Hannah Black’s novella Tuesday or September or the End begins in the early months of 2020, on the heels of a strange discovery: an alien object, oak-tree-like but seemingly machine-fabricated, has materialized on the shore of Jones Beach. According to the frenetic narrative of the news, one that chokes everyday life, it would seem that everyone in America is obsessed with the possibility of alien contact. But Bird initially has no interest in the strange object; she is a communist who would rather “talk about her feelings,” while her boyfriend, Dog, a social democrat, tries to “embrace popular feeling”—he is “among the enraptured many.” In March, after COVID is recognized as a legitimate threat to life, the couple is separated without ceremony or passion. They seem uninterested in reuniting until riots following the murder of George Floyd turn into a revolution: all prisoners are released, and Rikers falls into a sinkhole. 

In the real-life early months of 2020, it was assumed—at least by magazine editors, and the writers they commissioned—that collective grief was best understood through a process of individual accounting: reflections on how one spent or wasted or optimized their newfound free time. “Pandemic diaries,” as these reflections became known, promised to do the work of explaining ourselves to ourselves. Today, they have altogether disappeared. Tuesday or September of the End bears many of the superficial marks of the genre; the events of the book are demarcated by the months in which they occur, and, as Black told BOMB, it is “a fictionalized version of the first six months of 2020 … as if you can fictionalize time itself.” But while the diary fixates on the ordinary, attempting to derive collective meaning from individual routine, Black’s novella mobilizes an absurd and unlikely third party whose arrival signals a break from the anesthetizing qualities of contemporary life. Humanity submits “itself as an object of study” for the aliens, who interview people one by one; the aliens, in turn, suffer from “the introduction of the concept of prison,” but are “deeply healed by riot.” I was so compelled by their psychology, which enables the couple and all of the other humans they live among to feel collective liberation as something tangible, inevitable, and already arising. 

—Maya Binyam, contributing editor

How Full Metal Jacket revealed 'the mindlessness of conflict'

Andy's back with a hugely important episode of At The Match, as he travels to Łódź in Poland to see Ukraine's second 'home game' since the Russian invasion in February.

He walks through crowds of vibrant local supporters with British-Ukrainian journalist Andrew Todos, who reflects on a hugely difficult period for the national team. We also hear a fevered home support cheer on Oleksandr Petrakov's men, who came away with a point after a ludicrous James Collins opener.

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To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.

In 2002, the year I graduated from college, I had a young male psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian who called me the night before every session to confirm our appointment. I feel bad for this guy now. He was kind of clueless and innocent, and I tried to horrify him at every session with more and more outlandishly irreverent thoughts about life. I’m not sure why I did this—maybe just for my own entertainment. He used to tell me that he could decipher my moods based on my outfits—he could determine when I was depressed or activated or hadn’t been sleeping based on the color combinations I chose. This was a very confused, manic period for me, and I had developed a practice of dressing that followed something like an equation. One garment had to be the equivalent of garbage; disgusting T-shirts and track pants fit into that category. One garment had to be opulent and luxurious, like a sequin blazer or buttery leather pants. And one garment had to be ironic. This was the hardest category to fulfill because it was so subjective.

I had first learned the word ironic from the hit nineties movie Reality Bites, but I didn’t understand it until I had lived in New York for several years. New York teaches you all kinds of interesting things. It was during this period when I was dressing like a lunatic that I used Leonard Cohen’s spoken opening of “First We Take Manhattan” as the recording on my answering machine: “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” His voice is dark and conspiratorial but pure and noble, and he speaks these words a cappella, as though to announce that a great force of collective love and fury is about to overtake the world. I thought this was rather ironic, because I was a young woman who was not in the business of overtaking anything. I could barely take my medication.

Tell Us What You Know

One day in 1966, the CIA interrogation specialist Cleve Backster was feeling silly. On a whim, he tried clipping a polygraph wire to the leaf of a common houseplant. A polygraph, or lie detector, is typically hooked up to a person to measure factors like increased heart rate and skin moisture, in order to determine whether the subject is truthfully responding to questions. A needle corresponding to physiological changes registers a line on paper; the line will supposedly spike if a person lies. Polygraphs are finicky instruments and their reliability has been repeatedly debunked (simply being attached to one can be enough to make your heart rate jump), but they do successfully measure fluctuations in an organism’s physical state. Backster thought he might be able to incite a spike in the line of the lie detector if he somehow excited or injured the plant. He decided he might set one of its leaves on fire. But as he sat there, contemplating burning the plant, the polygraph needle jumped. Backster—who in his free time was also an acid-dropping astrologist—noted that the spike was identical to the kind elicited by a human fright response. He quickly jumped to the conclusion that the plant could experience emotions like a sentient being. And since he had only contemplated hurting the plant, he also concluded that the plant could sense his thoughts. The plant was a mind reader.

Over the following decades Backster cleaved ever tighter to a theory he developed called “primary perception,” which he believed to be a form of consciousness embedded in the cells of all living beings that, at least in the case of plants, gave them a profound sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others. If it had not been the sixties, perhaps his work would have been relegated to the shelves of pseudoscience, but he hit a nerve of the Whole Earth generation with its burgeoning environmental movement. Like Backster, a certain set was already primed to believe in communion with plants in the form of, say, ingesting psilocybin or peyote. Backster became a figurehead for a cultural fascination with plant consciousness. His findings about the ability of plants to sense danger, read emotion, and communicate were publicized widely, notably in the still-popular book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, but also on TV shows. His ideas were adopted by the Church of Scientology, and eventually even made it back to the CIA, which invested in its own research about plant sentience.

