. The problem with that was that I immediately stopped being able to write. I could go through the motions of it, but nothing came out right. So I was suddenly an unemployed mother — with a husband who didn’t understand the time/money thing either. We lived in a miniscule flat and shopped at Kwik Save. Sometimes we couldn’t afford the bus fare there. I found it all extremely frightening. I spent the last of my savings on learning how to be a subeditor. I hated the work — I couldn’t stand correcting some journalist’s sloppy article about their marvellous weekend in the Cotswolds or whatever. I almost died of envy every day.

The Costwolds

Then a very lucky thing happened. My great aunt died and left me a small amount of money. It was the sort of amount I could have used to put a deposit down on a flat. Given the state of our living conditions it seemed like the right thing to do. But then a second very lucky thing happened. A friend of mine, who is a psychoanalyst, insisted quite fiercely that I should use the money to train as an analyst. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to do it. It seemed selfish. I was meant to be providing a proper home for my daughter. But I had been telling people I wanted to do it on and off for twenty years. If I didn’t do it then, when would I? I decided it probably couldn’t wait any longer.

I had been telling people I wanted to do it on and off for twenty years. If I didn’t do it then, when would I?

During my analytic training I also had to work. It never stops! And just to make things more cheerful, my marriage ended. I taught creative writing, edited psychoanalytic texts and did the odd bit of my own writing. And when that didn’t work I had to have my rent paid by the state. It wasn’t exactly a breeze. But after five years I was a psychoanalyst. It was worth it.

The fact that it all came together still seems like a bit of a miracle to me. But life has definitely taught me that you mustn’t get too comfortable. Sometimes the people I work with say to me, ‘It’s alright for you — you’re sorted.’ (They are generally not crazy, but clever and troubled.) I look back at them opaquely, as my training has taught me to do. I wonder whether I will ever do another job again.

Why I Wrote A Silly Love Book

Anouchka Grose — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:30:00 +0000

There is a school of thought that says you’d have to be very arrogant and/or very stupid to imagine you had anything new to say about love. It’s probably true. Some of the most exciting minds in human history have already given the subject a great deal of thought. People have been writing about it for almost as long as they’ve been writing. And what poets and philosophers haven’t covered, scientists have. (And what poets and scientists have left out has been thoroughly picked over by dating gurus and magazine journalists.) Whether you think love is a sublime mystery, a chemical reaction or a strategic game you’ll be able to find a huge supply of reading material to back you up.

Cupid

So why would anyone choose to add to the literature-mountain? Perhaps for the same reason that the mountain got made in the first place. Romantic love makes you crazy, and speaking, singing or writing about it is often the best cure. From Catullus to Shakespeare to Beethoven to Eric Clapton, human beings have regularly been pushed to produce by their own painful romantic feelings. It doesn’t matter that the objects of their affection so often turn out to be hopeless non-starters. The point is that the feelings, at the time, are so unbearable that they have to be dealt with somehow — and expressing them can at least give you the sense that they’ve got a place to go.

If symphonies, plays or hit records aren’t your speciality you might find yourself sending countless loopy emails.

If symphonies, plays or hit records aren’t your speciality you might just as well find yourself talking on the phone incessantly or sending countless loopy emails. In a sense it’s all the same thing. Love clearly needs to be articulated. So if someone writes a book about love it may not be their fault. It may be that they’ve decided it’s better than bothering their friends with endless angsty texts. It may be because they can only afford to go to psychoanalysis once a week. Or it may be because they can’t compress all their mental machinations into a short poem. In any case it would be kind to forgive them because they are simply doing what humans seem to need to do.

I didn’t calmly decide to write a book about love, I was thrown into it by circumstance.

I didn’t calmly decide to write a book about love, I was thrown into it by circumstance. But to the list of excuses above you could also add that I listen to a lot of people’s accounts of their romantic difficulties in my own work as a psychoanalyst. Another excuse is that I often waste money on magazines because, on the covers, they promise to answer all sorts of difficult questions: Does he really love you? Do you really love him? What should you wear to make him love you more? Magazine people are often very good at spotting the kinds of questions we’d like to have answered — but notoriously bad at keeping their promises. This is partly because some of the best questions are unanswerable. And partly because magazine publishers can be a bit unscrupulous.

Dolly Parton

While I didn’t imagine I could write a book that would actually solve the mysteries of love, I did think it might be as well to try to say something about the very pressing wish to understand it better. (If only for the sake of my own sanity.) And also to attempt to say something proper about why it’s so bloody difficult. I certainly didn’t imagine that I had anything more useful to offer than Plato, Freud or Dolly Parton.

So I took some of their ideas, and all sorts of other people’s, and tried to pick out some of the top tips from across the centuries. There were lots of good ones. By the end of writing the book I was definitely less mad (despite having fallen in love in the middle of chapter six, with someone who is neither hopeless nor a non-starter). My hope is that reading it might have the same effect on other people. Or better, that it will leave them so confused and frustrated that they will go and write a much more insightful book — which I will then be able to turn to if love ever makes me crazy again.

The First Time

Fri, 8 Jan 2010 10:10:00 +0000

The first reading of a new novel is thrilling. It’s also nerve racking; it’s a first kiss, a first… it’s all those ‘firsts’. Perhaps it’s most like the first night of a new play. All you can think is, will the audience get it?

The venue was gorgeous, the revamped Booths Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye. The new owner, Elizabeth, had clad it in wood panelling, littered it with sofas and a group of incredibly handsome American women.

We jumped from Bowie to John Irving, and I was glad; I was on familiar ground.

I walked on to the stage to Marc Bolan and T Rex’s Get it On. With a main character and a novel called Diamond Star Halo it was inevitable and it was great.

David Bowie

‘How important is David Bowie to you?’ Peter Florence asked and I rambled on, trying to get back into my obsessed, teenage mindset. We jumped from Bowie to John Irving, and I was glad; I was on familiar ground.

It’s strange talking about what you’ve done, but as a contemporary writer, you have to. The interview, the reading group, the bookshop, the festival circuit, they are all part of the deal. You often formulate the hows and the whys and the great ‘what is it?’ while you are actually up on that stage. Sometimes it’s nice to think on the hoof. Sometimes it isn’t. At this event I realised that, among other things, I’d written a novel about the domestic side of rock n’ roll, because Diamond Star Halo is dominated by women; women who look after these roaming men, these rock stars. After all, the novel begins in 1977.

Sometimes it’s nice to think on the hoof. Sometimes it isn’t.

We talked about the difficulty of capturing the moment of live music on the page. We talked about the dead horse Crazy Love who has to be buried again and again in the novel. We talked about the family I had created; Halo, Vincent, Molly, Ivan, Dolly, Nana Lew, and of course, Fred. We talked about the process of writing and re-imagining other books in your own work. We talked about Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and we played Kate Bush’s song. It was lovely to hear Kate again.

Kate Bush

Finally, one of the handsome American women at the back asked me what my favourite song was. It’s a hard question. As hard and impossible as ‘what’s your favourite book?’

‘The Flying Burrito Brother’s version of Wild Horses' I told her.

‘Can we hear it?’ she asked.

‘You know it’s a very long song,’ I whispered to Peter.

‘6.22,’ a man in the front row said.

‘Sorry?’ I asked.

‘That version of Wild Horses is 6 minutes and 22 seconds.’

‘We’d better fade out,’ said Peter, ‘or we’ll be up here all night.’

Listening to Gram Parsons, I wouldn’t have minded.

Diamond Star Halo has been chosen as The Hay Festival’s Book of the Month for January 2010.

Why I Love Snow

Charlie English — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There are several answers to the question of why I love snow. Partly, I love it because I remember the feeling I used to get as a child on waking up in our house in northern England and pulling back the curtains to see that it had snowed. Back then, we dragged our sledges out of the furthest corner of the attic where they had been since the previous year, and out along the path towards the sledging hill, where we stayed until it grew dark.

skiers

Another part of the answer lies in the Scottish skiing holiday my mother took us on when I was 11, after my father had died. I became so absorbed in the business of the descending the mountain on these nefarious strips of wood and fibreglass that, when the week was over, I realized I had thought of nothing else. Skiing, the explorer Nansen once wrote, washes civilization clean from the mind. I have visited the snow in some way or another every winter since then.

Skiing washes civilization clean from the mind

a snowflake

Then of course there is the beauty of snow – not simply of a snow-filled landscape, the way dusting it gives the russet top of a Scottish mountain or the jaw-dropping white cone of a Himalaya, but at microscopic level, in the detail and individuality of each crystal.

But perhaps most of all I love snow for its ability to transform the everyday into the special, which is what occurred some years ago when it snowed on our street in north London. I watched that night as flakes fell into the orange glare of the streetlamp, hustled this way and that by the wind before they fell out of the cone of light and were lost. In the morning, the kitchen was bright with sunshine reflected from the snow, and when we opened the door, a cold, mineral smell filled the air.

London in the snow

After breakfast I set out with my oldest son towards the park. He was two and hadn’t seen snow before. We followed our usual route, along the pavement between the curving cliffs of terraced houses, but this time everything was different. Even the sounds of the city were muffled, and came to us as if from a great distance. Inside the park we made snowballs – it was a damp, sticky snow – then rolled one of them along the ground until it began to creak. We made a second large sphere of snow to plonk on top of the first, and, with sticks and bits of bark, added eyes and a smile and buttons and arms.

My son and I came back from the park in a buoyant mood. I love snow for the effect it had on me, and the effect it has on him.

Effing fairy cakes

Peter Silverton — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:00:00 +0000

And so to Haverstock Hill on Monday, for the launch party. It was held in the upstairs room of the Sir Richard Steele — courtesy of my friends Kirk and Paul who own it. A big old gin palace of a boozer, it’s Hogarthian exuberance downstairs in the main bars and colourful, elegant postmodernism upstairs — with a wonderful, original, 1860s ceiling cornice and rose.

Sir Richard Steele

It’s named for the first father of English journalism. Steele (1672-1729) was a Dublin-born protestant who grew up in Fulham and lived in a cottage on the site where the pub now is — there is a gorgeous stained glass window of him in the main bar. He — deep breath — founded The Tatler, The Spectator and The Englishman (where he published the memoir which was the source of Robinson Crusoe). He’d fill his letters pages with letters he’d written to the editor — ie himself. He invented the theatre review. He married a sugar heiress. He was an MP. He nearly killed a man in a duel. He met his second wife at his first wife’s funeral. He was surveyor of the Royal stables and head of the commission charged with selling off the estates of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s supporters. He died in Wales.

Sir Richard Steele met his second wife at his first wife’s funeral.

His best-known remarks include:

* ‘Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.’

* ‘No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience…’

* ‘When you fall into a man's conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.’

A patron saint to us all, then. Well, to some of us anyway. Me, at least. Certainly, he’d have been first on the launch invite list. As he wasn’t . . .

I have learned that the best way to put an invite list together for a party is to do it the same way you’d prepare a bride’s outfit. You mix something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

Drink was drunk (and drunk). Talk was talked (and talked). There was cake — tiny fairy ones arranged on a table to spell out FUCK. As the evening wore on and the cakes were eaten, the remaining cakes were re-arranged to spell new words.

Books were sold, bought and signed. Many books, to my intense relief and delight. Anxious about being left with unsold piles, only a few dozen were brought along. They’d gone within half an hour. So the people looking after the book stall (thanks Doro, Dot, Sheila and anyone else who helped out) took orders and money for several dozen more. If you’re one of those who ordered, your book (with its dedication) will be with you very soon. You will also get your free CD — a soundtrack to the book’s popular music chapter. (I’ll post the tracklisting here at some point.)

One speech was made. Mine. It wasn’t very good. I thanked a few people. I made a joke — I think. I thanked some more people, pointing one or two out. I got down off the table. My son pointed out that I’d forgotten to thank my wife, Jennifer. I got back on the table, thanked her and stood down. It was pointed out that I’d forgotten to thank the rest of my family. I got back up, did the thanks, got down. It was pointed out that I’d forgotten to thank the family dog, Bear. Fuck him, I said. He’ll have to make do with the one I gave him in the book’s acknowledgments.

Blindfolds as an icebreaker

Edward Hollis — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:01:00 +0000

Yesterday I had a day of hifalutin chat with postgrad students but today is spent with second year, and if I’m honest, this is the bit I really enjoy – introducing a subject to people who nothing about it.

I ask the students to tell me what the floors and walls are made of from tactile and auditory cues.

We start out by looking at the room we’re in – which is at present a bare and empty studio, looking more like an office than a room in an Art College; and we go through various ways of trying to describe it. We start out with words, and move on to drawing – perspectives at first, then more abstract representations of sensations. I play the game I play every year with the students, leading them blindfold, in crocodile around the building, asking them to tell me what the floors and walls are made of from tactile and auditory cues. That’s the ostensible purpose but the real one, of course, is to break the ice which it always does.
In the afternoon I draft in the third years to teach the new ones how to survey a room – the predictable chaos and laughter ensues and the day ends on a high.

Parthenon

In the evening, whore that I am, I’m off down to the BBC again for my latest media appearance – on Arena, an Irish culture radio programme. It goes well, as far as I can tell, but it’s odd, sitting alone in a studio in a darkened office, making a call to somewhere else. It’s stranger still (I don’t know why) to be talking about the Parthenon and Venice and Vegas to an Irish radio programme. I feel like I should be talking about something Irish, but I’m not sure what.

Bricking It

Peter Silverton — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:50:00 +0000

The Brickhouse

And so to the Brickhouse in Brick Lane, for a Wednesday evening reading. A restaurant with a stage and a modern east London clientele, the Brickhouse is right across from the Truman brewery, not far from the old Shoreditch tube station — and its imminent new replacement.

There are regular readings at the Brickhouse, ‘curated’ and compered by Don Eales. He’s a hyper-charged, charming, long-haired, heavy-bellied, middle-aged Shoreditch-Hoxton interzone activist-hustler with a self-acknowledged history of drug enjoyment/abuse — and typical of the sort.

He’s a hyper-charged, charming, long-haired, heavy-bellied, middle-aged Shoreditch-Hoxton interzone activist-hustler.

I was a late addition to the line-up, encouraged along by Suzanne who I’ve known for years. She works in PR and, as 'Suzanne Portnoy', writes about her — notably adventurous — sex life. As split lives go, it’s an interesting one, isn’t it?

Mick Brown's book on Phil Spector

For once, I arrived early. Suzanne wasn’t there but Mick Brown was. We’ve known each other even longer. He was there to read from his Phil Spector biography (which I would recommend even if I didn’t really like Mick).

Don Eales introduced me to the other writer-readers. I was surprised by how many of them were women and how dressed up they were but I didn’t give it much thought.

It kicked off at eight o’clock. The format was clear and effective. Don got up on stage, slobbishly engaging and funny, introducing each writer-reader with wit, enthusiasm, jokes, flattery and, often, a shaggy-dog story. As the evening wore on, the stories became shaggier and shaggier, eventually to the point where they were more shag than story. Which, as it happens, had a certain metaphorical aptness.

The evening started with a mixed bunch of readings. Poetry, of course — some of it about Tony Blair, of course. (They didn’t like him much, you probably won’t be surprised to learn.) Verses in a Glaswegian accent about taking cocaine in the toilets of semi-legal clubs (sometimes with Don Eales). Mick and Spector. A guided tour of a South American prison.

I’ve long planned to write a piece entitled Great Escalator Journeys of the World. The list includes the one in the National Portrait Gallery — which takes you back six hundred years in thirty seconds.

There was a piece about tube escalators. I paid close attention to this. I’ve long planned to write a piece entitled Great Escalator Journeys of the World. The list includes the one in the National Portrait Gallery — which takes you back six hundred years in thirty seconds. And the one at Westminster station — like being in an HR Geiger image. And the Beaubourg ones — running up the side in tubes. And the one at Dupont Circle on the Washington Metro. And the one in the Bond St station mall — the world record for escalator riding was set there (214.34 km, July 17-21 1989).
So taken was I with this idea, in fact, that I suggested it as a travel piece to one of the Sunday magazines — The Observer, I think. It was rejected. Why? ‘Escalators don’t go anywhere,’ I was told, completely straight-faced.

Although Don had told me I would be on early, he kept coming over to tell me he’d moved my spot. I couldn’t figure whether that meant I was moving up the bill or down. Still can’t.

As the evening moved on, I began to notice that an increasing number of the readers were women. Also, that their material was increasingly moving into the sex territory occupied by Suzanne. There was a story — graphically read by its female author — about sex in a car in a suburban railway station car park. There were readings with more swear words in five minutes than in, say, a page of my book.

There was a female tantric sexpert, a curly-haired woman in young middle age (as were nearly all the female readers). She was dressed in a baby blue and white Little Bo Beep mini-dress and five-inch black, bondage-strappy stilettos. The adjective that comes to mind is, I suppose . . . evocative.

Little Bo Peep costume

Before she started reading, she announced that she had forgotten to put on knickers, then called for water — which was placed on the stage next to her. She refreshed herself regularly throughout her reading — which was about why all women should treat themselves to a tantric sex masseur. Obviously, in her underwear-absent state, she felt she couldn’t bend over. So instead she did a kind of sideways curtsey. If it wasn’t a regular part of her act, it was an inspired piece of improvisation. Evocative, even.

I began to worry, obviously. It was getting late. Drink was being drunk. Women were being . . . evocative. I’d have to read soon. How could I deal with this kind of crowd? I’d planned to read the story of the first time I said ‘fuck’. As I was a small child at the time, this is a shocking story in some circles. At this gathering, I felt like a maiden aunt. And Suzanne hadn’t even read yet.

I began to worry, obviously. It was getting late. Drink was being drunk. Women were being . . . evocative. I’d have to read soon. At this gathering, I felt like a maiden aunt.

I would be on right after her, Don promised me. I was correct to worry. Her story was about her birthday present to her boyfriend — group sex in the upstairs room at Rio’s, the swingers club in Kentish Town high street. (‘London’s leading naturist health spa’ according to its website.) Follow that, sucker.

I took the stage, I hope, with the blitheness of, say, Marie Antoinette stepping up to the guillotine. I was in a world beyond terror. Fear and worry were not just pointless but impossible. Things were far too serious for that. All I could do was get on, not look too foolish, get off and get home.

I’d already cut my story right back from the book version. But I now cut it even further, right back to its essence — leaving in the Krays and Tony Hancock (for popular appeal) but dumping the bits about spastics and Hemel Hempstead town centre. There was a beginning, a middle and punchline — with not much of the second.

No one booed. There were some laughs and applause at the end. ‘Tough story’, said the Icelandic toy manufacturer who Suzanne had brought along with her. (Like me, he declined her suggestion that he pay a visit to Rio’s. ‘Chicken,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ he said, Icelandically.)

smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel

I sat down and concentrated on learning to breathe again. The final act was on, a woman in a very tight, slinky black evening dress. She read a story from a large, fur-bound book. It was about a sexual encounter, told from the woman’s point of view, of course. Like mine, it had a punch-line: the male in the story was a dog.

And so to Brick Lane, a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel, a walk to Old Street tube, a short journey — and bed.

Communist keepsakes

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 09:30:00 +0000

Berlin Wall dominoes

I have my own piece of the Berlin Wall (or more accurately, two spindly pieces) which have been kept in my mother’s house in an empty tub of Danish butter since I chose them. Aged 11, I had gone on a trip to visit the crumbling Eastern Bloc.

