The ISIS MT17

the ISIS tt17

BACK COVER

FRONT COVER

staff editors: Lily Begg and Tj Jordan deputy editors: Gaby Mancey-Jones, Madeleine Pollard, Ailbhe Rea, Vicky Robinson sub-editors: Zad El Bacha, Lev Crofts, Lael Hines, Emily Lawford, Felix Pope, Tobi Thomas website director: Mouki Kambouroglou fiction director: Flo Ward fiction team: Zara Baker, Joshua Cathcart, Kat Dixon-Ward, Charlotte Jackson, Alex Matraxia creative director: Hope Sutherland creatives: Sarah Bai, Megan Black, Joshua Cathcart, Florrie Engleback, Joe Higton, Alex Matraxia creative events team: Jojo Dieffenbacher, Ainsley Katz

Visit our website to see regularly updated articles, fiction and broadcasting:

broadcasting director: Sofia Blanchard

isismagazine.org.uk

broadcasting team: Harri Adams, Molly Carlin, Hanako Lowry

To get involved with The ISIS contact us at:

events director: Julia Warszewski

editor@isismagazine.org.uk

creative events director: Alexandra Luo

events team: Barbora Bute, Tess Hulton, Lauren Sneade business team: Connie Simms, Francesco Acqua

Published by Oxford Student Publications Limited Š 2017

social media manager: Mary Ormerod

Chairman: Louis Walker Managing Director: Rebecca Iles Finance Director: Katie Birnie Secretary: Tom Hall Tech Director: Utsav Popat Directors: Sophie Aldred, Mack Grenfell, Tom Metcalf, Joshua Mcstay, Steven Spisto

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CONTENTS READING ‘READ’ Otto Råsånen 4 READ Otto Råsånen 5

HERITAGE TWO SELVES IN THE VOID Maan Al-Yasiri 8 COSROE Ryan Bradley 12 ON BEING COOL Gazelle Mba 14 THE HOLEY LAND Zad El Bacha 18 PARTRIDGE Kat Dixon-Ward 22 FORGOTTEN BALLADS OF THE BIAFRAN WAR Tobi Thomas 23 CARDIFF BUS Brian O’Driscoll 26

CULTURE YORK HAVENS Ryan Bradley 30 WRITING FOR THE FUTURE Billie Esplen 31 TEA Georgina Quach 35 CANTEEN, HOSPITAL MORNING, NIGHTSHIFT Daniel Murphy 37 OXFORD ON FILM Tara Snelling 40 SUN Alexander Bridge 43 THANKS, IT’S MY MUM’S Jaleh Brazell 44

PHENOMENA WATCHING FOOD Anora Sandhu 48 KILLING A PIG Harri Adams 52 MAKING NOISE Felix Pope 53 N19 Flo Berridge 57 TWO’S A CROWD Anora Sandhu 58 SLEEPER’S CANYON Fred Gelert 61 SHARING SPACES Tj Jordan 62

500 THE NEWEST TESTAMENT Emma Levin 66 WATER LILIES Anna Lewis 68 FICTION THERAPY Katty Cowles 70 [THE POINT] Lewis Hunt 72

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READING ‘READ’ Otto Råsånen

S

ometimes we forget we have hands. We do so just about every time we read, even though one hand, maybe both, come into contact with the page. We restrict the function of hands to holding the page down, or as a means to pursue the poem which outlasts the boundaries of a single page, and requires hands to turn over to the next fold. Attention sits squarely on the whiteness of the page and the modest collection of black characters on it. Everything else shrinks away. There’s a certain perverse circularity to the whole process: reading creates a sense of bodilessness, and in turn the sensory imagery of the poem re-engages the body.

Why do our hands fade to ghosts? Why is our reaction to the page to shrink into the Cartesian dimensionless point of pure mind? It’s not a natural reaction—a child will have had the chance to play around with pages using her hands long before she learns to ‘read’. Our hands, already there on the page, could make something of themselves on it; a composition on the page, obscuring certain words, casting others into sharper relief, conversing and constructing messages.

There is plenty on the page which we are paying no mind to.

There is plenty more of ourselves that could be brought to the act of reading— starting with the hands.

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read

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editorial T

his magazine has been a creative process in every sense of the phrase.

The Trinity Term 2017 ISIS is a product not simply to read, but to hold, feel, fondle, fold, bend and caress; it is a physical creation.

On receiving ‘Read’ and its accompanying essay—the two pieces that introduce this edition—we realised the innate physicality of our project.

After our creative director drunkenly painted on an ISIS colleague’s bum early in the term, another member of the team was inspired to draw on the topless chest of a friend.

This corporeal spirit has been present ever since: photographing our hands started unexpectedly competitive comparisons; finding rocks whilst covering mugs and clocks in sugar birthed our hypothetical acid rock band ‘Sugar, Rocks & Clocks’; the 3am pick-me-up food delivered to the lay-in session instigated an artistic experiment with pizza grease. This was undoubtedly a mission propelled by bodies, materials, and the relationship between the two.

And so, thanks to the clay woman, wire shopping trolleys, torn-up soggy teabags, broken light bulbs, mirrors in mirrors, wedding veils, feathers and piles of Ulysses’ editions; thanks to meanderings through Oxford photographing our front doors, Sarah’s insistence that we observe a leafy bush as she reads us her ‘Leaf ’ poem, and afternoons spent in the serene brightness of Hope’s studio apartment, we bring you an ISIS that is made of material ‘things’.

You’ll find bullet-hole-showered buildings in ‘The Holey Land’, moth-eaten hand-me-downs in ‘Thanks, It’s My Mum’s, heaps of dusty Qur’ans in ‘Two Selves in the Void’, plastic spoons and sugar granules in Daniel Murphy’s poems, and reeking animal guts in ‘Killing a Pig’. But before we give too much away, we hand over this term’s ISIS to you. Read it like the physical, malleable piece of art that it is—coffee stains and all.

With much love, Lily, Tj and the rest of the ISIS famille

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HERITAGE

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I

n Baghdad, there is a street that is famous for its many book shops. It is named after the greatest Arab poet of all time, Al-Mutanabbi. Sellers pile their books on carpet floors or crumbling tables and haggle over their prices, though the vast majority of them are sold for around 10,000 dinars. They appear in a variety of languages, but Arabic and English dominate. Behind the mess there are cafeterias and more established bookshops. These have the privilege of tradition, many of the owners having inherited their books and the walls that surround them from their fathers. It is in these shops that you find hardcovers with titles written in perplexing and incomprehensible Arabic calligraphy. At the very end of the street stands a rusted bronze statue of Al-Mutanabbi, his right hand in the air as if he were in the middle of one of his bombastic lines, praising himself as the ideal Arab— part desert warrior, part poet:

smiling old man—she noticed a photograph of five young men with a black ribbon in the corner. The man noticed her gaze and said, quoting the Qur’an: “With every difficulty, there is relief / verily with every difficulty there is relief.” My mother replied: “May the rest of their years be in your life.” She would later show me an article reporting that the man’s five sons had been among the victims of a bombing of the street during Iraq’s civil war.

“The desert knows me well, the night and the mounted men

“Of course, aren’t we all.”

As we were walking back down to the nearest taxi point, a bookseller caught my attention with a line I have often heard in Iraq: “You don’t look like you are from here, can you read English?”

“How did you know?” I asked.

He laughed, telling me: “I can always spot foreigners, it is obvious you know—” “He is Iraqi,” my mother interrupted.

“His father and his mother are both Iraqi so he is—”

The battle and the sword, the paper and the pen.”

“But your clothes,” he laughed without addressing what my mother reiterated, “your clean face, you are wearing shoes when everyone else is wearing sandals. It is obvious!”

“Al-Mutanabbi is a famous Arab poet from the Abbasid Era,” my mother says after seeing me struggle to sound out the inscription under the statue. His poetry dealt with courts, women, and encounters with lions and their smiling teeth, among other topics. But now the magnificent statue of Al-Mutanabbi is tired with dirt and riddled with graffiti.

Just before the statue is a grand old cafe where my mother and I sipped excruciatingly sweet black tea under old photographs of Baghdad. When we went to pay at the till—operated by a large and seemingly perpetually

I chuckled awkwardly and walked over to his table. He had old English mass market paperbacks; books once popular and now probably out of print. “I have Arabic books too, you know, if you can read that. I know when you guys leave you never bother to learn Arabic. You can always learn though,” he said, pointing towards the Arabic section of his bookshop.

The first book that caught my eye had its title in English: Seven Pillars

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of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence. I picked up the hardcover book expecting to read left to right, but opened it up to find Arabic writing. I flipped it over and saw the Arabic cover. “Lawrence of the Arabs,” my mother said when I gestured for her to come over and see what I had found.

“Lawrence of the Arabs… he lied to us, promised us Palestine and a free Arab state and the Arabs were foolish enough to trust a man with blue eyes and blond hair and pigeon Arabic,” my uncle said when I showed him my new purchase later that day.

TWO SELVES IN THE VOID

“But he didn’t know about the SykesPicot Agreement,” I replied to my uncle, who shook his head. The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret deal between the British and the French that divided control over the Middle East despite their wartime promises of Arab independence.

The purchase was a sign of a burden that I feel every time I go to Iraq. I am reminded that I am not enough of an Arab, and that if I did not amend this then I would be just another Iraqi that’s been westernised and lost to another world. My identity is questioned by people who have the same skin tone, the same hair and same taste in food as me. Simply because I reach for the seat-belt in a taxi (“I knew you’re not from here, only foreigners care about safety”), or by the telling nature of my clothes, or because I defend Lawrence to my uncle with my Wiki-knowledge of that period’s history, I am in cultural limbo.

living as a british iraqi Maan Al-Yasiri

You are being played by the book just like Lawrence tricked the Arabs.

I decided that every night in Baghdad I had to read a few pages

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of my Arabic copy of Seven Pillars.

The sheer lopsided oddity of an ethnic Arab trying to learn his native tongue from an Arabic translation of an Englishman who learned Arabic as part of a British colonial project escaped me at the time, but I persisted.

“So-so-some of the eveel-evil— fuck—some of the evil of my tale may be—may have been inhuman i-iin our circumstances.”

Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances.

The first line took me at least five minutes. I put the book to one side and watched a documentary on Lawrence presented by Rory Stewart instead.

Lawrence was a British colonial officer sent to ‘Arabia’ to incentivise and guide a revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the midst of the First World War. The rebels captured Damascus but, unknown to them, the great powers had already divided the region. Rory Stewart, a current MP and a former senior coalition official in Iraq, had decided to present a BBC documentary on Lawrence after learning that American soldiers in Iraq were made to study Seven Pillars. Lawrence’s ability to unite feuding Arab tribes into one force has earned him the colonial authority sought by Westerners trying to understand the region. Even though a century had passed between the Great Arab Revolt and the US invasion of Iraq, the Americans thought that Seven Pillars could continue its educational purpose. By the end of the documentary, Stewart had presented Lawrence as a friend of the Arabs who had wanted their

freedom and liberation and was deeply disappointed when the great powers refused to grant it. My uncle disagreed: “Who cares about Lawrence’s dream for the Arabs? Are we so barbaric that we need a man in a military uniform to liberate us?”

Lawrence wrote in an undoubtedly colonial tone. His prose, absorbed in the wider imperial project, described ‘the Arab’ as equal parts exotic, sexual and noble in his savagery.

Lawrence was, after all, a colonial officer. However, I could not help but feel an affinity with Lawrence, at least as he set himself out in Seven Pillars. Before I boarded a flight back to London, I ordered an English copy of the book to cross reference with the Arabic one. The idea was to read the two texts side by side and thus strengthen my comprehension of the Arabic.

One image that did not manifest itself in my mental vision when stuttering through the Arabic copy was of a skinless Lawrence who had “quitted” his “English self ” to take on an “Arab skin”, only to fail and be left skinless. He had “dropped one form and not taken on the other”.

He was naked in the desert and he was scorched. A century away, a taxi driver had decided that I am not an Arab, while in Britain it is hard not to be reminded of my inability to be considered English purely due to the way I look. One form is taken away, but no other is bestowed, and I am left outside, naked, in the cold.

Back in Oxford, I began reading fewer and fewer pages. Two weeks passed, and I noticed a shift in my reading towards the English, away from the Arabic. Once again, I “quitted” myself of my Arab self. With that, I

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slowly stopped listening to Fairuz. I stopped completing the exercises in my ‘Mastering Arabic 2’ textbook.

I stopped trying to think in Arabic.

And yet, despite this, I am always on the outside. Just as an Iraqi taxi driver can spot my otherness by the fact that I put a seat-belt on, I often notice that I am the only non-white person in a room and I am reminded that I am not from here because I do not look like the people that are. I feel like Lawrence, stuck out between “two selves that converse in the void”. When a friend opens a gift I just bought for them I feel an innate aversion, inherent from my Arab upbringing and my mother’s constant reminders that it is rude to do such a thing. My conversations with relatives from Iraq on the phone are almost militaristic in their simplicity, while Arabs are used to superfluous praising and emotive language. When I’m in Baghdad, I try to read Arabic and talk to relatives about history and politics.

But when I am back in the UK I drift away towards western culture. I go months without uttering a single word of Arabic.

