“The caretaker sees the world through its wishes; he feels the passage of time this way, he hears the people’s pain, he smells the glacial pace of change.”
Author: New Critique
[Poetry] — Tom Holmes
“This is where Oppenheimer lived / before he ended the war, / where he read the Bhagavad Gita”
[Essay] The Teratologists — Louis Armand
“Post-war nuclear technologies represented the first instance in which direct transformation or even control of the planetary environment came into view as a scientifically achievable proposition.”
[Poetry] ‘Net Curtains’ — DS Maolalai
“this morning is milk / with a thick mist / of souplight”
[Editorial] Solidarity with Black Lives Matter: Links to anti-racist educational resources and how to support and donate to anti-racist causes and organisations
New Critique stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
[Essay] ‘Dominic Cummings must be sacked’: Contemporary Political Engagement and Early Modern Petitions — Ellen Paterson
“Widespread anger over evil counsellors and the exercise of agency via petitioning that dominate contemporary political discourse have fascinating antecedents in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.”
[Poetry] — Simon Robson
“the Boots perfume counter assistant looking / like Dracula’s daughter”
[Essay] The Adviser’s Hubris: Cummings’s Cromwellian Machinations — Josh Mcloughlin
“Following on from Johnson’s turn as the sacrificial lamb, Cummings treads the political boards as contemporary history’s schemer-in-chief, thrasonical and hubristic in the advertisement of his unassailable power.”
[Essay] ‘…And now I am cast as a ghost’: Spectre(s) of India in Midnight’s Children — Seamus McGinley-Hughes
“The text delves into the recesses of primordial memory, cuts up and rearranges history and figures nation as dream; memory, history, and nation inform, antagonise, and haunt each other.”
[Fiction] ‘The Talented Higgs Boson’ — Mary Peelen
“You have to admit that in this way, the Higgs has sort of a sheen of godliness.”
[Fiction] ‘Clarity’ — Mark Halpern
“Among the many words they didn’t use was judōteki-kōgeki—literally, passive-aggressive—which had recently infiltrated the Japanese language via Western theories of psychotherapy. But did Japan need such a word? Maybe that’s just the way people are. Especially as relationships wear on.”
[Essay] Boris the Ditherer: Covid-19, Sovereignty, and the State of Exception — Josh Mcloughlin
“An abject figure, Johnson will serve as an object-lesson in political impotence, a catastrophic failure of the decision-making imperative that is supposed to underpin sovereignty.”
[Fiction] ‘Train Ghosts’ — Yash Seyedbagheri
“Imagine Mother, a silhouette in lavender.”
[Fiction] ‘Debt’ — Franck Vanhee
“If I lend you a letter w, you must return that same letter w, the oman in the bookshop said.”
[Essay] Metaphysical Detectives: Guilt, Grace, and Gaze in the World of Twin Peaks — Cam Scott
“Lynch and Frost are especially masterful where this feeling of estrangement is concerned.”
[Fiction] ‘The Ghost of You’ — Christopher Moore
“He may as well have fucked me into the mattress, he was so possessed with it.”
[Essay] ‘What’s Going On?’: The Moral Philosophy of A Serious Man — James Mcloughlin
“The Coens do not put characters such as Larry through the mill gratuitously. Rather, they fiercely interrogate aspects of their own identities in order to fully understand themselves and their world.”
[Essay] Bacon’s Hysteria, van Gogh’s Shoes: Deleuze and the Problem of Affect — Josh Mcloughlin
“Bacon’s paintings insist, with some violence, that affects are not sensational properties but exist in relation to an outside—whether other bodies, as Deleuze concedes, a Barthesian ‘ongoingness’ that connects body to atmosphere, or a primordial being-in-the-world, as in Heidegger’s Dasein.”
