Jack Mapanje

For this year’s Free The Word festival, we at 26 paid tribute to the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN, celebrating its 50th anniversary. Fifty of us scribbled a 50 word sketch in honour of a prolific writer from PEN’s armoury. Jack Mapanje, my man, is a Malawi born poet, who was imprisoned for four years without cause. You can see all of our pieces for 26:50 on the 26 Tumblr Here are mine:

Jack Mapanje

“Jack… Jack…”
Someone calling out for him,
Lost in the night.
Another bad dream.

Morning used to break here,
full of the song of the birds.
“Jack… Jack…”
They came for him.
Singing

Without charge,
They get the man but not the name.
His is with the birds
‘Jack… Jack…’

by Mike Exon

Interactive Writing

The 26 Exchanges event at the Royal Academy of Engineering has sadly past, but with luck it will soon be preserved in digital history online. The show was an experiment in pairing writers from around the world and animating their conversations as living. moving text. Editorial animation is emerging as an interesting medium. It’s evolved beyond the credits at the end of a film into a powerful and emotional means of messaging, of adding to the raw power of words. I’ll out a link up here as soon as I can. Thanks to the writers collective 26 and International PEN though for their pioneering work, and for finding such capable desingers.

Mike Exon

Notes On Reading from André Kertész

Paper is needed now. Bring it in any time.

Try and get to the Photographers’ Gallery before Oct 4th if you don’t want to miss On Reading, the collection of Hungarian born André Kertész. This is a trip through the years (from 1915 to 1979) taken for the eyes of readers via the lens of a master. (Cartier-Bresson credited Kertész with setting the scene later crystalised by himself and Robert Capa.)

Here’s the thing. Reading is everywhere. It’s more important than we give it credit for. And when we’re reading, we’re reading alone, at one with the world and ouirselves together. Kertész’s readers are caught heads down, engrossed in the page, in every place possible – on the beach in Cannes, on the roof in Greenwich Village, or just sitting on a wall.

One boy sits on a pile of old newspapers holding a war-time comic from 1944. The hand printed shop window sign hanging over him reads ‘Paper is needed now. Bring it in any time.’ As he reads to escape the world, it is in acute focus all around him. Just like the magnifying glass of the old man stooping over the secondhand book stall in Book Row, Manhattan. Kertész’s subjects are all of us. As they read the world waits.

On Reading, to 4th Oct, Photographers’ Gallery, Ramillies St, London W1.

ICA showcases textual picture-making

Liliane Lijn does Poor. Old. Tired. Horse just fine.

When words, or rather when text meets image the cocktail shaking really begins. Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. at the ICA in London suffers the fate of so much art. An intriguing name, if you let the words ferry you away, but not one that does justice to the experience.

P.O.T.H is a fascinating array of painstaking work to build art out of letterforms. It’s highly visual and dynamic as a collection, but the real intricacy comes up close. An homage to the buidling blocks we take for granted, and new forms of picture making from the Sixties ateliers of Carl André, David Hockney, Vito Acconci, Liliane Lijn (pictured).

For a full account of Horse see issue 2 of ROLAND, the ICA’s visual arts magazine. Not since Wyndham Lewis’s Blast have words enjoyed this power. Great work.

Today’s Pynchon Day in the UK

When old Tom Pynchon publishes, it’s a big day. People know about it, well certain people do. They obsess, specualte and as they count their coins out over the counter, wonder why so many have already disappeared off the pile when Daunts has only been open forty minutes.

Last time, for Against the Day, there was a press release supposedly written by the mystery man himself. For Inherent Vice, his Ballardian looking latest, the Pynchon Project has been lower key. Phone calls and e-mails to Penguin Press were unreturned. Was it really going to come out? The whole thing felt like Wonka’s, nobody in – nobody out: somehow the books still got themselves on the shelves. That’s what happens in the post digital world.

Inherent Vice is set up as a Sixties thriller, with the usual cast list of supra real characters and a trippy LA plot. The Pynchonites want it to be scrawled with question marks and his trademark sense of knowing. Glenn from Blackwell’s rates it anyway. ‘Not his best but his easiest read yet’.

There’s still some firepower left in the old missile launcher then…?

SoPo Soho Poetics

Poetry has a hard time keeping up with world. Its public image is shot through. It’s seen as inaccessible, old fashioned and irrelevant by most, the unstirred. All those Ryhming Simons throwing shapes on Radio 4′s BH every week don’t help. Nor does the Shakespearean rap crew that gets down on the Late Review from time to time. Modern university courses skip through it, and the feeble tusslings of the Laureates just stir up contempt.

So it’s good to see that the scene lives and breathes in the back streets, a slice of which was dished up like last night at SoPo, run by Laura Forman and the Elmwood writers.

Nathan Penlington mixed magic, performance and some cracking ryhmes from Uri Geller’s ‘My Story’ (by John Fuller as Penlington quipped), though the spoon bending took us to dangerous territory given the scale of the poetry PR problem.

Emily Berry stuck rigidly to her words. Words of love lost and empty, lives spun dry by others. Her’s was a brave self exposure, raw and naive, unadorned, coloured only by words.

Missed George Szirtes. The T S Eliot Prize winner. Check out Reel if you want to know what it takes.

Don’t mince your words

 

People don’t read any more. We’re mollycobbled by moving images. It’s time to let words do the talking using all the weapons of mass animation. Wordle.net is a good little free app for animating text. If you do use it just make sure you spread the word for Pete’s sake!

Try writing with a typewriter

 

Copyright: 2009, Florida Center for Instructional Technology

 

This is a great little toy that deliberately throws you back to the days of the typewriter. What’s the point? Well, you have to focus your writing up front because you can’t make mistakes. Have you got what it takes? It’s free to download…

Gillian Tindall in conversation

Gillian Tindall sat alone and inspired at Daunts, Marylebone last night. There to preview Footprints in Paris: A Few Streets, A Few Lives, she was on a one woman mission to teach us the ways of the wild left bank.

Like her book, the chat was a blend of memorised history, personal anecdote and fictional thread. Generations of her family had spent their gentlemanly lives in the old Parises, as had she.

There is a blend of reality fiction around that mashes such strands into a new type of work. The Sinclair school

Covers of Beckett

From now until 2011, some 20 Becketts are being republished by Faber. Beckett’s books have always attracted great typographic covers. I was lucky enough to pick up an old US edition of Murphy languishing on the shelves of Booth’s in Hay on Wye earlier this year. The cover is a piece of typographic poetry in itself.