Society for the Elimination of the Cliché

Book Review: Wes Brown's 'Shark'

2012-01-24T05:19:00.000-08:00

New edition out Shark is out soon. Here's one of the first reviews of the new version by Kate Wilson:

Here we have a book quite unlike anything I have read before... Reading Wes Brown's debut novel is a little like getting punched in the stomach (in a good way)...

Set in Leeds, the protagonist John Usher is a soldier of the Iraq war returning to the humdrum rhythms of civilian life. Rather than appreciating the peace his return offers, John misses the violence and heat of his life as a soldier, seeking solace in aggressive games of pool at the failing local bar, and intense sexual encounters.

There were several things that surprised me about this book, not least of which is Brown's dedication to writing in a Leeds dialect. Initially I thought this might be distracting for me, as I haven't spent any time in Leeds and can't hear the accent, but I found I fell into the speech patterns. This was a daring move, and one which works extremely well in firmly placing the novel, and in giving an impression of that working class (for want of a better term) environment with its racism, misogynism and general struggle to adapt to the times. We are introduced to the tensions between Pakistani men and right-wing nationalist groups, and there is a real sense of a society on the point of collapse.

The dialect is made all the more interesting as it is balanced with a kind of rough poetic prose, which often uses expletives and alliterative, sexually explicit language with great results. While the characters themselves are limited in what they can articulate, Brown is a competent narrator with a distinctive style. He moves smoothly between the sections set in Leeds to those few scenes in the blistering heat of Basra. These transitions are not done too often though; this is not a novel comprised of flashbacks (which is what I had expected). Rather, these sections are used to emphasise the mundane cycles of John's life. He wakes up. He watches TV. He goes to the bar. He drinks beer. He has sex.

As he considers his prospects, the reader is left feeling as though there is nothing he can do that won't undermine his experiences at war. Sex is the closest he can get to the immediacy of experience that he craves, yet even that comes with the complication of attachment. The initial thrill, even John's proclamations of love, fade with time. Driven by an underlying desire for 'something more', the characters fail time and again to find any kind of real fulfillment.

For more reviews by Kate Wilson

Christopher Hitchens: Enlightenment Fundamentalist

2011-12-28T12:59:00.000-08:00

If ever anybody lived for outraging new forms of correctness, it was Christopher Hitchens.

Anybody would think a man who’s targets ranged from Mother Teresa to Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky to Sarah Silverman, actively sought attention. Or so detractors have said. Though why should this be a sleight on the accuracy of his convictions is debatable. For when Hitchens is right, he is very right. Yet there is a lurking suspicion of controversialists: that what they miss in accuracy they make up for in shock value, and, ultimately, lack sincerity. While this may contain a grain of truth, it can be too easy, too safe to deny the liberating impulses of a contrarian. In an earlier book of missives exploring radical, dissenting positions, Letters to a Young Contrarian, Hitchens wrote: “The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

And it was the independence of Christopher Hitchens mind that was shocking. Not the bombast – the performance, and the bravado – the sensitive and broad-ranging erudition that made counter-intuitive points sound right. Beyond the Wildean character was a brilliant literary critic who habitually stormed the world stage to outrage, delight and inform.

Hitchens had two basic modes: the commentary and the polemic. The former brought out his female qualities of intuition, gossip, sympathy; the latter, were either attacks on anything he didn’t like (generally some form of dogma, illiberalism or stupidity) or defenses of ideas or people he did liked. Or loved. These are macho, loud, and scolding. In She’s No Fundamentalist, Hitchens takes up the task of defending Ayan Hirsi Ali and happily names and shames his former acquaintances Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Baruma for incorrectly slurring Hirsi Ali as an “Enlightenment Fundementalist.”: But who dares to say [that belief in free speech is] the same as the belief that criticism of religion should be censored or the belief that faith should be imposed? To flirt with this equivalence is to give in to the demagogues and to hear, underneath their yells of triumph, the dismal moan of the trahison des clercs and “the enlightenment driven away.”

This enlightenment is not uncontroversial. The Greatest Think Tank in History, its promise of what Saul Bellow calls, ‘the universal eligibility to be noble’ is self-defeatingly seen as a cover for Western hegemony. Hitchens railed against cultural relativism and sacred cows, his pet hate being the idea of ‘moral equivalence’. And, in the intellect of Hitchens, we had a living specimen of the paradoxes of our politics. Had Hitchens classically moved Left to Right? Had he become a megaphone for Western Imperialism? Was he an advocate of universal freedom? Had the Left, as Nick Cohen contends, moved Rightward by implicitly supporting reactionaries in the name of multiculturalism? Hitchens saw a schism he thought transcended the traditional Left / Right divide: and it was this: “Briefly stated, this ongoing polemic takes place between the anti-imperialist Left, and the anti-totalitarian Left. In one shape or another, I have been involved – on both sides of it – all my life. And, in the case of any conflict, I have increasingly resolved it on the anti-totalitarian side.”

For the anti-imperialist, loyal to popular Marxist critique, the West is still the great superpower and the enemy of an enemy can so often be a friend. Islamists are resisting American hegemony. For the anti-totalitarian, Islamism and theocracy are barbaric, reactionary, oppressors of freedom. In Saul Bellow: The Great Assimilator Hitchens writes of Bellow’s political evolution: “His life as public intellectual is sometimes held to have followed art or trajectory: that from quasi-Trotskyist to full-blown ‘neocon’.” And, yet, like so many so-called neocons, like Hitchens himself, Bellow was hesitant to embrace the term. Further complicating the Left / Right diagnosis is the fact that many conservatives oppose liberal interventionism on the grounds that it is Leftwing Utopianism. Others, like Michael Gove, vehemently advocate interventionism as essential to defending the West. There are other Marxist critiques: no less the accelerationists who argue that capitalism, a revolutionary force, must be ‘speeded up’ in order to collapse itself, before moving onto a new stage of materialism. America, therefore, embodies the ideals of former Leftist movements and is the perfect agent of revolutionary change.

Left or Right, evidenced in these essays is a garrulous, individualist, raconteur glinting with contradictions: eloquent, literary, moral, boyish, patriotic, and charismatic in the way only a sort of upper-class Englishman can be. Essays range from the female humour deficit, to food and drink, to a cultural history of fellatio, the experience of torture and the oppression of the burka. Again, with the eclecticism of subject matter and forceful clarity of prose, parallels with his, Leftwing-patriot hero are easily drawn. Revealingly, in Hitchens’ view, George Orwell: “Decided to write as if people could be addressed as if they were humane and intelligent and democratic.” When we write about our heroes, we are really writing about the aspirations of our higher selves.

At its best, Arguably is Hitchens being Hitchens. George Orwell was novelist as well as journalist and committed himself to fighting earthly totalitarianism. Hitchens, by extension, no less courageous, no less anti-totalitarian, possibly stretched the definition of fascism to include Bin-Ladenism. Though what matters most is not whether Hitchens was Orwell, for, he was, unfailingly himself. Playing by the rules, keeping your head down, not speaking out for fearing the condemnation of peers may be safe, even lucrative, but it is not necessarily the path to truth. Arguably, true or untrue, Left or Right, reminds us of the sacred freedom of an unchained mind.

How would you shape the future of writing?

2011-09-26T06:06:00.001-07:00

On the 15th of September NAWE, Arvon and NALD members came together for a day of discussion and debate about how to ensure that the next generation of young writers and literature activists can flourish. The event focussed on the needs of young people outside formal education and explored ways in which they can be supported.

To provoke and inform the discussion, NALD commissioned a number of leading young writers and activists to share their thoughts on how we can help the next generation to flourish. What do they want to see happen? What needs to change? What would flourishing mean? What’s working well?

Helen Mort a poet and five-time winner of the Foyle Young Poet Award, argues for, ‘a more low-key, constant set up support opportunities for young writers who are still experimenting with different ways of writing’. This is a powerful point. While there are many eye-catching and brilliant schemes – many brilliantly funded – long-term, low-key support can be equally, if not more valuable. Helen reminds us that while young poets have plenty of opportunities, for something “to flourish and maintain its bloom, it needs to be nurtured and sustained as well”.

The pathways to support are changing. Adam Lowe, a publisher and novelist, cites the difference between the word-of-mouth and arbitrary Google searches he used to rely on to social media and the way the industry opened up as soon as he met key contacts. He makes the case that, “there needs to be greater recognition of the changing face of literature. A written work may now include multimedia and be interactive. There is a continued blurring between writing and performance, writing and art, writing and music.” Might the changing form of the novel lead to new kinds of writers? How well does the sector accommodate them? It’s vital we join up the dots of existing provision without directing it, to offer expertise without rules, without creating arts cartels and infrastructures run by the same people in the same way. The problem of an arts ‘establishment’ and the conventions of poetry are tackled by David Tait, “If we’re to believe what we read, very few operate outside of [the established] framework.”

David makes the case that too many are playing it safe in contemporary poetry. There are too many voices that are sub-Duffy or sub-Armitage. To use Harold Bloom’s figuring, too many are ‘suffering the anxiety of influence’ and for poetry to truly ‘flourish’, poets need to be braver, and take on more “exciting range of subject matter”.

Being braver is the encouragement offered by Nici West. Young writers and activists should, “be provided with support to become independent within the literature development industry, and no longer rely on larger funded organisations.” There’s a balance to be struck between support and setting people free. There is a danger that too much support, and dependence, forever being labeled a ‘young writer’ can act as a stabliser and stop young people taking risks. For Nici, flourishing means, “[making] that step from volunteering and participating in free work, to producing themselves.”

The volunteering approach can be problematic. Free time has its own expenses, leading Alex Pryce to soberly point out: “literature organisations might have to get used to those talents they want to work with passing up opportunities more frequently in other fields.” The underlying assumptions are changing and have to change to suit new developments: the economic downturn, the cost of higher education and the rise of digital mean that the literature landscape is a changed place. Did the value attached to higher education institutionalize the practice and thinking of young writers? Alex argues that, “the Arts need to consider if in some cases formal education isn’t exactly the answer [they’ve] recently become accustomed to it being” and “in response to fees increases, do literature organisations need to rethink their recruitment strategies?”

The challenges for young writers go beyond the personal, they are strategic and economic. These challenges are real. Joe Kriss asks us to evaluate the current infrastructure and warns, “If there are not formal positions or opportunities available in arts organisations, writers and activists must have the skills to find their own income.” His position echoes that of Nici West, “If these new writers and activists are taught how to run their own organisations and market themselves by taking a grassroots and regional approach, they will also create new networks and audiences for literature.”

Tom Chivers, a poet and live literature promoter, has embraced the notion of creating new networks wholeheartedly and says: “Literature activists sometimes have ‘proper jobs’ but just as often they sit outside, or on the peripheries of, the professional arts or publishing industries. This is what entrepreneurship looks like, in early stages at least […] those with responsibilities to guide strategy over the entire sector need to realize this, and offer appropriate support and funding.”

Tom believes, “Activism is about risk. So it shouldn’t be too cozily supported by the ‘industry’.”

How can we support young writers and not be cozily restrictive? What do they want from arts organisations? How do we overcome the economic challenges? Where is the digital shift taking literature? These provocations certainly make for interesting reading and each shed light on a different perspective of life as a young writer and activist. The urgency of an uncertain future means, ‘to know and not to act is not to know’. Perhaps this is the true meaning of activism? If ever there was a time to rethink and evaluate how best to support young writers and activists, it’s now.

For the rest of the provocations

NALD

The great euro swindle

2011-09-26T06:02:00.000-07:00

More admissions from the Left. This time it's the BBC admitting they sidelined debate from Eurosceptics and even called them 'mad':

As Rod Liddle, then editor of the Radio 4's Today programme, said: "The whole ethos of the BBC and all the staff was that Eurosceptics were xenophobes." He recalls one meeting with a senior BBC figure over Eurosceptic complaints of bias. "Rod, the thing you have to understand is these people are mad. They are mad."

Click here for the full article in The Telegraph. Perhaps had the BBC honoured its supposed commitment to neutrality, we might have had an electorate better informed about the dangers of the European Union?

Labour conference: why Ed Balls had to apologise

2011-09-26T05:56:00.000-07:00

Finally, after years of much mockery and bile from the Left defending the deficit reduction plan and attacking Labour's record on immigration, Ed Balls has admitted Labour got things wrong. It's a startling admission from a political firebrand:

He admitted that Labour had not spent every penny wisely, an admission of waste. He also said he agreed with David Miliband that a Labour government should not have been judge and jury on whether the government is meeting its fiscal rules.

Indeed the centrepiece of Balls's speech is that Labour must embrace the concept of the Office for Budget Responsibility, an independent body set up by the coalition which is responsible for monitoring public finances and setting out growth forecasts.

He also accepted Labour had lost trust on the economy, adding "it's a big task" to turn that around, pointing out that opposition in the UK can last 18 years.

"Opposition is about answering the big question, but I can't answer that question unless people are trusting in our credibility and our ability to make tough decisions and that means acknowledging things which went wrong as well."

In his speech he mentioned failure to control immigration, the 10p tax rate and the 75p pension rise. Collectively those amount to some big admissions.

The Guardian

Cosmopolis review in Politics On Toast

2011-09-19T10:27:00.000-07:00

When Francis Fukuyama wrote “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such…” triumphalism was in the air; not only had the United States seen off it’s geopolitical rivals – starting with Nazism and finishing with Communism. It ended history. History in the Hegelian sense. The Utopianism once seen on the Left could now be seen on the Right: free markets and liberal democracy were inseparable. The future was American.

And for some years, these assumptions became cultural orthodoxy. Enter the Masters of the Universe:

“He kept doing this because he knew the yen could not go any higher. He explained that they were levels it could not reach. The market knew this. There were oscillations and shocks that the market tolerated to a certain point but not beyond. The yen itself knew it could not go higher. But it did go higher, time and again.”

In Cosmopolis, Eric Packer, is not the self-styled Master of the Tom Wolf’s Bonfire of the Vanities. He is typically DeLillo-esque. A multi-billionaire, prone to abstraction and numerical mysticism, riding through New York City in a stretch limo on a day heavy with what Saul Bellow called ‘event glamour’. The President is in town, a rapper’s funeral proceeds through the streets and an anti-globalisation protestors demonstrate in Times Square.

Don DeLillo has created a canon of literature as idiosyncratic as it is prescient. Veering away from the compendious Underworld and voodoo histories of Libra, the author’s later works have become slimmer, humbler, abstract, invariably strange. Of these later works Point Omega (2010) is the most successful with the what can only be described as a ‘quantum ghost story’ The Body Artist, the least. What could easily be dismissed as haute couture and self-regard, DeLillo has attempted an audacious novella. Packer is sub-human. An idiot savant. Like Leopold Bloom, setting out on a voyage of the mundane to the butchers’ shop in Ulysses, Packer sets out to get himself a haircut. But he is not on foot. His mode of transport is the distancing limousine in which he spends his morning engaged in bizarre conversations, unfettered lusts and having a rectal examination whilst lusting over a female colleague via telescreen.

It’s not all cyber-capitalist, market mysticism in the world of Eric Packers as he rolls around town when it’s revealed that he is has been the subject of death threats. DeLillo has written at great length about something he calls ‘Assassination Aura’; a sense of how historical event can weave their way into fiction. There are DeLillo’s hallmarks: the power of crowds, the auspices of technology and the threat of terrorism, ulterior modes of knowledge, the vacuity of consumer culture, and outright abstraction:

“Because time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future. The future becomes insistent.”

Time has become a preoccupation of DeLillo, who’s interest of late has primarily become the nature of reality. From this everything else follows. It is the only way to understand DeLillo, the strange licks of his language, the every so slightly parallel universe he creates with a quantum awareness.

For the rest of the article

Laurie Penny: Class snobbery about the EDL won't halt the far right

2011-09-19T09:36:00.000-07:00

To those on the Left - and to be exact - members of the UAF (Unite Against Facism) who trawl Twitter looking for anything that might inflame their phosphorescent outrage, here's Laurie Penny, a leading Left wing thinker, reminding you that hatred toward the despicable EDL should not pour out into class snobbery, violence and misogyny:

"Never hit a woman, but do kick a dog." Since seeing a video of two young "anti-fascists" apparently crowing over the embarrassing assault of a female member of the English Defence League at their failed demonstration in London last Saturday, those words have been reverberating in my brain. In the clip, a young, excited, middle-class man at the successful Unite Against Fascism counter-demonstration sneers that "the most tattooed, horrible scrote of a woman I've ever seen" fell out of a retreating coach. His friend sniggers as he describes how she was "left bewildered and isolated" before being kicked and punched. "Never hit a woman, but they're not women," he adds. His objection to the victim seems to have more to do with the fact that she was tattooed, and "horrible" than the fact of her attendance at a far-right hate march.

It's not just the incident itself which is shocking, but the attitude the video bears out, a smug, nasty condescension replacing real political analysis. The video was posted on EDLRaw – a pro-EDL YouTube channel – and its source has not yet been verified. However, when I shared it on social media, asking for confirmation, a handful attempted to excuse the jeering with the mantra "a fascist is a fascist".

The implication was that violence, class prejudice and misogyny can be tolerated on the left as long as its targets have attended a terrifying racist intimidation parade. An eye for an eye: the EDL hate us and misunderstand us, so it's alright for us to hate and misunderstand them right back. I marched with 1,500 others to defend the borough of Tower Hamlets, where I used to live, from the racists I saw chanting "you're not English anymore" at young black boys in the street, and I understand the impulse to defend our homes and communities from far-right violence. However, if we truly mean to protect Britain's most deprived areas from the rise of the far right, the threat of violence in return is no sustainable strategy, and nor is sexist sneering over a woman getting a humiliating beating.

That type of unpleasant posturing is not at all representative of organisations like Hope Not Hate, Unite Against Fascism or, indeed, of the majority of European anti-fascists who demonstrate and organise to resist the infection of politics and culture by the type of racist, far-right ideology that led to the massacre of 77 people in Norway recently. There remains, however, a stubborn strain of snobbery on the middle-class left that is all the more important to address because it is uncomfortable.

For the rest of the article

The Independent

Philip Larkin: Poems selected by Martin Amis

2011-09-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

In his review of Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis, Sean O'Brien strangely focuses his review on the editor's introduction and segways into an obscure, if bevelling long-running argument in literature:

Ideology, as has been pointed out by Amis's sometime opponent Terry Eagleton, among others, has the useful characteristic of only afflicting other people. Amis states that the attacks on Larkin's reputation following the publication of Andrew Motion's biography and the letters occurred "during the high noon, the manly pomp, of the social ideology we call PC", and he declares: "All ideologies are essentially bovine." There were efforts to "demote" Larkin, but he is still here, still being read, still clearly racist and misogynistic (though not in the poems) and still, neither despite nor because of these flaws, and in the opinion of many people who can't stand his political or sexual attitudes, a great poet. It's no good "our" wanting him to be like "us" – any more than it is for Amis to pretend that his own irascible liberalism is free of ideological constraint.

He goes on to comment that he too "was struck by Larkin's reflexive, stock-response 'racism', and by his peculiarly tightfisted 'misogyny' [Amis's quotation marks]. But I bore in mind the simple truth that writers' private lives don't matter; only the work matters."

Does only the work matter? Can biography inform our reading of the work? Or is this a distraction from the universal enterprise of creation?

If Martin Amis seriously belives, "only the work matters" - he has a funny way of showing it. Rhapsodising for years now about the private predilcitions of Bellow and Nabokov; he even makes signifiant points in his introduction to this particular collection based on biographical detail. Amis has made an art of self-contradiction. Perhaps the simple truth is the only that thing matters.

The True Face of Islamism

2011-09-12T03:11:00.000-07:00

Couple of finds from the world wide web. The first revealing insights from Bin Laden's own writings - including the admission that terror attacks against Muslims have been counter-productive. Janet Levy nails down the other themes as the prohibition of coexistence with non-Muslims, the outlawing of separation of Church and State, opposition to democracy and the embrace of Jihad. Curiously, there's also propaganda tracts designed to deliberately misled The West and anticipate both secular and Islamic opinion.

Leading Al-Qaeda expert and author, Jason Burke, has a vast knowledge of the subject from firsthand experience. He says:

"Violent Islamist rhetoric was influenced by the revolutionary ideologies of the 20th Century," he says, citing the impact of Nazism and revolutionary communism on the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic thinkers.

They also share similar structures," he says. "What does radical Islam do? It takes a situation, it explains what's gone wrong and it gives you a programme for a solution. You don’t really need to think. It gives you all the answers, just like revolutionary communism or Marxism."

He also warns:

"Watch out for social conservatism. Western portrayals of the Middle East and places like Pakistan can be very misrepresentative. Western journalists, myself included, very often allow the educated, elite English speaking voices to dominate, giving the impression that they're representative of much of their society."

"So you end up with a view of a country made up of either extremists or moderates. The majority middle ground doesn't get heard. And that majority middle ground is often socially conservative, religiously conservative, deeply anti-American and deeply anti-Western. I think it is going to be very interesting to watch in the coming years."

Why we haven't seen a great 9/11 novel?

2011-09-12T03:06:00.000-07:00

Interesting article about whether fiction can give Sep 11 meaning. I think DeLillo's Falling Man certainly can, but Miller takes a sneering tone at the great man of letters straight from the Bronx:

In the 1990s, the haute-postmodern novelist Don DeLillo liked to say that the terrorist had supplanted the novelist in cultural importance. "Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror," he told the New York Times Book Review. "Today, the men who shape and influence human consciousness are the terrorists."

It was the sort of stylized, mandarin pronouncement that seemed terribly sophisticated at the time, although if you thought about it for a bit, what did it really mean? There's a lot more to consciousness than fear, and even name-brand terrorists like Timothy McVeigh and Theodore Kaczynski go down in history as lethal crackpots, not transformative figures. Harriet Beecher Stowe they are not.

But surely 9/11 was a special case? An attack so catastrophic, with such a high death toll and striking so hard at the root of American complacency must have unique import, a significance that, in turn, only novelists have the power to address at length and in depth, with the intimate imagination that fiction is uniquely suited to employ. Right?

That, at least, is the idea that perceptibly impresses itself upon every novel set in or after 2001. Yet, looking back over the decade, even the best of these books can't seem to do more than circle around a void.

