Regime Change and Zimbabwe

I guess I'm just among millions of people the world over this weekend, wishing all the harm in the world upon the awful Mugabe, his Zanu-PF mafia, and those goons of his who have been running around Zimbabwe this week advising citizens that a vote cast against the Chief will be the last thing they do on this earth. (Speaking of dictators: my bedtime hour was poisoned last night, having watched news pictures of that newly ordained Man of Peace Kim Jong-il, slouching across his imperial balcony in one of his tiny jumpsuits, so as to wave a fey hand at a parade in his honour somewhere beneath him...)
Zimbabwe, but. What is to be done? I've found myself recalling (you may too) that in the run-up to the Coalition invasion of Iraq some of the loudest voices in opposition sounded not so much opposed to regime change as desirous of setting the global agenda on same (i.e. why Saddam before Mugabe?) But let's assume that was just a minor element of a bigger rhetorical argument, and that no serious parties have the appetite, will or means for knocking Mugabe off his perch. On that note I can't quite bring myself to see what the right-wing press are saying at the moment, because rightly or wrongly I fear I'll have to read some nostalgia for Ian Smith and the Good Old Days. Thickening the moral soup on this point is a piece in the New Statesman by Mark Ashurst, director of the Africa Research Institute, and Gugulethu Moyo, a Zimbabwean lawyer. They write:
"The collapse of the post-colonial pact between Mugabe and his erstwhile enemies - the Rhodesian farmers, Britain, capitalism and Empire - has triggered a keen appetite for historical vindication among western critics. Mugabe's fiercest critics are often the same people who, in the early 1980s, turned a blind eye to the notorious "Gukurahundi" slaughter of 20,000 Ndebele loyal to his rival, the late Joshua Nkomo. But in Zimbabwe today there is not much appetite to indict Mugabe for human rights abuses - if only he would go quietly."
Well, he's not going quietly today. So what next? Timothy Garton Ash had a few suggestions in the Guardian yesterday: a new UN resolution, non-recognition of the results of today’s non-poll, no US/UK investment in a new Zimbabwean platinum mine, the rescinding of Mugabe’s honorary knighthood, a petition to Thabo Mbeki, attendance at a demonstration at Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday party in Hyde Park today - and good old sanctions, as once seemed to work in South Africa and Poland. Maybe throw into that a shot of red-blooded socialist solidarity, like the case I read highlighted by Christopher Hitchens in Slate of South African dockworkers who refused to unload a shipload of Chinese weapons bound for... guess where?
So, a few encouraging thoughts for a bad day, perhaps. Others in the London area can be more active in their expression and get along to Hyde Park.

Faber and Faber online in style

My esteemer publisher's brand-new and redesigned website is now available for public scrutiny, with lots for the browser to mull over and enjoy, including an exclusive Q&A with James Bradley, author of The Resurrectionist, which is a 'Summer Read' pick of the Richard & Judy show. There's info on the recently launched and much admired Faber Finds imprint whereby long-unavailable works of distinction are brought back into print. And currently there's a link to me and my stuff from the Authors page.

How Andrei man, have yuh hurd o' tha Toon?

Per my previous thoughts on Euro 2008 - the Germany/Austria match the other week was probably the last we will see of Mario Gomez in this tournament. So does that shorten the odds of Newcastle making a daft bid for him? In the Freddie Shepherd era, perhaps. But nobody knows quite what Mike Ashley wants to do with his money in these belt-tightening times. Much may depend on the charm and world-renowned acumen of Dennis Wise...
Belatedly, I learned that the Toon's crack scouts (or scouts on crack?) had been keeping an eye on Andrei Arshavin. But the Russian lad's own belated but bloody electrifying entrance to the tournament has been as good as a kick in the eye to any such pipe-dreams. As the fella on ITV said the other night, Alex Ferguson should take the £60 million he could get for Ronaldo and use about one-third of it on Arshavin.

The Sean Penn Administration, Cannes 2008

Last weekend I had a really interesting conversation with Sean Penn about his service as Jury President at the recent Cannes Film Festival. (That's him in the photo, having a smoke and looking slightly concerned - whether by the gentleman next to him or the paparazzi gang behind, we're not to know.) Anyhow, an edited account of aforementioned conversation will run in the next issue of Sight & Sound.
After Sean was announced as this year's Cannes Prez I was struck by the number of media outlets who decided to run the rule over the Festival's choice, so rehashing the legend of Penn the Dangerous Hothead of 1980s tabloid lore, as if ignorant of the fact that inter alia he had previously competed in the Official Selection at Cannes both as actor and director, and won the Acting Palme for She's So Lovely in 1997. But, such is the general standard of reporting on cinema out there, and particularly when bracketed to coverage of the Cannes Festival, where the celebration of what is very best in film is inevitably shackled to a realisation that movies are consumed far more widely and profitably by devotees of Spiderman and Batman, be they young or old.
Sean has been on the record umpteen times in the past about his particular problems with the Hollywood mainstream, and the outriding assumptions about the audience. And this subject naturally arose in the course of our Cannes discussion: 'As an audience member', he remarked, "I always feel frustrated by the monoculturalism of American cinema, and in so many places it’s American monoculturalism that people buy." (Yes, 'Hollywood Movie Actor' is still his own main occupation, but the closest he's ever got to the Hollywood mainstream is working for Clint Eastwood, whose creative control over his own work is the envy of film artists everywhere.)
There is a certain caste of film critics for broadsheet newspapers, in the UK as well as the US, who see themselves as the scourges of that 'American monoculturalism', but very often I think they're kidding themselves, if not their readers: their own finicky sense of personal discernment is what comes top of their agendas. The thought reoccured to me when Sean described how he and his jury ignored all the daily critical chatter about the films they were adjudicating upon: a discipline that resulted in his feeling aggrieved on the part of certain films and filmmakers once he reviewed the press coverage in the aftermath of the Festival and saw how movies he admired unreservedly had been instantly weighed in the balance by The Critics and found wanting.
At Cannes the deadline-driven comprehensive-coverage rush to judgement can be very injurious to a movie. Of course, judgement is always waiting round the corner for any creative undertaking and cannot be hidden from. But I know how Cannes works, and what is the daily routine for most film journalists out there (it's long, but not arduous, not by any reasonable standard, other than on the liver...) And it's a matter of fact that Cannes is not the ideal place for arriving quickly at a considered view of a picture, much less for conveying that to readers. Hence Sean's lament, particularly on the part of Steven Soderbergh's Che, on which his jury bestowed the Best Actor prize for Benicio Del Toro, but which had a rough ride in a lot of print outlets. "The diminishment", Sean told me, "is reminiscent of the bad reviews Bonnie and Clyde got, or Apocalypse Now, or the 'failure' Wizard of Oz was or It’s A Wonderful Life was." This remark I think is particularly useful, because the critical tendency is very often to make the best the enemy of the good. But with a lot of critics who regularly refer to the masters and masterpieces of the past, all you have to do is imagine what they would have said of those great originals had they been reviewing at the time: most likely, "Not without interest, but with (sighs) a lot of problems..."

