Reviews

An Evening with Linnea Mirthva: Translator, Guitarist, Poet

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Reading from her translations of the legendary Wevi Jequa, greatest poet of the Outer Calyx Isles

Last night at the Lantern Hall in South Swindon—where the acoustics are such that every sound hangs around like incense—Linnea Mirthva took the stage. A name whispered among polyglot literati and vinyl collectors alike, Mirthva is a distinguished translator, an acclaimed classical guitarist, and—by her own frequent admission—a connoisseur of obscure salad dressings (her vinaigrette of burnt fig and miso found its way onto the BBC news when several guests collapsed after imbibing it).

But this evening wasn’t about arpeggios or emulsions. It was about language, breath, and the slow-burning brilliance of Wevi Jequa, the long-reclusive poetic oracle of the Outer Calyx Isles—a half-mythic archipelago somewhere in the South Pacific.

Who Was Wevi Jequa?

Wevi Jequa (1213?–1282?) was born, it is said, “in a tent that never faced the same direction twice.” A poet, translator, stone-carver, and briefly an amateur meteorologist, Jequa composed in the ancient tongue of Kalenni, a language thought to be untranslatable due to its emotional case system and refusal to use future tense.

Her poems were discovered in 2007, when a windstorm cracked open an abandoned cliff monastery on Calyx Minor. Inside: 54 scrolls bound in eel leather, many illegible, others riddled with botanical references, unsolvable puns, and precise temperature readings.

For years, Jequa was dismissed as a linguistic prank, a kind of poetic cargo cult. Until Mirthva arrived.

Mirthva and the Impossible Tongue

Fluent in twelve languages and rumored to be romantically entangled with gentlemen in at least five of them, Linnea Mirthva became obsessed with Jequa after hearing a misquoted line at a conference on “Preverbal Memory and Oceanic Syntax.”

She taught herself Kalenni over four years whilst living in a houseboat near Reykjavík. “I had to learn to think without a future,” she once said. “It’s good for the digestion.”

The result was “Salt from the Hourless Sea”, her translation of Jequa’s major works, hailed as “a spiritual reformatting of poetry itself” by The Swindonian Literary Supplement, and as “linguistic alchemy with a drizzle of lime” by Bon Appétit Swindon (which featured Mirthva in a spread titled “Dressing the Poem”).

The Reading

Mirthvale stood simply, a black guitar case unopened beside her, wearing what appeared to be an Ancient Greek tunic embroidered with punctuation marks from extinct alphabets. She read from Jequa’s “Poem for the Tide That Forgot to Recede,” pausing not at the end of lines, but where the emotion case required silence.

One excerpt, rendered here:

I held your hand /

like a grain of sand /

that once contained /

the argument of seas unseen.

The audience sat motionless, perhaps unsure if clapping was permitted. When she did lift her guitar, it was not to play, but to strike a single harmonic—creating an echo of the sort that Jequa once described in their poem “If we knew the true sound of time we would weep backwards.”

Epilogue in Emulsion

After the reading, Mirthva hosted a small gathering in the vestibule, serving lettuce leaves dressed with a new concoction she called “Sunshine, Mustard & Fog.” Ingredients remain secret, though one guest claimed it “tasted like a memory of seawater filtered through an oily rag.”

In Linnea Mirthva, form and flavour, sense and sound, converge. And in Wevi Jequa, she has found the ultimate collaborator: a poet who never imagined a future, and whose words now live exquisitely, impossibly, in ours.

Exhibition Review: “Everything Is Also Nothing, Probably” at Zamboni, Hoxton

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There are art shows that delight. There are those that challenge. And then there is Everything Is Also Nothing, Probably, an avant-garde exhibition that appears to be conceptually rather a blancmange.

Curated by the relentless Fizz Zamboni, the exhibition bills itself as “a radical dismantling of objecthood through performative epistemic collapse.” What this translates to in practice is 13.5 installations of varying solidity and a lot of confused visitors.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors are handed a single brown crayon and instructed to “unlearn the grid.” There is no map, only a trail of shredded astroturf leading to a large plinth displaying a sculpture titled Untitled (my aunt’s opinions)—a heap of damp tea towels wrapped in dental floss, next to an amp which is gently humming the Monte Carlo national anthem. According to the wall text this piece explores “ancestral tension and the US preference for football over Football.” How it does this is not explained.

