I READ IN A BOOK BETTER THAN ME of the Schöne Müllerin theme of unattainable beauty and also that green turtles are the source of turtle soup. How ridiculous, I think. How preposterous, I think. I am not a green turtle, I am Rind. M, and I am the source of Rind. M Soup. I am the well from which Rind. M soup will be brought up by the bucket.

Everywhere I walk I see it, soup with hands and feet and arms splashing along the circumference of the wind, and I splash myself around and rent a test kitchen by the canal and purchase on credit the biggest hand built ceramic bowl I can find and have it carried in by twenty burly figures who place it on a purpose built hob I’ve destroyed the polished white tile floor of the test kitchen to have installed.

The hob has the sharp mocking angles of a gargoyle making a gurgle and the bowl atop it is fat and round and large and suggests with its round fat largeness that it’s the entrance to another realm. A wooden ladder with the texture of dry clay leans against the bowl and I climb up to the rim and pour, one pail after another, filtered water in – a wannabe Sisyphus with a choice.

It takes seven days and seven nights for me to fill the bowl up enough, and it takes even longer for the water to start to simmer. Soup isn’t energetic.

The heat coming from the bowl and gargantuan hob – the air all around it shimmering, dancing – is spreading and attracting attention, children from the nearby hamlet approach wishing to play, to take photos, to hit their mobiles on the sides of the bowl and laugh at the sounds generated and glass cracked. I want to avoid children getting hurt and adults shouting at me, so I bury a small sign with a spike in the bottom in a patch of threadbare grass between the test kitchen and canal that reads: Danger. Soup being made.

I had to remove the roof of the test kitchen, of course, mainly due to the size of the soup bowl but also to prevent condensation forming like the seedlings of water stalagmites from the steam rising from my soup, so now the test kitchen really isn’t so much in a building but merely protected by the walls of a once-upon-a-building. The lip of the bowl rises above the walls which once wore a hat, the naked tops of which flicker as fairy lights diagnosed with frenetic energy would from the wires I have snipped like defunct cupids’ bows.

The simmering water in the bowl resembles the ocean boiling as our sun turns against us, a primordial ooze letting its moisture cook away and leaving vacant holes in its moveable mass, and I start off small. I clip and drop my toe and fingernails into the bubbling. They are swallowed, winks in a hall of blinks, and the soup spits haphazardly. Exuberantly. I tape several bin bags to my ankles, wrists, and neck and run up and down the canal in clear sight of the children my sign has done nothing to prevent gathering, children who stand all wide eyed and open mouthed with giant spoons in hands that clench with a peekaboo kind of hunger. I run in front of them as an auditioning jester would and fill my bin bags with salty sweat from the depths of me and then I drain them with some difficulty into the soup where it collects like oil on water before sinking but leaving behind as tokens small flakes of white on the surface which persist and, I hope, catch the eyes of passing birds above.

Viscous is what Rind. M soup is gently becoming as I hurl in lumps of thick yellow and green earwax and snot, rolling the materials into sticky balls between my finger and thumb and flicking them into the soup to maximise flavour and personality. Colourful is what Rind. M soup smells like as I let my urine splay in an amber arc into its centre for I am the figure piece of a broken down fountain, scraping out and tossing lumps of my faeces after the arc too – for I am too a deprived living statue merely masquerading as a centre piece – where they bob and float, fibrous, until the heat proves too much for even the sturdy sword of fibre and they fall back into the embryonic materials they were formed from.

My warning sign seems to be shifting forward, or the world it is implanted in does, for the children seem larger than before, individual model villages distorting what makes a model a ‘model’, and they hit their giant spoons against the giant spoons standing shoulder to shoulder with them and the sound produced is that of a great armoured horse trudging on weary but cobbled stones towards an unsightly war.

I take a cheese grater thoughtfully provided by a cupboard in the test kitchen to the rough skin on my knees and elbows and let my essence drift like the gentlest of snow down into the soup. I scrape at the back of my throat for material where my voice seems to come from and when I gather enough of something, roll it into a white ball and add that too. I am naked for my clothes have been minced as small as possible and tossed too into the soup, and I sit on the lip of the bowl – the chimney of a well lived house, letting steam and smoke rise through me – and masturbate furiously, once, twice, thrice, on and on and let what is produced in progressively smaller quantities fall in leaps and bounds into my soup, where it breaks away in solidarity.

The distant floor outside the flickering walls of the test kitchen is made of a type of hyper-compressed mud somehow both dry and moist, and I splay my arms like wings of desire and leap off of the side of the bowl to fall upon it, landing on my chest so firmly I am winded and, after gagging for a while, cough up a thick clear jelly which I gather, the eyes of the waiting children swallowing my every movement, and throw into the soup too where it floats, a ghost that finally finishes the business and sinks out of sight.

I bleed for my soup, sticking each of my finger and thumb tips with a sharp and thin knife – also provided by the bountiful test kitchen – and feel my pulse as a tribal beat inciting frenzy and hedonism in the individual cells of my blood which dance provocatively out of me and drop towards the future. My head has been shaved, of course, and the skin there feels as soft and furry as a tennis ball ready to be what it is as I gather and dip the coarse mound of my locks beneath the surface of the soup where individual strands float, spaghetti refusing to expand.

My soup looks marvellous at this point and the sight of it whips me like a cream, filling me with air and transformation, the ochre light emitting from it getting stronger as even more of me goes into it.

The photographs of family members and close friends; the hand drawn maps; the personally sewn ponchos; the postcard collection; the top hat I’ve always wanted to buy; the hamster I wish I’d never brought; the 8.5-centimetre ball bearing I kept throughout my childhood in a red canvas backpack locked in a bright pink metal replica of an American school locker; the keys to my flat; the spare tyre to the car my grandad had; the tune I can sometimes never get out of my head; the dandelion I always want to pick; the dildo I let get lost in my hair; the second shadow I suspected was attempting to overthrow my primary shadow; the surname my great grandmother lost; the sunglasses I’ve never worn; the pint glasses I’ve stolen; the humdrum mornings blending cyclically into one; the Sunday nights I fear; the orange brick I wish to become; the tuna cans I forsake for environmental reasons; the cigarette butts I’ve gathered; the stones I have licked; the apples too soft and too hard and too perfect I’ve eaten; the pears; the unicycle learned; the bike never ridden; the small blue tea plate I once tossed beneath a skip; the forklift I sat in once; the stained glass window I lost an hour inside; the cobbles I sometimes trip on; the other cobbles I sometimes catch myself on; the rivers drunk; the rivers swam; the ponds I can remember; the carrots I’ve consumed, and the peppers and cucumbers and grapes too; the microwave I remember best; the rice cooker I brought as a present and never gifted; the maggot I saw once and then lost sight of.

My soup is cooking nicely; I can smell a diminished version of myself rising from the surface of its brilliant depths, and the smell floats around like smoke with visible cartoon glee while the waiting children, who have trodden on my warning sign, circle the bowl like a ring around a finger.

I am thoroughly worn out and feel I have nothing left to give. I take an extra-long ladle and dip it into the depths of my soup and taste myself and wait to feel a clicking into place, one of satisfaction and desire meeting in the middle, an ouroboros eating itself forever. But I have not attained beauty, and my soup tastes like a mixture of water, rust, and the roof of a mouth after a night of heavy drinking.

I throw the ladle away; I’m not afraid of attaining. I stretch my limbs out and dance on the lip of the bowl with the abandon of a banana that knows it will eventually be chopped up for nothing but porridge, but not yet, for I am the giraffe seeking to leap over the moon and I dance on the lip and then I dive from the lip and I enter my soup. Rind. M in Rind. M soup. Rind. M soup drawing all strength from Rind. M’s muscles and drawing too Their essence, which is a spindly and white thing seeping from Their pores.

The ochre light becomes coruscant as They are cooked and though the soup is bubbling loudly, flavouring itself like an automation in motion, all that can be heard are the dull clinking claps of spoon bellies on spoon bellies and a voice shouting: “We can share. We can all share!”

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IS BEING A SON ONLY THE DISAPPOINTING ANTITHESIS to being a daughter? The sole merit in trying to become a girlchild opposite, trying to carve oneself into that particular inverse shape, one of a man a father might finally find able to adore? This is what being a son is for Whalefall protagonist Jay Gardiner, who values his father’s approval as he values the oxygen in his tank within the belly of the beast. He might breathe unselfconscious and self-assured if only he could stop crying, stop flinching, stop being so humiliatingly, irredeemably limp. He has learned to experience his own tenderness as a bodily defect, his identity embodied defect, a softness under the skin that no amount of self-discipline can cauterise. ‘Jay detects no masculinity inside himself. He clings to his mother’s apron, literally. He has a blankie. He’s too small. Skinny as a girl.’ (Kraus, Whalefall, p. 34) — something sickening in the littleness of this child, in his striking self-belief that his very constitution is an affront to the man who made himself from himself, from his own über-virile means. He suspects his father might have known how to love another daughter — with long hair and giggly-toothed grins and fragranced pigtails dangling in front of his shark-sharp mouth — but can only bear to love a son made harder than himself; that somewhere in the inscrutable machinery of paternal achievement, Jay has been assembled incorrectly, the manual nowhere to be found (‘I can fix this, I can fix you’, [Whalefall, 2026] blunt knife held to baby-boy forehead; matching manmade tattoos).

Jay is a crybaby, and he knows this; the knowledge burns his insides like a deep breath held too long, the private humiliation of a schoolyard-scrape enough to collapse a lung. His grief is embarrassingly physiological as well as affective, something that surges up in his throat, floods his face, makes a mess of his mouth before he can swallow it back (bubbling up like blood gushed passed teeth and tongue). His suffering holds no dignity or promise of maturation; he is the same child he was his first hour on earth, he always will be: ‘The day you were born, you cried so hard you popped a little hole in your lung.’ (Whalefall, 2026) Dragged kicking and screaming from the womb, already guilty of excess. Burdensome. Too loud, too limp, too easily hurt.

Austin Abrams makes this shame horribly, brilliantly embodied. His screams splinter into thin, shrill, high-pitched cries that seem to come from somewhere younger than his own body. Raw, ragged, humiliating noises: the snot-thick and strangled sounds of sheer animal panic, a body abandoned of composure. Indeed, there is something almost infantile in their pitch, in the catches and the cracks — something unbearable and indecent in watching Jay hear himself making them. Inside the enormous, muscular cavern of the whale, with flesh pressing in and air dwindling to a desperate ration, its dark, gunmetal body becomes a thing of ruptures and disgorgement, mimicking en masse the swollen, carcinomatous coughs of mesothelioma. The horror is wet and close, crushing and intimate: blood in the water, the slickness of viscera, the frantic labour of a body within another body. ‘Phone call from Mom. Jay zones out. Rotten organs inside him too.’ (Kraus, Whalefall, p. 296) Jay has always carried his father’s internal injuries in his own marrow. Grief, too, has a body. It putrefies. It festers. It makes a home of the soft places we have never been touched, and ourselves refuse to touch.

