London ILB - FAP?

Still not sure if I can come, but will be there around 8 if I can...

Got here early. Pint of mild and a copy of Eric van Lustbader's seminal work The Ninja, which I plucked more or less randomly off the shelves of the pub, in order to justify my appearance.

LYRICAL
in its tranquility
REMORSELESS
in its violence
STUNNING
in its sensuality (aye-aye)
HEART-STOPPING
in its suspense

apparently. Surely how this FAP is going to turn out.

Oh I say, apparently it also

EXPLODES THROUGH THE FRONTIERS OF MODERN FICTION WITH UNPRECEDENTED POWER

astonished I haven't heard of it before tbh.

Hmmm. Seems pretty conventional so far.

"What the hell am I doing with a Mercedes? he asked hi
Self rhetorically."

lol.

Might just liveblog this book if no one else arrives.

Ah, my game pie is here.

Game Pie? I wish I could've joined you chaps now. Liveblog the pie at least.

Game pie was good, not great. We've got a quorum now. Intense discussion about the finer points of literature as I'm sure you can imagine.

where is this FAP?

somewhere near London Bridge maybe?

Yes, Royal Oak. Borough. Link upthread?

Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring, you fapping fellows.

The beer sounds good, on that link.

A pity, for me, I couldn't make it.

I have ended up destringing a guitar.

def coming, get fucked up talk abt books.

✓

Thanks to everyone for a wonderful evening.

Yep, was v enjoyable. The beer is good, pinefox. Still one of my favourite pubs in London.

Further to the FAP talk of a UK 20 under 40, just spotted this.

Slim pickings:

1 Chris Cleave (b 1973) His first novel, Incendiary, was about a terrorist attack on London and was published on July 7, 2005. The Other Hand (2008), a cross-national thriller set in England and Nigeria, became a word-of-mouth hit.

2 Rana Dasgupta (b 1971) Born in Canterbury, but now lives in Delhi. His first collection of stories was set in a Tokyo airport; his first novel, Solo (2009), was about a 99-year-old Bulgarian chemist.

3 Adam Foulds (b 1974) After writing his verse novel The Broken Word about the Mau Mau rebellion, he wrote his Man Booker-shortlisted study of John Clare, The Quickening Maze (2009).

4 Sarah Hall (b 1974) The author of four novels, the first two of which were set in the early 20th century in her native Cumbria. Her most acclaimed work is The Carhullan Army (2007), about a band of women rebels surviving in a Britain hit by environmental disaster.

5 Steven Hall (b 1975) His debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts (2007) – about a man who loses his memory and tries to create a new identity for himself – unusually lived up to his publisher’s hype.

6 Mohsin Hamid (b 1971) The Reluctant Fundamentalist – a literary thriller about a Pakistani man who may, or may not, be a terrorist – came within a whisker of winning the Man Booker in 2007.

7 Anjali Joseph (b 1978) Her debut novel, Saraswati Park, is published next month. Sharp yet lyrical, the novel, which is set in Bombay, shows the influence of Amit Chaudhuri.

8 Joanna Kavenna (b 1974) Wrote seven unpublished novels before her eighth, Inglorious, was published by Faber and won the Orange new writers prize. Described as “Dostoevsky meets Bridget Jones”.

9 Benjamin Markovits (b 1973) Part way through a trilogy of novels about Byron and his circle, this assured writer has also just published an autobiographical novel, Playing Days, about a professional basketball player in Germany.

10 China Miéville (b 1972) Inspired by horror writers such as HP Lovecraft and Michael Moorcock, his science fiction and fantasy books – including Un Lun Dun for young adults – have legions of fans.

11 Paul Murray (b 1975) His second book, Skippy Dies, a comic novel set in a private boys school in Ireland, was recently described in the Telegraph as “gigantic, marvellous, witty…heartbreaking”.

12 Patrick Neate (b 1970) Won the Whitbread (now Costa) novel prize in 2001 for Twelve Bar Blues, a picaresque novel about New Orleans jazz artists. His most recent work, Jerusalem, deals, like his first novel, Musungu Jim, with European encounters with Africa.

13 Ross Raisin (b 1979) This Yorkshire-born novelist’s first book, God’s Own Country (2008), followed the dark story of a teenage farmer’s son living on the Moors.

14 Dan Rhodes (b 1972) After his second book, Rhodes declared he wanted to give up writing. Luckily for us he carried on with Gold (2007), about a Welsh-Japanese woman living in a coastal cottage, and his most recent book, Little Hands Clapping.

