Will Buckingham's Blog, page 21

In Oldham

Well, I’m back in Leicester after a fantastic two days in Oldham, where I was at the 2013 Brilliant Books award. And the whole thing has been enormous fun. We writers and illustrators were all looked after incredibly well (the legendary Oldham Cheese Pie lived up to the whispered rumours), and it was a pleasure to meet teachers, librarians, schoolchildren and parents and see such enthusiasm for writing and literature, as well as to get to know some of my fellow-writers better.

The Snorgh and the Sailor did not make it on this occasion, although it was wonderful to be shortlisted, and congratulations to Sarah Warburton and Caryl Hart for their winning book in my category, The Princess and the Peas, as well as to the other winners, Adrian Reynolds and Thomas Taylor, Ruth Eastham, Gina Blaxill and Katie Dale: all of them not only superb writers and artists, but also delightful human beings.

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Brilliant Books 2013

A very quick post this, to say that I’m heading to Oldham today for the Brilliant Books 2013 award, and am very proud to say that The Snorgh and the Sailor is on the shortlist. The full list of shortlisted books is here — there are some great books on the list, and it’s good to be in such fine company.

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What do you want to talk about?

It is always interesting to get reviews, even if they are not entirely favourable — or perhaps particularly if they are not entirely favourable — and so I was pleased this morning to see that my book Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling  (the original title, incidentally, was the much nicer Troubled Tales, but Bloomsbury, alas, overruled me!), has had received an interesting, although somewhat ambivalent, review from Jeffrey Di Leo, over on the excellent Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Given the ambivalence of the review, and given that it is both careful and thoughtful, I thought it might be both fun and interesting to respond at length; but time at the moment is not on my side, and so I will have to leave such a response to a later date. Instead, I thought I’d update this blog with a few brief reflections. The first thing that I should say is that, at the age of forty-two, it is nice to be referred to as a “young philosopher.” But having said this, I start to worry that this compliment is perhaps a little double-edged. “Young,” of course, can also be understood as “naïve”. And if this is the suggestion, then I think that Di Leo is on to something, because there is something rather naïve about my project. My PhD dissertation, after all, back in 2007, was called Naïve Phenomenology: Thinking Ethics Through Stories, and I invoked the idea of naïveté back then in the hope that sometimes naïveté can get to places that sophistication cannot. I still think that this is true.

But leaving this on one side, what strikes me above all about Di Leo’s review is this:  he and I do not really want to talk about the same kinds of things. In other words, it seems to me that Di Leo wants to talk about Levinas’s philosophical development, about his place in twentieth century thought, about the relationship between Levinas and Derrida, and about the fine detail of the relationships that exist between Levinas’s various works. He also wants to talk about a number of errors that he has identified in the bibliography. And these, of course, are precisely the kinds of errors that I really should have picked up on (shame on me) and that I can only put down with a sigh to a certain naïve inattentional blindness to scholarly apparatus. All I can say here is that, having had these pointed out, in the unlikely event of a second edition they will be corrected. “Must try harder,” as my school reports used to say. And Di Leo also wants to talk about how this book reads as a kind of Bildungsroman, or philosophical coming-of-age story (which in a way it is, but only insofar as this is just one of the stories at play in the book, and far from the most important). Finally, he wants to talk about how developing some of my ideas in dialogue with contemporary narrative ethicists such as Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell, and Alasdair MacIntyre might be fruitful. It is in relation to this last point that I have the strongest sense that here is something we both would like to talk about, although I’d like to throw into the mix anti-storytellers such as a Galen Strawson as well.

But whilst all of this made for interesting reading, it didn’t really touch on many of the things that I really wanted to talk about in the book. Instead, what I really wanted to talk about were all kinds of questions that didn’t appear in Di Leo’s reading of the book at all. I wanted to talk about the peculiarity of the commitment, shared by Levinas and by many of his commentators, to the notion that existence is inherently tragic. I wanted to talk about how this tragic vision might cramp our approaches to ethics. I wanted to talk about the weirdness of Levinas’s philosophical project in which, early on, he poses the problem of violence, and then much later  responds with the notion of violence that is set against violence as a solution. I wanted to say: no, this violence-against-violence is inadequate as a way of talking about ethics, and we need new approaches that are not to be found in Levinas, or in Derrida, or perhaps in this whole tradition of ethical reflection. I wanted to suggest ways it might be possible to reflect on ethics beyond this turbulent maelstrom. And I wanted to talk about how ethics is a matter not just of argument and counter-argument, but of life and lives (which is why I had the perhaps unfortunate habit of what Levinas himself called breaking through the “screen stretched between the author and the reader” and why the book might read like a simple account of philosophical development), and to suggest how texts about ethics might shape real, actual lives.

At the end of his review, Di Leo says, “this project raises more questions than it answers,” which pleases me immensely, because I always find questions more bracing than answers, although I’m aware that this, for a reader who might want answers, again this is something of a double-edged sword. He goes on to add, “Ultimately, this book is an account of one philosopher’s struggle to make sense of Levinas — and a record of what the author takes to be success.”

Here I find myself wanting to say that if this is what I seem to be talking about, it looks as if I have failed to get my message across. Because insofar as this book is an account of a struggle to make sense of Levinas, it is a only this to the extent that this making sense of Levinas might be a means to a further end. Call me naïve, but I have always seen philosophy as part of the struggle (part, I should stress, and not the whole of the struggle) to make sense of ethics, to make sense of life. And whilst Levinas has helped illuminate a great deal for me, I see him neither as the alpha nor as the omega of ethical reflection. I see Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling more as a marker on the way than as record of success — a marker that may prompt some readers, at least, into intriguing new directions.

As for success or otherwise, well… what can I say? In this struggle to make sense of life, it seems to me that success, at best, is only ever partial.

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Writer’s Toolkit: Writings, Travels and Tools

Tomorrow, I’m down in Birmingham at the Writers’ Toolkit day, taking part in a couple of panels. Firstly, I’ll be talking about writing work overseas, and secondly about digital tools for writers. These are rather large, rag-bag subjects, and as these are panels rather than stirring orations, I will need to keep things rather brief; but I thought that here I might present a few thoughts on both topics — both for the benefit of those who might be interested and not make it to Birmingham, and also so that I can use this blog post as a crib-sheet tomorrow, and thus not have to lug my Macbook down to Brum.

Working Overseas

As a writer, I tend to write about elsewhere. The great literary critic and writer Walter Benjamin one divided storytellers into two tribes: those who wander here and there, gathering tales from far-off places, and those who stay put and till the soil close to home. And whilst Benjamin points out that the storyteller is most fully realised in the conjunction of the distant and the close-to-home; but most storytellers and spinners of tales fall more into one camp than another. And this is certainly true for me: I am a writer in love with the idea of “elsewhere”. My first novel, Cargo Fever, is set in Indonesia; my second novel, The Descent of the Lyre, is set in Bulgaria. And I’m now working on a number of projects related to both Indonesia and China.

So the main thing I’ll be talking about tomorrow is research for writers, and what it means. I’ll be talking about heading out to Indonesia to hang out with sculptors, for the research which eventually led to my novel Cargo Fever, and to another current work in progress.

 

Abraham Amelwatin in Tanimbar

 

Damianus Masele in Tumbur, Tanimbar

 

I’ll also be talking about travelling to the Rhodopi mountains of Bulgaria to make the acquaintance of non-existent saints, to research old traditions of music and folk-belief, and to explore the old sites associated with the myth of Orpheus.

 

Tatul – Bulgaria

 

Shiroka Luka – Bulgaria

 

And, of course, I’ll be talking about China.

 

Child in a Lotus – Jinan

 

Finally, I’ll round things off by talking a bit about what it means to travel for research as a writer, questions of language, questions about funding, and also perhaps a few things about the increasing internationalisation of the writing and publishing world and how this kind of kind of research work overseas can lead to all kinds of other fun opportunities opening up.

OK, that’s enough for working overseas. In the section on tools, I’m simply going to open up for pubic scrutiny the various bits of my toolkit as a writer.

 

The Tools I Use

I love good tools. They fill me with joy. And there are some particularly wonderful tools out there that have made my life as a writer immeasurably easier. I’m going to mention a few in this session, under the following headings: i) Research; ii) Hammering out ideas; iii) Writing; iv) Keeping Track; and v) Keeping Sane.

 

i) Research

Writers are often parasitic upon the labour of scholars, and I am particularly obsessive about reading scholarly stuff as a way of preparing for writing projects. In particular — being lucky enough to have access to university libraries — I make use of PDF articles. One of the tools I love to keep track of these is Bookends. It is more or less an extremely powerful bibliographic database, but also one that keeps your PDFs in order and searchable. It’s not the prettiest beast, but it is fantastically functional.

 

Bookends for Mac

 

Also in the not-pretty-but-wonderfully-functional category is DevonThink, which I use to throw all of my bits and pieces of research into, so that I can cross-reference, search through it, make notes and so on and so forth. I save clippings and snippets from the web, even scan documents into it, which I can then search. Here’s a picture.

 

DevonThink for Mac

 

ii) Hammering Out Ideas

Here we enter the realms of the beauty of pure, unadulterated simplicity. Scapple is my new favourite tool. It is a kind of free-form mind-map that doesn’t force you into thinking in trees and hierarchies. It is a mind-map, in other words, for the anarchic mind, a visual, spatial note-taker. And I’m in love with it. Here’s Scapple in action with one of my current projects.

 

Scapple on the Mac

 

iii) Writing

Of course, there’s also writing. And writers use Word, right? Well, wrong. Some writers do, and good luck to them. But Word is horrible in the way it fails to reflect the way that the writing process works. So my heart lies with Scrivener, from the same people as those who make Scapple, and about the most wonderful writing environment I know. Here’s a screenshot.

 

Scrivener on the Mac

 

Scrivener is wonderful for too many reasons to note: because of its flexibility; because of the way it is designed to work with you as a writer, not against you; because it is easy to move stuff from here to there; because the full-screen, distraction-free editing is glorious; and because it is very, very stable.

 

iv) Keeping Track

Once my writing is done, however, there’s the question of what to do with it. And if you send a lot of stuff out, then it is hard to keep track of what has gone where. Who have you submitted to before? Who has rejected your work before? Who has asked you to send more? For this, I use Bento — now discontinued by Apple, a bit clunky and unloved, but good at its job. Here’s a picture.

 

Clunky but still useful: Bento

 

v) Keeping Sane

Finally, I should give a shout-out to Self-Control, the app that can lock down Facebook, Twitter, even the whole internet, so that you can get work done. There are some other similar tools out there as well, like the wonderfully-named Anti-Social, which works on PCs as well as Macs. Honestly, I don’t know how I’d get anything done without these.

 

Self-Control, for those who don’t have any!

 

Conclusion

So, this is a rough overview of what I’m talking about in my two very different panels tomorrow. I’m looking forward to the day, and to being back in Birmingham catching up with old friends. If you are there, come and say hello!

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Tanimbar Medicine in Unmapped Magazine

I’m absolutely delighted to say that my essay on Tanimbarese medicine has been published in the wonderful Unmapped magazine. The essay is about witchcraft, possession, strange octopi that lurk in the stomachs of their victims and crazed Indonesian nuns with syringes. Unmapped is available by subscription, for £2 a month — and it’s a wonderful publication, so do think about signing up.

Here’s an extract:

It is a terrible thing to be a witch in the Tanimbar islands. The soul of a witch is light, unanchored. A witch has no ballast, which is why witches can fly from place to place, shuttling to the distant island of Ambon on their night flights to buy bottles of beer, or entering the bodies of others and causing them mischief. But to be without anchor in the turbulent seas of existence is a curse, and so the witches of Tanimbar long for something, anything, that might be heavy enough to lend them weight, even for a short while.

You can read the rest here.

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Bob Gottlieb on Editing

I’ve been thinking a whole load about editing lately. This is partly because I’m editing two book-length projects of my own, and partly because I’m in the thick of writing a book about writing, and so I’m having to step back from the process to think a bit more broadly about what it means to write. So I thought I would share what is one of my favourite pieces on editing, the interview in the Paris Review back in 1994 with the great editor Bob Gottlieb. The interview is interesting in itself, in that interviewer Larissa MacFarquhar interviewed Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, John le Carré, Cynthia Ozick, Michael Crichton, Chaim Potok, Toni Morrison, Robert Caro, and Mordecai Richler, asking them about working with Gottlieb; and then she interviewed Gottlieb himself, thereby getting both the writers’ perspectives on working with him as an editor, and his perspective as editor working with the various writers.

Here’s an extract:

 

The editor’s relationship to a book should be an invisible one. The last thing anyone reading Jane Eyre would want to know, for example, is that I had convinced Charlotte Brontë that the first Mrs. Rochester should go up in flames. The most famous case of editorial intervention in English literature has always bothered me—you know, that Dickens’s friend Bulwer-Lytton advised him to change the end of Great Expectations: I don’t want to know that! As a critic, of course, as a literary historian, I’m interested, but as a reader, I find it very disconcerting. Nobody should know what I told Joe Heller and how grateful he is, if he is. It’s unkind to the reader and just out of place.

 

The full interview can be found here.

