MacNovel

Gesamtkunstwerk

January 22nd, 2012

The title of this post is a German word that’s been adopted into English usage in the art world and translates roughly as total artwork — which I suppose is similar to the concept of total football as played by the Brazilian team of 1970 — as the ideal and ultimate, all-embracing example of a skill (so the defenders could dribble like strikers and vice versa). In aesthetics Gesamtkunstwerk is similarly ‘a synthesising of different art forms into one, all-embracing, unique genre’.

The quotation above comes from the catalogue of an exhibition called Gesamtkunstwerk currently running at the Saatchi Gallery just off the King’s Road in London. It’s a collection of work subtitled ‘New Art from Germany’ — so writing about a contemporary German artist in my novel I thought I’d better visit.

I’m not much of an art expert, particularly on sculptures and installations, but I found the quick visit I had around the gallery in my lunch hour to be quite fascinating. There was a fair amount of what most people would find quite bizarre — bits of cloth threaded on to sticks and so on — but even the more abstract sculptures seemed to have something of a theme about materialism and post-industrial society. Scrap metal and other discarded objects were often used as materials.

Similarly, there were a fair number of collages formed out of pictures taken from popular culture. I’m a bit ambivalent about ‘real’ artists creating collages — it seems like cheating to me to chop up existing images (presumably the copyright of someone else) and just re-arrange them in a different pattern. But that’s all related to the debate about artist as craftsperson and creator or artist as an interpreter and re-imaginer. One artist whose collages made an impression on me was Kirstine Roepstorff, who’s actually a Dane working in Germany. She had an impressive collage that looked like it had been set in Center Parcs called ‘You Are Being Lied To’ (by men apparently — it’s a feminist statement) but I marginally preferred a science-fiction flavoured work called ‘All Possible Experiences’ which I’ve linked to below via the Saatchi Gallery website.

All Possible Experiences -- Kirstine Roepstorff -- from Saatchi Gallery

I also liked Stefan Kürten’s architecturally inspired paintings, which reminded me of all the solidly-built, brutalistic office blocks that I’ve worked in myself in Germany over the last 10 years or so.

I was impressed by Georg Herold’s two sculptures (both called ‘Untitled’). These were both of female figures created out of wooden battens and canvass and finished off in red or purple lacquer. The catalogue points out the paradox that the figures appear in poses that are sexualised and festishistic yet they are made using very dehumanised materials (not the smooth marble, bronze or plaster that one might normally associate with representations of the human form).

Georg Herold Untitled 2010 -- in Gestamtkunstwerk at the Saatchi Gallery

While all the artwork is new, the artists themselves are a mixture of ages. (I bought the catalogue as it has CVs of all the artists and I’ll use it to construct a more credible apprenticeship for Kim.) There are some young artists but there also some éminences grise. Isa Genzken had several peculiar assemblages of objects on show — according to the Time Out preview she has been more influential in the German art scene than Gerhard Richter. I’ve not blogged about it but I went to see the Tate Modern’s exhibition of Richter’s work (Panorama) last year and I think I’d rather part with money to see a retrospective of his work than Genzken’s – but then what do I know? (Well I suppose I know quite a bit more about German art than I did a couple of years ago.)

I’d not been to the Saatchi Gallery before so the highlight of my visit wasn’t the art from Germany but the fascinating Richard Wilson work 20: 50. This is a huge tank of used sump oil with a mirror smooth surface that is viewed from a platform slightly above. It’s amazing — a black void that’s also invisible and reflective.

We had another workshop session with Emily today and I took the opportunity of being up in the general area to visit the London Art Fair at the Business Design Centre in Islington. Not having the financial means myself to set up as a dabbler in art collection, I realised that I’m fairly ignorant about the business of art — how galleries and dealers interact with artists and collectors. I was a little reluctant to pay well over £10 for a ticket to an event which seemed to be geared around selling things but I was incredibly glad that I did. I only spent about two and a half hours there but could easily have spent twice as long. The effect of walking around the exhibition with so much art on display was visually intoxicating — and mixing with that arty type of person will hopefully inform my writing of Kim.

While most of the artwork was up for sale, there was plenty of work from well known artists that could be viewed as it would be in a gallery. I didn’t have time to track down the Damien Hirst and David Hockney pieces (and if the gallery owners had looked at my shoes then I doubt they’d have given me the time of day) but I did come across a couple of Beryl Cook pictures quite unexpectedly.

From my fairly random strolling around the stalls I noted the following artists (and their exhibiting galleries) as those I particularly liked. Pamela Stretton’s mosaic-like works at the Mark Jason Gallery were intriguing (rewarding both close up and distant viewing). I also liked the abstract cityscapes painted by Alicia Dubnyckj and Jenny Pocket at Sarah Myerscough Fine Art. On a similarly geographical theme I also enjoyed Tobias Till and Susan Stockwell’s work at TAG Fine Arts. (Susan Stockwell’s ‘China Gold’ is about the most eloquent commentary on globalisation and the credit crunch that I’ve yet seen — if I had £3,500 to spare I’d buy one of the 5 copies.)

For research purposes I was less interested in the famous artists and more in those who made a living at their art but have yet to hit the heights — which is the position the novel finds Kim to be in. Because of this interest, I managed to get a place on a guided tour of the Art Projects section of the fair which is dedicated to new and emerging artists.

The tour was given by Art Projects’ curator Pryle Behrman who explained the recurrent themes that appeared to be common in much of the work. Unsurprisingly a lot of art commented on the economic situation but he said there was also an emergence of playfulness and a rejection of the concept of artists as a profound commentator. He said that many artists realised that art fairs where work was sold to speculators at inflated prices (like the one we were at) were part of the problem with the naked greed strain of capitalism — so artists as a whole could hardly be holier-than-thou about it.

To emphasise the point, one of the most striking exhibits was the corbettPROJECTS ‘Ghost of a Dream’ by Adam Ekstrom and Lauren Was. They create spectacular but fragile displays decorated with used lottery scratch cards and covers of romantic novels.

Perhaps the most bizarre, but also thought provoking, was the work of Jenny Keane who sketches stills from horror movies in black and white line drawings. She then licks the most horrific part of the picture (such as where a vampire might strike on the neck) and does so with such intensity and endurance that she not only scrapes a hole in the paper but makes her tongue bleed in the process (see photo here). The blood and saliva seep into the paper around the hole — and are listed as artistic materials when the works are sold — see here.

The boundary between physical and intellectual, which Jenny Keane is breaking down by embedding her bodily fluids into the artwork, is something that probably polarises the ‘artistic’ community and the respectable bourgeoisie who might like to collect their works. I briefly mentioned about 3 months ago that I went to see the Pipilotti Rist show ‘Eyeball Massage’ when it was on at the Hayward Gallery. Rist is not shy of using her own body to make her point as an artist. Although it’s never titillating or prurient, she appears naked in some of her works and one of the best known, Mutaflor, features shots from a camera that appears to emerge out of her anus — which is fleetingly shown in close-up.

This was all shown at a flagship exhibition at one of Britain’s leading visual art galleries so it’s understandable that in the novel this is the metropolitan attitude than Kim blithely takes with her into the Home Counties sticks — but will her very liberal attitudes go down well with the respectable commuting and country types?

Tags: 'China Gold', Art Projects, artists, Beryl Cook, Georg Herold, Gerhard Richter, Gesamtkunstwerk, Hayward Gallery, Jenny Keanee, Kim, Kirstine Roepstorff, london art fair, pipilotti rist, Pryle Behrman, Research, Richard Wilson, Saatchi Gallery, Susan Stockwell, Tate Modern, theme
Posted in Research | 2 Comments »

Voice

December 31st, 2011

Christmas Bestsellers 2011

There’s a lot of discussion in creative writing courses about how authors can find their voice. It’s quite a difficult concept to articulate — most simplistically it’s what defines the distinctiveness of an author’s style. This may, depending on the author, be generic to all their output or restricted to a subset of their work. Also there is debate about how some authors use a consistent voice whereas others vary their narrative voice according to the tone of different parts of a book. In this post I’m mainly concerned with the sort of authorial voice that suffuses most of a writer’s work.

Maybe one of the best ways of capturing an author’s voice was to do what we did in the most recent term of the MMU MA course — when every week a couple of us would contribute a short piece of original writing ‘in the style of’ whichever author we’d discussed the previous week in the Reading Novels module.

So I contributed short pieces inspired by Vladmir Nabokov, Margaret Drabble and John Banville (in the guise of Benjamin Black). I couldn’t help my examples of writing go beyond even pastiche and into the territory of parody — but with different degrees of subtlety they seemed to work.

It was fascinating to see how the other students tackled the exercises too. Who were the literary chameleons who could identify the elements that made another writer’s work distinctive and impose these on their pieces — and who were the types who would nod in the direction of the writer’s style but still make the piece recognisably theirs. Sometimes there were students who alchemically combined the two — both embracing the writer who inspired the piece and also making it unerringly their own.

Writing parodies or pastiches is an incredibly useful exercise — according to one of my friends at Metroland Poets, W.H.Auden said that if he was to teach poetry then he’d restrict it to parodies only.

But imitating other writers, even if it gives a fascinating insight into their techniques, isn’t going to establish a new writer with an unmistakeable voice – the sort of semi-mythical, startling new voice that agents say leaps off the slush pile and transfixes their attention for hours. I guess agents spend enough time reading submissions that they’re the experts at spotting voice leaping from the written page. I tend towards the romantic notion that your writing personality is like a fingerprint or indelible watermark: uncontrollably unique like your spoken voice and the result of hundreds of thousands of experiences and encounters as well as reflecting your genetic personality. How it’s formed must be the subject of many literary PhDs –also witness the popularity of books like Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens.

The spoken voice analogy is where the horribly blurry photo comes in at the top of this post. It shows books on promotion as Christmas presents at a local W.H.Smith branch. It’s a collection mainly of celebrity memoirs and TV cookery tie-ins — which as the Guardian’s round up of Nielsen’s Bookscan sales figures shows comprised the bulk of the top sellers this year (apart from David Nicholls’s ‘One Day‘).

