Magma threw a launch for their Island edition. It was a wonderful evening full of tremendous poets reading tremendous poems, along with a touching tribute to the poet, Gboyega Odubanjo.

I read Estuary, which was published in the Island edition, and The Rookery.

Photo by @pennydampier.

I love Daphne Du Maurier, though I’ve barely scratched the surface of everything she’s written. I’m currently reading the print version of Don’t Look Now and Other Stories. And I recently finished listening to the audio book of Rebecca, as read by Anne Massie. This is my first ever audiobook novel. This is what I learned:

• I didn’t think I would like listening to audiobooks. Turns out, I do.
• I didn’t think I’d consider that listening to an audiobook was the same as reading the print book, but I do.
• Anne Massie, RIP, reads beautifully. There’s 19 hours worth of text she had to get through. I genuinely don’t know how she did it without letting the quality drop.
• I worried I would miss bits while I was doing other jobs, and I did. But I didn’t lose the thread, (though that might be a function of having watched the movie).
• The opening chapter of Rebecca contains some of the most breath-taking description I’ve come across. She’s writing about Mandeley, of course. She never over-does it. She picks the right detail to draw a picture and set the tone. Everything in the book is affected by that opening chapter.
• I have an audible account through Amazon, which I’ve barely used. I listened to Taj Atwal reading Naomi Booth’s Sour Hall last year, and a version of Faust for my dissertation, plus Enron. It’s enjoyable to listen to these pieces while doing things around the house. I listened to Sour Hall while re-arranging my son’s bedroom.
• My plan is to listen to Jane Eyre next. The only Brontes novel I’ve read is Wuthering Heights, which was tremendous, though completely different from what I expected, (for which I blame Kate Bush!) The Brontes were born in the small village near Bradford in which my sister lives, so I feel a geographical connection to them. I just haven’t read much of their output. An audiobook seems like a good way to address that.
• The Jane Eyre audiobook is read by Thandiwe Newton, who I really like in movies. She has a very different voice from Anne Massie – not worse or better, just different. It’s less actorly, more normal.

I passed my Masters. As you might imagine, I’m rather pleased.

From the moment I decided to do the MA, I knew it was the right thing to do. Everything about the course – the fact that Birkbeck is a college for working people, with classes in the evenings – everything was what I needed. As it turned out, I had four superb tutors in Rachel Seiffert, Grant Watson, Stephen Willey, and Julia Bell, who were encouraging and inspiring in equal measure. I learned a huge amount from each one, and I grew as a writer as the course progressed.

I wrote the following for my application. This is what I wanted from the course, and it’s pretty much what I got.

Guidance
Primarily, I want a sustained dialogue about my writing with knowledgeable and experienced supervisors who can provide an independent assessment of my abilities and choices, and who can nudge me toward good habits and sound practice.

Planning
At work, we rely upon deadlines to meet our commitments to the business and our readers. My goal is to use this course to imbue a similar discipline in my own writing to emulate the working relationship between an author and a publisher. Honouring submission dates is good manners, demonstrating an awareness of the dependencies on an author, such as freelancers or in-house editorial staff, sales and marketing teams, and buyers within book chains, etc..

Validation
Everyone needs a champion, someone who can vouch for their abilities and sensibilities. A commissioning editor seeing MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck on my cover letter would know I was serious about my writing and that I had benefited from the coaching of a world class institution.

Community
I love collaborating with other writers and artists, finding projects that suit our mutual goals and cheerleading the work of others. In some ways, I’m trying to replicate the community and support I found at Peter Sansom’s writing workshops, where we discussed each other’s work, gathered to collate pamphlets, and attended each other’s readings. I hope to find a similar sense of community and mutual support on this course, sharing a love of the written word and helping each other achieve our individual goals.

Professional growth
Ultimately, I hope the course will help me grow from a good amateur writer into a good professional writer, to think strategically about the material I chose to work on, and to understand how best to present my work to convince a swamped book trade and a reluctant public.

It’s this switch in my own mentality I believe this course can give me, to consolidate my belief in my own abilities.

A big shout to Amy Ridler and Julie McGovern, who have been my big writing pals these last two years, along with Joe Platt, Louie Conway, Katy Severson, and a dozen other wonderful writers who have become great friends. When I talked about Community above, it’s these people I’m thinking of!

John Harvey is supposedly retired from writing, but you wouldn’t know it from his output. Last year he published the exquisite tiny collection of poems, Summer Notebook. This year, Shoestring Press have published On Balance.

I read some of the poems from On Balance pre-publication, so reading them now in book form is like meeting an old friend. There are some tremendous poems in the collection, but my favourites are the ones which riff on Peter Sansom’s Lanyard. I met John through Peter, so that connection has always resonated with me.

Anyway, it allows me to flag up the interview I did with John last year. I’d never done an interview before, and though John was managing all sorts of health issues, the most prominent of which was a broken collar bone, he kindly gave me two hours’ worth of wonderful copy to take home with me.

The interview was published on the Mechanics’ Institute Review.

I was influenced by a Scottish writer, William McIlvanney, who wrote three novels about a Glasgow-There was a move towards what I hoped was a greater authenticity. It was social realism plus crime. Crime gives you the story, but the background is social realism. I was working toward a picture of Nottingham that was as accurate as possible, where the characters were as accurate as possible, and the storyline opened up things about living in that place while providing a narrative to follow.
Instead of writing 12 books a year, I wrote one book, so I could expand those parts which I couldn’t linger over in the shorter stuff. I could spend more time on character, on describing place. I could have some kind of political attitude, if it fitted with the story. I could be more careful about language. I could do a lot more rewriting. There was no rewriting on the early stuff because there wasn’t time.
I had plenty of time to write the first Resnick novel, Lonely Hearts. I had time to revise it. I had a proper editor who went through it and told me ways in which it could be improved. I had an agent. I was operating on a wholly different level.

