The Holborn Cenotaph

My new short story ‘The Holborn Cenotaph’, published in a limited print edition by Piece of Paper Press, was written for and first performed as a live reading at ‘The Cenotaph Project & the public sphere’, an event that I did with Maya Balcioglu, Stuart Brisley, and Sanja Perovic (chaired by Johanna Malt) that took place in the King’s College Strand Campus chapel in London, on 24 October 2014.

-1Presented in the Swiftian tradition of a ‘modest proposal’, ‘The Holborn Cenotaph’ frames a satirical proposition: that the current high-rise tower of Holborn Police Station be decommissioned and converted into ‘a new Holborn Cenotaph, a 50-metre high, networked memorial to those men and women who have lost their lives or who will die in contact with the police in the UK.’

‘The Holborn Cenotaph’ draws on conversations with Stuart Brisley et al that I have been conducting through 2013-14, through my residency and current Visiting Research Fellowship at King’s College London, in order to research a new work of prose fiction exploring aspects of Brisley’s work. ‘The Holborn Cenotaph’ is one of two* stories that were intended as prototypes or test pieces for this larger project, after a method adopted by French poet Louis Aragon in the early stages of writing his novel about Henri Matisse, where he noted the need for:

a kind of trial approach to my theme, a marginal commentary on [his] method, in order to justify the liberty taken with my subject, my own variations, the sort of detachment I aimed at.

During planning for ‘The Cenotaph Project & the public sphere’ event, I recalled that Stuart Brisley had been a supporter of Piece of Paper Press in the early days of the project during the mid-1990s (donating the early publications that he had collected to the UCL Library’s Little Magazines Collection). We thought it might be apt to use the format for a publication that we could give away on the night. An uncorrected proof edition of ‘The Holborn Cenotaph’ with variant text and limited to fifty numbered signed copies was distributed to the audience at the event itself.

-2This edition of ‘The Holborn Cenotaph’ is published by Piece of Paper Press in a limited edition of 150 numbered copies. To obtain a free copy while stocks last please send a stamped and self-addressed envelope to:

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UPDATE, MAY 2016: APOLOGIES BUT THIS EDITION OF ‘THE HOLBORN CENOTAPH’ IS NOW OUT OF PRINT. A FREE DIGITAL EDITION IS PLANNED FOR SEPTEMBER 2016, IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE NOTIFIED WHEN THIS IS AVAILABLE, SIGN UP FOR UPDATES HERE.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE POSTS ABOUT ‘THE HOLBORN CENOTAPH’

LISTEN TO ‘THE HOLBORN CENOTAPH’ LIVE AT LONDON RADICAL BOOKFAIR, 7 MAY 2016.

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‘The Holborn Cenotaph’ was written for October [2014]’s event at the King’s College Strand campus chapel, London, but could be read in any public or civic space associated with ceremonial or displays of power. In addition to the updatable sections indicated within the text, the story could also be adapted for performance in any UK location, whether alongside Brisley and Balcioglu’s The Cenotaph Project or not, by substitution of Holborn Police Station and other London or location-specific detail with any UK police station building, town or city; MOPAC (the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime) for any local police authority, etc.

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Download ‘The Holborn Cenotaph’ press release (opens as PDF).

Piece of Paper Press was created by Tony White in 1994 as a lo-tech, sustainable publishing project used to publish new writings, visual and graphic works by artists and writers. Past contributors have included Michael Moorcock, Tim Etchells, Bruce Gilchrist, Liliane Lijn, Elizabeth Magill, James Pyman, Suzanne Treister, Alison Turnbull, Penny McCarthy and others. Each book is manufactured from a single A4 sheet that is printed on both sides using a photocopier or a domestic printer, and then folded, stapled and trimmed by hand to create the book. The edition is limited to 150 copies, which are usually distributed free by post. This is the 28th title from Piece of Paper Press.

*The other story written as a test piece for the larger project in this way is ‘High-Lands’, which was originally commissioned for radio by London Fieldworks as part of their Remote Performances project, broadcasting live from Outlandia on Resonance 104.4fm during August of this year. Listen to ‘High-Lands’ on my SoundCloud page.

