Victor Olliver

Madame Arcati now blogs at Anorak

2010-09-24T19:27:00.000+01:00

And on that note, goodbye

2010-09-03T09:49:00.002+01:00

My blogging phase is over. No more free prose. xx

Hilary Mantel: Awards, silly AS Byatt and an indoor lavatory

2010-09-02T20:39:00.001+01:00

Hilary Mantel writes a rather delish piece in the latest issue of Intelligent Life on writers and awards. The 2009 Man Booker prize winner for Wolf Hall, she's a veteran of shortlists and victory cheques and so ably qualified to guide us into a world where X Factor-like star-fucking collides with trembly loner-creatives shy of flashlight.

The piece is so rich with observation and sly indiscretion that I shan't even attempt to synopsise. But my thanks to a reader for drawing my attention to Mantel's amused recollections of the 1990 Man Booker on which she was one of the judges. Of the benign absurdities she writes:

'There was an element of bathos when the winner, A.S. Byatt, said that she would use the money to build a swimming pool at her second home. At times of crisis—and winning this prize is a crisis—people say the most extraordinary things. I seem to recall one novelist saying more humbly that his winner’s cheque would pay for an extra bathroom. For years I dreamt of pursuing the watery theme: of flourishing my £50,000 with a cry of, “At last, I see my way to an indoor lavatory."'

Mantel recalls the many idiotic things said to her at awards by members of the public and her mixed feelings of watching a winning title rocket up the Amazon sales chart while the curses of online ranking and categorising seem like off-shoots of prize industry thinking.

But she's done well out of it. She reveals that winning the Man Booker has helped her find publishers in 30 countries in the last nine months - and made her rich enough to write what she likes.

Intelligent Life

Charles Shaar Murray: How to enchant the grown-ups

2010-09-01T16:22:00.001+01:00

You, too, could be the next Charles Shaar Murray. The 'legendary' former NME rock writer will tutor 20 aspirants in the art and craft of writing and journalism in an eight-week series of masterclasses called The Hothouse Project, hosted by Storm Books, in north-west London. Price: £195. Late Sept-Nov.

He will help refine your talents in interviewing and reviewing, even in writing a column. In his shoes I'd familiarise the student with the small claims court and the value of sleeping with commissioning editors - one must always think pragmatically, that's what I always say. Not that the latter strategy always gets you the promised column: I know of one female writer who pleasured a national newspaper editor for a while and he never delivered. So, my third lesson would be in artful blackmail. The fourth would be in the everlasting value of storing emails: delete nothing. I shiver with delight at what students could learn from me.

But back to CSM. He appears to think that he has secrets to impart for the betterment of literary career. He reviewed Stephen King's memoir On Writing once and concluded that 'personal magic' is the X factor any writer needs for success. So prepare to enrol at Hogwarts.

CSM website

Proust's Overcoat - some like it otter

2010-08-30T20:30:00.003+01:00

Photograph courtesy of Eric Karpeles

Here it is, the literary Turin Shroud: Proust's overcoat. He wore this otter-lined garment in all weathers and used it as a blanket every night while writing in bed.

The photo is to be found in Lorenza Foschini's recently published Proust's Overcoat: The True Story of One Man's Passion for All Things Proust. She tells the intriguing tale of Parisian perfume magnate and bibliophile Jacques Guérin's successful quest - which began in 1929 - to save many of the great dandiacal author's manuscripts, notebooks, personal effects - even his bed.

Appalled by his homosexuality, Proust's family - and sister-in-law in particular - had already embarked on a campaign of vandalism against their inheritance when Guérin made it his life's work to salvage what he could. Foschini's literary detective tale channels the Indiana Jones-like spirit of Guérin who saw his chance to do posterity a favour when he was brought by chance under the care of Marcel's brother, Dr Robert Proust. The things Guérin had to do to save some moth-eaten coat!

Tarka the Otter was first published in 1927, a Guérin contemporary. Interview with Foschini

Divine Brown writes her Cherry Red autobiography

2010-08-28T14:24:00.000+01:00

The 'Hollywood sex worker' who rocketed to international stardom after fellating actor Hugh Grant in his car back in 1995 is writing her memoirs.

Divine Brown - or Estella Marie Thompson, as she once was; or Stella Thompson as she now calls herself - is piecing together her life story around the night of Hugh's fateful erection in her company along Sunset Boulevard.

I do think she should use Hugh's nickname for her - Cherry Red - in the title; something like, 'Better Cherry Red Than Dead', something like that.

When I typed 'divine brown writes autobiography' into Google for further details, the first link up was 'Gordon Brown biography delayed until after election'.