I didn’t realise how intensely I’d worked on my MA until the day I handed in my dissertation. I was in the thick of a covid bout, so my health and thinking were not as they might have been, but I slipped into a post-dissertation lull that was quite uncharacteristic. I would look at a page of words and I wouldn’t want to engage with them, which is not like me. I rarely if ever suffer writer’s block and I’ve always got something I want to work on. Because my writing time is limited due to family and work, etc, I can usually get myself fired up about something or other to make the most of my time.

Anyway, this lull allowed me time to think about my writing and what I want from it now the MA is done, now I’m not writing primarily for the course.

Tutor Julia Bell talked about the concept of exit velocity, of how we would carry what we’d learned forward into our writing careers. The concept resonated with me, and I’ve been thinking about the steps I need to take if I want to become established as a writer and maybe even make a living from it.

So these are my plans for the near future.

• Representation by an Agent. It’s almost impossible to thrive as a writer without representation, so that has to be a priority. In the past, I’ve tried a scattergun approach – sending out a piece of work to ten agents at a time. That approach hasn’t worked. I’m now being more picky and sending a bespoke email to one agent at a time, favouring the agents who represent my favourite writers. (This approach was recommended by speakers at our summer term lectures).
• Dig deep into my back catalogue. I have a million projects from various phases of my writing career, so I’m working my way through it, taking stock of what I’ve written and thinking about how it might prove useful in the future. Short stories that I rushed off in a quick writing frenzy, plays I wrote as an exercise in class, half-finished poems, novels and long poems that need another draft: making sure I know what I’ve got in my back catalogue that I might wish to publish, or that might become a part of something else, or that I might put up on here.
• Create a proper website. I need a place to send people if they want to know more about my writing. I need a website that can act as a showcase for my work. It might include a blog, because I can see the value of keeping the website ticking over with new material, which many writers’ websites don’t do. I suspect the blog won’t be this one here, on WordPress, because I don’t want to share the screen with adverts: they cheapen the words around them.
• Send stuff out. I won’t get anywhere if my writing remains on my hard drive. I need to get it out there.

Yesterday, this came through the post:

And page 68, there I am. Or there my poem, Estuary, is, to be more accurate. I’ve long admired Magma, and I’ve long wanted to be published by them. And yesterday it happened. I’m very pleased.

There’s a launch party on the 22nd November in London Bridge, where I’ll read Estuary, and possibly an additional poem. It’s a long time since I’ve done a reading, so can’t wait. I was tempted to fly up to Edinburgh for the Scottish launch the following day, but giddy as I am at the thought, practicalities won out.

Quick aside: I don’t know the etiquette about sharing the poem outside a journal. If it was online, I’d share a link to the website and encourage people to click through, but because it’s print, I don’t know if it’s OK to take a photograph of the poem on the page, and post that on here or Twitter? Does that undermine sales, or does it act as a loss leader to bring people to the journal? I am sure every journal has a different take on it. Perhaps the kind thing is to wait until the next edition is out, at which point I’ll publish the poem here.

In the meantime, here’s a snippet:

I recently finished Bunnyman, the memoir of Will Sergeant, the guitarist who formed Echo and the Bunnymen. This is what I learned, (or was reminded of):

• Punk was a short-lived thing. The really interesting stuff was what came after.
• The kids who were into punk/post-punk ran the gauntlet every time they left the house. There was always some meat-head ready to challenge them for their look. It took bravery to follow their hearts.
• The seventies were a bleak time. No one had any money, everything was on a shoestring. But everyone was in the same situation, so it kind of balanced out.
• Creativity needs an infrastructure to build upon. The Bunnymen had an astonishing club to go to (Eric’s) that all-time great bands came to play, cafes to hang out in, indie record labels on their doorstep.
• This gave them a chance to access other levels of the infrastructure: the magazines, Sounds and the NME; John Peel and the BBC; Sire Records. The Bunnymen were good enough to be offered the opportunity, (many bands weren’t), but they might have found it a bit harder if that infrastructure wasn’t in place.
• Brian Eno talks about Scenius – where a given location at a given time elevates the work of the people who are there to encourage them to reach greater heights. The list of bands or musicians from Liverpool at that time is astonishing: Echo and the Bunnymen; The Teardrops Explodes; Bill Drummond and Dave Balfe, who went onto run the label that signed Blur); Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford, who found fame in Frankie Goes to Hollywood; Ian Broudie; Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark; Jayne County, Pete Burns. Pretty astounding.
• The dole and art college/teacher training (along with crappy jobs) have been the bedrock of working class creativity these last 60 years. The great equalisers.
• There’s a thin line between competent and greatness. There were more accomplished guitarists than Will Sergeant, but so what – he was the perfect guitarist for the Bunnymen, who were a magnificent band. He needed a base competence, but beyond that, it was all to do with his own musical sensibility.
• One thing leads to another, but you don’t know what the another thing is until you do the one thing in the first place. Will went to a party above a pub, presuming it would be crap. He was early, and the only person he vaguely knew there was Ian McCulloch, who was usually late. They started nattering. One thing led to another, but he didn’t have a clue what circumstances had lined up for him until he got to the pub.
• Start with what you’ve got. If you haven’t got a drummer, use a drum machine.