I know that the next time I visit Iraq I will feel the same urge to be more Arab. After all, the ultimate shallow aim is to hear from a relative that I am not westernised and that I have stayed true to my heritage. I also know that upon returning to the UK, I will feel an aversion to being so ethnic and different; I will find refuge in similar shallow demonstrations of acceptance. The pressure to cater to both sides is the only solidity that I possess, inherited from seeing my life, as Lawrence saw, “through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments”.

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“A century away, a taxi driver had decided that I am not an Arab, while in Britain it is hard not to be reminded of my inability to be considered English purely due to the way I look.”

cosroe Ryan Bradley

“My flimsy flesh! It’s failed me again,” cried Cosroe, rolling lidless eyes.

Semile blanched, nervously nursing his tea. Sipping it meekly.

I shouldn’t shiver, he thought—I shouldn’t shake.

I’m hardly whole myself.

The host? Wizened, yes— shrivelled, true; a sleepy tree in autumn. But yellowed too; a bronzy corpse, caked in winter’s milt. “Failed you how, Mr. Cosroe?”

“I’ve spoiled the brew, it seems. My finger fell in the sugar. Shall I fetch it out?”

The painter shrugged. “No need, sir.

The damage is done, I think.” But his host? He never listened. Cosroe’s claws were quick. They fumbled about; searching in the sugar, foraging for a finger; “I’ll find it somewhere. It’s not in the pot, is it?”

“The teapot?”

Semile spluttered, tipping the cup—cooling his drink on the carpet. Zesty, potent. Not like the others; bonbons, truffles, a slice or two of pie—that was his breakfast; a breakfast in revolt. A dessert for morning’s dinner—now a foul deserter; a truant to the

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tummy, a renegade to the gastric gland.

Semile’s digestibles climbed high, laddering up his throat. Candied beets, chewy toffees, and several rounds of shortbread. They’d meet the air again. They were juicy, toothsome. And much to many’s liking. But Cosroe’s tea? An oily, inky soup.

I ruin pictures in a single stroke.

Details blur. Colours fade—like nitrate, or Flash Paper on film—it erases faces, surrogates a smog. It guns holes in cotton! Your geriatric gardener has better blues than mine.”

The cadaver gasped. “But you’re such a young man!?”

“Yes—yet so are you, Cosroe. And look what happened there!”

The artist’s palate stung. This new flavour lingered—besieging sugar, warring with the moreish. What was it? Decay. Or death, I think. Dancing on his tastebuds. Gag. Scrape your tongue. Dig caves in the pink!

Silence. The room stilled. Crickets chirped, cicadas croaked. But Cosroe cried. He whined, “Ahhh, alas,” masking his face in his fingers. Or what fingers he had left. One was in the sugar. Or was it the teapot?

“Did you like it?” asked Cosroe, all earnest, dry, and drowsy. He bent forward, his old armchair creaking.

Then, he smiled sweetly, coiling a single, silver lock. The teapot buzzed. Again, the flies were renting room. Their fee? Paid in snouty acid.

Armoured wings; wet. Fuzzy fur; soaked. They swam in the tea-leave sea. Unhindered. Unchallenged. No Incy dared to gollop them down, squicked by Crosroe too.

“Now, now, Cosroe! Take courage!

It was a blague, a cantrip—a giddy turn of tongue. Schoolboys sting with such talk. I was cad, a clown…”

“They’re in the pot?” repeated Semile, whispering—as if danger loomed, as if a horsefly could harm them.

“Yes. I think so. Peer in, could you? I would, but… my ears might tumble in, my eye could fancy a swim.”

“I would, Cosroe. But I’ll find nothing, I fear,” he sighed, “my sight is… palsied. Of late, I see so little.

“Go on…” sniffled the ugly crier.

“I… was… boorish? Brutish?” said Semile, lancing the boil of offence.

“Don’t cry…” he added, almost pleading.

Sneering, Cosroe cackled, failing to stifle his laughter. “I’m not crying, Mr. Semile. I’m having a titter. I’ve played a cantrip of my own, it seems.”

A titter? A Cantrip? Semile blushed, fooled mightily. “But your tears?”

“Are waste. Oils, fats, mucus—all of that. Cadavers don’t cry, you see.

They leak.”

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THE PO

OL PLA YERS. SEVEN GOLDE AT THE N SHOV EL. We real cool. We Left sch ool. We

Lurk lat e. We Strike st raight. W e Sing sin . We Thin gin . We Jazz Jun e. We Die soon .

Gwendoly

n Brooks (1917-20 00)

ON BEING COOL breaking down racial stereotypes Gazelle Mba

Gwendolyn Brooks says this and indeed all things best. The Pulitzer prize-winning poet articulates the essential truths of black life.

She notes death’s proximity to coolness. While its black arbiters lurk, strike and sing, something dark and threatening looms. She unites the two. She takes a fatal stab at the balloon of cool and happy, constructed at the beginning of the poem.

black people “are not free to be happy”, by meditating on a culture in which the creativity and expression of black people is valued and prized over black life. A culture that systematically separates the cultural output of a marginalised group from the very people who create and disseminate it, so that they float detached and unmoored from what they own. In an essay for a collection entitled ‘Black Cool’, the artist and photographer Hank Williams Thomas describes the moment he got his first pair of Nike

The queer theorist Sarah Ahmed reminds us that “happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be happy.” Brooks’ poem artfully diagnoses a peculiar way in which

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shoes: “It was around this same time I learned that I was ‘Black’. At the time, I saw no connection between the two. I was only five years old, and statistically more likely to be dead or in jail by twenty-one than to be in college. But I didn’t know anything about that; I just knew that I liked the color blue.” Liking the colour blue holds an innocence that is punctured and dismantled by the paradox which unsettles both Thomas and Brooks.

How to be both visible and invisible; how to be both loved and reviled; or just simply, how to be. How to be in a black body.

I have long wrestled with the question of existing in a black body. I have vacillated between the essentialising demands of both whiteness and blackness.

While, thankfully, gendered and racial self-consciousness flickers intermittently throughout the days, months and years, I still return to myself burdened by contradictory expectations. I lack the self-respect extolled by the essayist Joan Didion, a self-respect which stems from an uncomplicated relationship with one’s race. It is a way of being which Didion describes as giving “us back to ourselves… without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.” I have returned many times to find I was not there. Existing in a black body—Frantz Fanon speaks of the colonised subject’s fantasies of jumping, swimming and running “of action and aggression”—is to be engaged in acts that seek to unify that which has been anatomised, dissected and scrutinised. It means mediating the ways in which black identity isn’t seen as being either

good or bad but both good and bad: navigating a culture with a take it or leave it approach to all things black. The problem with ‘cool’ isn’t the directness of the compliment, its peculiar ability to define and to categorise, or its absence of any clear meaning. What irks and frustrates me about ‘cool’ is how certain speech acts become racialised with both our consent and obliviousness. In London, a city where forty percent of people are BAME, wearing a certain hairstyle wouldn’t mark you as different or provoke a reaction from the vast majority of people. But in Oxford, your ability to slip past unnoticed as a black person is halted.

‘Cool’ in white spaces becomes a way of accommodating black people by foregrounding their difference— once that difference has been made acceptable and safe.

Sections of Claudine Rankine’s Citizen are applicable here. She describes the moment where “Someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful.” Butler’s reply is eye-opening: “We suffer from the condition of being addressable.

Our emotional openness... is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this… for so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person… you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisibile in the face of such language acts.” What I am therefore advocating is a thoughtfulness and a patience with language; an awareness of each other’s “emotional openness” contained within our “addressability.” There is so much that lies beneath what we say. ‘Cool’, with its connotations of ‘I don’t give a fuck’, its smoothness and chilliness,

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when it occurs in certain contexts, can demobilise and paralyse the person to whom it’s addressed. It makes you ‘hypervisible.’ You are hypervisible already because of your braids, or your haircut, or your clothes, or your voice, or the colour of your skin, or your name, or, or, or.

Yet, because you are ‘cool’, you are in some way passive, despite your intense desire to act out, to be angry, to feel sad. You have been assigned your social role. You fit—but what is it you are fitting into exactly?

II The Black-British filmmaker Cecile Emeke’s creation of moving and affecting portraits, through interviews with members of the black diaspora, brings to mind the French poet and writer Baudelaire’s conception of the flâneur. Emeke’s style evokes “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” modernity that Baudelaire speaks of in The Painter of Modern Life. In it, she fashions the marginalised into aloof and inscrutable observers. Emeke’s ‘cool’ does not render one inert—it inspires passion and fury. Cool under the lens of black auteurs is thus radically different. Black auteurs create something different because they shift and displace the discourse of dominant culture. They don’t simply continue our hegemonic ideas

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of what cool is, they provide new and reworked definitions and meanings.

In his queer film Looking for Langston, Isaac Julien’s characters similarly embody black cool. They possess an undeniable charm. I stood in awe of the sleekness and slickness of their dress and movements. But beneath this sleekness is a humanity, an awareness of one’s subordinate position, chances and opportunities.

Both Emeke and Julien want their viewers to look at their subjects—to witness their coolness, their spirit.

But we are already asked to perform a different kind of looking. A looking which, as Fisher writes, “already testifies to an absence at the centre; looking because it is a political imperative in the face of a hegemony which is perpetually ‘covering up’ a past it cannot absorb.”

2016 was the year Dev Hynes of Blood Orange, alongside Grace Jones, brought “ultimate blackness” to the stage of the Greek Theatre in Berkeley CA. Hynes’ work, his own transatlantic version of black cool, is informed by the civil unrest following the deaths of Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice. What fascinates me about Hynes and his manipulation of ‘cool’ is that he portrays a blackness that is profound in its complexity.

It is complex and assured, because it does not rely on definitions and conditions being forced upon it. It creates and assembles itself. Black cultural production is centred on this particular ability to bring seemingly disparate parts and ideas together. Hynes creates his own world by amassing bits of the world he has left behind. He fits neatly into the writer Kodwo Oshun’s musical school of thought, in which

he critiques a journalism that “still insists on a solid state known as ‘blackness’.” He wishes to “dissolve this solidarity with a corpse into a fluidity maintained and exacerbated by sound machines.” To spurn cool, as traditionally defined and wielded, is to take up fluidity. Oshun identifies other stifling effects of cool, when he observes how since “the ’80s, the mainstream British music press has turned to black music only as a rest and refuge from the rigorous complexities of white guitar rock.” Cool is so often constructed linguistically and culturally as an exotic, black island suitable for a short trip, but not for living. What Emeke, Hynes, Jones, Oshun and Julien reveal is the true beauty of the island—an island that stands markedly apart from its construction by a white imagination.

Blackness involves experiencing disjunctions and misalignments as you relate to and with the world.

Coolness does much to perpetuate this friction, while it threads itself through black existence, knitting it together. So much of our language, our unique systems of communication are usurped and misinterpreted. ‘Coolness’ inheres itself in black art and culture. Yet it seems caught between oppression and liberation, trapped in a cultural nowhere land. Cool is emblematic of the indecisiveness of structural racism; it animates the ways in which black people both fit and do not fit.

But what I would like is to conceive and experience the word on its own terms. Not by neutralizing it, but by revelling in it, separately from any value or meaning assigned by a difficult and cruel society.

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“I feel a slight irritation at the statue for how unrealistic it is, and at myself, for viewing a revival in nationalist spiritas healing unity, when in Europe I would have seen it as bigotry.”

THE HOLEY LAND

lebanese post-war loss and humour Zad El Bacha

W

hen I was little I asked my uncle what Swiss cheese was, and he said: “It’s like a Lebanese building, it has holes in it.”

Lebanese buildings have a lot of holes in them as a result of the civil war from the last century. Everyone middle-aged or older has lived through the war.

Everyone who is young has been aware of the war every day of their lives, of how Beirut was divided between Muslims and Christians and suddenly you couldn’t cross the street to visit your best friend, and how the Druze killed every Christian on their mountain, they say, with knives. The holes are not only in the buildings, but also in the stories. Everyone has their own idea about why the war started, and why it went on, and which of the million tiny factions had the bigger reason to be fighting. Wikipedia says it all started with a fishermen strike; my mother just says it was the Christians. Nobody seems to really know, but everybody talks about it. When I was very little, my mother would light up my birthday candles and say, “Look, they’re alight like buildings!” My father told me about the excited joy of his first moment of youthful freedom, the thrill of going downtown on his own, which was abruptly ended by the city burning and him running home. He does not speak of the bombing with fear or regret: it was part of his youthful experience, part of his thrilling realisation of being alive. There is a

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recurring joke on TV: a man lies in bed unable to sleep and confused as to why he cannot.

Then he remembers that he forgot to turn on his bombing sounds tape.

Now that the war is over, I go back to Lebanon for the holidays. We go to see the Martyrs’ Monument. It is in the Martyrs’ Square, which used to be a beautiful little piazza by the seaside, but now it’s surrounded by construction work and military camps. The monument itself stands in commemoration of the hanging of some Lebanese men who had spoken out against the Turkish rule of Ottoman General Jamal Pasha in 1916. The original conception of the statue would have had two women, one Muslim and one Christian, holding hands over a coffin. On the statue today, the dead martyrs’ religion is not made explicit, but history tells us they came from different faiths. In a country where I cover and uncover myself depending on the religion of the street I’m walking along, a country from which my parents had to flee to Turkey for their illegal inter-faith marriage, this monument holds a utopian, nostalgic appeal.

I lean on it, careful not to touch the chewing gum sticking on its surface. I feel a slight irritation at the statue for how unrealistic

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it is, and at myself, for viewing a revival in nationalist spirit as healing unity, when in Europe I would have seen it as bigotry. I think of the only times I have heard my family talk about Lebanese unity, and it was in a push to keep out Syrian refugees.