I can remember visiting the Berlin Wall clearly, not least because there was an enterprising man in a parka stood on top of it with a small pickaxe offering to break a chunk of the wall off in exchange for US dollars. I found this unbelievably funny because it seemed perfectly straightforward to take one’s own piece of wall and I couldn’t see why you would pay anyone else to do it.

An enterprising man in a parka stood on top of the Berlin Wall with a small pickaxe offering to break a chunk of the wall off in exchange for US dollars.

I also remember my family meeting a Romanian family on the Trans-Siberian who were keen to explain their own tragedy, mostly with the aid of a vivid piece of photojournalism which depicted the fall of Ceausescu and more particularly, the murder of the patriarch of their family. I was largely oblivious to the context of this near-conversation (there was no common language but the guesswork in this case was fairly straightforward).

I'm embarrassed to say that I have hardly filled the gaps in my knowledge in the intervening years. This is why I'll be gobbling up the novels of our newest author Herta Müller, whose fiction illuminates the effects of Ceausescu’s dictatorship on ordinary people in Romania. As Peter Englund, president of the Swedish Academy, said of her, immediately after awarding the prize: 'The past is always alive for her. When I read her books, I was very shaken inwardly. She writes entirely honestly, with an incredible intensity.'

Hooray for Herta!

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 18:00:00 +0000

Herta Müller

Our Associate Publisher Tasja Dorkofikis has seen off fierce competition to win the translation rights to new work by Nobel laureate Herta Müller. Tasja had begun negotiations with Müller’s German publisher Hanser before the author was awarded the Nobel last month. As Tasja has said, ‘It was all pre-Nobel. Then she won, so things changed a bit – many others stepped into the negotiations, but we held out ... There were five other publishers involved, auctions all over Europe – in Italy 10 publishers were involved.’

We will be publishing Atemschaukel, or Everything I Possess I Carry With Me in 2011. This will be followed by Der Fuchs War Damals Schon Der Jäger (The Fox Was the Hunter Even Then) and a selection of essays as well as an as-yet-unwritten future title by Müller.

Tasja has said, ‘We are honoured as well as hugely excited that Portobello Books will be Herta Müller’s new British publisher. Dealing with the universal themes of alienation, oppression and migration, her books force the readers to look at the dark and complicated realities of European history. Masterful, poetic and precise, without a word out of place, for me, her writing truly illuminates and explains the human condition.’

Rusty isles and dazed students

Edward Hollis — Mon, 2 Nov 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Callanish stones, Lewis

My first day of nothing for some time. I enjoy the luxuries of washing up, hoovering, weeding, and going for a long walk in the wind. I finish the day with a bottle of red and a massive cauliflower cheese. Nuff said.

In the evening I watch an extraordinary documentary in which Jonathan Meades wanders around the ‘Isle of Rust’ (Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides) making gnomic statements heavily larded with his particular brand of bitter irony. It’s beautiful and excoriating: he has a gaelic singer sing what sounds like a traditional song amid the stones of Callanish.

Let us engage with quality enhancement as well as assurance

She sings

\And become a-one-stop-shop centre of excellence
So that our interactive visitor heritage experience
May widen customer awareness
And meaningfully engage the local community.\

Wonderful. The camera pans from the ancient stones to abandoned cars in peat bogs, rusting corrugated iron sheds, and piles of decaying white goods, nibbled at by bored sheep. He’s really caught the post apocalyptic tragedy of the Highlands.

Term begins, and the art college is a scene of chaos, as is traditional. Students wander, glassy eyed, trying to find rooms and people they will not find for hours, or days even. Everyone is lost and confused.

art student

But it’s okay. dazedness and confusion is, after all, a central aspect of the Art College experience. Everything I say I say at least five times, as wave of late student arrives after wave of late student. But I’d forgotten what fun it was to play little Hitler, and I think all the students are sufficiently terrified by the prospect of the nest year’s study – at least, they do their best to humour me by pretending they’re scared. Then they’re off to the canteen for lunch, and I can see that half of them having heard a word of it.

Cambridge Blues

Peter Silverton — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:00:00 +0000

To Cambridge, on a Wednesday afternoon — a journey I make regularly, to visit friends. This time, though, I was on my way to give a talk to the university’s English Society. It is, as you’d expect, the most ‘civilised’ of train journeys. Everyone says ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘excuse me’. (As a collective noun for the English middle-class, that’s not a bad one, is it? An excuse-me.) Everyone is reading — books, broadsheets and papers.

As a collective noun for the English middle-class, that’s not a bad one, is it? An excuse-me.

No one is shouting down a phone. I think crisps and babies are banned. Fat people, too. There is no need to use my friend’s method for getting four seats to himself, tried and tested on the 300-mile haul to Newcastle. Buy a four-pack of Special Brew. Snap one open and place the over-strength quartet on the table in front of you. No need to take so much as a sip. Most people, he assures me, would rather stand all the way to Geordieland than sit next to him. It works particularly well, he adds, on early morning services.

Cambridge

I’d never been inside a Cambridge college before. Both my university stints have been in London. (Having just finished an MSc at UCL, I am quite convinced that UCL’s elevation to number four in the world’s best universities must surely be connected with my presence there. Surely it must.) I spent a lot of time visiting friends at Oxford but Cambridge, never.

Oh, yes, actually I now remember I have been in a Cambridge college before. It was for a May Ball sometime in the late 1970s, when I was a writer for Sounds magazine. I’d been taken along by one of the bands who were appearing that night. The Tyla Gang, I think — pub rock survivors with a grizzly bear of a singer whose lack of hair (and affability) would kybosh any career.

Elvis Costello, then in the first flush of his angry young manhood, headlined. ‘This is for all you fucking penguins,’ he shouted at the students who were all — uncomfortably — togged up in evening dress, most of them for the first (and often only) time in their life.

Elvis Cpstello

He was genuinely furious, amusingly oblivious to the irony that, as the son of band singer Ross MacManus, he himself was the beneficiary of a parental leg-up, helping his father out on R White's Secret Lemonade Drinker TV ad campaigns — he sings the backing vocals. The old school microphone system, you might call it, perhaps. The crowd loved his attack on them, of course, and roared their approval. Which made him angrier. Which they adored, naturally. So more anger . . . etc etc. It was a wonderful show.

There was no such violence or anger in my performance — or, rather, only in the violent language I quoted from my book. On the contrary, it was a most charming experience, at St Catherine’s college — beautiful entrance, functional and dull interior spaces.

The audience was a couple of dozen undergraduates, mostly studying English as far as I could tell. I’d asked in advance what they would like me to talk about. What you like, I was told. So l gave them an hour or so synopsis of the book — including a clip from The Wire in which a murder-scene is explored and analysed almost exclusively via two words, fuck and motherfucker. It’s a bit arch and actorly — as one of the students pointed out to me later.

One of the students pointed out that The Wire is a bit arch and actorly.

They took me surprisingly seriously. Surprising for me, that is. I’ve never before had people tap notes of what I’m saying into their laptops. Why? For a dissertation which took in early Scots poetry — and therefore the written debuts of both fuck and cunt (‘in cunt-beten’ for ‘venereally infected’).
I did okay, I think, but I was far from great. I got laughs and two lots of applause at the end but still . . .

DNA helix

They — the EngSoc committee — took me for a drink afterwards, in the Eagle, the spot where the double helix of DNA was first described. Three or more of them were wearing black sweatshirts with their name and committee title on the back. I was impressed. When I was a young student, I would have rather died than worn such a thing — such was my level of fear and childish cynicism. You find progress in all kinds of strange places.

Even, as I found out the next morning, on the Cambridge-London train. As ever, the 9.20 was waiting at the platform, gradually filling with passengers. By the time I got there, it was nearly full.

As I put my bag in the overhead rack and went to sit down, someone shouted at me, very loudly. Then someone else laughed. Then there was more shouting. And more laughter. I turned round to see a man in a window seat shouting into his phone — while the rest of the carriage laughed loudly at him. The shouter remained smilingly oblivious to the laughter — and its significance. Both shouting and laughter went on for a good five minutes.
When we arrived in London, the woman who had been sitting opposite the shouter saw me and told me she’d seen me at a party the previous evening. (It was for a friend’s show at the Cambridge folk museum. It’s about people and their rooms and their significance. Go. Not just because it’s a friend, either.) She asked about my book. I asked about the shouter. ‘Not just that,’ she said. ‘He blew his nose then put the dirty tissue on the table.’ A pause. ‘He was a doctor, I think.’

Effing and blinding in academia

Peter Silverton — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

As a collective noun for the English middle-class, that’s not a bad one, is it? An excuse-me.

Cambridge

Oh, yes, actually I now remember I have been in a Cambridge college before. It was for a May Ball sometime in the late 1970s, when I was a writer for Sounds magazine. I’d been taken along by one of the bands who were appearing that night. The Tyla Gang, I think — pub rock survivors with a grizzly bear of a singer whose lack of hair (and affability) would kybosh any career.

Elvis Costello

He was genuinely furious, amusingly oblivious of the irony that, as the son of band singer Ross MacManus, he himself was the beneficiary of a parental leg-up, helping his father out on R White's Secret Lemonade Drinker TV ad campaigns — he sings the backing vocals. The old school microphone system, you might call, it perhaps. The crowd loved his attack on them, of course, and roared their approval. Which made him angrier. Which they adored, naturally. So more anger . . . etc etc. It was a wonderful show.

One of the students pointed out that The Wire in is a bit arch and actorly.

DNA helix

Even, as I found out the next morning, on the Cambridge-London train. As ever, the 9.20 was waiting at the platform, gradually filling with passengers. By the time I got there, it was nearly full.

Family therapy

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Un Secret

A Secret is Claude Miller’s thoughtful, dramatic adaptation of Philippe Grimbert’s autobiographical novel of the same name. As Frenchy-French as they come – I’m thinking of the breast-feeding close-up, the Chanel-style swimsuits, and buckets of Proustian mother-lust – this is also a beautiful, compelling story of a post-war Jewish family coming to terms with its past.

As Frenchy-French as they come – I’m thinking of the breast-feeding close-up, the Chanel-style swimsuits, and buckets of Proustian mother-lust.

Our narrator, the sickly Philippe, is an only child but imagines he has a brother. Bolder and more athletic, there is much for Philippe to envy in the imagined sibling; but most of all, he is not a disappointment to Maxime, his father (Patrick Bruel). In reality, Maxime can barely hide what borders on resentment at his son’s paltry sporting efforts. This and other things – like Philippe’s insistence at dinner that a plate be served for his ‘brother’ – provoke silences and looks between the parents which suggest a huge, unspoken weight. Something terrible lurks in the wings, and we know it can't hide much longer.

The crisis finally comes in 1955, when Philippe is 15. In a class being shown footage of mass graves of the Holocaust, a classmate makes an anti-semitic remark. Usually shy and weak, Philippe lashes out with all the anger which has been silently seeping into him all his life. The family’s neighbour and old friend Louise (Julie Depardieu), administering her daily massages to Philippe, decides it is time to pull the wool from his eyes.

Cecile de France and Patrick Bruel

Cut to the 1930s: for its privileged classes, a heady time; but to look back on, a sort of naive calm-before-the-storm. And we see the real circumstances of Philippe's parents' courtship. He had created his own version in his head - sporting glamour and champagne, all burnished by bright sunshine - but this was protecting him from the truth. His father and mother, the enchanting diver Tania (Cécile de France), were each originally married to a brother and sister, Anna and Guillaume, who introduced them. Maxime and Anna’s child Simon is the apple of his father's eye - the little sportsman Philippe had imagined.

Maxime undresses Tania with his eyes right from the day he marries another woman, but Tania snubs him. Rumours of a tryst between them are damaging her reputation even before it has happened, but their adultery is only precipitated by disaster. After arguments and painful farewells in Paris, the loose circle of friends must make their way separately to a crossing into the 'free zone' with their forged documents, before the mass deportations start. Anna, her husband at war and her head full of jealous suspicion, takes her ultimate revenge. When the guards ask to see her papers, she intentionally hands them the copies with 'JEW' stamped on them, and points out her son. They are packed into a van and never heard from again.

Cecile de France as Tania

Maxime has lost his family at a stroke, and the iconic Tania is more beautiful than ever. She is pregnant when they return to Paris, and they decide to make the best of a bad situation. They marry, and Philippe is born.

The film throbs with danger. Claude Miller says he filmed Tania 'like one of those Art Deco lamps of statuesque women' - and it is true that all stops seem to be out to portray her as an untouchable goddess; a sullen, irresistible presence who attracts trouble like a magnet. With her appearance alone, Miller hints at disaster.

An ordinary story of love and desire is exploded by war. Anna could never have inflicted so much pain in peacetime, and the guilt of romantic betrayal is compounded by the immense guilt of France as a whole. And indeed Philippe's uncovering of the family secret seems to be a microcosm of the progress of a nation: the past must be faced before we can move on. The Vichy Regime's collaboration with the Nazis has been examined a great deal, but rarely with such a delicate balance of tenderness and threat.

Coughton Court and an intimate crowd

Edward Hollis — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:18:00 +0000

Coughton Court

Magnus, the grandson of Mrs T – not the prime minister, but the chatelaine of Coughton Court – has been detailed to introduce me. He’s studying business management at Exeter, and this is his last weekend of the summer vacation. Mrs T, like her namesake, has autocratically lassoed him to help out at the festival. Magnus is no architecture buff, but, as we’re walking into the tent, he points out a window in one of the octagonal towers at the heart of his ancestral home. ‘That window there’ he says’, ‘lights a room that none of us can work out how to get into.’ When did they forget? I wonder, and how? It’s fascinating to think that the history of architecture – like the history of everything else – is as much an issue of amnesia as memory. I recall the citizens of medieval Rome, who, having forgotten who built the monuments amid which they built their miserable shacks, and what they were for, imagine that they were mountains thrown up by giants, imbued with magical properties.

It’s fascinating to think that the history of architecture – like the history of everything else – is as much an issue of amnesia as memory.

The talk is, er, intimately attended, and while this is only slightly painful –I’m well acquainted with lecturing to half empty halls – while I’m talking ad lib everyone looks at me and I look at them – we connect; but when I read from the book it’s most odd: everyone stares off into the middle distance, eyes glazed with what I hope is not boredom. It must be like audiences for classical music - I certainly never know where to look in a concert.
After that talk, and a magnificent summery lunch of salads in the tent, I get a lift up to Birmingham to catch the train home. It’s like travelling to a different world, and as quickly as the dreaming spires of Coughton Court disappear below the rolling horizon, so the gigantic silver blob of Selfridges looms up behind the sharp gothic ruins of Victorian Manchester.

Unaccountably, there being no reviews this weekend, and a small audience at the Coughton Court event at Throckmorton, my ranking on Amazon jumps by 2000 places.

Fairground Attractions

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:55:00 +0100

A sidecar cocktail

It’s October, so it must be the Frankfurt Book Fair. Each year, editors and agents from all corners of the globe converge upon a conference centre that’s so big it has its own tube station, supermarket and hair salon, for a week of intense half-hour meetings fuelled by chocolate, cocktails and hype. It is the publishing equivalent to speed-dating.

As I packed my suitcase, I looked over my schedule: 3 days, 42 meetings, 7 cocktail parties, 4 dinners, and one 5.30am alarm call. This year, for my own sanity, I was determined to remain aloof from the traditional frenzy of hearing about a 'hot book', trying desperately to track it down, reading it overnight, falling for it heavily and scrabbling to concoct an offer, only to discover that it has already been sold in a pre-emptive bid to an other editor, who did the deal with the agent over croissants at dawn. That way lies heart-break and madness.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the publishing equivalent to speed-dating.

Patricia Highsmith

So, this year, I would stay calm, collected, and content to converse about interesting projects and then read the manuscript in a more leisurely way back in London. As a counterbalance to the noisy chatter about unattainable new books, I threw into my case a novel I knew would keep me completely absorbed – Patricia Highsmith’s classic psychological thriller Strangers on a Train. Thus armed, I stepped on board the Eurostar.

Within an hour of arriving in Frankfurt, I was inching my way through the crowded bar in the Hessicherhof trying to spot the Italian editor for my first appointment. No sooner had we kissed hello in the appropriate fashion (2 kisses for Italians, Brits and French, 3 for Dutch, air for North American, handshake for Japanese) than she asked me if I was reading the ‘hot book’. Apparently it was being touted as ‘Devil Wears Prada meets A Brief History of Time, only shorter and with more jokes’. Hmm. I hadn’t heard of it, let alone received it.

A rush of blood to the head. Sounds interesting, I said, trying to sound disinterested. 'What’s the pitch? ‘

My phone started buzzing. It was an agent back in London. He told me he wanted to email over a novel, which was probably going to be one of the ‘hot books’ at the Fair. There was already an auction going in seven European countries, a pre-empt on the table from Uruguay, film interest from Brad Pitt’s production company, and he was expecting his first British offer in the morning. A rush of blood to the head. Sounds interesting, I said, trying to sound disinterested. 'What’s the pitch? ‘Well, it sounds crazy, but the way I’m thinking of it is kinda Devil Wears Prada meets…’ Oh dear. The buzz had begun and I was powerless to resist. I could tell that Highsmith would be relegated to the bottom of my bag until I was back on the train in 3 days time. After all, telling each other crazy stories and getting ridiculously over-excited is what Frankfurt is all about.

Me, John Humphrys and the Clusterbeep

Peter Silverton — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:40:00 +0100

John Humphrys

So I became — to the best of my knowledge, anyway — the first person to say ‘clusterfuck’ on Radio 4. Or, rather, the first to say clusterbleep on the Today programme. I also said bleep, bleep, bleep and bleeping a lot — particularly bleep.
It was broadcast before 8am on a Saturday, making a neat — and I’m sure, deliberately ironic — lead-in to Thought For The Day. In fact, I actually recorded it the previous morning — their idea so I could use actual swear words which could then be bleeped in the mix.

Or rather, we could use swear words. I was interviewed by John Humphreys, all fresh and Cardiff from his Friday edition. He started the bleeping, too. It was him not me who first said bleep — though I did premiere bleep and bleeping and considerably outdo him in my bleeping bleep output.

John Humphrys started the bleeping. It was him not me who first said bleep.

Why was I there? To add my bleeping two pennorth on the BBC’s latest twist and turn over the start of the watershed. The new advice is not very clear. Even the people on Today weren’t at all sure about it. The basic idea, though, seems to be that 9pm shouldn’t be seen as a hard boundary but something that programme makers should take note of. Or maybe it just says that there shouldn’t be too many bleeping bleeping bleeps or bleeps till 10pm.

Russell Brand

What was my view of this? As I say in the book, the Ofcom report on the Ross-Brand kerfuffle only mentions the word ‘fucked’ once in all its often mimsy 37 pages. It could easily have been replaced by ‘had sexual intercourse’ — or even ‘made love, sensitively, delicately and fully in accordance with equal opportunities guidelines’. The fuss would have still been the same. It wasn’t about language or sex. It was about intrusion and asinine behaviour. I said the BBC should be less bleeping worried about swearing.

What did I learn from doing the show? Four things.

One: what so many of my friends are doing that early on a Saturday morning — or whatever time it is in their distant time zone. I have been on radio many times, on TV a few times and in newspapers innumerable times. I have never, ever had so many friends email me to tell me they’d heard me. (Which also, I guess, must mean I was okay. Failure’s handmaiden is generally foot-shuffling silence.)

