Futures and Pasts

In classic cottage industry-style, there is a box on our kitchen table containing 150 copies of ATOMANOTES by Liliane Lijn, which launches tomorrow at Maggs Gallery, London W1.

As described in a previous post, ATOMANOTES continues a conversation that Liliane Lijn started in 1968 (long before I began Piece of Paper Press sixteen years ago, at the tail end of the last recession* in 1994).

Each of the 25 titles I’ve published since 1994 has been made by hand. Which means that at some point either the artist or the writer that I’m working with on a particular title, or myself, or both of us, will have had to sit down with 150 sheets of printed A4 paper, fold each one three times, staple it and, finally, trim the upper and right-hand edges to make a 16-page book. This usually comes at the end of a conversation and a process that can last anything up to a couple of years.

The bit with the stapler and the Stanley knife is important not because it affords opportunities for craftspersonship (which the project has always broadly eschewed), but because Piece of Paper Press was intended to be cheap, sustainable and — in some ways — the least one could do to make a book; if that makes sense. Each edition costs as much or as little to print as the going rate for 150 double-sided photocopies, plus a small amount of labour, which has never been contracted out or bought in. The artist’s or writer’s contributions are impossible to cost. The format was designed so that it would not need funding to continue and could survive with virtually no infrastructure. Continuing this ethos the books are always given away free so don’t have to pay their way and don’t generate more than the most minimal amount of admin. Any other way and I have a feeling that the project would have collapsed years ago. Who would have the time? The flipside in these days of infinite digital ubiquity is obvious: producing something this ephemeral in such relatively small quantities seems to go against the grain.

But just because discussions about developments-in and the future-of publishing concentrate almost exclusively upon developments in technology (ebooks, ipads, google, blah blah — all of which, of course, as a writer, I am having to try and get to grips with) doesn’t mean that this is the only possible future. It is a banality to reflect that the illusion of continuous technological progress is just that; the same can be said of economic growth. So what other futures might publishing have? And what if those futures look more like the past?

A recent conference and publication out of the University of Wisconsin documents and explores one such future, which is happening now. The ‘Cartonera‘ phenomenon first emerged in Argentina during the economic crisis around the turn of the century, and has since spread across the South American continent.

A newish book, Akademia Cartonera: A Primer of Latin American Cartonera Publishers, Academic Articles, Cartonera Publications Catalog and Bibliography (edited by Ksenija Bilbija and Paloma Celis Carbajal) was published to accompany the conference and in her opening essay, Johanna Kunin describes the emergence of the movement very succinctly as follows:

Eloísa Cartonera, in Argentina, was the pioneering project of cartonera publishers, created and promoted by a young writer and two visual artists in 2003, less than two years after the Argentine economic collapse that caused urban cardboard-pickers (cartoneros) to become a symbol of the suddenly increased poverty rates and urban marginality and vulnerability levels.

Cardboard is purchased from cardboard-pickers at a price higher than the value that cardboard-pickers usually receive on the market. That cardboard is then used as book covers, which are decorated with colorful stencil techniques by youngsters; inside, the photocopied pages of the books are hand-bound containing stories and poems. Acknowledged Argentine and Latin American authors grant permission for the publishing house to edit their books without asking for benefits. This has given great visibility to the project. In addition, by publishing the texts of young avant-garde Latin American writers, Eloísa Cartonera also provides a means of expression for authors who would otherwise struggle to have their voices heard. All the books are sold at an affordable price and thus promote “democratic” access to Latin American literature and to reading in general.

There are various online resources about the Cartonera that I’ve been discovering by browsing around the University of Wisconsin site. Best of all is the Latin American Cartonera Publishers Database, an introduction to which reads:

The Cartonera publishing phenomenon began in Buenos Aires in 2003 and was spearheaded by writers and artists interested in reconfiguring the conditions in which literary art is produced and consumed. They came up with a progressive new publishing model that challenges and contests the neo-liberal political and economic hegemony.

The database contains reproductions of scores of Cartonera publishers’ handpainted cardboard covers, including this one which is reproduced on the database homepage.

I shall be looking more closely at the scene in future posts, as I think it is truly visionary and one of the most interesting and exciting things to happen in either literature or publishing in recent years; to my mind a far more vital and forward-looking development than the iPad, for example.

But maybe I would say that because for the past 16 years once or twice a year I’ve sat down for a morning or an afternoon with a pile of printed A4 paper, a stapler and a Stanley knife. With me more often than not will have been an artist or a writer who will have spent a year or more producing a literary or graphic work that is suitable for a 16 page, A7 book. A few cups of tea and some conversation form the backdrop to a task that is by definition repetitive, but which is also very social and above all is simple and functional.

This week, that occasional half-day of stapling and trimming has resulted in 150 finished copies of Liliane Lijn’s ATOMANOTES, a work which has had a longer gestation than any other I’ve published; 42 years. We’re giving most of the print run away tomorrow night. Remaining copies will go to the scientists whose replies to Liliane’s questions comprise the bulk of the text, and to past contributors to Piece of Paper Press. I’m sorry to say that no ebook version is available. Liliane has posted an animated preview of a near final draft on her website, but it must be said that this is a poor substitute for the real thing; ephemeral though that may be.

