Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, March 3, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels
incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the
place of speculation in fiction.
I need to be careful discussing Christopher
Priest’s The Prestige (1995). This is one book where any detailed discussion of
the plot risks spoiling a first-time read; it’s not so much a whodunnit as a
howdunnit.
The novel concerns two 19th
century stage magicians, Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden, whose bitter rivalry
has tragic co... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, February 17, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an
investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view
to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.
Many
years ago, I used to read a lot of SF and then I got bored with it and
stopped. When I started browsing for it again on the shelves of new and
second-hand bookshops (ah! remember when it was so easy to do that?
real bookstores with real books!), there were a few names that were new
to me, one being China Miéville. Strange name. I thought... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, February 9, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is principally known these days as a writer of ghost stories. In particular, the classic “Green Tea” has been anthologised countless times.
No doubt this has coloured public perception today of his novels, but it is the case that they are not supernatural fantasies. In her 1946 introduction to the novel in question,... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Friday, January 29, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.
I’d heard of Richard Jefferies’ 1885 novel After London, or Wild England for a while before I got round to reading it. Given that this is meant to be one of the great ur-texts of the English Catastrophe tradition – it is granddaddy, whether authors or readers are aware of it or not, to Ballard’s The Drowned World, John Wyndham’s The ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, January 20, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.
This is the one that surprised me most out of the eight – and in a favourable way. The book had lain on the shelves here unread for ten years. To be honest, I’d never had any great desire to get started on it, or on any other book by Kazuo Ishiguro. Nor had I seen the 1993 film made of his earlier Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of t... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, January 17, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.I knew a bit about Michel Houellebecq, the supposed bad boy of French letters. How he was prosecuted unsuccessfully for racism for asserting in his 2003 novel Platform that Islam was the stupidest religion. How he hated his mum and his mum hated him. That he’d written a book about H P Lovecraft. His repudiation first by French leftist writer... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, January 11, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.
Terrorism isn’t something that was invented on 11 September 2001, nor even thirty years before that in Northern Ireland. A hundred years ago, terrorism obsessed the Western world much as it does today. The bogeymen in those days were not Islamic extremists but revolutionary anarchists. Dynamite was the weapon of choice. Conrad’s The Secret ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, January 5, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.
Paul Auster has been getting it in the neck from The New Yorker critic James Wood. Wood takes the opportunity of a review of Auster’s most recent novel, Invisible, to parody his oeuvre, concluding with a damning precis of what he takes to be the stereotypical Auster novel: “A protagonist, nearly always male, often a writer or an intellectua... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Friday, January 1, 2010,
In :
writing
A Happy New Decade to all regular readers and to those stumbling across this blog from wherever. One of the projects I set myself in the year just gone was to research what exactly I mean by “speculative fiction” – a term coined in the days of New Worlds magazine in the 1960s/70s as an alternative spelling-out of the initials SF. The idea was that the term would seek to encompass not just science fiction but any narrative that involves an element of fantasy, or to be more precise (since ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Thursday, December 17, 2009,
In :
writing
 Grace Lake, poet, also known as Anna Mendelssohn, has died aged 61. Here is Peter Riley's obituary. Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, December 9, 2009,
In :
writing
I'm recovering from last night's reading in the desperate for love series curated by Alan Hay and friends at Komedia, Brighton. I had the pleasure of supporting Tom Raworth, one of the great presences in British poetry over the past few decades. He is a formidable performer as well as poet. I also enjoyed hearing the third poet on the night, Rowena Easton. Equally amazing to me was the audience - young, engaged, and, unusually in my experience, about 90% unknown to me. I guess there were aroun... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, October 13, 2009,
In :
writing
