♦
I. Patricide by Alan Wall.
‘To some extent, we are all still in the sacred wood at Nemi. The difficulty is establishing whether we should be engaged in killing the Old One, or in protecting his memory. Are we saying, he who made me I shall now unmake, for only then can I be truly free? Or are we saying, you who claim in the form of so many institutions this plenipotentiary power are lying through your teeth?’
II. The youth tactic by Peter Riley.
‘The “youth” tactic is a clearing of space. It always has been. It’s a binning of senior and threatening poets and editors in order to create a vacant space where youth can mount the stage and claim its audience. The platform on which it is done is perhaps invariably one of the ability to comprehend and cope with a changed world. I remember doing it myself in the 1960s. We binned people like Ted Hughes and Dylan Thomas and claimed a new dispensation. Some 70-year-old poets are still doing it, to their everlasting shame.’
III. Non finito by Anthony Howell.
Ice Age art at the British Museum: ‘Their art is one that excels in using the shape that is already there. The upward thrust of a fragment of antler. Well, this could be a leaping horse – the leaping feeling, rather than jumping or rearing, coming from the torque of that particular fragment of antler.’ And the art of Vodou in Nottingham: ‘For where the cave artist picks up a fragment of tusk, the Haitian artist makes use of junk – old car tires, abandoned dolls, rusted oil drums.’
IV. Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Forty years ago, the editor of the magazine that gave Bruce Springsteen his first serious press coverage asked, “Who is Bruce Springsteen?” Now, in reviewing a new biography of the singer, the editor finds the question remains. ‘More than any rock ‘n’ roller in history, Springsteen has touched people to the core – without their actually knowing much about him. They thought they knew, they were encouraged to think they knew, but they didn’t know.’
V. Guernica by Nigel Wheale.
‘Almost everyone involved in organising the five exhibitions of Guernica during these critical months, and many of those who visited them, must have been aware that Republican lines were collapsing; Catalonia was overrun during January, half a million fleeing north from Barcelona in the last days of the month. Among the mass of human misery, more art cargo was on the move…’
VI. The ethics of favouritism by Stephen T. Asma.
‘People who are triggered to charitable acts share their good fortune with others. But it isn’t fairness that accomplishes this moral goal – it isn’t the pursuit of equality; it is kindness, good will, and, dare I say, a little bit of “favor”.’
VII. The entertainments of a Victorian nobody by Stephen Wade.
George Grossmith’s Pooter ‘just wants to be an acceptable member of the new middle class – those who were at the time living in the London suburbs and travelling into the city to work, generally pushing pens. This new class hungered for self-improvement. Pooter is anxious to do the right thing, and desperate not to make a faux pas in the ‘best’ company.’
VIII. The Case of Edmund Rack by Tom Lowenstein.
‘The parish cannot be approached on horseback without great difficulty, and even danger; the road from Porlock being only a path about two feet wide, winding in a zigzag direction along the slope of the hills, and often interrupted by large loose stones and roots of trees. The woods abound in whortleberries, and a variety of fine polybodies…’ Also: from the Fortnightly‘s archive: Coleridge as a Poet by Edward Dowden.
IX. A calendar for Mars by George Lardas.
The machines of men are at work on Mars from sunrise to sunset and through the night, day after Martian day. Soon those days add up to months and then years. But whose months? Whose years? Published with ‘Mars‘ by Sir Robert Ball from the Fortnightly‘s 1892 archive.
X. On Sculpture by Anthony O’Hear.
‘In sculpture, the inert becomes animate, or if not actually animate, certainly worked through by mind, infused with life, meaning and finality by mind.’ Published with Walter Pater: On Greek Sculpture. Three celebrated essays from the Fortnightly Review’s archive.
XI. Heroism and European Exploration by Ricardo Duchesne.
‘Europeans were not only exceptional in their literary endeavors, but also in their agonistic and expansionist behaviors. Their great books, including their liberal values, were themselves inseparably connected to their aristocratic ethos of competitive individualism.’ Published with Ouida’s 1906 essay on Sir Richard Francis Burton, the famous explorer and ethnographer, from the Fortnightly archive.
XII. Postmodernism by Charles Jencks.
Published with Postmodernism at the V&A, a brief editorial preface, a review of Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 by Anthony Howell, and an informal exhibition memoir by Keith Johnson, ‘Memphis Comes to Kensington‘.
♦
A Partial Archive of the New Series.
Two poems by Lawrence Binyon.
Monochronos by Hugh Chisholm.
The Bibliomania by John Ferrar, MD.
The Convergence of the Twain by Thomas Hardy.
Ocean by Ann Lauterbach.
Two poems by Lawrence Markert.
Dulce et Decorum est by Wilfred Owen.
