Andrew Blackman

I realised I haven’t written anything here for a week. The official reason is that I was busy – the unofficial reason is that I was in a constant state of nervous anxiety and couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds at a time.

The reason for the nerves is pictured here: public speaking. I’ve done it before, quite a bit, but it’s always the same. My mind enters this circular mode of thinking, where all I can do is imagine the same scenarios, churn the same stale fears and worries around in my head, over and over and over.

In the end, of course, the launch party was fantastic. The turnout was bigger than I expected – the place was packed. The venue – the Phoenix Artist Club – was ideal. The speech went fine, people clapped, the reading from the book was good, people clapped again. I signed lots of copies, more than I thought I would. And after that I relaxed and just enjoyed the fact that I was publishing my first novel, and that I had a lot of friends and family to celebrate with me and be happy for me.

There’s a good description on the Legend Press website, and more photos available here.

Andrew Blackman On the Holloway Road andrew blackman, book launch, launch party, On the Holloway Road, phoenix artist club, Writing

In the course of researching my speech at Leicester University earlier this week, I discovered that last year 120,947 new books were published in the UK (source: Nielsen Bookscan).

I found this quite depressing, not just as a writer but as a reader. As a writer, of course, it makes me worry about how hard it will be to get my book noticed among 120,946 others, and also about whether the world really needs another book at all. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised its implications for me as a reader.

I don’t count how many books I read, but I’d guess it averages out to a couple a week, so possibly a hundred in a year.  A hundred out of 120,947. Of all the knowledge contributed to the world in the UK each year, I am accessing less than 0.1% of it. And that’s only books published in the UK.

And when I thought about it some more, I realised that a lot of the books I read are not newly-published. I spend a lot of time catching up on the millions of books published in the centuries before I was born. The British Library helpfully estimates that to get through all 14 million books in its collection would take about 6,000 years.

My point? I don’t know anything more than a tiny, tiny slice of what there is to know. Of course that doesn’t mean that I can’t have opinions. But it does mean that I should be humble, and always be willing to admit that I’m wrong, that there’s a lot of stuff I just don’t know about.

There is a bright side, however. Actually, two bright sides, if that’s metaphorically possible.

For one thing, quite a lot of those 14 million books in the British Library are ones I could quite happily do without reading.

For another thing, nobody else knows anything very much either. Even an avid reader couldn’t get through more than a few hundred books a year, still a tiny fraction of the whole. So all anyone can hope for is either to be an expert on some tiny subject or to have a broad knowledge with lots and lots of gaps. It’s heartening for me to remember that just as I have a deep insecurity about all the things I don’t know, so must Salman Rushdie. So must Barack Obama. So must all the critics, all the journalists, all the TV talking heads. Even Tolstoy and Goethe and Proust must have had the odd moment when they wondered if they really knew what they were talking about.

Somehow I find that heartening. It’s like the old trick of losing your fear of someone who intimidates you by picturing them on the toilet. It’s a reminder that we’re all human. No matter what we say or how many pretences we go through, we’re all human, and none of us knows very much at all.

Andrew Blackman Literary news books, british library, ignorance, knowledge, Reading

Well, it may be post-racial America, but in the newsroom of the New York Post it’s apparently still pre-civil rights America, circa 1955, a time when it was still OK to draw a parallel between black people and monkeys.

The Post’s defence for its horrific cartoon is that there was a story in the news about a monkey escaping from a zoo and being shot by police. This from soon-to-be-ex-editor-in-chief Col Allan:

The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy.

What Allan doesn’t explain is the connection between the two news events. How can you possibly get from an escaped monkey to an economic stimulus package, except via the sick racism of  “Monkey = black people = Barack Obama”?

Please, somebody give me a non-racist explanation for this cartoon. Please.

The reason I’m writing about this is not to bash America from the smug safety of London. We have plenty of our own racial problems here. And from what I’ve seen from some brief reading across the web, the reaction to this cartoon shows that many Americans are as shocked and disgusted by the cartoon as I am.

My point is simply how deeply influenced we are by ideas. I worked at a New York newspaper for several years and know how many people must have seen that cartoon and approved it for publication. That nobody thought to question it is a real problem. That the connection between a dead chimpanzee and the President of the United States could occur even in one person’s head in the year 2009 is a problem. But it’s not entirely surprising: those ideas were implanted by centuries of propaganda and can’t be erased in a single election cycle. I suppose the encouraging thing is that so many people are succeeeding to whatever degree in moving beyond them.

