Review: ‘The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems’, V.R. “Bunny” Lang, ed. Rosa Campbell.

The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems. V.R. “Bunny” Lang. ed. Rosa Campbell. Carcanet Classics, 2024. pp.232. ISBN 978-1-80017-337-8.

If Bunny Lang is mentioned in the same breath as any other poet, it is usually Frank O’Hara. Given that, as editor Rosa Campbell reminds us, Lang and O’Hara worked out together how to be poets, if you approach this book looking for echoes of O’Hara’s “I did this, then I did that, then I did something else” poems you will be bewildered. That isn’t how Lang works. If I can compare her to anyone, then I haven’t been struck so forcefully by poetry since reading Lyn Hejinian. The placement of text, spaces, upper-case letters, and so on in poems like “Pique-Dame” or “I Waited Five Hundred Centuries for the White Crow” makes me think instantly of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry. But whereas Hejinian makes it clear that she loosens her own proprietorship of a poem, thereby relinquishing her authority over meaning into the hands of her readers, Lang serves us with poetry that seems so intensely personal that we feel she would rap our knuckles if we tried any such malarkey with her words. She seems to pose to us the questions “What does poetry do? What is it for?” and as soon as we start to answer she interrupts us and says “No. You’re wrong. Stop and think again.” And then, on the other hand, her poems seem to grow without any such deliberation.

Her poems are difficult. Not long (well, not many of them), not full of obscure words, apparently not deeply philosophical, not high-flown, just difficult. But only difficult inasmuch as where she starts a poem doesn’t necessarily indicate where she’s going with it, nor that stops on the journey and the terminus will be recognisable. That is what holds me, though it sometimes leaves me begging for a connection that isn’t obviously there; it is as though the difficulty doesn’t make any poem inaccessible. Read a poem – wow! – on to the next one, and the next, and worry about meaning some other time, is one way to approach them; no one will penalise you if you want to sit and puzzle, and puzzle and sit, and seek and wonder, though.

Rosa Campbell spent a long time poring through the archive of the documents of Lang’s life in the Houghton Library at Harvard, unearthing the collection in this book. Some of them have been published before, many have not. Campbell writes, of the things she felt she had to leave out, that they are “fragments […] handwritten in pencil on little blue sheets and scribbled in the margins of theatre programmes, typed on the torn-off top of a letter draft or hovering uncertainly  at the bottom of the manuscript of a poem.” Oh how I wish they had been included! Or that they had been given an edited volume of their own – the koan and haiku of Bunny Lang! Or perhaps I will take my own copy of The Miraculous Season over to Harvard, seek out these fragments, and use my pencil to make a palimpsest around and through the printed verses!

These fragments may be part of the chronicling of the creation and interruption of Lang’s poems that Campbell draws to our attention, the “typewriter which jams” and the “voice downstairs” and the “telephone which enters” and every damned porlocking thing that dams the sacred river of Lang’s poetsmithy. But sometimes the metal of a poem is left with only a coat of primer, declared finished by circumstance. We sometimes look at work with the raw materials deliberately left visible, the scaffolding left in place as part of the project.

I’m at my first reading. It won’t be my last. How could it be. I am picking up lines like “Now guests no longer come here to dismay our waiting” (and I remember Michael Flanders’ quip, noting that the Greek word for “stranger” and “guest” are the same, “Hence ‘xenophobia’ – fear or loathing of guests”). “The workaday webs of us admiring spiders.” “[…] folds and faults / Zones and vaults.” 

I learned something, though. There is no end to the week.
Sunday you can call it but it does not mean
That Sunday anything will end. No indeed.

“Stones see back” (Hello Maurice Merleau-Ponty and your principle of reversibility!). The whole of “Things I Have Learned In Canada,” reading like five verses from a cock-eyed apocrypha, proverbs, handy hints and tips, lackadaisical matchbox aphorisms designed to cause more trouble than cure, some bloody brilliant such as “Use your ears and you will be able to speak a variety of languages. Speak them and forget your own.” Yeah, maybe start with Ojibwe? A love poem (?) that ends:

Terror and weakness, Marvellous James
With nothing on his face but purpose
And sometimes, ownership.
January, Betelgeuse – 
Brazil, tundra, stars,
I love you very much,
I recognise my loss
I love you very much,
I love you very much.

A suicide note containing a horrible curse – “I wish you no petty dismays.” A surprise party where the bridegroom doesn’t recognise the guests. A whole poem:

At last the Indians have their summer.
While the rest of us were at the beach
They were waiting.

A letter from a Grandma that begins with “And.” If you have “passed unharmed through the miraculous season” you will have reached the end of the book. You may want to start again. I know I want to. 

