The good news or the bad news?

‘Which do you want first,’ we used to say. ‘The good news or the bad news?’

The bad (although very old) news is that there is no Glastonbury this year. It’s a shame as I’ve enjoyed doing gigs at the Free University of Glastonbury over the past couple of years. Highlight of the 2011 festival for me was performing with Richard Norris of The Grid and The Time and Space Machine on a new live version of my short story ‘A Porky Prime Cut.’

The story was commissioned by SCAN in Bournemouth and Poole and is set in and around Turbary Common and the West Howe area of the conurbation. The ‘Porky Prime Cut’ of the title refers of course to the messages that were scratched into vinyl records by legendary pressing engineer George Peckham, and the ebook of my story includes links to various resources by and about George. The story itself tells of a subtle war of attrition between wannabe art students and soul boys of the time, a particular byproduct of which was a certain acid house myth about, ‘Bournemouth soul boys who were so “hard core” that they were into T.G.’

If you know Richard Norris’s work you’ll immediately see why it was such a good fit to work with him on the story: he really was a UK acid house pioneer. Richard co-produced (with Genesis P-Orridge) Psychic TV’s Jack the Tab LP, a piece of musical metafiction in its own right in that it was presented as if it were a various artists compilation of the then nascent UK acid house scene.

The good news is that we enjoyed doing the Glastonbury gig so much that a few weeks later I went down to Richard’s studio in Lewes, East Sussex to record a studio version. Here is an exclusive preview of that session: me reading ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ with Richard’s fantastic accompaniment. Click the ‘forward’ button on the small player icon below to start.


Creative Commons License
A Porky Prime Cut by Tony White, music by Richard Norris is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Download a free ebook of ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ (published by James Bridle’s Artists’ eBooks project), which includes beautiful photographs of Turbary Common by Bournemouth photographer Diane Humphries.

§

For news of more live events including the Free Word Centre, London on 26 April, and — just confirmed — the Port Eliot Festival in July, see my new Events page.

More good news: Taste the Lazer, a new LP by The Time and Space Machine is out next week!

Who has the right to write in the UK right now?

It was just confirmed the other day that my new work of fiction, Dicky Star and the garden rule, will be launched at the Free Word Centre in London. This launch event will be on 26 April 2012. All are welcome.

I’m particularly pleased about this for several reasons, not least because the Free Word Centre’s stated ethos is to be a place ‘where reading, writing and free speech come together.’ As such the centre on London’s Farringdon Road is home to organisations including the Arvon Foundation, Apples and Snakes and The Reading Agency that each promote and support literacy and writing in the UK. English PEN is based there too, and Index on Censorship who ‘defend freedom of expression on behalf of people around the world.’

Events in recent months and days have demonstrated, if such demonstration were needed, that freedom of expression is an issue in the UK at the moment. I’m not talking about supposed freedoms of people in positions of power to defy ‘the PC brigade’ and spout any old racist, sexist, homophobic garbage, but the freedoms for example last year, to comment on the so-called ‘England riots’ of summer 2011 as they were happening, and more recently, the freedom to publish opinion in relation to the war in Afghanistan.

After the riots across the UK of August 2011, two young men, Jordan Blackshaw of Northwich, Cheshire, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan of Latchford, Warrington, were each given four year jail sentences following their conviction on charges of incitement to riot.

There were of course some critical responses to these and other harsh sentences relating to the 2011 riots, but elsewhere in the media there was an active evocation of complicity, a rhetorical call upon a consensus that may or may not exist. As one commentator put it:

If we know one thing for certain about the England riots, it’s that the public have been urging the courts to dish out some serious punishment.

‘The public’? Certainly the Lord Chief Justice’s judgement was clear: offences committed during the riots were as such ‘aggravated crimes’, and sentences should therefore, ‘be designed to deter others from similar criminal activity.’

The judgement in the cases of Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan discusses in some detail whether or not the ‘event’ pages they had created (not ‘websites’ as he erroneously describes them throughout) were a joke or were literally intended (are these the only two possibilities?), and seems to conflate agreement after the event and under questioning regarding possible effects of the posts with a prior intention. In his judgement, this means that Blackshaw, ‘believed the offences he was inciting would happen,’ (paragraph 57) and that Sutcliffe-Keenan, ‘accepted that he had encouraged the commission of riot, and intended to encourage its commission,’ (paragraph 59), even though Sutcliffe-Keenan had later cancelled his ‘event’ with the message, ‘“only jokin f… hell,”’ (pararaph 63).

Another way of looking at these particular cases might be to suggest that what Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan had actually done was to use social networks to compose short pieces of creative writing in response to current events and circulate them to each of their small groups of friends; to publish them, in other words. No-one, not even the young men themselves, actually turned up at these so-called ‘events.’ Perhaps this was because of messages from the police that were posted on Blackshaw’s page at least, warning of the consequences of attending. Or could it be that nobody turned up because the status of the posts as fictions was already clear to those involved? Perhaps, whether Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan quite understood this or not, the Facebook ‘event’ function was being used primarily as a publishing rather than a purely logistical medium.