And then there is the traumatogenic age regression. The regulator: that small, constant, palliative instrument through which Jay draws his breath, relies upon for comfort and calm, keeps him buoyant, keeps him alive. Close-ups of biting and teething and tonguing, mouth working around a dummy in wordless, wet little babbles to nobody. It occupies a role almost obscene in its tenderness: a pacifier for a full-grown boy, a substitute for the soothing he has never been able to ask his father to doll out. From within the core of the whale, he calls out for Dad, later for Daddy. Squeaks it out, pops a lung. Under pressure, under terror, under the catastrophic sensation of being swallowed whole, Jay retreats towards and into the smallest version of himself, wet-eyed baby on his bed wanting Dad. He can no longer try to be a man; he just wants to be someone’s boy.

‘I’m not worth you.’
(Yes you are Daddy)
‘I’m going to screw you up.’
(Of course you are Daddy)
‘But maybe I can teach you things.’
(I am sure you will Daddy)

[…]

‘I’ll make sure of that. I’ll give you all the tools.’
(I do not want tools Daddy)
‘So when it matters, Son, you’ll know what to do.’
(Daddy all I want is you)

(Kraus, Whalefall, p. 362)

Aadoration misshapen and intermittently warm, tangled with humiliation, housed inside the very hands that inflicted the hurt, lodged inside the throat of a sorry, hiccuping, blur-blind animal-boy. Jay’s father is not absolved by his affection, nor does his cruelty make that affection unreal. How terrible, that a wound can become a household custom — an alarm clock, a bonding ritual, a lesson learned. How a child comes to recognise love by the shape of the pain in the palm and the point that accompanies it. This, then, is the terrible arithmetic of the abusive parent: adding tenderness on top of years of terror and arriving at a sum one can live with (‘I don’t know how to fix this, and I’m scared of you’, Whalefall, 2026). The damaging and the damaged and the scraps of attention you find in the difference. Jay doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t want to visit the empty casket of his Daddy’s grave, doesn’t want to drive up home from his borrowed life at college to address the father-shaped hole in his family. There is a peculiar selfishness to refusing grief: the desire to preserve the dead exactly as we need them, to keep our resentments pristine, to withhold forgiveness as the last vestige of self-possession they cannot take from us. Jay must learn to carry his father forward without letting his father continue to carry him under. There is no purity nor final absolution in this grief, whereby every injury becomes worthwhile and petrified into gemstone. There is only the awful, ordinary fact that love can and must survive its own failures and ineptitudes, and that a child can spend his entire life starving sick for something he has, in breadcrumbs, already been dished out. Where does the body put all that unspent care? Can you locate the ache when it’s pressed upon? What do you miss about him and why is it everything?

Jay is born a second time from the whale’s wet, lightless innards, almost Aphrodisian in his expulsion though there is nothing clean or immaculate about this birth. He comes out bloodied and raw and raped. Raised gashes ladder his neck and score his jugular; acid brands bloom across his flesh; his ruptured eardrums a strange, Sassoonian echo of the ecstasy of a body finally broken past purpose; his right hand is gone. The soft-lunged, weeping body he once despised has been made into a grotesque reliquary of its own unwilling and unwanted endurance. There is no miraculous conversion of mutilation into manhood. He is still Jay, frightened and bereaved and soft in all the places that matter, tender as a contusion thumbed too hard, a wound worried to weeping. Still a welp. Still a crybaby. Still nineteen and nauseous with the same sick little flutter in his stomach, the same tears caught between his throat and his eyes. Still waiting behind all that scar tissue for Daddy to come wake him for fishing.

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i. Fickleness

SUBSTACK IS A BRILLIANT PLATFORM, but it’s far too easy to change your name and logo.

I’ve taken advantage of this feature too many times - initially, I wrote under Storefronts and Subways, a line I particularly liked from a poem I wrote (incapabilities - now available in Inframince Journal). I published my first collection of short stories with that link, storefrontsubway.com (now defunct) on the back cover, and since then I've had to add in a redirect every time I've changed my publication name.

I didn’t like how long Storefronts and Subways was to say, so I went in a different direction; first weurd, then paraphenatic, both words I'd entirely made up, one a misspelling of ‘word’, the other a sort of portmanteau of paraphernalia and fanatic - some clever wordplay, I thought. I briefly owned both weurd.com and paraphenatic.com, and both times I thought I'd figured out the name I'd build my brand on.

Well, neither weurd nor paraphenatic lasted very long, because, you know, they’re not real words. The problems were especially obvious with paraphenatic - it’s hard to say, hard to remember how to spell, and Google autocorrects you to paraphernalia if you look it up. So, once again, I went in a different direction.

Next came Desolation, Blue, and I stuck with this one for a while. It was a combination of my two favourite Bob Dylan songs; Tangled Up in Blue, and Desolation Row. I thought it was sufficiently pretentious, and I held onto this name for a while. But then, again, I had doubts; the name was too long, like Storefronts and Subways, and I really liked the one-word Substack names, because it just seemed so much more official.

So, Desolation, Blue became Desolatia, another word I made up, and I won’t insult you by belabouring the point - you see where this is going.

Eventually, I gave up and resigned myself to writing under my real name (though even this came with some variance - luca’s substack vs Luca Zani). This has been fine, especially for building a personal brand, but I've always wanted something bigger from writing and building a presence on Substack. I’ve been envious of the bustling literary magazines, collecting the brightest voices and the most brilliant literature from this community, building something bigger than themselves.

ii. The final rebrand

This is what I'm hoping to achieve with Critick, my biggest - and final - rebrand. I really have made it official this time. You can follow Critick on LinkedIn, or find our magazine listing on Chill Subs. You’ll see our other promo here, or in the Critick subscriber chat, and in time we hope to have a separate section (and maybe podcast?) for paid subscribers.

But more than branding, or audience growth, my goal with Critick is to collate the best writing I've seen on this website, and from the wider internet, in one place. We’re offering poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, interviews, and more - every medium you can think of, because it doesn’t make sense to me that you’d constrain the offerings of a magazine in that area.

In time, we’ll be running themed submission calls, and emphasising certain mediums over others, but for the time being - while we get on our feet - we want anything and everything (as long as it’s good). Send us your experimental poetry, your niche essays, your interviews with feline companions. If we like the writing, we’ll publish it.

We want experimental, provocative works that question our cultural conditions. Whether it’s fiction, poetry or an essay, your work should challenge us as readers to see things differently, to assess things with a new heuristic. We want to read (and publish) works that push us, challenge us, occasionally offend us (one can achieve this without being racist, misogynistic, hateful).

If you’re considering submitting a review, ensure that the cultural artefact you are reviewing is of a similar kind of importance / provocation. We’re interested in reading your well-formed opinions on these transgressive and interesting works of art.

As with every constitution, there ought to be some boring housekeeping, so here it is:

iii. The boring stuff

I’m Luca Zani. I’m the editor of Critick, but I'm also the sole employee. We don’t have a poetry editor, an editor-at-large, or any staff writers, and for the moment we don’t need any. I monitor the submissions inbox by myself, and I aim to respond to all submissions within a week, maximum two.

You can read our full submissions guidelines here, but to be honest there’s not much more to it. Send us everything and anything. We don’t pay, because right now we don’t make any money (that’s where you come in - a paid subscription helps keep Critick above water, and allows us to pursue larger goals like the podcast and extra supplements), but we’re also entirely free to submit to.

We’ll promote your work, link whatever you want to plug on the post, and, if you’re on Substack (and chances are, you are), add you to our recommendations list of Critick contributors.

All we ask is that you subscribe to keep Critick going, and if you like the stuff we publish that much, consider throwing us a couple pounds of your hard-earned cash. We won’t waste it.

If you’d like to submit to Critick, and you really should, you can email me directly at critickmag@gmail.com. You can also find the link to submit on the magazine homepage.

Thank you all, very much, for indulging in my latest venture. I swear it to you that this one will last, because all else aside, I seriously can’t be bothered to design another logo.

I am beyond grateful for everyone who has already submitted their work to Critick, and those of you who choose to donate a small portion of your immense wealth to the magazine. Keep reading, and I hope you’ll consider becoming part of the work yourself!

All the very best,

Luca Zani

Editor-in-Chief (isn’t that fancy!)

ONE OF THE SADDEST COMPROMISES of the AI-ridden age is that everything becomes about AI in some way, whether in the artefact itself or in the critical eye. Everything you see or read seems to point to AI, and if it’s not explicitly about our new gods, it’s in the subtext, in gentle nods and slight cinematic shifts that make it difficult not to think of Claude, or ChatGPT, or even Copilot. AI is everywhere, and it does everything, and it would seem, now, that everything is about AI.

Clayface is not, on the surface, about AI. It’s a body-horror movie, the first of its kind from the acclaimed superhero juggernaut, DC Studios. Clayface follows Matt Hagen (or rather, Matt Hagen is Clayface), a movie star who undergoes a radical microbiological facial surgery to maintain his job-finding good looks. As these microbes make Hagen more powerful, they begin to spiral out of control (you know what’s coming) and eventually dominate Hagen’s appearance and abilities.

The allusions to AI in Clayface are immediate, and obvious in the premise of the movie itself: a formless power, capable of morphing its appearance into anything the user desires, which eventually escapes containment and consumes the user whole. Read this way, Clayface is a fairly on-the-nose parable about the dangers of vanity, genetic modification, and - of course - AI usage, especially on such superficial matters. Hagen’s shapeshifting abilities act as a physical allegory for the rising prevalence of AI deepfakes and artificially-generative imagery. As Matt’s powers develop, he is able to "wear" different faces, and seamlessly mimic other people to spread confusion. This formlessness plays directly into modern anxieties about identity theft and our society's inability to trust what it sees.

The film also explores the dangers of an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) outgrowing its creator. Early on, Dr. Corr - Hagen’s cooperative surgeon - insists she has the AI and its nanocells completely under control, but this turns out to be typical human overconfidence. The nanobots soon begin operating unpredictably in response to Hagen's emotions and injuries, eventually taking on a life of their own as his biology is entirely rewritten by their iterative code.

The allusions to AI appear at a glance, but deeper in the thematic core of Clayface are more contemporary and cutting-edge concerns. It’s easy to draw a line from Hagen’s obsession with, and dependence on, his appearance to the modern phenomenon of looksmaxxing, where young people on the internet continue to undertake increasingly harmful methods of making their jawlines stronger, pushing their chins forward, slimming their faces, and so on.

Clayface warns us against the dangers of pursuing such goals, especially when they become ends in themselves, and we’re focused more on bettering our looks for the sake of looking better, and not for any career or sexual success. This mindset, Clayface identifies, is fertile ground for delusion and radicalisation, and the film does well to shake us by our shoulders and remind us that extreme cosmetic modification, complete AI-dependence, and an obsession with artificial perfection are not normal, and nor are they desirable. Observing Matt Hagen’s unenviable situation, we are reminded again, forcefully, of how good we have it - and what a shame it would be to hand that over to the technocratic overlords of tomorrow.

Clayface, for what is essentially a debut horror, is an extraordinarily didactic film. It is, of course, a decent horror, with all the trimmings as standard; wonderful cinematography, stock characters, thoughtful scriptwriting. Where it really excels is as an overview of our current moment - the AI bubble, the looksmaxxing craze, the superficiality bull-run. More than anything, the film is an effective confrontation of the audience, a telling-off of sorts; it’s a demonstration of the pitfalls we’re racing towards, and a plain warning against such ‘progress’.

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I’M NOT VERY GOOD AT CHESS. My peak Elo, the rubric of strength that chathletes (proprietary) lord over each other, is around 1050, placing me in the 83rd percentile of all players. So I’m better than you, on average, but not ‘strong’ by any real chess enthusiast’s standard.

But boy am I enthusiastic about the beautiful sport of chess. For the amount I play I really should be better, but I play ambiently, aesthetically, on sound and feel, often playing to lose, shuffling the pieces around in satisfyingly familiar ways, ways that give me the self-induced illusion that I know what I’m doing. In chess the athlete can lie to himself to his own advantage. I remind myself of the robust reasoning behind my tactical series of moves. I pity my opponent, caught unawares in my wooden trap, writhing around like a wasp hit with water, backed into a corner and forced to give up his inventory. I have forgotten that knights can move backwards. I have lost the game.

But chess is no game. A game is flippant, and uninteresting, and one does not give one’s all to engendering self-success in the matter. None of this is true of chess, the sport. In chess one is stretched mentally and physically (don’t believe me? Watch players try to hit the clock in a time scramble) to their limits, taken out to deep and murky waters, and made to fight for their survival. Only in a game (confusing) of chess can you watch a man sit still for three hours and suddenly burst into tears. Or fall to his knees in the sheer jubilation of having outwitted and outfoxed a fellow genius, from a completely even starting position. Chess is as fair as it gets, the same pieces lined up in the same configuration, a dance of call and response, push and pull, action and reaction.

Chess is, in many ways, no different from sex. Chess is as Faulkner put it, the ‘minute clicking of little wheels’ that makes up a life. And chess is also love.

The greatest players in the world see chess in sequences of 10 or 20 moves, whirling simulations showing various possible futures. I don’t play chess this way, so calculated and determined. My chess-playing is evocative of the virtuoso pianist, or perhaps 2018 LeBron James - a complete flow state, a synchrony and synonymity with the pieces at hand; I don’t play chess to win, or to improve, or with any Kantian imperative. I play chess, categorically, or rather chess plays me, and together we carry to term a rhythmic, iridescent brainchild.

Chess is a ferociously effective prophylactic. Whenever I feel myself leaning into vice, I reach for the board to soothe my wanting mind. Sometimes one does not need to go so far as to play the game; to watch others do it is enough. Occasionally, in what is known in chess circles as the ‘magnanimous cuckception of grandmasters’, I will watch titled players watch other titled players’ matches. In every case I learn something, because it is impossible to interact with chess and not learn something. From chess I have learned to balance a relationship with the demands of a working life. I have learned graciousness and care. I have learned to call out injustice where I see it. I have learned to fix a tire. This and more chess has taught me.

Chess is tripartite, like strong government, or narrative: Opening, Middlegame, and Endgame. Through each stage the players dance, a step into enemy territory met with a tentative retreat, before the roles are reversed, and he who backed down now charges forth, in a blinding light of adherence to the truth, the player’s own truth which he has calculated and by which he firmly stands, willing to stake his life on his claim that this plan, his plan, is superior beyond all the rest.

In the Opening each player seeks to establish confidence in his plan, approval in the other (by way of their proportionately careful response) and prospective prospects. A successful opening involves a dalliance with repetition, before the players sacrifice their respective point men and begin the merciless annexation of the other’s territory. A good chess player, like a goalkeeper, takes up space to the dissatisfaction of his enemy.

Where the opening might be a romantic bolero of preconceived notions, the Middlegame is a cerebral, edgy breakdance. Here the players poke and prod at the nerves of each other, noticing always in every case and never forgetting not even one time not even when it means they dip below their 600 Elo blitz rating even though they genuinely are 1050 rapid that knights can move backwards. They shuffle here and there, never so far away as not to be dangerous, but just out of mind, until one slips and falls - and they always do - and like a shark my opponent smells blood in the water.

The Endgame is not like any dance you have ever seen. It is a gladiatorial, brutal, violent series of captures, the resulting population of which can only be one. Here each player races to calculate the fecundity of their structures, and the necessary king moves (often dormant up to now) to adjust the position in their favour. There are great Endgame players, just as there are great Opening players, and there are some, not many, but some nonetheless, who can do both.

It will come as no surprise to you now, dearest chreader (proprietary), that I am one of those unicorns. With my sparkling horn I conduct, from start to finish, the waltz between myself and opponent. I see the polyvalence of chess and with open arms I index its totality, for there is no greater way to show that you love something than to understand it.

Checkmate.

THE YEAR IS 2365. It’s Thursday, the day your book club meets. You’re reading some 21st-century classic, because you’re an old-fashioned, anachronistic kind of group that thinks nothing good was written since those late-early-pre-AI guys back in the 2020s and 2030s. You reach for your legally nameless e-reader - the standard issue model - and open the silicon cover (this one’s designed like an old Penguin paperback cover!) to discover the battery icon blinking, condescendingly, at you. No problem, you think, I'll just charge it up. A few seconds later it’s coughing into life, but you find yourself in a much deeper hole - you’ve run out of ReadIts, the proprietary currency that converts USD into an equivalent pages-to-read allowance. No book club for you today; you’ll have to wait until your usage limits reset next week.

In recent years, the boom of audiobooks, podcasts, Kindles, and other paperless reading practices has reached new heights. Given their rapid increase in popularity, we might ask whether these new modes of reading influence, corrupt, or otherwise change our literary habits. How might these various modalities affect our consumption of what is, at its core, the same story?

We have to begin by asking the question – what is it to read a story? Can a story come in any form? Does the form change the story at all? It certainly is the case that nowadays, stories are available in a plethora of mediums – sometimes, the same story comes in paperback, audiobook, cinematic, and musical form, and you can, if you wish, experience it in all of these mediums all at the same time. The options for the avid, plugged-in reader nowadays, it seems, are plentiful, perhaps so much so as to induce a kind of literary agoraphobia.

There are a few clear differences between the traditional paperback and modern digital media. The feature set of online reading is vast and often over-determined – we don’t need a book with Bluetooth capabilities! Though some features are useful, such as negating the need for a reading light, the digital literary experience is vastly different from the timeless simplicity of the paperback. However, there is something grounding and authentic about the streamlined, paper feel of an old book. Here we find the first real upsetting of the online reading experience.

Books are often thought of as an escape from the algorithm, or perhaps from the stresses of everyday life. This is, in part, because a book is a one-dimensional object; when the only thing you have in your bag is a copy of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, you can only read Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Evident as it is, I think this is key to the cathartic experience of reading – you focus your attention on just one thing, get lost in a single story, and do all that mental transportation without looking at a single screen. This is what the e-reader ignores about the experience of reading literature.

The e-reader presents a Wi-Fi-connected, ever-present library of every work of literature written by our species, available for purchase. This completely neglects the one-dimensionalism of what a book is supposed to be. It treats reading as an act of efficiency, focusing on the words alone, and so long as the words match up, it’s the same as having the physical book, right?

I disagree. I think that the fickleness of the e-reader damages the resilience of the reader, makes us less likely to stick with a challenging story, and makes it hard to commit to just reading. That is what reading, even if it must be dressed up in technological garments, should be about. It should be about incentivising just reading, not trying to turn the literary experience into a subscription model run for profit. Businesses need to make money to survive, and the literary business is no different, but this must not come with damage to the habit of reading itself.

Audiobooks and podcast-series are no different. Technology transforms the literary experience into something hands-free, allowing you to ‘read’ – or consume the story – while running, doing the dishes, or working. This is another corporate misunderstanding of what the act of reading achieves, again treating stories as things to be completed, ticked off and added to the ‘read library’ as quickly and efficiently as possible. Why would you want to be doing anything else while reading? Isn’t the point of reading to be distracted from the outside world, absorbed in something fantastical?

Of course, there is a benefit to audiobooks. For those who find reading paper text inaccessible, audiobooks allow them to consume their favourite stories without compromise. This is, of course, a positive addition to the enterprise of literature – promoting the global inclusivity of reading and story is always a benefit. However, in the vast majority of cases, it seems that audio-literature is made to be consumed alongside other activities, and this is, some might argue, a corrosion of literary habits.

In the technological era, it comes as no surprise that reading literature has been swamped by a plentiful supply of digital options. Clever, feature-rich, and efficient as they are, I don’t believe any of these mediums are going to completely overthrow the literary experience, or replace the form entirely. In the end, we ask ourselves, could anything truly replace the singular weight of a hardcover book, or the fragile, translucent sheet? Our capacity for sustained, undivided attention is increasingly rare, and increasingly necessary, and literature is one of the few places left where it is still being asked of us. Of course, the question is whether we let it keep asking.

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THE MAJORITY OF YOUR YOUTUBE recommended feed is how-to-reduce-your-screen-time content.

How I cut my screen time by 80%. How to cure brainrot. How to make each day so fun you don’t have time to scroll. Our no-phone road trip. 10 ways to stop ruining your life. The ideas we lose by morning. A notebook to cure the infinite scroll.

All real videos. All with the ability to be genuinely useful. And you watch them, absorb them, feel something shift — actionable advice, you think. You put your phone down. You pick up a journal, or a novel, or you just sit there for a while in the quiet of your own room. An hour passes. You think: I’m cured. I’m detoxing. I’m fixing things.

And then the dopamine the algorithm gave you, from a different kind of doomscrolling, fades, and you return to baseline.

Now you’re just bored. The movies on your watchlist look uninteresting. The book doesn’t hold your attention, and besides, it’s too dark to read anyway. The light switch is all the way over there. You’re bored.

But you can read your phone screen in the dark. And it’s right next to you, and you’ve been focused, analogue for a couple of hours, so you deserve this. So you go back. Instagram, TikTok, whatever else you have. Photos, if it comes to it. And then you hit a real problem: the scroll itself becomes boring, the physical movement of the thumb itself starts to feel unrewarding. In retrospect, this is the moment to put the phone face-down and go to sleep. But in your half-awake, dopamine-depleted state, you won’t take boredom for an answer.

The App Store beckons. Here is a whole new frontier of stimulation, untested and full of promise. Now you’re scrolling for things to scroll on. Games. Habit-tracking apps and photo editors. Financial helpers and calorie counters. A catalogue of exciting sign-up pages and in-app purchases. You download two or three. Test them out. Beat a couple of levels of a game you won’t remember the name of in the morning. Pay £12.99 for a year’s subscription to a stretching app, the fourth one you’ve seen, because it’s 75% off and that’s too good to pass up — never mind that you’re already in bed and it would be strange to start doing yoga on the floor at this hour. You’ll make use of it in the morning. You’ll remember.

And then the crash. The login confirmation email that pushes you over the edge. The sudden clarity of what you’ve just done, the bleak comedy of it. You delete the apps. You forget to cancel the subscription. In a year’s time you’ll see the renewal charge, curse yourself, and commit to at least getting your money’s worth — you’ll stretch in the morning. You will.

The next day you’re in productivity no-man’s land: committed to improvement, but carrying the staleness of last night’s scroll. You open YouTube. You watch the first screen-time essay you can find. And the cycle begins all over again.

None of this is weakness. If anything, the problem is that you intend too well. You absorb the advice, you feel the conviction, you take the first steps, and all of it is sincere. What goes missing is the follow-through, and willpower is no help, because willpower isn’t what’s holding you back.

Psychologists call this phenomenon the belief-behaviour gap: the persistent, measurable distance between what people say they value and what they actually do. The platforms are not neutral surfaces on which we choose, freely, to spend too much time. They are systems optimised, at extraordinary expense and sophistication, to keep us returning — to make the path of least resistance lead always back to the feed. Against this, a YouTube video about dopamine detoxing is well-intentioned but structurally mismatched. It’s deep in enemy territory, and though it is valiant in its message, it is smothered by its surroundings.

This is why the detox content is so easy to consume and so difficult to act on. Watching a video about reducing screen time is itself a screen-time activity. It gives you the feeling of having done something — the warm glow of a good intention actualised, the brief dopamine of resolution — without requiring you to change anything about the structure of your life.

What actually changes behaviour is not conviction but added friction. The people who successfully reduce their phone use tend not to be the most motivated; they’re the ones who made it mechanically harder to pick the phone up — left it in a different room, bought an alarm clock, put it in a drawer before dinner. They change the environment rather than trying to overpower it with resolve. This is boring advice. It doesn’t make for a compelling video essay. It doesn’t give you the satisfying feeling of insight, or the hit of a new idea landing. It does, however, work.

The cycle persists not because we’re all weak, but because the solution is unavailable in the place we’ve learned to keep looking for it. You won’t find what you’re after in the App Store. The next subscription, the latest video, the shiny new UI of a bestselling app isn’t going to get you off the phone and out, into the real world. You know this. You’ve always known this. The trick is that knowing it is not enough — and the great big algorithmic overlords know that knowing it is not enough, and they are counting on exactly that.

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THE MODERN SUPERHERO FIGHTS a very different set of battles from the laser-eyed cartoonist of the previous generation. Pattinson’s Batman, the latest Thor, Keaton’s Birdman (if you can count it), and now the Corenswet Superman. A line of heroes, just as muscular and powerful, but fighting villains of a much different form than the typical green malevolent; those of inner purpose, their emotional childhoods, and the court of public opinion.

Having moved on from coldly banishing whatever threat faces the entire planet and flying off into the sunset, the protectors of our world are sunk by problems far more sensitive and tender. Pattinson’s Batman struggles to reconcile his public perception, the duties and responsibilities he feels bestowed on him by the people of Gotham, with his inner sense of inadequacy.

The Thor of Marvel’s most recent efforts has become something of a big, muscly laughing stock, reduced to a slobbery which renders him daunting now only due to his cheese-dust-encrusted fingers.

Michael Keaton’s Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance, sits in a different class, even among these more considered superhero movies. Riggan Thompson, a has-been superhero actor haunted by his past role as Birdman, battles a debilitating insecurity, a fractured sense of identity, the burden of his past fame, and a longing for artistic validation. Birdman, not so much a superhero movie as an exposé of life after fame, sets a precedent and draws a blueprint for the modern superhero; strong and dynamic, but ponderous and sensitive all the same.

David Corenswet’s Superman fits somewhere in the middle. Recognisably heroic, Superman flies, zaps lasers out of his eyes, catches buildings, and all the rest. He’s not the laughable bum that Thor has been reduced to, but he’s not a tentative, inert figure like Birdman either. Rather, Superman’s typical dynamism is shaken when he learns that his parents’ intention for his move to planet Earth was not the altruistic mission he thought it was, but far more self-interested; and in this discovery, he finds his purpose uprooted. Against this despair, Clark Kent fights his true battles in this film; celebrating his humanity, finding his purpose, and choosing, as his foster father reminds him at the end of the film, to celebrate the way he received his parents’ message, rather than their intended instructions.

The formula makes sense – for all-powerful, invincible demigods, what physical problem could possibly be as threatening as losing their purpose, or public disapproval, or feeling like they’re no longer needed?

But why at this time? As the audiences of these original films grow and mature, so too must the heroes and, in turn, their priorities. Ultimately, these superhero movies are moral lessons for children, about the triumph of good over evil, the importance of justice, and the rewards you get for doing the right thing (or the punishments you receive for trying to step out of line). And those are good lessons to teach an eight-year-old, but once that child grows up, they need to learn more sensitive lessons. So all of a sudden, Superman isn’t just showing you that it’s important to stick up for those around you, but that you have to find a purpose, and you need to be able to support yourself in that purpose, even if those around you are falling away.

Batman no longer preaches only the ill fate of those who bend the arm of the law, but that constantly showing a brave face to the world only makes you more miserable, and doesn’t work anyway. Our heroes mature in line with their audiences, so that their moral lessons remain pertinent.

The other noticeable development in these comic-book adaptations is an increased politicisation. Though it couldn’t seem to decide exactly where it stood on the matter, Superman made some explicit references to the Israel-Palestinian dispute and the imposition of the US on foreign affairs – Lex Luthor even gets caught illegally selling arms to the invading army which isn’t reportedly in US interest, in a fashion which makes it hard not to think of Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal. This is in line with a general Hollywood trend of sliding snide political remarks into its box-office hits; Mickey-17’s blatant caricature of Donald Trump, played brilliantly by Mark Ruffalo, 2023’s The Marvels’ exploration of the refugee crises and environmental exploitation, and even The Batman’s display of institutional decay and corruption.

Movies will always be a reflection of the time and space in which they were created, and to ask them to remove their political undertones would be a disservice. Ultimately, superhero stories can and will continue to inspire children with the confidence to know that their problems can be overcome. It just so happens that now, those children are grown up, and the kinds of problems they face are very different from the monsters of their childhood.

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THE UNIVERSITY YEARS, especially the first, are to be taken up with drinking, clubbing, and one-night stands. This is how it is supposed to go. I never wanted any of that, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like I was supposed to be chasing it; surrounded by eternally passing-out, salacious peers, I struggled to feel certainty in this peaceful, uneventful position I’d taken up - walks with my partner, regular journeys between here and home.

I’d settled down, not settled in to university the way everyone else seemed to.

There’s an unavoidable sense of isolation to being the odd one out, for whatever reason that abnormality may be. And so, I was happy, but constantly worried that I was missing out. This, mixed with a potent bout of homesickness to start off the year, kept me oscillating between satisfaction and desire. Burdened with the life I knew I wanted to lead, and the lives I saw around me, I had the choice of both and paradoxically, I wanted neither. Both choices felt like giving something up, condemning a different me.

My ideal image of the future was constantly in flux, great swirling pools of vague projections – two sprightly kids and a yappy dog, or dancing drunk through old town in the early hours of the morning, or competitive managerial positions in sterile law firms. I gravitated towards each future without intending on committing to any. At any given time, I felt the lack of whichever wasn’t my primary focus, but never the complete uncertainty that can only be cured by blindly giving in to one singular vision.

So, I was caught in the seams between maturing and conforming. I saw monogamy as monotony, and intoxication as immaturity.

I pitied and envied my flatmates, who were clubbing every night and had a seemingly endless rotation of friends. Of company. I wasn’t lonely, but I didn’t have the social circles they had, and that worried me. Even with my perfect home life to fall back on.

I knew that what I had then, and where I was at, was where I wanted to be in the future, but the fact that I was seemingly already there scared me. It wasn’t supposed to go this fast, was it? I was supposed to flail around for a few more years, hit the hard brick wall at 25, and turn myself around, I thought. Grow up and start taking life seriously.

So, despite having everything I knew I’d ever want from a social life, I was in search of more. I didn’t find it in the bars and clubs populated by my flatmates. I didn’t find it in the meaningless romance of mysterious men1 with undetermined last names. I was trying to fill holes already plugged, trying to cure myself of a sickness I didn’t have.

The desire for what I already had constituted no more than a repackaging. I just wanted to feel differently about my situation, to feel like I was fitting it, doing the early 20s right. I wanted to feel like one of my peers, going through same universal university experiences. I wanted stories to tell my future children, advice for them when they asked about these sensitive topics. I didn’t want to tell them I’d always been like this, the stolid parent seemingly incapable of excitement or spontaneity. I wanted to be exciting, vague, vivacious, bright. I wanted these things entirely for their own sake.

As the year went on, I envied my peers less and pitied them a lot more. I saw firsthand the self-flagellation and loathing that accompanied their Instagrammable lifestyles. The commitments to sobriety, the deep desire to find love, the sorrowful awkwardnesses of home life. I had what they all wanted, the absence that they were all drinking and smoking and partying to plug. And yet, for a while, I would’ve traded them in that lifestyle for the absence itself, given the thing they were running towards to take their shoes from them, to experience their longing manifested in social extremity.

