“Borrowed your book Don Don from the library yesterday…started reading it some ten minutes back…had to find you out fast and tell you that I had never read a book as sharp as this.. felt like “straight from the heart-straight into the book-straight into the heart”…had never been this glad about a book…made me feel real happy for the first time in my life that I love reading books…” Poornima Sasidharan
The ‘Evil’ of Daniel Bartlam
To label the teenager Daniel Bartlam “evil”, as the Daily Mirror does this morning, is a gross oversimplification, not least because implicit in this label is the idea that he is somehow not human, something other, an abomination. He is none of these. Rather he is all too human – an isolated, troubled and destructive young man – who, lost in a violent and nihilistic virtual world of soap operas, video games and the internet, was driven to commit an evil act. We would do better to look into our own damaged and troubled hearts, rather than simply consign one teenage boy to hell. We cannot, and should not, let ourselves off so lightly.
The Tragedy and Delusion of KONY 2012’s Jason Russell
Jason Russell’s KONY 2012 film is indeed very powerful, playing perfectly to an idealistic youth with its simplistic, gung-ho Hollywood sentiment: that human evil can be eradicated and the world finally made good if only Joseph Kony, the Ugandan warlord, is at last captured and punished. And this youth, by virtue of their youth – believing that humanity can be transformed – have responded in their millions, the film mobilising them to rise up and demand global action.
The intention to stop Kony from abducting children and using them as either cannon fodder or sex slaves is a noble and important one. However, KONY 2012, and the movement around it, possesses the same tragic delusion as Obama’s first presidential campaign – that America and the spirit of all her citizens, the whole world in fact, would suddenly be transformed once he was in office. This has not happened, and never will happen, even with a second term, which I hope he gets. And likewise, the capture of Kony will not bring about such miraculous transformation either, for his victims, the Ugandan people and the world at large.
It is only with age and wisdom that one realises humanity cannot be “transformed”, and though an individual can change, can better his spirit, can choose good over evil, evil shall always occupy his heart, shall always be lurking in his soul. It was Solzhenitsyn who concluded the following in The Gulag Archipelago, after years of immense personal suffering at the hands of Soviet Communism: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various stages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.” Kony’s victims, some of whom I know well, have reached the same conclusion.
Thus, though the arrest, trial and punishment of Kony is vital and necessary, it will not transform the lives of his victims and the lives of future children in Uganda, Africa and beyond. Destroying him, and other warlords and tyrants like him, will not mean the end of human evil. Russell, in KONY 2012, casts himself as a superhero, telling his young son that he will go and get the evil Kony once and for all, and in doing so, restore goodness to the world. And his child believes this brave, philanthropic, compelling statement. And yet days after the film’s global release, this same superhero is detained by San Diego police for masturbating in public, vandalizing cars and screaming obscenities. It would seem that Russell is not only close “to sainthood” but also “to being a devil”, in the words of Solzhenitsyn.
Russell’s family, and the charity of which he is a co-founder, Invisible Children, now push the line given to them by his psychiatrist, that he has suffered from “reactive psychosis”. He likely has, psychosis defined as “a loss of contact with reality”. And yet, according to this definition, he was arguably psychotic even while making the film, such is the extent of his delusion in it. Thus, his naked breakdown, it seems, was less the consequence of extreme exhaustion, stress and dehydration as a result of enormous public attention which contained equal measures of praise and scrutiny, and more his realisation of his own tragic naivety and delusion, that the world and humanity are in fact far more complex than he wants them to be and cannot simply be saved from evil. I wish Jason well with his recuperation: it’s clear he’s suffered enough from the events of the last week and now needs the time to heal.
Just as crucial as Kony’s capture is that his victims are helped to get on with their lives. Invisible Children would do well to use Russell’s film, and the money they’ve raised through it, not only to bring Kony to justice but also to continue to help his victims, to allow “good to flourish” in them rather than “exuberant evil”. The charity does this anyway, its work to be commended, though it would do better to spend less of the money on campaigning now and more on giving to those in need in Uganda.
Mtaala Foundation does not believe it can transform the world, but does believe, and has shown that, it can help victims of Kony and other vulnerable Ugandan children make changes to, and better, their lives, and in turn the lives of others.
Please donate to Mtaala Foundation.
