Curiosa Hamiltona

Protect IP / SOPA Breaks My Internet

2011-12-01T10:25:00.003Z

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

On Anthologising I

2011-11-20T12:06:00.006Z

In The Equation

2011-11-03T13:20:00.003Z

This plus this equals this.

World Poetry Portfolio #6: Nathan Hamilton

2010-12-20T17:17:00.009Z

In case you missed it, and assuming you'd find it interesting, as you both follow this blog, I thought I'd post here that I had some poetry featured (some old, some new) as part of Sudeep Sen's World Poetry Portfolio at Molossus.

I am featured as #6: "I am not a number, I am a free man."

You might also notice featured alongside this selection an advert for Oregon Wild Hair: 'The World's Most Literary Moustache Wax.' I like this advert. It makes me want to grow a wild and literary moustache. But I also wonder how a moustache wax might be literary. If it were used regularly by literary types, I suppose. Or if it wrote a book. On moustaches, presumably -- sticking to what you know.

Stop Sharpening Your Knives 4

2010-12-16T20:11:00.021Z

SSYK 4 - January 2011 from Simon Davenport on Vimeo.

The Stop Sharpening Your Knives 4 antholog-zine has arrived. As the triumphant ident. indicates, it is moving, epic, hi-tech, big budget, romantic -- bestial? And likely to contain horses.

  SSYK4 is edited by the poets Emily Berry, Nathan Hamilton, Sam Riviere, and Jack Underwood. The series is fast establishing a reputation for spotting the best new poetic talent around.  

SSYK4 contains excellent new poetry from Emily Berry, Theo Best, Amy Blakemore, Ben Borek, Hayley Buckland, Tim Cockburn, Callan Davies, Margot Douaihy, Joe Dunthorne, Charlotte Geater, Matthew Gregory, Nathan Hamilton, Robert Herbert, Charlotte Hoare, Kirsten Irving, Joe Kennedy, Agnes Lehoczky, Mollye Miller, Heather Phillipson, Meghan Purvis, Sam Riviere, Ben Stainton, Jon Stone, Sam Thomas, Emily Toder, Jack Underwood, Chrissy Williams, and Michael Zelenko.

SSYK4 available now from

Egg Box Publishing.

The Rialto: Younger Poets Feature Update

2010-04-02T17:51:00.011+01:00

The submissions doors are now closed and Flight Rialto U35 is underway. It looks to be a smooth one so far, with perhaps a little turbulence, but generally good weather is forecast. We’ve checked

poetry looms

the cargo bay for stow-away over 40s and other potentially explosive compounds, and … OK, there’s only so far you can stretch a metaphor before it threatens to snap …

So, the little experiment feature that Michael and I planned for the 25th anniversary has turned into a big experiment. We’ve had approximately 300 submissions of between 1 and 7, sometimes 8, poems (but most have been well-behaved and stuck to the original requested 3-5) and all this is in 7 days. This now leaves the slightly huge task of reading and selecting from between 800-1200+ poems in two or so weeks.

Oops. That is a lot of poetry.

In fact, it’s so much (and so much of it seems to be of a pretty decent quality so far, on my initial Beirut-soundtracked read-throughs) that we’re thinking of extending it over more than one issue and perhaps using it as the start of other regular ‘focus features’; different ages, groups, genres, or themes might be explored, for example, and different submission methods. We’re thinking about it. If you have any ideas, do get in touch.

One thing we seem to have proved is that there is — if you didn’t know already — a lot of poetry being written out there by younger people and that The Rialto continues to be a place these poets want to be seen. What also appears certain is that if you want to give yourself far more work to do than is healthy over a Bank Holiday weekend then you should send out an open call for poetry submissions via email, Twitter and Facebook, and then ruefully watch enthusiasm melt your inbox.

Anyway, I said I’d do it, so I will … it’s on with the show … excuse me, I have poetry to read … (and thanks to all those who helped spread the word through recommendations, reposts, tweets, and blogs)

[Note: I am likely to be listening to a lot of Beirut while editing this feature, including the introduction. If any of you consider their East-European-folk-inspired melancholy potentially harmful to an adequate reading of your work, speak now or forever hold your peace. I am happy to consider suggestions of alternatives.]

The Rialto: Younger Poets Feature

2010-03-22T19:42:00.018Z

I've been asked by Michael Mackmin to organise a 'ones to watch' feature for The Rialto's 25th anniversary edition -- published in May and including poems from Andrew Motion, Carol Ann Duffy and Tomaz Salamun, among many others.

I have been busy soliciting submissions from individuals (ongoing) I'd like to include, if possible, to make sure I can make a certain point or two with it. In the interests of fairness, however -- and to add an element of experimental fun -- I am also now seeking to broaden the catchment beyond my own network biases and peccadilloes with further recommendations and a short-deadline open call.

So, starting here at Curiosa: calling all poets, 35 and under! Please send 3-5 poems (no more than 5 sides) to this email address by 31st of March. These should either be previously unpublished or published somewhere of significantly lower profile than The Rialto (where Rialto would act as a greater showcase and validation of your work). Yes, it is a short deadline -- that's part of the challenge. It is also an experiment (for future work) to test or prove that such a submissions process might work well for things...

This is not limited to UK poets -- we are curious to see others, too -- but it will probably remain focused on the UK, based on the likely catchment. We'll see...

Depending on response, this may also develop into a regular feature, after establishing itself with this first introductory list, perhaps focusing on different genres or age groups, and including different submissions processes. So, get sending your poetry and spread the word! Please pass this on, in any way you see fit, to poets you feel fit the bill, or send me some work yourselves. But be quick! I look forward to reading your poems.

For more information about The Rialto, please visit: www.therialto.co.uk

Down at the White Horse, feat. Bob Walsh

2010-03-01T16:37:00.011Z

I had a drink with a cool guy called Peter at The White Horse the other night. I found out that the pub has an interesting story to it, documented next morning here on my iPhone. Bob Walsh is the barman there who told me all about it. Forgive amateur footage and goofy interjections - I only had 10 mins filming and an hour editing.

Clinic Presents: MAGIC

2010-02-10T14:45:00.002Z

Sorry for short notice and shorter note. Here is information about a reading tomorrow night. I'll be reading some old stuff and some new stuff: I have been building a gang of Malcolms.

CLINIC
Presents:
/// MAGIC ///

MUSIC:
Talons
On Histories of Rosenberg
Hreda
Jamie n Commons

POETRY:
Nathan Hamilton / Jack Underwood / Matthew Gregory + Clinic

EXHIBITION
Take Courage Gallery

Curated by CLINIC

Thursday 11th February
/// 7 Till 1 ///

Amersham Arms
New Cross SE4
£3 with flyer / £3.50 without

clinic presents

UEA CREATIVE WRITING ANTHOLOGY, 2009

2009-10-10T16:42:00.003+01:00

You are cordially invited to the launch of the UEA CREATIVE WRITING ANTHOLOGY, 2009. Attend and get your copy at a reduced price ahead of the official release on OCT 31st.

NORWICH Launch:
Tuesday October 13th, 7:00pm
UEA Drama Studio
UEA Campus
Norwich
NR4 7TJ

MAP

***

LONDON Launch:
Thursday October 15th, 7:30pm
Basement Bar
Slug & Lettuce
North Block (1-63)
5 Chicheley Street
Lambeth SE1 7PJ

MAP

UEA is proud to announce two new anthologies of work from their world-renowned creative writing MA. The UEA CREATIVE WRITING ANTHOLOGY: PROSE features a foreword by alumna Tracy Chevalier and introductions from Kathryn Hughes, Andrew Cowan and Val Taylor. It showcases thirty talented new writers from the Prose, Scriptwriting and Lifewriting strands as they lead us through the musings of a hairstylist, the birth of a snow child, and the fjords of Norway telling fine tales of refugees, lovers and Republican bloggers along the way.

The UEA CREATIVE WRITNG ANTHOLOGY: EIGHT NEW POETS is introduced by prize-wining poets Lavinia Greenlaw and George Szirtes and brings together eight fresh and fine new voices from all around the world (Australia, Bermuda, Greece, Hong Kong, New Mexico, and the UK) – some already being heard and heralded.

“UEA has a knack of discovering writers with a distinctive voice – in this case 40 distinctive voices – and these latest anthologies prove that standards remain high. Thoughtful prose, considered poetry, provocative stories that stay in the mind, extracts from novels that make one long for the finished book. Read them and sample the future.” – John Boyne, 2009

The MA has produced numerous impressive and prize-winning alumni, including Ian McEwan, Anne Enright, Tracy Chevalier, Kazuo Ishiguro, Adam Foulds, John Boyne, Kathryn Simmonds, Diana Evans, Trezza Azzopardi, Owen Sheers, Toby Litt and Deirdre Madden.

THERE ARE TWO LAUNCH EVENTS, ONE IN NORWICH AND ONE IN LONDON, FOR BOTH ANTHOLOGIES

Copies are available online now.
Facebook event info here.

--------
PS I will be back blogging properly soon...

Crasher Squirrel War: Victory!

2009-08-21T18:23:00.009+01:00

I bring joyful news from the frontline. Yesterday I received notification from Warren Kinsella that he has accepted our demands and as a result peace has been declared. At heart a decent, noble individual, Kinsella posted on his blog on the bright morning of August 19th a note ceding all claims of ownership of the disputed squirrel to me. I am therefore announcing an end to all hostilities and have called off our forces. All military operations will now cease.

I would like to distance myself from a hurricane that ravaged Toronto recently. I claim no responsibility, but wonder whether or not I have powerful friends.

We may now allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing. Yet we must remember that Mashable, in all its might, remains unsubdued and unswayed in its wrong-headedness. My number two squirrel champion of all the internets is still mistakenly attributed. Remain vigilant. [NB: since writing, they have updated their website and it is now *correctly* attributed -- friends, we continue to triumph in peacetime!]

However, as I survey the battlefield; the fallen, the wounded, I wonder: was it worth it? Was this victory worth the struggle; worth the pain and the great losses on both sides? In all this destructive madness, in all this focus on a squirrel, what have we missed? I forgot, in the fury of conflict, for example, that, among other things, three posts ago was my 100th post on this blog. A milestone that seemed trivial at the time.

Regardless, today I am happy. Usain Bolt was inspirational last night. Today the cricket has been joyful. Spurs are winning football matches and the Launch of Stop Sharpening Your Knives 3 went very well on Wednesday.

And you know it wasn't even a real squirrel. It was a bloody Marmot.

---

PS. Some people have been asking for t-shirts of the protest crasher squirrel my brother created as well as my Last Supper Crasher Squirrel and Yalta Crasher Squirrel efforts. I am thinking about this. In the meantime, some bright spark has devised a way for you to make your own pic. Why not do so now, to celebrate this fine day?

PPS. I now find my Last Supper Crasher Squirrel on the Daily Mirror Website, under 'Surprise Squirrel' ... hurrah!

Crasher Squirrel on CNN

2009-08-19T08:25:00.006+01:00

I bring you an update from the frontline. My demands are slight: a link from his website to return my little squirrel to its rightful owner. Then perhaps a supportive effort to have the Mashable link so changed, but this is secondary.

Already, I bring happy news in our continuing struggle. CNN have featured the Crasher Squirrel Craze and in their footage is a little clip of my 'Last Supper, Crashed' -- properly mentioned as originating on Buzz Feed. This a small victory, but it brings us joy nonetheless. The fact that it is news is perhaps a greater tragedy than any, but let that not distract us from our prize for the moment...

Here is the footage so that you might all share in the glory...

Declaration of War Against Warren Kinsella

2009-08-18T08:39:00.002+01:00

I am speaking to you from my living room in Norwich. Last week I, in email form, handed WARREN KINSELLA a final note stating that, unless I heard from him by the end of Monday this week that he was prepared, at once, to correctly attribute my picture of a squirrel, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that, consequently, this blog is at war with WARREN KINSELLA.

You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed. Yet I cannot believe there was anything more, or anything different that I could have done and that would have been more successful. Up to the very last it would have been quite possible to have arranged a peaceful and honourable settlement between Kinsella and myself. But Kinsella would not have it ...

A situation in which no photoshopped squirrel could feel itself safe had become intolerable. And now that I have resolved to finish it, I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage.

When Warren Kinsella Stole My Crasher Squirrel

2009-08-15T13:14:00.029+01:00

on the dangers of social media -- a sorry tale of shifty interwebbery...

You'll possibly be aware of the spread of the brief Crasher Squirrel craze: a Canadian squirrel interrupted a holiday snap, with amusing results. This filled the popular 'caprice plus cute animal doing something surprising/stupid' niche of internet trash and so instantly lots of people have been photoshopping it and a number of newspapers have reported it, keen to seem cutting edge and internet savvy.

As am I. So I added a couple of my own.

Last Supper Crashed

Yalta Conference Crashed

What can I say? I'm a sucker for internet tosh. It's actually not the best of memes and might well die a death soon: after I Can Has Cheezeburger cornered the market a few years ago with lolcat -- kitteh photos combined with oddly translated-Japanese-sounding words, and the occasional incongruous seal talking about a bucket -- anything else in this species seems a little tired. It is also more than a little Dramatic Chipmunk. I've already spotted bad T-Shirts on offer, which rather proves it an instant cliche. (The universal symbol of crappy entreprenurial endeavour: whatever happens, wherever, someone has a dodgy cart nearby selling a bad T-Shirt about it.)

However, I love my squirrels. They are my trashy little internet creations.

And so I feel it my duty to report a villainous ruse to deny me some limelight.

I originally posted my little squirrels doing stupid things here, at Buzz Feed. Again, what can I say? It was 2:30 in the morning, I was drunk...

When I awoke later that day, I spotted that Mashable had featured the top 10 Crasher Squirrel Pics. Naturally keen to follow the spread of this intriguing cultural phenomenon, I clicked through to read the article.

Alongside some slightly more lame efforts, there he was! My slightly less lame little squirrel! Number 2 champion of all the internets! Seen by perhaps tens, or hundreds of thousands of people. But, what's this? What does it say here? "Via Warren Kinsella?" Who's he? Who the HELL is Warren Kinsella?! So, I looked, and... the nefarious git stole my squirrel! Look. No mention of getting it from BuzzFeed, and he gets his name on Mashable... oh no, that is too much. That is just wrong.

Now, it could be attributable to the theory of monkeys typing. But I fear not. It is exactly the same photo -- see here also. I clearly remember concentrating fiercely through my beery haze, perhaps with my tongue out, spending a good deal of time on trying to line up the squirrel in the picture so that the lighting worked perfectly. (Yes, I know.) As well as trying to get the old photo fuzziness just right on the other. (What can I say?) I also have the originals, as I wanted to use them as a desktop (an idea I correctly dismissed as ridiculous the next morning, after a contemplative cup of tea).

Look, it's not like I didn't have anything better to do. Like sleeping. In fact, I'm actually quite a busy guy... but I felt it important to contribute something concerning tree-dwelling rodentia to the world at 2:30 on a Thursday night/Friday morning. My inner squirrel needed to be expressed.

But, oh villainy! After generously donating my little crasher squirrel pic to the cultural trash heap of human endeavour, to see it lazily nabbed [well, mistakenly unlinked to/uncredited] by another stabs my warm heart deep with an icy shard of interweb evil. It is like someone else's Dad taking credit for my child scoring a goal in the FA Cup Final.

Anyway, on Warren Kinsella's Twitter page, he says he likes a scrap. Well, Mr. Kinsella, I'll give you one. I want my squirrel back, you muttha... this is war! My name is Curiosa. Writer of a sometimes read blog. Owner of a borrowed squirrel. And I shall have my vengence...

On second thoughts, perhaps I should use this as an important opportunity for growth and move on. Maybe I'll add a few more photos while I'm at it... perhaps with some funny text... and perhaps I should get a t-shirt done... or, no, I know, one of Mohammed -- that's bound to piss someone off...

Swine Flu Pandemic Shocker Death Oh My God

2009-07-07T13:25:00.015+01:00

"Just the facts, ma'am."

I only seem to have time to update this when I am ill. And I am ill. And, naturally, because of the headlines, because I am grumpy and ill, I think I must be about to die of pig flu. Well, actually, no, I don't, for I have read a little bit about biology, and have a smattering of knowledge about biological systems, and I know the difference between a cold and full-blown influenza A, so I am immune to the media and their games...

Oh, but a famous person got it. This must make it serious. Just like poor Rupert Grint, I also have a sore throat and have been in bed for a few days. Perhaps I *do* have swine flu. I think this brings us closer together, Rupert and I. I feel briefly dusted by the magic of his ginger celebrity. Perhaps the very viruses that are in me now are the direct descendants of microbes that previously ravaged the throat and lungs of a Harry Potter star. Perhaps we have briefly harboured similar DNA. This actually raises me up the ontological league table. Oh happy day! And, because a celebrity had it too, this swine flu, this somehow makes my suffering more real. Rubbish. Get lost, Daily Telegraph, and get lost, Anita Singh. You, lazy pig farmer editors: you are the curse of this age!

Illness can be good, too. Not only because it gives me time to update my blog. Illness also, as wise philosopher sages have said, lets you know you are actually alive -- if this universe were all just a solipsistic fantasy, why would I think to create illness? I am ill, therefore I am. I'd have to be a bit of a twisted sod to torture myself with.... oh. Well, that's what gets me out of bed in the morning. Or, hang on...

Importantly, however, and my reason for blogging to you, oh world, is that this illness and fever has led me to a new amazing breakthrough scientific conclusion: the uncontrollable and potentially deadly pandemic of swine flu is not linked to a poorly maintained muggy pig grave in a Mexican desert. Oh no, sirs and madams. It is instead an irrefutable by-product of the uncontrollable levels of spam on the internets.

Consider the evidence: spam has been increasing steadily. So has swine flu. People are exposed to high levels of spam everywhere. On Thursday I read a poem about spam, and on Friday night I began the long process of deleting all my spam messages on Facebook: I was ill by Saturday. Swine flu started with pigs. And, as we all know, spam is made from dead pig. I rest my case. And all this aided and abetted by bad-journalist-pig-farmers troughing out the latest bit of celebrity garbage; slowly turning all newspaper content into yet more spam...

Socrates, long legged, bearded, and reclined at a Symposium coffee break one afternoon, picks up a tabloid newspaper, mid-thought, while considering contemporary society: 'Swine Flu Pandemic', he reads. He might well pause for a smirk.

Egg Box & Landfill Reading

2009-05-25T12:35:00.018+01:00

Daniel Kane and Jeff Hilson
Poetry Reading at UEA

The Time: Friday 29th May, 6pm
The Place: Room A3.02 (Arts)

On 29th May, former American Studies lecturer Daniel Kane is fluttering back into the UEA habitat to read from his new collection, the funny, edgy and risk-taking _Ostentation of Peacocks_, published by Norwich-based Egg Box Publishing. Alongside Daniel will be fellow poetic ornithologist, Jeff Hilson, whose acclaimed sequence _Bird bird_ was published this year by Landfill Press. The readings will be introduced by Egg Box editor and publisher Nathan Hamilton, and followed by a discussion with the poets introduced by Telegraph critic and Landfill editor, Jeremy Noel-Tod.

About the poets:

Daniel Kane was born in New York City and grew up in Manila; Mexico City; London; Tenafly, New Jersey; and New York City. He is currently a senior lecturer in American literature at the University of Sussex. His poetry has been widely published, most recently in the London Review of Books.

Jeff Hilson is senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Roehampton University. He runs the Crossing the Line reading series in London, and is the editor of _The Reality Street Book of the Sonnet_, described by Ron Silliman as 'flat out the best book of its kind I have ever seen'.

Here is a sample of _Ostentation of Peacocks_ for you to enjoy. If you can't make it, be sure to buy your copy here. Copies of both publications will be available at the reading, along with a free glass of wine and a sneak preview of Egg Box's next offering: Vahni Capildeo's eagerly-anticipated second collection _Undraining Sea_. We will look forward to seeing you there.

Jeff Hilson's blog.

Please to internet detail on your blog sharing machine? That would be wonderful like the internets.

Too Busy to Blog?

2009-05-10T20:33:00.005+01:00

A brief update on a few things. Curiosa has been up to a lot recently. Most of the absence can be accounted for by running Blogging Norfolk: a project that caused me to stop blogging for a period of time while I talked to lots of people all about the benefits of blogging, or arranged workshops teaching people how to blog. It included a few appearances on the radio chatting about blogging, a picture and video interview on the BBC Norfolk website of me looking like an exhausted murderer, talking about blogging, then an entire day of blogging. All the while, not actually blogging. Or, at least, not blogging here. Instead, I was blogging here.

It was all great fun, and thanks to the BBC, Writers’ Centre Norwich, and Arts Council, England, for the opportunity. And thanks to Sam Jordison for all his help, too -- it has hopefully proved a decent test case for exciting future work.

Over this same period a number of other things happened. My brother ended up stranded in Mexico, caught in the middle of the Swine Flu pandemic of hysteria. I had dinner with and bummed a fag off Martin Amis (he still owes me 50p, mind). I attended a lovely wedding, to which I turned up late because of a pregnant lady and a blue hat and at which I injured myself dancing. I did a reading with Kapka Kassabova and Abi Oborne at SoPo -- an excellent new reading series organised by Laura Forman (we were really well looked after, with free booze and the best ever nibbles I have ever nibbled at a poetry event). I also saw some boring Handel; interesting live literature; got my haircut...

All of which I failed to blog or Twitter about adequately or interestingly, due to distraction. This has caused a build-up of what feels like blogger’s guilt. To expunge this, I am going to catch up and post a few things here over the next few days and back-date them (along with new stuff)… just to get us back on track, dear Curiosas…

The Collected Poems of Ian Hamilton

2009-05-08T22:25:00.014+01:00

Hmm. Lunchtime, I think...

Today saw the publication of the collected poems of Ian Hamilton, my uncle; an exemplary poet and a significant influence for me, personally as well as artistically. I hope to write more about this and his relevance for younger poets at another juncture. For the time being I’ll give a bit of info about the book and let a few of the poems speak for it.

First of all, this characteristically witty and previously unseen poem, the better of three published recently in the TLS, and one of a number of new ones featured in the book:

Work In Progress

A six foot three American breathologist
Has cornered me for cocktails; 'Suck on these',
He says, and chucks me a slim vol.
Entitled: Big. Two words a line, at most,
Nine lines a page, typography diseased,
It's signed: 'To Ian, in pulse-harmony --
You dig? Love, Irv. November, seventy-three.'
And on the sleeve, a photograph:
Irv felling trees.

And here a few more of my long-standing favourites:

Rose

In the delicately shrouded heart
Of this white rose, a patient eye,
The eye of love,
Knows who I am, and where I've been,
Tonight, and what I wish I'd done.

I have been watching this white rose
For hours, imagining
Each tremour of each petal to be like a breath
That silences and soothes.
'Look at it', I'd say to you
If you were here: 'it is a sign
Of what is brief, and lonely
And in love.'

But you have gone and so I'll call it wise:
A patient breath, an eye, a rose
That opens up too easily, and dies.

Returning

It isn't far. Come with me. There's a path
We used to take. There is a stream,
A thin ripple, really, of white stones
Dislodged from a dilapidated boundary
Between two now-forgotten fields;
There is a tree, a muddily abandoned sprawl
Off-balance -- the one tall thing
You could see from where I walked with her.

What it all looks like now I wouldn't know,
But come with me. It was an early dusk
On that day too, and just as sickeningly cold,
And when I called to her: 'It isn't far',
She said: 'You go.'
Somewhere ahead of us
I thought I could forsee
A silence, a new path,
A clean sweep of solitude, downhill.

Dear friend, I wish you could have seen
This place when it was at its best,
When I was,
But it isn't far. It isn't far. Come with me.