Richard T Kelly at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, August 16 2008

The programme for this year's Edinburgh Book Festival is now published and online. I'll be there, I'm pleased to say, and my joint event is billed as follows:

Nick Harkaway & Richard T Kelly
Saturday August 16 7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
First Fiction: A BOOKCASE EVENT
Two of the most talked about debuts of the year. Nick Harkaway, son of John Le Carré, pours massive exuberance into his giddying fantasy of a post-apocalyptic Britain, The Gone-Away World. Richard T Kelly's equally ambitious Crusaders is a socio-political epic, people struggling to survive in the run-down, swift-changing North of England."

So. Maybe I'll see you there...

I've not been in Edinburgh at Festival time since 2001 - the last of four years I did as consultant to the Film Festival, also Lizzie Francke's last as Artistic Director, and the year when Sean Penn came to town - that was certainly the start of something... Previous to that, I tried out the whole Edinburgh thing in a few different categories. I was part of the Young Programme-Makers sidebar of the Television Festival in 1996. Further back, in 1993, I directed a stage production of David Mamet's Edmond on the Fringe, with a team of young performers from Bristol University far more talented in that field than myself (among them Neil Cole, Claire Wille and Samantha LeMole, to speak only of those whom I know to have carried on performing.)

So, looking back, I have to say I gave it a go.

Euro 2008: Not a Full-Back's Tournament...

How's it been for you so far? I must say I think some of the games have been bloody good. All the obvious things have been said correctly about Holland, Spain, and Portugal. What of the Germans, the pre-tournament faves who started so nicely? Here I should interject that:
a) I hold no brief whatsoever for the England team, and am relieved by their absence from this tournament, since the side is largely compromised of players I hate from club sides I hate; so I have no problem taking a friendly interest in the Germans (though I did hate them back in 1990 and 1996, when England sides more properly composed of the staunch likes of Beardsley, Gascoigne and Shearer were cruelly robbed.) And,
b) Following on from the above, though I can get interested in teams that don't feature players I know of and/or like, I'm instinctively more interested in teams who can claim some relationship, however tenuous, to Newcastle United. Turkey vs Czech Republic was a funny one last night, since Emre Belozoglu and David Rozehal lined up on opposed sides but both are headed out of St James's Park. But frankly you rarely get to see too many Toon players at the highest international level. What you do tend to see a lot of are the conspicuously over-priced duffers whom Newcastle are likely to offer for once their post-tournament price has sky-rocketed. Most such players go to Man United or Real Madrid, or even Spurs, or these days probably Portsmouth. But if they're really crap they may just end up being paraded in front of a dubious Gallowgate End. For instance Kenny Dalglish in his ill-fated 18 months at Newcastle made a strange and spectacular hash of buying players who would fail miserably at the 1998 World Cup.
I return to this sore subject with a bit less regret, because a month ago I learned Newcastle were keenly tracking Mario Gomez of Stuttgart and Germany, a shooting-boots sensation who clearly had no interest in coming up the Barrack Road to play for the Geordies against Wigan next season. Still, I've watched Gomez closely in this tournament, and so far the alice-band-wearing charlie hasn't managed to hit a cow's arse with a banjo. 10 minutes ago he achieved the Miss of the Tournament against Austria. Maybe he'll fill his boots in the second half. But for the moment Newcastle are looking lucky...

Bresson vs Mailer on the Meaning of a Bad Day

For a lot of years, and most especially on days when things aren't going so well for whatever apparent reason, I have treasured this comment of Robert Bresson's from his bracing little book of aphorisms, Notes on the Cinematographer. To wit:
"These horrible days – when shooting film disgusts me, when I am exhausted, powerless in the face of so many obstacles – are part of my method of work."
That's the spirit, I've tended to think. Don't fight a prevailing ill wind too hard. Accept that at certain hours the odds just aren't in your favour. Regroup and fight again tomorrow. See it as all part of the process.
But another of my heroes has just made me think again on this matter. Yes, Mailer, and in the course of the Q&A book On God as mentioned below. Insofar as I take the idea of karma seriously, as some objective accounting of our daily bravery and goodness or otherwise, which may have repercussions for us in a life to come as it has from some previous lives - I do so only because of Mailer. He always insisted that something spiritual was at stake in every instant of our lives, however seemingly banal and quotidian. And inevitably this led him to an integrated theory of Bad Days too, to wit:
"Whenever you have a bad day, there’s a lot of reasons for the downer. I can give you twenty causes for such an hour. Some are serious, some are passing. But, no, I won’t let you hide behind the notion that a bad day is no more than a slot on the roulette wheel… Whenever we have an emotion we can’t account for, good or bad, I expect that the root is karmic… Intense and unaccountable emotions can come from one’s karmic past."
So - I'm going to have to think this over anew. Does one give the devil his due if only for 24 hours? Or fight the devil at all times and all costs? Even when having a cup of coffee, or waiting in for a tradesman to call...? Some of Mailer's examples in On God are only marginally less bathetic. But I know what he's driving at.

Don't Shoot the Messenger, whether from Helmand or Arkansas

By a little and a little in this life I have learned to read and engage with the arguments of writers and commentators I was formerly inclined to disagree with on sight. This is no great achievement, of course, but I think it's been good for my health. Max Hastings was much too Establishment a figure for me in the 1980s and 1990s, but having begun to read some of his military history I'm much the better for it. This piece of his on the British mission in Afghanistan is for the Daily Mail, which is a different sort of Health Warning in itself, but it also reflects a substantive body of informed opinion, and while I wish the facts therein were otherwise, sadly they feel like facts nonetheless.
Then, to sink right below the waterline of decency... Dick Morris is someone I can't find an excuse for, but this Republican spinner/strategist was certainly made more than welcome in the Clinton White House, and as I recall he had no bigger fan than the Lady of the House. As such, the Devil knowing His own, I'm sure Morris's reckoning of Mrs Clinton's current schemes and motives is correct or near-as-dammit.

Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? The Debate Continues.

Say what you like about Vanity Fair magazine - that, for instance, it's Hello for people with degrees, or that its left-leaning political coverage might pack more clout if it wasn't swaddled in dime-a-dozen glossy worship of the Rich & Famous - but I have to say that Jim Windolf's blogging piece on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and translations of both plain can't be beat for covering all the key issues in a sharp and serious and amusing manner. Windolf seems to be as interested as I am in Nabokov's famously high-nosed dismissal of Dostoyevsky and all his works.
This was not just a matter of public pronouncement for Nabokov but a stubborn refusal to teach so much as a word of the author of The Brothers Karamazov to his Russian Literature undergraduate students at Cornell University back in the mid-1950s (i.e. when Nabokov was still teaching for his pennies, rather than reclining at ease on royalties from Lolita.) Hard to argue with Nabokov, of course - but, really, this was muleish of him.
The recurrent debate on whether having a favourite between the two Russian masters implies a personality type (or disorder...) feels like mere dinner-party sport to me - certainly not a serious question once one's undergraduate years are past. It seems to me the older you get the more you're bloody grateful to have the pair of them around, if only in spirit on the shelves...

