by Fearghus Roulston, PHD student working on the British Library's zine collections

On 9 September, the British Library hosted a workshop and discussion on zines – limited-circulation, often homemade publications dealing with relatively niche or unusual topics. The Library has a wide-ranging collection of these materials, dating from the early 1970s onwards, and one of the highlights of the workshop for me was the opportunity to hear about the variety and breadth of the research prompted by different kinds of zines.

We were delighted to bring together a group of researchers, academics and colleagues from within the Library over the course of the afternoon, to talk about how zines have featured in their work and writing. Over two short sessions we moved from the 1950s to the present day, from France to Manchester via the USA, and from punk music to radical politics and literary counter-cultures.

Image from Chris Warne's presentation

In the first session, Rebecca Claire-Binns of UCL described Gee Vaucher’s design and zine aesthetic and its relationship to anarcho-punk, and especially to Crass; the University of Sussex’s Dr Chris Warne gave a different geographical perspective by analysing the influence of punk design practices on the French art collective Bazooka during their stint working with the leftist Libération newspaper; and Dr Jackie Batey showcased the University of Portsmouth’s Zineopolis collection of art zines, suggesting possible avenues for research within this archive and showing some of her own work connecting these zines to contemporary issues of mental health.

Image from Jackie Batey's presentation on zines

Despite the apparent disparity of these topics, they brought together a group of really interesting ideas on the relationship between politics and aesthetics, and on how currents of design take shape across time.

In the second session, Professor Bill Osgerby of London Metropolitan University looked at some very early precursors of zines, from the literary counter-culture of the 1950s to biker zines from the 1960s. He also linked the development of zines as a form to technological shifts. The availability of relatively cheap photocopying from the 1970s onwards is a particularly important factor.

Image from Bill Osgerby's presentation

Bill was followed by Dr David Wilkinson from Manchester Metropolitan University on how zines, especially City Fun, helped him chart the evolution of post-punk as a subculture in Manchester. This research contributed to his new book. I concluded by looking at some Northern Irish punk zines and the insight they give into aspects of everyday life in Ulster in the 1970s, particularly into boredom as described (and perhaps exaggerated) by the young people writing in the zines.

This session highlighted, again, the geographic diversity of zines. It also suggested various different ways of reading them as sources – through their relationship with technology, but also as routes into a particular historic understanding of emotion and of cities. We rounded off the evening with a trip to the final event of the Library’s Punk 1976-78 exhibition, Punky Reggae Party: The Story of Rock Against Racism.

 

 by Kathryn Johnson, Curator Theatrical Archives and Manuscripts

Until the passing of the Theatres Act in September 1968, which removed the legal necessity for all stage plays to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, these are the dread words which a producer might read when he opened the letter from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office informing him of the cuts and alterations required in his script before the Lord Chamberlain was prepared to issue a licence.

There had been a permanent official in charge of staged entertainments since 1545, in the shape of the Master of the Revels, but only after the return of Charles II in 1660 did the Lord Chamberlain begin to take a serious interest in censorship and the regulation of the theatre. The first Theatres Act of 1737 came about because Sir Robert Walpole was suffering under the satirical attacks of Henry Fielding and others on the shortcomings of his ministry. This act reduced at a stroke the number of “legitimate” theatres in London to two, Covent Garden and Drury Lane. While this provision was lifted by a second Theatres Act in 1843, the censorship of new plays continued until 1968.

Image of the Lord Chamberlain's Day Books

Some of the new regulations laid down by the 1843 Act continued unchanged for more than a century. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office levied a charge for reading a play – one guinea (£1.05) for a one act play, and two guineas (£2.10) for plays longer than one act. The Office kept extremely careful records of all plays and monies received, largely because the Examiner of Plays, the functionary whose job it was to read each play and advise the Lord Chamberlain whether they were fit for licence, was paid these sums of money rather than a salary. These careful lists survive in the British Library as the Lord Chamberlain’s Day Books.

Only in 1911 was the Examiner of Plays required to write a formal report recording the grounds on which he had decided (or declined) to recommend that a play be licensed. The files which grew around the reports submitted by the Examiners have survived as the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Correspondence. In later years a file for a controversial play might contain everything from complaints from members of the public – “This is the New Babylon!” raged one anonymous correspondent about a risqué revue of 1937– to press cuttings, copies of police reports, and ticket stubs and witness statements for the occasions when a play’s producer was prosecuted for presenting unlicensed material.

