Tweet If You Agree

Technology is wonderful. When it’s shown on TV it’s always in HD, runs at lightning speed and works everytime. Our heroes patch themselves without flicker directly into the city’s CCTV to watch fluid action on the city streets. The protagonist will open his laptop and with instant boot-up will connect via brilliant, colour enhanced and stable Skype to a fellow operator calling in from the Gobi Desert. Action will flow. Voices will sync. When M checks her email she can always remember her password and without a pause her account loads first time.

Workstations do not get viruses. Nothing gets in to take the embarrassing content of C drives and to mail it out, in fragments, to all the operator’s friends. EBook readers work in full sun and their batteries never run down.

On the train along the Welsh border it is not like this. Signal is as fictional as the novel I’m reading. Text messages are about as instant as old time letter post. By the time we reach Ludlow my battery, which I forgot to put on essential overnight charge, is down to 10%. I try checking the weather. The screen stays blank.

In the house it’s just as bad. Here I have to lean against the inside of the front door to get anything. And I don’t live anywhere odd. This is a standard city terrace not surrounded by big buildings. The tallest nearby thing would be a passing double-decker bus. There’s a better signal at the Writers Centre at Ty Newydd in Llanystumdwy. Although you do have to stand on a tree-stump in the top field to get that.

Pre computer the worst thing that ever happened was that through overuse keys on your typewriter stopped working. The poet John Tripp’s machine was famous for having most of the vowels type out of alignment. The lines of his verse wobbled as they sang.

The Oulipo group of writers developed a whole art form based around malfunctioning pre-computer technology. A typewriter which had the letter e missing was seen as a creative challenge. Could a novel be written using only words which avoided this vowel? George Perec’s “A Void” (La Disparition) was the result. “A familiar story of a drunk man waking up with his brain in a whirl”.

Do we do this kind of thing in Wales? The poet J P Ward has a letter to the editor of the latest Poetry Wales in which all the keys of his typer appear to be transposed. “Imno pqrstuvwx” he writes. “y za bcdefgh……” M could probable work out what he’s saying, no bother.

On the train near Newport the phone signal returns. Mark Taylor is the new WMC CEO an incoming tweet tells me. Progress at last.

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 5th June, 2010. There is too much text for me to tweet.

The Zen of Epynt

On the cover is a black and white photograph taken somewhere in Epynt. It shows a tree and a sort of corrugated sentry box. Inside the box, on guard against the elements, are two sheep. The pic is by Magnum photographer David Hurn. What does it mean? That’s like asking what the sound is of one hand clapping or the look of your real face before you were born. This is the cover of my latest collection of poetry, Zen Cymru. Hurn’s photograph sums that up. The zen of Welsh life, the unanswerable, the ever present, the one we know.

A friend, picking up this neat slim vol for the first time, told me that the cover was where the book’s strength lay. Support when you need it. The cover is the only part not by me.

The book collects new poems from the past several years. Age, passion, spiritual searching, house fires, hospitals, guns. Poems about hunting down Buddha, Christ’s arrival in Cardiff in 2005 and the title sequence, a pared-down haiku sequence that rolls from Splott to Abereiddi and back.

But that’s certainly not all. There are music poems. Folk singer, late Phil Ochs’s only visit to Cardiff. The trial of Phil Spector. Sightings of Elvis in Merthyr. The grave of Bela Bartok among the bushes in Hungary. On the train from Severn Tunnel Junction with John Tripp and Bob Dylan. I’ve always found music completely enveloping. I could never work without it, never compose without something playing out there, keeping my thoughts on their central zen track.

As expected a number of the poems have Cardiff concerns. Included is the text that makes up the acrostic construct made from the various ways the capital’s name have been spelled through history. The final version is in the paving outside John Lewis. The original of The Ballast Bank, a poem about the city population’s origins, sits carved in rock outside South Wales Police Headquarters on James Street.

Kerdif lists some of the city’s great street characters – Everyone from Peg the Wash to bin-banger Ninjah and Toy Mic Trevor.

