Category: Uncategorized

• Writing: Find the Time or Don't, a great post by John Scalzi: "Because if you really wanted to write, you would find a way to make the time, and you would find a way to actually write."
• An interesting piece from Kate Kamikaze about the gentrification of Brighton. How do people keep on doing interesting things as Brighton becomes less hospitable to creativity?
• Engineering serendipity: "If you want to be in the right place at the right time, be in lots of places all the time."
• The Writing Business is a long post, split into three parts, which has some hard facts and statistics on getting published. Well worth a read.
• Remember the story about a writer getting a book deal after leaving a manuscript on Richard and Judy's doorstep? That's not quite true.
• In Defence of the Gatekeepers - Max Dunbar discusses one of the most important functions of publishing houses, that of filtering. With ever-increasing numbers of books being published, curation becomes more important.
• Learn this – Russel Davies talks about sports liveblogging, describing Xan Brooks on the epic Isner/Mahut match ("the Everlasting Zombie Tennis Players on Court 18") as "a masterful display in a genuinely new form". I meant to post this a few months back, but it's still interesting.
• Harsh Lesson for the branding guys 

I spent last weekend in Derbyshire, at a family wedding. It was a lovely day. Rain threatened on the day itself, with a shower as the bride reached the bottom of the hill near the church. The problem was solved by the car driving slowly until the shower passed, and the weather was good for the rest of the day.

 

I loved the marquee and the table decorations:

 
 

The wedding was also a chance for me to see my new nephew, pictured below with my brother-in-law:
  
 

It was a great weekend. Congratulations to Julie and Andy.

1. The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize is having something of a Hank the Angry Dwarf moment, with supposedly 'organised' voting boosting some of the entries (including my friend Justine Kilkerr's excellent novel, Advice for Strays). This has resulted in a 'recount', with a further vote to pick between 'promoted' and 'unpromoted' shortlists. It seems strange to see such controversy at this stage in the web's life. How can you exclude new members from a forum without turning it into a clique? And why would you want to, since some of these new people may stay around? I liked Justine's comment on the recount and will be fascinated to see how this plays out (particularly since the first shortlist broke no explicit rules). I'm very glad I don't have to make the decisions here.
2. James Bridle (whose excellent dConstruct talk I discussed here) has posted about his Iraq War historiography, a 12 volume book containing all the versions of Wikipedia's article on the Iraq War. The talk and slides are also online.
3. My Friends In the Internet (via Bea Devile): "The Internet is a real place. There are real people on it and in it."
4. Speed Dating Four Poetry Pamphlets is an interesting review of some poetry books, including Ellen de Vries' pamphlet Girl in the Air. I find the idea of objective poetry reviews seductive, and am tempted to add up the cost-per-poem of some of my favourites. I like to think of Ellen as reassuringly expensive, the Waitrose of the poetry world.
5. Iain Sinclair on Marine Court in St Leonards which he describes as "one of the glories of the south coast". I used to work for an IT company in this building, and a friend lived in the residential part. A small group of us held a champagne breakfast one morning on the balcony, with a beautiful view of the ocean. Sinclair's novel, Dining on Stones, features some scenes set in St. Leonards around the time I was there, and I recognised some of the passers-by he described.
6. I feel appropriately chided by Matt Sheret's post Beyond 'Peak Culture', as I've been guilty of the same promotion of 'Austerity Culture'. His counter-argument has set me questioning myself.
7. The Brighton Life Drawing Sessions have some incredible plans for White Night. I've also heard that the clowns I saw on Friday will be returning. It's already starting to look like White Night 2010 will be amazing:


 

I spent Sunday afternoon exploring Lewes. I had a good day.

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday I took a day off and wandered up to London with Richard Willis. We left Brighton at the break of dawn, arriving in the capital by breakfast time. We walked from Victoria to Trafalgar Square, which was my daily commute when I last worked in London. Arriving at the square who should we see, but the Mayor of London. It seemed like a good omen for the day.

  

Prompted by meandmybigmouth's recent visit, we started out with a trip to the National Portrait Gallery where they had the exhibition for the 2010 Portrait Competition. It was as impressive as the previous ones I've seen, but for some reason left me feeling melancholic. I don't know if it was the pictures selected, the early morning, or something else, but all of the images felt like memento mori.

The painters had worked so hard to portray their sitters. Many of the labels discussed the personalities the artists had tried to capture. But as soon as the picture was finished, the sitter would be aging, becoming less like their image. Maybe I should feel the same way from photography, but I guess the difference is that painting takes so much more time. Everything I saw seemed somehow elegaic.