I look up the statue on the internet: TripAdvisor says that it’s quite mediocre, falling apart, but it’s very interesting to see the holes!

My cousins, aunts, and uncles take me to the National Museum, which is full of Roman columns and Egyptian tombs. They don’t seem to care about these objects, there is just one thing they’ve brought me to see: “Look at the things with the holes in them!”

I do, and it’s a lot of fun. Everyone laughs while reading the descriptions of how they survived. There is a nice Ionic column behind which a sniper hid, recovered from a street corner by a loving archeologist. It’s funny because it’s unexpected, and nobody says it, but we are all a bit solemn as we think about survival and destruction and how we are all here with the holes.

It’s interesting to see the holes. Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese artist, must have found it interesting, too; her statue, Witness, is a reconstruction of the Martyrs’ monument: two men stand upright, and a pained man lies under them. The statue is full of holes, this time not from bombings, but carved purposefully by the artist’s hand. It is white like a mimic of the Hellenic marbles. I look at it and I can’t decide if the holes break the abstract perfection of the statue, invading it with a reminder of violence and death, or if they become some sort of decoration, themselves sublimated in the white deathless marble.

I don’t know, and when I walk around Beirut, this question continues to bother me when I see a stunning white building with a sunlit garden poking out of its holes.

I walk inside and I realise that it is so beautiful, a tiny spot of green born out of abandonment in this dirty, noisy city. Then I look at the shelves and one of them still has a pot on it, and I remember this is not pretty, and the same reason why the building is full of holes and there is an abandoned pot is the reason the city is so terrible, and left with such poor infrastructure that I can’t take a bus, and my uncle keeps some guns in the car just in case. And I feel bad for finding it so beautiful.

I wonder how the British curators Jessica Morgan and Ann Coxon, who curated the Saloua Raouda Choucair exhibition at the Tate Modern, felt when they decided to include a painting full of holes and glass shards. The story of it is that Choucair, who lives in Beirut, was going to the theatre with her daughter, and her husband decided that he would rather not move from the sofa where he always sat at home.

He was in the toilet when a bomb fell on that very sofa. About the incident, Choucair said: “From then on, I’ve never allowed my husband to not go to the theatre.” Above that sofa hung the Two=One painting which is in the Tate exhibition. I do not know whether the curators intended to merely show the truth of the artist’s life or to use the violence as a quirky decoration. But Choucair’s comment has the same throwaway humour with which my family and the TV speak of the war. It is the consciousness that this is real life, and real life cannot be a constant tragedy. We cannot look

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at our histories and the holes in the buildings that surround us and feel nothing but sadness, so we make jokes and we build things.

I cut little circles in my notebook while my mother tells me about how they never had any glass in the windows in case they exploded and hurt them, so they replaced them with plastic bags instead. She speaks of how she liked the rustling of the plastic sheets on a summer night. I make the little holes in my notebook because they are both pretty and tragic, and my mother colours them in without saying a word.

I only know that the holes are there and so does everybody, and everybody is building something in them and around them, forging jokes and identities out of the signs of our collective trauma.

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PARTRIDGE Kat Dixon-Ward

He found you shotstartled under lines of sedge, wing off at the hinge, ribs out like cupboard drawers.

So coarse a life he could feel each palpitation, red against his thumbnails how the neckfeathers lift and fall— Yes, the kindest thing, it’s the kindest thing to do You, snapeyed and glaring, had wanted more of light That autumn, the fireworks were pangs of birds. He felt them twang the reeds.

Clouds of birds at every circle shock and throng and bleed.

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forgotten ballads of the biafran war

1967, the persecuted Igbo people, mainly settled in the south-east of the country, established the rediscovering nigerian rock music Republic of Biafra and declared independence from Nigeria. One Tobi Thomas million Biafran civilians starved due y mum fills our house with to a naval blockade on the Republic. music. My earliest memories By 1970, Biafra surrendered and the were singing along to Boney M and war ended. But the scars of the war Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Grace were still visible, and made their way Jones’ A One-Man Show poster stands into Nigeria’s own legacy of rock. tall and proud at the top of the Nigeria’s cultural influence across landing, her distinctive cheekbones the globe is vast: Peckham in South and broad shoulders protruding out London is referred to as ‘Little of the frame. My mother’s mother Lagos’; Yoruba, an official Nigerian filled her house with the sound of language, has vast influence on her mother tongue: Nigerian Jùjú Cuban Spanish and Brazilian such as Sunny Ade and The African Portuguese. Considering this, it Beats, and Ebenezer Obey, entangled seems strange for Nigerian rock to with my grandfather’s love for jazz, be half in shadow; for a very long blues, and ragtime. But it wasn’t time, relatively little has been known from my Nigerian family that I first about its legacy, or its artists. learnt of Nigerian rock music as a The residue of Nigerian rock had distinctive musical tradition. It was been reduced to a collection of only last summer, from a CD found compilation CDs, like the one I in my local Oxfam entitled ‘The first found. They act as a collective World Ends: Afro-Rock and Psychedelia diary, snapshotting the post-civil in 1970s Nigeria’. When presenting war trauma felt by the musicians it to my British-Nigerian mother during this period: the rock artists and Nigerian grandmother, they had who transitioned from surviving the absolutely no idea what I was talking civil war, to spearheading the ’70s about. rock movement amidst the backdrop 2017 marks forty years since the of a military government. Often outbreak of the Biafran War. In when we think back to ‘the ’60s’,

M

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our view is reduced to a monolith of peace symbols and flower crowns.

But in 1960s Nigeria, Woodstock and psychedelic mushrooms were substituted for three years of conflict.

At a panel on the ‘Politics of Sound Systems’, the founding member of Soul II Soul, Jazzie B, spoke about how their aim was to create a sound which paid homage to their Caribbean heritage but was also distinctly British. In the same way, Nigerian rock took and altered African-American influences of jazz funk and motown, constructing a distinct Nigerian sound which wasn’t devoid of indigenous influence.

These artists were storytellers, whose experience of wartime was expressed in the form of this countercultural movement. Unlike the West, where the use of psychedelic drugs in the ’70s corresponded with psychedelic music, Nigeria’s postwar dissociative trauma became the fuel with which the rock movement tore through the landscape.

Wrinkar Experience became one of the first Nigerian rock groups to have a major record hit with ‘Ballad of a Sad Young Woman’ in 1973. The single’s slightly wailing, dark and mysterious sound represented the turmoil of the war. The outpouring of the bands from eastern Nigeria is not by coincidence, as the conflict was intentionally situated in the east by the Nigerian government.

Amidst the gunfire, a network of rock bands appeared. The Hygrades demonstrated the best of underground sound systems and DIY culture. Their lead guitarist, Goddy Oki, not only built his own studio, but also the amplifiers and instruments. Question Mark’s single

‘Scram Out’, with lyrics such as “people tell me don’t do that / But I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do”, threw down the gauntlet in the face of traditional values of obedience and conformity perpetuated by the older generation. The Funkees, a national treasure of the former Republic of Biafra, played their first show the night the war ended.

The religious tensions between the Muslim north and Christian south translated through the actions of the young adults creating music. Ofo The Black Company’s lead singer, hailing from the south, was the son of a Christian pastor. Their successful single ‘Allah Wakbarr’ did not stem from a genuine interest in Islam, but was rather an act of rebellion.

But it wasn’t until speaking to Uchenna Ikonne—music historian, author, and producer—that the picture came into clear view. His research uncovered this genre when no one was looking; it helped to bring the forgotten tale into sunlight. “I suppose I was always aware of it when I was a child. I really came of age in the 1980s, by which [time] the rock scene was about a decade in the past. But echoes of it were still hanging around,” he tells me. Ikonne’s experience with this music shows its nuances across the Nigerian diaspora. By contrast, my mother—the same age as him but born and brought up in London— had no awareness of the genre. The songs of my grandparents, from the highlife movement of the ’60s, mirror the dreamy, tender era of the wave of the ‘African renaissance’, with Nigeria having gained their independence as a British colony in 1960. But by the ’70s, this nebulous dream of unity collapsed; the tone

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became hazy, confused, piercing.

The trajectory of The Waves was a replica for this: following the war, their tone became harsh and psychedelic, reflecting the distressful anguish of the conflict.

The combination of Aba, his hometown, and the heavy prominence of the rock scene in the area made East Nigeria a harbour for Ikonne’s research. Within the city, his work was coloured with the experiences of the many living old-timers of the period, as they had both vivid memories and photographic evidence.

Although maintaining that the likes of the Beatles and James Brown were some of the most influential figures during the movement, Ikonne tells me about how the civil war had some influence too. The war, and the social disruption caused by it, brought an end to the older, traditional highlife as the main musical idiom, and so opened up a space for rock to become mainstream. “Highlife had become driven by ethnic segregation, but rock was more democratic. It was for everybody.”

Ikonne confirms what my mother and grandmother’s lack of awareness of the g e n r e indicates:

the unremembered aftermath of the ’70s rock movement. “There is no rock legacy today. Most young Nigerians don’t know that Nigeria even had a booming rock scene to begin with.” In some ways, Fela Kuti’s popularity came about with rock’s demise. The pioneer of afrobeat, coupled with his avantgarde style and lyrics that unsilenced conversations of sexuality, sealed the fate of rock by the late 1970s—“His afrobeat overshadowed the rock revolution, starving it of exposure and attention”.

Although Nigerian rock of the ’70s is mainly a product of the past, some music acts are still performing. Twin sisters Taiwo and Kehinde, forming The Lijadu Sisters, are one of the only musical acts from the era still active today. When combined with the lack of women within the ’70s subculture, it’s even more significant, with Ikonne telling me that “it was generally considered to be an unseemly world for young girls to be in the midst of, so they were very few and far between.” At first listen to these artists, I had a thrilling sense of recognition. I can’t speak Yoruba— I’ve never even been to Nigeria—but a few tracks on an obscure CD can connect you to cultural ancestors you never knew existed. And when I played the CD to both my mother, and then my grandmother, they both agreed.

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CARDIFF BUS Brian O’Driscoll

Thanks Drive.

Cheers Butt.

Nice one mate.

An adult single please.

I mean, like, yah, I was saying to Delil… …

Imp’lite shite. Whoxactly do these-up Their own arses-pricks think they are.

I works evrydaay. I sees wha they gets Up to, On’ere.

Y salfe nesaf yw Sevenoaks Park …

Where’s the Millennium.

Yfed en gloi.

When I was here it was more… real, yah?

Shan’s one’s on the way. It’s a boy.

Your mum. …

Piss. Tha’s all tha’s outside, piss.

Not th’rlentless drillin of the north, Na. You don’t get wet through, jus damp.

Soggy.

Charm of the town.

Y salfe nesaf yw Atlantic Wharf …

Ta spa.

Thank you driver!

Hark goes th’lark of the Kairdiff Arms Park.

Honestly, such an undiscovered gem!

Shame about the pissheads though. …

Keep on movin on ini, yeh? Yeh? Only two more trips to Greyfriars.

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I saw the blood spill on St Marys And Mill, right on down to Chippy Lane.

Y safle nesaf yw Clarks Pies …

Ori bro, you okay?

Ta mate.

Arwh, which bus to Rover Way? When I was young it was Tiger Bay. Shirley Bassey. …

Jog on ‘butty’, you’re norin Swans now.

Grangetown ‘strangetown’ you little shits.

Roidhead tha’ keeps on giving it loud.

Scatter your teeth Every hit.

Y safle nesaf yw Cathedral Road …

The Castle of Bute. I saw in my youth.

Birds are bad. I am sad. Bard to bad.

Among the Sheephats and daffs I finds my own truth. …

Oh Drive sort tha nutter. …

Last Stop, Central. All out, all out …

Y safle nesaf... Safle diwethaf.

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CULTURE

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YORK HAVENS

Ryan Bradley

it comes. Sun! I must invite the sun to my picture. When I see the sun, I’ll wear a hat like my picture.

Only it’ll look more hatish, I hope.

I’d like a straw one, made to fit my head. But hats are hard to come by.

My head never fits them. Anyways, I draw the sun. I put it, smiling, in a page corner. When I look up, the sky is dark. My window’s black. I hear footsteps, Ely’s boots on the landing. He storms in, red-faced and angry-eyed, and tries to take my pencils. But I’m not finished, so I get angry too. I’m taller than him. So I push him down, and now I’m really crying. I try to take them back, but Ely gives up. His legs are limp. Blood is on his head. It trickles down, and now I hate the garden. I hate the flowers, I hate the trees, I hate the smiling sun. That fat circle beams out, its stupid face is ugly. I take my sharpest pencil, and scribble out the sun. I scribble out the trees, I scribble out the pretty flowers. I leave the little dog. I like its curly tail.

I’m fairly good at drawing. Ely says so. I drew myself on holiday. It’s hot in summer, so that’s why I’m wearing a hat. I hope it looks like a hat. Ely says so, but it could be better. I have high standards, I think. The hat is bad, but the rest is good. Still, it looks a lot like me. I drew it in front of a mirror. I had four candles, to see myself. It was night, but I took too long, so the candles were short.

Wax fell on the floor. This made Ely angry and he hit me. He said I was like a dog that kept pissing on the carpet. He got mad at me, but then he was nice again. In the morning, he gave me pencils—and more markers too! I started drawing in lightimes.

