‘My mother’s brother was christened Cedric, but people always called him Joe.’
In 1986, Joe’s brother, my uncle Frank, offered to take me to see him. By then Joe was living in Wolverhampton, in a place called Penndale Lodge, which Frank gave me to understand was some sort of refuge for destitute old men. From Four Oaks, the private estate where Frank and my aunt Miriam lived…
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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘As the weeks went by, I began to realize that the park had its own unofficial and carefully calibrated infrastructure.’
‘The man on the other end told me he was looking for sexual fantasies that were about eleven sentences long.’
‘Ask anyone in Ayodhya, and they will say the city’s Hindu–Muslim harmony can withstand any test.’
Snigdha Poonam on the construction of a Hindu temple on the ruins of a mosque in Utter Pradesh.
‘The place we come from, the place we call home, is the home of our suffering.’
Jamaica Kincaid talks about finding her way to writing.
‘How do we perform our politics, our outrage and our grievances when we are among a group?’
Anthony Anaxagorou talks about his collection Heritage Aesthetics.
‘Refusal is the last recourse of the powerless.’
Marina Benjamin on her years of not eating, and not growing.
