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Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us

The X-ray shows an opaque stain on a lobe of the right lung. Fernand has no precise idea of what this means, beyond the fact that the statement’s length invites the interpretation that what he took for a common cold, caught after a soccer match in Algeria, may be a more serious illness. Very probably tuberculosis.

An excerpt from Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, the first novel from Joseph Andras.

Zahir: Desire and Eclipse

The suggestion here is that the ‘I’ (like the ‘it’ in expressions like ‘it is raining’) is simply a verbal construct — a placeholder for an agency which only exists in language and whose entire being consists in ‘a name’. For Borges’ narrator, the Zahir destroyed his identity; for this collection, it simply revealed the existing cracks.

Accordingly, much of Zahir treats language with a degree of distrust.

Oscar Mardell reviews the Zahir: Desire and Eclipse anthology edited by Christian Patracchini.

Chauvo-Feminism

‘Everyone I know says they’ve met a chauvo-feminist at some point during the past few years,’ says Sam Mills in this excellent book. I am sure she is right, and I greeted the text with some relief because chauvo-feminism is exceedingly difficult to deal with; to someone on the end of it, it may feel intractable, hard to prove and you may think it is only you. You may be told, if you dare to challenge the man who practices it, that you have entirely misunderstood; it is all in your head and no-one else has a problem. So why are you making a fuss? Perhaps you will even wonder if you are going mad. All these things have happened to me, at several points in my life and more recently where their effects were appalling for my view of myself, self-esteem, and trust in others.

Anna Vaught reviews Sam Mills‘s Chauvo-Feminism.

Poem Brut 113 – Fire Signs

‘These found texts are from a fire precautions sign at a disused textiles mill in Farley, near Leeds. It was demolished soon after. The long, elaborate wording seemed to me to offer up other meanings.’

In the 113th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Mark L Valentine.

His Shadow Book: Jordan A. Rothacker Interviewed

The writerly answer would be that it is a totally fictional creation, but all me, as all the characters I create come from me, out of me, and are me. But this writing process was one of method acting. I developed this character out of my own pain and frustrations and then gave him life in his own journals. When I thought thoughts that fit him, I wrote them in there. That journal — which became several journals — was always in my pocket and I wrote in it out in the world. The text itself bleeds in and back out of reality and life and the clues within it support this idea and crazy experience. References to Anna Kavan and Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre” tease out the lie that Maawaam is me and that he isn’t.

Jordan A. Rothacker interviewed by Chris Kelso.

Between Parentheses

On Wednesday, December 4, 1935, beneath an article about the removal of a controversial monument from the front lawn of the county courthouse, the twenty-first page of the Los Angeles Times carried an item about the death of an assistant professor, thirty-two years of age [sic], a graduate of the Universities of California and Paris, then employed in the Classics Department at Harvard, in a hotel suite overlooking downtown’s MacArthur Park, where he and his wife, Marian (née Tanhauser), were staying during a visit to her gravely ill mother, whose estate they were putting in order.

Short fiction from Ryan Ruby.

Duos #18 – The Earth Will Come to Laugh and Feast.

The book evokes the strong bond between art and literature, and of ekphrastic writing that evokes images by highlighting hidden relationships and implied mysteries. The result is a moving collection of poems and short stories revealing the profound state of existence and the fate of our torment, the inevitability of suffering, and of our helplessness from pain.

As Tinti says “This partnership moves from the rubble, passes through cemeteries, sniffs out the signs of what has gone. Roger Ballen’s photos, my words, are a kind of defense against the terrible power of death. They are an accumulation of enthusiasm, injuries, obsessions. They are effigies composed to disturb the reader, to ambush the thought, the things.”

In the 18th of the Duos series, new poetry by Gabriele Tinti and Roger Ballen.

Burroughs and Scotland

Kelso documents a precursor of sorts to Burroughs’ transatlantic shit-stirring in the serial killer and rapist Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel. I think the inclusion here of these grim and apparently unrelated facts is not entirely normal in a biography, but feels like an important hangover from Kelso’s fiction. He’s always been good at making unusual connections, and his idea that Manuel was a demon seed from across the water whose planting on Scottish soil was the beginning of mutations in the country’s collective psyche preparing its population for further subversions is an interesting one.

Matt Neil Hill reviews Chris Kelso‘s Burroughs and Scotland.

The Hearing Trumpet

“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.

The English Fear of Cities and Europe: Patrick Keiller

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.

3:AM Magazine

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