Art Kavanagh

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.

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.

An unusually wrongheaded post from Terence Eden: How to make Markdown footnotes start at zero. First, footnotes in HTML (and so in Markdown) are a kludge, and not a good way to annotate a page. And, whatever about indices starting at 0 in hackerdom, the first note should be first, i.e. numbered 1.

Nicholas Carr is on Substack now, with New Cartographies, and he’s closing down his old blog, Rough Type where he’s been posting only sporadically in recent years. And there’s a new book coming.

“ It is probably the most ill-advised legal action since Oscar Wilde put pen to writ.”

What, worse than Gillian Taylforth’s? (Or William Roache’s, for that matter?) No misconduct by Coleen Rooney’s lawyers

The latest from Talk about books is about the “Ode to a Nightingale” and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Terrible beauty, unpalatable truth: Remarks on some of Keats’s odes 📖

In which I follow up a post on my personal site from a few months ago, about the regrettable narrowness of my taste in poetry, with a look at two of Keats’s odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. I thought I’d fit more Keats in but there was a lot to say about these two.

I’m already having second thoughts about automatically crossposting from Micro․blog to LinkedIn. I’m afraid it might make me more reticent about what I post to MB. I need to think some more about what to do about my LinkedIn profile.

TIL that the site of the former, much missed, AMT kiosk at Heuston is now occupied by a Caffè Nero Express. That’s a lot better than nothing and will have to do. Significant delays to Heuston trains following incident ☕️

Now that I’ve retired and don’t expect to be looking for work again, I’ve been thinking about how I use LinkedIn. For the past few years, I’ve been using it mainly to post links to my newsletter, Talk about books. To start with, I’m going to try automatic crossposting from Micro․blog

Today’s Talk about books post is about the short stories of Shirley Hazzard, particularly those from her first collection, Cliffs of Fall, and the ones that weren’t collected before the Collected Stories (2020)📖 Trying to keep the poetry separate

Shirley Hazzard’s short stories fall into two broad categories, those about working for the UN (“the Organization”), and those about men, women, relationships and social situations. This post is about the stories in the second category.

What was a dead judge doing in the courthouse anyway?

I want to make a kind of “author index” of the writers I’ve been writing about in my newsletter, Talk about books. I suppose the obvious way would be to create a Category for each author and use them as tags, but it seems unwieldy. I’d love to hear any better suggestions. Front matter … maybe?

I used to work beside Old Street roundabout from 1988 to 1991 inclusive, haven’t been back for at least 25 years. Amazed to think that the “jumbotron” is still there. What a mess ☹️ And yet it seems appropriate somehow. That’ll teach us to get ideas above our tube station.

While I was reading this fascinating Guardian “long read” on my phone, the page automatically reloaded twice, each time losing me my place. Do news sites not actually want people to read what they publish?

I’m shocked to read that drummer Martin France has died, aged 60. I know his work from the trio with John Taylor and Palle Danielsson. I had just been listening to their first album (Angel of the Presence) before I read about his death 🎶

My latest post in Talk about books is about two novels from the early 2010s dealing with rural Ireland in the wake of the economic crash a few years earlier: Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart and Belinda McKeon’s Solace 📖

Two novels about rural Ireland in the wake of the economic crash, published in 2011 and 2012 respectively, make for an interesting comparison both with each other and with Caoilinn Hughes second novel about which I’ve written before.