Porn is Rampant and Nobody Reads Anymore

According to writer Gary Shteyngart the future of America is one where nobody reads and porn is rampant. Jobs in retail trump everything and the National Guard patrol Manhattan. How soon? Ten years. What happens in the US first happens to us next. On my recent visit to the American south I expected to see flags, southern Baptists and even more never-leave-your-car shopping experiences than I had last time. And, given the progressive nature of the land of the free, everyone would be using iPads and Kindles. Books, in paper form at least, would no longer be.

What I actually witnessed was rather different. To start with there seemed to be fewer drive-ins although given the increasing number at home maybe I’d simply got used to the phenomenon. The 9/11 marking at a festival I attended went by in perfunctory fashion with little of the national heart wrenching I’d seen on previous visits. Then there was the lack of iPads. Well, i anything actually.

Looking around the 2000-strong audience I spotted only one man holding an object that could be said to resemble a portable device. When I got closer this turned out to be a games machine. So much for progress. Nevertheless , a large proportion of these North Carolina festival goers were reading. Novels, collections of short fiction, paperbacked poetry. Out here the book certainly wasn’t in retreat. You wouldn’t experience this amount of mass open air reading anywhere in Wales, even at the Hay Literature Festival. Death of the paper book? Not yet.

Back home I found my Kindle waiting. Slim, elegant, very light weight and resolutely black and white. Would I get on with this? Could I use it in bed? As digital machines go it turned out to be pretty flawless. Operation was instinctive, the displayed text easy on the eye and pages changed at the flick of a fingertip.

Online at the Kindle Store masses of free content awaited. Dictionaries, science fiction compendia, the complete works of Dickens, classic poetry by the lorry load. There was also any amount of free blog-books by self-published literary wannabes content to forego professional profit just to be read.

In the commercial section titles turned out not to cost quite as much as I’d expected. Delivery was instant. Press the buy button and text would arrive by 3G in seconds - the cost recouped from my card virtually without me noticing. The future, certainly, but would it catch on? I got off the train at Cardiff Bay amid a rush of Sudoku players and window gazers. Ahead of me was a woman reading as she walked. That’s something you don’t see much these days. And what was she using? A kindle.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in The Western Mail. #171

Men Only

Is the history of Welsh writing in English a male preserve? Did women take part? Or are the Anglo-Welsh a bit like the American Beat generation – men, men and then more men. Women hanging around the fringes, stringing beads and drinking wine while the men do writing’s real work. It’s certainly the case that Wales’ golden age of Anglo outpouring was managed almost entirely by males.

At a poems and pints night as part of this year’s BayLit Festival (held, amazingly, in Cardiff Central Library where books and beer have never before mixed) Aisling Tempeny told us in a very funny poem what studying the subject was like. Welsh writing in English consisted of blokes called Jones, Williams, Thomas, Rhys and Davies with first names like Rhys, William, Gwyn, and Glyn. There was a Gwyn Jones and a Glyn Jones and a Thomas Jones and a Rhys Davies, a Lewis Jones, a Lewis Davies and then even a Richard Lewis Davies. Men in a cymric blur. Women not present. How does the newcomer manage?

And I admit that I’ve found it hard, sometimes, to market such things with precision. When the Academi’s annual Gwyn Jones lecture was on the subject of Glyn Jones, both éminences grise , I did have trouble passing the message on. That’s the problem with Welsh names. Curtis, Webb and Tripp are the memorable exceptions.

The first set of free author postcards from Academi and the Rhys Davies Trust featured sixteen faces. All dead. These were images from the core of twentieth century Welsh writing in English. Brenda Chamberlain was one. The other fifteen were men. Jack Jones, Gwyn Jones, RS, Tripp, Rhys Davies, Glyn Jones, Raymond Williams, Roland Mathias. The authors on whom our tradition rests.

Were women missing because they didn’t exist, had been overlooked or simply never had their books published. They certainly exist - if you hunt literary history you’ll find dozens of female names. Women writers were overlooked by a generation of readers but are now back with a bang. Check the work of the English departments and the output of the reprinting presses for proof.

Academi and the Rhys Davies Trust have now launched a second set of free postcards, including images of a few writers who are still with us. Black and white images of Hilda Vaughan, Margiad Evans, Lynette Roberts, Dorothy Edwards feature prominently. There are also cards depicting Idris Davies, Caradoc Evans, Ron Berry, David Jones, W H Davies and a very youthful looking Dannie Abse. Two wear hats, one has beads and eleven wear ties. Another age. To get your free set send a large self addressed envelope to Academi, Writers Postcards: Set 2, Mount Stuart House, Mount Stuart Square, Cardiff CF10 5FQ.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #170

Does All This Stuff Come From Above?

