New Linear Perspectives

The Ghost Edition

NLP — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:26:50 +0000

In NLP’s winter edition, we have found a league of spectres to accompany you amongst the silent shifting of the snowflakes. Don Paterson and Alison Watt’s recent collaboration at the Ingleby Gallery, where Watt’s artwork was accompanied by Paterson’s succinct verse, allowed Paterson to release the ghosts from Watt’s mesmerising pieces. In an attempt to reflect these spectral musings, NLP visual editor Claudia Massie has produced images of the east Scottish coastline and its surrounding area with a Hipstamatic ipod application, accompanied by verse by NLP editor Andrew F. Giles. This collaboration takes into account the difference between our reaction to a single artwork and a photograph, echoing Walter Benjamin’s seminal writing on the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction, and the further ghosts that are revealed through this process. They question: “Are these the features of the past, traced into the geography of cloud/& glass?” Next, film correspondent Christopher Smail takes his usual forthright and witty look at the recent adaptation by Lynne Ramsay of Lionel Shriver’s controversial book We Need To Talk About Kevin, where the ghosts of the protagonist’s victims, including his father and sister, symbolise the ghosts of the victims of mass shootings worldwide. Next, a new short collection of poetry ‘I Have Killed Albatrosses’ by US poet David Groulx. His work is filled with the ghosts of the past, a lyrical past replete with personal demons, the dead and absent and the beautiful cruelty of nature, that exhibits a haunting turn of phrase, a subdued imaging of colour and, half-hidden, a hint at redemption that recognises the inexorable passing of time. Finally, a lost piece first commissioned by NLP in early 2011 is finally brought back from the dead. Les Wilson sat for the interview but the journalist, in a way, became a ghost (don’t worry, he’s not dead – yet), and the text was lost, to NLP at least. NLP re-imagines the interview in the style of Les Wilson’s recent book for Scottish imprint Vagabond Voices, the art-versus-capitalism novel Fire in the Head, with interesting results: the NLP-produced short story explores the impulse to creativity, or lack of it, and the politics of art.

Finally, we at NLP would like to thank-you all our readers for your brilliant support this year, which has seen NLP rise to even greater heights in our own idiosyncratic and incorruptible way. May the counternarrative continue!

The Punctum Edition

NLP — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:45:44 +0000

“I will always listen to outsiders. They have a lot to give”, says Sally Evans in her
interview for this month’s Punctum Edition. Sally is the quiet radical of Scottish poetry, evident in her deep and abiding love of books at Kings Bookshop in Callendar (along with husband and fellow poet Ian W King), her editorship of Poetry Scotland and the years she has spent supporting and promoting the scene. In this in-depth interview with NLP, Sally lays out her beliefs, gives an insight into the workings of her poetry, and makes some fascinating commentary about the nature of poetry and poets. Sally’s attitude towards the world of words is both an education and an inspiration. NLP’s film critic Christopher Smail takes a weird and monstrous ride through the Norwegian wastelands in his review of 2010 film Troll Hunters. He muses on the role of the B-movie in the modern cinematic experience and the notion of fairytale, CGI-style, with his usual humorous aplomb. Finally, NLP editor Andrew F Giles explores Robert Capa’s photograph Death of a Militiman (1936) through the ghostly lens as seen by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and John Berger; the
article questions Susan Sontag’s always controversial take on violence in the photographic image and wonders if she wasn’t stuck in “her academic detachment from the subject” and in fact betrayed “something more like a subconscious abstraction that heralds the Spectator’s ‘infinitesimal films’ unravelling”.

The Signs Edition: Kenneth Goldsmith, Laura Mate & Claudia Massie

NLP — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:02:07 +0000

With an umm-ing and err-ing word-for-word ‘conceptual’ interview technique, the writer with the misheard name Delaina Haslam dances about the page with prophet of conceptual poetry Kenneth Goldsmith, discussing some of his work and his recent brush with the Obamas at the White House. Goldsmith reveals his desire to buy a kilt in London, fly to China and have it copied ten times because “it’s the perfect place to go for-for, err, my, you know — a plagiarist in China is, will be welcomed with open arms.” Goldsmith reveals himself to be a fascinating and humorous subject in this exclusive interview. NLP’s visual arts editor Claudia Massie takes us on a mesmerising photographic journey through rural Perthshire in ‘Farm Signs’. Her stormy, brooding take on the strange words that map our countryside is reflective of her deep, dark watercolours and functions as a gateway into our fading linguistic present and palimpsestuous linguistic past. Finally, our Parisian correspondent Géraldine Garcia spoke to photographer Laura Mate about her recent photography project based in Beijing that explores the constantly changing role of women in Chinese society, read it here. Kenneth Goldsmith is off-camera with a brace of kilts.

NLP: the Quiet Snowfire Edition: poetry from Theresa Muñoz, a new short story from Andrew McCallum Crawford & photo-review of August’s Microsessions by Delaina Haslam

NLP — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 10:59:56 +0000

NLP’s Microsessions last month was a fiery snowstorm of words, poetry, film, music & art. We are still recovering. Thanks to all those who got involved, we hope you enjoy Delaina Haslam’s photo-review of the event – a veritable smorgasbord of flying & settling words that created a quiet blizzard at the top of Leith Walk. In this month’s belated edition NLP is also delighted to welcome back the twisted mind of short story writer Andrew McCallum Crawford, and his new story ‘Teeth’, and a new friend for NLP, poet Theresa Muñoz, whose feather-light whispered words reflect beautifully in the fading snowstorm of the Microsessions. Check out her first short collection for NLP, ‘fire, somewhere’.

Are We Ersatz? edition: Allan Massie returns, Nicola Moir polices Hong Kong, Nigel Holt verses the Middle East & Suri Sumatra performs her body.

NLP — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 12:30:14 +0000

“…Ah! You are a happy fellow,” said Mr Farebrother, turning on his heel and beginning to fill his pipe. “You don’t know what it is to want spiritual tobacco – bad emendations of old texts, or small items about a variety of Aphis brassicae, with the well-known signature of Philomicron, for the Twaddler’s Magazine; or a learned treatise on the entomology of the Pentateuch, including all the insects not mentioned, but probably met with by the Israelites on their passage through the desert; with a monograph on the Ant, as treated by Solomon, showing the harmony of the Book of Proverbs with the result of modern research…”

(extract from Middlemarch, George Eliot)

New Linear Perspectives is celebrating over a year of monthly editions. To mark this momentous occasion, we curate our first live arts & culture event on Saturday 13th August at Embo Deli - NLP: Microsessions – a night of poetry, film, art & music. We also present our most ambitious edition yet. Welcome to the Are We Ersatz? edition.

In his second piece for NLP, elder statesman of Scottish literature and writer’s writer Allan Massie introduces an exclusive short story, ‘The Boy At The Door’. His mournful and cutting retelling of a young man in thrall to a great master and condemned to remain always in his shadow serves as a lesson for a world taken in by the ersatz. Massie’s rigorous description of a failed literary hopeful presents writers and readers with the polemic of truth, damning the “bad emendations of old texts” that Eliot’s Mr Farebrother finds so enchanting. However, the deeper circular nature of Massie’s Hemingway motif suggests an endless irony to any critique of the ersatz, and questions human reaction to the concept. With great pride NLP welcomes Massie’s famously incisive style to its pages and pities Massie’s “tall and gangling” cipher, who waits for a happy ending that never appears whilst mistelling the story he was born to write.

Sydney-based regular NLP contributor and artist Nicola Moir recently returned from a trip to her birthplace of Hong Kong with a fascinating photodiary of her time there. She documents the transformation of the police department into an exciting new space exclusively for NLP.

Nigel Holt’s first short poetry collection for NLP, Ice Yaqoub, both idolises and brutalises our Western perception of the Middle East. His beautiful, fearsome but always human figures from the United Arab Emirates speak in a guttural language that is the bastard polyglot child of both the west and east, and inhabit an ambiguous space that remains mostly unarticulated and sorely under-represented on these shores. Holt’s poetry may not be comforting or fit into an exoticised western view of the arabic world; his spiky, abrasive verse – rhythmic, captivating snapshots of Emirates life – reveals images that are thought-provoking and no-nonsense.

Suri Sumatra, the performance artiste alter ego of half-Scottish, half-Indonesian counterculturalist Heather Morris, comes ready to ruffle some feathers. Her deeply articulate and impassioned stance during her interview with NLP editor Andrew F Giles is impressive. Sumatra takes the word feminist and picks it up in her teeth, shakes it wilfully around and makes it appear other. Her choreographed celebration of the female form and her openly intellectual attitude to ‘performing her body’ is a stimulating affront to the current culture of brainless branded style.

NLP, the (non)-native edition: new poetry from Richie McCaffrey; cane toads & freedom from Nicola Moir; Xavier Dolan’s new-wave from Christopher Smail

NLP — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 14:38:50 +0000

When Richie McCaffrey first approached NLP with his poetry we were awestruck by its grey tones, guttural Highland syllables and the deep, inexorable song of the sea. In his short collection for NLP, ‘Taxidermy’, Richie conjures up a palimpsest that stretches across Scotland’s shores, where “a forgotten clan knapping their arms in the swash” stand side by spectral side with the “professional types,/ all suited and booted/ (who) often came in to hit/ the Stella and the deck.” Here Richie uncovers a Scotland pitted at all its edges by sea, a seafaring nation of (non)-natives that is not trapped by the temporal. Regular contributor Nicola Moir, star of last month’s interview with Claudia Massie, examines the hilarious, and equally deeply disturbing, cultural phenomenon of the cane toad in Australia, in her article ‘Non-native: the Cane Toad, Kevin Ladynski & Mark Lewis’. She suggests a lesson for all of us by revealing, amongst the tongue-in-cheek presentation of Lewis’ film Cane Toads: The Conquest and the art of Kevin Ladynski, a dark fascist side to human nature. Finally, NLP is pleased to present another newcomer to our film-writing fold. Christopher Smail is a precocious Bermudan writer who is currently based in Stirling, Scotland. Christopher introduces Xavier Dolan’s recent film Les Amours Imaginaires in a style that fits well with this sumptious film – a Canadian film that references the French new-wavers and legendary Hong Kong director (and favourite of NLP) Wong Kar Wai – in his article ‘Stylish Love: Xavier Dolan’s Les Amours Imaginaires.’

NLP: The in-between Edition; new poetry from Michael Kearns and Howie Good; Nicola Moir in interview with Claudia Massie

NLP — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:24:34 +0000

In this month’s edition NLP welcomes two poets from the US, legendary artist-activist Michael Kearns, and poet & college professor Howie Good. Michael is also (famously) an actor and his work for NLP expresses his stagework through a triptych of poems; in a wider sense the Kearns triptych is a political piece that examines the experiences of HIV-positive people, and creates a memorial for the many fine artists, poets & writers who have been lost to AIDS – arguably lost in a kind of interstitial space and not always recognised by wider society. Howie Good controversially examines another fine artist lost to the ether – Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s relationship with his underage wife has often been a point of contention with scholars and readers, but Good gives us an understated study that is mystical and toys with time as a construct, when “Everything yearned toward everything else”, in a way that adheres to Poe’s legacy and settles itself in the ‘in-between’ temporal, literary & cultural space from which the edition takes as its title. Finally NLP is delighted to welcome back Nicola Moir. Nicola is a Hong-Kong born artist based in Australia who goes in-depth with NLP’s visual arts editor Claudia Massie, herself a highly successful artist, in a fascinating interview which takes in Nicola’s recent works on the ‘in-between’ spaces of Sydney’s suburbs, in part inspired by the psychogeographical musings of Will Self, made popular in the 1950s by Guy Debord.

