Buzzwords

The Postman’s Diary By Kevin Boniface. I wipe down the interior of the van with one of my depleted supply of sanitising wipes. “There really is no need,” says our CEO via a press release from Switzerland, “Just wash your hands regularly.” In the photograph he looks like a 1970s northern comic, the kind that laughs at his own jokes. I’m feeling okay all things considered, I’ve not really been sleeping and I’ve lost the feeling in one of the fingers of my left hand. Out on my delivery there are no people on the streets but there’s plenty of

The Lockdown Paintings By Christiana Spens.

The Douglas Fir Trail By Joseph Schreiber.   Spring is a strange, slow, sloppy season where I live. As the days grow warmer, the snow covered paths that snake through the dead brown grass of the fields and forest floor begin to soften, turn slushy and muddy. Suspiciously bright yellow patches emerge along the routes frequented by dog walkers. One eagerly searches for the first hints of buds on branches. Then, just as you think you’re emerging from winter at last, the temperature drops, a new layer of snow drapes the earth and the trails turn to rivers of ice.

The London Mouse By James Miller. When my daughter wakes in the morning and I go to collect her from her cot she says, ‘Not going nursery, no’. It’s a statement, an expression of novelty, but as the days go on, it’s also a question, as if she’s asking, ‘how much longer will this continue?’ She’s a sociable little girl, my daughter, used to four days a week at nursery and a busy programme of seeing other friends or family at weekends. Now she just sees me and her mother: friends, family, nursery, the music class, all the rest of

Lovely April By Jude Cook. When a full UK lockdown was finally announced by our lying, incompetent government on Monday 23rd March, a number of writers commented, hey, it’s not so bad after all, Shakespeare wrote King Lear under similar conditions in 1606. A day later, many of those same writers — mainly those with children — were wondering how they’d failed to write even a simple home-delivery shopping list between awaking at 6am for day-long fiasco of chaotic home schooling, fervid anxiety about money and vulnerable loved ones, and an evening of epic drinking. After a week, the thought

By David Hayden. On a first meeting with a writer, recently, I was told of a long period of disconnection from writing that had begun in a loss in the experience of reading; a draining away of vivacity in, and connection to, language that had spread to perception and experience away from the page. Hope was expressed that books could be found in which directions back out to life, of this kind, could be discovered. I thought of books that might suit this purpose — too many books — and then, much later, I thought of more books. Here are

The Horns of Jericho By Oscar Mardell. 8AM Small mercies: I’ve received an email from David Collard (surely, the most generous figure in the game). “Future historians” it begins, “may well refer to the current state of things as the Phoney Plague”. And David is spot on (again). Aside from the obvious (what I’m anticipating is nothing akin to what my grandparents anticipated in ’39), the present situation feels oddly like the first two thirds of Humphrey Jennings’ Fires Were Started (1943), the unthinkable and the everyday, representation and reality, actors and civilians, all blurring seamlessly into an eerie sense

Morons By Sam Jordison.       Now is not the time for negativity. Now is the time to pull together. Now is the time to put aside old enmities. To forget the past, to forge through this thing and to think about how we can make a better future together. We may be socially distanced, but I’ve never felt closer to my fellow UK citizens than when we all went out a few nights ago and cheered the heroes from the NHS who have been putting their lives on the line to save ours. I’ve never felt closer to

This Level of Metaphysics Ain’t no Shit Geert Lovink interviewed by Bram Ieven. BI: In the last couple of weeks we have all sequestered ourselves into self- or state-imposed quarantine. Most of our social interactions now run exclusively through social media platforms. In Organization After Social Media, the book you co-authored with Ned Rossiter, you lamented that “media turned out to be empty containers, individualizing people rather than imagining collective agendas”. What does it mean that we are now restricted to using individualized and individualizing media that seem singularly unable to construct any form of collective political imagination? What’s your

Confinement. By Andrew Hodgson & Temmuz S. Gürbüz. @andhodgson & @temmuzsr

Rupert Thomson writing his new novel in London under lockdown: “Really getting through the biros”. @RupertThomson1

Meaning and Covid-19 By Hugh Fulham-McQuillan.     When humanity last experienced an explicit crisis of meaning in the years following World War II, existentialism enjoyed a resurgence. In a recent tweet I suggested that it was due a revival. This was partly due to the succour I was finding in the work of Ingmar Bergman at the time but also because finding and making meaning is, in my opinion, one of the more significant ways of coping with our existence and our eventual death. Up until about two months ago, the majority of people have had little need to