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Big Beasts, Little Beasts, and the Value of Creative Writing

In this week’s Times Higher Education, there is an interview with the writer Hanif Kureishi, who has recently been made professor of creative writing at Kingston University. When it comes to creative writing, universities are fond of appointing Big Beasts of literature to professorial posts, in the belief that the presence of some charismatic megafauna might add colour, sparkle and glamour to the grey halls of academia. And for the Big Beasts in question, it is an attractive prospect: after all, however big a beast you are, it is hard to make a living from royalties alone – these days, it’s tough out there on the savannah.

I have become accustomed to thinking of the world of writing as an ecosystem, which is why I imagine Hanif Kureishi and Ian McEwan and Lionel Shriver and Zadie Smith and co. as charismatic megafauna, as Big Beasts whom we like to admire as they cluster around the watering-holes, or bellow magnificently, or gallop through the long grasses with lithe elegance. But in my years teaching creative writing, I’ve come to realise that there’s more to an ecosystem than charismatic megafauna, and that if you are willing to turn away from the thundering and bellowing and galloping, if you are willing to lie on your belly and look at what is going on in the underbrush, there are all kinds of other fascinating things taking place: astonishing and almost entirely neglected poets scurrying around like timid shrews, or curious communities of mini-beasts working together on strange and wonderful constructions. In other words, the world of writing is far more vast and rich and fascinating than the Friday-night Discovery Channel-style media obsession with charismatic megafauna might suggest.

This is also why I found myself strongly disagreeing with Kureishi’s too-easy dismissal of undergraduate courses in creative writing. Here’s the section of the interview.

 

What is an undergraduate degree worth?



I only teach MAs and PhDs, but I think an [undergraduate] degree in creative writing is totally worthless. There’s no guarantee that if you have a degree, that you’re an artist, that you can write. It’s [simply] a good opportunity for students to meet teachers. I mean, giving someone a [creative writing] degree, you might as well give them a swimming certificate – it doesn’t guarantee that your [work] is of any value, or that there will be any audience. That depends on the market.

 

It seems to me that in Kureishi’s complaint against undergraduate creative writing, there is an implicit assumption that the point of a degree in creative writing is to become a Big Beast. At least, I presume that ‘artist’ here equates to ‘Big Beast’ – a writer who has a substantial audience, who has cornered a lion’s share of the market, who can stand proudly beside the media waterhole alongside the likes of Kureishi and McEwan and friends. But this is one of the problems with Big Beasts: they have a somewhat myopic tendency to only recognise others of their kind,  to assume that the only interesting game in town is Big Game.

Universities themselves are often guilty of pushing this assumption that what a degree in creative writing is there for is to nurture Big Beasts. This is why they also go out to seek and tame charismatic megafauna to bring back into the academy. When they fall victim to this, universities end up peddling a kind of sympathetic magic: a notion that by rubbing yourself up alongside Big Beasts, you might be able to turn into one yourself. However, this obsession with megafauna is unhelpful, because Big Beasts are necessarily only a tiny part of an ecosystem (they are an important part, of course, but not as important as they might imagine they are), and if universities set themselves up to produce ranks of Big Beasts, they are bound to fail most of their students.

Although Kureishi goes on to say that there is no “real body of information” that makes up creative writing as a subject and that “writing in the end is really a matter of taste”, creative writing is not, and should not be, a contentless subject. We at De Montfort University teach courses on how writing can be used to explore the puzzles of identity and the complexities of the human experience of place; we train students to develop critical and editorial skills; we look in detail at the techniques of writing, from formal verse forms to strange experimental hybrids; we explore research methods; we look at the complexities of the publishing world; we range over a whole series of arcanely useful issues, from desktop and internet publishing, to the dark arts of publishers’ contracts, to questions of money and finance.

In all of this, we are not just aiming to nurture the next generation of Big Beasts. Instead, we are working on the basis that a good creative writing degree can do two things. Firstly, it can help nurture and develop the next generation of those who, in as many ways as possible, will care for and contribute to the richness of this literary ecosystem of books, stories, poems, plays, and ideas. Earlier this year we had our fifth cohort of graduating creative writing students. We don’t have any Big Beasts amongst our graduates yet. But Big Beasts typically have a long gestation period. We do, however, have former students doing all kinds of things that contribute to the health of the literary ecosystem. Some are publishing poems and pamphlets and stories and blogs and articles, others perform at spoken word events, or stage and direct plays, or set up their own theatres and theatre companies. We have past and present students who risk everything night after night on the stand-up comedy circuit. Some of our graduates are now teaching creative writing in schools and colleges and in the community. Others are setting up small magazines, or working in publishing. Still others are stabled alongside Hanif Kureishi and Ian McEwan and other Big Beasts, in the wonderful collection Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud, edited by my colleague, the novelist, poet and short story writer Jonathan Taylor. When I look at all of this teeming richness, and when I think of all of my former students who are tending to and caring for this richness, I feel some confidence in the future of the literary ecosystem.

