"Couscous with Tata Hannah" by Huguette F Zerbib (Dubois, 2019)

I attended this book's launch on Oct 9th. The book's described as "a memoir of a largely vanished world and of Jewish North Africa." The author (named after Victor Hugo, her mother's favourite author) was born in Algeria to Jewish parents. They moved to Casablanca. She grew up in Fez. Then the family moved to France (the French in 1871 had offered Jews French nationality).

The author avoids info-dumping dollops of history and authentic detail. The background for each story is contained in the others. We don't always know the cultural background, but nor does the girl in the stories. We deduce from observations, as she does. In some instances we know more than the girl does - about adult hypocrisy for example.

The anecdotes from when the author was a young girl are richly detailed, the details going far beyond "local colour". There was social friction between the Arab and French speakers, but it didn't stop them joking together in the same cafes. There was snobbery amongst the French speakers, and between Jews of differing thoroughness. The girl observes and questions the adult world without yet understanding it. She experiences a locust swarm, a once-a-year traveling cinema, fossil-hunting, US paratroopers landing, sudden disappearances of classmates.

The second part mostly comprises stories that the author, then living in England, heard from her mother (then living in Paris). They're never too long. There are potted biographies, anecdotes that summarise a life, facts about a person that only come to light after their death. Family traditions are more closely adhered to than religious ones. Each piece is capable of being read in isolation, though they're interlocking and cumulative. Sometimes the reader doesn't find out the significance of a piece until the end. Even more than in the first part, we're made aware of the differences between people's actions and intentions, even if the characters aren't aware at the time. I'll summarize just a few of the pieces.

In the first of these stories, "The Cello Player", Marcelle, a girl who plays the piano, is rather in awe of Nathan, an accomplished cello player. At the end we read "Marcelle was my mother. Her childhood sweetheart, Nathan, died before he reached twenty."

"Uncle Mordecai" is perhaps my favourite piece - only 3.5 pages long yet revealing much about arabs/Jews, rich/poor, male/female. In other stories there's undisguised disappointment when yet another daughter is born - daughters mean dowries and nobody to carry on the business. Mordecai has 12 children, 9 of them girls. But all's not lost. He's the richest man on the street of Jews. He owns his house (albeit a concrete bunker built by Arabs). He's only a cobbler, so how did he get his money? It's world war two, leather and food are in short supply. He gambles with Arabs sometimes. He works hard, rising early, passing the hamman and next to it, the public ovens for bread. Most of his clients are well-off Arabs, but if they wear long robes how will people see their fashionable shoes? So he tells customers that if they give him a dozen large eggs, he can make the leather for their shoes squeak louder.

"My Grandfather, the Opera Lover" is about Felix, who owned a bar in Oran. There were productions by touring French companies mainly for civil servants and government officials. Gifted amateurs performed the rest of the time. From the gods, "peanut shells and tightly padded sweet papers" bombarded the lower circles. The interval was a chance to top up on projectiles. When Carmen's about to be stabbed, the chewing and heckling stopped. Soon after, Felix was called to war. He was wounded and eventually committed suicide, his grave by a wall away from the cemetery's main alleys. The narrator's mother never told the narrator how her father died. She found out many years later, when visiting a distant relative who knew.

"There was no clock in my grandmother's flat. There was no need for one". Thus begins "Reine". We read about the noises by which she knew the time of day - a neat way to introduce us to her life style. Every Saturday lunchtime grandmother feigns surprise when her sister Reine knocks. She invites Reine to stay for the day. Each time, Reine plays hard to get. We learn why her husband left her, why she took refuge in Oran, taking meals with a rota of relatives. "Although she became demanding and cantankerous with age, no one objected to her eccentric ways. My lasting memory of her was her unique and uncontested ability to piss standing up."

In "The Son" the narrator's invited on a day trip away from Paris. She goes with Aunt Mani, the widow of Uncle Mordecai. We learn that "In spite of the appalling treatment she had been subjected to through all her married life, she had remained good-natured and doggedly devoted to him". They are visiting the plot of Mani's son's planned house, a glimpse of the future, but they also pop into a care home where Mani's cleverest son is. We learn how he rebelled against his father's wish for him to continue the business. Doctors had asked for consent from the parents to operate on him. Aunt Mani said that afterwards "Thank God he has calmed down ... there are no tantrums, no violence any more. He's put on weight since, which is a good sign, isn't it?" At the end she says "I can't see what's so marvellous about these recovery places. They're all right, but there's nowhere like home. Only parents can look after their children properly. A mother and a father always know what's best for their own, don't they?"

