I just posted this over on the My Place or Yours blog, alongside a brief apology and all the poems I’d written during that residency. I was originally going to draw this with the character discovering her head, but I much prefer the idea of an EarPerson, especially if we’re illustrating poetry, and given that in general I read much more than I publish.
This weekend I went to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford to talk about plans for the World Shakespeare Festival in 2012. In conjunction with the Olympics, the powers that be want to create some kind of cultural side-dish to compliment the pole vaults and long jumps. I couldn’t attend the first bit of the weekend, but I got there this afternoon thinking it might be a a big, concrete discussion about what the RSC staff were planning, what was already in place and how they might consider moving forward. I got the sense from the others in the Poetry Society Team (Judith Palmer, Kayo Chingonyi and Alan Ward) that the workshops the previous day had been very good, but that many of the participants were AmDram enthusiasts and they may not have been the most useful group to consult about this festival.
I really like this french woman’s work.
This summer I was part of the audience for Radio 4’s ‘Bookclub’ with Gillian Slovo, author of Red Dust. It’s a decent book about a young South African lawyer, torture, apartheid, generational shifts, truth, love, justice etc… I hadn’t heard of her father Joe Slovo before the interview, but she comes from interesting stock. Her mother, Ruth First, was murdered by a parcel bomb in 1982. It’s often tenacious ground interviewing the child of famous people, because they rarely have the integrity, insight or talent of their parents. Luckily, Slovo has written a thriller with an ambiguous ending and an interesting point of tension between the main character and her Old School mentor: the former is a prosecution lawyer, the latter has always been defence. Is one position inherently better than the other? Are you somehow ’siding with the law’ if you aim to prosecute someone? Are you unsympathetic to all the social and economic factors that brings a person to the stand? And what if the person you’re prosecuting says they were tortured? And what if that torture extracted a true confession?
On that note, Christopher Hitchens being voluntarily tortured:
A show on the BBC, ‘The Torturer’s Tale’ which tracked down torturers willing to speak about their experience.
And Thomas Glave’s story The Torturer’s Wife.
Anyway, I asked a few questions and hopefully one of them was good enough to remain in the final show which airs on Sunday 4th October, at 4pm.
Last night I ate my dinner in front of Ghost (1990, dir. Jerry Zucker), starring the late Patrick Swayze, Whoopi Goldberg and Demi Moore. Having endured Almodovar’s Broken Embraces the night before, I was in the mood for some straight-up cinema with a linear plot, a central hero and some good old fashioned resolution at the end – in this case, Swayze’s ascent to Heaven, having just sent the bad guy screaming in to Hell.
But what really got me was Demi Moore’s costume. Lead heroine in a button up shirt? One reviewer points out that “the only thing that is possibly more outdated than the visual effects is Moore’s infamous close-cropped hairdo.” But I thought it was kind of refreshing. After seeing Broken Embraces Housemate A and I sat and talked about the Penelope Cruz Porn that we’d been subject to; Penelope Cruz looks at herself in the mirror; Penelope pouts; Penelope walks down the hall in a tight suit; Penelope has sex; Penelope is crushed to death by a speeding vehicle. Thankfully.
In fact, scrutinising Demi Moore’s outfits and appreciating Whoopi Goldberg’s turn as ‘the store front mystic’ made me think of a show I happened upon last week. It was billed as ‘television’s first feminist tv series’ and aired on channel 4 in 1998. It’s called Big Women. Amazingly, the channel’s Test Tube Telly site has all four episodes available, so I spent two evenings in a bizarre feminist time warp. The series charts the humble beginnings of a feminist publishing house in 1971 and its eventual sale to a giant corporation in 1996. In an interview with The Independent, the writer, Fay Weldon, said:
“The series was [Tariq Ali's] idea. But I go on thinking that anything that is done by men and women together has a kind of energy and life as God intended. Things that women do together tend to be more dutiful.”It’s amazing this is the first drama about feminism there has been on television. But for so long we haven’t been able to see the wood for the trees.
“Perhaps the series will show how dangerous ideologies and isms are … you’ve got women with permission to hate men now and that’s what we have to pull back from.”
So, I quit doing Budo for Litro a few months ago because I didn’t have time. Term is coming to an end, however, and I’ve been dying to produce something, anything, that isn’t an essay / commentary. Of course it’s never that simple and I will stew for weeks – months – without setting pen to paper, despite knowing it’s the only thing that will make my day worthwhile. I’m sure lots of us do this and I believe the term is procrastination. It’s ancient, humdrum stuff. But yesterday I watched a documentary about Irish monks who sailed from the north of their country to the place we now call Scotland; if they could paddle across the sea, build a monastery on the island of Iona and create the Book of Kells – coloured with lapis lazuli from a mine in Afghanistan! – in the 6th century, I can draw a grammatically fraught comic about a film I went to see in the comfort of the 21st.
“I can say with hand on heart that I’ve never seen a digital film that can do quite what one originated on film does. (And yes, I’m aware that nearly all celluloid-originated films get transferred to digital for the editing process before returning to celluloid.) It’s not just the obvious things – inferior representation of movement, synthetic-seeming colours, the sense of that rigid, invisible bitmap that can’t swirl or flicker as celluloid grain does – it’s something ineffable, a feeling that the analogue photographic image retains a contact with its human subjects and the way the light falls that digital somehow distorts. [...] And while we’re knocking digital, let’s kill off its premiere myth, which is that its cheapness would open the door for new waves of talent. [...] Rather, it has made cinema overall seem more underwhelming and less important than it was, in part because the overall standard has fallen for the first time since the 1980s.
- Nick James, Editor of Sight and Sound, April 2009 (Volume 19, Issue 4)
So I finished my internship at Diva Magazine. I learned that people want to be shown in a positive light and this is okay; that people are willing to talk to you and respond to challenges if you avoid attacking them; that there are genuine nutcases in the world; that writing clearly/simply is as great a skill as writing technically/academically; that you should spell things out; that *everyone* I meet once worked with or was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party; that people who work for magazines have to *think of things* to write about and aren’t magically bestowed with knowledge; that editors might – shock, horror – ask others for their opinion; that the media is probably where I want to spend the rest of my life.
So Yemisi challenged me with ‘red’ after I declared D40 war on him. I thought this was pretty disgusting.
