tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42664788710597257232024-02-19T08:53:24.884+00:00Ictusictus [ik-tuhs]
1.
In prosody the stress, beat or rythmical accent of a poem
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In medicine a seizure, a stroke or the beat of the pulseoliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.comBlogger301125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-12272545730155293532023-11-03T23:26:00.000+00:002023-11-03T23:26:02.646+00:00'First There is a Mountain': Bobbie Gentry and Donovan at the BBC<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="482" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4dQroAfV1vw" width="581" youtube-src-id="4dQroAfV1vw"></iframe></div><br />oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-14434736070136659932023-11-03T22:24:00.004+00:002023-11-03T22:55:50.669+00:00Letter for Gaza<p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-bottom: 0.1em; padding-top: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Yesterday, a group of writers, editors, and academics known as the <a class="external" href="https://www.writersagainstthewarongaza.com/" rel="noopener" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG)</a>—an ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people and modeled on American Writers Against the War in Vietnam—published this statement of solidarity/open letter:</span></p><p class="sqsrte-large" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-bottom: 0.1em; padding-left: 80px; padding-top: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people. This war did not begin on October 7th. However, in the last 19 days, the Israeli military has killed over 6,500 Palestinians, including more than 2,500 children, and wounded over 17,000. Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison: its 2 million residents—a majority of whom are refugees, descendants of those whose land was stolen in 1948—have been deprived of basic human rights since the blockade in 2006. We share the assertions of <a class="external" href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">human rights groups</a>, <a class="external" href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2022.981867/full" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">scholars</a>, and, above all, <a class="external" href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/06/a-day-in-the-life-of-the-west-bank-occupation" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">everyday Palestinians</a>: Israel is an apartheid state, designed to privilege Jewish citizens at the expense of Palestinians, heedless of the many Jewish people, both in Israel and across the diaspora, who oppose their own conscription in an ethno-nationalist project.</span></p><p class="sqsrte-large" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-bottom: 0.1em; padding-left: 80px; padding-top: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;">We come together as writers, journalists, academics, artists, and other culture workers to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation. We stand firmly by Gaza’s people, victims of a genocidal war the United States government continues to fund and arm with military aid—a crisis compounded by the illegal<a class="external" href="https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-settlements-west-bank-biden-49c4788ffc5f5ee41d5c48365ac5395b" rel="noopener" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"> settlement and dispossession</a> of the West Bank and the subjugation of<a class="external" href="https://www.972mag.com/citizenship-residency-revocation-explainer/" rel="noopener" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"> Palestinians within the state of Israel</a>.</span></p><p class="sqsrte-large" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-bottom: 0.1em; padding-left: 80px; padding-top: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;">We stand in opposition to the silencing of dissent and to racist and revisionist media cycles, further perpetuated by Israel’s attempts to bar reporting in Gaza, where journalists have been both denied entry and targeted by Israeli forces. <a class="external" href="https://cpj.org/2023/10/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">At least</a> 24 journalists in Gaza have now been killed. Internationally, writers and cultural workers <a class="external" href="https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/a-surge-in-suppression/" rel="noopener" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">have faced severe harassment</a>, workplace retribution, and job loss for expressing solidarity with Palestine, whether by stating facts about their continued occupation, or for amplifying the voices of others. These are instances that mark severe incursions against supposed speech protections. Specious charges of antisemitism are leveled against Zionism’s critics; political repression has been particularly aggressive against the free speech of Muslim, Arab, and Black people living in the US and across the globe. As was the case following the September 11th attacks, Islamophobic political fervor and the widespread circulation of unsubstantiated claims has galvanized a US-led coalition of military support for a brutal campaign of violence.</span></p><p class="sqsrte-large" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-bottom: 0.1em; padding-left: 80px; padding-top: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;">What can we do to intervene against Israel’s eliminationist assault on the Palestinian people? Words alone cannot stop the onslaught of devastation of Palestinian homes and lives, backed shamelessly and without hesitation by the entire axis of Western power. At the same time, we must reckon with the role words and images play in the war on Gaza and the ferocious support they have engendered: Israel’s defense minister announced the siege as a fight against “<a class="external" href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israel-defense-minister-human-animals-gaza-palestine_n_6524220ae4b09f4b8d412e0a" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">human animals</a>”; even as we learned that Israel had rained bombs down on densely populated urban neighborhoods and deployed <a class="external" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/13/white-phosphorus-chemical-what-is/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">white phosphorus</a> in Gaza City, the <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">New York Times</span> editorial board <a class="external" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/14/opinion/israel-gaza-war.html" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">wrote</a> that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law”; establishment media outlets continue to describe Hamas’s attack on Israel as “<a class="external" href="https://time.com/6321671/why-hamas-sabotaged-peace-prospects-israel-attack/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">unprovoked</a>.” Writers Against the War on Gaza rejects this perversion of meaning, wherein a nuclear state can declare itself a victim in perpetuity while openly enacting genocide. We condemn those in our industries who continue to enable apartheid and genocide. We cannot write a free Palestine into existence, but<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span></span>together we must do all we possibly can to reject narratives that soothe Western complicity in ethnic cleansing.</span></p><p class="sqsrte-large" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-bottom: 0.1em; padding-left: 80px; padding-top: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;">We act alongside other <a class="external" href="https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/10/14/an-open-letter-from-participants-in-the-palestine-festival-of-literature/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">writers</a>, <a class="external" href="https://sites.google.com/view/scholarsofpalestineopenletter/home" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">scholars</a>, and <a class="external" href="https://www.artforum.com/columns/open-letter-art-community-cultural-organizations-518019/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">artists</a> who have expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause, drawing inspiration from the Palestinian spirit of <a class="external" href="https://thenewinquiry.com/the-first-week/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">sumud</a>, steadfastness, and resistance. Since 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (<a class="external" href="https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/cultural-boycott-guidelines" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">PACBI</a>) has advocated for organizations to <a class="external" href="https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/cultural-boycott-guidelines" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">join a boycott</a> of institutions representing the Israeli state or cultural institutions complicit with its apartheid regime. We call on all our colleagues working in cultural institutions to endorse that boycott. And we invite writers, editors, journalists, scholars, artists, musicians, actors, and anyone in creative and academic work to sign this statement. Join us in building a new cultural front for a free Palestine.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-bottom: 0.1em; padding-top: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;">So far, the letter has received over 4000 signatures, including those of Ocean Vuong, Lilly Wachowski, Leslie Jamison, Jia Tolentino, Jonathan Lethem, Valeria Luiselli, Jamel Brinkley, Jami Attenberg, Laura van den Berg, Alexandra Kleeman, NoViolet Bulawayo, Max Porter, and Maaza Mengiste.