The rules by which plays were judged fit or unfit came about as a result of the 1909 Joint Select Committee on the theatre. The Committee suggested that the Lord Chamberlain should license any play submitted to him unless he considered it

1.  To be indecent
2.  To contain “offensive personalities”
3.  To represent on the stage in an invidious manner a living person, or a person recently dead
4.  To do violence to the sentiment of religious reverence
5.  To be calculated to conduce to crime and vice
6.  To be calculated to impair friendly relations with any Foreign Power
7.  To be calculated to cause a breach of the peace

In practice this meant that a play must not have living persons as characters, or those recently dead, whatever the manner in which they were depicted.   This rule applied particularly to the Royal Family: no plays about Queen Victoria were permitted before the late 1930s. No Biblical personage, and certainly not God or Jesus Christ could appear as a stage character, however reverent the production.

No wonder that a satirical alphabet of the 1930s had under the letter C : “C is for CENSOR, who keeps the stage clean, by ruling out God and the Crown as obscene.”

A development of rule (a) led to the set of rules concocted to regulate the nude reviews which appeared in London and elsewhere from the late 1930s, the most famous of which were the long series of Revudeville shows at the Windmill Theatre in Soho. Occasional complaints about indecency of dress on stage were nothing new, and there had been a considerable brouhaha when a revue in Coronation Week 1937 had been accused of featuring topless dancers. But in April 1940 the Lord Chamberlain of the day, Lord Clarendon, held a conference on stage nudity and the supposed decline in moral standards. Rather like the 1909 Select Committee, it achieved little except to formulate the famous rules, summarised as “If it moves,it’s rude”. The nude tableaux had to resemble works of art, and exhibit genuine artistic merit. The lighting had to be subdued, and no movement whatsoever was permitted – the girls posing nude were not even allowed to smile. Furthermore, before any nude pose could be exhibited, a photograph had to be submitted for official approval. Many though not all of these photographs survive in the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Correspondence files, sometimes neatly annotated with the words “YES” or “NO” by a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s staff.

Image of Reader's report for the second submitted version of Hair!, LCP Correspondence LR 1968/2 

Moves to liberalise and then to abolish altogether the laws on censorship gathered pace in the middle and late 1960s. By the time the Joint Committee on the Censorship of the Theatre began its meetings in the summer of 1966, radical change was unstoppable. The first draft of the bill which became the 1968 Theatres Act saw the light in January of that year. By July it was ready for the Royal Assent, and on 26 September 1968, it became law. The very last play to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain was As long as I live, a melodrama written for amateur performance, read and recommended for a licence by Examiner Charles Heriot less than a week before the act became law. But the most famous play of 1968 remains the “tribal love-rock musical” Hair, submitted three times in the spring and summer of 1968 by three different managements, each time refused a licence. It is perhaps not accidental that Hair – complete with expletives and full-frontal male nudity -eventually opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre on 27 September 1968, the very day after the new act became law.

This blog is part of series for Banned Books Week 2016. See also Melvin Burgess’s blog on Censorship and the Author, curator Christian Algar on the ‘corrected’ Il Decamerone, curator Tanya Kirk on The Monk, the Bible and Obscenity, The Book Banner who inspired Banned Books by curator Alison Hudson, Banned From the Classroom: Censorship and The Catcher and the Rye by curator Mercedes Aguirre and a blog on Press Freedom and its Limits in Revolutionary Vienna by curator Susan Reed.

Banned Books Week was initiated by the American Library Association in 1982 in response to an increasing number of challenges in the US to books in schools, bookstores and libraries, and in particular, books aimed at children or young adults. For the first time in the UK we are holding events, activities and publishing a series of blogs, all on the topic of Censorship and Banned Books, made possible by the partnership between The British Library, Free Word and Islington Library and Heritage Services and in association with the ALA.

Related articles

Banned from the classroom: Censorship and The Catcher in the Rye - English and Drama blog

The Monk, the Bible and obscenity - English and Drama blog

The Book Banner Who Inspired Banned Books

Il Decamerone – “Corrected” by Rome

Melvin Burgess: Censorship and the Author - English and Drama blog

by Mercedes Aguirre, Lead Curator American Collections

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is an American classic. It is also one of the most censored books in American literature. One of the earliest works of fiction exploring male teenage consciousness, The Catcher in the Rye is narrated in the first person by Holden Caulfield, who struggles with feelings of alienation and anxiety. The novel has been the subject of controversy almost since its publication by Little, Brown and Co in 1951, and the debate around the book is still very much alive today. Salinger’s novel was listed in the top ten most frequently banned books in schools and school libraries in 2001, 2005 and 2009, according to the yearly list provided by the American Library Association.

