I recently had the pleasant though difficult task of judging the Heritage category at the Three Counties Open Art Exhibition administered by Keele University at the Burslem School of Art.  Heritage, of course, has many aspects, encompassing the built environment and remnants of the industrial past as well as less tangible manifestations.

The Exhibition features many such – from a museum interior, to images of Stoke-on-Trent’s steelworks and potbanks (Francis Proudlove), to the cultural heritage of football and pubs (Geoffrey Wynne), with their undeniable emotional resonance.  Any one of these would have been a worthy winner.  Upstairs in the Arthur Berry room is a concurrent exhibition, ‘Common Ground’ by Ian Mood, inspired by the artist’s close family history as well as Stoke-on-Trent’s urban landscape.The work chosen for the Heritage prize, after no small degree of agonising and with the help of sponsor Ford Green Hall’s Neil Dawson, was a small collage in the upstairs gallery, Rising.   Created by Stoke-on-Trent’s Sheena Kelly, it is a stitched collage in ‘mixed media’ depicting a smoking kiln, factory building and canal.  Fragments of text: ‘we love locally’, ‘in small batches’ etc. also suggest pottery production – a particularly artisanal industry.  The slightly naïve execution references Stoke-on-Trent’s industrial heritage, but also comprises a witty commentary on the current state of the city along with the global problem of waste production and disposal.

The term ‘mixed-media’ can hide a multitude – Rising is made of refuse, bits of old packaging.  One connotation is the waste of the pottery industry and its workers.  But there is a positive spin – not least in the title: just as rubbish is recycled into art, the industrial heritage buildings depicted here are being turned to new use.  Middleport Pottery, still successfully producing Burleigh ware, is currently hosting the Weeping Windows ceramic poppies installation.  This is expected to generate a significant influx of cultural tourism in Burslem and beyond.  Empty shops are hosting pop-up art events and all over the city heritage buildings are being turned to new uses.

Enquiry to a delighted Sheena revealed that much of the material was provided by a packet of Kettle chips.  In the service of research I purchased two packets myself – Sea Salt & Crushed Black Peppercorns and ‘Sea Salt and Balsamic Vinegar of Modena’. These are marketed as proper posh crisps: ‘hand cooked’, ‘absolutely nothing artificial’ – their credentials to authenticity and the artisanal are loudly trumpeted.

A quick visit to the kettlebrand.com website reveals reassuring information on the company’s sustainability practices: ‘Sustainability comes first’, we are told; ‘our natural promise extends beyond the ingredients’.  The tone is mildly patronising, puns aside: ‘We’re chipping in to live in harmony with the environment around us . . . .   The truth is, we all need to care for the planet.‘  However, they sorrowfully admit, it has not yet been possible to find an environmentally friendly form of packaging which would protect ‘the quality and freshiness of our product all the way to your favorite chip bowl’.  Hence, at the moment, each packet bears what we might dub the mark of McCain, also incorporated in Rising: ‘Sorry, this package is not currently recyclable.’  I suspect the truth of the matter is that they haven’t been able to find an environmentally friendly form of packaging that would not impact negatively on the bottom line.  Kettle is not the only brand to feature in Rising: a bird (dove?) flying upwards across the middle ground is made of a San Pellegrino ‘Eco-lid’ – 100% recyclable, apparently, but pretty much redundant and serving rather to confirm the pretensions of this pricey Euro-pop.  (Parent company Nestle scandalously promoted powdered baby milk in developing countries back in the day.)

Kettle chips, in common with most successful brands, has been subject in its short history to multiple merger and takeovers.  At one point it shared a stable (Kellog’s) with its polar opposite in crisp terms, the reformed and apparently pre-masticated aberration of a potato snack that is Pringles – “once you pop you can’t stop”.  It is currently owned by Campbells Soup, whose flagship product spawned perhaps the most iconic food art of the twentieth century – Andy Warhol’s pop-art Campbell Soup Cans (1962, MoMA).Ironically, given the mass-produced subject and advertising by which Warhol was inspired, the medium here is painted canvas – a separate painting for each of the 32 flavors.

