Favourite Books, Alasdair Stuart | Transmetropolitan

City Life-Warren Ellis and Darrick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan

Spider Jerusalem is a journalist, which, of course, means he’s a leering, posturing collection of too many syllables, too much rage and far, far too much facial hair. Spider quit The City (There is only The City at this stage) when, despite his best efforts, a political candidate he refers to only as ‘The Beast’ is elected mayor. Spider moves out to the mountains, grows a beard, learns to hate his local bar and everyone in it, and moves on.

Until his publisher points out that Spider has spent the advance for his books but hasn’t actually finished the contract. Reluctantly, Spider returns to The City, becoming an urban reporter for Mitchell Royce, one of the only editors who has ever survived working with him and one of the closest things Spider has to a friend. Almost immediately he’s caught up in a riot between a group of people who have spliced their DNA with extra-terrestrials and the police. He writes about, offsets a bloodbath and is rewarded with a savage beating. The City always welcomes back it’s fallen sons.

Transmetropolitan is both a passionate hymn to gonzo journalism and the pursuit of the truth that is journalism’s highest ideal and a dizzying five year ride through a future which shows us at our best and our worst. Over the course of the series, one of Spider’s friends becomes a religious despot, another a dissociated cloud of nano particles and a third is killed as a result of helping with with a story. Historical reserves within The City replicate exactly periods of human development, right down to disease and violence, a new religion sits on every corner, boosted animals serve on the police force, Mercury is a solar power plant and people from the future beam television signals back to the present day to mock their ancestors. There are a billion stories in this naked city and no one cares about a single one of them; except Spider Jerusalem.

Utterly foul mouthed, cheerfully hedonistic and hopped to the nines on every drug he can beg, borrow, steal or make Spider is far from a hero as you could imagine and yet is that rarest of beasts; a decent man. His pathological hatred of the political scene would be a cheap gag in a lesser writer’s hands but with Ellis we see every hit he takes, physical and emotional, from doing what he does. Spider hates The City but he’s entranced by the ideas that make it up, the different cultures, the different species, the potential for something more. It’s this potential, and the people standing in it’s way, that power Spider and the series follows him through his initial year back into a Presidential campaign that reveals exactly how deep the pit of corruption is. This is political science fiction which is both political and humane, focussing time and again on people, on character and most of all, on the shaven headed man in the good suit with a knack for a huge insult and a capacity for heartbreaking compassion. Aided by Cannon Yarrow and Yelena Rossini, his two ‘filthy assistants’ Spider cuts a swathe through the world, leaving havoc behind him as he pursues the truth to it’s bitterest, and frequently most entertaining end. He hates you all, unless you’re good people, in which case the world’s angriest man is on your side and in this instance? The pen really is mightier than the sword.

Transmetropolitan is a classic, an eleven volume science fiction novel crammed with ideas, jokes, violence, horror, profanity and humanity. Transmetropolitan is in short The City in all its brutal, stupid, beautiful glory and you couldn’t ask for a better tour guide than Spider. Just don’t mention deadlines… (Transmetropolitan is written by Warren Ellis, drawn by Darick Robertson and available in the following eleven volumes: Back on the Street, Lust for Life, Year of the Bastard, The New Scum, Lonely City, Gouge Away, Spider’s Thrash, Dirge, The Cure, One More Time and Tales of Human Waste from book and comic shops everywhere)

Everybody’s Reading final weekend

Everybody’s Reading heads in to its final weekend, but there is still plenty of reading and writing activity for you to enjoy.

SATURDAY
Unfortunately two events – the Kick School of Creative Writing and ILUVLYRICS have been cancelled due to the English Defence League protest happening in the city centre on this day. We hope to reschedule both for future dates. In From Script to Performance writers David McCormack and Sue Mackrell read from their own scripts and dramatic monologues at the Central Lending Library, 10:30am. Watch a short play about the Gravity Racer, holder of a world land speed record, at the Blackfriars Hall from 2pm. And meet Puneet Bandhal, author of the Bollywood series of fiction books, at Belgrave library from noon.

SUNDAY
The Decadent Romantics bring a hint of theatricality to the poetic experience in one of our final festival events. Enter the Study of the Decadent Romantics at the Crumblin’ Cookie coffee shop from 2pm. And as part of We Are One Leicester, a special event celebrating Leicester’s diversity, Bali Rai will read Three Singhs on My Shirt alongside many other acts including musician Billy Bragg. Bali’s reading of this story at the Walkers stadium on Saturday opened the festival, and will also bring it to a wonderful close. http://www.oneleicester.com/weareone/

THE ASIAN WRITER
Hamilton library plays host to The Asian Writer readers and writers day, with a great programme of events on Saturday. Followed on the Sunday with a cream-tea reading retreat. Scones, tea and books, what could be better? These events are listed in full on The Asian Writer website: http://theasianwriter.co.uk

And also…festival and event organisers will be gathering at The Pub on New Walk, Friday from 5pm for a friendly drink to celebrate Everybody’s Reading. All welcome.

Utter Nonsense | K.A. Laity

K.A Laity is author of Unikirja Dream Book and the award winning Peltzmantel. Dr Laity teaches at the College of Saint Rose in various fields including film and medieval literature.

If there is one theme of my life, it has to be nonsense. I blame Lewis Carroll. I had a jacket-less hard cover edition of both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There that was the lynchpin of my childhood. Along with the Mary Poppins series, Alice’s adventures filled my head as a child in some profound kind of way that – looking back – I realised has shaped me ever since. Carroll’s books prepared me to discover Peter Cook, Monty Python and Vic Reeves and put me permanently out of step with my contemporaries.

I don’t care.

There’s something refreshing about a good old-fashioned obsession. I read the book over and over, in my room, lying in the fields by my house, sitting up in a tree, at my grandmother’s at my aunt’s. It had nobly brown covers and an orange-ish color font. And the illustrations! They were almost as good as the words, but not quite. I have a handful of things I can recite from memory, mostly things I have to teach, i.e. the opening lines of Beowulf (yes, in the original Anglo-Saxon) and The Canterbury Tales. However, I can recite the whole of Jabberwocky, too. I think it’s the first thing I ever memorized and how absurd it that? All those words that Humpty Dumpty had to explain to Alice! Yet, I remembered them. Maybe I just needed H Dumpty to teach me; he is the spirit of the 21^st century, you know, demanding words meaning whatever we wish them to mean, provided we pay them better wages?

The obsession goes beyond the pages of the book. I’ve taught classes where I made the students read Alice and the annotations and obscure academic essays and had them watch both Jan Svankmajer’s film version and Jonathan Miller’s, too. It’s hard to say which they find more disconcerting. Svankmajer’s combination of live action and puppetry, with impossible physics and a mouse that builds a fire on Alice’s head often disturbs students so much that they protest. Miller’s surreal dream of a picture strikes me as the most “accurate” of the Alice films, faithful in its faithlessness and besides it’s got Peter Cook, so two obsessions for the price of one? Win-win.

I’ve also reviewed and written on adaptations like Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland (absolutely brilliant) and Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, a pornographic surreal narrative where Alice meets up with Dorothy of Oz and Pan’s Wendy to share and heal the sexual tragedies of the childhood encoded in their much loved stories. I’ve even written my own bits of absurdity, sometimes based directly on Alice. Decades—far too many—have passed and the obsession has never slacked. How to write a story like that? How to live forever in someone else’s imagination and take on an entirely new life? I hunger for that second life: will I ever achieve it in my own writing?

What does it matter? We’re all in the Red King’s dream after all, so plum pudding all around and we’re all queens now. So obey me.

Everybody’s Reading going on strong

Leicester’s own festival of books and reading continues today and tomorrow with a selection of great events including readings, film and music.

WEDNESDAY
Jazz legend Stan Tracey appears at the Y-Theatre, 8pm accompanied by Jean Binta Breeze and Mark Gwynne Jones for a once in a life time performance of Under Milk Wood. Or you can catch Mavis Nicholson reading from her new novel at the Central Lending Library from 7pm. Earlier in the day the Young and Un:Bound book review website launches at Kona Blue coffee shop, 4pm.

THURSDAY – NATIONAL POETRY DAY
We celebrate National Poetry Day with a great host of poetry themed events. The Lyric Lounge returns to the Y-Theatre for a full day of poetry joy. Join the effort to write a Big Poem for Leicester with poet John Gallas between 12-1:30 at the Adult Education College. Interested in film and poetry? Pam Thompson and Keith Allot lead a special writing workshop linking the two at Phoenix Arts, 7pm, which will be followed with a public reading of the Leicester Writer’s Club also at Phoenix Square. The De Montfort University Creative Writing crew conduct special poetry readings from 6-7:30pm. And, to round-off an excellent Thursday, Tim Waterstone – founder of Waterstone’s bookshop – reads from his debut novel at the Adult Education College.

Everybody’s Reading continues until Sunday 10th October with many more brilliant reading events.

Favourite Books | Alasdair Stuart on Catch 22

Moving the Bomb Line-Catch 22

There are certain bits of culture that you really need to hit earlier than you should. These are the things that detonate behind your eyes like a bomb, altering how you view the world and leaving a mark that never fades, a crater that never gets filled in. These are the things you never see coming but always feel the effects of and, for me, Catch 22, is one of them.

Jospeh Heller’s seminal novel is, superficially, the story of Yossarian, a bombardier in the 256th squadron who wants very, very badly to live. The bombardier sits in the nose of the bomber, effectively in a glass bubble thousands of feet above the guns that want very badly to kill him and his crew and Yossarian’s had enough. Every time he gets near the maximum number of missions an airman can fly it’s increased and every time the bomb line is moved, the bombers are put over ever more dangerous, and pointless targets. So, Yossarian does the only thing you can do; goes slightly mad.

What follows is a gleeful canter through the po-faced lunacy of war and bureaucracy as Yossarian engages in a pantomime battle with his superiors over the bomb line. Every day they move it forward, every day he moves it back and every day the squadron risk their lives on pointless missions of absolute importance even as Yossarian argues that under Catch 22 he has to be sent home. Catch 22, you see…well, it’s probably best if I let Heller explain that himself:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.

Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

You have to be mad to fly, the moment you point out you can’t fly because you’re mad, you’re clearly sane enough to fly. It’s a beautiful, elegant knife of a concept which is certain to cut you whichever you hold it and it’s this idea, that there is no escape, that powers both the comedy of the novel and its escalating horror. It’s Catch 22 that leads to Yossarian being sent out over and over, that powers Milo Minderbinder’s ridiculous rise to the head of a global conglomerate and his near bankruptcy when he buys all the Egyptian cotton in the world. It’s Catch 22 that leads Chief White Halfoat to obsess over dying of pneumonia and his tent mate, Doc Daneeka, to obsess over catching pneumonia from a healthy man. It’s Catch 22 that starts the engines of the bombers and leads to the unspeakable horrors of the novel’s second half. It’s Catch 22 that forms the crucible these men burn in.

Catch 22 is by turns an ensemble piece, a comedy, a tragedy, a war story, a love story and a horror story, all of which get thrown together in Heller’s relentless bombardment of ideas and chaarcters, jokes and moments of blank eyed horror. Catch 22 is a novel that makes no sense and makes far more sense than it should, perched, like Yossarian, on a fragile shell between genius and disaster. It is, in short, a book well worth moving the bomb line for.

(Catch 22 is available now from Vintage,

ISBN-10: 0099477319 or ISBN-13: 978-0099477310. Closing Time, the sequel written in 1994 is available from Scribner, ISBN-10: 0743239806 or ISBN-13: 978-0743239806)

Everybody’s Reading continues…

Everybody’s Reading continues in excellent style this week, following an exciting weekend of events, including Bali Rai’s special reading at the Walkers Stadium, and Afghan women writers at University of Leicester.

Monday sees a host of excellent reading events to educate and entertain. Author Dan Tunstall leads a day of reading events at Fullhusrt school. Ten Bits of Work and a Fridge, an exhibition of written and visual arts by members of Leicester writers club opens at the Independent Arts Centre (and runs through the week until Sunday 10th October). 2 Funky Arts present their first Urban Tea Time from 4-6pm (repeating each afternoon until Friday 8th October) and Highfields Library welcomes author Nduka Onwuegbute who will be reading for children and adults from 5-9pm. Phoenix Square continue their books to film adaptations with a screening of Le Lectrice and Books That Changed the World brings together speakers fron around the city to talk about the books that have changed their lives from 7:30pm at the Adult Education College. And in a highlight of the festival, Karen Ferguson speaks about the challenges of getting a young son reading in Can’t Read, Won’t Read at the Central Lending Libraryfrom 6:30pm.

Tuesday manages to be every bit as exciting. Volunteers taking part with Everybody’s Writing can partipate in writing workshops at the Independent Arts Centre in the afternoon. Dickens and the Serial Reader at the University of Leicester, 5:30pm, presents special items from the Charles Dickens museum. Best selling crime author Stephen Booth reads from his new novel at Knighton library, 7pm and in celebration of its 2nd anniversay at the Y-Theatre, WORD! – Leicester’s longest running and best spoken word event- presents poet Jean Binta Breeze in performance + open mic from 8pm (7pm if you wish to perform).

We look forward to seeing you at one or more of these great events.

HELP US CAPTURE EVERYBODY’S READING
If you have photos, video or audio recordings of events happenig as part of Everybody’s Reading, then you can help capture the festival by letting us have copies. Send digital copies or links to larger files to:literature.network@gmail.com  

Flash Fiction | Karen Schindler

Reproduced here with kind permission from Karen Schindler. For more flash fiction on a variety of topics visit her website.

Wanda Warmheart’s Witchy Ways …………Flash Fiction

Wanda Warmheart didn’t want to be a witch, one day she just woke up and was.

Wanda wandered down the way wiggling her ears and whistling. Wanda didn’t know any other girls who could wiggle their ears, and few who could whistle well. Wanda felt that the two things together were a fine way to while away the time while walking, but by next week she wanted to work in juggling as well.

Wanda walked along waving her hands at trees, certain that eventually she would find one which would open to reveal a wondrous world. A world which would welcome Wanda Warmheart and appreciate her witchy ways.

Wanda liked trees. You always knew where you were with a tree. Trees went down into the earth, they went up into the sky, they gave off oxygen and positive energy. They stayed put; despite what wags sometimes whispered. Trees were dependable. Wanda was a tree hugging witch. A white magic witch. Not the other kind. Wanda felt cackling and eating small children who gobbled the latticework round your wainscoting would be icky. And Wanda didn’t do icky.

Wanda’s nose, unbidden, paused Wanda in her walking to inhale a wonderful smell wafting from a nearby dell still wet with dew.

Wanda wrestled the weeds aside and wriggled through the wet undergrowth in search of the source of the beguiling aroma.

What met Wanda’s widened eyes was wondrous. Wanda pinched herself lightly; willing herself not to waken if what was before her was a lucid dream.

**
The solid looking woman adjusting the logs on the fire wrested all doubt from her mind that the scene in front of Wanda’s wide eyes and wider nostrils was real. No vision could be that beautiful. No smell that alluring, and since no one could possibly sleep through the amount of drool currently filling her mouth without drowning on their pillow; Wanda concluded that she must
be awake .

This woman looked like she knew the secrets of the universe. And Wanda had some questions. Oh yes, lots of questions. Questions about caterpillars and ghosts and zombies and why cooked pudding gets a skin but the kind you buy ready made in the store doesn’t, so many, many questions about the wild workings of the wonderfully wide worlds.

The woman looked up at her and smiled, then looked off to the side and said:

“Oh dear, and before you even get to eat….”

**

Wanda? Wanda…. WANDA!…. Miss Flotsum’s voice finally penetrated and Wanda came together with a whap unheard by the classmates in the rows surrounding her desk.

“Yes, Miss Flotsum?”

“I asked if you could please go to the board and solve the problem.”

Wanda slid out of her seat and squelched to the chalkboard, worked at the problem for a bit and came up with 42. She squelched back to her seat, everyone in the room noting her wet shoes and the muddy knees of her jeans. Wanda knew that soon she’d be able to keep the connection longer and then she’d get some answers to her questions about the myriad worlds she slid into with ease. But for now, she figured it wouldn’t hurt to learn a little more math to help her along the path to her witchy ways.

The value of reading, the cost of ignorance | Damien G. Walter

Yesterday I watched the great Bali Rai read a story aloud to twenty-thousand people at the Walker’s stadium at half-time of the Leice

ster vs. Scunthorpe match. I’m not sure what the people of Scunthorpe made of it, but the football fans of Leicester loved it, and took away thousands of copies of the story to read at home after the match.

This was all part of the Everybody’s Reading festival which I, along with a team of committed and hard working people from libraries and elsewhere, have spent much of the last three months organising. We like direct project names here in Leicester, so when we set up a festival to get everybody reading, we call it Everybody’s Reading.

It is a real honour for me to have spent a good part of my career to date working on the cause of getting people reading. Some of that work has focussed on basic literacy, but more of it has been about encouraging a passion for books and reading, and a love of learning. I have organised festivals of reading, world record reads, teen reading awards, reading days, reading groups and even done the odd thing here or there with writing and writers. And I’ve enjoyed every moment of it.

Like many people who dedicate their time to encouraging reading – librarians, teachers, writers, to name just a few – books and reading have had an an enormous, positive impact on my life. Growing up with just my mum, in a small flat on a big housing estate, with very little money or options, the horizons of life seemed very limited. But my mum had a real love of books and reading that she passed on to me. And it was through books that I got access to a whole wide world of knowledge and experiences that would otherwise have been completely closed to me. Even when my mum passed away when I was in my late teens, books carried on providing a route through life. A path towards university, a Master’s degree, a career, and even to discovering my own identity as a writer.

The value of reading – the knowledge, learning and growth it unlocks in us – is incalculable. The cost of ignorance – the hole that we fall in to when denied the chance to learn and grow – is seen every day on our streets and in our communities. An estimated 1 in 5 adults struggle with reading, and it is no coincidence that those people are also more likely to have worse employment, poorer health, greater chance of mental illness or imprisonment and are likely to die younger. Reading is not just a pleasurable activity for middle class intellectuals, it is a fundamental life skill without which we can not grow and reach our full potential.

It is all too easy to take for granted the access to books and the levels of reading we have achieved in our society. Less than a century ago, very few people were able to access books, and it is only in the last few decades that almost everyone in our society has gained both access to books and the chance to develop a real passion for reading and for learning. It is also easy to be complacent about this achievement, and forget that without continual effort, we could easily lose the schools, libraries and other social institutions that have opened reading to everyone.

Everybody’s Reading is really a very tiny drop in an ocean of work needed to support and develop reading culture, but it’s a drop I’m quite proud of. If you are in Leicester or nearby, then I hope to see you at one of the many great events during the festival.

Everybody’s Reading is here!

The Everybody’s Reading festival begins today, the start of nine days of events to get Leicester reading! You can receive live tweets from the festival by following @GetLestaReading on Twitter and find the full festival event programme on: http://everybodysreading.wordpress.com

A few of the events to look forward to over this weekend include:

Bali Rai reading ‘Three Singhs on my Shirt’ at the Walkers football stadium

The Kick School of Creative Writing Writing (Independent Arts Centre, Saturday, 1pm)

Manga and Anime day at Phoenix Square (Starts 11am)

Film Adaptation: The Reader at Phoenix Square (Saturday and Sunday)

Afghan Women Have Their Say (Sunday, 7pm at Embrace Arts)

Judging a Book by Its Cover workshops (Y-Thetare, All Day)

We hope you enjoy the first weekend of Everybody’s Reading and look forward to seeing you at one of the great festival events!

Always Judge a Book by It’s Judge | James K Walker

Always judge a book by its judge

The winner of the Booker has never been easy to predict with the outsider often pulling off a shock. Take DC Pierre’s victory in 2003, who would have thought that such a populist narrative (imagine Jerry Springer on death row) would ever get the nod above a literary goliath such as Margaret Atwood or Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, which ticked all of the right boxes with her tale of multicultural life in the capital. Another notable exception to be usurped was William Trevor who lost out to rookie Yann Martel a year earlier. If anyone deserves the golden toaster of recognition for services to literature, it’s our Trev. But it does suggest that the Booker is free of cultural bias and favouritism, although the conspiracy junkies will tell you its very ‘unpredictability’ is evidence of foul play.

Perhaps it’s not the books we should be looking at then, but the judges. They have, after all, been selected for their suitability – although the selection of some panellists is arguably as controversial as the winners. Was it any surprise that Conservative elder statesman Douglas Hurd plumped for Ian McKewan’s Amsterdam? Who else would even care, let alone identify with, the misadventures of a foreign secretary, composer and newspaper editor? It was a self-indulgent status-dropping yarn, written for the inner circle. Then there is that other great bastion of the written word, Michael Portillo. When he opted for Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger he was offering the world an insight in to a corrupt Indian ‘told you so’ society, whilst proving – without any reasonable doubt – he was a nice guy Eddie, a man of the many different types of people of GB Ltd, and nothing like those ghastly Spitting Image caricatures. ‘I hope you all feel guilty for getting me wrong’ was the subtext.

When Lisa Jardine, the former protégé of Raymond Williams (CV: founding father of British Cultural Studies), crowned the Life of Pi literary king, she was admiring his humanitarian observations of the human condition, such as the need to respect difference and how to live in harmony with Others. Then there is last year’s winner Wolf Hall. Hilary Mantel’s speculation of political life would no doubt have pleased Radio Four’s James Naughtie, who in The Rivals and The Accidental American has exposed the ‘lark tongue’ shenanigans of the New Labour courtiers.

So let’s speculate about this year’s chosen ringmaster, Sir Andrew Motion, a curiously contradictory figure. On one level he is firmly a member of the establishment after his tenure as Poet Laureate and all that Lady Di hype. He also has a presence – in some capacity – on some of the most significant cultural organisations in the country. But he’s also a self-confessed ‘old school leftie’ and still a party member. In person he is softly spoken, awfully polite, and strikes you as a man of integrity. But then according to some critics this is another contradiction, less we forget the ‘Larkin betrayal’ and that affair. But it is the loss of his mother after years in a coma that has had the profoundest affect. To be physically present yet unable to communicate on a meaningful level has, I believe, shaped his psyche. The book that taps into this will win on Oct 12th.

www.jameskwalker.co.uk