The Catcher in the Rye cover from the 1985 Bantam edition

But what makes the The Catcher in Rye such an offensive book?

The use of Salinger’s novel as a set text in schools has been challenged by people who object to its use of swearwords and its sexual content. The work contains several disturbing scenes, including instances of abuse, and is written using 1950s teenage slang. The first curse word appears in the opening of the novel when Holden warns the reader not to expect an account of his unhappy childhood, or as he puts it, ‘that David Copperfield kind of crap’. But there are many more –according to associations who have protested against the novel the word ‘goddam’ appears more than 200 times. As these groups often point out, the novel was originally written with an adult audience in mind. The debate sparked by the novel, the question whether teenagers should be protected from ‘foul’ language and sexual content, curiously mirrors Holden’s own obsession with preserving childhood innocence, becoming the ‘catcher in the rye’, ‘catching’ children from falling off a cliff (and into the adult world).

While a number of American schools and parents’ associations may consider the language in the novel objectionable, many teachers see The Catcher in the Rye as a work which resonates with their students in a way that few classic novels can. The book is therefore in the unlikely position of being required reading in some schools, and a banned book in others.

Does the censoring of the novel contribute to its enduring allure for young readers? Most of us remember the first time we read a book meant for adults; the first time we saw forbidden words in print. Since The Catcher in the Rye remains a bestselling book in America 65 years after it was first published it is in any case unlikely that censors will get in the way of people’s enjoyment of the novel.

This blog is part of series for Banned Books Week 2016. See also Melvin Burgess’s blog on Censorship and the author, curator Christian Algar on the  ‘corrected’ Il Decamerone, curator Tanya Kirk on The Monk, the Bible and Obscenity and The Book Banner who inspired Banned Books by curator Alison Hudson.

Banned Books Week was initiated by the American Library Association in 1982 in response to an increasing number of challenges in the US to books in schools, bookstores and libraries, and in particular, books aimed at children or young adults. For the first time in the UK we are holding events, activities and publishing a series of blogs, all on the topic of Censorship and Banned Books, made possible by the partnership between The British Library, Free Word and Islington Library and Heritage Services and in association with the ALA.

Related articles

The Monk, the Bible and obscenity - English and Drama blog

Melvin Burgess: Censorship and the Author - English and Drama blog

by Tanya Kirk, Curator for Printed Heritage Collections 1601-1900

Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary on Sunday, 9^th February 1667/8 that he was ‘up, and at my chamber all the morning and the office doing business, and also reading a little of L’escholle des filles, which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world.’ This does seem a bit like a convenient excuse to read smut on a Sunday, but it’s entirely typical of the view of the establishment for a huge part of modern British history.

Until well into the 20^th century, it has been the case that a privileged few have been considered exempt from any need for a protective censorship. Historically there have been libraries of banned books in the Houses of Parliament (for the use of members only) and in the Vatican, as well as in the British Library itself, which for part of its past history maintained a ‘Private Case’ – books which weren’t entered on the public catalogue, and for which readers had to make a special application. It was a fundamental that the censorship of books was in order to protect certain demographics – the poor, or women and children – who were not seen as intelligent or educated enough to read them without personal damage.

Mostly today we think of historic censorship being to prevent civil unrest by banning books that could incite a riot, or to prevent the corruption of morals – such as the belief that reading romances could make women behave like this (from a long poem, The Age Reviewed, written by Robert Montgomery in 1827):

Matthew Lewis’ 1796 gothic novel The Monk proved particularly controversial – as a novel, many considered the core readership to be women, and the book contained graphic depictions of sexual desire. In our Terror and Wonder: the Gothic Imagination exhibition a couple of years ago, we displayed this print by Charles Williams depicting what reading The Monk might incite a lady to do.

A Lady reading The Monk by Charles Williams

However what’s maybe a little less well-known about the novel is that it also caused controversy because it included the following passage about the Bible:

‘That prudent mother, while she admired the beauties of the sacred writings, was convinced that, unrestricted, no reading more improper could be permitted a young woman. Many of the narratives can only tend to excite ideas the worst calculated for a female breast: everything is called plainly and roundly by its name; and the annals of a brothel would scarcely furnish a greater choice of indecent expressions... [it] but too frequently inculates the first rudiments of vice, and gives the first alarm to the still sleeping passions.’

