Today, I have been made aware of time at numerous points in the day. It started with Geoff Dyer – someone I have ‘limited’ time to interview to ensure he appears in the next LeftLion. He’s doing a talk with John Hegley at the Nottingham Contemporary on 10th June about D H Lawrence and so it’s a great opportunity to get one of my favourite writers in the magazine. Dyer is a brilliant public speaker who enthrals audiences with his idiosyncratic moaning (like an intellectual Victor Meldrew) and so I started by checking out his talks at various festivals on YouTube. The first one I came across was a sermon on punctuality…

I ‘didn’t have time’ to listen to all of his talks as Aly and I were doing a food review of Iberico – which is easily the best tapas bar in Britain, let alone Nottingham. So I legged it down to the Lacemarket. I arrived on time but my girlfriend was fifteen minutes late (which is early by her terms – time is relative). As I sat cursing her and going over Dyer’s sermon in my head, I opened up my copy of the New York Review of Books and on the front page was a feature about Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’. This was first shown at the NAE as part of the British Art Show but as you can probably guess, I didn’t have time to blog about it at the time. It has since shown at the Hayward Gallery in London before moving on to the Tramway in Glasgow from May 27 to August 21. I urge you, find time to see it.

‘The Clock’ is simply the most magical piece of artwork I’ve ever seen. Unlike most art, it’s something that is both aesthetically and technically pleasing. It’s a 24 hour film sutured together with film clips from around the world. For every minute, there’s a different scene. Sometimes you see the time on a wall clock or watch, other times it is referred to by a character. It sounds tedious but it is unbelievably addictive. The excitement when you recognise a film or actor or a particular scene that transports you back to childhood is suddenly taken away from you as the next edit kicks in. People sigh, laugh and even talk to the person next to them – something you don’t usually get in the silent, clinical galleys of a gallery.

‘The Clock’ works on numerous levels. Unlike the films that it shows, it works in ‘real’ time, but when you watch it, you forget about time. The clips are temporal, nudging you back to specific moments in your life, you want to see more but can’t – a fitting metaphor for many things I don’t have time to write about now.

LeftLion hit the streets of Nottingham this Friday and we all had a celebratory drink in the Orange Tree. There’s no better feeling than watching groups of people consuming your sweat and toil as you quietly sit in the corner with a pint. This issue, we plumped for an interview with Henderson Mullin, head honcho of Writing East Midlands. I had to fight to get him in because there’s a general preference for author interviews in the mag but I think he is more important. The recent cuts to the arts has seen the number of literature organisations receiving funding cut from 58 to 53, the most notable scalp being the Poetry Book Society. Other frightening facts to consider include; the total number of organisations receiving funding has fallen from 849 to 695 and of the 791 previously funded organisations, 206 have had their funding applications turned down. This is why he had to go in because their future has a direct impact on local literature and writers need to know that they exist. We’re in this fight together.

Writing East Midlands are important because they function as a facilitator. They link people up while providing numerous schemes that put money in the back pocket of the starving writer. They’ve helped raise the profile of literature in the region through their Lyric Lounge project, mentoring schemes that offer invaluable feedback, writer-in-residence programmes with free workshops and most recently, launched the East Midlands Book Prize which will be announced in June. Organisations like this didn’t exist back in the day so it’s important that writers know that there is help out there. It’s safe to leave the garret.

Selecting something for the next issue is going to be near on impossible. I’m currently working with Ste Allen of Deal Maker on a spoken word event with Chester P headlining, so he needs to go in. But then Geoff Dyer is giving a talk on D H Lawrence at the Contemporary and he’s one of my favourite writers. Then there’s the interview with Cat Arnold I did a month or so back. She wants to wait until after the May 5^th elections before deciding whether to expand on the recent comments about her private life. So she’s topical as well. Maybe the answer is we need to go up to 48 pages for the next issue. There’s too much going on in this city to restrict ourselves to 32 pages. Talking of which, this was our 40^th issue spanning across six or seven years. That’s not bad going considering we’ve never been funded and survive solely on advertising. But then, our style is legendary.