The Forties

'The self that has survived those trashy years',
Its 'austere virtue' magically intact. Well then,
He must have asked himself, is this
The 'this is it'; that encapsulable Life
I never thought to find
And didn't seek: beginning at the middle
So that in the end
The damage is outlived by the repair?

At forty-five
I'm father of the house now and at dusk
You'll see me take my 'evening stroll'
Down to the dozing lily pond:
From our rear deck, one hundred and eleven yards.
And there I'll pause, half-sober, without pain
And seem to listen; but no longer 'listen out'.
And at my back,
Eight windows, a veranda, the neat plot
For your (why not?) 'organic greens',
The trellis that needs fixing, that I'll fix.

As mentioned, the book has a small but interesting selection of new poems and juvenilia, plus some manuscripts displaying Ian's own edits -- along with a moving introduction and further decent scholarly work by Alan Jenkins. It is published by Faber and Faber and will hopefully get the coverage it deserves.

We lost Ian suddenly, too early, in 2001, and I miss the opportunity to ask for his opinion or advice often. I regularly wonder what he would have thought of this or that poet, or myriad other things. Here he is on the poet laureate ten years ago, for example; and here is an extract from Dan Jacobsen’s fine interview with him 6 months (we didn’t know it then) before he died -- along with copious biographical and other notes (scroll down for the interview extract). The interview is available to buy in full here (or is available in large part in LRB back-issues). It is well worth a read. I will blog more about this another time, as this is probably enough for now -- he wouldn’t have liked me to go on (indeed would already have thought this all a little too much…)

All poems (c) The Estate of Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton Collected Poems is available now from Faber & Faber.

Celebrity Look-a-likes 4: The More Interesting Story

2009-04-30T16:22:00.024+01:00

Fernando Alonso relaxes at a GP Fundraiser

New research into the sinister world of celebrity lookalikes has unearthed *amazing facts* recently. A scientist has proved that Adam Goldberg, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Fernando Alonso are all, in fact, related.

Goldberg and Alonso are brothers, while Baron Cohen is a cousin of both. Prof. Crick, Head Scientist from the Big Insititute of Science, Miami, explains:

"I was first piqued by the possible genealogical links between the three of them at my brother's house while eating pizza on his couch. It was just after watching the Malaysian Grand Prix. A trailer for the DVD release of the Borat movie came on TV and I was due out that evening to see my sister, who'd taken me to watch Saving Private Ryan for my birthday several years previously, which we both enjoyed. Suddenly, it struck me: could these guys all be related?"

Baron Cohen's hilarious new character,
Fredericko -- homosexual Spanish estate agent

After a successful application for a PhD placement at the Big University of Science in 2005, Prof. Crick embarked on a three-year investigation of the possible links between the three well-known celebrities. Unfazed by a mountain of evidence to the contrary, and despite wide-spread criticism and professional condemnation from so-called experts, Crick persevered in his pioneering work.

"The clincher was when I took a swab from Cohen's mankini after trailing his movements for a number of months. I had to wait until the right moment, after the correct amount of exertion by Cohen, before I drugged him and took my sample. I then compared this with Alonso's discarded driving glove and a scraping taken from the nose end of a rolled-up 5 dollar note I'd retrieved from the coffee table at a cafe Goldberg frequented. My studies showed they were similar. Further work proved they were related."

Critics have said that most people 'kind of knew this already' having always thought they looked alike, before the study revealed the obvious at great cost. Other experts have gone further, pointing out a wealth of historical and biographical evidence in contradiction of Crick's findings -- not least that all three were born in different countries of unrelated mothers.

Goldberg relaxes after test driving a Williams

"Such nay-sayers do not concern me", says Crick, "it is quite feasible that Scientologists in science labs are conducting genetic experiments and generating viable offspring to hand on to alien collaborators", says Crick of his controversial findings, "these aliens then abduct the mothers and implant the ready-prepared offspring in the womb when it is at optimal fertility, something which they can tell from their specially advanced science instruments."

While experts might disagree, the media reaction has been very positive in helping get word out about these dangerous practices. Those newspapers and TV stations not distracted with exaggerating and misleading the public over the scale and scientific likelihood of a pandemic of Swine Flu have thankfully been doing their duty by alerting the world's attention to this deeply evil alien conspiracy through apocalyptic, histrionic headlines and inaccurate reporting.

UK Government officials were generally unavailable for comment, despite repeated 'phonecalls, but a spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security said, in reference to alien involvement: "this ... is ... appalling ... [I will ensure] never [to let] contact [with] me [happen] again."

Despite uncertainties over his own parentage, further research into whether UK poet and publisher Nathan Hamilton was somehow also involved in these sinister experiments has not proved conclusive. Preliminary studies were abandoned after initial approaches met with a hostile response and a research panel decided he was not famous enough. This reporter remains credulous.

Landfill in the Egg Box

2009-03-11T13:14:00.016Z

some landfill

And, while I am talking about matters economical (see previous post), I thought I'd mention that I heard, at the IPG Conference 2009, that publishers, and particularly smaller independents, are quite well placed to be recession resilient. (I will blog more about all this at some point over the next week.) I also learned that an economic low point is a good time to buy companies.

Therefore, with this in mind, I can declare here that Egg Box and Landfill will be merging and setting sail on the risky financial high seas of poetry publishing, together henceforth. It is a move that is sure to shake the markets to its fundamentals and bring forth the first green shoots of economic recovery. Actually, I'll admit this is unlikely, given company structure and earnings, but, nevertheless: look out crusty editors, insipid scene-sters, and status quo, for we are coming for you, cutlasses and daggers drawn, our sails powered by a new wind...

By way of announcing our future co-operation, here is some information about an upcoming Landfill event, and some excellent featured writing from those reading: Jeff Hilson, Chris McCabe, and Simon Smith. Hope to see some of you there:

***

Landfill Press is pleased to announce 3 new sequences by

Jeff Hilson, Chris McCabe, and Simon Smith

to be launched with a reading

at 7.30 pm

on Wednesday 18th March

Harold Pinter Drama Studio

Queen Mary, University of London

Arts Building, Mile End Road, E1 4NS

All pamphlets are now available to buy @ £3 each (+ 50p postage)
or 3 for £8 (+ £1 postage)

Paypal to sales@landfillpress.co.uk

Other titles at www.landfillpress.co.uk

***

Jeff Hilson, Bird bird
41 prose poems on the birds of Britain.

Coccothraustes coccothraustes (hawfinch)

That tapping. It’s the rain or the rainiest day that nobody looked at the hawfinch and it’s like a Dixons in the springtime. It’s massive its head in a conifer belt. We have streets and we have a Dixons. We have streams and houses and fields on the borders of woods and we have like a Dixons. That’s where your iPod is. Like there was this shy gardener found with sixty iPods. Much more like that because he so rarely mixed with them. I mean the finches. Got to get to take them from the city for the white phase that they utter in. I mean again the finches. It’s so dark it passes. The lores as they slide over each other. That’s where your mouth is. Finches and iPods interchangeably. And that tapping. It’s so thin it must be a display.

***

Chris McCabe, The Borrowed Notebook
An elegy in 15 sections.

6

The White Album: you said you listened to it before I was born.
A black joke: I said I would be listening to it when you were dead.

Live Forever the shaving soundtrack from the bedroom door --
he’s always singing about needing more time. I said “don’t we all”.

I could have played on full volume, upstairs, an audio CD
of Plath’s poems, while downstairs you turned up your
scratched LP of Ted Hughes’ Crow. Could have.

Montage of where we meet on the staircase
in mortgaged space, fucked over by the rent of time.

***

Simon Smith, Browning Variations
8 found sonnets from the Brownings' love letters.

So shall my flower’s eye be ruined forever
Tennyson was still in Town
He unaffectedly hates London
I will go out and walk where I can be alone

I will look in the direction of London
And send my heart there
The early “day of small things”
Talk and “stare” at the same time

Not one feeling is lost, and the new/
Ones>feelings/are infinite
Take care of this cold wind

She has been in the habit of going to London
“’Pippa Passes’ pretty and odd” she does not
Love me after all, nor guess at my heart

Quantitative Easing and The Myersons

2009-03-11T12:08:00.013Z

Today is, or will be, quantitative easing day, says this guy here. The experiment begins. Now, I don't know how you feel about it, but I have a deepened sense of 'uh-oh' about the whole thing. Hopefully it'll be a great success, interest rates will climb, the banks will start lending again and my sense of dread will prove misplaced but, at school, when I studied the history of the economic collapses of Germany and the US that occurred in the early 20th century, or when I have read about other economic collapses in the news, one of things I've heard mentioned as a bad thing that appeared ridiculous in hindsight was when they did anything like put more money in circulation, or print more of it.

However I'm not an economist and my understanding of all this is deeply flawed. But I do know that I feel uneasy and I wonder what this move is good for. Is there an element of short-termist impatience to get the whole thing running again and the headlines turning around? Might it be better to just wait for things to level out, while reforming the markets slightly to make sure it doesn't happen again -- isn't that progress? Tinkering and experimentation at a time of fragility, in hope of artificially boosting an early upturn, seems very risky. Has it ever worked? (Do people know?) Or perhaps it would all be a lot worse by now if they hadn't been busy bailing out and tweaking here and there. Perhaps the problem is that the good it does will always be invisible, the bad very visible. In which case, poor old Gordon Brown.

The thing that makes me angry, with my layman's understanding, is that the banks are now receiving our money in two directions, via the government through bailouts, and via our current accounts, savings accounts, mortgages, bonds etc, and *still* they don't do anything in our interests. Even worse, in some cases they are spending even more of our funds fighting against us -- their own shareholders -- as we try to claim back our money from them, which they took unlawfully. They know no shame. I await retribution. I will vote for anyone willing to find and flatten those responsible. I would like to see something like this.

It also strikes me that, if the banks repaid the unlawful bank charges to the thousands-to-millions of customers hit with them (rather than cynically delaying it), that might well stimulate some positive economic activity, as people treated themselves after the windfall. In some cases, people are owed thousands. Refusing to pay out is a third way they are failing us. So, what exactly are they good for? As far as I can see, in recent history: they take our money, pay us lower than the going rate of interest for it, charge us unlawfully, then don't pay us back what they owe, at the same time as screwing up the economy through irresponsibility, and display no signs of guilt. That is almost the definition of a criminal.

And, as it is quantitative easing day, let's have a bit of quantitative easing for the Myersons too, please. My thoughts are with them in all this tawdry and hypocritical crap in the papers at the moment.

I had horrific teenage years myself. I had friends and family who suffered drug addictions, and, at various stages I (for different reasons) and they were unruly and paranoid, exhausting, self-destructive and aggressive. I can spot much of the slight madness, cocky self-justification and exaggeration, breakdown and recovery between the lines of Jake's cynically chased 'quotes'.

But some don't recover, or don't want to. It is an impossible situation to find oneself in, trying to deal or help with another person's addiction and aggressive denial, especially if that someone is a loved one, and I can well imagine throwing someone out of the house being the only solution left. There is little help available for those who are faced with dealing with another's drug problems.

Most came round in the end and rebuilt their relationships. None had to suffer a media spotlight, though, and the thought of the people who must (I assume) be chasing or prodding or exploiting Jake Myerson's wish to be public about it makes me very angry -- it is utterly irresponsible. It is a delicate situation and he needs quiet support and time to recover and gain perspective; to grow up. He does not need this, whatever he thinks, and those who kicked off about it, or arranged the kicking off about it, shouldn't have. I hope he's getting to talk to some good people, too.

And I can't see anything wrong with Julie Myerson having written about it. She tried to keep it private. Yes, it was unlikely it would remain so forever (with hindsight), but she also probably needed to write about it for her own well being -- there is nothing wrong with that. And the thought that it might help others was likely a genuine one. If anything, once Jake's own perspective develops, it'll help when one day he wants to see the other side of it, properly. But it probably won't be until he's a fair bit older or has a child of his own.

Why am I banging on about this? Well, I lost my Mum to alcoholism and related disaster this day a few years ago, so I am thinking about such family things -- how things turn out, how bloody difficult it all is -- and so wanted to say I hope they all come through it OK. And that it has lowered my already rock-bottom opinion of contemporary journalism, if that were possible.

PS quantitative easing sounds like a fat banker relieving himself after a particularly heavy meal.

The Manhattan Review: Invited to the Party

2009-03-02T16:02:00.015Z

Curiosa in party mood.

It is always nice to be invited to the party. Therefore Curiosa is in a party mood (and provides photographic proof). Todd Swift has again revealed himself as a man of good tastes by including me in a selection of 'Seventeen Young British Poets' in the Fall/Winter edition of the New York based bi-annual antholog-zine, The Manhattan Review. It will be launched on Thursday night this week (5th March) at Oxfam Books and Music shop, 91 Marylebone High Street, London, W1. Here are the details. Hope to see some Curiosas there.

The list was co-selected by the Manhattan Review's editor, Philip Fried, and is intended to feature seventeen poets who would likely feature "on a list of the thirty most impressive, or original, new younger writers to start publishing in the 21st century". And, while I generally dislike listings of the elect, my scorn is naturally lessened by actually being included on this one, thanks very much.

The others On The List include the following surprises or usual suspects: Emily Berry, Zoe Brigley, James Byrne, Melanie Challenger, Isobel Dixon, Joe Dunthorne, Nathan Hamilton (oops... typing out the list without due care and attention...), Luke Kennard, Chris McCabe, Alex McRae, Helen Mort, Daljit Nagra, Jacob Polley, Sally Read, Kathryn Simmonds, Jack Underwood, and Ben Wilkinson.

It does not intend to be exhaustive; there are others, some noted in Swift's introduction, who should or could be among them -- and naturally I second that.

Swift himself highlights and queries the curious wish or need for a sense of 'the next big thing', or anointing over-determined 'new generations' in the British poetry scene. It's my gut feeling that, if this is curiously British, it might have something to do with being a monarchy for so long. Honest. It has degenerated our sense, or capacity for dealing in, ideas of fluidity and flux, I fear. Of polyphony without taxonomy. But I'm not sure. It is also to do with the all-infecting marketing-think that pervades our age.

In the 1990s, the "New Generation" and "Next Generation" campaigns did as much damage as good, to my mind, and, no doubt, similar schemes will continue it soon -- the way Faber&Faber's new Arts Council pamphlet series is turning out seems set to do so. And the Eric Gregory Award, while admirable, often over-anoints poets as interesting before they are interesting. People defend its track record, but then people look to it for this track record -- and what if you are not aware of it early enough? And then the extended culture of various prizes and awards...

All so much kneeling at courts for dubbing and arising, it seems, sometimes. Although many countries do it, so it is perhaps rather more human nature generally. And can I really be saying 'do away with all awards'? That seems an extreme and potentially silly position to have argued myself into. But I, generally, don't enter any. No doubt my opinion would be different should I enter and win one.

Laudably, Swift is careful not to over-egg his selection and declares it a provisional report on an unfolding present (as should they all). But he does assert that there is more than just merely media buzz at the moment -- there is a different sense of things, new possibilities. Indeed there is -- and I've felt so too for some time.

Elsewhere, in his perceptive introduction, Swift also draws a familiar line of distinction between two main, often rival -- esp. among the older editors I think -- approaches in British poetry.

One side might be termed the "British empirical tradition" which "expects, requires, its poets to work within either the neo-classical, or Romantic, mode. Poetry that is praised for its craftsmanship, sense of restraint and truth to lived (but not hyper-emotive) experience; nuance and understatement. Nature (or "eco") poetry is de rigeur. Irony is welcome, but not too much "Postmodern" shifting of tones ... Those concerned with the subtle, formally masterful British lyric would include Sean O'Brien, Don Paterson, Roddy Lumsden, George Szirtes, and Hugo Williams."

The alternative tradition are the "more avant-garde, sometimes known as neo-modernists", with Denise Riley and J.H. Prynne named as pre-eminent exponents. These are defined as those who "tend to disrupt or reconsider the lyric stance, and investigate language from a philosophical position". They are often influenced by Veronica Forrest-Thompson, W.S.Graham, Lynette Roberts and American figures such as Olson and Dorn.

Younger voices now, as highlighted also by Swift, and I agree with him, are playing faster and looser between these two traditions. And that is an exciting thing. But there is room to infer an accelerating irrelevance for older editors involved in presiding over the anointment or publication of younger poets. Indeed, a wise poet, critic and editor with whom I share some DNA once said to me that, beyond a certain age, he avoided reviewing younger poets for just this reason...

And so where would I place myself? Well, I'd say I generally enjoy and am intrigued by the latter hymn sheet while often apparently being misread -- particularly by younger poets -- as more concerned with the former. Which, I suppose, is a strange kind of compliment. Or it could just mean I don't use enough 'quotation marks' -- or even just write badly.

The Manhattan Review antholog-zine can be purchased difficultly here and is well worth a read. Elsewhere in the issue are poetry and criticism from Toon Tellegen, Penelope Shuttle, Julia Hartwig, George Szirtes, Ruth Fainlight, Tim Liardet, Benjamin Fondane, John Kinsella, D. Nurkse, Hal Sirowitz, Christopher Bursk, Seth Abramson, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Bob Wormser, Marc Kaminsky, Mark Sullivan, and Ian Brand.

To add further to my party mood, I also have a poem in the March 7th issue of The Spectator. Please spread the word and buy (perhaps multiple copies of) this one, too, so that both publications might notice a brief peak in sales when publishing my work. This might then later be described as 'The Hamilton Effect' and will encourage other magazines to follow suit -- should I ever buy a printer and begin to assault them through the post.

Exit to music ...

A Brief Note

2009-02-17T15:44:00.016Z

This is a brief note to let you know that I've now posted the last of the write-ups for TOC2009 below. They are Narrative is Changing, Youth and Creativity and Reasons to be Cheerful. I've also tweaked a few with addenda or a couple of extra links. And rather than write up Sarah Lloyd's presentation on Tues 10th, I thought I'd just give you a link to the article it was based on here and below. And here is the full text of a speech delivered by Jason Epstein on Technology and Human Nature, Tues 10th Feb, 2009, 5.30--6.00pm. It is an interesting counterpoint to much of what I've summarised. Enjoy.

TOC2009: Goodbye New York

2009-02-12T04:05:00.010Z

Curiosa atop the Empire State, 2008

Well, the Tools of Change for Publishing Conference is now over. 'Already?!' I keep thinking. But also not soon enough -- I am pretty knackered.

Not so long ago it was Sunday, I was settling in to an armchair on the 38th floor, watching the busy circuit glow of the avenues of Manhattan, the dark Hudson, New Jersey flickering beyond, looking ahead to a busy few days. There's a lot to say about the conference generally; it could do with a full write up somewhere, as there were some interesting main threads to it all.

It seems too soon to be leaving NY again. I love this place. Watching the sun rise over New Jersey on Monday morning, The Hudson revealed in peach, a full first day ahead, felt easy; homely even -- perhaps it is to do with the fame of the place; the familiarity. It has been hectic -- 14-hour days of learning, thinking, writing, rethinking, tweeting -- but very relaxed, too; oddly peaceful in the middle of such a busy place in a busy city at the centre of many busy worlds.

Again, I've learned a lot, and thought a lot, at this conference. There are a few more interesting sessions and ideas to write up (those that don't re-iterate what I've already posted, that is) and I'll drop them in to the blog tomorrow, or soon after [now done - CH]. In the meantime, OReilly are posting many of the presentations here. Also, rather than write up Sarah Lloyd's presentation on Tues 10th, I thought I'd just give you a link to the article it was based on here.

But just one more thing, ma'am, before I go. A number of thoughts have been asserted, sometimes glibly, about human beings and communication at this conference. And about the 'global community.' I have had to try to hold my tweeting tongue on occasion, as it may surprise you to learn that I have been wanting to make a wry observation. I overheard this conversation:

Person One: are you Australian?

Person Two [Chinese features]: Canadian.

Person One: Oh, I don't speak Canadian.

[pause]

Person One: Ni hao

Person Two: [looks puzzled]

Person One: I'm speaking Chinese.

Person Two [confused, but friendly]: Oh, you speak Chinese?

Person One: No.

Person Two [confused, annoyed] walks away.

Perhaps this speaks for itself. Now, to bed. But, before that, I think I'll watch this again. It is a demonstration of how Jason Epstein's Espresso Book Machine V 2.0 prints a single book. There has been one working here in the exhibitors' lobby. It is curious. I like watching this for some reason. The tidy process of it: boringly tender. It should help me get to sleep. To sleep, perchance to defrag.

TOC2009: The Narrative is Changing

2009-02-12T03:22:00.010Z

TOC2009: The Narrative is Changing: Sensors, Social Editors and the New Storytelling: Nick Bilton, Weds 11th 9:15--9:45am

Notes from the above session, with the usual disclaimer that is has probably been distorted through my own brain-prism since.

In the context of allaying fears that longer form content will die out altogether, Nick started off with a couple of amusing examples of over-reactions towards new technology from the NYTimes (where he works on the tech side of things). The example was taken from the March 22nd issue of 1876. The writer was concerned that the telephone might 'change the way we live our lives. Given the ease of communication afforded by this new technology, it will destroy the need for people to ever have to leave their homes again. They will never go to church or the park or...' etc...

Then, not much longer after this article, another one appeared and, while it accepted that the predicted cultural impact of the telephone may not have been as severe as was first thought, the advent of the phonograph would soon 'destroy the need for people to ever have to leave their homes; they will fail to attend concerts, or recitals, or the theatre...'

Ergo, these things keep happening. The increase of online activity won't necessarily mean a destruction to life and literature as we know it.

The problem now is that we are online nomads; nomads who want shelter from the blizzard of information. Based on personal research, Nick estimated that he probably comes across approximately 162000 links a day through surfing webpages. That is a bewildering array of choices -- and a lot of it is repetition.

Our brains are changing to cope with this inundation... our brain activity when web searching is different and increased when compared to reading; the ways in which we process data and interact is changing through social media. We are starting to cull our information through these networks and are becoming a swarm intelligence, of sorts, in so doing; we have created esoteric colonies to help navigate effectively.

A service which would help in this (esp. re. news delivery) would be a form of smart content; content that can properly sense when you have read it and which will therefore not present itself in irrelevant or noisy situations -- it will help you navigate content flow. An example (among other things) of what the NYTimes R & D dept. is looking into is a customisable Times. A print-to-order vending machine where you can select and build your own copy based on what you want to know -- rather than have you buy a whole copy and then waste the paper the stuff you don't want to know about is printed on. (A couple of tweets about spoiling serendipity here, but I don't agree -- there will still be an element of surprise possible in the options presented, and I am forever 'stumbling upon' interesting titbits when surfing.)

Nick then cites his young son Luca who he describes as opportunistic, omnivorous, hungry for content, and who is growing up in an information age that facilitates this. When encountering, for the first time, the fact that sometimes photos had to be developed, instead of viewable instantly, he was incredulous; it is what people will expect, and those who don't provide it will fail.

Nick also disagrees that IM & SMS are degrading our language; he sees it rather as a hybrid form of communication, using and creating acronyms, as we have always done (OK, bus, snafu); it is not a deterioration.

Before the alphabet we had cave drawings, then we had illuminated mss., the printing press, then broadcast... things have changed again, and we need a new form of narrative and storytelling to cope. We are at the birth of a new form; a way in which everyone can contribute; everyone can become a storyteller. And publishers and media providers need to experiment and engage to find and provide these new forms.

As a brief experiment, Nick called a number of publishing houses and asked to be put through to their R & D department. He was met with silence or incomprehension in nearly all cases. Where is the R & D? This needs to change. People will still pay for content, to think otherwise is incorrect. It's faster, it's easier. It just needs to make sense. And the talented editor and taste maker is pivotal in this. (Regular readers will know that Curiosa agreed with Nick a great deal on a lot of these things.)

Nick Bilton speaks at OReilly TOC2009

For more OReilly photos, go here. You may even be able to spot the back of my slouched head in some of them. And here is a brief and tantalising tour of the New York Times R & D lab, where Nick works.

