World Book Night 2017: BOOK ISH NESS

With spring comes... World Book Night.

The theme this year was chosen by wild artist, king of the rubber stamp, and long-time Nessie aficionado Steven Fowler. He decreed that the United Artists, rather than reading and responding to a single work of fiction as in previous years, would research the history of publications around the Loch Ness monster, and contribute a new work to the genre. As plans began to take shape, the name BOOK ISH NESS (created by Linda Parr) was adopted for the project.

This year's programme was the most adventurous yet, surpassing previous research in the woodlands of Oxfordshire (The Secrets of Metahmeralism, after Donna Tartt's The Secret History) and the takeaways of Bristol (TOAST: A Night on Weevil Lake, after Douglas Copeland's The Gum Thief).

Sighting on Loch Ness, 12 March 2017

Primed with studies of cryptozoology and hazy evidence of 1970s monster-spotting technology, members of the public sent in evidence captured around the globe. The Loch Ness Investigation Bureau (officially formed in 1961 and closed in 1972) was Rebooted in response to this flurry of sightings. Thirteen members of the Bureau met at Fort Augustus on 10 March and spent five days carefully observing Loch Ness from different look-out points including the Nessieland attraction at Drumnadrochit, the turrets of Castle Urquhart, and the great locks at the end of the Caledonian Canal. This gruelling observation schedule, from dawn to midnight daily, led to many new and interesting discoveries. Sarah Bodman, the expedition's head chef, did an inspired job of feeding hungry LNIBR members at Morag's Lodge.

Even in the woods there were monsters

Beginning to map the monster

I began a ballad recounting our investigations, but - true to the spirit of Hunting The Snark which inspired it - it remains unfinished. Thankfully other Investigators have been more organised. You can see documentation of LNIBR preparations and excursions, records of sightings, and other results of the trip (both visual and verbal) and buy a copy of the BOOKISHNESS publication at the UWE Book Arts Website. And there's a movie too! 

BOOKISHNESS,

containing contributions from many monster hunters

World Book Night 2016 : The Handmaid's Tale

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

The United Artists assembled in the Grand Ballroom of the White Swan Hotel, Halifax on 23 April for the annual World Book Night event. This year The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood was selected by artist, performer and writer John Bently. The 16 artists present created Serena Joy, a portfolio of miniprints responding to the text, from rubber stamps contributed by 43 international artists. We were lucky to have rubber stamp authority Stephen Fowler in attendance. After a hard day at the inkpads, a musical sermon by John Bently and the Eyes brought events to a close.

Pleasure is an egg. Rubber stamp by Corinne Welch, printed by Mette-Sofie D. Ambeck 

All Flesh. Rubber stamp by Jane Cradock-Watson, printed by Angela Butler

Serena Joy: the final set, complete with gilded box. 

Photo: Sarah Bodman

You can see all the finished prints and read a full list of contributors on the UWE Book Arts website, where there is also a link to John Bently's impassioned rendition of 'Amazing Grace' and other delights. Many thanks to Sarah Bodman who assembled this digital record, as well as coordinating the event and curating the Serena Joy portfolio.

If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending... But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.

Some Small Good Things: World Book Night 2013

On Tuesday 23rd April the annual world book night collaboration began. Since 2010 I have been celebrating world book night with Sarah Bodman and fellow book artists, including Angie Butler and Natalie McGrorty. The events have seen new books generated from novels by Patricia Highsmith, Douglas Coupland and Donna Tartt. This year, the chosen text by Raymond Carver was more minimal in two senses - firstly, it was short story rather than a novel, and secondly, as the title itself suggests, it concerns A Small Good Thing.

This year, hot on the heels of organising Bristol Artists' Book Event, Sarah Bodman co-ordinated the event and dinner, with a collaborative text that contained contributions of small, good things from book artists around the world. A film was produced (in homage to Robert Altman's Short Cuts - itself inspired by Carver's stories). The film and full details of the project can be viewed on the UWE bookarts website, where there is also a free, downloadable version of the texts. These can be printed at home to create a zine, and there's even a blank page provided to fill in with a small, good thing of your own to make the book unique. 

World Book Night - The Secret History Dinner

The annual collaboration with Sarah Bodman and Co. at CFPR Book Arts to produce an artist’s book in tribute to a particular novel is now complete. The book, print and video will launch on 23rd April, World Book Night.

