Will Buckingham's Blog, page 19

Photo Gallery from Sofia Launch

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Photographs from the Sofia launch of The Descent of the Lyre in Bulgarian translation, Произходът на лирата on 8th April 2014.

Thanks to all the photographers, and to everybody involved! It was a great evening.

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The Descent of the Lyre (Произходът на лирата): events

 

Events here in Bulgaria from today (8th April) to Saturday (12th April) for the launch of the Bulgarian edition of The Descent of the Lyre, ”Произходът на лирата“

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A Tale of Two Edwards

The trouble with minor royals is that they are so hard to tell apart. I never quite know which one is Anne or Margaret, which one is Edward or Andrew, and which one is Elizabeth or Philip. They all seem to blur into one. So when somebody says “prince so-and-so” to me, I always have to stop and think for a moment to work out which one they are talking about. Anyway, this problem has presented itself to me again here in Bulgaria when I heard the news this afternoon that Prince Edward was in town.

Now, it might be argued that (ignorant fools such as myself apart) everybody knows who Prince Edward is. He’s the Prince, the not particularly successful media mogul Prince, the Master of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners Prince (I admit I cheated and looked the last one up)…

Or is he? Because after hearing about this unexpected Royal visit — which is connected with the centenary commemorations of the start of World War One — I went online to find out more. And it seemed that the Bulgarian media were not entirely clear who it is that they were getting. So on the one hand Novinite, the Sofia News Agency, reported that the Earl of Wessex (the aforementioned gardening and game-show Prince) was in town to meet President Plevneliev and to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; but meanwhile, the Sofia Globe were reporting that a wholly other Prince Edward had flown into Bulgaria. This other Edward was not the Earl of Wessex, but was instead the Duke of Kent, and he too had apparently been laying wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and meeting President Plevneliev.

At this point, I got a little confused. I don’t know my Edwards very well, so I had to look up the Duke of Kent to find out more about him and to make sure that he wasn’t also Earl of Wessex. It turns out that he is not. He is not, that is to say, Master of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners, or to my knowledge in any way associated with It’s a Royal Knockout. Instead he is First Grand Principal of the Supreme Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons of England, whatever that is supposed to mean, and he is also President of the Scout Association — which at least goes some way to proving my long-held thesis that the Scout Association is more or less an organisation designed for mini-Freemasons or for Freemasons-in-training.

Just in case I had my facts muddled, I decided to turn to photographic evidence, to make sure that I knew where I stood. Here are the two photographs that I found on Wikipedia.

 

 

Now, Wikipedia cannot always be trusted; but if I am not mistaken, these are not the same person. This is something of a revelation to me, as I had assumed that there was only one Prince Edward (the first of these), and now I find out that there are two.

Of course, it probably doesn’t matter too much: at the end of the day one prince is probably good as another. And nobody should be expected to keep track of all these princes running around and doing princely things in their funny headgear, and with their funny handshakes. Certainly nobody in Bulgaria should be expected to tell one British Prince Edward from another (how many people in Britain can distinguish the members of the Bulgarian royal family? I rest my case…). But for the sake of clarity, if anybody spots either of these dubious individuals wandering the streets of Sofia, it would be good to know which one is here, laying wreaths and shaking the hands of presidents.

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Back in Sofia, Seven Years On

It’s been a quiet morning here in Sofia. The coffee pot is bubbling away on the little electric stove-top, outside there are sparrows cheeping busily, and I’ve got the entire guest-house to myself. The last time I stayed here was in 2007. Back then, the guest-house was busy: there was an alarmingly fierce six-and-a-half foot actor who strode around in his underpants, and who was apparently playing the part of a mafia hoodlum in a TV drama; there was my Russian guitarist friend (and lover of P.G. Wodehouse) Dmitri — who I last spoke to online a few weeks ago, who has more recently taken up the harp, and who played me O’Carolan tunes via Skype all the way from Nizhny Novgrod; and there was a serious German sociologist who spoke excellent Bulgarian, and who was carrying out research on corruption amongst the political classes. It was a heady mix. But now it is low season here in Sofia and the guest house has only recently reopened after a few months closed for business over the winter — so at the moment I’m the only person here.

