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cromulentbookreview · 6 years

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Binge!

It makes sense why we use a term normally associated with food like “binge” to describe that day where you do nothing but watch every episode of that one TV show. You don’t really hear someone say that they’re going on a book binge, though. When referring to a media “binge,” it’s usually always TV, and, to some extent, movies (I once binged all three Extended Editions of Lord of the Rings - it took a day and a half and it was amazing). I think we need to have more book binges in our lives. In fact, there’s even a book review site way more organized and put together than mine will ever be that’s actually called Book Binge.

Anyway, for me a book binge is when you pick out a series that already has several books out and you read them all, one after the other. I did this earlier this year with Naomi Novik’s amazing Temeraire series. I’m pretty sure it’s why I had to get new lenses for my glasses this year. I’ve been on a historical mystery kick lately - I think it has to do with the season changing from Summer to Fall where I immediately go “get me some 19th Century British Detectives!!”

Which was how I ended up tearing through all 10 of Will Thomas’s Barker & Llewelyn books.

I’d never heard of the Barker & Llewelyn series until I was traipsing around Goodreads looking for some 19th century mystery fiction. Like my strange obsession with 19th century British dudes on boats, I loves me some 19th century British mystery stories. Initially, I didn’t start out to binge the entire series. 10 books is a lot. I had a hard time with Temeraire, which is also kind of 10 books (9 and a bunch of short stories). There were times with my Temeraire binge where my attention wavered, where I wanted to just put the books down and go read something else, but I pressed on. And I discovered one of the great joys of a true book binge: no agonizing wait for a sequel. No having your interest piqued by book one and then sitting and waiting for a year and a half for the next book. With a book binge, you can put down book two and immediately pick up book three because BOOK BINGE.

There are a few 19th century British mystery series out there that I’m almost too afraid to start with because they consist of roughly ten thousand books and counting (looking at you, Anne Perry) and there’s no way I’d be able to focus on (or care about) a single series for that many books. So when I saw that the Barker & Llewelyn series consisted of nine books, like Temeraire, (plus a tenth book I’d gotten on Netgalley), and that all of them were under 350 pages, I was like “OK, I’ll give the first book a go, and see what happens.”

Yeah, I may have immediately gone from the first book to the second one. And then the third. And then the fourth and the fifth...I couldn’t stop.

The series is all about our audience surrogate, Thomas Llewelyn, and our substitute Sherlock Holmes, detective private enquiry agent Cyrus Barker. At the start of the series, Llewelyn is 22 and a widow who just spent eight months in Oxford Prison for theft. He’d been set to go places, having gotten a scholarship to Oxford, but the whole prison-sentence thing derailed all his plans. So he ends up in London (where else?) looking for work. After months of failed attempts to get a job (not a lot of job opportunities for ex-cons out there, even in the 1880s), Llewelyn decides to try for one last job before throwing himself into the Thames: an assistant position with a prominent private detective enquiry agent, Cyrus Barker. Barker, like all Great Detective Private Enquiry Agent types, is a Scottish eccentric with a mysterious past who knows everything about anything and anything under the sun. He’s got all sorts of weird scars and gang tattoos. He grew up in China and speaks like, eleventy-one languages. He wears sunglasses all the time. Like, all the time. Apparently he does so even when he sleeps. (Yes, they had sunglasses in the 19th century. No, they’re not called sunglasses in these books, but they’re referred to as his “dark spectacles”). Barker is, of course, filthy rich, and upon hiring the poor, unfortunate and 1000% broke Thomas Llewelyn, immediately provides him with room, board, and a whole new suit of fancy clothes. He also sets about correcting Llewelyn’s behavior and manners, a pretty tall order since Llewelyn is a super snarky Welshman. As far as Watsons go, Llewelyn is definitely one of the more amusing, which makes these books so goddamned fun to read.

Also, Barker has a butler called Jacob Maccabee, who rivals Llewelyn in his deadpan snarkiness. I ship Llewelyn/Mac so hard - every time they’re in a scene together they just have so much chemistry. I don’t care if Word of God is they are both straight. I just want them to be together and snark at each other all day long..

Uh.

Ahem.

Anyway.

Yes, this series is very much your standard, buddy-detective private enquiry duo present in basically all movies, TV and books, but they’re fun. And you know what we all need right now? Fun. Pure, unadulterated fun where the good guys triumph over the bad guys, where the mystery is solved and you’ve got your Sherlock Holmes and your Dr. Watson. Because have you seen the news lately? Yeah, I need some stories where pure good triumphs over evil, where people freak out at the concept of rubber tires and the telephone, and where the story of the day isn’t doom and gloom and horror. Just, you know, murder. But fun, because it’s not real. And because it was the 19th century. In Britain. And not real. Well, except Jack the Ripper, those were real but...you know.

Here’s a summary of the first nine books in the sereies:

BOOK 1 - Some Danger Involved: Your average detective enquiry agent-duo origin story featuring brilliant detective and his new snarky Welsh sidekick!

BOOK 2 - To Kingdom Come: Barker & Llewelyn go undercover and build bombs for the Irish!

BOOK 3 - The Limehouse Text: Barker & Llewelyn face big trouble in London’s 19th Century Chinatown!

BOOK 4 - The Hellfire Conspiracy: Barker & Llewelyn fight human traffickers, secret societies and such!

BOOK 5 - The Black Hand: Barker & Llewelyn fight the Italian mafia!

BOOK 6 - Fatal Enquiry: Barker & Llewelyn fight Barker’s almost comically evil arch-nemesis!

BOOK 7 - Anatomy of Evil: Barker & Llewelyn fight Jack the Ripper!

BOOK 8 - Hell Bay: Barker & Llewelyn Present: Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None!

BOOK 8.5 - An Awkward Way to Die: Barker & Llewelyn solve a case in, like, 20 minutes!

BOOK 9 - Old Scores: Barker & Llewelyn Present: Japonism in Late-19th Century England!

BOOK 10 - Blood is Blood: Barker is put temporarily out of commission by an explosion! Llewelyn must solve the case himself! Who should show up to help but Barker’s long lost brother??

A little more about Blood is Blood:

So Thomas Llewelyn is only a couple of weeks away from happily marrying his lady love, Rebecca Cowan née Moccatta. Everything is hunky-dory. And then someone tries to blow up his and Barker’s office. Barker is badly injured, leaving Thomas to investigate who tried to kill them by himself. Oh, and, same day the offices are blown up, Caleb Barker, Cyrus Barker’s long lost brother, first mentioned way back in Limehouse Text, I think, shows up. Caleb had been a major plot point in Fatal Enquiry, but then was never mentioned again until this book. He’s been living in the lawless American West, acting as a Pinkerton agent. But can he be trusted? Also, Rebecca’s family is super against her marrying a detective private enquiry agent who isn’t Jewish. Upon seeing just how dangerous the job can be, Rebecca starts having doubts. Will Thomas be unlucky in love yet again? Tune in November 13 for Blood is Blood, same bat-time, same bat channel.

Yes, this series can, at times, be formulaic and tropey, but...fuck it, I love it. Sometimes there’s comfort to be had in a story where you know the good guys will solve the mystery, maybe picking up a few scrapes along the way. I tore through all of the books of the Barker & Llewelyn series in about two weeks, and finished Blood is Blood in about a day. I should’ve gone slower, because I need more. I need at least five more books, Will Thomas, and I needed them YESTERDAY. Aaaackgh. This is what I get for binging. How long until book 11? Will we be getting another novella soon? And when are we going to meet Thomas's family?! 10 books and we've never met his parents or any of his nine siblings! I want a whole book dedicated to Thomas reconciling with his family and he and Barker and Mac running all around Wales. I NEED IT.

