Feminists at the Manchester Literature Fesitval

 The Manchester Literature Festival has come and gone for another year, and much inspiration was found there. By both design and accident I ended up going to hear a string of feminist writers. Cathy Newman talked about her book 'Bloody Brilliant Women', a history of all the women who are missing from  ... history. Followed the same afternoon by Caroline Criado Perez, who lead the campaign in 2017 to have Jane Austen on the £10 banknote. Her book 'Invisible Women' catalogues, as she says she had to, the many thousands of tiny ways in which the existence of women is ignored and belittled by society that is designed around men. I kind of skim read the book because it becomes a little depressing and predictable, but all the things she says in it very much needed to be articulated clearly.

The following weekend I volunteered at the Deborah Levy event, and then stayed on with Julie to hear Mona Eltahawy in conversation with Mariam Khan (editor of 'It's not about the Burqa', an anthology of writing by Muslim women). Mona's book 'The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls' is currently being read so I will give you more on that later, nevertheless she is one forthright feminist who doesn't pull her punches.

I was a bit let down by the poetry: one event where neither of the poets used the provided microphone and were unable to project their voices across a small bookshop and the other where I was so tired that I struggled to stay awake. I loved Vona Groarke's reading and may well seek out her collection, and, though we had listened to some of his collection Deaf Republic on Radio 4, I found that Ilya Kaminsky's accent is so strong that I could not have followed the poems without the thoughtfully provided printout (which is pretty much the same as just reading them). Howard Jacobson left an impression by demanding to know why his picture was not on the T-shirts when David Baddiel is. Julie and I also went to the Castlefield Sermon which this year was given by Gillian Slovo. Although she has lived most of her life in Britain she has written about South Africa and expected it to be part of her talk about the hope for democracy, but instead she discussed her work with the Grenfell Tower survivors and then Extinction Rebellion. So it has been a fascinating, but very non-fiction, couple of weeks. 

Pandiagonal magic squares

The last week started on Monday evening with Simon Armitage (cool portrait on his website, do go and see), a Manchester Literature Festival event to launch his new collection 'The Unaccompanied'. Julie and I have seen him several times before and it was an excellent and entertaining evening, where I resisted buying the book. 

Monkey and I have been hard at work learning the capital cities of the world, so she made me a birthday cake with a map on it; she was disappointed to be unable to fit in Greenland once America was stuck on, but Africa is excellent. There were candles to mark specific capitals that I mainly failed to get right.

Then we did a charity shop trawl around Chorlton and came home with quite a substantial pile of books. I am particularly pleased with Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and Sebastian Barry. Candide and the two Asimov are for Monkey, and Ulysses is just to sit on the shelf for that moment when I feel inspired to tackle something hard.

Today Julie took me out to Elizabeth Gaskell's House to see a performance called 'Exploding Women', part of the Manchester Histories Festival, produced by the dynamic duo LipService Theatre. The show presented the chequered history of Manchester women of science, including Caroline Birley, Marie Stopes, Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker and Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw (The pandiagonal magic squares are one of Kathleen Ollerenshaw's significant contributions to mathematics.) We also had an interesting conversation with one of the volunteers at the house, about Mrs Gaskell's friendship with Charlotte Bronté, and, after my unexpected enjoyment of Emily Dickinson's biography this time last year, I am definitely inspired to read her biography of Charlotte. 

Anne and Hollie and Salena and Eimear

Oh what a wonderful but exhausting couple of weeks it has been. The 2016 Manchester Literature Festival is finally over. Last week was full of literary delights for me, starting on Monday with Anne Enright, who's book 'The Gathering' won the Booker Prize back in 2007. She looks a little austere in the photographs but was a wonderful speaker and read a lengthy piece from her new book 'The Green Road', complete with the huffs, sighs and tears of her characters, making it a definite addition to the list.

I have been quite a long time fan of Hollie McNish and saw her last year in Edinburgh with the Loud Poets. Monkey, Julie and I went to see her at Gorilla on Wednesday. She read from her new book 'Nobody Told Me' about her experiences of pregnancy, breastfeeding and new parenting. It was very entertaining in a nostalgic kind of way, though there is a lot of personal/political stuff going on in her writing too.

Hollie was joined by the equally fantastic Salena Godden. I did not know her and quite deliberately did not seek her out on Youtube, and was glad I had not because her performance style is quite outrageous. She was very loud, energetic, in-you-face confrontational (in a good way) and uproariously funny. Her new poem 'You're a Citizen of Nowhere', written for Teresa May, is up there on her blog. As well as her own work she has contributed recently to a book called 'The Good Immigrant', a collection of essays that explores the issues of race and immigration in the UK today.

And Thursday I volunteered at the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama for Eimear McBride. She was so completely engaging and talked about both 'Girl is a Half Formed Thing', and her new book 'The Lesser Bohemians'. She was very inspiring in terms of writing what you want and stepping so far outside the box that your book is impossible to describe. 

I waited to the end of the signing queue and had a lovely chat with her.

