Publishing

I've just read a very interesting post in the Tart of Fiction blog, about the difficulties of being published. I left this comment:

I sent my first novel cold to publishers around 15 years ago. (It never even occurred to me to find an agent in those days.) The first sent it back in a matter of days (four!), the second kept it for 18 months before admitting that the paperback division wasn't interested. The editor who wanted it, Neil Belton, suggested I get in touch with an agent. I did.

I was taken on, presumably on Belton's recommendation. By this time, I'd written another novel and she tried to sell that one, without success. We parted company. Novels three and four were circulated to agents, once more without success (nibbles but no bites), and it wasn't until two friends of mine who knew agents effectively introduced me that things changed. Both of them offered to represent me!

I made a choice, the wrong one as things turned out (for reasons I won't go into here), and another novel did the rounds without being bought. Humbly, I went to the agent I'd previously turned down, and she agreed to take me on. Eighteen months and what must have been thirty or forty rejections (for its quietness) later, she sold novel No. 5 to Picador. It's coming out in spring 2008.

The lessons? I'm not sure. The first is that I was picked out of a slush pile all those years ago and came damned close to being bought. So it can, or could, happen. The second is that the wrong agent is less than useless and the right one worth her weight in gold. The third is that no book will get published until it falls into the hands of the right editor. In my case, she'd turned the book down a year earlier and then, because she found herself thinking about it at odd moments, asked to see it again before making an offer. If the book had reached her without mediation, maybe she would still have bought it. But do books reach senior editors without mediation? I doubt it.

Interestingly, the whole commercial issue has only come to the forefront now, as we decide on the title and cover. My title - a quote from Shakespeare - was considered too quiet, apparently the biggest sin in mainstream publishing, and we've finally found an alternative with more zing that pleases us all sufficiently and has won the approval of the sales people. Now we have to decide on a cover! These, of course, are peripheral issues to the book itself.

Perhaps the most important lesson, to me at least, is that I kept writing.

John Cale: the definitive Hallelujah

No success like failure

I was surprised recently when the name of a friend of mine came up in a conversation I was having with someone who works in the media, younger than me, finger on the zeitgeist: let's call him J. I met the friend who was mentioned at university and last year, after more than 25 years, we made contact and found that our friendship was, against all odds, intact. In those 25 years, I've done what I've done, working abroad, writing and so on, and my friend has become a household name in Britain, much loved and suitably rewarded (You know who you are!) for his work in television and theatre.

And what did J. say? That it was odd to see how two people could start off equal and yet one of them should become so successful and the other should end up a... At this point his voice trailed away but it was fairly clear that the word he wasn't prepared to utter in my presence was 'failure'.

And I started to look at my life and my friend's, and weigh them against each other. We've both done pretty much what we've wanted to do in our lives. We both have relationships that are strong and have lasted for over 20 years. He has children and I don't, but J. didn't know that. We've both achieved recognition for our work (though mine has come much more recently, and to a far more modest degree). We're both surrounded by friends. We both have houses we love and are proud of. We both have dogs... I could go on.

In fact, the only significant differences are two. Money and fame.

So why was I so surprised?

BEATING TIME

Another poem from the collection entitled VALUE. Once again, it seems like the work of a slightly deranged person I'm not sure I'd want to know, though some of the cultural references still mean something to me. Translate 'the new thingliness' into German and you should be able to track down the identity of Rasha, the black dove. Oh yes. The River Manifold, for much of its length, flows underwater.

BEATING TIME
‘The conscience is to you as what is known,
The unknowable gets to be known.
Familiar things seem a long way off.’
John Ashbery

1
Fool music from a country station
and the murdering king is accomplished out of clay
as the granite slopes wear woven caps.

He borrows a voice from the clack of iguanas,
he swallows a compass, he paces the carpet,
recoils from his maker into the head

of a Chinese dragon. It is there he can breathe.
Don’t scald his porcelain lungs with blue.

Crossfire. Blockades. The skeleton of his aunt.
Let’s play that tune again.
His lampshade chest is the new thingliness.