Rising, then, is part of a now rather august tradition commenting on consumer culture.  We are all aware of the gaps between rhetoric and reality generated by organisations in their marketing and PR.  Kelly has cleverly recycled this rubbish while speaking gently of the Potteries industrial past and its pain and looking optimistically to the future.

The New Vic’s recent show, Table, was first staged at the National in 2013 and had its regional debut here.

It was one of the best evenings of theatre I have been privileged to be part of in some time. The table of the title is made by a carpenter in Lichfield at the end of the 19^th century to mark his marriage. The table is then a mute centre-piece and witness to the joys, clashes and changing social and moral shifts in the family over the next 6 generations. There is humour and lust, as well as crisis and despair in Tanya Ronder’s script. The enduring message is that we are shaped and fight against both our family and the invisible social forces which seek to regulate our behaviour – moral codes, religion, the previous generation. The narrative is not linear, and the play is carefully choreographed to slip backwards and forwards in time and between Lichfield, London, Herefordshire and Africa.

The cast were excellent and the energy they put in to their performances deserved a fuller house. It is disappointing that more interesting and challenging theatre at the Vic does not receive the attention it deserves from an otherwise loyal audience.

In contrast to the intense seriousness of Table is the current production, Astley’s Astounding Adventures. Staged to mark the 250^th anniversary of the founder of the modern circus, Newcastle Under Lyme’s own Philip Astley (he was the originator of the 42 foot ring with clowns, jugglers, acrobats and trick riders we know today), it is part of a programme of events and circuses around the area (my favourite so far was Circolumbia – South American hip-hop circus!).

This production is a joyous celebration of a working-class lad’s rise through the military ranks to become a circus impresario. The entertainment moves at a breathless pace. The central characters live, love and perform amazing circus stunts while maintaining excellent North Staffs accents (I’ve lived here 25 years and I still can’t do it) – sometimes while upside down. There is juggling, acrobatics, trapeze and that dangling from curtains thing. The circus in this play is genuine circus, not the faint impression of circus that theatre usually resorts to. I won’t tell you how they convey the horses and trick riding – you’ll have to find out for yourselves. The whole thing is accompanied by a little orchestra.

Astley’s is not exactly Beckett, but it is a great night out.

So, two contrasting but equally rewarding evenings.

The autumn season at the Vic has many promising productions, which we will be organising trips to.

images courtesy of the New Vic theatre

Debbie in her ceremonial robes and delivering her inspirational speech, with fellow Honorary, Tristram Hunt (former Stoke MP and current V and A director), just behind her.

English and Creative Writing nominee, award winning playwright Deborah McAndrew, received her Honorary Doctorate at the Staffs uni graduation ceremony at the glorious Trentham Gardens. In her acceptance speech, Debbie told the Class of 2018 how she journeyed from Coronation Street to the stages of London and then to Stoke to become a playwright, a mum and a beekeeper, where she finds the inspiration for much of her recent work. She inspired the graduates with her appeal to ‘bloom where you are planted’ and to bring your contribution to the community around you, which she has done herself. Claybody theatre, the company she set up with her husband Conrad Nelson , puts on high quality theatre with local and regional resonances in unconventional theatre spaces. Debbie said of the award of Honorary Doctorate: “I have loved living and working in Stoke and working with the students of Staffordshire Uni and I thank everybody at the university for the wonderful day I have had. I particularly wish the Class of 2018 all the success they desire”.

Deborah McAndrew is a Staffordshire based, award winning playwright and educator. She won the UK Theatre Award and the Manchester Theatre Award for Best New Play for her World War I play, An August Bank Holiday Lark. She has worked extensively at and with the New Vic in Basford, where her recent adaptation of Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns was a great success. Her adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac was a critical and popular success. She is the creative director of locally based theatre company, Claybody Theatre, which produces plays of local relevance in iconic local sites – staging Ugly Duck in the Burslem School of Art (followed by a successful transfer to the New Vic) and a new play, Dirty Laundry, in the China Hall at the Spode factory. She is the author of nineteen original plays and adaptations. Through Claybody, Deborah both celebrates North Staffordshire identity and promotes culture in the city. She is a familiar voice on Radio 4 drama, has worked extensively (as an actor and writer) with the internationally renowned Northern Broadsides, and works with the Writer’s Guild to promote drama.

Deborah has worked to promote literacy and creativity in schools, most recently as the National Literacy Trust Author in Residence at Ormiston Horizon Academy. She has taught playwriting to drama students and given visiting writer talks to creative writing students at the university.

Deborah has also written for the Sentinel, celebrating the culture and history of the city, as well as bee keeping.

Deborah is a creative figure of national importance who supports and celebrates Stoke on Trent at the local, regional and national levels, and who has promoted creativity and literacy to the young people of the city.

The Association of Literary Urban Studies organised a symposium last week at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London. Scholars came Finland, Estonia, Australia, Italy and all over the UK to share their research. The theme was The City: Myth and Materiality. There were excellent papers on a wide range of topics. The ones that resonated with my own interests were those that explored how stories are told about the metropolis by marginalised groups, and how those stories – sometimes nostalgic – can be employed to challenge official urban histories. The city, as so many urban commentators have argued, is unknowable in it scale and complexity. Stories, then, become a strategy for controlling and ordering the seeming chaos of urban life. Diverse papers on urban planning in Rochdale, anti-austerity demonstrations in Athens and New York baseball in Don DeLillo’s Underworld revealed the power of personal myth to comprehend the materiality of the city. Jennie Bailey (MMU) described her project to capture the stories of social housing tenants displaced by regeneration projects in Rochdale. Markuu Salmela (University of Tampere) explored a ‘Subway playoff’ between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, portrayed in DeLillo’s epic novel, to reveal the nostalgic narratives of sports teams after they have been relocated away from their original communities (work which echoes my own concern with portrayals of the Dodgers and Ebbets Field in Paul Auster’s fiction and films). Maria Mitsoula’s (Edinburgh) paper on the marble mythologies of Athens, and particularly how protesters used marble from a recently regenerated city square to violently challenge the authorities, showed how unofficial mythologies can remake city spaces and provide a radical alternative to official myths of the city.

Tom Wolfe  1988. Wiki commons

Tom Wolfe, the American writer, has died this week at the age of 88. He is known as the author of two significant novels: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (recounting his experiences with Ken Kesey and the Merry Tricksters in the 60s) and The Bonfire of the Vanities (made in to a movie starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith in 1990). But his greatest influence has been on the writing that he termed New Journalism. The movement has given us Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (about a quadruple murder in Kansas), Michael Herr’s Dispatches (recounting his experiences of reporting the Vietnam war) and Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (an account of a drug-fueled trip to report on a motorbike race in the desert) – these works have the quality on a ‘non-fiction novel’ (Capote’s term) because they reimagine or report upon actual events. Wolfe anthologised the writing of these authors, himself and others in The New Journalism (1975) and gave a name to a style of writing that had emerged as a response to the 1960s. Wolfe claimed that the novel was bankrupt, and called instead for a form of writing that was as accurate and neutral as journalism, but as creative and involved as the novel written by the realists and naturalists of the nineteenth  century (Balzac, Zola and Dickens). Wolfe rejected the experimentation of postmodernity, preferring the conventional linearity and representational strategies of realism, seeing in it an immediacy and emotional involvement that gives the work greater authenticity. Readers of The Bonfire of the Vanities (the topic of a chapter I am writing for a new monograph on the contemporary New York novel) will know from its epic scale and reach that it has more to do with Dickens’ panoramic views of London than it does with the fractured narratives of contemporaries such as Thomas Pynchon or E L Doctorow, whose experimentation he rejected as artificial.

Today is Virginia Woolf’s 136^th birthday (b. 1882). She is a significant figure in literary modernism and somebody who gave us a number of ways to think about it from both a creative and critical perspective.

Woolf was highly conscious of the changes in social and cultural arrangements in the early decades of the 20^th century.

In her influential essay on the novels of (Stoke’s own) Arnold Bennett, she wrote:

On or about December 1910 human character changed. All human relations shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations shift there is at the same time a change in religion, politics and literature.

(‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ 1924)

As a result of these shifts and changes, Woolf saw that the modern writer had a responsibility to represent the world in a new way because, as she put it:

Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. (Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’)

One way of thinking about the effects of these social transformations was the way in which artists represented the human form. Under the stresses of rapid change the body is distorted. Munch’s The Scream, Picasso’s figures and portraits, and Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ are all familiar examples.

Artists responded to this by adopting new and innovative forms appropriate to the dynamic nature of the new world

Writers turned to the internal lives of their characters to record the impressions of the world rather than attempt to represent an unrepresentable reality

Modernist artists such as Woolf were themselves at the forefront of the processes of modernity, attempting to make sense of the disorder of a complex and confusing world, and seeking new modes of representation appropriate to this flux and fragmentation.

Woolf was the author of influential texts, such as Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and the peerless Orlando (1928). Orlando, in particular, plays with ideas of time (a central character who lives from the time of Elizabeth I to the Great War), identity, sexuality and gender (the central character is, at turns, a man, a woman and androgynous).

There has been much controversy this week over the diversity of the undergraduate syllabus at Cambridge. Here, some Staffs Uni lecturers dwell on the ways in which we hope to make our teaching relevant to the complex world we all live in:

“I was just reading about this in the Evening Standard, and thinking about my own list of 5 set-text novels for the Adaptation module. James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room), and Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart) rub shoulders with Camus, Doris Lessing & Edith Wharton (the main criteria for their selection was that they be short ‘modern classics’ (ones that I love), and adaptable to cinema.

Interstingly (or ironically), both Baldwin and Achebe fall foul of political correctness in their own right (Baldwin sinning against cross-dressers, Achebe asking us to sympathise with a wife-beater), which in no way detracts from their greatness, any more than Kipling’s colonial perspective detracts from his.

All v interesting. I was discussing the concept of the canon with 3rd years in week 1 and it was generally agreed it should simply be added to – don’t throw baby out with bathwater.” Margaret Leclere.

“I also teach Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and 4 others from that list of 10 (Beloved, Lonely Londoners, TGOSTings, Wide Sargasso Sea – and Jean Rhys was white, by the way!, not BMEthnic as the article claims).

I run a year-long module called Global Voices: Stories of Empire which contains only two white writers – Albert Camus and Jean Rhys, both of whom write prose which mines deep into the complex cultural psychology of the colonised nation.  My module on Magical Realism also features the work of so-called “BAME” writers such as Amy Tan (Chinese-American), Toni Morrison (African-American), Salman Rushdie (Indian) and Luke Sutherland (black British).  On this module we also read work by Laura Esquivel (Mexican) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombian); although these writers might not be thought of as ‘minority-ethnic’ in the UK, Hispanic cultures are aligned as ‘minority-ethnic’ in the USA.

As you can see from my job title – “Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies”- , I even reject the term “English Literature” to describe my subject area: Camus and Marquez we read in translation – how on earth can we consider them to be “English” in any sense, and a lot of the literature which I put on my modules may have been written in English, but it is written in countries a long way from England where the main language may not be English at all.  In my view, the label “English Literature” gives a sense of primacy to the English language, English culture and British (English) imperial practices of the past from which I like to distance myself in my work in order that I can more clearly understand the ‘voices’ and the literary art of people so long considered to be ‘Other’ to all that is English.” Melanie Ebdon.

“My PhD was in African American experimental poetry. I teach contemporary African American poetry (e.g. Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen– I’ve published a chapter on her for an edited collection with Ashgate), Black British and Asian poetry (e.g. Patience Agbabi, Nabila Jameel, Daljit Nagra). Like Mel, when anyone asks me what I teach, I tell them ‘Literature’ not ‘English Literature’ for the same reasons (though I can accept “Literature in English or English translation”). I also teach Pound, Eliot, Baudelaire, Whitman– there is a range of diversity in all the texts we teach.” Lisa Mansell

“American literature has always been open to the experiences of marginalised groups – regardless of the nature of the inequality. I teach the Harlem Renaissance (Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen’s beautiful and poetic Passing) and slave narrative (Frederick Douglas). More recently, Native American writers (such as Sherman Alexie) and African American writers (such as last year’s Man Booker winner, Paul Beatty) have revealed the stupidity of segregation and racism through humour. Toni Morrison’s Civil Rights era novel, Song of Solomon, is a powerful exploration of the tensions in the politics of race, identity and resistance, combined with a lyrical examination of the power and problematical nature of oral cultures.” Mark Brown