In 2015, in The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski argued that critique, a term she uses to characterise the predominant institutionalised practices of interpretation, solicits the critic to adopt a stance and tone of ‘ferocious and blistering detachment’. The critic’s encounter with a text is driven by ‘desire to puncture illusions, topple idols and destroy divinities,’ that is both combative and paranoid. Towards the end of this book, Felski invokes Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as one... [read more]
Talking about dreams is tricky. This difficulty is expressed in various ways, but essentially the challenge is this: can words ever give a truthful account of what is experienced in sleep? If you dream of a sheep and then write or talk about that sheep, are you really describing what you saw? After all, it is a widely held belief that an image perceived while asleep is a code packed with unfulfilled wishes, memories and neuroses. A dream-sheep is always a desire-wolf in disguise.
Emma Lieber... [read more]
I went to a party dressed as John Cooper Clarke once. The theme was Dress As Yr Idols. I was in possession of a physique, a pair of trousers and a tie that were almost skinny enough, plus I had just about enough hair that, if doused in coca-cola and back-combed like Nicky Wire said to, it’d approximate his beetling updo. More importantly it was easy and I got to go around roaring the lines from Beasley Street — ‘people turn to poison / quick as lager turns to piss / sweethearts are... [read more]
There is an immediate difficulty, or perhaps rather a temptation, that presents itself when forming a response to any 'last book', particularly one produced under circumstances such as those in the background of Matthew Sweeney's final volume of poetry Shadow of the Owl. The poems it contains were largely composed in the period leading up to the author's death in August 2018 from motor neurone disease. They are poems full of portents and dark symbols, meetings with apparitions and last meal... [read more]
In his mid-twenties, Walter Benjamin wrote a formative essay on the historical evolution of language. Anticipating by a generation the critique mounted by key figures in the Frankfurt School, in relation to which he was more of a distantly orbiting satellite than a component star, he staged an inquiry into the archaic origins of the linguistic faculty, tracing the route by which its original nominative purity might have ramified into the instrumental version of communication to which more or... [read more]
Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: & Other Essays
reviewed by Jonathan Gharraie
Close to the beginning of this elegant, chewy collection of essays, Elisa Gabbert describes arriving at the Rice University campus on the morning of 9/11, and watching her fellow students watch the unfolding tragedy with ‘that air of disbelief that can seem almost casual.’ The casual note, whether absurd, funny, or melancholic, is important to Gabbert. She never allows it to dominate, but it’s a reliable way of leavening her rich textual mix of facts and scientific theories. The book is... [read more]
In ‘Theses of the Short Story’, a suitably succinct essay by Ricardo Piglia, the Argentine author and critic suggests that every short story is in fact two. ‘A visible story hides a secret tale,’ he writes, ‘narrated in an elliptical and fragmentary manner.’ The surface narrative has a subterranean twin, one no less tangible or ‘real’. Like the mind with its conscious and unconscious, neither of these discrete threads are dominant, indeed they are strangely intertwined. ‘The... [read more]
Robert Selby’s debut collection of poems, The Coming-Down Time, is a marvellous volume of lyrics the main subjects of which are family legacies, history, love, England, and poetry. The volume is divided into three sections, the first and third of which are numbered sequences. East of Ipswich opens the volume and is a sequence of 20 lyrics in memory of Selby’s maternal grandparents, the main focus being on his grandfather, who served in the Second World War as an artillery man. The poems... [read more]
Penelope Mortimer, Saturday Lunch with the Brownings
reviewed by Thea Hawlin
‘You can’t forget the experience of loving.’ Penelope Mortimer’s narrator notes in her short story ‘The White Rabbit’, ‘You can only push it back and cover it up and use it for something else.’ Experiences of loving are the foundations for Mortimer’s writing, works which delve unreservedly into subjects such as motherhood and marriage. Her short story collection from 1960, Saturday Lunch with the Brownings – reissued by Daunt Books – highlights how women have been artfully... [read more]
For years I had an Il deserto rosso poster on my wall, and for years I wanted to be Monica Vitti, with her piercing look and black sweater and air of mystery (and in this film, the technicolor-tinted russet hair I coveted). I loved the way the actors and images subtly captured the melancholy of inner worlds, as well as those moments of solitude and awareness beyond words. People merely sitting on a bench, or looking at one another, conveyed infinities. This delicate form of alienation, this... [read more]