There are outright 9/11 novels, like Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" or Jay McInerney's "The Good Life," and those dealing with some aspect of the aftermath, like Amy Waldman's "The Submission" or Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland." Even a novel that has nothing much to do with the attack -- Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom," say, or Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad" -- is obliged to at least genuflect in that direction, stopping at some point to mention how disturbed its characters were as they sat mesmerized in the blue glow of their TVs for a few days or weeks in 2001. Then whatever the story is really about kicks in again.

To continue reading

Salon.com

Sex, porn and feminism: “Female Chauvinist Pigs”

2011-09-06T15:39:00.000-07:00

’What a woman was criticised for doing yesterday, she is ridiculed for doing today.’

Edith Wharton, 1915.

We might adapt Edith Wharton’s sage observation to read: ‘What a woman is criticised for doing today, she was ridiculed for doing yesterday’. In Ariel Levy’s lightweight polemic (a slim 200 pages, written in an accessible, sometimes friendly, sometimes geeky prose style), she argues that ‘raunch culture’ has hijacked the project of feminism and now it is women who are subjugating themselves. As the blurb reads, ‘[Levy’s] polemic explores the myth of this new brand of empowerment and refuses a culture-wide obligation for young women to look and act like porn stars’. That’s a heady statement, and one which has faced little counter-argument from newspaper reviews here in the UK or in the US. This new brand of empowerment, or in other words, guiltless sexual enjoyment, really a myth? Is it not one of the achievements of feminism that woman are freer to pursue sexual behaviours rather than stick to traditional gender roles? Is the obligation to act like a porn star really culture-wide?

There is a myth, certainly, but it is a myth that our current generation are ‘pornified’ wholesale, with porn being somehow inherently corrosive and making people exponentially more sexually permissive than before. In America there’s a popular movement toward abstinence; and in the UK, many young people are involved in loving, trusting, mutually respecting and long-term relationships. Levy is right, however, to argue that a process of pornification is going on; that popular culture, at least, is becoming increasingly comodified and that previously hidden, previously encountered on top shelves, or passed samizdat round schoolboys’ dorm rooms, are now in mainstream culture. In a moment of startling observation, Levy notes that the word ‘sexy’ has become a byword for anything exciting, dangerous or good and is fast becoming ubiquitous. She rightly points out that children as young as 12 or 13 are performing sexual acts on one another with the intention of broadcasting them to their friends on mobile phones and other such media. The effect of this could injure and deform the development of a young person.

Levy tackles the excesses of the porn industry, and shows how female role models in popular culture like Samantha in Sex and the City are oblivious consumers (‘I don’t believe in the Republican party or the Democratic party. . . I just believe in parties.’) and that too strong a focus on cultivating a designer lifestyle can encourage a population of happy consumers rather than civically aware citizens. And her aim is far reaching, too far: Girls Gone Wild, Olympic athletes posing in playboy, sex parties, blokey lesbians, Paris Hilton, pole-dancing classes and women who go to strip shows. It’s often difficult to see how Levy equates such disparate strands of behaviour: what brings such targets together for Levy doesn’t always read like concern that women have become ‘female chauvinist pigs’ so much as a deep-seated dislike of promiscuity, hedonism and sexual permissiveness.

For the full review go to Politics on Toast

Collision

2011-09-04T16:57:00.001-07:00

If one guy believes, "[Christianity] is a wicked cult, and it's high time we left it behind." And another believes, "There are two tenets of atheism. One. There is no God. Two, I hate him." They're on the road toward a bloody good bust-up. For those of you who haven't seen it, I heartily recommend Collision. A sort of Rocky for intellectuals - as Christopher Hitchens faces off against Douglas Wilson in a heavyweight battle over God. Or perhaps in Hitchen's case, the non-existence of God.

Unlike some of the liberal wing of the Church of England, Wilson is interesting in that he believes that miracles must be true. That Jesus must be the son of God. The bible not metaphor or allegory. Otherwise Christianity is a great fraud. The film is well shot with parts striking in black and white and allows space for these two eloquent pugilists to speak for themselves.

Is that all there is?

2011-09-01T08:21:00.000-07:00

With the rise of the New Atheists comes the assumption that the God question is an open and shut case. Science can explain the world and it's version is more wondrous anyway. Nothing to worry about. No reason to sweat in the night.

These days, one is continually running up against a crass evolutionary neuroscientific pragmatism that is loved by popular evolutionary psychologists and newspaper columnists (of the kind who argue that we are happiest living in suburbs and voting Republican because neuroscience has “proved” that a certain bit of our brain lights up upon seeing Chevy Chase or Greenwich; or that we all like novels because stories must have taught us, millennia ago, how to negotiate our confusing hunter-gatherer society—I exaggerate only a little). Taylor is right to claim that the popularity of this type of reduction is “one of the most burning intellectual issues in modern life.”

Much of this sounds like symptoms of Ray Tallis's 'Darwinitis' and 'Neuromania'. The thoroughly unscientific instinct to reduce, extrapolate and create meaningless explanations. We used to fear the 'overlapping magisteria' of religion and science, but it seems the New Atheism, having devoured religion, is taking its place with a not-entirely scientific belief system.

You can read James Wood's full article on Secularism and its Discontents here.

Changing Education Paradigms

2011-08-30T15:02:00.000-07:00

Brilliant animate lecture provided by the RSA on 'Changing Education Paradigms'. Too often the education system serves to reinforce bad ideas, conformity and unoriginal thinking. Sir Ken Robinson argues for a 'paradigm shift' in how we educate. I'm skeptical of anybody who comes along and somehow has all the ideas. But there is much new thinking to consider and I particularly like his critique of the false distinction between 'academic' and 'non academic' intelligences.

The Fascism of the Anti-Facist Left

2011-08-30T14:53:00.000-07:00

Amusing story over at The Telegraph from the always brilliant Brendan O'Neill. Having campaigned for years to get the EDL banned, the Unite Against Fascism has now found itself and other groups temporarily banned from protesting in key areas over the next few weeks. The UAF decides who is facist and then campaigns for alternative viewpoints to be suffocated and (or) banned.

This is the crux of Brendan's argument:

The freedom to protest must mean that everyone, from worthy Left-wingers to cranky EDL types, should be at liberty to gather where and when they please and to demand whatever they want. What UAF is fighting for is not freedom but privilege. If a thing is denied to some people but granted to others, then it’s a privilege rather than a right – and UAF wants the “privilege to protest” in certain London boroughs where it expects other, less privileged, possibly non-human political activists to be silenced and curfewed on its behalf by the government. That is, UAF only really believes in Government-approved, Tory-approved, forms of public agitation.

Their is a worrying trend from the Left to assume they have all the answers to all the questions; that they have a monopoly on truth, and too many times people have argued for 'no platforms' or to ban opinions they don't like. Not only is this illiberal, it's likely to makes matters worse as fringe views are excluded from the mainstream and allowed to fester unchallenged.

Why it's kicking off in London

2011-08-09T07:42:00.000-07:00

The moral degradation of the riots is now being validated by the Left intent on recruiting any thug, yob or miscreant to their 'radical' cause. Who mindlessly confuse opportunist thuggery with an uprising. There is simply no excuse for sabotaging, mugging and attacking the communities of hard-working people.

This from Verso:

By Tamar Shlaim / 09 August 2011

You've probably heard it said a dozen times today: “It's like 28 Days Later out there.” Every thirty seconds, there's a new riot zone. I've rarely known the capital to be this wound up. It's kicked off in East Ham, then Whitechapel, then Ealing Broadway (really?), then Waltham Forest... It's kicked off in Croydon, then Birmingham, then (just a rumour so far) Bradford... The banlieues of Britain are erupting in mass civil unrest. (Lenin's Tomb)

Tariq Ali, writing on the London Review of Books blog, asks the questions mainly absent from much of last night's coverage:

Why is it that the same areas always erupt first, whatever the cause? Pure accident? Might it have something to do with race and class and institutionalised poverty and the sheer grimness of everyday life? The coalition politicians (including new New Labour, who might well sign up to a national government if the recession continues apace) with their petrified ideologies can't say that because all three parties are equally responsible for the crisis. They made the mess.

They privilege the wealthy. They let it be known that judges and magistrates should set an example by giving punitive sentences to protesters found with peashooters. They never seriously question why no policeman is ever prosecuted for the 1000-plus deaths in custody since 1990. Whatever the party, whatever the skin colour of the MP, they spout the same clichés. Yes, we know violence on the streets in London is bad. Yes, we know that looting shops is wrong. But why is it happening now? Why didn't it happen last year? Because grievances build up over time, because when the system wills the death of a young black citizen from a deprived community, it simultaneously, if subconsciously, wills the response.

Nina Power, writing for the Guardian yesterday summarises some of the specific circumstances in which the riots are taking place, and argues that it is imperative to take this context into account in any analysis:

The policies of the past year may have clarified the division between the entitled and the dispossessed in extreme terms, but the context for social unrest cuts much deeper. The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last Thursday, where it appears, contrary to initial accounts, that only police bullets were fired, is another tragic event in a longer history of the Metropolitan police's treatment of ordinary Londoners, especially those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, and the singling out of specific areas and individuals for monitoring, stop and search and daily harassment.

One journalist wrote that he was surprised how many people in Tottenham knew of and were critical of the IPCC, but there should be nothing surprising about this. When you look at the figures for deaths in police custody (at least 333 since 1998 and not a single conviction of any police officer for any of them), then the IPCC and the courts are seen by many, quite reasonably, to be protecting the police rather than the people....

Images of burning buildings, cars aflame and stripped-out shops may provide spectacular fodder for a restless media, ever hungry for new stories and fresh groups to demonise, but we will understand nothing of these events if we ignore the history and the context in which they occur.

Laurie Penny, blogging at Penny Red, writes eloquently against the lazy opposition of 'mindless violence' versus 'political protest'.

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you're no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.

However, Penny argues, the riots are also a cathartic expression of power by those least used to wielding it:

They cannot be stopped, and they know it..Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?”

Visit Google Maps to view all the areas affected in London so far.

The Legacy of Stan Barstow

2011-08-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

Stan Barstow was part of a generation of writers who created a 'moment' in British culture. A tipping point, where, for the first time, Northern voices and Northern life were thrust into the mainstream and challenged the cultural heterodoxy.

Nick Ahad has written movingly about Barstow's legacy in the Yorkshire Post Which includes this sound-bite from the Leeds-loving Anthony Clavane:

"Barstow, like Braine and Waterhouse, wrote about grabbing the new opportunities – but also about the price to be paid for ambition – which was loss of identity. Storey wrote an essay in 1963 in The Listener arguing there was an insularity particular to the West Riding pysche, but he and his fellow kitchen-sink novelists transcended that insularity and helped create a cultural ‘moment’, with its own northern, and particularly Yorkshire, vernacular, that opened the doors for future generations.”

Shark on the Apple iBook store

2011-08-03T03:14:00.000-07:00

"In Shark, Wes Brown writes with a kind of rhythmic Northern realism, catching the way we think, the way we talk, the way we act round here; he manages to make the North a marvellous place, a place where art can happen, where epic can feel comfortable..." Ian McMillan, poet and broadcaster.

Shark is now available on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iBooks for a very tempting £2.99.

Freedom for those we Hate

2011-08-03T03:05:00.000-07:00

The excellent Sean McHale on Why We Must Not Alow Anders Breivik to be used as an Assault on Civil Liberties:

What is it that inspires an individual to mass murder? That drives them to the point where they see that the only outlet for their beliefs is slaughter. Be it those on the far-right, far-left, nationalists, or Islamists - Is it their ideas which bear the weight of the dead? This is a much more difficult question to answer than may first appear when it comes to Anders Breivik. For Brevik, it appears, was acting alone. He was free from the group influences of say ETA, or the Palestinian militant movements which pressurise younger members through hierarchies which manipulate the minds of martyrs and murderers.

In the aftermath of any Islamist perpetrated atrocity commentators press the point that even though Islam was a part of the mentality of the terrorists it is either not a harmful ideology or not of the sought that makes up the beliefs of the average believer. It is thought that they will never be inspired to violence as they are influenced by a myriad of other ideas alongside their faith. So why is it that when it comes to the far-right any idea that made up the manifesto of Breivik is now seen as dangerous and one, potentially, in need of limitation? The same breadth of acceptance does not seem to have been applied to followers of the right as of Islam.

For the rest

Art for Whose Sake?

2011-07-20T16:21:00.000-07:00

Peter Whittle giving it some on the self-denigration of art over at the New Culture Forum:

Sensing that by downgrading their own currency, so that they could no longer claim to have a special place and consequently less claim on public money for support, the arts went about hitching themselves to other bandwagons. So, art became a great way to ‘foster social cohesion’, to ‘bring communities together’ and attempt to heal growing ethnic and religious rifts. It became a great provider of ‘public therapy’, in which the simple act of doing something together was deemed enough, regardless of the mediocrity or banality of the enterprise.

This has had maybe unforeseen but nevertheless inevitable consequences. The emphasis on ‘social outcomes’ such as community cohesion, which has been at the centre of so much thinking in the arts in recent years has led to a situation where, in the very interested of that cohesion, the arts might need to be censored, or, more insidiously, censor themselves. At an arts conference I attended recently, a leading theatre director unashamedly said that he would of course consult with local communities before putting on a play which dealt with issues which might be deemed ‘sensitive.’ It was astonishing to hear this. Yet it was indeed the logical conclusion of a situation in which the arts had suborned themselves to wider social policy.

It is abundantly clear the cultural apartheid is widening and the values of 'high art' need reclaiming.

Chavs & The Likes of Us – Book Review

2011-07-18T08:27:00.001-07:00

What do you call a chav in a suit? The accused. Two chavs in a car, no music on, who’s driving? The police. What’s the difference between a chav and a coconut? One’s thick and hairy, the other is a coconut. From salt of the earth to scum on the streets, the white working class are the minority group it’s OK to discriminate against, and, curiously, it’s not just uppity snobs at it, it’s the left-liberals too.

Owen Jones, an Oxford graduate and former trades union worker has launched himself headlong into the subject. Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class is an invective against the injustices of contemporary Britain and a call to arms for a new class-based politics.

Jones begins with an anecdote about a party of well-to-do liberals where an offensive comment is made, yet, strangely, nobody picked up on it. He then leaps into The Strange Case of Shannon Matthews, and asks, “Why does the life of one child matter more than another’s?” Jones uses the case, the confusion and variety of attitudes, the difference in terms of press coverage, tone and polity to that of the McCanns’ to explore and unconvincingly attempts to debunk the ‘Broken Britain’ argument and the contorted views ranging across the commentariat on the underclass. For Jones, class is clear cut, and he fluctuates between the classic ‘them’ and ‘us’ when he’s being particularly factional; and the more usual tripartite system of working, middle, and upper. Jones makes the assumption that working class are a homogenous block, with shared interests, that are represented by the trades unions and old Left politics alone. Such naiveté is self-defeating. This is the illiberalism of a millennialist.

And it’s not long before Jones’ trades union sympathies and shibboleths begin to appear, the bones of his argument. Ultimately, Thatcher is to blame for anything and everything and started the class war. But what of 13 years of New Labour? They’re Thatcherite too. For Jones, you are either a trades unionist and old Labour, ‘right-wing’, ‘a maverick’ or ‘Blair-like’. The only solutions can come from the old Left, and they know exactly what these solutions are. Beyond nods to The Spirit Level, opposing plutocrats and calling a new society ‘based around people’s needs’ there’s no suggestion of how these aims can be met. It’s true to say the New Economy has its troubles – but we need to recapitalise the poor, not shackle them in restrictive ‘class identities’. The British economy was turning toward the services because they were higher up the value chain. To credit Thatcher with transforming, rather than reshaping the economy is to play into her mythology.

The trouble with the word ‘chav’, like any ‘hate speech’, is the instability of meaning. I may call my brother a chav as part of our brotherly bravado. My mother may call slobs and scroungers chavs because it’s a way of cleaving the respectable from the unrespectable working class. And snobs or bigots may use the word to mock and chide those who are less educated, less wealthy and less fortunate. And, equally, my mother may take offence to this. The origin of the word is contentious. Some plump for the vituperative “Council House And Violent”, others claim the word derives from the Romani ‘chavi’ meaning child. More convincingly, the origin may be the Hebrew word, ‘chaverim’. Which, “[entered] working-class London usage through the East End Jewish mobs, who shared the affection for vulgar and extravagant ostentation in dress and jewellery.”

What may, consciously or unconsciously, be alluring to left-liberals, the revulsion towards chavs is displaced disgust at the excesses of consumer-capitalism, and the supposed vulgarity of those who shamelessly enjoy Sky TV, Burberry hats, gold rings and tabloid newspapers. In the superior worldview of the cosmopolitan multiculturalist, which separates people into identities rather than economic groups, the working class has come to be seen as everything that is reactionary, thuggish and backward about 21st century Britain. They are flag-waving, Sun reading, Little England scumbags.

For the full review

Politics on Toast

Trespass goes digital

2011-07-12T03:44:00.000-07:00

Trespass Magazine has gone digital. The latest edition - Justice - features one of my wrestling stories, 'The Trial of Shelton Matthis'. Here's an extract:

Washed, shaved, stitched and elegant in a broad shouldered suit, Shelton Mathis runs a rough hand through his hair as he steps towards the exit door. The self-inﬂicted gash above his eyebrow (hidden by a beige plaster) wouldn’t stop bleeding, making him late. Lucy Autumn is waiting in her polka-dot dress, stifﬂy glossing her lips.

“Crumpled shirt. And you’re late.”

Lucy twists his collar and slaps his chest, “You did remember to book a table?”

“You’ll love it,” Shelton answers, taking his arm around her and thinking of tonight’s match, the thirty-thousand in the arena,
the bookers happy with his performance, his gimmick’s got over, “Yeah, think you’ll really like this spot.”

“What’s the food?”

“It’s a surprise. Used to love this place as a kid. It’ll be fun. They’ll make a fuss of you.” Shelton laughs, cupping her arm as they walk in tandem to the end of the car park and the metal fence, waving goodbye to the security guard. They walk out onto the rain-griddled street glowing gold under high street lamps and the big city skyline. His back is stiff and he gasps, aching to his shoelaces. Lucy ﬁnds this funny and can’t help giggling at his obvious discomfort. He’s big, a ridiculously big man with square features and a dopey, honest face.

They stop at the end of the avenue, waiting for the lights to shift to green, and Lucy brushes her ﬁnger along Shelton’s
beige plaster.

“You’ve cut yourself again?”

“Juiced.”

“Doesn’t make it better.”

“It’s part of the gig.”

“It’s self harm.”

“No worse than cutting yourself shaving, it’s just a little nick.

See?”

“Makes me want to gag.”

“You haven’t asked me about the match, the title shot, or any-

thing.”

“It’s bleeding again, it’s horrible.”

“It was a good match. Maybe the best I’ve ever been in.”

He waits for her to respond, but she is silently appraising the restaurant as he escorts her in with a giant hand on her back. They’re ushered to their table at the back of the room next to a huge plastic lobster. The waiter is a wrestling fan and wants Shelton to autograph his napkin. Bar staff take pictures and the waiter holds claws with the giant lobster. Lucy squirms in her chair as Shelton gets the crustacean in a headlock, squeezing its red long antennae. Nearly every man in the place starts chanting, “SHELTON MATHIS, SHELTON MATHIS!” He pumps a ﬁst in salute and takes his seat smiling; Lucy’s cheeks burn red and she lifts her eyes, glaring at Shelton.

For the rest of the story and to subscribe to Trespass

Paul Auster: Why Roth Is Wrong About the Novel

2011-07-12T03:39:00.000-07:00

Philip Roth believes books will soon be dead. Paul Auster respectfully—and strenuously—disagrees.

You notice it's always some really old guy with his powers waning, who pronounces the death of the novel? The novel may have lost its centrality, may be seen more as an e-book, but the form's not going anywhere.

For the video on Jewcy.

Politics on Toast

2011-07-12T03:35:00.000-07:00

A new right-leaning web magazine has been launched called 'Politics on Toast'. The writers are mostly young and interesting upstarts. Here's what they have to say about themselves:
What’s Toast About?

Politics on Toast is a right-wing political magazine. Like toast, we have made this magazine to be consumed on a daily basis, perhaps for breakfast and certainly whenever you like. And like toast it is simple and digestible, containing lots of clear articles without jargon or pseudo-intellectualism.

As a magazine that defines itself as “right-wing”, we stand in opposition to left-wing cultural and political domination and aim to incite and rile the opposition. Not only that, but “right-wing” is such a loosely defined term that we are a broad church.

Among our contributors we have libertarians who thinks that people should be allowed to do what they want and social conservatives who think that people ought not always do what they want. We have Thatcherites who believe that leaving the markets alone is best for society and we have authors who argue that free markets inevitably lead to moral decline. We have those who believe that the Tories are the party of the right and those who think that the Tories have made too many concessions to the left.

So, there will be plenty of opportunity for debate and discussion on Politics on Toast. And you – yes, you! – are invited to argue with, or support, us.

To go to the Politics on Toast website

The Anatomy of Influence

2011-07-05T09:06:00.000-07:00

Exciting times. Harold Bloom has a new book out. Loads of promo, including video interview, here.

Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it," writes Harold Bloom in The Anatomy of Influence, "is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate."

This has long been my position. Even before fleshing it out with Bloom's seminal work and Roger Scruton's writings on Beauty. There was the intuitive knowledge that art is valuable for its own sake and its only duty is to beauty, not to fulfilling political aims. That is to say, the personal and the passionate.

Dirty Hari claims to hate the Daily Mail...

2011-07-05T03:56:00.000-07:00

Damning article for anybody who had been defending Dirty Hari. Guy Walters in the New Statesman has all the evidence. This wasn't cutting and pasting a couple of lines, paraphrasing what somebody had said. This was heavy lifting:

Over the weekend, I read the defences made by Peter Preston and Mark Lawson for Johann Hari's plagiarism - for that is what it is. Mr Preston believes that Mr Hari's practice of inserting his interviewees' words from other sources into his interviews was merely "an occasional habit", and Mr Lawson appears to think that Mr Hari was merely "searching for the earlier existence in print of words included in an interview". If only both men were right, but sadly they are not. Instead, they merely dismissed the charges as being the dumb products of anonymous name-callers on Twitter.

