Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser (eds.), A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill
reviewed by Ben Leubner
‘Poetry,’ said Frost, ‘provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.’ No wonder, then, that a young James Merrill took to it so avidly, seeking whatever permissible ways he could find to say things that could not otherwise be said in the mid-20th century, especially if it was guaranteed to upset one’s mother.
When Merrill’s mother found out that her son, then a student at Amherst College, was having a romantic affair with one of his instructors, Kimon... [read more]
Even if it does feel like a kind of middle-class aliens-built-the-pyramids project, I find it hard not to be fascinated by the Shakespeare authorship question. What I mean is, if I were to be offered one use of a prototype time machine — to go anywhere at anytime — I’d already be wearing my neck ruff and make-up. But when it comes to the work of Shakespeare, the need for certainty is a contradiction. Imagine, for a moment, that we knew everything there was to know about William... [read more]
Naomi Ishiguro’s assured, sensitive debut novel, Common Ground follows the intertwined lives of Stan and Charlie, who meet as teenagers on the common in Newford and reunite by chance as adults in London. Thirteen-year-old Stan is bookish, small for his age, and being bullied by bigger, posher boys at school. His father has recently died and he doesn’t feel he can talk to his busy, emotionally-distant mother about his troubles. In other words, he is desperately in need of a friend. The... [read more]
The stories in Ben Pester’s debut collection are surreal and disturbing, and yet also somehow an uncanny depiction of how we live now. In the same way we don’t notice when we are dreaming, his stories teeter on a margin between the conceivable and the extremely crackers — the ‘just the sort of shit that would happen’ margin. In fact, you might say his stories are less surreal or unfeasible so much as merely unlikely — although who could recognise what’s likely these days as we... [read more]
There is a stage in our young lives, said Freud, where we undertake ‘research’ to begin trying to understand our body in relation to others, and in Katharina Volckmer’s debut novel, The Appointment, with a narrator about to undergo an unspecified medical procedure, it’s as though laying — assumedly — bare she’s harking back to a state of exposure that might have been lived as that ‘researching’ child. The narrator asks what the hell is right or wrong with her body. She... [read more]
In the early 1900s, a chimpanzee named Peter toured the world as a vaudevillian performer. Peter would smoke cigars on stage, shake hands, dance, and even speak English. The only word he knew, or had learned, was ‘Ma-ma’. Advertisers soon declared him ‘a monkey [that] made himself into a man’.
Born in 1903, author G.L. Trevelyan would have been six years old when Peter’s performances became the subject of psychological study at the University of Pennsylvania. She would be 14 when,... [read more]
Among the several eccentricities for which the Canadian Professor Jordan B. Peterson has become widely known is a peculiar choice of example to illustrate the formation of dominance hierarchies outside the sway of human society and culture. Peterson might have settled on rutting stags, or chest-beating orang-utans; instead he picked a non-mammalian species, the European lobster, whose outsize claws serve a primary purpose not of predation, but of violent competition for mating opportunities.... [read more]
Paul B. Preciado’s Can The Monster Speak? is the text of a lecture delivered pre-pandemic to the L'École de la Cause freudienne in Paris in 2019. I should say partially delivered; Preciado was heckled off the stage, called ‘Hitler’ by a woman in the audience, and subjected to jeers and boos before he could finish. It was partially filmed, and circulated online in choppy parts, like an illicit porno for anti-Lacanian theory kids everywhere. The importance of Lacan here cannot be... [read more]
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
reviewed by Mathis Clément
The last time George Saunders’ thoughts on writing and the writer’s life appeared on bookshelves, they came filtered through the oddball idiom of Aldo Cummings in ‘The Falls’, one of six stories that make up Pastoralia (2000). Aldo is walking along a riverbank, feeling pleased with himself. He thinks of himself, ludicrously, as a great writer; ludicrous because of the way he thinks:
To an interviewer in his head, Cummings said he felt the possible rain made the fine bright day even... [read more]
John Sutherland, Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me: Her Life and Long Loves
reviewed by William Poulos
Poetry studies are becoming more like Hollywood. I don’t mean that they’re becoming more accessible or more entertaining. Rather, they’re becoming more and more obsessed with poets’ lives, as if poets were as glamorous or as interesting as Cary Grant or Marilyn Monroe. As the mounds of biographies, letters, memoirs and diaries increase, the poems lie neglected, foxing in some untidy spot. Back in the dark days, critics, deprived of the light of biographical scholarship, were forced to... [read more]
