Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson is, before anything else, a personal text. That is a difficult distinction, generally, especially when addressing Emerson, and even more so when discussing a biography about him. ‘All history becomes subjective,’ he writes in ‘History,’ ‘in other words there is properly no history, only biography.’ What has passed before our time remains a dead text without translation. It is only at the point of contact — at the moment of subjectivity — that history can be said to exist at all. When Emerson says biography he of course means the life we have now, as it grows and will be read in another present. [read full essay]
That’s the Albini sound: punk doesn’t have to mean disorderly. Instead, it’s ruthless discipline. Creatives of all stripes need an Albini figure in their life, or could benefit from reading up on him. Anxiety, doubt, and the prevarication that calls itself perfectionism can only wither before such work ethic. [read full column]
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess
reviewed by Grace Tomlinson
A chapter in US critic Becca Rothfeld’s astonishing debut essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, opens with professional minimalist Marie Kondo ripping out what she wants to keep from her books and disposing of the rest. Her newly freed pages are printed with sentences that inspire her, and are therefore allowed their paper-thin allotment in Kondo’s carefully decluttered home.
The more extreme minimalist can save yet more space, if only in one dimension, by cutting out these... [read more]
In the 1890s, with the rise of electric lighting and the need for copper wiring, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, headquartered in Butte, Montana, and owned by Irishman Marcus Daly, became one of the largest mining operations in the entire world. Buttressed by an enormous vein of copper, Butte was a boomtown, and the resulting labor opportunities — potentially lucrative but extremely dangerous — attracted an influx of Irish immigrants. By the turn of the century, over a quarter of its... [read more]
Matthew Worley, Zerox Machine: Punk, Post-Punk and Fanzines in Britain, 1976-88
reviewed by Alexis Forss
The hiss of tape and a murmur of studio ambient: someone laughs, cusses, or maybe crashes into something. Then the clicking drumsticks and here comes the count-in. Onetwothreefour! Amateurism, demystification, and materiality announce themselves at the top of a punk track, cleansing and corroding, nihilating and liberating, not only blasting towards a new musical future but also carving out a hard rock orthodoxy. And anyone can play. Maybe this rings a bell: ‘This is a chord. This is another.... [read more]
Around the turn of the Millennium the English — some of them — started thinking anew about their national identity, and how to disentangle it from Britishness. A catalyst, looking back, is often supposed to be the England men’s football team’s charge to the semi-finals of Euro 1996. The years since have seen a stream of enquiries into Englishness across a range of fields, from sociology to the history of pop music. After Brexit, the discussion has narrowed to politics, with several... [read more]
What is a good death? Does it depend on how we die, or where we end up next?
In her first book, Intervals, Marianne Brooker tells the story of her mother’s decision to stop eating and drinking after being diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. But this is not simply a personal memoir of illness and death. From its very first pages, where Brooker deciphers the transformative power of imagining a better life from a children’s story about a toy rabbit, Intervals is a... [read more]
A poem is a kind of conspiracy between the poet and the reader, and not simply in the sense of a plot or secret plan. ‘Conspiracy’ (from the Latin conspiratio) has the literal meaning of ‘I breathe together with others’ and that, metaphorically, is what we do when we read a poem. We share the poet’s thoughts and feelings, their position in the world. We share their air.
In her long poem ‘Lachrymatory’ (which appeared in issue 3 of Tolka magazine last year) Aea Varfis-van... [read more]
Michel Chaouli, Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Michel Chaouli opens his study of the techniques and functions of criticism with a startling confession. Some years ago, while teaching a standard module on the modern European novel at Indiana University, in a lecture focused on Franz Kafka's The Trial, he read out a paragraph from the text and promptly found he had nothing to say about it. Improvising desperately, he skipped to another passage and read that, and another, but always with the same result. The emotional dynamics of the scene... [read more]
Serge Daney, trans. Nicholas Elliott, Footlights: Critical Notebook 1970–1982
reviewed by Sam Warren Miell
After his premature death in 1992, aged 48, Serge Daney’s unpublished notes were collected in a volume entitled L’exercise a été profitable, monsieur, after the French translation of a line repeated in Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet: ‘The exercise was beneficial, sir.’ Daney, who was at his death the most important writer on cinema in France, had explained that it was this film, beloved in France and more or less ignored everywhere else, that best allegorised the trajectory of the... [read more]
Emmie Francis & Mark Godfrey (eds.), Five Stories for Philip Guston
reviewed by Patrick Christie
Philip Guston lived several artistic lives — as a muralist employed by the New Deal Works Program Administration to create anti-fascist art on public buildings; as a figurative painter combining his passions for Giorgio de Chirico and Piero della Francesca to make tableau pictures responding to the Holocaust; as a respected Abstract Expressionist and member of the New York school alongside childhood friend Jackson Pollock; and finally, as a political satirist producing pastel-coloured... [read more]
‘A ledge of any kind got me going,’ Holly Pester’s narrator declares on the first page of the poet’s debut novel The Lodgers, revealing a childhood fantasy of ‘climbing inside a small case or container, like a piano stool or matchbox’ to live a ‘pretend little life’. A life can’t be built on a ledge — it is, by definition, narrow and temporary — but anyone who rents in the turbulent UK housing market will recognise the narrator’s constant searching for something to hold... [read more]
