Method or madness?

Can inspired teaching be reduced to method or does it always require inspired teachers? The most influential educational models today duck this question by placing their trust in curriculum and through policing teacher compliance with testing regimes. The best teachers, according to this model, are those who efficiently and consistently get good results in high stakes testing. But there was a time when quality in education meant something different and when the key site of educational debate was method. Now method has been relegated to the sidelines. The old arguments for student-centred education and discovery learning, now bundled up as 'progressive', have been safely stowed away in the stock cupboard to gather dust. As a way of thinking about knowledge or about learning processes they have been shelved. The idea of disrupting power, of education as a critical force or some sort of act of emancipation have gone out of fashion. Education is there as an economic investment in a stable future rather than as a force for social change. You may still hear enthusiastic university lecturers talking about facilitating rather than transmitting knowledge, preferring to be the 'guide on the side' rather than the 'sage on the stage', but that's in the arena of adult learning. Christopher Zalla's film Radical resuscitates this seemingly moribund debate. Here the teacher is inspiring, his method - well, it's radical - and it delivers the goods in test results. The brilliantly drawn teacher, Sergio Juarez, who prefers to be known as Sergio, turns the tables in an underachieving primary school in Mexico, where social forces, crime, poverty, corruption and high stakes testing seem to have the students well and truly trapped. Sergio literally turns the tables (into imaginary boats) and then gets rid of them altogether. He does the same with curriculum requirements - turns them upside down, then gets rid of them. He is passionate, inspired, sometimes frustrated, and maybe even slightly crazy. But all along he is desperate to find ways for his students to realize their full potential. Not once in the film does he express any overtly political views, despite the fact that what he is doing is deeply political - there's just no dogma attached to what he does. He appears to be driven by an unwavering belief in learning and knowledge as a fundamental human right. That's it. Well, that and the internet. His vision is inspiring, but it's not as if there aren't obstacles - the initially sceptical principal, the dismissive colleague, the corrupt official and so on. Also there is the grinding poverty, the oppressive forces that restrict the students, their lack of self-belief - the injustice of it all. Radical the movie is sometimes a little simplistic in its analysis, in its avoidance of politics, and occasionally veers towards the sentimental. But Sergio's passion is brilliantly captured and the evolution of his relationship with the principal is delicately handled and heart-warming. It's based on a true story and that gives weight to the argument that Zalla's film is making. Still the argument rests on method - re-packaged from A Radical Way of Unleashing a Generation of Geniuses. It's not exactly Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, more like a neoliberal fantasy - but that would be straying into the politics of education which the movie doesn't do. This is about education and method, but it could just as well be about a very brave and inspired teacher who believes in his students. In the end, it's thought provoking and there's so much to discuss. I wonder how this movie would play in a teacher education course today?
 

Monitoring reading

I've been reading fiction throughout my life and I seem to have developed a number of strategies for evaluating - or perhaps it might be better to say monitoring - what I'm reading as I go along. I don't think they'd have universal appeal or that they might just simply work for anyone without any modification, but they work well enough for me and just because of that they may be worth sharing. So here we go. First of all I want to be won over by a writer, and I want that to happen fairly quickly - in the first couple of pages at least. I want to enter the world of the writer. Nothing too flashy but just enough to make me want to carry on. Maybe it's a gentle hint of what might follow, a voice that appeals, a setting or interaction that intrigues me. Then after the start I tend to apply what I call the 100 page rule. At this point, do I understand what's going on? Do I feel sufficiently hooked in to continue? Do I want to know what happens next? Can I get some sort of purchase on the different characters - can I remember who they are? In the past I've just abandoned what I'm reading if it fails the 100 page rule. Nowadays I'm a little more forgiving and may persevere for a while. And then next, about halfway through, regardless of the length of the thing it's the halfway point - I'm asking myself 'Is it worth carrying on?' or have I just had enough? Life is short enough. My default tendency is to give a writer the benefit of the doubt. I know enough about writing to know how much effort is required and just how hard it is to say what you want to and how easy it is to fall short. Writers should be given the benefit of the doubt. But this halfway point is very significant to me. It usually helps me to distinguish between the very good and what's good enough. Of course, you never really know until the end - that's just the way it is. By way of example, at the moment I'm reading Colm Tobin's The Blackwater Lightship. The first couple of pages are excellent. That's definitely a tick, then. By page 100 I note that I'm completely absorbed. It's certainly got more to give. At the halfway mark I have Declan, a central character, at his grandmother's bleak abode, dying of AIDs. Present, a couple of friends and various members of his fractious family. Is it worth continuing? Well I'm not put off, but neither can I see much in terms of resolution for the family. How will it end? Declan's got a one way ticket - there can be no surprises there. Sad or tragic though it may be, he will die. Things hang in the balance but nothing much can change by the logic of the book's own narrative. Yet the second half manages to open up the back stories of the characters in a way that is so much more plausible than other two parters (Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies would be an example). This gives Tobin's novel additional depth and nuance. It looks like there won't be an easy settlement but as Declan's health becomes progressively worse, the three generations of women move closer to understanding one another. It's as close to a resolution as we're going to get and the writing is very good. There's a small dazzling window when Tobin's narrator captures Declan's sister's despair: 'Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices. They meant nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea ....It might have been better, she felt, if there had never been people, if this turning of the world, and the glittering of the sea, and the moving breeze happened without witness, without anyone feeling, or remembering, or dying, or trying to love.' Bleak, but blindingly good - I guess that's what Tobin intended.

