Any Human Face launch

Any Human Face had its official UK launch yesterday evening in the Travel Bookshop, a place I wholeheartedly recommend for all your reading needs should you be in or near Notting Hill, and probably worth a specific trip for. (It is a travel bookshop, after all.) I was accompanied by Simon Barraclough, who pulled some fine Italian-focused work from his poetic hat, and introduced by my friend and agent, the poet Isobel Dixon, so I couldn't have been happier. I also had the chance not only to see some old friends - including one I haven't seen for 33 years (hello, Sara!) - some newer ones (hello, Katy!) and some very new ones ( hello Essie!), but also to cement some previously virtual ones (hello Rob! hello Anne!).

You can see more photos of the event here.

UK launch

I'll be reading from Any Human Face on Saturday, 3 July, at The Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill, London. Even better, I'll be accompanied by Forward shortlisted poet Simon Barraclough, for an Italian-themed evening. This is the cover of Simon's fine collection. I haven't added mine because I'm sure you're all more than familiar with it by now.

We'll be starting at 7 pm. There will be wine, possibly Italian, and snacks...

You can find all the info here.

Days in England

What I should be doing now is telling you all about my last week in England, as I promised. And since should is the governess of will, to coin a phrase, that's exactly what I'll do. It all started off with a visit to the very wonderful Jen and Chris Hamilton-Emery, who publish fantastic books in exquisite editions, making their writers happy and the fortunate readers of those writers even happier. They are, of course, Salt Publishing and without them, and it, the world would be a sadder and less literate place. They also make excellent coffee and gave me a couple of freebies. What I was doing there was meeting them for the first time, which was great, and picking up some pre-publication copies of The Scent of Cinnamon, my new short story collection. And a very lovely thing it is. I think we can all be proud of ourselves. 

I then had a walk round Cambridge and discovered that whole tracts of the city are now given over to mobile phone shops. I stumbled into a queue of McFly fans waiting for autographs from two McFlies in HMV. I looked for two books I wanted, neither of them particularly arcane (OK, Edmund White's My Lives and some stories, any stories, by David Foster Wallace... Satisfied?), found neither at Heffer's and both at Borders, which came as a shock. Bowes and Bowes is now the CUP bookshop as, of course, you all knew, but I didn't and was disappointed. I almost had lunch at the Gardenia, in memory of Jonathan Williams ('street food'), but ended up with a rather miserable (in both senses) king prawn salad, sitting outside a place near the market in the unseasonable heat. 

My other reason for being in Cambridge was to go to the annual lecture at my old college, Emmanuel, to give 'moral support' (though what qualifies me for this I'm not sure, other than a willingness to be entertained) to Griff Rhys Jones, who lived on the other side of the roof garden in South Court when I was doing drugs and so on for three utterly delightful years. I used to watch him stride up and down in his room at three a.m in search 

of whatever was needed to complete his history essay, before he wisely switched to English and could enjoy the opportunities offered by constant leisure. Griff was in fine form, as usual, still striding up and down, though with shorter hair. Dinner followed and was really very good, another marked change from the Cambridge I remember. I met David Lowen, who somehow finds time to run the Emmanuel Society, and agreed to take part in a Literary Day at the college. I'll keep you informed.

My other (non-personal) reason for being in England last week was to take part in Ride the Word III. Well, I had a great time, reading the final story from the collection, previosuly available only in Dutch translation (and how often can one say that?). Elizabeth Baines and Vanessa Gebbie have both blogged about the event and impartial judgements on my contribution can be found there, but it was a great pleasure to be on the bill 

with three such interesting and accomplished poets - Simon Barraclough, Vincent De Souza and Isobel Dixon - and, in particular, with short-story writer, Jay Merill, who was an absolute revelation and a delight. Add to that the opportunity it gave me catch up with old friends and meet new ones - you know who you are - and I couldn't have been happier. Which brings us back to Salt, without which most dishes would be very dull indeed.

Two days in London

...actually, one and a half days in London, but they followed the same rough pattern as the two days I spent there last autumn and I'm just so self-referential I couldn't pass this one up. You can find out what I did last year by clicking here.

This time I went back to London for the launch of the very wonderful Katy Evans-Bush's collection of poetry, Me and the Dead. It was a spur of the moment decision, egged on by Ryanair's extremely cavalier attitude to global warming and my own desire to be surrounded by poets for an hour or so. Believe me, dear reader, I didn't regret it. (Well, perhaps momentarily, when Ryanair provided synthetic UHT cream for my cardboard bucket of already undrinkable tea and an eye-rolling Polish steward had no idea what sandwiches were available and seemed to regard this as my problem. But hey! 80 Euros...)

Before the launch and after a late lunch with my sister in the Mess - an excellent café in Amhurst Road; I recommend it - I met up with Isobel Dixon (friend, agent, poet) in a smart and colourful place at the back of the BFI called Benugo's, where we were joined by Henrietta Rose-Innes, who'd won the £10,000 Caine prize for the best short story in English by an African writer the evening before. (You can read the prize-winning story here.) We celebrated with reviving glasses of champagne before heading off to the Royal Festival Hall for a look-in at the London Literary Festival barbecue, where I almost met Rachel Holmes, head of literature at the South Bank Centre, and had some extremely drinkable white wine. This had the advantage over Pimm's of being immediately available rather than a reward for reaching the head of a shortish queue. After which, we moved on, without Henrietta but with Julia Bird, to Katy's launch in Covent Garden.