Let me leave you with a thought about the poem “Two Cats Have Killed A Bird.” It is clearly inscribed “For Frank O’Hara” and is as near a love-song one to the other as we’re likely to get, even though as a love-song it is the sort that you need to be dreaming to recognise for one. Of Lang’s juxtaposition with O’Hara, Campbell says, “This is often the fate of women who happen to be connected to famous male artists and writers, regardless of their own professions or talents; relegated to the status of auxiliary, passive inspiration, they freeze into silence.” That alone would be sufficient for this book to be both valid and valuable. The fact that Lang is capable of elbowing any (male) member of the New York School aside to wince and count his ribs, adds to the validity and value a poetic power.

The Miraculous Season was a labour of love on the part of Rosa Campbell, is evidence of her academic tenacity and, in showcasing V.R. “Bunny” Lang, showcases one hell of a 20c poet.

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Review: ‘Poyums’, by Len Pennie

Poyums, Len Pennie. Canongate, 2024, hardback, 116pp. ISBN 978-1-80530-138-7. 

Len Pennie is a young Scottish poet writing in English and Scots, a journalist, and an active advocate of the Scots language. She is well-known on social media, as a result of which she has had to put up with a lot of pestering that goes beyond banter. Small wonder that her poems can be sharp, aimed, and delivered on target. The simple design by Valeri Rangelov on the front cover of the book could strike you as a stylised tulip, but in fact it’s a flaming match, and that says something about how Len Pennie works as a poet – she uses the seductive devices of meter and rhyme, she uses her gentle wit, until suddenly ye ken fine ye’ve been telt! “You are not poetry,” she says, “you’re just a man, neither stanza, verse, couplet nor line; I did not write you, get the fuck off my page, there is nothing about you that is mine.”

It isn’t often that I make a point of pre-ordering a book of poetry – or any book, for that matter. I made an exception for Len Pennie’s Poyums. 

Does meter and rhyme work for her? It’s an old dodge, it has been done to death, but it works for John Cooper Clarke, it works for Linton Kwesi Johnson, it works in rap. When the ancient Greeks invented iambic pentameter, they did so because a line could be easily remembered and delivered in a single breath. That’s the strength. However, to someone reading, say, Richard Siken or Oisín Breen it’s outmoded, and that’s the weakness. Sometimes Len Pennie has to tinker to make it work. A line like “but when soap’s been rinsed off and I’m all nice and dried” scans perfectly, but makes the reader feel like maybe the syntax lacks a definite article somewhere; it certainly made me read it over twice. This is why – bear with me – I love to hear Len read her poetry aloud more than reading it for myself. I’m too bloody critical, which comes of studying literature. I sit there counting metric beans, waiting for a poet to hirple. But then along she comes and bowls a googly with enjambement, rhyming “ways he” with “crazy,” and that’s no mis-step but rather a wee skip and a dance, and I have to smile.

Lemn Sissay is quoted on the front cover as calling Len “a poet who redefines what poetry is and who it is for.” Is that a fair comment? Well, poetry can say things that, somehow, prose would never allow to be said; it can say things that would simply sound snide or like invective; it can be polemic, but because it is also entertaining you can kid yourself it isn’t. Len takes on issues such as spite and violence toward women, issues that I thought society was getting over. But it isn’t. I’m seventy-three and I have never known a time in my life when there has been such racism, sexism, and gender-hatred. So no matter how entertaining her poetry is, it is not here for entertainment. It is polemic. 

I’m going to leave you with my favourite verse. It’s not from her most hard-hitting poem, but on the second and third reading of it you do feel the jester’s bladder bash you round the back of your head. This is perhaps where Lan Pennie’s talent really lies – like a medieval court jester she is allowed to speak truth to power without fear of punishment. Her poem ‘The Library’ starts by inverting: “What if stories told us? What if books read us back?” The final verse goes:

So I sat at my typewriter, writing my wrongs,
And putting each book back where each book belongs.
And as each shelf was filled with the pages I chose,
Like the sunset in exile, my library rose,
And with each tome handcrafted, from paper to spine,
My library’s open, and the stories are mine.
I own my own narrative, rewrite the start,
Delved inside the ashes and salvaged my heart,
And though far from idyllic, I do not intend
To abandon my book till I’ve written the end.

Poyums is a book not to abandon until you have read it to the end, and maybe picked it up again from time to time.

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Oisín Breen: ‘Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín and other poems’ reviewed.

I have recently received two books of poetry, and in both cases I know the poets personally. So as I review their work, you can judge for yourselves whether I’m biased towards being kind for the sake of friendship. The first book before me is by Oisín Breen, an Irish poet currently living in Scotland. Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín and other poems is published by Beir Bua Press, Co. Tipperary, Ireland. It is slim and (irritatingly) the pages aren’t numbered. I have no idea whatsoever why that irritates me, but I have to acknowledge that what it does is stop me from integrating the page number into what I am reading. We read everything. We experience everything, and every moment has its resonances and repercussions, so perhaps I can well do without page numbers. Let’s move on. 

