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Mariangela
Ian SeedThree texts
Rupert M LoydellVessel
Melita SchaumSome Guts
Simon Collings (with collages by John Goodby)Three Short Fictions
Meg PokrassThe Campus Novel
Peter RobinsonCharlie Boy and Captain Fitz: A One-Act Play
Alan WallSnapshot, Sachsenhausen and three more poems
Peter BlairSeven short poems
Lucian Staiano-DanielsFour prose poems
Olivia TuckThe Back of Beyond and two more prose poems
Tony KittTwo poems
Moriana Delgadofrom Reverse | Inverse
Lucy HamiltonSix haibun
Sheila E. MurphyKingfishers and cobblestones and five more new poems
Kitty HawkinsZion Offramp 76–78
Mark ScrogginsCome dancing with me and two more new poems
Marc VincenzPlease Swipe Right
Chloe Phillips‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem
Linda BlackStill Life
Melita SchaumIn memory of
John Taylor with drawings by Sam ForderImmortal Wreckage
Will StoneNew in Translation
Snowdrifts
Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Belinda CookePoems from Prière (1924)
Pierre Jean Jouve, trans. by Will StoneSix Prose Poems
Pietro di Marchi, trans. by Peter Robinson -
A new Review of John Matthias’s Some Words on Those Wars by Garin Cycholl.
Anthony Howell’s review, A Clutch of Ingenious Authors: Michelene Wandor Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories | Annabel Dover Florilegia | Sharon Kivland Abécédaire
Essays by Alan Wall
· ‘King of Infinite Space’: The Virtue of Uncertainty
· AI: Signs of the Times
· The Lad from Stratford
· Stanley Kubrick: Sex in the CinemaWill Stone’s Missing in Mechelen and At Risk of Interment
G. Kim Blank’s Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up behind the Encyclopædia Britannica
Tronn Overend’s Samuel Alexander on Beauty
AND Conor Robin Madigan’s Master Singer, Simon Collings’s Robert Desnos, Screenwriter, and Igor Webb’s Never Again
New Fortnightly Serials
from The Ruinad
Anthony Howellfrom White Ivory
Alan Walland much more below this column.
Departments
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Contact the Editors here.
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Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections, Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
Previous Serials
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying · Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
AND read here:
· James Thomson [B.V.]
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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Twin cities.
A Fortnightly Review.
Tales of Two Londons: stories from a fractured city.
Edited/curated by Claire Armitstead.
Arcadia Books | 250 pp | £9.99 $5.05
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By MICHELENE WANDOR.
THE DOUBLE ATTRIBUTION above signposts the disorder of this anthology, literary merits notwithstanding. ‘Edited’ appears on the front cover, ‘curated’ on the back blurb. The terms could, of course, be loose synonyms. Blurbs combine accurate representation of a book’s aims and contents, with the imperatives of the sales pitch. An editor is responsible for introducing and guiding us to the book’s interior. Do they cohere or conflict?
The blurb heralds a stark contrast between rich and poor in London. So what else is new? Of which major city could one not say the same? Are these the two ‘Londons’ — rich and poor — of which we will wot? There is, indeed, a short section on Grenfell (led by journalist Jon Snow) and further references to the fire crop up along the way. However, neither Grenfell, nor any other crisis/disaster provide a fulcrum for the collection to delve with any depth of analysis into the rich/poor divide.
The blurb says ‘nearly 40%’ of London’s people were born outside the UK; the intro says ‘nearly 37%’. Ok, blurbish licence; but it is clear that ‘nearly 40’ will feel on the way to 50 (ie, half), while ‘nearly 37’ feels like a bit more than a third. It matters because the first makes London sound ‘divided’ (in half), the second makes London sound potentially excitingly multicultural. Mixed messages.
Onto the content: the blurb says the book is written by ‘as diverse a group of people as the metropolis it records’. That’s one hell of a major claim, and, not surprisingly, while the collection reaches a multi-cultural starting post, it is no way genuinely representative, and literarily democratic. How could it possibly be?