10 X 10 X 10 Giveaway post

It has been creeping up slowly over the last couple of months, but finally I have reached my 1000th post! It feels like a huge milestone, who knew I had so much to say. I decided to celebrate the things that I have enjoyed about blogging with a 10 x 10 x 10 post. 
Up first are my ten most visited posts:

10: Cool Aid Dying with 1031 visits
9: Cooking and Sewing Post with 1114 visits
8: Carol Ann Duffy with 1124 visits
7: for the home educators HESFES : long self-indulgent holiday post with 1216 visits
6: for the reptile fans Tegu Walking with 1123 visits
5: for the Philip Pullman fans Midsummer's day with Will and Lyra with 1496 visits
4: Engelby by Sebastian Faulks with 1158 visits
3: Luscious Lemon Cake with 1565 visits
2: an early poetry post, visited by many students I think Margaret Atwood Poetry with 3247 visits
1: (not quite fair on Margaret Atwood but combining two as they go together) Lizard Cake and Lizard Cake Tutorial with a total of 4985 visits

Next I give you, with much torturous decision making, my ten favourite books of the 462 that are labelled at book reviews (alphabetical for I could never rank them one to ten):

Any Human Heart by William Boyd
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Words from a Glass Bubble by Vanessa Gebbie

And the final ten posts are the ten that I love, either because they mark significant things that have happened over the last few years or just times when I wrote something important to me or that I was particularly pleased with:

Don't Apologise speaks for itself, I was angry, I should write like that more often.
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be is a brief post that celebrates 15 years of friendship with the Ridley Birks family. 
Two Deaths, Three Kisses and a Punchup was written in 2011 when I blogged for the Library Theatre's production of Hard Times
Monkey Quilt the Final Chapter is the result of over two years working on our beekeeper's quilt.
Favourite Moments gives the best bits from my visit to Costa Rica with my mum in 2014.
Dead Dog Poems is one of many many post written during my longstanding involvement with the Manchester Literature Festival, it was one of my favourite events.
What I Think is a course review of 'A Brief History of Humankind', of the many courses I have done with Coursera since 2013 it was the most interesting and engaging.
Night of Writing Dangerously: Monkey and I have participated in NaNoWriMo several times, and are planning to again this year.
Luggage: I have taken part in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge every year since 2012, several years I have done flash fictions, and this is one I particularly liked.
Blogger (a poem) that I wrote back in 2010

I hummed and hawed about what to do to celebrate, and thought that of course there should be a give-away. I know people visit when I post stuff and I hope you get some interest or enjoyment out of reading but I thought it might be nice to know who you all are. So here are three outrageously unique tote bags that I made for my short-lived Etsy shop, so maybe if people just say hi and leave their email contact/blog link and I will pick three people at random to send them to.

Red and Black flocked satin lined with white cotton.

Brown satin with gold spirals lined with pale pink satin.

Pink paisley satin lined with pale pink satin.

Literary failures and successes

I have admitted defeat (for the time being) with Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I picked it up in the library on the spur of the moment and struggled with it for a fortnight, but it is impenetrable. Even though there is a wiki specifically designed to lead you through the finer points of the novel I decided that this is just not the right time for me to tackle something that needs an explanation of what is happening in each paragraph. Maybe when I have a year with nothing better to do, or when the arthritis has removed my ability to do anything other than read, or perhaps I'll get one of my grandchildren to read it to me as I lie on my deathbed. Anyway, I'm sure I'll give it another go at some point. 

On the plus side the Manchester Literature Festival is now well under way. I went to my first event last month however, one of the preview events, that saw my wonderful Professor Harari visiting to promote his new book. I did his Coursera course, 'A Brief History of Human Kind' three years ago (unfortunately it no longer seems to be available) and I was so excited to discover he was going to be coming to the festival. His new book, Homo Deus, is an examination of where the human race might be headed next.

I was a little starstruck when I went to get him to sign his book and managed to mumble something barely intelligible about how much I had enjoyed the course, but it was really lovely to see him in person, and he was just like he seemed in the online lectures. 

Last night I did my second event; the most wonderful Lemn Sissay was performing as part of the 8th annual Black and Asian Writers Conference organised by Cultureword at the Contact Theatre. I confess I had not heard any of his poetry previously but knew of him after he was elected Chancellor of Manchester University last year. He approached me in the foyer when he arrived, because I was wearing a MLF volunteer t-shirt, and asked about books for sale, and he was very distressed to find that, due to some very poor communication, there were none. The event, nevertheless, was a roaring success, sold out, and he was so funny and engaging and chatted on during the question and answer session way past the official finish time. 

His new collection is called 'Gold from the Stone'.

I will just give you this poem, called 'Some things I like', which is quite a good example of his style and delivery, though this video is from a couple of years ago. 

