Culture

The title of this book refers to a line in Mike Marqusee’s poem ‘Egypt’. In it, Egyptian people are filling a public square, presumably Cairo’s Tahrir Square, their images captured on TV. Much like a dream, Marqusee writes, what is happening is ‘turbulent and calm, much wished for, full of surprise.’ But unlike a dream, this is a revolution that will leave ‘definable traces in the atmosphere, like incense.’ He concludes: ‘I know this is not a dream because like a dream / everything is…

Poet, former Children’s Laureate and presenter of Radio 4’s show about language Word of Mouth, Michael Rosen is also well-known as a scourge of ‘traditionalist’ education and his left-wing political activism on a wide variety of different topics.

This book covers Rosen’s life until he left university at 23. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Rosen is the author of many children’s books, this means that the writing is often from a child’s perspective. I found it amusing…

Mike Marqusee
Definable Traces in the Atmosphere: Selected Writings
OR Books, 2018; 366pp; £13
Available online here.

The title of this book refers to a line in Mike Marqusee's poem Egypt. In it, Egyptian people are filling a public square, presumably Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and being captured on TV. Much like a dream, Marqusee writes, what is happening is ‘turbulent and…

Sun hangs over London, as if she’s stalking me. The lawn
has burnt patches, like a blister which won’t heal. The weather
forecasters are excited. The weather forecasters are lying.

In the arctic, a mammoth iceberg hunches its shoulders, splits,
topples over. The cast-off, a small country, floats towards
the warmth, its watery cargo melting.…

In the summer of 1968, a young man named Sam Lord combined forces with Peter Dukes and Jean Lou Msika (a French Tunisian expelled from France because of his involvement in the May uprisings in Paris) to set up a low-cost/no-cost screenprint workshop in a damp basement on London’s Camden Road.

Over the next three years, the Poster Workshop printed thousands of revolutionary/protest posters from hundreds of designs. Peter Dukes kept a copy of every poster that was printed.
…

emergency use soft shoulder (1966). Photo: Josh White, courtesy Corite Art Centre, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles

Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft may seem an unlikely place to host an exhibition of 1960s Warhol-inspired socially-engaged prints from California, but these brightly-coloured, life-affirming texts by Corita Kent make for an exciting dialogue with artworks by members of the Roman Catholic local artistic community in the permanent collection.

In 1921,…

The title of this print is a reference to this saying of Jesus as reported in John’s gospel in the Christian bible: ‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.’

This print takes the slogan ‘Enriched Bread’, and its overall design, from the wrapping around Wonder Bread, a US brand of cheap sliced white bread.

Bread has religious significance for Christians. Bread is multiplied during the feeding of the five…

I’ve been writing songs and poems (often the same thing) since the mid-’60s but have never been prolific. Nearly two years ago, I told a friend that once I’d only written five or six in an entire year. The friend immediately set me a target: write a poem a week for a year.

I was apprehensive as I set to, but the first arrived on 15 November 2016 and I never missed in 52 weeks.

I found it challenging at first but as the year wore on I began to look forward to writing the next…

On International Women’s Day this year, I was singing: ‘Sister, my sister, she’s walking with me, walking for equality, she’s walking with me…’, a song that was sung in the 1970s women’s liberation movement in the USA.

This song is a zipper song – just a word or phrase is changed to create a new verse, making it really useful for singing on marches and enabling people to join in. We added our own verses, singing to…

Dear readers, I’ve belatedly made the acquaintance of a remarkable US writer who died a month after I was born. I wish I’d encountered him years back but here’s a quote and you’ll see why he immediately endeared himself to me: ‘When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: “Whose?”’

Don Marquis, novelist, poet, newspaper columnist, playwright and (I insist) philosopher, was born in 1878 and in 1916 he began a famous column in New York’s The Evening Sun…

A couple of years ago, I went to an international peace gathering in Sarajevo. Because of the place, there was a much greater proportion of people able to attend from Eastern Europe and from further east than is often the case in gatherings held further west in Europe. This was a great learning opportunity for me because I am used to being in ‘international’ spaces that are still dominated by Western culture.

When I am choosing songs to help bring many voices together in concert or…

PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series continues with this showcase for the writing of the legendary science fiction (SF) writer and memoirist Samuel R. Delany, featuring the title novella, Delany’s famous 1998 essay ‘Racism in Science Fiction’, and an interview with Delany by series editor Terry Bisson.

Clocking-in at seventy-two pages, The Atheist in the Attic centres on the famous November 1676 meeting between the philosophers Leibniz and Spinoza (the latter the atheist…

Silkscreen image taken from Poster Workshop 1968–1971 published by Four Corners Books, review in next issue.

A Dangerous Woman is a compelling new play by Alex Gifford that has re-fashioned the well-known story of Alice Wheeldon (1866–1919) so that this piece of radical history speaks clearly to our times. Performed in Stroud by the outstanding Gloucester Theatre Company in February, the fluid and fluent production got off to a blinding start and held our attention to its moving solitary end, with Alice singing a capella to a white dove we imagine but never see.

The story is a…

The ‘Collateral Damage’ project is inviting everyone to commemorate non-military victims of war by making unique textile white poppies. The military often refer to non-military deaths or destruction as ‘collateral damage’. These days, over 90 percent of people killed in war are civilians. Others suffer loss of family, home, community and even their country.

In November 2018, it will be 100 years since the end of the First World War. This centenary year is a golden opportunity to…