6 min read

Oxford’s architectural styles through time

Oxford has many architectural wonders. These world-famous buildings range from medieval towers to modern university sites, showcasing changing styles from Classical to Modern. In this blog I focus on a selection of buildings to give an insight into the multitude of architectural styles in the city.

Twelfth century: Christ Church Cathedral

Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, in his poem ‘Thyrsis’ described Oxford as ‘the city of dreaming spires’. Christ Church Cathedral, with its distinctive tower, exemplifies this idea. The spire has a pyramidal shape accented by four gabled, lucarne (dormer) windows and pinnacles at each corner of the square base. It follows the architectural style of the Romanesque and Gothic, the most characteristic styles associated with Oxford university.

On the exterior are layers of blind arcading with rounded and pointed arches, typical of Romanesque and Gothic architecture respectively, as well as crenellated walls and buttressing. A large rose window divided into ten parts dominates the wall behind the altar and, along with the masses of stained glass windows, allows beautiful, saturated light into the cathedral. The interior feels immensely grand with large pier supports that allow the building to rise to great heights, joining at the top in the form of an intricate lierne vault.

The cathedral we see today is a small part of the original building from the twelfth century. It is what remained when a reformed Tom quad was built between 1525 and 1529, and the cathedral was absorbed into Henry VIII’s new Christ Church College. The nave, choir, main tower and transepts are late Norman, though gothic features are present. and The rich lierne vault was added in the 1500s, designed by William Orchard with a dozen pendants linked by ribs that together form eight-pointed star shapes.

One hundred and seventy-six years ago today, on the evening of Monday, June 22, 1846, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon—sixty years old and facing imminent financial ruin—locked himself in his studio in his house on Burwood Place, just off London’s Edgware Road. The month had been the hottest anyone could remember: that day, thermometers in the city stood at ninety degrees in the shade. Despite the heat, that morning Haydon had walked to a gunmaker’s on nearby Oxford Street and purchased a pistol. He spent the rest of the day at home, composing letters and writing a comprehensive, nineteen-clause will. 

That evening, only a few streets away in Marylebone, Elizabeth Barrett penned a letter to her fiancé, Robert Browning. The poets’ courtship was still a secret, but they wrote each other constantly, sometimes twice a day. Like everyone else, Elizabeth was exhausted by the weather; earlier in the month she had complained to Browning that she could do nothing but lie on her sofa, drink lemonade, and read Monte Cristo. “Are we going to have a storm tonight?” she now wrote eagerly. And, indeed, as dusk turned to darkness, the rumbles of a summer tempest began. By ten o’clock, Londoners could see flashes of lightning on the horizon. 

Back in Burwood Place, meanwhile, passing her husband’s studio on her way upstairs to dress, Mrs. Mary Haydon tried the door, but found it bolted. “Who’s there?” her husband cried out. “It is only me,” she replied, before continuing on her way. A few minutes later, Haydon emerged from his studio and followed her upstairs. He repeated a message he wanted her to deliver to a friend of theirs across the river in Brixton and stayed a moment or two longer, then kissed her before heading back downstairs. Once again alone in his studio, he wrote one final page that began, “Last Thoughts of B. R. Haydon. ½ past 10.” Fifteen minutes later, he stood up, took the pistol he had bought that morning, and, standing in front of the large canvas of an unfinished current work in progress, “Alfred and the First British Jury”—one of the grand historical scenes he favored but brought him few admirers—shot himself in the head. 

How Cornelia Parker uses explosives, steamrollers and snake venom in her work

We're back with two bags of souvenir Bulgarian pottery for another trip down memory lane as Kate, Luke and Pete kick off with the 2015/16 season - dilly ding, dilly dong!

The Iceland horror show came and went, the Champions League served up its best season ever and the Ramble became Football Ramble Daily. After that, we welcomed our new cohort to Ramble HQ and, following a Film Club-filled lockdown, we came roaring back with over 500 episodes of glorious nonsense. Oh yeah, and England got good again!

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Last night I hit a deer, a fawn actually. Just a ragged thing still with its spots, it could’ve been born that day. Its mother stood on the side of the road. I saw her first and only the fawn when it was too late, my own new child in the backseat. I was immediately seized with the guilt that I shouldn’t be there and the deer should, that I was in the wrong place throttling a car through the woods. The next day at the farm where I work the lettuces were missing their hearts, the best, sweetest part eaten by deer. It is getting to be summer when things like this happen.

The solstice itself is mundane. Every December and June we have the shortest day with the longest night or the longest day bathed in light. On the first winter’s day our shadow looms, a lonesome outline imprinted over frozen ground. On the summer solstice we cast less of ourselves on the earth, which is teeming with green life. Does the waning and waxing of the days somehow govern human temperament or are we more fickle, flitting between the dark and light faster than the earth’s slow tilt and pull from the sun?

Searching through old journals, like a meteorologist’s log, I looked for the noting of many solstices amidst my own human concerns and the agricultural ones on the farm where I worked: summers lost in a frenzied blur of sunlight and bounty and winters disappeared into whitewashed hibernation. What is this burning desire day after day to note the passing of a mouse or a stranger shoveling scrambled eggs into their mouth? Why record anything at all? In wanting to redeem this compulsion to record and its accumulation year after year, why not proclaim, The solstice is a day of import! Each winter and summer passed only once, like a car charging irrevocably through a dark wood, and then was gone.