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William ShawThis is the afterword to 41 Places: 41 Stories, the book that I published to go with 41 Places. Partly it's a kind of manifesto for what I'm trying to do with UnMadeUp.It was in Los Angeles, writing a book of true stories set in South Central, that I first understood the power of linking narrative and geography. West Coast hip hop was all about place. Rappers depicted their South Central with an extraordinary geographical precision. When someone like Eazy E rapped about, “ridin’ on Slauson down towards Crenshaw,” I could picture him there in his car, bottle of Old English 800 at his side, driving past the street vendors and Nation of Islam evangelists who populated the intersection with Crenshaw Boulevard. Geography made the stories they told real, making you realise that this wasn’t some entirely other, fantasised world of violence and transgression they were talking about. It fixed these stories in a shockingly concrete, physical space at the heart of one of America’s richest cities. 41 Places is all about finding new ways to tell true stories – new ways to write them and – in its original form at Brighton Festival 2007 on the streets of Brighton – new ways to read them. Here in the UK, non-fiction remains an under-rated genre, ghettoised as biography, history and occasionally reportage. Apart from the usually overlooked Samuel Johnson prize, all the major literary awards are dedicated to the art of fiction writing. It’s a shame because non-fiction has such power. For myself, there’s little that tops the frisson I get when reading an In Cold Blood or an Akenfield, thinking, “this actually happened.” More than that, too. Viewed up close, the reality of everyday life can have such a strange and moving texture: the drunken conversation at a kebab shop at two in the morning, the breaking of a boot heel on a date, the sudden mysterious disappearance of a back-pack… The mundane becomes the marvellous. This is a quality that, for me, has a particular relevance to Brighton. It was in Brighton that I first discovered the Mass Observation project – housed in the University of Sussex at Falmer. As an idea Mass Observation was quickly co-opted by sociology wonks and market researchers, but for a brief moment in the late 1930s it was also a madly heroic attempt to create a new type of imagist literature. Mass Observation was the creation of poet Charles Madge, surrealist painter/film-maker Humphrey Jennings and ethnographer Tom Harrisson, who took literally surrealist André Breton’s injunction that, “poetry must be created by everyone”. Harrisson, Madge and Jennings encouraged volunteer observers “to collect a mass of data without any selective principle.” What they achieved was an extraordinary collection of apparently random close-up visions of everyday life. One of the group’s earliest projects was Worktown, a study of workingclass life in Bolton. On one level Worktown allowed a few arty middleclass men to indulge in slumming it. But it was also a celebration of how extraordinary the everyday can be. At one bar in Bolton, an observer noted: “Large, tough guy with masses of hair held down by a hairnet … suddenly takes a small live tortoise out of his overcoat pocket and threatens woman with it.” Threatening a woman with a tortoise?  Before the group’s artistic ambitions started to fall away, to be taken over by a drier methodology, they also produced one great book, May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937 by Over Two Hundred Observers. May 12th was the day of the coronation of King George VI. It too was full of small haunting moments. Jennings noted, “In the Park behind the stands there is an area of black mud strewn with pieces of torn newspaper. A woman sits alone in the mud surrounded by the paper, her head in her hands.”Of course, their disingenuous claim to a “lack of selective principle” was equally an excuse for removing the focus of the day from the stuttering King, putting it instead on the rest of us, the new mass society. Jennings imagined he was kick-starting a new literary form; in fact May the Twelfth led nowhere, baffling and irritating critics. I’d like to believe that Jennings was just ahead of his time. Maybe he’d have thrived more in the age of the blog, a genre which is creating a new style of short-form, observational literature, (albeit – so far – a generally narcissistic one). The devil, as the Mass Observation experiment showed, is in the detail, the tiny miraculous facts of everyday life. The crucial peculiarity of individual existence. The tortoise in the pocket. The what, and – especially in the case of 41 Places – the where. 11:48 PM - 20/7/2007 - post comment
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A growing collection of narrative non-fiction miniatures  £8.99 incl. p&p (UK only) Outside the UK email UnMadeUp for details. Home Unmadeup Editions Un-MADE-Up story archive RSS 
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Recent Entries - Nik Perring - William Shaw - Emma J. Lannie - William Shaw - Nik Perring Public Service Announcement: Un-Made-Up becomes giddy with excitement at the prospect of publishing short, beautifully wrought pieces of non-fiction writing. Submissions may be edited but will only be published with the final approval of the author. For local colour - or color - local spellings are retained when appropriate. All copyright belongs to the authors, illustrators and photographers. COMING SOON • A story of teenage love and coffee • 41 Places • The one-legged man on the beach • |
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