Issue Three

Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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