There was a time when the world thought that inspiration came from above. It arrived rather like those rays of sunlight in William Blake engravings. Touched your head and caused works of genius emerge. There are still hoards out there today who think that this is the way great things happen. Beethoven’s Fifth, Hamlet, Fern Hill, Good Vibrations. Went out one day for a walk, came home, sat before the keyboard and there the work was. Brilliance effortlessly emerging, a gift from god.

In a way, of course, this is how it happens. Genius flows. But to make it so the artist needs to have studied the work of others, learned the basics, practised endlessly, worked out how to identify crap and become willing, no matter how much effort has been expended, to throw things that don’t sound right away. Most of all, the creative individual needs to know how to be in the right place at the right time. Where magic operates. Where inspiration can be encouraged to spark. Where the stuff of art can be made real.

We’ve a place like that in Wales. For writers anyway. Tŷ Newydd, the writers’ centre, set just back from the coast in Gwynedd. A great white house overlooking the sea. A place where the ley lines of creativity intersect and where great works are born.

At Tŷ Newydd the ambitious open-minded spend a week in the company of a pair of experienced authors. There’s an element of teaching, explaining, readings, criticism and the passing on of technique, form and style. There’s a lot of inspiration and plenty of opportunity to try things out. There’s also a mid-week visit from a guest reader, just to brighten things. You are there with your fellow writers, eighteen of you maybe, accommodated in new en-suite rooms, with access to an unrivalled library, computers, healthy food and even healthier air. You get a chance to strut your own stuff, if you want to. You can talk to the tutors about your work, explain what you want to do and where things are right now. They’ll help you plan the future.

I’ll be up there at the start of November. My course, managed in tandem with that great Aberystwyth poet Tiffany Atkinson, is called Poetry from Nowhere. Is this possible? When there are no ideas in the mind, not the faintest touch of inspiration and the rain blows outside. What do you do? This week will explain. There’s a guarantee that you’ll go home with something new and with a head full of brightness that wasn’t there when you arrived.

Guest reader is Ira Lightman, fresh from Radio Three and full of unimaginable spark. Interested? Check www.tynewydd.org or call 01766 522811. Dates are November 8th to 13th 2010.

An earlier version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #169

Magazines - the Revolution is Still On

Hard to credit it in a digital age but the literature magazines are still with us. Those printed bastions of cultural excellence that appear quarterly, hopefully, beautifully – their high season issues are now in the shops. The market for these things has been declining for as long as I can remember. There was a golden age, before the war, when anecdotal evidence tells us that almost every working men’s canteen, corner shop, tea room and parlour across Wales had its subscription up to date and lit mags were the talk of the town. Everyone read poetry. But now that poetry is too modernist to understand no one does. The world consumed short fiction. But with TV is in every room (not to speak of being on almost everyone’s phone) fiction no longer holds sway. Once the views of the reviewers cut cultural ice – now simply no one cares.

Yet the mags still appear. Small print runs, glossy and smiling, pushing literature on. And they do. Despite the paucity of their audience this is still the cutting edge.

In the latest Agenda, magazine of the IWA, cultural historian Peter Stead suggests that Rachael Trezise might just have written “the first draft of our contemporary history”. Wales 2010: year zero. Trezise as Gwyn Alf Williams.

Helle Michelsen’s Planet runs the tight line between politics and culture, one that you can track in Wales but that’s virtually invisible in England. The latest issue is a place where Ozi Rhys Osmond’s Art of the Valleys pushes up against Nick Bourne, Cynog Dafis and Julie Morgan’s debate on coalition. Craig Owen Jones’s take on Asians in space sits beside Stevie Davies on Dowlais Steelworks. And W T R Pryce’s fine analysis of Eisteddfod chairs follows Gillian Drake’s piece on open air swimming. Planet’s cultural Wales is nothing if not diverse.

It is in the new Poetry Wales, however, that revolution is really apparent. In the 1970s when the late Eric Mottram held the helm of London’s Poetry Review the English-speaking literary world was split into two mutually opposed factions – the traditionalists and the innovators. In the cause of progress Mottram favoured the work of the latter. In Wales space was only ever available to the former. My own Welsh work sank into the mist.

Thirty years on Zoe Skoulding’ s new issue turns the tables. London’s Poetry Review now represents English poetry’s calm centre while Poetry Wales displays enough innovative work for one to mistake it for an issue of Bob Cobbing’s And. Alice Entwistle interviewing Wendy Mulford, John Goodby on Welsh modernist poetry. Poetry by Lee Harwood, Ralph Hawkins, Geoffrey Hill, John Powell Ward, and a stream of innovators from inside Wales and without. I enjoyed every page. It’s taken an age but Wales might at last have caught the world up.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #168

What Will The Future Look Like?

