Kicking and screaming into the 21st century

Five Leaves has just published its first three e-books, each at £2.99. All three titles were previously published in paperback. J. David Simons' novels are set within the Jewish community in Scotland and though connected can be happily read as stand alone novels. The Pretender is a novel about literary forgery. This is new territory for us, and we are still learning. More of our backlist titles will follow. Click on the links below to find out more about the books. In due course they will appear on every platform, but at the moment they are only on kindle.

http://tinyurl.com/liberationofceliakahn, http://tinyurl.com/creditdraper, http://tinyurl.com/belbinpretender

Poets

I'd previously posted about Nottingham Poetry Society at seventy and last night attended the book launch of their anthology, Seventy, which was concluded by the editor CJ Allen reading one of his own poems, Poets, published below, by kind permission of the author.

Poets
You don’t have to admire them, but you might as well;
they receive so little attention. They are causing a ruckus
at The Oblivion Tea-Rooms. They are steadfast
in their uncertainty. They believe they are following
an ancient set of instructions found in a cave.

The instructions are badly translated and partially eaten
by sheep. They have seen the darkness. Their desires
are works in progress. They have no sense of sin.
They bathe in metaphorical waterfalls.
They meet in private and read each other to sleep.

Like everyone else, they stand at the edge of the water
and watch for a sail. They make a noise like an animal
trapped in a sack. They make a noise like a library
in the very early morning. They look like lanterns
swung in an underground cavern. They sit on benches,

saying the light is quite like beaten gold.
They try but they can’t help being slightly annoying.
They are not terrorists or Apollos or aircraft carriers.
They are frequently humbled by the need to earn a living.
They will make a fuss over nothing. They join hands and dance

like ceiling-fans. They love rivers and hares and hatstands.
They climb ladders of grammar to find the perfect view.
Their exaggerations are indistinguishable
from the truth. They feast on thoughts and air
left over from the previous century.

They harvest thunder. They wander. They smell of tarpaulins
and adhesive corners. They know how to pull the wool.
They luxuriate in epigraphs. They miss the point.
They dream about wolf-whistling the Furies.
They have no idea what they’re doing. This is their secret.

CJ Allen, 2010
Poets was first published in Assent 64/3 and will appear in Clive Allen's next collection, At the Oblivion Tea-Rooms from Nine Arches Press in summer of 2012.

Doomed, we are all doomed...

It is always easy to tell a Scotsman from a ray of sunshine, but two interesting statistics came up in discussion at the, sadly not very well attended, States of Independence (West) event in Birmingham on Saturday. The first was talking with a medium sized independent. They told me that they'd had some problems, including big returns, with a well known chain bookseller but they are now getting orders - a fraction of what they used to get, but now have to give 59% discount on standard stock. 59%? Add in the costs of representation, distribution and author royalties and the publisher is left with about £2.20 on a £9.99 book. Of course not every book printed sells, so allowing for returns and unsolds, the publisher is probably getting £1.50 a book. Now this is OK if you are printing tens of thousands and have the books typeset in India and printed in China, and can sell foreign rights. But that was not the case with this publisher. Looks like their business model is cracked.

But they have done pretty well with e-books... Later a writer announced that it is perfectly easy to crack the encryption in e-books that prevents the equivalent of file sharing. He said that as an experiment, he downloaded the complete text of the Booker prize longlist in half an minute, for free. So... soon all e-books will be free. Can't make money by printing books, can't make money by making e-books. There's not a lot left. But still, it was not such a bad day, the number of book sales was slightly higher than the number of manuscripts offered to us.... I rather fear that when the last publisher in the UK closes, attending the closing sale of the last bookshop, those attending the party will be mostly made up of people waving an unpublished manuscript, quite oblivious to everything else. Happy Monday.

