3:AM Maintenant presents nýr skáldskapur
3:AM Magazine & the Maintenant series presents: nýr skáldskapur a Free Poetry Reading at the Rich Mix Centre Icelandic & British poetry in collaboration Iain Sinclair & Ragnhildur Jóhanns EirÃkur Örn Norðdahl & Stewart Home Scott Thurston & BryndÃs Björgvinsdóttir Jón Örn Loðmfjörð & Tom Jenks A truly unique evening of poetry will see the […]
Maintenant #37: BryndÃs Björgvinsdóttir
I believe that all forms of art have the capacity for protest – if people feel like it. It just happens that I’m quite useless at all other forms of art. I don’t know if I would describe my poetry as a form of protest though… Sometimes it feels like even just pointing out the plain obvious is then received as some sort of extremism; in that sense my art is a form of protest, sure… I’m often come inspired by things I dislike, so the protest is inseparable from the inspiration, it even comes first, in a way. My thoughts are not separate from what bothers me out there — in that way the context and the content is always somehow social… I sometimes enter joyful conversations on design, cuisine, entertainments, space, time, unicorns and rainbows and completely ruin them with tales of traumatic events or political agenda. But, you know, I don’t think people who are preoccupied with the world in that way are unhappy — or even pessimistic — however full of misery their discourse is…
For the 37th in the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Icelandic poet BryndÃs Björgvinsdóttir.
Six Poems
The Norwegian Bible Society
has decided to eliminate the word “hell”
from the new Norwegian bible.
Professor Mogens Muller
from the Department of Theology
at the University of Oslo
has managed to prove that in the original Bible
the word “hell” – or “gehenna”
never referred to an underground dwelling:
“Hell” he said, “is the name
of a prehistoric rubbish heap south of Jerusalem,
currently the location of Palestine.”
By BryndÃs Björgvinsdóttir.
The Missing Links
“The only art is to omit“. * Antimatter captured for the first time. * The lost history of Californian punk. * Punk documentary. * The Ramones in rehearsal, 1975 (video). * Sid and Nancy crotchet dolls. * World premiere of Glenn Branca‘s 15th symphony. * John Cage‘s Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48). * A blog devoted […]
3:AM Cult Hero: Garrison Keillor
(above: Cover of Time magazine, November 4, 1985. Keillor was the subject of the cover story ‘Lonesome Whistle Blowing‘ by John Skow) I hear that old piano From down the avenue. I smell the pine trees I look around for you. Oh my sweet, my sweet old someone Coming through that door… It’s […]
Julia, We Don’t Live in the 1980s
From Downton Abbey to Wolf Hall, UK film, drama and novels are increasingly centred around the past: as a recent Guardian editorial had it, the past is safe. Even when the contemporary is represented, there is little sense of time. From a cultural viewpoint you can look around and get the impression that the financial crisis, the new austerity and the rise of the Islamic far right had never happened. Absence of time is matched by absence of place. As Carl Neville points out, British film is centred around London: London is where significant things happen. You never really see Edinburgh in Trainspotting or Shallow Grave, but at the start of Renton’s brief career in London ‘the first shots of his work and bedsit are presaged by an almost comical number of establishing shots of such a clunkily generic nature that it’s hard to determine whether this is a parody’.
Max Dunbar reviews Carl Neville‘s Classless.