I started a blog a while ago to document the restoration work we do, I think it’s rather interesting & worth documenting. At the start of the year a bought a nice camera & have been working on time lapsing all the various stages of the job. You can see the first couple on the blog, but I have 50gb of photos to process and a rather poor computer that cant handle the task!

The blog is also about my own personal work, mostly because I doubt I’d manage 2 different blogs at the same time…

Anyways this is where I make!

So Saturday morning it’s pouring with rain…. I’ve been living in the same flat for a year and I’ve always had the idea of fitting a window in every flat I live in just for the hell of it so I figured it was time for that to start.

So the target window is the classic space above the front door..

Ah what can we say, a bit dull but has potential….I took some measurements and made my way down to the studio.

Music / check.

Tea Bags & milk / Check.

3.27pm….

I got finished at 10pm, too late to fit the window so up early on Sunday and she’s done by half 12.

I really enjoy the workshop, it’s a total joy to have all the possible tools for whatever crazy plan I’ve come up with to hand. The only thing that would make it better is a coffee maker.

My Bench is usually pretty tidy… not so this week!

The most important things in the studio are probably the kettle and the dusty radio. Well what’s not dusty in this studio?

It’s located in part of the Wasps on Dalry road, a very entertaining st. I like the open studios weekend we have and hopefully this year I’ll have the time lapse videos ready to show people. The business of stained glass has many stages and processes and altogether it’s probably quite unknown to anyone outside of the business, it would be nice to share a little insight to the work.

If I’d planned this a bit more I’d like to put in more about the various tools we use. Essentially there are only a few key items. That’s part of the beauty of this work, it’s all hand tools and it’s the same tools that stained glass artists have been using since the beginning more or less.

Aye well, this has been me, that’s been my weekend and this is where I make!

More: Website | Twitter

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‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.

As Andy Stark, the photography tutor puts it, several of his graduates have successfully ‘transcended art school’. Whilst it’s typical to see students taking on ‘issues’, this isn’t ‘docu-porn’ – here are people who have gone into unchartered territory, lived and breathed their subject matter and thought about relevant ways in which they might affect some change.

Go and seek out James Bettney’s work. Having heard about the plight of Nepalese widows, ostracised by their society on account of long-held reincarnation beliefs, he worked tirelessly to record their lives. These are more than just moving portraits – in themseleves first rate – but complete life stories meticulously recorded and translated, and presented here in a beautiful artists book. He’s in the process of setting up a charity and a website which will be at mutunepal.com

In a similar vein, Sarah Fishlock has worked closely with the Scottish Middle Eastern Council telling highly personal stories of isolated Iraqi’s living in Glasgow, stuck in a cultural and physical no mans’s land after working for the British MOD. Shrouded by official secrecy that prevents their faces being photographed, Fishlock instead trains her camera on incidental details that tell you much about the transient state of the lives she’s documenting.

Alec Farmer’s slick graphic work belies much earthier concerns and practical ideas. His ‘Co-ordinate’ project is one of those devastatingly simple but brilliant ideas harnessing off the shelf technology. He uses reskinned Flickr Maps as the basis for connecting world issues with problem solvers and designers, and although hypothetical it’s easy to see it taking off.

Lu Sisi (another graduate familiar to CenSta members) is a motion graphic exponent who has carved out his own niche through an exploration of the merging of sound and image. His main piece is a tribute to the Heidelberg press in the art school caseroom, which he brings alive with it’s own clanking, whirring sounds boiled down into a sort of breakbeat soundtrack for his stop motion animation. (Industry watchers should note that he recently won an New York Festival Gold, where he was entered into a professional category by mistake!).