In both cases it is also cited in the judgement (and therefore deemed, one must assume, as being of significance) that the pages were ‘also made available for general public viewing,’ but given the well-documented complexity of, and rapid changes to, Facebook’s privacy settings, this may not have been quite the clear decision that is suggested.

Certainly, these were pieces of writing that if penned by another and published or framed in a different way might have been understood as satirical or parodic commentaries or fantasies about the riots and/or those participating in them, about Government policy, and economic and other injustices, or about Facebook itself and the types of social relations it enables prescribes.

Interestingly, the title of Blackshaw’s ‘event’ (yes, it had a title!), ‘Smash D[o]wn in Northwich Town,’ is even constructed as a rhyme. There is a town called Northwich, but there is no such place as ‘Northwich Town.’ It is a deliberately poetic construction.

In October 2011 both convictions were upheld by the Court of Appeal.

As I write this, recent days have seen a similar arrest for a piece of writing published on a social network, but unlike the events of August 2011, this time there was also an opportunity to compare it with what was in some ways a similar piece of writing, but one that had been published in a different context.

Firstly, someone used a social network (Twitter) to post a link to the Guardian letters page where he and others had had letters published voicing criticisms of the official statements about the six British soldiers from 3rd Battalion the Yorkshire and 1st Battalion The Duke of Lancaster’s Regiments who were tragically killed in Afghanistan on 6 March 2012. In the lead letter (see right) another correspondent, Gregor Truter, characterised these statements as ‘sentimental and frankly appalling.’ He then pointed to the failure to acknowledge the huge numbers of civilian casualties in the war so far, and described the language of the official pronouncements as ‘hypocritical and shameful. Cowardly, disgraceful, appalling.’

Secondly, the Independent reported that a young man of nineteen named Azhar Ahmed from Ravensthorpe, West Yorkshire had posted a message on a social network (Facebook) where he criticised the official statements about the six British soldiers from 3rd Battalion the Yorkshire and 1st Battalion The Duke of Lancaster’s Regiments who were tragically killed on 6 March 2012. Ahmed characterised these statements as ‘gassin,’ and pointed to the failure to acknowledge the huge numbers of civilian casualties in the war so far. Ahmed’s use of language (see far right) was unskilled and much more intemperate than that of Truter. The comments of a spokesman for the West Yorkshire Police have been widely reported:

He didn’t make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother.

Clearly, the gist of each of these more or less contemporaneous pieces of writing, if not the language or the media used to publish them, was very similar, but while some received the approbation of having their letters published in a national newspaper, Azhar Ahmed (who published in a place where such official approval is not needed) was arrested and charged with ‘a racially aggravated public order offence,’ even though as Kenan Malik points out: ‘Ahmed never mentioned race, ethnicity or even culture or faith in his rant.’ There is more very useful discussion of Ahmed’s arrest on — of course — the Index on Censorship blog.

All three examples — whether one is comparing Azhar Ahmed’s argument to those of more obviously educated writers of letters to the Guardian, or looking at all closely at Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan’s convictions for incitement to riot — are in some way also about writing, publishing and power, and new ways that social media is being used. Does the treatment of these young men also suggest that not everyone has the right to write in the UK right now? That some people in the UK are allowed to write but others are not?

§

Join English PEN:

English PEN promotes the freedom to write and the freedom to read in England and around the world. Anyone can join our membership, whether you’re a writer, a reader, an editor, a translator, a publisher, a literary agent… or just someone who is passionate about literature.

Support Index on Censorship by subscribing to their magazine for future issues including, in June 2012, ‘Olymic challenge’:

As London prepares to host the Olympics, Index takes a look at sport and freedom of speech. Should countries with poor human rights records be allowed to host international sporting championships? Is there any evidence that sport can have a positive impact on free speech? Or is it time to stop expecting sport to be morally improving?

See also China Miéville’s eloquent piece on the racism surrounding the Tintin au Congo case in the Belgian courts. It is, he says,

depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it.

Dicky Star and the garden rule is published on 26 April 2012 by Forma. Pre-publication copies are exclusively available from the Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) Shop.

The Ghost of Music Industry Past

This stickered CD turned up in some forgotten corner of the house the other day, and it seemed so striking that I had to share it. A relic of another era perhaps, but one that is worth looking at again, especially when analogies between the music industry and book publishing seem to have been popping up everywhere recently.

Here for example was Future Book’s useful four-part comparison from the end of last year. Here is Danuta Kean blogging about the music industry’s failures to enforce copyright and how that might play out for publishing. Here is another widely reproduced piece by an anonymous publisher predicting that there is, ‘no future in printed books. They’ll be like vinyl: pricey and for collectors only.’ (And here is writer Steven Hall rejecting that same analogy on Twitter).

In light of this, and when the figures about the cost to the music industry of file sharing are revealed to be occasionally ‘dodgy’, it is interesting to see these kind of inflated figures again too: five CDs for £50!

