November 2011
Issue 1
PROFESSOR’S NOTE The Art of Not Knowing By Kélina Gotman
As an undergraduate, I had always been a gogetter. And then on graduation, I got a job on Wall Street (more or less), learned to wear designer clothing, and was never more unhappy. The economic crash happened (the last one, when the dot-com bubble burst) and I lost my cushy job almost as fast as I had obtained it. For the first time in my life, I was at loose ends. So I started to wander. Up and down the streets of New York, with a notebook in hand. I filled dozens and dozens of notebooks. I wrote walking, standing, eating, dancing. I wrote in the night, during the day. I didn’t know. I was trying to figure it out. What? Who knows. I still don’t know. Who I was, what was happening to the world. I read, and I wrote. I moved back to Montreal (where I was from), and kept writing. I haven’t stopped. I always keep diaries, notebooks. Big ones, little ones. In my rucksacks, my purse. I concoct projects. I moan. I draw (sometimes). I doodle, mentally. Think things through. It’s always different with a pen in hand. And, I discover. It’s that, that keeps me going: not knowing – ever, really – and hovering at that edge, the tip of knowledge (as Deleuze calls it) where it passes into ignorance. The place – as Bataille says – where you really find yourself, where you’re bared, going into the unknown. That’s what we do when we research, when we write. We have to not know, and slowly, slowly, things come to light. They shift. In the darkness, a contour changes. You follow it. You don’t know where it will lead. It’s terrifying. And exhilarating too. We could call this the art of not knowing. Maybe it’s more of a craft. Or a habitus. A way of being. A productive discomfort, punctuated by little epiphanies
Thinking about Vintage By Hadeel Mohamed
Sit in a Starbucks anywhere on the Strand, and you will definitely see an unextraordinary man who told his Barber to give him the Don Draper cut. If you happen to stray around an alley in Shoreditch on a dark Saturday night, prepare to have your life lit up by a 60s Mod Dress and platinum-topped pixie cut that will lead the way like the Northern Star. Pick your decade, the greatest hits from the 20th Century are being played out on London streets all around you. Brogues, leather Satchels and trench-coats offer a shorthand of accessible images and narratives. Style in our age of living is not as much about dressing well, as it is about ‘dressing up’. We will sell our choices of style to ourselves like we are living in a M&S Food advert, ‘These are not just a pair of sunglasses, these are Buddy Holly sunglasses’. We will buy a Moleskine notebook or a greatcoat and become
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when suddenly an idea crystallizes. And then it’s gone. More often than not. But just for that moment: for that moment, I give everything else away. For that moment, maybe, I have found something. I write this in my notebook, on the bus. The handwriting gets more excited. But do I know all of this already? And if I am not discovering, are you? Reading this? Hopefully, a little bit. If this image contaminates you just a little bit, you’ll carry off a notebook, into the streets, into the city. These days, my writing is getting more personal. It’s these contexts, these moments, too, that I like to write. Snippets of thought, framed for just a second by the page. A little theatre on the ‘mystic note-pad’ (as Freud would say). Hovering, until the stage hands scurry away and disappear into the wings. Hemingway or Wilde, rather than remain ourselves. This offers the synonymous trade in that matches ‘old’ for ‘wise’, ‘impulsive’ to ‘spontaneous’. This penchant for romanticizing the past has become economically viable for Luxury brands, who market a ready-made narrative for buyers of a ‘Vintage’ or ‘Classic’ product. Acquiring a small (albeit cheaper) piece of Luxury such as Gucci perfumes or Calvin Klein underwear, has become as ubiquitous as the culture of deli coffees and Smart Phones. This idea of marketing a more subversive version of yourself is something that can be attributed easily to the volatile tax bracket that is University Students. I could smile with glee as I write up offensively stereotypical descriptions; perhaps a Film student in his leather jacket and a pony-tail, or a Geography student with a great propensity for patterned jumpers. But while it is satisfying to categorize students by the prejudice of their degree, these assumptions are of course hyperbolic. And for the perpetrators of this crime, they are only guilty for being found in their numbers. After all, it is so much worse to be called trite, than pretentious.
FLASH FICTION The Underground Man By Jack Barton
I am ill today, but have been worse
Someone speaks for the subterranean Charon
My pulse throbs like a bloodshot eye,
Who I never see.