Andrew Blackman Political comment cartoon, monkey, new york post, obama

This was a good, quick read. An interesting story that explores several moral issues such as euthanasia and privacy rights. Another theme is the yearning for greatness and the sacrifices involved, often in vain. For example, Clive is a famous composer trying to create a “Millennial Symphony” and struggling with the pressure. He feels on the verge of creating a work of genius but keeps being interrupted just as he is about to create a crucial part. Vernon is a newspaper editor who thinks he has created a truly great front page, one that will restore the paper’s declining circulation and will become so iconic that it is used in journalism school one day. Julian Garmony is a right-wing Tory foreign secretary on the verge of a leadership bid but threatened with oblivion by the exposure of his cross-dressing habit (the subject of Vernon’s great front page).

One thing the novel captured really well was the fickleness of public opinion: at several crucial points, there is a sudden swing and people who supported one view before suddenly say the complete opposite and maintain that they always believed that. Reminds me of the death of Princess Diana, when the same newspapers that were exoriating her before her death suddenly started idolising her. This novel was written in 1998, a year after Princess Diana’s death, when this issue, and also issues of press invasion of privacy, would have been very current.

There was a real let-down for me, though: in several instances, the characters just didn’t feel real. The ending, particularly, was a disappointment. (Major spoiler alert!!) The ending just seemed inconsistent with the characters, much too dramatic compared with what had gone before. Clive and Vernon had argued, had a disagreement, each thought the other was morally at fault. Fine. But it’s the kind of thing you can get over, or just not bother to call the person again. The thing is, they end up killing each other! It’s just bizarre. There’s a bit of a setup in that the woman they both loved, Molly, the woman whose funeral opens the book, died very slowly and painfully, and they’d both agreed that if they were terminally ill, the other one would assist in their suicide. References to Amsterdam’s relaxed assisted-suicide laws are sprinkled through the book as foreshadowing. But still, when they end up killing each other, I just didn’t buy it.

Some beautiful writing, good scenes – the Lake District one was particularly memorable - and it kept me reading all the way through. There was some great description of the act of creation in the parts where Clive is trying to write his symphony, and a good exploration of the moral dilemmas of the newspaper industry. But it was a big problem for me that at several points I just didn’t believe the characters would really do what the writer said they were doing. McEwan has written much better books – Atonement was fantastic. This was just OK.

Andrew Blackman Ian McEwan amsterdam, assisted suicide, composing, euthanasia, mcewan, Reading

When I first decided to quit my sensible career job and focus on writing, I suppose this is the day I had in mind. At the end of all the early mornings and late nights and rejection letters and self-doubt and setbacks and new starts and hating the chapters I loved yesterday and editing and wondering and dreaming and starting again yet again, I finally have a book in my hands.

Of course, I had seen endless pdf proof copies of the cover and all the inside pages, and indeed with all the obsessive reading and re-reading and detailed line-editing had got a little sick of seeing them. But holding the physical copy in my hands, flicking through the pages and running my fingers down the spine was a different experience altogether. It reminded me what I made all those sacrifices for.

Not only that, but I realised that, at the end of it all, I have a book I am happy with. In fact, it’s a book I am proud of. I don’t know what the world will think of it, or even if the world will pay enough attention to form an opinion at all. But I am happy with it.

Andrew Blackman On the Holloway Road andrew blackman, novel, On the Holloway Road, Writing

An elderly, celebrated artist, Masuji Ono, is living in retirement in Japan just after the end of World War Two. His daughter is having trouble in her marriage negotiations for reasons he can’t understand: gradually he realises it’s because he is associated with the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, a period now discredited and blamed for bringing disaster on the country.

The theme of the book is the role of the artist in the world, and this is what old Masuji Ono gradually explores. As with many of Ishiguro’s books, memory plays a large role. Ono thinks back to his apprenticeship with an artist who devoted his life to paintings of the city’s night life, the “floating world” of the title, temporary and transient. Ono follows him initially, but then wants to do something more meaningful with his life and his art, and reacts against this decadence with his first rebellious painting “Complacency”, later reworked as “Eyes to the Horizon”, a propaganda painting used to exhort the country to go west into Asia. His motivations were good, though – his friend Matsuda showed him the poverty in the city and said that the only way to stop the people’s suffering was to make Japan into a great empire like that of the European nations. It was the wrong course, but as Matsuda says as an old man, “There’s no need to blame ourselves unduly. We at least acted on what we believed and did our utmost. It’s just that in the end, we turned out to be ordinary men. Ordinary men with no special gifts of insight. It was simply our misfortune to have been ordinary men during such times.” Or as Ono says, “Of course, we took some bold steps and often did things with much single-mindedness; but this is surely preferable to never putting one’s convictions to the test, for lack of will or courage.” This is contrasted with a character called The Tortoise, a slow imitator: “His kind do not know what it is to risk everything in the endeeavour to rise above the mediocre.”

