Which Side Are You On?

It's not often that you discover a poet right beneath your feet, but that's what happened to me in Berkeley. Given, it's more likely there given the Berkeley Poetry Walk just off Shattuck Avenue, the main street. It's an amazing thing to trip lightly over Sappho, Shakespeare, Ohlone songs, Ursula Le Guin, Ntozake Shange... and then, an unfamiliar name: Genevieve Taggard.

Born in Hawai'i and moving across the country from California to New York, Taggard's early twentieth century trajectory weirdly mirrors that of President-Elect Barack Obama. And as a poet who combined love lyrics and political shout-outs, she certainly would make provocative bedside reading for the world's next leader.

Taggard eschewed her missionary upbringing to join communes (this is in the 1920s, not the 1960s), walk picket lines and correspond with the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Her work appeared in small magazines and chapbooks that were produced by the leftist community, but was also published (and sold widely) by Knopf.

Although she's been recuperated as a labour poet, a maker of modern ballads like Florence Reece, who wrote the lyrics to Which Side Are You On? during the 1930s strike in Harlan County, Kentucky (you can see her sing the song during the 1970s strike documented by Barbara Kopple in Harlan County, USA), it's an early and ecstatic love poem, written while she lived in California, that shines up in gold letters from the Berkeley sidewalk. She takes her place among better-known radical poets of place like Jack Spicer, whose works encompass picket lines, chorus lines, die-ins, sexual ecstasies, detention camps, weatherboard houses, bookstores, the wind...

While in California, I read a lot (a lot!) of poetry, including celebrations of place, love and politics in C.S. Giscombe's mysterious and wonderful Prairie Style and Luci Tapahonso's lyrical unfolding of family and roots in Saaníi Dahataal/The Women Are Singing. But I also read Howard Zinn's A Power Governments Cannot Suppress and several Ursula K. Le Guin novels, and all this reading from the left made me wonder: where is the literary history of this thread in American literature (taking in Emma Goldman, Theodor Dreiser, Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, and others)? Where is the literary history of work and workers?

And while I wondered that, I thought: as publishers, film studios and record labels confront the internet era, a recession, and what seems like a dwindling appetite for diverse, serious culture, could community organising and the historical Alphabet Agencies point a way ahead -- and are there artists who would, like Taggard, take up the banner and link poetic lines to picket lines? Where are Grace Paley's street-corner heirs? Who will follow Dreiser, and join WalMart or hotel employees as they strike? And could Obama, deep in biographies of FDR, see a way to incorporate the energy of radical artists in his plans for change in America?

Bookwitch/Fantasy

A magical blog about children's books (chapter and picture) and fantasy literature -- all the posts have a sparkling sense of adventure, a deep love of reading, and a spirit of play. Essential reading in gloomy times!

The SF/fantasy shelf of Delirium's Library has received a good dust-off recently, as I decided to read my way through Ursula K. Le Guin, having revelled in Malafrena and Orsinian Tales, two of her less-known books. While travelling in the US (that most invented of all countries), I read the first three Hainish novels, collected in one volume as World of Exile and Illusion by Orb Books, as well as Fisherman of the Inland Sea (whose title story is one of the most haunting and resonant stories I have ever encountered). Any Hainish stories, which are about travelling across interstellar distances, are the perfect narrative and philosophical accompaniment to transcontinental jet lag!

I also read her odd YA novel called The Beginning Place, which I found secondhand at the incredible Moe's Books in Berkeley, which combines an eclectic range of new books with an astonishing secondhand SF section. _Worlds_ came from the equally amazing Borderlands, a live and kicking SF specialist store in the Mission in San Fran, where I discovered that Le Guin's incredible essay collection Dancing at the Edge of the World has been brought back into print by kick-ass Grove Press, who also revived a lot of Kathy Acker's novels.

I also enjoyed a long browse (and time with some feral kittens) at The Other Change of Hobbit in Berkeley, rediscovering writers whose worlds I'd inhabited vividly but whose names had slipped from the tip of my tongue, like Jane Yolen, O.R. Melling, Terry Windling, and James Tiptree Jr. (the balance on the 'to-be-read' shelves has been restored by the addition of Julie Phillps' necessary biography of Tiptree/Alice B. Sheldon, to whom I was introducted by Le Guin's series of essays on the 'is s/he, isn't s/he' question that are included in long o/o/p The Language of Night).

The very helpful clerk at Borderlands also introduced me to Emma Bull's _The War of the Oaks_, as I was on a quest to find urban fantasy/SF for a friend with a serious Stephanie Meyer addiction. The quest led me (back) to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, both of whom have been waving their gothic lace-gloved hands from the 'to-be-read' shelf. I'm excited about entering some lurid, graceful, sexy, dreamlike, bitter, funny imaginative worlds. Any further suggestions welcomed!

A Teapot on Pluto

Hyperlinked science fiction from the brilliant Julie Bertagna -- including the best chat-up line/excuse for being late you've ever heard.

Smoking the Bible

When Bobby Sands smokes a fag rolled in a page of Revelations in Steve McQueen's Camera d'Or-winning film Hunger, it's a profound and blackly humorous act, a gesture that compactly communicates a whole series of ideas about faith, religiosity, the Word, the body, hunger, narcosis, desire, addiction, pleasure... Such a telling gesture, original and pitch-perfect.

And then it cropped up again, in another film at the Toronto Film Festival: Maria Govan's Rain, a less austere film, but equally as much about bodies finding new configurations of pleasure and self-expression onscreen. Set and shot in Nassau, is no cultural tourist checklist of Bahamian culture - but the film wouldn't be complete without a sensi-smoking scene, here in the safe hands of Magdaline, who invites Rain to smoke up with her under an outrageous and beautiful painting of a black Jesus. Naturally, her skin of choice is Revelations.

Twice is a co-incidence. But thrice is a meme: today's Guardian Review helpfully (because the book sounds like laboured Fischer-by-numbers) reveals that a DJ-ing monkey with a sidearm rolls itself a Bible-skinned spliff.

Which makes me wonder, as Hickling writes of the monkey, is smoking the Bible now "a comic device that has so outlived its useful purpose you want to borrow [the monkey's] gun and shoot it"

Headline Poetry

I am loving this poetry blog from small and perfectly-formed poetry press Wave Books: check out PoetryPolitic, 50 American poets (showing how truly diverse an identity is encompassed by that national designation) offer thoughts, in poem form, through the 50 days leading up to the election. They are profound, personal, political, playful -- and available as downloadable MP3s, to be enjoyed and meditated on. Plato thought poets should stay out of his Republic (because they enchant readers/listeners with their attempts to encapsulate the ideal forms of things in words), while Shelley called poets "unacknowledged legislators." On this blog they are in neither camp (or both): deeply engaged with the intimate daily and earthy, and the myriad ways in which politics is interwoven into our dailiness and our dreams -- pointing up the ways that politics as practiced has come to neglect the personal (except where it interferes for religious reasons) and the real 'popular,' the concerns of the people. The same has been said of lyric poetry -- particularly the experimental stuff -- but these poems show different. More immediate than CNN's newstrack and more vibrant and resonant than the Huffington Post: these poems are news that stays news. Thanks to Susan Schultz for posting it on Facebook!

Ni Putes Ni Soumises Ni Sphinx: Arab Women Writers Speak Out

Today's Daily Star has a great article on women writers from the Middle East. Alice Fordham notes the "anglophone appetite of late for female authors from the Middle East," and investigates why that appetite tends to depictions of honour killings and repression, on the one hand, or what could be seen as updated versions of the Arabian Nights harem fantasy on the other. French junior minister Fadela Amara started a group for Arab and North African women in France, whose name aptly sums up the Orientalist imaginings these writers have to fight with: Ni Putes Ni Soumises: Neither Whores Nor Submissives.

To which, in a talk, Joumana Haddad added, neither veiled dancers nor Sphinxes. Surely part of the point about reading is to break down illusions and deeply-held beliefs, not have them confirmed (er, for me, anyway). But publishers have to do what sells - even poetry publishers, as Chris Hamilton-Emery writes in his Salt publishing blog - so it's repression or wild abandon.

The dubious infamy of Rajaa Alsanea's Girls of Riyadh as a Saudi Sex and the City ignores the facts that a) it's a pretty clever email newsletter novel that's very deliberately playing games with identity and storytelling and b) under the shoes and cellphones froth is a pretty hardcore, depressing picture of double standards (across gender and class) in Saudi society. Alsanea disguises her pin-sharp analysis under a chick-lit dress -- you can't say that for Freya North.

But what's more depressing still (for readers) is that while Girls of Riyadh is available in every airport and megachain bookstore, where are the books by Naguib Mahfouz prizewinners like Nabila al-Zubair, Alia Mamdouh, or Hoda Barakat?

