E is for England
‘Englishness’ is a term that has grown as flat as our beer, and as meaningless as our national anthem.‘Englishness’ is something to be rolled out every four years for the World Cup in order to sell Mars Bars and Gillette Razors. It has been appropriated by the sort of people that think the p
Great British Walks: Didcot Power Station
If you have every travelled via the South-West Trains service from Oxford to Reading, you will, most likely, recall seeing the three cooling towers of Didcot power station rising out of the landscape, roughly fifteen minutes into the journey. Clumped together among a shoal of smaller administrative
School Days
They call in my mother because I don’t know how to read. She sits stiffly on a chair, ready to spring. She smells like cigarettes and perfume to cover up the cigarettes. Smoking kills. “We’re concerned about Melanie’s reading,” says the Principal. She’s also sitting stiffly on her chair,
Literary Graves
“You know what was written on Keats’ grave? ‘Here lies one whose fame was writ in water.’” Bob Dylan mulls this over. “Where’s he buried?” Dylan is with Allen Ginsberg, visiting Jack Kerouac’s grave in Massachusetts. Ginsberg asks what graves the singer has seen. A pause. “Victor
Soumission by Houellebecq: Satire or Smut?
France has a history of producing bitterly controversial writers: Baudelaire the Sapphic Pornographer, Celine the traitorous Anti-Semite, and Derrida the Obfuscator. Today, that great tradition is embodied in slight, ailing frame of Michel Houellebecq, who is quite possibly the most controversial wr
A Suggestion
We can only imagine that the child went softly, aaaaaaafound some comfort in those flowers he is gripping, hardened now to fossils, while his fingers are dust. If there is something to add, supply it here, for even beneath the earth, one day there will be nothing left to hold onto. &nb
Not a Fairytale
There are lots of things I could tell you about Tom but the only one that really matters is that he jumped off the bridge when he was twelve. Because he wasn’t scared, you see. He’s never been scared of anything, not as long as I’ve known him, which is just about forever. Things that […
‘Sciamachy’ by John Fuller
I Whoever from the stinking village calls One quick accusing word, Or stiffens, circling like a bird About the empty air, or who has heard Some wall beneath a finger hiss, he falls. This knowledge is not good. We must invent The sparkling education Of the Dog, condone the bun Crammed in its gob: our
Renaissance Porn
In 1527 Pietro Aretino published I Modi, a collection of sixteen sexually explicit engravings originally by Marcantonio Raimondi. The Italian Renaissance had just created the world’s first hard-core porn magazine. The engravings in I Modi are remarkable on account of their sheer openness. The subj