The War Against Silence: An Interview With James
Kelman

Interview by Darran Anderson.

3:AM: Kieron Smith, Boy is both a continuation of themes that have run through much of your writing (giving voice to the alienated, exploring grammar and syntax) and a departure away from the adult world, what inspired the work?

JK: There is no inspiration in that sense. If you are a writer you do better to write, and keep on writing. Some pieces develop more quickly than others. This novel developed from a few pieces I was working on over a lengthy period, especially one short story which did not stop. Eventually this story was not part of the novel. It concerns the boy as a 13 or 14 year old, whereas the novel ends a year or so earlier.

3:AM: In keeping with life, your books have a meandering feel, do you approach them with a plot mapped out or do you find yourself getting swept along as the book progresses?

JK: I?m unsure about “meandering”. Kieron?s life seems packed full of incident and trauma. I certainly don?t use plots, but nor do I get “swept along”. This is a working process. Creativity is not passive, I don?t see the creation of art as passive.

3:AM: You’ve said previously that books are the last truly free artform left, in what sense?

JK: I think I said something along these lines but not that, not precisely. The beauty of prose fiction that I see is simply that in order to create something you need only pay attention to personal exigency. If you work in drama there are all these other constraints; I enjoy working in drama - stage, radio, television, film - but it very rarely happens; all these other people come between yourself and the piece. And I?m not talking about actors here, but the sorts of pressure that gets applied to directors, producers and theatres. The work gets squeezed to the point where it hurts to continue. The most obvious example is language itself, if you want to work in drama, and create it from your own experience, if that experience happens to be male working class culture around west central Scotland. Be prepared to censor and suppress your characters, or write only from tiny corners of that experience. In prose fiction the freedom to work honestly exists, although you may have to fight for it. In those other areas of literature, I mean drama, there is only silence. That sort of aesthetic integrity does not exist in radio and television, and seldom on film.

3:AM: There’s a sense in your books that language is a battleground, that pride at the richness of language comes as a form of resistance against establishment-speak and that by denying the language of a people the authorities deny the very existence of the speakers. It’s evident in Sammy’s encounters with representatives of the State in How late it was, how late, the isolation of Patrick Doyle in A Disaffection and in the attempts to mould Kieron Smith “to speak proper.” Do you still see this as a battle still raging and have you seen any change between your first book and now?

JK: The distinction between battles and wars: people mistake battles for wars. Questions around language and imperialism have been to the fore for hundreds of years. My work still suffers in this respect, the new novel notwithstanding. The forces of reaction are what they are, they don?t go away.

3:AM: Do you ever tire of the controversy that your books inevitably stir up in some quarters or do you enjoy fighting the good fight?

JK: It is not a good fight. The crucial factor is the ability to earn a living, this is what is taken from writers who work on/from the margins. Your question suggests it is a fair go, an even fight, or some such nonsense. It isn?t. One side has power and authority and the other doesn?t. One has the power to stop the other from earning a living. It is better to be acknowledged as a writer than have to continue proving it all the time.

3:AM: You’ve said your method of writing is to keep several projects on the go at once, are there any that have gotten away or that you plan to come back to one day?

JK: A couple have got away; I thought I would have written at least one earlier novel but I could never devote adequate time to it. I was having to work in ordinary jobs at the time and eventually it did “get away”. However, I wrote many short stories from the wreckage. But maybe it would never have worked as a novel anyway, not at that time. Occasionally in art we take on work that we are not quite ready for technically, we need to work our way through other stuff before we can get it finished. It happened to me with my first novel, A Chancer. In order to finish it I had to write The Busconductor Hines. No doubt to finish Kieron Smith, Boy I had to finish Translated Accounts.

3:AM: There’s been a institutionalised view of Scottish history and culture that it ended with the Jacobites or the “tartan-and-heather kind of bollocks” of Walter Scott, an outlook that’s been shattered by yourself and colleagues like Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead and the sadly-departed Jeff Torrington, do you feel part of a new cultural era in Scotland or even the continuation of a forgotten buried one?

JK: A new cultural era in Scotland…? There is so much dishonesty around, so much humbug. Your “forgotten, buried one” is more interesting. Wouldn?t it be nice to see the radical tradition acknowledged within our education system. Imagine our college, university and secondary school students knowing about Alexander Wilson, Thomas Muir, Andrew Hardie, James Wilson and John Baird, about Hugh Miller, Helen McFarlane, Kier Hardie, Cunninghame-Graham, Jane Rae, John Murdoch and Willie Nairn, Agnes Dollan, Helen Crawfurd, Arthur McManus, George Yates and James Connolly; Patrick MacGill, John Maclean, Guy Aldred, John Wheatley, Harry McShane etc.

3:AM: For all its evocations of a turbulent childhood, Kieron Smith, Boy seems arguably your most optimistic book, do you find there is cause for hope or is the light at the end of the tunnel just an oncoming train?

JK: I don?t know what you mean by ?optimistic? in this context. The novel concludes towards the end of the boy?s first year at Senior Secondary school. I don?t know what that signifies. I don?t think it signifies anything. Already he has started dogging it, i.e. truanting. Who knows if he even makes it to the end of first year. He has already said “fuck” in the classroom, maybe he?ll fuck off altogether.

3:AM: What’s next for your writing?

JK: The usual: short stories, long stories, plays and essays.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
One of the most original and influential living writers, James Kelman’s works include The Busconductor Hines, A Disaffection, You Have To Be Careful in the Land of the Free and the Booker Prize-winning How late it was, how late. His latest Kieron Smith, Boy is published by Hamish Hamilton. Image courtesy of Murdo MacLeod.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-war-against-silence-an-interview-with-james-ke
lman/

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Book Related Board Games

About a year ago I mentioned Bookchase which according to their website:

Bookchase® is exactly what it says - a chase with books.

Bookchase® is also the world's first board game about books which comes with your own bookshelf, library card, bookshop, and your own set of tiny books to collect. First one to collect six books and head home wins! Simple really.

Bookchase® is a family game which can also be played by adults and is designed for anyone from 5 years upwards. Never read a book? - you could still win. Read all the books in the world? You could still lose. Dare you take the Bookchase® challenge?

Today, I was pleased to see it for sale in my local Waterstone's bookshop along with...Harry Potter Cluedo (aka Clue (US)):















Dark magic has been performed at Hogwarts. A fellow student has vanished from the famous School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?and it is up to you to solve the mysterious disappearance. Play as Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Luna or Neville and try to discover who did it, what spell or item they used, and where the student was attacked. Was it Draco Malfoy with a Sleeping Draught in the Owlery? Move around Hogwarts making suggestions? but watch out. Wheels on the board actually move to reveal secret passages, hidden staircases, and even the Dark Mark. Think you?ve gathered all the facts you need? Go to Dumbledore?s office to make your final accusation to win the game. Players 3-5, Ages 9+

Online prices start at £19.99 for the Harry Potter edition of Cluedo but several outlets appear out of stock. There was just one copy left in Redditch Waterstone's.

Read The Full Article:
http://eurocrime.blogspot.com/2008/11/book-related-board-games.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Paul Austers Man In The Dark

Man In The Dark (New York NY: Henry Holt, 2008), the newest novel by New York City novelist Paul Auster, is a devastating and brilliant novella that begins with the story of a man in a dream, and the man who dreams it. I can?t even tell you how many Paul Auster books I?ve read over the years (including seeing the films Smoke and Lulu on the Bridge, both of which he also wrote), including fiction, non-fiction, memoir and poetry (my favourite for the longest time has been The Book of Illusions). For the longest time, Man In The Dark moves between two opposing threads, of an ordinary man brought into an alternate universe where the United States is in a civil war with innumerable dead, and where 9/11 never happened, who is brought over to kill the author, seventy-two year old August Brill, who is writing the entire story in his head. If you kill the author, the reluctant soldier is told, then none of this will ever have happened.

