EQUUS Press was established in 2011 in Prague with the objective of publishing new writing that is innovative and doubly marginalised: written outside the literary establishment defined by the Anglo-American publishing industry, and outside the confines of nationalism, pursuing a cosmopolitan agenda. Such a doubly marginalised position, it is our firm belief, allows for a writing both idiosyncratic and authoritative. This marginalized writing can take a stand, make a change, and matter – things increasingly rare in titles conforming to the dictates of the book market and the tastes of mass readership. Writing published by EQUUS, though diverse in its genre, form and style, is always concerned with dwelling, identity, and place as experiences of writing. Writers published with us are concerned with writing not as a vocation, but as a way of living. EQUUS aims to become part of the kind of momentum which has been gathering in Prague over the last several years, with the city re-emerging as a genuinely cosmopolitan centre.

EQUUS’s inaugural title was Clair Obscur by Louis Armand, which replied to the publisher’s search for innovative writing with a volume of prose which explores the relations between cinematic and literary writing as containers of, and vehicles for, memory. Reminiscent of Alain Resnais’ or Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s and Samuel Beckett’s fiction—though in no way reducible to any one of them—Armand’s novel reads history, both personal and general, as a palimpsest of place-bound traumas, as a ghost-story of ever-eluding loss in which “only the dead return.” Taking place alternatively in Trieste, Venice, Marseilles, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Clair Obscur reconstructs some of the most acute traumas of the past century. Reading the 1990s Yugoslavia war through the prism of the fascist terror in the Trieste of the 1930s and 40s, Armand’s text launches a sustained poetic reflection on memory, guilt, fantasy and desire in the cataclysmic history of Europe in the past sixty years.

In early 2012, thanks to the hospitality and enthusiasm of Birkbeck College, University of London, EQUUS established itself as a publisher with a base in the UK. Three new EQUUS Press titles by three Prague-based Anglophone writers were launched in London and Manchester in mid-April, 2012. Each work in its own way embodies the kind of writing that EQUUS aims to promote: Louis Armand’s Breakfast at Midnight, Thor Garcia’s The News Clown, and Ken Nash’s Brain Harvest.

Louis Armand’s Breakfast At Midnight 

A brief synopsis of Louis Armand’s Breakfast At Midnight would run as follows: Its nameless narrator has returned to Prague after ten years wandering through Mexico and South America as a fugitive. Back in Prague, the narrator moves into a barge on the Vltava River and attempts to reconstruct the circumstances (of his father’s murder) that led to his becoming a fugitive while also searching for his childhood lover, Regen, who ten years earlier disappeared after a series of violent events and under mysterious circumstances. He reunites with Blake, a fellow exile whom he’d met on his South American peregrinations and who’s turned from a drug-dealer and hustler into a photographer with the double fondness for photographing corpses and playing games with the narrator’s mind. One grey morning Blake takes him to see the body of a girl that has turned up in the local morgue. The girl looks strangely like Regen, conjuring up many ugly ghosts of the narrator’s pasts and dispatching him on a psychedelic odyssey through the Prague underworld (redubbed, after its most famous literary ghost, as “Kafkaville”). Attempting to escape his demons, the narrator encounters a Russian girl called Inessa, wise beyond years, who gives him the chance to see himself in a new light. Out of the violence, ugliness and despondency of a life lived in self-loathing and recrimination, the narrator rediscovers the possibility of things turning otherwise. The ending offers no rainbows, but the abyss no longer yawns as wide.

Even though a-few-hour read, there is an “epic” quality to this novel, in its compactness and unity of motifs, its mythological symbolism, and its language. Verbal echoes and visual emblems make disturbingly repetitive appearances, such as the scene of “trees thick with fruit fly… bees swarming from the hives at the foot of the orchard, a loud buzzing… In the tree a bed sheet wound like a thick rope… a ladder rested against the trunk. On the ground beneath it… a pair of my mother’s shoes, covered in ants” – the scene of the narrator’s mother’s suicide. The never-ceasing rain holding hostage the whole of Kafkaville is a perfect match for the narrator’s quest for Regen (“rain” in German), equally obsessive, hopelessly inconclusive, and intangibly fluid. The last to complete this ghostly trinity is the abusive father, a butcher always at work at the abattoir, “assembling and disassembling his machines, like an angry Archimedes. Machines for cutting, grinding, pressing” – the father whose violent profession finds its grim parallel in his rape and continuous abuse of the young Regen, an unspeakable deed the son must avenge. The mythology is present in even such details as the framing locations in which the story of the contemporary Oedipus takes place, from his barge of insomnia and delirium named G.O.R.A. (acronym for Argo, the fabulous vessel) to the place of ultimate reconciliation, the Kafkaville quarter of Trója (the Homeric Troy).

The language takes on a certain fatal, absolute diction of the epic mode, in which almost every paragraph offers a sentence or two that read like a self-enclosed epigram or a consummated epigraph: “The mistake is believing that anything remains the same”; ”We vanquish, we decimate. Yet time remains closed.”  As in the Homeric epic tradition, metaphor is used as a window onto some otherworld, here, more often than not, the gloomy otherworld of repressed history: for example, Blake in his Enfield gear looks “like some Luftwaffe pilot blitzed on pervitin” and likens the situation of the artist under totalitarianism-turned-capitalism to “kiss[ing] Marilyn Monroe’s feet so you can be buggered by Stalin.”

Billed as an “acid noir Coltrane-esque elegy to the other Prague” and described as “Mickey Spillane meets Georges Bataille on speed,” Breakfast at Midnight unsettles and evades resolutions in order to teach a valuable lesson. That the truth value of any individual or collective claim to “coming to terms with one’s past” should always be measured against the deeds of the teller, not the words of the tale. And that there is nothing inherently redeeming in absolution, nor is there anything virtuous about its pursuit since, according to one of the book’s most memorable axioms, “Every confession is a lie.”

Thor Garcia’s The News Clown 

Thor Garcia’s monumental novel, The News Clown, which was a finalist in the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, has been described in a Publishers’ Weekly review as a narrative “fuelled by prodigious amounts of alcohol and tobacco, sex and drugs, [skipping] along from one bizarre episode to the next in the tortuous life of Thor, a young man whose dreams of a literary career have been sidetracked into an undemanding job as a ‘news clown’ for a small wire service in the crime-infested back alleys of Bay City.”

Indeed, sidetracking in this work can be seen as the principle of narrative organisation itself: where Armand’s text presents a terse, compact, unified vision, Garcia’s is a loose, episodic, picaresque survey of the turn-of-the-millennium America. There are parallel lines of development, narrative tracks played simultaneously, on a number of levels. The lived world of Thor and the legion of his drinking buddies, fellow sots, lovers, and one-night stands is one of celebration. Whether at a wedding or a funeral, or whether to the accompaniment of punk music or violent porno makes no difference whatsoever: for the be-all is to consume, amuse oneself, and forget it all in order to start over. However funny the escapades and snappy the wisecracks of Garcia’s entertaining satirical narrative, as the number of women and bottles conquered and downed rises beyond count, so does the number of black eyes received in drunken brawls and the equally innumerable scars to the soul, driving the point home that the end of pleasure is callousness now that despair is beyond emotional reach. This has a symbolic parallel in the colony of worms invading and gradually coming to inhabit Thor’s apartment, to his initial disgust, and his alternative horror and protests which finally metamorphose into resignation.

Alongside Garcia’s Punk version of Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age (a satiric post-apocalyptic Golden Twenties) another textual world invades the pages of the novel: the world reported through Thor’s magazine articles, the world of crime both organized and random, but vile and gruesome either way. Here lies News Clown’s crowning achievement. Thor’s binges and shags and hangovers coexist with an endless series of reportage headlines such as “MAN STABBED TO DEATH ON BAY METRO,” or “STUDENT SHOT TO DEATH AT BEACH”. And so on and so forth, with repetitiousness at once benumbing and grisly, the unspeakable horror of violence and suffering of its victims reduced, in the callous journalese of the reporting, to figures and modus operandi.

Mediation is of course the question behind all reporting, communication and language; and the mediatised world of Garcia’s protagonist appears unmasked by those in service of its fictitiousness. One example of many is the discussion of 9/11 in the “HIDE IN ‘PLANE’ SIGHT” chapter, where Thor is fed evidence by one of his colleagues that the buildings were exploded from the inside and the planes were photoshopped into the videos. “Then they showed it to the world, and everybody instantly became convinced that aluminium airplanes can knock down steel and concrete towers!” In a world of general insanity, survival is possible not through reason, but of out-crazing your opponents: “the only way to beat them is to think as crazy they do.”

Finally, the text of The News Clown itself comes to us, with a fine additional meta-textual touch, already mediated – furnished with explanatory footnotes, presenting “official reports,” “evidence presentation” and “investigation results”; but no additional voice is required for it to be clear that such discourse of official truth can only serve to further deceive and blur fact with fiction.