Perhaps the popularity of Alsanea's novel, and a growing interest in the region (even if it's the queasy Dubya 'feminism' that saw (as reported in Harper's) a group of Texan women airlift vibrators to Iraqi women after the 'liberation' -- it should be pointed out that it's supposedly illegal to purchase or own sex toys in Texas...) will lead English-language publishing to reflect the diversity of women's voices across the region -- and booksellers to take stock of what already available through presses like Saqi and the American University in Cairo Press.

Two new online initiatives are also designed to apprise English-language publishers and readers of the depth and diversity of publishing in the Middle East: the British Council has a focus on Arab literature this year, including the New Arab Books list. Most exciting is the English PEN Online Atlas, a handy world literature wiki-type site that is also focusing on Arabic-language writing at the outset. The site was soft-launched at the London Book Fair earlier this year, and there's already hundreds of books and authors listed, and not a houri or moustachioed sheikh in sight...

Good Medicine

Free stories online by leading Canadian Aboriginal authors at The Medicine Project -- including a brand-new story by the deliriously wonderful Richard Van Camp whose short stories Angel Wing Splash Pattern and novel The Lesser Blessed rocked my world one hot, sweaty Toronto summer. So enjoy the free taster at the Medicine Project...

Representative Poetry

Hats off to the Library of Congress for selecting Kay Ryan as the next Poet Laureate. Not only is she a spare, elegant poet in these wordy times, but she is also a) female and b) an out lesbian.

No such luck here in the UK, where Carol Ann Duffy was mooted as Poet Laureate in 1998, but cast aside due to the unsavoury fact of her high profile lesbian relationship with another writer. Articles earlier this year (no, I can't be bothered to dig them out) implied that she might be in the running post-Motion, now that the relationship is over.

It's not often these days that the US pulls ahead of the UK in terms of rights & representation (perhaps not since Auden and Thom Gunn emigrated in search of pastures queer) -- it's about time the UK started celebrating (or at least recognising) the amazing contribution that lesbian, gay, bi and trans writers have made and are making to our literature.

Dear Aleister...

NYT Books leads with a surreal story about Portuguese nationalism and the letters betweenFernando Pessoa and Aleister Crowley. Apparently the Portuguese poet (or more properly, poets, as he wrote under multiple pseudonyms in several languages) noticed a miscalculation in the Great British Satan's astrological charts.

The letters are currently in the possession of his family, and the government want to keep them in the country, possibly installing them in the Pessoa house-museum, where poems pop up on flyleafs. I spent the afternoon working in a filmmaker's private archive, and there is a sheer delight in finding a note, a line, a page, a doodle that seems to hold a small, inexplicable key to their working process.

On the other hand, I hate the nationalist discourse that swirls around certain authors' papers having to be preserved 'for the nation.' It's especially rich coming from Britain, which led the world in ripping off cultural and sacred art and stuffing it in mausoleums in London.

But how great would it be to read the letters between Pessoa, one of the twentieth century's strangest writers, and Crowley, the suburban nutcase? Not least because I once had a penpal who was convinced he was the reincarnation of dear Aleister.

Gifted? Absolutely.

Rajasthani-born and Cardiff-raised Nikita Lalwani picked up the inaugural Desmond Elliott Prize for quality writing in popular fiction last night for her novel Gifted, and promptly donated her prize money to the fabulous human rights and free speech organisation Liberty. Liberty's director Shami Chakrabarti has been one of the most visible and outspoken leftist presences in the British media since the invasion of Iraq -- possibly the most high-profile woman of colour to be found on TV, radio and in the press since Moira Stuart was dumped by the BBC for being over the hill. As the current issue of Sable points out, things have improved under Greg Dyke in terms of representation at the BBC -- but not much.

Lalwani's welcome win hints at a turning point in British culture -- the critical and popular success of Gifted consolidates the long-overdue emergence of a generation of British women novelists of colour, writing diverse novels in different genres, on awards *and* bestseller lists (Zadie Smith, Diane Evans, Monica Ali, Andrea Levy). This is a considerable achievement given that study after study shows that all aspects of the UK book industry remain overwhelmingly dominated by white men, something that initiatives such as the Orange Prize (for women writers) and Decibel (a traineeship for people of colour in the creative industries) are working to change.

Not only that, but as a further sign of the times, Lalwani scooped the frontrunner for the award, Tom Rob Smith, who has been the subject of profiles in the UK press for his six-figure deal thriller. William Hill might have quoted odds of 1/2 on Child 44 taking the prize, but as Rumi Vasi, the child maths prodigy who is the protagonist of Gifted would have known, sometimes it's about more than the math. Congratulations to Lalwani for her award and her generosity in showing the true meaning of "gifted": the ability and desire to share.

Literary Consequences

... which is not what happens when, come the morning after, you read something written in the throes of the night before. Rather, it's an storytelling experiment by Hamish Hamilton, which has just added a chapted by a fifth author: Steven Heighton, one of my favourite novelists. The Guardian are up to something similar. So far, Ali Smith is the crossover voice between the two, so maybe a Vargas Llosa meta-consequences will ensue, with characters from Hamish Hamilton turning up in the Guardian's 52...

Au Revoir, Aimé Césaire

At 94, Aimé Césaire had lived through -- and been a major player in -- the postcolonial twentieth century. His legendary poem about Martinique, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal inspired and incited a generation of African and Caribbean writers to fight for independence, self-determination and self-expression with his concept of negritude. Not least among them was Wole Soyinka, who oppsed negritude by saying, "a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude, it pounces," to which Leopold Senghor responded: A tiger doesn't speak!. With Césaire's death, a literary tiger has been silenced.

Free the Comics!

It's only a fortnight until Free Comic Book Day on May 3. I'll be picking mine up at Fantastic Realm in Finsbury Park, but I will be missing the lovely freebie with strips by local artists put together by my old Toronto local, The Beguiling.
It's the seventh year for this annual celebration of independent comic stores across North America and internationally -- a triumph in a publishing climate ever more dominated by big publishers and big chains. Not only that, but schools and libraries are starting to realise that comics are a great way to promote literacy, especially with titles like Shekhar Kapur's Ramayana, Devi and Snake Woman series for Virgin changing the all-white, big-boobed face of superhero comics.

But Virgin are really playing catch-up as Arab countries boast their own superhero comics promoting understanding of Islamic values and Middle Eastern history. There's The 99, named after the 99 traits of Allah, from Kuwait, and Middle East Heroes from Cairo's AK Comics. Not so much with the evil ragheads of classic American comics, AK's series got lots of positive web coverage when it was announced and both books have proved popular.

So far, so positive. But the comics medium is not only there to serve nationalist or community-building purposes -- it can also be used for critique and satire, as well as reportage. While the Egyptian authorities have no problem with Zein, the Last Pharaoh representing their culture in the graphic world, it seems they have more of a problem with "the first adult Arabic graphic novel, is set in a chaotic modern Cairo pulsing with financial and social insecurity." Magdi al-Shafi'i's The Metro uses the story of a bank robbery to throw light on corruption and change pulsing through an urban, modern Cairo that's very different from the cartoon-bright world of Middle East Heroes. It has more in common with critical and political graphic novels like Etgar Keret's Kamikaze Pizza and it's also met an excited reception.

And lo, it's beenbanned. Not just banned, but booksellers have been told to wipe any mention of it from their computers. And the publisher Sheikh Muhammad al-Sharkawi, a blogger, translator and academic, has been jailed (for the second time: he served a previous sentence of two years for solidarity with Egypt's judges against the ruling party). Why? Because the graphic novel is written in colloquial language and could harm "public manners," according to the Arabic Network for Human Rights.

After you've picked up your free X-Men or Amelia on 3 May, take a look at Words Without Borders' translation of The Metro… It's a free comic -- and it could help to set a wrongly-imprisoned man free. Now, isn't that a job for Zein, the Last Pharaoh?

Old Books, Pt II

and also old films, so look away if you're of a purely literary disposition.

Romola has been dispatched and I'm parcelling out Alberta, which is almost as depressing-yet-tempting as Jean Rhys' short stories (cold, alcoholism, unwanted pregnancies, sexism, but -- PARIS!), and I'm trying to get down to 'serious' work reading. Id est, theory. Stuff published (although not really sub-edited) by Routledge and various university presses. I read about half of Griselda Pollock's new book Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum at the British Library before the buzzing neon lights and chattering/texting undergrads overpowered my will to study/live. It's a brilliant concept: a tour through the privately-curated imaginary 'museum' of an extremely thoughtful and wide-ranging art historian, focused around Canova's Three Graces and various statues, paintings, photographs, and performances that resonate with details from the sculpture. It's also a ridiculously badly-designed book: all the images are in misnumbered portfolios at the start of chapters, instead of in the text, which makes it seem impossibly dense. I'm looking forward to hearing further chapters as part of the Slade lectures in Cambridge. Especially the one on Charlotte Salomon, who is one of my favourite artists, and feminist filmmaker Chantal Akerman.