May-Lan Tan and Rosa Liksom

I heard May-Lan Tan at the literature festival this year and was intrigued by the story she began reading. The library very helpfully provided me with a copy of 'Things to Make and Break'. They are slightly disturbing stories, mostly about very vulnerable people. Many of her protagonists are children, often trying to make sense of the mysteries of adulthood: a young girl wanting to meet the stranger that her mum is going on a date with, two children called Lauren who both lose a parent, another young girl who has an abortion and has to watch her sister enjoying parenthood. One quote from a story about Jimmy and Erin, friends negotiating the challenges of adolescence together:

"They take off their shoes and leave them outside on the rack. The hall light is on and her parents' door is open. Erin goes to talk to them.

Jimmy stop in the bathroom to wash the Sharpie Xs off the backs of her hands. She doesn't have a curfew, but they never stay at hers because she lives up at the far corner of Hoboken and shares a room with little twin sisters who never shut up. Erin lives six blocks from the station and has a queen-size bed. She says Jimmy's lucky, but Jimmy thinks curfews are nice, in a way. It means someone else is the adult.

The ink isn't coming off. Even though Erin didn't get X-ed tonight, she didn't try and get served; she never risks it unless they're in some nowhere dive. She's honestly the only person Jimmy knows who can pull off a fake ID. At seventeen, Erin looks fourteen, but she always wears a full face of makeup and a push-up bra and dresses neck to toe in black, so the glamour quotient kind of throws it off. Jimmy has never worn a bra of any kind, and she's had her period twice so far. She hopes some of Erin's girlness will rub off on her." (p.169-170 from New Jersey)

At the end of the same event I was chatting to a young man who recommended Rosa Liksom. Well, I didn't remember her name but I remembered she was Finnish and wrote short stories, so I googled that (isn't the internet wonderful). The library also had one of hers. 'Compartment No.6' was definitely a bit of culture shock. I did, many years ago, travel across eastern Germany by train, and it was something of a similar experience, though that was only a day, compared to this journey, that seems to go on for weeks. A young woman, apparently escaping a strange relationship in Moscow, finds herself sharing a train compartment with a hard drinking ex-soldier who regales her with lurid tales of violence and sexual conquest. We learn little about her though the story follows her more closely, and he comes across as a rather archetypal Russian, stubbornly loyal to his country in spite of the privations and indignities that have been inflicted upon him in the name of progress. It is quite a vivid portrayal of the Russian character, explaining why the country has continued to function in spite of, rather than because of, communism and its subsequent collapse. 

"The man sat on his bed. He wore a plaid shirt open over his white longjohns. Under the wrinkles of the white shirt peeped a sweaty muscular belly. He picked up a small orange from the table and started to tear roughly at the peel. When he'd eaten the fruit he dug a tattered newspaper from under his bunk and blurted out from behind it in an irritated tone, 'People are restless when they're young. No patience at all. Always rushing somewhere. Everything goes at its own pace. Time is just time.'

He wrinkled his brow and sighed.

'Look at me. An old duffer, a melancholy soul filled with a dull calm. A heart that beats out of sheer habit, with no feelings in it any more. no more pranks in him, not even any pain. Just dreariness.' " (p.15)

As a seasoned traveller the man takes her under his wing and between them a kind of bond forms. 

"A fire-red afternoon sun spread over the wind-whipped sky. Behind it dripped vast sheets of sleet. The girl rummaged in her knapsack, the man set the table for dinner. they ate slowly and silently, drinking well-steeped tea - black, Indian Elephant tea she'd bought at the foreign exchange shop. After the meal the man would have liked to talk but she wanted to be quiet. He took his knife out from under his pillow and started to scratch the back of his ear with it. She rested with her eyes closed. And that's how they travelled that whole long twilit evening, each of them sleeping and waking in their own time." (p.80)

The story paints a picture of him and as they travel it also paints a picture of Russia, though there is not much light it in. They stop at random places along the way to 'rest' the engine, but they are either told they cannot get off, or the carriage attendant tells them the place is not worth seeing. There are some lengthy descriptions of decay and neglect as they crawl across the frozen wastes towards Mongolia. When they cross the border they leave it all behind; the final sentence here is repeated at several points throughout the book, symbolising something I felt, but what, I was left to ponder:

"The Soviet Union is left behind, the Lenin statues and portraits, the watercolour paintings of deserted shores on a foam-flecked stormy sea, the mechanics, oil workers, wretched men working on kolkhozes, miners, address and phone-number kiosks, the monuments to the Revolution, the dance pavilions in the parks, the old couples swaying to the beat of a mournful waltz with fur hats on their heads, the stair brooms, entryway brooms, cabin brooms, chamber brooms, cellar brooms, pavement brooms, barn brooms, stable brooms, bathroom brooms, front yard brooms, back yard brooms, garden brooms, well brooms, the old ladies wrapped in big black cardigans with dusty leggings and threadbare slippers on their feet, lackadaisically swinging their wilted brooms. ...

