is a writer based in London. He is interested in the relation between politics and experimental art, especially the political turbulence of the 1960s. His writing often attempts to traverse the minutiae of the subjective experience of art and the material conditions under which it is produced and received. He received an MA in English from University College London.
“My name is Abra. My name is Abra. I had almost forgotten that; the naming of things lost its importance here, with no one to hear them named.” So begins Gaining Ground, the newly reissued novel by Canadian writer Joan Barfoot. Gaining Ground was initially published as Abra in Canada in 1978 and it is being reissued by Faber in the United Kingdom this month. When the book came out it …
On a long walk, I wander into a solo show of the artist Pierette Bloch.
The main room has a long wall text that I mostly skim ... something about the repetition and rhythm within her practice resembling time within music.
Across the room, I see a piece covered in short marks of rich black ink.
In the block next door to me lives a man with scars running up from either side of his mouth, a violently extended smile. His top-floor flat was once home to a pack of black and white cats he got as kittens, or perhaps bred, but once the cats became old or bold enough, they escaped from their balcony, down to freedom in the concrete streets of East London below.
When I was 12, or 13 or 14 I had a Joan Baez record. I had about 20-30 records then in my collection. Some were given to me, from my grandfather, and maybe my cousin, who I considered an expert of music at that time (she was a Beatles fan), and some I bought with my own money, earned from dog sitting, baby sitting and handing out flyers for a nearby second hand store, that paid me too little to stand for hours in the street …
Shortly after Hurricane Melissa, my aunt calls to tell me everyone’s roof caved in. The magnitude of this causes me to elide grammar in my retelling: surely I should write everyone’s roof has caved in, roof should likely be in its plural ‘roofs’, the tense of the sentence is both present and past. And of course it wasn’t necessarily ‘everyone’; she was referring to her own home …
I’ve been accused of being insincere. In March, I had a Paris love affair. The shooting of Braquâge (une évasion) caused Jacques Rivette to have a nervous breakdown. Shot in June 1975, but only released in 1978, the film, a western set in Paris about a jewel thief and her sales girl accomplice whose title combines the words braquage (robbery) and âge (age), was intended to be the third filmed and fifth released in a quintology of films Rivette called Scènes de la Vie Parallèle …
Votives, archives, storehouses, bric-a-brac shelves, the magnetic side of my boiler, mantlepieces, picture galleries, display cases, messy drawers, white IKEA Kallaxs and shelving units from Habitat, pinboards, Pinterest, the area of skin that starts under my right arm and goes down to my knees, Encyclopedia Madonnica, hard-drives with the orange rubber lifejackets, a jeweller’s well-worn fingers
Taking on a lecture titled ‘Why I Write’, Lydia Davis struggles with the why and decides instead to focus on the how. Into the Weeds, a book edited from this lecture, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, started by Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell and administered by Yale University, opens with the initial invitation.
I know people know what death looks like and I knew what it looked like before I saw how my mother wore it but there was no way for me to know what she would look like dead until she had died which feels unfair.
The winter wind hitting your exposed skin feels sore; the two collide to create a fissure on the plain of your neck like brittle land. Your hands are red and swollen, ankles charred from the chill.
When she was a little over seven years old, her mother, Mrs Roy, found a family who could take care of her when Mrs Roy was overwhelmed with running a one-of-a-kind school in Kottayam, in the southern state of Kerala, India. The chosen family lived in a big, airy house. The problem, however, was the “respected” senior who was the patriarch-grandfather.
My grandparents’ house had a large garden which bordered three-quarters of the property. The walls were painted a dark, earth green to blend in with all the plants, trees, and flower bushes they had planted and tended to over the years.
There is a very particular shade of blue that is created by shadows left when sunlight reflects off snow. Luminous and cold, tinged with white light, it catches in drifts and at the base of trees.
The first time I listened to Lily Allen’s latest album, West End Girl, I already knew what it was about. My eyes had skimmed over the headlines of articles revisiting her Architectural Digest tour, the ethics of an open marriage and, of course, the breakdown of her marriage with the tabloid-branded “sex addict” David Harbour.