Radical bookshop seminar

The Chapter and Verse book festival in Liverpool at the Bluecoat is the venue for a free seminar about radical bookselling. Mandy Vere from the local News from Nowhere bookshop chairs a discussion about the current state of radical bookselling and its prospects, while I give a talk on the history of radical bookselling, delving into the past waves of libertarian, hippy, Communist and freethought shops.
The event is free, on October 13. Full details on:
http://www.thebluecoat.org.uk/events/view/events/1131

A long weekend on the left

In the last posting, about the big Cable Street day on Sunday, I mentioned some of the groups on the demonstration. I should also have mentioned the Clarion cyclists. That particular group had cycled hundreds of miles to attend - I think I heard one say he had cycled 741 miles. They had a point, public transport in London that weekend was awful, with the DLR not running and various other lines or part lines having the weekend off. The Clarion people had arrived on Saturday to mark the 75th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War. The International Brigades Memorial Trust and Philosophy Football were not to know it would be the hottest day of the year, which meant the evening gig in a packed hall was rather sweaty. The only person who looked cool was Victoria Hislop. I had my doubts about her, though I'd read and enjoyed her book The Return, but she won me over explaining her general and specific Daily Telegraph background and lifestyle and how things changed when she started writing the novel that the book became. She immersed herself in Spanish Civil War stories and what she found shocked her, being a woman whose family had happily holidayed in Spain under Franco. This resulted in a rather unhappy two years of deep immersion in the civil war and its aftermath as she wrote the book. The IBMT is of course an organisation of fairly longstanding and knowledgable left-wingers so I was impressed that she wanted to be on a panel at the event. She in turn was quite impressed to be called, for the first time in her life, "comrade" by one of the trade union speakers.

I was a little surprised by one of the other speakers (and I don't mean our Andy Croft) who wondered whether there would have been so much interest had it been the "Norwegian Civil War" because of the romantic nature of Spain and the Spanish people. Would 2,500 British people have travelled to fight in Norway? Yes, actually, had the situation and times been the same. Anti-fascism is not determined by the number of fjords a country has.

International Brigade... Cable Street... There are a number of good reports and photos on line. A good place to start is http://stevesilver.org.uk/blog/battle-of-cable-street-75-anniversary/. And then back home in time to pack for a Leicester Trades Council event celebrating the Dirty Thirty, with David Bell speaking to the Five Leaves' book of the same name and Alan Parry singing, including the song he has written about the group. Eight or so of the Dirty Thirty were present including Malcolm Pinnegar and Darren Moore who spoke, and Johnny Gamble, who got his own special cheer for being the only man in his pit to have gone on strike. Jane Bruton, a nurse, who used to be involved in the women's support group also spoke, reading out old minutes and letters from back in the day. This was the second evening in a row that ended with the Internationale - though in this case not the Billy Bragg version, but the full strength original version, standing, with clenched fists aloft.

Finally, today I attended a meeting of local UNISON members who were taking up the Six Book Challenge as part of their Union Learning. It became a Seven Book Challenge as they were presented with copies of the Five Leaves' Nottingham anthology Sunday Night and Monday Morning. A printer we had dealings with found 400 copies of the book in their warehouse which we had not accounted for and we have been steadily finding ways of giving them away to good homes. Why is reading so important to trade unionists? Apart from its intrinsic value, and the value of building a reading culture in the workplace, as the number of veterans of the Spanish Civil War and Cable Street - and even the 84/85 NUM pass on - we can find out what they thought at the time, what they believed in, find their stories, their tall tales, and find what they can teach us through books. Reading allows us to meet remarkable people doing remarkable things. UNISON is doing a great job working with the Reading Agency to promote reading in the workplace.