I was thinking of using my short story, Vincent’s Lost Letter to his Brother, Theo, October 13th, 1873, as my submission piece for my first module, so I drafted up this Critical Essay to submit alongside it. In the end, I submitted another piece, the New Luddites, so I didn’t need this essay. I thought I’d stick it on here, instead.

Vincent’s Lost Letter to his Brother, Theo, October 1873 is not a typical piece for me. I usually base my stories in the villages where I was raised in the foothills of the Pennines. Though I have lived in South London for nearly a quarter century, I’m still making sense of my upbringing in a working/lower middle class household in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

This piece presented me with several challenges about delivering a short story within this specific setting.

Themes

There were points on ingress into the story:

• Vincent Van Gogh lived in South London for three years, before he started to paint, working at an art agency in Holborn, London. I liked the idea that he walked the same streets as me. His first verified drawing is of his boarding house in Kennington.
• He famously only sold one painting in his lifetime. Though this is cited as proof of Vincent’s unrecognised genius, I believe it’s evidence that he was a lousy salesman of his own work. This speaks to the many talented writers and artists I know who are invariably dreadful at self-promotion. (This also speaks to me, too).
• Emile Zola and Pissaro both spent time in London at the end of the 18^th century. I hoped to engineer a meeting between Zola, Pissaro and Van Gogh to build the story around.

I abide by the Ian Rankin school of research, which states you should read around your topic enough to validate your premise and provide themes and plot points to feed into the narrative, but you should save the detailed research for after the first draft, when you understand the specific details you require to provide authenticity. This serves to ensure the story doesn’t operate solely as a vehicle to document your research. The story should come first.

Unfortunately, the first illusion shattered by my research was that Zola, Pissaro and Van Gogh could have met. Their London timelines did not overlap. However, Van Gogh was in London during the fire at Alexandra Palace, which I would become a trigger that precipitated his darkness. The proposed meeting of the authors morphed into a visit to the Bunfields graveyard off Old Street in East London, where Bunyan, Blake and Defoe are buried. Van Gogh was an anglophile, a fan of Bunyan and Dickens, and I enjoyed the thought of him as a fan boy, bewildered by their canon and eager to understand their world.

There were other themes I wanted to feed into the story:

• Van Gogh was an immigrant
• London was technologically advanced for the time
• He enjoyed Victorian culture
• The British reform movement was important to him
• The drawing he did of his lodging can’t have been his first effort. There must have been other attempts. (He only painted in oils in the last ten years of his life)
• People liked him and supported him. He was not alone here
• Vincent was socially minded, triggered by the poverty he saw in London
• His faith, and the imperative for the church to support the poor, was spurred in London
• Art was for the wealthy
• Van Gogh was not born into poverty, his family was comparatively well-off
• Wealth, and the corresponding improvement in diet, would have made Vincent more sturdy than the guttersnipes he saw.

Format

Our understanding of Van Gogh’s time in London comes from his letters to his brother, Theo, among other people. The letters document his working life for the Art Agency, Goupil & Co, and his stay in lodgings, as well as his impressions of London.

Very close to his brother, Theo.

I conceived of a lost letter that he wrote to Theo, where the darkness that shrouded his mind began to become apparent. A letter would let me explore Vincent’s thoughts as he explains his to his most trusted confidante. He becomes the narrator of his own tale. I had to find a gap in the timeline when he could have conceivably written the letter, and a reason why he didn’t send it. I began with a plan to write three letters, over the course of which his problems deepen Ultimately, it seemed unlikely that he would write three letters, all of which he would destroy, rather than just one.

An epistolary would distinguish it from the play, Vincent in Brixton, which focuses on Vincent’s relationship with his landlady, Mrs Loyer, and her daughter.

Though Vincent’s letters to Theo were in Dutch, I thought the narrative would be well served if he wrote this letter in English, or that the translation was in itself clumsy. This would add a naivity to the telling, as he (or the translator) sometimes struggles with the language. I don’t know Dutch, so I brought in the speech patterns of the smattering of German I know. In this way, I hoped to hint at the otherness of his time in London, the young immigrant contending with a big, fast, unforgiving foreign city.

Dropping in reference to his future art, chair, crows, self-portrait, stars

Avoiding clunky painting references like palate and brushstroke in my description

The letters we have do not hint at the darkness that plagued him, and it feels strange when reading them to think of the disconnect between this positive, smart Vincent, and the tortured genius of public perception, contending with poverty and mental instability and his own burgeoning talent. which gave me an excuse to have him destroy this letter out of shame.

A question I asked myself: was it fair to put Van Gogh in situations he might not have been in, and to put words in his mouth? As human beings we still have a duty of care to accurately portray historical figures, to be as fair. For example, though I wanted to reference Van Gogh’s self-mutilation later in his life, (or at least the public perception of it), I didn’t want to make light of what was clearly a symptom of wider mental health issues.

I wrote Vincent’s Lost Letter to his Brother, Theo, October 13th, 1873, during the first module at college, the Reading and Writing Seminar. The module was run by Rachel Sieffert, who was a wonderful person to learn from. For my second workshop piece, Rachel encouraged me to try my hand at historical fiction, which is a genre I hadn’t had a serious go at previously. Turns out, I love writing it.

I live in South London, and Van Gogh lived in Kennington, just a couple of miles up the road, when he worked for Goupil & Cie on Southampton Street, who were an art dealership. I knew Pissarro and Zola both lived in Upper Norwood (Crystal Palace, as everyone knows it now) in the late 19th century, and my first thought was to imagine a meeting of the three somehow. Sadly, their time in London did not overlap (though apparently Pissarro and Zola did meet here).

