Paul Houghton and Dr. Catherine Burgass have been taking part in the Live Age Festival at the Potteries Museum, which is exhibiting work by Lowry and local counterpart, Arthur Berry until January 10th 2016.
Paul hosted a Creative Writing Workshop: “Writing is Seeing” on October 3rd, and it was followed by a talk by Dr. Bugrass & Prof. Ray Johnson: ‘Arthur Berry and the Poetics of Place’.
We welcomed new level four students to our English and Creative Writing courses with a trip to the Potteries Museum, Hanley, where Dr. Melanie Ebdon gave us a thrilling reading of Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon in an atmospherically reconstructed mead-hall, (contemporaneous to the writing of this poem) and artefacts from the Staffordshire Hoard.
The trip celebrated the end of a busy welcome week, which also included a student learning conference. Staff and students from English and Creative Writing joined colleagues and peers from History and Sociology.
On a research trip to the Lowry Gallery in Salford, I had one of those slightly odd experiences where art and life intersect. The image above is Lowry’s uncomfortable and uncomfortably named The Cripples (1949). When challenged that he could not possibly have encountered so many people with disabilities, Lowry hauled his sceptical interlocutor round post-war Manchester to prove a point. Waiting for a delayed tram to Salford Quays I conversed with an unkempt man who explained that because he had been sectioned he got no dole. As I was making notes in the Gallery, a small group of people with physical disabilities and learning issues came in. Their carers evinced shock at the picture’s name, though the image which elicited the strongest response from one of the group was The Bedroom, Pendlebury (a dingy tribute to van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles). The degree to which Lowry mocked or empathised with his subjects generally is debateable and though this image shows scant evidence of the latter quality he did undoubtedly appreciate the impact of misfortune and trauma. What is clear, surely even to the sceptical, is that austerity Britain would provide him with plenteous subject matter today.
There are 25 Lowries currently hanging in the Lowry-Berry exhibition at the Potteries Museum. The Lowry in Salford holds a large permanent collection – both demonstrate that Lowry was not simply a painter of industrial landscapes populated with ‘matchstick men’.
In conjunction with the exhibition of paintings by L.S. Lowry and his local counterpart Arthur Berry – ‘Observers of Urban Life’ – at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Paul Houghton and Catherine Burgass are both involved in ‘Live Age Festival’ events. Paul is running a creative writing workshop ‘Writing is Seeing’ and Catherine is talking with Ray Johnson on ‘Arthur Berry and the Poetics of Place’, both on Saturday 3rd October. Attendance at either of these free events will also gain you free admission to the exhibition, which places these two significant twentieth-century painters of the industrial landscape side by side for the first time and is well worth seeing. For further information and to book go to: http://www.liveagefestival.co.uk/#!october-3-schedule/cgjf
The 2015 NSS results have just been publicly released. These are standardised surveys of current students, held at every University in the country, and which feed into things like league tables. We are pleased to report that … our students are pleased! Overall satisfaction is above 90%, as likewise is the satisfaction with our teaching. Compared with English and Creative Writing departments around the country, we are ahead of the pack in five out of eight indicators.
Plans for the new term are coming along nicely. There will be a new module, Writing for Success, for the first years. The planning for the first year trip to Grasmere, the home of the Lakeland poets and Romanticism, is well advanced. In addition, there are plans to see The Winter’s Tale and Waiting for Godot at the New Vic and to take in the exhibition of the works of Lowry and his local counterpart, Arthur Berry, at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.
More news as it’s confirmed.
A great figure of American letters, EL Doctorow, has died at the age of 83. He achieved the distinction, as a writer, of being both commercially successful and receiving a great deal of scholarly attention. This is because he was both a chronicler of American history – his books explored the the Jazz Age, the rise of the Mafia, the Industrial Revolution – and an explorer of literary form. My favourite, and the one I teach, is his 1971 novel, The Book of Daniel. Here, with a thin veil of fictionalisation, he explores the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953 for passing nuclear secrets to the USSR, and the consequences for their children in a different radical age at the end of the 60s. The book is at once an account of personal trauma and loss, a meditation on America’s post-War radical movements, and an exploration of the limits of literary form and the earlier certainties of narrative perspective and temporal organisation. The book incorporates polyphonic narratives of the persecution of both the Jews and radical thinkers over time – characteristics that both the Rosenbergs and Doctorow himself shared. The Book of Daniel is my favourite book and every time I return to it I discover something new to say about it.
President Obama tweeted this:
“E.L. Doctorow was one of America’s greatest novelists. His books taught me much, and he will be missed.
You can read the Guardian obituary here and follow links to more interesting articles and interviews.
The English and Creative Writing staff at Staffs are delighted to congratulate the graduating class of 2015.
It was a glorious day at Trentham Gardens for our students to spend their last day as Staffs students (though we are looking forward to welcoming some back for Masters study). Lou Whotton and Atia Shafique scooped prizes, though so many students did so well and have been great over the last three years that it was almost impossible to choose.
The Stoke Sentinel were there, and you can see their pictures here
We managed to round up most of the students for our own pic, and here we all are before the ceremony.
![IMG_4329[1]](http://blogs.staffs.ac.uk/ecw/files/2015/07/IMG_43291.jpg)
Our congratulations, once again, to all our students who graduated this year. We are very proud of you all and have really enjoyed teaching you and getting to know you over the last three years. Please stay in touch and let us know how you are getting on.
Mark, Martin, Mel, Catherine, Barry, Lisa, Paul and Douglas.
I was in that London at the weekend to see the RSC’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (which we study in Make it New: American writing 1900-1950). During the day we took in the London Eye and the new cable car across the Thames at Greenwich. We separated these panoptical pursuits with lunch at the Tate and some contemplative time with Rothko’s magnificent explorations of colour, shade and shape.