Joining the paperback club

Care of Wooden Floors officially came out in paperback in the UK yesterday, although it's been on the shelves in a few places for a few days and might take a day or two to filter through everywhere. It's part of the Waterstones Book Club this autumn, which means you can get it there for a substantial discount and if you don't like it they'll give you your money back. So, a pretty enticing offer, but it's available from all good retailers, be they your friendly local indie bookseller, affable railway terminal stationer or hail-fellow-well-met internet retail colossus. 

Collected Irks

This is a rant concerning a detail that many of you will consider inconsequential. But this is my blog, and blogs are home of the triviality-induced crosseyed hissy-fit. So no apologies.

I love anthologies and compilations of essays and reviews. Love 'em. Can't get enough. I've just finished Christopher Hitchens' mammoth Arguably, presently I'm reading Jonathan Meades' hefty Museum Without Walls, next in line is Mark Dery's welterweight I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts. Such is my taste for the format I might even get the AA Gill. I don't know what gave me this taste for longform episodic nonfiction; Tom Wolfe or Hunter S Thompson, but I can't remember who I read first.

However I have a recurring problem with these anthologies, one that baffles me as much as it irritates me. These collected essays all appeared at different times and in different places. They are often assembled out of chronological order. That's all fine. But the date and location of appearance is mostly only given at the end of each essay. That's annoying. But it can be worse, and worse. Sometimes only the date is given, and the original publication is hidden in the copyright info or the index. Sometimes (and this is the case with the new Meades) only the date is given and there is no way of telling where the essay appeared. And on very rare occasions, not even the date is given.

Date and location of first publication are vital pieces of information, crucial to properly understanding the texts, and they should be given at the head of the essay, under the title. I am sick of having to skip ahead to see if, for instance, X is writing about JG Ballard before or after his death, or Y is writing about George W Bush before or after his re-election. Why are readers treated this way? Is there a rationale beyond mere convention? Do anthology editors believe that readers do not like to be reminded of the fact that they are reading "second hand" pieces? That seems condescending and deceptive. Some other reason? Perhaps essayists or their editors do not like to let readers see how a writer's cloth is cut to suit their clients - how a voice might seem to alter depending on whether one is appearing under the masthead of The Spectator or The Guardian. But this sort of subtlety is precisely why contextual information is invaluable. And we are all adults - surely the intelligent reader will appreciate that writers gotta write.

In summary: knock it off. Please. And to end on a positive note, William Gibson's Distrust that Particular Flavour is a recent example of an anthology that did it right and put the info up front. Sadly it's the only one I can think of. But it can be done. 

Appearances in August

Is it 12 August already? Crikey, how time flies. Here's where I can be found (the rest of) this month.

Most importantly, I'm appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 22 August. Appearing twice, in fact. At 8.30pm I'm reading & talking with Argentinian debut novelist Iosi Havilio, whose book Open Door is published in the UK by recently-Booker-longlist-anointed And Other Stories. A bit before that, at 5.30pm, I'm participating in the Amnesty International Imprisoned Writers Series, reading in support of imprisoned Ethiopian journalist Eskinder Nega. Please do come along. I'll also be in Edinburgh for a few days around these events, so if I know you & you're in town, drop me a line - it would be particularly nice to put some faces to some Twitter names.

The Edinburgh reading will also be the (fairly low-key) launch of the paperback of Care of Wooden Floors - they will be on sale at the event, an early chance to buy as the official pub date is 30 August. Anyway, please do look out for it in shops from the end of August, with its charming green cover, left, designed by Jo Walker.

I'm in print in a few other places in August as well. Everyone should rush out and buy Icon 111, not because of my contributions but because it's a truly wonderful issue with the theme "Restless Cities". Under that banner comes Geoff Manaugh on the implications of ungovernable "feral" cities, Debika Ray on the neoliberal "Charter city" concept, Fatema Ahmed's interview with professor David Harvey on cities in revolt and Justin McGuirk on Sao Paulo's periphery. My contributions are a review of PD Smith's wonderful book CITY and a short report on Carmody Groarke's Filling Station.

Another review by me appears in this week's Building Design - on the subject of Rowan Moore's Why We Build - ambitious, erudite, witty, gossipy, mostly excellent, with some weak points. Update, 13.8: The piece is now online (subs only, sorry).

