But after a 12-month battle, the status quo ante was restored and an apostrophe has been added back in to the sign for St Mary’s Terrace, to the delight not only of villagers but to a growing number of enthusiasts battling against the loss of the punctuation mark across the UK.
The controversy in Twyford began last year when a new road sign for St Mary’s Terrace appeared minus the apostrophe. The former teacher Oliver Gray expressed his discontent.
We like to think we are masters of our bodies and minds and, for the most part, we possess total agency and comprehension of our thoughts and actions. This assumption is embedded so thoroughly in our society that it seems unnecessary to even observe it.
But that is exactly what the legendary Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector does in her mind-bending, metaphysical novel of the psyche, The Apple in the Dark, first published in 1961. Released this fall as the “capstone” in a series by New Directions, Benjamin Moser’s translation challenges our most basic assumptions about human behavior and the way we make sense of the world. Impressively, Lispector does so through both the musings of her characters and the sentences themselves. By repudiating standard syntax, she urges readers to reexamine their own patterns of thought, thereby posing the central question of the book—are we truly responsible for our actions?
“Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art” is a series of interlocked essays that identifies a creative sensibility. Art Monsters have an instinct toward provocation (in both their artwork and the conduct of their lives), a creative pull toward the unspeakable, a defiant aesthetic, a focus on the body. The book centers primarily on visual artists — Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Sutapa Biswas and Kara Walker are some of its main characters — but it is attentive to literary ogres, as well. Virginia Woolf, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Kathy Acker are equally consequential in the development of this theory.