That writing is almost exclusively by and for the middle-classes is evidenced by the glee with which journalists pore over JK Rowling’s early life. Here is this poor single mother saved from her dreadful life by that behemoth Potter. No comment that this life is actually real life for a large number of people where bills loom like ships coming out of the fog and who have little of no chance of ever owning that Woolfian dream of a room of their own.
(1) Jack Kerouac is perhaps the most famous writer who describes life on the other side of the breadline. ‘On The Road’, is a post-archetypal journey, west across fifties America. This frontier was a bum one, living by the seat of your pants. There is a certain freedom to it; no job, no money. The woman, and the men. Kerouac was, after all, the sometime lover of Neal Cassady, his travelling companion.

Kerouac, along with his fellow beats, Burroughs, Ginsberg, while may be the first to document this new America was only playing at being a bum. Safely middle-class he had his mother’s to return to where he could type out his experiments knowing that three square meals a day would be provided. Along with the alcohol that eventually killed him.

(2) Charles Bukowski was disdainful of the beats, with which he was clumped. Appearing at a reading with Burroughs, they resolutely ignored each other. The life of a bum was Bukowski’s life, the drink, the dead-end jobs. It was no pose, although he himself became something of a cause célèbre.

‘Post Office’, his first novel, an autobiographical account of his off and on life as a postal worker, was a document of this experience. Written in just a few weeks, it went on to sell millions.

Bolstered by this, Bukowski exerted his influence, or the moolah did, publishing never being one to miss a beat. His own hero at the time was out of print. Bukowski says he discovered John Fante in his local library and it was reading him that made him want to write, or made he realise what writing could be about.

(3) Fante’s three early novels ‘The Road to Los Angeles’, ‘Wait Until Spring, Bandini’ and ‘Ask the Dust’ tell the story of Arturo Bandini, living in depression era Los Angeles, trying to make it as a writer, living in flop-houses, hungry and aching for love. This is the American dream for what it is for many; just a dream.

(4) As dreams are passed from father to son, Fante’s son Dan also became a writer. He also inherited the love of alcohol, the dislocation. His first three novels ‘Mooch’, ‘Chump Change’ and ‘Spitting off Tall Buildings’, are thinly disguised autobiography. They tell the story of his own alcoholism, living on the fringes of American society, not working, or working as a cab driver, a window cleaner, telesales, one step from drink, drugs, madness.

But why read of such things? Is it as William Boyd says, reading as empathy? For me I read to find myself, and to escape myself. Find myself in people who have no hope, no future. Escape myself in history, adventure, drama.

(5) George Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ I first read because at the time my dad was living the life of a bum. It was something to aspire to.

“Don’t ever get a mortgage,” he said, as if this was something I could ever aspire to. Instead I was cursed with his love of books.

For all these writers (6) Rimbaud was something of a template. He is the archetypal artist as outsider. As a teenager he wrote brilliant poetry and was transported by Verlaine to 19th century French society which he duly scandal by such antics as wiping his arse with another poet’s poems and becoming the lover of Verlaine. They moved to England where they lived in poverty, writing in the British Museum because heating and lighting were free.

Rimbaud eventually grew up and became something of a gun merchant in Ethiopia. Perhaps it should be time for me to get my application in to Haliburton. If only I didn’t have the pacifism of a Methodist.

Better be like (7) Genet; beautiful prose, sordid life. If you want sex, and prostitutes and prisons then Genet is your man. Start with ‘The Thief’s Journal’. He eschewed personal property and lived his life out of a suitcase. He was engagé at least – pro-Palestinian, supporter of the Black Panthers, and later of the gay rights movement. He was both a bum and believed in something.

(8) Raul Nunez’s Antonio (from ‘The Lonely Heart’s Club’) and (9) Willy Vlautin’s Frank Flannigan (‘The Motel Life’) are looking for love. The former lives in a sleazy Barcelona hotel dumped by his wife. He mixes with low-life, drug addicts in his search for someone special.