TOC2009: Reasons to be Cheerful

2009-02-12T03:00:00.007Z

TOC2009: Reasons to be Cheerful: Keynote: Tim O'Reilly Weds 11th Feb 9.45--10.15am

I didn't quite get all of Tim O'Reilly's presentation because I was pretty dazed and confused on Weds morning. It was a good motivational piece, though, and I've teased out a few bits here, while again probably conflating.

Tim O Reilly observed that while we are in the middle of a financial crisis, and a time of instability, the birth of the Gutenberg Bible was at a similarly bad time of significant disruption and chaos. Good things come out of these times, so don't be glum.

He also recalled Victor Hugo's lament for the lost story-telling form of cathedrals [in The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Do let me know if you know -- I can't remember], and pointed out that in some ways the Gutenberg press could, tentatively, be seen to have killed this. Echoing Nick Bilton and others, he pointed out that we are at a similar period of transition now, and this needn't be bad (the 'things are changing, get over it and get on with it' line...)

We live in an amazing time. Billions of people are slowly coming out of poverty and are gaining access to the internet. It is like a huge supercomputer with previously unused processors coming online (I missed whose this analogy was originally, sorry).

We are creating a global intelligence network, one we can't imagine the end result of now anymore than could Gutenberg have imagined James Joyce or universal literacy. Already the internet has created more pages than exist in all the books printed in all of human history. Sure, there are issues to do with quality here, but they will pan out.

We are in a time where the Stimulus Bill can be up online and open to comments, line by line, from the population it affects and the lawmakers passing it, within hours -- that is the benchmark. It is potentially hugely empowering and democratic; that should be cause for a big celebration, not fear. Another fact, and an intriguing one, is that 'phones are everywhere. 50% of Africa owns a mobile, and in some cases they spend 70% of their disposable income on them. This is how important this is.

O'Reilly recalls a discussion with his wife in which one of them admitted 'I just don't know the answer to that' in the middle of an argument or discussion. A four year old present said simply 'but daddy, where's your phone?' This was the moment, describes O'Reilly, that he realised the future was in online information.

People are still reading a lot. Most of the pages viewed online are based around text -- people are working with words. Publishers should be relieved by, and happy about, this! And book communities are readily establishing themselves online -- with GoodReads as an example. And the second most followed person on Twitter is Stephen Fry -- an author and entertainer.

So, get serious about being useful for your authors, and their readers. Experiment properly with new media and content delivery with a view towards this, and you will be fine. Curators still matter, and will continue to -- digital networks still operate in systems of status conferral. Publishers confer status on authors; they are at the head of the long tail; they can look ahead, but they also need to direct -- but what can publishers do for writers who are better at the web than them? This is the potentially sobering thought that many may need to address.

And the notion that people are not willing to pay for content, that the internet is 'free', is shaky.
Consider how much people are paying for access to information, it's not just advertising:

access fees (to internet) industry: 25.8 billion
music industry: 2.3 billion
[do please double-check these figures, I'm not 100% certain...]

Don't get caught in the idea that nobody will pay. Content ubiquity is the key. Make your content available in any format, and wherever your readers want to find it. And share what you learn with each other -- blog about what you are doing, confer, work together, publish research.

O'Reilly says they are near 50% of direct sales in eBooks. They are learning from their web activity that collaboration matters. Involve your readers ... to build your product. When users are given early access to books under development, revenue in Safari more than doubles ... involving users and customers, as well as authors, in the process increases sales dramatically. It is the power of the open process. Experiment with pricing and be confident -- people need what we do. Remember:

we are members of a great profession
people are coming online wanting to be taught, informed and entertained
the best way to predict the future is to invent it

At this point I might have whooped and punched the air, had I not been in severe need of a coffee...

Addendum: and in the Twitter feed today, Tim O'Reilly flagged up this entry at The Digitalist. But Curiosa coverage is better.

Tim O'Reilly speaks at TOC2009

TOC2009: Youth Creativity

2009-02-12T02:59:00.005Z

TOC2009: Youth Creativity: Emerging Trends in Self-expression and Publishing. Evangeline Haughney and Bill Westerman, Weds 11th Feb 3.40--4.25pm

Only a few points to summarize from this one, but here is another post. Between us we catch most of it. I was surprised about how empty this session was. It was information that should have been of interest to publishers. The test age range was 13--18 (I think).

Youth are increasingly creating, sharing and remixing content online. Mashing and hacking (in a good way). And the majority of teens actively seek out and get feedback for stuff they have posted -- they expect the process to be social. They are using Photoshop to make content without, necessarily, having a long time goal in mind -- it is for its own sake.

Girl1 is creating a persona online -- information about what she likes and who she is to communicate and connect. She has been making websites since 13, largely as a social thing to 'play' and 'hang out' with friends. Typically, she demonstrated a generally more transient use of software and did not have an element of fear attached to 'not knowing Photoshop fully' as demonstrated by adults. So, they are generally more tech savvy (not so much of a surprise).

Girl1, and many others, would confidently assert 'yeah, I know Photoshop' because they could make the creations they wanted -- and they did not care about whether there was 'a better way of doing it'. Their approach to finding things out was ends driven, rather than means driven. They would not inquire about 'how do I use the X tool' but rather 'how do I create an effect for falling snow'; or 'how do I make it look more like...'

This is in contrast to the typical contemporary adult approach of treating 'learning a new piece of software' as a life event, involving courses and the like.

Contrary to popular belief, Girl1 also has an early understanding of licenses -- she would share a CD with a friend as they only had one -- rather than simply copying it and proliferating. (Note a potential vested interest on part of the Adobe involvement in the study here, though.)

The other thing worth noting is that, while much of what was created was built on an existing image or starting point, the outcomes were, importantly, highly individual. Girl1 would paint and experiment with physical media such as wood and would then scan and use these for her own brushes, as she wanted something that no-one else had -- she wanted something unique and personalized.

Further studies will involve working with teenagers with an expressed desire to go into areas such as graphic design or media generally, as this was a noted, and potentially useful, missing perspective.

TOC2009: Lunch

2009-02-12T00:59:00.000Z

the lunch depicted may be different to the lunch consumed

Today, during lunch at TOC2009, and no doubt because of lunch, I caught myself thinking that perhaps the change that is underway in publishing -- relating back to the "Tribalization of Business" idea mentioned in yesterday's post -- is more like a reversion. It harks back to the pre-farming days of the hunter/gather.

Before we had farming, there was less of a notion of ownership. No-one owned the land, they followed the seasons and the herds. And this accounts for over 3/4 of our existence as a species; this is how we are hard-wired. We became sedentary when someone stuck a fence around a field, as environmental factors changed, declared ownership of the land and food, and then controlled the supply for their own wealth. Then notions of status shifted to fit these new social circumstances.

The advent of the internet brings a whole new free landscape, harking back to our roots, and throws into sharp relief, against our better instincts, efforts to enforce control. Cf. what Cory Doctorow has been tweeting and banging on about all along re. DRM. This is obviously just an analogy -- and we must be careful with analogies, as, although compelling, they tend not to get us very far (and there have been lots of analogies here) -- but it struck me as a half-decent thought worth sharing. Please do help bring it forth, if you feel so inclined...

TOC2009: The Rise of eBooks: Panel

2009-02-11T07:48:00.006Z

TOC2009: The Rise of eBooks panel. Joe Wicker, April Hamilton, David Rothman, Russ Wilcox, Mark Coker, Tuesday, Feb 10th 1:40-2:25pm

what will the future look like?

eBook sales have increased as print sales have declined. Over the last year (I think it was) there has been a 60-80% increase for eBook sales and a 10-20% decline for print. Amazon says 10% of unit sales are now in eBook form. The eBook explosion is just around the corner (which we have heard before).

Why is it different now? Why did they fail in the past?

People were not enchanted by paying more or the same amount as for a printed book for what was a cheaper-to-make-and-distribue product. Also, DRM has been an irritation and a curse. It is getting better but has a long way to go.

We're at the beginning of a wedge. Technology is going to make the reading experience better and better: more sizes (smaller and larger screens); new countries adopting; the advent of touch and other interfaces.

The predictions are that, by the end of 2009, we're going to start seeing flexible screens. 2010 is when we'll see flexible screens expand in production (this will allow advertising driven models such as newspapers) -- then we will see the gradual introduction of colour, until we achieve magazine quality in about 10 years from now.

The potential is huge. Consider: a digital bird watchers' book that can record and identify bird sounds from a central database and present you with the relevant information (the iPhone can already do something similar with music and iTunes). Amazon's proprietary fixation with the Kindle could put them at a significant disadvantage. They need to learn from Apple and open up.

A single product is needed which can be calibrated by user demands. What do publishers need to do? They need to be investigating and using the technology as much as possible -- to engage properly and develop content away from print to enhance reader experience. And eBooks need to move beyond the ported print-book concept.

As a corollary to this, the indie author is someone who decides, for whatever reason, that mainstream publishers are not providing or useful for them in some way. They have 'chosen' to do so, not 'resorted' to it. With access to more eBook reading devices, through the marketing potential of the internet, book markets will become more like that of films, with more and more indie authors operating like indie filmakers, auters, or indie musicians/bands (indeed, some already are). The difficulty for authors is the tarnished legacy of the term 'vanity publishing' for books -- but this will fade; is fading.

It is not, or does not have to be, an 'e' vs 'print' equation -- they can be complementary. Russ Wilcox (E-ink) is predicting eBooks will be 6-8% of total market in 12-18 months. It is spurious, but he has behind-the-scenes insight.

And this was demo-ed at the 'Lightning Demos' session on Tuesday evening. It is the new (to be released later this year into early next) PlasticLogic reader device. These are exciting times.

Amusing to cf. myself (if you'll forgive me this particular vanity), a good few months back now, prattling on here.

**Addendum re. statistics**

"Today, more than 10 percent of the units we sell are Kindle books."

CNN reported: "Its texts account for 10 percent of Amazon's book sales despite the fact that 200,000 titles -- a tiny fraction of the books offered on the site -- are available in digital form."

This has all since been revised to:

"Kindle sales make up more than 10 percent of sales of books that are available in both traditional and e-book form."

TOC2009: Scott Meyers: Authoring Challenges in a MultiPlatform world.

2009-02-11T07:47:00.003Z

Scott Meyers, Authoring Challenges in a MultiPlatform World, Tuesday 11th Feb, 2009, NY 10:45--11:30am

Curiosas: meet Scott Myers.

If what we want to do is publish things for people to consume on multiple platforms, then there are considerations in authoring. Publishers need to educate their authors about all of the various platforms on which their work could exist, and help them write with these in mind: paper, web, portable devices (future proofed), and also audio devices.

Assuming that the traditional printed page is the only, or even primary, form might not work in the long term. Although tactile, it is generally a limited output device -- so don't target it solely, as it may shut doors or make conversions more laborious and costly than they have to be.

A 'platform-agnostic' manuscript should be aware of new expository tools of colour (without cost restrictions), video/animations, and audio.

Authors need to learn:

what works, where, and why.
what doesn't work, and why not.
to use restraint and only use new expository tools as just that: to describe something that would otherwise be difficult to explain, or enhance something fruitfully.

Generally, authors and publishers want to be working towards 'capability dependent content' -- an awareness of how information will render in different formats; to prepare or be aware of alternatives in case of difficulty, and therefore keep the manuscript open to platform proliferation.

The crux is that the role of the publisher is experimentation; they need to help authors get the broader view. Find out what's effective then give guidelines, templates, and help your authors in the production of a relevant ms, as it will help you in the long-run.

There are similarities to the mindset in screenplay conception, but this shouldn't be taken too far, as there are different targets. For more, and to make more sense of what is probably a pretty dry-seeming and error-prone summary here, visit The Fastware Project. The post about XML, DocBook, etc is pretty interesting, and nicely summarizes a number of things I learned about it all last year, too.

TOC2009: Tues Feb 10th 2009: Keynotes

2009-02-11T05:10:00.005Z

Morning Keynotes, TOC09, Tuesday 10th Feb, 2009, NY 8:45--10:15am

Today was the beginning of the conference element of TOC09, and the numbers have increased dramatically. There must be around double the number of attendees compared to last year, which is an interesting fact given the current climate. First off this morning were the shorter Keynote Sessions. Here are a few quotes or points from each. Forgive reductive paraphrasing -- there are only so many hours in the day... I'll break these up into separate posts, eventually. Usefully, here are some notes for cross-referencing and gap-filling, from another fellow attendee. Our powers combined...

'A Book is a Place', Bob Stein @ The Institute for the Future of the Book

Bob explains CommentPress (released '07) in terms of an evolutionary process (it is a very useful bit of open source). He says they have built a transactional book environment so it can be taken to the commercial environment.

Now the conversation that the book engenders is part of the book itself. Books are now social experiences. They are a place of congregation, with authors leading communities of inquiry -- or perhaps a common quest.

Publishing now is about nurturing vibrant communities. Publishers should be about curating an environment around their authors and readers; they will differentiate themselves on their ability to do this.

New technologies mean human inquiry and knowledge can become a collaborative effort in ways that they could never have been before. And the problems we have are so complicated that they need a coordinated effort.

It took 70 years of the 15th/16th century to realise that page numbers might be useful. Things have been moving slowly and much of the most interesting stuff has happened in the last 5 years or so. We are still at an early stage in the evolutionary process. We have to learn how to collaborate, many minds, many hands, on the same problem... congregate and collaborate is the way forward.

Eventually we won't call these things books anymore -- but for now it is still a useful term.

Twitter: a dissenting tweeter points out that "Bob Stein does not differentiate between a community and fandom"

Twitter: another tweet points out "hasn't it always been a social experience? Was it not always? It was also a social act, but the network gives that new, powerful, implications."

'Literature as a Web Service': Peter Brantley, Digital Library Federation

The book has been relatively primitive, in terms of similar proportions, and a very limited conception, for a long time. Numbers of pages, size of page, layout of text have all changed little...

The book is a social construct. We have worked together as a society do decide what a book is. (It is... cf. "a machine to think with" L. A. Richards. Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924).

But books have never really been static. We READ books -- and this is an intense engagement. It is an attempt to engage thought. They are a commodity in concert with language and a concept of personal space.

Our analog culture is being uplifted to digital -- digitised and uploaded to the network. And what wasn't analog historically is being born digital. A 'book' is being redefined.

Books are now networked commodities, not physical commodities. Reading therefore becomes redefined. Reading has been a largely solitary act -- now it is becoming social. (A few dissenting tweets to this -- pointing out that, on the contrary, books and reading have always been social, but technology makes them potentially more so -- liberates, accelerates, and gels this potentiality with the network.)

We are now reading many things in the context of other people and things. It is becoming embedded in the network. What is published will be less about the book than about the people who read them. The focus has to be on people who engage with them. Moving mentally from books to people requires us to engage what's important in a book: the words that mean and engage. Digital words can be described by other words, joined across books, and linked with data.

Gesellschaft book becomes Gemeinschaft book. An environment of participatory engagement is emerging across books. Any book can be a passage into a world of thought. Bookscans means the words of books can be fully associated with each other -- and literature can become a web service.

Twitter (#toc): andrewspong: Did anyone raise this as a question? RT @mdash: [Isn't] any sufficiently advanced ebook [...] indistinguishable from 'the Internet'?

Twitter (#toc): modernevil: Brantley is a proponent of the semantic web. Use it to fulfil the potential of hyperlinks we've been missing, integrate all information...

'Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks': Cory Doctorow

Publishing is not the worst offender in rights protection and management (and therefore does not encourage as MUCH anti-feeling supporting piracy) and it should perhaps play this card more often.

DRM is a futile area. BBC iPlayer -- why DRM when you're already broadcasting, un DRM-ed, for free?! The result: lots of Doctor Who (hmmm... have you ever seen them in the same... ) for free on YouTube.

DRM on books is every bit as futile -- they can be re-typed and scanned anyway. Deadly Hallows was copied, translated and proofed into German within 24 hours.

Never underestimate what the time rich and cash poor are willing to do. It is always cracked -- through the front and back door. The more you DRM the more it is cracked -- for the challenge/revenge. In 2008, the game with most draconian DRM was Spore. The most pirated game in 2008 was Spore.

Successful companies are those that make sure all the people willing to give them money do. 'It doesn't matter taking stuff from jerks' -- so don't be jerks. The record companies were jerks, and look what happens there -- people are motivated to take their stuff. Publishers have a better, more transparent royalty system, and less exploitative generally -- sell this message to the would-be pirates.

Using time-limited DRM on eBooks just encourages contrary thinking: if I break the DRM, I can keep it forever!

And, if somebody else (Amazon) puts a lock on something you own and doesn't give you the key, it's not to your benefit.

So abandon DRM and just have a simple, short EULA that simply says, "Don't Break Copyright Law." Don't ask 12-yr-olds to comprehend complicated licensing agreements when signing up; they will likely grow up inspired to rip you off, or generally negatively motivated towards you when they are old enough to understand.

Publishers should not license any more content to Amazon UNLESS Amazon give the option to allow or not allow DRM -- to have Amazon controlling the DRM is a terrible business model for future. Publishers should decide themselves if/when to implement DRM (which they shouldn't anyway) and not be dictated to by platform owners. Publishers the world over should all call Amazon tomorrow morning and remind them who dictates the terms about how their materials are sold.

on Twitter (#toc): walkley: Doctorow good, polemical, thousand mile an hour stuff - as expected.

More tomorrow -- bedtime for Curiosa.

TOC2009: Francois Gossieaux: Building Communities Around Content

2009-02-11T02:59:00.003Z

tweet tweet

I picked this up in the Twitter Feed this morning. It is another summary of Chris Brogan's session from yesterday -- it should help fill in any gaps I missed through slightly jet-lagged inattention.

And following is a useful summary from a fellow attendee of a session which sounded interesting this afternoon, but which I missed, due to being in a different one: Scott Berken: How Progress Happens: Leading the Human Side of Change.

But this post is about the second session I attended on Monday afternoon, led by Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran concerned with Building Communities Around Content.

It orbited a key concept, based on an interesting report the speakers authored, of 'The Tribalisation of Business' (well worth clicking through properly to flesh all this out). Very generally, thoughts in the session (from speakers and attendees alike) ran as follows (I'd advise reading the report and clicking through from the links thoroughly).

Building Communities Around Content

The key is letting people (employers, employees, customers) behave the way they have been hard-wired to behave: humanly; tribally. People want to connect with other people; our essence is sociability. People want to be helped and want to help others -- an important factor of any community is this feeling of reciprocity.

People generally evaluate what they are doing in one of two frameworks:

a market framework -- which tends to be cold, calculated, and contract driven.
a social framework -- more neighbourly, based on favours and friendships.

Generally speaking, the social framework is a greater motivator and it is vital to access this in your community -- do so and your community will do a lot more of your work for you (including policing, quality control, 'etiquetting', micro-communities).

So, while the technology infrastructure is important, it is not the driving force -- the social infrastructure is. Keep it simple, relevant, intuitive, and based on the fundamentals. The key question to ask is: what is the value I/we have that I/we can engage people with and what will they get out of it? It may seem obvious, but many companies forget this. There is a social element or value embedded in everything -- find it, unless you only want to engage customers for the few minutes/day they're in a commercial mode.

Think also: where are the people already? Where can we find them? But NOT in order to capture and isolate -- the key instead is affiliation. Do you HAVE a community somewhere already, or do you need to BUILD a community? A useful example here is Tivo -- they did not build this, their customers did. They identified where it was happening and then co-operated fully on the customers' terms.

Problems discussed

Central to the community working is the role of the community manager. However, it is often compromised.

Most communities are set up or run in some way as a tack-on to marketing departments -- but if a community is to be successful, it will and should eventually touch on every area of the business.

If distracted by other responsibilities, or if added to a list of existing responsibilities, it will not work effectively. The key is reliable information flow... does it reach and involve the right people? Or does it bottle neck and stagnate in the marketing department?

Through these communities, publishers (but it might as well apply to other producers) shouldn't just 'sell' a book -- rather 'share' and 'build' an enthusiasm around your common interest, in author or subject.

The 'community' needs its 'community manager' with a team of cross-functional, well-connected support curating and creating. This team needs to have the power to be able to 'get things done' . The 'community manager' is a special and rare skillset -- it is not a job for a marginalized intern.

The community needs investment and engagement from all levels from those with the best knowledge and expertise within the company. The more someone knows, the faster they can help, and the more valuable, and more quickly valuable, the community information will and can be. And the investment will be mostly in human capital, rather than equipment or technology. The most successful models see a human capital weighting of around 80%. So invest in the right people and talent.

And, when assessing your community, don't assess the success on different data (like web visits or time online engaging), assess it on the same criteria as other projects or departments: revenue, ideas, impact on sales etc. Make sure you are analyzing it the correct way. And don't disregard the 'lurkers' -- while they don't 'engage', they may well be getting value out of it.

Be sure to plan effectively with a pilot that will scale well, and from which you can learn what you need.

Takeaways to think about or remember:

communities can increase revenue per customer by 50%
communities will increase product introduction success ratios
amplify everything you do
increase effectiveness and decrease costs (marketing)
a strong physical world component is important

Final facts/predictions:

many will continue to fail because people forget the basics
communities will eventually transform the role of the Community Manager
the early adopters who do it right will force industry-wide changes
companies will find out how to build predictable community models
new product development and advertising strategies will be and are necessary to engage with the social framework understanding (cf. yesterday's blogpost)

**Addendum: this is interesting in this context**

TOC2009: Chris Brogan: Blogging and Social Media

2009-02-10T04:39:00.005Z

I should have brought a camera with me.

After a lovely day spent hanging out in Brooklyn, eating bagels and drinking beer with up-and-coming young NY literary agent friend, SF, I install myself in the conference hotel and, before I know it, I'm eating breakfast, the Tools of Change Conference is underway, and I'm twittering and tweeting away.

Chris Brogan starts the first session (Blogging and Social Media -- specifically how to use them both effectively in marketing) by telling us we're already ahead of the curve just by being here. This is reassuring. He says we're starting with a free-form tutorial that promises to be neither normal nor typical. He says I can leave and he won't weep. Cory Doctorow is in the front row to my left. I am feeling slightly out of my depth.

As a result of this free-form presentation, these notes -- inaccurate as they are because filtered, paraphrased and distanced in time -- are also likely to be quite 'free form'. I hope you get something from them nevertheless. If you are interested in more 'real time' coverage, search Twitter with the '#toc' label.

Much of the talk is taken up with familiar arguments for being more human (a good thing) on the web these days. And being more honest in your interactions. Most compelling of the early points is: there is a growth, online, of a 'new currency' of attention and trust -- and it is one that is difficult to become rich in. What organizations should be doing is generating trust and interest online through more direct relationships around content and products; they should be, for example, making 'platforms' of books, or thinking about 'books as ecosystems'.

With a brief mafia analogy, CB outlines that books are currently, essentially, as well we know, distribution problems (ones which DRM exacerbates) and that, rather than thinking of themselves as book traffickers, publishers, and organizations generally, should think of themselves instead as 'trusted information brokers.' And they should be engaged properly with media that changes the way people interact in order to effect this.

Publishers must go beyond the page -- they should be interested in augmenting the content they want to sell through a number of media. Make it more useful: consider availability in different formats for different occasions (driving, jogging, traveling by train or plane...) "I want the paper book, I want a web version, I want an audio version, and I want a way to self-sync that." "All the other media are bundling products-you guys aren't moving fast enough." CB

At the heart of his argument is the familiar conviction that publishers/companies should always be looking to 'interact' rather than just 'deliver'. Social media like Twitter and more conventional 'blogs' are there to be used to help develop an intimate cafe feel to interactions with customers. Might it be a good idea to find your 1,000 most interested and loyal customers for a product, and talk more directly to them, rather than attempting to blanket market millions (of evermore inured) consumers with a tight corporate ad that, although polished, doesn't quite hit the mark, or even irritates *because* of its effort to seem polished?

