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Mariangela
Ian SeedThree texts
Rupert M LoydellVessel
Melita SchaumSome Guts
Simon Collings (with collages by John Goodby)Three Short Fictions
Meg PokrassThe Campus Novel
Peter RobinsonCharlie Boy and Captain Fitz: A One-Act Play
Alan WallSnapshot, Sachsenhausen and three more poems
Peter BlairSeven short poems
Lucian Staiano-DanielsFour prose poems
Olivia TuckThe Back of Beyond and two more prose poems
Tony KittTwo poems
Moriana Delgadofrom Reverse | Inverse
Lucy HamiltonSix haibun
Sheila E. MurphyKingfishers and cobblestones and five more new poems
Kitty HawkinsZion Offramp 76–78
Mark ScrogginsCome dancing with me and two more new poems
Marc VincenzPlease Swipe Right
Chloe Phillips‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem
Linda BlackStill Life
Melita SchaumIn memory of
John Taylor with drawings by Sam ForderImmortal Wreckage
Will StoneNew in Translation
Snowdrifts
Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Belinda CookePoems from Prière (1924)
Pierre Jean Jouve, trans. by Will StoneSix Prose Poems
Pietro di Marchi, trans. by Peter Robinson -
A new Review of John Matthias’s Some Words on Those Wars by Garin Cycholl.
Anthony Howell’s review, A Clutch of Ingenious Authors: Michelene Wandor Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories | Annabel Dover Florilegia | Sharon Kivland Abécédaire
Essays by Alan Wall
· ‘King of Infinite Space’: The Virtue of Uncertainty
· AI: Signs of the Times
· The Lad from Stratford
· Stanley Kubrick: Sex in the CinemaWill Stone’s Missing in Mechelen and At Risk of Interment
G. Kim Blank’s Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up behind the Encyclopædia Britannica
Tronn Overend’s Samuel Alexander on Beauty
AND Conor Robin Madigan’s Master Singer, Simon Collings’s Robert Desnos, Screenwriter, and Igor Webb’s Never Again
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from The Ruinad
Anthony Howellfrom White Ivory
Alan Walland much more below this column.
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Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections, Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
Previous Serials
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.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying · Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
AND read here:
· James Thomson [B.V.]
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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A charming sense of novelty.
By CHRISTOPHER LANDRUM.
So you hear people talking how miserable a King must be; and yet they all wish to be in his place.
………………— Samuel Johnson1
IN YOUNGER DAYS, mother would often warn brother and me how the biblical children of Bethel were eaten by bears after they mocked the prophet Elisha for his baldness. Perhaps I didn’t listen well enough, because eventually, at about age sixteen, it came to pass that my crown began to thin. Soon enough I looked tonsured and saintly. A few years later my frontal hairline began to recede. The opposite sequence befell my brother. He lost it in the front first, then in the back.
So, understandably, I couldn’t help but reflect on Prince William’s recent tidying of the hedges around his ears. Nor could I help contrasting his haircut to Donald Trump’s shorn mane.
As an American, I don’t believe I’ve ever empathized on an intimate level with any member of the royal family. Until now.
I even felt a charming sense of novelty upon learning about the Prince’s new look. Being only ten months older than him, I had certainly sympathized with him and his brother while watching a nation mourn their mother. I’ve also always found the last letter of Charles I to his son, written on the eve of the father’s regicide, to be quite moving. But only the recent headlines about haircuts were enough to cue my conscious to ponder what it is like “to be the Prince.” For as an American, I don’t believe I’ve ever empathized on an intimate level with any member of the royal family. Until now.
Now there is nothing profound in the remark that novelty is one of the pleasures of travel. But, while planning a first trip to Ireland last winter, I read so much about its history and literature that I became overwhelmed by its culture and controversies. Eventually I had to tell myself: “If you had total information about Éire and Northern Ireland, there would be no need to visit. For nothing there would be surprising. Nothing would be novel.” Yes, with perfect knowledge of the place, I would be able, even from far away Texas, to sympathize with Celts and Saxons, Loyalists and Republicans, refugees and permanent residents. But had I kept my distance and never visited them, that sympathy would’ve remained superficial. Moreover, without having experienced the island and encountering its people face to face, it would’ve been difficult to empathize on a personal level. To have opted out of visiting would’ve left few legitimate ways for me to “put myself in their shoes” the way I now can with the U.K.’s future king.
♦
IN A DISCUSSION of cognitive types that follows Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), Umberto Eco once explained how he grew a beard for twenty years, then shaved it, and later became intrigued how certain acquaintances recognized him immediately, while others were slightly hesitant toward his new face. This is because our minds force new shapes to fit old molds, particularly when it comes to perceiving human faces. The Nobel economist Daniel Kahneman, following Philip Rosenzweig’s lead, calls this mental sequence of adjusting older perceptions to understand newer ones part of the halo effect. As Wired magazine’s founding editor Kevin Kelly puts it: “We tend to see new things from the frame of the old. We extend our current perspective to the future, which in fact distorts the new to fit into what we already know.” Even a Yankee like myself can admit that, though the distortion may be benign––nay, even beneficial––Britain’s royals, whether young or old, tend to confer a halo effect onto most of their observers.2
Yet, not only do our minds squeeze square new pegs into round old holes, but as Machiavelli has observed, humans tend to need the new to realize the old:
Two centuries after Machiavelli, the nonconformist minister Henry Grove similarly observed: “this Fondness for Novelty … makes us out of Conceit with all we already have.” Applying their words to the topic at hand, we can say that once an individual begins the new experience of balding, that person tends, no pun intended, “to cut their losses.” Most grow jealous to keep, and sometimes attempt to cultivate, whatever hair they still have left. But there are different manners in which that can be achieved, and I know of no greater contrast in manners on this matter than that of my nation’s president and your kingdom’s prince.3
♦
IF THE OLDER Dr. Johnson were a terrific arguer, it was because he had tempered the tyrannical style of banter used in his younger days. “When I was a boy,” Johnson recalled, “I used always to choose the wrong side of a debate, because most ingenious things, that is to say, most new things, could be said upon it.” This is probably why Johnson later praised a passage from Goldsmith: “When I was a young man, being anxious to distinguish myself, I was perpetually starting new propositions. But I soon gave this over; for, I found that generally what was new was false.” Goldsmith’s words compare well beside another of his friend Johnson’s observations: “what is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught.” No one, however, appears to oppose the current Prince’s recent hairstyle choice.4
It is only the tyrant who tries to make everything appear so new that nothing resembles the old.
Machiavelli writes that legitimate governance, by either a prince or a republic, tends to accomplish new things for their people. This is because illegitimate governance is so common that its opposite always feels quite remarkable. But these new things, in order to be effective for the people, must resemble the previous things––even if their resemblance is completely contrived. For it is only the tyrant who tries to make everything appear so new that nothing resembles the old. In this weird way, the tyrant attempts to make whatever is new appear ex nihilo––an absurdity on par with Johnson purposefully arguing for the wrong side in a debate, or a president daring to claim he coined the phrase “prime the pump.”5
Yes, the Prince has a new look. Yet, whatever is new is, at least according to Machiavelli, accidental. Accidents, like the genetics that bequeath one with baldness, are but random events. But, as the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson once pointed out, “without the random, there can be nothing new.” God save the new.6
♦
Christopher Landrum’s work has appeared previously in The Fortnightly Review as well as Real Clear News of Chicago. He lives in Austin, Texas and writes about books at bookbread.com.
NOTES.
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Publication: Tuesday, 27 February 2018, at 15:08.
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