Some Complaints and a Challenge.

Wolverhampton is probably not in the running to be the next European city of culture. It's not a complete cultural wasteland, it has a pretty good art gallery , a decent theatre and some good live music venues. The local Waterstone's however is really letting the side down.

I've talked before about the Waterstone's in Birmingham. There are two of them in the city centre, the one in the beautiful old bank building and the one that's near the Pavilions, which has a larger than usual selection of poetry, drama, philosophy etc.

The Waterstone's in Wolverhampton on the other hand is a different matter, although this possibly says more about smaller Waterstone's stores than it does about Wolves. I went in looking for Waverley by Sir Walter Scott, which is on my reading list for Romantic Century. They didn't have it. In fact they didn't have anything at all by Walter Scott; the 'classics section' was only given one small section of shelves, and at least three of those were entirely taken up by Dickens. I like Dickens, but he could have some room for everyone else.

Of course, being me, I decided to explore the rest of the shop. It had no Scott, and no Byron, but it had four different books 'by' Jordan. I think that about sums up the situation. This shop had no room for one of the most famous poets ever, but could find room for the novels of a woman whose biggest claim to fame is having cartoon knockers, and whose only discernible talent is showing them off.

You may be wondering why I put the word 'by' in inverted comas like that. I once read (I think mainly out of morbid curiosity) an interview with Jordan in the Metro, in which she revealed her... method for writing novels. Basically, she comes up with the idea for a plot and then the novel is ghost written. To me this seems to be a similar process to celebrity endorsed perfumes or clothing lines, where you know that they had very little input and are more or less just a brand.

If Katie Price wants to defend herself from this statement, I suggest she gets in touch, and she can do so by way of a short story competition. All in favor say 'aye'.

Review: 'Confessions of an English Opium Eater'

Some of you may be wondering why I chose to call this blog 'Undertheinfluence'. Well, my intention was to emphasis the fact that as aspiring (or, to put it in a way which sounds less up-my-own-arse, 'wannabe') writer, I will always be unavoidably influenced in one way or another by whatever I happen to be reading at the time (and everything else I've ever read). In that spirit I've decided that it would be a good idea to stick the occasional book review up here. 'Occasionally' meaning whenever I finish reading a book, which is nowhere near as often as it should be. I'll also do a poetry review every month, in keeping with my earlier pledge to read a collection every month.

The first book I'll be reviewing is Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which seems appropriate given the name of the blog. I had to read this for my 'Romantic Century (B)' module at uni, but (if you're reading Ian) it could also sit nicely on the 'Life Writing' reading list. At eighty-eight pages it is more properly a journalistic essay than a book, and was initially published in two parts in the London Review in 1821. Despite it's short length though the book is full of interesting episodes which give a rich picture of life in early 19th century Britain. For example, we are told that Manchester factory workers would often spend their wages on opium because 'the lowness of the wages... would not allow them to indulge in ale or spirits'. Times have clearly changed. I've never tried to buy heroin, but I imagine it would cost me a fair bit more than a pint.

De Quincey's descriptions of being essentially homeless in London and Wales are intriguingly juxtaposed with episodes where he is mixing with young aristocrats at Eton, and the hallucinogenic Opium-dream sequences build layer upon layer of hypnotic detail. What is really interesting about this work though is de Quincey's style of writing which is capable of both wit and seriousness. For a confessional autobiography he doesn't actually give the reader much detail about his life in the period when he was taking opium, partly because of his decision to remain anonymous. This lack of background information does not seem to matter though as de Quincey guides the reader through a whirlwind off different associations, often addressing them directly.

I once saw a review of Trainspotting which described it as 'the voice of punk grown elequent', but this heroin story gives us a voice which is truly elegant.