The Universe Edition: Carsaig: new poetry from Alice Willington; Beach: photography from Natalie Muallem; Neophyte: a new short story from Kathleen Rocksavage

NLP — Sun, 01 May 2011 17:04:14 +0000

According to Buzz, the character in Kathleen Rocksavage’s new short story for NLP, each person “inhabits a universe that most resembles a celestial book that writes its own stories”. In her second short collection of poetry for NLP, prize-winning poet Alice Willington continues to explore this solitary and imperfect sphere – as the poet reveals, the observer has “been sitting here so long/ the lights discern no life”. However, situated within this strange, seemingly lifeless reality, Willington’s collection includes a whispered paean to Carsaig, evoking hope and “the eternal return// of echoes to the waves.” Newcomer to NLP photographer Natalie Muallem reveals a different universe at night-time through the cameras lens, reconsidering the day-time experience of sun and sand to reveal a dark, hypnotic place of robots, strange towering shapes and coagulated light, in her photo-series ‘Beach‘. Finally NLP is pleased to welcome another newcomer, Kathleen Rocksavage, who presents the first measured literary critique of recent inescapable royal events, the all-conquering, all singing, all dancing marriage of William of Wales and Catherine Middleton, in her short story ‘Neophyte’, with more than a nod to George Eliot.

Take a look at the recent review of NLP by Sabotage: Reviews of the Ephemeral.

The subversion edition: Chinese art part II; The Keystone part III & IV; Yin Eye; Mac & Wills

NLP — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 09:43:40 +0000

With the ‘disappearance’ of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei now headline news, NLP thought it timely to revisit Allan Harkness’ in-depth appraisal of Zhou Chunya and his fellow Chengdu artists, who, grappling “the thought of Chinese painting faced with the end of modernity”, produce a “a genuinely critical art, a restless art, one openly enquiring in all directions from a base in friendship, mutual support and collaborative effort” in Chengdu Artists Part II. This seems an interesting counternarrative to the heavy-handed attitude China seems to show towards their great, subversive artistic champions such as Weiwei. Another angle on subversion is revealed in the latest chapters of Chris Pritchett’s graphic tale, The Keystone, which approaches architecture from a dark-tinted viewpoint and evokes a brand new, exciting netherworld for this discipline – Pritchett’s drawing is quite mesmerising as we proceed with long-awaited Parts III and IV. Finally, NLP is pleased to introduce Andrew McCallum Crawford into its ever-growing fold of talented Scottish writers. His short stories ‘Mac & Wills’ and ‘Yin Eye’ are subversive in their own way, short, sharp snapshots of relationships and macabre goings-on that are at once menacing and human.

Steven Severin on Cocteau: the interview; Emily Wolahan: new poetry; Berlusconi gets bitten: pontifications & protest.

NLP — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 14:44:14 +0000

To paraphrase Ruth Gordon, octogenarian star of seminal 1973 film Harold & Maude, and with exactly the same sentiment, New Linear Perspectives greets the dawn of a new March with a breath of fire – HUH! This edition sees NLP editor Andrew F Giles travel to the central European city of Bratislava to interview co-founder of Siouxsie & the Banshees, Edinburgh-based Steven Severin, to discuss his latest re-imagined film score. Severin is on a world tour performing his ambient electronica update of Georges Auric’s score for Jean Cocteau’s proto-surrealist 1930 film Blood of a Poet, and granted NLP an interview, read here. NLP’s head film critic Katy Karpfinger continues her film series by examining Blood of a Poet in depth, the first film Cocteau ever made. European correspondent Géraldine Garcia reviews Draquila, a damning cinematic indictment of Silvio Berlusconi from 2010, accompanied by our own political troubadour and his heartfelt re-telling of grass-roots Italian protest song Bella Ciao recently sung by the thousands of protesting women during last month’s Giorno delle Donne in Italy – click here. Finally, NLP is very proud to introduce a new poet to its already burgeoning stable of excellent Scottish and international talent. North American Emily Wolahan’s deeply intellectual work focuses on an interpretation of the fine arts with a finely tuned appreciation of the limitations and vagaries of the human spirit. Read her poetry here. NLP is delighted to have her on board. This is our most daring and accomplished foray into the arts scene yet – a literary, political, musical, poetic breath of fire!