Friday 12 August 2016

Some news and a reading list

Not your average news extravanganza, this is more a comp(i)l(ic)ation of interviews and random items gathered by George Ttoouli over the past few weeks...

The winners of the Ink, Sweat and Tears/Café Writers Poetry Pamphlet Commission were published in April this year (while G&P was sleeping).

Jonathan Morley was my co-founder and partner-in-rime at Heaventree Press ten years ago. The description for his pamphlet, Euclid's Harmonics, sounds on form given his recent output in anthologies like Voice Recognition: "a reckoning of his years in Coventry, manipulating register, form and language to create a dazzling, genre-defying collection".

And Jay Bernard's The Red and Yellow Nothing sounds like a wonderfully weird synthesis of black racial identity and Arthurian legend. Jay I met when she was winning awards as a teenager and then through her first pamphlet with tall lighthouse, your sign is cuckoo girl (she's also in Voice Recognition).

Both pamphlets are available at the IS&T shop.

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There's an interview with horror writer Ramsey Campbell online for free, via an academic journal. Ugly website, ugly format, but some good snippets.

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Pierre Joris is interviewed in the latest issue of Asymptote.

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Interviewing Sophie Mayer led me to a wonderful audio interview with Ava DuVernay on NPR.

The last six minutes of this is amazing: DuVernay talks about, firstly, King's argument that rich white people used race to distract poor white people from their exploitation by rich white people.

And then DuVernay explains how, contractually, the original screenwriter, Paul Webb, exercised his contractual right to be credited as sole writer of the final film, despite her rewriting a substantial portion of the script, including having to make up some of King's speeches because the copyrights for King's speeches are already owned by Dreamworks and Warner because Stephen Spielberg is working on a biopic of King. Oh irony.

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And, following a weird retweet incident, which got me far more visibility for five seconds than I felt comfortable with, I found this podcast interview with Laurie Penny.

The interviewer is a little sycophantic (I mean, anything short of drawing blood is a bit too pandering for my tastes), but the discussion of the writing process was reassuring, given where I am right now with writing projects. [1]

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Simon also sent me this essay on lyric essays. It's, you know, adequate, but I wish there was a more articulated discourse on the bleeding edge of experimental essays.

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And a closing delight, thanks to those lovely people at Nothing in the Rulebook, who managed to capture a few minutes of Will Eaves reading in London, end of July. Joyous.


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[1] Though I did wonder if there's a calculated attempt to get a kickback from a word processing software in there. How do you separate evil, capitalist socialite mediatistas from ethical ones? So far I've only encountered teh internet'z misogynist method of mindless teenagers and frustrated men yowling threats, which I believe is based on the medieval 'water method' for determining if a woman is a witch.

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