Oh, migod. Do we ever need a new post here or what. Is that really the date? The 26th?? Feck. How did I ever not post anything all this time. We need a hit and quick.
So on this, the day when the Director of the Poetry Society was apparently barred entrance to the building and not even allowed to collect her personal effects before being summarily dismissed by the Board – and that is all I know, because the staff are not allowed to say anything on pain of the Sack, by which I mean a Butt of Malmsey, & I mean the drowning in it not the drinking it kind – on this day, I plan to talk to you about the ACE cuts. The Arts Council is somehow involved in this PoSoc thing, but I wot not how, but more to the point I read this excellent article the other day…
There is a new magazine, a very serious one called The White Review (see its About section). It has an associated website, and on that website is to be found an excellent article – or, more accurately, a series of thoughts or even, given The White Review’s About section, pensées – by Charles Boyle, on the recent cuts to funding in literature by the Arts Council. It’s a beautiful piece, and winds up as a kind of – well, read it and see where it gets to.
Here is the crux of it, the statement among all its quotable statement that brings me up shortest:
‘Literature’: a slippery thing, but you know, you really do, from a few sentences, a few lines: the rub of one word against another word, the turn of a phrase, a sentence coming out of the blue . . . And when the good writing arrives, I want to read it aloud or show it to others, which is the most basic form of publishing.
I love this reminder of what “publishing” means.Don Paterson has a similar thing, where I’ve heard him talk about the life of a poem, and he says it’s “published” as soon as you’ve shown it to someone – as in the old phrase about “publishing gossip abroad,” for example. But I also love the reminder of what we’re all doing, exactly. Perhaps the simplification of aim in this statement might be taken on board (sic) by some of our publishing and writing and literature promotion institutions?
Mr Boyle is of course an industry insider – having been, as the piece also says, “twice been made redundant by mainstream publishers. Publishing is always precarious” – and is now publisher of the excellent CB Editions. He knows whereof he speaks. And there is plenty of food for thought in this article, if you’ve been puzzling over recent events or the reactions to them.
I suppose the other item to mention in our current context – by which I mean the end of the world – is the purchase of Waterstone’s, the only remaining high street book chain in the country, for over its actual value, by a Russian billionaire – and the surprise appointment, to run it, of James Daunt. Yes! It’s saved! (For now. We must wait, as with a transplanted poorly plant, to see how much of it withers or what has to be chopped off…)
Londoners will recognise the name of this new Director as being that of Daunt Books – an excellent little chain of six or so upmarket bookshops, which embody the same sort of spirit that Waterstone’s did when it was brand new. I remember when there was only one Waterstone’s shop, in South Kensington. Just like Daunt does now, it had lovely wooden shelves, great books enticingly displayed, knowledgeable staff, a personal feel to it, lots of serendipitous things to look at, and these lovely red carpets… I was a dirt-poor student, and then not-student, and I used to go in there and look at the books and sit and read. I must have bought books there more than once, but I remember being given a £10 book token for Christmas – by my then-boyfriend’s parents, I think – which was a fortune back in those days. I took it like Charlie Bucket almost to the shop, and bought two books. One was for my boyfriend, and the other was Kevin Crossley-Holland’s book of Norse myths, which I still have.
James Daunt is quite possibly the best person in Britain to envision – to embody that vision – of Waterstone’s as occupying a place again which is all about the books – and the customer for those books, not customer-as-cash-cow. Of books as a treasure, and a bookshop as being a place – well, as being that wonderful place. Where you discover worlds. How can you really describe a good bookshop?
One hopes there will be fewer mugs, puzzles, bookmarks, novelty items, and little plastic chotchkies by the tills, far fewer celebrity biographies, and nothing outside the baby section stuffed with foam beans.
It’s great news. I actually smiled when I read it – and possibly even laughed out loud.
If you’re spoiling for a fight, you might like this ridiculous article in the Spectator. (I know…) Or if not you might like this good one in the Guardian, where Sam Jordison explains so beautifully why the news is so wonderful (“you can get a pretty good impression of the differences in the two operations by comparing their websites. Here’s Waterstone’s. And here’s Daunt Books“).
I suppose, meanwhile, wearily, that there will be more news of the poor old PoSoc before too long, but that we will have to wait for the extraordinary meeting people are campaigning for, now, before any headway is made. It’s all a bit depressing, what with infrastructure crumbling around us like the Day of Reckoning anyway, and the literature world really needing to support its member organisations. The staff are very sad. None of us needs more sadness right now, the world’s gone mad already. And they’re not even allowed to talk about it to anyone, and there aren’t very many of them, so I imagine they’re feeling a bit isolated, too. (Yes, it all feels a bit exaggerated, whatever it is. As someone said earlier, it’s the Poetry Society, not MI5.) All members should do something – what, I’m not sure, but something. If the extraordinary meeting is not on a Tuesday, I will try to go. And I might now finally read my old copy of Poetry Wars.
(By the way, I’m drinking some ancient sherry I found in the office when we were packing everything up to move down to the other floor, everything in green plastic crates (not butts). Someone left it behind when they left in April… It’s a bit like Malmsey perhaps.)
Read Poetry Wars, Katy, and you’ll see that nothing has changed . . . how depressing.
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Dear Katy
My favourite quotation about publishing comes from Craig Raine’s ‘A la recherche du temps perdu.’ ‘All publishing was corrupt and nasty,/as I should know, I swallowed my pasta.’ As poetry editor at Faber for ten years, he really knows whereof he speaks. I found Don Paterson’s observation more than a bit trite. As someone who has planned his own poetic career like a military campaign, he is the last poet on earth to be satisfied by simply showing his poems to one other person. As for the Poetry Society, all I will say is that unfortunately the British Poetry Establishment has been building up bad karma for decades with its shameless cronyism, nepotism and favouritism.
Best wishes from Simon
‘I love this reminder of what “publishing” means.’
Well, no, it doesn’t. Not really.
Yes it is “making public”, inasmuch as the public can be represented by a circle of the admirer’s friends.
Likewise self-publishing (like what we’re doing now) is making public, in a way. So is saying something to someone.
But publishing in the sense that’s usually discussed is about reaching a much larger public than that, in other words distribution, in other words commercial publishing. Publication of that sort has elements ( e.g. the legitimation implied by someone risking their own money on publishing someone else) that are completely absent from these pleasant vignettes of spontaneous manuscript-passing.
I’m being very boring about it, I know.
Hi Michael! Yes, it isn’t the sense in which we usually talk about it, but it is a useful thing to try and think what we mean when we say “publish” – that is, what publishing was FOR. It’s a longer view than just the business side of it. So many people are so desperate to “get published” – but I’ve heard publishers talk of authors from whom, after their books were “published”, they never heard again. I heard of a book that sold not one copy. Not even to the person’s friends! All they wanted was to “have a book out” – or something. And as you mention, someone had risked their own money on it. So I do think there is value in stripping things back to essentials, especially at a time like this, when as ACE admits there is more funding to “develop writers” than there is to “publish” their work.
Dear Katy
You make the point perfectly. It is the job of poetry editors to pick winners and they hardly ever do. In any other line of work they would be sacked for chronic incompetence. Their pathetic defence is that the British public no longer buys poetry. And whose fault is that? Theirs!
Best wishes from Simon