This is an essay commissioned by Book Works in response to Diana Georgiou’s novel, Other Reflexes. We asked five writers and artists to each respond to one of the book’s chapters, each themed around a particular sense, with a text-based work of some kind. Here, Joelle Taylor responds to the prompt of ‘Heavenly Smells’ with … Continued
We were on the bed out in Somerset when it happened. During our stay at that little cottage with the roaming dogs and spiders, that’s when you became mass. Stretched on the bed with the books. Still in your towel, damp from the shower.
We’d prized ourselves on weaving through the pages of all that literature we’d overpacked; poetry, myths fanning across bedsheets, an aura to our warm bodies
‘kalon praman which literally translates as good thing’
The ‘good thing’ recurs in Diana Georgiou’s Other Reflexes, and it makes me feel good and hungry at the same time. I am fed by the idea of the ‘good thing’ even before it has been described. I consider its conceptual power.
Diana, thank you, first, for the invitation to respond to Other Reflexes. At the end of your prelude, I gasped in recognition – at your impulse to explain to your love why your ‘relationship to listening is a little strained’, and at the patience behind the statement that once your love has read what you have written, you will be there, waiting and ready to listen to what they have to say.
I arrive in Nicosia as I do everywhere, camera ready, wanting to create a visual diary of a city. Not just its permanent or its long-standing features, such as its rivers or coastlines, or its buildings, monuments, or public art, but also its ephemera: graffiti, posters for gigs, plays or exhibitions, players or crowds at football matches, anything else that places it in a particular moment.