Ken Nash’s The Brain Harvest 

The thirty-odd stories in Ken Nash’s collection The Brain Harvest present a variety of styles, themes and arguments in themselves. There are elaborate, developed narratives with detailed characters and plots (as in “The Cello Garden,” the fictional account of the life and fate of a beautiful cellist Anna Leibowitz), and there are sketches in a few rough brushstrokes (“Making Babies” and “My Lobotomy,” two very different, yet eerily funny renderings of amorous failures). They feature real-life characters and narrators trapped in surreal or unreal states and situations (both “The Two Lives of Edward Hopper,” who “having pursued realism to its end,” has nothing to paint, for all’s been painted, and “Maurice Utrillo” who achieves an epiphany of space, surface and depth when observing a commonplace wall); but they also brim with completely fictional or even fantastic characters in equally surreal situations (“Anima Husbandry,” a three-page description of a Moldovan wife’s dismantling and packing her husband into a suitcase for a trip to Paris; or “Three Sisters,” where the narrator stages the famous Chekhov piece featuring three specially trained chickens). This blending has as its combined effect not only the defamiliarising the real, but the equally unsettling familiarisation of the unreal, ultimately posing the question of whether one can or indeed should distinguish between these two in a fictional world such as Nash’s.

Equally unsettling, if also “wickedly humorous,” as the recent Prague Post reviewer Stephan Delbos has correctly noted, is the basso continuo that prevails underneath the episodic brevity and constant shifts in narrative perspective performed by these tales: Nash’s preoccupation with language and the bizarre names inhabiting and describing both the natural and the corporate worlds. Delbos’s list of these appellation is as good as any: “Cambodian Vine Rattan, Sinai Braided Sea Grass, Singapore Cane, Burmese Celery Hemp, Uyghur Cave Moss” (“Baskets”), or “afternoons watching Korean soap operas dubbed into Cantonese, and evenings watching bootleg videos or playing high-stakes mahjong, while chain smoking Mann Si Fat cigarettes” (“The Hostage”), Nash’s manipulation of the particular and the minute has the attention for the bizarre and the ability of evoking the grotesque.

Described as “an eclectic, deceptively witty collection of short fiction that represents the crystallization of one of Prague’s most resourceful and imaginative English-language writers” by Delbos, and commended by Clare Wigfall—in her cover blurb of the collection—for how each of Nash’s short stories is “distinct and memorable in its jewel-like compactness,” and the characters are “unique and endearing,” Brain Harvest is a richly imaginative if also highly heterogeneous collection. It was no exaggeration when Wigfall compared Nash’s “playful and quick-witted style” to that of the “maverick American greats like George Saunders and Donald Barthelme.” To this, one can only add Nash’s avowed influence of the labyrinthine structures of Jorge Luis Borges, and the evident presence, behind the eerie waft of the everyday turned grotesque that hovers over the collection, of the unquiet Prague ghost of Franz Kafka.

 *

For all their differences, these three books—Breakfast at Midnight, The News Clown and Brain Harvest—are tours-de-force of their respective genres, challenging exercises in narrative style and technique, and fruitful examinations of the extents to which language can both generate and stifle emotional responsiveness. As such, Armand, Garcia and Nash all seem to share the sentiment of their famous Prague precursor:

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?…we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” (Franz Kafka’s letter to Oskar Pollack, 27 January 1904)

You can buy the titles here:

• Thor Garcia’s The News Clown
• Louis Armand’s Breakfast at Midnight
• Ken Nash’s The Brain Harvest

With the highest average top-to-bottom pay ratio in the public sector (at 15:1), campaigners argue that universities should be looking to achieve greater equality. Student campaigners are making four demands of their universities:

• To publish top-to-bottom pay ratios,

• To work towards a 1:10 multiple,

• To pledge to pay workers and contractors a ‘living wage’

• To publish Vice Chancellor and senior management pay.

Lisa Camps, Young Greens Head of Campaigns said

“At a time of student fee hikes, public sector redundancies and cuts to university departments, increases in management pay are totally unacceptable. Vice Chancellor pay currently stands at around £200,000 and has been rising dramatically over the past decade. We estimate that if one university head cut their salary from £250,000 to £140,000, 49 minimum wage workers could be paid a living wage.”

Saatchi’s first major photography exhibition in a decade, and a self-styled cross-section of the world of photography now, Out of Focus collates the work of 38 artist/photographers whose diverse subject matter and approach to the medium offer a spectrum of delights within the space of the gallery.

