Anna Della Subin

Phantom Threads, by Anna Della Subin We've recently updated our website to make signing in easier and more secure

“In Warner’s work, new technologies do not dispel but verify enchantment, confirming the presence, ever around us, of an unseen world.”

@annadella.bsky.social from a talk delivered at the conference Enchanting Wor(l)ds: The Works of Marina Warner.

A new magazine of politics, culture, art. Coming soon.

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(Still image from a film by Yto Barrada)

‘Her Own Cuneiform’ | Anna Della Subin The poet Dunya Mikhail is preoccupied with Iraq’s urgent present, but she studies it with the care of an archaeologist exhuming relics of the deep past.

“When I moved the time machine’s lever to the year 1991,/it began to shake severely and seemed as if on fire,” Mikhail writes, recalling the terror of living through Operation Desert Storm.

In the current issue of the @nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

‘Her Own Cuneiform’ | Anna Della Subin The poet Dunya Mikhail is preoccupied with Iraq’s urgent present, but she studies it with the care of an archaeologist exhuming relics of the deep past.

In Dunya Mikhail's work, the mythic, the journalistic, and the poetic meet; war transforms into a Type A character, and Enheduana talks with Siri in a dream. My latest in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

https://snrk.de/breakfast-in-tahiti/ =================================== Snark mark 2/5: Its habit of getting up late you’ll agree 　That it carries too far, when I say That it frequently breakfasts at five-o’clock tea, 　And dines on the following day. In November 1859, Dodgson gave a lecture at a meeting of the Ashmolean Society on “Where does the Day begin?”. A stopped clock is right 24 times a day, if you start carrying the clock around the globe due West at an angular speed of 15°/h once it has stopped. (It’s almost like the mad tea-party having always six o’clock while moving around the table.) Only the day date suddenly would change somewhere. (That’s where in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the March Hare quickly changes the topic.)

If you follow the sun around the globe at six o'clock, it's always six o'clock.

snrk.de/breakfast-in...

Through Alice's eyes we see a complete subversion of the adult social world, revealing how rule-bound conventionality is inextricable from other states—of dream, illusion, play, and counter-passages of time.

Podcast: Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin · Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll London Review of Books

In Episode 4 of FICTION & THE FANTASTIC, it's always six o'clock. Marina Warner and I step across the silvery mist of Lewis Carroll's looking-glass, to a place where queens scoot backwards and can remember the future. We ask, who was it that dreamed it all? @lrb.co.uk

www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...

@thenation.com

The Enchanted Worlds of Marshall Sahlins What if we saw the study of ghosts, gods, and other metapersons as worthy of a science of its own?

Sahlins detected “a clear and simple law of revolution”: that it is the rulers, not the revolutionaries, who undermine a society’s government. “It is from deep traditional values that the opposition draws its outrage—and in defense of them, takes to the streets.” www.thenation.com/article/cult...

... in the gap between our knowledge, which can only be partial, and our fantasy, which can reach towards totality, "we have only to identify the point where the imagined fortress does not coincide with the real one and then find it,” this exit route to another city or an otherworld.

We look at the relationship for Calvino between the fantastic and his anti-fascist politics, and in contemplating his incantatory last line, at how the literature of the imagination opens up portals. “An opportunity for escape exists," Calvino wrote elsewhere...

These cities, "too probable to be real," are narrated by Polo as bedtime stories for a brooding sovereign in the twilight of his empire. Says Polo to Kublai Khan: "If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance."

We voyage through cities made entirely out of plumbing, populated by water nymphs; through cities of desire, memory, and rumor, built on a collective dream; through cities like New York, perpetually under scaffolding—for when the construction stops, the destruction will begin.

Podcast: Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin · Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino

In Episode 3 of FICTION & THE FANTASTIC, Marina Warner and I enter the labyrinth of Italo Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES, and the text that inspired its frame, the 13th century travels of Marco Polo, composed from a prison cell. www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and... @lrb.co.uk

We end with Gulliver's encounter with the highly-rational quadrupeds who are contemplating the genocide of man, and the still urgent questions Swift poses about the dark side of Enlightenment rationality. Can reason itself be salvaged? Or is there something else that should take its place?

... how the words-on-wood prophesies AI models; the relationship between the fantastic and language; the idea that, if only the words were different, somehow everything could change.

Topics may include! analysis of disgusting treasures; reverse creation myths; Gulliver as Grildrig or "girl-thing"; expulsion from paradise; the abjection of immortality; fantasy and misanthropy (we are stuck with ourselves, so how do we live?); Lilliputian theology (burial with head upside-down)

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (1726) is often read as satire, but what do we learn if we read it as fantasy, as not only a comment on its own contemporary political realities, but as speculation or hypothesis of an alternative future? What worlds does Gulliver open up for us, almost 300 years later?

Podcast: Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin · Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift

Episode 2 of FICTION & THE FANTASTIC is out, wherein Marina Warner and I take on a longtime favorite of mine—and to each her own pronunciation of "Houyhnhnm," the race of intelligent horses who have colonized mankind... www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and... @londonreview.bsky.social

There are now more than fifty LRB writers on Bluesky - including @torilmoi.bsky.social, @jessiechilds.bsky.social, @sophiagoodfriend.bsky.social and @bekadiski.bsky.social with writing in our new issue and on the blog this week.

Read and follow them here:
go.bsky.app/5CZWQgk

Topics may include: storytelling as salvation; the relationship between imagination and eroticism; who are the jinn and can you marry one?; illusion and the inventions of language; how enchanted fiction stands not opposite to reason, but as a form of it.

The first episode is out today, on THE THOUSAND & ONE NIGHTS, a text that takes place in the blurred space between night & day, dream & awakening, life against death. We read from two poetic, beguiling scenes from Yasmine Seale's new translation.

Podcast: Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin · Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ London Review of Books

Introducing FICTION & THE FANTASTIC, a new podcast series from the LRB, wherein Marina Warner and I traverse the classics of enchantment, to discover how it has been a mode of inquiry and hypothesis.... www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and... @londonreview.bsky.social

Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine, by Anna Della Subin A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, by Nathan Thrall Night Games: And Other Stories and Novellas, by Arthur Schnitzler The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, by Olga Ravn Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, by Leah Hunt-Hendrix, and Astra Taylor Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, by Steve Silberman

Here are some of my favorite reads from 2024.

(See alt text for authors and titles.)

#books

If in London— please join me, Bidoun, & many others on Sunday for readings from the Gaza Reader, in support of the Artist Fundraiser for MSF in Palestine www.artistfundraiser.com