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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Seven Short Poems by Lucian Staiano-Daniels.
2. Reflections on Anonymity 2 by W.D. Jackson.
3. On Learning a Poet I Admire Often Carries a Pocket Knife by David Greenspan.
4. Hautes Études and Mudra by Michael Londra.
5. Rhyme as Rhythm by Adam Piette.
6. Windows or Mirrors… by Charles Martin.
7. Three Texts by Rupert M. Loydell.
8. Two Poems by Moriana Delgado.
9. Mariangela by Ian Seed.
10. Six Prose Poems by Pietro De Marchi, translated by Peter Robinson.
…and much more, below in this column.
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
New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series, with more than 2,000 items in its archive, is more than ten years old! So, unless you’re reading this in the state pen, you may never catch up, but you can start here with ITEMS PUBLISHED DURING OUR 2023 HIATUS (July-August 2023):
Master Ru by Peter Knobler | Four Poems on Affairs of State by Peter Robinson | 5×7 by John Matthias | You Haven’t Understood and two more poems by Amy Glynn | Long Live the King and two more by Eliot Cardinaux, with drawings by Sean Ali Shostakovich, Eliot and Sunday Morning by E.J. Smith Jr. :: For much more, please consult our massive yet still partial archive.
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.’
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
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.
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.
DEPARTMENTS
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Underground fiction.
A Fortnightly Review
A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground
by Marko Jobst
Spurbuchverlag | 160pp | €16.00
By MICHAEL HAMPTON.
Ficto is cognitively challenging, an unorthodox architectural treatise in which Jobst’s narrative finds him tangled in a conversational knot from which his own viewpoint slowly emerges
This is the realm of chthonic, Moorcockian London as depicted in the British sc-fi film Quatermass and the Pit (1967), with its fictional Tube Station Hobbs End, where after the wreckage of an ancient Martian space craft is discovered by archaeologists, a malevolent psychokinetic force is released; and of Creep (2004) starring Franka Potente, a horror flick set in an abandoned storage facility below the network where a deformed hermit carries out sickening experiments on hapless commuters.
Jobst triggers a seismic wave from below aimed not just at attacking architecture’s obsessive disciplinary focus on enclosed voids as its key epistemological and structural unit, but overturning it too.
Here then is the heart of the matter, the Underground reconceived as a dynamic if overlooked “megaobject” (due to its size, invisibility and lack of homogenous station design — the latter exemplified by variable tiling, signage and platform dimensions), rather than a string of interconnected individual stations that had their conceptual origin in the ninteenth-century separation of the passenger hall and train shed. This shifted viewpoint is echoed above ground today in the motley, transparent look of singular buildings such as the Shard, Walkie-Talkie, Cheese Grater, Gherkin etc. So Jobst triggers a seismic wave from below aimed not just at attacking architecture’s obsessive disciplinary focus on enclosed voids as its key epistemological and structural unit, but overturning it too. The result: “lightness” becomes the new desideratum in buildings, signifying for the human subject a giddying loss of the anchor of place: architecture’s moment to leave behind its “traditional notions of burden and support, notions tied to gravity”. Repeated underground in the affective space of TfL’s carriages, the social body in transit paradoxically circulates freely even as it loses its own form, blurring as passengers merge with others in an endless trafficking, becoming “anybodies”; pure movement rather than mass, the defining, sometimes deafening hallmark of this “corporeal and spatial regime”.
Ficto becomes louder and louder, mimicking tannoy announcements as it reaches a close, and despite claiming to not be a sub-type of the better known ficto-criticism (largely associated with the dissimulating, gonzo anthropologist Michael Taussig), does occasionally lapse into discourse…
Ultimately, Jobst’s book is neither a fiction nor a history…but a courageous, if odd, hybrid.
Ultimately, A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground is neither a fiction nor a history (though it borrows traits from both) but a courageous, if odd, hybrid. In 1776 Dr Johson remarked of the digressive novel Tristram Shandy, that “Nothing odd will do long”, underestimating its innovative features. It would be easy to make the same mistake again, ignoring the way Jobst as “amateur-scholar” has defamiliarized the experience of riding “the Tubes”. In 2001 I was amongst the audience at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, to hear performance artist Bruce McLean give a lecture entitled ‘Rubbish Dump Developments and Anti-Social Housing: An Animated Speech’ in which McLean proposed an overhead monorail for London to beat road congestion and join up the major art museums. What a wonderful twin to the Underground’s “intimate world of movement and sighs” that might one day turn out to be!
♦
Michael Hampton is a writer and critical theorist based in London with a special interest in artists’ publishing. He has contributed to many magazines and journals including The Blue Notebook, Frieze, Geschichte, The Penguin Collector’s Journal, Rapport, Schizm, /Seconds and The White Review. He writes regularly for Art Monthly and in 2015 his revisionist history Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the Artists’ Book was published by Uniformbooks. Sharon Kivland recently published his speculative essay “Beyond Walter Benjamin’s Paris & Kenneth Goldsmith’s New York” as a limited edition in her series The Good Reader: Beyond Walter Benjamin’s Paris & Kenneth Goldsmith’s New York (Anagram Books). He is currently working on a collection of psychogeographical writings about London.
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Publication: Tuesday, 22 January 2019, at 10:59.
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