Write faster, Will Thomas.

Predictably, after a book binge such as this, my eyes now hurt pretty badly. Time to invest in those fancy eye drops my optometrist keeps telling me to buy.

RECOMMENDED FOR: Anyone needing an escape from the awful world we live in now.

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR: People who think everything’s fine for some reason. You know. This guy:

OVERALL SERIES RATING: 4.5/5

TOTALLY UNBIASED VICTORIAN MYSTERY / MURDERINO FANGIRL RATING: 5/5

BLOOD IS BLOOD RATING: 4/5

RELEASE DATE: November 13, 2018

ANTICIPATION LEVEL FOR NEXT BOOK IN THE SERIES: Olympus Mons

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weirdletter · 5 years

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Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past (Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature), edited by Sarah E. Maier and Brenda Ayres, Anthem Press, 2020. Info: anthempress.com.

‘Neo-Gothic Narratives’ defines and theorizes what, exactly, qualifies as such a text, what mobilises the employment of the Gothic to speak to our own times, whether nostalgia plays a role and whether there is room for humour besides the sobriety and horror in these narratives across various media. What attracts us to the Gothic that makes us want to resurrect, reinvent, echo it? Why do we let the Gothic redefine us? Why do we let it haunt us? Does it speak to us through intertexuality, self-reflectivity, metafiction, immersion, affect? Are we reclaiming the history of women and other subalterns in the Gothic that had been denied in other forms of history? Are we revisiting the trauma of English colonisation and seeking national identity? Or are we simply tourists who enjoy cruising through the otherworld? The essays in this volume investigate both the readerly experience of Neo-Gothic narratives as well as their writerly pastiche.

Contents: Introduction – Sarah E. Maier and Brenda Ayres 1. The Devil Has Red Hair – Brenda Ayres 2. The Persistence of the House: The Defamiliarisation of Gothic Tropes in Neo-Gothic Novels – Julian Wolfreys 3. Frankenstein’s Doubles – Daniel Downes 4. Toxic Neo-Gothic Masculinity: Mr. Hyde and Tyler Durden – Martin Danahay 5. Theorising Race and the New Imperial Gothic in Neo-Victorian Returns to Wuthering Heights – Carol Davison 6. ‘Here We Are, “Again”!’: Textual Painting as Neo-Gothic Narrative, from Peter Ackroyd’s ‘Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem’ to ‘The Limehouse Golem’ – Ashleigh Prosser 7. Queer Desires: Polymorphous Sexuality in Anne Rice’s ‘The Vampire Chronicles’ – Laura Davidel 8. Haunted Cultures, Haunting Lives: The Neo-Gothic in Australian Postcolonial Novels – Karen Livett 9. The Blood Is the (After)Life: Vampirism, Science and Neo-Gothicism in ‘Dark Shadows’, ‘Ripper Street’, and ‘The Passage’ – Jamil Mustafa 10. ‘Hill House’: Neo-Gothic Adaptation as a Revenant – Barbara Braid 11. “It Is Not Life That Makes Me Move”: Brainstorming about/with the Self-Aware Zombie – Karen E. Macfarlane 12. Neo-Gothic Dinosaurs and the Haunting of History – Jessica Gildersleeve and Nike Sulway 13. Doctor Who’s Shaken Faith in Science: Mistrusting Science from the Gothic to the Neo-Gothic – Geremy Carnes 14. Peculiar(ly) Monstrous: Ransom Riggs and the Children of the Syndrigast – Sarah E. Maier Index

#book #essay #gothic essay #weird essay #weird studies #gothic studies #neo-gothic

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green-violin-bow · 7 years

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Hawksmoor, BBC Sherlock and historiographic metafiction

First:

This piece is not of academic quality or rigour. I left university eight years ago; I studied literature in two languages and did well at it. Nevertheless I am no longer in academia and have not written an essay since then. My sources are partial, dependent on what I can get access to through my local library, through academic friends, or what I choose to pay for on JSTOR. I work full-time and have put no time into e.g. referencing (always my least favourite part of essays).

Although I personally hold out hope for unambiguous Johnlock still, I would not class this as a ‘meta’ arguing that it will certainly happen. This is a reading, undertaken for my own satisfaction and interest, jumping off from the inclusion of ‘Hawksmoor’ as a password in one scene of The Six Thatchers. I do not particularly mean to suggest that Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat are deliberately playing with/off literary criticism. They may well be holding two (or more) time periods in tension, however, in a way that I choose to explore through the lens of the literary tools described here. I do not seek to challenge or disprove other fan theories.

I am no television/film studies scholar. There are probably layers and layers of nuance and meaning that I’m missing because I simply have no frame of theoretical reference in that field (and one of the primary ‘texts’ we are talking about here is, after all, a television show). The abundance of television and film references discovered by Sherlock fans have made it clear that the show’s creators deliberately allude to other visual media within modern Sherlock all the time. I believe my approach here is valid because Hawksmoor, a literary text, is pointed to in the show, and because ACD canon itself was a literary text. But I want to flag up this important way in which my analysis is deficient.

I tagged a few people in this but I’m aware this is more of a musing/essay than a traditional ‘meta’ so don’t worry about reading/responding if it’s not your thing!

The Six Thatchers

In The Six Thatchers, Sherlock visits Craig the hacker, to borrow his dog Toby. On the left of our screen (taking up an entire wall of Craig’s house, realistically enough…) are lines of code, in the centre of which is written ‘Hawksmoor17’.

I was interested in finding out more about this. I decided my first port of call would be the ‘detective novel’ Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd.

Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is a historian and author, who has written a huge array of fiction and non-fiction, including:

London: The Biography (non-fiction)

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day (non-fiction)

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (an imagining of the diary Oscar Wilde might have written in exile in Paris)

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (novel, presenting the diary of a murderer)

Hawksmoor (novel)

In his work London is present, constantly, a character in itself, woven into the very fabric of the story as irrevocably as it is into the mythos of Sherlock Holmes.

Hawksmoor

In brief, Hawksmoor is a postmodern detective story, running in two timelines. Each timeline focuses on a main character: in 1711, the London architect Nicholas Dyer; two hundred and fifty years later, in the 1980s, Nicholas Hawksmoor, a detective, responsible for investigating a series of murders carried out near the churches built by Dyer.

Ackroyd plays with the ‘real history’ of London throughout, muddling and confusing the past with fictional events, with conspiracy and rumour.

There was a real London architect named Nicholas Hawksmoor who worked alongside Christopher Wren in eighteenth-century London to design some of its most famous buildings. He also designed six churches. Ackroyd chooses to change the eighteenth-century architect’s name to Nicholas Dyer, and to make Nicholas Hawksmoor the twentieth-century fictional detective instead – a deliberate muddling together of timelines and of ‘facts’.

Ackroyd had drawn inspiration for Hawksmoor from Iain Sinclair’s poem, ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor: His Churches’ (Lud Heat, 1975). This poem suggests that the architectural design of Hawksmoor’s churches is consistent with him having been a Satanist.

As well as changing the historical figure Hawksmoor’s last name to Dyer, Ackroyd adds a church, ‘Little St Hugh’. Seven, in total.

The architect Dyer writes his own story, in the first person and in eighteenth-century style.

Only in Part Two of the novel does Nicholas Hawksmoor – a fictional detective with a real man’s name – appear, to investigate the three murders that have so far happened in 1980s London. Written in the third person, the reader is nonetheless invited into Hawksmoor’s thoughts, his point of view.

As the novel proceeds, Ackroyd employs literary devices so that the stories – separated, apparently, by so much time – begin to blur. In particular, the architect Dyer and the detective Hawksmoor are linked. For instance, both men experience a kind of loss of self, a “dislocation of identity”, upon staring into a convex mirror (Ahearn, 2000, DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-2000-1001).