§

Liliane Lijn, ATOMANOTES, London: Piece of Paper Press, 2010

*Coincidentally as I cycled to Maggs Bros. this morning to set up for tomorrow’s launch, the former, disastrous, Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont, probably Lord Lamont of Black Wednesday these days, wandered absent-mindedly onto the Hyde Park cycle path. I rang my bell. Didn’t want to damage my bike.

Recharging

After posting (below) my attempt at drawing a Throbbing Gristle-style lightning graphic that I needed for the ebook of a forthcoming short story commission, I suddenly remembered where else I’d recently seen a similar design…

Coming soon: ATOMANOTES by Liliane Lijn

In haste, a quick advanced notice that the next publication from Piece of Paper Press is ATOMANOTES by Liliane Lijn. It will be the 25th title in the series and here is the press release that we just finalised and which will be sent out in due course. We’re going to be holding a launch event at Maggs Gallery in Hays Mews, at the rear of Maggs Bros. Rare Books.

The making of ATOMANOTES spans more than 40 years. Here’s a short extract from the press release:

In 1967, inspired by analogies formulated from her scientific readings, between the structure and behaviour of matter with that of human beings, Liliane Lijn began writing them down in her notebook under the heading Atom-Man Notes. Lijn wanted to collaborate with a physicist to explore relationships between the atomic structure of matter and the human brain and to compare human behaviour with that of atomic particles, but receiving little response from scientists at the time she instead wrote a philosophical epic poem, Crossing Map (Thames & Hudson Ltd. 1983) that explored human relationships in terms of energy transfer and dematerialisation.

It was Liliane’s residency at the Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley (SSL) that provided a catalyst and opportunity for those questions originally posed in 1968 to be asked again now. See this previous post for background on Liliane’s residency, plus a free download of her essay ‘The Language of Invisible Worlds’. One of the many things that is interesting about this essay is the way that Liliane uses her current research and practice to (as I put it then) ‘continually echo and reframe [her] early explorations’.

Just as has happened in fact with ATOMANOTES.

I went to Liliane’s studio a couple of weeks ago to finalise the book. Various new works were installed around the space including a significant (and surprisingly large, at around 3 metres high) kinetic text work from 2009 called Way Out Is Way In Poemdrum (In homage to William S Burroughs). The making of this work too spans several decades.

(I’d recommend the aforementioned ‘Language of Invisible Worlds’ essay for background on Liliane’s friendships with Burroughs, Sinclair Beiles, Gregory Corso et al in Paris where she lived from 1958-63.)

The list of media used to make Way Out Is Way In Poemdrum is very interesting:

Painted steel solvent drums, 3 phase motor, inverter and programmed speed and direction control chip, halogen lighting. 5 words from Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Liliane has been making kinetic text works for many years. They often comprise motorised cylinders — some aligned vertically, others horizontally like a phonograph — or cones, which subject fragments of text to movements and rotations of varying speeds to transform the words into light and colour. The texts Liliane uses have often derived from conversations and collaborations with writers. Sometimes these text fragments are further subjected to a kind of reductive editorial pragmatism: what will fit. Some early conical works from 1964 onwards are included in the 1974 film What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping.

I was intrigued by the dedication of this recent poemdrum to William Burroughs. Liliane told me that Burroughs wanted her to incorporate some of his text into a kinetic work after seeing an early exhibition of her text works at the Librairie Anglaise on Rue de Seine, Paris in 1963. In a gallery over the road at the same time had been an exhibition of caligraphic paintings by Brion Gysin that were themselves derived from Burroughs’ texts, but which perhaps felt oddly static in comparison with Liliane’s machines and typography. She was summoned by Burroughs, who spoke at length about Naked Lunch and the possibility of collaboration.

Forty-six years later he got his wish, the conversation distilled by time and memory to these five words: way out is way in.

§

ATOMANOTES by Liliane Lijn will be launched with a reception at Maggs Gallery, 50 Hays Mews, London W1, on Tuesday September 14, 2010.

Knowledge Commons #5 – If you can’t find it online, draw it

I’ve been working on a new short story commission which will be published in both ebook and print formats in early 2011, about which more information in due course.

For reasons that will become clear later, I’ve been trying to source a particular kind of lightning flash graphic which for something so familiar and — as I thought — ubiquitous was proving quite a challenge. I even found myself going to the laborious lengths of grabbing, flipping and rotating various dingbats and ‘special characters’ only to find that they were simply not quite right, not to mention that the results were too low-res to be of any real use.

It was only when I’d wasted loads of time on these fruitless attempts to approximate something digitally that I thought, well maybe I should simply try and draw it.

This scan is of my first attempt, which is a bit wonky here and there because the wood grain of the kitchen table showed through the paper that I was leaning on, but it’s still far better than anything I could find online or adapt from any existing image or font resource. It is also certainly good enough to reduce and use as an ornament in the print edition.