Looking at the content with the detachment that distance gives – nothing more I can do now, the thing is out – I can see that there’s much about death and the fight of life against decrepitude. Miro is in there. So is Llywelyn Goch ap Meurig Hen. Unexpectedly for some there’s also a handy index to the Holiday Timeshare Sellers Handbook. Number of times they say it isn’t actually a timeshare – 432. References to luxury – 34. Mentions of rain – 1.

It’s a book that again treads the thin line between tradition and innovation. Just when you think you’ve got it the ground shifts. Then shifts again. Zen Cymru is published by Seren Books.

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 29th May, 2010. Zen Cymru launches at Hay on Tuesday 1st June, 8.00 pm on the Dream Stage where Peter finch will be reading and in conversation with John Goodby.

Still Angry After All These Years

John Wain’s Charlie Lumley in Hurry On Down, an unemployable private detective cum window cleaner with Jehovah’s Witness leanings spends all his time in the pub. Stan Barstow’s Vic Brown in A Kind of Loving followed a beer-loving dance hall existence to get himself through the gritty day. “Jimmy tells me they’re all going out to the Lord Nelson, that’s a pub on the way to Bradford, for a booze-up….it’ll be a kitty do with everyone chucking ten bob in at the beginning of the evening and drinking until it’s gone.” Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon suffered from roaring hangovers. “His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.” That’s from Lucky Jim.

These were the Angry Young Men (and they were all men), the realists of the late fifties and early sixties, the British Beat generation. Beatniks without the hitch-hiking, the visions and the be-bop. Trad jazz revolutionaries. Looking back we might laugh but they set a style.

In a sense a lot of contemporary Welsh writing in English is following their path. Rachel Trezise’s award winning valley-set street level fiction may have different heroes, and ones who use drugs rather than beer, but the working-class dialogue-rich approach to story-telling is the same. “Wait ‘til ewe try iss stuff man, he’s saying, trying to keep his half-made joint under the lip…..” (Fresh Apples).

Similar territory is traversed in the work of John Williams, Sean Burke, Matthew David Scott, Suzie Wild, and Catrin Dafydd. The new generation no longer follows grand ideas. It does not chase revolution of any kind. Our world of overconsumption, inequality and political machination is skirted in favour of a coming to terms with what can be seen through the window.

Our new writers offer mirrors to the world they actually live in. This world, the Welsh world, the one turning through the streets of Cardiff and flowing over the mountains above Llanystumdwy. Understand that and you’ll know the universe.

John Updike, Richard Ford and Don DeLilo have spent life-times creating a fiction that reflects the every-changing America into which they were born. Ford’s sportswriter, Frank Bascombe, and John Updike’s rabbit, Harry Angstrom, are among the greatest characters of twentieth century fiction. For the twenty-first they need new faces. Des Barry, John Williams and Rachel Tresize are hard at work fashioning replacements.

Meanwhile A Kind of Loving turns 50. Pontardawe resident Stan Barstow’s masterpiece will be celebrated on BBC radio this summer. Serialisation and a feature on Woman’s Hour. And a reprint of the great work will come from Parthian.

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday, 22nd May, 2010

The Shoplifted Book Fades Away

The shoplifted book no longer has the value it once had. The days when the grey economy used the book as a sort of alternative unit of currency appear over. Have you tried to offload any old books lately? Even those charity plastic sacks which collect jumble are now marked ‘no books please’.

It’s hard to credit but at one time pre-owned copies of most things held their value. Even Book Club editions could be resold for something. Journalists with their review copy stacks could lug them to the market and get back at least enough for wine and a steak dinner. In the hippie era Abbie Hoffman published a guide to alternative life called Steal This Book. I had it on the racks in my shop. £4.50 a copy. How many actually left the store under people’s coats? Quite a few.

Copies of Stewart Williams’s much sought after Cardiff In Old Photographs were the book economy’s equivalent of the US dollar. Copies were stolen in quantity. Fly boys entered the L-shaped Cardiff arcade branch of John Menzies through the north door, lifted a handful of volumes and slipped back out silently through the exit to the south. The second hand store at the end of Bridge Street was their destination. Turnover was high and fast until the owner cottoned on to what was happening. Identifying marks were inserted in the backs of the books and the culprits apprehended.

Techniques varied. It was never the person you suspected, either. The man in the smelly greatcoat, the one with the shifty eyes and the long fingernails. Did he steal your art titles? Almost never. Those left, unpaid for, in the hands of neatly suited businessmen or women with prams.

There was a man who always came in chewing. He spent an age with books containing maps or prints. Always left buying nothing. We thought he was doing research, completing his MA here in store. He turned out to be chewing string. When this was suitably wet he’d lay it along the inside spine next to a desirable map. The dampness would seep into the paper and after ten minutes or so he was able to slide out the print without making any sort of tearing sound. Up his sleeve it went. Sold on to the antique market the same day.

Some worked in pairs. One would cause a diversion such as accidentally upending a spinner. In the ensuing chaos his partner would fill a briefcase with desirables. My shop always prosecuted. I always ran after miscreants. Off we’d go, streaming up the street with books flying everywhere. Make a scene and they won’t come back. Seemed to work.

Steal This Book has recently been reprinted. Copies sold vastly outrank those lifted.

An version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday, 15th May, 2010. Not many Western Mails get shoplifted, I'm told.

Less Land More Text

Poetry in the landscape is not a new thing. In the revolutionary sixties Edwin Morgan had verse on the sails of yachts floating on the Brighton seafront. Agitprop writers chalked text on town hall steps, planted slogans in daffodil bulbs in city parks. Apposite quotations, full of pith or sentiment, have been the staple of gravestones and school premise proscenium arches since the time of the Victorians. What’s new in the recessional twenty-tens in public poetry’s ubiquity.

Cardiff has long had bits of verse out there in its public face. In front of the Central Station stands William Pye’s stone block recreation of Cader Idris embellished with verse snippets by everyone from Dannie Abse to Rhys Dafis. On the waterfront of the Bay’s Inner Harbour John Masefield’s Cargoes is set in iron. “Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, / Butting through the Channel in the mad March days…” It could well be the Welsh Capital at its industrial height he’s talking about.

And no one could ignore Gwyneth Lewis’s now world-status iconic lines staggering in ancient Roman form across the front of the Wales Millennium Centre.

My own poetry is now in four public sites. A bilingual incantation celebrating spuriel (rubbish) runs along the top of the Lamby Way landfill site. Weather and greenery are taking their toll. A large piece of R S Thomas reprocessed by PF for the digital age rises up the front and then carries on along the corridors of BT’s Internet Datacentre on the Ferry Road peninsular. Around the base of Renn and Thacker’s gleaming silver steel blue-lit lighthouse in front of the new South Wales Headquarters on James Street runs a poem about the races and languages of the city. The ballast bank replaced, the past brought back to life again. My latest, my largest concrete poem yet, is an acrostic made from the various spellings of the word Cardiff as recorded by history. Kerdiv. Cardaif. Gaerdydd. Kerdiff. This straddles the paving as part of Jean-Bernard Métais spike and ring L’Alliance outside John Lewis. My largest concrete poem ever, I announced at the unveiling. Doesn’t he know the slabs are made of granite muttered someone from the developers.

The National Poet, Gillian Clarke, is a central component of the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s Landmark Sonnets proposal. This popularist scheme, which apparently has the backing of Gordon Brown, aims to put poetry onto public sites right across the UK. Given the status of the organisers we can expect the verse to be excellent. The locations will be stunning. Gillian’s is already composed. It’s a verse of fish pass and people which will sit somewhere on the Cardiff Bay Barrage alongside a translation into Welsh by Menna Elfyn. Others will follow. Watch the Insider for news of progress.

