s g n i K d n a s e g a b Of Cab Journal of King’s English Literary Society
ISSUE 6
pr of es so r ’s grammes at North American universities, prioritising those that offered generous teaching assistantships. The first to come up with an offer was in Vancouver, where I read a lot, moved from one university to another, and completed an MA in leisurely slow motion (4 years). I also started on a Ph.D., which I eventually brought back uncompleted to England, where I soon found myself at very loose ends. I had an unfunded place at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, and some very marginal part-time media studies teaching at a polytechnic in Coventry. Meanwhile, I was broke and living in a room at the top of an empty clergy house in Holborn, disconcertingly close to a blue plaque marking the site of the garret in which the eighteenth century poet and forger Thomas Chatterton finished himself off with arsenic at the age of 17. It was time, evidently enough, to strike out in a different direction. I was never going to find anyone to pay me to write books, but I could at least produce an adequate sentence, and I had also taught a few writing courses in Vancouver. Armed with these modest abilities, and making no mention of my more intellectual interests (I remember being asked to promise that I was not a “Trotskyist” seeking to foment uprisings in British factories), I got a job teaching ‘communication skills’ for a training organisation called The Industrial Society. A typical week might start with two days on public speaking to mining engineers in Wigan, followed by interviewing skills in a Kent pharmaceutical works, or perhaps letter
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I find myself fighting with words as I think about the question put to me by the editors. Perhaps there are some people who start steadily, pace themselves, and then power on through to a closing burst of triumph, but to me the word “career” seems better fitted to horses and the race track. Neither can I associate my working life so far with a planned and continuous line of advance, like the solid arrows with which military historians like to represent successful troop movements in their maps of battles. I even have trouble with the alternative offered by the headmaster of the last school I attended: unaware that Michael Gove and David Willetts were waiting in the wings of history, this liberal and progressive-minded visionary urged his departing charges to remember that “Life is not a race; it’s a dance”. So how did I get to be doing what I do? My first step consisted of a BA in English and American Literature from the University of Kent, which was then a brand new university. I found it a very stimulating degree: interdisciplinary, ambitious, and outward-looking too. But I graduated with no idea of what to do next. I wanted to write, but had no convincing sense of what or how. I also needed to earn a living. The university careers officer wasn’t encouraging (he turned out to be a poet who had at least found himself a job). After a few indecisive months, I got a job as a supply teacher at a struggling comprehensive school in Whitstable on the north Kent coast. I contributed to its underperformance for two terms, and the experience filled me with a desire to be elsewhere. So I applied to MA pro-
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“I can’t help it if I’m lucky ”
writing for secretaries in an insurance office somewhere in the south. I saw a lot of towns, cities and cheap hotels, and I gained, sometimes reluctantly, from working with very different groups of people. Whatever I managed to do for those who came on my courses, the job definitely equipped me with communication skills that would prove unexpectedly transferable - not least when I began to present radio programmes a decade or so later. I didn’t grasp this at the time though. Indeed, I threw it in after about a year, thinking that I had earned a period of unemployment in which I might try to get back to the higher pursuit represented by my dormant Ph.D project. I had no sooner quit than something quite unexpected started to happen. I got a call from Dublin, from a person in the management of the Irish Times, whose colleague had been on one of my writing courses, and she wanted to know if I would do some work for another friend at the Irish Export Board, whose advisers were trying to develop new European markets for Irish products. The work I did with them led to a call from a merchant bank, also in Dublin, which was having trouble calling in its loans from farmers in Cork and elsewhere. Money had been lent in better times and the farmers, who now found their repayments impossible, were winning in court on the grounds that the bank’s letters of warning were unclear or, indeed, impossible to understand. The directors of the bank decided it was time to give their secretarial staff some brisk remedial training. On the very first day it emerged that they were actually scapegoating juniors who were quite capable of writing adequately, but had been filling their letters with so many archaic constructions - “heretofore” and “on the aforementioned inst.” - that all meaning disappeared. Far from being badly written attempts at communication, the letters flying westward out of the bank were artfully composed works of obscurity designed to guard their scribes from the accusation that they had said anything that might later rebound on them. I remember explaining to the initially very sceptical directors that the words “author” and “authority” were closely related, and that they had better think about giving their mismanaged junior employees the
