Month: July 2023

Hilma af Klint and Mondrian

July 19, 2023

This exhibition, at Tate Modern, is a curious pairing. The Tate says both artists started from nature and developed a new abstract language: but they never met and did not influence each other, and their motives seem very different. They both used coloured squares sometimes, but that’s about it.

Mondrian painted flowers and landscapes in a conventional style as well as the rectilinear images with primary coloured blocks for which he is known. For me these push abstraction too far, but they are popular (Katharine likes them).

Klint is problematic in some respects. Most of her works were meant to illustrate her Spiritualist beliefs, and they are heavy with obscure meaning. She said that some were done with spirit guidance (which recalls some of Blake’s pictures, and there is a just a hint of his muscular symbolic figures in Klint’s stuff). She didn’t generally exhibit them, and it’s possible she wouldn’t have wanted them shown. I suppose the curators nevertheless see her as a significant gap in the story of art, but she seems well out of the mainstream. I must say that if her work had been shown in the sixties it might have found a following, and prints of her works might now be selling well alongside esoteric Tarot illustrations and mandalas in that kind of shop.

Dr Semmelweis

July 19, 2023

This play, starring and partly written by Mark Rylance, tells the story of how Dr Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that fatal puerperal fever could be almost eliminated just by getting doctors to wash their hands. This radical innovation was not accepted by the profession (and the play makes clear that Semmelweis was, well, somewhat lacking in diplomacy, which didn’t help) and the doctor himself, whose behaviour became increasingly unacceptable, died in a lunatic asylum.

It’s a great production, which includes a group of women who play violins and dance around or with the actors. That sounds weird, but it mostly works, only seeming intrusive a couple of times.

It seems odd now that the simple notion of bacterial infection should have been so difficult to grasp. Part of the problem was that Semmelweis had only sketchy, inaccurate ideas about the mechanism: he just knew, and demonstrated, that washing worked. Sadly it was a long time before the practice was universally accepted.

August 2023 competitions

July 17, 2023

Here’s my regular look at writing competitions I might enter during the coming month.. 

  • The Scottish Association of Writers has the Westerwood competition for stories of 2-3,000 words. Entry is £7 with a parsimonious prize of £100. The deadline is 5 August.
  • Uncharted Magazine wants 1,001 to 5,000 words. Entry is $20 and the prize a more generous $2,000. Stories must be on the theme ‘The Aftermath’, and in one of the three genres they publish: SF/F, Thriller/Horror and Mystery/Crime. The deadline is 6 August.
  • Gival’s regular contest is with us again: 5-15,000 words, entry $25, top prize $1,000, enter by 8 August.
  • Periscope wants briefer stories, up to 1,500 words, on the theme ‘Identity’. £10 entry, first prize £1,000 and the deadline is 15 August.
  • Louise Walters is back with the competition based on page 100 of your novel. It’s £5 to enter: no money prize but a full editorial report and a box of books. Deadline 20 August.
  • The Summer version of the Masters Review competition is back – up to 6,000 words, $20 to enter and a prize of $3,000. The deadline is 27 August.

All the rest have a deadline of 31 August.

  • Creative Writing Ink wants up to 3,000 words, entry is £9 and the prize £1,000.
  • Bit of a fanfare for the University of New Orleans’s Publishing Laboratory, who are offering a prize of $10,000 plus publication. For that they want a full-length novel or collection (no word or page limit) and an entry fee of $28.
  • On a more modest scale, Anthology wants a maximum of 1,500 words, for an entry fee of £18 and a prize of £1,000.
  • Letter Review looks for up to 5,000 words. Your £20 entry fee gets you access to a £1,000 prize pot to be split three ways – so £333.33, I suppose.
  • Aesthetica Magazine puzzles me slightly, because it seems to be an avant-garde publication about art and design rather than a literary one. But the competition claims former winners have gone on to great success. It’s £18 to enter, with a prize of £2,500. Up to 2,000 words. 
  • The Kenneth Patchen award is for an innnovative, experimental novel of any length. $25 to enter, win $1,000 and publication.
  • St Lawrence look for a collection of 120-280 pages. $28 gets you a shot at $1,000.

Good luck if you enter any of these, and do let me know if you get anywhere!

Karen McLeod

July 11, 2023

Interesting talk from Karen McLeod at Croydon Writers last night. For a long time she worked as cabin crew for an airline, but managed to write a novel In Search of the Missing Eyelash which was published and did very well. Then she found it was hard to write the follow-up her agent pressed her for.
Instead she developed a comedy act based on the character Barabara Brownskirt, the laureate of Penge, which she still performs. But, having parted company with her agent, she is now writer in residence at the Bookseller Crow Bookshop and has a memoir of her flying days coming out next year.