Although I admit that I’m somewhat nostalgic for the varied company that there was back then in the summer of 2007,  at the same time it’s nice to have what is effectively my own private apartment here close to the centre of Sofia, all of which is giving me a chance to sit and brew coffee and do a bit of writing and thinking, and get ready for the next week or so of events.

This morning I took a walk into Sofia, stopping off for banitsa and coffee in the Central Sofia Market Hall, and then heading into town to see if I could get my bearings after so long away. Some Bulgarian friends have told me that things have changed around here, that I would not recognise the city since my last visit, and that Sofia is not what it was; but it seems reassuringly not that dissimilar from how I remember it. And to my delight, as I was wandering past the bookstores down on Graf Ignatiev (there seems to be a flourishing of bookstores in Sofia at the moment, as this article on Radio Bulgaria’s website points out), I was pleased to come across the first sighting of my novel in the window of a bookstore, which reassures me that the book does in fact exist.

Seven years ago, when I left Bulgaria with the first draft of The Descent of the Lyre in my hands, I did so with two aspirations. The first was to get the book published in English, which eventually — after a lot of redrafting — happened in 2012. The second aspiration I kept closer to my chest: it was to one day see a Bulgarian edition. This, I thought, would be the true test of my success when it came to striking the right notes in my attempt — reckless foreigner that I am — to spin and respin myths and histories from Bulgaria. It is largely thanks to the efforts of my friend Annie Pecheva (see Annie’s blog here, it is in Bulgarian, but Google translate has a good stab at it), and the enthusiasm of the wonderful and dynamic publishing house, Enthusiast, that this has all eventually happened. And so it was a strangely moving experience to see that book sitting there in the shop window.

This afternoon, I’m taking it easy and meeting up with an old friend. Tomorrow is also more or less free. Then on Tuesday, things really start in earnest, with a busy round of press, radio and TV interviews, and the launch event in the evening at Greenwich Book Center, on Bulevard Vitosha (a free event — see the Facebook event page here). After that, I’m heading east to Varna, where I’ve got a packed schedule of readings, events and workshops thanks to the wonderful Lecti Centre. And so whilst I feel a little nostalgic for the mayhem of 2007, it is probably good to have a bit of time to gather my strength for the coming week or two…

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“Introducing Happiness” In the Irish Times

My breezy little book about philosophical approaches to happiness — Introducing Happiness: A Practical Guide — has been out from Icon Books for at least couple of years now, so it is nice to see it being picked up in an article on positive psychology in today’s Irish Times. Here’s the extract:

Similarly, Will Buckingham, author of Introducing Happiness: Big Ideas for Real Life, suggests that national scales of wellbeing can be hijacked by politicians who want a happy electorate without providing the social and economic infrastructure for their citizens. Just consider how Irish people often score highly on happiness scales – even during the recession. Perhaps the questions the positive psychology researchers are asking need to be broadened out to include justice and equality as well as subjective wellbeing.

This isn’t quite my argument: my argument is closer to that of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die, which argues that — at worst — governmental happiness agendas risk making unhappiness a personal moral failing, which absolves governments from a concern with questions of social justice and equality. In other words, we don’t need to fix the problems with massive inequality: you just need to do a bit of meditation or listen to some soothing music. And if you are not happy after that, well you are not trying hard enough. Businesses do this as well, of course (Ehrenreich is good on this), and so do universities: stressed at work? Well, what can you do to improve your well-being? It is not that this is necessarily a poor question. It is that when it becomes the only or the predominant question, then something fishy is going on.

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The sound of the world running its course

A quick post this, as I’m fairly busy tying up loose ends and getting ready to head over to Bulgaria. But I thought that I should just pause to share a  beautiful image tweeted today by Enthusiast, my Bulgarian publisher, with the translation of the final sentence of The Descent of the Lyre.

I love those birds on the power-line.