The idea that the Bible itself was a transmitter of vice into the minds of the young and impressionable was incredibly scandalous and was one of the reasons why Lewis was eventually forced to self-censor his work for the 4^th edition.

Lewis’s copy of the 3^rd edition with his own censorship marks – C.28.b.4-6.

However, Lewis wasn’t the only person to make this suggestion. In 1822, a man called Humphrey Boyle was prosecuted for having called the Bible an obscene book. His defence at the trial consisted of him delivering an impassioned speech condemning various passages of the Bible, and then announcing, much to everyone’s surprise, “Gentlemen, the first extract I shall read to you is the story of Lot and his daughters.” Although Boyle was eventually found guilty and sentenced to prison for 18 months, it was maybe an exoneration of sorts that when he began to read from the Bible at trial, the counsel for the prosecution sent all the women and children out of the room.

This blog is part of series for Banned Books Week 2016. See also Melvin Burgess’s blog on Censorship and the author  and curator Christian Algar's post on Boccaccio's Il Decamerone.

Banned Books Week was initiated by the American Library Association in 1982 in response to an increasing number of challenges in the US to books in schools, bookstores and libraries, and in particular, books aimed at children or young adults. For the first time in the UK we are holding events, activities and publishing a series of blogs, all on the topic of Censorship and Banned Books, made possible by the partnership between The British Library, Free Word and Islington Library and Heritage Services and in association with the ALA.

Related articles

Melvin Burgess: Censorship and the Author - English and Drama blog

by guest blogger, young adult and children's author Melvin Burgess, in anticipation of Banned Books Weeks (25th September-1st October 2016) which kicks off with Censorship and the author at the British Library on 22nd September, at which writers Melvin Burgess and Matt Carr will discuss censorship with Jo Glanville.

Melvin Burgess photographed by ©John Coombes

Censorship in books for teenagers takes a number of forms, but before looking at them, it's worth looking at the provision of fiction for teenagers in general, and the peculiar and privileged position books do hold among them.

Written matter is, in fact, the only media in which any serious issues can be seriously explored in a fictional way for people under the age of eighteen. Film, for instance, is strictly censored according to age – we're all familiar with the age rating for films in the cinema. At first sight, this might appear not to matter, since anyone can actually get to see anything via the internet; but if you look at provision rather than access, you get a very different picture. When my book Junk first came out, a number of production companies wanted to make a movie based on the book, but they very quickly realised they couldn't because “the audience for whom it's intended won't be allowed in the cinema.” Funding was impossible, and the project was dropped. Junk later appeared in a castrated version on BBC education.

That remains the case to this day. TV is the same. Access, although technically very limited, is in fact almost unlimited. Provision on the other hand is almost non-existent..

Censorship of provision is well and away the most successful way of going about the job of restricting what people get to see or hear but it does have some other unfortunate side effects. In the case of film anyone over the age of about twelve, can get to see things, many of them highly inappropriate, that they technically shouldn't. Meanwhile, the kinds of material they actually should be getting, but which some adults would still feel uncomfortable with, simply doesn't exist at all.

This isn't particular to the UK, either. It is in fact, global. In every continent in which visual material for film or TV is made, serious content for teenagers is effectively stifled at birth by the censorship of age. It appears at first glance to be a matter of simple negligence, censorship by accident, almost; but something that happens with such uniformity on such a global scale is obviously nothing of the kind. That doesn't mean it's done on purpose of course, but it does say a great deal about our attitudes to teenagers that the provision of visual imaginative material for them is restricted to the anodyne on such a universal level.

Books and other written material such as graphic novels and comics are uncensored for age. The importance of written fictional material for teenagers can be measured exactly by the degree of absence of fictions for them in other media. It is of the very first degree of importance.

Censorship of books does occur, however, at a much more local level. I remember very well the librarian who kept my books in a locked cupboard at the back of the library, so that no innocent youngster could inadvertently come across them, and suffer god only knows what forms of psychic shock or corruption. That's an extreme example, but that librarian was acting in the manner in which censorship against books does occur; by the system of gatekeepers. I'm referring to those people who are in a position to control or regulate books to young people; librarians, teachers, bookseller managers, parents – in other words, the very people whose job it is to encourage reading are the ones who also take it upon themselves to limit it.

It goes without saying, but even so I feel I have to say it, that this is not a role all of them relish.