That is, might it be better to try to please some of the people more fully, rather than everyone a little, or not at all? It is a way back, in a more crowded, over-produced world, to a sense of community, relevance and importance; of a feeling of a valued and relevant relationship with the provider. Make your Twitters or Blogs like a bat-signal that goes out to the genuinely interested.

So, tend always towards the more human, less 'processed' interaction; rather than a 'tight message' that too often seems cheesy or mis-aligned, make an effort to relate or entertain. But, importantly, let people contribute, and make your information easy to find and use. People want to communicate and want to help each other and be helped -- make your comms and marketing reflect this.

Here are some examples, sites and products mentioned along the way which may help with all of this (how they might should be self-evident!) And the crux is that they are free, cheap, and relatively easy:

Here are a couple of don'ts:

"Just because you *can* use Twitter doesn't mean that *you* should on behalf of your organization" - CB. That is: communicating well, and selling without appearing to sell, is a skill that not all possess. (More about this tomorrow.)

Don't over-sell or inundate once someone has 'opted in'. (This is particularly relevant for those populating the growing Temple of Spam that is Facebook.) "Just because I've held out my hand to you doesn't mean I want you to stick your tongue in my mouth." CB

And a few general points:

how much time should I spend? an experimental answer: two hours a day? but don't spend it talking about beer.
segregate your lists...
... or make pools.
don't just apologise for cross-posting, put the time in. "You Live or Die by Your Database."
being helpful is better than being on message
let people find your stuff and do stuff with it
it is all about connecting and bringing people together

Plus, via a Twitter from Brogan this evening, here is an interesting take on current trends.

And, finally, Chris Brogan also claims to have invented 'C4', which consists of Canadian Club and Cherry Coke.

More tomorrow, including notes from the second session from today (it is quite late, and your intrepid Curiosa is knackered, with an inhumanely early start...)

TOC2009: Pigeon Smuggling Death Wish

2009-02-06T18:37:00.000Z

I dare you...

Today is my last day in blighty before I head to NY, NY, for the O'Reilly (yes, reilly!) Tools of Change Conference, 2009, 9--11 Feb, from which I intend to Twitter and Blog -- so expect a few blog posts over the next few days. Of course, I may get ill again and contract about three different viral and bacterial infections in the throat, chest, and lungs (which is what happened last time) but I may also survive the biological threat of the transatlantic flight's recycled air to bring you news of a digital and webby sort from a leading publishing conference. Keep in touch and find out. This may also be potentially my last full day in Britain ever (more about this later).

The imminent trip stateside has reminded me of something I forgot to blog about before:

Last year, while in New York, I got approached twice by Scientologists in Time Square. One time was on my way to the conference -- ill -- and another was on the way to inadvertently make myself feel ill at the appalling Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.

The first time, on my way to Bubba Gump, a guy handed me a leaflet and attempted to engage me in conversation. He was friendly, wore a light blue rain mac (it was raining) and wanted me to come watch a film with him. 'Odd.' I thought. 'We hardly know each other.' He seemed nice, if a little too smiley, but I was in a hurry so I declined and said I'd be on my way.

Sat in Bubba's, I read the leaflet, over limp, sugary shrimp, and realised he'd been trying to tell me about the informational film described therein (the leaflet that is, not the shrimp) -- to be sure to stop in and watch it. It was about the Church of Scientology. It listed three separate showings, two of which co-incided with my trip. Given what I've read of Scientology, I took the approach as a compliment and, as the depressing dessert arrived, thought I might actually try it out, in the interests of investigative citizen-blog-journalism (I mean the film, not the dessert -- that was a step too far). I didn't. I now regret this.

The second occasion, again in Time Square, on the way to the conference at this point, a different guy (at least, I think it was a different guy) handed me another leaflet. I was getting ill by now and I can't remember what words or noises were exchanged, but do I remember he seemed offended or at least perturbed. I wondered again about attending. Again I didn't. I still have one of the leaflets somewhere. If it happens this time, I'll go and watch it I think. Then, hopefully, this will become a more interesting blog post.

So, I am about to head to NY on a jet plane. In honour of this, and all the confused and frustrated herding and prodding and paperwork and associated worry this brings, I thought I'd highlight this story. This is mainly because it allows me the opportunity to feel like Ronnie Barker as I describe the following: a man was recently arrested and detained by Australian customs for smuggling pigeons in his trousers. Further inspection revealed eggs in his vitamin pot, seeds in his belt, and an ‘undeclared aubergine’.

The picture illustrating this villain as he no-doubt, out of frame, shame-facedly presents his ‘undeclared aubergine’ is priceless… go on, have another look.

What do you think gave him away? Embarrassing coo-ing from the ankles? A few seeds trailed behind him as he waddled warily down the off-ramp? Or could it have been -- oh, please, let it have been -- the rather-too-vaingloriously-stashed aubergine that alerted the wandering eyes and hands of the camp Aussie customs guard…

Imagine the tentative, penguin two-step he would have had to perform as he tried to smuggle it all discreetly through Melbourne airport; perhaps an attempt to read a magazine, unfazed and aloof; maybe the occasional nonchalant look askance over large sunglasses and big moustache; or maybe he risked a more confrontational smirk of wry pride at the contents of his trousers.

John Cleese should play this guy in a film...

So, this might be my last full day in blighty, I say? Yes. The explanation? Well, barring falling foul of horrific illness, or virulent TB caught from a tramp, or getting shot, or getting stopped at border control for having forgotten to fill in a further form I didn't even know about, or joining a cult, or hanging it all as too much trouble and absconding to join my brother in Mexico, I have noticed something about my flight details. Something that should have occured to me when I booked them as the cheapest option among a lot of more expensive options...

I am flying out of NY. This is on Thursday 12th. In the evening. So, yes... my plane lands, in London, on the 13th. That's right, Curiosas: I've booked myself onto a plane, traveling between the two top targets of international Islamic-extremist terrorism, in the middle of a period of adverse weather conditions, and my return flight is due to land back in London, in time for the rush hour, on the morning of Friday the 13th.

And that's not all. Friday 13th happens also to be my birthday. What was I thinking? Having now spotted this, I am hoping that the fates can resist the reckless taunt (equivalent to, say, running manically around a hilltop with a copper pole in the middle of a lightning storm yelling 'I dare you! I fucking dare you' at the simmering clouds) and instead might see fit to spare me this particular cruel irony. But I also admit it could be, potentially, hilarious. We'll see.

Mind you, given how it's all going, there might not be a blighty to return to. I heard a majority of the country is already dead from snow...

I mean, honestly, did you know that Canada has had six feet of the stuff in some areas? And a good deal of other places have had it a lot worse than us. And here we have school closures, traffic stranded in need of rescue, public services infrastructure grinding to a standstill, after, again, a couple to a few inches of the stuff? And, what's more, we've had similar for decades (60s, 70s, 80s, 90s...). This is nothing new.

What is new is the increasing shrillness of our media response. The headline shouldn't be 'weather crisis', 'doom' -- I'm sick of this kind of infantile catastrophism -- it should read 'Britain ready to stop at first sign of slight draft' or 'British incapable of managing anything effectively' or 'Britain so desperate to appear to be triumphing through adversity like it once did in the middle of a real crisis that we'll invent a crisis out of nothing, no matter how childish, just so we can appear to be triumphing over it and despite it'.

But that might be a bit long. But, really, please, just shut up and get on with it. Or, as we once might have said, Keep Calm And Carry On. Surely there's something more interesting happening somewhere for you gits to report on?

This is a nicely illustrative juxtaposition. Well done, R4.

And now we're back to planes crashing into rivers and things. Oh dear. Wish me luck... I dare you, I fucking dare you...

Egg Box TV 1

2009-02-05T22:33:00.000Z

As promised, here is the video of the Budapest to Babel reading at the Hungarian Cultural Centre on Jan 21st, featuring George Szirtes and yours truly introducing new Egg Box poet, Agnes Lehoczky -- now of Hugarian TV fame (see earlier posts below). The above is just the intro. Here is a playlist that should hopefully run through the whole thing in more or less the correct order. And here is the Egg Box TV YouTube Channel.

Celebrity Look-alikes 3

2009-02-04T15:16:00.002Z

The plot thickens.

Time to revisit a Curiosa regular, I think. This is Celebrity Look-alikes. As a recap, we have discovered that:

Leonard Nimoy and Bruce Willis share a likeness

This was revealed to me while traveling the New York subway and regarding a picture of one of them while thinking about the other, for reasons undisclosed. The evidence:

left: Bruce Willis in Star Trek fancy dress; right: Leonard Nimoy in a hat.

Seriously, look at them: stick a bowl cut and some pointy ears on Bruce, or shave Leonard's head...

Yeah? You see it? At the very least they share the same look of slightly vacant, moody constipation...

We have also established that:

Baron von Greenback and Avram Grant are perhaps the same person.

This hit me as I watched the latter being interviewed by Lee Dixon (pictured below) on Match of the Day once. (I was at my brother's house.) Again, the photo evidence:

right: Avram Grant being interviewed by Lee Dixon; left: Baron von Greenback gives a press conference.

This might also count as a Look-alike double, as it points out the clear likeness between Lee Dixon and the furry thing (whatever it was) that used to follow Greenback around, putting one in mind of a furry Dennis Thatcher to Greenback's Maggie.

Now, I can also exclusively reveal that:

Glenn Close is slowly turning into Paul Newman.

A rash claim, you might think. Well, doubters, here is PROOF:

left: Paul Newman at a premiere, wearing earrings for some reason; right: Glenn Close relaxes at a ball game.

I spied this while catching up with the Jonathan Ross show on iPlayer. He interviewed Glenn Close. It was like Newman was speaking from beyond the grave. Admittedly, this would mean he was talking about his role in Fatal Attraction, among other things, but it was still as if he were alive and walking among us. Would that it were true. I wish I was Paul Newman. Don't you? I don't mean dead, I just, you know... it would be cool.

So, naturally, I have a theory. Well, a few.

My first theory: the quality of the celebrity gene pool is reducing alarmingly and under this pressure incestuous relations are increasing in much the same manner as royal families, causing more and more of them (and there are more, but I'm keeping them for later...) to look the same and go mad. You might consider the recent upsurge in zero-to-hero Big Brother type shows as an effort to gather more genetic material from the wider population; similarly sports stars making the transition to TV shows, film, and, disastrously, music.

Secondly, the environmental factors of the celebrity lifestyle causes similarities in appearance through similar exerted pressures. A lifetime gurning at cameras and putting on make-up could result in similar developments in facial musculature and wear.

Thirdly, we may responed to celebrities based on familiarity of experience of other celebrities, and this may exert an influence in the population at large as well as in Holywood; that is, 1. studios may select people because they have a similar 'look' to bygone famous people, and, 2. we may respond to them on along the same lines...

Fourthly, and I think far more likely, there is an evil programme of cloning and eugenics going on in Los Angeles. A large Scientologist compound is somewhere churning out generation after generation of film stars from petri dishes and huge vats of science goo.

Yup, that's it alright. I shall investigate. Stay tuned for more.

London Nights II

2009-01-25T18:46:00.000Z

Further news about Hungarian TV broadcasts recorded at Egg Box's Budapest to Babel launch at The Hungarian Cultural Centre on Wednesday. Again, visit Duna Televizio here. Find the show marked as '23.01.09 at 20.37 pm' and called 'Kikoto'.
Apparently, so I've been told, these also air in the US and Australia. I imagine on Hungarian language channels for emigre communities.

Again, for those of you who don't speak Hungarian: this time we're on towards the end of the 10-15 min programme. Speed through, or watch patiently, the earlier sections, which has some inexplicable and slightly lacklustre fire-juggling at the unveiling of a bronze bust, then an interview with an older guy with glasses who looks like he should be American (I don't know why, he just does) who goes on a fair bit, until you find pictures of London once more, and then the appearance of the lady with the red hair. It all feels a bit Fast Show, I know -- I keep expecting someone to say 'Chris Waddle'...

Right near the end, after a feature about a visual artisit, it's showtime for Egg Box again! It's a longer slot this time. The book is once more arranged kinkily on a polished surface, along with a nice piece to camera from Agnes Lehoczky, and George Szirtes. Again, more nice, bustly crowd shots -- those of you who were there are likely to be able to spot yourselves -- and I manage to look at least semi-interested in the background this time, which is a plus.

Egg Box is putting together a subtitled version of the downloaded video files. If we get permission, expect them all to be uploaded here and on the new Egg Box site, in some form, along with our own footage, before long.

London Nights I

2009-01-24T14:28:00.000Z

Just back from London last night -- quite a busy few days. The Egg Box launch of Agnes Lehoczky's Budapest to Babel at the Hungarian Cultural Centre went very well, with a good 50-60 in the crowd, and many of them genuinely interested book-buyers, as opposed to self-interested networkers/promoters, which is always an edifying bonus. And great to see so many of the invited guests there.

In exciting news, kept secret until the evening itself, a Hungarian TV crew from Duna Televizio (link seems dodgy with Safari -- if so, try Firefox) was arranged to cover the event: they filmed bits of the reading itself and conducted a few interviews with those in attendance. Egg Box has gone global, once more! The book has since been featured in a number of Hungarian broadcasts -- more detail about this soon. Here is one of them. The relevant programme to click is: "2009.01.23.17.30. Duna ter." You'll know you've got the right one if it starts with some cheery music and a signpost thing surrounded by some spinning cultural stuff... the programme itself is about 10 minutes long. There have been a couple of other bits on other shows, too, which I'll let you know about soon.

If you don't speak Hungarian, watch until about 4-5 minutes in when a red-haired woman chats to the show's host, with bits of footage from the city of London. Then listen for a mention of Agnes' name (Lehoczky Agnes, as they say it) and watch and wait. Among other things, you will see the book arranged, like a seductive temptress, on the shiny top of a grand piano. Then look also for your own gorgeous mugs in the crowd; many of those who attended are there...

Yours truly, as you will see, was busy scowling and texting, inattentively -- unaware that this would be broadcast on a European TV network. Stupidly, instead of switching my 'phone off and trying to get my beaming mug on the telly, I was distractedly having to semaphore in lost and late guests, individually, like air traffic control to a small fleet of errant, malfunctioning jumbo jets.

It was all great fun and many thanks to the Hungarian Cultural Centre for helping arrange everything, and to Gorgeous George Szirtes for helping set it all up.

Egg Box also recorded the event (in fact you can see us doing just this in the TV footage) and, barring any sound problems, we'll soon have it edited and uploaded for the enjoyment of those who sadly couldn't make it. At the end of the reading, I was actually heard in public using the phrases 'richly textured' and 'unique voice'. What can I say? I was pretty tired. It was a busy night. This is unlikely to spoil enjoyment of the final cut, as it will be removed, and I have since been fasting in penance for having uttered such egregious cliches.

A final note: appropriately, Weds Jan 21 was also Agnes' name day in Hungary. So, happy name day for Weds, Agnes, and well done on a great reading. Also appropriately, Agnes shares a name with her major influence, Hungarian poet, Agnes Nemes Nagy.

Buy your copy of Budapest to Babel here on the gorgeous new Egg Box Website (work is continuing, but we've gone live with what we have so far). We are seriously low on the first print run now so, if you want a first print first edition, you'll have to hurry, hurry, hurry...

More soon, including more Hungarian TV, a trip to the 'Babylon: Myth and Reality' exhibit at the British Museum, a 'State of Poetry' event at the Savile club, and a podcast interview for new arts journo kid on the block, Patrick Hussey.

Budapest to Babel Launch

2009-01-19T12:36:00.001Z

Dear Curiosas

The Hungarian Cultural Centre, in association with Egg Box Publishing (and Curiosa Hamiltona) cordially invites you to celebrate the publication of 'Budapest to Babel' by Agnes Lehoczky.

The collection of poems and young author will be introduced by George Szirtes, poet, and Nathan Hamilton, poet and publisher.

There will be free wine...

Wednesday 21st January at 7:00pm
Hungarian Cultural Centre, 10 Maiden Lane
London WC2E 7NA

Here is a map

And here is the invite:

Tony Hart Dies, European Art Hoax

2009-01-18T12:41:00.000Z

some people pointing at some art

Sad news today: Tony Hart has died at 83 (or 84 -- the BBC gives both at different places on their website). I’ll be honest: I thought he already had. But here I remember fondly his BBC kids art programmes and the world seems a colder, meaner, place without him. When younger, growing up without a father around, I recall thinking: ‘he’ll do’ and asking my mother if she'd mind recruiting him. She said she'd see what she could do. He had a cosy, avuncular TV persona, and although I never sent any infant daubings to be displayed in The Gallery, I often thought about it, while reviling those among my prepubescent contemporaries who did for selling out. As well as presenting art programmes, he served as an officer in the 1st Gurkha Rifles in the Second World War (I found out from The Telegraph, naturally -- although I can't even imagine him ever getting cross) and he designed the first Blue Peter badge. ('Awarded to young try-hards', for this or that, was my thinking, back then. I was, naturally, above hankering after these little trinkets.)

And, coincidentally, on the same day, I’ve been chuckling away at the Czech art installation commissioned to mark the beginning of their European presidency. Originally, I saw the headline 'European Art Hoax Causes Offence' and put the two together, hoping that someone had played a trick and Tony Hart hadn't really died, but no: This is a real story about a real-life cheeky piece of Euro-art. It depicts a model-rack of 27 country stereotypes: France is a country on strike, Germany is covered by a bunch of motorways tenuously resembling a Swastika, Italy is covered with footballers, Britain is an absence in the top left.

It is named ‘Entropa’, was made by Czech artist David Cerny, plus a couple of his friends, and is meant, in the spirit of ‘satire and sarcasm’, as an effort to prove Europe 'can laugh at itself' -- have a look at a few details here.

And, naturally, Europe can’t: Bulgaria has already complained and requested that its depiction as one large Turkish toilet be removed as it is 'offensive to their national pride'. I think it's actually the funniest piece, which is probably why it offends. It is a little more ‘full-on’ than some of the others, true, but really the complainants are monomaniacs missing the point that this representation is amusingly undermined by its group presentation within an ‘easy to assemble’ model-rack of cultural clichés (an incomprehension which makes a nice point about some EU politicians, perhaps).

And already the bad journalism is underway. Check the pictures of the artwork, and then read here. Apparently Bulgaria’s piece “represents Bulgaria with several figures urinating.” (If they haven’t corrected it by now.) Where is that exactly? In the easy-to-find-within-two-minutes pictures I’ve located in a number of places, it is somewhat different. Or are there people already expressing disgust and alarm without having seen the thing at all… surely not… or perhaps I am the one who has missed something?

It is a brave and silly piece -- and will bring a great deal of attention to the artist (which is basically what we all want having not got enough as kids) but, for me, the main criticism would be that it is not quite funny enough.

But one other thing is interesting. Despite Britain’s uncomplaining reaction -- “we can laugh at ourselves” -- I am very certain, after a period working in the sector, that something similar, with an equivalent profile/situation (public art for the Olympics, say?) would not be possible in this country, unless I’m very mistaken. Which, given that we're the nation that produced Monty Python, makes you think.

Not Entirely Serious

2009-01-16T17:41:00.000Z

As some of you may know, I do not own a TV. Did you know you can be called 'elitist' for that these days? I know this because I was just so accused recently. The offender will remain anonymous. I would like to make clear that this 'no TV' situation was never really a 'choice'. It just evolved. I stopped watching, then forgot to buy one when I moved house a couple of times, then got used to not having one. On the whole, I’d recommend it -- I mean not having one -- the good (largely Amercian, it seems, at the moment) stuff ends up on DVD anyway, and now there’s iPlayer.

So, I don’t pay a license fee. And, you know, I am Very Glad I don’t pay for a license fee. The first reason I am glad is that I get to send cheeky letters to the TV License people explaining why I don't pay a license fee each time they attempt to bully me into paying one. The second reason I'm glad I don't have to pay a license fee is that I saw a Song for Europe (or something like that) by accident just recently: a carnival of glitzy toss presented by Graham Norton concerning the search for Britain's next Eurovision song. There should not be a license for this, I thought. There can be no license for this. There is no license for this.

The programme featured the increasingly awful, although once nearly half-good, Graham Norton presenting a series of dodgy crooners and songsters performing bygone Euro hits in an effort to be chosen for Britain's next effort which will be composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. (No word of a lie, I choked on my Coke when this was announced and he walked out, stunted and puzzled, half-waving to the baying studio crowd... I felt sorry for him. I actually felt sorry for Andrew Lloyd Webber -- not just the fact of him, but for him.) Each singer would be 'assessed' by a panel of judges etc...

It made me physically ill. Although this may have been the stodgy pizza I was eating. The same pizza that made me lethargic to the point of not being able to raise my voice to ask politely whether the people I was with (who seemed equally upset by the whole catastrophe) would mind changing over the channel.

I cannot stand these formats. No, further: they upset me. Deeply. I couldn’t believe what I was (accidentally) witnessing. Having not had a TV for a while, occasional returns to watch have given a perhaps misguided but certainly keen sense of a serious decline in standards over the last eight years or so. (These waypoints often occur, tiresomely -- for the hosts -- at other people's houses.) Or perhaps I kept getting older and more crotchety, even discerning, in the interims? No, I don’t think so -- if anything, I feel more stupid than I was back then. Do I sound like Mary Whitehouse? Perhaps I do.

I guess there was Noel’s House Party before this. And the Generation Game before that. But with NHP and TGG there was more of a sense of everyone knowing it was dreadful and silly and camp, all of them joining in on equally low terms for a bit of a fun wrestle in the mud. No, this Euro shit was much worse. Really nasty. It was something about the gaudy insincerity of the apparent ‘national cause’ that made it so -- the disgusted and disgusting background contempt with which the thing was conducted. And the hunger in the audience and the contestants for it all -- one of them 17, I think.

Yes, it would all no doubt be defended as ‘a bit of harmless fun’, but is it really harmless? I could hear the lazy TV editors and producers sniggering behind the scenes; guffawing that people would actually lap this crap up. Then no doubt in other meetings complaining bitterly that 'this is what people want.' It was the bad faith of the whole enterprise that really appalled. And the look of slightly pained, even fearful, regret in the eyes of Andrew Lloyd Webber and the other panelists… or worse, could it be smug, highly-paid disbelief -- disbelief that it really could be this easy; this under-demanding?

After each 'contestant' gave their rendition of their chosen past Eurovision song (Waterloo was actually a high point, with a whole new layer to it in this context) the panel would spout a few rehearsed stupidities, or over-enthusiastic, trite remarks, before lottery voice man announced the inevitable ‘phone number to call…

No, don’t ask them. Don’t ask the viewers back home what they think. Don’t ask us idiots watching this mess. And especially don’t ask those who would actually ‘phone in… Don’t pretend it matters. Don’t cynically ape, even degrade, a democratic process in this way. Don’t take the opinion of those who would bother watching this stuff over a panel of experts. Stop this. Stop this, please. And, oh no, oh God, no… not a ‘sing along’ on the interactive red button… anything but that… a sing-a-long for who? Those out there who can’t even patiently listen to these cherry-picked desperadoes; those who would rather sing over them and then -- what -- vote for whoever looks most like their own reflection?

It all appeared some grand, accidental and embarrassing statement of cultural failure... I accede that the whole thing was actually a joke because we'll not win anyway due to it all being bizarrely political and ridiculous, the idea being to instead go all-out and really make fun of it... but this? No, not this... Bring back Terry Wogan: that was the way to do it. His laconic, affectionate derision of the whole spectacle, speaking somehow simultaneously of the hilarity of our deranged role in the universe. This was all too frantic and half-arsed. You could see the exhausted staff meeting behind it, through the yawning gaps in content...

