Styled ‘part countercultural history of England, part ghost story, and part magickal psychogeography’, Sharp’s preface to the Collection clarifies its literary objective: ‘to fecundate a strain of visionary fiction from the animated exploration of landscape and history.’ Mapping the nation through a series of occult pilgrimages to sites haunted by the ghosts of dead writers, artists, and directors, abandoned military sites and the loci of crime, conspiracy, and mystery, Sharp turns England into ‘an arena’ for ‘an open-ended and ludic ritual in all dimensions.’ The result of this ‘visionary field report’ is a ‘counterfeit of history’: a diabolical Ordnance Survey that resounds with hieratic dirges, satanic hagiographies, uncanny connections, and eerie laughter. [read full essay]
Coined by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger in 1974 when, after an extended period of working long hours, he found himself incapable of experiencing joy, ‘burnout’ has become a buzzword in recent years. An enervating psychic state marked by emotional exhaustion, a pervasive sense of futility, and the depletion of empathy, care and compassion, the condition is now frequently used as an umbrella term for the cognitive damage and distress wrought by the conditions of late capitalism. Indeed, according to Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, it shouldn’t be understood as ‘an affliction experienced by relatively few . . . but, increasingly, and particularly among millennials, the contemporary condition.’ [read full essay]
In his classic study of The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence (1970), Raymond Williams wonders what was emerging in England between 1847 and 1848 during the prodigious 20 months which saw the publication of Dombey and Son, Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, Mary Barton, Tancred, Town and Country and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Of course, the answer is in the list. What was emerging, at least in part, was the novel: ‘a new kind of consciousness’. The task left for us today is... [read more]
‘Their heavy footsteps, out of tune with the timbre / of my stilettos. I wasn’t wearing stilettos / but I think you will imagine that I was’. In ‘Bleach’, the opening poem of Phoebe Stuckes’ debut poetry collection Platinum Blonde, these lines strike upon two key themes which unravel throughout the book. First, they introduce the object of scale, mass and excess: the heavy steps of a wide gait, the light timbre of a quick shuffle, this also occurs earlier in the poem, ‘I liked the... [read more]
Rebecca Watson’s relentless debut novel, little scratch, propels readers with its experimental approach to language that ricochets the thoughts and actions of a nameless female narrator across each page. The novel’s presentation, which is varyingly reminiscent of an excel spreadsheet, a Twitter feed, and the vanguard, unconventional prose of modernist literature, weaves difficult subject matter into a new narrative fabric. This jarringly presented and deceptively simple text reflects... [read more]
In 2015, in The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski argued that critique, a term she uses to characterise the predominant institutionalised practices of interpretation, solicits the critic to adopt a stance and tone of ‘ferocious and blistering detachment’. The critic’s encounter with a text is driven by ‘desire to puncture illusions, topple idols and destroy divinities,’ that is both combative and paranoid. Towards the end of this book, Felski invokes Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as one... [read more]
Talking about dreams is tricky. This difficulty is expressed in various ways, but essentially the challenge is this: can words ever give a truthful account of what is experienced in sleep? If you dream of a sheep and then write or talk about that sheep, are you really describing what you saw? After all, it is a widely held belief that an image perceived while asleep is a code packed with unfulfilled wishes, memories and neuroses. A dream-sheep is always a desire-wolf in disguise.
Emma Lieber... [read more]
I went to a party dressed as John Cooper Clarke once. The theme was Dress As Yr Idols. I was in possession of a physique, a pair of trousers and a tie that were almost skinny enough, plus I had just about enough hair that, if doused in coca-cola and back-combed like Nicky Wire said to, it’d approximate his beetling updo. More importantly it was easy and I got to go around roaring the lines from Beasley Street — ‘people turn to poison / quick as lager turns to piss / sweethearts are... [read more]
There is an immediate difficulty, or perhaps rather a temptation, that presents itself when forming a response to any 'last book', particularly one produced under circumstances such as those in the background of Matthew Sweeney's final volume of poetry Shadow of the Owl. The poems it contains were largely composed in the period leading up to the author's death in August 2018 from motor neurone disease. They are poems full of portents and dark symbols, meetings with apparitions and last meal... [read more]
In his mid-twenties, Walter Benjamin wrote a formative essay on the historical evolution of language. Anticipating by a generation the critique mounted by key figures in the Frankfurt School, in relation to which he was more of a distantly orbiting satellite than a component star, he staged an inquiry into the archaic origins of the linguistic faculty, tracing the route by which its original nominative purity might have ramified into the instrumental version of communication to which more or... [read more]
Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: & Other Essays
reviewed by Jonathan Gharraie
Close to the beginning of this elegant, chewy collection of essays, Elisa Gabbert describes arriving at the Rice University campus on the morning of 9/11, and watching her fellow students watch the unfolding tragedy with ‘that air of disbelief that can seem almost casual.’ The casual note, whether absurd, funny, or melancholic, is important to Gabbert. She never allows it to dominate, but it’s a reliable way of leavening her rich textual mix of facts and scientific theories. The book is... [read more]
In ‘Theses of the Short Story’, a suitably succinct essay by Ricardo Piglia, the Argentine author and critic suggests that every short story is in fact two. ‘A visible story hides a secret tale,’ he writes, ‘narrated in an elliptical and fragmentary manner.’ The surface narrative has a subterranean twin, one no less tangible or ‘real’. Like the mind with its conscious and unconscious, neither of these discrete threads are dominant, indeed they are strangely intertwined. ‘The... [read more]
