In the beginning, there was only green. Green and green and nothing more: the green haze of meadows; long leaf-green summer days; the glass green of a pool. In spring the trees were electric. The hedgerows flashed past me behind glass, bending away into nothing. There was only the endless green of the garden, blurring before me as far as the eye could see.

But I don’t want it to begin this way. The beginning ought to be so much more spectacular. This is our Big Opening, after all, so surely there should be fireworks, a band striking up, velvet curtains swishing open with a flourish? I want the shimmering of strings as the opening titles roll and we descend from above in a pool of light, a shower of glitter and confetti. The wave of a magic wand, the silver clash of cymbals, a puff of smoke, a cosmic explosion. The heavens and earth rising out of chaos as we slide out of the void and burst into being in tiaras, feather boas and sequinned shoes. The wave of our hands - hello there! we’ve made it! - and trumpets sounding out a triumphant ta da!

But perhaps there were no fireworks. Perhaps instead we came to life quietly, awaking first in the garden. Say it all happened slowly, amongst the roses that bled fat petals into our empty hands, with mossy grass between our toes. Or maybe it began the bare room, beneath the cold ticking of the clock on the wall, far from the green of the garden. Some sleight of hand and here we are: perhaps after all the end is where we start from.

Back to the start. Stop. Rewind. In the beginning there was green and only green. I’m going back through the gate, down the path, back to the beginning. I’m telling you how it really happened: with distant voices, and laughter. High summer again and the garden callow, viridescent. The garden is green and green and nothing more and I am lost again the long grass, where the lawn slopes away towards the still lake shore.

I think I have a new favourite magazine - the beautiful Lula. Just look at some of these glorious page spreads from the latest issue (no. 8) which I have been happily browsing this afternoon:



Whilst I can see that its style may be a bit girly and whimsical for some tastes, I have to say that for me it is an utter treat to read a fashion-led magazine which isn't entirely focussed on persuading readers they desperately need to buy this week's "must have" item and should slavishly follow the latest celebrity trends. Even better, Lula includes a minimal number of advertisements, which are placed only at the start and end of the magazine, meaning that as a reader, you aren't constantly bombarded - or worse, left wondering what is genuine editorial and what is marketing copy.


As the ever-wise Hadley Freeman points out, "contrary to popular belief, fashion magazines aren't catalogues" and the great thing about Lula is it really doesn't feel like one. Rather than being primarily about shopping, Lula is really all about inspirations, ideas and aesthetics. OK so I'll admit there's a "sleb" or two in there but at least they're not the usual suspects - this is, after all, a magazine that eschews the apparently inevitable choice of Victoria Beckham as fashion icon du jour in favour of such alternative (and far more interesting) choices as Louise Bourgeois, Gertrude Stein, Diana Vreeland and Peggy Guggenheim amongst others. And there are some thoughtful, interesting articles as well as beautiful fashion shoots - because guess what? The two aren't mutually exclusive! This issue, for example, brings together a feature on Edie Beale, a life-size dolls house installation by artist Heather Benning, short fictions by Rupert Friend and Louise Cork, and an interview with the incomporable Luella, as well as a whole treasure trove of lovely images to enjoy.





The only thing I would say is that the typography can get a bit annoying: the distinctive Lula font designed by Becky Smith and Pedro Cid Proenca looks cute for titles but becomes a bit unreadable when used for larger blocks of body text. But that aside - what better way than to spend a lazy Saturday reading Lula, drinking tea and eating ginger biscuits?

I'm now feeling inspired by... boater hats; grossgrain ribbons; birds and butterflies; tea parties; hats with veils; paper cut-outs; 1940s hair; anti-minimalism; giant Alice in Wonderland bows; doodles; latter-day Victoriana; cup cakes and cocktails; plaits; ephemera; Dalmatians; seamed stockings; misty old photographs; layering; eye-popping rainbow brights; and wearing socks with peep-toe shoes. Lovely!

I was interested to read Hirsh Sawnhey's piece on The Guardian blog this week, How Independents will save literature from the recession. Writing from New York, Sawney reports that the city's commercial publishing scene is already beginning to feel the effects of the "credit crunch" ("sales are flagging... some predict 2009 will be the worst year the industry has seen in decades") and increasingly look likely to be shifting resources away from riskier, innovative titles from new writers towards "safe investments" like the ghost-written celebrity novels and autobiographies that are already so ubiquitous on the shelves of high-street bookshops.

