The buried Tea
The flat horizon is sucking down the light, swiftly now, along with the parched heat, cooling, turning cold as the white sun is replaced by a white moon and the once dazzling cobalt sky reduced to black. Day drops into night. Conscious into subconscious. The desert devouring both.
To desert is to abandon. Forsaken. This Negev Desert–Israel perpetually at war.
By Dian Parker.
The Underground Republic of Tony White
White’s subtle pulp detective novel comes with all the benefits of the genre: a complex and twisting plot with a genuinely shocking and satisfying d énouement, a brooding, troubled and edgy anti-hero cop protagonist and a broad, psychogeographic and political landscape taking place in the designated sacred spacetime spanning the end of the Miners Strike in 1985 to the Battle of the Beanfield at Stonehenge. Writing it White adopts the playful puzzle materials of the Oulipo lit guys and gals and draws esoterical fodder from the Guardian crossword puzzle and the Sylvain Marechal’s French Revolutionary Calendar. There’s a luxuriance of natural feeling and grounded knowing in the well-healed prose. It has an assurance that drives the plot towards its severe but thrilling denunciations of our corrupt forces of law and ordure. White works against the bookish and cloistered, brings vernacular energies to his communal memories of this time.
Richard Marshall reviews Tony White‘s The Fountain in the Forest.
The Two Cultures Revisited: on Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now
Has the Second Culture simply made all this stuff up in order to impose itself on the rest of society? Pinker seems to think so, because he can only dismiss these claims as the cool malaise of too many people reading Derrida. More nuance and sensitivity is required here. For one thing, it vastly overstates the influence of French and German intellectuals on the cultural mainstream. And to say that the Waldens and Waste Lands of the world are merely poetic and intellectual flourishes of a class ignorant of science and resentful towards progress is a glib dismissal and woefully simple for someone as thoughtful and meticulous as Pinker.
Jared Marcel Pollen reviews Enlightenment Now.