My wife was reading the Michael McIntyre book and said ‘You can imagine him speaking every single line of this’ and then I realised the stunningly obvious fact about the whole selection: the common factor shared by virtually every single one of these books is that they are purportedly written by (or about) people whose spoken voices are very familiar to the reading public — clearly McIntyre, the Hairy Bikers, James Corden, Lee Evans, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall but also, in the collective memory, Steve Jobs and Jonny Wilkinson.

Knowing the public persona of the (supposed) author immediately changes the way a book is read. There’s no discovery process about the author (or the voice of the author) — if the author’s meant to be a celebrity then it immediately contextualises the words on the page for the reader.

I was flicking through Alison Baverstock’s ‘Marketing Your Book’ and noted another glaringly obvious (but revelatory) point she made: unlike repeatable commodities such as bread or milk or shoes, books aren’t bought more than once (except on occasion for presents and the like). That’s why publishers must love franchises. Readers might spend ages deliberating and prevaricating about trying something new but once they know they like an author then they’re hopeful of the same pleasurable experience again and will repeat purchase — part of the reason why book series are so attractive to publishers. It’s also inherent in the behaviour of book buyers — people go out to get the new Terry Pratchett, Lee Child, Sophie Kinsella and so on because they know they’ll encounter something familiar — if not the same characters then certainly the authorial voice.

Perhaps what’s most terrifying for putative writers who aren’t celebrities is the question of whether theirs is a voice that people want to hear? For a comedian or celebrity chef their written voice is something they don’t need to worry about making their own — the cover page and their TV appearance should see to that. But if it’s a first novel then the authorial voice will be new and unfamiliar (unless it’s an attempt at bandwagon-jumping and imitating someone else). That’s why activities that promote new writers, such as literary prizes and competitions, are so important. (Speaking of which, one of my ex-City coursemates — Bren Gosling whose blog is linked in the sidebar — has had the great news that the manuscript of his recently finished novel — ‘Sweeping Up the Village’ has been put on the longlist for the Harry Bowling prize 2011.)

A final point on the W.H.Smith display is to note how little fiction it contains — only the Martina Cole and the Christopher Paolini — and the Wimpy Kid book (if that counts). Perhaps that’s a little unfair as next to the shelves was a rack containing Richard and Judy’s latest seasonal selections — all recently-published fiction. What’s also startling is the predominance of books about sportsmen, comedians and cookery.

I guess a humorous novel about an ex-rugby-playing, TV cookery show contestant who leaves an IT job to run a gastropub might have a bit of appeal to a publisher’s marketing department at least. Let’s hope 2012 at least sees it finished.

Happy new year everyone — I’m hoping the next 12 months will see the publication of some of the great writing that’s been produced by my coursemates and other writing friends.

Tags: Alison Baverstock, book sales, Charles Dickens, commercialism, creative writing, feedback, Guardian Book Blog, Manchester Metropolitan University, marketing, Metroland Poets, theme, voice, W.H.Smith
Posted in Publishing | 3 Comments »

Wenlock Saved

December 21st, 2011

I have a short update to the story of the Wenlock Arms in Hoxton, mentioned below, which is relevant to the fate of many pubs across the country.

The Wenlock is a spit-and-sawdust, East-end style local (which looks from the outside rather like a more downmarket version of the Queen Vic from EastEnders). It’s typical of an urban pub style that would have been found on virtually every street corner in Victorian London. However, the triple threats of German bombing in the second world war, post-war redevelopment and the consequences of changing leisure time activites leading to changes of use have led to such pubs becoming increasingly rare. If the buildings still stand as pubs then they’re likely to have been either gentrified into ‘bar and kitchen’ gastropubs or be vile drinking dens full of pool tables and fruit machines.

Not so the Wenlock. Mainly due to the pub’s promotion of real ale from small and microbrewers and the consequent patronage of the members of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and like minded drinkers, the Wenlock has continued as a genuine community pub — for example hosting regular live music. The phrase ‘unspoilt by progress’ (used by Banks’ for their beers in the West Midlands) could be applied accurately to the interior, which appears to have been under an informal preservation order that has seen a moratorium on any discernible interior decoration — which to the generally stylistically challenged CAMRA members is seen as a Good Thing.

As mentioned in the post on Shoreditch, the Wenlock sits in an area that is on the fringes of the Hoxton-Shoreditch urban renaissance — had it been any closer it would probably have been converted to a bijou neon place called Bar Frottage or something. However, the economic winds of redevelopment finally reached the Wenlock and an application was made to Hackney Council earlier this year.

As suggested above, planning laws mean that there’s no requirement to request permission to change the use of a pub into a similar sort of establishment, like a bar or restaurant, so long as it’s used to sell food and drink. This has been why many pubs have been ruined by being turned into failed restaurants. You could probably turn a pub into a kebab house quite happily.

However, permission is required to change the use of the building to any other sort of commercial use and, particularly, for private housing. As the price of housing is so expensive in large parts of the country, particularly London and the South East, the physical building of a pub (or even just the land it stands on) can be worth far more as an asset than the pub will ever hope to generate as a business. That’s why so many pubs are owned by speculators or giant pub companies that securitise their property portfolios in the City in exchange for cash.

In the case of the Wenlock, developers wanted to build at least five apartments on the plot. These would no doubt have sold for well over a million pounds collectively — creating a profit that would probably take a back-street boozer decades to realise. Therefore, all but the most successful pubs in this country, are only protected from the raging forces of market greed by local planning regulations. In the case of the Wenlock Hackney Council rejected the change of use application and many locals and real ale supporters celebrated this in the autumn.

However, there is a loophole which those wanting to redevelop the Wenlock sought to exploit. Premises can be denied permission for change of use but, unless a building has listed status or is in a conservation area, then the owners can do more or less anything else to it — including demolish it. This tactic has been used ruthlessly in the past where pubs have literally vanished overnight when developers have sent in bulldozers at midnight. (The famous Tommy Ducks in Manchester was an example, which was razed to the ground one night in 1993 at 3am in the morning. This pub used to have women’s knickers pinned to the ceiling — I was once taken there after a school trip to the theatre by the teachers!)

The Wenlock was just outside the Regent’s Canal Conservation area and so its locals were disturbed to see a notice of demolition attached to the building at the end of November. This is apparently a technical process to inform the council of an intention to demolish a building and normally the council can only object to the method of demolition proposed (unless the building is listed or in a conservation area). So it appeared that the Wenlock was going to be turned into a patch of waste ground — with the presumed intention of later lobbying for the original residential development once the pub had become only a memory.

But the pub’s supporters mounted a huge campaign (there’s a Facebook group called Save the Wenlock, which I belong to) and mobilised a coalition of beer drinkers and lovers of vernacular architecture to lobby Hackney council themselves. The pub could have been demolished, as I understand it, from about the 22nd December.

On Monday 19th December at a meeting of Hackney Council, the conservation area was extended to include the Wenlock Arms. The pub had been, possibly, days from demolition but has now been preserved — the fabric of the building and its permitted usage at least — whether the owners want to hang on to it with no prospect of it being anything other than a somewhat down-at-heel looking boozer is an open question. (There’s a very detailed historical and architectural account of the area — and an adjoining pub, the King William IV — on the council website.)

Fortunately there won’t be the traditional, short-lived rush to celebrate the preservation of an amenity that few people actually used — as happens often when economically struggling pubs are denied permission to change use. The Wenlock has never seemed to want for customers, which shows what a bleak outlook there is for less busy pubs when customers have less disposable income, beer duty is rising and inflation (especially utility prices) is rising fast.

As with most retailers, Christmas and New Year are the best times of year for pubs and there will be many publicans who will trade up until New Years Eve, bank the Christmas takings, and then shut down for good. The Wenlock’s success story is rare but it’s salutary and an example of what community action can achieve.

Tags: CAMRA, economics, Hackney Council, Hoxton, planning regulations, pubs, Shoreditch, Tommy Ducks, Wenlock Arms
Posted in Research | 4 Comments »

Broad Beans and Sea Urchins

December 7th, 2011

Writing in the Field -- Tate Modern Espresso Bar

I was in London today and took the time to do a bit of novel-related research. I’m planning on setting a small part of my novel in the Tate Modern and so thought it might be in the spirit of the novel to actually write some of it there.

So, as the picture shows to the left, my netbook is out next to my Tate cappuccino while I wrote a few hundred words about what my characters were doing in the same place — I’m not sure if that does anything for the authenticity of the words on the page but it probably helps me feel that I have some sort of credibility in attempting to use this as a location.

I guess the photo is a bit symbolic in showing the subject of the writing along with the means by which it’s intended to be captured — the Word 2007 screenshot.

The floor where I was sitting is home to the current Gerhard Richter exhibition. This is an incredibly well-reviewed exhibition featuring the works of one of the world’s leading artists, who happens to be German, which fits a little with my novel.

I went to see the exhibition (it’s one of those you have to pay to go in) about five or six weeks ago and was actually very impressed with it. Richter is an incredibly versatile artist who’s created abstract art as well as fascinating landscapes and portraits and still lives — two of his works are exceptionally well known: one of his daughter turning her head and another of a candle that was used on a Sonic Youth album cover .

The Aphrodisiac Encyclopaedia at Christ Church Greyfriars

I then had a look around Daunt Books’ new Cheapside shop.

Nowadays I have to enter bookshops with a resolution of steel — I WILL NOT BUY MORE BOOKS (because I haven’t even got room for all those I currently have — let alone time to read them all). But as soon as I set foot over the threshold I’m ready to be seduced.

And seduction was on the menu for the book I found on one of the tables in the store was The Aphrodisiac Encyclopaedia by Mark Douglas Hill. And seeing as my novel has lots of food in it and relationships then it immediately attracted my interest.

Co-incidentally I was pleased to see this book as I’ve spent an amount of time on the web trying to see if I could get any more seriously foodie information on this subject myself and oddly enough the range of websites that come up tend to be a bit gimmicky or commercial.

I won’t reveal exactly what my intentions are for purchasing this particular volume of literature to peruse but I think some of the more unusual combinations might give me a bit of fun.

