Cover designed by Kid30.
LeftLion turned 51 on February 1st and we rabbited on about the Festival of Words for quite a bit because this was Nottingham’s first literature festival since the 1970s. This included an interview with David Almond, a two page lit-binge ridiculing this embarrassing statistic, words from writer in residence Deborah Tyler-Bennett and a poetry page dedicated to performers appearing at the festival. By all accounts I should be delighted at managing to arm wrestle so many pages out of the mag. But I’m not. Why? Because another feature, The Lion List, took up more pages and wasn’t as time specific. It was another music feature. Now don’t get me wrong, we have a duty to capitalise on Nottingham’s recent good fortunes music wise – and it’s been a long time coming – but anyone who thinks that is more important than waiting 30/40 years for a literature festival is an absolute fruitcake. It should have been our front cover. It should have been tattooed on our foreheads. Anyway, enough of this bitching. All is forgiven because of the fabulous illustration for the festival by Cameron Bain (see below), and the front cover we ran with was pretty special: totus ceterus est propago (or should it be ceteris?)
Illustration by Cameron Bain
Our six book reviews this issue were: Entertaining Strangers Jonathan Taylor, Species NTU Creative Writing MA, Student David Belbin, Dogtooth Chronicles Kirsty Fox, Full Chicken Jacket Tom Hathaway, Amsworth Through History Bryan Maloney. Katie Half-Price got her teeth and other body parts stuck into Cheryl Cole, Will Self, and Jonas Jonasson. As always I tried to find an appropriate reviewer for each book which on some occasions borders on the obsessive. For example, Tom Hathaway is a living breathing Charles Bukowski so we needed someone who could appreciate his sense of humour. Andrew Graves was perfect. Graves uses the stage name of MulletProofPoet which is a play on ‘Bulletproof Poet’ – the name Bukowski was known as in certain circles. I doubt anyone would pick up on such subtle layering but that’s the fun of editing together the literature pages. You do it entirely for your own gratification. All the rest is propaganda, etc.