Mailing List


Orlando Reade

Orlando Reade is writing a Ph.D. on English poetry and cosmology in the seventeenth century. His interview with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye can be read in The White Review No. 13.



Articles Available Online


Wildness of the Day

feature

December 2016

Orlando Reade

feature

December 2016

One day in late 2011, waiting outside Green Park station, my gaze was drawn to an unexpected sight. Earlier that year a canopy of...

Interview

Issue No. 13

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Orlando Reade

Interview

Issue No. 13

Modern philosophy is threatened by love, whose objects are never only objects. Philosophers have discovered in love a lived...

U Mubarak It kind of grows out of traffic The staccato hiss of an exhaust pipe begins to sound like record scratching Skidding and braking, the vehicles resume their car horn concerto Braying, bawling, crashing, farting, fortissimo hustling cut in Then comes the imperious vroom of a makana – the Arabic corruption of the Italian word for ‘machine’ – as a motorcycle is called on the streets of Cairo…     R 1998 That staccato hiss is how the city breathes while you’re bumping along on your feet You’ve been taking in toxins, dodging potholes and garbage mounds As you slip in mud, now, you catch the tail-end of something rough and magnificent that’s just gone past your ear It must be playing inside that Speed-like murder motor there, not a mini but a micro bus: fatalistic transportation of the poor You almost fell on your side as it charged, with all those bodies tripping over you and each other in the metal-rubber-and-asphalt cruelty of its passage, the punishing heat and no room to walk Yet you listen hard as you balance on the curb, leaning back to make way for a huge wicker board piled with bread and balanced on the head of a cyclist pedalling barefoot and unperturbed   It’s a hit you recognise: an old sound by the urban folk legend Ahmed Adaweyah (b 1945), a waiter by trade It dates from the mid seventies, pretty much when you were born So you don’t know if the city was as it is when it was made, but this Cairo breathes through it exactly as it should: beautifully   You want to heave a nostalgic sigh – just as your lips part, a fresh discharge of exhaust blows in your face So you light a cigarette instead Round the far corner there’s a kiosk that sells chilled green bottles of the local Stella beer They come wrapped in crinkly black bags so the pious sons of bitches don’t know what you’re drinking – more seriously, so they know you know they don’t want to know what   The kiosk owner smiles as he recognises your face He’s playing a Darth Vader-sounding Saudi recitation of the Quran on his little stereo, the hypocrite You ask if he’s got any Adaweyah for your sake and, crouching in the shadow of the

Contributor

August 2014

Orlando Reade

Contributor

August 2014

Orlando Reade is writing a Ph.D. on English poetry and cosmology in the seventeenth century. His interview with Lynette...

Life outside the Manet Paradise Resort : On the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

feature

November 2012

Orlando Reade

feature

November 2012

*   A person is represented, sitting in what appears to be the banal and conventional pose of a high street studio portrait photographer:...

READ NEXT

Art

May 2014

The Interzone and Dexter Dalwood

Sarah Hegenbart

Dexter Dalwood

Art

May 2014

‘Burroughs in Tangier’ (2005) has captivated me ever since its display in the 2010 Turner Prize Exhibition. The work...

fiction

January 2012

Collapse - A Memoir

Jesse Loncraine

fiction

January 2012

Author’s Note   I began writing about the war five years after it was over; a war the world...

poetry

January 2016

Two New Poems

Elena Fanailova

TR. Eugene Ostashevsky

poetry

January 2016

(POEM FOR ZHADAN)   This (my) country will be the death of you Its military mathematics Its secret services...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required