A great deal of this actually happens in the school library, where the kind of material that older teenagers in particular like to read, is by no means always considered suitable for them. When I began writing, schools were still the main source of sales for children's books and to this day, publishers are concerned not to put anything out there that might fall foul of the kind of “standards” that schools require. All too often, such standards, purporting to be some kind of moral stewardship, actually revolve more around the the kind of stories the local press might summon up if they found people under the age of fourteen had access to books with such horrors as drugs, breasts or sexual activity of any kind.  There is in every class at least one unfortunate child with a mad parent, and if the school's senior management is more concerned with public image than developing young minds, that one person can completely define what kind of reading matter every child in the school has access to. In such schools, many readers will tend to ignore the library almost as much as non readers. It's a vicious circle.

Junk of course, and Doing It, were often kept by thoughtful librarians in brown paper wrappers under the desk, to be handed to chosen, suitably mature students, who weren't always he ones who would benefit from them the most. But I can also think of many examples not by any means connected with my more controversial books. One teacher told me how, when reading a passage from my very first book, The Cry of the Wolf, to a group of parents, one mother rose quaking with horror that something so violent (the wolves got shot in a suitably bloody fashion) was available in an institution of education. As a result, not just that one, but all my books were taken off the school shelves.

Violence, however, is one of the rarer targets for the banning of books. The usual one is sex – very handy when everyone over the age of thirteen is fascinated by it – and second is religion. I don't tend to write religious books, but back in the day I did write a book called Burning Issy, which showed witches persecuted by the Church in the 17th C. This book caused me to be dis-invited to a very posh school, on the grounds of “we do not feel the parents of our students would want them to be introduced to this sort of thing.” I was puzzled by what “this sort of thing” might be, but my enquiries yielded no further answers. My guess, though, is that someone somewhere out there, actually believed I was acting as a propagandist for Mr Satan.

Other gatekeepers can include book sellers. Those who remember the book shop Borders from a few years ago, may be surprised to hear that at least one store didn't stock my books, after receiving one solitary complaint.

Of course all this occurs alongside a great deal of support, and stems from an issue which begins life as something quite reasonable. Content, of course, is an issue that all parents will be concerned about.The real issue here isn't about whether we want to allow unrestricted access to children of any age whatsoever; we have allowed them that already (so long as we're not in the room at the time.) It's more about the disconnect between the kinds of material young people want to engage in, (and that we passively allow them to engage with), and the kind of material that we as adults want to present them with. It's a bit like teaching someone to swim in the bath, and then turning your back while they rush out and splash in around in a fast flowing river.

What are we scared of, I wonder? Finding out what they really think? It's all very hypocritical on the face of it, but presumably such a universal system serves some kind of purpose. Perhaps its something to do with permission. All over the world, adults passively encourage teenagers to breech the rules that we ourselves have put into place. I wonder if we rather like the idea that they transgress – that it is in fact a necessary right of passage. In that case, the  rules are more like the governor on a lorry, rather than the actual brakes. Even so, it's a pretty abyssal way of doing it, that leaves people at a time in their lives when they are changing so much, risk taking so actively, and trying to get to terms with an ever more complex and rapidly changing world, without the imaginative structures that might help them negotiate it.

The most moving and enthusiastic, as well as the most common emails and letters I've had from teenagers speak of the sheer relief and joy they've had at finding something that seems to actually reflect what's going on in their own heads in an honest and authentic fashion.

YA is barely twenty years old, and it remains the only form in which the contradictions I've spoken about are ever reconciled. Already it's become fashionable to knock it and to dismiss it's existence as a form, even among the people who actually write the stuff – driven, perhaps, by the urge to widen their readership among adults. Every publisher and every writer wants their work to be crossover, rather than pure YA as such. It would be a tragedy if it ever got genuinely taken over by middle aged wannabe youths, looking for nostalgia. At its best it is for teenagers, about being a teenager, and its disheartening to see grown ups trying to hi jack it for themselves.  If they succeed, we'd be talking about banned genres, rather than just books and that old biblical saying – To those that have not, even that which they have shall be taken from them – will yet again have proven its  worth.

Banned Books Week was initiated by the American Library Association in 1982 in response to an increasing number of challenges in the US to books in schools, bookstores and libraries, and in particular, books aimed at children or young adults. For the first time in the UK we are holding events, activities and publishing a series of blogs, all on the topic of Censorship and Banned Books, made possible by the partnership between The British Library, Free Word and Islington Library and Heritage Services and in association with the ALA.