As can be expected from the Saatchi curators, a staple selection of works include large-scale, brash pseudo-portraits (see Katy Grannan’s eyesore of a series in the first gallery) showcasing badly applied lipstick and ancient, wrinkled, blue-rinse tattoos. To be honest, I don’t mind them, they’ll soon be in American bank lobbies anyway (cynical, moi?). But, hold your breath, beyond these predictable hurdles you’ll find some acutely considered images by thoughtful and explorative artists, dotted through the show.

Noemie Goudal, who’s been around for a year or so on the main stage since graduating from the RCA (immediately into Saatchi’s hands), captivates me with her images of effected landscapes. Conventional by comparison with some of the artists exhibited she nevertheless subtly, quietly grapples with the photographic image as a means to record photography itself, reaching stalwartly into the constructed and psychological nature of the paradisical escape. She looks inward in a way few others in the show can or dare, and vastly outpaces the vulgar monochromatic mosaic pieces of her curatorial bedfellow in the gallery’s arrangement, Mat Collishaw, who’s own passé enlargements of newspaper cutouts-cum-facebook-photos are belligerent and selfish with the viewer’s vision.

Still, at least Collishaw demands an answer to what beauty in contemporary photography actually means. The works of some of the other exhibitors such as David Benjamin Sherry’s large acid-wash chromatic landscapes fall back on beauty as a refuge from the question ‘Why are you doing another Ansel Adams?’ This seems to cause a split in the show that remains unresolved, with interesting results. Is contemporary photography allowed to be beautiful, and if so is that all it needs to be? After all, its draw towards gritty reportage, visible in the work of Broomberg and Chanarin, can still produce some of the most stunning imagery we face within our increasingly alien but globalised community.

Taking on sexuality are photographers such as Michele Abeles and Laurel Nakadate, alongside veteran Ryan McGinley. The body as fetish, object, and pin-up is treated both in the camera lens and in post-production, though with mixed results; McGinley recaptures adolescent night-prowls and naked adventures with breathless magnetism, but Marlo Pascual’s less racy, torn female portrait turned leaning sculpture is a little underwhelming in it dulled and softened plexiglass form.

Most striking though is the inclusion of works that just aren’t photographs (if you think authorship is important) such as Collishaw’s, but more significantly those of John Stezaker. Although lifted wholesale and somewhat uninspiringly by the Saatchi curators from Stezaker’s recent Whitechapel retrospective, it is interesting to find his collage works are now so completely ingrained in contemporary photography, a realm he has skirted around for decades. Perhaps then, that is the show’s greatest success. It brings together a range of answers to the question of photography, some of which inevitably end with a collectible photograph, but many of which still want us to look at the underside, the edges, and whatever is caught (be it accidental, scripted, or contrived) in the middle.

Mariah Robertson’s stunning photogram experiments on a 70-meter roll of photographic paper take this to its extreme, producing a dazzle-camouflage of floor tiles and grid patterns in which the hiccups and bleeding edges are the raison d’être of the work. Repetition through variation akin to Len Lye’s forties film work cascades across the gallery floor. Photography as installation then, in the same space as photography as collage, and photography as site of contact; with light and material, mindscape, sexuality, and conflict. The show compounds all of them at once through a bricolage of disparate images that in many cases use photography as the barest of conjoining threads. Though this creates as many problems as it attempts to solve in its catch-all display, it returns us to a love of imagery itself. Saatchi is the only man who can give us such gavage, heaped on our plate and beckoning us to dive in. Vodka sponsorship aside, Out of Focus delights in retinal immersion; beauty, ugliness, and the questioning of it all.

At Saatchi Gallery until 22nd July. Open 10am-6pm, 7 days a week, last entry 5:30. Nearest Tube, Sloane Square.

http://matthewreevescurator.wordpress.com/

Image Captions:

Yumiko Utsu
Octopus Portrait
2009
C-type print
55 x 44.5 cm
Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London
©Yumiko Utsu, 2009

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin
Culture 3 Sheet 72
2010
C-type print
150 x 190 cm
Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London
© Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, 2010

Four Horsemen is clearly a testimony of a newly formed political, economic and social climate in the United States, and can be resumed by a quote from one of its key speakers, Noam Chomsky: ”We are accelerating harsh times for youth.” It is one of the many ‘independent’ documentaries or media mediums which attempts to expose America’s and capitalism’s inconsistencies, hypocrisies and contradictions in areas such as Banking, Foreign Policy, the War on Terror and Natural Resource management.

When naming his documentary, director Ross Ashcroft is obviously pointing towards a biblical reference; the infamous four horsemen of the apocalypse from the book of revelations. Ashcroft himself believes that they are well on their way and to prevent this apocalyptic future the problems exposed are to be resolved.

