What I’m Reading
Somewhere overseas, more than a decade ago, I was among a group of poets, novelists and translators, who were visiting another writer at his historic home. Inside, before I could ask anyone about the house, its age and its style, I found myself knocking on a wall. Days later, one of the novelists who had been there said, with a chuckle: That is the difference between us—a novelist would begin by describing the house; a poet knocks on the wall to check that it is real. * In thinking about the topic ‘What I am Reading’, I was stalled for […]
What I’m Reading
I might as well be honest. A great year of reading it was not. I had a baby in May this year, in the first flush of the pandemic, so I feel zero sense of shame about what I did or did not read. I figure whatever I get around to is a bit like yoga: doing anything is a win, even if I just lie there breathing and trying to follow what’s going on. First, I can definitely tell you what I have not been reading. I did not read Defoe’s The Plague, Camus’ La Peste, or any other […]
The Vulgar, Not The Vulgate
I find myself avoiding the word ‘sex’. It is an ugly word. Not because it is boorish, but because it is too refined. ‘Sex’ is clinical: sterile, precise, institutional. It comes from the Norman French, originally Latin—what philologists Reneé and Henry Kahane called ‘the status symbol of the rich, the powerful, the refined, and the snobbish’. It is the word of aristocratic victors, looking down upon Anglo-Saxon oiks. Even today, ‘sex’ belongs in the official lexicon of government, business and academia. Adults use it in treatises and memoranda, often without sniggers or twitches. It is acceptable— that is to say, […]
What I’m Reading
The romance and horror of the navigable world I amuse myself by finding patterns in and between the books I tumble into, or stumble over, or on occasion drag myself through, grumbling. Lately, I have been able to gather many of them loosely with a theme I think of as the romance of the navigable world. These books do not shatter or rebuild the world; instead, they share the pleasant and dangerous fiction that the rules of the world can be learned. It is a dream that unites aviation histories and Regency romances, crime fiction, and business development guides. I […]
Essays
When We Talk About Time
Every now and then, perhaps every few weeks, I end up asking how you feel about time. It baffles you, this strange question—it baffles me too. Perhaps that’s why I keep asking you—maybe it’s not that I’m searching for an answer that I cannot find, it’s that I don’t want to be alone in my confusion. It feels as if the past decade, but particularly this year, time has receded in a tide, never to break back on land. I don’t know where I’ve been.
Fiction
Tempting the Pest
‘Push!’ I yell even though it’s just me heaving the long claw of crowbar down into the sand and wedging up the fence from below. The mesh winces, creaks. ‘Push!’ I shout like a midwife birthing new life; here in the long hot flat with the afternoon swelling and the wires ruling long lines of fire. I press what is left of my weight into the bar, heaving as the fence clings on, its thin nails gripping at the soil.
Memoir
In The Beach
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Poetry
Patina on Glass
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