‘All art is contemporary art’, the installation artist James Turrell once said, ‘because it had to be made when it was now’. This is not an uncontroversial observation, but Erik Kennedy’s second poetry collection, Another Beautiful Day Indoors, certainly strikes a very strong contemporary note by expressly being of the ‘now’. There are two poems, for example, about the current post-pandemic moment. In ‘Post-Pandemic Adaptation’, the poet regrets abandoning his plans for change... [read more]
I remember sitting in the study room stuck to the chair. It was in the thick of summer, on the hottest day during a heatwave, and I was reading for my Masters dissertation. My topic was on seduction narratives of the 18th century, and though I was sweating like a nun in a Sadean plot, there was nothing remotely sexy about this scene. French libertine novellas lay sprawled out in front of me; pages of articles on ‘the nature of libertine promises’ or ‘the seducer as friend’ sat limp on a... [read more]
Megan Dunn’s first book, Tinderbox, was an astute, formally daring work of comic non-fiction that traced her years working for Borders bookshop in the UK during the 00s, while attempting a feminist rewrite of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451. The follow-up, Things I Learned at Art School, is a prequel of sorts, a more conventional memoir of her early years growing up in New Zealand in the 80s and 90s, which nevertheless crackles with all the energy and inventiveness of her debut. Dunn’s... [read more]
Walter Benjamin once made the point that journalism had weakened our capacity for storytelling. For him the mark of a real story was ‘chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis’. A good storyteller knows that some things have to be left tacit: 'It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the... [read more]
Emily Hall’s The Longcut possesses no plot, unless an artist walking to and eventually arriving at a meeting with a gallery person, all the while wondering what her work is, while also worrying occasionally about her status at her day job, may be judged a plot. None of the characters bear so much as a name. Characterisation, at least as it’s generally defined both in American MFA workshops and by most Big Five editors, is virtually nil. There’s precious little in the way of story — I... [read more]
Alex Harvey, Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Among the bonus tracks on what appears, for the time being, to have been Tom Waits's last album of original songs, Bad As Me (2011), is a selection called 'Tell Me'. The record's preceding 44 minutes have oscillated wildly between broken-backed odes to dysfunctional relationships, tenderly gruff statements of resignation at their demise, and a burst or two of expostulating political fury, coming to rest with a befuddled celebration of New Year's Eve, the singer executing a lethargic segue into... [read more]
Sincerity gets a bad rap, and perhaps understandably so. It can easily tip into sentimentality, which at best can feel like a kind of deranged optimism; at worst it can carry with it the ickiness of unearned intimacy and emotional exposure. I’m thinking too of the coercive sentimentality in wellbeing practices: consider the range of mindfulness apps cynically employed to pacify the anxious capitalist subject. I will confess to bringing some of these reservations to my initial reading of... [read more]
Dylan Riley, Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present
reviewed by Luke Warde
What are they? The sociologist Dylan Riley poses this question at the very outset of Microverses, referring to the 110 — originally handwritten — ‘notes’ out of which this, his latest book, is made. Their writing was prompted by a confluence of personal, political and social crises: his wife Emmanuela’s illness, the final months of the Trump presidency, and the Covid pandemic. Most are short discursive essays of varying length and on various political, sociological and cultural... [read more]
There is a paradox at play when it comes to memoir. On the one hand is the attempt to be honest about one’s life, and on the other is the mask we all wear — the way we wish to be seen versus the way we want to see ourselves. Does a memoir ever truly go behind the mask, or is it just another performative aspect of it? The very act of writing a memoir — or, at the very least, seeking to publish a memoir — is to present oneself as one wishes to be seen. The paradox lies here: by examining... [read more]
David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch
reviewed by Miles Beard
The first problem one encounters with David Mamet’s new essay collection, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch is figuring out what in the hell he’s talking about. What begins to reveal itself, however, is that this question is answered more easily by asking a subtly different one: who in the hell is he talking to?
By his own self-mythologising, Mamet is still a humble newspaperman who, despite the judgement of his critics, somehow foraged a path to becoming... [read more]
