Review: Jess Thom, Not I at the Battersea Arts Centre

Nestled in the rafters of the Battersea Arts Centre, Jess Thom’s Touretteshero production of Not I shelters from a wintry blizzard. The critic’s darling, Thom’s production first debuted at the Edinburgh Council Showcase as part of the city’s Fringe festival in 2017. Now three performances into a three-week residency, Thom is beaming to a soundtrack of Akala’s Fire in The Booth. She welcomes audience members to take a seat and chirpily declares, tics and all, that us snow-faring spectators will “receive a badge of [foreskin] honour for braving the arctic conditions”. As I take my cushion, Thom introduces herself as a “30 something white woman of average build in a very cool wheelchair, and in a black outfit”. “I also have Tourette’s syndrome,” she continues, “which means I have.. [Kate Winslet].” She smiles and laughs, permitting chortles from the smattering of nervous, senior Beckett academics occupying the backseats. She is accompanied by Charmaine, a British Sign Langauge performer and interpreter who describes herself as “a mixed-race woman in my thirties, also dressed in black”.
It is clear from the offset that the accessibility of the performance has been thoroughly, thoughtfully considered. Exits are marked out for audience members who find the performance too disturbing, as well as noise-cancelling headphones being pointed out. Thom soothes us with the observation that Beckett “wanted the play to work on the audiences’ nerves, not their intellect”. And she’s right on the pulse. The performance is arresting and interspersed (of course) with Thom’s tics’. These manifest as biscuit and hedgehog and appear most commonly in Beckett’s ellipsis. To accommodate for her physical tics, Thom is elevated whilst in her wheel chair; in keeping with the stage directions for Mouth to be eight-feet above stage level. Thom is a hypnotic Mouth, in the sense that one can’t help but slump into a dream-like state as the monologue drifts from one traumatic vignette to another. Narrative is spliced with a morose, disoriented amnesia. Charmaine dutifully signs.
Thom’s performance is followed by the screening of a documentary. In this, Thom speaks with the late Beckett scholar Rosemary Poutney, introduces company members of Touretteshero as well as citing UK Grime as an influence on her delivery of Mouth’s monologue. We follow Thom’s personal backstory and deep, lived attraction to the text. “For a long time, I thought theatre wasn’t a place I could exist” she says, “I wanted to occupy the only seat in the theatre I wouldn’t be asked to leave”. Thom encourages audience members to make conversation with their neighbours and to discuss their thoughts regarding the performance, before opening the floor up to a Q&A. Commentators praise her unique reclamation of the text. She speaks on the importance of visualising disabled people in theatre spaces. Thom has the last word, stating “people are disabled by attitudes that don’t accept people who are different”.
This is an inventive staging of Beckett’s 1972 verbal ambush, which brilliantly reconceptualises the elusive Mouth and questions the conservatism towards productions of Beckett’s work. This is a radical task, where Samuel Beckett’s infamously stubborn legacy as a playwright and director so frequently informs the staging of his work, to the letter. Thom and Touretteshero underscore the humanity at the core of the monologue as one that is both universal, and, specifically analogous with the experiences of disabled peoples.

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Words, Ellie Potts.
WRITTEN FOR [SMITHS] MAGAZINE

