Must Try Harder

It is about eleven on Christmas Eve Eve. I am in Asda buying snacks and pop to mix with the spirits we have at home. It is filled with people buying huge quantities of crisps, breaded mozzarella fingers and Advocaat. I have just had to wait in the ‘20 items or less’ self-service queue for ten minutes while a couple scan through an entire large trolley worth of alcohol and ready meals, and another man struggles with the mysteries of the barcode scanner. My arms are loaded with heavy bags; I am glad to finally be heading towards the rotating doors which lead to freedom and cool air.

But wait! As I walk past the last row of self-scan checkouts I spot something which troubles me. A skinny young woman in pink tracksuit, mouth hanging half open, is about to finalise her purchase of Santa Baby, the latest ‘novel’ by Katie Price’s ghost-writer. Filled with the charity of the season and the snobbishness of the English graduate, I think ‘I must do something to prevent this affront to everything I stand for.’ I fight back the urge to approach the woman, pick up her book, and say “ma’am, I have as much confidence in Katie Price’s ability to write a novel as I do in your ability to read it”, then watch as she puzzles of the meaning of my words. I leave the store feeling sickeningly smug.

On my way home, through the dark streets of Wolverhampton, I am smacked by a grim realization. Katie Price has four autobiographies, seven novels, and twenty six children’s books on the market. I have one book of verse which has only sold three copies, and I bought all of those. I know that quality is more important than quantity, and I feel in my self-important heart that my book must be better than any of Jordan’s, but there is one fact that I cannot ignore.

I have written a handful of paragraphs and two or three lines of verse in the past few weeks. Even with a ghost writer in tow, Katie Price clearly spends more time working on her literary career than I do. How can I call myself a writer when I apparently put less effort into writing than Britain’s most famous blow-up doll?

And so it becomes clear. I must try harder. And step one is to reinstitute this blog, and make it better than ever before. Watch this space folks, and have a Merry Christmas.

Book Review: Scarlett Thomas, 'Our Tragic Universe'

'Never judge a book by its cover,' says the old adage. While I know this is the case, I've often had a problem with this statement. If you aren't supposed to judge a book by it's cover, what do you judge it by? You can't just stand in Waterstones reading a whole book. Believe me, I've tried.

Luckily, anyone judging one of Scarlett Thomas's books by their beautiful hardback covers will not be disappointed by their content. I first came across Scarlett Thomas through The End of Mr. Y, which tells the story of a PhD student writing a thesis on late Victorian thought experiments, who finds a supposedly cursed book containing instructions on how to reach a psychic realm known as the 'troposphere'. If this all seems increasingly far fetched, be assured Thomas's prose is strong enough to carry the reader through it, and there are so many interesting philosophical ideas crammed within its pages that it makes for genuinely intelligent, thoughtful reading. I loved it, and started lending it to people almost as soon as I had put it down.

Last week I was pleasantly surprised when one of these people bought me a copy of her latest book, Our Tragic Universe, for my birthday. Especially as I needed something to read before the start of the next semester and a return to busy reading lists. Before opening it, judging the book by its cover, I saw that Cannongate's design department had once again excelled themselves.

The book's protagonist, Meg, lives with her boyfriend in Devon, ghostwriting teenage genre fiction to pay the bills while her 'proper' novel shrinks and changes shape but never seems to progress. There is a trend in fiction to centre stories around middle class bohemians, especially writers and publishers, and I sometimes worry that the whole thing could collapse into a smug, self referential black hole. In Our Tragic Universe, despite a cast made up almost exclusively of middle class bohemians, this does not seem to be a problem. The characters are human, likable, but imperfect. They move through the story getting together, breaking up, making unexpected fortunes, changing from happiness to sadness or from sadness to happiness, meeting fairies and searching for a monster on Dartmoor, but none of it feels climactic.

In most books this would be a flaw, but in a book which concerns itself so often with questions of plot, the nature of fiction and it's relationship to real life, it seems appropriate that despite all these reversals we finish the book feeling as if nothing much has happened. Indeed, one of the book's central questions is that of how to avoid simplistic expectations of a neat plot where the hero overcomes the monster and all loose ends are tied, both in fiction and in the ways we use its structures to understand our real lives.

Scarlett Thomas teaches creative writing in Kent, and it is clear that this has inspired some of the ways in which this book examines the structures of fiction, making it an interesting read for aspiring writers. While the book reflects the 'storyless stories' it discusses, it does it in such a way which to me, never felt boring, although I'm sure some readers would find it slow to start, I expect most of them would be won over by the end, which despite the feeling that nothing has been overcome, still gives a satisfying sense of conclusion.

Some things to worry about....

So, the new government has announced cuts in many areas. It's a recession; cuts are a necessary unpleasantness, and unsurprisingly nobody wants to be on the receiving end. The Socialist Worker Party has been putting up posters imploring people to protest against the cuts, but what's the alternative? Spending at the same rate in spite of our huge national debt?

So what am I worried about? At the moment, two things. The cuts to arts organizations, and the possibility of unlimited tuition fees at universities. If these changes come into place it will be too late to affect my degree, and despite the possibility that I might choose to return to university for a Masters, it's not for myself that I worry.

I have an uneasy feeling that, in a higher education culture which increasingly values business skills and employability over more traditional academic traits, it is the Arts and Humanities over which the sword of Damocles hangs poised, particularly the more purely academic subjects. Why study Literature when Media offers more employability options?

And combined with the cuts to funding for the arts, it offers the possibility of a particularly bleak future. A future where higher education costs at least twenty-one thousand pounds, and the more prestigious institutions cost much more. Where the already rich can afford the education it takes to make their way into politics and big business. In this distopia, no arts would ever be banned. They would merely die out with a whimper, financially unviable.

Obviously I don't believe things would really get this bad, but the arts which require a lot of funding, such as film, music, and most of the visual arts, could suffer badly. Obviously pop music (which I use in the broadest possible sense, to mean anything other than Classical and perhaps the more high-brow forms of jazz) will survive and probably even thrive. It is at once a multi million pound industry and a modern day equivelant to folk music, the music of the people. As ever, some of it will be very good, and some of it will be very bad. Street art could also do very well, and the often anti-authoritarian dialogue it presents will be particularly suited to the tough times ahead.

Where does literature fit into this? On the one hand the materials are relatively cheap, as are the books which must fuel the engine of any writer, and while publishing can still be relatively expensive, the advent of home printers and the internet make it easier than ever for your work to reach a wider audience. However, there is not much money in poetry, the short story or even the more literary novel, the changes in university funding mean that it will become increasingly difficult for people to study literature. The accessibility of electronic self publishing is also has its less attractive points. The internet is a big place, with no quality control, and obscurity is the curse of the blogger.

The arts have some difficult times ahead, and I think what literature needs is to learn from the unsigned band and the street artist. We need to develop a DIY culture which encourages good quality work, links to the great conversation of long dead poets, dramatist, authors, journalists and philosophers, but is also ready to experiment and carry that conversation forward into new directions. Of course, how we achieve this is another question...

Official Launch

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am glad to announce the official launch of the new BCU literary magazine, Paper Tiger. Thanks to everyone who submitted or was involved at the planning stages.

Read it, hot off the virtual presses at www.apapertiger.tk

Email any submissions for future issues to apapertiger@live.co.uk

Quick Notice (let's make this happen)

Tomorrow, at 1pm, there is an open meeting about an English Department Literary Magazine in B609. If you are an English student at BCU you may have gotten a text about it. I fully intend to be there, and suggest anyone with an intrest does the same.

Towards the end of last academic year myself and another student, Alex Kent, attempted to get a literary magazine started. Due to a large dose of naivity, this dwindled to a couple of pages in the student union magazine, Spaghetti Junction. We never thought of suggesting it to the department and our knowledge of publising things like this was minimal. We received no submissions, and the page quickly starved to death.

I only hope that with the department backing us, and a fuller pannel of people working on it, this time will be different. We have a great Creative Writing course at BCU and the people on it deserve a place to showcase their work. Come on everbody, lets make this happen.

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.

A Confession...

Hello, my name is Luke, and I have an addiction. I’m not an alcoholic (although they do say admitting it is the hardest part). I’m not, to the best of my knowledge, addicted to sex or drugs, and while I will confess to a minor addiction to Rock and Roll, that’s not what I’m here to talk about. My addiction began probably before I turned two, and as of yet shows no sign of abating. Ladies and gentlemen, I am addicted to words. My rate of consumption is difficult to determine, due to the pressures of university life I currently get through a novel almost every week, in addition to plays, poems, magazine articles, films, television programmes, adverts, song lyrics and countless conversations. What’s worse is that I’ve now started dealing. I suppose everyone deals here and there, but I’d very much like to make a living out of it (yes, this is going to be one of those ‘struggling/aspiring/wannabe writer’ blogs, apologies to those of you who were hoping for something a little more ‘trainspotting’).

Where does this addiction come from? I don’t know. What I do know is that I just love words. All sorts of words. Words which crack and slap and spit. Words which you sound like other words. Words which you can pick apart one syllable at a time. Words which you can roll around your mouth as you say them (of which ‘bollock’ is an unfortunately literal-sounding example). Words which mean more than one thing. And I love what happens when you string words together to make a story or a poem. The way they can be made to pierce the heart or tickle the funny bone. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I think that sometimes ten well chosen words can say more than a thousand pictures (no offence to any visual artists out there). Anyway, that’s what this blog is about. Not necessarily individual words themselves, but my attempts to become a better (and with any luck, better known) writer, and about anything which pops into my head to write about. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it interesting, and not as pretentious as it has the potential to be (feel free to let me know if it’s heading in that direction). Here’s to a better blog next time, not because I think this one is bad, but because improvement is the way forward.