LOVE, HONOUR AND FOREPLAY – LAUREN KAYE’S I’M ALL IN, FIVE YEARS ON

Posted on September 9, 2020 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged book review, comedy, empowerment, fantasy, featured, female pleasure, gender, Hey Arnold, I'm All In, Lauren Kaye, live poetry, love, lyrics, marriage, non-monogamy, patriarchy, performance poetry, poetry, R&B, relationships, romance, sex.

By Carmina Masoliver

August saw the five-year anniversary of Lauren Kaye’s ‘I’m All In’, a poetry collection described as a ‘seductive collection of romantic and sensual poems that speak on the inevitable episodes of love, sex and relationships’. The occasion was marked on social media – at a time where artists are forced to be more resourceful than ever when the stage is taken away. As Kaye outlines in the introduction, her poetry ‘is written much how I speak’, and it is best to have seen her live or see live videos so you can then hear her voice as you read coming through the pages.

GENERATION PARK NORWICH: TOO BIG TO FAIL?

Posted on June 9, 2016 by Norwich Radical in Community and tagged Amber Rudd, angel of the north, Axis, backers, BH, biomass, biomass power station, Buro Happold, BWSC, CHP, clive lewis, co2, community benefit, CRed, E.ON, East of England Development Agency, EEDA, energy, environment, Environmental Sciences, EON, fantasy, generation park, GPN, Green, incinerator, investment, Jaywick, John Schellnhuber, Kevin Tovey, NCC, New Norwich Power (N2P) Limited, norfolk, norwich, Norwich City Council, NPH (Norwich) LLP, Pelco (Distribution) LLP, PensionDanmark, power plant, Regional Development Agency, renewable energy, Suzanne Jones, Trevor Davis, UEA, University of East Anglia, world landmark.

by Suzanne Jones

In March this year the Evening News reported that Generation Park Norwich (GPN) had run out of money, leaving its backers (Norwich (NPH) LLP) with debts of £3M. The ‘green’ credentials of UEA, the leading advocate of the scheme, had been further undermined by the complete failure of their own biomass project, at a cost of £10M, and were first reported in the Norwich Radical in August 2015.

Norwich City Council (NCC) seemed to be back to square one after spending 12 years and £700k of public funds trying to come up with a viable use for the Utilities Site, to the east of the city centre. To quote Clive Lewis, the Norwich South MP, the whole scheme seemed to be ‘dead in the water’ before it had even got off the drawing board.

Yet now, like a phoenix from the incinerator’s ashes, it has miraculously risen again; ‘mysterious’ new backers have emerged, and things are back on track for the planning application to finally be heard in July or August. How is it that proposals which have been dogged by controversy, bankruptcy and delay refuse to die? Are there reasons why Generation Park Norwich (GPN) is just too big to fail?Continue Reading

PASSWORD

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged #readwomen, body, Carmina Masoliver, creative writing, fantasy, love, love poem, memories, memory, name, nature, password, poem, poetry, romance, salt, seawater, taste, women writers, writing.

by Carmina Masoliver

He types my name in for a password
but it isn’t long enough
so he uses seawater instead.Continue Reading

LITERATURE VS GENRE – SECONDS OUT (PART 2)

Posted on November 17, 2015 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged academia, Angela Carter, art, Arthur Krystal, books, China Miéville, commercial, Connie Willis, criticism, Docx, Don Winslow, fantasy, form, genre, Girl with all the gifts, guest, high brow, horror, Jonathan Jones, Kurt Vonnegut, literary fiction, literature, Lord Dunsany, low brow, Melanie, Mervyn Peake, metaphor, mike carey, money, mr carey, myth, novel, Oliver Burkeman, pandora, politics, Pulp, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, reading, school, sci-fi, smart, study, Ted Chiang, Ursula LeGuin, writer, writing, zombie.

by Mike Carey

Continued from part one, published on The Norwich Radical two weeks ago.

I hate to rake up ancient history, but here’s another example from a little further back – dredged up because in this case it is a writer of literary novels (Edward Docx, in the Observer in 2010) who’s saying this, so the agenda is maybe a little more naked.

Even good genre… is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That’s the way writing works and lots of people who don’t write novels don’t seem to get this: if you need a detective, if you need your hero to shoot the badass CIA chief, if you need faux-feminist shopping jokes, then great; but the correlative of these decisions is a curtailment in other areas. If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.

Considering that Docx rails against “a fundamental dishonesty” in the way this subject is usually discussed, I’m going to pick my words with care.

LITERATURE VS GENRE – SECONDS OUT (PART 1)

Posted on November 3, 2015 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged academia, art, Arthur Krystal, books, commercial, criticism, fantasy, form, genre, guest, high brow, horror, Jonathan Jones, Kidd and Castano, literary fiction, literature, low brow, Mark Liberman, mike carey, money, mr carey, novel, Oliver Burkeman, politics, Pulp, reading, sci-fi, smart, study, Terry Pratchett, writer, writing.

by Mike Carey

The argument about the relative merits of literary and genre fictions just keeps running and running. There’ll be periods of decorous silence, and then it will break out again, usually in the form of some egregious statement in a broadsheet or magazine, and it will be like it never left.

One thing you tend to notice after a while, though: it’s almost never writers of genre fiction who are picking the fight. To be fair, it’s often not “literary” writers either – it’s academics taking up the cudgels on their behalf; considerately telling us which stories are worth serious consideration and which aren’t. And I guess we appreciate the help, right? Because it’s a bewildering fictional landscape out there and an innocent young seeker after truth could easily go astray.Continue Reading

NOT ‘JUST A STORY’: FIFTY SHADES AND AN ABUSIVE REALITY

Posted on February 14, 2015 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged abuse, abusive reality, arts, BDSM, domestic abuse, e l james, fantasy, feminism, fiction, fifty shades of grey, film, film industry, Harry Potter, media, microaggression, miriam grossman, nicola collins, rape, reality, romance, sexual violence, women, writing.

by Cadi Cliff

Content warning: mentions abuse and rape.

Fifty Shades of Grey. The Twilight fanfiction by E.L. James has sold over 100 million copies around the world. The film, with a Valentine’s weekend release, had been marketed as the ultimate date-night movie, an ‘incredible fairy-tale love story’, a piece of ‘mommy porn’. I’m going to start this by saying that yes, I have read the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy (borrowed, not bought), and no, I do not condone censorship. You are free to read and watch what you like. However there is something about the credibility given to Fifty Shades by the volume of individuals going to watch it — it took £1m in ticket sales ahead of its February 13^th 2015 release — that doesn’t sit well with this writer.Continue Reading

fantasy

LOVE, HONOUR AND FOREPLAY – LAUREN KAYE’S I’M ALL IN, FIVE YEARS ON

By Carmina Masoliver

GENERATION PARK NORWICH: TOO BIG TO FAIL?

PASSWORD

LITERATURE VS GENRE – SECONDS OUT (PART 2)

LITERATURE VS GENRE – SECONDS OUT (PART 1)

NOT ‘JUST A STORY’: FIFTY SHADES AND AN ABUSIVE REALITY

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