stomaselli

The Corpse / 1

By Alan Cunningham.

‘We went to the loft while the wedding party was eating. The fiddler came too.
‘Take yer partners for a set’, the fiddler said.
We were about twenty boys and there was only one girl. She was well danced. A feeling of poignancy undertoned our merriment.
‘This would make a good wake’ a philanderer said.
‘Only the corpse is missing’, another said.

The Green Fool, P. Kavanagh.

As just boiled coffee is poured into a small glass of milk, a moment of sadness is experienced – and at first I enjoy that I seem to have no control over that.

My girlfriend – with whom I have recently reconciled after some time apart – is away, in Spain, in Madrid, on a residency, a work placement – and while I know that she will return to London when it ends I find it difficult to avoid feeling sad because of that.

If I were busier I would not feel so sad, perhaps.

ten thousand tiny spots

By Sheila Armstrong.

In the city, there are ten thousand thousand mouths. But a mouth is a terrible thing. A gash across the skin; a slit that has been widened and then healed so that two lumps of scar tissue trace the wound on either side. And inside, inside some instinct has caused lumps of calcium and carbon and bone to protrude out, sprouting in some awful facsimile of symmetry; each lump pointing upward, anchored with a cruel hook below the jaw, their surfaces blunted and ground down into flat planes that crush and grind.

Stasis

By Ian Maleney.

 ‘I matured at twenty-four,’ says Morton Feldman, in a radio interview with Charles Shere, in California in 1967. He was forty-one at the time, almost half-way through his mature period, which ended with his death in 1987. It was shortly before he stopped working for his father. Feldman’s conversation with Shere is cyclical, but wide-ranging. There are many long pauses, and many half-jokes that aren’t really that funny. You can hear them lighting cigarettes in the studio, the curl of a match inches from the microphone. They’re spiralling around this idea, arguably the central assertion of Feldman’s career, that he doesn’t believe in Hegel, but in god. At first I wasn’t sure what that meant. I wasn’t sure that anyone he said it to knew either, but they went along with it anyway. So will I.

April Truth

By Ilya Zverev, translated from the Russian by Anna Aslanyan.

Apart from the story with the deck, there were a few other significant achievements. Leo Makhervax, a crazy young naturalist, was shown a picture of a little bird cut out of a Polish magazine, and told that it’s a zoological mystery, a Papio nightingalis, which can be found in the south of Galápagos Islands only, and sings in a man’s voice.

‘Galápagos Islands are generally full of surprises,’ Leo said. ‘This is the only place where you can find giant tortoises.’

A Writer’s Guide to the Dialectical Landscapes of Dublin

By Therese Cox.

Objects are of course of central importance in Joyce’s Dubliners short stories: think of the coin Corley presses into the palm of Lenehan at the end of ‘Two Gallants’ or the feather in the hat of the plump lady in ‘Counterparts’ who gives rise to violent emotion in the beaten-down Farringdon. In the Dubliners stories, such objects often give way to that favourite old chestnut of creative writing classes everywhere—the epiphany, a dialectical image worn smooth from overuse. But it is not in the Dubliners stories, instead in Ulysses where Joyce truly unlocks the enormous transformative power of the object, and he does it by naming so many specific, verifiable objects and places found throughout the city so as to inspire an urban scavenger hunt—hence Bloomsday on June 16th, when readers take to the streets to create their own re-enactment of an imagined past. What is so limitless and exciting as a bar of lemon soap? Nevertheless, it’s that same imaginary bar of soap— an emblem of the one Bloom buys for Molly—that compels enthusiasts every year to drop by Sweny’s pharmacy for a whiff of that lemon scent, a mass-manufactured Proustian madeleine for the smart set. (Full disclosure: I, too, have bought the bar of lemon soap on more than one of these occasions. it’s very good soap—but no epiphany.)