Andrew Blackman

I went to the Barbican recently for two exhibitions – Radical Nature and the Free Art Fair. I liked the first more than the second.

The Free Art Fair was a great idea: have am exhibition at the Barbican and give away the work at the end through a random draw. It was ruined, though, by someone’s idea to have a children’s music event in the same space. Young children banging on drums and clashing cymbals made it impossible to enjoy the event or even to look at the art properly. I did like a text piece by Terry Smith capturing the artist’s self-doubt and self-contradictions, many of which I related to. But a lot of it I just couldn’t get into. Perhaps I’m just sore because I didn’t win

Much better was Radical Nature, an exhibition about “Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009″. It was very varied, with some installation pieces, videos about old projects, photographs, etc., and a bit of a mix of art with activism.

My favourite was Luke Fowler’s video about Bogman Palmjaguar, who has protested strongly against the degradation of his local natural landscape. He has been classified as a paranoid schizophrenic, something he disputes vehemently – but the more violently he protests, the more this is seen as a symptom of his ‘disease’. The video cuts back and forth between images of the man himself and the landscape he’s trying to protect, suggesting a connection between man and nature, between his thoughts and the landscape, perhaps even between the degradation of the landscape and of his own mental state.

There was also a section of rainforest uprooted and left to grow horizontally out of the gallery wall, which looked so incongruous in a bright white gallery space and really made me ‘see’ rainforest depletion in a new way. Also the artist Tue Greenfort had put a frankfurter on the end of a string attached to a camera and left it outside for a fox to find at night. Every time the fox tugged on the frankfurter, he took a picture of himself. The result was a series of funny and surprisingly cute self-portraits, although I could also see the artist’s point about the interaction of urban and rural/natural and artificial.

A series of photos of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline was interesting, but struck me as just straight documentary and not very ‘artistic’. Similarly a piece about how the degradation of coral reefs removed a vital natural defence against the 2004 tsunami and greatly worsened the impact – it was fascinating, but the sort of thing I’d expect to see on BBC TV, not in an art gallery. Other pieces, as usual with an art exhibit, I simply didn’t get at all – e.g., a set of tubs with kohlrabi and other vegetables growing in it was not art to me, even if it was in an art gallery.

There were videos and photos describing large-scale Land Art projects, like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake. I also loved the images of New York’s Battery Park City as a wheat field – this was after it was created as a landfill using earth from the World Trade Center construction, but before it became a residential neighbourhood. The artist Agnes Denes somehow managed to plant two acres of wheat there in 1982. I lived in Battery Park City myself from 2000 to 2001, so it was quite astonishing to see acres of bright yellow wheat in place of the apartment buildings I know so well, and with the dense concrete and glass of the World Trade Center and Wall Street just behind it.

Andrew Blackman London life art exhibition, barbican, free art fair, london, radical nature

Last year I won the Luke Bitmead Writer’s Bursary, an event that changed my life and led to the publication of On the Holloway Road. This year it is the turn of Ruth Dugdall with her novel The Woman Before Me.

The award ceremony last night was a wonderful experience for me personally. It was great to remember where I was a year ago, how things have changed since then, and to be grateful for it all. I also enjoyed seeing the event from another side, without all the pressure and nerves. I was able to relax and enjoy it more, to chat for longer, to meet some great people. Last year was just a blur!

Although I wasn’t going through the same extreme emotions as last year, it was still an emotional night. The award was established by Luke’s family after he died at just 34, shortly after having his first novel published. His mother Elaine and sister Tiffany were there last night, and Elaine gave a wonderful speech about the work they are doing through the Luke Bitmead Memorial Fund both to support fledgling writers and to press for a more open discussion of mental health problems. It’s a wonderful and brave thing that they are doing, and I’d encourage you to check out the site to learn more about it and also about Luke’s life (the site was originally his personal website/blog). Donate if you can, or buy one of Luke’s books… and if you’re a writer, start to get your novel in shape for next year’s contest!!

Andrew Blackman Literary events award, luke bitmead, ruth dugdall

Saw this interesting take on the body’s energy levels. At the moment I am working nights to supplement my writing income, so energy is something I always struggle with.

