Tag: writing
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The monstrous body
Scary Monsters II: global greed and the gluttonous dodo Monsters are not just things that lurk under the bed. They are powerful images that have always been used to represent the things we might not want to face in ourselves, as individuals or as communities. Different monsters have represented different fears or anxieties in different…
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The chimaera
Scary Monsters III: collapsing space If you had walked into one of the princely Wunderkammern or cabinets of curiosity of seventeenth-century Europe, you would have been assailed by the wealth of objects covering walls, ceilings, shelves and probably floors; naturalia, exotica and artificialia arranged in strange juxtapositions, decorative arrays and obscure taxonomies. The visual impression…
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The Unending Cycle
For Ayesha I look into Haruki’s eyes and discover something that disturbs me profoundly. There is a familiarity. In the aftermath of The Demolition Of My Construct (my break-up), I must admit I am suffering from a fear of intimacy with anyone, anything. Even these fluffy felines, Haruki and Mowgli. What I see in his…
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The Second Body
At 6 a.m. on a Thursday morning in November it was completely dark outside, but the butcher’s shop was strip-lit and the raw meat area was full of busy young men. It was difficult to see exactly what they were doing – the men were large and they were moving quickly in a small crowded…
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Concrete Music – Artificial Plant – October
Concrete Music over six foot lying on its back damp-worn sides as souvenirs of basement tenure unmoved to the top floor a sun-bleached face now that the upstairs neighbours are rubble ears within shouting distance. With shells, the BLOCK was returned to itself though imprecisely scythed; concrete lines don’t demarcate but are breached…
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Shopping centres, caves and the fate of us all
If you leave Nottingham train station and head towards the centre of the city, you will eventually come up against a large brown wall barricading the city. Actually it is the backside, or front (it’s hard to tell), of a shopping centre called Broadmarsh. Like a museum gift shop, the only way is through. I…
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The Cooked and the Half-Baked
“The great press baron, Lord Northcliffe, used to tell his journalists that four subjects could be relied upon for abiding public interest: crime, love, money, and food. Only the last of these is fundamental and universal. Crime is a minority interest, even in the worst-regulated societies. It is possible to imagine an economy without…
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Green Boots
The water falls on her head, on her face, around her ears. She sits on the floor and it falls encasing her in the only shelter she has found in this house. She feels safe, she must be, no one can demand anything from her while she´s in the shower. Her back hurts. Her feet,…
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Wolf yollez
‘We’re not far from wolves.’ – Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1914: One or Several Wolves?’ Human-canine relationships are some of the most conceptually disordered and uncertain of interspecies relationships, precisely because the history of domestication is so long and so complex. The type of canine perspective offered by contemporary writers such as Donna Haraway…
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A Wolf, Crossing
When night falls in the Charente, the inhabitants of its rural villages retreat to their homes. They lock their doors and pull iron-hinged timber shutters over every window. Pale sandstone walls, grey with age, cracked and pitted, their seams of lime mortar dried to dust, become as impenetrable as medieval keeps. In the dark, you…
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Things She Doesn’t Know
When she was growing up, Lily kept a list of things that she didn’t know. She was big on lists then – she liked knowing the top ten most valuable beanie babies, or the five most destructive earthquakes in history. She liked knowing things, and she liked not knowing things, and she wanted to keep…