Art Kavanagh

But yolked [sic] together like this, they’re each diminished.

Rachel Cooke is not impressed by Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz. She makes it sound a bit addled, I must admit 📚

Today’s post from Talk about books is about Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields. It marks the end of the fourth year of Talk about books’s existence 📖

Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields, is shorter, tighter and more mature than her first. Also, it seems to me that the strongest stories are concentrated in the first half of the book.

My Bluesky feed 🦋 is full of people promoting “starter packs” for topics I’m not interested in. (I don’t mean yours!) Even where I am interested, I wouldn’t want to follow a lot of people all banging on about the same subject. I keep telling myself it’ll pass soon.

Farewell to Roy Haynes. Sad, of course, but he had reached a good age 🎶

Fred Kaplan has written a novel and it sounds intriguing: Ethan Iverson’s Transitional Technology 📚

I’m getting really fed up of Substack’s RSS feeds; they really ought to fix them.

My post on Grotius and the minimalist theory of natural law, which has been getting far more hits than any other post on my personal site, has just dropped off the bottom of the recent posts list, so I thought I might as well give it a little boost.

Just posted on my personal site: Wigs on the green: The resignation of Hugh O’Flaherty from the Irish Supreme Court. I’m still annoyed about a 25-year-old Irish legal scandal. I was reminded by reading Ruadhán Mac Cormaic’s book, The Supreme Court (2016) 📖

In the past Lammy has called Trump a ‘woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’.

David Lammy has been fighting for his job. Gosh, I wonder why Lammy would have said something like that?

In today’s email from The Fortnightly, Julian Gridham links to a post of his from a few years ago On the Design of Poetry Textbooks. Reading that prompted me to unearth an earlier post of my own, Reading poetry in scholarly editions 📖

I know this is not a time for silly, wild-ass speculation, so forgive me, but … you don’t suppose the Trump campaign could have been bullying pollsters to make the former president’s numbers look a bit better? Nah, didn’t think so.

Today’s Talk about books post was supposed to be about three Roman plays by Shakespeare but I didn’t manage to get as far as Coriolanus, so I’ll probably do a separate post about that later. All honourable men: Shakespeare’s Romans

Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus are all formally tragedies. That’s not to say that they all follow a similar pattern, such as the pattern of a noble, admirable hero destroyed by a trafic flaw, which may be detectable in the first play.

Computer guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to walk in. The cautionary tale of Goldman and Apple’s credit card

Clint Eastwood has just directed another movie, at 94: Juror #2 🍿

I’m going back and forth about whether I should be worried about the US presidential election. On the one hand, the result will certainly have repercussions for us in Europe. On the other, there’s nothing effective that we can do to influence it. So, should we be tearing our hair out or not? 🤷🏻‍♂️

I’ve decided what to do about LinkedIn (something I was dithering about a few weeks ago) and updated my profile there accordingly.

I’ve changed the way I do the “description” for my newsletter posts. Now, I’m using Hugo’s Summary method, with the first paragraph styled using the CSS pseudoclass :first-of-type to distinguish it from the rest of the post. But it seems that most mail clients don’t support that pseudoclass ☹️

The latest Talk about books is about the second of Wilkie Collins’s four major novels of the 1860s, in which the Vanstone sisters, Norah and Magdalen, suddenly find themselves without parents, money or a home. Incontestable wills: Wilkie Collins, No Name

The novel that Wilkie Collins published between The Woman in White and Armadale might at first seem less compelling than either of those but it’s a powerful tale about the response to a legal injustice.

Unintended consequences: deposit return scheme leading to more litter

This summary is written at average reading age and whilst it does not form part of the judgment it must be reproduced with it.

Maybe because I’m used to legal language the “average reading age” summary strikes me as stilted and artificial, as if she were making a special effort to avoid the obvious or normal phrasing. Like a Martian postcard.

Hi @manton, I deleted templates authorslist.md and layouts/authorslist/single.html because they wouldn’t behave as I wanted. Instead, I made a new redirect from /authorslist to a static html page. But the old /authorslist still loads in priority to the redirect. Is there a way to get rid of it, pls?

Cecily Carver doesn’t want to use her Substack to do literary takedowns of buzzy contemporary novels by women, but in the case of Miranda July’s All Fours 📚she has made an exception.