Jedward & Garry Bushell life stories: I just want to kill myself

2010-08-26T20:40:00.004+01:00

Quite by accident the other night, I stumbled on a reality TV show about Jedward, the 18-year-old Irish identical twin brothers who purport to sing. Because I missed the first bit, I had no idea why they had been moved into a penthouse suite someplace in Dublin where they sought the stopcock, turned it on and flooded out the bathroom. Apparently this was their first time away from mum and dad (but what about their weeks away on The X Factor last year?). I assume they are virgins. I switched channels as they opened the fridge.

It's ony fitting then that John Blake has just snapped up rights to Jedward—Our Story, by Jennifer O'Brien: the authorised biography. It's out in October, just as The X Factor's warming up. Quite frankly, if this book does not recount their first (two-for-the-price-of-one) masturbatory experience - in separate rooms I hasten to add, yet weirdly coincident thanks to twinship oo-ee-oo telepathy - then I can't think what else is worth reading.

Just as challenging is the news that Garry Bushell's memoirs Bushell on the Rampage is due out on (appropriately) 9/11 from Apex. In Chapter 7 he recounts passionately snogging Barbara 'Bar' Windsor in a BBC green room. Bar repays him with a review for his book - 'Garry never pulls his punches, he’s naughty and great fun.' I'm surprised to learn that an average Apex initial print-run is just 500 copies. 'Future runs will incorporate any favourable review comments on the back cover to assist in increasing book sales,' Apex promises. To 600 copies?

Rupert Smith: Why he took the Low Road to erotic immortality

2010-08-24T12:24:00.004+01:00

Rupert Smith? James Lear? Rupert James? Zelig?

One of my worst habits is promising writers I'll email-interview them and then not following up. It's a dreadful thing (not) to do, and is probably the result of homophobic abuse at school, or something. No wonder Shena Mackay hardly talks to me anymore; and as for Frances Lynn, I'm certain she is consulting a witch doctor (but I'm coming, Frances!) as I write.

Meanwhile, Rupert Smith. Before I email-interview him (I've only kept him waiting for about a year), let us subject ourselves to his excellent literary example.

Prior to his becoming the highly successful, tax exilable author he now is, unimaginably he struggled to find a publishing home for a Rupert Smith novel. But he was fortunate in his choice of louche friends. One advised him that one sure way to glory was erotic fiction. And so his alter ego James Lear and The Low Road were born - an 'erotic rewrite' of one of his favourite books, Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped. 'It's the story of young Charles Gordon, who leaves his Scottish home in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion and goes in search of the man he loves, the false priest Lebecque. He's kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery, and... ,' Rupert explains on his website (link below).

Indeed, all his erotic titles appear to be conceived from one-night stands with teacher-approved texts before a painful (re)birth as self-pleasuring mutations. Hot Devil was a little inspired by Gone With The Wind while The Palace of Varieties boasts the oblique parentage of Gerald Du Maurier's Trilby and Balzac's Le Père Goriot and Illusions perdues. Having read Rupert's excellent Man's World (a recent Rupert Smith novel) I can testify to his splendid comic skills. He's as smart as smart as smart is Rupes.

I should also add that he has a second alter ego, Rupert James. This one does battle with the likes of Jilly Cooper and Penny Vincenzi, constructing racy blockbusters, such as Silk, for the commercial women's/island beach market.

The literary lesson of all this industry is to yield to your inner Jekyll & Hyde, rise above your paltry self and diversify. Multi-egoing is the way. Rehearse in front of a triptych mirror and give each of your reflections a name. The worst that can happen is you get sectioned or catch sight of a mole hitherto undetected.

I'm quite keen to ask Rupert about porn fiction that features pensioners and the disabled, apparently there's a thriving market for such work - I'm convinced I attended a reading at London's Green Carnation club some time back where he expounded on these sub-genres. I just hope I'm not starting to hallucinate.

Rupert Smith's website

US Vogue's Grace Coddington starts work on memoirs

2010-08-23T16:47:00.002+01:00

As she nears 70, US Vogue's creative director Grace Coddington is writing her autobiography at long last.

She raised her public stock when she upstaged her boss Anna Wintour in the 2009 movie The September Issue, bitching about some of her haughty editor-in-chief's weird fashion decisions and questioning her picture choices in the art department.

Coddington is expected to write about her lengthy stints at both British and US Vogues - and doubtless will tell us why she fled the former after Wintour took over in the mid-80s.

According to Jerry Oppenheimer in his Wintour bio Front Row, this was because Coddington could no longer stand Wintour's interference and autocracy, and popped off to Calvin Klein in New York. Curious then that the two women started at US Vogue on the same day in 1988, first sign of the love/hate, symbiotic working relationship that made The September Issue so compelling.

Coddington has started work on her book with former Men's Vogue editor-in-chief Jay Fielden.

