The End of Bookselling

In the days when I was a bookseller February was like the grave. Who would have thought that six short weeks before the store had been a bedlam of buyers. People who never normally visited the shopping centres of cities suddenly there buying everything in sight. The last minute shopping rush was a joy to behold. Boxed sets, slab-sized coffee table tomes, multi-volume hardbacks, anthologies, books in slip cases with attached pens, maps, driving gloves, diaries or garden secateurs. They all went. Buy now or don’t buy at all. The world ends tomorrow.

But Feb was a different story. Hours of silence. A visit by a traffic warden stepping in out of the cold. An out of town visitor asking directions. Someone with a dictionary they’d been given ten years ago asking if they could exchange it for cash. Publishing dried up too. This might be a new year but nothing fresh was appearing. Who would be interested during the winter dark?

Today, however ,the digital revolution has seen an end to that. Bookshops barely exist in the way they once did. Stock is at a minimum and usually only titles that sales databases say will shift. Pulp bestsellers go at half price from the shelves of supermarkets. Customers no longer come in to ask for that book they heard about on TV the other night, not sure of the author’s name but he had a beard.

If punters really want a book they go for it online. Paper copies via Amazon, downloaded versions next. Goodbye Borders, Lears, Dillon’s, Menzies, Fopp. Hello Appleshop, Gameszone, Abercrombie and Fitch.

But, ever hopeful, the new breed of small independent one-person publishers continues to blossom. Their stock sells hand to hand, via Facebook, Twitter, over the counter in the local coffee shop and among the fake flowers and calendars at Greetingcards-Are-Us. The brand new Cardiff-based Mulfran Press has brought out Lynda Nash’s Ashes of a Valleys Childhood – poems and photographs that recall the 1960s Rhymney Valley and do so with a welcome lack of cloying sentiment. The Abbey on Caldy Island publish Echoes From A Far Shore, a book of reflective verse by the Cistercian monk David Hodges. God celebrated in seascape, prayer and the glory of the skies.

Dave Lewis’s excellently named Pont Press brings out Layer Cake, twenty-five years of vernacular, edge-walking and thoroughly entertaining verse. Antony Rowe helps Stuart Warner self-publish Echoes of the First Song, a set of West Wales poetry and explanation where the discussion often outguns the actual verse.

Chris Kinsey’s Cure for a Crooked Smile from Ragged Raven continues to enhance her reputation as a wildlife poet of the first order. Top of the pile is Philip Gross’s set of cracklingly brilliant retakes of Simon Denison’s pinhole camera photographs. Cinnamon Press. Rush for your copy now.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday February 20th, 2010. Who on earth reads this stuff, I wonder.

Our First City vs Our Biggest

Whatever happened to the untrammelled wilderness? That land the Romantic Poets loved. A place where wildness flowed and human intervention was nil. Today’s new landscapes are cities – places of concrete, glass, movement and dust. John Briggs, the photographer from Minnesota who has lived in Wales now for long enough to look local, has devoted his recent self to Newport. Wales’ First City reads a welcome sign at the unreconstructed bus station. There are nine-story tall hair grips holding up a slender new river bridge. The arts cluster in the skewed silver box that is the Riverfront. The cattle market, loved and lost, is gone.

Briggs, is a follower of Cartier-Bresson, the photographer who invented the decisive moment. He waits on the street, Leica in hand, for the photograph to arrive. His splendid collection, Newportrait, fresh from Seren shows how near to the border Newport actually is. A child is shown having “We love our queen” stencilled onto her cheek by her mother. Waving flags royal visit celebrants balance themselves on the Upper Dock Street road sign. Women wearing union jack aprons sit in deckchairs in the sun.

In between Briggs records a multi-cultural community at work and at play. His people shots bring warmth to his bleaker takes on the built environment – the night lit transporter bridge, the market, the white Germanic clock tower of the civic centre. The sense of the past hangs ever present in Briggs’ black and white work. Shops full of industrial clothing, the windows of the workingmen’s dining room, the austere and perfectly-framed take of dying Llanwern seen from the working terraces of the city itself. But ultimately Briggs is his own man. A seeker of the fading, a photographer determined to catch it all before it goes.