This is what buying music looked like in July 2001, and that promotional sticker is real.

The significance of the date is not that we’re looking at this from the vantage point of the current recession, when the thought of spending £50 in a record shop in one go might pinch a little for most of us. It is rather that this was produced a few months before the launch of the iPod, at a time when even though the MP3 format had been around for the best part of a decade, there was still no easy, mainstream way to legally obtain music online, and there wouldn’t be for another couple of years.

That’s why I found this sticker so surprising, because I’d forgotten how bad things were. The contrast in scale between this last gasp of how the industry wanted us to buy our music — the model they were clinging to, and no wonder — and how we do it now, mostly it would seem via the online purchase of single tracks for pennies, relatively speaking. Even when we do have to buy an album at full price it’s more likely to cost a vinyl-LP-reminiscent £6.99 for either the CD or the download, although the latter will often be packed with extra material.

So it is with a re-issue of the reggae classic Come Back Darling by the mighty Johnny Osbourne (produced of course by the late, great Winston Riley) that has been knocking around for a while. The downloadable version of Come Back Darling weighs in with an impressive sixty-one tracks instead of the original twelve, and even then it doesn’t quite squeeze in all the ground-breaking music produced by Riley in those Techniques sessions. So while Johnny Osbourne’s boisterous classic ‘See and Blind’ is there, Dennis Alcapone’s even more exuberant version of the same track is missing. Luckily for me I’ve had both singles on vinyl since I was a kid. Luckily for you, ‘Look into Yourself’ by Dennis Alcapone is on Youtube, which also didn’t exist back in 2001 when this CD was stickered.

‘O Brother,’ indeed. Fifty quid for five CDs? Blimey! It’s a reminder, if one were needed, that extending copyright and strengthening copyright protection cannot retrospectively protect a monopoly industry from shooting itself in the foot, or from its own past greed and complacency.

—

For more on the riveting subject of copyright extension in books and film respectively, you may also be interested in Adrian Hon’s gently satirical ‘Eternal Copyright: a modest proposal’ for the Telegraph:

Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. But what, I ask, about your great-great-great-grandchildren? What do they get? How can our laws be so heartless as to deny them the benefit of your hard work in the name of some do-gooding concept as [sic.] the “public good”, simply because they were born a mere century and a half after the book was written?

And film director Alex Cox interviewed by Craig Terlino (via Boing Boing):

Now they want to have longer copyright periods because they say the young artists are relying on this money. The young artists never see any money because they sign away that money to big media corporations […] We, the artists, lose all of our rights to these massive corporations, who then come down heavy on these kids for downloading films and music that we never see a penny from. It’s complete bullshit. I want to encourage your audience to go and pirate a bunch of my stuff right away.

And finally — brace yourself — here is an interesting piece by Frédéric Filloux from the Guardian on why ebooks are like software.

Off-Broadway

(adjective) 3. (Publishing/Literature) designating the kind of experimental, sometimes (but not exclusively) lower-budget productions, non-traditional collaborations and commissioning partnerships, innovative distribution models and prototyping associated with literature published outside of ‘traditional model’ publishing by the mainstream houses.

With apologies for taking what is a very specific set of criteria relating to theatrical productions in Manhattan and applying them to literary publishing in the UK, but I’ve noticed that ‘Off-Broadway’ is becoming a useful metaphor, an easily understood shorthand when talking about my more experimental literary projects; particularly stories or books that allow me to explore future publishing-type scenarios.

So, for example, when someone asks — as they did last night — what I’m working on or what I’ve got coming up next, I will thank my interlocutor for their kind interest and tell him or her that I have a new work of fiction coming out on 26 April which is called Dicky Star and the garden rule.

If their curiosity remains unsated, as was the case yesterday evening, I will continue. Telling them that this book was commissioned alongside new works by the brilliant artists Jane and Louise Wilson as a kind of open-brief, arm’s-length collaboration, that this will be on general release in both print and ebook editions as well as being on sale at Jane and Louise’s exhibitions over the coming year, and that it will be launched with events in London and later (we hope) in Leeds and Manchester and more.

Should I be pressed to expand further, as indeed I was, I may add that review copies are going out this week, and that a limited number of pre-publication copies are also exclusively available from the DCA Bookshop at Dundee Contemporary Arts, where Jane and Louise Wilson’s exhibition is on until 25 March.

‘Sounds great,’ they will say. ‘Is that with [name of usual/previous publisher]?’

‘No,’ I will reply. ‘It’s kind of Off-Broadway.’

—

Tony White, Dicky Star and the garden rule. Forma Arts and Media Ltd. Publication date: 26 April 2012. Extent: 49pp. Size: 210 x 148 mm. Distribution: Cornerhouse http://www.cornerhouse.org/books ISBN 978-0-9548288-6-8. Price: £5.00

In case of emergency

February 4 is National Libraries Day: ‘a free-to-join gathering of people who believe in the importance of libraries.’