 

Let's hear it for the trees

There's a hypnotic, meditative quality to Perfect Days which foregrounds the Koji Yakusho character's quiet immersion in simple everyday life as a Tokyo toilet cleaner. He is surrounded by busy people, but also by natural beauty. A touchstone here is the sunlight leaking through trees, summed up by some beguiling cinematic images of that komorebi effect. Quiet acceptance seems like a template for contentment and it has been suggested that Wim Wenders is taking a stand here. But what do we read into some of the other motifs? The cassette tapes he plays in the car each morning - those lo-fi analogue recordings of a previous generation that haunt the movie? Or the delicate suggestion that his past and his family relationships may not be so straightforward? And all those imaginative toilet designs that we encounter? Critics have tended to focus on the beauty of the film and have celebrated the portrayal of a character seemingly at peace with the world, turning away from, or escaping from the mess. But, perhaps inevitably, there's more beneath the placid surface of the film. It takes us away from toilets, from toilet cleaning and from Tokyo, such a potent symbol of the modern world. It could be argued that Perfect Days makes an uneasy settlement with the modern world, in the same way that the Koji Yakusho character may have made an uneasy settlement with his life. Some parallels can be found in another slow and quiet film - Here from the Belgian director Bas Devos. The central characters, a Romanian construction worker and a Chinese bryologist develop a romantic connection in natural beauty walking through the woodland around Brussels. The trees and the mosses come to the foreground, They are beautifully filmed as modern life speeds by in the background - trains ceaselessly moving rootless people from place to place. Here is another sideways glance at modernity. The character Stefan is more troubled than Wim Wender's toilet cleaner, but his life is just as simple and his motivations are nothing but generous - he cooks up soup and walks miles to deliver it in plastic tubs to his friends. Here may be overlooked because Devos is not so well known and because it may be siloed as art house, but it is still a real achievement. On the other hand Wim Wender's huge reputation has already insured that Perfect Days gets plenty of attention. But both films deserve to be taken seriously, both show what a feature-length film can do, and both have important messages for us. And let's hear it for trees - they don't feature in the credits, but they are major actors in both these wonderful, thought-provoking films.

The reading habit

My reading habit is almost as bad as my writing habit. In fact it may be worse. It costs more for a start and it has the added disadvantage of cluttering the place up with its remnants - books. I usually read a couple of them a week. Sometimes non-fiction but most of the time these days fiction. A long term ambition has been to make some sort of reference to what I read here, on this blog. But that's too much pressure. And the trouble is that I don't quite know what I think about a piece of writing until sometime afterwards and by then I've started on something else and then I forget what I thought before. My clearest thoughts about my reading usually begin to crystallise out as I'm reading, but somehow it seems wrong to write them down before I've finished the whole thing. Wrong and probably unfair. So my first impressions of Checkout 19 was that it was a rather clumsy attempt to claim cultural capital with all those references to her reading. That was until it started to impress me with its deep interiority and its own grappling with the writing/reading process. But all that fell away when I started to admire the jaw-dropping way that it would lurch into full-blown fantasy. Still when I reached the end it had become something else again, another kind of story. Bennet's book is unsettling. It's hard to compare it with anything else and perhaps that's why I can't quite bring myself to say I enjoyed it. OK, it shares some common features with something like Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, but then that's a more conventional form, a memoir with an explicit trajectory, a memoir that dwells directly on its central character and context. On some occasions when I read I just get absorbed in technique and with Checkout 19 I found myself turning back the pages on a couple of occasions to find out how skilfully Claire-Louise Bennett got us from A to B. Quite remarkable in itself. I turn the corner of the page as if I'll go back again which is something I rarely do, because by then I'm on to the next thing which in this case is Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

Don't lean on me man

Scribbled notes on a scrap of lined paper sold for £89,000 the other day. They were the draft lyrics for Rock n Roll Suicide and Suffragette City – complete with the added revisions ‘Hey man!’, ‘Don’t lean on me man’ and ‘Outasight’. The everyday nature of the materials and the rather unremarkable addition of those words might seem trivial or even banal if it were not for the huge impact of Bowie’s songs on popular culture. That scrap of paper, those hastily scribbled jottings are like visible traces of a creative process in vivo. Those songs echoed around bedrooms and shared houses, bedsits and squats, family homes and student flats. They were sung along to, played, replayed and performed time and again, spooling outwards, as it were, from those hastily scribbled lines. Of course, it wasn’t just the lyrics, it was the voice and the music too, the distinctive sound of that particular recording, distributed on vinyl, in its instantly recognisable cardboard sleeve. And it goes without saying, the RCA supply chain ensured that copies were there, ready and available in the racks and trays of LPs that like-minded people habitually flicked through when they went to their favourite record store, back in the day. Matter of little significance has, over time, become a much sought after collector’s item - the value of that scrap of paper far outstrips the value of the raw materials it’s made from, and the ways in which the words themselves wound their way around the feelings and impulses as well as the hopes, beliefs and dreams of a generation of listeners is difficult to capture because of its inevitable multiplicity. It may well have been the soundtrack of many people’s early lives - but then what lives? How did the lyrics come to mean in different contexts, how were they understood - how were they heard, misheard, disliked, detested? Material history can be a bit like that, for although we might agree on the importance of a particular artefact, its meaning is fundamentally unstable inviting interpretation, re-interpretation and misinterpretation. Music in popular culture seems to inhabit the outer reaches of such instability because of the way in which it is often woven into significant personal events, stitched in to one’s particular state of mind, the recreational drugs, relationships, lifestyles and ambitions of the time. Perhaps music in general does this, seamlessly attaching itself to the memories and affects, the distinctiveness of a life. After all this is key to the success of Desert Island Discs, now 81 years old. The 8 track format is such a convenient hook to tell the story of one’s life - or at least a version of it. With an aspiration to be a writer, poet or wordsmith and a nascent literary sensibility I was drawn to the words that punctuated the soundtrack of my early life. That soundtrack was made of vinyl. Singles and EPs that span around at 45 rpm, LPs at 33.3 rpm. Mostly I first heard stuff on pirate stations, on a transistor radio, on Top of the Pops or round at friends’ houses. But the LP soon became something to own. The record sleeve had the all-important supplementary information. The aesthetic of the art work, the names of the musicians, the way they looked, the way they dressed and how they had their hair - the instruments they played, who sang, who wrote the songs and of course, the lyrics themselves. No longer inaudible or misheard, there they were, nearly always on the back of the sleeve or on a pull-out, and you could read them, sing along or just pour over their meaning, if you could fathom it out. Some were more self-consciously poetic than others, some were just rubbish, but nonetheless huge clouds of creativity billowed out of that early flowering of rock music. It seemed at the time that the lyrics carried valuable messages. If they were not poetic they might gesture towards expressions of lifestyle, of taste, of belief and in doing so fashioned the habits of mind of a generation. Whimsical and romantic, uncompromising and rebellious, conceptual, quirky, hedonistic, we were served up with a range of possibilities, a wardrobe of identities that might distinguish us from the mainstream. Only a few at the time saw how the subtle threads of capitalism were part of this, establishing a marketplace in which even the costumes of anti-capitalism could be bought. And now, just the words remain – like a dog without a bone, an actor out on loan (it’s all there somewhere, even if the melody is hard to sing!). Skeletons, threadbare outfits. At an earlier auction the lyrics for Bowie’s Starman sold for £203,500. Unlike Suffragette City, these look like neat copy – presentable handwriting on graph paper with misspellings corrected, probably provided for publication of the official lyric sheet. They don’t have quite the same feel as the Rock n Roll Suicide and Suffragette City lyrics – they’re more polished, more self-conscious, but their market worth is still interesting, and given that an early demo of the song went for £41,000, a fifth of the price, it seems like the material trace of writing is an important marker for the collector, being closer perhaps to an autograph than a ghostlike voice, written by the hand of an icon, don’t lean on me man.

