Pansies

There’s an interesting piece in today’s Guardian CiF by Mark Lawson. Entitled How fiction lost the plot, it looks at the presumed sorry state of modern fiction publishing and runs through the usual suspects: cliquishness, discrimination, book prize juries descending to compromise. In the end, though, he pinpoints the failure of the public library system to support literary fiction, devoting its shelves to DVDs and Citizens Advice Bureau pamphlets rather than novels. Books that were once guaranteed a thousand hardback sales now languish in warehouses and, finally, remainder book stores, assuming they’re published at all.

I’ve always been too much of a hoarder to feel happy about borrowing books, though I valued the opportunity the British Council library in Rome once gave me to sample writers I couldn’t afford to buy in the pre-Amazon days when imported books cost the earth. The only person I know who consistently used a library is Jane, who went to the public library in Mare Street, Hackney, at least once a week. She now buys her books almost exclusively from the new and extremely well-stocked Oxfam book shop on Dalston Road. This is great for her and, of course, for Oxfam, particularly as she regularly re-donates the books to the shop. It’s less great for the author and publisher, of course, as the copy has already been sold further up the line, although I’ve often found that a book bought in a charity shop leads on to other works by the same author being bought from retail booksellers, much as downloaded music, in my case at least, leads on to the purchase of a legitimate CD.

Lawson concludes by saying that the success or failure of a book now depends on the vagaries of judging panels. My editor confided in me that prizes can actually make very little difference to sales, and can even have a deleterious effect on them if the effect of the prize is to provoke spitefulness among the winner’s rivals and peers. It’s also true, though, that a book with a very low profile indeed can’t help but benefit from a little attention. I’m obviously thinking about Little Monsters, for which no longlist is too long, no recognition too abject. I remember, some years ago, Hari Kunzru turning down a prize from the Daily Mail and wondering at the time if I’d have his moral integrity. Well, I don’t wonder any longer. I haven’t.

A couple of last thoughts. One comment was left by someone who published a first novel but had the second one turned down as being ‘not good enough’. Gulp. Another contains a link to someone who failed to find a publisher at all and took to droplifting his novel. Droplifting involves leaving copies of the book in booksellers. The piece is entertaining, thought-provoking and worth a read.

PS Pansies, as you know, was the title of DH Lawrence’s best known collection of poems. It doesn’t refer to flowers, and it certainly doesn’t refer to the morally disordered (pace JP2), but is derived from the French pensées – thoughts which, according to Lawrence, come “as much from the heart and the genitals as from the head.” In other words, I’m rambling.

Family values

Edi Vesco, the author, among many other things, of a guide to the Harry Potter novels for Italian fans, was murdered by her 18-year-old son last Tuesday. According to the son’s own account, he first tried to rape his mother, then knocked her out with a spumante bottle and cut her throat. You can find more details here.

Minister for the Family, Rosy Bindi, said the murder was a sign that ‘the family has become fragile’. This is the standard response to cases of domestic violence of this type, which are disturbingly frequent in Italy, despite the reiterated insistence on family values by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities (i.e. the people we elect to govern us and those we don’t). An insistence that naturally refuses to admit any recognised legal alternative to the traditional family; indeed, that sees attempts to recognise alternative structures as the main threat to it. Ratzinger’s annual address harped on in a multitude of languages (and one grating German accent) about the centrality of the one-man-one-woman-one-marriage-licence-n-number-of-children family model to a healthy society and, get this, international peace, as though war were the prerogative of unmarried, and possibly morally disordered, men (and not the god-fearing married variety).

Given that these brutal murders happen so frequently within the family itself, might it not also be the case that the family per se shares some of the responsibility for them? Not the ideal family (whatever that might be), but the family as it’s constituted here and now, in modern Italy. In the current Italian context of no affordable housing for young people (or anyone else), no unemployment benefit or social support for young people (or anyone else), no job security for (young) people entering the work market, university degrees that aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, minimum investment in post-school training and a culture so devoted to acquisition it demands young people change their mobiles once a month or die.

Great shoes

http://cdn.channel.aol.com/aolexd_widgets/widget.swf This comes from This Just In, via Monkey Magazine

Inexplicable labelling

Unnecessary labelling

Blair-faced devotion

Well, Tony won’t be answering his elders and betters back any longer, I imagine, now that he’s finally thrown his mendacious lot in with Vatican Inc. It’s only a stone’s throw, by helicopter, to Tuscany, after all, and presumably he’ll be making himself useful about the place until God makes direct contact. Let’s face it, how long can the current CEO hold down the job? By the time Tone’s sorted out the Middle East and ditched the bitch (the Sacra Rota, natch), he’ll be more than ready to slip on those Prada pumps and get his ring well buffed. And no more foolish promises over dinner, right, Tone? This time it’s to the death.

Facts

Let’s start the year with a fanfare for rationalism. World-class scientists were asked what, if anything, had changed their minds by John Brockman, a New York literary agent and the man behind the site, Edge. All of them confessed, for want of a better word, that new information, new evidence, had led to new formulations. Well, of course. This is how science works. Now let’s ask a similarly eminent group of religious leaders the same question and listen to them ramble on about revealed truths.

As Brockman says: “When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy. When God changes your mind, that’s faith. When facts change your mind, that’s science.”

Memory

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions as a rule. Why set yourself up to be disappointed? Isn’t that the world’s job? But, watching The History Boys a few days ago (see earlier post) made me realise how few poems I knew all the way through. It also reminded me of how very impressed I was when Renata recited an entire canto of Dante from memory recently. (Canto 15.) So what I’d like to do this year, and this isn’t so much a resolution as a fond hope, is memorise the rest of the many poems I can start but not end. The first one is going to be John Clare’s I Am, because, like everyone else, I know and love the first three lines and then have very little memory of what happens next. To help me, I’ll post it here:

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live – like vapors tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest, that I loved the best,
Are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below – above the vaulted sky.

The willies

The extraordinary Phil Cool does Terry Wogan. The real Terry Wogan. If anyone has a copy of Phil Cool doing Ronald Reagan (that’s right: the real Ronald Reagan), I hope they let me know.

A creative spring

In his Terminal note to Maurice, EM Forster writes that the novel was the direct result of a visit in 1913 to the ‘socialist and Whitmannic poet’ Edward Carpenter at Millthorpe. Forster comments:

It must have been on my second or third visit to the shrine that the spark was kindled and he and his comrade George Merrill combined to make a profound impression on me and to touch a creative spring. George Merrill also touched my backside – gently and just above the buttocks. I believe he touched most people’s. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts. If it really did this, it would have acted in strict accordance with carpenter’s yogified mysticism, and would prove that at that precise moment I had conceived.

I was reminded of this scene when I met the author of Akenfield, Ronald Blythe, in Aldeburgh. I’d learnt earlier that day that he used to come to Aldeburgh to shop with Forster so my first thought was something along the lines of diachronic degrees of separation. Only four between me and Whitman, I calculated, and this is where my memory or myth-making tendencies – what my mother called ‘romancing’ – played me false. Because I was convinced, first, that it was Carpenter himself, not Merrill, who’d laid hands on Morgan’s backside and, second, that Carpenter had been blessed in similar fashion by Walt Whitman. At which point. Morgan’s creative stroking of Blythe’s bum was a foregone conclusion and all that was missing was Blythe’s own fair hand on my own fair small of back. I wouldn’t say I took the position, in the manner of a beta male orang-utan, though I do admit to a momentary flirt with the Suffolk historian and baton-holder, in my eyes, in the greatest race. Well, my bum went unrewarded, but I did get a warm palm pressed against mine and a whispered, Thank you, my darling boy. It will do.