After that we visited the British library for the Magnificent Maps exhibition. It made me want to be a little boy again, scribbling maps of places I loved and places that would never exist. We also visited the permanent exhibition where we saw the first page of JG Ballard's crash, a type written sheet covered in scrawled amendments. We also saw Scott's diary, which never fails to move me – I still find it hard to believe that things could have gone so wrong.

 

 

A stroll across town took us to the Tate Modern, but we discovered we had had our fill of culture. Instead we sat on the balcony and watched the clouds pass by. As the sun came out we saw some interesting shapes.

 

 Our final event of the day was the Proms, where we took advantage of the £5 standing tickets. It was a long wait but the queue was friendly. I eavesdropped on our near neighbours, a teenaged boy telling a couple of girls about the wonders of special relativity and what happens as a body approaches light speed. "Best of all," he said, "Your mass increases." "That's a boy thing," one girl said to another.

 The concert was fascinating. I've been to the proms before, but never this close to the orchestra. It was amazing to watch the players – the patience of the percussionists as they waited for their moments, the way the double bass players seemed to dance with their instruments. We heard three pieces, diving out during the third; my favourite was Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. A couple of reviews of the night are here and here. I know next to nothing about classical music (other than don't clap between the movements!) but it was a good evening.

After that we had a mad dash back to Victoria for our coach home. We were delayed by an electrical fault, but a visit from Sammy's Garage soon had us underway. It was a long day but a lot of fun.

On Monday night, Ellen de Vries and I held our first planning session for our upcoming writing workshops. I've run a couple of free flash fiction sessions with Ellen in the past and we have another planned for next week. In these sessions, people are given photographs as prompts and have to write stories on them within a certain amount of time. We have two main rules: everyone has to read something of what they wrote, and nobody is allowed to make any apologies for the work. People seemed to like the previous sessions (Tom Hume has written a post about one session) and we enjoyed hosting them.

The Write Club sessions led Ellen and I to thinking about workshops and what other things we'd like to do. Last month we set up the Brighton Creative Writing Sessions, and we have four events planned in September and October. These sessions will take place in Jake Spicer's art studio, currently home to the Brighton Life Drawing Sessions. We will provide a playful, friendly and experimental environment for people to try new things with their writing.

In the past I've expressed concerns about conventional workshops and creative writing teaching. One thing I dislike is that many conventional creative writing courses focus on publication and 'success'. For me, one of the most exciting things about writing groups is the social aspect.The Sessions want to explore on writing as communication, as an activity that is thrilling and life-enhancing in itself. 

On Monday Ellen and I settled down with some food from Pompoko and planned our first few Sessions. I've designed workshops in the past, but these feel like more of an event. Ellen and I are approaching this as we would a performance or a piece of writing. We want to make sure that, as well as producing some great writing, everyone enjoys themselves and has an exciting experience. We want these to be workshops that people will enthuse about afterwards.

The first session we're holding is Writing and Life, which will focus on the visual aspects of writing. We're going to take full advantage of Jake's studio. I don't want to give away too many details, but I think we've come up with something quite special. You can sign up here. We've done our best to keep prices low, and will be charging £20 for a five hour session, or 4 sessions for £60. If you want to try our next free session, there are still a couple of places left. And please do email me if you have any questions.

Latitude was a lovely interlude between finishing the book and my return to Brighton later this week. It's a fantastic festival with a perfect site (despite a massive downpour on Saturday morning, the ground was dry again within an hour or two). I only saw a handful of bands, spending most of my time between the poetry, literary and comedy tents. I saw three of my heroes through the weekend (Chris Morris, Eddie Argos, and Bret Easton Ellis) along with lots of interesting people I'd not heard of before. Among the highlights:

