Following The Grid Line

As I went up through Llandaf with an 1880 Ordnance Survey map of the district in my hand I wondered just what I’d find. Would the totality have changed? Would the old streets shown from a hundred and twenty years ago have vanished into the dust to be replaced by new structures, terraces, parking places, curry houses and shops? Not a bit. The grid was identical, it was just the detail that had morphed. How much had we added here in a century? Not as much as you’d think. I wrote what I discovered down.

This act, artificial, contrived, even faintly ridiculous, was one of psychogeography. I discovered this later when the book of which my Llandaf piece formed part was published. Real Cardiff. ‘Finch is clearly a flaneur, suggested one reviewer. ‘A situationist,’ remarked another. ‘A psychogeographer. One who lets the built environment inform his emotions, who has discovered new ways for the pedestrian to explore the city, someone who lets go and ambles, a literary explorer of maps.’ So that’s what I was. Amazing.

Will Self, I discovered, had for years authored a column called Psychogeography for The Independent. In it he wrote of his experiences walking to New York, using trains to reach sales conferences, living in an empty high rise on Merseyside. He was the embodiment of what turned out to be a growing popular movement of artists and activists who had for years been using such conceits to propel themselves across the planet.

There were those who used numbers, throwing dice to define a grid point and then seeing who could get there first. Others followed the grid lines themselves as they bisected the landscape. Could the line be walked? When it reached buildings could you go through them, into the window, through the door, over the roof?

Iain Sinclair, author of one of the seminal reworkings of the urban landscape, Lights Out The Territory walked the M25, staying within 300 meters of the roadway, and recorded his experiences. What was there, in this liminal landscape? Abandoned factories, mental asylums, storage tanks, waste.

My own psychogeographic amblings took me along the entire Cardiff route of the Glamorgan Canal. Gone for decades. Who knew where it had run? With photographer John Briggs I tracked the long vanished Roath Branch railway from Gabalfa into Cardiff Docks. In a single day I tried to climb as many of Cardiff’s tall buildings as I could. I visited every street named after a battle, planet or element. I drank in all the pubs of Canton.

This last episode took some doing and, I have to admit, is still incomplete. Progress is slow. The pubs are closing too fast. Check Seren’s Real series for progress.

#199

Gongs Again

Its’ award season once again. Those months of the year during which the Eisteddfod, the Wales Book of the Year, the Dylan Thomas Prize and all the other lesser events give out their gongs. Winners will proliferate. But is the achievement real? Prizes? You get them by chance, because you know the judges, because your name fits, because you were in the right place at the right time, because your publisher pushed you, because of bribery, because it’s a fix.

As far as I can tell this latter accusation may run true in America but has little foundation here at home. Scandal, however, is a prize season currency. If things do not go according to plan the press come out in droves, delighted. Book cock-ups make headlines and have been doing so for years.

Back when the Nobel Prize was virtually the only literary award operating its first winner wasn’t contender Leo Tolstoy but a minor French poet called Sully Prudhomme. How could the judges be so blind? Quite easily, as it transpired. In future years they went on to omit Hardy, Ibsen, Kafka, Proust, Valery, Rilke and James Joyce. Did the award signify outstanding literary talent and world-beating prowess, asked the press? Clearly not.

In 1974 conflict of interest mired the Booker Prize when one of the judges, the wife of Kingsley Amis, Elizabeth Jane Howard, short listed her husband’s Ending Up. In later years the same pattern repeated. Judges pushed works by their spouses, sons, lovers, agents and publishers. Can there be anyone on the scene who is truly independent?

James Kelman won the 1994 Booker with a novel in thick Glaswegian dialect, How Late It Was, How Late (in which the world’s favourite swear word appears more than 4000 times). It emerged that the judges had selected his book not because it was their first choice but rather to block the first choices of others. Judge Julia Neuberger broke rank after the ceremony and denounced the work as rubbish. The author, she said, “was just a drunken Scotsman”.

In Wales the Book of the Year attracts similar disturbances, although not quite on the same scale. Who will ever forget the Minister who read out the wrong name as winner? YouTube certainly won’t. In the long past there have been judges who have leaked and who have publicly disagreed. There have been writers who have been upset and those who have promised to give their award to charity and didn’t. And then there have been those who have immediately vanished from the literary scene without a trace thus underlining the award’s efficacy.

Overall, however this Welsh Booker has been a cracking success. Increasing sales, great winners, excitement, entertainment, literature as a horse race. The short list for 2011 is here

#198

This Stuff Is Like Liquid Gold

What’s top of the loan list at libraries? What regularly rides high among the bookshop best sellers? Nothing less than that literary equivalent of a reality show, the biography. The life story, a tale pulled from the real world, from tangible events featuring named and actual people. How easy are these things to write? Very, if the number turned out by minor celebrities, pop singers, politicians and sports persons of every stripe is anything to go by. It doesn’t matter, it seems, how your earlier academic life might have gone. If you are famous then, by definition, you can write. Check out some of these wonders, they read like liquid gold.

The reality is, of course, that most are ghost written. The famous person’s manager sets it up. The famous persons speaks, the ghost takes notes. The book comes out and a million pounds are earned. The world simply can’t get enough of the truth behind the glitter. Or what they are told is the truth. And what might, to some, be glitter.

But not all biographies are done this way. Many are simply the product of a determined writer’s desire to tell a good story. John Williams’ recent biographies of Michael X and Shirley Bassey are cases in point. Both tell the tale of people who have had interesting and pertinent lives. And Williams recounts their stories with aplomb.

However, not everything always goes to plan. Here’s Dawn French: “I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I'm going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first.” Or, as Chris Eubank said when asked if he had ever considered writing an autobiography, “On what?”

These and some other problems that you may have encountered when trying to tell your own or someone else's story were the centrepiece of Literature Wales's Writing For Life conference at Blaenavon over the weekend. Howard Marks was the star, a man gone well beyond biography and now writing creative fiction. But it was Dai Smith who stole the show.

#197

Not Much Of A Spectator Sport

Why do we listen to poetry? Many of us don’t, of course. Verse recitation is hardly a great spectator sport . It’s thought of by many of as a minority activity in the same category as collecting diesel electric shunter numbers or participating in kendo. That’s the Japanese art of the sword practised while wearing head to toe black robes and metal head gear, if you were wondering. Poetry, when read out loud by its author, can give us not only music and magnificence, entertainment and elevation, but new insight into what the writer actually meant. If, indeed, they did actually have some content to impart and were not simply making an artistic statement.

The form has come a long way. When I first experienced it (decades ago, back bar, Park Hotel, A G Prys Jones in an armchair delivering somnambulant verse to a prim audience already mostly asleep) poetry readings seemed to be too intellectual an activity for their own good. Organisers were chastised for letting their poets on stage wearing anything less than a suit. Poets were asked to hand out written versions of their verses in advance lest the audience lose their way. Poetry was straight and it was quiet. We went home at 9.30 full of worth.

In the twenty-first century this is no longer how things are. In reasonably quick succession I have recently experienced the whole contemporary range. First up was a reading by the backwoods open-field master of the mystic, Chris Torrance. This was delivered by a hat-wearing, seated poet to the accompaniment of techno, treated guitar music from the inimitable Chris Vine. The event was as much a poetry performance as it was a musical adventure. I then attended a more traditional poets from the floor stand-up event which included readings (i.e. with bits of paper in front of the poet), recitations (here the poet recited from memory), along with a performance from one new-tech innovator who read from text flashed to his iPhone. The entire audience appeared to be participants. I began to wonder who the readings were actually for.

At the launch for The Listening Shell, a book of poems celebrating the writing centre, Ty Newydd, there was a large crowd. The poets, and there were loads of these, everyone from Samantha Wynn Rhydderch to Tony Curtis and Nigel Jenkins to Paul Henry, appeared on stage in managed order. No one read more than a single piece. It was all over by 9.00. The audience loved it. Exposed but not drowned. Less is more.

At the Spoken Word All Stars in the Pierhead the multiracial crew had not a single scrap of paper between them. Poetry, delivered from the hip by the hip and for the hip, flowed seamlessly for ninety minutes. The audience rocked, poetry rolled. Verse out loud, it still works.

