Steve Finbow interviews David Mitchell

1. For Japan Times

2. Another interview in "Stop Smiling"

Steve Finbow read at the recent Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 1 launch. David Mitchell is one of the most highly regarded contemporary authors. They have in common that both are English writers living in Japan.

Ossian

Steve Finbow: interviews with David Mitchell

1. For Japan Times

2. Another interview in "Stop Smiling"

Steve Finbow and David Mitchell are both English writers living in Japan.

Ossian

This evening

A Reader

Send us your photos and news reports to onionmbeke (at) willesdenherald.com. A fiver for the best one and dinner with Mona for the runners-up.

Gordon's rain

I rejoiced that Blair had gone - and then Brown began to speak

"'It has been a very emotional day,' said Sky News's Adam Boulton. 'I have seen some incredible things today, things I never thought I would see.' What were these incredible things? 'I have seen the Blairs' exercise bicycle removed from Number 10,' groaned the honest fellow; and across Britain one imagined the Sky audience returning their sodden handkerchiefs to their eyes as they were racked with fresh bouts of sobbing. The exercise bicycle! The Prime Ministerial exercise bicycle! Never more to be used in Downing Street again! Woe, woe and thrice woe!" (Boris Johnson)

It's like Foot breaking his foot on the first day, or Kinnock falling into the sea. Gordon promising to rain changes on us, while half the country is flooded out. "We must have change! Change everything! Let it be decreed." It's like a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, topsy-turvy par excellence. Never mind thousands of changes, one good one would be nice.

Feargal Mooney

Things fall apart

"...of all the deranged notions that were floated - Blair as a 'faith ambassador', please - they came up with and settled on this idiocy. Why stop there? Why not put a Klansman in charge of race relations, a paedophile at the head of the Boy Scouts, and set up a Melvyn Bragg School for Cultural Excellence while we're at it? They have selected Tony Blair, the executioner of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the co-sponsor of Israel's murderous attack on Lebanon, the arms dealer to the crooked Saudi dynasty, the detestable spear-carrier for the American Empire, and bag-carrier for Bush, to be the Quartet's envoy to the Middle East." (Lenin's Tomb)

The world has been turned on its head. Jeeves is now to be the boss and Wooster has to go and be an emissary to the fuzzy-wuzzies. Maybe he even thought Apres moi le deluge, as he toddled off with floods all around the country and wars around the world.

Feargal Mooney

Donnington Road this evening

Wake of the sun

 

Keeping you up to the minute with Willesden clouds

Friends of the Willy

Lines between day & night

Nice website, Steve. "Flotsam and jetsam" goes with the feeling of coral or driftwood conjured by the Google graphic at the head of the page. I used to have some "flowers" made out of branching black coral and tiny white seashells that looked just like that.

Ossian

New London 2012 logo by T Boy

Somebody said that even the teaboy at Sphagnum Photo Agency could do better than the official London 2012 olympics logo. So Sphagnum supremo Onion Mbeke gave the work experience slave, who henceforth wishes to be known as T Boy, 20 minutes, the maximum time that Onion can survive without tea, and here is what he came up with. Wolf Howlin's or whatever they're called took a year and 400 grand to come up with their messy and fragmented effort, which has since struck several people into epileptic fits. For the small price of 20 minutes off, I think that T Boy ain't done too bad. Man. (Feargal)









"These are just ideas. They are not meant to be static or monochrome, they are meant to use the Olympic colours and transform for animations." (T Boy)

T-Boy © Sphagnum

Support your local bookshop AND authors

New Short Stories 1 is in stock (right on the main counter) at the Willesden Bookshop (Willesden Library Centre, 95 High Street, Willesden, NW10). They have sold eleven copies to date, and I can assure you they won't run out of stock! If you happen to get there and the last one has gone, ask them to phone me and I'll run round the corner (literally, that is where I live) with a new batch. Yes, that is publishing, you know, big business. I was hoping to give the profits to Comic Relief, but as yet not even near breaking even. Come on you lot.

As for Amazon, at one point New Short Stories 1 was in the top 40 anthologies. Don't get excited, though, because this can be achieved by just selling two copies in one day. Now if you all want to help (who the hell am I kidding, nobody even reads this) why not see if we can send the book spinning up to the top of the Amazon charts? Let me know if you buy a few and I'll get a screenshot as proof of the chart position.

I'm rather shameless about promoting this as so much blooming work went into it, and it is also packed with wonderful reading. I can be cool some other time. (When I'm dead will be soon enough.)

