The Burgess Project

About The Burgess Project – a picture book

2007-05-09T09:54:00.002+01:00

In April 2005, Chris Gribble invited us to experiment with new technologies, new writing and new audiences during an innovative strand of the inaugural Manchester Literature Festival, due to launch in October 2006. The "Freeplay" strand is where Literature, Technology & Media come together, and The Burgess Project was all of those things, and more. We accepted the commission with glee.

Our challenge to modern North West writing talent Cath Staincliffe, David Bateman, Dike Omeje, Jean Sprackland & David Gaffney: come on a coach trip around Burgess' Manchester, lead by most recent biographer Andrew Biswell. Visit the International Anthony Burgess Foundation to discover more about the Man, his writing and his music. Then spend a day with us to devise the show, and then another fortnight polishing your own live literature piece.

As this was a promenade performance across various city centre venues, there needed to be a connection, a link to move the audience between venues. The end of each Act is pinpointed by Burgess chasing our narrator "Enderby" in an attempt to cancel the show. Although he doesn't know why he's in trouble, Enderby runs away at every attempt of contact.

Details were littered everywhere throughout the performance from a busker on a street corner to 'Wanted' posters of known criminals. Some audiences left knowing the busker was part of the show all along, some left with the knees-up tune as their ringtone, some held photographs from Hulme past and present, and some retold the text message narrative of a crime victim. The intention was that everyone wouldn't get everything, that experiences would be shared, perhaps on the scene with a stranger or later in the pub with a friend.

Because the project was about the process as much as the performances, we documented the whole thing in a feature-length DVD. We thank our commissioner Manchester Literature Festival (Chris Gribble & Cathy Bolton), funder Arts Council England, North West, the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and Andrew Biswell.

The Burgess Project is dedicated to Dike Omeje who died in January 2007.

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1. Co-narrator "Rosie" waits for the 25-30 pre-booked audience to set up their mobile phones for the events ahead. Act One: Jean Sprackland's sermon from the pulpit in St Ann's Church, "Lecture on Saint Anthony, Patron Saint Of Lost Things". Outside, a busker is playing the song our unsuspecting audiences will later be singing along to.

2. The audience follow narrators "Enderby" & "Rosie" as they escape on-screen nemesis, 'Burgess', to Act Two: Dike Omeje's "The Poetry in Motionless Tour" on a heritage bus. During the reading, audience were sent photographs of the parts of Manchester where both Anthony & Dike both lived, 60 years apart, by bluetooth.

3. An homage to Burgess' piano-playing father, the crew gather astonished shoppers as the audience promenades from Act Two to Act Three. The busker stands on a different corner, but plays the same song – do we recognise him?

4. "Enderby" & "Rosie" watch on as David Bateman delivers Act Three: "The Miraculous Trinity Of Anthony Burgess’s Virginities". A cage of TV monitors shows an eclectic array of live & historical footage using VJ software, 'Resolume'. Stewards in branded t-shirts offer handouts to bemused passers-by. Many of them join us.

5. Outside Harvey Nichols, the audience explores a two-way text messaging narrative while watching a Forensic Team in Act Four: "Crime Scene" by Cath Staincliffe. Before we arrive the the forensics have already gathered a huge random audience. We now number around 50-60.

6. Passing the busker in Cathedral Gardens, "Enderby" again escapes the call of Burgess, leading our audience into a shop in The Triangle, where David Gaffney, and his on-screen alter-ego, Gifford, are waiting to deliver Act Five: "Guided by Voices".

7. Act Six is the finale – or is it? The now huge Exchange Square audience sing along with the now-familiar Busker in a traditional pub-style knees-up: "Nothing so sweet as a story". Tshirted stewards hand out the lyrics and the crew point along to lyric boards.

8. And they thought it was all over: "Burgess" finally wins, in this BBC Screen intervention. Burgess finally finding "Enderby" and cancelling the show in favour of a pop video based on a song mentioned in A Clockwork Orange, 1962. In our version, the lyrics were first published by Bateman in 1986, with music added by Steve Cooke in 1999.

9. Having scooped so many of the public, we needed to tell them what had happened... Thanks Manchester, you've been great.

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The Credits
the-phone-book Limited are Ben Jones (in this project, Performance Director) and Fee Plumley (Executive Producer).

Performers
Writer, 'The Poetry in Motionless Tour': Dike Omeje
Writer, 'Guided by Voices': David Gaffney
Writer, ‘The Miraculous Trinity Of Anthony Burgess’s Virginities’ and lyric of ‘You Blister My Paint’: David Bateman
Writer, sms crime scene and lyrics for 'Nothing so sweet as a story': Cath Staincliffe
Writer, 'Lecture on Saint Anthony, Patron Saint Of Lost Things': Jean Sprackland
Rosie: Maria Gabriella Ruban
Enderby and co-writer of 'Nothing so sweet as a story' soundtrack: Chris Sievey
Anthony Burgess: Stewart D Laing
Busker and on-street flyerer: Stuart Hudson
Forensic Investigators: Simon Bates & Nina Gilhooley

The Production Team
Tech/Stage Manager: Julian Tait
Producer: Eliza Tyrrell
Production Assistant: Emma Persand Carter
DVD Producer: Jamie Kennerley
DVD Assistant: Lucy Donaldson
Animator: Charlie Hopkins
Musical Director and Co-writer of 'Nothing so sweet as a story' soundtrack: Paul Draper
Music and singing on ‘You Blister My Paint’: Steve Cooke
Mobile Content Producer: Dave Marsden
Mobile Content Assistants: Emma Persand Carter & Si Richardson
VJ / Vision Mixer: Roger Robinson
Vision Technician: Jim Green
Van Driver: John Daly
Stage Crew: Alec Cook, Arslan Tontor, Roman Panowek, Geoff Lee
Head Steward: James Garrett
Stewards: Kate Feld, Kate Taylor, Emma Foster, James McGrath, Aowyn Sanderson
Event Security: Paul Connor
Insurance and equipment: Little Star Productions
Projectors: Redeye
PA equipment: STS Touring
PR: Catharine Braithwaite & Shelagh Bourke, Lethal Communications
Biographer: Andrew Biswell
The Burgess Project Logo: Jenny Lomax, Firebaud
Furniture: East Manchester Community Forum

Venues
St Ann's Church (Elaine Lindsay, Paul Campion, Roger Hill, Ronald Frost); Manchester Transport Museum (Chris Lonergan); Triangle (Michelle Atack); BBC Big Screen (Marie Sleigh & William Jenkyns); Whitworth Museum (Penny Howarth).

Officials
Manchester Literature Festival (Cathy Bolton & Chris Gribble); Arts Council England, North West (Literature – Avril Heffernan & Will Carr); The International Anthony Burgess Foundation (Alan Roughley, Nuria Belastegui & their associates); Manchester City Council Events Unit (Mike Parrott, Toby Rathbone, Kathryn Woolstencroft & all); MCC Parking (Dave Wilkinson); Titchy Coffee Company (Claire); Lammarrs (Joel & Ian).

