Will Buckingham's Blog, page 35

Stories, philosophies, museums, conferences &c.

I am writing this from a café in Cambridge. I'm spending a couple of days here attending the Child and the Book 2012 conference, where I've been talking about the Snorgh and Emmanuel Levinas, which has been good fun. My argument, more or less, is that story-thinking can be a way of making philosophical moves that and raising philosophical questions that more "straight" philosophy cannot. As The Snorgh and the Sailor is coming out on Monday (get your copy here), the timing is excellent. I'm also doing a workshop later this afternoon about philosophical storytelling. It's designed as a chance for a bit of fun and banter at the end of a long day; but if anybody comes up with deep philosophical truths, I suppose that will be a bonus…

It's the end of a busy week at the end of a busy term. On Tuesday and Wednesday I was at another conference, Museum Utopias 2012, at the university of Leicester, giving a paper along with Elee Kirk on Calvino and what we were calling "invisible museums" — those things that are valuable to those who visit museums, but that will always remain invisible no matter how many evaluations are carried out.

Both conferences have been incredibly friendly and stimulating affairs. Conferences differ, of course; but in my view they are often at their best when they are friendly and welcoming and there is lots of time to chat outside of the organised sessions.

Next week, I'm going to take something of a break, which I'm looking forward to. But I'm also doing a bit of guest blogging over on Necessary Fiction, where I'm Writer-in-Residence for April. I'm out of the habit of blogging (as followers of thinkBuddha.org will know), and so it is good to have an excuse to kick-start some new thinking. When I post over there, I'll also put links up here on WillBuckingham.com. Otherwise, I'll just sit back and watch as my brave little Snorgh launches himself out into the world. I hope the little fellow does well. Buy a copy: it's only eight hundred words, and it might cheer you up. But let me leave you with a nice review of the book from the Birmingham Post:

Simply written, with a subtleness that adds sophistication to a picture book, Buckingham, who is author of Tindal Street Press's Cargo Fever, has shown that he has a tender touch… There is just a hint of poignancy in this beautifully illustrated book… and children will love the energy of the sailor who barges into the Snorgh's life and makes him realise what he's missing in the big, wide world… It's a book to treasure.

Snorgh.org

Recent visitors to this website may have found it behaving a little strangely. It's a complicated (and really not tremendously exciting) story about server loads and PHP scripts and so on and so forth; but now I'm glad to say that things should be back to normal, there should be no more problems with CSS and other peculiar errors, the site is happily hosted on shiny new servers, and everything seems to be behaving itself more or less well again.

Anyway, on top of various other things — including the lovely States of Independence last Saturday — I've been putting together a small website for my forthcoming book with Thomas Docherty, The Snorgh and the Sailor. The site is at Snorgh.org — I just couldn't resist the domain — and although it's still very new, it already has some little bits and pieces of Snorgh trivia, an insight into the evolution of the book with some of Tom's beautiful early sketches, and — most importantly of all — a recipe for samphire soup. Do go over and have a quick look. And do remember that you can also visit the Snorgh on facebook.

In Praise of Small Press Publishing

The coming weekend, on Saturday 17th March, is the annual States of Independence here at De Montfort, a one-day festival celebrating independent press publishing. And, as ever, there's a full programme of events, readings, talks and happenings, as well as a small army of publishers, booksellers and the like here on campus. It should be an excellent event, and the full programme can be found here. I'll be doing a joint panel on happiness along with my old friend Suryacitta from happy-buddha.co.uk. Both Suryacitta and I have recently published very different books on happiness – mine a kind of free-wheeling and practical exploration of various philosophies of happiness from the Cynics to Zhuangzi (it can be bought here), and Suryacitta's a thoughtful, nuanced and practical approach from a Buddhist perspective (which you can get hold of here).

Small and independent presses are the life-blood of the literary world, providing a kind of literary biodiversity in a world that increasingly tends towards monocultures; and so States is always a great event in its ability to remind us that there are greater riches out there than may be apparent from the pile-'em-high 3 for 2 offers in Waterstones. And – did I mention this? – it is entirely free of charge. If you are near Leicester, you should really come along.

