A quick note to say that I’ll be at the Port Eliot festival this weekend, and MENACE and I will be appearing in the Round Room at 2pm on Saturday, alongside Keith Albarn and David McCandless (of Information is Beautiful) as part of the World of Wonders.
Say hello if you’re about, and any tips for other things to see gratefully received.
In September, I’ll be speaking at dConstruct, in Brighton.
The theme of the day is design, which I don’t know very much about, and I wouldn’t put much stock by my talk description.
Nevertheless, I will be talking about books, I expect, and attempting to close the circle on recent explorations of the book as designed object in time and space, and recent obsessions with loss and destruction in the works of Borges, Sebald, Bevan, Baez and others. And Geocities.
You should buy a ticket. Some of the other folk look really good.
Yesterday I spoke at Words In Progress, an event convened by Hannah Gregory, of Vertigo of the Modern, and Monster Emporium Press. There was much goodness there, from such fine folk as Ambit, CB Editions, antepress, Strange Attractor and Zero Books—the latter represented by Nina Power of Infinite Thought, whose book One Dimensional Woman is worth your time.
My favourite work, however, was by David Rule from or-bits, whose obsessional diarising over six months produced a five volume, barely edited memoir, and who turns his and…
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Just a quick note to say that the good people at Playful asked me to speak at their one-day event all about games and play on Friday 30th October, at Conway Hall, London.
I don’t know much about games, so I’ll be talking about books. Surprise! But they will be playful games, or playful literatures, or playful ways of constructing literatures… or something.
UPDATE: due to a previous speaker on the same subject, I didn’t talk about books, but about AWESOMENESS, MAGIC, and a computer made out of matchboxes. You can read the full…
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As regular readers know, I’m currently in India as part of the British Council’s UK Young Publishing Entrepreneurs scheme. We’ve spent the last few days at the utterly wonderful Jaipur Literary Festival, and while I’ve got some time online I thought I’d write up one of the many talks I attended, and its associated lessons. Much more of this kind of thing to come.
The very first session I attended on Friday morning was with bestselling author Chetan Bhagat (left). His first novel, Five Point Someone and it’s successor, One Night at the Call Center are…
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Penguin Books, Russell Davies and, er, me, are hosting a day of bookish, techy mucking about in London on January 17th.
It’s for publishing folk, and for geeks, and there’s more info on the Penguin blog. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while (remember Slow Fire? Yeah, sorry about that), and it should be a lot of fun.
Hopefully, we’ll be taking the book apart and thinking about what we should be doing with it in the future. There’s been a lot of pontificating and a lot of “new initiatives” in the industry, but…
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Two years ago, I co-founded London Lit Plus, an open literary festival for London. We’ve had two excellent years, but with all kinds of commitments, it would in no way be right to attempt to keep running it in my somewhat useless and slapdash fashion, to the inevitable detriment of the events.
But it’s a wonderful thing, and I still believe in the concept of the open festival, and I’d love to see it continue. So I’m appealing for someone or someones to take it on, with full blessing and support.
If you’re interested, read this for…
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London Lit Plus, the literary festival I set up last year, kicks off for the second time tomorrow. I’d love to see you there.
After a slow start, we’ve gathered up a bunch of really fantastic events. There’s a great string of events for classic London authors like Derek Raymond and Chris Petit, walks across the territories of Patrick Hamilton and W.B. Yeats, live readings and poetry from Liar’s League, Spoonful of Poison, Legend Press (at Speaker’s Corner!) and the Stuckists, a great kids and comics event from the DFC,…
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I’ve been spending the day listen to friends twitter from NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference at the South Bank, and an Arts Council England summit on the future of literature just round the corner. NESTA was established by the government in 1998 with an endowment of £250 million. Just last week, ACE announced £16.5 million of Lottery funding for the Southbank Centre, the same week I discovered that my full-price membership of that institution no longer lets me take in a friend for free.
Meanwhile, the slash and burn of the literature sector continues (others too:…
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I’m very pleased to say that my open-source literary festival, London Lit Plus, is happening again this year.
Full details at londonlitplus.com, with plenty more to come. Head over, check it out, start spreading the word – and think about holding an event!