So, our Ossían comes out of his cell and looks at the waterfall – maybe a trout is leaping up the damn thing but maybe not – and the wee cataract brings forth a flood of words from him. And they are as Irish as anyone writing in English can pour. In fact, it strikes me that what I’m reading here is the work of the best Irish poet currently writing in English. Not that there is no whiff of parody about this, or at least of the absurd, for here is someone who is as aware of Joyce and Brian O’Nolan (I can hear him damning me now for even mentioning them, and reinforcing a stereotype of the black and sinister arts of an Irish writer in foreign parts!) as he is of Yeats. T.S. Eliot is, however, also banging on the door, at the head of a dozen other wights of sundry heritages, begging to be let in. Och, no more of this nonsense! 

I say “no more of this nonsense” and then the poet chips back at me, “the beast is holy, the haar is holy, and holy too is the red honey,” and Allen Ginsberg yells over the top of us both “The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!” until we beg him to stop. Please. There is only so much intertextuality a mortal can take.

But it’s serious, deadly serious. Written with care, and with love for language.

At first sight, there seems to be something infernally unruly about Oisín Breen’s poetry, until you spot the fact that the structure is there, recognisable but bloody oneiric, lulling you into a false sense of security and then ripping itself up and changing. The poet knows what he is doing, committing shapes to the page as well as words – left justify, right justify, hanging indent, italics, upper case – and then abandoning them like half-finished blocks of flats, malls, and offices, maybe half-recalling them later as though at a second try. This breaks your expectations, but instead of putting you off, it makes you continue to read, hoping for a structural resolution. Will there be one? 

What is structure without words? Oh, and what words! “All poetry,” he says, “is songliness. AND IT IS SHATTERING-”  The opening of ‘The Love Song of Anna Rua’ hits me like a waulking song, with its patterned “Ha-ra-hao-  Rah-Hao-  Ha-Ra-Hao-” No, I have no idea why the upper/lower case. Just accept the mystery. And if you don’t have the Irish…

Na caillini, dubh. Na buachualli, dubh. 
An grá; dubh, mar nil faic na fride againn.

… the operative word is black. And then…

Yet, though our beauty, like the hourglass,
  has long since been crushed, it remains,
  and it IS animating,
And it IS the agent of disruption.
It is in the stirrings of the cracking of eggs.

And then the last words of the book, tailing the final poem, a one-pager (Oh Lord, F. Scott Fitzgerald is tugging at my sleeve, ffs!):

And their black wings beat against the lolling current,
Along the white lines that bifurcated the luminescent tunnels
Collapsing in their wake.

That the last word should be “wake.” A trail of water behind the boat, come up from sleep into consciousness, a farewell to the dead. I always approach Oisín Breen’s writing as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, to take part in the creative process myself. Oh, will you have this book!

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L is for Larionov

Mikhail Larionov, ‘Red Rayonism’, 1913.

Rayonism was the first style of abstract (or near-abstract) painting to arise in Russia. It was invented by Mikhail Larionov. Well, actually it was invented by Natalia Goncharova and Larionov, but the letter “G” has already been taken in this series, otherwise I might have given her precedence.

Rayonism follows a simple and dynamic idea, that of interpenetrating rays of light. ‘Red Rayonism’ plays with our senses; it unsettles us with counter-intuitive results. We feel that the penetrative effect should be towards the narrow, needled end of each band of colour, but that point is the point of origin, and the light diffuses outwards from that point. The umber rays appear to be the product of subtractive colour mixing, as when media of different colour combine; we expect additive mixing, as these are rays of light. If an object is suggested at all, if there is anything figurative here as opposed to abstract, then it is here only in what Goncharova and Larionov called its “symbolic surface.” For all the haste in their definition, the feeling the viewer gets is one of painful solidity, or shards, the red rays having the redness of blood from a gash.

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Tentacular magazine currently has a review by myself of the new collection of poetry by Irish poet Oisín Breen. Go see.

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A quick visit to StAnza

Firstly, a message of thanks to the folk at StAnza for continuing to grant me media accreditation; and secondly, an apology for the tardiness of this article. Instead of writing individual reviews, on this occasion I’m going to post a kind of general summary, mentioning the events and readings I went to.

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It has been two years since I last came to StAnza, and in between times I have parted company with the review site for which I used to write, migrating my reviews here. Even my visit this year, cut short by my having to spend three days away at a conference for International Women’s Day, felt nothing like the immersion that StAnza offers, nor the response that this offer deserves.

Up to now, my experience/attendance at the festival has been governed by the amount of reviews I thought I could complete quickly enough to get them onto the web site while the festival was still running. This year I have a base in the School of English at the University of St Andrews, so you’d think I had less of an excuse for sticking to a meagre platter. Oh well…

As I lounged on my guest house bed, just over the River Taff from the Principality Stadium, I was able to keep up with the StAnza Twitterstorm – something was always going on, poets and events were being tagged, tweets were being retweeted. I thought back to the two or three times I had stood in queues outside the Byre Studio or Parliament Hall and heard people saying “We’ve just been to see such-and-such, and after this reading we’re off to see so-and-so…” It’s a marathon, a marathon at a gentle pace, as most of the festival-goers are retired. There’s nothing surprising in that, as the first four days of StAnza are weekdays, and anyone younger is probably working.

I do see some younger folk around – I spot a student or two from the university in an audience – and I feel young myself, as a student, although that’s a wee bit of a conceit.

The ‘Coastlines’ poets.

I have a question: why is it that I saw so many tweets saying that StAnza “opened” on Thursday 5^th? There were two events on Tuesday 3^rd, and six on Wednesday 4^th, and they were right there in the festival brochure. Certainly when I attended ‘Coastlines’ I was not in any doubt that this was a festival event, not a pre-festival event. The brochure advertised poetry from Anna Crowe, nature writer Jim Crumley, and Valerie Gilles, but there was much more to the event. In addition to the advertised poets, there was a presentation by PAMIS (Promoting A More Inclusive Society), giving an opportunity to wheelchair users Rachel Frame and Arianne Holmes to provide multi-media additions to the words of Maureen Phillip; after that we were treated to readings of poems about Tentsmuir – the coastline between the Tay and the Eden in Fife – from the competitors, runners up, and winner of the Scottish National Heritage / National Nature Reserves competition.

Valerie Gilles

If I had to pick one of the headline poets from this event, with all due respect to Anna Crowe and Jim Crumley, it would have to be Valerie Gillies, whose poems took us on a journey from the source of the River Tay in a corrie on Ben Lui, to “Sheughie Dykes” as Tentsmuir was once known. “Sheugh… sheugh… sheughie dykes…” we joined in, and then “seugh… seugh.. seugh…” followed by a soft intake of breath to represent the sound of waves on the sand.

Perhaps the idea that StAnza “opened” on the 5^th had something to do with the fact that there was a “sneak peek of some of the highlights” of the festival on the evening of the 4^th, under the title ‘Festival Launch Extravaganza’, my emphasis. But then the very next item on the 4^th refers to “Opening Night.” Make your minds up! If you wanted to see younger faces and hear younger voices, by the way, then the place to be was the Inklight open mic, once again in the no-man’s-land of Wednesday evening. I was in that myself, having recently started to write poems (like I said, I feel young!). I can tell you this: it was a thrill.

Let’s grant, anyway, that by the time I went to the first ‘Border Crossings’ event on Thursday, the festival had started. I’m a fan of the ‘Border Crossings’ event, and I hope they continue to be an integral part of StAnza. The eight events under this banner during the festival juxtapose two poets per event, each of whom has poetry that either crosses borders, or springs from the poet’s experience of having crossed borders. Sometimes they find things in common – for Yorkshireman Tim Turnbull and Bangladeshi Shehzar Doja it was cricket, and even I joined in the ensuing twanter (banter on Twitter). Let me do a thumbnail summary of each of the four poets I managed to catch…

Shehzar Doja, Tim Turnbull, Johan Sandberg McGuinne, Gerry Cambridge.

Shehzar Doja: rich, rich, rich language coupled with a deliberate delivery. Often he seemed to be musing, capturing words out of the air, rather than reciting already-composed pieces.

Tim Turnbull: dry, laconic humour, coupled with the ability to use rhythm and rhyme when necessary. The simplicity of those devices never fell into doggerel, and when he cocked one side of his mouth up to mimic the louche lingo of Heckle and Jeckle, he almost sounded like – dare I say this? – a contemporary of mine, a poet from the other side of the Pennines (*ducks).

Johan Sandberg McGuinne: a large and colourful presence. Multilingual, Gaelic, Southern Sami, English, resonances between the Sami joik and puirt à beul. Each language struck its own rhythmic pattern.

Gerry Cambridge: probably enough to say that he founded Dark Horse! The fact that his latest collection was taken up by HappenStance Press says more.

I missed such a lot – not only poetry events but all the peripheral performances, exhibitions, and displays. Next year, with my feet even more comfortably under the table at the School of English, I may miss less and may be able to do more justice to the featured poets.

The Lonely Londoners drop in on Edinburgh

Patrice Lawrence: Workshop
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
Writers’ Retreat, Charlotte Sq. Gardens
Edinburgh International Book Festival
1pm. 23^rdAugust 2019.

