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Yearly Archives: 2018

Ibsen’s new drama.

By JAMES A. JOYCE. TWENTY YEARS HAVE passed since Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House, thereby almost marking an epoch in the history of drama. During those years his name has gone abroad through the length and breadth of two continents, and has provoked more discussion and criticism than that of any other living man. […]

Three poems by Sam James.

. Anaphora. What should I lament, losses of forests, hope, or even direction? No, only time poorly spent. How has it been used, to lay out the preface of a concept’s surface? Time has been abused. Shall we bring to fruit the flowers of the tree, shall we, from the root, rise tall enough to […]

Seven poems: Peter Robinson.

Peter Robinson: ‘Deposited at Castletroy and come
like an old man to this country,
I may stroll at ease
above the Shannon’s dark mutinous waves
into County Clare, then back again…’

After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, Pt 3 Sec 3.

After the snowbird, comes the whale pt 3, sec 3: ‘The multiply provisioned store, islanded within spacious customer parking, is in this way, like a barn at the centre of a field system, no less a functional warehouse, than the staunchest downtown JCPenneys. In both cases, old Fairbanks and even older stretches of the arboreal sub-Arctic have been swept away by pre-fabricated modular convenience architecture devoted to importation and product distribution.’

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives.

Anthony Howell: ‘The play is like a comb, dripping with the honey of Nigeria, offering us a characteristic love of proverbs and turns of phrase…’

Three poems by David Cooke.

. MILESIANS. They were matter-of-fact and mercantile, their deities stockpiled in lumber rooms, containers, or the air-conditioned acres of a state-of-the-art clockwork hangar. Too good to clear away, they laid them up, just in case, alongside incense and charms, the stacks of cheap libationary bowls. It didn’t take that much – distant thunder, a tremor, […]

Nostalgia: As good as it ever was.

Michael Blackburn: ‘The problem for the left with nostalgia is that the past did happen. It’s real. And even when some of it is “imagined” it is still composed of fragments of reality. More importantly it is an emotional response.’

The new life of Whistler.

Walter Sickert: ‘If Whistler has himself left, in an interesting and passionately felt life-work, a contribution to our better understanding of the visible world, he has also done another thing. He has sent the more intelligent of the generation that succeeds him to the springs whence he drew his own art — to French soil. ‘

Walter Benjamin and the City.

Alan Wall: ‘Had Le Corbusier been given his way in the early twentieth century, then the Parisian Babel would have been translated entirely into Esperanto; a modern synthetic language of the Enlightenment: modernism rendered as a form of aesthetic hygiene. But the city photographed by Atget survived, for a while anyway. Benjamin obsessed over Atget’s images, which he reckoned had drained away the auratic entirely, and produced something different in its place. ‘

A respectable case for Brexit.

Nick O’Hear: ‘When things go wrong the EU can be pitiless. The Greeks are in a dreadful mess. Unemployment is 21 per cent, but youth unemployment is a catastrophic 45 per cent. Even if much it was their own doing, they have amassed a mountain of debt (180 per cent of GDP) with consequent failing public services. Austerity won’t get them out of this.’

After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, Pt 3 Sec 2.

After the snowbird, comes the whale pt 3, sec 2: ‘With Dido interred, to some degree among the fleshpots I’d carried to the care home, I continued to engage with Virgil…Once I’d spent more time in Tikigaq, I started to see this as a part of my training. It was the deep modeling of Virgil’s poetry, its part organic and part artefactual glamour, that translated a notion of the Aeneid’s internality to a version of what Tikigaq earth comprehended. ‘

1968 and all that.

Michael Blackburn: ‘Apart from their opposition to the Vietnam war I think the only things the students were complaining about that were related to reality were the old-fashioned methods of teaching at universities and the fact that living accommodation was segregated between men and women. Not exactly revolution fodder.’

Whistleblower Lit.

Anthony Howell: ‘We live in bewildering and depressing times. Recently, Labour’s victory in the local election was spun as a defeat in all the mainstream papers, even those papers that are supposedly inclined towards socialism. The BBC, which used to host satirical programmes and intense contrarian debates, is now perceived simply as a mouthpiece for government, with prospective employees routinely vetted by our secret services to ensure they adhere to the government line. ITV is little better. Gone are the vivid days of “Spitting Image”.’

The Picture in Ireland.

Laura Potts: ‘You warned the living of the dead.
And said that prayer you’d never said, but it was lost instead.
And in those gobbet-drops of flesh wept Our Lady overhead.’

I’m 25, give me my £10,000.

Michael Blackburn: ‘Again, we come up against the unquestioned assumption of all do-gooding, omnisapient, bleeding heart liberal types, that they can work out what needs to be done (because they’re clever like that) and that “we” (the taxpayers) must stump up for it.’