A version of this posting appeared in the Western Mail as The Insider on Saturday 8th May, 2010 with the world still undecided, well the British world, and the skies full of dark clouds. #146

Silver Devices

On a bench in the park sits a youth staring at a silver device. Bigger than a phone, smaller than a laptop. The sun’s up. He’s reading Dan Brown on his Sony Book Reader. The future has reached Waterloo Gardens in Penylan.

You can store a thousand titles on these slippery things, an entire library, more books than my parents ever had at one time in their entire house. More titles than my school games master read in his entire life.

They are not yet ubiquitous, these readers, but they, or something like them, will before too long. When the book is read you delete it or store it. And because of the publisher’s paranoid systems of digital rights management you can’t hand it on.

Oxfam won’t get it. The church jumble will be reduced. The second hand book trade is fast coming to an end.

There was a time when south Wales boasted scores of such stores. Backstreet warrens, market stalls. There was – and still is, because they haven’t quite vanished yet – a great pleasure in fumbling through stacks of dusty volumes hunting for bargains or enlightenment or that out of print title by Jack Jones you’d heard rumour of but never seen.

John Freeman’s vast enterprise on the corner of Bridge Street in Cardiff, more or less where John Lewis stands now, had more stock than Harrods. The place was a maze of stack, box and shelf. The owner professed an ability to locate anything instantly. Do you want to buy these paperbacked Ian Flemings, I’d ask. Nah, got dozens of those downstairs.

Nothing I ever wanted to sell ever appeared to have any value. The market, such as it was, was always for things I didn’t own. I’d drag myself back home with my box of ex-review paperbacks. I stuffed them once into a corporation litter bin on Queen Street. Left them in telephone boxes. Handed them for free to passing youths.

Today the antiquarian trade works out of web sites and auction houses. Stock is bought and sold without the trader ever having to leave his phone. On the net everything has a market value and anything is findable. Today on Abe books I located 1723 copies of things by Jack Jones. Admittedly some of them were by Jack Jones, the rhymer of cockney slang, a few were about Jack Jones the trade unionist, two were by a Jack Jones who’d written about John Lennon. But a lot were for Bidden to the Feast, Off to Philadelphia, Give Me Back My Heart and Rhondda Roundabout.

The thrill of the chase has gone. Jack is everywhere, if you want him. Although I’m not sure if he’s available yet for the Sony Reader. But I’d best check.

For those into these things the Rhys Davies Trust and the Academi have just published a free set of 16 black and white author postcards. One depicts Jack Jones. Call 02920472266 for your set.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday, 31st April, 2010. That's what the date is on my watch, a DKNY fashionista miracle.


#145

Laugharne As Plasticine

The walls between our languages seem to be bending, at least they were in Laugharne the other week. There was a time when what went on in Welsh stayed that way. And if your song or your poem was in English then your audience would inevitably be English-speaking monoglots. Wales stumbled towards the free world of the future with a system of cultural apartheid firmly in place.

But here in the no longer booming two-thousands the world is a different place. For a time now the number of Welsh-speaking writers willing to address English audiences has been on the increase. Menna Elfyn, Grahame Davies, Elin ap Hywel, Gwyneth Lewis, Catrin Dafydd, and others have all straddled the language divide and found that, having done so, they did not wake up as traitors. “I am only willing to speak in English to fellow Welshmen outside our borders”, a famous novelists was once heard to say. “I have no interest in anything other than Welsh literature”, retorted another. “I am never speaking the English tongue again”, declared the Anglo-Welsh poet Harri Webb. These polarised and provocative positions do not resonate now as they once did.

At the Laugharne Weekend there was an exciting and rich mixture of new music (Fionn Regan), cult authorship (Niall Griffiths), revived renegades (The Fall and the Slits), musicologists, poets, fictioneers and prize-winners of all sorts. Here the two languages of Wales banged up against each other naturally, as if we were a balanced bi-lingual nation. One where the product was more important than the process. What you’d said more significant that the language you used. How you sang more enjoyable than the tongue you employed.