The extent to which the same will be true here in the UK is currently hard to say. We can only hope there won't be quite such a dramatic effect: according to this post on Litfest's blog, Tim Waterstone has recently been speaking about how, historically at least, UK book sales actually increase in times of recession. That does make some sense to me: after all, a £7.99 paperback looks like a pretty good investment compared to a couple of pints, especially if you're like me and you can easily read a single book three, four five (ten...twenty...two hundred) times. And if you're in the mood for a treat, a book feels like a relatively reasonable and sensible impulse-buy compared with splurging on, for example, a pair of frivolous shoes (not that I would be at all inclined to do that, of course... hmmm... anyway...) So perhaps the credit crunch will see us all spending more evenings curled up with a good book and a cup of cocoa? It certainly looks likely to herald happy days for local libraries, second hand bookshops and the like.

However, even if the picture for the big commercial publishers does look a little bleak, it may be that literary culture will not be significantly affected. Sawnhey suggests that it will in fact be safeguarded "through the dark economic days ahead” by a core of small independent publishers, who are uniquely placed to weather the financial crisis, and I think he might just be right. After all, there's no doubt that smaller, more flexible independents are all ready well used to continually innovating and adapting their businesses, working with narrow profit margins, delivering a lot from only limited resources, and coping without expensive businesses lunches, glossy marketing staff and hefty PR budgets. And all this whilst building strong personal relationships with their writers, prioritising artistic experimentation and innovation and playing an important role as 'talent scouts' identifying and developing the most exciting new writers.

Given all this, perhaps Sawhney is right to suggest that the current climate will provide an opportunity for small independents to thrive in comparison to their market-driven corporate cousins. Let's hope so - because as Sawnhey himself rightly points out, "good things come in small, independently-owned packages!"

10 fun things to do:

1. Wander through Columbia Road Flower Market on a Sunday morning for people-watching and a rainbow of spring flowers - daffodils, crocuses, tulips and hyancinths. Also good should you wish to pretend you live in a Richard Curtis film, not that you would really.

   
   
2. Admire the Rob Ryan paper cuts in the Ryantown shop. This one is my favourite (so true).

   
   
3. Go to a late, late night movie at the Barbican as part of their Do Something Different Weekend for the East Festival. However, speaking from experience I wouldn’t really recommend late-night Watchmen to those with a sensitive disposition and/or stomach.

   
   
4. Walk down Brick Lane, stopping off for bagels and street art en route.

   
   
5. Go window shopping at the ever-gorgeous Tatty Devine. 

   
   
6. Admire the beautiful vintage-style bicycles and accessories at Bobbin Bikes. (I went a step further and took this beauty for a test drive.)

   
   
7. Eat Vietnamese.

   
   
8. Take a meander through Camden Passage in Islington for vintage clothes, antiques, bric-a-brac and general flea-markety ambiance.

   
   
9. Contemplate the sparkly cupcakes at Treacle Bakery (though actually I reckon these ones are much, much better)

   
   
10. Play a fun game of ‘I-Spy in Shoreditch and Hoxton’ scoring points for ‘Black Framed Glasses,’ ‘Ostentatious High-Top Trainers,’ ‘Trilby,’ ‘Asymmetric Fringe,’ ‘Wet-Look Leggings,’ Extreme Big Hair Situation,’ ‘Pet as Accessory,’ ‘Giant Sunglasses, Even Though it’s Not That Sunny’ and ‘Single Speed Bicycle’. Double points for any three or more in combination. (This one is the most fun.)

It has been a very busy week or two. It's been one of those times when I suspect I might be a bit mad even attempting to have a full-time job at the same time as studying for an MA. On the other hand, though, it's also been a really varied and interesting couple of weeks, so I can't really complain too much.

Anyway, I will shortly be heading down to That London for a few days, but first, here are a few things I wanted to post - a quick round-up of news:

Apartment is closing its doors... The unique exhibition space in a council tower block flat, co-curated by Hilary Jack and Paul Harfleet will close its programme with a show by Giorgio Sadotti entitled ‘PAUL, PAUL IS THE ART’. The show runs until 2nd April and viewing is by appointment - check it out while you have the chance!

Throughout March, look out for the project If you read this, I’ll give it to you by artist Katya Sander throughout the public spaces of Manchester and Salford. Thousands of pin-badges bearing the statement “If you read this, I’ll give it to you (but then you must wear it too)” are moving through the cities, travelling from person to person. Badges will be available at sites within the city, and can be taken from anyone you see wearing them. The project is part of Whose Cosmopolitanism? a series of public events to launch the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures (RICC) at the University of Manchester which has also included events with visiting speakers such as David Harvey and Jacqueline Rose.

The Other Xeno-epistemic is an interesting event coming up at A Foundation on Friday 20 March. The event is part of TAXED, A Foundation’s series of events designed by locally-based artists which explore the power of imitation, and “art’s capacity to import other people’s ideas, to shamelessly replicate successful existing models, to beggar belief with its flagrant piracy!” This event has been literally “taxed” from a workshop by Sarat Maharaj at Test Site, Rooseum, Malmö in 2002, and involves a “sideways” reading of a chapter from Deleuze & Guttari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Participants are each assigned a footnote to research in advance, and will come together to discuss their findings and ideas, resulting in what Maharaj describes as “the kind of crazy-paving reading that makes [artists] ‘dodgy’ from the ‘doctoral’ point of view”. You can read more here, including details of how you can participate and view the results!

Nominations for this year’s Best of Manchester Awards are now open. There are categories for art, music and fashion (though sadly not for writing) so get nominating all your talented friends and neighbours!

And coming soon... Artyarn will be artists in residence at Contact throughout April and May as part of the AIR programme. As well as workshops and yarn bombing, they plan to produce a new piece of work, the Knitting Orchestra - an experimental sound piece produced directly from the act of knitting.

Take a look at the new Preston Writing Network which aims to "put Preston's diverse and vibrant literary culture on the map," promoting and developing new writing in Preston through on-line activity and a programme of workshops, live literature and more. The network is the writing strand of They Eat Culture, a new arts development company run from the Continental Arts Space in Broadgate, and there's more information about how to get involved or submit work to the blog here.

Please find ZigZag! is a storytelling project launched by Litfest and writer David Gaffney. If you should happen to be in Lancaster, look out for a series of mysterious lost cat posters appearing around the city centre. These stories form the first part of a three-part story of unrequited love set in and around the Storey Institute. You can read more online by checking out both characters blogs - Fern and Charlie - though really, half the fun of this story is how it unravels in real time in the public spaces of Lancaster in a distinctly non-digital format.

Do check out Bewilderbliss, a new literary magazine dedicated to “new words from new writers” which showcases the poetry and prose of Manchester University and MMU postgraduate creative writing students. You can buy the brand new first issue (the theme is ‘The Guilty') from the Cornerhouse foyer bookshop where I hear you can also get hold of Belle Vue, another new zine I’m hearing good things about from reliable sources (see here and here). I'm loving all this DIY publishing action going on at the moment!

Kate from The Manchizzle is organising a get-together for Manchester Bloggers at Centro on Tuesday (10 March). I plan to be there, and will be wearing my name-tag with pride!

On a similar blog-related note... I am astonished by the wealth of great new Manchester blogs I keep coming across at the moment - it feels like I discover one practically every day. If you want a good read, may I point you in the direction of Equine Obesity, Mithering Times and Blunt Fringe just for starters? And whatever you do, don't miss Emily Powell’s My Shitty Twenties which is absolutely brilliant.

...I was reading somewhere recently that you should never write a blog post longer than a paragraph or two because people get bored and don't bother reading it. That's a rule I absolutely fail to observe on this blog, and I have certainly broken it very conclusively today. If you're still with me, well done you. And you'll probably be relieved to hear that I've now finished.

The second edition of the excellent Manchester Review includes an interview by MJ Hyland with Irish novelist Colm Toíbín in which he somewhat controversially claims there is “no pleasure” to be found in the process of writing:

Oh, there’s no pleasure. Except that I don’t have to work for anyone who bullies me. I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway and I would disapprove of it.


Toíbín’s response, which was picked up by the Guardian on Monday, fascinates me precisely because personally, I couldn’t feel more different. I don’t think there’s any way I would ever write anything if I didn’t love the process of writing. Narcissistic or not, like Will Self - one of nine writers surveyed by the Guardian in response to Toíbín - I find the whole experience of writing enormously enjoyable: “the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes - many notes - and most seductive of all: the buying of stationery.” Maybe it’s because I don't do it for a living - or maybe it’s because of the kind of writing I do - but unlike Amit Chaudri, who believes “writing novels is no fun; nor is, generally speaking, reading novels” - for me writing (and reading for that matter, novels more than anything else) has always been a source of uncomplicated pleasure.

In fact, just thinking about this makes me sorry that I seem to do so little writing of fiction these days - I struggle to find either the time or the imaginative space to give to it. But I do miss writing more regularly and consistently, for the sheer experience far more than any actual ‘outcomes’. What I miss is the utterly self-indulgent pleasure of what A.L. Kennedy describes as “making something out of nothing, overturning the laws of time and space, building something for strangers just because you think they might like it, and hours of absence from self.”


Of course, I don’t pretend that writing - and especially writing fiction - isn’t hugely difficult. In fact, it's often a fraught process, with all the pitfalls that Hari Kunzu pinpoints “self-disgust, boredom, disorientation and a lingering sense of inadequacy, occasionally alternating with episodes of hysterical self-congratulation as you fleetingly believe you've nailed that particular sentence and are surely destined to join the ranks of the immortals, only to be confronted the next morning with an appalling farrago of clichés that no sane human could read without vomiting.” But it’s exactly that sense of a challenge, of problems to be overcome, of seemingly insurmountable obstacles in your path that makes writing fulfilling - and thus (or perhaps I’m just a masochist!) also ultimately enjoyable.

Consequently, I was surprised how many of the novelists in the Guardian’s survey appeared to agree with Toíbín, some even claiming they were simply in it for the cold, hard cash - though amongst the wealth of negative voices, Self and Julie Myerson (“Writing gives me enormous pleasure...it’s a joyous thing”) provided welcome relief. 

However, I have to say that I am tempted to take all of their responses with a pinch of salt - for as Joyce Carol Oates herself rather perspicaciously reminds us, D.H. Lawrence tells us to trust the tale and not the teller. Ultimately one can’t help suspecting that these writers are simply entering into a process of self-mythologising, consciously or unconsciously believing they should uphold the stereotype of the “tortured artist.” Of course everyone’s different, and my experience isn't necessarily true for everyone, but I do wonder if there’s just a tiny little bit of “protesting too much” going on here.

I'd be intrigued to know what others out there make of the question of "writing for pleasure". For those writers out there, is the process of writing something you enjoy, or is it just too fraught to be truly pleasurable? And if so - for those of us unable to command fees for our work on the Toíbín scale at least - what do you think it is that motivates us to do it at all?

I honestly think that the title sequence is probably my favourite part of a lot of films. There's something about that moment just when the titles begin, the music starts and the audience stop shuffling and whispering and chomping down popcorn and suddenly go quiet, as if by the wave of an invisible magic wand.

If I was a film-maker, I think I would especially love making those title sequences. Maybe I'd even forget about making the films themselves, and just concentrate on making really beautiful title sequences - hints to imaginary stories that are never told. For me, what makes the titles so interesting is that they are a question mark - they set the tone for what is to come, atmospherically, stylistically - but at the same time, they can't give too much away. But simultaneously, as a framing device, they demonstrate that the story is exactly that - just a story, no more, no less.

I was pleased to discover Art of the Title recently, via the lovely myturtleneck blog. Art of the Title is a site entirely dedicated to title sequences - taking its inspiration from that moment "when your heart sank just a little when you realized the Pink Panther movie wasn’t a cartoon." The site has a great selection of images from both iconic and little-known title sequences, as well as video clips you can watch.

A few of my favourite images from the site are here (To Kill a Mockingbird; Napoleon Dynamite; Vertigo; Juno - click on an image to see them in more detail) but I'm sure there's lots more still to come - after all there are some fantastic examples that they haven't posted thus far. Who could resist, for example, the glorious title sequence to Amélie?

Mmmmm... dreaming of summer and raspberries - ideally one for each finger. March is finally here, and it feels like spring is on the way. Other good things from today: mocha; homemade currant cake; a rainbow of coloured pens; listening to the new Lily Allen album (which I know I'm not supposed to like, but I do anyway); excellent new woolly socks; a riot of snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils in the park; getting things crossed off the to do list; and an enormous bowl of spaghetti bolognese on its way for my dinner. How have your Mondays been?

(It has become obvious to me from writing these lists that most of the things that cheer me up are things to eat. But what can you do? Can't help it - just greedy. Now I'm off for another piece of that cake...)