Hirst and Emin: Artists of Deceit
I have a dear friend – an immensely gifted writer and artist – who not only produces wonderful work of real craft and quality but is faithful to it also. He is his art; his art him. What he creates reflects his character, no more than this, provides a window to his soul, and the soul one finds there, in each work, is perceptive, honest, probing and rich in thought and feeling. His creations can never be described as mediocre, shallow and superficial, these characteristics that define so much of contemporary art and culture.
As I look at his drawings, which can be found everywhere throughout his home, in his kitchen, living room, hallway and landing, I wonder why on earth he is not more valued, his art more appreciated. His work is not only better than many well-known and successful modern artists, but possesses a greater depth and integrity as well. He is perhaps a victim of these noble qualities, however.
Many of us see clearly the shameless and greedy charlatan in Damien Hirst, the false and talentless exhibitionist in Tracey Emin, yet we dare not voice such truths, these faux artists lauded by so many. How can so many be wrong? Quite easily, as history testifies to, many artists though celebrated in their lifetime subsequently judged to be average and overrated. The public is easily led, the likes of Charles Saatchi acutely aware of this. The man can give anything value if he gets behind it sufficiently, puts his name to it.
And yet it is precisely Hirst’s and Emin’s capacity for deceit, and their complicity in Saatchi’s and other collectors’ mercurial profit-making dance, which explains their success. The hollowness of Emin is clear enough when we see her commission for David Cameron – a pink neon sign displaying the words “More Passion”. That is it, the kind of sign you’d expect to see on a shop front. It is not art. She claimed she wanted to give Cameron, the moral conservative, some “cool”. In truth what she gave him was the perception of cool, much needed after he’d locked up so many young people in the aftermath of the London riots. Where Ai Weiwei uses his art to challenge and subvert poor and immoral governance, Emin uses hers to prop it up, now little more than a Conservative Party lackey it seems.
Art must have a moral purpose, even if, in the case of Michel Houellebecq, the enfant terrible of French letters, this intends to illustrate nothing more than the utter foolishness and futility of practically all human endeavour. It must not be driven solely by profit and fame, Hirst and Emin slaves to both. There is little art in Hirst hiring others to make his art. Ai Weiwei might do the same, yet he is motivated by political conscience – to undermine the Chinese Communist authorities – rather than personal greed and vanity. And there is little art in Emin’s patchwork quilts, these works based on the hollow and unimaginative conceit of violent and sexual expletives expressed on something as “wholesome” as a patchwork quilt.
Houellebecq, the great cynic with his mighty sardonic wit, would likely concede this is precisely why they are so successful in this modern age of ours, which has made art out of that which is not art, wealthy fools like Elton John paying millions for their vacuous and unremarkable work. Behind the grand and provocative titles of their works, which you hope like Nietzsche’s writings will express something profound and prophetic about human nature and the human condition, they express nothing but the artists’ deceit – Hirst and Emin are brilliant salespeople, masters of presentation and hype, understanding fully the value of provocation and sensation in order to sell their work. Yet what they are selling is empty and purposeless, serving them but no one else.
The Ugly and Awkward Truth of ‘Occupy London’
One of the protester’s banners at Occupy London declares, “The 99% needs a safety net more than the 1% needs a security blanket.” Many mainstream commentators argue that the protesters are nothing but a bunch of demented anarchists and hateful Marxists in search of either chaos or utopia, presenting no viable alternative to the Capitalism system which they so despise. Yet there is nothing mad or contemptuous in the above statement, nor in the one below, which states, “The banks own you! The government has a credit card with no limit and you are their collateral! We are the 99%.” Both statements, rather, contain an ugly and awkward truth, that we live in a profoundly unfair and unjust society where the 1% – our rulers, the wealthy – have a lot and care little for the 99% who have very little. What’s most at fault here is human greed. The 1% will do all they can to hold onto their wealth, will do and say anything in its defense. If only these few had the courage to own their greed, confess to it, rather than to deny and seek to justify it. If only the 1% would say, “We have the lion’s share not because this is how the system works – capitalism an unfair system in which only the toughest survive – but rather because we are fucking greedy and are simply not prepared to help the 99%, see them prosper more, because if we do then we shall have less, shall no longer be the 99%.” How I long for the 1% to be this honest, to take personal responsibility, rather than hide behind endless increasingly unconvincing justifications for their greed. It has no other name, I’m afraid. Greed is greed.