‘If you can’t find it online, draw it,’ I thought, without quite realising until later that the reason this formulation sounded slightly familiar was that I was paraphrasing the title of a track from Laurie Anderson‘s 1983 performance of United States I-IV: a piece — I just looked it up — for tape and cartoons dedicated to Ludwig Wittgenstein and called ‘If You Can’t Talk About It, Point To It.’

Not so obscure as it sounds. Those performances were quite a big deal at the time. Anderson had just had a huge hit in the UK with ‘O Superman’, and her epic performances over two nights of the 8-hour United States I-IV were promoted by the ICA at the Dominion Theatre, London in February 1983. I went along. Here is a scan of the programme. It has probably survived the years so relatively unscathed because I stored it inside a record sleeve.

There was a great kind of home-made quality to Anderson’s work up to and including this period, even when she was using or ‘talking about’ technology (in as far as she ever really talked ‘about’ anything directly, which would be almost never; prefering as she did to tell oblique stories). This home-made quality very quickly disappeared though as her studio recordings went mainstream, only to be replaced for a while with what felt, feels, to me like an instantly kitsch, almost generic NY arthouse hi-life style; cue what seemed at the time to be the inevitable Adrian Belew guitar solo (impossible to better after this highpoint). Via the music- and art-press interviews and features accompanying her hit single ‘O Superman’ and those performances of United States I-IV, it had been Anderson’s references that had switched my teenaged self on to writers like Gertrude Stein and Thomas Pynchon, but by the time she returned to the Dominion Theatre in 1990 for the ‘Empty Places tour’ it seemed that the same old anecdotes were being trotted out in every interview (albeit to audiences that were never anything less than appreciative). Strange to say perhaps, since the recitation of anecdotes was a big part of her work, but it all started to feel a bit repetitive.

If you don’t know it, ‘If You Can’t Talk About It, Point To It’ is a short and very slight instrumental — almost like a sketchbook piece, which I mean in a good way — in which a small number of taped voice ‘samples’ are effectively sequenced to form a few seconds of shrugging, breathy funk which has both the reduced range and the percussive quality of an instrument like an mbira. It is odd to be reminded of and writing about a piece of music that was insubstantial even 30 years ago, but since I am, I suppose it is worth registering that the title is also an obvious Wittgenstein gag i.e. you don’t have to pass over in silence what you can’t talk about, you can also point to it.

Maybe I am also picking up on some media traffic following Anderson’s use of an appearance on US TV show Letterman a couple of weeks ago precisely to point at something, in this case the Gulf oil spill disaster, through a topical rewrite of her recent song ‘Only An Expert’. (Something that a number of UK artists have been doing recently too, by contrasting, for example, BP’s activities in the Gulf of Mexico with the company’s domestic sponsorship of the arts, particularly through the Liberate Tate movement.)

A .png of the Art Not Oil website

There is a nice quote in the programme accompanying those 1983 United States I-IV performances. ‘In this work,’ Anderson writes:

‘I have tried to make a distinction between art and ideas. Because ideas have a direct line to the brain; but art sneaks in through the senses. It drifts in. So there isn’t time to analyze it…’

It is a bit of dialectical whimsy which seems to fall somewhere along the same spectrum as her distinction after Wittgenstein between talking about something and pointing to it.

It is interesting looking at a significant and monumental art work like United States I-IV across the digital event horizon; looking back to those pre-internet, analogue days. There’s a prophetic line in her Burroughs homage, the song ‘Language is a Virus’ (or at least there is in the the United States I-IV-era live version of the song; it is missing from the overproduced and nonsensically cheery version on her album Home of the Brave). In the former Anderson tells of attending a science lecture. ‘So I walked in,’ she writes, ‘and there were all these salesmen and a big pile of electronics […] And they were singing: We’re gonna link you up […] We’ve got your number.’ Which, I suppose, they did and they have.

‘Picture a Christmas tree,’ they tell her, ‘with lots of little sparkly lights.’

So now that we are all ‘sort of hanging off the same wire‘ and I often find that even when I’m working, writing stories, much of my time is spent doing little more than simply pointing at stuff (albeit sometimes clicking, too), does that distinction between talking about it or pointing to it, between ideas and art, still hold? Or does the pervasiveness and the myriad ubiquity of information and media mean that it is ideas and information that sneak in ‘through the senses’, while art has the more direct line? It certainly felt that way when out of exasperation I drew this lightning flash and a couple of others for the cover of a forthcoming short story.

Foxy-T archive #3 – ‘street talk’ scare stories

Earlier this week Andrew Gallix of 3am Magazine tweeted the Guardian‘s coverage of a pamphlet published by right-wing thinktank the Centre for Policy Studies on literacy in primary education, written by Miriam Gross, backed by the current Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson and called So Why Can’t They Read? Coverage in the Guardian hinges — as their headline suggests — on the supposed finding that ‘street’ talk is, brace yourself, breeding illiteracy (my italics).

Aside from the questionable vocabulary of that headline, the wider story rang a bell for obvious reasons. Not least that when my novel Foxy-T was published by Faber and Faber in 2003 it was criticised for using the language that I was hearing all around me in east London at the time—what a few years later would become known as Multicultural London English, or MLE—where white, Asian and other mainly (but not exclusively) young people were adopting or hybridising Black British language and in so doing were disrupting what had been the very necessary identity politics of the preceding decades: a disruption typified for me by young Bangladeshi rudeboys calling each other ‘Rasta’ and most easily illustrated by the fact that it became impossible to determine the ethnicity of an unseen speaker (e.g. someone sitting behind you on the bus) by the sound of their voice. It had seemed to me that if with Foxy-T I was trying to map the ephemeral economies of Cannon Street Road, London E1, then this most ephemeral economy — spoken language – would need to be central to that. It would have been impossible to write the novel in any other way.

Where those identity politics of the 1970s intersect most productively with literature is in the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, the importance of whose work cannot I think be overestimated.

A couple of years ago I was invited to Goldsmiths for an event called African Consciousness, Reggae and the Diaspora, which was to be a conversation illustrated — if that is the word — with music; a conversation between the influential critic and theorist Paul Gilroy and Linton Kwesi Johnson. (I notice that there is a more recent solo Lecture by LKJ on African Consciousness in Reggae Music, to which these are the opening notes.) That evening at Goldsmiths got off to a great start but after what could only have been about 15 minutes the alarm went off, as well it might if Gross’s pamphlet is anything to go by because it seems that this is still dangerous stuff. We all had to shuffle back out into the autumn dark, which took a while because the place was absolutely rammed. You might think that whichever University authority it was would have been able to simply turn the alarm off and then invite us back in again to continue with this all-too-rare opportunity to hear both Gilroy and LKJ speaking relatively informally and in intimate surroundings, but for whatever reason this wasn’t possible.

There is a telling scene near the beginning of Franco Rosso’s excellent 1978 Arts Council documentary about LKJ (which a few years ago was released on DVD in Japan and seems to also come bundled with some DVD editions of Rosso’s more well-known feature Babylon). About 8-minutes in, he is being interviewed by a young female radio journalist who responds to a short recitation by telling him (in the received pronunciation of the time which would of course have been essential for any woman wanting to work in broadcasting and which now sounds more anachronistic than particularly posh or patronising): ‘I started to understand that about halfway through, but it’s not really for my ears, is it.’

It is strange to see such exercisings of power being rehearsed again now though. Or perhaps given the certain Tory tendency for stigmatisation of marginal and disempowered groups it’s simply to be expected. It is strange, too, having to get used to a new generation of obnoxious Tory ministers getting on the Today programme and trying to ‘feed us a burger‘ about this or that.

Maybe I was reading this a bit too closely but I don’t think so. I couldn’t be sure, initially, whether it was the Guardian or the CPS that had made the poor decision to attribute (and pejoratively) the anthropomorphic action of ‘breeding’ to what is after all a linguistic abstraction, and to do so within a discussion about the impacts of migration. In fact I was slightly relieved to see that the word occurs neither in the press release or the pamphlet. Boris Johnson’s introduction describes an ‘epidemic’ of illiteracy among Londoners, while Gross’s own use of language is more measured.

But just because the Guardian‘s headline arguably made the story sound more racist than it is, doesn’t mean that it is not a strange and to me slightly odious piece of work. Any young person or parent who has endured SATS and league tables will groan to read Gross’s bizarre (indeed her main) recommendation of a spectacle that would corral teachers and pupils into some vast annual reading competition designed with the sole purpose – it would seem –  of proving ‘once and for all’ (and year after year, depending which bit you read) that her preferred ‘Synthetic Phonics’ system is the best for the teaching of reading skills.

It would be hard to conceive a more monumental and coercive waste of time.

The pamphlet has a familiar and authoritative journalistic (i.e. unscientific) tone. Gross cites various anonymous sources throughout, such as ‘a young graduate’, ‘one experienced teacher’, or ‘many teachers’. While ‘anecdotal evidence’ is invoked to support generalisations such as this one on page 6: ‘the proportion of school leavers who can’t form sentences coherently is alarmingly high.’

Named sources cited extensively include Shahed Ahmed, the head teacher of Elmhurst Primary School of Forest Gate, London E7, and Avril Newman, head teacher of the Sir William Burroughs [sic.] primary school… Huh? Do they teach ‘the cut-up technique‘ there, I wonder?

I love the fact that such a glaring typo (and one that is so easy to fact-check and proof) as this supposed ‘William Burroughs’ Primary School should occur three times in a document from a Tory thinktank about falling standards of literacy. Is ‘street’ talk perhaps undermining the standards of proofreading, too?

Surprisingly, given that e.g. Guardian coverage of Gross’s pamphlet has focused on this assertion about ‘street talk’ producing illiteracy, the subject takes up little space in the book, forming as it does the tail-end of a poorly organised chapter entitled ‘Immigration’ (poorly organised not least because it includes a discussion of dyslexia that doesn’t relate to immigration at all and might have more logically been included in the previous chapter). The chapter peters out with an unpleasant and particularly unnecessary stigmatisation of what Gross calls ‘Barbadian patois’ before finally giving up the ghost when she adopts a gratingly sympathetic tone to speak for ‘these pupils’ (whoever ‘they’ are):

There is another language issue which is rarely mentioned: “Street” English, the argot in which children – both white and non-white – who live in the poorer areas of inner cities often speak to each other. This language contains a mix of various ethnic influences – Caribbean, Cockney, Afro-American, Indian and others. Like dialects and slang in other countries, “Street” has its own grammar, its own vocabulary and its own pronunciation.

[Primary school teachers] encourage children to read poems and stories written in ethnic dialects – in Barbadian patois for example – which is fine, but they omit to point out that there are linguistic discrepancies.

Only later, when they get to secondary school, do these pupils discover that “Street” is not acceptable in their written work. Understandably, they find this both confusing and discouraging.

So, clearly, in the absence as it is presented here of any evidence whatsoever to back it up, Gross’s assertion reads like opinion presented as fact. However, the very absence of references or qualifications to break them up makes these few sentences more easily reproducible (and thus perhaps more conducive to press coverage) than other parts of the text. Almost incredibly, Daily Hate coverage (which I am not linking to) ignores the provocation altogether.

Actually of course the spectre of mass illiteracy and falling standards is raised every summer, ‘street talk’ scare story or not, because August brings with it the GCSE and A-level results.

Back in 2004, when the paperback of Foxy-T was published, I had a call from Radio 4’s Today programme, or actually a fax: they tracked me down to a hotel room in Tallinn, Estonia where I was attending the ISEA 2004 digital arts and electronic media festival (festival programme here). As part of their coverage of the next day’s A-level results they would be interviewing the then Schools Minister David Milliband and others about supposed falling standards in secondary education, after which they would turn to me to talk about Foxy-T. Great. During the interview, the co-anchor Ed Stourton gamely read a section of my novel aloud before asking whether by using such contemporary language I was in fact excluding ‘some of us’.

For some reason the Today programme’s sound archive which includes every programme broadcast since 2003, is missing this section, which is listed here at 08:20 on 19 August 2004. However I do own a low quality cassette recording of the interview which I have digitised and am making available now (with only mild apologies for the background noise and hiss) since part of the purpose of this site is to make archive materials available, and a poor quality recording is generally preferable to no recording at all.

The first two minutes or so of the segment feature writer Alec Hamilton talking about Henry W. Fowler of Fowler’s Modern Usage fame. Around 47-seconds in you will hear a slight rattle as might be produced for example if a china coffee cup were set down in some immediately regretted moment of absent-mindedness onto a glass-topped coffee table in a former Soviet sphere Baltic hotel room. There is one small victory in there too, in that I was able to say, uncontested, on the Today programme that Linton Kwesi Johnson is one of the most important British writers of the last 40 years. I still don’t know quite why I said that, because I think he is possibly the most important British writer of the last 50.

Two sevens clash

Five years ago today I was due to meet a then colleague at Paddington Station by 09:00 and travel by train to Swindon for a meeting. When I got to Waterloo and made my way down the escalator to the Bakerloo Line I discovered that it was ‘down’; not working. I think it was the Bakerloo Line. One of them wasn’t working. What would I have done? I’d have thought about walking to the Jubilee Line platforms, picking up a Stanmore train there and changing to a west-bound Hammersmith and City or Circle Line train when I hit Baker Street, but it probably would have seemed too long a walk so what I did was hop on a northbound Northern Line and instead of going straight up to Warren Street and then switching via that short walk at street level to the Circle Line at Euston Square I got off at Embankment and changed platforms to pick up a clockwise Circle Line train that would take me slowly but surely to Paddington via South Ken. Such are the instant computations and adjustments made by any tube traveller; decisions made almost beneath the threshold of conscious thought. At 08:50 the train stopped in the tunnel some distance short of Bayswater tube station. A few minutes later there was an announcement blaming an electrical surge elsewhere on the network for the delay.

Because we were underground there was no mobile signal, so no communication in or out. Minutes ticked by and I missed my friend, my train and my meeting. One hour passed; people were very calm and just chatted or read their books and newspapers. Two hours. There may have been one or two further announcements, but no new information until getting on for 11:00 when we were told that we would have to leave the train – I think they said that we would be ‘de-trained’ one carriage at a time – and be led along the tracks to the nearest station, Bayswater.

Soon it was the turn of our carriage and as our single file of passengers neared the train driver’s cab through which we were due to exit, I remembered that my then still new-ish mobile phone had a simple video camera and enough memory to shoot a few second’s worth of video at a time. ‘How cool! What are the chances?’ I thought, realising that I would be able to get rare footage of our walk along the Circle Line’s tunnel, through which — as with many of the shallower, cut-and-cover style tunnels around the London Underground network — run both the clockwise and anticlockwise tracks. I shot as many bursts of video as I could, the first of which was logged on the phone as being taken at 11:13, or two hours and twenty-three minutes after the train had been halted in the tunnel. At one point we emerged into the daylight of the brick-sided Moscow Road cutting.

Here is the video. I don’t think I even showed it to anyone for about a year. We’d been out of harm’s way after all and such images had become instantly commonplace, but then recently I needed to migrate photo and video files off that old phone so thought I should edit it together.

When we reached street level and were in range of a mobile signal once more I found a new SMS in my phone’s inbox. It was from S asking if I was OK. How strange, I thought, when she could have had no way of knowing that I had been stuck in a tunnel for nearly two and a half hours!

I remember a fleeting impression of a science fiction-style scene of abandoned or stationary buses parked on a Queensway that was curiously free of motor traffic. Puzzled, I went into a shop where I was told the still only partially correct news that there were bombs on buses.

More voicemail and SMS messages came through much later, including from my friend who had reached Paddington before 08:50 when the first bombs had gone off at Aldgate and — more relevant to us — Edgware Road stations, and safely caught the train to Swindon before the lockdown of travel to and from London rail terminals.

Mobile networks were down, too, by this time, overloaded or jammed, so like everyone else — everyone, that is, apart from the four bombers, the 52 innocent people they killed and the nearly 800 injured — I continued walking, in the direction of home.

—

Creative Commons License
Circle Line, London by Tony White is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Book Club Boutique

© Gaynor Perry, 2010

I was very pleased to be asked to do another reading for the Book Club Boutique at the weekend. I didn’t need much persuading. Since this regular Soho literary night was founded by poet Salena Godden and editor Rachel Rayner at the beginning of 2009 it seems to have gone from strength to strength.

Where many in the book trade seem to use Twitter to spam followers with witless promo dressed up as reader competitions and the like, the Book Club Boutique set a standard early on for using social networks (especially Facebook and Twitter) to create a real community around their events. Last summer they worked with James Bridle and Newspaper Club to produce a Book Club Boutique freesheet to give away at festivals through the summer. There’s always a great kind of energy around what they do, and there are always big audiences with a real appetite for literature; as I suppose is symbolised by the gaping mouth of their logo.

I last read for them back in the spring of 2009, when I invited a number of writers (Lana Citron, Matthew De Abaitua, Mark Waugh and Will Ashon – who has just released the story he read on that night as an ebook) to join me for a London Short Story Night. It was great fun.

This latest event, held in the church adjacent to pop-up members club Quintessentially Soho at the House of St Barnabas in Greek Street, was billed (like the Book Club Boutique itself) as the marriage of books, booze and boogie woogie. Other readers included Melissa Mann, the mighty Malcolm Bennett, Stuart Evers and many more. MC Salena Godden was in Generalissimo guise to preside over a mock wedding between books, booze etc, or their proxies i.e. volunteers from the audience, including Graffiti My Soul author Niven Govinden as ‘books’. Here is a typically artless picture that I took with my mobile during the ‘service’ as singer Lisa Lore serenaded the happy trio and audience members queued to pin ‘money’ to them.

Luckily, the photographer Gaynor Perry was also there. Gaynor took some great shots of various writers in action on the night, which she has added to the Boutique’s photo album on Facebook. A couple of them are of me, including this rather good B&W which she has kindly allowed me to reproduce here. Thank you Gaynor.

Free University #2

This improvised sign was the doorstep of the Artist Liaison office (i.e. Portakabin) and backstage door for bands performing on The Park stage at Glastonbury festival. It made me think of the artist Bob and Roberta Smith.

On the train down to Castle Cary I’d read John Harris’s excellent article on Ian Hunter’s Diary of Mott the Hoople in the Guardian Review (which I’d recommend), so maybe I was primed to enjoy a bit of backstage scruffiness.

I was there to do a ‘lecture’ at the Free University of Glastonbury, ‘the festival’s very own literary tent’ as the blurb said, which was put together by our affable-unflappable host Mathew Clayton ably assisted by the equally unflappable Kal. It was great fun and I’m really pleased that I was invited to participate. Other speakers included Idler editor Tom Hodgkinson, Matthew De Abaitua, Peter Hook and Rob Chapman, author of this summer’s brilliant Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head.

Also sharing the bill with me on Sunday was Hamish Skermer, who this year was piloting a sustainable, well designed and user-friendly composting toilet design at various locations around the festival. Hamish had only recently returned from Haiti where he’s been working on similar initiatives to replace an infrastructure that was strained even before the terrible recent earthquake. Hamish has been teaching people to rebuild more sustainable sanitary facilities for the more than two million internally displaced people forced to live in improvised settlements across the country. He is an inspiring man who can and does talk about shit for hours, here is a link to his website Natural Event.

My presentation included a reading from ‘Albertopolis Disparu’, a story that I wrote for the Science Museum during my stint as writer in residence, and which they published as a free give away last year on their vintage imprint A Science Museum Booklet which we had resurrected for the purpose.

