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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Hatcheston Halt by John Matthias
2. Disinterest and Aesthetics Pt 1 by Tronn Overend
3. Out of the house and into the business district by Martin Stannard
4. We need to talk about Vladimir, by Jonathan Gorvett
5. Two new poems by Fred Johnston
6. Several dwarves and one pet by Meg Pokrass
7. The wheel in the tree: An appreciation of Penguin Modern Poets 12. By Ian Seed
8. Wonder Travels: a memoir by Josh Barkin
9. Five poems from Fire by Jaime Robles
10. Three instructive texts by Rupert M. Loydell
…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 and Blind Summits
Previously: More below. Scroll down.
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: On John Wilkinson’s ‘Wood Circle’, by Rupsa Banerjee | The Ringstead Poems by Peter Robinson. With an afterword by Tom Phillips | From Dialyzing: poetry by Charline Lambert. Translated by John Taylor | The O.E.D Odes by Lea Graham | Demarcation and three more poems, by Pui Ying Wong | What are poets for? Alan Wall on Nathaniel Tarn’s Autoanthropology | Martyrdom. Anthony Howell on the Russian invasion of Ukraine | Bard-think: Anthony O’Hear on teaching with Shakespeare | The Pleasure of Ferocity: A review of Malika Moustadraf’s short stories. By Michelene Wandor | Pastmodern Art. By David Rosenberg | Central Park and three more new poems. By Tim Suermondt | What Is Truth? By Alan Macfarlane | The Beatles: Yeah x 3. Fab books and films reviewed by Alan Wall | The Marriage by Hart’s Crane of Faustus and Helen by John Matthias | Young Wystan by Alan Morrison | Nothing Romantic Here. Desmond Egan reviews Donald Gardner | Parisian Poems, by César Vallejo, translated by César Eduardo Jumpa Sánchez | Two sequences of poems by David Plante, introduced by Anthony Howell | Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Big Noise in the Night: Film commentary by Simon Collings | Gli Ucelli and two more poems by Michael Anania | Interior and three more prose poems by Linda Black | For Britney (or whoever) by Fran Lock | The wages for reading is rage: Reflections on the Book Revolution in Texas. By Christopher Landrum | Selfies by Rupert M Loydell | The Loves of Marina Tsvetaeva by C.D.C. Reeve | My Mother’s Dress Shop by Jeff Friedman | The Bride’s Story. Grimms’ No. 40. An elaboration by W. D. Jackson | Poetry Notes: Early titles for 2022, by Peter Riley | Short Icelandic Fiction: Fresh Perspective (Nýtt sjónarhorn) by Aðalsteinn Emil Aðalsteinsson and The Face and Kaleidoscope by Gyrðir Elíasson | Exercises of memory: Prose poetry by Adam Kosan | Species of light and seven more poems by Mark Vincenz | Two Micro-fictions by Avital Gad-Cykman | Pictures, with Poems: A two-generation collaboration. Photographs by Laura Matthias Bendoly, with poems by John Matthias | In Famagusta, a revisit by Jonathan Gorvett | Shakespeare’s Merchant by Oscar Mandel | Toughs by Anthony Howell | Holding the desert, a sequence of poems by Richard Berengarten | Two pages by Michael Haslam | Contusion not Rind by Peter Larkin | Four poems by Katie Lehman | Blind summits, a sequence of poems with an audio track, by Peter Robinson | The Censor of Art by Samuel Barlow | Small Magazines, and their discontents (as of 1930) by Ezra Pound | Modern Artiques by Robert McAlmon | Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Blavatsky in violet: poetry by Alan Morrison | Everything that is the case: A review of John Matthias’s Some of Her Things by Peter Robinson | Khlystovki by Marina Tsvetaeva, newly translated by Inessa B. Fishbeyn and C. D. C. Reeve | A king and not a king, a poem by W. D. Jackson | Violet, an essay by John Wilkinson :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
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.
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A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
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In defence of les femmes françaises.
A Response to Boudicca Fox-Leonard, as well as
a Fortnightly Review of
Sophie
by Camille Vivier
Tilburg, Netherlands: APE Art Paper Editions, 2019 | 80 pp hardcover | $50.70 £31.50
By CHRISTOPHER LANDRUM.
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I HAVE NO complaint, critique nor retort regarding Boudicca Fox-Leonard’s declaration “Why I’m So Relieved I’m Not a French Woman” which appeared in The Telegraph last September. I do, however, have a few questions:
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Is it so shameful to seek beauty? To seek it in books? In the human body? Or how the beauty of the body or of a book can reveal, whether intentionally or otherwise, some speck of the inner beauty of the mind and the greater ineffable beauty of the soul?
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And books that start with the beauty of the human body—what do they offer? A double surprise in being a beautiful book as well as a book about beauty?
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But what if the book was just about one particular beautiful body? Like you see with those large, sometimes heavy coffee-table books of Marilyn Monroe, Michelangelo’s David, or Bowie and Iman: what if instead of one beautiful body, the opening of the book meant encountering two versions of one body, very, very nearly alike (but not quite)?
Thus only four amino acids, coupled into two pairs, offer an almost unlimited prospect for variation.
—Jerome M. Levi
Some selves are more self than others
—Paul Valéry
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NOTE: In The Fortnightly’s online template, illustrations are thumbnails with captions or onward text links embedded. To enlarge an illustration, click on it. To read a caption, hover over the illustration. To play an embedded video in a larger size, click ‘full screen’ option. ‘Esc’ returns you here.
