gala poster

 

 

 

 

OOO APR 2013

 

 

 

What is the opposite of the “final nail in the coffin”? The last lick of paint? Hmm… whatever the words needed, deeds are done. Wild flowers planted in the front garden, steel gates coated in virgin white, bars removed from windows, barbed wire stripped from the signs. All tools packed away, all paints stored. Our Oval Office is ready for book business.

 

What sort of format will this take, though? And why did we adapt the OFF_PRESS logo (notice the Triple O echoes it, though), rather than open OFF_CENTRE or OFF_PLACE?

 

Well, the building is going to be home to more than just one press. It is an “insider art” publishing house, meaning it will bring together several orgs working with migrant and ex-prisoner cultural initiatives, so we wanted to give it a name which was not solely associated with OFF.

 

We do however have a book gallery downstairs where all of our gorgeous, both conventionally and hand-bound, books can be found and bought. We are not quite open 9-5, sometimes 9-9, sometimes 10-midnight – we have a phone line being installed on the 1st of May, ring us anytime after that and pop in if we are in!

 

/ ed

 

 

 

 

OOO sign

 

 

I keep getting calls from interested parties asking about the psychoemotional wellbeing of our publishing house… changing logos, late with books, WTF etc… seeing as we are more about doing than blogging, we have been lax in updating this page, but here goes:

 

/ our new home in Oval is getting new layers of paint and vision every day. it will be a new media and publishing house for artists and the ex-unfree (meaning those who have been in prisons, secure hospitals, refugee centres, etc).
 

/ the latest book by Irit Amiel is going through a much needed redesign
 

/ our involvement in eMigrating Landscapes is giving us intellectual wings (UCL / SSEES)
 

/ new publishing projects are being debated as the future of publishing is being debated
 

/ books on cultural theory, anti-bullying skills and general fiction in the pipeline

 

So while we get our hands dirty doing up buildings, binding new books and hobnobbing with the foreign and the unfree, hold on to your hats – lots more coming your way from the OFF_BRAND

 

/ ed

 

 

 

Please join us to discuss new ideas about borders and “New Europeans” in contemporary literary landscapes with writers GRAZYNA PLEBANEK and AM BAKALAR and commentators AGATA PYZIK and TIM BEASLEY-MURRAY.

 

Wednesday 20 March, 5-7pm

 

Room 433, with the reception afterwards in the Senior Common Room UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
16 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW

 

FREE but registration essential: www.emigratinglandscapes.eventbrite.com

If you can’t attend the event, DIRECT STREAMING will be available at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/live/emigration-2

 

The discussion is part of eMigrating Landscapes project (http://www.polishculture.org.uk/literature/news/article/emigrating-landscapes-1965.html) organised by UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute in London, UCL European Institute, and OFF_Press. 

 

.
A.M. Bakalar was born and raised in Poland. She lived in Germany, France, Sicily and Canada before she moved to the UK in 2004. Madame Mephisto is her first novel. Her novel was published in English (Stork Press, 2012) which is a rare phenomenon for the Polish authors to publish a debut work in the foreign language. A.M. Bakalar lives with her partner, a drum and bass musician, in London. She is currently at work on her second novel. Read her conversation with Magda Raczyńska published in Gazeta Wyborcza’s Wysokie Obcasy (in Polish)
.
Grażyna Plebanek is a writer, journalist, columnist, author of short stories and of highly acclaimed and bestselling novels Pudełko ze szpilkami (‘Box of Stilettos’, 2002), Dziewczyny z Portofino (‘Girls from Portofino’, 2005) and Przystupa (‘A Girl Called Przystupa’, 2007). Plebanek’s latest novel Illegal Liaisons (Nielegalne związki, 2010) sold 27,000 copies in Poland and is her first novel translated into English (Stork Press, 2012). Born in Warsaw, Plebanek has lived for five years in Stockholm and she now resides in Brussels. She is among a group of international artists whose portraits will be exhibited in Brussels Gare del’Ouest for the next 10 years. Grażyna’s website: www.grazynaplebanek.pl
.
Agata Pyzik is a Polish journalist and writer living in London, writes about art, architecture, music and literature for many British and Polish magazines. Her focus is art and politics from the “former East”, cold war, modernism. She writes for, among others, The Guardian, Icon, Frieze, Afterall, the Wire and Sight & Sound. She’s preparing a book on the cultural “dreamlands” in the Eastern and Western Europe during the communist era for the Zer0 Books. Agata’s blog: nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour
.