But the value of a creative writing degree – if it is a good degree, and perhaps not all of them are – does not only lie in the way it can help contribute to the continued health of the literary ecosystem. A good creative writing degree can be put to use elsewhere. We have former students who are studying to become lawyers or doctors, and who contact us say to us that the things they have learned on their creative writing degree have been of immeasurable benefit. A creative writing degree can teach you many things: a deeper understanding of human communication; the ability to tell a compelling tale; knowledge of how the various technologies of the written word, from books to social media, can be put to use; skill in turning a phrase; the arts of editing, writing to brief, close reading, and diplomacy; and finally what some might call ‘creativity’, but what I like to think of as a good dose of low cunning.

After only five cohorts of students graduating, it is early days here. We are still hoping that one day we will see a Big Beast emerge from our ranks at DMU. When that happens, as I’m sure it will, then I will be delighted. I look forward to the day when I can attend a book launch with canapés and champagne and fireworks put on at the publishers’ expense, to the day when I can watch a former student transform into charismatic megafauna. But bringing about the coming of that happy day is not our sole aim or purpose, and neither should it be the criterion by which the worth and value of teaching this curious, rich and fascinating subject should be judged.

This blog is dedicated to all my current and former creative writing students.

The Myriad Things on Hiatus — but still blogging elsewhere

For various reasons — mainly my current workload — I’ve decided to put The Myriad Things on hiatus. I’ve got so many writing projects on the go that I haven’t really had the time to give sufficient attention to this blog. I’ve also had a curiously niggling uncertainty about what this blog is about. So I’ve decided to keep blogging over on willbuckingham.com/blog, where I’ll just be continuing to talk about anything that interests me (the “about” question, and the question of coherence, are not so pressing over there, as it’s just my personal site), and at least temporarily to cease operations over here. I’ve archived all previous content from the Myriad Things over there as well.

The thing about blogs is they need a certain amount of momentum to maintain, and I was finding that I was having to post the same or similar content to two different sites – so in the end I decided that if I’m going to find any time to write at all, I should focus my energies a bit more. I will be keeping the domain here at The Myriad Things, as I may think about other ways that I can put it to good use. It may be that in some months’ time things change (they usually do), and I find a way to refashion what I’m doing over here. But this will probably be the last post for a while.

Unmapped

Just a quick plug here for the new (and terrifically interesting-looking) Unmapped magazine, a magazine for hidden stories from around the world, tales from places that have been left off the map.

They are publishing two issues a month, and you can subscribe to a month’s worth for a very reasonable £2. Their beautifully-designed website is here, and their inaugural issue is free.

Accidental Sinology

I’m down in Bangor for a brief spell, where I’ve been talking to creative writing and translation students about how a few years back I found myself stumbling into matters Sinological, and the general mayhem that has ensued since then. I wasn’t sure that I was going to get here at all this morning, as there was train chaos across the midlands; but five trains (five!) later, I pulled in to Bangor station on time. And I’m glad I made it.

It’s been a fun afternoon. My talk was called “A Book of Changes? Writing, Chance and the I Ching: or, The Adventures of an Accidental Sinologist”, so I was talking about my forthcoming novel-of-sorts, A Book of Changes, based around the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching. Then in the second half, we spent some time playing with translation of poems from the entirely invented language of Ogdish. Both in terms of the book, and in terms of the Ogdish, what interests me is question of the minimum conditions needed by a system to generate novelty. In some perhaps somewhat spurious mash-up between Lucretian physics and I Ching metaphysics, it seems to me that the conditions are these: structure, chance and motion.

But this all on one side, it has been good to have the chance to look back at my seven-year tussle with the I Ching, this strange, erratic walk that has led me down avenues I could never have anticipated. It all seems to me in retrospect to be not unlike Zhuangzi’s xiaoyao you 逍遙遊, or free-and-easy rambling. And speaking of which, this evening I’m looking forward to spending an evening of such rambling in the company of my wonderfully welcoming hosts from the university here in Bangor, before I face the train home tomorrow afternoon.

Image of Bangor Pier courtesy Nick Macneill