Killers

 

Perhaps Martin Scorsese is playing with conventions, but 3 hrs 26 mins sounds like a very long movie. Killers of the Flower Moon is that long but I can honestly say that it didn't drag, the evening just had to be rearranged to accommodate it, and that's no bad thing. The murders, the casual racism and the downright evil intent of William Hale are dramatisations of real-life events that took place in the 1920s and were explored in David Grann's book of the same name Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. The film script is based on the book. But although we get a bit about the FBI, the film concentrates on the strongly drawn characters and the atrocities that they unleash. Leonardo diCaprio, as Ernest Burkhart, is excellent at playing a character who is weak, confused and easily manipulated by William Hale (Robert deNiro) whose charitable mask hides a seething caldron of malice.  Most sources categorise the film as a Western and there's plenty to be said about that - how the genre has evolved and what it means now. I don't find it a particularly useful box to put this film in, but through a series of co-incidences, work on the mostly grim encounters between white settlers and Native Americans has been on my mind a lot recently. Delving into the work of Sebastian Barry had taken me into the brutal world of the Indian Wars - a bloody chapter in American history, which Barry handles so well. In Days without End he manages to weave in delicate intimacy, love and yes, even gender fluidity, with the trauma of human atrocity without lessening the impact or significance of either. I didn't need Faber to include the first chapter of A Thousand Moons in that book, but I went on to read it anyway. Equally brilliant writing. So although reading the two, one after another, was no co-incidence at all, I didn't think of either in terms of a Western - and good for Faber, they don't go down that route, either. Then, in a second-hand bookshop, I picked up West by Carys Davies. If anything was at work it was subliminal. I just wanted something fairly short, something with a lively narrative and a quick flick through suggested that's what I'd get. What a great first novel it is too. It's short, there's a strong storyline and some pitch-perfect writing. Always fascinated by writing about writing I thought she has a particularly deft touch in looking at that particular settler practice from a different perspective. One of her central characters has a Native American companion who dispassionately observes the act of writing 'the dip of the point of one of his half-bald feathers into the ink, the sound that was like the working of the claws of a small creature on a leaf or the smooth bark of a tree.' Wonderful! With a title like 'West' it's easy to think of it as a Western, but it's so much more than that. And again it exposes colonialism and the bloody violence of the settlers, the land grab, the fight for domination, the inhumanity of those who think of themselves as civilised or somehow superior. And then we watch the news.

Why writing still matters, too

 

For the cover of Why Writing Still Matters I wanted an image that conveyed some of the messages that are to be found in the book - and that's quite a big ask. This image of Tom Price's wonderful piece called Network, which is in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was an obvious candidate. It might make you think of writing as it is becoming - writing with technology, which is consistent with the book's subtitle, 'Written Communication in Changing Times'. The fact that I'm in the picture as well is a bit of an in-joke. But in the end we went for the more abstract image which is credited to Nick Oakes but doesn't actually get any commentary. It's a photograph of initials and names carved into a tree trunk near the Alhambra in Spain. I like it because it references an everyday, but unofficial use of writing - using your name as if to say 'I was here, too' - here for as long as this writing surface remains. It will outlast the act of inscription, but anything further is uncertain. It is the trace of an action - a penknife gouging out the crusty bark of a tree. Someone leaves their mark, announces their existence, expresses their frustration, pledges their love or whatever. I like it because it can be read in different ways, and because it might provoke all sorts of different reactions. The specific detail of its origin and author(s) are unknown. The fact that it has been coloured with the primary colours that Miro was so fond of adds another dimension for me. That and the place in which the photograph was taken - I have fond memories of visiting the Alhambra. Visiting and queuing. Once we waited for 6 hours! It can be like that at the height of the tourist season. But, it's always worth it. The Alhambra and the Generalife are a potent reminder of Moorish rule in Europe and an important part of Spain's architectural heritage. A jewel in the crown of Andalusia. Of course, none of this is in the photograph, but it's what I bring to the photograph. And somehow when you put all that together you get more of a sense of what writing is, what writing does and then maybe, perhaps, why writing still matters.