Diké Omeje

2007-01-18T11:29:00.000+01:00

We are very sad to report that the poet Diké Omeje died of cancer at the weekend. Diké was a dynamic and inspirational force on the performance poetry scene in Manchester and beyond. He captivated audiences across the country with his thoughtful words and captivating presence. Diké was a firm favourite in many of the Manchester Poetry Festival programmes and brought his unique brand of wit and poetic dexterity to the first Manchester Literature Festival through his involvement in The Burgess Project and the Mancunian Meander. He had two collections of poems published Crafting the Practice (Crocus Books) and the Mindfield (Cheers Ta), and was published in many anthologies including Poetry Slam (Manchester Poetry Festival).

Diké was highly regarded and well loved amongst his contemporaries. He was always encouraging new poets and was a keen supporter of the many performance nights that have flourished in the city in recent years. We are immensely grateful that he dedicated so much of his 34 years to poetry. He was, in short, an impossible act to follow.

Cathy Bolton & Fee Plumley (Manchester Literature Festival) & The Burgess Project Team

For more information on Diké or to post your own condolences please visit myspace.com/artycoolate

Commonword are raising a memorial contribution towards Dike’s funeral expenses. If you are able to make a donation please let them know by email how much you are able to commit and send a cheque made payable to Commonword Ltd to: Commonword 6 Mount Street, Manchester M2 5NS. They will pass on all money received to Dike’s family.

Photograph: Diké Omeje during The Burgess Project development weekend. Credit: Jamie Kennerley, September 2006.

You Blister My Paint

2006-10-31T00:03:00.000+01:00

I thought that love was like a gentle rain
Like the sun up above shining down on the grain
But your kind of love must be a different strain
I can tell you how soft & gentle you ain’t
– You blister my paint

You drive me too hard then you blame the machine
You take me apart just because you feel mean
I could do with some armoured plate in between
I can tell you how kind & cool you ain’t
– You blister my paint

You know that I like you, you know that I care
I think you’re delightful, & quite debonair
But can you imagine the way that I feel
When my surface is cracking & starting to peel
& I’ve got some bad news that I think you should know
– You blister my paint, & it’s starting to show

You’ve got a blowtorch sun, you’ve got an acid rain
I can feel my skin melting, away down the drain
I want to go underground & not come up again
Let me tell you how loving & tender you ain’t
– You blister my paint
– You blister my paint

From David Bateman Curse Of The Killer Hedge
(1996, Iron Press)

Each promenade performance by The Burgess Project has concluded with a video of the song, You Blister My Paint, played on Exchange Square’s big screen system and complete with a bopping drunken Anthony Burgess played by Stewart D Laing.

The title of the song is taken from A Clockwork Orange (1962). It first appears in chapter 1 of the novel, where narrator Alex mentions that the song on the stereo in the Korova Milkbar is “Berti Laski rasping a real starry oldie called ‘You Blister My Paint’.”

The lyric dates from 1986, when I was writing a stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange for the Hit & Run Theatre Company, to be staged at the Unity Theatre in Liverpool in April 1987. It was one of two versions of the lyric I wrote then; and though we never actually set either of them to music for that production, we kept the general idea when we plumped instead for Robert Fripp’s fraught and frantic rock ’n’ roll song, You Burn Me Up, I’m A Cigarette.

Later in 1987, Anthony Burgess brought out his own lyric of the same title, in the first edition of A Clockwork Orange: a play with music. In this version, the song turns up slightly later in the story. When Alex and his droogs return to the Korova, “fagged and shagged” after an evening’s ultra-violence, we are told:

A song comes out of the loudspeaker. An emasculated voice, that of Johnny Zhivago, warbles:

You blister my paint,
Make me feel faint.
It’s slaughter.
You turn my knees to water.
Water you ain’t.

When I shove my saint
Into your quaint
Cathedral,
I get all tetrahedral,
Got no restraint.

Here, Burgess uses the song simply as a sample of pop “cal”, intended to compare unfavourably with the snippet of “real music” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony which is sung immediately afterwards.

My own lyric of You Blister My Paint was published by Iron Press in 1996, in my first full-length collection of poetry, Curse Of The Killer Hedge. Then, in (I think) late 1999, I received a package forwarded to me by Pete Mortimer of Iron Press. It contained a cassette of two recordings of You Blister My Paint set to music by Steve Cooke and performed by his group of that time: one live version, and one funkier, tighter studio version. It is this studio version that --seven years later-- has been used for the video finale of The Burgess Project’s city centre performances. Paul Draper was able to digitally sharpen up the sound of the recording at his Dead Frog Studio; and it’s a pleasant surprise that several people have commented on the song’s Manchester feel. After all, when Burgess recorded passages from A Clockwork Orange in 1973, he deliberately reverted to his original Manchester accent that he had dropped in the 1930s.

The video of our dancing Anthony Burgess was shot by Jamie Kennerley and edited by Ben Jones, who intercut the dance sequence with snippets of video used earlier in the show, recapitulating the show’s various themes and thus turning the song into an effective final movement of the show as a whole. I still can’t get over the sight of our Anthony Burgess waving his tie around his head as he drunkenly cavorts around his apartment. Get down in that groove, Funky Tony B!

Though I did meet Steve Cooke while I was visiting Newcastle in 2000, we’ve since lost touch, and my attempts to find him have so far failed miserably, so if anyone knows of his whereabouts, I’d be very grateful if they could ask him to get in touch with The Burgess Project through the team@the-phone-book.ltd.uk e-address. Cheers.

2006-10-21T12:41:00.000+01:00

When we first devised this project last year we decided we would close the performances by sending out the credits by sms. And then we realised no amount of stacked messages could possibly include everybody!

the-phone-book Limited are Ben Jones (in this project, Performance Director) and Fee Plumley (Executive Producer). This project would not have been possible without the following team of people:

The Production Team
Tech/Stage Manager: Julian Tait
Producer: Eliza Tyrrell
Production Assistant: Emma Persand Carter
DVD Producer: Jamie Kennerley
DVD Assistant: Lucy Donaldson
Animator: Charlie Hopkins
Musical Director and Co-writer of 'Nothing so sweet as a story' soundtrack: Paul Draper
Music and singing on ‘You Blister My Paint’: Steve Cooke
Mobile Content Producer: Dave Marsden
Mobile Content Assistants: Emma Persand Carter & Si Richardson
Vision Mixer: Roger Robinson
Vision Technician: Jim Green
Van Driver: John Daly
Stage Crew: Alec Cook, Arslan Tontor, Roman Panowek, Geoff Lee.
Head Steward: James Garrett
Stewards: Kate Feld, Kate Taylor, Emma Foster, James McGrath, Aowyn Sanderson.
Event Security: Paul Connor
Insurance and equipment: Little Star Productions
Projectors: Redeye
PA equipment: STS Touring
The Burgess Project Logo: Jenny Lomax, Firebaud
Furniture: East Manchester Community Forum

