Evening without angels

Listening to this. Looking at these. Reading this. The TV's on too.

Blair's Bombs

Rachel from North London is an admirably independent voice for victims of the 7th July bombings in London. Today she merely links to another survivor's story. It is quite something. The details are what make Steven Lovegrove's account of one summer's morning remarkable: the words he said to himself; the greed of the taxi-driver; the walking home from the hospital; the people crossing themselves. Above all though, for me, were two things: the sense that it never happened in time. There was only ever before and after. And secondly, the staggering question and answer in the immediate aftermath of the explosion: "a young man behind me asked, 'Why would they bomb us?' I replied, 'Olympics'."

Elsewhere, Lenin's Tomb, in responding to the destruction of the Samarra Shrine, reminds us that Blair's occupiers have already been caught once preparing terror bombings to foment civil strife (see penultimate paragraph) and, oh yes, slaughter civilians. So it's likely the horror stories we might read if Iraqi survivors wrote blogs - and blogs in English - would feature such questions too. The answer would be different though.

A correction, six years late

In my essay on Paul Celan, posted by Spike in 2000, I called his friend Yves Bonnefoy 'an avowed Christian'. It's come to my attention from a reliable source that he isn't. From this distance, I can't remember how I decided he was. Anyway, I shall correct it in the version over which I have control. But the other will have to remain.

This is the joy and the curse of the internet. When I first wrote things for Spike - a review of two Beckett biographies, the Cioran meander, the Bernhard, Celan and Will Oldham introductions (all written in the last century) - I didn't consider their future. Unfortunately one cannot wrap online articles around fish & chips. To every browsing reader, they appear freshly posted. So, from time to time, I get an email either praising or criticising the Cioran atrocity. Both types embarrass me. I'd delete it given the chance but, apparently, it's one of the most popular pages on Spike that doesn't mention porn. Bugger.

Culture: pyrotechnics against a night sky of nothinginess. (Cioran)

Book Wrap

Has anyone used Book Wrap?

I've seen rolls for sale and wonder if one needs origami-like, present-wrapping skills to make it worthwhile?

Got any Rizlas Virg, I'm dyin' a skin up?

One of my regular time-wasters is searching Amazon UK using the Publication Date: Newest First selection. This morning, I entered 'Dante' into the search field. Second from top was a title that threw me for a moment: Dante's Divine Comedy Box. Is this a discovery of a cache of jokes, balloons and medieval card tricks? Ah, no. It's a rather dubious illustrated 'adaptation' of the Commedia.

The first book to arouse genuine interest was Peter Hawkins' A Brief History of Dante published in July by Blackwells. But I've still to read all of Dante's Testaments which I've been told is one of the best books on the subject.

Next, at the end of April, came veteran Dante scholar Barbara Reynold's Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man from IB Tauris. What makes this book stand out is the claim that Reynolds' "research indicates that Dante smoked cannabis to reach heights of creativity". Who would have thunk it?

The Sixth Type

I was attracted to the review in the TLS of Peter Hobbs' collection of stories by the title of the book. I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train. It suggests a unique sensibility, even a wilfulness to write what needs to be written rather than just another set of stories. What is it about titles? Is there something to be discovered in the titles given to novels?

Reading David Lodge’s book Author, Author, I noticed that Henry James was always beginning works with titles taken from the name of the main character. Guy Domville, Daisy Miller, The Princess Casamassima. When his friend George du Maurier took up the pen, his first novel was called Peter Ibbetson, his second Trilby. Perhaps this had something to do with a general fascination with the rise of the individual and its isolation. "My prison cell - my fortress" as Kafka put it a little later.

There were also titles taken from the names of places - Washington Square - and, more familiarly to us, ‘poetic’ titles such as The Wings of the Dove. Whichever, they all indicate a close focus on one person or a group. Very little seems to have changed. Take Amazon UK’s Hot 25. There are examples of all three. First, the individual: The Time Traveller’s Wife, The 5th Horseman, The Last Templar; then there’s the location: Labyrinth, Brokeback Mountain, and finally the ‘poetic’, though in this list there's only one: The Shadow of the Wind.

The remaining titles can be included in sub-sections: For example, Saturday might well have been called Henry Perowne or Fitzroy Square. And I suppose Peter Hobbs' title could well be classed in two of these three.

There is a fourth type too. The appeal to scientific modes of storytelling: The History of Love, The Da Vinci Code. Like the ‘poetic’ title, it alludes to uncommon knowledge without the attendant pretentiousness.

Yet there is a type of title that usurps all three: the cliché. Be Careful What You Wish For, Malicious Intent, Second Honeymoon, Dead Simple, Making Your Mind Up.

I can't imagine ever being attracted to a book with a brazen cliché as a title. I seek the sixth type; the type of title that is as mysterious and as compelling as the narrative it shrouds.

PS: As it happens, Peter Hobbs' book was in my local library, so I'm now reading it.

Bourne of cynicism

There shouldn't be so much fuss over Michael Dibdin's spiked review of Jonathan Freedland's pseudonymous thriller. Negative reviews are often rejected. I know of three, including one of my own. Editors have to edit after all, which is why you won't see anything positive here. What appalls me in each case, however, is that the book was written and published in the first place.

I suspect in Freedland's case, he'll soon be telling one inevitable interviewer how he had no intention of writing a highbrow novel for intellectual reviewers - it is just an unpretentious yarn for the general reader - and telling another, once it misses out on the Booker and the Whitbread, that the literary world is policed by snobs who sneer at genre fiction but popular novels can be great literature too, look at Dickens. I was playing with genre, he'll say, extending it, inverting it, subverting it.

The lawyer of Genre

One can only agree with Amanda Craig in her defence of Romantic fiction that "the idea that all great literature must, by definition, escape genre is snobbish and wrong." I have no problem with that. (And I’m grateful that she names names along the way). After all, for some time now I’ve insisted that one of the great novels of recent times is Gert Hofmann’s Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl. In addition to being unique, it is also a love story; a Romantic novel!

One can’t easily disagree with the sentence that follows either: "Great literature plays with genre, extends it, inverts it and subverts it - but it cannot, ever, be wholly independent of it."

Unfortunately, ease is precisely what genre fiction is about. It might be futile to try to escape genre, but writers who struggle to do so are the only ones I want to read. Genre fiction is for people at home in the novel.

Craig reveals the anxiety lurking beneath the surface when she insists that Romantic fiction is “alive and kicking in the works of prize-winning authors such as Maggie O'Farrell, Joanne Harris and Sarah Waters”. Ah, prize-winning. That's what it's all about. And I thought this was about literature.