The Bed of Procrustes - a tale from the dust of Greek myth, yet one that rises from the roadside like a grim milestone marking the journey of civilisation. Procrustes, that innkeeper of cruelty, the highwayman with hospitality on his lips and butchery in his hands, offered travellers a night’s rest on his iron bed. … Continue reading The Bed of Procrustes: Where Truth Is Made to Fit
Tag: reading
The Man of the Crowd: The Ghost of the City
There are some stories that seem to have been written not on paper but directly upon the human condition, and Poe’s The Man of the Crowd is one of them. It's the story of a nameless narrator, recovering from illness, who sits in a London coffeehouse and watches the endless river of humanity pass by. At first, … Continue reading The Man of the Crowd: The Ghost of the City
Blind Pew: A Study in Terror and Vision
Newell Convers Wyeth, Blind Pew (1911).A haunting illustration for Stevenson’s Treasure Island: the blind beggar strides down the moonlit lane, stick thrust forward, half-frail and half-fearsome - fate itself tapping towards us. In another life, back at home, whenever something went awry - a cup chipped, a tool gone missing, a mystery mischief no one … Continue reading Blind Pew: A Study in Terror and Vision
Down Below: Leonora Carrington’s Descent into the Furnace of the Mind
Leonora Carrington didn’t so much write a memoir as vomit out an apocalypse. Down Below isn’t autobiography in the polite sense, with polite sentences arranged like cutlery for an afternoon tea. It is, rather, the table turned over, the crockery smashed, and the cutlery embedded in the wallpaper. This slim, feverish account of her psychotic … Continue reading Down Below: Leonora Carrington’s Descent into the Furnace of the Mind
The Man in the High Castle: History as Hallucination
Some novels ask ‘What if?’ and there are novels that ask ‘What is?’ Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle manages the perverse trick of doing both at once. Set in a United States divided between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan after an Axis victory in the Second World War, it ought to … Continue reading The Man in the High Castle: History as Hallucination
Wording 