‘Albertopolis Disparu’ uses the science fiction and fantasy staple of the found manuscript to invoke an apparently lost work by Michael Moorcock pseudonym James Colvin called Terminal Session. The story riffs on Moorcock’s work with legendary space rock band Hawkwind, particularly the Moorcock-penned spoken word civil defence parody ‘Sonic Attack’. It’s the latest in a series of (authorised) stories I’ve been writing since around 1999 which create a kind of commentary or correspondence-by-fiction with Michael Moorcock and his works.

I was down at Glastonbury with my 18 year old son, and the night before my gig for the Free University he stumbled upon Nick Turner’s Space Ritual setting up for their gig in the intimate Rabbit Hole stage. I’m glad he did because it was this stage rather than the Pyramid which seemed to be the psychic centre of this year’s festival running as it was a series of acts that reflected the festival’s 40 year history.

Space Ritual was by far the best gig I saw all weekend, and I’d imagine that the other hundred or so people in the Rabbit Hole would agree. J and I had been watching George Clinton with Parliament/Funkadelic (as the billing put it) on one of the larger outdoor stages, where their energy was dissipating slightly, so the idea of catching a good Space Ritual line up was enough to see us abandoning the last half of Clinton’s set with a shrug and racing back to the Rabbit Hole as fast as we could. But from Clinton’s opener Maggot Brain to Nick Turner’s Brain Storm does seem like a logical psychedelic progression: space funk to space rock.

Space Ritual members vary but the line up for this Rabbit Hole gig was the principal members listed on wikipedia (so apart from Jerry Richards, Chris Purdon and Miss Angel, if you’d seen Hawkwind at Glastonbury in 1970 you’d have seen this lot):

  • Nik Turner – vocals, sax, flute (Hawkwind 1969-77, 1982-84)
  • Mick Slattery – lead guitar, vocals (Hawkwind 1969-70)
  • Thomas Crimble – keyboards (Hawkwind 1970-71)
  • Jerry Richards – bass guitar (Hawkwind guitarist 1995-2001)
  • Terry Ollis – drums, percussion (Hawkwind 1969-72)
  • Chris Purdon (a.k.a. Chris Mekon) – audio generators, FX, analogue synths
  • Miss Angel – Dancer

I should have tried to get hold of the set list to reproduce here, but it included various Moorcock era tracks including ‘Sonic Attack’, also ‘Ritual of the Ravaged Earth’, ‘Otherworld’, ‘Walking Backwards’, ‘Brain Storm’, ‘Sonic Savages’ and many more. The gig was energising, exhilarating and an absolute tour de force, and if on that other stage Parliament/Funkadelic were struggling slightly to invoke the Mothership, Space Ritual drove that mother into the ground.

To be continued…


Free University of Glastonbury

I’ll performing be at the Free University of Glastonbury at 12:15 this coming Sunday lunchtime. Here is the blurb and a link to information about the excellent line-up, location, times etc:

The Free University of Glastonbury, the Festival’s very own literary tent, returns for a second year after making its debut in 2009. Based in HMS Sweet Charity in the Park it throws opens it doors again for a mind expanding series of lunchtime talks featuring some of the UK’s leading writers and free thinkers.

There’s a Facebook group (as you might expect), and I just saw this great new image on there which could be a banner or a bumper sticker or both :-)

There have been other Free Universities of course. The artist Joseph Beuys founded the Free International University from his studio in 1973 (or 1972), while much more recently London’s Resonance 104.4 FM offered a Free University of the Airwaves through the summer of 2008. Many of the specially commissioned programmes that were part of that Free University of the Airwaves are still available as podcasts.

Chris Dorley-Brown’s excellent 2007 project BBC in the East End (reviewed here for Frieze by Michael Bracewell) uncovered some amazing BBC news footage of the Anti-University that was set up at 49 Rivington Street, London in 1968, by Allen Krebs, David Cooper and others. The Anti-University was located directly over the road from a very dingy-looking but instantly recognisable Bricklayers Arms, and the footage includes John Latham and others.

I can’t offer a Youtube link, but the Anti-University news report is available to watch free on the truly amazing BBC in the East End 2-DVD set that is available for free loan at Whitechapel Idea Store, London E1. I can’t stress highly enough that this is absolutely recommended viewing for anyone looking for ultra rare footage of the capital.

I should declare a two-fold interest in that I collaborated with colleagues at the BBC, the Arts Council and the BFI to set up Chris’s residency in the BBC Archives and, secondly, I don’t know if there are any copies left but when this DVD was launched library users who borrowed it got a free-to-keep copy of an illustrated BBC in the East End booklet to which I had contributed a short work of prose. There’s very much more to say about Chris’s project, but I’ll keep it to a plug for the Anti-University footage for now… See you at Glastonbury.

Books and the City

Stewart Home, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, p.62 (invitation reverse).

Happy Bloomsday.