Other highlights include:

• “Time Is a Sock Full of Screams” by H.M. Iris: A looping video of an elderly man whispering the word “refrigerator” into a mirror until he forgets why. At the 14-hour mark, a pigeon appears which critics have widely interpreted as a metaphor for vulture capitalism.

• “You Must Participate or It Doesn’t Count” by Sambi Donc: An interactive installation in which viewers are encouraged to climb inside a large clay pancreas while a stranger recites lines from obsolete IKEA instruction manuals. One woman entered and emerged, softly weeping – the artist later said this was exactly the reaction she hoped for.

• “Quantum Croissant (v.3.2)”by Elvei Haddred: A Invisibilism performance piece happening “continuously and nowhere,” which reportedly occurred during the opening, though no one is sure what it involved, or if it did.

The show’s only clearly labeled object, a fire extinguisher, turned out not to be a commentary on emergency, presence, and gallery insurance compliance, but to be an actual fire extinguisher.

Notably, in several rooms Zamboni has eschewed traditional information panels in favour of interpretive haikus scrawled onto vintage undergarments pinned to the ceiling. This leads to a degree of neck strain, but the poem referencing Marcel Duchamp and digestive distress is arguably worth the chiropractor visit.

Many critics scoff. “Nonsense!” Many cry, along with “Pretentious!” Especially when reviewing a piece that is a puddle named Emotion Pool (after Susan). But to miss the point is perhaps the point. Everything Is Also Nothing, Probably is less an exhibition and more a philosophical dare. It does not ask to be liked, or even understood. It asks only to be noticed.

You may leave enlightened or enraged, or simply unsure what constitutes art nowadays. But one thing is clear: Zamboni has created something both unforgettable and unclassifiable. Which, in avant-garde terms, is practically a standing ovation.

Book Review: The Runcible Goose Has Landed by Eustacia Blot

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In The Runcible Goose Has Landed, debut novelist and accomplished fine artist Eustacia Blot offers an eccentric, exuberant, and surprisingly affecting literary foray that reads like the fever-dream correspondence of Edward Lear, Virginia Woolf, and Julie Hatteau. Blot, known in the contemporary art world for her unnerving mixed-media tableaux and papier-mâché reliquaries of imagined saints, brings to fiction the same sensibility she brings to her installations: surreal precision tempered with unexpected emotional acuity.

The novel, despite—or perhaps because of—its literary title, announces itself unapologetically as something not quite of this world. The “runcible goose” in question is neither bird nor allegory, but an ambiguously sentient weather-vane-cum-clock, discovered atop an abandoned folly in a fictionalised archipelago off the coast of Devon. The plot, such as it is, follows Gilda Trapse, a retired ecclesiastical upholsterer with a latent talent for cartography, who finds herself reluctantly drawn into a cultish movement of birdwatchers, metaphysicians, and rogue librarians known as The Ornithognostics.

What sounds, on paper, like an exercise in preposteristical excess is, in practice, a novel of surprising formal elegance. Blot’s sentences are exacting. Her use of syntax evokes early Nabokov, all tremble and torque.

Her visual training is palpable on every page. The topography of the fictional island of Quarrelton is drawn with such textured clarity one is tempted to believe in its existence. In fact, an appendix includes a hand-drawn fold-out map—rendered by Blot herself—that walks a fine line between medieval mappa mundi and Turner’s storm studies. The effect is not unlike walking through an exhibition in a high-concept white cube gallery that happens, inconveniently, to be speaking in riddles, written on the walls, in French, using white ink.

And yet beneath the arch tone and polymathic layering lies a narrative of genuine human concern. Gilda’s gentle descent into belief—belief in something vast and irrational —is never treated with condescension. In Blot’s hands, absurdity becomes a spiritual mechanism. The novel, finally, is about how we make meaning out of the nonsense around us. It is, in its way, a hymn to eccentric faith.