Had Messrs Lawson and Preston examined exactly what was going on, they would have seen that many of those commenting were hardly anonymous, and the points they made were thoughtful and valid. (Funny how the likes of Preston and Lawson doubtless celebrate people power and the vox populi in, say, Egypt, but not in this country.) Far from being an "occasional habit" of "cleaning up", Mr Hari is a serial plagiarist, and he does not deserve their misplaced sympathies.

Last week, I showed you how Mr Hari appeared to have lifted 42 quotes from Malalai Joya's memoir for his supposed interview with her. What follows is another interview by Johann Hari that features a number of quotes lifted from another source. This one is a good 'un, because the interviewee is none other than Ann Leslie of the Daily Mail - a newspaper that Mr Hari states is "the enemy of everything - literally everything - I believe." It would appear that Mr Hari's hatred for the Daily Mail does not make him averse to lifting several hundred words for his Ann Leslie interview from a piece that appeared in August 1997 in the, er, Daily Mail.

This was an enormous piece - some 4000 words - and the beginning largely dealt with Ann Leslie's traumatic childhood in India. Readers of the Independent in 2004 would have been impressed by the revelations that Hari appeared to have elicited from Dame Ann. Of course, had they known that much of what they were reading had appeared in the Daily Mail some seven years before, they might have been less than impressed.

There's matching transcripts of the Daily Mail article and Hari's own, and the rest of Walter's piece, here.

The enemy of my enemy is a friend?

2011-07-05T03:52:00.000-07:00

Honest blog from Rob Marchant over at Labour List. Some on the Left have been apologetic toward some of the most ultra-conservative and illiberal elements in our society. Nick Cohen has been going on about it for years, but when confronted, many deny there's a problem or say you're pandering to the Daily Mail. Here's Rob Marchant:

Let me tell you about Raed Salah. Or, rather, let him tell you about himself in the following quote:

"You Jews are criminal bombers of mosques,
Slaughterers of pregnant women and babies.
Robbers and germs in all times,
The Creator sentenced you to be loser monkeys,
Victory belongs to Muslims, from the Nile to the Euphrates."

Yes, he is a racist, hate preacher and, as the BBC reports, leading 9/11 conspiracy theorist. He is a leader of the Islamic Movement, closely aligned to the terrorist group Hamas and recently notorious for mourning the death of Osama Bin Laden. If you need any further examples of his being a thoroughly nasty piece of work, you need go no further than this piece.

That is, naturally, why he is being excluded from Britain: how much more evidence do you need? What possible excuse is there for engaging with this man? But in our time-honoured, support-the-underdog way, parts of the British left are doing just that.

Three - count ‘em, three - Labour MPs decided it was ok to invite him to speak at the mother of all Parliaments, before the authorities intervened and put a stop to it.

For the full article

Rushdie doesn't give a fuck

2011-06-28T06:05:00.000-07:00

Sir Salman Rushdie is unequivocal about the death of the multi-millionaire, porno guzzling, self-promoting Islamist Osama Bin Laden in today's Guardian:

What did you make of the latest chapter, the news of Osama bin Laden's death?

I thought: good. It's about time. And of course I loved the fact that it turns out he enjoyed looking at pornography, and watching himself on TV – the more of a jerk he looks, the better for everyone. One of the likely consequences of the Arab spring is that al-Qaida immediately starts to look more irrelevant. It shows that this argument (which has been far too prevalent in the west) that there is a different set of criteria you have to use when you look at Muslim countries is bullshit. This is not an ideological revolution, or a theological one; it is a demand for liberty and jobs, desires and rights that are common to all human beings.

Why doesn't Greece simply default?

2011-06-28T05:16:00.000-07:00

It's a good question, answered over at the Institute of Economic Affairs by Phillip Bagus. What's stopping Greece defaulting? The EU Superstate of course:

Let us examine the case of Greece. The Greek economy with wage rates that are too high is no competition to innovative German industry enjoying moderate wage increases.

The result of these artificially high Greek wages would be poverty and unemployment. These effects, however, are partly counteracted by the profligate spending of the Greek government. To finance the spending, the Greek government simply prints bonds. Transferring new funds to the Greek government, the banking system buys these bonds and uses them as collateral for new loans from the European Central Bank (ECB), which thereby monetises the government deficit. The Greek government uses the new money to pay for early retirement schemes, an army of public servants and generous social benefits. The Greek economy’s lack of competitiveness is thereby sustained and increased.

For instance, the Greek government could issue a bond, receive new money and pay a minister. The minister buys a BMW with the new money. As a result prices in the eurozone rise and Greece enjoys a trade deficit with Germany. Greeks live beyond their means financed by the issuing of government bonds and the production of new money. Cars flow into Greece in exchange for new euros and debt promises. Europeans from fiscally more responsible states pay the bill in form of higher price inflation and since 2010 in form of direct guarantees for subsidised loans to the over-indebted Greek government. As the Greek government benefits from the euro, it does not want to default and leave the eurozone despite the riots in the streets.

For the full article

What's the point of writing a book if you have no online presence?

2011-06-27T05:36:00.000-07:00

This article on Bubble Cow is the holy grail for new writers.

Many young writers I come across still have the lingering Romanticism that you can earn a living out of being a writer, and that 'all' you need to do is write a great book and it will be published and catapult you into international stardom. This was always unlikely, particularly for literary authors, and increasingly so with the changes in the industry.

In the same way The Long Tail (selling less of more, rather than more of less) revolutionised ideas about online commerce, the idea of writer as curator of their own online readership, I believe, will become the norm.

Let’s face it, in 2011 writers need a strong online presence. In a world were self-publishing is a realistic option, and big publishers are telling us that having an online presence is essential to getting a book deal, writers are left with little option but to embrace technology and start building. But this leaves one important question: How do you build an online presence?

In this article I will show you how writers can build an online presence, in the process avoiding wasting time on activities that fail to bring potential book buyers to your site.
Inbound vs Outbound

The phrase ‘online presence’ can mean many things, but at its most basic it simply means attracting visitors to your blog or website. The more ‘regular’ visitors you push to your site, the stronger your online presence.

The traditional method of attracting attention is what is known as Outbound Marketing. This type of marketing is things you (or someone else) do to try and tell people about you and your book. TV, radio and print adverts are all types of outbound marketing, as are book reviews and Google adwords. As a rule of thumb outbound marketing tends to be both expensive and its effectiveness difficult to measure.

For example; a book publisher may pay for a glossy poster to be placed on the side of a fleet of busses. A big picture of your book rides around the streets for all to see. Yet, despite the expense it is impossible to measure just how many people buy your book as a result of seeing the advert. A lot of expense with only a potential reward.

Inbound Marketing flips the outbound model on its head. Inbound marketing focuses on techniques that drive potential book readers to your site by providing content that is both interesting and engaging. By delighting readers they are more likely to seek out your content and, hopefully, buy your book. As a side effect inbound marketing tends to be very cheap and almost always measurable.

For example; let’s say you were to set up a Twitter account and build a fan base of 1000 followers by sending out links to valuable and relevant resources. You could engage with these fans and slowly educate them to the presence of your book, converting a number of them into book buyers in the process. Using some simple free tools you can track the number of visitors you drive to your site and the number of these who go on to buy your book.

For the full article

Indie and self-published authors are using online audiences combined with the traditional methods of book reviews and the print media to promote their work and sell books. Big publishers are following this trend too and spend much of their marketing time using 'inbound' social media.

Curating your own online presence will help you develop your reputation and minimise the risk for potential publishers. Many writers are still reluctant to do this. But there are many who are - and magazines like The Cadaverine or resources like the Young Writers' Hub are helping them do it.

The Incredible Bollocks of TV Crime Drama

2011-06-21T02:12:00.000-07:00

How Leeds Changed The World author is going on about The Incredible Bollocks of TV Crime Drama over at Culture Vulture. What's probably as interesting as the article is the debate that follows afterward on the message board. TV writer turns up to defend his craft and asks, do these inconsistencies really matter? So are we cranks for noticing out of date registration plates on cars or should be loosen up? Is all a load of bollocks?

This from TV writer David Allison:

But actually, constructing a watertight crime plot is tough in the script process. It’s not like writing a novel, where you are free to make any decision you wish. Scriptwriting is a collaborative process and at any given time, you are going to be dealing with notes and ideas from the producer, the exec, the script editor, the channel and so on and so on. Rewrites can often involve total rethinks or changes in personnel and so your beautifully constructed plot suddenly sprouts a leak or two – and as you tend to them, you notice more. It’s a shifting story that will often end up looking quite different to the thing you started out with. The cliche of this is that within this process, the writer has got screwed over. Actually, on a good show with a talented team, that isn’t the case at all. What that team has actually done has improved your story and your script. But it is a very, very different way of working to prose writing and if you’re precious about your ideas or convinced that no one knows better than you do, you won’t get far.

Is he right? Should collaborative writing have fewer plot holes with more eyes to see? Or do too many cooks spoil the broth? What's the director doing? Is it about time constraints?

For more and to see Mick's response

The Austerity Argument

2011-06-16T14:42:00.000-07:00

Fraser Nelson on form over at the Speccie talking down the claims made by Ed Balls:

“So when I am asked in interviews, what would [Ed Balls] be doing differently to cut the deficit, the first thing I say is that — in the words of the old farmer being asked for directions by a passing driver — I wouldn’t be starting from here.” Really? We can only assume that the deficit would be even bigger if he’d has his way. And remember, he was all set to replace Darling in 2009 — and was only stopped when it became clear Cabinet members would resign in protest.

And a thunderous article in Newsweek by the imperious Niall Ferguson:

The real lessons for the United States are clear. Those who run up debt in good times can borrow only so much more when a recession strikes. And heavily indebted governments postpone fiscal stabilization at their peril. If you wait to reform until the bond market calls time, you are—to use a technical term from economics—screwed.

I'm not saying these cuts are nice or pretty. Or that they're definitely going to work. But there is more of an argument to be had than the moral repugnance, patronising and absence of an alternative solution (or at least accept that their solution may involve pain, and may not work) from the deficit-deniers.

More on both sides of the argument, here.

The North! Where we do what we want

2011-06-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

Anthony Clavane talks about the 'Leeds Movement' in the Guardian. I'm a part of it. Although, I think to being part of it, is to not being a part of it. Why? Because this is the North! Where we do what we want!

Last meal together, Leeds, the Queen's Hotel,

that grandish pile of swank in City Square.

Too posh for me! he said (though he dressed well)

If you weren't wi' me now ah'd nivver dare!

"The Queen's English" by Tony Harrison

Every few months or so, David Peace and I meet at that grandish pile of swank, made even grander during the city's rebirth as a shiny shoppers' paradise. The man who invented a new genre of fiction – "Yorkshire noir" – is back in town. After his decade-long exile in Japan, the prodigal son has returned, like Ed Dunford in his first novel, 1974, to find that things have changed. Once the region's boomtown, Leeds is now a synonym for the fall. Outside the hotel, there are holes in the ground. New buildings have been mothballed. Thousands of new flats lie empty. The cuts are in place; the harrowing of the north is upon us. "The darkness," Peace notes, "is back."

But, whisper it softly (whispering it softly is very much the Leeds thing), while he was away there has been something of a literary renaissance. A new generation of edgy provincials is about to storm the citadels of London, throwing itself about town and flaunting its talent. Or at least it would be if it could be bothered to get on the train. For it appears to be afflicted by Billy Liar Syndrome; in Keith Waterhouse's classic tale, William Terence Fisher bottles it when his freewheeling girlfriend offers him the chance of a swinging time in the Big Smoke. Getting on the train is, of course, a metaphor for aspiration.

The words "Leeds" and "literary" are rarely, if ever, used in the same sentence. As a Harry Enfield character once mocked: "Don't talk to me about sophistication – I've been to Leeds." And yet, in the 60s, that golden age of aspiration, Waterhouse was part of a crack force of prickly outsiders who barged through the privileged ranks of the elite.

A disproportionate number of these iconoclasts were from Leeds and its surrounds: Waterhouse, Alan Bennett, Tony Harrison, Willis Hall, David Storey, John Braine, Stan Barstow . . . throw in Jack Higgins and Barbara Taylor Bradford (and, at a stretch, Barry Cryer, who formed an unlikely comedy duo with Harrison) and you have the Leeds Movement.

Never heard of it? That could be because, unlike the Merseybeat Poets or the Madchester Sound, it was never officially acknowledged. "It's something to do with a lack of self-identity," Peace explains. "It's the same with music. Manchester and Liverpool have clearly defined music scenes. But while Leeds has had great bands, it has never really had a scene."

This anonymity is all part of the charm. On my last visit to Elland Road, Leeds United's football ground, I bumped into Bernard Hare, whose disturbing memoir Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew, about underclass kids growing up in east Leeds during the 1990s, was hailed as an instant classic. "I've become a recluse," he smiled, anticipating the haven't-seen-you-in-yonks question. "Leeds has hugely influenced writing and thought," argues Mick McCann in How Leeds Changed the World. "It's just that no one seems to know it. It's part of our Leedsness not to blow our own trumpet. To keep our feet on the ground, to not show off, to never get ideas above our station."

This is only part of the story. Personally, I think Dickens's "beastly place" – much to the horror of its civic boosterists – revels in its image as a grim, sullen, down-to-earth, anti-intellectual, proudly independent, no-frills, dark and gritty city. Peace's characters in his astonishing Red Riding quartet frequently toast each other with the words: "To the north, where we do what we want!"

The new wave of West Riding iconoclasts – Peace, McCann, Caryl Phillips, Kester Aspden, Dave Simpson, Alice Nutter, Boff Whalley, Ian Duhig, Wes Brown, Tom Palmer, Robert Endeacott and John Anthony Lake – do what they want. I interviewed some of them for my book Promised Land, a cultural history of Leeds United, and they all made it clear they wouldn't want to belong to a movement. This, I suppose, is what makes them iconoclasts. Like the Waterhouse generation, they write about escaping a life of provincial confinement. Some have escaped – but they all seem to return, in their writing at least, to the dirt and the darkness. Brown's Shark depicts an underclass struggling to belong, grafting for its patch. Aspden, Phillips and Duhig have all written movingly about the murder of rough sleeper David Oluwale, one of the most notorious racist crimes in British history. "I think that darkness comes from growing up in West Yorkshire in the 1970s," Peace says. "It was a dark time: not just the Ripper, police corruption and miscarriages of justice, but economically and politically."

For the rest of the article

Why is the Universe 'just right' for life?

2011-06-14T13:08:00.001-07:00

The Universe is not the open and shut case the New Atheists claim it is. Nor does this make traditional theism unproblematic. As Louis MacNiece once speculated, world is crazier than we think. Paul Davies, a physicist and popular science writer, has asked, why is the Universe just right for life? For us to be as we are, the whole Universe has to be as it is.

Inayat Bunglawala confidently summarises the arguments considered by Davies in this Guardian article. Here's an extract:

Davies looks at a series of different models that might otherwise explain this fitness for life, including:

• The "absurd universe": the universe does mysteriously permit life, but that is just the way it is: there is no point to it, and if it had been any different, we would not be here to debate it. Life is merely an extraordinary accident. Davies says that this is "probably the majority position among scientists". Stephen Hawking encapsulated this view in his remark that "the human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet".

• The "multiverse": there are an unimaginable number of universes apart from the one that we inhabit. Statistically, some would have the right conditions for life, while many, many others would not. We are lucky to be in one of the ones that permit life. Richard Dawkins expressed some support for this view in his book, the God Delusion.

• The "God hypothesis": many scientists find this an unsatisfactory position because although it may help explain why life exists, it merely replaces that with another big question. How did God come to be? The monotheistic faiths, including Islam, hold that God is a necessary being. "Vision cannot comprehend Him, yet He comprehends all vision," the Qur'an says.

Davies considers the curiously counter-intuitive speculation that cause and effect could run both ways, and the end of the Universe could be its beginging:

This from Adrew Crumey's review in the Independent:

Causality, he argues, could work backwards, so that the real cause of our universe is its endpoint. The point our cosmos is evolving towards could be one in which the whole of it becomes conscious. Philosophically minded readers might be reminded here of Spinoza, Kant, Schelling or Goethe, all of whom said strikingly similar things. Davies, it seems, is a new Romantic - if not a postmodernist.

Christos Tsiolkas interview in Bookslut

2011-06-13T16:37:00.000-07:00

Interesting interview with one of my favourite contemporary writers, Christos Tsiolkas. While The Slap may be 'Neighbours with ID', the concerns are recognisable to anybody living in a Western-style market state. The paradoxes at the heart of liberalism:

I had been trying to meet Christos Tsiolkas for weeks. My work colleagues were starting to doubt that I ever knew him and my credibility was seriously faltering.

Tsiolkas, the winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Slap, (among other awards) now has a best seller. Tsiolkas was not returning my calls!My status anxiety had reached freakish levels. We're both Greek Australians, of similar age, (he's younger), and we inhabit Melbourne's northern suburbs from which the characters in The Slap emerge. I should have pursued my writing forcefully; I should have left for the US; I should have become a lawyer, a politician; I should at least have become rich, famous; I should have... I got the call!

"Sorry mate, I have been flat-out and the Melbourne Film Festival is on; I have been there every night." Tsiolkas is apologetic and I feel like a wanker.

We met at his home in Preston on a cold, grey Melbourne morning moulded by drizzle. We hugged and kissed. "Ela, mate come in mate, coffee?" We were the characters from The Slap, in a scene repeated millions of times in what could have been my uncle's house in 1969. We were the new class in the old burb. We may have been drinking coffee on a laminated kitchen table from the '60s, but we were not our parents.

"What I felt was new in the novel for me was trying to work out what this new middle class is. We are all tertiary educated yet we all have a foot in a kind of parental, familial working class, culture," Tsiolkas said.

I wonder aloud if we can ever lose that ethnic chip on the shoulder. Can we ever stop that gnawing internal beast, the "wog"? The wog, which fills us with equal measure of arrogance, pride and self-loathing?

For the full interview

The King's English

2011-06-06T03:22:00.000-07:00

Revealing article about Kingsley Amis over at The Telegraph. Here's an extract:

He goes on, more revealingly, to observe that the contemporary short story tends to be published in “those pale and sickly present-day equivalents of the Victorian fiction magazines, the periodicals subsidised by the Arts Council or one of its offspring. A writer, or any other kind of artist, who partly or largely need not depend on pleasing the public, who in effect has his fee guaranteed whatever the quality of his produce, is tempted to self-indulgence and laziness.” Better to stick to the novel, “which is as yet unlikely to contain any material subsidised by the Arts Council”.

Amis’s fear of art being viewed as pretence and the artist as lazy or dependent is clear from these remarks; and who would accuse an artist of being lazy? The answer might be: a working man. With his talk of produce and workbenches, Amis is trying to create the image of the writer as an ordinary worker, to dispel art’s associations with foppishness and pretentiousness and self-aggrandisement. These associations were evidently painful to Amis – but why? It is as though, in the modernist possibilities of the short story, he perceived a threat both to his masculine and his writerly identity; yet for a generation of American male writers emerging contemporaneously with Amis, the short story was a sort of “working man’s” – almost a macho – form.

Interesting to see, like David Storey and many other working and lower middle-class writers, that Kingsley sees his craft as graft. While those you grew up with are labourers, grafters, strong men, proud men, earning an honest living with their bare hands, the writer's role carries the emasculation-threat. 'Workers' as my mum reverentially calls them. There is an honour and spirit to good work that is a vestige of the Protestant work ethic. A second trait common to this social grouping, is the dislike and mistrust of purely publicly-funded art. People on the lower end of the wage spectrum, knowing how much tax they pay, are astounded that another sector of the population can 'get away' with fannying about in the arts.

Barefoot in the Park 2011

2011-06-03T15:07:00.001-07:00

For those of you feeling particularly mental, this Sunday I'm reading as part of the Scribe's session at Barefoot in the Park in Leeds. Plenty of other things going on too. In its own words: "Barefoot in the Park is a one-day maelstrom of poetry, storytelling, comedy and music – and this time we mean the full power of the storm. But still laid back – we are a friendliest of friendly bunches after all!"

Here's the schedule:

12noon – Doors open
12.30pm – Scribe Magazine Session
1pm – storyteller Matthew Belwood
1.30pm – poet Vahni Capildeo
2pm-2.40pm– 1st Open Mic
2.50pm-3.20pm – band – The Love Birds
3.30pm – poet Adam Strickson
4.05pm – performer Henry Raby
4.40pm – poet Michael McCarthy
5.10pm – Cadaverine Magazine session
5.40pm – poet John Whale
6.10pm-6.50pm – 2nd Open Mic Session
6.50pm – 7.35pm Slam Battle
7.45pm-8.15pm – band – The Clifford Village Band
8.25pm – poetry&prose Competition Results Presentation
8.35pm – poet Special Guest

For more about the festival

Harold Bloom: "a tired, sad, humane old creature."

2011-06-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

In his own words, Harold Bloom, the preeminent literary critic of his time, is "a tired, sad, humane old creature." Or so he says in an entertaining and enlightening interview in The Paris Review.

Bloom is in rude health, referring to his own feet as 'Bloomian', stopping off in the kitchen to gawp at a female sports broadcaster and general mutterings and name-dropping from the world of Literature.

If you're unfamiliar with Bloom, he is a fierce advocate of the 'Western Canon' and canonicity in general. As well as compelling theorist. His idea about the Anxiety of Influence and creative misprision are as near to a truthful commentary on the creative process as I've discovered.

Here's an extract:

Recently, Harold Bloom has been under attack not just in scholarly journals and colloquia, but also in newspapers, on the op-ed page, on television and radio. The barrage is due to the best-seller The Book of J, in which Bloom argues that the J-Writer, the putative first author of the Hebrew Bible, not only existed (a matter under debate among Bible historians for the last century) but, quite specifically, was a woman who belonged to the Solomonic elite and wrote during the reign of Rehoboam of Judah in competition with the Court Historian. The attacks have come from Bible scholars, rabbis, and journalists, as well as from the usual academic sources, and Bloom has never been more isolated in his views or more secure in them. He has become, by his own description, “a tired, sad, humane old creature,” who greets his many friends and detractors with an endearing, melancholy exuberance.