"The Book of Euclid" by Rowan B Fortune (ed) (Cinnamon Press, 2013)

A poetry/prose anthology presenting the work of over 30 writers. Sometimes (e.g. with "This isn't a horror") the poetry content is side by side with prose that might make readers wonder what the poem's line-breaks are for.

The prose seems safer than the poetry. My favourites were "Vigilante", "The Dead Skipper", "Among Men", "Hurricane Daughter".

"The Mays 23" by Varsity Publications

The 2015 collection of Oxford and Cambridge University students' work, with a twist. This time "segregation of poetry, prose and visual arts will be removed" (p.i). Readers are told that "as you move around inside these covers ... you will form a poetry of your own" (p.ii). I'd call much of the content on the earlier pages avant-garde - I didn't get/like it. The graphics/text mix was the easiest aspect of it to understand.

I liked Emma Levin's "Cheese-branding". "Our Body" and "All in the family" were ok too.

"Farther Away" by Jonathan Franzen (Fourth Estate, 2013)

Essays, addresses, rants, and articles about books he likes that are out of print.

In "I Just called to say I loved you", he writes that "The technological development that has done lasting harm of real significance - the development that, despite the continuing harm it does, you risk ridicule if you publicly complain about today - is the cell phone", largely because "it enables and encourages the inflicting of the personal and individual on the public and communal". He continues "I simply do not, while buying socks at the Gap, or standing in a ticket line and pursuing my private thoughts, or trying to read a novel on a plane that's being boarded, want to be imaginatively drawn into the sticky world of some nearby human being's home life" (p.148). I'm warming to this guy. I didn't realise that he'd become a bird-watcher -

since I'd been fired by by critical theory, and was looking for things to find wrong with the world and reasons to hate the people who ram it, I naturally gravitated to environmentalism ... around the time my marriage was breaking up ... I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment ... But then a funny thing happened to me. It's a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds ... And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I'd seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species p.12

He makes some points about novels that I was unaware of -

• "So what exactly is a novel, and why did the genre appear when it did? The most persuasive account remains the political-economic one that Ian Watt advanced fifty years ago. The birthplace of the novel, in its modern form, happens also to have been Europe's most economically dominant and sophisticated nation, and Watt's analysis of this coincidence is blunt but powerful, tying together the glorification of the enterprising individual, the expansion of a literate bourgeoisie eager to read about itself, the rise in social mobility (interesting writers to exploit its anxieties) ... the disintegration of the old social order into a collection of individual isolates, and ... the dramatic increase in leisure for reading. At the same time, England was rapidly becoming more secular ... To read the story of Robinson's vacillations and forgetfulness is to see the genre of spiritual autobiography unraveling into realist fiction" p.30
• "A number of recent scholarly studies have undermined the old notion that the epic is a central feature of all cultures, including oral cultures. Fiction, whether fairy tale or fable, seems mainly to have been a thing for children" p.32

I especially liked the long "On Autobiographical Fiction" essay -

• "Reading and writing fiction is a form of active social engagement, of conversation and competition. It's a way of being and becoming. Somehow, at the right moment, when I'm feeling particularly lost and forlorn, there's always a new friend to be made, an old friend to distance myself from, and old enemy to be forgiven, a new enemy to be identified. Indeed - and I'll say more about this later - it's impossible for me to write a new novel without first finding new friends and enemies" p.124
• "My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka" p.128
• "The point at which fiction seems to become easy for a writer ... is usually the point at which it's no longer necessary to read that writer" p.129
• "you have to become a different person to write the next book ... There's no way to move forward without changing yourself" p.130

The section where he writes about how the earlier drafts of "The Corrections" were reshaped by circumstances is the best part of the book.

In "Comma-then" he writes

I walked to the door and opened it, then turned back to her If you use comma-then like this frequently in the early pages of your book, I won't read any farther

He think you should write "When I got to the door, I turned back to her" or "I walked to the door and opened it. Then I turned back to her" or even something like "I walked to the door, opened it, and I turned back to her" on the grounds that the "Comma-then" is only seen in literature.

I didn't know that he was friends with David Foster Wallace. He writes "Like a lot of writers, but even more than most, Dave [Foster Wallace] loved to be in control of things. He was easily stressed by chaotic social situations", p.163

Other reviews

• The title article (New Yorker)
• Geoff Dyer (Observer)
• Phillip Lopate
• Paul Clements

"The Organised Mind" by Daniel Levitin (Penguin, 2015)

There's little raw material in this book that I haven't already read in other popular science books and magazines, but the anecdotes and reminders are worth a read. The conclusions aren't revolutionary, amongst them being: quality time is useful; you don't need to remember where things are if they're in the right place; the way that we classify (in drawers, supermarket shelves, and memory) is worthy of study and benefits from a junk drawer; procedures and organisation that work in an office are useful for personal situations too. He shows how psychology experiments help us better understand chunking, time management, dealing with e-mail, decision-making, jet-lag, dating, back-ups, probabilities, and guestimates.

