Tag: literature
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Editorial: Wolf Crossing
Look into the eyes of the wolf. What does it see? On 29th August 2016, shortly after the announcement of Steve Bannon’s appointment as Donald Trump’s new campaign CEO, The New Yorker ran a cartoon by Paul Noth. It shows a large billboard standing in a field of grazing sheep. Upon it is a wolf…
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Open Call: Wolf Crossing
In Finland there is a line around the city: susiraja, the wolf border. Within is law and order: shopping malls and social security. Beyond the susiraja lie the wilds and the wolves – just 200 at the last count. Who will howl in the forests when the last wolf departs? The susiraja may be inviolable…
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Frankenstein: Before the Beginning
Every thing must have a beginning… and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. It was precisely two hundred years ago tonight that a very particular nightmare first appeared. In the early hours of 16 June 1816 – around 2:30am if a recent headline-grabbing astronomical…
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A Pervert’s Guide to the Apocalypse
The bold white title reads “Cool Photos”. I dutifully open the email to find yet another link to yet another photo essay from yet another intrepid, probably amateur photographer who has schlepped their medium format through the crumbling halls of Detroit. Or was it Pripyat again? Or some (now) generic computer generated image of the…
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On a Headland of Lava Beside You
Joanna Kirk and I are both artists living in Blackheath and have become good friends over time as our children are the same age, friends and at school together. This has led to frequent conversations with us sharing books (for example Karl Ove Knausgaard’s) and views on exhibitions and artists, on newspaper articles and TV…
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Strawberry Hill Anastylosis
Strawberry Hill House first poked its turrets into my undergraduate imagination as the birthplace of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, whose central image apparently came to him in a dream there – “of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle – and that on the uppermost…
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Of a Mouse, To a Mouse
The clean pink two back feet he has have long toes almost like a bird’s. Unlike a bird’s, the tail, a draggled earthworm, limps behind his search. Head joined on distinctly to a face but not a neck to speak of. See his oildot eyes like little fleas and yes, they’re shiny! really! Shining eyes!…
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Open Call: Clean Unclean
Cleanliness, they say, is close to godliness. And the pig has long resided in the realm of the unclean. Even today: “It’s like a pigsty in here!” – as if the pig has much choice in how he lives… More than ever do we feel the urgency of cleanliness: clean hands, clean homes, clean minds….
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(Re)Imagining the Insect
54 million years before humans appeared on earth, there was once upon a time an insect that died, its cadaver is still visible and intact, the cadaver of someone who was surprised by death at the instant it was sucking the blood of another! Jacques Derrida, Typewriter Ribbon, 1998 It is all very…
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Books of the Month
February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 Like a Tree, Walking Vahni Capildeo Carcanet November 2021 Pothos Rosa Campbell Broken Sleep Books October 2021 Cartographies of the Imagination Kirsty Badenoch, Sayan Skandarajah (editors) September 2021 Epic Camilla Nelson Guillemot Press August 2021 Echtrai Journal B G Nichols / Bran Graeme Nairne (editors) AnMór July 2021 Florilegia…
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She speaks
in a hoar frost, she said: the weather’s made a Miss Havisham’s wedding feast of this wood the dark of bark and leaf is cobwebbed over the hoar has clapped white hands over all those breathing mouths the air nests whitely in the trees and waits like birds like words to be…