I was reading an essay over the holidays (because Theory never stops) about Akerman which made me realise that I also need to start Delirium's Cinema, as the number of important films I haven't seen is at least comparable with the bookshelf lacunae. Film and books are totally tied together for me, not only because I am fascinated by adaptation (even more so after reading Linda Hutcheon's enviably readable and comprehensive A Theory of Adaptation) but also because I learnt a lot about film from books, and vice versa. I've never been so startled as when a student came up to me on the first day of the first film course I ever taught and said they were horrified that there was a textbook and a course reader -- they had thought that a film course meant no reading. I'm intrigued by accounts of film-going in novels and poems, and by the use of poetry and literary allusions in cinema. Although cinema studies is becoming fiercely anti-literary, I can't help but see the two as entwined.

That's why I'm enjoying my other big read of the week, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's Unthinking Eurocentrism. Like the nineteenth-century novel, this is a work whose importance I've long known, and whose position I've known about through references in other books, but which I've failed repeatedly to read beyond the useful introduction (linked above).

What's most useful for me is that it's a vast catalogue of films that I either don't intend to see (Drums Along the Mohawk) or wouldn't have a chance of seeing (Brazilian auto-ethnographic video documentaries). Perhaps it's as naughty to expand one's cinematic knowledge through reading about films as it is to presume that seeing the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is the equivalent of reading it, but what a cataloguing project like Shohat's and Stam's offers is discernment and guidance in the overflowing world of media "choices."

Many of the films in my "never going to see" category are the ones that are easily available: screened at multiplexes, frequently on cable, released on DVD. These are the ones that, according to Shohat and Stam, form the presumed canon of cinema. They're mainly Hollywood or Hollywoodized products and there's a widely-promulgated belief that Hollywood is the natural definition of cinema. In fact, they have some excellent statistics as to why not: Hollywood cannot compete with the domestic output of Asian national cinemas today, for example. Even in the early days of film, the narrative that holds that the French invented cinema and the Americans perfected it (with crumbs for the Germans and British) leaves out the development of national cinemas in India, Argentina, Brazil, and other countries, which occurred simultaneously. Yet "early film," as taught in the majority of EuroWestern schools, means Griffith, Chaplin, Méliès, and Murnau. Maybe with Nell Shipman thrown in to demonstrate "diversity." But the whitewashing of cinema is inbuilt into the aesthetic criteria cinema studies inherits from art history and literary criticism: West is best, which means linear narrative, character motivation, verisimilitude, etc. And as in early cinema, the argument goes, so in contemporary cinema. After all, Hollywood's dominant production and distribution model has reached every corner of the globe, so what film hasn't been affected by it? Why, therefore, bother teaching a Malian or Filipino film, when they're just derivative of the superior model? And why even touch contemporary cinema when classical Hollywood film and European neo-realism are the quintessence of filmmaking?

Shohat and Stam's book offers a number of powerful rebuttals to these arguments (which I grinned and bore through dinner with a senior American film scholar last week -- perhaps the reason that I finally pulled it off the bookshelf). Is it necessary to watch all of classical Hollywood to understand continuity editing? Nope, nor to get agitated by the sexism and racism built into the system. Is it necessary to see Knocked Up to know that it's not very funny when it comes to the right to choose? Nope again. That's why film criticism exists, and even Theory, divided off into a scary section of its own in most bookshops. It can encourage people to go and see a more challenging film, like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days by making it accessible as well as relevant.

That's what's also needed with Theory: books like Hutcheon's and Shohat and Stam's, and even Pollock's, have plenty to offer readers who want to be informed. They're not jargony, they have lots of images, and they're all concerned with questions relevant to contemporary life. But while memoirs, pop philosophy, and "history of x" books have seen non-fiction sales soar in the last ten years, books that require readers to think (rather than doing their thinking for them) have been pushed into corners haunted only by students with booklists. Just as even independent cinemas are falling over themselves to screen barely left-of-centre, studio-funded fare like No Country for Old Men. Perhaps I'm alone in wanting a challenge, particularly to the status quo, but I don't think so. Nor did George Eliot. But that's why Romola's never been adapted for the screen. Too much thinking.

New Blog, Old Books

... which was always the intention of this blog, but being Delirium sometimes the excitement of the new and curious overtakes the best of intentions. Here at DL I've begun the new year by admitting to myself that my knowledge of books written before I was born is, erm, slightly selective despite having studied English Literature at university for about a thousand years. I largely skipped eighteenth and nineteenth century fiction, and admit to some bourgeois/humanist anxiety about the fewness of the European classics in translation on my shelf. Unlike my friend Steve, I don't have the iron will to conceive a program of reading including a moratorium on the new, but I am trying, piecemeal, to spend some time with the Classics shelf in the bookstore.

And it's very seductive, not least because it's one of the few places that classic paperback design persists, with the elegant black Penguin Classics spines dominating at my local independent bookstore (I never liked the garish yellow and red of the 1990s Oxford World Classics redesign). Penguin is rightly celebrated for its excellence in book design, which makes its venture into ridiculous celebrity cover art (Manolo Blahnik for Madame Bovary) seem slightly childish, totally a product of Blair's obsessive "Brand Britain" type of design fetishism. Meanwhile, in the background, they continue to provide an astonishing kaleidoscope of foundational texts from many cultures, including a new translation of the Shahnama (Persian Book of Kings).

That's one for another day. At the moment, my lacuna-filling has brought me to George Eliot. I tried to read Mill on the Floss when I was eighteen, and threw it out of a coach window after about seventy pages. Boooooooooring. Bonnets and Pilgrim's Progress and moors. Where was the wuthering? In the spirit of Alice, I found it hard to see the point of a book with no shagging and no pop culture references. I was obsessed with Kathy Acker, the Sandman, and Michael Ondaatje. I wanted wild poetry, rebellion, experimentation, and general naughtiness.

George Eliot, though, she knew all about naughtiness: how it lives in the smallest acts of rebellion. How it has to stay small in a society as constrictive as hers. And how, in a society where women could only be bodies, perhaps the greatest act of transgression was to stay true to a life of the mind. That's what I learnt from Middlemarch, which I read on something of a dare by my friend Kate. It took me nearly two weeks of reading several hours a day, but I got obsessed with it: not so much with Dorothea but with the catty, arch voice of the omniscient narrator which seemed to speak for/from Dorothea's secret heart. I did in fact once play Dorothea in a play set after the end of Middlemarch, but never read the book. What I mainly remember from that play is the sense of constriction, and the childlikeness attributed to her, which I can now see as misogynistic bobbins. Although everyone considers her unworldly, I find Dorothea - certainly by the end of the novel - one of the most grown-up characters I've ever encountered. Her seriousness of purpose is breathtaking.

Romola, which I'm reading now, seems like a sketch for a novel focused on a serious woman. It's not considered one of the Eliot canon (except by Henry James, who loved the Florentine setting - and probably the tortuous sentence structures) but there's a perverse pleasure in its oddness, the way in which Medicean Florence is turned into Middlemarch, with its churchy faction and its bold young men, its dry scholars and beautiful country women. Romola is a Dorothea who married Lydgate, a serious young woman discovering that a bold, popular young man in probably extremely shallow. It's fascinating to see the pieces played differently.

But it's more of an academic exercise than a pleasurable fiction. My current pleasure read is Alberta and Freedom by Cora Sandel, perhaps Norway's most celebrated woman novelist. I had never even HEARD of her until I encountered a new edition of Alberta in the Galignani bookstore in Paris, which is a treasure trove and possibly heaven. I'd never been there before and it was good enough to distract me from the promise of "Paris' best hot chocolate" at Angelique's next door, which looked like something out of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoninette.

Alors, Alberta. Cora. According to the introduction to Virago's English translation, they are one and the same: a Norwegian woman who has fled a marriage to learn French in Paris, writing occasionally and modelling for artists. It's Paris between the wars, the literary era that most makes me wish for a time machine, and Alberta is part Jean Rhys and part Jean Seberg. There's something in both the mordant observation and cultivation of solitude that reminds me of Tove Jansson.

Is it a Scandinavian thing? I haven't read enough Scandi literature to know. Will I ever? Delirium's Library stretches to the vanishing point...

Were You, or Have You Ever Been?

In 1957, Judge Clayton Horn threw out the obscenity case against Allen Ginsburg's Howl, saving City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti from 50 years in jail.

If Ferlinghetti had served all that time, yesterday (3 Oct) would have been the day he stepped back into the light of freedom. In tribute to the poem, the publisher - and the clear-sighted justice - Pacifica.org broadcast Howl yesterday... and only broadcast it online, as WBAI-FM were afraid of getting smacked down by the FCC, the New York Times reports.