Robb Hetherington illustration show is sublime. I initially thought it was graphics, such is the attention to typographic craft and his exploration of the printed medium. He’s reset Samuel Beckett’s ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, his work responding to and translating Beckett’s ideas, produced as one-off monoprints. Made with an innovative technique blending black ink and golden-yellow varnish on perspex plates, each piece is singular and unique, an artwork rather than something set for reproduction. On an adjacent table a monitor showing a Beckett film is placed face down on a scanner, and new ‘translations’ of it – distorted black shapes and scan lines, are pumped out of a printer.

Sebastian Kalvik has an assured maturity about his work, an understanding of classic typography and layout with the conceptual ability to push projects. I’m making it sound dull, but it’s not, his ‘Cultural Cartographies’ and Scott vs Amundsen books are a joy, and will provoke severe designer envy.

Oliver Pitt. Illustration. I’ve used the word sublime already, and I’m not even sure how to categorise this work. Beguiling? Whetever it is it keeps drawing you back in though. And I want to own some of it. I’m also sure I’ll be seeing more of it commissioned. Tutor Dan Williams says that Pitt has ‘created his own visual language… a spiritual space’ and that makes sense when you’re in front of these largely mono works which seem to oscillate,
and describe entirely foreign shapes, objects and areas.

There’s almost too much to mention in detail, so here’s a few more in summary:

Dean Pauley ‘s delicately crafted manuscripts of of spam email;

Walter Hamilton’s ‘Last’ books – brick like documents of the soon to be demolished Foulis building;

Eva Dolgyra’s monoprints;

Rory Hamilton’s holographic type experiments;
Tau Siroko’s – Intertextual newspapers / format posters;
Lynsey Marshall’s HD films, scripted in collaboration with Louise Welsh.

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Thanks to Steve Rigley, Andy Stark, Dan Williams, Edwin Pickstone, Kerry Aylin, Mark Baines, and various students
for letting me in and around on the day.

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City Night Preview tonight – Thursday 9 June

Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2011 | gsa.ac.uk  for further details.
Open: 11-18 June 2011.
Sat/Sun: 10am – 5pm
Mon – Thu: 10am – 9pm
Fri 17th June: 10am – 7pm

2011 marks a special year for the Glasgow School of Art Degree Show.  It’s the last time there will be a show in the Foulis Building and the Newbery Tower, the twin design obelisks that have faced the Mackintosh building for the past 35 years and are now to be replaced with a fine Steven Holl designed structure.

In this years Fine Art show in the ‘Mac’, there’s evidence of the fluctuating relationship between ‘art’ and ‘design’ – if not a ‘cross-disciplinary practice’ then at least the presence of parellel design languages, and design methods being interpreted. For example, Tim Savage references Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes and QR codes, and Kate Lampitt Adey and Theresa Malanay take textile craft as a starting point to explore feminist issues. Adey’s work references embroidery hoops installed as crafted collaged patchwork canvases, however it’s Malaney’s work which really engages with the internal architecture, semi-opaque monochrome hangings which drape the full double-height of the Mackintosh studios, creating a distinct ‘veil’.

Approaching both the design/fine art and gender politics paradigms in an equally refreshing way is Hells Gibson, whose beautifully understated letterpress posters pepper the vertical slats of the Mac with hard hitting sloganeering. Great graphic design, let alone art.

Hannah Brackston’s “Nomadic Workshop” – featuring a bike pulling a trolley with a tent and tools looks like it’s bumped into graduating visual communication student Alec Farmer’s Nomadic Shelter.   (maybe they could go on a tour together).

There’s plenty of enjoyable spectacle where the artists – perhaps in reaction to the nature of the degree show itself and the pressure to be ‘discovered’ or ‘make it’ – explore a self-exploitative side. The basement of the Mac this year at times resembles a tongue in cheek fetishistic dungeon. Alicia Mathews leads us, via a concealed door and Leonard Cohen, into a sort of onanist’s screening chamber complete with sticky cinema seats and red-lit flock wallpaper, whilst she writhes fully frontal and awkwardly humps a mattress. 