The Cable Street Day

The Cable Street day started early, bumping into the already tired looking march organiser Steve Silver on his own, mooching round the Cable Street Mural, waiting on the stage to turn up. He wandered off to show me where his grandparents used to live on Cable Street itself and to talk through some of the detailed history of the day, which he is still finding more about. Down at Wilton's Music Hall the stalls were starting to be set up, volunteers from the Cable Street Group were already busy. Pippa Hennessy and Blake Griffiths (together with me and Myra Woolfson making up the Five Leaves team) were there before me, having left Nottingham at 6.30am - they would not get back until 1.30am the next day. Don't mention the European Working Time Directive.
Among the first people to visit our stall was a man with a photo of his father treating one of the injured at Cable Street. Crikey - all the publications about the day recycle the same images. This was completely new to me. He was one of many people sharing family memories of the day, though the number of actual Cable Street veterans able to attend is now limited. At our later book launch I was pleased to see Max Levitas (who spoke at the rally), Beatty Orwell and our own Bill Fishman. There were many stalls including from our friends at Brick Lane Bookshop, Housmans and Freedom and we were well entertained by street theatre and music, including by strolling actors in period costumes rallying the crowds "to Aldgate".
The march - initiated late - passed by. It was led by a number of Bangladeshi groups and our friends from the Jewish Socialists' Group. The Indian Workers Association was strongly represented, as were local trade union branches, the Woodcraft Folk with a brilliant hand made Cable Street banner, and the Connelly Association contingent was a reminder that so many of those at Cable Street were London Irish dockers, who used their work tools to prize up paving slabs to make barricades in 1936. The stall was too busy to leave to see the young musicians of the very multicultural Grand Union Youth Orchestra though I'd sneaked in for their rehearsals.
The next event was the book launch of our five Cable Street books. Maggie Pinhorn of Alternative Arts, the main organiser of the day, had said it would be busy and perhaps 300 people attended. Jil Cove of the Cable Street Group spoke first, followed by Andy Croft who had written the introduction to the late Frank Griffin's October Day. He was followed by Frank's daughter, Josephine Clark, who read from the book. David Rosenberg, who is doing more events based on his book Battle for the East End than anyone thought possible, read next. Alan Gibbons was unable to attend because of family reasons, so I read a little from his young adult fiction book Street of Tall People. Fittingly, Roger Mills ended the launch by reading from his Everything Happens in Cable Street. By now our piles of books - over two stalls - was going down fast. This was the best day of bookselling we have had. Period (as Americans say).
Astonishingly, about 125 people came to our panel discussion on rebel writers from the 1930s, to hear Mary Joannou, Andy Croft and Ken Worpole have a friendly disagreement of the impact of the literature of the 1930s. There was no time for audience participation, though Stephen Watts managed to chip in. Stephen was one of those reading (from our AN Stencl book All My Young Years at the previous night's Cable Street party organised by Jewdas. Leon Rosselson had the next set - I was on stall duty but I got his latest four CD collection and agreed to put on a Rosselson gig sometime in Nottingham. We used to talk about publishing a Leon Rosselson songbook, but somehow that never happened. My fault, not Leon's.
At six we turned into pumpkins and the stall was packed away, or what remained of it. It was time to be civilians, and attend the evening gig. The excellent compere was Ivor Dembina followed by Michael Rosen (one of whose poems had its first book outing many years ago in a Five Leaves/Jewish Socialists' Group book). I can't list the whole cast of those appearing on the magical old music hall stage at Wilton's but the people who stood out for me were the comedian Shappi Khorsandi, the band The Men They Could Not Hang and, finally, on great form, in front of a packed and appreciative hall, Billy Bragg. All of the artists performed gratis, all events were free, and the bucket collection will be used to shore up Wilton's and to pay for all the publicity and other costs. Anything left over will be used to further honour those who fought to defend their area on that extraordinary day on 4th October 1936 under the slogan of No Pasaran! They shall not pass! Five Leaves was thrilled to be part of such an extraordinary day, marking the 75th anniversary of such an extraordinary event.
Map by John Wallett

Emanuel Litvinoff - 1915-2011

I was sorry to hear of the death of Emanuel Litvinoff, who has died peacefully at the age of 96. He was a novelist, an editor, a poet. I particularly admired his Journey Through a Small Planet, his memoir of the Jewish East End. Emanuel Litvinoff was one of twenty poets included in the Five Leaves' anthology Passionate Renewal: Jewish poetry in Britain since 1945. At the launch, a decade ago, by then an old man, Litvinoff described, to a new generation of readers, how in 1952 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts he read his poem "To TS Eliot". He had written it following buying Eliot's Penguin Selected Poems, finding that Eliot's anti-Semitic poems from the 1920s were still included; poems like "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a cigar". Litvinoff's poem is a blistering attack on Eliot:
"I am not one accepted in your parish. / Bleistein is my relative..." and, after describing the horrors of "walking with Cohen" at Treblinka he finishes one stanza "I thought what an angry poem / you would have made of it, given the pity."
Just as Litvinoff was about to begin, in walked TS Eliot with his entourage. Litvinoff said "I nearly died", but he read the poem "and it absolutely stunned everybody". There was uproar. To his credit - reported by another Jewish poet, Dannie Abse, sitting close, Eliot put his head down and muttered "It's a good poem; it's a very good poem."
One poem in the anthology "Earth and Eden", includes the lines "When time and memory intersect the sun / there is happiness..." I hope there will be a memorial gathering and reading from Emanuel Litvinoff's work.