Well, count me in, because libraries of one kind or another are places in which I seem to spend a lot of time, although my use of them has changed over the years. When I was a child I went to the library to borrow books, and I’ve encouraged the same as a parent. Now when I go to libraries it is most often as part of the process of writing them, because of course there is more to libraries than the lending and borrowing of books, vitally important though that is.

Libraries can also be both a repository for and a gateway to archives of all kinds, many of which are simply unavailable anywhere else. For example, I was researching for a forthcoming fiction title among bound archive copies of the now defunct alternative news weekly Leeds Other Paper in Leeds Central Library recently. Most UK newspapers are held in the British Library’s Newspaper Collection in Colindale, London, but not the Leeds Other Paper. These copies of the LOP in Leeds Central Library may well constitute the only complete collection that exists of this important alternative newspaper.

While waiting to access the LOP archive I also happened across the Leodis project, a fantastic photographic archive of the city that was established by Leeds Library & Information Service as part of a Yorkshire-wide Lottery-funded photography archive digitization project in 2003. The Leodis site is a bit clunky in many ways, but not bad for something that launched in 2003. Back then, even now-familiar approaches to copyright and licensing and the ways that we access and interact with content online like Creative Commons were still more or less part of a creative, legal and publishing avant garde, so e.g. there is no obvious notice on the Leodis site about whether, how or under what terms one can use the photos, beyond the options to leave comments or (and I’m resisting the urge to put an exclamation mark at the end of this sentence) to buy a print.

It is well worth digging around — well, wading through — the Leodis site however as there is some really great material on there, not least of which for a bibliophile are the many pictures of the Library itself, which has gone through various transformations over the years including the recent excavation of a magnificent tiled hall, originally the reading room and now a visually stunning cafe. Browsing through the photos, I found myself particularly drawn to some images of the Music Library, the very shelves and false ceiling of which it was in fact that had needed to be removed to reveal the spectacular tiled hall beneath. The Music Library still exists, it has simply been moved upstairs.

In light of popular myths about the supposedly recent so-called ‘dumbing down’ of libraries to accommodate music, DVDs and other media, it was interesting to read in the text accompanying this great image that

The [Leeds] Music Library was started in 1950, as part of policy to establish subject departments, rather than keeping all stock as a vast collection. Originally music scores and books were available, in 1957 a record lending library service began. This cost £2,500 for which 1,837 records were purchased.

The work of fiction that I was in Leeds to research is set in the city in the mid-1980s. Many of the LPs in the Music Library’s loan collections at that time could well have been purchased as part of that same late-1950s job lot, but they were still in good condition and still being loaned out nearly thirty years later. The Music Library’s vinyl loan collection is now long gone of course, but I was pleased when trawling some secondhand dealers recently to find for sale one mint vinyl copy of an LP that had been a Music Library favourite when I lived in Leeds, and which now I thought about it I was keen to hear again: Follow the Drinking Gourd by Alex Foster and Michel Larue.

Foster and Larue’s album was released in 1958 by a New York record label called Counterpoint who up until the previous year had traded as Esoteric Records, a willfully obscure jazz and art-house label started by Jerry Newman which operated out of 75 Greenwich Avenue (now the Bar-B-Que restaurant). As a student in the early 1940s, Newman had cut live recordings of jazz gigs direct to disc. He set up the label after WWII, in part at least to release those early bebop recordings. Newman’s interest in live recording continued, too. For a fantastic example of this, see the Ghostcapital music blog, which has a great rip of Newman’s live recording of the Toraia Orchestra of Algiers that was released on Esoteric in 1952, plus high quality scans of cover art, record labels etc.

According to Bill Morgan’s The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s City (City Lights Books, 1997), Kerouac hung out in the back room of Esoteric because a school mate worked for Newman. Supposedly he cut some recordings in Newman’s studio, but a 1955 plan to record On the Road with live accompaniment from saxophonist Allen Eager never happened.

In a foreword on the back cover of their 1958 long-player for Newman, Michel Larue and Alex Foster suggest that ‘American Negro Folk Music has been too long neglected […] Here is music created years ago, yet [it] is the source of the present American trend in music.’  According to a short biographical note,  their ‘new approach in Folk Music’ was the result of Foster and Larue wanting to collaborate and perform in night clubs, not just for the theatre and concert hall audiences to whom they’d each been playing up to that point.

I don’t know how many copies of Michel Larue and Alex Foster’s vinyl LP are still floating around, but — and I can’t say this clearly enough — if you see it, buy it. The production of Foster and Larue’s sparse arrangements is clear and spacious, and there’s a stagey kind of rockabilly-funk to their percussion-and-bass-propelled versions of Blues, gospel and folk standards that include a masterful and probably definitive ‘John Henry’.

If you can’t get hold of the vinyl, the record has also recently been reissued for CD and MP3 (albeit under another name — ‘American Negro Slave Music’ — and with a slightly reduced track listing) by the Essential Media Group label. Here is their page on the Myspace player.