Tim Beasley-Murray is Senior Lecturer in European Thought and Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. He was born in the Congo. He studied Modern Languages (Czech, German and Russian) at Cambridge and, after a year at the ENS in Paris, joined SSEES in 1996 as Lecturer in Slovak Studies. His PhD was on conceptions of experience in Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin. A revised version of this came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2007 as Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin: Experience and Form. He has published on aesthetics, literature and political theory. Currently he is working on a research project on conceptions of speech and silence in political philosophy.

 

 

 

COMMUNITY CENTRE FOR PUBLISHING AND MEDIA DEVELOPMENT

8A HARLEYFORD ST

OVAL

LONDON SE11 5SY

UK

 

 

OOO_House_Image_sml

 

ANALOGUE & DIGITAL AS ONE

The debate over the future of the book is over, if it ever even got started – there is

enough room in the marketplace and in the imaginations of book producers and

readers for both analogue (paper) and digital (computer) formats, which will

include perfect bound, hand-made, ebook, app, online and all other publishing

formats.

.

BOOK CAFE / WORKSHOP / OFFICE/ STUDIO

OOO brings all of the above under one roof – on the ground floor, there is

a publishing gallery and workshop representing the first millennium of book

development, while the upper floor is the office and studio where digital

technology is used to lead the way into the second millennium of multimedia

formats.

.

OUTSIDER ART

OOO also exists to offer development opportunities for creative media

entrepreneurs of the future, who will be sourced from two outsider art groups –

migrants and those who have experienced custody (refugees, secure hospital

patients, ex-offenders) based in London. We want to work with those who have

been through difficult life experiences and give them the confidence and skills

to create new places of work for themselves and their communities.

.

FUTURE BUSINESS MODEL

OOO is run on a social enterprise basis, with all profits from its activities

being fed back into the organisation. However, we are clear about our aim to

produce high quality art and progressive debate around publishing and digital

media, and wish to engage with those who see their future within professional

culture and arts fields of the 21st century.

 

 

Enemies of the North - March Saturday 30th at the Cornerhouse in Manchester
http://www.cornerhouse.org/ - 5.30pm to 9pm in the Annexe room – entrance free

 

A special Camarade event, a day of original collaborations in poetry, sonic art and visual art, celebrating the resurgent energy of the northwest innovative poetry scene. Enemies in the north will also see the launch of Gilles de Rais (by David Kelly and I) & the Estates of Westeros (by Ben Morris and I), two books in boxes, published by Like This press www.likethispress.co.uk  as well as Elephanche (by Marcus Slease and I), a book of poemplays, published by Department presswww.departmentzine.blogspot.co.uk The event will feature:

 

Zoe Skoulding & Robert Sheppard
Richard Barrett & Nathan Thompson
Sarah Crewe & Jo Langton
Michael Egan & Bobby Parker
Steven Waling & Matt Dalby
Adam Steiner & Eleanor Rees
James Byrne & Sandeep Parmar
SJ Fowler & Marcus Slease
Daniele Pantano & David Kelly
Tom Jenks & Chris McCabe
& Ben Morris

 

-
Enemies of the South – April Saturday 27th at the Arnolfini in Bristol
http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/ - 6.30pm to 7.30pm in the Light Studio

 

Enemies presents a special one off Camarade event as part of the remarkable 4 days programme at the Arnolfini in Bristol http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/4-days-1which sees avant garde poetry and performance art at the forefront of a wonderful festival programme. The event will feature:

 

Holly Pester & Emma Bennett
Tim Atkins & Mark Waldron
David Berridge & James Wilkes
Patrick Coyle & SJ Fowler
Daniel Rourke & Claire Potter
Jeff Hilson & Marcus Slease
Tom Jenks & Chris McCabe

 

The first international Enemies event took place in Berlin a few weeks ago. Feinde (http://www.weareenemies.com/enemiesberlin.html) was a collaboration with Alessandra Eramo, in performance and in residence at the amazing Wortwedding gallery http://wortwedding.blogspot.co.uk/ You can read about the event, watch the performance and the video installation art that was part of the collaboration here - http://blutkitt.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/enemies-berlin-feinde-with-alessandra.html

 

More events to be announced soon for the Enemies project, thanks as ever to the Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Arts Council England.

