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“People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats,” somebody says a few pages into Leonora Carrington’s 1974 novel The Hearing Trumpet. Most people would agree; if anything, the bad run of septuagenarians of late shows this age range is too narrow. The statement is characteristic of this chatoyant novel. Cats are everywhere in The Hearing Trumpet: their sheddings are collected to form a sleeveless cardigan; psychic powers are attributed to them; the earth freezes over and an earthquake thins out the human population, but the cats survive. Beneath its cattiness, the remark also offhandedly conflates species (the way “people” transmutes into “cats” at the end of the sentence) and recognizes the virtue of people usually excluded from civic life for being too young or too old. This broadening out of our ordinary categories of human life is at the heart of the novel.
Jim Henderson reviews Leonora Carrington‘s The Hearing Trumpet.
Then there are Herzen’s “absence of Continental diversions”; the absence of a credible London newspaper — it seemed to me that the Evening Standard was written for and read mostly by commuters on trains to dormitory towns and suburbs all over south-east England; the absence of metropolitan government, abolished in 1986; and, finally, that London was characterised by all this absence. When he said, in the next-but-one sentence, “London was the first metropolis to disappear”, I don’t suppose he meant that London was physically absent — that would be silly — but that it’s absent as an idea.
Andrew Stevens in conversation with Patrick Keiller.
Even in the face of the histrionic Royal Mail suspension of deliveries to Europe over Christmas, or Donald Trump’s claims about postal ballots leading to voting fraud in the U.S. election, a novel dedicated to the question of whether competition should be permitted for letters weighing less than 50 grams hardly seems evocative. And yet, Hjorth’s novel is a jolting tour de force impossible to put down, gleaming with philosophical insight and tenderness in the most unexpected places.
Denise Rose Hansen reviews Vigdis Hjorth‘s Long Live the Post Horn!
When I talk about female friendship, I feel a kind of ambivalence: there’s a whole school of chick lit and soppy movies about the redemptive qualities of female friendship, how your female friend is gonna be there no matter what and is more important than anyone else out there. I don’t mean that friendships like that don’t exist, but what I’m more interested in are depictions of friendships Lila and Lenu’s in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, which is all over the place — both dangerous and nurturing — depending when you drop in.
Linda Mannheim in conversation with Kit Caless.
These poems are collaged horoscopes cut out from Harper’s Baazar’s “real” horoscopes.
In the 112th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Ariadne Radi Cor.
These pieces come out of thinking about the gap between language and perception, between thought and utterance, thought and mark-making. They come out of the tradition of erasure poetry and steady stitching as a response, approach and way into world.
In the 111th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Karen Carcia.
The bachelor enters to a bar on the back alley. He notices that the tune in the Chinese restaurant is chasing him. The happy rhythm of ‘La en gañadora’ is coiling around him in the dim light. ‘La engañadora’ means the fraudster in Spanish. But it was translated in the US as “Anything Can Happen When You’re in Havana”.
A short story by Hiromi Suzuki.
For Swift, Knowledge (with a capital K) does not exist. It does not exist in the sense that it is not out there waiting to be found, that its constituent parts are not readymades prepared to be rearranged. The more the search is performed, the more the fragmentary quality of knowledge, of meaning, is revealed. My silence comes as no surprise. It seems I short-circuited that part of my internal belief and was left wordless.
An essay by Joshua Calladine-Jones on Jonathan Swift’s Guillver’s Travels.
You wanted me to come with you to watch
Them shoot your drugs and wrist-tie you
To that cheap bed. Could you hear the blank
Clatter of dropping ice in the hallway machines as you faded?
By Nicholas Rombes.
During these lulls he would approach the walls warily and place his ear against them, listening to the slumbering monster on the other side — its fresh breath of eternal rehashing — as though he were back in the catacombs. Sometimes he placed his sweaty hands flush with the wall on either side of his head and they would leave marks resembling prehistoric cave paintings.
A film by Julie Kamon based on a text by Andrew Gallix.