In contrast Brian Lee collects the old photos of others rather than make new himself. His Cardiff Remember When (Breedon Books) shows me things about the capital I’d never seen before. And I’ve made that city my special interest. The half demolished County Cinema in Rhymney. Norman Harvey’s car showrooms on Penarth Road with a real lioness in the window. Dante’s Inferno showing at the Empire Cinema on Queen Street. Sybil Marks and her hot-pants wearing dancers in the final of Come Dancing in 1971. The Salvation Army pop group, the Joy Strings, arriving at Cardiff Prison for a concert. If you are old enough these things echo. Like Briggs, Brian Lee mixes people with buildings, collecting a past that would otherwise be totally lost.

The city of this book looks completely parochial, despite shots of Harold Macmillan walking the streets in 1960, the Pope in his Dr Who-like popemobile in 1982 and even the youthful poets R S Thomas and Dannie Abse reading together in 1980. Cardiff you’ve come a long way.

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 13th February, 2010

Soundtrack to the City

Are there any people who have lives where music doesn’t play? Check any high street and there you’ll find scores of shoppers with headphones in their ears. Same with cyclists, dog walkers, people on trains, runners and park bench sitters. Our lives have soundtracks. Several years ago I stopped people on Queen Street in Cardiff to ask them what they were listening to. This caused consternation among some who thought I was from the local authority out to impose a new Health and Safety regulation. But when I told them it was research for a book all was okay. What they were listening to turned out to be dance music mostly. Lots of Michael Jackson. Whitney Houston. Mariah Carey. Rap. Guy on a skateboard playing reggae. No one listening to classical, no spoken word, not one person willing to own up to playing the bachelor boy, Cliff.

Many people can’t work without a soundtrack. Depends on your job but if you can manage it then you’ll have the player going or the radio on. Bankers might not but dentists, surgeons, mechanics, designers, and architects – they all listen. Martin Scorsese’s films display this to perfection – music seeps through the pores of his characters, rock belts through every scene. In New York Stories where Scorsese has Nick Nolte playing one of the Abstract Expressionist painters smashing paint onto giant canvases the soundtrack roars. The painter just can’t function without high decibel rock coming at him out of his speakers. The streaks and swirls of colour he manipulates are done in time to whatever is beating from his boombox. Couldn’t paint in silence. Without the beat there’d only be a canvas of empty white.

The novelist Nick Hornby has taken this idea one stage further and written his life soundtrack up as a book. Everything from Bruce Springsteen to Rufus Wainwright gets a mention with Teenage Fanclub appearing twice. You can download this set onto your mp3 player and listen while you read. Doing anything in silence is now antique.

Cities themselves have soundtracks. What sounds well in Rio doesn’t somehow work in Barry. Samba along the sands, Bossa Nova among the chips at the Codfather of Sole. This is how I think Cardiff sounds – a soundtrack for the city from the past fifty years: Twist and Shout – The Beatles. Cardiff Born – Frank Hennessy. Green Onions – Booker T. Cardiff Rose – Roger McGuinn. Do The Ayatollah – Cardiff City Fans. The Grangetown Whale – The Hennessys. Delilah – Tom Jones. Red Red Wine – Red Beans and Rice. The Brokedown Cardiff Blues – Cripple Hard-Armed Davies. A Design For Life – Manic Street Preachers. Siwgr Siwgr Siwgr – Euros Childs. Cardiff In The Sun – Super Furry Animals. Do you have a better selection? Let me know.

An earlier version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 6th February, 2010

The Real Black Book

Launching a book is not like launching a ship. Not quite. Drink is involved in both cases, certainly. With the ship the bottle gets smashed over the bows. With a book the bottle’s contents get drunk. But there are similarities. Books, like ships, can be slow moving when they start and fine words get said as they slide down the ramp. Then everyone cheers and the builder relaxes. Just a bit.