I just don’t get these formats or how people can live with suggesting them. I don’t get these programmes. I can’t see the justification, the reason for them. Surely people don’t want this. We want something with a little more to it, but the TV guys can't be bothered, that's the problem, right? People only watch this stuff because it is there and they are too overtired from work to think about or do anything else and have no realistic process available to change things. You could put anything on at this time and enough people would accidentally watch it to justify more of the same to lazy young TV producers and editors full of the half-arsed received wisdom of marketing and media courses. Following the demands of the market? Please say you're not… it doesn't make sense... not when you are the ones choosing the shows to put on in the first place. No! I will not buy it! Such arguments are the refuge for those too timid to take a risk on something difficult and different; something new; something requiring real judgement to pull off... !

And then the next singer -- music, cut away, vox pop at a dayjob piano, then back to the carnage in the studio -- who is it?

It's a gold-shirted Damien.

And with his arrival, a sudden, terrible realization.

As I swallowed my Spicy Chicken Tikka and gagged slightly on too much Coke Zero, it hit me: Christ! This is what Armageddon will look like!

Orchestrated by modern day marketeers, advertisers, and bad TV/Film producers, it’ll have its own ‘phone in and everything: "Lets ask the viewers at home, now we’ve dispatched those meanies, the cynics, which level of hell do we want for the inaptly-termed elitists?

Call now on 0898 666 661 for the eighth circle of hell: where these sinners will be forced to take part in an eternal sing-a-long-a-‘phone-in-for-Europe…

0898 666 662 for the seventh circle: to be chased and harangued for all time by a bandwagon of tabloid readers offended by something they haven’t read, seen or listened to…

0898 666 663 for the fifth circle, to be forever involved in a conversation in which all others participants say ‘literally’ when they mean ‘figuratively’…

0898 666 664 for the ninth circle, to attend, in perpetuity, an awards ceremony at the end of the universe in which every lifetime achievement trophy is won by an oily, butt-kissing hack who was friends with the judges…"

We changed the channel: reruns. We switched off. I resolved to not drink quite so much caffeine-containing soft drink in future.

Oh, and then I read this today. So you really shouldn't be here.

Eye Spy New Year

2009-01-02T23:38:00.000Z

In a New Year’s marmalade-y calm, I read today this slightly pointless piece (but then it is a blog -- ahem) at the Guardian. If the author, Xan Brooks, is interested, he should be aware of this. Unless he thinks it all goes without saying, which it possibly does. Curiosa-ly, none of the related links from the piece appear to mention anything about it either, so I point it out here for any interested Curiosas who happen to drop by, and before I forget about it too. If piqued, it is good cross-referenced with this, and read in light of it, rather than as a comprehensive biography.

And here’s a silly thought: could J D Salinger really be surfing cyberspace, setting up Google alerts for his name… perhaps even blogging anonymously… ? If so: hi there, JD. Thanks for Franny and Zooey -- it’s great and helped get me through a bad few months a number of years back. The Glass family is stunningly well drawn, as if you need me to tell you. And Catcher in the Rye is brilliantly done, and unsurpassed, although often poorly imitated. And, you know, sorry about Ian and all that... I was only about 7 or 8 around then, so didn’t have anything to do with it… and I honestly couldn’t care less how you spend your days… but I would like to read more… so, you know, drop me a line, hey? I promise I won’t tell anyone…

The other thing that Jan 1st is famous for is being the beginning of the New Year: the period for fresh starts and Resolutions. Each year a lot of time, energy, and column inches are spent on helping us decide on ways to improve ourselves. But then I read here that we really shouldn’t. Good, I agree. So, I won’t be making any efforts to ‘improve myself’. Instead, I will form a general plan to ‘improve my life’ by perhaps making more of an effort to do things I like while avoiding situations and people and things I don’t like (I’m with you here, at least in part, JD, old buddy old pal) -- and to perhaps write more about it all here.

Some sad news about Harold Pinter, too -- of which you will all be aware, no doubt. But I spotted, with the passing of the renowned playwright, that an article appeared here about his poetry. It very tactfully avoids dealing with the fact that it’s often over-looked and viewed as secondary because, generally speaking, it is not very good. It ‘got under the skin’ alright, CHE: it got under skin because it was bad. Oops, there goes the ‘Egg Box’ Collected Poems of Harold Pinter… and I was just about to write Judy D. a letter asking…

And why a marmalade-y calm? Well, my entire holiday period has been spent watching the Frasier Complete Collection-- a way of hiding from Christmas and all its phony merriment. Instead, we thought we’d indulge in some genuine fun, and a marathon of it at that: we’ve watched all 11 seasons while pigging out on good food (I have put on half a stone.)

It has been a while and I’d forgotten just how good it is (Frasier, I mean, rather than pigging out on good food -- which is good, too). Watching them back-to-back, it is hugely impressive how few inconsistencies there are in storyline and characterisation (although there are a couple of niggling ones), and how it maintains energy all the way through.

The earlier half is a smidgen better than the later, when it slips occasionally into too much of an opening-and-shutting-of-doors high farce. And a few episodes feel like the actors are kind of going through the motions. And they develop a number of ‘stock’ storylines by the end -- and the last couple of episodes seem rushed, somehow. But, generally, it is hugely rewarding and heart-warmingly gentle. It holds up brilliantly and is often moving, among the many laughs -- and remember, that’s all maintained over 22-24 episodes a season, in the US. And remember, too, that it is a spin-off from Cheers’ twelve seasons.

To be that good, and that unique, for that long, especially in the modern TV climate, is pretty amazing… Frasier Crane is the longest running TV sitcom character in history, apparently, and Kelsey Grammar spent 20 years of his life in the role. And there are rumours that there may eventually be more… and what a supporting cast… hats off to them, one and all…

The other thing I realised was that Frasier was also genuinely educational. Following the series actually taught me things I didn’t know; and useful things, too -- like what a 'ramekin' is. How often could you say that was true of a sit-com? Or of an entertainment TV programme generally?

I could go on with this retrospective… but the net result is that, after watching lots of good old TV in Frasier, and eating far too much sugary food, I feel full, in body and mind, of some sort of marmalade, and a calming one at that, after feeling full of pointy turds and sand. Hence ‘marmalade-y calm’.

Happy New Year to all.

Ostentation of Peacocks by Daniel Kane

2008-12-23T17:42:00.000Z

Another fine book has hatched from the Egg Box. This one is called Ostentation of Peacocks by Daniel Kane and it is a very pretty looking thing too. It is sure to go far. This is what other people whose opinions you can trust have been saying about it:

"This remarkable book adds up, heartily, to its own 'heap big meal'." -- Bill Berkson

"Daniel Kane is the revitalising voice twenty-first century poetry needs. fresh, funny and visionary, this book offers the reader a real world of fantasy with the lyric grace of early Ashbery and the prophetic ambition of early Ginsberg." -- Jeremy Noel Tod

"The variegated plumage of kane's elegant, iridescent, fan-tailed poems is a constant delight... a gorgeous collection, and one that deserves a 'harmonious welcome'." -- Mark Ford

"Fun is missing from this world everywhere; but here it is, at times pitiless but still fun ... not only fun has been missing, but also compassion, and that is here too, 'with singular freshness and poignancy'." -- Rebecca Wolff

This is another beautifully designed hardback collectible -- there probably aren't many better looking books of poetry around at the moment. Take a look. And it is pretty great on the inside too. And Charles Alexander agrees here. And Ron Silliman mentioned it briefly on his blog also. Which is about as far as he'd be likely to go. Really, it's a good thing...

We will be holding reading events in January and here and there throughout next year. Again, if you want one off the first print run, you'd better hurry... and, as ever, please buy from our website, rather than Amazon (the enemy of small independent publishers boo... hisssss...)

Curiosa News

2008-12-20T16:26:00.000Z

As we head towards the end of the year, perhaps a brief post to let those of you who are interested know about some other things Curiosa has been up to. This is Curiosa News. We will be back occasionally with more updates.

New Writing Season, 2008 (the series of events I programmed for New Writing Partnership in Norwich) finished in late November and feedback has been resoundingly positive (but I would say that). Find out more here.

As part of New Writing Season, I also helped put together a day of discussion for a number of arts organisations from around the country called Literature Re:Connected. This was in partnership with Amb:IT:ion. We were talking and thinking about what arts organisations should be looking to offer in light of recent developments in web technologies. For those of you who are in to such things, the speakers at the event were video-ed and these videos, along with a few others from New Writing Worlds 2008, which I also helped put together earlier in the year, are available for viewing here, on the NWP channel on You Tube. There is some good stuff in there, so worth a look.

In other news, I've had some poems accepted for The Spectator and The Manhattan Review. More on this when the relevant issues are published -- but both magazines are well worth a look anyway, even without me in them. Honest.

I also wrote a review for Poetry London, which you can find out a little more about here. You'll have to buy a copy to read it, though. Or find a copy here.

With my Egg Box publishing hat on, along with a slight re-brand (read: new logo) I also published three new books: The UEA Creative Writing Anthology 2008, Budapest to Babel by Agnes Lehoczky, and Ostentation of Peacocks by Daniel Kane. Reviews and coverage for these and other Egg Box books have appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The Times, Time Out: London, Radio Four and Radio Three. Sales are going well. All are available through good bookshops, and Amazon, but, if they take your fancy, we still prefer that you buy through our website (we make more money that way).

Work is underway for what might be four new Egg Box books next year, so keep your ears pricked for those. I'll announce them soon enough...

And work continues on the new Egg Box website -- a little prone to delay, as it tends to be the thing I forget about doing what with everything else, but we should have something sorted out soon. It has been a tricky business working out the best way to do things, and what programming language to opt for, but we may have something worked out finally...

And that's all for now. Now over to Angela with the weather.

Budapest to Babel by Agnes Lehoczky

2008-10-23T17:12:00.000+01:00

A new book has hatched from underneath plucky old mother hen's feathery underside at the Egg Box. This one is by Hungarian-born poet, Agnes Lehoczky. The well-known babel myth provides the backbone for the first cycle of poems and a departure point for further journeys in this, Agnes' first book in English. Budapest to Babel is a lively and rewarding exploration of the difficulties and joys of language. Often poignant, always inventive, states of confusion and chaos, playfulness and delight, are all explored with a freshness of style and tone. An original and unique talent.

This is what people have been saying about Budapest to Babel by Agnes Lehoczky:

"Agnes Lehoczky draws on the poetic tradition of making language the subject of the image but complicates this intriguingly by being in two places at once; she makes herself both actor and acted upon in enjoyable strategies of investment and displacement." -- Lavinia Greenlaw

"It is rare to find such articulate poems about inarticulacy; poems that comprehend inarticulacy in their composition and which are, for my money, very moving ... an original writer with something original to say." -- George Szirtes

This excellent collection from a exceptionally talented poet is presented in a beautifully printed hardback collectible, ideal for the more sophisticated Christmas present, don't you know. If we do say so ourselves, there probably aren't many -- if any -- better looking books of poetry around at the moment. It was recently included in a round-up of the best poetry collections of the year in The Telegraph.

We will be holding a launch event at the HCC (download their programme) in January and a number of others early next year. However, stocks are already running pretty low (and we've hardly publicised it yet!), so, if you want one of the first print run, you'd better hurry... as ever, please buy from our website, rather than Amazon (the enemy of small independent publishers boo... hisssss...)

Hadron Holiday

2008-10-15T15:55:00.000+01:00

Curiosa has been rather busy for a while now. It has been a busy year with lots to do. Perhaps it is about time I explained what exactly I have been up to that could have caused me to be so busy and to forget to write for so long. It is no small matter, I can assure you, and it has been difficult remaining modestly silent. Yes, it is about time that I explained: I have been busy saving the world. Busy saving the world from what? Well, this, as it happens. It is a long story...

Those who are interested in such matters will remember that the large Hadron collider experiment took place in September. Or, rather, you’ll remember they fired it up but couldn’t complete testing. Or perhaps you won’t remember – it all rather depends. You’ll notice also that this is when I stopped posting. You’ll further recall I mentioned I had some time off around this time. This is no mere coincidence.

Those who have been following Curiosa’s adventures will know that I have been charting the potential for the sudden Destruction of Life As We Know It through the investigation and documentation of oddly shaped vegetables received from the River Nene Emporium of Evil and Dread.

Through elaborate calculations and research too complicated to post here, I realized that all evidence seemed to point to one thing: the utter destruction of everything at some point in mid-September.

It became apparent through the course of my distracting and time-consuming investigations that the odd shapes exhibited in fresh farm produce in our area were being caused by volatility in the fabric of space and time. Incidences were on the increase through harvest time and the large stocks of produce that projections indicated would have accumulated come mid September could only point to something disastrous on the horizon.

I searched the Google machine on the Interweb for large-scale physics experiments around that time; experiments that could – in a dangerous game of chicken with the laws of the universe – bring about the wholesale destruction of everything, through monkey-like trial and error prodding and poking at matter and anti matter... I found this.

So, I booked some time off and set out to foil things. Then all I remember is my first day back at work. It was as if my holiday had never happened.

But then I found this. Clearly, I managed to pull something off, but what? Can anyone tell me? Perhaps we’ll never know. What I do know is that I sacrificed my holiday to save the world. And did anyone thank me? Did they bollocks.

Publishing, 20 years on... ?

2008-09-01T23:43:00.000+01:00

I was catching up on some TV viewing through the BBC's iPlayer recently, during my time off, and happened across 'Doctors To Be: Twenty Years On'. I only just remember (honest) the first programmes, I think (or repeats of them, perhaps). These follow-ups, charting 20 years of serious change in the National Health Service and looking at how the group of young med students ended up, got me wondering, idle... what will publishing look like, 20 years on... ?

So, remembering back to all I learnt at the TOC08 conference that I sent myself to, through Egg Box, as part of the Escalator Leadership Scheme run by Arts Council England, East (and which I'll be off to again next year, because it was great) I tried to work it out and... guess what: I'm not sure! I don't think anyone is. Many things are a-foot and a-changing... here's some wild speculation...

(And before I get going, here are some good places to look for what's going on, although many of you will know of them. And there are many more things to click through to from them...

future of the book
tools of change for publishing
publishing talk

now, onwards... )

With the decline in book reading, despite resilient sales figures for now, and the behaviours of the more screen-burned, less book-interested younger generation, what is likely to happen? And as the older business models start to crumble, or at least show their age, what will a future publishing house look like -- anything like they do today?

Well, I'm not an expert, but don't completely buy in to the doomsday 'complete death of the book as we know it' theory -- I doubt many do, deep down. Although forms of eBook do seem set to take over, or already have taken over, wherever convenience is a key factor in a purchase decision (e.g. one handy book reader device with multiple digital book files versus a sack full of a tonne of text books to take to school = no-brainer), I think there will always be a market for the 'traditional book'. Especially while the digital equipment set to replace it does not measure up in terms of reading pleasure...

But will it always be so? Will people always want to stock up their ever-smaller houses with piles and piles of old fashioned, pleasantly paper-and-glue-smelling books? Whether decorative, or as a testament (or reassurance for the less secure) of learning and accrued knowledge -- or aspirations towards it, at least -- will anyone see the point in bothering in the future... and what of environmental/waste concerns?

Perhaps books will become a more occasional, luxury, even antique/decorative buy -- people may cling on to their very favourites, or bibles, say, as special purchases or lavish gifts, delicately put together for the mantlepiece, bookcase, other, but with newer purchases made digitally, as a tester? Or maybe books will feature more as commemorative purchases for content you enjoyed, or interacted with first, online... whichever way I look at it, a decline, in various ways, seems likely, but a retro 'real thing' fanbase seems likely to continue, as it has done elsewhere.

But will books be replaced by, say, the Kindle or Sony Reader? I actually think this is very unlikely. These devices seem attached to the, for me, rather quaint notion that there needs to be a 'separate' device through which to consume a digital version of the traditional 'book' -- that is, I see the Kindle and Sony Reader as rather too linear an idea; rather than a likely replacement, they feel like an almost nostalgic dead end.

What I mean is, in the long term, a barrier for these devices is the fact that they are 'one more device' -- it is far more likely that people are going to own more and more powerful, and smaller, portable PCs (or mobile 'phones?); single devices on which they will download and view all sorts of content: portable multi-media devices for journeying around with that will allow games, emailing, video phoning, music, books, films -- everything. Why, therefore, in the long run, would you want separate devices for each? So, the eBook as a digital software format, becoming more and more versatile and cross-media, yes, but hardware 'replacement' digital e-readers in their current imagining? No. They remind me of the older electronic word-processor machines: inevitably subsumed into a comparatively more versatile device -- the home computer. And look what is happening with mobile phones: the trend is towards further integrated single devices, not proliferation.

Is it more likely that digital book software -- rather than hardware -- will develop instead into some form of narrative gaming hybrid artform, with ARGs becoming the dominant form of entertainment and way of consuming narrative... something akin to the books imagined in the Harry Potter universe, and on from there... ? Could be, I think...

But what will publishers become in the meantime?

I'm still not sure. No doubt there will remain book-publishing departments, but they may begin to look a little like the vestigial wings on an ostrich, or perhaps decorative plumage, or ceremonial uniform; or penguin wings -- still useful (for swimming, balance...), maybe even relevant, but not in the ways they used to be. Either way, I think publishing houses will likely shift severely in their focus and emphasis. I can see a decline in simply 'book publishers'; a decline in companies selling solely, or predominantly, traditional 'books' as deliverers of content/narrative...

Instead, perhaps they may morph as producers, merging along the way with a new breed of literary agency, into variants of 'creative narrative content' companies (or departments within companies), or more general 'intellectual property' companies, or some such -- producers and providers, with writers/authors, of quality narrative/characters for cross-platform, genre-bending, cross-media delivery, with perhaps small, remnant book 'wings'... using and trading their historical legacies -- popular books, familiar stories, characters -- and strong brands -- and therefore good search ratings -- and positioning themselves as a beacon or stamp of authority and quality in an otherwise confusing, murky fog of web-based content...

That is, I can see publishers and agencies moving forever closer... and also computer games manufacturers, book publishers, film/TV production companies, perhaps even advertising agencies -- anything that requires narrative, believable characterisation, or creative words in some form -- merging; that demands for decent words, narrative, story-telling, what have you, will increase in ever-more web-focussed gaming, TV, film, publishing/production companies, while consumption of books as a form of entertainment declines.

Consider film -- more and more, authors don't get the big pay day until a book is made into one, and many are perhaps even writing with this as a hoped-for end product. I can see the 'book writing' phase of this process reducing further and it becoming, more and more, a matter of writers or authors, attached to, say, 'X production companies' or departments as a new form of staff writer, perhaps, producing the stories and characters to feed a multi-media machine... but this is a long way down the line yet, I think...

But is this flight of fancy a positive or bleak outlook for writers/publishers? This is difficult to call, but, given that the web offers the opportunity to reach a huge number of people almost immediately, given the right idea -- one that captures the imagination in the right way -- then there's every likelihood of the former. There'll always be a demand for good content; for good, well-crafted literature, narrative, characters -- and in potentially many different new forms. And there'll likely always be a need for all the various tools and people in place at the moment in terms of crafting it. And, with demand, there will naturally be a lucrative way to supply. The trick will be not to get stuck in primordial delivery mud; the trick will be new ideas and experimentation; protectionism is likely to induce failure -- as many wise sorts have said.

So, what of us small independent publishers? Well, perhaps lapsing again into a hackneyed analogy might be OK, in the interests of keeping this 'readably' short... Consider the destruction of the big, old, and slow to adapt dinosaurs: after the metorite hit, it was the smaller, wiley, rat-like, warm-blooded mammals, or the birds, or the tiny insects or even single-celled life-forms -- those better suited to a new world -- that survived, adapted, diversified and now dominate... if we forget certain sea-dwellers... but, if they were in the depths of the dark sea, we could argue that this was a different environment -- say... law?

Anyway, good news or bad news? Potentially both. But, 20 years down the line, it seems likely, even given our conservative tendencies in this country, that books, or consumption of what books currently offer, is likely, in large part, to have significantly altered, but not dwindled... but I may be wrong.

Oh, and if we're to make the back to the future deadline, we need hoverboards and hovercars within the next 7 years... and we've missed time travel by 23 years...

Anyway, back to telly-watching and time off...

Book Launch 2.0 and infidelity.

2008-08-26T20:32:00.000+01:00

A busy Curiosa the publisher thinks all current and/or future authors, or Egg Boxers, or anybody interested in becoming one, should watch this:

Yes. That's it! That is it, Mr. Dennis Cass. That's it exactly.

And a guilty confession: I am currently blogging at Inpress for the next few-days-to-a-week on their new blog there... just to help out, like. I know, I've hardly written anything here and now I'm blogging there? But, hey, I've been busy again... this doesn't mean I don't still love you, dear, dear blog... and I've got some time off now, so there will be more -- perhaps much more -- soon.

The Manager Is Away...

2008-07-21T20:47:00.000+01:00

Needing to book a reading as cheaply as possible in London soon, I called [The Venue] last Weds on the off-chance: no answer. Call again Thurs: no answer. Call again Fri: leave message after poorly recorded answer phone, send email.

Then I leave it a few days. No email. No call back. So, I call again today: no answer. And mailbox full. "Funny..." I think... "perhaps everyone is dead..."

So I call the main office [in same building]. Bloody venue manager is on holiday.

So I ask if I may book [the blue room] on [9th Nov] through them instead.

They say best to wait until [Bob], the venue manager, is back from holiday.

I say I need to know before then. Like, today... [I have learnt "like, today" from assertive American lawyers on TV].

They say best to wait until [Bob] is back.

Us: When is he back?

Them: He's back on the 2nd August.

Us: But I need to know, like, today...

Them: Best to call when he's back...

Us: Well, could you at least have a look to see if it is booked on the 9th... ?

Them: Oh, yes, I can do that... it is booked on the 9th.

Us: [pause] Is it booked on the 8th?

Them: It is looking bad all over November... Best to ask [dickhead] when he's back.

Us: Yes, I am beginning to appreciate that, but is there anything booked on November 8th?

Them: Oh, yes, there is.

Us: Is this thing being held in the blue room?

Them: No, it is in the red room.

Us: So the blue room is free on the 8th? In the evening? For a booking?

Them: Yes it is.

Us: Well, can I book it then?

Them: Best to wait until the venue manager is back from holiday.

Us: Well, perhaps I should send him an email -- is he picking them up?

Them: Only rarely. He is on holiday.

Us: I know he is on holiday. Is he picking up his emails?

Them: Yes.

Us: So I'll email him and make a booking for the 8th, which is free -- which you can see -- but which you cannot book, shall I?

Them: But He might not check them until he gets back.

Us: Yes, quite, which is why I wonder why can't you, or anyone else who is there, while [Dickhead] is away, book it?

Them: ....

Us: OK, I'll send him an email and call him when he gets back.

Them: Yes, that would be best.

Us: On the 2nd August.

Them: Yes.

Us: Have you ever read any Harold Pinter?

Them: Pardon?

Us: Nothing. Goodbye. [and fuck you].

Them: Pardon?

Us: and thank you. [and fuck you].

Live Literature

2008-06-26T20:10:00.000+01:00

One of the many facets of a current and growing sense of a new British poetry scene, or scenes, is the emergence of the more live-experience-focused breed of poet-performer. Is this a genuinely new form, and one that lacks an adequate critical platform or approach to deal with it? Assuming yes, here’s an attempted start...

This performance-based form of word-art, variously described as spoken word, stand-up poetry, what have you, is here. And it is different from theatre, stand-up comedy, music, and so-called beat poetry, but it borrows or draws on all of these. And, through a process of this hybridization of stand up sets, theatrical performance, and the poetry reading, something of a pedigree is starting to emerge, I think, that might be definable. For various reasons for now, I’ll call it 'Live Literature' (as do many, but the terms seem fairly interchangeable).