Paper matters, too

In Why Writing Still Matters I spend some time tracing the invention and development of paper as a writing technology, but not with the detail and enthusiasm that Basbanes applies in On Paper. But I do note that after the French Revolution writing paper began to appear bearing the names of new government offices and departments. Sometimes this was lavishly produced from engravings of the motif Liberty, Egality and Fraternity. Pictorial writing paper subsequently began to make its appearance on the correspondence of traders and shopkeepers, signalling a sort of sophistication or professionalism. By the early 1800s good quality writing paper was beginning to become available in England. Headed paper with embossed and ornamental designs was often printed with decorative or coloured borders. Some of this high quality paper was watermarked and used for invitations, greetings and to promote social events. Although the written messages inscribed on them were important, the quality and decoration on the paper carried an additional message - distinctive, expensive, tasteful, carefully chosen. Paper and printing were important to the prolific French novelist Balzac. This is partly because of his professional background as a printer, and partly because he was a keen observer of the practices of the Parisian literary world of his time and the gradual diffusion of literacy which was shaping the social and political life of the time. His concerns add texture to Lost Illusions, even when they stretch the bounds of credulity. When David, the printer's son proposes to his sweetheart he accompanies this with a lengthy discourse on his new ideas about paper making. 'Paper, which is no less wonderful a product than printing, of which it is a basis, had long been in existence in China when it penetrated through the underground channels of Asia Minor' he declaims. And this is just the beginning! This proposal speech spans five pages. What it offers us in terms of a detailed history of papermaking far outweighs its potential in the arena of courtship.

Why Writing Still Matters

My new book Why Writing Still Matters was published by Cambridge University Press last week. I haven't actually seen a copy yet - distribution being something slightly different from printing and publication, but I'm fairly certain it exists in that particular material form. And that's actually a significant transformation because up until this point in time it has been entirely digital. From proposal through to draft and final chapters it has been a thing on a computer screen. During this time the 10 months worth of writing has found its way up and down the country, across to New York and then out to Puducherry (formerly known as Pondicherry) for proofing. I mention all this because it's directly related to a major theme in the book. I wanted to explore, to think about and perhaps rethink writing in the context of digital communication. Does writing still matter? Of course, it will come as no surprise that I do think that it still matters - but of course, how, why and in what ways is central to the book. I don't make much of the double meaning of 'mattering'. With the rise of new materialism that's become rather old hat, but nevertheless my book does dwell on the materiality of print and digital technology. And still I find myself keen - perhaps too keen - to actually hold the thing. It has had an ephemeral existence for too long. I want to feel its substantial form, its heft. I want to see it occupying some space on my desk, my windowsill, the kitchen table. I want to take it with me in the car and watch others browse through it. And I want to give a copy to some of those who have contributed to its development. It's almost as if its 'thingness', its existence as a work only becomes complete when it achieves a certain material form. Why should that be the case? A common sense way of thinking about this is to recall that I did actually set out to write a book. I wasn't thinking of an extended blogpost, a free-to-use extended pdf essay, a beer mat or anything else. I was imagining a book all along. I shouldn't be so surprised. An observation, that can be found in the book, is that we live in a sort of halfway house, in which pen and paper happily co-exist with keyboards and screens. Our local high street probably still has a stationer's that stocks pencils, pencil sharpeners, pencil cases and all the other peripheral devices associated with what is sometimes referred to as traditional literacy. We might need to Google 'stationers near me' to find it, but that's my point. Back to the book - Why Writing Still Matters ends up being something like a cultural history of writing. My rather unsystematic tracing of writing through its long history is a way of illustrating many of the amazing and inventive uses - and staggeringly tragic misuses - of the written word. Its reach and its influence. Writing itself is value-neutral and like any technology, it is malleable. But it has become an established part of how we develop perspective, how we legislate, how we govern and build knowledge. It's part of how we unite around a common cause. It's part of informed debate. Of course, it's a whole host other things too - and not all of them are so positive. But perhaps an education in and through writing is the best we can have. I hope I have contributed to that understanding - but all that aside, I have another hope, too. I hope those who get to the book will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Thinking about Yoko Ogawa

I read The Memory Police about a year ago and I thought it was so good that I should post something about it. I put the book down on the deep windowsill in my study which functions a bit like an in-tray. That's where I put things I'm working on, or things I need to attend to - work, parking fines, speeding tickets, tax notices and so on. For a while, each morning, I'd look at it and think about what I might write, but I couldn't come up with anything. Gradually things began to accumulate around it, and there were more pressing things to do, like my own writing for instance. Soon it was hidden underneath other stuff, well after the fines were paid and the tax notices filed away. But now there were papers to review, drafts to look over - maybe a new parking fine to pay or to appeal against, life goes on. It would be a fiction to I claim that I forgot about The Memory Police. It just got buried. It got buried because I couldn't work out what I wanted to say about it. Occasionally it would come to light again as I sorted through the mess of things on the windowsill. And if I tidied up, as I do occasionally, there it was - something I wanted to do, and I'd promise myself that I'd write something about it. But I didn't. After some time, maybe six months or so, I realised that I wasn't going to get round to it and that it would be better just to forget it altogether. It got shelved, somewhere or other. I gave up. The title stayed with me though, and from time to time I would mention the book to someone or just conjure up the strange atmosphere that it created for me. And then last week, when I found myself in a bookshop looking for something to read, I remembered it, but I couldn't think of the name of the Japanese author who wrote it. I felt a bit under pressure because I wasn't sure whether I'd parked my car illegally, but I googled the title anyway and there it was - The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. The bookshop had a couple of shelves that featured Japanese writers, and that's what had prompted my memory. I quickly turned up three titles by Ogawa and chose The Housekeeper and the Professor. I'm about half way through it at the moment and it confirms my view that Ogawa is a brilliant writer. It seems good to post about it now and I certainly don't want it to sit on the windowsill like The Memory Police did. It's written in the same spare prose style, conjuring up this rather strange world, not unlike our own but different, of course, unusual perhaps. 'Haunting', I think it says on the dust jacket. But what does that actually mean? I have no idea, nevertheless it is - haunting, unusual, atmospheric. The reader is drawn into this very particular sort of world, detailed but impressionistic - both at the same time. If I said it was a bit like ink wash, I hope it doesn't sound as if I'm looking at it through the eyes of a romantic orientalist. It's like ink wash because it's beautiful, delicate and at the same time slightly out of focus. Blurred. There's craft and precision; every word contributes to the whole. In this sense, I'm reminded of Small Things Like These, in fact everything by Claire Keegan, although the result couldn't be more different. And just like The Memory Police, The Housekeeper and the Professor is about remembering and forgetting although so far, at least, there isn't the same feeling of oppression, the same political undertow that haunts the pages of The Memory Police. Even though I haven't finished reading it yet, it's a real achievement, and it probably won't ever sit on the deep windowsill underneath the random stuff that accumulates there.

