Tincture Journal Issue Seventeen Autumn 2017

Tincture Journal Issue Seventeen (Autumn 2017)

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written. Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid 'scientific' plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually works on the ground. The real vitality of cities, argues Jacobs, lies in their diversity, architectural variety, teeming street life and human scale. It is only when we appreciate such fundamental realities that we can hope to create cities that are safe, interesting and economically viable, as well as places that people want to live in. 'Perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning... Jacobs has a powerful sense of narrative, a lively wit, a talent for surprise and the ability to touch the emotions as well as the mind' New York Times Book Review

Field Guide to Autobiography

This book earns its title. It's a field guide to the ecosystem that is being human. And that means it is also an autobiography. It is unclear in most of the poems where the human begins and ends, and this is how it should be. The world that comes out of these poems is luminous and difficult. This isn't conventional nature poetry; it's a poetry that helps us understand the future and the world that embeds us. - Juliana Spahr What is a species autobiography? An autobiography not written through the convention of the senses? What is the bone mouth, what is it to break the surface? If autobiography is a particular history of body and bodies, then what kind of book is this? What does it permit itself: not to know? Does the book accomplish its non-human (human) aims? I like that there is a wren in it. I like that there's a whale. - Bhanu Kapil Forage the wilds of language with Melissa Eleftherion's field guide and find yourself reconstituted in sensate particles of taste and sound. Saturated in the language of insects, these poems expose identity's viscera down to its protoplasmic and mineral compositions, its Latinate roots, its collectivizing and individuating compulsions. Passing through syllabic way-stations of consciousness in formation, attention is brought to bear upon that which is irreducibly alien in us, yet common as fur and delectably female in its reproductive capacity - not to mention badass! Here are whorls, and bursts of light, where to fly is to sing is to fly, where -soft noises- compose a listening to instruct your ontological imagination. Following Eleftherion's exertion towards classification, we are led to its (im)possibility. Read this book! You never know what form you may be compelled to assume. - Elise Ficarra