Two: John Humphreys’ place in the public imagination. A good half of those emailers asked about him — or asked if I hadn’t been worried about going up against him. (I wasn’t. He’s a professional. He is charming — and knows how to spur you to be as articulate and amusing as you can.)

John Humphrys is charming — and knows how to spur you to be as articulate and amusing as you can.

Three: as I long suspected, I must be the only person of my age, class and inclinations who never listens to the Today programme — or even Radio 4. ‘What!!!!???’ said an American journalist friend. ‘Radio 4 is the thing that makes this country liveable in.’ I never have listened to it. I don’t really know why. Maybe there are just too many old soul compilations to work my way through.

Four: that I may have developed a cabinet minister’s capacity for side-stepping questions. According to my friend John, I answered an awkward one with ‘To an extent, but on the other hand not . . .’

Oh, so why did I say clusterbleep? I gave it as example of the potential richness of filthy English. I reported its use by a Geordie long exiled in America who had recently declined the offer of a top job at the Olympics on the — evocative and certainly accurate — grounds that it would inevitably be a . . . clusterfuck.

Climbing Dark Mountain

Paul Kingsnorth — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:35:00 +0100

Back in the summer, I helped kick off an experiment. I wrote about this experiment on this blog, before it had really even begun and when I was still curious, even anxious, to see what if anything might come of it. Three or four months later, through the slowly-clearing mist, we are starting to discern some answers.

The experiment was the Dark Mountain Project, which I and my co-founder Dougald Hine grandly titled a ‘new literary movement for an age of global disruption.’ I’ve described what the project was about on this site before, and there is much more detail on our website and in our manifesto. Suffice to say that we were –are – attempting to put into words many things about the approaching future, and the troubled present, which many of us feel but which we don’t allow ourselves to express. Primarily, perhaps, the increasingly obvious fact that the world we thought we were building is not the one we are going to end up with, and that there is not going to be very much we can do about it. We wanted to respond to this by pulling together creative people from all walks of life, to try and write, literally or figuratively, new stories, to replace the failing myths that underpin our failing civilisation.

It was an ambitious, and perhaps entirely foolish, enterprise. There was no real precedent for it, and neither I nor Dougald really knew what we were doing. We just took what came, wrote what we had been needing to say for a long time, and put it out into the world, wondering if anyone would understand what we were talking about.

Thousands of people have visited our website each day, from as far afield as Polynesia and Alaska.

I’m not being disingenuous when I say I’ve been genuinely surprised by what this has unleashed. Since we launched the project, online and in person with an event in Oxford in July, we have been deluged. Thousands of people have visited our website each day, from as far afield as Polynesia and Alaska. We have received so many emails that I have only, today, been able to clear a three-month old backlog. Bloggers the world over have picked up on the Project. Papers from the Morning Star to the Guardian have featured it. In the New Statesman, in what must surely be some kind of first, our self-published, hand-printed, twenty page manifesto received the lead review in the books pages, where chief reviewer John Gray gave a lot of space to a review that managed to be both sympathetic and critical.

Why might this be? Judging from a lot of correspondence, one reason is that we are articulating something that others have been feeling but have not put into words; or, if they have, have not found a place where they can connect with others who understand those words. Our manifesto in particular seems to have struck a chord with many people who are sceptical about the mainstream narratives about the future being offered to us right now not only by the usual suspects – politicians, economists and the like – but also by those who claim to challenge those narratives: environmentalists, political radicals, self-proclaimed outsiders.

What has also resonated is our call for a cultural response to this predicament. Our next moves, we hope, will help flesh out this response; and it will be a response which is shaped by others. Most of our efforts right now are focused on the first issue of the Dark Mountain Journal, which will be published next spring, and which will showcase what we’re trying to do. It will be a real, physical object, book-sized, beautifully designed, thought-provoking, challenging. We hope to launch it at a weekend-long Dark Mountain festival we are planning in a beautiful, mountainous location. We are looking for ideas and contributions from writers and creators everywhere.

We are also working on a collaborative art show, at the http gallery in London, which is seeking contributions from the kind of people who don’t think they get their work shown in art galleries; who don’t even think they’re artists.

In short, something is happening. I’m still not quite sure what it is, but I know it’s looking quite special, from this angle. If what is happening looks good to you, we’d love to hear from you. At the moment we’re still in the foothills; but we’re moving, steadily, upwards.

http://www.dark-mountain.net

How The F Word Made Me A Writer

Peter Silverton — Wed, 7 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0100

NB: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE

Where did I first start thinking about Filthy English? In Robinson, a small town with an English name just outside Paris. (The name comes from the novel, Swiss Family Robinson. It’s an odd story and a good one, too. But I’ll leave it for the moment.)

I’d seen a teenage girls’ magazine on a newsstand. It’s cover line was ‘Tous les mecs sont les cons’. My French is okay so I could translate it: all blokes are cunts. But my knowledge of French language is dated at best so I checked it with the person we were staying with: my wife’s great aunt. She worked as a translator at UNESCO so I guessed she’d heard all kinds of language.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘It does mean what you think it means.’

Well, yes. But also no — as I learned later. I wasn’t up to the delicacies of questioning a great aunt — even one who worked as a translator at UNESCO — on the differences between English and French vaginas. Or, to be precise, the differences between the English and French uses of their words for the vagina/vulva.

Con. Cunt. Two words for the same thing — more or less. A pair of similar looking words from a pair of cultures separated by nothing more than twenty miles of sea, eight hundred years or so of episodic wars and what Freud called the narcissism of small differences.

Yet, as I learned, un con and a cunt are quite different. Un con generally means nothing more than ‘fool’ — as in the Le Diner Des Cons, a comedy about fools, idiots and publishing executives. Call someone a cunt, though . . . that is something quite, quite different.

So, I found myself thinking: how can English cunts and French cons be quite such different things? The English one is still the most unacceptable word in the language — even the Guardian is queasy about using it. The French one, though, is acceptable even when writing for very young women — of an age when they are only just beginning to come to terms with the fact that they have one.

Occasionally, I’d discuss this cross-Channel difference with people and often they’d add something. That Montreal’s francophones use religious words to swear, for example. Or that the rudest words in Latin was ‘landica’, clitoris. Or, as the comic George Carlin pointed out, you can go on the radio and talk about pricking your finger but not about fingering your prick.

Sometimes, they’d tell me things that turned out not to be true. That fuck was the acronym of ‘fornication under the consent of the king’. Or that Japanese people don’t swear.

The more I thought about it, the stranger and more distinct swearing (and its siblings, blasphemy and obscenity) came to seem. Every society does it, to a greater or lesser extent. Every society has always done it. Even the dumb swear — in sign language.
Yet every society simultaneously tries to suppress swearing — or at least regulate it. It also seemed clear to me that swearing was becoming more and more publicly acceptable — in Britain, at least. Though you still wouldn’t call your great aunt a cunt. I wouldn’t anyway.

I had the basic, core idea, then: swearing is a human universal that we nonetheless try to suppress. Which meant swearing must be significant — really significant. It must sit close to our own core, in fact. Simply, swearing must be an inextricable part of what it means to be human.
Then, of course, I had to put some flesh on that core idea. Which took me to four places, mostly.
One: books etc. I spent an awful lot of time in the British Library and trawling the net. A nosy policeman searching my hard drive would discover enough filthy searches to lock me up for eternity plus a day. I learned to ignore the stares of people on the tube as I skipped through books with titles like The Anatomy of Swearing or Expletive Deleted.

Two: friends and colleagues, particularly foreign ones. Sometimes I’d ask particular questions: I had long and extensive discussions about the intricacies of the word kurwe with a Polish artist. Sometimes people would just start asking me about the book and I’d soon be talking about the varieties of eastern European gynaecological insults. It certainly meant I was never short of someone to talk to at a party.

Over time, I came to feel perhaps the way doctors do. I found I could talk about all kinds of material which few people would normally discuss over dinner. I’d find myself explaining the various national words for having sex between a woman’s breasts. In Italian, una spagnola — a Spanish thing. To a Spaniard, una cubana — a Cuban thing. To an American, a Dutch fuck. As I wasn’t embarrassed, they weren’t either — not even great aunts. They laughed, of course. But they didn’t giggle.

Three: experts. There’s a whole community of bad language experts out, many of whom were generous with both their time, knowledge and sources. For example, Jesse Sheidlower, an American adviser to the Oxford English Dictionary, shared his previously unpublished early ‘motherfucker’ citations. John Clark of the Museum of London pointed me to the location of London’s long-gone Gropecunt Lane — it’s on Cheapside where Pret A Manger is now.

Four: myself. The other major starting point of the book was the memory of my own start in swearing — and its impact. The first time I said ‘fuck’, my parents moved house. I was four at the time. (This is not unusual, by the way. Research shows that swears are often children’s first words.) Right away, then, as a small child, I’d learned the ineffable power of swear words. No wonder I became a writer.

In which I hit the promotional trail...

Kevin Jackson — Mon, 5 Oct 2009 17:30:00 +0100

Monday am, and no hangover! It’s the start of publication week for Bite, and tonight I am trundling down to London to discuss vampires live – right term?? – on Radio 3’s Night Waves. This should be fun, as the presenter is a cheerful chappie called Matthew Sweet, who has an admirable passion for long-forgotten British films of the 1950s. Lively banter possible. In addition to plugging Bite, I am also meant to be reviewing a new Korean vampire flick called Thirst, by the estimable Park Chan-Wook, if I have spelled that correctly. It’s an amazing film, which deservedly bagged a major prize at Cannes. I’ve seen it twice already, and have been duly ravished by its unique combination of old-fashioned melodrama, grotesque comedy, intense visual inventiveness and all-round excellence. The story-line is based, very closely in parts, on Zola’s Therese Raquin (of all things), and I haven’t seen a film with such thoughtful composition and loony narrative daring for years. It’s already well up in my personal top ten vamp movies...

I haven’t seen a film with such thoughtful composition and loony narrative daring for years. It’s already well up in my personal top ten vamp movies...

Poster for Park Chan-Wook's Thirst

Anyway, tonight’s radio appearance is about the third or the fourth hoop I will have to have jumped through on the way to publication. The first step was writing a longish article for the new issue of Sight and Sound, on the theme – loosely – of how the startling proliferation of vampire product over the last couple of years has not necessarily meant a plunge in quality; and on the secondary theme of how all the best new vamp fictions have forged fresh new alliances between the worlds of supernatural fantasy and the everyday. Naturally, I raved about Thirst, but I also took the opportunity to big up some other recent phenomena: mainly last year’s remarkable Swedish cross-over hit, Let the Right One In, and the HBO series True Blood, which is on Wednesday on Channel 4. Do check it out: it’s sexy and funny and a considerable improvement on its source, the Charlaine Harris series of Southern Vampire thrillers.

With that literary chore tucked away, I took the narrow road to the deep north – OK, a plane to Glasgow – for an appearance at the Wigtown Book Festival. The festival people have sent a car to pick up me and another author, a tall and distinguished looking chap by the name of Marcus Sedgwick. Within about fifteen minutes it emerged that (a) Marcus has, for the last five weeks, been living in a village ten minute’s walk from my own turf in Southern Cambridge (but he is just over the county border and thus counts as an Essex Man) (b) that he has written vampire fiction for teenagers and c) that, without noting my name, he had recently bought a copy of my last book, Moose – a publication so obscure and ill-selling that even I am only distantly aware of it. This delightful set of coincidences set me to wondering whether some God of the Undead is not smoothing paths for me...

Wigtown Book Festival logo

Wigtown was a lot of fun; I met a couple of old friends, notably the novelist Giles Foden, and the hospitality was unimpeachable. My own event was hardly a Woodstock – about thirty people showed up – but the atmosphere was pleasant and some members of the audience were even kind enough to titter at my jokes. I was interviewed by a shrewd and funny American lady who works for the Scotsman, and didn’t seem too offended that I had been impolite enough to have a loud heated argument the night before with her senior colleague on that paper. (It was about which twentieth century Italian poets supported Mussolini. Typical pub topic.) Questions from the audience were thoughtful and sympathetic; one of them was from a puppeteer called Allison. By the time Marcus and I were shunted back to the airport, Allison and I had agreed that I would write a short vampire verse play for her company. Freude!

My own event was hardly a Woodstock – about thirty people showed up.

The next episode was a bit abortive. As you may have read in the national press, a Canadian chap name of Dacre Stoker, a descendant of Bram himself, has been given a very large chuck of change to co-write a so-called official sequel to Dracula. This is not an idea that stands up to much critical scrutiny, but Dacre himself – I interviewed him at Castle HarperCollins in Hammersmith, revoltingly early last Monday – turned out to be a disarmingly modest, straight-arrow kind of guy who made no claims for his book other than entertainment value. And this is fair enough: the prose isn’t any better than your average thick-necked thriller, but it’s a sight better than Dan Brown, and the narrative beetles along quite merrily. He was a nice fellow, in short, and I was sorry to hear that some Man in a Suit at The Sunday Times spiked the story, before I had time to write it up, on the grounds that the vampire craze is over. I hope it is no very cynical asperity that leads me to find these words strangely reassuring...

Thursday will be launch night at the Little Shop of Horrors. Too late to crash-diet, so I’ll try to think up some decent jokes for my thank-you speech.

Per ardua...

Northanger Abbey and walnut cake

Edward Hollis — Fri, 2 Oct 2009 12:45:00 +0100

Northanger Abbey

No reviews today – or, not as far as I can see. I take the train to Redditch, to attend the Throckmorton Literary festival at Coughton Court in Warwickshire – at least I think its Warwickshire. I’m met by a driver (a driver!) at Redditch station, and we swing by my hotel on the way of the festival – it’s a curiously hideous gothick pile amid beautiful countryside, that has all the papery substance of Northanger Abbey, and the charm of some asylum. Here’s a wedding on in the function rooms, and as I check, applause ripples out into the Fonthill-esque octagon. The receptionist is grim faced – ‘too late now’ she mutters.

Coughton Court, by contrast, is a surprisingly tiny gem: an elaborate Tudor gatehouse set in a rather charming eighteenth century gothick facade, that leads to a half timbered courtyard, and two wings of a very naïve mid seventeenth century Dutch classicism. It’s like a miniature pocketbook primer of the English renaissance.

Yes, its England – the England, at least, of marquees in the garden, and tea and walnut cake, and charmingly overgrown herbaceous borders. There’s a even a vegetable garden, where I spend half an hour or so meditating on the beauty of massed leeks, and purple sprouting, and cabbages. Everything is beginning to turn autumnal.

walnut cake

And so is the literary festival – I am slowly becoming aware of the English rural literary festival – it attracts a certain audience and a certain type, I guess, of book as well. I can’t imagine Irvine Welsh working the bepashminaed county ladies, or sampling the walnut cake. Woodstock or the Burning Man this festival ain’t. Here, David Starkey, and numerous others speculate on the amours of Henry and Elizabeth, the urbane Father Michael Collins enumerates the wonders of the Vatican, and Kate Adie talks about danger.

Feeling vaguely worried about tomorrow’s talk, I sit on a bench to think about it, gazing out over a lake and a Chinese pavilion. The bells in the old church tower striker five, and all of a sudden, my cabaret cowboy adventures in Shoreditch catch up with me. I do what everyone should do on a summers afternoon in an English garden, and fall asleep.

The Last Days of Decadence

Edward Hollis — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:45:00 +0100

Holland Park

I wander, in an awful hungover fug, down to Holland Park, past stuccoed houses that shine brilliantly in the morning light, and have eerily immaculate gardens of lavender and box. The park itself is wonderful – the remains of an Elizabethan mansion are stretched over a garden that strikes just the right balance between formailty and overgrownness. The original gatehouse has been housed, like a backdrop for a masque, under a gigantic tent.

Heather rings me at about four - I’m in Covent Garden. ‘Its fancy dress tonight,’ she says ‘you’ll have to find something.’ I break out in a sweat – clothes shopping is my idea of hell at the best of times . Clothes shopping for fancy dress, in Covent garden, with half an hour to go before the shops close, with the worlds worst hangover (yes, even still at 4pm) is quite another.

Everyone in Shoreditch is so cool that they don’t even look up from their laptops and their lattes as Hank Marvin III emerges from disabled cubicle.

But I find Angels on Shafestbury Avenue, and kit myself out with a cowboy outfit – everything is going to be just fine. I trek up to Shoreditch High Street, and end up in some achingly hip hostelry cobbled together from a derelict warehouse with some retro plastic chairs, and a French barmaid. I nip into the loo to effect my transformation. Everyone in Shoreditch is so cool that they don’t even look up from their laptops and their lattes as Hank Marvin III emerges from disabled cubicle.

I wander down the High Street to the Last Days of Decadence, push open the saloon doors and stride into the bar, where, ensconced in art deco splendour everyone is sitting around in authentic period costume dating all the way back to 2009.

Actually, it’s fine. I love being a cowboy, and spend most of the night getting chatted up by earnest twentysomething straight men – or so I like to imagine. The drama of the club nigh unfolds in the background – a rather chaotic promenade performance, involving a German scientist, an evil baron disguised as a Bedouin tribesman, a retired imperial colonel, and an alcoholic ageing society beauty.

My most pleasant conversation is with a phD student at Queen Mary’s in disguise as an Edwardian aeronaut, who, having been stranded on a pacific island, has gone native.

I’m just sober enough to check myself on amazon – phew, I’m about 3500.

Bite the film

Kevin Jackson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:30:00 +0100

Still from the making of Bite, the movie

It is now over a week since we wrapped the shoot of Bite, the promo film for...ur, Bite, and I still feel, in the memorable simile T.S. Eliot suggested to W.H. Auden, ‘Like a June Bride – sore but satisfied’. What most amazes me is that we got the thing done at all.

The process began about three or four months ago when I was having lunch with my mate Roger Parsons at the BBC, and he suggested that it might be a good idea to make – a phrase I had barely heard used in cold blood – a viral video. I had a bit of a think, and came up with a fairly daft parody of a 1950s-style telly commercial, plugging Bite as if it were a domestic product that can change the life of bored housewives, like Mr Sheen. It would involve a comic disjunction of word and image, the voice-over evoking ideas of domestic bliss, the image showing a disgruntled mousewife rebelling against her daily grind – smashing the crockery instead of washing it, napalming the shepherd’s pie... that kind of thing. Then she settles down for a nice read of Bite... by the time Hubby comes home from the office and asks ‘What’s for dinner?’, it is clear that he is.

Real films, Derek Jarman used to say - RIP, Derek - are not made with money, they are made with brains.

Rubbish, really, but it got me started. The next thing was to face up to the glum fact that, with a maxed-out credit card and an overdraft threatening to go feral, the only way to make this modest film would be to wheedle chums and others into working for love, which is to say, for nothing. I was partly inspired by the example of my colleague in the London Institute of 'Pataphysics, Magnus Irvin, who a couple of years ago managed to shoot an ambitious and oddly beautiful half-hour drama, Prayer Cushions of the Flesh, for roughly eleven thousand quid. Real films, Derek Jarman used to say - RIP, Derek - are not made with money, they are made with brains.

Still from the making of Bite, the movie

The tom-toms pounded and people started to come forward. Colin Minchin, an ace BBC editor with whom I had worked on a few of Roger’s arts documentaries, agreed to write the score as well as cut the piece. (We also started work together on a vampire musical… but that’s another blog.) Magnus would do the sets and generally art direct. Ian Irvine, noted man of letters, offered to cook high quality snacks for the sake of morale. Members of the London Vampyre Group, which I had joined in the course of writing Bite, agreed to show up as supporting cast in costumes and fangs – thereby saving us several hundred quid at a stroke.

