Whatever it is, we're against it.

:: latest features

Correcting the Record

We can respect the private grief this death must bring and sympathise with that sadness. But that shouldn’t involve changing the record and distorting the proof. The most decent thing to do is to leave him as he chose to live his life, aloof and apart. Coronavirus has killed over 150,000 people in the UK alone in the past year. More than a million around the world. Every single one of those deaths is a tragedy. Prince Philip deserves no more public mourning than any of them. Not least because he’d got what he wanted. “In the event that I am reincarnated,” he famously said. “I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation”. That’s who he was.

By Sam Jordison.

Adjacent to Love

With him, there was a standard of love she felt herself failing to live up to, but which she wanted and hoped to approximate; with Caleb, by contrast, her relationship seems destined to remain static for as long as it lasts. She will always be in loco parentis and he will always make what seem like modest demands, so they will always stop short of a breaking point. Presumably for this very reason, the narrative skips the long duree of their marriage and we cut straight from their wedding to them in old age. One can easily imagine Lydia avoiding the subject of climate change during those years, since, unlike the climate itself, it never seems to change. And all the while, ‘it happened slowly, and then it happened all at once.’

Sam Burt reviews Isobel Wohl‘s Cold New Climate.

Poem Brut #115 – L’Inferno under Revision

The page of literature has retained its ontotheological reputation. Before the built environment of the grapheme can be figured, before writing can be marked, certain prepropositional circumstances are supposed necessary that any project going under the name of art commence. Such discursive biases, however, besides being redundantly geocentric (for, one can route them to, say, architecture’s prepropositional ground), are apparently ignorant of a certain ongoing immanence, just as primordial as it is momentary: as Leon Battista Alberti inscribed, “QVID TVM?”

In the 115th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Albe Harlow.

The Poetics of Non-Space: An interview with Matthew Turner

Buildings, and how we interact with them, are shadows of thoughts and feeling before we become fully conscious of them. A cluttered home can be stream of consciousness made real, which is much more convincing than traditional articulations of that narrative mode, that for me is usually too ordered and well defined. Space in my writing expresses pre-conscious and pre-personal undercurrents which one of my favourite writers, Nathalie Sarraute, defined as ‘tropisms’ — a phrase borrowed from how plants move towards the sun or other stimulus, such as wind, gravity and darkness. I think my characters grow towards walls and objects, and in turn spaces grow inwards around them. Kafka wrote in one of his notebooks that everyone carries a room around inside of them, and we can hear the noises it makes — it’s this kind of relationship.

Matthew Turner interviewed by Andrew Gallix.

Of Monkeys and Monsters

Instead of sleeping Kierk is out grabbing beers at a bar, sitting at the open window in the breeze and watching the late-night groups of people walk past in fits of laughter or discussion. Then he’s out to join them, meandering past the bright lamplights and shuttered store windows of New York City at night. To be a scientist again, to be working on consciousness again—he can’t believe it. He is a secular priest once more.

An excerpt from The Revelations, the first novel by Erik Hoel.

The Shit Poetics of Queer Men

The ribbon was and is a symbol of AIDS awareness. Gay Twitter was not happy. These symbols, once associated with dirty filthy queers—profane and untouchable—were now incorporated into a semiotic system concerned with cleanliness and sanitisation—sacred and hand-ringingly tactile. In both scenarios, historically important symbols for the queer community were sanitised, stripped of their queerness, and used in disorientingly different contexts. In reaction to this persistent sanitisation of queerness, one might welcome a radical sullying of queerness once again

Donna Marcus reviews Castle Faggot by Derek McCormack.

Saint Briac

We were at the beach, I had been begging to go, to come along, and it was after a long lunch—your grandma wanted to talk to me about the Liberation—that we went for a walk along the coast.

Short fiction from Jacqueline Feldman.

Pandemic Literature

We speak about the nightmarish imagery: lilacs out of the dead land, a heap of broken images, fear in a handful of dust. About World War One, the Industrial Revolution, modernism. Before long it is time to end the class, a lump in my throat, to thank everyone who’s joined in for their cooperation in using the new technology, for all our discussions in class up until now. It’s only when I’ve logged off that I wonder about a context for the poem that we didn’t discuss: the Spanish flu. The virus and the poem, three years apart. I’d never thought of the connection. Idly, I scroll through JSTOR, find a chapter on The Waste Land in a book by Elizabeth Outka called Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. The miasmic residue of the pandemic experience, it argues, infuses every part of the poem, in ways we have been missing all along. Outka’s autopsy revealing the virus spread through the bronchioles of the poem. Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit. A poem burning with fever. Burning burning burning burning burning / O Lord thou pluckest me out. This fresh new pandemic sending us back towards a residue analysis. The cruellest month looming.

Tara McEvoy on The Road, The Waste Land and the pandemic.

Your Attention is Holy

Would we spend less of our lives online if the clock on our computers was in the middle of our screens, rather than being hidden down there in the corner like a guilty secret? Or would we just Tweet more about the passing of time?
The narrator of Patricia Lockwood’s new novel remembers lost time in a way functionally similar to a foregrounded clock: her niece is born with Proteus syndrome, a genetic disorder that will radically shorten her lifespan. But instead of a linear narrative in which a millennial realises that life is short and logs off to go and smell some roses, we’re given something more honest.

Sam Burt reviews Patricia Lockwood‘s No One is Talking About This.

Love in Panic Time

I burned everything, even
The art, so called. Don’t panic.

You should have seen the oil
Stain the sky and then rain down
In greasy drops.

A new poem by Nicholas Rombes.

3:AM Magazine

:: latest features