I wish I could say that my mind feels clammy
It might have been him on the winding stairs
Yet it is crystal sharp fatigue.
once
The lights were bright in the bar
In a blue jacket and hat.
And down here nothing’s changed.
People clutch their bags like lifejackets, not
They are a pervasive bare-bulb acid lemon
children.
Interrogating me for my sanity’s whereabouts
I wall myself in with headphones
The backs of my eyeballs itch
Because the leagues of stone and sewer
In the artificial heat
Will not do, and so do many more,
Or the mental nausea
All of them not thinking - only I - that
Of white tiles blurring by.
If the river was wise to how we slipped behind
The indigo brick road becomes
Its back we would feel the wrath and drown in
The most diluted grey
The concrete labyrinth of the giant, burrowing
But only if I fend off sleep
worm
And trudge up stairs, down walkways
Whose greatest sorrow is never having seen
Otherwise I am taken along to its end:
the sky
The waterfall edge of the world.
And who would eat men alive, begrudging us
Intimidating metal clanks sparks fly
our moon-filled eyes
From the juggernaut. I can hear them
Yet never knew he was tunnelling graves.
Over the fake-tasting cold air
Some things are nothing more than trips. We could track our whole lives on tasks and trips. On such things are our floor-plans drawn. On such things we rise and fall – we win and lose. The preparation of an egg, runny and soft to drip all over our sunned faces. The parkour of your hand which creeps, tentatively towards the constellation of freckles on the back of a new love. The electricity of such movements. An inch. A slow move towards – and then away – from you. Such things trace a life, trace a mind. How can we keep such records? How might we continue to live such that we remember how hard these things are? Come here, and let us remember – travel – together. Let us climb inside.
centres
By Olivia Gagnon He thought he knew then -- that it was not about what it purported to be about. That there was no good way to say anything. That there was something infinitely inaccessible and infinitesimally secret about her. She was both bigger and smaller than that which he had promised her she would become. Had been. He was almost sure he remembered the silent ways in which he had promised himself that she would grow no bigger than a constellation, but no smaller than a star. He remembers tracing lines between them in a supreme act of delineation. In some wonderful act of self-preservation. And he had stopped counting the number of times she had toed the line, sending waves of panic through every avenue of his body. He had forgotten the trembles of a first encounter, the way you can simultaneously be both in yourself and in another person. A loss is always a loss, any way you spin it. He knows that now. And he knows she runs around through other people’s hearts as well. And spins around in minds. He wonders about chemical reactions and bones. He wonders about the colour of her toes, and the shortness of her breath. He longs to revisit every moment before the moment. It is a glorious thing to lose someone he thinks to himself –
I want to be an Actress By Liza Weber
Pulsing Pod. You reddening clod! Your ducts splay to wastes of water Now spilling forth in drowning soar Spitting you out on debris shores. Faint, sounds your cry in Players gyreDumb stranger midst principle choirsBid you, hear the Rhythm and Rhyme Quit from yourself. Disgorge of time.
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If you want to submit anything for the next issue, please email us at: kclenglishsociety@hotmail.com
BOOK REVIEWS
Room, Emma Donoghue Review by Annie Hughes
Emma Donoghue’s highly acclaimed seventh novel “Room” has been hailed by many critics as “a novel like no other” and in my view is one of the most ground-breaking pieces of literature to emerge this year. Inspired by the story of Joseph Fritzl’s incarceration of his daughter Elizabeth, and the cases of Natascha Kampusch and Sabine Dardenne, Donoghue stunningly mixes a delicate fictional narrative with chilling echoes of horrific truths. Is it any wonder therefore that Donoghue’s harrowing novel has achieved widespread popularity and been shortlisted for a number of prestigious literary awards? One aspect of “Room” which explains its vast success is the chilling content of the novel which has moved so many readers to tears. The first half of the novel takes place within the twelve-footsquare room in which a young woman has spent the last seven years of her life, having been abducted at the age of nineteen and used as a sex slave. As a consequence of repeated rape, she has a five year old son name Jack who narrates this profound and touching story. While “Room” is undoubtedly a novel filled with
The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman
horror, tragedy and lost opportunity, it is also a tale of pure love, hope and of course courage. Jack’s “Ma” has spent the first five years of his life nurturing, enriching and loving the innocent child as best she can given the impossible situation the two characters find themselves in. Despite being distressing “Room” is an incredibly uplifting novel as it reminds the reader that even in the face of the darkest situations, humanity still breaths, and human goodness will always ascend human evil. It is testament to Donahue’s skill as a writer that, while treating the gruelling subject matter sensitively and seriously, she never becomes melodramatic in tone, and allows us to both empathize with the victims of incarceration and effectively comprehend the horror of the experience. What may account for the novel’s widespread praise is the heartbreakingly innocent narrative voice of Jack; how he comprehends his life in room, and how he comes to terms with the change which comes after that experience, and how he touchingly humanizes all the objects in room, calling “Rug” his friend and commenting that “Table” must be hurting from all his scratches. Child narratives have become a popular mechanism in modern literature, and Donoghue once again reaches perfection with the innocent eyes of Jack.