This will only be a short report, not a long review, because workshops at Edinburgh Book Festival are unlike chaired events or performances in the larger theatres. They have more in common with informal seminars, and this one was a matter of a couple of dozen of us sitting in a circle, listening to a writer enthusing about one of her favourite books. Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, for Patrice Lawrence, was instrumental in helping her discover the Trinidadian side of her own heritage, and she described her delight in first reading it. A second reading revealed the sadness in it, and also a strong current of sexism displayed by the characters – after all, it is often young men who form the first wave of any migrant movement, and finding their feet sexually is as much a part of their experience as is learning their way around, absorbing culture, or getting used to the weather.

Entering the Writers’ Retreat to the sound of Lord Kitchener’s London Calypso, we, the attendees, had various levels of familiarity with The Lonely Londoners. I had studied it both as an undergraduate and a postgraduate, and in fact I have posted about it before; others had yet to read it. Patrice did manage to coax us to participate a little, but frankly we could have cheerfully floated along on her enthusiasm. The book itself, written in 1956, I can thoroughly recommend. It has an opening that is, or certainly ought to be, as famous as that of A Tale of Two Cities, 1984, Pride and Pejudice, or Catcher in the Rye, evocative of an almost Dickensian London. Episodic, though with a common theme, it is arguably a piece of Modernist literature, with its shift of focus and point-of-view (though it is mainly in free indirect style, focalised on the character Moses), its lack of plot resolution, and a wonderful ten-page passage of stream of consciousness. It is full of flawed characters, chancers, overgrown boys out for a good time or simply trying to survive, and one uncompromising woman determined to treat London as if it were Jamaica and to travel in the city as though on a proud Odyssey, but we care about them all – Patrice reminded us of that fact. Above all it has a wonderful sense of time and place.

It was a great pleasure to meet Patrice, and I hope to do so again. As for the workshop experience at the Book Festival, do it if you get the chance.

No info available about this publicity shot of Patrice Lawrence. It was retrieved from an Edinburgh Festival web page.

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A Traveller Named Sue

Sue Perkins: Blundering through Asia
New York Times Main Theatre
Edinburgh International Book Festival
1.30pm. 22^ndAugust, 2019

reviewed by Paul Thompson

After this event, I exchanged a few words with Jackie McGlone, who had chaired it. We confessed we’d both fallen a bit in love with Sue Perkins; this wasn’t going to be of any use to the three of us, because Jackie’s straight, Sue’s gay, and I’m male. Last I checked. Jackie told me that this follow-up to her first event that Sue had agreed to do at short notice, about her book East of Croydon – I hope no one needs me to explain the references in that title – had turned out to be totally different from the first one. This was due, of course, to Sue’s instantaneous wit, her never being lost for words or for ideas to express in those words. In fact, she had us laughing today without saying a word, just on the basis of a few facial expressions.

Sue Perkins is, of course, a very familiar figure in comedy and broadcasting. The more I listened to her and watched her today, the more I began to see – or rather suspect – that her public face was not all there was to her. I could see an occasional hint that there was a side to her that would only be revealed at home, with her boots off, to a partner. Then she would take a vacation from the Sue Perkins we all see, and with whom Jackie and I had just fallen in love, from her public persona. There is probably a space where she can be flat, or irritable, or just ordinary. That is not to say that her public persona is a false one, it can’t be, it’s essential, it’s Sue Perkins and that’s that. No one can do what she does without it coming from something dominant in their character.

On that basis, she had the audience in a sell-out NYT Theatre in the palm of her hand. We laughed, we were moved, and sometimes, due to her description of her experiences in Southeast Asia – notably the one about pig’s offal flying everywhere – we were close to upchucking. As Sue says, “It’s impossible to downchuck!” The choice of food in Southeast Asia, she told us, was between the unfamiliar dishes that the locals eat, and their attempts at Western cuisine. Her advice was not to be tempted by the apparently familiar; for example, they don’t really do dairy, so a Cambodian milkshake may very well have “a heavy back-taste of haddock.”

Sue’s moments of seriousness moved us. “How pretty poverty looks,” she said, “when you don’t have to live it.” She described a journey to a glacier, a place of pilgrimage high on a mountain, and likened the experience of silence and barrenness to transcendental meditation, to a loss of self, so that the gradual descent involved recognising objects like trees, colours, and the sound of human activity with something like surprise. Speaking of street children, and wanting to avoid the whole “white saviour” thing, she spoke about the only things she could give them having been an afternoon of uproarious playtime, and a few pairs of Converse shoes in sizes far too big for their feet. The humour of her delivery only made it more poignant.

Hilarity came in her description of teaching a few words of English to the women of a remote Cambodian community, without any interpreter to help them out. Sue had succeeding in teaching them how to count from one to ten, when she noticed that they were enthusiastically pointing to their upper torsos. She realised they wanted to know the word for breasts in English, so she taught them “Boobs.”

“Booooooooobs!” they all repeated in wonder and delight.