Missorts Volume II reviewed on 3am Magazine

“White is our nimblest political novelist … Foxy-T toughened his linguistic resources further and moved him away from pure fixed literary shapes, again showing a resourcefulness and agility that writers from this political, republican, revolutionary imagination have always embedded. Fellow novelist Toby Litt recognized this when he cited Foxy T as one of his favourite contemporary novels. White’s writing is a deliberate disjunction from tyranny, something tougher and more disruptive than the Icarusian tones of the modern globalised style. What White is engaged in is an occult activism whereby the subconscious imagination merges the political, scientific, natural, educative and mystical through several types of process … Unlike Coleridge White hasn’t shifted from the radical ground to the conservative but finds new juice in the underground rivers of radical art streams and writing that Missorts_vol_ii_cover_lo-rescontinue to roll out like a sacred river, kind of measureless. With Tony White’s fiction there is always an engaging lightness of touch, a deft abilty to wind out stories that carry a freightload of edgy material with a beguiling ease. Missorts II is no exception to this. It steps briskly out and quickly brings the reader the sorts of pleasures that only a writer at ease with his material and form can deliver, a series of voices that can hold the geographic and historical action together without any sense of forced engagement … He’s found a way to negotiate the pitfalls of modern fiction”
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Read ‘Tony White’s Sinuous Traces’,  Richard Marshall’s review of Missorts Volume II in full on 3am Magazine.
Buy the limited edition paperback of Missorts Volume II direct from publisher Situations.

Find out more about Missorts Volume II.

 Missorts by Tony White, project website
Missorts Volume II

ICYM — 9:00am, tweeting a short story a day until Friday

Twitter pals, I’ll be tweeting a link to audio of a short story at 9:00 today, Tuesday 18 November and another at the same time each day until the end of this week. Each recording is a collaboration with a different artist or musician.

Video still © Inga Tillere, 2014

Video still © Inga Tillere, 2014

Tuesday 9:00am, ‘High-Lands’ — art school, shortwave radio and The Stranglers at the Roundhouse in Jubilee year. My short story for radio featuring a live soundscape accompaniment by Johny Brown of the legendary Band of Holy Joy. ‘High-Lands’ is due for publication in August next year, but was first broadcast in the summer as part of Remote Performances by London Fieldworks and Resonance 104.4fm.

Wednesday 9:00am, ‘A Fragment from the Lives of the Conquistadors’ — Did Cortés come to LA? A psychedelic parable, Castañeda apocrypha, feat. sound by Steven Hull. My short story which formed the basis of LA artist Hull’s extraordinary Puppet Show at the last Glow Santa Monica, now available on yellow vinyl LP A Puppet Show, with sounds by Gibby Haynes et al.

Thursday 9:00am, ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ — Bournemouth Soul Boys who were so hard core that they were into TG? My short story for SCAN’s Digital Transformations project, this is the studio version of the story as performed with UK Acid House pioneer Richard Norris for the Free University of Glastonbury, at Glastonbury Festival 2011.

Friday 9:00am, ‘Stormbringer’ — My short story for London Fieldworks’ Syzygy project performed in full for the first time in August 2014 with live musical accompaniment from guitarist Peter Lanceley, in a Lochaber living room overlooking the Sound of Arisaig at sunset as part of Remote Performances by London Fieldworks and Resonance 104.4fm. Recently repeated in tribute to the late and legendary bass player Jack Bruce.

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ICYM will be tweeted at 9:00 Tuesday to Friday this week.

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Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3

Some other bloke called Tony White

Some other bloke called Tony White

Now that all but one of my books on Goodreads are correctly attributed to me I have updated my Goodreads author page. Due to some glitch, most of my books had been listed under THIS bloke (right)! My recent novella Missorts Volume II still is.

I have also been testing out the Goodreads widgets by including ‘Add this book’-buttons on the books page of my website, like this one for my novel Shackleton’s Man Goes South.

Shackleton's Man Goes South

WordPress doesn’t seem to like the buttons very much, to use the technical term. Mouse-over them and nothing much happens. It allows you to click-through to find the book on the Goodreads site itself, but doesn’t seem to let you rate the book remotely. Anyway I’m going to try them out for a bit. But at least now that my worst problems with Goodreads seem to have been sorted out, I have updated the profile and added blog and video content on my Goodreads author page.

Tony White, DICKY STAR AND THE GARDEN RULE, publication date 26 April 2012, Forma Arts and Media Ltd.I was going to post Forma’s video of me reading from my novella Dicky Star and the Garden Rule at the Free Word Centre on there, but Vimeo and Goodreads don’t speak to each other at all — to use another technical term ;-) — so instead I’ve posted one of the mini-readings from my novella Missorts Volume II that publisher Situations filmed and have put up on Youtube (see the whole playlist here).

Those Missorts Volume II videos were something of a test themselves, too. I thought it would be interesting to see if there were sections of the novella that might have enough depth and velocity to work as one- or two-minute readings, with enough of a narrative transformation for the clip to be worth watching.

