Bookworm: The big Appel

I’ll say this for Jacob Appel, who won the Dundee International Book Prize: he isn’t exactly afraid of controversy.

This is a man who quite happily argues in favour of prostitution, polygamy, incest between consenting adults and even – provided the animals don’t mind – bestiality.

Maybe this isn’t the reason he feels at home in Dundee, but he clearly does. Accepting the £10,000 award last Thursday night, he kept his ultra-libertarian views to himself. ”Twenty-four hours in Dundee,”he told the civic and literary worthies at last week’s prize-giving ceremony, “and already I’ve encountered more friendliness than in 39 years in New York City.”

I’m not sure whether this would still be the case if he’d told them why there’s really nothing wrong with them having sex with their grannies or made the case for zoosexuality. Personally, I’m dismayed that such a word even exists.

But after scanning his resume at the back of his prizewinning novel, The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up – a satire on post-9/11 American patriotism – I don’t have any doubt that Appel would have the intellectual firepower to make his case.

The author, it reveals, ”is a physician, attorney and bioethicist in New York City … He is a graduate of Brown University, Harvard Law School, Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at New York University”.

His website points out another accomplishment. As well as all of this, he is a licensed New York City sightseeing guide, which just goes to show what sort of bright, freethinking guys are showing people around the Big Apple these days.

CAMPBELL’S KINGDOM

Appel would, therefore, probably know all all about Watts Bar in Lower Manhattan, which is where Peter Hill often met fellow Scot and artist Steven Campbell in 1983. Ten years earlier, Hill had been a 19-year-old lighthouse-keeper on the Firth of Clyde – he wrote about it in the excellent Stargazing (Canongate, 2004) – but art was always his first love. On Thursday he will be coming over from Melbourne, where he teaches postgraduate art students, to talk about Campbell (“a genius, as simple as that”), the influences on his painting, and the Glasgow and Scottish art world of the early 1980s. The event is at Edinburgh’s Summerhall centre at 7pm.