The title-track of Foster and Larue’s original vinyl release — Follow the Drinking Gourd — is of course a folk classic in its own right, with a long and complex if not to say contested heritage. See the website of Joel Bresler’s fascinating Follow the Drinking Gourd: A Cultural History project for more on this. Bresler reveals that Foster and Larue were the first Black artists to record the song, but among the numerous versions of ‘Follow the Drinking Gourd’ that are collated and discussed in his wide-ranging commentary I was particularly delighted to see one by the Welsh folk and country act Triban, who recorded the song in both Welsh (as ‘Dilyn y Sêr‘) and English languages.

Regular readers may recall that I’ve written about Triban here before, in connection with the destruction over the past decade of the former Redgrave Theatre in Farnham, Surrey (a connection that is both too slight and too convoluted to repeat here). However, that single emblematic act of cultural vandalism pales in comparison with what could be about to happen to public libraries all over the country: a century or more of work for education, literacy and the public good swept away with no thought for the consequences.

The bad news in this new cultural and educational emergency is that there is of course no one simple way to raise the alarm.

Tim Etchells, ‘Emergency Phone’, 2012.

§

National Libraries Day, Saturday 4 February 2012:

See the activities map and other resources on the National Libraries Day website for information about events happening on the day.

If you are on Twitter, follow @NatLibrariesDay and the hashtag #NLD12.

Further listening:

Alex Foster and Michel Larue, American Negro Slave Songs (Digitally Remastered), Essential Media Group, 2009. (Possibly MP3 only), £7.49

Michel Larue, Songs of the American Negro Slaves, Folkways/Smithsonian Institute, 2009 (Original Release Date: 1 Jan 1960). CD £21.59, MP3 £5.99.

Triban, Harmony: Y Casgliad/The Collection, 1968-1978, Sain Records, 2011. SAIN SCD 2637 CD bocs set £16.99 (also available as 64-track MP3 download)

Forthcoming fiction:

Tony White, DICKY STAR AND THE GARDEN RULE, Forma Arts and Media Limited, publication date: 26 April 2012, 49pp, size: 210 x 148 mm. ISBN 978-0-9548288-6-8 Price: £5.00

Radiation information

I will be in Dundee, Scotland this weekend to do a live reading from, and to talk about my forthcoming work of fiction Dicky Star and the garden rule. I will also be attending the opening of the exhibition by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson. The two things are connected, and not only because both will be taking place at Dundee Contemporary Arts.

Jane and Louise Wilson’s works were commissioned by Forma Arts and Media to coincide with the anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the former Soviet Union on 26 April 1986. I was commissioned by Forma in turn to respond to all of this in a work of fiction that could be published as a standalone edition alongside this DCA show and at subsequent exhibitions of Jane and Louise’s work, notably at the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester in September of this year, as well as for general sale.

Dicky Star and the garden rule will be published on the anniversary of the disaster on 26 April, when it will be launched with events in London and (I hope) Leeds — and there are some exciting plans afoot for Manchester — but some early pre-publication copies will be available on Saturday and then from DCA throughout Jane and Louise Wilson’s show, which runs until 25 March. Review copies will be going out in February.*

My DCA gig is this coming Saturday 21 January at 2pm. It is free, but booking is recommended — see info below.

I have blogged some background during the research process: here and here. Dicky Star and the garden rule is set in Leeds, where I was living in 1986, but I wanted to draw on new research rather than old stories: new research which took in amongst other things the archive of alternative news weekly Leeds Other Paper, home of the extraordinary headline above, from their cover for 9 May 1986 (right). These blog-posts were then partly a means of thinking aloud about the project, but also a way of divesting myself of — or throwing off — some of my existing stories about the period; ridding myself of biographical anecdotes. I wanted to be able to start from scratch: to respond both to Jane and Louise Wilson’s work, and to the Chernobyl disaster itself in a completely new way.

Here (left) is a shot of the front cover design, and the following is an extract of the back cover blurb:

Dicky Star and the garden rule follows Laura Morris and her boyfriend Jeremy through the turbulent days at the end of April 1986 when the world’s worst nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the former Soviet Union.

Dicky Star and the garden rule is published to accompany Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson, a series of works that were commissioned to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Novelist Tony White reveals Jeremy and Laura’s story in vivid daily chapters that follow the disaster’s impact in the UK, but are also each determined by their own quixotic puzzle…

More on all of this in Dundee on Saturday, and on here and elsewhere anon. In the meantime, I’ll paste in the booking info for this Saturday’s event at DCA below. If you can get to Dundee it would be great to see you there.

*N.B. If you are a book blogger and not already on my press list but you would like a review copy of Dicky Star and the garden rule, please message me your contacts and a link to your blog on tonywhite [dot] popp [at] gmail [dot] com and we’ll do what we can – thank you!