15 Kamila Shamsie (b1973) The author of five novels, mainly set in the Pakistan of her birth. Her most successful work is her latest: Burnt Shadows (1999) follows two families from the Second World War in Japan to the aftermath of 9/11.

16 Zadie Smith (b 1975) Wrote the wildly successful White Teeth while still at Cambridge. Her writing has matured since then, most notably in On Beauty (2005).

17 David Szalay (b1974) Winner of a Betty Trask Prize, Szalay’s The Innocent is told from the perspective of a KGB agent in late Forties Russia.

18 Adam Thirlwell (b 1978) Clever All Souls fellow who published Politics at the age of 25 and since then the Milan Kundera-inspired The Escape (2009).

19 Scarlett Thomas (b1972) The End of Mr Y (2007) was a surprise bestseller about a student who discovers a long-lost Victorian novel.

20 Evie Wyld (1980) After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (2009) was a haunting first novel set on the Australian East coat.

The question is, for those who actually read books that have come out recently, is which author (and which book) shd I go for?

Rana Dasgupta sounds like the kind of thing I'd like. He mentions 'central European guys' and I'm usually all over that.

1 Chris Cleave (b 1973) His first novel, Incendiary, was about a terrorist attack on London and was published on July 7, 2005.

Don't read this. Eerily unprescient - bomb leads to chaos and riots etc, rather than people knocking off work early and going to the pub. Also, awful 2D characters.

I tried to think of something to say about that list, but it's been 3 days and nuthin. Uninspiring names, and I'm p ignorant. But HELL why should that stop me

SO, braindump: I don't mind Dan Rhodes, might read the new suicide-museum one, no probs with Foulds (but have only read poetry by him), vaguely intend to read Mieville one of these days and Sarah Hall's Carhullan Army at least sounded intriguing – 70s feminist SF redux maybe. Scarlett Thomas sounds like she has a taste for strange ideas? No, wait, "Her first three novels feature Lily Pascale, an English literature lecturer who solves murder mysteries," fuck it.

Markovitz maybe decent? Can't shake the illogical suspicion that his literary career is parallel to his sporting career: couldn't make it in the American leagues, came to play in Europe.

For the rest, mostly names talked up by people I don't trust, and fuck a Thirlwell; but hadn't heard of Dasgupta, that could be good.

(The fap was great fun by the way - thanks for suggesting it xyzzzz__)

So I got me a copy of The City & The City by China Miéville. Let's see how that flies. Will read the new Foulds at some point, was mildly impressed without being blown away by The Broken Word. Hated the tiny bit I read of his first novel.

I guess Paul Murray is interesting me there. A comic novel? Really? Guy's got balls. I bet you anything you like it's not funny, but still, I'm intrigued.

I bought the Paul Murray, but haven't read it yet--it was three books in a slipcase, like 2666, and the book design nerd in me won out over the usually disappointed reader of supposedly comic novels.

I think we should stage an ILB FAP in the first week of 2011.

If anyone is interested then let's discuss details.

You're a hard taskmaster, but reckon I'm game.

This affair shall be convenient only for those who occupy that there green and pleasant sceptred isle, right?

Possibly only for those in its decadent slum hell capital. Count me in! Anything but the 5th.

Liveblogging of this FAP on Guardian website for international audience. Page refreshes every time Gamaliel Ratsey picks up his pint.

Christ.

Any days are fine with me. For location, I do prefer it to be nr London Bridge (or surrounding areas).

we could still plan this

I can agree about London Bridge

Sounds good. How about this Thursday?

I think so!

Thursday, London Bridge is good.

The Royal Oak again?

fine by me.

Thurs and Royal Oak = all good.

def coming, get fucked up talk abt books.

― tetrahedron of space (woof), Thursday, 10 June 2010 15:43 (6 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Prob about 6.30 for me.

Probably won't be there much before 8 again :/

Not sure yet. It depends whether I go home first and change out of my wet cycling gear, you'll be thrilled to know. About half six if I come straight from work, half seven if I don't.

I was going to ask about this. OK will aim for 7 or after. Not sure I've been to the pub before, or then again maybe I have.

Can be a bit tricky to find if you're going for the first time, or not -

The Royal Oak, Borough

will be there twixt 6:30 and 7. ditched bike but trains a bit screwy. conductor has just said on PA 'I apologise everything's cocked up for you'. the fuck you say - I'm going to get drunk and talk about books maunder about stuff maybe slightly connected with books; couldn't be better.

Hey that was fun. No idea why I took against Michael Wood at the end of the evening. I don't really mind him. Sry for any table banging.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n22/michael-wood/presence-of-mind

oh! and you have to say that's magnificent.

meanwhile:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/06/annie-lennox-feminist

A good evening! Think we pretty comprehensively dealt with Mills & Boon, Tolstoy, The Magi, Norman Cohn, Nik Cohn, CS Lewis, Alasdair Gray, Paul Morley, Owen Hatherley, Jonathan Franzen, DFW, Tom McCarthy, Zadie Smith, James Wood and Michael Wood. What was the name of that 17th century troublemaker you mentioned, p.o.v - somebody Coates?

Back on Wood's WBY book: it's marvellous compared to most literary criticism, but it does repeat elements that were frustrating to me and, I think, Mr Wooof in the original essay:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n16/michael-wood/yeats-and-violence

The crack-pated dreamers of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ by contrast are ruined by hindsight, they were only dreaming, and it is not ‘enough/To know they dreamed’, and not just because they are not all dead yet. Even death will not convert their errors into anything but folly. But why is this? And who are they?

They are a class, as Roy Foster says, the old Ascendancy in Ireland. Elsewhere Yeats borrows a phrase from the poem to talk about Lady Gregory, who is said to be ‘indifferent to praise or blame’, a quality attributed to the law that was one of the pretty toys ‘we’ had when young. But then their youth in this sense goes back a while, at least to the 18th century, as Foster suggests, and by the early 20th century that class was nervous rather than idealistic, and many Protestants were arming rather than dreaming. Foster also invokes England and the Pax Britannica, and I think Yeats is skilfully creating a movable moral and political community, English, Irish, international, a now defunct club to which anyone who was wrong about the world can claim to have belonged. Or can be accused, by themselves or others, of having belonged to. Members would be, for instance, all the casualties of what George Dangerfield long ago called the strange death of liberal England; all the Irish people who hoped for a non-violent progression to independence; and in the club’s most capacious definition, all the inheritors of the Enlightenment, in Europe and across the world, all the believers in some sort of moral progress running alongside the 19th century’s manifest advances in science and technology.

Did such a club exist, except in a retrospective arrangement, to borrow a phrase from Joyce? This is hard to say, since the evidence comes mostly from the club’s repentant and guilty members, in instances full of self-parody.

I've always this pretty misleading and unnecessarily muddy, and Wood repeats it in the book. It's OK as a paraphrase of what WBY seems to be saying, but I think it misses the probable incoherence of WBY's thought, the fact that what he says likely doesn't add up and is full of special pleading.

So:
- the Irish Ascendancy shouldn't be identified with these other groups
- the Ascendancy is internally incoherent anyway, or is an idea (dear to WBY) rather than a real sociological group. Some Anglo-Irish were nationalists, some were unionists - they can't really be run together politically.
- once you get to 'skilfully creating a movable moral and political community, English, Irish, international, a now defunct club to which anyone who was wrong about the world can claim to have belonged', you are admitting that the group isn't real, is just a Yeatsian construction, and that it has little real connection with the Ascendancy. But in the book he throws in references to the Americas here too!
- Enlightenment? But WBY was in many ways an anti-Enlightenment figure! He believed in magic, gyres, myths etc! Once you let him stand as part of a pro-Enlightenment group you've lost whatever coherence was left in the construct.

I guess I'm saying MW is too generous to WBY here, and thus makes himself look much more historically naive than he surely is.

ps / WBY was not a liberal either, though admittedly in Ireland he struck positions that were comparatively liberal, partly in the name of an idea of Protestantism

Yeah, I think it was that paragraph, and especially the point about the enlightenment that tripped me - it accelerates from mild hey-wait-a-sec confusion into real incoherence. The attempt to reclaim him for a humane, liberal, fairly sensible worldview can't really work - like he's not a MacNeice - the nonsense, the self-dramatising (and the self-dramatising picking apart of the self-dramatising), the dodgy politics are where part of the energy and complexity come from. But to be fair Wood's alert to that elsewhere, so yeah maybe that par is a bad slip. Surprised that it was carried over into the book.

Maybe if we'd written letters of protest about this para to the LRB at the time, we could have stopped this material from reappearing!

Had a lovely time last night - was thoroughly vexed beforehand, in high dudgeon, and the evening proved just the tonic I needed. It's a total pleasure to listen to the conversation, and, er, boozily interrupt with the sketchiest of comments. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Sorry Stevie, missed your question - Titus Oates was the troublemaker.

Feel like we barely got started on Owen Hatherley & the world of Zero Books.