To date we have made books for Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley and Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief. This year we featured Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History. The dinner took place over Easter weekend, in an aptly situated venue in Oxford. Collaborators brought their typewriters and cameras, and food and drinks from the book were served throughout the night, including dangerous-looking mushrooms, an elaborate lentil dish, roast meats, frozen cheesecake, and even food inspired by Bunny’s tasteless wake at the Corcoran’s house.


The typed version of the group’s collaborative essay: The Secrets of Metahemeralism, cobbled together and triple-spaced in the style of Bunny Corcoran provides the core of a photocopied, editioned artist’s book, in tribute to the narrator Richard’s extra paid duties at college. The book will also include postcards, notes, scraps of paper, photos, etc. 


Contributors to the book were: Helen Allsebrook, Helen Barr, Sarah Bodman, Angie Butler, Simon Butler, Arthur Buxton, Nancy Campbell, Jenny Gal-Or, Hazel Grainger, Charlotte Hall, Anna Lucas, Kirsten Norrie, Simon Smith and EF Stevens. 

Angie Butler’s Letterpress Etiquette Network has printed a letterpress broadside edition of lines of text selected from the compositions (below).

TOAST: A Night on Weevil Lake

Staedler Print by Helen Allsebrook

TOAST: A Night on Weevil Lake is now complete. Sarah Bodman has made a riotous film charting our tribute to Douglas Coupland’s novel The Gum Thief on World Book Night. To see the inevitable visit to STAPLES stationery superstore, the discovery of a weevil in the pancake mix, and the necessary last-minute recourse to Chinese takeaway… click here.

In addition, an artist's book has been published, incorporating verbal and visual toasts from each of the dinner guests (as well as some satellite participants).

Poetry Beyond Text

I celebrated World Book Night with Sarah Bodman and friends in Bristol. Last year Sarah lavishly recreated every meal mentioned by novelist Patricia Highsmith in The Talented Mr Ripley as source material for our book Dinner and a Rose, and the sinister feast was so splendid we decided to make the fictional dinner party an annual event. This year the featured book was The Gum Thief by Douglas Copeland... and a full report will follow when I am completely recovered.

Meanwhile the book that rose from the ashes of last year's dinner is being exhibited this month at Dundee Contemporary Arts. The exhibition is organised by Poetry Beyond Text, an AHRC funded project to investigate 'vision, text + cognition' in literature. The exhibition travels to Edinburgh where it can be viewed at the Scottish Poetry Library in May and afterwards at the Royal Scottish Academy. If you can't make it to either venue, there are images at the Poetry Beyond Text online gallery.

The Way to a Murderer's Mind is Through his Stomach

The first copies of Dinner and a Rose are bound for Dundee, to take part in Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text, Cognition, an AHRC-funded project to investigate how readers respond to visual aspects of poetry.


Many of the book artist Sarah Bodman’s works conduct dialogues with existing publications. The Flowers in Hotel Rooms series, for example, documents tributes to the books she has read while travelling. So when Sarah was commissioned by Poetry Beyond Text to create an artist’s book, she decided to work with The Talented Mr Ripley and other novels in the ‘Ripley Quartet’ by Patricia Highsmith. Sarah is intrigued by the culinary theme Highsmith employs to chart Ripley’s greed for the good life: ‘his relish – both for killing and the fine food he would have if he could afford it’. Ripley’s character is defined by the food and drink he consumes, from devil-may-care martinis in Mongibello to penitential hot milk in Rome.

The first of many pages in an early listing of Ripley's meals by Sarah Bodman

Sarah asked me to provide poems for the book, and inspired by Poetry Beyond Text’s interest in experiment, we decided to recreate Highsmith’s menus in a live performance. Sarah prepared a delicious, if macabre, dinner, for twelve guests, with a thirteenth place set for the absent Tom Ripley. Every food mentioned by Highsmith was served, from cold chicken in aspic to sole veronique, and every drink mixed (even Dubonnet!). The dinner lasted over twelve hours. The conversations around the dinner table had unexpected synchronicities with the Ripley novels, including the perils of impersonation, the ambiguity of beauty, death by water and passport forgery. All the night’s conversations were recorded and I used the transcriptions as collage material, creating a series of eighteen poems. Sarah photographed Ripley’s setting for each course; these images and the poems partner each other in the finished work.