 

 

 

COMMUNITY CENTRE FOR PUBLISHING AND MEDIA DEVELOPMENT
8A HARLEYFORD ST
OVAL
LONDON SE11 5SY
UK

 

 

OFF_PLACE googlemaps

 

 

ANALOGUE & DIGITAL AS ONE

The debate over the future of the book is over, if it ever even got started – there is

enough room in the marketplace and in the imaginations of book producers and

readers for both analogue (paper) and digital (computer) formats, which will

include perfect bound, hand-made, ebook, app, online and all other publishing

formats.

.

ART CAFE / WORKSHOP / OFFICE/ STUDIO

OFF_PLACE brings all of the above under one roof – on the ground floor, there is

a publishing gallery and workshop representing the first millennium of book

development, while the upper floor is the office and studio where digital

technology is used to lead the way into the second millennium of multimedia

formats.

.

OUTSIDER ART

OFF_PLACE also exists to offer development opportunities for creative media

entrepreneurs of the future, who will be sourced from two outsider art groups –

migrants and those who have experienced custody (refugees, secure hospital

patients, ex-offenders) based in London. We want to work with those who have

been through difficult life experiences and give them the confidence and skills

to create new places of work for themselves and their communities.

.

FUTURE BUSINESS MODEL

OFF_PLACE is run on a social enterprise basis, with all profits from its activities

being fed back into the organisation. However, we are clear about our aim to

produce high quality art and progressive debate around publishing and digital

media, and wish to engage with those who see their future within professional

culture and arts fields of the 21st century.

 

 

 

66472_10151416261402938_109618786_n

 

 

 

 

Back from Poland with a mountain of books and a head full of ideas.

Visions of our new building are clarifying and cementing at the same time.

More updates just as soon as I manage to switch inner tongues, unpack, unwind, write some business plans, make a million calls and come to write OFF_BLOG#11, where all will be revealed…

 

 

Marek

 

 

OFF_PLACE googlemaps

 

 

 

 

themerson

 

 

 

 

It is 4 am and I am writing a blog. Modern malaise? Insomniac epidemic? Nah, yesterday I celebrated signing the lease on a beautiful new building in Oval, London, as a home for our growing press and got a bit of icky tummy food poisoning from the local chip shop (stay away from curry spring rolls) and so sleep is hard to come by tonight. But thinking about the future, about new books, opening a bookshop, going round Poland again next week to research successful bookshops there (hoping to open in Oval in the summer), where not only will we work with migrant writers but also with writers coming out of prison – ex-OFFenders, as I like to think of them.

 

This year, I was meant to come into some money, buy a Harley and ride it to Spain to see a gorgeous friend of mine I call Princess, because she is a quantum royalty and no doubt. However, she will have to settle for my Kawasaki and the opening of a bookshop – 8 Harleyford St – coincidence or quantum mechanics? I know she loves books more than bikes, like me, so she will forgive…

 

More blogs coming up from the road, fuelled by pepto bismol

 

Marek

 

 

OFF_PLACE googlemaps

 

 

 

 

THE TROUBLE AT THE HEART OF IRIT AMIEL’S POETRY / PIOTR SLIWIŃSKI

 

 

Irit Amiel’s Polish poems have thus far only appeared in several slim volumes, finding a small, if faithful, group of readers in their native tongue. And yet they employ a great oratory power, being part of the rich legacy of literature concerned with (or rather contemplating) the Holocaust. Instantly, however, questions abound. Whose history is this? Specifically Jewish or Polish also? Irit Amiel’s family lived in Poland since the 16th Century. She herself lived – suffered, survived – her childhood and early teens there, before moving to Palestine at the end of the War. When she did eventually begin to write, she chose to do so in Polish, the language of her lost motherland.

