litro.co.uk

The Play’s the Thing

webmaster — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:43:02 +0000

Katherine Kelly & Steve Pemberton in 'She Stoops to Conquer'

There’s an important fact that you don’t really get told in English lessons: plays aren’t actually meant to be read. Go to school or university and you could come away imagining that plays are strangely bare, odd-shaped novels, with no description and scene changes instead of chapter titles. The truth is, of course, that plays (being plays) are meant to be acted, and reading them only lets you understand half of what’s really going on. It’s like trying to watch a film from the next room while you’re busy with something else.

Plays, after all, are about communication, and communication is made up of a lot more than just speech. It’s about the nuances you put into words, the movements you make, the tone of your voice. You can say the words “He’s very handsome,” and show by the way you say them that you really do think so, or that you think that he thinks so, or that you secretly think he’s a hideous toad in a suit.

This is something that living in London has really brought home to me. I keep going to see plays that I think I know well, and every time I come away astonished at how much better they are in action than I even imagined they could be when I was reading them. She Stoops to Conquer is a case in point. Written in the eighteenth century by Oliver Goldsmith, it’s the story of upper class twit Marlowe, a man who’s spent all his life being educated and has consequently never learnt how to deal with women of his own class. A saucy rake around bar maids and the like, he becomes a dribbling idiot when put near any girl who’s fully dressed and able to write her own name. Eventually, his father loses patience and sends him off to be married to upper class lady (and extremely clever girl) Kate Hardcastle. Of course, Marlowe can’t even look at her, but Kate likes the look of him so much that she decides to seduce him by dressing up as a maid. Events, of course, proceed amusingly from there, and end up with lots of marriage and general revelry.

Even on the page, She Stoops to Conquer is completely delightful. It’s difficult not to be won over by a heroine who exclaims, when told of a prospective lover’s good looks and fortune, “He’s mine! I’ll have him!” Gleefully anti-authority and with a deliciously hard-headed attitude towards romance – when another character exclaims, “Perish the baubles! Your person is all I desire!” he’s told off by his fiancée for being too impractical – She Stoops to Conquer champions desire founded on what’s in someone’s head as much as what’s in their heart. Love in this play is about compatibility, mental as well as physical, an attitude that chimes so well with what we believe today that I’m forced to conclude that either people in the eighteenth century were much more advanced than we give them credit for or that we’ve hardly moved on at all.

But that’s just the text. The play is what you do with that text, and the ever-brilliant National Theatre have used Goldsmith’s words to create a new production that’s charmingly naughty, visually spectacular and so uproariously jolly that I left the theatre in a haze of goodwill towards mankind.

As I’ve said, I studied the play at university, and so I thought I understood the irony of lines like Marlowe’s “As for Miss Hardcastle, she’s too grave and sentimental for me.” But when I finally saw him saying it, blissfully ignorant, while the Miss Hardcastle in question came sidling up behind him lifting up her skirt and aiming her cleavage at his head, I realised that I’d been missing how incredibly, dirtily funny the situation really was. This production definitely makes the most of She Stoops to Conquer’s physical humour. Marlowe, when he finally notices Kate in her peasant dress, leaps up and neighs like a horse; characters slap and pinch each other and drag each other in and out of rooms; and Kate’s country bumpkin mother has an awe-inspiring accent that travels up and down the register from Glasgow to Torquay.

Sophie Thompson (who plays Mrs Hardcastle) really does have a show-stealingly great turn. From her curtseys (which always end up as undignified crouches) to her hair-piece (which is constantly falling out) she’s outrageously pitch-perfect. Not that the cast she overshadows aren’t excellent as well. Kate (Katherine Kelly) is beautifully pert, Marlowe and his friend Hastings (Harry Haddon-Paton and John Hefferman respectively) are beautifully foolish, and Mr Hardcastle (Steve Pemberton) has a beautiful time shouting at everybody.

