Mark Roberts – Writer’s Manifesto.

An old joke compares writers and park benches, because park benches can support families. As a writer I…

• Will never be motivated by money; I’d only be kidding myself.
• Will dream of infinite worlds, but none crazier than this.
• Will construct interesting characters, and throw them in at the deep end.
• Will remember how important characters are, and stop drowning them all.
• Will be dedicated to the craft, from my bed, at 2pm, on a weekday.
• Will write the most outlandish things that I can imagine.
• Will make them fit for public consumption the next day.
• Will never leave any piece unfinis

Signed: Mark Roberts

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, review by Elizabeth Butler (2001 film adaptation)

Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg delivers a quiet and subtle interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in his 2001 film adaptation that is at once bleak and touching.

The film’s setting is a bit of country road with the requisite tree—here portrayed as a dead or possible dormant sapling, but instead of landscape with grass or other flora, the roadside is piled high with mounds of gray shale and gravel, as if the characters’ meeting point were in the middle of a quarry’s waste pile or on the outskirts of a town reduced to rubble. With the sky cloudy and the characters’ clothed in faded black suits, the use of rubble makes the whole scene monochrome and already, before any of the characters have spoken a word, the film is imbued with a quiet sense of despair and bleakness, of something having been lost or buried and there is “nothing to be done,” as the characters are fond of saying.

The play is presented as if the camera had captured a moment of real life. Two people, friends who have known each other for a long while, are waiting for an acquaintance and talk to pass the time, rambling on about whatever subject comes into their heads. The acting isn’t done with cloying melodrama with the characters sunk in pathos, nor does it play up the humor to parodic proportions. What humor exists in the film is subtle and comes mainly in the second act, as it arises from the unexpected reoccurrences of events from the first act.

This is where Beckett’s background as an Absurdist truly comes into play. Absurdism is a style of theater that plays up the pointlessness and meaningless of existence. Its plays are characterized by having no plot in the conventional sense as conventional plots generally have employ meaningful progressions and try to make sense out of the characters’ lives. Waiting for Godot is the poster child of Absurdism, as the second act is essentially a repetition of the first act, except with a few differences to content, and nothing is progressed or even explained. Only one of the characters seems to notice this, and the others all believe he is either delusional or dreaming. The very idea that a whole day could repeat itself so exactly is absurd and it is from that that film mainly derives its humor.

Into this absurd landscape, the actors bring to life characters that, though they are themselves a little absurd and certainly off-kilter, are nonetheless believable. Barry McGovern’s Vladimir is the one (relatively) straight man in the film, a deep thinker who philosophizes about salvation and existence with a bit of a mothering streak who is capable of thinking himself into very dark holes. In contrast, Johnny Murphy’s Estragon is a character who doesn’t try to think but just floats along with life, dreaming. While long tracks of the film are just the two of them talking, their rapid-fire exchanges, jumping from thought to thought, are never boring.

Pozzo is played to pompous perfection by Alan Standford, a stereotypical aristocrat who treats his valet more like a semi-intelligent beast of burden than a human being. While at times his performance takes the character’s arrogance and casual cruelty to the extreme, Standford also unearths an almost childlike need to be liked by Vladimir and Estragon as he constantly looks to them for affirmation after a long speech and when he receives no reply attempts a mournful about-face.

Stephen Brennan gives a remarkable performance as Lucky, managing to convey with his eyes alone a deep, mournful despair of having long since resigned himself to his situation. However, there is a spark of life to Brennan’s Lucky, a small, secret inner fire which he lets forth in Lucky’s “thinking” speech, a speech which Brennan manages to spew out at an astonishing clip, drowning the other characters in a large turret of words.

Together the four carry the film through a twisting carriage-ride that famously has no particular point, progression, or climax, but which is not made the less interesting or enjoyable because of that.

Festen (directed by Thomas Vinterberg) Review by Elizabeth Butler

Being the first film of a new cinematic ideology, Festen (1998) was under a lot of pressure to show the worth of Dogma 95. For a brief recap, Dogma 95 was a collection of Danish filmmakers who were fed up with the “film of illusion” made possible by use of cosmetics, optical effects such as special lighting, and other such standards of filmmaking. To combat this, members drew up a Vow of Chastity to which they were all to adhere in filmmaking, with stipulations as to what cameras to use (only handheld), what lighting (only natural), even what kind of movies to make (no genre films, nothing set in the past or future, no superficial action such as murders).

To these stipulations, Festen adhered religiously.

It is easy to tell from the jerky tracking that the camera is handheld. The colors of the images appear grainy and dark because most of the scenes take place either inside where sunlight is restricted by window curtains or at night where light comes from either candles or low lamps. Only those scenes set on the roadside in the middle of the day seem conventional. All of this gives the impression of a home-video shot by an inexperienced amateur, which, as the plot is that of a family gathering to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of a patriarch, actually works quite well for the film. It is only for the first few scenes of the movie, where the audience is still getting introduced to the paradigm of the film’s construction, that these techniques are disorientating. Once the story truly gets rolling, the sheer emotionality of the scenes quickly overwhelms any notice of the camerawork.

As per another of the rules, Festen has no orchestrated soundtrack. Conversations are accompanied only the sound of the characters’ clothing or footsteps, or by the ambient noise-scape such as the wind or birdsong. The only music in the film is when a character generates it by either playing the piano or singing. Once again, the audience is reminded of a home-video that lacks the equipment and resources of a large studio production.

Not only does the lack of musical accompaniment work for the setting, but it also heightens the tension in the film. Lack of verbal interaction can cause some viewers to become uncomfortable or feel awkward. On top of that, without the aid of a musical score to help interpret a scene, the audience is subjected to the full brunt of the characters’ emotions. When Helene (Paprika Steen) breaks down in the bathroom, her sobs are the only sound filling the empty space of what should have been family solidarity. When Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) stands up and delivers an accusatory speech to a dining room full of family and friends, the audience is forced to become another one of the people at the table, whereas a musical score would have allowed the audience to remain “an audience.”

To many modern movie-goers, the stipulations put down by the Vow of Chastity seem to be an extreme over-reaction. If movies are supposed to be accurate representations of reality, then what is wrong with the use of cosmetics? Lots of people use cosmetics on a daily basis. The Vow of Chastity also restricts filmmakers to a very narrow range of subject matter. Many view this in the same fashion as abstract or modern art (“even a child could do that”), seeing the stipulations as of little intrinsic worth, but in the case of Festen, they arguably led to a more impactful film.

Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort – Review by Heather Redhead

There is a sense of great loss and heartbreak echoing throughout ‘Factory of Tears’ by Valzhyna Mort. As the only book of poetry to be published in Belarusian with English translations on the opposite page, it is unique. But the book is also making a standpoint, as the Belarusian language has been increasingly dropped by its people in favour of Russian. In 1995, the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko controversially made Russian a state language, denouncing Belarusian as a ‘poor language’ and arguing that ‘you can’t express anything lofty in Belarusian’. In the book ‘Factory of Tears’, Mort seeks to both criticise these remarks and re-establish Belarusian pride in its native language.

Mort’s aims are clearly defined throughout her book, as the very first poem within the collection, ‘Belarusian I’, expresses the difficulties of keeping the language alive:

‘when we discovered we ourselves were the language

and our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes

when our eyes were poked out we talked with our hands…

when we were shot in the legs we nodded our heads for yes

and shook our heads for no’.

Her depictions of the extreme lengths being fought by both sides (that defending the language and that wishing to dispose of it) create a horrifying image of torture that resonates strongly with the reader. By repeatedly using the first person plural form of narration, Mort includes her entire generation in the fight. The language used in her poetry also creates imagery of a young generation, bringing to mind the innocence of youth, such as in ‘Juveniles’:

‘because we are children

between days and nights

as between adults’ feet in a dance hall

painting our faces like easter eggs’.

Yet behind this childlike imagery there lies strong political meaning throughout the poem, which culminates with the emphatic lines, ‘because we are children/ no one is going to deny us the city we grew up in’. Other poems in this collection also use images of childhood to describe the vulnerable nature of the Belarusian language, such as ‘Belarusian II’: ‘your language is so small / that it can’t even speak yet… / it’s not a language. it doesn’t have any system’. Mort’s passion comes across clearly, as by using these familiar images she begs the younger generation to fight for its survival.

Interestingly, in recent years the younger generations have become increasingly attracted to their native language, particularly following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. This has led to the emergence of several groups organising Belarusian readings. In 2014, President Lukashenko has even given a speech in Belarusian rather than Russian for the first time in twenty years. Perhaps, with her revolutionary choice of publishing in Belarusian, Mort helped to inspire this remarkable development. Either way, ‘Factory of Tears’ has certainly encouraged the world not only to remember Belarus’s native tongue, but also to join the battle for its survival.

Dualism by Jessica Tillings – an in-class response to Valzhyna Mort’s Factory Of Tears

The South Downs split me
from the waist.
Rolling like the Severn,
Deep into the valleys;
The apathy of my veins tie knots
To the Beacons
and pebble dash houses
Dukestown – Gwent –
Soft tarmac for rollerblades
Horses at fence chews;
my national pride?
As real as Dan Yr Ogof,
weak as their growls –
feedback from speakers
I hung my heart in the Hangers.
Spilled my gut upon the Poet Stone.
Disassociated –
the Queens escape me.

Review of The Glimmering Room by Cynthia Cruz – Review by KAREN LUNT

Cynthia Cruz’s The Glimmering Room (2012) isn’t so much an anthology as a battleground. At war are ideas of beauty, materialism, gender identity, fatalism, exploitation and redemption. Her main characters are all young, including a recurrent ‘I’ figure that links the poems and may or may not represent the author. They appear as victims of themselves as much as a harsh world.

But Cruz has a weapon in these struggles – words. They are short and often marshalled into stanzas of one or two lines. The effect this has is to give a sense of taut containment, the chaos among the words being just kept in check by them.

Their potency, however, lies in their juxtapositions. The pairing of opposing images is used partially to evoke the overarching theme of the collection – the prolific contradictions of American life, particularly as demonstrated in Cruz’s California and New York homelands. ‘Soon the ambassadors from the Netherworld/Will begin their jet-like descent’, ‘the beautiful doomed‘, ‘Piss-/Elegant at the halfway house for the trashed and gone galore’.

In a set called New York State (numbered but printed out of order, another contradiction), Cruz describes life in the hospitals in which she was treated for anorexia from the age of eleven – ivory shells glued to stripped wood boxes, meals ‘magically calibrated‘, black teeth stuck together ‘like beads of memory’.

In being fused together, the significance of each thing is heightened by its apparently incompatible partner. The result of them together may be initially disorienting, but they realistically illustrate the fact that it is in such disparities that life can be defined. This is relevant to Cruz’s own life to the extent that in an interview she stated ‘I would not be alive today were it not for both anorexia and poetry’.

One of the strongest uses of imagery and juxtaposition is in the poem Molotov. At one level a sense of mechanised nihilism is the dominant feature. But punctuating and mingling with images of violence are the homely, familiar objects surrounding the author.

I got my radio on…

I can hear the daisies

As they fell the desert.

Pretty machete like

Paper Machete confetti of

Dropped cluster bombs and now…

It’s like a song.

The nature of this situation and the point made is revealed in the opening lines – tinfoil-wrapped ‘dream pills’. Cruz has made combining beauty and ugliness a characteristic feature of her award-winning work, showing abuse and mental illness from the inside. Here she also achieves something rarer and more difficult – an effective expression of the destructive beauty of addiction for its victims, while making the connection between cause and long-term effect unmistakably clear from the start.

In one of the poems titled Stages of Disaster Cruz states her overall cultural critique directly, in two-line stanzas that create a feeling of monotonous regularity – ‘Mothers/Starving in the suburbs.’, ‘…an endless/Prescription for Oxycontin.’ Her characters are not only young but mostly female and lost down the cracks of the American Dream that produced them.

Tsar time, Russia time by Linda Boutet. An in-class response to Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort.

Revolting voices sing up the dead and Stalin whispers in

the cold night of occupation ~

 

He stalks the museum on Kaseorg

a name scratched by a lost tooth picked up and bloodied

 

interrogated in the vodka palace downtown

 

The Red Cross letter drops

like the A-bomb

and reveals you standing in the ruins of my father’s past

 

(unable to voice)

 

Tsar time, Russia time

 

and your

bitter

bitter

bitter

bitter words

The Old House by Jude Bernardo Gleeson (From an exercise in class in response to The Glimmering Room by Cynthia Cruz)

Ashtray brother,

collect my vices in

your mouth

Endless books, stacked.

