Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future
reviewed by Tom Cutterham
The United States was born in a bloody civil war, which over the course of eight years not only dismembered the British empire in North America, but also wrought transformative destruction on indigenous communities and created displaced populations from Canada to Florida, New Orleans to the west African coast. Uprisings, insurrections, filibusters, and secessionists have plagued the republic ever since — just as they have other settler-colonial empires. The Civil War of 1861–65, which ended... [read more]
The oldest text in the Friulian language is a 14th-century poem. ‘Piruç myo doç inculurit,’ it begins, ‘Quant yò chi vyot, dut stoy ardit. . .’ ‘My pear so sweet, so coloured, / When I see you, I feel brave.’ You could mistake it for a Slavic tongue, all consonants and gutturals. But Friulian is a distant cousin of Italian, descended directly from Latin with a bit of Celtic thrown in. 600,000 people speak it today, almost all of them from their namesake region of Friuli in the... [read more]
In her 2020 book, Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, Lola Olufemi presented the project of radical feminism as yet to begin. As she writes, addressing young activists, ‘you are making a commitment to a world that has not yet been built.’ The book is split into neat chapters, each focusing on a particular form of violence deployed by the patriarchal operation of the state. It opens with a quote from Christina Sharpe: ‘Imagine otherwise. Remake the world. Some of us have never had any... [read more]
Deceit is a ruminative and slow-burning novel that reveals as much as it conceals. Written in the form of diary entries by an unnamed narrator, the first impression is of a great candour, even pedantry at getting things exact on the page. The writer, a Russian who has fled the Bolsheviks to live in exile in Paris, begins by unfolding his thoughts with a Proustian languor: paragraph-long sentences; an array of commas and semicolons; strings of adjectives and adverbs. But soon, a sense of... [read more]
‘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]