#196

Now I'm a Cyclist Too I Just Can't Cope

I’m slogging up Newport Road, Cardiff carrying two bags of shopping and with a rucksack on my back. It’s been raining and there’s water everywhere. A cyclist dressed like a praying mantis and going like a rocket barrels down the narrowing pavement as it passes under the Valley Rail line to Queen Street Station. Pedestrians scatter. But somehow not me. I end up with my carrier of apples, M&S ready meals, a CD by Jeff Beck and a DVD of Elvis’ first four films (reduced to ten quid so therefore essential) ripped from my hand and scattered to the four winds. The streaking cyclist vanishes into the distance. Par for the course, this course, so it seems. Newport Road, the eastern gateway, the route out of here to Wales’ first city, Newport. Then Chepstow, the border and centralist England beyond. The only place now without its own devolved administration, as a Tweeter recently said.

I’ve come along here, down the years, with any number of writers. Adrian Mitchell when he was resident author at the Sherman. Adrian Henri after the Liverpool Scene had played Charles Street. Hunting for a late night drink. With Czech grandmaster Miroslav Holub looking for a room. With sound poet Bob Cobbing heading to my house to sleep on my battered settee.

There seems to be something about this whole writers on tour business that is against proper hotels preferring cut-price put-you-ups instead. It’s happened to me. I’ve slept on z-beds, collapsed couches, mattresses with mammary droop, sleeping bags on floors and piles of blankets. When you are touring you get expenses, yes, but given the level of fee usually offered you need to spend them with care.

This is one of the essential difficulties with writing. Everyone expects you to do it for free, or for a fee so low it might as well be. There’s a notion that somehow your book sales will increase and you’ll get your costs back from the margin you make on that. Or that your publisher, rich beyond dreams, will magically cover whatever you spend. Limousine, five star, fine dining, multiple top end sandwiches in the first class on the way back.

Last time I got myself up to the level of entitlement to that it turned out that the line I was travelling on didn’t run first class carriages. And when I asked my publisher to pay for my overnight at the five-star Llangollen Hilton they just laughed.

Back on Newport Road I’ve reached the Four Elms, a place where Ifor Thomas once carved a stack of books into fragments with a chain saw. You could do that then. No health and safety. Another bike hurtles towards me. I hide in the bus shelter. Is the world getting better or worse?

#195

Gabble Rather Than Books

How many ways are there to read a book? You pick it up in the hope that you can lose yourself in it, that the story will grip you enough for you not to want to put the thing down. You hope it will illuminate parts of your life that have been dark for decades, that it will explain to you how you are what you are. You want it to be set in the world you live in, with characters like those around you, so you can relate. You want it to take you to places you’ve never been, worlds you don’t know, to give you vicariously experiences you could never get any other way. You want it to take the language in your ears and bend it into new and thrilling shapes. You want it to lift your spirit, to turn all the lights on and to make the world sing.

Reading can make us better people. Yet despite what you might hear there’s a crisis going on out there. Literature is in retreat – too elitist, too obscure, too non-productive, too economically backward, too difficult, too distant. What’s there to replace it? Immediacy, street life, gabble, things that engage for the shortest of moments. Literature has fought back with flash fiction (novels of fifty words or less), one word poetry, text message tales, life stories now told to camera but never written down.

At a literary dinner recently Ken Follett told us that thrillers worked only when there was a tension present that could be drawn out to fill the entire work. One that kept the reader engaged. He said that the life of his characters had to shift every five pages, just to keep the reader on board. Old stuff, sure. Dickens knew this. But still eminently true. Depicted life needs plot.

Glyn Jones was a great Anglo-Welsh poet and novelist. His classic tale, Island of Apples, will be reprinted shortly by the University of Wales Press. Glyn insisted that plots were best dealt with as core ideas. These things are like snowballs, he once told me. You get a concept, an image, an action, a name, and then you roll it forward and it attracts content as it goes. The novel as a glowing idea rather than a flowing line.

But it’s fiction with self-evident plot that sells, that gets borrowed the most from our shrinking libraries. Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth moves more than 100,000 copies a year. Glyn’s do only a fraction of that.

But don’t dismiss Island of Apples. This is a masterwork. A romantic tale without sex, the pre-adolescent angst of a valley schoolboy coming to terms with the world of the imagination. The reprint will be available in June.

#194

Books As Buses

Buses come together, in gangs, like good films, like great nights out, like the men in the poet Wendy Cope’s life. But books, they roll and roll, in an ever rising tide. Of the making of books, as it says in Ecclesiastes, there is no end. Take a look, for example, at the lot of the judges of the Wales Book of the Year Prize. Back in the nineteen-nineties they would need to consider a hundred books and then make their choice. Today that number has doubled. This is the result of technological advance, an improved economy, a desire by funding bodies to see these things professionally hit market and a much enlarged producer base. The literature industry has been teaching creative writers how to do it in increasing numbers since the pale and dark nineteen-fifties. The consequence is more books.