Assembling over twenty ”global thinkers”, both the marginalized and well recognized, they are all established figures in areas diverging from finance, to linguistics and sociology; Chomsky, Joseph Stiglitz, Tarik E. Diwary, Max Keiser. All revealing what are apparently secrets or unknown complications in the western liberal and blissful ideology. Another figure which seems to come up often is an ex-N.S.A. economist who help topple central American governments in the 1970′s, John Perkins. Many of them have already participated in a variety of independent documentaries which have been emerging in the US and Britain since September 11th, and have accelerated their publications since the 2008 financial crisis.

Four Horsemen is in direct continuation of a works such as Inside Job and Capitalism: A Love Story. This movement should be seen as a new political and social awakening in the U.S., often refereed to as the ”Truth Movement”. While still a notably small movement, its precipitous rise over the last few years nonetheless makes it something worth watching.

These films aim to expose a view on the world and international affairs which emerges from America but doesn’t seem to be given the desired amount of coverage in mainstream media; large networks, newspapers and praised channels (such as Fox, CNBC). As some of these documentaries have pointed out the centralization of news and media, and their will to make profit from the news they present impoverishes its quality and does not necessarily allow for serious critical analysis.

Four Horsemen differs from others due to the notoriousness of its key speakers and a well elaborated rhythm and progression of its demonstration, many of these documentaries are not quite as professional in cinematographic and animation terms as they might not have the same means.  Ashcroft dissects America’s and the worlds problems into four main points; a banking system, an unsaid Empire, a poorly managed War on Terror, and our future lack of resources.

Other points are put forward on our energy and food crisis exposing how unequally the world resources are distributed. All the problems put forward by the documentary seem to go in one direction: against capitalism.  Here the new wave of documentaries, films, cartoons, youtube media channels diverge greatly in the solutions to the same evil; Capitalism and Centralisation of power.  Here some of the ”Truth Movement” mediums tend to explain that we should accept a notion of socialism, welfare state, taxes for the richest, the abolition of intellectual property, etc… Yet other, thus is the case of Ashcroft, go the other way; aggressively attacking the neoliberal and neoconservative views on economics and social policies, but advocating for a return to classical economics thus; less regulation, more free market, no government control over commerce finance or other realms of society. Thus seemingly advocating for a libertarian type of government. (Ron Paul being one of the American conservative candidates currently best representing these views.)

Yet this is were Four Horsemen is fundamentally wrong. As one of its speakers states that in America today: ”We have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.” It then attempts to expose what ought to be done according to sacred capitalist and classic economic values, and what is currently being done by distorted advocates of state control, or neoliberals. This is where most leftist viewers and probably even Marx himself would chuckle.

The most hopeful element of this documentary is the critical analysis and the demonstration of the perversity in our daily lives. It also must be taken into account that criticising capitalism is not an easy thing to do in the United States. As Stiglitz explains, prior to 1989 it was unthinkable to mention a systemic problem in America, as the enemy was socialist. Therefor we can clearly see an awakening in the ”Truth Movement” which Four Horsemen contributes to. However this movement, which is certainly a young movement, tends to forget that knowledge exists elsewhere than on internet, television, or media.  Thus the critic or struggle is far from having ended with this documentary, it has merely taken another small step.

It really can work sometimes, the internet. Don’t let the sites of Tom Raworth and Stephen Rodefer – absolute towering geniuses of literature – fool you; they are serious writers, despite the retro webpages. (Rodefer’s is designed by equally impressive writer Peter Manson, twinned to an equally unimpressive site. Nonetheless READ these people.)

There are innumerable badly designed literary magazines too. But The Claudius App ain’t one of them. It’s wierd, it’s… you guessed, wonderful. I won’t pretend to have read everything on it, but it has some striking content. The manifesto is a must (i.e. it is helpful) for any burgeoning writer who wants to be relevant, and not merely regurgitate. Cue regurgitation:

From manifestos in an emergency to emergent manifestos. From articulating de Mans to the demand for articulation and back again, lest the closed community eddy into an antmill circling its own affinities (return of the same of the same of the same return). The incrementalism of the brokenwindowpolicy that supposedly keeps contradictions controllable within a localized feedback window fails when its Windows that gets broken, broken into, hunting for Ether Eggs. That was the world you saw just now.  Its contradictions are our own, our currency, actualité, à la une.

As n-1=M+1, we’re cloudspeaking a manifesto for May Day. What do you dream of Gen-Y?  Thread your needle into the Haymarket here. Articulate your multitudes, contradict them, wipe-out or re-up. Alter, delete, add, share.  Cut, paste, link, strike, troll, flame, scroll. Stigmathaumaturgy. Forgive me: I wanted you here in the googledoc, where I is deleted.