'Cancelled' Martin Amis bio finds a new publisher

2010-08-23T10:02:00.002+01:00

Last month The Australian reported that Martin Amis and his agent Andrew Wylie had forced the cancellation of Professor Richard Bradford's Martin Amis: The Biography at Peter Owen. It appears the biographer had intruded a little too deeply and unflatteringly into Mart's emotional baggage - a sure sign that Bradford tackled his subject with welcome zest and rigour. Happily Constable has picked up the book which is due out at the end of January 2011, billing it 'The first biography of one of contemporary British literature's most gifted and controversial authors.' I have written to Bradford to see whether he has had to make any cuts.

You're published - but how do you get yourself famous?

2010-08-21T23:55:00.004+01:00

You may have a publicist, you may have done the author tour. But still you walk down your local shopping precinct unmolested by literary stalkers. That's no fucking good. One way to raise your profile is to buy your own David Frost/Letterman, be interviewed on camera and have the filmed result posted on video and social media sites such as YouTube and Twitter. Price starts in the low hundreds of pounds. Talking Books TV could be just one way of taking control if you're self-published or if your publisher is loafing.

This is not an advert, but an invitation to sample and report back to me. Watch the video and here's the web link http://talkingbookstv.com/.

Chas Newkey-Burden: Britain's most prolific celebrity biographer?

2010-08-20T16:18:00.005+01:00

CN-B - unauthorised use of one of his pics

One of the wonders of celebrity unauthorised biography is the writer Chas Newkey-Burden. Whereas the Kitty Kelleys sustain an output of about one book per five to seven years, Chas snips out about half a dozen bios a year. His Amazon page is a staggering display of rush-job fecundity.

Consider. In October we have his The Wanted: The Unauthorised Biography to look forward to but not before his Dannii Minogue: The Biography, the paperback version. Simon Cowell: The Unauthorised Biography (the paperback) came out in April, before the paperback of Amy and Blake - Love is the Drug in July. That same month he pulled off the miracle of Justin Bieber: The Unauthorized Biography: a miracle because his subject is just 16. And in October, don't forget to order a copy of his Heston Blumenthal: The Biography of the World's Most Brilliant Master Chef for Christmas. Oh dear, I quite forgot - his Stephenie Meyer Queen of Twilight: The Biography paperback was issued in March; and the Kindle edition of Brad and Angelina: Truth & Lies plopped in April.

Since I have not read any of these John Blake/Michael O' Mara/Michael Joseph productions I cannot fairly assess their quality, though one Amazon reviewer of the Stephenie Meyer complains that 'much of what is contained in the book are copies of reviews of [Meyer's] various books, and extracts from the many interviews she has given (pages upon pages upon pages of reviews are reproduced in this book).'

Why is there so much critical bitchery about these days? At least Chas went to the bother.

You'd think his keyboards are sufficiently bashed already yet astonishingly he also regularly updates a lively 'philosemitic' blog called OyVaGoy - I'm afraid to say that his fanaticism for Israel is an object lesson in how wars get started and are sustained, such is the hairdryer nature of his prose. Though not Jewish himself he explains he began to identify with Israel post-9/11, having lazily sided with the Palestinians for years. Given the furious nature of his energies - not unlike those of his one-time co-author, the blessed Julie Burchill - perhaps he needed a cause to sustain the fiery thrill of venting.

I must do his horoscope.

Eva Petulengro's Painted Caravan: A new one for nostalgia fans

2010-08-20T15:00:00.045+01:00

I said the other day I'm not one for nostalgia. But there's no doubting that the market for yesteryear non-fiction is a pretty lucrative one. And a good example of the genre is the Romany media astrologer Eva Petulengro's The Girl in the Painted Caravan, just announced by Pan for February 2011 release.

The memoir describes the world of Romany gypsy travellers that's all but disappeared from the British countryside. Eva 'didn’t go to school or visit a doctor when she was unwell,' reads part of the blurb. 'Instead her family would gather wild herbs to make traditional remedies, hunt game and rabbits, and while the men tended horses to make a living, the young girls would join the women in reading palms.'

Having worked with Eva many years ago on her magazine Romany, I know she has a sharp recollection of the history of her culture and of the many intriguing characters she encountered on her journeys.

The Good Funeral Guide: How to dodge the grave robbers

2010-08-18T16:10:00.002+01:00

Of one thing I am certain: no headstone. I want no chiselled nonsense dedicated to my memory. I quite fancy the idea of burial at sea - I don't know if Brittany Ferries or some such lay on body disposal theme cruises - with friends and relatives seeing me off with a raised glass prior to riotous partying at the expense of my estate. No church, no hymns, no hideous poems or ghastly bouquets: just a clairvoyante-in-trance to lend my ghost her vocal chords for my mediated eulogy and the sound of a Brittany Ferries horn (my valedictory message to the world) as my carcass becomes one with plankton.