I suppose the grass is always greener. But, that grass, their grass, withered in my mind as the year went on. I was more accepting of my lot, leaned more heavily into the equanimity of my daily life. I stopped wanting what I was told to want, and recognised the pleasantries of my days that others were so jealous of, and chased so hard with the very coping mechanisms I was, for a long time, desperate to be involved with.

It’s easy to feel like you’re missing out when, in a certain sense, you really are. Everybody around you is committed to a certain kind of lifestyle, and it’s human nature to fit in. Conformity is safety, and we’re conditioned to seek out safe spaces and groups. But, by the end of the year, I saw that I was conflating safety with regression. I was happy with the person I was growing into, and I was happy to be this person forever. Why weaken that now, just to be recovered later? Why subject myself to the masochism and the insecurity, just to fight my way out of it in a few years’ time?

I spent that year in search of something I already had. What I have is strong, and supportive, and wonderfully plain. It’s a foundation to build a life upon, despite the immediate social costs. By the end of that year, I was certain that my grass was greener, not because anything had changed, but because I’d finally stopped looking over the fence.

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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO TELL A STORY? Narrative, at its core, is concerned with change. A depression or improvement in the state of affairs. A stroke of good luck which lifts a character to better circumstances. An apocalyptic misfortune that reduces once-thriving societies to rubble. The stories we tell map change, and in the rare event that they don’t concern the change themselves, they are about the consequences of an offstage change, the reactions, the prevention, or otherwise the impacts of said fluctuations. But to experience change, we have to move forward in time. J. Miller claims that ‘It’s about time. All literature is about time.’ and indeed it seems that the marching of time is a fundamental prerequisite in this chronicling of change that we call storytelling. In order for change to occur, narrative must respect the linearity of time.

Typical fictions, in the sense of entirely text-based novels, have only to ensure that they respect the continuity of time in one dimension. The sentences and word choices which make up the stories they tell must defer to time in order to enact change, but this is all the novelist has to bear in mind. However, the outbreak of the formally-termed graphic novel in the mid-1960s (historian Richard Kyle coined the term ‘graphic novel’ in an essay featured in the November 1964 edition of the ‘Capa-Alpha’ magazine) revolutionised the way that stories interact with change, and as a result, time.

Now, the author had to respect the chronology of time in two dimensions; in the textual narratives they wrote, and further still in the illustrations which adorned their written fictions. The invention and popularisation of the graphic novel, and especially the experimental graphic novel, re-formed how our stories engage with time. To understand exactly the significance of this shift in storytelling capability, this essay will begin by first exploring what the genre of the graphic novel – and particularly the experimental graphic novel – is; its hallmarks, evolution, and conventions. After securing an understanding of the genre, this essay will explore the unique ability of the experimental graphic novel to engage with time in multiple dimensions – using a particular focus on Richard McGuire’s ‘Here’ and Fabio Moon’s ‘Daytripper’ in order to do so – before finishing by considering how this expansion in our narrative-forming abilities has impacted both the process and the reception of literature.

But what is a graphic novel? Typically, the term is considered to be distinct from a ‘comic book’, which is itself generally used for comics series and periodicals, as ‘graphic novel’ tends to relate more to a standalone story. Historically however, the two have been used interchangeably. Nevertheless, broadly we might take the graphic novel to be a series of panels or pages of illustration which accompany some kind of minimally-text based, but present, narrative in one cohesive book or production. An experimental graphic novel, such as ‘Here’ and ‘Daytripper’, is one which uses this formal method to explore, challenge, or otherwise contend with a boundary in style or content. As we shall see, both ‘Here’ and ‘Daytripper’ break conventions in form and content in order to better portray the advance of time.

Where did the graphic novel come from? The origins of the form are contentious, because as noted, the definition of the graphic novel itself is hotly contested. The Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines it as ‘a fictional story that is presented in comic-strip format and published as a book’. However, given the dispute around its definition, it is difficult to pinpoint the outbreak of the graphic novel form in world literature.

Nevertheless, ‘The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck’, dated from a Swiss publication in 1828 and published in English in 1841, is often provided as the first ‘graphic novel’ which satisfied the above definition. The wider genre didn’t begin to take shape until 1894, when Russo-French cartoonist Caran d’Ache started work on a 360-page wordless book which he termed a ‘drawn novel’, though the project was never completed. Nevertheless, this suggestion demonstrates the beginning of a renaissance in understanding that storytelling and fiction in literature might not have to take place through sentence alone. d’Ache and his co-conspirators in the ‘drawn novel’ project began a revival of the medium of storytelling through images that has its heritage in the earliest cave-drawings of Cáceres, Spain, dated from 64,000 years ago. Since that time, humans have chronicled their lives in narratives by drawing them; the written story is an innovative development in comparison, dating only back to 2100 BCE with the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’. The revival and codification of the ‘drawn’ novel by d’Ache which precipitated the ‘graphic’ takes us back to these roots, to our primitive mode of constructing narrative in order to make meaning in our lives; picture-drawing.

Moving from d’Ache into the 20th century, the graphic form exploded in formality and popularity. The launch of ‘Classics Illustrated’ in the mid-1940s, a series that adapted classic and important novels into the graphic form, greatly increased popular awareness and demand for the illustrative fiction.

By the late 60s, the form was arguably as respected in the literary field as its textual counterpart. Indeed, author John Updike addressed the Bristol Literary Society on ‘the death of the novel’, and explained that he ‘saw no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic strip novel masterpiece’. Signalled by Updike’s blessing, the graphic novel had cemented itself as a storytelling vehicle in literary culture.

So how does the experimental graphic novel utilise time in a way which is inaccessible to its textual counterparts? Unlike the author of the classic novel, the illustrator has greater control over the imaginative picture which fills the readers’ mind as they digest whatever fiction they are reading. Typically, the best the author can do is use evocative and metaphorical language. Take this passage from the supreme American novel, ‘The Great Gatsby’:

“Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must felt that he had lost the old warm world, and paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sun light was upon the scarcely created grass.”

Fitzgerald is often hailed as one of the most expressive writers in American fiction, but even in this wonderfully redolent passage, there is room for discrepancy in the readers mental-image. Questions as blatant as; what kind of leaves? What did the grass look like? Were there clouds in the sky?

These questions, whilst irrelevant to building plot or character sincerity, or indeed to the passage of time in the novel, demonstrate that with textual narrative, there is much room in the readers mind to interpret the sentences into whatever aesthetic experience they desire. This is not so much the case with the experimental graphic novel; the illustrator, by their very nature, is able to provide an exact, specific mental image to the reader – by providing a physical one. By removing the ambiguity which comes with converting text into image, the graphic novelist is better equipped to convey a specific sentiment or set of circumstances with a reduced risk of misinterpretation, especially when it comes to something as easily misunderstood and often crucial to the narrative as the passage (or lack thereof) of time.

Understanding this privilege of the graphic novel, and exactly how the illustrator wrangles time in multiple dimensions, requires a particular interrogation of the works of McGuire and Moon. Richard McGuire’s ‘Here’ is an experimental graphic memoir which takes a singular spatial location and imagines it over a broad temporal spectrum, ranging from 500,957,406,073 BC to the year 2033 AD. – what may have been a living room in 1947 was the middle of a forest in 1753, or a nuclear wasteland in 2031. The project acts as a pushback against the tyranny of time, reaching across temporal borders in order to present a singular space, in multiple moments.

In the above frame, we can note the manifold portrayal of time which McGuire achieves, by layering several temporal moments on top of a singular spatial one. In the same room in which a man might have stood, finishing a conversation in 1991, a boy might’ve posed, crouched in some kind of athletic start, in 1933. Through his illustration, on a single page McGuire shows us the versatility of time, bringing multiple moments into one cohesive unit. This can only be achieved, with the level of clarity and distinctness, through illustration. To portray the same notion in text alone seems an arduous task, and even if this magnitude of temporality could be recorded, the mental-image would be subject to distortion in the reader’s mind. Rather, it is the special privilege of the graphic novelist, by combining the dimensions of the written word with their illustrative embellishments, to so wholly and without confusion capture this particularly hazy and intricate idea of the stratification of time. “Graphic novels often concretise literary ambiguity”, as Elaine Martin pointed out, and ‘Here’ certainly does turn the mysticism of the orbit of time into a digestible graphical representation.

Similarly, Fabio Moon’s ‘Daytripper’, a ten-issue comic later converted into a cohesive book unit, plays with the tyranny of time in a way often inaccessible to classic fiction. ‘Daytripper’ follows the life of one man, Brás de Oliva Domingos, through various moments, exploring the choices he makes and the different paths his life could take. Similarly to McGuire’s work, Moon’s production plays with the passage of time and the way memories shape our understanding of the present – each ‘episode’ ends with a different version of Brás’ death, and in each he tackles one of life’s biggest questions; arising from the dead in the next ‘episode’ simply to contend with another.

In the above scene, Brás dies from a mishandled robbery, and reflects on his priorities in life – his choice to pursue his authorial desires over the relationships closest to him. However, Moon then invokes an atypical chronology by reviving, resetting, or otherwise restoring Brás in the following scenes or episodes, where he dies in a plane crash, of a heart attack, by firing squad, or indeed of old age; each one teaching him a different life lesson, each one forcing him to confront a different aspect of what it means to be a human.

In very different ways, both ‘Here’ and ‘Daytripper’ refuse to bow to the tyranny of linear time. Unlike textual narratives, they use multiple dimensions to briefly take the reader outside of time, to allow them to jump back and forth through ages, across death, and outside of the present as they please. The illustrative capacity of these novels, which is not accessible in typical fiction, is what allows them to do this with such clarity, and what guarantees the consistency of their output. There is no mistaking the imaginative image that McGuire hopes to convey by his layering of time, when the exact physical illustration is provided on the page. There is no confusion in the incredulity of Brás being on the next page, when the reader just saw him die on the operating table in the scene before. But by combining their stable narratives with these illuminating drawings, these novels manipulate time with a dexterity and decisiveness which was previously unavailable, which always carried with it an interpretive volatility in the soley written word. It was not possible to know with certainty, when the novelist would subvert time in typical narratives, exactly the kind of vision they had in mind. We map our own lives onto the sentences of these fictions, and we make our own corresponding images as a consequence. But the graphic novel, with its authoritative optics, stewards time in a way that lacks insecurity, that lacks interpretive room.

The popularity and critical approval of both ‘Here’ and ‘Daytripper’ point to a shift in the storytelling landscape which favours the illustrative. One which celebrates the graphic novel for its condensation of ‘the complexity of modern life with its babble of signs and symbols and stimuli’. Once again, we are finding ourselves searching for a way to express our truest and deepest feelings in a way that words alone cannot capture, and we turn to the graphic to allow us the chance to express ourselves in this way.

Revealed by both McGuire’s and Moon’s projects is the importance of visual literacy. Not just for digesting the inevitability of time, but in the broader pedagogical domain also. Reading comprehension experts ‘often suggest teaching students to visualise what they’re reading, and even draw pictures of it, to increase comprehension and retention’. A picture is worth a thousand words, it is often said. But when it comes to understanding the world around us, to understanding ourselves, perhaps the graphic is worth even more. Graphic novels, through the subtlest choices – a unique shade of red, the sharpness of a character’s jaw, the interior décor of a particular setting – can spark revelation in us, can lead us to better recognise or understand our own lives.

Ultimately, this is what the graphic novel has changed about the enterprise of literature. By understanding exactly how the experimental graphic novel is able to contort time in multiple dimensions, we unlock an appreciation for the breadth of the graphic novel’s capabilities, a breadth unmatched by its textual counterparts. In this breadth lies the expansion of storytelling operation that graphic novels provide – the unique ability to present an exact mental image, one devoid of interpretation and distortion. By presenting this specific mental image, the graphic novel can better communicate a precise sentiment to its audience, without having to rely on their uniform reaction to a string of adjectives. Charles Hatfield said, ‘The interplay of word and image in comics is not merely additive but synergistic, creating meaning that neither element could produce alone’, and indeed this combination of pictorial representation with a structured narrative in both Moon’s and McGuire’s novels creates a level of meaning and understanding which cannot be done by word (or simply illustration) alone. ‘Here’ and ‘Daytripper’ take our two foremost storytelling methods and combine them, expanding storytelling beyond the individual capabilities of either form. The experimental graphic novel gives us a version of narrative that speaks to us in the truest, most human way.

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Ambassadors Theatre, West End.

IT IS PITCH BLACK IN HERE AND THE RADIOHEAD IS TOO LOUD. The show has just started. You are holding on to the seats, tight, as the emergency exit signs dim and the music takes over all of your senses, and in the dark, unable to hear, see, think, feel, with cold air blowing directly at your face, you are terrified.

Paranormal Activity, written by Levi Holloway and directed by Felix Barrett, is scary. It’s an ode to dread, to spectacles of horror which don’t just hammer you with confounding set pieces and cheap jump-scares. From the very opening instructions to “take a deep breath”, Paranormal Activity holds the entire theatre in a brutal tension, one which is very rarely relieved throughout the entire performance, but is instead used to torment the audience by piling that tension onto their ever-accelerating heartbeats until the moment seems as though it just might crumble under the weight of its own suspense.

Paranormal Activity, playing at the historic Ambassadors Theatre in the West End of London, follows James (Ty Fanning) and Lou (Ami Okumura Jones), who move from Chicago to London to escape their already-troubled past. As the supernatural forces which plagued Lou across the Atlantic again rear their ugly heads in London, the couple must confront their demons - and their faith - in a cerebral tale which seems to dissect the line between psychological instability and demonic presence. The central preoccupation of the show, which initially seems to be focused on the visions of Lou, charts James’ journey to confession and facing his faith, a journey he can make only by confronting demons of his past, real and imagined.

Credit here belongs to Holloway’s script, which never lets the ambiguity feel like it’s dodging a decision — each scene withholds just enough certainty to keep both readings, psychological and supernatural, alive, until the final act forces a reckoning between the two.

The set design from Fly Davis is thoughtful, a multi-level windowed layout which allows for natural movement around the couple’s new home, while keeping all of the most haunting moments in view. The first big set piece, a moment of costume-design and stage mechanics brilliance engineered by illusionist Chris Fisher, made good use of this open layout, shocking the audience into a collective shriek. The show frequently employed this ease-of-movement for terror; shadows running around the living room, or Lou appearing in the bathroom and disappearing, before popping out downstairs a moment later.

It’s a show predicated on the idea of silence and darkness, often lit solely by a torchlight swung around by James, adding the expectation of seeing something newly terrifying in the torch-beam.

Despite the occasional technical shock, the grand payoffs in Paranormal Activity are few and far between; instead, the show relies heavily on revelations in the dialogue - twisting expressions, sinking realisations, and paradoxical lines - to fill its audience, which was dumbfounded and often groaning collectively in fear, with a familiar dread. James’ mother Carolanne, played by Pippa Winslow, often terrorised the audience with her oscillating, paradoxical dialogue with her son, swinging from motherly love to bitter disparagement and twisted hatred.

Fanning and Okumura Jones play a convincing, breezy couple, and their transformation into the deceptive, apoplectic pair we see by the end of the final act is compelling, and tragic. Alongside strong performances from Pippa Winslow as Carolanne, and Kirsty Bushell as Etheline Cotgrave (a paranormal expert who holds a seance with the couple), the couple’s well-oiled dialogue and evident chemistry sell the happy couple, investing the audience in their relationship and its disintegration.

Paranormal Activity is a terrifying show. It’s relentless, refusing to let you catch your breath, or smile, or really think at all; when your heart isn’t dropping at a deadly line, or a contorted face, it’s being overloaded by deafening metal music, in total darkness.

I USED TO BE REALLY ‘SPOTTY’. I had ‘moderate’ acne, on the medical scale that goes from mild —> moderate —> severe. I didn’t have the big, painful nodules and cysts required for a severe acne diagnosis, but I most certainly had the voluminous scatter of red, white, and blackheads, clumped in pockets of pus on my cheeks, jaw, forehead, temples, mouth, sides of my nose, and then on my neck, back, chest, and thighs. I would show you a picture of how bad it was at the peak of the condition, around 15-16 years old, but I don’t have any pictures in which you can see it. None at all.

My acne was easily the most prominent, quite possibly the only, serious thing affecting my mental health throughout my school years. I saw acne, especially facial acne, as one of those afflictions that rendered a person ugly, no matter what else they had going on. To 15 year old me, Dorian Gray himself would’ve been disgusting to look at, were a few spots to grow on his cheeks and forehead. This is clearly an absurd point of view, and one I have grown out of with age.

But acne ruled my mind throughout secondary school. I’d count the new spots as they formed on my face each morning. I’d know, and note, where they’d popped up, two new ones on my left cheek and oh, great, a slight reduction in the pustules near my bottom lip. I used to wish that I could take all my facial acne and put it on my back, because no one could see it there.

I really just wanted to look like a grown-up already, I think.

And I tried every single treatment out there, the creams and the ointments, the balms and the drips, the lifestyle changes, the diets, the sweat-reduction, some less intense pills, sleep, all kinds of sobrieties, everything - I tried everything. Things would work for a bit and then stop, or flare-ups would happen when I overloaded on those methods which seemed to initially yield results; either way, it didn’t get better throughout school. It bothered me so much, because my face was the first, really the only thing people saw in a school where the uniform policy was just a blue, black, or grey suit, and so I felt that I looked so unprofessional, so immature, so boyish, surrounded by peers who looked as though they were starting a job in IB at Goldman Sachs tomorrow. It didn’t help that I had braces during this time, either.

I felt like a kid, which is a calamitous thing to feel at 15, especially in an intensive, extremely sophisticated grammar school.

So I struggled pretty badly with the mental effects of acne throughout school. Ironically enough, the physical condition itself never bothered me that much - it was rarely painful and never seriously so, and the ‘bacne’ rarely flared up or got in my way. But I was just so self-conscious about it all, and so acne became an ambient thought, something I rarely had to bring to the front of my mind because it was alway there. Any time a mirror passed or a camera was brought out or I had to talk to a clear-skinned peer of mine, I was always thinking about how reflective the light was, how sharp the camera, always charting the wandering eye of my interlocutors, assuming they were counting my face, and judging me for it.

Sometimes in weaker moments I would look at the pictures of severe acne that the NHS had on its website, because I wanted reassurance that there were people out there in the world who had a worse acne experience than I did. If they could exist in society, then I could too. It goes without saying that this is a ridiculous thing to think, to concern yourself with, but I was so insecure at this time that I just needed something to hold on to, to show me that this wasn't anywhere near as bad as it could get. This didn’t stop me from catastrophising anyway.

As school passed and I went off to university, my acne improved. This was due, as far as I can tell, entirely to age; my hormones settled down, auxiliary things like my diet and lifestyle improved, and I finally started to understand I was coming out the other side of it. I also stopped using all products during this time, washed my face pretty much exclusively with water, which I still tend to do most of the time today. But things improved, and I was happier, and more confident, and thought about it a lot less.

But that was just, kind of, all there was to it. It got steadily better, and today (going into my final year of university), it’s pretty much all gone. You wouldn’t say I ‘have’ acne, the condition, at all. I have a few spots here and there, and after a few bad meals or late bedtimes things will flare up occasionally, but long gone are the days of counting the new spots and positioning myself in those ridiculous mental contortions. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that my acne’s gone now. I observe this, every day, to be true but I’m not entirely out of the headspace yet.

I don’t know what I was expecting to feel when my skin finally cleared up. I’d been fantasising about it for years, and when I realised that it had indeed gotten better there was nothing but gruff recognition, a realisation that, yeah my skin was pretty clear now, great, haven’t got to worry about that anymore, but that was kind of it. It was an extraordinary anticlimax. This had been the bane of my existence for years, pretty much my entire teenage career, and now I had finally slain the dragon, I was practically unbothered.

I have matured between 15 and 20, or so I would hope. I like to think that even if it were as bad today as it was in Year Nine, I wouldn’t be so bothered, because of that maturity that I've gained. I suppose there’s no way to know, really, and perhaps I would be just as much of a blubbering mess now as I was at the time. Perhaps I still do scan over my face every morning, but I just keep coming up empty. Perhaps, if it came back just as strong, I'd be no better than the inconsolable 15 year old, desperately rubbing his face with all manner of soaps, hoping it’d all be gone in the morning.

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I AM IN KINGSTON STATION AND ALL THE TRAINS ARE CANCELLED. My girlfriend, Anishka, that’s to you, is trying to get us to Tooting Broadway to try this pizza from Slab City Pizza, Detroit-style, cholesterol-tripling, heart-burning squares of cheese and focaccia.

To get from Kingston to Slab City Pizza, which is in Tooting Market, we have to get the short train to Wimbledon and then change onto a 5-minute Thameslink to Tooting station. This was where the troubles began, what would become a series of tribulations, each of which serving to reaffirm to myself my own commitment to trying this gorgeous pie, a pizza by which I would be tested and would succeed time and time again, until I and the universe felt I deserved it.

