I managed to send my 30 or so published stories in the form of a collection to a Michigan based publisher via email. Today I hope to do the same with a UK publisher and return to a story I haven’t worked on for several months.
I’ve just been looking at the Arts Council website and found this gem: “Arts Council England is committed to ensuring that artists and those who work in the creative industries are properly remunerated for any work that they do. ” Surely that should say, “for the work that they do”. “Any” makes it look like there’s a search on for exactly what they do. If the Arts Council shares the north European view of the arts what hope is there? Perhaps the Arts Council England mission statement should say: “Arts Council England is committed to finding out what those layabouts do.”
But generally, we’re so fucked up in England regarding the Arts you’d think the Renaissance never happened. Perhaps there are some who wish it hadn’t. I just saw an article about the gentrification of Arts qualifications and how English working classes are turning their backs on the Arts. They forget the Brit Art movement, but unless you’d been living in a box and hadn’t noticed, the English working classes have turned their backs on everything except chips, crap cars, drink and drugs. As someone with a working class background with an MA, I can only welcome the move because it leaves the field clear. Normally I’m following the herd into IT, or whatever we’re supposed to do next, Paddy Power Online Poker perhaps! But not this time.
I googled “Arts jobs” and found some useful sites:
artsjobfinder.co.uk (also Arts Council)
What would Mr Arbuthnot of Titan Steel in Doncaster think of that? Not a lot. Mr Arbuthnot is the man Greasy Chin Clarke cited during the election fiasco as the sign of a revival of Manufacturing in Britain. And he’s right. I believe Mr Arbuthnot of Doncaster has a vacancy for 5million spot welders. Don’t all rush at once or you’ll sink the sinking ship.
Cy Forrest 