Flannigan inhabits motels, one after another, dreaming of his girlfriend, forced to turn tricks by her mother and his brother who killed a kid. Their existence moves ever downwards. No future.

If capitalism works it is because it is self-perpetuating, an endlessly recreating myth.

(10) William Boyd would have it that his life is out there for all of us, not wealth, but its obverse. Life, he posits, is precarious. Adam Kindred the hero of his latest novel, ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’, loses everything, and descends into a London’s underworld of bums and drifters.
This is the riches to rags story of our recession age. A cautionary tale, perhaps, for the haves. They are, after all, the people who read.

Drew Gummerson’s first novel ‘The Lodger’ was published in 2002. It was a finalist in the Lambda Awards in the States. Drew’s latest book ‘Me and Mickie James’ was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2008. Drew is also an award winning short story writer, his short fiction being widely published and featured on Radio 4.

Summer and the sea go together naturaly. Drew Gummerson remembers his summer reads and asks you for yours.

In summer our reading takes us inexorably to the sea.

It may have been the Prince Regent, in the early nineteenth century, who made this flight to the coast fashionable with the remodelling of his summer palace, the glorious Brighton Pavilion. And so he might have taken with him on those summer jaunts, Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate (1821), or James Fenimore Cooper’s, The Pioneers (1822). I don’t know.

It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that there was a real boom in our seaside towns, the advent of steam trains having resulted in a more mobile working class. So it could be said that Dickens himself wrote the first summer blockbusters, or perhaps Wilkie Collins. For what could be better than to be ensconced on the beach at Blackpool with The Moonstone (1868), a rollicking adventure concerning a stolen Indian gem?

My own childhood summer holidays were spent on boats. Every year we would head off to the Norfolk Broads, not the sea itself unless you ventured up to Great Yarmouth, and there it would be, the sea, in spitting distance. I, bookish even then, imagined we would be cast out, like in Arthur Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea.

He was my writer of choice back then and on those holidays I would read and reread his books, especially the ones set on the Broads, The Big Six and Coot Club. I even had my own binoculars and could spot a coot at a distance of quite a few yards. A skill I have not lost in adulthood.

Later on as our family fell on harder times, or disintegrated if you like, I remember long summer holidays in the garden of our council house reading the works of Stephen King and James Herbert (It and The Rats, all four of the series, being my favourites respectively). The house we were in was temporary, up for demolition and damp like a rain-forest and horror must have matched my mood. Or perhaps like all teenage boys I just liked blood and guts. A sensation I have lost in adulthood.

Dad eventually wound up in Greece, and visiting him on a Greek island I read John Fowles’ The Magus (set on a Greek island), and Gerald Durrell’s My Family and other Animals (also set on a Greek island). The former is spectacular with a plot that twists and turns and bends your mind, like the Greek sun. The latter is funnier than I expected, both better and warmer. Both have that sense of freedom and escape, something that holidays are surely about.

One thing for is for sure and that is where there is summer there will always be books.

Take M J Hyland’s latest This is How, for example. In it Patrick Oxtoby moves down to the south coast after his girlfriend breaks off with him. It’s set in the sixties, a time of boarding houses, communal bathrooms, pens hanging on pieces of string.

If you’re a writer don’t read it because it’ll make you want to give up. If you’re a bit of a loner, and awkward in the world, like me, don’t read it because it kind of goes off the rails, and you think, ‘oh shit’. But for everyone else, it’s marvellous.

For those writers and loners reading this, non fiction perhaps being safer ground, then maybe you should get Leviathan. It’s just won the Samuel Johnson prize, nicely timed to thrust it in the public eye for summer.

Leviathan is about, well, whales. (With an ‘h’ you have to say if you are reading this out loud, to a blind cousin perhaps.) It is a real potpourri of a book, full of fascinating facts and stories about whales; P T Barnum’s pair of belugas on Broadway in mid nineteenth century New York, the history of the blue whale being built in the Natural History Museum (looks not a lot like a whale as we’d only seen dead ones in the flesh at that time.)

Did you know we’d seen the earth from space before we’d seen a whale in it’s own environment?

Or that whales can be startled by the slightest thing, the click of a camera say and this will cause them to dive.

Or that touch a whale’s skin and it will feel it across it’s whole body.

It is a history of whaling, the wealth of which built America, and it is infused with the story of Moby Dick; a failure in its own time, out of print and forgotten on Melville’s death. He had a launch party with only one guest, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

It also contains the best descriptive passages I have ever read. Not dull, flowery, pointless prose, but descriptions of days out whale watching, diving to meet these beasts.

I’m ranting.

It must be the hot weather. Or the thought of a holiday looming.

Now, what books shall I pack? Any suggestions?

Supported by Writing East Midlands

Drew Gummerson’s first novel ‘The Lodger’ was published in 2002. It was a finalist in the Lambda Awards in the States. Drew’s latest book ‘Me and Mickie James’ was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2008. Drew is also an award winning short story writer, his short fiction being widely published and featured on Radio 4.

On the stage in the Phrased and Confused tent at last year’s Summer Sundae festival I was asked if when I was writing ‘Me and Mickie James’ I knew that I would be expected to go out and read from it, living the ‘rock & roll’ lifestyle, as it were. My answer was simple.
“No.”

Sure, I knew performance poets existed, but I was neither a poet or a performer.

My personal experience of writing had been sitting at home alone fretting away at keys, drinking coffee. I had dreams of being published but I also had dreams of being really small and not being able move my forefinger and thumb together.

So to suddenly find myself thrust in front of hundreds, or dozens, or sometimes just a single person and be expected to be witty, funny, and to play at being an author at the same time was a shock.

But I had read my Charles Darwin. I adapted.

Or was that the Borg.

(Years ago I used to go out with this bloke. I saw him once a week, the only time I wasn’t writing, and on that one night we used to sit and watch Voyager, back to back. He had them all on VHS.
Voyager in my head is like yoga for other people.)

Things I’ve learnt.

Don’t read from the book for more than seven minutes. Break it up with some amusing anecdotes. If you haven’t got any, make them up. If the anecdotes are any good, weave them into the next story you write. Leave plenty of time for questions. That’s what people are there for. They want to probe you.

(Note from ed – ‘Aren’t you writing about local live literature? You’re talking about yourself…)

Sorry. In my defence, it’s not that I’m obsessed with myself. I actually don’t like myself a great deal which is why I write. I can create alternative versions of a better me. And I still always write about losers.

Boom Boom.

The lovely Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze said at the last Short Fuse, Leicester’s Short Story night, that her writing came from an oral tradition, siting around the stove, telling stories. It shows. She was great at reading.

“I want to be like her,” I thought.

Unfortunately I don’t come from an oral tradition. I come from a long line of misanthropes.

(Ed – ‘Now you know that’s not true.’
Me – ‘I know. Just an anecdotal filler’)

What I love about Short Fuse is that it takes place in a beautiful old theatre. It has enormous round jazz tables with red tablecloths, candles in the centre of them. It has a great sound system (heaven compared to most of the other readings I’ve done). And you can take wine in and get quietly drunk while listening to a whole host of people read to you.

Seriously, it’s nice.

As Polly Tuckett, its director says, ‘Short Fuse aims to bring the pleasures of the short story to a wide audience, beyond the usual literary insider clique.’

And I have proof of this, having taken people with me who wouldn’t normally go to that kind of thing. They liked it.

Now you might sense a common theme here when I tell you that the next local live lit event I’m going to mention also serves alcohol. Don’t blame me. I’m not making it up.

Catherine Rogers, one of the founders of Hello Hubmarine, tells me she set up the event as she wanted ‘a hub to do creative stuff centred around writing but with a strong spoken word element also. I wanted to see a regular live literature event in Derby along the similar lines of City Lights in San Francisco and Shakespeare & Co in Paris.’

It’s the same as Short Fuse as it has a relaxed, chilled out atmosphere, but different as Hello Hubmarine is more multi-media. They have films, live music, poetry, and short stories all in the mix. There’s something for everyone. Unless of course you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like anything.

What Polly Tuckett and Catherine Rogers both share is a passion to get live literature out there (and in Hubmarine’s case I mean literature etc) and both have firm ideas of how their events will progress.

Polly is talking of recording the stories and making them available online, Catherine says that Hello Hubmarine have a website in development, ‘Pixel Lab are working on the website with support from Writing East Midlands and designer Jim Cork who has done a lot of the posters is going to work on the branding – it’s all pretty exciting.’

It is exciting.

But don’t take my word for it. After all, I get paid to make stuff up.

(Ed – ‘A bit like an MP without the expenses?’
DG – You’re not funny ed. Just go and get me a duck island.)

Go along. Have fun.
And if you see me why don’t you buy me a drink? Then feel free to probe me.
Short Fuse takes place on the third Tuesday of the month. Click here for details.

Word! is Leicester’s open mic poetry night. Takes place on the 1st Tuesday of the month. Click here for details.

A L Kennedy writes a great blog on writing and performing. Click here to read it.

BookSlam is a London literary night. They have a great website here and you can subscribe to their podcast and listen to all sorts of famous people reading.

Homework is another London literary night. Click here for their Myspace page.

I am reading at Pride Words – 1830 22nd July 2009 Foyles, London – Details below:

Come for an evening where the power of the novel will be explored. We welcome favourite Stella Duffy (Stonewall Writer of the Year 2008), comedienne VG Lee (As You Step Outside), a sharp Adam Mars Jones (Pilcrow), multi-faceted Karen Macleod (In Search of the Missing Eyelash), LAMBDA Award Finalist Drew Gummerson (Me and Mickie James). Hilarious, insightful, intimate, queer, here and proud these authors will also read from their latest works. We’ll look at identity, love and pain, hope and despair and there will be plenty of time to ask your burning questions.
Visit www.londongaytheatreclub.co.uk using promotional code: LGP22 £5

Finally, feel free to add you own links to any live lit events in the comment boxes below.

Supported by Writing East Midlands.

Drew Gummerson’s first novel ‘The Lodger’ was published in 2002. It was a finalist in the Lambda Awards in the States. Drew’s latest book ‘Me and Mickie James’ was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2008. Drew is also an award winning short story writer, his short fiction being widely published and featured on Radio 4.

I witnessed it myself, he was lying face down on the floor, blood pooling from his head. That he was dead, was quite obvious.
In 2002 my first novel, The Lodger, was published by GMP (Gay Men’s Press). Even as it came out I was hearing rumblings from the publisher; Waterstones were playing difficult, upping the percentage of the book’s cover price they wanted to retain, independent bookshops no longer existed. And Millivres, the parent group which owned GMP, were beginning to realise they could make more money selling dildos than they could books…

A serious novel that no one was interested in later, I wrote a sequel to The Lodger, Rising Camp. Just as I was finishing I heard the news, GMP was no more, they were, so to speak, dead. As Rupert Smith wrote in his 2006 article, “The era of niche publishing is over.”

In a way.

Because publishing, it seems to me, is in a constant state of flux and well able to adapt to changing market conditions.

This year, 2009, is the 50th anniversary of the publication of William Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch. That it is now a classic text belies its origins. The Naked Lunch was first published by the Olympia Press, a tinpot fly-by-night seat-of-your-pants publisher, in Paris in 1959.

That The Naked Lunch wasn’t picked up by a more mainstream publisher retrospectively is obvious. This was before the Lady Chatterley trial and Burroughs book was full of sexual references. This meant it fit perfectly into Olympia Press’s ethos being both erotic and avant-garde.

The Naked Lunch therefore found the right publisher at the right time.

Publishing houses have changed since those days. While they were formerly run like gentlemen’s clubs, long lunches, cigars and deals by handshake etc etc, these days they are big business, corporate. The cottage industry of yesteryear has amalgamated, been taken over by large multi-media companies. These days they are part of one, or two, big happy families. For example Random House includes the imprints, Arrow, Bodley Head, Century, Chatto and Windus, Ebury Press, Harvill and Secker, Hutchinsonn, Jonathan Cape, Vintage, William Heinemann and so on.

Many of these imprints, if not all, will formerly have been their own publishing house, independent and subject to their own long lunches etc etc.

Along with the homogenisation of publishing houses has come the homogenisation of book selling. The end of the net book agreement, whereby discounting was now allowed effectively meant the wiping out of small independent bookshops.

What we have now is big business selling to big business.

The death of GMP then is part of a longer and ongoing trend. And perhaps, rumours of this death too are exaggerated.

But first an aside. From reading deflamatory posts on writing websites from writers about agents and editors the point often seems to be forgotten that agents, editors, publishers et al are also people who love good books. The evidence of this is that many good books are published.

It is easy for some to look at Jordan and other celebrity (ghost)writers and say this is the reason they aren’t published. Ludicrous obviously. There has always been popular culture and ever since publishing existed people have been bemoaning its decline.

My attitude to publishing is consistent. If I write something good enough it will be published. If I’m not published then it’s my fault. I don’t blame the system.

My agent told me one of the reasons she read my submission was because I had been published before. For this I have to thank GMP with whose death I started this blog and to which I keep coming back to.

For while it may have died small publishers do continue and indeed these days are proliferating. Like the Olympia Press of their day they are able to target audiences not reached by the mainstream guys. These days the back streets of Paris aren’t their home but the digital highways of the internet, and the advance of print on demand technology.

My latest short story was published in a collection put out by Peepal Tree Press, ‘the best in Caribbean writing’, Bookkake is publishing ‘new and classic works of transgressive literature’, Salt does a really fine job of publishing new collections of poetry and short stories, Five Leaves publishes crime and Jewish interest books amongst other things, Sylph Editions books of ‘experimental writing, theoretical essays, monographs and photography books’. And in the sci-fi world there is PS Publishing, Night Shade, Golden Gryphon, TTA Press, Tachyon, Prime. (Not my domain so thanks to LiteratureNetwork.org editor Damien for these).

And of course Canongate, the small Scottish publisher, which sold millions of The Life of Pi and has had hit after hit since then.

Changes are ongoing.

Launched this week in London was the ‘Espresso Book Machine’. Choose from one of 500,000 books, mostly out of print texts, and within minutes it will print you out a perfect paperback while you wait.

Also at a recent meeting I had with my agent she told me she was planning to open a bookshop. Due to the recession shop rents have come down. According to her the next few years would see the rebirth of the independent bookshop.

So, all is good in the world of publishing. In fact, I’d say, we’ve never had it so good.

Some books:

Penguin Special (The Life and Times of Allen Lane) by Jeremy Lewis tells the history of the modern paperback.

Paris Interzone and This Is The Beat Generation by James Campbell are two very fine books about literary life in Paris in the 50s.

Supported by Writing East Midlands

Drew Gummerson’s first novel ‘The Lodger’ was published in 2002. It was a finalist in the Lambda Awards in the States. Drew’s latest book ‘Me and Mickie James’ was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2008. Drew is also an award winning short story writer, his short fiction being widely published and featured on Radio 4

Books for me are like mountains for other people. I read them because they’re there.

But sometimes, like the time I am standing up in the office reading out swaths of Don Quixote laughing like a drain only to realise no one is actually listening, or when I don’t know what’s happening in Big Brother / Eastenders / anything, I wonder why I bother. Or rather I wonder how I can make other people bother / justify what I spend a lot of my time doing / explain why books are the sexiest thing on the planet.

(When I’m not reading I spend a lot of time worrying and thinking.)

(And now I’m thinking if you are reading this blog on the Literature Network site you probably already like reading so why am I trying to convince you? Answer: Please print this blog off and post it through your neighbour’s doors on either side of you. Wear a disguise. If they accost you tell them you are the new postman.)

(“Accost”. This is a word I learnt from reading Shakespeare. One-nil to reading already.)

To my relief, that other people think the same as me, that books and reading are the sexiest things since sliced bread etc etc I now know from having recently watched BBC4’s Reading Week.

First off the bat was John Mullen’s ‘How Reading Made Us Modern’. A minor change to the licensing act in 1695 meant that anyone and their pigeon could set themselves up as a publisher and subsequently the eighteenth century heralded the birth of reading as we know it today, with the beginnings of the modern newspaper, magazines, then novels.

Reading became a mark of self-improvement and a measure of social progress. The coffee shop was the place to be seen, newspaper in hand, talking about the world. And of course it was also the time of Samuel Johnson and his dictionary.

(I would have loved to have been alive at this time, a period when all knowledge was knowable.)

Of course the backlash would come later, from Virginia Woolf and her cronies for a start, who didn’t think the ‘masses’ were capable of being educated, (and note her flirtation with eugenics). Books were for the upper classes she thought with their rooms of their own.

So we forget how reading was political. And indeed is political. If you read a lot, you can know a lot, you can make informed decisions, understand things, change them.

The scientist Rita Carter in her documentary ‘Why Reading Matters’ makes this point, reading does something to the brain, it makes connections, teaches us empathy.

We, as humans, weren’t born to read. It is not a sense, touch, smell, sight and so on, and by looking at brain imaging she establishes how reading is not confined to one part of the brain. When we read different sections of the brain fire up, pulses pass between them, links are made.

Whether computer games, watching videos on YouTube have the same effect, she was not sure (I am!), the research has not been done. But it’s something to tell your kids, ‘reading is good for your brain’. Along with spinach it is something to be drummed into them.

The last, and most inspiring, documentary was Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen’s ‘Just Read’. In it Rosen goes into Springwood Primary School in Cardiff and has ten weeks to transform the school into a ‘reading school’ culminating in a reading week.

On going into the school initially it was clear reading was not a priority. Teachers said as part of the national curriculum they didn’t have time to “just read” to the kids, the library was tiny, divided between two corridors, cluttered and unattractive (in comparison to the super duper multi-media computer centre), and when asked the large majority of the kids were hard pushed to think of the last three books they had read. It was clear reading was ‘not cool’.

Rosen set about changing all this. Attractive posters were put up in corridors displaying the favourite books of the teachers, teaching assistants, caretakers and dinner staff. The children had creative writing lessons, culminating in a book featuring poems from all the children. Book sales were organised, as were trips to the library. (“Do I have to sign a contract?”, “How much does it cost?”) A room was found for the school library. It was painted, books were displayed properly, it was opened by Rosen and the kids loved it.

I remember clearly my own reading experiences at primary school, going up to the library, going to book club after school, being read to by my teacher. And I was a member of the Puffin Club. (I am very happy to see that this has been resurrected. If you have any kids or know any join them up now. After you have been round to your neighbours in disguise that is.)

Enough.

A brief history of reading: Once upon a time nobody could read. We taught ourselves signs. Oral stories became written stories. Printing was invented. Reading became political. The Modernist movement made reading deliberately obscure so people would stop reading and become less political. The Post-Modernists took up the baton. Then passed it to advanced capitalism who invented daytime tv and Nintendo DSs. People are subdued and forget that reading is political. Result, advanced capitalism lands itself in an awful mess. Answer, pick up a book. Further result, nirvana.

Supported by Writing East Midlands

Drew Gummerson’s first novel ‘The Lodger’ was published in 2002. It was a finalist in the Lambda Awards in the States. Drew’s latest book ‘Me and Mickie James’ was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2008. Drew is also an award winning short story writer, his short fiction being widely published and featured on Radio 4