Dirty Talks: Recent Episodes
RCA MA Writing Students
“I invited you here to corrupt you. What did you expect? A Sound of Music sing-along?” – John Waters
Pee-yew! Smell that? It’s the RCA’s famed, international magazine ARC, back after a brief hiatus, with THE DIRTY ISSUE. Don’t wash your hands, don’t look away. We’re here to get DIRTY in this seething, stinking world.
✨ARC 2020 THE DIRTY ISSUE Radio Hour Hosted by MA Writing Students at the Royal College of Art
Natalia Ginzburg describes us a well which numerous women have trapped themselves in, and ‘what they need to do now is start scratching with their nails and biting with their teeth, to defend themselves from the unhealthy habit of falling into the well every so often’;
Virginia Woolf sighs and gets mad at what the women writers have to confront, “…who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman”;
WOMXN are dirty, unable to live up to the Y chromosome.
Are they right?
Are we wrong?
Guests: Jasmine Cox, Sicily Scarlet
Host: Eko Binyao Liu
“To speak of the catastrophe was an offence under the new regulations. The rule was to choose not to know’ - Anna Kavan, Ice
It is the middle of the night and our house is on fire. In our dreams, we’re busy eating clean whilst our father talks only of smoke. Our mother weeps in the basement. Her tears form swamps that ooze with the chemicals of excess. He cannot bring himself to look at her. The climate is a cruel tyrant made in our image, raging in the language of fire and flood, extinction and drought. In the seam of rotting landscapes and choking oceans, what will become of tomorrow? Two writing students from the RCA share their reflections on the theme of the environment. It is the middle of the night and our house is on fire.
Guests:
John Vaughan - The Boys, Sicily Scarlet - Blood Moon.
Host: Stephanie Gavan
Episode 01: The Dirty illness🦠
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
Susan Sontag hits the right nail on the head. The boundary of the kingdom of the well and sick is blurring at this moment under this particular condition.
How would you interpret illness and the quarantine with a literary work? What does the illness mean to all, mentally and physically? Who is suffering and how is that suffering expressed? Two students from the RCA Writing Program read us their favorite pieces to decipher illness.
This is Dirty Talks, ARC 2020 Radio Hours.
Guests:
John Vaughan, Greer Dale-Foulkes
Host:
Eko Liu
Leave your fine velvet dress at home, the white suit as well;
Take off the leather Oxford shoes, those Baroque's too.
Worn T-shirts are fine, that old oily pair of jeans
those sullied garms are what we want.
Let's start a journey, play with dirt, all the dirty things.
We'll be waiting, ready when you are.