Credit: Wellcome Collection

Shared Words: Interview with Author Nicola Barker for [smiths] magazine

Credit: Kevin Moran 

Has life changed for you since winning the Goldsmiths Prize?
I’m afraid I've been leading a terrifyingly un-literary life since winning the prize as I’ve been moving out of London. So that’s a life change I guess. The money certainly helped me out. And I think the prize may have altered the perceptio, an experimental writer. I don’t think people quite knew what kind of a writer I was before, because my work is so varied. Of course my themes are pretty consistent (paradox, transcendence, suffering, repentance, redemption) but I use many different forms in which to express them. Nothing I do is especially considered. Spontenaity is the key. Change is good. Challenge is good. And it’s fun to be put into a box as it gives you even more of a reason to bore through the cardboard and establish a peep-hole.
n of my work, too, at some level. I am now, officially
How does the experience compare to winning other literary prizes?
I like the fact that this prize is attached to an institution of learning - and one that I hold in high esteem. That makes it better, somehow. Some prizes are huge and life-changing. The IMPAC was an insane amount of money. I think the good thing about a prize - any prize - is that you become a small part of something positive. Prizes are celebrations. Kind of like little Christmases all year ‘round.
How did the process of writing H(A)PPY compare to your other books?
H(A)PPY was one of my shorter, quicker books. They generally interrupt bigger, longer books (which take many years) and are written joyfully - enthusiastically - in a burst of manic energy. H(A)PPY was very much in this mould. Sometimes books predict what is to come. It’s kind of mystical and magical. I imagine it must be something to do with the unconscious (even the world soul) expressing itself. So H(A)PPY was a disruptive work and it bought a great deal of disruption into my life. I didn’t sleep for about 8 months during the writing. Maybe an hour or two a night. Sometimes it’s hard to know if you are writing the book or if the book is writing you.
How do you mark literary success?
I don’t. Success isn’t a word or an concept that remotely interests me. I work because I love what I do. I write because I have an agenda and am driven to express it. Success is all about other people’s perceptions of you/ the world. I’m interested in finding fulfilment in a different and quieter way. I don’t crave approval - I never have. I try to be good. To do good. To be honest. To be sincere. To be present. To live in joy and in pain, if that’s what is necessary.
Did you make any significant omissions to the novel over the editing process or did it remain fully-formed?
I write my books by reading and rereading. It’s a laborious process. I’m a perfectionist and very controlling. The work can often be dense and complex. Kind of like a big jigsaw puzzle. So it’s hard to edit once it’s complete. When my beloved Agent, David Miller, died a year ago someone wrote in an obituary that he heavily edited my work. That was both weird and untrue. Because my work has never been edited, and David barely ever changed a word. The work is what it is. For good or for bad. And H(A)PPY is no exception.
Do you think your experimental manner of blending colour with language will pave the way for more experimental works? 
The funny thing about the colour is that I never thought of it as particularly experimental. I work on a laptop and have always used colour without thinking. It only became an issue when I took the manuscript to my publishers because colour printing is hugely expensive. The colour is used in the text to express emotion - that’s what’s interesting about it, not the colour itself. I find it funny that things which in day to day life seem perfectly uncontentious suddenly become odd and innovative when they apper in a novel. But it’s really all just context.
Was this something you have previously encountered in fiction? 
It wasn’t, but like I say it didn’t occur to me that it was anything particularly new or unusual. Why it was used was what mattered, not that it was used. Form only interests me insofar as it brings the narrative to life. It isn’t an end in itself.