So, having picked a term, it now needs a bit of attention developing a useful, workable definition (well, I feel I need one anyway –- no doubt someone else has already done so better elsewhere). So what is it? Where, for example, does the theatre/performance element end, say, and the literature begin? What are the terms or approaches through which you might assess it? Does doing so really matter?

Regardless, and for the sheer hell of it, here are some starting points for approaching a workable definition of (good) Live Literature (all slightly flexible, naturally, to ensure a nice redundancy before I’m even finished). I will try to add to and refine these for something more comprehensive in future, and I invite revisions and further suggestions:

1) A good/matured Live Literature act avoids disingenuously and lazily positing or counterpointing some shadowy poetry 'elite' or 'aristocracy' it seeks to antagonize and agitate. This is a big (insecure) and narrow-minded cliché that is rarely relevant, interesting, or even accurate -- the good stuff lies elsewhere, further along, after assuming artistic importance in one's own right.

2) Similarly, a good/matured Live Literature act should not describe a non-existent stuffy and failing poetry world it is here to save –- this, again, is disingenuous nonsense normally used to hold up an empty, self-aggrandising rhetorical position predicated on a flawed understanding of poetry, poetics and poetic history. It should be proud of its roots, and it should deal with its ancestral genealogy of forms with an open mind, rather than adolescently attempting to distance.

3) With good Live Literature, the words should be doing most of the work. Or, the words should be the driving force of the act/performance/event. If another aspect holds sway -– the action, for example -– it becomes other –- e.g. theatre or dance. Or, if a beard holds sway, it is Scroobius Pip [cheap gag, best ignored as irrelevant]. As a further example, a comedy song can be considered as within the bounds of Live Literature if the driving force of the artistic enjoyment/understanding is from the words –- foregrounded use of rhyme or rhythm for humour, surprise etc (and cf. earlier posts about poetry and music).

4) With Live Literature, the words must be good (in whatever way) words; surprising words, as with any form of literary endeavour. Too many Live Literature acts are little more than incoherent shouty doggerel polemic –- not literature, or even really Live in most senses of the word.

So, in summary, anything where the words are foregrounded or are the focus in an interesting performance conceit or frame; anything where the energy comes largely from the words and their manipulation and impact in a live setting, is potentially good/matured Live Literature. But in order to be considered a good/matured Live Literature event, the words should be the biggest thing on stage. The mantra should be: The Words Must Do The Work.

PS. How does that differ from stand-up? I’d argue that in stand up the laugh or gag is the main concern governing most editorial decision making, whereas with Live Literature the main concern would be making sure the words are the best they could be and doing the most work they can with everything else adding to that (but not superceding).

PPS. There might be an interesting distinction to be drawn between ‘performance’ and ‘delivery’ in terms of furthering a definition… but I am tired and should go to bed...

Chris Hamilton-Emery's Poetry Landscape

2008-06-25T20:09:00.000+01:00

Publishing chap, Chris Hamilton-Emery (CHE) of Salt, has posted here a good description of an emergent poetry landscape in a message to Salt readers, of which I am one. I agree with much of it, although I’m not confident that the commonplace ‘out of the elite’ and ‘into the hands of the people’ framing is reliable anymore, if it ever really was. And I have a few problems with what might be a couple of bits of slightly frayed thinking in the concluding phrases. He asks us to take two things from his post. I have taken these and wandered around with them and, to be honest, I find bits of them are bugging me, Dear Reader. So, in the interests of personal mental hygiene, and in the convivial spirit of debate, I am going to bore you with these objections now in order to banish them from my wandering and forgetful brain. The first of CHE’s two things to take is:

“… poetry belongs to you, not to the poet or the critic or merely the privileged and overeducated, not teachers or academics or editors, and there is someone out there writing for you right now, in ways which will extend your life and what it means and it's not dull drudgery, nor is it the literary equivalent of navel fluff.”

I would ask who are these (Salt) readers of poetry being addressed who are not, nor have they ever been, nor will they ever aspire to be, a poet, or, for that matter, a critic. Or even an academic or editor or teacher. Who is this audience (assuming we are looking beyond a book-selling poet’s supportive family and friends)? Who is this 'you'? Present yourselves. And, OK, assuming this 'you' does exist, why the oppositional set-up between 'you' and the apparently negatively referred to critic, poet, teacher, overeducated or priveleged persons to whom poetry does not belong? And how can it not belong to them if they are invested in it? And what does privileged mean in this context? Is this pitch not in fact reinforcing the very divisiveness that CHE is apparently raising objection to? Odd.

I think what CHE is generally getting at is that poetry is, potentially, for everyone, and that it is a good thing. 'You' is maybe 'the world'. Well, yes, although facile to say, there’s not much to disagree with there. Poetry belongs first and foremost to personkind in general, rather than any proprietorial subgroup, and art is a good thing. Surely there is unlikely to be anyone who is a genuinely enthusiastic poetry lover and/or writer around today who would ever disagree with that. Broad church is a good way to go about things. But not without discernment (which we'll come to). And the real problem for me is that the articulation of his point still slightly presupposes an outmoded and disingenuous conception, for the sake of his rhetorical positioning, of ‘us’ and ‘them’; derived from an outdated, to my ear, reactionary anti-and-post-Arnold-through-Leavis (in terms of High/Low) conception of the poetry world that has actually used up its rhetorical usefulness, these days, IMHO.

And, further, I can’t let this one go: is it really possible to be ‘overeducated’? What kind of strange nonsense is that? Is he pulling our legs? Can you actually have that much education that it eventually becomes a bad thing? Are we really at a stage when someone can say this and get away with it? Surely the only way the statement could hold water would be if the hypothetical person learning were irredeemably evil, or if learning were likely to make him/her bad in some way? Is that ever the case? Or, again, is this just a slippage due to a disingenuous rhetorical posture, leading to the heady use of a term smacking rather ominously, but probably accidentally, of a diseased demotic anti-bookishness (of a curious sort we have in this country). Is this just disguised marketing; crowd pleasing? But what crowd? And what could possibly be constructively pleasing about a notion of 'overeducation'? It is certainly an odd standpoint for a former academic publisher. So what I think he perhaps meant to say instead of ‘overeducated’ was: ‘those as yet undefined people who are arrogant with what they do know (which is not as much as they think) and who should not be relied upon.’ Which perhaps includes me. Oh dear.

The second part of the statement is expressed in positive generalities with which I concur [it has also been expanded upon after writing this, but context remains the same]. And this is just a blog post, and so should not be taken too seriously –- I accede to my imagined antagonist –- but my main thrust is that in small but important ways this post of CHE’s is sometimes not coherent in its points of view and conclusions. And I feel it should be.

So, the second thing CHE wants us to take from his post is this:

“writers need to know what readers want and where their lives are at. If you can't find stuff that speaks to you then shout out wherever you can, get the full range of choices, there are thousands of new writers. I think you deserve the best from your poets and if the stuff you've discovered isn't working for you, don’t be managed or misled. The world of poetry is now as large and fragmented as the independent music scene so don't be cheated out of any life enhancements you are due, make sure you get all your slices of pie and cake. Why choose anything less?”

I’m not completely sure what this means. Particularly that odd verb ‘managed’. And I'm not sure I agree with the premise that writers need to know what readers want and that readers need to be "central to the poet's art" [an earlier conclusion in the post]. I think a talented engagement with language and words are central to the poet's art. One should write genuinely, to strengths and talents and one's own true concerns, with good words, and then hope there are readers and publishers who are interested after that. To my mind this is a better practice -- otherwise you risk second-guessing the market, and that is a dangerous slippage towards the phoney.

And 'don't be managed' sounds to me like CHE the salesman. He is perhaps wishing you’ll try, without short-cutting with some external 'management' input, every single one of his catalogue items, good and bad, in the hope you may like a few of them. But isn’t it possible that too much Salt could be bad for you? Might there be some ('manager' or advisor) person, other than the writer-producer, or the publisher (so without a vested interest) to whom you could turn first of all for better nutritional-editorial advice or guidance about what you might like, or what might be nutritionally good for you, based on their experience and knowledge; someone whose tastes you may trust? Or someone with whom to check that there wasn't something you were missing in the stuff that wasn't working for you...

Sure, nobody has all the answers, but I’d ask someone who knew more than me about stereos before I piled indiscriminately into Currys and successively bought EVERYTHING in their shop in the hope that a few of the items I took home would be what I wanted, or before throwing out a complex bit of equipment I couldn't work out and didn't have a useful manual for. And I would certainly ask someone without a vested interest what it is I might be looking for and where to go to get it before I started shouting for it from a manufacturer.

My confusion is that this actually seems at odds with an earlier opinion of CHE’s: that of his perception of a need for new, and new outlets for –- probably younger –- critics to make sense of the landscape; that they are needed for the job of discernment amid the current proliferation and polyphony of new poetic outlets and outputs with which the traditional critical frameworks are having difficulty. And that there might be voices that will develop that might be worth listening to as arbiters or taste definers in this way.

So, it all makes a bit more sense to me if I read this second thing to take away as something of a call to arms for readers. Suggesting they swot up through reading as much as possible and to be persistent and discerning rather than dismissive is sound. But, at this point, readers start to become critics, do they not? But then what of the conflicing portrayals of the figure of the critic to whom poetry doesn't belong? By becoming more critical does one gradually disinvest oneself of a stake in poetry? Surely not. You perhaps see my confusion now… I generally agree with what is being said, but there are some problems or confusions abounding from the rhetorical standpoint...

Anyway, in cooperative spirit, taking those bits I agree with and ignoring the bits I've in haste probably not understood or read properly, I’ll briefly tackle something about the current poetry scene that I’ve been meaning to address in a more critical way in the next post (see above).

PS and lurking behind all this, I think, is a further debate/exploration to be had/carried out (another time –- when there is some) about abuses of poetry for incongruent (for the creation of good poetry) other aims -– poet and publisher alike -– that CHE also touches on. But anyway...

New Poetry

2008-05-26T16:38:00.000+01:00

So, Anne Marie Fyfe writes in the Guardian on Saturday about an effervescent new poetry and hazzards a guess at twelve young poets to watch out for in the context of where 'a new canon' will come from. It is a lightish piece of no real consequence, and the list is flawed/biased in some ways (have a guess at why I think so), but it is a risky thing to do, so credit to AMF for that. And it is good to have new poetry being written about...

... as Todd Swift points out on his blog, and then kindly adds me to the list! Aw, shucks. Thanks.

But he's right to, of course. But then my judgment is biased and flawed too. And many others are missing. But that is, I guess, the nature of lists.

And, on Jack's behalf, I'd like to correct that S/S/Y/K was, in fact, 'co-edited' with Sam Riviere, and got by with a lot of help from its friends, as Jack would be the first to point out too... but then that is the nature of short biographies.

Anyway, constitutionally speaking I am too prematurely old and decrepit to be on a new poet list: I've had a bad back for the last few days and the other night refused to go into a bar because it was 'too crowded and noisy'. All there is to look forward to now is slippers then death.

Pelicans

2008-05-23T15:55:00.000+01:00

winged menace

So I'm strolling home along leafy Ipswich Road in Norwich after a long week of poetry, football, and religion, when, suddenly, Dixon Lanier Merrit’s immortal limerick pops into my head, attacking me out of nowhere:

----

A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican,

He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week

But I'm darned if I know how the helican!

----

And I wonder “is this true?”

Firstly, can a Pelican’s beak hold more than its belly can? Technically, no. It is, in fact, the Pelican’s pouch underneath the beak that holds the water, not the beak itself. However, it is true that the pouch can hold more than its stomach: about three gallons in some species, the stomach about one gallon.

“Good for you”, Merrit, I thought -- you are a trustworthy humourist.

But can it take in its beak enough food for a week?

Theoretically, yes. I mean, all the food it eats passes through its beak, so, assuming a hypothetical pelican eats for a hypothetical week, this food will naturally have been held in its beak at some point over that period. Whether they do this all at once is less sure. Also, they swallow whatever they catch, when they catch it, so they certainly don’t carry a whole bunch of food around for a week, if that is what Merrit was implying. That would be unhygienic and could give them beak rot. And if they swallowed an entire week’s food all at once, well… that could be messy. No, this claim is a little shaky.

And the line “But I’m darned if I know how the helican” is disingenuous. It is very obvious how the ‘helican’: it is by virtue of the pelican’s, observable, aforementioned, large expandable skin flap under its beak, used for draining excess water when scooping fish from lakes. This is a lazy last line.

Now incensed by Merrit’s slack composition and irresponsible if not dangerous disregard for empirical fact, I decided to find out more.

It turns out that he began writing these silly lines while he was an army chef – they were designed to entertain troops in the trenches during the first world war. Well, I guess, when surrounded by wanton death and destruction, far away from home and loved ones, a little limerick about a pelican along with one’s grey rations might just brighten one’s day. But smack or morphine in the soup would have been better, Dixon. Or perhaps some good porn.

What we have here, quite clearly, is someone who is happy to simply play indulgently with silly words, spreading misinformation and lies in order to mildly entertain others and ingratiate himself, even in the worst of situations. A dangerous man. A silly man. A humourist poet. Unproductive and having a shaky relationship with the truth.

Who knows how many men may have been sent over the top with these lines ringing in their ears, chuckling away to themselves thinking ‘life isn’t so bad, just think about that little pelican and his big beak. Ho ho ho.’ Chuckling away to themselves at lies. As they were mowed down in their thousands. Disgraceful.

However, it seems, soon after, that he had something of a crisis of conscience and was involved in the founding the Tennessee Ornithological Society, in 1915. Actually, no. The dates don't work. Merrit must have done this before he went to war. This makes his crimes against truth even more foul.

Then I was thinking that the pelican was perhaps an interesting symbol: a beast with a mouth that can hold more than he can actually stomach. It perhaps says something about our marketeering, self-promoting times. All gob, no guts.

Then I find this and this. And this makes me think uh-oh. They too are evil. They too are attacking. And they don’t even care about the kids, as the Daily Mail righteously shrieks. But we’ve had it coming. The world is turning, as I have proved here before with vegetables. Even the pelicans have had enough. Yet more evidence for my End of Days Database of Evil and Dread.

-- and that poor lady:

“blimey – you poor thing: how did you get that scar?!”

“I, er… well…”

So, mere coincidence that I should have been hit by Dixon Merrit’s poetry pelican just as they have started to turn on us? Or is Merrit perhaps trying to send a warning to me from another realm? Is there something sinister afoot, the full, terrible scope of which might shake our very bones with dread?

Yes. Without doubt there is. Be careful out there, brave Curiosas. Repeat after me:

A devious bird is the pelican,
He will do whatever the helican

To darkly ensure
That we are no more

And rule the whole world, oh as welican.

Oulipo: Univocalisms

2008-05-20T17:20:00.000+01:00

Inspired by some research into oulipo, a group of chums -- Tim, Joe and Ross -- have been working on some univocalisms for an interesting live show they are putting together. I saw an early and enjoyable version of it at Tom's excellent London Wordfest a few months back. Luke Wright has also had a go here.

Very generally, The Oulipo are all about formal constraints opening up new potential in literature. They also sound like they are a race of very small people. Univocalisms are poems written using only one vowel. Strictly, you should not use 'y' either. Some UK Oulipeans (of normal height) you might find interesting to look into are Stanley Chapman and Ian Monk.

Understandably, for the sake of interest -- in terms of making an enjoyable live show -- these chums have been allowing themselves a lot of room for manoeuvre within the rules. E.g. all phonetic variations within their chosen vowel constraint and 'y' are allowable. So, if they are writing a univocalism in 'e', they might allow themselves 'the tree wheels freely'. If one were to be more purist, one might say only the vowel sound 'ee' -- as in 'tree' -- should be allowable. Therefore 'the' and 'freely' are not options -- but allowing yourself 'y' lets you make use of adverbs. They also allow themselves a free verse form. But the constraints exist only to encourage creative potential and rules are made to be broken.

So L says I should write a univocalism. So I do. And it is a bit silly.

I've posted the first draft separately below. Constraints are: only one type of 'i' sound. No 'y' sounds, but abbreviations allowed. Three lines a verse. And, to introduce a tiny bit of the Oulipean fun with maths: first bunch of stanzas has to be nine stanzas long -- therefore three to the power of three. Second bunch has to be six stanzas -- three to the power of two. Third bunch has to be three stanzas long -- three to the power of one. Repeated three times. But I've broken some of these rules for certain reasons at the end, which could be a cop out. And all these constraints may well have made it boring and too long. Or they may have just made it harder to make it interesting -- you decide.

PS. And I'd like to say I wrote it in three hours the other day (which was the original intention) but it ended up closer to 4 or 5. I'll perhaps try and redraft it in future in strictly three-hour sessions, and perhaps try and make the number of syllables in each stanza divisible by three. Anyway, here it is. It was pretty fun to write in the end, so I might try some more of this oulipo larking in future.

Poem: Univocalism: Jim 'n' Tim

2008-05-20T14:04:00.000+01:00

I. Jim’s trip.

Hip Jim skims Viz, sips Pimms.
His grim lisp sings, insipid,
In spliff mist, with thinning vim,

Dim pimp: his bitch list
Is shrinking. This is bitching him.
'Trim Tim is winning --

His bling glints big, his Bim.
is king. This stinks. This is piss!'
-- Jim is sick with it.

His hip lil’ impish chip, Lin Ping,
Is gimping. Jim isn't in.
Jim’s ship is sinking.

Spinning thick wisps, Jim
Drinks big, inks this:
‘This is it! This is it, Trim Tim.

Bring it. Bring it -- Blink’s gig, bitch.’
Jim lisps: ‘This fist will hit him stiff!
This fist will finish his shit;

This fist will kill Tim.’
Jim sits, spits:
‘Lin Ping! Shift it with this…

Bring Trim Tim in,
Bring him in; this, Jim’s fist,
will finish him, innit!’

Lin Ping spins, splits.
Hip Jim sits, licks his lips,
Sips his lit spliff. Jim kips.

In his brinking trip, Jim,
Glimpsing Trim Tim’s thick mitt,
Fits… Jim sits, blinks…

His dick shrinks, Jim thinks:
‘Shit. This isn’t… Shit,
Trim Tim is big!

This is thick, innit…
Tim’s fists is skill... His shit is king.’
His thinking shrill, Jim is in fits.

Jim splits: “Lin Ping! Lin Ping!”
Jim sprints hill, ditch…
“Lin Ping! Shit, Lin Ping!!”

Jim’s lips fizz, hissing
With sick, his kicks
Diminishing…

Jim isn’t fit. His stitch hits –
Jim trips,
Hits bricks; kips.

Jim is sitting.
Singing swifts twist
with skill. Jim, wishing wings,

thinks: “This is it.
Shit. This is it.”
Spliff mist shifts

in his thinking.
Jim’s spirits sink.
“This is it.”

II. Tim’s crib

Trim Tim is chin-lifting in his crib.
Tim digs lifting – it is bliss;
His bitch, Trish, digs Tim’s trim.

His crib is swish, glints with bling.
“Things is sick with Tim, innit”, Trish thinks.
Trim Tim digs Trim Tim.

Trim Tim is skimming Viz, drinking Pimms,
Thinking his shit isn’t stinking.
In spills Lin Ping, Hip Jim’s hip lil’ impish chip.

Lin Ping is tripping, dissing Tim,
Lifting this thing Hip Jim writ:
“This is it! This is it, Trim Tim.

Bring it. Bring it -- Blink’s gig, bitch.”
Blink’s gig? Trim Tim thinks Blink is shit.
Trim Tim thinks Hip Jim thinks Blink is shit.

Is Hip Jim shitting him? “Lin Ping,
Is Hip Jim tripping? Jim ‘n’ Tim is thick, innit?”
Tim thinks this dissing isn’t Jim… Jim is hip,

Jim is chill. This shit isn’t him.
Lin Ping isn’t in Tim’s crib. Lin Ping
Is splitting – hitting it.

Tim thinks, insipid, sips drinks. Sips drinks,
Thinks… it’s Trish! Trish ‘n’ Jim is… Bitch!
“Dim bint! Is this it? Jim ‘n’ Trish, is it?

Shift it! Shift it, bitch! This shit isn’t fitting this pimp!”
Tim hits Trish. Trish lifts it, shifts it… Trim Tim sits.
His spirits sink. ‘This is it’, thinks Tim, ‘this is it…’

Tim is livid. Spinning with it.
Swishing sticks, spitting pins,
Drinking big gins.

Trim Tim kits big. “Blink’s gig is it, Jim?”
Spits Tim, swigging his tin,
Sticking big sticks in his Bim., big pins in his sticks.

“Blink’s gig is it? Fitting. Shit gig, shit prick.
This, Tim’s fist; this, Tim’s stick will hit him stiff…
His bit, Trish, this Tim will kill with his dick…”

Tim’s fit chicks is digging Tim
Spinning his sticks. Pimp Tim is missing this
In his fits thinking stiffing Jim is his fix…

“The trick is this!” Tim hits
With his sticks. “And this!” Tim fits.
His bling crib is in glinting bits.

Spinning his sticks, Tim slips,
Hitting his hip, tripping him.
Tim hits bricks. Tim kips.

‘Shit! Blink’s gig!’ Blinks Tim,
Kipping in bricks, sticks,
Bits of crib bling…

Tim splits, shifts it in his Bim.,
“This pimp is in killing trim”
Thinks Tim, “this pimp

Is giving it with sticks; this pimp
Is finishing it. Hip Jim
Will sink. Tim will win.”

III. Blink’s gig

Jim is thinking ‘miss Blink’s gig,
Miss Blink’s gig, it’s shit!’ ‘til this
Trish chick digs him kipping in his Bim.

‘Tim hit this fit Trish?!’ Thinks Jim
In Blink’s gig. ‘Hitting chicks isn’t in,
Hitting chicks isn’t Hip Jim’s thing.

This Tim, with his bling crib, this Tim
Is in shit!’ Jim sits, blinking; Blink sings
In thick mist. Trish Brings drinks,

Winks, sits with Jim, sings Blink’s hits.
Jim thinks Blink, with Trish, isn’t shit.
“Blink is sick, innit, Trish?” grins Jim.

“Jim, Blink is shit.” Trish winks.
Jim ‘n’ Trish kiss. It’s bliss. In
Slips Tim. Tim sits with Trish ‘n’ Jim.

Kissing, Jim ‘n’ Trish miss him.
Tim grins, thinking ‘this is piss’,
Lifting his stick, pins glinting

In Blink’s gig’s glitz… Hip Jim
Is thinking pimping isn’t him;
His ship is sinking? His pimping ship stinks!

This pimp isn’t pimping.
This pimp digs chicks.
This pimp digs Trish!

With this, Jim is hit with Tim’s stick.
Thick, glinting, Jim spills, blinks, is still.
Tim grins, hits Jim, hits Jim, hits Jim...

Trish is sick. Tim’s stick sticks in Jim.
Trish springs with grim hissing;
Slips in Jim’s ink, spills it –

Tim winks, swings his stick.
Blink isn’t singing.
‘Gig is slipping’, Blink thinks,

Lin Ping zips in, thinking ‘Jim, Jim…’
With Tim lifting his stick, Lin Ping
flings Lin Ping in his ribs,

with wings, thinks Tim, with Lin Ping
hitting him with vim,
spinning him.

Trish sits still. ‘This is sick’, spits Trish,
‘This is sick, Jim. Lin Ping is hitting Tim
In bits with Tim’s stick…’

Jim isn’t with Trish. Jim is slipping,
Finishing his gig. Hip Jim ‘n’ Trim Tim
Spill inks, mixing in pimp slicks.

Jim is sitting with wings,
Thinking ‘is this it?
This isn't it, is it?’ -- his wings itch.

Mists drift think
With Jim’s pissing,
Lifting his rigid digit,

Bitching ‘n’ spitting till
He thinks he spots a light
Like colour after black and white.

