Issue Four

Thomas Marks

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

Peter Scott

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

James Purdon

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

Arthur House

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

Rose McLaren

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

Jonathan Gharraie

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

Jonathan Gray

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

Nia Davies

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

Leila Peacock

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

Julian Mills

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

Susanna Hislop

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

Editor’s Note

Why do we write? Among the mysterious impulses that compel us to put words on paper lies a human desire to capture and preserve something, to create a bulwark against loss and chaos. Several pieces in Issue 4 of The Junket are concerned with this attempt to save and hoard our experience. Susanna Hislop’s ‘Book Keeping’ is an affectionate and humorous memoir of one of our great storehouses of culture, The British Library, and the author’s often vexed relationship with its occupants, while in ‘The Future of Memory’, Jonathan Gray delivers a rhapsodic meditation on the implications of the digital age for our ability to synthesise and reproduce our sensory experience in all of its richness and complexity.

Some pieces are more interested in remainder than reminder; not so much what can be saved as what gets left behind. Peter Scott’s ‘This is Legacy’ inspects the Olympic site first as a demolished no-where and, five years later, as a zone of exclusion, questioning what, if anything, it will bequeath to the future. James Purdon’s playful, subtle ‘Rossolimo’s Profile’ outlines a scientist who tried to measure and record complex human characteristics but left behind only sketchy details of himself. Nia Davies’ ‘Plea for a Flotation’, which seems delicately assembled from poetic flotsam, is one of three finely-wrought poems whose strange and troubling voices range from the colloquial to the apocalyptic.

Death and the everyday co-exist elsewhere too. Thomas Marks rails against the tedious minutiae of living with a food allergy in ‘On Not Eating Nuts’ in which the threat of anaphylactic shock lurks unspoken. In ‘Unreal City’, Rose McLaren wonders how to respond to a place where death is both horrifying and everyday, and, in focussing on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, discusses what role art might play in negotiating the unspeakable or ‘psychologically inadmissible’.

Jonathan Gharraie’s ‘The Next Generation’ sees a father and son’s relationship mediated, not via a novel, but via a TV series, Star Trek, in a bold personal exploration which finds the alien in the familiar and the familiar in the alien. In ‘The Sad Dove Drank Grape Juice’, Leila Peacock comically negotiates the peculiarities of a foreign language while gaining insights into the strangeness of her own, and in ‘Flow’, Julian Mills succeeds elegantly in reconciling, through meditation and swimming, ‘a body that had become a stranger’ with his restless mind.

Arthur House

List of Contributors

Nia Davies

Nia Davies is a poet and novelist. She has had her poems published in various magazines and anthologies such as Poetry Wales, The White Review and The Salt Book of Younger Poets. Her pamphlet Then Spree will be published by Salt in autumn 2012. She is based in London. http://niadavies.wordpress.com

Jonathan Gharraie

Jonathan Gharraie lives in Derbyshire and is working on his first novel.

Jonathan Gray

By night Jonathan Gray is doing a PhD in philosophy and the history of ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London. By day he works at the Open Knowledge Foundation, where he gently encourages governments and galleries, libraries and laboratories to open up their material. More about him can be found at jonathangray.org. @jwyg

Issue Four

Contents

Editor’s Note

List of Contributors