Performers
Writer, 'The Poetry in Motionless Tour': Dike Omeje
Writer, 'Guided by Voices': David Gaffney
Writer, ‘The Miraculous Trinity Of Anthony Burgess’s Virginities’ and lyric of ‘You Blister My Paint’: David Bateman
Writer, sms crime scene and lyrics for 'Nothing so sweet as a story': Cath Staincliffe
Writer, 'Lecture on Saint Anthony, Patron Saint Of Lost Things': Jean Sprackland
Rosie: Maria Gabriella Ruban
Enderby and co-writer of 'Nothing so sweet as a story' soundtrack: Chris Sievey
Anthony Burgess: Stewart D Laing
Busker and on-street flyerer: Stuart Hudson
Forensic Investigators: Simon Bates & Nina Gilhooley

Venues
St Ann's Church: Elaine Lindsay, Paul Campion, Roger Hill, Ronald Frost
Manchester Transport Museum: Chris Lonergan
Triangle: Michelle Atack
BBC Big Screen: Marie Sleigh & William Jenkyns
Whitworth Museum: Penny Howarth

Officials
Manchester Literature Festival
Arts Council England, North West (Literature)
Manchester City Council Events Unit: Mike Parrott, Toby Rathbone & all
MCC Parking: Dave Wilkinson
Titchy Coffee Company (caterers): Claire
Lammarrs: Joel and Ian
PR: Catharine Braithwaite & Shelagh Bourke, Lethal Communications.
IABF: Alan Roughley, Nuria Belastegui
Biographer: Andrew Biswell

Finally we can reveal... the starting point for The Burgess Project!

2006-10-19T01:22:00.001+01:00

The journey will start inside St Ann's Church at 2pm on 19th, 20th & 21st October. For those who are interested, there will be a tech setup opportunity at the same venue from 1.30pm.
Pass it on...

If you have not already received the Booking Form please complete it and either email it in advance or just bring it with you. Errr, and a brolly.

For those who can make it in the afternoon, the 'Celebrating Burgess' event is at The Whitworth from 7-9pm on Friday 20th.

Enjoy the show!

Finally we can reveal... the starting point for The Burgess Project!

2006-10-19T01:22:00.000+01:00

We will congregate inside St Ann's Church at 2pm on 19th, 20th & 21st October. For those who are interested, there will be a tech setup opportunity at the same venue from 1.30pm.
Pass it on...

If you have not already received the Booking Form please complete it and either email it in advance or just bring it with you. Errr, and a brolly.

For those who can make it in the afternoon, the 'Celebrating Burgess' event is at The Whitworth from 7-9pm on Friday 20th.

Enjoy the show!

Anthony Burgess's Rites Of Spring; and Letting The Side Down Badly

2006-10-14T00:34:00.000+01:00

Anthony Burgess’s Rites Of Spring
Fictitious First Performance
Of The Symphoni Malaya, 1957

As the final movement nears its end,
the timpanist rolls in C,
and “Merdeka!” cry the crowd.
“Freedom!” they cry, egged on by the harpists,
the xylophonist and trumpeters;
and the timpanist, one Anjing Panas,
alias John Wilson, alias Anthony Burgess,
symphonic composer incognito,
rolls and rolls and triumphantly rolls,
in his mind the middle C from which all else follows,
and the symphony’s coda
becomes a beginning of something else,
a well-spring of independence,
a mass crowd-voice of freedom,
a gut-felt wildness suddenly unleashed
after long years of oppression.
Such a pure vision perhaps cannot last,
and –look: just there– a fight breaks out
and spreads, bodies sprawling,
knocking over the impromptu seating
like a John Wayne bar-brawl but in Malay.
Yet still, when the timpanist breaks off at last
and the orchestra pack up their kit in disgust,
there’s the sense that this coda-still-never-quite-finished
has become a revolution just begun –
has become not a coda after all,
but instead the first movement
of a messy symphony of freedom
that will continue forever.

David Bateman
20-22.9.06

Letting The Side Down Badly

It’s very easy to be critical of Anthony Burgess. His faults that immediately spring to mind include snobbery, persistent lying, religious hypocrisy, and some appallingly muddled thinking on morality.
But, reading of his time as a teacher in Malaya in its final three years as a British colony (from 1954 to 1957, the period in which plain John Wilson became also Anthony Burgess the published author), there are a couple of very endearing things about him. One is his hatred of the racism in his fellow colonials. Another is his general difficulty in accepting authority of any sort, and specifically his obvious dislike of the colonial administration (the same administration that would not even allow him, an employee, to publish his novels under his own name).
Unlike his fellow colonials, Burgess bothered learning Malay --to the equivalent of degree level-- and socialized with local people. He saw Malaya as “the most remarkable multi-racial society in the world,” and his immediate friends included people from Britain, Malaya, Sumatra, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and India. His headmaster, a disciplinarian who apparently referred to his Malay pupils as “wogs,” commented, “Wilson lets the side down badly.”
Anthony Burgess’s poor relationship with his headmaster was typical of his relationships with his bosses and with authority figures in general – a pattern of antagonism that would last all his life. “When you make your peace with authority, you become an authority,” said the singer Jim Morrison, who Burgess would doubtless have hated; but Burgess certainly never made his peace with authority.
Though Burgess felt that the British still had a useful educational role to play in Malaya, his overall attitude to the colonial administration was one of resentment of its all-too-obvious failings -- “the shambles, [...] the obscurantism, the colour-prejudice, the laziness and ignorance” -- so he was able to identify with the Malay wish for independence. It was because of this sympathy --and possibly also in an attempt to gain publicity by jumping on an obviously popular Malay bandwagon-- that Burgess came to write one of his most ambitious musical pieces to date, the Symphoni Malaya, to celebrate the handover planned for August 1957.
Though his main potential market, Radio Malaya, showed no interest in the piece, Burgess was later (1975) able to give a vivid description of the symphony’s riotous first performance in 1957, where the audience’s cries of “Freedom!” --encouraged by the orchestra-- merged with the closing movement, and where ultimately the actual ending was never played due to the outbreak of a free-for-all fight.
For all its vividness, Burgess’s description is entirely fictional, for no such performance ever occurred -- indeed, the symphony has never been performed at all. But, partly because this instance of Burgess’s fabulation is such pure fantasy, such pure wish-fulfilment, I find it gives a rather endearing insight into the wishes he would like fulfilled. Not only does he want to have his work performed by a full orchestra: also he wants a reception for it as memorable and chaotic as that of Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring, but better; also he wants it to be part of a whole national mythology, and also he wants his art to be fused and identified with a movement towards freedom. For sure, his false account is self-aggrandizing; but, for me at least, there is a certain charm in its sheer ridiculousness, and even a certain nobility through the principles with which he chooses to align his fantasy.
Reading of this bogus event in Andrew Biswell’s (2005) biography of Burgess, and suddenly seeing (or at least thinking I saw) how Burgess’s mind had worked at a particular moment, I wrote the poem “Anthony Burgess’s Rites Of Spring” almost immediately. The two poems about Burgess I’d written before had concentrated on the more negative elements of Burgess’s false accounts and his music, so it felt good to write something more positive.
The first draft of the poem practically wrote itself, I think in less than half an hour. Drafts two and three were mostly just neatenings-up and adjustments to the rhythms, but then I suddenly realized that what Burgess would really want was to be in the orchestra itself as well as being the composer. So I decided to add further lies to Burgess’s own; and, seeing as how I didn’t have the burden of expecting anyone to believe me, I could put Burgess in any orchestral role I wanted, so naturally I made him the all-important timpanist, playing incognito.
Two other little serendipitous details crept in at this point. Firstly, I was able to draw his alias, “Anjing Panas” (which is literal Malay for “Dog Hot”), from separate parts of two equally spurious names created by Burgess (1958) in his novel, The Enemy In The Blanket. Secondly, the fact that the timpanist was rolling in C reminded me of the importance of middle C to Burgess. When he was a child, his father had shown him middle C on the piano and the musical stave; and from these very skimpy basics, Burgess had managed to teach himself music. “Find middle C,” he wrote later, “and you have found everything.”