Hoards of visitors from other parts of Wales (and even more from beyond) flowed through our most surreal of townships. This is the place where the chip shop closes at 8.00, festival or not. There’s no tourist information centre. And the memory of Dylan hangs on in the well-preserved writing hut: new walls, new doors, new floor, new windows and re-roofed recently but still as it always was.

Bill-toppers were Roddy Doyle, Martin Carthy and Howard Marks. In the Fountain Inn Keith Allen, wearing a kaftan, ran three episodes of Laugharne’s Got Talent. I didn’t have the strength to stay to see who’d won but it might have been the nine year old singing Gwenith Glyn.

The afternoons of singers blended languages and literature as if the world was plasticine. Richard James, The Gentle Good, the amazing Katell Keineg, Charlotte Greig with her Freud reworkings, Mark Olsen and others did the sort of thing with song that Rachel Tresize, Dan Rhodes, Louise Welsh and Patrick Jones did with words.

The Laugharne Weekend is a real addition to Wales’ cultural calendar. Long may it continue.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 24th April, 2010 - #144

Five Vodkas Help

After the reading to promote Zen Cymru, my new collection from Seren, in the round gallery where my voice had echoes and the audience seemed impossible to get close to I am surrounded by punters. This is that part of the literary scene called Q&A where audiences get to question the speaker on whatever they like. This is usually about the work. Although not always. What’s your position on the bomb, I was asked at one event. Do you have any pets? What’s your favourite TV programme? Do you know what time the next event starts? This question asked at a festival by a punter eager to get me done and to move onto Ian McEwan.

Tonight, however, my interlocutors stick to the literary script. Most of them are students of one kind or another, beginners on the literary ladder, keen to get ahead. And there’s a pattern to the things they ask.

Copyright is the big one. Simultaneously the most powerful and misunderstood piece in our panoply of state-managed protective legislation. Copyright is something you need do little gain, I tell them. You just write and the form of the words you choose are your copyright. Automatically. But, unfortunately, not the idea behind them. Did Shakespeare think up the plot for Romeo and Juliet? Probably not. But it’s his words we all remember.

At this point the urban myth of the play someone once sent in to the BBC rears its head. In this tale a play is submitted by a keen beginner only have it either ignored or immediately rejected. Several months pass. The still keen proto-playwright is at home idly listening to the radio when on comes his or her play. It’s beautifully produced, but attributed to another. When you pursue this sorry tale it inevitably turns out to have happened not to the myth recounter but to someone else. My sister told me. It happened to her best friend’s uncle. Chase it and the sorry tale vanishes into the sand. Nothing is ever proved or even provable. Unless you are Dan Brown or J K Rowling, that is. At the level they work claims that you’ve nicked your ideas are legion.

Beyond the worries over ownership are concerns about public presentation. Isn’t performance difficult? How do you stop yourself shaking? I share with them advice given to me by a famous broadcaster. Have a drink beforehand, he advised. One but no more. It’ll take off the edge. Have two and you’ll be on the road to garbling. At the event I was running the famous broadcaster then drank five vodkas straight and did the funniest show I can remember. Practice, I guess.

There were questions about style and substance, publication and plot but none on cash. Chasing fame remains up front. Why else bother.

#143

The Literature of Sport - Full of Mud and Fog

Do sport and creative writing come from the same planet? Can sports journalists ever make the Booker? There’s a suspicion that, down the years, great writers have always been those who dislike ball games. The ones who hung around the radiators in school when they should have been out there in the rain on the pitch. Those who lock themselves in the library when the six nations are on. The ones who think David Beckham is a game show host and Ryan Giggs a sandwich shop owner. There’s a gulf and our national Welsh propensity to compose poetry about agriculture doesn’t help.

Of course if you dig down you’ll find a whole raft of quality writing based around sports. David Peace’s brilliant The Damned United and Nick Hornby’s unputdownable Fever Pitch being two recent examples. And if you really want to find out what literary Wales’s take on ball games really is then Gareth Williams’s anthology in the Library of Wales series, Sport, should show you.