Ossian

Sasquatch

Eeeee eee eeee & Bed by Tao Lin:

"...a weightlessness entered into Chelsea’s blood—an inside ventilation, like a bacteria of ghosts—and it was sometime in the fall, before her 23rd birthday, that her heart, her small and weary core, neglected now for years, vanished a little, from the center out, took on the strange and hollowed heaviness of a weakly inflated balloon."

You can now read Tao Lin's 2006 Willesden short-listed story "Sasquatch" online. It is part of the collection Bed (Melville House, 2007).

Troglodytes troglodytes

There Now

Sphagnum

King of the birds

I see wrens from time to time and the other day I saw four (this is one of them) at the same time in a dead tree by the window of my writing shed. The king of the birds, according to folklore. They are noisy beggars, for something that could be mistaken for a queen bee as they dart rapidly by too fast to see clearly. They fly low and I've seen them going under a shed and under a building, which must be how they earned their latin name troglodytes troglodytes. Their "song" sounds a bit like some sort of drill.

Ossian

The warmonger as human interest

The long kiss goodbye (Martin Amis, Guardian)

In pictures and video: Amis on Blair (Pictures by Dan Chung)

"Deplorably flirtacious" is hardly a strong enough term for these starstruck diary entries about the chief cheerleader and cannon fodder purveyor for the invasion of Iraq. Blair decided that Britain would "pay the blood price" and now spends his time trying to mumble up plausible sounding excuses. All we're short of is the "Saint Sebastian shot full of arrows" illustration. Cool Britannia.

Feargal Mooney

The sky just now

Sometimes it doesn't seem so bad...



And then, a demon.*

O. Mbeke, Sphagnum

* This would make a good title for Ruth Rendell. Send her a link, Feargal. Ed

Ed's mug beats £20k

Review - Pulp.Net

Twenty grand can't buy you vivacity, twenty grand can't buy you newness, but for a very small consideration, the price of a mug perhaps, you can buy the book that's got more reaction than the stuffy old National short story anthology with its list of dead authors on the cover. If you think our review is not too dazzling, look at the low wattage of theirs.

P. O'Toole

Review this

Pretence or Genius? (James Topham, The Roundtable Review)

"New Short Stories 1, sees [Pretend Genius] team up with another rather eccentric and marginal artistic project, the Willesden Herald blog. A community blog written by the people of the London borough of Willesden [...] Overall, the collection showcases writers who are technically gifted, who are craftsmen and craftswomen with stories to tell and an assured way of telling them."

Of course, I've neglected to quote his more critical comments, but I ask you, people of the London borough of Willesden, can you blame me? We have worked our fingers to the bone (and that is just a medical fact, not a cliche, the bones are actually sticking out through the skin) to bring this august organ to vibrant life. And what do we get, we get it thrown back in our faces, that's what we get. Still he does recognise that great writer who is a good friend of Willesden, puts him on a par with people who have no par. The non-pareil. The reviewer is not devoid of all percipience.

The list of contributors to New Short Stories 1, together with last year's Willesden finalists continue to prove an outstanding literary form guide. Only this week Canongate signed up Nicholas Hogg. Today, the Daily Telegraph announces Vanessa Gebbie one of five winners out of over 2,300 entrants for their novel in a year competition.

Both writers read recently at the launch of New Short Stories 1.

Ossian

Easy rider

Marmalade cat on a Suzuki

O. Mbeke, Sphagnum

Podcasts: poetry in Willesden

This is me reading at the Willesden Writers event in the Metrowords festival, last Thursday.

• Subscribe to the Pretend Genius podcast series in iTunes
• Pretend Genius' page in the iTunes podcast directory
• Visit Pretend Genius Press podcast home
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And here are two poems by Daljit Nagra, an excerpt from his brilliant reading. Unfortunately we're only allowed two. These are "In a White Town" and "Darling & Me!" from Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Faber, 2007).

• Subscribe to the Willesden Green Writers podcast series in iTunes
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• Please check back later for a link to the iTunes directory listing.

Look out for more excerpts from Lynsey Rose and others in the next podcast.

Ossian

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Be Amazed! - Be Terrified! - Be Our Guests!