§

Tony White reading from Dicky Star and the garden rule and other works

Dundee Contemporary Arts

Saturday 21 January 2012, 2pm

Free but please book in advance on 01382 909 900

Jane & Louise Wilson are at Dundee Contemporary Arts from 21 January – 25 March 2012

Reclaim the ‘Occupy the Moon’ meme

My new short story ‘Occupy the Moon’ is now live on The Arts Catalyst website. The story was commissioned to accompany their group exhibition Republic of the Moon at (and co-curated with) FACT in Liverpool. The show opens tonight and then in 2012 it tours, first to the AV Festival and then to further venues yet to be confirmed. Here is the blurb:

As the players in the new 21st century race for the Moon line up – the USA rejoining China, India and Russia and jostling with private corporations interested in exploiting the Moon’s resources – a group of artists are declaring a Republic of the Moon: a ‘micronation’ for alternative visions of lunar life. Republic of the Moon challenges utilitarian plans of lunar mines and military bases with artists’ imaginings and interventions. Combining beguiling fantasies, personal encounters, and playful appropriations of space habitats and scientific technologies, Republic of the Moon reclaims the Moon for artists, idealists, and dreamers. The last race to the Moon was driven by the political impulses of the Cold War, but shaped by extraordinary visions of space created by writers, film-makers, and artists, from Jules Verne, Lucien Rudaux, and Vasily Levshin, to HG Wells, Stanislav Lem and Stanley Kubrick. Can artists’ quixotic visions reconcile our romantic notions of the Moon with its colonised future, and help us to reimagine our relationship with our natural satellite in the new space age?

Republic of the Moon includes work by artists including Agnes Meyer-Brandis, WE COLONISED THE MOON and Liliane Lijn (about whom see my previous blogs here, here and here).

Liliane’s work for the exhibition is called ‘moonmeme’ and it explores the possibility of projecting a word on to the lunar surface that might be read from the Earth. It is an evocative idea — ‘celestial signage, interplanetary publication’ — that I put at the centre of my story. While I was writing the piece I needed to check a few technical matters with Liliane, and she sent me over a couple of beautiful napkin sketches (as in, they were drawn over lunch) thinking around this projection idea. I’ve reproduced one here with permission.

Talking of moon-related memes, though, it is interesting to see that an ‘Occupy the Moon’ meme — unconnected with my story — has been proliferating in the form of rightish-leaning and barely satirical spoilers of other Occupy-generated or related web-based material. In that context it is a reductive one-liner and a fairly toothless joke: a Facebook group with no friends, a kind of lame, ‘we’re-the-99.99999%-who-haven’t-been-to-space’ schtick.

The work in the Republic of the Moon show is the opposite: subversive, generative and illuminating.

I’m particularly looking forward to seeing Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ ‘The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility’. Meyer-Brandis’ work has a charm and wit that belies its thoroughness and rigour. ‘The Moon Goose Analogue…’ is inspired by a late 16th, early 17th century work of science fiction entitled The Man in the Moone, that was written by the English Bishop Francis Godwin and published posthumously. A new edition of Godwin’s extraordinary text was recently put together by William Poole, and published by Broadview Editions. In Godwin’s story, which includes the first descriptions of weightlessness in space, a traveller named Domingo Gonsales harnesses a flock of migratory geese to make the journey. An idea which reappears of course in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.

The Arts Catalyst have recently posted an excellent short video interview with Agnes Meyer-Brandis about her project and the flock of Moon Geese that she, just like the fictional Domingo Gonsales, has raised from the egg for the purpose.

The Moon Goose Analogue, Agnes Meyer-Brandis in conversation from The Arts Catalyst on Vimeo.

§

Read my story ‘Occupy the Moon’ on The Arts Catalyst website now.

Style, wit and narrative drive – not falling, but crawling

Research in the newspaper archives for a short story that I’m writing for publication next year to accompany exhibitions by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson is turning up some very rich material, including interesting ephemera, such as a launch ad from 1986 for ‘Paladin Fiction’ (see detail below), a new paperback list from one of the then Grafton Books paperback imprints (all long ago subsumed into the modern Harper Collins).

The 1986 Paladin launch list of four titles included books by Jonathan Meades, Thomas M. Disch and Don Bloch, and the ad promised that new Paladin Fiction titles would be published monthly.

The most exciting book on the list by far, though, is Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote. The figure (right) who appears at the foot of the ad is not Joan of Arc, but a female Quixote, extracted in fact from the front cover illustration.

I’d been thinking about Kathy Acker, because a week or two ago Ubuweb tweeted a link to the fantastic Kathy Acker audio archive that they host. This is really well worth exploring: I can’t recommend it highly enough. Among the gems on offer are audio files of her collaboration with The Mekons on Pussy, King of the Pirates, which was recorded in Leeds and Chicago in 1995. Mekon co-founder (and former Three John) Jon Langford, describes Pussy… as being,

like a short story version of the book put to music — very interesting for us, musically. It was one of the best things we’d done in a long time. But it was dismissed [by the rock press] as a knocked-off thing — because people couldn’t handle it. A lot of male rock journalists could not deal with Kathy Acker.