Then they began to point at their crotches, and Sue realised that they wanted another anatomical term in her native language. That was the moment when she went to pieces and ended up teaching them a non-existent word that sounded a bit Welsh. Honestly, Sue, what are you like! So there’s that, there’s therapy, there’s her mother, there’s her father, there’s her attitude to death, and there’s clinging to the back of a donkey at the edge of a thousand-foot drop, there’s a baby crying in the audience – “Ah, the sound of Brexit!” – and ultimately there’s a queue yea deep and yea long wanting copies of her book signed. That’s what it’s like with a headliner at the EIBF.

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“Is ‘the Left’ now an overwhelmingly middle-class enterprise?”

David Kogan: Which way now for the Left?
Garden Theatre
Edinburgh International Book Festival
2.15pm, 20^thAugust 2019

reviewed by Paul Thompson

That’s the question I wanted to ask David Kogan. I’m a fully-paid-up member of the bourgeoisie and ditto of the Industrial Workers of the World trades union (yes, I have an acute sense of irony), and I wanted to know whether David Kogan thought that the Left today was a middle-class thing. “No,” was his answer, “but the policy-makers around Jeremy Corbyn are!”

I didn’t actually get to put the question to him during the event. I had to interrupt his book-signing to do it, but his answer shows at least two important things. That plenty of hands went up during the Q&A part of his event, so that getting a chance to hold the roaming mic was like entering a lottery. And that David’s focus is on ‘the Left’ in terms of the UK’s Labour Party. That is only to be expected, as he has been observing and reporting on the Labour party for most of his career.

The thrust of this event was to showcase David’s book, Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party, and what he did for the first twenty minutes of the session was give us positively the most cogent summary of an entire book that I have ever heard from anyone at the EIBF. He is precise, he is analytical, and if his book is as good as his presentation, then it’s on my Christmas list. He gave us facts we already knew, facts we didn’t know, and facts we might have forgotten – among the latter was that only on three occasions did a Labour leader become Prime Minister by overturning a Conservative government (the Labour leaders in question being Clement Atlee, Harold Wilson, and Tony Blair). Among the facts we might have forgotten was that the sudden rise to leadership of Jeremy Corbyn was partly due to rule changes brought in by the Blairites to curb trades union influence. Among the facts we didn’t know, but might well have guessed when we stopped and thought about it, was that when he asked Tony Blair about his fall from grace, the one word the former Prime Minister never uttered was “Iraq.”

Jeremy Corbyn’s relative success in the 2017 election, which he nevertheless failed to win*, was followed by two debacles within the party. Firstly (sorry, I’m doing a lot of “firstly – secondly” today) the issue of anti-semitism. David could reveal that this wasn’t just something whipped up by hostile media, but that a minority of members or former members do or did hold some rather unspeakable views, and that the issue has not been properly dealt with, or perhaps dealt with consistently would be a batter way to put it. This subject could have filled an event of its own, and still not come to any proper resolution; it is very, very hard indeed to unravel, say, legitimate criticism of Israeli politics from unwarranted bigotry, particularly when a common vocabulary may serve to obfuscate. Secondly, a lack of clarity and consistency on our future in or out of the EU. There is a distinct reluctance in the House of Commons to back Jeremy Corbyn as an alternative to Boris Johnson, who heads the furthest-right Conservative government for generations, maybe ever; nevertheless, parliamentary convention is that the Leader of the Opposition should get the first chance to form an alternative government, should the sitting Prime Minister fall to a vote of no confidence.

David Kogan signing copies of ‘Protest and Power’ in the Bookshop.

Here are some sound-bites from the session:

“If the Tory party resembles the Borgias, the Labour Party resembles Game Of Thrones.” That was actually from Ruth Wishart, who chaired the event. A Wishart-chaired event is always worth going to!

“Is Labour a party of power or a party of protest?” That’s not a new question. In order to gain power, Tony Blair had to ditch socialism and back neo-liberal economics, as a result of which the UK has had right-of-centre government for about forty years. The question is not really a choice between power and protest, but whether the Labour Party can persuade voters that neo-liberalism has ruined the country and a left-of-centre alternative is a necessary cure. Discuss.

“Influence is not enough – you have to control the organs of the party.” See above.

“All the New Labour princes and princesses were parachuted into seats.” The phrase “New Labour princes and princesses” will stay with me! Thank you, David.

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Footnote:
*I seem to be the only commentator who is prepared to mention the following two linked facts. Firstly that Theresa May was able to form a government not because she came to an accommodation with the DUP, but because Ruth Davidson ran a successful if disingenuous single-issue campaign in Scotland to persuade Scots who were against a second Independence referendum, that voting for the Conservatives in Scotland was the only guarantee of preventing it, and thus she magicked twelve seats out of what had been up until then a desert for the Tories. Without those twelve seats, May would have lost the general election by a Hielan mile. Secondly that the Labour Party’s virtual extinction in Scotland has been partly due to the SNP maintaining centre-left domestic policies. Had it not been for the first of these facts, we might well have spent the last two years governed by a Labour-SNP pact in Westminster. Discuss!

