Stuart Kelly: The Browser

Published on Sunday 7 February 2010 10:34

So it's come to this. The City of Literature's fourth reading campaign, after Kidnapped, Jekyll And Hyde and The Lost World, is a selection of poems. The "Carry A Poem" idea is one that I love, especially as it moves poetry away from its slightly pious contexts.

I look forward to the poems beamed on to walls, attached to flowers in St Andrew Square and fluttering around as little business cards. I've decided to keep John Berryman's Dream Songs in my bag for the month, since there's nothing that makes my journey in on the No 14 more bearable than an extended American avant-garde meditation on suicide. But I simply must protest, nay fulminate, at one of their stunts. Semi-naked ladies with poems written on their backs – in a library. This is a kind of blasphemy. Libraries are sacrosanct spaces, sanctuaries from our pole-dancing and thong wearing culture. Libraries are places where old men can think about semi-naked ladies in peace.

Brought to Booker

The Booker Prize has discovered, through the labours of the Browser's dear friend, the indefatigable Peter Straus, that it missed a year – 1970 – due to a change in the rules. So they're running a belated contest, with writers as diverse as Muriel Spark, Brian Aldiss, Ruth Rendell and Melvyn Bragg up against each other. I think they should run another competition: the Booker Mistakes Prize. Which is the best book, in the past 40 years, that they overlooked? For the long-list at least: BS Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, Robin Jenkins, Iain Sinclair and Angela Carter.

One helluva game

It's nearly here! I write, of course, of the computer game Dante's Inferno, loosely based on some terza-rima theological poem. "It's a highbrow/lowbrow project by design," say the programmers. "If you know the poem, the game has a lot to offer. If you just want to mash buttons and kill demons, that's all it has to be for you". But I throw down a Browserly gauntlet to Electronic Arts, the company. I want to play Purgatorio and Paradiso too. I'd much rather blast Thomas Aquinas than listen to his ontological arguments.

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 07 February 2010