Interview + Podcast roundup

Hello all –

 

It’s been a while (The Unsung Letter is on hiatus for a little bit) but I thought I’d share some places where I’ve been lately.

 

I spoke to the Times, The Herald, and the Sunday Post and you can read the interviews through the links.

Most recently Alistair Braidwood of Scots Whay Hae and I had a chat all about Mayhem & Death, On the Edges of Vision, Flesh of the Peach, travel, rejection, loneliness, grief and making art – and Jeff Goldblum, of course. Have a listen here. It’s a good long one, so maybe make yourself a cup of tea first.  Mayhem & Death was reviewed on Scots Whay Hae here.

No Longer Naked

The covers for Mayhem & Death and On the Edges of Vision are here!

 

   

 

I think they’re stunning & perfectly eerie.

 

Mayhem & Death is a brand-new story collection which also includes Powdered Milk, a novella, along with woodcut illustrations to go with each story. You can pre-order it from 404 Ink here.

 

On the Edges of Vision was first published in 2015 and won the Saltire First Book of the Year. This reissue brings it back into print for the first time since then, and I’m so delighted 404 Ink have chosen to do so. You can pre-order it here.

 

Or – if you’re a little canny and want to have both, you can buy the bundle, and save a little in the process here.

 

 

The Unsung Letter No. 48

Michelle Bailat-Jones writes this week’s Unsung Letter on a book with shades of Barbara Comyns (one of my favourite writers):

 

[redacted] tells the story of a peculiar family—nine children, two parents—living in a large house on the outskirts of a small city. In many respects, they are an experiment, a utopia created by the parents according to very specific rules. The greatest of which is their near complete isolation from anyone else excepting a weekly trip to the library. While this house and family can be considered a utopia, it is one without a moving force; it has turned inward and become frozen.

 

Read the full thing here – and sign up to receive The Unsung Letter here. Each week brings a different writer/book lover on an underhyped book that might just change your life.

 

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Small reminder – if you’d like, you can buy my pamphlet The Goldblum Variations here for £5. It’s a book of absurdist micros on a celebrity/plurality of worlds/beings. It would make a charming stocking stuffer for someone who would like an excuse to be off reading by themselves (or someone who likes to read stuff aloud to others – it’s short and sweet). You can check out reviews and add it to your Goodreads list, if that’s the kind of thing you do here.

This Reader’s Manifesto

Today my first book review for PANK is up.  Please go and have a peek, if you like, and if you have opinions, let me know what you think.

 

In a moment of furious over-reaching I have decided to come up with a manifesto of what I want to achieve as a reviewer. Yes, I know this is only the first review, and I am getting a little ahead of myself. I want to come at this from a good angle. I want to sort of dive in and be a bit brave. There will be bullet points to make this official. So before I start apologising in advance, here we go.

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There are many ways to be a reader. As a reader I have always read with my eyes half-closed, listening and running my finger along the words, stopping, letting the air rush in and out. Because I am not as much an intellectual, systematic reader as one who seeks out the textures of the book, the images, the scents of grass and sickness, the cobblestone and cold high room. How this is achieved in chains of sentences one after the other until the end.

 

I read not just in sympathy with the character but seeing how they are fitted and made distinct from their world. How they shape and want and touch and shake. With an eye to the layering of time like paint and philosophy and weather and landscape and hurt and thresholds and liminal states and other constructions of instability and evolution.

 

My aims and wishes as a reviewer:

 

• I wish, then, to read well, critically, but must do so with an awareness of what my constraints are in seeing, and therefore with acknowledgement that the tackling of the text is necessarily subjective, perhaps overly colourful. Purple even. I will try not to go overboard with metaphor. Oops, isn’t ‘going overboard’ a metaphor too? Can’t win.

 

• And now that I am going to review seriously – not much more seriously, since I am terribly earnest about words – it is important (for me) to set out what, exactly, I’m going to review. In also the hope that I might receive books to read to feed into my churning readerly writerly brain.

 

• I will try to read new and newly translated books that are essential, exciting, fierce (my favourite word for books), haunting, nihilistic, loving, cunning, humane, clear-eyed.

TELL ME THAT I MAY READ THEM.

 

• I will try to read well and write my understanding out. I want to make clear this hazy appreciation of the text, so that others will be intrigued. I want to be kind in the manner of a surgeon. Maybe a little sloppier.