With fines of up to $325,000 in their arsenal, the FCC have succeeded where the 1950s courts failed -- but the internet follows in Ferlinghetti's footsteps. Following a run of 1950s-set movies (Good Night and Good Luck, The Notorious Betty Page) this seems like clear evidence that the US is heading back to the days of UnAmerican activities -- which bodes well for another Beat-inspired revolution.

To Pacifica and all who sail with her, DL says: "Good night, and good luck!"

Tori Gets a Tan

Clyde, one of Tori Amos' myriad characters from her new album American Doll Posse records in her blog that she left the Australian leg of her tour with a copy of Shaun Tan's amazing illustrated book The Red Tree. Which is weird, because DL just picked up a copy of that book at the truly incredible Salts Mill bookshop, while attending a reading by SF Said, author of Varjak Paw as part of the Saltaire festival. Delirium, as Sandman fans will remember, was based on Tori by her friend and fan, Neil Gaiman.

It seems strange but perfect that this should happen the week I saw Theatre de Complicite's A Disappearing Number at the Barbican, with texts by John Berger -- as I'm reading Berger's new book, Hold Everything Dear. Complicite's show, which makes mathematics into poetry, works from the idea that everything is connected, both figuratively and literally.

The same day, I get an email from my Australian friend, the brilliant playwright and poet Jasmine Chan, who introduced me to Tan's work with a copy of The Arrival which - in true DL style - greets visitors to my flat, who get drawn to its beauty, but has yet to be read. Now I feel that I must, to participate fully in the connectedness.

Rumi-nations

Happy 800th birthday to Rumi. Born in 1207 in Balkh, now part of Afghanistan, Rumi's life, as much as his poetry, offers incredible resonance with the present. He was driven from Balkh by invaders, and lived in exile in Anatolia, where he wrote his masterpiece the Mathnawi, about exile, loss and the spiritual longing for reunion.

800 years on, controversy and division reign online, with his family claiming to run the only true Rumi site, which identifies the poet as Anatolian and embroils him in religious and geneaological disputes. Rumi.org, rumi.net and a surprising number of Rumi bars and restaurants also pop up on Google, however. Perhaps the global location of the eateries is a more profound indication of one of the central tenets of Rumi's work, which goes beyond nationalism, in the spirit of the wandering dervish.

It's a thought that's beautifully expressed in Sally Potter's film YES, which took some of its inspiration - for a story about the relationship between an Irish-American scientist and a Lebanese Armenian doctor, both living in different kinds of exile in London - from Rumi's ecstatic verse. Rumi was a religious poet, a Sufi mystic, but his poems emphasise belief as an opening of the heart in love.

Here's Rumi's vision of a world in which love, rather than the lust for power, rules, in Shahram Shiva's translation:

"This is a gathering of Lovers.
In this gathering
there is no high, no low,
no smart, no ignorant,
no special assembly,
no grand discourse,
no proper schooling required.
There is no master,
no disciple.
This gathering is more like a drunken party,
full of tricksters, fools,
mad men and mad women.
This is a gathering of Lovers."

"There is no high, no low... No proper schooling required." How radical a thought is that, on the eve of the Conservative party conference?

Gone Down to Sedna

This blog it becoming an obit list. Morbid. But it seems like attention only turns to some of the most moving and important artists of the day when they go into the night. None of them gently.

Katerie Akiwenzie-Damm drew my attention to the passing of storyteller, artist, raconteur and rager Alootook Ipellie, forwarding a link to her reading at his memorial service. Although Ipellie was recognised as a major figure in Canadian letters, his death did not make any of the Canadian national broadsheets, although there's a wry and warm note in the Ottawa Citizen.

for example by this article in Studies in Canadian Literature, which asks why so few Canadian First Nations, Métis and Inuit writers are widely known, either nationally or internationally?

It's a damn good question. The UK broadsheets are wetting their knickers this week over the new Michael Ondaatje novel, and undoubtedly the new Margaret Atwood/Alice Munro/Alistair McLean would have the same effect. Don't get me wrong: I moved 3000 miles across the pond to study Canadian literature, inspired by In the Skin of a Lion.

But what I found when I got there was a storytelling and poetic culture of vast inventiveness, resilience, humour and rage that's barely known: writers as lauded as Beth Brant, Tomson Highway, Greg Scofield, and others whose work has largely been published by indigenous presses such as Theytus and Kegedonce (Akiwenzie-Damm's press), or regional and feminist presses. Their work connects with the land in a way that Ondaatje's catalogue of city buildings can only faintly echo.

I'm more excited than I can say about the film adaptation of Fugitive Pieces that opened the Toronto Film Festival this month. But I'd be even more excited to see the second film by Métis director Clint Alberta. But it's not going to happen, because he's dead. Likewise another book from Ipellie, a follow-up to the magnificent, surreal, wonderful, scary, sexy Arctic Dreams and Nightmares.

Poet and one-man publishing army rob mclennan paid tribute to Ipellie on the Ottawa Poetry blog -- by quoting from the MSN Encarta article on him! Cmon, this is a writer who toured, read, published, made friends and enemies tirelessly and internationally.

mclennan gives a link to one of Ipellie's essays, which glints with shards of his sharp wit and precise eye for gorgeousness and horror. If you can find it, track down Akiwenzie-Damm's anthology Without Reservation for Ipellie's answers to everything you ever wanted to know about having sex in the Arctic but were afraid to ask. When NASA (or whoever) accepted Sedna as the name of the planet, or planetoid, or planetlike object, found in the Kuiper Belt, Ipellie's story "Summit of Sedna" should have appeared in the New Yorker. Or projected onto the sky.

Those Inuit party girls remember you, Alootook. They're waiting for you with Sedna, down under the sea, combing her hair.

Amazing Grace

American short story writer and poet Grace Paley died Wednesday. If you've never heard of her, you've never lived.

The first and last of a generation, Paley was a street-corner agitator, a poet of everyday speech, a fantasist of the porch stoop. She was one of the few remaining voices of the Bund, the Jewish Socialist unions who brought Yiddish humour (and food) to the tenements of New York.

In her stories, the Big Apple is its own country, half American but half Eastern European, and half purely itself. She did that kind of math, brilliantly. She was a mistress of the shrug, the pause, the glinting eye, the ear as keen as a journalist's pen, the absurd punchline that had you in tears.

Her stories were like Chagall paintings more than a little: a woman climbs a tree in Central Park to think; an American tourist decides she prefers China; a very overdue library book holds the secret of a failed marriage.

In my favourite story, a Jewish preschooler gets to play Mary in a nativity play - a matter of complex pride, shame and surprise to her parents, a microcosm of what is means to be a secular working-class Jew in America summed up in the neighbour's question after the play:

"Nu, so how's the Virgin?"

I can't think of any better tribute than that I'm going to hunt down my Collected Stories, signed by Paley at a reading in 1996, and re-read every story, treasuring them. Then I'm going to hoist my soapbox under my arm, go out and protest the war, and listen in on the lives and dreams of passers-by as I do.

Instant Nostalgia

It's a moment that could have come from a novel by the great adopted Canadian himself: the same month that Spook Country (a novel that has its own blog, that's how avant it is) is published, the restaurant where the protagonist of its prequel, Pattern Recognition eats dinner on her first night in London closed up shop.

I have a particular affection for Galangal that's entwined with geek god William Gibson descending from the cloud forests of Vancouver to notice a so-so Thai restaurant opposite the Odeon on Parkway. It was the site of many lively dinners with some of my best friends, one of whom also became friends with a writer-director called Giada Dobryzenksa who persuaded Gibson to appear in her short film Mon Amour, Mon Parapluie.

She stayed friends with Gibson, and kept him updated about her life in London - so weird aspects like Galangal and Mega City Comics, which Tom introduced her to, show up in Pattern Recognition. Tom, a filmmaker, lived on Parkway for a long time, as does a filmmaker character in the novel...

I bought Pattern Recognition at Heathrow airport as I was flying back from London to Toronto, the day after a Galangal dinner with Tom and our merry band. Reading about Cayce Pollard's transatlantic flight (she was in First, I was in cattle, but the principle was the same) I was struck with the Gibsonian emotion of "instant nostalgia," a sense of loss not for the distant past but for the previous moment. Time magazine uses it to describe the particular quality of pop art, which puts a sheen of kitsch melancholy over instantly recognisable brands and dead celebrities. Blogger Shit Happens was inspired to instant nostalgia by seeing the Transformers movie.

It's the emotion of the postmodern condition - a continual ache of loss for the empty present, a sense of entropic decay as what makes the vibrant moment come alive. Gibson would probably call it "nano-nostalgia," or use the example of feeling sad when - for example - playing an interactive game the previous day's state of affairs, scenarios and posts have been superceded by the new day's. Cyberloss is all the more painful for the illusion that the Web "remembers it for you wholesale."

