The Booker Longlist

Nice to find myself (under my Twitter handle, Canfan) quoted in full on page 17 of today’s Guardian Review digest of the reader comments about the Booker longlist. For anyone interested who can’t be bothered to trawl through the long or short version, here’s what I said. ‘The Mitchell is brilliant, I think, and would be a worthy winner, but I agree with Joe Thomas: McGregor’s Even The Dogs is an outstanding read, formally audacious and stunningly written. Did Bloomsbury nominate it? If so, perhaps the bleak subject matter put the panel off. I read it in one sitting.’ (The Guardian retained my misspelling of Jon’s surname, which I added an ‘a’ to.’ Oops.)

Loudon Wainwright sings in C

I was having dinner with friends recently and they started telling another guest that I was a massive Dylan fan. I confessed that I’d seen Dylan ten times, but it didn’t seem that many to me. I have one friend who’s nearly into three figures. Still, they got me thinking. Which other acts have I seen ten times or more? There aren’t many. Gaffa, a Nottingham band from the 70’s. REM, Elvis Costello and Richard Thompson. I’m into the teens for those three acts largely because they’ve been touring for so long. I first saw Thompson in 77, Costello in ’80 and REM in ’83. The other act who should be on that list is Loudon Wainwright III. I’ve seen him eight or nine times.…

Janelle Monáe

Earlier this week, a couple of my favourite music bloggers, Mike and Marcello, were tweeting about Janelle Monáe. By the wonders of the internet, within minutes I was listening to her entire back catalogue and ordering her rather wonderful new CD, The ArchAndroid, from Amazon. It’s a varied smorgasbord of modern soul sounds that makes the new Prince cd (good as it is, well worth all 65P I paid) sound dated. Here’s a track from it, plus an obscure non-CD trailer that was presumably released to promote her first EP proper, The Chase. Janelle Monáe – Wondaland Janelle Monáe – The Chase

What If Shakespeare Were Alive Today?

A couple of years ago, the cartoonist Brick and I came up with a two page comic strip for the magazine Tripod. It’s about the nature of comics and graphic novels and has since been reprinted elsewhere in part and full. I’ve used it in my own university teaching. Now we’ve decided to make it available for free. You can find it on the downloads page of this site (or read online here). As an added bonus, above is a key to one of the panels that Brick did for English Drama Media magazine, while below is part of an introduction that I wrote for that reprint. Enjoy. There’s an old saw saying that ‘if Shakespeare was alive today, he’d be writing soap operas’. What…

Willy Vlautin and The War Horse

I don’t go for stories about animals. You’ll hunt in vain for animals in my novels, or even pets. As for stories narrated by animals, put it this way. Paul Auster’s  novels since Moon Palace have been variable but the only one i don’t like is Timbuktoo, which is told by a dog. It’s far too cutesy. So I’ve not read Michael Morpurgo’s The War Horse, which is narrated by a horse. And I had no interest in seeing the play based on it, though I’d heard good things about the songs in the production, by John Tams. However, my partner and I had a London day out planned, primarily to see the Henry Moore exhibition at Tate Britain (it’s wonderful and we went round…