I had a great time. Katy read two poems, with great elegance and authority, from a chair in the corner of the over-crowded downstairs room of Treadwell's, leaving us wanting more - the only way to be left, in poetry as in much else. I finally met a whole bunch of people I'd previously known only as fellow-bloggers or web acquaintances of one kind or another - Elizabeth Baines, Simon Barraclough, Anne Berkeley, and wasn't disappointed. I also had the very great pleasure of seeing John Wilkinson again after more than twenty years. And the wine didn't run out. I'd planned to start reading the book on the 38 as it wound its towards Hackney, but found myself listening to a conversation between a disorderly drunk and a young artist from Liverpool, possibly about god, in which each vied with the other to see how many times they could address the other as man and still maintain something recognisable as argument. Sadly, the number was lower than either of them fully realised.

Wednesday, as those of you who were in London will know, was cold and wet. I had medical reasons, despite this, for wearing shorts (you don't want to know), although desert boots were, on the whole, an unwise choice, as was my using an umbrella that protected more or less the same amount of me as a wide-brimmed hat. Still, a grand day out it was, as my sister and I moved off once more to the South Bank to see the Cy Twombly show at Tate Modern.

I wouldn't have missed it for anything, though Twombly's final 'status' remains for me as much a mystery as ever. By which I mean that I've never been more impressed by an artist with fewer painterly virtues, and then less impressed by an artist whose painterly ambitions are clearly enormous. The first Dubuffet-influenced stuff struck me as great, perhaps because I worship the ground Dubuffet walked on, while the earlier graffiti works seemed aimless and the sequence produced at Sperlonga - ten miles from where I live - looked vacuous and muddy: I didn't get the 'symbolic whiteness' business mentioned in the pamphlet at all. The darker crusty stuff in the next two rooms was arresting, with its throbbing dicks and scatological references - I found myself wondering if he'd known Pasolini -, but the Bolsena series, ostensibly influenced by Apollo 11, didn't work at all. I felt that Twombly liked the idea of science, but not the effort involved in doing it. There was the sense of a pastiche of genuine cultural activity, when what he was doing was, basically, winging it by faffing around with formulae that were merely artistic. This carried on into, and informed, the Muybridge stuuff in the next room. My sense is that other artists have done fake science much better than Twombly, although my sister liked these two sequential works very much. She didn't much like the tributes to Nini Pirandello, on the other hand, which I thought wonderful: restrained, elegiac, hard-won. We agreed though on most of the final work. I remember one critic talking about the falling-off in Twombly's ouput, but what impressed us most was the sheer energy of the later work. There was a footling quality about the Roman stuff done in the 60s, despite the down-and-dirty aspirations it clearly had. But Hero and Leandro and The Wilder Shores of Love, particularly the former, were grandly ambitious and achieved works by someone who has suddenly become a great colourist, something that's evident in the Venice series and even more so in the two Four Seasons sequences. The large, brash Bacchus paintings in the final room, where the difference between blood and wine, revelry and madness, is obliterated by the swooping, harrowing scrawl of red, are a great way to end the show.

On the way back, a Ryanair cabin crew member was heard to scream at a passenger. "Stop shouting at me, all right? Stop shouting at me." It's the little things that count.

Me, me, me, a whole book of me

Some very good news. The enterprising, innovative and discerning Salt Publishing will be bringing out a collection of my short fiction later this year. The collection will contain a few stories you may have read, plus lots you haven't (unless you know me very well indeed). It's provisionally entitled The Scent of Cinnamon, after my O. Henry Prize Story (yes, I know you know...). I'm delighted to be in the company of such friends and fellow writers as Isobel Dixon, Katy Evans-Bush (Me and the Dead out next month!), John Wilkinson, Vanessa Gebbie, Anne Berkeley, Simon Barraclough, David Gaffney and a glittering host of others. What did they say about MGM having more stars than heaven? Well, move over, MGM.

In the second sentence of this post I originally wrote brining instead of bringing. How subliminally salty is that?

Tags (2)

I've been tagged with the same task by two people, which suggests that the growth of a meme may not be exponential at all, but whatever the opposite of exponential is. In other words, the circle might get smaller and smaller until finally only I'm left. What a horrifying prospect. The taggers (and I'm honoured by their attention) are Linda Grant and Simon Barraclough. They've asked me to list six random facts about myself and then pass the task on to six other bloggers. Well, the first part is easier than the second. So let's start with that.

1. When I was a child I thought the word 'unyet' existed and was slapped for answering back when Mrs Fletcher, my teacher, told me it didn't. The primary school was so small we used to watch schools programmes on the TV in her living room, sitting in a circle on the floor with her Aberdeen terrier on the sofa behind us.

2. I have bags of second-hand clothes I've never even opened. (This random fact is being recycled from an earlier tagging exercise - I suspected it was, and checked. Why should it matter so much? A nod to Linda?)

3. I was once described as 'a small bearded man with one earring' by the Cambridge Evening News.

4. I have a genuine Roman tessera round my neck, made of blue glass and found in our garden beneath the big lemon tree. There's a display case in a nearby museum (in Sperlonga) in which hundreds of similar tesserae have been tipped, like Spangles, so it's precious but not that precious. It makes me wonder, though, what else there might be in the garden.

5. I'm currently editing a report on the control of the Armenian vole.

6. I was given a ride as a child in the Rolls Royce Silver Shadow used by Charlie Drake at a Royal Variety Performance. I'm not interested in cars now, and I wasn't then, so the reason I remember this must have something to do with Charlie Drake. I'd rather not think any more about this.

Now comes the hard part. I feel that I'm exhausting my tagging credit, but I'll give it a go.

Erin O'Brien

Kay Sexton

This should be Vanessa Gebbie, but she's declared herself a meme-free zone. How wise! But I can't think of anyone else....

Rachael King

Tyla Tingle

Elizabeth Baines (who tagged me some months back with a very similar meme: revenge is a dish best eaten cold!)