Blogging Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann

In my teens I enjoyed what was for me a very useful correspondence with the Scottish singer/songwriter Momus (Nicholas Currie), who responded very graciously to umpteen dogged queries I had about his delightful recordings, in particular some of their literary underpinnings. I remember my chasing him about Jean Genet and he saying essentially that one or two of the plays were fine and dandy but that the novels (Our Lady of the Flowers and so forth) he planned on 'saving for his old age', along with Kafka's America. I found this very impressive, and shortly thereafter affected a similar if less meaningful stance toward the later novels of Thomas Mann. Thankfully the pose didn't last and I gave in to Doctor Faustus, of which I can say there is scarcely a novel I like better. But I was daunted still by Mann's slightly earlier tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers, all 1400+ pages of it. 'Only the exhaustive is truly interesting', Mann is believed to have said. (But then he never had to get through Crusaders.) In any event a friend has just made me an excellent present of the recent translation of Joseph by John E. Woods, and some low-but-building thrill tells me this is the very moment to crack those forbidding pages. I'm probably old enough now. But how long will the whole take me, in this age of distraction? Hard to say, maybe all year, but as a project I will log my impressions of it occasionally as I go along. Next year, I don't doubt, all the readers' groups will be at it like rats up a drainpipe...

Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac on DVD

In the Ten Bad Dates contributors listing I cite this as my favourite movie, for whatever that's worth. I've put up with a dodgy second-hand VHS of it for ten years now, but last week I discovered it's new to DVD. So that's good. I wrote the following for a festival program in 1999:
'Among the elite group of acknowledged cinematic masters, Robert Bresson is the most mysterious, the most forbidding, the most intensely revered. On the strength of these slightly thankless distinctions, he was also reckoned to be box-office poison. But understand that Bresson was neither hostile to or aloof from the movie-going public. Au contraire: no director could have respected an audience more, been more desirous of their attention and appreciation. “You must leave the spectator free”, Bresson fretted during a Cahiers du Cinema symposium with Godard. “And at the same time you must make yourself loved by him. You must make him love the way in which you render things. That is to say: show him things in the order and in the way that you love to see them and to feel them…” From this you get a savour of the great man’s seriousness, and the depth of his passion. Of course, if each man’s love were the same as the next, we’d all get into a terrible punch-up. As it is, Bresson’s inimitable way of seeing can still divide a crowd. Five or so years ago, I took an American friend to the re-release of Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac at London’s Everyman. We were fellow film students, accustomed to casting a self-consciously cool eye over each other’s favourites. On my home turf, so to speak, I was a little anxious, not having looked at Lancelot in years. Yet within minutes of projection, I was bobbing happily on the edge of my seat. After all, who but Bresson had the nerve to make films like this? Towards the close, as Lancelot tersely rallied his comrades for their doomed last stand (“Pour Artus contre Mordred!”), I wondered why this moment couldn’t inspire the same misty cinephile reverence as Warren Oates’ analogous “Why not?” in The Wild Bunch. Nevertheless, en route to the pub, my buddy was wryly sceptical of what he’d just seen: ‘Man. All those shots of feet…’'

Norman Mailer: On God

I'm reading this extraordinary book of dialogues between Mailer and his friend the scholar Michael Lennon, recorded in late 2006. They confirm and elaborate upon those spiritual convictions of Mailer's that have always erupted out of individual novels in the past, but which were abundantly present on every page of what turned out to be the last work, The Castle in the Forest. It's all quotable stuff, but this is a particular speculation that I was mentally underlining within moments of first meeting it:
"All right - we are going to be reincarnated. Whether we know what our reincarnation will be, I doubt. I expect it will be full of surprises, most unforeseen. Some, given our vanity, are likely to seem outrageously warped."

The Boss vs Lionel Bart...

Last night, around 9pm, my mobile started ringing. I recognised the Caller ID and answered, only to hear dim ambient noise, the hubbub of a group of people, some distant music. I figured My Mate had triggered his Blackberry accidentally down the pub, and so ended the call. Moments later my phone rang again, and this time the music was louder and clearer, as were the lyrics, and people were singing along: 'Because the night/belongs to lovers...' Finally my brain started working, this after a long torpid day. My Mate was at the Springsteen show at the Arsenal Emirates, and the E Street Band had just lit into the tune Bruce gave to Patti Smith. And My Mate just wanted to share a little of that magic with me. It sounded fantastic, though not as glorious as 'She's The One' when My Mate duly called me back 3 minutes later...
Would I had been there. It would have much amazed me. Very like... But the asking price was £125 face-value for a ticket, and I can't live with that. In any case my missus was watching the Andrew Lloyd Webber music show I'd Do Anything on BBC1 and I was getting more and more interested as it came down to a public vote between two girls vying to be cast as Nancy in a new Cameron MacIntosh West End production of Oliver!
Then came an unexpectedly great moment of television - or as good as these extended-advert talent-contests can manage: both Lloyd-Webber and Macintosh showed their hand in advance of the public vote, and said they favoured 18-year-old Jessie (Irish, flame-haired, clearly highly gifted, understandably a tad vulnerable) over the mid-20s Jodie (from Blackpool, with a good big voice, and a heroic weight-loss behind her, in all a typical model of what you'd want for Nancy if you intended the show to be much like the film etc.)
But I certainly respected their preference: god knows who'll play Bill Sykes this time out, but the idea of young Jessie as his deluded and masochistic female doorstep suddenly proposed an unusually strong, interesting - even disturbing - Oliver! Alas, the British public know what they like, and clearly wanted this Oliver! to have all the heft and originality of an episode of Eastenders, and so plumped for Jodie. Jessie couldn't hide her tears, but the camera kept a fairly dignified distance from these. Anyhow I hope she'll do very well in something else in due course. But as for Lord Lloyd-Webber and Sir MacIntosh, well, they just had to stand there and applaud their second preference, something that two men of their wealth and standing must find a bit galling. Still, in these dog days for the West End, they have enjoyed another extraordinary PR boon for their project on BBC primetime (a state of affairs that Kevin Spacey was sounding very annoyed about on behalf of Dame Theatre a while back.)
Meanwhile over at the Emirates I assume the Boss had moved onto The Rising or Born To Run or however it is he closes his shows these days. Yes, I should have been there. I don't believe in being puritanical about musical taste, but it's better for the soul to stay attuned to the Good Stuff, and listening to Jodie earlier giving it karaoke-style welly to a version of Whitney Houston's appalling I Have Nothing was a grim reminder of the stuff that will otherwise creep into the void between one's ears.

