Small Street Press

Room 2 -  The following is a test to see how a journal format will work on here! "I do not care at all for men, but London - it is Life!"  - Katherine Mansfield 3pm   I'm lying face down in a park in the middle of Shoreditch; my aching belly pressed into the hot earth, watching the trains go by. No wall on any street here is untouched - this pretty spray paint patchwork. I'm making peace with the idea that this could be the best moment of my life. I'm making peace with the idea that every moment could be the best moment of my life. I have some cheap red roses by my side and sun on my back. Heat rises from the ground like like its the hot breath from an upwards-looking face, leagues below me.  Earlier, after I accompanied Room 4 for her belly button piercing (her eyes scampered up and down the the ceiling when the needle went through - I watched her disembodied for a second, but she said it didn't hurt) and we had coffee at a place with flowers on the table, w...

 'What's let loose upon us? Who loosed it?' The Relationship Between Environment and Destiny in Our Mutual Friend (1865) By Lucy Coleman When Humphry House suggested that he could describe the entire world of Charles Dickens’ novels without once mentioning nature, [1] he summarised the opinion of generations of critics; that nature, if it exists at all in his novels, ‘is never unconnected from man.’ [2] Dickens was interested in the inextricability between humans and their environments, once writing ‘people like the houses they inhabit’ in his working notes for Little Dorrit, [3] and this relationship is brought to the forefront in his final novel, with a river that dominates the narrative, shadows that consume and fire that knows the future. The natural elements in Our Mutual Friend continually extrude beyond their bounds, exerting an influence over characters’ destinies.             The world of Our Mutual Friend is ob...

'Ungentle Laws and Customs' The Role of Violence in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) By Lucy Coleman The consensus reached by critics that the role of Mark Twain’s 1889 time travel novel is to ‘bring together two otherwise disparate historic periods in order to measure them against one another’ is most absolutely true in its relationship to violence. [1] The story hinges on brutality, with the central theme of physical violence established in the first few pages, when Hank Morgan is ‘laid out’ with a crowbar in an arms factory, only to wake up in an anachronistic 6 th Century. [2] By charting the rise of a despot as he ‘plays the game,’ Twain places the loud and visceral violence of Arthurian works such as Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur beside the silent, mechanical weaponry of the 19 th Century, ultimately proving one form of combat to have a superior moral character to the other.             Twai...