Cocteau’s Orphee was made for the price of a few glasses of absinthe but looks quite ravishing.

Meanwhile I worked at the short script; made it less of a comic squib, more – for want of a better word - poetic. The life transformation idea, nicked from Persil adverts, suggested some more profound forms of life transformation. I started to think about descents to the Underworld, and Cocteau’s Orphee – one of my favourite films of all time, not least because it was made for the price of a few glasses of absinthe but looks quite ravishing. I then became even more pretentious, but that can be another blog too. Maybe.

With only three weeks to go until the proposed shoot date of 19 and 20 September, I still lacked a cameraman and a leading actress. Thanks to my actor pal Toby Beer, who called in some of his friends, I soon had both. Dom Colchester would shoot it; Pamela Banks would star. An envelope full of tenners secured us a large if primitive shooting space in Dalston, and, after a last minute panic about getting Pamela fitted with fangs and sewn into a djellaba, the game was afoot.

Still from the making of Bite, the movie

For three nights before shooting, I was rigid with anxiety, but virtually the second we started a kind of cheerful magic descended. Thanks to Dom and his mentor Mike, who generously came along to light, we sped through the shots with amazing ease; the BBC types and other industry veterans on set were awed by how swift and professional these chaps were. And Pamela…

Well, it was almost embarrassing to see how she took my flimsy conceits and gave human depth and intensity to them. Embarrassing, but thrilling. She is also – is one allowed to say such things these days?; oh the hell with it – awe-inspiringly beautiful on camera. She has displaced Anna Karina from top spot in my pantheon of spiritually radiant screen goddesses. If she does not become a major star in the next two to three years, the world is even sicker than I thought.

We wrapped half an hour early on the Saturday, two and a half hours early on the Sunday. I went home knackered, but so fizzing with adrenalin and pleasure that I still could not sleep. Colin worked while I idled, and had a complete rough cut ready by Weds. What did it look like? That’s for others to say; it should be up on YouTube and elsewhere in the next couple of days (details to follow). All I will say for now is that it looks pretty much on screen as it did in my brain, and that I ache to do it all again. The next part of the Bite film odyssey is a music video for a song from the Minchin/Jackson musical; we hope to shoot that one in late October, with a little help from our new vampire friends, and especially from Darren Jack Powell, who played the dashing vampire king and executed a most creditable waltz. Watch this space, or, better still, offer to produce it for me. Used tenners are fine.

Excelsior!

Vermeer and a posh curry

Edward Hollis — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:30:00 +0100

Another radio, another radio engagement: this time, speaking peace unto nation from Bush House for the World Service. This isn’t a live interview, so there isn’t that feeling of dread urgency about it. I read from the Berlin chapter of The Secret Lives of Buildings, making it sound as dark and mysterious as I possibly can.

The interviewer is, as everyone is, charming but terrifyingly efficient. The moment the interview is over, I’m spirited away and it’s very clear they have lots of other things to do. The art of journalism, I’m realising, is the art of making friends very quickly, then moving equally fast. One has to be a great conversationalist, extraordinarily empathetic, and very incisive to operate like that for a living. I wonder what they all do when they go home.

In order to convince myself I’m doing something about the next book, I walk along to the National Gallery to find that wonderful Dutch cabinet whose interior is painted with an interior rendered in anamorphic perspective. It’s there: a black box pierced by two holes which, when one peers through them, open into a house of many doors and windows – neat, serene, and endlessly intriguing.

cabinet by Samuel van Hoogstraten

The cabinet, the work of Samuel van Hoogstraten, is exhibited in a room by other painters of the Delft School. In the Vermeer, a lady stands at the virginals before the tall window he always painted. De Hooch’s canvasses depict doors opening into doors and rooms into rooms and courts into streets. Karel Fabritius outdoes them all. His view of Delft is taken from the inside of a music shop opposite the Oude Kerk, and it is rendered through a convex mirror. This room of the national gallery is a treasure: a room composed of images of other rooms, at whose heart is set Hoogstraaten’s imaginary, impossible interior.

This evening is the big launch. It’s a bit like a wedding, really – everyone I know is there, and I spend most of the evening accepting their compliments, and introducing them to one another. I even try to set up a couple. It’s wonderful feeling, and I enjoy myself thoroughly. I get drunker and drunker, and my signatures on their books become more and more unruly, my prose purple. We end up in a rather smart Indian restaurant that we treat like yer local Kohinoor. My agent Patrick stands on the chairs and speechifies. I minesweep all the drinks and everyone flirts with my mother.

Philip, my editor warns me about amazon ‘that way madness lies’. He advises ‘but you need to make sure you’re in the top five thousand. If not, the book chains won’t even register your existence.’
Its 1 am. I’m at place 5100. I’ll place an order in the morning.

Nasa at the Crossroads

Piers Bizony — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:15:00 +0100

NASA logo

On Oct. 4, 2004, a group of revolutionaries in the Mojave Desert sent a little dart-shaped rocket called SpaceShipOne beyond the earth's atmosphere. Burt Rutan, the ship's designer, had gotten tired of waiting for NASA to change - to become more nimble and innovative - or else get out of the way. So he designed the first purely privately funded manned space vehicle. ‘Government space agencies want to commit us to their old-fashioned technologies’, he says. ‘We already know how that stuff works. What we need is the freedom to try some new, smarter and less expensive ideas.’

On the ground, watching the smoke trails through powerful binoculars, were two lifelong space fans from Britain: Richard Branson and his colleague Will Whitehorn. Just two days later, Branson revealed that his Virgin group was ready to finance SpaceShipOne's larger successor. More than $100 million was allocated to set up a new company led by Whitehorn, called Virgin Galactic, to develop a suborbital space liner accommodating six passenger seats.

This was the opening salvo from a clan of wealthy Internet pioneers and business entrepreneurs who grew up in the 1960s Apollo era and imagined that by the time they came of age, space flight would be available to thousands of us. But to date barely 500 of the world's six billion people have left our planet's familiar bounds.

Forty years after NASA’s Apollo 11 triumph, these men concluded, it is the space agency itself that has kept us grounded. NASA has suffered in-flight tragedies with the Challenger and Columbia while falling victim to managerial decay on the ground. But the biggest problem with NASA today is a lack of that most American quality:
competition.

In the wake of President Kennedy's 1961 speech urging America toward the moon first time around, the agency could call on a dozen eager aerospace companies to submit rival proposals for the Apollo spacecraft, and choose the best from a strong field.

Four decades later, a succession of corporate buyouts and takeovers has left us with just two contenders, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, with the heft and experience required for building the big, beefy spacecraft that NASA will need for any future moonshots. NASA cannot innovate radical new rocket technologies while it is so dependent on a couple of huge corporations with a perfectly understandable vested interest in protecting their existing investments and infrastructure, dedicated to those old shuttles.

But beyond the confines of that creaking federal-industrial universe, change is afoot. Rutan, Branson and other private pioneers in the ‘NewSpace’ business are starting to unveil their cheaper, faster and sexier ships. In July last year, Richard Branson proudly introduced his new craft, which he called ‘one of the most beautiful and extraordinary aviation vehicles ever developed.’
The Virgin Mothership (VMS), named ‘Eve’ in honor of Branson's mother, is a twin-fuselage aircraft capable of lifting a passenger- carrying rocket plane, SpaceShipTwo, to the uppermost levels of the earth's atmosphere and releasing it for the final blast into space.

Eve is conducting test flights right now, while SpaceShipTwo will be unveiled in December.
Eve is pushed along by jet engines, but most of the work of lifting this huge yet delicate-looking carrier aircraft into the sky is done by its enormous 140-ft wing. The slender appearance of the craft is deceptive. Its carbon composite structures render it incredibly strong, yet lightweight and fuel efficient.

Will Whitehorn insists that personal space flight is just one of several markets that Eve will service. SpaceShipTwo, he says, ‘takes people up, and brings them all down again to a safe landing. . . . so, what would happen if we didn't have the people, and we didn't need to bring any of the spacecraft down to earth again?

That might seem an odd scenario for a space tourism company, but Virgin Galactic's business plan assumes that payloads of metal and silicon will be just as profitable as those of flesh and blood. With slender disposable rockets carried under Eve’s huge wing, the system will be capable of launching small scientific and commercial satellites all the way into orbital space, at a fraction of NASA's costs for similar missions using ground-launched rockets.

Two other private companies are making similarly giant strides in the space market. In fact they are poised to deliver launch services to NASA when the shuttle makes its last flight, and 2015, when its new Orion crew capsule is supposed to enter service. Throughout those years, NASA will have no obvious means of sending astronauts to the International Space Station unless they hitch a ride aboard Russian Soyuz capsules.

Orbital Sciences of Dulles, has broken ground on a new launch facility for its $1.9 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station with its Taurus II cargo rocket. Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, California, is preparing a similarly well-funded rival booster designed for people as well as stuff.

Future funding of these vehicles from NASA will be based on launch services, not hardware. This distinction is crucial. It means that the space agency purchases access to space, but not the spaceships.

This puts pressure on SpaceX and Orbital Sciences to deliver reliable launch vehicles, or else they won't get paid.

The bonus is that the launch systems remain in private ownership, and the companies concerned remain free to solve their own design and manufacturing problems, and to sell additional launch capacity to other buyers, without interference from NASA.

All of which points a way forward for America's federal space effort.
If NASA can relinquish its traditional habit of designing and building rocket hardware in partnership with its cozy cabal of giant corporate allies, it might yet be capable of spurring new technologies instead of merely standing guard over old ones.
The trick is to buy the ride, not the horse. If Lockheed and Boeing want to get NASA back into space on their heavy old cart horses, then let 'em. No doubt they are more than capable of delivering, but NASA should pay them when the ride is ready, and not before.

We celebrated Apollo 11 this year because it served, as President John F. Kennedy predicted, "to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills." But that was in the 1960s, when NASA flaunted the most incredible wonders that the world had ever known. Today, in advanced middle-age, it has reached the point where it is no longer the proud vanguard of new technologies. It may instead be the faltering custodian of museum relics.

Now we wait to see what happens next, and wonder whose vehicles might, perhaps, launch the space adventure anew. I'll be placing a bet on some of the recently evolved little NewSpace mammals darting around the ankles of NASA's stumbling dinosaur.

This article first appeared in The Washington Post.

A First Class Train, Heat magazine and free biscuits are my idea of bliss

Edward Hollis — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:25:00 +0100

Heat magazine

I have scheduled this morning to meet students to explain to them where their desks are, what their timetable will be, and how the year will run.

But I have forgotten what students are like. In every year group, from first year to masters students, the majority of the students are either late, or have failed to turn up at all. One is stuck in Florence, another doesn’t really see why she should be here, since she had a party to go to in Glasgow. So I’ll have to go through the whole process again, some time next week, when there is no time to do it. It will all be my fault, of course, that they don’t have any idea what’s going on.

I satisfy my lust for vengeance by sternly telling the poor victims who have turned up that I don’t tolerate lateness, and that their studies are up them. It washes off them like water off a duck’s back – I’ve said it all before; and my message is more than a little compromised by the fact that I’m running late too.

I race to the train – first class, Heat and Now magazines, and free biscuits – pure bliss, as the immaculate beaches and castles of the northeast slip by in cold bright silence. I don’t settle down to do any work until we reach York, when I address myself to my Vegas with a Baedeker piece that’s due in for the Independent next weekend. I’m thinking Lucy Honeychurch does Caesar’s Palace.

I’m thinking Lucy Honeychurch does Caesar’s Palace.

My bliss is shattered by a call from Radio Three: ‘We’ve got the president of the RIBA in to speak to you’ says the producer, ‘and Piers Gough. They’ll be arguing against the thesis of your book.’ My knees turn to water. I owe Piers Gough more than he will ever know – it was his exhibition about Lutyens at the Hayward Gallery that persuaded me to become an architect in 1981. Not that I’m a functioning architect any more – more of a recovering one.

I have two stiff white wines with Pru, Portobello’s Publicity Director, when I get to London – she’s not impressed, but I need them – to steady the nerves. We sit in a penthouse bar clearly designed in 1985 for businessman to entertain their nieces in, and at five to nine, descend to the deco splendour of Broadcasting House.

The radio show ends up being rather cosy; and I realise that all those aggressive discussions you hear on the wireless aren’t half so bad when you’re actually in the room (with another glass of wine) sitting round a table. The presenter, Matthew Sweet says he doesn’t want it all to sound like a dinner party – and I hope it doesn’t – but it feels like one. Ruth Reid, the president of the RIBA is a little perplexed, I feel, by the situation but Piers Gough swims in it. ‘97% of all buildings’ he confidently states ‘are still performing the function they were designed for’. In the lift on the way down he laughs, ‘That was a good statistic I made up, wasn’t it?’

And so bed – and amazon on the phone. I have slipped by 1000 places again. I blame that Dan Brown. I’m going to send him of a copy of the book – which by some strange voodoo process of transference, will translate his sales into mine.

The joy of singing Elgar

Edward Hollis — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:35:00 +0100

Arthur's Seat

I’ve slipped a further thousand on amazon, but the number of pages containing other books purchased by people who bought my book has increased from 3 to eight. I’m still selling better than the new metric handbook, but not as well as Charlotte Baden Powell’s The Architect’s Pocket Book. Thus I read the auguries and the entrails, before the day has even begun. After amazon I log onto Shelley Von Strunckel’s horoscope site – surely she could be more specific? Doesn’t she know I need information?

At lunchtime, I bicycle down to BBC Scotland for a radio interview. It’s all very friendly, and everyone is delightful and helpful. I surprise myself by remaining coherent, and, even more amazingly, not being possessed by a frenzied desire to visit the loo at some impossible moment, which is what usually happens in these situations. I ask the listeners out there who has a piece of the Berlin wall under their beds, and the sound engineer’s hand shoots up behind the glass.

It’s the best urban park in Europe, if not the world: a wonderful piece of mind clearing emptiness: a miniature Highlands, placed, for everyone’s convenience right in the middle of Edinburgh.

It is such a beautiful, crisp day that I reward myself with lunch outside in the Grassmarket; and after an afternoon of photocopying and desultory email administering I take a jog round Arthur’s Seat. The Firth of Forth stretches out like an endless blue desert, and the Lammermuir Hills roll down to it in waves of green and brown. It’s the best urban park in Europe, if not the world: a wonderful piece of mind clearing emptiness: a miniature Highlands, placed, for everyone’s convenience right in the middle of Edinburgh.

And then it’s to the protestant whiteness of the Canongate Kirk to choir rehearsal. We’re singing all sorts of very self indulgent English music at the moment: Leighton and Elgar – music to make choirboy mischief to, my ex used to call it. One can imagine a lot of very sensitive Anglican handwringing, and believing in things in a very real sense. I have to design a poster for the concert, which will be entitled ‘Cathedrales Englouties’. It should be a faded collage of Monets impressions of Rouen, I feel.

Afterwards we repair to the pub next door for a beer, as do some fencing society, who fight in the churchyard at the same time. I console a friend about her imminent return from sabbatical ‘ It’s awful’, I tell her ’it takes months to get used to having to work for a living again.’ It’s her first day back tomorrow.

I do so love to help my friends.

Me and Shelly von Strunckel

Edward Hollis — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:30:00 +0100

Shelley von Strunckel

I’ve discovered a new writer’s obsession – checking up on oneself on amazon.com. Its even better than Google: the rating for your book is updated hourly - a sort of compulsive literary celebdaq. Overnight, I shoot upwards from 3000th on the bestseller list to 1500th. Mid afternoon I’m selling better than the real architect’s bible, the New Metric Handbook. By evening, I’ve slumped in the polls to 2500th. This is becoming worse than last week’s Shelley von Strunckel horoscope obsession.

I spend an hour in the morning sitting in a café wearing brown corduroy, trying to be a writer. I get as far as a chapter outline for the next book – with lost of dots and ellipses indicating the points at which I haven’t got the slightest idea what’s going to happen.

But then real life intervenes, and I spend the rest of the day lugging drawing boards around the interior design department at Edinburgh College of art, in preparation for the arrival of the students on Wednesday. I bet that Sir Roy Strong doesn’t have to do this, I grumble to myself, as I apply Mr Muscle to the fifty second board.

Actually, its deeply satisfying, and very relaxing, after two weeks of an international workshop – 45 students from Germany, Turkey, Finland, India, and Switzerland, locked inot a youth hostel in the Old Town at the end of the Edinburgh Festival, and told to get on with designing something– anything – limited only by its duration. We got some wonderful answers: the five minute group devised and performed a flashmob, hanging masses of umbrellas off a bridge, and stopping the traffic .

The five second group devised a very poetic moment: five seconds of absolute silence, granted to one person, and one person alone, at the opening event for the Fringe. The five months group proposed flooding the entire city to see what happened, while the five millennia group walked around asking people what message they would leave for people five thousand years in the future. ‘Keep your legs warm and your head cold’ was my favourite answer.

It was a wonderful workshop, and you can check out all the videos they made of their work on youtube: IMIAD Workshop Edinburgh 2009. It was an entirely experimental, theoretical project – but it was a lovely exploration of how our built environment changes over time.

But I’m glad it’s over, and life is back to normal, Tomorrow, I spend an hour next to the photocopier, churning out handouts for the start of the new year. I guess it’s a literary production of sorts.

A First Time for Everything

Catherine Hall — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:00:00 +0100

My lovely Portobello editor Laura once told me that having a book published is a series of firsts, and she was right. I’ll always remember the first time I read the blurb for my novel Days of Grace, my first glimpse at the jacket, holding the first copy in my hands, reading my first review, first seeing it in a bookshop, the first time somebody told me they’d read it and liked it. All those firsts were wonderful.

Then there are the other, terrifying, stomach-churning firsts, the public side of being a writer, which means coming out of the library, taking out your earplugs, standing up and being seen.

It’s not simply fear of exposure. To publicise my book, I happily wrote articles revealing intimate details of my life. But that was still writing - I was still in control. There was a safe distance between me and the reader, with no opportunity for difficult questions.

I write precisely because I can’t speak – I’m a shy show-off, an exhibitionist who doesn’t like to be looked at. Put me in a situation where I have to be seen, or worse, speak and I’m a wreck.

Catherine at her launch party

My book launch, for example, was filled with my closest friends and family, the easiest audience ever. I knew I would have to make a speech; not a very difficult one, just thanking the people to whom I was truly grateful. But it was a speech, nonetheless, and I was in a state of utter terror. Then there was my first talk to a book group, a sitting room full of the most sympathetic, generous audience, but that didn’t stop me retching behind a garden hedge on the way there.

Then came the big one. Early this year, I receive an invitation to speak at the Edinburgh International Literary Festival in August. As I read the email, I feel a complicated combination of emotions; an enormous sense of flattery at having been asked and cold, palm-drenching fear at having to do it.

I know I must – it isn’t the kind of invitation you turn down. I tell myself to be professional, that it’s months away and I have plenty of time to prepare. I feel calm as soon as the letters arrive, telling me about my hotel, overhead projectors, transport and arrival times, The details appeal to my inner list-maker, distracting me from the real issue at hand. I read the ‘Notes for Authors’ cover to cover, noting that strapless or beltless dresses are not recommended as they make it difficult to clip on a microphone. I go to Covent Garden and buy a high-necked dress with a patent-leather belt.

