Better than any review: Spring Snow – A Translation

Spring Snow - A Translation, by Alison Turnbull

Spring Snow – A Translation, is a beautiful aritst’s book by contemporary visual artist Alison Turnbull, which was published by Book Works in 2002. Here’s the blurb from the Book Works online catalogue.

‘Alison Turnbull takes Japanese author Yukio Mishima’s novel Spring Snow as a starting point to produce Spring Snow – A Translation, which is literally a visual translation ordered by colour. Drawing on Mishima’s evocative use of colour in the novel, Turnbull condenses the narrative into a colour palette. Working from the English edition, she isolates and orders each of the more than six hundred colours as they appear in the text – what emerges is a visual essay on the nature of translation.’

I wrote a short work of fiction ‘Spring Snow: Mukashi-Banashi’ for the book’s introduction, using cut-ups from Timothy Lea’s Confessions of a Private Soldier and peripheral texts from Lafcadio Hearn’s Kotto: Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs, as well as information about dock strikes in London and Japan in 1896 and 1997 respectively. In this story the narrator, ‘Tony White,’ asks whether, ‘leaders are forged in the crucible of circumstance or whether they emerge from youth fully formed and are themselves the blacksmiths [… In] another time, in different circumstances,’ the story continues, ‘who could say whether Kimitake Hiraoka’s pride and zeal might not have been warped beyond recognition. Instead of a mighty figure on the stage of worker liberation, he might have become […] a swooning fascist.’

In my story Alison Turnbull herself is also recast as an acolyte and contemporary of this parallel universe Mishima. She sends a portfolio of her colour translation of Spring Snow to ‘Tony White’ after their fateful meeting on a train out of Yokohama in 1929, and maintains ‘a fitful correspondence’ with the narrator until her death in 1973. The story ends with the reflection that, ‘it must indeed be gratifying to the publisher to bring it back into print for a new generation that is making its own discovery of Japan.’

Better than any review, some pleasing ripples in the multiverse resulted from the publication of this book; some responding to the gravitational tug of fiction, others to the pull of non-fiction.

Firstly, a couple of writer friends who read Spring Snow – A Translation assumed that the entire project was the fiction, not just my short introduction. They thought that I had not only created that text and this book, but also therefore the character and oeuvre of Alison Turnbull.

Conversely, when searching the British Library‘s catalogue to send information about Spring Snow – A Translation to a reader and colleague who had requested it, I discovered that rather delightfully the British Library have attributed authorship of Spring Snow – A Translation to the fictional ‘Alison Turnbull’ described in my story, who ‘died’ in 1973, rather than to the real Alison Turnbull who is very much alive and represented by Matt’s Gallery, London. Here is a screen-grab of the British Library catalogue record for the book.

British Library catalogue entry for Spring Snow - A Translation, by Alison Turnbull

You can buy Spring Snow – A Translation by the real Alison Turnbull from Book Works online shop here.

Link to an interview with Miljenko Jergović

I wanted to quickly link to a really good and very short interview with Miljenko Jergović on Hungarian Literature Online which I picked up via Maud Newton’s blog.

Miljenko was born in Sarajevo in 1966 and now lives and works in Zagreb. The introduction to the interview notes that readers of Croatian daily Jutarnji List have voted Miljenko the best Croatian writer of the decade. The excellent Words Without Borders writes that his work ‘has been translated extensively throughout the world’, though unfortunately for us Anglophones hardly any of it into English.

There is one short story collection available in English translation, Sarajevo Marlboro. Also, a great story by Miljenko Jergović entitled ‘Araby’ opens the Croatian Nights (Serpent’s Tail, 2005) anthology that I co-edited with Borivoj Radaković and Matt Thorne, and which was published simultaneously in Croatian Translation as Hrvatski Noći (VBZ, 2005).

You can buy Croatian Nights from The Book Depository here.

Croatian Nights, Serpent's Tail 2005

Piece of Paper Press: London and Sydney

Cover shots done for Barbara Campbell’s News Haiku, POPP.024, and my own London Palm, POPP.025. These editions were published and launched simultaneously at an informal event at Riverside Studios bar on 29 November 2009, and at an event in the new Performance Space Clubhouse, Sydney, NSW Australia on 12 February 2010.