Hard to believe, given the number of festivals that Wales currently hosts, that there was an age when the only game in town was the National Eisteddfod. Food festivals, jazz festivals, story festivals, drama festivals, face painting festivals? Nope. And literature festivals? What on earth could they be? Wales didn’t know. That was until 1988 when Norman Florence and his ebullient son Peter came along and founded the Hay Festival. In its wake came others including the Welsh Academy’s festival in Cardiff. Suddenly there were gangs of poets in the urban streets, novelists on platforms and fictioneers in halls signing shed-loads of their books.

The Cardiff Festival brought writers and writing to the centre of the Capital. It was engaging, entertaining and expensive to run. Its street-wise offspring is the biennial Bay Lit Festival. Slick, sharp and innovative. It uses a multiplicity of venues spread across the fizz and flash of Cardiff Bay.

This year’s fest runs over the long weekend of the 28th to the 30th of October. Its theme is the shock of the new. “What will the future look like? How do we get there? What’s holding us back?” This isn’t just a festival of stuff on stage where the audience just listens but a rush of events and activities where festival-goers can actually join in. At BayLit you can perform on stage, start your own fanzines, send poetic text messages and thoroughly enjoy yourself. You can also argue about literature’s future. You can do that in the company of Dragon’s Eye presenter Adrian Masters and the editors of Raconteur magazine.

The Welsh Underground (and, yes, there was such a thing, once) gets a special issue of Angel Exhaust magazine. Co-editors John Goodby and Andrew Duncan will launch this at an event where academic lecture meets raging sonic performance. Can this still be poetry? It once was and in woken-up Wales once again is.

Parthian’s Bright Young Things, all four of them, will read from and talk about their 2010 novels. Jon Gower and Llwyd Owen will discuss the trend for new novels to get two bites of the cherry – first in Welsh and then the following year in English. Can the market stand it? With such blatant repetition is there any artistic point?

At the new library there’ll be a poems and pints night. The astute among this column’s readers will have spotted that the library isn’t in the Bay and doesn’t have a bar. But we’ll let that pass.

Y Glêr will present an evening of twenty-first century cynghanedd; Hannah Silva, Liam Johnson, Ceri Elen and Rufus Mufasa will push performance’s boundaries, and the Mabinogi will get re-worked by Owen Sheers, Gwyneth Lewis, Russell Celyn Jones and Niall Griffiths. There’s much more. Check www.academi.org for details.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #167

Hard Times Again?

The arts flourish in hard times. Dickens didn’t quite say this in his novel of the same name. He was more concerned to reveal the conditions under which working people laboured and to expose the misconception that prosperity makes us moral. You reap what you sow. Mr Gradgrind discovers the use of creativity but ultimately fails as a MP. Josiah Bounderby is revealed as a hypocrite and a bully. Louisa grows old and childless. Only the circus performer, Sissy Jupe, really finds happiness. In Hard Times’s take on deprivation culture helps but cannot on its own save the world.

Yet Dickens himself certainly knew how to capitalise on times of industrial darkness. Hard Times was written in parts and sold as a serial. Like a Victorian version of Eastenders. The process allowed the author to hone delivery of cliff-hanger suspense which kept his huge audience completely enthralled. The he backed the book with a seemingly never-ending reading tour. Charles Dickens, a bit like the Rolling Stones, was forever on the road.

It was he, more than anyone else, who popularised the idea of live dramatic readings from works of fiction as a form of public entertainment. Pay your money. Come in and hear the writer speak. During the 1860s Dickens gave hundreds of performances from his work – first in America and then later up and down the UK. The shows were full of gesture, dramatic declamation, changes of pitch and of voice. Dickens worked propless. He was a great success.

Wales enters its own version of hard times with its literary readings machine operating at full stretch. At no time that I can recall have there been so many well-attended and well-organised public performances of poetry and prose put on at venues across the country. In the south-east it’s even possible to attend something of a literary nature every night of the week.

Owen Sheers, Nigel Jenkins, Mab Jones, Gemma June Howells, John Williams, Dave Oprava, Nick Fisk, Ifor Thomas, Mike Jenkins, Paul Henry, Liam Johnson, Menna Elfyn, and Catrin Dafydd work well and often. The National Poet, Gillian Clarke, engages in gruelling tour schedules of Dickensian proportions. The pay is little more than adequate. But audiences can be spectacularly good.

Hard times threaten all this.

