Fear of literature

Today I picked up the programme to this year's Brighton Festival (May 5-27). What literary greats are going to appear this year? I turned to the relevant pages. The first four faces one sees are Gordon Brown, Andrew Marr, Shami Chakrabarti and David Dimbleby. Did I get the wrong page? No, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a civil rights campaigner and two BBC political commentators constitute the headline acts of the literary branch of the festival!

Page two of the booklet advertises three more features: discussions about Baghdad and Chernobyl and, at last, something about literature. The poet Tony Harrison, it says, "is Britain's leading theatre and film poet" (what ever that means. I know him as a poet alone, such as A Cold Coming from 1991). So he's going to discuss poetry? No. "He is also a writer who firmly believes that poetry should address the great issues of the day". Ah, we know what that means don't we? Isn't poetry a great issue? Apparently not. He's talking about a film about Hiroshima.

It looks like I'll be keeping up the tradition of not attending a single event. Even the one vaguely interesting literary event has to be mitigated by current affairs. Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng discuss the book about the latter's life in Sudan.

This fear of books is catching. Today's TLS has an advert for the Bath Literature Festival. The eight pictures feature: a TV historian, a TV psychiatrist, an actress, a TV cook, an illustrator, a philosopher, a crime writer and just one (rather photogenic) novelist. There might well be others appearing, but they're keeping very quiet about it.