One must make peace with the fact that The Runcible Goose Has Landed resists all easy classification. It is not satire, though it skewers. It is not fantasy, though it invents. Nor is it parody, though it toys with the genre’s structural bones. What it is, perhaps, is the literary equivalent of one of Blot’s own sculptures: strange, intricate, disturbing.

It may not be for everyone. Those seeking plot in the conventional sense may find themselves adrift among footnotes, parenthetical digressions, and excerpts from apocryphal ornithographies. But readers willing to surrender to its idiosyncrasies will find themselves richly rewarded.

With The Runcible Goose Has Landed, Eustacia Blot proves that her voice is delightfully unique. This is the sort of novel that will either be adored or politely avoided – it will not be forgotten.

Book Review: Grandma Rode a Lizard into Town by Jorvik Parn

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One does not pick up a novel titled Grandma Rode a Lizard into Town expecting restraint. And Jorvik Parn—performance artist, multilingual cough drop salesman, and occasional sculptor of edible furniture—delivers exactly what the title promises. With this riotously strange and oddly poignant debut novel, Parn proves that literary fiction can be both conceptually daring and gloriously, unapologetically absurd.

The eponymous Grandma—whose real name, we are told, is “Lorna Widdershins”—rides into the dusty desert town of Hatwater, Arizona astride an iguana named Barry, trailing a cloud of cactus pollen. She claims to have arrived in search of the Thoughtful Thorn, a legendary succulent believed to flower only once every presidential impeachment. But her arrival sets off a sequence of events involving migratory watchmakers, and a local bakery that communicates exclusively in Morse code.

Narrating this sunbaked saga is Dr. Linus Ogle, a disgraced ethnobotanist-turned-hatmaker, who’s attempting to write a definitive taxonomy of Italian headgear. What begins as a documentary project soon devolves into something halfway between an existential awakening and a highly conceptual scavenger hunt. The story’s structure—if one can call it that—is a patchwork of desert diary entries, annotated botanical etchings, and excerpts from The Hatwater Codex, an unreliable manuscript said to have been dictated by a drunken cowboy during a terrible sandstorm.

Parn’s prose is glorious and of the highest order, oscillating between the lyrical and the downright lunatic. Here, for instance, is how Ogle describes a moment of spiritual vertigo: “The wind smelled of forgotten jams”. A perfect sentence.

Though Parn is often compared to Pippy Schell and Sally O’Brien, there’s something uniquely tactile about her imagination. Every page is steeped in texture, textile, terrain and temperament. The town of Hatwater is drawn in surreal but loving detail: its silent hat parades, its broken laundromat, its local economy powered almost entirely by barflies and barbers.

What holds the novel together—barely, but beautifully—is its earnest heart. Beneath the dust, scales, and millinery chaos is a story about the language of grief, the elasticity of family, and the strange comforts of miscommunication. Grandma’s journey, we come to learn, is not just botanical or symbolic, but deeply personal. She’s trying to bloom in a world that’s forgotten how to water anything but its own assumptions.

Readers who crave plot will be deeply confused. Those who demand linearity may run for the hills. But readers willing to surrender to Parn’s hallucinatory logic will be rewarded with a novel that is not just read but inhabited.

Grandma Rode a Lizard into Town is, ultimately, a book about the things we carry: our baggage, our bruises, our hats. Jorvik Parn has written a debut that defies categorisation. It doesn’t care if you like it. It dares you to keep up—and somehow, through all the surrealism and silliness, it makes you feel deeply seen.

Book Review: My Toenails Are Ideograms by Plover C. Glint

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It is a rare pleasure—indeed, a great privilege—to encounter a novel that is so well written as this startling and singular debut from the award-winning Plover C. Glint. She is of course the conceptual painter whose previous claim to fame involved a solo show of weather-reactive canvases that changed hue with barometric pressure. Glint’s novel, much like her artwork, seems animated by a conviction that language itself is both an aesthetic medium and an unruly deity.

