Poem Brut #76 – Disrupted Blue on Sepia
These Polaroids were taken by my mother, who died unexpectedly at the age of 52 back in 2003. There is nothing written on them to indicate where they were taken. I have deduced that they are either from her travels around Europe or her time living in Canada, in the early 1970s. These snapshots (there were around 20 in total) got separated from a bag of family photos, perhaps as they had no people in them and were more focussed on the structural. Whatever the reason, they were put to one side. The family photos were later lost, whilst under my care, during a turbulent family time and a hedonistic period in my early 20s. So these cast-offs, of sorts, are all that remain. I recently came across them again in my belongings and started to think about texts that might work well with them. I thought about travel writing and novels about journeys etc. Then the lyrics of one of my mother’s favourite albums, Joni Mitchell, Blue, sprang to mind, for multiple reasons, themes of travel, tragedy, love and loss being some of them. So I started to experiment with words used in the lyrics of the album, defamiliarising and disrupting these songs I know so well, to fit the unfamiliar places in the pictures, that, in some way, at this time, represent my mother.
In the 76th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Vik Shirley.
In the Psychologist’s Chair
Sally Rooney noted in a recent conversation with Lerner, which launched The Topeka School at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, that the texture of his new novel departs from that of his previous two. This difference in form and feeling is, in Rooney’s view, due to The Topeka School being told in the third person. But even though Lerner in this book is splicing together the perspectives of several characters belonging to a ‘90s psychologists’ community in Topeka, Kansas, he is not moving away from his usual autobiographical thread. Rather, like his friend and colleague Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, Lerner’s polyphonic new novel is perhaps more persuasively auto in its firm hold of the complexity of strands that makes out a family, a body politic, and the maladies that threaten to ‘dissect’ them.
Denise Rose Hansen reviews Ben Lerner‘s The Topeka School.
Humanities Computing, Digital Humanities, and Computational Humanities: What’s In a Name
On 16 July 2019, Folgert Karsdorp, a postdoctoral research assistant at the Dutch Meertens Instituut, tweeted: ‘I’m thinking about developing a workshop/event/journal/community for computational research in the humanities that doesn’t exclude people with profound computational skills and knowledge. Who’s in?’
By Leah Henrickson.