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Yearly Archives: 2018

1922, that liminal point.

Alan Wall: ‘he significance of the year 1922 is beyond question. Kevin Jackson in Constellation of Genius calls it Year One of modernism, and Ezra Pound took to dating his letters from the date of completion of Ulysses. This was the end of the Christian era. Yeats had already remarked, after watching Ubu Roi: “After us, the Savage God.” ‘

After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale Pt 3 Sec 1.

After the snowbird, comes the whale pt3, sec 1: This, on account of my own solitude, was no doubt a projection and I found myself repeating the passage in The Waste Land where Eliot writes ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins,’ and it was my happiness both to inhabit the ruins of what Asatchaq narrated and to imagine building something from them. It was in this environment that our common experience of solitude met.

Rrose Sélevy.

Rrose Sélevy: ‘Marcel Duchamp: In the lane there was a blue bull near a white seat. Now explain the motive for the white gloves.’

The Gauloises Blonde and four more poems.

Lana Bella: ‘ike a girl lost,
like the first crescent in a kind
of teardrop, I was never born to feel
night from your hair, backlit with
smooth shine dirt giving yards
to fire and smoke.’

The drink.

Michael Blackburn: ‘It’s also about time I stood up and announced to you, dear reader, that my name is Michael Blackburn and I am not and never have been an alcoholic, though I was often called a drunk in my tippling days. Whatever large amounts I drank and for whatever length of time that lasted I never had what it took to be a full-on alcoholic — and I’ve known two people who did, literally, drink themselves to death.’

The meaning of a match: Les Herbiers vs PSG, 08.05.18.

‘The war [in the Vendée] was the first ‘total war’ in modern history, in which men, women and children were involved. It was also the first modern war in which regular troops [from Paris] were repeatedly beaten by mainly unarmed…peasants [from the Vendée]. It was a savage affair in which each side were guilty of atrocities.’ — LJ Dunn

Thought leaders and Ted Talks.

Chloë Hawkey: ‘It’s the leader, not the thought, that we love in the thought leader, and the intellect that we hate in the intellectual.’

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

After the snowbird, comes the whale pt 2, sec 2: ‘A Tikigaq name ties its owner to both past and present. My local name is also a fictional extension, a local self, a mask connecting me to village history. I’m both sceptical and acquiescent. I am and am not Aniqsuayaaq. It doesn’t matter. What I’ve brought to this bedside is a name that’s part of Asatchaq’s experience. My other self has no existence.’

Jeffrey Kripal and the secret body.

A Fortnightly Review of Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions by Jeffrey J. Kripal University of Chicago Press 2017 | 448pp | $45.00 £34.50 By JAMES GALLANT. JEFFREY KIRPAL HAS devoted a substantial part of his academic career to what he sometimes calls, in ironic deference to modern skepticism, “impossible” […]

Essay on Spam.

Alistair Noon: ‘Come, O Ostrich Chuckle Ball.
Come, exoplanets. Come, dark matter I could call
out at the superfluity, Hi, here I am!
For where there’s intelligent life, there’s spam.’

Five new poems by Emily Critchley.

Emily Critchley: ‘Remembering to remember. Remember to pass beyond you into the us
In the winged shadow, the space you will never know.
Taking me from myself, in the path
Which the blind birth of the day has consigned me to.’

Are we all racists now?

Michael Blackburn: ‘The abominable and inexcusable treatment meted out to immigrants and their families over the decades is not in question. But the deliberate policy of the left in recent years of opening up the old wounds and pursuing a course of malevolent compassion, or rather malevolence masquerading as compassion in exploiting minority groups, is also abominable. ‘

Two new poems by Carol Rumens.

Carol Rumens: ‘From Mametz Wood and Loos,/mouths blaze with rhyme, but when/Demos sifts the chaos,/we watch how class writes men,/in every stripe of pen.’

Looking back in anger.

Alan Wall: ‘Kitaj was obsessed all his life with Cézanne, and Cézanne certainly believed that everything needed in life and art was here, right before us, but we had to learn to see with utter integrity, and that meant ridding ourselves of false visual conventions. It is not the subject-matter of art that makes it lofty, but its method of perception. ‘

Two new poems by Carola Luther.

Carola Luther: ‘The women are feathered,
shamans of the afternoon.
Have you ever seen such food
they say, sandwiches, meat, fruit,
a feast of love and sacrifice
laid out on trestles. Oh Noreen!’