Nerve 11 - Round-up of Recommended Reads

Round-up of Recommended Reads

How to engage with Liverpool’s Capital of Culture Year has been a question on the minds of every cultural warrior in the city. Well, just over a year to go before it’s all over so to encourage you all in asserting the people’s version(s) of culture which we are so rightly famous for, we’ve put together a list of DIY books to help you on your way.

Let’s start with The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World by Lewis Hyde (Canongate £8.99) which takes as its opening premise the idea that a work of art is a gift and not a commodity, something our funded-driven world often forgets. Inspiration for creating your own public art is to be found aplenty in Street Renegades: New Underground Art by Francesca Gavin (Laurence King £12.95). Frustrated by the wholesale corporate theft of street creativity, many artists are employing different techniques in their work using new materials - fly-tipped rubbish, street signs, children’s toys, chalk - changing the way people experience city life around the world.

Then, once you’re inspired, you’ll want The Guerilla Art Kit by Keri Smith (Princeton Architectural Press £10.99) which contains everything you need to put your message out into the world, “for fun, non-profit and world domination”. And if you’d like to combine DIY with world change, then Do It Yourself: A Handbook for Changing Our World edited by the Trapese Collective (Pluto £12.99) is the one for you. Unlike the glut of books about living “green” in an isolated individualistic consumerist way, this is the real deal for ethical and sustainable living, creating community with others and taking back control of our lives from governments and corporations. Or is gardening your thing? Well we have just the book – Guerilla Gardening: A Manualfesto by David Tracey (New Society £10.99) – get out there and plant those seeds!

OK so that’s how to do it yourself – here’s a few that were made earlier.

Liverpool is full of poets, playwrights and comedians, so one of each to keep you going:

I love Michael Rosen, from his wacky children’s poems, to the book he wrote after the death of his teenage son, “The Sad Book”. And now we have his latest adult anthology, Fighters For Life: Selected Poems (Bookmarks £7.99), a collection to make us think about the world and how it might be different. His “Republican Hate Poem” begins “May the King lose his thing, May the Queen get gangrene.” You get the idea.

David Hare is known as a political playwright, but has also given numerous lectures, addressing subjects such as God, Iraq and rail privatisation – probably not all at once. Obedience, Struggle & Revolt (Faber £9.99) brings together a lifetime’s sustained thinking about art and politics.

Linda Smith was one of the few women to conquer the male dominated world of comedy. I Think the Nurses Are Stealing My Clothes: The Very Best of Linda Smith (Hodder £8.99) will have you in stitches – she started out on the Miners’ Strike picket lines and progressed (?) to Radio 4. Here she is on David Blunkett: “Satan’s bearded folk singer” and John Prescott: “I think language isn’t his first language”, and strangely she has a piece about rail privatisation too.

Lastly a couple of home-grown collections. Writing Liverpool: Essays & Interviews edited by Michael Murphy & Deryn Rees-Jones (Liverpool University Press £14.95) asks is there such a thing as a distinctive Liverpool literary voice, through pieces about Bleasdale, Grant, McGough, Russell, Tafari, Forrester, La Plante et al.

And for a final irreverent laugh at the Monolithic Culture of Capital – sorry European Capital of Culture – try Bill Stott’s cartoon book, Capital of Culture Liverpool (Ian Boumphrey £5). Headline in newspaper: “Ashkenazy to play Liverpool”. Man reading: “On his own?”

To buy these books and more go to: News from Nowhere, 96 Bold Street, Liverpool L14HY or go online to www.newsfromnowhere.org.uk

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