The desk

When my mother died, I couldn't work out what to do with the desk she had. It was rather like the one here, and it had been part of the family home as we grew up. About five foot in height, the hinged front pulled down for a writing surface revealing a series of small cubby holes that could be used to store things like envelopes, tape, pencil sharpeners and so on. I say five foot in height, but I can still remember it towering over me, not being able to reach the flat surface of the desk top, and having to be warned not to bang my head on it. I've kept hold of it all these years, although if anything it's a bit low to work at as a stand up desk. It's become clear to me that this one is a rather cheap affair - my mother referred to it as 'post-war utility furniture' - and I know that's probably true because a friend of mine's got a posher version. Better cubbyholes and drawers and even a couple of pop-out lopers that support the work surface from underneath. My parents could never quite agree on what to call it. It was one of a number of things that seemed to index their different backgrounds. My dad just called it the desk and was even known to deride my mother for calling it a bureau. For her it was a bureau, and for me because I'm interested in writing and all its appurtenances it's come to be known as the 'secretaire' which could be thought of as it's official classification in the world of furniture - 'secretaire' or 'secretary desk', although I note, in passing that in The Luminaries Eleanor Catton simply refers to is as a 'secretary' (and she can do no wrong in my opinion). And there's an alternative, too, that I rather like - the escritoire. Somehow that seems to be far too sophisticated a word to describe my dad's desk, but doesn't that just show the way we value a little bit of French? Secretaire is good because of its connection with the word secretary - originally someone who was privy to private and confidential matters (including correspondence), but escritoire appealing because of its etymological connection with scribing, with writing, with mark-making. I suppose there's a book to be done on writing furniture - desks, tables, study rests, lecterns and not to mention all those rather ugly computer tables. I'd like to read something that really grapples with the peripheral material paraphernalia of writing. Maybe not just furniture, why not venture into stationery as well? Its inventive, technological and - well, material.

Fountain pens

I remember a time when writing with a fountain pen was something to aspire to. Yes, the fountain pen with its little metal lever, delicately hinged against the soft bladder within, to syphon up the ink. I remember the wet, metallic smell of ink. Quink in glass bottles - presumably the qu- for quick, as in quick drying; ink as in ink. The syringe-like way in which it was drawn up into the pen. And I can still recall the sensuous flow of ink from the nib, flowing on to the page as I tried to master nib technique, scratchily unsatisfying one day, smooth and flowing the next, so unpredictable that there were whole catalogues of disaster and frequent frustrations along the way. Bent nibs, split nibs, or the two vertical sections hopelessly crossed.  Accidents, leakages and the stained fingers of the apprentice writer. The running out of ink, and the excess of ink, pooling into blots on the page. And, of course blotting paper - loose or as part of a pad, the necessary accompaniment to pen and ink. Essential for drying-off your writing before the fold, before a turn of the page. Blotting paper to keep on top of minor spillages, to clean the nib, to mop up bottle drips. Blotting paper pellets, launched across the room from a flexed ruler - oh, the anarchy of stationery in the schoolroom! And then, the hazardous business of penmanship, of lining up letters of an acceptable size, looping them together, working to a standard of perfection, the ideal perfection of handwriting, and the grown-up signatures we all aspired to. I've still got my father's fountain pen. It's a Sheaffer with a screw-on lid, with the smooth contours of what might, in its time, have been thought of as futuristic. There's something rocket-like about it (although that may because I still see it through the eyes of a child who grew up with Dan Dare, moon-landings and space exploration). All right, so it may or may not be futuristic, but it's certainly elegant, gracefully tapered, carefully designed. It tapers like a bullet. It has a dark walnut-coloured finish, reminding me of a mint humbug. And, in common with all of its generation, the pen lid has a small golden clip to secure it to your pocket - the inside pocket of your jacket, of course, because 'wearing' it on your front pocket was seen as rather crass. There was something very accomplished and professional about the way in which my father parted the front fold of his jacket to draw out his Shaeffer for signing a cheque or making a note. In those moments, the pen was like a powerful weapon in the hands of an assassin. It was always on target, just right, and his signature was always the same, neat and flowing. It seemed to encapsulate the very essence of him. His neatly loped signature was like his neat wavy hair, carefully parted and carefully presented.

