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At the Penguin Press ‘launch lunch’ I talked about a book called Waste, by Tristram Stuart, which we're publishing in July. It's about food waste. We throw away up to 20 million tonnes of food in the UK every year, and that amount is matched by some other European countries, Japan, and the US. If there was a way of redistributing the excess it would feed 1 billion of the world's hungry three times over. Food is wasted all along the supply chain. Farmers overproduce because they know as much as a quarter of their crop may be rejected for aesthetic reasons – if a potato is too knobbly or a carrot too wonky it will be thrown away. In the supermarket, because of unnecessarily strict food safety guidelines and sell-by dates that again are there for aesthetic reasons, food is thrown out weeks before it would be unsafe to eat. And finally, in the home, we buy too much food and don't eat it all. If we wasted less, global food prices could stabilise, thereby allowing the hungry to afford more, and because there would be less demand in the rich West, the countries that export food to us at their population's expense would sell it where it was needed. Pollution would be drastically reduced – there would be fewer cows emitting methane and fewer fuel-guzzling machines transporting and processing food.
The author lives by example. As a student he fed himself on what food shops and supermarkets threw away. He is a Freegan. To this day, as well as the pigs he rears and his vegetable patch, he lives largely on what is discarded by others. Now I have always wanted to go bin-dipping, and when I mentioned this to my colleague, Emily Hill, she confessed that she did too, so on a Sunday afternoon in April we went looking for our dinner in bins around the Strand and Covent Garden.
***
The first supermarket we came to had closed a few minutes before we arrived, and there was no sign of food being wasted front of house, but when we went around the back we saw a man unloading several green pallets into a green skip. The pallets were full of food that had reached its sell-by date but was fit to eat. When we asked if he minded us taking pictures he was delighted. He had complained to his manager about the amount wasted every day but was told there was nothing they could do about it. Not only was this food fated to expend its nutrients in an incinerator or pit, it was sprayed with blue dye to prevent the food being sold on, a slightly less offensive deterrent than bleach, which some supermarkets use to put off scavengers.
The second supermarket, within walking distance of the first, was more careful about who it let look at its bins. We came to locked doors and a warning sign that rhymed: ‘This door will not open before 8AM, unless it is the dustbin men.’ We moved on to a doughnut shop. A black bag nestled innocuously by its doorstep. It was heavy. I opened it and found a buffet of multicoloured, icing-smeared, cream-filled unhealthy snacks. They had been put in the bag an hour earlier, when they would have been fine to eat, and now were soiled by cup dregs and damp tissues.
Our last two stops were coffee shops. One we passed as it was closing, saw the fridge shelves stacked with ready-to-eat sandwiches and resolved to come back to find out what was being done with them. The other we were drawn to by the small hill of transparent bin bags outside it. The first, we discovered, did not throw its sandwiches away, but saved them till the next day – a guiding star of frugality in a sea of commercial effluent. But the see-through bin bags of the second were full of sticky Danish pastries, soggy bread pitted with dried fruits, and croissants.
We went home hungry, but not because there wasn’t enough to eat.
Full Disclosure: What follows is a highly subjective
narrative based on my personal experience of being a 100% fan[1] of
the above pictured writer who was known for his favouring of incredibly long
sentences and footnotes but more importantly was inhabited by a crushing
brilliance and infallible genius that allowed him to describe exactly what it
feels like to be a live, thinking homosapien in this crazy modern world we call
home.
Yesterday, at Hamish Hamilton,
we announced a major new acquisition that is of particular significance to me;
the posthumous masterpiece, the ‘Long Thing’ my literary hero had been working
on since Infinite Jest, a new novel
from David Foster Wallace, The Pale King.
When The New Yorker ran an extract
from the novel, Wiggle
Room, I couldn’t believe it. Still raw from the tragic loss of his death,
suicide at a mere 46 after a lifetime of severe depression, I couldn’t believe
that there was more. And not just an unpublished story, or an essay, but a
novel. D.T. Max explains how this all
came about in his brilliant and devastating essay ‘The Unfinished’
(also in The New Yorker):
'In his final hours, he had tidied up the
manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two
computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other
pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded
his attempt to integrate them into the novel. This was his effort to show the
world what it was to be “a f***ing human being.” He had not completed it to his
satisfaction. This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it
was the ending he chose.'
My love affair with David Foster
Wallace’s writing began after a combination of Janet Street Porter’s bile (‘I
thought it was some kind of evil practical joke’) and Paul Morley’s enthusiasm
(‘the way of using words in all sorts of extremely gymnastic ways is
continually a sexual and intellectual thrill’) during a discussion ofOblivionon Newsnight Review compelled
me to buy a copy. I had never read anything like it, despite being in a pretty
intense DeLillo/Pynchon/Auster place at the time. The stories just blew me
away, especially Good Old Neon, which
I still maintain to this day (as my colleagues here in the office can attest
to) is one of, if not, the[2]
finest pieces of short fiction ever written. After Oblivion I quickly, or as quickly as one can with DFW, devoured the
rest of his books and discovered a writer completely without peer[3].
In his fiction he explored hideous
men, anxiety, obsession and addiction; in his non-fiction he tackled everything
from luxury cruise liners to Presidential campaigns, state fairs to
dictionaries of American Usage. Oh, and tennis, always tennis. Through it all,
his insane genius is evident and all is peppered with gut-wrenching hilarity and
an epiphanic sadness that just plain nails the human condition. With The Pale King (and I’ve been lucky
enough to read 120 pages of it so far) he describes the lives of the employees
at an Internal Revenue Service centre, and its central character is a David
Wallace[4].It is about boredom (which was apparently
coined before the word ‘interesting’),
‘About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain,
its levels and forests and endless wastes. Learned about it extensively,
exquisitely, in my interrupted year. And now ever since that time have noticed,
at work and in recreation and time with friends and even the intimacies of
family life, that living people do not speak much of the dull. Of those parts
of life that are and must be dull. Why this silence? Maybe it’s because the
subject is, in and of itself, dull … There may, though, I opine, be more to it
… as in vastly more, right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size’.
His aim was to be emotionally engaging and to
write about boredom while being entertaining and to show the world what it was
to be a human being.
In all his work he has shown me
this. Which is why he is my favourite, why I love his writing, why I was
devastated by his death and why I am unbelievably honoured, excited and
privileged to be able to work on this book and to bring this peerless
chronicler of modernity to the audience his singular genius deserves.
[1] I would
go out on a limb here and say, w/r/t David Foster Wallace, that he is in fact
my favourite writer of all time and has, in Infinite
Jest, written the most accomplished and enjoyable novel I have ever read.
[2] An
honourable mention should also go Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener
[3] As HH’s
own Zadie Smith says, ‘he’s so modern he’s in a different time-space continuum
from the rest of us.’
[4] Although
as his author’s forward claims, w/r/t him (the real David Wallace) being the
main character, that this isn’t a cute, look-mum-no-hands “metafictional titty
pincher”.
The gloves were off last night, as Particular Books launched with a head-scratching, brain-teasing, knowledge-dredging Quiz to End All Quizzes at the Ivy House in Holborn. The six-man teams included booksellers and Penguins alike, and ranged from Occasionally Right (Rights), Economic Collapse (Finance) and www.winners.com (Online), to the heart-breakingly named Hopefully Better Than Waterstone's.
The first round –English Countryside– had us baffled with questions about swan-upping, but reassured us when our teams got the correct answers for questions about a man being buried with his heart in a biscuit tin (Thomas Hardy) and the misconception of Gypsy provenance (Egypt). The Pubs round brought the teams close to fisticuffs, with quotes from Coleridge, Churchill and Ogden Nash, and all the teams frantically trying to remember the words to Pop Goes the Weasel (fact lovers: it references The Eagle on City Road). Round 3, a fashion round, introduced quizmaster extraordinaire Simon Winder to the world of Jefferson Hack, Kanye West and Milla Jovovich, and made us all resolve to wear a little more colour, a little wilder heels, and accessorise a little neater. Just as long as we can name which film Lauren Hutton starred in alongside Richard Gere in the 80s (American Gigolo. Yesssssssss.) The Weird English Words in round 4 introduced us to B.U.R.M.A., a baby oyster (a spat), the oche and the hiphop female equivalent of 'pimpjuice' ('Milkshake', apparently. Discuss). Aaaand... relax.