So too with Real Cardiff. I’ve been on the circuit recently doing my best to promote. This has involved standing up in crowded shops, reading sections to milling crowds, visiting hotels and talking to assembled audiences of the great and the good, signing copies in hallways, on small tables, and in the street. Always smiling. Never stop.

At the Park Hotel big launch someone wanted to know if the HMS Tonypandy I referred to in the section on nuclear submarines visiting Cardiff actually existed. Jonathan Adams had already back-projected a shot of a WW2 sub with the name Tonypandy photoshopped onto its side so I said yes. And if it never existed then it should. Although Wales’s status as a nuclear free zone might mitigate against that.

At the Waterloo Gardens Teashop, recently and somewhat perversely voted Britain’s best coffee shop, I read the section that dealt with Cardiff’s thespian past. I told of Ray Smith and Ray Handy and how it once was with actors and directors and the National Theatre that has taken thirty years to arrive. I told also of Dedwydd Jones’s 1985 Black Book on the Welsh Theatre, a diatribe against state subsidy (or non-subsidy) and the way the establishment had allegedly held the whole theatrical world back. It was a ghost from a long past.

Grahame Davies, an enthusiastic Real Cardiff supporter (and author of the well received Real Wrexham) then went home to find an envelope waiting for him. Inside was a copy of that same 1985 Black Book, no letter, no explanation. Photos of Roger Tomlinson, Welsh Arts Council drama department head inside. The tired twenty-five year old arguments featuring a cast of characters largely now moved on to other pastures restated as if they were of today. Similar envelopes had apparently been sent to other literary and theatre figures across the country.

In Real Cardiff Three I discuss the fracture in time that runs right across the Oval Basin where Torchwood have their base. Fiction, of course. But seeing Dedwydd’s book winging through the mails again I’m now not so sure.

Back on the launch trail I sell four copies of the shrink-wrapped sets of the reprinted trilogy and sign another shed of the new vol. Will there be a fourth, someone asks? Maybe. Let’s see how this one shapes up first.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 30th January, 2010

Reading the Landscape

What do you read when you travel? The Rough Guide? That would get you to some offbeat places. The Rough Guide to Ireland took me to Coleman’s Temple in the Bog, middle of absolutely nowhere at all. I’d never have found that on my own. Feet soaking. Wrote one poem. Chased by several cows.

It has to be said, though, that I prefer to be reading something actually set in the place I’m visiting. I read Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky when I first went to Morocco. Bowles’ take on the desert sands and the people who lived among them coloured everything I saw. For Sardinia I read D H Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia, a travelogue that told of mud-floored houses and brilliant sun. It was written back in 1919 – something I hadn’t clocked. By the time I got to look at the island most of what Lawrence had seen had been moved on.

For the Appalachians I had Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, the funniest travel book anywhere. His description of his overweight walking companion, Katz, throwing away his equipment and clothes as he slogged through the hard, north American greenness is difficult to beat. I came up through Tennessee and hit the trail north of Gatlinburg. Worst place on the planet, reports Bryson. The trail itself was long and tree roofed. I didn’t see anything but leaves for ten miles. When I checked with A Walk in the Woods for confirmation that I was on the same path as Bryson I discovered that Gatlinburg was the place that he came off. I’d inadvertently covered the only section on the whole 2167-mile trail that Bryson had not.

Next up will be a brief visit to Egypt and without even trying I’ve got two appropriate volumes on my hands. As a matter of professional interest I’ve been reading Ken Follett to find out just how literary this thriller-diller actually is. He’s a mega-best selling author with Welsh origins who ought to be better known in his home land. I’ve read Whiteout and found that engaging page-turner appropriately thrilling but hardly heavy weight. Now I’m into Triple, a tale of multi-national spies chasing each other over the Egyptian desert. The pages are turning like windscreen-wipers.