The clocks on the walls in the street lobbies of Moscow's official buildings, telling the time, the cabinets of experts, the factory party committees, secret gambling dens, clandestine home concerts, art exhibitions in artists' studios, the local committees, sentry booths, blini booths, biscuit booths, patched roofs, houses collapsed under the snow, the millions of peasants who died of hunger, the city dwellers, the workers, the millions in prisons, the loyal citizens broken down by work camps and labour sites who died of cold, the denunciations, the Party tyranny, the choiceness elections, the election fraud, the grovelling and inordinate mendacity, the millions fallen in useless wars, the men, women and children executed at the edge of mass graves, the millions of Soviet citizens that the machine had abused, tortured, mistreated, neglected, trampled, cowed, humiliated, oppressed, terrorised, cheated, raised on violence, made to suffer, are all left behind. The Soviet Union, a tired, dirty country, is left behind, and the train plunges into nature, throbs across the sandy, desert landscape. Everything is in motion: snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people, thoughts." (p.143-144)

Skating on the edge of Chaos

This is the biggie, and I was very disappointed that, in the end, I missed Paul Mason at the literature festival since I had been hoping to ask an erudite and searching question. 'Postcapitalism - a guide to our future' is a fascinating investigation into the history of the capitalist economic system and an examination of where it might be going in the light of the financial crises that have occurred in recent years. There is a lot of marxist theory in this book, so be prepared to get your head round some ideas that you might think you already know stuff about. I certainly had a basic notion of marxism, having read a bit at polytechnic. It was another book like 'This Changes Everything' that was hard to read because so much of the 'story' leaves you frustrated and angry. I blame it all on the annoying people who invented money, it really is the root of all our problems. 

It is far too complicated to explain all the arguments so I will try and quote a few things to give you the gist of it. Back in 1910 a guy called Hilferding managed to get his head around what was happening to capitalism:
"His book, Finance Capital, would become the reference point for all left-wing debates on the future of capitalism for a century. Hilferding was the first Marxist to understand the scale of capitalism's mutation. What is more, in the new structure many of the permanent features looked exactly like those Marx had listed as counter-tendencies to the falling profit rate: export of capital, the export, via migration, of surplus workers to white-colonial settlements abroad, the pooling of profits via the stock market, the move away from entrepreneurship into rentier-style investing.
The finance system, which in the previous century had functioned as a puny redistributive centre for business profit and an unreliable source of capital, now dominated and controlled the business world. The counter-tendencies to crisis had become synthesised into a new, more stable system.
...
For Hilferding, the forces of instability had not disappeared, but had been driven into a single sphere: the imbalance between the production and consumption-oriented sectors of the economy. He explicitly ruled out 'under-consumption' as a cause of crisis, pointing out that capitalism could always create new markets where old ones were exhausted, and thus go on expanding output. But the possibility remained that sectors would expand at different rates. Hence the need for state intervention to prevent such an imbalance." (p.58-9)
He still believed however that this change was the final stage of capitalism and would leave inevitably to socialism; in 1989 the death of the Soviet bloc and the rise of globalism put paid to those hopes.

What was not foreseen in the early 20th century was the information revolution that Mason believes is paving the way for a transformation of capitalism: "Once you can copy and paste something, it can be reproduced for free. It has, in economics-speak, a 'zero marginal cost'." (p.117) 
He goes on:
"If you are trying to 'own' a piece of information - whether you're a rock band or a turbofan manufacturer - your problem lies in the fact that it does not degrade with use, and that one person consuming it does not prevent another person consuming it. Economists call this 'non-rivalry'. A simpler would for it would be 'shareable'.
...
This has major implications for the way the market operates.
Mainstream  economists assume that markets promote perfect competition and that imperfections - such as monopolies, patents, trade unions and price-fixing cartels - are always temporary. They also assume that people in the marketplace have perfect information. Romer showed that, once the economy is composed of shareable information goods, imperfect competition becomes the norm.
...
Until we had shareable information goods, the basic law of economics was that everything was scarce. Now certain goods are not scarce, they are abundant - so supply and demand become irrelevant.
...
In short, information technology is corroding the normal operation of the price mechanism. This has revolutionary implications for everything, as the rest of this book explores.
If they'd understood capitalism as a finite system, Romer and his supporters  might have explored the massive implications of this extra-ordinary statement - but they did not. They assumed the economy was, as in the textbooks, composed of price makers and price takers: rational individuals trying to pursue their self-interest through the market." (p.117-118)

Fast forward just a few years:
"In 1997, Kelly proclaimed the existence of an emerging new economic order with three main characteristics:'It is global. It favours intangible things - ideas, information, and relationships. And it is intensely interlinked. these three attributes produce a new type of marketplace and society.
...
The solution, Kelly said, was to invent new goods and services faster than they could slide down the curve to worthlessness. Instead of trying to defend prices, you had to assume they would collapse over time, but build business in the gap between one and zero. You had, he warned, to 'skate to the edge of chaos', to exploit the free knowledge customers donate when they interact with websites. By the late 1990s , the received wisdom among those who understood the problem was that capitalism would survive because innovation would counteract technology's downward effect on pricing. But nowhere did Kelly explore what might happen if this failed." (p.126-127)

