Elite Paralysis
An editorial.
FOLLY
MAGAZINE
An Oxford student magazine publishing long-form creative work in literature, politics, and the arts.
Volume 1
Editor's Note
Analysis
Built on Quicksand
Over the past decade Dutch politics has veered hard to the right as voters respond to Geert Wilder's anti-immigration appeals. Olivier Berg surveys the vacillating response of the center-right to the threat.
Criticism
Mating in the Rearview Mirror
Mating (1991), the breakthrough novel of the peripatetic developmentalist-turned-novelist Norman Rush, has recently enjoyed a revival. Pippa Conlon explores the novel's relationship with the Rush's radical youth and his lifelong relationship with his wife.
From the Bronx to the World
Al Pacino came of age in the Bronx; he matured as an actor in the turbulent transition years of the 1970s, when New York was in the midst of urban crisis. Hassan Akram reviews his memoir, Sonny Boy (2024), and gives a panoramic account of the actor's career.
Fiction
Afire
I suppose you’ll want to know how it started. Like most things in life, it was a matter of chance. The start of summer had brought with it an unbelievable heat and I came to town on a bus. There was no air conditioning, only pairs of those old-school, semi-openable windows. They didn’t help. Heat slipped through the openings and settled itself heavily into our space. The bus rolled on steadily, but around it everything seemed impossibly immobile. Moving felt more like wading. I might not have been covered in mud, but thick sweat layered itself on my skin. The worst was my feet. I wriggled them inside my boots, but they seemed increasingly melted into the fabric of my socks.
Lake Atitlan
On my gap year I ran away from my family to spend a couple months in Guatemala. I'd always wanted to travel after high school, but I knew the stereotypes about gap years and wanted to avoid them. So I found myself in a cooperatively-run Guatemalan school in the mountains, being taught Cervantes’s tongue by a motley crew of aging former guerillas and new, middle-class hires, who for some reason tended to be horny Guatemalan men. It was one of the lonelier periods of my life. Spanish remained stubbornly incomprehensible. At the end of the seventh week, three American girls that I had become friends with put together a plan to hire a local guide and make the 50-mile-or-so trek to Lake Atitlan, a volcanic lake in the center of the country ringed by small hostels, ritual centers, and mansions of both the Guatemalan and international elite.
Mila
In the sixteenth summer after my wife and I moved to the lighthouse, I started dreaming. I saw the great hand of the ocean, slow and speculating. It scratched at the rock face, boulders dislodging as easily as flecks of sediment. Each teetered uncertainly for three beats of a slow-swinging pendulum, then stumbled with lopsided urgency towards the sea, a lumbering, then galloping, clink of shale-on-shale, rushing and rising like a drumbeat, a loud splendid crash picking apart the neatly stitched seams of the ocean, a trembling, greedy span of water rising up to swallow it whole, the strict tunnel of air down through the dark breathless blue. Then all was quiet again.
Switch, Ignition
We were seven all, two too many spilling out the sides of the five-seater — Three windows open, one—behind—broken, hairline fractures spilling down from a jagged corner — I twisted toward an unbroken window, the leather of the car seat clinging painfully to the undersides of my thighs tender and blistering as I leaned backwards, away from the mass of sunburnt limbs in the backseat. Eyes stinging from Etesian-stirred dust, the crown of my head already sun-lanced and smarting, I watched him: watched the glare-bleached fuzz flittering on the backs of fingers curled around the peeling steering wheel, the tremor in the ring finger and pinkie, a proactive, past-perfect souvenir from his father’s side travelling in a lazy arc, up-and-down-and-sideways with the wheel in tandem with the wheels around switchback after switchback, pins in the mountain’s thistle-bush hair — Prophetic perfect: I died.
Interview
Kostümjude
Germany has stood for its resolute support for Israel's assault on Gaza. Alex Cocotas explains the origins of this stance, its implications for Jewish and Muslim life in Germany, and the role of the intellectual in Europe today.
Poetry