The cumulative effect of all the parallels is that the reader starts to lose any sense of temporal separation between the time periods; starts to see Dyer and Hawksmoor as almost the same person; to suspect each of them of being the murderer and the detective at the same time. The parallels between the time periods “escape any effort at organization and create a mental fusion between past and present” so that “fiction and history fuse so thoroughly that an abolition of time, space, and person is […] inflicted on the reader” (Ahearn, 2000).

Importantly, I believe, Hawksmoor again and again “tries to reconstruct the timing of the crimes, but this is from the start impossible” (Ahearn, 2000). This is a rather familiar feeling to Sherlock Holmes fans.

At the end of the book, Dyer and Hawksmoor come together in the church, take hands across time, or perhaps out of time. They become aware of one another. Their perspectives dissolve and seem to merge into one person, into a new style of narration not like either of them: “when he put out his hand and touched him he shuddered. But do not say that he touched him, say that they touched him. And when they looked at the space between them, they wept” (Ackroyd, 1985).

Historiographic metafiction

Hawksmoor is a postmodern detective story. It has been classified by critics as a work of ‘historiographic metafiction’. As a detective story, it lacks the most familiar feature – a detective who is able to sort and order the events and facts, before finally drawing together all the threads to present a coherent, satisfying and plot-hole-free conclusion. In other words, a solution to the mystery.

So what is ‘metafiction’? Waugh defines it as “a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (1984).

In Hawksmoor, Ackroyd uses a popular literary form (the detective story) to unsettle our understanding of fiction, reality and history. An Agatha Christie detective novel (for example) relies on an accepted, understood structure, where the reader has definite expectations of what the outcome will be; as such, Christie’s novels “provide collective pleasure and release of tension through the comforting total affirmation of accepted stereotypes” (Waugh, 1984). In metafiction, however, there is often no traditionally predictable, neat, satisfying ending: accepted stereotypes are disturbed rather than affirmed. The application of rationality and logic to the clues gets the detective no closer to solving the crime. Readerly expectation (“the triumph of justice and the restoration of order” [Waugh, 1984]) is thwarted.

Hutcheon coined the term ‘historiographic metafiction’, fiction where “narrative representation – fictive and historical – comes under […] subversive scrutiny […] by having its historical and socio-political grounding sit uneasily alongside its self-reflexivity” (Hutcheon, 2002). It is a kind of fiction that explicitly points out the text-dependent nature of what we know as ‘history’: “How do we know the past today? Through its discourses, through its texts – that is, through the traces of its historical events: the archival materials, the documents, the narratives of witnesses…and historians” (Hutcheon, 2002).

Whereas a ‘historical novel’ will present an account of the past which purports to be true, a ‘historiographic metafiction’ has a combination of:

deliberate, self-reflexive foregrounding of the difficulty of telling ‘the whole story’ or ‘the whole truth’ especially due to the limitations of the narrative voice;

internal metadiscourse about language revealing the fictional nature of the text;

an attempt to explain the present by way of the past, simultaneously giving a (partial) account of both;

disturbed chronology in the narrative structure, representing the determining presence of the past in the present;

‘connection’ of the historical period structurally to the novel’s present;

a self-consciously incomplete and provisional account of ‘what really happened’ e.g. via ‘holes’ in the [hi]story which cannot be resolved by either narrator or reader (Widdowson, 2006, DOI: 10.1080/09502360600828984).

The above points are certainly true of Hawksmoor. The reader of Sherlock Holmes will find some of them very familiar – for example, Watson’s self-conscious in-world changing of dates, names and places; and the impossible-to-resolve timeline. The audience of BBC Sherlock will also find these features very recognisable, especially from Series 4 of the programme.

I’d like to examine BBC Sherlock itself as a ‘historiographic metafiction’: a ‘text’ which self-consciously holds the past and present fictional events of Sherlock Holmes’ life in tension, not merely as another adaptation of the source text, but as a way of destabilising the accepted ‘[hi]story’ and mythos of Sherlock Holmes.

The Great Game

The Sherlockian fandom is well-known for its practice of ‘The Great Game’:

“Holmesian Speculation (also known as The Sherlockian game, the Holmesian game, the Great Game or simply the Game) is the practice of expanding upon the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by imagining a backstory, history, family or other information for Holmes and Watson, often attempting to resolve anomalies and clarify implied details about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It treats Holmes and Watson as real people and uses aspects of the canonical stories combined with the history of the era of the tales' composition to construct fanciful biographies of the pair.” [x]

There are a number of interesting features about the Great Game. It:

pretends that Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were real people;

ignores or explains away the real author Arthur Conan Doyle’s existence;

attempts to use ‘real’ historical facts (texts…) to resolve gaps in a fictional text;

in turn, produces additional (meta)fictional texts, often presented as ‘fact’ in journals set up for the purpose;

in so doing, adds constantly to the (meta)fictional destabilisation of chronology and holes in the story, as different, competing ‘versions’ are added by a multitude of authors.

The Sherlock Holmes fandom, as it attempts to elucidate ‘what really happened’, only destabilises the original (hi)story further – drawing attention, over and over again, to the gaps and inconsistencies in the original canon tales.

I would argue that the Sherlock fandom has been engaged, for over a century, in an act of collective historiographic metafiction.

The writers of BBC Sherlock are aware of themselves as fans, and of the wider Sherlockian fandom. They paid tribute to Holmesian Speculation in the episode title of Series 1 Episode 3. The title – ‘The Great Game’ – is a signal, an early marker of postmodernity in BBC Sherlock, a sign that the Sherlockian fandom will not be absent from this metafiction.

Implicating the reader/audience

There is an interesting moment in Hawksmoor where Detective Chief Superintendent Nicholas Hawksmoor goes to investigate the murder of a young boy near the church of St-George’s-in-the-East. The body is beside “a partly ruined building which had the words M SE M OF still visible above its entrance” (Ackroyd, 1985).

As Lee says, the “missing letter is "U," ("you") the reader” (1990).

Elsewhere in the book, Hawksmoor receives a note instructing him “DON’T FORGET … THE UNIVERSAL ARCHITECT” alongside a “sketch of a man kneeling with a white disc placed against his right eye” (Ackroyd, 1985).

Lee suggests that this drawing refers to “detective fiction’s transcendental signifier” Sherlock Holmes, and that the “Universal Architect, here, can only be the reader, since it is he or she who is in possession of all the histories: the historically verifiable past, the eighteenth-century text and the text accumulated through reading”. Thus, the reader is “doubly implicated not only as a repository of the past, but also as a co-creator of artifact and artifice” (Lee, 1990). In the Sherlock Holmes fandom, this is more true than in almost any other; co-creators indeed.

The missing ‘U’ in Hawksmoor can be clearly linked to the daubed ‘YOU’ in ‘The Abominable Bride’, a sign that, from that point on, BBC Sherlock will be clearly and mercilessly implicating its audience; putting the Sherlockian fandom back in the story, where it has always belonged. This includes the writers and creators of BBC Sherlock.

I also think there is reason to link the ‘YOU’ daubed on the wall to another piece of graffiti in BBC Sherlock – the yellow smiley face in 221b. An all-seeing, ever-present audience within Sherlock and John’s very home.

It is often repeated that Arthur Conan Doyle only continued to write Sherlock Holmes stories out of financial necessity and due to public demand; that he was bored and exasperated by his creation. The Sherlock Holmes fandom is (possibly apocryphally) known as having worn black armbands in the street in mourning for the fictional detective when Conan Doyle attempted to kill him off in The Final Problem.

