October 2015
M.R. James on ghost stories
I am concerned with a branch of fiction; not a large branch, if you look at the rest of the tree, but one which has been astonishingly fertile in the last thirty years. The avowedly fictitious ghost story is my subject, and that being understood I can proceed.
Read MoreJay Aquinas Thompson Interviews Eric Weisbard
Eric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read MoreByron had wanted to keep Shelley’s skull…
Francis Gastrell was very annoyed. He had bought a nice new house only to find hordes of uninvited guests tramping through his garden and helping themselves to sprigs and branches from his mulberry tree.
Read MoreBatiked With the Walk of Ages
From The New York Review of Books: The free-living dolphins of the Bahamas had come to know researcher Denise Herzing and her team very well. For decades, at the start of each four-month-long field season, the dolphins would give the returning humans a joyous reception: “a reunion of friends,” as...
Read MoreOwen Vince on HARK
As a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The air is too warm, the heating always on; there are pink plants drooping against the Roman blinds.
Read MoreJeremy Fernando: Not
A response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I will not’ but that this is a preference.
Read MoreA Piano of Bourbon
"Don’t go down the rabbit hole,” my husband tells me, but it’s too late. It is 3 A.M. and I am still at my desk, the lamp burning hot on my notebook.
Read MoreVincent W.J. van Gerven Oei visits Spac
Sometimes one can feel disgust, revolt, despair. To be confronted with a situation that seems by any standard beyond reason, beyond purpose, where one looks into the toothless, rotting mouth of a political and economical system.
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Like many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
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A response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
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As a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
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Eric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
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What, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
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Poet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
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In May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
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Florence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
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To begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins...
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Now it seems the state’s radical conservatives are degrading the historic, populist-provincial mentality of Iowa; they are revising the state’s legacy within the broader...
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A few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
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The persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
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As many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
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The memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost. The ghost for me.
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If duende, the source of inspiration that Lorca sets out to champion in his essay at the expense of the Muse, is “in sum, the spirit of the earth”, a force linking body and soil through a struggle akin to death, then the Muse is a force that speaks to the head and inspires art that is, in the words’ most negative senses, cerebral and high-minded.
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Burton was born in Kentucky. He moved itinerantly before settling in Oakland. Temperatures rise, so does the suicide rate.
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I’ve been writing a more or less monthly memoir of my life in the sixties and seventies when I lived with Doris Lessing, and my continuing relationship with her until her death last year at 94. It is also an ongoing portrait of my incurable cancer.
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The cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers...
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