Think it through. Then have a look at the poems, especially Catherine Wagner’s ‘Chicken Poem’.

Despite this endorsement, I still cannot navigate the website well, even though  I’ve now clocked a whole 20 minutes on it, I cannot get to issue 1.

But at least it has an aesthetic that isn’t childish. Perhaps in twenty years it will appear so, or we will have new issues of The Claudius App injected directly into our mindbrains. Poetry by osmosis… a truly horrible prospect.

Open mics, held in venues that range from the cosily candlelit to the downright odd, are accessible to all and a natural place to get started. However, Joshua Seigal, who’s had poems published in Popshot and Penpusher, points out that from a literary perspective ‘these are extremely hit-and-miss’. Be prepared for long silences as performers shuffle through mounds of paper onstage, fretting over what to read out. And don’t be surprised if you find yourself awkwardly applauding a ‘divorce poem’ that has clearly been written for someone in the audience. The personal nature of some material can make for uncomfortable listening.

Poetry ‘slams’, in which performers battle before a panel of judges, are an altogether different beast. ‘We wanted to create something that people who weren’t poets could enjoy’, says John Paul O’Neill, host London’s first and oldest slam Farrago. In his view, ‘you have to be a bit of a poetry nut to really enjoy an open mic night’.

The competitive nature of slamming raises the bar. If you score highly, you’re likely to be invited back for a feature slot.  Slams also guarantee immediate public feedback, a perk if you don’t mind public dissection. There are slams all over the world, which makes participants part of what John Paul calls a ‘continuous, living community’- one with strong links to the world of publishing. Slam alumni have gone onto great things; Elvis Mcgonagall is now a resident poet on BBC Radio 4′s Saturday Live and Kate Fox has taken her solo show to the Edinburgh Festival.

Slams have also widened the demographic of performance poetry by encouraging female performers, who continue to be under-represented in clubs. Farrago frequently takes affirmative action, ensuring that 50% of those on the bill are women. Yes, perhaps surprisingly, machismo pervades London’s poetry scene. At Poetry Unplugged on March 20th, only 2 out of the 18 poets who turned up were female. Ceri May, compère at Y Tuesday Poetry Club, suspects that this is due to how ‘angry men wearing black and shouting’ is still a common spectacle. ‘It can be quite intimidating to come into a place that is full of men loudly putting the world to right in verse’.

However, poets are divided on the merits of slamming. Dissenters say that it shoehorns art into a competitive format just to guarantee an audience. ‘Slam is to poetry what music is to the X-Factor‘, argues seasoned performer Steev Burgess. ‘I’d hate to think that poetry today will be judged on what we see at slams’. He observes that stylistically, slams encourage a tendency towards the formulaic- ‘You draw out the 3rd syllable of a 4 syllable word, you use ‘-tion’ words a lot, you’re more angry than reflective and you adopt a nasal American whine even if you are a middle class Englishman from Penge’.

Unlike at most open mics, slam judges frown on reading poetry off the page and there is a resultant pressure to memorise your set. More than one nascent poet has stumbled off-stage after forgetting his lines, never to return.

No doubt then, a slam is a more intense gig. But as Joshua points out, ‘although not for everyone, they’re the surest way to recognition’. So if you’re thick-skinned, it’s definitely worth a shot.

Much of the book is a discussion of the concept of multiculturalism and how it functions in the contemporary world. Multiculturalism is the doctrine that several different cultures (rather than one national culture) can coexist peacefully and equitably in a single country. Many current world leaders, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel , Prime Minister David Cameron, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy claim that multiculturalism has failed, specifically in regards to the sizable Islamic community that has formed in the West. Although these politicians gripe about different issues, Bowen states that “the issues they raise – real or imagined – have complex historical roots that have little to do with ideologies of cultural difference.” Many Germans feel that Muslims are unable to assimilate, yet Germany has historically held a policy that is hostile to immigrants; and Cameron claims that Britain is divided culturally because Islamic communities are exclusive, but ignores the fact that Catholic and Anglican parents segregate their children by putting them in schools that only accept pupils of their religion. It is easier to blame the so-called failure of multiculturalism on another cultural group instead of one’s own.

