Carrie Etter – who as well as being an acclaimed poet, is also senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa and editor of the important anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets – read last Wednesday from her third collection, Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), some of the poems of which were part of a pamphlet from Oystercatcher called The Son, which was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice.

This collection of prose poems reflects upon giving up her son for adoption when she was seventeen – though, Etter said, she wanted to find her way to writing of difficult emotional experience that wasn’t confessional. She used, she said, in her early twenties, to write confessional poems – and confessional poems on this subject – but she has since found that by focusing on direct personal narrative, which often focuses on event– the hallmark of the confessional – she was not able to achieve her aim, that of bringing consciousness of the day-to-day experience of loss through in the collection. There is also a concern for the reader’s ability to access or feel, emotion, in works that are explicitly concerned with it. The best way, Etter said, to let the reader into emotion is not to tell of the emotion but evoke it for the reader to be able to experience it for herself.

This is achieved in the collection by a carefully structured pattern of four ‘Imagined Sons’ poems – in which meeting between herself and her son are imagined, sometimes told in a direct realist style, as in ‘Imagined Sons 11: The Friend (Part 1)’:

Coming out on the other side, I’m surprised I see no people, no one visible in the distance,      only low sones, tablets of grey and black, occasionally a white cross, and I apprehend this is a –

And often filtered through fairytale, and, particularly Greek myth, as in ‘Imagined Sons 16: Narcissus’:

I break into sobs, and when the water of my tears laps at my feet, I know I’m here to drown us both

In other places, this refraction through myth becomes more riotous, as in the surrealist ‘Imagined Sons 9: Greek Salad’, a modern Metamorphoses in which her son, transformed into an olive tree for raping the keeper of the god’s olive grove, appears as an olive in her Greek salad. Having listened to him start to talk about the emotional neglect of his now keeper, Etter cuts him off, mid-whine, by eating him:

‘Delicious,’ I say to the waiter, swallowing the small olive whole. ‘Just delicious.’

The poems have their own logics, avoid any singular way of seeing or thinking about the experience of imagining encountering her son – she was surprised, Etter said, by the fact that she ate the olive – she hadn’t started the poem intending to, yet she was sure about it’s psychological accuracy, the way it followed through the logic of the poem.

These imagined son poems are then carefully divided by ten ‘Birthmother’s Catechisms’, so that every four imagined sons poems are followed by a catechism, which also bookend the collection. These catechisms came later than the imagined sons poems – it took a long time, said Etter, to realize that the question and response form of this genre of religious instruction was the right form to raise questions not only that weren’t able to be explored in the imagined sons format, but which were raised by that format. Consequently, these catechisms constitute a form of self-questioning (rather than, as with the religious model from which Etter takes her form, a mnemonic for learning answers by rote):

How did you let him go?

A nurse brought pills for drying up breast milk

How did you let him go?

Who hangs a birdhouse from a sapling?

In a collection that scrutinizes many imagined sons and encounters with them, these poems of self-scrutiny are, I would say, necessary. Etter too thinks so, saying that one editor who loved the imagined sons poems didn’t like the catechisms, thought they were a ‘mistake’. But Etter found them, not only necessary, but necessary as a regular structuring device, giving a more complete sense of the day-to-day experience of loss a birthmother has. This very careful ordering, led to questions of editing and ordering, which Etter impressed was far more necessary than many people would often think – the order of poems, whether in a collection, magazine, or anthology, affects how, and whether they are read. Don’t, she said, start any publication with a twelve-page poem.

Etter and Patricia Debney, who was hosting, also talked about the form of the prose poem – a form in which Kent runs the only module in the country. Coming to a definition of poetry that focused on sensibility, rather than forming words into lines – they suggested that the difference between a lyric poem (including a prose poem) and prose was down to whether you were interested in telling a story or in investigating ideas – which, they agreed, was the work of the lyric poem.

In what was one of our highest tech readings so far, Amy Cutler provided an excitingly interdisciplinary event, applying poetic techniques of collage and erasure to film, text, diagrams and graphs: most frequently, though not exclusively, putting the disciplines of geography (her PhD, in geography, was on the coast and forest in modern British poetry) the philosophy of memory, an interest in materiality and in gender in conjunction through her practice. The result is a poetry that is intelligent and thoughtful about its own processes, with an impressive sense of scope – every project was different, employed different media and processes, – and an accompanying sense of depth. These works, both individually and taken together, are focussed and important, providing different ways of investigating, for example , and this was the thread that ran clearest for me through the work , the processes of memory.

Cutler’s first piece was a film and text montage that put pressure on the gendered subtext running through her source material, and the language of memory: –she said, of the French films she was using: ‘the hunt for memory in these clichés is also a hunt for a woman, recherche femme, the woman for whom Ridder becomes the subject of a time loop experiment in Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968), for whom the man journeys back to the still image of his own death in Marker’s La Jetée (1962), and for whom X dreams of Marienbad’. ‘Toast’, which Cutler read later, published in Litmus magazine, also focused its interests on the clichés of romantic memory and in aphasia, the speech condition in which impedes your ability to select the right word:

Language leaks through various holes in the skull / who’d have thought

we’d still be trying to be faithful/any of us can live on if we try / let’s say

any one of us / with one drink left on the late edges of a very cold night

Another poem, ‘Chanson’, riffed on two lines by Jacques Brel: Cutler explaining an interest in memory paradoxes through the words ‘I’ll never forget you’: which, whilst true when said in the moment of saying, has its truth invalidated by later loss of memory.

Next, Cutler read from an erasure poem: an erasure of the index of first lines of R S Thomas’s Later Poems. She was inspired, she said, by finding what she felt was a brilliant few lines of poetry:

on reading the index. The idea, she said, was to ‘make a love affair’ from them – to develop a love story out of the quite often religious texts of Thomas and of his love affair with the landscape of Wales, a love affair that talked to the idea, and this is why the later poems were used, was concerned with memory, with looking back at the end of life.

R. S. Thomas’s actual poetry, of course, is the antithesis of the sort of process-based practice that Culter puts his words through – which is part of the fun of it – she was interested, she said, in the strange figure that gets constructed in his poems which isn’t there in his poems – the way a different kind of poetic can emerge, by happenstance, out of what most people would regard as the material around his work, rather than the work itself. She enjoyed, too, the way in which the internal logic of the generic form she had chosen to inhabit, the index, created the movement of tone in the poem – which changes according to the alphabet – particularly, for example, around the letter ‘I’.

The materiality of the book, and its paratexts – marginalia and appendices, is of particular interest to Cutler, both in her research and in her marginal remarks around the readings of her poems. She talked about sharing experiences of making books as children, about her clear memory of the first time she ever encountered a footnote (-in the Moomins – it told her that if she didn’t understand a particular part of the story, she should get an adult to explain it to her. As no adult could offer an explanation beyond the understanding she had of the text – as she had fully understood it – this footnote created for her the sense of there being inaccessible knowledge that she was denied access to). This interest in paratext provides the form for an exhibition Cutler is curating in Leeds in June, called, Forest Expectation Sites, in which a series of artists and poets will create responses to the work of the poet Peter Larkin, creating a contemporary and artistic collections of adversaria, a Renaissance term for scholars’ annotations.

Cutler then read a collaborative piece that had been written in 2014 for the Polish Cultural Institute in protest against the fact that polish bishops had recently announced that all mothers should breastfeed, and that there was no way of distinguishing between sex or gender in Polish. Taking a polish instruction manual for breastfeeding, she and her co-translator translated and retranslated until the text started to deconstruct and critique itself, often in very amusing ways.

Again showing an interest in the relationships between languages, and in cultural memory in the guise of fairy-tale, Cutler read a poem of names for Rumpelstiltskin . The tale exists in many different European countries, but Rumpelstiltskin, whose power resided in his refusal to tell his name, is called by a different name in every language – not just a different name, but names with entirely different etymologies and meanings.

I’ll go with Shortribs, Sheepshanks, or Laceleg: a poor girl’s milling tune. I think

I’ve forgotten him now. Dear, it’s not possible to kill off anything in rumpled words

The latter part of the reading was more obviously concerned with Culter’s interest in geographical science and in the potentials of interdisciplinarity. Talking about Douglas Oliver’s diagram poems, she said diagrams (and this offers really interesting potential for understanding how her interest in translation relates to her other interests) are ‘machines of translation’, they enable you to move between disciplines, to create new thought. What is also important in this creation of new thought, is the bringing together of different media, creating new ways in which they communicate with and inflect off one another – Land Diagrams,  an online series, curated by Cutler, in which writers respond the same visual encodings of landscape, is one example of this, and it is the crucial operation of her chapbook Nostalgia Forest (which she closed her reading with), from Oystercatcher Press  in which dendrochronological (tree-ring reading) diagrams are put against fragments of Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting (2000).

Here the interplay between the diagrams displaying how the history of a tree can be read from its physical form – rings, scars, incline – and a text on the functions of human memory poses questions about the materiality of memory, how the past is experienced in the present. Both diagrams and text are ‘found’ materials – it is in the moving between that new thought is created.

Linda Grant was at the Creative Writing Reading Series on Wednesday to read from and talk about her latest book, Upstairs at the Party, a campus novel set in an new university in the early seventies – a university that, though unnamed, is clearly the University of York, where Grant herself went as an undergraduate in the early seventies – it was then, she said, eight years old, with only 2,700 students.

Though Grant dismissed the tendency of critics and interviewers to search for autobiography in her books – describing it as a ‘modernish idea about authenticity’, this novel, given its setting in time and place, clearly has a quasi-autobiographical setting, even if the events – leading up to, and then exploring the repercussions of, a tragic event that happens upstairs at a party – are not necessarily – though it seemed to me that they perhaps also were closer than Grant explicitly said. However, this seemed needful to Grant in this novel – which seemed to be focused around trying to understand her generation – and finding that to do so, she needed to go back, in her own words to the intimate place in people’s lives they return to, their formative influences’. She was interested, she said, in her generation’s idealism and what became of it – and the novel, and her thoughts on it, seem permeated with the ideologies of the early seventies.

She described this time, at first. as the dead period between the sixties and punk, but it soon became clear that to her, and for many, this was in intensely active time, a time of heated left wing politics among her generation – of feminism, Marxism, explorations of gender and sexual identities – a time when Peter Hitchens could be found on campus hectoring fellow students into taking the Marxist pamphlets he was handing out. Grant now, and in the novel, her narrator, maintains a skepticism towards the fervor of these ideologies – it is clear that this was a time of political experimentation with identity – which is perhaps why she describes it as dead – its experimentation and ardor being both something potentially damaging to individuals, and something that has had long term societal legacies. The age perhaps needed, she said, those that would experiment with and discover the boundaries of these ideologies and identities, and those who fall off the edge.

This, she said, was what differentiates her novel from other campus novels – it is the opposite to Brideshead, the novel, she said, that they were all reading at the time, because, at York, the halls of academe didn’t really exist: the students themselves were actively creating the mythology and themselves. York, she said, was fascinating, in its ideology that totalitarianism could be defeated by the amalgamation of arts and sciences in a collegiate system built from concrete and centered around a plastic-bottomed lake. There wasn’t, she said, really any pastoral care, its students were left to sink or swim on their own. And many of them sank.

Asked about the relation of her work to the historical novel – given that Upstairs at the Party is, like her other novels, set post World War II – that is to say in the relatively recent past, Grant replied that she is far more interested in in what she feels she thinks of as modern times – with WWII providing a cut off point – she wouldn’t she said, ever write a novel set during WWII, she’d find it too like dress up, but the legacy of that war, and post world war reconstruction is something that very clearly she thinks of as part of what h some to define modernity.

She was asked too, about likeable characters – citing Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist as an excellent example of a brilliant novel with no likeable characters. The popularity of the likeable character, of someone you can root for, she dismissed, saying the questions you should ask of your characters are: are they alive? are they interesting? is their monstrousness interesting? do you recognize their flaws/mistakes? If you want to make friends, she said, don’t go to fiction, go to a party.

David Nicholls kicked off the Creative Writing Reading Series for the Spring term, reading and discussing his novels and screenplays to a room packed to standing room only. David started the evening by reading the first page – and the first chapter – of his latest novel Us (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014): Douglas Petersen, Nicholls’s narrator, is woken in the middle of the night and told by his wife that she is leaving him. A grim end to start with, though the tone was resolutely comic – the way shocking news can often fail to register, being so outside daily experience that it can be incomprehensible, was deftly observed: Douglas at first thinks his wife is, as she often does, asking him to check for burglars, and so dutifully checks the house for intruders before she has to repeat herself to get the message across.

This beginning puts us in rather different territory to Nicholls’s previous novels which, though they similarly often focus on relationships, track the beginnings of romance in younger couples – as was the premise in One Day, which followed the protagonists’ relationship over twenty years from university into their early forties. Us, said Nicholls, is an older book – citing a mixture of parenthood and the fact that he didn’t feel as confident, now in his mid-forties, in writing as convincing a contemporary twenty-something as he could when he was twenty-something. This was the first time, he said, he had tried to write someone older than himself: Douglas is in his mid-fifties, and not only the birth of Nicholls’s children, but the death of his father – which occurred some months into the writing of Us – have clearly had their impact upon it, the novel’s emotional core turns, with a turn in point of view, to the father-son relationship between Douglas and his son Albie.

Pressed on this potential correspondence between life and art by Alex Preston, Nicholls talked in some depth about the relation of his father’s death to the final shape and focus of the novel – which is dedicated to him. Whilst insistent that his relationship with his father – though difficult and troubled – was not identical, or even particularly similar in fact to Douglas and Albie’s relationship, this did raise the question of whether it is possible to write something you haven’t thought or felt. Nicholls’s conclusion on this was to say ‘there isn’t a single moment [in the novel] where I could say ‘that happened’, yet [his relationship with his father] overshadows the writing’. He also pointed to his use of incidents, thoughts or emotions in his own life which he has used in his novels, but transposed, projected onto other characters, scenarios and relationships – if one cannot write something alien to one’s thoughts or feelings, those emotions are always twisted, or disguised, by the operations of fiction. Although his characters, he said, were hardly ever based on people he knows, ‘little bits of myself come through’. When he does use others, he said, it is often actors – because what he takes in trying to create a character isn’t so much incidents or personalities but performance, mannerisms or rhythm – a physicality. He gave the example of Rafe Spall, who inspired some aspects of Ian in One Day, then later played him in the film.

Despite this being in some ways an older novel than his previous books, this distinction is not altogether straightforward – Great Expectations, Nicholls pointed out (Nicholls’s referents and roots are in clearly in the nineteenth century realist novel, which can be seen not just from his content and style, but his epigrams – James, Hardy, and his screenwriting CV – adapting, among others, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd for television), is always thought of as a book of youth, but it’s narrated by a 55 year old man. Similarly, Nicholls described Us as ‘a travelogue in place and time’: it has two presents at once. If we start in a point of time and space – Connie telling Douglass she is leaving him – we then get two stories, one about this break up, and one about their relationship, from when they first met.

Nicholls talked about how he had consciously attempts to keep himself on his toes following the successes of his previous books – if you have a success, he said, the temptation is either to do the same again, or to do something entirely different – the trick is to try to do something in between. In order to avoid predictability, and this was a point as much to do with genre as his relation to his other books, he has to play games with structure, to misdirect – which he often does with time structures and point of view. Point of view is clearly something that preoccupies him: Us is his second novel written in the first person, the first being Starter for Ten. Nicholls’s aim in Us for this point of view is the exact opposite of his previous use of it: whilst Brian in Starter for Ten has similarities to Nicholls, Douglas is rather different, Douglass’s character and occupation as a scientist allowed Nicholls to challenge his ability to write in the first person – he was interested, he said, in writing, in the form of fiction about someone who didn’t value fiction, in writing about art through someone who wasn’t confident doing so. In some ways, also, Nicholls said, he wanted Douglas to be an anti-Dexter, the male lead character in One Day, and writing him in the first rather than third person helped him create those distinctions. Nicholls talked too about the difficulties in narration of One Day – a narrative written in the third person past tense, which put pressure on his writing. In the first person, banality is allowed; the narrative is a reflection of a character’s personality. Third person doesn’t allow for this. A first person novel, however, requires a getting into character, the assumption of a voice. Tellingly, Nicholls said this was his quickest novel to write – nine months, but that it took him four years of writing to get to those nine months. The novel started out, he said, as a much more spiteful and angry book about father and son.

The book is written rather differently, too, from his previous novels, comprising of 180 short chapters- Nicholls said he wanted to aim for a series of vignettes, or snapshots, creating an impression like flicking through a family photo album. This particular form would seem to be heavily influenced, not only by the content of the book, but by Nicholls’s background as a screenwriter – your average screenplay, he said, comprises 180 short scenes, ruthlessly edited: in screenwriting you are constantly being asked by others ‘do we need this scene?’ – it is clear that he sees screenwriting as something which has given him concision. And plotting too – Nicholls talked about how, in adapting his books into screenplays, he would immediately give his team a scene-by-scene, chapter-by-chapter breakdown of action, something they seemed surprised to get from an author. But these plot-breakdowns seem to be essential to Nicholls’s writing: he can’t, write, at least well, he said, without having first prepared structure and plot – which also goes some way to explaining the time proportions of the planning and writing of this novel!

It was clear that Nicholls credits screenwriting with developing much of his ability and style as a novelist – he claims to be influenced by Woody Allen as much as Dickens – and he sees many of his authorial techniques as equivalent to filmic devices. He described his epigrams, for example, as equivalent to captions in a movie – suggesting a tone, creating a distance from the action. His dialogue, he said, is also more immediately sharper, improvisatory, and requires less editing than other aspects of his writing. However, he also talked about the difficulties he had in adapting his own books into films. Asked by a student what the goal is in adapting a book, he agreed that often fidelity is the enemy of a good adaptation – that you need to make something that works with the potentials of its own medium. For example, he said, during a scene where Emma and Dexter have an awful dinner in One Day, in the book, one can access Dexter asking himself why he’s acting like this. In a film, of course, this is unmanageable – you have to rely on the actor to do the novelist’s work, and if the screenwriter is too tied into the novel they perhaps won’t see how to make the transition work. He also expressed discomfort around genre – saying that initially he found it uncomfortable that he was pressured into changing the ending of Starter for Ten for the film into something that more closely resembled the genre of romantic comedy – in his novels, he said, he always tries to avoid, or play with, the expectations of genre. However, he said that the also feels the film needed to end that way, the expectations and structure of film demanded a different ending to that required by the novel. He’s wary, for example, he said of someone making a speech that changes someone’s mind, of the last-minute airport dash – no-one’s mind, he said, is ever changed by this in real life, but then, he said, this isn’t quite real life. Novels, and films, give meaning and structure to a life that doesn’t have that – one of the reasons that he often tries to undercut the reader’s expectations – sometimes, as in One Day and Us, very dramatically. We didn’t get to find out, in the case of Us, how dramatically, so we were left, as I now leave you, on a cliffhanger.

The last Creative Writing reading series of the term offered us the chance to hear some of the current undergraduate and postgraduate students read their work at the open mic night.

Duncan MacKay, first-year PhD student, artist and poet (his work can be found at Poetsdoos, Enigma, PN Review and ZONE magazine, his artwork is held in collections at CERN and NASA and exhibited locally through the Lilford Gallery) kicked the night off by reading three short lyrics. Duncan is also a research fellow is astrophysics, and his poems use innovative poetic techniques to interrogate scientific methodology, and scientific language to disrupt poetic form, though he also has a more lyrical – what he described as ‘Zen-y’ – mode, which came across in ‘Refuge from a Sudden Shower’.

Polina Orlova read a poem responding to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land called ‘Water’, which investigated many of the tropes of the original poem.

Olivia Pinkney read a poem called ‘Body’, which interrogated the objectification of the female body, and women’s relations to their bodies – the repeated refrain ‘my body is not my own’ morphing by the end of the poem into ‘I am not my body’.

Katie Szyszko got the prose readings off to an excellent start, reading a tautly-written prose piece which explored childhood memory, family relations and diaspora experience in both funny and moving ways – reflecting upon her changing relation to her Grandparents’ orthodox faith.

Joe Hill read one of the lightest ‘Dirges’ I’ve yet to hear: a response to his mother telling him that he would have to have children or face being alone, his poem, which started out by seeming to be about his inability to relate to children used a perfectly pitched repetition to achieve a humorous twist at the end of the poem.

Tom Parsons read a poem-critique of Richard Linklater’s 2014 film Boyhood, examining the premises of identification and universality that he sees as underpinning the film of ‘this young man with memories you could own’:

I wanted to see him mainline heroin

Or kill a friend

Or just alienate himself from others

In a way that wasn’t cool or introspective

Neelam Saredia read two new poems – Neelam is a very accomplished performance poet whose clever observational poems are delivered with energy and panache  – she’s always an enjoyable poet to watch.

Chris Scott, a second year PhD student, read two scenes from his novel Intermission – the first a dialogue, and the second a visually descriptive piece which used short and, most particularly, sentences composed of three adjectives, to great effect.

I read some new Sappho translations out with Molly Bloom in January & which will be performed more fully at the Centre for Gender, Sexuality & Writings LGBT week from the 16-20^th February.

Maryam Ala Amjadi read an excellent poem ‘What meets the eye may run from the mouth’, soon to be published in the next issue of the feminist magazine Hysteria, which also offered a feminist reading of the body and perception.

Then, after wine and mince pies, it was time to wish each other a merry Christmas and say goodbye until next term, when we have another fabulous rostra of writers lined up for the series.

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This week the Creative Writing Reading series welcomed Mark Waugh, author of the cult novels, Come and Bubble Ententre,  and a writer who also has his foot very firmly in the modern art world: he is currently Head of Innovation and Research at DACS, Chair of Spacex Gallery Exeter and board member of Photoworks and Brighton Photo biennial. He is an associate advisor of SUUM and Producer of the International Curators Forum.

Waugh is an experimental, bold and highly amusing writer – if his interests are highly theoretical – a close understanding of not only what Derrida meant when he said ‘there is no outside-text’, but what that continues to mean in our daily lives was very much in evidence – they are only so inasmuch as this helps us understand the culture in which we live – and an Waugh’s eye is always on consumer culture, on drug culture, on porn. This places high value on text, of course, as a form of intervention into culture – Waugh’s main aim, he says, is to ask what a text means after we’re immersed in text as our means of navigating the world.

His books are experimental in very different ways – 1997’s Come is a deliberately small, square book, with irregular typographical layout and non sequential sentence that end in very different places to where they began. The layout, Waugh said, was intended to encourage the reader to feel that they could approach the whole novel non-sequentially – just picking it up and looking at a page, then putting it down perhaps flicking to another – illustrating an interest in deconstructing narrative that perhaps owes something to his involvement in the production and practices of art-books, and the production of images. The layout, he said, is a game with the reader

2009’s Bubble Entendre, too, has its relation to the art book – the Semina series, published by Book Works, publishes experimental prose and is named after the series of nine loose-leaf magazines issued by Californian beat artist Wallace Berman in the 1950s and 1960s. Berman is considered by many to be a pioneer of assemblage art – the magazines mixed collaged artworks with poetry by Allen Ginsberg, Jean Cocteau and many others. The design of the book itself reflects other concerns – that it is a yellow book was deliberate – a nod to another leading light in the history of avant-garde publishing – though the image is, of course, rather unlike the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. Waugh seemed to take some joy in this disruption, and the disruption the books cover must cause to its reader’s experience – would you take it on the tube? he wondered.

Come has a particular interest in club and drug culture – and the question around these – as with Waugh’s interest in porn – is always in the question ‘what is the significance of this? ‘, & the novel explores the wider political and social implications of fashions in drug culture – MDMA for example, Waugh said, came into fashion post-AIDS, and this trend for a drug which generates pleasure without stimulating sexual desire thus registers late twentieth-century anxieties around sexuality, non-mainstream community, and pleasure.

With porn, Waugh is both interested in how the concept of porn sits historically – in a lineage from De Sade through Bataille – and how a book operates differently to the internet – a transcription of youporn in a book will be a different thing to the video – not merely because of a difference between motion picture and text, but due to the object of the book, and the differing ways in which both mediums are policed and relate to questions of authority. Waugh recounted a story of how Book Works’s copies of Bubble entendre, destined for the New York book fair, were confiscated by the New York customs on suspicion of being a manual for terrorism. Conversely – the domain – at least printed – of porn – Penthouse magazine – has, perhaps because of the relation of porn to concepts of taste ad morality – has proved, at least historically, more open-minded to aesthetic innovation than one would expect – publishing some of Waugh’s more experimental fiction along with his partner’s art work.

Why might the New York customs office have suspected that Bubble Entendre was a manual for terrorism? The book – more traditionally plot driven than Come, although this plot is played with and chronologically disrupted and overlaid in order to disturb the reader’s sense of temporality – is set in a 2012 takeover of Claridge’s during the Olympics, putting, Waugh said, our fear of terrorism alongside the tedium of sport. Set in a time which is in our past, but at its writing and publication a point in the near future – the novel’s setting produces an odd glitch in time- a future already a past: Waugh said his aim was to create a dystopian novel set so closely in the future that it would very quickly become ridiculous by its own standards – when that future arrived differently. Half the fun, then, for the reader as well as for Waugh reading back with hindsight, is to see what in 2009 looked liked the landscape of 2012 and read it with a knowledge of 2012 – a scene, as Waugh points out, where one character asks another if they haven’t seen their face in News of the World has a completely different force given the events of 2011, and creates a surrealism completely beyond the author’s control. Which, it seems, is something he particularly relishes.

On Wednesday evening Viv Albertine performed what is now becoming a more usual kind of gig for her to a packed room. She was reading from and discussing her memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys (Faber and Faber).

The title, apparently, used to come from her mother’s favourite nag – that she wads only interested in’ Clothes, clothes, clothes. Music, music, music. Boys, boys, boys’. ‘Which goes to show’, said Albertine, ‘that no matter how superficial your interests, if you try hard enough you can really turn them into something.’

Perhaps not quite what her mother had in mind, but it is, of course, this mixture of subversiveness, humour and readiness to make herself the butt of the joke that is, and has always been, Albertine’s great appeal. Both in her extracts from the book and in person, Albertine was sharp, engaging, confident in revealing her quirks, mistakes and lacks of confidence, and incredibly likeable.

Most famously the guitarist of The Slits, Albertine’s book, as she pointed out, is not purely, or even predominantly, a factual autobiography of her time in one of the punk movement’s most famous bands, but, as a personal memoir, a book that spans much wider period of time. And, as she pointed out, being in the band, though it may be the most important thing about her to others, is not necessarily the most important experience of her life. Nonetheless, there is not only a lot of material from this time, but in many ways the ethos of the band – uncompromising, problematically feminist, messy, defiant – is also the ethos of the book, which deals such post-punk material as cancer, IVF, divorce, Audis and middle-age with as much visceral frankness and humour as her stories of trying to give Jonny Rotten a blow job, or having Johnny Thunders persuade her to take heroin.

On which note, we did get a tour of the book’s sex scenes – whilst Albertine assured us there was ‘other stuff in there’, she couldn’t resist the urge to give us what she clearly considers the most entertaining sections of the book – which are ribald but deftly written scenes of embarrassing sexual encounter – which Albertine seemed to take some delight in retelling. One had the sense that perhaps she deliberately makes herself take on more humiliation than the situation demands – but it was clear that she viewed encountering the ways in which she experienced her sexuality, and expressions of it, as humiliating, as an important feminist project – an attempt at honestly analyzing how the pressures put upon women to express their sexuality – both in the seventies and nowadays – manifested themselves in her own experience. She was also insistent on seeing her whole career through the lens of feminism – pointing out that punk’s refusal to assimilate to the expectations of larger culture was, for The Slits and other female punks, an explicitly feminist project – even being in a band was a refusal of the expectations of the limited life that women at the time, from childhood, were trained to expect and desire.

Albertine was also incredibly thoughtful and eloquent about craft – proving repeatedly that even a memoir which may seem very warts-and-all is actually the product of a huge amount of structuring and editing. Talking about her initial ideas of structure – that each chapter would, stemming from the title, be structured by a ‘boy’, this scheme, she says, fell away a year into the three year writing project – but was fundamental in getting the memoir started. Albertine revealed that she kept a note over her workspace saying ‘The Book is Boss’ – subordinating any personal discomfort for the sake of a better book – but also editing out many scenes and events from the first to second draft in order to make the book’s structure work. Part way through, she said, she realized that she was writing a story about a woman who had struggled against expectations to make music, retreated to middle-class, married life and then had to struggle against the expectations and conventions of this new found life in order to, yet again, make music. This structure of life and book discovered, scenes which detracted from this narrative, or weren’t deemed interesting enough for the reader, were discarded, while pieces that she had written for herself, only as a joke or to get her started writing first thing in the day, ended up having to stay – including a piece about her labia that many critics have picked on as one of the braver pieces of the memoir. It seemed that, although Albertine may often be the butt of her own joke in the book, the process of writing it had enabled a form of self confidence and allowed her to find, not only structure in her life, but understanding of the events of it – it was only when writing the book, she said, that she realized that Johnny Thunders had manipulated the situation leasing up to her taking heroin in order to make her vulnerable, rather than acting kindly by pre-warning her that she was about to be kicked out of The Flowers of Romance. Both the life she told, and her insights into what enabled her to tell this life as well as she has done, were fascinating.