Andrew Blackman

The cost of feeding the birds has gone up a lot. It only cost Mary Poppins tuppence a bag, but in Trafalgar Square today it’ll cost you £500, according to an aggressively-worded sign that confronted me as I left the National Gallery the other day.

Now I’m sure there are sensible, practical reasons for this rule. I’m sure that the pigeons spread all kinds of terrible diseases, and that the government had to spend millions of pounds cleaning all the shit off Nelson’s hat. But the thing is, I’m not a very sensible, practical person. I prefer the pigeon-carpeted Trafalgar Square of my childhood to the sanitised urban space I see now. As a child I used to love chasing the pigeons and watching them flutter up into the sky, and standing in the square as an adult I wished I could have seen a child running around doing the same thing.

It made me wonder whether this is the way London is going in general. More rules and regulations, more safety and cleanliness, but in each apparently sensible regulation a steady chipping away at the soul of the city. Can a city be ruined by too much sense? I know that when I lived in New York, a lot of people there were nostalgic for the old city, dirtier and more dangerous, but somehow more alive.

So what do you think? Would you prefer to live in a clean, well-regulated city? Or one with more beauty and more surprises, but also more shit and disease?

Andrew Blackman London life city life, london, mary poppins, trafalgar square

Went to see an interesting exhibit recently at the Courtauld Gallery on the Strand. What I liked about it was that instead of just showing the paintings themselves, they built a whole exhibition around the artist’s process for these particular paintings, showing his preliminary sketches, talking about his ideas and motivations, etc.

The permanent collection, too, was worth a visit. For a small museum it has some famous paintings, like Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere and Van Gogh’s Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear. With the latter I was surprised when I looked at it up close to see some of the colours he’d used in his own face – orange, green, yellow, etc. I knew the painting but had never looked at the detail so much, and was amazed at how many different colours he used, many of which I would never have thought belonged on a human face!

I was also interested in Kokoschka’s Market in Tunis, a panoramic scene which had a curved horizon reminiscent of a photograph with a wide-angle camera. Erich Heckel’s Seated Female Nude was quite disturbing but brilliant. And I also liked Francis Bacon’s Crouching Figures, which was paired with Honore Daumier’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

The Cezanne exhibition runs until 16 January, but I’d recommend a visit any time to see the permanent collection. If you’re cheap like me, you can get free entry on Mondays before 2pm!

Andrew Blackman London life art, courtauld gallery, exhibit, free, london art

This was a very interesting collection of short stories from around Europe. There’s one piece from each country, so it really felt like a broad and varied collection rather than being weighted toward particular countries. One thing I didn’t like is that some of them were extracts from longer pieces, which I don’t think works very well. A short story is crafted specifically to fit that length; an extract from a novel, no matter how well-written, often feels dissatisfying to me because I feel as if I’m missing things by not reading the rest of it. Also I found it strange that, despite the 2010 in the title, the stories themselves were written between 2006 and 2009. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but I like the idea of surveying the best things written in one particular year. The 2010 just means that this is the inaugural edition of what will be an annual collection.

The stories gave me some really interesting ideas. They were so varied in style and subject matter, and even the ones I didn’t like at least had a fresh and interesting style. Nothing was boring or predictable – I didn’t enjoy all of the stories, but never because it felt too similar to something I’d read before. Some of my favourites were:

Bulbjerg by Naja Marie Aidt (Denmark): an idyllic family walk in the countryside that quickly becomes nightmarish – they get lost, the boy falls off his bike and is seriously injured, the husband confesses to an affair with the wife’s sister…

Resistance by Stephan Enter (Netherlands): reminiscence about a childhood chess teacher, which really captured well the dynamics of boyhood, the difficulty of escaping from the group mentality, the ease of going along with the crowd rather than standing up for a teacher who is different, better, but easy to mock.

Friedmann Space by Victor Pelevin (Russia): clever satire of the greed, chaos and corruption of post-Soviet Russia, in which the phrase “money attracts money” is taken literally and a character goes around Moscow carrying thousands of dollars of cash and ends up finding a lot more. I liked how the writer used the language of science to add a faux seriousness to a comic tale.