To answer the inevitable question: no, My Toenails Are Ideograms is not about podiatry, per se. The title—plucked from a line uttered by the book’s elusive protagonist, Dr. Hesper Ving—is emblematic of Glint’s entire approach: playful, opaque, and steeped in a kind of ecstatic misdirection. The plot (a term used here with gentle flexibility) revolves around Ving, a former semiotician turned subterranean gardener, whose toenails begin to grow in geometric patterns that closely resemble extinct logographic scripts. As word of her condition spreads, Ving finds herself alternately pursued by linguists, wellness influencers, and a splinter sect of Neo-Gnostic calligraphers.

It sounds preposterous, but Glint executes the conceit with such intellectual bravado and painterly delicacy that disbelief dissolves. The novel is constructed in fragments: diary entries, annotated glossaries, synesthetic footnotes, and transcripts of interviews conducted by a German podiatrist, translated into sign language. The result is a text that reads as though Borges had been fed a steady diet of fermented turmeric and left alone in a stationery shop.

What distinguishes Toenails from mere postmodern pastiche, however, is Glint’s abiding attention to the sensory texture of language. Her prose is lush, tactile, often vertiginous. A particularly memorable passage describes a dream in which Ving’s feet sprout alphabetic plumage and lift her into the sky:

“Each toe unfurled like a vellum scroll, the symbols inked in lapis and milk. The wind turned my ankles into punctuation. I hovered somewhere between an ampersand and a sigh.”

Glint, one suspects, sees writing not just as communication but as choreography—a dance between symbol and sensation. Her visual training is apparent not just in the vividness of imagery, but in her spatial sense of narrative structure. The novel resists linearity, opting instead for a kaleidoscopic accumulation of motifs: avian grammar, fungal etymologies, the erotic potential of ligatures.

And yet, amid all the conceptual mischief, there is emotional gravity. Ving’s journey—strange as it is—functions as an allegory of bodily estrangement and linguistic exile. Her toenails become a site of both wonder and alienation: a part of her that speaks in a voice she cannot fully understand. Beneath the novel’s cryptic surface lies a meditation on what it means to live in a body that betrays, translates, and transforms.

My Toenails Are Ideograms will no doubt divide readers. For some, it will prove impenetrable, its digressions maddening, its humour too barbed or baroque. But for others—those who find joy in the cryptic, who believe literature should sometimes behave like an installation piece or a fever dream—it will feel like home.

Plover C. Glint has written an unusually profound book: absurd, intricate, and oddly luminous. One suspects it won’t be the last time we hear from her.

Book Review: Michelangelo Was Actually Three Children in a Coat by Dr. Lisette Thrumble

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Every generation produces a handful of scholars bold enough to upend the established canon. Dr. Lisette Thrumble, previously best known for her well-received thesis on Da Vinci’s obsession with soup, now offers a meticulously footnoted reassessment of the Renaissance’s most revered figure. Her new book, Michelangelo Was Actually Three Children in a Coat, is as scholarly as it is surreal—a wild, speculative ride through both marble and myth.

The central claim, presented with disarming academic calm, is that Michelangelo Buonarroti—the sculptor of David, the painter of the Sistine Chapel, the architect of St. Peter’s Dome—was not a single Florentine genius, but a trio of exceptionally precocious orphans working together under an elaborate coat or toga-like garment.

Thrumble’s argument is audacious, but she backs it up with some compelling evidence.

Drawing from obscure tax records, erratic handwriting in Michelangelo’s notebooks, and one suspiciously childlike doodle in the margins of a papal commission ledger, she constructs a theory that is part detective story, part psychological case study, and part theatrical farce. According to Thrumble, the “Michelangelo” persona was an invention devised to navigate the adult world of patronage and papal politics in a world where precocious children were unable to become artists.

Each of the alleged trio is given a profile:

• Giulio, the topmost child, was the “face man”—the negotiator, letter-writer, and smooth talker who dazzled the Medicis with a vocabulary far beyond his years.

• Tomaso, the middle, had an uncanny grasp of musculature and was “responsible for all torsos and minor prophets.”

• Alfonso, the base of the stack, was the legs—and also the sculptor, possessed of superhuman calves.

Thrumble acknowledges the incredulity her theory provokes and devotes several chapters to painstaking evidence. There are floorplans of art studios, designed with everything low down and easily reachable by kids. Witness testimonies noting Michelangelo’s “high-pitched” voice and tendency to “wobble dramatically when turning corners,” and one lengthy appendix on how a small boy might feasibly carve Pietà if extremely determined and in possession of an extremely sharp chisel.

More than just an exercise in speculative absurdity, Michelangelo Was Actually Three Children in a Coat slyly pokes at the myth of solitary genius, asking: must we always believe in the singular, tortured male artist? Or is it possible—just possible—that our most revered masterpieces are the result of unexpected collaborations?

Thrumble’s writing is both razor-sharp and delightful. Her footnotes often devolve into bickering with herself. Chapter titles include “On Marble” and “The Coat as Metaphor”. The index is riddled with passive-aggressive entries like “David, see: thighs, improbable.”

While the book will never replace Vasari in the syllabus, it may well find a home in the hearts of skeptics, surrealists, and anyone who has ever looked at a work of art and thought, “A child have done that!” This book tells us, maybe they did.

Book Review: Dada, You’re Doing It Again: The Avant-Garde as a Prolonged Temper Tantrum by Professor Malvina Jibber

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In Dada, You’re Doing It Again, noted cultural provocateur and self-styled “historian of art hysteria” Professor Malvina Jibber offers a blistering reinterpretation of the Dada movement, suggesting that the entirety of early 20th-century anti-art wasn’t a reaction to war, or nihilism, or even Duchamp’s moustachioed Mona Lisa—but rather an extended and highly curated temper tantrum thrown by artists who had simply not been invited to enough parties.

Jibber’s central argument is that Dada was less a movement and more “a collective sulk that got out of hand, then became extremely fashionable.” She likens the famous Cabaret Voltaire gatherings in Zürich to “the avant-garde equivalent of revving one’s motorbike whilst wearing a velvet smoking jacket.”

Chapter One, Tristan Tzara Throws a Fit, opens with an imagined scene in which the poet, denied access to a fondue party hosted by Swiss Symbolists, retaliates by inventing performance poetry made entirely of sneezes and obscenities shouted into a megaphone through a sock. “This was not rebellion,” Jibber insists, “it was a form of attention-seeking too abstract for kindergarten but somehow perfect for 1916.”

From there, the book gleefully unravels. Marcel Duchamp’s famous Fountain? “A passive-aggressive bathroom prank.” Hugo Ball’s costume poems? “Proof that if you give a man too much felt and not enough supervision, things will head south quickly.” Jean Arp’s paper collages? “The work of someone who dropped things and decided not to pick them up.”

Jibber’s prose is relentless in its scholarly tone, riddled with footnotes that lead nowhere, references to fake Swiss newspapers (Le Scandale Invisible), and one baffling appendix devoted entirely to the dietary habits of Zurich’s café culture. Chapter titles include:

• Cut-Up or Shut Up

• Zürich, Zany, and Slightly Damp

• If You Glue a Spoon to It, Is It Still Art?

• Why the Hat Was Crying: A Psychoanalysis of Max Ernst’s Millinery Phase

Most outrageously, Jibber proposes that the entire Dada movement was retroactively curated by a secretive alliance of Parisian gallery owners who found the movement’s nonsense to be “highly affordable and weirdly portable.” In one passage, she posits that Dadaism peaked when a man accidentally sold his laundry as a symbolic sculpture titled Le Défi des Chaussettes.

Though some of her claims are historically inexact and frequently incoherent, Jibber’s book is riotously entertaining. She skewers sacred cows with a butter knife and dances around scholarship like a dadaist performing a foxtrot with an oversized soup can. Her love for the absurd is palpable, and her conclusion—“Maybe Dada never ended, it just moved to Instagram”—feels disturbingly plausible.

Recommended for: anarchic aesthetes, curators with a dark sense of humour, former art students and anyone who has ever been caught short whilst looking at a urinal on a plinth.