The Clerkenwell Group

I went to a creative writing group last night at the hip, funky, comfortable Three Kings pub in Clerkenwell (they have Deuchar's IPA on tap, always a good sign). I found these folks online, as we live in that kind of world these days, don't we, and didn't know what to expect. There is always the possibility going into one of these things blind that you might end up having to listen to some old biddy's five cycle epic poem on her allotment plot called The Tyranny of Slugs - and then try not to be too mean when you have to say what you thought of it.

But it was brilliant and all the work was strong, diverse work. In a way meeting by the web is beneficial. I suspect in creative writing programmes you have much of the same people. Middle class folk writing about the drudgery of the suburbs and marriage.

There was a lovely 74 year old lady there, a Hungarian who has lived in Paris for 40 years and recently come over to London. She is a web writer, putting her diaries, kept since a child, on her various blogs, along with photos and other musings. There was a funny exchange when she was talking about her diaries someone asked 'are you going to try to get these published?' And she said, 'But I publish every day.' Which I thought was quite a progressive, web 2.0 way to think. I noticed she posted some pics on her Flickr site of our meeting in a folder called Dare to Share.

I left the meeting inspired to finally round the bend and finish my long gestating and much-hyped novel. It was good to share it with some others - I have only shown it to one or two people whom I care about and trust. Strange that about 60,000 people read what I write every week in The Organ, yet creative stuff, I keep that close to the chest.

Infinite rest

Busy days at The Organ and too many boozy nights mean I have been neglecting you, gentle Reader.

I was deeply saddened last weekend when I heard that David Foster Wallace hung himself. I had come into his stuff late, only getting into him after reading his story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I was put off when Infinite Jest originally came out, not because of its heft, but because I thought that all those footnotes and endnotes was nothing more than clever-clever post-po-mo jiggery pokery. When I finally read it, I discovered that underneath this stuff is heart and optimism. And it's also a mammoth book of ideas, boundary-pushing, brilliant.

I was talking about DFW with a friend from home and he said that he couldn't believe that someone could write Infinite Jest and top himself. But then I was thinking how can you write something like that and not kill yourself? You write something like that, maybe your work is done. And maybe if you are optimistic, yet clear-eyed you will be continually let down by the world. Suicide becomes the logical option.

Dreaming of Bernie Goetz

Another day, another bout of low level violence on London's public transport. I'm on the way home from a publishing 'do on the number 12 from Oxford St. Am feeling blue, because of a number of things, but mostly because that's just me. So I'm listening to the folder on my iPhone I've cleverly called 'wrist slitting music'. So I'm engrossed in that in my it-would-be-amusing-if-it-wasn't-my-life way, when I'm tapped on the leg by the guy sitting opposite.

'The fuck you lookin' at, Boss?' he asks.

I stare for a long second or two, weighing my man up. He's up for some sort of scrap I can see by his eyes. I've been threatened and/or brought into some kind of Travis Bickle bullshit three times in the last few days. The worst incident when I was threatened with a stabbing at the fucking Camberwell Library amidst the graphic novels section. Tonight, I'm tired, I'm fucked off, don't at the moment care if I live or die, to be utterly frank. And I say, 'Looking' at you, fucko.'

This takes him aback, cause this thing is all about power. He wanted me, the middle class white boy to crumble. And I can see his eyes calculating. And they slide over to this older, dumpy East Asian woman and he says, 'the fuck you looking' at?' and she just gets up and walks away. And that leaves me and him, and we sit back and don't look at each other for the rest of the ride home.

Mmmm...Bacon

I went to Tate Britain this afternoon to see the Francis Bacon centenary exhibition. It was a bright sunny day, just a bit of autumn bite in the air. Fall is my favourite time of year, and I sauntered down Millbank to the museum with a spring in my step, an ain't life just fuckin' grand smile on my face.

Then I went inside and was bludgeoned by Bacon's paintings, my spirit crushed by their unrelenting bleakness and unyielding brutality. In Bacon's work there is no hope, no humanity - life is just suffering and violence and horror. It is his portraiture that disturbed me most, his subjects scream (as in the famous reworking of Velazquez' Pope Innocent X), their faces are blurred or partially erased or distorted. They all made me feel hollow and despondent.

There was an interesting room which with collected ephemera from Bacon's studio. Bacon, apparently, always claimed his paintings came out in a spontaneous rush. But this archival room showed that he obsessively planned, made lists of potential subjects and worked and reworked preparatory drawings. That Bacon self-mythologised in this way probably says more about how the public believes an artist produces his stuff - it all must be in a mad spontaneous rush, Mozart dashing off the Jupiter symphony in an afternoon, say - not about grit and hard work.

Of course, the Tate being a modern museum, it has to be down the the kids, and I mean little kids. In the middle of the exhibition, they had a table with paper and art supplies so that little children can doodle and paint. This is in a room called Apprehension with Bacon's work from the 1950s which, according to the exhibition notes, is fuelled by "a sense of dread pervading the brutality of everyday life" and has "an air of personal menace" due to his violent affair with lover Peter Lacey. In one painting, a distorted, grotesque baboon wails, in another two naked men grapple in what could be construed as a rape scene. And today, there was some little girl at the table drawing a golden sunset with a box of Crayolas.

It gets more bizarre. The events around the exhibition include a session for kids aged 5-12 called, I shit you not, Bend it Like Bacon, where the little shavers get to "re-enact the lying, crawling, bending, standing, turning and falling figures you can see in Bacon's paintings." Ooh, that'll be fun. Especially if they get to pretend to be the half-human, half-cow eviscerated carcasses of the Crucifixion triptychs.

Istanbul, not Constantinople

A few pics from my recent Frankfurt Book Fair jaunt to Istanbul.

Funny signs in Ireland

Yeah, I could show pictures of rolling hills, etc of the trip to the Old Sod. But you've seen them all on posters, the Rough Guide and Guinness adverts. So here are a few of the signs that made me chuckle during the holiday.

1: I kept looking at the figure in the top sign, taken at Rosses Point, Co. Sligo - he looks like the victim of foul play rather than stumbling off a cliff. Shot in the back, just how they do it in those parts.

2: Everywhere on the streets in the rather salty district of Stonybatter, Dublin are signs imploring the locals to pick up after their damn dogs, some in Irish. They don't seem to work.

3: I sure hope this dog from the Maynooth area gets founded.

4: I wasn't able to take a snap of this road sign because we were trundling by at speed, but found one on the interweb. I could not for the life of figure out what it meant; I eventually guessed, 'No Tie Fighters in squadrons of three.' Apparently it has something to do with car or truck axles.