The second half of the book moves onto the realities of Muslim immigration and Islamic culture’s effects on Western countries. Most have heard popular statements like “Islam is growing so fast that it will take over the world in fifty years,” or “Muslims are trying to impose sharia law!” However, Bowen writes these accusations against Islam off as hyperboles spread by the uninformed. Muslim fertility rates are actually falling, and it turns out that while sixty percent of American Muslims think homosexuality is wrong, so do the same percentage of American Protestants!  Muslims cannot take over a place with their cultural beliefs if a number of the people in the country they are “infiltrating” already share the same views. As Muslims are not trying to force their beliefs on entire countries, countries are not willing to accept Islamic sharia law as their own. The book discusses how although there is much fear that Islamic tribunals in Britain have too much say in legal matters and courts are allowing sharia law to stand in the American justice system. But as Bowen argues, the civil law always comes first. Time and again, Muslim council members deal only in religious law and advise people to seek legal help. Western court cases condemned for “upholding” sharia law turn out to be rulings that agree with or acknowledge previous decisions made in countries that have elements of sharia law in their own justice systems. Bowen reiterates: Islam is by no means taking over.

What with all the misconceptions and rumours floating around about Islam, a book like this is certainly necessary for doing research to assess the truth behind what biased politicians and racist neighbors have to say. It is a very quick read, only 115 pages. But inside its four chapters, Blaming Islam is full of reasons why we should place our blame elsewhere.

Whether to carry out high profile stunts or to simply share gallery space, collectives are a time-honoured tradition of working in the art field. London has its share of collectives, and a hive of activity in the London art scene today is DE/FAULT. Formed in early 2011, DE/FAULT is Emmeline Rodman (Central Saint Martins), Lucy Armah (University of Edinburgh and Sorbonne) and Tarini Malik (London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martins). It is, in their words, an interdisciplinary “nomadic creative space and art collective”.

Following a debut at the Old Deptford Police Station and their VOLUME II multi-artist show exploring the concept of the line last December in Hackney, DE/FAULT are now busy working on a 12-hour curated show featuring the contributors of Conjunction Zine, then moving on in summer to show photographer Carl Bigmore’s work in Berlin. They are documenting fashion street bloggers, planning a silent screen image and short film exhibition set to live music accompaniment, and a pop-up show of puppet craft.

In an interview, they spoke about their approach and offered advice for arts graduates thinking about moving into curating and collaborating once art school is over:

Tell us about what you bring to the collective, and what you decided DE/FAULT should strive for.

Lucy: The name DE/FAULT came from the first show Emmeline and I put on at Byam Shaw, where we tried to push artists to challenge what they considered the default positioning of their practice. I think this idea of questioning the automatic way we position different types of art is at the heart of DE/FAULT. My main passion and knowledge is within design and the applied arts disciplines. But really it’s about each of us being flexible. We do have quite similar values, so we rarely disagree in any serious way!

Tarini: ‘Default’ by definition is ‘the failure, absence or lack of’ and DE/FAULT hopes to nullify the negative obstacles that can pollute the art world such as inaction, financial obligations and constrictive dogma. Being nomadic and by being open to new voices and ideas, we hope to create positive situations for emerging artists and creatives no matter what medium. Both Emmeline and Lucy are practicing artists and I have an art history background with curatorial and writing experience, so we compliment each other. 

Emmeline: We source artists, organize and promote shows and offer help and advice to creatives who might want help in planning their future. Artists aren’t all naturally marketers or experts on PR so we often help with writing press releases, online social networking promotion and event strategy.  I have an advertising and PR background and enjoy the promotional side of the events, finding artists and representation.

Tell us about preparing shows, like your December opening in Hackney at Ground Floor Left

Tarini: Finding a space for the VOLUME II group show was challenging, as this was our breakthrough show. We had decided that we would work with three artists that we believed had exceptional potential who had previously exhibited at the Old Deptford Police Station. We searched for other creators by going to graduate shows, approaching those that we believed strongly complimented and added to one another’s work and ethos. We funded the exhibition ourselves and worked really closely with the artists to realize their final pieces.

Lucy: We articulated a theme through these artists and sourced the remaining three artists by seeing how far that theme could be pushed.

Emmeline: Finding a space is always the hardest part as this changes the installation options for the art work and you are often looking at the space with a non-creative interest, for example, where to put the bar and making sure there’s space for people to stand. Often you have to compromise on space for location; a private view’s ‘success’ is often marked on how easily it is to get through the door from the room’s congestion.

For those arts graduates considering a similar group approach, do you have any advice?

Emmeline: Make the maximum contacts you can and really invest your time in projects which you find challenging, try to think of where art might be going six months in the future. I always like to know someone with unnaturally good graphic design skills, someone who enjoys tall ladders and helping us carry the odd piece of work. We’re always surprised by the generosity of the people we meet and what they offer us, from a can of white paint to an hour of time.