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#JTB100

The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes
The Spiegeltent
Edinburgh International Book Festival
6pm, 17^thAugust 2019

reported by Paul Thompson

One of Daphne du Maurier’s characters in her 1944 play The Years Between, when asked who the great writers of the day were, said, “We shan’t know for fifty years” (62). Who can tell whether J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, George R.R. Martin, or E.L. James will be remembered in half a century’s time? The James Tait Black Prizes have, over the past century, been awarded to writers as diverse as D.H. Lawrence and Cormac McCarthy, to writers whose names are well-known and writers whose names are well-known to people who know the names of writers. It’s impossible to guess whether JTB fiction shortlisters Will Eaves, Jessie Greengrass, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and winner Olivia Laing will be literature’s Mozarts or Salieris in 2069.

I was one of the postgraduate readers for the fiction award in the prizes’ centenary year. To be precise, I was co-opted in to help deal with a backlog, and spent all my time over the midwinter holiday reading, and compiling a report to say which book(s) out of my allocated batch I felt deserved a place on the shortlist. One of the shortlisted books was in that batch. This article is not going to be so much about the event in the Spiegeltent itself – there is, after all, only so much one can usefully write about an award ceremony, when the main question being asked is “Who won?” – as my thoughts about the awarding of prizes, and this prize in particular. I’m not going to deal with the biography prize beyond saying that Lindsey Hilsum’s In Extremis, a biography of Marie Colvin, is a brilliant book which at times makes a third-hand account feel like a first-hand experience. Instead this article is more about the process by which, as far as I can tell, one book made it from my batch to the shortlist.

There is a problem with the awarding of literary prizes. We who are involved in picking the books that make it through the various stages are, in effect, the gatekeepers of what is considered to be literature. As a specialist in popular forms of literature, I made it my business to champion a book that used a conventional structure and style, but used it in a surprising way, and presented a fairly conventional story arc. My point was that the James Tait Black Prizes are literary prizes, not prizes exclusively for ‘literary fiction’. In order to have under serious consideration the broadest range of literature, it is perfectly acceptable to find a book outstanding, that is in some way conventional; it is not necessary to privilege experiment, risk taking, and innovation. Of course none of those three things should be discarded. They are, after all, necessary and vital if literature is to flourish and develop. But they are not the sine qua non. It is equally the case that a book’s being built on an established foundation should not be grounds for discarding either.

Was it the book I championed that made it through to the shortlist? I’m not going to say. What I will say is that when I was listening to Dr. Alex Lawrie talking about the book that had made it through, I realised that she had seen things in it that I had not. Nevertheless there had been conversations amongst some of us postgrad readers as to what precisely our role had been, if not to carry out a sift. Did our recommendations actually carry any weight? Would they consider a new system for 2020? If I hear anything, I’ll let you know.

Olivia Laing; photo by Nick Barley.

Perhaps I should get back to this year’s fiction winner, Crudo by Olivia Laing. It is just that, a winner! If I understand correctly, it was written without revision, each stage in the story being affected by what was going on in the world at the time – the doings of President Trump, for example, or the latest stage in the UK’s journey towards Brexit – and this gave it a kind of immediacy. It has one of these opening passages – we heard it read out today – that make a jump from the expected. Yes, this is the champion of the popular and the conventional praising an unusual opening, but to be frank there is something about the way it is crafted that makes a reader want to punch the air, rather in the way J.D. Sallinger’s first readers must have done when coming across his line about “all that David Copperfield crap.” Here it is:

Kathy, by which I mean I, was getting married. Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane from New York. It was 19:45 on 13 May 2017. She’d been upgraded to business, she was feeling fancy, she bought two bottles of duty-free champagne in orange boxes, that was the kind of person she was going to be from now on. Kathy was met at the airport by the man she was living with, soon to become the man she was going to marry, soon, presumably, to become the man she had married and so on till death. In the car, the man told her he had eaten dinner with the man she, Kathy, was sleeping with, along with a woman they both knew. They had also been drinking champagne, he told her. They laughed a lot. Kathy stopped speaking. This was the point at which her life took an abrupt turn, though in fact the man with whom she was sleeping would not break up with her for another five days, on headed writing paper. He didn’t think two writers should be together. Kathy had written several books – Great Expectations, Blood and Guts in High School, I expect you’ve heard of them. The man with whom she was sleeping had not written any books. Kathy was angry. I mean I. I was angry. And then I got married.
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Clumsy? Yes, it gives that impression, as if maybe “Kathy, by which I mean I” is still tipsy from drinking champagne. There are moments of entanglement when it’s not clear who’s actually sleeping/eating with whom, because of the way clauses appear to be in apposition. Are “orange boxes” boxes that contained oranges or boxes coloured orange? And there is the David Copperfield crap of Great Expectations. What on earth can she mean? But it’s an opening that pulls the reader right into the book to find out about the “abrupt turn” and its consequences.