I generally don’t drink caffeine, but sometimes when I’m desperate to make quick progress I do. When I wrote the first draft of On the Holloway Road in a month, while working full-time, needless to say I drank a LOT of coffee! It worked well then, I think, because it was a limited time and I could keep myself going. In general, though, I relate to what this article describes – caffeine and refined sugar giving short bursts of energy but building up a “biological debt” which makes you more tired and needing more caffeine/sugar all the time to keep your energy up to the same level.

That’s why most of the time I avoid the coffee treadmill. Sometimes it’s a struggle, especially when I take my laptop to a cafe and am trying to write while the aroma of fresh coffee wafts over me. It’s so tempting to get that instant buzz. But what this article makes clear is that there’s always a pay-off later on. I will try to remember this article and its useful distinction between “two types of energy: one obtained from stimulation, the other from nourishment.” Nourishment definitely seems like the way to go.

How do you cope with swooning energy levels? From what I’ve read and heard anecdotally, coffee seems to be as much a part of writers’ lives as a laptop and dictionary. Does anyone else notice this growing feeling of fatigue or “biological debt” from too much coffee, though? What about energy drinks, Pro Plus, Red Bull, etc.? How do you find the right balance between being productive and staying healthy?

Andrew Blackman Being a writer biological debt, coffee, health, sugar

A man dies slowly and in great agony. He ponders the meaning of life, and this increases his anguish: even worse than the physical pain of a slow, lingering death is the spiritual anguish of realising he has wasted his life.

Tolstoy’s main target here is dishonesty and hypocrisy. This is established from the opening scene, when Ivan Ilyich’s death is announced, and the reaction of his colleagues is to think about how this will affect their promotion chances, while speaking the usual lines about it being a “sad business” and so on. Even his widow, Praskovya Fiodorovna, is more concerned about herself than her dead husband: after telling a mourner about his three days and nights of incessant screaming, she says “Oh, what I have gone through!” Then she tries to find out how she can increase the government pension money due to her from her husband’s death.

Then Tolstoy takes us on a quick tour back through Ivan Ilyich’s life, showing us that he also participated fully in this dishonesty, concerning himself with appearances and advancement. In every decision, even marriage, he is heavily influenced by what other people will think. With each promotion in his career as a judge, he attains more power and money, but it’s never enough. At each stage he simply spends more money imitating people higher in the social scale than he is, and wanting to attain that next level. It’s not coincidental that he sustains his fatal injury while climbing a ladder to show a workman exactly how he wants a new curtain to be hung. The novel is saturated with vanity, pettiness and materialism, and they cause Ivan Ilyich’s spiritual and physical death.

Long before Kubler-Ross, Tolstoy hit on the stages of grief in the character Ivan Ilyich. He goes through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, although not always in that order. He often swings violently between the different emotions, depending on his own state of mind and on outside events like a doctor getting his hopes up.

The only examples of honesty in the book are in children (both Ivan Ilyich’s own childhood and his young son Vassya) and in the character of Gerassim, the butler’s assistant. Vassya and Gerassim don’t lie to him or see him as an inconvenience – they display simple human affection and love for him.

Indeed, love seems to be what Tolstoy is saying life is all about – not romantic love necessarily, but a broader kind of love for your fellow human beings and for God. This is what was missing from Ivan Ilyich’s life as he immersed himself in petty advancement and the acquisition of meaningless accoutrements. This deathbed revelation at first causes him great agony as he rages against all the lost time, but in the end it’s what allows him to find peace.

Andrew Blackman Leo Tolstoy bargaining, book review, death, god, ivan ilyich, tolstoy

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

- George Eliot

Andrew Blackman Inspiration monday morning inspiration

Greg Watts just linked to an interesting article in the Financial Times about the recent spate of media hoaxes, like a boy supposedly trapped in a balloon and a fake US Chamber of Commerce press conference on climate change, and the wider questions of media credibility.

For me, the hoaxes are definitely a symptom of something wider, and not as worrying as the use of reheated press releases. One of the most revealing exercises we did at journalism school was reading The New York Times from cover to cover and identifying the likely original source of each article, i.e., the place where the journalist first got the idea to write the story. It was surprisingly easy to tell, and in a surprisingly high proportion, the answer was a corporate or government press release.

The New York Times, being a relatively well-staffed, carefully-edited paper, did at least interview other people, check the facts, and present as many sides of the story as it could. But still, the agenda of what it wrote about was largely being set by PR departments rather than real events or original investigative reporting.

These days, those concerns seem quaint. In a growing number of cases, not just in the freesheets but also in the ‘quality’ papers, the problem is not that their content is almost entirely determined by PR-created pseudo-events, but that they don’t even check these spoonfed articles or provide different sides to the story.

I don’t blame the journalists – it strikes me as largely a consequence of journalism entering the internet age without any plan or understanding of the business model. So news organisations have offered their content free online, with the predictable result that people no longer want to pay for paper copies. Advertising has fallen through the floor. Staff numbers have been slashed. And instead of having to create one edition a day, journalists now have to create unlimited editions all through the 24-hour internet news cycle.

With fewer journalists having to produce a lot more news a lot more quickly, it’s not surprising that they’ll latch onto any old hot-air balloon story that comes their way.

Andrew Blackman Literary news churnalism, columbia journalism school, journalism, pr, press release, pseudo-events

I don’t generally read this kind of thing, but it was given away free by a very nice lady on the L. Ron Hubbard stand at the London Book Fair earlier this year. I don’t like to write anything off without having read it first, so I thought I’d give it a try.

The writing was not bad, and the plot moved along quickly, with lots of twists and turns. The only problem was that the characters did not feel like human beings. And that, for me, is a big problem. There was a hero, a dame, a sidekick and a villain, and at no point did they threaten to break out of those narrowly-defined roles and acquire the complexities of real, living people. At no point was there any doubt that the hero would coolly win every battle, the dame would fall for the hero, the sidekick would provide occasional comic relief, and the villain would curse as his dastardly plots were foiled.

If you like a good, exciting plot with lots of action, this is the book for you. If you are interested in character, and want to read books that make you think about the world slightly differently, it’s probably best to look elsewhere.

The most interesting part of the book for me was the history of pulp fiction and the biography of L. Ron Hubbard at the end. He certainly had an adventurous life, and his output was prodigious: “Between 1934 and 1950, L. Ron Hubbard authored more than fifteen million words of fiction in more than two hundred classic publications.” He also wrote under fifteen different pseudonyms: Winchester Remington Colt, Lt. Jonathan Daly, Capt. Charles Gordon, Capt. L. Ron Hubbard, Bernard Hubbel, Michael Keith, Rene Lafayette, Legionnaire 148, Legionnaire 14830, Ken Martin, Scott Morgan, Lt. Scott Morgan, Kurt von Rachen, Barry Randolph, Capt. Humbert Reynolds. There are apparently 230 million copies of his works in circulation.

The pulp fiction magazines in general boasted thirty million readers each month – perhaps a fact for today’s short-story magazines to chew on.

Andrew Blackman L. Ron Hubbard iron duke, l ron hubbard, pulp fiction

“And in the end it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”

- Abraham Lincoln

Andrew Blackman Inspiration monday morning inspiration

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lmg/sets/69593/

A few weeks ago, I walked past an Evening Standard vendor, and glanced at the headline: “WORLD’S FIRST AIDS VACCINE”. This was big news – a massive scientific breakthrough that could save millions of lives. My response was to shake my head and keep walking.

People think the Standard’s circulation is plummeting because of the internet, or the freesheets. It’s not true. The paper is dying because of crimes against journalism, committed over many, many years. As it turns out, that AIDS headline was true – there had been a major breakthrough, and it was big news. But I simply didn’t believe it, because so many other times over the years I’ve picked up a copy of the Standard and found its headline to be either completely misleading or downright wrong. I stopped trusting it, and I was disgusted by its adulation for the rich and famous and its condescension for struggling Londoners like the striking Tube workers.

The simple truth is, if the Standard produced quality journalism, it could see off competition both from the internet and the free papers. London is a huge city, and people would pay 50p for hard-hitting stories about local life and politics. They just won’t pay for rehashed non-news, spiteful columnists and celebrity gossip.

A few months ago the Standard tried apologising for being so awful. This seemed at the time like a mistake – just reminding people of all the reasons they hated the paper in the first place. I haven’t read it recently but I’ll bet it hasn’t changed much after that apology either.

So as of last week, the Standard is being distributed free. This will presumably mean massive cutbacks and an even further deterioration in the quality of the journalism. The freesheets, after all, seem to be mostly wire copy with added vacuous features by incredibly young-looking columnists. They don’t break important news or hold politicians to account; they are simply a vehicle for advertising. The Standard will have to do the same if it wants to make any money.

This means that London will be left without a serious local newspaper. It’s true that many of the national papers have a strong London bias, so we do get local coverage. But a big city still deserves its own paper. It’s sad for London that it doesn’t have one, and it’s sad that, as a trained journalist and someone who cares about the news, my only reaction to the prolonged death throes of the Evening Standard is profound satisfaction. The only people I care about are the vendors who have been shouting “Standard, Standard, West End Final” across the city since the beginning of time. I’ll miss them. Anyone involved in actually producing the Standard’s curious journalistic mix of nastiness and irrelevance, however, thoroughly deserves their fate.

This post is obviously quite a personal viewpoint/rant – for some more informed comments on the subject, see Dave Cole and 853.

Andrew Blackman London life death of newspapers, evening standard, journalism, london, newspapers

I love the opening line of this book:

One could begin with the dust, the heat and the purple bougainvillea. One might even begin with the smell of rotting mangos tossed by the side of the road where the flies hummed and green-bellied lizards bobbed their orange heads while loitering in the sun. But why start there when Tayo walked in silence, oblivious to his surroundings.

Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s concern is with character, not with exoticism. If a Londoner like me went to Nigeria, I’m sure I would notice the dust, the heat, the bougainvillea, the mangos and so on. But it’s not what the character is noticing, so it’s not what we’re told about. There are no colourful backdrops here for Westerners to gorge on – they have been replaced by believable characters, struggling with familiar problems like lost love, betrayal, regret, guilt and the difficult balance between responsibility to others and responsibility to oneself.

Specifically, the novel deals with the difficult relationship between Tayo, a young Nigerian on a scholarship to Oxford, and Vanessa, a British colonial officer’s daughter. As an interracial couple in 1960s Britian, they face racism from passersby, policemen and notably Vanessa’s father, and Tayo also worries about whether his own family will accept Vanessa, and whether she will be able to live in African society. Many of the problems, however, are of their own making – they hold back from saying what they feel, they miscommunicate, they misunderstand, they lash out, they are unfaithful. And then fate and politics intervene at crucial points – as Tayo is about to propose, he gets a telegram saying his father is dying and he has to return to Nigeria. A military coup prevents him from returning. Much later, he is about to visit Vanessa in England but is arrested on his way to the airport.

I kept waiting for the happy ever after moment, but to my relief it never came. The ending is happy in a way, but this is certainly not a traditional romance. By the end of the book, there’s a glimmer of happiness but much has been lost. The characters’ trajectory mirrors that of Nigeria, as the optimism of independence is replaced by cynicism, outside exploitation and internal corruption, until finally, at the end, there’s some tentative hope for the future. I don’t think the characters are meant to ‘stand for’ the political developments in a literal way, but there’s the same sense of progress at a great price, bitter lessons learned, opportunities missed, hopes clouded by the memory of mistakes and failures.

One downside of Manyika’s strong emphasis on character was that, for me, sometimes the characters’ thoughts and emotions were excavated too thoroughly. Although the narration is in the third person, we have full access to all the thoughts and feelings of both Tayo and Vanessa – the narrative switches back and forth between one point of view and the other. The good part of this is that we get to know the characters very well, but I would have preferred for some of the character development to be shown through their actions and words so that I could guess or interpret their real feelings, rather than having it all laid out for me.

Still, I enjoyed the book very much, both for the love story of Tayo and Vanessa at its core and for the way political changes and ideas from Nigeria to Oxford to San Francisco are woven into the story. And, most of all, for focusing on the characters instead of the mangos!

Andrew Blackman Sarah Ladipo Manyika