The underground library

I will have become a real commuter the day I start religiously bringing a book with me. Not to read, but to carve out a space on the train, to ward off the noise and the spurious intimacy of rush hour. No wonder so many books are sold in London – they are sword and shield, blanket and magic potion.

London’s reading bedroom

Been going into work early, sometimes even early enough to get a seat. The Tube is very bedroomy then. No one speaks. Some women paint on make-up, hold out little mirrors to check they’re doing a passable job. But that’s rare. Sleeping or reading are the usual things. Mostly people read books. A guy next to me is reading history: the Age of Europe. 1600s, I think. He turns the pages incredibly slowly. I ask if it’s the Age of Asia now, but he says no, today we are in the Postmodern Age. He closes his book and gets off at Mornington Crescent, leaving me thinking, Funny that, because Postmodern sounds so old… Like aeroplane or Hi-Fi Stereo. Hovercraft, Information Superhighway. So what age do we live in? Perhaps the Age of Plastic. Yeah, still.

Citation needed (Wikipedia)

Incidentally, I love it when Wikipedia says ‘citation needed’ – evidence of the multiple personalities behind the machine.

Writing for the web

So many things about writing for the web are different from writing for print. As part of the day job I’m churning out topical pieces that disappear in a barrage of tweets, each crafted to exacting criteria. There’s even a fixed word length per sentence that we must not exceed. It’s a production line of words for a service that gets a big readership. It’s just, I worry that I’ll not be able to write the way I used to any more; that the rules will become so internalised that I’ll forget how to have fun with words.

Words I learned today:

Purdah, Darwinopterus.

My hairdresser friend

is coming to town for some kind of hairdressing show, and I am so pleased that I happen to have had my hair cut recently. Unless you too have a hairdresser friend, the enormity of my relief may be lost on you. It’s those puzzled, almost pitying looks, accompanied by the kind assurance that he’d love to cut my hair, if only he had the time…Then I see myself in a shop window on the way to the Tube: although my mop was scissored last week and I witnessed great chunks of it lying on the floor, it’s growing back superfast. By next week when he gets here, it will be wild as ever.

My favourite library

It’s quiet here, but busy too, and it’s a place where I feel I belong. Speech is rare because, like me, other people here are busy writing, making notes, or simply reading. Of course, life couldn’t be like this all the time – it’s a relief at times to go over the road for a coffee and hear voices again. But it’s great, I love it.

I was in a different library recently, one newly built with public funds… There were 50 people there, all quietly reading, when in walks this one guy yelling into his mobile. You know those ‘I’m-on-the-bus’ conversations? Well, this time it was ‘I’m-in-the-library’. The person at the other end didn’t believe him, he kept on saying ‘I’m-in-the-library’, louder each time. This guy didn’t want to use any of the library facilities except an armchair; he settled in one near me, still talking. After a bit I gave up and left. A librarian saw, and apologised. ‘I can’t say anything,’ she said. ‘Our new policy says it’s OK to talk or use your mobile phone.’ Weird. There are already so many places to use a phone. Why would we need another?

Election night remembered

So last year Steve Moran asks everyone to share their election night thoughts (yes, yes, the one in north America) and for some reason around nine months later it gestates into a web page. Here.

The literary remix – problem or not?

This thing of reversioning other people’s books is so complex and varied, it’s hard to have a consistent opinion on it. If it was down to me I wouldn’t want a rule barring all books of this kind but for each work to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. If it had genuine merit in its own right, let it pass; if not, then not. Only, who would decide?

Once upon a time, good taste or a good editor took care of this sort of thing and saved the rest of us from exposure to it. Now, where is either when you want them? That just isn’t how it works any more. Self publishing and web publishing leave the decision in the hands of the punters, who vote with their cash or their cursors.

But if JD Salinger cared enough to sue over ‘Sixty years later: Coming through the rye’*, the recent unauthorised “sequel” to his classic ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, then part of me is glad he won. And part of me wonders, would it have sunk without trace had he not bothered? The supposed sequel features as central characters one Mr Caulfield and one Mr Salinger, and its writer, perhaps as a marketing aid, took as his pseudonym the name JD California. It may be unfashionable to stand up for copyright just at the moment, but without wading around in the mire of side-taking I can say this – what is so wrong with originating your own creative work and taking your chances on whether it sells?