So where are we going with this, and here it begins to get worrying for us ordinary people; my sister's job in financial services was replaced by a computer programme some years ago, very sensibly she is now training to be a nurse:
"In the first wave, we find that most workers in transformation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are likely to be substituted by computer capital.
In the second wave, it is everything relying on finger dexterity, observation, feedback, or working in a cramped space that gets robotised. They concluded the jobs safest from automation were service jobs where a high understanding of human interaction was needed - for example, nursing - and jobs requiring creativity." (.174)
But it's not as scary as you might fear:
"So what we have in reality if an info-capitalism struggling to exist.
We should be going through a third industrial revolution but it has stalled. Those who blame its failure on weak policy, poor investment strategy and overweening finance are mistaking symptoms for the disease. Those who continually try to impose collaborative legal norms on top of market structures are missing the point.
An economy based on information, with its tendency to zero-cost products and weak property rights, cannot be a capitalist economy.
The usefulness of the labour-theory is that it accounts for this: it allows us to use the same metric for market and non-market production in a way that the OECD's economists could not. Crucially it enables us to design the transition process so that we know what we are trying to achieve: a world of free machines, zero-priced basic goods and minimum necessary labour time.
The next question is: who is going to make it happen?" (p.175-176)

'Postcapitalism' appears like book that would be really heavy going but it is a thoroughly engaging read. He does not talk down nor get overly technical but assumes that the reader is intelligent and willing to understand the arguments. It is very all encompassing as he, in effect, analyses in quite a lot of detail the social, ecomonic and political history of the 20th century, drawing together ideas from a wide range of sources. 
One thing that I made a note of that struck me very hard was an impact of the Second World War that had never occurred to me before. In a tiny section entitled 'The Massacre of Illusions':
"The scale of death during the Second World War makes it difficult to comprehend. So its impact on the politics and sociology of the working class has been the subject of a horrified silence. But let us puncture it. The majority of the Jews killed in Eastern Europe were from the politicised working-class communities. Many were adherents either of pro-Soviet, left Zionist parties or the anti-Zionist Bund. The Holocaust wiped out an entire political tradition in the global labour movement in the space of three years.
In Spain, the unions, co-ops and militias of the left were destroyed by mass murder - and their traditions suppressed until the 1970s. Meanwhile, in Russia the working-class political underground was exterminated by the gulag and mass executions.
What Orwell called 'the flower of the European working class' was crushed. Even if it had only been a question of numbers, this deliberate slaughter of politicised workers - added to the tens of millions of people killed by military action - would have been a turning point in the story of organised labour." (p.196-197)

I think it makes a strong case, and one that is not reliant on a particular political ideology; it is not anti-capitalist, nor is it proposing new social or political structures. What it is saying is, like Marx, that the end of the current version of capitalism is inevitable, that the mechanism that gave rise to capitalism have been fundamentally changed by technological advances and we should stop trying to cling to the old way of doing things. It is quite a revolutionary book, and more people should read it.

"As we pursue these goals, a general pattern is likely to emerge; the transition to postcapitalism is going to be driven by surprise discoveries made by groups of people working in teams, about what they do to old process by applying collaborative thinking and networks.
What we are looking for are rapid technological leaps that make things cheaper to produce and benefit the whole of society. The task of the decision-making nodes in a networked economy (from the central bank to a local housing co-op) is to understand the interplay between networks, hierarchies, organisations and markets; to model this in different stages, to propose a change, to monitor its effects and adjust their intentions accordingly.
But for all our attempts at rationality, this is not going to be a controlled process. The most valuable things that networks (and the individuals within them) can do is to disrupt everything above. Faced with group-think and convergence, either in the design stage of an economic project or in its execution, networks are a brilliant tool for allowing us not just to dissent, but to secede and start our own alternative.
We need to be unashamed utopians. The most effective entrepreneurs of early capitalism were exactly that, and so were all the pioneers of human liberation." (p288)

Theatre and Literature

Another posting lull will hopefully be followed by a massive surge in posts as a lot is going on in the next couple of weeks. My son Jacob has just been for a visit and I took the offspring out for a joint birthday outing to the Corner House. It recently renamed itself 'Home' which I find to be the worst name for a theatre ever and so I am pledged to continue to refer to it as the Corner House (though the theatre building is not on the corner of Oxford Road and Whitworth Street where the cinema is but further down the road and round the corner). We went to see the performance company 1927 on the opening night (in Manchester that is, it has been touring worldwide for some time) of their intriguing piece of theatre entitled Golem (do visit their website and watch the trailer). Described as somewhat like a comic book come to life, it was thoroughly engaging and brilliantly put together, with performers interacting with a projected animation; it tells a cautionary tale of the insidious nature of consumerism. 

Starting on Monday is the annual Manchester Literature Festival. This year they are celebrating their tenth anniversary and the brochure (mine is already looking a little the worse for wear, tea stains mainly) has photos of the participants at age ten. I have a lovely selection of events that I am volunteering for this year, starting with the wonderful Michael Rosen on Monday evening, discussing the future of children's poetry. Many of the events are free so if you are in the vicinity do check out the website, find someone you have never heard of and open a new door in your life.

