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The brand spanking new Culture Laser tackles the grimdark world of commerce on both sides of the Atlantic and the exploitable creative possibilities of being a jerk on the busiest shopping day in the American calendar.

Our friend Mark Vitelli gives us a glimpse into a brand new holiday that will totally change your life, Fashion Friday, a bid to make something unusual and provocative out of the apocalyptic occurrence that is the first business day after Thanksgiving, commonly known as Black Friday, which looks like the found footage section from zombie movies.

Author, filmmaker and all-round good guy Ewan Morrison takes us on a magical mystery tour round the malls of Scotland, filling high his trolley with tales, curios and objets d’art for your delectation. Will you find happiness among them? He gives us an insight to his collection Tales from the Mall, which you can see more of at the YouTube!

And finally we have a fantastic treat in Washington’s own Robert Sarazin Blake with his epic track “i didn’t call you from philadelphia”, an exploration of modernity, American life and the Thanksgiving tradition of listening to super-long songs.

Don’t forget you can subscribe to us through iTunes, to get all the freshest lasers delivered right to your door.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy this brand new Culture Laser.

This Saturday, 1 December, I’m back from my French connection to compere a really exciting event, New Writers at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow! It’s part of the huge celebrations going down for Book Week Scotland, which – if you have been hiding under a rock or living in a hotel in rural France – kicked off on Monday and run through this weekend.

Saturday features Book Week’s Pop Up Festival, an awesome idea that runs from ten in the morning til long after the wintery sundown with kids’ events, discussion panels, writing and illustration workshops, and a barnstorming Literary Death Match (featuring Christopher Brookmyre and Kevin Williamson vs Joe Dunthorne and Graham Joyce) to bring the booky bacchanalia to a close. The New Writers lineup at features eight winners of the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Awards, who will each have a ten-minute slot to give us a taster of their work. Here’s your cheat sheet for the evening:

4-5pm:

– Katerina Vasiliou

– Roy Gill

– Andrew Sclater

– Claire Askew

8-9pm:

– Allan Radcliffe

– Roushan Martens

– Thom Laycock

– Katy McAulay

The whole day’s festivities are free and will be massive fun. Totally worth coming home for. Info on the entire day’s events are available here, and the info hub on Book Week here. See you Saturday!

This December I’ll be packing my bags full of precious ephemera and riding the rails down to old London town, and you should come hang-out. That’s right — the only “one-to-one poetry reading in a makeshift bedsit” at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe is heading to the Battersea Arts Centre for a short run in one of the most cutting-edge theatres in the UK.

Book Tickets Here

The BAC’s Christmas Cook Up season is epic and exciting and means my little show will be surrounded by scratches, musicals, cabaret, friends like Little Bulb and Josie Long and two stunning productions from the acclaimed Kneehigh theatre. I expect an anything can happen atmosphere similar to the one at Hidden Door, Edinburgh where our show was lucky enough to kick off.

Anyway, if you are in London you must come see all the treats on display and, please,  pop in for a twenty-minute holiday in a room full of booze and poems. There’s a mug of tea with your name on it.

Red, Like our Room Used to Feel is a rare, intimate, one-to-one poetry reading. Hide away in a cozy bed-sit, among trinkets, ephemera,
artworks and an original score. Select your poems, lay back, make yourself at home, enjoy a snifter of port or a spot of Earl Grey, and drink in the specially created atmosphere.

From 12 – 15, 18 – 22 December.

The installation features music from Gareth Warner’s Ragland, paintings, photographs and objets d’art from a host of Edinburgh-based artists, plus Van Winkle’s award-winning poems read by the author. It is joy, memory and loss condensed into a tea break. It is an ambient audio voyage. It is a red room to lay down in, close your eyes and be where you want to be.

Herald Scotland: ***** “A brief oasis of calm, where being read to is a welcome pleasure not often enjoyed beyond childhood.” — Mary Brennan

What: Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel

Where: Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill, London, SW11 5TN

When: 12 – 15 December & 18 – 22 December, 2012; shows from 6:20 pm (every 20 minutes)

How Much: £5 / 3

Box Office:  www.bac.org.uk / 02072232223

***UPDATE***

Creative Scotland has very kindly agreed to fund our expedition to the Battersea Arts Centre! I’m really grateful for their support, without which this could have been a really difficult endeavour. We’re packing up this weekend, and my goodness this excitement is nigh-palpable. Remember to book your tickets here!

For all of our amis dans la France, I will be the ‘Featured Poet’ speaking words and drinking wine with the good people at Au Chat Noir café as part of their weekly open mic night called Spoken Word Paris, or en francais, ‘scène ouverte.’ It was set up by a dashing and talented fellow named David Barnes way back in 2006, and quickly became infamous for being an egalitarian and edgy  open court for writers of all stripes. It happens this and every Monday evening and is packed with warmth, frivolity, and dead good poetry.

They run a pretty tight ship, starting at 9pm and finishing all performances by midnight a la Cinderella for the important purposes of socializing, and drunkering.

If you’re in the Paris part of the world come over for some spoken word, some poetry, some stand-up, some stories, some deeply hip conversations about life, the universe and Jack Kerouac.

Monday, 19 November

9pm-12pm

FREE

Au Chat Noir 76 rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud 75011 Métro Parmentier.

Voila!

Really excited to have work published in Where Rockets Burn Through a super-cool anthology of science fiction poems edited by your friend and mine Mr Russell Jones, who has assembled a stellar cast of writers from across the UK. The poets involved are too numerous and blindingly brilliant to list on these pages, but as luck would have it you can check them all out at the Penned in the Margins store.

Blasting into the future, across alien worlds and distant galaxies, fantastic technologies and potential threats to humanity, Where Rockets Burn Through brings science fiction and poetry together in one explosive, genre-busting collection. Climb aboard, strap in and fire up the photon cannon.

Penned in the Margins is a great independent publisher that organises literary events in London’s East End.  Please support them by getting a copy of this killer collection of sci fi verse.

I recently had the pleasure of having a poem included in the art/poetry collaboration Estuary: A Confluence of Art & Poetry, in which “You Wanted to See the Lighthouse” is paired up with a couple of evocative images made by Arab-American artist Ilham Badreddine Mahfouz. You can read the poem and view one of Ilham’s paintings in all its high-rez glory here.

This was a really cool project to be involved in, and the end result, published by Moon and Mountain, is mighty pretty. If you got a pocketful of clams and a hankering for an art object, you can pick it up at their store. It makes a beautiful present — or just a gift for yourself!

Thanks to all the fine artists and poets involved in the collaboration.

Tales of One City

The joy of working with children in schools has always been the amount of pure, weird, creativity at play. Abstract images and thoughts could often give legendary surrealists a run for their money.

Alongside Niall Walker, Edinburgh Libraries ‘Reading Champion’, the kids at St. Katharine’s came up with this blazingly odd haiku. We loved it so much, we got them to draw some pictures and turned it into this original animation. We’re pretty proud of it and hope you take a moment to enjoy.

Bookmarked is the Scottish Book Trust’s latest podcast, in which we bring you all the news from across Scotland that could be categorised under the heading ‘books’, lit in neon and intermittently flashing. We deal in interviews, readings, sneak previews and more books, dropping in the first week of every month.

On our maiden voyage you’ll find a behind-the-scenes tour of ‘GiftED‘, the Edinburgh book sculptures exhibition currently touring Scotland; a catch-up with Wigtown resident and author of the eagerly anticipated “Things You Need to Know About Rockets” and book lover, Jessica Fox; a taster of Book Week Scotland’s events programme and a quick-fire interview with author Jenni Fagan, who fills us in on her favourite books for people who are short on time. She doesn’t mention her own book, “The Panopticon“, but you should read that too. It is major.

We’re getting excited for the upcoming Book Week Scotland, running from 26 November – 2 December, a massive programme of free events going down all over Scotland, plus a fantastic collection of poems and stories called My Favourite Place, featuring new work from Liz Lochhead, Michael Palin(!) and Scots everywhere. Book Week Scotland is a humungous endeavour, is going to be a rollicking good time, and can’t wait to meet you. I’ll be at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow all day on 1 December. If you can’t go there — you might want to hear more about a great literary scavenger hunt happening in Edinburgh. Rachel McCrum, of Inky Fingers, tells us all about the Calloocallay Scavanger Hunt! (PRIZES!).

Give your ears a treat and catch up on all the great bookly things currently gracing our shores.

Produced by Colin Fraser  ::: Music by Ragland

We caught up with incredible poets slash art facilitators slash awesome humans Ken Arkind and Jon Sands during their recent tour of the UK and Ireland, and got a funny, yet, in-depth chat about their views on the nature of performance poetry and the importance of promoting art in underprivileged areas, PLUS some of their own excellent work. We had a total blast with these guys, can’t wait to catch up with them again, and I thoroughly recommend you look up more of their work on the YouTube.

Ken is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and full time touring artist (who I first met in Melbourne) and who has performed across the US, been published in numerous anthologies. Jon is a full-time teaching & performing artist. His first full collection of poems, The New Clean, was released in 2011 from Write Bloody Publishing. He is currently the Director of Poetry Education at the Positive Health Project.

If you want to hear some uplifting work and remind yourself why we do this stuff in the first place, listen in.