It’s all backed up by gorgeous costumes and a stunning set (the Olivier Theatre’s rotating stage is put to good use, and we even get tree trunks lowered down onto the stage in the garden scene), and an incredibly enthusiastic ensemble who gallop around banging on pots and pans and singing.

She Stoops to Conquer is a wonderful text that’s had wonderful things done to it, and the result is a play that’s genuinely funny and warm-hearted. And most importantly, it’s a pleasure to watch.

Robin StevensSimilar Posts:

Q&A: Clare Wigfall

webmaster — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:02:30 +0000

Clare Wigfall had a story published in Issue 97 of Litro and took part in our crazy photoshoot at the Dalston Boys’ Club. Since that time, she’s spent a year in Edinburgh. You can find out what else Clare has been up to recently in our Litro Alumni section.

What is your earliest childhood memory?
It would be something faded by the Californian sun of the early-eighties, most probably.

What makes you happy?
Tea, my daughter’s laughter, good music on my headphones, finishing a new story, sunlight.

When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
When I was at art school, and decided I didn’t want to be an artist.

What are you reading at the moment?
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by the Bosnian-German writer Saša Stanišić.

What advice would you give to a first time writer?
There are no rules.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Lucky Charms cereal – pure sugar and chemicals.

How do you relax?
Watching kittens on YouTube.

What is your favourite book?
I don’t pick favourites.

Which author is underrated or deserves to be better-known?
Molly Keane.

What’s the worst job you’ve had?
One week in an office.

What is the most important thing life has taught you?
Ask me when I reach the end.

What’s next?
A new story collection for Faber.Similar Posts:

Litro Alumni: Clare Wigfall

webmaster — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:00:43 +0000

Here at Litro, we pride ourselves on publishing great original fiction. Although they may not have been big names when we published them, many of our writers have gone on to do great things. Litro Alumni catches up with those authors to see where they are now:

Clare Wigfall

I had a story in Issue 97 and took part in a crazy Litro photoshoot at the incredible Dalston Boys’ Club. Since that time, I’ve spent a year in Edinburgh. The Book Festival was a definite highlight, as was a residency I did at Cove Park.

Faber & Faber have commissioned me to write two new books for them; a new collection of stories, and a novel which will be set in colonial Malaya. Last year I was awarded the K. Blundell Trust Award. I was also long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Bank Short Story Award, and shortly after had the honour of being appointed as Writer in Residence for Booktrust. For eight months, I kept a blog for Booktrust which is archived on the site, so do take a look. I recently published my first children’s picturebook - Has Anyone Seen My Chihuahua? with Walker Books.

As a direct result of the Litro publication, I was asked to teach for the London organisation Spread the Word. I’ve also started teaching for the Arvon Foundation this year and ran the first workshop series for the Cork International Short Story Festival. Life has now taken me back to Berlin, a city I love, where I am working on my new story collection for Faber.

Read Clare’s story in Litro Similar Posts:

This Sporting Life

webmaster — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:54:37 +0000

'The Art of Fielding' by Chad Harbach

In the last few weeks, there have been a lot of column inches in the review sections of the weekend papers regarding the new US bestseller The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. I haven’t read it yet but I know it’s been mentioned as the next “Great American Novel” and has received generally excellent reviews from the press. I’m sure it’ll be a multi-faceted book with the usual helpings of love and life-changing experiences but what I find interesting is that the background to the novel is baseball. Now, I’ve nothing really against baseball – I certainly don’t understand the finer points of what looks like an upmarket rounders, even though it’s always on screen in almost every American bar. My point is more general. Given how much sport seems to dominate our lives these days, it strikes me that there are relatively few novels in which sport features to any great extent.

I’m not saying that there aren’t any. In fact, in recent years, one or two novels with sport as the background have been very successful. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill was a novel mainly about the strangeness of New York but showed cricket in possibly the last city in the world where you’d expect to find it. The Damned Utd by David Peace featured a fictionalised Brian Clough struggling to maintain his high standards of football management when thrown the challenge of looking after Leeds United. I know this book divided opinion, written only two years after Clough’s death, but I thoroughly enjoyed both the book and the subsequent film, starring Michael Sheen.

