William Sutton's Blog, page 39
February 17, 2015
Star and Crescent: think global, write local
Star and Crescent is an invigorating new website, sharing news, culture and commentary site with a Portsmouth focus. They aim to offer timely, daring, investigative writing: an antidote to the conformist and controlled angles dominating the mainstream media, online and off. I’m proud to have this piece included, explaining how I explore local inspiration through the medium of cake.
The Creme of Local Writing
A view of mainly Southsea eateries where the budding scribbler may lurk unharassed.
“Are there any Southsea cafes good for writing in?” asked a post on Portsmouth Writers Hub Facebook page.
I was astonished by the few hesitant answers this query received. What have our local writers been doing? Don’t tell me they’ve been writing at home? How else do we expect to create a literary scene and draw out budding homegrown writers, except by lounging around, in public, actually writing?
I couldn’t help splurging an overview of my promiscuous cafe wanderings. My top ten tips drew droll comments from writer friends: “Show off”. I remain unabashed.
Austin Kleon’s book Share Your Work talks up the value of a ‘Scenius’, a word conjured up by musical innovator, Brian Eno. Not everyone can be a genius, but we can all be part of a scene.
Through collaborations and collisions, we rediscover our own creativity. I used to ask myself, why can’t I be in Paris in the 1920s, with Joyce, Fitzgerald and Hemingway? Dorothy Parker’s New York, Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury set, Dickens’ Punch Brotherhood? The solution, of course, lies not in idealised cliques of the past, but in café crème and lemon drizzle.
Portsmouth is a city ideal for writing. A city of reflections: Spitbank Fort shimmering beyond Southsea Common; the Guildhall glimpsed from the elevated train; the Harbour viewed from Portsdown hill (over hot chocolate from Mick’s Monster Burgers).
Anyone who has ever struggled over writing a novel, an essay or a thank you letter, will know how a solitary stroll can refresh the soul. Kierkegaard writes, “Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” Novelist Natalie Haynes declares that her best writing is done at 3mph. And that most maritime of books, Moby Dick, begins with crowds looking out from the extremest limits of Manhattan, as if drawn by the magnetic needles of passing ships’ compasses: “As every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever”.
Thus in
spired, the trouble is scribbling the thoughts down. Before they vanish in the breezes, I advise you to finish your solitary stroll at a cafe. (You may take my writing programme seriously, or just decide that I like cake.) Psychologist Ronald Kellogg’s The Psychology of Writing discovered that the optimum noise level for writing is not necessarily silence, but your own highly subjective requirements for preserving the state of flow. Maintaining trains of thought is critical, but so is an environment that enables creative flow.
I recommend seeking out places locally owned and staffed. There are several reasons. Invest your pennies in local enterprises and enterprising locals, rather than bolstering faraway chains. Is buying a coffee really a political act? Yes: if you spend with multinationals, the money floats away elsewhere. Spend it local, keep it local. If you want such ventures to survive, buy from them and they will thrive. (Tell your friends too.)
Besides the economics, new environments stimulate fresh thoughts: the independent will always be more fecund than the generic cafe. Getting to know local faces feeds your mind (as long as they don’t absorb all your precious scribbling time). I’ve culled countless characters from cafe eavesdropping. How much dialogue have I transcribed, ideas that have provoked and shaped my own world view. Ever since coffee came to the west, it has been beloved by writers, artists and musicians. It has fostered culture – and counterculture – that has aroused establishment suspicions from mediaeval Ottoman villages to mid-60s Greenwich Village.
Cafes have enriched not just my writing, but my life. (Against the expense of my coffee habit, I weigh the articles I have written, jobs applied for and contacts made.) In cafes, I have rehearsed plays and rewritten novels, scribbled postcards and completed tax returns, hatched plots and held secret trysts, sung songs and been wooed with poetry. Most of all, I have made friends.
Here are my favourite Southsea stops, and suggestions of what you might write there.
Casa de Castro
Simply the best cake. Tarts and pastries effortless and uplifting, as if chef Silvana de Castro had conjured them from rarefied Rio mountain air. Casa de Castro opened just as I was moving to Southsea, like a wish answered. It was here I conceived my vocation: to spend the earnings from my teaching job in Surrey’s commuter belt in the cafes of Southsea, thus redistributing the wealth of the capital via the medium of cake.
You might write: exotic travel articles, lulled by New Orleans jazz and Rio de Janeiro bossa.