In my bag I have Stevie Davies’ latest, Into Suez, a novel about women “in a tumultuous world of casual racism in the run-up to Egypt’s revolt against its hated occupiers”. Stevie Davis is the Swansea-based Booker nominee with a reputation for class tale telling. Her take on Suez should be unputdownable. I propose sampling its pleasures on the banks of the Nile. You can read yours in Welsh rain if you like. Into Suez is published by Parthian.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 23 January, 2010

Just When You Think They Are Finishing They Carry On

Jaci Stephen had this right ages ago in The Evening Standard when she dryly remarked about poetry readings – “just when you think they are finishing they go on…” And go on some of them do. Tell the poets they have a fifteen minute slot and inevitably they’ll attempt to read for forty. How much poetry read out loud does the world need?

I’ve been on the road recently promoting my new book, Real Cardiff Three, which ostensibly is not poetry. This is travel writing, history, memoir, psychogeography, story. I get onto the platform and talk about the city’s history, my take on how it has come into being and why it looks like it does. I discuss Cardiff’s peculiarities – the lost watercourses, the vanished holy wells, the ways in which the place has got itself named after metals, precious stones and the shires of England. I talk about its tall buildings, its sophistication, its hidden tunnels, its all-white cityscape, its place as Wales’ heart, stuck out like a fist, here on the south east border. My audience listens. Then I read one of Real Cardiff’s poems. The books have just a few. I do the one about the Russell Goodway Memorial Roundabout or list the books people never borrow from the new Central Library. A History of Minor Roads in Wales. The Joy of Splott. Highlights in the History of Concrete. Bombproof Your Horse. Did Lewis Carroll Visit Llanrumney? Caerphilly Cheese Problems Solved. The audience wakes up and falls about. Poetry gets to places where prose never can.

At the biennial John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry the other month the level of sophistication, invention and sheer linguistic verve proved once again that good verse could still thoroughly entertain. The place was packed. I don’t think I’ve seen a poetry audience enjoy themselves so much in years. Dafydd Wyn, the west Wales winner, gave us Anglo-Welsh poetry like it used be but with added oomph. Liam Johnson made the air flicker with his verbal virtuosity. Thaer Al-Shayei came on dressed as a gorilla and had the entire place falling off their chairs. Sally Spedding managed the same trick with her tales of medical misdemeanours. There were top end performances that embraced everything from football to fighting demons. Live poetry still does it. In two and a half hours I spotted not one yawn.

And if you look about you’ll see that this reading thing is going through a revival. Mab Jones and Ivy Alvarez rock at the Promised Land. The Absurd in Mold mashes music and bi-lingual verse into an entertaining whole. Seren take the high ground with their First Thursday series. John Williams works lit and music at Chapter this month. There are rumours of new poetry and music series starting up elsewere in the city. Poetry certainly has a future.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 16th January, 2010

Walking The Streets In Hope

I’ve been walking the streets again. Taking literature to the people. A thing which in my youth was an ideal but which the years have bashed about it. Here I am doing it again. The plan is to leaflet a whole district with invitations to the launches for my latest book. Get the news out there to those who normally hide when they hear the word culture. To those who haven’t read anything at all since they went to school. Who do you read, you ask, and like many a politician, they scrabble around in the depths of memory and then come out with it. George Orwell, they say. You can’t beat 1984.

Indeed not.

My leaflets are made of card to aid letterbox stuffing, and full colour to catch the eye. At the second house I visit I get chased up the path by a furious neighbour, ripping my card into shreds. Keep your rubbish, he shouts, scattering the thing across the road. There was a notice on his door which read “If you put another menu through this door I will never eat at your restaurant again” and above that a sign saying “No Junk Mail”. I’d ignored that. Same thing happened to me when decades ago I’d gone by delivering labour party leaflets. You are the cause of all my troubles, one large and tattooed householder had complained. People seem to enjoy ripping things up.

