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?

Thomas Mann

Which bit of formidable sculpture would win in a fight, do you think? Paolozzi's Tyneside 'Vulcan' as glimpsed here in one of last week's entries? Or Herr Thomas Mann, as immortalised in this thumping great Berlin bust? I'm in a favourite-writers mood, see, and harking on Mishima as below reminded me of one to whom Mishima bent the knee. Again, the length of the average novel may have been a consideration here: Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Joseph And His Brothers all have great capacity to them... My favourite of Mann's productions is the magisterial Doctor Faustus, and when I get round to constituting a proper Recommendations element to this blog I shall say more about why.

dovegreyreader...

...is a name in the blogosphere that has started to crop up in my field of vision with increasing regularity: a Devonshire "bookaholic"/community nurse, who runs a very diligent and involving blog on what she's reading, i.e. seemingly just about every bit of fiction that's being published into bookstores. She posted the following in respect of Crusaders, and I have to say I'm very glad of the courtesy and consideration shown. Even had she been less keen on the novel... I hope I would still have had the courtesy in return to say: books and reading clearly need more advocates of her sort out there.

Spring Snow...

It's not just the snowfall of early April that has started me thinking of Yukio Mishima again lately. It's also something to do with very long novels, and with the idea of reincarnation too... Plus some dark thoughts about one's level of physical fitness, and general tendency toward torpor... And also the issue of how thoroughly busy one ought to be as a writer. Mishima never really stopped working - until, that is, he stopped - and in about as appalling a manner as one could envisage. The photo herewith depicts the pre-iron Mishima of course - dreaming perchance of the rather leathery muscle-Mary he would become? Anyhow, Googling about to remind myself of some of the content of Mishima's short stories I found this thoroughgoing response to the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, which I'm aiming to re-read this year, images from which have stayed in my mental furniture ever since I first picked up that huge volume back in 1988. So I still think of it as my favourite of his, if not for After the Banquet, which I wasn't so keen on as an adolescent but have come to regard more highly over the years in which my interest in sexual perversity has, simultaneously and thankfully, receded.

Zidane, formidable...

Memory lane... reading the just-published 'news novel' Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn has brought back the summer of 2007 to me in all its dank, rain-steeped misery. As sorry forecasts of a warm but wet July/August 08 start to surface, a good time then to recall the baking-hot cold-beer World Cup summer of 2006. For me that was all about the slow return to supreme form - and the sudden exit pitch-left - of the player in white seen in the photo montage above (this by premasagar on Flickr.) I wrote about this and other aspects of the great Zizou in an essay you can read here from Sight & Sound, prompted by the art-movie Zidane - A 21st Century Portrait. The Guardian today reports that lucky Australians will get a rare glimpse of him back in action June 1.

Crusaders / Brackstone on Sky Arts' The Book Show

Crusaders on stage @ Live Theatre, Newcastle

Following this here link will take you to the site of the estimable New Writing North, specifically their Multimedia page, whereupon you will find a downloadable podcast of a Crusaders platform event held at Newcastle's Live Theatre (Broad Chare, Quayside NE1) on Wednesday March 5 2008. (Alternatively the direct link to the podcast is here.)
I was In Conversation about the book and its background with NWN's terrific director Claire Malcolm and also my Faber editor Lee Brackstone. But I have to say the chief appeal of this audio-nugget is a selection of dramatised bits from Crusaders that were marshalled by Live's artistic director Max Roberts of Live (the first voice you'll hear on the file) and performed by some totally top-drawer North-East actors, including Trevor Fox (as John Gore), Tracy Whitwell (as Lindy Clark), and Deka Walmsley (as Martin Pallister and others...).
The picture to the left, meanwhile, is of myself and the aforementioned Brackstone, between us the customary small token of authorial gratitude that I bestowed upon him at the London launch party for Crusaders. Lee is a West Ham man, but I consider him one of life's centre-forwards, and certainly fit to fill the Shirt of Legends as shown. My understanding, though, is that he'll be framing it rather than wearing it...

At a seminar on blogging a novice speaks, falteringly...

Crusaders in the papers

In advance of some terrifyingly slick multimedia stuff that I'm about to post up here about Crusaders, I'd like to quickly pay my respects (and direct browsers) to some old-fashioned write-ups that appeared in the newspapers and journals and were gratefully received by this author: from Joel Rickett in the Independent on Sunday, Adrian Turpin in the Financial Times, Andrew Holgate in the Sunday Times, John Gray in the Independent, Stuart Kelly in Scotland on Sunday, and Sean O'Brien in the Times Literary Supplement. There were also interesting notices in the New Statesman and the Guardian. And from the blogosphere and elsewhere I was very glad of these reviews from Bookmunch and the novelist Susan Hill.

Vulcan by Eduardo Paolozzi

It seems needful to have a photo of someone/something other than myself on this nascent blog - and I can't immediately think of anything finer than the bruising 7-foot bronze that stands on a spot not far south of Newcastle Central Station. It's hard to imagine a time when a piece of sculpture/statuary located conspicuously in the North East won't have some sort of (post-) industrial connotation. But to my eye the 'Vulcan' has always looked like he still knows how to use his hammer...

30.03.08: Keegan's Third-and-a-Bit Coming...

Just to step aside for one minute - were you there at White Hart Lane, on the day when the sun finally came out, the net got bursted, and Keegan gave us a wave? I was, in the company of the top-drawer NUFC chronicler who recorded proceedings in the following (unimprovable) fashion.
http://www.nufc.com/2007-08html/2008-03-30spurs-a.html

New Statesman diary

For Web-archival purposes i.e. before I forget that I ever wrote it, below is a link to the Diary column I did for the New Statesman in the week (January 17 2008) that Crusaders was published. Obviously the set of subject areas I chose to dwell on was not an accident...
http://www.newstatesman.com/200801170007

Film in Focus

Moving on... for all proper cinema fans I'd just like to recommend the site http://filminfocus.com/ to which I contribute various bits, including an essay on Ian McEwan (the following gobbet from which just occurred to me for some reason...)
"If there is a recurrent scene in McEwan it is the sudden appearance of evil, pain or death – dreadful things that ought not to happen, but do – in the lives of solid and unsuspecting bourgeois people..."