The Joys of Wikipedia

I'm sure that anyone who is in anyway involved in the university system is used to being told how wikipedia is at it's best too simple and at it's worse too apocryphal to be used as a source of academic information. This is probably true, but I feel that it somehow misses the point. Wikipedia is not there to replace academic journals, it is there as a repository of interesting (or sometimes not so interesting) information for the general reader. This function, it fulfills magnificently. And if it is occasionally inaccurate it is worth remembering that for every ill-informed mistake or malignant lie that is posted there are hundreds of informative articles, and a horde of researches wait to swoop down like eagles to correct the inconsistencies.

Wikipedia is also very good for finding interesting things which you weren't even looking for. For example, a few weeks ago I was looking at the Wikipedia entry on Samuel Taylor Coleridge as research for my Life Writing assignment. My tutor, the much-praised Mr Ian Marchant, actually encourages this sort of behaviour, taking the view that for a creative module, it is far more important to be interesting than to be accurate (as long as we are still aiming for some sort of truth). This not only led to my discovery of the man from Porlock which became the focus of my project (Coleridge's excuse for Kublah Khan being 'unfinished' was that he was interrupted halfway through by a visitor from Porlock which, in short, made him lose his mojo), it also led me to a less relevant but arguably more interesting discovery. I got distracted. forgetting for a moment that both Xanadu and 'The sacred river Alph' are both entirely fictional, or at least mythical, I decided to look up the real Kublai Khan and see if he had tried to build 'a stately pleasure dome'. He hadn't. A map on this page caught my attention though, and below that map was a name. That name was Rabban Bar Sauma.

It turns out that there had been a christian tradition in China and Mongolia as far back as the 7th century. This in itself was unexpected and fascinating, but then I discovered that Christianity was also a strong force in ancient Mongolia which it seems was much more cosmopolitan than might be expected. Rabban Bar Sauma was a christian monk, born somewhere near modern Beijing, which was then part of the Mongolian empire. Sometime in what wikipedia vaguely calls his 'middle age', he decided to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with his student, Raban Marcos. Because of Military unrest in the middle east (some things never change) they never made it to Jerusalem, but ended up in Baghdad, where they met the Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox church. They carried out some diplomatic work for the Patriarch, failed to return home because of more military unrest, and when the Patriarch died, Marcos was elected as his replacement.

The story did not end here (although judging by the length of this post it might have been better for my readership if it had). Marcos then appointed Bar Sauma to make a diplomatic journey westwards. By this point he was in his late sixties. On this journey he met the Byzantine emperor, witnessed an eruption of Mount Etna, failed to meet the pope (who had died not long before he arrived in Rome) but negotiated with his cardinals, met several European kings, including Edward I of England, returned to Rome and met the new pope, (who allowed him to celebrate his own Eastern Eucharist on Palm Sunday in the Vatican). He then returned to Baghdad bearing gifts for his former student from the new Pope as a sign of inter-church good will, and spent the remainder of his life there writing down his adventures.

I know it's unfashionable to stick a moral on a story, but I feel a post this long needs something to justify it. Something along the lines of 'you're never too old to start an adventure' seems appropriate. It also makes me wonder how big the gulf was between far eastern Christianity (which would have been effected by contact with Buddhism and other oriental philosophies) and the western forms of Christianity we are used to. Maybe Wikipedia can tell me.

Banjo man

Today as I got to work, there was a man sitting on a wall in the car park playing the banjo. I don't know who he was or where he came from, but he was a youngish man, and didn't look homeless, and he certainly wasn't a busker. Our carpark is not a public throughway, and there really is no reason for any one to go through it other than to get to the back entrance of the odeon. People don't even walk past it close enough to have noticed the banjo player. He was, as a friend of mine pointed out, playing only for the music itself.

Personally I think there is something really special in that. As I passed the man, we exchanged a glance and a nod. That was my way of saying 'I like hearing you play the banjo as I get to work on this sunny, start-of-spring day'. It put me in a good mood for my shift, which is also helpful. About fifteen minutes into my shift, the next time someone had to go to the car park, he was gone. I wouldn't be surprised if the managment had moved him along. I'm not even sure I'd blame them for doing so, it's part of their job to keep an eye on things like that after all.

Personally though, I would have been tempted to employ him to play there everyday.