All trains, for both the Kingston —> Wimbledon and Wimbledon—> Tooting legs of the journey, are not running for the next few hours. This country, though gladly incorporating of rain and snow in our cultural identity, has always crumbled under the slightest heat. We elected to get the bus into Tooting, which was 40 minutes of compressed, hot air, but still our fastest option. On the way there, Anishka double-checked the directions to the Slab City Pizza in Tooting, only to find that it was permanently closed. A quick call in to the phone number listed on the site confirmed this - the location has been recently shut down, and we scrambled off the bus and towards the Clapham Common location, the only other Slab City Pizza around.

Clapham Common is nice, lovely even, perfectly pleasant, at a push. We didn’t explore much, because by this time we were both rather hungry and Slab City Pizza was a short walk from the tube station. Slab City Pizza is an American-themed pizza joint, offering both Detroit-style blue steel-pan square pizza, and the thin, flopping New York slices that demand to be folded lengthways. We’ll get on to talking about the pizza in a moment, but first I feel compelled to mention that, while I have never been and will never seriously be a food reviewer, and lack both the palette and the vocabulary to make any real headway in this domain, I am half-Italian, and quite the fussy eater, so pizza (especially margherita pizza) is something of a specialist topic.

I’ve had Chicago deep-dish pizza before, but I've never tried these Detroit-style squares, with the cheese fence crust. I don’t think that’s what it’s called, but it looked like a fence to me, a dreamlike curtain of burnt cheese which surrounded the soft, browning crust. I’d hesitate to call it a pizza, something about that feels wrong to me deep in my soul, perhaps in the Italian part, but whatever it was it was absolutely delicious. The layering, as far as I could tell, was crust - cheese - dollop of sauce - parmesan cheese, and I mentioned to Anishka at the time that I can see why they call it a ‘pie’.

If I have any criticisms to make, and I feel as though I should for the sake of providing a decent, all-round review, it’s that the sauce wasn’t very well distributed, concentrated only on the middle, which made the rest of the slice resemble more of a burnt-cheese-topped focaccia, which I suppose I was not complaining about. The thickness / lightness balance of the bread itself was noticeably competent, allowing for maximum hold and straightness without being too crunchy or difficult to digest. Again, it’s not a pizza, I feel strongly about that, but it is absolutely delicious.

The New York slice was not such an overwhelming success. It was still a good slice of pizza - though it’s worth mentioning my bar is very, very low. I’ve had hundreds, maybe even thousands, of slices of pizza in my life and I can’t say I've ever had a ‘disgusting’ one. Margherita, anyway. Some of them have been bad, sure, like the frozen ones from Sainsbury’s or something, but never disgusting. So of course it was good, I liked it, but especially compared to the cheese-crust heaven on a plate to my left, this slice felt mediocre at best. The cheese had a slight medicinal quality, heavily synthetic, but there was lots of it (again, too light on the sauce in my humble, humble opinion) and the base of the slice was surprisingly firm for an angle and size like it was. It held straight, didn’t flop or wobble much under pressure, but also didn’t hurt the roof of the mouth when biting. Structurally excellent, but lacking the volume of sauce and the quality of cheese required to be a truly excellent slice. The pepperoni was fine, not spectacular, as it always is, unless you get the chorizo and the larger, salami slices that they do in the local Italian restaurants. Because I am half-Italian, if I didn’t already mention.

Slab City Pizza introduced me to a new style of pizza; you might say that it redefined what a pizza can be thought of, if you wanted to sound totally unbearable. It didn’t quite do that for me - I'd still take an authentic Italian wheel over the big squares - and perhaps it’s not a pizza at all, but it is inarguably delectable. And - a big relief for both myself and Anishka, who had had it before and was recommending it to me - certainly worth travelling for, even with all those typical, systemic British failings.

YOUNG, INTELLECTUAL BOYS GROWING UP in Victorian England simply could not be trusted with the orienteering of their own moral development. They had to choose a literary or popular figure to model themselves on, upon whom to base a large part of their dispositions, and many chose to emulate Hamlet.

At first glance, it’s easy to see why. The tortured, poetic soliloquies. The commanding dominance over his lover, repulsive to us now but no doubt inspiring to a young aristocrat or flowering poet of the time. His resistance to control and subjugation. His desire to avenge the injustices of his father’s death.

Manliness, which in retrospect we consider Shakespeare’s tragic hero to be lacking, personified to them through Hamlet and his debilitating introspection, his combustible temperament.

Another of Hamlet’s character traits so lauded by these men-in-training was no doubt his inclination for the melodramatic. Especially around the topic of death, ‘The Dane’ was prone to lofty and flamboyant theatrics. His ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy stands tall as one of the greatest ruminations on death, courage and the unknown in the English literary canon. He wonders;

Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Death is understandably a theme on Hamlet’s mind. His father’s ghost has just told him of his uncle’s malevolent fratricide, and made Hamlet swear to exact his revenge. Hamlet’s psyche is both processing the results of and plotting the execution of a death, a murder, and this duality is noticeable in his oscillating attitudes towards his own ‘mortal coil’.

Perhaps the attitude that Hamlet takes which we would be most receptive to, both in Victorian training and in our modern times, is his romanticisation of death. We’re suckers for a charming death quote, a pithy but profound aphorism comparing the tribulation of death to the great curtain fall, the great leveller, the great unknown… whatever death is, we feel the need to call it great.

We love talking about death, in no small part owing to the wealth of previous literary material. It’s wildly prevalent throughout Shakespeare’s corpus:

‘But here, upon this bank and shoal of time / We’d jump the life to come.’ [Macbeth]

‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once.’ [Julius Caesar]

‘To die, to go we know not where; / To lie in cold obstruction and to rot.’ [Measure for Measure’]

Shakespeare presents us with a host of death-aesthetic quotes, but he’s not alone. Death and its ideation permeates more modern literature also:

‘He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.’ [Gatsby]

‘Death is a beautiful thing. It takes so much away, but it leaves us with this—a baby’s heartbeat.’ [Beloved]

‘Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time’. [Never Let Me Go]

Why have we always felt the need to romanticise death?

Notice that in literature, film, and art, death often symbolises something more extraordinary—be that love, sacrifice, or destiny. By romanticizing it, we give death structure and meaning, an interpretive framework which makes it easier to process. We can soften the harsh reality of death by poeticising it. We can construct narratives where death becomes a moment of transcendence rather than just a bleak ending.

Less practically, we might think there’s a certain beauty in the melancholy of death—consider Gatsby staring at the green light, knowing he can never reach it. The mourning, longing, and sorrow of death and loss have a poetic quality; we make death feel more like an art form than a biological reality.

Much like Hamlet, we’re uncomfortable when confronted by the bleak realities of death. We always have, and we always will, look for ways to comfort ourselves, using this process of romanticisation to help us reshape death. We use the poetic and dramatic form to fashion death into a literary device, purposefully dulling the knife’s edge so that we might hold it by the blade, and comprehend it fully. ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all’, Hamlet concluded. Rarely have words written in the 17th century been so enduring.

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I HAVE FAMILY IN ITALY, but the first time I ever visited Milan was just a few years ago, with my father and brother. The half-marathon was on, and the free tram had been far too busy to help us get across the city. We rode that tram as far as we could, accompanied by a couple from the Netherlands who were in town to run the half marathon but had ended up unable to compete due to injury, before getting off and deciding to walk the remaining five miles into the city centre. We stopped in a cafe to get some bottles of cold water before we started walking. This is where I met Mario.

Mario was an elderly gentleman, almost 90, with a full head of grey and no facial hair, save for whatever stubble had blossomed since his morning cut. He wore, as all European elderly men do, an immaculate suit, and was sat on one of the two-seater tables, reading something on his phone. His phone was an old Samsung, barely functional, and he had a wallet flip-case.

I don’t remember how I got to talking with Mario. I don’t suppose I would’ve approached him, but I can’t imagine he wandered over to strike up a conversation either. Perhaps I did ask for directions; suffice it to say, we started talking, through google translate and exaggerated gesticulations. Very soon into our conversation it came up that I’m studying for a degree in philosophy and literature; Mario seemed greatly pleased by this fact. He began telling me about his life’s work - to translate the poems of Edgar Allen Poe from 19th-century English into modern Italian. He had written a book, a little PDF compendium of 55 of Poe’s works, and he told me that of those 55, only 7 kept their original rhyming structure in Italian. I wish I’d gotten a copy of that PDF. I really don’t know what prevented me from asking in the moment.

I noticed there was a dedication at the beginning of the book, which was also a poem, but not one of Poe’s. I asked Mario about this. He told me that he had lived in England for a brief while in the 1950s - there, as a young boy he’d met an older gentleman, who was a cleaner, and this cleaner had introduced Mario to poetry, the form which had given Mario his livelihood for over half a century. The cleaner had shown Mario a poem he wrote, for a woman that he’d loved, and Mario was so touched by the poem that he’d included it at the forefront of his book; this great study of poetry, dedicated to the humble man who’d introduced Mario to the form.

It’s been years since Mario told me this poem, and I never wrote it down, but still I can produce it from memory. The poem goes like this:

The poem itself reads like a nursery-rhyme; simple, romantically plain. It’s a world away from the contemporary post-modern literary irony that dominates bookstores, the beguiling meta-post-auto-quasi fiction that we see so much of. It’s nothing but rhyming couplets and sentimental imagery, but I don’t think the power of the poem is ever to be found in technical complexity, and nor should it be mistaken for brilliance.

I think it’s the economy of emotion that makes these verses so striking, the shift from a pretty standard devotional gesture to an oddly calculated, arithmetic close. It’s a strange interpretation of love, one that seems so basic at a glance but is actually a struggle to pin down.

I can understand what drew Mario to this poem though, what made him put it at the beginning of his life’s work. For a translator obsessed with the rigid mechanics of Poe’s work, this unpretentious stanza represents, for Mario, poetry in the purest form; a raw and fundamental state, a verbal keepsake. It is the preservation of a feeling, from over a century ago.

I never saw Mario again. I didn’t take any contact details, nor was I able to track down his PDF book online. I don’t have much to convince you, or anyone, that he’s real, save for a little origami boat that he made me, while he walked us up the street, explaining to me the etymological influence of Shakespeare.

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ON THE 1975’s A BRIEF INQUIRY INTO ONLINE RELATIONSHIPS, there’s an interlude called ‘the man who married a robot’. It tells the story of a man, snowflakesmasher86, who enters into a relationship with The Internet. Here it is.

This is a story about a lonely, lonely man

He lived in a lonely house, on a lonely street

In a lonely part of the world

But, of course, he had the internet

The internet, as you know was his friend

You could say his best friend

They would play with each other everyday

Watching videos of humans doing all sorts of things

Having sex with each other

Informing people on what was wrong with them and their life

Playing games with young children at home with their parents

One day, the man, whose name was @SnowflakeSmasher86

Turned to his friend, the internet, and he said, “Internet, do you love me?”

