The Dark Ages (cont.)

Remember people saying that the position of women in Afghanistan would be immeasurably improved by invasion? Wasn’t that one of the reasons we ‘went in’? Well, read this from today’s Independent, about the murder of Malalai Kakar. Here’s an extract:

Commander Kakar had earned particular enmity from the zealots for leading a female team of 10 officers who would carry out raids to free wives and daughters being held captive by their male relatives. Her office became a refuge for women being threatened and mistreated and she regularly challenged orders from conservative judges to force them to return to their families.

Absolutely…

This comes from the Facebook group End Christian Homophobia. If you’re on Facebook and would like to join the group click here.

The Dark Ages

The home of Martin Rynja, the director of Gibson Square, which plans to publish The Jewel of the Medina, was attacked by Islamist arsonists yesterday. You can read about it here.

Announcing the publication of The Jewel of the Medina earlier this month, Mr Rynja said he felt such books were important in a liberal democracy. “If a novel of quality and skill that casts light on a beautiful subject we know too little of in the West, but have a genuine interest in, cannot be published here, it would truly mean that the clock has been turned back to the dark ages. The Jewel of the Medina has become an important barometer of our time,” he said.

Art craters

Good news from the sales rooms.

Erotic verse

A little bit late, but I wonder if anyone else reading the Guardian’s guide to writing poetry last week noticed the wonderful misprint on page 19. It comes in the trickle of text to the left of the main body of text and says (and I’ll maintain the line breaks):

“The

sonnet’s

moist

obvious

feature is

that it has

14 lines”

Gagging order

If you’d like to know more about the absurd case of satirist Sabina Guzzanti being prosecuted for “contempt of the pope” and, more generally, the state of freedom of speech in an increasingly myopic Italy, there’s a very useful article in today’s Guardian online. You can read it here.

Days in England

What I should be doing now is telling you all about my last week in England, as I promised. And since should is the governess of will, to coin a phrase, that’s exactly what I’ll do. It all started off with a visit to the very wonderful Jen and Chris Hamilton-Emery, who publish fantastic books in exquisite editions, making their writers happy and the fortunate readers of those writers even happier. They are, of course, Salt Publishing and without them, and it, the world would be a sadder and less literate place. They also make excellent coffee and gave me a couple of freebies. What I was doing there was meeting them for the first time, which was great, and picking up some pre-publication copies of The Scent of Cinnamon, my new short story collection. And a very lovely thing it is. I think we can all be proud of ourselves. 

I then had a walk round Cambridge and discovered that whole tracts of the city are now given over to mobile phone shops. I stumbled into a queue of McFly fans waiting for autographs from two McFlies in HMV. I looked for two books I wanted, neither of them particularly arcane (OK, Edmund White’s My Lives and some stories, any stories, by David Foster Wallace… Satisfied?), found neither at Heffer’s and both at Borders, which came as a shock. Bowes and Bowes is now the CUP bookshop as, of course, you all knew, but I didn’t and was disappointed. I almost had lunch at the Gardenia, in memory of Jonathan Williams (‘street food’), but ended up with a rather miserable (in both senses) king prawn salad, sitting outside a place near the market in the unseasonable heat. 

My other reason for being in Cambridge was to go to the annual lecture at my old college, Emmanuel, to give ‘moral support’ (though what qualifies me for this I’m not sure, other than a willingness to be entertained) to Griff Rhys Jones, who lived on the other side of the roof garden in South Court when I was doing drugs and so on for three utterly delightful years. I used to watch him stride up and down in his room at three a.m in search 

of whatever was needed to complete his history essay, before he wisely switched to English and could enjoy the opportunities offered by constant leisure. Griff was in fine form, as usual, still striding up and down, though with shorter hair. Dinner followed and was really very good, another marked change from the Cambridge I remember. I met David Lowen, who somehow finds time to run the Emmanuel Society, and agreed to take part in a Literary Day at the college. I’ll keep you informed.

My other (non-personal) reason for being in England last week was to take part in Ride the Word III. Well, I had a great time, reading the final story from the collection, previosuly available only in Dutch translation (and how often can one say that?). Elizabeth Baines and Vanessa Gebbie have both blogged about the event and impartial judgements on my contribution can be found there, but it was a great pleasure to be on the bill 

with three such interesting and accomplished poets – Simon Barraclough, Vincent De Souza and Isobel Dixon – and, in particular, with short-story writer, Jay Merill, who was an absolute revelation and a delight. Add to that the opportunity it gave me catch up with old friends and meet new ones – you know who you are – and I couldn’t have been happier. Which brings us back to Salt, without which most dishes would be very dull indeed.

Paul Newman

Paul Newman set the standard for me, in so many ways. I don’t know if it’s true that, after Butch Cassidy and The Sting, he wanted to do The Front Runner with Redford, with himself as the coach and Redford as his athlete-lover and that Redford refused, but his wanting to do it (and Redford’s refusal) both ring true to me. He was a brave and beautiful, essentially modest, man. In the last photograph I saw of him, a few weeks ago in one of those gloating tabloid exposures of the frail, he looked like my father, which shocked me. In this photograph – and there are a million others – he looks both drop-dead cool and aware of what that costs. I saw a man who looked like him once, many years ago, outside a pub in Notting Hill, so like him I actually thought it was, and still remember my heart missing a beat, my breath failing. I stood and stared at him, utterly without the power to move away. I can still remember how he was dressed. 

I borrowed this photo from jockohomo datapanik. Thanks.

Ride The Word III

More about this later. Pazienza…

Proud father examines The Scent of Cinnamon