Umbrella by Myra Sklarew.
A Morning by William Stafford.
A Voice from the Nile by James Thomson [B.V.].
Two poems from the hôpital Broussais by Paul Verlaine.
Signals by Michelene Wandor.
Screeds 1 by Stephen Wiest.
SELECTED BY THE POETRY EDITOR:
Quite frankly, a sequence by Peter Hughes.
Four poems by John Welch.
The Old Man By Robert Coover.
Dennis and Dinny by James MacGuire.
A Recollection of L’Adorée by Ethel Dilke.
An Encounter by Robert Coover.
Vorticism by Ezra Pound.
Pound’s First Canto by Anthony O’Hear.
Derek Wallcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize by Michelene Wandor.
Robert Bly’s prose poetry by Myra Sklarew.
John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud by Martin Sorrell.
The New Libertine by Anthony Howell.
The function of criticism at the present time by Matthew Arnold.
Bernard Stone and the Turret by Brian Patten.
F. T. Prince and other British mavericks, by Anthony Howell.
A Man of Letters, an interview with Robert Louis Stevenson, by H. R. Haxton.
Francis Thompson by Katharine Tynan.
Apollinaire, the war poet by Martin Sorrell.
Coleridge as a poet by Edward Dowden.
John Buchan by Roger Kimball.
W. H. Davies and the gift of laziness by Martin Armstrong.
On Nicholas Moore by Martin Sorrell. Published with ‘Pomenvylope No. 10‘ by Nicholas Moore.
On Sculpture. By Anthony O’Hear.
THREE ESSAYS ON SCULPTURE by Walter Pater.
The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture 1. The Heroic Age of Greek art.
The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture 2. The Age of Graven Images.
The marbles of Ægina. On the ‘philosophical aspect’ of Greek art.
Notes on the complexities of Post-Modernism by Charles Jencks. Published with Postmodernism and history, by Anthony Howell.
Vorticism at the Tate by Andrew Thacker.
Elizabeth Taylor by Andrew Sinclair.
Sarah Bernhardt by Arthur Croxton.
The language of The King’s Speech by Stan Carey.
A solution to the mystery of Macbeth’s witches by W. J. Lawrence.
George Grossmith by Stephen Wade.
The beauty of quantitative easing by Nick O’Hear.
Poetry Notes by Peter Riley.
Clues & Labyrinths by Alan Wall.
Una Visione Estesa by Keith Johnson.
Currente Calamo by Michael Blackburn.
Reviews and comment on books, etc.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2011: The Intensive and Extensive Worlds of Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage by Lucy Sheehan, Columbia University.
2012: A Competitive World: Ambition and Self-Help in Trollope’s An Autobiography and The Three Clerks by Rebecca Richardson, Stanford University.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Nick Lowe by Austin de Lone.
Andrea Missé, 1976-2012 by Anthony Howell.
Strictly Come Dancing by Michelene Wandor.
Fairness and family values by Stephen Asma.
A quest of the imagination by J. B. Bury.
On social disorder by Gerald Gaus.
Joseph de Maistre’s ‘different sort of progress’ by Anthony O’Hear.
The evolution of mystery by Maurice Maeterlinck.
Carlin Romano’s America the Philosophical, reviewed by Anthony O’Hear.
Is it possible to teach creative writing? by Michelene Wandor.
Death to the Reading Class by Marshall Poe.
Bookshop Memories by George Orwell.
The e-Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Alana Shilling.
The Production and Life of Books by C. Kegan Paul.
Inventing Asia by Kate Hoyland.
Sir Richard Francis Burton by Ouidah.
Genealogy in America by Drew Moore.
Published with On ancestor worship by Herbert Spencer.
Fragment: Concepts of Time and the World We Live In by Alan Macfarlane.
From the Øιλοκαλíα to Franny’s pea-green book. By Andrew Louth.
Panentheism and the god of Athens by Thomas Conlon.
Newton’s prisms by Alan Wall.
A calendar for Mars by Rev. George Lardas.
Mars by Sir Robert Ball.
Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’ by Andrew Sinclair.
The virtues of European populism by Denis Boyles.
Iowa’s caucuses by Jon Lauck.
The Rosenbergs and their apologists by Allen M. Hornblum.
Included: Related material from the archives republished in this New Series.
♦
Edited by Anthony O’Hear and Denis Boyles.
The complete index of Principal Articles | The complete index of Chronicles & Notices
Welcome to The Fortnightly Review. This is the New Series.
Chronicle & Notices: Our Rolling Register of Shorter Articles, Excerpts from Interesting Books, and Notes from Elsewhere on the Web.
List of Editors & Contributors.
This site: © 2012. All rights reserved.