This applies as much to music as to fiction. So much ‘new’ music consciously emulates sounds that are 15, 20, or 30 years old (mostly between 27 and 32 years old just at the moment, but it all depends on what is selling). The trouble is, it can be hard to know if you’re listening to a recent remix or to the original. It is one thing to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’, another to lazily piggyback-ride them to death.

Death is of course an important consideration. It is a very fine thing for publishers if the author whose work is being revisited [or remixed, or mashed up, or perhaps as some might say, ripped off] is dead. Ideally they will be very dead, so dead in fact that copyright is no longer a concern; this reduces the risk of a court case somewhat. So, Quirk books will follow up the literary mash-up ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ with ‘Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters’ — ‘60% Austen and 40% tentacled chaos’. Other publishers have joined the goldrush and plan to release titles such as ‘Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter’ (subtitled ‘She Loved Her Country; She Hated Demons’) and ‘I am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas’. See the Guardian for more.

The Salinger case proves that when borrowing heavily from another writer’s work, it’s not enough for the author concerned to be merely old and reclusive. They really do have to be dead. And preferably, they should not have a powerful estate taking care of how posterity perceives their work.

What would reduce the risk further, I’d suggest, both to publishers and perhaps to readers, is for the writer to bring enough new material to the project for it to genuinely “belong” to them as author. For example reviewers who decribed the 2007 Booker shortlisted novel Mr Pip as “Lloyd Jones’ imaginative riff on a classic Dickens novel”, did so safe in the knowledge that Great Expectations was just one of the many flavours running through the novel. Lloyd Jones did not rely upon it so heavily that his readers needed to have read Great Expectations in order for Mr Pip to make sense.

Rendered as a percentage? Hard to say, but not more than 2 or 3%.

Personally I’m not sure a 60:40 ratio of old to new is fair, even if on the face of it, it’s legal. The author (or publisher) doing the borrowing ought to bring more collateral to the equation than that.

Jane Austen with zombies

When I said what came next might be something Jane Austen would hate, I didn’t mean the video in that last post — which I have a feeling she wouldn’t really object to. No, I meant Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which people may have noticed in their bookshops recently. It is anyone’s guess how Jane Austen would react were she brought back to life to comment (the most annoying aspect, from her point of view, might be that the writer responsible has probably minted more than she ever made from the sale of her own books). But I suppose I’m slightly concerned that if this is a hit, we’ll be treated to a ‘literary’ diet of zombies with everything (which here means, everything classic with expired copyright). Like chips with everything, that could be a little dull. The one person I know who has a copy of this book is saving it for when she goes on holiday, so if you’ve read it or have strong views, do get in touch.

Jane Austen in Chawton

Two hundred years ago, in July 1809, Jane Austen moved to Chawton village in Hampshire, where her brother had inherited the local manor house from a cousin. Jane lived with her mother in a cottage on the estate, now the Jane Austen House Museum. Here, she revised the manuscripts of ‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Northanger Abbey’, and wrote ‘Mansfield Park’, ‘Emma’ and ‘Persuasion’.

I am not sure whether to be surprised it is as much as two centuries since Jane Austen’s work began to be published, or surprised that it is only two centuries. Her work has had a massive influence on literature and on attitudes to life in these parts. And she is big in Bollywood too. What next? Well, it may be something she’d hate… but if she was around today, who knows?

A big fat zero

The noughties are nearly gone.

Just as we got used to writing and saying the word ‘Noughties’ in unembarrassed fashion, the decade is about to be over. And what a nothing of  a decade it was. A decade in which the art, music and writing of other decades was endlessly recycled, a decade in which an attack on two buildings became the justification for a so-called ‘War on Terror’ in which many thousands were murdered and others went hungry, while in countries geographically (but not otherwise) far removed from all this, we became overly interested in food and ate far too much of it, then dieted or went to the gym or the doctor to remove the resulting fat, and spent our time watching celebrities do the same thing. Technology allows us to connect with people anywhere on the planet, but those who have advertising money to spend keep trying to herd us into mass market spaces where we will endlessly watch and listen to just those same few people that we are all on first name terms with and about whom we already know far too much.