Ten minutes to scoff some delicious Thai food, and then onwards into battle. The fifth round, titled 'Q & U', baffled some team-members. After answering 'lacquer', 'Quebec' and 'equals sign' for previous answers, one of our group decided the answer to 'A traditional lawn game involving the throwing of a metal or rubber ring to land over a pin?' was hoopla. Weak. Link.
The Animal Names and Facts of the sixth round gave me enough fascinating facts to bar me from a pub for a month. (Did you know that the deadliest marine animal is the box jellyfish? And that George Washington's teeth were made from hippo tusks? Or that itching powder is made from tarantula hair? Or that the only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat?) The final round saw us reaching deep into our GCSE memories to recall how French we were, with questions ranging from the most hated man in French schools (Charlemagne – he invented school) to the Four Musketeers (no, none of them was called Dogtagnan). Having been in the top three for much of the night, we were cruelly pushed into fourth place, and victory was snatched from the Colophon of Publishers by the seven-strong team, Bardini the Magnificent.
If I've learnt anything from the night it's that a gricer is a trainspotter, Shakespeare's father was an ale-inspector, and I shouldn't do pub quizzes with anyone I have to face the next day.
.... Whose day wouldn't be made by this? Respected editors and sensible copywriters alike flocked the corridors of power to prod and be delighted by this fantastic creature.
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Since it's April Fool's Day, I'm in a jovial mood, and looking at what's occurring currently, we seem in need of some light spirits. In one of our meeting rooms today, I noticed some wag had put a sticker on Ernest Shackelton's Escape from the Antarctic saying, "The inspiration for the BBC's I'd Do Anything", and it made me laugh. Obviously, the original sticker came from Charles Dickens's searing indictment of child poverty, rather than the noted explorer's musical escapades in the South Pole, but it got me thinking – in this vein, which stickers would you like to see? To get the ball rolling:
1984: "The inspiration for Channel 4's hit show Big Brother"
One has to take one's laughs where one can find them.
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In this post JoeThePublicist and Alan Trotter discuss the art of publicity using twitter, on twitter (Penguin gets meta!). The images below accurately reflect their conversation with only certain liberties taken. For ease of comprehension Twitter's reverse chronology has, um, been reversed. Clicking on the images will take the viewer to the links referred to in those images, sometimes..
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I've lived in Hackney for almost nine years now. That's 31 years short of urban magus Iain Sinclair's 40 in the borough. In Hackney time Sinclair puts me in short trousers.
Like Sinclair, I am also an interloper. I came to London in my early twenties, and I've put down roots. My daughter was born in Homerton Hospital just eight weeks ago; so for me there will for ever be a connection to Hackney.
On Saturday, I got the chance to join an Art Bus tour organised around Sinclair's book and his relationship with three Hackney artists. We met up at the studio of the Dickensian-named Oona Grimes in Finsbury Park. Grimes has provided the interior illustrations to the book. She and Sinclair first collaborated together over a shared interest in the Elizabethan magician Dr Dee. Her studio contains two enormous presses and large, heavily stained housings for her acid baths. You get the sense that there's industry in her artistry.
I leafed through her wonderful a is ..., which consisted of a series of prints of imaginary cities, from A–Z. Samuel Butler, Tarkovsky, Borges and others were represented. That was our leaping-off point. The fake, the contrived, the unreal. We got on the bus: suitably steeped in mythology it was time to hit Hackney.
The Art Bus was an old Routemaster which puttered off through Stoke Newington. On board they were serving gin and tonics. We were promised music, and there was: a single iPod and a pair of headphones made its way along the upper deck.
Our first stop was in London Fields. Even before we got off the bus it was clear something was happening. There was white and blue police tape everywhere. There were solitary policemen standing by said tape to ensure we obeyed its implied injunction not to cross it. Iain Sinclair led us away from the tape and the police to what looked at first sight to be a garage. It was an artist's studio. I noticed later that the tape seemed to surround the studio, like we'd somehow got inside the cordon without being noticed or having noticed. Boundaries dissolve in Sinclair's company.
Jock MacFadyen's work reminds me of the paintings of Peter Doig. Large canvases, hypnotically vast spaces. MacFadyen's works are also confections. He takes buildings, places and transports them. Sinclair told us he was interested in the retrieval of sorts that the paintings had become. Many of MacFadyen's paintings show buildings that no longer exist. These are ghost buildings, they survive only on canvas, filtered through MacFadyen's imagination.
We piled on the bus for what would be my last stop. Into Hackney Wick where we visited an artists' commune (much to their indifference) and then across the road to Mother Studios. Both the commune and the art gallery lie on one side of the Hertford Union Canal; on the other side lies the Blue Wall, which protects/conceals/hides/obscures the Olympic building site.
We had an audience with the artist Stephen Cornford, whose work was on display in the Elevator Gallery. His spinning guitars were both violent and unsettling, but he was reassuringly friendly and told us of his previous project which was to trespass all over the Olympic site while evading the security. He liked the fact that this private land had been bought for the nation, but liked less the reality that though it was considered to now belong to all of us we weren't allowed on it. The contradiction appealed to him and he set out to explore it. The Blue Wall is more of a challenge than the white and blue tape.
The Art Bus was heading off to a bistro, but I was heading home to my partner and my daughter. Along the canal, with the Blue Wall to the east, I watched the sun set over Hackney in the west.
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If I could write like anyone in the world I think I would maybe like to write like David Vann. Each word in a sentence feels like it’s been weighed and measured to such precision, it’s as if they could be set in stone; at the end of what seems to be every paragraph there is a moment of epiphany that makes you stop and think ‘Amazing! How did he manage to get to that?’ There are moments of such pure and emotional power that I had a genuine physical reaction: at one point I read fully three pages with my mouth open in shock. I’ll guess you haven’t heard of him, not because I’m very cool or anything but because up until late November last year I hadn’t either, and we don’t publish his debut book of fiction, Legend of a Suicide, in this country until October this year.
Let’s be honest with each other: I’m a publicist and you probably don’t trust me. My job is to cajole, nag, bully and create – here’s an ugly word – hype for things I want you to buy. Distrust can be good, though, as it can help to create healthy scepticism. The best journalists are healthy sceptics, who insist on making their own mind up about something. The best I can do is try to get them to take a chance on even taking the time to make their mind up, rather than just dismissing something out of hand. The best way to do that is through – here’s a nice word – enthusiasm. Doesn’t everyone love enthusiasm? Well, maybe not all the time. Let’s be realistic. But in my job it’s very helpful and, with David Vann and this book, I am 100% ain’t nuthin’ but the truth enthusiasm, hence this very early shout out.
The book is comprised of five stories that book-end a novella, all inter-connected and with a clear progression. The more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve realised it’s a different way of writing a novel.
The more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve realised what a shatteringly good work it is. A colleague here said that when he finished it he went downstairs to his flatmate and, completely unbidden, told him step by step every detail in the book; it was so vivid to him it felt as if he’d lived it. Another texted me with a completely unquotable but extremely visceral reaction to a particular moment in the book. While this may tell you more about my homelife than you need to know, I’ve found myself having to read out sections of the book to my girlfriend, while she tries to get on with doing, you know, actual stuff, because I’ve been so struck by their clarity and brilliance. And it’s not as if she’s going to have to pay for a copy. I’m sure I could even stump up for one for her parents. If it’s Christmas or a birthday. Maybe.
The book was published late last year, only in the States, by the small but venerable University of Massachusetts Press, and we’re hoping that, on this side of the Atlantic, it will be loved by people in the same way that the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle loved it. If you like American fiction, if you like Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler, Cormac McCarthy, if you like stupendous writing from anywhere then you have to read this book. I’m not telling you Next Big Thing So Go Tell Your Kids or Die Trying; I’m just saying that if you like great books I think you will love this. It’s wonderful, it’s moving, it’s literature. It’s Legend of a Suicide by David Vann, and it’s a little way off at the moment, but it’s well worth the wait.
And, because it’s the 21st century, if you’d like to hear more about this book as it gets closer to publication, then ping me @joethepublicist on twitter. I don’t know what I’m doing on there yet but I could maybe update you and stuff like that.
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Blimey, this travelling lark is slow. I'm sorry I seemed to forget Southern Europe - I'm not going to Germany next at all. Poor old Italy. With its wealth of literature, from feline to flagellatory (always fond of literature that portrays Odysseus as the rotten fibber he truly was), I'm afraid I lumped for something altogether less translated.
Third stop: Italy. Or... the Roman Empire. So, lots of Europe, but mainly centred around Rome.
I'm not sure why I haven't read this already. Maybe it's my mother-in-law's habit of referring to it as "One Clavdivs"*, which is v. v. pleasing but leads me to expect some kind of Wodehousian educational hoot, or maybe it's the clunky jacket on the edition I owned as a youth; either way I'm enormously grateful to Naomi Alderman for suggesting this as my Italian destination.
The Penguin blurb describes this as "one of the most... gripping historical novels ever written", but somehow I feel that this doesn't do it full justice. Rather than merely being a juicy and salacious novelization of Rome, it's mannered, and dry, and genuinely feels as if it's been translated, but really thrives on all these things, and lacks any of the fustiness or distance that translation could sometimes entail. It's funny, and frightening, and despite the fact that I couldn't sketch that family tree if you paid me (although I don't think I'm alone in that), I found all the characters to be incredibly well-drawn and unutterably fascinating. It's a page-turner, and, most importantly, features passages like this:
"'The cook's a genius,' they are all thinking. 'The mullet with piquant sauce, and those fat stuffed thrushes and the wild-boar with truffles - when did I eat so well last?... Ah, here comes the slave with the wine again. That excellent Cyprian wine.' ... And everyone says, thinking of the thrushes again, or perhaps of the little simnel cakes, 'Admirable. Admirable, Pollio.'"
'Thinking of the thrushes again'? If I was served fat stuffed thrushes, I wouldn't just be thinking of them a few minutes later, I'd be stuffing the chef into my bag and locking him in my own kitchen. Mmmm... tiny cooked birds...
Conclusions as a traveller:
Probably not the right country to marry your first wife's new son's second cousin's grandmother. A little too much poison knocking about to ensure the wedding ceremony didn't go off without at least one guest collapsing and dying, and tricky to ensure that you weren't your own sole inheritor.
I am so excited about hitting the rest of Europe. Germany, if all goes according to plan, will be my next-but-one stop, and then I'll try to thread up through Scandinavia. Thank goodness I didn't throw out my moonboots.
Sam the Copywriter
*This is the same mother-in-law who told me about Poe's Raven almost being a Parrot. Then she said, "Lenore! Nevermore!" in a parrot voice. Boy oh boy, it made me laugh, but I will never be able to read Poe again.
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Again, thank you for all your suggestions. Although I haven't taken up all of them, they are grist to my plodding-route mill and spark off many ideas (as well as bulking up my Amazon wishlist). I think I've got a fairly clear route of where I'm going to go in Europe now, and I think I can even begin to see glimmers of another continent. Hurray! Although I'll regret saying that when all the bedding looks funny and I'm forced to eat three meals a day at McDonald's just to feel like I recognise something.
Third stop: SWITZERLAND! More specifically, Lake Geneva
I have to confess, I'd never read any Brookner before. I think I'd dismissed her as a bit wimmin-y, and although there's the odd phrase here or there that reads a bit heavily-autobiographically, the whole book is neat, and light, and captures perfectly both the sadness of out-of-season resorts and the weight of one's baggage when one flees heartache. Edith Hope, a romantic novelist, has been ordered to Switzerland by her loved ones after a 'shocking' romantic indiscretion. Poor Edith, constantly reminding us that she's been compared aesthetically to Virginia Woolf, is shipped off, carrying her feelings like precious eggs, tuning them constantly but never really examining them, so certain is she of what kind of life she has agreed to.
Although not hugely, uniquely Swiss, I think this conjures up that cold, clear, medicinal travel that only autumn in that kind of place can provide - and I loved Edith's wit, and her sense: in another lifetime, she might have been Elinor Dashwood (and ended up with Hugh Grant SQUEEAAAL). The recognition of her hotel room decor as "veal-coloured" is something that made me snigger out loud on the Tube, and her overactive imagination (and subsequent disappointment) as she views each fellow-guest is something so sadly recognisable.
Earns extra Swiss points by having one character eat lots of delicacies from the Patisserie.
Conclusions as a traveller:
Don't bring your dog to Switzerland. They hate dogs. And probably don't bring your daughter, either.
Right, next stop, Germany. Now these guys are seriously witty, so I am bracing my ribs for some first-class tickling. Please keep the suggestions coming in - although I do have a German book in mind, I'm a bit scared of it.
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