The internet looked at him and said, “Yes

I love you very, very, very, very, very, very much

I am your best friend

In fact, I love you so much that I never, ever want us to be apart, ever again, ever”

“I would like that”, said the man

And so they embarked on a life together

Wherever the man went, he took his friend

The man and the internet went everywhere together

Except, of course, the places where the internet could not go

They went to the countryside

They went to birthday parties of the children of some of his less important friends

Different countries, even the moon

When the man got sad, his friend had so many clever ways to make him feel better

He would get him cooked animals

And show him the people having sex again

And he would always, always agree with him

This one was the man’s favorite and it made him very happy

The man trusted his friend so much

“I feel like I could tell you anything, ” he said, on a particularly lonely day

“You can, you can tell me anything

I’m your best friend, anything you say to me will stay strictly between you and the internet”

And so he did, the man shared everything with his friend

All of his fears and desires

All of his loves, past and present

All of the places he had been and was going, and pictures of his penis

He would tell himself, “Man does not live by bread alone”

And then he died in his lonely house, on the lonely street, in that lonely part of the world.

You can go on his Facebook

For the last 20 years, we’ve reassured ourselves that man does not live by bread alone. We’ve bathed in the luxuries of Uber Eats, of Spotify, of Instagram, of the Trainline app. We rejoice over the progress we’ve made.

Subscribe to the Flora app! For 8.99 a month, it’ll boost your productivity by 11x. Whatever that could possibly mean.

Inconvenience is the enemy of productivity, we taught ourselves. What kind of dusty, ancient creature loads up a CD? Presses play on a DVD streamer? Get it on Netflix, on Spotify. Pay to skip the ads, of course. You shouldn’t have to wait thirty seconds to hear that song. We’ve given ourselves instant media, under the guise that it’s cheaper and more efficient, and aren’t the arts just this profoundly human and meaningful endeavour that everyone deserves unlimited access to anyway? Never mind that we’re engaging with less of it than ever. Never mind that it’s probably cheaper to buy a CD of that album you really like, to buy your favourite box-set and watch it until the disk snaps, than it is to pay for access. Because that’s what a streaming service is. You’re paying for access, for the recommended albums that you might listen to. If you can find the time. Paying for the ‘we think you’ll like’ carousel on Netflix. And that’s great if you’re willing to use it. Having a global collection of new and past music available instantly and in the best digital quality achievable is magical, if you use it. But don’t pay for access, for the off chance that you might stumble across it on a particularly boring day. Buy the album. Own the album.

The man is born in a lonely house, on a lonely street, in a lonely part of the world. And he dies in that lonely house, on that lonely street, in that lonely part of the world. But his Facebook, his digital footprint, persists. Long after we’re gone, our stories will be liked. Our tweets used to posthumously cancel us. People will comment on our TikToks. We won’t be able to attend to our Snapchat streaks.

We’re pretty simple creatures. Fifty years ago, if you wanted to make plans with someone, you had to have a little faith. Call, set a time and a place, get yourself there, and hope they show up. No sending them your eta, a quick text to let them know that the bus is running late. Our brains aren’t built for the algorithmic onslaught of travel photos, party highlights, and relationship statuses. Look at this fun party you weren’t invited to. Look at this marathon I ran while you were stuffing your face with popcorn on the couch. Look at the celebrity I met. Implicit in all these posts, reaffirmed by every story-like and supportive comment, I’m better than you. How could the peaks and troughs of your ordinary life compare to another’s curated highlights?

We know this. We preach it to others. We smear rumours of facetune and filters to comfort our distraught and envious friends. And yet, when we lie in bed and scroll, pressing our necks against the headboard to give ourselves that reels-induced double chin, we let ourselves feel bad. We make ourselves feel bad, pinch the thumb-full on the side of our bellies and wonder why we don’t have the kind of fat-free vascularity that makes our stomachs look like a game of snakes and ladders. We wonder what’s wrong with us, that we don’t get invited to these parties where everyone’s beautiful and confident and always, always smiling. Never mind that it was Kim Kardashian’s baby shower, and you don’t run in the same circles. There’s a problem with you for not being there. It was something you did. Slaves to the algorithm, goes the phrase cited so often that it’s now meaningless. But we are.

But now, all over YouTube, we’re breaking up with our phones. We’re dumping The Internet.

Video essay after video essay, decrying the need for digital nomadism.Decentralise your phone! Delete social media! Buy a notepad! People trying to go 30 days without a phone. Buying an alarm clock. Keeping a physical calendar.

We’re finally becoming disenfranchised with the Algorithm. Slowly, purposefully, we’re waking up to the chokehold that the never-ending pit of TikTok’s have over us. We’re seeking intentionality again, seeking real human connection and conversation. Putting the phone away at the dinner table. Making eye contact. Asking for directions.

We’re feeling the urge to just be done with it all. Watch a sunset without taking a picture of it. Socrates didn’t want to write any philosophy down, because when you write something down, you don’t have to remember it. When you take pictures, and snap and share and post and upload, you don’t have to remember it. You don’t have to experience it, as long as your followers do.

How selfless.

No wonder flip phones made a comeback. Yes, it was cool; it was trendy, it was an aesthetic. But buried in amongst the posers, some genuinely want to disconnect. To give it all up, get a brick phone, and move out to a log cabin in the woods. With animals and open doors and record players. Vinyls and CDs and cassettes and instruments. Make music, physical music, and record it physically.

We’re social creatures, sure. We can’t thrive in prolonged solitude. But rather than taking that need for connection and using it to justify a daily post, we’re seeking sincerity. We’re all just looking for someone to escape to the log cabin with.

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Sadler’s Wells, Islington.

YOU HAVE DONE THIS TOO. You’ve gone to the wrong platform and caught the opposite train, and been taken straight back to your original destination. You’ve found out about an exam hours before you have to sit it, scrambling to learn the answers from your peers. You’ve gotten the dress code for an important event wrong. You, too, have been unprepared.

Going into Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man, a contemporary ballet adaptation of Bizet’s classic Spanish opera Carmen at Sadler’s Wells, I was unprepared. I hadn’t heard of the original opera, and I hadn’t looked at the details of Bourne’s show before booking the tickets, so it dawned on me only after the first musical number, ten or so minutes in, that what I was watching was going to be a story told without words.

Internally I cursed. I’ve never actually gone to see a ballet, but I have been to the opera once before, to see Verdi’s Rigoletto. That had been interesting, but quite a thing to get through, the kind of show you remind yourself is timeless, impressive Art in order to stifle a yawn. I had liked it but my pretensions about opera had felt confirmed: refined, subtle, elegant but unexciting. The Car Man did a lot to undo my presuppositions, to expose my naivety.

At its core, The Car Man is a retelling of the classic gothic tale; the esoteric intruder, the travelling man, inserting himself into an otherwise tranquil village and smashing things up, turning the denizens against each other and taking his smoke-shrouded leave. The show opens in Dino’s garage and diner, with a gangly group of horny mechanics jeering at Lana, Dino’s salacious wife. Into the garage comes Luca, the travelling man, who instantly commands the attention and favour of both Lana and Angelo, the man who is courting Lana’s sister, Rita. From here unfolds a vicious, erotic conglomeration of sex, loyalty, and murder, as Lana and Luca frame Angelo for their killing of Dino, and flee Harmony (population 356, now 353).

The more cerebral and psychedelic second act swaps the car shop for the glitzy bar, and charts the consequences of this homicide-escape, of Luca’s guilty conscience and Lana’s wandering eye. Ultimately, Angelo - fresh from his own murderous prison escape - returns to battle with Luca and exact his revenge on Lana. Before he’s able to, Lana, seeing the error in her ways and the pathological evils of the man she ran away with, shoots Luca, ridding Harmony of his torturous, tempting presence. The Car Man is at once an interrogation of masculinity, a spectacle of eroticism, and a Hamletian revenge story.

Bourne’s adaptation trades Bizet’s cigarette factory for a rowdy mechanic’s workshop. This setting provides the necessary overtone of masculinity which allows the workmen to explore their uncompromising sexual urges, in a show where men and women kiss and fondle without discrimination. Between the oily setting and the rugged workwear costumes, a glorious paradox of sexual androgyny and toxic masculinity unfurls, and the players manage to draw an impossible line between their boisterous, brash jeering and whooping, and their elegant, refined ballet movements. Overworked masculinity and sexual liberality go hand in hand in Bourne’s 50s-style interpretation, owed in large part to the traditionally masculinised setting.

Luca and Lana are drawn to each other because of their willingness to defy traditional gender roles, in a context where they seem impossibly celebrated. The romance launches as they both, for a moment, stand performing their traditional roles - he polishing the car, she proving some dough. Luca discards his rag and advances on Lana, but it’s not until he sweeps her dough aside - freeing her of her gendered containment - that their spark ignites. From here we come to see Luca as the standard model of masculinity in an over-masculinised space, the man in a car shop full of boys (a car shop which, prior to Luca’s arrival, displayed a ‘MAN WANTED’ sign).

It is the pathology of Angelo and his lust for Luca which is the central construct of the show. Initially framed for the murder of Dino, Angelo then actually kills a guard to engender his prison escape - he takes on the identity with which he is branded, and his behaviour throughout the second act exemplifies this character-assumption. He is violent towards Rita, and openly aggressive in his sexual advances towards Luca, even as they fight to the death (Luca having trained Angelo to fight early in Act One, a didactic act which had evidently ameliorated Angelo’s feelings towards him). He flaunts his gun, seemingly intent on blowing his girlfriend’s brains out, but at the moment of death time and time again he chooses love, if not for her then for Luca, the travelling man.

The choreography and composition of the play was faultless. The pacing oscillated: the first act blew by, save for a slightly lagging third scene dominated by lilting woodwind and long, romantic movements. The plot really swelled, or came into establishment, in the final scene, and all that came before could be accused of being overly establishing and thematic, almost to a fault. And then a dreamy, neurotic second act completely overhauled the first, replacing the brashness of the car shop with the sensitive and subtlety of a liminal cocktail bar.

The Car Man is an interrogation of masculinity and fidelity. It is also an exercise in futility, in allowing misfortune and mischief to enter our hearts and realising much too late that it must be expelled. It is a proof of what happens when that expulsion happens when it is all already said and done. The Car Man is a gothic classic and it is also, in a sense, the tale of Adam and Eve. It is a highly stylised, highly temporal reformation of a classic, pedagogical, ever-relevant tale. Prepare yourself.

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