Essays
How does it feel to be famous?
The End of the Tour is the product of this posthumous celebrity. This is true in the obvious sense that neither James Ponsoldt’s film nor the book on which it is based would exist if David Foster Wallace had lived. But it is also true in the more complicated sense that the film both relies on and participates in the construction of Wallace as a cultural symbol.
Don’t Go To Jolo – Part Two
The second instalment of Matt Thompson’s reportage on the resistence to terrorism in the Sulu Archipelago of the southern Philippines, during which he performs badly at a karaoke session with the Vice-Mayor of Lamitan City, Oric Furigay, descendent of ‘the last Conquistador’, and accepts his offer of a heavily armed escort to visit the outpost of Tipo Tipo, ‘the capital of the terrorist’.
Philip Hodgins: Mettle
Philip Hodgins’ poetry is alive with strange images, jolts of perception, sudden beautiful cadences. And his poetry is frightening. I mean not supernatural fear but the intimate animal fear we have for our own bodies, the fear of pain and the fear of death.
Don’t Go To Jolo – Part One
The War on Terror that George W. Bush declared in 2001 (in which he included the Philippines as one of three fronts, the other two being Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa) may feel to America like a bad dream that is dragging on too long, but empires have come and gone during the dream of Jolo and its surrounds. The War on Terror is nothing new in the Philippines. It’s more a state of nature.
Across the face of the sun
I still don’t fully understand The Transit of Venus, which I suspect is why I will keep returning to it throughout my life. It has been fascinating to observe, in other writers’ responses, how often they remark on seeing its greatness only on a second visit – often decades after first buying or reading it.