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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 RobinsonThe goddess of emptiness.
Jean Frémon, trans. by John Taylor -
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
Simon Collings, Carrying the past: The Afterlight by Charlie Shackleton.
New Fortnightly Serials
from The Runiad
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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Underground fiction.
A Fortnightly Review
A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground
by Marko Jobst
Spurbuchverlag | 160pp | €16.00
By MICHAEL HAMPTON.
PERHAPS in A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground it is through the figure of the “amateur-scholar protagonist” (as the publisher’s blurb puts it) that author Marko Jobst (formerly Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Undergraduate Theory Coordinator at the University of Greenwich) is able to find respite from the day-to-day duties of an academic, ie designing course modules, marking essays and explaining assessment criteria to students, as he proposes a startling new phenomenonogical take on the history of the London Underground system? Jobst’s research project is certainly methodologically unconventional, resting on a series of conversations staged in the informal niches and gloomy carrels of the British Library (natural light levels are woeful in this building, making it as dingy as a Victorian cigar shop), with a stream of phantom architectural authorities, who are conjured up, and with whom he is on first name terms, ie Jan (Piggott), Adrian (Forty), Wolfgang (Schivelbusch) et al. This is a clever way to subvert standard bibliographic referencing, though in reality means that A Ficto-Historical Theory comes across as something of a curate’s egg, its rhetoric of the highly speculative sort, aiming to re-enchant the London Underground, and reconceive it as a delirious space with “peculiar discontinuities between inside and outside”.
Jobst’s actual starting point is the very first stretch of cut-and-cover Underground, the Metropolitan line, opened in 1863 with 11.8 million customers in its first year — although his paradigm includes various earlier fantastic plans for a subterranean network: a scheme for an arcade railway down the river Fleet valley, and Joseph Paxton’s rejected Great Victorian Way, a sort of supersized linear conservatory, called out as “epic madness”. He notes the influence both of Euston as a precursor station, and of the 2nd Great Exhibition or Crystal Palace (1854), arguably the world’s first theme park. Eventually the principal mainline termini with their plush integrated hotels (apart from Waterloo on the Surreyside—which Jobst neglects to mention—thought far too rough a neighbourhood for middle-class travellers), would be joined up by the Circle line, and he makes much of this, particularly how places soon became “points” in the circulation of traffic, and Victorian railway mania transformed the understanding of space…
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
Parcelled thematically into short Chapters, such as “Hypnos / Eros”, “Space, Movement, Image and Machia” — themselves sub-divided by italicised “Threads”, and illustrated throughout by a series of black and white axonometric drawings by Nic Clear, with a nod to Guy Debord’s Situationist map The Naked City (1957), Ficto is cognitively challenging, an unorthodox architectural treatise in which Jobst’s narrative finds him tangled up in a conversational knot from which his own viewpoint slowly emerges; one that charts how London’s piecemeal development gave the capital city a quite different spatial trajectory when compared with Barcelona, Paris (is it far fetched to find an echo of Brexit here in the system’s non-EUness?) and New York, which were Haussmanised (i.e., subject to the scenographic regulation of long, straight vistas), and built their metros in one go. In the 1920s London Transport Passenger Board Supremo Frank Pick had actually recognised the need for order, calling London an “accident”, one he attempted to rectify by inviting architect Charles Holden to design a tranche of brand new public-friendly Underground stations (such as Arnos Grove), commissioning Modernist posters from the likes of László Moholy-Nagy and Paul Nash, together with a new sans serif typeface by Edward Johnston; in short making the LTPB “interwar England’s only real avant-garde” as Owen Hatherley puts it in The Ministry of Nostalgia (2016).
In the section called “Space”, classical modernist space, raumkunst, or “the art of space”, causes Jobst’s brow to darken. With Wolfgang Schivelbusch as his guide, we get acquainted with the dynamic break from nature which railway construction with its vocabulary of linear cuts, tunnelling and panoramic sweeps brought about, until Jobst asserts that the labyrinthine space of the London Underground is of a different order, one that is subversive of classical architectonics. He cites the “layered and multiplied” central London lines built in phase 2 as a result of Brunel’s deep tunnelling equipment (“the Tubes”) where, severed from street level reality, we meet the soot-coated surfaces of our troglodyte past, locked inside:
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…
In another clever dodge, Jobst hosts a conversation (by adding speech balloons) with Eduardo Paolozzi’s statue of Newton after Blake (1995) in the plaza in front of the British Library, the slightly unhinged act of a fantasist in the best sense of the word, who nevertheless recognises how precise measurement inscribes the heavy engineering project or “megamachine” of the London Underground. In effect, he has produced a smart handbook for Underground joyriders that frees itself from the visual and pragmatic grip of Harry Beck’s famous diagrammatic map.
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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