Meanwhile, in other small-press related news, I've just had a couple of stories published in two lovely publications. The first is my piece "Precious Treasure Chicken", a non-fiction piece about an encounter with an alien in the Chinese city of Baoji (宝鸡), and it is published in the annual anthology of the Lowestoft Chronicle based out in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The anthology is called Far-Flung and Foreign, and is edited by Nicholas Litchefield. Luke Rhinehart, no less, says that the collection is "both provocative and enjoyable", and so it's well worth getting hold of.

The second piece is my story "How Many Things?" that has been published in the beautifully-designed Frogmore Papers, which is looking particularly handsome in this issue, the cover somewhere between a tablecloth in a French farmhouse and a Dutch momento mori painting.

"How Many Things?" is about a present-day heir of the philosopher Shao Yong (邵雍), who sets out to enumerate all of the things in existence. The Frogmore Papers is available on subscription by going to the website of the Frogmore Press, who are found here.

If any readers of this blog are thinking of coming along to States, then do track me down and say hello. I'll be running around for much of the day, helping out with organising, attending events and so on; but as usual I'm hoping to have time to spare to chat, to buy books, and to generally have a good time.

 

 

 

Going Back to Art School

I knew that it was an auspicious sign when the woman sitting next to me on the train from the gare Montparnasse to Nantes last Monday had a voice like Barry White and was reading a book by Raymond Queneau.

I'm over in France as I'm spending the current week at the école supérieure des beaux-arts de Nantes to run a bunch of creative writing workshops and activities with a group of seventeen exceptionally talented students. And so far it has been an enormous amount of fun. I confess that I do not speak particularly good French — good enough to persuade a stern-looking SNCF official at Montparnasse to let me transfer my ticket to another train after I was caught up in the Eurostar chaos of last Monday, but not good enough to talk about the nuances of writing creatively — and so I've been working in tandem with artist Georgia Nelson on a variety of exercises that mix creative writing and the visual arts, and that cut between both English and French.

Some time ago now, I was a student of Fine Arts, up in Newcastle; and whilst it was a bit of a patchy education (there was not a great deal in the way of teaching, and so throughout the four years the art I produced grew appreciably worse, rather than better), I can't help still thinking that there is something tremendously exhilarating about the creative excitement of being in a studio space, and seeing the walls slowly filling up with images and words. When I think of my poor, nomadic creative writing students back home, who shuffle from one bland room to another, most of them laid out in a manner suited to either the most Gradgrindish models of pedagogy, I find myself nostalgic for the feel of masking tape, the scuffed edges of things pasted hastily onto the walls, high ceilings, spaces flooded with natural light, free of chairs and other such frivolous items. The rooms I teach in these days have signs on the doors saying what can and can't be done, setting out precisely how the tables and chairs may and may not be moved. The have buzzing strip-lights. Sometimes they have no windows at all. They have walls that never known the feel of masking tape. And if you were to spray-paint a poem on those bland, empty walls, you would immediately be branded a hooligan and removed from the premises. These are the spaces in which we are supposed to create. Of course, because my students back at DMU are also exceptionally talented individuals, they often rise to the occasion; but the external conditions are not always what they might be.

Anyway, I'm two days in here in Nantes, and having a lot of fun. Yesterday we worked on writing and translating poems between English, French and Ogdish (the language of Og is astonishing in its richness and its grammatical complexity: few scholars truly understand it). Today we've been messing with Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, or Little Red Riding Hood, as if she hasn't been messed with enough already. And tomorrow we'll be doing a haibunga walk. Haibunga is a mix of haiga and haibun, and it is a word that, when it first issued forth from my lips this afternoon, I imagined I had invented (delighting in its closeness to "cowabunga") until I did a Google search and found to my disappointment that somebody else had got there first. Perhaps I can retrospectively define "cowabunga" as a haibunga that must contain a mention of, or an allusion to, cattle.