Literature has seen more than a decade now of Welsh development. Such determined foundation building is now providing results. It’s cheap, too. Hour for hour poets tend to cost less than plumbers. Take the money away and, far from being more creative, a lot of them will have to turn back to teaching and other staples to keep the world from the door.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #166

The Hemingway Look-a-Like Contest Winner

Every year at Sloppy Joe’s Bar, down in Key West, they run an Ernest Hemingway lookalike contest. Unlike the Elvis lookalike show at Porthcawl where contestants at least try to sound like the King Hemingway doubles don’t need to write. Looking is the deal. Safari suits, fisherman’s white-wool turtle-neck sweaters, round faces, Richard Attenborough white beards. Hats need to be doffed. Animals and birds are not allowed on stage. Bring your own cheering team. On the contest’s website are photos of winners going back to 1983. Does all this increase the great novelist’s sales? The jury is out.

In Wales the nearest we’ve ever had to a Hemingway doppelganger was Jack Jones. His writing style was certainly different but with his latter-day white beard and pugilist stature he did bear a vague physical resemblance. I imagined that when Jack passed in 1970 so too did the Hemingway look. No longer fashionable. Not really. That was until I came across a photo of the ex-pat Cardiff author Jon Manchip White. Put a beard on that man and he’d be contest winner for sure.

Manchip White now lives in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee, a place as distant from Key West as it is from Wales. Not that this has slowed Manchip White as an author. His list of literary achievements goes back to the early 1950s and is as long as your arm. Novels, poetry, short fiction, works on ancient Egypt, the Aztec Empire, Diego Velázquez, France, the great American deserts, north American Indians and, not unexpectedly, Wales. His splendid The Journeying Boy: Scenes from a Welsh Childhood published in the States by the Iris Press is a great introduction to old Cardiff.

He’s descended on the one side from the Manchips, west country seamen, ship owners, merchantmen and on the other the very Welsh Whites. That line goes right back to Cardiff’s own centre-stage martyr, Rawlins White.

This White was an illiterate sixteenth century fisherman who stood up against the return of Catholicism under Bloody Queen Mary. For his faith (or, rather, because he chose to protest it) he was imprisoned in a squalid cell at the foot of Cardiff’s Cock’s Tower (now lost somewhere under the new St David’s shopping centre). He was subsequently burned at the stake near the end of Church Street. There’s a memorial plaque. This once adorned Bethany Chapel in Wharton Street, a building now subsumed by Howell’s menswear department. The plaque is still there. You can check it, it’s on the ground floor just behind the trouser rail.

Jon Manchip White has celebrated his illustrious ancestor in a TV play produced originally by Emyr Humphreys the tapes of which now seem to be lost. Undeterred he is now working on a version of the tale as a novel. Watch this column for news.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail #165

The Train Coming At Us Across the Plains

If the revolution doesn’t come down the street with its men in bandanas carrying guns then do it with words. Writers the world over have adopted this approach. The past is never good enough. The world cannot be allowed to stand still. Make it new, said Ezra Pound. “The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.”

Upend what went before, the new is what sings. Never mind the tune.

At Parthian Books, our West Wales base for permanent insurrection, they’ve always had a good eye for this kind of thing. If the revolution doesn’t spin then make it. If the world is content then upset it. If there’s a bastion somewhere then storm it. The latest ruse is their brilliant pitched reinvention of the bright young thing. Four new fictioneers, Wales-based if not yet of entirely Welsh blood, have been packaged and pushed as the rising literary stars. And this year is the one in which they will shoot.

Tyler Keevil, a mid-Wales based Canadian, has Fireball a teenage thriller full of death and car plunges. Wil Gritten, a north Walian who has been round the world twice and is still under twenty-six, contributes Letting Go, a travellers tale that runs from Wales to south America. Susie Wild, habitué of the blogosphere and permanent follower of the Welsh literary event, has The Art of Contraception, short fiction full of the deranged and the fantastic. James Smythe, a Welsh-educated teacher, adds Hereditation, a tale of depravity and philandering in New York.

The set are packaged to perfection and promoted with their own web-wrap of blog, comment and clip (http://iconau.com/brightsite/?p=351). Is this the literary world actually changing? The books are out now. You decide.

In Cardiff Bay this October the Academi’s Bay Lit literature festival runs episode two of The Shock of the New. This is a celebration of those literary things which deliberately rub against the grain. The new, the left field, the experimental, the strange, the thrillingly shocking, the unexpected and the never before seen. Being new here means being at very least different. Not young, necessarily, but not been round the block too often either.