Max Prus manages to combine a vertically challenged scottish actor playing ‘Mark Chapman’ (“you might know me, ahm famous fur killin John Lennon”) in a time travelling fridge, and some rather explicit ‘love’ scenes with himself a friend in a Yoko Ono mask, whilst Ono’s “Mrs Lennon” plays in the background. He’s also aiming to catch Modern Institute curator Toby Webster’s attention by implicating him in Amazon shopping reviews of used pantyhose. “I’m disappointed, these are woolen, not opaque as advertised, this is not the first time…”.

In another darkened cove Claudia Nova invites us to “Applause” [in neon] for her absent self, and signs-off with a Warner Bros. cartoon style “That’s all folks”.

Meanwhile Beth Dynowski simply has a sign-up promising us that she will essentially be installing herself in her space all next week as a performance work. Insert art jokes about ‘absence and the self’ and ‘escaping the confines of the gallery space’ here.

Escaping the basement, there’s still much to seduce you in the large open Mackintosh gallery up the main staircase. You won’t really fail to spot the Alice Metila Steffen’s Essex inspired light installations, made up of white stilettos and a crude sunbed tube table. A must-see for all you TOWIE fans.

For the sheer aesthetic pleasures of good old paint on canvas, there’s Gillian Anderson’s marbled glories, tastefully tonal yet rooted in the process of alchemy and Rorsach ink blot tests.

Meanwhile, one to watch might be Silja Strom, who has a prolific output of intense collaged works

featuring strange distorted mystical creatures. Always great to see development of this type of work too (pictured).

In the same balcony space, Thomas Hatton provides possibly the most assured of the Fine Art Photography bunch, with a ‘barely there’ sort of a show, bleached out desert topographies with painstakingly dodged elements, a nod to a pre-digital craft yet stunningly contemporary.

If, after all this, you feel your senses have been barraged to the point where you can no longer think for yourself, Romany Dear’s installation will happily wrench the balance of control from the viewer back to artist. ”For the next eight minutes I would like to encourage you to fully embrace absolutely everything” a text on the wall instructs.  Dear’s retro cassette tape and headphone audio tour guide then proceeeds, in a Miranda July style deadpan naivety, to gently poke fun at the whole experience of viewing art as it implores the listener/viewer to stroke his chin or ‘become part of an art piece’.

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Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2011 | gsa.ac.uk  for further details.

Open: 11-18 June 2011.
Sat/Sun: 10am – 5pm
Mon – Thu: 10am – 9pm
Fri 17th June: 10am – 7pm

Spaces

You can’t get creative unless you are in the right ‘place’. Merchant City is home to loads of art studio spaces. Whether it’s the creative melting pot that is Glasgow independent studio (walking into them feels just like walking into the art cupboard at primary school, but better!) or the serene, light- filled WASPS studio spaces at The Briggait, you’re bound to find the perfect space to create, work and play!

Ink

Despite doing all of our work online, Ink is still one of our favourite creative tools. We write everything down before giving it the ‘multimedia’ treatment. For inspiration and some great use of ink we go to PLAN-B Books;  Scotland’s only dedicated graphic novel shop.  It’s a great place to immerse yourself with a coffee in one hand and a Graphic novel in the other. Or for some true ink wizardry take a look at Hepcat Tattoo – the country’s only rockabilly studio.  The speciality of the house is, as always, good tattoos, but they do like their American traditional. If you’re a rocker, skate punk, deadbeat or square there is nowhere else to go.

Ideas

We are bursting with ideas for campaigns and ways to showcase the best of Merchant city – but sometimes not every idea can become a reality or we don’t have the tools to make it happen. Ever find yourself in that boat? Then a visit Ico Ico. Ico Ico is a creative company working in music, design and enterprise. Their aim is to increase economic growth and sustainability in the creative industries sector by providing support for enterprises within media, arts, crafts, music, film, performing arts and designer fashion. The perfect creative cure!

Sewing it all together…

So when we have got the space, written down the idea, worked out if it can happen, we need to sew it all together into a campaign! That’s when we hit Make It Glasgow. From hand sewing, machine stitching, crochet and spinning. This is the place to be stitch all your crafty creations together.

What do we when it’s all done?  We hit Blackfriars for a pint to celebrate, before we begin the whole process again….

 http://tinyurl.com/ya67g5w

This year, the book festival was brave. It did things it had never done before. In a time where funding is being pulled left, right and centre, it would be easy for an established festival like the EIBF to stick to their guns, sit on their laurels and hide, but they didn’t.

Instead, they brought out a programme that was rich and varied, with more of my favourite writers than I have ever seen before (and that’s after working for  four literary festivals over six years) and a selection of exciting new events.

From Unbound, which filled the Spiegeltent with music, writing and tons of people every night, to their fantastic guest selectors, to their fantastic social media presence, they were really on the ball. They showed what a book festival could do.

As the Booker prize was announced today it made me sad that they did not take risks with their selection. There was no Mitchell, no Christos Tsiolkas, no spark. Though I appreciate the work that literary novelists do, I ultimately believe that authors who appeal to a wide audience do  great things too.  Be it Scarlett Thomas or (dare I say it) Stephenie Meyer, these guys are really reaching and affecting a large group of people. Neil Gaiman tells a great story about how he was once asked by a literary novelist at a festival how he made his living, to which he replied, ‘I write books’. The novelist was incredulous that Gaiman could support himself solely through his writing. This is something that has really stuck with me.  It makes me happy, then, to see the Guardian running the Not the Booker prize, which allows people to nominate the books they feel are deserving of acclaim. The shortlist is currently being contended, but you can read the original longlist here.

Seeing the range of books submitted for consideration is joyful; just look at it! Comics sit happily next to literary novels, which in turn are making friends with science fiction stalwarts and popular fiction.  It’s very similar to what you see in this year’s book festival programme, and it’s a trend I hope to see continuing.

And so I am going to look forward, to when the winter is over, when Charlotte Square has been re-sod, and my bones stop hurting.  I can’t wait to see what next year’s book festival, and Not the Booker, bring us..

It’s perhaps an overstated question, because books aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and the likes of McSweeney’s have shown that publishing, literature and storytelling can benefit from thoughtful innovation. However, there’s no doubting that digital culture is taking over, and games are at the forefront. In terms of financial turnover, games are bigger than movies; they’re bigger than music; they’re bigger than books or art. Yet, at the same time, they’re often still considered to be nerd territory: a form of culture far away from the mainstream, to be feared and questioned.

Tom Chatfield is an arts writer, most notably for Prospect Magazine. He participated in two events in order to promote his book, Fun, Inc: Why Games are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business.

Chaired by play theorist Pat Kane, the first session asked many of the now-familiar questions about digital culture. Swathes of the conversation could easily have been subtitled: Video games: they’re not as good as going outside, are they? Despite this, Chatfield gave a good overview of gaming culture for the older audience in attendance, although he oddly concentrated his focus on the implications of World of Warcraft on sociological research and population modelling. Sure, participants’ activities in massively multiplayer online games can be measured and statistically modeled, but games have other things to tell us about who we are.

Like most people in my generation, games were my introduction to computers. I can readily remember when the term video games wasn’t a quaint anachronism. I stared in fascination at the Afterburner machine at my local swimming pool; was responsible for a series of horrific crash landings in Timex’s Flight Simulator on my ZX81; spent a year living in North Carolina coveting my neighbour’s NES. For my thirteenth birthday, I asked for a source code compiler, and for most of my teens I traded homemade computer games with my friends. We ran Spire Magazine, one of the first hypertext-based online magazines, which led to coverage in the Financial Times and in other places, which in turn led to my Internet career. Just as some kids learn to play the guitar and end up writing their own songs, I learned how to program. Code and games are arguably the new rock, for at least a subset of my generation; for me, Peter Molyneux and the Bitmap Brothers were every bit as cool as Kurt Cobain.

Games aren’t just about death, although there’s always been a heavy emphasis on bloodsport, which can be cathartic or unsettling depending on your point of view. Take The Secret of Monkey Island: released in 1990, this was part of an adventure series produced by LucasFilm. You can’t die, and there is no scoring; playing these games is about the experience itself, and the only thing you need to do to win is persevere. They crossed a line between movies, interactive fiction and game-playing, becoming ever more sophisticated. Portions of Monkey Island were written by Orson Scott Card, the science fiction author responsible for the classic novel Ender’s Game. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was based on an unproduced movie script, but easily made the transition to a more interactive format. As you progressed, your decisions shaped the kind of gameplay you experienced; if you were more orientated towards action, you could fight your way to the end. If, on the other hand, you were more interested in puzzles or character development, those were also available routes.

The Dig was in some ways the culmination of this genre; it was based on a story idea by Steven Spielberg, and took a psychological, atmospheric approach to weaving a story. Backgrounds were hand-painted, and characters were sparsely animated. Dialogue and plot took a front row seat.

Unfortunately, as the games industry evolved and consumers wanted bigger bangs and fancier graphics, LucasFilm started to focus more and more on flashy, fight-centric Star Wars titles. Their adventure games – undoubtedly classics, both of storytelling and gaming – were discontinued.

All, however, is not lost. The indie games movement only got a brief mention in Tom’s talk, but similarly to the indie film movement’s role in the wider industry, this has become the new home for quieter, more artistically expressive gaming ideas – for example, the breathtakingly beautiful Machinarium.

The second session, Where’s the Fun? took over the Spiegeltent for a discussion about what fun is, how it’s evolved over time, and whether we’re having more or less fun than we used to. Barry Miles discussed the fun he had in sixties London, in underground clubs with the likes of the Rolling Stones, and wondered if the corporate influence on the culture of fun is having a detrimental effect. Digital culture in general, both authors noted, is largely owned by large corporations.

This is actually changing – by technical design as well as through the rise of the indie movement. Just as the corporate managers aren’t the people actually playing or composing music, they’re also not the people genuinely innovating in digital culture. This is still the domain of hackers, who treat it as more of an art or a political endeavour than business. (The open source blogging platform WordPress makes this point succinctly in its motto: “Code is poetry.”) In fact, many people responsible for games, social networks and platforms are unsettled by the corporate influence, and are actively seeking to do something about it. The likes of OStatus are specifically designed to ensure that Facebook and its monolithic ilk will be less relevant in the future than they are today. Similarly, we are likely to see decentralized massively multiplayer games, where different parts of the game universe are crafted by completely separate artists, hackers and designers. The gaming world is evolving, and it is as artistic as it is lucrative.

It’s become obvious that there is a generation gap that affects understanding of digital culture, but it’s not insurmountable. Like most things, you have to experience it to really understand it: Facebook and Twitter, for example, is a terrifying idea to people who don’t actively participate. I’ll fully admit that war games like Call Of Duty scare me, but I know that if I played them, I’d grok their significance and purpose.

Just as rock and roll was a new, envelope pushing culture in the fifties, sixties and seventies, digital culture is remaking who we are in the 21st century. Games are an integral part of that, and are an artistic medium to embrace and explore rather than fear and question.

David Shields has a compelling proposition: that long-form fiction, at least popularly, has not really evolved past the 19th century novel. He argues that our lives are more complex, demanding and overloaded with strands of information than ever before, in a way that the fiction – and art as a whole – that attempts to describe our lives hasn’t so far managed to tackle. The title of his book alludes to his hunger for art that tells truths about the world we’re living in, blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction, and throws away established conventions about what a story should be.

He shared the podium on Sunday with Eli Horowitz, managing editor of McSweeney’s, the publisher founded by A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius author Dave Eggers. They have managed to escape the tumbling fate of the publishing industry as a whole by turning their publications into things of art and beauty in themselves: whether it’s their in-house hardbacks, their literary quarterly, Panorama, their newspaper, or Wholphin, their DVD video periodical packed with unseen and awesome short films, the form feels almost as important as the content.

I’ve been a big fan of theirs for the best part of a decade, and the thoughts that Horowitz shared at the Book Festival were fresh, intelligent and refreshingly bullshit-free. He dismissed, for example, the idea that ebooks were somehow inferior because reading a paper book is in itself a magical experience (something I’ve heard over and over in my role as a technologist). If books are going to compete, he noted, their form has to compete with the convenience of ebook readers, and their content has to continue to innovate, and to strive to be vital.

We’re a new generation, empowered by technology to transform the world around us. What both Shields and Horowitz seemed to be doing was calling out for writers and artists to be true to themselves instead of the established norms – particularly the commercial norms – and do what we feel we have to do. It’s the story, the reality and the issues that count, rather than the framework that we put them in. Ignore genre and write what you need to write.

That message was echoed by both Garry Trudeau and Alan Moore, who took the stage with Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell on two consecutive days. (Sasha’s written a great overview of the Alan Moore event over here.)

I grew up reading Doonesbury, and can’t claim any pretense of objectivity about Trudeau. I love everything he does. The strip is a very different kind of narrative, but it presents an impressive body of work: a continuous story, updated four panels a day, for forty years. Doonesbury manages to be cuttingly satirical, intelligently human and almost zen in its artistry: as Alan Moore pointed out, often the art will be static from panel to panel except for some small detail, which will change for either comedic or emotional effect. It’s a style that Moore’s seminal graphic novel From Hell deliberately mimicked. As accomplished as Moore’s novels are, however, I doubt he could keep the same group of characters growing, changing and never losing their power for four decades.

I approached Garry after the talk, my heart beating and head buzzing, and managed to say about three intelligible words before giving up and collapsing in an awkward heap of admiration and linguistic malcoordination. They say you should never meet your heroes; perhaps that’s because you’ll spend the rest of the month kicking yourself for being such a dork. (However, he – along with everyone else here – was polite, articulate, intelligent and very friendly.)

Both Trudeau and Moore heeded a version of David Shields’s call to action in their respective times. Trudeau took the newspaper cartoon, at the time saturated with the likes of Little Orphan Annie and Blondie, and turned it into affecting real-life commentary. Alan Moore took pulp comic books and turned them into sophisticated literature that discussed what it means to be human. Both became the voices of their respective generations by writing what they felt was vital – what they felt people needed to hear, rather than what they said they wanted.

As both Shields and Horowitz were quick to point out, this generation – digital, disparate and respectful of long-tail individuality – has yet to find its voice. There’s perhaps an argument that, thanks to personal publishing and the Internet, the voice is actually the whole generation. Nonetheless, there’s all to play for, and it’s time for artists to shed their inhibitions.

However, this is not the Moore I saw today. Sure, he has an excellent beard, and yes, he is frighteningly intelligent, but at his core Alan Moore comes across as a very rational and personable man.

His work in comics helped redefine the genre at a time when it needed it most, helping, in his own words, to make comics fit their times and more accurately reflect a contemporary world. Almost 30 years on, and Moore speaks of his comic work with only a hint of regret, and apologises for starting the trend that has made every character in today’s comics a psychopath or a murderer.  Sadly, he does not hold the rights for the most famous of these books (Swamp Thing, Watchmen, V for Vendetta), due to creators’ rights issues. Moore has now become known for his work outside the mainstream, with smaller publishers like Knockabout and America’s Best Comics. For people looking for something off the beaten track, I can now recommend Moore’s new magazine venture, Dodgemlogic.

During the space of a too short hour, Moore talked about his background, his methods of storytelling (Moore is famous for his highly visual scripts) and his past with DC. He speaks with such confidence and resolution about this time, that you can’t not see his side of the story.

At the end of the event, an audience member asks; ‘Alan, how do you not compromise your morals and stay true to your writing, while still making your books a huge commercial success?’ to which Alan Moore responds:

‘As a writer, you simply cannot think about commercial success. You have the obligation to stay true to your own voice, but that is all. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what people want, because they’d probably want The Sun; it’s about what they need.’

My wish with my Edinburgh International Book Festival coverage was to provide an accurate picture of what it’s like to go to a festival and still have to get up the next day, and in some ways my (lack of) coverage has been quite accurate, because no one has seen me. I run from work to events, sloping in and then dashing off again to help out with work (day work) related projects or to catch one of the few shows I foolishly booked for at the Fringe. I wish that I could wander serene and bookish around Charlotte Square Gardens, notebook in hand,  looking all calm and interesting, but I am really never going to be like that. I will always that slightly mad person with the red hair bouncing from one event to the other, looking vaguely stressed out . If you spot me, come say hi. I am not as stressed as I look, promise.

Anyway, here’s the first part of my blast through Charlotte Square this past week, to give you an idea of what it has been like.

OPENING WEEKEND

On Saturday morning the Edinburgh International Book Festival opened its doors for the 21^st time. By now a truly grown up festival, it has been given new youth by its latest director, Nick Barley, who took up the reigns in October of last year, and has since been making some radical changes to regular book festival fare.

The first day, however, was classic Book Festival. The Soweto Gospel Choir were singing just inside the entrance to the gardens and the weather was glorious. There were old faces and lots of new ones, and that lovely book festival buzz was definitely doing the rounds.

First up was Garth Nix, Australian author of Lirael, Sabriel and Abhorsen. He put on a great show, and told a lot of stories about his life (most of which turned out to be lies), to teach the kids in the audience that anyone can tell a good story – or a good lie – with the right tools.

It was interesting to go from an event where stories were described as lies to the Philip Pullman event. Pullman was attending the Book Festival to discuss his latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. The book is divisively published as part of Canongate’s Myth series, which sees well known authors reimagining famous myths.

The Good Man Jesus certainly has Pullman written all over it, and smacks of His Dark Materials, both in tone and ideological bias.

The event featured Philip Pullman in conversation with former Bishop of Oxford Richard Harries, and rock star theologian Richard Holloway. Richard Holloway spoke about faith and the problems of the church at the closing event of last year’s festival, and did so with such intelligence and compassion that it seemed only natural that he would chair this event.

For a discussion that could have so easily disintegrated into argument, Holloway handled the event admirably, instead posing questions that allowed Harries and Pullman to find common ground and expand upon their views for the audience’s benefit.

All three started off in agreement that the figure of Jesus likely existed, but whether this figure was divinely sent is another matter entirely. CS Lewis famously said that Jesus could only be one of two things, God or mad, but Pullman sees this is a foolish dichotomy, and one that can only divide people. Holloway asked: Is it possible to have a non-divine Jesus that is still morally relevant, or are the human and the divine interminably bound together? This is the question that Pullman has tried to answer in The Good Man, providing a moral and human alternative to the traditional gospels of the New Testament.

What I found interesting was Pullman’s openness to discussion and debate, despite the strong moral thwack of his novels. Last year at the festival, we saw Richard Dawkins speak out about the foolishness of religion. Pullman was the opposite. Though he remains opposed to the structures of institutional religion and is sceptical of miracles, Pullman believes that, at the end of the day ‘religion is about the experience’ and so anything that encourages this cannot be a bad thing. To Harries, he said:  ‘If my book makes people so cross that they go and read the New Testament, no one could be happier than me.’

All three men come from very different backgrounds, but agreed that the experience of religion is, at the core of it, one’s own, and that very little can or should be done by the church to mediate it. Though part of me wanted to see Harries and Pullman go at it Vatican-style, the end result was much more informative.