At sunsleep, my pencils are taken away. One time, I was doing my future garden. It has flowers, trees and a little dog. I was pleased, but also not pleased. I’d forgot, but then

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WRITING FOR THE FUTURE potential and possibility in young adult fiction Billie Esplen

“What the child divines in the book is what he may be capable of; childhood is the developing of an appetite for future possibility. We know more about the experiences we don’t have than the experiences we do have.”

I

n my last year of primary school, I decided that I was going to write a children’s book. I wanted to write it because I wanted to read it, and I felt that as a reader my sense of satisfaction with the book’s imaginative world and moral orientation would be safest in my own hands. This was not the first novel I had started to write, but it is the only one, so far, that I have finished. I became so attached to the idea and the characters that drafts and re-drafts followed me through my teenage years right up to the summer before I came to university.

Adam Phillips psychoanalyst

turns into a war between the angels who want to let human-angels like Ellen join them on the islands and those who don’t.

The novel has, almost completely unconsciously on my part, some pretty forceful moral messages in it.

As I read it back this holiday before sending it to a writer friend for tips about what to do next, all I could think about was the refugee crisis.

I was undoubtedly influenced as a child by books like Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy and even R.J. Anderson’s little known fairy tale Knife, about a fairy fighting to bring cultural exchange with humans back into her isolationist community.

Children’s books inevitably have some form of ‘baddy’. For this goodbad relationship to exist, more clearcut than it is in mature fiction, some hardcore morals have to come into play. I seem to have—unwittingly

It is difficult to describe the premise of the novel. I inevitably end up not bothering or spinning out a lengthy eulogy for every last detail of the plot, including my opinions on all of my own characters, and describing the way I wrote specific chapters. I’ll try to be more concise here. The protagonist, Ellen, who grew less stroppy as I became older (a real low point for her was me aged thirteen trying to seem worldly), is an orphan who grows wings, gets adopted by an angel, and is taken to live on an island in the sky. Life is simple up there; there are lots of nice people, some not so nice ones, some surprising revelations, and what

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a paranormal romance I should wait at least five years before trying to publish it: the industry had to get all that out of its system. and before t h e ‘European migrant crisis’ came to public attention in 2015— created a novel targeted at nine to twelve-yearold children which arguably promotes open-border policy.

This is something that delights me.

Reflecting on this, I decided that I wanted to find out how the Children’s and Young Adult publishing industry had responded to our recent, divisive, and potentially destructive political events. Had it? Our generation saw an obsession with what publishers and agents called ‘paranormal romance’: when a teenage girl or boy falls in love with someone who is not of the same species or cosmic origin as them. Star-crossed lovers meet sci-fi/fantasy. The powder keg that sparked this trend was, of course, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, the six-hundred-and-something page finale of which I read in six days aged eleven. In fact, it was the very same year that I started writing my own book. Sitting at the back of a ‘How To Get Published’ conference aged twelve with my friend from primary school, I took very seriously the advice that if I had written something which wasn’t

It has now been seven years. The YA section of my local bookshop consists simply of two tall shelves.

Twilight, obviously still a bestseller, is positioned cover-out. So is I Am Malala. So is Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls, which was made into a film last year. The others similarly presented are all quite recent. One is about two teenagers who decide to get married for the purpose of taking ownership of some property and set off on a road trip across the UK. Of course, they fall in love in a decidedly un-paranormal way during the process. One deals with a hopeless young male romantic who is surprised to develop feelings for a girl who “dresses in oversized men’s clothing” (a direct quote from the blurb). Another is an adventure story in the vein of James Bond set in Europe during the rise to power of the Nazi Regime. The hero is dodging assassination attempts and finding out how his past is entangled with the surrounding political machinations.

The most eye-catching of the promoted YA books was The Wall, by a writer called William Sutcliffe. It has been printed with two different covers: one for the YA market and one for adults. This is a fairly unprecedented move.

Highly acclaimed writers such as Mal Peet, who wrote Tamar and Life: An Exploded Diagram, have

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been trapped into the YA industry by their decision to publish with predominantly children’s publishers like Bloomsbury. One of the mantras on getting published is ‘knowing your audience’: and this does not usually involve crossing age demographics. Guardian-reviewed, The Wall implicitly tackles the IsraelPalestine conflict through the eyes of a boy who crosses over from one into the other in search of his lost ball. This lack of specificity plays on what is seen as the current grey area between dystopia and reality: a cultural phenomenon which can be seen in the use of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, incidentally also displayed in the YA section, to criticise Trump’s decisions on women’s health.

The display table of new children’s fiction for those aged nine to twelve opposite the YA shelves is dominated by historical and chronologically non-specific almost-fantasy fiction.

One is about a girl who flees Krakow on the outbreak of WWII and travels across Poland with someone called ‘the sparrow man’. The browser gets a sense, as with the YA, that people are keen on the younger generation learning from the past.

There is a mental-health-consciouslooking book that explores the romance between an optimist and a pessimist, both twelve years old, who go to the same therapy group.

Amnesty International has produced a collaborative book of short stories and poems about freedom. And, most interestingly of all, feminist dystopia à la Atwood has apparently hit this age-group too. Naondel by Maria

Turtschaninoff is a story about a world run entirely by men. Women exist as slaves, servants or wives, but they are discovering psycho-kinetic powers. The blurb reads: In their golden prison, the women wait.

They plan. They write down their stories. They dream of a refuge, a safe place where girls can be free.

And, finally, when the moon glows red, they will have their revenge.

The intended audience of this novel is children under twelve. If anything could be accused of desiring to ‘influence’ its readers, it would be this. And it’s brilliant.

The question that remains is whether the use of young people’s literature to promote cultural and political ideals is problematic. Many of us spend our youths consciously and subconsciously modelling ourselves on our favourite characters. How would Lyra handle this situation? Wow, Edward loved Bella even though she was ordinary! As psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says in his recent book Missing Out, children’s literature is all about possibility and capacity. Adults, he argues, like to see themselves reflected in the books and stories they enjoy—the aspects of their own lives that

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they have succeeded in and the observations they have made about the world. Yes, I see a lot of myself in Dorothea, but of course I would never make the mistake of marrying Mr. Casaubon. I’m just as cynical yet perceptive as Eleanor Catton on a good day! Young people, on the contrary, see all the things that they are not and have not done. They see this, as with much of the world, as part of a universe of things which are not yet theirs.

All novels ask questions through representation of experiences.

The fact that children’s beliefs and ideologies are less solidified and thus their impressionability greater, obviously makes overt textual messages more problematic. It is also highly problematic for me to write that, as the literary industry is, as a rule, very liberal, these messages tend to be ‘the right ones’.

Because there are no right ones.

Adult fiction may be able to deal with more complex political and cultural issues without reaching a firm conclusion. However, because youth fiction presents a simplified, though not necessarily less impactful or pertinent, version of morals and decisions, it enables the authors to

put forward simple messages about incontrovertible truths (e.g. human rights) without bringing themselves into question.

It is also natural that, when writing a children’s book, you thread it through with helpful or illuminating observations about the world which you can make from a position of superior age. Children read, just as adults do, for answers. Hence the obsession with romance even in fiction targeted at pre-pubescent children. The mystery of love and its relationship with sex is one which cannot be prettily or easily simplified.

But it can be dealt with.

My thirteen-year-old self, as I sat down to write my novel, put in a few out of place innuendos and lots of stroppy teenage angst. This was my way of self-presenting, writing into the YA genre before I had got there, and presenting myself as more experienced than I actually was. That is, writing myself into my future possibility. By the time I was seventeen or eighteen, I was desperate to speak back to this same thirteen-year-old and tell her that she didn’t need to do any of this. So, that is where the book sits now. It started out as the book I wanted to read, and ended as the book I wish I had been able to. Which is not a bad place for young literature to come from.

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tea for tea in vietnam

taking time

uach

Georgina Q

solo and careful preparation of Gong Fu Cha. I am about nine years old; visits to my grandfather and grandmother’s compact flat in Birmingham are always a delight, and yet, I’m always a little on edge.

There are eight sisters and one brother on my mother’s side of the family. They are all dispersed across the world, but even when we’re all together in my grandfather’s flat, I never know quite where to place myself in our little crowd. One of my aunts (my dì thu ba—‘third aunt’) is back from the market, arms full of guava and bánh bèo (steamed rice cakes). The kitchen is a hub of noise and delicious smells. My brother and cousins are chasing the cat. I hunt for a nice little corner of peace to perch and daydream; to avoid the probing gaze of my aunts and their innumerable questions (“How’s school?” “When are you getting your ears pierced?” “Do you like these jade earrings?” “How about this colour?”) My grandfather is like me; we’re both longing for a space to think and rest our ears. In the sanctuary of the living room, my grandfather briefly flicks through the newspaper. In front of him, a big bamboo tea tray is laid out, with a white bowl of tea leaves and a set of shallow tea cups. They look like thimbles. The sunlight filters through the windows, bathing my grandmother’s Money trees and delicate bone china figurines in a gentle pink glow. My grandmother has a fascination with the royal family, and on the back of the living room door, there is a calendar with

There’s nothing quite like a good cuppa in the morning. Except an afternoon cuppa, or a midnight cuppa, or a mid-breakdown, crisisaverting cuppa. In fact, it is really just the activity of tea-drinking that’s unparalleled. Across almost 2,000 years of known history, the ways of preparing and drinking tea have undergone significant changes. In 1906, writer Kakuzo Okakura published The Book of Tea, a treatise exploring the philosophy of Teaism. Teaism, as a blend of Zen Buddhism and Taoism, used the ancient tea ceremony to foster mental discipline and a kinship with nature that enabled enlightenment.

Today, a caffeinated brew asserts its special slot in morning routines all over the world. Yet the reverent attention once paid towards this “liquid amber”, in Okakura’s words, has largely been lost in the Western world. We have been estranged from the practice of tea-drinking at a sacred level. At home, we tend to throw a tea bag into a mug, add hot water, and, in a few minutes, enjoy our steaming brew.

This certainly makes for a contrasting state of affairs to Okakura’s characterisation of teadrinking as the “worship of purity and refinement”, where the tea ceremony produces “the utmost beatitude of the mundane”.

One of the earliest memories I have of this amber-coloured phenomenon is of my Vietnamese grandfather’s

35

glossy shots of the Queen and her corgis. I sit on the floor by the armchair and silently watch my a-gong (grandfather) drizzle hot water over oolong leaves in the tiny teapot.

I’m transfixed by the almost frustrating slowness of the teamaking ordeal. After two minutes pass, the water is poured into the serving pot. My grandfather always exudes calmness in his movements, but here his long fingers deftly carry out the infusion process with a particular solemnity. After brewing for a short while, he transfers the water from the ‘fragrance cup’ to the ‘drinking cup’. I watch the steam from the cup cloud his face and wonder what it smells like.

The aroma eventually reaches me, and with it, images of tea fields in staggered hills. In Adeline Yen Mah’s Watching the Tree, the Chinese author recalls her Aunt Baba telling her as a child that “tea sharpens the mind, soothes the stomach, and nourishes your qi ”. The tea gives him a glow as the hot infusion sends surges of spontaneous joy circling around his body. My grandfather’s concentration on the tea infusion, the temperature and colour of the water,

all reflect this belief of qi.

My thoughts about my late grandfather always wander back to these moments: the way he performed this wonderful, leisurely ritual of the infusing and pouring of hot tea; his ability to extract beauty from simple things, calmness from chaos, and the perfect depth of flavour from tea leaves, testifies to the remarkable power of this ritual.

My family continue this tea tradition even now, and the very pouring of tea is essential in showing respect when I am with my elderly relatives.

At Yum Cha (going for ‘dim sum’), if someone pours you a cup, tea etiquette requires you to lightly tap the table top a few times with your fingers to respectfully thank them. Although the art of tea-drinking may seem elusive and esoteric, the Western world might have something to learn from the traditions of Chinese tea culture. Just as Tai Qi invites us to slow down and focus our attention on the present moment, the tea-drinking ceremony encourages patience and an appreciation of the ordinary, translating the very essence of that wise saying: “enjoy life sip by sip, not gulp by gulp”.

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CANTEEN

Daniel Murphy

My fingers flick the plastic spoon I used to stir my third cup of tea, now cold. Two hours, I was told. But under these fluorescent bulbs days might have passed. I wouldn’t know.

It’s half past three by the clock on the far wall, but it hasn’t moved since I sat down.

I pour another sugar packet into my cup and watch each granule pierce the tea’s beige skin. A hundred crystal blades sink in but leave no scar, just a tremble on the surface that dies and returns the world to stillness. You need more than a coating of sugar to get through these two hours. Sweet things hurt flesh less than cold metal, which punctures and pulls your skin in a room far away from here.

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HOSPITAL MORNING Daniel Murphy

Cold fog falls and chokes white hospital walls in the early morning.

A thousand windows stare down at me and I can’t guess which grey pane hides your body. An ambulance passes, no lights, no sound. Its silence catches as my fingers close round the space where yours should be.

If I held stones instead of breath I’d throw them to smash each window open and climb through the shards. There aren’t enough pebbles.

Too many windows vanish upwards into the cloud.