Van Gogh took his first known forays into art in London. His first verified piece is a sketch of his board house in Kennington. He was an anglophile, and loved the great British novelists, such as Dickens. He developed a social conscience, and considered a life in the church as a way to alleviate the poverty he saw. These were all lovely chunks of information to build a story around.

Vincent was a regular correspondent with his brother, Theo. Their remaining letters let us see who Vincent was in those days. I invented a lost letter to channel Vincent’s more anxious thoughts. (It’s a lovely co-incidence that this post is going out on the 150th anniversary of my made-up letter).

The globes of gaslight of an evening make me feel I’m walking among the heavens. To look into the water from Westminster Bridge is to see the weeds as a widow’s shawl, lank and drawn downstream to the distant darkness. So far from the coast, the tidal Thames heaves its great mass inland or disappears out to sea to leave little but a stream in a bog of mud. I see many broken things on the water’s edge: fractured clay pipes, smashed crockery, discarded bones. The mudlarks make good work on the beaches when the river is gone.

But London fog is not like Helvoirt fog. The heavy soot of the myriad manufactories falls upon the city’s back. It makes my spit dark and thick. The mist shrouds the streetlight, leans in to tell its secrets. These are the streets of Dickens, of the lost children of civilisation, finding places to live in the shadows of ramshackle buildings that seem too derelict to inhabit. It frightens me, and, I confess, at times it excites me, too. Dickens’ old house is not far from Southampton Street, and I walk there at midday as I take my repast. I had the temerity to sketch his house on Doughty Street, but hated my work and threw it away. It was junk.

I’ve always been centre-left: I believe society is happier, healthier, more productive, saner, when it has a social welfare system as a safety net whenever we need it, (and we all need, whatever some people claim). The Health Service, first and foremost, should be free at the point of use, and should be given proper investment to make up for the shortfall from the last 13 years. The transport network should be brought back under state ownership and properly funded, as should the water supply, as should energy.

At the same time, I’ve worked in the private sector all my life. I’ve worked for small independents and global megacorps and PPPs, American and British, and I know there are some areas I don’t want the state shoving its nose into. Publishing, my field, would not benefit from government interference, except for committed funding for small presses and arts organisations so they can take their place in the ecosystem of arts provision. Which is a way of saying, I’m not anti-business. But as a society, we need to ensure business operates where it brings benefit to society. It shouldn’t be allowed to ride rough-shod over our humanity in order to make its quarterly numbers.

Though I’ve always been centre-left with a strong green streak, I’ve never been affiliated with any given political party. I’ve voted Labour in every general election, a mixture of Green and Labour in local elections, but no one has so embodied my views that I want to join them or campaign for them. I want a government that understands its resonsibility to build a strong economy based upon environmentally sustainable practices and a culture that reveres its citizens and its standing in the world. I need it to take a holistic view of the vast, vast problems that face us, and to offer up an approach that embraces all of it.

The current government is the opposite of that. It has proven to be feral, greedy, short-term, narrow-minded, and hypocritical. It is xenophobic, racist, bullying, nasty, and criminal. It supports policies that benefit Conservative Party’s donors, not policies that are good for society. These last thirteen years will be seen as the lowest ebb of a nation that has everything it needs to be wise, open, responsible, sane, but gets dragged into the gutter by press barons and politicians who are beholden to money.

I am for a complete reform of British governance. I’m for proportional representation and for a written constitution. I’m for nationalisation of our services, with significant investment so they are once again up with the best in the world. I’m for a law on ecocide, so companies that damage the planet should pay for its repair, and board members who sanction environmental harm should be jailed.

And the first step is to get the Tories out. They are a disgrace.

Well, that’s that. I submitted my dissertation and now all there is to do is wait.

I have friends who are magnificent bloggers. (Russell Davies, Steve Bowbrick, take a bow). They know how to work in the blogging format. They may work very hard at it behind the scenes, but on the screen, it is very natural, affable, engaging.

I’m not like that. I’d describe myself as a novelist these days, and I don’t know of many or any novelists who are natural bloggers. I can think of three or four novelists (I won’t say who they are, this is not about naming and shaming), where the tab on their website for their blog is usually empty or paltry. We don’t think in a manner that works on a blog. We’re too long form.

Still, there are various bits and pieces I want to keep ticking over that don’t fit anywhere else, and a blog is a useful device for dropping links to my published pieces, etc. So I’m going to give it a go again, and see if I stick to it. And if I do, I’ll upgrade from WordPress to something more serious.

But in the meantime: howdy, my pals who still use feed readers, and have stood by the format while everyone else got distracted.

After two brilliant years, I’m close to completing my MA. I still have my dissertation to submit, and one piece to receive a mark on, but otherwise I’m done.

I’ve loved it, absolutely loved it. I learned so much and my writing has improved considerably. As I wrote in this post two and a bit years ago:

My plan is to use it to realign my mindset, to switch from being a good amateur writer to being a good professional writer.

I think I did that. My attitude is different now. I still struggle to get things published (there are only a handful of writers that don’t), but I have a body of work that I believe in and which is growing, and which I am confident will find its audience if I can find the right gatekeeper to work with.

So it just remains to finish my dissertation (it’s there or thereabouts), tidy all the books on my bookshelf, and file the writing I’ve done over the last two years. And then I need work out what I’m going to write next, and make a renewed effort to get things out into the wider world.

Last summer, I went into Lightship 95 recording studio on the Thames with singer Amy Darton and pianist Thiago Costella. We recorded a song called The Couple on the Street. I made a quick video for it on the way to work, which turned out nicely.