News Haiku was written and produced during Camp- bell’s recent visit to the UK and here is the short explanatory statement that she wrote for the press release.

‘While I’ve been in London this autumn, I’ve been searching the Guardian and Observer for buried haiku. The task requires a soft-focus reading. It can take a while to find these signs of the eternal now amongst news of the only-just-happened. Like a poetic code, the five and seven syllable runs of text are dispersed throughout the paper; from items on climate change, local floods, meteor showers, EU and M&S appointments, to what’s on the TV or what to buy your dad for Christmas. I shake the lines free of newsprint, reassemble them into their 5-7-5 haiku formulation, punch them out again with a Dymo labeller and give them to you here for further deciphering.’

London Palm comprises short notes that I wrote to present at a symposium to mark the 1000th night of Campbell’s 1001 nights cast. That symposium was at Performance Space in Sydney, so it was particularly fitting to do the launch of these titles there. I was only sorry that I couldn’t be there this time.

I have a small number of spare copies of both books (which reconciles the print runs we’d given away in UK and Australia) and I’ll make five sets (one copy of News Haiku and one copy of London Palm) available to the first five people to comment here. No rush.

Rapid prototyping: stories for EPUB

At the end of 2009 I collaborated with James Bridle to publish three new short stories in the EPUB format via James’s new electronic publishing project www.artistsebooks.org

Include Me Out, artistsebooks 2009

I discussed these in my presen- tation at the London Libraries Ebook Market- place Seminar at Swiss Cottage Library on Monday 22nd February. It was an interesting event, with librarians and colleagues from publishers and suppliers including Bloomsbury, Exact Editions, Credo, WF Howes, BBC Audiobooks etc.

I’d also read from one of the stories ‘Include Me Out’ a couple of days earlier at Matt Lock’s The Story conference (yes I know, I liked the ‘DePo Masthead’ theme Matt used for The Story’s blog) at Conway Hall on 19 February 2010. So I thought I’d link to them here, now, too.

These ebooks were funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The stories are part of my Balkanising Bloomsbury series and are an outcome of a residency that I’d had at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) which was supported by the Leverhulme Trust. They were published as part of a mini-festival that I co-directed with Dr Wendy Bracewell at SSEES, called Destination London.

I was delighted to work with James as I’ve been following his booktwo blog for a while where he has been exploring the future of publishing with more intelligence than most. In other words he has avoided many of the platitudes, received wisdoms and knee-jerk angsting about piracy etc, that often bedevils serious discussion of the subject. See Mssv take apart some howlers in Jason Epstein’s piece in the current NYRB. And sorry but I’m worried by Danuta Kean’s uncritical embrace of Peter Mandelson’s ‘three strikes’ proposal to deny web access without trial for unspecified periods of time and at ministerial discretion; ‘three strikes’ is frankly more alarming than the supposed problem, i.e. the cure is more damaging than the disease.

I’m not trying to say anything new by noting that most artists and writers operate in a mixed economy where they make pragmatic decisions about giving stuff away all the time. Some we all know have been making a positive virtue of the fact for years. Others actively make work about the law, copyright or issues like piracy; work that involves testing the boundaries of such concepts – I may come back to this in another blog. Quite prosaically, too, though, most of the published writers I know have given stories away or written stories that were always designed to be free, to be out there, with motivations ranging from wanting to take part in a great project like Barbara Campbell’s 1001 nights cast to my giving a story to 3am Magazine because I liked what they were doing. Conversely every writer knows (from experience) that there are well-known magazines that promise to pay but never do.

I’ve been convinced of the value of giving stuff away for ages though. It’s what I’ve been doing with Piece of Paper Press since the early 1990s. I was also involved in the groundbreaking CODE conference nearly ten years ago, commissioning a series of accompanying essays from Matt Locke, Stewart Home, Joe Banks of Disinformation, Steve Beard and others, back in the days when James Boyle, Lawrence Lessig and co were discussing and sharing the conceptual groundwork for Creative Commons, which I have now used to licence these latest EPUB stories. Those CODE essays were published in an early version of the Diffusion eBook developed by Proboscis, which I’ve also used for some other stories in this series. I’ll link to those another time.

I’d been wanting to do something with the EPUB format for a while. I liked the sound of it because it is nonproprietory and doesn’t tie you to a particular device or OS;  because it offers a way to publish things for free; because I saw people I knew, people who read books, wandering around with iPhones that had great ebook reading capability but not much to read on them; and because it’s important as a writer to actually experiment and see what this stuff can do.

So that’s what these are; an experiment. When I was writer in residence at the Science Museum, London in summer 2008, Hannah Redler who directs Science Museum Arts Projects, borrowed some engineering jargon to described such experiments as ‘rapid prototyping’, which is a good way of putting it. At that time I was working with the Museum looking for a way to publish a short story ‘Albertopolis Disparu’ that I’d given them (non-exclusively) as an outcome of my short residency there in summer 2008. Another experiment.

Albertopolis Disparu, A Science Museum Booklet 2009

Plans for a print edition of ‘Albertopolis Disparu’ centred around our revival of their grand old ‘shilling monograph’ imprint A Science Museum Booklet, which I’d discovered in the archive. (Note for geeks: our design also mirrored exactly the format of the Aloes Books chapbook edition of the Thomas Pynchon short story ‘Low-Lands’.) The Museum workshops built a specially-commissioned display that was to be sited outside the lifts on the first floor. They gave away thousands of them. ‘Albertopolis Disparu’ also, I was delighted to hear, passed the ‘litter test’ that generally applies to free print that is given away in those vast halls: they didn’t find any copies of the book discarded in the stair wells. Copies of ‘Albertopolis Disparu’ were also available free to cab drivers from the Cabmen’s Shelter on Thurloe Place in South Ken, reviving the old tradition whereby local publishers gave free books and newspapers to the Shelters.

We also wanted to make ‘Albertopolis…’ available free online, and to publish some great stories that had been produced by participants including Sophie Hope and Al Robertson in a free writing workshop that I ran at the museum in 2008. However at this time in early 2009 EPUB still hadn’t had its possibly iPhone-driven ‘VHS moment’, so we had to resort to using downloadable PDFs on my residency webpage. So this was all still very much in keeping with the unspoken ‘free as in freedom AND free as in free beer’ ethos that (with apologies to the free software movement) I’d adopted for my residency, but felt a bit clunky and outdated. If we’d had EPUB then it would have been great.

A matter of months later, though, and James and I met up for coffee at Maison Bertaux and plotted using EPUB for these Balkanising Bloomsbury stories out of my Leverhulme Trust residency at SSEES. We got talking about artists books and giving stuff away, and it kind of synched up with what he was thinking about for artistsebooks.org

So three new short stories, free to download. They are a kind of rapid prototyping experiment in EPUB. I’m including them in my live events at the moment, and all of them are also available in print formats e.g. here. These EPUB versions should work with iphone, ipodtouch, android, BeBook, Nook, Stanza, eBookPro, SonyReader and Aldiko etc. Comments and feedback are positively encouraged by James and artistsebooks.org and more titles are in the pipeline so it’s definitely worth bookmarking http://www.artistsebooks.org

The stories are:

Bring Me Sunshine

How We Made ‘An American Legend’ Part 1

Include Me Out

Foxy-T on the book club quilt

Ginny sent news that the front cover of the first edition of my novel Foxy-T (Faber and Faber, 2003) is to be included in her book club quilt. Thank you Ginny, this made my month. I will find out more about this anon but I think that the idea of a ‘book club quilt’ is fairly self-explanatory. It is also completely brilliant; such a great idea.

Ginny’s book club has been going for a while now and they’ve read a lot of books, so I’m really honoured that Foxy-T is included. It’s also a particularly nice cover, which was designed by Jonathan Gray of gray318 – who at the time was being justly celebrated for the cover he did for Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated.

Ginny sent this jpeg of the  patch, which I love. It is currently unhemmed. I will ask Ginny to send another few images as the book club quilt nears completion (though I have no idea how many weeks, months or years away that might be).