These thoughts about brevity and speed, narrative transformation, remind me of a conversation that I had with poet Tim Wells at the launch of pal Stewart Home’s brilliant latest novel, The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones the other day. Tim Wells is currently doing some great research on the ranting poetry scene of the 1980s, and publishing much of it on his excellent Stand Up And Spit blog. Tim was part of that scene, and like many poets he still gigs regularly. Chatting to him the other night, I wondered if the live readings scene for fiction had petered out a little in recent years. Tim’s suggestion was that readings from poetry can have the energy of a 7″ single, while those from fiction can often feel like listening to an LP; that the energy of a 7″ single (by extension) can be more appealing live.

Q. Does he have a point?

New: audiobook playlist for Shackleton’s Man Goes South

There is now an audiobook playlist for all three of my readings from my Science Museum novel Shackleton’s Man Goes South.

The readings were all recorded in the studio of my occasional, long-time collaborator, the composer Jamie Telford. Pals will recall that Jamie used to play live keyboard accompaniment to my readings from the novel CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO, and that he composed the Portwall Preludes (a series of works written specifically for St Mary Redcliffe’s church organ) that provide the compelling musical soundscape for Missorts,

For Shackleton’s Man Goes South, Jamie Telford composed the sea shanty-ish ‘Going South Theme’, which bookends and punctuates these audiobook extracts.

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Download the FREE ebook of Shackleton’s Man Goes South direct from the Science Museum website.

Shackleton’s Man Goes South is the Science Museum’s Atmosphere Gallery commission for 2013, published exclusively as part of the Contemporary Arts Programme.

© Tony White, 2013. All music © Jamie Telford, 2013. Recording engineer Andrew Phillis.

A display charting the literary and scientific inspirations behind Shackleton’s Man Goes South in the Science Museum’s Atmosphere Gallery runs for two years, from April 2013 to April 2015.

Shackleton's Man Goes South

Making Conversations

I am pleased to be talking to Dr Sanja Perovic of King’s College London, Chris Shaw and Bronac Ferran for Bronac’s Making Conversations programme on Resonance 104.4fm, 12 noon Tuesday 4 November. Pals will know that I chair the board of Resonance 104.4fm, so it makes a nice change to be on the other side of the microphone, as it were.

Michael Moorcock, ‘A Twist in the Lines’, POPP.027Among the things that we may discuss are my artists’ book project Piece of Paper Press, which gives this website its name, and which I began twenty years ago in 1994. You can read posts about recent Piece of Paper Press editions by Michael Moorcock (left) and Liliane Lijn elsewhere on this site.

We will also discuss the ‘loose collaboration’ that Perovic and I have been conducting with the artists Stuart Brisley and Maya Balcioglu over the past year or so. One output of which is ‘Into Day One of the Revolutionary Period’ [Opens as PDF], an edited and annotated transcript of a conversation between the four of us, which was published as a pamphlet by DOMOBAAL to accompany Brisley’s November 2013 performance work Before the Mast.

As well as discussing Sanja and Chris’s respective current projects, conversation will touch upon artists’ residencies, stories about climate change — including my recent article ‘Wanted: A New Kind of War Artist’ — and a thread of experimental publication that runs through my work, including my most recent novel Shackleton’s Man Goes South, which was published by the Science Museum, and can be downloaded free in all ebook formats from their website, or via the specially developed touch-screen ‘ebook dispenser’ that is part of the display about the novel in the Museum’s Atmosphere Gallery.

Listeners will be invited to send in a stamped-addressed-envelope in order to receive a copy of The Holborn Cenotaph, a new short story of mine that was first performed as a public reading as part of (and is being published to mark) The Cenotaph and the Public Sphere, an event by Balcioglu, Brisley, Perovic and I that was held in the Sir Gilbert Scott-designed chapel at King’s College London as part of their recent Arts & Humanities Festival 2014 (seen here in preparation, with Stuart Brisley at left).

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resonance web logoMaking Conversations, 12 noon, Tuesday 4 November 2014, Resonance 104.4fm across London, or via the Resonance webstream.

To receive a copy of the forthcoming Piece of Paper Press edition of The Holborn Cenotaph, please send a stamped, self-addressed envelope (standard first- or second-class postage) to:

Tony White, c/o DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH, KING’S COLLEGE LONDON, VIRGINIA WOOLF BUILDING, 22 KINGSWAY, LONDON WC2B 6NR

Stormbringer — for Jack Bruce (14 May 1943 – 25 October 2014)

Image © 2014, Jo Joelson, London Fieldworks

Image © 2014, Jo Joelson, London Fieldworks

My short story ‘Stormbringer’ will be broadcast on Resonance 104.4fm at 4pm today, 28 October 2014. Here’s what it says in the Resonance 104.4fm schedule:

By way of tribute to the late Jack Bruce, a special broadcast of Tony White’s short story first broadcast as part of Remote Performances in August 2014. ‘Stormbringer’ was inspired by talk of a period in Jack Bruce’s life when it seems he was entitled to be formally addressed as The Much Honoured Laird of Sanda. Voice: Tony White. Guitar: Peter Lanceley.

Tony White, explains:

© Anthony Oliver, 1999

© Anthony Oliver, 1999

In 1999 I had been invited to be part of an art project that was to take place on the remote Scottish island of Sanda, off the southern tip of the Mull of Kintyre. Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson of London Fieldworks had invited a group of artists — including composer Kaffe Matthews, writers Steve Beard, Jenni Walwin and myself — with former members of Airkraft, the then world champion stunt kite team, to collaborate and explore connections between mind and weather. The kite team would be bolting themselves to the mountain and sending up stacks of kites that dangled meteorological kit, and both Kaffe and Steve ended up using those data streams to drive their respective compositions. I was to contribute by exploring these ideas in a work of fiction and had been casting around for some sort of visionary voice with which to explore the place, but had drawn a blank. Luckily, on the boat from Campbelltown, it was mentioned in passing that a previous Laird of Sanda had been Jack Bruce. That’s Jack’s tractor that you’ll see, Dick told me, still stuck in the marsh.

Well, here was a true visionary, and musical colossus: the mighty Jack Bruce. But what, I wondered, would a rock star in self-imposed exile from the fallout of that first-generation London R&B scene on a tiny island at the gateway to the Atlantic do all day? This was the music of the Black Atlantic, after all. So how might he assuage the ‘postcolonial melancholia’ (to borrow another of Paul Gilroy’s phrases)?

On Sanda Island © Bruce Gilchrist/London Fieldworks, 1999In my story (which is called ‘Stormbringer’, after the Michael Moorcock novel of that name) my fictional bass player makes a cloak out of curtains and plays psychedelic games whilst pretending to be a character from a Michael Moorcock novel; and not just any character, but Elric of Melniboné, the Eternal Champion. Within hours of arriving on Sanda I found the skull of a small cetacean washed up on the rocky beach and made a ‘moon staff’ by lashing it to a tall, straight stick, then I set out to explore the island, perhaps to devise some lysergic ritual to tune in to those old Atlantic frequencies.

Strangely, the ‘moon staff’ — or its bony head, at least — became the focus of a real superstition, and turned me into a sort of Jonah. It was a wind curse! Whenever it and I appeared, the kites would come tumbling out of the sky. Don’t bring that thing near us, the kite team pleaded. By the end of the stay I was starting to believe it myself, and was relieved to return both staff and skull into a decidedly choppy sea rather than risk taking them on the already perilous boat journey back to Campbelltown.

Image © 2014, Jo Joelson, London Fieldworks

Image © 2014, Jo Joelson, London Fieldworks

Back on the mainland, I immediately made contact with Michael Moorcock, who very graciously granted me permission to use Elric and elements of the Eternal Champion cycle of novels in the story, and I acknowledge that support again now. Chatting about the period, Mike wondered whether it hadn’t in fact been Ginger Baker rather than Jack Bruce who was the Elric fan.

‘Stormbringer’ appeared in the Idler magazine and then was published by London Fieldworks a couple of years later, but has never been performed in full, and certainly never in Scotland. So when I returned to the Highlands this summer with London Fieldworks and Resonance 104.4fm for Remote Performances, we decided to correct that. ‘Stormbringer’ is here performed as a live reading with musical accompaniment from Peter Lanceley of the Resonance Radio Orchestra on guitar and effects, in front of a small audience gathered in a Roshven living room that looked out over the peaceful waters of the Sound of Arisaig at sunset.

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‘Stormbringer’, will be broadcast on Resonance 104.4fm, 4:00pm, Tuesday 28 October 2014. Listen at 104.4fm in London, on the Radio Player app or via the Resonance 104.4fm webstream.

Update, 15 July 2021 — archive audio of the Remote Performances recording of ‘Stormbringer’ at Roshven is on the project’s Mixcloud archive. Music: Peter Lanceley, Sound recording: Sarah Nicol for Resonance FM

‘Stormbringer’ by Tony White was also recently republished in 2017 anthology Michael Moorcock’s Legends of the Multiverse, edited by Jean-Marc Lofficier