There is evidence out there that, as a leisure activity, reading is on the increase. Book publishing, if not vibrant is certainly a viable activity. TV has not reduced us all to pulp. We turn it off sometimes and spend a few hours with a favourite author, thrilled, excited, enthralled, uplifted. Society has discovered that reading and writing can be acceptable alternatives to wrecking bus shelters, and can help combat depression by aiding feelings of self-worth. I write therefore I am. I read and I improve. The old adages return.

It’s the book prize season again. A time when the best books, or those the judges think might be, rise to the top. The Roland Mathias Prize has just been awarded while the Wales Book of the Year soon will be.

Bowing to pressure from readers who felt it inequitable that poetry should compete against fiction and non-fiction against verse, this year will be the last where that situation prevails. From 2012 Literature Wales will offer category prizes to the best work of fiction, the best book of poetry and the best work of creative non-fiction. From these three winners an overall Book of the Year will be selected. There’ll be a Welsh-medium award as well as one for works published in English. In keeping with these straightened times ceremonials will be minimized.

This year’s award, decided from the bumper crop of works that came out during the past twelve months, will be announced simultaneously in Cardiff and in Bangor.

Who might be in the running? Despite my current job I write I have absolutely no insider knowledge here. But it’s been a good year. Watch this space.

An earlier version of this posting appeared in The Western Mail as The Insider. #193

Still Real Afters All These Years

It had been a good night at Chapter, proving that the cultural epicentre of the city hadn’t yet completely shifted to Roath. The night before I’d been at Market House, the art centre’s extension next door, a mess of studios, work rooms, offices for small arts companies, designers, publishers, dancers. I’d been talking up the capital, giving the assembled my take on what makes this great place tick, how it shines and shimmers, how it had been in its dirty past, how its Welshness works, how it fits into Wales, a post-industrial coal valley capital, growing ever larger over the hills that stand behind it, recovering land from the mass of tidal bog to its south.

“I bought your Real Cardiff when I first came here,” says the Turkish girl, smiling. “I thought it might tell me where I was”. I tell them about the lost wells of Penylan and the one with the shape of Christ’s knee on the rim. I tell them about the Butes being like Bill Gates and buying out anything that sprang up in opposition. The austere second Marquis with his docks and his visions. The Catholic third with his Victorian Disneyworld at Cardiff’s heart. I talk about the rivers, the Tan, the Whitebrook, the Canna, the Wedal, which we no longer have. We sup Cabernet Sauvignon and sporadically nibble at the crisps brought by the organiser. Some of the listeners buy books.

For many years I came here to the New Welsh Review offices, presided over, then, by the late Robin Reeves. Robin was a green-leaning socialist nationalist. Voice of understanding. Knew the world’s shape. He ploughed a liberal furrow with his literary magazine, NWR. You got a free mug if you subscribed. On these were the faces of Idris Davies and R.S. Mug collectors signed up and then threw the magazine away. The magazine itself has now moved to Aberystwyth and its former offices are occupied by men with drawing boards and computers and tubes of paint. Out of the window I can see early evening Market Road revellers, setting off for the pubs of Cowbridge Road – the Corporation, the Ivor Davies, the Kings Castle, the Admiral Napier. Places full of shine and light.

It has always been like this in West Cardiff. Before the Arts Centre came to Chapter in 1971 the buildings were Cantonian High School. Before that the space was used by the monthly Canton cattle market which ran from the Police Station to Carmarthen Street. Sheep and cattle pens, stables, slaughter house, meat market, manure, dust.

But today culture shines. Blown Magazine is based here and the theatre is the venue for John William’s In Chapters performances. NWR under its new editor Gwen Davies might even launch in the bar. Watch this space.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #192

Green and Green

I’m at the bottom end of Brecknockshire set for one of the longest drives Wales has. I’ll cross Brecon, enter Radnor, cross Montgomery and end in the south of Denbighshire. I’m travelling from one side to the other of Powys, the giant county created in a fit of local government reorganisation in 1974. This is the paradise of Powys, the ancient kingdom, the land of Cynddylan, Rhodri the Great and Maredudd ab Owain ab Edwin. It’s been restored.