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“authority” to say anything at all. I was back and forth to Dublin many times over that one. By the time we had finished, the bank had been quite significantly restructured. And since banks tend not to respect things that come cheap, I had to raise my already high fee at every visit. I had never set out to become a “management consultant”, but my ability to pass as one for a few days each month was soon producing enough income for me to spend quite a lot of time on my researches at home. Meanwhile, the government, under Margaret Thatcher, was trying, even then, to roll back the welfare state, a manoeuvre that entailed encouraging voluntary organisations to take up “partnership” with the public sector. Aware of the temptations as well as opportunities created by the new funding programmes, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations decided to set up a small unit that would help its members to a better understanding of their own distinctive forms of organisation, and of what they could lose as well as gain by the change. A couple of years previously at the Industrial Society, I had been seen as an oddball with no industrial experience and not even a proper suit to wear. But I now resembled a rarely qualified person who knew about “management” and organisational training, but would not be out of place in charities, community organisations, or campaigns like CND. The job was modestly paid, but I took it on the informal understanding that, while
I would certainly do the work, nobody should count my hours too closely. For the next five years, I had a salary of sorts, an office in Bloomsbury’s Bedford Square, and a job that allowed me to spend several hours a day researching in the library at Senate House or the British Library, both of which were only a few minutes away. And all this had developed out of a low status job, which I had taken in a moment of desperation and left in another less only a year or so later (Perhaps there’s a lesson here: be careful not to stand in your own way). It was while employed by NCVO, that I returned to the project I no longer imagined completing as a Ph.D, and set about converting it into my first book. Journalistic opportunities opened for the first time when it was published. A few years later, the Guardian took an extract of my second book, and then offered me a contract as a features writer. By the time that came to an end, I was doing quite a lot of broadcasting work – on both radio and television. As for my unintended career as a management consultant to voluntary and arts organisations, that remained part of the mix until I had finished my fifth book. Some of my academic friends seemed a little disapproving of my improvised “career”. I remember meeting the Cambridge English don Stefan Collini, who was then writing about “Public Intellectuals”. He asked me what I did, and when I told him, his eyebrows arched and he remarked, loft-
Christmas Greetings Literature Lovers!
Welcome to our festive edition of Of Cabbages and Kings! Thank you for all of your creative submissions. We are delighted to announce the winner of our best entry competition goes to Elena Gillies, for her smouldering review of A Clockwork
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ily, that this was quite some “repertoire of scams”. I also remember being told by a business school professor that I was an early “portfolio” worker: someone who, rather than having a single occupation, had several spheres of activity and was in the enviable position of being able to determine how he or she moved about between them. Maybe so, but it didn’t feel anything like so deliberate at the time. Indeed, I now suspect that I had an early and comparatively benign glimpse of the life awaiting those who nowadays join the “precariat”, a word that has been used to describe the insecure employment pattern facing graduates going into journalism, television and many other fields nowadays. Perhaps the key thing for anyone tempted by that life is to decide what you will try to stay in control of as you move from one situation to the next. In my case, it was the books that had to be my own, and I’ve had some bloody battles with publishers to keep them as I wanted them to be. Overall, though, I know I’ve been fortunate, both in finding a way of maintaining my intellectual activities alongside other work, and in having had the time – much of it spent as a loan-free and subsidised student in English departments - to develop the critical perspective that has remained the source of my living even though I have rarely had anything so unified as a single fulltime “job”.« Professor Patrick Wright, Literature and Visual & Material Culture King’s College London