Outfit packed, I go off on my summer holidays to Italy, where I frolic about and forget all about impending work commitments. But one night we have guests. Chatting about my book, they ask what’s next.

‘Well, I’m speaking at the Edinburgh Festival.’
‘Wow, that’s a big deal!’

The anxiety floods back. I go through Days of Grace, trying to decide which bit to read at the event. I come to realise how hard it is to pick an extract that doesn’t give too much away, or that needs too much introduction. I start to lose faith in the book at all, let alone feel that I am capable of answering any questions about why I wrote it.

Catherine's oak tree

And then the panic attacks begin. I began to wake at 5.30 each morning, sweating and shaking, gasping for breath, my heart hammering. I feel claustrophobic in my little room. The only solution is to go outside in my pyjamas and sit under the ancient oak tree. This oak tree is the scene of many heart-felt chats over the past five years about whether I was really a writer, whether I was doing the right thing giving up my job, whether I would ever get published. It’s a very special place. For three mornings in a row, I sit there, watching the sun rising over the hills, holding a copy of my book in my hands and trying to tell myself I can do it. Safe in the knowledge that everyone else is asleep, I begin to practise reading out loud. But hearing the sound of my own voice makes me blush. After a minute I realise I am speaking in a monotone. After two I can’t bear to listen any longer.

My friends tell me I’m being ridiculous. The boys have spent days constructing a compost bin, an enormous solid wood structure. They are very proud of it and suggest that I use it as a stage.

‘Tonight, after dinner, you can stand on it and do your reading. It’ll be good practice. Go, Caterina della Compostina!’

I refuse.

My sister tells me to feel the fear and do it anyway. I seek refuge in a bottle of red wine.

We have an eight-month-old baby staying in the house. Early one morning her father comes out onto the terrace and sees me under the oak tree. He shakes his head and brings her to me to look after whilst he goes to make the coffee. Holding solid little Francesca calms me down and I decide I’ve found my first audience. With her in one hand and the book in the other, I read the whole thing through, finishing just as her father returns.

‘Batti le mani,’ he tells her. ‘Clap your hands.’ Being an obliging sort of child, she does, and I feel better.

I last went to the Edinburgh festival more than ten years ago. This time it’s very different. My grubby hostel room on the city outskirts is transformed into a four star hotel in the centre of town. As I am taking advantage of a room service sandwich, my friend Sam arrives. We decide to go and check out the book festival and the tent where I’m going to speak. It is quite small.

‘There might only be about three people in the audience,’ I say hopefully.

We call in at the authors’ hospitality yurt, cosy with wood-burning stove, cushions and Turkish rugs on the floor. Everyone is terribly friendly and nice. Sam makes the most of the free sandwiches and we manage to resist the bottles of whisky standing next to them.

Days of Grace

We spend the day of the event searching for a pair of flat black shoes as I have decided my red patent heels make me look tarty and are not in keeping with the image of a serious writer. Sam pretends not to realise that it’s not about the shoes and rises to the challenge. We scour the length of Princes Street, triumphing just before lunch.

Back at the hotel, I am feeling sick and can’t stop clearing my throat. Luckily Sam teaches singing and so is an expert at voice technique.

‘Pinch your throat between your thumb and finger.’
I grab my neck.
‘Not that hard, you idiot! You’ll make yourself choke.’
I release my grip.
‘Now laugh. It’ll relax your muscles.’

All there is left for me to do is panic about whether or not the dress will still fit after a month of pasta and cheese. It does, but only just.

The ‘Notes for Authors’ say you have to arrive forty minutes before your event. I hover in the yurt, shivering in the Edinburgh evening chill. From where I am sitting I can see Carol Ann Duffy having a glass of wine. I feel even more of a fraud. The black shoes have started to rub.

Laura and Lindsay from Portobello arrive, with hugs and smiles and reassurance, and I feel instantly better. They tell me that Edinburgh audiences are lovely, that people are there because they want to hear about the book and that it’s perfectly normal to be nervous. Then they tell me the event is sold out. A whole new wave of panic rises into my throat and I rush off to the authors’ loos.

I am sharing the event with Eleanor Thom, another first-time writer. We exchange shy smiles and looks of terror as we are led from the yurt under a tunnelled awning along to the tent. I feel like a Christian about to be thrown to Roman lions.

Catherine Hall performing at the Edinbugh Festival

The tent is full of people smiling expectantly. We climb onto the stage and sit. I try to breathe slowly as the chair introduces us, forcing myself to look up and see the audience. I know that when she stops speaking it will be my turn to read. The lights are very hot and I begin to pour with sweat.

I find it difficult to remember what happens next. I know I read from Days of Grace, Eleanor reads from The Tin-Kin, we have a conversation with the chair, then we answer questions from the floor. It’s all over very quickly, the audience claps, then we go off to sign copies of our books. I have a terrible feeling that I made absolutely no sense at all. I apologise to Laura and Lindsay.

‘I’m sorry I messed it up.’
Lindsay looks puzzled.
‘Eh? You clearly weren’t at the same event as me. It was great!’

Perhaps, I think, I’ve managed to pull it off after all. The Portobello ladies take us for a jolly dinner. There is so much adrenaline in my veins that the wine goes straight to my head and after a while I begin to believe that maybe, after all, it was ok, that, miraculously, there seems to be no similarity between how I feel inside and how I appear.

Hungover at Edinburgh airport the next morning, I think about the previous couple of days. Despite all the panic and nerves, I realise that I have actually rather enjoyed myself. I resolve that next time, if there is one, I’ll keep calm and carry on. It’ll be easier, I tell myself – it won’t be the first.

Positive Parenting

Ariel Leve — Tue, 1 Sep 2009 14:25:00 +0100

The Cassandra Chronicles

I am a devout optimist, believing that every day is a gift to be savoured to the fullest. My daughter, Ariel, on the other hand, is the self-appointed ambassadress of pessimism who sees doom around every corner and has never seen a dark cloud she does not love. When she is not worrying about something or other, she wonders why. In her dark and delightful book. she asks, ‘Where did my father go wrong?’

Well, I've been thinking about an answer to that for some time - decades, actually - and I haven't come up with a convincing response - not convincing to her, at any rate. I suppose one answer might be, 'Where has my daughter gone wrong?' but that's an equally irrelevant query. I believe it finally comes down to the 'half-full-half-empty' paradigm. I do not believe anyone has a monopoly on right or wrong, or on optimism or pessimism - it finally comes down to the 'half-full-half-empty' paradigm, and so much of your macro- or micro-view depends on where you are coming from, and where you are going - and what you think may be waiting for you around that corner.

But I digress. Among the blurbs on the dust jacket of The Cassandra Chronicles I am quoted as asking 'Why would anyone buy this book?' Buy it, and find out. You will love it.

Life and Art

Tue, 1 Sep 2009 11:15:00 +0100

For many writers, there is a fine line between fact and fiction. I’m aware that I’m hardly breaking new ground here – it is only natural for one’s real life to feed one’s work - but for some of us this fine line is more easily crossed than it is for others. Once over the line, when an author passes off an essentially autobiographical work as fiction, a can of worms is not only opened but the worms often spill over and multiply, encourage accusations of slander, acrimonious splits, lifelong estrangements and formal legal proceedings.

I know only too well about traversing this tightrope. For me, life does not feed what I write so much as it is what I write. Not long after I moved to Nice, it occurred to me that I’m the kind of writer who should really have a blog. I had a new life on the Riviera and all the material a girl could need. Even before embarking on the project, I decided against revealing the blog’s existence to anyone en France because I didn’t want to have to make a choice between censoring my content and potentially falling out with friends.

Unfortunately, only two weeks in, I accidentally sent the link to someone (I’d cleverly set it as my email signature). This particular guy featured in several posts. He also knew most of the other characters and although I hadn’t used any real names it wasn’t going to be difficult for him to work out who was who. Realizing my error immediately, I spent the rest of the day feeling nauseous as I waited for his reply, convinced that the deafening silence was a sign of wrath. Finally, he got back to me: ‘Very good but thank God you only refer to me as the Scot…’

‘Very good but thank God you only refer to me as the Scot…’

As time has gone on, more and more of my friends here have come across the blog. Some I’ve told on purpose, others have found it accidentally and so far no one has reacted negatively. Yet I’m still always slightly on edge: whenever I don’t hear from someone for a while I immediately assume that they must be angry about something I’ve written. I’m even more nervous when it comes to potential suitors. I once refused to send the link to a man I was dating in case the content discouraged him from seeing me again.

To complicate my life further, the novel I recently started working on is unashamedly autobiographical. Sure, there are tweaks and exaggerations, a combination of personalities here or there, but, ultimately, I don’t think many people will have find it difficult to decipher identities. A literary agent once told me that writing this way was legal suicide. She suggested that anything remotely based on reality should be scrapped. If I took her advice, I’d probably be left with less than twenty pages. Besides, most of my friends are expecting to make an appearance now; they’d be upset if I bumped them out.

'Look at D. H. Lawrence, he was always falling out with people.'

There are times too, when I judge it wiser to keep things to myself. For example, the other day I was writing a piece around the theme of He’s Just Not That Into You and was talking about it with my Mum. ‘Don’t you dare put that up on your blog,’ her voice jumped down the telephone cord, ‘you’ve got your future happiness to think about. Look at D. H. Lawrence, he was always falling out with people. And you know that your Croatian relatives haven’t spoken to you since your article in the Family section of the Guardian .’ As my mother is also a writer, one who has featured my life in her work on numerous occasions, I thought she was treading on thin ice. Then again, her warning did make me think twice: was there really any harm in letting this one go? Given that my future happiness was hanging in the balance, I deemed it wise to hold fire. I wrote a new piece about a character from a TV show and put that up instead. I’m hoping that he hasn’t taken offence.

Advice to help you survive August and beyond

Ariel Leve — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:47:00 +0100

Ariel Leve

Dear Cassandra,
My husband says he will divorce me if I keep bouncing out of bed in the morning, singing 'Another day, another dollar'. What should I do?
Muriel, Rhyl

Dear Muriel,

How important is your husband? Really. It sounds like you’ll be fine on your own. Do you really need to be married? I doubt it. If I were your husband, I’d be miserable having to face that kind of enthusiasm every morning. Think of what you’re doing to him. Clearly you’re not one to consider the impact your cheerfulness has on his psyche. Stop torturing him and agree to a divorce.

Dear Cassandra,
I sometimes feel like a bad person because I worry more about my dry cleaning bills than about global warming and third world debt. What should I do?

Tamara, Gloucester Road

Dear Tamara,

Why should you feel like a bad person? If you were wearing wrinkled linen or dirty cashmere – it wouldn’t help save the world. Throughout history people have panicked when reading a ‘dry clean only’ tag – and for what? The world has survived. Embrace your anxiety and leave global warming to Al Gore.

Dear Cassandra,
I prefer my own company to the company of other people. Is this wrong?

Graham Grace, Finsbury Park

Dear Graham,

Why would this be wrong? Not everyone has something to say. And even when you’re around people who have something to say, it can be taxing. I prefer to be around people who prefer their own company. The only problem is, they don’t go out very much – so it’s hard to meet them.

Dear Cassandra,
In the past six months I have lost my job, my boyfriend has walked out on me and I have had to move out of my flat and onto a friend’s floor. I feel pretty chipper, should I worry about this?

Alice Harrison

Dear Alice,

Yes. The fact that you have to ask if you should worry is indicative of how far gone you are. You are sleeping on a floor. Unless you have a back problem, it doesn’t get any more depressing than that. Something is very wrong with you that you don’t see this and I suggest you seek help immediately.

Dear Cassandra,
My wife says I am a misanthrope? Is that a bad thing?

Peter, Willesden

Dear Peter,

I’m confused. Are you asking me what the definition of a misanthrope is? Or, are you asking me if I think it’s a bad thing to be misanthropic? Either way, I don’t like your wife.

Being a misanthrope doesn’t necessarily mean you hate people, it can mean you just have negative thoughts about them – and what’s wrong with that? Why does everything and everyone have to be so appreciated all the time? Give your wife a copy of Chicken Soup For The Soul and tell her to go away. I know, I’m a horrible person. Thanks for writing!

The Entertainment Value of Snuffing Grandma: a nation of children roots for the Mafia

Joe Bageant — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:30:00 +0100

Every day I get letters asking me to weigh in on the health care fracas. As if a redneck writer armed with a keyboard, a pack of smokes and all the misinformation and vitriol available on the internet could contribute anything to the crap storm already in progress. Besides that, my unreasoned but noisy take on this issue is often about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. None of which has ever stopped me from making a fool of myself in the past. So here goes.

Neon sign advertising healthcare evaluations

There ain't any healthcare debate going on, Bubba. What is going on are mob negotiations about insurance, and which mob gets the biggest chunk of the dough, be it our taxpayer dough or the geet that isn’t in ole Jim Crow’s impoverished purse. The hoo-ha is about the insurance racket, not the delivery of health care to human beings. It's simply another form of extorting the people regarding a fundamental need i.e. health.

Unfortunately, the people have been mesmerized by our theater state's purposefully distracting and dramatic media productions for so long they've been mutated toward helplessness. Consequently, they are incapable of asking themselves a simple question, namely: ‘if insurance corporation profits are one third of the cost of health care, and all insurance corporations do is deliver our money to health care providers for us (or actually, do everything in their power to keep the money for themselves), why do we need insurance companies at all?’

The answer is: because Wall Street gets a big piece of the action. And nobody messes with the Wall Street Mob (as the bailout extortion money proved).Better (and worse) presidents have tried. Some made a genuine effort to push it through Congress. Others expressed the desire publicly, but after getting privately muscled by the healthcare industry, decided to back off from the idea. For instance:

Franklin Roosevelt wanted universal healthcare.

Harry Truman wanted universal healthcare.

Dwight Eisenhower wanted universal healthcare.

Richard Nixon wanted universal healthcare.

Lyndon Johnson wanted universal healthcare.

Bill Clinton wanted ... well we can't definitely say … because he made sure that if the issue blew up on him, which it did, Hillary would be left holding the turd. Is it any wonder that woman gets so snappy at the slightest provocation? First getting left to hold the bag on health care, then the spots on that blue dress …

So why did American liberals believe Obama would bring home the healthcare bacon? Because they live in an ideological cupcake land and it’s a big neighborhood, a very special place where “Your vote is important,” and “by electing the right candidate, you can change our beloved nation.” Most of America lives in the neighborhood, even though they’ve never personally met the shrubbery and flowerbeds of such things as “values” and “hope” bloom. Hope that our desires coupled with the efforts of a good and decent president can effect “change.” Evidently these voters never heard the old adage, “Hope in one hand and piss in the other, and see which one fills up first.”

The slaughter of the innocents by the healthcare lobby has pretty much extinguished the political usefulness of the word hope. Nobody, especially Obama, uses it now.

Government assured health care, the first onstage scuffle of the Obama administration, has quickly settled down into the accustomed scenario of very rich and powerful people in expensive suits “finding middle ground,” otherwise known as the status quo. Single payer health care soon became “a consumer government alternative to private insurance,” and is now “a system of health cooperatives Next comes “slightly better health insurance (but not medical services) than before, from the same insurance companies but at twice the price; don’t worry though, we’re increasing your tax load so you can afford it.”

The televised screaming matches, having served their purpose, are over now. The presidency and the nation have settled back into the normalcy of the officially sanctioned state consciousness and its curious non-language, one modified and shaped daily by corporate and government symbiosis. Over generations we’ve come to internalize this imagistic language, which is quite theatrical when heated up for public consumption and dully bureaucratic when attention is to be avoided. But always it is void of content and any sort of truth. In the corporately managed theater state, it’s not whether a thing is true that matters, but how it sounds and looks and what you call it. Call end of life counseling a “death panel,” and you’ve just turned mercy and choice into one more Great Satan.

In the end though, healthcare American style comes down to the preferences of two elite castes, Congress and corporate powers, neither of which can exist without the other. Corporations need the government to sanction their methods of extracting wealth from the public. Congress needs corporations to finance its campaign chariot races. Right now members of Congress have an excellent chance of putting the arm on healthcare industry lobbyist for some real cash:

Senator Smedley Heathwood: “Oh, I dunno, I’m sort of liking Obama’s alternative.”

Godzilla Health Care Inc.: “Here, take this suitcase full of gold bullion, call me if you run short. And remember, we’ve got that ‘Life is a preexisting condition’ bill coming up in the Senate soon.”

Siamese twins, joined at the hip, they share the same goal, preservation of control -- the government’s social control and the corporations’ economic control. And you cannot have one without the other.

Barack Obama

Obama got elected on hope of reform, despite that one cannot reform a mafia, only pay increased extortion moneys. He’s fortunate that it was not a genuine demand for reform, just hope. We’re fortunate we did not demand reform because we’re not going to get it. We just hoped for reform. Obama doesn’t have to reform the healthcare industry mob. All he has to do is look like he took a shot at it, and hope it’s convincing enough. What we’ve seen is probably his best shot, too. Why not? There is always the off chance it might work, in which case his “presidential legacy” would be assured. And if it doesn’t, well, the serious progressives who are screeching mad at him now will still have to vote for him as the incumbent in 2012. Or learn to love somebody like Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush,
Rick Santorum (take your pick) or some as-yet-unknown the Grand Old Party drags out from under the hen house and ballyhoos as a “new face.” Luckily, Dick Cheney is out of the question, barring a coup by the far right wing of the schizophrenic GOP. But still, after Palin, one shudders at the prospects.

Whatever happens, we will not see the Congress stand up against the extortion of its people by the healthcare industry. We will not see even the most ordinary kind of healthcare declared as a human right, as it is in so many other nations. We will see, however, greater access to the public treasury by the insurance corporations.

Every nation in the world is now party to at least one treaty that addresses health as a human right, including the conditions necessary for the delivery of health services .Healthcare is a right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hell, even Saddam Hussein provided healthcare.

Americans cannot grasp this fundamental aspect of human rights (but then we cannot even get child nutrition, or limiting the number of times you can taser an old lady in an airport, out of the starting gate) and join the civilized world and assure its people of such things is testimony. Testimony that we live in a vacuum exclusive of the accepted standard of mercy and decency common to civilized democratic nations elsewhere. Testimony that even we the citizenry would rather maintain and spread lies than accept truths such as most people in countries with universal healthcare would not ever give it up in favor of the U.S. system.

Most of all though, it is testimony that we live under an induced mass hallucination where spectacle replaces facts, information and common sense. In place of actionable information, we are served up screaming red faces … angry mobs manufactured for TV protesting “government interference in the people’s health care choices.” One must wonder what inchoate anger is really being tapped by the organizers of these strange “citizen protests.” As usual, the straw boogeyman of socialism is once more invoked. “Oh my god! I’ll have to give up my $1,100 a month insurance bill, which only pays 80% of my insurance costs AFTER I pay the initial $5,000 of those costs! If that ain’t Joe Stalin all over again, I don’t know what is! We get the false media drama of "death panels."

And being captives of spectacle and hyperbole, we friggin love it. The idea of death panels plays to our childish attraction to the extreme and entertaining. Killing Grandma is far more entertaining to our imaginations than say, guaranteed access to chest screens and blood pressure medicine. Two generations into this national infantilization, it’s now the only national life we know -- the ideological spectacle made real.

