The Browser

Published on Friday 27 March 2009 14:06

After 10 dates at Glasgow's Aye Write Festival, I was off to St Andrews for the StAnza poetry festival, and by the time you're reading this, I'll have just returned, deo volente, from the launch of the Ullapool Book Festival.

StAnza's big hitters this year included Simon Armitage, reading that rarest of things, a good poem about September 11; Ian Rankin on his desert island poems (and also reading his last published poem – from an old issue of Lines Review for the collectors out there) and Roddy Lumsden, who launched his new book, Third Wish Wasted.

Lumsden's poetry goes from strength to strength: wry, witty and plangent, and capable of leaping from Kate Moss to the role of spice in warfare seamlessly.

Among the smaller events, Kevin Cadwallender read a poem in the voice of a dalek, and I lost myself in a game of word-bingo at the Poems vs Lyrics panel (only seconds before someone said Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan, yet the whole event managed to avoid mentioning Wagner once).

The most memorable event, though, was the Swiss sound poets. For the literati, sound poetry is a cross between Steve Reich's music and Gertrude Stein's syntax. For the uninitiated, it sounds like a cross between an orgasm and a speech impediment. As the poets warbled, cackled and whooped about sanitary towels, I reminded myself again what a lucky person I am.

Half-baked

Work is the subject of a new book by Alain de Botton, Britain's favourite trustafarian philosopher. The subject has been dealt with in empathetic detail by writers as diverse as Studs Terkel and Andrew O'Hagan, and somehow de Botton's air of dilettante musing jars against his topic rather quickly. One interviewee at a biscuit factory in Hayes "grew swiftly defensive" when quizzed on whether or not he could bake. I started to wonder what de Botton's baking skills were like. It seems wearisomely typical that his chapter on "Painting" has nothing to do with Dulux and is cluttered with references to Titian and Mantegna instead.

Birth of reality TV

Lurking around the more literary blogs, I was amazed to come across a reference to a 1974 novel by D G Compton called The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, about a young woman dying of cancer whose every moment is also being filmed for an amoral and jaded television audience: indeed, one reporter has cameras implanted in his eyes to catch her final seconds. It was filmed, as Death Watch, with Harvey Keitel and Max von Sydow, mostly around Glasgow. One for this year's Film Festival perhaps?