Serials
“Painting isn’t dead. The novel isn’t dead. They just aren’t as central to the culture as they once were,” says David Shields in “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.” In an era where we need books for people who find television too slow, where does writing go from here?
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An 18-year-old Canadian with writerly ambitions, working on his uncle and aunt’s Sussex pig farm, gets to meet the butler of famed English literary critic, Cyril Connelly. Ch. 8 of “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
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In 1983 Leningrad, at an underground art exhibition, Mikhail Iossel meets a German man who tells Iossel how he survived the Nazi era. A story in a burning sentence.
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Brian Fawcett gets to a pig farm in Sussex, England the long way around. He goes through a brain glitch, the Visigoths’ sack of Rome, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the British Museum Reading Room. Ch. 7 of The Sussex Variations traverses the History of the Knowable World.
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More passages from Vian Andrews’ journals about life in Italy’s Umbrian countryside. He’s thinking about books, silence, pruning tools, theatres, Bob Dylan, and the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban.
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Mikhail Iossel pauses in a Montreal metro underpass to listen to a busking middle-aged violinist playing Shostakovich’s “Waltz No. 2.” It’s a melody that can fit into a sentence.
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On a Sussex pig farm in 1963, Brian Fawcett is thinking about the intelligence of pigs, dogs, humans, and nuclear missiles.
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Mikhail Iossel is on the Red Arrow night express train from Moscow to Leningrad on January 9, 1986, when he meets a fellow traveler with two bottles of brandy and a box of chocolates. It’s a journey that can be told in a sentence.
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In Ch. 5 of Brian Fawcett’s “Sussex Variations,” there’s courage, war, character and a dying boar.
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Vian Andrews is out in the olive orchards, clearing brush from under the trees and thinking about ChatGPT and the future of artificial and other kinds of intelligence. The latest passage from Andrews’ journal about life in the Umbrian countryside, “Scribbles from Italy.”
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