Imagine the surprise of seeing one of these photographed bodies in a white dress with a blonde burst of hair—very much like Marilyn immediately before her skirt flies up in The Seven Year Itch (1955), a little bit of Dolly Parton in luminescence, a bit of the rosy-hue reminiscent of Enchantress Gilda of the Land of Oz—but beside that body in this particular book stands a shadow of the model, black-clad, hair hidden under a tight hood—very much like Death in Ingmar Berman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), but a femininized character of Death, one with equally foreboding charm and matching mystery as her white counterpart. The viewer must confront white queen and black queen—the book is their chessboard—at least a portion of the book is—each half a harlequin in a carnival of dichotomy.
In chess, the player intends to make his moves and to have some effect upon the system. In a language, on the contrary, there is no premeditation. Its pieces are moved, or rather modified, spontaneously and fortuitously.
—Ferdinand de Saussure
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To see beauty twofold, nearly matching, nearly mirrored, completely twinning, but not in every exact feature and feeling, but certainly a sense of balance between them, the compassionate balance of Islamic ihsan, the balance inherent in the Dao, the balance of Emersonian compensation—the balance in the way one musical note completes a chord. “Of course, there had to be two,” the viewer-reader realizes, “It could not have been any other way,” like two sides to one page.
‘The life we lead in common’, the younger Simeuse said in a melancholy voice to Laurence, ‘is an abnormality; so is the love we bear one another and the love you have for us. Perhaps it’s because twins are an exception in nature that all those whose life-stories have come down to us have been unfortunate. As for us, see how inexorably destiny purses us.’
—Balzac
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A few adventurers were compelled to permanently behold Medusa not because her hideousness inspired terror, but because she was so magnificent to gaze upon.
But suppose a viewer-reader looks too hard and burns their eyes, as children do with the sun, or their lips, as Isaiah did in the throne room, or those who saw the Gorgons and turned to stone. Yet some say a few adventurers were compelled to permanently behold Medusa not because her hideousness inspired terror, but because she was so magnificent to gaze upon that the gazers knew—with a terrifying purity—she or he might forever be both scarred and poisoned by her beauty, as if having been bitten by one of her snakes. A few wise listeners of the myth realized that the coils of her hair weren’t really serpents, but only twisted metaphors, for to never be able to set eyes upon such tremendous beauty was a realization as terrifying as being bitten by dozens of adders. So when it comes to Medusa, one must look only upon her reflection in the mirror, her twin, her other self beyond herself, though the mind and spirit of both remain mysterious, permanently distant from the viewer.
A woman is not beautiful when her ankle or arm wins compliments, but when her total appearance diverts admiration from the individual parts of her body.
—Seneca
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Good looks are a possession of great value in human relations; they are the first means of establishing goodwill between men, and no one can be so barbarous or so surly as not to feel their attraction in some degree. The body enjoys a great share in our being, and has an eminent place in it. Its structure and composition, therefore, are worthy of proper consideration.
—Montaigne
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It is only natural that this exposé must now morph into the final metaphor of a butterfly: a balance of two-twice-over all united in a single vision, something between synchronicity and singularity. For the anterior side of a butterfly’s wings may display a gorgeous bouquet of dun beside swirls of ash gray, all intertwined with the golden hue of summer hay, while on the posterior side of the wings, one might see streams of silver on a blanket of indigo, interspersed with glimmers of crimson. That is to say the butterfly has two sides, both beautiful, balanced and diverse, yet undeniably individual. So the bottom-side of the butterfly may be brown, and the top-side blue, but the wings are matching no matter which way you look, wings perfectly proportioned for optimal flight—all united in a single spark of life—for yet there are ways to view it as two-things-in-one, or, perhaps, two-things-and-one. For what is any butterfly but the results of overcoming obstacles, going through tremendous changes, then, emerging as something completely new and now capable of (instead of crawling as one does in early life) flying in her prime to get where she needs to go in order to achieve her goals?
There is no secret to creation; but every creation has a secret.
—Albert Camus
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Christopher Landrum lives in Austin, Texas. His work has previously appeared in The Berlin Review of Books, and Real Clear News of Chicago. An archive of his work in The Fortnightly Review is here. He writes about what he reads at Bookbread.com.
NOTES.
Honoré de Balzac, Une Ténébreuse Affaire (A Murky Business) (c. 1841), trans. Herbert J. Hunt, (New York: Penguin, 1972, 1985), “II. Corentin’s Revenge,” pp. 160–61; Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus) (c. 1942), trans. Justin O’Brien, (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), p. 114; Jerome M. Levi, “Structuralism and Kabbalah: Sciences of Mysticism or Mystifications of Science?” Anthropological Quarterly 82 (Fall 2009): pp. 929–84 at p. 971; Michel de Montaigne, Essais (Essays), trans. J. M. Cohen, (New York: Penguin, 1958, 1988; Cohen’s numeration follows the Édition Municipale), (II, xvii) “On presumption,” p. 199; Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics) (c. 1916), ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehays with Alberte Riedlinger, trans. Roy Harris (c. 1955), (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1983), pp. 87–89; Seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Letters from a Stoic), trans. Robin Campbell, (New York: Penguin Classics, 1969), Letter XXXIII, p. 79; Paul Valéry, Cahiers (Notebooks Vol. I), trans. Paul Gifford et al; ed. Brian Stimpson; based on the French Cahiers, ed. Judith Robinson-Valéry, (New York: P. Lang, 2000), (1912. G 12, IV, 672), p. 327.)
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Publication: Wednesday, 24 November 2021, at 15:05.
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