{"id":279,"date":"2015-01-05T16:06:05","date_gmt":"2015-01-05T16:06:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/?p=279"},"modified":"2015-01-05T16:13:25","modified_gmt":"2015-01-05T16:13:25","slug":"mark-waugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/mark-waugh\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Waugh"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"waugh1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This week the Creative Writing Reading series welcomed Mark Waugh, author of the cult novels, Come<\/em> and Bubble Ententre, \u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<\/em>a writer who also has his foot very firmly in the modern art world: he is currently Head of Innovation and Research at DACS, Chair of Spacex Gallery Exeter and board member of Photoworks and Brighton Photo biennial. He is an associate advisor of SUUM and Producer of the International Curators Forum.<\/p>\n

Waugh is an experimental, bold and highly amusing writer \u2013 if his interests are highly theoretical – a close understanding of not only what Derrida meant when he said \u2018there is no outside-text\u2019, but what that continues to mean in our daily lives was very much in evidence – they are only so inasmuch as this helps us understand the culture in which we live \u2013 and an Waugh\u2019s eye is always on consumer culture, on drug culture, on porn. This places high value on text, of course, as a form of intervention into culture – Waugh\u2019s main aim, he says, is to ask what a text means after we\u2019re immersed in text as our means of navigating the world.<\/p>\n

His books are experimental in very different ways \u2013 1997\u2019s Come<\/em> is a deliberately small, square book, with irregular typographical layout and non sequential sentence that end in very different places to where they began. The layout, Waugh said, was intended to encourage the reader to feel that they could approach the whole novel non-sequentially \u2013 just picking it up and looking at a page, then putting it down perhaps flicking to another \u2013 illustrating an interest in deconstructing narrative that perhaps owes something to his involvement in the production and practices of art-books, and the production of images. The layout, he said, is a game with the reader<\/p>\n

2009\u2019s Bubble Entendre<\/em>, too, has its relation to the art book \u2013 the Semina series, published by Book Works, publishes experimental prose and is named after the series of nine loose-leaf magazines issued by Californian beat artist Wallace Berman in the 1950s and 1960s. Berman is considered by many to be a pioneer of assemblage art – the magazines mixed collaged artworks with poetry by Allen Ginsberg, Jean Cocteau and many others. The design of the book itself reflects other concerns \u2013 that it is a yellow book was deliberate \u2013 a nod to another leading light in the history of avant-garde publishing \u2013 though the image is, of course, rather unlike the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. Waugh seemed to take some joy in this disruption, and the disruption the books cover must cause to its reader\u2019s experience \u2013 would you take it on the tube? he wondered.<\/p>\n

\"bubbleentendre\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

C<\/em>ome<\/em> has a particular interest in club and drug culture \u2013 and the question around these \u2013 as with Waugh\u2019s interest in porn \u2013 is always in the question \u2018what is the significance of this? \u2018, & the novel explores the wider political and social implications of fashions in drug culture \u2013 MDMA for example, Waugh said, came into fashion post-AIDS, and this trend for a drug which generates pleasure without stimulating sexual desire thus registers late twentieth-century anxieties around sexuality, non-mainstream community, and pleasure.<\/p>\n

With porn, Waugh is both interested in how the concept of porn sits historically \u2013 in a lineage from De Sade through Bataille \u2013 and how a book operates differently to the internet \u2013 a transcription of youporn in a book will be a different thing to the video \u2013 not merely because of a difference between motion picture and text, but due to the object of the book, and the differing ways in which both mediums are policed and relate to questions of authority. Waugh recounted a story of how Book Works\u2019s copies of Bubble entendre, destined for the New York book fair, were confiscated by the New York customs on suspicion of being a manual for terrorism. Conversely \u2013 the domain \u2013 at least printed – of porn \u2013 Penthouse magazine \u2013 has, perhaps because of the relation of porn to concepts of taste ad morality \u2013 has proved, at least historically, more open-minded to aesthetic innovation than one would expect \u2013 publishing some of Waugh\u2019s more experimental fiction along with his partner\u2019s art work.<\/p>\n

Why might the New York customs office have suspected that\u00a0Bubble Entendre<\/em>\u00a0was a manual for terrorism? The book \u2013 more traditionally plot driven than Come<\/em>, although this plot is played with and chronologically disrupted and overlaid in order to disturb the reader\u2019s sense of temporality \u2013 is set in a 2012 takeover of Claridge\u2019s during the Olympics, putting, Waugh said, our fear of terrorism alongside the tedium of sport. Set in a time which is in our past, but at its writing and publication a point in the near future \u2013 the novel\u2019s setting produces an odd glitch in time- a future already a past: Waugh said his aim was to create a dystopian novel set so closely in the future that it would very quickly become ridiculous by its own standards \u2013 when that future arrived differently. Half the fun, then, for the reader as well as for Waugh reading back with hindsight, is to see what in 2009 looked liked the landscape of 2012 and read it with a knowledge of 2012 \u2013 a scene, as Waugh points out, where one character asks another if they haven\u2019t seen their face in News of the World has a completely different force given the events of 2011, and creates a surrealism completely beyond the author\u2019s control. Which, it seems, is something he particularly relishes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week the Creative Writing Reading series welcomed Mark Waugh, author of the cult novels, Come and Bubble Ententre, \u00a0and\u00a0a writer who also has his foot very firmly in the modern art world: he is currently Head of Innovation and Research at DACS, Chair of Spacex Gallery Exeter and board member of Photoworks and Brighton […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39849,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39849"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":289,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions\/289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}