Looking further back, there have been novels or stories about rugby league (This Sporting Life by David Storey), golf (The Clicking of Cuthbert by PG Wodehouse) and pool (The Hustler by Walter Tevis). If you like your crime novel with a horse-racing setting (and you’ve read every Dick Francis book), you can’t beat the Saratoga series (Saratoga Longshot, Saratoga Swimmer etc.) by the American writer Stephen Dobyns, featuring the private detective Charlie Bradshaw. Moreover, if The Art of Fielding has given you the urge to read even more about baseball, you could try Ring around the Bases by Ring Lardner or any collection of his short stories, such as Round Up or Selected Stories. Lardner was a sports journalist in the American mid-west and wrote his stories between 1915 and his early death in 1933, at the age of 48. Although not so easy to find today, his books capture the prohibition-era and the American obsession with sports that not many other countries play. So, I’m certainly not saying the shelf of sporting novels is empty or of a low standard, just that compared to the number of novels featuring love and romance, for example, we see very few with sport at the centre.

Some of the best books about sport are, of course, the straightforward biographies or autobiographies, once you cut your way through the large number of ghost-written “why I’m so great” books. Try It’s Not about the Bike by Lance Armstrong on cycling (and his battle with cancer) or the excellent King of the World by David Remnick about the rise of Muhammad Ali. Both books shed light on two sports that don’t always get as much exposure as others. As for football, where lack of exposure certainly isn’t a problem, I’ve found the most enjoyable books have taken a more offbeat view of the sport. Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby is a good example of this, focussing on a die-hard fan’s obsession with Arsenal, though to be honest, compared to those of us who support a League One team, he can consider himself lucky. Another book in this vein is A Season with Verona by Tim Parks, a gripping story, part-travelogue, part-social history, where the author journeys around Italy with the often terrifying fans of Hellas Verona during one of their rare forays in the top division of Italian football. I couldn’t put the book down, desperate to discover the outcome of their battles, sometimes in every sense for the fans, with the might of Milan and Juventus.

It’s possible, then, that the relative dearth of sport-based novels is because of the difficulty of capturing the sheer thrill and excitement of actual sporting events, whether in watching or participating. So, with that in mind, I suppose it’s about time for my daily jog around the local park.

Briony Wickes

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Photo Inspirations – Disaster

webmaster — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:00:33 +0000

OMG. What happened? To whom? Why?

Photograph taken by Paige Sinkler

Paige SinklerSimilar Posts:

Good Bad Books

webmaster — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:00:23 +0000

Last week, I wrote about Culture, something that has an almost unique ability to make most of the population very nervous, as though it were a test they were bound to fail. It’s an understandable position but a very unfortunate one – people should be able to read, or look at, whatever they want, regardless of who they are. But if there’s a mistaken belief that there are certain kinds of art that can only really belong to people who speak like the Queen and have souls shaped like David Cameron, there’s an equally silly and almost as prevalent idea out there that there are certain sorts of book that are not for ‘real readers’.

This, as a position, drives me completely crazy. It’s also something that I come up against repeatedly on my university literature course. Although academia is beginning to wake up to the fact that books are still being written today, and that some of them are even quite good, there’s still an enormous amount of infuriating snobbery about genre fiction.

Genre fiction, of course, literally means books about romance, crime, horror, science fiction and fantasy. If I was feeling prickly (as I am when I’m repeatedly told that many of the books I enjoy are somehow invalid as fiction) I’d define it as any book in which the characters do more interesting things than just stand in a room and cry.