Doing workshops in a different setting has been both exciting and also really rather liberating, and not just because of the satisfaction of refamiliarising myself with the pleasures of masking-tape. As a discipline, creative writing often finds itself tucked away in the darkest corners of English literature departments. We are a shifty bunch, not wholly to be trusted ("don't go down there—that's where our writers live…"). But this traditional arrangement always strikes me as a lost opportunity. I'd far rather see creative writing departments in art schools than English literature departments. There are perhaps two reasons for this. Firstly, it seems to me to be a good thing to remember that there is a whole world of literature and poetry out there, not just in English. Most of what I read these days was initially not written in English: the sea of stories is both deep and wide. And secondly, to place creative writing alongside other creative disciplines is a reminder that writing is as much about the practice of close attention to the world, as much about investigation and experimentation, as much about attempts to think otherwise, as it is about generating final texts for a literary industry, or for academic and scholarly dissection.

Anyway, tomorrow we'll be at large in Nantes, me and Georgia and seventeen or so students (and a film crew, who are turning up in the afternoon to do a video blog on our activities). We'll be writing haibunga and, if there are any cattle around, cowabunga, as well as renga of sorts in the Japanese garden on the Île de Versailles. Then on Friday, I'll be heading back home, and the students will be continuing to develop the ideas they have been working on over the week in the company of a mime artist and street theatre practitioner. Eventually all of this will be bundled together into something — an exhibition, a performance, a publication or perhaps something else — for the Voyages à Nantes festival later on this year in June. I'm hoping to get back over here to see what they come up with. I like the fact that, at the moment, I simply can't predict anything at all. Cowabunga, I say.

The Snorgh in the Bookseller.

I'm delighted to say that The Snorgh and the Sailor has had a very nice write-up in The Bookseller, thanks to Vanessa Lewis of the Book Nook in Hove. Here's the review:

The Snorgh and the Sailor by Will Buckingham celebrates storytelling in a different but delightful way, as a solitary and grumpy Snorgh is inspired by a sailor washed ashore in the storm. Althought set in his ways, the Snorgh's life is changd forever by the arrival of the nthusiastic, adventure-hungry sailor. This is a charming book that celebrates the power of the imagination and the thrill of adventure, and Docherty's quirky benpanship creates a truly endearing Snorgh.

The book is not due out until April; but you can keep up-to-date on Snorgh-related happenings by Liking the Snorgh's very own website page. And you can pre-order the book here.

Snorgh Sneak Peek

It's only three months or so until my children's book The Snorgh and the Sailor is due to be published by Alison Green Books, illustrated by the breathtakingly talented Thomas Docherty.

A couple of days ago, I received a sample copy of the book in the post, and it looks beautiful; so I thought I would share a sneak preview of Tom's beautiful illustrations with visitors to this blog. The text is rather small; so to find out more about the story, you'll need to buy the book when it comes out (it's available on pre-order!)

 

The Snorgh snuffles around his lonely marsh…

 

 

Snorghs don't have visitors!

 

 

The sailor arrives…

 

 

An incident with a whale.

A Devil from the Vaults

It was about a decade and a half ago that I decided to take writing seriously. I was in the Tanimbar Islands in Indonesia, with a typewriter, time on my hands, and a yearning to make use of my native tongue; so I sat down and wrote a story called "George's Devil". Perhaps it wasn't a particularly good story (although, even now, I console myself with the thought that it wasn't particularly bad), but it was the first story I wrote since I was at school, and so I still bear some degree of affection towards it. Shortly after I finished it, flushed with an over-exaggerated sense of my own capacities, I decided to write a novel…

Anyway, a couple of months back, novelist and all-round good sort, Steve Himmer from the excellent website Necessary Fiction, said that he was running a month's event throughout January of 2012 publishing the first stories ever written — written, not published — by published writers. Steve assured me that the stories didn't have to be any good. In fact, he said, it might be even better and more interesting if they were not very good at all. Thus reassured, I dug out the story, which was still in its original typewritten format on crumbling foolscap paper, typed it up in electronic form, and sent it off. The story has now been published over on the website. You can read it by clicking HERE.

Introducing Happiness Now Published

Just a very short post to say that my book Introducing Happiness: A Practical Guide is published today by Icon Books. I've written a fuller blog post on the book over on my thinkbuddha.org blog.

The book – a practical, if sceptical guide to the philosophies of happiness – was an absolute pleasure to write, from start to finish; and I'm delighted that it has now found its way out there into the world. In due course there will be a companion website on the Icon Book site: I'll link to it when it is up and running.

Kindle users can download the book direct. Those who prefer their books to be made not out of bits of information, but out of bits of trees can get hold of the paperback version.

