The Poetry Pharmacy

One day (I know this is hard to believe) Woody Allen will be no more. Even worse, you and I will be no more (which still at times feels like news to me). Of course we hope for Woody (and … Continue reading →

If you haven’t read Jean Kwok‘s short story Where The Gods Fly, you should do so right away. Three reasons (actually five, but I am culturally nudged into saying three): a) It’s an extremely fine short story, and was recognised … Continue reading →

Before the internet, if you wanted to commit yourself to a transcendental pursuit, you would need to go and stand on a pillar in a desert for a clearly circumscribed period of time, or wall yourself into an anchorage, built … Continue reading →

Whenever I meet flesh-encased authors, I need to be careful not to refer to them by the book-embedded appelations I hold of them in my head. Alex Preston is of course Alex ‘TBC’ Preston. Not because he is forever awaiting … Continue reading →

I love the idea of chain-readings. Say: Nicholson Baker reads me some John Updike. Updike then reads Nabokov. Nabokov does his RMSYL with a few exquisitely-chosen passages from Dickens, and Dickens closes the circle by reading from Nicholson Baker (I’m … Continue reading →

Education. Behind those four ceremonious syllables, a whole welter of thoughts and feelings about value, memory, interpersonal depth, and reading materials churn. I can remember to this day with a kind of wincing shame privy only to those who have … Continue reading →

A few weeks ago you heard Nicky Harman reading a poem from my Chinese doppelganger, Han Dong, whose short story ‘Deer Park’ can also be heard on this site. One or two emails from newfound Chinese fans have suggested I … Continue reading →

This photo shows the intensity of reading the part of this story where it all starts to go horribly wrong. So horribly wrong does it go, you might want to take a few deep breaths, and maybe hold onto something … Continue reading →

As teeth-gnashing the editing of these readings can sometimes be (how to compress down an hour or more of fine chat into just 40 minutes of podcastery?) one of the things I really love about doing this, is being reminded … Continue reading →

Mothers. And fathers. Two people it is almost impossible for us to be neutral about. Particularly if they’re our own.   I was running a reading group last week in a Mental Health and Wellbeing Centre. We were reading Of … Continue reading →

Last Friday, Nikesh Shukla read a short story by Dave Eggers, so it seems only fair in the quid pro quo ways of the world that Eggers returns the favour for Shukla.   He was up for it and suggested … Continue reading →

Sometime in my 20s, I wrote a novel called Grim inspired by Angela Carter's Wise Children. I dimly recall my tome being plotted around twins, a fictitious rock group, a deeply neurotic mother, and some Kurt Cobain inspired suicide pact.    I wish now that I had found and chosen De Lillo's Great Jones Street rather than Wise Children to be progenitor of my pastichery. A poor man's DeLillo might have been almost publishable, as the career of [insert the name here of someone you're jealous of] has shown in spades. But nobody can really do Angela Carter other than Angela Carter herself. That said, after reading me this story, Chantal sent me one of her own, which was deeply, impressively Carteresque. So maybe it is possible, but just not for me. This podcast is for Swiss Cottage Library. Those wonderful Civil Servants of The Book! Quiet, circumspect folk, who walked past us as we sat for an hour on their echoey stairwell and didn't at any point ask what the hell we were doing there, or attempt to shoo us away. What will we become of us, where will we go, when all our libraries have been turned into Primark stores and coffee shops?

Mavis Gallant was our Short Story Book Club read for February. I chose Mavis after hearing Antonya Nelson read and discuss her story 'When We Were Nearly Young' as a New Yorker fiction podcast. I was tramping up Chinnor Hill somewhere between Bledlow and Radnage, huffing, no doubt puffing, and this story was keeping me company. It remained with me for months after this walk, hauntingly so. Subsequently I thought a month of Mavis might be worth the effort and suggested we read her Selected Stories for our Short Story Book Club meet-up.  It looked like a slim enough volume on Amazon.  Little did I realise that the flatness of the screen belied the 912 pages lying behind the cover. Mavis is good in small doses. A sentence or two can keep your nourished for weeks. Nine-hundred and twelve pages of Mavis Gallant however feels like a form of literary gavage. I was just about to give up on her when Rosalind Harvey suggesting reading 'Voices Lost in Snow'. And so we did, which was just the ticket as I'm now back to tooting that Mavis Gallant vuvuzela. Enjoy.

Knock, knock! Who's there? Etgar. Etgar who?

Out of the blue (is there really such a thing?), an  email from Davide Maione, a photographer who last contacted me in 2005 after reading my review of Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted. The review mentions in passing his friend Claudio Galuzzi. I was not to know when writing this that Claudio had not seen in the millenium, having died in 1998 just a year past 40. When I met Claudio, I didn't speak enough Italian to talk sensibly to him about any of the subjects that interested the two of us (literature, music). His English was variable, to say the least. God knows how he'd managed to interview the  Glaswegian Teenage Fanclub the year before was one of my unvoiced thoughts. I was nineteen. He was thirty-three. I had dropped out of Cambridge after two years of banging my head against ways of learning and being that estranged me to the point of some sort of mental breakdown. It was all too much. So I ended up living on a farm just outside Casalpusterlengo, which was itself just outside Milan, which was just outside the UK where I felt too ashamed to still be. I had been offered accomodation and set up with a teaching job by Fiorangela, a widow in her late 50s  (I can't remember her surname). She herself was an English teacher, who still lived on the farm which had belonged to her husband's family. She had two teenage sons: Giovanni, a Guns N' Roses fanatic (and conveniently for him, Slash-lookalike), and Stefano, also into G&R, but with the appearance of a sound engineer rather than a rock star. I'd met Fiorangela the summer before in Verwood.  She had given up a week or two of her holiday to accompany a class of rowdy youngsters to Dorset for their so-called "full immersion" into English culture and language. They were mainly immersed in each other and anything Italian that they could find in Hardy country (coffee, pasta, Superga shoes, Italian-sounding cinema names). I was meant to be teaching them English. When I banged on about my own linguistic shortcomings to Fiorangela (I spoke no European languages apart from English and the odd sentence of bastardized Dutch, A.K.A Afrikaans) she offered me a place to stay in Casalpusterlengo, and found me a teaching job. There was nothing in it for her. I certainly wouldn't have wanted a nineteen year old me slouching around my house, listening to execrable music (though not Guns N' Roses, much to the chagrin of Giovanni), smoking execrable cigarettes (Marlboro Reds), trying to learn my Italian from Teach Yourself books and comics. She charged me a pittance for full board and lodging. So I had a good amount of cash to spend on music and books. I would go to Claudio Galuzzi's tiny record shop in Casalpusterlengo and while away an afternoon practising my pigeon-Italian on Claudio and listening to the latest CDs he was into. And Claudio, unlike about 95% of the inhabitants of Casalpusterlengo, was into the good shit. Sure he stocked the latest Europop pap and all the stadium filling rockers like U2 and Bon Jovi. But that's not what he listened to. From Claudio I first got to hear, and might have even have purchased the first Tindersticks album, the first Pavement album, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, PJ Harvey's Dry, Big Star, Nirvana, and of course his beloved Fabrizio D'Andre. Sadly, I could only come up with monosyllabic platitudes when he played this incredible music to me. But that was OK for Galuzzi. He was a very cool, well-read,  somewhat highbrow poet and musician, but he was also a very kind man. And in many ways I was surrounded, nurtured, and healed by kindness from all quarters during those six months I lived in Casalpusterlengo. A kindness I almost took for granted then, maybe only now am able to fully acknowledge; a kindness I'd found in such short supply at Cambridge. I only ramble on like this, because serendipitously, love and kindness, and where the two merge, is what this episode of Read Me Something You Love turns out to be about.