William Hill: Brown 6/4 to go before the next election

As reported in the Spectator, "Brown is 6/4 to go before the next election 7 to 2 to leave this year 15/8 to be replaced in 2009, 11/10 to go in 2010." This is tough-minded betting. In the Independent the other day Johann Hari was suggesting that Brown accept he's lost the next election and embark on some berserker spree of red-blooded socialism for the 2 years he has left. And John Rentoul, the smartest biographer of Blair, was chastising those disciples of the former PM who fell in meekly behind Brown last year, after a token bit of moody shilly-shallying. David Aaronovitch in the Times raised the issue of all that rancid karma Brown and his best pals stored up for themselves during the presumptive Blair-baiting wait for succession. (And I have to say to my eye the worst of Brown is his rotten taste in political allies and little proteges.) It's hard to see a bracing blast of economic good news sufficient to save Brown within the next 18 months, the time-frame he would need. I can't see him going out in some blaze of redistributive glory. I don't see how Charles Clarke or Alan Milburn could lead the party, though perhaps as stalking horses they could smoke out a more considerable stiletto-wielder. I don't think the public are ready to accept a second consecutive unelected PM, least of all in these grim circumstances. And I'm not sure a smart young man like David Miliband wants to bet the house this year or next, and risk fast-forwarding to the end of his and all political careers, i.e. failure. So what do I think is going to happen? What would I like to happen? I'll decide once there's a bit of clear blue water between us and the Crewe and Nantwich by-election.

Alan Clarke by Richard T. Kelly (Faber, 1998)

Forgive the past beckoning me in but... it was round about 10 years ago this week that I signed off on the galley pages of my first book for Faber and Faber: Alan Clarke, an oral history of the life and times and (TV) films of the great director of Scum, Made In Britain, The Firm, Contact and many more. In great but needful haste I had begun work in early December 1997, calling on Tim Roth at a production office in Soho where he was prepping his directorial debut The War Zone. I finished the manuscript in March 1998, after 3 1/2 months of crazed gumshoe work, interviewing all round the country. But it was the time of my life, at the time anyway, and an honour to do a hugely improbable book-length tribute to a man whose work I venerated and who seemed to embody most of the good things in the world, as was confirmed by my expert witnesses.
None of the press reviews of the book are online anymore so please excuse the self-absorption of my posting the choicest nuggets up here like so:
“A quite remarkable, heartbreaking book… one of those rare movie books that makes you sit up and start reading… Kelly has had the excellent idea of letting Clarke’s mates tell the story, and he has interviewed everyone he could find, from the women in and out of Clarke’s life, to co-workers like David Yallop and Roy Minton, producer Mark Shivas, cameraman John Ward, actors Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, Ray Winstone and Eleanor Bron. There are more than sixty of them in all, and they’re cut together to make up a bewitching portrait of Clarke… Alan Clarke the book is a model of how to write film history.”
David Thomson, Independent On Sunday
“A sort of oral biography of our television times.”
David Hare, Daily Telegraph
“If there is a better book about British television in the 70s and 80s, I have yet to read it. This extraordinary assemblage of interviews, put together without editorial comment like the printed equivalent of a talking-head documentary, establishes the role of Clarke as friend, mentor and unsung champion of all that is right (and enemy of all that is wrong) with image-based culture in Britain.”
Nick Roddick, Sight & Sound
“Alan Clarke was controversial all his life and yet is hardly known, which is surprising when you read what a funny, untamed, sexy, charming scruff he was. The reason he got away with it was his prolific brilliance as a director. Richard [T.] Kelly’s book is a fascinating insight into a man of difficult, testy and passionate views.”
Angus Wolfe Murray, Scotsman
“Not so much a biography of Clarke as an oral history, Richard [T.] Kelly’s absorbing book depicts an uncompromising hellraiser who tirelessly turned his unflinching gaze on the most controversial subjects. It will make you mourn the passing of a TV industry which fostered work as challenging as his.”
John Wrathall, Premiere
“This is far more than one man and his craft, as the very essence of British culture and politics seeps through the text. A vivid portrait is painted of the unemployment and depression that was to influence Clarke and drive him to leave an anger-fuelled time capsule of society’s injustices for future generations to learn from.”
Dan Rider, Total Film

Offshore '97 by Chicane feat. Power Circle/Louise Burton

This tune came out at a point that was just past the threshold of my own interest in house music, i.e. before my tastes got exclusively focused on Richard Thompson box-sets and suchlike. But I post the promo up here by way of a small contribution to the online dance-musicological database; because, Googling around, I note that there appears to be some small historical confusion over who actually supplied the vocals to this track. Well, it's my friend Louise Burton, as seen in the clip. Doesn't she sound great?

Gordon Ramsay: So Macho...

The concept of 'machismo' gets a bad rap in the media, and sometimes in the real world too. For instance I once wrote in a book of Sean Penn's 'authentic machismo', and a (female) newspaper reviewer thought this very notion ludicrous (which made me wonder what her boyfriend/helpmeet reckoned to such views.) I guess that from its Spanish origins to its common English usage machismo just suggests too much in the way of exaggeratedly bumptious behaviour and a chauvinistic sense of entitlement. Obviously there is a portion of personal identity that may be no more than performance and/or masquerade: a fact one expects is understood by all those gay men who affect black leather jackets, and also - one hopes - by some of the rather more slight and unimposing straight guys who affect same.
Still, Norman Mailer fan that I am, I think machismo needs defending now and then, insofar as it can reasonably describe a readiness on the part of certain men to put whatever physical fortitude and strength they are blessed with to good and courageous uses. (To get in harm's way, you could say.) Women are of course entirely capable of the very same solicitude and bravery; one might only suggest that since men tend to be physically larger and more robust then maybe more of an onus falls upon them.
Anyhow... watching Gordon Ramsay's The F-Word last night on Channel 4 I was in no way surprised to see the Great Chef teaching his young son to catch and gut a rabbit, then cooking it in a ragu for the lad and his mates following a back-garden kickabout to which the ex-Ibrox trainee Ramsay contributed keenly. Many people, myself included, love Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and Hell's Kitchen shows for the big and untrammelled manner in which the host expresses himself while urging people to do better than what they're doing. There's something improving about it. The F-Word, though, is a different beast. Watching Ramsay jet-skiing and ice-fishing for his supper, or getting his hands gory with the primary stage of food preparation, is only what we have come to expect and seems authetic to the man. But this apart, the show seems utterly dogged and weirdly compromised by the awful self-adoring celeb guests whom Ramsay is happy to air-kiss (Last night? Kate Garraway, Jesus H...); and the equally awful crowd of general-public would-be food snobs who are encouraged to sound off throughout the show. Clearly the only thing that can stop Ramsay is Ramsay, so he will go his own way; and the foodie world is inevitably bound up with rich people, however they came to be so. But it always feels odd to me that Ramsay's media persona is bound up with being simultaneously a) refreshingly bullshit-free and b) offering further needless exposure to prime bullshitters.

