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It is a joy to learn of Cahill’s work, thinking that the verses are embedded in the Vedas, which in itself was ‘without authorship’, and in the past was strictly ‘inaccessible by women’ (Hudson, 1980). It is my humble opinion, that women should be entitled to write (let alone access) such verses, for it is their minds and bodies which are the closest to the God(s), with their ability to fulfil humanity’s highest aspiration to harbour the seed to create consciousness: Selves, Others.
Harold Legaspi on Michelle Cahill.
Stiegler’s central thesis was focused on the idea that we cannot separate man from technics. Insofar as we can consider ourselves human beings, we must understand that we are defined by our inherent technicity which arises simultaneously with our becoming human through a process of exteriorisation which he calls epiphylogenesis. Epiphylogenesis can essentially be understood as the exteriorisation of consciousness into tools, art, and other forms of technics.
Matt Bluemink remembers Bernard Stiegler.
Through poetry, A Commonplace stands for access and empowerment, for freedom from state intimidation and enclosure, and for ownership of the lands we live from. It argues for—by celebrating—the vitality of poetry: its vivid, living nature and its empathetic necessity in our critical matters. This concern, and his apparent disdain for politics which seek to turn Britain inwards, is what guards Davidson’s work against the significant risk of seeming pastoral, or over-invested in the ‘old’ features of English life which dominate his work: apple orchards, country roads, bicycles, bricks. A Commonplace elevates whichever common things are yours, without insisting that apples and bricks are everyone’s grounding.
Fiona Glen reviews A Commonplace: Apples, Bricks & Other People’s Poems by Jonathan Davidson.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.