I was interviewed in The Bookseller for a feature on English PEN. The article doesn’t seem to be online yet but you can read the article in all its printed glory below. Eagle eyed readers will note that three of the pictures are by yrstrly, too. As with the radio interview, I share the limelight with a colleague: this time, Writers in Prison Programme Manager Cat Lucas.

Link

The statement reads:

“This press release is being issued on behalf of the organizers of the Jaipur Literature Festival. It has come to their attention that certain delegates acted in a manner during their sessions today which were without the prior knowledge or consent of the organizers. Any views expressed or actions taken by these delegates are in no manner endorsed by the Jaipur Literature Festival. Any comments made by the delegates reflect their personal, individual views and are not endorsed by the Festival or attributable to its organizers or anyone acting on their behalf. The Festival organizers are fully committed to ensuring compliance of all prevailing laws and will continue to offer their fullest cooperation to prevent any legal violation of any kind. Any action by any delegate or anyone else involved with the Festival that in any manner falls foul of the law will not be tolerated and all necessary, consequential action will be taken. Our endeavor has always been to provide a platform to foster an exchange of ideas and the love of literature, strictly within the four corners of the law. We remain committed to this objective.”

I will write more on this tomorrow, but I will say for now that the repetition of the need to abide by the law seems a bit tone deaf, given the context – if reading aloud from a literary work “falls foul of the law” then the law is an ass and those who support it are enemies of free expression and literature. It is not too much to ask the organisers of India’s most important literary festival to understand that.

Today, the Sri Lankan journalist Prageeth Ekneligoda will have been missing for 500 days. Ekneligoda was abducted on 24 January 2010 and has not been heard from since. There is still no news of his whereabouts or fate and his abductors are still at large. His wife Sandhya has been petitioning the Sri Lankan government to investigate the disappearance, but they have callously ignored her pleas. Ekneligoda had been a thorn in the side of the government, exposing crimes against humanity. From Sandhya’s incredibly moving letter to Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, about the case.

In late 2008, Prageeth produced conclusive evidence of the use of chemical weapons by Government forces against Tamil civilians in the North. Prageeth, who believed that such weapons were being used with the aim of annihilating the Tamil population living in LTTE controlled areas, dedicated his time and effort to gathering further evidence and to raising awareness regarding this issue at different forums both locally and internationally.

Ekneligoda is one of several independent journalists to have been disappeared or killed in recent years. Editor Lasantha Wickramatunga was one such writer, who predicted his own murder and wrote an editorial to be published posthumously. The Sri Lankan government always denies involvement in these most sinister of crimes, but it does nothing to stop this violence againsts its own citizens, which is an implicit endorsement and encourages further disappearances. It has allowed a horrible culture of fear and oppression to develop, one that shrinks civil society and ruins the lives of ordinary people. This, in a Commonwealth country that recently hosted the cricket world cup.

Sri Lanka also hosted the Galle Literary Festival in January, one of the few places where ideas of free speech and human rights can be discussed. Author and poet Minoli Salgado imagined what the festival might have been like. I recorded a podcast of Minoli reading it.

A Feast of Words

The writers were at the table, eating each others words. Delicate morsels of sliced crime, tangy segments of romance, silver spoonerisms washed down with a glass of iced humour that turned the lips green.

‘How delightful’, one cooed, ‘I must try this at home.’

The wine critic was not sure. She would like to have sampled some rough shreds from a local saga of lost lives, but didn’t want to be first. She settled for some pickled irony instead. She might fold the saga in her napkin and eat it later in the leisure of her hotel room.

The book feast had been almost everything she’d hoped for. An orgy of words, with whale watching, devil dancing and fire walking between meals. The initial fuss that the feast was inappropriate, when the rest of the country was half-starved, had died down. Only a Nobel Laureate and a Booker Prize Winner had cancelled their meals. It was not much of a loss. She had tried their work and found it went poorly with Bordeaux.

But the local saga with its siren-red chunks was a different matter. And so were some of the short shots of poetic violence that she’d tried that morning. A caffeine kick, those poems made her wake to where she was.

She was about to reach for the saga when someone staggered forward with a dish too bizarre for words. A giant black and white cartoon of a man’s face slashed by a cross of two chillies upon the lips.

‘My husband,’ said a woman, proffering the placard and a sheaf of printed leaves. ‘This is about my husband who’s gone. Please take and read. Read and eat at the same time. It is possible no?’

‘It’s inedible.’ ‘It’s uncooked.’ ‘Where’s it from?’ They all asked.