A few houses have sensible wide letterboxes set at hand height and a pushover to use. Most, however, have devices installed simply to make deliveries as complicated as they can be. I understand now why Postmen get so upset. The world has become paranoid about drafts. They don’t fear junk, they are afraid of cold air. Behind the letterboxes lie thickets of draft preventing brushes, deep-weave curtains, cloth flaps, springs, boxes, cages, bags. Post only gets delivered if you hammer it through. Or leave it on the mat.

On my afternoon’s round trip I counted eighteen hand-scrawled “the bell doesn’t work - knock loudly” notices, twenty-eight “we do nothing at this door unless you show us your birth certificate” printed commands issued by the Boy Scouts and at least ten “do not park in front of my house” signs masquerading as official dictates by having the words “Polite Notice” done in South Wales Police blue along the top.

The leaflets I was distributing promoted my latest book of psychogeography, Real Cardiff #3. The experience acquired has given me more than enough material for a whole chapter in Real Cardiff #4.

Will this happen? Seren, my publishers, have announced that number three is the last. But now I’ve opened a file for number four on my computer. Let’s see how that fills.

An earlier version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 2nd January, 2010

Writing While Standing Up

There’s nothing to writing – all you do is sit down at a typewriter and open up a vein. That was the advice of early twentieth century songwriter Walter Smith. It’s a thing that fascinates many. Just how do you write?

Jeffrey Archer, now an amazing sixty-eight, hangs onto the older methods. He uses a pen, scratching his words onto a pad. His secretary then types the stuff up, triple spaced, for the great man to correct. He admits he’s old fashioned like many out there who still work like he does. But they are beginning to fade.

Being in command of your own keyboard and using the swift and spell-checkable skills that computer process comes with is now the way for us all. Those that don’t sing their words into digital recorders for transcription later that is. It’s true that I’ve had words come upon me while walking the streets in the rain and, lacking any other method, phoned the ideas home and left them on the answerphone.

Hemingway, apparently, could only ever compose while standing up. He had a special stool and table fixed onto the back of one of his boats so he could work from there. There are other writers, naturally, who can only ever manage anything while lying down.

William Burroughs, the drug master and major twentieth innovator, author of The Naked Lunch and creator of the cut-up, needed endless dope. Without the push and the haze that gave him he couldn’t write at all. Dylan T also demanded additional help, his however in liquid form.

There’s no one best method. Work out your own. Writers, not unsurprisingly, need to write. Not boast about it, talk about it, or remember how it once was. They need to get out there and start. Best advice in the world. Start and then go on.

I’ve always found the mornings the best time. Fresh from sleep. Don’t speak to a soul to avoid wrecking the mood. Set up a place where there can be no interruption. Unplug the phone, turn the mobile off. Have settled in advance all the things that might come creeping in at you. No visits by repair men or cold calls selling you cheaper electricity. Make mental space and use it all.

I know this system won’t hack it for much longer in the age we are now in. This is a time where communication is constant and instant. Sound drips from the pores of the world. To write today the author needs to be able to manage it between multiple distraction, in small and readily consumable slices. Attention spans are no longer the length of a chapter. The text message novel is gaining ground. Watch it come.

This posting appeared, or a version of it did, as The Insider in the Western Mail of 26th December, 2009

Huge Breakfasts of Kippers

Does the idea of spending a weekend in a great house somewhere surrounded by writers fill you with dread? How about facing up to a long lecture on the meaning of apricot sponge in the work of John Tripp at 9.00 am after a night in the bouncing bar? Maybe an open forum on the way the publishing industry works? Or a discussion on the work of one of our literary greats. Welcome to the literary conference. How they used to be. We love these things in Wales.

You sign up and spend three days in a shared room somewhere deep in the greenness. Fellow delegates, for this is what you are now, join you for huge breakfasts of kippers, muesli and fried eggs. You study your day programme. There’s a choice first off – women in the nineteenth century industrial novel or a lecture on the works of the folk poets of Gwynedd. You choose and slumber. After an hour there is gentle applause.

