A Dada gathering

 Sunday 28th August at 7pm UK time

If you're not already on the mailing list for these monthly live online events please leave your full name and email address at the end of this blog.

A gathering dedicated to the life, work and legacy of Hugo Ball, co-founder, with Tristan Tzara, of the hugely influential Dada movement.

                                                 Hugo Ball (1886-1927) performing at the Cabaret Voltaire

Catherine Schelbert will join us from Switzerland to read, in German and English, from her acclaimed translation of Ball's 1916 novel Flametti, or the Dandyism of the Poor which (as it happens) I reviewed for the Times Lit. Supp. in 2014.  

Hugo Ball wrote this hilarious, provocative, largely overlooked, semi-autobiographical novel in1916, the same year he, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, and others founded Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Their artist-run nightclub gave birth to Dada as a form of artistic protest against the brutality of the First World War raging in Europe. They spread their ideas in absurd, grotesque performances, sound poetry, and manifestoes. It is from this cultural and political context that the novel Flametti emerged.

“Flametti contains my whole philosophy. Love for those who are down. For the outcasts,
the downtrodden, the tormented.”
                                Hugo Ball in a letter to his sister Maria Hildebrand-Ball, December 1916.

“Schelbert has tackled [. . .] the original with wit and gusto —I can think of no other novel with so many exclamation marks. Every utterance is a mini-manifesto.”
                                David Collard, Times Literary Supplement

“Flametti is a novel that believes in art, and that believes in people. But it’s not at all clear why.”
                                Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Full Stop

“I love your Flametti !!! You are the best reader, writer, translator and all the rest . . . ever. Who had the magnificent idea to have you read it? It could be me. I want the whole book read by you.”
                                Jacqueline Burckhardt by email 

The programme celebrates the latest incarnation of Flametti as a revised edition of her translation (published this month), accompanied by an audiobook/radio play (available online and as a 10" vinyl disc) of Catherine's reading embelished by a soundscape created by Rotterdam-based artists Robert Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma. You can listen to an extract here:

https://www.fuckinggoodart.nl/Archive/flametti-testpilot.html

Join Catherine, Robert, Nienke and myself for a programme dedicated to all things Dada. Expect a few surprises and beneficial shocks. 

    

Keep the lights on!

David

A live online Bloomsday gathering

 Sunday 16th June at 7pm UK time

On the 16th June we celebrate Bloomsday (of course) with American authors Lee Klein and P. J. Blumenthal (who will, for one night only, be known as Mr Bloomenthal). They'll be joined by the publisher Jacob Smullyan the poet Simon Barraclough (making a welcome return) and, from Dublin, Joycean Caroline Hett with news of a remarkable discovery.

Lee will be reading from and discussing his new fiction Like it Matters, P.J. will introduce his new novel Winston Hewlett's Impotence and Simon will be reading from his new collection Divine Hours. Full details below.

If you're not already on the guest list and would like to join the audience please leave your full name and email address at the end of this blog.

Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel by Lee Klein

Every Bloomsday, six male writer reader drinker friends gather at a bar to talk about life and literature and to celebrate the idea of the masterpiece more than the masterpiece itself. All are frustrated to the point of desperation. But this Bloomsday will prove different: one of the most celebrated younger writers in the world, with the power to potentially unlock their careers, is expected to join them.

Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel is about ambition, creation, delusion, success, failure, submission, acceptance, rejection, idiocy, anger, idealism, persistence, and the excessive consumption of exceptional beer. It’s also about walking and reading, the gestation of literary and literal offspring, and the joys and sorrows of writing with intent to publish.

Since graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2006, Lee Klein’s stories, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in Harper’s, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007, and many other sites, journals, and anthologies. He is the author of The Shimmering Go-Between: A Novel (Atticus Books) and Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox (Barrelhouse Books), and translator of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (New Directions), for which he received a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award. He lives in the Philadelphia area with his wife and daughter.

