Buzzwords

Left Pending By Miranda Gold. Yellow ringed, disinterested, but the illusion of eye contact was convincing enough. We were a week into London’s variation on the theme of lockdown by the time I’d realised the blackbirds had gone. Every morning since New Year I’d watched them blandly through glazed eyes till the coffee kicked in, laying down a retrospective appreciation for their supposed loyalty to the tree outside my window, perched long enough to let me think I’d met their quiet, steady gaze. In their place came vanishing flashes of blue and yellow, with a beauty so sudden and startling

The Giant Sloth of North America By Russell Persson. Looking back as upon the stretches of tiles who in surface become our maps the ones skipped our lost or never laid ashlar. Filling in these pauses with the measurements of others — books nearby and raw footage of space and seas and some of it untrue. The place our unquiet eye leads us. Or bored or somewise unsated we take a few slow steps and decide to learn about geologic time and how the moon came to be. On geologic time there were the periods of heavy bombardment. Millions of

Lockdown Alphabet By Nicholas Royle. Anosmia My symptoms included anosmia — loss of sense of smell — along with headache, dry cough and temporary mild fever. The man on the other end of the 111 phone line, in the first week of March, wasn’t impressed, being more interested in whether I’d been to northern Italy in the past fortnight. It wasn’t his fault. When you’re working from a script, the script needs to be right. He didn’t think I had the virus, so neither did I. There was nothing anywhere about anosmia being linked to Covid-19. Not a word. And

Wagtails and Minuets By Des Barry.   At this time of year in Australia, the position of sunrise from our balcony window drifts north-east as winter approaches. Before the sun appears through the sparser branches of the trees above the rooftop horizon, it lights up the sky in pale pinks, in orange and blue. I tend to wake up around 5.30am so I usually see the dawn. This early, the path along Port Philip Bay and the low grassy area beside it, aren’t so crowded with runners and dog walkers. If I can get in a walk, and the weather’s

So Fondly Do They Sing By Charles Leitner.   What do you think of the ship Pequod, the ship of the soul of an American? Many races, many people, many nations, under the Stars and Stripes. Beaten with many stripes. Seeing stars sometimes. – D.H. Lawrence The city is quiet and the nights seem to have been returned to the rats and rabbits. The train cars are all but empty. Except for a handful of passengers, they roll along mostly on their own. Steady. And like the factories still churning, they are a good reminder that modern civilization in some

Lockdown By Monique Roffey. As I write this, the UK is coming up to the end of its fifth week in lockdown. I will be fifty-five tomorrow, 24th April. At high risk, with asthma and a rare autoimmune illness, Churg Strauss Syndrome, I’m glad I made it to this age. However, in these times the subject of age has a much edgier significance. Thank God, I’m not nearer 60, is a quiet thought. Better odds. At least I’m blood type O, etc, etc. All these selfish and self-shoring up thoughts have come and gone, and come and gone, and I’m

The Novels of Self-Isolation By Russell Williams.   What books should we be turning to in our present moment of crisis? As we deepen our breathing, steel ourselves for trips to the supermarket and prepare for lengthy periods of collective self-isolation, what novels might help us unlock, or at least try to think through our historical moment? Some titles have been getting a great deal of attention in recent days. Foremost amongst them is Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decameron — a series of stories acting as what scholar Martin Marafioti memorably describes as “narrative prophylaxis”, telling tales to help fend off the

The Pleasure of Crime By Adam Scovell. In a time when every opportunity to escape the horror of our current situation is grabbed with relish, I found it surprising on recent reflection that my chief remedy for coping with the barrage of frustrations and worries over the Coronavirus and its handling were stories of murder. Not actual murder of course but the pleasures of crime fiction. A genre dismissed and treated with condescension by the unimaginative with such regularity that you could almost set your watch by it, crime fiction for me has acted as a sparkling tonic to the

The Plague During Pestilence Laura Marris interviewed by Ethan Powers. It was in late January that Laura Marris began to see a reflection of her work on the television. Marris, a literary translator and creative writing professor at the University at Buffalo, had been working for several months on a new translation of Albert Camus’s The Plague. Glancing intermittently between the words on the pages and those on the screen, it wasn’t until one word in particular began flashing across the bottom of TV screens throughout the world that the abnormality of the situation truly hit her. “QUARANTINE,” the screens

Bindings By Simon Okotie.     And he was, of course, now that his wrist bindings were starting to loosen, right on the brink, potentially, of gaining some crucial information, if not perspective, on his predicament in that, shortly, he would be able to use the hand and arm so loosened to delimit if not demarcate the space that he (as he continued, provisionally, to refer to himself) took himself to be contained within, and, in so doing, garner sufficient evidence, he hoped, to enable his escape from it, which is to say to enable him to remove what he

See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Breathe No Evil By Jeff Wood.     One year ago this week I called my grandmother in Ohio to wish her a happy birthday. It was her 97th birthday and now one year more. We spoke to each other across an ocean. She had the news on mute on the TV in her room and at one point she stopped speaking, and gasped faintly, and then said, “Oh my. Jeff… Notre Dame is burning.” ^✹^ This did not begin. It did not end. It is not in order. It’s in the order that