Requests from an imagined hospital
palaver with the painted feathers of song-birds,
the ochre-stained river. He whispers
his blood group into the mouth
of Rasha, the black dove.

Now there’s an address that could be yours.

2
I wanted to be what
you said I was
all the time I
was listening to the radio.

A specific number of dead
on the shelf
a portrait in wood
of a detumescent nude.

As the people walked towards the clinic
I harboured my boat and waited too.

Everywhere it was raining
alarm clocks
and opening hands
and disconcerted

musical gems were tumbling
from a silk-lined bag.
That was the season for speaking in tongues.

All the time I was listening to the radio.
Now it is the motion from one thing to another

or it is the place where bad stories are made
to convince us of the world’s bad use of us

or a kind of art denied the human figure,
vague cushion stifling our fictions of
life, love, death, avocados. To imitate
so many people becomes a kind of coin,
the impecunities of an even pettier trade
Poor naked city.
Was that where I was?

I seem to walking into an even more curious
war than the one I left so many years ago.

3
Capable of its most intimate reach,
a thong on the backs of giggling children,

that nervous flush in the veins of exchange
in a country whose crops are nylon and beads,
mirrors that reflect in the many images of the king
his fatuous dance around fire

like the magnetised needle in his stomach.
He shall become despised, he hopes,

as bitter water is despised,
a certain kind of popular air whistled between the teeth
while window blinds beat around a wooden bar.

His language is not held in common, his sex

is a question asked three times.
His arms are open at the wrist

as he reaches toward the pear tree.
He sucks out the fruit
from under the dappled skin.

4
The river goes under the earth
a second and final time. Timeliness as the dragon
swings on the calendar, as the music
arranges itself on the black caked
scimitar chest of the king.

He looks at the chart.
He folds his raw gums up.
He is waiting to be unsexed.
He confuses ‘war’ with ‘ward’ or the fanciful tangling
of a river’s art, frivolous and intense
along the boundaries of a fine
state to be in. He offers the doctor
his medicine. The River Manifold.

Articulate the soft bones of his anger,
supple as a glove or translucent fish, bury him
up to the neck in rats, words, death.
Bite on the bullet, death.
As to the leavings
something will come of all this.
Lick treacle off a pierced spoon in the nursery.
In that mirror all mirrors are touching.

5
Listen to all that water,
so near it hurts.

He pushes the leveller down to his knees,
his language the delicate pink

of entirely separate notes
in a bloodied stream, a good

number to follow. He wakes

in the cabinet of feathers, his earlobes
bleed like the entrails of a glass

and wounded gazelle.
His mouth is the deranged wardrobe

in which a seamstress, weeping,
points out magnetic north.

6
In the riveting lack of its
dark mineral growth the compasses
are what happen. He pushes a spade
through that crystalline powder
that is water’s revenge
on the garden. He asks his
penis for a little light relief,
he opens to the gurgling
passage of water, of red and
white cells, still wondering if the dragon
is out to get him. Too much earth
beneath his feet and drinking
deep is what the earth,
requiring him, will ask of its
own blood. He takes no more chances,
wrestling down the window. Myopic
children tango from the spar right
into the sea. Each new direction
splints the disarmed politics
of their wordy, glistening lasso
as it flashes back over the meadow
grass, the nightingale loop,
the vicious exactness
greasing their palms with a
tacky silver, residual light
that might as well nestle under the ribs
as become a sick bird fluttering
for its exit, tendentious
signature signing off the main
man. Listen as he takes off
his sewn white plimsolls, his
hairy blue sweater and rolls them up
and stuffs them into the mouth
of his household god. Hard butter
would melt into the shards of
prophecy there and then be dumb.

Toffee

After all this wearisome political stuff, I thought it was time to post a picture of Toffee. I found her in a cardboard box marked Omaggio (Free) outside a pet food shop. She was just over three weeks old and should still have been with her mother. She fitted neatly into my hand. Now, five years later, she moves sofas to hide her bone.

She's called Toffee for obvious, chromatic reasons. My father, who was deaf, called her Coffee, for similar reasons, and she seemed perfectly happy with that.

