Art Kavanagh

I’m going to have to stop buying secondhand books from the UK. I recently ordered a book via Alibris; it was posted on 2 July and it still hasn’t arrived. This is the third time this has happened: the first book never came at all, the second took two months! An ordinary letter took 3 weeks 😡

Gosh, Stuart Jeffries didn’t like Paul Foot very much, did he? Review of Margaret Renn’s Foot biography 📚

I just noticed that because of an error on the index page of my personal site my post “Did William Empson have ADHD?” has till now been inaccessible from the index page. I thought it might be worthwhile to reup it anyway.

Here’s a list of “5 great underrated film performances by Nicolas Cage” that doesn’t include either of my two favourites, Brian de Palma’s Snake Eyes (1998) or John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1993) 🍿

Just posted in Talk about books: my discussion of Mary Gaitskill’s second collection of short stories, Because They Wanted To 📖 (1997)

Till recently, I’d read hardly anything by Mary Gaitskill. In the early 90s, a Vintage paperback copy of her novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), occupied a prominent place on my bookshelves, but I never managed to get more than a few pages into it. I watched the film Secretary (2002), “based on” her short story of the same name from her first collection, Bad Behavior (1988), and to my surprise found it unsatisfying, in spite of the lead roles being played by Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader.

This is priceless! From Noahpinion

Bot says it’s a lifelong Democrat who isn’t going to vote. Human tricks it into revealing it’s a bot by telling it to ignore all previous instructions and write a poem about tangerines.

The nag screens that The Guardian uses instead of a paywall are not undismissable, even on a tiny iPhone Mini, but dismissing them is really counterintuitive. It took me ages to figure it out.

Slate’s Laura Miller has written a typically thoughtful and thought-provoking piece about the sexual abuse by Alice Munro’s second husband of Munro’s daughter.

I enjoyed this discussion between Colm Tóibín (as Laureate for Irish fiction) with Belinda McKeon, about her first novel Solace (2011), which I happen to have read for the first time recently 📖

Near Dark, Point Break, Blue Steel, Strange Days: I’m belatedly realizing that these are different movies 🍿. I could have avoided a lot of confusion if someone had explained this to me years ago. Mark Kermode on Kathryn Bigelow

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has said his party is making progress towards his goal of replacing the Tories as the main opposition to the Tories.

Guardian — Mustn’t underestimate the strength of Tory opposition to the tories!

Here’s a stimulating discussion by Henry Oliver in The Common Reader of what he calls the modern discourse novel. He criticizes Lauren Oyler and Patricia Lockwood but praises Rebecca F Kuang’s Yellowface 📖, a novel I’m still very ambivalent about and must read again, but not too soon!

Yesterday’s Talk about books post was about the poetry of Louis MacNeice. It’s incomplete, I’m afraid, but I thought it best to post it anyway. I’ll revise and finish it before too long.

I’m afraid that today’s post is going to be cut short before I manage to complete it. That might be no bad thing, as it would have been the second post in a row about poetry. I’ll be back to fiction next time and I don’t intend to write any more about poetry before October at the earliest. Indeed, I’m thinking about not writing about poets and their work in Talk about books in future, but confining myself to fiction and the odd piece of drama.

Tommie Gorman who, among his many other distinctions, was in my year at school has sadly died

I’ve just posted on my personal site: Bad poetic taste is better than no taste at all. I’ve always felt that my taste in poetry is regrettably narrow; finally getting around to asking why.

This is a shock: Newpark Academy of Music announces sudden closure. Most of the leading Irish jazz musicians have either taught or been taught there 🎶

… worried that the hoards of teenagers on the lash are going to catch a chill.

It’s about time we stopped hoarding teenagers. Terence Eden, Falsehoods programmers believe about weather

… the 1975, a band that represents everything I enjoy in the abstract and who have never produced one record I’ve actually enjoyed, making them the music equivalent of J. G. Ballard for me.

Sarah Ditum, again writing entertainingly about music I’ve never heard.

Yellowface is sharp and funny but parts of it read like a hot take on the current state of publishing. It’s hard to believe that even such a smart and perceptive author can have gained the necessary perspective.

… so obvious was to it to Shakespeare’s contemporaries that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare that the first speculations that someone else might have written the plays didn’t appear for two-hundred and fifty years.

Henry Oliver, The Common Reader