Orange at the Soho Theatre. In true Christmas spirit, we’ll be sending her and a friend to see the Royal Court Theatre’s production of In the Republic of Happiness. Thank you also to Patrick Wright for sharing with us all the twists and turns of his career. We hope to see you all at the English Society’s Poetry night and social, enjoy! Merry Christmas, Louise, Sophie and Geri «
(until 5 Jan at the Soho Theatre)
You will see people actually spit and get spat at in this play. I feel it is my duty to warn potential theatre-goers of this as on every occasion this happened, I actually (and audibly) tutted. It would appear that even choosing to attend a play that is famed for its sexual violence and brutality cannot suppress the delicate middle-class suburbanite in me. However, if you can battle through this urge, it is of the utmost importance that you appreciate one of the most sexually charged, violent and visceral plays that will ever be on stage. Director Alexandra Spencer-Jones’s all-male cast from the theatre company Action to the Word gives this play an energy that fully brings out the base desires central to Anthony Burgess’s 1960s dystopian novella. The play is highly homoerotically charged and each member of this strong cast uses it to great effect. Bizarrely—but perhaps the ultimate compliment to the director and the cast—is that for a production that has such a bubbling menace to it, you cannot help but enjoy the play. A great deal of that enjoyment comes down to the play’s lead Martin McCreadie as Alex DeLarge. McCreadie is a man in total control of his craft—handsome, muscular, charismatic and, above all, vicious. His eyes pierce through the audience in a theatre that only holds 160. The effect is that his anger becomes almost tangible—maybe even infectious. He becomes the
ultimate anti-hero that you can’t help but be attracted to despite that fact he is evil incarnate—a very impressive feat for an actor who rapes a man on stage with a broken bottle. For those who are yet to read A Clockwork Orange, here is a brief summary: Set in a futuristic city where the population are ruled by an oppressive super-State, Alex and his gang of ‘droogs’ (the novel is written in a Cockney-Russian hybrid language called ‘Nadsat’) spend their time committing brutal acts of meaningless violence. Alex is the gang’s ringleader and will come home only to fantasize about future acts of violence to his beloved classical music. Eventually one particularly brutal act sees Alex left at the scene of the crime and sentenced to an unpleasant stint in prison. When his behaviour does not improve, he is subjected to the ‘Ludoviko Treatment’ that sees its patients injected with a vomit inducing drug before watching a series of increasing violent films until such time as they cannot think of a violent or sexual act without wanting to vomit. Now considered ‘cured’ Alex is sent back out
into the world where revenge awaits him despite having no means of defence. The novella and play ask big questions about whether it is right to take away a person’s right to choose the choices they make. Certainly, Alex is an inherently evil human being who seems beyond redemption but is that enough to justify what is done to him? A Clockwork Orange is intense and it will certainly not be for everyone. That being said, I urge you to push through the awkwardness and celebrate in the rampant sexuality and violence this play portrays so exquisitely, you will at least come away knowing whether or not A Clockwork Orange has cured you. « Elena Gillies, 1st year English Language & Literature
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Photo: Simon Kane
A Clockwork Orange
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Bernard Kops was born in Stepney Green in 1926. A son of Dutch-Jewish immigrants, he grew up amid deep poverty in London’s East End, a world to itself, where “almost 200,000 souls were crammed into just one square mile”, as a character from his play puts it. - As an inhabitant of the East End, you had the ‘gift of the gab’, Kops says. We were always trying and seeking opportunities, and many became quite restless in their attempts to escape. He tells of his father’s desperate endeavours to get enough money to send his family back to Holland, as the event of war became a certainty. He did not succeed, resulting in many tearful evenings in the kitchen. If he had, the Kopses would have ended up on the same train as Anne Frank, says Kops. Only one cousin survived the Holocaust.