 

• I want to read the fine boned literary works. Dense tissue books. Books ribbed in scars. The slim sucker punches, the weird hybrid prose-poem-memoir novels combing their hair with their fingers, the hissing mess, the elegant bombs. I am aware of another Reader’s Manifesto, that struck out against the literary, the ‘plotless’. Well, I love the unabashedly literary. Something that is trying so hard to play to test to cut up to expand and blow apart cannot be elitist. The elite run the tory party, and giant corporations and banks with casual disdain.  Literary writing is effort made to look effortless (sometimes) and made for the people.

Sometimes, yes, there is writing that creates a clique and does little else, but these are not what I read nor wish to here. I also believe there are more than a handful of literary styles out there, and that it is important to seek out both the well made traditionally written works and the experimental.

 

• I want to read books mostly written by women. Sorry, though I know white, middle class men of certain milleux receive hardly any attention these days in the press. I know! Terrible shame. But I’d like to be a little biased. I spent a lot of time at university, undergraduate anyway, thinking that women just didn’t seem to have written anything. I have years of the sin of omission to make up for. I will make exceptions for the exceptional. Two exceptions I can think of right now: Patrick Somerville and Steve Himmer.

 

• I wish for dazzling fiction, of a type that does not always scream at you from the shelves. I want to read the strange and lyrical and yes a thousand other terms of superlatives from not just British and American authors but Australian, New Zealander, South African, Trinidadian, Irish, Indian, works in translation – a commonwealth of letters.

 

• I ask, also, where are the low-lying Scottish female writers of literary fiction of the up-coming generation? Are you hiding in the shadow of all that crime-procedural stuff? Down a close somewhere, picking over the usual murder weapons, shaking your head at the voyeurism, the usualness of it all? Has Alexander McCall Smith cornered you, kindly, for tea and biscuits in 44 Scotland St? Or are you further North, typing away in the village coffee shop while you should be sending out CVs?

I know of prolific Kirsty Logan, who has written some grand fiction, and hope to pick up a collection of hers for review. I just went to a reading given by Catriona Child. But more! I need guidance. Step forward, young lady writers! I’m a reader and I’d like to read you!

Just in case you think me limited, young is also ’emerging’ is also ‘new’ so age is not the key thing here.

 

• Books and authors I have loved of late: Green Girl, The Summer Book, The Hour of the Star, most of what I have read of Virginia Woolf, of Jean Rhys, of Toni Morrison, of Anne Carson, The Way Through Doors, Season of Migration to the North, The Sound and the Fury, Nabokov of Pale Fire, Pnin, Lolita of course, lots of the 19th-20th century Russians (inc. Bulgakov, excluding Dostoevsky), the Odyssey, the Aethiopika (An Ethiopian Tale), The Golden Ass.

 

• Authors for consideration so far: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Catherynne M. Valente, Zoë Wicomb, Lauren Beukes, and Herta Müller and Elizabeth Ellen (with thanks to StuckInABucket and Nouvellist).

 

• In my reading pile, to be reviewed if they haven’t been on PANK already: Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles, Zazen by Vanessa Veselka.

 

I would love your suggestions. Please add to this list with titles you think might fit, and I will try to acquire them (not sure how, at this point) and try to do them justice in review.

Confluence

A little while ago, I put my name down on Artboy68‘s website to be a part of his 100 Portraits Project.

My Gravatar was chosen for portrait number 81, and just a day or so ago it arrived in the post, looking even lovelier in real life (massive thanks from me!):

You might also remember I recently held a giveaway  – which, after picking names out of the air (I threw numbered pieces and chose one at random) the winner, through a bizarre coincidence, was Artboy68.  Right now over on his blog he’s talking about the parcel he received, which contained the photo booklet and a number of other random Scottish goodies.

In other news, I’m reading the first book of the American Indie Press Haul of Wonder:  Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith and have been blurting on my twitter and tumblr about how much I love it so far. I have to resist the urge to start talking about it already. Nope. Must. Go. Finish. Last. Pages…

Endless Reads Review: Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky

'Fifty Islands I have not visited and never will'

I’m reviewing an atlas today. Perhaps it should count as my first non-fiction title, but I think not. You see, while this is an atlas of real places, with timelines showing major events on each and a wonderful topographic illustration sitting opposite Schalansky’s descriptions, this is, from the very beginning, a book that highlights the problematic ‘truth’ of maps.