WILLESDEN GREEN WRITERS' WORKSHOP presents*

A team of explorers from Willesden went out into the unmapped jungles of Kilburn and captured this awesome and previously unknown beast. Now we bring you live on stage, in a twenty-ton, totally escape-proof cage

SPECIAL GUEST DALJIT NAGRA
Willesden Green Library, Thursday, 24th May 8 - 10 pm

Local poet Daljit, has achieved the almost un-precedented feat of having his first volume of poetry published by Faber & Faber, Britain’s leading publisher of poetry. His collection is called, ‘Look we have coming to Dover!’ and several of the poems revel in the linguistic quirks of the British Asian scene. But those are just three or four out of the whole book and he also goes in for a bit of Hilda Ogden and Yorkshire dialect, very amusingly. It is perhaps a distortion for the media to concentrate on those ones that play with dialect, but they are funny. The rest of the poems are a rich tapestry of words, a muscular hammering of evocation such as in the title poem, and an eclectic mix of forms, including some Dylan Thomas-esque diamond shapes.

Members of the Willesden Green Writers’ Workshop, whose anthology, ‘The Monkey’s Typewriter’, won the Arts Council’s coveted Raymond Williams prize in 2005, will be joined by Daljit for an exciting evening of poetry and prose.

BOOKS ON SALE, REFRESHMENTS PROVIDED AND IT’S FREE!

Free poster to drop from helicopters

* In association with the New Willesden Poetry Minstrels "A song, a dance and a good ol' dithyramb!"

Animals

Horrifying Animal Abuse In China

Sky News Video. It's disturbing to watch. Boycott Beijing 2008 and also boycott London 2012, because the abbatoirs here are just as bad.

Zoz

Local kid hits the big time

Show Me the Sky

The coruscating prose and inspired storytelling of Nicholas Hogg has been recognised by Canongate publishers, announcing "Show Me the Sky to be published in 2008.

His short story "Paradise" is included in "Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 1" (see Amazon links on the left. At about 13,000 words it is an example of what is sometimes called the "long story" genre.

My father was born at the height of clouds. He entered the world wailing, lungs pumping the mountain air and desperate for oxygen. He lived because he had the breath of a Kalenjin, as had his father and his grandfather before, a long line of proud and noble descendants from the ancient tribe of highlanders from the hills of the Great Rift Valley.

He grew up at an altitude where visiting relatives from the lowlands fainted and had to sit and take a rest from the sky. A village where the rhythm of life was set by the stars and the moon, the sun and the rain, a village where horseless cowboys herded the cattle, and my father and his brothers ran down the strays barefoot. (From "Paradise" by Nicholas Hogg, in New Short Stories 1)

Ossian

Mastery and devilment

Last Night by James Salter

I heard him interviewed and he claimed not to try for this silky smooth effect. It bothered him to be constantly referred to as a masterful prose stylist, a writer's writer, because it was in danger of making him too self-conscious. However there is no doubt that, as Richard Ford said in his introductory notes to this story, that there is no "grit" in James Salter's style. Yet I found that this story was as horrifying as just about any I've ever read. It trickles into the mind like a snake under a door before striking with deadly effect.

Ossian

Soul sale

I've sold out and freshened the Amazon links designed to get some commission. However, in three years they have never generated more than about 75p, which is too small an amount for Amazon even to transfer. Now that they are spanking the brand newy, mayhaps they will garner mucho lucre, faith, musha, och go away.

I will list books mostly by local authors, and mostly of short stories and poetry that I have read and highly recommend, such as Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit Nagra, the bard of Dollis Hill. Naturally, I list my own book as well and any with Willesden in the name! (Please take all these crimes into account when sentencing.)

By the way, you can come and see Daljit Nagra at a free Metrowords Festival event hosted by Willesden Writers Group at The Space, Willesden Library, 95 Willesden High Road, 8 p.m. next Thursday the 24th. I heard him read at The London Tavern, in a benefit event for the Lebanon, and it was a great night. Entrance free, and there will be a some wine, juice and water on the house.

Ossian

Let's invite the Queen to Dublin, join the Commonwealth

Now that Bertie Ahern has addressed the Houses of Parliament and planted a tree at a museum with Ian Paisley, who has stated on Irish radio that he is proud to be Irish and reminded listeners that Dublin was the capital before independence, where his father's birth was registered, for example, not to mention the extraordinary power-sharing setup in Belfast, it's past time that Ireland invited the Queen on a state visit to Dublin. Let's join the Commonwealth as well, if they'll have us—none of this will lessen us as a nation, but it will help mend relations between north and south.

Harry Lemon, Dublin