The Gender of Sound

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin tells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.

Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: ‘before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.’ Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero’s killing tools, our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. 

This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota, where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew. 

The Cosmic Oval is a nocturnal entrance into an exploration of feminist cosmologies, storytelling and the many ways of knowing and imagining the hot blue beginnings of time. By turn dreaming and waking, Ella Finer enters history and imagination from the sleep side, taking her cue from Anne Carson. Finer attends to cultural memory as composition, gathering cosmic guides with whom to listen beyond what is given to hear.

In west London, the entrance to architect and theorist Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House is overlooked by The Cosmic Oval, a representation of the origin of the universe referencing both contemporary scientific discoveries about its elliptical shape and ancient cosmogonic myths. Finer’s imagined conversation between the figures who inhabit the frieze surrounding the Oval, such as Hannah Arendt, Imhotep and John Donne, re-orchestrates cultural history to explore social scenes of study and the way knowledge moves through bodies and time.

Commissioned by the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House.

What can we know, and what remains beyond our reach? 

In 1979, Annie Dillard witnessed the solar eclipse in Yakima, Washington. In Total Eclipse this celestial event becomes a metaphysical reckoning. With lyrical precision and eerie clarity, Dillard unforgettably evokes the strangeness of the shifting sky and the psychic dislocation that descends with the shadow. 

The quiet yet epic unravelling of the familiar becomes revelation: a rupture in time, a confrontation with mortality and a brush with the sublime. Juxtaposing the cosmic and the mundane, Total Eclipse meditates on the limits of perception and language, entering the surreal intensity of the phenomenon to emerge with the brief, blazing clarity offered by darkness. 

Foreword by Himali Singh Soin
Images by Mark Lowe

Who decides what happens after sex? The last decade has seen many significant changes to the laws governing women’s reproductive rights around the world, from liberalisation in Ireland to new restrictions in the USA. After Sex offers personal and political perspectives from the mid-20th century to the present day, setting feminist classics alongside contemporary accounts. These essays, short stories and poems trace the debates and tell the stories; together, they ask us to consider what reproductive justice might look like, and how it could reshape sex.

The writers pay special attention to people — both fictional and real — who have sought control over their sexual lives, and the joy, comedy, difficulties and disappointments that entails. But above all, After Sex testifies to the power of great writing to show us why that freedom is worth pursuing — without shame and without apology.

With contributions from: 
Lauren Berlant, Joanna Biggs, Edna Bonhomme, Gwendolyn Brooks, Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, Storm Cecile, Lucille Clifton, Rachel Connolly, T.L. Cowan, ’Jane Does’, Maggie Doherty, Nell Dunn, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Enright, Deborah Friedell, Tracy Fuad, Kristen Ghodsee, Vivian Gornick, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Barbara Johnson, Jayne Kavanagh, Lisa Hallgarten and Angela Poulter, Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Knight, R.O. Kwon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Natasha Lennard, Sophie Lewis, Audre Lorde, Amelia Loulli, Erin Maglaque, Holly Pester, Adrienne Rich, Denise Riley, Sally Rooney, Loretta J. Ross, Madeleine Schwartz, SisterSong, Sophie Smith, Annabel Sowemimo, Amia Srinivasan, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Alice Walker and Bernard Williams.

Ursula K. Le Guin began writing as a poet, before writing across genres for her entire life. This elegiac collection of poems, completed shortly before her death in 2018, reflects on the soul, mortality and the mysteries beyond. Weaving together rich sounds, echoes of myth and her vivid sense of our place in the natural world, So Far So Good walks between the knowable and the unknown with characteristic daring.

“great teacher. great spirit.” adrienne maree brown

Launched in New York City, in 1992, the Lesbian Avengers rejected the picket line and ordinary demo for media-savvy, nonviolent direct action.

They were superheroes arriving "to make the world safe for baby dykes everywhere;" warriors with capes and shields doing a line dance; dykes "Lusting for Power," pushing a giant bed float down Sixth Avenue in New York (with lesbians on it); nationally-ambitious Avengers eating fire in front of a hostile White House; lovers reuniting a statue of Alice B. Toklas with Gertrude Stein, then waltzing in the snow in Bryant Park. And homos who shamelessly chanted, "Ten percent is not enough, recruit, recruit, recruit."

Originally published in 1993, Homocom edition 2021

Anne Carson's remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic love. Since it was first published, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson's lyrical meditation on love in ancient Greek literature and philosophy, has established itself as a favorite among an unusually broad audience, including classicists, essayists, poets, and general readers.

Beginning with the poet Sappho's invention of the word "bittersweet" to describe Eros, Carson's original and beautifully written book is a wide-ranging reflection on the conflicted nature of romantic love, which is both "miserable" and "one of the greatest pleasures we have."

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent.

By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.