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I’m lucky enough to live close to Hay on Wye, it’s my destination of choice on a wet Sunday afternoon. The bookshops go on forever, and there are one or two decent places to eat, not something that can be said of many small Welsh towns. I’m a food snob, and a book snob, and a snob in general, so when the festival comes around, I like to make sure everyone I know who tells me they intend to go that I prefer Hay when it’s quieter, when I have the place to myself.
After all, most people who attend the festival are not there because of a hunger for all things literary. What they want more than anything else is to see, and if possible talk to, a celebrity. This doesn’t interest me at all. If I go, I'm there out of sheer intellectual curiosity.
Yesterday, however, after tramping through heavy rain from the car park in town to the main festival site, one end of Hay to the other, and thankfully having seen not one celebrity, I found a quiet bar, bought a hideously expensive pint and slumped myself in a sofa. I’d arranged to meet friends there, but they were scattered about the site, and none of them genuinely interested in books (unless you include ones by Alan Titchmarsh) so I had a few minutes to plan my intellectual journey for the day. I don’t know about you, but when I attend things like this I always have to have a focus – whether it’s poetry, or fiction, or history, I have to prepare myself, consider in advance what perspective I intend to take in order that I’m not thrown in any direction, and end up completely adrift on a brown sea of aimless hogwash. (Hay is muddy, remember).
And then Adrian Edmondson walked into the bar, in wellies, and he stood right next to me and I could actually hear him talking.
Those few minutes were very difficult for me, you understand. I was suddenly sucked under by just the sort of empty headed nonsense I had hoped to avoid. I remember, ten years ago, having a pee next to Adrian Edmondson in the toilets at Leigh Delamare services. He was more famous then. I didn’t speak to him on that particular occasion, of course. It would have been very inappropriate, but here, in a bar, well, this was a different matter.
I found I couldn't help myself from continually glancing up at him. Not because I am in awe of him in any way, but more likely because I was considering how his comedy is in an intellectual tradition that follows Beckett and Pinter, and I was thinking I could go up and ask him something along these lines but decided against it because he might think I was a tosser.
After Edmondson left the bar (he drank two pints when I had managed just one) I decided I would go and look for my friends so I could just mention, in passing, that I had just seen a very famous comedian, and making sure I shoehorned Beckett and Pinter into the same garbled sentence so I could impress upon them that I was interested in Edmondson from a cultural standpoint and really his fame was of no interest to me. He’s just a bloke like other blokes, he drinks beer and uses the urinal (I have witnessed both, remember).
So I hurried out of the bar, fighting against a tide of bodies making their way to some ‘talk’ or other. I pushed through the middle class masses wondering why it is that they feel this need to see someone talk. It’s as ridiculous as listening to someone paint. Why go all the way to Hay to see people talk? Similar talks are all over the internet. If you are truly interested in what these people have to say, then just stay at home and watch the videos on youtube. Or better still, read their books. It’s all very hollow, isn’t it?
And then I saw the great Australian novelist Tim Winton, and wasn’t that Martha Kearney just behind him? And what the hell is John Bercow doing here and, suddenly, looming out of the light like a great galleon emerging from fog, there is Stephen Fry, right there, in front of me, smiling, avuncular, our national treasure. He was being ushered towards the new signing area next to the bookshop, nodding, his massive brain working away.
Lower status celebs (like Bercow) sign books in the main shop, but those of bigger stature, like Fry, sit in a sort of corridor next to the shop, so fawning admirers can line up and wait their turn for a few seconds of unselfconscious, fully paid, staring.
I am above all this, of course, and when I eventually meet my friends, I quickly steer the conversation to the Theatre of the Absurd and just drop in the fact I had been in a bar with Adrian Edmondson, and wasn’t it pathetic that grown men and women stare and whisper, and that I’d also seen Stephen Fry.
One of my friends, Gary, then mentioned that he had a ticket to see Fry talking about Shakespeare. Gary has never seen a Shakespeare play in his life. So why, I wondered, was he so keen to hear what Fry had to say about the bard? I have all the BBC Shakespeare on DVD, as well as one or two of the Branaghs. I'm serious about my Shakespeare, not like Gary, who's just a dilettante. But off he went, ticket clasped in his hand, his eyes glazed over in expectation. Fool.
Later that day I made my way back to the car park in the town, still curious as to true nature of the festival. What is this desire human beings have to be close to famous people, who, just because they choose to write, or perform, are given inordinate status? I was thinking this, and as I entered the car park, much emptier than it was earlier on, there walking towards me was Blackadder himself, Rowan Atkinson.
I tried not to stare, but there was nobody about, no one could see me, so it didn’t matter, and Atkinson had his eyes on the tarmac, obviously keen not to meet my gaze, so I had a big long look. He isn’t as tall as I expected. Not much between him and Bercow.