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-bottom: 0.1em; padding-top: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">If you’re a writer, editor, journalist, educator, or cultural worker who finds yourself horrified by the ongoing carnage in Gaza, horrified at the near unanimity of approval this situation has received in Congress and the UK Parliament, horrified by the stifling of dissent and the threats to the livelihoods of your artistic peers, please <a class="external" href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfypedT5PcTSVZaQLZmD7p58Y4TM6pw7XoRu-f-2fTH0-HE6A/viewform" rel="noopener" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c01823; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s, 0.1s, 0.1s; transition-property: color, background, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear, linear, linear; transition: color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">sign and share this letter</a></span><span style="background-color: white;">.</span></span></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-28792922637449331672023-08-04T00:03:00.003+01:002023-11-03T22:26:08.003+00:00Dancing Ghosts by Chris and Cosey<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="412" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rleNmsuYYFY" width="496" youtube-src-id="rleNmsuYYFY"></iframe></div><br /> <p></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-78025820359259404172023-06-18T10:31:00.011+01:002023-11-03T22:34:59.327+00:00Echoland: Derek Attridge on Finnegans Wake<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 12pt; text-align: center;"><br /></p></blockquote><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 12pt; text-align: center;"><img alt="" class="vc_single_image-img attachment-large" decoding="async" height="600" loading="lazy" sizes="(max-width: 424px) 100vw, 424px" src="https://www.maramarietta.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/11-james-joyce.jpg" srcset="https://www.maramarietta.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/11-james-joyce.jpg 424w, https://www.maramarietta.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/11-james-joyce-212x300.jpg 212w" style="text-align: start;" width="424" /></p><div class="separator"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #4d4d4d; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">While writing a review of the fascinating collection brought out recently by Tears in the Fence's new publishing imprint, <i>Knitting Drum-Machines for Exiled Tongues</i> by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, I was researching multilingual poetry on the internet when I came across this essay on portmanteau words in <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, probably the most illuminating I've read on the subject: </span></div><div class="separator"><br /></div><div class="separator"><a href="https://www.maramarietta.com/the-arts/fiction/james-joyce/" style="font-family: arial; text-align: center;">https://www.maramarietta.com/the-arts/fiction/james-joyce/</a><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><br /></p></div>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-76240839593988220282023-04-29T07:38:00.005+01:002023-04-29T07:38:32.137+01:00Neurodivergence and The Piano<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="402" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WWFJ39nn6Rw" width="486" youtube-src-id="WWFJ39nn6Rw"></iframe></div><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"> This startling video of a young woman with severe autism and a visual impairment was a reminder to me that we should never make assumptions about those who are generally assessed as "less able" because of their neurodivergent presentation or communication manner but who might possess other aptitudes, understandings and means of expressing themselves we can be unaware of unless we make an open-minded effort of empathy and offer meaningful opportunities for these to manifest themselves. </span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> I came across this on the recent Channel 4 series <i>The Piano</i>, quite an interesting twist on the formula of uncovering hidden talent. Various members of the public are invited to play a piano located within a train station, a sizeable yet informal and largely transient audience. The resulting performances have in many cases the unexpected charm of the amateur player improvising their own untutored compositions, a form of outsider art probably very prevalent in the same way that many people write poems or paint landscapes in their own time without necessarily thinking of garnering acclaim for it. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> That desire to engage with music, move our fingers on the keys and link sounds together in a resonant way (within the ambient bustling soundscape of a train station) seemed to say something important about the innate connectivity of music and how you don't have to be a "unique talent" like Lang Lang (one of the judges) in order to use this marvellous instrument to externalise a small part of your inner truth to the world, as Lucy in particular was so remarkably able to do in her sequence.<br /></span><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WRvLluBcg0U" width="320" youtube-src-id="WRvLluBcg0U"></iframe></div><br /><p></p></div></div>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-88113693447320815222023-01-05T21:16:00.002+00:002023-01-05T21:16:43.897+00:00 'One’s form is one’s tool': New Yorker Interview with Jorie Graham<p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Graham, Jorie | Voca" class="n3VNCb KAlRDb" data-noaft="1" height="400" jsaction="load:XAeZkd;" jsname="HiaYvf" src="https://voca.arizona.edu/system/files/images/Graham_Jorie_10_27_1982_2.jpg" style="height: 350px; margin: 0px; width: 285.8910891089109px;" width="327" /></p><p></p><p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/jorie-graham-takes-the-long-view?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20January%203%2C%202023&utm_term=lithub_master_list">https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/jorie-graham-takes-the-long-view?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20January%203%2C%202023&utm_term=lithub_master_list</a> </p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-19960430119710295312022-11-20T17:37:00.002+00:002022-12-05T10:31:35.527+00:00George Saunders Interview and Story Club<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hm85f8g0DYg" width="320" youtube-src-id="hm85f8g0DYg"></iframe></div><br /> <span style="font-family: arial;">This is an intriguing interview George Saunders did with Stephen Colbert on <i>The Late Late Show</i> recently. Even though I haven't read his new book of short stories<i> Liberation Day </i>which he's plugging here, I've become an avid follower of Saunders' Substack blog called <a href="https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/office-hours-438?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email" target="_blank">Story Club</a>. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> Some of the themes and approaches he advocates in chatty, witty form during the interview are explored in more depth in the weekly posts of Story Club, often via the prompts of a famous short story he wants to examine or by thoughtfully responding to an email from a reader or aspiring story-writer. The importance of seeing where the story takes you without too strict a plan or structure in place; the pre-eminence of discovery and risk-taking over premeditated invention or having a point to prove (or something unitary to say); the embrace of fun, surprise and humour in how you approach your writing, rather than seeing it as a tortuous, self-lacerating process. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> I really warmed to how, in one of his posts, Saunders described his own evolution from a struggling stylist endeavouring to write like Hemingway or Tolstoy or one of his other realist masters and not having much success in terms of publication and not feeling he was getting anywhere artistically; but then pretty much giving up on trying to write "great literature" and (with a sense he had nothing to lose) instead starting to just "goof around" and write more intuitively and spontaneously, seeing what would come out. Only then did he start getting published and begin to garner acclaim, ironically discovering his own voice just when he'd given up on trying to find it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-51073798005240456512022-10-08T23:44:00.001+01:002022-10-08T23:52:08.450+01:00There'd Better Be a Mirrorball<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="436" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FY5CAz6S9kE" width="525" youtube-src-id="FY5CAz6S9kE"></iframe></div><br /> <p></p><div><span style="font-family: arial;">"I'd throw the rose tint back on the exploded view"</span></div>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-65071228663856566582022-09-01T00:00:00.004+01:002022-09-01T00:00:56.289+01:00Dean Young RIP<p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="dean young | Young, Dean, Square sunglasses men" class="n3VNCb KAlRDb" data-noaft="1" jsaction="load:XAeZkd;" jsname="HiaYvf" src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f2/e6/5f/f2e65f9f1d365368d55be70d7497b781.jpg" style="height: 400px; margin: 0px; width: 300px;" /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Dean Young passed away last week at only 67, a poet I greatly admired. A moving tribute from his editor at Copper Canyon Press <a href="https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/in-memory-of-dean-young-1955-2022/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20August%2026%2C%202022&utm_term=lithub_master_list#:~:text=We%20are%20deeply%20saddened%20to,his%20home%20in%20Cincinnati%2C%20Ohio.">here</a>.