Clik here to view.
Opening a Chain
A word can sometimes snag and spend you spinning through a chain of associations. Listening to The Mills Brothers’ recording of Cole Porter’s Miss Otis Regrets (recorded most memorably by Kirsty...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Murmuration by Rinko Kawauchi
Murmuration: Rinko Kawauchi Filed under: Photography, Verbals, Visuals Tagged: Rinko Kawauchi
View ArticleClik here to view.
Links of the Week
Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Karl Marx with subconscious masses in his beard
Karl Marx with subconscious masses in his beard – by Yüksel Arslan Filed under: Painting, Politics Tagged: Karl Marx, Yüksel Arslan
View ArticleClik here to view.
To Follow Spinoza
Of Spinoza, Hegel professed boldly, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all” and “It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Come as you are .. to Spinoza (and Deleuze)
Deleuze is difficult, but I read his work like opaque poetry. There are good maps available for those who want to engage in what Deleuze called the “nonphilosophical understanding of philosophy.” I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Kushner’s The Flamethrowers
In those moments when we step out of time, dissolved in a book or piece of music, where are we? First-person fiction is a form of voyeurism, surreptitious participation in a scene in which we have no...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Work of Translation
A five-volume edition of Paul Valéry’s Cahiers/Notebooks have awaited my attention for a while now. Beyond inattentively flicking through some random entries, I have waited for some curious alignment...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Links of the Week
Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Back to Calvino
Italo Calvino: Letters 1941-1985 I know Michael Wood as the author of Literature and the Taste of Knowledge and Yeats and Violence, both works of literary criticism that I liked very much. Wood both...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Kind of Guy
In this passage from Calvino’s Letters, before he has published a first novel, Calvino reveals his dedication to veracity: They want articles all over the place and I write them because it takes half...
View ArticleClik here to view.
They Are Coming For Your Writers!
Yesterday morning I woke up thinking about totalitarianism and book burning and tweeted the following question: If They confiscated all our books but those by a single writer I would keep Beckett. And...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Now They Are Coming For Your Books!
The second of my questions on Twitter attracted fewer responses but they were more interesting as they named specific books. Of course I’m going to have to read all those on this list that I haven’t...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Stupor of Power
It is hard, perhaps impossible, not to be cynical about politicians. Our institutions have singularly failed us, repeatedly. As the man credited with the title of first anarchist, Pierre-Joseph...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Coetzee’s Age of Iron
In the late eighties, the professor in charge of our research group invited us regularly to his Muswell Hill house for debates that would often extend, over dope and Rioja, into the next morning. Let’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A New Kind of Space
I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. I seem to have sensed from the first that to read...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Unplugged
Northerns – Moriyama It is time for a holiday, to a cabin in a forest with a lake. I have books and a canoe. I am unplugging from the grid. See you on the other side. The Hermitage at the Center The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Decompression Zone
After several days living in the dappled shade of a forest comprised mostly of ancient giant redwoods, I’m unable, or unwilling, to return to London. I find myself in need of a decompression zone, so...
View ArticleClik here to view.
All-Powerful Masters
I read Valéry’s Notebooks very slowly, often just a page a day. I find myself chewing over the fragments in the notebooks. They need time to ferment. Often they serve literature’s most valued function,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
That Smell and Notes From a Prison by Sonallah Ibrahim
Suspected to be the iceberg that sank the RMS Titanic, there is supposedly a red smudge, like the Titanic’s red hull, near its base at the waterline. In iceberg jargon this would be termed a pinnacle,...
View Article
