The Fortnightly Review in Review: July 2025
Fjording ahead
This month’s installment of TFR in Review is later than usual, because as the photos show I’ve been to Norway, traveling with a group of Lake Forest College colleagues to attend a seminar on AI and the humanities hosted by the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. The artists and writers associated with the Center are bullish on the possibilities of AI-manipulated art; I’m much more skeptical, not least because the worst people in the world are the ones pushing the technology. But it’s impossible to be skeptical about the landscape of Norway itself! This review will therefore be a bit different from the past installments—call it my dispatch from Norway, if you like—even as I also call your attention to the wonders of our July issue.
Friday, August 1
From Chicago to Oslo by way of Copenhagen. Staggered about in the grips of jet-lag. Oslo is the city of the future as we were imagining it in the 1990s, smooth Brutalism with engaging bits of asymmetry like the Opera House, which one can and should climb like a mountain for its views of the city and of itself.
(Our July issue kicked off with the interview with Kathleen Rooney conducted by me and Bob Archambeau at the Arts Club of Chicago. Kathleen has become a major figure on the Chicago literary scene, and I’m charmed by her continued commitment to her Poems While You Wait project, while the nautical literature fanatic in me can’t wait to read her next novel, Man Overboard!, to be published next summer.)
Saturday, August 2
Today was all about the Munch Museum, a massive, even ominous structure that looks like it was built by House Harkonnen. We all know The Scream, but I did not know much else about the work of Edvard Munch (1863-1944), so the huge museum, which houses 26,000 artworks gifted by the artist to the city of Oslo upon his death, was something of a revelation. The exhibit currently running on the lowest floor, Lifeblood, presents the artist in the context of the ill health that plagued him and a whole lot of other people in the late nineteenth century. His father was a doctor at probably the worst time in history to be a doctor, when the understanding of illness and its causes went far beyond the ability of medicine to treat it. Munch’s bleakly compassionate paintings are juxtaposed with medical instruments, surgical tools, a primitive incubator, and other objects that create a vivid sense of the precariousness of life in those times.
(TFR will always consider poetry to be its first commitment, and we published some richly subtle poems in July. There was Lea Graham’s “Hansel,” which includes some rather Scandinavian imagery—“Gneiss and devil’s purse / and striated sky”; Andrea Moorhead’s translations of poems from the Québécois poet Véronique Cyr’s “Forest of Clues” (the title evokes Baudelaire’s “Correspondences”); Simon Perril’s “The Audubon Dish,” which transposes a birding expedition of John James Audubon into the key of “The Owl and the Pussycat”; and Aaron Belz’s grimly hilarious “I Wrote a Note” and “Oprah.”
Sunday, August 3
The six-hour train ride from Oslo to Bergen increased in picturesqueness hour by hour, in spite of mist and rain. At times the view out the window had the quality of moonscape, with tufts of green thrusting up here and there between gray rocks, and water reflecting the changeable moods of the sky. Bergen itself proved to be more beautiful than Oslo, with more various architecture, crooked little streets radiating out from the harbor at Bryggen, and rain—did I mention the rain?
(I’m not supposed to pick favorites, but my favorite piece that we published in July is probably Mark Scroggins’ reflections on his ongoing poem-of-a-life project Zion Offramp, “Asymptotic Oz: Fragments on Dub Poetics,” which interestingly mirrors Joe Donahue’s ideas about the poetics of incursion, forthcoming in these pages. As astute about the writings of Michael Moorcock as he is about Walter Pater, Hawkwind, dubstep, and the ‘Objectivist’ poets, Mark is just plain good company, so check it out.)
Monday, August 4 - Wednesday, August 6
We get to know the folks at the Center for Digital Narrative, among them co-directors Scott and Jill Rettberg, administrators Andreas Hadsel Opsvik and Ola Roth Johnsen, digital poets Jhave Johnston and Jason Nelson, and assorted postdocs and researchers into everything from masculinity in the gamer community to the creation of chatbots of historical figures to studies in algorithmic folklore. They could not have been friendlier or more hospitable, and they were eager to show off the gorgeous campus of the university in which they’re housed.
The seminar was an outgrowth of the HUMAN Grant to Lake Forest College, of which I am one of the fellows, exploring the editorial uses of AI in my capacity as Co-Director of Lake Forest College Press. Me and a team of student researchers are working on a new edition of the writings of the Chicago anarchist and firebrand Lucy Parsons. So I presented a progress report on that while the other participants offered up a dazzling assortment of slides, videos, and talks on their work as artists, critics, or artist-critics. I am not quite sure what electronic literature is, but I’ve read enough McLuhan to know that TFR in itself constitutes electronic literature in terms of its medium, which in ways more or less definable alters the experience of reading but also of editing and composition. Anyway, it was interesting stuff, though from a cultural perspective I see more downside than upside from the proliferation of LLMs, text-to-image generators, etc.
(Take refuge from AI discourse with poet and musician Jack Tan’s dispatch from Melbourne, in which he discusses prose poetry as a form peculiarly suited to transcultural encounters such as those he finds in his practice as a teacher.)
Thursday, August 7
Having pined for them all week like a certain parrot,1 I was floored to actually see the fjords on Thursday, traveling by train and bus to Gudvanger for a two-hour tour of the Aurlandsfjord, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Friends, if you ever get the chance, don’t pass it up! It’s simply the most beautiful landscape I’ve ever seen—even Yosemite at its most glorious doesn’t quite measure up.
(Two pieces of critical prose round out this review of our July issue: Al Basile’s engaging “Writing Jazz Wrong,” which reflects on writing about jazz as well as jazz-like writing, and David Clare’s review of M.G. Stephens’ latest poetry collection, Popeye Unchained, which includes collages by Archie Rand. If you ever wished that John Ashbery’s great sestina “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” were book-length, or if you’re simply interested in the peculiar cultural half-life of everyone’s favorite squint-eyed sailor, this may be a book for you.)
On Friday we flew home, and now it’s Saturday and this dispatch is more than a week late: I cry you mercy! But do stick around because it’s going to be a great month. We have already published our latest TFR interview with the debut novelist Marcela Fuentes about the role played by curses in Malas (“bad girls” apparently doesn’t come close to capturing the flavor of that title). ICYMI, read three poems by John Redmond that follow the Modernist imperative of receiving diverse impressions with remarkable lightness of touch. Still to come: Joseph Donahue’s sui generis “BLAKETALK”; poems by Brian Swann; a series of flash fictions developed by Tim Guthrie, Davis Schneiderman, and Andi Olsen; a dispatch from London; and other goodies.
The semester looms and I don’t expect to be going on any new travels anytime soon, but each new issue of TFR is a journey in its own right, right? Thanks for traveling with us.
Joshua Corey is Editor-in-Chief of The Fortnightly Review. Dream of a Rarebit Fiend is his personal Substack. He lives in Evanston, Illinois and teaches English at Lake Forest College.
But not a stochastic parrot.