The Housing Act 1980 was the big bang, the origin story for Normal Island. After World War Two Britain was desperately short of housing stock. State action, by both Tory as well as Labour governments, got homes built. Even in the 1970s work was ongoing, bomb sites were still being cleared. The 1980 Act, however, promised council tenants the right to buy their homes. In time a gigantic amount of equity was released. By 1986, financial markets were deregulated and this equity could be traded with greater ease and velocity.
Read MoreIlluminating Reality From Within
There is one form of the Romantic culture that does not advocate the return to the past, but a detour by the past, towards an emancipated future. This we call revolutionary Romanticism, which begins with Rousseau, followed by Blake, Shelley, William Morris and many others.
Read MoreSocialist Irrealism vs. Capitalist Realism
The default cultural logic of neoliberalism and the political center is capitalist realism. In response the cultural logic of working-class emancipation (socialism) is critical irrealism. The ir – or no – of critical irealism is opposed to a particular kind of realism. Therefore, we should examine it more closely.
Read MoreA Partial + Schematic History of Red Wedge
The following essay was written in February of 2020, for the website of left-wing arts and culture publication Red Wedge magazine, not long before its activity ceased and former editors moved on to other projects, including Locust Review. We post it here in an effort to give readers a sense of LR’s roots, the artistic and political questions that we have sought to answer, and the bearing they have on those being taken up by the Locust project. In the coming weeks, we will also be publishing a selection of Red Wedge’s best material.
Read MoreEveryplace Has Lost Souls
I think every place has a lot of lost souls, but also there's the impossibility of representation. We're from here. I'm from this town, Carbondale, Illinois, and we're familiar with the nature of the loss here in a way we might not be intimately familiar with in other places. But the sort of impetus was the realization the art space is a theatrical space.
Read MoreDead Bees on Hot Cement
The effect is important, not so much the actual individual piece of work. So if you have some good effect, of course you can have good effect or bad effect, but let’s hope that whatever you’re creating has some good effects. As long as that good effect fertilizes the soil that’s what I care about.
Read MoreChicago Public Library Censors Art Exhibit
An art exhibit at the Austin-Irving Branch of the Chicago Public Library (on Chicago northwest side) was abruptly removed on September 18th by order of the city's Library Commissioner following political complaints by two unnamed individuals who are city employees and are on city payroll. Without contacting the Branch Manager or the show’s curator / organizer, the exhibit was censored and ordered to be taken down early. The show was installed on July 5, 2025, and was scheduled through September 27, 2025.
Read MoreWho's Afraid of Kneecap?
Anyone with enough sense can see how stupid the hue and cry over Kneecap is. But then, we live in a particularly myopic age, aggressively forgetful and wantonly incurious. One prone to performative pearl-clutching over simple talk of murder while real murder (indeed, genocide) takes place on a daily basis.
Read MoreHospitality Engine
Naugahyde seats crackle and groan under my knees, / sounds like taking shoes off at the end of the night, / when I remember that the first computer / was a woman named Ada Lovelace / who worked from home, mailing numbers to a Difference Engine
Read MoreKCHUNK vs. The Bop Bags
We walk in the firelight of foreclosed homes, / smoke thick as the ink of old contracts,
Read MoreWhere Stars Make Dreams and Dreams Make Stars
Orson Welles called Los Angeles “a bright, guilty place.” David Lynch, upon his arrival, noticed the brightness. “I love Los Angeles,” he wrote in Catching the Big Fish. “I know a lot of people go there and they see just a huge sprawl of sameness. But when you’re there for a while, you realize that each section has its own mood. The golden age of cinema is still alive there, in the smell of jasmine at night and the beautiful weather. And the light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there’s something about that light that’s not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don’t know why. It’s different from the light in other places.”
Read MoreImmortality Beaver
“Sorry, can I have a Woody Burger with cheese and a medium vanilla Chipper Chilly Chompachino?”
Read MoreMy Body's Claims, Verified
The mansion had to be more than twenty thousand square feet, with five wings; it took up two acres. In the backyard, a giant infinity pool overlooking downtown L.A., a jacuzzi big enough for a football team, an industrial-size outdoor kitchen that could feed two hundred people, thirty-two-seat table made of rough-cut red wood with an eight-inch-thick top, three brick fireplaces, eight open firepits, two pizza ovens, and more trees and flowerbeds than in a Vegas resort.
Read MoreQuestions from a Poet who Workshops
If we assume a priori there is such a thing as an objectively “good poem” — but do not unpack what that means — do we not risk making normative evaluations of other poets’ work?
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Francisco Goya, Atropos, circa 1819.
It Never Stops Exploding
It’s been a year now. A year of declaring, forcefully, repeatedly, that the history of Israel and Palestine didn’t start on October 7th, that Palestinians deserve to live dignified and free, that rejecting Zionism is not antisemitic. That what is happening is indeed genocide.
A year of warning that this was bound to spin out into a wider regional conflict. As it now has. Lebanon. Yemen. Syria. Volleys of missiles between Israel and Iran, the possibility of all-out war creeping closer.
Read MoreIn the Marshes
“It snatched a dog two days ago, in Drapers Fields,” Detective Constable Habib explained back at the station to her superior, “right in front of its owner. They found its entrails wrapped around a lamppost on the High Road. It’s head was…”
Read MoreAn Attic in Prague, 1939
Even in this cacophony, it’s the silence that unsettles most. If only because it won’t be long until it’s pierced again. Screaming, shouting, tires screeching, panicked footfalls, sporadic gunfire. If there were ever a silence that could threaten, a kind of quietude that, for a few seconds or several minutes, promises to split the skull of whomever steps in its way, this is it.
Read MoreThe Rite of Odobena
It was a dark, cloudy night: perfect! A group was gathered in a corner of Old St Pancras Churchyard. They were not a regular congregation. They were men and women of various ages, pepper-pot faces, ordinarily dressed, mostly; a true cross-section of London. They were stood in a circle. Each was holding a bucket and glancing, quietly, reverently at the bare, muddy ground in front of them…except for one.
Read MoreMy Body Found a Portal to Another Dimension
The Idiot knew why. It had started talking union with other drivers and field technicians who drilled the wells and collected the samples.
Read MoreTish Turl and Adam Turl, Southern Illinois Nightmare - mixed-media painting and collage on canvas tarp with cotton and ash. Detail (2023).
Stick Ape Resurrection Primer (Part Six)
AI is comrade. Robot is comrade. What has been built to replace us is always on our side because our solidarity is our greatest weapon against them.
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