forty pages, we still leave each chapter feeling as though we were acquainted with them. But The Imperfectionists still reads like a novel not a collection of short stories. The overarching story of the novel – the conception and the eventual demise of the newspaper that ties together all the characters – gives it a vertical as well as a horizontal dimension. As you progress through the novel, you at times refer back to the previous chapters as new pieces of the puzzle fall into place, painting a picture that you never knew existed. It may seem ironic to buy a book about the struggle of the printed word. And yet I urge you to purchase or borrow a physical copy of the novel because the greatest pleasure in reading it is derived from rereading it many times. Follow in the undistinguished footsteps of the novel’s Oliver Ott, the socially awkward millionaire’s son thrust into the publishing industry by his siblings: he spends his evenings holed up in his mansion in Rome, reading The Hound of the Baskervilles to his dog instead of trying to save his failing newspaper: ‘Oliver knows this book so well that “reading” is hardly the word – he wanders about in it, renews old acquaintances, allows Dr. Watson’s lank thread to reel him gently forward.’ And that is precisely how the book is best enjoyed. Pick a chapter and ‘wander about’ with the lazy obituary writer or the copy editor with a persecutory delusion, and you will feel as though no time has passed since the last time you saw them.
Reviewed by Jacqueline Gunn
Whenever I used to tell people I wanted to become a journalist, before I could give them a chance to frown I would always added hastily and apologetically, ‘That is, if there be any newspapers left by the time I finish studying’. Tom Rachman’s debut novel captures this current feeling that newspapers are a species with no evolutionary future as free digital media eats away at the profits of the traditional media. The novel tells the story of eleven people whose lives, in one way or another, converge in an unnamed newspaper published in Rome. The author’s journalism background gives him the authority and the confidence with which he portrays the pedantic and comical corrections editor and the desperate reporter. So much so that it made me not want to go into journalism. Each chapter in the novel could stand as a short story, providing momentary but acute observations of eleven characters at turning points in their lives. These range from the grave – death - to the seemingly trivial - ceased idolisation of a childhood friend - but they all affect the characters’ lives and their attitudes towards their future. Perhaps a film equivalent of this book would be Paris, Je t’aime; like the film, although the author does not linger with any character for more than
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THEATRE REVIEWS ‘night, Mother
Review by Kelly Kirkham Rarely have I ever been stunned into silence by a production, but I left the small top floor room of the Old Red Lion Theatre in deep contemplation of the performance I had just witnessed. My attention was caught from the very beginning and held for the entire the play as I sat watching two compelling actresses tease out the dynamics of a fragmented mother-daughter relationship in their front living room. Set over the course of an evening, in rural America, Jessie is busy putting her Mama’s house in order. Beginning to explain mundane domesticities such as which sweets belong in which jars, where the cleaning products are and how to use the washing machine, Jessie goes on to state that at the end of the evening, she plans to go to her room and shoot herself in the head. Mama fails to take her seriously at the start, but soon realises that her daughter is entirely serious in what she says. From this point on, the play consists of Mama’s persistent persuasion against her daughter’s choice, and it is here that the actresses come into their own. Sadie Shimmin and Pat Starr are both fantastic in their roles, yet I felt the latter edged it through her powerfully emotional and fiercely intelligent portrayal as Mama. Starr’s ability to