In the late 1950s, Kops, together with writers like Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker, emerged from the Jewish East End and reinvigorated a theatre and a culture that until then had been in love with its own glorious past. This year, Kops’ first novel for young people was published: The Odyssey of Samuel Glass. A wonderful book which demonstrates the vitality and humour that characterizes so much of Kops’ writing and that the past is as alive as the present.
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“A writer, if he is worth anything, is automatically committed. Writing in the first place means commitment.” – Bernard Kops
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Punctuating the Silence Bernard Kops, ‘the Poet of the Theatre’
- When the full weight of the Holocaust reached us, a strange silence followed. It was impossible to talk about it. “God is good” my mother always used to say, but as it proved to be untrue, one was at a loss how to get a grip of the world, a world that had lost all normality. And it was this strange silence the new writers punctuated. A multitude of voices emerged, and put an end to a theatre that was robbed of dreams and nightmares. New truths and new perspectives demanded a new type of actor, who took to the stage together in likewise new plays. - Because up until then, the theatre had been a great division-maker between worlds: the rich and the poor, the educated and the non-educated. You might say that both the time and the playwrights were playing off each other: we first followed the tide, and then the tide started
following us. Although we were no group of writers, we had a certain emotional temperament in common: discontent with the present state of things. The plays of Bernard Kops reflect a world in fragmentation. Drawing upon his own experiences, and by moving the action from drawing-rooms to markets, the monotonous voice of the upper middle-class fell apart. The influences of Yiddish theatre are clearly felt in his writings, as in his first play, The Hamlet of Stepney Green, where deep tragedy is mixed with comical elements, and a lyrical use of dream-logic is intertwined with music and song.
In 1958, Kops made the following statement in the theatre magazine Encore: “The systems of presentation and casting and abysmal factories of entertainment in the West End must be changed.” A statement that still resonates today. « Interview and article by Elise Dybvig Soreide, 2nd year English Language & Literature
Today, in a world where the riots never took place, and where to glorify all things British seems to be universally accepted as the thing to do in an unstable time, the theatre is once again the ‘theatre of reassurance’. Producing 1930s musicals and bland, quintessentially “British” plays – drifting away from any engagement with the world around it. Ccover of the theatre magazine Encore from 1958, back row: Arnold Wesker, Errol John, Bernard Kops and David Campton; front row: N. F. Simpson, Harold Pinter, Alice Jellicoe and John Mortimer
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Conrad has Marlowe saying that it is not just difficult, but ‘impossible’, ‘impossible to convey the sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence.’ I’ve always taken this to be a hands-up admission of failure. It made me realize how vulnerable Marlowe was, and how vulnerable Conrad was, sitting, cowering behind his pen, unable to make the words dance to the tune he was tapping his foot to. Of course, he did manage something, but he still had to put those words in Marlowe’s mouth. When I was on route through Croatia, coming from Mostar to the coastal city of Split, I thought a lot about this ‘subtle and penetrating essence’ of which Marlowe talked about. I’d lie across two seats on the bus with my feet stuck up against the window thinking about how this ‘epoch’ would look on paper,
it wasn’t even so much the conveying as seeing for myself the damn essence of the thing. I’d turn back to Dominic on the row behind me and I’d point out a yacht carving its way across the Adriatic and I’d say ‘How about instead of catching the train at four we take my yacht out, bring a few girls with us and a crate of Dom Perignon, get tight and have a blast.’ He’d reply that champagne made him gassy, we would take out a crate of Château Peyraguey instead, ‘which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend.’ But one of us would always wish aloud that we were millionaires and drugaddled playboys and that would ruin it. This was the sort of essence I could envisage, but without meaning to I’d catch myself thinking that if I were sitting on my yacht with Dominic and my girls, I’d be dreaming of dusty hills and smoke-stained trains. When we got
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off our last bus into Split I was aching from keeping my body so rigid all the way through the twists and turns of our mountain road. I’d managed to sleep a bit, but I was always snatched from rest by my centre of gravity shifting towards the floor. I lay on my head so that when I opened my eyes I could follow the blue of the sky and the sea getting closer. We weren’t available for Split. What they don’t tell you about the sensation of these incommunicable epochs is that aside from what gets lost in translation, they are icebergs of creatures, with so much dirt and watery slurry beneath their gleaming peaks. The Adriatic was a more profound blue than anyone could ever see elsewhere, with such a vast bulk of it under the nose of these behemothic yellow cliffs that it made for a perspective that was sublime. But our smiles were suffering under dry heat and heavy bags, the tic-taccy plastic shit of people and the streets, expensive food and stuttered future movements, the unromantic stale odor of beer on our breaths and a half caught sleep breaking down our relish of the sea breeze. We gave up on etching this city on our memories and dragged our feet like school boys to a cafe where we could find cheap coffee and greasy meat. ‘I’m spending my last kuna on a huge and decent meal’ I said. Dominic asked whether I meant now or later. ‘Now and later. So not my last kuna here. But the principle’s the same.’ ‘As soon as we get to Zadar, we’ll find the place and go straight out to a liquor store,’ I said. ‘I think we should lay off the grape brandy.’
