I’ve written before about how I find the idea of gendering literature a slightly bizarre, although instinctively interesting, concept. It is difficult not to see the label of ‘women’s writer’ as derogatory – and I would usually resist it for any author I admire. But for once, this month, I am happy to claim it. Because if Anne Tyler is the ultimate example of a ‘women’s writer,’ it’s an accolade indeed.

You’ve probably heard of Anne Tyler. The …]]>

Queen of Baltimore

The aim of Bookdiva is to bring women who love books together, and highlight books that women might want to read.

I’ve written before about how I find the idea of gendering literature a slightly bizarre, although instinctively interesting, concept. It is difficult not to see the label of ‘women’s writer’ as derogatory – and I would usually resist it for any author I admire. But for once, this month, I am happy to claim it. Because if Anne Tyler is the ultimate example of a ‘women’s writer,’ it’s an accolade indeed.

You’ve probably heard of Anne Tyler. The 70-year-old Baltimore-based author has written 19 novels, as well as two children’s books and numerous short stories. She has won several awards, including the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has had two novels adapted for film and four for TV, and is championed both by critics (John Updike, Michiko Kakutani) and fellow writers (Eudora Wealty, Nick Hornby, Sebastian Faulks).

But you’re very unlikely to have heard from her. Notoriously private, she has not conducted a single face-to-face interview in 35 years and eschews all book tours, press junkets and lectures. That’s why it was a huge coup for Oxford Literary Festival to secure a public appearance last weekend, in which she was presented with the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence and discussed her new novel The Beginner’s Goodbye with chief reviewer Peter Kemp.

Domestic is the most common word used to describe Tyler’s particular brand of brilliance; she is, as the New Statesman’s Lisa Allardice puts it, “drawn to small scale domestic dramas…an exquisite chronicler of the everyday.” Her novels, in which she herself admits that “nothing really happens,” eschew complex plots or experiments with language and form for a focus on character and relationships. She excels in family politics and in creating set pieces where they are put under pressure and exposed; as Kemp reflected, she has a mean way with a disastrous Thanksgiving dinner.

In short, she ticks all the boxes for ‘female literature’.

CONTINUE READING AT BOOKDIVA…

Really good porridge. A fantastic new word. Gary Oldman. Especially Gary Oldman in The Fifth Element, bleeding black goo. Mmm.

However, this means that I tend to find anything labelled ‘erotica’ pretty unerotic. There are only so many combinations of body parts, fluids and squishy sounds in the world, but that’s not the problem – there are only so many plots, too, and a lot of people have done amazing things with those. No, my issue is that most erotica is quite simply bland. Badly imagined, badly written and dull.

So I was excited …]]>

Fifty Shades of Black and White

Unexpected things turn me on.

Really good porridge. A fantastic new word. Gary Oldman. Especially Gary Oldman in The Fifth Element, bleeding black goo. Mmm.

However, this means that I tend to find anything labelled ‘erotica’ pretty unerotic. There are only so many combinations of body parts, fluids and squishy sounds in the world, but that’s not the problem – there are only so many plots, too, and a lot of people have done amazing things with those. No, my issue is that most erotica is quite simply bland. Badly imagined, badly written and dull.

So I was excited when the press got all hot and bothered about Fifty Shades of Grey, EL James’s bondage novel that has become the fastest selling book of the year and is heralded with ‘bringing erotica into the mainstream.’ Last year a friend bought me Taschen’s Le Petite Morte as a wedding present: a beautiful, sensual, downright hot collection of photographs depicting female orgasm. I was hoping that FSOG might be the literary equivalent of this: smart, unsentimental and actually sexy. I’d love to read a piece of erotica that properly turned me on. It would make the No.38 so much more fun (although the new Routemasters are titillatingly buff).

Oh well. Instead, I’ve just trudged through far too many badly written, adjective-laden pages of tat. The erotic revolution is, unsurprisingly, a PR tease. But what really worries me is that this stuff is supposed to be, according to James’s publisher Selina Walker, ”liberating for women”: a bold reflection of modern female desires.