Putin’s Third Term
It appears that Putin will be President once more, despite the protestations of the Russian people who cry not only foul play but also that they’ve had enough of Vladimir Vladimirovich – the leader who refuses to relinquish power in the vein of the many despots before him. Democracy in Russia is nothing but a façade, an illusion. Men such as Putin, former KGB apparatchiks, have little concern for the will of people – what they want and need. Rather such men, former nomenklatura, care only for the state, the Russian state, which they will serve, as they did the Soviet state, until the bitter end. Communism collapsed because the people had had enough of this state, which was utterly indifferent to them, hindering them and diminishing their happiness when it had claimed to be doing quite the opposite. Yet Putin’s state, this new state he moulded out of the debris of the old Communist one, is the very same. Vladimir Vladimirovich, a moody bugger like his monstrous predecessor Stalin, expects gratitude from his people for his dedication, his loyalty to Russia and her people. His surly face conveys a man who’ll be President again only because he knows best, what’s best for the Russian people, and that, despite the great demands of the job, he will make this enormous sacrifice for his people, a sacrifice which includes accumulating vast personal wealth. Putin might have labelled certain oligarchs thieves, yet he is perhaps the greatest thief of all. He robs the Russian people not only of their wealth but also their freedom.
God and Melanie Phillips Will Cure ‘Sick’ Britain!
David Cameron, returning from his holiday in Tuscany earlier this week, declared a “fightback” against the rioters in England, vowing he’d do “whatever it takes” to restore order to the streets after four days of rioting and looting. He had to respond decisively – for there were significant questions over his leadership after he seemed more concerned with his choice of tennis coach than the state of the nation – and so he cast himself in the manner of Churchill, the brave and wise leader confronting the evil at our door. And yet this evil was not the threat posed by a powerful foreign entity, Nazi Germany, but rather by a weak domestic one, the rage of an underclass for which we are all responsible.
Melanie Phillips, however, believes that she and her biblical, orthodox, conservative and right-wing friends are not responsible, the blame resting solely with the former Labour government and the liberal intelligentsia. And so she, the grande dame of the Daily Mail, wrote yesterday, with all the demented glee of a fanatic, that the riots were “the all-too-predictable outcome of a three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value.” She concluded with great hyperbole – Phillips’ forte, the lady clearly a frustrated novelist – that “within the smouldering embers of our smashed and burned-out cities, we can only look upon the ruins of the Britain we have so dearly loved: the Britain that once led the world towards civilisation, but is now so tragically leading the way out.”
These rioters were a ragtag army at best, and hardly wreaked the level of devastation which Phillips’ incendiary, and might I say irresponsible, journalism proclaims. But then, for her, it appears to be less about the search for, and portrayal of, truth – her journalistic mandate is increasingly unclear – and more about the enforcement of her irrepressible moral agenda. Perhaps alongside her Orwell prize Phillips ought also to be awarded the prize of ‘High Priestess of Fire and Brimstone’, and worshipped as such. And her closing statement about Britain as it once was, leading “the world towards civilisation”, though it panders perfectly to the readers of her rag, a daft nationalistic bunch, is deeply subjective. Many Africans and Indians saw, and continue to see, Britain less as a bringer of civilisation during colonialism and more a purveyor of greed and barbarism, though the committed Judeo-Christian Phillips is unwilling to acknowledge this darker aspect of her kind and creed, which included the use of a “metal castrating instrument” to cut off the testicles and fingers of the Mau Mau in Kenya in the 1950s and the massacre of hundreds of peaceful protesters including women and children in Jallianwala Bagh, India, prior to Independence. Where is the civilisation here, my dear Melanie, in this “most civilised, most gentle and law-abiding” of countries?
Phillips goes on to turn her maniacal zeal to “fatherless boys who are consumed by an existential rage and desperate emotional need, and who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at everyone around them.” This would seem to imply that boys with fathers cannot suffer from such rage, which makes me something of an oddball, as I carried bundles of it and still do, in fact frequently share it – this existential rage – with my father. For this is what makes me human, this sometimes rageful search for meaning. Phillips sums up this theme of “fatherless boys” by calling “lone parenthood a tragedy for individuals, and a catastrophe for society.” And yet I see nothing tragic in my ex and her son, whom she brought up predominantly on her own, she a wonderful and loving single mother and he a great young man with a good heart. In fact, I see something rather more tragic in parents who, despite hating one another, stay together for the sake of the children, this arguably a far greater recipe for future violence and rage.