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‘In those situations jugs of wine are definitely called for.’ ‘More wine!’ he roared, not shouting, but pretending to. We ordered espressos and burgers, which were huge so we checked they were really ‘mali’ and then wondered how big the large size was. After I’d done I ordered another coffee and lit up one of the blessings of the region - a dirt cheap cigarette. ‘The major drawback of these one use cameras’ I said, ‘is that you spend so much money on them.’ ‘Yeah, I won’t be able to develop them for years. But that’s half the fun, forgetting about something and then returning to it years later and being surprised.’ ‘I want to be surprised now, I want to see how that photo with the little Czech guard turns out’ I said. ‘That will be undoubtedly hilarious. I’m glad we did that, it was beautiful.’ That night we were both drunk and turned out of a horrible little strip club just before the sun rose. But we’d dashed through cobbled streets and up untold stairs to find this vantage point at the top of the world. And I’d sat and tried to analyse this perfect moment. The trees on the hill top were gently rustling with the traffic just starting up in the city below and the clouds were dashed across the sun in such a way as to dapple its pink with little puffs of smoke. I’d gulped the three beers we’d brought with us because I felt empty still, even though I’d made a little poem up in my head so I could remember the experience. I still felt hungry. ‘I don’t know how we managed those stairs’ I said. I still felt hungry,
but I was running out of money so I had another cigarette and thought about the other literary thing Dominic often said as part of our co-illusion, ‘I have no money, no hopes, no aspirations. I am the happiest man alive.’ None of that was true in any reliable sense, but when I heard it I wanted it to be said a little louder every time. On that hill we’d watched the sun rise far enough to touch the roofs of all the buildings in the city but leave the streets still in shadow. I’d thought about a girl, when I was sitting on that wall overlooking the city and its river and I was upset with myself for being boring enough to waste all those shining moments with the past just because I was drunk and the sun was rising. We walked back to our beds eventually, stopping in a bakery for two Danish pastries, and just like that, after a whiskied sleep it was the next day and we had other stuff to do. ‘It wasn’t too long ago we were in Prague’ I said. ‘It was only two weeks back, but its long enough to forget how we got down from that hill.’ ‘I remember how, we just walked down the steps.’ ‘I don’t remember. I remember I was so content though because I wasn’t thinking at all, it was a perfect enough hour to paint a picture of.’ I was happy about it too but I was an ass and said with conceit that ‘we live as we dream’, I forced Dominic into finishing the phrase that ends ‘which is alone.’ « Jake Mardell, 2nd year English Language & Literature
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The Tie Nina Simone sang on the wireless by the windowsill as he ironed out the creases in his work shirt. He did this every Friday night just before he went to bed. No matter what he had been doing during the day, if he was drunk, if he was tired, or angry or sad, Friday night was the time where he washed, ironed and hung up his suit. This way he would not have to lay his eyes on it until Monday morning. It was a blue, pinstriped number, ill fitting when he purchased it, but as he had grown older his shoulders and back had grown sufficiently to fit the blazer. Nina’s voice was shaking with elegant purpose in My Baby just Cares for Me. Years ago he used to listen to this song over and over again, and as he ironed out the final creases from his shirt, he could not remember why he ever stopped doing so. He folded the shirt slowly, savouring every step in his Friday night ritual. He moved on to the faded blue trousers, the minimal wear and tear of office life now beginning to show in the seams and stiches. He ran the iron over each leg with confident swipes matching the rhythm of the music, as he mouthed the lyrics that he still remembered word for word. Tomorrow he would