Galangal will be just one of the ghosts that haunts Spook Country when I get around to reading it. Another will be the long-lost alt thread where I discovered an earlier Bill (beta-test version?), a hippie draft dodger dealing weed in Toronto's Yorkville. In the way of the gradual instutionalisation of the web, you can now watch this choice titbit, this covert discovery, on the CBC archives. Despite this fresh-faced countercultural charm, Gibson says that the future he was responsible for inventing, as the Capo of cyberpunk, just isn't living up to his specs.

You know what they say: those who can't find history on Google? Condemned to watch Big Brother repeats.

Word Power

At Harare's Book Café, getting booed off stage ain't the worst thing that can happen to a poet. Italo Calvino has an essay in Cosmicomics where he writes that the fear broadcast by the censors remind us of the power of the word.

I'm trying to think of a joke about "getting booked," but there just isn't one, so -- read, be inspired, spit some words of protest. And if you're lucky enough to be at the Edinburgh festivals (whichever of them) this week, check out my good friend and heroSandra Alland spitting into the wind of war at Word Power's anti-war reading tomorrow (10th).

A Malian Moment

The great library of Timbuktu is about to be restored, depending on the political will (and aims) of Libya and South Africa. Meanwhile Rokia Traoré is touring her stage show Wati, which imagines Mozart as a griot at the court of 13th century Malian emperor Soundiata Keita. Keita was the Charlemagne of Africa, but his name meant little to puzzled audiences at the Barbican. With Touareg bands like freedom fighters Tinariwen and Timbuktu-based Tartit insurgent, and drawing crowds to the annual Festival in the Desert, is this Mali's moment?

2007 also sees the resurgence of Mali's film industury - following in the path laid down by the great Souleymane Cissé - with Faro: Goddess of the Waters screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and making the new Artistic Director, Hannah McGill's, top five picks for her first fest.

Are there Malian writers about to build on the recognition of African writers in Britain this year, with Chimananda Adichie Ngozi winning the Orange prize, and Chinua Achebe winning the Man Booker International Prize? Any suggestions or recommendations for Malian reads?

Dying for the Words

A rare event: I got talking to a fellow cinemagoer after we caught each other surreptitiously checking out our tear-reddened eyes in the washroom mirror after the film. Talking about things that make us cry, I mentioned the newspaper, and she cited a story she'd heard on BBC World this week about the assassination of master calligrapher Khalil al-Zahawi in Baghdad. And that's the only traditional news outlet where I could find information. Blogger liosliath, at Morocco Time, links to the BBC article and to some examples of al-Zahawi's calligraphy. Follow the link for the art, not the blog, which is reductionist and partisan in claiming al-Zahawi's death as part of a Zionist plot.

From the other reductionist, partisan corner comes Bobfrombrockley, who makes the excellent point that there's been no news coverage of this story in the English-speaking world (comparable to, say, David Hockney being mugged and shot and no-one reporting it), and the slightly less sound point that al-Zahawi's death somehow proves that the US & UK are right to be in Iraq.

Logic fails. Words fail. Language is shorn of beauty. A library burns.

Also in memory of novelist, filmmaker, educator, provocateur Ousmane Sembene.

Innocuous yet volatile? Verbose yet inchoate?

Yes, I have been wasting more time online in the last couple of days, on a new site called Wordie. I was tipped off by the LibraryThing bloggers, who were offering alternative pursuits to bookhounds howling at the downed LT server.

And it's soooooo addictive. It's one of those fabulous web applications that seems almost, but not too, useful -- aha, you say, a place to store all the words I don't understand from reading critical theory, and see if other people understand them. Or, wow, now I can save up all my silly anglo-francisms. Or collect lovely made-up words from poems. Or try to have the most neologisms. And so the lists proliferate... Unlike urbandictionary.com, Wordie doesn't seem to exist in order to cache demeaning sexist and racist slang 'inventions' of bored wiggas. Or if it does, I haven't really tripped over that list yet.

Wordnerds may be equally unappealingly elitist, but who can resist the almost embarrassingly profligate sensual charm of vega's gems of colour list? It's like an art store for poets!

Be Kind, Read Wild

On a completely different note, my friend Alison talked me into adding iRead to my Facebook page yesterday -- I was waiting for books in the British Library and bored, so not so much with the arm-twisting. It made me realise that I hadn't written a thing on this blog for ages, hence the guilt-induced double post.

Particularly shamefully, I forgot to post a book launch for Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilisation, a book that seems far from my normal beat, but is a) written by one of the best teachers I ever had, Ted Chamberlin, and b) is actually a book about the entwined history of humanity and its companion species that offers a horse's eye view on colonialism, agriculture, war, poetry and just about everything. It was held in the lovely new branch of Daunt Books in Holland Park, the latest flowering of the fiercely independent travel bookstore whose musty attic galleries of antiquarian maps and books in the original Marylebone High Street branch suffused my teenage years with a wanderlust that has been largely bookish. Books and travel are natural partners in my mind, two ways of exploring, two kinds of journeys. Ted's books - not only Horse, but also If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? - are ideal travel companions: anecdotal, erudite, political and passionate in equal measures.

Horse is not the only book currently fanning the fires of summer wanderlust (the execrable air in London is also doing its bit - yesterday it was, I swear, brown by 7pm). Chamberlin points out that part of the horse's fascination for writers/riders is its double signification of wildness and domestication - the promise of mobility and the promise of home. It's a paradox that would, I think, delight Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey, who lights out for the homes that EuroWestern thought sees as wilderness (the Amazon basin, Nunavut, the Australian outback, West Papua), and finds there that a sense of wildness is instrumental in making home for the people who live within and with it.

I absolutely fell in love with Wild from the first review I read in the Observer, followed by a fortnight's wait to have the book in my hands - during which I read everything I could find about the author: an interview in G2, an old Utne cover story that sets out the philosophy of wild time that lies behind the book, and some loopy, goofy, charming, playful writing for magazines like Resurgence and Aisling.

The web - its very name suggesting stuck, caught, constrained - is not the best place to meet Griffiths, although searching for her work does point to the wilds of the web, the way it brings small magazines to a wider community and allows them to connect with one another. Its webbiness is taken back from Spiderman and returned to Spider Woman, to Anansi, and to the increasingly uncommon garden spider as a labour of love, of storytelling, of subsistence.

That wild style isn't mine, but an imitation in tribute of Griffiths. Her wor(l)dplay is reminiscent of the wise, wild Mary Daly and another Spider Woman, poet Cecilia Vicuña, the title of whose English-language collection The Weaving of Words and the Unravelling of Water could also serve for Wild. As the Independent's review points out, Griffith has found wildness within an English paradoxically domesticated by globalisation. She returns frequently to the roots of words whose wood has been transformed into bland flatpack furniture.

One such astonishing etymology, that threw even this Inga Muscio reader, was Griffths' connection of "cunt" not only to "kenning" and other words for knowledge, but to "kind." Hello! I once spent an entire semester studying the use of the word "kind" in a Coleridge poem (I can't remember which poem, instructive in itself) with the archetypal eccentric professor, and although spiralling into all sorts of places - Japanese woodcuts, Roma songs, Saussurean linguistics - to explore the full menaing of "kind" as an animist Brotherhood of Species, not once was sex, gender or sexual difference mentioned. Even though (through the haze of memory) I think that the poem was about fatherhood and lacked more than the shadow of a mother.

Similarly, the reviews I've read of Griffiths' book (four so far) have all conformed to the notions of suburban, patriarchal, disembodied deathliness against which she sets the lifeforce of wildness, by glossing over the thread of kindness through her book, focused as it is on womankind, women's kindred to the wild, and particularly the kindness and kenning of cunts. While some of Griffiths' country business (in Shakespeare's pun) is the useful stuff of travel literature (how do you change a tampon while canoeing up the Amazon? hiking through West Papua?), there are passages of prose dedicated to the interconnections of interior and exterior wildscapes. Rather than sublime unknowability inspiring feats of phallic conquest, Griffiths learns and shares an indigenous sense of respect for the necessary mystery, an unknowing that is the basis of true knowing.

I'm tempted to quote whole chapters, but that would be like turning the Rockies into ski-chalet subdivisions: this is a book whose (argument is that) wildness is in its wholeness, and that wholeness is in wildness. To read it is a kindness - a gentling of the spirit, a sense of affinity, an erotic learning and an elemental call to action.

Bureau of Film Incompetence?

Cary Bazalgette's letter in today's Guardian is the latest strike against the British Film Institute's mishandling of its role. As Cary points out, control of the BFI has been given to the Film Council, a commercial body whose total contribution to the canon of British cinema is Sex Lives of the Potato Men. The full woe of the story is documented - of course - on a blog, bfiwatch, run by Pam Cook, a BFI and Screen author.

Here's my take, unsanctioned by senior academics, just based on interactions with various high-ups in the BFI over the last year, and also on conversations with library staff. In the tradition of corporate takeovers, the Film Council is now severing the BFI into edible chunks under the cover of convergence and flagship-ness. Squillions of pounds were poured (literally, the place is made of very expensive concrete) into the ugly echo chamber of the BFI Southbank's new "wing" (think 1970s brutalist institution rather than beautiful bird), while the library struggles to fund new acquisitions and, er, pay staff.

While many researchers gently mock the BFI Library - until last year, the catalogue was entirely DOS-based and required an advanced degree in information science to find anything; there's no internet available, wireless or otherwise; the microfiche machines print ghost copy - they do so with great fondness and, more than that, a long, democratic history of use. Because the library is public, all you need to work there is a library membership (roughly a tenth of the cost of a London Library membership) and a pen (yes, a library that allows pens!) There are open shelves for browsing current and reference material, as well as a treasure trove of publicity material, deposited screenplays, audiotapes and videos. You may find yourself working alongside well-known film scholars such as Laura Mulvey or film journalists or producers or costume designers or students. All sorts of names pass over the screen that lets you know your books have arrived from the basement.

Most important of all, the staff know the collection brilliantly -- able to judge whether it's worth searching for that obscure Polish film magazine, and equally able to advise on how to find what you don't even know you're looking for. Currently, there are too few staff working too few hours, because of pay cuts siphoning off money to the empty concrete box on the other side of the river. While it's undeniably exciting that the new Mediatheque is (selectively) making material from the National Film and Television Archives available to viewers on site and on tour around the country, it just points up further the way in which the Library and Publishing divisions are being regarded as poor relations. It just reinforces a comment made to me by a student in a first-year film studies course:

"What do you mean there's a reading package? This is a film course!"

Lambda Origami Themselves Over Trans-Sexy Striptease

I'm just copying and pasting an email from Greg Wharton of Suspect Thoughts. He tells the story of Peggy Munson's censoring by Lambda so eloquently and succinctly that all I have to add is: get to grips with the press's catalogue to show your support of their authors.

Disabled Origami Striptease Author Peggy Munson Censored
for Explicit Erotic Content and for Appearing to be Straight

Last Thursday evening, our author Peggy Munson was to perform an excerpt from her Lambda Literary Award Finalist novel (Best Lesbian Debut Fiction), Origami Striptease via DVD at the annual San Francisco Lambda Literary Award Finalists’ reading. Peggy is disabled with Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome and Multiple Chemical Sensitivities and cannot travel for readings. It was arranged by Charles Flowers (the Executive Director of Lambda Literary Foundation for her to perform in San Francisco via DVD as she has done on several other occasions since the release of her novel. Peggy created a specific new DVD performance for the occasion. Ian Philips, Mama Bear and I, as well as several other folks, specifically came to see the DVD performance and cheer her book and her on.

Peggy’s DVD reading wasn’t shown, nor was anything mentioned as to why the scheduled Peggy Munson was not performing. She was simply not mentioned (thought the screen and DVD were hooked up and ready to go).

Immediately before the event ended, Ian went over and asked Jim Van Buskirk (the Program Manager of the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library) what happened. He stated that he didn’t know; that Chuck Forrester. The Lambda Literary Foundation Vice-President, had the information to introduce her.

I then spoke with the Lambda Literary Foundation Board President, Katherine Forrest, who emceed the reading. In brief (after obviously being caught off guard about being asked), she told me that Jim Van Buskirk informed her that he had watched the video selection and that it was "straight." She asked me if I had seen it. I said no but that I’ve read the novel of course. I asked her if she had seen it. No, she hadn’t watched the DVD. She had made the decision to not show the video (or even mention Peggy being scheduled to perform) without watching it. She told Jim she trusted his judgment completely. She made the decision on his statement alone. They didn't show it—even though one of the other seven readers was a “straight” spouse from an anthology about straight spouses of people who come out as LGB or T and another was Max Wolf Valerio who is a transman with a girlfriend. They didn’t show it even though Jim’s supposed statement about his perception of Peggy’s performance was incorrect.

Peggy wasn't there to ask about it, she said. But I said, ah...there's a reason for that, she’s disabled which is why..., did no one read the introduction and bio?, and the book was there, the book that has been read enough times to be narrowed down to a Finalist, and Ian and I were there, as we always are, and Jim is (was) a friend and has our personal telephone as well as our office cell.

The content is straight, she said. I said, um, no, the actual gender is not ever mentioned. One of the characters is trans. I told Katherine they might take a little more care in making such black/white statements and judgments when trying to include the community as a whole. Her complexion, which had been ever-more beet red during our conversation, blanched considerably when she heard me say “trans.” This is not the first time the Foundation has upset the trans community. An uncomfortable conversation later, Katherine took full responsibility for censoring the excerpt for gender. She said that it was a wrong decision and that she felt horrible about it. She also gave an apology to Ian about the situation. I believe she was greatly upset by what she did. But she did it, and there’s nothing to take that away.

It should be noted that not thirty minutes after Katherine made the decision to silently censor Peggy’s performance and inclusion in the event, she stood up before the audience and proudly talked to us about the Foundation being “our” Foundation and that the mentoring Lambda Literary Foundation would provide with their new LGBTQ (there’s that pesky T again!) Writer’s Retreat would help authors with the community and support she didn’t have when she was younger. This is our foundation?

The next morning I received a voice message from Charles Flowers (the Executive Director of the Lambda Literary Foundation) who stated sincere apologies for the situation, again stating that Katherine made a wrong decision and he would do everything possible to see if Peggy might be able to perform at one of the other city’s readings. What could he say? He set the whole thing up, but he wasn’t there when Katherine made the poor judgment call. He's on the hot seat for something out of his control.

When I spoke with Charles on the phone later that morning, he said Katherine watched the DVD that morning and said Jim must not have watched enough of the video since it was about a woman going down on a man, then a man going down on a woman, then two women having sex. She was rushing the video to Charles for him to add to the New York Lambda Finalist reading, if possible. I’m not sure what excerpt Katherine watched and what she heard Peggy read, but I don’t think she understood it. That's not Origami Striptease. But at least she watched and tried to understand, I guess.

I finally spoke with Jim late that afternoon when he returned my voice message and email pleas to help with some details about what happened. Despite being a friend and working together for years, he was almost hostile during our conversation and sounded quite upset with me over the situation, and the fact that I was questioning him. That makes sense! Why would I want to know the truth about the situation, anyway?

Let’s remember to never question any action by others, kids. It makes those in question annoyed.

Jim was—not surprisingly—telling a very different story from Katherine’s the night before and Charles’ earlier in the day. But I was forewarned. Charles did say that he “doubts I’ll ever get the truth from Jim about it.” Jim stated he did not have enough time to review the DVD before the reading, and only watched part of it at that point, which was 45 minutes before everyone arrived for the reading. When I asked when the DVD arrived, he said he received the DVD that Monday (Peggy rushed delivery to make sure Jim had plenty of time to test the DVD with the player, etc.). I guess four days is not enough time to watch a five-minute DVD for an event that you are in charge of.

Jim disagrees with what Katherine said the night before and stated he did not say anything about “straight” content but told Katherine specific “words” that he thought were inappropriate for the public library. (I guess I should have asked him the specific words but since the whole idea of a few words being so objectionable to him is so bizarre that under the circumstances it wouldn’t make a difference.) He thought the video to be too sexually explicit to be played.

I said, come on, Jim, I’ve been at and performed in dozens of your events…are you for real? (The San Francisco Library system and that branch most specifically host readings and events by many of our friends and colleagues and sexual content has never been an issue—at all. Nor is gender usually an issue. It is San Francisco after all. But censorship has been an issue. In 2004, I was part of a panel sponsored by the library and the New York Times regarding queer marriage and our anthology I Do/I Don’t. My contact at the New York Times wanted me to tell my authors on the panel that they couldn’t discuss the upcoming presidential election. Ha! Not. Jim was as furious as I was and stood beside me when I said that they were crazy to try and censor the content. The panel happened as planned.)

I said nothing in Origami Striptease is any more graphic than the excerpt the Lesbian Erotica Finalist Karin Kallmaker read. He agreed that it wasn’t, yes, that's true, he said, but she was “there” and able to judge the audience for appropriateness. What? Did he really say that? He took full responsibility for censoring Peggy for “explicit erotic content.” He later refused to confirm that he had agreed it wasn’t any more graphic and actually said “yeah, what-ever!” at me. I’m surprised he didn’t give me a fingersnap too. Jim did not, like Katherine, act like he was sorry and actually was quite a prick about the whole thing. I guess he didn't like (the portion of) the video (that he didn’t really watch), huh?

When talking with Katherine after the reading Thursday night about things I thought might have been the reason for the missing performance she said there was no such thing as too sexually graphic an excerpt for the Lambda reading and that that wouldn’t have been an issue or a reason to not include her.