She's bilingual. She disobeys commands in both languages.

DICO? DICEVO...

Prodi's cobbled together a twelve-point list designed to hold the centre-left coalition together until the end of the legislation. It's sufficiently vague to work for a while at least and, faced with the alternatives of a technical government or, even worse, the return of Berlusconi et al., we have to hope it does.

Oddly enough, the list doesn't mention the word DICO, despite having a point devoted to family matters. Francesco Storace, former minister of health and currently under investigation for political espionage, commented, with his usual ready wit: Dico (I say)? Dicevo (I said).

The Vatican, in other words, has managed to block civil union legislation by playing the Andreotti hand, as I predicted.

I've said it once and I'll say it again. Nice one, Giulio!

Crisis? Just ask Giulio

It was inevitable that sooner or later Romano Prodi's government, with a majority of one in the Senate, would stumble and fall. And it isn't surprising that two of the people responsible for yesterday's defeat should represent fringe elements of the radical left, although not the parties they belong to (nor the electorate, given that both of them have their seats as a result of the quota system introduced by Berlusconi). Smugly irresponsible, they'll no doubt be enjoying their self-righteous fifteen minutes of attention right now.

But I'd like to know why Giulio Andreotti (mafioso, seven times PM and devout Catholic) changed his mind after having assured the government of his vote, and abstained, knowing full well that abstention is considered a vote against. Vatican pressure? After all, this way the government has fallen before the DICO debate on civil unions, avoiding what might have been an irritating defeat for Old Mother Benedict. And if it does struggle back to its feet, it's unlikely to risk a second debacle in the upper house so soon after yesterday's.

Nice one, Giulio.

Running Babel to advantage

Like some mythological beast, the university language centre I work in is about to undergo what looks like its final metamorphosis.

Its first director treated it as a centre of power and money cow, running the place as an occasionally benign dictatorship until she was crossed by higher forces. (The disadvantage of wielding power in a feudal set up is that there's almost always someone nearer to God than you are; in this case, the Magnificent Rector, as they're touchingly known in Italy.)

Director No. 1 was replaced by a woman whose sense of self-esteem is so highly developed she was once seen stamping out of the Bank of Italy screaming, I'll have you closed! (For the benefit of my Italian readers, Vi faccio chiudere!). She stuck it for fifteen months, during which the place ran on auto-pilot.

And now we have Director No. 3, a law professor. He's going to be supported by something called a giunta. (Translates as junta: among its definitions is: Military dictatorship, a form of government wherein the political power resides with the military.) In theory, this will give him the expert didactic advice he's going to need in order to run a centre devoted to the teaching of foreign languages at university level.

The startling thing about the junta is that not a single member of it is a professional language teacher. We haven't even been asked.

Yet no one here seems to think it startling at all. This is a state of affairs that would be hard to imagine in a university in any other country in the world.

A question of priorities

It's interesting that the Anglican church appears to prefer the homophobic Archbishop Arsehole of Nigeria to the rather more gay-friendly Episcopalians in the States. It's none of my business, of course, but wouldn't it be a little closer to the message of their founder (I'm referring to Jesus, not Henry VIII) to support a gospel of love and good will to all men? And wouldn't it be doing a Christian service to the many hundreds of thousands of gay men and women being persecuted in Africa by Arsehole and his torture-happy cronies if the Anglican church showed a little more compassion and a little less self-interest?

Navigation

Another great story by Vanessa Gebbie, in the Steel City Review. The Marc Lowe piece is pretty fine as well.

Phylogenetic, ontogenetic... As long as our mothers love us

Berlusconi totty, Mara Carfagna, ex showgirl transformed into member of parliament for the capo's 'political' party,Forza Italia, announced a couple of days ago that gay couples couldn't be considered families because they were 'constitutionally sterile'. Tell that to a broody lesbian with a turkey baster.

More to the point, as a national legislator (Zeus help us!) she appears to be saying that all childless couples should be denied legal recognition. This would exclude all women after menopause from the joys of holy wedlock, not to speak of those born sterile, soldiers and otherwise whose balls have been blown off in Iraq, bearers of defective genes who choose not to reproduce, etc.