The Mail’s grande dame believes that the youths who went ‘on the rob’ are not victims of poverty but moral collapse. All of us are on the brink of moral decadence and savagery, our natural state an Hobbesian one, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and hence the only thing which will keep us in check is a regular dose of “moral concepts that underlie our civilisation”, in Phillips words, preached to us on high from the pulpit. Will this, I wonder, therefore include instruction on how to operate the metal castrating instrument and how to massacre innocent women and children? Phillips is convinced that we need saving and only her God can provide this. Yet her God has had his time – he failed us long ago – and that is why we turned away from him, embraced liberalism and chose to live in a Godless country. Why should his reinstatement be successful now? What Phillips proposes represents little more than the perpetual delusion of a religious mind that is so entrenched in its own belief and dogma that it is incapable of seeing another away of living and being. I’d be inclined to look, rather, to the work of John N. Gray for our salvation. In his work, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, he argues that our salvation perhaps lies in learning to see that, far from being the centre of the world, we humans are just other animals, albeit deluded ones, part of a self-regulating system, Earth, that has no need of humanity, does not exist for the sake of humanity, and will regulate itself in ignorance of humanity’s fate.
Phillips posits that “welfare dependency created the entitlement culture that the looters so egregiously display. It taught them that the world owed them a living. It taught them that their actions had no consequences. And it taught them that the world revolved around themselves.” She forgets quite how and why this entitlement culture came about – she would do well to read Orwell – the postwar British government finally acknowledging the terrible class inequity and social injustice in Britain, the rich having exploited the poor for far too long, which led to the formation of the welfare state and a redistribution of wealth, both of which were, and remain, right and proper. There remains some way to go, of course. We must still endure the likes of Philip Green, whose greed and tax evasion has no bounds, and numerous footballers and other celebrities who hoard their coppers, but then, at least Mr. Green and many of his millionaire chums are working class folk. Perhaps Melanie believes that the unfairness of prewar Britain made for a better society, the underclass she so despises subjugated to such an extent that it dared not even suggest that it might be entitled to what the rich are. Because this is the crux of it, you see – poor, unemployed and marginalised angry youths looting, stealing goods which the rich do feel entitled to, which the rich do take for granted. How dare they rise up? I hear Phillips cry. Their oppressed ancestors would never have done.
I am neither a “left-wing politician” nor a “middle-class ideologue”, but rather someone who believes in a fair and compassionate society and will fight the likes of Melanie Phillips and her hard-hearted, hateful and hypocritical Conservatives to the very end. Her spiteful wrath even extends to the Archbishop of Canterbury, asking derisively whether, “Anyone care to guess what he will eventually say about them [the riots]? Quite.” How ironic. For Rowan Williams possesses what Phillips so desperately lacks, a quality which will heal any sickness in society – namely love. Feel the love, Melanie!
A Decadent and Murderous Underclass!
A Mail on Sunday poll this week reveals that “more than half of Britons want a return of the death penalty,” and this prompts me to reflect on a recent prison visit I made, in order to read from, and discuss, one of my novels – a meditation on life and death. As I sat and discussed the themes of the work with a group of inmates, the majority of them lifers, it dawned on me that there was more truth here, in this prison library, than there was on the outside – beyond these cells, bars, walls and perimeter fences – in the offices of politicians and journalists.
The men before me, hard and troubled men who had committed violent crime, and in some cases had killed, talked frankly of what they had done, and why they did what they did. If the Mail on Sunday had its way, however, more than half of them would now be dead, their fates sealed with a lethal injection, the preferred method of the newspaper’s intelligent and compassionate readers. The rag prides itself on encouraging “public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think,” in the words of its chief columnist Peter Hitchens, yet at the same time profits from a populist, conservative and bigoted editorial line – for this sells the most newspapers – and is utterly intolerant of any opinion which contradicts its own. It would far rather its readers not think, because if they did, its sales would likely plummet.
