The Browser: A headache for the big freeze

Published on Friday 3 July 2009 16:24

Dundee's Literary Festival is still in its infancy – this is just its third year – but even the fact that they decided to call it a Literary Festival rather than a common or garden Book Festival shows they have ambitions.

These hopes were borne out with a programme including Adam Mars-Jones, David Peace, Beatrice Colin and John Gray. I've enjoyed Gray's events in the past and was delighted that he didn't just repeat the talk he gave in Glasgow. He gave a splendid cadenza on the idiocy of cryogenics. Sure, he admitted, they might be able to unfreeze your head in 3009, but in the millennium in between there will certainly, he claimed, be civil wars, ecological catastrophes and other disasters. And you think that a freezer in Missouri is going to survive all that? Those who pin their hopes on cryogenics, he mordantly suggested, actually believe in the immortality of institutions.

National pride

David Peace is the man of the moment, with a novel out next month (the second part of his Tokyo trilogy) and a series of high profile adaptations – Red Riding, The Damned United – earlier in the year. His talk was revealing about his influences: such underrated writers as Sillitoe, Wain and Braine. But maybe the resurgence of proudly local English writing – writers like Jacob Polley, Ross Raisin and Nicola Monaghan as well as Peace – is a response to the linguistic independence Scottish writers like Kelman and Gray achieved in the Eighties and Nineties. Just a thought.

Genre gem

Another unique feature about Dundee is the Comics Conference, a day of events about graphic novels, with academics alongside practitioners. The theme was "time in comics", and David Bishop gave a bravura analysis of Alan Moore's Time Twisters. The whole theme was upstaged by Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan and the new Dan Dare, who claimed another comic book writer had told him the secret of time in comics, but only after they'd ingested interesting pharmaceuticals. In response to one earnest question from the audience, he quipped: "You do know I drink to excess sometimes, don't you?" The comics day is a welcome addition, and made me wonder why Scotland doesn't have more genre festivals.

Twitter ye not

Watch out: the authors are getting restless. After Alice Hoffman's Twitter fit about a bad review, where she gave out the reviewer's phone number and asked her fans to "tell her what u think", Alain de Botton has blogged on a critic's site saying "I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make". De Botton claims the reviewer "killed" his book, which is nonsense. Bad reviews maybe shave 5% off sales: no reviews kill a book. And if reviewers really could kill books, don't you think we would use that power more frequently?