David Bateman
9.10.06

What We Did On Our Day Out

2006-10-09T22:28:00.000+01:00

The first development day for The Burgess Project, on Saturday 9th September, was my first visit to Manchester for several months, and also definitely a bit weird at moments. There were the producers, the audio-visual crew, and we five writers, all in various degrees of shocking ignorance of Anthony Burgess, being driven round various downmarket Manchester suburbs in a coach with Burgess biographer Andrew Biswell as our guide on what had been described to us, rather portentously, as “a psycho-geographic tour of Burgessian Manchester.”
I doubt that the residents of Harpurhey, Miles Platting, Moss Side and Withington, as they idly paused to watch our luxury coach slowly nosing its way between the parked cars lining the narrow streets of terraces and semis, were saying to each other, “Yes, sirree, that’s the Psycho-Geographic Tour Bus going through, bang on time as always. You can set your watch by it.”
The portentousness of its title aside, the tour itself was mostly simply a very informative summary of the early years of Anthony Burgess, or John Wilson as he was then (yes, he really, really could so easily have ended up calling himself Tony Wilson). Driving through the “long-gone Manchester” of Anthony Burgess, we writers showed ourselves very easily distracted by the present day: a sign offering a generous reward for the recovery of a missing parrot, and later a man in the street with a pet python draped over his shoulders, seemed to arouse more excitement than the absent Burgess. After all, you can’t imagine draping a writer who’s been dead for thirteen years over your shoulders (and if you can, that’s sick). (What sort of snake do you imagine Burgess to be? What has he just eaten?) That said, we did get down to proper business as well. For me, two of our most notable stops weren’t actually Burgess’s old residences, but more central, at the end of St. Peter Street, and on Oxford Road. On the steps of Central Library, Andrew Biswell told us of Burgess’s various different stories of his early sexual encounters, leaving me impressed by the number of times Burgess seemed to have lost his virginity; and later, in the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, we had chance to see one of the main settings of Burgess’s early crises of faith.
I think all five of us writers were struck by the grandeur and detail of the architecture and statuary of the Church of the Holy Name – with its massive enclosed space, its side-chapel tableaux, and its tall, pointy-roofed pulpit standing there like a wood-and-marble space-rocket ready to blast off direct to Heaven. The fact that there was a tramp kipping at the back and two cleaners hard at work at the front made the scene all the more enticing for any writer. Sensing that there might be competition to use the church as a source of inspiration, I staked an early claim to the idea of using the stations of the cross as a structural element in my poem – though not, as it turned out, to do with Burgess’s religion at all.
All this, and still only lunchtime. Later in the day, various of us would visit the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, The White Lion and The Bay Horse. Also, I having spoken once too often and too loudly within the hearing of the company of The Phone Book Ltd (technophiles all) about how mobile phones will never catch on, I would be made to borrow a moby and made to learn how to use the damn thing (Curses!); but more usefully, I would learn through sage advice rather than hard experience never to buy chips on Oldham Street, and I would retire to my considerately provided overnight flat in Chatham Street to finish my chips and write the first draft of a poem which I am not going to tell you about yet.

Burgess Versus Bateman: The Early Rounds

2006-09-24T16:08:00.000+01:00

When, back in June, Fee Plumley first invited me to take part in The Burgess Project, I felt a bit guilty about accepting. Though I knew a bit about Anthony Burgess, and had read some of his stuff, I was very aware that my feelings towards Burgess weren’t entirely positive.

So, having written that, “yes, I’d be delighted to take part in your current project,” I explained my ambivalent relationship with Burgessiana. Cue the copy-and-paste...

I’m not actually a mad keen Burgess fan, but he’s interesting enough that he’s inspired me to write stuff in the past, and could pretty much certainly do so again. I’ve mostly only ever read A Clockwork Orange (which I enjoyed a lot) and the Enderby novels (which I enjoyed not so much); and I regard him as someone who was morally very mixed up. That said, I have a fairly intimate involvement with A Clockwork Orange, since in 1986 I wrote a stage adaptation of it for Hit & Run Theatre Company, which was staged at the Unity Theatre in April 1987.
Later that same year, Burgess brought out his own stage-script of A Clockwork Orange (which is a bit cursory, and looks like he spent all of about five days working on it), and he wrote the following, in what he calls “A Prefatory Word” – which actually runs to six full pages, so it’s quite a long word:
“I am disclosing a certain gloom about visual adaptation of my little book, and the reader has now the right to ask why I have contrived a stage version of it. The answer is very simple: it is to stem the flow of amateur adaptations that I have heard about though never seen.”
Wow! What motivation for his writing! Anyway, I’m personally quite proud to be one the people of whom he whines.
An incidental extra is that in 1986, while writing the adaptation, I wrote a couple of poems as potential lyrics, based on a song-title that turns up in the novel of A Clockwork Orange, namely You Blister My Paint. (You’ll find one of the poems in Curse Of The Killer Hedge.) Then in 1987 in his stage-script, Burgess himself did a short lyric of You Blister My Paint, and his is actually copyright a year later than mine – all of which I naturally find very entertaining. (I will add that the only things our respective poems had in common were the title line and the use of the rhyme-phrase “you ain’t.”)
Well, now you know about my ambivalent relationship with Burgess, you might not be so keen to have me in any Burgess-oriented project. As I say, I’m quite keen myself, and I’m sure I’d do something positive, and also it would be a pleasure to work with you again; but it’s probably worth you knowing this other stuff in advance so you aren’t under any misapprehensions.

By the way, did you know that Anthony Burgess’s full name was John Anthony Burgess Wilson? Just think: given the choices, he could so easily have called himself Anthony Wilson.

Funnily enough, ... just this weekend ... I was putting together a little summary of my publication history, and ... In a way there’s an odd little Burgess connection there too, because the reason I was putting together my publication history was that I’m trying to place a novel I’ve written –a nonsense comedy thriller called The Sarga Of Harry The Hand– which is written in its own unique twisted version of English, rather like A Clockwork Orange is, though personally I’m more influenced by Professor Stanley Unwin and Doctor John Winston O’Boogie Lennon (not forgetting Edward Lear) than by Anthony Burgess. Still, he was pretty daring, and very important in showing that it can be done: a whole novel in a dialect that no one’s ever heard of before!