During lockdown, book sales boomed. Many of us who were forced to work from home found we had an extra couple of hours of free time per day because we weren’t commuting. We read. We watched movies. We binge-watched TV series. Isolation was tough, and we reached for works of imagination to escape our confinement, to bring light relief, to help us understand what was going on in the world.

The English language is fundamental to British culture, and English literature is the English language at its finest. Directly or indirectly, it filters through everything we think and do, and imbues our daily lives with a richness that sometimes we don’t appreciate. When literature matters so much to us as a nation – to our view of ourselves, to the world’s view of us – why would we not encourage students to immerse themselves in its variety and glory, to understand it thoroughly, to carry its message forward? But that is what Birkbeck University is planning to do.

The founding and growth of Birkbeck University – the Mechanics’ Institute – is testimony to a sane and civilised society providing opportunity for working people to engage with the world around them and to better their lot in life. Birkbeck offers opportunity for working people to grow, to challenge themselves, to follow their dreams when their circumstances mean they don’t have the luxury of ditching the day job, when they still need to earn a living.

I would not have been able to continue my study had it not been for Birkbeck’s unique operating model. I am in the second year of a two-year part-time MA in Creative Writing. English literature and creative writing go hand in hand. Understanding literature is fundamental to better writing. So I don’t just write, I also read, for the course and for the love of it. I am from a working-class background, I work for a living, and it has always been my dream to sit within an ecosystem that revolves around written works of the imagination. Birkbeck allows me to do that.

You don’t have to study English to degree level to enjoy works of literature, but it’s a cornerstone of any worthwhile institution to offer an undergraduate course in the written word of our native language, to offer the opportunity to understand our shared body of literature. It speaks to the aspiration of your student body, of the students you wish to attract, to present English literature as an option. For Birkbeck, of all places, to walk away from English literature, or to downplay it, is to suggest that literature is not for working people. At least, that’s how it feels.

As a writer of fiction, I am on a perpetual lookout for the reasons behind human behaviour, for the motivating factors behind a given course of action. I want to think well of the people around me, to search for resolution, for the satisfying ending. I believe in redemption. And so it is with the plight of English teaching at Birkbeck. I have faith that a solution can be reached that allows the English Department to survive and to thrive. But as I am not party to the discussions as to department’s future, all I can do is add my voice to the multitude of people who know that closing the department (or downgrading it, which is tantamount to the same thing) would be an error. English literature sits at the heart of British culture, and Birkbeck needs a thriving English department to support working people who love our language.

Just finished:

• The Birds & Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier <- course recommended reading
• How To Be An Art Rebel, xxx
• Mindf*ck, Christopher Wiley
• Other Stories and Other Stories, Ali Smith <- course recommended reading
• Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice <- read while listening to the audio

On the go:

• Word Perfect, Susie Dent
• Who Let The Gods Out, xxx
• What Nature Does For Britain, Tony Juniper
• Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
• Young Skins, Colin Barrett <- course recommended reading
• The Creative Writing Coursebook, Julia Bell and Paul Magrs (ed)

Recently acquired but not started:

• The Lady with the Dog, Chekhov
• The Gallows Pole, Benjamin Myers
• The West Yorkshire Moors, Christopher Goddard
• Blizzard 51

I just listened to Colin Morgan reading Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal. Recommended.

I start my course at the end of the month. My induction is three weeks today, the course starts four weeks today. The course will be presented in person, which is really pleasing. I chose a college I could easily travel to, if we ever came out of lockdown.

Over the summer, I picked up several books from the recommended reading list. I’m not the fastest of readers, but I’ve been working my way through the pile next to my desk. I’m using the fact that I’m paying a nice sum of money for the course as an excuse to sit and read, when there are other things around the house I need to do.

I read a mixture of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Lately, I try to stick to new fiction (or, at least, new to me) though, now and again, I fall back on novels I love, eg The Wind-up Bird Chronicles or Vonnegut.

The poetry is a mixture of contemporary authors, (the last three collections have been Caroline Bird, Ann Sansom and Tiffany Atkinson), and older things I’ve missed, like Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Additionally, I try and put time aside to read new editions of poetry magazines. I have subscriptions to Rialto, The North and Ambit.

My non-fiction is split between: books about democracy and the environment, (I recently finished Guy Shrubsole’s Who Owns England, which covers both); and books about sport. I’m not an adventurous cyclist, but cycling books are a particular joy.

When it comes to my writing, I have far too many things on the go, which has always been a problem for me. My writing time has to be tucked into those little spaces in my life when I’m not dealing with family or work, (or this summer, laying a lawn in the back garden). When I commuted, the train (and lunch) was my writing time. I’m finding it harder to hollow out a space to write now I’m working from home.

Which brings me to this blog. I tried to post twice a week but it has proven too much for me. Once my course starts, I’ll have even less time to write blogposts. Though I want to keep it going, clattermonger.com is the lowest priority. So I’m going to post just once a week for the foreseeable future.

Counselling will be offered to those hardest hit by this momentous decision.