At coffee you fill up on biscuits and discuss with your fellow travellers the fate of short fiction in an age of television and the power of poetry on the internet. There is a bookstall run by someone you’ve seen somewhere before, you are sure, a man with a beard. He stocks books by delegates and a stack of second hand stuff you’d never look at anywhere else. With nothing else to spend your cash on you find yourself buying. Get your copies signed. Why not.

Mid afternoon there’s a literary walk through the local woodlands. Appropriate poems are recited by the walk leader. Half way along it starts softly to rain. At 6.30 there’s the keynote speech. A London novelist driven in by limo to talk about her latest book. Copies cost £25. You don’t bother. Dinner is chicken with lumpy mashed potato. There is pudding but so sticky you can’t get it out of the bowl.

In the bar later is a poems and pints session. The poems flutter and drone. Almost every delegate appears to have brought something with them. Folded sheets are produced from back pockets. Files are unbagged. Pamphlets taken from under arms. The pints make things bearable. You drink far too many.

The following morning almost half the delegates fail to get to the first lecture. There’s a summing up after coffee at 11.00 am. You spot people leaving at 10.45. It’s been a great few days. You’ve met and mingled and got a hold on how the world works. Money well spent. In your car boot are copies of signed poetry booklets you’ll never have otherwise bought. You are replete. The sun comes up. You drive to meet it.

Watch out for the Academi’s next conference. It won’t be anything like this.

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 12 December, 2009

The Long Tale

Wales did not shine at the Booker. Sarah Waters, Pembrokeshire-born but somehow still separate from the Welsh literary community, did not win. I shouted for her. The Little Stranger could have given our rocking little country another winner. I talked it up. But in the end Hilary Mantel’s slice of Tudor passion beat Waters’ mid-twentieth century ghosts.

Getting onto the Booker short list can do a wonder for your sales. Get the judges to like you and a slovenly moving slab of literary fiction can be turned into a jet hot bestseller overnight.

The same kind of thing, albeit at a slightly less frenetic level, also happens with Wales’ own competitions. We may have fewer bookshops than England but ours have loyal audiences. Step up the Wales Book of the Year long list. Twenty books, ten in Welsh and ten in English, the best of our now burgeoning output, get selected each spring. They run the rapids towards a £10,000 prize awarded in high summer. Who got there last time? Deborah Kay Davies’ brilliantly written Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful and Wiliam Owen Roberts’ all-embracing Petrograd. Half of Wales has by now consumed those two examples of engaging fiction. The Wales Book of the Year Award is a solid indicator of quality. Want to find out who and how we are as a nation and enjoy yourself in the process? Read the complete long list.

Currently a new team of judges - John Gwilym Jones, Aled Lewis Evans and Branwen Gwyn in Welsh and Ian Gregson, James Hawes and Sara Edwards in English – are reading their way through hundreds of potential contenders. We are three quarters of the way through and even allowing for the fact that Christmas output has not yet hit the stands it’s looking as if it could be a bumper year.

Might our National Poet Gillian Clarke get there with her new collection, A Recipe for Water? Could John Barnie’s well-received Tales of the Shopocracy make the ten? Or Byron Rogers’ Me, Horatio Clare’s A Single Swallow, or even Sarah Waters near Booker, The Little Stranger?
In Welsh the choice is even tighter. Dafydd Islwyn, Robat Gruffudd, Alan Llwyd, Bobi Jones, and Fflur Dafydd all have books in the field. So too do two who normally battle it out on the English side – Jon Gower and Lloyd Jones. Jones won the Award for his novel in English in 2007.

The judges will by now be facing anew (for this team have never done it before) the same problems their predecessors did. How to compare a slim vol of poems with a 300 page slab of fiction? How can a serious literary study be compared with a racy street-wise novel? Watch this space.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 5 December, 2009