Nothing If Not Critical Quarterly

This week I have been mostly reading the 50th Anniversary edition of the scholarly journal Critical Quarterly, edited as it has been since 1987 by my friend Professor Colin MacCabe. Colin first put me into CQ in 1996, publishing a thesis of mine about the Italian film/opera set designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti. These days I'm listed among two-dozen CQ Contributing Editors (among the others are Simon Frith, Christopher Hitchens, Isaac Julian, Denis MacShane MP, and Jon Savage.) That said, I've not actually written anything for CQ since about 2002. (Where does the time go? But then nor has Nigella Lawson, whose name is also on the masthead for reasons I can never quite remember.)
CQ makes for great reading on the London underground (much better than some free paper with the latest on Amy Winehouse's flea-hive) and the other morning I glanced up from Colin's essay 'Towards A New Cambridge Philology' and thought I saw George Steiner sitting some way down the carriage. If Colin is the cleverest man I know (and he is) then I daresay Steiner is the cleverest I've never met. Both men, funnily enough, have in the past endured unfathomable academic slights from Cambridge University - which seems to me queer, since I thought cleverness was meant to be Cambridge's Big Thing. I know that when Colin taught there c. the late 1970s he had some highly brilliant students, because I keep running across them in their developed incarnations, and not just at CQ events such as last week's 50th anniversary dinner, where one such alumnus - the actor Simon McBurney - read in memoriam (and superbly) a poem by CQ's founder Brian Cox, who died recently. (Of course Colin taught a few twerps there too, some of whom still went on to make their way in the meeja world, but then such are the wages of a Good University.)
This week I think Colin is in Cannes: now unofficially retired from film/TV producing but still drawn to the Great Festival, from which he routinely reports for CQ and where he is usually Treated Right on account of having done some jury service in the past. So in the hope he is having a good one, and perhaps bumping into Sean Penn at some well-lubricated function, I will tonight raise a glass of rosé (or maybe retsina? Whenever I've dined with Colin a la Grec he's usually ordered a bottle of same while pointing out that this was the stuff Homer drank...)

The Jill Jones Fan Club (Defunct)

When I was still a boy (this would be the late 1970s?) I read a newspaper column by the then-celebrated TV reviewer Clive James, discussing some surly broadcast interview with Johnny Rotten (then of the Sex Pistols). James disapproved of Rotten more or less totally, as did most responsible media outlets of the day, and made an especially aggrieved point of how rock 'n' roll - which had brought joy to his own Aussie boyhood back in the days of Bill Haley and the Comets - had since degenerated into an obnoxious disgrace. So much for poor old punk. 'Johnny Rotten' (John Lydon to you) is now older than James was when he wrote that Eeyore-ish diatribe. Rock 'n' roll has never died, and some of its leading early practioners are now pension-age, albeit rich as Croesus. In my teens I found it impossible to take seriously any rocker over the age of 30 - maybe 35 at an absolute push. Now past that upper age bracket myself, I just plain don't trust or rate anybody younger. If I count the 'records' I have bought (or requested to be bought for me as presents) over the last two years, the roster of artists is wizened beyond belief: The Who, Dylan, Springsteen, Levon Helm, Robert Plant (with Alison Krauss, of course)...) Be it said, not all my favourites have to be Rolling Stone standard-issue Rock Legends. I remain loyally devoted to Maria McKee and to Bob Mould, once the respective frontpersons of rowdy young bands I adored back in 1986. And then, once in a while, I will try to touch base with other singers and songwriters of that vintage, to revisit their old stuff, and see if there's been anything new since. A simple task in the Amazon/YouTube era, right? Nope. So if anybody can find me a CD of Peter Case's eponymous debut LP (1986) for a reasonable price I am ready to meet and talk cash-money. Did Test Department's The Unacceptable Face of Freedom ever get a CD release? Or Nile Rodgers' Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove? And then, above all, consider the Strange Case of Jill Jones (pictured above, on the cover of her own eponymous debut c. 1987, and 20 years later at some sort of Prince-related reunion.) I shan't detain you with all the varied reasons for her fabulousness. But I do understand she finally released a follow-up album c. 2001-2, an acoustic set, called One? Occasionally I see it offered unreliably around the Web, priced at $40 or so, second-hand - dammit. What I want to know is how come I can't get away from Leona Lewis and her reasonably priced and utterly pointless recordings, but I can't find the last Jill Jones recording anywhere readily to hand on God's earth? What is the point of music? None of this makes me Mean Old Man Clive James the Second, you understand - just the irate president-in-exile of the Jill Jones Fan Club (Defunct).

"Cool book alert: 10 Bad Dates with De Niro"

It's a nice thing for an old guy like me - and a book with deceptively serious intentions - to today receive a mention on USA Today's Pop Candy Blog as compiled by Whitney Matheson. The idea that anything associated with me could work for fans of pop, candy, and young women called Whitney... well, it takes years off the creaking knee and elbow joints.

Dept. of Boss Ladies: Calling Peggy Noonan

In answer to yesterday's question/offer of civic duty from your correspondent, this in the Wall Street Journal from Peggy Noonan: "White women have been Mrs. Clinton's most reliable base of support and readiest crutch, the superdelegate said. And maybe they're the only ones who can break through, both to Mrs. Clinton and to the country, and tell her to stop..."
Now, here's another question: why is a famous old Reaganite phrase-maker like Peggy Noonan coming on so earnestly concerned about the fortunes of the Democratic Party should Obama not be its nominee? And she's not the only one. Ah, the black arts...? Or is everyone feeling the same dose of common sense right now whatever their ideological stripe?
BTW the photo sees Ms Noonan in the company of 'MediaLizzy', whose very interesting Flickr posts often show her pictured alongside leading GOP pols and comrades.

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls, Ken. You Neither, Hillary... Hillary? Can You Hear?