You recommend reading the novel whilst listening to Agustin Barrios: The Complete Historical Guitar Recordings. Are you able to listen to music whilst writing? 
Never! I wear industrial ear muffs to block out all sound while I work. Focus is key. The word - the shape, sound, rhythm of it. How it sits on the page and what that means. Sound is a distraction. I meant for the reader to familiarise themselves with Barrios’s work (and his world), in general, that’s all, because he is an important character in the book.
You’ve said that you’re a “great believer in boredom, challenge and suffering” (inews.com November 2017). Could you elaborate?
I believe in them insofar as I believe in the possibility inherent in them. I just moved house and I’ve spent a lot of time depending on other people to do stuff to facilitate the whole thing. I’m constitutionally incapable of waiting around. Impatience is my worst characteristic. So it’s been challenging not simply doing everything for myself, which is my natural way of being. I sincerely believe, though, that challenges bring out the best in us - are a means of learning about ourselves and the world. Overstimulation -  and the craving for it - are deadening evils. They eviscerate the soul.
To what extent does your environment shape your writing? 
That’s hard to say. Potentially not at all. My work is a little shell that I clamber into - like a hermit crab. I tuck myself into it. I find rest in it. Where I write doesn’t really matter. As a writer you create worlds within your mind and wander about in them.
Where did you write H(A)PPY?
Mainly in Hastings, in a bungalow on the Firehills, with beautiful views of the town and the sea.
Have you ever undertaken a literary pilgrimage?
My automatic response to that question was, uh, no. But then I realised that I did undertake a kind of literary pilgrimage a month or so ago to visit TS Eliot’s old London flat which is now the offices of the TS Eliot estate. It’s run by my former editor Clare Reihill and much of the place is as it once was. She gave me the most incredible guided tour. It was especially wonderful because she had known Eliot’s wife, Valerie, very well and had been with her there when she died. So I got to look at Eliot’s bed and his suitcases and his old typewriters (one still had a piece of paper in it that he’d doodled on) and his copy of Ulyysses, and his kitchen table and his drawings and his study and his photos of Ted Hughes and a million other wonderful, precious, intimate things. It was breathtaking.
In general, though, I only undertake pilgrimages for religious reasons. The last one I took was to the little church where Julian of Norwich had her anchorage. It was so lovely and quiet and full of light. I brought home a hazelnut (they leave them there for pilgrims) which now sits on my desk to remind me of her and everything she represents.
Do you have any advice for young writers/creatives in 2018?
Be brave. Don’t be too serious. Have fun. Eschew ambition (which is the death of creativity). Please yourself. Frighten yourself. Challenge yourself. Confound yourself. Declare all-out war on your ego. Write about what you don’t know. Be generous. Always try to have low expectations but high ideals.
What’s the best book you’ve been gifted? 
There are too many to mention. When I was at school in Enfield a friend loaned me her copy of Satre’s The Age of Reason. It was revelatory for me. And when I was shortlisted for the Booker I was given a beautiful, handmade copy of my novel, Darkmans. It’s exquisite; bound in a hand-stitched patchwork of coloured leather with a little jester’s bell on the spine.
What do you work on in-between novels? 
I work on novels in-between novels. I never stop working. Fiction is a kind of maddening, dripping tap that can’t ever be fully closed.
You mentioned in your acceptance speech for the Goldsmiths Prize that your victory was influenced by your tiny fringe, in a nod to Goldsmiths’ notoriously trendy haircuts. Who do you think has the second-best fringe in contemporary fiction?
I went to Russia with Louise Welsh for the Arts Council a year or so ago. She had a magnificent fringe which hung at a highly enviable angle. That fringe cheerfully upstaged mine everywhere we went.
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Nicola will be coming to Goldsmiths on the 24th January where she will be in conversation with Tim Parnell and reading from her novel, H(A)PPY.