Southsea Coffee Company
Simply the best coffee. A midweek flat white will cure any writer’s block. Your spirits soar. The creative pathways surge. At any time of day, you will spot other writers scribbling. The staff strike the essential balance between knowing when to be friendly and when to leave you to your notebook. It’s ever tempting to indulge in fruit toast, fragrant porridge, unique sandwiches, and the restlessly inventive raw cake nibbles. They even kept a salad on the menu (marinated grated beetroot and home-made hummus) until I could bring my wife to try it.
Write: fiction.
Teatray in the Sky
Aromatic tea served in stylish tea sets. Mouth-watering cakes. An atmosphere of relaxed cool that imbues you with the style of the objets d’art around you.
Write: nonsense postcards to long-lost friends, poems in the style of Edward Lear.
Southsea Beach Cafe
Jam Jar Puds. Superfood salads. Beatific beach views.
Write: windswept romance.
Mumm’s Cafe
Back to basics bakelite and breakfasts of the utmost promptitude.
Write: gritty TV soap opera.
Southsea Tennis Club/Pavilion Cafe
Tennis-themed smoothies, as the weather illuminates and darkles through many windows.
Write: Chick Lit, heart-rending articles for Weekend Family section.
Brasserie Lou Lou’s
Croissant, café au lait, Gauloises at the street tables.
Write: intellectual crime fiction, post-structuralist Euro philosophy.
Victoria Park Cafe/The Lodge Arts
A courtyard conducive to dreaming, with the chirruping of birds and Wellington boot plant pots.
Write: short stories with a dash of magic realism.
Central Library Café
Cakes to lift weary spirits, potatoes to fuel critical thought.
Write: historical fiction, investigative journalism.
Aspex Gallery
Espresso. Gift shop. What more do you need?
Write: manifesto for art revolutionary movements.
Canvas Coffee
Smell of roasting beans and dusty train platforms.
Write: travelogues, road movies.
Home Coffee
Watching Albert Road, sipping fine brews.
Write: radio drama, tragicomic and melancholic.
Glaring omissions: 101 Reykjavik, Smile, Southsea Library Cafe, The Coffee Cup, Manna, Proper Pompey Kitchen, Coffee#1, Sellars Coffee House, Garage Lounge, Yellow Kite, Magick Bean, Feed, Churchill’s, The Tenth Hole, All About Tea, Delaney’s, Guildhall cafe, Canoe Lake cafe. Please tell me places I’ve missed. In a future piece, I intend to take a tour of the best Sunday roasts in town in a future issue. Recommendations welcome, meat raffles included.
PS: Pompey ain’t what it used to be
At a recent talk on Portsmouth as the Home of Great Writing, a spectator was dissatisfied. “Yes,” he declared, “but Pompey isn’t what it used to be.” It wasn’t clear which vanishing aspects of the city he lamented. I wondered if my cafe culture was under attack.
Speaker Matt Wingett replied with a tale of his cappucinometer. I too remember overhearing an explanation at a coffee van around 1990. “The beans are roasted and ground, the milk is fluffed or steamed.” And the look of astonishment from the lady who was hoping for a nice mug of instant.
Some may rue what they consider gentrification, gastrofication of pubs, and latte culture. But it’s intriguing that, these days, nobody goes on about how great French food is. The British eat out regularly and with expectations exceeding our parents’ generation. And, given a week’s holiday, I’ll seriously consider staying in Southsea.
February 15, 2015
Risk Wise
This glowing review of Polly Morland’s latest book, Risk Wise, describes it as thought-inducing, entertaining, insightful.
I’m currently absorbed in Polly’s previous outing, The Society of Timid Souls (or How to be Brave).
I’m fascinated by the way she steers us through her search to understand courage, and fear, shaping a series of anecdotes into an effortlessly entertaining narrative. But more than the admiration I feel for the structuring and meticulous research, I am moved. Over and again, I find myself smiling, crying, fearing and hoping along with the many protagonists, into whose lives Polly gives us such revealing glimpses. We can tell who she likes, and who she doesn’t, though she never says explicitly. And her own reasons for going on such an apparently old-fashion quest can be glimpsed through the seams of the narrative. A generous, poetic and compelling humane book.
I am off to buy Risk Wise from my local Blackwell’s.
February 10, 2015
Fairytale Collaborations
Portsmouth Fairy Tales (for Grown Ups) has been a collaboration of continual pleasures.