Writing migration

Helping us to reflect on our particular position in the wider sweep of social and cultural life is something that literature does well. I don't mean that all literature does or indeed should do that, but it is often the case. It was a pre-occupation of nineteenth century novelists, who often constructed dynamic localised narratives against the backdrop of social and political change. The parochial or provincial drama played out on a larger canvas. Flaubert's Madame Bovary is subtitled 'provincial lives'; Eliot's Middlemarch  'a study of provincial life'. Nowadays it doesn't get spelt out in the same way. Go, Went, Gone could be about anything, from the title, but what you get it is a chilling blast of what it might be like to be an illegal migrant in modern day Europe. Jenny Erpenbeck's novel centres on a recently retired professor and his encounters with a group of African migrants in Berlin. Pause for thought. What is it with these recently retired professor types? Is there an offer on at the Writers'R'Us character warehouse? I'd only just recently retired the recently retired professor in Orkney for heaven's sake! They're full of ideas, and good intentions, not quite sure what to do with themselves, well-read and disturbingly adrift in their cardigans. Do they themselves represent something - tell us something about ourselves, our comfortable, rational, cloistered, male ineffectiveness, perhaps? In stark contrast the migrants in Erpenbeck have each in their own way become ambiguous, hurt or in some sense erased. They live in limbo. When Erpenbeck isn't being pedagogical - feeding us snippets about sub-Saharan politics, religion, culture and conflict, she's being rather clever. The retired professor is a character formed in pre-unification Germany and this adds depth. So here, identity, nationality, and the effects of political extremism create a shadowy backdrop to the story. What's clever, is that Erpenbeck doesn't have to tell us all this, she just gestures towards it. She doesn't need to tell us because we know it. We are her readers, after all, not the migrants that she writes about. And this is the problematic bit of Go, Went, Gone - even as she is helping us to empathise with the lives, the stories and the hardships of the migrants she is objectifying them, she is othering them, at just the point at which she's trying not to. I think this is partly a structural problem. She zooms in on the main characters one by one and gives each their individual story. It's almost as if she had found a similar group of migrants and interviewed them. You end up with something like a collection of pen portraits. But Erpenbeck is too sophisticated a writer to hang her story on this alone. Richard, that's the name of our retired professor - the same as the retired professor in Orkney, unfortunately - Richard has his own story, his own suffering, and this is partially resolved towards the end of the novel in a way that the plight of the migrants isn't - and thank goodness, because that's true to life. There's also a clever metaphor at work throughout the novel - something about surfaces, and what's beneath the surface. A quote at the beginning informs us that 'surfaces were invented by the devil'. The novel ends with Richard saying 'the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can't possibly endure'. But what exactly is it about surfaces, when staying on the surface seems so vital in some of the dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean that Erpenbeck also writes about? Go, Went, Gone will stay with me because it's a story about nationality and migration in contemporary Europe, and it's a story that should be told more often.

Remote island fiction

You could imagine a particular kind writing workshop. There's an assignment: sketch out a story set on an island. Have two main characters, and a small cast of locals. The main characters go to the island, some events unfold and then they return to the mainland. End of story. It doesn't seem like much, but there's still plenty of possibility. Amy Sackville's novel Orkney and Audrey Magee's The Colony are both framed in this way, but pull in very different directions, as if to illustrate this possibility. Orkney is a tale of enchantment and loss - inward, psychologically oriented; The Colony a set piece on cultural dominance and exploitation, outward-looking, political. But first, more on similarities. Both stories are set on remote islands of what might be called the Celtic fringe of Europe. Orkney, as its title suggests is set on a Scottish island - probably Westray, whereas Magee's island is somewhere off the Irish coast. Both contain lyrical descriptions of the island seascapes in ways that thicken the narrative. Magee has one of her characters scramble 'on hands and knees along the cliff's edge to peer at caves and archways cut by the ocean' whereas Sackville's studies the 'flats and crevices between the ridges', which are 'strewn with snake-like seaweed'. And both have epigraph's by clever people that signal their orientation: Nietzsche for Magee and Cixous for Sackville. The narrator of Orkney is a professor on the brink retirement, but the island of his experience is refracted through the mysterious, almost mythical presence of his young wife and former student. The Colony dwells most consistently on the character of Mr Lloyd, the artist. Although we repeatedly see the island through Mr Lloyd's eyes there are a number of disrupting devices at work; the character JP, a French linguist studying the island variety of the Irish language, several of the islanders themselves, and the brief almost journalistic accounts of the Troubles - or to be more precise, the deaths of ordinary people caught up in sectarian violence, and these accounts are interspersed with the narrative. The plot of Orkney has none of this structural complexity, it dwells on the slightly uncomfortable Lolita-ish relationship between Richard the professor and his lover, it draws us in like an obsession or an addiction. We are hypnotised, we are enchanted, just like Richard, as slowly his young lover dissolves into pure myth. She - and we never learn her name - she seems to slowly escape his grasp, to fade away, until she finally disappears. Readers are left with the enigmatic sense of Richard's young wife and the character of Richard himself, aloof, misanthropic, obsessional, not particularly attractive, but at the end of his tether, 'I am a cancelled man. I cannot see what I should do with the days ahead; I cannot see tomorrow morning even.' It is as if he is about to be erased, too. 

Reading The Colony straight after Orkney is one thing. But I wonder what it might be like to do it the other way round? Would it force a different set of comparisons? Or are they just very different kinds of writing, with different purposes, different preoccupations? I would prefer it that way, but reading both, so close together, made me wonder about the attraction of what might be thought of as remote island fiction. There are plenty of examples of it, and they're not all recent. Perhaps it's simply that a specific and circumscribed setting helps to sharpen a writer's focus. But it also seems that the symbolic separation from the mainland that the island motif provides actually offers us new perspectives on the mainland itself.  The poetic, the lyrical Orkney could be read as a critique of our dull, grey conformity, the ways in which we can be trapped (is that what Richard really stands for?). The island is nothing if not beautiful, haunting and dangerous, whereas Richard's life before the island is...well, boring. Standing on The Colony we see a mainland that is deeply marked by political domination and struggle in ways that also play out in social, cultural and linguistic worlds. In Sackville, Orkney can safely remain a placemarker for the romantic imagination and folklore (that's hopeful), but Magee's island exists in a dynamic relationship with the mainland. What will become of the language, of the lives of the islanders, their creative and economic ambitions? It is a different story and it poses different sorts of questions.