Words,  Ellie Potts @eldpotts
Pic, Kevin Moran Photography

Smiths Tries: The Goldsmiths Composers Collective (GCC): Making it New

Credit: Francis Devine

The Goldsmiths Composers Collective, or, GCC are through and through SFG. The collective does not solely seek musical compositions, but also draw on dance, spoken word, live electronics and experimental theatre. In the words of this year’s president, Rowan Perrow, "GCC is a platform for students of all disciplines to have their work showcased live. We're hoping to broaden student attitudes towards 'composition' and performance, and the variety of genres, methods and forms that art can take."
December’s lunchtime concert saw an impressive schedule of student compositions around the central theme of ‘displacement’. The lunchtime programme was fronted by a composition from Barnaby Goodman entitled ‘Nocturne for the Piano at Brighton Station’- dedicated to ‘all displaced by poor infrastructure’. Methodically and artfully organised, the tempo was regulated by the number of delays and the station’s cancellations influenced the ‘inclusion of musical expletives’, jarring harshly against the soft Chopin-ic melody. As it happened, Thursday the 7^th December was riddled with cancellations, and the piece was punctuated by the pianist’s mid-way announcement “The 10:39 train to Waterloo is cancelled”.
Following this was Adrián Montúfar’s piece ‘Delirio- Comunión’, a piece dealing with ‘juxtaposition, erasure, re-contextualisation and replacing of text from different poetic sources’. The piece was comprised of four singers and the ensemble sang a collection of vowels and consonants summoned from the writings of Peruvian poet César Vallejo. The effect was beautiful, ushering fragments of harmony against whooshing phonic manipulation.
Next was Evie Hilyer-Ziegler and Francis Devine’s ‘Two Pieces for Viola and Prepared Piano’. The distorted twangs of the prepared piano deconstructed the recognisable sound of the piano; sometimes metallic, sometimes muffled, sometimes harpsichord-like, reminding the listener of the string-based sonic origins of the piano. There were nods to both minimalism and jazz with moments of improvisation and serialism, piano and viola in chirpy dialogue.
Elaborated in the programme simply with one undulating line, noise-group BumGunge’s ‘The Bear’ was an auditory odyssey through radio waves. Harnessing an impressive buffet of electronic equipment, the duo birthed a symphony of dusty, ethereal sounds building to a cacophonous climax of white noise, tremendously resonating around the Great Hall.
The concert’s compositional finale came from J. Bastion in the shape of ‘‘REFUGEE’’: Pendullic Cultural Oscillations in Crisis and Eb Major’. This was indeed an immense ‘conceptual performative experience’ with live projections, large ensemble and three performers in elaborate home-fashioned headdresses. Bastion contemplated the semiotics of the refugee and the displacement of individuals across cultures and periods through improvisation and feedback loops, wildly massing into ‘the eternal echo chamber’.
What strikes me, as someone who is not wholly musically minded, nor classically trained (albeit a smattering of early years flute lessons) is the accessibility of the performances. All pieces were prefaced by a thoughtful explanation in the concert’s programme, articulating the original personal responses to the theme of displacement. This is art to be consumed by those of all creative backgrounds; avant-garde, perceptive, and dazzling.
GCC’s next event is projected for March and is aimed at showcasing compositions from female and non-binary creatives. For composition submissions or for more information regarding GCC meetings and events, contact: goldsmithscomposerscollective@gmail.com or connect on social media at https://www.facebook.com/goldsmithscomposerscollective/?fref=ts
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Words, by Ellie Potts @eldpotts

Review: The Suppliant Women at the Young Vic: for [smiths] magazine

Ferociously executed and deliciously, faultlessly synchronised, David Greig’s revision of Aeschylus’s play, The Suppliant Women is in the spirit of the community-based original. Greig’s reworking of the text has been championed by community choruses in Edinburgh, Belfast, Newcastle and Dublin and now takes pride of place in London’s Young Vic theatre. It charts the journey of fifty women, daughters of Danaos, from Egypt to Greece fleeing forced marriage with their cousins, the “unholy sons of King Aegyptos”. The Suppliant Women presents the female condition in flight, navigating Diasporic identities under a strict patriarchal thumb. In keeping with Ancient Greek performance, the evening is prefaced by an announcement from a civic official; Conservative MP John Glen, parliamentary under-secretary for Arts, Heritage and Culture. Glen recites the names of the play’s sponsors, marking government subsidisation of the arts through percentages of ticket prices. Glen conducts a libation, pouring a bottle of red wine along the porous grey stone of the open stage, squawking “in the name of Dionysses, god of wine, rejoice!”  I find the inclusion of a true-to-life politician here intriguing. When theatre is so often a place to evade reality, Glen injects realism and reminds the audience of their benevolent rulers and the cultural allocation of their taxes.
Women are at the heart of this play, and the chorus rightfully take centre stage. It is a patchwork flurry of multi-coloured women, all residents of Southwark- having trained for the play since September under the direction of Ramin Gray, choreographer Sasha Milavic Davies and vocal leader Mary King. The chorus of women largely operate as one body, only splitting off to individual voices in times of crisis, Gemma May giving a highly commendable performance as chorus leader. The use of incense, candles, torches, flapping scarves and confetti all invite a high sensory engagement. Live percussion and woodwind accompanies Greig’s rhythmically loaded language, reminiscent of Kate Tempest’s metered delivery, albeit en-masse. The women brandish suppliant branches threaded with white fabric which they use to simulate the motion of their journey by sea, swing over their heads and lay down as offerings to their recipients. The women are plagued by the violence of men, their attractive youth and their vulnerability as asylum seekers, crying “the worries of women as exiles are endless”. This speaks of a universal female condition; their only bargaining chip in the kingdom of men being the threat of self-destruction through suicide, cursing the city of Argos. This is a play that ruminates on human migration and attitudes towards migrants, transcending the historicity of the original; “if you’re a migrant the people will talk”.
"Equal power to all Women" is the triumphant closing war-cry. It is eternally relevant.

