Slamming

I don’t normally use this blog to flag events, (Do I look like Time Out?), but London’s Book Slam, hosted by the ebullient Mr Patrick Neate, in my ever so humble (wring hands) opinion, is probably the best literary night in the world (hyperbole? Me, never). I first pottered along to Cherry Jam some years ago when my fabulous friend Lana Citron was reading from her new novel, and stayed to be shock & awed by Patrick Neate’s poetry, some very good folk music and more readings.

Now it’s become so popular it’s moved from Cherry Jam to a nightclub, Neighbourhood, off Portobello, and has got all shiny and grown up with a swishy looking website, an oh-so-popular podcast and literary & musical names to make you swoon, (Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Adele, Nick Hornby, & Kate Nash amongst others.)

Next Thursday, the 28th February

This month they will be celebrating the advent of an eerily early spring in the company of cultural correspondents including (in Patrick Neate's own words): -
JULIAN GOUGH, author of the hilarious and plain brilliant 'Jude: Level 1' and winner of the National Short Story Prize, no less. He's flying in from Berlin.
ZUBZ, one of African hip hop's most innovative wordsmiths, jetting in from Jo'burg.
JAMES YUILL, a singer-songwriter at the forefront of new folk. He sings, he writes songs, and he rights wrongs. He'll taxi it cross town.
SALENA GODDEN,punk princess, poetess and high priestess of exorcising excess. She's also the author of the forthcoming 'Springfield Road' and she may be on rollerskates.
Plus, back from a bout at her majesty's leisure (he's a taster), DJ ILS.

Hemingway's Garden of Eden & James Scott Linville

To lunch in Highgate Village today for baskets of dim sum and pots of jasmine tea with the magnificent James Scott Linville, who flew in from New York last night. His latest project is the screenplay for the feature film of Hemingway's The Garden of Eden. Starring Mena Suvari, Jack Huston, Matthew Modine, Richard E Grant, Caterina Murino & Carmen Maura it'll be hitting the festival circuit this year, before going on general release.

I hear that the costumes are fantastic (the film is set in the 1920s), although there are no images available to press yet. Definitely one to watch out for later on this year. Linville also hosts a writer's blog at The Main Point where poems, essays, short stories and the like from himself, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Janine di Giovanni and more are posted regularly. Highly recommended - and not just because Mr Linville & I are friends.
Photos:
The car used in Garden of Eden
William Styron, The Paris Review co-founder George Plimpton, and James Scott Linville celebrating the magazine's anniversary

The Brodsky Touch

I highly recommend Lana Citron's latest novel The Brodsky Touch, which comes out on 17 July, and features her agent provocateur Issy Brodsky.

For a taste of Ms. Issy Brodsky, click on the following link to hear her read the first chapter of The Brodsky Touch. Or, if the Issy Brodsky Guide to Infidelity is more your cup of tea, check out the Bloomsbury website.

Coincidences & connections

What a week. Apart from sweltering in the heat (although I have been told countless times that I am experiencing a delightful New York spring, and that when summer comes then I’ll reminisce fondly about the mild weather back in May), I have been glued to my keyboard during the day, and managing to drink my bodyweight in vodka in the evenings.

I finished David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, a first novel so brilliant I despair of ever writing anything so interesting, elegiac, evocative and just so damn good. It deals with coincidences and passing connections across the world. It was an apt book to read here: my life in New York consists of a chain of my own (rather more banal) coincidences & connections.

On Thursday JSL asked me to join him & Elizabeth Wurtzel for supper at Fish, in the West Village. Elizabeth is now studying for a JD at Yale School of Law and is in New York for the summer as an associate at an NY law firm. She’s both fiercely intelligent and very attractive. By happenstance alone, sitting at the next table were three of my NY English friends, (including T, a model so gorgeous that men’s jaws drop when she walks by).

Other connections this week: P, the sexy boy I met at A&A’s wedding emailed to say that he had stumbled across this blog through Google; another reminder that any person one mentions on a blog will eventually read your comments. Good thing I was (rightly) very complimentary about him. Elizabeth wrote this cogent & timely piece in the Wall Street Journal on the implications of speaking one's mind about other people's characters on-line.

On Saturday I had a blind date with M, a photographer whom I met on line. We discovered that not only does he shoot for the magazine for which I was an editor for five years, but that I had actually produced several of his US based stories back in 2000.

We met for coffee for a couple of hours at The Bean. It’s the first date I've been on where I was equally dating the datee’s dog, but I think I passed muster with the dog. I had got off to a bad start in an email complaining about minute, over-pampered dogs in Manhattan, expecting that one day I would accidentally impale one on a stiletto whilst marching down Madison. He then mentioned his Chihuahua. He's not my type, but he’s great company, and we hatched a plan for a story driving a Bentley on an iconic drive in the US (Bentley have offered me any of their cars to drive/write about if I have a suitable travel story in the US).

Literary lions

It’s not usual at a drinks party to spot a Nobel Laureate out the corner of your eye. Orhan Pamuk, currently in exile after a series of death threats following his recent acquittal in the Turkish courts for “insulting Turkishness” is a rare bird to spot. Kind of like bagging the Yves Saint Laurent of literature.

When JSL called to persuade me to a small do up the road on E 18th, I hadn’t quite grasped that it was the literati-filled New York launch of William Dalrymple's lauded book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857, which came out here last week, following its English launch last year. Hosted by Suketu Mehta,(who wrote Maximum City), at his beautiful townhouse, Booker-winner Kirin Desai was there too.

Although I spent much of my twenties on a travel magazine for which Dalrymple wrote, I didn’t get around to reading any of his books until I was struck down with shigella dysentery in India whilst I was on assignment a couple of years ago. I spent a miserable week being poked and prodded in UCH’s tropical diseases ward and, desperate to read about the country, even if I was too ill to travel around it, chewed up his entire works with increasing glee. City of Djinns, his account of a year spent in New Delhi as an foreign correspondent sticks most in my mind. It's an eminently readable, eloquent and witty study of an ex-pat's life in that cacophonous and bewildering city, intertwining his domestic travails with a meticulous, almost wistful, account of the history of Delhi.

He’s an award winning bestseller in England now, and deserves to have an equal success in America. His readability, certainly not a given with historical works, and his sound analysis are reason enough for his works to transcend the British fascination with the Raj, and gain him a global readership.

I spent most of the evening talking with JSL, of course, a beautiful Colombian member of a think tank dealing with Latin American politics & culture, an al Qaeda expert from NYU's Center on Law & Security, a fascinating Turkish doctor & an NY Times book reviewer. Gloriously fashion-free, if a little heavy going at times.

The earlier part of Saturday can be summed up as follows:
Union Square Greenmarket. Not a patch on Borough, and a somewhat disappointing dearth of snacks for JD & me, hungry as usual.
Purchasing the new Kaiser Chiefs' album. Excellent. Go buy it.
Burgers at Paul’s in the East Village. Excellent. Go eat there.
East 11th St flea market. Excellent. Go pick up cheap frocks there.
Buying cold remedies at Rite Aid. Excellent range of self-medication. Go there if ill.

I wore:
Evening: vintage lucite necklace, black vintage A line cocktail mini dress. Black patent ballerines. Random black leather shoulder bag from Century 21.
Morning: Brown leather flat riding boots. Blue New Look T shirt. Denim skirt. beige cashmere wide scarf, CK aviators (press gift from the presentation on Thursday)