Parakeets and Purity
Because the land, the country, is such a focus of horticulture, there are important moments when its extraordinary fetishisation has connected it with movements of the extreme right: rhetorically, to…
animals
Of a Mouse, To a Mouse
The clean pink two back feet he has have long toes almost like a bird’s. Unlike a bird’s, the tail, a draggled earthworm, limps behind his search. Head joined on…
In Richmond Park
Here is the cusp of November colour: deer in a nicotine prairie. Trunks snaked by squirrels, clouds and crows over yellow and russet leaf-rag. On thin legs, bulbous-jointed like twiglets,…
Multiverses 263-396: Another Worlds iz Possible
After John Bell, Momus, Heisenberg, Jonathan Swift, I Ching, Calvino, and Shrodinger Multiverse 263 The Multiverse in which multiplication is always exponential across galaxies. For every status update posted…
Open Call: Clean Unclean
Cleanliness, they say, is close to godliness. And the pig has long resided in the realm of the unclean. Even today: “It’s like a pigsty in here!” – as if…
(Re)Imagining the Insect
54 million years before humans appeared on earth, there was once upon a time an insect that died, its cadaver is still visible and intact, the cadaver of someone who…
A Field Guide to East London Wildlife
Humans are not the only species undergoing a process of urbanisation. It is well documented that we have made a mess of this planet, and – depending on who you…
Oikeusjuttu (The Trial)
In Finland, the wolf is both more and less than an animal; it is a symbol. And this November sees a court case in which the very nature of that…
Rye’s Valhalla
Influx Press’s editor-at-large, Gary Budden, and author of Marshland, Gareth E. Rees, venture into Rye Harbour with inadequate footwear and a 1904 guide to Sussex. They discover more than they’d…
Modern Naturalism
In 1958, the great Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser published the Mould Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture. In it he declared, with characteristic chutzpah, that: “Only the engineers and scientists who…
Walking in the Sky
A small brown kestrel rises over the crest of a hill and pauses, hanging in the wind, scanning the fields below. With a tilt of its wings, it shifts vantage…