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Words by Literary and Creative Editor, Ellie Potts. 
--- @eldpotts

Photo by Stephen Cummiskey

The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein: Notorious at The Barbican: Review

Drawing on the canon of queer and radical feminist performance art, Lauren Barri Holstein’s Notorious at the Barbican Centre is a slap in the face of convention. Alternatively known as ‘The Famous’, Holstein pushes, prods and (literally) pisses on formal representations of the female body in an anarchic, brash cacophony of saccharine pop, feathers and vaginal secretions; foregrounding the abject.

The stage is a greyscale, decadent assembly of chandeliers and velvet drapes soundtrack to a looped clip of a crackling gramophone. Nestled in the Barbican’s basement Pit theatre, Notorious is tucked away sub-street level like a naughty secret, driven to the underground whilst some lofty Shakespearean production takes place several metres above our heads.

Notorious opens with plumes of smoke and three witchy corpses hanging behind the weighty curtains; humming and groaning in and out of harmony with each other. Ghostly legs protrude from beneath uniform dresses styled from tresses of grey hair extensions. “So there are rumours going around about me- have you heard them?” Holstein purrs, in hushed Kardashian tones. Her face is projected in real time, luminous green onto feathered curtains. The curious backdrop gives the projection a textured distortion, amplifying her exaggerated features. Holstein parades the video camera, the LED screen reflecting a mirror image back towards her. She confesses stories of sleeping in forests, decomposing corpses and animals penetrating her vagina- all delivered in a thick, breathy whisper.  Her words are laced with conspiring voices, blurring the distinctions of truth and reality in performance and systematically critiquing her exaggerated gender performance.

She surveys the audience and thanks former students for attending, momentarily dropping the valley girl guise to assume her reality as an academic at Queen Mary University. Holstein convulses erratically, sound tracked by Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop”, madly jerking at her pubis and imitating a crudely explosive orgasm somewhere between twerking and electrocution. The final flourish is a jelly snake emerging from her vagina whilst gyrating, gazing into the audience and subsequently eating it. Holstein is unsettling, brash, and quite frankly- punk as fuck.

Her wig falls off in the frenzy, unabashedly revealing an exposed flesh coloured skull-cap that mutates her complex gender identity. What follows is a series of shrill confessions, “I know that I can be a whore sometimes and also I’m really sorry for being such a slut [...] last night I snuck into your flat and replaced all of your garbage bags with female condoms because they’re roughly the same size”. A grizzly series of apologies follow from Holstein’s spooky minions (Krista Vuori and Brogan Davison), charting bestiality, abused tampons and vomit-related blunders, drawing on audience members to project their pleas for pardon. These become more and more farfetched, questioning feminine exteriority. “I’m really sorry about my face” grins Krista, maniacally. She proceeds to imitate her own suicide, hanging to her “favourite song” No Limit by 2 Unlimited. After a minute or so, Krista tires of the hanging and starts feverishly bounding in time in to the music.

Holstein dons a squid wig and a dress made of beads and braids that expose her bare breasts. Retrieving the video camera, she fishes the lens between her labia before asking “familiar?”. Soon we notice an artificial eye has been placed inside her vagina and Holstein twists her legs, making the lips of her labia open and close imitating a winking eye. “Vaginas are hilarious you guys” she snarls, before placing the ball in her mouth and sucking, chewing and spitting the putrid orb to the beat of Nicki Minaj’s “Starships”. Holstein starts to deconstruct her fishy headdress, pulling it tentacle after tentacle and smacking them against her own body in an act of voyeuristically motivated self-flagellation. A lone tentacle flies into the audience, she kisses the residual legs. The track loops and Holstein is suspended and bound and passing on the remaining tentacles to her minions she is lightly whipped. Thereafter, Brogan is told to “incorporate a lesbian sex scene” and delivers an x-rated monologue, fancifully inconsistent and aligned with the male gaze of contemporary pornography. The absurdity of the story reaches its climax as Brogan screams of being “furiously fisted with pizza”.