The Sherlock Holmes fandom has long been considered importunate and unruly. As Stephen Fry puts it in his foreword to The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes: “Holmes has been bent and twisted into every genre imaginable and unimaginable: graphic novels, manga, science fiction, time travel, erotica, literary novels, animation, horror stories, comic books, gaming and more. Junior Sherlocks, animal Sherlocks, spoofs called Sheer Luck and Schlock; you think it up, and you’ll find it’s been done before. There is no indignity that has not been heaped upon the sage and super-sleuth of Baker Street” (2017).

And yet, with every new adaptation, there is a tendency to regard it as a blank slate, in direct conversation with the canon of Arthur Conan Doyle. There is a tendency to forget the changes that fandom itself has wrought on the figure of Sherlock Holmes – a weight of stereotype and expectation which warps the character to a pre-fit mould in every incarnation. As Fry says, Holmes:

“rises up, higher and higher with each passing decade, untarnished and unequalled. Because, I suppose, we need him, more and more, a figure of authority that is benign, rational, soothing, omniscient, capable and insightful. In a world, and in daily lives, so patently devoid of almost all those marvellous qualities, how welcome that is, and how grateful we are, for its presence in our lives. So grateful, that we won’t really accept that Sherlock Holmes could ever be classed as ‘make believe’. Between fact and fiction is a space where legend dwells. It is where Holmes and Watson will always live” (2017).

This is the traditional understanding of Sherlock Holmes and its fandom, and is highly reminiscent of the voiceover by Mary Morstan in Series 4 Episode 3, ‘The Final Problem’: “I know who you really are. A junkie who solves crimes to get high, and the doctor who never came home from the war. Well, you listen to me: who you really are, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about the legend, the stories, the adventures. There is a last refuge for the desperate, the unloved, the persecuted. There is a final court of appeal for everyone. When life gets too strange, too impossible, too frightening, there is always one last hope. When all else fails, there are two men sitting arguing in a scruffy flat like they’ve always been there, and they always will. The best and wisest men I have ever known – Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.” [transcript by Ariane Devere]

The conception of Sherlock Holmes as “a figure of authority that is benign, rational, soothing, omniscient, capable and insightful” shows what we, the reader, want: a traditional detective story, with an all-knowing detective, who uses rationality and logic to assess the clues and brings us smoothly, at last, to a solution which reasserts the order of things; where justice is done and society is made safe once again.

BBC Sherlock, however, resists these comforting fictions. The detective unravels, becoming more emotional, more human as the story progresses. Mysteries go unsolved. The narrator gets more unreliable with every episode. Characters inhabit strange states, seemingly alive or dead as the story demands. The ‘rules’ of traditional detective fiction are flouted left, right and centre.

Viewed as a historiographic metafiction, BBC Sherlock aims to hold up the historical text (ACD canon) against the modern one (BBC Sherlock) in such a way as to slough away a century of extra-canonical fan speculation and addition, and give a new reading to canon.

‘Writing back’: re-visionary fiction

I would now like to look at Peter Widdowson’s journal article, ‘Writing back’: Contemporary re-visionary fiction’ (DOI: 10.1080/09502360600828984). He argues that there is a “radically subversive sub-set of contemporary ‘historiographic metafiction’” which, while being “acutely self-conscious about their metafictional intertextuality and dialectical connection with the past”, ‘write back’ to “formative narratives that have been central to the textual construction of dominant historical worldviews”.

Widdowson explains that his term ‘re-visionary’: “deploys a tactical slippage between the verb to revise (from the Latin ‘revisere’: ‘to look at again’) – ‘to examine and correct; to make a new, improved version of; to study anew’; and the verb to re-vision – to see in another light; to re-envision or perceive differently; and thus potentially to recast and re-evaluate (‘the original’)” (2006). He points out that this is closest to Rich’s approach to feminist criticism: “We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (Rich, 1975).

This act of ‘knowing it differently’ can also be achieved by “the creative act of ‘re-writing’ past fictional texts in order to defamiliarize them and the ways in which they have been conventionally read within the cultural structures of patriarchal and imperial/colonial dominance” (Widdowson, 2006).

Widdowson lays out what he regards as the defining characteristics of re-visionary fiction, first negatively by what it is not:

Re-visionary fiction does not simply take an earlier work as its source for writing;

It is not simply modern adaptation – instead it challenges the source text;

It is not parody – whereas parody takes a pre-existing work and reveals its particular stylistic traits and ideological premises by exaggerating them in order to render it absurd or to satirise the ‘follies of its time’, a re-visionary work seeks to bring into view “those discourses in [the source text] suppressed or obscured by historically naturalising readings. The contemporary version attempts, as it were, to replace the pre-text with itself, at once to negate the pre-text’s cultural power and to ‘correct’ the way we read it in the present” (Widdowson, 2006).

As to what re-visionary fiction is:

First, it challenges the accepted authority of the original. “[S]uch novels invariably ‘write back’ to canonic texts of the English tradition – those classics that retain a high profile of admiration and popularity in our literary heritage – and re-write them ‘against the grain’ (that is, in defamiliarising, and hence unsettling, ways)”. This means that “a hitherto one-way form of written exchange, where the reader could only passively receive the message handed down by a classic text, has now become a two-way correspondence in which the recipient answers or replies to – even answers back to – the version of things as originally delineated. In other words, it represents a challenge to any writing that purports to be ‘telling things as they really are’, and which has been believed and admired over time for doing exactly that.”

Second, it keeps a constant tension between the source and the new text. A re-visionary fiction will “keep the pre-text in clear view, so that the original is not just the invisible ‘source’ of a new modern version but is a constantly invoked intertext for it and is constantly in dialogue with it: the reader, in other words, is forced at all points to recall how the pre-text had it and how the re-vision reinflects this.”

Third, it enables us to read the source text with new eyes, free of established preconceptions. Re-visionary fictions “not only produce a different, autonomous new work by rewriting the original, but also denaturalise that original by exposing the discourses in it which we no longer see because we have perhaps learnt to read it in restricted and conventional ways. That is, they recast the pre-text as itself a ‘new’ text to be read newly – enabling us to ‘see’ a different one to the one we thought we knew as [Sherlock Holmes] – thus arguably releasing them from one type of reading and repossessing them in another.” The new text ‘speaks’ “the unspeakable of the pre-text by very exactly invoking the original and hinting at its silences or fabrications.”

Fourth, it forces the reader to consider the two texts together at all times: “our very consciousness of reading a contemporary version of a past work ensures that such an oscillation takes place, with the reader, as it were, holding the two texts simultaneously in mind. This may cause us to see parallels and contrasts, continuities and discontinuities, between the period of the original text’s production and that of the modern work.”

Fifth, they “alert the reader to the ways past fiction writes its view of things into history, and how unstable such apparently truthful accounts from the past may be”, making clear that the original text, though canon, was also just a text and should not necessarily govern our perceptions and understanding forever.

Sixth, “re-visionary novels almost invariably have a clear cultural-political thrust. That is why the majority of them align themselves with feminist and/or postcolonialist criticism in demanding that past texts’ complicity in oppression – either as subliminally inscribed within them or as an effect of their place and function as canonic icons in cultural politics – be revised and re-visioned as part of the process of restoring a voice, a history and an identity to those hitherto exploited, marginalized and silenced by dominant interests and ideologies.”

That last point, I think, should also apply to queer re-visionings of source texts (and indeed, Widdowson uses the example of Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation re-visioning Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in his article).

We can view BBC Sherlock as a re-visionary fiction which aims to ‘speak’ “the unspeakable of the pre-text by […] hinting at its silences or fabrications.”

BBC Sherlock as re-visionary fiction

Not only does BBC Sherlock have to hold itself up against the original canon of Arthur Conan Doyle; there is also a century of accumulated speculation and creation by an extremely active and resourceful fandom to contend with.

I think that BBC Sherlock asks us to re-vision ACD canon, but has a few sly jabs at the Sherlock Holmes fandom (including the writers themselves) along the way. Let’s look at some concrete examples:

John Watson’s wife:

In BBC Sherlock, the woman we know as Mary Morstan has no fixed identity. Her name is taken from a dead baby; she is not originally British; she is an ex-mercenary and killer; she is variously motherly, friendly and threatening; she shoots Sherlock in the heart – or does she save his life? In Series 4, her characterisation is more unstable than ever. She is a romantic heroine, a ruthless killer, a selfless mother, a consummate actress, a wronged woman, a martyr, an ever-present ghost, and the embodiment of John’s conscience. She is also the manifestation of the Sherlock Holmes fandom’s speculation about John Watson’s wife: did he have one wife, or six? Was she an orphan, or was she at her mother’s? When did she die? How did she die?

Ultimately, however, if you hold BBC Sherlock up against ACD canon, it highlights the fact that so many Sherlockians have tried to compensate for: in order to reconcile the irregularities in Mrs Watson’s story as narrated by Watson, she would need to be a secret agent actively hiding her identity. Examining BBC Sherlock against ACD canon makes us apply Occam’s Razor – the idea that the simplest explanation will always be best. John Watson’s wife was only written into the story because homophobia was so pervasive at the time that ACD was writing that his characters – and by extension he himself – would have been suspected of ‘deviance’ if there had not been a layer of plausible deniability in the shape of a wife.

And there you have it: the central problem of Mary Morstan/Watson, in both ACD canon and BBC Sherlock – she shoots Sherlock in the heart – or does she save his life? Look at ACD canon again. Does Mary Morstan’s engagement to John Watson hurt Sherlock Holmes, to the point that he replies, at the end of SIGN, “For me, …there still remains the cocaine-bottle”? Or does Mary Watson save his life? In the nineteenth century, suspicion of a romance between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson could have meant imprisonment or even hanging; many men suspected or accused of same-sex relationships chose suicide rather than total disgrace. Mary Watson’s presence provides Holmes and Watson with a lifesaving alibi.

Let’s have a look at this against the criteria for a ‘re-visionary fiction’:

Challenges the idea that Watson ‘told things as they really were’ – instead, it introduces the idea that Watson deliberately obscured the facts of his and Holmes’ partnership

Keeps the pre-text Mary Morstan constantly in view – a startling contrast, which rather effectively comments on the position of both women and queer people in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries

Enables us to abandon our “restricted and conventional ways” of reading the original – if it makes no sense for Mrs Watson to have existed in ACD canon, then the reader must radically reconsider Holmes and Watson’s relationship; no longer ‘just’ a friendship, but a lifetime’s commitment, as close and loving as a marriage. BBC Sherlock encourages this re-visioning by setting Mary up as a rival to Sherlock; by having her attempt to get rid of him; by highlighting that she both kills and saves him. It re-casts Sherlock Holmes as the dominant romance of John Watson’s life, in every version.

It causes us to see parallels and contrasts between the two time periods: the societal homophobia that made Mrs Watson a necessity in ACD canon has largely gone in modern Britain. But BBC Sherlock hints at a profoundly closeted bisexual John Watson who strives after a ‘normal’ wife who “wasn’t meant to be like that”. The continued presence of a Mrs Watson very effectively shows us that societal attitudes are not as profoundly different as we may think.

BBC Sherlock shows us how the existence of a Mrs Watson has been written not only into the [hi]story of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, but into the fabric of society: Sherlock Holmes is a great man, but God forbid he should also be a happy, human man, in a loving relationship with another man. The cultural script has been written: the great figures are either straight, or they are nothing. There is always a wife.

As discussed above, the presence of Mrs Watson is also important politically and culturally. It draws attention to the total lack of agency for nineteenth-century women, and to the restrictive narratives imposed on female characters in today’s culture. It makes terribly clear the extent and dangerousness of the homophobia in nineteenth-century Britain. It highlights the fact that there are still countries today where people are forced to hide their sexualities for fear of being imprisoned or killed.

The Watson baby:

In BBC Sherlock, the woman we know as Mary Morstan is revealed to be pregnant on the Watsons’ wedding day. In ACD canon, Watson never mentions a child from his marriage. In Holmesian speculation, plenty of children have been suggested for Watson, especially since it is often posited that he must have had more than one marriage (that Watson might be infertile is not something the proponents of the ‘Three Continents Watson’ school of thought often like to suggest).

As a re-visionary fiction, then, BBC Sherlock forces us to examine the source text: in a time when reliable contraceptive methods were virtually non-existent, why did John Watson and his wife never have a child?

The options, broadly, are:

Mrs Watson was infertile (if Watson only had one wife)

Watson was infertile (if he had more than one wife)

They didn’t have sex, either due to ignorance (but Watson was a doctor…) or reluctance

Mrs Watson only ‘existed’ because societal homophobia made her a necessity (see above).

John Watson:

In Series 4 of BBC Sherlock, John behaves in an unrecognisable manner: he beats Sherlock bloody, so that his eye is still bloodshot some little time later. This is said to be due to the pain of losing his wife, and the fact that her death is Sherlock’s ‘fault’.

Viewed as re-visionary fiction, as metafiction, BBC Sherlock here satirises the idea of the ‘deutero-Watson’ which has existed since Ronald Knox wrote his Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes. It also, however, critically examines the fact that, in ACD canon, there are (at least) ‘two Watsons’: one, the narrator, seemingly the most reliable and loyal of fellows, straight (in all senses) and true, good in a fight; and a second, the ‘true’ John Watson behind the narration, the man we discern when we look beyond the surface of the tales. A man who is devoted, above all, to Holmes; prepared to adopt Holmes’ habit of ‘compounding a felony’ to follow the idea of justice as opposed to law; prepared, in fact, to break the law if Holmes thinks it right; prepared to abandon his wife at a moment’s notice, when Holmes calls; prepared to alter all kinds of details in his stories to protect their participants. (Also, presumably, a bit of a joke about the accidental ‘dual personality’ that ACD gave his Watson by naming him James and John on different occasions.)

Looking at ACD canon through the lens of BBC Sherlock, the entirely unreliable nature of Watson as a narrator comes to light, but the enduring feature of his stories – his love for, and loyalty to Holmes – provides the obvious answer to why he should be so unreliable. Watson may be ‘two people’, but he lies, he breaks the law, he abandons his wife and his patients for only one person: Holmes.

Ultimately, the reader understands that they have been lied to, because the truth would have been impossible to tell at the time ACD was writing. Famously, the final story in the Sherlock Holmes canon, The Adventure of the Retired Colourman, ends with the words, “some day the true story may be told.”

If BBC Sherlock is seen as re-visionary fiction, Series 4 of the programme becomes a representation of the artificiality of the construct that we think of as BBC Sherlock and – viewed through its lens – ACD canon becomes visible as an equally artificial construct, filtered through the writings of an unreliable narrator and governed by the societal and cultural imperatives and prejudices of its time.

Every trick has been employed in Series 4 to highlight its artificiality: lack of coherent structure, temporal uncertainty, incoherent character arcs, introduction of a deus ex machina character, fluctuations of genre, and members of the crew actually appearing on screen. Just as in Hawksmoor, the ‘case’ of Series 4 defies solution. BBC Sherlock and Hawksmoor are both postmodern detective fictions. We have been told that this is ‘a show about a detective, not a detective show’. The form of the show, like the form of the traditional detective novel, leads us to expect a neat, tidy ending, explained carefully by an all-knowing figure of authority. The makers of BBC Sherlock, however, have done everything they can to pantomime a lack of care for, or understanding of, their own show. They have simultaneously inserted themselves into the story (Mark/Mycroft; giving varying accounts of when/how Series 4 was written; lying and saying that they lie) and withdrawn the ‘grand narrative’, the fiction of the omniscient narrator.

Why?

For over a century, ACD canon has been read in the same way: as the most archetypally logical detective story available to us. The fact that the canon is a huge mess of inconsistencies, requiring the collective effort of thousands of people to pick away at, is typically explained by the idea of an omniscient but uncaring storyteller: Arthur Conan Doyle.

This is particularly ironic for a fandom which supposedly wishes to disavow the existence of an author at all.

And yet, the problem is, if you don’t slip into extra-universe speculations on ACD’s attitude to Sherlock Holmes, you have to face head-on the conclusion that Watson is a very, very unreliable narrator indeed.

And you have to face why.

@devoursjohnlock @garkgatiss @221bloodnun @tjlcisthenewsexy @may-shepard

#sherlock meta #hawksmoor #bbc sherlock #acd canon #historiographic metafiction #postmodern detective fiction #hawksmoor17

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peaamlipoetrydoctor · 2 years

Text

Go Large Or Go Home!

No surprise, but I didn't get to mention the day's prompt in the earlier post - it was all a bit too serious for such a frivolous thing.

Anyway, the prompt was to write a poem starting with a command.

As is becoming typical, my poem is rather prose-ish with a hint of story-telling - the form, to the extent there is one, plays at the boundary of "text" (the command) and "sub-text" (what other meanings might be accompanying or attaching to or undermining that command).

So I give you -

Go Large Or Go Home!

Go large as you feel comfortable going, to the extent you feel comfortable or go home!

– assuming that wouldn’t be too much trouble, assuming that you’re not already at My Old Man Said Follow The Van levels of alcohol immersion, assuming you have a home to go to.

Go large – if you’re large – we’re committed to body positivity here – or go skinny if your form tends more in that direction – not gonna judge your thigh-gap, or thigh-gap-lack or go home!

– bearing in mind that this isn’t intended as any kind of judgement on whether (or indeed, not) you consider yourself to be at home here. Any friend of L. Sayers / Dorothy / Parker /Posey /Simmonds is welcome here, at least for the first two or three days…

Go largo – which is to say, slowly, or perhaps very slowly, in a broad, dignified style, as in the manner of the exit one might wish to make from the Key on realising the extent of the gangster-ish shenanigans bubbling away under the surface (storm, of course, permitting).

Go home – unless you are cool, brave, composed as Bogie, in which case you may consider toughing out your stay at the hotel until it’s time to take a boat out on the water for a little at-sea duelling, and heroical derring-do, then back to shore and home for tea (no medals).

PS the boat in the pic is certainly not the kind of vessel our Humph used for his at-sea heroics in Key Largo but is a boat-pic I've recently rediscovered and feel some fondness for.

It reminds me of two happy years living in a little flat with a balcony view out over Limehouse Basin - where, occasionally it was sunny, and even more occasionally, people proceeded past us in rowing vessels (more usually, it was canal houseboats...)

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bbcbreakingnews · 4 years

Text

Help save YOUR local: Pubs that you can phone to order a takeaway pint

BERKSHIRE

Thatched Tavern, Ascot – food and beers for takeaway and collection.

Tel 01344 620874

Order via website thethatchedtavern.co.uk

Great Shefford – Hungerford – takeaway food and drink.

Tel 01488 648462

Website thegreatshefford.com

BRISTOL

Wooden Walls – Bristol. High street micro pub offering cask ales/traditional beers

Order by texting 07858266596

Or email orders to [email protected]

BUCKINGHAMSHIRE

Full Moon Pub – Hawbridge and Cholesbury, Bucks – country pub offering food and drink

Tel 01494 758959

Website: fullmoonpub.info

CHESHIRE

Roebuck Inn, Knutsford – country pub offering food and drink with village shop selling local produce

Tel: 01565873939

Website: roebuckinnmobberley.co.uk/

CORNWALL

Queen’s Head – St Austell, Cornwall – food and bottled booze

Tel 01726 822407

Website https://ift.tt/3eAGGoZ

CUMBRIA

Brown Cow, Dalton-in-Furness – country pub dating back to 1500s offering food and drink.

Tel: 01229 462553

Website: https://ift.tt/355DXRa

Or order using the Barrow Eats app

The Vagabond – Whitehaven – food and drink

Tel 01946 66653

Website thevagabondpub.co.uk

Facebook https://ift.tt/32pgqcd

DERBYSHIRE

Blue Bell Inn, Chesterfield – picturesque pub in an old church building doing food and drink

Tel 01246 852146

facebook.com/TheBlueBellInnNorthWingfield/

The Dragon, Derby – offering takeout Afternoon Teas, Cook at Home roasts, heat at home ready meals and alcohol.

Tel 01283 704795

Order online via website thedragonatwillington.co.uk

DEVON

Balfour Arms, Sidmouth

Tel: 01395 513443

Website: ourlocal.pub/pubs/the-balfour-arms-sidmouth/

Facebook: https://ift.tt/3eDU8s0

Redwoods Inn – Tiverton, alcohol and food

Tel 01884 820148

Website redwoodsinn.co.uk

DORSET

Poole Hill Brewery, Bournemouth – food and drink

Tel 01202 557583

Website poolehillbrewery.com

Boat House, Christchurch – food and drink

Tel 01202 480033

Website boathouse.co.uk

ESSEX

Hare and Hounds, Colchester – food and drink

Tel 01206 330459

Website thehareandhounds.net

https://ift.tt/3mZZ7q8

The Old White Horse, Ockendon – food, including fish and chips, and alcohol

https://ift.tt/2JPQ8cZ

Alcohol must be pre ordered on 01708 853111 or by texting 07740649531

GTR MANCHESTER

Orange Tree, Altrincham – food and drink

Tel 0161 929 0224

Order via deliveroo.co.uk

George Charles and Unagi, Didsbury – food and draft ales

Tel 0161 445 4999

Website thegeorgecharles.co.uk

Order via deliveroo.co.uk

HAMPSHIRE

The Victory, Hamble-le-Rice, Southampton – food and drink

Tel 023 80453105

Website victoryinnhamble.co.uk

HERTFORDSHIRE

The Black Horse, quaint village pub offering food and drink

Tel 01992 583630

Website theblackhorse.biz

The Three Tuns, Hormead – food and drink

Tel 01763 289405

Website 3tuns.com

https://ift.tt/2JPQ8K1

ISLE OF WIGHT

Waterfront Bar, food and drink

Tel 01983 756969

Website waterfrontiow.com

KENT

Unicorn Inn, Canterbury – offering real ales and cider every day 1pm to 3pm and Monday to Friday 5-7pm

Tel: 01227 463187

Website: www.unicorninn.com/

Nelson Arms, Tonbridge – food and drink

Tel or text 07852 300069 to order 7 days a week

https://ift.tt/3p0OTHM

LANCASHIRE

Ale House, Clitheroe – real ales

Tel 07547 359853

Website thealehouseclitheroe.co.uk

https://ift.tt/32nqSkK

Little Bare – Morecambe – bottled real ales and food

Tel 07817 892370

https://ift.tt/32m9AEz

LEICESTERSHIRE

Fox Inn – Hallaton – ales and food

Tel 01858 555278

Thefoxhallaton.co.uk

LONDON

The Grapes – Limehouse

Tel 0207 987 4396

Website: www.thegrapes.co.uk/

Gatehouse Highgate – London pub offering food and drink

Tel: 020 8340 8054

Website: thegatehousen6.com/

YORKSHIRE

The Old Star, Kilham (trad village pub) offering food and drink.

Tel 01262 420619.

Website theoldstarkilham.com

The Norfolk Arms, Sheffield, (pub with rooms) food and drink.

Tel 0114 230 2197

Website norfolkarms.com

WORCESTERSHIRE

The Golden Cross, Harvington – offering food and drink

Tel: 01386 304505

Facebook: https://ift.tt/2I5hP0R

Message or call ahead to order

Walter de Cantelupe Inn, Kempsey, 01905 820572 (pub and rooms) food and drink available.

Tel , 01905 820572

Website walterdecantelupe.co.uk

WILTSHIRE

Red Bull Inn, Malmesbury. A village local. Concentrating on food, but may offer drinks later.

01666 822108

https://ift.tt/38k4U5E

WEST MIDLANDS

The Stratford Alehouse, Stratford-upon-Avon. Micro style pub, offering drinks to takeaway and delivery.

Tel 07746 807966

Website thestratfordalehouse.com

TYNE AND WEAR

The Schooner, Gateshead – rock ‘n’ roll venue offering food and drink

Tel: 0191 477 7404.

Website: theschooner.co.uk/

SUSSEX

The White Horse Inn, Ditchling – offering food, drink and a village shop

Tel: 01273 842006

Website: https://ift.tt/38kZjfv

The Independent Taproom, Brighton. Offering 14 draft craft beers, a selection of 150 canned beers and a selection of wines.

Tel 01273 602822

Website theindependentpub.pub

https://ift.tt/3eCvp7z

SURREY

The Plough Inn, Coldharbour, Dorking. Offering food and drink, collection and delivery. ‘Trying help people get through these bleak times’.

Tel 01306 711793

Website ploughinn.com

https://ift.tt/3n3rl3a

The Royal Oak, Guildford. An historic pub in the town, offering drinks including draft beers.

Tel 01483 457 144

Click and collect via Facebook https://ift.tt/3n12ZqJ

SUFFOLK

The Sailors Home, Kessingland, Lowestoft. Drinks only available for takeaway.

Tel 01502 740245

Website sailorshome.co.uk

SOMERSET

The Globe, Milverton, Taunton. Family run village pub offering food and drink.

Tel 01823 400534

Website theglobemilverton.co.uk

Riverside Inn, Saltford,. Pub in the River Avon, offering food and drink to takeaway.

Tel 01225 873600

Website riverside-saltford.co.uk

RUTLAND

The Wheatsheaf, Langham, Oakham. Food and drink takeaway available.

Tel 01527 869105

Website thewheatsheaf-langham.co.uk

OXFORDSHIRE

The Seven Stars, Marsh Baldon. Offering food and drink. A 400 year old coaching inn which was going to be redeveloped but was bought by the local community.

Tel 01865 343337

Website sevenstarsonthegreen.co.uk

NORTHUMBERLAND

The Three Horseshoes, Blyth,. Offering food straight away, will offer drink as soon as possible.

Tel 01670 822410

Website threehorseshoesblyth.com

NORFOLK

The Jolly Sailors, Brancaster Staithe, Kings Lynn 01485 210314, food (mainly pizzas) and beers available.

Tel 01485 210314

Website jollysailorsbrancaster.co.uk

The Rising Sun, Coltishall, food and drink available.

Tel 01603 737440

Website risingsuncoltishall.co.uk

MERSEYSIDE

The Black Toad, Hoylake Wirral, micro style pub offering wide selection of drinks to takeaway.

Tel 07835 360691

Website theblacktoad.co.uk

LINCOLNSHIRE

Royal Oak, Aubourn, offering range of food and drinks, including steaks and fish and chips.

Tel 01522 788291

Website royaloakaubourn.co.uk

https://ift.tt/3pa5Qzs

The post Help save YOUR local: Pubs that you can phone to order a takeaway pint appeared first on BreakingNews.

source https://bbcbreakingnews.com/2020/11/07/help-save-your-local-pubs-that-you-can-phone-to-order-a-takeaway-pint/

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cvkaldanvoorham · 6 years

Text

CV Nadja Voorham

Nadja Voorham (b.1988, SE/NL) lives and works in Amsterdam (NL).

Nadja is an interdisciplinary artist concerned with intimacy and central to her work are the power dynamics of attempts to hide desire, shame and failure. In this context she explores the modes of performance that arise from the real, imagined or feared presence of others. She works across performance, moving image, text and sculpture, using elements from socio–corporeal cultures such as sports and BDSM. The work is an invitation to notice the moment desires and hidden narratives leak into exposure.

Education

2015–17

MA Contemporary Art Practice, Royal College of Art, UK

2008-12

BA Fine Arts, Audiovisual Department, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, NL

2010

Cooper Union, Exchange Semester, New York, US

Selected group exhibitions

2019

Sunday Fantasy, Mimosa House, London, UK

2018

Young Boy Dancing Group, Norbergfestival, Norberg, SE

Bomb Factory Artist Film Festival, Art Week Exeter, Exeter, UK

Bomb Factory Artist Film Festival VI, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London, UK

Hold Me Now – Feel and Touch in an Unreal World, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL

Hobart Ah Um, Cinema One, Hobart, AU

We can be at my place, Cable Street Studios, London, UK

2017

Interstitial Practices: Extruding Performance, ArtBar, London, UK

Young Boy Dancing Group, Yvonne Lambert, Berlin, DE

Circuit, Taiga, St Petersburg, RU

Show RCA, Royal College of Art, London, UK

Cactus, Café Oto, London, UK

2016

Rhythmic Osmosis, Limehouse Townhall, London, UK

In the sky when on the floor, Galleri Mejan, Stockholm, SE

Rhythm and Disappointment, Chalton Gallery, London, UK

The Politics of Performance and Play. Feminist Matters. Leiden University, NL

Calculation, Kurgan Regional Art Museum, Kurgan, RU

Being – Doing, Asylum, London, UK

Revolve festival, Uppsala, SE

Chewy, Dyson Gallery, London, UK

Work in Progress Show, Royal College of Art, London, UK

Cactus, The Windmill, London, UK

2015

Wiolators: Reykjavík Edition, Kunstschlager Stofa, Reykjavík Art Museum, IS

Notafe festival, Viljandi, EE

99¢ Plus Art Shop II, 99 Cent Plus Gallery, New York City, USA

2014

Videos without ideas, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, NL

Tourist Information Center, Supercollider Contemporary Art Projects, Blackpool, UK

Wiolators Blackpool Edition, Supercollider Contemporary Art Projects, Blackpool, UK

Re Re Re, kunsternaarsinitiatief beyoncé, Amsterdam, NL

ABBA Art Books By Artists, Vondelbunker, Amsterdam, NL

Henk: we will meet in the future tense, NDSM-werf, Amsterdam, NL

2013

Public assembly, The White Building, London, UK

Festival:display, Weld, Stockholm, SE

Solo exhibitions

2016

Falling, Weld, Stockholm, SE

2014

Purpose/Passion/Posture, Podium, Oslo, NO

If you ignore everything that you do on purpose and concentrate

on all the things that you do by accident, Sodom&Gomorrah, Amsterdam, NL

2013

As I was waiting. Outpost, Amsterdam, NL

As I was waiting, Galeria SDM, Lissabon, PT

Grants

2018

Mondriaan Fund Stipendium for Emerging Artists

2016

DanceWeb scholarship

Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds

Residencies

2019

Studio4 Summer Residencies, Chisenhale Studios, London, UK

2015

Work Centre 232, Amsterdam, NL

2013

The Barber Shop, Lisbon, PT

Teaching experience

2019

4 x workshops, Chisenhale Studios, London, UK

2014–15

Archaeological Bodies, Teaching a movement and film workshop at seven occasions, Novi Sad, RS & Lviv, UA

0 notes

andotherstoriespublishing · 7 years

Text

Raising the Visibility of Black British Publishers.