Should author Charles Cowling update his excellent and informative The Good Funeral Guide he is welcome to include my recurring burial fantasy. A consumer guide of this sort is long overdue, particularly because, as Cowling says, funerals are almost always a 'crisis purchase' and therefore subject to all sorts of sharp practices. The UK alone has 5000 funeral directors of varying quality: what we really need is a Michelin-type guide to their services with consumer spies spot-checking burial shows, as if reviewing a restaurant or hotel or Cats.

Interestingly, the Guide recommends no branch of Co-operative Funeralcare, because of relative high prices and its 'unethical' de-recognition of the GMB Union. Cowling's central message is plan, plan, plan - don't put off. For a taster and useful updates, check out his website and blog first, here. The story of the American memorial service and the 600 egg salad sandwiches is a recommended read.

The Good Funeral Guide: buy here

70s Style & Design: My saviour from the flaccid Jim Callaghan

2010-08-17T15:41:00.002+01:00

It may be a crippling lack, but I have no nostalgia. To me the present is always superior to the past: hello Lady Gaga, bye-bye Madge. Friends of another era are best left there; their yearnings for time machine recollections fall on deaf ears. To me, Facebook is a 21st Century nightmare of zombied exes (I jest, natch...).

However, periodic attempts are made to fill me with a longing for dead things, and the latest is the delicious-looking, lavishly illustrated 70s Style & Design by Dominic Lutyens and Kirsty Hislop, published last year.

I blame Jim Callaghan for my antipathy to the 70s. Quite why the predatory Tom Driberg once grabbed Jim's flaccid penis is beyond my understanding. Just to look at old news footage of that misshapen blob of pinstripe outside Number 10 (face perma-shiny; thin Brylcreemed hair combed redundantly) cramps out happier memories of the 70s, such as the suffocation of Adam Ant scene in Jubilee (1977) - Britain's finest ever movie.

© Jane England

Yet 70s Style & Design is a flood of memory jolts of why I might want to flit back to that decade. On a return ticket, mind.

Identifying four key themes of the 70s - Pop to Postmodernism, Belle Epoque, Supernature and Avant-garde - Lutyens and Hislop cover fashion, interiors, art and architecture. Everything is an influence or an influenced, ever in (r)evolutionary transit. Punk - unhygienically black in tooth and claw - distantly journied from France's 19th-century Decadent movement via Dadaism and a 100,000 Warhol trash-lover art students. Meantime, a lot of what originated in the 70s didn't take off until later, such as the Debbie Harry/Fiorucci look, an 80s smash 'n' grab.

Past-plunderer and Biba-creator Barbara Hulanicki is rightly identified as a key revivalist of 70s retro camp, rooted in the Naughty Nineties and 20s/30s Art Deco, culminating for me in Joan Collins' The Bitch and its many mirrored walls and ceilings. And its glossy, glorious crappiness. (Fans of Hulanicki may enjoy this, from my meeting with her last year with permanent fiancee Molly Parkin)

Eco warriors under the age of 30, who imagine life began on their day of birth, will be shocked to learn that 70s stalwarts such as Habitat and Laura Ashley were inspired by the back-to-nature movement of that time. The Supernature section, more than any other, will drag you jarringly back to the present in pessimistic déjà vu.

Reviewing the book late last year in the Spectator, Bevis Hillier gossiped that Lutyens ('a great-great-nephew of the architect') had told him that 'he and Hislop hoped their book would give the lie to the cliché reputation of the Seventies as "the decade that taste forgot"'. Hillier concluded: 'I’m sorry, but the book wonderfully, triumphantly confirms the cliché. It is a Kitschfest of the highest order.'

Who would argue with Bevis?

To buy a copy of 70s Style & Design click here

Dominic Lutyens' blog. Dominic is working on the text for a book on Celia Birtwell which will be published by Quadrille in autumn 2011.

Sue Brayne: Death - the final frontier (some think)

2010-08-16T16:27:00.001+01:00

Sue Brayne

This summer saw the publication of the world's first death magazine, Eulogy. It's too early to say whether it will live or die - certainly it has elicited some odd responses. I hear of one woman in a branch of Marks & Spencer having a fit when she saw the magazine stacked on the shelf, calling the manager and demanding the removal of all copies - and they were removed.

Personally, I would have ordered her off the premises with a lifetime ban: this may explain why I don't work for M & S.

Death, then, is in the zeitgeist wind - or rather, the fashion to talk about it in an exploratory way begins to bud, against taboo. And so it is a happy coincidence that I come across a new book on the topic: The D-Word: Talking About Dying: A Guide for Relatives, Friends and Carers by Sue Brayne. (Click link to buy)

Published in January, it's selling surprisingly well, and is already being used on palliative nurse training courses. Matter-of-factly curious about death since way-back, Sue relates her own near-death experience in a plane crash and her later death studies with the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross organisation. In the West especially, the rejection of spiritual perspectives has left many of us with no psychological or emotional preparation for the end of life - one's own or that of loved ones and friends.