He is happy to talk about most anything—politics, romance, sports—although he admits he is “too used to” some topics to get into them. One sets out to disagree with him, and the response is, “Oh, no, no, my dear . . .” In a class on Shakespeare, a mod-dressed graduate student suggests that Iago may be sexually jealous of Othello; Bloom tilts his furry eyebrows, his stockinged feet crossed underneath him, his hand tucked in his shirt, and cries out, “That will not do, my dear. I must protest!” Not surprisingly, it is by now a commonplace of former students’ articles and lectures to start off with a quarrel with Bloom, and in his view, this is only as it should be. He likes to quote the Emersonian adage: “That which I can gain from another is never tuition but only provocation.”

The interview was conducted at the homes he shares with his wife, Jeanne, in New Haven and New York—the one filled with four decades’ accrual of furniture and books, the other nearly bare, although stacks of works in progress and students’ papers are strewn about in both. If the conversation is not too heavy, Bloom likes to have music on, sometimes Baroque, sometimes jazz. (His New York apartment, which is in Greenwich Village, allows him to take in more live jazz.) The phone rings nonstop. Friends, former students, colleagues drop by. Talk is punctuated by strange exclamatories: Zoombah, for one—Swahili for “libido”—is an all-purpose flavoring particle, with the accompanying, adjectival zoombinatious and the verb to zoombinate. Bloom speaks as if the sentences came to him off a printed page, grammatically complex, at times tangled. But they are delivered with great animation, whether ponderous or joyful—if also with finality. Because he learned English by reading it, his accent is very much his own, with some New York inflections: “You try and learn English in an all Yiddish household in the East Bronx by sounding out the words of Blake’s Prophecies,” he explains. Often, he will start a conversation with a direct, at times personal question, or a sigh: “Oh, how the Bloomian feet ache today!”

INTERVIEWER

What are your memories of growing up?

HAROLD BLOOM

That was such a long time ago. I’m sixty years old. I can’t remember much of my childhood that well. I was raised in an Orthodox East European Jewish household where Yiddish was the everyday language. My mother was very pious, my father less so. I still read Yiddish poetry. I have a great interest and pleasure in it.

INTERVIEWER

What are your recollections of the neighborhood in which you grew up?

BLOOM

Almost none. One of my principal memories is that I and my friends, just to survive, had constantly to fight street battles with neighborhood Irish toughs, some of whom were very much under the influence of a sort of Irish-American Nazi organization called the Silver Shirts. This was back in the 1930s. We were on the verge of an Irish neighborhood over there in the East Bronx. We lived in a Jewish neighborhood. On our border, somewhere around Southern Boulevard, an Irish neighborhood began, and they would raid us, and we would fight back. They were terrible street fights, involving broken bottles and baseball bats. They were very nasty times. I say this even though I’ve now grown up and find that many of my best friends are Irish.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think your background helped in any way to shape your career?

BLOOM

Obviously it predisposed me toward a great deal of systematic reading. It exposed me to the Bible as a sort of definitive text early on. And obviously too, I became obsessed with interpretation as such. Judaic tradition necessarily acquaints one with interpretation as a mode. Exegesis becomes wholly natural. But I did not have very orthodox religious beliefs. Even when I was quite a young child I was very skeptical indeed about orthodox notions of spirituality. Of course, I now regard normative Judaism as being, as I’ve often said, a very strong misreading of the Hebrew Bible undertaken in the second century in order to meet the needs of the Jewish people in a Palestine under Roman occupation. And that is not very relevant to matters eighteen centuries later. But otherwise, I think the crucial experiences for me as a reader, as a child, did not come reading the Hebrew Bible. It came in reading poetry written in English, which can still work on me with the force of a Bible conversion. It was the aesthetic experience of first reading Hart Crane and William Blake—those two poets in particular.

INTERVIEWER

How old were you at this point?

BLOOM

I was preadolescent, ten or eleven years old. I still remember the extraordinary delight, the extraordinary force that Crane and Blake brought to me—in particular Blake’s rhetoric in the longer poems—though I had no notion what they were about. I picked up a copy of the Collected Poems of Hart Crane in the Bronx Library. I still remember when I lit upon the page with the extraordinary trope, “O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits / The agile precincts of the lark’s return.” I was just swept away by it, by the Marlovian rhetoric. I still have the flavor of that book in me. Indeed it’s the first book I ever owned. I begged my oldest sister to give it to me, and I still have the old black and gold edition she gave me for my birthday back in 1942. It’s up on the third floor. Why is it you can have that extraordinary experience (preadolescent in my case, as in so many other cases) of falling violently in love with great poetry . . . where you are moved by its power before you comprehend it? In some, a version of the poetical character is incarnated and in some like myself the answering voice is from the beginning that of the critic. I suppose the only poet of the twentieth century that I could secretly set above Yeats and Stevens would be Hart Crane. Crane was dead at the age of thirty-two, so one doesn’t really know what he would have been able to do. An immense loss. As large a loss as the death of Shelley at twenty-nine or Keats at twenty-five. Crane had to do it all in only seven or eight years.

INTERVIEWER

Did you read children’s stories, fairy tales?

BLOOM

I don’t think so. I read the Bible, which is, after all, a long fairy tale. I didn’t read children’s literature until I was an undergraduate.

INTERVIEWER

Did you write verse as a child?

BLOOM

In spite of my interest, that never occurred to me. It must have had something to do with the enormous reverence and rapture I felt about poetry, the incantatory strength that Crane and Blake had for me from the beginning. To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons. To try to write in verse would have been a kind of trespass. That’s something that I still feel very strongly.

For the rest of the article

The Paris Review

7 reasons to buy Shark

2011-06-01T03:32:00.000-07:00

It's been a little while since I did a shameless plug. Today that time has come with six reasons why you should buy my novel, Shark. The novel has sold well, for a debut distributed from a small press, but there's sill plenty yet to read it.

1. According to Ian McMillan, "Wes Brown writes with a kind of rhythmic Northern realism, catching the way we think, the way we talk, the way we act round here; he manages to make the North a marvellous place, a place where art can happen, where epic can feel comfortable..."

2. It's available as a Kindle Book, for only £3.44.

3. It's the first novel to feature the English Defense League.

4. It has an excellent review in Litro.

5. It has covert art by Calum Harris.

6. It's about the emasculation of the white working-class.

7. It's actually pretty good. It has a few bobbles here and there. But plenty to be getting on with.

The State of Amis

2011-05-21T06:31:00.000-07:00

The Night Light launch night was a great success. The site is now up and running and looks very nice indeed.

They were kind enough to publish my essay, The State of Amis. Here's an extract:

Martin Amis’s next novel, The State of England, will be published later this year. Amis claims, “it’s his worst yet”. Based on Mikey Carroll, a crack-smoking lottery winner. “Lionel Asbo wins £90m on the lottery and does something so vicious…I can’t tell you what.”

Once a novelist of Hogarthian scope and wit, the author of Money, London Fields and The Rachel Papers was the enfant terrible English letters. His novels were funny, barbed and wise. His style, a rapping sort of American-English, heavily influenced by Bellow and Nabokov was electric, stylish, and addictive. Martin Amis styled a language that captured the fusion of the eighties; the high and the low, the demotic and the mandarin, the easy money and the social decay:

"As my cab pulled off FDR Drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds, a low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of the lane and slipped in fast right across our bows."

Amis successfully combined the high style of Bellow with the frenzy of mass culture. The Oxbridge intellectual was obsessed with low life, with junk culture and moral degradation. Yet, as we waited for Amis to write with the seriousness he craved, we waited and nothing happened.

After Money came London Fields, a pastiche of the Victorian novel with apocalyptic overtones and the comic-book noir of a graphic novel. He had success with the stylistic and satisfying conceit Time’s Arrow and gradually descended into the “not knowing where to look bad” Yellow Dog and the boring House of Meetings and Pregnant Widow. But with State of England, Amis is clearing setting out to write about the way we, or some of us live today.

The likelihood is he will fail. Amis’s satirical powers have faded since his peak in the eighties, and the effect will be yet more strange caricatures of yob life:

Take this segway from London Fields:

"There were worse guys. Where? There in the hot light of CostCheck for example, the scuffle at the door, the foul threat and the elbow in the black neck of the wailing lady, then the car with its rust and its waiting blond, and off to do the next thing, whatever, whenever necessary."

This descends into wordplay, and at its worst, sneering mockery of the uncultured, unwashed, unpalatable masses. Amis is by no means raging a class war – his novels are wonderfully misanthropic, but if we are to have serious accounts of serious times, is this it?

It’s not just Amis failing the mark. Sebastian Faulk’s A Week In December is another attempt at a “state of the nation” novel. Despite his likeability and sincerity to write his characters with dignity and sympathy, A Week In December fails to deliver what it’s meant to. Sadly, another rather wealthy, gentle, Oxbridge educated older man gives us his take on the country with a knowledge that largely seems to have been filtered and coloured by tabloid hysteria.

Hassan is a young man with terrorist aspirations:

"His new machine, unfouled by Internet and e-mail history remained in its box for a week. He couldn’t find any legitimate use for it. Eventually he thought he’d better download some songs, go on YourPlace or do a few of the things young people were supposed to do, so if the police came calling it would look normal."

Faulk’s Englishness is better suited to Engleby and James Bond. While A Week in December may amuse readers who don’t want to go beyond the preconceptions of social styles found in the daily news cycles, it won’t do to adequately express something new, challenging and provocative about a nation going through extraordinary times with its population righteous and divided, multiracial and disconnected, technologically adept and socially bankrupt. The diversity and difficulties are new and complex. They deserve more clarity and vision.

Hanif Kureishi achieved something like this in the eighties himself with My Beautiful Launderette and Black Album. Documenting contemporary Muslim life and the divisions between the secular and the religious, the integrated and the traditional. More recently, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth was a throw back to Dickensian variety with a convincing if self-conscious voice. But the novel was marked by what the critic James Wood calls, hysterical realism. Wood describes a hysterically realist work as a “big, ambitious novel” that pursues “vitality at all costs” and consequently “knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being.”

For the full article

The Night Light

*Live Knife Fighting

2011-05-20T02:43:00.000-07:00

TheNightLight is relaunching its website today and to celebrate, the online magazine will be taking on fellow webzine, The Cadaverine at the Deansgate Waterstone's in Manchester.

It'll be a 'literary death match' style set up. A War of the Proses as Yorkshire takes on Lancashire.

Here's some blurb:

Two publishing houses, both alike in dignity,
In Waterstone's Deansgate,
Where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break
to new mutiny: Lancashire
...and Yorkshire settle old scores in a bloody war
of the Proses

*Knives replaced here with literature for safety's sake.

Join The Night Light and The Cadverine as they take each other on in a live literary duel to the death. Both publishers will present a team of their best contributors to defend their county's honour in a series of short story and poetry readings.

Entry is free of charge and Waterstone's have a fully operational and legit bar.

After 9 you can join us for celebrations/mourning in The Deaf Institute basement where the victor will undoubtedly be mocking the corpse of the defeated.

Judging Panel:
Adam Lowe
Dominic Williams
Katherine Horrex

Team Night Light:
Wes Brown
Tom Hughes
Nathan Connolly
A.J. Kirby
Ben Godfrey

Team Cadaverine:
Andrew McMillan
David Tait
Dom Hale
Kim Moore
Michael Conley

I'm the turncoat, as having founded The Cadaverine, I'll be fighting for TheNightLight.

The Plot Against Roth

2011-05-19T07:15:00.000-07:00

Since the deaths of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and John Updike, Philip Roth has widely been claimed as 'America's greatest living novelist'.

If you Google 'greatest writer america philip roth', 1,200,000 results come up. Including many in newspapers like the Guardian and the Telegraph promoting this fiction.

But, this week, a judge has withdrawn as judge of the Man Booker International prize in protest at Roth's win:

Author and publisher Carmen Callil has withdrawn from the judging panel of the Man Booker International prize over its decision to honour Philip Roth with the £60,000 award. Dismissing the Pulitzer prize-winning author, Callil said that "he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe".

Good for her. Roth has written a handful of great works and is doubtlessly a top writer. But he's written the same book relentlessly for years. Indignation? The Humbling? Nemesis?

Exit, Ghost is one of the worst novel's I've ever read. About? You guessed it. An old bloke shagging a younger woman.

Roth is horribly overrated. He represents the interests of the middle-class, middle-aged, centre-left orthodoxy and rarely goes beyond or does anything interesting with these conventions. His work won't stand the test of time.

Anybody for Blue Labour?

2011-05-16T15:39:00.000-07:00

In opposition, the Tory's played lip-service to Philip Blond's 'Red Tory' agenda. Now it's Labour's turn to go 'blue'. This from The Telegraph:

The Blue book, entitled The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, is the result of seminars in Oxford and London attended not only by Blue Labourites, who think the party must again espouse its traditions of faith, flag and family, but by defenders of the breakneck modernism of Tony Blair. Ed Miliband wrote the foreword, and his henchmen, Lords (Stewart) Wood and (Maurice) Glasman, sat down with David Miliband and new Labourites including the former cabinet minister James Purnell.

I've long been interested in the gradations and paradoxes of political ideology. Some less astute types I know seem shocked that it's possible to be a 'right-wing Labourite' or a 'left-wing Tory'.

What's more, while David Cameron dragged his party to the centre-ground in opposition, trying to become 'the heir to Blair' and embrace the Blairite consensus of neoliberal economics and social liberalism, Ed Milliband seems to be looking to Labour's ideological past and the majoritarian values of the white working-class.

But is looking blue a concession to Tory supremacy? Is Cameroonian conservatism the new master narrative?

Among Lord Glasman’s ebook co-authors are Marc Stears, one of Mr Miliband’s university friends, and Jonathan Rutherford, a Middlesex University professor and an admired architect of Blue Labour. Prof Rutherford’s contribution is a paean to “community, work, country and a sense of honour”. Labour’s future, he argues, is conservative or it is nothing.

Dawkins dodges God debate

2011-05-14T15:25:00.001-07:00

Dawkins has become the high priest of atheism off the back of The God Delusion, his many debates and TV appearances. Yet according to The Telegraph, he's dodging a debate with William Lane Craig:

But he now stands accused of “cowardice” after refusing four invitations to debate the existence of God with a renowned Christian philosopher.

A war of words has broken out between the best selling author of The God Delusion, and his critics, who see his refusal to take on the American academic, William Lane Craig, as a “glaring” failure and a sign that he may be losing his nerve.

Prof Dawkins maintains that Prof Craig is not a figure worthy of his attention and has reportedly said that such a contest would “look good” on his opponent’s CV but not on his own.

This silly CV thing might sound like a witty retort, but he's had time to think about it. And given that Dawkins has been on television debating lunatics, literally lunatics and people at New Age fairs, why not debate a professional philosopher? Surely, engaging in debate is about truth and not bragging rights?

The Shannon Matthews kidnap

2011-05-14T07:29:00.000-07:00

The Shannon Matthews kidnap is the subject of my next novel, When Lights Are Bright. Sometimes a crime and the public outcry can reveal the state of the nation. This case does that, but so much more. There was the blatant difference in tone and scale of reportage to that given to the middle-class McCanns who were 'respectable' and could mobilise an impressive PR campaign. There's the value vacuum. Where professionals were afraid to be politically incorrect, and judge Karen Matthew's 'lifestyle choices'. Equally, it revealed a patronising attitude toward the 'underclass'. Chav baiting. Shannon became a poster-girl for 'break-down' Britain. And perhaps most interestingly of all was Karen Matthew's attempt to manipulate the media. The understanding of the news-cycle's need for a follow up to the McCann's story and the politically correct response she would receive. The well-intentioned people would see her as 'vulnerable' and 'uneducated'. And she played it. Tim Adam's levels out all the complexity in this Guardian article:

With the story in mind, though, Matthews' life looked for a while to me like the extreme fall-out of that sudden collapse in values, of ideas of propriety and duty that disappeared along with the mills and the industry in the area. Not one of the fathers of her children had ever thought to make an honest woman of her. 'They'd all,' as she complained, 'left me.' Shame was not a part of her life as a result. No politically correct person, or social worker, or benefits officer, would judge her lifestyle choices, but pride and self-esteem or any other adult value weren't part of it either.

Interview in the Hub

2011-05-11T05:39:00.001-07:00

Strong interview with Daniel Sluman over at the NAWE Young Writers' Hub. Look out for Sluman's debut poetry collection later in the year. One to watch.

Shark has been described as 'Northern realism'. How important is it for writers to explore the grittier aspects of modern life, and how has basing your novel in the north made life easier or harder for you in writing it?

It's interesting how interlinked the words 'Northern' and 'gritty' are and how often they're used to described Shark.

There's a danger that we can fall into a trap that David Forrest talks about where 'the North' is become a negative-stereotype of itself and not truly representative.

That said, their are still gritty, dark, violent, racist, misogynistic, nihilistic, alcoholic, and narcotic elements to Leeds - like any 'regenerated' city. Like any city living in the 21st century. Not all of these vices can be simply explained away.

For me, the Leeds I write is a mythic city. It has elements of the real but it's located somewhere deep in the subconscious. Maybe even preconscious. Near the nub of the spine. Oddly enough, I don't think of it as the North. It's more of a ghost house.

There are moments int the novel of laughter and bigheartedness, of hope and grace. So yes, gritty, but, hopefully, a lot of other things too. Beauty being the central consideration. Writing completely uncensored.

How do you think 'writing completely uncensored' fits in with the literary world today? Who are the influences for you in terms of that visceral, immediate style?

Given the furor every time anybody says anything controversial on the likes of the Guardian, you'd be forgiven for thinking we live in a censorious climate. That freedom is speech is seen as some sort of cover for incitement and hatred. And terms like 'misogynist' and 'reactionary' are too easily banded about, devaluing their currency.

But that's not been my experience with Shark. By and large, readers and critics have been decent enough to differentiate between the uncensored thoughts of of the likes of John Usher, and the thoughts of the author. Some don't like the 'graphic' content or the 'valourising' of a Sun-reading, ex-soldier. Though I see it more as an act of Jacksonian democracy.

With the immediacy, I needed something that could capture John Usher's awareness, his experience of the world. It ended up being third-person localised, free-indirect style heavy under the influence of Updike and DeLillo. In the end, I started to focus more on the shape and the sound of the words.

For the rest

Shark is now available as Kindle eBook

The Austerity Debate

2011-05-10T03:06:00.001-07:00

The Austerity Debate rumbles on. And while what happens to the economy will effect us all, very few of us know what's going on. The FT has brought in some of the world's top policy-makers and economists to have their say.

There's Robert Skidelsky's postponement perspective:

Deliberate steps to eliminate the “structural” (ie non-recession induced) deficit should be postponed until the recovery is firmly entrenched. With the budget balanced, or even in surplus, at high employment, continued growth will steadily reduce the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product. This is what happened after the second world war.

To Niall Ferguson's tightening of fiscal policy:

It was said of the Bourbons that they forgot nothing and learned nothing. The same could easily be said of some of today’s latter-day Keynesians. They cannot and never will forget the policy errors made in the US in the 1930s. But they appear to have learned nothing from all that has happened in economic theory since the publication of their bible, John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, in 1936.

In its caricature form, the debate goes like this. The Keynesians, haunted by the spectre of Herbert Hoover, warn that the US in still teetering on the brink of another Depression. Nothing is more likely to bring this about, they argue, than a premature tightening of fiscal policy. This was the mistake Franklin Roosevelt made after the 1936 election. Instead, we need further fiscal stimulus

For more viewpoints on the austerity debate

Iraq concludes first book fair in 20 years

2011-05-09T07:02:00.000-07:00

Some good news from Iraq: Baghdad — Iraq's first book fair in 20 years concluded on Thursday with organisers and attendees hailing it as a return for the violence-wracked country to the global literary scene.

The two-week exhibition featured more than 200 publishing houses from 32 countries displaying about 37,000 books at a massive conference hall in Mansur, west Baghdad, according to the event's organisers.

The books on offer were mostly in Arabic, but English and French literature was also on sale.

"Baghdad has regained its place on the world's cultural map," said Safira Naji, a member of the organising committee for the Baghdad International Book Fair, the first such exhibition organised by the Iraqi government.

For the rest

Overrated: Paul Muldoon

2011-05-07T15:33:00.000-07:00

I thought it was just me. I remember being drawn to Paul Muldoon during my short spell at University. He was excessively praised. Yet much of the poetry was inventive nonsense and cryptic posturing.

Eric Ormbsy expands in the always excellent Standpoint. Here's the gist:

Of course, a poet shouldn't be judged by his efforts at self-promotion, however strenuous, but by his poems. From New Weather of 1973 to Maggot of 2010, with another 12 collections in between, Muldoon has evinced a quite dazzling command of verse. There's no formal measure of which he's not a proven master. He's especially renowned — rightly so, I think — for a verbal exuberance of astounding virtuosity. Formulations at once bizarre and apt, startling and often outlandish images, crafty multilingual puns, macaronic rhymes, cadences both suave and syncopated, pour forth in a seemingly inexhaustible cascade of glittering invention. The result is that the very surfaces of his poems, the cunningly knotted and woven texture of his words, seem an end in themselves. Consider one stanza from "Incantata," his much-admired tour de force, an elegy for the artist Mary Farl Powers:

The fact that you were determined to cut yourself off in your prime
because it was pre-determined has my eyes abrim:
I crouch with Belacqua
and Lucky and Pozzo in the Acacacac-
ademy of Anthropopopometry, trying to make sense of the ‘quaquaqua'
of that potato-mouth; that mouth as prim
and proper as it's full of self-opprobrium,
with its ‘quaquaqua,' with its ‘Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq'.

