New Gabriola Publisher launches first book! Night Forest Press is pleased to announce the publication of its first title.
Sun and The Son is jimy dawn’s debut poetry collection. It has been described by poet and author Roger Farr as an “alchemical conversion of grief into life”.
The author describes the context in his Preface: “In late August 2018 my youngest son took his life. I had been writing and exploring poetry before that date, but everything changed after ‘the event’. Hence the decision to separate this collection into Part I and Part II - Sun and The Son.”
Farr continues, “jimy dawn demonstrates something we always knew about language. He reminds us that, Children sleep. Rivers send us home. Stories never end.”
jimy dawn is a multi-media artist. He studied painting, drawing and design at the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr College of Art. As a singer and lyricist he staged musical performances in a collective known as Sylo. He also wrote and acted in the award winning, independent film project “Like a Tree in Which There are Three Blackbirds.”
dawn, his wife Mimi and their found street cat, Pinta split their time between Toronto and Victoria Canada.
Sun and The Son is available for secure purchase at Nightforestpress.com
Its been a turbulent year and early November hasn't been the same without our annual festival. However we have a wee treat for you. Join us for our famous festival party NEoN at Night and stream it into your our living room – our resident DJ RHL is coming out of isolation to bring you a 2 hour set of vinyl delights. Spinning in the first hour classic house with a sprinkling of disco, followed by another hour of typical NEoN mayhem. (Techno, Breaks, Jungle)
NEoN alumni and experimental AV artist Raz Ullah will be mixing up a backdrop of video feedback imagery, vortex havoc and retro chromatics.
It was good to see this article in the Elephant yesterday entitled "The Artists Keeping the Absurdist, Irreverent Spirit of Dada Alive". It highlights several interesting artists (Sang Woo Kim, Leo Fitzmaurice, Matilda Moors and Ted Targett to be more precise) that they claim are keeping Dada alive. But has it ever gone away?
Well we don't think so. Some of us have been staying true to the Dadaist faith for many a long year. The influence of Dada can be seen everywhere in popular culture from the visual arts, music, literature, comedy, film, advertising and something as ubiquitous as the social media meme. Dada like art itself is everywhere.
SVOX.TV is a new channel for film and video arts showcasing an array of extraordinary work produced as part of the output from artists, artist collectives, creative studios and broader practices. It is a celebration of the diversity of content, genre, subject matter, method, narrative, and storytelling.
It serves as both documentation and storytelling; a final realisation of ideas, a form of artistic investigation, and exploration into philosophical and abstracted notions, and an archive.
I grew up in the sixties and was into counter culture as much as I could be living in rural England but I'd never heard of Avant Garde magazine. By all accounts it wasn't widely known in the wider world, but those in the know, knew.
Apparently, "Avant Garde is a seminal, but somewhat overlooked by a wider public, magazine, which broke taboos, rattled some nerves and made a few enemies. The magazine was the brainchild of Ralph Ginzburg, an eager and zealous publisher, even if the path that led to Avant Garde wasn’t so straightforward. It represents the third major collaboration between Ralph Ginzburg and Herb Lubalin, the magazine’s talented art director. The two previous magazines came to unexpected demise due to their candor and provocativeness, that landed them into legal trouble."
"The Bomb Factory Art Foundation is delighted to announce the return of our Artist's Film Festival. Following an impromptu hiatus, we will once again be looking for short film or video submissions that are exhilarating, experimental, sad, funny, mind-blowing or whatever artists exploring the vast potential of the moving image come up with.
We are asking applicants to submit work via an open call. All works considered must be a maximum of five minutes in duration. Works made with a production team are welcome, but you must be the lead creative behind the project - see submission form for further info."
Omen To That - The Art of the Zine! is a truly delightful podcast where Damian The Omen of artninetwo.com interviews the very talented artist and zine creator Raechel Leigh Carter. Together they look at the world of zine making! Try to unpick some of life’s mysteries such as what happened to Morrissey? And, talk about art, life, the universe and terrible films. Give it a listen. You’ll thank me for it.
Judge’s copy: the copy of the novel belonging to the judge in the case was acquired by Bristol University in 2019.
By courtesy of the University of Bristol Library Special Collections DM2936, photograph by Jamie Carstairs., CC BY-SA
The paperback copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover pictured above is of great cultural significance. Leafing through the pages one discovers hidden gems: pencil markings, underlinings, marginal annotations. Accompanying the book are sheets of headed stationery from the Old Bailey, containing handwritten notes relating to the novel along with a clumsily hand-stitched fabric bag – apparently made not to protect the book but rather the person carrying it by obscuring its title.
It’s the “judge’s copy” of the book, used by Mr Justice Lawrence Byrne who presided over the 1960 Lady Chatterley trial in which DH Lawrence’s famous novel was at the centre of a test of Britain’s new censorship law.
The University of Bristol’s acquisition of the so-called “judge’s copy” in 2019 was an important moment and, having assisted in making the case for its new home to be in the university’s special collections, examining it for the first time was thrilling. Now, on the 60th anniversary of the trial it is timely to consider this intriguing volume. But first a reminder of the case with which it was connected.
In August 1960, by pre-arrangement, the police were handed copies of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley by its publisher. Following this, Penguin Books Limited was charged with publishing an obscene article under the Obscene Publications Act 1959.
The 1959 act aimed both to strengthen the law concerning pornography and to protect literature. It created the publishing offence (the handing over constituted publication) and provided that material was “obscene” if its effect, taken as a whole, was such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who were likely to read, see or hear it.
But a public good defence meant a conviction would not result if it were proved that publication was justified “in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern”. The Lady Chatterley trial was a test of the act; in particular, would the defence protect creative works?
In the courtroom, while the defence did not accept the book was obscene, their focus was on its literary merit. A line up of 35 witnesses (women and men) were called on behalf of publisher Penguin to speak in favour of the book, including authors, academics, clergy, a 21-year-old English graduate and a headmaster. The prosecution played a minor role, calling only one witness and sometimes putting no questions to those who appeared for the defence. In the end, after three hours of deliberation, the jury of three women and nine men returned a unanimous verdict. Penguin was acquitted.
Judge’s copy
Which brings us back to Lady Chatterley and, in particular, the book in the fabric bag. Copies of the unexpurgated novel were circulating before 1960, meaning some of those involved in the case had long been familiar with it – the first defence witness had read it in about 1940. The police had acquired a marked-up proof copy of the Penguin book before the publisher’s handover.
The lawyers had taken great pains to study the 1960 text in preparing for the trial. Defence files show that Penguin’s solicitors undertook an analysis not entirely dissimilar to that on show in the “judge’s copy” with its accompanying notes. As prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones demonstrated in his opening to the jury, where he observed that the words “fuck” or “fucking” occurred at least 30 times within the novel’s pages, so too had the Crown.
The jury were given copies in court, just before the trial began. At the end of the first day, the judge adjourned the case, directing them to read the book but forbidding them from taking it home. After a gap of several days the proceedings resumed and the trial continued for a further five days.
Reports tell how copies of the novel were handed round the court during the trial, to the jury, witnesses and to the judge, with the players occasionally leafing through the pages in search of a particular passage. The judge, however, was given a copy of the book at the same time as the jury first received it, on day one of the trial, before proceedings got underway.
Lady Byrne
It seems that at some point Byrne shared the novel with his wife, as we are told that most of the markings in the book and all of the separate notes are in Lady Dorothy Byrne’s hand, with a few annotations apparently made by her husband. Accounts suggest she worked on the text before the trial (or perhaps during the jury’s reading days), with her husband adding notes during proceedings as she sat next to him. Lady Byrne is also credited with making the bag.
This all suggests that the couple worked together, with Lady Byrne taking the leading role. Moreover, they did so despite Griffith-Jones’s question to the jury on day one of the trial: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”
How then did the “judge’s copy” journey to Bristol? The Byrne family auctioned it in 1993. It came up for sale again in 2018, selling to a private individual in the US. In an attempt to keep it in the UK, the book was placed under temporary export deferral and expressions of interest were sought. At Bristol we put together a case to acquire the book and fundraising efforts began, with contributions coming from organisations and individuals.
As a result, the “judge’s copy”, notes and bag now reside alongside the Penguin Archive and trial papers of Michael Rubinstein, Penguin’s solicitor. Given its history, however, I wonder if we might begin to reconsider how we refer to this Lady Chatterley. Because of her work, the judge’s wife seems to deserve credit; it is not only the “judge’s copy” it is also very much “Lady Byrne’s copy”.