The key word here is interesting. I’ve noticed that often, when a book is accused of being ‘genre’, what its accuser really means (but doesn’t want to come out and say) is that it seems suspiciously like it might be fun to read. Many critics – and academics – suspect fun. There’s an invisible rule in their heads that all good books have to be difficult, and so all books that don’t tie your brain in knots of uncomprehending agony must therefore be bad.

'Snuff', the latest novel by Terry Pratchett

In one of my seminars last week, another student brought up Terry Pratchett. It was a valid reference and a relevant comment, and he could have left it at that, but the moment the words were out of his mouth he got a look on his face as though he’d just come to his senses to find himself desecrating his mother’s grave. He backtracked frantically – he’d read one book! Once! When he was a child! It meant nothing! It was just one time! – and then he started talking about Derrida, to prove that he was a serious academic who knew large texts and had important, grown-up, un-fun thoughts about them.

Personally, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Why can’t you bring up Terry Pratchett in an academic setting? He’s a writer, isn’t he? He puts down words on a page in exactly the same way as Alan Hollinghurst or A. S. Byatt, and those words get published and read just the same as theirs do. And after all, there isn’t an approved list of topics about which you can intelligently write. A passage about an elf, or a pair of shoes, or a bloodstained corpse, has just as much chance of being good as does a passage about sex, or loss, or the unbearable trauma of being. It all depends on the person who’s written it.

In fact, if we take Terry Pratchett as an example, a lot of what he’s doing when he writes about trolls and swords and magic carpets is using them to make extremely subtle and embarrassingly spot-on comments about the society we live in – which also happens to be exactly what Jonathan Swift, who now appears on almost every English literature course anywhere, was doing three hundred years ago. But of course he’s not genre, because he’s from history, and therefore all the funny parts of his books are probably just mistakes.

Actually, as soon as you do look at older texts, the genre-as-worth argument begins to totally break down. Many books that we now think of as classics would probably, if they had been published today, have been shoved on the Genre Shelves of Shame, where only nerds and children can get at them. Dickens and Hardy, for example, wrote specifically for the mass-market and most of their novels were first published in instalments, in popular magazines. Their analogues in terms of sales today would probably be writers like Stephen King or Alexander McCall Smith. Frankenstein? Well, that’s a science fiction horror novel. Dracula? The same. The Odyssey? Fantasy. The Three Musketeers? Historical fantasy. The more you think about it like that, the less literary snobbery makes any sense at all.

As you might be able to tell by now, I think the boxing-in concept of genre is incredibly stupid. It prevents a lot of people from feeling able to try authors they’d probably love, and it prevents a lot of really great authors from getting the recognition they deserve. China Mieville is one of the most creative and intelligent writers working today, but he would probably have to crawl on his knees to the country he’s named after to stand any chance of getting mainstream prizes for his work. It’s a sad state of affairs, because what should matter is the quality of someone’s writing, not what that writing is about. Against all those idiotic people who think that fun is a dirty word, I defend my right to read Zola and Diana Wynne Jones, Nabokov and Meg Cabot, and enjoy them all in very different, but equally valid, ways. And so should you.

Robin StevensSimilar Posts:

The New Culture Revolution

webmaster — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:01:56 +0000

Now it’s Chinese New Year, it is time to ditch the Chow Mein Pot Noodle. In the year of the Dragon, cuisine from the far east is being rediscovered as more than just fast food. It comes from a tradition more than 1,000 years old, and each dish is intended to tell a story with poetry and panache. Alexander James, picked up the chop sticks.

There are few cuisines, or even cultures, that are as misrepresented as the Chinese. You don’t have to look further for evidence than its food scene. Take Japanese cuisine; it’s perceived as being up there with the finest, the undisputed darling of the Asian food boom. It’s said that because it can take up to 15 years to make a sushi master, the end result is perfection on a plate.

But it can take even longer to master the art of making Chinese Dim Sum, up to 20 years, by which time most City Bonus-Boys have already retired. Still, most people’s idea of Chinese food is slurping limp and lank soggy noodles after a night on the sauce. It seems only now, food from the grand continent is winning the respect it deserves.

