Simon Taylor

My copy of Alejandro Zambra’s Not to Read in its white card cover blue inside embossed with the logo of Fitzcarraldo Press, having taken as long as it does to push a ferryboat over a mountain, has arrived. The day of our return from Rotorua. Its translator says about

Talk–always hard to know how cheap–how dear–usually, Oh Dear –there is talk of the coming recession–“like none in our lifetime” (whose? a strange shared lifetime?)–and of the autocracies evolving from draconian measures adopted under exceptional and unprecedented circumstances. I don’t think this is the

… we have just discussed it. And together, as a team or nation or society or whatever the hell it is, we can do it! We can beat this normality back into the slimy hole from which it has once again begun to slither. Or the right off the barren promontory

but who’s counting? The return to work. The return to normality. Well, let’s not. It is as we have known for some time. Franco “Bifo” Berardi writes, is worth quoting at length, because so good: …we will never be able to return to normality ever again. Normality is

If you’re anything like me which there is no reason to suppose to be the case you are being subjected to a plethora of performative pamphleteers. You know which there is every reason to suppose the .ppt effect or the .pptx effect–not unlike the QR-code effect in being

I’m dreaming of a theatre. Another one. This one’s doing Howard Barker’s The Last Supper, so it’s called Theatre for Breakfast. But it could equally be called, as Barker called his own theatre, ‘theatre of infection.’ I have been writing that there’s only one thing