Talking to these inmates and hearing their different stories, it was clear that their violent acts were not the product of evil, as the likes of Hitchens would have us believe, but rather were born out of a personal horror, of a kind that the privileged politician or journalist cannot, in his worst nightmare, conceive of, though he is still ready and willing to pass judgment on these fallen men, sure in the knowledge that they must be condemned not understood. When the inmate Jimmy pulled out a pump-action shotgun and shot the man who had sexually assaulted his daughter, he did so not in a cool gesture of premeditated evil but in a desperate fit of blind rage.
I am tired of the righteous rhetoric from the likes of Hitchens, who believes that the British justice system has been made soft by social liberals and cultural Marxists – of which I am one – prison a mere breeze for its inhabitants. It is one thing, Peter, to visit Wormwood Scrubs, but quite another to be incarcerated there. I doubt you’d last long, even with the apparent luxuries of a television set or video game console. You’re not mentally, or indeed physically, tough enough. In his work, A Brief History of Crime, Hitchens argues that poverty and other forms of social deprivation do not cause crime, that the former principle of “due punishment of responsible persons” be reinstated i.e. the reintroduction of capital punishment, and that we give up, once and for all, on namby-pamby modern theories of rehabilitation.
Hitchens, and other social conservatives, such as Theodore Dalrymple aka Anthony Daniels, insist that the only remedy for our increasingly criminal society is the abandonment of any notion of rehabilitation and an immediate return to Victorian justice and punishment in the Puritan mould. Hence, the only way to deal with a murderer is to kill him, and if the Old Testament’s eye for an eye cannot be met, then at the very least he needs to be hurled in solitary for the remainder of his despicable life with nothing but a copy of the King James Bible for solace. For in Hitchens’ world, moral virtue can only be acquired through the practice and discipline of religious faith, and capital punishment is consistent with the Christian belief in forgiveness – though God knows how!
The young Peter might have been an atheist like his older brother – he was also a Trotskyite – yet his growing disillusionment with socialism pushed him, first, to political conservatism, then, to God. This is an all too familiar path for the bitter Conservative, the liberal and progressive heart turned so sour that it now despises what it used to love. Hitchens and Dalrymple, though the latter is an atheist, are one and the same in this respect. They blame liberal intellectuals for minimising the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and undermining traditional mores, both of which have, according to the po-faced right-wing couple, contributed to the formation within Britain, and other rich countries, of an underclass afflicted by violence, criminality, welfare dependency and drug abuse. And yet was the inmate Jimmy – he subsequently died in prison – really a product of this new underclass, and did liberal intellectuals make it permissible for him to take revenge in the manner he did?
The answer to both is a resounding, No! Jimmy did what he did out of rage, a rage born out of love for his daughter, the thought of her violation unbearable. Was it more likely that Jimmy, a working class lad born into abject poverty in postwar Britain, would resort to violence in defense of his family, than, let us say, the privately educated Peter Hitchens, born in Malta and of sound military stock. Yes, of course it was. Jimmy was born into violence, it commonly employed by his family and class to resolve all manner of grievances and disputes, and though this does not justify what he did it surely goes some way to explaining it. And though the likes of Dalrymple would posit that Jimmy is the classic manifestation of this dreadful underclass – this mass of nihilistic, decadent and welfare dependent poor people given license by Champagne-sipping liberals to live badly and destructively – I would posit, rather, that Jimmy, far from brazenly taking the law into his own hands and acting with all the characteristic ignorance, arrogance and irresponsibility of the underclass to which he purportedly belongs, was consumed by such rage that he, quite literally, lost his mind and committed an awful act. He talked about what had happened to him when I met him, and wrote about his violence in subsequent letters, taking full responsibility for his actions, expressing deep remorse, and eager to make amends as best he could.
This is a difficult notion for social conservatives to grasp as they tend to be cold-hearted, unsympathetic beasts. Short of warmth and compassion in their own hearts, and hence the capacity to forgive, they struggle to comprehend how a man like Jimmy could be so swept up in the whirl and turmoil of anger and grief that he could do as he did. And so they then conclude – so sure are they that we must all live a certain way, their way – that something like capital punishment is an effective deterrent. Had the death penalty been in place, would this have deterred Jimmy from pulling the trigger of his shotgun? No, it would not. Because such was the state of his mind and heart that practicable and reasonable considerations about how he might be punished carried no weight at that fateful moment.