        

The Library has recently received the first 3 issues of Swimmers bimonthly pamphlet series. These will be available in our Reading Rooms later this year. In this guest post, the editorial team at Swimmers, explain more about the group and the series, and how to find out about future events and publications.

Swimmers publishes a limited-run bimonthly pamphlet series. The pamphlets combine creative and non-fiction written work, alongside artwork in various forms, created by established, emergent, and new writers and artists. To mark the publication of each pamphlet, Swimmers runs an events series—frequently hosted at The Function Room in Somers Town—where artwork exhibits provide a backdrop for poetry, fiction, and script readings and performances.

Swimmers was founded in 2013 in collaboration with arts association STORE. STORE is composed of an educational programme of arts and architecture courses, wide-ranging public exhibitions, and a socially engaged design practice: through this nexus, STORE has created projects and events beneficial to local communities, such as the Summer School in Gillett Square. STORE and Swimmers’ shared ethos and interest in the city space made for an ideal collaborative partnership, through which an initial series of readings, screenings, and performances were hosted in a derelict space in Bloomsbury, where STORE/Swimmers built a library and cinema. Contributors to Swimmers events, and to an anthology-style publication produced in response to the series, included (among many others): Sarah Howe, Maureen McLane, Amy Blakemore, Will Self, Richard Wentworth and Christopher Reid.

In 2014, the Bloomsbury space was regrettably claimed by property developers. Shortly afterwards, Swimmers dived underground, occasionally resurfacing to host one-off events in collaboration with STORE at a variety of venues across London—such as Taste and Poetry and Architecture.

In March 2016, Swimmers received ACE funding to help launch the pamphlet series. Issue One featured an essay on race and poetry in the UK by Kayo Chingonyi, alongside new poems by André Naffis-Sahely and photo-printed artwork by Ned Scott. Issue Two featured a fragmentary essay on translation and fan-fiction by Sophie Collins, new poems by Caitlin Newby—ancient hymns to the Mayan goddess Inanna, taken from the cuneiform and put through translation software—and A3 prints by Luke Burton. In the current issue, Matthew Gregory explores the phenomenology of the piazza, Richard Scott takes inspiration from Bellini, and Tamsin Snow renders an autopsy table. Issue 4, released later this month, will feature new written work from Daisy LaFarge and Anne Boyer.

Swimmers wants to celebrate the physical, tactile object, to inspire communication between readers, and to allow the written word to enjoy the single-event status often reserved for visual artwork. Swimmers also distributes the pamphlets for free, so that the pamphlets are not restricted to an economically-privileged readership. To achieve all this, Swimmers utilises an experimental distribution model; on subscribing to the mailing list at swimmers.london (or emailing direct at [email protected]), you will be notified as to when an online sign-up sheet will go live. The first 30 people to sign-up receive a copy—through the post or hand-delivered—for free. In order to widen this readership, a copy of each issue will be accessible to the public at the British Library Reading Rooms. Select content from each issue will also be downloadable as a PDF from swimmers.london, one month after that issue is distributed.

While The Function Room undergoes refurbishment, the next Swimmers event will be held at 7.00pm on Thursday 29th September, The New Evaristo Club, 57 Greek Street, London W1D 3DX. Readings from Emily Berry, Daisy LaFarge, and special guests. Entry is free.

By Rachel Brett, Reference Specialist

Among the fanzines on display in ‘Punk 1976-78’ is a copy of Sideburns, featuring a diagrammatic representation of three chords, with the caption 'This is a chord - this is another - this is a third ... now form a band'.

Imagine this famous three-chord approach as a manifesto for life; it might look something like this:

1. Committing to the destruction of old beliefs
2. Accepting that we are alone and committed to create our own ideals and beliefs
3. Living in accordance with these self-authored ideals while resisting the temptation to return to old ideal (in the words of Robin Ryde).

When we speak of punk then, you could argue that we are also speaking about a philosophy. We are still talking, and putting on exhibitions about, Punk because inside the record sleeve was the message: change is possible.

Brave New World

The first issue of Ripped and Torn created by Tony Drayton (Tony D) on display at Punk 1976-78 at the British Library until 2nd October

While the three points above read like a punk manifesto, it is in fact a summarisation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s conceptualisation of a ‘superman’. Such beings would live by their own values, choices and beliefs, cast off old perceived habits and pre-given morals to ultimately lead a freer and more fulfilling existence.

This is an over simplification of an illustrious theory by Nietzsche, yet parallels can be drawn with the ethos of the punk spirit which was tantamount to the idea of change and autonomy. Punk wanted to rip it up and start again, and it wanted to do it for itself. If we want to consider the significance of punk, its legacy and intention beyond slogans perhaps then the German philosopher Nietzsche is just as germane as Joe Strummer.

This is not to connote punk was a preconceived philosophical gesture, rather it is offering a reflection on punk’s demand for change that became a shaping force within culture as demonstrated in the British Library’s exhibition. This however, raises a question - If art can be philosophically considered, why shouldn’t pop music also be contemplated with philosophical curiosity?

Such outrageous posturing to situate punk within a philosophical proposition will provoke a loud disquiet in the crowd. What has punk got to do with philosophy? A brief glimpse into some of Nietzsche’s ideas may be thought provoking for the curious. Nietzsche loved music. Life without it he famously said isn’t worth living. Music for him was an expression of the imagination, a dynamic power in the everyday world, an expression of a life changing force within all humans, a feeling and an emotional outburst, and anger after all is energy…

Nietzschean gesture

 
Friedrich Nietzsche around 1869. Photo taken at studio Gebrüder Siebe, Leipzig. Courtesy of WikiCommons.

Nietzsche considered music’s function within Greek tragedy, which he understood as an artistic form born from the struggle between the gods Apollo and Dionysus. As a philosophical concept Dionysus denotes a primordial urge outside the rationality of instincts representing intoxication, excess, and a drive towards a transgression of limits. Nietzsche identified these aspects within non-representational art and specifically encapsulated within the power of music to covey suffering as a universal truth as opposed to an individual symptom.

In the modern world the rational reigns, while gods and myths are banished as the divine guiding principle for human existence. Nietzsche’s panegyric of Greek tragedy lies in his argument that such enlightenment had failed. Instead privileging  a return to the subterranean impulse of the Dionysian spirit within music to exposes the depths of human experience beyond the rational.

Put another way, the unifying experience of music contains a potential for change to live creatively beyond the suffering of the human condition. Heck, sounds a bit punk to me!

Going Underground

Reproduced with kind permission of ©Gary Neill

In 1886 Nietzsche raised the question “What would music have to be like if it were no longer Romantic in its origin, as German music is, but Dionysiac?”. Given his understanding of the Dionysian drive in music, I would propose it would be like  Punk. This proposition was explored in the contemporary world by the artist Dan Graham in his work “Rock my Region”. In this ‘video essay’ Graham drew out the ecstatic release within punk music and illustrated comparisons with the same release in religion and the Shaker movement.

Punk was a sonic and visual sign in an otherwise grey, over commercialised industry. It was the fly in the ointment, a critique of society, mass culture and of itself. That is to say of pop music. Perhaps punk’s greatest legacy is that it remains indefinable. What do we mean by punk? Everyone knows all the answers to this, don’t they? Yet we still dispute it, maybe because punk demanded a change and while it was not the revolution McLaren’s King Mob dabbling’s aspired to, it did effect exactly what pop music could be, sound like and how it could be made and distributed.

Punk’s still got a job to do; only it’s going to take more than a guitar to do it. Better get out your philosophy books kids, there’s an overdue revolution waiting to happen and perhaps Nietzsche and a bit of Greek Tragedy just might help…

Hey! Ho! Dionysus & Go!

by Christian Algar, Curator, Printed Heritage Collections

Poetry which attains popularity or critical acclaim often does so because it is perceived as beautiful or as something that makes some kind of meaningful impact on the senses, whether it be read privately or aloud. But what about poetry that actually looks beautiful or striking?

Historically, pattern poems or shape poems have generally struggled to be taken seriously as a literary form. To modern minds and senses this can perhaps be hard to understand – concrete poetry in art books for the coffee table, for example, are very collectible. There is also often an additional reverence for texts and illustrations contained in antiquarian works, especially when looking at Renaissance or early modern efforts in books from the hand-pressed print period.

The English poet, Thomas Watson (1555/6-1592), is the pioneer of English play with pattern poems. His Sonnet LXXXI, ‘A Pasquine Piller erected in the despite of Love’, published in Hekatompathia, or Passionate Century of Love, 1582, is probably the earliest printed pattern poem in English:

 

 Thomas Watson’s ‘A Pasquine Piller erected in the despite of Love’, 1582, British Library C.14.a.1

 We can wonder at the faces pulled by readers paging through a copy of Watson’s work upon seeing this.