In the first published volume of his Diaries (recently ranked by GQ as the greatest of all political books, but don't let that put you off), Alan Clark cheerfully records his part in propelling John Major to the Tory leadership/Prime Ministership after the ousting of Thatcher in November 1990. In Clark's mind the mission was partly to secure a properly Thatcherite succession (and here he was deluded) but also, and with more vigour, to thwart the PM ambitions of the noveau riche and left-of-the-party Michael Heseltine, whom he despised, albeit not quite coherently. Clark's crowning moment in the latter respect was to bump into an ashen Heseltine in some Commons back-corridor in the hours after it was clear that Major had won. No words were exchanged at that awkward encounter, but Clark was sufficiently erudite to commemorate it in his journal with a telling quote from Emily Dickinson: 'A great hope fell, you heard no noise, the ruin was within.' If Clark felt any small sympathy for his hated antagonist it was in the knowledge that Heseltine had known of his doom before the results were formally declared. His campaign manager Michael Mates had polled Conservative members privately, and then "brought the numbers" forlornly to the candidate.
I wonder at what point Ken Livingstone received his own private 'numbers' last week, and so set about mentally packing up the London mayoral desk? And who was the messenger? Not his dubious longtime accomplice Lee Jaspers, one assumes. But like Heseltine, 'Ken' will just have to live with the notion that time and circumstance and a few active malefactors just rolled right over him.
And then, post-Indiana and North Carolina, who will bring Hillary Clinton the numbers? Is there any set of numbers she will accept? Or will she be like the evil brothers at the end of the movie Trading Places, screaming 'Turn those machines back on!' even as the room deserts and the security guards draw near.
But basically if they're fearfully looking around for a volunteer candidate-number-bringer in Team Clinton, I am absolutely bang-up for the job, and will do it with a winning smile - since winning is such a big deal in the Clinton Dynasty, even when you're actually losing.
(Livingstone photo by Annette Boutellier)

Ten Bad Dates With De Niro conquers LA and NYC...

... Or at least the Los Angeles Times, in the person of the venerable critic and Clint Eastwood expert Richard Schickel, gives the book a very generous review here. This bit in the New York Post is a little smaller but hell, I'll take it. What further glory could this lead to, I wonder? A rush on copies at the big Barnes & Noble bookstore next to the Farmer's Market in Hollywood...? Hollywood execs giving the book to each other as birthday gifts, or just plain timely reminders of why they first entered the beautiful business of movies...? Or me being hired as a consultant on the next major studio attempt to make a half-decent Hulk picture, i.e. one that doesn't end in a silly video-game fight scene? (The latter possibility because, as Schickel notes, I am a loyal friend to well-meaning but widely despised movies everywhere.) Well, at any rate I'll just have to bide my time and keep grafting until the summons comes from Burbank...

The wizardry of Nicolas Roeg, revisited

Last week I wrote up and passed along what I had been thinking lately in respect of Nicolas Roeg and his mercurial movies. Then I went off on a little jaunt for several days with the wife and bairn... At any rate I'm back in the chair now and the aforementioned Roeg piece is now posted at Film In Focus, the excellent film site I mentioned back in the old days of last month when this very blog was but a bairn itself. "Ah, time...", as Roeg himself might say with a twinkly look in his eye as a precursor to several thousand fascinating remarks on the subject.

Biofuel: Capital's Newest Best & Safest Bolthole...?

Per my previous post, instead of sitting and pontificating around midnight I should have been reading this by Mark Lynas and Ian McWhirter from a recent New Statesman. In summary, though, it remains the case that We Are All To Blame. Or maybe I'm just acting like one whom Norman Mailer labelled 'Desperate Ambrose': the perennial ineffectual moaner, at whom the corporate fat-cats laugh with high scorn, safe in the certainty that if there is such a thing as karma in this world then they will yet be favoured by that process, i.e. such was their evil energy in this life that they will be reborn, as evil men... For these and other such thoughts read Mailer's and Mailer Jr's The Big Empty. (Re. the genealogy of 'Desperate Ambrose', I'm not sure if Mailer re-defined some pop-cultural reference entirely for his own purpose. For another take see Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. Any excuse, after all...)

China hungry for meat, the US crazy for fuel

A report in today's Telegraph tells us there is an OFT investigation afoot into possible price fixing by UK supermarkets and some of their major top-brand suppliers (of products such as PG Tips, Andrex, and Warburton's bread, all used and endorsed round my gaff.) Along the way the report notes more generally that "prices in supermarkets have risen by 5.5 per cent since last April, according to official government data... a 500g packet of dried spaghetti has increased by 51 per cent. The price of butter has risen by more than 50 per cent." As a student in the early 1990s I often subsisted on buttered pasta, and students are generally poorer today - massively in debt, like the rest of us - so you do the math, as they say... but the price of food is evidently becoming a problem for the majority in the UK, especially those 'hard-working families' who did so much to install the current government. The crisis - as usual these days - is bigger and wider and worse than we think, but most people have fingered red meat and biofuel as major culprits, the debate usefully summaried by the Independent here. And what action am I taking personally to address the malaise? Tending the moths in my wallet, as usual, and not drinking take-out coffee anymore. (Astounding rip-off. 'Fair trade' my eye.) As in the case of my cousin whose annual New Year Resolution was to give up bobsleighing and ballet-dancing, I'm sure the benefits of my rigour will be striking. (BTW, the photo - by Tim Ellis on Flickr - is of course a figurine of the old PG Tips monkey, before the brand went 'trendy', presumably so as to raise the price.)

Crusaders back in the Financial Times

"Oh, the state of the nation / Is causing deprivation." Had I had been asked 20 years ago what the phrase 'State of the Nation' meant to me personally (and, of course, back then nobody was asking me anything of the sort...) I would have gladly discoursed about either a) various drama series I had seen on television, mainly written by Alan Bleasdale, or b) a mid-ranking recent single by New Order, a band I have always adored and thus forgiven for some of their dodgier lyrics (as above.) But this is Spring 2008, the season of the State-of-the-Nation novel, and it seems that I have written a contender in this peculiar category. Adrian Turpin of the Financial Times, who wrote an early review of Crusaders for which I was massively grateful, has now graciously cited the book again in a long review/thinkpiece concerning various titles, including the paperback of Blake Morrison's last novel, and Gordon Burn's Born Yesterday. For my part I couldn't be more pleased to have my book described by Adrian Turpin as "an enjoyable and unapologetically Victorian slab of social realism." And, to extend the theme of my previous post, I have to say that, as intriguing as I find the figure of Tony Blair, I'm much more interested in Pontius Pilate. The general tendency, mine too, is often to see whatever's happening in politics today as the bitter end, the final insult. And some observers will indeed have seen worthier standards applied in public life. But I don't think there's all that much new under the sun. At any rate, if we the people want to revive or reform our politics then we're obliged to get actively involved in politics, from day to day. As Bernard Sumner sang elsewhere in the aforementioned mid-ranking New Order tune, 'Yes, it's the state of the nation / That's holding our salvation...'

Crusaders' share of Blair in Fact and Fiction...

