The Shrieking Violet issue 16, Manchester Blog Award and recent inspiration

Issue 16 features Bert Jansch, Manchester's typography, city quarters, Esperanto, Belle Vue, smokey beans, creative writing, poetry, embroidery and illustration.

I have been thinking about the different types of quarters that seem to be appearing more and more, not just in Manchester but in other towns and cities I have visited.

Nija Dalal is a writer and radio producer, and has just finished an MA in Anthropology. She's radio obsessive, cooks and crafts and sews, and keeps a blog about it when she remembers. She grew up in the American South, in a bizarre immigrant household, though no more bizarre than most immigrant households. She says "y'all." Currently in Manchester, she's lived in Sydney and Atlanta, and she's looking for a job in radio (do you have one going, by the way?)...Nija has condensed some of her Masters thesis findings into an article about the anthropological implications of Manchester's typography.

Bill Chapman, who has been speaking Esperanto since 1967, got in touch with me offering an insider's perspective on an article I wrote about the Esperanto for the modernist issue 1. During our subsequent exchange of emails, he sent me a photo of the Manchester Esperanto society in 1948 (motto 'Obstinately onwards'!) and told me about the adventures Esperanto has enabled him to have. Esperanto celebrates its 125th anniversary next year, and I asked Bill to expand on his stories in article form for the Shrieking Violet. Bill is a magistrate in north Wales and has worked for many years in education and training, most recently in the field of lifelong learning. He is enjoying being a grandfather.

Long-time contributor and friend of the Shrieking Violet Rebecca Willmott describes herself as 'a self publisher with a specific writing interest in revisiting the circus with a needle and thread'. Her favourite things are: pumpkins, clowns, embroidery hoops and running writing and book binding workshops with children and sometimes adults, 'but children are more curious'. Manchester's Belle Vue circus holds a particular fascination for Rebecca, and she has written and embroidered an article on it. Rebecca has just moved to London to start an internship at textile magazine Selvedge.

Louise M. North wrote her first story, about a blue apple, aged 5. She likes writing about the odd, the weird and the wonderful and, if she can manage it, the odd, weird and wonderful all in one story. Louise has combined the odd and weird in a story about a recognisable Manchester locale, with an illustration by Alex Boswell.

Cyrus Amini, who has contributed a poem to issue 16 of the Shrieking Violet, has previously been an independent video producer and broadcast professional. He now develops property nicely but mainly concentrates on enjoying himself.

Mr Jacket's smokey beans recipe came to the Shrieking Violet via Morag Rose of the Loiterers Resistance Movement. I have tried and tested it and recommend eating hearty helpings on top of toasted, buttered rye bread for dinner on a winter's night, with the leftovers for lunch the next day.

The cover is by Manchester-based illustrator Bryony Jackson. I'm really pleased as I have long been a fan of Bryony's work and have been asking her to design a cover ever since the Shrieking Violet started back in August 2009!

Daniel Fogarty, an artist and designer based at Rogue Studios in Ancoats, kindly assisted with the design and layout.

Remember, this publication is best read whilst listening to guitarist and singer Bert Jansch, who died of cancer last month.

Read issue 16 online here:

Open publication - Free publishing - More fanzines

Download and print your own copy of the Shrieking Violet here.

Very badly photocopied copies will be left around various places in the city centre this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon, including Piccadilly Records, Good Grief! shop (in the Soup Kitchen), Koffee Pot, Oklahoma, Nexus Art Cafe, Cornerhouse.

To request a copy in the post (free) or to contribute to future editions email Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com or join the Shrieking Violet Facebook group.

Manchester Blog Award

The Shrieking Violet won Best Arts and Culture Blog at the 2011 Manchester Blog Awards which took place during Manchester Literature Festival, after being nominated for the third year in a row. It was good to hear readings from other blogs at the awards ceremony, and to hear the winning entires in the Real Story competition, including Shrieking Violet contributor Nija Dalal! It was a shame that I was rushing off to the Jens Lekman gig at Band on the Wall, on the other side of town. Many thanks to anyone who read, nominated or voted for the Shrieking Violet.

Other winners included Shrieking Violet issue 10/Manchester's Modernist Heroines contributor Hayley Flynn, who won Best City and Neighbourhood Blog with Skyliner. David Bailey, who designed the cover for the Shrieking Violet issue 10, won Best Personal Blog for Food Legend.

Recent inspiration

I've been dipping in and out of the artist Ryan Gander's book Catalogue Raisonabble Vol. 1. My favourite bits of the book are his writing, especially extracts from his 'Loose Associations', interesting essays which flit from topic to topic in 'loose associations'. These led me to a brilliant magazine called Dot Dot Dot, produced by Stuart Bailey of Dexter Sinister, in which some of Gander's Loose Associations appeared. I've been reading issue 19 of Dot Dot Dot, which compiles editions of a newspaper called THE FIRST/LAST NEWSPAPER which was issued from Port Authority for three weeks during November 2009. Content is a mixture of archive material and contemporary articles written by different international artists and writers, some fairly short and others more in-depth, quite often concerning the media, the history of the press, the evolution of publishing and mass communication.

I recently watched this lecture from 2007, which has contributions from Stuart Bailey, as well as Michael Bierut from the website Design Observer. I really enjoyed hearing about how Dot Dot Dot started and developed as a magazine, and how it received submissions of content that was not what you would expect to find in a graphic design magazine but the editors published it anyway to change conceptions about what 'should' be printed. I was also interested in Michael Bierut's talk about how Design Observer started and grew, and attracted readers despite the length of its posts! He made some observations about comments on blogs and blogging 'communities'. I am often discouraged that there are few comments posted on the Shrieking Violet (especially negative comments) and the lack of discussion or debate around anything I write.

54th Venice Biennale

Four years ago I visited Venice for the first time, an impromptu trip booked a couple of days beforehand to join a friend at the Biennale. It was a rewarding experience – Venice is the ideal city to wander round unplanned and without a map – in fact it's best experienced lost as you never know what's waiting around the next corner. I was overwhelmed not just by the canals and narrow passageways, but excited and inspired by a few days of wandering around a city taken over by art. As well as the two main Biennale venues – the Arsenale and the Giardini – I constantly stumbled across pavilions spread throughout the city, peering at art tucked into the corners and attic spaces of palazzos, on show right next to the ever-present, gently lapping, intensely blue water. I had to miss the Biennale two years ago, as Venice can be a very expensive city to visit, especially when unemployed. Being in the lucky position of having a job meant funds permitted me to attend this year, but it was a flying visit with a day at the Giardini and a day at the Arsenale and not as much time as I would have liked to have visited the independent pavilions.

Even by the standards of Venice – itself a floating, watery marvel (for a short documentary about how Venice 'works' visit http://vimeo.com/21688538), the Arsenale is spectacular, a series of vast spaces where ships were once built and various outbuildings which still contain the rusty, broken remnants of machinery. I found it all too easy to be distracted from the art by the surroundings and much of the art that stood out for me was that which took on the epic space by standing up to the hefty brick columns and reaching upwards to the high ceilings. Adrian Villar Rojas' dense display of monumental clay sculptures stand like cracked, uprooted trees in the Argentinian pavilion, and other highlights are some of the para-pavilions – pavilions constructed by artists across the Biennale to house the work of other artists.

Song Dong's para-pavilion makes an impressive introduction to the Arsenale – a recreation of a traditional Chinese home surrounded by a maze of wardrobes salvaged from local families. Each is similar but subtly different – remnants of their past still stick to them including scraps of wallpaper and stickers, reminders of the individuals that once owned them – although they're all connected by a recurring green curtain. It seems appropriate that the parapavilion houses personal work by both Moroccan Yto Barraba and Ryan Gander. Barraba's plays with the reliability of memory – Family Tree is built from the faded, leftover spaces where photographs once sat on the wall of a family home, and her film Hand-Me Downs is a series of childhood stories effectively set to found film footage – whilst Gander's is a tiny self-portrait of the artist sprawled out of his wheelchair.

Another highlight at the Arsenale is Christian Marclay's The Clock, a rare opportunity to forget your surroundings – and a film in which you could quite easily lose yourself. The Clock is a twenty four hour collage of clips which literally follows the clock around the day, capturing the suspense as well as the boredom of waiting for the time to change – and rousing a few laughs from visitors stretched out on sofas and settled down to escape the torrential rain outside.

I found the shows at the Giardini, where countries have their own pavilion in the grounds, for the most part, more interesting. This year there was a trend towards transforming the pavilions until they were unrecognisable – the Dutch pavilion has been reinvented as a theatre because, as we're told in the show, it's completely unsuited to showing art despite being an icon of modernist architecture. Greece's is reclad in wood and filled with water, the visitor experience stripped down to crossing a bridge across a new, artificial lagoon. The roof has been removed from the British pavilion, where Mike Nelson's installation I, Imposter recreates a dwelling in Istanbul, down to the smells and head-ducking lowness of the ceilings. Visitors are left to wander round a series of rooms which bear the traces of recent human activity – as if someone's just left. It's eerily realistic, and the inclusion of two darkrooms – hung with photos of buildings which inspired the work – make make you suspend your disbelief and wonder if you might be in a 'real' building, transported piece by piece to Venice and painstakingly rebuilt.

Although I preferred pavilions which stuck to one or two artists, such as the understated elegance of the Austrian pavilion, which houses sculptures and films by Markus Schinwald, and the interplay between the sculpture of father and son Dominik and Jiří (who stopped making sculpture before his son was born) Lang in the Czech pavilion, rather than group shows, other highlights at the Giardini include Jan Švankmajer's disquieting and subtly ominous 1968 film The Garden in the thought-provoking Danish Pavilion, themed around free speech. In the main venue at the Giardini, Ryan Gander's imagining of what a 25 euro coin would look like, stuck to the floor as if it's landed from the future, is worth a look (if you don't walk straight over it!), and I enjoyed Amalia Pica's work, including Venn Diagram, which goes back to the censorship facing society in her native Argentina during the dictatorship of the 1970s.

One thing I didn't remember from my last visit to the Biennale is how bizarre and surreal the experience can be. Much of the work consists of grotesque spectacle – thousands of stuffed pigeons overlook visitors to the Giardini, placed there by artist Maurizio Cattelan, whilst Hong Kong's Frog King (inhabiting a cavern that's like a bit of Camden Market transported to Venice) greets visitors outside the Arsenale. Italy's pavilion, bewildering and often kitsch, incorporates a terrifying installation on the mafia that uses every technique possible to disorientate and confuse – darkness, corridors, loud noises. Visiting the overbearing Swiss pavilion – a claustrophobic cave constructed from consumer detritus and graphic, inescapable images of human violence – is also a genuinely uncomfortable experience – although the effect is slightly lessened by staff crouching with brown tape making repairs and the whole thing starts to fall apart when the cotton bud structures begin disintegrating. Algorithm, a pipe organ attached to an ATM in the US pavilion is, whilst not exactly subtle, at least, entertaining – especially watching the reactions of members of the public who have queued up to take out cash to a musical soundtrack.

Venice Biennale is on until November 27.

A ticket allowing entry to the Arsenale and Giardini costs €20.