Looking through the table of contents, I initially wondered what wasn’t an aphrosidiac — there were quite a few foodstuffs that are pleasant to eat but perhaps not best known for their aphrodisiac qualities — e.g. steak, honey, caviar, chocolate (although I guess a lot depends on how one might use the last three on that list).

Then there are the sensual or symbolic foods that would go on any Valentine’s night menu — oysters, asparagus, truffles, figs and maybe a few others.

I was quite puzzled over the aphrodisiac qualities of some of the book’s contents — watermelon, celery, pine nuts, quince, anchovies, cheese (which sort — presumably not Stinking Bishop, which I bought recently from Neal’s Yard). Having read some of the foods’ entries these less erotic inclusions appear to made on the strength of their vitamin and mineral content — zinc being a favourite plus various amino acids or similar, like trpytophan, which apparently triggers the release of the feel-good hormone dopamine. Apparently, the book says, eating a banana mimics in a presumably more muted way the taking of ecstasy.

The book gives a recipe (for two, obviously) for each of the ingredients — and some look rather nice. I’d guess most lovers would appreciate a well-cooked meal, even if the ingredients were fairly commonly eaten anyway — like eggs or pineapple. However, some choices seemed utterly bizarre — such as broad beans. How a food so unavoidably associated with flatulence can be considered at all sexually alluring is something of a mystery — apparently it’s all something to do with the ancient Greeks and Pythagoras and the supposed similarity in the bean’s shape to the male gonad (and it also produces dopamine, apparently — better tell the ravers).

At least broad beans are quite familiar unlike some of the aphrodisiacs. The most unusual include pufferfish, sea urchin and iguana. I’d probably rather breakfast on cold pizza in the morning or a leftover kebab heated in the microwave than eat sea urchin. But, then again, in the words of 10cc, eating pufferfish might be one of the things we do for love.

As for iguana, I don’t think even the characters in my novel would go so far as serving that up in pursuit of seduction. (Apparently iguanas have some powerful glands in their inner thighs that produce powerful sex pheromones, which causes them to be turned into an aphrodisiac stew in their Native Nicaragua.) It’s a shame as the book has a recipe for ‘Roast Iguana with Chipotle and Oregano Marinade’, which would have been an interesting dish to feature in my novel. Maybe I’ll go instead for symbolism and have a character with a pet iguana which the cognoscenti will know is a symbol of their hidden, raging sexual passion.

Of course, the Aphrodisiac Encyclopaedia doesn’t take itself very seriously (see the link to the author bio above). This is a point that seems to be missed in a rather humourless and contradictory review of the book in the Observer — stating that the way to spot a mediocre novelist is the inevitable use of a meal as a metaphor for sensuality but then goes on to equate eating with sex and states that an intimate meal involves ‘wearing your elemental self on your sleeve’ (maybe it’s OK to use the metaphor in a review but not a novel or maybe I’ve missed some self-reflexive irony?).

Of course there’s not much science behind the claims for most aphrodisiacs — although the social and cultural associations of some of the better known foods in the book are enough to make the consumption of these foods in the right context a suggestive and potentially innuendo laden act. I’m sure I can put the research to good effect.

And on the way between the Tate Modern and Daunt Books where I was seduced by this volume, I walked over the Millennium Bridge, which gave me the opportunity to monitor the progress of the Shard again. This time I’ve got a smeary-lensed, city scape with what my blogging acquaintance Female PTSD describes as a giant Issey Miyake perfume bottle (that’s an analogy as a male I never would have got).

The Shard Nearly Finished -- 6th December 2011

Tags: aphrodisiacs, backstory, broad beans, Daunt Books, food, Gerhard Richter, iguanas, London, psychology, sea urchin, setting, Tate Modern, The City, The Shard
Posted in Research, Writing Process | 1 Comment »

When I Grow Rich…

November 19th, 2011

…ring the bells of Shoreditch in Oranges and Lemons, Shoreditch being where mos of the start of my novel is set, although I very much doubt the bells of St. Leonard’s are going to help me get rich by writing it. (The church is apparently features on current BBC series Rev, which is also set in Shoreditch.)

I’ve visited Shoreditch many times while I’ve been writing the novel, particularly recently, and I think I’ve noticed the most recent stages in its metamorphosis from run-down, working class area to the predominantly cool artists’ neighbourhood that it is today — although you don’t need to wander too far away from the Rivington Road/Shoreditch High Street area to find yourself in some very unartistic-looking, grim housing estates.

Bishopsgate from the Edge of the City

Perhaps the opening of Shoreditch High Street overground station about 18 months ago has been a catalyst as now the area is linked directly to south London and the North London Line at Dalston.

Shoreditch is surprisingly close to the City of London and its concentration of wealthy financial services workers. The photo below is taken from Shoreditch – the marker post on the right side of the photo shows the City of London boundary marker.

It’s an extraordinary transition point with the Broadgate development on the right along Bishopsgate and the Gherkin in the distance. The street where I stood to take the photo is a very short length of road called Norton Folgate which connects Bishopsgate with Shoreditch High Street. It’s probably no more than one or two hundred yards in length but the contrast in urban landscape between its two ends is striking.

Great Eastern Street, Shoreditch

Slightly further up the road, looking away from the City is Great Eastern Street. This very ordinary looking street is actually London’s inner ring road — connecting the end of the dual carriageway at King’s Cross with Tower Bridge via Angel and Old Street. Village Underground with its tube trains on the roof can be spotted in the middle-distance.

After our first workshopping session of the autumn at Mike B’s in Old Street, I visited Village Underground’s large warehouse space (what the trains sit on top of) for the Moniker Art Exhibition in October , which was timed to co-incide with the big London Frieze event in Regent’s Park (at £27 a ticket that was a bit steep for me). But there was a lot of really good at the Moniker Event — and the space at Village Underground was a good venue for it.

It’s surprising that hundreds of years after the Roman and medieval walls of London fell into disrepair that it feels as if there’s still some psychological separation between inside and outside their boundaries.

Not the Globe Theatre but Noisy, Dirty, Anonymous Curtain Road, Shoreditch

All types of disreputable activities occurred in areas like Shoreditch, just outside the City walls and, in the late sixteenth century, this included actors and playwrights, along with all the other undesirables cast outside the City walls like thieves and prostitutes. Just around the corner from Village Underground is this plaque in Curtain Road, which is a very understated memorial to the Curtain Theatre – a predecessor of the Rose and Globe Theatres in much more historically celebrated Bankside.

London’s first theatre (called The Theatre) was located somewhere around the area between Curtain Road, Village Underground and Shoreditch High Street which has had the track for the new

Rivington Street, Shoreditch

overground station laid right through it. It’s incredible to think that this area of Victorian warehouses, 60s office blocks and surface car parks was a crucible of the English language — where Shakespeare started his writing career.

Very close to the Shakespeare plaque is the Old Blue Last – a live-music venue described by NME on its website as ’the world’s coolest pub’ and continuing Shoreditch’s history of alternative entertainment. A roll-call of the ‘coolest’ acts of the 2000s have appeared at the pub including Amy Winehouse, Florence and the Machine, (Gordon Brown’s favourites) the Arctic Monkeys, the Vaccines and many more.

Old Blue Last, Shoreditch

Places like the Old Blue Last won’t have deterred the arrival of trendy artist types in the area and I thought the photo below shows an appropriate clash of old and new — über-cool American Apparel (apparently the shop where Ruta Gedmintas bought her outfits for Frankie in Lip Service) has opened up next to a pub improbably called the Barley Mow.

Old and New on Curtain Road

Actually the Barley Mow is only a traditional looking boozer from the outside, as I found when I organised a pub crawl starting at the pub, and found that the price of a pint of their Fuller’s ale was a far from working-class £3.70.

A group of us did 8 pubs in all in a route from Shoreditch to Islington via Old Street and the Regent’s Canal. Second on the list was the also archaically named

Probably Not Many Bricklayers in Here Any More -- Bricklayer's Arms, Shoreditch

Bricklayer’s Arms (thought the punctuation of the name suggests there was only one tradesman).

On the crawl was the ultimate down-at-heel boozer that’s been the unlikely beneficiary of being turned into a nationally famous ale drinkers’ destination — the Wenlock Arms on the borders of Old Street and Hoxton.

It’s in a very mixed area with new apartments being developed around the Wenlock Basin on the Regent’s Canal but also being situated in the middle of the sprawl of forbidding-looking council estates that border the trendy centres of Shoreditch and Hoxton.

Wenlock Arms, Hoxton

It’s an almost stereotypically ‘unspoiled’ pub — almost falling to pieces in places — but it’s got a thriving clientele of ale drinkers (some of whom I know seek this place out from the USA) but it has been under threat recently of being redeveloped into a five storey block of flats.

It’s the sort of authentic place deserves to be preserved and, as an example of one aspect of pub culture, a pub very like it might find its way into my novel. And any inquisitive barmaid who might work in this sort of pub would certainly know how to keep and serve great beer.

Tags: artists, Curtain Theatre, history, Hoxton, London, Moniker Art, Norton Folgate, Oranges and Lemons, pubs, setting, Shakespeare, Shoreditch, The City, Village Underground
Posted in Research | 3 Comments »

Jeremy Discusses GDP, Yoga, the Greek Referendum and Escalators

November 2nd, 2011

Apologies for the long absence…I have about half a dozen blog posts in various forms of readiness to publish but, for day-job related reasons and because I’m trying to write more of the actual novel, I’ve not managed to finish the posts off for a while. The following is recycled from a post I put up on our MA year group’s communal blog (it’s a closed group, I’m afraid) and it’s about how the all human life (almost) can be found in its not very flattering glory between 12 noon and 2pm on BBC Radio Two.

The Jeremy Vine show has been called Daily Mail radio and it’s quite formulaic but it’s often hilariously entertaining. Jeremy Vine himself seems to adopt this ‘reasonable man’ persona that makes most of the peculiar people and oddballs on his show think he’s being incredibly sympathetic when, in reality, I suspect he’s gently satirising them.