Three books

'The First Century After Beatrice' by Amin Maalouf was one from my TBR Pile Challenge. I bought it on the spur of the moment quite a long time ago after reading a glowing review, but I was not as absorbed by it as I had anticipated. It charts the story of a man and his daughter against the background of the emergence of a 'substance' that promotes the conception of boys and its impact on the planet, so there is a lot of politics and social commentary. I found its dividing of the world into the affluent developed 'North' and poverty stricken underdeveloped 'South' a little dated, as if they are homogenous blocks with no differentiation of societies, economies, cultures and environments. This was such a big stumbling block for me that I found myself criticising everything about the way that he described the crisis and its consequences and aftermath. I'm kind of sorry because I think the idea had potential but he ended up trying to do too much with the story. I enjoyed it more for the relationships between the members of the family and how it played out over time. The character of the 'wife' Clarence interested me the most but her journalism took her away from the story so much I did not get to see enough of her and she played second place in his life to Beatrice.

One brief quote, nothing to do with style, just one that I thought made the point well:
" You sometimes imagine that with so many newspapers, radios, TV channels, you're going to hear an infinite number of different opinions. Then you discover that it's just the opposite: the power of these means of communication only amplifies the dominant opinions of the time, to the point when it becomes impossible to hear any other bell ringing." (p.104)


'The Secret of Lost Things' by Sheridan Hay was another that I read about and bought, but much more recently. In this book a young girl called Rosemary, upon the untimely death of her mother, finds herself thrust into the surreal world of an obscure New York second hand bookshop called the Arcade. It is populated by the most incredible cast of misfits and oddballs, united I felt by the fact that they are all rather self-absorbed. Alone in the world she befriends Lillian, the concierge at the crappy hotel she lives in, and the glamorous Pearl, the transsexual who works the cash register. She becomes obsessed with the elusive (and unobtainable) Oscar and forms a bond with him as they begin researching the possibility of a lost Herman Melville manuscript. Meanwhile the weird shop manager Walter Geist has developed an obsession with Rosemary, and seeks to involve her in his plans to obtain the manuscript. It is as if the whole book takes place in some kind of alternate universe or time warp; everyone is obsessed with books, either reading, or collecting, or, in the case of Arthur, looking at the pictures (mainly of naked men). I am not sure that as a group they are very good role models for literary involvement as it has become a rather unhealthy habit all round. But I still wanted Rosemary's life; it is romantic and bohemian, and nothing at all like working in a real bookshop I'm sure. 

Lots of quotes, because I loved this book, and it is all about the characters, with the Arcade a character in its own right:
"As well, a number of the Arcade's employees had rather dramatic aspirations. They were variously failed writers, poets, musicians, singers, and were marked with the clerkish frustration of the unacknowledged, the unpublished. The Arcade's thousands of volumes mocked, in particular, literary aspirations. The out-of-print status of most of the stock was further proof of the futile dream of publication. As a monument to literature, the Arcade had an air of the tombstone about it." (p.37)

This second one reminded me of the Susan Hill quote about literary DNA, I like quotes about reading:
"The books housed on one's first adult bookshelf are the geological bed of who we wish to become. And when I think of my few acquisitions, I have to admit how fiercely the autodidact struggles for her education, and how incomplete the education remains. How illusory is any accumulation of knowledge!" (p.106)

" 'Well, a bookstore, but also a reliquary for the bones of strange creatures. Mermaids' tails, unicorn heads ... that sort of thing. You're looking at natural history in this place.'
He swivelled his big head around.
'The books act to filter out the normal. The real. And we've changed shape in the isolation, like specimens from the Galapagos. We're isolates ... islands in an island, like the island you came from ...'
'Stop Arthur, you are peculiar,' I told him, impatient with not following his point, with his rambling.
'Exactly so. You've concluded my argument for me. I've no choice but to be peculiar.' " (p.117)

Lovely contrast between two of the characters:
"Metcalf was probably close in age to Geist, but preserved to a kind of specimen-like perfection. The cashmere turtleneck clung to his trim form, which was dressed completely in black: it would have been easy to confuse his shadow with his actual self.
...
A more striking contrast in figures could not be imagined, unless it was Geist's and mine. Metcalf appeared a man at once attenuated and condensed; Walter Geist, simply the spectre of one." (p.158)

Last one, again a nice contrast, but here in places not people:
"It was clean and orderly. The architecture - concrete, glass and steel - was aloof and spacious. The interior lights were bright; every aspect the antithesis of the Arcade. I knew books to be objects that loved to cluster and form disordered piles, but here books seemed robbed of their zany capacity to fall about, to conspire. In the library, books behaved themselves." (p.183)

A wonderful book, not much action but plenty of literary intrigue and references. I have shied away from the idea that a whole story can be peopled by outrageous characters, but why not?