When people ask me what I’ve been working on recently, I can tell of our two celebratory launch parties, fabulous tales told with relish to the right audience in the right venues, with all the talents of photography, art, video, food and music added into the recipe.
The pleasures are manifold. There you have the pleasure of:
being asked in the first place
dreaming up a tale outwith my usual parameters
researching it (exploring Portsmouth City Museum’s story of the city, Dickens’ dazzling Portsmouth article, photos and archives, long list pubs drawbridges street names and philosophical societies. Who would have guessed that the Russians docked with such pageantry and thirst in 1862?
rehearsing, cutting, rewriting
performing, indoors and out, formal and informal, multimedia and ad hoc on street vox pop
having a book out (when my own publisher let me down)
royalties; actually royalties, from ebook and hard copy (thanks, Tessa; thanks, Matt). We’d imagined it was just a calling card, but it’s a devilishly goodlooking artefact.
meeting artists so willing to contribute their talents: Nick’ Ingamells’ photos, Jon Everitt’s art, Port & Lemon’s designs, Danielle of Elysium 8’s video genius, hospitality of Groundlings Theatre and Guildhall, The Lord Mayor’s imprimatur.
comradeship: I love this band of ragged writers.
admiration: but I hadn’t expected to be so impressed by the writing, which whisks us from sea to cemetery, from satanism to prostitution, from future to past, from flood to famine.
help from shops and other outlets: a great excuse to talk to Aspex Gallery, Warsash Studios and Teatray in the Sky. Thanks for all those sales and all that good feedback.
In short, if offered a spot in a collaboration of writers, I would recommend that you take it.
February 9, 2015
Getting the Picture
You never get too old to cry over love.
‘The best novels seduce the reader, so allow the wonderful chorus of voices in Sarah Salway’s Getting The Picture to do just that. Let them whisper secrets, plans and mysteries; of the past, of the present. Let their possible futures come into focus for a celebratory final picture. This novel is uplifting, sinister and beautiful.’ (Tiffany Murray)
Which is why I’ve just bought Sarah Salway’s Getting the Picture (only £2.99). You can buy the book here, and read an extract here.
I loved her Something Beginning With… and was equally disturbed and fascinated by the wry and wrenching love tales of Leading the Dance. I’m delighted to hear this one is now available and looking forward to reading it.
February 8, 2015
Interviewing your own characters
David Mitchell interviewed most entertaingly by @GuardianBooks podcast.
I’ve loved David Mitchell’s books (apart from one I couldn’t finish), but wasn’t expecting him to be so entertaining on all sujects from:
– his unlikely friendship with Kate Bush
– interviewing his own characters in the shower to see if they’re fit for the next job (this, I think, may be a fib, but makes a better story than days of note-making, crossings out and solitary walks, and what audiences want is to know what the act of writing is like, not what it’s like to actually sit there writing)
– deciding, after his sixth books, that he is not really a novelist
I come away from listening to this and rush to my notebooks, ready to seek new shapes to my writing, and to re-employ my favourite characters from my own previous writings.
February 7, 2015
Breaking news: Bic pen out of ink (the haiku)
Bic pen out of ink:
Neither lent, nor lost, nor leaked.
Improbable haiku.
#amwriting
February 5, 2015
Mists and Rains (Les Fleurs du Mal)
A number of you have been asking me about the new novel, Lawless and the Flowers of Sin, which signally didn’t come out on 1 August 2014, despite Amazon’s vaunting and indeed one bookseller offering it for £45.16 (a phenomenological bargain, seeing as it doesn’t yet exist). That disappointment was due to the untimely demise of Angry Robot’s Exhibit A crime imprint, just as I was trying on my outfit for the launch party.
A number of early readers have said warm, admiring things about it, including publishers: “an elegant and vivid depiction of the setting and period,” “the seduction of the style carries right through the narrative”, “deftly conjures the atmosphere of the era”, “biting satire”. Thank you. I look forward to sharing it more widely. As the latest judge prepares for the latest enquiry, Flowers of Sin seems a timely tale.
As yet, however, I have no further news.
Patrons
In the interim, something of my sources.
I just heard David Mitchell, eloquent on the Guardian Books podcast. When being questioned about intertextuality, he deflected the discussion to more fecund and funny byways. Do readers care about intertextuality? Don’t we just enjoy the book, enjoying a pat on the back and a raise of the eyebrow if we spot thieved sources?
Here, then, I’ll detail a few of the misty thefts that led to Flowers of Sin.
