Issue Three

Arthur House

Before the Thaw

At Yaroslavl, looking east on a bend in the frozen Volga, river, land, and sky merge into a white vagueness in the middle distance. The Volga seems like a boundary at the end of the earth, but somewhe… Read article

Thomas Marks

An A to Z of Coach Drivers

Axel had been a gendarme for thirty years, including a stint during the late ’80s when he’d been seconded as a bodyguard to François Mitterrand. He was a short, golden-skinned Breto… Read article

Toby Ferris

Slow Work and Plain Chant – An Apology for the Failed Life

‘I am groping for clarity and coming up with something else, as if the object I wished to grasp, to hold up, rotate, study, understand is not after all susceptible of direct observation. The big thi… Read article

Olivia Laing

The Lonely City

There’s a painting halfway up the pristine snail shell of the Guggenheim Museum in New York of a - but already I’m beginning to fumble. There’s a painting halfway up the pristine snail shell of … Read article

Kristen Treen

Print Culture

When I talk about what I do, the index finger of my right hand automatically enacts a scrolling motion. The finger bends into a hook; it straightens; it repeats, a mid-air gesticulation. Each time t… Read article

John Gallagher

Language Turned Convict

Heere I set before thee (good Reader) the lewd lowsie language of these loytering lusks, and laysie lorels, wherewith they buy and sell the common people as they passe through the countrey. – Thoma… Read article

Jordan Savage

Feet! Feet!

For dancing’smy soul delight (Feet! Feet!)- Frank O’Hara. Beginning Stories start at the end of things. The Odyssey began at the end of the Trojan War. This morning snuck up before I’d quite s… Read article

James Purdon

Castles in the Air

In a university town on the west coast of America, tents are floating in the sky. First one, then another is lofted into the air, each held up by its own rig of white balloons. In front of of the plaz… Read article

Crystal Whitaker

Prishtina Streets

Eyes to the ground. Each step brings a new texture, mostly curious, sometimes treacherous. It may be the relentless subzero temperatures striving to shear layers of stone from the bedrock of paving sl… Read article

Peter Scott

Smoking Ban

This is not a confession. This is not a story or a parable, a manifesto or a warning, a love letter or a fantasy, self-help or recruitment drive. If it mattered when I first tried a cigarette, I coul… Read article

Editor’s Note

April, as Chaucer says, is the month to shake off winter lethargy and hit the road. It seems apt, therefore, that so many of the pieces in this spring issue of The Junket should deal with distant trips or local perambulations, with digressions and diversions undertaken in the name of a purposelessness which only confirms the unique value of the journey, whatever the merits of the destination.

In certain parts, snow is still on the ground. Writing from Gorky Park and the banks of the Volga, Arthur House delivers a sub-zero traveller’s meditation on the hard packed layers of history and culture that make up the new Russia, while in ‘Prishtina Streets’ Crystal Whitaker picks through slush and rubble, traversing the thawing postwar cityscape of Kosovo’s capital to uncover the ground-level traces of urban adjustment.

Peter Scott’s ‘Smoking Ban’ recalls a number of vivid memories in thinking about the dynamics of sociability and solitude that govern the vexed relationship between the smoker and his cigarette. Another series of vignettes makes up Thomas Marks’s ‘A to Z of Coach Drivers’. From this itinerant alphabet, illustrated by Julian Mills, emerges a story about different ways of staving off isolation while living life at long distance.

Isolation is also a strong presence in ‘The Lonely City’, where Olivia Laing finds her encounter with a painting shaped by moments of human connection and disconnection in the vast hive of New York. Here, she discerns ‘a kind of secret currency of the city, a solidarity of the solitary’ which succeeds in complicating our usual understanding of social attachment.

How might differences of language be manipulated to shape that understanding? In ‘Language Turned Convict’, John Gallagher looks into the history of thieves’ cant, prison slang, gay argot and other ‘cryptolects’ to show how secret languages change to keep well ahead of current usage.

‘Slow Work and Plain Chant’ finds Toby Ferris ruminating on how an attentiveness to change itself – to process rather than product, iteration rather than completion – might offer a worthwhile alternative to more end-directed ways of thinking about achievement.

Kristen Treen’s ‘Print Culture’ is concerned with other kinds of slow work – the daily data-work of electronic publishing contrasting with the strenuous material craft of woodcut printing – and Jordan Savage, setting out in search of something new after a period of unexpected change, finds a restored sense of embodiment and connectedness in dancing the Lindy Hop in the clubs of Brighton.

James Purdon

List of Contributors

Toby Ferris

Toby Ferris is responsible for the Anatomy of Norbiton and its counterpart on The Dabbler blog, Atlas of Norbiton. @AnatomyNorbiton

John Gallagher

John Gallagher is working on a doctorate about language-learning in the early modern period. He once did stand-up comedy in front of Ian Paisley. @earlymodernjohn

Arthur House

Arthur House is a writer based in London. @arthur_house

Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing is a writer and critic. She's the author of To the River (Canongate) and is currently working on The Trip to Echo Spring, a liquid history of the relationships between writers and alcohol. She lives between Brighton and New York. @olivialanguage

Issue Three

Contents

Editor’s Note

List of Contributors