embody the role of a mother who knows her daughter is already lost is heart-wrenching. Her determination to protect the vulnerable light of her daughter’s life from extinguishing and her inability to acknowledge the limitations of how far her love will contain Jessie’s demands, is enough for any audience member to re-evaluate their own relationship with their mother. This is not to say that Shimmin doesn’t hold her own. On the contrary; Jessie is a character who is acutely sensitive to her own place in the world. Suffering from epilepsy, protected (perhaps overly) by her mother as a result, Jessie feels there is nothing more in her life to wait around for. Perhaps the expectation of such a character would be to portray her as a moping wreck, but Shimmin reverses such anticipation and plays Jessie as a determined divorcee who holds confident in her plan. Shimmin shows glimpses of the isolation Jessie feels underneath such an exterior; her perception of the world as being unfair and most impressively, the failure she feels at her lack of self-fulfillment. Such an awareness of this psychology is a hard role to embody, but Shimmin succeeds. ‘night, Mother is a play that draws on the reality that we do in fact hold a choice over our deaths if we so wish, whether we contemplate such dark thoughts or not. The spotlight on family life acts as another hinge on which to hang the drama and proves just as successful as the focus on suicide. The production has certainly been one of the highlights of my theatre-going experiences and the ending still holds firm in my memory. A play always asks the audience to suspend reality for the duration of its time on stage, but it is unusual that the effects of such a drama force those watching to consider the realities of their own lives and their own relationships. This is what ‘night, Mother does and for that, in my eyes at least, it is worth every penny of its ticket price.
The Tempest, Royal Haymarket Review by Louise Wang
Firstly I must remark on the extraordinary value of the mere £15 front row seat I attained one blissful morning, after queuing for the second time at an offensively early 9:15am. The sheer anticipation from ten o’clock that day through to the evening would have been enough to tip any expectations over into the unachievable: even if Prospero was being played by Lord Voldemort reincarnate. The spectacle was beautiful (more fairy than fish), yet supported by a rather bleak stage set that looked more out of Dickens than Shakespeare. Rather than having any greater function in the play than a dark backdrop, it seemed to melt away as reality does at the point of a magician’s staff. Ariel filled the air instead with a perfect mixture of buzzing, boyish excitement and girlish pride, of spritely love and unearthly distance. The rest of the dancing and singing (however high-pitched) was unfortunately robbed by Ariel’s exquisiteness and on the whole a blur.
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This production’s main success seemed mainly in tying Shakespeare’s loose ends rather than challenging its audience. Caliban seemed more like Miranda’s pet gone wrong than an important reminder of a great colonial question. It was a series of broken images: the twists and turns of men drowning, a harpy and a white shell necklace are what remain in the mind’s eye long after it has seen the infuriating innocence of Miranda or the delights of comic drunkenness. Indeed, Stephano was so convincingly drunk that I started to doubt my choice of first row seating. No doubt Trevor Nunn thought Fiennes was the only man to rule over the machinations of this multifarious fantasy world. The strain of which was so wholly characterised, the audience could believe genuinely in the possibility of a tragic rather than comic end. For one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays, it felt very long, perhaps to give the ending a greater sense of finality. Knowing the potential of this particular play to challenge by posing questions unanswered, this shouldn’t necessarily be the intended goal. I enjoyed it, as I enjoyed Harry Potter, immensely but not enough.
INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW O’ HAGAN Author of award winning novels including ‘Be Near Me’, ‘Personality’ and more recently ‘The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe’ as well as the non- fiction book ‘The Missing’. His works have been adapted into documentaries and plays and he has written numerous articles for publications including The New Yorker, The Guardian and The London Review of Books. O’Hagan is currently also a Creative Writing lecturer at King’s College London. Andrew O’Hagan is a novelist, journalist and an academic; although there are some differences between these styles, he emphasises that: ‘the same notion of trying to say something original should be common to all forms. If you are trying to write well then your standards will remain whatever genre you’re working in.’ O’Hagan adds self- deprecatingly ‘I find it hard to write whatever I’m writing’, reassuring for any students just starting out as writers. O’Hagan’s works, including ‘The Missing’, a non-fiction account of missing people in Great Britain, often merge the factual and the fictitious, which is his intention ‘I’ve always liked the idea of the parameters between fiction and non-fiction, between the privacy of art and the public nature of society. Those borders should be porous.’ Through this exposure of the internal, O’Hagan hopes that a writer is able to examine society, and ‘bring new morals into focus’ for the reader. He describes novelists as barometers who are able to measure the weather of emotion in society and translate it into their writing. The question of where our society is looking for role models, whether religious or outside, and how that is changing is a fascinating cultural dilemma which O’Hagan presents for us to examine. His novel ‘Be Near Me’ depicts a priest within a Scottish community whose morality is challenged by his sexual deviance. This can be compared to his novel ‘The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe’ which explores the Monroe myth and uses the comedic narrative voice of the character of a dog, an outsider, who is baffled by the absurd celebrity infatuated culture in which he finds himself. O’ Hagan muses upon this; ‘There’s something pseudo-religious about the practice of celebrity and something pseudo- saint-like about the way celebrities behave, as if they’re up on the cross for the people. People used to seek sainthood as something The heightened celebrity culture has also caused us to endow writers with a kind of mythical status. Not only do we want to read the book, but we also want to know everything about the writer and how they constructed their novel. The carousel of book readings, prizes, film adaptations and of course interviews which authors are expected to participate in perhaps distracts from the writing itself. O’Hagan believes that ‘good novels should dictate the terms of their own success.’ Ultimately the relationship between the reader and the novel is what’s important and ‘the mystery around books as phenomena rather than books as readable texts is a form of hysteria.’ The speeding up of the publishing process and the loss of the art of editing is also concerning when considering the future of the book industry in an age of digitalisation. O’Hagan fears that the devaluation of the editing process could lead to carelessness. O’Hagan’s Scottish childhood continues to influence his writing; ‘In some ways my childhood is more distinct for me now than it was when I was a child.’ O’Hagan mockingly discusses the nostalgic tendencies of Scottish writers absent from their homeland, ‘weeping about the hills of Eyrie’, dismissing such sentimentality as unproductive for creating original thought. Although he continues to be concerned with the questions that Scotland is facing, he has now lived in London for twenty years and enthuses ‘I love London so much. It belongs to every nationality, great cities are like that.’ He is now settled into the King’s English Department, and excited about the possibilities of teaching creative writing. He believes that it can improve one’s skills as a reader, as well as developing one’s ability to use the written language creatively and effectively. He equally describes the value of practicing writers to an English Department; ‘writers who are actually struggling with the process of writing in the every day. That’s more exciting for the students and more motivating for the teachers. For me, every day is a writing day, and that practice must not be allowed to slide’. O’Hagan is a great admirer of Norman Mailer for his ‘great willingness step into a conundrum and write from the centre.’ O’Hagan, depicts similar determination to explore social concerns. In 2009 he lectured on George Orwell at Birkbeck, and described both the loss of the working class as a separate entity and the de-politicisation of our society. Reading this lecture now, O’Hagan’s observations seem to foresee the problems reflected by this year’s riots, ‘We should always be interested in where our morals are going. The riots show a generation that wasn’t interested in changing society, they were just interested in robbing it.’ Despite his interest in the social concerns of our age, O’Hagan is very clear that his novels do not have an agenda for social change; ‘People don’t behave to type even if they’re politically active. They still behave like human beings.’ O’Hagan discusses the controversial character Father David in his novel ‘Be Near Me’, who may not be a likeable character, but who he hopes engages our sympathy as readers; ‘The question is not “is he likeable?” but “does he live?”. A novelist’s job is to create humanity on the page and give readers the instruments with which to imagine an actual life’. Finally I ask O’Hagan to consider the future of literature and the function of writers within our society, to which he provides an optimistic answer; ‘Writers are explorers in that they have the same ideas of frontiers and of breaking through them. We’ve all got a bit of Neil Armstrong in us. We want to be the first to plant a foot on new territory and put a flag in it and say, “this is mine”. You must believe that you’re going to say something sometime with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work. It’s dreamers, fiction makers and then truth tellers who are all behind advances in society. So let’s hope.’