The 2010 event which runs from the 25^th to the 30^th is expected to feature workshops with iPad makers Apple, Hannah Silva and Liam Johnson live texting, the curse of celebrity culture, the unknown Tiger Bay, the melding of literature with sound, the Welsh Underground (remember that?) and the Mabinogion rewritten one more time. Watch the web for details.

It’s ironic that at a time when literature in Wales has never been so healthy that the downturn looms. It’s coming like Ashbery’s train, steaming towards us across the plains.

A version of the posting appeared as The Insider in The Western Mail. #164

Book prizes? Still how it all should be?

The Wales Book of the Year - now that the dust has settled should we consider how this Award is doing? Established back in the mists of time this, our premier Welsh book prize, has been presented to cultural winners for several decades now. Book Awards mark out the best the nation can produce and celebrate the chosen in as much style as possible. In a wider-Welsh world that loves TV and rarely opens literature’s covers anything that publicises and popularises can help.

The Award, made with steady even-handedness, goes annually to the best Welsh-language and the best English-language books of Wales. To enter you need to either write in the language, be born here, live here or have the country as a significant component of your writing. The prize is for the best literary title, the best writing, rather than simply the best printed book. It goes to authors and not to editors, translators, ghost writers, or compilers. This means that recipes, sports compendiums, poetry anthologies, new translations of the Mabinogion, and political commentary are pretty much excluded. It also means that picture books don’t make it. Unless they also contain writing of significant quality.

This year both the Welsh and English prizes went, somewhat controversially, to books where the author had worked with a photographer. Philip Gross did this with Simon Denison for I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon Press), John Davies managed the same trick with Marian Delyth for Cymru: Y 100 Lle I’w Gweld Cyn Marw (Y Lolfa). Was this unfair on the photographers, both of whom undoubtedly made a considerable contribution to the books concerned? The Award’s judges were clear. The Wales Book of the Year Award is a literary prize. It was the quality of the writing that led.

But do the prizes make any real difference to turnover? Sales of Booker Prize titles always go up when there is some sort of controversy or public falling out between judges. I’ve no proof but I’m sure the same sort of thing happens in Wales. What I have seen, though, is evidence that being on the Book of the Year long list does shift more copies.

The perennial problem, of course, is that judges have to gauge novels against books of poetry and sets of short stories against works of literary criticism. How do you do this? Official guidance says that you must but is pretty silent on just how. It’s been suggested that the way forward is to return to the days of category prizes - best novel, best book of poetry, best work of criticism.

But then, in difficult and recessionary times, how might this be financed? And what would happen to the impact a single big win makes? If you have a view do let me know.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in The Western Mail. #163

Maths

The world is made of numbers. Talk to the mathematicians and they’ll tell you that anything can be reduced to arithmetic. Computer programmers will explain that nothing moves in cyberspace without binary digits changing. The pulse is a numeric value, as is blood pressure and the rate at which air moves into and out of your lungs. Statistics have taken over the universe. When I took a fitness test recently – blow into a tube, run on the spot, have my weight recorded, my body fat index measured, checks made on how easy it was for me to bend and touch the floor - I was amazed by the amount of sheer data that emerged. Reams of the stuff. My life in figures - a portrait of Finch in equation, table, and chart. Everything, it seems, can be turned into numbers.

So too in the world of culture. How many entrants were there to the last Cardiff International Poetry Competition? 10,856. What’s the population of the UK - 61,414, 062. How many viewers did the World Cup England vs. Germany achieve? Eighteen million. A recent episode of Lewis attracted seven million. The TV production of Martin Amis’s super-popular cult novel Money pulled in one point one. As a people we are certainly consumers of small screen culture.

However, it’s not the same when you get to printed matter. Book production may be up with more new titles reaching market now than at any time since world war two but we appear to be spreading their consumption ever thinner. The world’s leading book awards like the Man Booker and the Orange normally get the names of authors and their books into the minds of most literate people. Sale should rocket- and in a way they do. But not as spectacularly as one might hope. Andrea Levy’s Small Island which came out fifteen years ago has to date sold 834,958 copies. Could do better.

Mass market best sellers – beach reads, thrillers, paperbacks with mirror covers that spin on stands at airports and in Tesco – can manage half a million copies in a good year. Literary novels, the more serious ones, sell considerably less. A first novel by a new starter can shift a few thousand copies across the whole of the UK and that is if the author is lucky. New Welsh interest novels do eight hundred or so on average. Poetry, that marker of all great civilisations, sells even less. A new UK promoted poet might sell into four figures but mostly don’t. If you are Wales-based then it’s less than half that total. Booklets, poetry’s mainstay, move in the low hundreds.

Around here all sales count, a thing worth remembering next time you attend an event. Buy the book, someone has to.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 28th August, 2010. #162