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London-rose / Beauty Will Save the World
The story of failure asks one question only: What do people who lose do next? 'Let the best one win.' War is one way. The other way is religion. Let me at the stakes. It's so much a matter of patience. No fury, beyond all reason, no sequence broken, but diverted.
Nothing seems to cooperate when you lose control. Blue becomes violet. Bend your head to the blank. The solution is so simple: don't identify yourself with your description of yourself
Nothing seems to cooperate when you lose control. Blue becomes violet. Bend your head to the blank. The solution is so simple: don't identify yourself with your description of yourself
104 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2022
5 people are currently reading
171 people want to read
About the author
Fanny Howe
91 books160 followersFanny Quincy Howe was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Howe wrote more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Her major works include poetry such as One Crossed Out, Gone, and Second Childhood; the novels Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and collected essays such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.
Howe received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize. She also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She was professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Howe received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize. She also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She was professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 27, 2022
Fanny Howe is a writer whose work can be impenetrably literary, requiring a reader to follow philosophical trains of thought as Howe leaps from idea to idea across a fragmented text. Divided Publishing has become something of a home for Howe in recent years, publishing Night Philosophy in 2020 and, now in 2022, releasing this previously unpublished text that was largely written in the 1990s. London-rose sees Howe as a globetrotter, traipsing around the British isles and beyond, musing on theology, war, and revolution. Always insightful, ever elusive, this is a wonderful surprise for Howe stans.
November 5, 2022
Motion is where faith starts. 1 Kings 19:7: an angel places a drink and bread at the feet of Elijah who is sleeping and says, “Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee.
London-rose / Beauty Will Save the World is an edition containing one previously unreleased and one recently revised text by Fanny Howe. It is published in the UK by Divided Publishing:
In the US, London-rose is published by Semiotext(e) (an ever-evolving distributor of cutting edge theory and avant-garde literature that holds true to its “punk rock” way of never becoming the status quo per Karissa Lang). An earlier version of Beauty Will Save the World was published by The Figures in in 1985 as Introduction to the World
London-rose (62pp) was written in 1994 when Howe was travelling in the UK and working intermittently, and begins:
Before 2000 my job was correcting errors others had made. I took cross-country trains every other week to visit young people and administrators to see if their grades were equivalent to grades in the US. Out of date, misread, measured incorrectly; failures of translation, sickness, prejudice—all these indicated that certain standards could not be shared across borders.
During that time, I turned from theology to philosophy and back again to theology. Here I wavered. I was unable to bear too much contradiction but persevered day and night in favoring Scripture and any revelation derived from experience. At the same time the open-endedness of philosophy, where it hovers and suffers, inconsolable with doubts, looked as heroic as poetry.
Howe has explained that she converted to Catholicism in 1982, and that liberation theology is important to her, and the fragmentary text of London-rose is infused with spirituality, but alongside a Marxist-type take (the Communist Manifesto is quoted a number of times) on the futility of work, here office work in particular, and the associated failings of the socio-economic system.
I try to explain to the interns, who seem malcontent, that there are people involved in this network of indifference who benefit by taking the apparatus seriously, even though it is absurd. They all agree to see themselves and each other as vital participants—citizens— in an orderly progress. They have determined that only the system can attribute value to their time and they accept the value given without question, because the more they do so, the more they benefit. They accept the system at face value and support it with their crowd. Yet they also have the relaxed neutral good humor of all winners who can vaguely mock their situation. (The doomed ones are the ones who take it all seriously and later question it.)
I tell the interns that often the winners groan over the burdens of working for the system, just enough to ward off feelings of guilt. In this way they can achieve the benefits of being good citizens without breaking a law or experiencing guilt towards the agitated losers. In such a way a reactionary democracy absorbs with tolerant smiles the frenzied outrage of those who question its authority.
As a London-dweller, it's hard not to find the references to the city (and the UK and Ireland) in general rather less insightful or original, although perhaps there is a post-colonial element here of turning the colonised gaze back on the coloniser:
The streets of London are packed with people from everywhere. The city is dirty, gulping pollution from the stuff of cars and buses, and by nine the working people look defeated, in their dark slightly shabby clothes. There is a solid but damp mass in the sky. Nothing blue comes through. Gray, gray. If you look up, though, the architecture is Roman in its territorial weight and claim, it’s sublime too, dainty, frivolous, the best the eye has to give. Journalism, literature, self-directed humor, cartooning, lampooning, theater—the British are good at these. And the proletarian feeling of the street-life makes it a city enlarged by the spirit of Marx.
The text is fragmentary, but Howe has explained (in the same linked interview) that she uses the technique of juxtaposition to create a narrative - Once you begin lining up disparate pieces of writing, a narrative arises which was never planned.
Beauty Will Save The World takes us more into the territory of poetry, less my preferred medium. It begins with a manifesto of sorts that echoes the themes of London-rose:
WISHES:
To participate in evolution as an aesthetic adventure by using limited materials (those supplied from the past) in a process which had no known goal. Mutations would occur from the coupling of words which were opposite but equal, and separate but the same.
By combining chance with deliberate choice, I wanted to suffer embarrassment on the page.
...
INFLUENCES:
Time, courage and a course called Introduction to Spirituality which concentrated on the Gospel of John. My entire desire at that time was to become enlightened by language and liturgy. Liberation theology was my usual way of remaining grounded in the ways of the world. I hadn’t used the techniques of my generation (appropriation, intertextuality) but was not far from their thinking when it came to politics in the secular city.
...
METHOD:
I invented some rules for myself so I could press order into the vast untamed thinking in John. I wanted to see if a thought was made of individual sentences or of single words. Recapitulation. To rewrite. To move certain words from one place to another to see how this altered the trajectory of the poem. To see how resistant a word is to a new thought, and vice versa. To test my ability to think in a new vocabulary and take a new path into the world.
But the poems are rather more abstract:
Ruby shoes are rushing by the wilderness
Which makes all parties turn their heads
Up above Mars and Saturn are the Sabbath stars
A woman hunts around for happiness she’ll never get
It was a mistake to find out
Now mushrooms in the soil of Caesar
Look like penises and half-girls
So layers of wet thunder belt across the woods
Where the rain unravels the ivy unable
To recover these great interpretations
Overall - London-rose alone would be closer to 4 stars but 3* overall for my personal appreciation. However, still very worthwhile.
London-rose / Beauty Will Save the World is an edition containing one previously unreleased and one recently revised text by Fanny Howe. It is published in the UK by Divided Publishing:
Divided is a publisher in Brussels and London.
Not knowing is its unpower.
In the US, London-rose is published by Semiotext(e) (an ever-evolving distributor of cutting edge theory and avant-garde literature that holds true to its “punk rock” way of never becoming the status quo per Karissa Lang). An earlier version of Beauty Will Save the World was published by The Figures in in 1985 as Introduction to the World
London-rose (62pp) was written in 1994 when Howe was travelling in the UK and working intermittently, and begins:
Before 2000 my job was correcting errors others had made. I took cross-country trains every other week to visit young people and administrators to see if their grades were equivalent to grades in the US. Out of date, misread, measured incorrectly; failures of translation, sickness, prejudice—all these indicated that certain standards could not be shared across borders.
During that time, I turned from theology to philosophy and back again to theology. Here I wavered. I was unable to bear too much contradiction but persevered day and night in favoring Scripture and any revelation derived from experience. At the same time the open-endedness of philosophy, where it hovers and suffers, inconsolable with doubts, looked as heroic as poetry.
Howe has explained that she converted to Catholicism in 1982, and that liberation theology is important to her, and the fragmentary text of London-rose is infused with spirituality, but alongside a Marxist-type take (the Communist Manifesto is quoted a number of times) on the futility of work, here office work in particular, and the associated failings of the socio-economic system.
I try to explain to the interns, who seem malcontent, that there are people involved in this network of indifference who benefit by taking the apparatus seriously, even though it is absurd. They all agree to see themselves and each other as vital participants—citizens— in an orderly progress. They have determined that only the system can attribute value to their time and they accept the value given without question, because the more they do so, the more they benefit. They accept the system at face value and support it with their crowd. Yet they also have the relaxed neutral good humor of all winners who can vaguely mock their situation. (The doomed ones are the ones who take it all seriously and later question it.)
I tell the interns that often the winners groan over the burdens of working for the system, just enough to ward off feelings of guilt. In this way they can achieve the benefits of being good citizens without breaking a law or experiencing guilt towards the agitated losers. In such a way a reactionary democracy absorbs with tolerant smiles the frenzied outrage of those who question its authority.
As a London-dweller, it's hard not to find the references to the city (and the UK and Ireland) in general rather less insightful or original, although perhaps there is a post-colonial element here of turning the colonised gaze back on the coloniser:
The streets of London are packed with people from everywhere. The city is dirty, gulping pollution from the stuff of cars and buses, and by nine the working people look defeated, in their dark slightly shabby clothes. There is a solid but damp mass in the sky. Nothing blue comes through. Gray, gray. If you look up, though, the architecture is Roman in its territorial weight and claim, it’s sublime too, dainty, frivolous, the best the eye has to give. Journalism, literature, self-directed humor, cartooning, lampooning, theater—the British are good at these. And the proletarian feeling of the street-life makes it a city enlarged by the spirit of Marx.
The text is fragmentary, but Howe has explained (in the same linked interview) that she uses the technique of juxtaposition to create a narrative - Once you begin lining up disparate pieces of writing, a narrative arises which was never planned.
Beauty Will Save The World takes us more into the territory of poetry, less my preferred medium. It begins with a manifesto of sorts that echoes the themes of London-rose:
WISHES:
To participate in evolution as an aesthetic adventure by using limited materials (those supplied from the past) in a process which had no known goal. Mutations would occur from the coupling of words which were opposite but equal, and separate but the same.
By combining chance with deliberate choice, I wanted to suffer embarrassment on the page.
...
INFLUENCES:
Time, courage and a course called Introduction to Spirituality which concentrated on the Gospel of John. My entire desire at that time was to become enlightened by language and liturgy. Liberation theology was my usual way of remaining grounded in the ways of the world. I hadn’t used the techniques of my generation (appropriation, intertextuality) but was not far from their thinking when it came to politics in the secular city.
...
METHOD:
I invented some rules for myself so I could press order into the vast untamed thinking in John. I wanted to see if a thought was made of individual sentences or of single words. Recapitulation. To rewrite. To move certain words from one place to another to see how this altered the trajectory of the poem. To see how resistant a word is to a new thought, and vice versa. To test my ability to think in a new vocabulary and take a new path into the world.
But the poems are rather more abstract:
Ruby shoes are rushing by the wilderness
Which makes all parties turn their heads
Up above Mars and Saturn are the Sabbath stars
A woman hunts around for happiness she’ll never get
It was a mistake to find out
Now mushrooms in the soil of Caesar
Look like penises and half-girls
So layers of wet thunder belt across the woods
Where the rain unravels the ivy unable
To recover these great interpretations
Overall - London-rose alone would be closer to 4 stars but 3* overall for my personal appreciation. However, still very worthwhile.
Read
May 13, 2025I always feel self-conscious about my natural tendency to write in loosely connected fragments but reading a book like this reminds me of the fact that when done well, i do also love to read it as it soothes my brain. Like these notes musings and poems feel like a hug while someone whispers you're not alone softly in my ear. Also. Marxism.
October 9, 2025
Gods will is not present in technology or in its effects. All those things belong to humanity: this is the horror of the twentieth century.
Enig
Er bange for at technologierne, de dårlige computere, forstyrrer et eller andet inde i mit hovede. Jeg er afskåret men stadig stimuleret. Kan det virkelig lade sig gøre????
Ok men den her bog er overdrevet god. Digtene i beauty will save the world var lidt sværere for mig at forstå men en dag genlæser jeg.
Enig
Er bange for at technologierne, de dårlige computere, forstyrrer et eller andet inde i mit hovede. Jeg er afskåret men stadig stimuleret. Kan det virkelig lade sig gøre????
Ok men den her bog er overdrevet god. Digtene i beauty will save the world var lidt sværere for mig at forstå men en dag genlæser jeg.
September 27, 2022
Not sure really what to make of this. Insightful, elusive, experimental structured randomness - if that makes sense.
January 2, 2023
Much to love in this drifting little volume that considers identity in relation to work, place(lessness), and other texts. The perfect length (70 pages) to really appreciate/meditate on her wistful ideas and metaphysical leanings.
October 8, 2022
While newly published this book by Fanny Howe was written many years ago. It seems Howe is an author of many books, but this was my first experience with her writing. The blurb says the book addresses the issue of "what do people who lose do next?" It does do that but not in any conventional way. There is a strand of thought that I think flows through the text but like a meandering brook, the flow is not straight and in places disappears from view. There is some lovely writing along the stream but full appreciation would require more trips in different seasons. I was not engaged enough to want to repeat the trip with so many other trips to take but suspect it might, at a later point in time, draw me back.
May 5, 2023
“Do birds and beasts still think they live in Eden?
Do all of us carry the knowledge of the primordial in our skin and bones?
If so, it must be beautiful.”
At first I really wasn’t feeling it but ended up really warming up to it. Wish it was longer.
Do all of us carry the knowledge of the primordial in our skin and bones?
If so, it must be beautiful.”
At first I really wasn’t feeling it but ended up really warming up to it. Wish it was longer.
Read
July 23, 2022I love her
November 14, 2022
The office worker relates to her output as a stranger does to her knuckles on a person’s door. The gesture is tentative, even slavish. A sheet of paper, a file, some mail. She is alienated not just from her boss and co-workers, but from herself, because her work goes somewhere invisible. She might as well be an orange in a supermarket. Who judges and cares for her? The person who sucks her juices.
This book is published by Divided – a small press split between London and Brussels who “publish authors who cannot balance or resolve their contradictions. The experimental form of the writing comes out of a need.”
It is effectively the joint publication of two separate pieces by Fanny Howe, a 1940 born American poet, novelist and short story writer, both of which were largely written and effectively published in some form the previous century. Of these the first is a fragmentary novella, the second a series of poems.
London-rose was written in 1994 when the author was working in London. The narrator of the book (which is at least partly auto-fictional) has a job in the UK (but for a US firm) “correcting errors others had made. I took cross county trains every other week to visit young people and administrators to see if their grades were equivalent to grades in the US”. The novella is written in a very fragmentary form as she travels around the UK (but also further afield in Europe) and muses on among other things – alienation, the world of office work and interns (and in particular on the way in which the office work is increasingly alienated from their role due to the level of abstraction in the jobs they perform), spirituality, Marxism and its critiques of capitalism, WWII and the holocaust (she visits Buchenwald with a Professor), a number of literary and non-fictional references.
The elliptical and sometimes aphoristic style reminded me at times of say Jenny Offill or Patricia Lockwood (although its clear that if anything Howe would have inspired their writing) but with perhaps greater use of poetic description.
London-rose itself takes its name from when the writer misheard (or misread) the name of Lansdowne Park while in Dublin – and I have to say that my own inability to see how the two could easily be mixed-up (in either speech or words) probably acts as an apt metaphor for my inability to fully ollow the way in which the author mixes up or juxtaposes the different strands of this novella.
But I felt that the best way to appreciate this novella was as I would poetry – in an impressionistic sense, drawing on what connections I could but also appreciating some of the imagery and amorphisms in their own right and overall I found this an enjoyable if difficult read.
Beauty Will Save The World was previously published in a different version in 1985 as “Introduction to the World”. An introduction to the influences on the collection starts with “a course called Introduction to Spirituality which concentrated on the Gospel of John” and a Method section refers to “press[ing] order into the vast untamed thinking in John” but unfortunately despite my very strong familiarity with the wonderful writing in John’s Gospel, I was, beyond the superficial, struggling to see any real links to it in the poems or gain any real purchase on the meaning of the poetry (of which I felt I had lost the gist) – something which probably reflects more on my own inadequacies as a reader rather than any failing of a vastly experienced author.
The brown recluse wears a violin design
No dolls but a prayer wheel. It's a spider
Who trusts the fall like an expert
This is a very old child's story
Absolute otherness gives the weight to gravity
Before the job was complete the Lord paid us
Work's never been as good again
Pass. All pass. The North cashed the ice in
And seven days of solid mist
Lay in which to plan well and lose the gist
June 27, 2023
Maybe the best book of poetry I have ever encountered
February 1, 2024
The only church this ex-catholic will ever walk into again will be a church where Fanny is speaking. Or existing. Maybe the church is a library. Or a London alley. I’ll be there, kneeling.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews