E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Cancelling is better than being a superspreader As a small publisher with a table booked at the 2020 LBF - the major gathering for the publishing industry in the UK - I stand to lose a lot of money if this event is cancelled - but if I went, or sent my team, I'd risk losing much more - including their lives or my own. Readers should not be compelled to become super-spreaders. Today Facebook has cancelled its May annual conference, major firms are cancelling all business plane travel, and 30 minutes ago the Swiss government - not known for its wild and irrational behaviour, cancelled ALL public events and gatherings of over 1,000 persons, until at least march 15. In Iran, the most holy Friday prayers have been today cancelled, and Mecca is closed to foreign pilgrims, as Saudi Arabia plans to control its borders from more contagion. Meanwhile, the stock markets globally have fallen to Crisis 2008 levels, and farther. If the organisers of the LBF really think their event - he...

Aim High, more often Year-end Best of lists are invidious, and, also, these days, ubiquitous, to the point of madness. But we have loved them for years... so... In the spirit of austerity and limiting resource-expenditure, Eyewear, the blog , this year will focus on the TOP ONE of various categories. Note we cannot claim to have seen or read everything, including The Post , or Lady Bird , which may end up winning the Oscar in 2018. So here goes. (we have not included our Eyewear books; nor have we included books of poetry, that may follow in 2018) BEST NOVEL 2017 1. The Transition - novel by Luke Kennard Oddly overlooked by some, this brilliant mock-dystopian millennial epic was both brilliantly funny, and insightful, and the debut of one of the UK's best-known younger poets. A great British comic novel, easily comparable in laughs per page to Lucky Jim . BEST FILM 2017 1. Good Time  If this was a longer list, we'd have room for Bladerunner 2049 , The L...

My old friend, Misha Glouberman , from Montreal, was a wit and philosopher in his precocious teens, and he went off to Harvard quite young, and then we lost touch, more or less, until Facebook intervened, though I saw him fitfully across my twenties, at a few parties that my brother, or I, or our mutual friend, Adam Frank , would hold - these were strange mixes of Wittgenstein and Iggy Pop . He is the first of my close teenage friends (as opposed to acquaintances, peers and colleagues - I suppose I should count Daljit Nagra or Wendy Cope here as the first, really) to be published by Faber & Faber (another is forthcoming but my lips are sealed for now), and his book, The Chairs Are Where The People Go , is infuriating, smart, useful, and often truly original, in a way that can almost be disquieting.  How did he think that?  It is in an odd form - a sort of Studs Terkel thing - another writer, Sheila Heti - interviews him and transcribes his monologues, into brief cha...

With oddly cruel timing, the Coalition government, showing its true colours this Christmas season of giving, has withdrawn funding for a charity which puts books into the hands of children to encourage literacy.  This is just not on.  However, Eyewear does believe there needs to be far more philanthropy from rich private citizens in the UK, as well as government support for the arts, and at least hopes that some one will step forward to keep this going.

Why is it that when newspapers like The Guardian ask famous writers to list their recommended summer books list, they tend to end up listing nada in the way of poetry, or barely any, anyway?  It tends to confirm my creeping dread, my suspicion, that poetry, like nothing, happens everywhere, to paraphrase.  Anyway, here are a few of the books, poetry or otherwise, battered and dogeared or brand spanking new, I hope to skim through this August, with suncream on (Factor 50): Flicker , by Theodore Roszak (thriller about film); Ludbrooke & Others (latest poetry collection) by  Alan Brownjohn ; Twenty-one Locks (debut novel by Guardian music journalist Laura Barton ); The Idea of a Christian Society by TS Eliot ; The Demon's Covenant by Sarah Rees Brennan ; A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood ; New Light for the Old Dark (poetry) by Sam Willetts ; Expressway (GG finalist) by poet Sina Queyras ; Patient Frame by Canadian novelist and poet Steven Heig...

The excitement and fuss over the announcement that the "Lost Booker" (from 1970) went to Troubles , by the tragically drowned writer JG Farrell, cannot hide a sense of let-down.  After all, Troubles is not a lost masterpiece, and Farrell is widely-read and respected.  There is not much clever in deciding to Booker this classic.  It feels the safe and obvious choice.  The opportunity was squandered to do something exciting and even daring with this alternative prize - to award another JG instead - JG Ballard .  Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition is probably his major work, and is still a shocking and innovative text.  Given Ballard's recent death, and the growing sense of his importance, it is surprising that the mainstream view of his writing is still seemingly a tad belittling.

As recent Eyewear posts have discussed, many British poets are (rightly I think) concerned, lest poetry become commodified, incorporated into a part of the capitalist literary industry. Sadly - or perhaps happily for those less-Marxist - novelists have fewer limits to their access to the culture of commodification. Indeed, prose writers are routinely coopted into an increasingly slick assembly-line approach to narrative-based writing: novel, radio play, audiobook, then audiovisual adaptation for TV or film - the "book" being simply the first in a potentially (and legally) infinite series of incorporations across all foreseeable media platforms. Meanwhile, back on Planet (Man) Booker, no one seems to have stopped the tedious juggernaut of endless back-slapping and PR machinations. Yet another prize has been concocted, out of the list of 41 Booker-winners, so far. The first was in 1969, so this isn't even the 40th anniversary (that's next year) - or is it? At any rate,...

The novella is the ideal form of the novel, just as the short lyric poem is the best sort of poetry - for a reason that is self-evident: brevity. Or rather, brevity by way of compression. And not just pounds-per-square-inch. The balance between the demands of the author, and the needs of the reader, seem to find equipoise in the novella - which can be read in one sitting, in one moment and place, just as much as a poem can, or a piece of music may be listened to. While longer works of writing have their different values and charms, one of them, surely, is the function of being able to be "picked up" later. There is no later in a novella - there is the enveloping sense of a dying movement, a now turning into a then, as one flows with the work itself. The novella is the glance at the painting that turns into the look that's held by wanting to see more, but also knows the gallery will be closed in an hour. Its dance with the finite is responsible and sweet at once - the nove...