Hmm... It's getting on for a year now since Blair's resignation. I know, the leavetaking took forever, so let's not rush to the anniversary retrospectives... Still, I raise the matter now not merely because a steady drip of Blair re-evaluations has turned into a running tap because of Gordon Brown's anguished and ungainly recent performances. And not because the whole Blair Conundrum was a key part of the backstory of Crusaders, as Joel Rickett cottoned to very quickly. No, it's because last month I sat on a panel called 'Blair In Fact and Fiction' at the Aye Write festival in Glasgow, alongside Martin Bell, Helena Kennedy and Joan Smith, and as ever with these things, given the time and the format, you rarely come away feeling you've said what was truly on your mind. This eyewitness reporter from the Herald clearly felt that we had all lined up over Tone with the sharpened stilettos out like it was Murder on the Orient Express. ("They all did it!") Indeed the chap mentioned therein who 'stood up for Blair' chatted with me afterward at the bookshop signing. (I hope he found the copy of Crusaders he bought not too yawnsome...) But there's so much to say about public figures of this prominence. Didn't even Garcia Marquez once say he would need a million pages to do justice to Che Guevara...? (Staunch people of the Left who always loathed Blair would shudder at that analogy.) In any event, what I think I said at Aye Write and have certainly said at every other platform occasion is that when in 1996 Blair described Pontius Pilate as the archetypal politician, I thought it was the most interesting thing I'd ever heard a pragmatic/centrist leader say. I still do.

Crusaders reviewed in the Church Times!

Seems like a good match to me... This is the April 18 issue of Church Times to be precise, now on the newsstands or otherwise hitting subscribers' doormats. The review is by David McLaurin, who I believe to be a novelist as well as a (former?) priest. At any rate his take on the novel is very gratefully received: "A big book... but the author transforms the blockbuster genre into something more profound... [It] gives the reader a satisfyingly intense and cathartic conclusion that is well worth waiting for... a fearsomely well written, if somewhat bleak, book."
(The picture is of inside Durham Cathedral, taken by John Dalkin, who posts on Flickr as 'Heaven's Gate.)

RTK Newcastle article in new Prospect (May 2008)

"London to Newcastle isn't rated among the world's great train journeys, but for any returning native of the northeast there are sights along the line that will elevate the spirits..."
The new issue of the excellent Prospect magazine is now on the stands and includes an essay by myself in the 'Witness' strand which somebody has wittily entitled In Search of Lost Tyne. Yes, it's a series of snap-shots of the current state of Newcastle upon Tyne - socially, economically, politically, and culturally. In a sense, because the plot of Crusaders concludes in 1997, this piece of reportage brings the novel's story up to date, and with rather more of a debt to the actualite.
Needless to say there's a great deal more to enjoy in the magazine, including an essay by the South Shields-born historian Robert Colls on the neglected novels of Melvyn Bragg; quite a bit about the 40-year anniversary of May '68; and a long interview with Christopher Hitchens by Alex Linklater, in which it is casually noted that Hitchens enjoys friendly relations with the 'independent-minded' Sean Penn. Any sane/civilised person would want to be the proverbial fly on the wall when those two meet for cocktails.

Pennsylvania primary: the commander-in-chief thing

A week or so ago Alexander Cockburn made a witty point in the course of a piece on his radical site Counterpunch, one that other commentators should kick themselves for having missed. At least, I didn't see it noted anywhere else in the drizzle of Dem-Feud coverage, and I read as much of it as you do... Cockburn was weighing up the broadly disastrous contribution of Ex-President Bill to his wife's campaign, and drew special attention to Bill's "managing to reignite Hillary's Bosnian disaster, where she converted a pleasant outing into an anecdote of courage under fire unexampled since Audie Murphy took on a battlion of German soldiers single-handed. Bill says that Hillary came up with this fictional packet because it was late in a long day and she was kind of tired and not thinking straight. So, as my coeditor Jeffrey St Clair, asks, what happens four hours later when that 3am phone call comes?" Makes you think, doesn't it? One wouldn't harp on it, except that I understand the latest Clinton TV attack-spots harp unashamedly on the theme of "Who do you think has what it takes...?" But, for now The Dream lives on - or do I mean the nightmare from which, one morning soon, we shall awaken?

"Religion is ‘the new social evil’" (Rowntree report)

Did you happen to see this report in the Times? Would have made the old Quaker quake, I daresay:
"Many participants said religion divided society, fuelled intolerance and spawned “irrational” educational and other policies... The findings contrast with [Joseph] Rowntree’s “scourges of humanity”, which included poverty, war, slavery, intemperance, the opium trade, impurity and gambling..."
Some of those old scourges have stuck around, of course. But what do you suppose has got people newly vexed about religion? Perhaps the sense that until recent years, in the UK certainly, religion had seemed not to impinge on any man or woman who had no use for it. Now it's irritatingly unavoidable in the atmosphere. I used to feel fairly glad that I had read the King James Bible and had a working knowledge of theology. At times I could see something in the Marxian idea of religion as "the soul of a soul-less world". You can't be a George Steiner fan (see below) and not have a use for some notion of 'transcendence.' And there is definitely a spiritual dimension to our lives, however one might choose to describe the spirit in question.
Used to, yes. Lately I'm rather coming round to the Bertrand Russell stance. Or as Christopher Hitchens said to Joe Scarborough: "I am atheist. I‘m not anti-Catholic. I am not anti-Protestant. I‘m not anti-Greek Orthodox or anti-Judaism or anti-Islamic. I just think that all religious belief is sinister and infantile and belongs to the backward childhood of the race."
I wasn't a respondent to the Rowntree survey, and don't know what the full report amounts to, but on the basis of the coverage perhaps I can say that as a citizen my views were in some sense reflected?

Newcastle 2 Sunderland 0

My late grandma was one of those people who genuinely "liked to see all the North East teams do well" in the football leagues, and would sit through the entirety of the Saturday final scores just to see how Hartlepool, Carlisle and Darlo had done. This is probably something to do with being from Durham, rather than Tyneside or Wearside. For a taste of a more partisan view, look at/listen to this and this from a packed St James's Park yesterday. Being the North East top dog isn't the grandest bragging right in the game just now, not with the top 4 far from reach and the likes of Villa, Blackburn, and Portsmouth having left Newcastle behind them this season. (Hence the importance of the career plans of the fella pictured above with his adorable little moppet on a startling day back in 2005.) But it'll suffice for the time being. After all, coming 11th or 12th in the top division these days is pretty much the same as coming 7th i.e. you still get nowt, and your passports stay in your drawers, though I can name at least one side for whom 7th place seemed to count as "taking the Premiership by storm" a few years ago. Alas, for me (and for other soul-searching Toon fans, I'm sure) it's Middlesborough who still hold the whip hand in the region, purely on account of a League Cup won as recently as 2004. Whatever they say about the pains of managing Newcastle it remains the case that to be a legend the gaffer only has to win six matches in a season, so long as they're all in the same cup competition. But Kevin Keegan has a bye through any such miserly qualifying process on account of pre-approval such as this.