These are the rules I’d introduce if I was in charge of football:

• There were would be a separate time-keeper. Let the referee deal with the players, let someone else manage the clock.
• The clock would stop every time the whistle blows. A player could play-act all they wanted, it wouldn’t make a difference. They couldn’t waste time, because the clock is stopped. Cramp at the end of cup final, players staying down after taking a knock, even VAR, no problem. Let them get it sorted out. It won’t reduce the amount of time the other team has in which to score.
• I’d add an arc five metres out from the corner flag. A team that’s leading can only have the ball in that zone for ten seconds. After that, they have to bring the ball back out. They can go back in again, but it at least gives the losing team a chance to win the ball without resorting to fouls. (A quick sub-question do teams practice to winning the ball when the opposition have taken it to the corner flag to run the clock down? Seems an obvious thing to do as a strategy).
• Whenever a goal is scored, the scorers have a minute to celebrate. Let them take their shirts off, let them go nuts, whatever they want to do. A minute after the ball hits the back of the net, the conceding team is free to kick off, whether the scorers are ready or not.
• Whenever the referee is surrounded by players contesting a decision, he/she can draw a line on the turf, using their chalk spray, beyond which only the two captains can step. The ref can then step back ten yards and discuss the issue civilly. Any players, other the captains, who step over that line would receive a booking.
• The two captains would have two reviews for VAR, which they can utilise if they think a decision is wrong. The referee can still refer anything to VAR if they deem appropriate. Like in cricket, if their review is successful, they retain their review.
• Any player caught, using video evidence, committing violent conduct or faking injury to get an opposition player sent off, will be booked or sent off a minute after the start of the next game they play. Their team then has to play with ten players for 89 minutes, plus additional games if the offence is bad enough. This applies to international tournaments, too.
• If a player is denied a goal-scoring opportunity because of a foul, they should be given that opportunity, rather than the defender being sent off. We could be the solo run from the half-way line, or a penalty, whether the incident occurred in the box or not.
• Clubs should get a trophy if they contribute more players to the winners of international tournaments than any other club. Let them share in the glory. (But it should be the team they’ve played for the season leading up to the tournament, not the team that buys them in the summer, just before the tournament begins).
• Offside should be clear daylight.

Just finished:

• The Writer’s Voice, Al Alvarez <- course recommended reading
• The Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke
• The Echo Chamber, Luke Williams
• You Are A Champion, Marcus Rashford
• Who Owns England, Guy Shrubsole

On the go:

• Word Perfect, Susie Dent
• Selected Poems, Tony Harrison
• A Taste for Death, PD James
• The Crucible, Arthur Miller
• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin <- course recommended reading

Recently acquired but not started:

• Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling

Hmm, maybe not the hardest working line in rock and roll, maybe in baroque folk pop.

There’s a line in Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat that changes direction four times in the space of nine words. The line is:

Thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes.

The way Cohen sings it, it goes:

Thanks …

A simple start, Leonard is thanking someone. He’s always been well-mannered, so this is not unusual.

… for the trouble …

Ah, he was being sarcastic. It feels like the line will continue along the lines of ‘… you caused.’ But it doesn’t.

… you took …

Back to the gratitude.

… from her eyes.

But what he’s really talking about is the positive emotional impact the person had on Jane (the third person in the song). The trouble wasn’t a ruckus of any kind, but a deep-seated depression or sadness or anger that had clearly been building in Jane for a long time. In the context of the song, this is noble and kind, a cuckolded man swallowing his pride and admitting that the affair his partner had with his friend was better for her than anything he could have done for her.

Nine words. A story in itself. A beginning, middle, twist, and resolution in one sentence.

The fence on this side of the garden has been threatening to fall down for ages. I had a couple of sessions with the new drill on screwdriver setting, screwing the panels to the battens, so hopefully it should hold itself together. The top batten closest to the house is almost rotted through, so I made sure the panels were screwed tight to the lower two battens. The fence is the responsibility of the neighbours, who are pensioners, so I don’t want to nag them to replace it until it really needs it. As it is, hopefully I’ve given it a few more years before it collapses.

I treated the fence to a new coat of preservative, which at the time of writing is settling down into a lovely chestnut colour.

I need to paint the base today.

Lunch Poems, by Frank O’Hara, is recommended reading on my course.

• I can’t recall how many copies of Lunch Poems I’ve bought over the years. Plenty! I buy it as a gift for friends if they haven’t come across it already.It works well as a small minding.
• (Though recently, Louis McNeice’s Autumn Journal has become my go-to gift).
• We have two copies of Lunch Poems on the shelf at home. One of them is mine, the other is a copy I bought my wife when we were courting).
• I re-read Lunch Poems every couple of years. It surprises me every time.
• I love the form factor of the City Lights books. I love the fact that I can shove it in my pocket when I go out, so if I’m ever stuck for something to read on a train or waiting for someone, I can fish it out.
• I’ve read it front to back several times. I’ve dipped in to read my favourite poems fifty times more.
• At its best, Lunch Poems defines the poetry of work-a-day Manhattan. The Lunch Poem poems are very modern, both topically and stylistically. They are city poems, reflecting the working life in mid-town.
• They are formless and are full of fun. And, though they don’t shy away from grief, they come at it obliquely, as if nothing is wrong, until it becomes clear that something is wrong, (I’m thinking of The Day Lady Died).
• I love that O’Hara has an active sense of humour within his poems, only to suddenly chuck in death and violence, where needed, to reflected the world around him.
• The poems that I care for least are his surreal, dadaist poems. I can’t be arsed with them, most times, and skip over them if I’m not in the mood. They don’t add up to much, though the language in them is rich and the ideas can be interesting. O’Hara wrote many few poems that adopted the largesse of surrealism. It’s easy to think that those poems were his nod to the painters and thinkers around him, as if he was trying to create something avant garden in keeping with his drinking partners at the Cedar Lounge, but it’s more likely that he wrote them because he liked writing them. I find them easy to ignore them.
• O’Hara’s poems that actually discuss lunch are up there with my favourite poems of all time. As I say, very modern. Very urban. Very urbane.
• My favourite poem of O’Hara’s is Morning, which isn’t in Lunch Poems. I came across it in his Selected Poems that I borrowed from Manchester Polytechnic Library, or maybe at Manchester Central Library when I was working there on a secondment. I copied it out and kept it at the front of my notebook. I’ve probably still got the copy somewhere.

