London Review of Books

When I was 22 I did what I’d wanted to do since I was twelve: I put my life on hold and followed my favorite band. I had just finished my first proper job: editing a budget guide to Ireland, assembled (like all the books in the now defunct Let’s Goseries) by quickly trained college students. I’d spent all summer under fluorescent lights in the Let’s Go office, receiving updates by air mail from the students who had been hired to crisscross the island, checking and sometimes rewriting their prose.

The Knight’s Maze, Eastnor Castle For John Our teenagers turn kids again, amazed Between tall hedges, planted to confound. They race ahead to the unknown, unfazed To meet with cul-de-sacs, and turn around. Between tall hedges planted to confound, Retracing steps – no cell phones and no map – They meet with cul-de-sacs, and turn around Laughing. We follow, part and overlap, Retracing steps. No cell phones and no map, They thread the living labyrinth of yew. Laughing, we follow, part, and overlap.

The idea​ of a road trip organised around trials and hearings at courthouses across the US had been in my head for years. Last autumn I found myself in a position to make it a reality. I had a month. My aim was to attend as many different kinds of criminal and civil hearing in as many parts of the country as I could. Some courts post their weekly dockets online but most don’t, so there was little scope for detailed planning.

James Schuyler​ gave his first public reading on 15 November 1988. People queued around the block to get a seat, and at the end he received the longest, most unconsciously glad applause Eileen Myles had ever heard in New York. ‘As for my moment in the spotlight,’ Schuyler reported to a friend a couple of days later, ‘well, truth to tell, I was a fucking sensation.’ The sensation had been a long time coming.

How do we want our judges to make their decisions? Robert Jenrick, shadow justice minister for the Tories until his defection to Reform in January, told the Conservative Party Conference last year that ‘judges who blur the line between adjudication and activism can have no place in our justice system.’ Judicial activism is a habitual complaint of those on the right when legal decisions don’t go their way.

Asense​ of ‘boundlessness’ afflicts Adam Gordon, the narrator of Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). Adam is a poet on a fellowship in Madrid, using phone cards to call home to Kansas because he’s not settled enough to own a mobile phone.

Bait,​ Mark Jenkin’s first feature film, earned him the Bafta for best newcomer in 2020. Jenkin had been making short films for seventeen years by then. Most of them had been filmed with old cameras of one kind or another – super 8, 16 mm – and some had frames with rounded corners, which placed them somewhere between generations-old home movie and rediscovered newsreel footage.

The​ word is not the thing. In spoken language a word is a distinctive sound or series of sounds. It does not have a ‘natural’ relationship to the thing it stands for. Ferdinand de Saussure theorised that a sign is made up of two parts: the signifier (the physical form taken by the sign, for instance a spoken word or its written representation) and the signified (the concept the signifier picks out).

As​ a twelve-year-old Boy Scout and altar boy, I always brought my gun to church. After murmuring my responses in the Latin mass, gleeful when I heard the ‘Ite, missa est,’ I hurried to the nearby woods to blast away at beer cans or paper targets. Father Burns sighed whenever he saw me stowing my bolt-action Mossberg .22 calibre rifle in my locker and slipping on my cassock and surplice.

‘Marie-Antoinette en gaulle’ (1783) by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun.