#absolutely hate the web landscape for artists rn

[pinayelf]

seeing as tumblr is the place I spent years building a platform on its hard not to panic (again) when there's possibilities of it sinking (again) because my income solely relies on commissions and my art reaching people

which is super hard to do on algorithm based websites and I've never been successful abt it

[lit--bitch]

Current-Reads (27/04/2020 - 03/05/2020) 🐸🍇

(Disclosure: I know a couple people this week, like Billie Collins from The Writing Squad. I know Elizabeth Ellen through Mira Gonzalez and her editorial help with my poetry. Everybody else be a stranger to me. 😢)

Preface as always: Every Sunday without fail I throw up the freshest literature and photography I’ve read over the week, sometimes it’s a book, or a piece I saw in a magazine or an online zine, maybe it’s something I saw on social media, etc. If I add ‘RECOMMEND’ next to a few of the titles, but that’s not to say I don’t recommend all of them, I just love some pieces more than others. Not everything will be everybody’s cup of tea, yanno, c’est la vie. And any titles that you see in bold are hyperlinked so if you click or tap them they’ll direct you straight to the source… or shopping basket.  

Bit of an off-week this week, my dog hasn’t been very well so my mind has been elsewhere, and that Annie Ernaux review took it out of me, ha. I was terrified to write negative criticism, openly, and it’s not even like I was saying, “I just didn’t enjoy this writing”, like the Ernaux text genuinely has politically biased implications. It’s really hard writing about the genocide in Algeria and my family, because 1. France has done a lot of work to avoid its discussion so they’re never held accountable, 2. A lot of people don’t really know about it, and 3. A lot of people don’t care, like a lot a people, the annihilation of the Amazigh hasn’t even entered social discourses like it has with Native Americans or the Aborigines, and these are still discourses which are a lot of the time, ignored. Getting people to just be aware of this, takes time, centuries even, and so many voices. I do feel like I’m screaming into a void, and I’m not surprised Fitzcarraldo Editions didn’t pay much attention to the review. It probably seemed impertinent of some random stranger to call out a 78-year-old feminist for her furtive privilege and non-condemnation of France’s role in genocide in Algeria. Afterwards I had a massive cup of tea, and took a minute out. The amazing and lovely work I’ve read this week has been like comfort-food. Current-reads this week include Billie Collins’s The Haircut, an excerpt from ‘Bluets’ from Elizabeth Ellen’s Poems collection which I still can’t believe came out two years ago, and I rediscovered this poem on one of Hobart’s web features. I also read a review Jon Petre did for SPAM zine on Cathy Galvin’s Walking The Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva, published by Guillemot Press (which is run by one of my old tutors and friend, Luke Thompson).  I adored these beautiful pieces for 3AM Magazine’s Poem Brut series, from Kayleigh Cassidy, to do man and other poems. FINALLY, last but not least, I read two wonderful writers on Split Lip Magazine, one from their 2019 site, JJ Peña’s manguitos, pears and grapefruits, and Threa Almontaser’s I Crack An Egg.

I also want to say beforehand that I check all the writers and their social media (i.e. I stalk them and their bios) to make sure I absolutely get their pronouns correct, I don’t just assume hes and shes, etc. So in case anyone’s concerned about that, dw I do this shit properly. 

Let’s get into it.

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Threa Almontaser’s I Crack An Egg on Split Lip (RECOMMEND): Cooking, family and religion. That’s the fucking trinity here. If it weren’t for the fact that I practised Islam when I was kid and my dad’s Muslim, I wouldn’t understand a lot of these references. The vernacular here is important, because what Threa does, is she makes you aware. She pulls you into her periphery, and then into her focalisation. It’s steeped in her habitus. This poem’s peppered with Arabic utterances, (wallah = I swear to God), references to the imam, henna and hijab. She negotiates the relationships of mother and marriage, tests the tensions in personality, admonishes expectations in the kingdom of her mother’s kitchen. I felt looked in the eye when I read this poem. Women are the backbone of everything. And Threa Almontaser’s one to watch.

Kayleigh Cassidy, to do man and other poems on 3AM Magazine (RECOMMEND): These are so cool, I’ve got a massive smile on my face rn. I loved these visual word collages. Each one is so individual in its own right and they’re so witty and relatable, haha. Particularly ‘to do’ and ‘an idea woke me’... They’re symptomatic of Gen Z anxieties and frustrations, they wrestle between our office selves and our artist selves. Just loved them. Adored Kayleigh’s bio too, “Kayleigh is dyslexic, working class and a massive fan of the moon; full, half or gibbous.”

Billie Collins’s The Haircut (RECOMMEND): Billie Collins’s writing is so familiar and real and intimate. It’s like home to me. I really loved this piece she did for the Writing Squad’s Staying Home series. I’ve been making my way through each of the works on there slowly, they’re so fantastic. Since the lockdown, we’ve been displaced by home haircuts and DIY. This piece is about the intimacy of giving your dad a hair cut written in the form of a contract (it echoes of tenancy agreement also, does anyone else get that?) / a play, I mean it’s amazing. The familial camaraderie and realism makes the scene so accessible and visceral. The opening immediately grabbed my attention:  “This is the first time I’ve ever given my Dad a haircut. I’m reluctant, but have agreed to do it on the following terms:

1. PARTY A [Hereafter: THE HAIRDRESSER] agrees to cut the hair of PARTY B [Hereafter: THE HAIRDRESSEE] under the proviso that no matter what happens, no matter the appearance of the resultant effect [Hereafter: THE HAIRCUT], THE HAIRDRESSEE is not allowed to get angry at THE HAIRDRESSER.”

The dialogue is a harmless bicker, which fades away as the focalisation of the speaker comes to the fore. It lessens in wit and exposes a more vulnerable and moving perception to the task in hand. It becomes tender, a moving cut. The ‘I’ finds a poignancy in being guided to cut the father’s hair, and the hairdresser becomes transfixed by other details, of skin and touch, in age and aging. It made me cry. Especially that reference to Tom Waits. Bloody hell, Billie.

‘Bluets’ from Elizabeth Ellen’s Poems collection, HOBART (RECOMMEND): Someone finally says it. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets wasn’t that great. Thank you Elizabeth Ellen. Elizabeth’s writing is like sitting in your trackies eating Chinese food and having a good sob. Other people have said similar things in that vein. It’s really the best of kind of writing, the most accessible and universal. This whole collection is about being messy, about revelling in your messy womanhood, being a messy fucking woman and having messed-up feelings and writing messed-up writing. It’s deeply self-contemplative and irritated, it’s also watchful. ‘Bluets’ is a sneak peek of a collection I adore, and keep going back to. This one poem singularly unpacks the tensions of neatness and neat perceptions of femininity, tight structures and the constrictive corseting of feelings Elizabeth Ellen so abhors. Let it all out. Let it all hang right out. 

JJ Peña’s manguitos, pears and grapefruits (RECOMMEND): This work is just absolutely gorgeous, and it was in Split Lip over a year ago. There is a tartness, a bitter acidity, a bite that you find in these sweetnesses from JJ Peña. The way we’re all hanging fruit from a family tree. The intergenerational trauma. The pain and weight of parental imperatives and suppositions. It’s the honesty and the enviable metaphor that makes this work so beautiful, it’s so vivid. Like: ‘the island treasures into golden sunsets & moons, into pandulce plazas & beaches where women who eat the sun walk around. no other place, he says, bleeds & blooms the sun.’ The language is so enriching, you can so clearly envision what he’s talking about, and how these landscapes and skies collide with more sinister and unpleasant experiences, of secret-keeping, sexuality and rape.

On a personal level I connected with this writing for the way JJ negotiates with questions of heritage and self-identity. There’s a huge pain in being divided between lands and culture and blood. When I was a kid, I used to tan like my Algerian father, I’d go mahogany, and I’d get crocodile skin in the sun. My mum used to have to rub olive oil on me. Now, I’ve still got that thick Kabyle-girl, North African skin from my dad, but since I’ve grown up, I don’t tan like that anymore, for whatever inexpicable reason, I burn worse than my English mother. And I’m lighter-skinned than her too, like cheesecake white. And I understand what JJ means when he refers to his father, who in ‘grapefruits’, declares: i got that peña blood. wood skin. My father’s the same. And I get it, I don’t know why I’m not the same either, JJ. But I think the exact same thing: I might have hardened skin if I’d spent my life working in my grandmother’s fields, picking olives. 

I’d hate to give any more away about this writing, so go ahead and read it and have a look at some of JJ’s more recent work in Barren Magazine. 

Jon Petre, on Cathy Galvin’s Walking The Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva, SPAM zine (RECOMMEND):  People never recommend reading a review of a book, they always just omit that part, and recommend the book straight-off. But a lot of the time, I wouldn’t know half of what to read if it weren’t for reviews. And writing reviews takes up a lot of time and a lot of reflection. I feel it’s necessary to review reviews, because they’re equally a piece of writing in and of themselves, and therefore an extension of the art being reviewed. I really loved this piece from Jon Petre. It not only made me want to buy Cathy Galvin, it made me want to read more of Jon. The review is as much an explanation of this psychogeographical poetry and Coventry’s ‘edgeland’ landscapes, as it is a wonderful piece in its own right. It is informative and witty, and its descriptions are succinct, measured and quite beautiful actually. I just loved this part in the opening paragraph: ‘I have always wanted to explore the edgelands. They are everywhere, hidden in plain sight, an alt-highway running into the hidden psyche of ostensibly dull places. If you want to get to the heart of somewhere stick to the edges.’

I also really enjoy the way Jon relays and quotes sections of the poems, he’s selective and careful. He recreates the oscillations in Galvin’s collection in his sentence structures: ‘Coventry’s punk scene is an especially positive part of the story ‘England’s dreaming Pistols and punk / peaches on beaches’ are up against ‘that figure head – / not what she seems, the Queen, the fascist regime’. Revolution and radical change has to start somewhere, as Lady Godiva herself proved – why not at the Coventry ring road?’

He’s chatty, he’s got a voice. ‘Galvin is clearly having a lot of fun mixing her references to Coventry history and other texts – quoting The Specials alongside Dante, which is 100% my shit – and stitching letters to Phillip Larkin and legalese about the ring road’s construction into art.’ He’s not sterile, he doesn’t write reviews that border on pretension, he’s not a ridiculously irritating sesquipedalian-ist (someone who likes to use big words, irony intended). He makes the books he reviews worth investing in, and you don’t need 10 tabs open to look up words he’s saying. He writes with precision and with feeling. SPAM zine in general is absolutely fabulous, and boasts some amazing writers.

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Right, I need a cup of tea. Next week’s review is Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk About The Trees Without The Blood. Absolute bleeder. I might be slower to the take next week because I’ve got my MA viva (on Zoom, wahey) and all sorts, so bear with me. Stay safe love-bears.