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- Volume 10, Issue 2, 2018
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2018
Volume 10, Issue 2, 2018
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The sound of placards
By Jesse AshAbstractThis piece follows two demonstrations from London and Los Angeles. A decade apart, the protests are described at first hand (London) and via mediated sources such as uploaded videos to twitter (Los Angeles). In this article, I build upon the resistant capability of organization within networks of communication and isolate one of the products of this organization; the street protest, in terms of its sonorous form in contrast to both its physical (numbers of protesters, critical mass) or symbolic presence (slogans, placards, banners). Using narrative, and examples such as the jangling of keys (Wenceslas Square, Prague, 1989), I take this murmur and buzzing of voices that declare a political intention as an opportunity to ask what the political identity of this public becomes when its symbolic meaning is ‘denatured’ (Barthes).
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The forensics of the pavement
More LessAbstractThis text represents a small experiment in writing. It is centred on an urban Hackney patch outside the flat where I stay in Stoke Newington, north London. It attempts to take in some dynamics of past and present, the composition of the pavement and some history above and below it. Hackney itself was once an orchard retreat for plague victims, but this patch is now territory of tarmac, pollution, foxes, shoppers, gulls, cyclists, a shooting, a mugging and a boy hidden in a bin. But it is a community, a functioning one, full of life. Influences on this episodic approach come from George Perec, with his invitations to transcribe the city; Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, with his theory of the city based on rhythm, and Tim Ingold’s ‘anthropology’ of line, capturing the traces and threads that compose and surround our lives.
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Drift report from Downtown LA
More LessAbstractIn March 2016 I walked around Downtown LA in an attempt to move beyond a neutralized contemporary version of psychogeography with its subjective, personalized relationship to space, towards an engagement with collective intensities held in the fabric of the place. The 3000 word text generated from these walks has drawn on earlier drawings, photographs, notes and recordings of the architectural ruins and social conditions left in the wake of deregulated capital. It maps a web of tactics and strategies undermining gentrification; points of intensity/contested sites include MacArthur Park, Skid Row, Union Station, Bradbury Building, Grand Central Market and the abandoned cinemas of Broadway.
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Venice, Venice
Authors: Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Norman M. KleinAbstractVenice Beach, Los Angeles and Little Venice, London provide the basis for a series of reflections that explore the way the city is hardwired into a collective imaginary. These very different reproductions of Venice share the underlying principles that correspond to the economic and political aspiration of the modern city: carnivality and staging; the hypnogogic dream space and travel; guild capitalism and spectatorship. The enduring references to Venice that exist at the heart of Los Angeles and London speak of a desire for the sovereign city state and reflect a wider move to a new feudalism that increasingly characterizes the western metropolis.
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Elephant memory
By Simon KingAbstractThis article is a non-chronological account of the documentation and mapping of walks over an eighteen-month period around Elephant and Castle, a part of South East London that, via its designation as a prime ‘regeneration opportunity area’, is experiencing a rapid but problematic transformation. The original group walk is constructed performatively in the shape of a spatial and temporal narrative, i.e. the solving of a mystery prompted by an American magazine’s 1941 photograph of bomb-damaged Sayer Street SE17, held in the Imperial War Museum archive. Via this and other textual fragments, walkers seek to reconstruct a history and determine the original coordinates of a once lost but now recuperated street. Subsequent walks, taking place either side of the recent conflagration of Grenfell Tower, become more dialogic as discussion turns to the social and political consequences of London’s land grab. Key motifs emerge also: parallel lines of thinking, e.g. Lend Lease 1941, Lend Lease Ltd 2017, mapping – personal and archival, quotation, ruins, the punctum in the image and the metaphor of place holding.
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LOS/LOSS/LOST
By Adam KnightAbstractLOS/LOSS/LOST explores how memory and architectural conservation are played out in Los Angeles. Structuring the text is a series of photographs taken by the artist of thirteen historical buildings designated ‘lost’ by the Los Angeles Conservancy. Writing embraces the motif of ‘lostness’ in biographical, artistic, literary and cinematic responses to the city. The essay attempts to parallel a longitudinal artistic project photographing former cultural monuments of the German Democratic Republic.
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Espials (Xtofer Marlowe in London)
More LessAbstractNiall McDevitt and Simon King’s joint Poetopography/Walkative explorations of Christopher Marlowe’s life and death in London prove the starting point for McDevitt’s retelling of the Marlowe myth and its astonishing relevance to the major issues of today. Two sites in particular – the Dutch Church in Broadgate where an anti-immigrant verse diatribe signed ‘Tamburlaine’ was pinned to the door on 5 May 1593, and Deptford Strand where Marlowe was murdered on 30 May 1593 and where the inquest took place two days later – prove especially mind-boggling. Many Marlovians believe there was a cover-up; and the tragic loss of one of the most brilliant poets in English literature still festers. The terrain cries for redress. A Los Angeles parallelogram is erected with the help of occasional allusions to Raymond Chandler’s fictional detective Philip Marlowe, named after the Elizabethan poets Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe. King chose the novel Farewell My Lovely as bibliomantic aid, the title of which seemed suitably elegiac, and which also furnished a succinct phrase to describe the general methodology of this book: leg art. We are all Marlowes, literary gumshoes.
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On real and imaginary spaces: Mapping the archive
More LessAbstractThe radically expanded concept of space, the so-called spatial turn found in the cultural and social sciences since the late 1980s, opens new possibilities for artistic practices that respond to the multilayered spaces of cities: the physical space with its built structures; the archive with its collected and catalogued documents as well as their systems of representation; and the imaginary space of certain cultural and ideological visions. Based on theories that assume these spaces not only determine each other and are mutually dependent, but overlap, and together create the space we experience, the article brings together two projects that map and explore urban settlements in London and Los Angeles by setting out a trail from the database of the archive: the historical records of the interdisciplinary British social research project Mass Observation (on London’s housing situation in the early 1940s) and collected data found on the social housing debate in Los Angeles during the early 1950s.
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El Errante
More LessAbstractA tale of mobility, ethnicity and colonial heritage, ‘El Errante’ is a reflection on several propositions concerning Los Angeles from the perspective of the eponymous El Errante who has taken to urban walking following the impound of his car. This new mode of ambulation allows him to see Los Angeles as a complex system contingent on its inhabitants’ metanarratives of mobility. Within these, use of public transport is mostly circumscribed to those Angelinos unable to drive or to be driven. For the carless – the poor, the illegal, the elderly and the young – the sidewalk and the bus stop are apparatuses for encounters in the city while the time slowed by walking and waiting for public transport renders the city in unique ways.
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WORKSHOP REVIEW
By Deirdre DalyAbstractPicture This! Using the ‘Writing Essays by Pictures’ Approach to Teaching Academic Practice, 5 May 2017
A report on the workshop led by Alke Gröppel-Wegener, part of the Creative Teaching double bill organized by Andrew Walsh, at the St. Thomas Centre, Manchester
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