Yet the suspicion persists. Sportspeople don’t write, writers don’t play. The common ground between them remains full of mud and fog. Dave Collins, who edits the magazine Welsh Football, pointed out recently that his magazine is full of new Welsh writing. Reports on games, on players, on clubs, on history. The Day Arsenal Came to Winch Wen, The FA Amateur Cup of 1893, a list of the injuries received playing in the Welsh league. However, even Collins admits that the ultimate literary merit of his material might be questionable.

But all is not lost. When faced with a class of reluctant readers, the poet Benjamin Zephaniah simply takes them out into the yard to kick a ball about. Is this poetry, sir? It will be when you write about it, Zephaniah replies.

In the south Wales valleys Academi has been pushing this idea as hard as it will go. Reluctant writers in Merthyr have been encouraged to mix sport and creativity by Peter Read and Mike Church. Phil Carradice has shown pupils how sports journalism works. Daniel Morden has mixed story-telling with sporting prowess. Mick Jenkins has used photographs of sporting action to inspire new verse. And Scott Quinell has shown pupils that even legends can have slow literary starts. He’s had had whole schools engaging with his Quick Read Aim High.

In Cardiff the Bluebirds have worked with Academi to get pupils from the south Wales region to visit their new stadium and to mix literature with soccer. All Skilled Up – Read It, Write It, Play it. To date 700 pupils have benefited, working with John Tripp Award winner Peter Read to create a new giant football poem and then to work on match commentary and reporting. Future stars for Dave Collins’s magazine. And after that novels and goals of their own.

A version of this posting appeared in as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday, 10th April, 2010. #142

Books for Your Wardrobe

Innovation and literature have always been fellow travellers. As the great art movements of history rang the changes across the world writers took note. Viewpoints shifted. The religious tract gave way to the novel. The novel itself changed from serial to single volume. It took on board stream of consciousness, turned to pulp, abandoned its chains and left the library shelf. It got carried around in pockets. Books became easy. Dropped their hard covers. Took on the role of diversion as much as education. Became places for play as well as places for art. And, more significantly, became so much cheaper to make.

Innovation flourished. During the latter parts of the twentieth century books appeared in a myriad of forms. There were novels in boxes, famously B S Johnson’s The Unfortunates which had twenty-five chapters printed as pamphlets. The order they were read in was up to the reader. Opal L Nations published a volume of poetry with a coat-hanger bound into the spine. You could hang this in your wardrobe with your shirts. There were volumes with pieces of carpet as covers. The tiny books published by the Fluxus Movement came inside match-boxes. J L Carr’s series of pamphlets, were small enough to shove up your sleeve, ideal, he insisted, for reading during sermons. Wales’ Philip Jenkins produced a book that consisted of cleverly placed holes done with a punch. Llangollen’s Childe Roland had a novel that consisted of 300 bound blank pages. Bob Cobbing published anthologies in plastic bags. Tom Phillips made his masterwork out of the printed pages of another. A Humument (available now from Thames & Hudson) is a painted book made directly onto the pages of W. H. Mallock's Victorian novel, A Human Document.

The high water mark for all this activity seems to have been the mid-nineties. Innovation at this point shifted to the net. New ways of writing were created, forms and styles made possible by the digital revolution took over. The hand-made book in a tin, in a bag, or on rolls of wallpaper faded from view. More’s the pity. But not completely.

Former Welsh resident Stewart Brown has for the past thirty years been making the word visible. He paints and collages it in a kind of post-concrete, non-digital mêlée of colour and bending font. His masterwork, a seemingly endless series of morphing letterforms and wailing colour is called Babel. Pretty appropriately, I’d say. “Beautiful, unsayable, meaningless, profound” is how he describes it. Babel comes in large canvas form, on gallery walls and in frames. It also comes loose in book shaped boxes. Lovingly presented and a total delight to open. Investigate Catalyst Press on the web. Buy Babel as card or as box. Expect to be dazzled.

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 3rd April, 2010