“What we typically think of as Chinese food isn’t really the same thing at all, more a version of what might have been popular in Hong Kong, and exported to the UK,” says Geoffrey Leong, director at London’s Asian food empire, Dumplings’ Legend, one of London’s Chinese restaurants to specialise in Dim Sum. Leong’s family are an Anglo-Chinese Dynasty, who played a part in shaping Chinatown in many gestations, exporting opium and tea in its hay day, along with the odd cow. “As a present from the Chinese to the British, because they liked milk in their tea,” he retorts.

Leong says real Chinese food and culture is largely unknown in the West, and put down to cultural stereotypes. “Think about the size of Europe, and the difference in, say, Scottish food to Greek food – the spectrum in China is the same,” he says.

However, one thing is uniform wherever Chinese food is served. “When the Chinese serve food to their guests, it is as a sign of their generosity,” Leong points out. “It’s about sharing and a Chinese dinner is more about the food more than anything. It’s not important to have flashy or seductive surroundings, as you’ll see from many restaurants, all focus goes into the food not the interior.”

That doesn’t stop many iconic Chinese food places stop trying to bring an element of swish minimalism or Asian bling to their table. Ping Pong restaurants have invested millions into bringing dim sum into a new market, that’s fresh, dynamic and keen to explore new tastes, in the same way Litro brings a fresh eye to literature.

Royal China, Queensway

One classic Dim Dum experience is Royal China in another of the UK’s dim sum eating outposts, in Queensway, London. It’s dining halls had a recent huge refurbishment to bring touches of the former-Emperor’s country to the tables of the UK.

“Dim Dum is intricate, it created by royalty more than 1,000 years ago when an Emperor wasn’t able to eat any of his lavish meals, so his cooks set about creating an alternative,” says Mr Lok manager of The Royal China Group.

“Dim Sum is an essential part of Chinese culture as families will gather over these delicacies for Chinese New Year to the Moon Festival, to celebrate or catch-up,” adds Lok

There’s more behind the dish than just taste, each parcel is symbolic, to fit with the Chinese element of superstition and bringing good fortune. The jiaozi dumpling symbolises prosperity to those who sit down for a family feast on Chinese New Year’s Eve. When the dumpling is crescent shaped it symbolises wealth, like the gold ingot once used in ancient China as money. It’s a tradition more than milliennia old, coming from superstitions about feeding the spiritual world, legends and history.

“In this way Chinese food tells a story, it’s not just about eating,” says Lok . “It’s about an explosion of flavours, all simply cooked, and the best way to learn is to take a lesson from the head chef at your favourite restaurant.”

There are many technical elements to creating a perfectly balanced dish. It is believed food should have a balanced yin yang. Remember that, next time you order that late night Special Chow Mein.

Alexander JamesSimilar Posts:

To Be Or Not To Be: The New-Look Dissertation

webmaster — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:00:31 +0000

As I write this, there’s many a final year English student in a library in every university town, panicking about their upcoming dissertations. For many of us, January means sales, snow and sticking to our new year’s resolutions but for the student, January brings with it the dark cloud of looming deadlines and, consequently, panic often begins to set in.

Billed as the ‘pinnacle of one’s academic career’, most English dissertations can be up to 20,000 words and ought to be focussed on a particular aspect of literature, the more specific the better. Gender in Victorian literature, for example, is far too broad a topic, whereas corseting the female body in the works of Margaret Oliphant is much more appropriate. As a final year student myself, I had my own dissertation-induced troubles just before Christmas, when it was time to submit initial ideas and choose a specific focus. As someone who enjoys the broad spectrum of literature, how does one go about choosing just one single area to focus on?

