stomaselli

Wonder is Really Nothing

‘As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away
Through ninety dark degrees.’
- Elizabeth Bishop

GK Chesterton said that nonsense was the literature of the future. There is no better proponent than Charles Lutwidge Dodgson writing as Lewis Carroll, no greater triumphs of nonsense than the Alices. Carroll insisted his books ‘meant nothing,’ made no sense.

Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So whatever good meanings are in the book, I’m glad to accept as the meaning of the book.¹

Alice, according to Carroll, was intended to be ‘trustful, ready to accept the wildest impossibilities with all that utter trust that only dreamers know.’ Carroll’s dream story is one with loops, entanglements, and passages that lead to nothing. It was essentially a new way of writing dreams: while Jonathan Swift took pains to explain everything, and Shakespeare carefully laid the groundwork for what was to come in his midsummer capers, Carroll offered no explanations whatsoever. Alice follows a rabbit straight down a hole and is in Wonderland, a space where you open doors with keys only to find more doors, games are played with animate objects, and events repeat ad infinitum.

Doolin Writers’ Weekend 2020: A Report

I was privileged to be the guest curator at the 9th annual Doolin Writers’ Weekend, which took place at Hotel Doolin, Co. Clare, 24-26th January 2020. Tired of the emphasis in festivals (usually) being on newness, or being led by publishing schedules, I decided, with full support from hotel manager and Writers’ Weekend organiser Dónal Minihan, to shift the focus to more experimental practices, to programme emerging artists and more marginalised writers. I called my introductory speech ‘Two Forks in the Path,’ and it went something like this:

Something Borrowed, Something New

Beginning Thursday 5 March 2020, gorse poetry editor Christodoulos Makris will be teaching a weekly course (duration 8 weeks) with title ‘Something Borrowed, Something New’ (aka Against Originality) at the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin:

gorse 13 submission call

 

“We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that’s performed upon it.”

– W.G. Sebald

 

In July 1937, the Nazi party put an art exhibition in Munich: Entartete Kunst, or, Degenerate Art. 740 modern works that the Nazis did not approve of were shown to ‘educate’ the public on the ‘art of decay.’ It was a rail against modernity and the moral collapse associated with it. The exhibition handbook explained that the aim of the show was to ‘reveal the philosophical, political, racial and moral goals and intentions behind this movement, and the driving forces of corruption which follow them.’

We are living in dark times. We want artistic responses to the theme of ‘Taboo.’  We are looking for fiction, essays, poetry, and art. Help us shine a light: info [at] gorse [dot] ie, subject line ‘gorse 13 taboo’. Submissions are open from 13th December until 10th January.

 

 

The static & the live

NEMESES: SELECTED COLLABORATIONS OF SJ FOWLER, VOLUME 2, publishes with HVTN Press on 26 October. We’re pleased to feature SJ Fowler’s collaboration with Rike Scheffler in gorse 11, our forthcoming Borders issue. Here is SJ Fowler on collaborations.