The centuries-old history of Jewish-Polish relations is one of the greatest treasures of Polish culture, and attempts to reach across the chasm of evil and forgetting are the most important gestures we can make as a people. Yet, beneath this flood of powerful feelings and mutual interest, we must not ignore the dramatic difference in the fates of the two nations. It was the Jews who were selected for extermination, regardless of whether they spoke fluent Polish or not. Dealing with their testimonies demands extreme empathy, while simultaneously forcing us to admit that there is a limit to understanding that which happened not so long ago on our Continent.

 

After so many years, I returned to the land

I was once born to,

the country which had been my first

sorrowful, solitary, unrequited love.

I loved it, but it did not return the feeling.

 

These simple, direct lines present the reader with a particularly difficult task. This isn’t an aesthetic problem, related to form, but something more metaphysical. There is too much pain in Amiel’s poetry for us to treat them with critical precision, too much undisguised truth for us to take as simple literature; they are too intimate for any critic to dare reach for their usual taxonomies and scalpels. This poetry, stripped of any artifice which might bar access, free from stylistic showiness, from any kind of dark dandyism or hysteria, turns out to be impossible to fathom. It is like a steep rock face in which we can see the odd chink or hold. Trying to climb it, however, proves fruitless: all we can do is maim ourselves, though what are such injuries compared to the wound which opened the verses up in the first place? We stand before them as if before an insurmountable wailing wall.

But what is this “wailing wall”? The original stands in Jerusalem, pious Jews gathering before it every August to honour the anniversary of the destruction of Solomon’s Temple. They weep over the fate of their nation: exile, homelessness, wandering, suffering, destruction, the intangibility of salvation. But is this wailing wall tall or low? How long is it? What is it made of? Is it smooth or rough to the touch? Does it impose upon the gathered with monumental might, or does it rather speak with eternal silence? Whatever the answers, they are irrelevant to the experience of the person who has found themselves before this mysterious construction. Nothing in its deepest meaning can alter or diminish its power. Can that place, however, speak to those whose grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, neighbours and playground friends were not slaughtered?

Irit Amiel’s poetry leads the reader into awareness of two vital things: firstly, that there is no such things as a “language of art” which could satisfy with its representation of the Holocaust, and, secondly, that there are no feelings with which the notion of the Holocaust could be tamed. Art created on the subject of the Holocaust becomes in a sense “a-art” (see the work of Rozewicz or Kantor), seeing as it feels forced to pose radical questions of its own authenticity or else “pre-art”, by which we mean a document, a raw, autobiographical record, a trail leading to – as Henryk Grynberg reminds us – an unartistic truth. In both cases what we want to avoid is conventional gestures, the turning of experiences which cannot be encapsulated or measured by previous standards into sentimental artefacts. This absolutely incomprehensible tragedy denies the reader the language of feelings; sympathy, reminiscent of commonplace pity, arouses a sense of disturbance; empathy, needing some point-of-reference experiences to help imagine what the shock must have been like, is in fact impossible. When confronted with this vast expanse of murder, agony, longing and evil we are – whether we like it or not – struck dumb.

And so these verses at first engage us in a limited context – at the outset, it is enough to be certain we are dealing with carefully considered literature. Trying to tackle “subject matter” or “lyrical timespace” seems here rather inappropriate. It would be the same as trying to dissect the child narrator in some of Grynberg’ novels, suggesting our intention was to equate agony with some specific literary codes. The subject in the work of – I am picking names at random here – Grynberg or Wilhelm Dichter, as well as Leo Lipski, Paul Celan or Nelly Sachs, is pain. It is pain doing the writing, ripping words from our mouths, or else gagging us.

And yet, in writing directly from memory, which here turns out to be a permanently raw wound, is it possible to attain literary greatness? Czeslaw Milosz, in his remarkable essay “The Immorality of Art”, referring to the story by Thomas Mann “Tonio Kröger”, stresses the contemporary age of paradox, based on not assigning to the self the “most gracious human reactions” or creations which arose out of them. The guarantee, or even the germ, of quality verse, and great art full-stop, is not in fact profound experience or feeling, but rather a “cool, studied attitude” which accompanies the writing of even the most horrific events or the reproaching of the most heinous crimes. Milosz describes this as “the original sin of art”, which even though it cannot be avoided, does cast a permanent shadow over itself:

 

“The incredible amount of poetry which was written in Poland during the last War, including that penned in ghettoes and camps, makes relevant Mann’s observation that an artist should be inhuman or even hyperhuman, while the authors of said poems were usually simply human. And in being so, they failed as artists, making their verse part of a vast and fascinating record of events, nothing more.”

 

Perhaps poetry, wanting to achieve artistic merit, must consider this concept of “inhumanity”, but does it also mean it is enslaved to it? I specifically chose authors who are admired and included in the canon of the most distinguished poets of 20th Century Europe (such as the two German writers), to, in advance, weaken a little the paradox described by Milosz. That which is most human sometimes establishes its own, previously unknown criteria of what is great, moving the boundaries of art beyond limits known to us, including – let us recall Celan here – silence which thus takes on shattering meanings. But above all it is pain which is awaiting the reader. In one of her letters to Celan, Nelly Sachs writes a telling phrase, seeing both artists living then in separate parts of the Continent (Stockholm, Paris) as linked by a “meridian of pain”. This is something which the readers of Irit Amiel’s poems should also be following, their artistic merit based upon – objectively speaking – the ability to impose upon the audience the same “”injury” – subjectively – from the susceptibility of said to traumatic persuasions.

In this context, the author’s refusal to agonise over the individual self is also key. The poetess does not occupy herself with the moral or linguistic impossibility of describing the Holocaust, but in the simplest and most accurate ways recounts the contents of her memories and challenges the conscience of existence. After Auschwitz, to refer back to the famous phrase from Theodor W. Adorno, poetry is not only justified, it is absolutely essential, as long as we assume that it will not be born of artistic vanity, standing instead guard over the shadows of those who have been destroyed:

 

As long as I am still here you are less dead,

but soon enough you will die for the nth and last time.

My end will finally wipe you from the face of the earth.

 

Led by the sense of obligation and the instinct to stay alive she keeps writing, recording, giving people and places the power to speak again, as if trying to resist the final slipping into nothingness. This series of portraits – funereal? (but those seen dying here did not end up in coffins), mournful? (but there was no mourning over the bodies), morbid? (yet Amiel wants to reanimate her characters, rather than weep over their physiological demise) – make a stunning impression on the reader. Mainly because the poetess depends on much material description, attention to detail and precision in recalling the minutiae of different character’s gestures or words. When faced with immeasurable sadness, one has to be coolly descriptive and lead the way through impossibly vast numbers to a single human being, thus bringing them back to life – even if it is for the fleeting instant of a line of poetry.

It makes death that little bit less anonymous, less despairingly banal. Its dignity is restored. Without dignity assigned to death there is no dignity in life, no passion to it. Hence, Irit Amiel’s poems also feature a degree of guilt about being a survivor. To live does not mean to show solidarity or to break away, to rise above, having earned the right to claim a different, more individual death. To come back to life in memory is to do penance, yet, at the same time, to reward the unfair advantage the living have over the dead,

 

I did not get to Treblinka on time

arriving some fifty years too late,

the trees standing bare in autumn.

I wanted to escape at once because

the rusting relic of a train carriage

was still there waiting for me,

the forest around it whispering quietly.

 

In Amiel’s poetry guilt causes us to challenge life any time lack of loyalty or greed appear, when it is threatened – in the name of its undeniable, sensual charm. How much eroticism is here, how much detail. Existence is physical, composed of a stomach, breasts, breath, hair, your own and also slightly recast in those of your children and grandchildren (using “The Laws of Genetics” as an example). Although the author effectively uses irony and self-irony, she also resorts to word games and the sense that existence itself is paradoxical, without getting tied up in certain poetical and philosophical tapestries. Amiel is a guardian of the past, not a commentator on the role she has chosen to play, a self-aware widow to a murdered nation.

Her poetry, being so clear and straightforward (though far from simplistic), puts us in a difficult position. Firstly, because we have to ask ourselves if these poems hurt us too: if so, then challenging their artistic merit is something of a fallacy; if not – then even virtuosity would then be in some way stripped of meaning. It is hard to consider who is experiencing the working of Irit Amiel’s verse – the Jew of the New Testament, fearing being counted as one of the “helpers of death” (from Milosz’s “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto”)? Someone suffering within the borders of their own unbreachable alienness? Someone discovering “Their” destruction for the first time? Who am I then, once done reading? Poetry which challenges the reader to ask such questions, questions so often ridiculed of late, deserves our full respect and attention, for it has broken free of the borders of its own tormented loneliness.

 

 

 

 

 

AMIEL_cover

 

 

 

70 years after the Holocaust”“To frame experiences ever so hard to express, you have found the only possible form:

a totally raw kind of simplicity. Because of this, you can be sure your poems

will always live on!”

W. Szymborska

 

Dark Flashes is the first-ever English language collection of poems by Irit Amiel,

whose work is focused on experiences of the Holocaust, both her own

and those of many others.

 

Irit Amiel was born in Poland in 1931 as Irena Librowicz.
She survived World War II in the Czestochowa ghetto, using false
Aryan papers. Via illegal routes (through displaced persons camps
in Germany, Italy and Cyprus), she reached Palestine in 1947. She
has lived in Israel ever since, where she works as a writer, translator
and writes poetry in two languages (Polish and Hebrew). Her volume
of short stories Osmaleni (published in English as Scorched by
Vallentine Mitchell, The Library of Holocaust Testimonies, 2006), was
nominated for various literary awards in Poland, including twice for
the prestigious Nike Prize as well as the Biblioteka Raczynskich Prize.
It has also been published in Hebrew and Hungarian. Volumes of her
poetry include: Egzamin z Zagłady (Łódź 1994, 1998), Nie zdążyłam
(Łódź 1998) and Wdychać głęboko (Warsaw 2002). She has translated
several books by Polish authors into Hebrew and her translations
of writers such as Leo Lipski, Marek Hłasko, Henryk Grynberg and
Hanna Krall have appeared in various journals. She has also translated
poems by Wisława Szymborska and several theatrical productions.
Her own poems have appeared in numerous publications, in Poland
and abroad. She is currently working on her autobiography.

 


 

Author: Irit Amiel

Translator: Marek Kazmierski

Language: English

Genre: Poetry

Pages: 114

ISBN: 978-0-9572327-2-3

Publication: 27/01/2013

 


P&P



 

Cena 50.00zl z przesyłką do Polski. 

Bank WBK

Apart Arts Ltd

konto nr

84 1090 2851 0000 0001 1964 3928

IBAN GB51ABBY09066642690657

SWIFT-BIC code ABBYGB2LXXX.

 

prosimy o przesłanie emaila do info@off-press.org podąjac imie, nazwisko i adres pocztowy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

camarade iv poster

 

 

 

 

 

AMIEL_cover

 

 

 

70 years after the Holocaust” 

“To frame experiences ever so hard to express, you have found the only possible form:

a totally raw kind of simplicity. Because of this, you can be sure your poems

will always live on!”

W. Szymborska

 

Dark Flashes is the first-ever English language collection of poems by Irit Amiel,

whose work is focused on experiences of the Holocaust, both her own

and those of many others.

 

Irit Amiel was born in Poland in 1931 as Irena Librowicz.
She survived World War II in the Czestochowa ghetto, using false
Aryan papers. Via illegal routes (through displaced persons camps
in Germany, Italy and Cyprus), she reached Palestine in 1947. She
has lived in Israel ever since, where she works as a writer, translator
and writes poetry in two languages (Polish and Hebrew). Her volume
of short stories Osmaleni (published in English as Scorched by
Vallentine Mitchell, The Library of Holocaust Testimonies, 2006), was
nominated for various literary awards in Poland, including twice for
the prestigious Nike Prize as well as the Biblioteka Raczynskich Prize.
It has also been published in Hebrew and Hungarian. Volumes of her
poetry include: Egzamin z Zagłady (Łódź 1994, 1998), Nie zdążyłam
(Łódź 1998) and Wdychać głęboko (Warsaw 2002). She has translated
several books by Polish authors into Hebrew and her translations
of writers such as Leo Lipski, Marek Hłasko, Henryk Grynberg and
Hanna Krall have appeared in various journals. She has also translated
poems by Wisława Szymborska and several theatrical productions.
Her own poems have appeared in numerous publications, in Poland
and abroad. She is currently working on her autobiography.

 


 

Author: Irit Amiel

Translator: Marek Kazmierski

Language: English

Genre: Poetry

Pages: 114

ISBN: 978-0-9572327-2-3

Publication: 27/01/2013

 


P&P



 

Cena 50.00zl z przesyłką do Polski.

 

Bank WBK

Apart Arts Ltd

konto nr

84 1090 2851 0000 0001 1964 3928

IBAN GB51ABBY09066642690657

SWIFT-BIC code ABBYGB2LXXX.

 

prosimy o przesłanie emaila do info@off-press.org podąjac imie, nazwisko i adres pocztowy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 




London Book Fair… what else can be said about you, oh that most cultured of meatmarkets, that hasn’t already been said over a million glasses of Whetherspoon’s worst house red in the vicinity of Earl’s Court in the past few decades.


Whatever has does not need repeating.


2013 will be lucky for those who accept a few basic bookselling truths:


  1. Publishing is a total gamble. There never were any plans or old wisdoms. Look at film in recent years – total repetition (Bond, Batman, Oscar tearjerker safebets). Then look at books – teenage wizards? teenage vampires? Scandinavian crime in translation? NO ONE has any idea how what worked worked and what will work next.
  2. What was once a business has turned into showbusiness. The major stands are still big, but it’s all paid for by corporate savings and other investments. The new e-startups are still shoved to the back of the second hall, where they hang around, looking grumpy, waiting for dinosaurs to croak. As they fall, there will be a lot of noise, but really, does anyone believe 2023 will be just like 2003 or 1973 when it comes to publishing, printing and distribution?
  3. We are too clever for our own good. Too smart to sound fake when putting on a front of business success, too stupid to own up that the new century really does demand new philosophies/business models/blood (delete as appropriate and move on into the 21st).


So, gentlefolk of the old guard, don your laminated passes, grab your bags full of freebie pens and notebooks and mingle into obscurity.


The real action is in the making somewhere… virtual? local? digital? or a quantum combo of all three?


Books are like horses. A hundred years ago, only the rich had cars. Now only the rich can afford equestrianism. It’s the same with e-readers and tablets. Time to put paper outy to pasture and nurture it as a beautiful but totally ineffective and un-ecological material on which to share the written word.


E-libraries. Hand-made limited editions. Spoken word gigs. Word of e-mouth publicity. The future is no better or worse than the past – it is just so very much different to the past, we, the men and women in corduroy, aren’t fast enough to see the future as it moves past us at close to speed of light…


See you below instead, where the indies will be brawling…





click on the image above to go to Eventbrite page to read more and book…









click on the image above to go to Eventbrite page to read more and book…








NEW STATESMAN – Bury me in paper How will the “Zelig of all materials” fare in the digital age?”


Love letter to the most influential material of our or any other time, by Ian Sansom – click on image above to read the article.
















The lineup for the next Camarade event is finalised, it will officially be the first event of the Enemies project


OFF_PRESS will be presenting translations of Polish poetry, new and old – Tuwim, Grzegorzewska, Amiel


Chris McCabe & Tom Jenks
​George Szirtes & Carol Watts
Peter Jaeger & Tim Atkins​
James Wilkes & Christodoulos Makris
Stephen Emmerson & Lucy Harvest Clarke
Alex Niven & Joe Kennedy​​
​Roddy Lumsden & Carrie Etter
Todd Swift & Paul Perry
Marek Kazmierski & Stephen Watts
Sophie Mayer & Astrid Alben
Holly Pester & Daniel Rourke
Kirsty Irving & Ryan Van Winkle
Tamarin Norwood & tba


Camarade IV – February 9th / 7pm / the Rich mix