I was recently explaining to my father-in-law that I‘d been reading the journals of Anaïs Nin from the nineteen thirties. I found myself trying to explain that Nin and Henry Miller and their literary crowd reminded me of the Beat Generation in the United States. There are of course differences but what I was trying to put my finger on was the sense I felt of fakery, pose and artificiality, the pulse of which ran like a drug run through the body of both literary groupings. Nin is a powerful, interesting and skilful writer but like Kerouac or Burroughs the ego-centredness of her writing is for some reason mildly irritating. Naturally one expects or it’s likely that someone’s diary  will centre on their responses, ‘things’, the shifting states of their inner life and the events that occur around them that they identify as important.  All that is expected but Nin, as with the Beats, has a lushness, a theatricality, an intellectual self regard, especially for her genius and the genius of those around her that rings false. Her writing has the dulled timbre of someone who has for many years projected significance to the smallest of events in her life or rather every event is felt significant. I don’t dislike Nin or the Beats but I am wary of their accounts because of this ‘literary spin’. I don’t object to this per se, per se all autobiography is the same in this regard i.e. is a partial pose. It’s just I guess that Anaïs, Henry and June, their joint muse (and Henry’s wife), all love themselves so much. The journals are suffused with a highly sophisticated but juvenile fascination with the self, as if they’ve been sprayed with a perfume of forced naivety or nihilism.
It was this nihilism or lack of interest in the outside world and intense focus on the self that in an odd way made me reflect on the bombings in Brussels this week by ISIS. On his way to Spain, to fight in the civil war, the very politically engaged George Orwell dropped in to see Miller, one of whose books Orwell had reviewed positively. It struck me that this meeting represented in a small way a meeting of two ends of the literary (and philosophical) spectrum.  Miller (like Nin) would never have dreamed of driving south, crossing the Pyrenees and joining the combatants (of either side). Engagement with Art and Life (especially in the form of Sex) not Politics was his credo, he took a distanced Nihilistic (or more positively put Buddhistic) viewpoint. Not that he had no political views, he disliked American consumerism and did, late in his life, sign a pledge not to pay his taxes in protest against the Vietnam war but generally speaking and in his writing he was more interested in the personal and the private life of the individual. Orwell, on the other hand, felt he had no choice, given the epoch he had been born into but to put politics at the heart of most of what he wrote.  The industrial complex meant that life WAS public, there may be some Winston Smiths fighting to preserve an inner private life but essentially that was not possible. The political superstructure controlled not only the physical environment but, with control of the media and language itself, it controlled the mental environment. 
Another writer I was reading this week was Derrida and I was reminded that, in a tangential way, this Orwellian notion of control over language tapped into elements of the semiology of Roland Barthes and Saussure’s Structuralism and more relevantly into the pessimism of Post-Structrualism. Forty years ago in ‘Of Grammatology’ Derrida was talking about the death of writing (or what he called the signifier of the signified). Writing (which had become, and overcome ‘language’, and now ‘comprehended’ language) or the signifier of the signified, that is, the rubric of meaning, the logos, the foundation stone of Western civilisation at least, had, in effect, eaten its own tail. Meaning was always open to an erasure, we stood on the shifting sands of a logocentric idealism (even the sciences because they were founded on the same self defining ‘language’), and that ultimately there was no meaning, meaning was meaningless. For some this was (and still is) gobblydegook, the reason I raise it is simply that it seems like another nihilism, a response to the a-political, the nuclear, the artificial, the computer created, the virtual, the multinational corporatized world etc.
Believers in the ‘so called Islamic State’ seem to me also nihilistic, though obviously in an alternate actively political and apocalyptic way. ISIS identifies the corruption of the ‘West’ as a corruption of ‘true’ meaning and sees the solution in death or rather in killing. On the Radio Four programme ‘The Moral Maze’ one of the guests repeatedly said that ISIS was not an existential threat to our way of life and I agreed.  ISIS are rather like the Anarchists in Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’. They cause terror by killing more or less at random. But that randomness is precisely what makes their position one of powerlessness with relation to meaning. If the populace of the world can be killed at random by ISIS, then these ‘soldiers of god’, who have not one brave bone or sense of empathy, become simply another maker of tragedy like a tsunami, full of force, empty of meaning. One of the thirty people killed in Brussels this week may, for arguments sake, have believed that ISIS were justified in killing anyone, a child say, if they were born in (or travelled within) Belgium. That, de facto, if you are born in the ‘West’ especially (but anywhere will do) it is morally justifiable to kill you. Whether you are a Muslim, a six year old child, a man, a woman, elderly, religious, non-religious, agnostic, left wing or right wing, angry at the world or happy with it, any nationality, if you’re from anywhere in the world, believe anything,  well... in fact, you the individual are irrelevant. For a believer in ISIS the point is that they need someone to kill, killing is the beginning and the end. They do not wish to convert, persuade or convince. Reason, logic, humanity, faith, religious belief none of this is relevant. They don’t even need much in the way of hate, for how can you hate those you don’t know?
 