Whoever puts the show’s schedule together must have a surreal sense of humour. The following list (that I extracted and edited directly from the BBC website) features almost all of the topics discussed on recent shows (starting yesterday and going back a month or so).

It has some of the most bizarre combinations of subjects imaginable. Both the first and the last items on the list below are mind-boggling.

Unsurprisingly, having listened a lot to JV over the past three years, his hobby horses appear to be materialising in my writing — if you see which topics tend to recur in the list below then you might be able to get an idea of what are themes in my novel — except for wheelie bins which are a JV favourite but haven’t played a part in my writing — YET!

I was thinking of subtitling my novel ‘How Jeremy Vine Ruined My Life’.

Jeremy discusses GDP, yoga, the Greek referendum and escalators.
Jeremy discusses violent pornography, Jimmy Savile, diabetes and canoeists and anglers.
Vanessa Feltz discusses supermarket apprenticeships, rickets, St Paul’s and stone theft.
Vanessa Feltz discusses knife crime, Mandarin, teenage goths and getting online.
Vanessa Feltz discusses unfair dismissal, dentists, domestic violence and seagulls.
Vanessa Feltz discusses the EU, house husbands, St Paul’s and Japanese Knotweed.
Vanessa Feltz discusses the European referendum, jailed parents, Islam and wide cars.
Jeremy discusses Colonel Gaddafi, stamps, living alone and dogs worrying livestock.
Jeremy discusses Dale Farm, energy sources, foreign aid and offensive language.
Jeremy discusses Dale Farm, the Euro, housing problems and egg donation.
Jeremy discusses Hillsborough, GPs cutting patients, funeral etiquette and Gaza.
Jeremy discusses anti-capitalist protests, energy prices, smacking and IndyCar racing.
Jeremy discusses journalists, a restaurant in trouble, pornography and our allotment.
Jeremy discusses unemployment, Libya, care for the elderly in the NHS and being a mum.
Jeremy discusses the police, lottery winners, wheelie bins and a young entrepreneur.
Jeremy discusses quantitative easing, TV repeats, saving money & an unusual police chase.
Jeremy discusses Steve Jobs, hot curry, the Jarrow marchers and memorial benches.
Jeremy discusses credit card debt, crime in prisons, being mixed race and Theresa May.
Jeremy discusses the Knox verdict, drones, tube drivers and parking restrictions.
Jeremy discusses adoption, the Irish presidency, war graves and a tortoise sanctuary.
Jeremy discusses Ed Miliband, Rihanna, extra-marital affairs and the Greek bailout.
Jeremy discusses defence cuts, horse whipping, cancer drugs and a young Labour activist.
Jeremy discusses drink-driving, the economy, care for the elderly and lullabies.
Jeremy discusses the economy, a couple living in a shed, feminism and rag-and-bone men.
Jeremy discusses PFI, a London bus stabbing, genital mutilation and the Blue Peter Annual.

and I just found two classics from the last two shows:

Jeremy discusses the IMF, umbrellas, insurance and using hedges as toilets.
Jeremy discusses the Euro rescue package, arguing, secrets and kidneys.

For a longer list of topics going back to June then click here. Inspiration from Jeremy Vine

Tags: Blue Peter, Jeremy Vine, Radio Two, surreal combinations
Posted in Research | 6 Comments »

Ready for the Shardpener

October 13th, 2011

Shard from the Millennium Bridge 7th October 2011

Another photo for the fans of the amazing Shard who end up landing on this blog and wondering exactly why.

It’s very close to being finished on the outside. The concrete core has reached its final height and the glass panels have almost enclosed it — the impression this photo gives me is of a huge pencil with a bit of protruding lead at the top, ready to be put into the pencil sharpener.

This photo was taken on a research run in London (see the Google map below to see exactly what route I took). I did some checking out of the locations in which I’m setting parts of my novel — mainly at the eastern end of the route.

I can’t think of a running route that would go past any more tourist sights than this one — or at least one where you could actually get up some speed. I’m not sure if New Scotland Yard or MI5′s HQ are proper sights but they were on the first stretch, then London Eye, the Southbank Centre (where I went earlier this week to see Pipilotti Rist’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery), Tate Modern, Millennium Bridge, St. Paul’s, Victoria Embankment, Cleopatra’s Needle, Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.

I even took my research so far I wanted to wander into the St. Paul’s Cathedral shop but, having just done 5km at the time, and dripping perspiration in puddles from my bright orange Nike running top, I decided to respect the decorum of the church and come back again another day.

More pics from other research trips to come in the next few days.

Check out my run below.

View Westminster-St.Paul’s Circular 2011-10-07 12:30 in a larger map

Tags: City of London, running, setting, St. Paul's Cathedral, The Shard, tourist sights
Posted in Research | 2 Comments »

Apologies to Tamara Watts

October 1st, 2011

The user name below, found on an office ‘multi-function device’ (i.e. printer), appealed to my puerile streak.

Are You Sure About Allocating That User Name?

I guess I shouldn’t laugh — maybe Mr Timothy or Ms Tamara Watts has had to deal with such sniggering throughout their lives — although the way computer user names are constructed to an unbending formula might prevent subtle ways of avoiding the construction. At least there’s a bit of ambiguity in the plural, I guess it’s even worse for someone with the surname Watt.

That particular piece of Anglo-Saxon vocabulary intrigues me as I was once pulled-up by an Open University Creative Writing student for using it in a screenplay writing assignment (and I suspect she deducted marks from the assignment in question). The objection wasn’t to the word itself — it was because I’d dared to put it in the mouth of a female character (in fact a prototype Kim).

She actually said that something along the lines of ‘a woman would never say that word’. (It might be an unwelcome consequence of feminism that many women — and I do think this is far more true of women than it is of men — seem to feel qualified to make sweeping statements on behalf of their whole gender group. It brings to mind Harriet Harman’s periodically facile assertions about women running organisations more effectively and compassionately — and in the next breath she denounces the uncaring destruction wreaked on the country by Margaret Thatcher.)

Every other woman who read that use of the word had no problem at all with it — so I don’t think it’s a gender issue — more of a generational one. Female baby-boomers, especially middle-class ones, have probably been conditioned by parents and peer-pressure not to swear in company but this doesn’t hold true for Generation X and Y — and especially not the generation who come after Y — whatever they’re called. (I’m a Generation Xer, by the way.)

‘The Angel’s’ characters straddle the boundary period between Generation X and Generation Y. (I’m using the most common definitions, according to Wikipedia, of X starting in 1964 and Y starting in 1982.) James and Emma are the tail end of the Xers, while Kim’s an early Y…and to some extent James will look at Kim as an example of a new, exciting generation (even though she’s not much younger).

But both the female Xs and Ys will swear a lot (I’m also going to have a woman Baby Boomer character too, who won’t). In fact the dialogue in the novel is so full of swearing that it breaks one of the cardinal Rules of Creative Writing that you tend to find in books — readers don’t like reading lots of profanities.

I’m not really sure about this rule on a couple of counts.

I can see dialogue in which every other word is effing and blinding will be tedious but some of the most captivating speakers I’ve listened to in real life use frequent swearing in an expertly oratorical way — to contribute to the rhythm of a phrase or for comic timing — think of some of the most popular stand-up comedians.
As with their reactions to sexual content, or something similarly taboo, what people say they think about a book/film/play/artwork is not necessarily what they think privately about it. I’ve blogged before about this issue might prevent honest discussion of a piece of writing in a workshopping situation — where it’s human nature for participants to use their feedback to reveal or conceal aspects of their own characters or experiences to the other participants.
The advice might be sound in that it points out the costs of alienating a significant portion of a writer’s potential readership. However, if you worry too much about offending people as you’re writing then you may end up with a story as inoffensive, uninteresting and utterly bland as if it had been written by a focus group.

Mind you, having expounded about how my professional and arty middle-class characters indulge in the joy of swearing, I’ve realised that I didn’t hear a single profanity (aside from a few ribald songs) in a location that I visited today (see photo below) that, perhaps 20, 30 or 40 years ago, would have been a bastion of male working-class culture — and which is now going-on for half female and with a very cosmopolitan mix of ethnicities (I particularly liked the personalised ‘Van Der Singh’ shirt I saw someone wearing).

Old Trafford Half an Hour Before Kick Off

I’m currently writing James and Kim’s initial restaurant conversation chapter and she teases him by suggesting everything about him says he’s an Arsenal fan.

Inside 'The Theatre of Dreams' (And No Swearing)

So Man Utd 2 Norwich 0 is my excuse for not getting that much writing done today.

Tags: computing. office life, Creative Writing Classes, demographics, Emma, Generation X, Generation Y, Harriet Harman, James, Kim, language, Manchester United, Margaret Thatcher., sex, swearing, workshops
Posted in Influences, Writing Process | No Comments »

What Happens in Vegas…

September 27th, 2011

…ends up in my novel. This may be something of a surprise seeing as most of it is set in an English country pub which, apart from the copious amounts of booze drunk, is probably one of the places least like Las Vegas in the world.

However, as has happened throughout the writing of this novel, what I’ve ended up doing in real life tends to have muscled its way into the narrative. The problem is that I’m taking so long to write the thing that the danger is that the plot I started out with will be crowded out with bizarre and incidental links to what else I was up to over the two years that it will have taken to finish (I have to be optimistic that it will be completed by Christmas — well, first draft, maybe?).

I’d like to say that the horribly long period between this post (written on a slow, stopping Chiltern Railways train in the dark) and the last (completed on a balcony in Santa Barbara overlooking the Pacific) was due to many words being committed to Microsoft Word but the time has mainly been spent enjoying the rest of the holiday (of which more later), getting back to work with the commute made more grinding by Chiltern Railways’ horrible new timetable – improved only for people north of Leamington Spa it seems – and doing all the tedious stuff that normally arrives in September.

But, as mentioned in my comments on the last post in response to Bren Gosling’s enquiries, I’ve come up with a whole load of new ideas for the novel. Some are wholly extraneous, irrelevant and (quite possibly) completely gratuitous but others serve to provide some missing context and backstory and to provide a bit of extra complexity to some characters.

And so to Las Vegas. This was the last stop on the holiday and I’m probably one of the last of my friends to have visited the place.

We arrived by car from Arizona and the Grand Canyon and, as I got the first view from the freeway about 10 miles away, I was quite prepared to dislike the peculiar cluster of high-rise buildings on the Strip, completely out of scale with the low-rise sprawl beneath.

Through a combination of special offers and me haggling at the reception desk for a pair of rooms with a connecting door, we ended up with a suite and adjoining king size room on the 39^th floor of the brand new Cosmopolitan hotel. The combined floor space was probably bigger than my house. Whereas the view from my house is of green fields and the rolling hills of the Chilterns behind, the view from the three (!) balconies we had in Las Vegas was of the Eiffel Tower (at the Paris casino), Caesar’s Palace, the Flamingo, a glimpse of the campanile tower at the Venetian and the amazing Bellagio fountains. We were too high up to hear the music (maybe a blessing) but the synchronised show was a spectacle nevertheless.

Nightfall on the Strip, Las Vegas

As well as being very well appointed and luxurious, the hotel room had some unexpected bonuses – a washing machine and tumble dryer were very useful for people who’d been living out of suitcases for two weeks. So rather than a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and some caviar blinis, room service delivered us a free packet of washing powder!

This was all very serendipitous research for the novel. As some of my ex-City friends might remember a piece I workshopped with Alison last autumn where Kim and James end up in a penthouse suite in a luxury hotel in London. If anything, the Cosmopolitan was larger and better appointed than the almost surreally sumptuous suite I imagined my characters stumbling into — it even had several plasma screens that controlled the music, lights, door locks and so on as well as being TVs.

I walked around photographing the suite and then also video recording it to keep for research (even the three toilets).

I’ll resist the temptation to make art follow life too slavishly and avoid writing into my novel a scene where Kim makes use of the facilities and puts her smalls in for an overnight wash and dry cycle (although, at that point in the story, she’s not changed for 36 hours so she probably ought to).

The Eiffel Tower, Las Vegas

Another Las Vegas experience that may make its presence felt in the novel is the Beatles/Cirque du Soleil Love show at the Mirage. This is something I’d wanted to see since its inception about six years ago but never really thought I would – bar a transfer to the UK. Some of the remixes in the soundtrack album ‘blew my mind’ (to paraphrase one of the songs featured) when I first heard them.

It was a superb show but, being along time worshipper of the Beatles music, I was most interested in the surround sound – having Paul McCartney’s harmonies on Come Together come out from speakers behind your ears is a memorable experience.

The Beatles have some very strong German connections: John Lennon is often quoted as saying ‘I was born in Liverpool but I grew up in Hamburg’. This German influence on the outlook of one of the best-known Englishmen and shapers of popular culture in the 20th century won’t be lost on Kim – who’s a devout Anglophile but also has the patriotic fervour of the ex-pat.

Caesar's Palace on the Strip, Las Vegas

Las Vegas – or the Las Vegas of the Strip – is such a ridiculously OTT monument to artifice that, a little like my reaction to Disneyland, the place couldn’t be viewed ironically – it ridiculed itself. I was awed by the scale and audacity of the place – a pyramid, a recreation of the New York skyline, a casino with an erupting volcano outside it and, perhaps most bizarrely, a monorail system of all things.

New York, Las Vegas

The whole place is a fiction – an attempt to paint audacious, and convincing, narratives to disguise the low-level, slot-machine routine gambling that provides the casinos with the cashflow that is the life-blood of the city.

But, ironically, it’s a fiction that isn’t executed in a tacky way. A lot of money is spent on exactly sourcing the right sort of materials to create a pyramid or the Manhattan skyline or similar.

Kim would know that one of the key figures behind much of the extravagant architecture on the Strip is Steve Wynn, who’s used his fortune to buy a lot of valuable modern art (though one of his acquisitions lost much of its value when he put his elbow through the canvas).

The all-you-can-eat buffets in the hotels also emphasise how Las Vegas is built on human fallibilities – greed being one, but also (obviously) gambling and sex is suffused throughout the city. It never seemed to be far from the surface in Las Vegas – whether the organised touts on the Strip with their ‘Girls To Your Room in 20 Minutes’ T-Shirts (incredibly I saw someone wearing one of these as a souvenir at the airport), the risqué shows (including one Cirque du Soleil one) or the general atmosphere of a perpetual stag or hen party – thronged with gangs of hardly-clothed young people, although no-one is going to be comfortable completely covering up in the 40C temperatures we experienced.

It’s no wonder, despite the Strip’s relatively recent transformation in the 1990s, that Las Vegas has come to occupy its own niche in the pantheon of popular culture — many novels and films mine use it as a shorthand to access fallibility and excess.

But despite the hedonism, there’s also an appreciation of real beauty and culture – as in the opulent setting of the Venetian with its ‘real’ gondolas — its artifice is a step up from the fibreglass reconstructions in theme parks. The first time I walked into the recreation of St. Mark’s Square I gasped at the incredibly lifelike blue sky. It’s such a ridiculous conceit to reconstruct a water-bound jewel of the Renaissance in an American desert that it’s completely seductive — and you’re soon on the water being serenaded past Dolce and Gabbana and Louis Vuitton. I can see how Emma would fall in love with this place in a second.

Gondoliers in Vegas

It’s a fiction writers’ dream – a fantastical place that is motivated by, and appeals to, all the human desires that are normally kept hidden by the inhibitions of society. I was so fascinated by the place I bought a couple of books when I got back on the development and history of the Strip — and I’m fascinated by the psychology of manipulation that is used in casino design.

It’s almost a cliche that there are no clocks or windows in casinos (although there are big windows at the new Cosmopolitan) but there are many other subtle triggers that are used to manipulate customers’ behaviour (perhaps no more than in a supermarket but it’s better to end up with too many buy-one-get-one-frees than to have your bank account cleared out). There must certainly be parallels with fiction writing and narrative.

So, despite, or perhaps because, my novel is largely set in such a supposedly staid and traditional place, some of the characters will be seduced by the idea of Las Vegas – it would be the sort of destination that both James and Emma would visit on their own stag/hen dos and probably go out for a long weekend in the winter.

And if anyone goes on holiday to Las Vegas during the course of my novel then you know that something interesting is going to happen — and what happens in Vegas isn’t necessarily going to stay there.

Tags: backstory, Beatles, contrasts, Emma, James, Kim, las vegas, psychology, Research, sex, theme
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Chilling Out with Kim

August 22nd, 2011

I’m currently sitting opposite the Pacific Ocean in one of the most pleasant and laid-back places in the world — Santa Barbara’s beachfront. However, I’m not doing a touristy travelogue and my enjoyment of the relaxed atmosphere is interspersed with virtual panic-attacks about the amount of money it costs to be here.

But I’m here because this place (as very attentive readers of this blog may have realised) is somewhere that’s ingrained in my psyche as I spent an academic year here as part of my undergraduate degree course — although it wasn’t here in chic downtown Santa Barbara (see photo below — taken from my hotel balcony) but the more rough-and-ready student ghetto of Isla Vista.

Cabrillo Boulevard, Santa Barbara

Isla Vista is a community of at least 10,000 students (possibly many more) and very few other people. I ended up living almost in the middle of it — in an apartment that bordered on its central business district (if that’s what various student bookshops, liquor stores, fast food businesses and so on can be called).

While this sounds quite anarchic and hedonistic, I probably reacted against it all to a large extent when I arrived — for one thing I was so young that it was illegal for me to buy alcohol, which was something very constricting for someone on the third year of a British university course.

I’m quite astounded now at how I managed to cope — aged 20 — being deposited on the other side of the globe in the days before the internet and e-mail. This was when phone calls home were so expensive you made them once a month and when national news came via the reading room of the university library’s periodical collection rather than a few clicks on a computer.

Perhaps, if anything, this experience of being transplanted between cultures has given me an appreciation of what British culture looks like from the outside — which is perhaps a theme of the novel.

Moreover, while it sits at odds with my northern English upbringing and redbrick (British) university roots, there’s always going to be something in me of the chilled-out Californian. I spent the best part of a year with the TV stations I watched most being the local KEYT Santa Barbara ABC franchise but also the local Los Angeles stations — while the names of suburbs in LA might seem a little random to many with a superficial knowledge of the area, I’ve gained mine from effectively being a local for a year.

Not that this has much to do at all with the profoundly English themes in my novel but hopefully the work I did here in Santa Barbara (especially the screenwriting courses) will seep subconsciously into the novel — or perhaps more overtly as I’m wondering about converting a character into a Californian.

Santa Barbara from Stearn's Wharf at Nightfall

And Santa Barbara (or Montecito — the other end of town to the university) is home to large numbers of movie, and other, stars. In a very tenuous Kim connection apparently the second biggest celebrity wedding of the year took place a mile or so up the road — Kim Kardashian who’s apparently very famous for being famous married a basketball player. This is all the sort of stuff that Emma disdains interest in but by which she’s actually fascinated.

So, appropriately, it’s on to Hollywood and Beverly Hills today (where, ridiculously, the internet costs extra in the hotel so I may be quiet a while).

And I’ve been very slow in picking this up but perhaps the biggest subconscious influence of all is how my novel’s title is an almost literal translation of the biggest city in California — Los Angeles — the Angels.

Tags: Californian lifestyle, deep seated influences, Emma, Isla Vista, Kim, Kim Kardashian wedding, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, screenwriting course, student life, subconscious, UCSB
Posted in Influences | 7 Comments »

SFMoMA

August 21st, 2011

It’s not some sort of weird business school acronym but the local shorthand for one of the best art galleries in the US — the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

It’s a little confusing as, according to the guidebooks, a very similar acronym — SoMa — is used to refer to the district of the city (South of Market [Street]) where the modern art museum is located.

The entrance fee for SFMoMA is $18 — which should make us based in around London very grateful for the free entrance to Tate Modern — the SFMoMA’s equivalent. I used a ticket that had been bought for a package of attractions — like cable cars and the Fisherman’s Wharf aquarium — so had about half an hour to look around the San Francisco collection of 2oth century artistry.