Like many of the 44 dizzying stanzas of "Incantata," this exhibits great brio; it's close to nonsense verse of an inspired, almost manic sort. The cross-lingual and assonantal rhymes, the plosive alliterations, the knowing allusions to Beckett, the repeated French quoi and Latin qua which end up sounding like nothing so much as hysterical frog-croaks-it out-Lears Edward Lear and out-Carrolls Lewis Carroll. But despite its technical brilliance, its calculated wackiness, do we believe for an instant that the poet has his "eyes abrim"? Not once in this long poem do we feel or share the force of grief.

But it's not all bad. Muldoon still has moments of ascension:

It wasn't always thus. In earlier poems, there is an elegant equilibrium between word and thing. Take "Hedgehog" from New Weather, his first collection:

The hedgehog gives nothing
Away, keeping itself to itself.
We wonder what a hedgehog
Has to hide, why it so distrusts.

We forget the god
Under this crown of thorns.
We forget that never again
Will a god trust in the world.

The making of London's 'white trash'

2011-05-07T13:51:00.000-07:00

Interesting take on 'chav baiting' from Ed Barrett in Spiked:

'Such prejudices loom large in The Likes of Us, often to amusing effect. Collins tells the story of how a woman at a media party complained that she had moved to the Elephant and Castle and couldn't buy aubergines locally. The area was 'very white', she explained. The fact that she and her friends were all white didn't strike her as a problem - they were clearly not the sort of whites she had in mind. 'Her multiculturalism made her colourless; her class made her superior', says Collins (1). Since the book was written, a more blatant manifestation of this prejudice has arisen: the fashion for mocking the baseball-cap-wearing 'chavs', who are pilloried for their accents, clothes, eating habits, ignorance and general lack of taste. The popularity of this pleb-baiting can be seen in the success of the relentlessly misanthropic ChavScum website, which has already spawned a cottage industry of spin-off books - buy one for someone you really hate (2).

One irony of this unedifying chav-baiting is that the mockers themselves are hardly standard-bearers for civilised values. The tabloid mentality is by no means the exclusive preserve of the poor and uneducated - 'dumbing down' is, after all, a phrase coined to describe the decline of cultural standards among the upper reaches of society, not those at the bottom. Why, then, are people queuing up to heap derision upon the hapless chavs?

For the rest of the article

Falling Man Review in FIPA

2011-05-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

Falling Man is not only a study in grief, but an elegy to a grieving city. While earlier, roving works like Underworld (1997) sought to capture ‘the whole picture, the whole culture’, Following on from the disappointing Cosmopolis (2003), a novel lacking heart and gravity, Falling Man is slight and tenderly hushed into being. The set-pieces are there. The parallels of art and atrocity, coolly precise. But there is crystalline shock. Deeply bruised. A mood of sadness, of morbid recollection. Falling Man is DeLillo writing with his guard down, walking headlong into brutal combinations of grief and loss.

The opening is harrowingly real, hauntingly human:

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and a space of falling ash and near light. He was walking through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him.

Falling Man begins with the fall of the Twin Towers. A crippling event. Keith Neudecker walks among the shocked bystanders and rising smoke of burning rubble. He has forgotten himself. The plot – if a story so slight can be called a plot – follows Keith’s return to domesticity with his estranged wife Lianne and soon begins an affair with Florence, a fellow survivor of the attacks.

For the rest of the article

The Great Estate: The Rise & Fall of the Council House

2011-05-07T07:22:00.001-07:00

Michael Collins is bald with big thick black glasses - and he's done a brilliant documentary on Social Housing. And it's available on iPlayer. He takes us through the problematic history of social housing, the thinking behind the architecture, the shifts in political mood and cultural realties. Impartial and fair, Collins brings us up to date with the current implementation of shorter-term tenancies.

Shark Kindle book

2011-05-05T03:40:00.001-07:00

Shark is now available as a Kindle book for the bargain price of £3.44. You can get a length free sample and purchase the book over at the Amazon Kindle store.

Here's some blurbage:

Shark is a story about the dispossessed and how they get by.

Ex-soldier and violent deadbeat John Usher returns to his boyhood home of Leeds to find things have changed. His community has been unravelled by gang culture, ethnic tensions and hopelessness.

"In Shark, Wes Brown writes with a kind of rhythmic Northern realism, catching the way we think, the way we talk, the way we act round here; he manages to make the North a marvellous place, a place where art can happen, where epic can feel comfortable..." Ian McMillan, poet and broadcaster.

"Brown is a new generation Updike with the ability to capture the essence of a time and place comparable to Cartwright's Heartland. Never has hard-fought alienation been rendered so tensely familiar and jaw-achingly hard to swallow." Jo Brandon, editor of The Cadaverine

"Here we have that rare artifact. A contemporary, regional, working class novel written with the ideas-based, language currency of the great transatlantic stylists: Updike, Bellow, DeLillo and Martin Amis. Wes Brown's art is to match literary intensity to the northern pubs and pool halls, finding the story in a young man's struggle to accommodate himself to the life he has been dealt, after service in Iraq, in a community divided and adfrift." Danny Broderick, The Workroom.

Interview on YouTube

More doubting Chomsky

2011-04-29T05:09:00.001-07:00

Johann Hari has some telling things to say about Noam Chomsky, a man who seems unable to accept any criticism and for whom is opponents are always morally bankrupt and intellectually deficient. Here are some highlights from an interview in the excellent Comment Factory:

The alternatives he posits are voluntaristic, anarchist communities. Firstly, I have never seen him persuasively give a case for how that could work except on a very small scale. It’s interesting actually, he was interviewed about this and he was asked: Can you give an example of this type of thing?

I think you have to acknowledge the implausibility of these voluntaristic, anarchist communities – I just don’t think that is possible in a world of 6 billion people with extremely complex sophisticated urban societies can be organized in that way. At some point you have to acknowledge that there will be some structure of power and, I agree, that they should be a damn sight more democratic, but you can’t say anybody who engages with power is simply an evil apologist for the system, and speak about them in the extraordinarily abusive way Chomsky does.

He has used the word “bullshit” to describe the idea that markets in any way generate wealth. I believe markets are a tool need to be extremely tightly regulated – markets will have a tendency to do things that are completely unacceptable like abuse workers’ rights or trash the environment, and that’s why you need to have very strict, tight democratic regulations and strong trade unions. But nonetheless, within those regulations and checked strong trade unions, markets do actually do something very important: they generate wealth. Chomsky denies that, and I think, therefore, there is this really big hole in his interpretative framework.

What I am saying there is no explanation from him for why North Korea – a country with no markets – has 3 million people dying of famine in the 1990s and South Korea – a country with markets – doesn’t. If the state was the primary agent of generating wealth and markets were irrelevant, it would be the other way round.

There’s another problem with Chomsky. I don’t want to get into sounding rude about him personally but there is a personality fault which is that he is completely incapable of admitting he is wrong about anything. A good example is when he said – “looks likes what’s happening in Afghanistan is a silent genocide” in 2003. That was an extraordinarily strong thing to say. Genocide is the ultimate crime – and it didn’t happen.

Doubting Chomsky

2011-04-28T03:25:00.001-07:00

In younger days, like many disaffected teenagers, I was much taken by Noam Chomsky and anarcho-syndicalism. He is and was a strong critic of US foreign policy. His view of human nature is scientifically simplistic and his refusal to condemn Islamo-fascism reveals his pathological biases.

This is Paul Berman extracted on Demosphia's blog:

IN THE MIDST of those other, smaller, suicide attacks came the much bigger one, the 9/11 attack on American targets. And, at once, with the alacrity of firehouse dogs responding to a bell, any number of people stood up all over the world to propose yet another variation on the same systematic denial. There was the same reasoned insistence that nothing unreasonable was taking place, the same argument that everything was rational, the same claim that it was foolish to be shocked, and the same affirmation that ordinary explanations of normal human behavior could account for every last amazing development, if only we would open our eyes. Some of the people with those explanations turned out to be marvelously articulate, too. And no one was more articulate, or quicker into print, or longer-winded, or more energetic, than Noam Chomsky--a peculiar case, you may suppose. But I do not think that Chomsky was a peculiar case. I think that Chomsky and his explanations of the terrorist attacks bring us to the heart of our present dilemma.

Chomsky, it must be remembered, is a scientist, in the specialized field of linguistics [which may not be all that scientific, since it's invariably about the interpretation of the means of interpretation]. He has always maintained that his political analysis and his linguistic theories are separate entities, without a logical bridge leading from one to the other. This seems to me not quite true. A single thought underlies the original version of Chomsky's linguistic theory, and it is this: Man's inner nature can be calculated according to a very small number of factors, which can be analyzed rationally. No shadow of the mysterious falls across the nature of man. Other linguists, Chomsky's predecessors and rivals, have maintained that man developed language as a method of communication, and that language arose in more or less the same way as the rest of human culture. But Chomsky has argued that, on the contrary, no one created language, nor can language be usefully regarded as an element of culture. The fundamentals of language, in Chomsky's theory, are a genetic fact. No murk surrounds those fundamentals, even if we can not yet explain every aspect. Language lies at the heart of human nature; but language is merely a biological code, which we will someday crack.

In later years, Chomsky has backed away from some of his early formulations. John Searle, one of his critics, maintains that Chomsky's theory was always much too simple and that, in his later formulations, Chomsky has abandoned his own ideas. Chomsky, responding to Searle, has argued that, on the contrary, he has merely ascended from one useful hypothesis to the next in the course of his scientific career, on a ladder of research and self-correction--thus proving, in retrospect, the usefulness of his original ideas. I have no way to judge this dispute, except to observe that even Searle, Chomsky's critic, regards Chomsky as not just a scientist but a very great scientist. I do appreciate the point about modifying one's views as the mark of true scientific investigation. Here the gap is undeniable between Chomsky's linguistics, which have changed substantially over the years, and his politics, which have changed barely at all.

Still, if we take Chomsky's linguistics in their pristine version, and then glance at his analyses of international politics, it becomes obvious that Chomsky looks at language and at international affairs in the same light. He sees a possibility of accounting for every last quirk of human behavior by invoking a tiny number of factors--the possibility of analyzing world events according to a handful of identifiable elements. In matters of international affairs, he is the last of the nineteenth-century rationalists, one more thinker with a theory of human behavior that rests on a tiny number of factors--in his case, two factors, in dialectical opposition.

The first of those factors is greed for wealth and power, which is embodied in the giant American corporations--though Chomsky has always recognized that powerful institutions in other countries sometimes draw on that same instinct and behave pretty much the same way that American corporations do. The corporations wish to maximize power and profits. They command the services of government, and they buy and bully journalists and intellectuals to create, on behalf of corporations, a picture of the world that makes the general public bend to the corporations' will. And, with government and the intellectuals and the press at their disposal, the corporations, acting in their own interest, drench the world in blood and misery.

Still, a second factor intervenes in world events, and this second factor, he has suggested, may even be a further genetic trait, not unlike the gene for language. It is an instinct for freedom. The instinct for freedom leads people around the world to resist the giant corporations. and so, a giant battle deploys across the globe, with giant corporations and their intellectual and governmental servants on one side, and people who are animated by a generic or genetic-like instinct for freedom on the other: the greedy instinct versus the freedom instinct. The corporations usually win, due to their immense power. Sometimes, the instinct for freedom wins. Stalemates are not uncommon. But these two factors suffice to explain everything--or very nearly. And world events, upon close examination, turn out to resemble the human ability to speak, as presented in the early version of Chomsky's theory: a seemingly complex and murky phenomenon that can actually be illuminated through a simple accounting of a very few number of predictable factors.

Chomsky unveiled his theory of language in the 1950s, which made his scientific reputation and he unveiled his vision of politics in the mid-1960s, in a series of essays about American policy in the Vietnam War, and the essays made his reputation as a political thinker. He seemed to command a vast army of facts in those essays, seemed to have read everything, and seemed preternaturally self-assured. He demonstrated an astonishing intellectual energy. And he hurled all of these personal traits and achievements at the American policy in Vietnam. In those days, Chomsky's furor against American policy was refreshing to see, at least for everyone among his readers who had despaired of the Vietnam War. Perhaps the emotion of the moment made the extreme simplicity of Chomsky's notion of politics a little hard to see. The blizzard of detail in his polemics tended to cover over the nature of his reasoning, too. Anyway, the simplicity in his argument didn't seem to matter, so long as he was battling against what his readers already knew to be a disastrous policy.

But the American military eventually withdrew from Indochina, and then the difficulties in Chomsky's view did lead to some noticeable problems. It was not so easy to explain what happened in Indochina once the Americans were gone. The million and a half boat people who fled from South Vietnam seemed to suggest, by their sheer numbers alone, that realities in Vietnam were a little more complicated than some of the anti-war arguments had once maintained. And how was anyone to explain the outright genocide that began to take place in Cambodia, under its new Communist rulers? The Communist forces in Cambodia had been thought to represent the instinct for freedom, as opposed to the greed of the American corporations; yet here were the Communists committing unimaginable crimes, with the whole of Cambodian society as their victim.

It began to look as if pathological mass movements do exist. The evidence was plastered across the newspapers. But the evidence could only mean that human motivation is not as simple as Chomsky had said--could only mean that rational analysis of the instincts for greed and freedom cannot account for the role that irrational factors likewise play in world events. It was a devastating moment for the political theories of Noam Chomsky. And he responded by setting out resolutely to demonstrate that, in Indochina, despite everything published by the newspapers, mass pathological movements did not, in fact, exist.

Well-known journalists reported one set of data, but Chomsky assembled immense supplies of alternative data, which he drew from the recollections of random tourists, wandering church workers, and articles in little-known left-wing magazines. The alternative data, in his interpretation, refuted the accounts of the well-known journalists. And, by piling up his data, Chomsky (writing with a co-author, Edward S. Herman, in their two-volume Political Economy of Human Rights--Chomsky's single most ambitious work of political analysis) made two different arguments. He showed that genocide had never occurred; and, conversely, he showed that, if genocide did occur, it was the fault of the American military intervention, which had driven the Cambodians mad.

In either case, the stories about genocide in Cambodia revealed that America's principal institutions were even more guilty than anyone had previously imagined. For the genocide was either a web of lies spun by propagandists for The New York Times and other organs of the giant corporations--in which case, the big American institutions were capable of perpetrating the most hideous and elaborate of deceptions on all mankind. Or, alternatively, if genocide in Cambodia was really a fact (which plainly seemed to him less likely), then the American military was guilty twice over--first, for having made war in Cambodia; and, second, for having provoked the Cambodians into committing their own crimes. Either way, genocide in Cambodia told against the United States. The rational nature of world events was shown to be real--the rational behavior that led America's corporations to behave in sinister and violent ways, and the perfectly understandable response of the corporations' victims in faraway Cambodia. And there was no need to recognize the possibility of another factor--of a mass movement devoted to mass slaughter for irrational reasons.

Chomsky has written many thousands of pages devoted to that particular logic. It is his habit of mind, in regard to world events. That was why, when the 9/11 attacks took place, he did not need to collect his thoughts. He was unfazed. The entire purpose of his political outlook was to be unfazed, even by the worst of horrors. He knew exactly what to say. The notion that, in large parts of the world, a mass movement of radical Islamists had arisen, devoted to mad hatreds and conspiracy theories; the notion that radical Islamists were slaughtering people in one country after another for the purpose of slaughtering them; the notion that radical Islamists ought to be taken at their word and that shariah and the seventh-century Caliphate were their goals, and that Jews and Christians were demonic figures worthy of death; the notion that bin Laden had ordered random killings of Americans strictly for the purpose of killing Americans--all of this was, from Chomsky's perspective, not even worth discussing.

It was because, to Chomsky, movements of that particular nature and style do not exist. What do exist are, instead, the two factors in his political theory; the instincts for greed and the instinct for freedom. How, then, to explain the 9/11 attacks? Chomsky knew what to think because it was what he had always thought. He could hardly deny that the 9/11 attacks had taken place. But his first impulse was to deny that the attacks were especially bad.. He compared the attacks to Clinton's missile strike on the Sudan in 1998--Clinton's feeble effort to attack bin Laden and his enterprise. In Clinton's attack on the Sudan, a pharmaceuticals factory (which the Clinton administration apparently in error, had identified as a bomb factory) was demolished. One person was killed--possibly two people. In Chomsky's interpretation, the damage that resulted from this attack easily outweighed the damage that resulted from the 9/11 attacks.

Clinton's missile strike was exceptionally deadly, Chomsky thought, because it destroyed the Sudan's supply of medicines, destroyed the Sudan's political tranquility, and destroyed the Sudan's economy, all of which led to far more death and misery than were produced by the 9/11 attacks. Such was Chomsky's contention. It was peculiar. Still, in one sense, it was deserving of respect. Who in America or in the other rich countries thinks to tally up the sufferings that descend on people in remote parts of the world from actions taken by the wealthy cosmopolises? Chomsky was proposing to do that. Yet his tally was preposterous, in each of its elements and as a whole.

The Sudan had other pharmaceuticals factories and other ways to buy medicines; radical Islamism and other factors had already destroyed the political tranquility; and the single missile attack was not going to destroy the economy.. Losses that came out of the attack on the United States on 9/11 were, on other hand, simply staggering, if you follow Chomsky's own procedure and tally up the indirect costs alone. For the 9/11 attacks jolted the American economy--the destruction of the buildings alone was an economic blow--the effect on commerce in any number of other countries around the world, in poor countries especially, was bound to be devastating. The damage done to Mexico by itself had to be fairly painful, even if we leave aside the special hopes that Mexico had entertained, prior to 9/11, for sounder and more profitable relations with the United States. Somebody could go from region to region, all over the globe, identifying the miserable effects of the 9/11 attacks that fell upon already poor people.

Still, Chomsky stood by his argument, and did so with his customary blizzard of references to obscure sources. And having made that one argument, he went on to a second theme, which was to rehearse the entire history of American violence toward other people, beginning with the American Indians (who, for his purposes, were considered as non-Americans). He predicted what was likely to come of President Bush's plan--not yet put into execution--to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan and uproot Al Qaeda's headquarters and training camps. Genocide against the Afghan people was likely to result, in Chomsky's estimation. This prediction conformed to Chomsky's picture of the many genocides of the American past. And, with this picture of America and its genocidal past and future in mind, he asked, why would anyone have attacked the United States on 9/11?

He knew the answer. The attacks on 9/11 represented the reply of oppressed people from the Third World to centuries of American depredations. The attacks represented, at long last, an active reprisal, and not just an effort at self-defense. The 9/11 attacks, from this point of view, were entirely predictable--logical events, even if bin Laden was not an attractive figure. Chomsky had no basis at all to attribute those centuries of Third World motivation to bin Laden. The notion of a Saudi plutocrat as a tribune of the oppressed was fairly ridiculous. Still, Chomsky stuck with this argument, too. And both of his arguments--the argument that wildly exaggerated the damage caused by Clinton's missile on the pharmaceuticals factory, and the argument that Al Qaeda was avenging the oppressed Third World--pointed in the same direction. The arguments showed that, if 9/11 was bad, America itself was ultimately responsible. World events could be rationally analyzed. The greed of American corporations, and the long history of American greed in the past, sufficed to explain every last astounding act of suicide terror. For there are no pathological or irrational movements, no movements that yearn to commit slaughters, no movements that yearn for death--and, if such movements do exist, it is because they have been conjured into existence by other forces.

Chomsky said these things in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in a series of interviews and articles, and his publisher gathered them together quickly and issued them as a pamphlet called 9/11. In the United States, the principal newspapers and magazines have tended to ignore Chomsky's political writings for many years now, because of his reputation as a crank. None of the most prestigious journals bothered even to review his book.

Even so, Chomsky's pamphlet became a giant best-seller.

(Berman, pp. 144-152.)

Dead Ink Masterclass: Fiction, May 21

2011-04-25T09:52:00.000-07:00

Fancy a workshop on writing fiction and developing your practice as a writer?

This three-hour workshop explore aspects of fiction – plot, characterization, dialogue and narrative – along with a guide to using social media, approaching a publisher, and finding an audience for your work.

All levels of ability welcome.

TUTOR: Wes Brown
£10 / 7 concession for under 25s, 12-3pm, Leeds

To book your place email w.brown@nawe.co.uk

Still Arguing About Amis?

2011-04-24T10:50:00.000-07:00

If my previous post on the merits of Martin Amis hasn't yet persuaded you of his talent, this touching riposte in the Observer to his unwell friend and militant atheist, Christopher Hitchens, confirms why I love the man. Why I think we should all be a little in love with our favourite writers:

My dear Hitch: there has been much wild talk, among the believers, about your impending embrace of the sacred and the supernatural. This is of course insane. But I still hope to convert you, by sheer force of zealotry, to my own persuasion: agnosticism. In your seminal book, God Is Not Great, you put very little distance between the agnostic and the atheist; and what divides you and me (to quote Nabokov yet again) is a rut that any frog could straddle. "The measure of an education," you write elsewhere, "is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance." And that's all that "agnosticism" really means: it is an acknowledgment of ignorance. Such a fractional shift (and I know you won't make it) would seem to me consonant with your character – with your acceptance of inconsistencies and contradictions, with your intellectual romanticism, and with your love of life, which I have come to regard as superior to my own.

The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one would dream of applying to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I respectfully suggest, is a slightly more logical and decorous response to our situation – to the indecipherable grandeur of what is now being (hesitantly) called the multiverse. The science of cosmology is an awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete and approximate; and over the last 30 years it has garnered little but a series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself to be an atheist, I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while continuing to go about his tasks, declares himself to be an individualist. It cannot be altogether frivolous or wishful to talk of a "higher intelligence" – because the cosmos is itself a higher intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot understand it.

Anyway, we do know what is going to happen to you, and to everyone else who will ever live on this planet. Your corporeal existence, O Hitch, derives from the elements released by supernovae, by exploding stars. Stellar fire was your womb, and stellar fire will be your grave: a just course for one who has always blazed so very brightly. The parent star, that steady-state H-bomb we call the sun, will eventually turn from yellow dwarf to red giant, and will swell out to consume what is left of us, about six billion years from now.

Arguing About Amis

2011-04-23T10:37:00.000-07:00

Admitting you're a fan of Martin Amis these days is pretty much like owning up to a sweaty, bowel roaring fart in a bourgeois delicatessen. The kind of thing that blows a blaze of skidmarks.

