Showing posts with label In Ballast to the White Sea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label In Ballast to the White Sea. Show all posts

Monday, 13 October 2014

The Lowry Lounge Saturday 25th October 2014


This year's Lowry Lounge promises to be very special!

The Lowry Lounge with special guest Iain Sinclair
The Bluecoat, School Lane, Liverpool
Saturday 25 October 2014
11am-6pm 
Tickets: Walk (11am-1pm) £5/Iain Sinclair talk (2-3.30pm) £5/combined ticket £8/book launch (4-6pm) free. Tickets & Information 0151 702 5324


The Bluecoat’s annual celebration of Merseyside-born ​author of Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry​ ​(1909-57)​, ​features the European launch of his 'lost' novel In Ballast to the White Sea

This autobiographical book, Lowry’s longest and most ambitious project of the mid‐1930s, was thought to have been lost in a fire, but was later discovered in New York Public Library after it become known his first wife, Jan Gabrial, still had a typescript of the book. Now, nearly 60 years after the writer’s death, the first ever published edition will be launched at this day‐long event in Liverpool.

The book is about a Cambridge undergraduate who wants to be a novelist but has come to believe that both his book and, in a sense, his life have already been 'written' by a Norwegian novelist.  Partly set on Merseyside, its annotations have been compiled by Chris Ackerley, with the help of New Brighton Lowry expert Colin Dilnot.

The Lowry Lounge 2014 features writer Iain Sinclair talking about Lowry in relation to his 2013 book American Smoke, which follows in the footsteps of American Beat writers and of Lowry, whose ​work in ​some ways anticipated theirs.

The event also includes a guided walk round Liverpool city centre, led by Colin Dilnot, visiting sites relating to the book and to Lowry’s childhood years on Merseyside. 

The book launch itself will be introduced by the editor of In Ballast to the White Sea, Patrick ​A. ​McCarthy and Vik Doyen, who wrote its foreword. 

Thursday, 9 August 2012

Professor Chris Ackerley – The Nordic vision of Malcolm Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea



Thanks to Nicolas Labbe for informing me that Chris Ackerley's paper was now available as a podcast.

Listen to the above paper delivered at the conference below HERE

Event Date: 18-20 July 2012
Hotel Solstrand
Solstrandveien 200, Postboks 54,
5201 Os, Norway
Modernism, Christianity, and Apocalypse

A conference organised by the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen, Norway; funded by the Bergen Research Foundation through the ‘Modernism and Christianity’ research project.

Professor Chris Ackerley – The Nordic vision of Malcolm Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea Malcolm Lowry’s re-discovered novel, In Ballast to the White Sea, is set in the 1930s and depicts its central character as caught between a vision of Cambridge Socialism (Russia) and a Nordic vision (Norway); but the latter is complicated by the Nazi appropriation of the Aryan ideal and the Axis desire to create a sphere of influence throughout the Baltic countries. This political theme is complemented and mediated by the literary one: Lowry’s deliberate adoption of Nordic themes and allusions, most notably from Nordahl Grieg, The Ship Sails On and Johannes Jensen, The Long Journey, but many others as well. These constitute a dialogue between Grieg’s socialism, Jensen’s advocacy of a Nordic vision, and Lowry’s attraction to both, despite their incompatibility; an attraction that led him to a complex understanding (often acute, sometimes incongruous) of the political climate as he perceived it to be in Norway, and with reference to himself.

Chris Ackerley is Professor and previous Head of English at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. His speciality is annotation, particularly of the work of Samuel Beckett and Malcolm Lowry, He has two full-length annotations of Beckett’s Murphy and Watt (republished Edinburgh U P, 2010), and with Stan Gontarski is author of the Grove Press and Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (2004, 2006). He is currently working on a study of Samuel Beckett and Science, and annotating three texts in the EMiC (Editing Manuscripts in Canada) project, one of which is Lowry’s recently re-discovered novel, In Ballast to the White Sea.

Friday, 4 May 2012

Gutted Arcades of the Past

Gutted Arcades of the Past is an on-going project that I have been working on since 2009.

The project is an attempt to create an encyclopaedia of Malcolm Lowry’s early life and work from 1909 to 1934. The cut off date of 1934 was chosen as a symbolic one reflecting him turning his back on Europe for the New World leaving Southampton on 28th July 1934 for New York aboard the Aquitania.

I have now decided to start sharing my work in the form of a blog to sit alongside my main Lowry blog Malcolm Lowry @ The Nineteenth Hole.

Gutted Arcades of the Past will evolve as my research continues but the biggest impact in the future for the project is what will be revealed on publication of Lowry’s re-discovered manuscript of his novel In Ballast to the White Sea

Saturday, 11 December 2010

Editing Modernism in Canada - Important news for Lowry Enthusiasts


I am pleased to report some significant news regarding the publishing of new and out of print works by Malcolm Lowry under the banner of the Editing Modernism in Canada project:

The EMiC project is affiliated with and/or partnered with several presses and series of editions: The Porcupine’s Quill; the Canadian Literature Collection, edited by Dean Irvine, and the Anthology Collection, edited by Janice Fiamengo, both published by the University of Ottawa Press; the Laurier Poetry Series, edited by Neil Besner, and the TransCanada series, edited by Smaro Kamboureli, both published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press; the CrossCurrents series, edited by Paul Hjartarson, published by the University of Alberta Press; McGill-Queen’s University Press; and the University of Toronto Press.

The editions in preparation include texts by a wide range of canonical, formerly canonical or popular, and non-canonical authors: Carroll Aikins, Ted Allan, Sol Allen, Irene Baird, Marius Barbeau, Bertram Brooker, Ernest Buckler, Fred Cogswell, Louis Dudek, Sui Sin Far, Marie Joussaye Fotheringham, A.M. Klein, Raymond Knister, Dorothy Livesay, Malcolm Lowry, Hugh MacLennan, Eli Mandell, P.K. Page, E.J. Pratt, F.R. Scott, Elizabeth Smart, Miriam Waddington, Sheila Watson, Wilfred Watson and the collaborative authorship of Martha Ostenso and Douglas Durkin as well as Oscar Ryan, Mildred Goldberg, Ed Cecil-Smith, and Frank Love. Many of these editions include digital apparatuses, and many of the proposed editions will be published online in the EMiC digital repository.

Given the EMiC project’s mandate to supervise and train graduate students and postdoctoral fellows working on their own editions, these editions are but a partial representation of the potential number of EMiC editions.

Our rationale for the selection of authors and texts has been determined by multiple criteria:

1) canonical authors whose works are either out of print or available only in excerpts in anthologies;

(2) canonical authors whose work is in print but unavailable in critical editions;

(3) previously unpublished works by canonical authors;

(4) formerly canonical or popular authors whose works are out of print and otherwise inaccessible;

(5) non-canonical authors whose work has already been the object of previous critical and literary-historical study but remains unpublished, uncollected, or out of print;

(6) marginalized and minoritized authors whose work has not yet been widely recognized as part of modernist literary cultures.

In addition to EMiC editions, the project will issue a series of essay collections and special journal issues with contributions by participants in the 2011 workshop and the 2010 and 2012 conferences.
Read more on EMiC

What is exciting for Lowry enthusiasts is the following which EMiC has in the pipeline:

2011

* Malcolm Lowry, Lunar Caustic, eds. Victor Doyen and Christopher Ackerley. Print edition with web-based apparatus (University of Ottawa Press)

* Lowry and Space, eds. Miguel Mota and Richard Lane. Multimedia book.

* After Lowry, dir. Miguel Mota. Film.

2012

*Malcolm Lowry, In Ballast to the White Sea, eds. Paul Tiessen, Patrick McCarthy, and Miguel Mota (University of Ottawa Press). Print edition with web-based apparatus.

2013

* Malcolm Lowry, The 1940 Under the Volcano, eds. Paul Tiessen, Patrick McCarthy, and Miguel Mota. Print edition with web-based apparatus (University of Ottawa Press)

Probably, the most exciting news is the publication of the supposedly "lost" manuscript of In Ballast to the White Sea. I understand that this publication will be based on an early draft held in Jan Gabrial's archive. This early draft may not be as complete as the one lost in the fire in Lowry's shack in 1944. However, it will provide a glimpse into the long thought lost work which will have huge significance for Lowry enthusiasts and scholars.

I will keep readers posted on above when I have more details.