I also appreciated the useful information at the back of the book: very full author bios/personal statements, translator bios, and a list of online resources for literature in each of the European countries featured in the collection. I can’t recommend all the stories in the collection, but the book overall was worth reading. I will definitely be reading the 2011 edition.

Andrew Blackman Aleksandar Hemon contemporary fiction, european fiction, short stories

'Male Artists’ Dressing Room (Clock)' from 'STILL' by Roelof Bakker

Just wanted to give a belated mention to a really good photography exhibition in Crouch End recently. It was a series of photographs of Hornsey Town Hall, an Art Deco listed building that has been minimally used for a long time now. After Hornsey was absorbed into the larger borough of Haringey in the 1960s, the town hall was no longer needed for its original purpose, and there has been a debate for ages about what to do with it.

In the meantime, Roelof Bakker went in and photographed the old, fossilised office spaces. There was something very poignant about seeing the abandoned offices, the old clocks, the posters and furniture, the files and letters that were once so relevant but now lie forgotten. Some images were fairly straight documentary, others more unusual. I remember particularly a clock that had rusted, and the rusty water trickling down the wall looked like a trail of blood. And the exhibition title was well-chosen – there was a stillness to the images, with the people who gave the place meaning long since departed and only the objects remaining, in a kind of stasis.

I am so late in posting about this – the exhibition closed about a month ago! But there are some more details, photos and exhibition notes here.

Andrew Blackman London life art, Crouch End, crouch end art, exhibition, Haringey, hornsey town hall, review, roelof bakker, still, weston park

I rarely read poetry, but I enjoyed this strange little book by Ted Hughes. It’s full of dark imagery, violence and unexpected humour. The poems read like myths of the origins of the world, except that at the middle of them all is Crow, this anarchic, chaotic, ugly, violent figure, playing tricks on God and turning creation upside-down.

I was reminded of the Anansi figure in West Indian Folk Tales, himself of course of West African origin. I suspect Hughes drew on a lot of mythological sources in these poems, many of which I am blissfully unaware of, but it didn’t seem to matter – even in the poems where I wasn’t sure what he was driving at, I was pleased by the rhythm of the language, somehow different in each poem but forming a coherent whole.

There’s a lot more you could say about these poems – you could probably do a whole English Literature course on them – but I don’t want to go that deep. I’m happy for now just to have discovered that rare thing for me, poetry that I can truly enjoy. I’ll keep this on my shelf and probably re-read from time to time, if only to try to understand why this worked for me and so much other poetry doesn’t.

Andrew Blackman Ted Hughes book review, crow, poetry, ted hughes

There are different types of writers. Some like to write and rewrite and rewrite endlessly, refining gradually, each draft a little more perfect than the last. I am not that type of writer. I am the type of writer who likes to get it right first time and then move on to the next thing. It’s what I did with my first novel, On the Holloway Road. I wrote the first draft in a single caffeine- and adrenalin-fueled month, and the final published book was not different from that first draft in any major way.

The second book is different, though. It took me a lot longer to write, and is taking even longer to rewrite. I think part of it is that I wrote On the Holloway Road with no realistic expectation of finding a publisher for it, so felt more free.  This time I am expecting my book to be published, so I am being more of a perfectionist. Part of it is also that it’s a more complex book. A big part of it is that I now have an agent, and he is coming up with lots of really good suggestions for improving the book, all of which involve more rewriting.

At first I hated all the rewriting – in my head I was already onto Book 3. But as I get deeper into it, I am starting to see what is possible. I am really thinking deeply about every single paragraph, weighing up whether it is necessary, whether it could be cut, examining the pacing and the plot development. I am discovering for the first time the pleasure of watching a book get better with each draft, rather than coming out in finished form. I still wouldn’t say I like editing nearly as much as I love the thrill of the initial creation, the words spilling onto the page and not knowing where on earth they came from. But I am getting used to it, and appreciating its value. And I feel as if I am learning a lot from doing this – hopefully enough to get Book 3 perfect on the first draft!

