Progressive culture since 1954
In late January, Newtown’s pulse became thready after the permanent closure of its lifeblood, Lentil as Anything. The pay-what-you-can restaurant was a microcosm of mutual aid, and highlighted how community-oriented not-for-profits could operate on a larger scale. Following financial struggles and rent-related disputes, the landlord decided to lock the manager out of the building due to a stalemate regarding rent payments.
The wasp lies by the window as if to beg elegy or apology for the ease with which I smashed its wings. I pretend not to notice & the next day, there are two of them.
When Iris Murdoch was grieving for her lover Franz Steiner, a few weeks after his death in late 1952, she talked for hours on end with fellow writer and eventual Nobel winner Elias Canetti.
It was a foggy London night and Canetti offered her a bed, telling her that she could lock herself into the room where they were talking and he would sleep somewhere else. ‘She looked at me with surprise and disappointment,’ he wrote, and said she would go back to Oxford.
As I returned to À rebours in lockdown I found myself bothered by a raw-red throat and spells of breathless lethargy, eventually joined by worsening digestive function. Leftovers from my own brush with the virus six months prior—or perhaps just results of an extreme lifestyle change, it’s hard to tell.
Neither the photograph of Tame nor the tabloid media’s response to it truly belong to the present. We might say that, just as Derrida felt the post-Cold War order remained haunted by the death of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, so too do the ghosts of another, dying war—that, at least nominally, on drugs—go on stalking the present moment.