</span></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-41501996976816541382022-08-17T22:56:00.001+01:002022-08-17T22:56:08.881+01:00The Ancient Mariner at Watchet Harbour, Somerset<p> <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRfnVlMsuIJOONSyz-b6qO9kc1aR3XAOZae2pTjHXUWQ9BCv4_Gy6Mk6jgfMrtZDwsePrYjLkruTsZSbMoBhU5QPhvS9Zse3B43slr9NohN6mDSoKc3X9zwROCh5NAkb-itfZvXUROKKJqt9VLt30lelJ4fbZ-z5PpBewVUV_7jZzpjrqFTdl_HslR/s4000/20220726_170245.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="3000" height="582" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRfnVlMsuIJOONSyz-b6qO9kc1aR3XAOZae2pTjHXUWQ9BCv4_Gy6Mk6jgfMrtZDwsePrYjLkruTsZSbMoBhU5QPhvS9Zse3B43slr9NohN6mDSoKc3X9zwROCh5NAkb-itfZvXUROKKJqt9VLt30lelJ4fbZ-z5PpBewVUV_7jZzpjrqFTdl_HslR/w436-h582/20220726_170245.jpg" width="436" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNBdgC1KbKfTTrDPo-c5zqCNFyrcTx2vofq4D659R-IOJymUZCr-y_j_KmdwN78pyVpuxRKIt_OwGR-uLmJjPTAV5Qjn9wux3ZUfr_lJaYrSfKlZqN9uBkMBbPCWsw3ggTWZRpxClZ-gB_aRa0ANiY0EMXYICk8uZwo7_CL9WKrhFHXI8vYu_kPp1O/s4000/20220726_170257.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="3000" height="496" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNBdgC1KbKfTTrDPo-c5zqCNFyrcTx2vofq4D659R-IOJymUZCr-y_j_KmdwN78pyVpuxRKIt_OwGR-uLmJjPTAV5Qjn9wux3ZUfr_lJaYrSfKlZqN9uBkMBbPCWsw3ggTWZRpxClZ-gB_aRa0ANiY0EMXYICk8uZwo7_CL9WKrhFHXI8vYu_kPp1O/w372-h496/20220726_170257.jpg" width="372" /></a></div><p></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-55047763459185075562022-07-29T00:04:00.006+01:002022-10-08T23:59:03.968+01:00Bring Down the Government<p> <span style="font-family: arial;">Like many people, m<span>y music-listening habits tend to go in phases, often influenced by what I come across on the radio (mainly Radio 6 or 3) or websites like <i>Bandcamp</i> or <i>The Quietus</i>, or read about in <i>Wire</i> magazine. I prefer that aleatory quality to it, as I do with the poems, books and authors I come across, at odd moments believing there's an underlying order or interconnectivity to my magpie-ish pecking which signals to me I'm heading in the right direction, whatever that might be.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> The last few months, for example, has seen a revisiting of Radiohead mostly sparked by a celebration of <i>OK Computer</i>'s 25th anniversary on Radio 6.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/u5CVsCnxyXg" width="320" youtube-src-id="u5CVsCnxyXg"></iframe></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></div><span style="font-family: arial;">Among numerous delights, 'No Surprises' shone out for me in its overlayering of an apparently mellow, anodyne melody with subtly dark, almost dystopic lyrics, especially the lines "Bring down the government/ They don't speak for us now" which could come from a raucous punk song but carry so much more force and depth when delivered in this subdued, understated context to acoustic guitar and a glockenspiel-lead tune.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> In this summer when by far the worst, most inept, most corrupt British prime minister ever to hold office has led his own government to all but implode, Thom Yorke's sweetly crooned lines seem to have resonated with all the more significance. </span></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-86482116269688610422022-06-16T23:59:00.012+01:002022-06-17T19:22:01.976+01:00Homage to Joyce, Dedalus and Kate Bush<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="286" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jV_76OZSsqo" width="344" youtube-src-id="jV_76OZSsqo"></iframe></i></div><br /> <span style="font-family: arial;">To celebrate the centennial of the publication of <i>Ulysses, </i>here are three very different responses to that astoundingly multifarious and kaleidoscopic masterpiece, whose lasting resonance has yielded generations of notable epigones, byworks and intertexts. Firstly, the modernist composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003) with his <i>Thema: Omaggio a Joyce </i>(1953), startlingly ahead of its time in taking a recitation of Chapter 11 of Ulysses by Berio's then-wife Cathy Berberian and - using tape-manipulation techniques - subjecting it to a "<span style="background-color: white;">reorganization of the phonetic and semantic elements of Joyce’s text".</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"> Secondly, I've been reading Chris McCabe's novel <i>Dedalus </i>(2018), a beautifully presented edition created by Henningham Family Press. At first I thought the concept behind this project was too ambitious to work: a sequel to <i>Ulysses</i>? Which writer would think they could manage a continuation of the greatest novel ever written? But in truth I've been won over by McCabe's wildly imaginative take on the day after Bloomsday, very much his own revisioning of the interweaving stories and themes and characters of <i>Ulysses</i> born of an intimate knowledge and passionate </span>enthusiasm for the novel. Years ago I did a Poetry School course lead by Chris on "<i>Ulysses</i> as Poetry" and as well as some chapters that stand as worthy imitations of Joyce's interior monologue prose-style, other chapters metamorphose into visual or sound poetry in a way which feels much in keeping with Joyce's ludic approach both in <i>Ulysses</i> and <i>Finnegans Wake</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> Finally, the wonderful video for <i>The Sensual World</i> by Kate Bush, which memorably uses the words of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in 'Penelope'. As we know, KB is having a moment this month thanks to Netflix's <i>Stranger Things, </i>which I'm a big fan of particularly for the nostalgia-drenched soundtrack and a plethora of references to tropes from early 80's TV and movies<i>. </i>It's great to see a resurgence of interest in 'Running Up That Hill', which will hopefully send people back to the marvellous <i>Hounds of Love</i> album - and indeed <i>The Sensual World</i> in all its far-reaching, haunting beauty.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/h1DDndY0FLI" width="320" youtube-src-id="h1DDndY0FLI"></iframe></div><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-81021214751623164752022-03-28T21:13:00.002+01:002022-08-17T23:11:58.648+01:00Ilya Kaminsky: Testimonies from Odessan Writers<p><br /></p><p><img alt="" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-158019" class="size-large wp-image-158019" height="352" loading="lazy" sizes="(min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw" src="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/img138-1024x638.jpg" srcset="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/img138-1024x638.jpg 1024w, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/img138-300x187.jpg 300w, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/img138-768x479.jpg 768w, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/img138-1536x957.jpg 1536w, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/img138-2048x1276.jpg 2048w" width="566" /></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/03/24/conversations-to-the-tune-of-air-raid-sirens-odesa-writers-on-literature-in-wartime/">https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/03/24/conversations-to-the-tune-of-air-raid-sirens-odesa-writers-on-literature-in-wartime/</a> </p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-43759455260176782792022-03-20T00:11:00.002+00:002022-03-20T00:14:06.180+00:00Electronic Music from Ukraine<p><br /></p>
<iframe seamless="" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=821110860/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/transparent=true/" style="border: 0; height: 470px; width: 350px;"><a href="https://astrangelyisolatedplace.bandcamp.com/album/portals-energostatic-for-ukraine">Portals: Energostatic (For Ukraine) by A Strangely Isolated Place</a></iframe><div><span style="background-color: #b2b2b2;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: arial;">A new release on Bandcamp from the US label A Strangely Isolated Place: "To help continue the much-needed support for the people of Ukraine, we have produced a compilation from one of our favorite Ukrainian-based netlabels, Energostatic Records. Released as part of our Portals deep dive series, the feature includes a remaster of specifically curated tracks, in both individual and mix form. These tracks are available here on the ASIP Bandcamp page as Name Your Price, with all proceeds going to Save The Children and their specific activities supporting Ukraine at this time. <a href="http://asip.me/stcukr" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" rel="nofollow ugc" style="color: #0687f5; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;">asip.me/stcukr</a></span>"</div></div>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-60460623945050668042022-02-07T23:39:00.008+00:002022-11-20T17:42:33.971+00:00Happy 100th Birthday, Ulysses<p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> A dedalian bloom of internet articles and radio programmes to celebrate the centenary of the publication of <i>Ulysses</i> in the past week or so, which coincided with Joyce's 40th birthday on 2.2.22 (I'm sure, as a lover of Dante, he was drawn to that rhyming of numbers too.) Due veneration and recognition of its pivotal importance somehow still seem tempered in some quarters with bafflement or peevish contempt for its supposed "impenetrability," as though holding it up as a great cultural monument absolves you of the need to actually read it. Even Anne Enright in <i>The Guardian</i>, while showing some regard for the novel and for Joyce, repeats the notion that "it's a novel in which nothing happens" whereas surely the opposite is the case:</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(203, 213, 224);"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><i>"It is an epic of two races (Israelite — Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). […] It is also a kind of encyclopaedia."</i></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: arial;">This is an excerpt from a letter Joyce wrote to his friend Carlos Linati, quoted in the most fascinating of the articles I've come across, "<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/deadline-ulysses/?mc_cid=41b8c74e91&mc_eid=1c2404a2d8" target="_blank">Deadline </a></span><i style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/deadline-ulysses/?mc_cid=41b8c74e91&mc_eid=1c2404a2d8" target="_blank">Ulysses</a>"</i><span style="font-family: arial;"> by Phillip Keel Geheber in the <i>LA Review of Books</i>, who makes the point that up to a third of the novel was added at the final revision stage in 1921 including some of the most original, innovative material.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> Just as <i>Ulysses</i> repays frequent re-readings throughout a lifetime, because its kaleidoscopically multiple perspectives and layers will yield a intrinsically different novel to the reader at different points in their own timeline, so does it morph and undulate in its wider valency to history and society. What I keep noting on my current re-perusal is how much a novel for own rancorous, divided times this is. Most of the other high Modernist classics - from <i>Hugh Selwyn Mauberly</i> and <i>The Waste Land</i> to <i>A La Recherche, The Man Without Qualities</i> and <i>The Magic Mountain</i> - counterbalance a fraught vision of fragmentary modernity with plaintive nostalgia for a more stable <i>age d'or </i>when high culture supposedly held societal values in place and liberal humanist sensibilities had not begun to suffer dissociation. Joyce - a life-long socialist (in distinction to almost every other major Modernist) - was more inclined to celebrate the bustling, interactive heterogeneity of the modern city than deplore it, in particular foregrounding the rich linguistic buzz of different registers and idiolects weaving in and out of one another. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> However, in choosing a second generation Jewish inhabitant of Dublin as his wandering mock-hero, Joyce hones in on the potential prejudice and ostracisation caused by what we now call "othering". You might miss them on a first reading, but the early chapters involving Bloom (especially 'Hades') are subtly dotted with moments of "micro-aggression", of slights and shrug-offs, nothing overt but enough to mark him as an outsider within the bluff, jokey discourse of Dublin street-life. This rises to a mock-heroic climax in his encounter with The Citizen, a one-eyed Cyclops who demonstrates that nationalism of any kind (even the anti-British, Irish nationalism with which Joyce had some sympathy) invariably masks a xenophobic agenda - as we have seen disastrously writ large in the age of Brexit and Trump. But Bloom's rejoinder to the antisemitism of the grandiloquent myope sums up the novel's underpinning ethos: </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> <i>"Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life (...) </i></span></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><i>Love</i></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;">"</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> This is why Joyce's encyclopaedic epic of the human race, of the human body in all its fallibility and persistence, culminates in a small act of kindness between two apparent outsiders - Bloom the intinerant Jew, continually on the run from thoughts of his wife's adultery and his son's death in infancy, helps out Stephen Dedalus the malcontent poet, in flight from the nets of state and religion and thoughts of his mother's recent death. Nothing happens in <i>Ulysses</i> the way it does in <i>War and Peace</i> or <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> or even <i>Middlemarch</i> - but if a profoundly rich and detailed celebration of the ordinary "life for men and women" and an unlooked-for action of support for another human being is nothing then we need to keep reading and re-reading the novel for another hundred years.</span></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-47477650260788652582021-11-08T23:09:00.007+00:002021-11-08T23:09:56.989+00:00Blame by Gabriels<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="500" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fp5ylC542NI" width="602" youtube-src-id="Fp5ylC542NI"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-66501203141585400902021-09-18T22:37:00.001+01:002021-09-18T22:37:44.135+01:00Hamish Hawk, The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion 1973<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="366" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yC_-YhydSyc" width="440" youtube-src-id="yC_-YhydSyc"></iframe></div><br /> <p></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-32939007625147083872021-08-31T08:39:00.014+01:002021-09-26T10:32:04.767+01:00Their Numerous Cancellations<p><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: arial;"> The recent furore around Kate Clanchy's <i>Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (</i>Picador, 2019<i>) </i>brings up some pressing questions about what has come to be called "cancel culture" and its impact on writers. Clanchy, of course, started out as a poet, winning the Forward for Best First for <i>Slattern </i>in 1995, one of the plethora of talented female poets celebrated in Roddie Lumsden's <i>Identity Parade </i>anthology.<i> </i>She developed her career as a poet alongside her career as an English teacher, with a particular interest in using poetry and creative writing to allow children from under-privileged and ethnic backgrounds (additionally with a focus on girls) to tell their stories. This lead to her being awarded an MBE for 'services to literature' in 2018 - the memoir about some of her teaching experiences <i>Some Kids I Taught</i> came out in 2019 and won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020 apparently because it tackled issues around class in education.</span></span></p><p><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: arial;"> So it seems bizarre that this experienced, lauded writer and long-standing teacher used to working in multi-cultural classrooms would not have picked up on the fact that she was using language associated with racial stereotypes such as "chocolate skin" or "Ashkenazi nose" or that she was </span></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: arial;">negativising some autistic children as "unaccountably odd" and "jarring company".* Equally, it seems remarkable that neither an editor at Picador nor one of the judges on the Orwell Prize panel would have picked up on these breaches in politically-correct discourse; nor did any of the book's early reviewers - uniformly positive as far as I can tell - identify these snagging-points. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;"> What happened this year seems a demonstration of how social media can seize hold of a cultural phenomenon and amplify aspects of its character to the point of distortion, inciting hordes of onlookers to contribute their voices to the clamour of outrage and moral opprobrium. On GoodReads and Twitter a growing number of posts started not only to call out these problematic aspects of the book but also to see them as symptomatic of a text that was soon widely reinterpreted and in effect demonised as an adumbration of patronising, middle-class "white saviour complex", full of misguided stereotypes and prejudicial, "othering" perspectives on Clanchy's multicultural pupils. Clanchy herself made matters worse by initially denying and then overreacting to the </span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">criticisms, while some of the accusers (</span></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(18, 18, 18); color: #121212;">including authors of colour Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh and Sunny Singh) went on to receive racist abuse from social media users themselves.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #121212;"> It's not my place to defend the book; I'm in the process of reading it and would like to make my own assessment as to its qualities and flaws. The danger is we lose sight of the text itself in this kind of trial by social media (often pitched at a heightened tone of angry, censorious disapproval), where blame rapidly migrates to the personal and </span></span></span><span style="color: #121212; font-family: arial;">simplistic lines are drawn between the words of a literary artefact and the author's subjectivity - I suppose with an autobiographical memoir the presumption that these lines are straightforward is greater than with a poem or novel but there is still a parallax effect operating in the space between writerly intention and reader reception. No doubt it was appropriate for Clanchy to apologise for what some saw as offensive passages or phrases in her book, but it was saddening to see her almost internalise the accusations of transgression by saying "I'm not a good person" and promising to rewrite parts of the book "more lovingly". This sounds like a critique of some undoubtedly ill-judged, questionable elements of a text she has written have morphed into a moral critique of herself as a person, apparently devaluing decades of practice as a teacher and writer who seems to have tried hard to validate the voices of marginalised, non-white female students.