Because this is ‘empowerment’ according to Made In Chelsea. The hero is a horrifying blank, a moneyed puppet woven from the dreams of a thirteen year old with a daddy complex weaned on Justin Bieber and Simon Cowell. My thighs do not moisten instantly at the sight of helicopters and yachts, giant sandstone lobbies and state-of-the-art stainless steel fireplaces or, indeed, “an imposing U-shaped sofa that could seat ten adults comfortably.” Smouldering grey eyes do not characterisation make. A small part of me (and not the small “clearly defined sac in a layer between the vagina and the urethra close to the perineal membrane” part of me) is serious about this. It worries for the girls.

And don’t tell me to turn my brain off. I’m a woman. The brain bit is half the fun, and there is nothing less sexy than stupid (Hey. Thor has a kick-ass intellect somewhere in there. I can tell.) I like a fuck as much as a winsome woo, but you’re going to have to fuck my brain too. I challenge you to read e.e.cummings’s i like my body when it is with your and not be more turned on in fourteen lines than you were in forty chapters of magnolia-scented designer whippage.

Am I wrong? If so, do enlighten me as to what I am so obviously missing. Otherwise, please offer your recommendations for the best properly erotic fiction out there.

The more surprising the better.

It seems only fitting that, …]]>

The magic behind the magic

London’s new smash musical Singin’ In The Rain has more than its fair share of memorable moments. And although the scene where Don Lockwood (Adam Cooper) joyfully splashes his way across the waterlogged stage wins out on feelgood factor, the funniest is the screening of Lockwood and his co-star Lina Lamont (Katherine Kingsley)’s disastrous first attempt to make a talkie. As their film unravels, complete with missed cues, dodgy sound and terrible diction, so do the audience; it’s a comedy set-piece only matched when ingénue Kathy Seldon (Scarlett Strallen) dubs the rushes later in the show.

It seems only fitting that, in a play about movies, a piece of film has a starring role. But while many of the audience may wonder who created the impressive lighting, set or sound, few will question who was behind the projection.

“We get mentioned a lot more now”, grins Ian William Galloway, the beguiling green-eyed 30-year-old from east London whose video design for the show has garnered glowing reviews from the Guardian, Telegraph and Evening Standard. “Generally the rule in lighting and sound and set is that if you don’t get mentioned that’s fine – it’s only if you get mentioned badly that it’s an issue! It’s perhaps been a case of reviewers not quite being sure who did what. But that’s solving itself as the naming becomes more consistent. Video designer or projection designer. They know what that means.”

The rest of us may have a little catching up to do. As a recent piece in the Guardian on projected theatre sets suggested, there is still an innate antagonism between theatre and video. Declaring that “using video technology for settings is nothing but the 21st-century equivalent of the painted backdrop” and that it “[goes] against the very essence of theatre: imagination”, the article prompted a storm of comments. But as Galloway points out, this represents only one application of video design in a fast innovating industry.

“All the technology, such as projection mapping, has been around for the past ten years. Because it was expensive people initially wanted to wow audiences by creating big spangly 3D projected sets. But now you can buy a projector from PC World for £300 that is as bright as what we were using forHis Dark Materials. This means people aren’t pre-deciding that they have to use it in a certain high-profile way, which means the design gets better. You can walk in and ask: what do you think it needs? What do we want to we say with the video? It could be subtle, it could only appear once. It’s like sound: how many effects you have has no relation on how good or bad the final product is.”

CONTINUE READING AT BOOKDIVA…

In his session ‘Storytelling: The Past and the Future of the American Novel‘, Grossman – journalist, book critic for TIME magazine and author of Codex, The Magicians and The Magician King – focused on the thorny issue of genre versus literary fiction – a topic I’ve publicly grappled with myself several times (for example, here and here).

Grossman’s thesis is that the very concept of …]]>

Grossman rocking the 'Oxford pose'

Thus spake Lev Grossman at the Oxford Literary Festival, in an hour of erudite, funny, self-effacing brilliance that made me jump up and punch the air in delight (Inside. I’m not American).

In his session ‘Storytelling: The Past and the Future of the American Novel‘, Grossman – journalist, book critic for TIME magazine and author of Codex, The Magicians and The Magician King – focused on the thorny issue of genre versus literary fiction – a topic I’ve publicly grappled with myself several times (for example, here and here).