At least one minority cultural presence is slimly threaded through. Rowan Moore refers to Dollis Hill synagogue, and I thought, maybe there will be an excursus into London’s various religious cohorts. However, the reference is only a reason to draw out a salacious portrait of one Edward, ‘pillar of the local Jewish community’, who turns out to be an aficionado of sleazy straight and gay sex clubs. No comment.
Jewishness appears more accurately in Alex Rhys-Taylor’s account of Petticoat Lane Market. He refers to Jews fleeing pogroms at the end of the nineteenth century, and quotes Mayhew’s reference to ‘Israelites’, peppering the piece with mentions of salt beef, ‘north European Jewish staples’, a Jewish anarchist who ate ham sandwiches, Tubby Isaacs’ sea food stall, and a reminder of waves of immigration — Huguenot weavers made space for Jewish tailors, with today’s impact of big money on the East End. However, Jonathan Jones’s almost scrappy account of three Jewish artists has no real rationale for the choices.
The end of the blurb chucks in the architectural and cultural sink, creating the expectation that the book might be a guide to places of everyday or special interest in London: a cross between a Michelin and a Rough guide? Neither; the pieces overwhelmingly focus on London north of the river, and not that far north at that.
Who chose the contents, how many were commissioned, how many already appeared elsewhere, and how much real discussion was there about what would mesh the anthology together?
The anthology was first published by OR Books, a five-year-old print-on-demand set-up, based in New York. Armitstead’s introduction says that this is the third in a series edited by John Freeman, ‘focussed on New York and America’. This may be a clue to the curated/edited distinction: at the very least, it raises the question as to who chose the contents, how many were commissioned, how many already appeared elsewhere, and how much real discussion was there about what would mesh the anthology together?
With no list of ‘Acknowledgements’ as a reliable guide, I counted fifteen of the thirty-eight contributions as having been previously published. It is possible that some of the others might also have appeared elsewhere. That’s not in itself a problem — many anthologies are a mix of reprinted and new material. Perhaps, though, it attests to a rushed compilation, and a concomitant lack of coherence.
ONE OTHER CLAIM to be scrutinised: published pre-Covid, Armitstead offers us ‘London at a time when it has felt fractured and embattled as rarely before in peacetime’. Hasn’t she heard of the ’70s, to name but one decade? Does she mean the 2016 Brexit vote? If so, that isn’t a centralising theme, any more than the rich/poor divide turns out to be. If the theory is that it is ‘fractured and embattled’, the anthology would need a far stronger delineation of the lines of conflict.
It may seem somewhat churlish to have focussed so clearly on what the anthology is not; my reason is that it claims to provide a series of compelling, urgent and representative insights into today’s London, and the collection doesn’t begin to bear any of them out.
However, there are some wonderful pieces. Ed Vuillamy provides a vivid picture of the kaleidoscope that was Notting Hill in the ’60s, made all the sharper by his personal anecdotes. Tom Dyckhoff’s essay on the O2 (Greenwich) is pointed and illuminating. Duncan Campbell, with an acerbic journalistic eye, analyses proto-mafiosi immigrants and the London underworld from the ‘sixties onwards. Richard Norton-Taylor provides a potted history of MI5 and MI6, and Andrew O’Hagan’s superbly stylish essay gives us a louche London, witty and a joy to read. All of these make entertaining magazine-type reading – but do not a coherent anthology make.
The Introduction tells us that English PEN is ‘an organisation which will receive the royalties earned from this collection’. All the royalties? Some? We need to know. PEN does sterling work in protecting, defending and supporting writers from all backgrounds, all over the world. But frankly, there would be more benefit in a donation to PEN than in shelling out for a book, which nowhere near lives up to its stated ambitions.
Even the title is a cheat: a tale of two cities? More like bleak expectations. In our hard times we deserve better than this; there’s no point in picking up these papers, or shopping for curiosities here. Somewhere there’s a sale in emperors’ clothes.
♦
Michelene Wandor is a poet, playwright and short story writer. She has also written a critique of Creative Writing — The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived (Palgrave). Her new poetry collection, Travellers, will be published in early 2021.
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Publication: Saturday, 5 September 2020, at 16:47.
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