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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

  In Derrida’s Memoires: For Paul de Man he quotes from ‘Mnemosyne’, a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin which he says was one of his dead friend’s favourites Reading this recently, I remembered that about five years ago I had tried to translate the same poem I searched my laptop for the file before dredging up an early version, in fragments, from an email It begins mid-sentence               When I wrote it I must have been twenty-two, living out of university and away from home for the first time                   My rooms were rented but not exactly a blur of sex, so that’s a lie (and not in the original) Hölderlin is coy about sex, the raunchiest he gets being ‘a longing to enter the unconfined’             I was working in a suburb in West London and could have done my journey—two trains, a short walk and a bus—in my sleep, which is probably why it took until the last few weeks there for me to notice anything Near my office, opposite St Anne’s Church, a bunch of flowers had been sellotaped to a lamppost Up close, the petals were colourless Underneath was a card with just an “x” on the inside, scrawled quickly and at an angle so that it could have either been a kiss or a cross                 Though named after ‘Mnemosyne’, the goddess of memory, Hölderlin’s poem is really about forgetting, or the failure to do so Death is never far from the surface and, in the last section, a flurry of classical references bring it into focus: Hölderlin says tenderly that Achilles ist mein, before adding he ‘died by a fig tree’ The poignancy here derives from the way he addresses Achilles as a lover or close friend and emphasises—as a lover might—not how but where he died             I thought that it was only later I had noticed the bunch of flowers, but this fragment suggests I might have recorded their existence at the time and simply absorbed them into the background haze of my commute                     Derrida argues against the kind of mourning that attempts to interiorise the lost object We should respect the ‘infinite

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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fiction

January 2016

Good People

Nir Baram

TR. Jeffrey Green

fiction

January 2016

Good People opens in Berlin in 1938. Thomas Heiselberg has grand plans to make the company he works for the...

poetry

February 2012

Sunday

Rachael Allen

poetry

February 2012

Supermarket Warehouse This is the ornate layer: in the supermarket warehouse, boxed children’s gardens rocking on a fork-lift truck,...

fiction

March 2014

The Garden of Credit Analyst Filton

Martin Monahan

fiction

March 2014

Ivan Filton had retired early. ‘I have been working a lot on my garden,’ declared Ivan Filton. ‘This is...

 

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