‘My job, when talking to my daughter, is to guess what she means, her job is to guess what I mean. We believe things about each other. But how do we have a concept of meaning before we have a whole language? When does an infant have a meaningful sense of meaning?’
Hugh Foley on Taylor Swift, Chat GPT and the broader uses and abuses of meaning.
‘Focusing on speech marks alone overlooks what novels can do in their absence. What if ambiguity is the point?’
Kira McPherson on speech marks, or lack thereof.
‘Ultimately, I think, in this moment, the body doesn’t matter. It’s just another thing to upload onto the cloud. Or rather, it matters because it’s the ultimate thing to upload. The realest thing.’
Hugh Foley on bodybuilding influencers.
‘In the time that has lapsed between Evenings and Weekends’ period setting and today, the world has been rocked by a global pandemic, and seen Britain usher in four new Prime Ministers, one of whom was outlasted by a Tesco lettuce.’
Katie Tobin on austerity’s literary legacy.
‘Entwining deeply personal stories into a tense political context allows for the exploration of the effects of this context at an individual level that, while fictionalised, is also infused with reality.’
Callum Tilley on politics in art.
‘They are less interviews than they are extended passages of domestic caterwauling. A sound editor would have an aneurysm.’
Ian Wang on voice memories.
‘The joy of taking on a subject not previously covered by historians is that one can approach it with an open mind, uncovering and assessing virgin sources like an archaeologist.’
Adam Zamoyski on Izabela Czartoryska.
‘To insist on seeing writing as a profession is both delusional and symptomatic of the LinkedInfication of everyday life – that very neoliberal desire to establish hierarchies between culture producers: the pros and the amateurs. This validation-seeking division is senseless, for what’s so wrong with amateurism?’
Fernando Sdrigotti on Literary Professionals.
‘As he writes in The Music of Time, ‘to make a poem at all is an act of hope’, for a future in which somebody is present, attending to the music and the craft.’
Tom Branfoot remembers the late John Burnside.
‘I guess maybe that’s called haunting, that magic pull of things akin to those in our glass boxes, things that cannot last.’
New writing by Tallulah Griffith.
‘It is for this reason that I never go to my field at this time of day but wait instead until I can be alone. Only then, in my experience, will it show me a secret.’
Charlotte Stroud on the secrets of the countryside.
‘All at once, it felt nihilistic and misguided. I had been on this extended fast, but it was devoted to absent men and not any real god. As such, there had been no revelation or resolution, no peace.’
Christiana Spens on Lent.
‘So what is the power of literary fashion, then? For me it lies in its virtuality, that imaginary quality of the ekphrastic, something so beautiful that it cannot exist in real life as we know it on the page. That virtuality also ties into the codification of clothing, and how it might suggest something about its wearer without saying as much.’
Katie Tobin on the Bloomsbury Group and fashion.
‘In other words, there is a love that waits, and it has been and is being published in Latvia – as well as elsewhere – right now, before our eyes.’
Ivars Šteinbergs on Latvian poetry.
‘If the meaning of a poem is obvious without breaking scrolling pace, then a core aspect of the form has been lost.’
Lee Hatsumi Mayer on the Romantic poets today.
‘Both contemporary pieces seek to build on this revolutionary choreography rather than imitate it perfectly, yet both acknowledge that Nijinska’s work marked key developments in the world of choreography, bridging the gap between one century and the next in the world of classical dance. So how did it come to pass that now she is known primarily as a keeper of her brother’s career?’
Esmee Wright on Bronislava Nijinska.
Pacifica Goddard on Hetch Hetchy & The Greatest Good
