Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Literature (Page 13 of 18)

Crowdsourcing Clegg Commentary

21 September 2010 / / 3 Comments

One perk of working for English PEN at the Free Word Centre is the annual festival, which includes the welcoming of a poet-in-residence.  Last year we had Ray Antrobus and Joshua Idehen dropping the rhymes. This year Kate Fox has been reciting poems to us at our desks.  Under the alternym Kate Fox News, she quickly writes and publishes poems about current affairs, such as the Pope’s visit and the party conferences.
Kate recited for us an experimental poem she wrote yesterday entitled “Nick Clegg’s Conference Speech Remixed“.  She has spliced some of Clegg’s soundbites together with realtime Twitter commentary.

Just imagine how different our country will be.
Not exactly a vision thing
Stick with us
It wasn’t a bad speech
Stick with us
Looks all so sincere
Stick with us
We’re stuck with U

I like this format.  For one, it includes a random, crowd-sourced element.  It is surprising how often the act of yeilding some control of your content to The Cloud or The Rabble yeilds something true and pleasing – Cybraphon and FOUND are the arch mongers of this type of art.  I also like the juxtaposition of the primary source material – the speech – with the commentary.  A poem that could not have been created before social media tools became ubiquitous.

Creativity in reading

10 May 2010 / / 1 Comment

Library Parabola

The original British Library reading room, now at the centre of the Great Court, British Museum. Photo by Sifter on Flickr


I just gatecrashed a meeting some of my colleagues were holding, about writers running workshops in UK prisons.  One of the authors made the point that the term ‘creative writing’ can actually have a negative effect on the people attending these workshops, because it implies that writing is the only creative act.
What needs to be emphasised, he said, is that reading is a creative act too – Using your imagination to reconstruct the story and fill in the blanks, between the words the author has sketched.  This is well worth remembering, lest we invest all our admiration in writers, and neglect the other half of the equation, readers.
There’s another kind of creativity in reading too, which is in choosing just what to read.  Making connections between authors, and between their stories, constructing a network of books, choosing which literary pathway to follow – these are supremely creative acts too.

The Long and Short of It

27 April 2010 / / 1 Comment

From The Guardian last week:

“We think this will be the renaissance of the short story,” said novelist Sophia Bartleet, who came up with the idea for Ether Books’s app while desperate for something to read when travelling back and forth to see her ill mother. She believes time-poor commuters, or workers grabbing a 10-minute break, could be tempted into reading a short story here, or a poem or essay there, on their phones.

Well, yes. The only problem is, I saved this article to read later on Instapaper for my iPhone. Combine Instapaper with @LongReads on Twitter, or the new LongForm website, and you have pretty much mirrored the Ether Books model. I worry that this is yet another niche filled by something free.
The longest things I have written on this blog are probably this meditation on Britishness, and this Borgesian theatre review… neither of which are that long at all, really. Writing something longer might be a goal for my thirty-second year, beginning today.

James Brindle archived two years of twitters into a hardback book. Photo by STML

Judging a Book by its Cover

1 April 2010 / / 0 Comments

An event report I wrote for the English PEN website.

Rick Gekoski, Alex Clark, Joanna Prior and Cory Doctorow.

Rick Gekoski, Alex Clark, Joanna Prior and Cory Doctorow.


I’ll admit, I judged this event by its cover.
I assumed that an discussion titled ‘Judging a book by its cover’ would be about book jacket design, rich and fertile ground for ideas on culture and mass marketing.  I expected to hear bookseller Rick Gekoski wax about the beauty of a hardback first edition, and hear Joanna Prior explain how Penguin’s mass market paperbacks have become an iconic design in themselves.  I expected to hear how the large publishers are stifling creativity by homogenising the book design process.
And in fact, I did hear about all those things. However, I expected them to be within a discussion that was essentially about aesthetics. I did not expect to be faced, instead, with a more philosophical question: what is a book? Is it the paper, the cover and the binding? Or is it the words on the page? Continue reading

Speech to the Society of Young Publishers

29 March 2010 / / 3 Comments

A friend and collaborator just e-mailed to say he enjoyed my use of Hanif Kureishi’s formulation on multiculturalism, in my remarks at Goldsmiths College:

‘Multiculturalism’, he says, ‘is the idea that one might be changed by other ideas’. It is a movement based on the dialogic exchange of ideas, even traditions, based on ‘the idea that purity is incestuous’.

I have used it in another speech recently, to the Society of Young Publishers annual conference, in Oxford last December.  In the interests of posting something new to the blog on a Monday morning, here is the speech I wrote.  It is not necessarily the one that I actually gave, but until Jon S uploads a video of the proceedings, I’m safe. The discussion was on ‘The Responsibility to Publish’, and I shared the panel with Chris Brazier, Co-Editor at the New Internationalist, Sarah Totterdell, Head of Oxfam’s publications department, and Alan Samson from Orion Books.

The View from the Panel

The View from the Panel. Photo by yrstrly.


On being asked to speak at this event, I was terrified that I was going to end up speaking in tautologies. If you’re at the Society of Young Publishers, then you’re already speaking to a group of people who are, by definition, of the belief that publishing is a civic good, that they are part of civil society.
So, I want to say more. Let’s go the whole hog.  My first thought is this: That of The Arts, it is literature and publishing, that has by far the greatest impact on politics. Continue reading

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