Anyway, I got into my car, and starting the engine felt a trifle disappointed that there was no one I could tell about my encounter with a superstar. I’m above all that anyway, so decided to keep it to myself.
Long ago, before most of you were born, I used to listen to music on vinyl. A vinyl single was usually about three minutes long, and a vinyl album, or LP, twenty minutes a side. When I started playing in bands, and writing my own songs, I thought it was best to write three minute songs, or to think in sets of songs forty minutes long. The technology of playing music dictated what I wrote.
When I watch a film I wonder how the screenwriter’s plotting is influenced by a movie's eventual length. If a film is ninety minutes long, each of its three acts gets to be thirty minutes. People will feel short changed if a movie is less than an hour, and often complain if it goes on for too long.
But what dictates the length of a book? I’m led to believe that publishers prefer children's novels to be shorter, but why? Is it simply because huge books don't sell? Are they too daunting or too heavy?
The original draft of a book I’ve just finished was 120,000 words. My agent insisted I cut in half. I did so, and although the book is neater, and sharper, I think it’s lost something of its rambling essence. (Can an essence ramble?)
So, like a DJ who creates an extended mix, or like the Directors Cut of a movie available on DVD, I wonder whether it’s possible to publish both long and shorter versions of my new book. And while I’m at it, I wonder if I could write an even shorter short one. Take this to its logical conclusion and my book will end up as a short story, a poem, or even a tweet. Perhaps it can exist, like matter, in a variety of states. The book is about music, so I suppose I could include a cd, or a link to a download.
These days so many of the contexts in which artists work are in flux. Writing is no longer confined to print, but to a myriad of forms. We can write blogs of infinite length (that no one will read). We can tweet pithy wisdom. (Nobody will read these either). At sea in the online world, we have no limit to their imaginings. I can write and record my music at home, upload it on to Soundcloud and don't have to concern myself with the memory capacity of the means of distribution. The LP, the CD, even the concept of music of any finite length has been challenged by software such as Koan which enables music to be ‘generative’ – that is, the composer determines certain settings (key, pitch, tempo, arrangement) and the music unfolds infinitely.
As someone who trained as a painter, then spent ten years in music before writing books, I see many art forms suddenly released from their bonds, in freefall. Of course it is liberating: there’s a new world out there, and it goes on forever.
Writers have always enjoyed creating their own restraints: Joyce’s Ulysses, Georges Perec, the works of Italo Calvino, the Oulipo movement, they have all sought to devise structures to give their work some limit, a reaction to, perhaps, a sense of reality as too chaotic.
Reality is too daunting to capture in its entirety, so we all need to be selective, to choose, to limit. But the boundaries of our reality are dissolving in the online world. We get vertigo, we run to find the edges, there aren’t any.
And our security, like the security we get from good parents who give clear boundaries, is threatened. It’s a brave new world. It's daunting and exciting in equal measure.
So, if and when my new 'work' eventually comes out, maybe it will be in several forms, the least of which will be the printed book. And if you miss most of them, please make sure you don't miss the tweet.
Anthony Burgess, on being told he had a brain tumour, and only a year to live, was jubilant. Great, he thought, a whole year in which I’m not going to get knocked over by a bus, or die in a car crash. Worried that his premature death would leave his wife with nothing, he threw himself into writing. The brain tumour disappeared, Anthony Burgess established himself as a major novelist.
This little story, which Burgess describes in his autobiography, may or may not be true. I doubt that it is. But regardless of its veracity, it’s been going round and round in my head for some time.
Like everyone else who writes and reads this blog, I am writing a book. It’s a book I’ve been working on for five or six years. It’s the one I’ve always wanted to write. I’m sure you all have one like it. But like plenty of novels writers write, I have struggled to finish it.
However, I had an Anthony Burgess moment.
In April this year I had an MRI scan that suggested the arteries in my head were unusually thickened, and I was at risk from a developing an aneurysm. I’ve written about this in an earlier blog, so won’t go through all the gruesome details again. I’ll just mention that the specialist took five months to tell me, by which time, I thought, I’m lucky to still be here.
More recently I had a second ‘enhanced’ scan, using state of the art MRI that, if the first had something of the 1970s about it, this one was 2001. I was sucked into the mouth of Hal. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
This second MRI machine was right next to a bank of monitors displaying my skull, brains and all that mazy Hampton Court stuff. How I longed to see a little homunculus sitting there in the middle, arms pulling the levers, sweat pouring down his little brow.
“Look!” I imagined yelling to the radiographer, “there, in the middle, a tiny man! And he’s gobbling chips!” The radiographer frowns. “That’s very common,” she says.