People admire your honesty and simultaneously shrivel their nose in disgust. So what is it about Amis? It's plenty of things. It's that he's literary royalty. He's posh. He likes money. He had expensive dental work. He's offensive. And so on.

But does he write bad books? Which surely is the crucial point? There is a declinist myth surrounding Amis which David Barret attacks vigorously in the always excellent Standpoint. The argument, put simply, is play the ball and not the man. But the most curious thing is that this may be the British intellectual Right openly embracing Amis as one of their own. An interesting cultural shift, as Amis claims to be just as Leftwing as he ever was. Has Amis moved Rightward? What's Left?

Anyway, here's a triptych of Amis extracts gathered by David Barrett. For once, let the work rather than the man do the talking:

I felt the baby's fear when I entered. A sudden pall of mid-afternoon, and silence, and no Keith and no Kath: just Kim, the squirming bagel at my feet on the kitchen floor. She seemed unhurt, only soaked and crying — and afraid. And that was enough, too much, should never happen. Oh I know when the babies come how we patter and creep like mice through the dark tunnels, to tend them, anticipate them, to pick them up and give them comfort. But it must be like that. It must always be like that. Because when we're not there, their worlds begin to fall away. On every side the horizon climbs until it pushes out the sky. The walls come in. Pain they can take, maybe. Pain is close and they know where it comes from. Not fear, though. Keep them from fear. Jesus, if they only knew what was out there. And that's why they must never be left alone like this.

— London Fields

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that ... Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them. Women — and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses — will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams."

— The Information

She had been unconscious for over a hundred hours, and he told his mother and brother that there was no point in coming, she would not be waking up and there was no point in coming, coming from Andalucia, from Sierra Leone ... It was nearly midnight. Her body was flat, sunken, on the raised bed, all buoyancy gone; but the lifeline on the monitor continued to undulate, like a childish representation of the ocean, and she continued to breathe — to breathe with preternatural force.

Yes Violet looked forceful. For the first time in her life, she seemed to be someone it would be foolish to treat lightly or underestimate, ridge-faced, totemic, like a squaw queen with orange hair.

"She's gone," said the doctor and pointed with her hand.

The wavering line had levelled out. "She's still breathing," said Keith. But of course it was the machine that was still breathing. He stood over a breathless corpse, the chest filling, heaving, and he thought of her running and running, flying over the fields.

— The Pregnant Widow

How not to respond to critics

2011-04-19T03:58:00.000-07:00

Little bit about Jacqueline Howett in Salon:

Every year, hundreds of thousands of books are put out by independent presses that let you pay to publish your own story. And with the popularity of the iPad and Kindle, these would-be authors can bypass the cost of printing entirely, making your writing-to-publishing process a one-step deal. That may have been one step too few for British author Jacqueline Howett, whose book went out into the world before it was copyedited -- and full of typos.

Jacqueline then went on to attack any criticisms of the standard of typesetting and the quality of the novel. She even told one guy to fuck off. The level of her hostility created more hostility:

This led to a 400-comment flame war that eventually spilled over to Jacqueline's Amazon page. Now, 47 customer reviews later, "The Greek Seaman" has a total rating of one and a half stars. Commenters have taken to calling the book "vile," "trash" and "not even a real book." It's doubtful any of these reviewers would have even found "Seaman" had it not been for the author's public blow-up on Big Al's blog.

Rather than take criticism quietly, Jacqueline was too defensive and ended up subjecting herself to gales of criticism, lowered her star ranking on Amazon and has become something of an internet sensation - for all the wrong reasons.

In praise of... The Dark Knight

2011-04-15T07:24:00.001-07:00

Here's a short piece I wrote on The Dark Knight for the libertarian journal Freedom in a Puritan Age:

In Christopher Nolan’s sequel to Batman Begins, we have less over-rationalisation of an irrational set-up and more of a cosmic struggle between the Dark Knight and the Joker. Unaccountable vigilantism against murderous terror. Unlike previous incarnations, Heath Ledger’s joker is convincingly terrifying. He has a Chelsea-smile. A penchant for knives. A devotion to chaos.

What we have here is an effective analogy of the War on Terror. Confronted with an enemy prepared to use indiscriminate and extreme violence to achieve their ends, Batman suffers a paroxysm of self-doubt. He goes into freefall believing his efforts to combat crime have only exacerbated the problem. Eventually, galvanised, bruising for a fight and supposedly committed to fighting a good war, Batman resorts to the extraordinary rendition of a foreign suspect; the covering up of Harvey Dent’s crimes; the telling of a noble lie; the torture and detention of the Joker and the creation of a database to spy on Gotham’s citizens. Not only that, but Batman’s blood-thirst blurs the line between good and bad. The Joker may be evil. But Batman may not be good either.

In the end, with the public turning against Batman, he accepts a necessary self-sacrifice to be loathed and does so because he believes what he is doing is right.

It’s unlikely Christopher Nolan is suggesting those who disapprove of the War on Terror are among its benefactors. But he may have unwittingly made a film that does.

The Spooky Art

2011-04-13T15:10:00.000-07:00

I'm sure all us writers have this moment from time to time. You've spent years trying to develop the skills and have the privilege of time to write. You get yourself ready. You have the high ideal of the thing you'd like to write. The essence of it. And nothing happens. Your words are simply words. Your prose is heavy and limp. The whole operation seems a nonsense and you being to think: what made me ever think I had anything to say? And why isn't it easier than this? I know what I want: why isn't it happening? The answer, of course, is that the nature of things is elusive.

This description of the Oswald's writing process in Don DeLillo's Libra gets it nailed:

Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of the little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete, and tried to guess at the rest.

He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.

Limits everywhere. In every direction he came up against his own incompleteness. Cramped, fumbling, deficient. He knew things. It wasn't that he didn't know.

A great insight into the mindset of a writer. It's also a strange sensation to write the words of an author like DeLillo. David Peace calls this 'practicing'. Where he copies chunks of writing he admires and mixes it up, rearranges, shifts perspectives, reverse engineers and to tries and see how it works.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

2011-04-13T07:35:00.000-07:00

According to the film producer, Walter Mirisch, neither he, nor Walter Wanger, nor Don Siegal, nor Dan Mainwaring, nor the author Jack Finney saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers as anything other than, "a thriller, pure and simple."

Perhaps their bodies had been snatched?

It's perfectly possible that nobody intended a political subtext. But then it's perfectly possible they didn't want to be seen to have a subtext (particularly if the film was supposed to be anti-McCarthyist). A classic of the genre, Invasion of the Body Snatchers has that eerie quality of 50s white-collar America coming into contact with alien strangeness. The film clearly expresses Red Menace anxieties of dehumanisation and loved ones being turned against them in the context of a thriller.

Much is revealed as Dr Danny Kaufman and Dr Miles J. Bennell argue (possible spoiler if you haven't watched the film):

Suddenly, while you're asleep...

they'll absorb your minds,
your memories...

and you're reborn
into an untroubled world.

Where everyone's the same?

Exactly.

What a world.

We're not the last humans left.

They'll destroy you!

Tomorrow,
you won't want them to.

Tomorrow, you'll be one of us.

I love Becky.

Tomorrow, will I feel the same?

There's no need for love.

No emotion?

Then you have no feelings,
only the instinct to survive.

You can't love or be loved!
Am I right?

You say it
as if it were terrible.

Believe me, it isn't.
You've been in love before.

It didn't last.
It never does.

Love, desire, ambition, faith--

without them, life's so simple,
believe me.

A world where you filial piety is to the state? Without individualism, choice and faith? Where raising a family isn't an aspiration? An untroubled world where everybody is the same? What could be more unAmerican?

A Fine Pickle

2011-04-12T03:54:00.000-07:00

Adaptations are everywhere. Great transformations are taking place. Book to stage. Poetry to music. Game to film. But what does it mean to adapt? And, artistically, what's the point?

Salman Rushdie has the most illuminating answer I've come across in his essay, A Fine Pickle. Here's an extract:

What is essential? It’s one of the great questions of life, and, as I’ve suggested, it’s a question that crops up in other adaptations than artistic ones. The text is human society and the human self, in isolation or in groups, the essence to be preserved is a human essence, and the result is the pluralist, hybridised, mixed-up world in which we all now live. Adaptation as metaphor, to paraphrase Susan Sontag, adaptation as carrying across, which is the literal meaning of the word “metaphor”, from the Greek, and of the related word “translation”, another form of carrying across, this time derived from Latin.

Many adaptations are too faithful to recreating the original in a different form. The BBCs Women In Love is guilty of this. Beautifully shot and well acted, it's devotion to the DH Lawrence's novel stultifies and cramps it's life as an individual work of art. Would we think it a great work had we only watched the TV adaptation?

Not for a second.

Which reminds us, an adaptation must adapt. It has to be inspired to replicate the beauty, the essence of the original. But be brave enough to reinvent its old self in the auspices of the new.

In Defense of Religion

2011-04-09T15:25:00.001-07:00

Today I got into a discussion on Facebook with a sophisticated atheist, Andrew Morris, and we had a good back and forth discussion about the subject of religion. We agreed to put the dialogue up on The Information.

Here's the transcript:

Andrew Morris: I'm sick of airy fairy, "spiritual" cretins claiming all that is beautiful, poetic, artistic, and subjectively creative as their own. It's the equivalent of the BNP doing the same with patriotism and national pride.

It's said that there are many atheists in the US who are in the closet because of the prejudice shown against them. There are publications that try outing them. Atheism goes hand in hand with intelligence, so it's no surprise that people in positions that require intelligence are often atheists. Apparently, you have absolutely no chance of getting anywhere in politics if you don't have faith of some kind. Even Islam is far more popular than atheism. All this from a country that was founded on Enlightenment values. Shocking!

Generally speaking, most atheist and religious people I know get along but I have known atheists to be provocative, which you might regard in the same way as Quentin Crisp provoked and flaunted his overt homosexuality back in the 60s. Sometimes, that's the best way to deal with prejudice.

An extreme religious/faith-based person is one who denies all evidence and reason in favour of faith (creationism over evolution would be an example). An extreme atheist/rationalist is one who considers all evidence and reason in the pursuit of truth - and where a definitive view (truth) is not possible, then a level of probability is calculated.

Religion/faith is NEVER changing your mind, no matter what new information is presented; atheism/rationalism is ALWAYS changing your mind, when new information is presented.

When it is claimed that there are atheist fundamentalists, in the same way that there are religious fundamentalists, if there is such a thing, then it would be a person who would always consider another viewpoint - in other words, fundamentally open minded.

If people can say, "I know there's no evidence, I just like the idea of God/ghosts/homeopathy/heaven/hell/etc.", why can't they say, "I know there's no evidence, I just like the idea that homosexuality is wrong/women are inferior to men/black people are inferior to white people". Faith teaches us that we don't need to have an argument. It's an immature way of thinking in a world where we no onger have to rely on our gut feeling.

Just because a lot of people think something doesn't make it true. Half of Americans think that creationism is true, so does that put evolution's probability at 50%? Of course not. Most people would accept that evolution is 99% probable (effectively true), despite only 50% of people believing it (and less than 20% in most Moslem countries).

God is nothing more than "liking the idea" - there is nothing else but that. Lets not forget that for the entirety of human history, we have had no other option - all we have had is faith and instinct. We have looked to give meaning to the world and we have done this based on guessing.

In the post-Enlightenment world of science, reason and evidence, we now have a mechanism to make objective decisions that point to ultimate truths. But we have only had these tools for a few hundred years. Dispelling tens of thousands of years in ingrained superstition will not change over night. The ground that religion has left grows smaller and smaller, with every truth that science reveals, but God and other superstitions are ingrained in every aspect of our culture and will not disappear over night.

Wes Brown: "An extreme atheist/rationalist is one who considers all evidence and reason in the pursuit of truth - and where a definitive view (truth) is not possible, then a level of probability is calculated." This is also known as skepticism. You can also be a person of faith, or agnostic, and part of the faith is a healthy skepticism. Also known as doubt. This is why Kierkegaard called it a 'leap of faith'. Because it is precarious and based on no objective 'proofs'.

I agree that there's a litany of crimes done in the name of religion. But not everybody uses faith as a way to jump-wire certainty into their beliefs. The equating of intelligence and atheism is not necessarily right. Saul Bellow? John Updike? Rowan Williams?

The separation of church and state must be a necessity in a liberal democracy. I am a devout secularist, but as an agnostic, am open to the possibility of a God. Given how little we know of the Universe, I wouldn't feel confident absolutely ruling out the possibility.

Too many people now unthinkingly equate atheism with materialism. Forgetting the numinous. The transcendent experiences and value assumptions we make as humans, but can't be 'proved' by science. Here I'm talking about the value of art, moral judgements, freewill, the nuances of human experience and other problematic areas that can't be proved right or not right.

The atheist-humanist Raymond Tallis has spoken eloquently on the subject.

This article by Paul Davies is interesting too.

Anyway, interesting stuff. And I wish you well in your sentiments against the illiberal and the superstitious.

Andrew Morris: I'd be happy to call myself a skeptic, Wes, or a Humanist. I wasn't suggesting that only atheists are intelligent, merely that they tend to be more so than religious people. There is objective evidence to support this. One example: of the world's top scientists, over 95% are atheist. I would class an agnostic as someone who is on the fence. I would say that I'm an agnostic about extra terrestrial life because, given what we know about the universe, it seems reasonable to have a 50:50 opinion. One should not be an agnostic simply because there appear to be two options - each option should be evaluated. I would not say that I'm an agnostic about fairies, leprechauns, angels, ghosts or God, because these things are extremely improbable. There is no absolute truth but when something is extremely probable, such as evolution, we say they are true. Conversely, when something is extremely improbable, we say that they are untrue, and when speaking about God, the generally accepted term is atheist. I agree completely with your views on secularism and atheism being confused with materialism.

Wes Brown: Absolutely. Although you did say intelligence goes 'hand in hand with atheism' (a little bit of a self-justifying argument) and decried 'spiritual cretins' and equate them with the BNP! I know that make perfect sense. Particularly to show how cultish little groups can toxify something by 'claiming' it for their own. But the rhetorical effect is to lump spiritual aesthetes in with bigots.

I think a lot of that originates from the history of the aesthetic where art was seen to be sacred and revelatory (Kant being the biggest culprit). Art illuminated the 'truth' of being. This Romanticism still lingers, despite much of critical theory edging towards different approaches and value judgements. Alongside a growing skepticism toward any sort of 'truth' or objective value statements.

There are philosophical difficulties with the word 'truth' that I'm glad you've expanded on (and agree with).

Atheism is both:
Positive belief: I believe in the non-existence of god(s).
Negative belief: I do not believe in the existence of god(s)

Theism is both:
Positive belief: I believe in the existence of God(s).
Negative belief: I do not believe in the non-existence of God(s).

Agnosticism seems to be neither. So I accept the science - I think evolution is a 'truer' account than creationism. But I can't rule out God(s) existence.

Andrew Morris: Maybe I should have said education goes hand in hand with atheism, because when people understand more about the world and themselves, they rely less (or not at all) on religion and faith. I think the BNP allegory was fair - I hate the way they try to take patriotism as their own, just as 'spiritual' people often do with anything of substance. I do also enjoy a bit of venting - this is Facebook after all. But I think we're pretty much on the same page!

Like you, I too ultimately can't rule God out but I think our definitions of agnosticism and atheism are semantics. If we agree that evolution is 'truer' than creationism, then we are moving away from agnosticism - sitting on the fence/50:50 - because we are taking a side based on the information available (rather than what we like the idea of). The further we move in that direction, the more likely we are to call it truth (or with religion, atheism).

The only absolute truth is that all that exists is our own cognition. Beyond that, we all have to accept a framework of arbitration. For me, this is governed by the laws of physics, the scientific method, evidence, reason. But in the faith/relativist world, belief or individual opinion has more value and we are often told that we all have our own truth (whatever that is meant to mean). And so, along with God, we have alternative medicine, conspiracy theories, ghosts, angels - basically anything that we can imagine - and we decide in which we believe by what we like the sound of/what feels right to us/ what our gut tells us - but never what there is evidence to support, or even what might be theoretically true. It's basically a free for all.

God sits on top of this way of thinking and helps to justify everything else, and if we can be agnostic about God, then why not everything else? If someone has an imaginary friend who they talk to, whom I have to respect the existance of (God), then why can I not claim that I have a magic crystal that heals cancer? This is self-centred, egotistical nonsense. What should be important and noble is the pursuit of truth. We should care about what is true rather than whether we are right. By ignoring truth in favor of opinion and belief, we create a retarded world of confusion based on a childish way of thinking that can only lead to disharmony, if not aggression.

Wes Brown: Have you read Truth by Simon Blackburn? Gets into a bit of that free for all.

Why is the only absolute truth the our own cognition? This is a philosophical belief - opposed to say - the idea that an independent reality exists beyond our senses. It would be very difficult to 'prove' this either way with scientific method. How do we know, for instance, that our reality is not a computer generated simulation? Not everything can be reduced to quantitative data. It would be a rather autistic way to view the world.

There is more to 'truth' than that which can be tested. And, as good a tool as reason is, we all put faith in it being an accurate guide to the world. It may be more sensible to do so, but we can't guarantee reason alone can illuminate everything.

It's not about 'liking' something. I am not a relativist. I am a rationalist and believe it is irrational to confidently rule out the possibility of a God. However, there are stronger reasons for disbelieving in fairies.

I, like you, believe evolution to be 'truer' than creationism. But that's not an objective fact. It's still a theory, and, perhaps, too large a theory to be subject to experiment. But we accept it beyond reasonable doubt.

If I think belief in God is a reasonable premise for a first cause. We get to the problem of - who created him? If we don't, we have an equally infinite regress into multi-verses, and where they came from that we can only speculate upon and likely never experiment on unless we can 'get out' of our Universe. (M-theory is quite interesting)

The 'God premise' - the transcendent guarantee of belief can be found in some political movements / cults that have taken on a dogmatic flavour. It's definitely a dangerous trait.

You can also have the transcendent ego. Somebody who simply believes what they believe is right because they believe it.

So this becomes a foundationalist problem above all else. Where we have to be weary of suspect premises that go on to justify even more suspect arguments.

The Moral Landscape

2011-04-09T03:51:00.000-07:00

Sam Harris has a new book out and he's back to end religion and convert believers to his scientific faith.

Anybody who believes science can inform our morality rather than describe the material processes of the world has taken a leap into the unquantifiable. Judging by Harris's defense of torture, it seems his science-informed 'morality' is deficient.

Canon chancellor of St Paul's cathedral, Giles Fraser, gets the trouble with Harris's argument:

Given his definition of religion, his attack on it is the philosophical equivalent of taking sweets from a baby. These things are wrong: "female genital excision, blood feuds, infanticide, the torture of animals, scarification, foot binding, cannibalism, ceremonial rape, human sacrifice". The list goes on. With regard to the god Harris describes, I am a much more convinced atheist than he – even though I am a priest. For Harris asks constantly for evidence, with the implication that if he discovered some, he would change his mind. My own line would be that even if the god he described was proved to exist, I would see it as my moral duty to be an atheist.

The swaggering attack on 'God' is easy when you invent the 'God' you want to attack. Any serious person and any serious person of faith knows these crimes done in the name of religion are wrong and detests them as strongly, if not more strongly than the militant atheist. It is an insult to equate all religion with these Dark Age extremes.

My question is: who's the more common? The believer who does good works in the name of their faith? Or the believer who will rape, murder and mutilate?

There are those who will say any notion of God is 'self-invented', but that's not necessarily true. Not if you take a negative view of God. In which you say you do not know what a God is, you do not know his intentions, but you have an open and inquisitive faith in the grace of sense, a truth beyond beauty.

The Age of Innocence

2011-04-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

In a farewell piece in today's Guardian, Martin Amis claims, "You have to be slightly innocent to be a novelist. You can't have too much nous. It gets in the way, somehow."

It's a sentiment I wholly agree. Somebody once said of Seamus Heaney, that he had the "Wisdom and a Socrates and the eye of a child". Writers must be innocent, otherwise, how would the world seem surprising? How would it retain its secrets if the writer doesn't have a high developed sense of child-wonder?

It's beautiful up North

2011-03-31T04:51:00.000-07:00

Good essay on Northernism in Article magazine. Here's the nugget of the argument:

Google ‘Gritty’ and ‘This is England 86’ and you’ll see scores of bloggers and journalists alike, praising Shane Meadows’ ‘realistic’ depiction of disaffected youth in Thatcher’s Britain, and highlighting the series’ controversial scenes of rape and graphic violence – tacitly perpetuating the bleak imaginary of the North in the process. Some may call the series ‘visually stylish’, of course, which it is, but there will be little or no attempt to interrogate the complexities of Meadows’ aesthetic. The truth is that the North of This is England 86 may be ‘real’ but it’s also beautiful – the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

I was heartened to read this. Partly because it's a belief I've long held and was picked up on at Headingley LitFest last week. The question went like this: Wes, Shark is very gritty, but it has decorous elements and high style, how do you resolve the two?

As David Forrest suggests in Article, the two virtues need not be mutually exclusive. Ian McMillan said of Shark, "Wes Brown writes with a kind of rhythmic Northern realism, catching the way we think, the way we talk, the way we act round here; he manages to make the North a marvellous place, a place where art can happen, where epic can feel comfortable..." That's exactly what I was going for. Yes, we love the tradition of social realists with the likes of Sillitoe and David Storey leading the way, the their writing was often caricatured into a negative stereotype of 'the North', where it's all dark and grim, and everybody's a bit rough.

That's only partially true. Their is a mordant beauty to be found everywhere. This is typical of American writers who write low-life in high style. John Updike said his mission was to "give the mundane its beautiful due". I wrote Shark with the high style because it had to document the awareness of John Usher - that means his immediate concerns and sometimes coarse, violent, bodily activities, but also the purer essence of being beyond words that we all implicitly understand. The truth beyond words. The glimpse of the numinous beyond gray life that Philip Larkin specialised in.

There were also questions about the 'politics' of my work. And while there definitely are political issues - it would be unrealistic to ignore them - I'm not in the business of agitprop, Literature as function, or scoring points. The novel goes deeper than that and is probably more religious, if anything. In the sense that Paul Tillich specualtes on the nature of faith, "Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith."

