Doubled Forging, or, Araki Yasusada and Why the West Wants Poems

To begin with, a story. Because, for us, here, the story is the important part.

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In late 1945, as the Allied powers began self-assuredly to map the contours of a new…

Skater’s Meadow

The short walk from Cambridge to Grantchester follows a metalled track, from which fields rise to a ridge on one side and meadows fall away to the Cam on the other. Before this opening-out, however, the path passes a patch of meadow that is peculiarly regular: it is square-ish, fenced on all sides…

Inventing a Genre: Pastoral Punk

The proliferation of micro-genres in the internet age is more often than not an excuse to deride the online music press. Appellations such as ‘witch-house’ or ‘seapunk’ start as social media jokes, but end up getting snatched up by the likes of Pitchfork and Dazed and…

Meditations on The Olm

By the time his street collapsed into a ravine, William Lyttle had excavated over 100 cubic metres of earth from beneath his house in Hackney. His tunnels, some more than 20 metres long, had not only undermined the road, but were also causing his neighbours houses to subside. In 40 years…

Shadows and Reading Strangely

This is about a text I found by being in the wrong place. Talking about books can sometimes feel like that: like a succession of empty boxes, or like every room is the wrong room, every discussion one that you’ve walked into at the wrong moment. I can’t, now, actually remember…

Painting With Bullshit

“Ooo. There’s been some bad racism and stuff like that going down today and no mistake, my liege. It’s made Mr. Winky go right small it has. Oh yes it has. Oh yeah. And my ball bag, my old ball bag has only gone up my bum. Here’s H from Steps…”

‘Media Vita in Morte Sumus’ or, ‘One Day We’ll Be on a Slab’

On Boredom, and Paying Attention to Karl Ove Knausgaard

I read an international bestseller this summer: the second volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Or, at least, so the front cover told me. It turns out that ‘international bestseller’ in the case of Knausgaard means something…