His friend?s grandmother was born in Berlin in the early twenties, and when the Nazis took power in 1933, her Jewish family reacted in the same way so many others did: they believed that Hitler was nothing more than a passing upstart and made no effort to leave Germany. Even as conditions worsened, they went on hoping for the best and refused to budge. One day, when the grandmother was seventeen or eighteen, her parents received a letter signed by someone claiming to be a captain in the SS. Alec didn?t mention what year it was, but 1938 would be a reasonable assumption, I think, perhaps a little earlier. According to Alec?s friend, the letter read as follows: You don?t know me, but I am well aware of you and your children. I could be court-martialed for writing this, but I feel it is my duty to warn you that you are in great danger. If you don?t act soon, you will all be arrested and sent to a camp. Trust me, this is not idle speculation. I am willing to furnish you with exit visas that will allow you to escape to another country, but in exchange for my help, you must do me one important favor. I have fallen in love with my daughter. I have been watching her for some time now, and although we have never spoken, this love is
unconditional. She is the person I have dreamed of all my life, and if this were a different world and we were ruled by different laws, I would propose marriage tomorrow. This is all I am asking: next Wednesday, at ten o?clock in the morning, your daughter will go to the park across the street from your house, sit down on her favorite bench, and stay there for two hours. I promise not to touch her, not to approach her, not to address a single word to her. I will remain hidden for the full two hours. At noon, she can stand up and return to your house. The reason for this request is no doubt evident to you by now. I need to see my darling girl one last time before I lose her forever?

Through his novels, Auster has always been able to bring characters into places they would never have expected, caught in moral and ethical dilemmas, to see exactly what they might end up doing, something he manages to make not only a surprise to the reader, but illuminating as well. Do we live lives made out of the intricacies of fate, or by the deliberate hand of choice? The writer (as many of Auster?s characters are) August Brill dreams his alternate dreams of an America at war with itself, and the darkness that comes out of the further dark, while mourning his late wife, and watching his granddaughter mourn her boyfriend, killed overseas in Iraq. Through being caught between the real story and the invention, is the author perhaps working to cause his own death?

Through the novel, Auster works through story after story, eventually working through, for his granddaughter?s sake, the story of how he met his late wife, and the story of their lives together. Moving through easy dialogue, these exchanges are the strength of an already strong novel.

How long did it take before you saw her again?

Almost a month. The days dragged on, and I couldn?t stop thinking about her. If I had known she was a student at Juilliard, I might have been able to track her down, but I didn?t know anything. She was just a beautiful apparition who had looked into my eyes for a couple of seconds and then vanished. I was convinced I would never see her again. The gods had tricked me, and the girl I was destined to fall in love with, the one person who had been put on this earth to give my life meaning, had been snatched away and thrown into another dimension?an inaccessible place, a place I would never be allowed to enter. I remember writing a long, ridiculous poem about parallel worlds, lost chances, the tragic shittiness of fate. Twenty years old, and I already felt cursed.

But fate was on your side.

Fate, luck, whatever you want to call it.

Very much a post-9/11 novel about America, Man In The Dark is a breathtaking novel that brings together such a dark pastiche that he manages to illuminate the light that sparkles out of it.

Read The Full Article:
http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2008/11/paul-austers-man-in-dark.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

News miscellany

Joe the Plumber gets book deal

Pope “Eggs” Benedict opens new Catholic bookstore (from Moby)

Ah-yhuk! Parents in Florida (and not necessarily toothless ones from the swamp) want The Kite Runner banned for high school students

BBC has huge Doctor Who archive (from SFSignal)

Abebooks charity auction

Read The Full Article:
http://www.bookninja.com/?p=4772

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Five Things I Hate About Chicklit

Don’t be fooled by the title.  I love chicklit.  Some of my favourite fiction authors are of this genre.  Well, I do suspect that some of them have been crammed into it with a crowbar: it’s always been a mystery to me why Marian Keyes and Freya North, who both tend to address dark and [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/five-things-i-hate-about-chicklit/

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Awards miscellany

Rawi Hage finally nails one

US National Book Awards

Some coverage of above…

…And more

Aussie on new Warwick Prize shortlist

Read The Full Article:
http://www.bookninja.com/?p=4771

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Real-estate confessionals

It's now sorted out for real - as of mid-December, I'll be in a new apartment. It seems like the window onto a new life!

I've lived in my current place for eight years, in other words for all of the time that I've been on the tenure track at Columbia. Now, I don't mean to grumble, I've been very lucky to teach here and to live in New York and so forth, but there is no doubt that beyond the already nerve-racking aspects of life on the tenure track when tenure is by no means a sure thing, the notion that one's housing is also entirely dependent on one's employment (almost all Columbia faculty rent from the university, because the housing stock is very nice and the rents are below market rates) represents another turn of the screw...

Now I have tenure, something that one of my colleagues (perhaps five years post-tenure) described as in her own experience working like a kind of IV of security, dripping reassurance and stability into her veins in a continuous and ongoing fashion. And I'm moving into a two-bedroom apartment - it's just round the block from my current place - so that I will finally be able to get my office out of my bedroom, an important development given that ninety percent of the time I'm working from home!

More room for triathlon equipment and bicycle, too.

I am still renting from my employer, so there remains a slight grace-and-favor aspect that I'm not crazy about, but given the realities of the New York housing market, that's just the way it's going to have to be, and I can definitely live with it!

I went over there this morning to take a few pictures, which I thought I would share here...

The floor plan, a classic instance of messy Davidsonian note-taking:

What you see when you first walk in (the view goes through to the south-facing bedroom/study at the front of the apartment):

The living room, which is the first room you come to after a short hallway (it's not super-bright, the windows look onto the building courtyard, but it's a gracious room, and the apartment has lovely high ceilings throughout):

Non-functional fireplace!

The kitchen (a dramatic improvement my current one, which has less counter space than you can quite imagine - I am going to get a counter-top coffee-maker, a novel idea!):

The sort of interstitial place that makes this type of apartment appealing:
The main bedroom, very bright (both bedrooms are south-facing and get a lot of light, a priority for me):

The study/second bedroom (corner door is a second bathroom - the other bathroom is in the hallway between kitchen and main bedroom):

The view from the study/second bedroom, which is what initially sold me on the apartment (I am a sucker for this kind of view - also, when I first saw it, there were still painters and workmen and dropcloths and ladders all over the place, it was too chaotic to get a really good sense of the space):

The feature that will change my life:
To the non-New York-dweller, it is inconceivable the extent to which a washer-dryer in the apartment is a luxury rather than a common feature - at my present place, I can do laundry in the machines in the basement, which is definitely a step up from the laundromat arrangement to which I became accustomed during grad school years, but there is something utterly lavish and decadent to me about the notion that I will shortly just be able to throw a few things in the wash without having to make a whole production of it!

Read The Full Article:
http://jennydavidson.blogspot.com/2008/11/real-estate-confessionals.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Good List

1) Apple bread from Cobbs.
2) Pretty sparkly snowfall before you're sick of it (give me another two weeks).
3) Not getting hit by a car (so far), on this, the worst driving day of the year.
4) Brilliant Kerry Clare takes her Passion for Reading to Ottawa (this is more good for the citizens of Ottawa than me, since I can't go; lucky citizens!!).
5) Coming Attractions 08 now in select bookstores, with a bestiary on the front, and stories by Daniel Griffin, Alice Petersen and myself. A gorgeous little book!

Another place that's really swish
RR

Read The Full Article:
http://rebecca-rosenblum.blogspot.com/2008/11/good-list.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

A white wenchs black eye

MERCUTIO Alas poor Romeo! he is already dead; stabbed with a white wench's black eye; shot through the ear with a love-song; the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt-shaft:

Read The Full Article:
http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/a-white-wenchs-black-eye/

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

The Second Official Day of Winter

And this is the balcony this morning - 10 hours after the previous post. As you can see, the park next door is all white, and the sidewalk has already been cleared. Which is good!!

Read The Full Article:
http://bibliobiography.blogspot.com/2008/11/second-official-day-of-winter.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!