 

“Some say it is Saint Ivan of Gela, playing his music to all the angels of heaven; others that it is simply the sound of the world running its course.”

Bulgarian visitors can get hold of a copy of the book from Enthusiast’s website by following the link here.

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Launching ‘The Descent of the Lyre’ in Bulgaria

It was almost seven years ago that I was last in Bulgaria for two months of research towards my novel, The Descent of the Lyre. Back then, I spent two months travelling around the mountains with my guitar, funded by a grant from Arts Council England, drinking brandy with pensioners, visiting small provincial museums and hillside churches, collecting stories. And now, seven years on, I’m heading back for the launch of the Bulgarian edition of the book.

Here’s the rather handsome cover of the book in Bulgarian, published by the excellent Enthusiast.

Произходът на лирата

 

It is going to be good to be back, and wonderful to be launching Enthusiast’s handsome edition at two events. I’m in Sofia on the 8th April for a book launch at the Greenwich Book Center, and in Varna on the 12th April for a launch at the Ciela Bookstore. In between, I’m also doing a few other events here and there, including a workshop (12th April) and a reading (10th April) for the Lecti Center in Varna (find out more about all these events on their website), who have been amazingly and wonderfully supportive.

I am not, of course, Bulgarian; and although I spoke some rough-and-ready Bulgarian back in 2007, I fear that most of this has been lost under the encroaching tide of my feverish Mandarin-learning over the past few years. And being an outsider with an only rudimentary grasp of the language, it is always perilous to write about other people’s histories. So when I first set out to write this book, I had two ambitions: firstly I wanted to write a book that would do quietly well back at home in the UK; and secondly I wanted to write a book that, whatever its shortcomings, would also be authentic and well-researched enough to manage to work in translation into Bulgarian. On both counts, I am very happy with how things have turned out. And I feel honoured and somewhat humbled that this most hospitable of nations has found a home for a Bulgarian language edition of the book.

I’ll be blogging from Bulgaria about my travels and my somewhat hectic schedule over there — I head out on the 5th April and will be back home on the 18th — so do keep checking back for updates on this blog.

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Creative Writing, Talent and Hanif Kureishi

Recently Hanif Kureishi has been whipping up several storms in several teacups over the (not very interesting) question of whether it is possible to teach creative writing. I remain baffled as to why creative writing is seen as the one single subject that is considered to be inherently unteachable, but there you go… Anyway, I’ve got a short piece this week in the Times Higher Education on this whole debate, and on my scepticism about the notion of “talent”. The link is here. You may need to sign up (for free) to read the piece, or you can have a look in this week’s edition of the THE.

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Happy Belated World Book Day

Yesterday was World Book Day, and somewhere in the misty north of England, there were Snorgh-related activities afoot at Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books (see the gallery of the Snorgh’s world travels here). But meanwhile I was back down in the Midlands working through a rather long to-do list. However, because I felt it necessary to celebrate World Book Day by idling with some book or other, this morning I belatedly took an hour or so to start reading Daniel Pennac’s truly lovely The Rights of the Reader.

The Rights of the Reader is one of those books that is so utterly persuasive and charming that I can’t be bothered to think about whether I agree with everything Pennac is saying or not. And that’s just as it should be, because Pennac’s whole thing is about the sheer pleasure of reading: it is about reading not as weight, obligation and heaviness, but as flight, lightness and freedom. So I am just revelling in the wit, intelligence and charm of what is the perfect book for World Book Day. If you haven’t read it yet, it is a pleasure not to be missed. So here — to whet your appetite — is a nice little overview of Pennac’s ten rights of the reader, provided by Walker Books.

The Rights of the Reader

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An Apparition on the Tyne

I’ve just arrived back down from a fabulous few days in the North East up at Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books, where I was taking part in Snorgh and the Sailor events for World Book Day; and I thought I’d share this image, tweeted by Seven Stories this morning, of a Snorgh at large by the banks of the Tyne river (they called it a “snelfie”…)

Snorgh on the Tyne

 

 

 

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