I’ve got to tell you
how I love you always
I think of it on grey
mornings with death

in my mouth…

……….

… do you know how it is

when you are the only
passenger if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go

• I love that poem, (even though I don’t care for anchovies).
• I love his lyrical poetry. It gets me every time.
• He uses language very gently, albeit within the honk of New York taxis and builders’ drills.
• Lunch Poems makes me wonder how openly gay he could be in New York in the 50s. Manhattan back then would have been as open as anywhere in the world, especially for someone who was working in the arts, but still, would his landlord/lady have been understanding? Would he get sneered at in bars? When he went to Fire Island, did the locals turn nasty? (The nearest I can get to imagining this is Sammy Clay’s relationship with Tracy Bacon in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay). Which makes me think, I’ve never seen a biography of Frank O’Hara. Maybe there is one but I missed it. I’m going to check it out.
• I once read that he thought himself too square for the hips, too hip for the squares. I can see that. I think there are a lot of people who like that, who hold liberal views but still need to hold down regular jobs. I’m probably one of them.

I painted the bench that I kept intending to chuck out but never did. I looks nice. I intended it to be a deeper blue, but in Homebase your knowledge of the colour inside a tin is limited to the small swatch on the label, which are often misleading. So I might take it a shade darker, but I’ll wait until the turf is down, so I can see the colour in the context. This blue might look amazing against a sea of green.

Just finished:

• The making of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Richard Newman
• Rialto 96
• The Nanny State Made Me, Stuart Maconie
• Racing Hard, Willian Fotheringham
• The Shropshire Lad, AE Housman
• Hotel insomnia, Charles Simic

On the go:

• Word Perfect, Susie Dent
• Selected Poems, Tony Harrison
• A Taste for Death, PD James
• The Crucible, Arthur Miller
• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin <- course recommended reading
• The Writer’s Voice, Al Alvarez <- course recommended reading

Recently acquired but not started:

• Why Women Will Save the Planet, Friends of the Earth and C40 Cities
• Tenth of December, George Saunders <- course recommended reading
• Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro <- course recommended reading
• Other Stories and Other Stories, Ali Smith <- course recommended reading
• The Birds & Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier <- course recommended reading
• The Misunderstanding and Caligula, Albert Camus
• Bar Mitzvah Boy and Other Television Plays, Jack Rosenthal
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
• The Invisible Man, HG Wells
• Going to Meet the Man, James Baldwin <- course recommended reading
• Young Skins, Colin Barrett <- course recommended reading
• Omeros, Derek Walcott <- course recommended reading

I built a shed. By ‘built’, I mean I bought it in bits and fastened it together, like an Ikea wardrobe but for outdoors. Still, I got pretty handy with the drill, and I did a fine job making a base from that old path I mentioned several posts ago, (you remember the one! the one about the path!) And I’d never put felt on a building before, so that was something of a learning curve.

Top marks to the shed people, they included more of everything I needed when it came to screws, felt tacks, etc, which was brilliant because I could make mistakes or drop them and lose them in the soil, and it wasn’t an issue.

When I lay a new path down the house return, I’ll use the same tiles to make the shed base a little less raggedy.

So now, I need to put stuff in it. It’s going to be a convenient dumping ground for anything we *don’t* want in the house or in the summerhouse. Which is good, because it will give us more space to play in.

And I have a shed.

I’m proud to say I commissioned three of these twenty beginner books about how to use the Raspberry Pi. It feels like a long time ago:

Including the first two:

Life Studies, by Robert Lowell, is recommended reading on my course.

• I’ve known of Robert Lowell for a long time, though I don’t recall reading any before. I might have read Skunk Hour in an anthology but, if I had, I’d forgotten the nature of it. I knew it was about some middle-aged man snooping around the cars of courting couples, but that was all.
• Life Studies is his most famous work. I didn’t care for it. Sorry, Robert.
• His poems were hard work, and didn’t offer any real insight once I’d gone to the trouble of trying to understand them.
• I understand that his poetry was part of an important movement in American poetry. The writing was a step away from the more formal, form-based poetry that came before it. In that sense, it lay the groundwork for many poets that came later, such as Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, etc. (I might have my chronologies wrong, but never mind).
• His work, so far as I understand it, is championed because of its autobiographical nature. Fair enough. I still didn’t care for it.
• There were lots of poems which had a historical perspective. They didn’t add up to much.
• The middle section of the book is a long prose poem.
• His prose is turgid.
• The story he told was uninteresting.
• I should be more analytical about what wasn’t working, but I’ve no interest in analysing his work. I’d rather read something else that interests me. The lesson I take away is, you can talk about big, interesting, vital topics, but you have to use language in a way that excites or interests the reader. Otherwise, they aren’t going to bother. Why should they, when there are a million books out there that are waiting to be read.

Which leads me to the following thoughts:

• You can edit life out of your text, or you can edit life into it.
• Personally, the first draft is just something I want to get down on paper, so I can say it exists.
• After that, that’s when the real work begins. I’ll take that first draft and work it again and again until it forms the shape I want it to form. In that sense, I work like a sculptor of clay, starting with a basic shape that kind of resembles the thing I’m after, and I keep working on it, getting it a little bit closer on every iteration.
• A good editor, like a good translator, can enhance your work. It’s hard to edit your own material, but still, you’re the one who knows what you want it to be once it’s done. You can’t delegate that.