Andrew Blackman Being a writer a virtual love, andrew blackman, editing, rewriting

Almost all writers carry a notebook around with them to record thoughts and ideas as they arise. They usually end up being quite random, a mix of the brilliant and the mundane, day-to-day worries mixed in with the germs of big ideas. To get an idea of what the inside of a writer’s notebook looks like, you could take a look at Ruminations from the Garden.

Strangely, it doesn’t end up being a bad thing. The narrative meanders around in unexpected directions, taking in corn prices, bestiality, religion, politics, weather, corn prices, cowboys, horse riding, the Lebanon-Israel conflict and pretty much anything else you can think of that was happening around 2006. But it does so in an engaging style and with absolute candour. If you can embrace randomness, then this is an enjoyable read.

It’s also true to life. Ford sets out with a clear plan of raising a small organic garden in the scorching heat of a Texas summer. He will clear a plot, plant it out, and tell us how it all works out over the year. He describes his rationale very well. Artificial methods of industrial-scale farming have made it possible to farm huge tracts of land with very few people, but at the cost of massive dependence on oil. Thirty gallons of oil are now needed to raise one acre of corn. The machinery, vehicles, chemicals, irrigation equipment, etc., are all dependent on oil in some way, and the oil is becoming more scarce. Prices are rising, and what happens when it runs out, or becomes so scarce that it’s unaffordable? Ford decides to find out, picking up his hoe and going back to old-style manual labour on one acre of his farm.

For a while, he sticks to this plan, and it seems clear what to expect. You start to enjoy the descriptions of repetitive manual labour, the attention to detail, the observations of things that are not possible to see from a tractor, the remembrance of old, almost-forgotten techniques that assume a sudden importance when combine harvesters and industrial pesticides are not to hand.

But then, as with so many great human plans, things go a bit awry. Other things get in the way. Drought strikes. The initial enthusiasm fades. As the book goes on, the garden becomes a less and less regular feature. You wonder what happened to it, sometimes, and then it reappears again choked with weeds, and then it’s back to some other anecdote. At first I got a bit frustrated and wished he would just follow through with the garden thing, but then I realised that he was just being honest. He tried to raise this organic garden in 100 degree heat, and it was really hard work, and sometimes he failed and sprayed weedkiller on the crops just because his back was aching and he couldn’t face weeding by hand, and sometimes he went back to it and spent all day and night picking tomatoes. That’s what people do. We work in bursts, committed one minute and distracted the next. What I wanted, the perfect story of an experiment carried through to its logical conclusion, was unrealistic. In fact, one of the points I think Ford was trying to make is that this kind of farming is incredibly tough, especially in the drought conditions of southern Texas in the throes of climate change. It’s a warning us about what to expect in the future, when our current, unsustainable practices are no longer possible.

When I learned to relax and go wherever Ford wanted to take me, I started to enjoy the book a lot more. It’s an entertaining read, much like listening to an opinionated, avuncular old relative telling stories at the bar. You don’t necessarily agree with all of it or follow the logic, but you enjoy the ride.

Andrew Blackman Don Henry Ford Jr america, cowboy, don henry ford jr, environment, farming, ruminations from the garden, texas, USA

I was on a panel recently at Whitechapel Idea Store with Alex Wheatle and Mark Piggott, discussing “London: fact and fiction”. When I heard a week in advance what the topic was going to be, I thought about all the famous London books I hadn’t read, starting with Alex Wheatle’s and taking in other big books like Brick Lane and The Buddha of Suburbia. How could I go on a panel and not have read all these books?

Well, in truth I probably could have managed OK – the discussion was fairly general anyway, and I could have just talked about the books I had read. But I don’t need much excuse to go on a reading binge. A lot of these books are ones I’ve been wanting to read for ages anyway, I told myself. So I stayed in bed for a week, apart from occasional trips to the British Library to find obscure titles, and basically just read constantly. It was wonderful.

To see the books I read, check out my updated 2010 reading page (yes, I know, Half of a Yellow Sun is set in Biafra, not London, but that was after the event!). Apart from enjoying myself enormously, I also felt well prepared for the event, and blew past my goal of reading 52 books for the year. The only downside is that now I have even more book reviews to catch up on!

