frame 30 September 2022
The September Issue
by the CHEERIO team
An autumnal welcome to all, from CHEERIO team!
In The September Issue, we bring film announcements from writer, actor and director Neil Bartlett, pyschogeographer Iain Sinclair and an a comical piece on our new Prime Minister.
With this being a transformative time of year, we are delighted to start this Long Read by presenting renowned journalist and media pundit Jonathan Lis' piece about our new Prime Minister.
No. 10 Downing Street
In the end, dreams really can come true. The strangest person you met at university can rise to become prime minister with no discernible charisma, competence or intellect. As Elizabeth the Second this week crowned her successor, Elizabeth the (I’ll spare your flushes), the nation seemed gripped by either existential foreboding or horrified entertainment.
Here was a woman known for precisely four things: the speech about pork markets and disgraceful cheese imports, now in its third generation of devoted online fans; staging public appearances with the same backdrops and clothing as Margaret Thatcher, like Single White Female for Tories and dead people; earnestly informing Parliament that HMP Pentonville had deployed barking dogs to deter drones; and having once been a Liberal Democrat.
The public has no idea what to expect from a woman who cannot engage on either a human or intellectual level. In a ten-year ministerial career Truss’s only achievement was rolling over existing trade deals and negotiating two new ones by giving her Antipodean counterparts everything they demanded at the expense of British farmers. She has spent the last two months pledging to ‘deliver’, like a version of The Omen narrated by Damien’s midwife.
There is a consistency to Liz Truss: despite the move from Lib Dem republican, to Cameronite Remainer, to hard-right Brexit zealot, she has always believed in the individual – and that individual is her. At a time of economic crisis, Britain’s last remaining surplus commodity will be the prime minister’s self-confidence. We can only hope that prospective foreign buyers don’t speak English.
by Jonathan Lis
Cheerio is also delighted to announce that Neil Bartlett’s beautiful cycle of stories, ADDRESS BOOK is shortlisted for the POLARI PRIZE, the UK’s only dedicated award for LGBTQ+.
Neil Bartlett writes:
" I am thrilled to be on this year's shortlist for the Polari Prize. Of course, it's great to be on the list - but even better is being part of such a visible and high-profile proof that queer writing and queer publishing are finding ways to be more inclusive, more adventurous and less afraid than ever. It's nearly forty years since my first book came out ; I'm proud to see how far we've come."
Readings and discussions from ADDRESS BOOK and other titles will take place at the shortlist showcase event on 15th September at the British Library, the Polari salon's new home. ROI, Neil Bartlett’s film with Anthony Reynolds, and UBU ROYALE, his new translation of Alfred Jarry’s UBU ROI, will be screened and published by CHEERIO in 2023.
THE GOLD MACHINE, was premiered and screened at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse on 13th September and was hugely enjoyed by all who attened. Sight & Sound, Ben Nicholson writes of the film: 'Sinclair's elegant prose peers through the layers of history built precariously upon one another, attempting to connect with deeper substrata of understanding.’
A collaboration with film-maker Grant Gee and from Iain’s book of the same name, it combines travel and psychogeography, exploring Iain’s great-grandfather’s journey to the Amazon.
Iain Sinclair writes…
"I have been excavating the family legend of my great-grandfather's 1891 expedition to Peru, and to one of the sources the Amazon, for what feels like most of my life. Arthur Sinclair published the account of his journey in 1895, the year when Joseph Conrad's first novel appeared. As a child, I treated the story as a rip-roaring adventure of dying mules, vanishing guides and white-water rapids approached on a balsa raft. Much later, my daughter, Farne, became obsessed with this book and began to undertake serious research, uncovering a much darker tale of the surveyors. Of land enclosures and coffee plantations. The filmmaker Grant Gee, with whom I had long talked of a collaboration, came with us, when I returned with my daughter, right before Covid closed off all further contact. Grant's film is now being streamed on Mubi and shown in various independent cinemas.
One unexpected outcome was that after developing techniques, blending documentary research and myth-making, I had the chance to write about the life and achievements of the photographer John Deakin. This felt like an inevitable request. The posthumous Deakin, just like my great-grandfather, was soon busy dictating his own version of what he felt I should be revealing of his fabulous and under-appreciated career."
Iain Sinclair’s novel, PARIAH GENIUS, which focusses on John Deakin and his world, will be published by CHEERIO in 2024.