Early in 2015, following years of growing unease about the safety and necessity of vaccination, an outbreak of measles that began in Disney World resulted in over 100 cases of the once eradicated disease being reported throughout the United States. The parents who chose not to vaccinate their children, and so precipitated the outbreak, were not religious nor were they necessarily right-wing science deniers. Many were affluent, educated, white, and from the upper middle-class. That is, they came... [read more]
Simon Morgan Wortham, Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis
reviewed by Joel White
It was in the waiting room of a hospital that I first picked up Simon Morgan Wortham’s Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis. Surgery was looming around the corner. Pain, in its bodily, immanent and imminent sense, was on the mind. Before I began to read, pain, as situated between the body and the mind, the material and the ideal, the past and the future, was present in all its ignominious facets. In fact, the dualisms that the thought of pain or the pain of thought... [read more]
Before I read Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble, I only knew her fabulist work by reputation. I actually own an earlier short story collection – she’s one of those literary unicorns who has made a name for herself without bothering about the albatross of a novel – but, and I can’t believe I’m admitting this, its ugly cover is too much. I’ve never brought myself to crack it open. Further evidence of my superficiality: I dived into her new anthology head first, head over heels in love... [read more]
Terry Coleman, The Old Vic: The Story of a Great Theatre from Kean to Olivier to Spacey
reviewed by Belinda Webb-Blofeld
A couple of months ago I watched Tree at the Old Vic, a two-man play that was a taut 90 minutes without intermission. The hubby and I were seated in the Stage Dress Circle, a few narrow rows towards the back of the theatre. And I recalled the note in Terry Coleman’s informative and well paced history of this theatre, that even though the Vic is today the same size as it was in its earliest days, it had once accommodated more than treble the audience. There were no stalls then, only a pit,... [read more]
Alberto Toscano & Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute
reviewed by Alex Fletcher
In a world abounding with mapping devices of various kinds (from SatNavs to GoogleMaps and GIS) there is nonetheless a surfeit of social, political and economic disorientation. Visual art and literature (as well cinema and television) often explore cartographic forms as a means for manufacturing a fragile compass for orienting the increasingly complex spatial and social relations of contemporary global capitalism. Yet such cartographic prominence, as Alberto Toscano & Jeff Kinkle highlight in... [read more]
One of the most remarkable figures of the Russian Revolution was Leon Trotsky, a brilliant writer – as a young man his nickname was ‘The Pen’ – a great orator, addressing crowds of thousands, and a formidable organiser, building the Red Army during a ruthless civil war. But by 1928 Trotsky was forced into travelling from one place of exile to the next and was eventually murdered on Stalin’s orders, being denounced as a ‘faithful servant’ of fascism. Paul Le Blanc’s short... [read more]
Behind the bluster and the speculative sightings of literature’s own four horsemen, the suggestion that the internet could be the death of the novel – an idea seriously entertained by some – is underpinned by an interesting question: how do novelists writing today acknowledge the presence of the internet and digital media in their fiction? Much has been made of the power of social media in particular and its influence on human behaviour and relationships, and fiction writers, always keen... [read more]
Paul B. Preciado, Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture & Biopolitics
reviewed by Jane Cleasby
Those coming to Paul B. Preciado’s Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture & Biopolitics having read the genre-splitting, sexually graphic critical memoir that was 2013’s Testo Junkie may be surprised at the former’s comparable conventionality. Save for the preface and the postscript, Preciado is barely visible in the pages of Pornotopia, and readers may be disappointed to find his writing in a much more traditionally academic style. This is likely due to the book’s genesis as... [read more]
Sharon Rotbard, White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa
reviewed by Alison Hugill
In his essay ‘On the Concept of History’, Walter Benjamin writes - quoting the Austrian dramatist Hugo Hofmannsthal - that the true historian must ‘read what was never written.’ Echoing this sentiment, and taking up the task, Sharon Rotbard remarks that ‘…the most interesting chapters in Tel Aviv’s account of itself are, without doubt, the ones that have been left out.’
From this conceptual starting point, he aims to lay bare the myth of Tel Aviv’s architectural history,... [read more]
Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age
reviewed by Peter Marshall
In the preface to his new book, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age, Robert Harrison states that the question his book intends to examine, ‘How old are we?’ specifically refers to the ‘we’ of post-war America, and sets readers up for what we can assume will be a cultural critique by way of a philosophic and historic reflection on the phenomenon of age. There are plenty of instances when one should trust the work more than the author, and this is one. Though Juvenescence is... [read more]