Holstein is suspended again, this time with the cry that “I need to purify myself”. She inserts test-tubes of coloured paint, confetti and coins into her vagina to the tune of Disney’s “Let it Go” and Miley’s “Wrecking Ball”.“Are you feeling better now? I’m feeling better” smiles Holstein, in-between gasps for air. What’s interesting about all of the evening’s physically intense skits is that despite the formal dance training of Holstein and her troupe, they are thoroughly exhausted and breathless following each rendition; complaining and swearing unrelentingly.

 “You’re here so I have to do something I suppose” she sighs, changing into her final incarnation; a sickening agglomeration of a Lolita-style crop-top and skirt, topped with a Rococo wig that she parades giggling, drinking soda and hula-hooping. As the hoop presses against her diaphragm Holstein erupts with burps that intersect her girlish giggles. She whines for want of a piss, spits out her mouthful of soda, curtsies and projects a resounding belch.

Retiring to an armchair in the corner of the stage Holstein reflects on her multiple forms, drifting between theatricality and presented reality. “You guys, this is the real me, the pure me, I’ve been resurrected as a sexy baby. This is how you should remember me... as I truly am.” This final form is a “rebirth”, cultivated by the audience’s desires to witness a woman being punished for her sexual agency because as Holstein rightfully articulates, “it’s really enjoyable to feel pity”.  

The performance culminates in an act of public urination over a small heap of popping candy which Holstein eats (“I just had to!”). She submerges her body in it, before finally assuming a highly dramatised “dead” pose, framed by her two underlings as the gramophone crackle resumes and then swells into Britney Spears’s “Work Bitch”.

In sum, Lauren Barri Holstein’s Notorious was born to unashamedly incite disgust. Holstein is no stranger to hitting the press for her radical performance art, gaining notoriety in The Telegraph in 2015 for showing clips from her production Splat! during her time as a first year lecturer at Queen Mary University. Notorious delights in Kristeva’s notion of the abject, and clumsily, stickily, meshes the perverse with the intimate. But does it promise anything less? Of course not. Despite critical lambasting from conservative publications, Holstein is making a stern comment on the socio-cultural implications of hyper-sexualisation in the post-modern age and interrogates the taboo and stigmatism that still pervades the female form.

Notorious takes the road:

18^th November-Tjarnarbio, Every Body's Spectacular, Reykjavik, Iceland.

23^rd November- Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Brighton, UK.      

All rights to Tim Fluck.

The Letters of Sylvia Plath 1940-1956: Live at the Southbank

Letters of Sylvia Plath was an evening of scholarly spectacle and revelling at the brilliance of the late literary luminary; trailing the hefty publication of Sylvia Plath’s collected letters between 1940-1956 and a veritable staple of the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival. In the words of the Southbank, “The festival celebrates the role words can play in reimagining a world on the brink” and this year’s bill boasted everyone from Claudia Rankine to Tom Hanks and Hilary Rodham Clinton. As I glided over Waterloo bridge I couldn’t help but notice cascades of illuminated messages daubing the building’s exterior as part of the “Wall of Dreams” initiative for the Poetry International Festival; hopes and dreams of European refugees and migrants, setting a sombre tone and emphasising the importance of language, of self, and of action.

The evening was arranged with a panel of literary veterans; Eimear McBride, Max Porter, Sarah Howe and chaired by Lavinia Greenlaw, all clustered in the vast hall like some great cultural womb. Plath’s letters were read by Lydia Wilson following an introduction from Plath’s daughter Frieda Hughes. “She is best explained in her own words” Frieda began, marking  her respect for her father’s sensitive treatment of her mother’s literary catalogue and the posthumous publishing of Ariel. She praises her mother’s determination and formidable work ethic, evidenced at a strikingly young age in her letters. Plath’s first letter is written aged 7 to her father, and as Greenlaw notes, shows that she is “thinking about colour, pause and effect”, experimenting with the colours she writes in and dramatically varying sentence length. “I got ink on my fingers. I had to rub it off with a stone” Plath dreams, prophesising her poetic voice.