Lucy:  Have conviction. It’s tough work, and you have a big responsibility for the artists you are working with. There is a lot of time that has to be devoted to less creative admin. It is much easier to stay positive at 4 am on Sunday morning when you are imputing email addresses into a database if you feel you are ultimately doing something worthwhile alongside talented people. Try to source your collaborators as widely as possible from the beginning – it becomes far too self-referential if you are only working with mates.

What is DE/FAULT doing now…and next?

Emmeline: Pretty busy, we have four shows this year including collaborations with Conjunction Zine  and electro-folk band The Dufflefolks. Our Berlin show will feature medium format photographs documenting trees from around the world by photographer Carl Bigmore. We are looking to work in a more experimental way later this year and put on shows in more unconventional spaces here and abroad; in 2013 we’re hoping to promote DE/FAULT in Oslo. We have an open call for collaborators.

Tarini: The group exhibition that we hope to run by the end of the year in the UK with three artists who have approached us – Andy Wicks, Mark Essen and Ben Bird – is a project we are really excited about. Finding a space where we can work together as a collective and invite people to come join us…not to say that we hope to be anchored in one place permanently but it would be good to have one platform where we can organize future events. Lucy has begun funding applications; even in this recession there are financial grants out there.

Lucy: This year we would like to be more experimental, so for the Berlin show, we are exploring ways of making it more than a photography show, a more visceral experience. We are just trying to make the shows we have coming up now as strong as possible and build a profile that will allow us to fund more ambitious projects.

More information at:

http://www.defaultspace.com/

Image Captions:

An image from artist Ben Bird featuring in DE/FAULT Volume III show

The exhibit captures the Monroe which history remembers: playful and theatrical. Her status as one of the most eponymous American women in history is left untouched. “Marilyn at the Savoy” shows a packed reception Monroe held in London, 1956- photographers climb over each other and scramble to change their films as she glances back at the camera with a casual indifference. In the most well known shot at the exhibition, “Marilyn On The Roof”, Monroe leans over a balcony in New York City, her taut smile and blustery hair seem to capture a unique brand of 50’s nostalgia.

The exhibition throws up surprises. Twelve original costumes worn by Marilyn are also on show- they were heavily influential on the era’s fashion and were coveted by a generation of women. They are provocative and gaudy but they are clearly suited to different roles in films. Throughout her career, Monroe struggled to escape her tag as a “dumb blonde” and she never fully managed to make the mark on Hollywood that she wanted. The most unusual dress is a black silk leotard from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; you get the feeling that the matching harlequin hat was something only Monroe could pull off.

You’re given insight into Monroe’s life before fame. In 1949, she had earned $50 for a nude photo shoot for a gas-station calendar in an attempt to scrape some money together; a young businessman named Hugh Hefner used these images to start a magazine named Playboy. She spent much of her career trying to re-brand herself as a serious actress but when the images were printed in 1953 they shaped America’s perception of Monroe. A complex psychological portrait of the actress is subtly conveyed if you pick up Marilyn by Nick Yapp on the centre table. Monroe claimed that she lost count of the number of abortions and miscarriages she had. Since abortion was illegal at the time, there is no evidence to prove or disprove her claims and this has fuelled a catalogue of rumours about Monroe’s sex life.

The exhibition highlights Monroe’s cultural significance as the most famous blonde of the twentieth century but it also teaches us that she was more than this. A shot of her distraught and in tears because she cannot fit into a dress at a New York parade reminds us of the enormous pressure upon her – pressure which would eventually lead to her suicide in 1962. Her conflict with fame, drugs, and marriage is made even more poignant given the recent suicide of another cherished American icon: Whitney Houston.

In ‘Backpacker Naturalist’, Hanlon details how his time studying zoology at Bangor University shaped his travelling dreams, before recounting his solo 15 month trek across New Zealand and Australia in search of Antipodean wildlife. Sensory imagery describing his first steps into the unknown will strike a chord with students hoarding travel ambitions: the cultural shock greeting him upon landing in Hong Kong is something all travellers will inevitably experience in their various adventures!

Even if birds and wildlife aren’t your thing, it’s certainly worth a read. Hanlon’s encounters with a dingo, a Fjordland Crested Penguin and kiwis work well alongside an analysis of Antipodean culture and stories of new friends and new experiences. Ultimately, this is a guide on how to follow through with your own travel aspirations – an easy and encouraging read for those needing that final push!

Backpacker Naturalist by James Hanlon is available now