Been a busy first month or two as arts correspondent. I guess highlights would be:

*Jack Thorne's play at the National;

*An interview with Mat Collishaw;

*Nigerian protests forcing cancellation of a Sotheby's auction (followed by The New York Times and the BBC);

*An interview with James Rhodes;

*Coverage of protests at the Turner Prize;

*Patrick Stewart's complaints about Broadway (followed by The Daily Express)

*Behind the scenes on Peter and the Wolf at the ROH, whose director, Tony Hall, I also interviewed;

*The suspension of the Royal Opera House's move North;

*A page three on Bob Marley;

*A splash on Joanna Yeates.

So I spent last week at Arvon centre the Hurst, in Shropshire, on a short story course. I'd really recommend going on something like this if you're interested in writing; the access you get to the tutors is excellent.

You're essentially there for four days. We had four three-hour workshops, two one-on-one tutorials (with Adam Thorpe and Olive Senior) and then readings in the evenings. Di Speirs, one of Radio 4's senior fiction producers, and the person instrumental in founding the BBC's famous short story award, also came down to answer questions.

I've also just been appointed The Independent's arts reporter/correspondent (not sure on the title as yet), so I'm going to be the point of contact for arts news at the newspaper for the forseeable. It's exciting, because we're also launching a new title aimed at young/lapsed newspaper readers imminently.

Here's my review of Geoff Dyer's essays, a book I couldn't recommend highly enough.

Finished "The Interpretation of Dreams" and this book on Riker's Island which was more interesting than I had initially reckoned, as well as picking through Adam Thorpe's short stories, Ballard's short stories, and Raymond Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" mainly because he was name-dropped by Yannis Philippakis in this month's Q. Also enjoying Geoff Dyer's essays. The following, a Jung quotation, stood out, among others, in Dyer's piece on "Tender is the Night".

"The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing...He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths...The only meaningful life...is...a life that strives for the individual realisation - absolute and unconditional - of its own peculiar law...To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his own being...he has failed to realise his life's meaning."

Wrote some things on Nick Cave, animal pyschology and a couple of historical documentaries.

Wrote a piece on some photographs accompanying "Restrepo", a forthcoming war film directed by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger. Also pitched and wrote page three of the paper on Alasdhair Willis.

Had a couple of weeks off. Read Gary Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story"; "Portnoy's Complaint", "Cloud Atlas" (jaw-dropping); a book of Iain M Banks short stories, "City and the City", Tom McCarthy's "Remainder" and Michael Kahn's "Basic Freud" (the excerpts below are from elsewhere). Wandered to Fulham library and now very much want to read this.

1. W.H. Auden:

"Bound to ourselves for life

We must learn to put up with each other."

2. K.F. Burdach via Freud:

"Dream is a bulwark against the regularity and ordinariness of life, a period of free rest and recreation for the chained imagination in which it tosses all the images of life into confusion and interrupts the steady seriousness of the waking person with a joyous childhood game; without dreams we should certainly age faster, so dream, even if not directly bestowed from above, may still be seen as a precious duty, a congenial companion on our pilgrimage to the grave."

3. Then Auden on Freud (not the simpering eulogy I was hoping for):

"...but he would have us remember most of all
to be enthusiastic over the night,
not only for the sense of wonder
it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
us dumbly to ask them to follow:
they are exiles who long for the future..."

"Stories" 2010

A short story by Michael Moorcock.

"We didn't want to write what we called Englit-fic: the styles and themes of which came out of universities in sad imitation of the great modernists. We wanted to write something that had the vitality of good commercial fiction and the subtle ambition of good literary fiction, reflecting the sensibilities and events of our times: stuff that would get us high with the sense of engagement of Proust or Faulkner but with the disciplined vitality of genre fiction pulsing from every page.

A few of us talked about a 'two-way street' to reunite junk, middlebrow and highbrow fiction. Some people out there had to be as frustrated as us, dissatisfied by pretty much everything on offer, literary or commercial. For ages people had discussed the 'two cultures'. We might just be the guys to unite them: writing for a reader who knew a bit about poetry, painting and physics, enjoyed Gerald Kersh, Elizabeth Bowen and Mervyn Peake, merging realism with grotesquerie and doing it elegantly, eloquently."

There's a repeat of the old maxim in here - something once relayed from Kubrick to Stephen King during their only pre-production phone call regarding "The Shining" - about the essential optimism of ghost stories.