In the introduction, ‘Paradise is an island. So is Hell.’ Schalansky talks about her childhood affinity for maps. As a resident of the DDR (East Germany) she didn’t have the opportunity of travel, and so walked the world with her fingertips.  After reunification, she talks about encountering an old West German atlas in school:

The first atlas in my life was called Atlas Fur Jedermann (Everyman’s Atlas). I didn’t realise then that my atlas – like every other – was committed to an ideology. Its ideology was clear from its map of the world, carefully positioned on a double-page spread so that the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic fell on two separate pages. On this map there was no wall dividing the two German countries, no Iron Curtain; instead there was the blinding white, impassable edge of the page. […]

Ever since then, I have not trusted political world maps, in which countries float on the blue oceans like vivid scarves. They grow out of date quickly and give barely any information apart from who is currently running which scrap of colour.

Maps tell us much more when they do not divide nature into nations; when they allow it to form the basis of comparison across all the borders made by man. In physical topography, land masses glow in the dark green of lowland plains, the reddish brown of mountains or the glacial white of the polar regions, and the seas gleam in every possible shade of blue, quite untouched by the course of history.

It is this stance that prevented me from quite loving this book, which is a beautiful object full of wonderful vignettes. Of course the world is touched by human history, and borders must be recorded – if only for the people living within them to be able to place themselves. I see that she is fundamentally against this. That she dreams of a world without borders. It is a utopian idea – against the dictates of nationalism, which I can completely understand as a German she is wary of. But even so, she contradicts herself. Every island she describes is owned by a particular nation, and this she records at the top of the page. Its name in various languages, and who it belongs to, and who first discovered it. She could have left this information off, and the book would not have suffered.

I suppose she is acknowledging the reality of conquest and colonisation while resisting it, through the focus on islands, who have their natural borders defined forever. Still, it sits unsteadily with me. A retreat from a political engagement. A deliberate limiting, marooning.

The absurdity of reality is lost on the large land masses, but here on the islands it is writ large. An island offers a stage: everything that happens on it is practically forced to turn into a story, into a chamber piece in the middle of nowhere, into the stuff of literature. What is unique about these tales is that fact and fiction can no longer be separated : fact is fictionalized and fiction is turned to fact.

That’s why the question of whether these stories are  ‘true’ is misleading. All text in the book is based on extensive research and every detail stems from factual sources. I have not altered anything. However I was the discoverer of the sources, researching them through ancient and rare books and i have transformed the texts and appropriated them as sailors appropriate the lands they discover.

She had me for the first two sentences. An island is a stage. Stories to congregate, singular images become distinct entities and take on elements of folklore. But then she says fact cannot be separated from fiction. If this is true on an island, then it is true everywhere. Everywhere that people are, the truth is hard to get at. History is always manipulated. And yet earlier this appeared to be something she wanted to get away from. The deliberate proclamation of herself as ‘chief fact finder/maker’ (which is it?) is something that bothers me.

This is a beautifully put together book, with wonderful descriptive passages (one that sticks out is the tale of Henry Eld on Macquarie Island (Australia) in the Pacific Ocean, disappearing into a tremendous crowd of penguins). I will continue to come back to these, to dance my fingers over the beautiful maps. But reading this will always be problematic, because of Schalansky’s introduction.

Small Press Delights

My father-in-law and stepmother-in-law arrived today from NYC and brought my Christmas presents in the form of books (always a good choice) and in particular – books that I had requested due to their inaccessibility over here. Small press books from America! An indie literary bounty!

From L-R: Zazen, by Vanessa Veselka (Red Lemonade), Inferno (a poet’s novel) by Eileen Myles (OR Books), Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith (Tin House Books) and Not Merely Because of the Unknown that was Stalking Toward Them by Jenny Boully (Tarpaulin Sky Press).

Tantalising – though right now I am digging into the Atlas of Remote Islands, which has finally arrived (ordered before Christmas). We think it floated here in a cargo trunk tossed by the Gulf Stream. Barnacle species sighted on the wood seem to suggest a lengthy detour in arctic waters.

Posts may be sporadic for the next wee while, but hopefully pictures to come, more of the sights of this country of mine. A few bits of blossom on the black-branched trees, a low drugged sky, but still I am hopeful of blue and sharp images to share.

Endless Reads Review: How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran + Swag!