I thought this from the redoubtable Vahni Capildeo and cohorts was well worth a look, even if you don't get the full benefit unless you happen to travel to (or live in) Trinidad (now the chill is arriving, I wish ...).  The magazine is fragmented/distributed across townscapes for folks to encounter at random. A much better idea than the patronising, airbrushed, subsidised package that is "Poems on the Underground" in London - cf the ghastly traduction of WCW below:  (original image here) They sho... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Friday, October 9, 2009,
In :
writing
Kent Johnson, Quite Interesting US Poet/Annoying Bastard (delete according to preference), has posted a blog here under the image of a Union Flag (he says it's upside down) about what he describes as the New British School of poetry. He talks of 'a constellation of perfectly exciting UK poets writing “in wake
of” the Cambridge-based greats J. H. Prynne and Tom Raworth– who could
be seen, in their two presences, genealogically speaking, as
somewhat to their later... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, September 23, 2009,
In :
writing
Having a new book out is still a bit of a thrill, I must admit, even when it's a book of work that is not that new. I have to thank Tony Frazer, of Shearsman Books, for the good production job he did on Songbook, which makes its debut around about now. The title is a bit of a misnomer, I suppose. An intentional misnomer. Let me explain. I have recently been getting back to doing something I last did in my 20s, writing songs - "proper" songs with verses and choruses and middle eights, and much... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Saturday, July 18, 2009,
In :
writing
 Tide in, blowy breakers, deep grey-green with silt in it. Sky is wet, bent over. A word “crystallised” in it. Drifting, long-lining, seining, trammelling, trawling, again, and always. And above that, more light, and here comes the evaluation: that everything will evaporate into nothing, that this book will capture nothing, that everything that is narrated here has occurred within the space of a split particle, where there’s nothing, where no one can hear you think. Hello! Sorry at this ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, July 13, 2009,
In :
writing
 Immense glitter sparkle in the distance. Split particles show splutters in chardonnay. Fishing with Higgs the bo’sun, fielding for godlets. Keep those figures floundering, flittering. So how do you know that you exist? When your whole life flashes? Can you describe this, Jack? They knew him as a fisherman, not as a fiddler. He flew into the light off the edge of the harbour arm on an old clinker craft with an elliptic stern, and was seen no more. What kind of language is that? What are you ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Friday, July 10, 2009,
In :
writing
 Turquoise in the lee of the groyne, a white sheet where the sun is upon it. Turns out this is an unnamed paragraph, about nothing, written in a “hotel of real spies”. A trumpet in the shape of a boat. At first glance, it extruded the body language of convergence, then it became convenient, and then a commodity, and so it goes on, day after day, beginning after ending after beginning, persons and events and horizons in a blur. History turns into salt – to what purpose? We are never told.... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, July 7, 2009,
In :
writing
 Pale grey-green, almost no waves, tide out. An aircraft disintegrated over mid-Atlantic, very peacefully. Zombies very nice peoples. No, they are vampires. They are Dover sole and plaice, and other flat fish such as dabs, flounders, lemon soles, also brills, turbots, cod and the various types of dogfish, large shoals of mackerel, herring, sprats, lobsters, shrimps and whelks. I love crashing flounders, please. Then your own thoughts start to cluster in. Build your own groyne right here and pu... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, July 1, 2009,
In :
writing
 A twinkling expanse in the morning sunshine. On a portable radio, sweet talk from across the globe. Sounded like she was singing from a nest of wires. Don’t think about it. The downtown retail sector is in a state of devastation. Hungry creatures roam, look like they’ve been punched senseless selling unsustainable debt to each other. I love my black Moorish bass. But I’ve been beaten over my metaphorical head too, and I’m much too nervous to stand up. (Stop it, you’re hyperventilati... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, June 23, 2009,
In :
writing
 Bands of green and blue, little rippling waves. And, may I say, a feather, of diseased appearance. The diseased head of a man. Who gave me the whooping ’flu, you swine? Is that a dog talking? Have we come to this? Take me to the cliff, and drop me there. Let me fall through space, and so become alive. Dolls and ghosts and dogs, daddy and mummy bears, gorillas, pigs and mice and all the hybrids in between. Breeding in a tight corner, sounds almost hooman. I ain’t scared of the sea, but it... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, June 21, 2009,
In :
writing
 A dazzling white sheet from afar. A blade shines from horizon to horizon, its light much too white for the eye. Light leaching out of it. Mild, variegated, lacking definition; but with a hard frosty glitter in the distance. Milk and dirt heaving rhythmically, water breathing in and out. Heavy easterly, the water brown with silt inland, and pale green further off, clashing waves in your face. Swirling muck in the shallows. Bumpy and glittering, then clean and clear. An intending surfer undresse... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, June 15, 2009,
In :
writing
Well, our new Laureate has now published her first official poem, and here it is. The official position of Reality Street on the Laureateship is, of course, one of studied indifference. The institution has as much relevance to poetry, or to contemporary life, as - well, the House of Lords with its wigs and knee-breeches, say. Its incumbents have historically been either good poets past their sell-by date or dusty nonentities nobody has read for hundreds of years. In recent times, we've had a r... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Thursday, June 4, 2009,
In :
writing
I'm just delving into my journal from 1994 now to help me recall one of several happy memories of David. I was visiting the US and he'd booked me to do a reading in a series he was curating at the Johnny Otis Café in Sebastopol, California (yes, it really was owned by the rhythm & blues singer of that name). Kathleen Fraser drove me to Sonoma County, and Susan Gevirtz and Cydney Chadwick were there too, also Steve Tills. I stayed overnight in David and Cecelia's house and met young Margaret ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, June 1, 2009,
In :
writing
Good news that Salt Publishing's internet campaign to save its business from going under has had a positive result. The Bookseller reports that Salt received more than 400 orders in a single day in response to its plea to customers to "buy just one book". Chris and Jen Emery's enterprise has been a shot in the arm for poetry in the UK, and I was happy to respond to the campaign (the book I ordered on this occasion was Chris McCabe's Zeppelins - which has a wit comparable to Tom Leonard, and be... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, May 24, 2009,
In :
writing
The textmusic symposium at Birkbeck College yesterday (Saturday) was a stimulating day of discussion about theory and poetic/musical practice. It's just the kind of area that interests me, and so I was sorry I wasn't able to get to London in time to hear Will Montgomery on the connection between Frank O'Hara and Morton Feldman and Steve Dickison (over from San Francisco) on reggae. I did enjoy David Grubbs (Brooklyn College) on his musical collaboration with Susan Howe, Frances Kruk on her co... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Saturday, May 2, 2009,
In :
writing
On 19 April we lost a great English visionary. I use the qualifier deliberately: JG Ballard, perplexed ever since his arrival as a youngster from Shanghai by his newly encountered homeland (see his memoir, Miracles of Life), by its absurd fixation on the past, seems ostensibly an alien observer, at odds with the literary and socio-political mainstream of England. And yet I see him as an exemplar of an English dissident tradition; the nearest comparison among writers might be with Blake. I met ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, April 14, 2009,
In :
writing
Maggie O'Sullivan's Waterfalls, promised for I forget how many years by Etruscan Books, is out at last. Completed 10 years ago, it's the companion work to red shifts (also published by Etruscan, 2001); the two books are a kind of diptych comprising the poetic project her/story:eye. This beautiful book draws on Maggie's Irish roots, and on (in her words) "riddle, lore, tale, song, lament, elegy" and "the Great Famine of 1845-52, the clearances, dispossession and exile". Here's a sample spread... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, March 22, 2009,
In :
writing
Read at the Runnymede Festival, Royal Holloway University of London, yesterday afternoon. First, we were delayed by a faulty train from Hastings, then by rugby fans, half of them kilted, travelling to Twickenham, then it was hard to find the venue, with the consequence that I missed Robert Sheppard and Ulli Freer while we were wandering around the campus. Met Ulli very briefly just before I finally found the "Management Auditorium"; he was muttering about having to "get to South London" and d... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Friday, March 20, 2009,
In :
writing
In my last post I said "I'm ambivalent about the increasing academicisation of innovative/parallel tradition poetry..." I think there may be one too many syllables in one of the words there, but I hope my meaning is clear, if not the precise detail of my ambivalence. I'm prompted by an announcement by my good friend Robert Sheppard of the proposed launch of a Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry which he is to edit with Scott Thurston (the publisher is Gylphi: www.gylphi.co.uk). The ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, March 15, 2009,
In :
writing
I have been taken to task by one or two subscribers to the UK Poetry discussion list for - well, I'm not sure what for, advocating closing down of discussion about poetry, I guess. To explain: UK Poetry, numbering some couple of hundred subscribers, is hosted by Miami University, Ohio, and dedicated to discourse around contemporary innovative British/Irish poetry. It is a great source of information and, sometimes, intellectual stimulation (though I'm ambivalent about the increasing academici... Continue reading ...
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About me
| Ken Edwards |
| Hastings, East Sussex |
I'm the editor and publisher of Reality Street, and a writer and musician.
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