Kadija George on the history of Black publishers in the UK

photo: Victor DIamini

‘The bravery and endurance of these Black and Asian publishers must be understood if we are to present a true image of British publishing and its impact on our society. It is also vital, if we are to encourage more BAME publishing professionals and writers, that British publishing is inclusive and welcomes all comers.’

‘Let’s Not Forget’ by Jazzmine Breary in Writing The Future report, published by Spread The Word 2015.

The history of Black publishers in Britain, much like other areas of Black history is at best invisible, or worse, misrepresented and misunderstood. The irony is that, although Black publishers tell the stories of Blacks in Britain, their own stories have until recently remained untold, even within the growing body of work on Black history. For example, in one of the most highly regarded texts of Black history in Britain, Staying Power by Peter Fryer, the mention of pioneering Black publishers amounts to one paragraph

However, 2015 was a turning point as two exhibitions in London featured the work and legacy of New Beacon Books (founded by Trinidadian John La Rose in 1966) and Bogle L’Ouverture Press, (founded by Eric and Jessica Huntley in 1967). ‘No Colour Bar’ at the Guildhall Gallery and ‘A Dream to Change the World’ at the Islington Museum (yes, John La Rose believed that the world could be positively changed through the publishing of works that spoke to justice and equality) were mounted with significant support from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Their work is now increasingly recognised as having a major impact on Black history in Britain from the 1960s as they created space in print and protest to accurately reflect Black life in Britain from a Black informed bias rather than from a white speculative one. The work they published was primarily poetry, non-fiction and literary criticism in books, pamphlets, and journals. It is true however, that novels by Black writers were being published at this time by UK based publishers. In 1962 OUP had started Three Crowns and Heinemann had started the African Writers Series, but the latter was started as and remains an educational imprint, not intended for the UK market.

Although Allison and Busby was not a Black publishing house per se, the books they published, particularly in their early years (from 1966), mean that Margaret Busby is known as a stalwart publisher of those times. They published groundbreaking writers such as Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta, whose trilogy Ada’s Story told the story of a single mother of five struggling to survive and write in London. Emecheta is still heralded as a heroine, continuing to inspire women of all ages and ethnicities.

Hansib Publications was started by Arif Ali in 1971, initially to publish newspapers and journals, but gravitating to the publishing of books.

The first titles of all these publishers spoke out loudly against anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism, setting the trend for the titles that followed, some of which, such as How Europe Underdeveloped Africa continue to have significant sales today. Throughout the years, particularly until the mid-1980s, these publishers, along with others, worked together on various projects and campaigns.

One of the main challenges today then, for new Black publishers is to be visible within the publishing industry in an environment where impact and economic sustainability matter in a highly technical creative industry, yet the community still have expectations for them to be socially conscious too.

Within the past ten years, new black publishing houses that have emerged have clearly taken this on board. Crystal Mahey-Morgan, for example, promotes her publishing company, Own It! as a ‘lifestyle brand’. Established in 2015, she publishes fiction and non-fiction. Most of her experience in publishing is in marketing and she uses all of the elements at her disposal to enable her to fill a 1000-seater venue for an event focused on the book launch. She combines the traditional approach, announcing the hardback title in advance, alongside manipulating social and digital media to reach her various audiences. Similarly, the name of another press Jacaranda Books Arts Music, shows that they are aware of the importance of selling across products. Founded by Valerie Brandes in 2012, their aim is to ‘Celebrate cultural, ethnic and social diversity in literature.’

Limehouse Books, established in 2009 by Bobby Nayyar have taken a slightly different direction in that they commission books, rather than taking on the time-consuming manuscript submission and acquisition process. They have also partnered with organisations to produce books. Although Cassava Republic Press was established in Nigeria in 2006 by Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, she set up a branch in the UK ten years later to publish African writers in the diaspora. The rationale behind her selection comes from her belief that it’s the right time to ask challenging questions of African writing, ‘where have we come from, where are we now, where are we going?’ Their mission is to ‘change the way we all think about African writing’.

The founders of all of these publishing houses hold degrees in the field of publishing or and have worked in more than one mainstream publishing house as an employee, or paid internship, often through a training scheme for people from ethnically diverse backgrounds. They can also be seen at trade fairs such as the London Book Fair alongside their peers from other publishing houses. These are the main difference between them and their radical, activist predecessors, yet all acknowledge and are aware of the history of black publishing in Britain that has gone before them, the achievements made and the path that was paved for them by these publishers and of their responsibilities to the community, particularly to the community of readers that they want to reach and represent.

Black publishers, then and now, represent a specialised area of publishing. What could be considered, alongside increasing the diversity of human resources within mainstream publishing houses, is to place young white trainees within Black companies as part of their training, in order to gain knowledge that they would not otherwise access in a larger corporate entity. Leicester University, for example, run a transcultural publishing module for undergraduates in their final year. The module is always oversubscribed. Most of the students are not Black, yet it trains a future workforce to understand that cultural diversity is the norm rather than an exception.

Routes into publishing are gradually becoming more open to those who may previously only have seen closed doors. In the UK we are fortunate enough to have professional writer development programmes, partly funded by Arts Council England. The programmes offer advice and can point people in the direction of opportunities and further information if needed. Some of these, such as Inscribe and Commonword, have Black staff members with skills, knowledge and experience in various areas of publishing and writing.

For more information on these programmes around the UK, see the following links:

Spread The Word (London) – https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk

Inscribe (Yorkshire) – http://www.peepaltreepress.com/inscribe

Writing East Midlands – http://www.writingeastmidlands.co.uk

Commonword / Cultureword (North West) – http://www.cultureword.org.uk/

New Writing North – http://www.newwritingnorth.com/

New Writing South (South East) – https://www.newwritingsouth.com/

Scottish Book Trust – www.scottishbooktrust.com/

Literature Wales – http://www.literaturewales.org/

Other useful links:

Download Spread the Word’s Writing the Future report

Visit the Hackney Museums exhibition page

Link to 50th anniversary celebrations for the George Padmore Institut

The Radical Lives of Eric & Jessica Huntley – No Colour Bar: http://huntleysonline.com/f-h-a-l-m-a/bbaa-art-exhibition/

By Kadija George

@kadijattug

Doctoral Researcher at Brighton University on Black British Publishers

AAAP (All About African Publishers) blog

#black publishers #black writers #diversity in publishing #diversity in media #new beacon books #black britain #black british #jacaranda #cassava republic #limehouse books #own it!

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philomaela · 7 years

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I just saw the limehouse golem and I really liked it.

#text #the limehouse golem

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cromulentbookreview · 5 years

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Binge! Part 2: The Re-Binging

I’m often put off by long book series - considering how often I complain about being suckered into the first book of a series, this isn’t surprising. However, sometimes I’m willing to put in the time to binge a whole series.

Like, for example, the Barker & Llewelyn series by Will Thomas.

So I binge-read the first 10 books of this series (well, 10.5, there’s a novella called An Awkward Way to Die ) in one long, dizzying binge last year. And, lucky for me, there’s a new book out: Lethal Pursuit! Pretty much exactly one year from the release of Blood is Blood!

But! If you haven’t read the first 10.5 books, here’s a review: