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Poem Brut #103 – Isolation

I don’t bake or exercise, so this was the most finicky, screen-free lockdown activity I could find. Each line is made with the same nine pieces of metal letterpress type, which meant printing the same sheet seven times, calculating spaces for each line and colour, and praying with every pull of the handle that the alignment was right on my fussy little Adana press. I’m obsessed with printing anagrams, which seem to draw out material traces of the repetitive, bodily-mechanical process and of the type itself. This lovely paper was rescued from a retired printer’s garage, where it sat and faded unevenly for a few decades. The case of type I smuggled home the day before campus closed is 48pt Westminster.

In the 101st of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by JT Welsch.

Our Sense of Time: An Interview with Olivia Laing

I don’t like the term autofiction. For a start I don’t think it’s a new thing. Isn’t Proust writing autofiction? And Christopher Isherwood certainly is. I think writers always play with the real and the invented, and I also think we’re in an era that is obsessed with memoir, to its own detriment. We like personal stories too much, and personal stories are very poor at revealing the political elements of a life, what’s shared. That excites me as a project, and I’m always trying to escape the I. Surely Crudo is biofiction, if it’s anything? I’m much more interested in we than I.

Claudia Bruno interviews Olivia Laing.

Rosie

I had lived the longest at the village house and could remember the time of arriving at consensus in our opposition to individualism of any kind. Favoritism was out. Babying, out. We didn’t ask about each other’s pasts. But there were, somehow, things we all knew about Rosie.

A short story by Jacqueline Feldman.

Journey to the End of the World with Joanna Pocock

So many young, big-city children are being brainwashed. They spend so much time in front of a screen where they are sold a life. They don’t live life; they consume a simulacrum of a life. It makes me incredibly sad. At the same time, my daughter and her friends go on the climate marches and they care deeply about the planet. But I keep coming back to this idea of schizophrenia as the normal state of our world. On the one hand, kids are protesting the eco-cide that is going on, yet they are buying fast fashion and iPhones. It isn’t their fault. They are children. It is our fault. We have allowed this situation to blossom through the idea of exponential growth. We will never solve the climate crisis until we start giving back to the Earth more than we take. Yet, how to get that message across? I don’t have an answer to that.

Claudia Bruno interviews Joanna Pocock about Surrender.

Metropolis

Goebbels thought Metropolis a masterpiece, and it seems Hitler shared his admiration. Recognising its power, Goebbels even sought to bring Fritz on as head of the German film studio UFA, overlooking the fact he was a Jew. “We decide who is Jewish,” the bloodsoaked old cynic is said to have mused. The Nazis’ appreciation has an even more fundamental link. Metropolis was a collaborative work between Fritz Lang and his then wife, Thea von Harbou. Lang was the director and visual master, but von Harbou wrote the script, and the story was adapted from a novel she wrote. While Lang was repelled by the Hitler regime, von Harbou became increasingly sympathetic to the Nazis, later joining the party; one of many reasons for their later divorce. No wonder that one key aspect of the message of Metropolis was appropriated by the Nazis, when one of its creators was a proto-Nazi herself.

Ben Granger on Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis.

Sex and Drugs and the Major Arcana

The whole novel is about being seduced. These seductions are manifold — desire and addiction, power and pleasure, the material world and the occult, the obsessions with sex, the tarot and the body. In the background, the threat of fascism, Nazis, General Franco and de-individualisation by the state. Maria and Martin rebel against ‘power’ by enacting their own events of bondage and domination, the fear instilled by fascism elaborated in the horror movies they watch obsessively and the Dark Grimoire Tarot — based on H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon — they use to divine their own ‘reality.’

Steve Finbow reviews Stewart Home‘s She’s My Witch.

Housing Haunted Housing (Extracts)

to kneel at the Wehrmacht haunt
and vacate all pretence
to uniformity simplicity eternity

to flagrantly defy the
flaktum alpine cottage volkshalle

but brazenly appropriate
the starkness quaintness weight

Enjoy 3 excerpts from Oscar Mardell‘s Housing Haunted Housing, a series of poems inspired by Brutalist architecture.

A Twenty-First Century War and Peace

war’s proximity to fiction
the way it all felt like a script
like déjà vu to those at Stalingrad

the sense that they were
not just soldiers in the fight
but players in some old Tolstoyan epic
a myth to justify a state
that couldn’t be sustained

in this we find
another mirror image

Oscar Mardell reviews Vasily Grossman‘s Stalingrad.

The Dregs (Excerpt)

“What does this girl look like?”
“Brown hair, radiant soul, eyes that penetrate the night.”
“She doesn’t sound familiar.”
“If you saw her, you’d know her. Everyone knows her. You definitely know her.”
“Listen, do you need me to call someone?”
“No.”
“You look like you could use a friendly face and a decent meal. I reckon I got neither. I rent this place from a customer who checks in regularly, so you can’t stay here, but I know some people who run squats in Guangzhou. I can give them a call…?”
“I came here for her. The co-ordinates, they led me right to your door.”
“Did someone send you?”
“Someone did, yes.”
“Who?”
“You can only see him when you dream. If you listen to the ‘sound’ you can hear him making love to Florence.”

Read an extract from Chris Kelso‘s The Dregs Trilogy.

The Dregs

Unger House Radicals begins with the relationship between an avant-garde film maker and his serial killer muse — one that will ultimately birth the Ultra-Realist movement. Deeply rooted in both narcissism and nihilism — as of course many cults are — its creators see Ultra-Realism as an updated (and distinctly non-faked) version of Grand Guignol theatre. Events get increasingly surreal when Kelso throws strands of multiple personality disorder and/or possession into the mix, and from this point forward conventional chronology is frequently abandoned. Without revealing too much, the cast of characters expands from here on in, as does Kelso’s exploration of various philosophies and the role that dreams and nightmares play in everybody’s lives, along with individual and societal complicity in an endless parade of atrocities.

Matt Neil Hill reviews Chris Kelso‘s The Dregs Trilogy.

3:AM Magazine

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