The form of the pattern is that of a lozenge on a stem, it is a shape well founded in the pattern poems from the classical traditions of Greek and Latin literature. Typical Hellenic patterns which filtered down into English representations are axes, altars, eggs, wings syrinxes and these lozenges; all of which are now thought of as being quite ‘conservative’ or unadventurous. Whilst these and more extravagant shaped pattern poems were keenly revived on the continent, the enthusiasm was not matched in British literature. But Watson was well placed to exercise the continental fashion for pattern poems, he had spent time travelling in France and Italy, composing all his work in Latin; this collection of one hundred (“a century” of) songs was his first work in English. Watson was anxious about offering verse in English and his opening piece in Hekatompathia, “to the Friendly Reader” asks them to go easy on his poems. If Watson was worried about his use of the English idiom, he didn’t seem so concerned about using the form of pattern poetry which he had been exposed to as a vogue from his time on the continent.

Whilst A pasquine piller …, is without doubt beautiful and striking to look at in the first instance, it is also something much more than a pretty looking poem. It is also a puzzle, a ‘trick’ that draws on playful arithmetic. It cleverly produces an acrostic motto or ‘posy’, “amare est insanire”. Watson must have been mindful about the possible reception of the foreign and cosmopolitan influences of the verse in Hekatompathia, each poem is annotated with a short introduction. Written in the third person they introduce named poets, themes or styles to the English audience. They can be seen as attempts to popularise his erudite and novel material. The introduction to Sonnet LXXXI, says, “all such as are of indifferent capacitie, and have some skille in Arithmetike, by viewing this Sonnet following compiled by rule and number into the forme of a piller, may soon judge how much art and study the Author has bestowed in the same.” It explains the “antitheticall or Antisillabicall” structure and explains that the pillar is “Orchematicall”, meaning that it is founded by the skipping of number by rule and order.

If this sounds complicated, Watson was kind enough to provide an acrostic for the next Sonnet which goes some way to further illustrating his art and study:

 Watson’s acrostic Sonnet LXXXII, 1582, British Library C.14.a.1

If this still looks complicated, you can follow the guide to make sense of the trick using a later printed facsimile on pp 116-118 of Poems. Viz.:-The Ἐκατομπαθια or Passionate Centurie of Love. 1582, edited by Edward Arber (1870), which is freely available online in digital facsimile, courtesy of the partnership between the British Library and Google Books https://goo.gl/rmj6xF

So what of its success? Astonishingly, Hekatompathia appeared in one edition only prior to Arber’s series of English Reprints in mid Victorian times. It may require some understanding why critical opinion, the Popes, the Addisons and the Butlers denigrated pattern poems as idle fancies. But, this opinion amongst British Literature seems to have persisted as the critic and poet Francis Turner Palgrave, writing about Watson and his Pasquine Pillar in 1872, says that the ingenuities, the tricks and conceits (in the literary sense), “happily, recur nowhere else in the Hecatompathia.”.

Still, killjoys aside, some contemporaries were evidently impressed, just several decades following Watson’s sole edition containing this wonderful visual text, someone cared to transcribe some of his work by hand:

 

‘Thomas Watson. Looking Glasse for lovers’. British Library, Harley MS 3277, f.37

It is rewarding for us to compare the print and the script – one a typographical feat, the other no less impressively executed by hand. Visual texts have an immense aesthetic, but there is often more art and work going on than simply imposing a model on some verse. The poet is still capable of reflecting and conveying ‘profound’ or meaningful thoughts. Though so often dismissed, it should be worth looking at more representations of visual verse or texts in early printed works …

 

Some further reading:

Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia, or Passionate Century of Love, 1582C.14.a.1

[Unknown hand] ‘Thomas Watson. Looking Glasse for lovers. Transcribed 1633’. Harley MS 3277.

Dick Higgins. Pattern Poetry: Guide to an unknown literature. State University of New York Press, New York, 1987.

Margaret Church, The Pattern Poem. PhD Dissertation. Harvard, Cambridge, MA, 1944.

Francis T. Palgrave, Review of Poems. Viz.:-The Ἐκατομπαθια or Passionate Centurie of Love. 1582. The North American Review, Vol. 114, No. 234 (Jan., 1872).

Edward Arber, English Reprints. (No. 21) Thomas Watson. Poems … London, 1870.