Writing On Literature

  • If Heaven is one place ( and it surely is, because the people who go there won't mind sharing) then it has many quarreling embassies on earth.  Most of these will make you feel welcome, because on the whole, with some obvious exceptions, religious people try to be nice, especially if you're new. Just keep the moonlighting a secret. Spiritual double-dating is one of the underappreciated pleasures of the post-enlightenment.  The Greeks one Sunday, and the Russians the next.  In Paris there's an excellent basement filled with guitar-playing South Americans. Nothing quite so exotic here in the English countryside, but enough god-in-buildings to keep a recent arrival interested.  The Anglican vicar in the church above the river lives in fear of central directives.  She points

    Sep 21,
  • In the local library, which I visit once a week, they have  a Mystery Book on the Issues counter.  It is hidden inside a plain white A4 envelope.  On four consecutive Saturdays, I have been able to resist. This week I cracked.  I had to have it. They wouldn't let me have the Mystery Book on the counter.  Underneath the desk, there is a pile of plain white envelopes.  I get the one on the top, and leave the library without opening it. I'm expecting a middle-brow novel.  It would be great to have a handbook on gyro-copter mechanics, or a guide to the sacrificial customs of Ancient Mesopatamia.  However, I can't quite believe a library will let its

    Sep 15,
  • On a bootleg Jimi Hendrix album called Mr Pitiful (German sleeve, Swiss pressing) Jimi has a shambolic stab at a studio recording of Wooly Bully.  He is long gone dogbone stoned, and has lost his earphones.  He finds this hilarious, but nobody else knows what he's looking for.  You know, he giggles, the ear-things, man, the ear-goggles.  I always loved that.  And since i-pods came out even more so.  Tuck in the plastic ear-goggles and see the world differently, in your own chosen way.   My music, my timing, my world.  I-pod, me-pod. The i-pod is a wonderful invention, but I can't help feeling there are some unanswered design questions.  I don't use my ipod on the bus, not since I was made jumpy by the

    Aug 18,
  • Man, I Feel Like a Woman Arena, August 2008 From personal experience, I will now pass on some essential advice about what to do when your motorcycling, canoeing, hiking and generally manly man friend tells you he’s about to have a sex-change. Don’t laugh. That’s it. Failing this, you must not under any circumstances go on to say what you’re actually thinking, which in my case was something like this: You ride a motorcycle called The Flying Pig and are an expert on remedies for shaving rash. You have a dismantled crank-case on the table in your front room. You drink lunchtime pints of Smiles Old Tosser and you work in the engine-room of a 7000 ton ferry. You are

    Jul 03,
  • Bigging up the Short Story November 2008 www.theshortstory.org [column width="47%" padding="6%"] Talking up the short story is an admirable enterprise, especially in Britain. The short story has been having a hard time, with outlets for publication shrinking and collections barely able to reach an agent’s desk. The idea of short stories making money has become as quaint a notion as travelling by commercial balloon. It is therefore quite right, and compatible with the national instinct, to support the underdog. We take the side of the short story and try to big it up. One way of doing this, which short story enthusiasts will recognise, is to suggest that a story is as challenging to write as a novel. Each line

    Nov 23,