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- Published 20240206
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-92-4
- Extent: 204pp
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Gutenberg babble
In his essay, ‘The dawn of the post-literate society’, British columnist James Marriott argues that the recent decline in literacy – and book-reading in particular – amounts to a civilisational crisis. That he does so on Substack, in X-friendly paragraphs that unfurl beneath headings such as ‘World without mind’, ‘The end of creativity’ and ‘The death of democracy’, is not in itself a reason to dismiss his argument. But nor is it an irrelevant detail.
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Apocalypse, then?
FictionWriting took almost everything from me. Most afternoons, I’d arrive home from teaching classrooms of uninterested students, have a little Henry time, defrost a ready-to-eat supermarket meal, open a bottle of shiraz and write until midnight. Most weekends, I’d start writing once the hangover wore off, break for lunch, and then write again until dinner. It wasn’t just punishing on my physical health, it ruined my relationships, most recently with Greg, who said I’d die miserable and alone if I maintained my grim routine. And for what? The occasional acceptance from an obscure journal read by twelve other short-story writers?
Time plays tricks
IntroductionTen years ago, the late, great cultural theorist Mark Fisher posited that our ‘montaging of earlier eras’ had reached such fever pitch that we no longer even noticed our submersion in a sea of bygones. And sitting alongside this purported cultural inertia are our increasingly divergent attitudes towards history – the far-right impulse to romanticise the past, the far-left desire to remedy its wrongs – and how they inflect our politics.
Walking through the mou(r)n(ing of a)tain(ted life)
Non-fictionMy big black cloak could probably keep me from freezing overnight. I remember a movie where a character smeared a layer of dirt over their body to stay warm. That would be my ‘break in case of emergency’ action…if my OCD will bury the anxiety of contamination for survival’s sake.