I pray that Hitchens never gets his way. For if he did, we’d be forever subject to his pedagogic discipline, the great fuminator demanding that we live differently i.e. his way, and that any other way is improper, bankrupt and immoral. But I also pray he does not get his way because I would rather live in a compassionate society, one driven to understand and forgive, not condemn and punish.
The State of Modern Fiction
What the fuck is going on with modern fiction?! I’m dying to read that wonderful book, which has a bloody big heart, yet I cannot find it. Gifted writers I greatly admire like William Boyd are now forced to churn out books like Restless, an all-too-familiar spy thriller that will be forgotten in no time, written for a pay check and no more. I can hear William’s agent whispering in his ear, “Look, just give me something I can get on Richard & Judy, okay. The friggin chimps in Brazzaville Beach aren’t cutting it. The British public are not interested in Central Africa and its primate inhabitants. Give them something more familiar, Will, something they can relate to. Yes, another World War II spy yarn, that will sell. The market will lap it up. This will be your bestseller!”
And so writers of the quality of Boyd are forced to pen boring, mediocre fare – yes, commercially-driven fiction conceived for the market first and the committed reader second – the kind of unremarkable books which those of us who believe in, and have a passion for, literature have bought and read a hundred times but never come close to finishing. Hell, we don’t even get a third of the way through them. And why? Because they are unremarkable, are not alternative, do not inspire. We know these books well. We pluck them off the shelves of Waterstone’s and WH Smith with great anticipation, our hearts beating excitedly. We dive into them as soon as we get home, settling ourselves on the settee and reading the first few pages in a kind of frenzy, longing to be immediately lost in their fictional worlds, consumed by them. And yet they do not grip us, do not move us, and soon, we are easily distracted from their pages and are looking for something else to do, to occupy us.
Who’s at fault here? The bookseller, the publisher, the agent, the writer or the reader. Well, all of them, to the extent that they are all slaves to the market. Yes, the relentless commodification of modern fiction is a ghastly thing! Why, because it encourages mediocrity, books becoming as bland as DIY furniture – made to measure, functional, conceived to do a particular job. Make you laugh, make you cry, bish bash bosh, job done. Now, books sit beside rows of tinned tuna in supermarkets, nothing more than commercial goods to be consumed, easily digestible and not too taxing. Idiotic sales statements adorn their covers, publishers reassuring would be readers that, yes, don’t worry, it’s more of the fucking same! And so, “Jo Nesbo is the new Stieg Larsson!” and “If you loved the Twilight series, then you’ll love The Immortals even more.”
A new book today, if it has a chance of being published, must not possess a whiff of the alternative, the innovative, the cult. A few possessing these awkward, unwanted traits do, however, slip through the moronic, money-grabbing filters of agents, publishers and booksellers, thank God, such as Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules Elementaires or Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but they are rare indeed. Hell, these two were published over a decade ago! Perhaps the logic of agents and publishers is the very same as tabloid editors and media moguls. The public want the lowest common denominator, therefore give them this and they will not ask for more.
The majority of writers comply, because they have to: they have children to feed, mortgages to pay. And so they write safe, producing work that imitates others, written within a clear genre, which their agent can flog easily to the publisher, and which the bookseller can then peddle to the lazy reader, who’ll consume it like a bag of popcorn, mindlessly and effortlessly. Others, however, think fuck ’em and self-publish. The agent or publisher might be too damn lazy and disaffected to do the work, but they are not. They believe in what they’ve written, however challenging or idiosyncratic it is, and they’re sure that even if the mainstream will not appreciate their work a small niche will, and greatly. Notable self-published authors include James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. These three, James, Marcel and Virginia, cared little for the majority, the consensus. They wrote not for the market, but for the love of writing, the beauty and truth it contained not the moolah it made. The same can hardly be said for James Patterson and Tom Clancy!
Storytails
Nick will be reading an extract from his novel, Love and Mayhem, at Storytails on Sunday 26th June 2011.
Storytails is a free event featuring readings of short fictional stories from some professional, and some not-quite-so professional writers. Storytails is held on the last Sunday of every month from 3pm at The Drop, beneath The Three Crowns pub on the corner of Stoke Newington Church St, London N16 0LH.
The aim of the event is to give those who enjoy writing short stories the opportunity to share original tales in a relaxed and friendly environment.
For more information please visit: http://www.storytails.org/