Winston Hewlitt's Impotence by P. J. Blumenthal 

Santa Barbara—1970s AD. One morning, Winston Hewlett, mid-30s, idle, wealthy, disaffected, finds he can’t do it anymore. This frightening discovery leads him down a rabbit hole into an unknown world populated with pop-psych groups, mad doctors, roughneck bikers, venues of sexual ambiguity, and the secret agents of a secret society. The frantic quest for his lost potency culminates in a zany chase scene through Disneyland where, pursued by goofy assassins, he stumbles onto the hidden meaning of that place. Finally, this odyssey leads to its goal: a direct confrontation with the truth behind his predicament.

P.J. Blumenthal is an American writer living in Munich, Germany. He is the author of a nonfiction book on feral man, Kaspar Hausers Geschwister (Kaspar Hauser’s Siblings), as well as a German-language blog, “Der Sprachbloggeur.” Three volumes of his poetry have appeared in the USA so far: A Lusty Romance, Poems for Readers and Slow Train to Cincinnati.

You can pre-order both books direct from the publisher here:

https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/like_it_matters/

 https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/winston_hewletts_impotence/

Divine Hours by Simon Barraclough

Simon Barraclough was born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, to an Irish mother who was a nurse and a Yorkshire father who built gear boxes for tractors and was a successful brass band composer. Eclectic, crucial books in the house were Ulysses, Ian Fleming thrillers and Arnold Silcock's humorous poetry anthology, Verse and Worse.

After studying English at Nottingham University, Barraclough gained an MA in Critical Theory from Sussex and then decided against pursuing a PhD, preferring to write instead. His first collection, Los Alamos Mon Amour, was published by Salt in 2008 and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

He is published widely in poetry magazines, including Poetry Review and The Manhattan Review, and his work has been broadcast on BBC Radio.

Buy Divine Hours direct from the publishers Broken Sleep Books:

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/simon-barraclough-divine-hours

Caroline Hett is an independent scholar with a particular interest in the Irish modernist titans James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. She joins us from Dublin with an exclusive report on a noteworthy discovery that will appeal to all Joyceans.

An evening with Jake Goldsmith, Charles Boyle and Kathleen Shields

Sunday 12th May at 7pm

This programme is now available to watch:

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/kV9zTcVuJYid17PaNtVnUtZIbcqr8dt8105oT9KjhzaJT8vBGIcuSmQJkQV6_ow.vP18aea8NVE9b3fP

Passcode: k^0#8!P3

If you're not already on the guest list please leave your full name and email address in the comments box at the end of this blog. I'll be in touch.

This month's free online gathering features the author Jake Goldsmith, publisher Charles Boyle and translator Kathleen Shields, who will be reading from and discussing two new books, neither of which can be easily categorised, both of which deserve your attention!

Jake Goldsmith lives in Suffolk, England. He is an author with cystic fibrosis and a list of other chronic health conditions. His writing mainly focuses on the phenomenology of illness, philosophy, and how illness defines one’s experiences. ​

His second book, published on 1st May 2024, is a collection of essays entitled In Hospital Environments. 

https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/in_hospital_environments/ This gathering is to celebrate the UK launch.

​

                                                 

In these essays—dealing variously with illness and disability, writing and reading, liberty and apathy, distrust and expertise, Raymond Aron and liberalism, love and grief, and, not least, a beloved cat—Jake Goldsmith demonstrates the radical honesty at the root of philosophy.

            “This is the sound of honest thinking in extremis.”

                                                                                            —Ray Davis, pseudopodium.org

Order In Hospital Environments here @asterism_books and elsewhere https://i.mtr.cool/skidllxcrx

_____________________________________________________________________________

In the second part of the programme we'll be joined by publisher Charles Boyle and (we hope) the translator Kathleen Shields, who will be discussing and reading from Jean Follain's  Paris 1935, published in April by CB editions.

 

This is an intimate, multi-layered portrait of the capital where he has been living for ten years, a celebration of what a city is at a point in time: priests and prostitutes and poets, shop assistants and shoplifters, immigrants and war-wounded invalids, royalists and revolutionaries, women, men and children all work and play and dream in these streets.

“Whether in poetry or prose, Follain is one of the great modern French writers, a secret garden                     waiting to be discovered by the curious. The publication of the first English edition of Paris, so                 nimbly translated by Kathleen Shields, is cause for joy.”

                                                                                                                       – Stephen Romer

Order Paris 1935 direct from the publisher: https://cbeditions.com/Follain.html

Jean Follain (1903–71) was born in Canisy, Normandy. After studying law at Caen, he worked as a judge while pursuing a literary career. He published several poetry collections, including Exister (1947) and Espaces d’instants (1971), as well as prose works about places, Paris (1935), Canisy (1942) and Chef-lieu (1950). Follain knew Éluard and Aragon and was a close friend of Max Jacob. He is often linked with the poets Francis Ponge, Eugène Guillevic and Philippe Jaccottet.

Kathleen Shields taught English at French universities (Paris and Caen) and worked on large bilingual dictionary projects in France and England. For many years she lectured in French at Maynooth University, where she specialised in teaching translation. She is the author of publications in translation studies and literature and of review essays in the Dublin Review of Books. She lives in Dublin.

Charles Boyle needs no introduction!

Join Jake, Charles,  Kathleen and myself on Sunday 12th May at 7pm UK time. 

These are dark times. Keep the lights on.

David

---

An evening with Rose Ruane and Julian Stannard

  Sunday 21st April at 7pm UK time

This gathering has been archived here and free to watch:

 https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/NgY_PvM0tB6pwunWCWxfRpKKJS_k9SOHzQ4u4RlZ-X6lMM9bnVtcMpZ01Y8IEsBr.H0Ff2gM-12JNRD1A

Passcode: 9Z3=k$Y3

This month's free online gathering brings together two wonderful writers: the poet Julian Stannard and the novelist Rose Ruane, who will be reading from, and discussing, their latest books.

If you're not already on the guest list and would like to join in please leave your full name and email address in the comments section at the end of this blog.

Rose Ruane was originally a visual artist working in performance, sculpture, drawing and video. Stories and language were always part of her art practice, but as the written word crept further and further into her art and gradually edged out making and performing, she had to admit that she had become a writer instead.

She undertook the MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University, and subsequently won the Off West End Adopt a Playwright award in 2015. She writes plays, makes podcasts, performs spoken word and occasionally still has a go at drawing and making things just to see if she still can.

She lives in Glasgow with her ever-expanding collections of twentieth century kitsch and other people’s letters, postcards and photographs.

Her debut novel This Is Yesterday was published in 2021. Her latest, Birding, is published  by Little Brown the week after this programme is broadcast! You can pre-order here: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/birding-rose-ruane/7402172?ean=9781472158000

Julian Stannard has been described as the poet of cabaret. His poems sing and weep in equal measure; a poetry of wretchedness and hilarity, of discombobulation and the bizarre. In his new collection Please Don't Bomb the Ghost of My Brother a dead brother returns on a white horse, a musical stag slips off to New York, the Kray Twins reappear, a summer pudding is carried across a heath, a pair of buttocks escapes their owner, a couple makes love on a rain-soaked stoop, the Mongols catapult concubines over the parapets, a dead friend walks out of his grave like a twenty-first century Lazarus, a blind boy breaks into the Kelvingrove Gallery and makes off with Salvador Dali’s crucifixion, Ezra Pound – half fish, half man – rises to the surface of the Venetian lagoon, and after ten years in the Cicada Lunatic Asylum the narrator finds peace in the Umbrian town of Bastardo.

‘Imagine 'Carry on Rilke', or Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal reworked as an end of the pier pantomime, and you get something of the flavour of Stannard's brilliant new collection. The mysterious poems are darkly funny, and the funny poems are disconcertingly mysterious. I can think of no better companion to have at your side as civilisation's walls collapse and the world spins crazily from its axis.’ —Alan Bilton

Order from Salt here:

https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/please-don-t-bomb-the-ghost-of-my-brother-9781784633066

Join us, and keep the lights burning.

David

An evening with Lara Pawson and Orla Owen

Here's news of next month's online gathering, the third of twelve planned for 2024. 

If you're on the guest list you'll automatically get a zoom link at 6pm on the day. If you're not on the guest list but would like to be, please leave your FULL NAME and EMAIL ADDRESS in the comments section below. And spread the word! It's free to join.

Sunday 24th March at 7pm (UK time)

Join two extraordinary writers for readings and conversation prompted by two very different books.