Here’s a list of all the books that I’ve associated with over the last six months, (in roughly the order I read them).

Finished:

• The Mountains According to G, Geraint Thomas
• Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum
• Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice
• This Sporting Life, David Storey
• Happy Birthday, Wanda June, Kurt Vonnegut
• How Sweet It Is, Lamont Dozier.
• The Crime Writer’s Handbook, Michael O’Byrne
• 218 Facts A Writer Needs To Know About The Police, Kevin N Robins
• Starstruck, Val McDermid
• The Air Year, Caroline Bird
• Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut
• God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian, Kurt Vonnegut
• Joe Kirby: King of Comics, Mark Evanier
• Ella Minnow Pea, Mark Dunn
• White Bicycle, Joe Boyd
• Nick Drake, Patrick Humphries
• Capitalism: 50 Ideas You Need To Know, Jonathan Portes
• Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau
• Antarctica, Clair Keegan <- course recommended reading
• Lumen, Tiffany Atkinson
• The Iron Man, Ted Hughes
• Life Studies, Robert Lowell <- course recommended reading
• The Good Ancestor, Roman Krznaric
• In Praise of Men and Other People, Ann Sansom
• Come Closer and Listen, Charles Simic
• Exit Management, Naomi Booth
• First Person Singular, Haruki Murakami
• Ambit Pop
• The Little Black Book of Data and Democracy, Kyle Taylor
• Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Illustrated History of Football, David Squires
• Ways of Seeing, John Berger <- course recommended reading
• Lunch Poems, Frank O’Hara <- course recommended reading
• Two Days in Yorkshire, Peter Cossins and Andrew Denton
• The Unaccompanied, Simon Armitage

On the go:

• Word Perfect, Susie Dent
• The Nanny State Made Me, Stuart Maconie
• Racing Hard, Willian Fotheringham
• Selected Poems, Tony Harrison

Acquired but not read

• Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
• Pity the Reader, Kurt Vonnegut
• Writing Poetry, Peter Sansom
• Careful What You Wish For, Peter Sansom
• Children of Men, PD James
• A Question of Blood, Ian Rankin
• There and Back Again, Don Letts
• How to be a Liberal, Ian Dunt
• London Incognita, Gary Budden
• The Secret Barrister
• The Creative Writing Coursebook, Julia Bell and Paul Magrs (ed)
• The Echo Chamber, Luke Williams
• The Unfolding of Language, Guy Deutscher
• The Blizzard 50
• The Artist and Writer’s Yearbook 2021 (a pressie – very kind indeed!)
• Why Women Will Save the Planet, Friends of the Earth and C40 Cities
• Rialto 96
• Tenth of December, George Saunders (Father’s Day pressie – thanks!) <- course recommended reading
• Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro (Father’s Day pressie – ta!) <- course recommended reading
• Other Stories and Other Stories, Ali Smith (Father’s Day pressie – merci!) <- course recommended reading
• The Birds & Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier (Father’s Day pressie – muchos gracias!) <- course recommended reading
• The Shropshire Lad, AE Housman
• The Misunderstanding and Caligula, Albert Camus
• Bar Mitzvah Boy and Other Television Plays, Jack Rosenthal
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
• The Invisible Man, HG Wells
• Hotel insomnia, Charles Simic
• —–> (I’m sure I’ve missed some. Ah well!)

Bought for my wife:

• AOC: A Celebration of the Fierce Brilliance, Lynda Lopez
• Jacinda Ardern: A New Kind of Leader, Madeleine Chapman
• Ruth Baden Ginsberg, Jane Sherron De Hart

Antarctica, by Clare Keegan, is recommended reading for my course.

• I hadn’t read any Clare Keegen before.
• She writes wonderfully well. Her prose is lovely.
• Her writing reminds me of Raymond Carver. Elegant, elegiac short strories, generally about a turning point in a working class person’s life.
• The stories are usually set in rural environments, many of them on small-holdings.
• I couldn’t work out where she was writing about: Ireland; Irish enclaves in southern USA; etc. That’s not a criticism, just an observation.
• She writes of working people and working lives with incredible attention to detail. It’s awe-inspiring. I wondered if it was a product of a life lived in those circumstances, or flawless, diligent research. Or both.
• This is the kind of thing I should look up, though to some extent, it doesn’t matter: the prose comes across as authentic. I believe her when she describes the location, the setting, the culture, the work practices.
• There’s a nice breadth to her story-telling, though mainly she talks about the sadness endemic to women’s lives. She talks about their resilience, too.
• So these are stories which reflect the experience of women. Though the settings are rural, there’s a universality about the experience which I am sure echoes in the lives of other women.
• There’s a story at the beginning where a woman seems to be being punished for her independence, for acting on her impulse. Everything turns to crap for her.
• I worry about stories where everything is crap.
• I know there’re a lot of crap situations out there. I/we know about them. We see them every day on the street, on the news. The trick is to acknowledge that, then find a way to represent the beating heart of humanity in a way that’s feasible.
• Anyway, I worried that all the stories were going to be like that. It gave me the impression that I wouldn’t like this collection.
• I need a bit of hope in the stories I read, not just despair. This might just be me, being a wimp.
• But then, not all the stories were like that. Many showed tough women, making the most of situations which were not of their choosing.
• Often, the situations are crap because the men in their lives are unpleasant, self-serving, greedy.
• As a man, I have no problem with men being represented like that. This is one woman’s view of the world. I don’t doubt that she is writing about men according to her experience. If that’s the case, men have a lot to answer for. It’s up to me and other men to learn to be better.
• In that sense, these serve as cautionary tales for the men who read them.