Anyway, if you’re still interested in having me, please do tell me more...

Obviously, it turned out that they were still interested in having me; but for some reason, nearly three months later and despite their promises, I still can’t get them to listen to the funk version of You Blister My Paint.

PS. This is my first ever weblog attempt (he announced pathetically). Next time I will even try to bring myself to use the word “blog.” It’s like when people say “Burgessian,” the “Bur” bit tends to disappear, and you just hear them saying “Jessian,” and you think, what’s all that about, then? Anyway, the point is that if turns out I’ve made a complete mess of it when I paste the bugger in, or if the act of mostly just pasting in a three-month-old e-mail should give the appearance of cheating or not trying hard enough, then I’m very, very sorry.

work in progress

2006-09-20T16:14:00.000+01:00

I'm getting to the stage where the work I've done is almost all there in content but it's a question of editing, polishing and testing it out. So I let it sit and settle overnight/for half a day or whatever and then I pounce back on it to see how it flows, what irritates or doesn't satisfy, what trips me up or needs further tweaking. I've kept a notebook for my ideas from the start of the project and it's interesting to look back at the starting point and consider where I've ended up - and how the route has varied from my initial imagining. There are some fragments that I've not used but still intrigue me so I guess they'll go in the writers ragbag for the future. Nowt ever wasted.

The Burgess Project

2006-09-18T10:55:00.000+01:00

(Auto)Biography

I don't very often read biography, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Andrew Biswell's book 'The Real Life of Anthony Burgess'. It's a highly readable - at times gripping - story. Fascinating also to read it alongside 'Little Wilson and Big God', the first part of the autobiography. I think what makes this so interesting is that Burgess was a master of re-invention - whatever the experience, he never seems to give the same account of it twice. The boundary between fact and fiction is of course never a clear one... but for Burgess it seems to have been exceptionally blurred.

On the other hand, there is something unusually open and frank about his writing in the autobiography. Deeply uncomfortable things -things other people might want to skate over, things which could show him (or others!) in a poor light - he exposes with a kind of fearlessness, or courage.

All this ambiguity gives us writers a lot to play with!

The Burgess Project

2006-09-17T19:10:00.000+01:00

The Burgess Project
Well, a week in and still spinning. Finished the book (Clockwork Orange) - and most of the movie. My DVD R cut the end off but I think I know what happened - although Burgess had two different endings, I think in the movie Alex is reformed. The script seemed very close to the novel and we laughed a lot, too. The violence is shocking - as it should be - but the dark humour is wonderful. I enjoyed the movie much more than I expected to. I knew I'd like the book. I think the most difficult thing for me in it, is the conflation of sex and violence. There's no depiction of sex as a healthy, positive and pleasurable thing - sex equals rape full stop and women are the victims. (I guess that comes from Catholic teachings on the sinfulness of sex but also from puritanism. When Alex is re-programmed lust as well as anger are repressed.

I've been scribbling and thinking and each day when I go walking I find myself trying out different rhymes and rhythms and come home with new possibilities - I'm one of those people you see wandering about mouthing audibly to themselves. I'm spending lots of time with the thesaurus and my dictionary of slang. Am also having a crash course on text message language from my daughter, gr8. The reason for all this will becomes clear at the event in October. I'm enjoying the intensity of working on something pretty exculsively for a short period of time. Much of my work as a writer (novels and tv scripts) takes months or years to complete so this is a novelty. Now there's a nice word.

The Burgess Project

2006-09-12T09:47:00.000+01:00

The Burgess Project
My head's still spinning from our weekend but in a good way. The intensive nature of the project is a bit like taking one of those cold plunges in fancy spas. The tour of Bugess's Manchester was fascinating, I'd worked or played in lots of the neighbourhoods but seeing them as a 'tourist' was strange. I've found an old copy of Clockwork Orange on my shelves - last read it probably 25 years ago - and I'm reading that. I loved it first time round for the language and the futuristic setting as well as the dark subject matter. Now I've finished Andrew Biswell's biography of Burgess - which was really interesting - I've found I have a couple of things in common with Burgess: both our fathers were tobacconists and both of us are lapsed Catholics. And writers of course. So now I'm scribbling fragments of ideas down on bits of paper and browsing the thesaurus and the internet and letting it all mash. And this is my first blog ever.

Development weekend update

2006-09-11T12:49:00.000+01:00

Pssst... not wanting to give too much away... but ... the psycho-geographic tour of a Burgessian Manchester and writing development session has just happened (see below for a mini behind-the-scenes photoblog!).

We worked hard, played hard and have a fantastic plan as a result. Big big thanks to Andrew Biswell for being an engaging and thorough tour guide, and to Alan and Nuria at the IABF for their time and access to the building and all the wonders which lie within. Thanks also to all of the writers and the production team for your unwavering energy and enthusiasm.

Now I am going to leave it to the writers to introduce themselves in the best way they know how, and more details will be released in the lead up to the three performances on 19th, 20th and 21st October, somewhere in the city! Don't forget you can email burgess @ the-phone-book.ltd.uk (remove the spaces for the address to work) to reserve your place.

The tour:

Before we even get started, Burgess is omnipresent! The night before the tour, A Clockwork Orange was on FilmFour, and on the way to meet everyone, we saw this poster for the November performance of Cyrano de Bergerac at the Royal Exchange - translated & adapted by Anthony Burgess. Serendipity?

The luxurious tour coach (with tables, a loo, a fridge and even a microwave!) and our lovely driver, Paul, who negotiated the tiny back streets of Manchester with surprising ease!

Next stop, Anthony Burgess' Manchester...
(and, err, no, he didn't go to that primary school)

Absorbing it all, somewhere near Harpurhey.

Central Library, one of the three places Burgess allegedly lost his virginity.

The confessionals at the Church of the Holy Name on Oxford Road, where Burgess lost his faith as an adolescent . As a student at Manchester University living in Moss Side, Burgess (then known as John Wilson) had to walk past the Church every day - a constant reminder of his eternal damnation.

The Princess Road flat where he lived with his father and stepmother, including the attic room where he, err, also allegedly lost his virginity.

All roads lead to the IABF!
This marked the end of day one. Day two is a closely guarded secret, the rest you will have to wait for ...

Andrew Biswell

2006-07-28T19:44:00.000+01:00

As this project develops, I will be inviting the different members of the team to make their own entries into this blog.

The first to accept this invitiation is Andrew Biswell, our lead advisor thanks to his extensive research for "The Real Life of Anthony Burgess", which I recommend you all buy :)

Thanks to Andrew Losowsky for the use of his photograph from the back cover.