Through affecting personal stories and the author's own advanced insights, The D-Word offers practical approaches to death, for atheists and those of faith alike. One of the most intriguing and challenging books of the year.

The D-Word website here

Gavin James Bower and the publisher with a BEE in his/her Dazed bonnet

2010-08-14T19:43:00.004+01:00

Gavin James Bower

In January of this year, my alter ego Madame Arcati ran an interview with the young writer Gavin James Bower for his debut novel Dazed & Aroused. Gavin is a former runway model and his book is set in the world of high fashion and modelling, so you get the drift on theme: but its stylised prose, likened by many critics to that of Bret Easton Ellis, placed it on the literary fringes, well outside the airport WH Smith concentration camps, which suggests more novels to come.

Something in this interview plainly annoyed one publishing editor who has just written in anonymously (as 'ed') to Arcati. The letter has the authentic tone of arrogance and know-all-ness characteristic of many publishing editors, long dead to books except as trophy index and window display. Like so many journalists who cannot write, here we have another editor who cannot read: doubtless extra-literary considerations drew him to the accursed world of books.

First, you may want to acquaint yourself with the interview to make sense of the letter. Or perhaps not. You can piece things together from ed's remarks. The letter (unedited):

'Ok this has gone far enough, someone needs to restore a little perspective here. I work for a major international publisher (in London) who was altered to a number of literary events and talents via a Guardian article and frankly, my time has been wasted.

'Let's start with: Bower and Dazed [Dazed & Confused, the magazine]. I know Rod and Tim at Dazed and they have 52 interns a years [Gavin having been one]. No one could possibly remember a single intern. Why attempt to sell books on this basis. Surely, it's embarrassing. Their commitment to Literature is very low and Jeff Hack is a cash cow - he's been rube to 104+ people since he was rube to you. Why make such a big deal out of the fact that you worked there for a week? It is also very bad form to glorify a magazine that charges £44,000 an advert. This excludes all publishing companies for the sake of hair products and fashion houses.

'Re 'The Publishing Industry': 'Bower. Surely you know that you were published because of your saleability - because the BEE [Bret Easton Ellis] model works. Evaluate your own prose. Place it in a lineage. Have a big old think about yourself.

'When a publisher signs someone like Bower we all sigh and mutter a variant on "how low can you go" to one another. This is a terrible blog and Bower is a bog-standard author. We all flitter around the HTML GIANT chaps, thinking, shall we? Shall we not? And even though these guys are much better than Bower, none of us will touch them, because frankly they're not good enough. This contemporary mode of short-sharp prose, with its confessional sexual misgivings and taboo breaking one-up-manship is so so tired. It's a genre to itself, likeable only to 'heart-break-fang-bash' - Twilight style, the first series of books written to suit supermarket shoppers.

'I saw you at Lit Death Match. Shambles.

'Chin up. Even if you killed yourself now, no one would care.'

ed.

Nesta Wyn Ellis back with 'sensational' life of Lord Bath

2010-08-12T20:17:00.003+01:00

Nesta does what Liberace never quite managed

Nesta Wyn Ellis makes an overdue comeback to the world of books this October.

The biographer of former Prime Minister John Major turns her focus on the Marquess of Bath in Lord of Love. Having read the MS a few years ago I can tell you it's pretty sensational with stories of domestic violence and all sorts of other claims about the aristo whose harem of wifelets at Longleat was once a scandal but now must be regarded as a quaint example of sexual incontinence and emotional infantilism.

As part of the blurb puts it: 'Beneath the fast paced tale of artist/entrepreneur Bath and his string of women lies a labyrinth of psychodrama resembling a Greek Tragedy, in its unfolding of passion, rage, ambition, revenge, joy, sorrow, loneliness, yearning, rejection infidelity, mother/son love, father/son hatred, tenderness and domestic violence.'

Though the bio is unauthorised, Nesta spent a lot of time with Bath and his women at Longleat House - 60 hours-worth I believe. He opened up to her in a way he may live to regret. As was the case with John Major who back in the early 90s invited Nesta to No 10 to write his life story after she interviewed him agreeably for the now defunct monthly glossy Woman's Journal.

Described as a near 'accidental masterpiece' by AN Wilson, the book documented the rows between Major and his wife Norma, involving airborne crockery. Poor Norma was incensed by this and other disclosures - and wouldn't have been placated when Nesta appeared on Wogan (then the nation's top TV talk show) and described Major as a 'flake'.