What's in this for writers? Quite a lot. "Flow" (for artists, musicians, sports-people, etc) is a topic that's attracting research attention. I'm sure most writers develop ways to maximize it (see the Neil Young note below). And more generally, the less time spent dealing with everyday life, the more that can be spent on creative activities. He mentions the value of constraints to writers, and how more than daydreaming is needed in order to be usefully creative. Here are some quotes -

Classifying

• "our brains evolved to receive a pleasant shot of dopamine when we learn something new and again when we can classify it systematically into an ordered structure" (p.32)
• "An essential component of setting up any organisational system in a business environment is to allow for things that fall through the cracks, things that don't fit neatly into any of your categories - the miscellaneous file or junk drawer" (p.300)

Attention

• "[the daydreaming mode's] discovery - a special brain network that supports a more fluid and nonlinear mode of thinking - was one of the biggest neuroscientific discoveries of the last twenty years ... The tendency for this system to take over is so powerful that its discoverer, Marcus Raichle, named it the default mode" (p.38)
• "The mind-wandering mode works in opposition to the central executive mode: When one is activated, the other is deactivated ... And again, whether you are in the mind-wandering or central executive mode, your attentional filter is almost always operating, quietly out of the way in your subconscious" (p.41)
• "There are four components in the human attentional system: the mind-wandering mode, the central executive mode, the attentional filter, and the attentional switch, which directs neural and metabolic resources among the mind-wandering, stay-on-task, or vigilance modes modes" (p.45)
• "neuroscientists have recently discovered that parts of the brain can fall asleep for a few moments or longer without our realising it. ... This applies just as well to the four parts of attentional system" (p.48)
• "Daydreaming also takes less energy than multitasking. And the natural intuitive see-saw between focusing and daydreaming helps to recalibrate and restore the brain. Multitasking does not" (p.170)
• "In many tasks, both creative and mundane, we must constantly go back and forth between work and evaluation, comparing the ideal image in our head with the work in front of us.
  This constant back-and-forth is one of the most metabolism-consuming things that our brain can do. We step out of time, out of the moment, and survey the big picture. We like what we see or we don't, and then we go back to the task, either moving forward again, or backtracking to fix a conceptual or physical mistake" (p.174)

Creativity

• "Creative people often arrange their lives to maximize the possibility that flow periods will occur, and to be able to stay in flow once they arrive there ... The singer and songwriter Neil Young ... pulls over to the side of the road, abruptly leaves dinner parties, and does whatever it takes to stay connected to the muse, to stay on task. If he ends up getting a reputation for being flaky, and not always being on time, it's the price to pay for being creative" (p.207)

Misc

• "the brain's arousal system has a novelty bias ... Humans will work just as hard to obtain a novel experience as we will to get a meal or a mate" (p.170)
• "Movies use the cut in three different ways, which we've learned to interpret by experience. A cut can signify a discontinuity in time (the new scene beginning three hours later), in place (the new scene begins on the other side of town), or in perspective. ... They are actually cultural inventions that have no meaning for someone outside our culture" (p.178)
• "Perhaps surprisingly, the U.S. Army has been among the organisations most adaptable to change, and has thought deeply about how to apply findings of psychological science to organizational behaviour " (p.278)
• "it is no coincidence that many great leaders are also great storytellers - they motivate others around them with a compelling narrative, one that they themselves embody" (p.284)

There's repetition of key findings. Sometimes I think it's the result of careless writing - e.g.

• "These are skills that can be nurtured beginning at a young age" (p.364)
• "This type of thinking can be taught and practiced, and can be nurtured in children as young as five years old" (p.365)

Other reviews

• Sophie McBain (New Statesman)

"the Bridport Prize antholgy 2005" (Sansom and Company, 2005)

The yearly anthology. From what the judges say, the stories were better than the poems

• "I was sent the top 50 stories, drawn from a submission of approximately 4,000, to judge anonymously. 49 of the stories I received were of a very high standard. A short story must go somewhere, and actually arrive in the span of its short life. It should have a beginning, a middle, and most of all, an end. I would say that 75% of the stories were predominately sad" (Maggie Gee)
• "I read 100 poems from the 4,000 plus submitted for the prize. They came with a warning that it had been 'quite hard to find 100 poems of good enough quality' - and I have to say, I can see what this means" (Andrew Motion).

I preferred the stories too - some SF and fable/fantasy, and mostly character-centred. I don't know which poems won prizes, but the ones later in this book don't seem at all striking.

