Comedians in novels

I've talked to a few amateur stand-up comedians, including those who've attended comedy workshops. I've watched many stand-up shows (including some open-mic ones) and can see how it's a fertile source of literary material. The author's problem is how to cope with the "tears of a clown" cliche.

Joseph O'Connor's short story "The Wexford Girl" has an obsessive joker, and I've read other short stories about sad stand-up acts. Novel-length attempts are rarer, not least because so many jokes are needed. I've read/heard -

• "Good Material" by Dolly Alderton - Andy (35, a comedian who does a lot of other bit-jobs) has been gently dumped. The PoV is shared by him and his ex. It's like a Nick Hornby novel.
• "A horse walks into a bar" by David Grossman (Jonathan Cape, 2016) - Dovaleh, 57, is doing his act. We're given it nearly verbatim - his life-story rather than jokes, though he has jokes ready when he needs them. The audience trickle away. In the end it's only him and a judge he'd invited along. They'd been schoolfriends, etc., though they've not met for decades. The judge and comedian take turns with the PoV.

In both we learn tricks of the stand-up trade. Confession and self-humilation on stage can be like an author's performance in a novel where life and art mingle - how much of it is therapy?

Margate and Canterbury

This charity bookshop with stained glass in Margate used to be a bank - I took the photo from its first floor. "The Margate Bookshop" nearby has an excellent range of poetry books. There are some interesting arty shops and markets in the "Old Town"

It was only when I arrived in Margate that I found out that the Turner Contemporary Gallery's there. This sculpture's dress is in the form of cowrie shells. One of Gormley's statues is nearly visible through the window. It was half-submerged way out at sea when I was there. An old swimmer had just entered the water by it.

Canterbury cashes in on Canterbury Tales (one is set only a mile or so from my house in Cambridge). It's an interesting city to walk around, especially if you like eating and drinking. If you prefer history, there's still more than enough to see. Were I a student again I'd be tempted to go there.

Canterbury too has decent bookshops, including an Oxfam bookshop and the inevitable Chaucer bookshop.

The main point of my trip was to attend "The Sampler" (part of the Canterbury Festival) with Barry Fentiman Hall, Jessica Taggart Rose, Maggie Harris, Katy Evans-Bush, Rosie Johnston, Connor Sansby, Poppy Cockburn and Mat Riches. There were some good poems (my favourite was about the Gormley statue) but I didn't stay to the end because the event looked like it would last 50% longer than I expected. The open-mic readers weren't the only ones with time trouble. Not for the first time, the ones whose introductions went on longest were the ones whose poems I wanted to fast-forward through. In a competition where poems can't be longer than 40 lines, winning poems can be a lot shorter than the maximum allowed. I think the same might apply at open-mics.

Rewriting the classics

I've seen Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead". I've read Joyce's "Ulysses". I've not seen Disney's "The Lion King". These works all allude to earlier texts - some more explicitly than others. For the reader/viewer some of these works are enriched by knowledge of the original but can stand alone, whereas others almost require pre-knowledge of the original.

In the last few months I've listened to two fairly recent novels that rewrite a classic from a different Point-of-View, sometimes injecting anachronistic concepts -

• "James" by Percival Everett - I've not read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", which remains (in revised ways) controversial. James (Jim) is Huck's slave friend.
• "Julia" by Sandra Newman - this uses much (maybe all?) of Julia's dialogue from "1984". Julia is Winston Smith's girlfriend. By presenting her words in a new, more feminist context, they take on new meanings. This idea (of not changing the original words or action, but letting them take on new interpretations) is used to a greater or lesser extent by other works of this type.

I enjoyed both novels. Knowing the original means that there are spoilers, though the treatments continue to offer surprises. The authors needed to decide how much the original work would be used as a constraint - how closely their book needed to track the events of the original. I suspect that they didn't want to contradict anything in the original - it's better to leave an event out entirely rather than bend it to fit the new plot. The picaresque nature of Twain's work eases Everett's task in this respect. Julia isn't so central a character as Jim, so Newman had more space to work in - more back-story to add. Reviews of "Julia" often comment on the ending, which goes beyond the time-frame of the main body of "1984".

