Yesterday I cancelled my subscription to the London Review of Books. I'd been considering this for a while, ever since For Books' Sake raised the issue of the completely skewed gender imbalance in the LRB's pages, both in terms of the percentage of books by men reviewed compared to books by women (74% male authors …
Category: reading
first Tuesday, second Wednesday
So my new year's not-quite-resolution to do less, to go out less, got off to a flying start this week when I went to two poetry events on successive nights. It was my second visit to Beyond Words in Gipsy Hill, which takes place on the first Tuesday of every month. January's star attraction was …
wine, women, words
That's a recipe for a convivial and enriching evening, and that's exactly what we got last Thursday at the launch of the fourth Loose Muse anthology, downstairs at Cottons on Exmouth Market. Once again, Agnes Meadows and her co-editors have put together a varied and top-class collection of writing by women who have attended one …
poetry panic attack
I spent Saturday morning sitting at my desk, thinking about a new poem, jotting down words and phrases, delving into dictionaries and reference books, nurturing that little knot of something in the back of my brain that I hope will evolve, take shape, emerge slowly onto the page. So I was already in a rather …
a short, vaguely feminist, marginally existentialist reading list
My younger sister asked me this week to help her with a request from a work colleague, who had approached her for suggestions of female writers to read. Her colleague likes Sylvia Plath, apparently, is interested in feminism and existentialism, and is planning to take four months off work to go to France and read …
Continue reading a short, vaguely feminist, marginally existentialist reading list
Open Plan
Open Plan is the neat title for a volume of poems by Graham Fulton, which distills with wit and precision the strange reality of being an office-worker. Published by Smokestack Books in 2011, Open Plan is a thoroughly rewarding read, belying what at first may sound like unpromising material - the daily grind in an …
big up for a little mag
Issue Fifteen of South Bank Poetry magazine is a bit of a cracker. The strapline is 'London and Urban Poetry', and the current issue features many Scottish themed poems alongside the London contingent. A fitting blue and white cover, and just under 40 pages of fine poems, given room to breathe and interact with each …
a packed week off – part one
which began, on the evening of Thursday 7th March, with a trip to the Barbican to experience The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns. Quite a mouthful. The exhibition focuses on Duchamp's interaction with and influence on four key American creators after he moved to New York in 1942. The main …
Well Done Bryan!
To the British Library on Friday evening for B.S. Johnson: His Life and Legacy. The event, marking the 80th anniversary of B.S. Johnson's birth, also tied in with the publication of a new collection of his prose and drama, Well Done God!, edited by Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew and Julia Jordan. The evening began with …
a brolly good read
I recently finished reading Umbrella by Will Self. A novel without chapters and hardly any paragraph breaks; a novel of shifting consciousnesses, where the narrative viewpoint often jumps mid-sentence; a novel unfurling along many different spokes, spanning a century, hopping back and forth between different decades; centred in London, her accents and voices, her many-layered …
