The Lightbox Sinéad Morrissey ‘If you had to describe yourself in a single word, what would it be?’

We’re sitting around our dinner table under the halogen strip light in the early evening dark. It’s October 1983. I’m eleven. My mother has recently decided the family should be vegetarian, so dinner is Hungarian goulash with mushrooms, sour cream and cheese. The melted cheese has turned stringy and is stuck to my teeth. Flattening his ears back like an owl, our cat mews outside the kitchen window – a pure-black boy cat called Morris. Morris Morrissey. We tend to name or acquire things that sound just like us. At one point we even had a Morris Minor. Whenever we got a lift to school instead of having to walk, my brother and
I ducked our heads while my mother parked, in case anyone saw us.

 ‘Isn’t that a fascinating idea?’ says my father. ‘A single word.’

 ‘Well, it’s possibly a bit reductive’, says my mother, getting up to let the cat in ... read more

Rod Mengham The exhibition organisers assume that a majority of its visitors will be Berliners, because the exhibition prompts them to remember what it was like to visit the building when it was still standing. It asks questions about the facilities available, and the sports and leisure activities it supported. (Besides the Volksstimme, there were several auditoria, art galleries, restaurants and beerhalls; a theatre; a cinema; a bowling alley; a swimming pool; a billiards hall; a skating rink; and a gymnasium.) The exhibition in fact asks a question about practically every object on show, which might seem to the non-German like a stereotypically German way to proceed. It even includes as a major part of the display a range of written responses to its leading questions. These vary between the bluntly dismissive (‘I never went near the place’) and the fondly nostalgic.

It swiftly becomes clear that the balance is tipped ... read more

Gregory Woods David Grundy, Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry, Queer Communities in Boston and
the Bay Area, 1944–Present (OUP) $120

Reviewing Stephen Coote’s The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (TLS, 22-28 April 1983), Alan Hollinghurst, of all people, roundly declared that ‘the increasing self-segregation of gays has had an enfeebling effect on their art’. This was a commonplace critical stance at the time, though less so coming from a gay critic. Hollinghurst’s main objection was to the new directness, where oblique coding had once been the norm. There was also the implication, inherited via the strictures of the New Criticism, that each poem should be able to stand on its own (actually a fair requirement for anthology pieces), but that many of these could not. The poem Hollinghurst especially objected to, all the more so because of its prominent position as the last item in ... read more