Twitter’s character limit has proven attractive to recent crafters of narrative, among them Teju Cole, whose novel Open City won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 2012. In an interview with Wired, Cole credited Twitter for engaging ‘the part of me that makes sentences. I try to shape a sentence that works. … When you’re writing fiction and longform prose, you think about the best sentences, of course, and you work on them. But when you’re tweeting, the sentences are isolated, they’re naked, and so there is that much more scrutiny on how they work.’ On the one hand, Twitter is like poetry, in that ‘every single line has a certain punch and precision to it’; on the other hand, it is like a drug: ‘I’m addicted to it the way I’m addicted to coffee or to my headphones: guiltlessly.’ [read full essay]
Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity
reviewed by Gareth Carrol
In the preface to his book, Charles Taylor describes how he began writing The Language Animal in the late 1980s. His aim was to outline a new theory of the linguistic system, based not on traditional views of the descriptive power of language, but intended to show how language shapes every aspect of our lives and sense of self. Now, some 25 years later, he presents what is still only Part One of his opus. He explains that his intention was to support his theoretical account of the constitution... [read more]
All stories are ghost stories, we are told in Samantha Hunt’s new novel, Mr Splitfoot, a book that uniquely argues for and against belief in anything beyond our world. Set in upstate New York, Mr Splitfoot is part ghost story and part road trip, with forays into religious cults, con artistry, meteorite mapping, abandonment and motherhood. It is a smart, well-structured novel with Dickensian twists and an equally knotted cast of characters. I could deploy with a straight face descriptions like... [read more]
Casey Brienza, Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics
reviewed by Susan Burton
Manga are highly-stylised graphic 'cartoon' stories from Japan, typically featuring characters with large, doe eyes, spiky hair, and pointed chins. Collected in manga comics, serialised manga stories are categorised by age and gender. Shounen (boys) and seinen (young male) comics feature stories on sports, politics, business and science fiction, and sometimes also erotic or sexually perverse tales. Shoujo (girls') and josei (womens') manga comics are pastel and candyfloss-coloured magazines... [read more]
Kirill Medvedev, trans. Keith Gessen, Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill & Bela Shayevich, It's No Good
reviewed by Andre van Loon
BIG RUBBER COCK
I saw it every day on the way to school.
I know that’s not the best way
to start a poem,
but there’s nothing I can do about my memories,
I can’t take the rubber cock out of my mind and
replace it
with, say, a New Year’s Tree.
Welcome to the poetry of Kirill Medvedev, Russia’s ‘first authentic post-Soviet writer,’ in the words of his translator, Keith Gessen. We’re a long way from the lyricism of Alexander Pushkin or Mikhail Lermontov. Medvedev’s... [read more]
Vertigo, as with any fear, serves as a form of post-justification. It’s a condition termed to contextualise a feeling and ground an unknown – a cocktail of responsive atmospheres charted as a measurable phobia underneath the guise of a catchall term. The word fails, of course. We think of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and James Stewart’s face will always tell us more of the nature of his bodily response than would the term ‘vertigo’ alone; the sensation is something we can only ever... [read more]
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, The New Human In Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900
reviewed by Imogen Woodberry
By the early years of the 20th century the nature and boundaries of human identity had become increasingly destabilised. One of the many conceptual revolutions provoked by Darwinism was the recognition that the present state of humanity was temporary; this led to a volume of speculation on what could next lie in store for the human species. Despite Darwin’s charting of human development as an upward trajectory, a move from simpler sub-species to more complex entities, change, it was feared,... [read more]
Espen Hammer, Adorno's Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe
reviewed by Stuart Walton
The verdict passed on culture by the historical catastrophes of the twentieth century, that it had failed in its innermost core by failing to reach the innermost core of human beings, was one of Theodor Adorno's most non-negotiable contentions. What was left of culture after Auschwitz was pure ideology, or else the delusive puerility of the culture industry. It had failed according to its own criteria. Not only had it not exorcised the demons of social turbulence according to the Aristotelian... [read more]
Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity
reviewed by Benjamin Noys
Moaning about Britain is a very British thing to do. The national ideology of ‘muddling through’, of compromise and moderation, is usually accompanied by a moaning about the misery of these compromises. The British, or perhaps that should be the English, are never so happy, it seems, as when they are queuing and complaining. Owen Hatherley’s Ministry of Nostalgia brings to bear his considerable polemical gifts to analyse a particular instance of ‘muddling through’: the emergence of... [read more]
Annebella Pollen, The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians
reviewed by Anna Neima
A dissonant, disquieting collection of over 100 images – many of them previously unseen – accompany art and design historian Annebella Pollen’s account of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: eye-catching, brightly coloured, Kandinsky-style designs; black and white photos of solitary, near-naked figures posed ritualistically out-of-doors; groups of young people dancing, hiking and camping in a heterogeneous range of costumes, some reminiscent of Robin Hood: Men in Tights and the modern craze... [read more]
Paul Fischer, A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power
reviewed by Stephen Lee Naish
It is no coincidence that North Korea seems to exist as an almost real-time movie. The country comes across in weird combination of gangster films like The Godfather, and Once Upon a Time in America, and the old science fiction adaptations of 1984 and Brave New World, played out over a seventy year period with no end credits in sight. The Kim dynasty, thus far including Kim Il-sung, his son Kim Jong-Il, and since 2011, Jong-il's young son Kim Jong-un, are the main stars of the picture, prima... [read more]