Andrew Blackman Reading alex wheatle, andrew blackman, mark piggott, Reading, whitechapel, whitechapel idea store, writeidea festival

The opening image of Ashes is a powerful one – a group of kids trying to stone a cat to death. The reason? “Something to do”.

The tone is set for the rest of the novel. Bleakness, lack of hope, pointless violence, misdirected anger, innocent victims. The setting is Meadow Well council estate in North-East England in the early 1990s, site of a real-life riot which Crow fictionalises in this debut novel.

One interesting technique in the book is the way that characters are drawn almost with equal weight. There is a central character, Jack, and the main narrative is driven by the question of whether he’ll turn his life around after his recent prison release or get sucked back into crime. But there’s also an array of other characters who get quite a bit of space on the page. And even passers-by or shop-owners are given names, backgrounds, miniature stories of their own.

It’s quite unusual in the way it’s done – almost as if Crow is trying to make the estate itself into a character by describing all the individuals in it. The strength of this approach is that there are no cardboard cutout characters. Everyone in the book is three-dimensional and believable. The downside, for me, was that sometimes the story lacked focus. You end up with a large cast of characters and it can be hard to remember who Sean and Dean are, or Alex and Ashley and Johnny and Paul…

Generally in a novel there’s an expectation that characters are introduced for a reason. When they aren’t, it leaves you feeling a bit let down. Nathalie, for example, gets a lot of time and attention, but her impact on Jack’s life is not as big as I thought it would be. In my opinion the novel would have worked better if it had focused more sharply on Jack’s story, not the story of the whole estate. Still, as I said it was an interesting approach, and in some ways it worked.

Overall I enjoyed the book and thought the writing, though uneven in places, was very lively and fresh. Matthew Crow is still only 22 and I think Ashes is a promising debut.

Andrew Blackman Matthew Crow ashes, book review, legend press, matthew crow, uk fiction

This is a fairly short and simple autobiographical account of a boy growing up in Guinea in the 1930s and 40s. Camara Laye wrote it in 1954 while studying in France, and you can feel the nostalgia for his homeland. Although the writing style is quite understated, the emotion is communicated quite effectively, and it’s very moving in places.

As the title suggests, the book only deals with his childhood, and it is faithful to a child’s outlook on the world. At the start, his entire world is the veranda around his father’s hut. Then it gradually expands to the rest of the concession, then to school, the town of Kourassa, then the wider country of Guinea when he goes off to study in the capital Conakry. Finally the link with childhood is severed altogether as he gets on a plane to France.

The mixture of pain and excitement at each stage of growing up is beautifully rendered. He wants to be part of his family, to follow his father as a blacksmith or his uncle as a farmer, but always knows that his success in school is moving him further away from that. He is being marked out for a different future, his family are sacrificing to give him something better, and he wants that, but also wants to stay where he is. His parents, too, are caught in this conflict of wanting him to succeed but knowing that his success means his departure from their lives.

Quite a bit of time is spent describing the circumcision rite, which may be of anthropological interest to some, but was for me more interesting as a symbol of the other changes he goes through in the book, the pain and fear at something new, the loss of the old, but also the anticipation of being a man, the pride he feels when he is given his own hut and his own grown-up clothes.

My copy is from 1969, and made me realise a couple of things. First, the introduction emphasises again and again the “dignity” of the protagonist and his family, as if it’s some amazing discovery that Africans can have dignity. Some people of course would still hold similar views, but I’m glad that for most of us today the value of a book like this is no longer in the radical discovery that African people are actually human beings. The second thing I realised is that I need to start buying hardbacks – this paperback literally crumbled in my hands as I read it. Does anyone else have very old paperbacks (60s or earlier)? Do they last?

Anyway, I enjoyed this book as an insight into a life at a moment of great change, starting in a very traditional setting and moving very quickly into different worlds. A lot of the political context is absent – French colonialism, for example, is only a shadowy presence in the book – but I don’t see this as a fault. This is a childhood memoir, and does no more or less than you’d expect: it gives a faithful depiction of the author’s early years. I found it interesting and quite moving.

Andrew Blackman Camara Laye africa, african child, autobiography, camara laye, childhood memoir, dark child, guinea