Susie Wild's Blog: Wildlife, page 50
December 6, 2011
THE STAGE REVIEW | CINDERELLA @THE RIVERFRONT
CinderellaPublished Monday 5 December 2011 at 12:39 by Susie WildEven in the year of a Royal Wedding, not every modern girl wants to grow up to be a princess. In Newport, however, Will and Kate fever appears to have taken hold and many women and girls in the audience are dressed up as exactly that, settling down to believe in fairytale dreams. Hiss & Boo's production keeps the ancient story traditionally soft, sappy and relatively unchanged, and a more contemporary world is instead only hinted at with the Ugly Sisters' Primark bags and occasional, catty LOLs.
The cast of Cinderella at the Riverfront, NewportThe romantic leads Nichola Lagan (Cinderella) and Rob Wilshaw (Prince Charming) are suitably saccharine and prove strong on vocals, but the song choices are often weak. Still, it is a saving grace that the show hasn't suffered too much under the influence of X Factor. Instead, it leans towards the stuff of real magic with a flying horse, fireworks, sparkle and indoor snow bound to bring out childhood delight and festive cheer in all people of all ages.As an added bonus, Buttons provides a party trick, teaching the audience how to pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. Although you might not manage it after three glasses of sherry on Christmas Day.Read the review on The Stage website
December 1, 2011
The Raconteur America is Out Now
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The Raconteur's America issue is out now. All 314 pages of it.
See all the photos from the Swansea launch in our Facebook album.
Buy America for £10.
The Raconteur's America issue is out now. All 314 pages of it.
See all the photos from the Swansea launch in our Facebook album.
Buy America for £10.
November 25, 2011
Hay Festival Kerala
You can see my blogs from Hay Festival in Kerala. Part 3 of Sunday, the final entry, should be going up soon. I had a blast. Highlights include having dinner with Jung Chang, not letting the monsoon rain stop a bunch of Welsh poets from having a good time in Kovalam, being touristy with Dylan Moore, drinking with Simon Armitage, Cat Weatherill, Ed Vere and co and the finale beach party. Big thanks to Germaine G for donating her mini bar supplies to us when we arrived at the after party to find the hotel bar was open to sit at, but not actually serving drinks. I also tacked on a mini beach holiday. Result. Photos will follow.
November 9, 2011
November 8, 2011
New Job!
Parthian Books announces a new editorial dream team - Kathryn Gray is the new Editor, and
Jon Gower and myself are the two new Associate Editors. Delighted!
November 7, 2011
The Raconteur 'America' Launch Events
Sun, 2011-11-06 19:08 |
Susie Wild
Parthian are pleased to announce that we are the new publisher of literary magazine
The Raconteur
. Join us this autumn for a number of events to celebrate the launch of the 'America' issue in the new paperback format.'Full of insights and valuable perspectives on the literary world'. – Alain de Botton
The 'America' issue promises a transatlantic treasure trove of the freshest fiction and poetry from both sides of the pond, ruminations and reminiscences of the writing life from American writers working in Europe and European writers 'over there', travel pieces and reportage from across the United States, an eclectic mix of interviews and features as well as an all-but-definitive A-Z of American Letters.Contents include:Godfrey Hodgson on American politicsAllegra Goodman on the American novelJack Foley on the birth of the beatsNew fiction from Tom Abbott, Russell Celyn Jones and Todd ZunigaNew poetry from Rhian Edwards, Salena Godden, Graham Isaac, lloyd robson, Tim Wells and Heathcote WilliamsEssays by Tom Anderson, Catherine Fletcher, Rob Lewis, Jo Mazelis, Gary Raymond, Graham Tomlinson, Dan Tyte and Susie Wild plus reflections from Taylor Glenn, Yahia Lababidi, Joao Morais, David E. Oprava, Bobby Sanabria, Mimi Thebo and Tamar Yoseloff.And a definitive A-Z of American literature
'The Raconteur in its new format promises to grow in both vitality and variety, creating a much needed showcase to present the best of our writing and ideas to the world.' – Jon GowerThe Launch PartiesJoin editors Gary Raymond, Dylan Moore and Susie Wild along with a selection of contributors for an evening of discussion and readings from the new issue.Swansea Launch Party feat. Jo Mazelis, Tom Anderson, Rhian EdwardsWednesday 30 November, 7pm, Americano Jazz CafeParthian Event PageFacebook Event Page£5 ENTRY which can be claimed off the cover price of The Raconteur on the night.Cardiff Launch Party feat. Rob Lewis, Tom Anderson, David E. Oprava, Joao Morais, Dan Tyte and Lloyd RobsonWednesday 7 December, 8pm, Chapter Arts CentreParthian Event PageFacebook Event Page£5 ENTRY which can be claimed off the cover price of The Raconteur on the night.WHSmith Signing SessionWe also have a signing session during the festive rush. Come and meet the editors at WHSmith, Queen Street, Cardiff on Saturday 10 December between 10 and 4pm. Copies of The Raconteur 'America' will be on sale, perfect gives for your literary loved ones, whilst Dylan, Gary and Susie will be on hand to offer expert advice on other great books to purchase, making your xmas shopping so much easier.
There will also be Raconteur events in London and Bath in early 2012.
Find The Raconteur online...Visit The Raconteur websiteBefriend The Raconteur on FacebookFollow @RaconteurSpeaks on TwitterPre-order The Raconteur 'America' for £10 with FREE UK postage
SOURCE: http://www.parthianbooks.co.uk/content/raconteur-america-launch-events
Interior Lives: women through the lens of Deborah Kay Davies and Tessa Hadley
'For an event last week at Swansea's Dylan Thomas Centre, I was in conversation with Cardiff authors Tessa Hadley and Deborah Kay Davies (the latter via virtual interview, available in full here shortly). The session's title, 'Interior Lives', was appropriate, because the worlds of both Hadley's
T
he London Train
(out in paperback this January) and 2010's
True Things About Me
by Book of the Year winner Davies are fiercely claustrophobic.'
Read Gwen's blog in full:
http://newwelshreview.blogspot.com/2011/11/interior-lives-women-through-lens-of.html
Read Gwen's blog in full:
http://newwelshreview.blogspot.com/2011/11/interior-lives-women-through-lens-of.html
November 2, 2011
It's time to log off for your own happiness
Yes, I do get the irony of blogging about my article from this week's WM...
Do you know your own Google ranking? Is life only happening if it is worthy of a status update and are the number of your Twitter followers in danger of overtaking @stephenfry? Writer Susie Wild insists all this online interaction is making us deeply unhappy, and the only way to reconnect is to unplug ...THERE was a time you'd only Google someone when you were playing the dating game.It was meant to minimise the risk that you wouldn't be compatible – you wouldn't like their job, their hobbies or, perhaps, their face.Thanks to being adults post-internet, when you typed in their name to the search box, chances were that your potential suitor's workplace website, Facebook page, and embarrassing Flickr albums would appear to you within seconds: them asleep, them drunk, them kissing someone else, those college fashion mistakes – their wedding day.Then, employers seeking reliable employees got in on the act, vetting their applicants online.Today using the internet to rate the chances of happy ever after with others has instead become a way to quantify happy ever after with yourself.We seem to have forgotten that the quality of our life, not quantity of our interactions, is what is most important.Thanks to our obsession with Twitter and Facebook, we've become needy youths again.In modern life we remain forever-teenagers, frozen in the land of playground petulance, painfully aware of how our every move is monitored, judged, and rated by our peers and anyone else who "matters".We Google ourselves, we feverishly click the @ button on Twitter to find out who cares about what banal status we've just posted, we've spiralled into a self-obsessed state of being.I'd argue it all began when celebrity culture switched to reality culture.Now each of us stars in our very own Truman Show, competing for the goldfish attention spans of everyone else – "Look at me, LOOK at me, LOOK AT ME!" – and bursting into panic attacks if nobody does.We broadcast our every thoughts across the social networks, we gather "likes", "fans" and "followers" to inflate our self-obsessed egos even more and apologise to them for any digital absences as a popstar would for cancelling a tour date.But if X Factor proves only one thing, it is that we are not all popstars.Still we transmit our personal thought feeds through technology that massages the individual, the "I" ever present from the iPad to the iPlayer.We are immersed in ourselves and our present, and any future plans and consequences no longer appear to register on our radars.Everything has become blurred – our on and offline personas, our public and private lives, our social and business circles.We are continuously networking and self-promoting on our oh-so-smart phones, improving our online CVs to attract new work, new lovers and new "friends". But if our phones are being smart does that make us act more stupid?Elias Aboujaoude is a Silicon Valley psychiatrist who has published Virtually You, an intelligent, informative book which looks at how the internet affects our personalities.The picture Aboujaoude paints is a bleak one.He believes our increased online interactions are leading to a long list of nastiness including narcissism, viciousness and childishness.We seek adoration, snap when we don't get it and then throw our toys about in a tantrum, in extremes, leaving immature dirty protests smeared across the Facebook "walls" of those who have "wronged us" (you may not have done it yourself, but we all have online "friends" who air their dirty digital laundry).This behaviour is repeated offline, and the way and speed we are used to doing things virtually makes us impatient in our physical interactions with the real world and other "real" people.If you're single, especially, the infinite possibilities of new lovers and friends mere clicks away, send delusions of grandeur rocketing – and the impatient nature of this new click click dating could be causing us to cut relationships short.Online and offline personas are often very different, and with more and more time being spent wired in, whether tweeting on date night, or glued to your Netbook, for some, virtual life and the personas of online communities like Second Life are becoming more real than Real Life.Ifor Thomas' new collection of poetry, Stalking Paloma, contains a series of poems written from the perspective of a cyberstalker who falls in and out of love with the singer Paloma Faith – location-tracking the object of his obsession to her local pub."I'm reading your tweets," he writes, "listening to your voice – eye on the door."Thomas gets the turning of the screw bang on, for while the internet does have a glorious capacity to reunite lost loves, lost friends, and connect fractured families and nations, it also has a flipside where the darker shadows of our personalities reside.It's what the columnist Grace Dent refers to as the angry twitchfork mob.For when we take a breather from being narcissistic, we turn our attention either to being sycophantic to the people we follow, or we turn mean.Like the stalkers and the trolls that go into cyber battle on message boards, safe behind their masks of anonymity.The instant one-click nature of it all can see many act without thinking.Trigger-happy tweets and status updates, carpet-bombed under the influence of #anger or #alcohol and deleted and regretted in the fail-whale-sized hangover of the following day.See Cheryl Cole's cringeworthy one-finger salute pictures recently – posting them seemed so fun at the time.I could tell you what would make you happier, but I know you are all too busy narcisurfing to have time to read about anyone or anything else.Instead I'll sign off with a subtle subliminal message – unplug.* Susie Wild, from Swansea, is associate editor of literary journal The Raconteur (Parthian Books) whose America issue launches next month. She is also the author of The Art of Contraception and the Kindle novella Arrivals and is currently working on a novel about the dark and the darkly comic sides of human relationships and the internet.
Read More http://www.walesonline.co.uk/showbiz-and-lifestyle/real-life/2011/11/01/it-s-time-to-log-off-for-your-own-happiness-91466-29694862/#ixzz1cXstZmhN
Corrections: I live in Cardiff. I would also like to add that the Cheryl Cole comment was added in by the sub, I don't care what Cheryl Cole does. Thanks!
Do you know your own Google ranking? Is life only happening if it is worthy of a status update and are the number of your Twitter followers in danger of overtaking @stephenfry? Writer Susie Wild insists all this online interaction is making us deeply unhappy, and the only way to reconnect is to unplug ...THERE was a time you'd only Google someone when you were playing the dating game.It was meant to minimise the risk that you wouldn't be compatible – you wouldn't like their job, their hobbies or, perhaps, their face.Thanks to being adults post-internet, when you typed in their name to the search box, chances were that your potential suitor's workplace website, Facebook page, and embarrassing Flickr albums would appear to you within seconds: them asleep, them drunk, them kissing someone else, those college fashion mistakes – their wedding day.Then, employers seeking reliable employees got in on the act, vetting their applicants online.Today using the internet to rate the chances of happy ever after with others has instead become a way to quantify happy ever after with yourself.We seem to have forgotten that the quality of our life, not quantity of our interactions, is what is most important.Thanks to our obsession with Twitter and Facebook, we've become needy youths again.In modern life we remain forever-teenagers, frozen in the land of playground petulance, painfully aware of how our every move is monitored, judged, and rated by our peers and anyone else who "matters".We Google ourselves, we feverishly click the @ button on Twitter to find out who cares about what banal status we've just posted, we've spiralled into a self-obsessed state of being.I'd argue it all began when celebrity culture switched to reality culture.Now each of us stars in our very own Truman Show, competing for the goldfish attention spans of everyone else – "Look at me, LOOK at me, LOOK AT ME!" – and bursting into panic attacks if nobody does.We broadcast our every thoughts across the social networks, we gather "likes", "fans" and "followers" to inflate our self-obsessed egos even more and apologise to them for any digital absences as a popstar would for cancelling a tour date.But if X Factor proves only one thing, it is that we are not all popstars.Still we transmit our personal thought feeds through technology that massages the individual, the "I" ever present from the iPad to the iPlayer.We are immersed in ourselves and our present, and any future plans and consequences no longer appear to register on our radars.Everything has become blurred – our on and offline personas, our public and private lives, our social and business circles.We are continuously networking and self-promoting on our oh-so-smart phones, improving our online CVs to attract new work, new lovers and new "friends". But if our phones are being smart does that make us act more stupid?Elias Aboujaoude is a Silicon Valley psychiatrist who has published Virtually You, an intelligent, informative book which looks at how the internet affects our personalities.The picture Aboujaoude paints is a bleak one.He believes our increased online interactions are leading to a long list of nastiness including narcissism, viciousness and childishness.We seek adoration, snap when we don't get it and then throw our toys about in a tantrum, in extremes, leaving immature dirty protests smeared across the Facebook "walls" of those who have "wronged us" (you may not have done it yourself, but we all have online "friends" who air their dirty digital laundry).This behaviour is repeated offline, and the way and speed we are used to doing things virtually makes us impatient in our physical interactions with the real world and other "real" people.If you're single, especially, the infinite possibilities of new lovers and friends mere clicks away, send delusions of grandeur rocketing – and the impatient nature of this new click click dating could be causing us to cut relationships short.Online and offline personas are often very different, and with more and more time being spent wired in, whether tweeting on date night, or glued to your Netbook, for some, virtual life and the personas of online communities like Second Life are becoming more real than Real Life.Ifor Thomas' new collection of poetry, Stalking Paloma, contains a series of poems written from the perspective of a cyberstalker who falls in and out of love with the singer Paloma Faith – location-tracking the object of his obsession to her local pub."I'm reading your tweets," he writes, "listening to your voice – eye on the door."Thomas gets the turning of the screw bang on, for while the internet does have a glorious capacity to reunite lost loves, lost friends, and connect fractured families and nations, it also has a flipside where the darker shadows of our personalities reside.It's what the columnist Grace Dent refers to as the angry twitchfork mob.For when we take a breather from being narcissistic, we turn our attention either to being sycophantic to the people we follow, or we turn mean.Like the stalkers and the trolls that go into cyber battle on message boards, safe behind their masks of anonymity.The instant one-click nature of it all can see many act without thinking.Trigger-happy tweets and status updates, carpet-bombed under the influence of #anger or #alcohol and deleted and regretted in the fail-whale-sized hangover of the following day.See Cheryl Cole's cringeworthy one-finger salute pictures recently – posting them seemed so fun at the time.I could tell you what would make you happier, but I know you are all too busy narcisurfing to have time to read about anyone or anything else.Instead I'll sign off with a subtle subliminal message – unplug.* Susie Wild, from Swansea, is associate editor of literary journal The Raconteur (Parthian Books) whose America issue launches next month. She is also the author of The Art of Contraception and the Kindle novella Arrivals and is currently working on a novel about the dark and the darkly comic sides of human relationships and the internet.
Read More http://www.walesonline.co.uk/showbiz-and-lifestyle/real-life/2011/11/01/it-s-time-to-log-off-for-your-own-happiness-91466-29694862/#ixzz1cXstZmhN
Corrections: I live in Cardiff. I would also like to add that the Cheryl Cole comment was added in by the sub, I don't care what Cheryl Cole does. Thanks!
October 30, 2011
Why women in radio are starting to talk back
'From awards ceremonies to drive-time presenters, radio is dominated by men. But not for much longer, writes one of the team behind the launch of Sound Women, a pressure group devoted to giving women a louder voice...'
More: http://m.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/oct/30/radio-sound-women-sexism-feature?cat=tv-and-radio&type=article
More: http://m.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/oct/30/radio-sound-women-sexism-feature?cat=tv-and-radio&type=article
October 27, 2011
The lack of women reviewers
Fantastic article outlining many of my issues with being a female critic in a world that is still so laughably embarrassingly far from gender-equal: http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/blog_01/blog_item.asp?Blog_01ID=270
PS... "Katy, Hi, I'll review some books written by men, if you want... I want."
PS... "Katy, Hi, I'll review some books written by men, if you want... I want."
Wildlife
This blog combines all my posts for the Bright Young Things website, Mslexia, Buzz, The Raconteur, The Stage, Artrocker and any other online content.
Formatting may be distorted as I have simply copied ...more
Formatting may be distorted as I have simply copied ...more
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