How much philosophy is there in a story about shoes? It's a feature of using things, for humans, that it involves more than just a mere description of functioning. Will Viney introduces his account of ‘things’ with stories related to his everyday life, describing the ‘use-time’ (as he calls it) of his running and walking shoes, ‘putting out the rubbish and jogging.’ Then there is ‘waste-time’ too; worn-out or forgotten, not in another ‘space’ but ‘outside time’. (Viney... [read more]
John Berger, Tom Overton (ed.), Portraits: John Berger on Artists
reviewed by Dominic Jaeckle
Events are always to hand. But the coherence of these events – which is what we mean by reality – is an imaginative construction. […] Reality, however one interprets it, lies beyond a screen of clichés. Every culture produces such a screen, partly to facilitate its own practices (to establish habits) and partly to establish its own power. Reality is inimical to those with power.
John Berger, ‘The Production of the World’
To the world of power I was only childishly... [read more]
Robert Roper, Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita
reviewed by Elsa Court
Vladimir Nabokov enjoyed offering lists of his own personal tastes and dislikes, in fiction, in interviews, and even in private. Admittedly, this habit tested the patience of those who knew him personally, but while the list of his most hated things is entertaining, eclectic and seemingly incidental (‘jazz, [bullfighting], progressive schools, music in supermarkets, swimming pools, brutes, bores’), his personal passions are presented as fewer, more carefully elected and often... [read more]
‘The past beats inside me like a second heart.’ So says Max Morden, the narrator of John Banville’s Booker-winning novel The Sea (2005), in an aside that could have been uttered by almost any of the soul-searching narrators Banville has created in the past 45 years. Banville has, after all, been writing the same kind of literary humanism for most of his career, and The Blue Guitar is certainly no departure. Like Max Morden before him (and other narrators, such as Alexander Cleave in... [read more]
Among the classic monsters of popular legend the zombie is often seen as a somewhat subordinate figure. While the vampire conjures gothic associations – of Hungarian castles and elegantly cadaverous counts, Frankenstein, the mysteries of alchemy and the occult – the unthinking, unfeeling, speechless and stumbling zombie is a figure bracketed with the crass horror films and violent videogames of contemporary culture. Yet despite its comparative lack of high-cultural literary purchase, it has... [read more]
Malcolm Miles, Limits to Culture: Urban Regeneration Vs. Dissident Art
reviewed by Harry Stopes
Limits to Culture: Urban Regeneration vs Dissident Art begins with a discussion of urban change in the developed world in the last three decades. Drawing on the research of other scholars, Malcolm Miles examines de-industrialised cities such as Liverpool, Bilbao, and Barcelona, describing how an often piecemeal set of new developments, renovations and city branding projects, driven by private individuals, corporations and local and national governments, has transformed these places. Where... [read more]
Choosing to talk about ‘two men at once,’ Anne Carson reasons in Economy of the Unlost, means to ‘keep attention strong,’ to ‘keep it from settling.’ In Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory, Volker Pantenburg deploys this strategy as a means to put in dialogue two of the most prolific European filmmakers/artists of the late 20th and early 21st century: Harun Farocki (1944-2014) and Jean-Luc Godard (1930-). Originally published in German in 2006, Pantenburg’s study remains a significant... [read more]
In a universe of overused adjectives, there’s one you rarely hear: 'spellbinding.' Perhaps that’s because very little holds our rapt attention as if by some cold magic. The best Steven Millhauser stories, as fans of his many collections know, do exactly this. They cast a spell from which there is no release. But the sorcery chooses certain victims. I was thrown when my brother confessed he found 2008’s Dangerous Laughter a puzzling antique, its narratives at once too fanciful and... [read more]
JM Coetzee & Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy
reviewed by Marc Farrant
In a short essay entitled ‘The Art of Telling the Truth’ Michel Foucault traces two distinct strands of modern thought, derived from Kant’s philosophy and specifically manifested in the text Was ist Aufklärung? (What is Enlightenment?). On the one hand, Kant ‘laid the foundations for that tradition of philosophy that poses the question of the conditions in which true knowledge is possible’ – philosophy as an analytics of truth. On the other, however, Kant in this text poses ‘for... [read more]
Emily Critchley ed., Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry By Women in North America & the UK
reviewed by Kate Duckney
Consider Peter Pan, the pouting boy king, a symbol of endless playfulness, laughter and petulance. Now turn your attention to Paul Auster and his assertion that we need ‘cackling boys to remind us of how great it is to be alive’, and that without these boy writers ‘there is no literature.’ There is space to experiment inside the outline of eternal boychild, but the writing never grows, it never connects. Peter Pan spurns the independence of Wendy when she is no longer compelled to be... [read more]