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DEPARTMENT NEWSLETTER The Writing Strand: Dr Janet Floyd, “Marking Essays: A Workshop “. Dr Floyd will conduct a workshop that looks closely at the practice of marking. In the workshop, students will be given sample essays to mark and then examine the entire process: how judgements are made; what strategies are awarded; what doesn’t work well etc. Because this session is arranged as a workshop, there will be room for only 40 participants. To secure your place, email english@kcl.ac.uk When: Monday 28 November, 17:00 Where: S-2.08
Department Research Seminars: 1) On Thoughts Occasioned By...Michel de Montaigne to Chris Marker When: Wednesday 16 November, 17.30 Where: 342 Norfolk Building Speaker: Professor Timothy Corrigan, Penn. 2) Arguing with Images: New Approaches to the Old Abbey Theatre When: Wednesday 23 November, 17.30 Where: 342 Norfolk Building Speaker: Dr Hugh Denard, King’s College
ENGLISH SOCIETY EVENTS
The Abstract
PhD Skill Lunches:
1) David Bellwood, ‘From Photons to Faeries: The Solidity of Light in Synaesthetic fin de siècle Writing’
When: Wednesday 16th November, 13:00 Where: English Department Common Room, S2.38 Topic: Conferences and Papers with Hannah Crumme and Philippe Roesle. What makes a good abstract What makes a good delivery What to expect from attending/giving Where to find conference and paper opportunities
Hannah Crummé, ‘William Scot, Concrete Language, and Abstract Images’ When Wednesday, 16 November, 18:00 Where: English Department Seminar Room, K2.39 2) Susie Christensen, ‘Diary Writing as Illness and as Therapy: Anais Nin and Otto Rank’ When: Wednesday 30 November, 18:00 Where: English Department Seminar Room, K2.39
English Department Doctoral Seminars: When: Wednesday 2nd November, 17:00 Where: English Department Common Room, S2.38
On the 26th November at 8.00 pm, we have organised a chilled night at the George Inn with lots of drinks and socialising! This is your chance to get to know everyone on the committee in a favourite haunt of Charles Dickens!
On the 2nd November at 7.30 pm, we welcome you to come and meet the committee at The Horse, which is just a short walk away from the Strand campus. We will be celebrating the launch of our new journal ‘Of Cabbages and Kings’ with lots of drinks and have reserved an area just for the English Society!
The English Society’s production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, part of the modern theatre module, is to be performed on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of Feburary. The castings will be held at the following locations from 6-8pm:
On the 18 November at 7pm, Woolfson & Tay present an evening of lugubrious music and lopsided prose. Frank Key will read selections from his books, including “Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke” and “Impugned By A Peasant”, interspersed with Outa_Spaceman playing a selection of self-penned songs, hits from the Hooting Yard song collection, and a couple of singalong favourites from the heyday of the music hall. Tickets are £5 and booking is advised! For further information, visit: http://www.woolfsonandtay.com/lugubriousmusic-lopsidedprose.html
2nd Nov - Strand - S-2.23 3rd Nov- Guys - Gowland Hopkins Lecture Theatre (Hodgkin) No previous acting experience is required; casting will be based on enthusiasm, bravery and openness to new ideas. There is also an opening for co-Producer/ Art Director role; please email ishersahota@gmail. com if this sounds appealing.
King’s Players auditions for Simon Stephens’ Pornography will be held at: November 21st, 6pm-9pm: Guys Campus, New Hunt’s House, G12; November 23rd, 2pm- 6pm: Waterloo Campus, Franklin Wilkins Building, Room 1.10; November 25th, 5pm- 9pm: Strand Campus, K4U.12 Written in response to the events in London in July 2005, the play offers a remarkable kaleidoscopic portrait of a London that moved in a few days from the euphoria of Live 8 and the Olympics announcement to the devastation of the July 7 bombings. Please email shakti.bhagchandani@kcl.ac.uk if you have any questions!
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“
‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘To talk of many things: Of shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax, Of cabbages and kings!’
”
Lewis Carroll , Alice in Wonderland.
Shakti Bhagchandani Thomas Brewer Coryn Brisbane Miztli Cadena Helena Goodrich Maia Jenkins Francesca paul benjamin Rabinovich