Anthony Burgess - a bibliography

2006-07-17T16:28:00.001+01:00

Many thanks to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation for the use of their Bibliography

Anthony Burgess had an immense literary output. The bibliography below includes all of his works published in book-length form and some of the works of other writers whom he edited (such as Joyce and Maugham), but does not include his uncollected writings; nor does it identify all the introductions and prefaces he contributed to other writers' works. Also, in most cases this listing only identifies British first editions; American first editions were usually published after the British ones, and are only included here if the title was different from the British version. In most cases, subsequent editions of Burgess's works are also not listed, unless, as is the case with the Malayan Trilogy (1964) or The Complete Enderby (1995), the new edition assumes a different form from the original. For a more complete bibliography of Burgess's writings, please refer to the bibliographic sources provided at the end of this section.

Original Fiction & Poetry
* Time for a Tiger, London, Heinemann (1956)
* The Enemy in the Blanket, London, Heinemann (1958)
* Beds in the East, London, Heinemann (1959)
* The Doctor is Sick, London, Heinemann (1960)
* The Right to an Answer, London, Heinemann (1960)
* One Hand Clapping (as Joseph Kell), London, Peter Davies (1961)
* Devil of a State, London, Heinemann (1961)
* The Worm and the Ring, London, Heinemann (1961)
* A Clockwork Orange, London, Heinemann (1962)
* The Wanting Seed, London, Heinemann (1962)
* Inside Mr. Enderby (as Joseph Kells), London, Heinemann (1963)
* Honey for the Bears, London, Heinemann (1963)
* The Eve of Saint Venus, Illustrated by Edward Pagram, London, Sidgwick & Jackson (1964)
* Malayan Trilogy (as John Burgess Wilson), London, Heinemann (1964); as The Long Day Wanes: A MalayanTrilogy, as Anthony Burgess, New York, Norton (1964). Comprises Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, and Beds in the East
* Nothing Like the Sun, London, Heinemann (1964)
* A Vision of Battlements, Illustrated by Edward Pagram, London, Sidgwick & Jackson (1965)
* A Tremor of Intent, London, Heinemann (1966) [subtitled 'An Eschatological Spy Story' in the US (New York, Norton, 1966)]
* Enderby Outside, London, Heinemann (1968)
* MF, London, Cape (1971)
* Napoleon Symphony, London, Cape (1974)
* A Clockwork Testament, or Enderby’s End London, Hart - Davies, MacGibbon (1974)
* Moses: A Narrative, London, Dempsey & Squires (1976)
* A Long Trip to Teatime, London, Dempsey & Squires (1976)
* Beard’s Roman Women: A Novel, New York, McGraw - Hill (1976), London, Hutchinson (1976)
* ABBA ABBA, London, Faber & Faber (1977)
* A Christmas Recipe, Illustrated by Fulvio Testa, Verona, Plain Wrapper Press (1977)
* Will and Testament: A Fragment of Biography, Screenprints by Joe Tilson, Verona, Plain Wrapper Press (1977)
* 1985, London Hutchinson (1978)
* The Land Where The Ice Cream Grows, Illustrated by Fulvio Testa, with text by Burgess, London, Benn (1979)
* Earthy Powers, London, Hutchinson (1980)
* On Going To Bed, London, Deutsch (1982)
* End of the World News: An Entertainment, London, Hutchinson (1982)
* Enderby’s Dark Lady or No End to Enderby, London, Hutchinson (1984)
* Kingdom of the Wicked, London, Hutchinson (1985)
* The Pianoplayer, London, Hutchinson (1986)
* A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music Based on His Novella of the Same Name, London, Hutchinson (1987)
* Any Old Iron, London, Hutchinson (1989)
* The Devil's Mode: Stories, London, Hutchinson (1989)
* A Clockwork Orange 2004, Anthony Burgess & Ron Daniels, London, Hutchinson (1990)
* Mozart and the Wolf Gang, London, Hutchinson (1991)
* A Dead Man in Deptford, London, Hutchinson (1993)
* Future Imperfect, [a compilation of The Wanting Seed and 1985 with new introductions by Burgess], London, Vintage (1994)
* Byrne: A Novel, London, Hutchinson (1995)
* The Complete Enderby [a compilation of the four Enderby novels: Inside Mr Enderby; Enderby Outside; A Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End; Enderby's Dark Lady, or, No End to Enderby] London, Penguin (1995) London, Vintage (2002)
* A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music3rd Edition, Including facsimiles of Burgess's music, London, Methuen (1998)
* Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems, Ed. Kevin Jackson, manchester, Caranet (2002)

Translations & Adaptions
* The New Aristocrats, Michel de Saint - Pierre. Translated by Burgess with Llewela Burgess, London, Gollancz(1962)
* Olive Trees of Justice, Jean Pelegri. Translated by Burgess with Lynn Wilson, London, Sedgwick & Jackson (1962)
* The Man Who Robbed Poor Boxes, Jean Servin. Translated by Burgess, London, Gollancz(1965)
* A Shorter "Finnegans Wake", James Joyce. Edited by Burgess, London, Faber & Faber (1966)
* Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmund Rostand. Translated by Burgess, New York, Knopf (1971)
* Oedipus the King, Sophocles. Translated by Burgess, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press (1972)
* Cavalier of the Rose, (1982) (based on libretto by Hofmannstahl, music by Richard Strauss).
* Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmund Rostand (secind translation by Burgess) London, Hutchinson (1985); new edition, London, Nick Hern Books (1991)
* Oberon Old and New, London, Hutchinson (1985) includes Oberon: A Fantastic Opera, by Carl Maria Von Weber with libretto by Burgess, and Oberon: A Romantic and Fairy Opera in Three Acts, by Weber with libretto by James Robinson Planché originnaly published in 1826).
* Carmen: An Opera in Four Acts, music by Georges Bizet, libretto by H. Meilhac and L.Halévy, based on the story by Prosper Merimée. Translated by Burgess, London, Hutchinson. (1986)
* Chatsky (or The Importance of Being Stupid): A Verse Comedy in Four Acts. Translated and adaptation of Alexander Griboyedov's Gore ot uma. London, Almeida Theatre (1993)