Some of the stories (e.g. "The king of love") read like atmospheric pieces or character sketches with a perfunctory finish. Verbal fireworks were kept to a minimum. I made a note of 2 similes (though the 2nd might not be one) -

• "He got a section 2 and was transferred to a place where they keep repeating your Christian name in every sentence, like firemen rescuing someone trapped in a lift" ("How to Eat an Elephant")
• "A jumble of objects cramped the wide hall and turned it into a terrible obstacle course. It looked as if there had been a decision to have a clear out followed by a failure of nerve at the last moment." ("Morgan's Pomade for the Misses Linster")

I've been meaning to read Adam Marek for a while. His "Robot wasps" was interesting, though formulaic in its structure - 3 threads were flipped between (wasps; neighbours; child's impending marriage) with at least 2 coming together at the end.

"Simon: The Genius in my Basement" by Alexander Masters (Fourth Estate, 2011)

The subject of this biography is Simon Norton, who at 15 scored 195 out of 200 in the British Mathematics Olympiad. The 2nd boy in 10,000 entrants got 155. He went on to win Gold Medals at the International Mathematics Olympiads, get a first before leaving school, and do research at Cambridge where there was a taskforce of 5 mathematicians whose different styles combined, working in an office they called Atlantis to uncover the mysteries of The Monster. After the team broke up, Cambridge University failed to renew his contract. He became an "independent researcher" (like Holmes in "Sherlock" and "Elementary").

I used to meet him quite often when I helped run Friends of the Earth in Cambridge. He was our public transport spokesperson. In the Mail section of my office procedures notes (1991) it says "Mail to Simon Norton can be left in the Other Persons tray". At meetings it was with some trepidation that I said "And now over to Simon with Public Transport news". I'd heard rumours that he was clever at maths, but I didn't check them out. I did maths at University. Like Simon, I played chess. I work with Cambridge profs and meet a few of them socially. At school I was friends with a chess prodigy, Glenn Lambert, who I've written about (his personality profile was interestingly uneven too - no A levels, average at maths), so I was interested in how this book would treat its subject matter.

The book

The informal style is much like Stuart: A life backwards, Masters' previous biography. Masters says "Just as ... [minus numbers] are not real things at all, but something you've done to positive numbers, i.e. you've 'minus-ed' them - in short, minus numbers are verbs, not nouns - so in biography, it's not the real subject, but the active, i.e. verbal, relationship between the biographer and subject that ..." (p.35) but Simon disagrees. As in his previous book, feedback's incorporated into the story. He realises that going to the shops with someone might be as character-revealing as presenting a list of their achievements. He's creative with typesetting - for example, p.9 has a black background with text and sketches because the narrator's in a dark room. Masters has a first in Physics and an MSc in applied maths, but it doesn't help much in this case - world-class Pure Maths is a world apart. With the aid of cartoons, Group Theory is described - painfully slowly at first, but I guess the pacing's ok because it gets there in the end.

Family

Masters thinks Simon's mother was much cleverer than his father. His brother Michael (OBE) is no slouch (Chemistry at Cambridge; he's written several books about fundraising and is interested in environmental concerns - a one-man "ideas factory" according to The Guardian). His other brother Francis runs the family antique jewelery firm; the Queen's a customer. "Every year Francis or Michael invite Simon to their house for Passover; and every year Simon arrives with his shoelaces flapping, his holdall bulging, his bus timetables and his smells, and eats all the parsley" (p.67).

Personality

Masters tries to assemble a collection of traits to construct Simon's character. I wonder if a standard personality test could have been tried - a Big 5 breakdown would have been interesting.

• "It's essential to emphasise that in no sense of the term is Simon mad" (p.33)
• "Everybody is messy somehow, and there's no other place for Simon to store his quota. Inside his head there's no room: all the mess has been swept out" (p.33)
• "People such as Simon ... don't trust words. Words may be a familiar method of communication (although Simon generally prefers grunts or showing off bus tickets)" (p.34)
• "Invariably, he knows where we were ten minutes ago, or where we are about to be after the next level crossing; it's where we are now that boggles him" (p.93)
• "eSimon, the Simon who logs on to his computer at one in the morning, is a different man to Simon the grunter: eloquent, fluent, conversational, reflective, poignant, sometimes funny and ... ascerbic" (p.70)

The hot-house Atlantis situation forced proximity between people who outside maths wouldn't normally mix. The other personalities in the team augmented Simon's traits - he needed a team though he didn't have a team mentality. The chemistry of the team was right for the task. Simon in particular benefited from this stimulation - "People would be working on a problem and he would just say a number, some long number. And people would continue talking, and maybe two or three hours later they would realise that this number explained the phenomenon they'd been puzzling over" (p.285).

Why the interest in public transport? More numbers, more connections, more directions and targets. A chance to be amongst people.