The museum has an example of one of the most seminal exhibits in modern art history — Duchamps’ Fountain. This is the famous urinal that was meant to be submitted to the New York Society of Independent Artists show in 1917 (although it actually wasn’t exhibited) as an example of how virtually anything could be considered modern art.

I was quite excited to see it in the San Francisco museum but apparently it’s not the original but one of eight replicas made by Duchamp in the 1960s, which are all on show at prestigious modern art museums (including the Tate).

So it’s a pretty iconic piece — the original piece of shock-value modern art that provoked millions of ‘I could do better than that’ comments over the last century…and it would obviously be well known to Kim.

Duchamps’s R. Mutt Urinal

A definite original in the gallery — and one that Kim would enjoy — is a Mark Rothko painting — Number 14. It seems that Rothko painted a few different works with the same title. This one is from 1960 and is in red and purple. I was persuaded of the significance of these Rothko blocks of colour by the Simon Scharma BBC documentary and, as this blog I’ve found online quotes of the artist, it’s easy to see that the paintings have an effect of “serenity about to explode.”

Mark Rothko -- Number 14

Serenity about to explode — that would be an apt description to work to for the first part of my novel.

Tags: artists, Duchampf, Kim, Mark Rothko, modern art, Research, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SFMoMA, subconscious, theme
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Tasty British Exports?

August 16th, 2011

I knew Gordon Ramsay had branched into US TV stardom with Hell’s Kitchen but I didn’t expect him to turn up on the second hour of US TV cookery primetime as main presenter of the American version of Masterchef -- all on Fox TV.

It was the semi-final last night and the contestants were sweating over their lemon meringue pies — I wonder whether it’s actually possible to send up this TV genre.

Somewhat serendipitously Masterchef had imported its floppy-haired, bearded, Johnny Depp-spectacled French judge — someone who I’d watched this time last year and blogged about when the programme was on when we were staying in Brittany. In its hyped-up introduction, the US show claimed that Masterchef is a TV phenomenon all over the world — India and Israel were mentioned.

What did seem telling was the contestants seemed much more openly competitive than those in the UK original, who almost seem embarrassed to get through. In the US version, they slag each other off like Apprentice contestants (who only seem to do that when goaded for pre-publicity — in the tasks the British Apprentice contestants are remarkably nice to each other).

Or perhaps Americans are just more honest — a big difference perhaps between British and US writing? I always think American writing is more direct — much more emphasis on active and imaginative verbs (as Stephen King would recommend) whereas British writing is typically more discursive. This doesn’t mean good British-style writing is bad — just different — compare the styles of Time and The Economist.

Ironically, given last week’s events, the British versions of these programmes seem to show a country more at ease with itself than the US — which has been brought almost to bankruptcy by the brinksmanship of its politicians, whereas in Britain they entered a coalition.

And on the other channel in the room next door were Piers Morgan and Sharon Osborne on America’s Got Talent. On second thoughts perhaps not all British exports are that tasty.

Tags: globalisation, Gordon Ramsay, international perspectives, language, Masterchef, Masterchef USA, the Apprentice, The Economist, Time
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Senseless

August 10th, 2011

Having written a post about what a vibrant, international city London is — and having written a significant number of words for my novel that use London as a setting — I’ve been feeling physically sickened by the events over the past few days.

Many of the locations for the looting and arson (the criminal behaviour doesn’t even deserve to be termed rioting, let alone protesting or demonstrating) are places I know reasonably well, having worked there for a while (like Croydon) or been there recently to enjoy a drink (Clapham Junction and Hackney). (I was also in the Bull Ring shopping centre a couple of weeks ago which has also been broken into and looted.)

Pembury Tavern, Hackney

As mentioned in a post below (with the bike photo) I was in Hackney around six weeks ago and started off an afternoon pub crawl at the Pembury Tavern. This pub is apparently very close to the Pembury Estate which was a trouble spot last night.

The main flashpoint was apparently in Mare Street, which I travelled along on the number 30 bus a few weeks before and is very close to the Globe in Morning Lane, which was our next stop after the Pembury.

I won’t offer any in-depth opinion on the reasons behind the disturbances here except to observe, in the context of this novel and blog, that I’d been surprised that Hackney seemed to be nowhere near as intimidating a place as some people like to portray it and I enjoyed going there. But I’m also glad that I’ve already done that piece of research. Given the difficulties of throwing off a reputation for being insalubrious, it’s deplorable that the actions of a very few idiots will have so damaged the areas where they live — the physical damage can be rebuilt but the reputational and psychological damage will live on for decades. Areas like Ealing and Enfield are suburban enough to withstand the damage but the more deprived areas like Hackney and Tottenham will suffer more and a lot of the good that the Olympics promised to bring to these areas in terms of regeneration will have been outweighed.

Ironically, at the same time these events have unfolded I’ve been working on a couple of parts of the novel that discuss the living in the city versus the countryside question. I’ve been asked in feedback sessions why Kim, an artist living in Hackney and working in Shoreditch (thankfully spared from the trouble), would ever contemplate leaving those places to set up in bucolic Buckinghamshire.

This is a tension that runs through the novel but I do think it’s credible that she would want to move — and the causes of the recent disorder give some reasons why. As with elections in the 1980s, when everyone said publicly they despised the Tories but enough secretly voted for them out of self-interest (not me by the way), the debate about housing location is similar. Lots of people like to claim they like living in an ‘edgy’ area and few declare a love for the suburbs. Yet it’s an established demographic phenomenon that middle-class, university-educated people tend to leave London in large numbers in their thirties — particularly when they’ve had a family.

Also, while I recently read an article in the Sunday Times magazine (that I can’t link to because it’s a pay-site) about how some of today’s well-connected modern artists are doing quite well financially, I doubt if Kim would ever be able to come close to be able to afford to live in the sort of village where The Angel is the local. Such ridiculous property prices are a problem in the countryside where the preponderance of commuters and the retired creates demographic problems of another sort. But if Kim is given a cost-effective way of getting out of London, then I think she’d certainly consider it — which also gives the opportunity to leave behind problems of other sorts.

What’s most unnerving about the anarchy on the streets is it affects people’s sense of personal security — and, while, in

Pembury Tavern Handpumps

reality, the number of people causing trouble is very small, the psychological repercussions are profound. I’ve also been asked in workshops what attracts Kim to James. One of the main reasons is, apart from his indefatigable admiration of her work, is that he boosts her own sense of security — something she doesn’t admit even to herself for much of the novel. A sense of one’s own personal security and physical vulnerability probably isn’t anything that’s going to be very honestly discussed in workshops but it’s something that, I suspect, deeply connects with a reader in the one-to-one situation that engages reader with a text.

I got too depressed about events to carry on watching rolling news on the television (which I think must examine its own role in the spread of copycat criminality) but have seen some hopeful reports about communities cleaning up and reclaiming the public spaces so here’s a photo of the Pembury Tavern’s line up of beers on its bars. I hope to go back soon.

Tags: criminality, Hackney, James, Kim, London, looting, motivation, Pembury Tavern, psychology, setting, thuggery
Posted in Frustrations | No Comments »

Shardenfreude

July 26th, 2011

Google Analytics tells me that there must be a lot of disappointed people who happen to land on some of this blog’s pages. Aside from my ardent and dedicated regular followers people land on the blog by via search terms that generally relate to subject that I’ve tended to mention in passing.

But today I can satisfy a group of people who are fans of an iconic sight that’s slowly emerging by London Bridge — the Shard (otherwise known as London Bridge Tower).

The previous blog entry of photos of the Shard has had more hits than virtually anything literary (bar the write-ups of talks by agents and editors during the City Novel Writing course).

The Shard From The North Side of London Bridge -- 5th July 2011

So here’s another fix for those fans of the soon-to-be tallest building in Europe. All are photos I’ve taken while running from Westminster up to the City along the Thames — out on the north bank and back on the South Bank.

Shard from the North Bank of the Thames 5th July 2011

They’re taken on occasions separated by 20 days — and on initial impressions it doesn’t seem that the Shard has risen much higher over that period — perhaps they’ve all been on holiday? Or maybe it’s because the building is so huge that it’s an effect of its scale.

The Shard from Guess Where -- 25th July 2011

Actually, I’ve learned from Wikipedia that the concrete core has reached its ultimate height of 72 storeys and that it’s now the floors for each storey that are being added — at a rate of one a week. Three weeks’ progress can just about be discerned between the photos. (btw It’s not a cropping mistake that there’s so much of the River Thames on the above photo — there’s a little hint of where it’s taken from in the bottom-right corner.)

But why am I putting lots of photos of construction work on a blog that’s (meant to be) about my long and discursive journey towards completing my novel(s) — and, with a bit of luck, beyond that?

But I’d argue that the Shard is just the most prominent example of a theme that runs through The Angel. It emphasises the dynamic, changing environment of London — and, being designed by an Italian and financed with money from the Middle East, it’s also an example of the internationalisation of the city.

I have a character who’s been drawn to London because, compared with anywhere else, she really thinks it’s the place to be. And unlike many weary Britons who believe themselves over-familiar with the city, she’s enthralled by discovering the place and the rapid change that’s happening around her makes it even more enjoyable — there’s lots of tradition but there’s also a lot of re-invention.

It’s difficult to overstate the amount of prominent new building that has taken place in London recently — and how distinctive the majority of the new architecture has been. I happened to come across Kenneth Powell’s book ’21st Century London — The New Architecture’ in Tate Britain last week. It’s a superb book for anyone interested in the development of contemporary London.

The list of structures put up in the last 11 years is almost awe-inspiring – and, being an artist, Kim is going to have an eye for good architecture.

Firstly, there are the obvious but hugely popular Millennium projects, such as the London Eye, the Millennium Bridge and the derided but distinctive dome that has now turned into the O2 arena.

With public transport being a bête noir of Londoners, it’s easy to forget the huge investments in transport infrastructure. I was pleased to see that Powerll agrees with my appreciation of the Jubilee Line extension’s transformation of Westminster tube station, which is like something out of a science fiction film.