This book was a gift from my friend C., who wants to chat about the content with me, so I read with a critical eye – and came away with the feeling that this book, while in some places moving and funny, is just not for me. It is not a self help book, more a polemic. In parts. In parts it is the story of Caitlin Moran’s adolescence and adulthood, her job as a music reporter and later columnist for major newspapers: her teenage struggle with weight and identity, her mildly disastrous wedding to (literally) the man of her dreams, the horror story of her first child’s birth, along with that time she hung out with Lady Gaga – a very nice, down to earth human being. For me, these were the parts with worth, with humanity – when she was being specific, when she was talking with brashness and grace about her own life.

The other side, the polemic – well, there are many many points in which her ideas of feminism fall flat for me. Mostly it’s in the urge I have to say CITATION NEEDED quite a lot. After every fact, after ‘every woman feels this way/does this’  i.e. has loads of shoes she doesn’t wear, has a terrible wedding, wants or wanted at some point to be a princess. In other places, she even states that women are not a monolith and that the problem with the patriarchy is that women are presumed to act the same.

Furthermore the idea that we can resist the dominant modes of expression by, as Moran suggests, simply ‘being hot’ and ‘laughing’ seems a little bit less active than I would like. Laugh it off, rather than engage, because if you are engaging, speaking out, you turn into a shrew, and become less attractive. I’m happy enough to be a truthful nag or a tiny long nosed mouseish creature, if the alternative is to pretend what is said or done doesn’t hurt me or trap me in a genderised cage.

So, problematic to say the least. I did appreciate her resistance to the Sex and The City gleeful capitalism, WAG aspiration and Princess-passivity (that is pushed on young girls and women through disney and the pink parade of toys they are exposed to). There were some points where the jokes fall flat for me because they are not based in truth ( and where I felt the need to read parts out to D, in order to vent my disagreement) and at others I was quietly snorting to myself.  For a really more thorough tackling of this book, I’d direct you to Victoria’s review over at Eve’s Alexandria – she articulates a lot of what I found problematic, in a far more eloquent way.

To end this on a more positive note  – I just wanted to post a picture of my swag. I’ve never really had swag before, except once when I was a runner up in a script-writing competition as a teenager. I don’t know if a messenger bag full of prizes count. Anyway, ‘swag’ is a fun word to say, and even more fun to get when you are talking about books:

From left to right:

The first two are chapbooks from the feminist press Birds of Lace, which I won by replying to a tweet on St Valentine’s Day. ‘Meet the Lavenders’ by Carrie Murphy is a poetry collection,  ‘The Birdwisher’ by Anna Joy Springer, which describes itself as ‘a murder mystery for very old young adults’.

The next three are: a small yellow book of poetry called Trees of the Twentieth Century by Stephen Sturgeon, which was given away as part of a subscription to Hobart (the journal next to Trees is issue 13), and most suprising of all, included the Hobart package, a copy of Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns, which had long gone out of print until Dorothy press brought it back.

The cover of the novel, so lovely and murky, was illustrated by Yelena Bryksenkova, who in my dreams will illustrate the cover of my novels. I’ve been a fan of Dorothy press since I first heard of it – it’s a small affair which only publish books by women, and they seem to take up works that I immediately want to read, but have until now not been able to afford.

Thank you Birds of Lace and Hobart – and hooray for swag. (I had to write it one more time)

Day and Night, Books

The books above are my collection so far for the month of March – the first of which I started a couple of days ago. Three presents (one of which was a book given out free with a newspaper) and one charity shop purchase of two pounds. Endless Reads 2012 is going at a fair old pace. So far I’ve been pretty good about not buying too many, mostly thanks to the generosity of others. So I felt this was a relevant (if slightly awkward) segue into the fact that it’s World Book Day today in Ireland and the UK! But not the rest of the world. The rest of the world celebrates World Book Day on the 23rd of April, but the day was moved to the first Thursday in March in Ireland and the UK, according to Wikipedia, to avoid having it fall in the Easter holidays.

Today, every child in education (up to the age of 18) will receive a one pound book token which they can use to help cover the cost of a book, or to buy a specially printed book for a pound. It’s a pretty wonderful thing, although none of the cheap books seem to be particularly long  reads, which is a shame for more advanced readers. I’d have loved to get my hands on some more challenging books if the scheme had been in place when I was younger. I was reading Les Miserables (along with a lot of other more age-appropriate fiction) when I was twelve or thirteen, and reading has always been my main occupation – in that respect perhaps I wasn’t really the target audience.  Still, maybe they’ll eventually print up some copy-right free classics (usually available for three quid or less anyway).