When Olivia Laing’s name was read out, and she took the microphone, her first words were “I’m blown away… bloody hell!” Amongst her subsequent words was the offer to share the prize money equally with the other three shortlisters. That’s Olivia Laing. That’s a winner.

Despite what I’ve said about the process, I do feel privileged to have been part of the JTB team. It gave me an opportunity, having read some marvelous books, to make a statement about the ethos of literary awards; and of course I got to attend the event, to stand for applause when Sally Magnusson asked us postgrad readers to make ourselves known. In 2020 I shall no longer have a formal connection with the University of Edinburgh, but I am determined to keep following the JTB Prizes with interest.

Winners Lindsey Hilsum and Olivia Laing, with Sally Magnusson (centre) who chaired the event. Image courtesy of the University of Edinburgh / Lesley Martin.

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du Maurier, Daphne. The Years Between. Samuel French Ltd., 1947.

Laing, Olivia.Crudo. Picador, 2019.

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Obesity is a Nazi issue!

Sofie Hagen signing copies of ‘Happy Fat’.

Sofie Hagen: Tackling Figures of Fun
The New York Times Main Theatre
Edinburgh International Book Festival
3.15pm, 17^thAugust 2019

reviewed by Paul Thompson

A few years ago I went to see my GP about some problem I can’t remember now. He did a blood test, and when we discussed the results he told me he was concerned about how my liver was functioning. He asked me to lose two-and-a-half stone within the next two years. I looked down and patted my stomach.

“I thought this was just ‘middle-age spread’,” I said. It hadn’t been something I was too worried about – I didn’t like my waistline, but I didn’t hate it either, I just thought it was something that happened to most people my age.

Then he used a word to shock me. “No, it’s obesity,” he said. I lost that two-and-a-half stone in six months. My liver function is now back to normal*.

If Sofie Hagen had been in the consulting room with me, she would have been livid to hear him use that word. To her it goes beyond a matter of shape-shaming. This insistence on “health”, she declared vehemently, “It’s Nazi – it’s scary!” reminding us that Adolf Hitler insisted that everyone should be healthy, and eliminating those who were not. To her, using the word “obese” is as bad as any instance of racism, homophobia, transphobia**, sexism, or any other position of bigotry. When she states simply that BMI is “not a thing,” she is accusing the medical profession of false science, it’s as simple as that.

In her talk today she spoke about how her publisher had insisted in her leaving out all references to the Nazis in her manuscript, before they would publish the book. Even the title – Happy Fat – is a bit of a compromise. Sofie has a heck of a lot of anger for the way the world reacts to someone’s size and shape, and she told us that the anger comes out in the book. What also came across, as we listened to her, is that she is stitchmakingly funny. From her rapid delivery and her rolling, seamless raconte we could see what makes her such a damn good stand-up act. Her throwaway lines, such as “I can say what I want about thin people because some of my closest friends are thin,” are acute observations, turned on their head, of the kind of things people say. That stand-up delivery meant that whoever was operating the on-screen captions for the benefit of people with hearing difficulties had to put in some fancy footwork to keep up; there was even an occasional dialogue going on between the op and Sofie. At one point, having said she wouldn’t name a former lover, with whom she had had a very romantic sexual interlude but whom she later heard on TV making a derogatory remark about needing to be drunk to have sex with someone fat, she went ahead and named him; however, the op couldn’t spell his name, so…

Sofie’s views are, arguably, extreme. They are certainly uncompromising. I wouldn’t say that they are beyond challenge, because I think some of her statements will be open to challenge‡. But that’s an inevitable consequence of bringing an issue to the fore. To be able to use humour as a debating weapon, and indeed sometimes turning it on herself, is a very valuable talent. Humour allows, encourages us to explore an extreme position, and it is often that blip on the head from a fools bladder that makes us pay attention, where polemic would make us dig our heels in and refuse to listen. This event was entertaining – if you get the opportunity to see Sofie’s stand-up act, take it – but, more importantly, worthwhile.

And I haven’t even mentioned the irony that the event was promoted by The Skinny. Oh… wait…

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*Yes, I know, equating ‘normality’ with health is a cultural conceit that is probably less than two hundred years old and not necessarily the definitive factor we suppose it to be; but that’s another, bigger issue, and I’ll not go into it here.

**It occurs to me to ask, seeing that the thrust of Sofie’s argument is that we should love our bodies, where someone who wants to transition fits in. Again, a larger debate – another time, maybe.

‡If only from my GP!

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My post about the James Tait Black Prize award event will be delayed for reasons beyond my control. Apologies for that.