Clearly we are meant to sympathise with Ono, even though he made the wrong choices. Ishiguro seems to be saying that an artist has to choose, cannot simply ignore life and paint pretty pictures. But by making public choices of allegiance, you lay yourself open to criticism and even ruin when times change. What is patriotic in one situation can come to seem treasonous or murderous in the light of later events.

Andrew Blackman Kazuo Ishiguro ishiguro, japan, novels, Reading, war

There was a nice piece about my novel On the Holloway Road in The Bookseller recently. It’s the main business magazine for the book industry in the UK, so hope it will get some people’s attention. There’s a scan of the article below, and you can also read it on my publisher’s website. Gives some good information about the book and the prize I won to get it published. (Scroll down to the bottom – it’s not “How to talk to girls”!)

Andrew Blackman On the Holloway Road book launch, bookseller, fiction, kerouac, luke bitmead, On the Holloway Road

It’s nice that some of those top bankers are “profoundly sorry” for allowing their greed to mess up the entire global economy. However, there’s something I’d like more than an apology, and the following clip expresses it best:

Andrew Blackman Political comment apology, bankers, credit crunch, greed, incompetence, ineptitude, unbridled greed, undeserving recipients of government handouts

“X” is when you feel yourself an object, not a subject. when you want to please and impress people, either by saying what they want to hear, or by shocking them, or by boasting + name-dropping, or by being very cool.

……

The source of X is: I don’t know my own feelings…..

….So I look to other people (the other person) to tell me. Then the other person tells me what he or she would like my feelings to be….

….That’s why I’m so interested in moral philosophy, which tells me (or at least turns me toward) what my feelings ought to be. Why worry about analyzing the crude ore, I reason, if you know how to produce the refined metal directly?…

All the things that I despise in myself are X: being a moral coward, being a liar, being indiscreet about myself + others, being a phony, being passive.

from Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag, ed. Davd Rieff, via New York Review of Books December 18, 2008. Extract from February 1960.

Andrew Blackman Reading character, diary, sontag

The writing grabbed me from page one: there is a real rhythm to it, and the description is beautiful. The first story in the collection is the sort of “lazy childhood summer holiday” tale that you expect to be idyllic, until the writer throws in really gruesome details, like a dog killing a mongoose, dead fish caught in hooks, a tourist vomiting in the sea, a dead bee swirling in the boy’s coffee, etc., etc. Then old Uncle Julius, who smells of pine cologne with a whiff of rot and decay, starts telling stories about his time in Soviet gulags. Then they get home to find the plants have all died because the neighbour who was supposed to water them died of a heart attack. And the near-starved family cat now looks at them with irreversible hatred.

So the tone is set. The stories are all separate but interlinked: images like the starving cat and details like the family’s history of bee-keeping recur later and remind you of the earlier stories. Much of the book seems autobiographical, as it ties up with known events in Hemon’s life: he really did leave Sarajevo for America in the early 90s, just before the siege started. So despite the apparent randomness of the stories and wide variation of writing style, the book is coherent. Hemon, however, plays with fact and fiction, leaving you unsure what, if anything, is true. In the story that struck me as most likely to be heavily autobiographical, Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls, Hemon’s character is called Pronek, and Hemon makes a minor appearance as a Dominican immigrant who wants to play soccer. A “Herr Alexander Hemon” also appears briefly in one of the lengthy footnotes to the Sorge Spy Ring as a researcher at the German Foreign Office Archives.

The overall effect reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges, a writer I admire a lot. There’s a sense of knowledge accumulating not logically but gradually, through the recurring images and symbols and the threads of stories running through each piece, even though individual facts themselves are distorted and played with. The contrast of the horrors of Sarajevo and the triviality of life in Chicago is handled very well, by focusing on the guilt of the narrator who has escaped, rather than adopting an accusatory tone of which Americans, I’m sure, are tired. The contrasts between a family dodging sniper fire in Sarajevo and a man in a Chicago restaurant demanding romaine lettuce instead of iceberg lettuce on his Turkey Dijon are striking enough and don’t need to be laboured. Thankfully Hemon doesn’t labour anything. His prose skips quickly on, letting the images speak for themselves.

Not everything worked – sometimes the similes were piled on too thick and sometimes they just didn’t work for me (how can pot plants on a step look like “servants with candles”?). And I didn’t see the point of the story The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders at all. But overall I loved the book, and definitely want to read his latest, The Lazarus Project, as soon as I can.

Andrew Blackman Aleksandar Hemon bosnia, fiction, hemon, Reading, sarajevo