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Izabella Scott

IZABELLA SCOTT is an editor at The White Review.



Articles Available Online


Shola von Reinhold’s ‘LOTE’

Book Review

September 2020

Izabella Scott

Book Review

September 2020

To read Shola von Reinhold’s ornate, multi-layered novel LOTE (2020) is to encounter a baroque mind. It tells the story of a queer Black...

Art Review

November 2019

Actually, the Dead are Not Dead

Izabella Scott

Art Review

November 2019

During Bergen Assembly’s opening days, I am asked to attend a number of mock funerals, including one for a...

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

September 2015

Izabella Scott

Contributor

September 2015

IZABELLA SCOTT is an editor at The White Review.

Book Review

August 2019

Jordy Rosenberg’s ‘Confessions of the Fox’

Izabella Scott

Book Review

August 2019

It’s hot as fuck, said the friend who handed me Confessions of the Fox, a faux-memoir set in eighteenth-century...

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Echo Chamber

Art Review

November 2017

Izabella Scott

Art Review

November 2017

A lattice of diamonds and crosses, painted onto a 21-metre long wall at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, scatters my gaze. Artist Navine G....
Hot Rocks

feature

November 2016

Izabella Scott

feature

November 2016

‘We have received around 150 of them,’ Massimo Osanna tells me, as we peer into four small crates stuffed full of dusty freezer bags....
False shadows

Art

August 2016

Izabella Scott

Art

August 2016

The ‘beautiful disorder’ of the Forbidden City and the Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfection and Light) was first noted by the Jesuit painter Jean Denis...

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fiction

November 2012

Religion and the Movies

Aidan Cottrell Boyce

fiction

November 2012

When the Roman Empire ruled the world, you could make it work for you. The women, the hospitality. You...

Interview

May 2012

Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer

Jacques Testard

Interview

May 2012

Much has been written about the precocity and talent of Jonathan Safran Foer, whose debut novel Everything is Illuminated...

feature

June 2014

A Grenade for River Plate

Juan Pablo Meneses

TR. Jethro Soutar

feature

June 2014

El Polaco appears brandishing his Stanley, as he lovingly calls his pocket knife. Five young hooligans huddle round him...

 

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