A Whole Series of Blake's 7 Could Have Been Filmed in Westminster Tube Station

Canary Wharf underground station is mind-blowing: it reminds me of the interior of a cathedral more than anything else — such a huge space suffused with natural light. The restoration of the huge canopy of the Barlow train shed over the tracks at St.Pancras station for the high speed rail link has been immensely popular, as has the development of the rest of the station — and there are much improved Thameslink and underground stations (I often used Kings Cross-St. Pancras on the way back from City University).

And there’s more on the way — right next to the Millennium Bridge (on the run I took the photos on), Blackfriars station is being transformed into something that will span both sides of the river. The corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street is also one huge building site (as I saw from the top of a number 24 last week), as is the area round Farringdon (and a few other locations) while Crossrail is being tunnelled. With Thameslink also being improved, London will have a couple of cross-city railways of the type people have always complained are commonplace in, for example, French or German cities. (There’s also the massive Heathrow Terminal 5, which like a few of these projects was derided at first and then eventually appreciated for being a tremendous piece of infrastructure.)

Then there are the marvellous renovations of iconic buildings: the Great Court at the British Museum, the Royal Festival Hall and, of course, most pertinently to my novel, the conversion of Bankside Power Station into the Tate Modern.

The office buildings in the City are probably the tallest and most noticeable developments. As well as the Shard, there’s the iconic Gherkin (30 St.Mary Axe), the newly finished Heron Tower, the Pinnacle (under construction in the City, which will be almost as tall as the Shard) and the Broadgate Tower (which looms over Village Underground — although less than originally planned as its height was scaled down).

City Encroaching On Shoreditch

Not all the big office developments are in The City. There’s the colourful Central St.Giles development (those yellow, red and green faced buildings), the Wellcome Trust building in Euston Road (a place I know some of my writerly friends use as a congenial venue to discuss their novels) and buildings I never knew had a great architectural pedigree, such as Palestra, near Southwark tube station, which reminds me a bit of a broken Rubik’s cube.

It’s not all work — there’s plenty of play. Two of the best stadiums in the world have been built in London in the last ten years. There’s the new Wembley Stadium, which is the second-biggest stadium in Europe and probably the best in the world for facilities (and I’ve just been extorted out of £92.50 for two tickets there to watch England vs Holland in a couple of weeks time). The Emirates Stadium shouldn’t be forgotten. I often used to fly over and think it reminded me of a giant Arse — quite appropriate for a club whose name oddly recurs in the names of its staff: a manager called Arsene and a striker named Arshevin. (I’m a Man Utd fan).

There’s a huge amount of redevelopment in London since 2000 – but there’s even more to come. At the start of the novelKim lives around Homerton in a tall block of flats (on the number 30 route) so she’s also been able to look out on the progress of the biggest transformation of the lot — the 2012 London Olympic park. This is home to some apparently incredibly inventive buildings — but the public’s not allowed near them at the moment. We’ll only be allowed in on the first day of the event itself…

…which begins exactly a year today. London will then be even more the world’s most international city.

And I hope I’ll be able to put my feet up and watch it, which I’ll have to do almost entirely on TV — although I did get a meagre ticket allocation out of the farcical process. Some will not be surprised to know they’re for beach volleyball — my excuse is I was working my way through the alphabet — I was also going for athletics! And in a year’s time I also hope to have long since put the finishing touches to The Angel too.

Tags: architecture, Blake's 7, Crossrail, Gherkin, Heron Tower, international perspectives, London, London 2012, Millennium Bridge, setting, Tate Gallery, The Pinnacle, The Shard, Village Underground, Westminster Tube Station
Posted in Influences | 1 Comment »

Not Balderdash or Piffle

July 24th, 2011

I always thought Victoria Coren — of Balderdash and Piffle and Only Connect was an intelligent person but now I realise she’s a rarer breed — an intelligent person who’s not a cultural snob.

In her column from today’s Observer (retweeted by Carole Blake) she ranges about familiar targets of intellectual derision, such as Harry Potter and Michael McIntyre, and exposes the very unpleasant assumptions that lie hidden beneath the snobbery.

However, it’s her story about how a King Lear DVD has become a surprise bestseller at Poundland that hits home because it ties in closely with the arguments in Jonthan Rose’s book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (review from the Independent here and Guardian here). Coren’s comment is true of far more walks of life than the literary:

Give it six more months, a million more sales, and we’ll start hearing that King Lear is a rubbish play from a second-rate crowd-pleaser; John Webster was always the man.

This makes the powerful point that many people marginalised by traditional intellectual educational establishments still have a thirst for the pleasure and satisfaction achieved through classical, literary or artistic knowledge. It seems to me that one of the most grievious mistakes the left has made in the post-war era is to conflate a lack of formal higher education with philistinism.

The comments she makes about the demise of The News of the World also resonate with me. It certainy wasn’t my Sunday newspaper of choice but I can’t believe that everyone gleeful about its demise was motivated by concerns over voicemail privacy.

The same principles hold true in novel writing: the closer one comes to the language and experiences of ‘normal people’ the more people will try to dispute your characters motives and credibility. If one writes about a nineteenth-century, deformed, psychotic serial killer then few people in a creative writing workshop will try to put themselves in the position of the character and try to question his (or her) motivations — and they’ll discreetly leave it to the author to work on his or her impressive feat of the imagination.

Yet write something set in the present day about someone who’s been working in an office whose marriage is a little unfulfiling and there will be

Tags: King Lear, Michael McIntyre, snobbery, Victoria Coren, workshops
Posted in General Life | 1 Comment »

Fields Inspired by Eric Ravilious

July 22nd, 2011

One of my favourite paintings — and one that is very germane to The Angel’s setting is John Nash’s The Cornfield, which I’ve blogged about previously. It’s relatively well-known, providing a motif for David Dimbleby’s BBC series on landscape painting a couple of years ago and can be viewed here on a link to the Tate Britain website.

Clearly the painting captures a specific moment in the agricultural year — the bringing in of the harvest — and as it was painted in 1918 it predates any mechanisation. The Nash painting depicts a line of wheatsheaves (amazingly the word ‘wheatsheaf’ isn’t in my wrist-sapping Oxford Dictionary of English). They’re portrayed almost anthropomorphically as semi-human figures (a little like monks with hassocks tied around their waists) and they look tired, weary and irregular, but still form a semblance of a line, much as one might imagine was the mood of the country at the end of the First World War.

I took the photograph below at 6.30am on the 15th July (St. Swithin’s Day — as immortalised by David Nicholls) on the way to get the train. (This is my bucolic route to the local station, which is wonderful on a July morning but awful on a rainy, muddy January evening). I’d walked the opposite direction the previous night about 6pm, when the grass had been cut but not baled. One point about the reduction in the number of farmers is that when the remaining farmers are busy, then they’re really busy. When the wheat is ready to bring in the combine harvesters work through the night. So it’s not surprising that the cut grass had been baled over the course of the previous evening.

A 21st Century Cornfield?

Although these bales are of meadow hay and not corn (which meant wheat when Nash painted his picture) I later realised that there was something of a parallel. Rather than sheaves that are designed to be gathered in the arms, these cylindrical bales are so huge they can only be moved by a fork-lift truck (or its tractor equivalent) — there are no more than a dozen of them in the field, which must be a good three or four acres. So my photo, with its long shadows, is similar in spirit to Nash’s painting but also shows the differences.

I was reminded of Nash because I paid a brief visit today to Tate Britain in Millbank, which is where The Cornfield is on display. I didn’t have time to go into their current Watercolour exhibition but I saw a few reproductions of the pictures elsewhere in the gallery. I was particularly struck by Eric Ravilious’s The Vale of the White Horse, featuring the genuinely ancient prehistoric monument which is just off the Ridgeway in Oxfordshire.

If you were to follow the Ridgeway from the Uffington White Horse north-east for about fifty miles, you’d end up at The Angel (in fact I might use a bit of artistic licence and have the Ridgeway go past the front door, as it does at The Plough at Cadsden). And Kim will be wonderfully excited about the connection between the land and the art — she’s going to take the Nashes and Revilious as inspiration.

There’s also a profound irony about Kim’s interest in Ravilious — like the Nashes he was a war artist — but unlike them he died in action. He was killed in an air-sea rescue mission in 1942 off Iceland.

Another serendipitous connection is that there is a brewery named after the White Horse.Their beers include two that are well-known to me — Wayland Smithy and, er, Village Idiot.

Tags: artists, Eric Ravilious, Hay baling, John Nash, Kim, landscapes, London, Paul Nash, setting, Tate Britain, Tate Gallery, The Ridgeway, theme, White Horse Brewery
Posted in Influences | 2 Comments »

Unlocking English as a Second Language?

July 18th, 2011

I’m writing about a character who doesn’t have English as her native language, although she’s lived in London long enough for English not to be accurately described, perhaps, as her second language — more her first through usage and acclimatisation.

I’m therefore always interested in the idiosyncrasies of how non-native speakers construct their English speech. Germans, like Kim, are generally very precise — although they often literally translate German grammatical construction (quite often possessives — like ‘the department of Mr Schulze’) and occasionally get tripped up on word genders (talking about inanimate objects as he or she).

But most young people who have constant exposure through living in this country will tend to speak very fluently — picking up English figures of speech and phrasing. They might sometimes want to draw attention to their ‘otherness’, though, as Kim does — which sometimes comes across on the page as inconsistency — although it’s deliberate on my behalf.

So I think Kim would have been more than bemused by this shop window in High Wycombe — on the main shopping street too. I’m sure she’d be horrified — she’s a cultural snob and very proud of her own language abilities.

It’s hard to know where to start in terms of listing the errors in the huge poster — but, despite its mistakes, it makes itself understood — in a similar way to how very limited English speakers often get their message across — perhaps one of the reasons why English is such a ubiquitous language?

Phone Shop Window in High Wycombe

Tags: English, German, High Wycombe, Kim, language, non-native language
Posted in Influences | 3 Comments »

Art for Art’s Sake?

July 12th, 2011

I’m not sure about Kim’s personal taste in modern art but with her training she’d be sure to be able to hold forth about Cy Twombly, the American painter who died last week, and was the subject of some posts on this blog from around 18 months ago when I first saw some of his work in the Tate Modern. Here’s a link to the Deutsche Welle website report on his death to show his influence in Germany.

Cy Twombly's Work -- From the Telegraph web-site

I guess she’d quite admire the scale and audacity of the work as I did — and the vivid colours. Yet work like Twombly’s certainly encourages those who see modern, abstract art of displaying as much technical skill as a child’s painting and of suggesting those who proclaim themselves the arbiters of its undoubted quality are those who would insist that the emperor was fully clothed — as this blog entry on the Telegraph website by Harry Mount makes clear.

Kim will produce mainly abstract works — partly because it will be amusing to see James struggle to make head or tail of what they mean — but she’s be technically trained to a very high standard, something which will hold James in awe of her talent and provide a reason for his attraction to her — which is an engine of the plot. James won’t ‘get’ the likes of Cy Twombly but Kim will try and explain to him why Twomby’s work sells for millions — but perhaps she’ll question why it is that his does but her own doesn’t.

Speaking of silly money paid for art, BBC1 on Sunday featured a programme called‘The World’s Most Expensive Paintings’ in which Alistair Sooke, an art critic, did an Alan Freeman style reverse countdown of the Top Ten. As all were in the tens of millions of dollars bracket and the most expensive — one of the Picassos (Nude, Green Leaves and Bust) — was $135m then it was no surprise that super-rich collectors were the owners of these amazingly valuable artefacts. Sooke’s analysis of the painting, pointing out subtle expressions of eroticism, sadism and the painter’s own hidden initials, was persuasive in asserting its value as a work of art — but $135m?

The painting is currently on display in Tate Modern, having been loaned by its Georgian owner — perhaps I’ve walked past it? The gallery would no doubt try to avoid the vulgarity of drawing attention to the value of the work. However, many of the top ten are hidden in private collections or, according to rumour, may even have been burnt.

The programme raised many of the questions about the relationship between art and money that crop up in The Angel — almost all the art works were produced when the artists were relatively penniless — although the likes of Picasso made money later on his reputation. The artworks are valuable because they are scarce and in demand as much as anything intrinsic about their artistic quality. Often a painting is purchased because it had been part of the previous famous collection — its value being acquired through provenance. There’s an interesting paradox that art, which by definition is created for the intellect or to pleasure the senses, has such a close relationship with money to the extent that at the very high end, art is potentially only appreciated because it’s expensive.

While Kim’s art work doesn’t sell for very much, she’s still chasing the moneyed-rich for what income she does get: the proximity of Shoreditch to the City underlines the symbiotic relationship between the two. James, unlike most City types, actually tries to look at art for its aesthetic, rather than monetary value — and this will be a welcome change for Kim.

The BBC1 programme had a real-life story worthy of any novel about a Picasso, La Rêve, about to be sold for an eight figure sum in dollars by its Las Vegas casino owner, Steve Wynn, who then accidentally stuck his elbow through the canvas, reducing its value by many millions. He said the good thing about the damage was that he did it himself, not anyone else — one wonders what might have happened if it had been a cleaner or security guard.

Tags: art, collectors, criticism, Cy Twombly, finance, James, Kim, modern art, Picasso, Research, Shoreditch, Tate Gallery, The City, theme, wealth, World's Most Expensive Paintings
Posted in Research | 1 Comment »

On Your Bike Boris

June 28th, 2011

Is it Art or An Old Bike in Hackney?

A couple of weekends ago I decided, purely in the name of research for the novel, to research the area where Kim lives — what has been to me for many years the infamous borough of Hackney.

I organised a modest pub crawl (five pubs — a proper one for me goes into double figures) and was joined by my old drinking chums Andy, Jon and Simon (and later Antony) and Guy from the City course also joined in impromptu.

In my experience Hackney isn’t part of the ‘maggot-ridden cess pit that is London’s East End’ (as Alan Patridge described the land of jellied eels and rhyming slang). It seems less threatening than many areas of south-west London that I lived in or near in the late 80s and 90s (I had two Crimewatch murders within a couple of hundred yards of where I lived in Hounslow).

We started off at the Pembury Tavern — a cavernous beer hall of a place just outside the centre near Hackney Downs station. We then walked through the town itself to the Globe at Mornington Lane — a modern boozer opposite Tesco’s about whose staff the phrase ‘salt of the earth’ could have been invented. We went on to a couple more pubs before ending up in the marvellous Charles Lamb in Islington — something of a post-workshop regular now for Guy and myself.

Crossing the road towards the pub we got a glimpse of the Hackney that will have attracted Kim. An old bike had been painted and adorned with flowers and was apparently attached to a lamppost just over the pelican crossing. Guy was very taken with this piece of improvised street art — exactly the sort of object the artists in his novel would have created. Not a utilitarian street bike of the sort promoted by Boris Johnson but one that has no practical value whatsoever — it’s just mysteriously ‘there’ to make a statement.

And so it seemed to confirm to me that this is Kim’s domain in London — shuttling between Hackney and Shoreditch on the 55 bus — the one Guy and I took there from Mike B’s place after the Saturday morning workshop.

Having been thwarted twice by the incompetence of the Olympic ticketing system and having failed to buy any tickets for events at the nearby Olympic Park for 2012, I may go back to the area and have a look around at the changes associated with the games. Fish Island looks well worth a look.

Tags: art, artists, Fish Island, Hackney, Kim, London, pubs, setting, Shoreditch
Posted in Research | 3 Comments »

Non-Instant Karma — We All Shine On

June 15th, 2011

I’ve recently been writing a very tricky chapter of The Angel in which Kim falls over and hurts herself and believes it might signify some sort of bad karma — which it may well be bearing in mind what she’s been up to. It’s quite a crucial point in the plot and I’ve found that I’ve put her in a situation that’s full of dilemmas and choices — which I suppose is good for the novel but quite risky to write in case I go off down a blind alley.

I originally wrote it predominantly with dialogue between Kim and James and relatively little interior exposition. When I workshopped this with the ex-City die-hards the majority view was that it would benefit from much more of Kim’s internal debate. (We also had a discussion about whether characters would have ostensibly frank conversations volunteering the number of sexual partners they’d had — which is perhaps the subject for another post.)

So I rewrote the chapter in a very different style — in places with long paragraphs of contemplation about what motivates one through life, etc. I then took advantage of a tutorial with Jenny Mayhew, our first term tutor on the MA at MMU, to get some feedback on the balance between interior/exterior. She thought it was generally about right — which shows the City feedback had helped but that there were some over-long deliberations which could be cut.

Jenny also gave some advice about increasing the amount of ‘stage-direction’ and playing up aspects of the fantasy and dreaming in the dialogue — things I’d deliberately toned down after having feedback in the opposite direction in the previous term. Jenny’s advice tends to echo my natural style and inclination, which is not particularly lean or taut, more observational and discursive.

I re-jigged again and added in some new ideas, some lifted directly from a conversation about different names for common field weeds in England and Scotland. The weeds discussion was in the office in London where I’ve now been working for the past four weeks, of which perhaps more in future posts. Time spent in this job explains the relative lack of blog posts as I’m burning the candle at both ends, catching the 0637 train into Marylebone and not going to bed correspondingly early enough as I’m trying to keep the writing still moving forwards — although to look on the bright side I’m close to some of my locations to return to do easy research.

Last night a dedicated group of the MMU MA students workshopped a revised draft of the chapter following Jenny’s comments (we do this without any tutor involvement from the university so shows we must be relatively dedicated and, to use one of Emma’s horrible HR phrases ‘self-starters’).

I’ve still yet to re-read the transcript of the online discussion, which is always very useful, but the material generated a lot of discussion — it must have done as we ‘chatzied’ for nearly an hour. (To get an hour of four people’s time — plus their reading in advance — on a piece of around 3,000 words was very fortunate — another student had to drop her piece at the last minute.)

We’ve got one more workshopping session left with Emily in about ten days time and then a long break for the summer — the MMU term finishes at the same time. As far as I’m aware, about four people from the City course have finished — or are close to finishing — their novels, including two who are in the workshopping group. Another four or five of us are making steady progress but aren’t there yet.

I must have written enough words for a respectable length novel — as an example I extended the original 2,500 word extract mentioned above by at least another 2,000 words in the rewriting — and I’m sure I can find a use for much of that, if not in the original chapter then elsewhere.

In our MMU workshopping session last night one of the other students presented a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of her projected novel, which reminded me that I’m long overdue a re-assessment of where I’m at. I don’t feel I’ve diverged too much from the original plot that I planned out with post-it notes well over a year ago but I’ve probably only covered about half the planned events or chapters, although what I’ve written has expanded in word count beyond that which what I originally anticipated.

Maybe because of Kim’s interest in karma, I’ve been noticing a few instances of Angel-related serendipity to inspire me to keep plugging on with the writing.

Angel Street EC1

The first was the name of a street I noticed in the City near Pasternoster Square and opposite bombed-out Christ’s Church Greyfriars, where I’m planning to have James and Kim sit and have a drunken conversation on their first day together — the street is, appropriately, Angel Street.

The Angel, Old Street

Then I also belatedly noticed that the pub over the road from Mike B’s wonderfully stylish apartment near Old Street where we’ve been meeting to do our Saturday workshops is also called, you guessed, The Angel — although looking like a traditional London boozer it’s a very different sort of Angel to the thatched country local I’m going to write about — but it’s a nice co-incidence anyway.

The Angel, Sheep Street, Bicester

And, just for completeness, although there’s no special connection to me, here’s another Angel — this time in Bicester. This is a town that Emma would never dream of living in but she goes there fairly regularly to snap up a few bargains or ten at Bicester Village — outlet store shopping centre for all brands she likes to dress in. Perhaps James might slope off for a pint there while she browses in Alexander McQueen, Diesel, Jimmy Choo, , Karen Millan, Radley, Hobbs, maybe buying Kim a cheap Superdry T-shirt and perhaps even nipping into Agent Provocateur.

Tags: Bicester Village, commuting, dialogue, exposition, feedback, internal dialogue, karma, planning, progress, serendipity, The Angel, workshops
Posted in Writing Process | No Comments »

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