One thing that is striking about this mid-’80s book advertisement is that a Kathy Acker novel is being marketed at all, let alone that — called ‘exciting’ — it is being published on a literary list by a mainstream, mass-market publisher, and that she is being described as a writer ‘with style, wit and narrative drive.’ All of which is absolutely true, amongst other things, but even if Paladin were still an extant paperback imprint, it is almost impossible to imagine the same thing happening today in a mainstream that often seems obsessed rather with ubiquitous celebrity and/or proximity to power.

Perhaps it is just as well that a host, or (to quote Charles Boyle in the progamme of the recent Free Verse poetry fair in Exmouth Market), ‘a disarray’ of small publishers is emerging, who may be better equipped to survive than were many of the small and independent publishers active when I first started finding readers for my fiction in the mid-late-1990s.

The Free Verse fair was put together by Charles Boyle of the excellent CB editions (or CBe for short). Charles is a poet and novelist, and a former in-house editor at Faber and Faber where in fact he brilliantly copy-edited my novel Foxy-T. He writes a very entertaining and informative blog about the contemporary challenges of being a small publisher: ‘We can work around rather than within the system […] I never set out to be a dissident, but it seems it comes with the job.’

Back when CB editions were launched, Guardian paperback reviewer Nicholas Lezard wrote an influential review of  Boyle’s pseudonymously-published first novel, the charming and intelligent 24 for 3 by ‘Jenny Walker’. CBe, he suggested, had been set up to support, ‘works which might otherwise fall through the cracks between the big publishers.’

I recently blogged Hugo Glendinning’s great photo of contributors to my Britpulp! anthology of 1999. Writing about the collection in an unpublished note, a speculative cover quote, Iain Sinclair (who himself edited the Paladin Poetry list for a while) said:

britpulp! is urban, nervy, agressive. Fast-twitch prose that fizzes and spits.  Narrative with a kick. Jump-cuts that hurt like a knuckle in the eye. Here are the improper (and therefore reliable) tales of the city. Here are stars who glory in their anonymity. Here too, in Michael Moorcock, Ted Lewis and Jack Trevor Story, are the best of the reforgotten (they’ve never gone away, although it has taken someone with Tony White’s sharp eye for history to acknowledge a proper debt). Pulp has always been a secret. Read by millions, remembered by few. There is no room for prima donnas in a world where gaudy-covered shockers have the lifespan of a fruitfly. There is only one rule: keep the pages turning. Get your retaliation in early, and often. Let this book read you.

With hindsight, I think Sinclair got something wrong here: it was no longer titles that had ‘the lifespan of a fruitfly,’ nor the writers who were ‘reforgotten,’ but the publishers, who were struggling at best to get coverage in the broadsheet review sections, hard-pressed to get books in to the bigger shops and unable to survive the closure of destination independents like Compendium in Camden Town. Small publishers such as Pulp Books, Low Life, Codex and Attack, to name only a few — just the ones that published me — are all long gone; ancient history, like Paladin.

In an interview I did recently with Matt Locke for Arts Council England, he stressed the importance of networks and, ‘relationships with audiences that are more than just the accidental monopoly of a big distribution infrastructure.’ Matt was talking about challenges facing arts venues, museums and galleries, and the kinds of ‘call and response’ relationships and the spaces and opportunities for emotional engagement that have been created by things like Twitter — issues that apply just as much, of course, to publishers and to the book trade.

Among Boyle’s contemporary ‘disarray’ of small publishers emerging in this past year — in precisely those ‘cracks between the big publishers’ — it has been interesting to see former-Idler colleague Dan Kieran and friends’ Unbound, which uses social networks and crowd-funding to pre-fund new titles by writers including — funnily enough, a quarter of a century later — Jonathan Meades, again. Of course it is not just small independent publishers using such strategies to create a connection with their readers, but an interesting aspect of something like Twitter is its leveling function (which I first noticed when I was writer in residence at the Science Museum two or three years ago, when a blog like the Londonist was tweeting London news and cultural stories with more authority and a clearer London-based identity than the Evening Standard), and that larger organisations have been slower to use it effectively, often mistaking Twitter, in Matt Locke’s words, ‘for a broadcast medium’ rather than a conversation among effective equals.

Meanwhile, And Other Stories have developed their own stylishly subversive and boutique variation of the subscription model. Depending how you look at it, And Other Stories‘ offer of four books a year for thirty-odd-quid may represent slightly better value for the reader than Unbound’s scale of support. Like Unbound it offers subscribers a printed thank you in the pages of the books they support, but while And Other… subscribers can participate in acquisition and other meetings, the ultimate editorial say-so is wielded, the website says, by the publisher, rather than a per-title subscriber threshold being reached.

But whither Paladin’s 1986 promise of style and wit? I recently went along to the Large Glass Gallery in London, for And Other Stories’ launch of Swimming Home, the immensely, yes, stylish and witty new novel by Deborah Levy, which opens with a very narrative drive — too fast on a mountain road in the South of France at midnight.