I’m not doing much for today – other than reading, which I do every day anyway – but I will getting actively involved in World Book Night (which is the evening of World Book Day, so, on the 23rd of April). In the UK (and Ireland? I’m not sure) and in the US, book enthusiasts sign up to hand out 24 copies of one of a hundred books chosen by national poll as a ‘great read’.

I’m going to be wandering around North and South Bridge in the centre of Edinburgh, merrily foisting a free copy of my book of choice to non-readers. The vetting process was quite strident – I had to fill out a form saying what I wanted to give out (from the list of a hundred, chosen by readers’ votes) and why, who I would give the book out to and why, where I was going to stand and why – Mostly, because I think books are ugly and beautiful and can give insight into the human condition and make us slightly kinder and more at ease with human difference, and that no one should be denied a book just because it’s too expensive, or they think libraries are not for them or what have you. In the end, I got through, and was chosen as a giver – and though it’s over a month away, I’m really looking forward to the event.

I chose I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith. There were a lot of books on the list that I liked, so why this particular one? Why not one of my favourites, Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day? One is a sweet, mildly funny coming-of-age-and-love story set in a marvelous crumbling English castle (rented by the protagonists) featuring a keen writer and some dashing American visitors – the other is an achingly beautiful meditation on aging, loyalty and loss as seen through the eyes of an uptight butler on his holidays. Which would be easiest and most inspiring for a non-reader to read? I wanted immediate appeal, which would open the world of books up to a reluctant reader, rather than risk putting them off with a licorice sort of book.

Are you getting involved in World Book Day or Night? If not, which book would you give away to non-readers to really draw them towards reading?

Endless Reads Review: Vinland by George Mackay Brown

There was a boy who lived in a hamlet in Orkney called Hamnavoe. The boy’s name was Ranald. Ranald’s father had a small ship called the Snowgoose. Ranald’s father – his name was Sigmund Firemouth – did not like the land or anything to do with it, such as ploughs or horses or barns. Sigmund Firemouth was only happy when he was at sea, adjusting his sail to the wind, going from one port to another with cargo, and, sometimes, passengers. – Vinland, George Mackay Brown.

Orcadian Ranald Sigmundson comes young to adventure: at the age of twelve he flees from his violent sea-faring father, stowing away on another ship, This ship happens to be captained by the famous Leif Ericsson – and so by chance Ranald is one of the first Europeans to set foot on Vinland. The beauty of this unknown land, and the encounters with the ‘skraelings’ or ‘savages’, which move swiftly from peaceable and welcoming to violent after the actions of a mistrustful Norse cook, will haunt Ranald forever.

After the Norsemen are temporarily driven from what will become Newfoundland, and winter in Greenland, Ranald decides to take to the seas as a trader. Despite his young age it seems like he has a knack for it, beyond the abilities of adults around him. In fact, he has a knack for most things, including survival. This is a useful skill in the time and place in which Ranald lives, circa 1000 AD, in the area of Northern Europe ruled by the King of Norway but constantly jostled by factions of minor kingships, murderous earls, and viking raiders.

However, as Ranald he grows up he becomes aware of his fealty to the land of his ancestors, and turns his hand to farming, and his back on the call of the sea, on the chaos of politics and war, and eventually even on his family, in favour of seeking a new land, beyond this one –

An admission: I wanted this book to set me on fire, and it didn’t. I think it was my cliff-high expectations: Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe, a novel about life on an Orkney island, a beautifully poetic, slow read, is one of my favourites, and I was expecting a similar kind of richness to the prose here.

What Vinland gives is a crisp rendering of a life of adventure in the Northern seas, political intrigue and disenchantment, and subsequent settling into quiet, meditative old age, all done in the style of a Norse saga. And this was just not what I needed at that moment. It feels like something I would have loved reading as a child, though it is definitely an adult book, particularly in the religious elements that Mackay Brown weaves into the latter half. Religious sensitivity goes hand in hand with a strongly environmental, humane message, which is essentially about living in harmony in the world.

It is, on its own terms, a compelling book with language that has the quality of a beaten-steel sword, and action that flows seamlessly along the highs and lows of one year to the next.