Then Lopate asked a couple questions solicited on index cards from the audience; the first question, asking the writers to describe their writing methods, got only boos from the audience because of its banality, and I was delighted to see Richard Ford yell out “Next question!” Before they moved on, though, Eco, looking inordinately pleased with himself, explained his writing method — he starts on the left side of the page and works his way over to the right. This got a laugh.

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Alexis Rowell writes about Sustainable Consumption and Production in Europe:
Food is something that affects us all. We all have to eat. But very few people know the extent to which oil underpins our food system, how much carbon is used in the production of food, how much water is used, and the impact the food system therefore has on climate change.
The current all-time highs in oil prices – $117 a barrel in April 2008 – is sending convulsive shudders down the food chain . . .

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The Right Brain vs. Left Brain Test.
Do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise? I’ll tell you what I see . . . later . . .

Funnily enough it was Saviano, the only writer dealing explicitly with non-fiction, who reminded us that the very notion of the hero or villain depend on a number of things, not the least of which, who is telling the story. Growing up in Naples it was the Mafia that were the heroes, the men who by their glamour, wealth and bravado embodied the heroic ideal. Or at least the ideal man to look up to. It was bound to appear in a panel dominated by men, the confession that heroism and masculinity seemed too tightly intertwined, that the hero himself is the very masculine archetype. Saviano was quick to support and dispel this theory at once, pointing out how these very mafia types drew for exaggerated fictional types on which to model themselves—a mafia man who built his house in an exact replica of Tony Montana’s in Scarface, or made men, practicing lines from The Godfather; uncanny cases of real people drawing from fiction to appear more real.

One of Goldman’s riffs began when the moderator, Matt Weiland, made a comment about the experience of someone who lives in a city, a “city liver,” then cocked his head, realizing that sounded odd.
“Guatemala City is hard drinking, so city liver is there,” said Goldman. “It’s a lawless city,” he went on. Seventy percent of the cocaine that reaches the US is transshipped there. Squatter slums have grown on the horrible muddy inclines around the city: a pulsing, perverted life. There’s space for enormous creativity, effervescence, “criminal busyness.” Crib houses are packed with stolen Indian babies from the highlands, being fattened up for the US adoption trade. Chop shops are dug into the ravines, Goldman said, and cars stolen in New York City may end up there. The city is extremely murderous. More people were killed there in 2006 than in Afghanistan. The gangs are medieval in their arcane structure and fervor. The city is pulsing with a very, very dark life.
“Frank is working for the tourist board of Guatemala,” Weiland said dryly.

Writers criticise Tesco for ‘chilling’ Thai libel actions
· Leading authors sign letter to retailer’s chief executive
· Supermarket chain urged to uphold human rights

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Jacob Russell looks at beginnings:

I wanted to begin with opening paragraphs rather than sentences, precisely to get past the “hook” –the workshop clincher that’s become a cliché of the genre. Though short fiction typically opens in medias res, a story that dispensed altogether with opening exposition would likely be received as “experimental,” or in some way, unconventional. The opening exposition, we all know, may establish setting, tone, introduce characters, present necessary facts; those are the obvious functions, but some of these may not come till later in the narrative, and none of them alone quite hit on what may be the defining features, those that truly begin the story–which initiate the process and stamp everything that follows with its particular identity, such that, were the writer to violate what has been laid out in that beginning, she would have to change it–or lose the story in a narrative cul-de-sac.

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An interesting report from the Literary Saloon at Metaxu Cafe, on the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. An impressive line-up moderated by PW-editor Sara Nelson, and including publishers Edwin Frank (New York Review Books), Michael Krüger (German Hanser Verlag), Halfdan W. Freihow (Norwegian Font Forlag), and Morgan Entrekin (Grove/Atlantic) made for a good trans-Atlantic mix and showed up the gaps in different cultural approaches to translation and publishing.

The complete list of participants, includes Peter Carey, Umberto Eco, Ian McEwan, Jo Nesbø, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Annie Proulx, Bernhard Schlink, Mario Vargas Llosa and Salman Rushdie.

When asked to comment on China’s curbs on the freedom of expression, from banning books to jailing writers, Enright spoke broadly of the prevailing power of literature in overcoming the debilitating effects of censorship on society.

“There was no way that when I was growing up that the tide of Irish writing was going to be stopped by something even as powerful as the Catholic Church,” she said, citing the uncompromising writing of Edna O’Brien and John McGahern.

“By conviction I’m against censorship in general and also in a pragmatic kind of way I think it doesn’t work,” she added.

The eyes of the world are on China ahead of the Olympic Games and a range of issues are of concern. Individuals with contrary opinions to the Chinese state are jailed, internet and media censorship is rife, and the ruthless suppression of Tibet continues.

The Icelandic singer Bjork shouted “Tibet! Tibet!” during a recent Shanghai concert, and the Chinese government immediately announced tighter controls over foreign singers and other performers. Film director Steven Spielberg resigned as artistic adviser to the Olympics due to Beijing’s policy toward Sudan’s Darfur.

The international writers’ association, PEN, is campaigning to free nearly 40 jailed Chinese writers before the Olympics, some of whom had been sentenced without trial.

But it seems that most western governments are so enamoured by the possibilities of the massive Chinese market, that their protests against the next super-power’s abuses of human rights are weak and ineffective.

The festival runs from the 1st to the 15th March. Although not on the scale of Cheltenham or Edinburgh, there is a varied programme on offer, mainly involving local writers and readers, of whom there are many. Among writers brought in to the festival from the wider world, there will be Tracy Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring), the poet Carol Ann Duffy (The World’s Wife), Joolz Denby, GP Taylor, and Joanne Harris (Chocolat).

Jonathan Heawood, the director of English PEN, will speak about the history and future of PEN International. He will concentrate on the dangerous side of writing, including the 2006 murder of Ann Politkovskaya, the author of books on Putin’s Russia and the war in Chechnya, and the threats to Salman Rushdie’s life in 1988. PEN’s members are writers and literary professionals who aim to promote literature and defend the freedom to write. This event will be in the Marriott Room at York Central Library on the 10th March at 7.30pm.

The law requires that copies of all published material – books, magazines – be presented for scrutiny. The censorship office’s 11 guidelines for what cannot be printed still include “anything that might be harmful to national solidarity and unity … any incorrect ideas which do not accord with the times … [and] any descriptions which, though factually correct, are unsuitable because of the time or the circumstance of their writing”. Newspapers were nationalised in 1964. Ever since, official news has had only a glancing relationship to reality, while censorship has had a great impact on the nature and ambition of Burmese letters. Writers are never “able to write freely about what they feel and think”, says Anna Allott, a senior research associate in Burmese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. It’s “a millstone round their necks”.