Guy Debord's Society and Spectacle

To steal a page from Guy Debord, society has become ideology. We live in an antidialectical false consciousness, imposed at every moment on everyday life as spectacle. We are held in thrall. Our faculty of ordinary encounter has been systematically broken down. In its place we now have our unique social hallucination. Never do we encounter anything directly, yet we get the illusion of encounter. This includes encounter with each other. Anyone who lives in meatspace with his or her fellow Americans could not deny 57 million of them health. In this society no one is any longer capable of recognizing anyone else. Instead, we see others as the screamers at the town hall meetings, or as communists who want to give free health care to illegals and establish death panels. Or as Christian fundamentalists, or as liberals or conservatives. Or as celebrities or as nobodies.

But most importantly, whenever we must come reach any significant agreement as human beings, whether it be about something as globally insignificant as U.S. domestic policy (we are only 6% of the world population, and though it hasn’t soaked in yet to most Americans, we’re also broke and owe the Chinese loan shark a wad) or as significant as global warning, we immediately cede the field to ideology. We simply don't know how to do anything else.

Ideology has utterly triumphed. It has separated us from ourselves and built itself a home inside our consciousness, from whence it operates now as our reality. There is no going back, only forward. Given that we are a nation of children who prefer to close our eyes and make a hopeful wish with Tinkerbelle, rather than give hope the piss test, then let us hope to high hell. We may as well go for broke. So let us hope that, in going forward, new and unforeseen developments in the national consciousness occur. Developments that offer an escape from this one so deeply colonized by the corpo-political machinery we created -- and which in turn recreated us. One that will break us loose from enthrallment. Maybe collision with a giant asteroid. Or that Garth Brooks will be barred from making a fifth comeback tour. That’s one hope. A consciousness shattering event by American standards.

Another hope is for an absolute and total collapse of the system.

At this point, I'll take what I can get.

Watch out for the oil crunch

Jeremy Leggett — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:30:00 +0100

Half Gone

There is one main similarity between the energy crisis and the financial crisis, and one main difference. The similarity is that we are dealing with two massive global industries – investment banking and oil - who have their asset assessment systemically, and ruinously, wrong.

The difference is that few people and organisations were warning about the credit crunch as it approached, whereas with the oil crunch, a host of people - many of them in and around the oil industry - are shouting a warning.

I am one of these. Half Gone, a shout hopefully delivered with a grin and a digestible crib sheet, appeared in November 2005. There had been other warnings, by other people, dating back to 1998. I didn’t and don’t claim originality. I just wanted to have a crack at writing a readable account, aiming to cast the arcane but vital message into new parts of the pond.

In the book, I hazarded that the peak would hit somewhere in the window 2008-2012. I was far from alone in that range either, among the “peakist” community.

For some reason - and regrettably I do not think it was a mass read-in of Half Gone - they changed their collective mind.

In November 2006, the International Energy Agency changed its tune on peak oil in a big way. This agency, having been set up by industrialised governments essentially to promote oil and other fossil fuels, had until that time been antagonistic to the peakists. For some reason - and regrettably I do not think it was a mass read-in of Half Gone - they changed their collective mind. They warned that the world was on an energy path “doomed to failure.” Oil depletion, compared to projected demand, was the main reason for this. As the FT saw it at the time, this turn-around amounted to an “apocalyptic warning.” In June 2007, the IEA spelt out the warning even more clearly. The world faced an energy crunch in five years, they said. This hit front pages all around the world.

In 2007, with the oil price soaring, I convened an Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security in the UK. This was my follow up to Half Gone. The world is full of middle-aged men with bees in their bonnets, all of them with their book in hand. I decided my point of view would have more impact if I sing it in loud baritone amid a choir made of businessmen.

The world is full of middle-aged men with bees in their bonnets, all of them with their book in hand.

The taskforce is chaired by Virgin, and members include Scottish and Southern Energy, Arup, Stagecoach, Foster and Partners and my own company, Solarcentury. We released our first report at the London Stock Exchange in November 2008. You can download it for free on peakoiltaskforce.net. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that it is as turgid as I tried to make Half Gone vibrant. The taskforce report concludes that peak oil poses a grave risk to the global economy. Specifically, what concerns us is the threat of a premature decline in global oil production caused by either or both of collective overestimation of reserves by the global oil industry, and inability to deliver enough flow capacity to meet demand because of underinvestment in exploration, production, and infrastructure. We forecast peak oil in 2013, on the then balance of probabilities. The second report, to be released in November this year, will examine - among other things - the impact of the recession on the brewing crisis.

My own view of the state of play is that the recession may have bought us a little time, but has deepened the crisis beyond. The central problem is that underinvestment by the oil industry today will play out as a tighter crunch in the middle of the next decade. It takes an average of six and a half years from finding an oilfield to bringing it onstream as useful capacity, and in the case of the rare finds of giant fields, often more than ten years.

Why haven’t more people in government, and the oil industry itself, seen what is coming? Why aren’t they acting proactively to soften the blow? The same questions can be asked, with hindsight, of the bonus cultists who gave us the credit crunch. Gillian Tett of the FT, a trained anthropologist, describes in her recent book “Fool’s Gold” how the banking elite achieved “idealogical domination” ahead of the financial crash. Elites do this to maintain their power, she explains. Effectively, they decide what is talked about and what is not. Hence there was a major “social silence” around the epidemic growth of derivatives.

This is exactly what I see going on among my old friends in the oil industry. And their dysfunctional culture extends right into Whitehall, which is asleep on this issue.

This is exactly what I see going on among my old friends in the oil industry. And their dysfunctional culture extends right into Whitehall, which is asleep on this issue. Officials at the Department of Business will barely engage with the UK industry taskforce. They prefer to believe BP and Exxon.

One of the few financiers who saw the credit crunch coming argued that derivatives were “financial hydrogen bombs built on personal computers by 26-year-olds with MBAs.” Here is another set of similarities and differences. The oil crunch is an economic hydrogen bomb. But it is being built by men who are close to retirement. The average age in the oil industry is 49: one of the biggest problems of all. It will fall to 26-year-olds to clear up their mess. Few of these youngsters have ever found an oilfield, much less built a refinery.

I hope that Half Gone will remain a vital backgrounder on all these issues. To my great regret, reality is playing out so far pretty much as I wrote it in 2005. The big open question, though, is whether the world can use the coming energy crisis to flip itself onto the kind of renaissance trajectory I describe in the final chapter of the book. That vision, of a world fast switching from fossil fuels to renewables and efficiency, is of a society not just facing up to energy-security problems, but beginning to deal with the monster threat of global warming.

This is an extended version of an article Jeremy Leggett wrote for the Independent on August 2nd 2009.

Why publishing the voice of doom makes me happy

Fri, 7 Aug 2009 14:00:00 +0100

I am a Pollyanna – by disposition and by determination. My glass is not only half-full, it usually contains something sparkly.

champagne

Ariel Leve is a Cassandra. Her glass is two-thirds empty and something about it doesn’t taste right.

So, when I had the chance to publish a book of Ariel’s gloriously self-deprecating and misery-laced Sunday Times columns, it crossed my mind that her pessimism (or, as she’d probably say, her pragmatism) might rub off on me.

But, with the book now sitting triumphantly on my shelf, I can safely say that the experience of publishing her chronicle of woe has been entirely joyful and (almost) disaster-free.

For a start, actually acquiring the book was blissfully easy. I had the idea one Friday lunchtime, we spoke on the phone that same afternoon; we met for breakfast on the Monday; and – in spite of Ariel’s anxiety that I might die in the night before completing my negotiations with her agent – we’d done the deal by Wednesday.

The book itself was printed without any of Ariel’s worst fears coming true. There was enough paper to create the pages; there were no shortages of ink or glue; and no Acts of God prevented the finished copies from arriving at our offices – although, admittedly, they were initially delivered to the wrong address.

The book itself was printed without any of Ariel’s worst fears coming true. There was enough paper to create the pages; there were no shortages of ink or glue

The only precarious moment came during the editing process. Ariel was back in New York, so we decided to go through the typescripts line by line during a series of transatlantic phone-calls. We’d just come to a chapter on ‘Sweating the Small Stuff’, when she started shouting. I assumed she was simply objecting vociferously to a proposed semi-colon: punctuation is, after all, a terribly personal thing.

But no: her flat was on fire. There were flames coming from the kitchen. I told her to put the phone down and deal with the blaze, then call me back when she was safe.

Minutes passed. I ran through the possible scenarios in my head. I tried to convince myself that she was probably exaggerating and it was just a bit of smoke from a breeze-snuffed candle, but my mind kept returning to the horrifying image of a char-grilled author… Finally, after an anxious half-hour, Ariel emailed to tell me that the guys from the fire department were just leaving. Her kitchen was blackened and the rice cake she’d been attempting to toast was inedible; but she was alive. For the editor of a fatalist, I'd say that counts as a pretty good day.

The Miraculous Prince Alexander Nevsky

Gina Ochsner — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:31:00 +0100

An icon of Prince Alexander Nevsky

The next morning friends of friends, Mitya and Galya were to meet us and show us around St. Petersburg. We waited in the lobby where a low layer of blue haze spilled from the open bar. A car pulled alongside the curb and a slender young woman with red hair and translucent skin emerged. Wearing little make-up and dressed in a print skirt that hung well past her knees and sweater button to the neck, she was the picture of modesty. As she climbed the steps to the hotel, a young doorman materialized suddenly and barred her entry. The woman muttered something and sidestepped the man; she had spotted us behind the glass door and we had spotted her. It was Galya.

"The doorman thinks I’m a working girl trying to do business in the hotel," Galya said.

We pushed through the glass doors and after hasty introduction Galya led us down the steps and toward the car. “We should get going. That person there,” Galya delivered a strafing look at the doorman, “thinks I’m a working girl trying to do business in the hotel.”

Curbside, Galya’s husband, Mitya guarded the car, his arms folded across his chest. As we approached he waved us into the vehicle. “Let’s go!” He said, hopping into the driver’s seat.

Dad and I climbed into the back seat and felt for seat belts. There were none.

“What’s the make and model?” Dad asked.

Lada VAZ

Mitya turned and grinned. “Lada VAZ,” he said, then applied a leaden foot to the gas pedal. Though the car was not his—obtained from a friend of a friend—it was his for this day and he was, it seemed, determined to explore the possibilities of the machine suspension. He was like the devil on ten ball bearings, a kid in a candy store. Enormous craters and gaping fissures in the pavement proved no obstacle to Mitya, who viewed them as mere puddles and raced toward them, dodging them at the last possible moment. Stop signs seemed to mere suggestions. Other cars were annoyances to be glared at. Trams were to be skirted around as one might a slow moving train. Fortunately they were few pedestrians about.

Galya noticed my concerted gaze on Mitya, now hunkered over the wheel, his knuckles white. He had come to a rare full-stop at an intersection, and seemed to be daring the other cars to his right and left to enter the intersection first.

“Not too many women drive here,” Galya said. “I have a driver’s license, but it’s too scary to drive in the city.”

Whether to punctuate her comment or to test it, Mitya punched the gas pedal and we lurched through the intersection and past the other vehicles. “What kind of shock absorbers come standard-issue on these?” Dad mused. A pointless question as we were discovering that in a stock Lada, the passengers are the shock absorbers. But it was a beautiful morning: the breeze coming off the gulf was cool and as my head bounced against a metal panel, I thought, this is far more exciting than anything I could have done back home like washing cars or waiting tables.

We flew past long buildings, none of them more than four or five stories high, all of them painted in fading colors of sunrise or sunset: rose, mauve, butter yellow, vegetal green until we came to the business sector, where the buildings wore more subdued colors. “This building I must point out,” Galya lifted a slim finger toward her window. “It’s the stock exchange, which is where Mitya and I first met when we worked as stockbrokers.”

All of the buildings were painted in fading colours of sunrise or sunset: rose, mauve, butter yellow, vegetal green.

“But not now?” I asked, immediately regretting the question. Of course not now. Money and jobs were scare, we’d been told by an elderly woman who sat in a metal chair at the end of the corridor of the hotel floor and held room keys for guests while they were out of their rooms. She looked so tired, and we learned that this was because she worked three twenty-four hour shifts per week, and on her days off she watched a granddaughter, so that her daughter could maintain a similar work schedule. But, she said, they were lucky: they had jobs.

“The economy just now is in the crapper,” Galya said. There was no trace of reproof in her voice—she was far too polite—only a note of resignation. “So Mitya is back to work at his old job, at the shipyard.”

At this the car lurched toward the curb and Mitya extracted the key. In a single movement he was out of the vehicle and removing the windscreen wipers which he deftly tucked under his jacket. “We’re here,” Galya announced. “Here” was Nevsky Lavra.

Alexander Nevsky Lavra

Nevsky Lavra was named after Prince Alexander Nevsky. A perusal of the kiosk literature informed us that Prince Nevsky defeated the Swedes in a battle on Chudskoye Lake in 1242. At this time Russia was not a unified country and various regions were vassal states. Political and military leaders, (the two adjectives never strayed very far apart) were required to pay taxes to their Tatar lords and ask them permission to rule their own provinces. After his father died, Prince Nevsky, successor to his father’s throne and title, spent three years at Buta Khan’s court, trying to obtain the necessary permission to rule the Novgorod region. Buta Khan, who was impressed with Nevsky’s learning and refusal to worship pagan gods, finally granted his permission. However, on the return homeward voyage, Nevsky fell ill near Nizhny Novgorod and died quietly on November 14, 1263.

Nizhny Novgorod Molitovsky Bridge

But at the funeral, the Prince performed his first miracle. While the prayer was read, a hand of the deceased unclasped to take the roll on which the prayer was written. And it was not until Metropolitan Cyril, who was reading the burial service, put the roll into his hand, that it clasped again. His relics are now stored in the Holy Trinity Cathedral at the lavra.

A woman of many jobs

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:45:00 +0100

In my opinion, there are few occasions more pressurised than a wedding. Faced with fifty or so old friends and a gaggle of new acquaintances, there is suddenly a need to be able to explain your life and define what it is that you are doing. At my best friend’s nuptials at the weekend I found myself stuck in a standard conversational Groundhog Day: ‘Do you live in London?’ the guest would ask me. ‘No I live in Nice,’ I’d reply. ‘Ooh,’ the other person would exclaim, ‘that must be nice! What are you doing there?’ ‘Oh I’m a writer.’ ‘A writer! How interesting! And you can make a living from writing, can you?’ This was the point when I paused to consider my options. I could: a) lie and nod my head politely b) try to change the subject c) tell the truth and explain that if I was living off the measly amount I get from freelancing alone I would be emaciated and wearing rags.

‘A writer! How interesting! And you can make a living from writing, can you?’

The French Riviera

The reality is that to be able to write and survive on the French Riviera, it has been necessary to add numerous other strings to my professional bow. In fact, I don’t know anybody who has accumulated a more interesting array of odd jobs than I have over the past year.

My initial plan when I moved here was to teach English. It didn’t worry me that I hadn’t a TEFL certificate or indeed any teacher training whatsoever; I was English – what further skills were required? Alas, it turned out that speaking proper isn’t enough to land a job at a language school; apparently you have to have a proper qualification as well. Thus I’ve only been able to procure one position since arriving, teaching a fourteen-year-old girl in Antibes.

Grazia magazine

An average class consists of flicking through copies of Grazia, doing her homework for her and gossiping about boys. For my efforts I earn 15€, which wouldn’t be so bad if the return bus journey hadn’t taken me three hours. That’s a whole afternoon of potential writing time up in smoke for less than 5€ an hour.

Clearly there was going to be a need to supplement my measly teaching income, so I considered my skill set and decided to re-launch my former career as an artists’ model. My first assignment was a week-long live-in position at an art retreat in the mountains modelling for a course entitled Erotic Art. Despite how this may sound, I can assure you that no whips or handcuffs were involved. Although as the week went on, I’ll admit I did start to come out of myself. I painted my nails red, draped oriental fabric behind me, wrapped a white turban around my head and flapped a fan of green feathers. Now I model as often as possible. Each time, the amateur artists coo and cluck over my excellent poses. One group of Scandinavian students even told me I was the best model they’d ever had. At the end of the session we swapped email addresses so that I could let them know when my novel was available in Norway.

Despite how this may sound, I can assure you that no whips or handcuffs were involved.

In addition to the modelling I have recently taken on the role of Nice’s premier (i.e. only) bicycle tour guide. The job is a dream: I get paid to tone up my thighs, top up my tan and chatter relentlessly to a captivated audience. Not only that, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve a natural disposition for guiding. Last week I even got a round of applause. ‘It’s wonderful,’ I said to my boss, ‘to finally have professional recognition for my work. I think I may have found my calling.’

So at the wedding, I didn’t have to pause for very long before I happily reeled off a list of my various professional pursuits. Rather than see me as a failed writer, people only remarked on what a fun and fascinating life I must lead and they were right; I may have less time to write these days but I have a hell of a lot more to write about.

Let's celebrate!

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:00:00 +0100

Real England

Here at Portobello towers, we have been celebrating Paul Kingsnorth. We like to celebrate our authors every day but today we are singling Paul out.

Paul has already been shortlisted for the title of Champion of England and been profiled in the Sun – which is a first for a Portobello author.

On Thursday last week, his book Real England made its appearance on Anthony Gormley's fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Well, the book may not have done... but Daisy, a 65-year-old, third generation Londoner, who took the time to talk about the book, did. Hurrah for Daisy, hurrah for Paul!

Paul's Dark Mountain Project is launched on Friday 17th July 2009. Visit the Dark Mountain website

Nicholas Lezard has said of Real England, 'I would like Gordon Brown to be strapped into a chair and have it read to him. And not let out of it again until he has given Paul Kingsnorth a powerful position in government.' This view is echoed by Daisy, who says, 'everyone in England should read it'.

You can buy Real England, and all our titles at a 20% discount if you order them directly from our site.

Ten Toilet Types

Rose George — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:04:00 +0100

Earth closet

1. Earth closet

The original eco-sanitary toilet, patented by the Reverend Henry Moule in 1873. Appalled by the cholera epidemics that killed hundreds of thousands in 1949 and 1854, Moule attempted to improve insanitary living conditions by doing away with water. The earth closet does what it sounds like: you defecate into a bucket, then pull a cord which releases earth to cover your motions. When the bucket is full, remove and replace.

2. The flush toilet

Bog-standard for most of the developed world, the modern toilet nonetheless comes in several varieties, in flush terms. Americans like their water to be pushed out of the pan into the pipe (a siphonic flush); Europeans like it to be pulled. Debates still rage on which is better, at least in toilet manufacturing circles. Outside toilet manufacturing circles, debates are beginning to rage on the wisdom of using clean drinking water to flush toilets with, in increasingly water-stressed times, as well as the debatable wisdom of throwing away precious phosphorous, an increasingly scarce resource without which we can’t grow food.

3. Urine diversion

Urine diversion loo

What God separates, goes the urine diversion theory, man should not mix. Putting solid and liquid waste into the same pipe along with several litres of drinking water has all sorts of detrimental effects. It makes it harder to clean the sewage, obviously. It makes it extremely difficult to capture the rich nutrients that are found in human excreta, 80% of which are in urine. Isolate the urine, and you can isolate the nutrients. You also get drier solids which are easier to compost safely. A double fertilizer boon for organic gardeners, and millions of Chinese, Swedes and Germans.

4. Mountain toilet

Some mountain resorts have composting toilets. For those that don’t, parks authorities increasingly beg walkers and climbers to be careful when they defecate. Piles of human waste and toilet paper are a growing environmental danger. The Scottish Mountaineering Council, for example, advises nature-lovers to defecate at least 30 metres from a water source, to bury the excrement covered with soil or leaf mould if possible and to carry a hand trowel for all such eventualities.