Half full and half empty

In one way or another a work of fiction is always subject to the gravitational pull of the time in which it is made. Whether we're thinking of its material form as Ozeki does, or whether we're thinking of its subject matter, shape and substance are important. A print book has a particular heft and the 550 pages of The Book of Form and Emptiness lend it a certain weight. The extent to which that weight is simply ballast could be what distinguishes good writing from the rest. The Book of Form and Emptiness faces a challenge common to much contemporary fiction that directly addresses the current milieu. To put it simply, issues like environmental catastrophe, the inequities forced on us by global capitalism and the rise of national populism do not readily present us with opportunities for resolution or narrative closure. The predominant cultural story, if it's not straightforward disaster porn, is one of unsustainability and collapse rather than one of noble decline or a utopian back-to-nature simple life. Ozeki piles on the tragedies, both personal and social. I'd not encountered the term 'psychic diversity' before, but it takes its place alongside disability, mental health issues, substance abuse and poverty. If loss and grief act as a pivot for the book, hoarding, self-harm and even gender fluidity also play a part. Nearly all the principle characters are in some way lost, confused or misguided. Exceptions are the author of the fictional book-within-a-book 'Tidy Magic', Cory the children's librarian, and the unnamed woman in the library who is always typing away on her laptop - perhaps typing the book itself. Reading all this was a lot to digest, particularly since it included the post-modern device of having the book itself addressing the characters and the reader and even reflecting on the nature of books themselves. Served up with a side dish of new materialism, there was a lot here on the agency of objects, enchantment, vibrant matter and so on - as if Ozeki had taken a crash course with Jane Bennett. As a result I could have done without the potted biography of Walter Benjamin and quotations from his essays - and the Borges garnish that was liberally applied.

The Zen that the author claims suffuses the book is hard to see amongst all this clutter. Its most overt appearance is in the figure of Aikon, the Marie Kondo like author of Tidy Magic who dispenses advice on how to fold your t-shirts and underwear. At times I longed for an Aikon editor who might clear a path for the characters and events that were building some momentum. But perhaps that's unfair. The prophetic old Zen master may be a stereotype, but he is important in his own way. And Benny's koan is the question 'What is real?' which forms an interesting counterpoint to the critique of consumerism that flavours the book. They come close to being brought together when Ozeki asks 'What gives things the power to enchant and is there a limit to the desire for more?'. To combine these thoughts with the idea that things, both made and unmade, have agency sets an almost impossible question...and if a book, too, is agentive what then? And how do you square a critique of consumerism with Benjamin's obsession with collecting books? Perhaps these are just meant as a collection of ideas to think about. All told, books and libraries have a central place in this fictional world, but there are unresolved tensions even here. Early on Ozeki observes that within this 'social hierarchy of matter, we books lived on top'. But the past tense is telling. Benji's mother, Annabelle, is laid off as media goes digital, and towards the end something similar is happening with the thinning out of library shelves. There's some print nostalgia at work here, but Ozeki is up front about this. In the end perhaps, The Book of Form and Emptiness is a timely reflection on the ways in which books shape our lives in different ways.

Travelling with Tolstoy

The passenger sees the world from a particular point of view. Separate, like a spectator, a world unfolds through the frame of the window. The framed scene outside is textualized, having a cinematic quality, as the passenger moves through the world without engaging with it in any other way than simply viewing it. There is a quality to this experience that prompts reflection, and it turns up time and again in literature. Towards the end of Anna Karenina Tolstoy uses this reflective experience to conjure up Anna's troubled state of mind. He sets the scene, "Sitting in the corner of the comfortable carriage, barely rocking on its resilient springs to the quick pace of the greys, again going over the events of the last few days, under the incessant clatter of the wheels and the quickly changing impressions of the open air, Anna saw her situation quite differently from the way it had seemed to her at her home." This introduces the reader to the reflective quality. What Anna thinks and feels is interspersed with the noise and movement of the carriage and the changing scene through the window, to the "incessant clatter of the wheels" and the "quickly changing impressions" outside. Her attention is drawn to the urban environment she is moving through "...she began to read the signboards. 'Office and Warehouse. Yes, I'll tell Dolly everything..." The signboards are particularly interesting conveying a familiar modern street scene. Later, on her return journey she looks at passers-by "'This one is pleased with himself,' she thought of a fat, red-cheeked gentleman who, as he drove by in the opposite direction, took her for an acquaintance and raised a shiny hat over his bald shiny head and then realized he was mistaken, 'He thought he knew me. And he knows me as little as anyone else in the world knows me'" Anna's mental state is captured in stream-of-consciousness writing that predates Mrs Dalloway by nearly fifty years - but it is the way in which Tolstoy juxtaposes the Moscow streets with her reflections that again captivates us. "Twitkin, Coiffeur...Je me fais coiffer par Twitkin...I'll tell him when he comes,' she thought and smiled. But at the same moment she remembered that she now had no one to tell anything funny to." Anna, as passenger, reads the world outside. Her grief only hits home when she thinks that she has no-one to share it with.

Texting characters

In the study of writing we often overlook the fact that the most commonly spoken language in the world is Chinese. Using characters - a form of logographic writing, is the most obvious choice for a population of over 1.5 billion. And so associating literacy with the alphabet is both limiting and inaccurate. In fact, there is no better illustration of how political and economic power intersect with the development and propagation of writing than the character-based system of Chinese writing. The technologies of writing that developed with industrialisation from mid-nineteenth century telegraphy, the invention of the typewriter through to the personal computer have all favoured alphabetic writing. Jing Tsu's wonderful book Kingdom of Characters - A Tale of Obsession and Genius in Modern China traces the struggles of inventors and language reformers who have fought against alphabetic domination. The inequities of telegraph tariffs, the design challenge of Chinese language typewriters and the innovative development of the 'digital sinosphere' are carefully charted. Understanding that an educated Chinese speaker can recognise and reproduce somewhere between two and three thousand different characters, gives an impression of the magnitude of the challenge. The massive take up of mobile communication has resulted in a sort of compromise. It seems as if the majority now use pinyin (a modified alphabetic system) to write, supplemented by the software's predictive text which translates their message into characters. If I had one criticism of Jing Tsu's book it's that she doesn't give enough space to the complexity, innovation and variation of text messaging in Chinese - (and Japanese-) speaking communities. The prevalence of mobile instant messaging in these communities and the heavy use of WeChat and WhatsApp means that this is now an important site for semiotic work.