 

 I have just been reading about Primo Levi, the author of the holocaust classic, ‘If This Is A Man’. I knew he supposedly killed himself by throwing himself down the stairwell of his apartment block in Turin and that this ‘suicide’ is disputed, some people arguing it was an accident. But the thing that, I’ve just read and has struck about this very urbane, literary, intelligent and sophisticated writer was that he lived almost his entire life in the same apartment. Apart from his brief and wholly unsuccessful time as a partisan in the Alps close to the Swiss border before his capture and time in an internment camp and then eleven months in Auschwitz and nine in various Russian refugee camps he spent the rest of his life in his fourth floor apartment the family home, initially with his mother and then rather less comfortably with his wife as well. This reflects both a different era’s notion of what was acceptable/normal and the more familial nature of Italian/Mediterranean  society perhaps?
 Certainly it reminded me of my time in Spain. For a couple of years I had a Spanish girlfriend and she lived in the family flat with mother, father and brother (and before they died grandparents and uncle). There is an embarrassment in contemporary British society that looks askance at children staying in the family home for too long. I don’t have any cultural axe to grind here it simply struck me that a sense of personal worth is deeply dependent on the norms of one’s society and our internal sense of who we are ( when that society descends  -or ascends - in moral terms we have little choice but to move with it and adapt).
Auschwitz, in an odd way, acted as a rite of passage for Levi. Despite its obvious horrors, on occasion, Levi also described it as his ‘university’ or what we might call these days, his ‘university of life’ experience. He learnt in Auschwitz that on the other side of the wire human beings (guards and inmates alike) lose the rubric of morality i.e. good, evil, just and unjust are smothered by a grey blanket of existence where survival and brutishness are the essence of living.  As he said ‘One had to ... strangle all dignity and kill all conscience, to enter the arena as a beast...’ Having been so far from humanity and humane-ness it was his wife Lucia Morpurgo with whom he was able to’ become a man again’.
Levi named his children after the Italian worker, Lorenzo Perrone, who regularly brought him food in Auschwitz (his daughters were called Lisa Lorenza and Renzo) which again struck a note with me having just named my second daughter (with my wife) Freya Constance. Our reasoning being that Freya was a Norse goddess and, as with our first daughter Isla, that meant an association with the north and my family name being Dalgleish this seemed apposite. And Constance because Sarah my wife liked it for its strength and (moral) solidity. How such things reflect us and our times is interesting and relevant to who we are and what our lives consist of. In our own small way we are all a part of history, and it is largely luck as to whether we experience history as a storm or as a still summer’s day. History also ebbs and flows and returns. The migrants dying on the coasts of Turkey and Greece could be you or I, or worse, our children. Before the Nazi Maelstrom swept across Europe many people stood by and did nothing, are we (those of us who are doing nothing) guilty of an equivalent  lack of reading the way the wind is blowing?

Started really getting my teeth into the longest audio project I’ve been offered today. ‘Crimson Shore’ is part of a series of (so far) six crime novels by Gillian E Hamer who has commissioned me to do the first three and in all likelihood all six of the novels. So There’s a lot of work in front of me but as I’ve said to her so far I’ve found reading fiction a little easier than factual books and certainly more fun. That’s not to say it won’t be challenging not least because of all the Welsh names and their pronunciation (the novels are set in Anglesey) and the accent itself. There are also characters with Scouse, Irish and German accents so it calls for quite a range.
My main achievement today was in fact sorting out a little bit of music for the interludes between chapters. This is not required but I think it gives audiobooks a little bit more and certainly adds to the atmosphere. The music is a mix of spooky children’s voices, a haunting piano piece and the sound of the sea. I had great fun mixing it all together but it always takes you longer that you think even to produce somethings that’s about 15 seconds long!
 Anyway my wife is calling me to get downstairs and make the evening meal so need to sign off below is the blurb on the book, which is a really good example of the genre but what especially appealed to me, a bit like ‘Shetland’ on the TV (but based on Anne Cleeves novels), what the setting, which is rather novel! Anyway the blurb:
A half-naked woman dead in a ditch.
A disappearing pathologist. A teenager run off the road. For a peaceful island, Anglesey is experiencing abnormal levels of crime. What's the connection?

DS Dara Brennan has women problems. His boss, Amanda Gold, is embroiled in office politics and his wife thinks he's a disappointment. And then there's DS Kelly Jones.

As missing-person cases become murder enquiries, Dara must put aside his personal life and focus on the killer's trail. The only tenuous link between the victims is an abandoned children's home. What happened there, twenty years ago? And who is hell-bent on revenge?

Dara is keeping his eyes on the road. But he forgets to look in the mirror.

It’s a good read but will be even better in audio!
 

Completed my latest audio book yesterday 'Nelson Mandela: The Heart of the Rainbow Nation' by Hilary Brown. It's another short book at 2 hours but it was fun to do and is an informative read and good if you want a brief, quick outline of Mandela's life and the people around him. I tried for the first time impersonating the figures in the narrative Mandela himself, Desmond Tutu (two words!) the Queen (which was difficult as I'm an anti-royal but felt I had to do the job I'm being paid for) even Muhammad Ali which wasn't great and David Cameron (again can't stand him!) who I couldn't get at all. The idea though is just to give an indication of the voice and remind the listener who is speaking. I rather liked my Obama and Mandela and it was as I say enjoyable and I think gives the audio more texture.
Dracula's Guest the audio should be out in the next couple of days and that I'm very pleased with the sound effects and general creepy feel I think I've given it I think serves the story really well. I hope it gets some listeners because it had a long an troubled history of production. When I first started out doing audio books I began with this as an experiment to get used to reading, editing the equipment etc. and learnt a lot but after several months and for various complex reasons I had to abandon my baby that I'd spent a lot of time on. Coming back to it a year and a half later I rerecorded it all in a day! Put the music and sound effects on in another day and a half and boom it was done! How things change! A bit of experience and you get so much faster. Mind you I knew the story, characters and style like the back of my hand as I'd had a lot of rehearsal the previous year!
Onwards and upwards with a crime novel 'Crimson Shore' by Gill E Hamer which I'm really looking forward to but with take maybe four months as it's longer and more complex but very exciting to be working on.

I have a number of projects in the works at the moment. In terms of writing the prinicipal project is a two volume collection of essays the first volume  (as yet untitled) includes essays on a wide variety of subjects, largely autobiographical in name. A few of the titles are 'The Comics of Childhood', 'Jack's Problem with Hitchcock', 'The Poetics of Space'  and 'The Purple Rose of Juvenilia' there's also a fair bit on theatre my experiences with RAT Theatre a highly experimental physical theatre company of yesteryear and Volcano Theatre Company of a similar ilk and who are still going strong.
The second volume is at the moment entitled Orwell, Two Guinea Pigs, A Cat and Goat: The History of Britain Essays' and has the unwieldly partly to indicate it's pou-pourri nature of subject and because a number of the essays were first published in a magazine called 'The History of Britain'. However I may give volume one the first half of the title!
The essays in volume two are roughly chronologically ordered begin with an essay on Rome followed by one on ancient Wales and includes my previously published 'Alt Clut: The Kingdom of the Rock' about a little known kingdom once dominant in the north of Britain. But the scope is broad and other subjects include Tom Paine, World War's I and II, Mahatma Gandhi, George Orwell and the Ku Klux Klan.