Annotated table of contents: gorse no. 6
‘We know what we are, but not what we may be.’
Editorial
Je est un autre
1.3 ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ by Borges contains the doubly memorable statement, from which I copy the following words: ‘All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare […] The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous.’
1.4 ‘I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.’
Essays
Children & Art by Lauren Elkin
There’s a line in the opening number of Merrily We Roll Along, the musical by Stephen Sondheim, that asks: ‘How did you get to be here? / What was the moment?’ I’m quite sure that I would not be where I am—which, for the record, is a flat in Clerkenwell, London, on a Sunday morning in January, before anyone else is up—if my parents had not taken me to the theatre to see Sunday in the Park With George one day in 1984. Something hit me in that play, I can trace all of my passions back to it, all of the ways I have related to the world, and understood my purpose in it. That day I fell in love with the theatre, and more specifically with musical theatre; I fell in love with art, with the nineteenth century, with Post-Impressionism, with France. I didn’t know I would go on to study theatre, or teach art history. I didn’t know I would move to France. I didn’t know you could move to France. I couldn’t foresee that one day I would live between Paris and London. I didn’t know you could live between two cities. I didn’t know I would become a writer, and understand the retreat from the outside world, hoping that the people you love understand, feeling the weight of their sadness, their disappointment. I didn’t know I couldn’t have the kind of life I wanted in New York, that the pressure would be too great to have a conventional job, to settle into a conventional life. To become a writer, I had to move to Europe. But to choose that life, I had to give up the one I was born with.
Killary by Thomas McNally
Orlando, a Seduction by Joanna Walsh
In Orlando, it is necessary to love something—and by its finish I find there is something I love, with which I have formed a relationship as close and slow as the oak tree, and as fast and light as words: it is not Woolf, nor her hero(ine), but the book, for Orlando is a seduction by text. It is a sly, playful and complicated relationship. Artifice is central to its seductive qualities. The passage where Orlando picks up an eighteenth-century call-girl is a turn-on.
Kill Music/Fake Music by Liam Cagney
The cultivated composer John Cage as a little violet orchid in an immense Irish wood. Under canopy, from a fragrant flower long in stem, the purplish violet folds of John Cage’s smiling petal face sprout forth, smiling, flowery teeth gleam, beam purplish from the grey tree trunk. Under dappled light into the forest’s ‘silence’ the little orchid John Cage signals, in his screaming violet flowerhood, the site of a devotional tree—words carved in its trunk—a secret musical score.
An Impossible Point in Infinity by Oliver Farry
Never Any End to Paris was published in 2003. That year I was living a similar life to its narrator’s younger self, in a near identical chambre de bonne on the top floor of a bourgeois Paris apartment building, just a few streets away from rue St-Dominique where he himself had lived. I was poor but not exactly unhappy—though I was frustrated enough with my life at the time, ‘living in an attic and working in a basement [bar]’ as a friend of mine put it, to move back to Dublin after fifteen months living there (Dublin brought only bone fide unhappiness and I moved back to Paris and its limited job options and cramped living quarters eighteen months later). I also used to visit the cafés of literary fame, though for some reason I never tried the Flore, preferring Les Deux Magots’ larger terrace a few doors down. I used to justify spending €4 on a coffee—twice the going rate in most parts of Paris—reasoning that nobody bothered you or moved you on, that you could theoretically spend hours sitting there reading or writing for that sum. But, the reality was, I had little desire to linger or become a regular.
Utopian Abbreviation by Daniel Fraser
It is hard to think of a writer’s work which is more explicitly concerned with the infinite than that of Borges. Infinity and the impossibility of its containment pervade his fiction, and endlessness continually leaks out from his tightly woven puzzles. The lotteries and libraries, the forked paths and books of sand, all allow us a glimpse at the infinite by exposing its nature to us. In other words, like a form of negative theology, they capture the infinite by showing that it cannot be caught. But what significance does infinity have for writing? What is the relationship between human beings, in all our finitude, and the infinite which Borges seeks? And what role, if any, might language play in navigating between the fragility of the material and the great beyond?
Guadalupe by Dylan Brennan
Mass is due soon as visitors start to arrive. Not the pilgrims that have spent the night here and all of the feast day but lighter skinned mass-goers seeming to disapprove of the abject delight of the poverty on display. They arrive in their finery. Their high-heels sound like their money. Sound like their arrogance. Before I go I have to do something. One for my mother back home, photo on the phone and I forget to ever show her. God I’m lighting candles again, still / The sentimental atheist, family / Names a kind of prayer or poem, my muse / Our Lady of Guadalupe.
On Blood-ties & Rituals by Dominique Cleary
My cousins picked their way through the fourteenth century food court, while I held a table. Black and white photos taken in June 2003 during Spencer Tunick’s event in Barcelona were displayed on the wall behind me. I got up for a closer look. People seemed oblivious to the camera, many stood casually in the street in the sunshine. Their nudity was incidental, their self-consciousness appeared to surrender to their common humanity. Yet these photos highlighted the individuals, each waiting to react to Tunick’s instructions over a hand-held megaphone. The result was not shown, but I had seen it online. The individuals disappeared. Anonymous bodies in thousands lay down naked, head to toe, across the length of Avinguda de la Reina María Cristina, with Monjuic Castle in the background. He transformed the concrete streetscape into a river of flesh.
Interview
A Journey Round His Skull: An interview with Geoff Dyer by Rob Doyle
Both those things seem so dated and limiting—I mean they’re almost periodising terms. Experimenting always evokes images of writers in lab coats. At the risk of putting it arrogantly, I’ve never considered myself avant-garde or experimental precisely because I’ve always been an original writer (an original writer, to extend the paradox a bit further, partly because of the unusual mixture of influences that I’ve absorbed). And it’s not like I’ve tried to be original; I’ve just not been eager to lash myself to the wheel of the conventions on which some writers depend. It’s very common for derivative writers to be labelled original—you know, their originality is recognised precisely because it’s been seen and done before!
Irish
Fiach by Simon Ó Faoláin
A bhráthair,
A bhráthair bhíobalta,
Réidh chun m’ionathar
A stracadh amach.
Colm Ó Ceallacháin
Stadann sé ansin, is síneann a cheann suas go haireach. Caochann sé súil orm faoi dhó, súil fhuarchúiseach, reiptíleach faoina mogall dúbailte. Le cleatráil sciathán éiríonn sé, is scaiptear síolta na gcaisearbhán ar fud an chlóis.
Fiction
The Law of Excluded Middle by David Rose
He is sitting at his desk, pen in hand, a back number of The Philosophical Review spread-eagled before him. A coffee pot whispers behind him. He is not writing. She is unzipping her dress, slipping it down; it clings to her slip, over her hips. The slip follows, but unpeeled, not pulled. Her stockings, sheer, catch in the lamplight. He puts a record on the turntable. Oliver Nelson. Blues and the Abstract Truth. He is not a jazz fan, nor a blues man. The record was bought to enliven a lecture.
Introduction to Djordje Bojič’s ‘To Warmann’ by John Holten
It was the belief in living one’s life as truthfully, as artfully, as possible that aided Bojić’s meteoritic rise: the intensity in which he lived was clear to see for anyone that came across him. It’s not that he was a jet setter or a party animal, one of the many ‘scenesters’ that populate the artworld of Berlin, London, or New York. Rather what was infectious was his humanity that lay in the ability to converse with the people he met, to be honest in the face of the fake, to be curious toward the superficial. He adopted art as a complete vocation, and his life was consumed by it; vocations after all have very little to do with the dictates of fluctuating fashion trends.
The Commons by Gavin Corbett
To heck with it I said, I’ll follow him. I don’t know my precise thinking. How normal would John Banville be? Believe me anyway when I say what I’ve said. It was an everyday jaunt. I went across Dame Street, under Central Bank, down Crown Alley, under Merchant’s Arch. I followed him across the Ha’penny Bridge, then I came to his front door. It was on the quays. I understand this is only the door to his office because he has a house on Howth Hill according to online interviews. All the way I was watching his head bob in space. I had the urge to say right up behind him and explosively Banville Banville. Panning from ear to ear as per stereo effects.
Occupation of the Same Space by Lauren de Sa Naylor
A web is spun around twin poles of empathy and identification, or, compassion and overdetermination. Empathy (from the Greek ‘em,’ in, and ‘pathos,’ feeling); overdetermination (a vehicle for desire’s excess). It really depends on which way I manipulate it, and the effect of this turning over, which invokes turning towards and turning away. I know that my eyes sting when I see a (public) image that lets me know where the event is taking place, evidence of clinical intervention. I hear that. ‘It’ is the event I cannot disclose.
Hugh Lomax by Bridget Penney
Lomax is a wonderful writer, that’s for sure. Picking over the flipside of a place dedicated to enjoyment he never turns a hair. Since he first made his fortune as a dramatist, the facility for dialogue should come as no surprise. He seems able to step right inside the skin of those he writes about; their words sting and fumble the air but leave the immense burden of their hearts unexpressed. As for his life? Well he ticks a lot of the boxes for a cult author though his early popular success might be seen a stumbling block.
Poetry
Three Poems by Chus Pato
salvaxe é que a humanidade diga as palabras
salvaxe é a atención coa que tu escoitas
a liña
fronte a que, sen esperanza, mantés os ollos pechos
falla
non caes do lado das tebras
translated by Keith Payne
savage it is that humanity speaks the words
savage it is the attention with which you listen
the line
against which, hopelessly, you keep your eyes shut,
fails
you don’t slip onto the dark side
Four Poems by Julie Morrissy
I saw Stephen Rea at immigration
the first time I landed in Montréal
his role burning papers in Michael Collins
left an impression on me
stories of safe houses, soldiers, bombs;
I hailed a cab to the Plateau
began work at Urban Outfitters the next day
bonjour hi bonjour hi bonjour hi
Four Poems by Aodán McCardle
Estates by SJ Fowler
Why if your seahorses are real, if the British take a lion for their sigil,
which is hardly indigenous to those islands is the velicopartor a creature of fantasy?
It does my thinking for me & so too my shopping for me
clean unfiltered bills couched carefully between its knuckles
sun enslaved in its heavy black feathers
a smile like a lover, hair like a woman, like my first wife
& a giant, thick, black hooked call.
When I say not the Welsh I mean a different minority.