Vitalpoetics

Recent Posts

• Quim Monzó’s Gasoline

  Like (and in fact by) Eugenia Demuro, I have recently been given the wonderful gift of a subscription to Open Letter Books. Aside from…

• The Adventure of the Mystery Machine with the Suspicious Odour (Sherlock Holmes pt.2)

  Holmes is the ultimate Victorian-Era Scooby-Doo, unmasking the irrational and metaphysical in order to expose the creepy-old-janitor-under-the-werewolf-mask of the coherent, objective world.

• Why read? Why write? Why Literature?

  It is in the plurality of meaning that, regarding both the ‘construction’ of reality and the conventions of mimetic (realist / readerly) literature, Literature assumes…

• My being [/language] is part of the totality of what is [written]

  It seems that for many philosophers, being must be conceived of as finite and therefore in some way whole. Perhaps this is what keeps them…

• Sam Leach – the Political Landscape

  I probably don’t have to describe the controversy surrounding Sam Leach’s Wynne Prize winning painting ‘Proposal for landscaped cosmos’ (below) except to say that the…

• The Adventure of the Ten-Foot Blue Dudes (Sherlock Holmes pt.1)

  The Holmes stories are defined by their narrative structure, and a necessary self-referential mechanic that is built into every facet of the tale. At every level these short stories operate as narratives in a state of flux.

• Swedenborg’s Oven: Head number Five – The 6th of April 1744.

  As you may well remember from previous posts I have been waiting for Emanuel Swedenborg’s Journal of Dreams to be returned to the…

• a sporadic and brief instance of critical fiction

  There is no primal scream without the sun, the deep crevice of the earth, Heraclitus’ flowing waters. The river runs its course: “We step and do not step into the same river, we are and we are not”.

• Ryszard Kapuscinski – Journalist

  Much controversy has surrounded a new biography of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932-2007) which alleges that huge swathes of his reportage were made-up. Defences have…

• Interlude – On the Price and Place of Manuscripts

  I have recently been indulging in fantasies about all the books I might be able to order on line and have delivered to my door,…