Our Billie

Our Billie

'An astonishing work' - Joanne Harris Every parent's worst nightmare became a reality for Ian Clayton. On a short holiday break in Hay-on-Wye he took his nine-year-old twins canoeing, and in a freak accident his daughter Billie was drowned. In a remarkably frank and vivid way Clayton describes what happened on that spring day, his desperate attempts to save his two children, and then what it felt like two years later to come face to face with the men who hired out the canoe. But Our Billie is not a story of bitterness and recrimination. Instead it's the story of how a family attempts to come to terms with something which makes no sense at all. Through his memories of Billie and his wonderfully affectionate portrait of the small town in Yorkshire where the family has lived for generations, he weaves a story of loss and remembering, of gratitude and forgiveness.

Popular Ballads and Songs, from Tradition Manuscripts, and Scarce Editions

Billie’s Bent Elbow

Deeply informed by jazz, Billie's Bent Elbow explores the nonsensical and nonsensuous in black radical thought and expression. Extending the encounter between black study, Frankfurt School critical theory, and sound studies staged in her first book Jazz as Critique, and, crucially, bringing Yoruba aesthetics into the conversation, Okiji attunes to various sites of intemperance and equivocation in thought and music. Billie's Bent Elbow eschews the parsimonious tendencies of the Western philosophical tradition, in its contribution to a shared project of improvised correspondence that finds its criticality in its heterophony of approach and intention. The book ranges from Haitian revolutionaries' rendition of "La Marseillaise," to Cecil Taylor's synesthetic poetics, to the aporetic mien of the orisha Esu, to Billie Holiday's undulating arm. What is more, by way of her intense fascination with these sites of fantastic noise, Okiji brings our attention to a galaxy of intimacies that flash up in her experiments in array and correspondence. The nonsensuous standard Okiji cultivates in this musical and essayistic book, in concert with a host of theorists, musicians and artists, is as much a statement of non-citizenry as it is preparation for intoxicated gathering.