In a letter to her mother in 1943, the young Sylvia recounts a meticulous list of tasks and times, showing a sense of maternal guardianship over her younger brother Warren, as well as an eagerness to please. Plath shows a strong awareness of her poetic voice and a need to shape her reception in the letter she writes aged 17 to her German pen-pal Hans, sent along with a selection of poems in traditional rhyme. Alongside these, Plath laments “I wish I could be there to explain the poems to you”. In this selection of her early poems; The City, The Farewell and The Stranger, Plath imitates the technical perfection of Frost and Dickenson in the custom of “New England mastery”. There is a fascination with how things work and the effect of action, and Sarah Howe marks Plath’s profound impact on her own work and the “powerful and dangerous influence” of Plath during early adolescence through her beguiling engagement with the self and external presentation. The self is a core preoccupation of Plath at this age, and she takes an active role in the deliberate editing of her presented self. From letter to letter we seen a renewed Plath, keenly aware of the stern eye of the letter’s recipient with each new self fresh and attuned to the intended reader. These voices are far removed from the pained cries of her journals and Plath shapes her self from correspondence to correspondence.

In 1950, aged 17, Plath’s voice is sardonic and shows a pitying scorn for left-footed intellectuals in letters to her long-time confidante Eddie Cohen. Plath enacts the desire to sculpt her true image and remains critical of deceptive photography; naming herself “a red-blooded American girl [...] original, unconventional [...] ice-cream and pickles are my dish”. However, behind this “sarcastic, sceptical and callous” surface is a far more misanthropic core and Plath deplores that her contemporaries “seldom realise the chaos that oozes beneath my exterior”. As Eimear McBride articulates, “you don’t think this gracious writing will reveal a savage interior”.

In a striking letter to the editor of Harper’s magazine in 1953, aged 20, Plath evidences her driving desire to edit, post-submission, by suggesting revisions for her poem Doomsday in her first dalliance with an “adult” publication. The narrative voice is what Porter calls a “high functioning Capitalist”, laughing and gloating that through working random odd-jobs she is paid twice; financially as well as using experience as subject fodder for poems and stories. Drawing back to the panel, Max Porter confesses his admiration for Plath’s daring professionalism, business-like determination and incredible attention to detail; every letter a “calibrated weapon”. Plath is highly productive despite being on the precipice of a self-destructive depression, this letter marginally predating her suicide attempt of 1953.

This period of trauma is retrospectively addressed in a 1953 letter to Eddie Cohen, as Plath explains the delay in her response to Cohen’s letter. She charts her summer at Mademoiselle, an exhausted return home, writing “glib jingles” and a consuming sense of being “sterile, empty, unread”. “The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing oneself” Plath writes, adding “the worst I hope is over”.

The neat timeline of the evening then follows Plath’s relocation to Cambridge in 1955, disapprovingly pronouncing her disdain at British men and their neglectful dental hygiene, British weather and British food. Plath’s overt disgust at Cambridge’s poor coffee and dwindling sunshine is swiftly forgotten as she meets her future husband at a literary soiree. Plath’s love for Ted Hughes is all-encompassing, she writes in 1956, “I do not merely idolise, I can see the core of him”. Still, there is a bitter pessimism to her writing that resists a rose-tinted honeymoon phase “I have fallen terribly in love which can only lead to great hurt [...] such a torment and pain to love him” she writes, and it feels unbearably prescient. Nevertheless, Plath is creatively rich, living and loving and immersing her poetry in Britain’s pastoral. Her creative output increases and she declares “my voice is taking shape, coming strong”.

The evening is rounded off with readings from the panellists- Eimear McBride choosing a haunting extract from The Bell Jar in which Esther fawns over baths “so hot you can barely stand to get in it”, with a shrewd attention to detail and memory of tubs and patterned ceilings. Max Porter reads Plath’s poem “The Detective”, following Sarah Howe reading of “Sheep in Fog”. We are reminded of Plath’s surreptitious wedding to Ted Hughes, and she boasts “if possible we are a happy Heathcliffe and Cathy”.

We hear an archived clip of Plath reading her poem Spinster set against an image of her at a typewriter on the Yorkshire moors. In this, the evening’s final reading, the unspoken is deafening. The disintegration of Plath’s relationship with Hughes and the much-speculated marital turmoil is barely alluded to throughout the evening. This is, I feel, in part a result of the timeframe which the letters span as well as the presence of Frieda Hughes as the family’s successor.

Letters of Sylvia Plath celebrates Plath’s lifelong curiosity with the world around her, pulsating from her formative years to the collection’s end. The letters capture her insatiable desire to shape opinion, capture her environment and reflect her essential spirit through language. There’s a wry sense of humour, a quick mind and a furious commitment to practise and discipline. Words can’t even begin.

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Words by Senior Literary and Creative Editor, Ellie Potts.

@eldpotts

Written for [smiths] magazine, 2017.

All creative commons: allhalls flickr.com

H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker: Reviewed

Shortlisted for this year’s Goldsmiths prize, Nicola Barker’s striking contender H(A)PPY  is a daringly artful exploration of censorship, Semiotics and typographic trickery.  

Perhaps characterised as the novel that no-one quite knows how to pronounce correctly (“happy with parenthesis?”) Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY  is a flourish of narrative self-surveillance moulded in a universe where one’s thoughts are moderated by Sensors for the collective pursuit of perfection. Barker’s world of Graphs, Oracular Devices and Information Streams feels simultaneously other-worldly and familiar in this age of infinite data, and draws on the rich traditions of Sci-Fi and Dystopian fictions.

H(A)PPY charts Mira A’s systematic demystification with the omnipotent System and the work’s title alludes to this fragmentation of truths and emotional modulations. Mira’s thoughts imperfectly oscillate between conformity and creativity, ultimately descending into unregulated language; “DECLARING WAR ON THE SYSTEM”. Barker’s novelistic experimentation with form operates on two levels; first challenging traditional methods of reading by baiting the eye with a smattering of colour to skim before reading the page. Secondly, the reader can’t help but speculate the reasoning behind the coloured grouping of these words, and as the frequency of colouring increases with the rising number of flagged words, our Mira A. becomes increasingly fraught, restricting her thought-patterns. The act is reminiscent of word-processing and technological monitoring of human expression, contributing to a fitting sense of dystopian suffocation.

The novel is thoughtfully prefaced by the Author’s suggestion that “Although by no means essential, this novel is best enjoyed in conjunction with Agustin Barrios: The Complete Historical Guitar Recordings 1913-1942.” and as such, music is a key thematic preoccupation which allows Barker to navigate the extent to which creativity is moderated under repressive regimes.

Barker’s critique of language domination is seen through the attention to the political history of Paraguay and the subversive use of Guarani. The symbolic use of Guarani (or rather, English marked in Green to indicate its use) is employed as a means of covertly communicating- reminding us of the potency of words. “I told her to be careful,' The Stranger said, 'not to be seduced by language. It can often be beguiling - seductive - beautiful, yet it is also unpredictable, dangerous, even lethal.”

Conceptual notions such as ‘the Past’ and ‘the Young’ are capitalised, marking these ideas as fixed, intangible models. Words are also marked with coloured fonts- reds, purples and blues, in a seemingly indecipherable code. Language takes centre stage and the attempt to polish and hone a perfect language is in tandem with the brutal attempt to homogenise the human condition- the ruling class of ‘the Young’ aspiring for neutrality and “smoothed” genitals, as well as removing their capacity to feel pain. The novel is a feat of typographic design, testing the eye and modes of reading as Barker delights in a breakdown of the language and methods of story-telling narratives, championing the incomplete, imperfect and illogical.  

Words by Elinor Potts for [smiths] magazine

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