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Quite the contrary - I am alive – and I am currently gearing up for some exam marking, invigilating, second draft finishing and book group visiting (come to Diss library on the 20th May – it’s in Norfolk).

I am currently reading Tim Mitchell’s ‘Truth and Lies in Murder Park’ (very nearly finished, honestly – then I’ll get started on the review), Patrick Hamilton’s ’20,000 Streets Under the Sky’ (I’m setting the book after next in a pub, that’s all there is to it) and in the downstairs toilet there is (holding back the shelf full of LRB back issues) ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.’ I was rather snotty about it when it came out, it being about wizards and all, but when I saw it for 80p in a library clear out in Crystal Palace a week or two ago I couldn’t resist, rationalising it to myself as very good value for money at 0.1p per page and a possible capital investment that might later find its way onto eBay. It very well still might, but not until after I’ve read it…

I’ve also been invited to a party, which is very nice. Will certainly not be blogging about it though, under Chatham House rules (or whatever they’re called).

Anyway, nice to be back.

Check me out on twitter too.

I like it. What do you think?

New arrival makes me too busy for blogging. See Vulpes Libris and try again at the beginning of July.

“Your difficult could be very different to mine. It might be a quality found in the style, the construction, or the narrative of a novel. It might be found by reading non-fiction, or poetry, or a form of writing you’ve never read before . For me it might be in my picking up that book that dad was disappointed I didn’t understand when I was twelve years old. It might be anything, but I would be able to tell you why it was difficult for me and you would be able to see why it was difficult and we could both benefit from understanding the processes that took me from one place to another. It is an ineffable but recognisable quality and our engagement with it should be respected. When we see it in writing we should hold it up and say “this is good,” whether we like that writing or not. What we should not do is dismiss it as obfuscatory, pretentious or needless, because we do not understand it, or like it, or because it makes us uncomfortable, or because we are threatened by it, because without this quality there is no movement, no change, no progress, no development, just the constant re-reading of what we have read before and if it means we occasionally have to sit through writing that merely mimics difficulty without delivering on its promise then that’s just tough and who knows, perhaps we are misreading it anyway. Perhaps, if we came back to it in ten years time we might at last get the point of it and understand that writing we dismiss is often writing we do not understand.”

 ”Every year it becomes less and less possible to find an independent bookshop or an independent publisher or an independent minded author and every book is fine tuned to appeal to Richard and Judy’s editor or whatever cultural trend is currently riding high in the collective unconscious. But what about the writing? What place is there in all of this for the difficult, edgy, elitist experimentation that has to be fostered despite its failure to be accessible or to appeal to a broad audience, or make money? Writing that offends in its desire to be superior, that doesn’t care if it’s not liked or understood or marketable? Where is this work to find a haven when its traditional home – the subsidised mid-list – is being gradually put out to grass and the resources that once paid for it are streamlined into paying for cardboard cutouts and window displays for an ever decreasing number of books?

The answer is nowhere.

There is a failure of will when it comes to resisting the commercialisation of writing where even those who write under the banner of ‘literary’ fiction feel they have to apologise for stretching their readership and the notion that James Joyce is superior to N1ck H0rnby is frowned upon. So we come back to the question of what is the writing for? James Joyce is better than N1ck H0rnby at being literature. Whether it’s better at being entertaining is a matter of personal choice, but if your notion of being entertained precludes being challenged then, perhaps, the idea that writing should be ebtertaining is one that needs to be questioned, because at the moment it is, in the market place, almost unassailable and it is suffocating everything in its path.”

 NOTE: I use this spelling of N1ck H0rnby to dodge his Google Alert. I haven’t got the energy to argue with him/his publisher/his agent/someone he knows at UEA about why I don’t think H1gh F1delity is as good as Finnegan’s Wake. 

Previous catches were landed within 12 hours of posting, so my feeling is that Tsepeneag is either too secure in his reputation to have Google Alert, or he is a wily adversary, not so easily netted. Or he doesn’t speak English… Or authors can only be called upon to take notice of potentially libelous or insulting material. I’m not cynical enough to believe the latter (although, if all else fails…) 

So let’s try:

PHILIP ROTH – I thought AMERICAN PASTORAL was brilliant (although possibly a little heavy on the glove making) if you read this, please leave a comment and, who knows, we might get together for a beer if you’re ever in Norwich (UK).

The only problem is that this does rather create a false impression of the accessibility of the material you are alerted to. I Googled an author’s name today – a famous one, now deleted from the blog – to see how many pages of results I’d have to trawl through before I found my mention of them amongst the hundreds of thousands of others. Both Google and I gave up at the 56th page of search results without finding me at all. Yet Google Alert, computerised and indefatigable, finds it without a problem seconds after it is typed up and presents it as if it were there for the whole world to see, when in fact it is practically impossible for someone searching for that author to ever come across it (presupposing the author is reasonably famous). Google might want to append a ranking of where the sites that are listed in their Alerts would place in a general search to give users an idea of how likely it is that anyone could ever find it. Could save a lot of needless anxiety.

On the plus side, I had an idea whilst pondering the above. If my mentioning authors is inevitably bringing me to their attention, mightn’t I be able to use it postively? Yes, is the answer.

By naming famous writers – who, let’s remember, would otherwise have no interest in me whatsoever – it should be possible to lure them to my blog. The appearance of their name would set off their Google Alert and draw them here. What I’d do once they were here I’m not sure, but at the very least by being nice to them, I might induce them to leave a comment. From there who knows? A conversation? A meeting of minds? A collaboration between a young-ish and ambitious writer (me) and a respected and established literary figure (them)? The possibilities are infinite, so let’s give it a go.

I will start off with my current idol:

DUMITRU TSEPENEAG – I can’t get enough of your VAIN ART OF THE FUGUE – please leave a comment if you read this.

If you are here, then let me direct you to Vulpes Libris – an excellent book blog, mentioned last week in the Observer as the future of book reviewing – who have asked me to guest sometime in the next few weeks in their Thursday Soapbox slot. Unlike me they have thousands of readers, so I’ll have to be even more circumspect than I have already been being… (and write more clearly)

Well, when I’m not familiarising myself with everything that’s ever been written on, around, or relevant to the subject of the lunatic judge D.P. Schreber (and there’s a lot of it – a hundred years’ worth and counting) or boning up on writing exercises for teaching next year, I’ve got to the point now where I only read books by people I’ve met.

One of the downsides of being around writers is that you have to read their work just in case they happen to mention it. They don’t like it when, after they’ve said ‘I did something similar in my novel The X of Y’, you reply ‘never read it. What’s it about?’ You can try to bluff but it’s hard work – all it takes is for them to ask you what you thought of some plot point and then all the smiling and nodding and ‘yeah, yeah’-ing in the world isn’t going to help you. It’s easier just to read it.

Trouble is, there are about twenty novelists (I’m guessing) hanging about at UEA with a combined oeuvre of more than a hundred books, so I have to prioritise. I’ve started with the best received novels of the people I’m most likely to have a reasonably long conversation with. After that I’ll work my way through to the difficult second novels and those writers who only occasionally poke their heads round. One day I hope to be able to walk the concrete pathways of UEA without having to duck out of the way of people I haven’t read yet. I just wish the buggers would stop writing new stuff: it’s difficult enough as it is.