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NIGHT SHIFT My reflection forms a spectre in the freshly-polished floor. He looks smaller than me, but I’m less sure of myself with him watching. Dim light creeps from the corridor and sits on the edge of each bed; past the still bodies machines’ eyes blink at me through half-darkness. It’s hard to think in the quiet. Sleeping people keep me awake as I wait for some noise to pierce the near-silence. A monotone bleep sits on the edge of my ears. When I close my eyes it sounds like the horn of an oncoming train. My eyes open.

There are no headlights. Just the sterile gloom of the night shift.

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Daniel Murphy

OXFORD ON FILM

polarised representations of our city in cinema

Tara Snelling “Pinter’s Oxford is a hotbed of privilege, breeding dark doings under the illusion of lackadaisical lawn-lounging in white” A lesser-known film centred on the evils of Oxonian life is Accident (1967), adapted by renowned playwright Harold Pinter from Nicholas Mosley’s novel. Oxford hangs back in the peripheries, defining the drama as Austrian student Anna (Jacqueline Sassard) dates fellow student William (Michael York), much to the irritation of two unhappily married Oxford professors. Pinter’s Oxford is a hotbed of privilege, breeding dark doings under the illusion of lackadaisical lawn-lounging in white. Oxford, here, is the enabler of deception. The pristine colleges mask the debauchery of its tutors, and while the scandalous sex all happens off college grounds, the thirst for power goes arm in arm with old school privilege. Knocking back whisky with a don during a tutorial is a little far from the weekly grillings familiar to undergraduates, as is a tense punting trip with William, his girlfriend and their tutor Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) in tow. Accident broke to a fairly unimpressed reception,

F

or students here, Oxford on screen is at once oddly familiar and totally unrecognisable. From Brideshead Revisited to Morse, it is a strange sensation to see the Bod in the skyline of a quasi-mystical twin of our everyday home, aggrandised and preened for the public eye. On the screen as in the media, Oxford repeatedly falls prey to caricature or cherry-picking. Newspapers elevate our university into an impossible ideal with unknowable admissions procedures, and then delight in unmasking its ‘dark side’.

Either by mystifying the best of its prestige or fetishizing the worst of its entitlement, films featuring Oxford play exactly the same game.

“It all looks very secretive, doesn’t it?” Vera’s mother offhandedly comments in Testament of Youth.

Whether idolised or demonised, Oxford is flattened into a onedimensional object of desire, and a ‘secretive’ mythos: a ‘Manic Pixie Dream Place’.

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and New York Times critic Bosley Crowthe dubbed it a “a sad little story of a wistful don” which was “neither strong drama nor stinging satire”.

While the film caves in to Oxford stereotypes and stuffy 1960s values, it is far from a misfired satire. Pinter and director Joseph Losey refuse to cast explicit judgement on either its characters or on Oxford. Although the university is underdeveloped and presented simplistically, neither the director or writer use parody to attack specific characteristics of the real institution.

While Oxford is framed as the site of degradation, it also finds itself as the final reward for the hardworking student. Cinematic history is lined with students stretching out hands to the dreaming spires, and the pipe dream of Oxford as the promised land drives the cast of The History Boys (2006). A play turned film, the story follows a batch of sixth-formers from a Thatcherite northern grammar school in the 1980s, streamed into an elite set of hopeful Oxbridgers. The film’s quotability stems from the way it mimics the presupposed notion of Oxford intellectual posturing and grand discussions. It gently prods and mocks the appetite for academic debate at any opportunity: in a jab which puts ‘Overheard in Oxford’ to shame, the school’s headmaster describes how there is “a vacancy in history”, to which tutor Irwin replies, with a wistful look, “That’s very true.” Of course, the headmaster clarifies, he meant a job. A sight-seeing trip and the interview stage soak up the city’s aesthetic, but Oxford here is the usual cardboard cutout representing dreams,

shy of anything more meaningful.

Witty characters feel like vehicles for ideas, and plot is an afterthought sandwiched between profound philosophies. The History Boys is a witty ‘think-piece’, and Oxford functions shallowly as the symbol of attainment.

An Education (2009), much like The History Boys, is a coming of age drama which presents Oxford as the happy ending. Sixth-form student Jenny (Carey Mulligan) works rigorously to get in, before the distraction of attention from an older man consumes her dreams and books are swapped for fine dining and shady practices. It is frustrating to see a trend where Oxford is an empty narrative device plucked to be a solution and salvation, rather than explored as a nuanced, real thing. One of the most poignant moments of An Education is Jenny’s confrontation with her head teacher about exactly why she should continue with the grind through academics. Her headmistress says, “Nobody does anything worth doing without a degree,” to which Jenny replies, “Nobody does anything worth doing with a degree. No woman anyway.”

Besides identifying 1960s sexism, her initial comment also vocalises the deeper anxiety of all

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adrift humanities undergraduates.

She reads between the lines of her teacher’s encouragement of education: “What you’re telling me is to be bored, and then bored, and finally bored again, but this time for the rest of my life?” This is the first film in which the veneer is scraped back, if only for a moment, if only in one monologue, and Oxford is seen as more than just an answer.

In An Education, Oxford is not the right choice like it is in The History Boys, but ultimately it becomes the only option. The film circles back to it without a cursory thought, and Jenny’s doubts are presented as a blip in the road rather than a moment of insight. At least her future is wide open—on Jenny’s career opportunities, her headmistress comments, in a way familiar to many English students, “It doesn’t have to be teaching. There’s always the Civil Service.”

The most recent rendering of Oxford in film, The Riot Club (2014), is another adapted play. Like Accident, it presents Oxford as exclusively evil incarnate, and follows the tale of the uncouth youth of a raucous secret society. Reminiscent of famous elite clubs, such as the notorious Bullingdon Club, writer Laura Wade and director Lone Scherfig come close to pinpointing problems with Oxford’s embedded privilege, but this characterisation makes it hard to take as serious criticism. Showcasing rooms far too beautiful for fresher accommodation, exaggerated tension in tutorial discussions, and a glimpse into the rumoured goings-on of a tiny fraction of the student population, it is clearly not a biopic of the average undergrad. The trashing of a room in a local pub is, however, just a breath

away from rowdier crew dates and student nights out, and the derision of staff and underlying sexism is a little too familiar. Careening in a car across Broad Street might not be technically possible, but the image is truthful to student cocksureness and inconsideration in the name of a good time. The Riot Club blows up ridiculousness to show the insidious, destructive fusing of the historic old boys’ club with millennial lad culture, but it is far from a standard Oxford experience.

There has been little effort to progress towards unidealistic depiction of Oxford. Films oscillate between an image of our university as scum of the earth to unofficial advertisements. Perhaps there is even a sense of déjà vu in the struggle to celebrate but not over-romanticise life in the ‘bubble’, as we try to take pride in our university without falling into the trappings of overglamorising. Behind our own lenses in a shareable age, we too swing unthinkingly between solidifying the myth with our Instagram accounts, while attempting to peel back façades by sharing the Tab articles crammed with statistics about mental health.

We, like filmmakers and the media, want the best of both worlds: to romanticise, and then to strip away.

Art does not owe honesty, but films feel most satisfying when birthed from honest places. In a generation that cries out for the truth behind the expectation of university, and in a time where that demand is slowly being met by shows about university such as Fresh Meat, there is room for filmmakers to consider new ways to honestly depict our university.

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SUN

Alexander Bridge

Seen standing at the door, keying the lock, turning for the sake of the air to see a fat red moon of a sun sitting centimetres above the edge of my eyeline All of it was through the trees, catching the fog on home street, making the edges of the branches blur and thicket the same air that caught the light in the morning and frayed the outlines of the ropes around the snowdrops bright white and hiding, now honest and cool in the blink of a day So I took out my phone while some guys were in a car, and one of them opened the door and stepped out Knowing the nature of wide-angles I made the landscape portrait, but it was too late “What are you doing?”

They both stepped out and glared, and I calculated my own trap “Why are you taking of a photo of me?”

Guilty for the raised phone, trapped by the railings, the door locked— they need only walk up the pavement and past the conflicting bins to catch me where I stand Moving now— I raised my hand in a weird and true stutter, and they were about to kill me on the steps before I told them to turn and see the big sun Staring directly at the sun The unwatchable colour of red orange and sun yellow of the sun in their eyes and mine, the car door swinging All three of us turned to face the edge, leaning a little, and struck Suspended like particles in warm water near the shore, there was no possible way for them to argue with me anymore and I didn’t notice them leave God forgive me for all of my sins beneath the For-Sale signs, that, in the photo I took, steal the view

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THANKS, IT’S MY MUM’S

forging identity from hand-me-downs Jaleh Brazell “I miss you.” “What’s wrong?” “She used to be my friend.”

This is my mum before she was a mum, wearing outlandish prints and flying to places I’ve never visited— literally jet-setting, still in the era of the Concorde. Yet the dress extends a strand of continuity between our two lives that would not otherwise exist; a strange, invisible umbilical cord made of thread.

There are certain phrases that carry more significance than their constituent parts. “Thanks, it’s my mum’s” belongs to this category; it demands context, a backstory. For five monosyllables, uttered every time you receive a compliment while wearing your mum’s work shirts from the 1990s, they are unexpectedly heavy with potential.

With this in mind, there is an almost theatrical element to wearing clothes from a different generation; it makes you question the effect of ‘dressing up’ as someone else, especially when that person makes up half your genes. Other people’s clothes are easy to come by, and charity shopping is often spoken of in the antiquated, romantic terms of adventure: you embark upon a quest to find a certain dress or go hunting through racks of vintage skirts. The whole process holds fast to the rule that the harder you have to work for something, the more value is attached to it—even if it is only an old cashmere jumper halfdevoured by moths. The cliché is that second-hand clothes have more of a story to tell, and possess that elusive ‘character’ which is bleached and made monotonous by high street branding. But the idea that clothes deserve a narrative, both as objects and through the way in which you acquire them, is given a personal

There is a photo of my mum in New York in 1984, wearing a Monsoon shirt dress and smirking at the camera. I can describe the smirk perfectly because she still has the same awful camera smile, but I can also describe the dress in equal detail because I now own it. I was a long way off being born at the time of the picture, and despite her signature squinty grin, she looks like a different person.

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edge when you wear the clothes of someone you know. By taking on elements of their appearance and identity, and choosing to project what they too projected into the world, you are building that person into your own image. The visible comes to stand for the invisible; clothes come to represent memory.

They tell the story of how you have been shaped by those who have come before you.

By wearing my mum’s clothes, I am making myself look more like her, while also highlighting the differences between us: it hung slightly shorter on her, but the neckline was higher, and the sleeves are looser now than they were then. But if I were to recreate the picture, our posture and piss-taking expression would probably be the same. The whole act creates a strange balance between continuation and displacement.

So, just as the same garment on a different body forges a link with the past, it also makes you stand out in the present. To put it simply, no one else in twenty-first-century Oxford is going to be wearing a brightly coloured Monsoon dress from the 1980s, and that in itself makes my connection with the woman in the picture a little bit stronger.

The act of wearing is thus as important as the item of clothing itself, and the peculiarity of this only stands out when compared to other traditions. It is generally accepted, for example, that inherited jewellery belongs in the realm of the sacred, and that the rings and necklaces of your relatives somehow form a metal-coated symbol of your family identity. The attitude to clothes is very

different.

They are things you wear until they wear out, easily severed from any physical or emotional significance. Pieces of jewellery happen to have an owner, but are ultimately artworks in their own right. Clothes, on the other hand, are intimately concerned with the person who wears them—they mould around your body shape, are mended and adjusted by your hand, and carry the stains and smudges of a life lived within them, well-worn with the mishaps of the past. Unlike jewellery, clothes cannot be isolated from the body that fills them.

This holds especially true, I have found, concerning the clothes of the dead. There is no doubt that my grandma (whose English, and general

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education, wasn’t great) articulated herself most fully through what she w o r e .

She was barely 5’ 2”, but you can gain a lot of stature from well made moccasins and elegant twopiece suits. To my mind, she had perfected the non-verbal form of self-expression that comes from refined taste and intelligent interest, but a shortage of ways to express them. As such, she was always immaculately turned out: matching Gucci shoes and bag, cashmere cardigans, and perfectly coiffed snow-white hair in a style not unlike that of Karl Lagerfeld. Now, months after the funeral, it is not her ring that makes me feel closest to her. It lacks a human tangibility— she was anything but cold, hard, and solid. Instead, it is the clothes that have outlived her, that show her truest self. Her silk scarves still smell of cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5, and her pirate designer goods (‘Femdi’ jackets and ‘Dulce & Gabana’ handbags) reflect, as much as is possible, her cheekiness. This is the closest a piece of clothing can get to having a real personality, by reflecting the irreverent sense of humour found in its previous owner.

way that is otherwise very difficult to do. You only know your parents from when they were parents, so their experiences before you can only be accessed in fragmentary snapshots— in photos or anecdotes. Clothes are the most tactile connection to these previous, otherwise unreachable times; photos record events, but clothes participate in them. Mum now cares little for fashion and dresses mostly in black, but her clothes from twenty years ago tell a very different story. When my grandfather died, my dad kept his father’s threadbare dressing gown and has worn it every day since. Giving a garment a new lease of life becomes particularly poignant when it comes to wearing the clothes of someone you love, or someone you miss, or both. Signet rings do not interest me, but the power of wearing your grandma’s sparkly shirt (with the shoulder-pads removed) on a night out should not be underestimated.

I went on a trip to Sicily last year, and wore the Monsoon dress tucked into high-waisted shorts almost every day, posing in a nauseatingly cameraconscious fashion on various ruins and dilapidated temples. I would not be surprised if, years from now, my daughter finds those pictures and cringes. But after she does, I hope she’ll go rooting through my middle-aged wardrobe, hunting for that 1980s heirloom.