Thoughts

2008-04-27T18:09:00.000+01:00

Some thoughts this week that you may have heard before.

1. Sometimes I think the world is a sea of shit, in which drift only a few scattered good souls; other times it seems like a room crowded with good people, but with a few shits who really stink the place out...

2. There is so much self-promotion around these days, but little thought about whether you have a self worth promoting.

3. I am not the first to point this out, but Avram Grant looks like Baron von Greenback from Danger Mouse. Seriously, look:

left: Avram Grant being interviewed by Lee Dixon; right: Baron von Greenback gives a press conference.

Both command legions of EVIL.

Tagged

2008-04-27T13:09:00.000+01:00

April is the cruelest month, breeding admin out of the dead Inland Revenue -- I have therefore been hibernating away from blogworld under a pile of nagging letters and forms, stirring only occasionally in order to issue a paper-ruffling fart, or to complain about the noise or temperature. I had retreated from the blogosphere to hide under a growing pile of arts management task-tedium and programming ennui.

That was until that scurrilous vagabond and angel of the night, Tom Chivers, tagged me. Tagged me with a horrible blogger lergie -- “a lergie, Jim” -- that I now have to inoculate myself against with six bits of personal information. Bah. Here are the rules:

Rules of Tagging:

Post these rules on your blog [well, easy enough…]
Write six random things about yourself in a blog post [oh, crap…]
Tag six people of your own [hell is other people]
Stick in a link for each person tagged [sigh]
Let each person know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog [but then they’ll hate me even more…]
Let the tagger know your entry is up [oh, I will do… oh yes, I will do that… he will pay…]

So, here you are:

ONE
I was arrested once in my late teens, but only spent one night in jail. Luckily, no one pressed charges. The offence was small and twatty.

TWO
I support Spurs, which I am starting to feel is too much of an awkward insight into my personality.

THREE
I was nearly expelled from school twice, but didn’t know this until two years after I left, when I got drunk with an old English teacher at her house party.

FOUR
There are only two people in this world who I would murder, given the opportunity.

FIVE
I sweat too much when I eat curry.

SIX
The first time I was ever on a plane was when I was 22 -- the pilot let me sit in the cockpit. It was ace.

And I tag:

Todd Swift
Chris Gribble
Luke Wright
Joe Dunthorne
George Szirtes
Jimmy Homunculus

… and now begone, Dear Reader -- Curiosa shall return to its entropic ice cave, to living off the carcasses of abandoned baby seals and hunching at night over a single dwindling flame …

Readings, readings, readings...

2008-03-11T08:46:00.001Z

Borek limbers up for another reading...

This week, I are been mostly doing... this:

IN SHORT:

Event: Donjong Heights, London Launch Party and Reading.
DATE: WEDS 12TH MARCH
Time: 7:00pm doors, 7:30/8:00pm start.
Venue: The Gramaphone, 60-62 Commercial Street, E1 6LT.

Presenting Ben Borek's critically acclaimed Donjong Heights, a quirky, at times hilarious, at times moving, rip-roaring novel in verse set in a South London tower block.

Toby Litt dubbed Donjong Heights 'a truly fantastic, wholly unexpected, London book' (Time Out) and chose it as one of his Christmas Reads for Radio4's Open Book. Visit www.eggboxpublishing.com to find out more.

A BIT MORE INFORMATION:

London Word Festival invites you to join the celebrations at this sound-enhanced reading of Donjong Heights, the hit novel in verse by exciting new poet Ben Borek.

Joining Ben to launch Donjong Heights is Norwich-based words/music collective Stop Sharpening Your Knives (www.stopsharpeningyourknives.co.uk):

"A remarkable gathering of emerging poets"
– Lavinia Greenlaw

"Individualistic, anarchic, dissident, argumentative, fun. I wish I'd written some of these myself"
– Hugo Williams

This evening will feature music from...

the fantastic Charly Helen:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=106801727

the charmingly talented The Middle Ones:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=48354533

the wondrous Gabriel Norland:
http://www.myspace.com/djsfromouterspace
http://www.myspace.com/finkin
http://www.theratfinks.co.uk/

and readings from: Jack Underwood, Sam Riviere, Tim Cockburn, Mat Gregory, Agi Lehoczky and maybe Nathan Hamilton.

Copies of both Donjong Heights (£10) and the SSYK anthology (£4) will be on sale. And you will buy them.

Here is the venue:
http://www.thegramaphone.co.uk/

And this is how to get there:
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=533766&y=181625&z=0&sv=E1+6LT&st=2&pc=E1+6LT&mapp=newmap.srf&searchp=newsearch.srf

Or stick this in Google Maps:
60-62 Commercial Street E1 6LT

For more info about LWF:

http://www.londonwordfestival.com

To buy tickets in advance (a mere £3, to cover venue):

http://www.wegottickets.com/f/216

And here is a facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=8539069842&ref=nf

Hopefully see you there. Thanks for listening. Enjoy.

New York 1

2008-02-13T23:10:00.001Z

You can hear it in my accent when I talk

Today was my birthday. But enough about that. I am feeling ill. But enough about that also. No, rather, this: as regular visitors who like working out averages will have noticed, I have left a larger gap than even my own already large average period of time left between blog posts. Regular readers will also have noticed that I regularly start blog posts with an apology for gaps in between blogging and that the reason given is normally that I've 'been busy'. Anyway (I also say 'anyway' redundantly too much -- and 'also'), what's the reason this time?

Well, I've been busy. But, also, this time, I've been busy on holiday! On holiday in New York (friends will know I've been keeping this quiet). And a smashing place it is too. I'm here for two weeks and, while this is largely a vacation (as they say here in New York), I have also been learning plenty at the TOC08 conference (more -- quite a lot more -- about this soon, when I get round to writing up my notes. Why didn't I just blog direct? Well, it made it quite hard to concentrate and my laptop is having battery problems...). It has all been quite an experience and I'll have something by way of a coherent and interesting summary to post about it soon, after some processing and cross-referencing time. Once my brain stops hurting, and once I stop coughing and sneezing all over the place.

Anyway, also on my birthday (which I don't like to mention), a little present from Tom Chivers: he has here revealed himself as a man of virtue, reason, and a highly developed critical acumen, by picking one Mr. Ben Borek as a literary star of 2008. He also, among others, picked some guy called Joe Dunthorne, whoever the hell he is. Never heard of him... he wrote something about Submarines, I think... he looks a bit fishy to me... kind of like a more stylish, better looking worzel gummidge...

And, as we're on the subject of people who look like other people, I realised today that Leonard Nimoy looks a little bit like Bruce Willis. This struck me as I regarded a photo of the former, while thinking of the latter (for my own, private, reasons...), on the New York subway...

Left: Bruce Willis in Star Trek fancy dress; Right: Leonard Nimoy in a hat.

Seriously, look at them: stick a bowl cut and some pointy ears on Bruce, or shave Leonard's head...

Yeah? You see it now? Well, at the very least they share the same look of slightly vacant, moody constipation...

Poem: Lunatics

2008-01-22T17:12:00.001Z

‘Just look at this’,
you insist -- we’re both up now
to witness the bathtub
catch luminous, pale blue.

We’re packed and ready for the move.
Our cul de sac
sleeps on, detached
from what has to happen here.

The window is closed
to less than half a moon.
We are surprised
at how much light gets through.

Poetry: Diversifying

2008-01-07T16:02:00.001Z

Borek: diversifying

The life of your average poet can be difficult financially. It is prudent to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket; to look for other means of gainful employment, or to look out for gaps elsewhere, in other markets, to augment your income streams before diversifying your investment portfolio (or something). Running courses, teaching, working in schools -- all of these help one to earn a crust when book sales don't provide enough and advances are almost completely non-existent. For the majority, writing poetry alone isn't going to make you rich. Not yet anyway -- not these days. So, think part-time work. Think steady arts admin jobs in slightly bad faith. Think writing on the side. Think pensions. Think investment. Think nest eggs.

Take our very own Ben Borek as a proud example. Borek -- recent recipient of a Society of Authors grant to help him with his next work -- rather than fritter or throw all his grant money away on something ridiculous like books, booze, or hookers, has instead used it to open his very own Polish supermarket. Called 'Borek', it is a thrilling and well-stocked purveyor of wholesome wholesale. It has fine lines of jackets, jumpers, sickly-looking caged animals and scarves. More worrying is the perhaps ill-advised line of beachwear -- but these are early days for Ben's career in retail. He is sure to go far.

And Ben isn't the only one at it. Not only individual rising poetry stars of the near future are concerned for their long term financial security, some of the bigger players are also branching out. On a recent jaunt around Norwich city centre, I spotted evidence that Faber and Faber too -- which supports a pretty healthy poetry list, to say the least -- is concerned by what is likely to be one of the worst years generally for book sales. They have wisely extended their business into the construction and roofing trade. Good move, guys...

Poem: Find -- draft

2008-01-07T12:10:00.002Z

What used to be a bird
lies, bashful,
ruined in snow.

It is reluctant to speak
on our night of fine ideas.
‘It comes to this’ it might have said
another time, if we’d have listened,
less full of ourselves and song.

Good News

2007-12-19T22:15:00.000Z

At the risk of appearing to have a one-track mind, here is a little bit more information about the phenomena that is Donjong Heights...

We've gone and sold out again, and demand still seems to be slowly increasing. This is a little strange and suggests to me, like oddly shaped vegetables often do, that the world has gone mad. Not that people wanting to buy copies of Donjong is in any way deranged or demonic (it is in fact very sensible). It's just that, as a publisher of poetry, I'm really not used to it.

It has actually turned my thinking on its head. I used to sit and wonder, each night (well, some nights), just why it was that people seemed so ready to send us their manuscripts and yet so reluctant to buy our books... 'why is this, Lord?' I pleaded. 'Why do they not understand?' I used to sit and hope and pray that, one day, the Poets Out There would realise that, if they all just bought a decent number of good poetry books regularly, and in the right way, then there would be plenty of money in it to go round.

Now, instead, each morning I check orders and inquiries, nervous that more will arrive and I will have to let down people who are eager for a piece of the Donjong Heights Egg Box action. 'Apologies, but we've run out of stock again... we won't have any more copies until early January... please pre-order now to avoid disappointment...' I witter, I worry... 'Why won't they stop buying it?!'... I exclaim, I weep...

But how joyous it is to have people so keen to buy our books! Good people. Sensible people with taste. God bless them, every one.

So, this is causing something of a paradigm shift in my well-maintained and scrupulously defended Bleak World View. You watch... the next time I get on a train, it'll arrive on time and the people on it will all be pleasant and tolerable. Everyone will start recycling regularly and the ice caps will start to re-freeze. It is all very unsettling and causes sleepless nights and worry. I mean, if things like this keep on happening, what will I have left to complain about? How will I get by, with only good news? What will keep me angry; keep me busy...

And there is more! It is my very great pleasure to inform both of you that Ben Borek has been awarded a £2000 grant by the Society of Authors to help him with the completion of his second book. It is a further shock to the system. This is, if I'm not very much mistaken, one of those rare times where an award has been given, without question, to someone who really, really deserves it... bloody hell.

To top it all off, Spurs have won their last two games and are in the semi-final of the League Cup. This is just bonkers and will not last. I can be sure of this much at least.

NEWS FLASH

2007-12-09T21:54:00.000Z

eggcellent news

Donjong Heights chosen by Toby Litt as one of his Christmas Fiction Picks for 2007 (alongside Don Delillo and A. L. Kennedy) on Radio4's Open Book.

Listen to the programme here.

This is splendid. Eggstremely good news. We are eggstatic... eggcetera...

Spotty itinerant

2007-12-01T00:57:00.000Z

beetling about

Breathing space. But only briefly, before a busy few days off out and about again. What's more, I will be taking lengthy train journeys (one to and from Wales, for a board meeting) so expect to return about mid next week with fresh tales of frustration and woe. Dreary and unrepentant announcements of delays; loud twats on 'phones in the quiet zone; a generally cacophonous aviary of buzzes, whistles, beeps and mobile drivel: the mere prospect makes me feel ill...

Brief Donjong Heights update: there will be a few readings in Feb/March sometime in London and Norwich, we think, so you will be able to get your copies signed by Borek's own newly gold-dusted pen-hand soon (stay tuned). Ben will also be hitting the airwaves, appearing on BBC Radio3's The Verb in February. This is both splendid and tremendous. After a rigorous and protracted tussle over contract riders with the BBC, a free prawn mayonnaise sandwich has been promised to the author in return for his presence on the show. Definitely prawn - we aren't being fucked about with shrimp. However, demands for peeled grapes and shaved kiwis (the fruit) have been met with stony silence. We're holding out. He has also been nicely reviewed here.

The next print run will be back from the printers next Tuesday (they tell us, anyway...) so we'll finally be able to fulfill the advance orders we've had through and get them out into the world again. If you're hanging on for yours, you'll have to be quick as it probably won't be long before they all go again... should have printed more than I have, but forgot to.

In breaking news: I have recently turned spotty. It is like being a teenager all over again. No spots to speak of for nigh on a decade and now, all of a sudden, three all at once. Big bastards too -- they took some shifting. It is the post-three-month-long-event-system-overload taking hold, I think: New Writing Season is now over and the body has had enough. Well, my pores seem to have anyway. Normally I just get shirty with friends and pick needless fights, but now spots too. Perhaps as a karmic penance for said predilection. However, it was a good run of workshops and people seem to have got a lot out of it, which feels good (I'm sure you care). Highlights: playing on the harpsichord in the gallery at The King of Hearts and happy customers. Lowlights: running out of coffee and whining punters.

I have also recently discovered from the River Nene Evil Veg Emporium that brussel sprouts look like this. That is: alien and foul. I'm not sure what I expected, but this was a surprise. Why was I not told this before? And what was I thinking? Perhaps that they grew individually like virulent fungus on the big forearms of afflicted farmers? These farmers might then have had to twist them off each week, one by one, and keep them in a box; their misery only slightly alleviated by the bonus afforded by so hoarding them and then being able to sell them to a rash and crazed public, eager for vegetal flatulence at Christmas. Something like this.

Donjong Heights Reviewed

2007-11-20T22:58:00.000Z

truly fantastic, says Toby Litt

Ben Borek's Donjong Heights was reviewed in this week's TimeOut: London. For those who missed it, here is Toby Litt's review, quoted in full (yes, I'm prepared to type the whole thing out in full for you good, good people -- I'm a little sad, I'll admit). It is a great review. It demonstrates excellent powers of discernment and extremely good taste on the part of its author, I think:

'The Onegin Stanza'. It sounds like a title that Robert Ludlum would have rejected at first draft. In fact, it's a particularly exacting verse form -- one with 14 lines (just like a sonnet), eight or nine syllables in each (more like a hymn) and a complex rhyme scheme intermixing couplets, quatrains and sestets. In other words, it's a bit of a headmasher. Hard enough, you'd think, to write a single obedient stanza. But to bash out a whole novel? Pushkin managed it, supremely, in the eponymous 'Eugene Onegin'. Twenty years ago, Vikram Seth had a very decent stab in 'The Golden Gate'. And now Ben Borek, a recent graduate of the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing MA, has taken the form and done it right and proper.

Here's the first of those stanzas: 'South London has its reputation:/No tube, a multitude of guns,/And hence this Johnsonesque quotation:/"When Peckham tires one simply runs/On up to Hoxton and carouses/In trendy nouveau-cool warehouses/And listens to Electro Funk/Affecting toned down retro-punk."/Don't get me wrong, it's no Soweto/Down South, it's not all crack and pillage --/Just take a look at Dulwich Village --/But for the common man it's Netto/Not Conran, tea not mochaccino/And Asda jeans, not Valentino.'

Donjong Heights is a tower block in south London. Within it dwells our hero, an unnamed young man who has been told by his doctor, one William Wyatt, that he is definitely going to die. His heart is rapidly slowing down, and cannot be stopped from stopping. And so, before he shuffles off, our hero decides to have a big party (Christmas is handily coming) and invite all the weirdest and wonderfullest residents of Donjong Heights.

Critics often maunder on about promise, forgetting that anyone who merits being called 'promising' in such a crowded scene has already achieved quite a lot. Equipped with the kind of verbal chutzpah that Paul Muldoon half-inched from Auden, and Auden nabbed from Byron, Ben Borek has a contemporary flow all his own. At one point he protests 'I know that I'm no Martin Amis', but there's something of 'London Fields' in Borek's mix of the demotic and the hieratic. This is a truly fantastic, and wholly unexpected, London book.

Toby Litt, TimeOut 5/6 stars

Dear goodly readers, if that wasn't enough good news, then I can also tell you that we have more copies arriving from the printers soon! Next week, in fact, so buy your copies now through the Egg Box website, before they all disappear again...

The Charms of Another

2007-11-08T20:38:00.000Z

Dear blog, I have neglected you again of late and I am sorry. It's not you, it's me. I've... well, you see, I have found another. Another whose charms are temporarily greater. I have strayed and now have a Facebook profile. It is with this new outlet for my narcissistic need to declare myself to all as if they really care that I have been playing, carefree and newly joyful. And in the meantime I have left you, left you stranded and all alone in the world...

Don't get me wrong, I've thought about you. I've thought about you a lot. It's just, well... you know how it is. I didn't mean it. I didn't mean to stay up all night playing Scrabulous with them. And apparently this obsession, no... this... this dalliance... apparently it only normally lasts about nine weeks. Nine weeks in the flush of youthful Facebook love. Then I'll probably settle down, so I've been told, into a comfortable Facebook middle age in which I just use it to slightly augment my real world social life. So, you know, hang in there... I'll be back more regularly now, I'm pretty sure. No, sorry, I haven't written anything new or interesting to show you either. It's just been one of those periods.

But hey, thanks for publicising Ben's book for me in the meantime. That was really great of you. Did I tell you: it's sold out! Yes, already. Don't worry, I've scheduled a re-print. Oh but look, now you're crying... I'm sorry. I'll try not to spend too much time with the other pages. But hey, it's not like it means anything and, you know, it's not like I've been mucking about with that grubby Myspace either. Well, not yet.. woah, now, don't get angry. No, no... that's not fair, you... I didn't... now, look, it's a free country... look, you don't own me, OK? Yeah, I'll try to keep in touch more from now on, alright? Oh yeah? Well, too bad, that's just the best I can do, so deal with it.

Donjong Heights: The Borek Has Landed!

2007-10-22T12:01:00.000+01:00

My, what a fine jacket

O come all ye faithful...

Rejoice, rejoice, for Egg Box's latest release, Donjong Heights, is here! And this one is a gorgeous illustrated hardback. If we do say so ourselves, it is unlikely you'll find a more enjoyable book of poetry this year, or one for a better price.

Donjong Heights is a, by turns, hilarious and moving mock heroic verse novella from Ben Borek. Written in Onegin stanzas, after Pushkin, it is set in a tower block in South East London and follows one young man's quest to host a jolly Christmas party on what might be his last day on earth.

The cast contains a wonderful array of eccentric characters and will have you laughing and crying all over your turkey, sherry and brussel sprouts -- it is the perfect Christmas offering.

Ben Borek was born in Camberwell in 1980 and graduated with distinction from the UEA Creative Writing MA in 2004. He is an immensely talented young poet who already demonstrates an impressive command of form and a pretty large dose of wit. Remember: you saw him here first.

This is a chance for all you jolly faithful to buy your copy now, direct from us in our store, before word gets out and they all disappear. Our store is the best outlet for us and it is a snip at only £7.99 (with free P&P to all UK orders). A bargain at twice the price. That's cutting our own throats.

Or browse and then order from your nearest bookshop, preferably Waterstones.

As a last resort, it is available through Amazon (but we -- author and publisher alike -- earn a lot less from these sales!)

As Ben is currently in hiding in Poland, there are no readings scheduled until well into the New Year. This is for his own as well as public safety: his last reading gave a priest third degree burns, caused the collapse of a building in Ipswich and resulted in the death of a bullock along with three inattentive front row audience members. So, if you want more Borek before then, you'll have to get yourself a copy fast.

With slightly premature season's greetings,

Egg Box Publishing

Something has hatched... Something is hatching...
www.eggboxpublishing.com

The Silence of the Long Distance Blogger

2007-10-21T11:19:00.000+01:00

'scuse me sir, you've had yer fun, now ...

Hi all. Well, I've been away for a while again. Away from my blog, that is -- I've still been sat in front of the computer occasionally, but I wasn't blogging. No, I wasn't doing that either, you filthy monsters. I have been taking some time making a few important decisions. These are decisions which I still haven't made -- they're quite difficult ones. And I will leave them in vague and general terms for now -- until I decide. Instead I will procrastinate here and blog to remind myself to make some decisions soon.

I have also been sulking. Sulking and disillusioned. Disillusioned because, dear readers, of this:

******

[received Sep 25th]
Hello,

Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that content in your blog:

curiosahamiltona.blogspot.com

allegedly infringes upon the copyrights of others. The content in question
is located in the following posts:

http://curiosahamiltona.blogspot.com/2007/08/amazing-amazing-science_26.html

The notice that we received, with any personally identifying
information removed, will be posted online by a service called Chilling
Effects, and we will send you the link of this notice. We do this in
accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for
online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement.
Please see http://www.educause.edu/Browse/645?PARENT_ID=254 for more
information about the DMCA, and see
http://www.google.com/blogger_dmca.html for the process that Blogger
requires in order to make a DMCA complaint.

We are asking that you please remove the allegedly infringing content in
your blog. If you do not do this within the next 3 days (by 9/28/07), we
will be forced to remove the posts in question. If we did not do so, we
would be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its
merits.

We can reinstate this content into your blog upon receipt of a counter
notification pursuant to sections 512(g)(2) and (3) of
the DMCA. For more information about the requirements of a counter
notification and a link to a sample counter notification, see
http://www.google.com/blogger_dmca.html#counter.

Please note that repeated violations to our Terms of Service may result in
further remedial action taken against your Blogger account.

If you have legal questions about this notification, you should retain
your own legal counsel. If you have any other questions about this
notification, please let us know.

Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

******

Can you believe it?! I couldn't. Apologies to those of you who didn't read the original post -- none of this will make much sense to you. Anyway, I replied with this:

******

[sent Oct 2]

Hi there --

I am yet to receive the link to the specific complaint (with contact details removed) about the content on my blog that is supposed to be infringing copyright. Perhaps it came through as spam and has been deleted? As the nature of the post was essentially parodic, and I think I attributed all quoted material to their original sources, I am keen to read this complaint before I make a decision about whether to officially contest it -- or perhaps it would be possible to simply alter the content, or attribute a source, so it is no longer infringing copyright?

Obviously, I understand that you may have to remove it in the meantime to protect yourselves; this is rather unfortunate, however, as it's basically a malicious complaint designed to defend the work of what are, in my opinion, con artists and quack scientists exploiting the placebo effect to sell dodgy merchandise.

Many thanks,
Nathan
Norwich, UK

******

I then received this in reply:

******

[received Oct 5]
Hello,

As mentioned in our previous email, we work with a third party to post
DMCA notices we receive. The notice we received because of the content on
your site can be found here (once the notice has been posted):

http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=4233

We have had to remove the content mentioned in the complaint from your
blog. If we did not do so, we would be subject to a claim of copyright

infringement, regardless of its merits.

Thanks for your understanding.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

******

It still has not appeared, so I haven't been able to view the specific complaint. Please feel free to check it yourselves and let me know if you see it appear any time soon (I may forget to check). In the meantime I have sent these two emails:

******

[sent Oct 20]
1.
Hello again,

Since you removed the post in question, there appear to be problems with the adwords and google ads functions etc on my blog -- I wonder if you could help sort this out, or let me know why/how to fix it?

Ta,

N

2.
Also, this notice is still not available -- so, I am still unable to see what the specific complaint was in order to contest it ...