A few days after J.G.Ballard’s archive was given to the British Library, I went to the excellent Cafe Oto in Dalston for the launch of the three latest titles in the Semina series that’s been edited for Book Works by Stewart Home.

I’m still partway through and enjoying Stewart’s own contribution to the series, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (read more about the book here) but I also liked the fact that invitations to the Cafe Oto event were stamped on to leaves torn from the book. I received pages 61-62.

Sections of the book seem to have been produced by appropriating text from spam emails about things like penis enlargement and substituting the ‘generic references to girls, women and ladies’ therein with the names of women artists. The passage reproduced on page 62 here ‘explains’ such a process.

And actually this kind of substitution is a literary strategy that I would usually describe as Ballardian, refering readers to a prime example of it in Ballard’s short story ‘Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty’ which was published in the 1989 anthology Semiotext(e) SF.

So from a writer, Ballard, who as this New Statesman review from 2001 puts it ‘examined the impact of technology on human desire’, to Stewart Home’s exploration of the role of women in the art world and of the impact of technology on writing, to the rather more prosaic topic of the day in publishing circles, the impact of technology on books and publishing. Stewart and I contributed to this ongoing discussion by taking part in a public event at Westminster Reference Library a couple of weeks ago, together with Gavin Everall of Book Works.

Gavin and I had stepped in at short notice because someone else dropped out. The event was called ‘Literature 2.0: Book Now For the Future‘ and the conversation was interesting and well-attended. We should have recorded it, but didn’t.

I started things off with a quick reading from my novel Foxy-T to give people who haven’t read it an idea of what I do. A few minutes earlier as we’d waited for the audience to settle in to their seats, I asked Stewart if he was going to read from Blood Rites…, and he said, ‘No, I haven’t really memorised it yet.’ (For those who haven’t been to any of Stewart Home’s readings they are a tour de force and notable for not being ‘readings’ at all; rather Stewart speaks the passages in question entirely from memory, without reference-to or presence-of a book. As happened this week at Cafe Oto, in fact.)

Westminster Reference Library is just off Leicester Square, and the timing of our event coincided with the televised mass media production surrounding the UK premiere of the shockingly bad film Sex and the City 2. Because it was a warm evening, the windows of the Library’s first floor event space were flung open so that our discussions about technology, free distribution, the Google book agreement or the finer points of publishing contracts were accompanied by the incessant screams and cheers of the several thousand Sex and the City fans gathered below. The sound rose and fell like waves crashing on to a beach.

The way that Sex and the City 2 choreographs its four central characters does not seem so different to the Ballardian substitution strategy deployed by Stewart Home in Blood Rites… In places it feels as if the names ‘Carrie’, ‘Miranda’, ‘Samantha’ and ‘Charlotte’ have been dropped in to a series of situations (including the UK sit-com and soap opera staple of the works outing or cast holiday) where little is demanded of them but the repetition of a very limited number of character-specific tics and a prolonged and infantilised cooing at any of the numerous displays of wealth and ostentation: overdubs must have been excruciating.

As is the film. Almost anything that was ever good, interesting or witty about the original HBO sit-com seems to have been stripped out and replaced by an endless posing of the question, ‘What shall we spend the money on?’

By the time our event in the Reference Library finished so had the one outside. The red carpet was gone. Stars and fans had been replaced by street sweepers and litter pickers. Crowd control barriers were being stacked on to lorries while technicians dismantled the various stages: the movie premiere’s industrial and class underpinnings were exposed.

Thinking about Ballard again and the film studios, airports and motorways that surround London, and thinking too about those Dalston streets around Cafe Oto, I remember that last year we were lucky enough to visit the set of Eastenders at the Elstree Studios complex. It was a private visit rather than a writing gig of any kind, and very exciting. In retrospect the timing was perfect. It should have come as no surprise, but I was still amazed by the extraordinary attention to detail that is brought to bear on that little maze of slightly smaller-than-life streets. One literary example: Pasted to a wall opposite the street entrance to the fictional Walford tube station — which at the time of our visit was shrouded in scaffolding and tarpaulin just like the stations of the real East London Line during its recent refurbishment — was a flyposter for the very real and then still quite recent event Hackney Adventures which featured Iain Sinclair and others. There was another poster for an event involving the artist Bob and Roberta Smith.

Since it is June 16, I will also say that at the time of our visit to the set, I noticed that one Eastenders character’s bookshelf contained not quite a copy of Ulysses itself, but of Clive Hart and David Hayman’s 1977 University of California publication James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays. Since I am writing this on Bloomsday that is close enough.

Visit over, we emerged and set off through the suburban streets that lay ‘in the shadow of the film studios’ (as Ballard says of Shepperton in this 1990 interview). Looking around and still feeling that slight psychic jolt where fiction meets reality, I remarked that after the hyper-real simulation of Walford, the town of Borehamwood didn’t look very realistic. It was a day-to-day observation that only felt uncanny later, when we got home and read the first news of J.G. Ballard’s death.

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Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, by Stewart Home (2010) ISBN 978 1 906012 23 6—Price £8.00