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On being hysterical

In fact, hysteria’s apotheosis came out of its masculinisation. Long associated with women—“hysteria” comes from the Greek for womb—as it exited the realm of possession and witchcraft and entered the domain of medicine, hysteria started to be found among men. Most of Charcot’s patients were women, but he became famous for his insistence on male hysteria. A muscular railway worker with hysterical paralysis following a train accident makes for a satisfying image: the masculine ideal suffering from the ultimate female complaint.

By Elena Comay del Junco.

Poem Brut #100 – Hanging by a Thread

These pieces are extracts from a journal I was keeping, on and off, in Sydney in the late eighties. Most of them were drawn in Karen’s kitchen, the woman who gave me a home when i was most in need of one. It was an open house, full of music and kind, creative, generous people coming and going. I kept my head down for the most part but was always listening, and often writing things down next to whatever drawing i was working on: bits of conversation, song lyrics, strange new words, wisecracks, memories I was trying to come to terms with and letters i would never send. Looking back at these pages now, I realise they also document a certain sea change in my life, a struggle that was taking place within me between drawing, which I had always assumed was where my path lay, and writing which I hadn’t much tried before. I guess words won out in the end.

In the 100th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Mark Czarnik.

Himmler’s Chicken

Himmler is always the first to arrive, anywhere. He is a farmer of chickens—he loves chickens—and those who know about the tending of fowl know that keeping a doctrinaire schedule is critical to animal husbandry.

A short story Tyler Smith.

The Novel as Kaleidoscopic Puzzle: Carlos Fonseca’s Natural History

One could call Natural History a “philosophical book,” a novel that remains in dialogue, throughout its pages, with the tradition of twentieth century French philosophy, from Badiou to Derrida. The book overflows, as has become Fonseca’s trademark, with multiple stories that direct the reader in different directions, but which slowly begin to trace the contours of a recognizable conceptual phantasmagoria. From Badiou, it seems to adopt his “theory of the event” and the idea of trying to find a truth, even when the final piece of the puzzle permanently eludes us. And from Derrida, it seems to borrow the idea that every event bears the traces of a previous event, traces that work as displaced repetitions, distorted copies of an original that never gets fully actualized.

Enrique D. Zattara reviews Natural History by Carlos Fonseca, translated by Megan McDowell.

Images, Text and Modern Feints: Dongyoung Lee’s I can’t and the Material of Meaning

One is of course tempted to suggest that Lee’s work constitutes a rigorous update of those Surrealist precedents that presciently if hastily staked-out the subterranean tell of structuralist intuitions. Lee’s work must surely be wondering what these supposedly old parlor tricks can do to the plausible differences between language, semiotics, art, philosophy, etc., after the dubiously permitted “language turn” redux of the 1960s. I can’t’s conceit about scientificity and textual hermeneutics is something of a send up, though it is meanwhile aboundingly rich. Material will not stop writing about itself; indeed, strictly, it will not stop writing itself.

Albe Harlow on I can’t give you an answer as matters stand by Dongyoung Lee.

Poem Brut #99 – Uncle Alex (Trocchi)

Alexander Trocchi has been called a deviant, a scoundrel, a genius, a monster. Semantics, words, letters organised in order to reveal a truth. He was all these things. He is, and will always be, my flesh and blood. The illustrative Cain to my Abel, something bigger and more powerful then me that will strike me down when I raise my body to match him, but I am grateful for the pairing. These poems are scales I have plucked from his Levithan hide. I have assembled them as best I can to show him as best I can. Here’s to you Alex, we’d be drinking whisky were you here but wait for me and we’ll be drinking starlight.

In the 99th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Aimee Keeble.

Three Days in March, 1917

What Solzhenitsyn describes, carefully and in detail, is the hodgepodge of leaders and potential leaders of parties (Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, socialists of different stripes, Kadets, Octobrists, and so on), the citizens (of all classes), the military, and the imperial family, and how they have competing interests. The struggle for control occurs largely in the absence of reliable information, and often is interrupted by bulletins filled with conflicting information from several quarters. There is no appetite for a united approach to restore civility. Anyone interested in how power politics is conducted will find Book 2 (and The Red Wheel in its entirety) fascinating, horrible, and depressing.

Jeff Bursey reviews March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 2 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Translated by Marian Schwartz.

Rumble in the High Himalayas

La means ‘a mountain pass’ in the Tibetan language. My first acquaintance with this two-letter word was the fictional place name, ‘Shangri-La’, in James Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon. Kashmir is described as a ‘Shangri-La beneath the summer moon’ in an iconic Led Zeppelin song. I recently happened to bump into Robert Plant, the co-writer of the song, in the lift of the hotel where I work and mentioned to him that the lyrics of ‘Kashmir’ are always buzzing in my head. He told me it was a one-of-a-kind song and couldn’t be repeated. In fact, it was Lhasa, on the far side of the Tibetan Plateau, which conjured up the images of a Shangri-La for Kashmiri traders who travelled along the Silk Road. The name Ladakh is derived from the Tibetan word, La-dvags, which means ‘a land of high passes’.

By Iqbal Ahmed.

Puppy Shower

In the elevator you readjust your tights, your skirt. You pout your lips and dab them pink. You hate puppy showers but this time, you think, it might be different. This time you want to be pretty.

A short story by Laurane Marchive.

Head for Heights

Then—a slip. Gravity has made the decision for you. You’re gone. In the air, heavy and falling. The rope snaps tight: a sharp parabola over the protection you placed below. The rock approaches again. There is no warning, and without thinking you raise your legs, brace the impact. Neatly done: no pain, no scratches or shattered ankles.

Alex Diggins reviews Slatehead: The Ascent of Britain’s Slate-Climbing Scene by Peter Goulding.

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