Art Kavanagh

In the late 70s my aunt was enthusing wildly about Sweet William, so I started to read her copy and really didn’t get on with it. I gave up and haven’t tried to read anything else by Bainbridge till now. I just read it over the past few days and I found the humour too cruel for my taste 🙁 📚

If he dies? You mean he might be immortal?

Headline from the i paper reading “Russia: Analysis: Putin is coughing and croaking. This is what happens if he dies"

Deep Down is one of the 20 or more Pieranunzi albums that I have but I haven’t listened to it recently. Thanks to Ethan Iverson for the reminder 🎶🎹

Comparing a memoir (Sex with Shakespeare), some short stories (including “Secretary”) and a novel (Normal People), all of which deal in one way or another with themes of masochism and/or submissiveness.

People should read more French novels, says Cecily Carver. She makes a good case for Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma … and for starting with Balzac.

Ironically, high housing costs, seen as a sign of wealth by some, taken together with a thriving multinational sector, seen as a sign of economic success, is probably the most disastrous combination militating against the establishment of a diverse, healthy economy.

David McWilliams, Irish Times

Lisa Lutz’s The Accomplice is the story of inseparable, long-term friends Luna and Owen. Owen is suspected of being responsible for the deaths, 15 years apart, of a former girlfriend and his wife, while Luna still hasn’t shaken off feelings of guilt over something she did when she was 11 years old.

I’ve noticed that Substack is now offering a free read of a paid post if you take a free subscription to the relevant newsletter — but only if you use their app! You can’t just read it on the web. No thanks.

Ethan Iverson on the legacy of Wynton Marsalis. This passage may throw some light on why I rarely listen to the original Akoustic Band albums, two of which I have, but am decidedly enthusiastic about their Live (2018) 🎹 🎶

Chick Corea and Michael Brecker got the memo, and soon had warmer-toned musicians in their acoustic bands presenting concerts that sounded more like jazz. (See, for example, the difference between Corea’s ’80s Akoustic band with John Patitucci and Dave Weckl and the later Trilogy with Christian McBride and Brian Blade. Patitucci may be the musician most affected by the buffeting winds of bass fashion: He sounds like a completely different player in his early years than after 1990 or so.)

I must have read the wrong Julian Barnes novels. The only two I was sure I’d read were Before She Met Me and Talking It Over (though I think I must at least have started A History of the World in 10½ Chapters). Then this week I read The Sense of an Ending. Still prefer Rushdie and McEwan 📖

George Eliot’s early novel combines a study of individual psychology with socioeconomic history. The stability and balance of this combination aren’t always apparent, but are nevertheless real.

I cancelled the month’s trial subscription to The Observer meaning to buy the printed paper occasionally — certainly not every week. Today was going to be a day I’d buy it but I woke up very late and all copies were sold. Maybe there’s something to be said for online subscriptions after all?

One summer in my early twenties, I was so poor that I was buying used books purely based on their length.

I found this piece by Erin Somers on the death of Martin Amis by following a link from Andrew Gelman’s post about her novel The Ten Year Affair 📖

The first two novels in Tana French’s Irish “western” series, complete with gold rush and new twists on some familiar tropes

I hate at least two-thirds of the stuff that the Substack Notes algorithm feeds me but I don’t know how to find the kind of thing that would train it to show me something I’d like better.

Didn’t the EU just reach a trade trade agreement with Trump in August? If he can tear that up and impose new tariffs whenever he wants something else, how can there be any point at all in negotiating with him? EU considers retaliatory measures over Trump Greenland tariff ‘blackmail’

He was scrupulously fair and totally unreasonable.

Jo Ellison on the possible benefits of having a monstrous parent. FT, so probably paywalled.

I just updated last week’s newsletter post about John Carey’s book on John Donne, to fix some small errors. I had left a couple of items off the list of “Works cited”, because I was tired and in a rush. Sorry about that.

The recent death of John Carey has prompted me to reread and reassess his provocative book about John Donne (1572–1631).

Sometimes other parents would call the house late at night to have my parents bring me to the phone and admit to my sleepless little friends that the ghost stories I’d told earlier weren’t true.

For that, I can almost forgive Sarah Moss’s preference for Jane Eyre over Wuthering Heights 📖

I didn’t know that Jessica Williams had become “disillusioned with the jazz world” towards the end of her life and experimented outside jazz. In fact, I had missed the news that she had died, though it doesn’t surprise me: I had read that health problems had stopped her from touring 🎶 🎹

Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, has said that an attack by the US on a Nato ally – in this case Greenland as part of Denmark – would mean the end of the alliance.

Surely that’s threatening him with exactly what he wants. Trump renewing calls for takeover of Greenland

Most of all, ChatGPT seemed to want me to write a book. ‘It doesn’t even have to sell,’ the chatbot said, diverging sharply from the view of my literary agent.

Henry Mance in the FT: Can ChatGPT help with a midlife crisis?

I was woken up by the blaring fire alarm in our apartment building at 5:50 this morning. I wasn’t able to persuade myself to get out of bed into the cold. Woke properly hours later: building’s still here. We’ve had a lot of false alarms and no real ones, which makes the fire alarm almost useless.

Anyone who didn’t see Wall-E as a warning can’t have been watching it.

It was kind of bleak, wasn’t it? I had some misgivings about my then very young nephews watching it but thought there wasn’t much point in trying to shield them from it. One of them now works in AI 🙁