George Steiner, maintaining the standards

I was 17 or 18 when I first encountered the critical writings of George Steiner, and I don't think I have ever liked a critic better. (I say 'critic' - modestly the man himself discounts his occasional fictions, including The Portage to San Christobal of A.H., but then one can be sure he sets the bar higher than the average mortal.) My favourite titles of his remain Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky and Real Presences. I will never forget hearing Steiner describe the true function of the critic as that of a postman: one who knows precisely where to deliver the missives of men & women of letters. (As I recall, he attributes this image to Pushkin?) And he returns to this theme in an excellent interview in today's Guardian. He also expresses the view that most writing "seems to me too often, in this country, at the moment, a minimalist art. Very, very non-risk-taking. Very tight - often admirably, technically. But finally one thinks of the nasty taunt of Roy Campbell, the South African rightwing poet: I see your bridle, where's the bloody horse?"

Ten Bad Dates With De Niro in America

Listen, I gotta tell ya - New York's never been a lucky town for me - for a buncha reasons - though as a visitor I like the place enormously, always have done. But anyhow, no hard feelings, and here's to maybe a little rub of the green come May 1 when the Rookery Press NYC will publish their US edition of the widely-considered-amusing movie-list compendium Ten Bad Dates With De Niro. I could say my luck's already turning a little, cos I never had no mention on no Page 6 of the New York Post before. And I've been reading Peter Travers in the Rolling Stone since I was a boy and Reagan was President, but now - whaddaya know? - my book's got a mention in his 'blog'. Yep, dollar for dollar all I can say is luck be a lady tonight. The new cover image for Rookery's edition really delights me, immortalising as it does the Very Worst Date real or imagined that you or I will ever be rubber-necker to.

The genius of Nicolas Roeg, live in North London this Sunday

This Sunday 20 April 2008 the Phoenix in North Finchley offers a Nicolas Roeg double bill - The Man Who Fell to Earth (1975) and Bad Timing (1980) after which Nic Roeg himself will take the stage for a Q&A with the audience, a session that I will have the pleasure of 'chairing'. I'll be writing about this at greater length after the weekend, but I should just quickly take this space to say some obvious things, i.e. 1) that Roeg is as brilliant a filmmaker as Britain has ever produced, the golden era of his work (roughly the 20 years from 1966-1985) being comparable to the best of anybody else's ever, 2) that a lot of us out there feel this way, and 3) that I will never forget the first time I 'met' Roeg (i.e. got his autograph) after a screening of Insignificance and Q&A at the Queen's Film Theatre, Belfast, in November 1985. Theresa Russell was at his side that night, and I couldn't have been more in awe if the proverbial Martian had fallen to earth and sat itself beside me in the front row. (The photo of Roeg herewith is by fikirbaz (Ozgur Poyrazoglu) from the Flickr site, and was taken at the Antalya 44th Golden Orange Film Festival & 3rd Eurasia Film Festival.)

Crusaders in Australia, and The Spectator...

... and so I wonder which of the above was the less likely place for Crusaders to crop up, had I been a betting man? At any rate, it's interesting to note new responses to the book in print when one had thought that moment was past. The latest Spectator makes some rather wearily familiar remarks about Crusaders in a 'round-up' of first novels largely concerned with the recently-published Submarine. A much more detailed solus review is in The Australian, and as on many previous occasions I have to count myself lucky to receive such a considered response to the book, given its particular idiosyncrasies, which the reviewer itemises perfectly intelligently and without malice. This oft-commented-upon business of the book's old-fashioned structure and archaic turns of prose-style is something I'd like to comment on myself at greater length - and I suppose this site is the place to do it, all things considered - but maybe not tonight, eh?

"The Best Man"? Springsteen favours Obama

Not that these things mean anything. I don't recall Springsteen's deeply felt on-the-stump renditions of 'The Promised Land' doing anything for John Kerry in 04. Nor do I recall Obama saying anything very stirring this year, other than he wasn't minded to share a ticket with Mrs Clinton. But then I don't have a vote in this election. I was simply interested to read Springsteen's just-published reasons for wanting Obama in 08. There's only one thing to be read into his assertion that the senator for Illinois is 'head and shoulders' above the rival candidate(s). Springsteen is a well-mannered fellow in public, and even were he not, he probably wouldn't summon up the same invective (i.e. invoking 'evil') as Christopher Hitchens in this critique of Mrs Clinton from a recent appearance on Fox News. But then again...

Crusaders - the basic plot explained...

The above 'author presentation' has been newly added to Faber and Faber's YouTube channel, and was recorded especially for an internal sales conference in September 2007. Not a fussy crowd, otherwise I'd have shaved that morning. The unflashy locations are matched by a spare attention to sound-levels, but it was quite a windy day, see...

Gordon Burn & David Peace

Yesterday I had the privilege of a sit-down discussion with two of the most formidable English writers working today: Gordon Burn and David Peace, who share some obvious affinities in subject matter (Peter Sutcliffe for one - the subject of Burn's Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son and the shadow-stimulus for David's 'Red Riding Quartet' of 1974, 1977, 1980, and 1983. Football, for another - 2006 was a red-letter year for writing in this field thanks to Gordon's Best and Edwards and David's The Damned United.) But by the time your estimation factors in the further range of Gordon's four novels (Alma Cogan, Fullalove, North of England Home Service and Born Yesterday) alongside his studies of the art world that include a book with Damien Hirst - and then you think about David's GB84, that occult history of the 84-85 Miners Strike, and then the fictional accounting of post-war Japan that he has now embarked upon, beginning with Tokyo Year Zero - and you have to consider it a blazing miracle that England can boast writers such as these. The symposium I had with them was arranged by Esquire magazine and was concerned primarily with crime and other forms of aberrant true-life behaviour, and the extent to which they make fitting inspiration for books. The resultant article should appear in the August issue (i.e. late July). But if you're stuck for reading beforehand, get yourself into some Burn and some Peace. If you've already read one or two do yourself a favour and read the lot.

Crusaders at the Living Room Book Group

I had some very good fortune last month in having the opportunity to discuss Crusaders with the members of a book group who had been hacking their way through it together over recent weeks. That's me in the photo - I'm on the red rather than the white, but a large one, de rigueur - and it's not posed, I really was using both hands to make a point, as is my wont. The session took place in the Living Room bar on Newcastle's elegantly restored Grey Street, in the district of the city that my mother is surprised to hear they now call 'Grainger Town'. My luck in getting this engagement was in the sense that readers' group meetings are, of course, an emergent force in our society, but their members (naturally) tend to value their recreational reading time highly, and I sense they prefer to assign each other books with widely-vouched-for qualities (i.e. prizewinners, or acclaimed bestsellers) rather than Very Long Debut Novels by Unknowns. Clearly I had in my favour that Crusaders is very much a novel of Newcastle and the North East, but the fact that a book treats aspects of one's locality is not a cast-iron reason to want to spend time with it. At any rate, I had a truly interesting time at the Living Room, and found it rather a privilege to get the unmediated responses of real readers, whatever was their reckoning of the novel's accomplishment. I wonder if I'll get another chance?