It's a curiously dumbed-down version of biological determinism dressed up as 'natural order.' It certainly doesn't seem to have much to do with spirituality. But, of course, this isn't what she means. Sterility isn't the issue. Gayness is.

And her homophobia was echoed in yesterday's Repubblica by Vittorio Mathieu--historian and philosopher we're informed by the paper--who announced that he's writing a paper about homosexuality. Before you get too excited, let me give you a foretaste. Apparently, homosexuality can't be phylogenetic, because 'the species would die out.' Well, not necessarily, old chum. As this book says:

... more and more detailed studies of animals in their natural environments made it increasingly difficult to discount all sexual interactions in animals among members of the same sex as exceptions, as idiosyncrasies, or as pathologies. Slowly, but steadily, a quite different picture emerged. A recent encyclopaedic volume by Bruce Bagemihl (1999) on animal homosexual behaviour provides evidence that hundreds of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, insects, spiders and other invertebrates engage in same-sex sexual activity. Clearly, what was once thought to be an aberration appears to be a behavioural pattern that is broadly, albeit unevenly, distributed across the animal kingdom (see also Dagg, 1984; Sommer, 1990; Vasey, 1995). Indeed, within a select number of species, homosexual activity is widespread and occurs at levels that approach or sometimes even surpass heterosexual activity.

But for university professor Vittorio Mathieu, Opus Dei acolyte and contributor to neocon mouthpiece Studi Cattolici, homosexuality must be ontogenetic, i.e. 'a regression to a certain stage of development or the state of remaining in that stage'. In other words, we haven't grown up properly. We're stuck in some early pubescent dick-sucking time-warp. It's an oddly Freudian position for a Catholic to adopt but, as the saying goes, the enemies of my enemies are my friends. Next thing you know he'll be saying our mothers made us. Well, he's certainly giving us the wool.

Guess what! My spell-checker doesn't recognise neocon. It suggests coconut as a valid alternative...

Fancy a cracker?

According to one of the weirdest sites I know (and only available in Italian, I'm afraid), the world is even filthier than we thought. Sexual imagery and language is everywhere. Nothing is safe. Even a humble biscuit has its own dirty little message concealed among the crumbs. What do you mean you can't read it? It says SEX! Now spit it out this minute!

The site (otherwise known as Centro Culturale San Giorgio) also does a nice line in fundamentalist homophobia. But I think it's had quite enough attention already, don't you?

The house above the cork forest (4)

Things go from bad to worse. It turns out that the land attached to the house is surrounded by common land, the boundaries of which are time-honoured but undefined. There seems to be a goat path running along the north-eastern edge and curving down to the well, which doesn't belong to the house but to anyone who wants to use it. It will pass across the area Joost plans to pave and convert into a patio. What do you mean? he says. Anyone? He can't believe it. He wants to know exactly where the lines are drawn. E. shrugs and tells me to explain that it doesn't matter, if it's common land it's as much his as anyone else's. Besides, once he's bought the house he can get the boundaries sorted out. Or ignore them. He can even buy the right to the common land. Everything can be done as soon as he's bought the house. He has to buy the house. But Joost shakes his head. He wants to know exactly where the lines are drawn.

Afternoons are spent with pots of paint, the four old men leaving strings of conflicting red blobs on stones, the trunks of trees, odd clumps of grass, like join-up-the dot drawings drawn on a giant scale. Joost looks around him with a sort of weary unbelieving desperation. Inside the house, the rain has started to coat the upper floors in mould. He's holding his little map still, now covered with pencilled lines, but nobody's interested in the map. Even the surveyor, who drew the thing, seems to regard it as an object of little value, as though it were less reliable than hearsay. He nods when Alessandro, or one of his brothers, starts to talk about a stream that's no longer there, as though its ghostly presence were still decisive. What stream? says Joost.

Joost sends me emails at the rate of five or six a week, from all over the world. Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Prague. But wherever his body is, in whichever international hotel or airport or sushi bar, his mind is on the house above the cork forest. He wants us to set up meetings with the vendors, their immediate relatives, their neighbours. He wants to know how much it would cost to have a certain kind of window shutter. He wants new maps drawn up and faxed.