For a change of pace, there's an essay by me in the new Architectural Review Asia-Pacific (#127), out shortly, on the "psychopathic interior" - that is, the home decor tastes of serial killers. Check it out.

COWF in Miniature

Doll's houses aren't generally my thing, but if you've read Care of Wooden Floors you'll know Oskar's eerie flat has a doll's-house quality to it - a small world, exact to every detail, set up to please its owner. The hapless narrator, inserted into this world, becomes something of a plaything for Oskar's whims.

Perhaps my parents picked up on this vibe, because when the book was published back in February, they made me a doll's-house set themed around it. Nice gift, huh? And an amazing thing to do for a writer, if you have one in the family - I was left pretty much in tears. Just recently I talked about it with my American editor and it was only then that I thought it might be nice to share the set with the world.

So here it is, set up. All the important elements of the book are present: a sheet of wood veneer for the floor, two cats, a piano, red wine and cleaning products.

What you see on the floor by the foot of the table is a little portable tile of veneer with a red mark on it - the first stain. On the other side of the tile is a bigger, redder stain, for ... later.

There's another view of the stain, and the bucket of cleaning products (including blue jaycloth) and mop. Exactly as described.

There's the second cat in the piano. (I'm aware the cats are the wrong colours, and I seem to have put the keys on the piano the wrong way around, don't write in!) The set also includes sheet music for Oskar's great work, Variations on Tram Timetables, and a couple of Oskar's hundreds of bossy notes.

In a rather meta touch, there's also a copy of Care of Wooden Floors - my Care of Wooden Floors, not the holistic New Age lifecare bible by Chandler Novack.

That's it. My parents are wonderful people. There are a few more pictures on my Flickr photostream. 

Appearances in June

Not much in the way of print this month (more in July), but two real-life appearances, both next week.

On Monday 11 June I'm reading at the wonderful regular lit night The Book Stops Here. Also appearing are two other novelists: Emily Perkins, whose most recent book is The Forrests, and Chibundu Onuzo, author of The Spider King's Daughter - a fellow Desmond Elliott Prize longlistee and one of the Guardian's literary talents to watch in 2012. It's at The Alley Cat, 4 Denmark Street, London WC2H 8LP - the event is free, doors open at 7.30pm, readings start at 8pm. Come!
Update, 11.6.12: Also reading is DW Wilson, winner of last year's BBC National Short Story Prize, who has either just been added to the line-up or (more likely) I missed the first time around - for which, apologies.

On Wednesday 13 June, I'm taking part in the launch of USELESS: New Writing in Art and Design, a publication produced by the students of the Royal College of Art's inaugural MA in Critical Writing. As the name suggests, the theme of the publication is USELESSNESS, a subject I'll be saying a few words about, before a series of performances on the theme. I led a couple of workshops on this project and the work being produced was really first rate - if you want to get a taste of the next generation of design writers then this is the place. The event is at the Banner Repeater gallery in Hackney and starts at 6.30pm. As far as I know it's free. Come!
Update, 11.6.12: More details about the event here. DJ sets by DJ sets by David Crowley, Brian Dillon, Jeremy Millar and Nina Power. Unmissable, I'd say.

The Infrastructure of Civility

Last year I was asked to write an essay for Artangel on 1395 Days Without Red, paired films by Sejla Kameric and Anri Sala (which it funded). Sadly the piece never went live due to timetabling issues and I forgot about it until now. So here it is. 

A group of people gathers on a street corner. They all face the same direction. Is this a queue? Not a word is spoken but clearly there is an understanding between them. All observe an invisible line on the pavement, not advancing so much as a toe beyond it. They are waiting to cross the street. The scene is at once familiar and disturbing; the street is quiet, the shared stance is too formal, too precise, and the group's seriousness, its watchfulness, puts the observer on edge. It is as if they fear the sunlight streaming down the street – they keep to the shadow. This patient group brings to mind the dusk-time photographs of Gregory Crewdson, in which everything is completely normal and thoroughly, horribly, wrong.

How do we know something is wrong? We are picking up on the information the group radiates about its situation. This is no special talent: we do it every day on the street, especially if we live in a large city. The more we see of this particular group, the more it unsettles. When an individual breaks from the group to cross, their separation from the others is in itself troubling – as a whole, they are so still. More troubling is that they cross at a run, or as close to a run as they can manage, as many of them are elderly. When they arrive at the far corner, gasping for breath, they resume their walk at normal pace. The city is Sarajevo, still haunted by the memory of its 1395-day siege during the 1992-1996 Bosnian War. Streets in the centre, certain vistas and angles, were covered by snipers. An act as mundane as crossing the street while picking up supplies became a tangle with death.

In Sejla Kameric and Anri Sala's twin films 1395 Days Without Red. a memorial of those times, there are no guns, barely a shot, no signs of danger. All we see is the behaviour of the citizens of Sarajevo, and the deadly games they were forced to play as part of their routine. The danger they are in is communicated entirely by their reaction to it – their trepidation, the agonising dash, the sobbing breaths after. These clues do more than enough to fill in the rest of the picture: the sniper at the window, his field of vision, the nearest safe point, the distance between.

Every day we read the signs around us, we understand our fellow citizens. When we see a group of people looking up, we look up. A group of people gathered silently on a pavement, visibly not progressing beyond a certain point, would make any of us pause and at least consider the reason. We are reading the city: it is a mixture of unseeing and seeing. On the bus, the behaviour of one passenger causes them to suddenly stand out – they are agitated, restless, they have not engaged the invisibility cloak that makes them appear like anyone else, that allows us to disregard them after a microsecond of consideration, an appraisal we are not even aware of making. Other calculations follow: are they drunk? Possibly violent? Just having a bad day? We can read the demeanour of the young man who is seen doubled over by effort, fighting for breath – we know the next run will be a big one, and sure enough the view stretches out to encompass a vast, deserted intersection, a shadeless desert. We knew it before we saw it, by observing a fellow citizen.

In Sarah Kane's harrowing 1995 play Blasted – inspired by and written during the conflict in Bosnia – a soldier demands a cigarette from the man whose hotel room he has just abruptly entered. Why, asks the man. “'Cause I've got a gun and you haven't,” says the soldier. And he gets his cigarette. Violence, or the possibility of violence, has imposed a new social calculus on the interaction. He has the gun so he gets what he wants. And so it is in Sarajevo. Our shared, instinctive urban behaviour – the way we minimise hassle to each other, the essential codes that make densely populated city life possible – aggregates into rituals, unspoken rules, an unwritten code. Disruption to these rituals causes angst: we know to keep walking when we pass through the ticket barriers on the Tube, clearing the path for others, and it's frustrating when a group of tourists fails to do this. Violence dissolves these codes, and imposes its own. Our basic expectation that we will not be killed by a bullet while walking down the street no longer applies. The faded white lines of the pedestrian crossings in 1395 Days Without Red could be the ruins of an impossibly refined civilisation, so remote is the safety they promise. The title refers to the necessity, during the siege, of avoiding brightly coloured clothes – a new law imposed by the madness that had taken the city. But it could equally refer to an absence of stop lights – years without the basic infrastructure of civility that cities need to operate.

But the city is not all civility. The possibility of a violent end while innocently going out to buy bread naturally fills us with horror – but this combination of mundanity and terror is not entirely out of place in any street. The social codes that manage our behaviour in the city, that smooth paths and prevent squabbles, are not the absence of violence – they have grown from the underlying possibility of violence. In Europe cities have been the venue for both civilisation at its most exquisite and for savagery at its basest. Kameric's film opens with a philharmonic orchestra performing in a modernist cultural space, intercut with tumbled graves in a public park. When not running for her life, the films' protagonist (played by Isabel Meridu) hums the orchestra's tune. A city, for all its affirmative gathering of human life and enterprise, often also hosts crime and mayhem. It is always a place of death as well as life. We coexist with all these aspects. For some this coexistence is closer to the surface than it should be, and 1395 Days reminds us of the hum of violence in all cities. As we follow Meridu, we are sometimes directly behind her, seeing the back of her head, sometimes watching her neutral but serious face from the front, other times watching her pass from a fixed vantage point – perhaps the view of the young skinhead in the park, whose sunken eyes are locked on a distant point, whose field of vision is stained red by nearby lights. (Perhaps he is a gunman; very possibly he's just an innocent, but the logic of the siege has obliged us to consider the possibility.) There is an inescapable voyeuristic about the way the camera follows Meridu, especially when we are fixed on the back of her neck. Combined with the suspension of safety indicated by the desperate dashes across intersections, the implicit threat in the air is sexualised. We never see where she is looking, what she is seeing, but we can feel something of how she feels; a desire not to be seen.

Where to find me in May

In the actual
I'll be taking part in a great event at Waterstones Piccadilly, London, on 16 May. It's four for the price of one: four of the Waterstones 11 all reading from our books, talking, answering questions, all that interacting with people stuff. The lineup is myself, Patrick Flanery ("Absolution"), Anna Raverat ("Signs of Life") and Rachel Joyce ("The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry"). That's also three Desmond Elliott prize longlistees in one place, for anyone keeping score. We will be "talking about their inspirations and their journeys from unpublished writer to literary success!", according to the listing. Tickets £5/£3, start time 6.30pm, more details 020 7851 2400.

 
In print - nonfiction
"The Towers of the Dead" is my contribution to Icon #108 (June 2012). It's a long interview with British Designer Thomas Heatherwick on what is perhaps his most ambitious and unusual project yet: an immense aviary enclosing the Parsi "towers of silence" in Mumbai. Central to the Parsi faith is the practice of "sky burial", in which the dead are left at the top of stone towers to be consumed by vultures. But modernity is threatening the practice, and with it the survival of a religion that is more ancient than Christianity. Not the usual brief for an architect, and Heatherwick's proposed response is far from the usual work of architecture, so please do be sure to pick up Icon while it's out. The rest of the issue, themed "Sacred Spaces" is great, too: Sam Jacob on Apple Stores, Edwin Heathcote on why architects love to design churches, Riya Patel on new ritual objects for a secular age, Owen Hatherley on Pyongyang, and much else.

Be sure to pick up Volume #31, "Guilty Landscapes" - it's an edition of the architecture magazine co-produced with the Unknown Fields Division, and thus includes contributions from a load of UFD collaborators, including me. My contribution is a long essay, "Zones of Anxiety", mostly about the Baikonur Cosmodrome as surreal militarised environment. I haven't seen any of the other features but from the contents page it looks like an amazing lineup: Kate Davies and Liam Young (of course), lots of other Unknown Fielders, Volume stalwarts Brendan Cormier and Arjen Oosterman, photographers like Chris Jordan, John Gollings, Edward Burtynsky and Bas Princen, filmmaker Michael Madsen (who knows where the bodies are buried), poet Mario Petrucci (of "Heavy Water: A Film for Chernobyl" fame) and just tonnes more.

If anyone's asking themselves "whatever happened to Toxic Tourism?", this Volume essay is a sizeable appetiser.

I'm also in New Humanist #127, May/June 2012, reviewing Peter Stamm's new novel "Seven Years" (Granta). Here is a link to the review.

Edited to add: I mentioned this in a previous round-up but I was jumping the gun a bit as it only recently came out - "Pocket Utopias", an essay of mine about the design of insane asylums in the 19th century and their influence on the rise of the suburb, is in Architectural Review Asia Pacific #124. It's a big and beautiful redesign issue, so well worth picking up while it's available. (There's a digital edition if you can't find a copy.)

In print - fiction
That's right, new fiction. Two short stories, although British readers might find them slightly out of the way.

I'm in "Man-Made Lands" a special "chapbook" accompanying the Spring/Summer 2012 edition of Ninth Letter, the literary magazine produced by the graduate creative writing programme and school of art & design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Edited by Scott Geiger, "Man-Made Lands" intersects literature and architectural space. Looking at future literatures that could be generated from real places, I imagine "Selections From The Foyles Cache", a book composed of all the fragments of emails, network updates and (of course) unpublished novels produced on laptops in the coffee shop at Foyles on Charing Cross Road.

And another. The third edition of Swedish fashion culture magazine Vestoj is themed "Fashion and Shame", and includes a short story by me called "Mirror" - a brief riff on paparazzi practices and the head-coverings used by defendants on their way into court hearings.

That's all for this month.