This comment on John Updike's work by critic Thomas Karshan comes as near to a poetics of his work and by extension of influence, my work:

"Updike's sentences at their frequent best are not a complacent expression of faith. Rather, like Proust's sentences in Updike's description, they "seek out an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith." Updike aspires to "this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence towards what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs."

Sex & Violence

2011-03-29T06:09:00.000-07:00

"If you suck on a tit the movie gets an R rating. If you hack the tit off with an axe it will be PG." ~ Jack Nicholson

Trespass Magazine is asking can violence more acceptable than sex? Why shouldn't sex ever be violent? Can violence be sexual? Trespass invites poetry, short stories, plays, visual art and opinion pieces that challenge the concepts and push the boundaries of our ideas about Sex & Violence.

To submit your work, send a MS Word doc and brief bio in an email entitled "Sex & Violence" to guest editor, Wes Brown, at w.brown@nawe.co.uk

Roger Scruton on Beauty

2011-03-25T07:22:00.000-07:00

Philosopher Roger Scruton presents a provocative essay on the importance of beauty in the arts and in our lives, making a case for restoring it to the centre of our civilisation.

Yes, he's a rampant homophobe, but he sure knows his stuff about art.

It seems while TV has descended into the moronic inferno, YouTube is the new home of high brow with a bedevilling array of essays, documentaries, debates and arguments.

Is Batman gay?

2011-03-24T05:53:00.000-07:00

Is the caped crusader, that sometimes Gothic, sometimes camp superhero gay?

The 60s TV series starring Adam West is a classic and far removed from the Gothic splendor of Tim Burton's Batman (1989) and Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (2005). However the classic series seems to share the camp of Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin (1997). The coincidence here is Robin. Batman alone is a revenge hero. A dark, brooding, Gothic vigilante. Whenever Robin turns up his character lightens. Could there be a subtext many of us have been missing? Is it the case, that Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson can only be accepted by Gotham if they don camp outfits and assist the conventional moral code by fighting crime? That they can only truly be themselves in the Batcave or after dark deep in the night life of Gotham?

The psychologist Fredric Wertham asserted in his Seduction of the Innocent (1954), that "Batman stores are psychologically homosexual." He went on to say, "The Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies, of the nature of which they may be unconscious." And then, "Only someone ignorant of the fundamentals of psychiatry and of the psychopathology of sex can fail to realise a subtle atmosphere of homoeroticism which pervades the adventures of the mature 'Batman' and his young friend 'Robin.'"

I hope Batman is gay. He'd be the first 'out' mainstream superhero and it would make these remakes more psychologically interesting and give depth and complexity to his brooding.

The Woes of Gove

2011-03-23T05:17:00.000-07:00

An impressive Tory in opposition, Michael Gove wrote Celsius 7/7 and was a rare Tory to appear on high-brow TV shows like the Review Show. He was once nicknamed, "the one man think tank".

Gove is gaff prone in government. He rushed out an error-strewn list of of axed school building projects. He was wrong-footed by an angry caller on Radio 5. And to top it off - here he is falling over.

Now he's upset the Guardianistas with his 50 Book Challenge:

Education secretary Michael Gove has suggested that children as young as 11 should be reading 50 books a year – and that leading children's authors should recommend them.

Following a tour he made of America's independently-run, state-funded charter schools – including the Infinity Charter School in Harlem, which set its pupils a "50-book challenge" over the course of a year – Gove said that schools in the UK needed to "raise the bar" on children's reading:

"Recently, I asked to see what students were reading at GCSE," Gove said. "I discovered that something like 80-90% were just reading one or two novels – and overwhelmingly it was the case that it included Of Mice and Men. We should be saying that our children should be reading 50 books a year, not just one or two for GCSE."

The education secretary's remarks follow a December report that showed British teenagers slumping from 17th to 25th place in an international league table for reading standards.

The comments have caused spurious outrage. Many mock Gove and question whether he reads 50 books a year? Or how our troubled library provision could accommodate it?

The idea is far-fetched. But then, it has been achieved in America and the key word is 'challenge'. As long as it remains a challenge and not a directive, and can go some way to improving our dire reading standards, it's not complete bollocks.

Revolutionary Literature

2011-03-22T04:17:00.001-07:00

Interesting article over at The Speccie on Revolutionary Literature.

Matthew Richardson writes:

Tackling the political present is a tough gig for most writers. In his article, Binyon compares the ‘Arab novelists today’, including of Mohammed Achaari and Raja Alem (the joint winners of the Arabic Booker), with ‘writers in the former Soviet Union, who also struggled to speak freely and faced being banned but won widespread influence and respect’. However, revolution and upheaval arguably make the job easier (the Romantics would have been lost without 1789). No novelist closer to home has quite captured the muddy complexities of contemporary politics. Both Martin Amis and Ian McEwan have dipped a toe in the Blair years (The Second Plane and Saturday, for example), but only to duck short of their best.

Richardson references Orwell and quotes Binyan:

Orwell’s worry that literature will be snuffed out by some form totalitarianism (here a religious totalitarianism) remains all too true.

Binyon writes:

Previous state censorship has been replaced with something more insidious: the threat from religious extremists, who will not allow any modern writer to question the fundamentals of Islam.

Perhaps extraordinary times demand urgency? Perhaps the shackles placed on your creativity inspire you to kick back in a way that our contemporary novelists haven't been doing?

Perhaps the likes of McEwan and Amis, love them as I do, are distanced from the muddy complexities of living the consequences of politics?

I've racked my brain for counter-examples. If these novelists are out there, who are they? Where are they? Why don't we know? My guess is that the so called gentrification of the arts and Literature's lowered standing have their parts to play.

We should call for an uprising of our own: from the people of the UK, the marginal, the underrepresented, yes, but desperately, vitally, those with something to say who can bring the news.

Headingley LitFest: Shark

2011-03-21T10:24:00.001-07:00

Headingley LitFest director Richard Wilcocks reports on his blog from last night's Shark event:

"Wes Brown lived in Burley, when he was even younger than he is now (early twenties) and his novel Shark is largely set in the area, which in case you don’t know is right next to Headingley. This evening event took place, appropriately enough, in a large front room in a house in Burley not far from the narrow bridge on St Michael’s Lane. He was interviewed by Mick McCann, author of the encyclopaedic How Leeds Changed the World. They are both in the photo. See Mick's Guardian article on Leeds writers and their rebel-rousing influence here.

Shark, described in its blurb as ‘a story about the dispossessed and how they get by’ has John Usher as its main character. He is an ex-soldier who returns to his boyhood home (in Burley) to find that things have changed drastically. Wes made it clear that he was an admirer of mid-twentieth century writers like Alan Sillitoe and that he hoped Shark would be seen as a genuine working-class novel which came out of real-life experiences, including his own. He talked about his early years, his father’s work as a professional wrestler and bouncer, and how he had spent ages with a guide to pool and snooker, because John Usher spends much of his time in pool halls. “It sounds very authentic to me,” observed Mick McCann, and after we had listened to Wes reading from the opening pages, I think most of those present agreed. Usher’s language is larded with the right obscenities, and his tough talk could be taken at least partly as a consequence of the time he spent in Iraq.

Wes explained that he is untrammelled by what is sometimes known as ‘political correctness’ and that opinions and statements that issue from the mouths of characters who have been in contact with organisations like the EDL (English Defence League) are just some of those that he has heard in real Burley and in real Leeds. “It’s not my racism. It’s for the readers to judge,” he said. “I didn’t write a manifesto.”"

Many thanks to Richard Wilcocks for inviting me to Headingley LitFest, Mick McCann and all those who attended the event.

For the full article and more on Headingley LitFest

Headingley LitFest

2011-03-18T02:55:00.001-07:00

On Sunday I'll be reading from Shark and When Lights Are Bright as part of Headingley LitFest. How Leeds Changed The World author Mick McCann will be hosting and I'll be in conversation with the audience. The event is a "break in" and will take place in somebody's house.

I'll read some of the "war stories" - the flashback scenes in Shark and the opening of the novel-in-progress, When Lights Are Bright.

If you'd like to come along, the event will be at 5pm, March 20th in Headingley Leeds. For tickets and directions call 0113 225 7397 or email w.brown@nawe.co.uk

For more details and to RSVP via Facebook, click here.

Degrees may be for the wealthy, but talent isn't

2011-03-17T06:49:00.000-07:00

This Guardian article on the "gentrification" of the Arts was published before the Browne report and the introduction of potentially higher tuition fees and makes for interesting reading:

Fears are growing of a "gentrification" of arts and humanities degrees as new figures reveal that the courses have become the preserve of wealthy students.

Statistics released to the Observer by the Sutton Trust, an influential education charity, show that 31% of those who graduated in 2008 with degrees in history or philosophy were the children of senior managers – the socio-economic group with the highest income. Across all English university courses, an average of 27% of graduates were from this group.

Language graduates were also disproportionately from the wealthiest homes, with 30% from the highest income group. In comparison, non-arts and humanities courses – with the exception of medicine and dentistry – had far fewer students from the highest-income group. Just 17% for education, 22% for computer sciences and 23% for business studies were from the wealthiest homes. For medicine and dentistry, the proportion was 47%.

The data are part of a forthcoming study in conjunction with the London School of Economics that was done before changes that could further deter low- and middle-income students from applying for arts and humanities courses.

While riders have been put on institutions that charge the full amount to reach our to lower income students, the figures suggest a trend that is likely to continue in times of economic hardship.

Students from lower income backgrounds - with less luxury and disposable cash - and with a greater sense of economic necessity will be deterred from Arts degrees. Without the safety net of an affluent background, Arts degress can be a big risk.

This would be a disappointing outcome. But there are other ways for people to make Art, and while the top degrees give people access to career prospects, it doesn't give them the ability to make great Art. My experience comes from the Literature end, and can't really be extrapolated to other Art forms with different demands like the theatre or opera for instance.

When I was editor of The Cadaverine, it was always exciting and reassuring to see that while wealth may be distributed unevenly, so is talent. Some of our best writers had no background in writing. Many weren't involved in the Arts at University level.

With the old publishing model of Oxbridge types and big publisher and bookshops in control of distribution, being part of that set-up was almost essential. But one thing I'm seeing with ex-Cadavers is a new network of the initiated. The Cadaverine published Foyle Young Poet Winners, writing form the Writing Squad, from Creative Writing departments across the country and from talented unknowns. Those published on the site are engaged in social networks and formed friendships.

Poets like Andrew McMillan and Martha Sprackland have gone on to write great poetry, perform their work and launch Cake magazine. David Tait edited Scribe, was published by Cadaverine and is now an editor there. The connections go on and on, become more complex, involve newcomers and serious institutions. Pints and Poetry in Newcastle. Edinburgh Young Writers. Pomegranate Magazine. Leeds Young Authors. The list goes on. And these groups are networked with their members spontaneously creating new networks, points of new work and independent spirit.

David Tait recently won the Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Award and has performed alongside Carol Ann Duffy. The list of achievements doesn't stop there. There's a generation of talented young writers creating publications, collectives, new work, credibility within the sector and finding real audiences. The Young Writers' Hub is part of this and is facilitating these networks. Bringing newcomers in. Increasing interest in their work.

This meritocratic literary mafia is part of the digital age. I'm convinced that many of next generation of leading writers are already connected and making it happen. That's doesn't excuse the apparent lack of access to Arts degrees. More should be done to ensure the Arts are for everybody and that Arts degrees are for those most deserving, not those who are most affluent. But that's not to say exciting things aren't happening in a different way that may eventually break down cartels of power in Literature.

Confessions

2011-03-16T03:54:00.000-07:00

Western Philosophy begins with Socrates and his contribution to the discipline is huge. Socrates' powers of reason are legendary. He was a clear thinker and a clear speaker. The central questions of his philosophy are what is a good life? And how should we live?

Philosophy - literally a love of knowledge - was about the art of living. The big questions of human concern.

John Cottingham's review of Stanley Cavell's Little Did I know in the excellent Standpoint Magazine touches on the modern disconnect between philosophy and human concern:

"Stanley Cavell, now in his eighties, has been among those whose work has challenged this prevailing paradigm. Though trained in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, he has also been strongly influenced by the so-called "continental" philosophical school, which has traditionally been less concerned with minute piecemeal analysis and more sympathetic to addressing grand existential questions about why we are here and how we are to make sense of our lives. Friedrich Nietzsche, who was preoccupied as much as any thinker with these momentous questions, remarked (in Beyond Good and Evil) that, "every great philosophy is a personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir". Cavell's latest book also makes a link between philosophy and autobiography, offering a prolonged memoir of the complex tapestry of his life which also, both explicitly and implicitly, reflects his conception of philosophy."

This goes for literature and art too. Will Self has remarked that every work of fiction is a kind of memoir. I would agree. To break with the tradition of "texts" and yoking the author from the work, literature is a memoir of a deeper self, of the conscious and unconscious concerns. This shouldn't mean that we become obsessed with a detective style sleuthing with the "intention" of the author. But it is an admission that poetry, stories and novels are written by people with the intention of expressing a sentiment. The artist may not exactly know what they are expressing - for art lives in negative capability - but that doesn't negate the truth that authors write to make a statement, to express something that has pressed upon the nub of their spine, that has possessed them in the locomotive spur of creation.

At school, we were sold literature on the basis that it could improve literacy skills and be attractive for employers looking for good communicators with an eye for detail. Fine. But what of the true meaning of literature? What about its capacity to "delight and instruct"? Not in a didactic way, not the FR Leavis tradition, but in a way we gain self-knowledge. Where we value the truth of poetry to, in Seamus Heaney's words, "set the darkness echoing".

Philosophy has split into incredibly specialised branches that are incomprehensible to anybody outside their cloister. Some of this is necessary. But some seems to be a result from an aversion to clear thinking, clear speaking and clarity of mind.

Take this from leading academic Judith Butler:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony is bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

What does this actually mean? When you finally unravel the puzzle, you'll find beyond the sci-fi junk language... Not a lot.

Thankfully, not all professional academics are bonkers. Ray Tallis for one, is an energetic and illuminating mind, outstanding in many fields and reluctant to adopt the term "polymath". Here he is discussing his book, The Art of Living.

The reasonable among us will know that human's aren't always rational. There is more to life than rigourous logic and category definitions. This is where personal biography can enhance philosophy (Kierkergaard's torture over his "leap of faith" for example) and remind us that the novel is a form open to perspective, to consciousness, to rationalism, to drama and poetry. As Cottingham says:

"Part of the appeal of the psychoanalytic outlook is its alertness to multiple nuances and deeper layers of meaning beneath our surface utterances. It is this dimension that much analytic philosophy appears to miss, with its insistence on a rigorously transparent discourse that eliminates all possible ambiguity."

Get Black on White

2011-03-15T06:17:00.000-07:00

‎"You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love." Ernest Hemingway.

Daily Routines is an oddly compulsive blog about "How writers, artists, and other interesting people organise their days."

Highlights include Ernest Hemingway's thoughts on his process, "[...] never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love." I think we all know what he means. Martin Amis also describes himself as empty when he's finished writing a novel. He's an idiot. He's given it all to the work. His perceptions. A chunk of self.

Janice Bellow describing Saul Bellow is fascinating:

"He sweats when he writes, and peels off layers of clothing. When he is concentrating particularly hard, he screws up his left eye and emits a sound that's a cross between the panting of a long-distance runner and a breathy whistle: "Windy suspirations of forced breath."

Janice adopts Saul Bellow's style to write about him - affectionate, admiring and effective. The love of accepting influence. The sharing of a style represents the symbiotic commitment to one another, to a creative life, to a shared life. The mimicry acts as a free-indirect style, giving a greater sense of the man and his work. Writers are generally asked themselves about what their process is like, how they get, in de Maupassant's words, "Black on White". Ink on the page. Here we have a third-person aspect, an objective observer describing the physical intensity of writing. The work makes Bellow hot and breathy - a locomotive push of purpose and inspiration.

The most American, the most glamorous goes to TC Boyle:

"I start with two newspapers: the L.A. Times and the Santa Barbara News Press. Then I re-read what I’ve written the previous day. Then I work. When that’s over, I do something physical: yard work, hiking, swimming, snorkeling. Then I make dinner, read, maybe watch a movie, sleep. This last is important: I need my rest, as we all do; and I sleep well, you’ll be happy to know, as a result of having a clean conscience."

Physical activity is not uncommon as part of a writers' routine. Saul Bellow enjoyed chopping wood. Philip Roth says he, "walks half a mile for every page he writes". Don DeLillo likes to run.

And the most neurotic goes to Truman Capote:

"I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I've got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don't use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance."

Time's Arrow and the Irreverisbility of Meaning

2011-03-13T16:10:00.000-07:00

Professor Brian Cox shows us the difference between asking what time is it? And what is time? In this excellently accessible documentary on the subject.

If we accept Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, the past, present, and future are happening now. Time is a property. But we experience it as a logical succession of events. We have developed brain clocks to measure linear time.

There are interesting considerations about Time to do with freewill, action and consequence - themes raised in HG Well's Victorian science fiction. But there's also the issue of morality. The necessity of Time's Arrow moving in the direction that it does. The exchange of innocence and experience. This insight is a gift of Martin Amis's short novel Time's Arrow and complimentary to the ideas of astro-biologists like Paul Davies, who argue that for human life to exist as it does, the whole universe must be as it is.

I MOVED FORWARD, out of the blackest sleep, to find myself surrounded by doctors... American doctors: I sensed their vigour, scarcely held in check, like the profusion of their body hair; and the forbidding touch of their forbidding hands - doctor's hands, so strong, so clean, so aromatic. Although my paralysis was pretty well complete, I did find that I could move my eyes.

Tod T. Friendly is born on his death bed. Events are narrated backwards by the playful, child-like innocent conscience of Friendly - an ex-Nazi doctor. With Time's Arrow running backwards: violence heals, death precedes life, and the tragedy of Friendly's evil crimes are startlingly revealed.

The reversal of linear time presents real challenges to our sense of meaning. Wrong becomes right. Massacres are frenzies of life. But then, perhaps, linear time is a necessary illusion. And, as TS Eliot speculated in the first of his Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

The Walking Man

2011-03-11T09:09:00.001-08:00

When Philippe Petit walked between the World Trade Centre buildings he became a symbol of the artist. Like Franz Kafka's A Hunger Artist, Petit is an enduring icon of what it means to commit yourself to an idea, the public contortions of private expression.

Art should be dangerous. Bold and vulnerable, the artist negates themselves to the impact of their craft. With every step, the artist is a showman, a conduit, a story-teller, a trickster risking catastrophe and ridicule. When the artist gets it right, the effect is supernal.

Art takes cultural risks. It puts the self on the line. It refuses to be categorised or fully understood. It shouldn't be easy. The continuum of intellect and passion ascend into its phenomena. Art does not work in service to a political creed. Nor can it be a means to an end.

For ours is an age of art as instrument. Art is anything you want it to be. Art is a tool to integrate people into society, rehabilitate criminals, protest against government policy, teach children literacy, or further other political goals. Goals politics has failed to deliver.

Then there is Phillipe Petit, walking in the clouds, poised at unbelievable height, balanced and grinning, like a harlequin. Let the artist walk the rope. The distance between intention and expression. See the bright star at the grace of his height.

The Spirit of McCarthy

2011-03-10T08:44:00.000-08:00

When school teacher Ruby reveals her unfashionable views on immigration the consequence is a racist attack on a Polish janitor. Or so it is in the thought-crime world of Waterloo Road. Where thoughts irrevocably lead to actions. So thoughts deemed "unacceptable" are aggressively shot-down without due consideration to the economy of ideas - John Stuart Mills' "grains of truth".

Nobody has a monopoly of truth. Nobody is infallible. Which is why arguments should be taken on their own merit and not thoughtlessly dismissed.

Ruby is accused of being "rightwing" and "racist" and a sententious deputy head teacher claims her views are based on ignorance. She is then shunned, mocked and hectored.

Perhaps this exchange between a pupil and teacher sums it up best:

Jonah: "I don't see the point of censoring them."

Miss Montaya: "I can't see the point of letting them run around making hate speeches."

Ruby's views are coarse, but certainly not hateful. Censorship only leads people to a sense of infallibility, as they never have to face the scrutiny of a sound argument.

Finally, Ruby "sees the light" and admits her comments were misjudged. The teacher has been taught her lesson. And a pupil's father who was claiming to be "undercut" by migrant workers is revealed to be a lazy, workshy, thug with no case to make. So everything is alright with the world.

Pleasantly infuriating: Germaine Greer

2011-03-09T02:58:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts on Germaine Greers' latest article in the Guardian. Now please pay attention everybody. I'm about to tell you what art is.

What is art? Art is anything an artist calls art. An artist is someone who makes or does something she or he thinks of as art. Making pictures can be called graphic art, but it is quite likely to have nothing to do with art whatsoever. Take the pictures that hang every weekend on the railings of London's Hyde Park, hundreds of them. No art involved. A graffito on a railway bridge is more likely to be art, most probably bad art, but art just the same. Most art is bad, but you don't get the good art without the bad. Our best artists make stuff they know is bad; the difference is that they destroy it themselves. Tracey Emin didn't wait to be told to destroy the paintings that earned her an MA at the Royal College of Art. There are a few dealers around the place who would kill to get their hands on them; she has made sure they never will. That's the kind of thing real artists can be expected to do.

How much of a definition is this? If everything can be art, is anything art? Do the aesthetic qualities of art exist or don't they? Or is Greer suggesting that artistic appreciation is subjective?

Art doesn't have to be an "absolute truth" to be objective. There is a pragmatic truth of consensus that has guided us well - what Ronan McDonald calls "the excluded middle". For, like moral judgements, absolute truths may not exist, but we can still create a reasoned middle-ground that is more useful than a problematic free for all.

For instance, if there can be no measure for art, the grounds for arts funding, academic grades, editorial selection are almost entirely arbitrary. Do we honestly believe the work of TS Eliot is no better than a shopping receipt?

And how is Greer judging between "good art" and "bad art"? Is it a moral argument? If I were to find incredibly inventive ways to sexually abuse people, would this be art? I shouldn't think so. But under Greers' prescription, it may well be art, just "bad art".

