The Surrealists claimed that automatic writing can unjam the jammed mind. If done correctly, it should release creativity from the constraints of reason and reveal how random coincidences are actually linked in a metaphysical way. The practice can serve as a cosmic connector of dots, it seems. This particular method is also part of a larger scheme, one that Breton calls the ‘private conspiracy’. The idea is that the artist is a prisoner and logic is the prison. According to Breton, an artist must always conspire to get out of that mental jail. Automatism is one way of breaking free. [read full column]
The new Nero exhibition at the British Museum makes its stakes clear at the entrance: this will be a reevaluation of the mostly negative ‘myths’ surrounding the history of the much-maligned last of the Julio-Claudians. There is a paradox at heart here: British Museum blockbuster exhibitions must make money for the cash-strapped institution and also satisfy a broad range of knowledge in the viewing public. Difficulty usually isn’t in the cards. [read full column]
Rachel Mesch, Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France
reviewed by Frankie Dytor
Queer historians have long struggled with the absence of their stories from the archive. The literary critic Terry Castle described her research as an encounter with the ghostly, a hunt for the ever elusive ‘apparational lesbian’. More recently, others, like the writer and activist So Mayer, have proposed that historians document queer and trans history by creating an ‘anarchive’. The anarchive would make writing a form of patchwork, an anti-linear process weaving together points of... [read more]
In her 2004 book Precarious Lives, Judith Butler challenges us to ‘imagine a world in which [. . .] an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community.’ ‘Loss and vulnerability,’ she hypothesises, ‘seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.’ This exposure to the world and to the desires of the other... [read more]
Tom Whyman, Infinitely Full of Hope: Fatherhood and the Future in an Age of Crisis and Disaster
reviewed by Tom Cutterham
If you have a small child, you may hold out some hope that the world they grow up to inhabit will be reasonably safe, even pleasant. That it won’t, for example, have its air and soil filled with the burned or buried remains of billions of plastic nappies. As a result, you may find yourself, more regularly than you would ever have imagined, kneeling by the toilet, carefully scraping your small child’s shit out of the reusable, organically-grown bamboo alternative with cute little pictures of... [read more]
Ruth Scurr, Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows
reviewed by Jemima Hubberstey
At a first glance, it might seem extraordinary to think of Napoleon, the great military commander and notorious emperor of France, through his gardens. Yet gardens are never neutral or even wholly ‘natural’ spaces, in fact reflecting the ideas and ambitions of the people who designed and commissioned them. As John Dixon Hunt argued in Greater Perfections (2002), ‘the garden has always been a complex and central human activity, arguably a matrix of man’s and woman’s ambitions,... [read more]
The story of the showman who comes to town is as old as escapism, and just as double-edged. When the circus rolls in, a world of pure distraction materialises before the downtrodden masses, rapidly constructed in the open spaces and filling their habitual vacancy with reckless acts of daring and astonishing curiosities, like Sleary’s horse troupe energising the lousy stinking lives of Coketown’s labourers in Hard Times. The travelling show was never just about entertainment, though; it... [read more]
Agnès Gayraud, trans. Robin Mackay, D.C. Miller & Nina Power , Dialectic of Pop
reviewed by Dan Barrow
The first book from musician and philosopher Agnès Gayraud starts from what seems like a Quixotic and unproductive project: to develop a theory of pop music as an ‘aesthetic form’ beginning from the work of the philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno. His writings on the ‘light music’ of the 1930s are notorious for their unceasing assault on what even sceptical critics took to be harmless or edifying styles like hot jazz and swing. He’s thus become the great bogeyman of academic... [read more]
Do you remember what you did yesterday? At first there’s a blank, a slight panic. Then you let your mind relax. All is fog, but little by little, things start to come back. Not in order. A call with S in the afternoon, a flurry of WhatsApps with R. A quick lunch of rice and broad bean salad with fresh parsley and garlic. Some scattered reading in the morning — a few pages of a book, an article posted by an acquaintance — then in the evening, wine and a Simone Signoret flick, Ship... [read more]
Growing up, Bridget Grant, the narrator of My Phantoms, couldn’t wait to leave her clan — her indifferent older sister; cruel, conceited father; and eager but essentially performative mother—so she left Liverpool as soon as she finished school. Now a fortysomething academic living in London with her partner John, she hasn’t spoken to her father in years. She even skipped his funeral. She keeps visits to her mother pegged at once per year, on her mother’s birthday, while her sister... [read more]
There is a moment in Nicholas Royle’s story ‘L0nd0n’ where the narrator, an editor at a small publishing house, does his job rather sloppily, allowing three different spellings for one term: ‘ghost writer, ghost-writer and, finally, the correct term, ghostwriter.’ Funnily enough, the narrator never actually meets the author of this brilliant new novel, one nondescript Ian, in person. Does he exist at all? He appears, rather, the literal embodiment of that misspelt term, its repetition... [read more]
Hatty Nestor, Ethical Portraits: In Search of Representational Justice
reviewed by Brett Walsh
In her first book, Ethical Portraits, Hatty Nestor examines artworks, activist projects and individuals subverting forensics, to find a morally acceptable way of representing people in the US prison system, exposing how they are dehumanised by their exclusion from representation and self-expression. She pays careful attention to the mediums of portraiture because she is acutely aware that each attempt at representation is intimately linked to a real feeling person, who deserves respect.... [read more]