The military know about shit because they have to: dysentery and gastro-intestinal diseases often cause more deaths than combat-related injuries.

5. Biscuit box toilet (army)

The military know about shit because they have to: dysentery and gastro-intestinal diseases have decimated fighting corps since the times of Alexander the Great, and often cause more deaths than combat-related injuries. Latrine-building is supposed to have improved from the 19th century, when field sanitation manuals advised on the best way to build a biscuit box latrine (use “a good, sound biscuit box and be sure to batten it under the seat).

6. VIP pit latrine

VIP pit latrine

The Ventihilation Improved Pit (VIP) latrine is an invention that has saved more lives than probably any other in the developing world. Pit latrines are common (except for the 2.6 billion people in the world who don’t even have the luxury of a pit). But they can be troublesome: children may be scared of big pits. And faced with a choice of defecating in a dark, stinky, fly-infested cubicle, people often choose open defecation instead. The VIP, originally developed by the wonderful sanitation engineer Peter Morgan in Zimbabwe in 1973 (and known then as the Blair Latrine, though not because of any British Prime Minister), had a pit set slightly backwards from the squatting slab, an interior vent pipe and a screen over the pipe to repel flies. A three-month experiment in 1975 found that 179 flies a day were caught in a non-vented latrine. In the VIP, the daily fly toll was two.

7. Arbor loo

Arbor loo

Popular in developing countries the world over, the Arbor Loo involves a pit, some shit and a tree. You fill the pit, then plant a tree in it. Millions of Malawians can testify to the wonderful bananas that grow from the rich compost.

8. Pour-flush pit latrine

One of the most famous versions of the pour-flush is the Sulabh Shauchalaya, the Easy Latrine pioneered by the Indian NGO Sulabh International. Founded by the Indian Brahmin Dr Bindeshwar Pathak, Sulabh was set up to provide decent, cheap latrines for people so that untouchables would no longer have to clean them with their bare hands. There are various models for sale, but all are affordable, and all can be flushed – important in an anal washing culture like India’s – with a cupful of water. The two –pit versions allow for composting (fill one pit then use the other while the first one composts for six months or so). There are millions of Easy Latrines in use; but there also over 1.2 million manual scavengers, as the latrine cleaners are known, still doing their filthy, appalling job, often for no money, in a country where untouchability has been outlawed for sixty years.

9. Helicopter toilet

Also known as a flying toilet, the helicopter toilet is a plastic bag. Simply defecate in the bag, wrap and throw. Popular in slums such as Kenya’s massive Kibera shantytown, helicopter toilets are better than leaving human waste – which can carry 50 diseases – lying around, but not much. The Swedish NGO PeePoople has now developed a biodegradable helicopter toilet called the Peepoo Bag, though the humble plastic bag is still a bestseller in most urban slums.

Open defecation is murderous. Women have to get up before dark to preserve their modesty and risk rape and animal attacks.

10. A tree/road/yard

For most people, their toilet is whatever open ground they can find. Four in ten people don’t even have a bag to defecate into. They use whatever they can. Open defecation is murderous. Women have to get up before dark to preserve their modesty and risk rape and animal attacks. Children ingest faecal matter in their food and water (as it’s on their feet and fingers), contributing to a global diarrhoea death toll of up to 2 million children under five every year.

Gorka and the Seagulls

Véronique Ovaldé — Wed, 8 Jul 2009 17:00:00 +0100

seagulls

Gorka has gone back to Camerone. Before leaving, he called his local branch of Alcoholics Anonymous to check that they did indeed have one in Camerone and that he would be able to attend the meetings as often as usual. Reassured on this point, he packed his rucksack: swimming trunks, a few T-shirts, a book of Chinese poetry, a primer on Ancient philosophy and an Agatha Christie. He went back to the B&B he used to go to with his parents as a child. It was under new ownership, thankfully: he’d have hated having to justify his return, or even sum up the situation – to say where he was in his life, which paths he’d strayed down.

Gorka has had a bit of a difficult year. He’s stopped drinking, and he divorced the same woman for the second time – which might have given him hope that she’d come back to him once more, but in fact it’s quite clear that there’s no longer much to hope for on that front. For both these reasons at once, he is convalescing.

As soon as he arrives at the B&B, he goes to the seafront to telephone his ex-wife (he is sure not to call from the B&B: he wouldn’t like the manager or anyone else in there to find out how things are with him). Teresa answers, speaks to him very gently. She approves of his decision to have gone to Camerone, tells him the air will do him good. (He can’t quite see the ‘good’ she’s talking about: Camerone is a town which is tropically hot at Christmas.) She speaks to him about their son, offers to put him on the phone; Gorka declines in a voice just as gentle as Teresa’s. It’s as though they’re both taking pains to show that they aren’t angry with each other. If the phone call lasted long enough, they’d be reduced to whispers, and there would be no more sound on the line but the wind of Camerone and the crackle of a thousand voices in the dark of the telephone network. Teresa tells Gorka to take care of himself. He doesn’t much like that the phrase, as it gives him the impression that she’s asking him to take care of himself because she no longer has the strength to do it. He waves his right hand around in the booth – which he’s left open so he doesn’t suffocate, and to hear the seagulls and the surf – trying to signal to her with this gesture that all is well and that he’s going to have a great New Year’s on the beach at Camerone.

And so Gorka settles into a soothing routine. He gets up in the morning at about nine o’clock, has a coffee in the B&B, goes out to the beach. The beach at Camerone is a town beach, lined with palm trees planted at regular intervals. They’re old palms, though – they were already there when Gorka was a child – and look more like weary old elephants looking for a place to die than palm trees. The buildings on the seafront are suitably shabby; whole sections of paint have disappeared with each equinox. Gorka sits in the sun for an hour or two before going for a paddle. He doesn’t swim – not yet. It’s still too early. He goes back to his spot. It’s his spot: the place where he leaves his beach towel, his book with its sand-blown cover, and his little towers of pebbles. He always sits in the same place. And the other beach-goers at Camerone do the same. There is a woman in a bikini who never takes off her violet shirt, so Gorka thinks that she’s had breast cancer – he watches her read. She always sits in the shadow of a rock; next to her is a child who digs holes, and a bit further away a man who notes down on the cover of the book he’s reading the words he doesn’t know: scale, chalice, mesmerism. Once, Gorka caught the book as it started to blow away in the wind.

Then at 5 o’clock, he goes to his AA meeting. He comes out again at about 7 o’clock, goes to the seafront where he eats some tapas and drinks tonic water, then goes back up to his room where he turns on the TV and doesn’t watch it. It’s as if he doesn’t see what’s happening on the screen; he’s elsewhere, taking stock of his year, of his life. It’s not looking too bad: there’s nothing to despair of, and Gorka isn’t a man for despairing. He’s even capable of taking crucial decisions at times, and has the vital ability to rally his troops when he senses that they’re dispersing. It’s a feeling he’s had many times in his life: of setting off down a path, or rather down several paths at once, of being disorderly and chaotic – because of the drugs and alcohol, of course – and finally of being able to regain his perspective, no longer see people who shouldn’t be seen, stop the ride and get carefully back on his feet. He thinks of his son, of a present he’d like to send him; Gorka doesn’t have inconsequential thoughts. He feels deliciously melancholy.

On January 1st there’s no AA meeting. Gorka has been in Camerone for a month now, settled in a fortifying routine. He has spent all his money on salmon caviar, ordering it by post. He received the package yesterday, after staying at the B&B to wait for the postman. He opened his parcel and took out the jar of small orange balls. He didn’t know if he should put them in the fridge; he didn’t know what it meant that they were pasteurised. He was afraid that the Camerone heat would make them boil up inside the jar, that they’d start to ooze out as though the hatching process was starting again. So he put them in the fridge at the B&B but had to say that they were a present for his mother. On January 1st, Gorka takes the salmon caviar out of the fridge, makes a little sign to the manager as if to say “Right, I’m off to give them to her now”, and goes and eats them with a teaspoon on the beach. It’s a very pleasant moment: it isn’t as hot as usual, there aren’t many people around – in any case none of the ones Gorka usually sees – and the sun shines through a hazy veil of cloud, so when he’s finished eating he lies down and falls asleep, and dreams of a tidal wave that wipes out Camerone. It’s been a long time since Gorka has had a dream. He sees the gigantic wave coming from far off, full of little pieces of paper; when it reaches Camerone Gorka sees that these are coloured bank notes, like Monopoly money. Instead of taking cover, the people come out to gather up as much of it as they can, and are swept away. It all happens in the deep silence of a dream. Gorka is woken by the sound of seagulls (their squawks and rustling feathers) as they fight to peck up the last salmon eggs from the jar. They look furious. Gorka smiles, gets up to move his towel a little way off and then stretches out again, propping his torso up with his elbows, his eyes fixed on the ocean but squinting cautiously, leaving the seagulls to squabble in peace.

Real Ireland

Wed, 1 Jul 2009 11:00:00 +0100

There is an England of straw hats and high teas and country pubs. I know because I have read about it. But my England has always been a very different place. To an Irish child, it seemed something much more modern and streamlined. If you have bounced along on potholes all the way to Rosslare, you don’t really mind spending the rest of your summer holidays on featureless English motorways. Even the towns we fetched up in, with their uniform branches of Woolworths and Wimpys, had an attractive regularity about them. If Ireland in the 1980s seemed characterised by a cranky inefficiency, England was its opposite: we had the past, but they had the future.

cream tea

As childish impressions go, this one has deeper roots. Mine was the England of the industrial revolution, the centre of colonial administration, a symbol of modernisation and progress - whatever those words mean. If the road to modernity took its toll on Irish culture, particularly with the loss of the native language in the nineteenth century, for a long time the nuances of the Anglo-Irish relationship still dictated that it was our business to be quaint and characterful, and Yeats and Hollywood agreed. I did not.

The nuances of the Anglo-Irish relationship still dictated that it was our business to be quaint and characterful, and Yeats and Hollywood agreed.

Still, a sense of cultural distinctiveness has tended to be exiled to the margins of these islands. Paul Kingsnorth’s Real England is a book which examines what this has cost English culture itself. In England’s identikit high streets and corporate pub chains, in the sprawl of its malls and suburbs, he detects a homogenisation of culture, the spread of the bland. In a global economy, the local is under threat as never before. And with it goes individuality, regional diversity, the real sense of community and place which underpins a national culture.

Real England

But Mr Kingsnorth, you have it all wrong.

Learn from my experience. I am not a local. Of anywhere. At least I try not to be. When I was six, my family moved from suburban Dublin to a small country town. With impeccable timing I decided that I was an urban creature and always had been: alienated, deracinated, happiest in an anonymous mob. But just try being part of an alienated, deracinated mob in an Irish country town - it’s hard work. You can’t walk down the street without some old fellow stopping you:

1. I know you
2. Oh, I do
3. I knew your grandfather
4. And your uncle George
5. But aren’t you the spit of your granny
6. Oh, y’are. Y’are indeed.

This is menacing to a six-year-old. No point in telling them not to talk to strangers and then abandoning them to old fellows propped on canes who feign intimate knowledge of their family history and genetic coding. My side of these conversations were invariably silent and repetitive:

a) I don’t know you
b) So I don’t
c) And I didn’t know my grandfather
d) So let’s leave George out of it
e) And get one thing straight right now
f) I am nobody’s spit, mister

Learn from my experience. I am not a local. Of anywhere. At least I try not to be.

I think this love of community, this sense of place is over-valued. There are advantages to being part of an anonymous mass. But in Ireland, such things are endemic. The capital has long been full of part-time Dubliners, people whose allegiances remain with the town or county they grew up in, possibly even the town or county their parents grew up in. These people will settle in the city, talk about building a place ‘down home’, return to do their duty in local elections as I still do. Now they are coming home to changed communities – a bit more EU infrastructure, a few more toytown designer outlets, a spreading commuter belt. These days, the part-time Dubliners are as likely to be travelling from the country to the city rather than the other way round, and local communities are expanding and fracturing at an equal rate. Intel or Dell is most likely to be the biggest local employer, but no one is complaining about globalisation. At least, not until the multinationals ship out again.

But the chain stores haven’t even dirtied their feet with my country town yet. The market square still does a booming trade, but no one has responded to years of entreaties to move in with their cheap standard clothing made-in-Taiwan. Character has been popping out like carbuncles all over the face of my town for years, and still no one is happy about it. I think they call it underdevelopment.

Perhaps no one really lives in one place any more. Perhaps there is no such thing as local culture.

I spoke to a new Dublin exile recently, someone who was priced out of the city by the property boom and who settled in this last redoubt of cheap Irish real estate. She didn’t know her new neighbours, didn’t have much in common with them, but she did like her new vegetable patch. Because she runs an online business from home, she considers herself much more part of a virtual community anyway. One foot may be rooted in the soil, but the lines of communication are running far overhead. Perhaps no one really lives in one place any more. Perhaps there is no such thing as local culture. A century ago, the isolated Aran islanders were taken by many to symbolise an authentic and distinctive Irish culture – one ‘racy of the soil’ and untainted by commerce with the mad modern world. It was a handy notion, but it ignored the fact that one half of Aran was generally found in Boston and New York, sending money and gossip home to the other half.

And yet if the ‘real’ Ireland was always a chimera, that sense of community and place bullishly remains. Despite the new rash of Tescos and Lidls across the country, not to mention the Dublin IKEA store that is awaited like the second coming, in Ireland there is still a strong investment in the local and the particular. Now exiled in my own modern metropolis, I asked my online friend how she was getting on back home. Things had changed. ‘I can’t go anywhere now’, she said. ‘People stopping you every five minutes. “I saw you down town last Tuesdah.” “Was that you up the ladder outside of Winkles?” How does everyone suddenly know who I am?’ That, my friends, is the real Ireland.

Are you free on Saturday?

Jo Baker — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:16:00 +0100

Waterstone's logo

So I’m doing a signing at a bookshop this weekend. And that’s great and it’s really lovely to be asked.

But a friend asked me if I was looking forward to it as we were slogging up the hill to collect our respective sons from school (I hadn’t told her – I don’t like talking about that kind of thing – my husband had, who has none of my reticence) and I had to admit I was dreading it. I’ve never done a bookshop signing before – but from previous experience of working in Waterstones, and from what other writers have told me, I expect it’ll involve sitting at a desk, smiling awkwardly at customers as they mooch round the 3-for-2 tables and cast me sidelong suspicious glances. If I’m really lucky my mum might drop in for a chat. That will be the sum total of the occasion, unless the staff take pity on me and let me help out at the tills.

If I’m really lucky my mum might drop in for a chat. That will be the sum total of the occasion

Tom Baker

I’ve stood in line at plenty of signings myself. Before the Alex Rider days, I had Anthony Horowitz sign my Robin of Sherwood novels, and The Falcon’s Malteaser. I queued for ages to have Tom Baker (no relation) sign his novel for me (he was my Dr Who, and I’ve always had a fondness for him as a result – he was as strange and lovely as you might expect). I know people who queued two hours to have Guillermo del Toro sign a book he hadn’t even written (del Toro’s got this great arrangement where he comes up with the idea, writes a page-long outline, and some other poor schmo does all the writing – that’s just so jammy.) But it’s never easy, it’s never comfortable, getting a writer to sign their book, not if you love their work. For me, there’s always there’s this strange disjunction between the intimacy of reading (the author speaking softly, conjuring images in my head) and then the fleshy being in the room (some, admittedly, fleshier than others). I always come over all blushy and don’t know what to say.

There’s always there’s this strange disjunction between the intimacy of reading and then the author being in the room in the flesh (some, admittedly, fleshier than others).

For instance, I was at an event in London the other day. A writer there, whose stuff I love, was standing three feet away from me, being talked at by someone. And if I’d had the nerve I’d’ve sidled up and smiled and said: that bit in your last novel, it was really great, that bit where you talk about …. But it doesn’t matter what I could have said, because I didn’t. I had a shy fit: didn’t want to intrude, didn’t want to impose myself on her evening. I set down my glass of wine and sidled off without speaking. Which was stupid, really; because it’s not like she was going to take offence – no-one does when you tell them you love their stuff.

I think I saw JK Rowling at the same event (not reading or signing, just attending) which made me realise that until then I’d believed that she lived in some kind of magical island in a gorgeous parallel dimension. I didn’t speak to her either (amongst other things, I’d be slightly embarrassed at being the only person I know who’s never read a single Harry Potter book – but then, I reckon it’s a bit like Freud or Marx now, you don’t have to read the work to know the gist.) though I did just about manage not to stare.)

Harry Potter – I reckon it’s a bit like Freud or Marx now, you don’t have to read the work to know the gist

Back when I worked in Waterstones, I used to help set up for signings and readings and hand round glasses of wine and sell books, and though that was one of the better things about the job (it was a really busy branch, so you were always knackered and overstretched – it was so busy that one Christmas I sold a bunch of books to Peter Mandelson without even noticing) it still wasn’t what I’d call actual fun. There’d often be two authors in at once, and invariably one writer would be selling much better than the other. I’d stand and chat with the underdog, refill their wine glass, and try and distract them from their colleague’s sales.

Catcher in the Rye

So I kind of think it’s stressful for everyone. Writer and reader and bookseller too. But as I said, it’s so good of the bookshop to invite you, and you’ve got to do these things. Unless you’re J D Salinger, in which case, you know, having written Catcher in the Rye it’s kinda okay to take the rest of your life off. And as I’m not, and haven’t, and won’t be, I’ll be sitting at the desk at Waterstones, Lancaster – the Cornmarket branch, round the back of M&S – from around 2.30 on Saturday 20th June, smiling awkwardly at the customers mooching round the 3-for-2 tables. So if you happen to be around, pop in and say Hi. I’d really appreciate

Twitter and the Iranian protests

Nasrin Alavi — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:54:00 +0100

Twitter logo

All over the world people are monitoring unfolding events in Iran, where an election victory by the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is being challenged on the streets, via the internet.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's contested re-election has seen mass arrests, newspaper closures, heavy censorship with many reformist internet sites and social networking sites such as Facebook blocked.

Even the mobile phone messaging services (SMS) have been shut down. But people have found ways to get their message across and to organize protest rallies that have included hundreds of thousands of people that are unprecedented since the eve of the revolution 1979. With several tragic fatalities; many have been forced to retreat into their homes by the security forces and the Basij militia that thunder through town on their powerful motorbikes, many are armed. Ironically mirroring a practice used as protest against the monarchy thirty years ago; under the cover of darkeners protesters shout “Allah Akbar” or “God is great” on the rooftops.

Yet for Iran’s tech-savvy youth there are other options of getting the word out. It was a simple tweet in the early hours of the morning June 13, by Gholamhossein Karbaschi – the proposed vice-president to Mehdi Karroubi challenger in the Presidential race – that first alerted anyone to the unexpected poll results. His Twitter message read,
"We too are in a state of shock, the things that are happening, are truly unbelievable".

Shall I tell?

Nasrin Alavi — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0100

We Are Iran

Iranians are discovering more every day about the man who has governed them for four years and - even now - hopes to do so for another four. During the election campaign he was often seen surrounded by adoring crowds. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's opponents have long accused him of busing in "extras" for these scenes, but this was confirmed only when an an official memorandum was revealed by Mohsen Rezaei - one of his three electoral rivals, and a former head of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) - indicating that each Basij (militia) centre was required to send 80-120 people to a pre-election rally.

