‘Behind every man I want to kiss lies that original desire, which it is my nature and my fate to displace.’
I only hope we may sometime meet and I shall be able perhaps to say what I cannot write.
– Bram Stoker to Walt Whitman, February 1876
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‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
‘an orange plastic basket of compost / down from the top of the garden – sweet dark, / fibrous rot, promising’
‘When I was seventeen, a freshman in college living in my parents’ house, I met Ruth at a poetry reading.’
‘Does it make you a little ghostly yourself, when what’s gone is more present for you than what’s here?’
Will Self and Mark Doty's discussion with Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing about blood, the surprising relationship between Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman and the nature of addiction.
‘Writing about Cassavetes feels like vocalese: putting lyrics to passages of jazz improvisation.’