Maybe we can turn to Kathy Acker again for a preemptive answer to Nicholas Lezard’s anxiety about works falling through the cracks, or one that turns it slightly on its head. Maybe the cracks are the place to be. Not falling through them, but crawling! In a good way. ‘The whole rotten world come down and break,’ as Kathy Acker puts it, in the brilliantly scatological and anthemic, ‘Ange’s Song After She Crawled Through London’, track two of the musical version of Pussy, King of the Pirates. If you don’t know ‘Ange’s Song…’ I would urge you to listen to it here, but be warned, it is also a gloriously revolutionary and obscene earworm, a song that I guarantee you’ll be singing for days.

Ivy4evr at the BIMAs

Great news that Ivy4evr, the interactive SMS drama for young people that I wrote with Blast Theory for Channel Four, which piloted at the end of 2010, is nominated for a BIMA award tonight, from the British Interactive Media Association.

Matt Adams of Blast Theory presented Ivy4evr at both at The Story 2011 in London earlier this year, and at the Childrens’ Media Conference, Sheffield in July, where it received this amazing review:

Stop and think about this for a second. How would you tell a story by SMS? How would you engage in one-to-one dialogue at scale?

[Ivy4evr] was an exploration: a project that genuinely sought to use new technology for an entirely new storytelling experience.

While the program was surely a creative success, its limited pilot nature meant that it only reached 5,000 kids. But that’s beside the point. So often, our tendency is to use new technology to do the same old thing in a slightly different format. We use electronic “folders” instead of manila ones, read ebooks that look identical to the ones on paper, and watch television on-demand that is indistinguishable from broadcast. The folks at Blast Theory and Channel 4 deserve a round of applause for being brave enough to truly push the boundaries of digital storytelling, to ask themselves how new media creates an opportunity for interaction that simply didn’t exist before. [Read the whole review here]

It’s all a good excuse to post Ju Row-Farr of Blast Theory’s brilliant drawing of Ivy (right).

Matt and Nick from Blast Theory are currently in Taipei doing a Mandarin translation of A Machine to See With, their Sundance commission from this year, but a bunch of us will be going along to the BIMAs tonight.

In the context of various future-publishing-type conversations that I have been involved in recently (including my conversations with Matt Locke for the Arts Council and with Kate Pullinger for this blog, and last year’s event with Stewart Home for Westminster Libraries, etc) it will be interesting to dodge the canapes and try to get a flavour of some of the other work being showcased, especially as most of the projects on the various BIMA shortlists are unfamiliar and not from the worlds of literature and publishing that I’m most in touch with. I’m hoping there will be some gems amongst the bigger-budget corporate stuff, and as ever I’ll be keeping a particular eye out for good writing.

Panoramic pulp

Panoramic Britpulp! shoot © Hugo Glendinning 1999
Michael Moorcock happened to be visiting the UK in the May or June of 1999, shortly before publication of my Britpulp! short story anthology for Sceptre. He had contributed a new Jerry Cornelius story called ‘The Spencer Inheritance’ to the collection, and had also made available some beautiful and never-before-published writing by the legendary Jack Trevor Story. Mike’s presence in the UK seemed a good excuse to pull together a photo shoot of as many of the other, living contributors as I could assemble in one place. We shot some interviews for Channel 4’s then late night TV book show Pulped in the Golden Hart on Commercial Street and then walked around the corner to the Brick Lane entrance of the lower levels of the old Bishopsgate Goods Yard (now demolished) where I’d arranged an hour or two’s access to this incredible space. A few of the writers just couldn’t make it, including Victor Headley and Simon Lewis, who I think must both have been out of the country. Photographer and friend Hugo Glendinning did the honours, producing this amazing panoramic shot, here newly digitized from 35mm slide, and which as far as I know never appeared in print at the time, except as reportage in Iain Sinclair’s review of Moorcock’s King of the City for the LRB. ‘When he makes one of his brief returns to England,’ Sinclair writes:

he is treated like a privileged ghost, a convalescent. Younger writers, attached to a sentimental notion of the heroic age of pulp, rumours of mass-market readership, have elected Moorcock as their King of the May (like Allen Ginsberg in dark ages Prague). A Prince of Thieves. It’s a courtesy title: see Moorcock, in the publicity shot for the collection britpulp!, on his throne under the railway arches, a scarfed and hatted Fagin surrounded by smooth-cheeked, bare-headed acolytes – Tony White, Stewart Home, Steve Aylett, Steve Beard, China Mieville. What you are getting is a frame from Moorcock’s comic strip, The Metatemporal Detective, showing a traditional ‘hell’s kitchen’ where ‘Old Man Smith’, the piratical ruler of the underworld, lounges on a raised chair to receive his tributes. Only in the labyrinth of fiction is Moorcock recognised as king of the city.

L-R: Stewart Home, Steve Aylett, J.J.Connolly, Nicholas Blincoe, Stella Duffy, Michael Moorcock, Steve Beard, Tim Etchells, Billy Childish, Jenny Knight, China Miéville, me, Darren Francis.