Do You Hate Books As Much As Andy Mulligan?

Andy Mullligan’s Trash comes out today—it’s a fast-paced YA story about a boy who ekes out a bare minimum of a living by picking through the giant piles of garbage produced by an unnamed third world city, until one day he finds an item that is valuable not just to the police, but to other people in power as well. He’ll be talking about the novel, and the experiences that inspired him to write it, in a number of places (such as TeenReads.com or Random Buzzers, the Random House Children’s Publishing website) over the next few days; you can find out exactly where and exactly when from RHCP’s Twitter feed. First, though, Mulligan has something to say about the kind of story he set out to write.

Is reading important to you? Is reading important to anyone?

The answer has to be no—not if the books are boring. Being trapped with a boring book is like a long-haul flight, which I’ve been doing a lot of, lately… that ache in the stomach when all you want to do is land! It’s the same with reading—an inner voice screams, ‘Someone cut these tedious passages!’

Being a teacher, occasionally forced to teach awful books, I quite understand a child’s desire to chuck one in a river and run onto the football pitch. So when I was writing Trash I wanted it to be a page-turner. I wanted a plot that would grip by the throat. I wanted characters who spoke fast, and got on with it! The books I hated as a child were the ones where nothing truly dangerous happened, and everyone behaved responsibly. Even in the soft corner of South London I grew up in, I knew there were mean streets, and gangs, and bigger boys who could kick your teeth in. Being a child was, and is, scary—school is scary.

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12 October 2010 | guest authors |

Paul Muldoon, “A Mayfly”

A mayfly taking off from a spike of mullein
would blunder into Deichtine’s mouth to become Cuchulainn,
Cuchulainn who had it within him to steer clear
of a battlefield on the shaft of his own spear,
his own spear from which he managed to augur
the fate of that part-time cataloguer,
that cataloguer who might yet transcend the crush
as its own tumult transcends the thrush,
the thrush that’s known to have tipped off avalanches
from the larch’s lowest branches,
the lowest branches of the larch
that model themselves after a triumphal arch,
a triumphal arch made of the femora
of a woman who’s even now filed under Ephemera.

Maggot is the eleventh volume of poems from Paul Muldoon, who’s currently serving as the poetry editor at The New Yorker. In that capacity, he’s taking part in a charity auction for Housing Initiatives of Princeton, offering himself up as three separate prizes: you could get a private reading of some of his poems; you could get a one-on-one consult about your own verse; you might even try for the guided tour of the New Yorker offices. The bidding runs through October 28, 2010, with a party at Princeton’s Present Day Club two nights later.

“Poetry is as vital as ever,” Muldoon recently told The Economist. “The teaching of poetry reading, however, is sluggish and, often, slovenly. It needs to be expanded in the school curriculum and be more a feature of society at large. The newspapers should all be carrying a daily poem. It should be as natural as reading a novel.” In the meantime, we do what we can.

11 October 2010 | poetry |