So there you have it. Peggy Munson was censored from the Lambda Literary Award Finalist reading in San Francisco Thursday night first by the San Francisco Public Library for “explicit sexual content” and then again by the Lambda Literary Foundation for explicit gender content, in essence for being, gulp, yeah, I’ll say it… “straight!”

Peggy Munson has blogged about the censoring of her performance. Charlie Anders has also blogged about the censoring.

Information about Suspect Thoughts Press and the dirty straight book called Origami Striptease can be found here. Please give Peggy some support and let her know your feelings by responding to her blog posting. You can see other offensive performances by Peggy. And you can order the apparently too-filthy-for-San Francisco-homosexuals novel.

Greg Wharton, publisher
Suspect Thoughts Press

Ideas, cinema thereof

Went to a curious new event this week, Cinema of Ideas, organised by the Independent Cinema Office at the shiny new BFI Southbank (aka the National Film Theatre, rebranded for the covergence generation). NFT 2.0 has a huge concrete and glass barn extension, which is eerily reminiscent of the spaceship in 2001, and in this extension there is a Studio, where the COI took place.

From the description circulated, it was going to be a salon, a soirée, an interlocution and circulation of ideas among the soignée folk of the cineaste world. Only, the Studio does not have moveable seats -- it's a small preview theatre with fixed seating and a classroom-like atmosphere exacerbated by an excrutiating echo/feedback loop on the sound system that occasionally made the panel sound as if they were speaking from outer space or the Tate Modern turbine hall.

Andrea Arnold didn't show (but, I've just discovered from IMDb, was in No. 73, one of my favourite TV shows as a kid!). But two out of three ain't bad, and both Ali Smith and Gaylene Gould from the Bernie Grant Centre were great raconteuses, very personable and engaging. Ali Smith in particular was a thoughtful respondent and addressed larger social questions with ease.

The same can't really be said for the audience -- it was a lot like an encounter group crossed with the first day of class, with each speaker starting "As a..., I feel that..." No-one really responded to anyone else's point. Few offered evidence or grounds, and fewer still were able to be reflexive or self-critical. There was a decidedly anti-intellectual atmosphere - we were there because we loved cinema, not ideas -- and apparently the two are incompatible.

Further frustrating proof that the salon culture that produced thinker-creators like Susan Sontag is little in evidence in the UK. The Guardian were full of praise, recently, for a new crop of small journals -- started and curated by editors at Faber and close personal friends of Manolo Blahnik. This is salon culture the wrong way round, proceeding from celebrity and established voices. Would Gertrude Stein have made headway in such a world? Could a journal like Close Up exist today?

I would love to edit an anthology in the spirit of Close Up, bringing together writing of all genres by poets, playwrights, essayists, psychoanalysts, filmmakers, artists, novelists like Smith (whose most recent novel The Accidental is one of the most brilliant pieces of thinking about film I've read) as well as academic theorists to really see how film is being thought about. The legacy of Close Up's writers, like HD, Dorothy Richardson, and Stein has been erased by the institutionalisation of film studies, although The Red Velvet Seat has collected many modernist women's voices, both professional writers and amateur cinemagoers, into an amazing collection.

There's so many exciting writers thinking about film now: Lee Ann Brown, Abigail Child, Dodie Bellamy, Tony Harrison, Anne Carson, to say nothing of all the emerging writers whose work appears in Chroma's Cinema issue. As well as critical writers who aren't film specialists like Marina Warner, bell hooks...

"The Order is All Things Happening Now" (Tom Raworth)

Several things, all occurring at once:

1/ The Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, where there were more film and film theory books than I can begin to describe. Yup, I spent most of my time in the book room -- although I did go to several panels and events about Web 2.0 happenings, including great papers by Julia Lesage and Paul Hertz as well as meeting the excellent crew from academic multi-party blog Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope -- interesting things afoot!

I was particularly drawn to the tables set up by Wallflower and Continuum, whose respective editors Yoram Allon and David Barker were both very friendly. Duke University Press's table was also heaving; I don't know who their designer is, but the books in the Next Wave series are highly desirable. I bought Amy Villarejo's Lesbian Rule, which should really be called Lesbian Drool, -- it's so beautifully presented and gorgeously written.

Duke were celebrating the 30th anniversary of Camera Obscura, which is probably my favourite film journal. Certainly the one I consult the most. And it's now online for subscribers. Among other things, Camera Obscura published the first academic article on Thriller by Jane Weinstock. Also, they had chocolate-covered strawberries at their party.

When I wasn't rambling round and round the book room desperately trying not to buy things (other accidental purchases included Geetha Ramanathan's Feminist Auteurs from Wallflower and Petra Kuppers' The Scar of Visibility from Minnesota, whose Visible Evidence series could have caused serious wallet hemorrhaging), I also caught Michelle Citron's new media project, Mixed Greens, a choose-your-own-structure set of intertwined films each identified by a salad vegetable icon on the home screen. Each story comprises the same number of sections featuring the same themes (heartbreak, family, desire, etc). There are two strands: Citron's Irish-Jewish family history, conveyed through interviews with relatives and footage shot in Ireland as well as historical photographs; and a history of lesbian America, and specifically coupledom and changing butch-femme dynamics, from the 1950s to the 21st century. Like many of Citron's films, this latter is composed of intermixed found and staged footage, using voice overs to narrate the intimate histories. My primary reaction to it was emotive - charmed, moved, engaged, sad and happy, aroused and amused - so I'm not ready to write anything analytical yet.

Her analytical voice is one of my favourite in film theory: Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions is probably the only volume of film theory I've ever given as a gift, for its wisdom as well as its style. It moves between film script, essay, double-column essay a la Kristeva, autobiography, confessional, photographic essay, arranging an act of witness without insisting on a binary of truth and fiction. Speaking, as Cathy Caruth says, from the wound. It's one of the beautiful Visible Evidence series, so it's a deeply seductive book to handle, even as its disturbing narrative demands that you keep reading and avert your eyes.

2/ Speaking of -- I read two incredible books while I was at the conference that have become entwined in my mind with each other, with the experience of SCMS and with my travels. The first was Stevie Davies' The Eyrie, which I saw reviewed in the Guardian by AL Kennedy, who could sell me on walking over a cliff. Suffice to say that I sobbed over the blazingly sunlit Great Lakes, utterly immersed in and gripped by the narrative of connections and disconnections between three different, anarchic women. As great as the characters were, and Red Dora is one of the most seductive and persuasive portrayals of an outrageous old age I've seen since the Auntie in YES, it was the waves and wash of language that kept me in the novel.

Similar yet different, the precision of Jenny Diski's On Trying to Keep Still astonished me. Her descriptions of travel through the landscape of the mind made me think of Kay Redfield Jamieson, but also reminded me of Maya Deren's films, in which impossible spaces are united by dream logic and editing -- it's a particular mind that is stepping between beach and ice and wooden floorboard with such elegance to carry you along. It's worth checking out her blog to see that this finely crafted, spiky and witty writing is going on all the time, and to contemplate the blog as a form of going out (public) while keeping still (private), of moving not moving, of engaging community while hiding away.

3/ Community always makes me think of the Toronto Women's Bookstore, where I spent a merry afternoon supplementing the weight of my luggage with a supermarket sweep. As I'm travelling and hanging out with good friends, I haven't had much time to enjoy my booty, but I am so looking forward to Nalo Hopkinson's newbie, The New Moon's Arms and Joanne Arnott's Steepy Mountain Love Poems. Drawn and Quarterly's beautiful newest book Aya is a treat for a rainy day (a fairly safe bet that it won't be long on the shelf in the UK, then), and I'm holding out for a delivery of Betsy Warland's Only This Blue after reading about it in the most recent Herizons.

4/ And after all that Canadiana (yes, it's allCanCon!), to end with a (slight) return to the US and media studies: Buffy Season 8 the comic. I am hyperventilating as I write this, and also predicting a panel at SCMS next year (oddly, Michael Franti is singing about vampires as I write this - the BtVS uncanny is back in business!). Can a comic be a TV series and vice versa? What does it mean when the paratext is rapidly becoming the text (tee hee)? The Buffy is My Life essay contest on Dark Horse's MySpace page is a curious example of the ways conventional publishing is harnessing online fan community energy and new media convergence. SCMS panel for sure (any takers?)

I Want!

I'm really used to wanting books (for example, the WACK! exhibition catalogue) but less used to wanting web magazines - after all, how can you own them? -- but Drunken Boat makes me feel all weak at the knees. It's the cutest kid at the prom, totally desirable and totally aloof. Want! Thanks to the fabulous poet and community activist and all-round grrl riot Sandra Alland for bringing it to my attention.

Addictive - but proactive?

Terrible things are afoot. Instead of writing a really cool short story riffing on Icelandic folk tales, I've discovered Squidoo via the lovely people at Artsphere, who offer the persuasive argument that if I Squidoo, I will make money, find a job, be elected president of the Galaxy and not be such a late adopter when it comes to social networking...

