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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

(This work is an extract from a longer poem of the same name)       This is a site for production This is a site for presentation  What is to be produced? What is to be presented?  This is a site for the production and presentation of a particular kind of subject  A subject marked by its pursuit of liberty, by individualism and collectivity, competition and cooperation By the sophistication of its speech    This is what we do with our comfort  This is what we do with our plenty    You are watching me, and I begin to watch Rather than using the gift, I reflect upon it Cobwebs2 Among the cobwebs, there, gathering in the corner of the doorway, a form persists, a tool, a silence, towards cleaving, carving, separating us from one another politically, aesthetically, socially, so that we may create a demand for these things we make, that appear here, that we do not yet have a name for     Minds are bending to the shape of this walking stick    This is a violence that can be overcome      What stick or stone is at hand to jam this twentyfourhour self-improvement, self-understanding, self-actualisation and total education? 3       Imagined public space  imagined public law  and in the air  experience and habit float…  experience, he says, is the way through danger4   I wait for Him to come  And I am nothing outside of this  While waiting, I swim,  stalk the interior  One way to move through the world among many  I surround you in my way of moving, my becoming –  monotone address, edge and end  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 minutes    2  Two words –  equality and equivalence  these are frequencies in the expression  of chronic fragmentation and chronic totality      I didn’t want to individuate  and now I am nothing  but a self-interrupting whole,5 a memory full of holes  haunted by the unpolitical    Someone said that this is where our obsession with voice capital V comes from And that listening instead, is grounded in our experience of the sacred It is our

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

READ NEXT

feature

May 2011

Short Cuts

Charles Boyle

feature

May 2011

1.. Whatever it is that the literature department of Arts Council England (ACE) is for, it can’t be for...

Art

Issue No. 6

Interview with Edmund de Waal

Emmeline Francis

Art

Issue No. 6

As we speak, Edmund de Waal, ceramicist and writer, moves his palms continually over the surface of the trestle...

Art

Issue No. 17

Water

Batia Suter

Art

Issue No. 17

Sources: Achate, Bilder im Stein / Josef Arnoth, Naturhistorisches Museum Basel Buchverlag, Bild der Wissenschaft 12, Dezember 1971, DVA StuttgartBasler Zeitung, Birkhäuser...

 

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