Literacy practices in libraries

The public library was an important landmark in my childhood. It was in safe cycling distance, it was always warm, and it was the context for a ritualized, and mildly intimidating, interface with the adult world. I can clearly recall the heart-thumping point at which I would offer up my chosen books to be date stamped. I was in awe of the librarians who to my childish mind held the power to refuse me, point out my errors or even fine me. Invariably they were friendly, but they represented a powerful bureaucracy, an arm of local administration, that was strong and ought to be taken seriously. A successful visit to the library was rewarded by a subsequent rush of excitement - checking out was an experience like the end of a school day, clearing passport control or leaving a shop with just the toy you had in mind. But the pinch point at the library desk held all the power. It was the power that charged the anticipation as well as the release. The point where everything seemed to hang in the balance. With repeated visits and growing confidence I gradually became more and more interested in what happened at that point. The way in which a book's identifier - the book card, was deftly removed from a paper pouch glued to the endpapers, date stamped and then slipped with ease into my personal library card, snuggly held in alphabetical order in the custom-built wooden card index. As time went by I learnt more and more about the library system. Ways of classifying books, using card indexes and even requesting books that weren't in my particular branch. Home from my travels, in 1972, I was delighted to find that my mum had put in a request form for Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi - The Glass Bead Game. A postcard arrived at our home address on the 5th August that year with a hand franked two and half pence stamp. I know all this because the form dropped out of a book the other day. Evidently I used it as a bookmark and then forgot all about it. But the card is a fascinating record of a set of social and material literacy practices that were very much alive at the time, in libraries - and elsewhere too. The card - a reservation slip, a standard 6 x 3 inch postcard, serrated on one of its narrower edges at the point where it was detached from the counterfoil. One side with four pre-printed and indented rows of dots (for the address), the other with clearly labelled positions for the book's details - author, title, publisher and so on. The local branch name is ink-stamped on (oh, those ink stamps, so often the seals of officialdom!). All the specific details are captured in the distinctive flourish of my mother's handwriting. And one other feature that deserves a mention: two small holes and an impressed line in one corner, the scars of an earlier stapling, which tell something about a prior process of attachment. Such an efficient system, a marker of a sophisticated analogue literacy practice in its heyday, at a time when public libraries were generously funded. I could go on, but as I nostalgically turn this yellow-edged card in my hands I realise it's also charged with all those memories - returning home, my mother, reading Hesse, the smell of the public library, date stamps, stationery. It is slowly becoming other, its original and specific meaning is tucked into a card pocket in a much larger multidimensional catalogue. 

Powerpoint fiction....anybody?

If you'd told me that the novel I was about to read contained over 60 pages of Powerpoint slides using some of the standard insert graphics you get, I think I'd change my mind and pick something else. Haven't we all had enough of Powerpoint? Surprisingly though, Jennifer Egan makes this device work so well in A Visit from the Goon Squad that I actually found myself really enjoying it. It's one of the many small triumphs in this Pulitzer Prize winner - a work that is packed full of insights and intrigues. I'd missed it when it won in 2011, but came to it late through the first chapter, Found Objects, which appeared as a short story in the New Yorker. It could be argued that the freestanding piece Found Objects has the edge. After all, it's tightly written and only hints at the broader landscape of events. In that sense it's more open for the reader. You can speculate all you like about Sasha, the focal character, about what is lost, found or stolen in her life and the fragmented dialogue with her therapist works very well in prompting this sort of perspective. I like the economy of the short story form for some of these reasons. I think George Saunders writes about making every word count in a short story - and that's why Found Objects works. Egan's stand alone tale raises all sorts of questions most of which are answered in the novel, so I suppose if you're the sort who hopes for some sort of closure in fiction you'd prefer A Visit from the Goon Squad; but both are very good. After several unsuccessful attempts to surf the wave of enthusiasm for Richard Powers, Egan has re-established my flagging confidence in American fiction.

Going slow

It's been a while. Perhaps it seems as if I'm a blogger on a go-slow, but really it's just the sign of a changing relationship with what I write. Recently posting has become a way of rehearsing thoughts that later become more extended pieces of writing - but somehow or other I didn't need to do that for the book Stacking Stories (out soon!). So that's where my energies have gone, writing that. But I still like the blog. I like it for its continuity, or to be precise for the way it maps change. Colin and Michele once described it as a 'wunderkammer' in their typology of blogs, but it long since changed direction. Gradually it became more performative. I tried to capture where I'd been, what I was reading and what was getting published. In other words it surfed the breaking wave of self-promoting academic identity performance (yuk!). Even quite recent posts - up to and including this one - seem to draw attention to what I've been up to in my professional life (such as this!). But I've also tried to stay faithful to the notion of capturing the main gist of what I'm thinking about, what inspires me. And it perhaps goes without saying, writing in one way or another always seems to come to the top of the pile. Producing it, consuming it, the two inextricably woven together. Everyday notes, graffiti, literature, sky-writing, logos, subtitles, digital, non-digital - the lot. That has to be the next (the last?) major project, translating that fascination into something that is both insightful and readable. Will I get round to it? I think so, although my current fascination with the Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero might be trying to tell me something. His short book Empty Words and the bible-sized tome The Luminous Novel are masterpieces in exploring the many ways you can avoid writing what you really want to write - or, how that avoidance can itself become a thing of fascination. Following that model I should probably post regularly about how I'm not getting round to starting work on that substantive topic. But I don't want to make a promise that I don't think I could keep.