Non-Fiction
* English Literature: A Survey for Students. As John Burgess Wilson, London, Longmans, Green (1958)
* The Novel To-day, London: Published for the British Council and the National Book League by Longmans, Green (1963)
* Language Made Plain. London: English Universities Press, (1964); revised and expanded edition, London: Fontana, (1975). First edition dedicated to Peter Green; second to Liana Burgess.
* Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader. London: Faber & Faber, (1965). As Re Joyce, New York: Norton, (1965)
* The Coaching Days of England: Containing an Account of Whatever Was Most Remarkable for Grandeur, Elegance and Curiosity in the Time of the Coaches of England, Comprehending the Year 1750 until 1850, together with a Historical Commentary by Anthony Burgess, and in Addition Decorated and Illustrated with a Great Number of Drawings, Prints, Views in Perspective Gathered for Purpose of this Work. London: Elek, (1966)
* The Age of the Grand Tour, Containing Sketches of the Manners, Society and Customs of France, Flanders, the United Provinces, Germany, Switzerland and Italy in the Letters, Journals and Writings of the Most Celebrated Voyages between the Years 1720 and 1820; with Descriptions of the Most Illustrious Antiquities and Curiosities in These Countries, together with the Story of Such Traffic by Anthony Burgess and an Appreciation of the Art of Europe in the Eighteenth Century by Francis Haskell. London: Elek, 1966.
* The Novel Now: A Student’s Guide to Contemporary Fiction. London: Faber & Faber, (1967); London: Faber, (1971).
* Urgent Copy: Literary Studies. London: Cape, (1968)
* Maugham's Malaysian Stories. W. Somerset Maugham. Edited by Anthony Burgess. Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational (Asia), (1969).
* Shakespeare. London: Cape, (1970).
* Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce. London: Deutsch, (1973).
* Obscenity and the Arts. Valletta: Malta Library Association, (1973).
* New York. Amsterdam: Time-life International, (1976).
* Ernest Hemingway and His World. London: Thames & Hudson, (1978).
* Man of Nazareth. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979; London: Magnum/Methuen, (1980).
* Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939: A Personal Choice. London: Allsion & Busby, (1984).
* Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence. London: Heinemann, (1985).
* Blooms of Dublin: A Musical Play Based on James Joyces’ Ulysses. London: Hutchison, (1986).
* Homage to Qwert Yuiop: Essays. London: Hutchison, 1986. Published as But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen? Homage to Qwert Yuiop, and Other Writings. New York: McGraw-Hill, (1986).
* Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess. London: Heinemann, (1987); New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, (1987).
* You’ve Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess. London: Heinemann, (1990).
* A Mouthful of Air: Language, and Languages, Especially English. New York: Morrow: (1992).
* One Man's Chorus: The Uncollected Writings. Selected and Introduced by Ben Forkner. New York: Carroll & Graf, (1998).
* Rencontre au Sommet. Dialogue between Anthony Burgess and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Translated into French by Lili Sztajn. Paris: Arte/Mille et Une Nuits, (1998). [Complete 87-page transcript of television program first broadcast in Sweden, (1985).]

Film and Television scripts
* Monitor: Silence, Exile and Cunning. Directed by Christopher Burstall. BBC Television (1965).
* Moses - the Lawgiver. Directed by Gianfranco DeBosio. ITV (1974).
* Jesus of Nazareth. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli. (1977).
* Celebration: Burgess in Manchester. Granada Television (1980)
* Writers and Places: A Kind of Failure. Directed by David Wallace. BBC Television (1981).
* Quest for Fire. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. International Cinema Productions/20th Century Fox. (1982). (Burgess developed the languages for the Neolithic tribes)
* AD. Directed by Stuart Cooper. Ten-hour TV miniseries. (1985) (Burgess wrote the script and also contributed to the musical score)

Recordings
This section lists only the recordings commercially available on Caedmon Records. Other non-commercial recordings exist - see, for instance, the British Library Sound Archives, which contain a number of Burgess readings and interviews.
* Anthony Burgess reads from The Eve of Saint Venus and Nothing Like the Sun. Caedmon, 1974. TC 1442.
* [Burgess reads extracts from] A Clockwork Orange. Caedmon, 1973. TC 1417.

Burgess Biographies & Criticism
* Aggeler, Geoffrey. Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist. University of
Alabama Press, 1979.
* Aggeler, Geoffrey, Ed. Critical Essays on Anthony Burgess. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1986.
* Bloom, Harold, Ed. Anthony Burgess: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
* Coale, Samuel. Anthony Burgess. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981.
* DeVitis, A.A. Anthony Burgess. New York: Twayne, 1972.
* Dix, Carole. Anthony Burgess. Edited by Ian Scott-Kilvert. Harlow: Longman for the British Council. 1971.
* Farkas, A. I. Will's Son and Jake's Peer: Anthony Burgess's Joycean Negotiations. Budapest: Akadémikiai Kiadó, 2002.
* Ghosh-Schellhorn, Martine. Anthony Burgess: A Study in Character. Frankfurt/M and New York: Peter Lang, 1986.
* Lewis, Roger. Anthony Burgess: A Life. London: Faber, 2002.
* Matthews, Richard. The Clockwork Universe of Anthony Burgess. Popular Writers of today Vol. 19. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1978.
* Modern Fiction Studies, 27. 3 (Autumn 1981). Special Issue on Anthony Burgess, edited by Samuel Coale.
* Morris, Robert K. The Consolations of Ambiguity: An Essay on the Novels of Anthony Burgess. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971.
* Stinson, John J. Anthony Burgess Revisited. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1991.
* Biswell, Andrew. The Real Life of Anthony Burgess. Picador, 2004.

Bibliographies
* Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 14, British Novelists since 1960 (1983).
* Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 194, British Novelists since 1960, Second Series (1998).
* Boytinck, Paul W. Anthony Burgess: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide. New York: Garland, 1985.
* Boytinck, Paul W. Anthony Burgess: An Enumerative Bibliography with Selected Annotations. Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1974.
* Brewer, Jeutonne. Anthony Burgess: A Bibliography. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow P, 1980.

The Burgess Project - the project outline

2006-07-17T16:14:00.000+01:00

A co-production between the-phone-book Limited & Manchester Literature Festival, to be presented October 2006.

About Burgess:
Anthony Burgess is perhaps the most famous writer to have come from Manchester, and yet he is astonishingly best known for a film adaptation of his novel 'A Clockwork Orange' that he didn't even script. An author of novels, poems and short stories, a teacher, critic, translator, journalist, broadcaster and avid diarist, by the time of his death at the age of 76, Burgess had published over fifty books and composed a tremendous amount of music - much of it un-heard.

Peripatetic from an early age, Burgess lived in Harpurhey, Higher Crumpsall, Miles Platting and Moss Side as a boy, before wandering further afield in adulthood - quite literally starting with a walking holiday around France, Belgium & Germany. No matter how far he travelled, he never forgot Manchester and The International Anthony Burgess Foundation remains in Withington as the caretaker of a vast archive of work.

Project Outline:
the-phone-book Limited proposes an exciting new production that will bring new life to a diverse literary archive. Using local writing talents and new technologies, we will deliver a live-literature psychogeographic historical tour of the city for the inaugural Manchester Literature Festival this October.

This project will be delivered in three stages.

1: Generating new writing.
With expert advice from the author of the most recent Burgess biography, Andrew Biswell, we will lead a hand-picked selection of the North West's most dynamic writers around the Manchester where Burgess lived, learned and worked. Then, using his work as source material, the writers will create a new collection of works that respond to his fiction, real life and music. Whether a vignette inspired by a musical score, a short story inspired by a Greek translation, or a haiku description of a Burgessian Manchester long-destroyed by Industrial development, we will present a modern approach to an epic collection.

2: Generating rich media content.
In the run up to the festival, some of those pieces will be rehearsed for live presentation, some captured as spoken word or musical recordings, and some dramatised for video productions. Add some real-life materials such as text excerpts from the original manuscripts and photographs from public archives, and you have a rich collection of material that can be delivered to the audience during the event, via their mobile phones. This material can be used to enhance a vignette, or to subvert it, to empower one point of view or argue against it.