Powys might be the largest of Welsh regions but it is also the least populated. You can drive miles through intensely green upland without seeing a soul. There are places here where you can stand on hilltops and as far as can be seen spot no evidence of human intervention. The Green Desert, the late Harri Webb called it. He published a book of the same name in 1969. The concept only really hits home when you drive through it. All is hawthorn, ash, scrub oak, pasture, Sitka spruce reforestation. A glowing, constant green – evidence of ancientness, non-intervention, and constant rain.

Webb’s poetry was accessible, historical, humorous, and often highly political. He sang, he rhymed, he amused. The nearest writer we have to him today is the outspoken and entertaining Mike Jenkins. Neither poet actually spent much time in the Powys desert. Why would they? There’s nothing here.

I exaggerate, naturally. There’s Newtown and Brecon and Builth and the great Powys capital, Llandrindod Wells. A place of smelly water and middle class, where business meetings involving participants from both the north and the south are always held. The geographic centre of Wales. Equal misery - to get there everyone has to travel.

So why am I making the great green drive? So that I can write the introduction to Mike Parker’s next book, Real Powys. The Real books have hitherto concentrated on conurbations, built-up environments, big towns, cities, streets, places where industry has changed the landscape, places where people live. Cardiff, Llanelli, Merthyr, Aberystwyth, Swansea, Wrexham, Liverpool, Newport. In the pipeline are Bangor, Pembroke, more Swansea and Cardiff once again. But that still leaves great slices of Wales unrealised. Most of the country, in fact. Getting the Welsh compiler of the Rough Guide to have a crack at it was an obvious move.

Parker spent a time on television travelling around Wales’s B-roads in a camper van. He’s a map fanatic, author of the excellent Map Addict, a sort of history of the object mixed with his own often hilarious involvement. As an immigrant he’s written perceptively about the native Welsh. His latest, The Wild Rover, covers the chequered and turbulent history of the British footpath. That’s due from Collins next month. Real Powys will come from Seren next year. Expect green on the cover.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #191

Bigger Than The Beatles

Come Together sang the Beatles in 1969 and we’ve been trying hard ever since. There are some great joinings out there. S4C and the BBC, Egypt and Libya, Spain and Gibraltar, Concord and Concorde, fish and chips, the Tories and the Liberals, Bradford & Bingley and Santander. John Lennon when he wrote that song from Abbey Road had in mind acid guru Timothy Leary’s Come Together campaign to oust Ronald Regan as governor of California. Lennon wanted revolution but Leary lost.

Back in Wales we have our own versions of togetherness. Plaid and Labour, Gwynedd and Anglesey, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the University of Wales, Swansea and Neath (now almost one city), Cardiff and Newport, still ten miles apart but from the Welcome to Newport signs on the road leading east from St Melons you wouldn’t know. It’s a Welsh thing, I suppose, because when you are small, as most things are in this country, then joining with someone else will make you bigger. The bigger the better. In a place where small has been beautiful for a lifetime that’s a revolution in itself.

The coming together of Ty Newydd, Wales’ National gem of a centre for writers and Academi, the literature promotion agency is something that’s been in the back of administrator’s minds for at least a decade. If the aim is to provide both consumers and creators of writing with a country in which to flourish then administrative slickness, financial security, and strategic clout become desirable options.

From April this year these two vital organisations will join together to become Literature Wales. In simplistic terms this means one web site, one ticketing agency, one place to call for literary excitement, access and advice.

Strategically this will ensure that that literature in Wales will now benefit from a truly national and rival-free delivery. From well-funded festivals in places where they’ve previously not been. From a commercially sponsored and completely restructured Wales Book of the Year. From free student and young people’s membership to Wales’s august Society of Writers. From a campaign to bring writers, reading and writing into the heart of communities that have previously felt themselves denied, disparaged or ignored. From a truly unified striding of Welsh writers on the international stage and a bringing to Wales of the writers of the world. To a knitting together of the loose threads of our culture, making theatre talk to poetry, linking health care to literature and putting our writers and their work in public places from the Cardiff Bay Barrage to the lighthouses off Anglesey.

Literature Wales, with the able support of the Arts Council, will put our literatures right where they need to be, make them enviable, accessible and enjoyable. Best of all Literature Wales will make them glow.

An earelier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #190