Julian Gough

Forgot to mention, I'll be talking about the short story, and the BBC National Short Story Award, on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, later today (Friday July 4th 2008) at the maythesweetlordhelpus hour of 7.20 in the morning. (There's a seven-twenty in the MORNING as well? Who knew?)

Totally forgot to mention it in time for anyone to actually tune in, sorry. This is not because I'm blasé, it's because I'm totally untogether (and find it hard to believe anyone would be interested in my opinion of the short story).

 I will be talking for about ten seconds, probably, so you missed nuthin'.

There's an enjoyable discussion of spam poetry going on, over at the Guardian Books blog.  I just posted a contribution there, so I may as well repeat it here...

I'm a fan of spam. I like the way that, beset by predators, predatory itself, it evolves with furious speed. I like to have a dip into my spam box every couple of weeks to see the new trends evolving (like the recent "What a stupid face you have" / "You look so stupid in this photo" variations.)

Ben Myers is right on both points, it's a stunning resource for poets, but to make good poetry out of it you have to be a very good editor. Alive to nuance and resonance. I've been playing with spam poems for years. (Not just spam: this week, I wrote two poems I'm very pleased with, constructed entirely from the legal disclaimers on poetry websites.)

By using spam, and other internet debris, poets can essentially outsource free association. But the best comment on the perils of the method comes from W.H. Auden, in a letter to the poet Frank O'Hara, long before the internet:

“I think you (and John {Ashbery} too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”
-W. H. Auden

If your ear/nose/throat/soul (add to/delete as appropriate) are alive to authentic nonlogical relations, then spam and all the other digital junk of the internet are your friend. They can jolt you out of the deep groove of habit. The first and hardest step in surprising and delighting others is surprising and delighting yourself.

It is not often an author is driven by circumstances to steal another author's pig, but recent scandalous events forced my hand.

 Some of you will recall my glee when I was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize a few weeks ago, alongside such old and new stars as Alan Bennett, Will Self, Garrison Keillor and Joe Dunthorne.

A noble prize, previously won by books such as Vernon God Little, and A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, the winner is showered in champagne and given a pig at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in Wales, just over the border from England. (You don't get to keep the pig, but they name it after your book, and take your photo with it, to the great amusement of future generations).

You can imagine then my dismay when I discovered, shortly afterwards, buried in the small print of the Hay-on-Wye festival programme, the odd phrase "Will Self, winner of the 2008  Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize." Winner? WINNER?!?!?!

As the festival program had gone to print before the shortlist was announced, this meant that the prize committee had picked the winner before they had announced, or perhaps even picked, the shortlist. It was a stitch-up. But worse, I had been denied my rightful month of anticipation, tingling, hiccups and giddy excitement.

Also I'd put serious money on Alan Bennett to win. His The Uncommon Reader is a little masterpiece. Something had to be done.

I thought long and hard. The prize is named after that comic god, P. G. Wodehouse, inventor of Jeeves and Wooster. What, I thought would Wodehouse have done, faced with such provocation? Sat in his room and written another comic novel, probably. That's how he reacted to everything, including World War 2. As I was already sitting in a room writing a comic novel this wasn't much help. Action was called for, dash it. So I asked myself, what would P. G. Wodehouse's greatest creation Bertie Wooster do, nobly backed by the genius of his manservant Jeeves?

And the answer came to me as in a vision - as though the ghost of Wodehouse himself whispered in my ear - he would steal the pig.

For if there is one constant in the work of P. G. Wodehouse, from Pigs Have Wings to Pig Hooey, it is that God put pigs on this good green earth to be kidnapped. Not a chapter goes by without somebody chloroforming Lord Emsworth's favourite sow, The Empress of Blandings.

And thus I made my way to the Welsh borders and, with the assistant of my trusty gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves (not his real name, but he would like to remain anonymous for some reason), I stole Will Self's pig.

I sent the organisers this, ah, pignapping video, containing my ransom demands. Tense negotiations continued up until the last minute. They, understandably, did not wish to give the prize to the man who had stolen their pig. I offered, as a very reasonable compromise, to deliver the pig to Alan Bennett's door in London if they would re-award the prize to him. They baulked - Will Self was in the program - his angry fans, denied, might rampage, torching tents, incinerating Gore Vidal in his invalid chair... The intervention of a bishop almost led to a compromise candidate (Joe Dunthorne), but we ran out of time.

This, of course, left them one pig short for the prize ceremony. And thus it was that, as you may have read in the Guardian and Bookseller over the weekend, Will Self was not awarded his pig. I was wondering how they would get over this, and so I attended the ceremony in disguise. The organisers, rather anticlimactically, pretended an outbreak of pig disease had kept the pig away, and they showed a video of a pig instead.

And so the situation rests.  The pig is in a safe place, and receiving the best of care.  For now.

It is to be hoped that the organisers of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize will give in to my very reasonable demands and re-award the Wodehouse Prize to Alan Bennett. Otherwise, I'm afraid they will get their pig back sausage by sausage.

Harsh, I know, but when you mess with the affections of six comic novelists, somebody's going to get hurt. 

I'm going to be reading at Listowel Writers' Week, on Friday 30th of May 2008, at 2pm, in the Arms Hotel. It's a programme packed with some pretty heavy Irish names - Seamus Heaney, Anne Enright, John Banville, and my favourite Irish economist, David McWilliams - as well as the occasional top-quality foreigner, such as Lloyd Jones (author of Mister Pip).

There's also some good films showing in their Film Club. May I most heartily recommend Todd Haynes' astonishing, poetic, jittery, thrilling dream life of Bob Dylan, I'm Not There. In particular, Cate Blanchett's performance is as good as acting can get. It is more alive and true than most of our own lived moments. See it.

If you see me wandering down Church Street, don't be afraid to give me a shout.

Listowel rocks.

I know that some reviewers felt that Jude: Level 1 was all Greek to them. Well, now Jude: Level 1 can be all Greek to EVERYBODY. It's being published next week by Topos Books of Athens, in a translation by George Betsos. George and I have exchanged many profound, cultured and erudite emails over the past year, as we tried to work out the best way to translate "Ardcrony ballocks" into Greek, so I know that he has done as fine and conscientious a job as could be humanly achieved. (And what a fecker of a book to translate, the man is a hero.)

One of the great, odd pleasures of being translated lies in checking out who you're now being published alongside. It's a bit like joining a very, very peculiar football team. Like the players signed by a football manager, the writers signed to a publisher's list do tend to share some indefinable attitude.  Some publishers are attack-minded (lots of odd books, young writers, high-risk experimental fiction narrated by a squid). Some are defensive (rather obvious mainstream contemporary stuff and a lot of the more tedious classics).

If Topos were a football team, it would be very entertaining to watch. I was delighted to see that I now share a list with Philip K. Dick's Ubik (a book I bought for the second time, and reread with pleasure, earlier this year. Indeed, I've raved about Dick elsewhere on the blog).  An impetuous, unreliable, unpredictable and possibly drug-crazed star striker of a novel, very likely to score the winner with a spectacular bicycle kick in the dying seconds of extra time. Also, unfortunately, quite likely to get arrested just before the match.

And, though I have no idea what position it would play in,  I am deeply intrigued by a book called The Insane President and Female Pleasure by the Greek writer Pepi Rigopoulou. Freud, Bosch, Goya, Ovid, Duchamp... definitely my kind of book. Good to see, too, that Topos have an experienced midfield general in Fidel Castro, whose memoirs they publish in the autumn. Though Alain Robbe-Grillet may have trouble passing a late fitness test after dying earlier this year.

Anyway, Jude: Level 1, in Greek.

Tell all your Greek friends. You don't have Greek friends? Shame on you. Go to Greece at once, make some friends, and tell them.