</span></p><p><span style="color: #121212; font-family: arial;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;">It'</span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #222222;">s informative to compare this incident (which I'm sure also has implications for how publishers and awarding bodies vet and assess both language and representation in texts they are considering) with the trend for outing/'canceling' earlier literary figures for historical indiscretions or un-PC behaviours. I recently discovered, for example, that Virginia Woolf had a half-sister who had a learning disability and was perhaps on the autistic spe</span><span style="color: #222222;">ctrum. Laura Makepeace Stephen was shut away in institutions and never visited by the family throughout her adult life although I believe she outlived Virginia - no doubt fairly typical attitudes for the time (and later - look at the Royals similar <span style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">treatment</span> of the "special needs cousins" Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon in the 1970s). But in 1915 Woolf wrote in her diary about a walk she took in Sussex during which she came across</span></span></span><span style="background-color: #fef9f5; caret-color: rgb(18, 18, 18); color: #121212;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> "a long line of imbeciles". She went on to say: "everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead or no chin & and an imbecile grin, or a wild, suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: #fef9f5;"><span style="color: #121212;"> Perhaps because this kind of extreme ableist/eugenicist perspective is read as historically determined or because of her status as an icon of 20th century feminism (or perhaps because this is a diary-passage never intended to be published rather than an excerpt from her literary writings), but I have never read any calls for Woolf's work to be "cancelled". It's all the more disconcerting to read this knowing as we do about her own mental health condition and the compelling exploration of post-traumatic breakdown she makes in <i>Mrs Dalloway </i>(which I re-read with great pleasure over the </span></span><span style="color: #121212;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(18, 18, 18);">summer) </span></span><span style="background-color: #fef9f5; caret-color: rgb(18, 18, 18); color: #121212;">through the character of Septimus Warren Smith,</span><span style="color: #121212;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(18, 18, 18);"> as well as the scathing attack on the psychiatric provision and treatment available to him, which tellingly is implied to be the motive behind Smith's brutal suicide rather than his delusional condition itself. </span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #121212;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(18, 18, 18);"> It's true to say that a century ago a learning disability and a mental health illness were seen as two very different things, whereas one of the huge steps forward we have made in comparatively recent years is in believing that they should both be perceived within a spectrum of neurodiversity, a spectrum which certainly reaches far enough to include all of us. In the same spirit, if we examine the life and work of any writer - contemporary or historical - , it will no doubt become apparent that they were or are at best (as Auden wrote of Yeats) "silly like us" ie. flawed, muddled, frequently wrong-headed human beings just as all readers are. This is not to excuse elements of serious prejudice within the works we read (and it seems that examples of questionable ideation and articulation can be upturned in the works of so many acclaimed writers, particularly of the Modernist period) but just an inkling that we should be prepared to make up our own minds about the books we choose to give time to and enter into dialogue with, rather than allowing the blunt, mutable instrument of social media to police our thoughts and dictate what we are allowed to read. </span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #121212;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(18, 18, 18);">*<span style="font-size: x-small;">As a teacher of students with autism and other complex needs myself, I would suggest these kind of comments are pretty commonplace even among less experienced staff within SEND departments and certainly when mainstream teachers like Clanchy are asked to work with our students - perception of "oddness" is a measure of non-conformity to neurotypical behavioural norms</span></span></span></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;"><span face="-webkit-standard, serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-14819818960147041152021-05-30T08:45:00.017+01:002022-02-07T23:05:47.260+00:008 Writers Who Also Made ( or Make) Music<p></p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">At long last I am conforming to that classic format for the informative blog-post, the listicle of numbered items on a shared theme, even as I toil under the stinging indictment that "no-one reads blogs anymore" (I can't remember on which American sitcom I heard the quip "<i>2006 is on the line, it wants its blog back</i>"). Ploughing on:</span><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LaHejLDqXvY" width="320" youtube-src-id="LaHejLDqXvY"></iframe></div></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: arial;">1. Frederico Garcia Lorca (who as an adolescent had dreamed of a career as a musician and composer rather than a poet), played piano on this rather crackly 1932 recording of traditional flamenco songs performed by the Spanish-Argentinian singer and dancer, </span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: arial;">La Argentinita (</span><span style="background-color: #f8f9fa; font-family: arial;">Encarnación López Júlvez). During this period, he was concentrating more on his work as a dramatist and theatre-director; in the same year he produced his most famous play, <i>Blood Wedding.</i></span></span> </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="302" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ppzoZYsE0U0" width="363" youtube-src-id="ppzoZYsE0U0"></iframe></div><div><br /></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">2. Boris Vian was a multi-skilled creative dynamo: not only a poet, playwright and novelist (author of one of my favourite French novels <i>L'Ecume du Jours </i>(1947)) but also a singer, songwriter, actor and jazz trumpeter, as this video of Vian playing with his brothers Lelio and Alain captures. Dead at 39, his life was an intense blaze of literary and musical endeavours, bohemian parties and desperate attempts to cobble money together: he wrote parodic potboiler-thrillers, the earliest French rock'n'roll numbers and even a single for Petula Clarke.</span><div><br /></div><div> <div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q_cpW6x3FUw" width="320" youtube-src-id="Q_cpW6x3FUw"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">3.</span> <span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Out of the extraordinarily varied career outlined in her seven volumes of autobiography, in the 1950s Maya Angelou was working as a dancer and chanteuse in New York nightclubs. She was chosen to perform one of her own songs in Stan Katzman's 1957 movie <i>Calypso Heatwave,</i> which hoped to ride the wave of a new fad for calypso music, briefly seen at the time as a youth trend ready to supplant rock 'n' roll.</span></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="283" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sWXFY65kM3Q" width="340" youtube-src-id="sWXFY65kM3Q"></iframe></div><br /><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">4. Nicola Griffith was the lead singer with Hull-based all-woman post-punk band Janes Plane, seen here playing in Brixton in 1982. Griffith went on to write the science fiction novels <i>Ammonite</i> (1992) and <i>Slow River </i>(1995), as well as other works of speculative and historical fiction. In 1993 she received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and has since written on disability and LBTQ issues. She now lives in Seattle with her wife, the writer Kelley Eskridge</span></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BKJ0BhH6zDU" width="320" youtube-src-id="BKJ0BhH6zDU"></iframe></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">5. In early editions of Ursula K Le Guin's 1985 book <i>Always Coming Home, </i>a kind of "future archive" of texts and images relating to an imaginary people called the Kesh, a cassette was included containing the album she made with electronic composer Todd Barton <i>Music and Poetry of the Kesh, </i>a rich amalgam of field recordings, sounds generated on invented instruments (such as a 7 foot horn called the hambouta) and Guin's intoning of poems in the language of the Kesh.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/alFgBiEsiq4" width="320" youtube-src-id="alFgBiEsiq4"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">6. Don Paterson - a stunningly accomplished guitarist as well as poet and aphorist - formed the "folk-jazz crossover" group Lammas with saxophonist Tim Garland in 1990, about the time when his poetry career was also taking off. This video captures a more recent revisiting of the first piece they composed together, demonstrating his intriguing style of playing jazz voicings on a classical guitar. What I didn't know until just reading it on his website was that Paterson also took some lessons with the seminal improvisatory guitarist Derek Bailey in the mid-80 and was part of the London "free-improv" scene before Lammas. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ea9hcD1-WnM" width="320" youtube-src-id="ea9hcD1-WnM"></iframe></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">7. The Kolkata-born novelist and essayist Amit Chaudari is also a singer in the North Indian classical tradition, a skill he learned from his mother Biyoja Chaudhari, also a highly acclaimed singer and performer. He has recorded two albums fusing Indian and western stylings, despite one being called <i>This is Not Fusion </i>(2004) - the other is <i>Found Music</i> (2010). Most recently he published a book exploring Indian music entitled <i>Finding the Raga </i>(2021).</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1TUZNHxoEmc" width="320" youtube-src-id="1TUZNHxoEmc"></iframe></div><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">8. English-Welsh poet Zoe Skoulding, whose poetry is often preoccupied with resonance and transmission (cf. her 2013 Seren collection <i>The Museum of Disappearing Sounds</i>), is also the bass-player and vocalist with "psychogeographical musical/artistic collective" Parking Non-Stop, alongside musicians Alan Holmes and Dewi Evans. In its melding of urban field recordings, industrial soundscapes and elements of krautrock and retro-pop, their album <i>Species Corridor </i>(2008) recalls the evanescent sub-genre of "hauntology" disseminated by Simon Reynolds et al circa 2006, inhabiting a roughly commensurate sonic zone as Broadcast, Stereolab and the brilliant <a href="https://ghostbox.co.uk">Ghostbox</a> label.</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /></div></div></div>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-23749967866340482562021-03-27T07:30:00.007+00:002021-03-28T07:38:04.686+01:00Poetry's Remote Community<p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQbBoRfP6DPSkSETgMw2_1m0RHhyphenhyphenYPiMmkEYbmU-nc3cKLdtjFfZkpxvwVIS94DXJ3fpj7HVEqfOyfAxnC3VXZcqvFoqugO58qqSN-pIAVkcCEVdDZvQO9bc5PEhaus3wOkrxS26j9b8U/s2000/TITF73.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1414" data-original-width="2000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQbBoRfP6DPSkSETgMw2_1m0RHhyphenhyphenYPiMmkEYbmU-nc3cKLdtjFfZkpxvwVIS94DXJ3fpj7HVEqfOyfAxnC3VXZcqvFoqugO58qqSN-pIAVkcCEVdDZvQO9bc5PEhaus3wOkrxS26j9b8U/s320/TITF73.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="text-align: left;"> If poetry is built on paradox, perhaps one reason poetry seems to have thrived under lockdown is the paradoxical nature of so much in our current lives. Hived off in our disparate households we are nevertheless engaged in a range of virtual interactions we have all had to stumblingly embrace (Zoom meetings, remote interviews and for we 'nincompated pedagogues' the muffled, stuttering pleasures of online teaching). Equally, our sequestered, inward-facing condition seems to have fostered a renewed sense of community in us, a concern for the less fortunate which has often been lacking from our discourse under a government intent on stripping back any of </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="text-align: left;">the commitment to public funding and social care many of us had thought the bedrock of a responsible, thriving society. </span></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> If at times it has seemed that the whole project of lockdown has been a self-sacrificing effort to preserve the most vulnerable members of our society at the cost of economic benefit, those of us fortunate enough to continue working will feel this a price worth paying, even as cabinet members all too quick to pay lip-service to such noble rhetoric are never far from revealing their true, Thatcherite colours. This was amply demonstrated in the latest disclosure that millions of pounds of tax-payers' money has been siphoned off via the furlough scheme to wealthy non-residents (such as tax exile Jim Ratcliff and members of the Saudi royal family) rather than focused on the smaller businesses it was earmarked for. This seems all the more insulting in the context of the government's proposed pay rise of 1% offered to nurses and other frontline healthcare workers who have continuously put their lives on the line by playing a key role in confronting the crisis in our hospitals under unimaginably difficult conditions.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> Poetry is built on the further paradox that it is invariably conceived and written in solitude but ultimately must function as an act of communication if it's to fulfil its fundamental motive (even if it is a case of "communicat(ing) before it is understood".) Although the thoughts of writers seem divided about whether lockdown has been beneficial for their creative process or not (eg. this Guardian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/19/writers-blockdown-after-a-year-inside-novelists-are-struggling-to-write">article</a>), many of us have experienced a fillip purely in the additional writing-time and solitude being at home has afforded us, as well as increased access to the ancillary activities that feed into our writing (eg. reading, nature walks, online research). But at the same time the communicative side of poetry, at least as it is manifested in live readings and face-to-face poetry groups and workshops, has suffered quite as much as the other performing arts and with it the sense that poetry also comes out of a living, breathing, talking community of other poets, "silly like us" (as Auden wrote of Yeats) but also bonded by that strange obsession with making lasting shapes out of the flyaway words that surround and confound us.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> It could be said, however, that poetry has adapted to lockdown circumstances perhaps more easily than music or theatre, many of its live events migrating online with comparative ease. Attending a virtual reading from home can, of course, have its advantages over travelling to and from a venue, especially during winter and especially (as in my case) when you have two small children to put to bed with no literally no chance of a baby-sitter thanks to lockdown restrictions.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> The launch reading for <i>Tears in the Fence 73</i> which took place last week seemed at first an ambitious undertaking, as the editor David Caddy had invited every single poet with poems included in the issue to read at the event, a generously inclusive gesture which seems in keeping with the ethos of the magazine. In the end an extensive range of poets contributed to the reading, which lasted for well over two hours. As well as the eclectic range of styles and themes on display in the magazine's selection, what was also wonderful was the international diversity of the readers, something again which Zoom facilitates much more practically than a physical reading. The sense that writers from around the world were coming together in a shared purpose was palpable and did restore that feeling of poetic community we often - immured in our little microclimates - mislay. That the <i>Tears in the Fence </i>poets fostered by David are a supportive and highly receptive listenership was also apparent, with generous comments in the Chat panel the norm and an active sense of encouragement in how the writers interacted with one another.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> I almost didn't make it to the reading for the very reasons cited above: my partner was also engaged on an online evening class so it was my turn to put the little ones to bed. I had literally just rocked my crying son to sleep and rested him on the sofa. I logged into the reading which seemed to take a few moments because of connection problems, but as soon as David's face came onto the screen he said "Is Oliver there?" I hardly felt prepared but fortunately had the edition of the magazine to hand and didn't have time to be nervous so just launched into the reading of my poem ('Elegiac Improvisation on the Death of John Hartley Williams'). This first foray into online reading, to an audience of listeners across the UK, Europe and beyond, felt like extending my voice and my words into a broader echo chamber of resonances, taking their place within a creative conversation that is ongoing.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> Copies of <i>Tears in the Fence 73</i> are still available from the <a href="https://tearsinthefence.com">website</a>.</span></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-20525847547250916722021-02-17T12:33:00.000+00:002021-02-17T12:33:01.496+00:00Lee Harwood Memorial<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT3GP2KUuWUVD8FN26sHRQB6Z1uVQqcbN3HSeuqyJ2ycgvXIVnTCF51HOYCiOOtveot3KhyphenhyphenD1NWTEi2-h6Qx0Fp-qJO5ectV1xaWW2LkRBlWuetiqs5u_XnB8VU-yTSEFqByDnxJfkLUg/s2048/E284B480-E3CF-4731-A2EF-B1551E8FF12B.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="409" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT3GP2KUuWUVD8FN26sHRQB6Z1uVQqcbN3HSeuqyJ2ycgvXIVnTCF51HOYCiOOtveot3KhyphenhyphenD1NWTEi2-h6Qx0Fp-qJO5ectV1xaWW2LkRBlWuetiqs5u_XnB8VU-yTSEFqByDnxJfkLUg/w307-h409/E284B480-E3CF-4731-A2EF-B1551E8FF12B.jpeg" width="307" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRlirgk05hQrwa4YnrXGUS_emx7DXN9o0fPPFu7DGEGEtWJUO65-pi6ZeOP9luDKMtarUY1Vv2jCqCV-A_U19XXSl3A_V397jpxsEWKlVSOs-IDQ7btMsBq0oi-U131E78xumCuecUPTk/s2048/5D106E84-D778-438D-9DDD-1B2D59151C17.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRlirgk05hQrwa4YnrXGUS_emx7DXN9o0fPPFu7DGEGEtWJUO65-pi6ZeOP9luDKMtarUY1Vv2jCqCV-A_U19XXSl3A_V397jpxsEWKlVSOs-IDQ7btMsBq0oi-U131E78xumCuecUPTk/w238-h316/5D106E84-D778-438D-9DDD-1B2D59151C17.jpeg" width="238" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> <span style="font-family: arial;">Sent to me by a friend who discovered it in Brunswick Square, Hove. It's mentioned, in fact, on Lee Harwood's Wikipedia entry.