have the day and the house all to himself. He swayed his hips with the music, as he laid the trouser on top of the shirt. His mind drifted, as he laid his only tie on the ironing board, he did not know whether he was carried away by the music, or whether he had been carried away half an hour ago by that last glass of gin, whatever it was the iron had left an ugly mark, more akin to a scar than to a burn. ‘No, no, no, oh shit’, he whispered under his breath. There was no chance that the mark was coming out. It was ruined, perfectly so. It was so central and brazen, as if someone had burned the tie with a singular purpose. He rubbed at the scar desperately with his wrist, the song did not seem joyful any more; it was mocking him, sardonic in its putrid happiness. He was damned to the ritual now; he would have to walk through a shopping centre like a lost soul, looking for a replacement tie. Before that he would have to drive in to the city centre on a Saturday in that big car, empty, save for himself. He would have to pay for the privilege of looking for a space to park in one of those godforsaken labyrinths that they keep for cars and the skateboarding teenagers. All of this just to look the part on Monday morning, a piece of fabric that says, ‘I’m normal’, ‘I’m here to work’, ‘I’m a professional’, ‘I’m a functioning cog working with all the other fucking cogs in the great big fucking cog-fest.’ Tomorrow was his day;
tomorrow he could stay in bed until whatever hour he pleased. Tomorrow he could watch television all day or learn to paint or order some food that actually tasted of something. All his freedom dashed by a marked tie. But then he pictured himself on Monday morning walking to his desk, the office fans blowing his thinning hair in their artificial wind. He would stride to his chair, wearing the soiled tie like a badge of honour. Eyes would dart to him, and he would stride on, undeterred by the office’s collective gaze and disapproval. This is what he would do. He hung up the suit and shut the wardrobe, resolving not to open it until Monday. The little time that was his would remain his, and after a breath of relief, he could hear the music again.« Joshua Stupple, 1st year English Language & Literature
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Christmas After Ogden He who said the best things in life were free Was probably Overtly lecherous. And to say it, although he must have felt his footing to be contrary to popular opinion, I doubt that he stood on his own cardboard mattress
The Coming of Day
To lecture us. When straying fingers cling
It is terribly hard to be grateful when Bread and butter’s haute cuisine ‘til dad, in return for a diamond ring, receives another all too apt copy of Martin Walker’s The Cold War. Thank God I’m poor.
To a glowing silver plate, a quiet ring Of favour rocks the seat,
Where two fumbling bodies meet. I, seeing the continuous arc curve
Back from love’s yearly failure, swerve Against recollection to a face, bent On hiding what is meant
For – uncertainty, or a ghostly fear After the heartbreak of that two pound wine 5%: glorified brine Go home to your forgotten TV, and extended family, for another viewing of Aygo by Toyota sponsored by The Great Escape and weep Thank God I’m cheap. « Frank Pinsent, 1st year History
That I shall hunt the deer Into an eternal sun
That burns thy will be done. We shall see, shall feel, if Summer brings Those laden trees promised by Spring. I twist her actions to fit a meaning
Created to stop my life from seeming
Lost in constant valleys, where peering down Gives others a chance to gloat, or frown.