‘My husband,’ she repeated with a hunger they did not understand. ‘He was a writer like you but disappeared last year. He wrote words the government did not want to hear.’

A plate of silence was served that made them feel hollow inside.

‘What words?’ offered the wine critic. ‘What words did your husband say?

The woman shook her head.

‘His words have gone with him. That is why I am here. I am looking for him in your feast of words.’

You can listen to my dulcit tones right here.  If it leaves you inspired, you can always head over to www.libelreform.org to find out how you can help the campaign.

Royal Courts of Justice. Photo by Yrstrly off of Flicker.

The young people organized themselves into groups that directed traffic, protected neighborhoods and guarded public buildings of value such as the Egyptian Museum and the Library of Alexandria.  They are collaborating with the army.  This makeshift arrangement is in place until full public order returns.

The library is safe thanks to Egypt’s youth, whether they be the staff of the Library or the representatives of the demonstrators, who are joining us in guarding the building from potential vandals and looters.

A major early move by the Egyptian government was to ‘flick the switch’ and choke Internet communications.  In the short term this has clearly given Mubarak and his cohort the upper-hand, by keeping the pro-democracy groups divided and chaotic.  However, the short-term gain might weaken them in the future.  As the the freelancer journalist Ashraf Khalil just tweeted from Cairo:

Told Nile TV that the main economic damage to #egypt is from Net shutdown (estimated $90 mill) and images of violence scaring away tourists

The stories of the Library and the net shut-down recall an old Wired article by Neal Stephenson, where he traces the paths of fibre-optic cables around the world (I actually mentioned it last December when discussing Wikileaks). Stephenson’s travels take him to Egypt, where a major new communications cable is being landed in Alexandria, at a most historic location:

If you turn your back on the equipment through which the world’s bits are swirling, open one of the windows, wind up, and throw a stone pretty hard, you can just about bonk that used book peddler on the head. Because this place, soon to be the most important data nexus on the planet, happens to be constructed virtually on top of the ruins of the Great Library of Alexandria.

Just one more reason why we are all bound up in Egypt’s fate.  Let’s hope that the people who marshalled to protect their museums, are the ones to prevail.

Kate recited for us an experimental poem she wrote yesterday entitled “Nick Clegg’s Conference Speech Remixed“.  She has spliced some of Clegg’s soundbites together with realtime Twitter commentary.

Just imagine how different our country will be.
Not exactly a vision thing
Stick with us
It wasn’t a bad speech
Stick with us
Looks all so sincere
Stick with us
We’re stuck with U

I like this format.  For one, it includes a random, crowd-sourced element.  It is surprising how often the act of yeilding some control of your content to The Cloud or The Rabble yeilds something true and pleasing – Cybraphon and FOUND are the arch mongers of this type of art.  I also like the juxtaposition of the primary source material – the speech – with the commentary.  A poem that could not have been created before social media tools became ubiquitous.

The original British Library reading room, now at the centre of the Great Court, British Museum. Photo by Sifter on Flickr

I just gatecrashed a meeting some of my colleagues were holding, about writers running workshops in UK prisons.  One of the authors made the point that the term ‘creative writing’ can actually have a negative effect on the people attending these workshops, because it implies that writing is the only creative act.

What needs to be emphasised, he said, is that reading is a creative act too – Using your imagination to reconstruct the story and fill in the blanks, between the words the author has sketched.  This is well worth remembering, lest we invest all our admiration in writers, and neglect the other half of the equation, readers.

There’s another kind of creativity in reading too, which is in choosing just what to read.  Making connections between authors, and between their stories, constructing a network of books, choosing which literary pathway to follow – these are supremely creative acts too.

“We think this will be the renaissance of the short story,” said novelist Sophia Bartleet, who came up with the idea for Ether Books’s app while desperate for something to read when travelling back and forth to see her ill mother. She believes time-poor commuters, or workers grabbing a 10-minute break, could be tempted into reading a short story here, or a poem or essay there, on their phones.

Well, yes. The only problem is, I saved this article to read later on Instapaper for my iPhone. Combine Instapaper with @LongReads on Twitter, or the new LongForm website, and you have pretty much mirrored the Ether Books model. I worry that this is yet another niche filled by something free.

The longest things I have written on this blog are probably this meditation on Britishness, and this Borgesian theatre review… neither of which are that long at all, really. Writing something longer might be a goal for my thirty-second year, beginning today.

James Brindle archived two years of twitters into a hardback book. Photo by STML

Rick Gekoski, Alex Clark, Joanna Prior and Cory Doctorow.

I’ll admit, I judged this event by its cover.

I assumed that an discussion titled ‘Judging a book by its cover’ would be about book jacket design, rich and fertile ground for ideas on culture and mass marketing.  I expected to hear bookseller Rick Gekoski wax about the beauty of a hardback first edition, and hear Joanna Prior explain how Penguin’s mass market paperbacks have become an iconic design in themselves.  I expected to hear how the large publishers are stifling creativity by homogenising the book design process.

And in fact, I did hear about all those things. However, I expected them to be within a discussion that was essentially about aesthetics. I did not expect to be faced, instead, with a more philosophical question: what is a book? Is it the paper, the cover and the binding? Or is it the words on the page?

I blame Cory Doctorow. Invited to give a quick run-down of his latest projects, he explained the experiments he was trying with his latest collection of stories, he explained that it would be released in several versions. You can read the free electronic PDF, or you can buy the generic paperback version. Then there is the gourmet version, which has letterpress production and includes hand bound, customised end-papers. And if you have a spare £15,000, you can buy the one-of-a-kind edition which includes an extra short-story… in which you are the star. These different strands prompt ideas of scarcity.  When the text is ubiquitous, rare versions take on extra value. In an age when books will be copied and distributed on hard-drives with increasing frequency (whatever security measures e-Book manufactures try to put in place), creating valuable versions of the books are a way of returning lost revenues to the authors and publishers. Alex Clark, from the chair, pointed out that scarcity is the basis of the rare books industry, of which Rick Gekoski is a part, and that he and Doctorow have a great deal in common. Gekoski agreed with Clark, saying that even within limited editions, the more scarce, the more demand. For example, he produces limited editions with a print run of 138. This comprises books numbered 1 to 100, A to Z, and I to XI. The twelve books with Roman numerals sell at a premium, but the numbered copies he has to give away as presents.

What’s odd about the act of making things rare or scarce is that it’s a process that removes the words and the author from the value of the object. “A particularly fine Joyce” or a version of Orlando inscribed by Virginia Woolf must necessarily have the same words as found in the paperback copies that clutter shelves in Oxfam. Perhaps fetishizing first editions and signed copies does the writer a disservice? Doctorow disagreed, pointing out that there are plenty of rare yet worthless first editions out there – the books that failed to be a success first time around. What also makes a rare book valuable is the cultural significance of the author and the text. His mission, he said, was to first make his books notorious. Only then could anyone trade off the scarcity he or others might generate (through limited editions, &ct.)

Gekoski went on to say that the sheer number of books (good and bad) that are published was a source of some worry. As an undergraduate, he always assumed that one day he would become “well read”. However, with as many as half a million new books published every year, the proportion of books he has read (even as a former Booker judge) is becoming smaller all the time. He is becoming less well read by the second. While he does not wish the death of the book, he says he “wouldn’t mind it having a serious illness.”

For Joanna Prior, the issue of the number of books being published only reinforces the need for a filtering system whereby we can choose which books are worth reading. The actual cover is one way that we can make a choice and there is a role for a trusted brand such as Penguin that can act as a guide to readers. In the age of print on demand, where anyone can be an author, and the age of Amazon, where anyone can be a bookseller, readers still need some measure of quality. This allows the traditional publishing process back into the picture, as one can really only generate consistent quality through a proper system of agents, editors and series editors to ensure quality (“and critics” says Clark, the final cog in the system). The problem of funding remains, however.

Gekoski was bullish on matters of taste. His panel chose The Sea by John Banville as winner of the 2005 Booker Prize. This judgement, he says, was ultimately not a matter of taste. Those who think it’s a bad book are “simply wrong”. However, he thinks publishers can make a book better by how they package it. Recalling a first edition of The Great Gatsby he read whilst on an aeroplane, he said that there was something about the superior production values (and as a publisher himself, he has experience of the craft) which made Fitzgerald’s words richer and the story that little bit more beautiful.

After the discussion, I asked Gekoski whether Banville would still have won The Booker had The Sea been set in 8pt Comic Sans. “I hope so” was Rick’s reply, undermining his earlier point. However, I think that his earlier argument still holds true. If Banville’s book had been produced carelessly, and typeset badly, it would have undoubtedly sold less copies. Readers would have found the strain on their eyes made the experience less enjoyable, and Banville’s word-of-mouth sales would never have materialised, which in turn would have caused the book to drop off the critical and popular radar. The issue of packaging and production, epitomised by the all important cover, does have a crucial role to play after all.

Update

Claire Robertson covered the event for the Society of Young Publishers.