Reading at Respect Festival, NW London

Ooops, meant to add a link earlier for this event tomorrow – at Respect Festival, Willesden, where I’m reading along with several writers who contributed to the heftily titled anthology What We Were Thinking Just Before The End (aka ’WWWTJBTE’  — and no, I don’t know how to pronounce that either. Maybe I am not East European enough.) Anyway, all that is happening 6pm-7ish, at the Shh tent, Respect Festival, Roundwood Park. Entry is free, and there will be music and other entertainments in the afternoon and into the early evening, and hopefully some more sunny weather, too. How to get there.

And the winner is…

I put this up late yesterday as a comment but then it seemed to vanish into nowhere. Thanks for both public and anon entries to the “what is Romantic” tiebreaker. Good answers all round (this includes the one that came anon). I like the way Mr Taradash brings Mills & Boone into this. Reading his and Ossian’s definitions, it does stretch the brain a little to figure out how we get from the Romantics to Chick Lit. But I think the phrase “limp-wristed heroism of the Celtic twilight ” swings it, really. So the winner is….    Ossian.

Well done Ossian, will be in touch to schedule delivery of your copy of Punk Fiction.

Win a copy of Punk Fiction

Tie-breaker Q: Who were the Romantics and what defined them? NB this is a no-google question, please just answer Rorschasch style with the first thing that comes into your head, sending your answer as a comment. The winner will be contacted by email and the book sent to them by post. Deadline to enter: 21 June 2009

Punk Fiction reviewed in The Guardian: “You leave its pages realising that being a punk really just means being young, high on the fumes of freedom and puffing your lungs up big enough to breathe life into the world.”

Question about a writers ‘movement’

Does anyone reading this know who the Romantics were? Or why they were called that?

This is WITHOUT Google, without any other online search or phone-a-friend, just what you KNOW. I am just as interested in wild guesses as I am in the truth. Who you think they are? Or might be? If you cannot hazard names, hazard a century or a theory about how best to describe them. Imagine there is a huge prize to motivate you (there isn’t).

Actually there could be a prize, will have a rummage and make an offer tomorrow…Answers in a comment box please. Anonymity guaranteed if wished – just say Not for publication in your comment. Ta very muchly…

Poetry just got interesting

Looks like new poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy is not the type to go gentle into that good night. Her first move in the job as state poet has been to bite the hand that feeds — unlike the guy in the job before her (what was his name again?) whose poetry was so spectacularly inoffensive that no one remembers much about it, or him. With ‘Politics’,  Duffy shows she has her finger on the pulse and is not afraid to say her bit. She has also donated the stipend for the job to a Poetry Society prize fund. Just as well, perhaps — whoever pays it out might have tried to claw it back.

No 4 bus story: the lost laptop (2)

So your laptop is gone. Panic, nastiness etc. What do you do? 

You ask around, and someone tells you about the place where the No 4 bus goes to sleep at night. It’s a ten-minute walk away, or a four minute jog in this case. You follow the directions you’ve been given. The further you get from the high street the less sure you are that this secret building actually exists, but finally you round a corner and it looms ahead of you like an overgrown brick shed. 

They pack a lot of buses in here, and how do you know for sure that  your No 4 bus is one of them? You don’t. It could be driving down some other road entirely…It’s a tense search, up and down a lot of stairs in 17 identical No 4s in search of THE one – but in the end, you find the right bus. How do you know? The bag is still there, exactly where you left it. 

If you don’t like happy endings, tough. When your laptop goes AWOL, just like when your hard drive gets fried, a happy ending is exactly what you need.

No 4 bus story: the lost laptop (1)

[OK, this is not the story the BBC recorded - but it is a true No 4 bus story.] It’s about the time I left my laptop on the bus.

It’s your worst public transport nightmare, isn’t it? And you can’t imagine how anyone would… Well, here’s how: the No 4 rambles around north London like a free sightseeing tour, and by the time you reach the last stop you’re nearly asleep. Downstairs the driver helpfully flashes the lights a few times to signal to passengers that the last stop is coming up. He leaves the lights off in the end for some reason, so you stumble downstairs in the shadows, neglecting to notice the bag with your bits and bytes in it. Of course you’re some way down the road when it occurs to you how nice and light you feel, walking along without… without your bag!

Panic, nastiness etc…. (to be continued)

What nationality is punk?

I’ve been thinking how much longer things used to take to spread from one country to another. By the time I heard of punk I expect it had pretty much crashed and burned in London but it was still reverberating in other places. My story in this Punk Fiction book is set in Germany and the music is from America and Ireland. So when I saw a union jack on the front cover, I was a bit surprised. Seeing it on my blog looks kind of strange, too.