My Own Personal Porlock.

When it comes to historical fiction writers differ greatly in their methods. Some research their subject and period meticulously, others prefer to trust their imaginations and, well, make it all up. Both methods are perfectly valid, although the latter relies on at least some prior knowledge and common sense. Generally I would probably fall slap bang in the middle of the two extremes, but recently, as I was working on a biographical piece on Samuel Taylor Coleridge for uni, I thought I should put a little bit more effort into research.

I was pleasantly surprised to find it actually quite interesting. Coleridge wasn't the most active of the Romantic Poets. He didn't elope to Switzerland with a young mistress, like Shelley, or have sex with almost everybody and then die in the Greek war of independence, like Byron. Hell, even Wordsworth visited revolutionary France and fathered an illegitimate child before he took to writing about daffodils. Coleridge on the other hand seemed to have spent the majority of his life talking or reading philosophy. Yes, he was addicted to opium, but so it seems was everyone else. Why then did I choose to write about him? I suppose mainly because Kublah Khan is one of my favorite poems.

Anyway, a week or so ago I was sat in the branch of Costa inside Waterstones on New Street, Birmingham. Bookshops are of course my natural habitat, and this particular one is situated in an old bank building, which makes it particularly interesting. I was quite happy, drinking my latte and making notes on William Hazlitt's My First Acquaintance with the Poets, sad as it is I could have spent the whole day in this manner. I felt like a 'real' writer. Added to that, I was actually finding some useful information, with in a couple of hours I felt as if, if I could just sit at my laptop, my work would just splurge fully formed onto the keyboard. Unfortunately it was not to be. I had to go to work.

I work at the Odeon, again on New Street. After spending the morning in the aforementioned manner, doing screen checks on the deeply irritating Alvin and the Chipmunks 2: The Squeekual comes as something as a culture shock. But more irritatingly, it meant I had to wait before I could start my work, and when I did the moment had gone, and it my splurge was, pardon the disturbing imagery, constipated. There's probably a moral in this story somewhere, but what it is remains ambiguous.

The Lost Art of Reading Poetry.

It's the 21st century. Nobody reads poetry anymore. This claim is probably debatable, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who do read poetry for pleasure, but I suspect they are few and far between. How many of you do? How many of you even know someone who does?

It seems to me that the only people who read poetry (or at least serious poetry, discounting overly twee, sentimental or purely humorous verse, although all those things I'm sure have there place) are either students of literature or people who are moderately serious about writing it, and it is usually only the later who read it for pleasure. Again, this is probably an over simplification, but one which, without doing any research, I would be willing to bet has large measure of truth.

I fall into both of the above categories and I will freely admit that I probably don't read enough poetry. This is a fault on my part.

Why don't people read poetry anymore? For some people the enjoyment of poetry is destroyed by having it dissected in front of them at school. Unlike dissecting frogs, there is no morbid fascination in the dissection of poetry. Only dry skeletal structures of metre and rhyme. For the aspiring poet these things are important, for the lay reader the effect (unless they are interested in the technical side) the effect is something similar to watching a magician who tells you 'I am now going to pull a rabbit from this hidden compartment in the top of my hat'. It could also be that people see poetry as being either overly twee or sentimental (as mentioned above) or pretentious and inaccessible. Or at the very worst both.

I'll be honest, there is a lot of crap out there. Especially on the Internet, where there is often little or no quality control (including on my now abandoned Myspace page). But there is also a lot of really really good stuff out there. Even on the Internet.

From this day forth I vow to read one collection of poems every month. It's not a lot, but it's a quantity I can fit around my uni reading lists, assignments and working. And, fully aware that most of my readers are likely to be students on my course and I may be preaching to the converted, I urge you all to go away having read this and read a poem. Just one. If your lucky, or look in the right places you'll find something which makes you think, which makes you say 'yes that's exactly how that feels/looks' or even just 'It doesn't matter what it means, those words in that order sound beautiful to me'.

In the end, that's what it's all about.


P.S. If you find anything good, send it my way.