Searching for the blank page
Just like Cage’s bucket dots are dots in Aeido and not a representation of a dot. And the blank page on page 31 is indeed a blank page poem or a part of the sequence. Not a representation of a blank page or a blank page at the end of a book or before a new sequence begins. It’s another beautiful statement. A blank page as you can imagine is very similar to a page with only a dot on it. But that they are juxtaposed and that the ‘dot’ pages carry so much information highlights, in the most effective way I’ve seen, the information that a blank page carries.
James Davies reviews James Mclaughlin’s Aeido.
Kureishiland
The Making of London is an ambitious project, and one that would inevitably leave many people disappointed by the author’s choice of subjects. London writing is a phenomenon so vast, for every name mentioned there are bound to be numerous omissions. Why Ackroyd but not Jeanette Winterson with her magnificent historical canvas, Sexing the Cherry? Why Iain Sinclair but not Stewart Home who is, in the words of the former, “commanding the desert around the northern entrance of the Blackwell Tunnel” (the only nod to Home made in the book)?
Anna Aslanyan on Sebastian Groes‘s study of contemporary London literature.