3: Generating new readers.
During the festival the writers and/or actors will present their new writing in a unique liveliterature event. Our audience will be lead through the city in a promenade style performance tour. The new works will appear as live readings and as pre-recorded footage sent directly to the audience's mobile phones via SMS and bluetooth. At the end of the event, all subscribed audience members will receive an SMS detailing all the source materials used in the creation of the event to stimulate further reading.

About the Producers:
The mobile phone has become a social phenomenon. Not only can we speak to one another from almost anywhere on the planet, we can also share thoughts and memories in real time, simply by using the 'rich media' capabilities of most handsets. Whether it arrives in text form, as an audio recording of spoken word or music, or as a still or moving image, the message is what counts.

Inspired by mobile phone technologies in 2000, the-phone-book Limited created a new genre of literature - the ultra-short-story - using a maximum of 150 words. In it's three years, the-phone-book.com encouraged people around the world to use their mobile phones and their spare time creatively, generating an archive of 935 stories written by 330 writers from 24 countries, all available to read across traditional and mobile internet.

Our belief in sharing our experiences has lead us to work with diverse organisations and communities across 15 countries. In the last six years we have delivered fair-trade commercial ventures, an online and performative education programme, passionate presentations at internationally renowned creative and commercial conferences, and have exhibited in the UK, Japan, New York and Adelaide.

About the festival:
Manchester Literature Festival will celebrate the creative interplay inhabiting our city through three strands of programmed activity:

Read is the place where you can meet some of the most exciting authors currently writing, in the best and most unusual venues that Manchester has to offer. In a trial run last year we hosted Carol Ann Duffy in the Royal Exchange, while John Stammers read to a select audience in a luxury suite at the Lowry Hotel and Daljit Nagra entertained us in a Sikh Temple in Cheetham Hill. We have held events in astronomical observatories, museums and private houses. This year, we will continue to mix large and small scale venues and bring emerging and established authors to the city.

Independent is a celebration of the best in independent writing culture. Manchester has always done things in its own way; we are a city that leads rather than follows. From independent publishers, new writers and writing forms, to the explosion of DIY culture in the form of ‘zines, blogs and electronic publishing...we will profile the future of writing before it happens. Whether it is a unique, three-day celebration of Palestinian literature in English, a fast emerging local publisher gathering tales of urban life from around Europe and translating them into English, or a summit on new forms of publishing, it will happen in Manchester first.

Freeplay is the moment when word meets code, offering us new ways of visualising, understanding and communicating our world. We have a project linking schools in Manchester and Northern India via WAP mobile phone internet technology. There will be a bluetooth-driven live literature event based on the work of Anthony Burgess. Blog-driven creative writing projects will enable MLF to lead the creative drive of writers towards the social revolution of digital technology.

The first Manchester Literature Festival will take place from Thursday 12th to Sunday 22nd October 2006. www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk

Starting at the very beginning

2006-07-17T15:04:00.001+01:00

In the spring of 2005, the then director of the Manchester Poetry Festival, Chris Gribble, approached me to ask if the-phone-book Limited wanted to do a new commission. New for them because the Manchester Poetry Festival was about to close, to be replaced by a brand new organisation - the Manchester Literature Festival. New for us because we had already made significant changes within our own company and were looking to develop new projects. New is good.

Not wanting to bore anyone too much with a large history (we are over six years old as an organisation now) we are called the-phone-book because we started out with a project that quite literally turned peoples mobile phones into books. In 2000 we - ben and fee - saw the potential of mobile devices as a creative challenge and an innovative distribution platform. While other companies dismissed the small format and minimal technology as 'crap', we saw the future and claimed wireless data space for artists, writers, musicians, and educators.

Our first project, the-phone-book.com, commissioned ultra-short-stories (max 150 words, min 150 characters) for mobile phone internet - WAP1.0. We didn't charge anyone to submit their stories, paid them professional rates when we published them, and didn't charge anything to our audiences for reading them. Not the greatest business model in the world, but it certainly proved the wealth of writing talent in the North West of England, and beyond, and has also educated a new generation of writers and readers, not to mention established a new genre of literature.

Since then we have commissioned artists to make ringtones and logos, developed an online and performative education programme which is now being taught by other trainers internationally, exhibited in Japan, USA and the UK and presented to artists and businesses at conferences all over the world. See fonebk.com for the list, and eventual archive.

It was our innovative combination of literature and technology that had attracted Chris in the first place. The fact that we also love to commission new work through our own projects was a bonus. The new Literature Festival would have a literature and technology strand, Freeplay, and Chris wanted a showcase project to launch both the festival and that strand. So he said 'come up with something entirely new'. And we did.

In the year that followed, we devised the new concept and started to get partners and funding in place. We knew it had to be something to do with mobile phones, had to commission new writing from the region's best writers, and feature a well known Manchester writer as a starting point. Why? Well the first one was obvious - we're the-phone-book, so we work with phones, right? Secondly, through the-phone-book.com we had access to a wealth of talent that we had badly missed since 2003 when the project closed after three successful years, and we knew we would be working with the local arts council, so any new commission would need to benefit local writers. Thirdly, it was the Manchester Literature Festival, so we felt we had to have a focus on someone from Manchester as our 'source material'.

Some brief websearching later, we realised that Anthony Burgess was a great choice. He was born in Harpurhey, North Manchester and moved around the city, studying at Xaverian college and Manchester University - a local boy indeed. His catalogue of work included not only 'A Clockwork Orange' (his most famous publication, made so by the Kubrick film adaptation that Burgess didn't even script) but a wealth of novels, short stories, translations and musical compositions. The man was prolific beyond comparison.

Even though he left Manchester after University in 1956, he never forgot the city and his experiences here. To honour his memory, there is a foundation - the International Anthony Burgess Foundation - in Withington. We contacted them, as well as the latest biographer Andrew Biswell (who also happens to be a lecturer in Creative Writing at MMU) to see if they fancied playing with us, and to our extreme delight, they not only came on board with enthusiasm, but the IABF have granted us full copyright waivers on any of his work. What more could we ask for?! They have also given us the use of their building for both the writing process and our launch party, a bundle of wonderful photos from their archives and put us in touch with Douglas Milton who has developed a one-man show based on Burgess' autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God. I cannot thank them enough.

The next step had to be funding. Which really brings me up to date because last Wednesday we got confirmation of our grant from the Arts Council. I didn't include the notion of a blog in my application - it's not like it costs any more, after all! - but I did plan to produce a documentary style DVD about the project and its process. So a blog can only help me keep track of the project and also makes an interesting piece of reading for those who eventually become our audiences! Especially as one of our intentions is to promote Burgess' back-catalogue - beyond A Clockwork Orange!

So, here you will find updates on the project as we head off on our psychogeographic tour of Burgessian Manchester, develop new writing with some of the North West's finest, create new technological toys to distribute the rich media archives to mobile phones, and then follow the project around the city when it all happens live in October!

Photo courtesy of the collections at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, used with permission.