Unlike most other biographers, Nesta is impossibly exotic and glam, deploying astrology, a sharp forensic and political mind and tanks of charm to lure or elicit stellar confidences. She was once Harpers & Queen's political correspondent and stood for Parliament herself, forging useful alliances at Westminster. Her notorious novel The Banker's Daughter was retitled 'The Bonker's Daughter' by wags. After the Major storm, during which time Nesta appeared several times on front pages including those of the Sun and Sunday Times, she moved to Paris to pursue her career as a nightclub chanteuse (see video below).

One can only hope that Lord of Love will bring Nesta back to the British Isles pronto - for yet further adventures of the literary and musical kind.

Nesta Wyn Ellis website (with musical accompaniment)
Order Lord of Love
Dynasty Press

Nesta sings on the Paris Métro

Georgina Spelvin: Ex-porn star writes a Lulu of a memoir

2010-08-11T16:28:00.001+01:00

I'm surprised the former Broadway and '70s Porn Chic actress Georgina Spelvin - star of The Devil in Miss Jones (1974) - couldn't find a paying publisher for her memoir, The Devil Made Me Do It. Never mind. She has found her reading public via digital self-publisher Lulu - yet another example of how very limited mainstream publishing can be.

'I couldn't find a publisher who wanted my book as I had written it. I just couldn't let someone else write it to suit the porn market,' she tells Charles Shea LeMone. Her engagingly gossipy and sexually graphic book tells all you need to know about the porn movie world - on giving head on set she thinks at one point, 'If you yawn you won't gag. It's not really THAT big.' But there's a lot more besides, including her battles with booze and off-porn careers, such as stripper, fish gutter and avocado packer.

In her Saga years she took up desktop publishing (she's 72 now) - and I understand she's written a sci-fi novel that's due for publication.

Here's Georgina's blog and website.

Review: Precious: A True Story. Pure as the driven Jon Snow?

2010-08-09T21:08:00.007+01:00

Up to three years ago I'd never heard of the journalist Precious Williams. Then one fine 2007 day, a Sunday newspaper was full of her claims of an affair with the Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow. Over two weeks various exotic activities were related before the paper abruptly withdrew the story and apologised to Snow - not only had he not had a relationship with Precious, he couldn't recall ever meeting her.

My Madame Arcati site echoed this apology after receiving a lawyer's letter. Madame had taken an interest in the baffling tale, naively repeating some of Precious' claims while engaged in a private email exchange with her in which she vowed more than once to furnish me with incontrovertible proof of a Snow liaison. No such evidence was ever supplied to me.

In the circs, Snow's response was most generous given the nature of the career-threatening allegations. He could have sued the Mail on Sunday and easily won himself a six-figure settlement, plus costs. He could have sued Madame Arcati and won 10p plus costs (20p). Instead, just gentle slaps on the wrist.

Had Precious just dreamt up a tale of romps with an esteemed TV broadcaster - now married to a woman called (heh heh) Precious? But why? Or had she been stitched up in some way by the newspaper? A bit of both perhaps?

Answers to these intriguing questions are not to be found in her memoir, Precious. Pity! Imagine all those lucrative killer facts. It's not every day that a borderline nonentity, with towering conceit and some newspaper and magazine articles to her name, persuades a paying publisher (Bloomsbury) to bring out her life story - a 'true' one according to the front cover. What I can tell you is that it is most certainly some story. And one blessed with that old publishing passe-partout that English editors just can't get enough of - the redemptive accent modulator called Oxford Uni.

The gist of her chronicle is this: mother ('Mummy Elizabeth') fosters nappied ethnic Nigerian Precious out to a big-hearted, white working class, middle-aged woman called Nanny in a West Sussex backwater. Why's not immediately clear. Mummy Elizabeth is educated, chic, volubly articulate and full of her Nigerian royal heritage. She has cash even if the odd cheque bounces. From time to time she re-enters her daughter's life, schlepping her off on family treks, before returning her to Nanny and ages of heart-numbing absence.

On one occasion Precious - who is also called Anita and Neety - is flown out to Nigeria where she gags at a local soap made from goat. This is not what a girl raised upwind of South Downs dairy herds is ever going to get used to.

Fussed over by Mummy Elizabeth one minute, slapped the next for no good reason, supported by Nanny but sullenly aware that Uncle Tom's Cabin gave birth to the old girl's sentiment for black babies, Precious is also the target of white racists in her net-curtained hellhole. Cultural, ethnic, emotional and class struggles brew up a major case of near-delinquent turmoil and rebellion as she teeters into her teens.

Precious is written in a spare present tense moo-boo-hoo, a well-worn device to flag timeless lowing sob story salvaged by literary craft. The basic narrative rings true, but the conversations and many of the observations are more impressionistic than literal: she can recall the cheddar-coloured hair of a social worker - remarkably from around the age of one. Her rather monstrous birth mother sears off the page in brutal technicolour. But Nanny alternates too wildly between loving toothless troll and cunning Fagin who uses her foster daughter as spy: she is the least credible of this cast of characters, and I suspect a parody of the original.

