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Audio from 'this is no longer entertainment' on Hotel magazine

While in Amsterdam at the beginning of the month I was asked by Hotel magazine co-editor Dominic Jaeckle to read some extracts from this is no longer entertainment for audio publication on the Hotel online archive.

Jaeckle has heard me read publicly from the book on a number of occasions, and his conception of a fundamental difference between the reading and hearing experiences, with regard to the material in this book in particular, prompted his invitation.

In a perceptive note accompanying the publication of the recording, he writes:

"The rolling composite voice on show in Makris’ this is no longer entertainment realizes a more complex relationship with polyphony than the page alone can allow. The experience of reading these texts can’t help but engineer a little bad detective work on the part of the reader; we’re accustomed to wading through a myriad of multi-authored opinions as we stroll a heavy thumb through the roll-call of comments that accompany any video, article or op-ed we encounter on screen, and the panoply of voices hidden behind Makris verse linger as spectral voices behind the text. Simultaneously elsewhere and imminent, on the page it is almost as though this is no longer entertainment is in conversation with its sources; toying with the degree of disassociation involved in shadow reading digital text fields, the mind can’t help but err towards an effort to identify where these ideas stem from. Hearing Makris read from the text is a different experience all together. Delivered in his staple flat and unshakeable timbre, the poem becomes a little joke on possession. A play with both the ghosts behind the poetry and with sense of a passing ownership of the perspectives on offer as they interlace behind a first-person vocality. An “I” built out of an acreage of text fields."



My thanks to Dominic and to Hotel for their continuing support of my work (in 2018 the magazine published two cuts from this is no longer entertainment ahead of the book's release).

And special thanks to Levina van Winden & Menno van Winden in whose apartment, and with the aid of ample amounts of good strong coffee, the recording of these five extracts took place in the morning of 2 March 2020.

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