And when those smiling photos meet a frame I hope, exiled, that nothing remains the same; For our dreams, surrounded by darkness, Will only ever fade. « Joe Prestwich, 2nd year German
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Short Notes for Saint Augustine I remember the first flight, I couldn’t deal with the air beating at my body. But I had to go on so I kept flailing and somehow got back on track The marks from clasping iron still raw on my limbs I had all the world returned to my hands and I swore I’d never give it up again
But then the pure kiss “completely hurled me off the road” said she, while snapping her fishnets, while taming her mussed hair with wiped fingers Everyone could see the blundering hunger in her eyes.
And her palm, a small reservoir where the dogs roam. (And she would Again and again she’d)
It was only five minutes. And like wet animals we shook off the water, I don’t know what do you want to do I don’t know that’s why I asked you Jesus darling, get a hold of yourself Are you innocent before Him?
“I know I shouldn’t do this.” He said to me between his nervous tugs at the mouth, “but I find myself signing up for another degradation, and I ask Why? Why do you do this to yourself? The problem is I can find all answers in the four crooked hours where she’s mine” I know it too well. It is the elegant risk, what I fight for with blood in my throat
It was a good one. Sudden stops that become swallowed by the original current and therefore grow all the more relentless…
When she sees the soldiers with hardened hearts and brutal knuckles waiting outside the gate, waiting for a cry of triumph, a definite calling She expects to witness the victory: the flames, the angels A flag battering the high heavens above— Instead there’s a surrender on both sides. Oh. Well, Let’s go.
So time and time again I lift my left heel My head against the wall, cut breaths on the floor There is no direction, no sense No discernment which we pretend to use; Under the dim lights, I only notice Our disregard of time and God. « Rena Minegishi, 2nd year English Language & Literature
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Ode to a F ly in a Ceiling Light
Sea Shanty
I see you
I chartered a course across
you don‘t see me
coursing veins and I
but this is not
sailed your scars and
police interrogation glass
rose on the swell, as we swelled together.
This is you, preserved
Castaways, voyagers.
in neither amber or sap
With sheets for sails
but your own plastic shell
white in the gathered dark.
intrusively electronic it doesn’t allow for
And you,
eavesdrops on the wall
practicing knots. The taste of ocean on our skin. «
Suspended sentence
the speck on the room‘s eyelash death becomes a constant 60 watt day « Emily Harrison, 2nd year English Language & Literature
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Emma Allwood, 2nd year English Language & Literature
The King’s Players present The Devils by John W hiting
12th, 13th and 14th December, 7pm (doors open at 6.30pm), at the Greenwood Theatre
End-of-Term Social You are cordially invited to the end-of term English Department Christmas social and Performance Poetry Night, hosted alongside the King’s English Literary Society! Professional poets will be reading alongside students from the department. Our talented line-up includes: Patience Agbabi, Ross Sutherland, Nathan Penlington, who has shared stages with performers such as John Cooper Clarke and Ricky Gervais, Megan Beech, one of our first year undergrads and Poetry Society National Youth Slam Winner 2011, and Penny Newell, who completed her BA in English at KCL and recently completed the Faber and Faber ‘Becoming a Poet’ course. «
The nuns at the convent of St Ursula have started acting strangely; but is their hysteria the raving of bored, cooped-up provincial women or proof of a local priest, Urbain Grandier’s commerce with Satan? Lines are blurred between conscious play-acting and psychotic episodes, religious devotion and sexual obsession, the performing of God’s will and brutal rape. And as for Grandier, accusations of a diabolical nature can be serious, especially when half the town are looking for excuses to kill you anyway. «
Of Cabbages and King’s
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Thursday 13th December, 6pm, at The Waterfront
Editors Louise Wang Sophie Merrison-Thieme Geri Ross Design Geri Ross Cover Artwork Chloe Firouzian Contact & submissions: cabbages.submissions@gmail.com