'Everything I Found on the Beach' by Cynan Jones. One of the events I volunteered at for the Manchester Literature Festival this year was an evening with Evie Wyld and Cynan Jones. I have reviewed both of Evie's books (here and here ) and requested this from the library on the strength of the reading. He read a long passage from his novel The Dig, which is about a badger baiter. It was graphic and profoundly disturbing and I have no desire to read the book, but the intensity of the writing made quite an impact. This book has some harsh moments in it, it is very dark, but I could not look away. It follows two men, Grzegorz, a polish immigrant working in a slaughter house and struggling to make a new life for himself and his family, and Holden, a young fisherman, dealing with the death of a friend and the responsibilities it has laid upon him. It is a short book, only 200 or so pages, and the tale all takes place within a very short space of time, and we follow in detail the thoughts, decisions and actions of the two as they react to an unexpected opportunity. Then we are introduced to a third man, part of the criminal underclass, and watch as he coldly plans the consequences of their choices. The story was very much outside my usual reading matter but it was completely absorbing. The writing takes you right inside the heads of all three men, understanding their intentions and motivations, even when the choices they make are alien. I anticipated the outcome somewhat but it did not take away from my involvement because by that time I was so emotionally engaged with Holden. The atmosphere of the book is quite bleak and even hopeless. The men are quite powerless to control their own lives, and you sense their intense frustration; they can feel themselves drowning and the events are a last ditch fight for their lives before they go under. 

Two quotes, taken almost at random because so much of the book would be worth quoting. They contrast the two men; Grzegorz with his sense of dislocation, trying to make a new life but missing the old, and Holden with his strong sense of belonging where he is:

"The boy stared. Grzegorz thought his son must have some faint memory of the big farm table, the low ceiling. Of the warm milky smell of the soft old woman that was being blurred in his mind amongst the matrons of this house, was turning into nothing more than a suspicion that he once know someone special. Poland would be a strange thing to him, a distant awareness that would perhaps fade and become nothing more than a historical fact as he grew. With all the Polish around him, nothing had really changed. But there was no place of focus for the boy now, and, looking at him, Grzegorz felt the boy would always carry this sense of having been removed from something and that he would never understand it." (p.18)

"A few fields over he could hear the bleats of the newly turned out lambs, calling for their mothers in the night, and the maternal patience in the answering mearghhs. The bad rain had kept off and it had been a good year for the lambs so far as the wet on their backs could bring them down very quickly. Somewhere, the plaintive call of a fox.
He knew this place well now. The field he was in was not farmed hard and it was scattered with stands of blackthorn and gorse, and sprawling piles of brambles. Everything had a bonsai quality to it, a denseness brought on by the constant, stunting grazing, the tough salt wind." (p.71)

A small book, but very densely written, even when 'nothing' is happening there is a lot going on; you certainly get your money's worth.

Listening not reading (much)

I went last night, as a volunteer that is (not that we had much to do), to hear Kate Tempest at the Contact Theatre as one of the last event of the Manchester Literature Festival. I was probably the only person in the audience who had not heard of her. She was this lovely mixture of worldly and naive, looking at first glance so young but with a voice that has quite a gritty quality that usually comes with years of hard living. She recited from memory for over 20 minutes her version of the story of Tiresias, it was utterly spellbinding. This is just a little taster of her style to tempt you, there is lots more on Youtube, and if you ever get the chance, do go and see her.

As a consequence I did not really get going on the Read-a-thon until this morning, and actually we have been planning a trip to the Manchester Art Gallery to see an exhibition about the First World War, so the reading has been quite limited compared to last time. Also there has been no cake this time:-( The Monkey is in London so I have not had company to stay up all night with.
I am really enjoying 'The Secret of Lost Things'  by Sheridan Hay and also 'Notwithstanding' by Louis de Bernieres (that I picked up at random in the library when my reserved books had not arrived, despite being 'in transit' for three days.) I hope everyone else out there has been having a good weekend of slouching on the sofa surrounded by books. 

Dead Dog Poems

The Manchester Literature Festival doesn't officially start until the 7th of October but I volunteered for one of the preview events last night, at Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama, where Don Paterson and Paul Muldoon were reading for an audience made up of festival goers and students who had been attending the 3rd British and Irish Contemporary Poetry Conference. The evening became something of a homage to Seamus Heaney, who died just a fortnight ago and had been scheduled to be reading last night. Both poets read from his work as well as their own and spoke about the influence he had had on them personally and on poetry in general. A gentle touch of self-deprecation was the order of the evening, genuinely presenting Heaney as the master and their own humble offerings as attempts to live up to the example he set. The world of poetry is obviously small and both men had plainly lost a friend. 

I find that I didn't really get around to reviewing Don Paterson's Rain that mum bought for me several years ago, I will try and rectify that soon. He was a lovely reader, very chatty in style and shuffling through his papers as if he were picking his choices spontaneously. He seemed to feel that his style was a little depressing, making several references to his penchant for dead dog poems, but on the whole I found him the more entertaining of the two. I particularly loved when he talked about having 'googled' himself and found the vast array of people determined to destroy his carefully constructed reputation, and he read us a poem which set out all the various criticisms of his poetry that had appeared online. It appears that poetry reviewers can be as pretentious as some poets.
Here he is reading Rain. On watching it again I realise how typical it is of how he read, as if he just happened to be reading a poem and someone came along to listen, not that he is reading to anyone. Every time I go to a poetry reading (and it's been a few now) it remind me how much this is an auditory medium, that listening is a whole other layer of experience over merely reading poetry. 