Grossman’s thesis is that the very concept of novels being split into ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ camps took hold during the 1920s with the modernist project to reject plot and narrative as a valid way of representing the world. Until then, the gothic horror of Dracula, the self-referential experimentation of Tristram Shandy and the romantic comedy of Pride and Prej had been permitted to happily co-exist under the single, unjudgmental category of  fiction. But while Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner and Hemingway and co. drowned themselves in words, whiskies and rivers, an equally self-conscious populist pole of fiction started to flourish with the establishment of DC Comics and Mills & Boon and the flourishing of writers such as HG Wells, Edgar Wallace and Raymond Chandler. Literary? Genre? In your corners, and get the gum guards in. At the same time, the New Criticism emerged blinking and bitching onto the scene; and so whole generation of literary critics was weaned on a vocabulary that understood how to parse and praise the rarefied pursuit of language and form, but not the plebeian one of plot and imagination.

However, according to Grossman, those boundaries are now dissolving once more. The modernist project was important and immeasurably valuable, producing most of the best literature ever written, but it’s pretty much run out of steam as DeLillo, Franzen, McEwan and co disappear up their own plodding asses. And the most important playground in which this experiment is taking place? Fantasy. From Susannah Clarke to Sadie Jones, Jennifer Egan to David Mitchell, ‘literary’ writers have been getting away with adding magicians, zombies, parallel worlds and all kinds of craziness into their fiction without publishers feeling the need to put a half-naked woman with long hair and a long sword on their dustjacket. And ‘genre’ novelists such as William Gibson, Philip Pullman, Patrick Ness, China Miéville and Grossman himself have been blurring the lines between sci-fi, fantasy, realism and top class grown up writing.

“Fantasy is indisputably the idiom people are paying attention to.”

“If Joyce wrote Ulysses now, he’d make it a fantasy.”

“I think any ambitious writer right now would be mad not to be exploring fantasy.”

My name is Molly Flatt and I am writing a fantasy novel. Man, that stings. I’ve spent the past year trying to describe my book using anything other than the f-word – literary adventure, imaginative drama, literary/genre crossover  -and confusing the hell out of everyone. But in one modest, magical hour Grossman articulated why – despite all my attempts to stick to a ‘literary drama’ that has at least a chance of being reviewed by the broadsheets or, y’know, winning the Nobel – I find myself unable to write anything but.

From the buzz around Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Great Gatsby adaptation to the flapper frocks that colonised last month’s Fashion Week, jazz has burst out of its earnest middle-aged-esoterica box and into the youthful mainstream. Last October’s London Jazz Festival – which has grown from humble origins to become the capital’s largest ten-day city-wide music festival – was notable for the volume of excellent home grown talent on display, such …]]>

Noemi Nuti at Phraseology

If you asked any London culture vulture to identify the hottest trends in the capital this spring, jazz and spoken word are both likely to figure on their list.

From the buzz around Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Great Gatsby adaptation to the flapper frocks that colonised last month’s Fashion Week, jazz has burst out of its earnest middle-aged-esoterica box and into the youthful mainstream. Last October’s London Jazz Festival – which has grown from humble origins to become the capital’s largest ten-day city-wide music festival – was notable for the volume of excellent home grown talent on display, such as Mobo-winning quartet Empirical and virtuoso saxophone and jazz duo McCormack and Yarde.

In parallel, the renaissance in spoken word events around the capital, which have been deservedly hyped over the past couple of years, show no sign of abating. Book Slam, “London’s first and best literary nightclub” is packed every month and even offers merchandise from a cloth-bound hardback annual to tote bags and T-shirts. Literary Death Match, the raucous American competitive-reading smackdown, has chapters in 36 cities across the world, and London’s is as vibrant as any. And last month, Shoreditch House’s Literary Salon featured Alexandra Shulman reading alongside Chris Cleave, Colm Tóibín and Richard Holloway. If this is a trend, it’s not only rather old, it’s one that has serious legs.