• The poetry tent had an excellent programme, which included my friend Rosy Carrick doing a couple of New Voices slots. I saw good performances from Anna Freeman, Rhian Edwards, Byron Vincent and Laura Dockerill's Word Orchestra. One note to performance poets, though: please can you stop doing patronising pieces about tabloid readers and the underclass.
• There was a showing of 4 Lions with a Q&A afterwards. This was marred only by a heavy-handed announcement that officials with night vision goggles would be making sure nobody filmed the screen. Both insulting and patronising- and there are better ways to steal a film than at a festival showing. Chris Morris lightened the mood a little, suggesting that there were only two officials and a whole crowd – with a little work, it would be possible to run them ragged…. The Q&A was fascinating, with some discussions about the film's research. Apparently, jihadi message boards are like those for "any other obsessive hobby".
• The Bret Easton Ellis interview with Miranda Sawyer was fascinating, but probably deserves a post of its own tomorrow. Hanif Kureshi was an interesting warm-up act; I liked his observation: "Writing could stop you going mad – but so too could reading"
• I read The End of Mr. Y a couple of years ago and wasn't particularly excited by it. On Saturday night, just before midnight, Scarlett Thomas read from her new book Our Tragic Universe, accompanied by her brother on keyboards. I was spellbound by the reading and had to buy the book. I can't wait to read it next week.
• The best band of the weekend was Crystal Castles, who played an amazing, chaotic set on Saturday. Alice Glass veered between being incredibly cool and a little daft, which makes her the perfect pop star (it seemed excessive to have a mike-lead roadie to untangle the wires when she caught them behind the monitors). Alice spent much of the gig in the crowd, cutting the set early after she was groped. Some media reports claimed the crowd were booing when she left, but I didn't hear any boos where I was. It was an amazing, furious set.
• On Sunday night, Robin Ince's book club featured a reading of one of Guy N Smith's Crabs novels, with musical accompaniment. Quite spectacular. I'm now resisting the temptation to re-read the Crabs novels.

Latitude was a great weekend. The festival isn't perfect (the heavy-handed bag searches were wearing) but the acts easily make up for it. I'm looking forward to next year's event.

Do you ever worry that signs are talking to you?

The photo above was taken in the village post office on Friday. They put up a message of the day – a little like one of those Unix login messages, but without the need for a keyboard.

Summer is definitely here. I spent Sunday on my first bike ride in years, dashing around the Derbyshire countryside between Calke Abbey and Staunton Harald reservoir. The weather was incredible and I am currently in love with the England and the summer.

I forgot to post this last week – the other weekend I went to the Bearded Theory festival. It's a small, relaxed event, held about thirty miles from where I'm staying. Joh spotted the festival and demanded I go with her. She'd been attracted by an eclectic line-up, which ranged from New Model Army to the Cheeky Girls via Senser.

A lot of the bands were heritage acts, some of whom did better than
others (Musicians! write songs you can still sing in your
forties!) The Wonder Stuff were as good as I'd hoped, but the biggest surprise of the weekend was Senser. I missed seeing them around the time of Stacked Up
and had low expectations fifteen years later. They performed an amazing
gig, which included a couple of bars from Milkshake finding their way
into Switch, and a great cover of Mama Said Knock You Out, LL Cool J's comeback song. (There's a recording of them doing the cover here).

There were the usual festival shenanigans, although elf ears and silly hats were refreshingly rare. We saw some frightening toilets. We lazed around in the afternoon listening to music in the distance. We heard political ska music – I've never seen the point of that. Has there been any recorded case of a fascist changing their mind after seeing a ska band in the afternoon?

I tried to explain to Joh that bad hats are a valid reason for disliking a band. I had a minor festival disaster, in that I only packed two books, and had pretty much finished them both on the Saturday. A tour of the event's stalls produced nothing to read.

At a festival you can never be sure who your next door neighbours will be. Camping behind us, for instance, was a man from the North-East, whose only tone of voice was an aggressive shout, whatever he said. But even more unnerving was the neighbour in the van next door. While Joh was preparing a supper of super-noodle sandwiches, I looked up to see:

 

I know clowns are people too, and need time off like the rest of us, but it's still disturbing when you find one living next door.

It's been freezing cold for the last week, but this morning I'm heading off to my first festival of the summer, Bearded Theory. Whoever chose the bands is obviously a big fan of '90s crusty, since Back to the Planet, Dreadzone, Senser, Banco de Gaia and Tragic Roundabout are playing. Also appearing are New Model Army, The Wonder Stuff and Blyth Power (whose festival I'm attending later in the year). But the most inspired bookings have to be Doctor and the Medics and the Cheeky Girls. The line-up is odd to say the least.

It will be strange to see so many bands I missed first time round. I can only hope they do better than Suede, who I finally saw in 2003, at least five years too late. Will the Wonderstuff hold up to their early 90's heights? And how will Dodgy compare to the first time I saw them, in 1994?

I'm looking forward to being away from the laptop for a few days. It should be a fun weekend, although the "world record attempt for the most amount of people wearing fancy dress beards in one place!!! sounds ominous.