A totem pole of spines,

titles of unread stories

Don’t be so coy,

the manual labour needs a

master. Work, work,

get a move on

The mother is old.

Mummified in daytime television,

cups of tea and phone calls

from the nurse

A response to Bolano by Thomas Stone

A young man, 20, sits at his desk. He is slim. Unremarkable. The lights are off apart from a single lamp, angled onto the page in front of him. The page is empty. His tiredness is evident. The need for sleep is tangible, a palpable presence in the air. The room is neither warm nor cold.

The man attempts to write something. It is quickly discarded. He attempts again. The curtains are drawn, no light is coming through. It is early in the afternoon but the sun is blocked. The room is lit only by the lamp on the desk. In small bursts he continues to write and discard in turn. After a while he reclines back in his chair. He rubs his temples. He produces a pack of Rothman’s from his pocket, picks one, and leaves the room. The desk lamp is still on.

He returns to the page again. Most of its new contents are scratched out. The young man attempts to rejoin his train of thought. With difficulty. Frustration is noticeable on him. The arch of his back. The running of fingers through messy hair. He is in conflict with his apathy and his urgency. He begins to write again. With more fluidity he progresses. Some moments pass before he stops again. The page is filled. The man’s handwriting is distorted, it sits on the page with a slight slant.   He assesses the words. He makes mental notes of each flaw, cherry-picks the better, the not so awful. He struggles through, re-reading, analysing. His head falls to his hands. His elbow creases the paper. He takes a sip from a mug of tea, (breakfast blend, simple. Milk, two sugars) it is uncomfortable, not quite warm enough. A drop wets the paper as it leaves his lips. It has left a ringed stained upon the book he used as a coaster, Keep The Aspidistras Flying, he looks at the book. How battered it is. He takes out another cigarette before leaving once again. He takes a coat this time. A cold evening is getting closer. He thinks of the poplars bending.

As he returns to his desk again he adjusts the lamp. With no real purpose, simply for habit’s sake. He looks through the words on the page. They are almost familiar now. He regains a sense of his thought pattern and chews over the ideas. The page is now badly creased. He sits, head in his palms. He rubs the bridge of his nose. He feels the mug. The tea is now too cold to drink. He taps his thigh, nervous energy, and stares at the page. He notices the ticking of his watch, upon the bedside table. It documents the seconds, the long gaps between them. He rises to his feet swiftly, with almost random fervency. He turns the lamp off and leaves the room for the final time. The door closes loudly behind him. The page is screwed into a ball upon his desk.

 

Untitled by Jessica Tillings

Dahlia is experiencing a change within her. Thirteen years old – she’s hit the threshold of her hormonal adjustment, but she does not know that. She hunches on a chair which is crammed into a dimly lit room. More like a charity shop storeroom than a study; the clutter gives her sanctuary. Her heavy-eyeliner gaze is fixed, intent on scanning the words and patterns on the computer screen. Lyric sheet after lyric sheet. The dark ominous tones of The Intense Humming of Evil drone out of the speakers for the fifth time this hour. She’s learning, or at least, trying to grasp how exactly this music speaks her language; how words can be so beautiful and carry such raw, tugging emotion within her. Within anyone. But no one hears it like she does.
One hand pulls at the ladders in her tights and the other is tangled in her long black hair. She is the epitome of her angst, but she does not know that.  She sighs like a silent scream as she opens a new Word document on her computer. Her bullet-hole eyes reflect in contrast to the luminous white page which pales her complexion. Her fingers awkwardly dance on the mouse; chipped black polish on chewed down stubs. Dahlia is having an internal crisis. She’s remembering her last attempt at poetry; something incredibly self-aware and stupid about a snail. She swallows with her eyes screwed up – the memory makes her want to choke. She doesn’t understand. She cannot comprehend how the weight of her vision fails to transcend from her gut; how her words paralyse in her wrists and recoil from her fingers.
She starts the album again. Whispering along to the lyrics – afraid of being heard. She begins; carefully caressing each key as she types. Something has aligned for her, but she does not know that.