I pitched and wrote a nice piece for our Saturday magazine about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Finished "Labyrinths", and Michael Swanwick's "The Dragons of Babel" (on the evidence of this he's the Armistead Maupin of the fantasy genre) reading "The Interpretation of Dreams."

"On becoming a novelist" (1983)

Came home from work and read this book, considered a classic, by novelist John Gardner, who once taught Carver. A couple of passages really stood out for me. If I were to choose one of them, it would be this (the other one was about choosing to study science over literature, which he had some interesting thoughts on).

"Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency towards churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know to be true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness; impulsiveness and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident."

"Boxer, Beetle"

Just finished this excellent book; reminiscent of Michael Chabon, I think, as well as Twelve Bar Blues (here's my review). I didn't much like any of the characters though their psychology was brilliantly rendered; eugenicist as repressed homosexual; bruiser who doesn't pay much attention to such things; free will versus determinism and all that jazz. Two digressions (language and architecture) as well as flitting between two times. I want to trace what came from where; the ideas are dazzling, and inspiring. Also completed Stephen King's On Writing, working my way through SF periodicals (or trying to, I'm guessing a lot of them are well past their golden age). Completed a couple of half ideas, Guardian Angela and Bobby Rodriguez which I guess are "flash fiction"; I don't have the heart to go back and fill them out. Wrote another quick story called "Carver beats the devil".

To read....

So I've been on a bit of an Amazon spree recently and I thought I'd upload this photo because I'm feeling slightly smug about it. I've got two weeks off coming up and I want to plough through this lot; have three pre-orders waiting in the wings and three more I'd like to read (including something by Jon Stone who I saw recently, but anyway). I think I should make headway with this lot first.

Oceans, The Deep, Coolth

A random week, but interesting. Had pieces published on Gwyn Prins' piece on A/C from the 1990s, one of the best papers I've read in ages; something on oceanography, again based on a scientific work which was as good as anything I've read, and a nice TV review.

Read The Big Sleep, some literature for something else I'm working on, finally London Orbital, (he loves the words "liminal", "plash", and "Italianate"); an ex-girlfriend's name cropped up in the acknowledgments, which was scary) and have started Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio's "Stories", within which the Joyce Carol Oates vignette blew my mind. A really tight, imaginative, visually clever narrative which was over in 15 pages. Not sure what I think of the Sinclair book, really, there's no real depth to it which is fair enough considering the ground he covers, but it's a very dense proposition. I guess it'll grow.

Harold Chapman

One of those rare pieces, speaking to an artist at the end of their career, which is really quite moving (the last time I think I felt this, really, was when meeting Liv Ullman at Karlovy Vary in 2005). Harold Chapman photographed all the Beats in Paris. I went to his home in Kent and spent a lovely couple of hours with him. His wife was taking photos silently throughout. The quote that really blew me away was this:

"I look back at those days in Paris as the happiest in my life. I discovered you could live frugally with very little and it didn't affect whether or not you were happy. All the worries people have about the rent, or the income tax, or insurance, had gone. Youth, of course, sees the world in different eyes. I am old, I can't see it the way they see it. But there are ways of existing quite cheaply."

I was really moved by that, for some reason. He has a lovely voice; I'd have loved to have uploaded an audio track of the interview. Anyway, as soon as he'd said that, my mouth dropped open. I finished the interview, pressed stop on the dictaphone. I looked up, and then his wife's camera just went "click", and she smiled. This is what she took:

I finally got around to reading my friend Jennie's excellent Costa-nominated novel, Inside the Whale, and Mr Satoshi by Jonathan Lee, which is brilliantly-well written. Am now reading Of Men and Monsters, a 1960s science-fiction book, and quickly worked through Laura Barton's first book, which is scarily-well written.

London lit mags

I wrote a piece on new London literary mags, vastly helped out by Pen Pusher's editor Anna Goodall, who came into the office and revealed herself to be a brilliantly cool and intelligent character. Have been going to a few of the salons in recent weeks and they're always a lot of fun.

I wrote a work blog about some of the short stories I've been enjoying recently and had some interesting suggestions.

Glastonbury 2010

Was in two minds about going to cover this, but I was glad that I went. I started off with a preview, then did coverage of the first night, Gorillaz's performance then a final night review, and finally an arts spread which I wrote between 7pm and 1am on Sunday night. We got caught in traffic on the way back; but I hope they let me do it again. I needed to blow of steam on Saturday night, and didn't go to bed, which made the following day quite challenging. I met some nice people who I'm still in contact with (including Vashti, whose brothers are Tom Baxter and Charlie Winston; she's an amazing character).