In the same vein, 9/11 is another work of art. Just "bad" art? Or does "bad art" include work that is genuinely shit? Like my attempts at making music?

In the haste and directness of her writing, Greer has failed to make these category distinctions.

Later, Greer makes the claim that Sacredness is separateness:

For most of human history, the artist has had no duty to record what things or animals or people actually looked like. The subject of art was more often something that could not be seen, such as the energy of the monsoon, depicted in the rock art of the Australian Kimberley region as the wandjina. In that case the artist was a person apart, a senior lawman who inherited the responsibility of keeping the sacred images fresh. Before he could lay a finger on them he had to travel to the sacred site by a special route and bathe in the clean, cold water of the deep gorges. Sacred is just another name for separate.

But isn't the purpose of this "Sacredness" to commune with the tribe? Don DeLillo's intention to, "the write the whole picture, the whole culture" is a latter day example of this. In primitive societies, the shaman was also a doctor and spiritual guide. These labours have been divided and specialised in a late capitalist age (the many branches of doctors, religious leaders and kinds of artists). I don't believe artists create art to be separate. On the contrary, it is a form of communion.

Amazingly, in the same article, Greer goes on to say:

The kids who get up at midnight and head out to a derelict wall to begin working on a graffito are working within a demanding tradition that requires the sequence of execution to have been worked out in detail in advance, before any mark can be made. They can make no money out of what they do. There are no prizes for them. They could go to jail. There is no truer example of the sacredness of the art enterprise than this.

So is this sacredness, the sacredness Greer likes separating or not? Aesthetics is pleasantly and notoriously problematic. Keeping great minds occupied for centuries. And it seems Germaine Greer's solution is no solution at all.

The Information: Going Digital

2011-03-08T02:15:00.000-08:00

Young Writers' Coordinator Wes Brown on becoming an "amplified author"

There's a lot of talk about digital. What will happen to distribution? Is the book dead? What do we do with a "free for all" where everybody can be published?

It's all so bad, so gloomy. Digital publishing also means more authors being able to find audiences and present their work in innovative ways. If:book's Chris Meade has an interesting take on this, he calls it being an amplified author.

So how might you get started? There's blogging, Tweeting and networking with Facebook. But if you want to find new ideas and discussion around the book as a form – if:book is brilliant resource on digital publishing and new possibilities for creatives.

Lulu is a site where you can easily add your titles. Otherwise you'd probably need a sellers account on Amazon. Here's a piece on how Lulu is an aggregator to the Apple iBookstore.

Neil Gaiman has some interesting things to say on piracy, copyright and distribution. Giving away your work for free may not be the worst thing in the world and might actually help you sell more print books and build a readership as an author.

The news section of the National Association for Literature Development (NALD) website is updated regularly with digital reading and industry round ups.

There are apps. I've not seen many that work well for individual authors. In the meantime, Ether books is a good one.

Wes Brown is a novelist and NAWE Young Writers' Coordinator.

On Writing Novels

2011-03-07T05:45:00.000-08:00

Writing a second novel isn't any easier than writing your first. Or at least I don't think it should be.

My first novel, Shark, was ambitious in terms of style and content. But rather than shy away from what are pressing contemporary concerns (the loss of vigorous manhood, the rise of the far right, soldiers returning to civilian life) – it was right to pursue these themes. Stylistially, I was going for something between John Updike's Rabbit, Run and David Peace's Red Riding Quartet. This largely meant a present-tense, localised third-person perspective that carried us through the narrative with a great deal of detail with intermittent second-person flashbacks to John Usher's time in Iraq.

The research and drafting of the flashback scenes too the better part of six months to write. I rewrote the 65 000 word novel about twice and spent a greater span of time working sentences into shape, sat up, late night, breathing syllables to myself and seeing if my, or indeed, John Usher's perceptions were accurately recorded on the page.

The difficulty with a first novel is you don't know if it's any good. And the task is so long, so engrossing – nearly two years in this case – you're not sure if anybody is still with you. If anybody is still listening. What might take you six months to write can be read in six hours. Maintaining focus and losing your sense of proportion is a problem.

In some ways, a second novel should be easier. You might think that you've found a method and you stick to it. But to write properly, to write freely, ecstatically, you have to extend consciousness. If writing is freedom – freedom must always be pushed to its fullest. So everything you learned in your previous novel is pretty much redundant. There's a new style to appropriate; new characters, new settings, a different world to supervise, God-like.

I'm currently working on When Lights Are Bright, a multi-perspective state of the nation novel based in Leeds. It focuses on people who live in the shadows – beyond the nexus of the media gaze and the professional classes. It's hero is a guy called James Oisin. He was working class and now pretty much middle class but fancies himself as a some sort of Christopher Hitchens style contrarian. His sense of self is shattered when his girlfriend leaves him, he's destroyed in an argument and he almost loses his mother. Instead of picking his targets as latte liberals on the arts scene, he was to go to the "underworld" of Leeds. In search of an era defining story on the Shannan Matthews disappearance, James descends into world where bouncers are the symbolic gatekeepers to another world of poverty, amorality, danger, compassion and struggle.

When Lights Are Bright will be four past-tense "movements" sandwiched between a present-tense prologue and an epilogue where all the characters cameo as they're caught up in an English Defense League March. Circularities of time and consistency of motif are essential to the novel. The first movement, The Myth of Progress, follows Jame's downfall and trouble with bourgeois life. The second, Variations on a Theme, follows a gang of bouncers and EDL members as they go to Wembley to watch an England game. The other two are yet to be written!

Not many people write with great facility. John Updike could – he wrote prolifically, profusely and probably too much. He wrote over fifty novels, books of short stories, poetry and criticism. Martin Amis has speculated that a "pressure on the brain" is the cause of his prodigious output. Vladimir Nabokov wrote Invitation to a Beheading in only three weeks. But I think, beyond the exceptions, writing is a hair-pulling, arse-scratching, self-critical, anxious and ambitious process. The two good bits of advice I've come across are: stop writing mid sentence. That way it's easier to pick up (Hemingway). And, “Writers are like prize fighters,” said Norman Mailer. “You wake up, sit down at your desk, put yourself through your paces – and wait for the critical blows to fall.”

Wes Brown will be reading from Shark and When Lights Are Bright as part of Headingley LitFest.

Shark reviewed in Litro

2011-03-07T05:42:00.001-08:00

Review by Jordan Philips

This debut novel from Wes Brown is very much of its time and place. Pervaded by Yorkshire grit, Northern realism and cinematic allusions, it is a visceral exploration of a young discharged soldier attempting to relocate in contemporary Britain. The violence of Basra, Afghanistan, Iraq has been exchanged for pool halls, the dole, bedsits. Racial tensions and the idea of a changing England permeate throughout the novel that Brown sets in the Leeds of the working class; but it is in the drama of the Snooker Club that these pressures play out and climax.

John Usher, the returning soldier, immerses himself in solitary games of pool, a dreary alcoholism, petty gambling, which are poignantly juxtaposed with flashbacks to a hot other world of violence and war. These experiences are impossible to compromise with a mundane life of little purpose or meaning, bouncing clubs or working in faceless call centres. Throughout, the question of what he was fighting for, and the looming question of England, dominates. His latent ability at pool and snooker seem to belong to a more hopeful time, representative of an escape that was not fulfilled and can now only be used to hustle money for drink or rent.

In its working class roots the novel is at its most powerful, where tabloid headlines infect common speech and the steady decline of Leeds United seems to parallel something more important. The Snooker Club of Brown’s Shark becomes a microcosm for a fractured England inhabited by a population struggling to belong, but all grafting for their patch of existence. The gangs of young Pakistani men, the far-right nationalist groups, the entrepreneurs and young professionals – all are fighting for their England, their patch.

Brown’s writing is an alloy of hard Yorkshire vernacular and genuine creativity that propels the narrative forward, exposing the state of the nation. Often bleak and forceful, Shark successfully remains grounded in its characters, affirming our shared humanity in our base similarities. An exciting contemporary novel, important in both its exploration of now and of the human condition.

Shark is published by Dog Horn Publishing. Find them online at www.doghornpublishing.com.

Litro

Back to the Future

2011-03-07T05:38:00.000-08:00

Liz: ‘It’s easy. You get on a train and four hours later, there you are in London.’

Billy: ‘The idea of being in London next Saturday put down on paper and staring me in the face, filled my bowels with quick-flushing terror.’

Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar agonised about whether to get the train or not and pursue his dream of writing scripts for a London comedian. But today, you can get the train if you want to, but you don’t have to.

Whilst it’s true London has a stranglehold over publishing, Leeds has more than enough going on and, in a digital age, we can build audiences like we’ve never done before. What’s more, with eReading now taking a sizable chunk of the market and the old model of distribution facing trouble, tightening its belt and not taking risks on new talent, there’s a chance for us to adapt, to develop new ways of finding readers and connecting to projects that develop writers and new models of publishing.

For young writers alone, Leeds has an enviable culture of self-organisation mixed with institutional support. Leeds Young Authors represent the UK in international poetry slams. The Cadaverine is a webzine and publishing press for writers under the age of 25. Scribe is a Leeds University based magazine open to alumni. Barefoot in the Park is an innovative and accessible festival based on Woodhouse Moore every Summer. Young Inscribe offers professional development to promising writers. Aside from energetic groups, bigger organisations like Ilkley, Morley and Headingley Festivals offer much needed credibility and support to young writers.

The NAWE Young Writers’ Hub launched last week in Leeds. We’re a news-driven resource and information directory for writers under the age of 25. We offer an insight into the writing industry for young writers as differing ability levels, teachers, parents and anybody interested in supporting a new generation of emerging writers.

The Hub has a pot of money to award grants, a team of rolling interns, guest bloggers, profiles, listings and somebody to ask questions. We also help young writers facilitate their own events in association with the Hub. It’s the first of its kind and it’s based in Leeds. As more of our reading culture migrates online, signpost services like the Hub will only become increasingly useful.

In David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, a character shouts, “The North! The North! Where we do what we want.” This sounds better than quick-flushing terror. The Young Writers’ Hub won’t lecture, hector or organise, it’s a way to help the flow of what’s already going on, and it’s up to young writers to make it happen. To let them do what they want. To make the connections and see a cross-section of the industry for themselves. We don’t “empower” people or go for any goofy arts speak. We just give them the information.

For the rest of the article

The Culture Vulture

The Hub Launches

2011-01-28T16:07:00.000-08:00

The NAWE Young Writers' Hub has officially launched. We enjoyed a fantastic evening of talks, Q & As, and readings by Zodwa Nyoni, Katherine Henderson and Andrew McMillan.

For some video

Interview in the Yorkshire Post

2011-01-26T05:47:00.000-08:00

Wes Brown is the kind of author young writers' groups can be proud of. Now he's launching his own. Jane Verity met him.

Wes Brown's first novel, Shark, is a story about the dispossessed. Following the life of an ex-soldier who returns to Leeds to find his community has been unravelled, it's the story of a young man's struggle to fit in.

It's something Wes Brown knows a lot about. Growing up in a council house in Burley, his father a professional wrestler and bouncer, his mother working in retail, writing was not a viable career option. It wasn't until he applied to the Sheffield-based group, The Writers' Squad, at 17 that he found something he knew he could do.

"I was terrible at school. It just never interested me. But working with Steve Dearden and Danny Broderick at The Writers' Squad, I was encouraged to do work placements at Penguin Books and Route Publishing. From there I went on to set up The Cadaverine, a website and anthology publishing work from writers under 25 in the region."

He then spent, "a few years in the wilderness," writing Shark in the early hours of the morning, holding down a variety of day jobs, from selling ice-cream at a cinema to working at a brewery.

"It was a tough time. It's like you're stuck in a room for two years talking to someone, and by the end you're not sure if that person is still listening.

"The image I would use is flying through a cloud in the dark. You've got your compass, but you can't see where you're going."

He describes the first draft as, "the worst novel ever written." And the second draft? "The best."

Brown smiles. He may be joking, but Shark has received wide acclaim. Ian McMillan has described the book as "making the North a marvellous place, a place where art can happen, where epic can feel comfortable." Praise indeed. What are his ambitions? "The Man Booker Prize. No, not really. I'm just going to see how far I can take it. Don DeLillo describes writing as, 'a concentrated form of thought,' and that really rings true for me. I want to write something that really means something. That's the big aim."

For the rest of the article

Source: Yorkshire Post

Big names lined up for 2011 Headingley LitFest

2011-01-26T05:42:00.001-08:00

African writer Ben Okri will be among the stars from the literary world appearing at the 2011 Headingley LitFest.

Leeds-born author Wes Brown, author of Shark, will also appear at the 10-day literature festival from Friday, March 18, alongside a host of other well-known names.

Coun James Monaghan (Lib Dem, Headingley) said: "We are always keen to show support for local initiatives such as the Headingley LitFest. Its popularity is a testament to the area's bustling cultural scene.

"The festival brings together children, students, residents and professionals, uniting the local community through the arts."
Other events scheduled for the week of the festival launch include a talk with author Isabel Losada and a lecture on late novelist Margaret Storm Jameson, hosted by Dr Richard Brown. For a full list of events, visit www.litfestprogramme.blogspot.com.

* African poet Ben Okri will read from his work and answer questions at Headingley Enterprise and Arts Centre (HEART) on March 26.

* Wes Brown will read from Shark and answer questions during a series of special event taking place in people's houses on March 20. To book, call 0113 225 7397.

* Hansa Dabhi will appear at Salvo's on Otley Road, Headingley, on March 14. To book, call 0113 275 5017.

For the full article

Credit: Yorkshire Evening Post

Don DeLillo: A writer like no other

2010-12-05T15:14:00.000-08:00

Before he leaves, DeLillo makes an impassioned case for the continuing significance of the novel. “It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience,” he says. “For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can’t be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it’s true.”

For the rest

Graphic: Brian Wood

Myths of the Near Future

2010-12-04T02:55:00.001-08:00

The following is an extract from my quartlery column in NAWEs Writers in Education magazine:

The internet provides us with a great variety of content. Not all of it is good. Not all of it is relevant. It can be hard to find what you’re looking for. With more to choose from, people don’t abstain from judgement, they become more discriminating. Reputable outlets of curated links and critical opinion – be it from a talented blogger or an established reviewer, critics are as vital to inform our judgement as they ever were. This is why the Young Writers’ Hub is publishing original news stories from our writers, but also reproducing relevant articles and viewpoints from across the internet. We are providing valuable access to the critical mood and the know how of industry specialists. We can help sift through the data and create new niche information streams. People don’t tend to read websites like newspapers or magazines; they won’t always spend half an hour on you alone, so we have to make our news fluid, provide it regularly and enable users to Facebook and Tweet items, allow the Hub to be an energetic contributor to a network of networks. This way we’ll keep people coming back to us – to find the information they’re looking for and by those new to us coming in through these extended networks. Curated data is becoming strong currency in an digital age. We can be as useful to national organisations as much as a pre-published author trying to get started.

For the full article

Beeb plugs the Hub

2010-12-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

You're never too young to become a writer. Leeds has a great literary tradition as exemplified by writers such as Arthur Ransome, Alan Bennett, Keith Waterhouse and poet Tony Harrison.

Now a local association wants to encourage the next generation of scribes.

The National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) are launching a Young Writers Hub in Yorkshire.

Described as the first of its kind in the country, it will be a news-driven resource and information directory.

It will concentrate on providing opportunities for writers aged between 16 & 25 in the region, and will complement other groups such as Leeds Young Authors, which was set up to promote positive social dialogue through the written and spoken word among young people of High School age (ages 13-19).

The launch event at The Carriageworks will be an evening of readings, discussion, networking and fun, and a chance to meet those running the hub and find out how to get involved.

The Hub will be co-ordinated by Leeds-based young writer Wes Brown. Wes is a 24 year old writer and founding editor of Cadaverine Magazine.

For the rest of the article

TV and Sabotage Times

2010-12-02T12:07:00.000-08:00

"Over the last ten years or so, TV has given us some of the best entertainment that’s ever been beamed into eyeholes, including The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm and more. TV has never been better, while cinema screens are increasingly clogged with pan-circling cack." That's Paul Brown over at Sabotage Times.

The Sabotage Times is a top mag. Clever, rude and funny like any half decent bloke.

Interview in The Workroom

2010-10-02T18:08:00.000-07:00

Here's an interview with Danny Broderick from The Workroom.

Dead Ink Master Classes

2010-09-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

I'm going freelance as a writing tutor. This course should be perfect for those wanting to get published and develop an audience. Here's the official blurb:

Tutored by novelist and publisher, Wes Brown, Dead Ink master classes are an intensive workshop series covering aspects of writing and publishing. Including:

• Writing exercises, feedback and editorial support

• Digital Marketing and Social Media

• Blogging and developing audiences

• How the book trade and publishing works

• Pitching manuscripts to agents and publishers

• Where eReading is heading

Please note there is a fee of £60 (£40 concs). This guarantees you two one-to-one intensive workshops and one month of ongoing support via email or telephone.

Workshops are flexible to suit your demands and can be based in Leeds, York, Bradford or Sheffield. If you would like to enquire about the series – send a sample of your work and a cover letter outlining your aspirations to w.brown@nawe.co.uk

Wes Brown is a writer and publisher based in Leeds. He is the Young Writers’ Coordinator for NAWE, the Information Manager for NALD and the founding editor of Cadaverine Magazine. He has been a bookseller and is an associate of Future Book. His poetry and prose has appeared in numerous journals online and in print.

A novel called Shark

2010-09-12T17:16:00.000-07:00

Well, the publication of my debut novel Shark is only four weeks away. On 14th October, 9pm at Ilkley Wildman Playhouse as part of The Cadaverine's slot at Ilkley festival, I'll be giving a reading alongside Kate Fox and Cadaverine Award Winner Nicola Hulks.

I'll be in Brown's in Leeds from 6pm. So if anybody wants to come across with me - you're more than welcome!

"In Shark, Wes Brown writes with a kind of rhythmic Northern realism, catching the way we think, the way we talk, the way we act round here; he manages to make the North a marvellous place, a place where art can happen." Ian McMillan.

Shark is a story about the dispossessed and how they get by. Ex-soldier and violent deadbeat John Usher returns to his boyhood home of Leeds to find things have changed. His community has been unraveled by gang culture, ethnic tensions and hopelessness.

Unable to sleep, his only consolation is drinking late into the night and playing pool by himself. That is, until an encounter with a hard right activist leads him into a twisted relationship of deceit, cuckoldry and hatred.

Wes Brown is a 24 year old writer based in Leeds. Shark is his first novel.

Wes Brown is available for interview. For further information please contact lucy@doghornpublishing.com

To buy the novel

Cover art: Calum Harris

Dead Ink

2010-08-30T10:39:00.001-07:00

I'm setting up a new digital publishing press called 'Dead Ink' and it'll be an opportunity to put some digital theory into practice. We're going to go down the DIY route and make full use of our existing contacts in the sector and become have to rely on cooperation, resourcefulness and our own spirit. The team consists of myself, former Cadaverine reviews editor Matthew Read and former Borders manager Matthew Noble. What we want to do is publish flexibly on a variety of platforms; run workshops, competitions and training days; host events, attend music festivals and publish a strong mix of new and established authors. They'll be plenty of new tricks and innovation too.

The challengs is to see if we can become fully self-sufficient, attract a significant readership and take risks with publishing on a budget of absolutely fuck all.

The Trouble with Faith

2010-08-26T12:54:00.000-07:00

"The subway, rattling, plunges back underground. Or, it may be, as some extreme saints have implied, that beneath the majesty of the Infinite, believers and non-believers are exactly alike."

That was the end of 'The Believers' - one of John Updike's Tarbox stories. Richard Dawkins makes the claim that faith brings certainty and comfort; but I think Updike, time and again, artfully reveals the complexity and doubt surrounding faith.

Photo: 'John Updike', John Cochran

The Rise of the Digital Skeptics

2010-08-25T11:03:00.000-07:00

The Review Show gave some air time to the debate surrounding the 'death of the novel'. There was a bit about David Shields' Reality Hunger - manifesto that claims the conventional novel is a 'lifeless form' - before we moved on to the subject of digital reading.

Jeanette Winterson perfectly summarised a mood of threat and resentment toward new developments: “What really worries me, most of all, is, it’s not writers, it’s readers....the digital revolution is going take books off the shelves. So how’re you going to find them, if you don't know what you’re looking for?”

I admire Winterson and don't want to sound catty. But I do buy online and somehow know what I'm looking for. It's fundamentally a failure of imagination not to see the complex and evolving digital lanscape, the way gatekeepers are changing, and that the switch to digital might not be a big black hole.

The Young Writers' Hub - Call Out

2010-08-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

The NAWE Young Writers' Hub is in its final stages of development.

The Hub, a news-driven resource and information directory, will be a 'big bang' for young writers and new readers. It will enable you to create your own links; learn more about the industry, keep up to date with opportunities and help you find new audiences for you and your work.

If you are a young writer or involved with young writers' projects - get in touch. We're looking for individual and group profiles, news, competitions, events, and links you think young writers will find useful.

For more info and (or) to send me your stuff - you can email me on w.brown@nawe.co.uk

Picture: Getting Published

Faith Schools Menace?

2010-08-19T07:52:00.000-07:00

Dick Dawkins was back on More 4 last night. In the melodramatically entitled Faith Schools Menace? - Dawkins roamed about, debated people (camera behind his head, combative) and interviewed the religious and the irreligious. He wasn't quite as shrill as he sometimes can be - and didn't barrack everybody he came across. A more excavatory approach yielded results as he revealed some of the shockingly bad science taught in a faith school. Dawkins was even surprisingly inert when an incensed Catholic guy accused him of not allowing people the right to be religious.

The 'right to be' argument is obviously cogent. But equally cogent is the right to argue against things you don't like and thereby contribute toward a free market of ideas.

And in this spirit, I think Paul Davies' controversial article in the New York Times makes for interesting reading. He argues: "[Until] science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus."

While Dawkins valuably highlights some of the problems with faith and faith schools, the way he proselytizes scientific certainty feels weirdly unscientific.