So far, so non-literary. But I think Squidoo could be a pretty good tool for writers looking to do lo-fi promo, and readers looking to pick up new titles. No-one's really cracked how to make the internet work for writers - don't buy the lulu hype - but maybe this self-generating, soapbox/storefront will be the way forward?

One R out of 3 Ain't Bad

Long time coming... But really, I've been doing more writing than reading of late (in the fun sense). I have been wearing grooves in the seats at the British Library and the BFI library, but somehow reading Derrida just isn't that fun anymore... Although I have been re-reading a lot of Ursula Le Guin, and thinking about why she's so amazing. How can you not love someone who reads and reviews so brilliantly and justly. I'm hoping that a little of her hard-earned charms will rub off on me...

Thankfully, for the time being, my writing is actually making waves. "They like me, they really like me!" [You can hear the parodic Hollywood hysteria there, right?]

So this is an utterly self-disinterested posting plugging the wonderful Stride magazine where I may have some poems in a recent online issue.

Look out for a familiar name cropping up in new issues of Seam, Staple, Equinox, Frogmore Papers, Interpreters House, Avocado, IOTA and Velvet.

Thanks to the lovely folks at the Poetry Library, Staple, Equinox, Frogmore Papers, Interpreter's House and Iota - along with other excellent magazines - can be read for free online.

Most small magazines are put together by volunteer editors, and most can't afford to pay their writers. If you can afford to buy or subscribe to any of these magazines, you're not only helping sustain a publication, but an entire community. But reading online and enjoying is all to the good :)

Double Poetry Whammy

from the Guardian this morning, treating Review readers to an interview with the magnificent Anne Carson AND a resolved Ruth Padel arguing that poetry is better than the gym as far as happiness indices are concerned. Both of them make a bid for the importance of 'difficult' poetry -- or indeed, claim that all poetry should be difficult. I can't really add anything to their contributions so... yeah... If the articles inspire you, look out for Padel's A Poem and a Journey, a follow-up compendium of poems and reading guides to her 52 ways of looking at a poem which is an English degree (except more fun and with fewer deadlines) in a book.

Jordan, Lorde, Sontag, Butler, Willis... Who Will Be Left to Speak?

Feisty, fabulous feminist essayist Ellen Willis died yesterday. The silencing of a major leftist voice in the US is a cautionary note after last week's midterms victory for the newly centrist Democrats. Willis was a pioneering voice for abortion, an expanded definition of family, workplace rights, pro-sex feminism and cultural radicalism.

She was also one of the first people to bridge academia and activism, and one of the last of a generation of feminist essayists who included Susan Sontag. Katha Pollitt is one of the few remaining feminists writing regularly for US national publication and receiving global attention (OK, Naomi Klein and Noreena Hertz are the newbies). Don't even mention Caitlin Smith or Ariel Levy, who Willis would have torn to shreds in seconds.

Where are the feminist essayists of our generation, trained in the humanities and thinking politically? Lots of brilliant women write for Bitch and Bust, many of them combining academic or professional careers with activist writing. But not the New Yorker or Salon.com. Why is that? And why are so many of the voices that do get heard those of attractive white middle-class women?

Poem of the Moment

The internal rhyme! The powerful use of the past participle to imply the pastness of its couplet partner. The subvocalic echo of the rush with which the news was received, with its powerful "sh" alliteration of a clean wind bringing change, borne on the wings of dreams...

And the tickertape stutter of "election" bringing us back to earth - openended, reminding us that the war (in the Senate and in Iraq) is not over.

The Evening Standard opted for the headline "Bushwhacked!" with its cowpoke charm and neat Whedon echo (GWB as king of the Reavers, anyone?) but this poster brings more chickens home to roost for me with its dual physical/emotional "crushed."

Waving or Drowning?

I've now been reading Virginia Woolf's The Waves for a month. It's less than 200 pages long, gorramit, but I just can't seem to finish it. It's actually a great book for public transit reading -- absorbing yet non-linear enough to roll with the punches (yup, actual punches sometimes, along with sophisticated elbow blocks and shoulder barges). I have read it before, back in the distant mists of my adolescent Virginia Woolf obsession (inspired by Sally Potter's Orlando) but the impetus to re-read came from the incipient multimedia stage production by Katie Mitchell at the National Theatre. I've wanted to re-read it for a while, since doing some work on how Virginia Woolf haunts contemporary films about women academics -- Charlotte Rampling gives a scintillating reading from The Waves in Sous le sable, very much a film about waving and drowning.

So -- will I finish the book before the show tonight? Or is it a book that - with its cyclical nature - can never truly be finished without beginning it again?

Get Some Chicken

Here I was, planning to be soooooo good and make some headway into the stacks of Delirium's Library (although Marina Warner's Phantasmagoria is so mind-blowing it's like a delirious library in and of itself)... and then: boom! New Marjane Satrapi leaps off the shelf and into my hands at Mega City in Camden. See, I keep trying to be serious and read about 'the role of the archive in contemporary artist's film and video' and an article on Jean-Luc Godard by someone called Frodon (no joke!). But. Comix get in the way.

Chicken and Plums! Chicken and Plums!

K, I'm gonna go read it now. Tomorrow I will be serious and get stuck in.

Small Is Beautiful

Kegedonce has just announced two new titles! Yay for small presses, especially a small press as unique as this - publishing work by First Nations writers, and brave enough to publish poetry AND fantasy fiction. Incredible. Daniel Justice's instant cult classic, Kynship, gets its sophomore sister, Wyrwood. And Rolland Nadjiwon's Seven Deer Dancing continues Kegedonce's run of excellent poetry. If you're thinking about Thanksgiving (and surrounded by Nature's bounty, who isn't), consider giving thanks to and learning from the first folks of Turtle Island by investigating Kegedonce's diverse list. You may just meet a fabulous witch called Denarra, and fall in love at first sight...

Trobadours of Yore (and Today)

There is a fabled place in far-off West London where poetry still thrives amidst the beer drinkers and musicians tuning up in the basement. That place is The Troubadour. OK, so their troubs tend towards the swimmers of the mainstream, but worth a visit if only because all these poets came from one writing workshop. And because Shapcott, Greenlaw and Padel are light years ahead of the Armitages, Farleys and Sweeneys.

Monday 9th October - COFFEE HOUSE POETRY

Many major New-/Next-Gen poets learned their trade at a Notting Hill workshop group founded in the ‘80s by Robert Greacen. Leading names from that group come together for a unique celebration of contemporary poetry— Poetry Society president Jo Shapcott has won the National twice; Her Book: Poems 1988-1998 (Faber 2000) contains poems from her 3 collections— Maurice Riordan edits Poetry London; his 3rd book, The Holy Land is due in 2007— novelist/radio-dramatist Lavinia Greenlaw teaches on Goldsmiths College’s Creative-Writing MA; Minsk, her 3rd collection, was Eliot-prize-shortlisted— Matthew Sweeney now lives in Romania; his many publications include Sanctuary (Cape 2004) and a Selected (2002)— Ruth Padel is Poetry Society chair and contributed, for many years, a uniquely popular poetry column to the Independent on Sunday; The Soho Leopard (Chatto 2004) is her 6th collection.
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Readings 8-10pm £5.50 / £4.50 concs

Events A-Go-Go

My pixie ears prick up on hearing of the following... launch of sexy new poetry collection The Allotment at Warwick University, Oct 12th, along with the fabulous "greatest hits" of rock star poet Andy Brown. There'll be a reading in Brighton, November 18th, for all you seaside lovers, too.

There's also a whirlagig of poetry this coming weekend in Cambridge, with the Experimental Women's Poetry Festival, including Susan Schultz, Kathleen Fraser, Redell Olsen and other lovely luminaries.

For something a bit more hands on, how about a writing workshop with Saradha Soobrayen and Dorothea Smartt as part of The Fire This Time, dedicated to queering - and celebrating - Black History Month.

And, good golly, there's Poetry International, featuring Lorna Goodison, Ulrike Draesner and others.

Enough to make a librarian want to curl up and snooze, er, read a good book :)

I think you mean "What the f*** happened here"

So, Verso are calling What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles "caustic and hilarious." Uhhhhhhhh, well, it's not Jon Stewart. Perhaps hilarious in an evil-laugh-here-is-how-I'll-kill-you Mr. Bond way if you're a Republican, but otherwise just pretty damn enraging as it reveals the systemic destruction of press independence, social security, civil rights and, well, the world perpetuated by the Bush II junta. Weinberger is exactly the kind of public intellectual whose absence from American life and media debate he laments. It's instructive that several of the major pieces in this book originally appeared in European venues. Read it and weep, kids. Then register to vote and get informed. I look forward, in a grim, hiding my face way, to a similarly intelligent, well-written and non-alarmist book about the Blair years.