 

 

Storytelling the Yijing (I Ching)

For the past few years, I've been working on a long-ish fiction/non-fiction project that explores the Yijing (I Ching / 易經) as a kind of storytelling machine. It was this project that precipitated me first into studying Chinese, and that then led to me travelling out to China last year – and, like all projects worth doing, it has seemingly colonised my every waking hour. Anyway, the book itself is still in draft form and needs some more attention before I decide what to do with it, but I've just had an article – one that includes three stories from the projected book – published in New Writing: The International Journal of the Theory and Practice of Creative Writing, and those who have access to the journal can get hold of the article here.

For those who don't have direct access to the article (sorry!), it's an attempt to ask what it is about the Yijing that makes it such a successful storytelling machine. It draws on various bits of theoretical gubbins from Calvino's Lucretian literature machines to Ming Dong Gu's work on the Yijing itself, but it also puts the literature machine that is the Yijing to work, so that readers can see it in action in the weaving of three odd little tales about ancient Chinese culture heroes (Fu Xi 伏羲), the importance of rubber-bands in the mechanisms of stories, and fox spirits. These stories will hopefully reappear in due course when the book is finished, and when I manage to track down a publisher possessed of sufficient enthusiasm/derangement to publish it.

Five Indie Books You (Probably) Won't Find in the High Street

The last year or so has been a year of some absolutely fabulous reading; and – as ever – I've far more enjoyed burrowing around the more obscure fringes of the literary world than I have ploughing through the latest pile-em-high, Booker-shortlisted, must-read blockbuster. So here are some recommendations for five of the books I've loved the most over the past year, books that your local bookstore may – more fools them – have overlooked.

The Bee Loud Glade by Steve Himmer

This is undoubtedly the greatest novel about ornamental hermits of the entire year. Hell, let's go the whole hog and say this book is the greatest novel about ornamental hermits of all time. Steve Himmer's The Bee-Loud Glade is as funny as it is profound, as strange as it is compelling. This is a book about wealth and poverty, about solitude and friendship, and about – among other things – a lion called Jerome. You simply can't dislike a book that features a lion called Jerome.

Get it here!

Spurious by Lars Iyer

I met Lars Iyer, the author of Spurious, several years ago at a conference on Blanchot, where – dressed in a Hawaiian shirt so lurid it made my eyes go funny – he gave a punishing two and a half hour paper on Blanchot. If I hadn't known what the experience of Blanchot's il y a was before the paper began, I certainly did by the end… Spurious is a semi-autobiographical satire of academia that moves from squabbles over who is Kafka and who is Brod, to the anxiety of creeping fungal growths, to the end of world. It is the funniest book I have read for a long time. After reading it, in an outburst of generosity, I am even ready to forgive Lars for his epic paper on Blanchot (although not, perhaps, for the shirt).

Get it here!

Pirate Talk or Mermalade by Terese Svoboda

Mermalade? A whole novel written in pirate talk? Perhaps what's most astonishing about Terese Svoboda's book is that it is very, very good. An eighteenth century tale of mermaids, pirates, loquacious parrots and all kinds of sundry horrors, this was a book, Svoboda herself says, that was written "without hope of publication". If that is so, then – Dear God! – how I wish that more books were written this way!

Get it here!

The Divine Farce by Michael S. A. Graziano

Three figures are trapped in a suspended concrete tube, sustained by pear-flavoured nectar. Eventually they break tube into a strange subterranean labyrinth, a heaven or hell of sorts. Michael Graziano's brief, allegorical novel successfully treads a fine line between hope and despair. It shouldn't work – it really shouldn't. And after reading what at first glance looks like a relentlessly depressing book, this is a story that leaves behind a curiously cheerful miasma…

Get it here!

The Golden Age by Michael Ajvaz

Czech philosopher and novelist Michael Ajvaz's wonderful ethnographic travelogue of an invented island culture where images have the same status as objects, and where cooking is considered a form of barbarity. The Golden Age is pure pleasure – funny and clever without being tricksy, beautifully crafted, and filled with the kind of lightness that my own literary hero, Italo Calvino, dreamed of being one of the characteristics of a new literature for what is now the present millennium. Glorious!

Get it here!