Bridge update

13/06/10 update. Have re-written The Bridge, trying to simplify it. Am reading the McKee book, China Mieville, and a couple of novels by people of around my age. Just finished short story collections by BEE, Jay McInerney, Raymond Carver. Kazuo Ishiguro's "A Family Supper" is quite nice.

Monarchy/anonymous bands

Interviewed Monarchy, who I've been obsessed with for about six months, then broadened the piece out to anonymous musicians in general. Went to Hackney to interview them via a laptop link-up; I really liked them, they seemed bizarrely human. I was glad they'd made the effort.

Also got to interview Patrick Neate, something of a hero, over the phone. It was nice of him to take the call because I think his wife was just about to have a baby. We interviewed him for my student paper for the first issue of which I was editor many moons ago, just as he was breaking through. I've finished The Pregnant Widow, re-read Lolita, felt obliged to read the first two Stieg Larsson books but I think I'm going to stop persevering with things I'm not really enjoying. On the other hand, Wells Tower's short story collection is ace.

Short stories #2

Spent a couple of weeks writing some other stories. I went for a run on Friday night and wrote Lost Cosmonaut afterwards. The relief of having got something done was weirdly moving.

The story is loosely based on the last minutes of Vladimir Komarov, the first man to die in space. I'd picked through a couple of books on it at the British Library - Epic Rivalry, and Fallen Astronauts (which possibly has the best subtitle in history), both of which are really intriguing.

Silver Tree is told from the perspective of a park keeper who is suddenly confronted with a silver tree that makes everyone who climbs it want to jump out.

Then there was Sky Island which I'm a fan of, told from the POV of an Ivy League undergraduate who kills someone while at a party held by a billionaire on a floating venue in the sky. Been loose with the details because I reckon the character wouldn't go into too many details. I got the idea for that on the flight back.

We All Need Space was the story of an old man going mad at the bottom of his garden; he's an amateur radio operator who thinks he's detected an astronaut's heartbeat (this was a first draft of Lost Cosmonaut which I kind of stuck with). Anyway, I'm going to leave these here until I figure out what I want to do with them. My favourites are probably Sky Island, Lost Cosmonaut, Silver Tree and We All Need Space, in that order.

Alan Campbell, who is represented by Mic Cheetham - and as well as being a very talented writer he was one of the programmers on the computer game "Vice City" - read a couple and said some very promising things, which I really appreciated.

22/05. I've been reading Interzone, F&SF, Pen Pusher, Litro and Ambit. William Boyd.

Rebuilding Haiti

Did a piece on rebuilding Haiti for the last ever cover of the Indy's features supplement. It took a couple of re-writes, mostly because I felt like comparing Haiti's reconstruction to historical examples was kind of invalid, given the uniqueness of its situation. When we eventually published it, I could see where they were coming from, even if I didn't entirely agree with it.

Ellie Goulding

Hung around with her for a bit in Glasgow for the cover of our Saturday magazine. She was really down to earth. On Saturday night she invited me backstage but I was kind of worn out.

NYPC

Interviewed the band in their North London studio. I was a bit nervous (since I fell in love with their first album) but they were very brilliant and massively accommodating. 

Hot Chip

Reviewed Hot Chip playing in Brixton. Wouldn't normally post a review but it blew me away. Went around to my good friend Dan's afterwards who I later heard had a rather bizarre night which I was glad I'd bowed out of early.

Losing on all fronts

Here's something I wrote for my work blog (which I don't normally link to, for some reason) about a paper published last year. It delves into the psychological effects of political attacks and I thought it was really interesting.

Delphic

Reviewed them at The Garage then interviewed them in Brighton. I didn't have long, but they were gracious, and funny.

Short stories

I took a week off work to write and have uploaded three short stories on to a separate blog which I'm hoping to update as regularly as I can. They kind of operate as writing exercises as well. The first is called "The Bridge"; it's about two kids who walk down to the marsh with their granddad. The other two I've since deleted, I don't think they're strong enough. (Kate le Vann kindly read all three for me). I'm also uploading them to Edit Red which seems like a valuable resource. "Patient" was kindly published by the guys at Short Story Library.

3/4/10 update: Inexplicably, Patient at Shortbread seems to be high up the Google rankings with almost 100 hits, which I suppose is marginally less painful than a kick in the balls.

KOC

They finally published my Kings of Convenience interview, something I'm unusually proud of. There's a link at the bottom to the full transcript, which is well worth a look, I think. They're very interesting people.