Four books hold up the corners of the novel, all four from Victorian days, all ground-breaking in more or less scurrilous ways.
This first is probably the only one still considered avant-garde today, which is a good effort after 150 years. Rather than discuss why and how that should be, I shall begin my nods to the giants on whose shoulders I attempt to clamber, giants whom I regard as the patrons of the book, bowing out of critical comment in favour of a poem of Monsieur Charles Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du Mal gave me title and theme.
Mists and Rain
O ends of autumn, winters, springs soaked in mud,
Soporific seasons! I love you and invite you
To enfold my heart and my brain
In a vaporous shroud and a wandering tomb.
On this grand plain where the chill wind disports itself,
Where through the long nights the weathercock grows gruff,
My soul, more than in the warmth of reheated spring,
Will open generously her crow’s wings.
Nothing sweeter to hearts filled with deathly things,
And on which freezes have so long descended,
O feeble seasons, queens of our climate,
Than the fixed look upon your pale white shades,
—Except, on moonless eves, we two, just we,
On a bed so wild, to put our grief to sleep.
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
My own translation, scratched together in the dark hours
January 7, 2015
“And your specialist subject?”
“And your specialist subject?”
My friend Dallas, on Celebrity Mastermind. Thrilling. Grilling. *proud*
I salute his chutzpah. Mastermind facts I’ve gleaned from Dallas:
– theme tune is called Approaching Menace by Neil Richardson: genius
– format devised to resemble Gestapo interrogations
– no interrupting as questions timed to be roughly equal length, thus making 12 pretty much a perfect round
– specialist subject: you tell them your principal sources, books, films etc; they may suggest narrowing a broad topic
– it’s terrifying
– however you practise, getting one wrong throws you off, and then the rot sets in
– Celebrity Mastermind general knowledge is a little easier than normal Mastermind (I’m not convinced, apart from sometimes an easy one to get you going – er, not Dallas’ first one, obviously)
– specialist subject: whatever you choose, you’ll discover you’re not as expert as you think
– the mini-interviews on Celebrity Mastermind are strange: such a nerve-wracking situation, how could you be relaxed and chatty? Comedian Russell Kane is witty and disarming, but then he is practised at being funny under pressure.
Dallas chose the Films of Werner Herzog, a mind-boggling catalogue of 60 ground-breaking films, on which I could answer precisely no questions. You can see the concentration in his features.
Competitors chose Hemingway, New Testament Parables, Frank Sinatra, so it was a heavyweight contest. It makes my mouth dry just watching.
A glorious thing. I hope Dallas’ biology teacher was watching.
On iPlayer this month: Celebrity Mastermind, 2014/2015: Episode 7: http://bbc.in/1zKcdYr via @bbciplayer
December 10, 2014
Unfriend [Wednesday Word] – older than you think
Unfriend: “I Hope, Sir, that we are not mutually Un-friended by this Difference which hath happened betwixt us.” OED citation, 1659.
Compare The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe, 1794: “But I believed, niece, you had a greater sense of propriety than to have received the visits of any young man in your present unfriended situation.”
As I write a piece on slang for Go! English magazine, I’ve enjoyed discovering a number of frowned-upon slang words that have a longer heritage than we might expect. Every generation likes to think its slang is the latest thing, but some of the latest words ain’t so novel.
Here on mentalfloss.com are 16 words that are much older than they seem, including
dude (1880s)
babe (1915 at least)
booze (1500s)
frigging (1500s, eg: “This shunting frigging new arrangement…has got every flaming thing foxed up.” 1943
)
December 3, 2014
Fliddermouse and other regionalisms [Wednesday Word]
Fliddermouse means bat. In Devon.
The BBC Voices recordings capture 1,200 people in conversation. Some of the clips are people talking about language – slang, dialect, taboo words, accents. Other clips cover all sorts of subjects and simply offer a flavour of how we talk today. As the website says, you may eavesdrop on Rotarians in Pitlochry and Travellers in Belfast, drop in on skateboarders in Milton Keynes, and overhear pigeon fanciers in Durham.
I particularly like the Word Map, where you can compare words for playing truant and being happy across the land:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/results/wordmap/
Our top 10 words for playing truant:
skive
bunk off
wag
skip
mitch
dog
hookey
twag
sag
nick off
with also-rans:
‘twag’ in Hull and Doncaster
‘cap’ in Derby and Nottingham
‘skidge’ submitted only in Paisley.
