My contribution can be found here.

I am reading books that have slipped through the net. Classic texts that I have missed along the way. This month I am reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

What is amazing about this text, after another failed attempt at reading J.G. Ballard’s Crash, is the rhythm of the line. Steinbeck just doesn’t capture the tone of the character, he captures the utter hopelessness of the time. It makes the reader want to learn more about how the great dust bowl came about, how families where displaced, robbed and thrown off their homeland by banks. It echoes the theft of land from Native Americans, it takes us through the language of the people, dubbed Okies, who for them the land is everything. It is their home, their life, their job and their family. In this spot a father died at the hand of a steer, a mother died of exhaustion, a child passed away to disease. There is blood in this land and Steinbeck knew it. If you’re going to try your hand at a twentieth century classic, reach for Steinbeck. Watch and listen to how a family is torn from its roots and driven west until the land runs out.

Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Cinnamon Press 2012) will be released in May and features my poem In the Mist. It has a foreword by David Lehman and the editors, Todd Swift and Kim Lockwood.

I am always amazed when editors manage to wade through hundreds of submissions to hone it down to an anthology. It is a hard process that I have been involved with on both sides of the fence, as an editor and poet. Todd and Kim have done a great job and have brought together such names as Helen Mort, Clare Pollard, Chris McCabe, Tom Weir, Kathryn Simmonds, Owen Sheers, Luke Kennard, Nathan Hamilton and Inua Ellams to name a few. I am proud to be amongst my contemporaries and to be placed within the wave of Young British Poets. More importantly, all the profits from this anthology go to Oxfam. So, dig your hands into your pockets and order it early for £6.38 rather than the RRP of £8.99, you can buy it from Amazon.

There is a brand new adaptation on BBC radio at the moment of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (available on iplayer until the 20th February 2012). It is interesting to compare this adaptation with Truffaut’s 1966 film of the same name. Even while listening to this I can’t help think of Oskar Werner as Montag strutting alongside Julie Christie, and how Truffaut made all women Julie Christie. It’s worth a listen and is still startling as we are now moving from a world of books to the world of the electronic. We won’t burn books, we’ll just leave them to rot, only a few of us will keep them and we will be seen as oddballs, weirdos, the strangers in the mall clutching a book rather than an electronic pad. So, my homage to Bradbury will start, as I consider this future:

It was creased, the edges worn brown, it had fallen out of the old man’s bag as he missed his footing on the escalator. The man had ascended. On the next level, people gathered, taking photos, posting to boards, to friends. They held their phones at arm’s length, the video junkies, the slot jocks who would have caught the whole thing. No one knelt. No one touched the old man. The blood had pooled beside his head. A teenager bent over as if to stroke the old man’s brow, as if to give him one last touch but he merely tagged his name in the drying blood. Scraping the shapes, not words, not like the book that was left at the bottom of the escalator. Dog felt the people behind him push, pull, point at the book by his feet. One of them plucked up the courage to touch it but Dog planted his foot firmly on it. The object was his. He was dog and this thing was his. He stared down at the title, Wuthering Heights. It was probably a filthy book. It was his kind of thing though he preferred the websites more than the writing. He hoped that amongst the creases and the filthy fingering there were some lovely pictures that he could pour himself over.

When I was nine there was a book scheme at my school. The idea was to get young boys like me to start reading more. I was already a great reader but couldn’t give up the chance to read more. More importantly this was a chance to own a book, though I owned some books (mainly fairy tale and ladybird books), most of my books came from the library (it shows why libraries are so important and why they should never close) because my family wasn’t made of money. We were working class and books where borrowed and never bought. Yet, these books where a mere 75p. I know this because I still have these books, I recently re-read them and brought them briefly into my MA dissertation. The books? The Tripods. Over one term I bought all three books and at the same time watched the BBC series (pictured as a Tripod enters the city). I remember my disappointment that they never made the third book and more importantly how annoyed that the second series ditched much of the second books plot for some strange and bizarre nonsense that made no sense. I won’t spoil the series or the books for you. A few years ago I read the Death of Grass, by the same author, this book was aimed at adults and was, at that time, out of print. This was a dark tale that appealed to me even more. For several months I toyed with adapting it for TV but as these things go, it went on the back flame and never happened. I was sad to hear today that the author of these four books had died. John Christopher was a prolific author, driven by his own working class roots and the desire to feed his family. He wrote as if it was a job. I like that about any writer. Writing is a job. John Christopher showed me that and I will miss not him because I never met him, I will however miss the books he never got the chance to write. At least, I have a number of his words on my shelf.

Today, I went and saw the new release, The Artist written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius. I am a big fan of the silent movie era, for me there has never been greater stars than Keaton, Lloyd, Arbuckle and Chaplin (Chaplin was the only one to make it to the talkies, albeit briefly). It reminds us when we watch these films how the new craft of film making was as wonderous as a Melies film or as exciting as Keaton falling beneath the onslaught of a water tower. Michel Hazanavicius catches the late flurry and glory of the silent movie and how the talkie destroyed many stars. A little known fact about some silent movie stars was that some where deaf, some where foreign with thick accents and others just had a voice to kill an audience (Gene Kelly parodies this in Singing in the Rain). There is a reminder of this painful scene in The Artist. The Artist is a modern silent film and deserves all the accolade. It is true film in a landscape of tired dialogue, hackneyed plots and famous actors playing themselves. I won’t spoil the ending of the film, but it will make you smile as you follow the ups and downs of George Valentin and the stunning Peppy Miller. It reminds of that films stars of the silent era, weren’t just stars, they were icons that changed the face of modern society down to how we dressed, what we ate and how we decked out our homes. I doubt many of you have a George Clooney bathroom. Long live HOLLYWOODLAND and down with HOLLYWOOD.