Not an Anthology: Into the Desert

I have just finished putting together Into the Desert, the first ever collection at my new project, eight cuts gallery. It features work from 19 amazing writers, and I'm incredibly proud of it. But that is, in a way, by the by. Why I'm writing something about it is I think this is a new way of curating and showcasing literature, and I would love to know whether you think it works.

To return to the beginning. The very first point in the eight cuts gallery manifesto states:

■Culture has no boundaries. It has no preconceptions as to what is literature.

So to showcase literature to its best effect, an anthology won't suffice. A website works rather well - I have been able to include not just amazing poetry and prose, but pictures, visual poetry, music, and even a stunning full-length documentary film.

The second thing that holding the exhibition online has been able to do is let me curate it mercilessly. The remit was simply to send in something that responded to the title, Into the Desert. The results were wonderfully diverse, literal, metaphorical, spiritual, and all taking a slightly different slant on what "the desert" might be and what a journey into it, and out of - where? - somewhere else might entail. It would be impossible to do anything with an anthology that wasn't really rather crude.

What I've been able to do online is to create a series of hyperlinks between pages that lead the reader through the exhibition in numerous different ways, placing different works together each time, making them question the meaning of each as they go, as well as giving them pictures of the overall theme that are as shifting as the desert sands themselves. And because the hyperlinks are anchored on words and images, I've been able to play with the audiene's expectations - to give them preconceptions about what comes next - preconceptions I can then either reinforce or upset.

In short, this format has been able to give me two exhibitions - that comprised of the pieces themselves, and that made up of the relations between them. Which, I think, is what good curation should always do. BUT, and here is the second question, does that kind oif curation have a place in literature?

There will also be a tie-in live show at Oxford's O3 gallery featuring readings, music and film, on November 18th. And I hope there will be both other live shows, and dedicated screenings of Cody James' full-length film, a documentary about the Columbine students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that forms a segment of the exhibition (along with Oli Johns' The Things They Let Into the Classroom and Sarah E Melville's French Lesson) that could be called something like "school is hell".

Games Perverts Play

It's my great great privilege to have a piece included in a wonderful new project, put together by the inspirational Elly, aka Quiet Riot Girl.



My piece, Meat, is here. It is a double privilege for it to be illustrated by the amazing Penny Goring



This is what Elly has to say:


http://gamespervertsplay.wordpress.com/


Games Perverts Play : stories and essays from the sidelines of pornography...


Games Perverts Play is a new and unique collaborative writing project, edited by Quiet Riot Girl http://www.quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/


Games Perverts Play uses pornography and essays to explore the less examined sides of our libidos, and to dissect our sexualities. Gender, power, pain and violence are all present in the background when we play. This project brings them to the fore, and enables us to look afresh at what it is we are doing when we write about sex, when we play sex games, and when sex gets serious.


First edition September 2010: OBJECTIFIED


We are told every day that women in particular are objectified in our culture, particularly by pornography. The word is supposed to have negative connotations.


But what happens when a bunch of writers take that word, and roll it round their tongues. What emerges from their pens? Their cunts and their dicks?


Here, writers Dan holloway, Marc Nash, Penny Goring, Mark Simpson, M de Winter, Arjun Basu and the editor, Quiet Riot Girl have objectified ourselves for your pleasure, and maybe your discomfort too.


We hope you enjoy the experience.

B**B AD

Hmm. Was gonna say it but I can't bear the thought of the spam-magnet effect it'll have. So substitute asterisks for "o"s :-)

This is the “what we’re up to” column. Feel free to treat it with schadenfreude as the “I told you so” column, to see it as an interesting reference point, or if you so wish as the place to cheer us on (we like that one!)

B**BAD sounds rather rude. It stands for Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair, which at this moment is the title of the collective’s sampler, due to be launched on an unsuspecting world on July 1st. I say at this moment because we’re a collective. So decisions come hard. We love each other and we’re all rather enamoured of our hippy credentials. Which means when we have two names on the table (the other is Zero Cuts – I like both, but they say completely different things – one is whimsical, intriguing, smacking of fragility and quality; the other is exciting, edgy, smacks of the new) two names sometimes stay on the table :p

Whatever it’s called, we’ve put together a really rather whizzy sampler of work, containing contributions from 13 of us. Some of us have given short stories, others extracts from the books they’re going to be publishing as part of the collective later on.

There were two driving forces behind the format. The first was to get readers slathering for our prose. That goes without saying – the main approach people have taken with this is to give pieces that aren’t necessarily their most polished or publishable, but are most distinctively them. Which is exactly what’s needed. I’m fed up with reading perfectly-crafted flat prose.

Second was length. We didn’t want to create a book. We are not a business and don’t want (well, OK, I don’t want – I may have forced this bit onto people :p) financial macramé getting in the way of things. So the idea of producing a collection that we published and all took tiny cuts of royalties from was a definite no-no. Plus, it goes against the whole marketing (and collective) ethos I’ve been expounding for the past few months of giving stuff away. So the idea was to produce something short enough that if people wanted to make it into a physical object they could print it from their desktop (something made centrally likewise doesn’t work when you have members in the UK, USA, Dubai, Finland, France and Hong Kong!!). Mostly, though, we’ll be giving away the pdf.

So that’s the centre of our attention at the moment. That and working on our guerrilla marketing campaign (I think guerrilla marketing’s great, but one of those things that if you don’t get it spot on, you end up wasting vast swathes of time, so we’ve got a group working on perfecting some really great ideas we came up with during a brainstorming session – there’ll be a how-to on that: it was incredible, we got way over 100 posts with some fantastic ideas). So what I’m doing at the moment is chasing down bios for people, trying to write some press releases, and not worrying about the fact we don’t yet have a cover!! Cancel that last bit. In the two days since I wrote this we do have a cover. An absolutely fantastic one, courtesy of the vastly over-talented Larry Harrison.