And as for Precious herself? Unendearing is one word I'd use. Heart-frozen, nor is she interested in your sympathy, thank you. She is Precious Will.I.Am's: targeted excellence against the casually racist drongos, with a birth family prone to brilliance. (And Precious is sooooo at home on the masquerading internet!) She is her mother's daughter, who will repeat maternal folly and place her own child with foster parents.

On second thoughts, it's just as well Jon Snow makes no appearance. He'd upend the story and rob it of its value as snapshot of One Woman's Struggle For Identity in Ghastly Little Britain (excluding Oxford). One line in Precious sticks in my mind - 'On Christmas Eve, I begin seeing things that other people say are not real.' Her excuse then was malaria.

Precious: A True Story

James Franco - another Hollywood-be writer like Ethan Hawke?

2010-08-06T20:26:00.005+01:00

James Franco

A 'powerful new literary voice' is soon to be unleashed on us. So announces editor Walter Donohue (of Simon & Schuster) who has just bought UK and Commonwealth rights to Palo Alto: Stories, a debut fiction from the Spider-Man and James Dean actor James Franco.

The hype describes the book as a 'compelling portrait of lives on the rough fringes of youth.'

Neither Hollywood fame nor handsomeness can account entirely for this further hyphenation of his career (he loves to paint, too). In the 'past two years, he has been awarded degrees in English literature from UCLA and Creative Writing from Columbia and has been accepted in to Yale's English PhD programme,' reports The Bookseller. At the very least we can be confident of accomplished techniques and few dangling participles.

Ethan Hawke

No, I have not read Palo Alto - it's not due for release in the UK until next January (October 2010 in the US). So I can't judge. But still I inwardly groan at the news. Of course his fame and young sexy movie-going fan base have played a part in ~~marketing~~ editorial critiques. I would respect an editor for admitting as much.

It's all very redolent of Gattaca actor Ethan Hawke's literary poke as a Hollywood-be writer. Back in 1996 he debuted with his so-so novel The Hottest State and last published the deeply humdrum Ash Wednesday (2003). Sadly, his new powerful literary voice appears to have done a Julie Andrews since. Yet there's nothing publishers love more than established glamour with prosy airs, no matter how short-lived or frankly unreadable. Think of the photo-shoots, darling.

I can already see the James Franco GQ serialisation and exclusive interview with Piers Morgan.

I hope I'm wrong. I really do.

James Franco

Ex-Jailbirds Rock - the Damji and Attwood live books show

2010-08-05T20:20:00.000+01:00

Un Chant d'Amour!* Erotophiles of the Michael Howard/Jean Genet tendency - and its phwoary fetishistic taste for the retributive slop buckets and iron bars of jail - will doubtless be descending on Stoke Newington Library Gallery on August 23. For two former prison inmates will be reading from their respective books - 'London's most dangerous woman' and Queen of Facebook herself, Farah Damji; and Cheshire-born stockbroker Shaun Attwood, survivor of 'America's toughest jail', banged up for money laundering and drug offences

Bad girl Farah of course needs little introduction. The lately retired Madame Arcati reviewed her autobiography Try Me last year - a book that 'sucks one into its consistently amoral world and then spits one out at the end dry-mouthed,' as one newspaper put it.

Bad boy Shaun's Hard Time (just published) covers the 26 months he spent in the jail system with the highest rate of death in America – a jail run by the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Phoenix, Arizona. While incarcerated, he illicitly began one of the world's first prison blogs, Jon's Jail Journal, which attracted international attention when the Guardian published extracts. The site highlights his and others' experiences of the 'barbaric and subhuman conditions in which filth, squalor and disease are the norm.' I shall be running an interview with Shaun shortly.

The event:
Date: 23 August 2010
Time: 6:30pm
Venue: 184 Stoke Newington Church Street, London N16, 0JS

More details

*This link takes you to Genet's film of this name. It contains adult material, and may cause some to tut, fret and then masturbate. I neither condone nor condemn

Molly Parkin - Mollywood, Mail and a Nova retrospective

2010-08-03T16:34:00.002+01:00

My permanent fiancée, the artist/fashionista extraordinaire, Molly Parkin, designed this yellow cut out lettered cover for her sexciting memoirs Welcome to Mollywood - out October 21 from Beautiful Books.

This is the first sighting.

It looks edible and should be sold at confectionary counters by the kilo. Surely a new career in book design must be in the offing.

On course to be a Christmas bestseller, the Daily Mail has already bought serialisation rights - secured against the Sunday Times' bidding. Other amazing promotions are in planning.