I confess to knowing nothing of Paul Muldoon, who described himself as a wanderer; having a tendency to wander the stage while reading rather than some kind of poetic style. Neither did I have a pen and paper to write notes so I was only left with an impression that I would need to give his poems more attention in print to appreciate them; several times he reached the end of a poem when I was expecting more so I was left with a feeling of having missed the point. He was much more methodical and had his selection properly scheduled with sheets and books arranged in order for the reading, and I felt a little as if he were hiding behind his mop of grey hair.
This video shows him noticeably more relaxed and humorous.



All in all a great start to this year's events. My first event of the festival proper is Patrick Ness. (Warning, don't go to youtube and start watching poetry videos, it could swallow up the rest of your day.)

Culture and all that

Two things to tell you about briefly if you happen to live in or visit Manchester. 

The wonderful Manchester Literature Festival is all ready for action and the website is now taking bookings (if you look closely at the word search on the cover it says 7th to 20th October). I will be volunteering again this year and hopefully a blogging slot too. As usual a wide variety of creative talent, from the well known to the relatively obscure. I am pleased to see a much wider representation from writers for young people, notably Eoin Colfer and Malorie Blackman, and also Neil Gaiman talking about his new children's novel. Lionel Shriver is doing the Manchester sermon (which Ali Smith did last year and was so brilliant). I am a bit spoiled for choice and have so many things I would love to go and see. Do go and check out all the events, many are free, and get yourself a culture fix.

Secondly is the 'do it 2013' exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery (created in collaboration with the International Festival) that I went to see with my mum last week. What you might call a 'conceptual' collection of artworks aimed at engaging ordinary people in the process of creating art; not so much come and look at the pretty pictures, more come and have your brain bombarded with crazy ideas. Go prepared to join in. On until the 22nd September.

Catch up post - Manchester Literature Festival

Well, it's all over, and it has been a hectic fortnight, especially for Cathy and Jon; I ended up doing nine events but between them they were at everything. I was going to be really organised and write about each one but I have been too tired the last week to settle down to it and now they are a bit of a blur. 

Jamaican poet Kai Miller at the Whitworth was a disappointment to me, I'm sure he was great but the acoustics in the vast gallery were so bad I could not hear him (admittedly we were sitting by the entrance not in the audience). 
'The Conductor' at the RNCM was wonderful. Author Sarah Quigley read two sections from her novel, which is about the composer Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad during World War Two. It was followed by a performance of his Eighth String Quartet. I have very rarely been to hear classical music and it was just beautiful. 
I jumped in at the last minute to go to the 'Manchester Sermon' (someone had cancelled on the volunteer website) which is a specially commissioned piece in it's third year, this year given by Ali Smith. You can read previous year's sermons on the commissions page of the website and the text of Ali's should be up sometime soon. She was absolutely fantastic but spoke so fast with so many ideas tumbling over each other that I could barely keep up, I am planning to go back and read it because it had some interesting ideas for NaNoWriMo writing. Although technically the remit was that it only had to be based upon a biblical passage she seems to be a lapsed catholic and I liked the fact that when the interviewer, Edward Stourton, tried to pin her down about her religious beliefs she just said no. 
Sunday was the big day for me, the Family Reading Day, a mammoth session from 10am til 6pm (no wonder there were not many volunteers for this one, and Jon admitted that someone had dropped out at the last minute so we were rather short handed). The town hall is the most unwelcoming of buildings, with 'no public access' signs at all of the entrances, not helped by the fact that the front door was blocked by the Sea Cadets parade. Once people made it inside it was no better, with most of the stairs blocked by 'no public access' signs, so it was with some perseverance that the audience managed to find us at all. But the draw of real telly people meant that the main event, an appearance by the lovely Alex and Cerrie from CBeebies, was a rousing success. But we had a busy day all day, story readers and drama aimed at variety of ages, with crafty activities going on all day for before and after the events and drinks supplied. I sat in on a couple in the afternoon: Sita Brahmachari and V Campbell both reading and talking to a small but select audience about their respective stories and the process of writing, and then a slightly bizarre avant-garde performance by a group of drama students of their adaptation of the story of Stanley's Stick, which left me confused so I'm not sure what the collection of young children at the front made of it.
The last night saw us at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation (where I spent most of my time last year) to hear Jonathan Harvey read quite a chunk from his first novel 'All She Wants'. Some of his friends in the audience gave him a hard time over whether it was based on people they all knew but he denied it vehemently. Who would have thought there was such a things as the Manchester Gay and Lesbian Chorus, but their rendition of 'Perfect Day' was just perfect and it rounded off a rather raucous evening. 
Me, well I'm already looking forward to next year, and maybe I'll even try and get an official blogging spot.