Art Kavanagh

I’ve been rewatching Law & Order: Trial by Jury, the spinoff which was cancelled after a single season in 2005–06, and finding it much better than I thought first time around. Main thing I still don’t like is that almost all the defence lawyers are unethical, several utterly corrupt.

Surely some of them were consecutive?

A discussion of a nonfiction (yet not very factual) book about the murder of film producer Sophie Bouniol in 1990s Ireland, and the Garda investigation of that crime.

The praise that was heaped on Bridget O’Connor’s After a Dance raised unrealistic expectations. Not unusually for a selection of short stories, it’s uneven; but with more peaks than troughs.

I’m celebrating Coltrane’s centenary in a highly unorthodox way: listening to Christian Sands, Thomas Fonnesbæk and Rasmus Kihlberg play “A Giant Leaves (Giant Steps/Autumn Leaves) — for Alex Riel” from Between Then & Now 🎶

Sarah Moss’s sixth novel, Ghost Wall, centres on an “experiential archeology” trip to Northumberland, cuulminating in the reenactment of the Iron Age sacrifice of a young woman.

I ordered a CD from Denmark a little over 2 weeks ago. It’s “estimated to arrive no later than” 13 October. Maybe they meant “no earlier than”. According to Postnord’s tracking site, it arrived in Ireland over a week ago (10 Sep). How does it take a week to deliver a CD in Ireland?

‘If you really believed AI was going to kill us all why would you participate?’ was a common question to Amodei this week.

Kathleen Stock,Unherd. I still think the answer to that is Roko’s basilisk.

Altman and tech “leaders” who rush ahead with AI while simultaneously warning of the risks of catastrophe probably take so-called Roko’s basilisk seriously. They feel compelled to press ahead while pleading with the rest of us to save them from the consequences of their cowardly credulity 😜

I’d have sworn Sandy Denny had died earlier than 1978. I saw Fairport (for the second time) in Theatre L, UCD after she had died, and I finished in UCD in 1978, so it must have been very shortly after her death. No wonder an acquaintance of mine was getting very upset. Where the time went 🎶

What was meant to be a post about Anthony Cronin’s treatment of the novels of Flann O’Brien in Cronin’s memoir Dead As Doornails, takes a surprising turn

(For the record, I also thought Madeleine Peyroux sounded too much like Billie Holiday and Wallace Roney sounded too much like Miles Davis.)

Lovely parenthesis in the middle of a discussion of crime fiction by Ethan Iverson 🎶

Somebody mentioned that it’s John Coltrane’s centenary this month 🎶

Screenshot from iOS Health app showing 8 steps taken for a walking/running distance of 3 Km

I recently failed to post a piece I’d intended to write about Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (2024) because I realized, late in the day, that my grasp of the novel’s themes and effect were shakier than I had thought. A blog post on “Elle Thinks” says much of what I didn’t manage to say.

Today’s post was supposed to be about Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake but I’m sorry to say that I didn’t manage to write it. I intend to discuss Creation Lake eventually (probably in November). My next post will be about Anthony Cronin’s memoir of Flann O’Brien.

… who subscribe to a set of authoritarian ideas and plans for the future based on half-baked theories and an incomplete understanding of how the world works.

Laura Miller in Slate, reviewing Gil Durán. Surely any “understanding of how the world works” is necessarily incomplete?

Today I couldn’t get my dinky little toy HP wireless printer (which I tend to use at least once most years) to connect to the wireless router and I discovered the previously unsuspected fact that I can connect to it straight from the Mac without going through a router. What’ll they think of next?

the hard left will always pair a conceivably popular economic programme with a provably hated cultural one. The mystery is why.

Janan Ganesh, FT No mystery. They’re terrified of having to implement the (conceivably popular) economic programme. Capitalism is how they get paid.

I like to remind myself every so often that Leopold Bloom was the same age (38) on 16 June 1904 as Cleopatra was in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.

In Helen Dunmore’s second novel, Burning Bright, the lives of two women, two generations apart, are intertwined with those of two pimps and a powerful politician, but not in the expected ways.

According to this Guardian headline, Sam Neill filmed role in Legend of Zelda film adaptation before his death. A “dog bites man” story if ever I heard one. How often does an actor film a role after his/her death?

I’ve finally finished reading At Swim-Two-Birds. I first attempted it at least 56 years ago and didn’t return to it till earlier this year. I kind of hate it: it’s bleak and depressing, the humour sour when not merely silly. Heavy going for a mere 228 pages. I’ll reread soon in case I’m wrong 📚

For several years now, I’ve preferred to buy albums on CD. Elias Stemeseder and Thomas Morgan, Io Pur Respiro is available only as a download or on vinyl so I bought the download. Here’s Richard Williams’s review 🎶 🎹

Slow Horses author Mick Herron began his writing career with a series of crime novels featuring Oxford-based private detective, Zoë Boehm. The protagonist of first and last books in the four-book series is Zoë’s friend Sarah Tucker.

Susie Steiner’s three Manon Bradshaw novels were published between 2016 and 2020, the last of them appearing just two years before Steiner’s death.