Perhaps you might assume that most third-year literary dissertations would target the big guns – Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen – classic authors that many will study at school and whose work is never out of print or off the screen and stage. At my university, however, this has not always been the case. There are many examples that I know where Shakespeare has been side lined, Dickens disdained and Austen avoided: my fellow students were turning away from the ‘great classics’ of the literary canon, choosing to focus instead on modern authors, such as Margaret Atwood and Stieg Larsson. Indeed, there were plenty of unexpected choices, with one student deciding to study the stories of Roald Dahl, whilst another chose David Nicholls’ recent bestseller, One Day. Many people, however, would be quick to rank the literary merits of King Lear over The Twits. So what is it that attracted my friends and classmates, the latest generation of English Literature students, to pick a novel more likely to be found on the bestsellers’ table rather than on a traditional University reading list? Why boycott the canon?

First and foremost, when it comes to writing a dissertation, it has to be unique. With such a vast body of criticism in existence already on authors such as Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen and, with much of it easily accessible via the Internet, it’s tricky to find something to say which hasn’t already been said before. Books like Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, although not yet typical fare on the school curriculum, offer an ambitious undergraduate some uncharted territory and a chance to write an entirely original thesis.

Nicholls’ One Day has probably been influenced by classics such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and this might allow the dissertation’s author to provide some interesting comparisons between them. There would be an opportunity to explore how Nicholls has managed to reinvent the old love story that we’ve read so many times before and yet provide a fresh and original take on it. Relevance is another key reason why I believe modern books have become such a popular choice for final year students. A dissertation is one’s contribution to present-day academia and so it’s important that it can reflect current issues, rather than rehash old ones. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a dissertation topic ought to be chosen because it’s something you enjoy and can be truly passionate about: Roald Dahl might be no James Joyce and The BFG is far from being Ulysses, but if I’m going to devote the next few months of my life to this project, slavishly working away every night in the library and missing out on all kinds of fun social events, I think it’s preferable that I write about some books that I find enjoyable to read. After all, I’ll be reading them more than once over the next three months.

It’s often said that it’s a mistake, as a student, to choose a degree because you feel you ought to, rather than one that you are going to enjoy studying for months and years. So, even before I start typing out a first draft of my dissertation, I’d like to offer an apology to William, Jane and Charles – we are sorry and we still really do like most of your works and promise to return to them later this year. In the meantime, across universities throughout the country, Roald and Stieg await.

Briony Wickes

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Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar

webmaster — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 23:08:30 +0000

A scene from The Pitman Painters at the Theatre Royal

In the first scene of The Pitmen Painters, set in the coal-mining town of Ashington in the 1930s, a group of miners have organised an after-work art appreciation class. The professor arrives and begins to give a slightly snooty lecture about Renaissance technique, but he’s quickly stopped by the leader of the group. They don’t want to hear about how painting is done, he explains. They just want to be able to look at a picture on a wall and know whether or not it’s any good.

I went to see The Pitmen Painters last week, and so this nervous attitude to culture was already in my head when my housemate the actuary turned to me a few nights ago and announced that he wanted to get into poetry, but he was afraid he wouldn’t understand what it was all about. At school, he explained, they were always talking about what poetry meant. What did he need to know, he asked, to be able to understand it?

My housemate may be part of the very suit-wearing, sushi-eating bourgeoisie that the Pitmen spend a lot of time railing against, but their worries about culture aren’t actually worlds apart. There is an assumption, encouraged by the way the arts are taught in schools, that works of art have to mean a particular thing that certain people (defined as those who have the correct, sanctioned bits of difficult-to-understand information in their heads) get and all the rest don’t.

As an English MA student, I’m one of the ones who should be in the know, but even I remember spending what felt like unbroken centuries of torment sitting in an English lesson waiting for someone to tell the teacher what the bird in Tennyson’s The Eagle represented. It occurred to me then, and it still does now, that no matter what ideas Tennyson may have had in his own head about the significance of eagles in general or that eagle in particular, there was no real reason why I or anyone else couldn’t just read the poem as being about an eagle.

There’s a great bit in The Pitmen Painters, after the men have moved on from appreciating art to trying to make some themselves, when they all gather round to critique each other’s work. One of them has done a very nice painting of a Bedlington Terrier standing in a garden. The size of it in relation to the scenery around shows the importance of dogs to the working men of Ashington, says someone. The painting is trying to convey something about the simple beauty in everyday life, says someone else. No, says the man who made it. I just wanted to paint a Bedlington Terrier. And I ran out of space on the board to do the surroundings properly.

This perfectly sums up two (slightly contrasting) things I believe about the arts – first, that there’s no reason why something shouldn’t be both simple and interesting, and second, that there’s not really a meaning at all.

You can look at Millais’s Ophelia, for example, and perfectly validly see a scene from Shakespeare, or the model who nearly froze to death posing for it in a bathtub in the middle of winter, or just a girl inexplicably drowning in very shallow water while surrounded by extremely ornate foliage. Similarly, if you know about Leda and Zeus you’ll be able to literally understand the story Yeats is telling in Leda and the Swan. Even if you don’t, the poem works just as well as a description of what it’s like to be assaulted by an enormous and angry bird. I completely admit that I have no real idea what is going on in Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, but that does not stop me finding it both amazingly colourful and completely hilarious (Google it and you won’t be disappointed).

In fact, the more confusing something is, the more you are free to decide what you think it’s about. The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot keeps coming up on the courses I take, and the more I read it, and read what’s written about it, the more I realise that no one in the entire world has any real understanding of what the hell it actually means. Therefore, I have decided that it’s perfectly fine to like it just because it sounds great.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Spread out in fiery points

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

Who is this woman? What is her significance? What does she represent in the poem? Who cares! Her hair is on fire. What I’m trying to say is that culture, like tax, doesn’t have to be taxing. At the end of the day, what it all means doesn’t matter. Although teachers and professors may try to convince you otherwise, no one really knows, anyway. The message of The Pitmen Painters, at least in my mind, is that even though not everyone is capable of being an artist, everyone is capable of being interested in art. Formal knowledge is just an added bonus, something that gives you another way to see a poem or a play or a painting. You don’t need to be daunted by it – one of the most important things about art is whether or not you like it. In fact, it’s still perfectly possible to dislike something even if you know it’s technically good. Ulysses is a masterpiece, and when I read it I hated it so much I wanted to take a flamethrower to its front cover. You should feel free to read and look at what you want to and conclude from that whatever you like. After all, it’s really all up to you.

Robin StevensSimilar Posts:

Q&A: Louise Phillips

webmaster — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:58:14 +0000

Since my first appearance in Litro, my work has been published in 34^Th Parallel and Monkeybicycle, and it is upcoming in Drunken Boat. Being published in Litro was a wonderful experience; it is a fantastic magazine and it is always exciting to see what other writers have done with the themes.

Louise Phillips

What is your earliest childhood memory?
The toy attached to the side of my crib. It had a rotary dial, a puffy red ball which sent a tiny piece of metal shooting up a tube and other delights.

What makes you happy?
Golden retrievers, Steven Gerrard goals.

When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
When I found out about Roald Dahl’s hut.

What are you reading at the moment?
Robert Schumann: His Life by Ronald Taylor, and America Begins: Early American Writing by Richard M. Dorson.

What advice would you give to a first time writer?
Take good care of your hands and wrists! Stretch your hands, and invest in a mouse, and wrist guards.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Bravo’s Real Housewives series.

How do you relax?
See above!

What is your favourite book?
Nana, by Emile Zola.

What author is underrated or deserves to be better known?
I think Tama Janowitz’s early success might have made things a bit tougher for her in the long run.

What’s one of the worst jobs you’ve had?
Telemarketing; trying to convince people to attend timeshare sales pitches with a call list garnered from duplicitous contest forms.

What is the most important thing life has taught you?
Tomorrow is a new day, and be nice to telemarketers!

What’s next?
Hopefully a move to Spain.Similar Posts: