In the essay ‘In the Shadow of Twitter Towers,’ from her recent collection When the Sick Rule the World, Dodie Bellamy writes: ‘This piece has 117,002 characters. That’s 836 tweets. Some students—even in graduate writing programs—make each sentence a new paragraph. It’s like they don’t know how to connect one thing to another. Perhaps these one sentence paragraphs best reflect our current reality—a series of discrete bits—better than my horse and buggy paragraphs that trot... [read more]
One of the central dilemmas of late modern experience has been the question of how it may be possible to retain hope in the face of widespread catastrophe. To go on whistling in the dark after the mounting evidence of atrocity is the demeanour of the unhinged, but to surrender to nihilistic fatalism, in the sense of believing in nothing other than fate, only comforts catastrophe's perpetrators. If disillusioned consciousness refuses to be pacified with Pope's suggestion that hope springs... [read more]
He has two antagonists; the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though,... [read more]
Fredric Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms
reviewed by John O'Meara Dunn
Modernism is the moment when resistance embodies revolution. This line can be towed more or less cleanly through Fredric Jameson’s The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms. This work bookends 2013’s The Antinomies of Realism and continues Jameson’s wider six-volume project, ‘The Poetics of Social Forms’ and that series’ exploration of the ways in which history and art inform each other’s inscription. Carried through from his last work is the concept of two... [read more]
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]