Intelligence

Masters: "A great deal is written about genius ... There is nothing on why it disappears" (p.308). Simon: "What do you mean, my genius vanished? That's the first I heard of it" (p.281)

Masters: "Mathematical ability depends on being able to make links between remote ideas ... they have a superb memory for certain types of details, can use it to draw comparisons with other mathematical discoveries they've made or read about elsewhere, and therefore can exploit tiny and hidden analogies of argument", (p.144). Some poets and comedians use outlandish metaphors and connections too.

Conway (the most famous of the University team) suggested that Simon treated all connections and coincidences as equally significant, and Masters says that "Simon is a collection of disparate facts and no interpretative glue" (p.315). I suspect that in the restricted world of his field of maths, many of the coincidences were significant, but the likelihood of significance lessens as one spans domains, and lessens even more when the real world comes into play. With maths, exams and challenges provided direction and aims. Research needs more instinct or more guidance. When the team broke up I suspect he ended up with neither, though he still produces excellent work.

"Simon has two further points to make about his brilliance." (p.327)

• He developed quickly but plateau'd - "by twenty, the equal of a professor, only his reading was not as broad. Then Simon's brain stopped developing" (p.327)
• "I sometimes think that I would not have been capable of doing outstanding work in any field other than what I worked in. In due course I had worked out the field which I was expert in, and the cast of my mind was not amenable to diversifying" (p.328)

He played chess for Cambridge too, which is why Raymond Keene (who I drew with in a simul once) makes an appearance. In the Acknowledgements section on p.356 it says that "Ray Keene explained Simon's talent and (more interestingly) his inabilities at chess", but alas the discussion didn't get into the book.

Places

Neither Woking nor Haverhill come out well

• "The 'Idle Banter' page of Haverhill's local website had to be shut down because the residents persisted in using it to swear at each other. For some reason Simon wants this wretched place to be connected to Cambridge by rail link
  'This is it,' said Simon, coming to a halt in front of a converted church. We peered through a pyramid-shared window at a community noticeboard and a poster for the Samaritans. But instead of going inside, he was off again, holdall banging against his side, body tilting right to counteract the pendulum effect, bushy head bowed - more barge than walk - past the 'Wanted for Murder' posters on the police station railings and the crowd outside the Wetherspoon's supermarket-sized pub.", (p.244)
• "The Martian is at the end of a dreary pedestrian walkway, its legs buckled with despair at finding that it's travelled sixty million miles, the last hope of a dying civilisation, and ended up in Woking" (p.98)

In Cambridge "We reached a street corner, stepped out to cross, and Simon paused, apparently confused. The passing cars did not honk. They swerved gently to avoid us. Donnish behaviour is well understood at this road junction in Cambridge.", (p.205)

The book suggests that Cambridge didn't have the means to educate Simon, that he was bored with the generalist nature of the syllabus. His school, Eton, helped him to do a degree early. Conway (an early starter too) thinks it's not a good option in general, but one can go too far the other way. A brilliant Olympiad partner of Simon ended up getting a C at Maths A level because his school didn't have the means or desire to stretch him.

Misc

"Beethoven is Simon's favourite composer. He enjoys the 'unexpected modulation' and the fact that 'as with impressionism, the melody does not include every note'" (p.108)

There's a typo on p.203 - "7 - 0 =0" should be "7 - 0 = 7".

Other reviews

• Jordan Ellenberg (New York Times)
• Alexander Linklater (The Observer)
• Anne Garvey (Jewish Chronicle))
• Helen Brown (Telegraph)
• Jenny Turner (Guardian)
• Frances Hubbard (Daily Mail)
• Publishers Weekly (Masters mines what is clearly a galloping case of Asperger’s for insights into the nature of genius, with only limited success)
• Nicholas Lezard (London Evening Standard)
• Andrew Martin (Financial Times)
• William Leith (The Spectator)

"Stuart: A life backwards", Alexander Masters (Harper Perennial, 2006)

The biography of a sometimes homeless, sometimes psycho person who lived around Cambridge. The text is punctuated by extracts from newspapers, and there's a map. The chapters are in reverse chronological order - an idea by the main character

• "'Do it the other way round. Make it more like a murder mystery. What murdered the boy I was? See? Write it backwards.'" (p.6)
• "Stuart's backwards inspiration has turned out to be excellent. At a swoop, it has solved the major problem of writing biography of a man who is not famous ... introduce Stuart to readers as he is now, a fully-fledged gawd-help-us, and he may just grab their interest straight away" (p.11)

The main character also offers critique. The author wants to find reasons, explanations, turning points - "In biography most of the time, the real person is a nuisance. One wants them out of the way. If only they'd stop muddying the waters with inconsistencies, denials, forgetfulness and different interpretations of your language, you could extract their essence" (p.213) - but Stuart doesn't see things quite that way.

I know many of the places in this book. Here, for comparison is part of another map of Cambridge from a book (a medieval whodunnit by Suzanna Gregory). I know "Addenbrooke's, the hospital complex of beds, smoke stacks and research departments on the edge of Cambridge; it looks over the wheat fields and the train line to London, like a crematorium" (p.11) and used to know one of people ("Twice winner of a Mathematics Olympiad Gold Medal, co-author of "The Atlas of Finite Groups", my landlord is a generous, mild man, as brilliant as the sun, but a fraction odd. Women have a habit of shrieking when they come upon him unexpectedly, waxen and quiet, standing on the other side of the door. His hair is wild, his trousers, torn. But one of Stuart's most personable (and most annoying) qualities is his refusal to judge strangers until he knows them, especially if they're peculiar" (p.32)). By chance the same character appears in Marcus du Sautoy's "Finding Moonshine" ("I could see what looked like a tramp with wild black hair sprouting out all over his head, trousers frayed at the turn-ups, wearing a shirt full of holes. He was surrounded by plastic bags which seemed to contain his worldly possessions" (p.22)).

I wasn't as excited as Zadie Smith about the book ("It's been years since I''ve been so delighted by a book"). Perhaps this is because via friends I already knew something about life on the margins. Theories of identity are slipped in. "Going inside" leads to a loss of familiar surroundings and praise from others, which for some people weakens their feeling of identity and self-respect. The book has several people whose created public face hides less pleasant details. The main character's management of self (his mood swings more than multiple personalities) doesn't lead to an identity that fits well into society. The author doesn't go into these issue much, though in Cambridge there's research in that area, so he'd have an excuse.

On p.1 it said "Outside, it is getting dark; the trees in the garden have started to grow in size and lose their untended shapes" which distracted me - "grow in size?". That was about the only hiccup though. It's an interesting glance at an alternative culture and belief system - the writer doesn't hide himself and the writing's unobtrusive.

• "I begin to see why bag ladies have bags. When life is this dull, you have to invent purpose ... Then one day you wake up and realise that it was all a con: what you had thought was an escape from madness was in fact the arrival" (p.87)
• "Most smuggling ... is done over the perimeter fence ... Then the prisoners on gardening duty (known as 'Wombles') clean up the mess and get it back to the cells" (p.113 - about prisons)
• "'If you took all the clothes off all the people in Cambridge,' declares Stuart, 'you'd be amazed how many of them had scars underneath.' " (p.123 - about self-damage)

Other reviews

• Stuart Watkins (readysteadybook)

"Sphinx 12" by Helena Nelson (ed) (2010)

I've picked up many poetry pamphlets through the years - some from Alternative bookshops like "News from Nowhere" (Liverpool) and "Mushroom bookshop" (Nottingham), a few bought by mail, and some as the result of entering pamphlet competitions. I have a few A6 booklets from the Merseyside Poetry Minibooks Series (Windows, Liverpool - mid 1980s onward) - Raymond Tallis, Lynne Greenway, etc. I have "A Static Ballroom" by David Morley and "Apocalypso" by Tim Cumming, both published by Scratch, and I've "The Scrap Heap" by Other Publications and Pork Pie Press (in dialect). I've several from HappenStance, Templar, Leafe and The Poetry Business too. If the choice is between a pamphlet and a book bloated by sub-standard poems, pamphlets make a lot of sense.

People have observed that pamphlets are on the rise of late. During this phase Sphinx magazine from Happenstance has been documenting progress. Issue 12 of Sphinx arrived today - the last paper issue. It's a shame that it's going, but as the editorial says - think "Fawlty Towers". In 60 pages it deals with Templar, Salt, Gerry Cambridge and several other big players. Not surprisingly, the contributors differ in many ways

• "I've spoken openly before about not being a poet", Alex McMillen (Templar)
• "I want to carve out more time from Salt to get back to my writing life ... That's what I'm here for, really, the writing", Chris Hamilton-Emery (Salt)

Looks aren't always everything, but they help

• "Design and production are a core aspect of our publishing practice and we strive for excellence as well as originality in this", Alex McMillen (Templar)
• "readers won't mind if their poetry comes in the form of a stapled bundle of A4 sheets with a plain cover ... The format is irrelevant; the integrity of magazine and editor paramount", Kevin Bailey (HQ magazine)
• "average text can be redeemed by the sheer beauty of lettering if it's elegantly used", Gerry Cambridge
• "acknowledging good design as an important concept in print publication is a big step forward", Gerry Cambridge
• "An occasional pastime of mine in bookshops is trying to guess typefaces used in books ... Trying to guess a typeface is like a form of typographical birdwatching", Gerry Cambridge

Some commonly held assumptions aren't always valid

• "it became clear that bringing the magazine out quarterly was an editorial straitjacket. I decided it was better to wait for a critical mass of good poetry to come in before publishing an issue", Kevin Bailey (HQ magazine)
• "most advertising, inserting, leafleting. launches have little commercial value ... Reviews are super, but they're not really sales drivers", Chris Hamilton-Emery (Salt)

Technology in the form of the Web provided the small press with an advertising and selling opportunity, but the emergence of e-books is a potential threat.

"New Writing 14" by Greenlaw and Habila (eds) (Granta/British Council, 2006)

Over a thousand submissions from 43 countries. On p.xi it says "There are many writers included here who have not published anywhere" but in the biographical notes it says that at least 41 of the 45 authors are published. The novel extracts interested me more than the short stories. The poetry was less mainstream than the prose.

"Fuselit 15: Tilt" (March 2010)

I've not seen this magazine before. Fuselit this time is hand-bound with orange ribbon and has a cover of 'jugshi tsasho' handmade paper from Bhutan, holed like a pinball table. It comes with a mini-CD and a bonus A6 booklet. Let's deal first with the bonus booklet - "Dr Fulminare's Bardgames". It involves game rules (for Dominoes, etc - my favorite is Jenga) translated so that they can be used to produce poems. I tried to assess the rules and the resulting poems together. The Domino rules were too loose (the poems ok) and the Scrabble rules too tight (a miracle that the poems exist at all). The "Old Maid" rules are just right, though I think the poem might have been stronger.

Oulipo has various offshoots - Oucuipo (about CUIsine), etc - but there seems to be no Oujeupo, which is rather a surprise given the Oulipo interest in chess. I think this booklet is a worthy contribution to the field.

Some of the poets in Fuselit have had books published by Penguin and Simon & Schuster. There's a surprisingly wide range: abba rhyme; shaped; haiku; a dialog; a 19 line poem where each line starts with the word "tilt"; and Nicelle Davis' "Disclaimer ..." which succesfully has a bit of everything - even holes.

Is this the shape of things to come (either round or A6, but always holed)? As e-mags take over, perhaps paper magazines will need to flaunt their materiality.

"London Magazine" (Aug/Sep 2009)

I bought this issue (Aug/Sep 2009) because they've been in financial difficulties recently, and because 2 people I know have pieces in there on subjects that interest me. The format is much as it's always been - about 140 A5 pages with stories, poems, articles and reviews (on cultural events as well as on literature). I've never been in it - I've been rejected once (the piece got a 3-figure sum elsewhere); accepted once (but the editor changed); and then a submission got lost in hyperspace.

Tania Hershman has 2 pieces of Flash Fiction, which is good news for flash. She's much published. I like her stuff, but not as much as others do. On p.72 I know that the neutrino radiation is no denser inside the tank than out. What I'm unsure of is whether the main character and the author know. The beginning's promising and the ending avoids closure, but doesn't have any wow factor. And "Transparent" is too transparent for me. Oh well.

Katy Evans-Bush's article on the ICA's "concrete art" exhibition reviews the show and discusses the topic. For me it deals too lightly with the topic, but I think the piece is just right for the magazine. It's interesting to catch the moment when text stops interacting with images and instead becomes the image. It's interesting how meaning changes when the word becomes decontextualised, and then changes again as letters begin to drift from the word. As she points out, new opportunities arise when breaking out of linear syntax, and yes, the Carl Andre piece she describes does "explore the condition of narrative". From what she says about the show I'd also agree with her about the lack of development in the field, and the neglect of new technologies.

Agnes Meadows expends 6 review pages on how wonderful Liz Almond's "Yelp!" is - "'impressive' is a understatement", "searing agony", "extraordinary strength, anger, bitterness and anguish", "simply stunning", "an extraordinary series", "The poetry will bite you ... It will draw blood", "she writes with poignant sweetness", "an unfailing eye for both the beautiful and the brutal". Over 3 pages of the 6 are quotes, so readers can decide for themselves. I'm not rushing out to buy it.

Mario Petrucci's 11 pages on Chernobyl include 3 pages of his 2-line stanza'd poems. It's an edited address to a conference. I found it waffly and repetitive. I think all he's saying is that "We can let Chernobyl demonstrate the supremacy of negative imagination, or we can repossess our potential to meet it with wisdom and growth" (p.44) but words bloat to fill the available space, spurred by the context's poetic license. So we get stuff like "A poem has the ability to alight in the mind, in the heart, not unlike an angel ... it is rather in vogue these days to suggest that Old Testament angels were neither sweet nor pure, but more like Jehovah's henchmen. Their plumage came not in white, but in shades of grey. There is something in that, though, because angels - like poems - are agents of difficulty as much as peace. This agency, embodied by poems and their messy grey-scale angelic impetus, is impoverished by post-enlightenment attempts to categorise literature and science as, at best, the most distant of relatives and, at worst, tribal arch-rivals" (p.37)

I've read some of Alison McLeod's stories. "The Light" (10 pages) doesn't pack enough weight. However, Guy Ware's story (8 pages) is one of the slickest I've read for quite a while.

The poetry has variety - rhymed and unrhymed, etc. Dunkerley's is right-aligned for some reason.

"New Writing 15" by Evaristo and Gee (eds) (Granta/British Council, 2007)

I've read a few past editions. Compared to those, this issue (which is well worth a read)

• seems to have fewer big names (fewer commissioned/agent-driven pieces)
• seems to be more tuned to its international audience - lots about Islam, and keen to display contemporary sub-cultures
• is less challenging, genre-wise. An earlier issue had a section of "Texts" - pieces that were hard to categorize. This issue has an epistolatory piece, and short pieces (as short as a paragraph) that are allegedly novel extracts, but is otherwise safe.

In poetry anthologies the range of styles often expands into areas usually dominated by prose. Here, where there's a mix of poetry and prose (increasingly rare in the UK) a tidily written anecdotal poem risks being compared to a paragraph of a short story. Robin Robertson's pieces are rather like end-of-chapter epiphanies but his isn't the only work that flirts on the border. I don't recall there being any end-rhymed poems.

Some stories almost seem chosen more for their setting than to widen the range of writing or genre. Canada, Sydney, South Africa and many other Commonwealth settings appear. Little's left of Old Blighty but for clubbing, airports, shift-work and multicultural dramas.

I liked Burrows, Yassin-Kassab, and Mohanty. Alasdair Gray's fun. I should read him more. Catherine Smith remains unconvincing - little grasp of visuals or sonics, it seems to me. The Zinneman-Hope poem sequence extract has far too many line-breaks given its proximity to prose. Sampson's is better. Desai's disappointing, Lambert's piece is inconsequential, and Hartman's goes on far too long.

"Alaska Quarterly Review" (Spring/Summer 2005)

Borders in Cambridge UK has a number of US and UK literary magazines. My current favorite is Alaska Quarterly Review - partly because of the value for money (280 pages for £5.75) but mostly for the content. This issue (Vol 22 No 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2005) has some drama and painting (which I didn't care much for). Fiction (11 stories) and creative non-fiction (5 essays) predominate over poetry (19 poets). No reviews! I like just about all the pieces. Even the more "experimental" pieces are readable - there are 4 prose-poems, and one of the prose pieces consists of 2 stories (one on the left-hand pages, one on the right-hand) depicting the same events from 2 viewpoints.

"Adultery and other diversions" by Tim Parks (Secker & Warburg, 1998)

These essays alternate in a rather bi-polar fashion between autobiography and philosophical reflection. Having done this kind of stuff myself I prefer to view them as applied philosophy rather that pretentious ponderings. He compares fidelity in marriage and football, comparing the Italian and British approaches. As he translates Calasso he wonders how the sun might affect his output, and about his son taking a language test.

I was relieved to see that though the author is "the best british author working today" (Brodsky), the winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, the Somerset Maugham award, and the Betty Trask award, and someone shortlisted for the 1997 Booker prize, he also got a D for creative writing at university and had each of his first 7 novels rejected at least 20 times.

"Remake" by Christine Brooke-Rose (Carcanet, 1996)

Written in the 3rd person. Having worked at Bletchley Park, she looks at the past the way she used to sift the espionage reports and messages, looking for patterns to give substance to the trivia. On the last page it says "Memory intercepts the messages of a mysterious invented enemy unseen, giant knight or flaming dragon, the interceptor a speck in time facing the immensity of confrontable selves". As a child she put up with trilingual jokes; as an adult she compared the soap operas of various countries (English ones have working class people, Italian ones have doctors and lawyers). Facts and impressions are fired out sentence after sentence. "the first twenty-three years so starkly crammed and anecdotal, the second twenty-two years, one chapter". It was more like a conventional autobiography than I expected.

"A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers (Picador, 2001)

Interesting that the acknowledgements were written first, and that few readers had taken up the interactive offers (the novel on a floppy, the phone-numbers). I didn't know that McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood included sections that detail the differences between the book and reality. Some good passages (the early chapters, his flights of fancy, his wacky publishing stunts) and sensible use of diagrams (his use of music notation to show the intonation of a phrase is an idea worth copying). Often funny, but it could have been quite a lot shorter.