He wants closure. And who can blame him?

Cameroon, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, Senegal, Sudan, Zimbabwe, etc.

Being gay is still a crime in 75 countries, and punishable by death in nine. If you're reading this blog you'll probably feel this is a bad thing and want to sign a petition for the international decriminalisation of homosexuality here. Go on. You'll be in good company. Where else does Elton John rub shoulders with Noam Chomsky? Lily Tomlin with Desmond Tutu? Martin Amis with Christopher Hitchens? (No, hang on. They've made up.)

No sign of Tom Cruise, though...

Layered dog

I just clicked on the next blog. It's in Japanese (I think) and features fish, both fried and alive, and a rather beautiful dog. I couldn't resist this photograph (actually, of two beautiful dogs). I know I have my own dog and should be posting photographs of her (and I will, Toffee, I will) but, in the meantime, let's enjoy this.

Copernicus got it wrong...

...according to Warren Chisum, the chairman of the Texas House Appropriations Committee. He has hard evidence of, you guessed it, a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the Old Testament by inventing the absurd notion that the earth goes round the sun.

The mouthpiece of an organization called The Fair Education Foundation, Inc. (enjoy their Fixed Earth website here), Chisum has been distributing his memo to fellow legislators in an attempt to convince them that evolution and the Copernican revolution are hare-brained pie-in-the-sky faith-based hogwash. Projection?

It's rather like the Pope accusing lobbies of trying to influence the legislative process in Italy...

Strained relationships

Italian judges, particularly those in Milan, have been making themselves unpopular with the rich and powerful (read Berlusconi and his cronies/sponsors) for quite some time. But now they're taking on the big bad wolf itself: The CIA. Along with the ex-head of the Italian secret service and a netful of smaller fish, 26 CIA agents are about to be tried for their involvement in a case of 'extraordinary rendition'. They don't even have to be extradited. Italian law can try people in their absence. For more information read here.

Whatever the result, and it's unlikely that anyone will actually end up in jail, this might turn out to be as big a legal landmark as the Pinochet arrest in London. It also coincides with strong popular feeling against government plans to extend the US military base near Vicenza, as well as the irritated reaction of Massimo D'Alema, Italy's foreign minister, to a rather cheeky letter from a cabal of ambassadors (US, GB, etc.) complaining about Italy's lack of commitment to cleaning up Afghanistan.

Bush must be wishing Berlusconi hadn't lost the last election...

DICO SI... with reservations

Finally an acronym that has a sense to it. DICO (short for dichiarazione di convivenza, or 'declaration of cohabitation') looks set to replace PACS as the shorthand for civil unions in Italy.

The word's particularly appropriate because it means 'I say', and not as an expression of polite surprise. It's in-your-face enough to work in manifestos, it lends itself wonderfully to banners, as in IO DICO SI! (I say yes!). Or, even better, IO DICO NO... A CARDINALE RUINI!. (I offer this merely as a suggestion - each to his own ferret noire.)

Its very pugnacity means that it will be used as effectively against its supporters, alas, as by them. But indifference to their use is in the nature of all arms worth respecting.

Now all we have to do is print the t-shirts. I'll be coming to the reservations later.

"And the Day After That"

Carolyn Steele Agosta has posted the first chapter of her novel "And the Day After That" here. It's entered in an American Idol style competition for fiction. If you'd like any more information about how it works, visit her site. And vote!

Shades of Alan Turing (2)

Well, he has replied, and I'm flattered.

Mr. Lambert,

Yes, the story is on the web site. As part of my computer security class, I teach different methods of encryption. My current programming assignment asks students to build a program that automatically decrypts texts written in English. You can see the statement of the problem at http://www.csee.wvu.edu/~cukic/Security. Your text is one of the seven students use to evaluate the decryption performance.

I must have downloaded your story several years ago, but I am not sure where from (it may have been NYT literary section). It is rather a coincidence that I use it for a "geeky" computer science class assignment. I hope you don't mind.

Regards,

Bojan