‘Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being’ [David Foster Wallace]. Is it?
Fucking Being To fucking be or not to be fucking. When so much writing – from song lyrics to medieval poetry – is concerned with sex (the giver, the receiver, the lack, the lust), I wonder whether it is possible to write, not about ‘what it is to be a fucking human being’ but rather [&hellip
Belleville / Pavement Cracks
Belleville Satie stirs, while breeze seeps through a window left ajar in Belleville, our home. The scent of white wine, our blood. The salt lamp kindling. Your precious orchids growing jealous Pavement Cracks I shall cast these cracks in the pavement with molten gold, so that I may hold these second
Zoos
In Memoriam R. S. Thomas I tell Genevieve Cooper about the world every Tuesday at three. She lives at the top of a hill outside of town and everyone assumes that she has some nurse up there who helps her out, but that isn’t true. She’s lived there since her husband died when she was […]
Prophetic Fallacy: The “prosperity theology” of a “faith healer”
“You’ve got cancer of the stomach? Are you ready to burn that cancer out? Here it goes in the mighty… Devil back off – back off devil! Hallelujah!” – Peter Popoff, 1986 In 1986, Peter Popoff was exposed. The American faith healer and “televangelist” had enjoyed great
The ISIS Short Essay Competition: “O tell me the truth about love” (W.H. Auden).
A mathematician’s perspective The science of love: instead of The One, there’s a distribution of Ones, everyone in the world has a number that tells you how compatible/suitable/loveable they are to you. Above a certain threshold we call it love. There exist algorithms to optimise your chances of
Keeping the Memory Alive (and Profitable): The problem of dead artists
There has never been a better or a worse time to be a dead celebrity. In 2012 the annual revenue generated in the USA by dead celebrities was estimated by Forbes at $2.25bn. Their work will remain; their profits are ensured but their legacies are not. After an adulatory obituary and a flurry of resu
The Ballad of Mohamed Bouazizi
“The Spring of Nations, for the second time, Turned out to be melodious bel canto.” – Czesław Miłosz, A Treatise on Poetry (1957). A time of schism, scandal, shock, dreams and killing drones, a whistleblower in the west, theocrats and thrones. Panic spurred a country’s qu
On Reading an Evil Book: Reflections on Mein Kampf
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf at the fortress-prison at Landsberg am Lech, a roughly Abingdon-sized town in the Bavarian countryside west of Munich. He had been incarcerated there for his ill-starred attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government in 1923, and, feeling the need to at once set his doctrine do
The ISIS Presents: “Is Art Dead? And Does it Matter?” A Panel Discussion
How do you define ‘art’? Should it be beautiful? Should it do something that no-one else has done before? Should it shape our understanding of ourselves and our society? Or does it just need to be in a gallery? With the rise of conceptual art, does there even need to be an ‘it’? Maybe you [&