And if you want to see her in the flesh, go to Vintage At Goodwood on August 13 for a retrospective catwalk fashion show based on her innovative Nova magazine years, in collaboration with designer Wayne Hemingway and Goodwood mastermind Lord March - who I understand is ferrying Moll about in his Rolls.

Tony Blair - with no paywall, read him for free

2010-08-03T10:09:00.000+01:00

I see Tony Blair has altered the title of his memoir. The Journey is now A Journey. This I take to be an act of PR humility. The use of the definite article might suggest a special messianic quality to his life; whereas the indefinite places him among us all, one of countless journeys, none more purposeful than his. This spinnish after-thought, the change in title, is characteristic Blair.

With no newspaper serialisation deal I know of, he has decided to run extracts from his life story on a new website from Sept 1, the day of publication. Review copies go out only that day. The book promises "unflinching, often wry detail" according to his site, and reveals "the relationships with colleagues such as Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson" - nothing much new then.

The retired Madame Arcati deconstructed his cover boy image on the book back in March, when it was still called The Journey. "Notice how the corners of his mouth level off against the suggestion of a promised smile from the parted lips," she wrote. "It's the look of someone no longer certain of his reception. He looks you straight in the eye but he's wary. Not to be confused with contrition."

'I'm armed with poisoned darts,' warns Kevin Spacey's ex-sis-in-law

2010-08-01T18:53:00.006+01:00

The artist Stephanie Mastini has kindly written in with news....

"According to my ex-husband Randy Fowler (Kevin Spacey's brother) he is self-publishing his book titled Symphony of Pain. His writer has decided to create this diversion from Kevin by not mentioning Randy's brother at all. They reveal that this is to ensure that Randy and his writer will not be sued. I was told that I will be in the book (no kidding)... and I am armed with poisoned darts if necessary.

"So, there I was, lying in bad, relaxing with my green tea, when I turned my head towards the television. It was Kevin's voice that caught me by surprise. A kayak.com commercial with Kevin reading the script??? Yes, it's true.

"Meanwhile, I am working on my book.... it is a slow process with my moving but I promise it will be a 'colorful' and provocative read. Now, back to my Southern life...

"steph xo"

Duchess of York stays loyal to co-writer over troubled novel

2010-08-01T15:53:00.001+01:00

The Mail on Sunday has run the story on the Duchess of York and her troubled historical novel Hartmoor (retitled Wingfield) - see my post below to catch up.

Originally, the paper phoned up Fergie's reps and those of her American co-writer Laura Van Wormer hoping to stand up a claim that the duchess had bolted with a $500,000 advance. She didn't bolt, and the advance has now been scaled down to £50k in the report. The true figure is probably closer to £64k, though the deal may well be worth $500k (if you include Van Wormer's advance and both women's potential earnings before royalties).

Laura - teased mercilessly by Madame Arcati in the past - has understandably not returned any of my messages. My source however assures me that though St Martin's Press had demanded a new co-writer, Van Wormer is not out of the picture, and may well work with Fergie on a rewrite in the next year or so. The Mail on Sunday is under the impression that she's working with a new author.

Fergie has stood loyally by Van Wormer when she could have easily acquiesced and made herself the fortune her many creditors would welcome.

The paper reports that the novel was part-written on a 2007 cruise paid for by Spanish-owned tiling firm Porcelanosa - in addition, Fergie received £250k to deliver five speeches when not working on the book. The costs of her entourage (including Laura) were also picked up by the firm.

Creative garrets are so last century.

Duchess of York did not run off with $500k book advance

2010-07-31T19:05:00.000+01:00

On my previous blog Madame Arcati, I wrote a number of times about the Duchess of York and the non-appearance of her historical novel Hartmoor that she was co-writing with the eye-catchingly named US author Laura Van Wormer.

I now understand that a UK newspaper is about to claim that Fergie took a $500,000 advance from the St Martin's publishers and basically did a runner, with little or nothing to show. The story is based on an account by a former employee of the hapless duchess.

The truth is, however, somewhat different. My information is that she received approximately $100,000 on signing a contract with St Martin's in 2005 or 2006. The contract may well have been worth half a mill, but this was contingent on delivery and publication.

Alas, creative differences arose between Fergie and her publishers. She envisaged an early 19th Century historical adventure set in and around the War of 1812 with America. The editorial shirts wanted in effect a drawing-room romance. As far as I know, the result is deadlock.

It's not an uncommon occurrence in publishing - that writer and editors collide on concept if not execution. What poor old Laura thinks about this is anyone's guess.

But one thing you can be most certain of - the duchess did not get $500k, she did not bolt - and I understand she wrote a considerable amount of the novel that's presently collecting dust.

Madame Arcati archive on the Duchess of York and her novel