Lara Pawson

Lara Pawson’s Spent Light is an unclassifable novel-memoir-essay hybrid, examining the hidden lives of objects – toasters, pepper-mills, fridge-freezers, Brazilian gaucho spurs – spinning off wildly into an account of the entire world of resource extraction and forced labour and industrial murder, alongside traditions of craft, reciprocity and affection.

‘Reading Pawson you realise how obedient most writing is, constrained by squeamishness or protocol … Lara Pawson’s writing is brilliant, unnerving and shockingly alive.’
                                                                                                                – Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement

     ‘Spent Light asks us to begin the work of de-enchanting all the crap we gather around ourselves to fend off the abyss – because we’ll never manage that anyway, the book warns, the abyss is already in us. But love is too. There might be no home to be found in objects, but there’s one to be made with other people. I think, in the end, this powerful, startling book is a love letter.’
                                                                                                                 – Jennifer Hodgson

‘I’m flabbergasted by the naked determination on show here, not to say the talent. Page by page, image by image, association by association, Lara Pawson develops a picture of the world that you won’t be offered anywhere else: stark, unremitting, brilliantly formed and written.’
                                                                                                                   – M. John Harrison

‘A shocking book. Lara Pawson’s merciless and exquisite prose adorns everyday objects with the violence of history – the savage comedy by which living creatures have become broken, petrified things. I will never look at a toaster or a timer, a toenail or a squirrel, the same way again.’
                                                                                                                    – Merve Emre

‘Spent Light is, obviously, not comfortable reading, but it is wild, bold writing in league with perfectly clear thinking, and while disturbing it is also, in a satisfyingly dark and absurd way, comic. Shelve it with Lucy Ellmann, Miriam Toews, Jenny Offill; brilliant, disillusioned women in absolute control of glorious prose.’
                                                                                                                    – Sarah Moss, Guardian (full review here)

‘Pawson, who explored Angola’s forgotten massacre in her first book, In the Name of the People (2014), writes with a grotesque beauty. […] Pawson has created something very much her own here. It’s not fiction, it’s not non-fiction, it’s not memoir and it’s not an essay. What it is is a reminder that everything in this world is connected and that stories are everywhere, even in objects we might otherwise overlook.’
                                                                                                                    – Susie Mesure, Spectator

Order direct from CB editions here: https://www.cbeditions.com/Pawson2.html

Orla Owen

Orla Owen's third novel Christ On A Bike was published by the award-winning Bluemoose Books on 25th January 2024.

Cerys receives an unexpected, life-changing inheritance, but there are rules attached. Three simple rules that must be followed...

Routinely unnerving, each chapter becomes progressively more uncomfortable as the source of the inheritance comes into question. The novel goes to some startlingly dark places in its exploration of free will and family ties, and what starts as a deceptively engaging light entertainment about sibling rivalry becomes a wild journey into madness, mayhem and murder.   

It's only been out for a couple of weeks so no press reviews as yet. But take a look at all the five star reviews on Goodreads! https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/200745697 I read it in. asingle sitting and was completely immersed--a brilliant idea, brilliantly realised.

Do join Lara, Orla and myself for an hour of readings and conversation. We look forward to seeing you.

Our next gathering witll be on Sunday 21st April.

Keep the lights on, wherever you are.

David

An evening with Melissa McCarthy and C. D. Rose

You can watch a recording of this online gathering here:

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/_O6oyxA5girQPI9Y85iAJHryFJavLLzyv3TXSV6c1mIhpzMSNgdJezaTUkQn68xX.YIFrH_I_FYyLGOLJ

Passcode: .F4Q6T^x

Sunday 11th February at 7pm UK time

Join us for an hour in the company of two of the very best contemporary authors who (it turns out) share a particular interest. You'll get an exclusive Zoom link at 6pm UK time. Please leave your email address at the foot of this blog if you're not already on the guest list and you'd like to join us.

Melissa McCarthy's latest book is Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro,  a collection of essays published by Sagging Meniscus Press)

    Photo: to do with light. 

    Phyto: plants and flowers. 

    Proto: the first, the original. 

    Nitro: it blows up.