Such numbers soon add up. But they are far outweighed by those involved in the conduct of the presidential election by Sadeq Mahsouli - Iran's interior minister and an intimate ally of the president since university days.

During the election campaign Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was often seen surrounded by adoring crowds but his opponents have long accused him of busing in "extras" for these scenes.

The official figures published by the interior ministry tell an extraordinary story. They are, for example, in the main inconsistent with traditional urban and rural voting patterns, including those reflecting ethnic loyalties. In the presidential election of 2005, Mohsen Mehr'Alizadeh came last. But he was still the leading candidate in his home state of Azerbaijan, gaining over a million votes there. This time round, Ahmadinejad's results throughout the country show a consistent victory margin of 63%, even in the home towns of his opponents - including the Azeri heartland of his main opponent, Mir-Hossein Moussavi. It is as if a clean line has been hand-drawn across the country; and it doesn't look good for a president so preoccupied with appearances.

The supposed 333,635 votes of the other reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi's were also at odds with his performance in the 2005 election, when he had received 5,066,316 votes to Ahmadinejad's 5,710,354. It appears that Karroubi even had more registered party canvassers than votes. Even the third candidate in the election, the president's fellow-conservative Mohsen Rezaei, was led by these absurdities to lodge an official complaint to the Guardian Council - which on 16 June agreed to re-examine the results in contested areas (and that's a lot of results).

For supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the source of what has happened is clear. I have asked many of them - largely passionate about the man and convinced of the reality of mass election fraud - why him? There are lots of answers, but there's always "that debate".

The innovative live televised presidential debates of 2009 saw Ahmadinejad in the unusual situation of being obliged to face stern criticism from his opponents on air.

The innovative live televised presidential debates of 2009 saw Ahmadinejad in the unusual situation of being obliged to face stern criticism from his opponents on air. The key moment in releasing an outpouring of support for his main rival was when Ahmadinejad, in Kafkaesque-interrogator pose, waved a file questioning the academic credentials of Moussavi's distinguished wife, Zahra Rahnavard. Ahmadinejad withheld the name but threatened to reveal it with a repeated: "Shall I tell? Shall I tell?"

Moussavi dealt with this shameless bullying with the quiet confidence of a mature statesman, calmly inviting the president to "tell". Moussavi then looked at the camera and said, more firmly: "People! I have come to change this state of affairs, where Iranians are all considered guilty until proven innocent and where government ministers are more concerned about compiling slanderous dossiers then serving the people".

In his calls for change, Moussavi had been inclusive; he even asked the Basij for support. Ahmadinejad undoubtedly has his own genuine supporters. But the handling of the election results, the brutal attacks and mass arrests of his allies that followed - all have exposed the totalising ambitions of his opponents.

"They", to use the word Iranians commonly direct at the powerful, are today revealed as the architects of their own misfortune. "They" have made this a fight to the end.

This article also apeared on openDemocracy

A bonanza of jours fériés

Tue, 9 Jun 2009 17:45:00 +0100

Hannah Marshall

Do bank holidays count when you’re a writer? It is a question that has been plaguing me lately because, like the UK, summer in France is a bonanza of jours fériés. For example, last week the designated day of slacking was Thursday. I’ve no clue what event the holiday was recognising but, as I took a sip of chilled rosé and slipped further back into my sun lounger, it occurred to me that welcoming it with as much enthusiasm as everyone else wasn’t such a bad idea. My friend was flailing in the pool beside me in an attempt to get away from her boyfriend, who was grabbing at the tie of her bikini top with intent. Giving up, he clambered out. ‘God,’ he said, grinning and shaking the water from his hair, ‘I love French bank holidays.’ I squinted up at him; he seemed not to have a care in the world. Of course, for people with proper jobs this is what the fériés are all about.

I’ve no clue what event the holiday was recognising but I took a sip of chilled rosé and slipped further back into my sun lounger.

A glass of chilled rose

Since I started writing full time, I’ve had the responsibility of setting my own working schedule. Initially, to help me stick to my self-imposed deadlines, I would repeat mantras along the lines of, ‘Writing is a job. Monday to Friday,’ and ‘Nine to five is novel time.’ If I’d actually been able to maintain this level of diligence, then enjoying the odd bank holiday would have been perfectly justifiable. Unfortunately, I’ve let myself go of late, and since my average working day now consists of tagging photos on Facebook, composing brilliantly witty emails and going to the beach, I’m not so sure that I can claim to need the break. When people ask me how the novel’s coming, I explain that I’m suffering from writer’s block and that, of course, it’s impossible to force the creative process.

'Nine to five is novel time.’

‘Is it nearly finished yet?’ my friend enquired on Thursday. She was sprawled on a deck chair next to me with her face towards the sun. ‘Um, no. Not quite. Nearly. I probably should be working on it now but…’ ‘Don’t be silly,’ she giggled, ‘today’s a holiday.’ Her boyfriend was bouncing a tennis ball menacingly above my head. ‘But Han,’ he said, still focusing on his hand-eye co-ordination, ‘haven’t you just been in Sicily for two weeks, on a HOLIDAY? I thought you were supposed to be a struggling artiste.’ The ball bounced awkwardly on the racket and flew into the pool. ‘I am an artist,’ I spluttered at him. ‘And I am struggling. On all fronts.’

It is possible to get whisked to a fancy hotel for a grand prix and still not be able to afford to put food on the table.’

Monaco

As I’d been bragging only moments earlier about the glamorous weekend I had in store, quaffing champagne at the Hotel de Paris and watching the Monaco Grand Prix, it occurred to me that I might be on shaky ground. ‘Listen,’ I tried to reason, ‘being a writer on the French Riviera isn’t the same as say being a writer in London. The approach to work here is Mediterranean, more laissez faire. Besides,’ I waved at him dismissively, ‘in this part of the world it is possible to get whisked to a fancy hotel for a grand prix and still not be able to afford to put food on the table.’ He shrugged, ‘So, if you’re not working on Sunday then I take it you give yourself weekends off as well?’ I turned away from him and closed my eyes; bank holidays were proving to be problematic enough, weekends could be left for another day.

Bee Revelation

Jo Baker — Tue, 9 Jun 2009 16:15:00 +0100

a solitary bee

Bees are having a tough time. I think we all know that. What with colony collapse disorder, viruses and parasites and agrochemicals. And that’s only our European bees: in America, they factory-farm bees. Colonies are driven thousands of miles in the bee equivalent of a tour-bus, pollinating orchard after orchard till they are so exhausted they just die. There being no insect equivalent of the Priory to check into.

There is no insect equivalent of the Priory to check into.

I have a lot of time for bees. It’s because they are furry. I know this because I have no such sympathy for wasps. The mental circuit goes something like: ‘Bees, furry little sweethearts, bless. Wasps – fuck em.’ As a child I always used to think if you could just scale up a bee to about the size of a guinea pig (and somehow painlessly blunt and depoison that sting) they’d make a lovely household pet. Imagine, settling down on the sofa after a long hard day, and having your pet bee humming contentedly in your lap as you stroked its furry little body (I also had this idea for scaled-down elephants (about the size of a cocker spaniel) but I’ll save that for another day.)

So, but, yeah: bees – they’re great, they’re having a hard time. So when I saw a bee in our paddling pool, I had to rescue it. It was ten-ish, getting dark, and I was gathering the crisp dry washing from the line. And there it was, clinging for life to a leaf like Kate Winslet at the end of Titanic. In fact, I wasn’t even sure it was alive, but when I fished it and its life-raft out it started flexing its antennae. And my first thought was, I’ll put it down somewhere so it can recover. But its fur was wet through, and my own arms were getting a little prickly with the evening cool: could I bring it indoors, set it down on a windowsill to warm up?

honeybee

Then the bee crawled off its leaf and into my hand, digging its hooked feet into my skin like tiny icepicks. It didn’t hurt, but it wouldn’t be so easy to put down now, and it seemed to be warming up from my body-heat. It fizzed out one wing, unsticking it from its wet fur. I smiled. It clambered round and up onto the back of my arm. I sat down on a kids’ chair and watched it.

Its wings were veined like stained glass and its antennae flexed and rippled thoughtfully.

It was beautiful. Its wings were veined like stained glass and its antennae flexed and rippled thoughtfully. I blew on it, gently, and its fur began to dry, and its second wing unstuck. I thought: this is going to end well. This is going to end like Born Free: there will be tears but they will be happy tears. This is not one of your Kes moments. It’s going to take wing and fly away, and after a really shitty day (I won’t go into that here either) something wonderful will have happened. And also, importantly, I won’t have got stung. But it didn’t fly away, it flittered its wings for a bit, then it packed them up contentedly, and climbed up and into the crook of my arm. Where the veins show blue through the skin. I sat a bit, and watched it a bit: it wasn’t budging. Time was getting on: I was tired, it was getting dark.

St Kevin

I tried to coax the bee onto a wild geranium, a yellow poppy, but it was having none of it. It was cosy, close to my pulse. As I watched, its antennae started moving slowly, rhythmically, softly: the bee was clearly falling asleep. I half thought, for just a moment: maybe I can just go to bed with a sleeping bee on my arm, which somehow made a synapse spark and I was thinking about Heaney’s poem about St Kevin, who, praying in the Gaelic fashion, arms outstretched, had had a blackbird nest in the palm of his hand. He held the nest and continued praying until the eggs hatched and the birds were fledged. But then, he had that whole mystic transcendental thing going on. Me: not so much. I need my sleep. I stood up slowly, arm outstretched, and searched about for a bee bed for the night. Somewhere cosy, dry, safe.

I was thinking about Heaney’s poem about St Kevin, who, arms outstretched, had had a blackbird nest in the palm of his hand.

The Green Bin. Always warm after a day in the sun, and full of ivy at the moment – full of leaves and curvy bouncy twigs. Prop open the lid a wee bit so it can fly out in the morning. Short of a human inner arm, the ideal place for a bee to spend the night. But just as I was about to ever-so-gently tap the bee into the bin, the bee gave what I can only describe as the bee equivalent of a snoozy stretch. Humans reach out their arms, flex their fingers, stretch out their legs from hips to tips of toes. The bee, doing its bee-y thing, and quite oblivious, stretched out its sting, and pushed it into me.

Bee sting (I suddenly recall, for several members of my immediate family) = rush to casualty with anaphylactic shock.

bee with its wings spread

At which I panicked. Bee sting = dead bee. Bee sting = ouch. Bee sting (I suddenly recall, for several members of my immediate family) = rush to casualty with anaphylactic shock.

I yelped (‘oh don’t do that!’ I believe were the actual words) and I brushed the bee away. It hit the ground. I looked down at my arm. A swelling like a tiny jam doughnut, pinky and oozing in the middle. But no sting left behind. I watched the bee crawl in under the green bin, apparently intact. I hope it was safe for the night. I went indoors in search of bicarbonate-of-soda (which is what you’re supposed to put on bee stings, and we didn’t have) considered self-raising flour (which does contain small quantities of bicarbonate-of-soda, but just seemed daft), and settled instead on a plaster. And today, this morning, as I write this, my whole right arm is tingling gently from the poison, the fingers ever-so-slightly numb.

And if there is a moral to this story, it is simply this: that I am a big idiot. But I knew that anyway.

How did Sid James really laugh?

Mon, 8 Jun 2009 18:00:00 +0100

Reina & Sid James

Reina James, author of This Time of Dying and The Old Joke and daughter of Sid, reveals that her Dad's laugh was not the famous throaty Carry On chuckle we all know but a rather sweet giggle.

Reina discussed this, and her relationship with her famous father on The One Show. The short film viewable below (Reina & Sid James) was first broadcast as part of The One Show.

Reina & Sid James

This Time of Dying

Reina's first novel, This Time of Dying is set during the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 and offers a powerful and moving portrayal of what it felt like to live through a pandemic and as such, provides a perspective on the recent swine flu crisis.

This Time of Dying was short-listed for the Commonwealth Best First Book Prize 2007.

The Times has described This Time of Dying as 'A five-star weepie.'

The Old Joke

On a lighter note, The Old Joke, Reina's most recent novel tells the story of a retired actress. Reina drew on her past as an actor herself and as the daughter of Sid James.

Maureen Lipman has said, ‘I absolutely love The Old Joke. It is written with immaculate precision and patient originality, yet never takes itself so seriously that we can’t laugh out loud and occasionally weep for these beautifully delineated characters.’

Meeting the Chinese Enver in London

Gazmend Kapllani — Mon, 1 Jun 2009 12:35:00 +0100

Enver Tohti

It was Saturday afternoon when I landed in London and I passed successfully through customs at Stansted and headed to my hotel. It’s called Citadines and is close to Thames. As soon as I arrived there I learned that I would be staying on the 7th floor – I like high floors and height. I like the internet even more. Possibly because I have lived in so many different homelands, I have found the internet the most generous of them.

I tried to connect my tiny laptop to the internet but I couldn’t manage it. I called reception asking for help and a gentle voice told me that someone would come to my room and fix the problem. In less than a minute someone had indeed turned up to assist me. He was gentle and kind and I think he must have been around forty five years old and of Chinese origin. I like this about London: that you have the impression that you are living in five continents at once.

Possibly because I have lived in so many different homelands, I have found the internet the most generous of them.

As he was fixing the problem, I glanced at his name badge on his uniform: Enver. For a moment a flash passed through my head, Is Enver a Chinese name?! I asked myself. I tried to forget about it but I couldn’t. It’s a name that has determined a considerable part of my life. I looked at it again: Enver. And I asked myself again, Is Enver a Chinese name? I made another effort to forget about it, in vain. I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask, ‘Excuse me, are you of Chinese origin?’ I asked him.
‘Yes,’ he replied gently
‘Excuse me for being indiscrete but is Enver a Chinese name?’ I asked again.
He smiled. ‘It’s a long story,’ he added. ‘My name comes from an Albanian dictator, Enver Hoxha’.

Enver Hoxha

At first, I thought he had learned that I was an Albanian writer and was playing with my nerves. I had travelled to London to talk about my book, The Short Border Handbook, which is about the Albania of Enver Hoxha and totalitarian borders. Now I was in the room on the 7th floor of a British Hotel, close to Thames on a rainy London afternoon and in front of me I had a Chinese guy named after Enver Hoxha. This was too much. I tried to recover. I asked him if I had heard right that he was called after Enver Hoxha. He nodded and, after recovering a bit, I explained to him why I was shocked. ‘I’m from Albania’ Ι said. It was his turn to be astonished. ‘Unbelievable,’ he said. ‘Unbelievable,’ I said. ‘Unbelievable,’ we said.

There was an explosion of the name Enver in China, especially among Chinese Muslims.

Then he began to tell me his life’s story and how he found himself with the name Enver. He was born in Xinjiang, in the Muslim region. He was born in 1963, when China and Albania were at the best point of their pure socialist love. At that time the radio in China – televisions had not yet reached China – used to talk all day long about Albania and Enver Hoxha, he continued. There was an explosion of the name Enver in China, especially among Chinese Muslims. When he was born, his parents wanted to be politically trendy and called him after Enver Hoxha. In his elementary school, out of a class of eighteen boys at least five of them were called Enver.

A Short Border Handbook

For a long time I have been obsessed with the idea of a trip to China. A mission to go there now and find the other Chinese Envers would be a good incentive. The other day we met again in the hall of the hotel. I gave my book to Enver and he told me his story. The painful story of a Muslim Chinese oppressed from the regime and abused by a British journalist who profited from him. In order to make a documentary, this journalist put Enver’s life in danger. Fortunately he managed to leave China.

He told me about his painful journey as a refugee in Turkey and afterwards in Britain, his feeling like a foreigner as a Chinese person in London, his struggle to survive, waiting for years for his refugee status to be recognized, his struggle to become a doctor in Britain, as he’d studied medicine in China and specialized in Istanbul. Talking about our journeys we forgot about Enver Hoxha. We felt much closer by our common syndrome: border syndrome...

Writing and uncivilisation

Paul Kingsnorth — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:03:00 +0100

No doubt every generation believes they are living through unprecedented times. Today we might look at the global recession, the rise of radical Islam or the spread of the online world to every corner of the real one and tell ourselves the same thing. We would be right, but not for those reasons.

Economic troubles, conflicts, new technologies; these things are as old as humanity. What is genuinely new is that we are living through an ecological crisis which could, within our lifetimes, destroy the civilisation which we take for granted. This is not an outrageous claim, merely a statement of fact. One species – homo sapiens sapiens – is effectively unravelling the web of life on Earth, at remarkable speed.

One species – homo sapiens sapiens – is effectively unravelling the web of life on Earth, at remarkable speed.

We think we know this story. But the story is perhaps not what we think it is. When we talk about these ‘environmental issues’, as we have come to call them, we still see them as part of the ongoing human narrative; the story of progress, the story of the taming of ‘nature’, the story of the humanising of the planet. We think these are ‘problems’ which will inevitably be ‘solved’ through political agreement or the judicious use of technology. As ever, humanity will triumph in its steady march towards perfection.

What is starting to become clear, though, is that we are deluding ourselves. The real story is much harder for us to hear: that we are but one species among many; not the point and purpose of the planet, as both religion and the Enlightenment narrative would have us believe, but a bunch of smart apes who are overshooting the ecological boundaries within which they must operate. If we can’t pull back, fast, then everything we know is going to change so rapidly that it will be hard, if not impossible to take in, and even to live through.

We are but one species among many; not the point and purpose of the planet, but a bunch of smart apes who are overshooting the ecological boundaries within which they must operate.

Unprecedented times, then. And this being our situation, we might expect to see writers and artists tackling these issues. We might expect, or at least hope, that the literary world would be spearheading this necessary readjustment. We might want writers, as they have done so often in the past, to frame this crisis and set the terms of debate; to lead from the front, to tackle the hard issues; to be unafraid, to paint us a picture appropriate for the times.

This is what writers should be doing. But hardly any of them are. In between traditional ‘nature poetry’ and crude agitprop is a vast gulf which none of our poets seem to be filling. Our novelists still churn out their explorations of the inner city or the country house as if nothing much had changed since 1990, or even 1890. Our non-fiction writers give us environmentalist propaganda or science-heavy refutations of the obvious. Journalism has been reduced to Westminster reportage or celebrity interviews. As writers, we are failing to engage with the biggest thing our species has ever faced; the biggest story of this or any other time.

Some of us believe that this situation needs to change. So we have recently launched the Dark Mountain Project – an attempt to bring together, to coalesce, a new literary movement for this age of global disruption. We want try and curate a new type of writing; writing which attempts to stand back from the metropolitan centres of human civilisation and question our true place in the world. Writing that faces up, unflinchingly, to who we are and what we are doing and what we need to change. We are calling it ‘uncivilised writing’, and we are looking for others who share our vision.

As writers, we are failing to engage with the biggest thing our species has ever faced; the biggest story of this or any other time.

In a month or so we will launch our manifesto, along with a website and, following that, a public event. The next stage of the project will be the launch of the Dark Mountain Journal, in which we hope to showcase the efforts of writers who agree with our vision and want to help us map a new way forward.

For now, we have online a basic website and blog, on which you can learn more about the project and sign up if you’re interested. If anything I have said strikes a chord, I hope you’ll come over and have a look. We think we might be onto something, and we’d love to meet people who agree.

a dark mountain

The Dark Mountain Project can be found at www.dark-mountain.net. Paul Kingsnorth’s website is www.paulkingsnorth.net