10 December 2005
Saturday 10 December 2005 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Ian McMillan presents the weekly cabaret of new writing, poetry and performance. This edition features another instalment from The Verb's award-winning eartoonist, Peter Blegvad.
Programme Details
As Radio 3 gets ready to celebrate Bach - every note, night and day - one of the poets commissioned by the Bach Season, Jo Shapcott, talks to Ian McMillan about her poem, Art of Fugue, inspired by the great master. She reads it, and reveals how music shaped the poem, and how it's as much a poem about listening as it is about life too.
Verlans is French backwards slang which is used in a forthcoming novel Just Like Tomorrow, which took France by storm last year. Translator of the novel, Sarah Adams, talks to Ian about the challenges of street slang and how to make it relevant to a British audience with different language and cultural references. She's joined by Cleo Soazandry, brought up in Paris until age 11, and together they reveal how slang in France has a very different role to play than in Britain. And, in a special performance for The Verb, Mister Gee, performs two pieces which reveal how street slang and hip hop can be great partners.
Also on the programme, The Verb's award-winning eartoonist Peter Blegvad, in one of his sublime acts of surreal thinking, shows how getting to grips with the gizzards of geese reveals the role machines have in translating language.
And The Giro Playboy, the debut novel of Michael Smith, who gained public attention for his work by delivering it as pamphlets in pizza boxes. He talks to Ian McMillan about how the Beat poets have influenced his writing, and his wish to make writing an essential part of pop culture.
That's all on The Verb with Ian McMillan and his guests at 9.30pm here on BBC Radio 3.
Producer: Ariane Koek
Additional Information
1) The Giro Playboy will be published in March 2006 by Faber and Faber. Michael Smith will be performing his work as The Giro Playboy across London in December: Friday 9 Dec, O'Reilly's Kentish Town ; 13 Dec, Bishops Gate (tba); 22 Dec, The Griffin , Shoreditch
2) Poetry In the Key of Gee by Mister Gee is out on Dapper Records. Mister Gee hosts the performance poetry night Brix-Tongue in London . For information about this and all his work go to www.mister-gee.com . www.applesandsnakes.org
3) Just Like Tomorrow by Faiza Guene and translated by Sarah Adams will be published in the UK in 2006 by Random House.
4) BBC Radio 3's Bach Week celebrates Christmas 2005 by broadcasting the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach continuously over ten days from Dec 16-25. For further information go to: www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/bach