Here, the idea of taking on a sartorial mantle fully comes into its own. Wearing other people’s old clothes is a way of connecting yourself to who they used to be in a

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PHENOMENA

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WATCHING FOOD the dangers of food porn Anora Sandhu

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hen the Food Network made its debut in 1993, it was met with a tepid response. The New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ column was unconvinced by the premise of a channel wholly dedicated to food, asking doubtfully, “has there ever been anything to eat worth watching?” But what began as a simmer of interest in the Food Network progressed into a rolling boil of public approval, as the channel patented its now familiar blend of cooking and entertainment.

A cast of celebrity chefs, food stylists and cinematographers elevated the content of the Food Network into spectacle, refuting The New Yorker by showing it food that was indeed worth watching. Even with the how-to shows, it was about the theatre; chefs like Emeril Lagasse showcased an effortless dance with their ingredients, from chopping board to plate, under the guise of the culinary demonstration. Voyeurism became the means of consumption, as viewers dined uninhibited on tantalising visuals, akin to the Manolos lusted over by 1990s girl Carrie Bradshaw in the glossy pages of the Vogue that she often bought instead of dinner, claiming that it

“fed [her] more”. By the turn of the century, satiety and consumerism were effectively conflated in the figure of the diner voyeur, and today, the Food Network’s legacy can be seen in the extensive menu of ‘TV dinners’ available on the smallscreen. Prepared in the comfort of our own homes, these meals are designed to visually sate, giving fresh meaning to the platitude ‘you eat with your eyes’.

As with everything, the Internet found a faster way to gratify desires, through the phenomenon of ‘food porn’. Websites like foodporndaily. com sprung up to glut users with highly stylised images of food, advertising a visual diet as necessary as our daily bread. Foodporndaily. com allows viewers to skim through these photographs, in a process best described by the site’s slogan: “click. drool. repeat.” This culinary simulacrum allows users to ‘drool’ over sumptuous desserts and salads alike, privileging having their cake over eating it. Text is incorporated into the photos, and the dishes drip in adjectives as glib as their buttery sheen. This new generation of food porn is a concentrated version of the

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breakthrough that food television made in the early 1990s. The celebrity chef has been effaced, and high speed videos make do with the bare essentials: a pair of hands still pandering to the excuse of the howto format, and, on occasion, the image of an open mouth. Both the buildup and the climax are collapsed; the entire show is reduced to the simple magic trick of the ‘here’s one I prepared earlier’.

While food porn websites specialise in this kind of imagery, a perusal of our Facebook newsfeeds is enough to put us in contact with the food porn that gets viewers liking, tagging and following. The newsfeed provides a fitting metaphor for our vicarious gustation—the idea of ‘image consumption’ is literalised in this space, which is as perversely efficient as the parodic feeding-automaton in Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times. In this virtual laboratory, food also takes on monstrous configurations. On websites like fdprn.com, as well as on Facebook, waffles and bacon breed with pizza and sushi; tacos and lasagne are yoked together in little acts of culinary violence, as food loses any sense of sensible judgment. Mentally, however, pleasure is doubled by the collaboration of popular favourites. Memories of disparate food experiences are emulsified, seasoned with the intrigue generated by the scandalous association of foods our rational brain tells us are best left apart. The attractiveness of these avalanches of cheese and chocolate is, at first glance, a striking counterpoint to the clean eating movement. But worshippers of unattainably healthy diets have found their own cult—a niche in the

food porn phenomenon dedicated to fetishizing kale, avocado, and the much-debated sweet potato toast.

And for those who don’t buy into the cheap trick of over-stimulation, food porn is quite simply an abomination.

The aversion is as easy to understand as the appeal: no one is able to take the middle ground on the subject of excess.

In South Korea, the attention has shifted from the performance of the food to the performance of the eater.

Mukbang (literally, ‘eating broadcast’) stars play on the success of food porn, ordering masses of takeout to consume in front of an audience of millions. Staring at someone while they eat is perhaps one of the most impolite things one can do; it can indicate envy, disgust and annoyance, probing uncomfortably into the diner’s corporeality. The virtual landscape of Mukbang liberates its users from social etiquette; they are free to watch their favourite BJs (an unfortunate acronym for ‘broadcast junkies’) slurp, burp and grunt with enjoyment, as they make their way through a meal for ten. Recreating the texture of the meal through sound and visuals, Mukbang BJs cater to a community of vicarious gluttons. For some, it is a distraction from the awkwardness of eating alone. Other viewers are attracted to the way Mukbang outsources the physicality of eating, indulging their desires by watching someone gorge themselves to the point of overfullness. The eaters, however, tend to be slim, appealing to extreme dieters by projecting a fantasy of zero weight gain. Thus, the trend’s toxic underbelly reconciles excessive eating with a culture of body shaming, and disturbingly, it

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serves as entertainment. Like the performances of French entertainer ‘Monsieur Mange Tout’, nicknamed for his consumption of indigestible objects (including eighteen bicycles, fifteen televisions, two beds, six chandeliers and a coffin), Mukbang celebrities captivate their audiences with the acrobatics of a resilient and bottomless digestive tract.

The tinier the eater, the more remarkable the gastric contortion. Viewers of Mukbang p a r t i c u l a r ly delight in seeing

small, female broadcasters eat so much; it creates a kind of paradox. The prevalence of ‘feeder porn’ is indicative of how much men like to see a woman eat, commingling the bodily desires of eating and sex to the point of interchangeability. But, while feeders gorge their women until they are immobilised by obesity, statuary and almost child-like in their dependence, female Mukbang BJs satisfy an entirely different sexual norm. Their public image is one of delicacy, but in private, hidden desires are given free reign.

Mukbang straddles this private/ public dichotomy through the privileged access that the webcam gives men to women in the comfort of their own homes, similar to the gaze in ‘camming’ pornography.

Outside of this domestic sphere,

however, women are berated for any indication of an appetite. The Facebook group ‘Women Who Eat on Tubes’ collects photographs of unsuspecting women in mid-bite, policing their bodies and making a spectacle of their basic rights.

The sexualisation of food porn is not localised to Mukbang, as the allusion to porn suggests. Food television is no stranger to sexualising food, and its frequent recourse to innuendo is a means of appealing to this metaphor of desire. The association between the erotic and the gustatory is cemented by suggestions of transgression and excess; televised food is often ‘devilish’ or ‘naughty’—like Nigella’s famous ‘Slut’s Spaghetti’—as chefs tantalise viewers by cheekily shunning conservative sexual (and culinary) mores. The term ‘food pornography’ itself was coined by feminist critic Ros Coward in the mid-1980s, as an “act

of se r vi tu d e ”: “the kinds of picture used always repress the process of production of a meal.

They are always beautifully lit, often touched up.” In Coward’s estimation, food porn acts as a symbolic stand-in for the effortlessly servile female object in the hungry male gaze, thus imposing the same unattainable standard on food as the glamour magazine does to women.

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Food advertising, like the infamous Cadbury Flake adverts of the late 1970s, crystallised this female food trope. Skimpily clad women suggestively nibble at the chocolate while the camera zeroes in on their mouths, bare legs and hands, making the implicit connection between the images of women and the images of food. As with Mukbang, the female appetite is reduced in this perverse food chain to the object of male desire, as Cadbury’s advertising hinges on a well-worn motto: ‘sex sells’.

Watching food, on whatever platform we choose, ultimately allows us to satisfy a paradox; we divorce ourselves from the carnality of eating, while lustfully partaking in it too. But where does it all end? The historical progression of food as entertainment, a prospect The New Yorker didn’t think possible, doesn’t show signs of reaching satiety any time soon. As visual consumption tends towards addiction, we should be forced to question what our excesses say about our culture’s outlook on gratification—and thus, what food porn might have to say about our relationship to sex, bodies, and femininity. But food porn isn’t so much an epidemic as it is a symptom, and while this industry thrives, who is really prepared to ration out pleasure?

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KILLING A PIG Harri Adams Well, there’s no right way to kill anything, no right way to die without knowing your executioner, unless it’s in sleep, or you’re with family and it’s just time. The pigs have reached twenty weeks and the farmer’s like a dad to them, God over his flock. They were fed by his hands.

The procession stops as one takes a piss.

It doesn’t know any better, its eyes on the ground-world of scent at the end of its snout, its little corridor of sight where in another life, if it wasn’t for the prick due for the soft skin at the back of its neck any moment now, it might’ve lived for truffle sniffing.

But the farmer hurries them to their hearse, and with an odd, quiet grace, the pigs proceed to their appointments with a lightning strike, to be stripped for parts and reborn.

I’m told that they’re made unconscious before they’re killed.

It occurs to me that we all eat each other’s litter.

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MAKING NOISE the history of noise music Felix Pope

Noise music is difficult to explain with words. This is perhaps because, to begin with, noise ‘music’ is not quite music at all. It rejects melody, structure, harmony, and frequently almost anything else

that might motivate one to listen to it. In person I often find myself resorting to imitating the sound with my mouth in an attempt to explain, distorting my vocal cords as if beatboxing with a mouthful of sand. In print a string of disjointed adjectives (hissing, clanking, fizzing, buzzing, grinding, thrashing...) is as close as it is possible to get.

Of course, actually playing a noise track to the uninitiated will not achieve much either, other than (usually) confusion and (occasionally) disgust. No, to understand how the apparent dichotomy of ‘noise’ and ‘music’ can be united, and why

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so many people choose to listen to the outcome, we must first understand what is meant by ‘noise’.

For the most part noise is a human creation. For most of earth’s history brooks babbled and trees fell, but overwhelmingly the condition of the world was silence.

It was not truly until the industrial revolution and the unprecedented population shifts that accompanied it that real noise emerged. And alongside it came new forms of social organisation, forms that would entrap and mould how we viewed it.

Plate glass windows created cocoons of sonic isolation for the upper classes. Noise became confined to the street, the factory, the working class neighbourhood. Silence was golden because it was a luxury good.

Therefore, noise ought to be properly understood not as mere sound, but as sound that is imposed upon us. A guitar played as loudly as possible at a gig we have chosen to see is music.

The same guitar, playing the same sound at the same volume, but heard through the wall at 3am is noise.

And noise imposes because hearing —not sight—is the dominant human sense. We cannot close our ears as we do our eyes. Sound cannot be turned away from. We cannot be woken from sleep by what we see. In a 1965 experiment conducted by the US air force, after ninety seconds of sound at around 150 decibels (about the same as a jet take off at twentyfive metres), subjects found their chests heaving up and down without their control. So powerful is noise that its use has been weaponised by the American police. Search online, and you’ll find shaky video shot on

handheld camera phones of militarystyle armoured trucks advancing towards throngs of demonstrators, splitting the air with a tremendous high-pitched ringing, and driving all those before them away, hands clasped over ears, faces contorted in shock. Where batons and tear gas fail, noise succeeds.

The first to really grasp the connection between noise and modernity were the Futurists.

Rebelling against all convention they rejected the past utterly, rushing headlong into an imagined future in which technology, violence, youth, and speed would sweep away the remnants of preindustrial society. In his ground breaking 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises, the composer Luigi Russolo argued that the modern ear had evolved beyond the “purity, limpidity and sweetness” of the classical tradition. We lived in cities, we heard the violent cacophony of industrial civilisation every day—why treat it as separate from music? Through the incorporation of “the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds,” he believed that he could expand the scope of music until it was allencompassing, until it incorporated every aspect of the modern world.

This was, of course, not exactly a popular view at the time. The devices he created to perform his new music were greeted with horror and violence at their 1917 premiere.

Members of the audience reportedly screamed “to the asylum” at Russolo,

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drowning out his noise with their own. As Debussy acerbically noted, “it’s a very practical way of recruiting an orchestra but can it really compete with that wonderful sound of a steel mill in full swing?” The answer given by the Italian concert-going public was a resounding no; few other performances were conducted, and none of Russolo’s machines survive today.

Modern reproductions, however, do exist. A row of neat brown boxes of varying size, each with a large black funnel protruding from the front, they make a deep and atonal roaring sound when a cog on the side is turned.

Listening to a recording of their performance in a New York gallery it’s clear that Debussy was correct— unpleasant they may be, but it is a weak imitation of a modern city.

It is not until 1952 that we see the next crucial step in the development of a noise music. In a small auditorium in Woodstock, New York, renowned experimental pianist David Tudor ascends to the stage. He sits before the piano, opens its lid and places his hands on his lap. For four minutes and thirty-three seconds he sits in silence, before closing the piano and walking away. In that brief moment the history of music is transformed.

The composer, John Cage, created a piece not of silence (as it is so often misinterpreted) but of pure noise. The creaking of chairs, the drumming of raindrops upon the roof, the footsteps of disgruntled attendees leaving the building. All at once these are brought in from the

natural world and carried, kicking and screaming, into music. He has conducted an act comparable only to that of Piero Manzoni, who in placing a plinth upside-down upon the ground made the entire planet a work of art, rendering the artist obsolete. Any dichotomy between noise and music has vanished; no longer is any sound taboo.

As with many of the most bizarre elements of the modern world, it was within Japanese culture that these ideas were really absorbed and developed. They took this understanding of noise as music, of all sound as permitted, to its utmost extreme, and it was from this that noise music truly emerged as a recognisable genre. The early pioneers of the 1970s and 80s rejected traditional instrumentation for broken instruments, industrial machinery, household objects, distortion pedals and feedback loops.

They traded cassette tapes of their latest experiments by post and played shows to tiny audiences in dark basements as a community of noise junkies developed. Gradually the basic principles emerged. Work at an insufferably high volume.

Play in too small a space. Leave the feedback unmastered. Constantly change the volume and texture of the sound so that even the most hardened listener is unable to adjust.

Above all continue to challenge your audience and eschew all convention.

Around this period one artist began to rise above all others, expelling such a vast and varied output that his work might be considered a genre in and of itself. This was Masami Akita or rather, Merzbow, as he is known on stage. A slight man with

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long black hair that falls below his shoulders, who preaches veganism and writes for bondage magazines in his spare time, he more than anyone else has defined the nature of noise music. By examining his works, it is possible to begin to grasp the essence of contemporary harsh noise.

Merzbow recently explained the process of creating and performing noise music for a New Yorker piece discussing his career. It is worth repeating his list of equipment in full, if only to understand the vast complexity involved in creating such organised chaos: “a handmade instrument that looked like a guitar; a table’s worth of gear; a piece of scrap metal mounted with springs; a contact mic and a power jack; something that looked like an empty tuna can; stomp boxes; fuzz, wah, and distortion guitar pedals; a ring modulator, an oscillator and a tone generator; an Apple laptop running granular sound synthesis software.”

As Merzbow says: “If Japanese noise is Zen, it is also rope bondage.” For bondage, when performed correctly and consensually, is not a process of domination and exploitation, but of willing subjugation. The subject allows themselves to be tied up, allows for discomfort, even pain, because to voluntarily accept pain in a ritualised setting is to overcome it.

And this brings us full circle to the question of why harsh noise is listened to by anyone, let alone by the middle class salary men Merzbow claims used to attend his performances. Harsh noise is a process by which we can take an imposition, and willingly accept it. In the same sense that we might read a dense Russian novel, or stare at a Jackson Pollock, it is through the struggle to understand and comprehend that enjoyment (or failing that, catharsis) is gained. The world is brought into music, and we are brought into the world.

It should not be taken trivially that the chief purveyor of such music is also deeply involved in the Japanese fetish porn industry.

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N19

Flo Berridge Is there any point in you and me touching each other fucked on red wine in your shitty north London flat dimensions apart plus five years but I’m bangin inside and its for your vinyl floor soft techno radio 4 and the way you say Brew

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TWO’S A CROWD

the rise of self-marriage Anora Sandhu

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ast year, Tracey Emin revealed that she had married a stone. The pair tied the knot in Emin’s garden in France, in homage to the location of the couple’s first encounter. The artist has openly gushed about her hunky, lichen-covered new spouse: “It’s beautiful, it’s Palaeolithic, it’s monumental, it’s dignified, it will never, ever let me down. It’s not going anywhere: it’s a metaphor for what I prefer to live with. I prefer to be single, doing everything I want to do and how I want to do it.” Emin’s life has continually informed her art, and her quirky wedding, staged in the public furore it created, became something of a performance piece. The strata of puns behind the ‘rock’ metaphor are playful, and employ the same literalism as a piece like ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With’. She studies her new life partner with as much unexpected candour as she studies her bedfellows, and her wedding can be read as part of a lifelong fixation with intimacy and its subversions. Over time, Emin has explored the many dimensions of female sexuality; from promiscuity in ‘Why I Never Became a Dancer’ to abortion in the series ‘Terribly Wrong’, she has continued to use the quarry of taboo as her inspiration. Her work is so often about love and sexual frankness, but in her celebration of self-love, as with her advocacy of celibacy in 2012, Emin breaks the final taboos of female self-ownership and clears a radical new space for her thematic matter. The stone is symbolic of the kind of permanence Emin has outside of the marriage—her career keeps her grounded, her self keeps her stable, and through this statement of singleness, Emin has dared to suggest that she can have a fulfilling, romantic life with no one else at the core of it.

Emin is not the first to flout convention by marrying an inanimate object. Tabloid headlines have longdocumented the objectophiliacs who organise symbolic weddings to profess their love for pillows, trees, walls and cars. But Emin’s wedding is distinctly different from these one-off, unconventional marriages. It is closer to the practice of sologamy—a

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playful portmanteau coined to describe the practice of marrying oneself— that trades finding your soul mate for finding yourself. Sologamy has become something of a trend recently, and since Linda Baker decided to marry herself in 1993, an ample handful of men and women have followed her down the aisle. The phenomenon appears to be a coping mechanism for the demise of marriage. In today’s Britain, one in three adults are unmarried and over fifty-one per cent are single, a five per cent increase from the last decade.

In Japan, a country with a declining birth rate, these statistics are even higher. Over sixty per cent of Japanese singletons are not even looking for love, and a strong aversion to dating and sex has led to the popularity of travel packages for solo weddings and honeymoons. The ONS analysis cites the “increased social acceptability of remaining single” as a reason for this shift, and singles around the world who are disillusioned by divorce and tired of Tinder, are opting for sologamy as a way of openly saying “I don’t” to the hunt for ‘the one’.

Sologamy, like Emin’s wedding, has a striking resonance for the contemporary woman. Although there are men who have married themselves, men seldom affix such huge importance to being a groom, and the word ‘bachelor’ is hardly as barbed and derogatory as ‘spinster’.

For women, being sologamous could partially be about reclaiming and rewriting this notion of spinsterhood positively, to undercut the persuasive tropes of female singleness pushed by mainstream film and television. A cast of bitter hags, uncompromising man-eaters, kooky loners, and jealous bridesmaids are familiar to any romantic comedy, and while the ONS’s assertion of the “increased social acceptability” of

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singleness might be true, sologamists retaliate against the nasty remnants of a culture obsessed with happy coupledom. For its proponents, the ideal of same-self marriage represents a celebration of the glory of flying solo, and as an expression of independence, it is a luxury newly afforded to women as a result of changing social mores.

Critics of sologamy are uneasy with the idea of women being so comfortable in their own singleness, associating the practice with the very same labels that sologamists try to shrug off. They have become a caricature of themselves; the TV comedy Glee had its sharptongued antagonist, Sue Sylvester, marry herself in the second season of the show. Glee neared a human treatment of self-marriage, having Sue get hitched following a heart attack at the end of the first season, as a gesture of commitment to a life that she had learned to value. But in her absurd Adidas tracksuit dress, zipped into her role as gym teacher, and performing as both brides and the officiant, Sue was portrayed as nothing short of a pathetic, comical narcissist, who had concluded that she was the only match for herself. Sologamy is entrenched in the same tired and stalemated debate around self-love and narcissism that feminism just cannot shake, and in 2017, self-marriage, like the selfie, is used as evidence for an increasingly self-absorbed culture. Commemorative photoshoots even fit into the same visual discourse as the selfie, and reading their vows into a mirror, sologamists often conjure transgressive figures like Lady Lilith, Milton’s Eve or Narcissus. But, like the Ovidian resonance of Emin’s stone, for sologamists, the mirror at a solo wedding seems to explore love in all its incarnations, rather than signposting sinful vanity. Vanity, a

concept that is highly charged in its relation to women, has also been an accusation levelled at Emin, whose art centres so heavily on her life and her emotional nakedness.

Hans Memling’s painting, Vanity, which depicts a woman enjoying her reflection, is a prototypical example of this disparaging stance against the female gaze, criticised famously

by John Berger: “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.” Berger’s critique of Memling goes beyond the Flemish Renaissance; for both Emin and sologamists, looking at themselves is not an act of vanity, but rather a form of self-reflection.

it is a statement as straightforwardly profound and symbolic as Emin’s.

The giddiness with which these women prepare for their big day, however, suggests otherwise. A romance with the wedding is being celebrated alongside a romance with the self, as sologamists strain to fit into a convention a couple of sizes too small for their values. Advocates of the sanctity of marriage shudder, but in grafting singlehood onto the institution of marriage, sologamists do more to preserve the ritual than they do to destroy it. And while the wedding industry rejoices at its ability to continue to sell a fantasy, even when an increasing number of people opt to stay single, selflove is somewhat cheapened by the thrill sologamists get from lavish spending.

In spite of all this, sologamy is undone by a glaring irony. For many women, the appeal of sologamy is that it satisfies their bridal fantasies as they buy into the antiquated notion that a woman’s wedding is the glamorous, defining moment of her life. The premise of the practice is thus problematised; the very industries that glorify matrimony are also involved in lampooning female singleness.

The incompatibility of this could easily be reconciled in the suggestion that sameself marriage is a political palimpsest for the definition of marriage, or that

Thus, while sologamy celebrates the right kind of values—those of self-examination and self-love— its premise is not as rock-solid as it purports to be. The ideology of sologamy is strong, but its methodology lags behind like the train of a wedding dress waiting to be tripped over. Using marriage as the means of protest creates a kind of paradox that undermines the values that sologamists are rightly asserting, as subversion is substituted for surrender. Indeed, sologamists are not the narcissistic, sad loners that they are repeatedly portrayed as; instead, the problem arises in their attempts to marry liberation with tradition, reinforcing the prominence of a practice they supposedly reject. At its heart, sologamy appears to be anxious; it is frantic about making a point, but seems ultimately to miss the point of a fulfilling singleness, grasping at something lost, or unfulfilled.

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SLEEPER’S CANYON

Fred Gelert

How many people have even seen a nightingale?

Are they a defunct Victorian invention?

Like penny-farthings wheeling out of the clouds— Tophatted gentry of fiction, a paper whisper fallen skyward?

Enough people write about them. Suppose they’re a bunch of liars.

Bloody liars.

Never seen a nightingale.

Only occasionally a rude smack of gulls, a squeezed needle of pigeons.

In dreams perhaps I know them, As shadows Clutched by veils of yellow smoke— and on the hinge of sleep’s heaving breath I have heard their ugly squeaking chokes.

Yet in dulcet daylight’s diagnosis Nightingales roll in elderflower friction, on the breath of country lanes in summer.

They are the summer dress, the caress on a downy breast of grass.

But this is all bloody fiction Surely.

No one knows life beyond the sterile crack of a city pigeons’ wings.

I’m telling you. no one.

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SHARING SPACES

social diversity in our local communities

Tj Jordan

This scene, whilst faintly surreal, was not exceptionally eventful. But it did mean something to me. Usually when we enter a newsagent’s, post office, supermarket or any other similar local amenity, we have a rather singular focus: I must post my letter before 5pm. I have to buy some milk for my morning coffee. It is not often, therefore, that we are aware of the other people that populate—that live in—our immediate surroundings.

Perhaps that is not surprising when we evaluate an individual ‘Moscato moment’. Why did she lug her pet into a newsagent’s on her hunt for an incredibly specific variety of [what I now know to be] sparkling wine? Depending on the level of curiosity that has developed in one’s personality, it may appear somewhere between mildly and not at all interesting to discuss the back story of the woman who inspired this piece.

I

’m standing in a queue at my local newsagent’s in Hackney, East London. The choice is a difficult one—Mars Bar or Snickers?

While I ponder, I become vaguely conscious of the conversation being held by the two young men with beards who have reached the till, one donning a retro baseball cap. They are discussing Brexit, and then, suddenly, alkyl nitrites: “We’re not getting poppers, I’m not eighteen!” During this protestation, a slightly older woman wearing a hijab strides purposefully through the door with a mewing grey cat in a box. She immediately asks for what sounds like a type of wine, and then leaves before waiting for a proper answer, mumbling to herself about how this shop never has whatever she was enquiring after.

The newsagent looks at me with an air of slight desperation and laments the fact that he might have been able to find the wine if he’d heard her. He waves his arms at his extended bottle collection as proof. “I think she said Moscato,” I suggest politely. After looking it up on my phone, the bespectacled man takes a photo of my screen, and we become acquaintances. The two of us agree that if he adds it to his selection she might start shopping there, and I leave with my Crunchie.

It would be slightly heartless, however, to declare that ‘everyday’ scenes have no fundamental value to the onlooker. Last week, I noticed a young girl of about three hide a bag of Tesco cookies in the adult magazine stand, causing her mother to embarrassedly fumble between a copy of Nuts and Zoo to retrieve them. Several elements of this enjoyable spectacle combined to induce a slight curl of my lips: the irony of the cookie’s likely role of being bought in order to keep the daughter quiet; the completely unintentional yet wildly inappropriate choice of hiding place; the contented, mischievous look

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on the girl’s face. The incident was a beautifully simple encapsulation of the sheer randomness—and simultaneous comedic ingenuity—of a child’s mind. There is little else to do in a queue other than observe, yet we so rarely do it with a worthwhile level of consciousness.

But in London, these timeless moments take on a significance that builds upon their romantic ordinariness. When we truly open our eyes in the supermarkets of our capital city, we find a cross-section of our local community that is becoming increasingly polarised outside of these shared community spaces.

This is a particularly noteworthy phenomenon in residential, mixedimmigrant areas such as Kilburn, Brixton, or my own home borough, Hackney. As that mother, who was black, began fishing between pages for her daughter’s cookies, three twentysomethings dressed to varying extents in vintage denim drifted by on my other side, discussing their plans for a dinner party they were hosting. By the time the biscuits were rescued, two old men in flat caps had wandered through the scene. One of them was describing a Victorian coin that he proudly held aloft between thumb and forefinger in a lively cockney accent. Within thirty seconds, several strata of my local community had unconsciously mingled with each other; a variety of ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, and ages. From canvas bags to Nike rucksacks, and high-vis jackets to suits, everyone was there.

It is almost impossible to find other spaces in which such a wide-ranging sample of society is on display. Pubs, as gentrification sweeps through the boroughs surrounding central

London, have become essentially discriminatory institutions.

Restaurants select specific economic tiers of society by the very nature of the price range on their menu.

Even our own university, though ostensibly not socio-economically selective, inevitably produces a lopsided community. Consequently, that minority of students from a less privileged background at highachieving universities often struggle to feel integrated. Of course, we push our trolley through a space inhabited by shoppers who may have bigger or smaller budgets than ourselves whenever we enter a supermarket; we are even socially differentiated by our choice between Aldi and Waitrose. But there will always be a more balanced array of social variables in Hackney Central’s Tesco or the Brixton Road post office than there is at Oxford University— everyone, however rich or poor, black or white, must occasionally do their family shopping or send a parcel.

As such, each individual may share that space with an equal level of confidence and ownership, regardless of their background.

The narrative snapshots of the everyday that usually pass us by thus take on a greater significance than my original story might have implied: they inform us of their participants’ social identity. These identities are at their most varied in London’s shared spaces, since the spaces facilitate everyday errands that transcend socio-economic differentiation. And yet the very normalness of each identity’s story is something that every character in this collage of ‘Moscato moments’ shares in; our shared spaces are at once a bastion of social diversity, and a reminder that we are ultimately all the same.

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500

the ISIS 500 words competition

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his Trinity term, we invited students from around the UK to write a piece of fiction in 500 words or under, inspired by a prompt carefully selected by our fiction and creative teams. The chosen prompt (see opposite page) is one Matisse’s six drawings for a 1935 limited edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, with text added by one of our fiction editors, Joshua Cathcart. As Joyce feared, the French artist created the artwork without reading the novel.

He sent six drawings of scenes from Homer’s Odyssey, evidently assuming that Joyce’s masterpiece was solely based on Odysseus (‘Ulysses’ being the latinisation of the ancient Greek hero’s name). This wonderful moment of confusion between two legends of 20th century culture inspired inventive and skilful submissions in the form of prose, poetry, essays, dialogue and more.

We hope you enjoy reading the winning entries.

The final list was chosen by our panel of esteemed judges:

Erica Wagner Former literary editor of the Times and Man Booker Prize judge “I really admired the energy and inventiveness of all the entries, and the way they crossed the boundaries between prose and poetry, pushing against the limitations of form. This makes judging a challenge, of course—but it’s a challenge of the best and most interesting kind.”

Jonathan Keates Multi award-winning writer and biographer, and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature “I think ‘Waterlilies’ has the best grasp of form and the truest professionalism—this person is a writer, with somewhere to go. ‘The Newest Testament’ is imaginative and shows real promise.”

Hilary Davies Multi award-winning poet, critic, and co-founder of Argo poetry magazine “There is something funky and strange about the dark furry thing in ‘Fiction Therapy for Dummies’. And it’s a clever link between the headache and the iconography of Polyphemus blinded.”

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1st: THE NEWEST TESTAMENT Emma Levin The problem arrived in a brown paper bag. Hardback, and bound in red leather, the title was embossed in gold. THE HOLY BIBLE. At present, it sits in room 461 of the Ministry for the Reconstruction of Literature—on a tall and elegant table, surrounded by tall and elegant chairs, filled with short and awkward men. The arbiters.

These men are amongst the most respected in the colony. They are the ones that remember the most, whose fathers had rocked them to sleep with tales of Alice’s Adventures in the Heart of Darkness and The Very Hungry Caterpillar Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. When the Central Bureau admitted that there should have been a library on board their ship—along with the seeds and ploughs, and other things necessary for building a new society—they were the ones who had pulled their socks up and picked up pens, reconstructing it all, fragment by recollected fragment. From Stephen Hawking’s biography A Brief History of Tim to the avant-garde poetry Instructions for the assembly of a BILLY bookcase, they were experts in 20th century literature. And yet, this book leaves them perplexed.

It claims to be a bible, but it does not resemble the bibles they know.

It’s missing the bit where Jesus and Aslan fight the decepticons.

There are only ten commandments. At no point is Jesus told that his princess is in another castle.

But lab reports don’t lie.

The leather is Terran cow, the paper is genuine tree, and the lack of radiation suggests that it’s early twenty-first-century. In other words, that it’s real.

The ramifications are terrifying. If (Gods forbid) their bible had strayed from the Terran standard, what else, culturally, might have drifted? Were caterpillar cakes truly made with caterpillar? Was cricket really a spectator sport? (Now that they actually thought about it, it seemed doubtful).

One of the men suggests putting the bible in a drawer and forgetting about it. Another suggests burial. A third suggests burning. A fourth (who wasn’t really listening) also suggests burning.

A vote is taken.

Every hand rises.

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2nd: WATER LILIES Anna Lewis

Henry has been waiting by Water Lilies for a very long time.

Every time he thinks the woman standing in front of it might be finished, she adopts a new pose and looks commandingly at her travelling companion. The man holds up his phone, tap tap tap, and she smiles.

The two have clearly mistaken the artwork for a monument.

Henry viciously imagines their day playing out as a series of backgrounds, Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur pinned innocently behind this woman, Monet just another frame for her head. He can’t get a good shot with them in the way.

He attempts to share an exasperated glance with the old woman to his left. She’s probably just as bored as he is, waiting here for Woman (and Water Lilies) to be completed.

They’re done. The two move on. Before anyone else can get in there, Henry strides forwards and points his camera head-on at the painting, click click click, and he smiles, and marches on to the next one. Soon he’s got all eight on his camera roll.

He flicks through them as he strolls down the steps to the rest of the collection. Not bad photos, not at all. * When the news of the space bombardment breaks, he’s at the airport, trying to find something good in the gift shop. Luckily, the complex algorithms of interplanetary humanitarian aid have determined Charles de Gaulle as a major evacuation centre.

Henry is among the few million to be teleported up to the peace ships before Earth is caught in the crossfire of a war it didn’t know about.

They scan and poke and prod him, poor bewildered man, and then he’s all alone.

A vast window runs along one side of the room. Outside, Earth hangs pendulously in space. As the ship pulls away the planet shivers and then bursts, like a flower, blossoming red and green and brown.

Click click click. There’s nothing else to do. * They want to reconstruct the masterpieces. There’s a call for

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photographs. There is talk of Caravaggios and Bruegels.

Henry duly digs out his camera. It’s in a box in the attic, dusty and forgotten, but nobody throws away the things they had with them when Earth was destroyed, even in all the excitement of Earth II. He hands the photos over and is thanked for his valuable contribution.

Months later he’s invited to the opening of the Earth Gallery.

He takes his husband. They drink champagne. It doesn’t taste quite the same as it used to—something to do with the grapes— but they’ve all got used to it now.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” His husband’s enraptured.

“I don’t know.” Henry scrutinises Water Lilies once more.

They’ve made a good effort, right down to the texture. “It’s just not like I remember.”

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=3rd: FICTION THERAPY FOR DUMMIES how to overcome ‘it all’ with simple characterisation Katty Cowles “So you’ve brought along something to share, yes?”

“Correct.”

“A serious piece?”

“I’ve been playing around with a few ideas.”

“But is it serious?”

“It’s a prose poem.”

“Never mind.”

“From the heart.”

“Lovely.”

“It’s called: If you had a headache you’d take pills for it!”

“Right. Good. I’m all ears.”

“Okay.”

“Deep breath.”

“Here it comes again. The thing that got my Mother has come back for me. The dark black furry thing that clings with its claws and braces with its blunt teeth; the thing that flies and folds and prances on the mantelpiece; the thing that hides behind the curtains and the television screen; the thing that won’t let me go or be, even when I squall and scream, and even after pills and caffeine, and even when I’m skinny with sadness or I’ve preened myself with fur and gold and those other boundaries—and even when I feel I’ve near as good had all the Life Sucked Out of Me. The heavy-handed furry thing comes back to squeeze and tease: “BUT OH YOU’RE SO LUCKY.” And what if I could tell it to Hush and go on guilt-free, twist a while in fickle thoughts and tight jeans, lie a little, get silly, without the black furry thing waiting up for me, sitting in the near-dark flicking through a magazine, counting up from one, two, three, until the key twists and it jumps up quick and keen

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to commence (with all the mirrors and the silence) the nightly routine?

The thing I know because I’ve seen; the sad shadow at six when she’s down on one knee with a dishcloth dabbing at a week-old stain on the settee. And there, the glass of G&T. And there, the untouched bowl of ice cream. And there, between the eyes and the forehead, the expression that reads, Leave Me! And then the arthritic knee and the hands cupping tummy, and then otherwise the feeling of being physically pain-free, and of course, Lucky.

And then there, next to her slippered feet, bored is the furry black thing bearing its blunt teeth in a rictus grin that twists towards me and threatens to open wide and sink in, clutch and cling forever with its Can’t and its Never, Never and the promise that Tomorrow Will be Better and The Pressure. It mounts the stairs and waits for me to sleep; it waits, and laughs some mornings when it hears the words It’s All On Me, and I Can Change if I JUST Believe! The oldest trick… The wagging fingers point at me when really they should point at it; the black and clingy thingy, the sad shadow at six, the lack of perspective, the lack of a quick-fix.”

“What do you think?”

“Okay, well it’s a nice first attempt.”

“The original.”

“Good, not great.”

“Okay.”

“But the ‘scapegoat’ is a useful go-to…”

“Yes. I’ll kill him in the epilogue.”

“Good. And did it help? The writing process?”

“What do you think?”

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=3rd: [THE POINT] Lewis Hunt

—Lo, Joe, says I. How are you blowing? Did you see that bloody chimneysweep near shove my eye out with his brush?

Ulysses, pg. 280—“the chapter... Cyclops” – Joyce A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter.

Notes d’un Peintre (Notes of a Painter) pg. 413 – Matisse The square brackets are the most integral insert in this piece.

It’s a tiered cake (definitely a wedding one) in which Matisse, Joyce and the Decorator all exhibit. An ectype purporting its myth across all levels.

In Matisse’s case, for $5000. The commercial magnate George Macy, founder of the Limited Editions Club, commissioned from the artist an illustrated Ulysses, and 1500 copies were published on the 22nd of October, 1935. Matisse only read the original: that is, Homer’s Odyssey. Stuart Gilbert in August 1934 had sent the schema of the ‘Homeric correspondences’ to Paul Léon to be passed onto Matisse. So in this image, in the words of the schema; muscle, gigantism, politics and the Fenian: are latent.

Matisse illustrated delicately, as when the Sligo illuminators gave free rein to their artistic fantasy—covering Mallarme, Baudelaire, D’Orleans, Montherlant, Nau, Alcoforafo, Reverdy, de Ronsard, Cartier-Bresson etc. ß [In the spirit of the chapter].

Using lists (discursive intrusions of multitudinousness, textual urges) Joyce affronts the one I/eye. The visual metaphor of the Cyclops as the blinkered nationalist acts as an analogue for the chapter’s own “says I”. The cyclops without multiplicity, is reductive reading.

What do I see? There are two recognisable bodies, perhaps the letter I, the letter P. The etched oval head is empty. As Matisse wrote: “Expression for me does not reside in passions glowing in a human face… The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive.” It seems a mopping before it does the blinding of Polyphemus. Whether it pertains to the No-man’s own anonymity is merely one guess. The plunge of the sharpened pike is amongst other things the transfigured monologism

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resolving itself. It carries another aspect of the chapter: victory in polyphony, creation-penetration. Although in a sense, we can diagnose all this as the identification of the subject matter before whatever else.

Having not read Ulysses Matisse was still familiar with summary.

The bodies amalgamous and fluid—the charcoal suggests.

Even the brief resuscitation of the reclining pose is important, as Joyce’s own bodies are extremely physical: shitting, masturbating: Matisse’s very full renditions move away from all sorts of nineteenth century bodies too.

The text, to my eyes, works this narrative, the font monotype Times New Roman. In that sense it builds on a new construction: Joyce transforms the myth to the everyday, Matisse to mis/ interpretation, and the text to explanation. “Ulysses” is Latin, Joyce’s cover was Greek Blue: this Times New Roman a new reversal. [Square brackets typically qualify extradeigetically: the possessive pronoun the Name’s function: reading=passive?]

Is Matisse mort? (his?) Something is definitely alive in many readings.

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staff editors: Lily Begg and Tj Jordan deputy editors: Gaby Mancey-Jones, Madeleine Pollard, Ailbhe Rea, Vicky Robinson sub-editors: Zad El Bacha, Lev Crofts, Lael Hines, Emily Lawford, Felix Pope, Tobi Thomas website director: Mouki Kambouroglou fiction director: Flo Ward fiction team: Zara Baker, Joshua Cathcart, Kat Dixon-Ward, Charlotte Jackson, Alex Matraxia creative director: Hope Sutherland creatives: Sarah Bai, Megan Black, Joshua Cathcart, Florrie Engleback, Joe Higton, Alex Matraxia creative events team: Jojo Dieffenbacher, Ainsley Katz

Visit our website to see regularly updated articles, fiction and broadcasting:

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broadcasting team: Harri Adams, Molly Carlin, Hanako Lowry

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Published by Oxford Student Publications Limited Š 2017

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