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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

My parakeets fly over us at dusk There are maybe 40 of them They fly low, not low enough to touch or to get caught in the knotted mess of our unbrushed hair but low enough to startle, to arrest our upward glances by creating fine streaks of green Low enough for them to gather speed in the gully of this long city road, this passageway between Victorian terraces with their mirrored uniformity The birds do not care for the details of these two-storey houses in the way that the new homeowners do, eyeing the contours of their frontage, their turreted bays alternating between doorways The birds are here for the passages between them, pacing their flight along its narrow run The gully is long enough for them to gather speed after they collect en masse at the eastern end, by the new café covered by the graphic designer’s showy mural From here they rush, unleashed and gathering velocity, to the road’s end, the western tip where suddenly they veer right, towards the glare of the dying sun    Contact improvisation is Steve Paxton’s term Paxton is a dancer that another dancer, Yvonne Rainer, once described as being able ‘to move like butter around a room’ – a phrase so delicious it is impossible to forget Paxton danced with Rainer, among others, in the early 1960s, forming a school of postmodern dance now most often associated with Manhattan’s Judson Memorial Church Contact improvisation is a form of dance that he established a decade later, in the early 1970s, fusing the repetitive pared down moves of the Judsonites with some of the intuitive mirroring of movement that he had come to learn in a study of aikido, a modern Japanese martial art It is a partner dance form, a form danced a deux, and it is based on the physical principles of touch, momentum, shared weight and, most elementally, a shared point of contact It encompasses processes of falling, rolling, of counterbalancing, of lifting It encourages dancers to adopt special breathing techniques that will make themselves feel and therefore present as

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

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Art

February 2015

Filthy Lucre

Rye Dag Holmboe

Art

February 2015

White silhouettes sway against softly gradated backgrounds: blues, purples, yellows and pinks. The painted palm trees are tacky and...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Hangnails, and Other Diseases

Giada Scodellaro

Prize Entry

April 2017

Benson’s Syndrome   Grapefruit. I have lost the word for it. Popillo? Popello? No, no. It escapes her, the...

fiction

January 2015

Adventures in Immediate...

Max Blecher

TR. Michael Henry Heim

fiction

January 2015

I can picture myself as a small child wearing a nightshirt that comes down to my heels. I am...

 

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