There is one aspect of smartphone technology we all now take for granted – your phone knows where you are. By extension, so does the creator of a piece of located fiction for that instrument, enabled therefore to release elements of narrative in particular locations or at chosen times, choosing backdrops for their storyline in the real world. However, this puts a new onus on the writer. Rather than conjuring up such settings from the imagination, they must be tested thoroughly for suitability. Are they easily accessible by public transport? Do they offer a safe space in which a participant can listen to audio or read text on a screen without getting knocked down by traffic or robbed when they take their phone from their pocket? How onerous is it, travelling from one location to the next? To drill down further into the technology, will GPS trigger effectively in the location you have ring-fenced remotely as the spot where a particular event will unfold, or will a tall building or other blind-spot get in the way? [read full essay]
Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix (eds.), Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night
reviewed by Stuart Walton
That the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Hate, as the high-water mark of 1977 came to be known, passed without much overt commemoration of the British punk movement says something more than that there was no burning desire to remember it. It speaks eloquently of the relation that punk rock already had with its own afterlife, even during its rapid maturation. Acutely conscious of the reified institutionalism to which popular music had already long since succumbed in the suffocating forms of... [read more]
The bardo, according to Buddhist teaching, is a kind of limbo state for the soul after the body reaches its corporeal date of expiry. Souls of the departed linger in the bardo before they are ready to move on to whatever happens next (either reincarnation or nirvana), but in the fictional world of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo – winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize – this liminal space functions a little more like purgatory. The souls of the departed come to inhabit their... [read more]
George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis
reviewed by Tom Cutterham
For a month in 2013, one small neighbourhood in the South Korean city of Suwon banned cars from its streets. Local authorities widened the pavements, and gave out bicycles and electric scooters to residents. ‘Cafes and restaurants spilled into the streets,’ George Monbiot reports in his new book Out of the Wreckage, ‘and people began to connect in ways that were impossible before.’ Without cars and their infrastructure cutting through the common spaces, community could return to old... [read more]
Some books of poems contain a part that overwhelms the whole, like an apple in a bowl of berries. In Wayne Holloway-Smith’s full-length debut, Alarum, that part is the 12-page meditation on class, brutality, and guilt entitled ‘Some Violence’. Although there is a political dimension to the violence of the title, Holloway-Smith does not report or catalogue it, as someone like James Fenton or Carolyn Forché might. And although the violence is local – domestic – Holloway-Smith does not... [read more]
Richard Power Sayeed, 1997: The Future that Never Happened
reviewed by Alex Niven
My abiding memory of 1997 is of a music video that emerged towards the end of the year. Officially a charity single for Children in Need, but actually an encomium for the BBC and its licence fee, the all-star cover of Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ released in late November was something like a dying fall for the ’94-’97 interval – that weird, quixotic glitch in the neoliberal timeframe.
Everything about this curious micro-period was summarised in the song and its heavily rotated... [read more]
I don’t know how stockings are made nowadays, Roland Barthes says in a lecture he delivered in 1980, but when I was a child they were knitted. He describes growing up surrounded by women who were ‘obsessed with the risk of getting a hole in their stockings’ which would then form a ladder, and the gesture ‘whereby a woman would wet a finger in her mouth and apply it to the weave, cementing it with saliva, and in this way she would stop it.’ He remembers, too, a tiny stall of... [read more]
Anna Feigenbaum, Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today
reviewed by Peter Mitchell
Consider the gas-mask dancers of Gezi Park. In 2013, during the occupation of Taksim Square, dancers – whirling dervishes, ballet dancers – started to put on shows, spinning and dipping in their full regalia, with the addition of the gas masks which were by then becoming the cardinal symbol of the protests. The images quickly gained traction within the feverish meme-jockeying that surrounded Gezi, and no wonder: there’s something indecently powerful in the juxtaposition of dervish robes... [read more]
The loosely linked short stories in James Miller’s third book – it’s not quite a novel, despite the back-cover blurb, though this is not to diminish it one iota – focus, in the words of its meta-narrator, on ‘a subterranean America full of un-American activities.’ This, at first glance, might appear to be familiar, even hackneyed, territory, supported by the book’s impressive quasi-graphic-novel cover, which drips with junkyard spares, palms, neons and law enforcement officers in... [read more]
Although Jean Giono’s short book (105 pages) begins in a biographical vein, it is not the historical Herman Melville that it depicts. Instead, the narrative soon drifts into the depths of the hypothetical and the fictional. Melville, in the process, becomes a kind of spirit-summoning: both a tribute to the American writer, and, as Edmund White puts in his introduction, the product of Giono ‘trying on’ Melville as an alter ego. The narrative itself describes only a brief episode. In a... [read more]
Frank Bidart, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016
reviewed by Ben Leubner
Frank Bidart’s Half-Light contains half a century’s worth of poetic output and runs to 665 pages. There are, however, only 144 poems total, and a mere ten of those poems, which I’ll discuss briefly in what follows, take up over a third of the volume, 244 pages, to be precise. Bidart has thus been prolific in his career in terms of sheer volume, not unlike Robert Lowell, but also fairly restrained in terms of the number of actual poems published, where in this regard he has more in... [read more]
