Romanticon, "Happy New Year?", 28 december 2025:
The only small concession I’ll make to this day: I rather like Janus the Roman god of portals, transitions, and beginnings. His double-faced image was often put over doorways— one face looking inward and one outward, one eye to the past and one to the future. As you enter this world, so shall you exit. In this sense, I begrudgingly accept January as the gateway to the year.
Steel, C., (2026) “Towards a theory of ‘poet-voice’”, Open Library of Humanities 12(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.23780:
Why do people reading poetry aloud stereotypically sound so sad? The term 'poet-voice' has recently gained currency to describe this vocal style, which is often cited - correctly - as a key characteristic of the spread of performance poetry in the 21st century. But this article shows that the roots of this style go back much further, and that to understand the contemporary aesthetics of poet-voice it is necessary to situate them in a genealogy that begins three centuries ago.
Francis Gooding, "At the Warburg", LRB blog, 2 januari 2026:
In the interim, the Bilderatlas became a legend (not unlike Walter Benjamin’s similarly unfinished and unfinishable Passagenwerk): an esoteric and perhaps tragic attempt to gain a glimpse of the occulted angel of history, whose perdurable sinews would be conjured in negative space by marshalling thousands of mysterious traces into a grand, kaleidoscopic hallucination.