Issue Four

Contents

Unreal City

Driving through the desert outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, I saw a car on a pole, a crashed, burnt out, gutted vehicle raised up on a stick, presented like a tray to the birds of prey circling above. S… Read article

The Next Generation

‘That is how humanity should be, I think,’ said Dad. ‘Like a computer?’ ‘Yes, Jonathan. It is much less bother. There’s none of the usual nonsense.’ This could have been anytime in th… Read article

Three Poems

Plea for a flotation Magnus’s melon seeds floaton dark and weightytomes of pond.  Only a sampan built to withstanda resurrection(that troubling symbol) will do.  We have pilchards at tea-time,w… Read article

The Future of Memory

In his À la recherche du temps perdu Marcel Proust writes of memories unfurling and unfolding like Japanese paper flowers suspended in water – from small seedlike bundles into fragile and exquisite… Read article

The Sad Dove Drank Grape Juice

When Mark Twain entitled his satirical essay on learning German ‘The Awful German Language’, he presumably intended ‘awful’ in both senses. German, I have found, is both awfully difficult to l… Read article

Rossolimo’s Profile

In September 1928, while preparing to travel, Dr Grigoriy Ivanovich Rossolimo died. Soon after death, the brain was removed from the corpse and preserved for transportation to the new Moscow Brain Res… Read article

Flow

'Clearly I am thinking about nothing. I am most certainly looking at nothing. Since nothing is present to my consciousness to beguile me with its colour and movement, I have not become one with anythi… Read article

Book Keeping

I am in an agony of classification.  Indicate the number (on a scale of 1-10) that best corresponds to how important each attribute is to you. Give a higher rating to attributes that are more import… Read article

This is Legacy

In 2007, a group of us attempted to walk the circumference of the Olympic Park in Stratford. It was surrounded by a blue fence, the colour of the off-licence plastic bags strewn across the canal towpa… Read article

Magnetic Mountain

Last Monday, having convinced myself that a thirty-five hour train journey was the only way I was going to read the last four hundred pages of Anna Karenina - a course of reasoning that my abject and … Read article

On Not Eating Nuts

As soon as I’m shown into the clinic, the specialist wants to know why I’m there. She’s had a long letter from my GP, she says, about some half-remembered symptoms I first suffered aged six – … Read article