Look, not all of this is true. The truth is not that exciting. I had the scan, I went home. The radiographer didn’t say anything at all. She smiled and nodded and I wondered, as I got my coat, whether she was looking at me that way because I had six months to live, or because she thinks I’m an idiot.
What if it was both?
But, when I got the report, it was reassuring. Whatever was on the previous MRI scan, it was not on this one. “No abnormalities in the brain, no lesions, the orbits, pituitary, corpus callosum, brain stem” and so on, all normal. Things are flowing as they should be. The homunculus needs a new armchair, but otherwise, nothing.
What, I asked the specialist, has happened? Why has thickening, or arteritis, or aneurysm, or infection disappeared? I thought these things were either irreversible, or cured only by colossal amounts of steroids.
No answer. A shrug. “An over enthusiastic radiographer,” he muttered.
“What?” I yelled, picking him up by the collar and holding him against the wall. “Are you saying my illness was the product of someone’s imagination?”
“Please,” he said, “it’s not my fault!”
He reached out and pressed an alarm button, two orderlies charged in, and in seconds I was strapped up, restrained, and couldn’t move.
“I just want the truth, doc,” I said, struggling to free myself.
“Put it this way,” he said. “Perhaps we in the NHS love to create fictions, too. Why should all the imaginative stuff be left to writers?”
For whether I was ill, and after a long rest, am cured, or whether there was nothing there in the first place, the fear that I had something eating away at my brains was the spur I needed. It wasn’t that I was afraid I wouldn’t finish my book before I died, it was that writing kept the worry away. As long as I wrote, I didn’t dwell.
I have nearly finished my book. I’m proud of what I’ve written, but know that finding a publisher for it will not be easy. It is, to say the least, very idiosyncratic.
But does that matter? I’m going to live.
In my last post for ABBA I wrote about my intention to take a roadshow to schools across Edinburgh. I say ‘roadshow’ but I’m not sure what that is. I also used the word ‘workshop’, and in the end decided it was a ‘wordshop’.
Well, I did go up to Edinburgh, and I thought I’d tell you about it.
First, I should I explain that I really didn’t know what I was doing. I think it’s important to state this otherwise you may be looking for the point of it. I had about three weeks to prepare, and was looking for interested teachers at the same time. You can imagine the difficulties when I first contacted schools.
Teacher: so what is this about?
Me: I’m not sure. Literacy. Words. Music.
Teacher: does it have a purpose?
Me: Oh yes, of course. It will have. Soon.
Teacher: Could you say what the purpose is?
Me: I want to expand your mind. I want to control your stationery.
With a couple of days to go I had a format for the ‘wordshop’ worked out. I would talk about interesting words, read a few poems, ask children to make up their own poems, get children to improvise a surreal drama, then finish with some whale sound effects. Everyone likes those. Had I discovered what the point of it was? No. I was on an adventure. I suppose I wanted the children to feel that too, as if they couldn’t be too sure of what was going to happen next.
I would hold up my books, perhaps read from them at the end if there was time. What I wanted to do more than anything else was engage children. Engage, entertain, amuse, confuse, distract, challenge, motivate, inspire. That sort of thing.
I’m back home now, two weeks or so later. It was great fun. The children I worked with were wonderfully exuberant and came up with some astonishing comments and insights, and took part with glee. I loved the moment a boy stood up and began a hilarious chant using the word ‘potato’, and in one school a teacher laughed so much she had to go and sit in the corner and dry her tears.
I learnt several things: a) my keyboard is heavy b) parking in Edinburgh is difficult c) most people are open to new ideas d) rationalising what you’re doing is not always a good thing e) nothing is as hard as trying to be funny, but when you succeed, it’s obvious. f) everyone loves to hear whale song.
So thank you Edinburgh, and all those people who gave me an opportunity to try out my multimedia self-publicity. A big thank you to Kenris and also Fiona, Saira, Amber and Richard.
Next, I want to try and combine music, poems and stories into a sort of operatic audio magazine. Sell them to schools at £5 a time. If it goes well I should make about £10,000 a month. Enough to afford some real whales.
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Blimey, Andrew - talk about being put through the wringer! But please - don't now let good news get in the way of the book!
What can you say? Except, hurrah that the first scan was wrong, huge congratulations on getting on with the book, and thanks for writing so lightly about something so awful!
hmm good post do not get it in the way of the book
If your book is as idiosyncratic as your blog posts, I totally want to read it! I'm glad this story at least has a happy ending - hope the fate of your book is as positive...
Delighted to hear you're okay!
Good news on both counts! What a horrific time to go through - but hope you can wish in a happy and healthy year ahead with much joy - and exactly the appropriate kind of imagination.
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