Collage proved to be a good choice for writing about food and crime. In its visual form, collage has been associated with food and drink since the Cubists’ still lifes on cafe tabac tables, which are in turn reminiscent of earlier, and more sinister, vanitas paintings.
Marjorie Perloff, in a lively survey of collage and poetry for the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, quotes a caustic review of the Cantos by W.B. Yeats. Yeats claimed that Ezra Pound had ‘not got all the wine into the bowl’. In other words, Pound’s collage technique led to poems as incoherent as the ramblings of an old soak. Perloff writes that ‘collage has been the most important mode for representing a “reality” no longer quite believed in and therefore all the more challenging’.

Above left, ‘Still Life with Checked Tablecloth’ by Juan Gris. On the right, a still life from Dinner and a Rose by Sarah Bodman.

Dinner and a Rose is published in a signed limited edition of 20 copies, priced £100.

Sarah and I are delighted with the project’s success and plan to make the ‘novel dinner’ an annual event. Next year’s book will be The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland.

The Gourmet Mr Ripley

Tom made a batch of martinis, and arranged the glasses and a plate of canapes on a tray in the living-room. When he heard the door-knocker, he went to the door and swung it open.

This weekend the book artist Sarah Bodman served up a macabre feast at her Bristol home: a seven-hour dinner party composed of every meal that 'The Talented Mr Ripley' consumes in between more nefarious activities in the novels written by Patricia Highsmith. The meal initiates a collaboration between Sarah and I on Dinner and a Rose, a book commissioned by Poetry Beyond Text.

Tom slid one leg over a stool and faced the door challengingly, yet with a flagrant casualness.
'Gin and tonic, please,' he said to the barman.

The night began with gin and tonics, the drink Ripley orders in the Manhattan bar Raoul's where he meets Herbert Greenleaf - a billionaire whose son he will later murder in the small Italian village of Mongibello, before embezzling his fortune. A whole cold chicken in aspic lay on the table alongside a bowl of celeri remoulade. Guests sipped tentatively at a lobster bisque, and those who had read the novels may well have wondered what devious plots were simmering on the stove in the next room.

Perhaps canelloni to begin with, creamy sauce over delicate pasta, and a good valpolicella to sip while he dreamed about his future and planned where he went from here ...

We enjoyed a bottle of Margaux with lamb chops and one guest nobly managed a sip of Dubonnet. Then beef consomme, followed by calves' liver and artichokes. Costoletta di vitello, much as it must have tasted from a small Mongibello cafe. Sole veronique. Cold roast beef. Crab sandwiches. Steak with ragout and whiskies.

Tom regretted very much that the main dish was ... a fabulously expensive item on the Italian market.

Sated, we approached the final course: chocolate mousse, strawberries soaked in liqueurs and shortbread galettes, accompanied by champagne and coffees, as fine as if prepared by Mme Annette, the housekeeper at Ripley's French estate, Belle Ombre. With a Bach harpsichord solo playing in the next room, I half-expected to hear the music abruptly stop and see Ripley wander in to mix a last martini.

By midnight we felt much as Ripley had done, sitting in a deckchair on a cruise ship bound for Europe at the start of his adventures, 'fortified morally by the luxurious surroundings and inwardly by the abundance of well-prepared food'. In advance of the publication, Sarah has put together this film of the event.

Last Suppers

Alain Delon as Tom Ripley in Purple Noon (1960).

Sarah Bodman, senior research fellow at the Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol, has invited me to collaborate on a book for the project Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition, which is commissioning new work as part of an exploration into how readers respond to visual aspects of poetry.

Sarah has long been an aficionado of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley quartet, which takes 'the talented Mr Ripley' from being a small time fraudster in New York to millionaire murderer in the beauty spots of Europe. Sarah is intrigued by the meals Ripley consumes, which are documented in detail by Highsmith as a sign of his growing sophistication. Ripley's victims stand in the ways of his appetite for the good life, epitomised by chicken in aspic, celeri remoulade and sole veronique.

My texts, variations on Highsmith's work, will accompany Sarah's photos in a limited edition artist's book. Meanwhile, we will generate some new responses to the novel by 'curating' a dinner party at which all the meals and liqueurs mentioned in the book will be served.