Tuesday 27 May 2014

YOU'VE GOT TO BE JOKING

if you think this is democracy,
this quango land
insult to our history,
this emptiness
of false celebrity,
this wretched shallowness,
this shattered ignorance
of all that shines from our fought-for heritage,
this media connivence
and bone idleness,
this following of the fast buck,
this grovelling to the greed of capital,
this sickening homage to materialism,
this lack of human spirit
in our city centres,
this brutal selfishness
encouraged by a government
that denies our European roots,
that scans the wonder of the vast Atlantic
for feeble ideas to run with,
this rat race of a society
that puts self above solidarity,
these feeble careerist substitutes for activism
who have lost any real will for change,
who have become corrupted by a power-lust,
who lack any passion
other than to climb grimly up their greasy poles,
clinging on to their self-delusion,
ignoring, in their centrist way,
the true beauty of community,
handing out their gongs to the servile
and rubbishing the selfless folk
who work their little miracles every breathing day.



KEITH ARMSTRONG

Friday 16 May 2014

BRIDGE HOTEL, NEWCASTLE WITH SARA HAUSER FROM TUEBINGEN



PHOTOS: PETER DIXON

TUEBINGEN WRITER SARA HAUSER VISITS DURHAM




    Above: Reading at St Chad's College Chapel, Durham University 14/5/2014
    PHOTOS: KEITH ARMSTRONG



Vita 
Sara Hauser was born in 1986 in Calw (Black Forest). Living in the University City Tübingen, she studies Philosophy, International Literature and Literary Writing. 
In 2012 she received a scholarship from the “First Academy of Reading Arts“. The following year, she and Tübingen‘s poet Tibor Schneider launched “hesse reloaded”, a symposium linking scientific, poetic and musical elements with Hermann Hesse's literary work as well as his relationship to Tübingen. 
Influenced by the “cut-up“ technique, Sara Hauser combines and “recycles“ in her miniature and short prose splinters of films and literature as well as fragments of personal memories to a new entity. Her current writing is inspired by films of Ingmar Bergman and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Additionally, she is influenced by writers like Daniil Charms, Friederike Mayröcker or Albert Camus and his philosophy of absurdism. 
Excerpts of her writing have been published in Tübingen´s magazine for literature and art “]trash[pool ”.