Some of the satisfaction of reading such novels derives from recognising the borrowings from the originals. My memory of the originals is hazy at best. I found myself at times wondering whether details were in these books because they had to be (being in the originals) or whether they were significant additions by the author. Did the original Julia work in Fiction section of the Ministry of Truth or is this a meta-fiction twist? Did Jim really tell Huck that Huck was his son?

I've recently listened to "The Family Chao" by Lan Samantha Chang. It parallels "The Brothers Karamazov" though I only realised that when I read the reviews afterwards. I think it works fine as a stand-alone book. It deals with son/father conflicts in a family of Orientals in the States. I've not read "The Brothers Karamazov", but reading the Wikipedia summary of it I can see how close the parallel is. It's clever - Chang had to find analogues for many features, in the way that Joyce did.

Richmond, London

It's where Alexander Pope lived for a while, having made money from doing translations. A memorial to him includes some quotes from his works including "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind".

An old prefabricated urinal is hidden away there. Having recently been to Paris I can say that the Richmond one compares well with the competition, though Paris also has urinals for females.

I visited Eel Pie Island too, where a now defunct music venue hosted Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, etc.

Liverpool: summer milestones

Over summer,

• my litrefs reviews site got its millionth hit
• my litrefs articles site got its half-millionth hit

I've retired too. This may explain why I've already written more prose this year than in any previous year: 32 Flashes and 6 stories so far. I've only written 3 poems though. None of the 2025 stuff has been published yet.

In the last month I've visited Paris, Nottingham, Chester and Liverpool. In my travels my biggest surprise was when I visited the Liverpool street where I used to live - much smarter than how I recall it. It's cobbled with a stylish bar at the end, and closer than I thought to the landmarks I recall - the 2 cathedrals, the Unity Theatre, the Everyman Theatre and the Casa.

I'm surprised that the Casa still exists. In my day it had soggy carpets, cheap booze and dubious curries. We went there after the pubs closed. It didn't draw attention to itself. It looks smarter nowadays but still seems rather out of place. Without the barrels and the letters over the door it might be just another family house. The old Casa (short for Casablanca) "nightclub" is now the Community Advice Service Association (CASA) set up by sacked Liverpool dock-workers, with a bar and performance area.

While I lived in Liverpool I went to a Writers club. I wrote some SF and got a poem on BBC Radio Merseyside, but I was too busy doing a Masters to progress much with my writing. Now time isn't an issue.

Paris

While in Paris last weekend (I stayed near the 13th's Chinatown) I visited some less central places and galleries that I'd not known about - MAC VAL, Belleville, Parc de la Villette - and some of the literary ones I knew of but hadn't been to before. Shakespeare & Co bags are seen around Paris. There was a queue outside the bookshop that I didn't join.

I wasn't tempted to try "au lapin agile" either. Opposite it is a vineyard, the vines draped with fine meshing.

AI vs AI

When e-mail replaced paper mail as the way to submit, the volume of submissions soared. One way the magazines coped was to use facilities like Submittable to deal with masses of submissions, passing the cost onto the submitting authors.

Writers started automating their simultaneous submissions. They found AI useful for content enhancement too. Most magazines said they didn't want AI work - though if authors do use AI, magazine editors won't be able to find out. A few magazines asked that authors should say if their work used AI.

Magazine editors are now using AI to fight back. Becky Tuch, who runs the ever-interesting litmagnews site on substack, mentions Dapple, a new rival to Submittable, Duosoma, Oleada, Moksha, Fillout, etc. Dapple lets editors add tags like “serial submitter” to authors (so watch out!). More interestingly, editors can outsource tasks to Ash, an AI assistant. It can generate forms. Maybe it could send out automated rejections for pieces that exceed the wordcount or use the wrong font, or have a low-quality list of previous publications. The Dapple site has videos to show you what might be possible.

Where will all this end? I suppose eventually AIs will submit material to AIs. But paper hasn't completely died out. I know of at least one magazine that still insists on printed submissions through the post.