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> In turn it sent me back to LH's poems, often marvellously indirect and floating, like ambient music you can dip in and out of, treating it now as background sound and now as something to home in on the detail of.* "<span style="caret-color: rgb(24, 13, 59); color: #180d3b;">What Harwood’s work manages to achieve is a form of representation which both communicates through language and acknowledges its limitations simultaneously...</span></span><span style="caret-color: rgb(24, 13, 59); color: #180d3b; font-family: arial;">The incomplete nature of the text allows the reader’s own associative imagination to come into play, to complete the meaning of the text." (from The Poetry Archive, where you can hear Harwood <a href="https://poetryarchive.org/poet/lee-harwood/">read</a> some of his poems.)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(24, 13, 59); color: #180d3b; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(24, 13, 59); color: #180d3b; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(24, 13, 59); color: #180d3b; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(24, 13, 59); color: #180d3b; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(24, 13, 59); color: #180d3b; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(24, 13, 59); color: #180d3b; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #180d3b; font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(24, 13, 59);">*I was thinking of what has become my most-listened to album of recent months, Robert Ashley's </span></span><i style="caret-color: rgb(24, 13, 59); color: #180d3b; font-family: arial;">Private Parts, </i><span style="color: #180d3b; font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(24, 13, 59);">although it would certainly be stretching the definition of "ambient music" to call it such - it really stands outside any genre of music or spoken-word recording and I fear I will have to devote a post to it to do it any justice - in the meantime, take a <a href="https://youtu.be/QpHjWjNSL_k">listen</a></span></span></div></div><br /> <p></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-72389898012558932472020-12-12T12:25:00.005+00:002020-12-15T11:50:49.657+00:00The Loch Ness Monster’s Song by Hen Ogledd
<p><br /></p><iframe seamless="" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2176576632/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/track=1016160515/transparent=true/" style="border: 0; height: 470px; width: 350px;"><a href="https://henogledd.bandcamp.com/album/free-humans">Free Humans by Hen Ogledd</a></iframe><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> A song from one of my favourite albums of the year ("</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #333333;">an ambitious, progressive, intelligent and experimental take on pop music"*) based on a richly sonorous sound-poem by Edwin Morgan. This was one of the first Morgan poems I ever came across and on rereading I'm sensing a Joycean multi-layering of possible and/or invented language-elements in Morgan's monster-ese, a polyglot speech-act reminding us through a bastardised, fictive symbol of Scottish nationhood of the cultural promiscuity and slipperiness of any state-imposed national language. How Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay operated as vivid components of the international Concrete Poetry scene during the late 60s and 70s while much of British poetry weltered in a parochial post-Movement conservatism is another story (and one that leaves out the underground streams of the "British Poetry Revival" emerging at the same time).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #333333;"> I'm also drawn to the historically (and politically) resonant name of this "prog-folk" group: Hen Ogledd is Welsh for the Old North, the region of northern England and southern lowland Scotland inhabited by Celtic Britons who spoke an ancient dialect called Cumbric. It became a kind of mythic realm from which Welsh bards such as Taliesin and Aneirin traced their lineage. Like Morgan's poem, and in a year when the supposed "levelling up" agenda between Northern regions and the South-east morphed into a kind of managed impoverishment as the government imposed month after month of high-tier restriction on already stretched cities like Manchester and Liverpool, Hen Ogledd seem to speak of an undermining of southern, metropolitan hegemonies, a reaching for the "tentacular roots" of alternative cultural traditions.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #333333;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #333333;">* <a href="https://thequietus.com/articles/29302-the-quietus-top-100-albums-of-2020-norman-records" target="_blank">The Quietus 100 Albums of the Year 2020</a> - always a great place to discover new and overlooked music </span></p></div>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-46015589700161523042020-12-01T07:02:00.001+00:002020-12-01T07:04:33.916+00:00Guest Poet: Robert Taylor<p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">RETSINA</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">If there was, running in its sweet bitter scent,</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">A thread of breeze playing the glint of sea’s glass,</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Glare off walls needling tears, tongue’s tingle of wine,</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">That tress of air, light, memory, warmth, that taste;</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">If there was that and the linger of resin,</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Fast against spoil like a loving drunk, </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">I would reinhabit this and be that drunk</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">And recompound it with the heart-stop scent</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Blown from the pine grove and its glue-gilt resin.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">All afternoon, with every emptied glass,</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Memory-tussled oblivion scud where we taste</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Less hurt in the yellow clarity of the wine.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">The gliding fish, the dolphins and the wine</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">We downed and downed until the sea seemed drunk.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">The offal-coloured olives sheening wet began to taste</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">As acrid as the stony ground-weed scent</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Where a throttled-sounding cockerel swallowed glass</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">In smashed throatfulls where light congealed to resin.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Its gurgle of blood mimed the sun that set as resin. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">A judder of bouzoukis coaxed more wine</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Your eyes shot their decision, their green glass;</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Your eyes of sea too clear for one so drunk</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Shone with what couldn’t be thrown off the scent</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Leaving the bewildering, unmanageable taste</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">As though fate transmitted in the mouth, a taste.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Somewhere a fly engulfed itself in resin.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Soon you receded to a ghost of scent. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Speech foundered in the dregs of wine. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">And every night thereafter I was drunk. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Pathetic; staring blankly in a glass. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Now is an aperture the day seeps through, its glass</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Bears no trace of that island’s sleepy taste.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">The only constant is the being drunk. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">These days secreting no protective resin</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Thought drifts back out on seas as dark as wine</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">When night falls and I topple to its scent.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Sweet bitter wine that soured in the glass.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">Memory a scented resin bleeding out. </span><br style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;" /><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222;">How everything just tastes of being drunk.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-size: small;"> Robert Taylor 2020 ("a sestina written with the further constraint that the title had to rhyme with <i>sestina</i>")</span></span></p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-88367285344609328872020-10-20T11:34:00.009+01:002020-10-26T10:35:10.300+00:00A Small, Good Thing<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> Hearing the news of Derek Mahon's passing a few weeks ago, I drew out his Collected Poems from an obscure bookshelf in the summer house to see if I was justified in my grandiloquent estimate that he'd been perhaps the greatest living poet of our disunited isles. Opening it I came upon the short poem 'Everything is Going to be All Right', for long a favourite of mine; and then remembered that during lockdown it had become something of a meme, much-posted and forwarded as a talisman for hope and perseverance, its title and last line a reassurance that this precarious state of affairs would not last forever (albeit our current cliff-edge teeter over the prospect of a second lockdown seems to render the measured optimism of even a few months ago premature.) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> No wonder, Mahon's astonishing little poem reminds us, people turn to poetry in times of crisis, as to the "small, good thing(s)" of Raymond Carver's story, where eating rolls of newly-baked bread can at least restore a grief-stricken couple to the immediate present; at least (as we say) keep them going. Poetry can encapsulate many-sided, hard-to-grasp, difficult-to-swallow truths in a kind of bullet-point form that goes straight to our innards through the music of its implicit concision, the flyaway chaff of words we hear all around us somehow transmuted into a lasting formula, an incantatory charm against despondency or surrender.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> Mahon's poem has this quality of being at once off-the-cuff, scrawled on the back of an envelope ("the lines flow from the hand unbidden") but also locked into its form, its loosely-rhyming pentameters and syntax unfolding with an inevitability that is in itself reassuring towards the final line's "brief stay against confusion", an example of what Frost called "sentence-sound" in the way it patches a commonly-spoken sentence onto an accentual-syllabic line that balances its trochaic first half with the assertive double-thud of the final spondee (perhaps this is why Mahon prefers the two word "all right" over the more frequently used "alright"). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> Somehow the line no longer sounds like a commonplace platitude, said to placate anxiety or jitters in others or in oneself; its rhythmic context lifts it to the level of lyric epiphany although this is heavily qualified by what's gone before. "There will be dying, there will be dying" announces the dreadful, repetitious imminence of death (like the daily Covid toll on the 6 o'clock news), only to be countered by a sensory immersion in the moment which can only ever be transitory and provisional: it's all we can hold onto, after all, just as the 12-line lifespan of the poem also fleetingly runs its course. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> But there's another reason why we keep returning to poems like Mahon's, why they "stay news" well beyond, say, the government's current spin-feed of "number theatre", bungled schemes and contradictory scientific advice. The more memorable and resonant a poem is, the more it becomes unfinishable to the reader, constantly open-ended and porous to re-discovery and reinterpretation. To paraphrase Roland Barthes, the richness of poetry is not that a hundred readers can find the same meaning in a certain text, but that a certain text can yield a hundred meanings to the same reader, perhaps at different points throughout her or his life. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> An example of this arose when my own memory of 'Everything is Going to Be All Right' abutted against how I was inclined to read it now. I had the impression that the scenario of the poem was a man/the poet lying in bed with his wife or partner and their small children, huddling together the morning after a stormy falling-out or estrangement. I took it to be a poem of reconciliation and togetherness after a difficult period, a "rocky patch" maybe, the last line a semi-joyful sigh of relief that things were back on track and the family had been restored to unity, at least until they have to go downstairs for breakfast.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> But on reinspection I can see there's really nothing to support this reading, no mention of partner or children or even family. The narrator could just as easily be alone in bed, "glad to contemplate" the simple fact of waking into his own space: perhaps he has even come through a painful separation (a theme of several mid-period Mahon poems) and is now "in spite of everything" embracing his own solitude and the opportunity to start writing again ("the lines flow...") </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> Surely it would be reductive to regard my previous reading as wrong, though, or this more recent interpretation as somehow right? The terms seem misapplied in the context of reading and re-reading poems.</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> I can see now that my original envisioning was as much to do with my own turbulent home-life at the time I first came across the poem as it was to do with anything Mahon had moulded into his beautiful 12 lines, just as my recent revisioning says something of the calmer, somewhat more settled place I find myself in these days, as well as of the sequestered spaces we've all been waking into this year. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> It makes me wonder again at the extent to which we create our own versions of important poems as we progress through life, elaborating different meanings in a complex dialogue with the formal properties and significations of the original text, meeting the poet halfway as they come forward from the page to meet us. This creative collusion can also happen on a broader level when a notable poem is reinterpreted to suit a national mood or set of circumstances and a whole new array of readers can rediscover a piece of writing stitched together some forty years ago as though it were a new poem made for this moment of tremulous uncertainty and - "in spite of everything"- tentative hope.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p> </p><p> </p>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4266478871059725723.post-17332596119281078462020-08-14T11:27:00.003+01:002021-02-15T13:11:05.991+00:00Ten Years of Ictus and Call for Submissions<span style="font-family: arial;"> In a post from earlier this year I mentioned that its been ten years this summer since I began this blog; sporadically enough at times and with a couple of hiatuses along the way but I've just about kept it going through what seems an unbelievable time-span, a decade of dramatic ebbs and flows during which my life has transformed itself in almost every way. Writing has been the one constant in a sense and this irregular blog has trickled along with it like a meandering tributary, never my main focus when I've found time to write but more like something running in the background, a testing-ground for thoughts and opinions, a fairly unpremeditated repository for poems, reviews, interviews, bits of music and miscellaneous other jottings.</span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> It amounts to a rather incoherent record of a decade it would be hard for me to summarise in any other way. Who knows how many readers came along for the circumlocutory journey, if any at all. I'm only pleased to have got this far. It seems a good enough point, however, to change things up a bit, alter the format and open the blog up to other voices a lot more, as I have often talked about doing in the past. I've included several contributions from guest authors in the past (both poems and reviews) and enjoyed the experience of sharing what I regarded as engaging work.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> I'm inspired by the likes of <i>The High Window, The Interpreter's House, Eyewear</i> and <i>Gists and Piths</i> to move <i>Ictus</i> away from being a common-or-garden writer's blog and more in the direction of an online literary review, with less of myself and more of other people's writings. <b>So if you'd like to submit some poems, a review, an essay or piece of creative non-fiction, or even a short story, please send them to: ictuspublishing@gmail.com. </b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> There isn't a particular style or genre or approach I'm more inclined to publish, although there are certainly qualities I value in both poetry or prose: a care for and awareness of form and crafted language; an ungeneric freshness of perception that's liable to give the reader a jolt of surprise and recognition; an engagement with ideas and concepts not as abstract add-ons but as dynamic forces energising the text. Overall the sense that this creative act was a psychological or even physiological necessity on the part of the writer: it wasn't just a classroom exercise, it urgently had to get out there into the world and communicate something to me as a reader, if only its own presence.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span><span style="font-family: arial;"> If this sounds prescriptive, it isn't meant to be and I welcome contributions from both experienced, published writers and complete beginners. I'm also very open to works from potentially marginalised or less often represented voices, especially BAME, LBGTQ and disabled poets and authors. I know that many people have turned to poetry during lockdown as a source of consolation or a repository of thoughts and ideas which have been beneficial to reflect upon in this anxious crisis; the simple fact of having more time or working from home has allowed a great creative outpouring to occur in many households, home-offices and garden sheds. I would welcome lockdown poems or poem-sequences: its become the key issue of our time and we are still processing its impact.</span></span></div><div><span><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span><div><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span></div></div>oliver dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.com0