What word rhymes with ‘banker’?

The other morning when I took this photo, the other tube passengers bristled as the flash went off. But once they realised I wasn’t photographing them, they didn’t say anything. (Doubt they would have, anyway…. Northern Line, in the morning? Don’t think so.) Besides the sticker says it all really. Without offending nearly as much as the average free paper that people on the tube were busy reading.

 

 

Insomnia and lit crit

Could not sleep last night. A writer whose work I like sent me a present of a lit crit book maybe a year ago, and about 3am I found it and started reading it. It was about 4, I think, before I stopped. Maybe next time I should try maths — could work faster, on the sleep-inducing front.

Six-month blog birthday

This blog has now been online six  months. Happy birthday, Lane7. I think it’s fair to say the complete absence of posts in recent months suggests I am far from the world’s most diligent blogger. Here I am, turning up like a bad penny, mainly thanks to a comment about Hawthornden from children’s writer Joan Lennon. (Hi Joan, congrats, I hope it goes really well for you. I am sure you’ll like the location. Who wouldn’t?) Well, I’d not really planned on writing a post today, and am finding the new WordPress layout good but distracting, so I’ll keep it short. Will be back soon with some updates on the fiction front.

Was that spam or not

Been sending lots more email than usual this week because I’m putting together LitCamp (with London Metropolitan University and PostCMS). I felt slightly bad for sending out so much email even though it was mostly going to people that wanted to get it. Next week, LitCamp will be all done and dusted, and I will avoid writing anything even vaguely spam-like. In fact I will aim for a completely email-free week. It will be like going on holiday, but without the annoying security checks and without the fear that my cheap airline will go under while I am away.

To teach creative writing, or not?

A chance came up recently to do a bit more teaching. Coming at it from an editor’s as well as a writer’s perspective, I hope I have something useful to add. BUT… have just been reading The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland and, well, have you read it? Those creative writing exercises he slags off, where the narrator is a piece of toast, getting buttered…? And the character who is the author of five critically acclaimed, but unread, books. Very scary.

OK, funny too, but scary. Try this for a longer and better-argued review, all I can say is I kept having to stop, then start again… in appalled fascination. So: go for it, or run for it?

—

later

“Go for it if it is not too time-consuming”, says Women Rule. Agreed, it is rewarding to help people improve their writing, but yes it does take up time. And on a per-hour basis the pay is modest. Last month I skimmed Rodge Glass’s biography of Alisdair Gray, in which Gray was blissfully scathing about his time as a teacher of writers, at a Scottish university.

Still, the way the subject is taught can vary a great deal, and after surveying the course materials I’d be using (and reassuring myself there were no buttered toast exercises to be handed out!) I decided I’d be happy to give this another go.

Payment in kind

I’ve hired myself out freelance to a weekly magazine where my job is to pretty up other people’s sentences for a fee. All very well except that, as with all freelance work, there will be the inevitable wait to process a payment. I’m sure the magazine can afford it, though. Their West London office seems swanky enough, as does the parade of shops it’s set on. On lunch break, I feel instantly poor: at the organic deli next door they are selling gorgeous but unaffordable sandwiches and a face cream that costs £120 for a tiny tube. I try the sampler and my skin feels great. A quick calculation. That was about £5-worth of cream –  earnings for the day just went up.

Falling down and getting up again

I fell this week, on Holloway Road. Still not sure how exactly. Maybe a passing motorbike handle looped through the handle of my bag as I was crossing the road, I don’t know. I was tired and something jogged me off balance. Anyway, the thing is, even though the pavement rushed to meet me and whacked me on the chin – I can still see that close-up of pavement with some of my blood on it – even though I did go to pieces a bit and worry if I would permanently have an enormous lopsided jaw – I got up, went home and iced the cuts and bumps. And now I’m back getting on with things. How is this related to writing? Maybe it’s like getting rejection letters. (One or two of those this week too.) But you have to keep going, don’t you?

Absence of life

When you spend too long sucked inside the screen – that is absence of life. What you do about it is up to you, maybe you are happy there. Maybe when we all run out of space to walk around on this planet, you will not mind at all. I try not to spend too much time inside the screen but today got links to White and Nerdy and the 30-Second Bunnies.