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FIONA ALISON DUNCAN
FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary Prize for Bisexual Fiction.

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Interview with Fanny Howe

Interview

Issue No. 29

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

Issue No. 29

Fanny Howe’s bibliography is as bewildering as her itinerant biography. Born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, the poet and author grew up in...

Interview

January 2020

Interview with Jamieson Webster

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

January 2020

Jamieson Webster serves as a torchbearer for a field out of popular favour. Her practice, psychoanalysis, was last century’s...

Please click on the links below to download, print and assemble (instructions in slideshow above) Vanessa Hodgkinson’s For the Motherboard: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, typeset by James Bridle    LXIX   But obsolete Pieces of the Game He plays Upon this Transparency-grid of Nights and Days; Hither and thither tweets, and posts, and slays, And one by one back in the Hard Drive lays   **   But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays  Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;    Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,  And one by one back in the Closet lays   Rubáiyát Layout 1 Rubáiyát Layout 2     A Note on the Text by Vanessa Hodgkinson   The Rubáiyát that I own is one given to me over a decade ago when I lived in Kuwait A modest copy bound in plasticised leather, it is cheap but speaks of the sumptuousness of its genealogy Of ‘travelling size’, it is like a bloated cheap postcard Every verse is surrounded by a repeated border of flowers that have long since been abstracted beyond recognition of anything natural The paper is sleek; a biro slides over it without leaving much more than an oily smudge   This Rubáiyát is special to me because it is a dual translation of the original Persian verse into French and English While I couldn’t appreciate the Persian, I was being given a double window of opportunity in both French and English, my maternal and paternal tongues It acted as a playful reminder of my inability to master Arabic, let alone Persian, despite moving to Kuwait to do so   I often compare my pidgin Arabic to my pidgin HTML These languages intrigue me but I am locked out of their possibility Despite my best intentions I am never going to master them I recognise forms, sequences, ways in which they coagulate to have meaning They both contain a fundamental logic that I admire and wish I could possess What kind of person might I be if I did read and write in Arabic and was proficient in computer programming! We can only shudder at the thought But the reality is that despite these languages being constantly

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary...

Exquisite Mariposa

Fiction

July 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Fiction

July 2019

I broke three contracts in 2016. The first was verbal, a monogamy clause. But he was fucking around too, and I knew, because everybody...

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feature

May 2013

Haneke's Lessons

Ricky D'Ambrose

feature

May 2013

‘Art is there to have a stimulating effect, if it earns its name. You have to be honest, that’s...

poetry

Issue No. 13

Morning, Noon & Night

Claire-Louise Bennett

poetry

Issue No. 13

Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice. It ought not to be too ripe – in fact there should...

Art

Issue No. 9

Dr Gaz

Jeff Keen

Art

Issue No. 9

Jeff Keen was among the most influential of a pioneering generation of experimental film-makers to emerge from the United...

 

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