From Troy to Hiroshima, Crimea to the nuclear Nevada desert, we make our tracks over the war-scratched globe, and when we reach a ruin or a destination we read the markings, record them using various forms of photography. Later—or much, much later—someone else in turn will try to understand our silvery traces. These are the threads that Melissa McCarthy follows, unpicks, weaves again into a nexus of light and time: the mirrored silver cells of a shark’s eyeball, sunlight glinting off the foam and sea wrack of the Aegean on flower with corpses, the silver salts of photographic paper, silver grave-treasures at Ur.

Like an archaeologist in her own strange literary landscape, McCarthy cuts through layers of history and technology to realign the dead and their images. She examines both what can be photographed and what remains always just beyond the frame, and photography itself. It’s a practice involving chemicals and the action of light. But it’s also an organising principle for literature and beyond: there are marks made—by us, on us—that we can’t yet fully see or understand, though they push on through to the surface, always re-blooming.

https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/photo_phyto_proto_nitro/

________________________________________________________

C. D. Rose's new novel is Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, published by Melville House.

Welcome to the fictional universe of C. D. Rose, whose stories seem to be set in some unidentifiable but vaguely Mitteleuropean nation, and likewise have an uncanny sense of timelessness—the time could be some cobblestoned Victorian past era, or the present, or even the future. In these 15 dreamlike tales, you’ll meet a forgotten composer who enters a nostalgic dream-world while marking time in a decaying Romanian seaport; two Russian brothers, one blind and one deaf, building an intricate model town during an interminable train ride across the steppe; a journalist whose interview with an artist turns into a dizzying roundelay of memory and image. Ghosts of the past mingle with the quiddities of modernity in a bewitching stew where lost masterpieces surface with translations in an invisible language; where image and photograph become mystically entwined, and where the very nature of reality takes on a shimmering sense of possibility and illusion.

C. D. Rose is an award-winning short-story writer, and the author of the novels The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure and Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else, as well as the story collection The Blind Accordionist. He lives in Hebden Bridge.

A book that belongs on the same shelf as Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and several works by Zoran Zivkovic, Stanislaw Lem and David Markson.” — Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

A collection of entrancing literary fables from an underrated master of the form.

LONGITŪDINĒS: an online gathering

 

Sunday 21st January at 7pm UK time

Joins us for a lively and inspiring hour in the company of the international team behind LONGITŪDINĒS, a multilingual magazine for creative writing, literary translation and the arts, with print and digital editions, and exclusive online content.

We hope this will prompt you to subscribe and/or donate to the crowdfunding scheme which will be launched tonight. We need to raise a modest £2k to secure the future of this excellent international publication.

If you're not already on my list of subscribers leave your email address in the comments box at the foot of this blog and I'll be in touch.

Programme

Introduction from Will Davies

About the magazine and the first two issues - a discussion with Antonio Ganbacorta, Andrea Romanzi and Amin Fatemi

Will on the  Kickstarter campaign 

Prerecorded audio/video multi-lingual readings of ‘From Switzerland’ by Peter Robinson (pre-recorded)

Closing remarks and thanks

______________________

Taking part (live or pre-recorded)

William Davies is a writer and library manager from southeast England. He has written for Literary Review, The Radio Times, Review 31 and various academic journals.

Amin Fatemi is a translator and Irish literature scholar. He is currently finishing a volume of poetry translation of an indigenous oral poetry tradition in southeast Iran.

Antonio Gambacorta is a translator and literary scholar, currently writing a collection of short stories, and editing two volumes on Samuel Beckett.

Peter Robinson's latest collection of poetry is Retrieved Attachments (Two Rivers Press): https://tworiverspress.com/shop/retrieved-attachments/. His edition of Giorgio Bassani's Collected Poems, translated in collaboration with Roberta Antognini, has recently appeared from Agincourt Press in New York: https://www.agincourtbooks.com/bassani-the-collected-poems. Winner of the Cheltenham Prize and the John Florio Prize, he is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading.

Andrea Romanzi teaches Scandinavian Languages, Literatures and Translation at the University of Rome, Sapienza and Università Statale, Milan. He has translated several novels from Norwegian and English into Italian, and in 2019 he was awarded the Bodini Prize for best emerging translator for his translations from Norwegian.

See the website: https://longitudines.com