Sitting in the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse, my friend tells me two stories. The first is about her grandfather, who arrived at Gare de l’Est after the Shoah, in which all forty-two members of his family were killed. He was hungry, maybe even starving, and took a seat in the restaurant of th…
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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.
‘The ancient stories we tell, as beautiful as they may be, also serve to shape our conventions about who we think we are or should be’
‘It’s easy to make an argument for the importance of literature in general, but almost impossible to sustain any conviction about the specific value of one’s own work.’
‘My painter caught me in a moment that is somehow rare and yet not uncharacteristic.’
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘Is there in fact a jostling for dominance between the art forms, some barely suppressed competitiveness?’
Adam Mars-Jones on music and ceremony.
‘All that yearning spilling down amid the treetops and roof ridges, a shadow I’d never properly considered before.’
