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Patrick Langley
Patrick Langley's debut novel Arkady was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in March 2018. He writes on contemporary art for Frieze, Art Agenda, and other publications. He is a contributing editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


Jesse Ball’s ‘Census’

Book Review

May 2018

Patrick Langley

Book Review

May 2018

Reading Jesse Ball’s new novel feels like being hypnotised, or like having your heart broken – but really it feels like both at once....

Book Review

November 2017

M. John Harrison's 'You Should Come With Me Now'

Patrick Langley

Book Review

November 2017

In a 2012 interview with the Guardian, M. John Harrison argued that the segregation of literature into genres is ‘a...

Breath-Manifester   Each bared morning is a swell time to die, Leaving the town’s ornate maze for the level Expanse of those lit and meat-eating fields, the Clouds that turn like ghost machines, the antic Tremendous woods where Pan’s breath on your heart Recharms a flame from its grey-furred ember I’ll wear my belt blazoned with Alpha Centauri, For luck, whilst you’ll surely sport that Oxfam scarf In whose puce stitch some crone has worked GI   E (Glory To The Most High) Time to die, to be Disturbed by the one re-re-repeated Word Fanfared by each time-warping bird, each fierce leaf Or pimped bud that is but love’s newest halloo Over the heads of the dead and alive, alive-O Laughing, you’ll lurch and say or missay, “only kenning what’s real Saves us from terror Wilhelm Reich” Wise words     Drones   You see the Greys, he said, girding his teeth for a lime doughnut, they use the owl’s nervous system the way we use a drone or hidden camera Given what I now knew, it almost seemed possible When green tea was announced I slid outside for a smoke,   paced roided grass, watched where stained smokestacks smoked into the wind’s dead breath, its yellow teeth Back in the conference centre, the tea- fresh crowd were pondering the giant owl that stilled her car on that night when she knew she knew nothing, its voice a savage drone   terrible to recall, a rising drone which turned her body into pixel-smoke swarming upwards and assembled anew (“like I’d been sucked into a white hole’s teeth”) on that craft that swept as quiet as an owl When she arrived home, hours late for tea,   her forehead was marked with a tau cross: T She paused, and the air conditioning’s drone momentarily quickened the cased owl on the wall, living eyes long gone to smoke, and shivered through the symmetrical teeth of God’s lost children (tell us something new!)   who’d come here to share what little they knew I thought of the onset of DMT – that sense of deliverance into the teeth of a buzzing wind or luminous drone, mere seconds after releasing the smoke – and then of that line from Twin Peaks, “the owls   are not what they seem” I dozed, dreamt of owls sane and inviolate in all they knew, and awoke to the guest lecturer: Smoke And Mirrors, Carl Jung And The

Contributor

August 2014

Patrick Langley

Contributor

August 2014

Patrick Langley’s debut novel Arkady was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in March 2018. He writes on contemporary art for Frieze, Art...

Art

September 2014

Semi Floating Sculpture

Luke Hart

Patrick Langley

Art

September 2014

Luke Hart will meet me at Gate 7. I get the text on the DLR, heading east past Canary...

Ordinary Voids

feature

Issue No. 9

Ed Aves

Patrick Langley

feature

Issue No. 9

I am standing in a parallelogram of shrubbery outside London City Airport. Ed is twisting a dial on his Mamiya RZ67 and squinting into its viewfinder. He...
Car Wash

fiction

January 2013

Patrick Langley

fiction

January 2013

He is sitting on the back seat of a car, somewhere in France. It’s a bright blue day, absurdly hot, and the roads are...
Ryan Trecartin: The Real Internet is Inside You

Art

April 2012

Patrick Langley

Art

April 2012

 ‘What’s that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?’ Marshall McLuhan   1: Your Original Is Having A Complete Human Change Meltdown Makeover   It’s difficult to describe Ryan Trecartin’s...
Nigel

poetry

September 2011

Patrick Langley

poetry

September 2011

Jamie sat alone at the edge of the dance floor and wondered how long it would be until Nigel arrived. The band had been...
Beyond the Horizon

fiction

Issue No. 1

Patrick Langley

fiction

Issue No. 1

Listen to the silence, let it ring on. (Joy Division, Transmission) I It is not yet dawn. The city is a distant murmur. Laid...

READ NEXT

fiction

January 2017

Peace

Patrick Cottrell

fiction

January 2017

Every morning as I walk to school through the dark blue decrepit world, I feel like I’m coming down...

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...

poetry

January 2012

Tynemouth Lodge

W. N. Herbert

poetry

January 2012

‘Sometimes I go to the tavern and get drunk.          What of it?’                                 Nesimi 1 Bars tend us...

 

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