So could the hottest place to be seen in April be Phraseology, a new Tuesday night event held at Shoreditch’s Bar Music Hall? The brainchild of saxophonist Dee Byrne and author Elanor Dymott, Phraseology combines exciting new jazz acts with literary readings and short films in what Byrne calls an “attentive and supportive” atmosphere. “Jazz is composition in real time through improvisation,” Byrne explains. “Poetry or novels take much longer to complete but are essentially an improvisation with words that took months or years to complete. Spoken word is probably the closest to an improvising jazz musician, where the artist is putting phrases together in the moment. The idea was to create a cross media audience.”

Of course, the combination of jazz and poetry is not a new idea.

CONTINUE READING AT FUTURESPACE…

It would …]]>

Do you celebrate or denigrate romantic fiction?

lt would be all too easy to satirise the Romantic Novelists’ Association Awards (RoNAs). When I’d traipsed through central London to One Whitehall Place – a particularly English breed of hotel, all polished banisters and dense swirly carpets, once unspeakably grand and now saturated with an Alan Bennett sort of weary melancholy – been misdirected by a miserable Polish waiter in a boardroom, and finally found my way up the twisting staircase to the Gladstone Library, I was hit by a hell of a lot of pink. Pink banners. Pink book jackets. And, oh yes, pink sparkling wine.

It would not be unfair to say that the vast majority of the people drinking the pink sparkling wine were women. And that the vast majority of those women had shoes that matched their jackets, grown-up children and voices redolent of bracing Cotswold walks. The whole evening unfolded rather like a Alan Ayckbourn play about a novelists’ awards ceremony: stale canapés; awkward jokes from the podium; trembling winners who seemed frankly happy to be let out of the house; agents, editors and journos swapping in-jokes and gossip laced with sly one-upmanship barbs.

But satire would also be a lazy response, and one that underestimates the passion, skill and downright importance of the people in that room. Snobbery from the literary establishment is all very well, but sales of romantic fiction account for a huge slice of the publishing pie. In 2007, romantic novels represented 22% of all adult fiction purchased.  Crime accounts for 20%, adventure/thriller 14.5%, and general popular fiction 26%; which doesn’t leave a lot of room for all those experimental postmodern epics we’re supposed to be feeding our brains. We might read the reviews of Bolano and Roth over breakfast, but when we jump on the tube most of us have a North or a Fforde in our hand.

CONTINUE READING AT BOOKDIVA…

The lust was palpable. As London’s designers – young and old, established and raw, buttoned-up and bold – paraded their vision for spring/summer 2012, the imaginations of a monochrome, wind-chilled audience sprouted a rainbow.

Jewel tones normally reserved for autumn shone on in Roksanda Ilincic’s fuchsia and gold structured dresses and Mark Fast’s ruby …]]>

A British icon on a British upstart

What are you wearing? What proportion of it is black, white, cream, grey, navy, camel, nude or beige? Be honest, now. Here’s a little snippet from ‘Basic Instinct’, my feature in the latest issue of PHOENIX which examines the chromatic quirks of the fash pack.

The lust was palpable. As London’s designers – young and old, established and raw, buttoned-up and bold – paraded their vision for spring/summer 2012, the imaginations of a monochrome, wind-chilled audience sprouted a rainbow.

Jewel tones normally reserved for autumn shone on in Roksanda Ilincic’s fuchsia and gold structured dresses and Mark Fast’s ruby and garnet skirt suits. Meadham Kirchoff and Richard Nicoll tapped the sweeter end of the spectrum with kitsch, sugary pastels. Peter Pilotto’s Indonesian prints blossomed in a tropical kaleidoscope of greens, pinks, blues and yellows, while Antonio Berardi employed a dramatic scarlet note with Valentino-esque aplomb.

So why, then, will the majority of that enraptured audience, clad like a murder of expensive crows, fail to buy a single item that veers this side of charcoal? And why will so many of the rest of us drool over rich dyes in magazines and then compromise on a lighter shade of ebony in the shop? At both Net-a-Porter and eBay, the volume of black clothes, shoes and accessories bought and sold is higher than for any other colour, regardless of the season; so bitching about fashion folk’s penchant for the dark side is pot-kettlery of the highest order.

It all begs the simple question: why do so few of us wear colour well?

If you haven’t already stumbled upon it at London Fashion Week, PHOENIX is a quarterly print magazine that represents all that is young, rising and provocative in London’s fashion and culture scenes. Our sixth issue is about everything bespoke, handcrafted and personal, and PHOENIX’s new website has also just launched, with everything from a gorgeous original fashion shoot ‘Post Modernists‘, to to a feature on social fashion apps, to an interview with London mayoral candidate Siobhan Benita.

Imagine that a sexy fashion version of Wired marries New Scientist and has an aspirational affair with The New Yorker, and you have an idea of what we’re aiming for. Ambitious? Maybe. But we’re going to have a hell of a lot of fun trying.

This is my second issue as features editor, and I’m really proud of how PHOENIX is evolving. It’s a privilege to work with the likes of high editrix and wordqueen Hannah Kane; creative director Leigh Keily; fashion editor Rebekah Roy; beauty editor Lan Nyguyen; music editor Kate Nash and books editor Abigail Tarttelin. Click through and get to know them; these aren’t just young, hard-working creatives at the peak of their game, they’re wonderfully down to earth and unpretentious people with a passion for producing something heartfelt, witty and intelligent in what can be a rather po-faced industry.

We’d love you to help us improve and grow. One way is by subscribing or buying a copy and then submitting all your feedback and ideas for what and who we should be talking about – here, through Twitter, or on our blog. But you could also become part of PHOENIX. I’m looking to showcase seriously superior young writing talent so if you have a pitch for a feature online or in the print issue, get in touch.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, right now I am wearing a pair of bright coral Uniqlo jeans. Screw black. Spring is in the air.

Silk is undeniably associated with elitism, elegance and expense. But according to biological engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto, it is in fact “the ancient material of the future”. In his brilliant TED Talk, Omenetto demonstrates how this “sustainable natural Kevlar” can …]]>

Can you think of a better use for 1.2 million spiders?

It’s whispering down the catwalk at Somerset House for London Fashion Week. It’s caressed by every tourist nipping into Liberty’s for an iconic paisley scarf.  And it’s the star of the current exhibition at the V&A, in the form of a shimmering golden cape that took 1.2 million Madagascan spiders, eight years and a team of expert handloom weavers to create.

Silk is undeniably associated with elitism, elegance and expense. But according to biological engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto, it is in fact “the ancient material of the future”. In his brilliant TED Talk, Omenetto demonstrates how this “sustainable natural Kevlar” can be used to create holograms, optical fibres, dissolvable body implants, microneedles and LED tattoos. Far from being a heritage fabric, he believes that this “new old material could profoundly impact high technology, material science, medicine and global health.”

Silk’s ability to weave together the past and the future is beautifully evident at the Golden Spider Silk exhibition, which exemplifies the coming together of traditional extraction and weaving techniques with the bold vision of British textile artist Simon Peers and US designer entrepreneur Nicholas Godley. The cape itself could equally be a Madagascan antique or the latest piece of McQueen couture.

Indeed, the ancient silk industry has helped to shape modern London. But the history of silk and the city is one of violence, folly and persecution that belies the fabric’s refined image.

Silkworms, silk goods and the skills of sericulture first came to Europe thanks to a series of brutal conquests of Asia and Persia, from sixth century Romans, seventh century Arabs and medieval Crusaders in turn. France and Italy quickly developed strong silk industries, but our island lagged behind. And so in 1609 the aesthete king, James I, attempted to develop a native sericulture in England, by purchasing and planting 100,000 mulberry trees, partly on a plot beside his own Hampton Court. Unfortunately, James had ordered the black variety. Silk worms feed off white mulberry leaves. The experiment failed.

It wasn’t until 1681, when Charles II offered sanctuary to the Huguenots being oppressed by the Catholic Louis IX, that London really embraced silk. The trickle of French refugees became a river when, in 1685 Louis XIV, revoked the Edict of Nantes, forcing all remaining Huguenots to convert to Catholicism or face persecution.  From 1670 to 1710, 40-50,000 Huguenots, many of them wealthy and highly skilled weavers, sought refuge across the channel.

Most of them headed to Spitalfields, which became the centre of London’s silk trade, otherwise known as ‘weaver’s town’. East London was an ideal destination for the new arrivals, as food and accommodation was cheap, and the area was relatively free from the strict economic control wielded elsewhere by the guilds. By 1700 there were nine Huguenot churches in Spitalfields alone.

Once you know what to look for, it is hard to wander around modern Spitalfields without seeing the shadow of those French silkmen everywhere.

CONTINUE READING AT LONDON CALLING…

Bear with me. I’ll get to the ridiculously talented accapella guys in a minute.

Alexa and Timon couldn’t make it, so instead they sent a best-wishes video from Berlin for us to watch on the day, featuring a whole host of AEG colleagues too. None …]]> Surprisingly, my husband manages to fit in a job other than me. He works for AEG, proud owner of the O2 and other impressively echoey sports and music venues around the world. Pre-husbandisation, he invited his lovely colleague in Berlin, Markus, to attend our wedding with his equally lovely wife and son Alexa and Timon.

Bear with me. I’ll get to the ridiculously talented accapella guys in a minute.

Alexa and Timon couldn’t make it, so instead they sent a best-wishes video from Berlin for us to watch on the day, featuring a whole host of AEG colleagues too. None of them could pronounce our name. It was very moving. The room got a bit dusty. And then, because they were playing the O2 World Berlin and Markus had collared them in the lift, seven super-energetic black dudes in co-ordinated bad-boy outfits popped up to say congratulations.

They were Naturally 7. It took me a while to realise, jumping and squealing like a girl who just happened to find some old Facebook shares in her handbag at their show at the Barbican last night, that they were them. I was too busy having fun watching them coax a Barbican audience  - majority middle class, middle aged and fed up from wandering for hours trying to find the bloody place – to full ovating, yelling, booty-busting splendour in a blistering old-school feel-good feast of a gig.

Naturally 7 produce their own R&B songs, as well as covers by everyone from Phil Collins to DMX to Simon & Garfunkel, using nothing but their voices. Every instrument, DJ effect and sample loop is created vocally. Sure, it’s a stunt, but when its executed this well it never gets dull. You can keep your retro 50s barbershop boys and soulful 60s acousticians. These guys have classic technique and musicality galore but they also have a bouncy, heartfelt playfulness and enthusiasm that has nothing to do with being cool and everything to do with giving your audience a damn good time.

So a belated thanks, boys, for the marital blessing – I had no idea you were this awesome. Everyone else, catch them when you can. Wear something that soaks up sweat and a big stupid 2012-style grin.

Sure, watch the adaptations, but be selective. Lean is mandatory. Andrew Davies’ exemplary 2005 Bleak House for the BBC beautifully balances the epic and the intimate, the poignant and the rambunctious. But Sarah Phelps’ humourless Great Expectations screened this Christmas was an emo Burberry ad of a flop. Good thing Mike Newell’s 2012 film would appear very difficult to fuck up, despite his controversial …]]>

CHARLES!

What to write? He said it all, literally. As we celebrate Dickens’s 200th birthday, this is definitely the year to go back and remember why Charles really does deserve his hype.

Sure, watch the adaptations, but be selective. Lean is mandatory. Andrew Davies’ exemplary 2005 Bleak House for the BBC beautifully balances the epic and the intimate, the poignant and the rambunctious. But Sarah Phelps’ humourless Great Expectations screened this Christmas was an emo Burberry ad of a flop. Good thing Mike Newell’s 2012 film would appear very difficult to fuck up, despite his controversial ending-change – with Helena Bonham Carter as Havisham , Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch and Robbie Coltrane as Jaggers, you’d have to do some pretty bad directing not to enter ‘instant classic’ territory.

Absolutely, dip into one of the biographies: Claire Tomalin and Simon Callow are deservedly hot right now, but Peter Ackyroyd’s 1990 tome is still a classic.

And if you get a chance to watch Callow do him, go.

But above all, read the damn books. When dug out from under the layers of expectation and assumption, which begins with the curse of the curriculum; continues through ubiquitous and vague application of ‘Dickensian’ to anything fat, cockney and frock-coated; and peaks with Gillian Anderson going full retard, it is always surprising how funny, sophisticated and ambiguous they truly are.

Go on then: which one’s your favourite and why?