Ta again,
N

******

Now, my beef here isn't with Blogger -- they have to protect themselves -- it's more to do with the fact of who they are forced into the position of protecting. It just goes to show that the internet is far from the free and wonderfully anti-establishment place that so many have it cracked up to be.

It also raises a few questions: 1. Why on earth would these people care about a minor blogger in Norwich, Norfolk, England, UK? Unless they are more than a little paranoid and pretty small-scale themselves. 2. Just who are these laws designed to protect? 3. Isn't 'Chilling Effects' a rather silly name? 4. When is my blog going to be properly fixed so I can make my millions from google ads?

As I said, the whole process has left me feeling disillusioned and my blog violated -- as you can see, they have forcibly removed the post and they have left the place in a bit of a mess. I wish they'd tidied up after themselves, I really do.

Madness, I tell you. And all very, very odd and sinister, if you ask me. I post all this here as an education and a warning... I am now imagining a courtroom scene... 'You can't handle the truth!', I bellow... oh yes...

******

Just this moment received this [23:00 on Monday evening]:

Hello Nathan,

Chilling Effects has been experiencing a high volume of legal complaints
lately and therefore the process is taking longer than usual. Please allow
up to a few weeks for the complaint that we received to be uploaded at
this link.

Thank you for your patience in this regard.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

******

A high volume of legal complaints recently? Somebody out there is getting all litigious in the blogosphere... you have been warned, intrepid webbers...

The Bloody Trains I

2007-10-02T21:35:00.000+01:00

signaling problems at Ipswich

Apologies for the silence (to the bizarrely increasing number of you out there): I have been on holiday in the South of France and then Dublin. And a lovely time it was too. We pedallo-ed down a deep, sheer gorge cut by bright blue water, ate cheese, drank fine wine, swam, took long walks along streams and by waterfalls, ate more cheese, slept, drank really good coffee and champagne, spoke French, caught up with old and much-missed friends, drove around spectacular hillsides, put the world to rights into long balmy nights under clearer skies full of familiar stars ...

But I am now back and I am ill. I have caught a cold from a Frenchman. Or it could have been an Irishman. No, I think it was a Frenchman. If feels like a French cold -- slightly phlegmy and located mainly at the back of the throat. This isn't quite the perfect homecoming I'd hoped for. After my break I expected to rush back, fully rested and newly upbeat and triumph -- just like Lewis did at the weekend. Instead, I have immediately hit a brick wall of physical limitation. Sometimes I really wish that my brain, along with being jacked-up to a computer to help with data storage and retrieval, could be transplanted into a never-tiring robotic host, rather than this cranky and unreliable bundle of flesh and bone I'm lumbered with. Other times this seems a bad idea.

As a result of this illness perhaps, a concept I am coming more and more familiar with is being time poor (and yet not feeling rich enough to justify it). Certainly I am earning more than I have before -- but that wasn't hard. It's just that there are so many things to do, or get done, or to see or go to, or things that one wants to do but can't ... Fine, if I was a high-flying lawyer I'd expect time poverty as a natural side-effect of employment. But working in the literary arts? Is the current time-sacrifice really worth the resultant wage packet? I keep thinking. Often it is a 'yes', but lately less so. Perhaps I just need to downshift a bit somehow. But then I need to earn what I do to pay the bills I have. And, then again, is there really a problem? I think perhaps instead I need an assistant or something. Yes, that's it: I need staff. What they'd do I don't know, and I couldn't pay them a bean, but certainly some sort of delegation is needed without loss of earnings. Hmmm. Well, that's currently impossible. Oh well. No, I probably just need more holidays, more often, and for longer. And no illness.

This is all by way of setting up a further complaint: After a full week taking planes between different countries (via Ryan Air) and cars, trains and buses to places within them -- each of them more or less punctual and all of them faster than their equivalents in the Eastern Region -- a word or two about just how appalling and third world the service offered by One Railways in this region, I think. Four hours it took from Stansted to Norwich on two bus replacement services. Four hours. Then, the very next day we were delayed for an hour outside Ipswich, due to unspecified 'severe signaling problems' on our way to a friend's reading in London -- all but five minutes of which we missed as a result. Ongoing engineering works they cite as the reason, while charging us stupid amounts of money.

When we asked on the 'phone if these ongoing engineering works would result in a high speed service between Norwich and London, or anywhere else in the country for that matter, this side of hell freezing we were met with sustained and almost hysterical laughter. For a full two minutes the lady on the 'phone laughed, then: 'We can only hope', she said. What's so damn funny? No, we can do a little more than hope, I think. We can, for example, spend the money extorted through the inflated fares to build something useful, can't we? Yes? Why is it so difficult to put together a decent rail service in Norfolk? Need I point out that the region is fucking flat?! No mountains to drill through or build over. A dearth of huge lakes to circumnavigate. No bloody sea to tunnel under. No, it's perfect rail-laying terrain. And yet it's taking them years ... and years to do what? Replace the current service with exactly the same useless one?! ... I would have said, if she wasn't just the person who sold the tickets. So, thanks to One Railways, now my holiday is over, I'm already stressed and full of resentment for the region and the nation as a whole. It took one day, one hour and thirty five minutes after landing at Stansted.

But, if we had a high-speed link to London, Norwich would lose all of its characteristic charm, people say. Rubbish. If that supposed characteristic charm or idiosyncratic whatever actually amounted to anything it'd happily survive a few high-speed train links to Other Places. Seriously, if I could point to one thing that might be holding the whole region back it would be the trains. How much time do we spend on them, going nowhere, when that time could be spent on other, more useful things? How difficult does it make arranging others to visit the region? How long is spent traveling to and from meetings? And how much money does that time equate to?

But then I think to myself:

... and suddenly I don't mind so much. This actually brought a tear to my eye. Moved by shadow puppetry, eh? I am growing weak in my infirmity, I think. No, I just need more holidays, more often. Yes, that is my new month's resolution.

End of Days 4

2007-09-18T22:31:00.000+01:00

For some reason beyond me and beyond science the blog publishing window that shows up after I click on 'publish post' is now in German. Why is this, I demand? This is the work of some demon. The most curious thing about it is that, the first time it popped up, I understood it perfectly and didn't bat an eyelid. This is strange as I have never learnt German. It must be that I am possessed by a German. For, when J viewed the same screen, she saw only English! And I'll tell you what else is awry, brave Norfolkian sages... look at this.

It has since been filed under 'dead people, risen' in my soon-to-be-comprehensive database of evidence for the oncoming end of the world. And have you ever seen a more dark and corrupted form than this foul vegetable beast, recently arrived from the River Nene Emporium of Evil and Dread:

evil vegetable

This 'fennel', I tell you, ate a cat. The noise was horrible: like air slowly being let out of a balloon. After this it began to double in size every hour before if left the premises and attacked a school bus. It is filed under 'vegetable, perennial herb' and is not to be trusted. Its common method of attack is to mislead by casually asking for directions (often for the coast) or the time. Be on your guard, good brethren of the dark tide.

Blogged Off?

2007-09-17T10:55:00.000+01:00

What rubbish

Apologies, dear reader, for my absence of late. It is because I forgot to blog: the one flaw in my otherwise full-proof blogging premise. I have also been very, even unhealthily, busy. Plus I was stunned. Yes, dear, loyal, and presumably mentally frail, reader, stunned. Stunned into silence, by this. On reflection, I think the delight at seeing France so thoroughly embarrassed outweighs the disappointment that it had to be at the hands of the 'plucky Scots' scrapping away with boring football and being called 'brave' again. I was also distracted and in jittery hiding for a few days because of this headline, then realised my mistake. And this hasn't helped my mood any. Plus this had me dismayed and appalled. Ach.

Anyway, enough sports rubbish. I have also had a lot of things to do. One of these things was a character test for a staff away day that caused me to fear a public revelation as being unsuited for Any Job on Earth. Until now, I had kept this quiet pretty successfully. But, upon revealing that my favourite dog was The Littlest Hobo and outlining which of a range of famous psychopaths I would most like to sit next to on a trip home from London to Norwich (rather than the usual ones) I now fear for my position and economic security. This personality test, along with a great S/S/Y/K reading (well done to all of us), lots of other people's poetry to (not) read, taxes to (not) do, a GFTA application to (not) fill in, a holiday to arrange, event to (just about) manage, a new website to orchestrate, and sundry other things, led me astray and obsessing about the (so-called) 'real' world.

So, on to more important matters. Another reason for my relative (welcome?) silence is that I have been doing battle with the filthy, evil forces of Brainwave Technology advertising that have proliferated on this fair blog since I posted something about the 'Writers Mind CD' -- a situation I have now exacerbated by mentioning it again. This destructive and wearying struggle has raged in the bowels of the Google Adsense filtering system and is ongoing. The fact that they have the resources to advertise so pandemically tells of just how many people there must be 'out there' who want to augment their brains in apparently easy, no hassle ways. Why not just read some books or do some courses, you feckless berks? I feel like saying. But this is unfair and perhaps even bigoted. It is actually just sad how many deluded sorts (unlike me) there must be out there; how easily they are led into bad faith and poor purchasing by unscrupulous tripe-merchants. If people keep advertising this stuff, the ads, or finding the funds to pay for the ads, must keep working. Alas. Then again, I wonder how much it actually costs to advertise ... I should find this out as it might be useful (or does anyone know already, to save me the hassle?!) ...

But the point I am wandering around to is that the internet really is feeling, more and more, as if it needs a good bit of house-clearing. This meant that I began to wonder again about my own apparent need to add my own significant byteage of waffle to the ever-swelling bank of web-based banality. This general manifest obsession with self-documentation and information storage -- holiday photos; twittering blogs (yes, I know); holiday films; unreliable encyclopedia sites etc -- it has me thinking that 1) people clearly feel the need, in the absence of meaning, to document their lives in the hope that this will perhaps speak of their presence on earth as sheer weight of numbers of population make it harder for any one individual to feel they effect real change or any impact at all and 2) there needs to be more in the way of quality control and editorial input or direction somewhere and somehow. At the moment, surfing the web often feels like walking through litter-strewn and badly graffitti-ed districts with as much carelessly strewn junk as useful or interesting civic works or enjoyable stuff. Hmm. And would this blog, therefore, be the equivalent of, say, a mouldy pizza crust on a Monday morning? Or (dare I dream) a crisp twenty pound note discovered tucked, unexpectedly, under someone's disordered and discarded newspaper? Reader, I do not know. But answers may appear here.

Hamilton Triumphs Again

2007-09-08T15:43:00.000+01:00

HarperCollins put faith in Hamilton. No, calm down friends and rivals, this peppy headline is, once again, only referring to the world famous racing talent, Lewis. Although, with the arena slightly closer to home, the brief, self-deluding little boost of encouragement was that much more pleasant and the pulse rate quickened a little more than usual. Alas, however, 'tis not, nor is it ever likely to be, so. But many thanks go to Flat Out for spotting and forwarding me the headline. I really can't imagine there'll be much to learn from his life story, though. Other than how great it is to be rich after being well supported from an early age. And, of course, what HarperCollins will now be hoping for is a title win or, failing that, a tragic and spectacular crash like Senna's to really push the sales. Actually, no, the crash would be the best option, with a title win a close second. This is England, after all ...

End of Days 3?

2007-09-06T11:07:00.000+01:00

timorous wee beastie

It is true that Norfolk is a strange place. As well as being the international centre of the rapidly approaching and accelerating apocalypse, which I have proved here in detailed and scientific previous posts, it has, as a result, some pretty strange wildlife. About this time of year, the days begin to shorten and the weather cools. All manner of wee beasties try to gain entry to the domestic idyll and spoil an otherwise pristine, calm and human realm. I photographed this little devil trying to gain desperate access to our snug flat by means of the catflap in our (first floor -- see previous posts) bedroom window. It is a hairbrush. A rare breed of Norfolk fauna, possibly of the order erinaceidae.

Understandably, this has perplexed me as, previously, I thought hairbrushes to be a little further down the ontological scale. Yet clearly this one can climb walls, dash across rooftops and respond to changes in the climate. Sadly, however, by the time I found this little guy, it was dead -- stiff as a brush. It was an ex-brush. Gone to meet its maker in Taiwan. Tragically thwarted fighting for a place in the warm. A bit like a poet standing at the edges of a literary awards ceremony. But not very much like it. What is irrefutably true beyond all scientific carping, though, is that hairbrushes are coming to life. There must be hundreds of these critters stirring or marching all over the broads. They must have bred from one carelessly tossed aside on a windy family jaunt.

This is all further evidence for my database of the corruptive and disturbing forces of evil at work in our county. J insisted, coughing and sneezing, that she left the brush there simply as a means by which to ventilate the room after I sprayed deodorant liberally all over myself and everything else in the morning rush, but I know that she is just trying to shelter me from an unpleasant truth.

And it seems the rest of the country is now also slowly waking up to Norfolk's role in the end of the world as we have known it. Those clever sorts in London have realised it too. The evidence? It is now faster to travel, by train, from London to Paris than it is from London to Norwich. This is a clear demonstration of the fact that Londoners are evacuating while they still can -- dangerously close as they are -- and trying, along with the rest of the country, through One Railway, to keep us cut-off. It is a strategy (a subtle one, I'll give them that) of self-preservation. But I have spotted it. They'll be turning round all the street signs and pretending they don't understand our accents next. And sensibly so! Luckily, I have the internet through which to keep up to date with these developments, and through which I can still warn the world.

And, in our vegetable box this week, and now filed in the database under 'vegetables, root', further proof of River Nene's dark role in all of this. A potato, horned like the head of an earless and demon rabbit. Although, again, J disagrees:

Proof: filed under 'vegetable, root'.

Poem: Reading -- draft

2007-09-02T10:12:00.003+01:00

Not so long ago, daylight and the hour
in long shadow cross our road,
yellowed at an edging now.
‘Can you see? The gathered cloud,
its pink and reds – that hedge – as if on fire?’

You turn a page to all of it.
And ‘did you see?
The way lightning hit the park,
the way everything just lit up?’

S/S/Y/K

2007-08-31T16:48:00.000+01:00

this be the flyer

Dear cherished and loyal readers, here is a little information about a few readings approaching that might tickle your fancy-bones. Three more opportunities to see these happy few, this band of brothers and sisters, read; three more chances to buy more copies than you need; three more chances to listen to the music of their fellow throngers. What more could you ever wish for? Apart from four more chances. Read on, read on and find out more (such as time, place, and other quite useful information):

We're pleased to announce the launch for our 2nd anthology of poems & art, S/S/Y/K (2). The event will be held at The Albany, 240 Great Portland Street (W1W 5QU, nearest tube: Great Portland Street) on Thursday the 6th of September from 7.30 pm. Over the course of the evening there'll be readings from the contributors (Jack Underwood, Agnes Lehoczky, Tim Cockburn, Sam Riviere, Matthew Gregory, Nathan Hamilton, Hayley Buckland) as well as music from King & the Olive Fields, Mat Riviere & Charlotte Morris. And, of course, copies of S/S/Y/K (2) will be available, all shiny & hot-off-the-press. It would be great if you could come and join us for a fun & celebratory evening of poems & music!

Further Norwich readings on our latest 'mini-tour':
22nd September @ The Norwich Arts Centre
7th October @ The Norwich Fringe Festival

More details of these nearer the time.

All three to be held in this very same year of 2007.

Accept no pale imitations.

Warm wishes, SSYK

End of Days 2

2007-08-21T21:43:00.001+01:00

The database for the body of evidence in support of my search for further proof that we are reaching the End of Days and that Norwich is the epicentre of the oncoming apocalypse has recently been expanded from mad people and insects to include vegetables. Specifically, carrots. Previously, your blogger may have mentioned, or rather suggestively recommended, that the local organic home delivery service offered by River Nene is a convenient, environmentally sound and healthy option for stocking your kitchen with dietary essentials. This was by means of craftily drawing brief and apparently inconsequential reference to a delicious dish I ate recently containing chard. This was a naive error of judgment for which I apologise.

It is now my considered opinion, based on evidence I will present here, that these River Nene-ers are a nefarious bunch of gene-manipulating demons and devil worshippers, grimly intent on bringing about the End of Norfolk and The End of the World. That they expect a respectable and thoughtful business initiative front will ward off prying local eyes for just long enough to complete their evil plans also makes them liars. Big ones. What cause do I have for this potentially libelous claim? Well, just after unpacking our vegetables today, J and I spotted this dirty little bastard:

evil bid for freedom, to do evil

This corrupt and sinister little taproot demigod is here snapped shortly before it set upon our fresh sirloin steaks with unholy relish, streaked up the walls shrieking in mumbo jumbo or foreign, and leapt out of the window to wreak unimaginable havoc on the world outside. It was recently spotted organising an illegal rave and leading a mob attack on a Police Station in Great Yarmouth. You'll notice there are no reports of a carrot's arrest -- the most evil always get away with it. And that the timings may not work out is immaterial: it is well known that demons can time travel. So, noble and dubious readers: keep your keen eyes on your vegetable boxes lest carrots catch you unawares. Something is not right out there ...

Also, is it just me or does it also look a little bit like Bert from Sesame Street? Further proof! Keep wits about you, brave Norfolk warriors!

Some More Poems

2007-08-19T15:28:00.000+01:00

Sunday is clearly now my Writing Day, I think. Here are two more early drafts (posted below). One of which is very silly, both of which are a bit of a departure. Many thanks to those of you who have emailed with useful feedback for the earlier three, leading to a number of little changes here over the last week or so. These latest ones are, I would like to say, unrelated to any recent events or people I have met and no animals were harmed in the making etc ...

Poem: Accident -- silliness

2007-08-19T15:19:00.001+01:00

The evening had gone well until
I trod on the cat, a few weeks old,
its bones rubbery; crunched
into jammy mess under heel:
I slid for yards, my arms outstretched and wheeling
for the moment before it all
as the grabbed curtain tugged the rail
loose from the wall
and swung it round to punt a tub of scalding soup
into the short-skirted lap and blouse and face
of the pretty woman who’d laughed at my jokes
and dressed as if she’d smothered herself in glue
and ran through a jumble sale
I said after the few more bottles
it was hoped would quell the repeated squeak
of a kitten’s last pressured gasp
and before I noticed the trail of muddy blood
I'd left on the rug she’d pointed out as having belonged
to a recently dead someone or other
and later propositioned her loudly for sex
in front of her boyfriend and her brother
who weren’t the same person as I'd quipped
the night after the funeral of her daughter
whom I’d loved

Poem: Tree -- draft

2007-08-19T15:17:00.001+01:00

This is no special morning
hunched here as an old tree makes a move
and manes through early gales that break
beyond a thin perimeter white wall.

It might be said to beckon, if trees could
beckon, its ‘capillaried hand conducts the day’
or it could display a ‘bronchial map’
and ‘throat to earth.’

But it’s more the fact the wind dies down
that brings us to this anteroom
in talk about the tree outside, the way it stood
and shook against the path of our late stroll.

Domestic Dictator

2007-08-19T14:20:00.000+01:00

It could be that the zombie dream was related to Facebook, I've found -- requests to join which weekly batter moaning at the door of my inbox. Nevermore, I say! This was pointed out to me by C at a lovely dinner last night at her and GS's and hosting your blogger, J, S, T, K, and E -- all of which is useless information for you. What you want to know about is whether any of their household animals looked like famous dictators from history, isn't it? And I am joyous to be able to tell you that they do! I leapt from the table quite rudely (why I couldn't just have stood up out of my chair I don't know) on more than one occasion to snap these:

dreaming murderous dreams

At first, I'll admit, I was unconvinced that this was indeed a genuine kitler -- it looked far too placid and relaxed to suffer from rampant megalomania and genocidal leanings. There just didn't seem to be enough simmering rage. Previous attempts to have these ratified have failed, so your blogger needed to be careful. I needed more proof. Happily, this came instantly, when I started talking about the Treaty of Versailles, at which point this happened:

boiling hatred

Immediately, the creature in question started fulminating quite raucously against an outrageous injustice to the proud state of Germany and then got very unpleasantly vituperative in terms I shall not repeat here, careful as I am to not upset my delicate readers.

I will now attempt to get this latest finding accepted by the powers that be, after they shunned my earlier effort. I don't know why, it was much better than ones they had up there. There must be some sort of dastardly kitler coterie behind them all, your intrepid blogger is thinking. It could also be that the picture was too grainy.

Update, Eating and Dreaming

2007-08-17T17:40:00.000+01:00

Hmm... Hmmmmm...

A brief thank you to those who sent me ideas and feedback on the last post in addition to the comments here. Especially S, whose info about Bach and Wagner and many other things have stuffed my brain. By way of pointing out a few responses, Altering Labyrinth has an interesting post and George Szirtes has a couple of very good articles up on his website (which is often extremely good value, if you didn't know this already, with a big thumbs up from Mickey the Producer -- if this makes no sense you will have to read on to earlier posts!). And JNT has just sent me a very interesting email about Neanderthals and other things. I'll come back to this topic at a later date, once I've had some more thinking time ... in the meantime, please feel free to get back to me with any further thoughts or suggestions any of you might have.

In exciting other news: I have just this minute arrived back from the engine room of the good ship Egg Box, huffing and puffing and covered in coal dust and engine grease. I have finally got the files for the limited edition hardback of Ben Borek's debut Donjong Heights off to the printers (it's a novel in verse and is a great read -- stay tuned for more soon!). This was after spending three or four hours in front of the computer connecting and reconnecting to the Biddles server after the ftp connection kept breaking over and over again while the 135 MBs slowly chugged through. Infuriating. However, good triumphed over the evil of interweb gremlins and, for those of you who like such things (and to remind myself that this is now done) here is a sneak preview of the dust jacket:

A Fresh Egg

As we speak, the very good indeed people at the aforementioned Biddles (an extremely fine and decently priced printer outfit based in Kings Lynn) are setting to work on bringing this gorgeous object forth into the world for general consumption. It should, and deserves to, do well. But I would say that, wouldn't I? I'll be playing around with the Egg Box website next, perhaps adding a sample PDF of the first chapter and some other bells and whistles over the next few days.

This has all been with a bit of a hangover after attending a friend's birthday and a reading last night. Note to self: mixing Prosecco and Bittburger over the course of an evening is very stupid. I think it led to one of the most bizarre dreams I've had in ages. I and a friend (I now can't remember who) were on the run around a completely unfamiliar city and the insides of large buildings composed of familiar/unfamiliar rooms, while being chased by swollen zombies. Yes, swollen. They looked a bit like Mr. Creosote. As we met others on our way, they too turned into swollen zombies covered in festering pustules and boils and I was, in a kind of half-bored way, continually having to fight off their blood sucking bites afraid that I too was about to become zombified and covered in suppurating skin blemishes. I am pretty sure this has nothing to do with Norwich or the people I spent the preceding evening with, so I am at a loss as to where this came from. I awoke with a fresh mosquito bite on my ankle. Perhaps I was bitten by a crack addicted mosquito. Any ideas? I also have a tax return to do soon ...

It has me intrigued, though, this dream. It's been following me around all day -- it was really very vivid. Perhaps I might start mixing all sorts of different drinks over the course of evenings out with friends over the next few months, to explore what these cocktails stir up from the subconscious soup and then write a poetic series ... all in the interests of science and furtherment of the arts, of course. Although that sort of experimentation is unlikely to lead anywhere good, I fear.

And now there's just time, before dashing out to meet up with G, for a quick look at the Adsense personality weather report: most of the ads seem to be about poetry these days, so this must indicate that I am mainly interested in poetry after all. However, there is, on occasion, a slightly embarrassing ad that pops up for a singles' dating site. Why, I don't know. Perhaps the interweb superbrain knows something I don't?

And you'll be really, really interested to know -- I mean really interested -- that I just ate a very nice plateful of tagliatelle in a Swiss chard sauce cooked with fresh veg from a (highly recommended) local organic farm. Oh yes. Oh yes I did.